A first-class commentary of Lossky's "The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church", putting it in context:
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ORTHODOX TALKS ON MONASTICISM AND PRAYER
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HOW TO ENTER INTO THE TIME AND SPACE OF GOD: CELEBRATING THE FEAST OF SAINTS CYRIL & METHODIUS
SS. CYRIL AND METHODIUS
mi fuente: La Enciclopedia Católica
These brothers, the Apostles of the Slavs, were born in Thessalonica, in 827 and 826 respectively. Though belonging to a senatorial family they renounced secular honours and became priests. They were living in a monastery on the Bosphorous, when the Khazars sent to Constantinople for a Christian teacher. Cyril was selected and was accompanied by his brother. They learned the Khazar language and converted many of the people. Soon after the Khazar mission there was a request from the Moravians for a preacher of the Gospel. German missionaries had already laboured among them, but without success. The Moravians wished a teacher who could instruct them and conduct Divine service in the Slavonic tongue. On account of their acquaintance with the language, Cyril and Methodius were chosen for their work. In preparation for it Cyril invented an alphabet and, with the help of Methodius, translated the Gospels and the necessary liturgical books into Slavonic. They went to Moravia in 863, and laboured for four and a half years. Despite their success, they were regarded by the Germans with distrust, first because they had come from Constantinople where schism was rife, and again because they held the Church services in the Slavonic language. On this account the brothers were summoned to Rome by Nicholas I, who died, however, before their arrival. His successor, Adrian II, received them kindly. Convinced of their orthodoxy, he commended their missionary activity, sanctioned the Slavonic Liturgy, and ordained Cyril and Methodius bishops. Cyril, however, was not to return to Moravia. He died in Rome, 4 Feb., 869.
At the request of the Moravian princes, Rastislav and Svatopluk, and the Slav Prince Kocel of Pannonia, Adrian II formed an Archdiocese of Moravia and Pannonia, made it independent of the German Church, and appointed Methodius archbishop. In 870 King Louis and the German bishops summoned Methodius to a synod at Ratisbon. Here he was deposed and condemned to prison. After three years he was liberated at the command of Pope John VIII and reinstated as Archbishop of Moravia. He zealously endeavoured to spread the Faith among the Bohemians, and also among the Poles in Northern Moravia. Soon, however, he was summoned to Rome again in consequence of the allegations of the German priest Wiching, who impugned his orthodoxy, and objected to the use of Slavonic in the liturgy. But John VIII, after an inquiry, sanctioned the Slavonic Liturgy, decreeing, however, that in the Mass the Gospel should be read first in Latin and then in Slavonic. Wiching, in the meantime, had been nominated one of the suffragan bishops of Methodius. He continued to oppose his metropolitan, going so far as to produce spurious papal letters. The pope, however, assured Methodius that they were false. Methodius went to Constantinople about this time, and with the assistance of several priests, he completed the translation of the Holy Scriptures, with the exception of the Books of Machabees. He translated also the "Nomocanon", i.e. the Greek ecclesiastico-civil law. The enemies of Methodius did not cease to antagonize him. His health was worn out from the long struggle, and he died 6 April, 885, recommending as his successor Gorazd, a Moravian Slav who had been his disciple.
Formerly the feast of Saints Cyril and Methodius was celebrated in Bohemia and Moravia on 9 March; but Pius IX changed the date to 5 July. Leo XIII, by his Encyclical "Grande Munus" of 30 September, 1880, extended the feast to the universal Church. [Note: The feast of Sts. Cyril and Methodius is currently celebrated on February 14 in the Latin Church.]
Saints Cyril and Methodius are two of the greatest missionaries in church history, as well as being patron saints of Europe. They also should be patron saints of Vatican II, of those who revised the Latin Rite and had it translated into modern languages, as well as of all those who are striving to continue perfecting the new Mass according to the mind of Popes Benedict XVI and Francis. That mind is well expressed below. - Fr David
How to Enter into the Time and Space of God
Pope Francis makes a surprise break with his silence on the liturgy. "It is the cloud of God that envelops us all," he says. And he calls for a return to the true sense of the sacred by Sandro Magister
ROME, February 14, 2014 – Fifty years after the promulgation of the document of Vatican Council II on the liturgy, the Vatican is solemnizing the event with a three-day conference at the pontifical university of the Lateran, organized by the congregation for divine worship from the 18th to the 20th of this month.
So far the liturgy has not seemed to be one of the top priorities in the vision of Pope Francis. In the long interview-confession with "La Civiltà Cattolica" last summer he reduced the conciliar liturgical reform to this dismissive definition: " a service to the people as a re-reading of the Gospel from a concrete historical situation."
Not a word more, if not for the "worrying risk of the ideologization of the Vetus Ordo, its exploitation."
But on Monday, February 10, with no forewarning Jorge Mario Bergoglio broke the silence and dedicated to the liturgy the entire homily of the morning Mass in the chapel of Santa Marta. Saying things he has never said before, since he became pope.
That morning the passage was read from the first book of Kings in which during the reign of Solomon the cloud, the divine glory, filled the temple and "the Lord decided to dwell in the cloud."
Taking his cue from that "theophany," pope Jorge Mario Bergoglio said that "in the Eucharistic liturgy God is present" in a way even "closer" than in the cloud in the temple, his "is a real presence."
And he continued:
"When I speak of the liturgy I am mainly referring to the holy Mass. The Mass is not a representation, it is something else. It is living once again the redemptive passion and death of the Lord. It is a theophany: the Lord makes himself present on the altar in order to be offered to the Father for the salvation of the world."
Further on the pope said:
"The liturgy is the time of God and space of God, and we must put ourselves there in the time of God, in the space of God, and not look at our watches. The liturgy is nothing less than entering into the mystery of God, allowing ourselves to be carried to the mystery and to be in the mystery. It is the cloud of God that envelops us all."
And looking back on one of his childhood memories:
"I recall that as a child, when they were preparing us for first communion, they had us sing: 'O holy altar guarded by the angels,' and this made us understand that the altar was truly guarded by the angels, it gave us the sense of the glory of God, of the space of God, of the time of God."
Coming to the conclusion, Francis invited those present to "ask the Lord today to give all of us this sense of the sacred, this sense that makes us understand that it is one thing to pray at home, to pray the rosary, to pray many beautiful prayers, make the way of the cross, read the bible, and the Eucharistic celebration is another thing. In the celebration we enter into the mystery of God, into that path which we cannot control. He alone is the one, he is the glory, he is the power. Let us ask for this grace: that the Lord may teach us to enter into the mystery of God."
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The February 10 homily of Pope Francis in the summary provided by "L'Osservatore Romano":
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The constitution of Vatican Council II on the liturgy, the first of the documents approved by that assembly:
> Sacrosanctum Concilium
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And this is how Benedict XVI spoke of it in his improvised talk with the clergy of Rome on February 14, 2013, exactly one year ago, one of the very last acts of his pontificate:
"After the First World War, Central and Western Europe had seen the growth of the liturgical movement, a rediscovery of the richness and depth of the liturgy, which until then had remained, as it were, locked within the priest’s Roman Missal, while the people prayed with their own prayer books, prepared in accordance with the heart of the people, seeking to translate the lofty content, the elevated language of classical liturgy into more emotional words, closer to the hearts of the people. But it was as if there were two parallel liturgies: the priest with the altar-servers, who celebrated Mass according to the Missal, and the laity, who prayed during Mass using their own prayer books, at the same time, while knowing substantially what was happening on the altar.
"But now there was a rediscovery of the beauty, the profundity, the historical, human, and spiritual riches of the Missal and it became clear that it should not be merely a representative of the people, a young altar-server, saying 'Et cum spiritu tuo', and so on, but that there should truly be a dialogue between priest and people: truly the liturgy of the altar and the liturgy of the people should form one single liturgy, an active participation, such that the riches reach the people. And in this way, the liturgy was rediscovered and renewed.
"I find now, looking back, that it was a very good idea to begin with the liturgy, because in this way the primacy of God could appear, the primacy of adoration. 'Operi Dei nihil praeponatur': this phrase from the Rule of Saint Benedict (cf. 43:3) thus emerges as the supreme rule of the Council. Some have made the criticism that the Council spoke of many things, but not of God. It did speak of God! And this was the first thing that it did, that substantial speaking of God and opening up all the people, the whole of God’s holy people, to the adoration of God, in the common celebration of the liturgy of the Body and Blood of Christ. In this sense, over and above the practical factors that advised against beginning straight away with controversial topics, it was, let us say, truly an act of Providence that at the beginning of the Council was the liturgy, God, adoration. Here and now I do not intend to go into the details of the discussion, but it is worth while to keep going back, over and above the practical outcomes, to the Council itself, to its profundity and to its essential ideas.
"I would say that there were several of these: above all, the Paschal Mystery as the centre of what it is to be Christian – and therefore of the Christian life, the Christian year, the Christian seasons, expressed in Eastertide and on Sunday which is always the day of the Resurrection. Again and again we begin our time with the Resurrection, our encounter with the Risen one, and from that encounter with the Risen one we go out into the world. In this sense, it is a pity that these days Sunday has been transformed into the weekend, although it is actually the first day, it is the beginning; we must remind ourselves of this: it is the beginning, the beginning of Creation and the beginning of re-Creation in the Church, it is an encounter with the Creator and with the Risen Christ. This dual content of Sunday is important: it is the first day, that is, the feast of Creation, we are standing on the foundation of Creation, we believe in God the Creator; and it is an encounter with the Risen One who renews Creation; his true purpose is to create a world that is a response to the love of God.
"Then there were the principles: intelligibility, instead of being locked up in an unknown language that is no longer spoken, and also active participation. Unfortunately, these principles have also been misunderstood. Intelligibility does not mean banality, because the great texts of the liturgy – even when, thanks be to God, they are spoken in our mother tongue – are not easily intelligible, they demand ongoing formation on the part of the Christian if he is to grow and enter ever more deeply into the mystery and so arrive at understanding. And also the word of God – when I think of the daily sequence of Old Testament readings, and of the Pauline Epistles, the Gospels: who could say that he understands immediately, simply because the language is his own? Only ongoing formation of hearts and minds can truly create intelligibility and participation that is something more than external activity, but rather the entry of the person, of my being, into the communion of the Church and thus into communion with Christ."
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English translation by Matthew Sherry, Ballwin, Missouri, U.S.A.
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WHEN WE ENTER A CHURCH WE ENTER THE TIME AND SPACE OF GOD (POPE FRANCIS). WHAT IS A CHURCH AND WHY?
The church is holy because it houses the gathered Church; and the altar is holy because it is on this table that Mass is celebrated. The real church is the Christian community: the building is only a "church" by association. Realising this has led many to conclude that the value of the church building lies only in its function, and that it is not a holy place as the Temple in Jerusalem was holy: only the community is holy, the building an optional extra. This has been reflected in the architecture of churches which often look like secular buildings; and movements like the neo-catechumenists often prefer to celebrate the Eucharist outside church buildings. After all, the earliest christians had no church buildings. If Le Corbusier defined a house as a "machine for living in", many modern churches look very much like "machines for praying in", without any holiness of their own.
In this post I am going to argue that this is contrary to Catholic Tradition, that even the least holy parts of a Catholic church are superior in their level of holiness to anything in the Jerusalem Temple, including the Holy of Holies.
In Old Testament times, God entered a sinful world, and there was an enormous contrast between places associated with God´s presence and the rest of the world, beween the sacred and the profane; and nowhere was as holy as the Holy of Holies. It was so holy that the High Priest entered it with trepidation, just in case God should manifest himself and the High Priest should die, because "no one can see God and live."
In New Testament times, the Temple is replaced by Christ´s body and by Christians who share his body and in the Spirit; but this does not mean that the there are no sacred places or things. The very contrary is true; and they are all over the place. Wherever the Christian life is lived becomes holy by association, far holier than any pre-Christian site. To believe otherwise shows a lack of appreciation for the meaning and effects of the Incarnation.
Genesis gives a cosmic role to Adam and Eve, naming all the animals, giving meaning to Creation. They were that part of Creation that walked with God in the cool of the evening. They were made in his image, and so became the means by which God's holiness poured out on Creation, as well as being Creation's voice by which it prayed to and praised the Lord. That is why Adam's fall was of cosmic importance, messing up everything.
Salvation, putting things right, is not just about souls: it is about restoring God's proper relationship to Creation as a whole, making it transparent to his divine Presence - making it holy - through the activity of Christians who share by the Incarnation in the very life of God.
Places are always holy to the degree that God is active in them; and things are holy to the degree that God uses them. God works in and through the Church and its members. Thus prisons and places of torture become holy because in them Christian martyrs have suffered and died; hospitals become holy because Gods loves the patients through the sisters that run them; the streets of Calcutta became holy through the activity of Mother Teresa's sisters; Christian homes become holy because of the Christian life that is nurtured there; music becomes holy to the extent that its beauty reflects the divine Glory. Most obvious of all, churches are holy because God acts at every level of church life.
It is the function of Church art to manifest the reality that it reflects. Whatever the style, a church that does not look like a church is a failure from the very start.
Recently, Pope Francis said in a homily:
"The liturgy is the time of God and space of God, and we must put ourselves there in the time of God, in the space of God, and not look at our watches. The liturgy is nothing less than entering into the mystery of God, allowing ourselves to be carried to the mystery and to be in the mystery. It is the cloud of God that envelops us all."
It is the function of Christian architecture and art to reflect this reality and mediate it to those who take part in the liturgy. Salvation in Christ restores to the Church and its members the means to sanctify places and things we use in the Lord's service, because we become Christ's instruments. Only at the Second Coming will the whole cosmos be holy in that way; but we Christians have a foretaste. Because of it, God's revelation, which comes to us as a Word, directed at our hearing, takes a myriad os shapes, directed to all our senses. Thus we say with St John:
We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life - this life was revealed, and we have seen itThrough art and the Christian life, we not only listen to God's message: He communicates to us through all our senses. Thus, Pope Benedict has said:
“I did once say that to me art and the saints are the greatest apologetics for our faith.”
It was Pope Benedict’s love of baroque art and architecture that is such a revelation for English-speaking Catholics. He explains that
“in line with the tradition of the West, the Council [of Trent] again emphasised the didactic and pedagogical character of art, but, as a fresh start toward interior renewal, it led once more to a new kind of seeing that comes from and returns within. The altarpiece is like a window through which the world of God comes out to us. The curtain of temperately is raised, and we are allowed a glimpse into the inner life of the world of God. This art is intended to insert us into the liturgy of heaven. Again and again, we experience a Baroque church as a unique kind of fortissimo of joy, an Alleluia in visual form.”
THE HOLINESS OF A CATHOLIC CHURCH AS EXPRESSED IN THE LITURGY OF THE DEDICATION OF A CHURCH OR AN ALTAR.
The church is holy because it houses the gathered Church; and the altar is holy because it is on this table that Mass is celebrated. Let us now look at what the liturgy has to say about the sanctity of a church, using as our chief source the Rite for the Dedication of a Church and the Rite for a Dedication of an Altar. What hits us immediately is the preliminary statement of the bishop to the people at the dedication of a church or an altar. On greeting the people, the bishop should say something like:
Brothers and sisters in Christ, this is a day of rejoicing: we have come to dedicate this church (this altar) by offering the sacrifice of Christ.(for a church) May we open our hearts and minds to receive his word with faith; may our fellowship born in the one font of baptism and sustained at the one table of the Lord, become the one temple of his Spirit, as we gather round his altar in love.
(for an altar) May we respond to these holy rites, receive God’s word with faith, share at the Lord’s table with joy, and raise up our hearts in hope.
We belong to the New Covenant in which all religious institutions of the Old Testament have been replaced by people. Christ is the temple, the priesthood, the only victim and the altar, and has also replaced the Law of Moses as the Way (). The Blessed Virgin Mary is the Ark of the New Covenant; and, when she was by Christ’s side while he was dying on the cross, she embraced both her Son and the whole human race in her love, and thus she came to represent all those down the ages whose synergy with the Holy Spirit would make them one with Christ on the cross: At the foot of the cross she was personally the Church in its relationship to Christ, the New Eve, and Mother of all the living.. As our icon depicts, she is personally what the Church is collectively: she is the Bride of the Lamb.. No longer is God’s dwelling place among the people on earth a building. Since Christ’s Ascension, the temple has been replaced by us who are participants in Christ; we are his body, the Church, in whom God dwells bodily, reconciling the world to himself. By participating in the Eucharistic fellowship we become “the one temple of his Spirit”. In the Old Testament, the covenanted presence of God depended on the temple and the fulfilment of the purification ritual on the Day of the Atonement; and the altar sanctified the offering so that it could be offered on no other altar; and hence the crisis when the temple was destroyed. In New Testament times, in contrast, it is the presence of God’s People that sanctifies the church; and it is the offering by Christ of himself that sanctifies our offering and the altar on which it is placed.
If we were neo-scholastics, or even scholastics, we would then deduce that the important part of the ceremony of dedication, the one that brings about what everybody is there to do, is the Mass. We could believe that all the other ceremonies, like the anointing with chrism, are really superfluous liturgical padding, done because we are ordered to do them by the rubrics, and because they add solemnity to the rite as a whole, but of no real practical use. In contrast, the bishop reminds us that these are holy rites. They are liturgy, and liturgy, all liturgy, is the product of the synergy between the Holy Spirit and the Church, is a participation in the liturgy of heaven and hence has a sacramental dimension. When holy water is sprinkled or, even more so, when someone or something is anointed with chrism, then the Holy Spirit is doing something. It is for us to discern what he is doing It is not possible to separate the "essntial" from the "non-essential" because they form an inseparable whole.
When Russians drink a toast, they smash the glass afterwards to indicate that who or what they have toasted is of such importance that the glass should not be used for any inferior purpose. Where God speaks through his word, where the Holy Spirit transforms mere human beings into sons and daughters of God at baptism, where the Father responds to the prayer of the priest and sends the Holy Spirit to transform bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood and the praying congregation into the body of Christ and temple of the Holy Spirit, the Church thinks it appropriate that such a place, together with the chalice and pattern, are so holy that they should not be used for any inferior purpose. Changing uranium into nuclear fuel leaves behind material that remains radioactive for tens of thousands of years. The rite of dedication teaches us that a single Mass can make a building or an altar holy for as long as it exists. Of course, it is often necessary to celebrate the Mass and sacraments in places that cannot be reserved for worship and to use ordinary tables as altars; but it is so easy to underestimate the holiness of the Mass and sacraments if we do not give to those material things most associated with their celebration the kind of respect that human beings have naturally given to holy things throughout history. For this reason, it is better to consecrate the building that is used for Mass and to use it only for liturgical functions. I have a gut feeling that something is wrong when we use a room or a table that has been used for Mass over a period of time for some other purpose. In saying this we recognize that, in practical terms, while the holiness of any Mass can consecrate a building, not every Mass does. There needs to be the intention of the bishop to dedicate the building exclusively for the liturgy for a dedication to take place, and the Mass needs to be celebrated for that purpose..
The question still remains: if a Mass is enough to dedicate a church or an altar, what is accomplished by the sprinkling with holy water, the epiclesis or invocation, and by the anointing with holy chrism?
The first thing that comes to mind is how the order of sprinkling, anointing, followed by the celebration of the Eucharist mirrors the classic order of the sacraments of initiation, of baptism, confirmation and communion. When icons are blessed in the Eastern Orthodox Church, they too are sprinkled with holy water and anointed with chrism Does the consecrated church together with its altar constitute an icon? It is never called an icon, not because it is less than an icon but because it belongs to a different order: it is the context in which God manifests his presence in Christ, while an icon is an instrument of that manifestation. Nevertheless, the consecratory prayer is going to say that the church and altar reflect the mystery of the Church, and it is clear from the whole prayer that we participate in that mystery in church; so it is certainly icon-like. .
On entering the church and after greeting the people, the bishop solemnly blesses water which shall be used, he says, to remind the people of their baptism and a “symbol of the cleansing of these walls and this altar”. There we have the parallel between baptism and the sprinkling of holy water on the altar and walls. These are ‘purified’, cleansed of any harmful influences due to sin and dedicated to an unspecified Christian use. Sprinkling them with holy water is a way to lay claim to them on behalf of the Church. From now on they are to be used in the continual passing through death to life that is the very pulse beat and rythm of the body of Christ. After sprinkling, the meaning of this act is summed up as follows:
May God, the Father of mercies, dwell in this house of prayer. May the grace of the Holy Spirit cleanse us, for we are the temple of his presence. Amen
After the readings, the homily, and the Creed, the Litany of the Saints is said in place of the General Intercession. The next main part is the Prayer of Dedication which contains the epiclesis. This is a place in the liturgy where, normally, the purpose of the rite is expressed succinctly. In the epiclesis, what is the Church asking the Father in Jesus’ name? In the solemn prayer of dedication, the bishop first states the purpose of the occasion:
Father in heaven, source of holiness and true purpose (…) today we come before you, to dedicate to your lasting service this house of prayer, this temple of worship, this home in which we are nourished by your word and your sacraments.
It then says that this house reflects the mystery which is the Church. The Church is fruitful and holy by the blood of Christ. It is the Bride made radiant by his glory, a Virgin splendid in the wholeness of her faith, and Mother blessed by the power of the Holy Spirit. We have seen that these are titles given to Mary as a person in her relationship with Jesus. The Church too has thee titles The prayer continues to use metaphor to describe the Church. It is a vineyard with branches all over the world and reaching up to heaven. The Church is a temple, God’s dwelling place on earth, made up of living stones, with Jesus Christ as the corner stone. The Church is a city set on a mountain, a beacon to the whole world, bright with the glory of the Lamb.
Now we come to the invocation (epiclesis) proper:
Lord, send our Spirit from heaven to make this church an ever-holy place, and this altar a ready table for the sacrifice of Christ.
It continues by asking that the sacraments celebrated here will be efficacious, that baptism will overwhelm sin and that the people will truly die to sin, that the people gathered round the altar may celebrate the memorial of the Paschal Lamb and be fed at the table of Christ’s word and Christ’s body. Then the perspective changes; and the prayer goes on to ask that what happens here will have a world-wide effect. It asks that the Eucharist, which is the prayer of the Church, “resound through heaven and earth as a plea for the world’s salvation”. It asks that through it the poor may find justice and the oppressed liberation. It then goes on to ask:
From here may the whole world clothed in the dignity of children of God, enter with gladness your city of peace.
This is a dimension of the Christian life little taught at an ordinary parish level. It asks that as we approach the heavenly Jerusalem with the blood of Christ and pass through the veil which is the body of Christ into the presence of the Father, we may take the whole human race with us. We are Catholics, not just for ourselves but for the salvation of the world, and the unity of the Church is an effective sign of the unity of the human race in the eyes of God The prayer ends with a doxology and the people answer, “Amen”.
Next comes the anointing of the altar and the walls of the church with chrism. Symeon of Thessalonica wrote of the anointing of the altar:
The Altar is perfected through Holy Chrism. A prophetic hymn is chanted, signifying the incoming presence and praise of God. “The Lord comes,” says the Bishop, referring to Christ’s First and Second Coming, and the continuous presence of the Spirit with us. …Since the Chrism is poured out in the name of Christ our God, and the Table represents Him Who was buried therein, it is anointed with Chrism; and it becomes Holy Chrism for it receives the Grace of the Spirit. And for this reason, as we have said, the “Alleluia” is chanted, for God dwells in there; and the Altar becomes the workshop of the Gifts of the Spirit. For on it the Awesome and Mystical Sacraments are celebrated: the ordination of priests, the most Holy Chrism, and the Gospel is placed thereon, and beneath it the Holy Relics of the Martyrs are deposited. Thus this table becomes an Altar of Christ, and a Throne of Glory, and the dwelling-place of God, and the Tomb and Grave of Christ and a place of Rest.
The bishop in our Roman Rite introduces the anointing with the following words:
We now anoint this altar and this building. May God in his power make them holy, visible signs of the mystery of Christ and his Church.
Clearly, these words indicate that it is God who makes the church and altar is never referred to in Tradition as an icon because it is an instrument used by the Church at a higher level of Christian Reality than icons. Icons depict some aspect of the Christian Mystery, and the Holy Spirit brings the person of faith into contact with what is depicted. On the other hand, the altar is the place where what is depicted in icons in present for real. A crucifix depicts Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, while on the altar is the sacrifice itself. The Blessed Virgin, angels and saints are depicted in icons, but they are present at every Mass, joining with us in crying “Holy, holy, holy.”. Everything that has a visual dimension can be depicted in icons, but the altar is the throne of Him who cannot be depicted. For this reason our attention is not directed towards the structure of the altar, but to its surface and the empty space above it. For this reason the empty space should not be cluttered up with unnecessary books or furniture - it is not a bench to put things on - so that priest and people will have a clear, uninterrupted view of the paten and chalice which are central to the whole action of the Mass.
This cannot happen without the Holy Spirit. As the anointing with chrism is done in silence, we must go to the epiclesis of the consecration of chrism on Maundy Thursday to look further into the significance of the anointing.. .
Only in the second consecratory prayer over the chrism is there any mention of the intended effect of anointing places and things. It asks:May the splendour of holiness shine on the world from every place and thing signed with this oil.
The “splendour of holiness” is nothing less than the effect on people and things when God makes his presence felt. When the walls and altar are anointed, the bishop in the name of Christ and the Church is asking the Father to send the Spirit on them so that the church may become a place of contact between God and the world. The “splendour of holiness” may shine from the church building as a reflection of the “glory of the Lamb” which shines from the Church made up of living stones, so that the building will become a true symbol of the living Church.
“The nations will walk by its light. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it” This can only happen if God takes the initiative; but the bishop anoints them with the confidence that the Father will answer this prayer positively. The church and the altar have become a place of meeting with Christ where we contact him, because he takes the initiative, using this sacred space as his instrument through the power of the Spirit. We enter into the splendour of holiness when we enter a church, and the altar becomes the central point of focus when we celebrate. It is a challenge to the architect and to those who are responsible for the lay-out of the church building, as well as those who organise and celebrate the liturgy, to help people realize the holiness of this place of meeting between God and his people..
The General Instructions from the Roman Missal have more to say about a church.. There are other focal points in a church, though they all direct our attention eventually to the altar. The first is the ambo which is the desk from which the word of God is proclaimed. The sacredness of this proclamation recalls God’s proclamation of the Law on Mount Sinai and God speaking to Isaiah from his throne in heaven. When the reader says, at the end of the reading, “The word of God”, he is making an enormous claim, the impact of which is normally lost, because it is dismissed as mere ritual. He is saying that GOD is speaking,, as really and as immediately as in any theophany of the Old Testament. When reading the word of God, the reader has lent his voice to Christ who is speaking “whenever the word of God is read in church”. To underline this fact, in the General Instructions for the Roman Missal (272) it lays down that the ambo like the altar, should be permanent and fixed to the ground; it must not be used for any other purpose, except for responsorial psalms and the Prayers of the Faithful who are praying in Christ’s name. The priest is not to read the notices, the monitor is not to makes his admonition, nor the choirmaster direct the choir from the same ambo that is used for the word of God. This ambo must be where everybody can see and hear. Evidently, everything must be done not to give the impression those who read are only fulfilling a ritual, or only reading a not very interesting text, simply because it is written down. Reading the word of God is a ministry and should be reserved to those who have been designated and who know what they are doing and why they are doing it and are prepared spiritually for the task.
Another focal point where God and human beings meet is the baptismal font. The rubrics say:
The baptistery is an area where the baptismal font flows or has been placed. It should be reserved for the sacrament of baptism, and should be a worthy place for Christians to be reborn in water and the Holy Spirit. It may be situated in a chapel inside or outside the church, or in some other part of the church easily seen by the faithful; it should be large enough to accommodate a good number of people. After the Easter season, the Easter candle should be given a place of honour in the baptistery, so that when it is lighted for the celebration of baptism, the candles of the newly baptised may easily be lighted from it.
There is also the confessional, but, apart from taking note that there should be one, there are no details except that it should be adequate and according to the law.
Let us now summarize what the liturgy tells about the church building. Firstly, the true temple, altar, priest and sacrifice is Christ, and, by extension, his body the Church. The true Church is the community which we enter by baptism and which is formed into the body of Christ by the Eucharist. The church building is an icon of the Church. It gets its name for this reason. It gets its sacred character from the fact that the word of God is heard there and the sacraments celebrated there, and, most especially, because it is the place where the Church gathers for the Eucharist. By using it we participate in the mystery it represents. However, this dignity does not belong to the building permanently until it is consecrated by the bishop who blesses it with water and anoints it with oil, an analogy with baptism and confirmation. When something is blessed with holy water, it is the Church and Christ through the Church laying claim to whatever is blessed, without necessarily determining its use. The blessing with water is an invitation to those taking part to renew their baptism and is used to purify the building from any contamination by sin. This blessing is also used when the church is merely blest. It is the anointing that gives the church its permanent function. Consecration of a church is not a sacrament because it is of ecclesiastical origin, but it is sacramental, in that the gesture of anointing expresses both the Church’s petition and God’s response. The bishop consecrates, but it is the Holy Spirit who makes the church holy, claiming it on behalf of the risen Jesus who is Lord of heaven and earth. Anyone who enters it with the right dispositions shares in the mystery of the Church. Moreover, the building speaks to the world of God by its very presence in the world. Of course, if it looks like a factory or a space ship, it probably won’t be able to fulfil that function, but that is its function.
Within the church, the altar is the only piece of furniture blessed with water and anointed with oil. It should be fixed and in a prominent place, so that all eyes are drawn to it. In a church of the Latin Rite, it is the only object that is so blessed and anointed. On its surface, the Holy Trinity is manifested in the consecration of the bread and wine, the Church is identified with Christ in his sacrifice to the Father, and is taken up through Christ’s death, resurrection and ascension into the presence of the Father, passing through the veil of the Holy of Holies by communion in Christ’s body. It is from the altar that the people are sent forth to be witnesses to “what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands."
THE ALTAR
A Coptic Eucharist: Priests around the altar."We think: we go to the temple, we come together as brothers - that is good, it's beautiful - but the centre is where God is. And we adore God. More important is the adoration: the whole community unites to see the altar where the sacrifice is celebrated and adored." (Pope Francis)
If you enter a modern church like Worth Abbey, Clifton Cathedral or Leyland Parish Church, you will be struck by the central position of the altar and how the eyes of those who enter are automatically drawn towards it. However, there is no real sanctuary as in the more traditional layout: it is more like a stage. The Eucharist is the centre of Church, so the altar is placed at the centre of the assembly. In words taken from the rite of the Consecration of an Altar, we are “gathered round His altar in love”.
The altar is prominent because it is the holiest place in the church, indeed, as an Orthodox writer put it, "(It) is the holiest place that can be found on earth. The Majesty of God descends upon the Altar, when the Bloodless Sacrifice of Christ is performed on it.” Another Orthodox writer says:
The altar is prominent because it is the holiest place in the church, indeed, as an Orthodox writer put it, "(It) is the holiest place that can be found on earth. The Majesty of God descends upon the Altar, when the Bloodless Sacrifice of Christ is performed on it.” Another Orthodox writer says:
The central and most important part of the Church, which is the Holy Altar, is blessed and sanctified by the ritual of the Consecration. According to Nikolaos Cabasilas: “the purpose of the Holy Mysteries is this: to prepare us for the true life…the altar is the starting point for every rite, whether it be to communicate or to receive Chrism, as well as to administer Holy Orders and the perfections of Baptism…(the altar is) the foundation or root of the Sacraments…”
Symeon of Thessalonica emphasizes the same point:
Just as a bishop or priest is needed to celebrate the Divine Liturgy, and a bishop to celebrate Holy Orders and the Sacrament of Chrism, in like manner these rites have need of an altar for the altar is the church; for it is on the altar that the Liturgy and Holy Orders and the Chrism take place… Through the altar the church is made holy; for without an altar there can be no church, but only a House of Prayer… [without an altar]it is not the Tabernacle of God’s glory, nor His dwelling place…nor can the divine gifts be offered on its Table…
(Announcing the Consecration of the
Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church
Stamford, Connecticut
Sunday November 2, 2008)
Sir Ninian Comper, the great Anglo-Catholic architect, summarizes Catholic tradition when he says:
[A church] is a building which enshrines the altar of Him who dwelleth not in temples made with hands and who yet has made there His Covenanted Presence on earth. It is the centre of Worship in every community of men who recognize Christ as the Pantokrator, the Almighty, the Ruler and Creator of all things: at its altar is pleaded the daily Sacrifice in complete union with the Church Triumphant in Heaven, of which He is the one and only Head, the High Priest for ever after the order of Melchisedech.
Of the church building he writes:
A church built with hands ...is the outward expression here on earth of that spiritual Church built of living stones, the Bride of Christ, Urbs beata Jerusalem, which stretches back to the foundation of the world and onwards to all eternity. With her Lord she lays claim to the whole of His Creation ...And so the temple here on earth, in different lands and in different shapes, in the East and in the West, has developed or added to itself fresh forms of beauty and, though it has suffered from iconoclasts and destroyers both within and without, ...it has never broken with the past, it has never renounced its claims to continue.
In the Assyrian Rite which is in Aramaic and has its roots in apostolic times, the priest says:
Before the glorious throne of Thy majesty, my Lord, and the high and exalted seat of Thy honour and the awesome judgement seat of the power of Thy love, and the absolving altar which Thy will has established and the place where Thy honour dwells, we, Thy people and the sheep of Thy pasture, with thousands of Cherubim which sing halleluiahs to Thee, ten thousand Seraphim and Archangels which hallow Thee, do kneel and worship and confess and glorify Thee at all times, O Lord of all, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, for ever. Amen.
At communion the choir sings,
The cherubim and seraphim and archangels in fear and trembling stand before the altar, and gaze at the priest breaking and dividing the body of Christ, for the pardon of trespasses.
In the Byzantine Rite the whole sanctuary behind the ikonostasis can be called the “altar” and is considered an extension of it, and the altar itself is also called “holy table” and “throne”, and its meaning cannot be understood without reference to the Old Testament. The word “sacrifice” in Hebrew comes from a verb that means “to approach”. Sacrifice was a combined offering by human beings and acceptance by God. It was the context in which God’s Presence among men was accomplished and continued. This was never more so than in the Holy of Holies in the Jerusalem temple where the high priest went in every year on the Day of Atonement to offer sacrifice by pouring blood on the tip of temple mount that came up through the floor. God’s Presence that was manifested in the acceptance by God of the sacrifice of Atonement once a year was a very special Presence indeed. God’s acceptance of the Atonement sacrifice implied a permanent Presence, even though the sacrifice took place only once a year; and it was a Presence among the people that gave substance to the Covenant between God and the Jews. He was present because he was their God and they were his People; and the Holy of Holies was where the two met. The Holy of Holies was the holiest place in the world, where sacrifice was transformed into Presence and the world was saved from chaos. God was enthroned in the empty space over the Ark of the Covenant in the first temple, and above the bare top of the temple mount after the temple’s re-building. The Romans discovered to their surprise that the Holy of Holies was totally empty, but the Jews knew that this emptiness was full of God because of the sacrifice that was celebrated there once a year. The rock was also the exact spot, according to Jewish belief, where Abraham attempted to sacrifice Isaac and where he offered the sacrifice “which the Lord had provided” Covenanted Presence and the sacrifice of atonement were linked together in temple theology.
There are obvious parallels between the Holy of Holies and the Christian altar. In the Byzantine Liturgy, the biblical roots of our understanding of the altar are very clear. It is the altar of sacrifice, representing Calvary; it is the Throne or Mercy Seat upon which the blood of Christ is sprinkled for our Atonement and from which God, in his Mercy, showers his grace on humankind, and this is the reason why the deacon calls on the people to ask God’s mercy so often during the celebration of the Byzantine Liturgy. The altar is Christ's tomb because from it comes the risen Christ to save us; it is the holy table of the Messianic feast, the marriage feast of the Lamb; and it represents and projects onto earth the altar in heaven. It is the place where heaven and earth are joined, and where the Parousia or Second Coming is anticipated. As God’s throne or mercy-seat, it is not orientated in any direction. On the contrary, everything and everybody are orientated towards it; and it is reaching up to heaven. In a word, the altar is the “liturgical East” to which both priest and people direct their gaze when they celebrate the Eucharist.
Let us think, for a moment, about the great altar of the Jerusalem temple, just outside the Holy of Holies. This too can help us understand the role of the Christian altar. The altar that was placed before the inner sanctuary did not look like the altars we are used to. It was very high, and the priests reached the top by climbing a ramp; and it normally had a fire burning on top of it which would consume the offerings. The Fathers of the Church, especially St John Chrysostom, were not slow in identifying the Holy Spirit as the Fire that comes down on the altar to consume and transform the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. St John Chrysostom draws a parallel between what happened when Elijah invoked the Lord who sent down fire from heaven to consume the animal sacrifices on the mountain, and the priest who invokes the Lord who sends the Spirit on the bread and wine, as all heaven keeps reverent silence. St Symeon the New Theologian and St Seraphim of Zarov both saw the uncreated light of God descend on the gifts during the Eucharistic Prayer, The Father sends his Spirit who transforms the gifts and also ourselves to the degree that we allow him, and sustains by his divine activity the existence of the gifts as sacraments.
It can be asked why, if the altar is not orientated in any particular direction except, perhaps, upwards, being the meeting place between the Church and the Tri-une God, it has been traditionally placed at the eastern end of a church building, so that all who use it are facing East. The answer is liturgical symbolism. The eastward position links these three holy places together: the altars in the Jerusalem temple and the altar in the heavenly temple are linked with the visible altar on which Mass is celebrated. However, it remains true that the links are there, even when the eastern position has been abandoned in favour of the modern lay-out. For this reason, the altar remains the “liturgical east” and the focal point of the celebration, whichever way the priest is facing. Whether the priest has his back to the people or is facing the people, he, like the people, is facing the altar where the active Presence of the Blessed Trinity becomes one with the Church in bringing about the Eucharistic Sacrifice, linking the earthly altar with the heavenly altar (Roman Canon) and with all other altars on earth across time and space. The Roman Canon pictures the consecration of the elements, not as Jesus coming down on the altar so much as the whole celebration being lifted up to the altar in heaven where we join the angels, the apostles and the martyrs.in offering praise to God. Hence, the attention is upwards towards heaven, and the altar is the point of contact between heaven and earth. It is called many things. The altar is "the glorious throne", "the high and exalted seat" of God's Presence, "the awesome judgement seat of the power" of God's love, "the absolving altar" where God's honour dwells (Assyrian Rite). The altar is heaven's gate through which the Apostle John passed on Patmos to join in the Liturgy of heaven, and through which we pass into God's presence every time we participate in the Mass.
Like in the Holy of Holies, it is not the furniture in itself that is the holiest point in the church, but the surface and the space above it. The altar’s true holiness arises from what is performed on it. As altar, it is sanctified by the sacrifice that is offered on it; as throne it is sanctified by the divine, merciful Presence that sits on it and presents us with the sacrifice that the “Lord will provide” ; as table it is sanctified by the food that is laid on it. The Altar is not only the true centre of the church building, indeed, without which it is not a church, but is where the new covenant becomes a reality. The altar is the true centre of the human race which is transformed by the Mass that is celebrated on it; and is the centre of the universe which is destined to pass through the death and resurrection of Christ into the life of the Blessed Trinity. For this reason, in the modern Roman Rite, the altar is kept free of clutter, so that there is unimpeded view of the altar surface where the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ. As the altar is a projection on earth of the altar in heaven, the table by which we partake in the Wedding Feast of the Lamb, while we look on the altar, we internally focus on heaven with the angels and the saints, not on one another; and, in being united to Christ in heaven by the power of the Holy Spirit, our unity with one another and our unity with all across time and space who have celebrated in the past, are celebrating now, or will celebrate in the future, is forged into one organic whole, the Catholic Church. It is a unity forged in Christ who is in heaven, not a unity constructed out of our feelings of togetherness on earth..
Statues and pictures of saints are not to be placed over the altar (Ded. Of Altar. Rubric 10.) Neither are relics to be cemented into the surface of the altar, nor may relics be placed on it for the devotion of the people (No. 10 & 11): it is holier than the holiest relic, holier than any icon, because the Reality that all icons depict is celebrated on it. However, both in East and West, a crucifix is closely associated with the altar, either on it or near it. It is often a processional cross. It is not the centre of attention because the altar is that. Nevertheless it has an important role. There are two ways by which the Church relates to Christ’s death on the cross which come together in the Mass: firstly there is its historical memory, a memory that is contained in the Gospels and passed down from proclamation to proclamation, generation to generation, and which the Holy Spirit makes for us the fullest and most complete revelation of God in the flesh. Secondly, we are brought into the death and resurrection of Christ by sacramental participation in the sacrifice of the Mass. The crucifix is in a prominent place because it demonstrates that what is happening on the altar is one with what the Church remembers. However, it is often placed to one side so as not to impede the sight of the sacred gifts by priest and people. The other icon associated with the altar is the Gospel book which is carried in procession and is placed on the altar from which it is taken from there to be proclaimed at the correct moment.
The altar is treated very differently in the Orthodox East. In our Victorian gothic monastic church the altar is under the tower and the presiding priest faces the people; while in an Eastern rite church, the presiding priest faces East, and the altar is separated from the people by an "ikonostasis". However, at both Masses the concelebrating priests face the altar, looking, not towards the East wall or the crucifix or the people, but at what is happening in that sacred space on the surface of the altar. In the West, We clear away whatever impedes the view of its surface, thus directing attention towards the main action; while in the East they honour the altar by enclosing it in a sanctuary in which only those who are officiating may enter and, by so doing emphasising the holiness of what is taking place there: two ways of honouring the holiness of the altar and what goes on there, and this reflects our different cultures.
We can now summarise what we know about the altar:
1) The altar is the focal point of the Eucharistic celebration. Whether the priest and people are all facing east, or the priest is facing the people, both priest and people are focused on the altar, or should be. If priest and people are conscious of what is happening on the altar, nothing less than a theophany of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, they will not waste time looking at each other, but will be bowed down in humility and love, offering to God, “an acceptable worship with reverence and awe; for indeed our God is a consuming fire.” (Hb. 12, 28f).
It is a common abuse and a misunderstanding of the whole meaning of the post-Vatican II liturgy if "Mass facing the people" is interpreted to mean "Mass in which the main focus of attention of the priest is the people, and the main focus of attention of the people is the priest". The focal point of the Eucharist, whatever way the altar is facing, is the altar itself; and the attention of the whole community, priests, altar servers and people, is directed towards it and what is happening on it..
I know that some priests treat the altar like a demonstration desk and keep their eyes on the people all the time, even mistakenly treating the little elevation during the doxology at the end of the Eucharistic Prayer as though they are showing the gifts to the people. Others act as though the Mass is like a television show, with the priest as the main attraction.
The oldest and simplest rubric for celebrating the Liturgy as well as for living the Christian life is that of St John the Baptist who said of Christ, "He must increase, and I must decrease." Metropolitan Anthony Bloom used to to have a saying which he attributed to St John Chrysostom, "For Christ to appear, the priest must disappear." The two-fold role of the priest is to act in persona Christi and to introduce the people, through Christ, into the presence of the Blessed Trinity. A liturgy that fails to introduce the people though Christ into God's active presence and re-focuses the action onto either the priest or the people is simply failing as Liturgy.
I do not blame the post-Vatican II for much of the abuse. It existed before, but people didn't notice it. Liturgical egoism abounded just as much before Vatican II: it just wasn't noticed and, of course, took different forms: proud prelates and prima donas in lace. Indeed, too much interest in lace and incense was looked on with suspicion, and seminarians believed they best served their vocation by concentrating on pastoral studies and football. Thus, when the changes came, many priests and sisters approached the new Mass with little litugical formation; and this has showed. They simply do not understand liturgy, and it can be blamed on their seminary training, not on the position of the altar or on the liturgy itself.
It is a common abuse and a misunderstanding of the whole meaning of the post-Vatican II liturgy if "Mass facing the people" is interpreted to mean "Mass in which the main focus of attention of the priest is the people, and the main focus of attention of the people is the priest". The focal point of the Eucharist, whatever way the altar is facing, is the altar itself; and the attention of the whole community, priests, altar servers and people, is directed towards it and what is happening on it..
I know that some priests treat the altar like a demonstration desk and keep their eyes on the people all the time, even mistakenly treating the little elevation during the doxology at the end of the Eucharistic Prayer as though they are showing the gifts to the people. Others act as though the Mass is like a television show, with the priest as the main attraction.
The oldest and simplest rubric for celebrating the Liturgy as well as for living the Christian life is that of St John the Baptist who said of Christ, "He must increase, and I must decrease." Metropolitan Anthony Bloom used to to have a saying which he attributed to St John Chrysostom, "For Christ to appear, the priest must disappear." The two-fold role of the priest is to act in persona Christi and to introduce the people, through Christ, into the presence of the Blessed Trinity. A liturgy that fails to introduce the people though Christ into God's active presence and re-focuses the action onto either the priest or the people is simply failing as Liturgy.
I do not blame the post-Vatican II for much of the abuse. It existed before, but people didn't notice it. Liturgical egoism abounded just as much before Vatican II: it just wasn't noticed and, of course, took different forms: proud prelates and prima donas in lace. Indeed, too much interest in lace and incense was looked on with suspicion, and seminarians believed they best served their vocation by concentrating on pastoral studies and football. Thus, when the changes came, many priests and sisters approached the new Mass with little litugical formation; and this has showed. They simply do not understand liturgy, and it can be blamed on their seminary training, not on the position of the altar or on the liturgy itself.
It is laid down in the rubrics (DA 7) that in new churches there should only be one altar. “It should be placed in a central position which draws the attention of the whole congregation” (CA 8) "The whole congregation" includes the priest. In a consecrated church it should be fixed to the floor and should normally be made of stone, unless the bishops decide otherwise (CA 9). The altar should be free standing “so that the priest can easily walk around it and celebrate Mass facing the people” (CA 8). (The Roman Missal General Instruction, No. 262). “The altar is dedicated to the one God by its very nature. (About the Church’s custom of dedicating altars to saints) “St Augustine expresses it well, ‘It is not to any of the martyrs, but to the God of the martyrs, though in memory of the martyrs, that we raise our altars.” (Contra Faustum XX, 21. PL 42, 3884). No statues or pictures of the saints should be placed over an altar in new churches, nor should relics of saints be placed on the altar for the veneration of the faithful (CA10). It is fitting that the custom of the Roman liturgy to celebrate Mass over the relics be retained, but these relics must be authentic and not placed either over the altar or set into the table slab, but in a special place under the altar. (CA11)
The Blessed Sacrament is preferably reserved in a chapel to some extent apart from the main body of the church, and another altar may be built there and used during weekdays when there are few people attending Mass. You may be somewhat surprised that it is recommended that the Blessed Sacrament should be in a chapel apart. Surely one of the most wonderful developments in the West has been adoration of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. It has been a main factor in the sanctity of many saints, and a sense of Presence associated with the tabernacle has been a cause of many conversions. Why then do liturgists say it should be in a chapel apart? Is it a move in a Protestant direction?
The problem is that we have such a lively devotion to Christ in the sacramental host that it tends to take our attention away from other important ways in which God is present with his people. For instance, next to the Blessed Sacrament, icons tend to lose their sacred function, which is a pity. Even more important is the active presence of all three Persons of the Blessed Trinity in the Mass, and not just Jesus in the host. The active presence of the Holy Trinity is expressed at the beginning of the celebration in the words of St Paul, “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God (the Father), and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with you. all.”. It is also expressed in the Doxology, “Through Him (Christ), with Him and in Him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all honour and glory is Yours, almighty Father, for ever and ever.” As is affirmed in the priest’s greeting in the Byzantine Rite, this participation by mere creatures in the life of the Blessed Trinity is what is meant by “the kingdom of God” When Eastern Christian touch the ground with their foreheads on entering a church during Lent, they are acknowledging the Divine Presence, not in the. Blessed Sacrament, but the Presence focused on the altar as the new Holy of Holies where the Atonement sacrifice is celebrated. Christ’s presence in the Blessed Sacrament as our food is understood as the central means by which we enter into the life of the Trinity. This presence of the Blessed Trinity expresses itself in different ways during the course of the Mass; and, if we wish the faithful to become aware of the nuances of God’s presence, that Christ is the Father’s Word who speaks in the Liturgy of the Word by the power of the Holy Spirit, that the consecration is a prayer on behalf of the Church and in Christ’s Name to the Father, that when we pray the Mass and sing, we do so with Christ in the Spirit, so that the Father is both the Source and Goal of our praise, we need to separate the celebration from the continual presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament which tends to hold the peoples’ attention to the exclusion of everything else. We can either discourage devotion to the Blessed Sacrament, which would be to diminish our own spiritual patrimony; or we can place the tabernacle in a central place, but behind the celebrant who has his back to it; or we can keep the Blessed Sacrament in a chapel apart from the main altar..In our monastery church we suspend the tabernacle or pyx over the altar. We believe it to be the best solution - though it would be impracticable we we needed to store a large quantity of hosts - because it associates the continued eucharistic presence of Christ in the consecrated hosts with the altar, gives that presence a central position, but without being an obstacle to the people appreciating the various shades, degrees and means by which Christ is present with them; and it does not impede the people from seeing what is going on on the altar
In the Old Testament, the people knew that their sacrifices were acceptable to God because they were laid on or poured out on altars that God had himself established. The altar sanctified the offering because God's Presence had decreed his sanctifying Presence in the Covenant to accept the sacrifices. In contrast, the Christian altar is sanctified by what is laid on it, by the body and blood of the the Lord. St Augustine tells us very succinctly, beginning with a quotation from Matthew 23, 17, “The Lord says to the Jews, ‘What is more important, the offering or the altar which sanctifies the offering?’ For the temple and the altar we must understand the Christ himself; for the gold and the offerings, the praises and sacrifices of prayers which we offer through him. It is not the offerings which sanctify Christ, but rather Christ who sanctifies the offerings.” (PL 35, 1329) Christ is the only sacrifice completely worthy of the Father, the only altar capable of sanctifying anything or anybody, and the only temple in which God dwells bodily. The incredible thing is that in the Mass we are doing something that no creature, not even the angels, can do by their own nature, only because of the synergy between the Holy Spirit and the Church: the glory which we give to God is nothing less than the glory that God is giving to God: we are sharing in the life of the Trinity, but always by entering into the death, resurrection and ascension of Christ; and.the focal point, what some call the "liturgical East", is the place where the Father sends his Son, at his Son's own request, by the power of the Holy Spirit, and the Son offers himself together with us in the unity of the Holy Spirit to the Father: it is the gate of heaven.. This is an anticipation of the "Parousia" or Second Coming. In both East and West, in the ordinary Roman Rite and in its "extraordinary" Latin use, the priests face the altar, as do the people. In the Divine Liturgy for Christmas when I con-celebrated,, there was a priest, the senior one present, who faced West; though not, of course, looking at the people because there was a tabernacle on the altar, and the sanctuary was not visible from the nave. The difference between East and West is that, while in the West we honour the altar by making it as prominent and as easily visible as possible, in the East it is honoured by being hidden in the sanctuary, either by an iconstasis in the Byzantine Rite or by a curtain among the Syrians.
The mystery of the Eucharist is explained by one ancient author:
God came among human beings so that they might meet him. (…) Thine is the kingdom of heaven: ours is thy house. (…) There the priest offers bread in thy name and thou givest thine own body for food to all for food. (..) Thy heavens are too high for us to be able to reach them. But behold thou comest to us in the church, so close. Thy throne rests on fire; who would dare approach? But the Almighty lives and dwells in the bread. Anyone who wishes to may approach and eat. (For the Consecration of a New Church Bickell I. pp 77 – 82)
WHAT WE LEARN FROM THE RITE OF DEDICATION
The church is holy because it houses the gathered Church; and the altar is holy because it is on this table that Mass is celebrated. Let us now look at what the liturgy has to say about the sanctity of a church, using as our chief source the Rite for the Dedication of a Church and the Rite for a Dedication of an Altar. What hits us immediately is the preliminary statement of the bishop to the people at the dedication of a church or an altar. On greeting the people, the bishop should say something like:
Brothers and sisters in Christ, this is a day of rejoicing: we have come to dedicate this church (this altar) by offering the sacrifice of Christ.(for a church) May we open our hearts and minds to receive his word with faith; may our fellowship born in the one font of baptism and sustained at the one table of the Lord, become the one temple of his Spirit, as we gather round his altar in love.
(for an altar) May we respond to these holy rites, receive God’s word with faith, share at the Lord’s table with joy, and raise up our hearts in hope.
We belong to the New Covenant in which all religious institutions of the Old Testament have been replaced by people. Christ is the temple, the priesthood, the only victim and the altar, and has also replaced the Law of Moses as the Way (). The Blessed Virgin Mary is the Ark of the New Covenant; and, when she was by Christ’s side while he was dying on the cross, she embraced both her Son and the whole human race in her love, and thus she came to represent all those down the ages whose synergy with the Holy Spirit would make them one with Christ on the cross: At the foot of the cross she was personally the Church in its relationship to Christ, the New Eve, and Mother of all the living.. As our icon depicts, she is personally what the Church is collectively: she is the Bride of the Lamb.. No longer is God’s dwelling place among the people on earth a building. Since Christ’s Ascension, the temple has been replaced by us who are participants in Christ; we are his body, the Church, in whom God dwells bodily, reconciling the world to himself. By participating in the Eucharistic fellowship we become “the one temple of his Spirit”. In the Old Testament, the covenanted presence of God depended on the temple and the fulfilment of the purification ritual on the Day of the Atonement; and the altar sanctified the offering so that it could be offered on no other altar; and hence the crisis when the temple was destroyed. In New Testament times, in contrast, it is the presence of God’s People that sanctifies the church; and it is the offering by Christ of himself that sanctifies our offering and the altar on which it is placed.
If we were neo-scholastics, or even scholastics, we would then deduce that the important part of the ceremony of dedication, the one that brings about what everybody is there to do, is the Mass. We could believe that all the other ceremonies, like the anointing with chrism, are really superfluous liturgical padding, done because we are ordered to do them by the rubrics, and because they add solemnity to the rite as a whole, but of no real practical use. In contrast, the bishop reminds us that these are holy rites. They are liturgy, and liturgy, all liturgy, is the product of the synergy between the Holy Spirit and the Church, is a participation in the liturgy of heaven and hence has a sacramental dimension. When holy water is sprinkled or, even more so, when someone or something is anointed with chrism, then the Holy Spirit is doing something. It is for us to discern what he is doing It is not possible to separate the "essntial" from the "non-essential" because they form an inseparable whole.
When Russians drink a toast, they smash the glass afterwards to indicate that who or what they have toasted is of such importance that the glass should not be used for any inferior purpose. Where God speaks through his word, where the Holy Spirit transforms mere human beings into sons and daughters of God at baptism, where the Father responds to the prayer of the priest and sends the Holy Spirit to transform bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood and the praying congregation into the body of Christ and temple of the Holy Spirit, the Church thinks it appropriate that such a place, together with the chalice and pattern, are so holy that they should not be used for any inferior purpose. Changing uranium into nuclear fuel leaves behind material that remains radioactive for tens of thousands of years. The rite of dedication teaches us that a single Mass can make a building or an altar holy for as long as it exists. Of course, it is often necessary to celebrate the Mass and sacraments in places that cannot be reserved for worship and to use ordinary tables as altars; but it is so easy to underestimate the holiness of the Mass and sacraments if we do not give to those material things most associated with their celebration the kind of respect that human beings have naturally given to holy things throughout history. For this reason, it is better to consecrate the building that is used for Mass and to use it only for liturgical functions. I have a gut feeling that something is wrong when we use a room or a table that has been used for Mass over a period of time for some other purpose. In saying this we recognize that, in practical terms, while the holiness of any Mass can consecrate a building, not every Mass does. There needs to be the intention of the bishop to dedicate the building exclusively for the liturgy for a dedication to take place, and the Mass needs to be celebrated for that purpose..
The question still remains: if a Mass is enough to dedicate a church or an altar, what is accomplished by the sprinkling with holy water, the epiclesis or invocation, and by the anointing with holy chrism?
The first thing that comes to mind is how the order of sprinkling, anointing, followed by the celebration of the Eucharist mirrors the classic order of the sacraments of initiation, of baptism, confirmation and communion. When icons are blessed in the Eastern Orthodox Church, they too are sprinkled with holy water and anointed with chrism Does the consecrated church together with its altar constitute an icon? It is never called an icon, not because it is less than an icon but because it belongs to a different order: it is the context in which God manifests his presence in Christ, while an icon is an instrument of that manifestation. Nevertheless, the consecratory prayer is going to say that the church and altar reflect the mystery of the Church, and it is clear from the whole prayer that we participate in that mystery in church; so it is certainly icon-like. .
On entering the church and after greeting the people, the bishop solemnly blesses water which shall be used, he says, to remind the people of their baptism and a “symbol of the cleansing of these walls and this altar”. There we have the parallel between baptism and the sprinkling of holy water on the altar and walls. These are ‘purified’, cleansed of any harmful influences due to sin and dedicated to an unspecified Christian use. Sprinkling them with holy water is a way to lay claim to them on behalf of the Church. From now on they are to be used in the continual passing through death to life that is the very pulse beat and rythm of the body of Christ. After sprinkling, the meaning of this act is summed up as follows:
May God, the Father of mercies, dwell in this house of prayer. May the grace of the Holy Spirit cleanse us, for we are the temple of his presence. Amen
After the readings, the homily, and the Creed, the Litany of the Saints is said in place of the General Intercession. The next main part is the Prayer of Dedication which contains the epiclesis. This is a place in the liturgy where, normally, the purpose of the rite is expressed succinctly. In the epiclesis, what is the Church asking the Father in Jesus’ name? In the solemn prayer of dedication, the bishop first states the purpose of the occasion:
Father in heaven, source of holiness and true purpose (…) today we come before you, to dedicate to your lasting service this house of prayer, this temple of worship, this home in which we are nourished by your word and your sacraments.
It then says that this house reflects the mystery which is the Church. The Church is fruitful and holy by the blood of Christ. It is the Bride made radiant by his glory, a Virgin splendid in the wholeness of her faith, and Mother blessed by the power of the Holy Spirit. We have seen that these are titles given to Mary as a person in her relationship with Jesus. The Church too has thee titles The prayer continues to use metaphor to describe the Church. It is a vineyard with branches all over the world and reaching up to heaven. The Church is a temple, God’s dwelling place on earth, made up of living stones, with Jesus Christ as the corner stone. The Church is a city set on a mountain, a beacon to the whole world, bright with the glory of the Lamb.
Now we come to the invocation (epiclesis) proper:
Lord, send our Spirit from heaven to make this church an ever-holy place, and this altar a ready table for the sacrifice of Christ.
It continues by asking that the sacraments celebrated here will be efficacious, that baptism will overwhelm sin and that the people will truly die to sin, that the people gathered round the altar may celebrate the memorial of the Paschal Lamb and be fed at the table of Christ’s word and Christ’s body. Then the perspective changes; and the prayer goes on to ask that what happens here will have a world-wide effect. It asks that the Eucharist, which is the prayer of the Church, “resound through heaven and earth as a plea for the world’s salvation”. It asks that through it the poor may find justice and the oppressed liberation. It then goes on to ask:
From here may the whole world clothed in the dignity of children of God, enter with gladness your city of peace.
This is a dimension of the Christian life little taught at an ordinary parish level. It asks that as we approach the heavenly Jerusalem with the blood of Christ and pass through the veil which is the body of Christ into the presence of the Father, we may take the whole human race with us. We are Catholics, not just for ourselves but for the salvation of the world, and the unity of the Church is an effective sign of the unity of the human race in the eyes of God The prayer ends with a doxology and the people answer, “Amen”.
Next comes the anointing of the altar and the walls of the church with chrism. Symeon of Thessalonica wrote of the anointing of the altar:
The Alter is perfected through Holy Chrism. A prophetic hymn is chanted, signifying the incoming presence and praise of God. “The Lord comes,” says the Bishop, referring to Christ’s First and Second Coming, and the continuous presence of the Spirit with us. …Since the Chrism is poured out in the name of Christ our God, and the Table represents Him Who was buried therein, it is anointed with Chrism; and it becomes Holy Chrism for it receives the Grace of the Spirit. And for this reason, as we have said, the “Alleluia” is chanted, for God dwells in there; and the Altar becomes the workshop of the Gifts of the Spirit. For on it the Awesome and Mystical Sacraments are celebrated: the ordination of priests, the most Holy Chrism, and the Gospel is placed thereon, and beneath it the Holy Relics of the Martyrs are deposited. Thus this table becomes an Altar of Christ, and a Throne of Glory, and the dwelling-place of God, and the Tomb and Grave of Christ and a place of Rest.
The bishop in our Roman Rite introduces the anointing with the following words:
We now anoint this altar and this building. May God in his power make them holy, visible signs of the mystery of Christ and his Church.
Clearly, these words indicate that it is God who makes the church and altar is never referred to in Tradition as an icon because it is an instrument used by the Church at a higher level of Christian Reality than icons. Icons depict some aspect of the Christian Mystery, and the Holy Spirit brings the person of faith into contact with what is depicted. On the other hand, the altar is the place where what is depicted in icons in present for real. A crucifix depicts Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, while on the altar is the sacrifice itself. The Blessed Virgin, angels and saints are depicted in icons, but they are present at every Mass, joining with us in crying “Holy, holy, holy.”. Everything that has a visual dimension can be depicted in icons, but the altar is the throne of Him who cannot be depicted. For this reason our attention is not directed towards the structure of the altar, but to its surface and the empty space above it. For this reason the empty space should not be cluttered up with unnecessary books or furniture - it is not a bench to put things on - so that priest and people will have a clear, uninterrupted view of the paten and chalice which are central to the whole action of the Mass.
This cannot happen without the Holy Spirit. As the anointing with chrism is done in silence, we must go to the epiclesis of the consecration of chrism on Maundy Thursday to look further into the significance of the anointing.. .
Only in the second consecratory prayer over the chrism is there any mention of the intended effect of anointing places and things. It asks:May the splendour of holiness shine on the world from every place and thing signed with this oil.
The “splendour of holiness” is nothing less than the effect on people and things when God makes his presence felt. When the walls and altar are anointed, the bishop in the name of Christ and the Church is asking the Father to send the Spirit on them so that the church may become a place of contact between God and the world. The “splendour of holiness” may shine from the church building as a reflection of the “glory of the Lamb” which shines from the Church made up of living stones, so that the building will become a true symbol of the living Church.
“The nations will walk by its light. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it” This can only happen if God takes the initiative; but the bishop anoints them with the confidence that the Father will answer this prayer positively. The church and the altar have become a place of meeting with Christ where we contact him, because he takes the initiative, using this sacred space as his instrument through the power of the Spirit. We enter into the splendour of holiness when we enter a church, and the altar becomes the central point of focus when we celebrate. It is a challenge to the architect and to those who are responsible for the lay-out of the church building, as well as those who organise and celebrate the liturgy, to help people realize the holiness of this place of meeting between God and his people..
The General Instructions from the Roman Missal have more to say about a church.. There are other focal points in a church, though they all direct our attention eventually to the altar. The first is the ambo which is the desk from which the word of God is proclaimed. The sacredness of this proclamation recalls God’s proclamation of the Law on Mount Sinai and God speaking to Isaiah from his throne in heaven. When the reader says, at the end of the reading, “The word of God”, he is making an enormous claim, the impact of which is normally lost, because it is dismissed as mere ritual. He is saying that GOD is speaking,, as really and as immediately as in any theophany of the Old Testament. When reading the word of God, the reader has lent his voice to Christ who is speaking “whenever the word of God is read in church”. To underline this fact, in the General Instructions for the Roman Missal (272) it lays down that the ambo like the altar, should be permanent and fixed to the ground; it must not be used for any other purpose, except for responsorial psalms and the Prayers of the Faithful who are praying in Christ’s name. The priest is not to read the notices, the monitor is not to makes his admonition, nor the choirmaster direct the choir from the same ambo that is used for the word of God. This ambo must be where everybody can see and hear. Evidently, everything must be done not to give the impression those who read are only fulfilling a ritual, or only reading a not very interesting text, simply because it is written down. Reading the word of God is a ministry and should be reserved to those who have been designated and who know what they are doing and why they are doing it and are prepared spiritually for the task.
Another focal point where God and human beings meet is the baptismal font. The rubrics say:
The baptistery is an area where the baptismal font flows or has been placed. It should be reserved for the sacrament of baptism, and should be a worthy place for Christians to be reborn in water and the Holy Spirit. It may be situated in a chapel inside or outside the church, or in some other part of the church easily seen by the faithful; it should be large enough to accommodate a good number of people. After the Easter season, the Easter candle should be given a place of honour in the baptistery, so that when it is lighted for the celebration of baptism, the candles of the newly baptised may easily be lighted from it.
There is also the confessional, but, apart from taking note that there should be one, there are no details except that it should be adequate and according to the law.
Let us now summarize what the liturgy tells about the church building. Firstly, the true temple, altar, priest and sacrifice is Christ, and, by extension, his body the Church. The true Church is the community which we enter by baptism and which is formed into the body of Christ by the Eucharist. The church building is an icon of the Church. It gets its name for this reason. It gets its sacred character from the fact that the word of God is heard there and the sacraments celebrated there, and, most especially, because it is the place where the Church gathers for the Eucharist. By using it we participate in the mystery it represents. However, this dignity does not belong to the building permanently until it is consecrated by the bishop who blesses it with water and anoints it with oil, an analogy with baptism and confirmation. When something is blessed with holy water, it is the Church and Christ through the Church laying claim to whatever is blessed, without necessarily determining its use. The blessing with water is an invitation to those taking part to renew their baptism and is used to purify the building from any contamination by sin. This blessing is also used when the church is merely blest. It is the anointing that gives the church its permanent function. Consecration of a church is not a sacrament because it is of ecclesiastical origin, but it is sacramental, in that the gesture of anointing expresses both the Church’s petition and God’s response. The bishop consecrates, but it is the Holy Spirit who makes the church holy, claiming it on behalf of the risen Jesus who is Lord of heaven and earth. Anyone who enters it with the right dispositions shares in the mystery of the Church. Moreover, the building speaks to the world of God by its very presence in the world. Of course, if it looks like a factory or a space ship, it probably won’t be able to fulfil that function, but that is its function.
Within the church, the altar is the only piece of furniture blessed with water and anointed with oil. It should be fixed and in a prominent place, so that all eyes are drawn to it. In a church of the Latin Rite, it is the only object that is so blessed and anointed. On its surface, the Holy Trinity is manifested in the consecration of the bread and wine, the Church is identified with Christ in his sacrifice to the Father, and is taken up through Christ’s death, resurrection and ascension into the presence of the Father, passing through the veil of the Holy of Holies by communion in Christ’s body. It is from the altar that the people are sent forth to be witnesses to “what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life – this life was revealed , and we have seen it and testify to it, and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us.”(1 Jn 1, 1ff)
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MONASTIC SPIRITUALITy from St John´s Abbey, Minnesota
Prayer and Work
As Benedictine monks, we approach prayer in a distinctive, monastic way. We pray the Psalms, those ancient, iron-age poems given to the Church by the people of Israel, at regular times each day. We come together to do this "work of God" and it is the glue that holds our community life together.
The Psalms are a rich repository of human religious experience, at times pleading, cursing, hoping, despairing, grieving, resting, rejoicing, praising, always from a position of profound trust in the saving power of God. Over the centuries, praying monks quickly learned that some of the Psalms were better suited to the morning, some for the evening, and some for midday. They noted that some of them were keyed to the mystery of the dying and rising of Jesus. So our prayer as monks is largely biblical and liturgical, ever responsive to the rhythm of the day and season.
We celebrate Eucharist each day, and with special festivity on Sunday. All of our prayer flows to and from the Sunday Eucharist, recognizing both spiritually and theologically that Christian monastic life would not make any sense without the resurrection of Jesus. Sunday is a "little" Easter!
Our individual prayer is also rooted in the Scriptures. From the earliest days of monastic life, monks have immersed themselves in the language, images, and narrative of the Bible. In the daily practice of reading a short passage of Scripture, pondering its meaning, and praying in and through the text, we continually rediscover the purpose and meaning for our lives and God's work in them. One of the great gifts of the monastic tradition is that we read Scripture continuously, that is, we don't jump around from one passage to another, from one book to another. Rather, we read and pray the Scriptures continuously, always in context.
Another powerful practice from the monastic tradition is centering prayer. Many times individuals find their prayer stymied and unfruitful because they conceive of it as human beings "talking to God." Centering prayer rebalances this equation because in this practice we simply sit in silence, in the presence of God, and let the Holy Spirit "work on us." Initially, because we are not speaking, our minds rush around, grabbing at everything. But with practice, we learn to let go of the mind's activity and to be in silence before God, who, as Saint Benedict teaches, is everywhere.
Monks work. They understand work as a normal, creative expression of being alive as a human being. They do everything from pastoring to teaching, administrating, repairing and maintaining the monastery, and growing food for the table. Saint Benedict instructs his monks that they should not complain if they have to "do the harvest," thereby ensuring that later generations of monks would respect all honest labor.
Note that the title of this section is "prayer and work." The conjunction "and" is extremely important because we are always struggling to maintain the balance between the two, between prayer and work. If we tip in either direction, we will surely be less than optimal in our search for union with God. Too much time in prayer can easily turn into a self-serving narcissism that is unaware of the needs of others. Too much work can easily lead one to rationalize being absent from community prayer, Eucharist, holy reading, and the life of the community. Prayer and work, in balance, are a sound-bite that expresses a distinctive element of Benedictine monastic spirituality.
Abbot John Klassen, OSB
June 25, 2013
The Spiritual Art of Lectio Divina
Prayer is at the center of Benedictine life. Understood as “the work of God,” lectio divina and the liturgy of the hours are among the first concerns in the day of monk. As a shared calling, prayer brings the differences and various pursuits of a community together with a common role and identity as monks. Prayer is a comfort in times of distress, a resource when in need, a selfless sharing and outpouring in times of success and joy. Prayer is so fully a part of the “ins and outs” monastic life, that it establishes the pattern and rhythm of the day through the dynamic interchange of worship and work. We come together each day to pray the liturgy of the hours and celebrate the Eucharist, but lectio divina, though usually a private practice, is also fundamental to the Benedictine life of prayer, and is essential to living and growing in Benedictine identity and spirituality.
“Lectio divina” translates to “divine reading,” meaning a prayerful reading of Holy Scripture, and other spiritual texts. Though often referred to by its Latin title, striking some as distant or foreign, the practice is really very common. It may be that the practitioner does not realize they are praying in the lectio divina fashion. Active and fundamental to the whole of the 2,000 years of Christian Tradition, and inherited from the Jewish reverence of Scripture, lectio divina is an open, hopeful and faithful trust and listening to God revealed in the Old and New Testaments, as well as the Spirit-filled writings and instructions of the Church. In short, every time you take a moment from your day to read from these writings in faith, hope and love, you are practicing lectio divina.
Cultural2.jpgBeginning and returning again and again to Scripture in lectio divina is a trustworthy spiritual practice, even without extensive instruction. However, committing yourself to lectio divina can be challenging, and as a private spiritual practice, an exclusion of conversation and guidance within the Church community can lead to misunderstandings. As a 2,000 year-old form of Christian prayer, many words of advice and methods have been developed and inherited throughout the Church Tradition for the purpose of helping establish this practice as a perpetual and reliable part of Christian life and spirituality.
An excellent introduction we favor and recommend is Accepting the Embrace of God:The Ancient Art of Lectio Divina by Fr. Luke Dysinger, O.S.B., from Saint Andrew's Abbey in Valyermo, California.
Accepting the Embrace of God: The Ancient Art of Lectio Divina
by Fr. Luke Dysinger, O.S.B.
1. THE PROCESS of LECTIO DIVINA
A VERY ANCIENT art, practiced at one time by all Christians, is the technique known as lectio divina - a slow, contemplative praying of the Scriptures which enables the Bible, the Word of God, to become a means of union with God. This ancient practice has been kept alive in the Christian monastic tradition, and is one of the precious treasures of Benedictine monastics and oblates. Together with the Liturgy and daily manual labor, time set aside in a special way for lectio divina enables us to discover in our daily life an underlying spiritual rhythm. Within this rhythm we discover an increasing ability to offer more of ourselves and our relationships to the Father, and to accept the embrace that God is continuously extending to us in the person of his Son Jesus Christ.
Lectio - reading/listening
THE ART of lectio divina begins with cultivating the ability to listen deeply, to hear “with the ear of our hearts” as St. Benedict encourages us in the Prologue to the Rule. When we read the Scriptures we should try to imitate the prophet Elijah. We should allow ourselves to become women and men who are able to listen for the still, small voice of God (I Kings 19:12); the “faint murmuring sound” which is God's word for us, God's voice touching our hearts. This gentle listening is an “atunement” to the presence of God in that special part of God's creation which is the Scriptures.
THE CRY of the prophets to ancient Israel was the joy-filled command to “Listen!” “Sh'ma Israel: Hear, O Israel!” In lectio divina we, too, heed that command and turn to the Scriptures, knowing that we must “hear” - listen - to the voice of God, which often speaks very softly. In order to hear someone speaking softly we must learn to be silent. We must learn to love silence. If we are constantly speaking or if we are surrounded with noise, we cannot hear gentle sounds. The practice of lectio divina, therefore, requires that we first quiet down in order to hear God's word to us. This is the first step of lectio divina, appropriately called lectio - reading.
THE READING or listening which is the first step in lectio divina is very different from the speed reading which modern Christians apply to newspapers, books and even to the Bible. Lectio is reverential listening; listening both in a spirit of silence and of awe. We are listening for the still, small voice of God that will speak to us personally - not loudly, but intimately. In lectio we read slowly, attentively, gently listening to hear a word or phrase that is God's word for us this day.
Meditatio - meditation
ONCE WE have found a word or a passage in the Scriptures that speaks to us in a personal way, we must take it in and “ruminate” on it. The image of the ruminant animal quietly chewing its cud was used in antiquity as a symbol of the Christian pondering the Word of God. Christians have always seen a scriptural invitation to lectio divina in the example of the Virgin Mary “pondering in her heart” what she saw and heard of Christ (Luke 2:19). For us today these images are a reminder that we must take in the word - that is, memorize it - and while gently repeating it to ourselves, allow it to interact with our thoughts, our hopes, our memories, our desires. This is the second step or stage in lectio divina - meditatio. Through meditatio we allow God's word to become His word for us, a word that touches us and affects us at our deepest levels.
Oratio - prayer
THE THIRD step in lectio divina is oratio - prayer: prayer understood both as dialogue with God, that is, as loving conversation with the One who has invited us into His embrace; and as consecration, prayer as the priestly offering to God of parts of ourselves that we have not previously believed God wants. In this consecration-prayer we allow the word that we have taken in and on which we are pondering to touch and change our deepest selves. Just as a priest consecrates the elements of bread and wine at the Eucharist, God invites us in lectio divina to hold up our most difficult and pain-filled experiences to Him, and to gently recite over them the healing word or phrase He has given us in our lectio and meditatio. In this oratio, this consecration-prayer, we allow our real selves to be touched and changed by the word of God.Contemplatio - contemplation
FINALLY, WE simply rest in the presence of the One who has used His word as a means of inviting us to accept His transforming embrace. No one who has ever been in love needs to be reminded that there are moments in loving relationships when words are unnecessary. It is the same in our relationship with God. Wordless, quiet rest in the presence of the One Who loves us has a name in the Christian tradition - contemplatio, contemplation. Once again we practice silence, letting go of our own words; this time simply enjoying the experience of being in the presence of God.
2. THE UNDERLYING RHYTHM of LECTIO DIVINA
IF WE are to practice lectio divina effectively, we must travel back in time to an understanding that today is in danger of being almost completely lost. In the Christian past the words action (or practice, from the Greek praktikos) and contemplation did not describe different kinds of Christians engaging (or not engaging) in different forms of prayer and apostolates. Practice and contemplation were understood as the two poles of our underlying, ongoing spiritual rhythm: a gentle oscillation back and forth between spiritual “activity” with regard to God and “receptivity.”
PRACTICE - spiritual “activity” - referred in ancient times to our active cooperation with God's grace in rooting out vices and allowing the virtues to flourish. The direction of spiritual activity was not outward in the sense of an apostolate, but inward - down into the depths of the soul where the Spirit of God is constantly transforming us, refashioning us in God's image. The active life is thus coming to see who we truly are and allowing ourselves to be remade into what God intends us to become.
IN THE early monastic tradition contemplation was understood in two ways. First was theoria physike, the contemplation of God in creation - God in “the many.” Second was theologia, the contemplation of God in Himself without images or words - God as “The One.” From this perspective lectio divina serves as a training-ground for the contemplation of God in His creation.
IN CONTEMPLATION we cease from interior spiritual doing and learn simply to be, that is to rest in the presence of our loving Father. Just as we constantly move back and forth in our exterior lives between speaking and listening, between questioning and reflecting, so in our spiritual lives we must learn to enjoy the refreshment of simply being in God's presence, an experience that naturally alternates (if we let it!) with our spiritual practice.
IN ANCIENT times contemplation was not regarded as a goal to be achieved through some method of prayer, but was simply accepted with gratitude as God's recurring gift. At intervals the Lord invites us to cease from speaking so that we can simply rest in his embrace. This is the pole of our inner spiritual rhythm called contemplation.
HOW DIFFERENT this ancient understanding is from our modern approach! Instead of recognizing that we all gently oscillate back and forth between spiritual activity and receptivity, between practice and contemplation, we today tend to set contemplation before ourselves as a goal - something we imagine we can achieve through some spiritual technique. We must be willing to sacrifice our “goal-oriented” approach if we are to practice lectio divina, because lectio divina has no other goal than spending time with God through the medium of His word. The amount of time we spend in any aspect of lectio divina, whether it be rumination, consecration or contemplation depends on God's Spirit, not on us. Lectio divina teaches us to savor and delight in all the different flavors of God's presence, whether they be active or receptive modes of experiencing Him.
IN lectio divina we offer ourselves to God; and we are people in motion. In ancient times this inner spiritual motion was described as a helix - an ascending spiral. Viewed in only two dimensions it appears as a circular motion back and forth; seen with the added dimension of time it becomes a helix, an ascending spiral by means of which we are drawn ever closer to God. The whole of our spiritual lives were viewed in this way, as a gentle oscillation between spiritual activity and receptivity by means of which God unites us ever closer to Himself. In just the same way the steps or stages of lectio divina represent an oscillation back and forth between these spiritual poles. In lectio divina we recognize our underlying spiritual rhythm and discover many different ways of experiencing God's presence - many different ways of praying.
3. THE PRACTICE of LECTIO DIVINA
Private Lectio Divina
CHOOSE a text of the Scriptures that you wish to pray. Many Christians use in their daily lectio divina one of the readings from the Eucharistic liturgy for the day; others prefer to slowly work through a particular book of the Bible. It makes no difference which text is chosen, as long as one has no set goal of “covering” a certain amount of text: the amount of text “covered” is in God's hands, not yours.
PLACE YOURSELF in a comfortable position and allow yourself to become silent. Some Christians focus for a few moments on their breathing; other have a beloved “prayer word” or “prayer phrase” they gently recite in order to become interiorly silent. For some the practice known as “centering prayer” makes a good, brief introduction to lectio divina. Use whatever method is best for you and allow yourself to enjoy silence for a few moments.
THEN TURN to the text and read it slowly, gently. Savor each portion of the reading, constantly listening for the “still, small voice” of a word or phrase that somehow says, “I am for you today.” Do not expect lightening or ecstasies. In lectio divina God is teaching us to listen to Him, to seek Him in silence. He does not reach out and grab us; rather, He softly, gently invites us ever more deeply into His presence.
NEXT TAKE the word or phrase into yourself. Memorize it and slowly repeat it to yourself, allowing it to interact with your inner world of concerns, memories and ideas. Do not be afraid of “distractions.” Memories or thoughts are simply parts of yourself which, when they rise up during lectio divina, are asking to be given to God along with the rest of your inner self. Allow this inner pondering, this rumination, to invite you into dialogue with God.
THEN, SPEAK to God. Whether you use words or ideas or images or all three is not important. Interact with God as you would with one who you know loves and accepts you. And give to Him what you have discovered in yourself during your experience of meditatio. Experience yourself as the priest that you are. Experience God using the word or phrase that He has given you as a means of blessing, of transforming the ideas and memories, which your pondering on His word has awakened. Give to God what you have found within your heart.
FINALLY, SIMPLY rest in God's embrace. And when He invites you to return to your pondering of His word or to your inner dialogue with Him, do so. Learn to use words when words are helpful, and to let go of words when they no longer are necessary. Rejoice in the knowledge that God is with you in both words and silence, in spiritual activity and inner receptivity.
SOMETIMES IN lectio divina one will return several times to the printed text, either to savor the literary context of the word or phrase that God has given, or to seek a new word or phrase to ponder. At other times only a single word or phrase will fill the whole time set aside for lectio divina. It is not necessary to anxiously assess the quality of one's lectio divina as if one were “performing” or seeking some goal: lectio divina has no goal other than that of being in the presence of God by praying the Scriptures.
Lectio Divina as a Group Exercise
THE most authentic and traditional form of Christian lectio divina is the solitary or “private” practice described to this point. In recent years, however, many different forms of so-called “group lectio” have become popular and are now widely-practiced. These group exercises can be very useful means of introducing and encouraging the practice of lectio divina; but they should not become a substitute for an encounter and communion with the Living God that can only take place in that privileged solitude where the biblical Word of God becomes transparent to the Very Word Himself - namely private lectio divina.
IN churches of the Third World where books are rare, a form of corporate lectio divina is becoming common in which a text from the Scriptures is pondered by Christians praying together in a group. The method of group lectio divina described here was introduced at St. Andrew's Abbey by oblates Doug and Norvene Vest: it is used as part of the Benedictine Spirituality for Laity workshops conducted at the Abbey each summer.
THIS FORM of lectio divina works best in a group of between four and eight people. A group leader coordinates the process and facilitates sharing. The same text from the Scriptures is read out three times, followed each time by a period of silence and an opportunity for each member of the group to share the fruit of her or his lectio.
THE FIRST reading (the text is actually read twice on this occasion) is for the purpose of hearing a word or passage that touches the heart. When the word or phrase is found, it is silently taken in, and gently recited and pondered during the silence which follows. After the silence each person shares which word or phrase has touched his or her heart.
THE SECOND reading (by a member of the opposite sex from the first reader) is for the purpose of “hearing” or “seeing” Christ in the text. Each ponders the word that has touched the heart and asks where the word or phrase touches his or her life that day. In other words, how is Christ the Word touching his own experience, his own life? How are the various members of the group seeing or hearing Christ reach out to them through the text? Then, after the silence, each member of the group shares what he or she has “heard” or “seen.”
THE THIRD and final reading is for the purpose of experiencing Christ “calling us forth” into doing or being. Members ask themselves what Christ in the text is calling them to do or to become today or this week. After the silence, each shares for the last time; and the exercise concludes with each person praying for the person on the right.
THOSE WHO who regularly practice this method of praying and sharing the Scriptures regularly find it to be an excellent way of developing trust within a group; it also is an excellent way of consecrating projects and hopes to Christ before more formal group meetings. A summary of this method for group lectio divina is appended at the end of this article.
Lectio Divina on Life
IN THE ancient tradition lectio divina was understood as being one of the most important ways in which Christians experience God in creation. After all, the Scriptures are part of creation! If one is daily growing in the art of finding Christ in the pages of the Bible, one naturally begins to discover Him more clearly in aspects of the other things He has made. This includes, of course, our own personal history.
OUR OWN lives are fit matter for lectio divina. Very often our concerns, our relationships, our hopes and aspirations naturally intertwine with our pondering on the Scriptures, as has been described above. But sometimes it is fitting to simply sit down and “read” the experiences of the last few days or weeks in our hearts, much as we might slowly read and savor the words of Scripture in lectio divina. We can attend “with the ear of our hearts” to our own memories, listening for God's gentle presence in the events of our lives. We thus allow ourselves the joy of experiencing Christ reaching out to us through our own memories. Our own personal story becomes “salvation history.”
FOR THOSE who are new to the practice of lectio divina a group experience of “lectio on life” can provide a helpful introduction. An approach that has been used at workshops at St. Andrew's Priory is detailed at the end of this article. Like the experience of lectio divina shared in community, this group experience of lectio on life can foster relationships in community and enable personal experiences to be consecrated - offered to Christ - in a concrete way.
HOWEVER, UNLIKE scriptural lectio divina shared in community, this group lectio on life contains more silence than sharing. The role of group facilitators or leaders is important, since they will be guiding the group through several periods of silence and reflection without the “interruption” of individual sharing until the end of the exercise. Since the experiences we choose to “read” or “listen to” may be intensely personal, it is important in this group exercise to safeguard privacy by making sharing completely optional.
IN BRIEF, one begins with restful silence, then gently reviews the events of a given period of time. One seeks an event, a memory, which touches the heart just as a word or phrase in scriptural lectio divina does. One then recalls the setting, the circumstances; one seeks to discover how God seemed to be present or absent from the experience. One then offers the event to God and rests for a time in silence. A suggested method for group lectio divina on life is given in the Appendix to this article.
CONCLUSION
LECTIO DIVINA is an ancient spiritual art that is being rediscovered in our day. It is a way of allowing the Scriptures to become again what God intended that they should be - a means of uniting us to Himself. In lectio divina we discover our own underlying spiritual rhythm. We experience God in a gentle oscillation back and forth between spiritual activity and receptivity, in the movement from practice into contemplation and back again into spiritual practice.
LECTIO DIVINA teaches us about the God who truly loves us. In lectio divina we dare to believe that our loving Father continues to extend His embrace to us today. And His embrace is real. In His word we experience ourselves as personally loved by God; as the recipients of a word which He gives uniquely to each of us whenever we turn to Him in the Scriptures.
FINALLY, lectio divina teaches us about ourselves. In lectio divina we discover that there is no place in our hearts, no interior corner or closet that cannot be opened and offered to God. God teaches us in lectio divina what it means to be members of His royal priesthood - a people called to consecrate all of our memories, our hopes and our dreams to Christ.
APPENDIX: TWO APPROACHES to GROUP LECTIO DIVINA
1. Lectio Divina Shared in Community
(A) Listening for the Gentle Touch of Christ the Word
(The Literal Sense)
1. One person reads aloud (twice) the passage of scripture, as others are attentive to some segment that is especially meaningful to them.
2. Silence for 1-2 minutes. Each hears and silently repeats a word or phrase that attracts.
3. Sharing aloud: [A word or phrase that has attracted each person]. A simple statement of one or a few words. No elaboration.
(B) How Christ the Word speaks to ME
(The Allegorical Sense)
4. Second reading of same passage by another person.
5. Silence for 2-3 minutes. Reflect on “Where does the content of this reading touch my life today?”
6. Sharing aloud: Briefly: “I hear, I see...”
(C) What Christ the Word Invites me to DO
(The Moral Sense)
7. Third reading by still another person.
8. Silence for 2-3 minutes. Reflect on “I believe that God wants me to . . . . . . today/this week.”
9. Sharing aloud: at somewhat greater length the results of each one's reflection. [Be especially aware of what is shared by the person to your right.]
10. After full sharing, pray for the person to your right.
Note: Anyone may “pass” at any time. If instead of sharing with the group you prefer to pray silently , simply state this aloud and conclude your silent prayer with Amen.
2. Lectio on Life: Applying Lectio Divina to my personal Salvation History
Purpose: to apply a method of prayerful reflection to a life/work incident (instead of to a scripture passage)
(A) Listening for the Gentle Touch of Christ the Word
(The Literal Sense)
1. Each person quiets the body and mind: relax, sit comfortably but alert, close eyes, attune to breathing...
2. Each person gently reviews events, situations, sights, encounters that have happened since the beginning of the retreat/or during the last month at work.
(B) Gently Ruminating, Reflecting
(Meditatio - Meditation)
3. Each person allows the self to focus on one such offering.
a) Recollect the setting, sensory details, sequence of events, etc.
b) Notice where the greatest energy seemed to be evoked. Was there a turning point or shift?
c) In what ways did God seem to be present? To what extent was I aware then? Now?
(C) Prayerful Consecration, Blessing
(Oratio - Prayer)
4. Use a word or phrase from the Scriptures to inwardly consecrate - to offer up to God in prayer - the incident and interior reflections. Allow God to accept and bless them as your gift.
(D) Accepting Christ's Embrace; Silent Presence to the Lord
(Contemplatio - Contemplation)
5. Remain in silence for some period.
(E) Sharing our Lectio Experience with Each Other
(Operatio - Action; works)
6. Leader calls the group back into “community.”
7. All share briefly (or remain in continuing silence).
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AN EXTRAORDINARY VIDEO: POPE FRANCIS ADDRESSES A PROTESTANT PENTECOSTAL CONGRESS IN TEXAS BY VIDEO
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THE PRIESTHOOD AND CELIBACY
A Case for Celibacy by Priests
By Fr. Robert Barron
(As seen on CNN.com)
The scandal surrounding the Rev. Alberto Cutie has raised questions in the minds of many concerning the Catholic Church's discipline of priestly celibacy. Why does the church continue to defend a practice that seems so unnatural and so unnecessary?
There is a very bad argument for celibacy, which has appeared throughout the tradition and which is, even today, defended by some. It goes something like this: Married life is spiritually suspect; priests, as religious leaders, should be spiritual athletes above reproach; therefore, priests shouldn't be married
This approach to the question is, in my judgment, not just stupid but dangerous, for it rests on presumptions that are repugnant to solid Christian doctrine. The biblical teaching on creation implies the essential integrity of the world and everything in it.
Genesis tells us that God found each thing he had made good and that he found the ensemble of creatures very good. Catholic theology, at its best, has always been resolutely, anti-dualist -- and this means that matter, the body, marriage and sexual activity are never, in themselves, to be despised.
But there is more to the doctrine of creation than an affirmation of the goodness of the world. To say that the finite realm in its entirety is created is to imply that nothing in the universe is God. All aspects of created reality reflect God and bear traces of the divine goodness -- just as every detail of a building gives evidence of the mind of the architect -- but no creature and no collectivity of creatures is divine, just as no part of a structure is the architect.
This distinction between God and the world is the ground for the anti-idolatry principle that is reiterated from the beginning to the end of the Bible: Do not turn something less than God into God.
Isaiah the prophet put it thus: "As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my thoughts above your thoughts and my ways above your ways, says the Lord." And it is at the heart of the First Commandment: "I am the Lord your God; you shall have no other gods besides me." The Bible thus holds off all the attempts of human beings to divinize or render ultimate some worldly reality. The doctrine of creation, in a word, involves both a great "yes" and a great "no" to the universe.
Now there is a behavioral concomitant to the anti-idolatry principle, and it is called detachment. Detachment is the refusal to make anything less than God the organizing principle or center of one's life.
Anthony de Mello looked at it from the other side and said "an attachment is anything in this world -- including your own life -- that you are convinced you cannot live without." Even as we reverence everything that God has made, we must let go of everything that God has made, precisely for the sake of God.
This is why, as G.K. Chesterton noted, there is a tension to Christian life. In accord with its affirmation of the world, the Church loves color, pageantry, music and rich decoration (as in the liturgy and papal ceremonials), even as, in accord with its detachment from the world, it loves the poverty of St. Francis and the simplicity of Mother Teresa.
The same tension governs its attitude toward sex and family. Again, in Chesterton's language, the Church is "fiercely for having children" (through marriage) even as it remains "fiercely against having them" (in religious celibacy).
Everything in this world -- including sex and intimate friendship -- is good, but impermanently so; all finite reality is beautiful, but its beauty, if I can put it in explicitly Catholic terms, is sacramental, not ultimate.
In the biblical narratives, when God wanted to make a certain truth vividly known to his people, he would, from time to time, choose a prophet and command him to act out that truth, to embody it concretely.
For example, he told Hosea to marry the unfaithful Gomer in order to sacramentalize God's fidelity to wavering Israel. Thus, the truth of the non-ultimacy of sex, family and worldly relationship can and should be proclaimed through words, but it will be believed only when people can see it.
This is why, the Church is convinced, God chooses certain people to be celibate. Their mission is to witness to a transcendent form of love, the way that we will love in heaven. In God's realm, we will experience a communion (bodily as well as spiritual) compared to which even the most intense forms of communion here below pale into insignificance, and celibates make this truth viscerally real for us now. Though one can present practical reasons for it, I believe that celibacy only finally makes sense in this eschatological context.
For years, the Rev. Andrew Greeley argued -- quite rightly in my view -- that the priest is fascinating and that a large part of the fascination comes from celibacy. The compelling quality of the priest is not a matter of superficial celebrity or charm. It is something much stranger, deeper, more mystical. It is the fascination for another world.
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By Rev. Robert Barron
A few weeks ago, in the wake of the Fr. Alberto Cutie scandal, an editor at CNN.com asked me to write a short piece (800 words) on the meaning of celibacy from a Catholic standpoint. So I composed what I thought was a harmless little essay, laying out as simply and straightforwardly as I could why the Church reverences celibacy as a spiritual path. I purposely avoided a number of the hot button issues surrounding the matter, and I pointedly insisted that any explanation of celibacy that involves a denigration of sex and marriage is inadmissible. Well, I sent this article off to CNN, rather proud that it would appear in such a prominent venue.
Then they started coming, first on my own e-mail: critiques, as vociferous as any I’ve ever received. A little taken aback, I went to the CNN.com site and found the article posted on the main page—and followed by nearly a hundred comments, 98 of which were sharply negative. About a week later, the article was picked up on Anderson Cooper’s blog site and once again, it was accompanied by unanimously disapproving commentary from readers. It appears as though this matter of celibacy strikes a nerve! And thereupon, I think, hangs a tale.
What were the criticisms, you ask? Well, they came from two basic camps, the evangelical Protestants and the radical secularists. Over and over, Protestant critics informed me that celibacy had no biblical foundation, and several of them pointed to a passage from the fourth chapter of 1st Timothy to the effect that “deceitful spirits” will one day invade the church of Jesus and “forbid marriage.” Well, the last time I checked, St. Paul, a celibate, told his people that, though he wouldn’t impose celibacy on them, he would prefer that they remain as he is (1 Cor. 7:7), and Jesus, a celibate, told his disciples that some people “make themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom,” that is, they eschew marriage, and that he would urge those who are able to embrace this sort of life to do so (Matt. 19:12). I don’t know, but that seems like pretty good Scriptural support to me! As for first Timothy, the Catholic Church forbids marriage to no one. In fact, throughout its history, the church has condemned as heretical those movements—Gnosticism, Manichaeism, Catharism—which did look upon marriage and sex as aberrational. No one in the church forbade me to marry; rather, I chose not to marry in order to pursue another path of love.
From the secularist side, I heard ad nauseam the claim that, in defending priestly celibacy, I was out of touch, otherworldly, didn’t have my feet on the ground, etc., etc. Well, yes. At the heart of my argument was the assertion that celibacy is a living witness to a supernatural way of love, to the manner in which the saints live in heaven. When he was challenged by the Saducees, who did not believe in the resurrection, Jesus said, “those who are deemed worthy to attain to the coming age and to the resurrection of the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. They can no longer die, for they are like angels” (Lk. 20: 34-36). The Catholic church recognizes that even now certain people should live as eschatological signs of this world to come, as embodied witnesses to a transcendent kind of love. It struck me that the vehemence of the critiques I received on this score flowed from the extreme challenge that celibacy offers precisely to the secularist view of the world. Another standard charge from the secularist camp was that the practice of celibacy has led and continues to lead to the sexual perversion of priests and the abuse of children. It frankly amazes me how persistent is this delusion. Though it’s been said thousands of times already, it evidently bears repeating: the overwhelming majority of sexual abusers of children are not priests and are not celibates. To say that celibacy is the cause of sexual abuse is about as reasonable and statistically defensible as to say that marriage is the cause of sexual abuse. Please don’t get me wrong: the sexual misconduct of way too many priests is a serious problem indeed, and one that the church has to address at many levels. But it’s a mistake to correlate it to simple-mindedly to celibacy.
A criticism common to both the evangelicals and the secularists is that celibacy was a cynical invention of medieval Catholic bishops and Popes eager to consolidate their hold on church property. If priests were married, you see, their wives and children would inherit the wealth that would otherwise have gone into the coffers of the church. I don’t doubt for a moment that there might have been some hierarchs who thought along those lines, but to reduce the discipline of celibacy to such commercial considerations betrays a pathetic grasp of the spiritual history of the human race. Celibacy has been embraced by religious people trans-historically and trans-culturally. Certain Hindus, Buddhists, Sufi Muslims, and Jewish Essenes have, over the centuries, abstained from marriage for spiritual reasons, convinced that it ordered them to God in a unique way. Why can’t the same be said of Catholic priests?
I mentioned above that the very venom of the reactions to my article is telling. In a certain sense, celibacy is meant to annoy, puzzle and unnerve us, for it witnesses to a dimension of existence that we can’t directly see, that remains alien to our experience and our ordinary categories of thought. Celibacy make a lot of people sputter and scratch their heads. Good.
Posted: 6/30/2009 10:23:03 AM by Word On Fire Admin
NOW READ THIS:
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A few weeks ago, in the wake of the Fr. Alberto Cutie scandal, an editor at CNN.com asked me to write a short piece (800 words) on the meaning of celibacy from a Catholic standpoint. So I composed what I thought was a harmless little essay, laying out as simply and straightforwardly as I could why the Church reverences celibacy as a spiritual path. I purposely avoided a number of the hot button issues surrounding the matter, and I pointedly insisted that any explanation of celibacy that involves a denigration of sex and marriage is inadmissible. Well, I sent this article off to CNN, rather proud that it would appear in such a prominent venue.
Then they started coming, first on my own e-mail: critiques, as vociferous as any I’ve ever received. A little taken aback, I went to the CNN.com site and found the article posted on the main page—and followed by nearly a hundred comments, 98 of which were sharply negative. About a week later, the article was picked up on Anderson Cooper’s blog site and once again, it was accompanied by unanimously disapproving commentary from readers. It appears as though this matter of celibacy strikes a nerve! And thereupon, I think, hangs a tale.
What were the criticisms, you ask? Well, they came from two basic camps, the evangelical Protestants and the radical secularists. Over and over, Protestant critics informed me that celibacy had no biblical foundation, and several of them pointed to a passage from the fourth chapter of 1st Timothy to the effect that “deceitful spirits” will one day invade the church of Jesus and “forbid marriage.” Well, the last time I checked, St. Paul, a celibate, told his people that, though he wouldn’t impose celibacy on them, he would prefer that they remain as he is (1 Cor. 7:7), and Jesus, a celibate, told his disciples that some people “make themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom,” that is, they eschew marriage, and that he would urge those who are able to embrace this sort of life to do so (Matt. 19:12). I don’t know, but that seems like pretty good Scriptural support to me! As for first Timothy, the Catholic Church forbids marriage to no one. In fact, throughout its history, the church has condemned as heretical those movements—Gnosticism, Manichaeism, Catharism—which did look upon marriage and sex as aberrational. No one in the church forbade me to marry; rather, I chose not to marry in order to pursue another path of love.
From the secularist side, I heard ad nauseam the claim that, in defending priestly celibacy, I was out of touch, otherworldly, didn’t have my feet on the ground, etc., etc. Well, yes. At the heart of my argument was the assertion that celibacy is a living witness to a supernatural way of love, to the manner in which the saints live in heaven. When he was challenged by the Saducees, who did not believe in the resurrection, Jesus said, “those who are deemed worthy to attain to the coming age and to the resurrection of the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. They can no longer die, for they are like angels” (Lk. 20: 34-36). The Catholic church recognizes that even now certain people should live as eschatological signs of this world to come, as embodied witnesses to a transcendent kind of love. It struck me that the vehemence of the critiques I received on this score flowed from the extreme challenge that celibacy offers precisely to the secularist view of the world. Another standard charge from the secularist camp was that the practice of celibacy has led and continues to lead to the sexual perversion of priests and the abuse of children. It frankly amazes me how persistent is this delusion. Though it’s been said thousands of times already, it evidently bears repeating: the overwhelming majority of sexual abusers of children are not priests and are not celibates. To say that celibacy is the cause of sexual abuse is about as reasonable and statistically defensible as to say that marriage is the cause of sexual abuse. Please don’t get me wrong: the sexual misconduct of way too many priests is a serious problem indeed, and one that the church has to address at many levels. But it’s a mistake to correlate it to simple-mindedly to celibacy.
A criticism common to both the evangelicals and the secularists is that celibacy was a cynical invention of medieval Catholic bishops and Popes eager to consolidate their hold on church property. If priests were married, you see, their wives and children would inherit the wealth that would otherwise have gone into the coffers of the church. I don’t doubt for a moment that there might have been some hierarchs who thought along those lines, but to reduce the discipline of celibacy to such commercial considerations betrays a pathetic grasp of the spiritual history of the human race. Celibacy has been embraced by religious people trans-historically and trans-culturally. Certain Hindus, Buddhists, Sufi Muslims, and Jewish Essenes have, over the centuries, abstained from marriage for spiritual reasons, convinced that it ordered them to God in a unique way. Why can’t the same be said of Catholic priests?
I mentioned above that the very venom of the reactions to my article is telling. In a certain sense, celibacy is meant to annoy, puzzle and unnerve us, for it witnesses to a dimension of existence that we can’t directly see, that remains alien to our experience and our ordinary categories of thought. Celibacy make a lot of people sputter and scratch their heads. Good.
Posted: 6/30/2009 10:23:03 AM by Word On Fire Admin
NOW READ THIS:
The irony is that this Eastern rite priest, standing heroically before the barricades, is probably married.
POPULAR ROMAN CATHOLIC MEDIA ATTACKED MARRIED CLERGY
An article by someone in the UKRAINIAN GREEK CATHOLIC CHURCH.
In fact, there is nothing that anyone in the Eastern churches could object to in Fr Robert Barron's two articles. The Catholic view of both East and West is that marriage and celibacy are complementary, and any local Church would be sub-Catholic if either of these two vocations were missing. It can be argued that the witness of celibacy is probably more necessary than ever. That is not the issue. The question is whether priests should be married.
Here there are two great traditions, each with as much claim to be Catholic as the other, each has been much blessed by God. All agree that priests cannot marry; so that an Orthodox or Greek Catholic priest who loses his wife in an accident, for example, cannot marry again. All agree that bishops should be celibate: hence, Eastern bishops are normally monks. The great difference is that secular clergy in the East, in both Orthodox and Greek Catholic churches, are chosen from among men who are married, though sometimes unmarried men are chosen, in which case, they have to remain celibate; while in the Latin West, secular priests are chosen from among those who choose the celibate life, though sometimes ex-Anglican clergy etc are ordained, even if they are married.
Hence, it is an over-simplification to say that ''Catholic priests are celibate;" because Greek Catholic priests are just as Catholic as we are, and there are exceptions, even in the West.
We can never use any argument in favour of celibacy that assumes that our Latin practice is more Catholic than the Eastern practice: it is simply not true.
We must get used to the idea that "Catholic" includes a number of traditions, all of which are equally Catholic.
However, we can claim rightly that Tradition, which is the history of Grace in the Church from the time of the Apostles until now, the product of the synergy between the Holy Spirit and the Church down the ages, has taken a distinctive form in the Latin Church, just as in the other traditions, and that one of its distinctive graces that has borne much fruit in the Latin Church is clerical celibacy. It is part of what we are, something we do not want to lose because of the secular atmosphere of modern times. As Fr Robert Barron argues, the fact that it annoys the secular world is something in its favour!
On the other hand, I wonder if it is justifiable to impose it in situations where it is clearly not working. I have been to parts of Peru where the people get Mass once a year, if they are lucky. Of course, the pentecostals are having a field day, because they can mould their structures to their situation and we can't. What a contrast to Greece where every village has its Sunday Mass etc because a local married peasant is ordained.
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APHORISMS OF ELDER SOPHRONY (SAKHAROV) The following words of Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov) were recorded by various Athonite monks.
my source: Pravmir
“I am neither Greek nor Russian; I am an Athonite.”
“I have been wearing a cassock for sixty years, but whenever I meet an Orthodox Christian or any other person, I bow my head low before him.” (Thereby the Elder wished to indicate that he feels himself to be the most unworthy.)
“Theology is the content of our prayers.”
“The Fathers of the fourth century left us certain prophecies, according to which in the last times salvation will be bound up with deep sorrows.”
“We must have the determination to overcome temptations comparable to the sorrows of the first Christians. All the witnesses of Christ’s Resurrection were martyred. We should be ready to endure any hardship.”
“Psychology brings the greatest evil to mankind today, because this science does not take into consideration Divine revelation, according to which man is created ‘in the image and likeness of God.’”
“All of us, at every moment of our lives, are in absolute need of Divine grace, which is given to man through pain and effort. When we pray in the morning, pray in the evening, and pray every moment – then we have the right to say: ‘Lord, do not leave me; help me.’”
“It is essential to read the Gospel, that incomparable book. Then our life will be built up on the basis of the Word of God. And we will begin to think and make decisions in the spirit of the Divine commandments. How beautiful, when one begins to think like the Creator of this world!”
“When we begin to lead the Christian life, all our labor, all our struggle [podvig] is directed towards accepting even our enemies with love. In this consists the Christian’s martyric witness.”
“The earthly life is for us a continual Judgment of God. If we follow Christ’s commandments, then the Grace of the Holy Spirit will come to us; but when we embark on them (even in small ways), God leaves us and we feel that abandonment about which outsiders do not even know. They do not understand what abandonment by God is.”
“The human soul is the image of God. It finds rest only when it attains perfection.”
“We do not think about how to change the world with our own powers. We strive to receive strength from God in order to act at all times with love.”
“When the grace of God comes to us, then we already here live in the dimension of eternity.”
“The most important thing in the spiritual life is to strive to receive the grace of the Holy Spirit. It changes our lives (above all inwardly, not outwardly). We will live in the same house, in the same circumstances, and with the same people, but our life will already be different. But this is possible only under certain conditions: if we find the time to pray fervently, with tears in our eyes. From the morning to ask for God’s blessing, that a prayerful attitude may define our entire day.”
“Whoever gives up his cross cannot be worthy of the Lord and become His disciple. The depths of the Divine Being are revealed to the Christian when he is crucified for our Savior. The Cross is the foundation of authentic theology.”
“The Christian’s great tragedy is the inability to find a spiritual father. Laymen are themselves guilty in this, if they are unwilling to listen to the words of their spiritual instructors.”
“Life without Christ is tasteless, sad, and forlorn.”
Translated from the Russian.
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ORTHODOX THEOLOGICAL DIALOGUE WITH CATHOLICS IN DANGER OF FAILURE, ACCORDING TO THE METROPOLITAN OF PERGOMAN, IOANNIS ZIZIOULAS
This is the first of three posts about Catholic - Orthodox relations. The second is by Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev, representative of the Moscow Patriarchate; and the third is by me, writing from a Catholic perspective - Fr David.
Metropolitan of Pergamon Ioannis Zizioulas has raised alarm bells about divisions between the Orthodox Churches. Some have reduced Christian unity to an alliance between religious hierarchies formed in order to tackle sexual ethics issues together
By GIANNI VALENTE
VATICAN CITY
my source: La Stampa, 26th February, 2014
(thanks to Jim Forest)
The theological dialogue between Catholic and Orthodox Churches which was launched with the aim of achieving full sacramental communion, risks stalling permanently. And one of the main reasons for this would appear to be the divisions that exist between the Orthodox Churches and those influential circles within the Orthodox faith – the Patriarchate of Moscow above all – that are refusing to recognise one universal primate as the leader of the Church, founded on a shared and canonical and ecclesial tradition. The alarm was raised by none other than the Metropolitan of Pergamon, Ioannis Zizioulas, a former member of the Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, co- President of the International Joint Commission for Theological Dialogue Between the Catholic Church and the Oriental Orthodox Churches.
Zizioulas, whom many consider to be the greatest living Christian theologian (his “Eucharistic ecclesiology” is appreciated both by Pope Francis and his predecessor Benedict XVI), restores faith in the upcoming meeting between the Bishop of Rome and the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew in Jerusalem next May. He sees unity among Christians as much more than just an alliance between Church hierarchies to form a “common front” to deal with ethical and sex-related issues.
Meanwhile, the direction the Ukrainian crisis has taken raises questions once again over the control the Patriarchate of Moscow exercises over the majority of Orthodox parishes in the Ukraine.
The date of the Pope and the Patriarch’s meeting in Jerusalem is nearing. What can we expect from this meeting?
“It’s going to be a very important event. The intention is to commemorate the meeting between Paul VI and Athenagoras 50 years ago, the first time a Pope and an ecumenical Patriarch had met since the days of the schism. Their embrace sparked hopes of forthcoming unity between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. This has not yet happened. But it is important to show the world that we are continuing to move patiently and determinedly towards unity. We are on our way to achieving this. We haven’t stopped. This is why the upcoming meeting between Francis and Bartholomew in Jerusalem will not just be a commemorative act looking to the past but represents a door that is open to the future.”
A year on from his election, what is the prevailing impression Orthodox faithful and leaders of the Eastern Churches have of Pope Francis?
“Pope Francis surprised all of us in a positive way, because of his style, his temperament, his humility and also because the actions he is taking as Pope could bring the Catholic and Orthodox Churches closer together. The Orthodox have always essentially seen the Pope as the Bishop of Rome. And Pope Francis often refers to this title as the title which allows him to exercise his ministry. The Orthodox used to see the Pope as a figure who put himself on a pedestal and the papacy as a form of ecclesiastical imperialism. They thought the Pope’s intention was to subjugate them and exercise power over them. Now there are many signs which are pointing in the opposite direction. For example, the Pope has stressed on more than one occasion that the Catholic Church can learn from the Orthodox Church when it comes to synodality and the synodal nature of the Church.
Does the creation of the Council of 8 Cardinals and the new impetus given to the Synod of Catholic bishops have anything to do with this?
“Yes, these are important decisions. Some misunderstand synodality, presenting it as the application of worldly political methods to Church life. But the theological dialogue between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches clearly set out the correct way in which synodality should be understood. In the Ravenna document of 2007 we recognised that the primacy is necessary and is deeply rooted in the Church’s canonical tradition. This is not just for human “organisation” reasons. It must always be seen in the context of synodality. The Church is always a synod and in the synod there is always a protos, a number one, a primate. This does not mean a penetration of secular thought on democracy or the monarchy into the Church. Only theology. It derives from the faith in our Holy Trinity. Ever since the very beginning, Church tradition has had canons which state the following: in the Church there is never a Primus without the Synod and there is never a Synod without the Primus. Harmony between the Primus and the Synod is a gift of the Holy Spirit. This has been our ecclesiology right from the start.”
The Patriarchate of Moscow rejected the conclusions of the Ravenna document you mentioned. Did you read the Russian Church’s pronouncement?
“Yes I did read it. I speak for myself and on behalf of the ecumenical Patriarchate when I say that we do not agree with that document. It claims that the primacy exists and has theological grounding at the local and regional Church level but not on a universal level. We know what the real reason for this is: they want to deny that after the schism in the Orthodox Church too the ecumenical Patriarchate exercised universal primacy. In order to achieve this, they reject the possibility of recognising the Pope’s role as universal primate in a way that is acceptable to the Orthodox Churches as well. In the Ravenna document they managed to reach a consensus on this very point: we recognised that in the Church the primacy is always exercised on three levels: a local level, a regional level and a universal level.”
Are internal divisions within the Orthodox faith compromising ecumenical dialogue?
“I fear that there are going to be problems. Particularly because the position of the Patriarchate of Moscow holds as much weight as a pronouncement by the Synod. These are not positions expressed by single individuals, by Metropolitan Hilarion or by Patriarch Kirill. With a pronouncement like that, it becomes difficult for an exchange of views to take place and this is what dialogue is all about. Imagine if the Orthodox Church today wished to enter into dialogue with the Catholic Church having already made certain synodal pronouncements on the primacy issue, which is the issue currently at the centre of discussion: it would mean there was no room for discussion and that dialogue had ended. The step taken by the Patriarchate of Moscow could have very negative consequences. It could in fact lead to the end of theological dialogue between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches which was launched in order to overcome the obstacles that are standing in the way of full communion. I hope this will not happen.”
Will clarifications be made at the sinaxis (assembly) of the Primates of the Orthodox Churches in March?
“We also need to discuss issues relating to the Orthodox Churches in the context of the great pan-Orthodox synod. Preparation work for this began several years ago and the event could be announced next year. I hope ecumenical dialogue will also be discussed, if not officially, then at least in private. I want to ask the Patriarch of Moscow whether he is aware of the consequences of the step he has taken. He may not have realised just how catastrophic it could be for dialogue.”
A while back you talked about a “narcissistic self-satisfaction” that has contaminated many ecclesial circles. Why is ecclesial introversion so insidious?
Pope Francis says that the greatest danger the Church faces is self-referentialism. The Church is there for the world not for itself. The Church gets its light from Christ, as the moon gets its light from the sun. But the light which beams out from the Church is not just for itself: it is for the world, for the life of the world. But what I see now in many ecclesial circles is a growing temptation to set the Church against the sin-filled world and sinful humans. But Jesus ate with sinners. He embraced them. The Church is called to give the same love and forgiveness and not to serve people an ideology caked in Christian words.”
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CARDINAL KASPER SUGGESTS AN ORTHODOX SOLUTION TO OUR PROBLEM OF DIVORCE AND THE SACRAMENTS
Kasper Changes the Paradigm, Bergoglio Applauds
The no-longer-secret text of the bombshell talk that opened the consistory on the family. With the indication of two paths of readmission to communion for the divorced and remarried. According to the example of the ancient Church
ROME, March 1, 2014 – Cardinal Kasper's inaugural address at the consistory last week is no longer under lock and key. It has been made public, in a journalistic masterstroke, by the Italian newspaper “Il Foglio" directed by Giuliano Ferrara, which has preempted by far the publication of this same talk in book form by the publisher Queriniana.
But that this talk should remain secret had already become nonsensical, after the words with which Pope Francis had honored it on February 21, at the end of the two days of the consistory dedicated to the question of the family:
"Yesterday, before going to sleep - although I did not do this to put myself to sleep - I read or rather re-read the work of Cardinal Kasper, and I would like to thank him because I found profound theology, and even serene thinking in theology. It is pleasant to read serene theology. And I also found what Saint Ignatius told us about, that 'sensus Ecclesiae," love for Mother Church. It did me good and an idea came to me - excuse me, Eminence, if I embarrass you - but the idea is that this is called 'doing theology on one's knees.' Thank you. Thank you."
In the course of his talk, Kasper said that he wanted "only to pose questions” because “a response will be the task of the synod in harmony with the pope.” But to read what he said to the cardinals, his are much more than questions, they are solidly built proposals for a solution. To which Pope Francis has already demonstrated he means to adhere.
And they are forceful proposals, a real "paradigm change.” In particular on what Kasper himself maintains to be the problem of problems, communion for the divorced and remarried, to which he dedicated more than half of his two-hour talk.
As www.chiesa had already anticipated in two articles, the touchstone of Kasper's proposals was the Church of the first centuries, which was also "confronted with concepts and models of marriage and family much different from those preached by Jesus."
In the face of the present-day challenge, Kasper prefaced that "our position today cannot be a liberal adaptation to the 'status quo', but a radical position that goes to the roots, that goes to the Gospel."
In order to verify if that is true or not - for various cardinals who took part in the debate, it is not - the following are the crucial passages.
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THE PROBLEM OF THE DIVORCED AND REMARRIED
by Walter Kasper
[. . .] It is not enough to consider the problem only from the point of view and from the perspective of the Church as a sacramental institution. We need a paradigm change and we must - as the good Samaritan did - consider the situation also from the perspective of those who are suffering and asking for help.
Everyone knows that the question of the marriages of divorced and remarried persons is a complex and thorny problem. [. . .] What can the Church do in such situations? It cannot propose a solution that is different from or contrary to the words of Jesus. The indissolubility of sacramental marriage and the impossibility of a new marriage during the lifetime of the other partner is part of the tradition of the Church's binding faith that cannot be abandoned or undone by appealing to a superficial understanding of cheapened mercy. [. . .] The question is therefore how the Church can reflect this indivisible pairing of the fidelity and mercy of God in its pastoral action concerning the divorced who are remarried in a civil ceremony. [. . .]
Today we find ourselves in a situation similar to that of the last Council. At that time as well there existed, for example on the question of ecumenism or religious freedom, encyclicals and decisions of the Holy Office that seemed to preclude other ways. Without violating the binding dogmatic tradition, the Council opened doors. We can ask ourselves: is it not perhaps possible that there could be further developments on the present question as well? [. . .]
I will limit myself to two situations, for which solutions are already being mentioned in some official documents. I want only to pose questions, limiting myself to pointing out the direction of possible responses. Giving a response, however, will be the task of the synod in harmony with the pope.
FIRST SITUATION
"Familiaris Consortio" affirms that some of the divorced and remarried are in conscience subjectively convinced that their irreparably broken previous marriage was never valid. [. . .] According to canon law the evaluation is the task of the ecclesiastical tribunals. Since these are not “iure divino," but developed historically, we sometimes ask ourselves if the judicial way should be the only one for resolving the problem or if other more pastoral and spiritual procedures could also be possible.
As an alternative, one might think that the bishop could entrust this task to a priest with spiritual and pastoral experience as a penitentiary or episcopal vicar.
Apart from the response to be given to this question, it is worthwhile to recall the address that Pope Francis delivered on January 24, 2014 to the officials of the tribunal of the Roman Rota, in which he affirms that the juridical dimension and pastoral dimension are not in opposition. [. . .] Pastoral care and mercy are not opposed to justice, but they are so to speak the supreme justice, because behind each appeal they discern not only a case to be examined through the lens of general regulations but a human person who, as such, can never represent a case and always has a unique dignity. [. . .] Is it truly possible that the good and bad of persons should be decided at second and third hearings solely on the basis of the proceedings, meaning paperwork, but without knowing the person and his situation?
SECOND SITUATION
It would be mistaken to seek the solution of the problem only in a generous expansion of the procedure of nullity of marriage. This would create the dangerous impression that the Church is proceeding in a dishonest manner in granting what in reality are divorces. [. . .] Therefore we must also take into consideration the more difficult question of the situation of the marriage that is ratified and consummated between baptized persons, in which the communion of marital life is irreparably broken and one or both of the spouses have contracted a second civil marriage.
One notification was given to us by the congregation for the doctrine of the faith in 1994 when it established - and Pope Benedict XVI reiterated this during the world meeting of families in Milan in 2012 - that the divorce and remarried cannot receive sacramental communion but can receive spiritual communion. [. . .]
Many will be grateful for this response, which is an instance of true openness. But it also brings up a number of questions. In fact, someone who receives spiritual communion is one with Jesus Christ. [. . .] Why, then, can he not also receive sacramental communion? [. . .] Some maintain that non-participation in communion is itself a sign of the sanctity of the sacrament. The question that is posed in response is: is it not perhaps an exploitation of the person who is suffering and asking for help if we make him a sign and a warning for others? Are we going to let him die of hunger sacramentally in order that others may live?
The early Church gives us an indication that can serve as a means of escape from the dilemma, to which Professor Joseph Ratzinger referred in 1972. [. . .] In the individual local Churches there existed the customary law on the basis of which Christians who, although their first partner was still alive, were living in a second relationship, after a time of penance had available [. . .] not a second marriage, but rather through participation in communion a table of salvation. [. . .]
The question is: This way that stands beyond rigorism and laxity, the way of conversion, which issues forth in the sacrament of mercy, the sacrament of penance, is it also the path that we could follow in the present question?
A divorced and remarried person: 1. if he repents of his failure in the first marriage, 2. if he has clarified the obligations of the first marriage, if it is definitively ruled out that he could turn back, 3. if he cannot abandon without further harm the responsibilities taken on with the new civil marriage, 4. if however he is doing the best he can to live out the possibilities of the second marriage on the basis of the faith and to raise his children in the faith, 5. if he has a desire for the sacraments as a source of strength in his situation, should we or can we deny him, after a period of time in a new direction, of "metanoia," the sacrament of penance and then of communion?
This possible way would not be a general solution. It is not the wide road of the masses, but rather the narrow path of what is probably the smaller segment of the divorced and remarried, those sincerely interested in the sacraments. Should not the worst be avoided precisely here? In fact, when the children of the divorced and remarried do not see their parents approach the sacraments they too usually fail to find their way to confession and communion. Should we not take into account the fact that we will also lose the next generation and perhaps the one after it too? Our long-established practice, is it not showing itself to be counterproductive? [. . .]
THE PRACTICE OF THE EARLY CHURCH
According to the New Testament, adultery and fornication are behaviors in fundamental contrast with being Christian. Thus in the ancient Church, along with apostasy and murder, among the capital sins that excluded one from the Church was also adultery. [. . .] There is extensive literature on the relative exegetical and historical questions, within which it is almost impossible to get one's bearings, and different interpretations. One could cite for example on the one hand G. Cereti, "Divorzio, nuove nozze e penitenza nella Chiesa primitiva," Bologna 1977, 2013, and on the other H. Crouzel, "L’Eglise primitive face au divorce," Paris 1971, and J. Ratzinger […] of 1972, [reproduced] in "L'Osservatore Romano" of November 30, 2011.
There can be no doubt however about the fact that in the early Church, in many local Churches, by customary law there was, after a time of repentance, the practice of pastoral tolerance, of clemency and indulgence.
It is against the background of this practice that canon 8 of the Council of Nicaea (325) must also be understood, aimed against the rigorism of Novatian. This customary law is expressly discussed by Origen, who maintains that it is not unreasonable. Basil the Great, Gregory Nazianzen, and some others also refer to it. They explain the judgment of “not unreasonable” with the pastoral intention of “avoiding the worst.” In the Latin Church, through the authority of Augustine, this practice was abandoned in favor of a more strict practice. Even Augustine, however, in one passage speaks of venial sin. He therefore does not seem to have excluded all pastoral solutions at the outset.
Even afterward the Western Church, in difficult situations, through the decisions of synods and the like always sought, and even found, concrete solutions. The Council of Trent [. . .] condemned Luther's position, but not the practice of the Eastern Church. [. . .]
The Orthodox Churches have preserved, in keeping with the pastoral viewpoint of the tradition of the early Church, the valid (for them) principle of oikonomia. Beginning in the sixth century, however, making reference to Byzantine imperial law, they went beyond the position of pastoral tolerance, of clemency and indulgence, recognizing together with the clause of adultery other reasons for divorce as well, which are based on the moral and not only the physical death of the marriage bond.
The Western Church followed another path. It excludes the dissolution of a ratified and consummated sacramental marriage between baptized persons, but it acknowledges divorce for non-consummated marriage, as also, according to the Pauline and Petrine privilege, for non-sacramental marriages. Along with this are declarations of nullity for defect of form; in this regard we could however ask ourselves if what are brought to the forefront, in a unilateral way, are not juridical points of view that are historically very much late in coming.
J. Ratzinger suggested that Basil's position should be taken up again in a new way. It would seem to be an appropriate solution, one that is also at the basis of these reflections of mine. We cannot refer to this or that historical interpretation, which still remains controversial, nor can we simply replicate the solutions of the early Church in our situation, which is completely different. In the changed current situation we can however recover the basic concepts and seek to realize them in the present, in the manner that is just and fair in the light of the Gospel.
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This talk by Cardinal Kasper is pure ressourcement theologie, looking for solutions to modern problems through the study of Tradition. This means that it follows the principles worked out by theologians in France before and after the 2nd World War, a network rather than a group which later became the the main influence in Vatican II where they were joined by Archbishop Wojtyla and Fr Joseph Ratzinger. The refugee community of Russian Orthodox theologians after the Russian Revolution in France made a strong impact on them. This talk is evidence of the continuity between the last five popes, even if Pope Francis still has the taste for bold decisions that Fr Joseph Ratzinger had during the Council but lost in later life.
Incidently, the idea that, when we cannot find a solution to a problem in the ordinary understanding of the faithful at the present moment, we can look for it in past Tradition where the Holy Spirit was equally present, then as now, this has opened up the possibility of re-interpreting Vatican I in the light of earlier Tradition and thus healing the East-West schism. This has frightened some and has brought about a difference between Constantinople and Moscow, as we saw in the last post.
Incidently, the idea that, when we cannot find a solution to a problem in the ordinary understanding of the faithful at the present moment, we can look for it in past Tradition where the Holy Spirit was equally present, then as now, this has opened up the possibility of re-interpreting Vatican I in the light of earlier Tradition and thus healing the East-West schism. This has frightened some and has brought about a difference between Constantinople and Moscow, as we saw in the last post.
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ASH WEDNESDAY AND LENT
my source: Aleteia
“Virtues are formed by prayer. Prayer preserves temperance. Prayer suppresses anger. Prayer prevents emotions of pride and envy. Prayer draws into the soul the Holy Spirit, and raises man to Heaven.” – St. Ephrem of Syria
Other than professional athletes genuflecting and pointing to the sky after a touchdown, when is the last time you associated manhood with prayer? Honestly, the only time most men pray is when they are in imminent danger or in desperate need of some kind. The rest of the time, they leave praying to the grandmas who attend daily mass.
Yet, this is entirely the wrong attitude. Courageous knights of ages past were not ashamed to kneel in front of the altar, or to dedicate themselves to the service of Jesus and Mary in prayer (check out this post for some knightly spirituality). Real men pray. Let’s talk about why.
Importance
Prayer is the breath of the spiritual life. Without it, your soul suffocates and dies. That’s why Jesus and the great saints of the Church were so urgent in their calls for us to pray always and everywhere. St. Paul commanded us to “pray without ceasing.” Jesus taught us to “pray always and not lose heart.”
In fact, prayer is so important that St. Alphonsus Ligori says, “Whoever prays is certainly saved. He who does not is certainly damned.” Let that sink in.
Prayer is so important because, whether or not we realize it, we are essentially beggars before God. Everything we need to be virtuous men has to be given to us. We will never be holy without grace, and there is no other way to obtain grace than through prayer.
Do you need courage? Ask for it. Do you need humility? Ask for it. Do you need to be pure in a world filled with temptation? Ask for it. Are you trying to overcome an explosive temper? Ask for patience. If you don’t ask, you won’t receive— it’s that simple.
Our Lent will be completely wasted if we aren’t praying. Fasting and almsgiving will simply become sources of pride if we aren’t approaching them prayerfully. No matter what else you are planning to do for Lent, prayer should be first on the list.
How to Pray
Maybe you want to build prayer into your Lent as well as your daily life, but you don’t know how. It seems so hard to sit still for even 15 minutes and pray. Even if you manage it, you’re not always sure what to say.
I understand because I struggle with the same problems. Prayer, like anything that is worth doing, is hard. Nevertheless, here are some tips based on the writings of the saints that will help us to pray.
1. Keep it simple - Prayer is paradoxical in that the more you say, the more difficult it is to mean what you say. Keep your prayer simple, and mean every word. The Our Father, the perfect prayer, is seven simple petitions. Many of the early monks would even pray by repeating one word or phrase, such as the name of Jesus. If you spent 5 minutes saying ”Jesus” over and over with love, it would be far more profitable than endlessly reading prayers from a prayer book coldly and mindlessly.
2. Just do it - The saints tell us that the best way to learn to pray is by praying. A distance runner doesn’t begin running ultramarathons over night. He begins with shorter distances and builds over time. So too with prayer. It doesn’t matter if you don’t feel like you are accomplishing anything, or how many times you try to pray and fail. It doesn’t matter how many distractions you have to fight. We have to keep showing up, day after day or we will never learn to pray. Simply asking like the disciples, “Teach us to pray,” is a great prayer to start with.
3. Intentional time - Monastics through the centuries have had specific hours set aside for prayer. While most of us probably can’t pray seven times a day like they do, we should build prayer into our daily routine. If we don’t, it’s never going to happen. I recommend praying 3 times a day: morning, noon, and night. In the morning, offer your day to God and ask for the graces you need. At noon, renew this offering of your day and ask for help to persevere in virtue. At night, review your day and confess your sins. Ask for forgiveness and give thanks for the blessings you have received. Again, if you aren’t intentional about prayer, it is never going to happen.
4. Acknowledge the need - A lot of us don’t pray because we are self-satisfied. Like the Pharisees of Jesus’ day, we think we have everything we need, and we view prayer as a favor we pay to God. That’s why we don’t want to do it. In reality, though, we are like the blind beggar Bartimaeus in the Gospels, completely helpless and needy. Like him, we should recognize our helplessness, and call out, “Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me!” We should examine ourselves and spend some time recognizing our own weaknesses. Not only will this make us more humble, it will inspire us to call for help— which is one of the best ways to begin praying.
5. Patience – If you’re expecting to become a great mystic like St. John of the Cross overnight, you’re delusional. Even if you are praying for something specific, like a virtue or a temporal need, God hardly ever answers us immediately. If he did, we’d start to think of him as a heavenly vending machine, dispensing our every desire when we press the right buttons. No, God wants us to be patient and persevere in prayer. Like the widow in Scripture who harassed the judge until he granted her desire, harass God in a good way, asking for what you need until you get it.
Conclusion
Volumes have been written about prayer, and I’m just scratching the surface in this post. The point is, prayer isn’t optional. You’re going to waste your Lent— and your life— if you aren’t praying. Get serious about it and make it a part of your daily life starting this Lent. It’s the way to virtue, holiness, and communion with our Heavenly Father.
What are your greatest struggles in prayer? How are you planning to pray more this Lent?
The Holy Forty Day Fast
By Sergei V. Bulgakov
The most ancient Christian writers unanimously testify that the Holy Forty Day Fast was established by the apostles in imitation of the forty-day fast of Moses (Exodus 34), Elijah (3 Kings 19), and mainly by the example of Jesus Christ fasting for forty days (Mt. 4: 2). Ancient Christians have observed the time of the Holy Forty Days as the season of the commemoration of the Suffering of the Savior on the Cross, anticipating the days of this commemoration, so that, strongly imitating His self-renunciation and His self-denial, these ascetical feats would show the living participation and love on the part of the Savior, who suffers for the world, and that before all this to be morally cleansed for the time of the solemn commemoration of the passion of Christ and His glorious resurrection. The very name of the Holy Forty Days is met rather frequently in the most ancient written monuments with the indication of the purpose of its establishment. "Do not neglect the Forty Days", wrote St. Ignatius the God-bearer in his epistle to Philippians: "for it establishes the imitation of the life in Christ". St. Ambrose of Milan spoke even more clearly: "The Lord has blessed us with the Forty Day Fast. He created it for your salvation to teach us to fast not in words only, but also by example". Sts. Basil the Great and Gregory of Nyssa assert that the Holy Forty Day Fast existed everywhere during their time. According to the Apostolic Canons (Canon 69) the Holy Forty Day Fast is considered obligatory and its observance is protected by strict punishment. St. Hippolytus (3rd century) serves as the indisputable witness of the antiquity of this fast and the paschal cycle traced to his see, containing the instruction from antiquity of the custom to stop the Holy Forty Days Fast on Sundays. On the basis of all traditions of the Holy Apostles, our Holy Church, on behalf of its representatives, fathers and teachers, always considered the Holy Forty Day Fast an apostolic establishment. Yet the Blessed Jerome on behalf of all Christians in his time said: "We fast for the Forty Days according to the apostolic tradition". St. Cyril of Alexandria repeatedly reminds us in his writings, that it is necessary to piously observe the Holy Forty Day Fast, according to the apostolic and gospel traditions. The Holy Forty Day Fast, continuing for forty days, was not observed however in the ancient Church at one and the same time, because that depends on the non-uniform number of the days of the fast and the days on which it was decided. Beginning from the Third, even from the Second Century, the Holy Fathers gave clear testimonies that the Holy Forty Day Fast depended upon forty days. St. Irenaeus wrote that Christians fasted for 40 days. Origen also confirms this in the Third Century. In the Fourth Century the eastern churches established the present order of the Holy Forty Day Fast from Monday after Cheese Fare Sunday until Great Saturday, understanding that this number includes Passion Week in the fast. The Holy Fathers: Cyril of Jerusalem, Gregory the Theologian, John Chrysostom, Ambrose of Milan, Blessed Augustine, etc., all agree that the Holy Forty Days is a fast for forty days, and all see it as the common establishment of the Holy Church. The fast of the Holy Forty Days is called Great, not only because of the number of days but also because of its special significance and its value for the Orthodox Christian.
"The more days of the fast", teaches the blessed Augustine, "the better the healing. The longer the abstention, the more bountiful is the salvation. God, the Physician of our souls, established the proper time for the pious to give praise, for the sinners to pray, for the ones to seek rest, for others to ask forgiveness. The time of the Holy Forty Days is proper, neither too short for giving praise, nor too long for seeking mercy. Holy and saving is the course of the Holy Forty Days by which the sinner is led through repentance in charity, and the pious to rest. During its days the Deity is mainly propitious, needs are filled, piety is rewarded".
According to the teaching of St. Asterius of Amasea, the Holy Forty Day Fast is "a teacher of temperance, the mother of virtue, the educator of the children of God, the guide through chaos, the serenity of souls, the staff of life, lasting and serene peace. Its strictness and importance calms the passions, dampens anger and fury, cools and calms all kinds of excitement, and slakes the appetite". "The holy fathers", teaches St. John Chrysostom, "appointed forty days of fast in order that during these days the people, having been carefully cleansed through prayer, fasting and confession of sins, will approach holy communion with a pure conscience".
According to the teaching of the Ven. Dorotheus, "God has given these holy days (the Forty Holy Days) so that those who will try, with attention and wise humility, to take care of themselves and repent their sins, will be cleansed of the sins which were made during the whole year. Then their souls will be released from the burden, and in such a way cleansed will attain the holy day of the Resurrection and without condemnation to receive the Holy Mysteries, having become a new person through repentance in this holy fast".
The Divine Services of Great Lent, on the one hand, presents to us the continuous prompting to fast and repent, and on the other hand, describes also the very condition of the soul, repenting and crying over sins. This general content of the Great Lent Divine Services also fully impacts his external image.
The Holy Church lays aside any pomp in the Divine Service. Before all she does not perform the most solemn Christian Divine Service, that is, the full Liturgy on the days of Great Lent, excluding Saturdays and Sundays. Instead she celebrates the Presanctified Liturgy on Wednesdays and Fridays (Laod. 19, Trullo 52). The Holy Church changes the structure of the other church services in accordance with time. She almost stops singing as an expression of the joyful condition of spirit, and gives preference to reading. She also changes the choice of the readings themselves according to the season. Thus, the Holy Church deprives the faithful of the joyful proclamation of the Gospel of Christ, and offers readings from the Old Testament word of God. She uses the Psalter especially widely, which mainly induces a prayerful and repentant spirit. The entire Psalter is read twice each week. The terrible speech of the Prophet Isaiah is also read, accusing the lawless and encouraging the hope of repentance. The pericopes in which the creation and the fall of man as described in the book of Genesis are read, and on the one hand, the awful displays of the wrath of God on the impious are described, and on the other hand, His mercy on the righteous. Finally, lessons from the book of Proverbs are read, where the Wisdom of God calls us to true enlightenment, teaches us about heavenly wisdom. In all the church services the Holy Church leads us to the prayer of St. Ephraim the Syrian, that God take away from us the spirit of sloth, despair, lust of power and idle talk, and that He grant us the spirit of chastity, humility, patience and love. Also frequently repeated is the prayer of repentance of David: "Have mercy on me, O God, have mercy on me", and the appeal of the reasonable thief: "Remember me, O Lord, when Thou comest into Thy heavenly Kingdom". All Divine Services of Great Lent are done quietly, slowly and with the greatest reverence. Few candles are lit in the candle stands, the Royal Doors are rarely opened, the bells are seldom and minimally rung, those present in the temple are called to prostrate to the ground frequently, and to kneel often. By the appearance, the setting and the external character of the Divine Service, the Holy Church teaches us that there should not be a place for joy and pomp, but only humility and sorrow, and lamentation for our sins in the internal temple of our repenting soul. Finally, the Holy Church connects the daily church services, the third, the sixth, and the ninth hours with Vespers to indicate the length of time for the daily fast. Generally, the Holy Church with parental care wisely directs all of us to observe strict abstention from food, to devote all time "of the soul-pleasing Holy Forty Days" and the cares of our salvation to God, to be released whenever possible from the usual earthly cares and occupations, everyday efforts and entertainments, to give a rather larger part than ever of our time for self-examination, moral self-correction, divine thoughts and to the Divine Services of the church. That we use this time, as the most convenient one for the cleansing of all sins, laying as a heavy burden on our souls and darkening the Divine image in us, through the Sacrament of Repentance, and then, already with a cleansed conscience, unite ourselves with the Lord, the Source of all joy, happiness and eternal salvation, through the Sacrament of Holy Communion. That, finally, having worthily "completed the soul-pleasing Holy Forty Day Fast", in peace with God, with our neighbor and with our conscience, brightly and joyfully, with a pure soul and an open heart, wewill meet "the Holy Week" of the Passion of Christ and "the light of His Resurrection".
The paradigm of the observance of the Holy Forty Day Fast was determined from of old. Ancient Christians observed this lent with special strictness, abstaining even from the taste of water until the 9th hour (3 p.m. in the afternoon). They ate after the ninth hour of the day, using bread and vegetables and abstaining from meat and wine, and also cheese and eggs, even on Saturdays and Sundays. The exceptions to this order were only supposed in extreme need.
The strict keeping of the fast weakened on Saturdays and Sundays and on the feast of the Annunciation (when it came in the Holy Forty Day Fast) on which it is necessary to serve a full Liturgy, but it was not weakened when the feasts in honor of the saints fell on the weekdays of the Holy Forty Day Fast, likewise when the same feasts were celebrated on Saturdays and Sundays. The present Ustav (Rubrics, Typicon) commands:
"The strong may persevere fasting up to Friday". "On the first day of the first week (Monday) it is by any means not necessary to eat, and the same way in the second. On Wednesday after the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts, the meal is placed, and we eat warm bread, and for food warm vegetables. Warm water with honey is given also. To keep the fast on the two days of the first week, the weaker eat bread and kvass after Vespers on Tuesday. The same applies to the elderly." The Holy Mountain Typicon commands not to eat food at all on the first day. On Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday one may eat one liter of bread and water, and nothing else, unless salt is needed with the bread. On Saturdays and Sundays olive oil and wine is permitted". In the other weeks, except for Saturdays and Sundays, we eat dry foods (xerophagy). Wine and olive oil is authorized on February 24, March 9, and on the day of the reading of the Great Canon on Great Thursday. "We do not eat any fish during all the Holy Forty Day Fast, except for the feast of the Annunciation of the Most Holy Theotokos and Palm (Flower-bearing) Sunday". On Lazarus Saturday it is permitted to eat caviar, but not fish.
THE MYSTERY OF LENT
by Dom Gueranger
We may be sure, that a season, so sacred as this of Lent, is rich in mysteries. The Church has made it a time of recollection and penance, in preparation for the greatest of all her Feasts; she would, therefore, bring into it everything that could excite the faith of her children, and encourage them to go through the arduous work of atonement for their sins. During Septuagesima, we had the number Seventy, which reminded us of those seventy years’ captivity in Babylon, after which, God’s chosen people, being purified from idolatry, was to return to Jerusalem and celebrate the Pasch. It is the number Forty that the Church now brings before us: - a number, as Saint Jerome observes, which denotes punishment and affliction [In Ezechiel, cap. xxix].
Let us remember the forty days and forty nights of the Deluge (Gen. vii. 12), sent by God in his anger, when he repented that he had made man, and destroyed the whole human race, with the exception of one family. Let us consider how the Hebrew people, in punishment for their ingratitude, wandered forty years in the desert, before they were permitted to enter the Promised Land [Num. xiv. 33]. Let us listen to our God commanding the Prophet Ezechiel to lie forty days on his right side, as a figure of the siege, which was to bring destruction on Jerusalem [Ezech. iv. 6].
There are two, in the Old Testament, who represent, in their own persons, the two manifestations of God: Moses, who typifies the Law; and Elias, who is the figure of the Prophets. Both of these are permitted to approach God, - the first on Sinai [Exod. xxiv. 18], the second on Horeb [3 Kings, xix. 8], - but both of them have to prepare for the great favour by an expiatory fast of forty days.
With these mysterious facts before us, we can understand why it was, that the Son of God, having become Man for our salvation, and wishing to subject himself to the pain of fasting, chose the number of Forty Days. The institution of Lent is thus brought before us with everything that can impress the mind with its solemn character, and with its power of appeasing God and purifying our souls. Let us, there fore, look beyond the little world which surrounds us, and see how the whole Christian universe is, at this very time, offering this Forty Days’ penance as a sacrifice of propitiation to the offended Majesty of God; and let us hope, that, as in the case of the Ninivites, he will mercifully accept this year’s offering of our atonement, and pardon us our sins.
The number of our days of Lent is, then, a holy mystery: let us, now, learn from the Liturgy, in what light the Church views her Children during these Forty Days. She considers them as an immense army, fighting, day and night, against their Spiritual enemies. We remember how, on Ash Wednesday, she calls Lent a Christian Warefare. Yes, - in order that we may have that newness of life, which will make us worthy to sing once more our Alleluia, - we must conquer our three enemies the devil, the flesh, and the world. We are fellow combatants with our Jesus, for He, too, submits to the triple temptation, suggested to him by Satan in person. Therefore, we must have on our armour, and watch unceasingly. And whereas it is of the utmost importance that our hearts be spirited and brave, - the Church gives us a war-song of heaven’s own making, which can fire even cowards with hope of victory and confidence in God’s help: it is the Ninetieth Psalm [Ps. Qui habitat in adjutorio, in the Office of Compline]. She inserts the whole of it in the Mass of the First Sunday of Lent, and, every day, introduces several of its verses in the Ferial Office.
She there tells us to rely on the protection, wherewith our Heavenly Father covers us, as with a shield [Scuto circumdabit to veritas ejus. Office of None.]; to hope under the shelter of his wings [Et sub pennis ejus sperabis. Sext.]; to have confidence in him, for that he will deliver us from the snare of the hunter [Ipse liberavit me de laqueo venantium. Tierce.], who had robbed us of the holy liberty of the children of God; to rely upon the succour of the Holy Angels, who are our Brothers, to whom our Lord hath given charge that they keep us in all our ways [Angelis suis mandavit de te, ut custodiant te in omnibus viis tuis. Lauds and Vespers.], and who, when our Jesus permitted Satan to tempt him, were the adoring witnesses of his combat, and approached him, after his victory, proffering to him their service and homage. Let us get well into us these sentiments wherewith the Church would have us be inspired; and, during our six weeks’ campaign, let us often repeat this admirable Canticle, which so fully describes what the Soldiers of Christ should be and feel in this season of the great spiritual warfare.
But the Church is not satisfied with thus animating us to the contest with our enemies; - she would also have our minds engrossed with thoughts of deepest import; and for this end, she puts before us three great subjects, which she will gradually unfold to us between this and the great Easter Solemnity. Let us be all attention to these soul-stirring and instructive lessons.
And firstly, there is the conspiracy of the Jews against our Redeemer. It will be brought before us in its whole history, from its first formation to its final consummation on the great Friday, when we shall behold the Son of God hanging on the Wood of the Cross. The infamous workings of the synagogue will be brought before us so regularly, that we shall be able to follow the plot in all its details. We shall be inflamed with love for the august Victim, whose meekness, wisdom, and dignity, bespeak a God. The divine drama, which began in the cave of Bethlehem, is to close on Calvary; we may assist at it, by meditating on the passages of the Gospel read to us, by the Church, during these days of Lent.
The second of the subjects offered to us, for our instruction, requires that we should remember how the Feast of Easter is to be the day of new birth for our Catechumens; and how, in the early ages of the Church, Lent was the immediate and solemn preparation given to the candidates for Baptism. The holy Liturgy of the present season retains much of the instruction she used to give to the Catechumens; and as we listen to her magnificent Lessons from both the Old and the New Testament, whereby she completed their initiation, we ought to think with gratitude on how we were not required to wait years before being made Children of God, but were mercifully admitted to Baptism, even in our Infancy. We shall be led to pray for those new Catechumens, who this very year, in far distant countries, are receiving instructions from their zealous Missioners, and are looking forward, as did the postulants of the primitive Church, to that grand Feast of our Saviour’s victory over Death, when they are to be cleansed in the Waters of Baptism and receive from the contact a flew being, - regeneration.
Thirdly, we must remember how, formerly, the public Penitents, who had been separated, on Ash Wednesday, from the assembly of the Faithful, were the object of the Church’s maternal solicitude during the whole Forty Days of Lent, and were to be admitted to Reconciliation on Maundy Thursday, if their repentance were such as to merit this public forgiveness. We shall have the admirable course of instructions, which were originally designed for these Penitents, and which the Liturgy, faithful as she ever is to such traditions, still retains for our sakes. As we read these sublime passages of the Scripture, we shall naturally think upon our own sins, and on what easy terms they were pardoned us; whereas, had we lived in other times, we should have probably been put through the ordeal of a public and severe penance. This will excite us to fervour, for we shall remember, that, whatever changes the indulgence of the Church may lead her to make in her discipline, the justice of our God is ever the same. We shall find in all this an additional motive for offering to his Divine Majesty the sacrifice of a contrite heart, and we shall go through our penances with that cheerful eagerness, which the conviction of our deserving much severer ones always brings with it.
In order to keep up the character of mournfulness and austerity which is so well-suited to Lent, the Church, for many centuries, admitted very few Feasts into this portion of her year, inasmuch as there is always joy, where there is even a spiritual Feast. In the 4th century, we have the Council of Laodicea forbidding, in its fifty-first canon, the keeping a Feast or commemoration of any Saint, during Lent, excepting on the Saturdays or Sundays [Labbe, Concil., tom. i.]. The Greek Church rigidly maintained this point of Lenten Discipline; nor was it till many centuries after the Council of Laodicea that she made an exception for the 25th of March, on which day she now keeps the Feast of our Lady’s Annunciation.
The Church of Rome maintained this same discipline, at least in principle; but she admitted the Feast of the Annunciation at a very early period, and somewhat later, the Feast of the Apostle St. Matthias, on the 24th of February. During the last few centuries, she has admitted several other Feasts into that portion of her general Calendar which coincides with Lent; still, she observes a certain restriction, out of respect for the ancient practice.
The reason of the Church of Rome being less severe on this point of excluding the Saints’ Feasts during Lent, is, that the Christians of the West have never looked upon the celebration of a Feast as incompatible with fasting; the Greeks, on the contrary, believe that the two are irreconcilable, and as a consequence of this principle, never observe Saturday as a fasting-day, because they always keep it as a Solemnity, though they make Holy Saturday an exception, and fast upon it. For the same reason, they do not fast upon the Annunciation.
This strange idea gave rise, in or about the 7th century, to a custom which is peculiar to the Greek Church. It is called the Mass of the Presanctified, that is to say, consecrated in a previous Sacrifice. On each Sunday of Lent, the Priest consecrates six Hosts, one of which he receives in that Mass; but the remaining five are reserved for a simple Communion, which is made on each of the five following days, without the Holy Sacrifice being offered. The Latin Church practises this rite only once in the year, that is, on Good Friday, and this in commemoration of a sublime mystery, which we will explain in its proper place.
This custom of the Greek Church was evidently suggested by the 49th Canon of the Council of Laodicea, which forbids the offering the Bread of sacrifice during Lent, excepting on the Saturdays and Sundays [Labbe, Concil., tom. i.]. The Greeks, some centuries later on, concluded from this Canon, that the celebration of the Holy Sacrifice was incompatible with fasting; and we learn from the Controversy they had, in the 9th century, with the Legate Humbert [Centra Nicetam., tom. iv.], that the Mass of the Presanctified, (which has no other authority to rest on save a Canon of the famous Council in Trullo [Can. 52. Labbe, Concil. tom. vi.] held in 692,) was justified by the Greeks on this absurd plea, - that the Communion of the Body and Blood of our Lord broke the Lenten Fast.
The Greeks celebrate this rite in the evening, after Vespers, and the Priest alone communicates, as is done now in the Roman Liturgy on Good Friday. But for many centuries, they have made an exception for the Annunciation; they interrupt the Lenten fast on this Feast, they celebrate Mass, and the Faithful are allowed to receive Holy Communion.
The Canon of the Council of Laodicea was probably never received in the Western Church. If the suspension of the Holy Sacrifice during Lent was ever practised in Rome, it was only on the Thursdays; and even that custom was abandoned in the 8th century, as we learn from Anastasius the Librarian, who tells us that Pope St. Gregory the Second, desiring to complete the Roman Sacramentary, added Masses for the Thursdays of the first five weeks of Lent [Anastas. In Gregorio II]. It is difficult to assign the reason of this interruption of the Mass on Thursdays in the Roman Church, or of the like custom observed by the Church of Milan on the Fridays of Lent. The explanations we have found in different authors are not satisfactory. As far as Milan is concerned, we are inclined to think, that not satisfied with the mere adoption of the Roman usage of not celebrating Mass on Good Friday, the Ambrosian Church extended the rite to all the Fridays of Lent.
After thus briefly alluding to these details, we must close our present Chapter by a few words on the holy rites, which are now observed, during Lent, in our Western Churches. We have explained several of these in our “Septuagesima.” [See their explanation in the volume for Septuagesima]. The suspension of the Alleluia; the purple vestments; the laying aside the deacon’s Dalmatic, and the subdeacon’s Tunic; the omission of the two joyful canticles, - the Gloria in excelsis, and the Te Deum; the substitution of the mournful Tract for the Alleluia verse in the Mass; the Benedicamus Domino instead of the Ite, Missa est; the additional Prayer said over the people after the Post-communion Collects on Ferial Days ; the saying the Vesper Office before mid-day, excepting on the Sundays; - all these are familiar to our readers. We have only now to mention, in addition, the genuflections prescribed for the conclusion of all the Hours of the Divine Office on Ferias, and the rubric which bids the Choir to kneel, on those same Days, during the Canon of the Mass.
There were other ceremonies peculiar to the season of Lent, which were observed in the Churches of the West, but which have now, for many centuries, fallen into general disuse; we say general, because they are still partially kept up in some places. Of these rites, the most imposing was that of putting up a large veil between the Choir and the Altar, so that neither clergy nor people could look upon the Holy Mysteries celebrated within the Sanctuary. This veil - which was called the Curtain, and, generally speaking, was of a purple colour - was a symbol of the penance to which the sinner ought to subject himself, in order to merit the sight of that Divine Majesty, before whose face he had committed so many outrages. It signified, moreover, the humiliations endured by our Redeemer, who was a stumbling-block to the proud Synagogue. But, as a veil that is suddenly drawn aside, these humiliations were to give way, and be changed into the glories of the Resurrection [Honorius of Autun. Gemma animae. Lib. iii. cap. lxvi.]. Among other places where this rite is still observed, we may mention the Metropolitan Church of Paris, Notre Dame.
It was the custom also, in many Churches, to veil the Crucifix and the Statues of the Saints as soon as Lent began; in order to excite the Faithful to a livelier sense of penance, they were deprived of the consolation which the sight of these holy Images always brings to the soul. But this custom, which is still retained in some places, was less general than the more expressive one used in the Roman Church, and which we will explain in our next volume, - we mean the veiling the Crucifix and Statues only in Passion Time.
We learn from the Ceremonials of the Middle Ages, that, during Lent, and particularly on the Wednesdays and Fridays, processions used frequently to be made from one Church to another. In Monasteries, these Processions were made in the Cloister, and barefooted [Martène. De antiquis Eccles ritibus. Tom. iii. cap. xviii.]. This custom was suggested by the practice of Rome, where there is a Station for every day of Lent, and which, for many centuries, began by a procession to the Stational Church.
Lastly, - the Church has always been in the habit of adding to her prayers during the Season of Lent. Her present discipline is, that, on Ferias, in Cathedral and Collegiate Churches, (which are not exempted by a custom to the contrary,) the following additions are to be made to the Canonical Hours: on Mondays, the Office of the Dead; on Wednesday, the Gradual Psalms; and on Fridays, the Penitential Psalms. In some Churches, during the Middle-Ages, the whole Psaltery was added each week of Lent to the usual Office [Martène. De antiquis Eccles ritibus. Tom. iii. cap. xviii.].
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ANOTHER PAPAL INTERVIEW
Vatican City, Mar 5, 2014 / 11:35 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Find below an English translation, by CNA's Estefania Aguirre and Alan Holdren, of the March 5 interview of Pope Francis with Italian daily "Corriere della Sera".
my source: Catholic News Agency
Holy Father, every once in a while you call those who ask you for help. Sometimes they don’t believe you.
Yes, it has happened. When one calls, it is because he wants to speak, to pose a question, to ask for counsel. As a priest in Buenos Aires it was more simple. And, it has remained a habit for me. A service. I feel it inside. Certainly, now it is not that easy to do due to the quantity of people who write me.
And, is there a contact, an encounter that you remember with particular affection?
A widowed woman, aged 80, who had lost a child. She wrote me. And, now I call her every month. She is happy. I am a priest. I like it.
The relations with your predecessor. Have you ever asked for the counsel of Benedict XVI?
Yes. The Pope emeritus is not a statue in a museum. It is an institution. We weren’t used to it. 60 or 70 years ago, ‘bishop emeritus’ didn’t exist. It came after the (Second Vatican) Council. Today, it is an institution. The same thing must happen for the Pope emeritus. Benedict is the first and perhaps there will be others. We don’t know. He is discreet, humble, and he doesn’t want to disturb. We have spoken about it and we decided together that it would be better that he sees people, gets out and participates in the life of the Church. He once came here for the blessing of the statue of St. Michael the Archangel, then to lunch at Santa Marta and, after Christmas, I sent him an invitation to participate in the consistory and he accepted. His wisdom is a gift of God. Some would have wished that he retire to a Benedictine abbey far from the Vatican. I thought of grandparents and their wisdom. Their counsels give strength to the family and they do not deserve to be in an elderly home.
Your way of governing the Church has seemed to us to be this: you listen to everyone and decide alone. A bit like a general of the Jesuits. Is the Pope a lone man?
Yes and no. I understand what you want to say to me. The Pope is not alone in his work because he is accompanied and counseled by so many. And, he would be a lone man if he decided without listening, or feigned to listen. But, there is a moment, when it is about deciding, placing a signature, in which he is alone with his sense of responsibility.
You have innovated, criticized some attitudes of the clergy, shaken the Curia. With some resistance, some opposition. Has the Church already changed as you would have liked a year ago?
Last March, I didn’t have a project to change the Church. I didn’t expect this transfer of dioceses, let’s put it that way. I began to govern seeking to put into practice that which had emerged in the debate among cardinals in the various congregations. In my way of acting, I wait for the Lord to give me inspiration. I’ll give you an example. We had spoken of the spiritual care of the people who work in the Curia, and they began to make spiritual retreats. We needed to give more importance to the annual spiritual exercises. Everyone has the right to spend five days in silence and meditation, whereas before, in the Curia, they heard three talks a day and then some continued to work.
Kindness and mercy are the essence of your pastoral message…
And of the Gospel. It is the center of the Gospel. Otherwise, one cannot understand Jesus Christ, the kindness of the Father who sent him to listen to us, to heal us, to save us.
But has this message been understood? You have said that the Francis-mania will not last long. Is there something in your public image that you don’t like?
I like being among the people. Together with those who suffer. Going to parishes. I don’t like the ideological interpretations, a certain ‘mythology of Pope Francis’. When it is said, for example, that he goes out of the Vatican at night to walk and to feed the homeless on Via Ottaviano. It has never crossed my mind. If I’m not wrong, Sigmund Freud said that in every idealization there is an aggression. Depicting the Pope to be a sort of superman, a type of star, seems offensive to me. The Pope is a man who laughs, cries, sleeps calmly and has friends like everyone. A normal person.
(Do you have) nostalgia for your Argentina?
The truth is that I don’t have nostalgia. I would like to go and see my sister, who is sick, the last of us five (siblings). I would like to see her, but this does not justify a trip to Argentina. I call her by phone and this is enough. I’m not thinking of going before 2016 because I was already in Latin America, in Rio. Now I must go to the Holy Land, to Asia, and then to Africa.
You just renewed your Argentinian passport. You are still a head of state.
I renewed it because it was about to expire.
Were you displeased by the accusations of Marxism, mostly American, after the publication of Evangelii Gaudium?
Not at all. I have never shared the Marxist ideology, because it is not true, but I have known many great people who professed Marxism.
The scandals that rocked the life of the Church are fortunately in the past. A public appeal was made to you, on the delicate theme of the abuse of minors, published by (the Italian newspaper) Il Foglio and signed by Besancon and Scruton, among others, that you would raise your voice and make it heard against the fanaticisms and the bad conscience of the secularized world that hardly respects infancy.
I want to say two things. The cases of abuses are terrible because they leave extremely deep wounds. Benedict XVI was very courageous and he cleared a path. The Church has done so much on this path. Perhaps more than anyone. The statistics on the phenomenon of the violence against children are shocking, but they also show clearly that the great majority of abuses take place in the family environment and around it. The Catholic Church is perhaps the only public institution to have acted with transparency and responsibility. No other has done more. And, the Church is the only one to be attacked.
Holy Father, you say ‘the poor evangelize us.’ The attention to poverty, the strongest stamp of your pastoral message, is held by some observers as a profession of ‘pauperism.’ The Gospel does not condemn well-being. And Zaccheus was rich and charitable.
The Gospel condemns the cult of well-being. ‘Pauperism’ is one of the critical interpretations. In Medieval times, there were a lot of pauperistic currents. St. Francis had the genius of placing the theme of poverty on the evangelical path. Jesus says that one cannot serve two masters, God and Wealth. And when we are judged in the final judgement (Matthew 25), our closeness to poverty counts. Poverty distances us from idolatry, it opens the doors to Providence. Zaccheus gave half of his wealth to the poor. And to he who keeps his granary full of his own selfishness, the Lord, in the end, will present him with the bill. I have expressed well in Evangelii Gaudium what I think about poverty.
You have indicated that in globalization, especially financially, there are some evils that accost humanity. But, globalization has ripped millions of people out of indigence. It has given hope, a rare feeling not to be confused with optimism.
It is true, globalization has saved many persons from poverty, but it has condemned many others to die of hunger, because with this economic system it becomes selective. The globalization which the Church supports is similar not to a sphere in which every point is equidistant from the center and in which then one loses the particularity of a people, but a polyhedron, with its diverse faces, in which every people conserves its own culture, language, religion, identity. The current ‘spherical’ economic, and especially financial, globalization produces a single thought, a weak thought. At the center is no longer the human person, just money.
The theme of the family is central in the activity of the Council of eight cardinals. Since the exhortation ‘Familiaris Consortio’ of John Paul II many things have changed. Two Synods are on the schedule. Great newness is expected. You have said of the divorced: they are not to be condemned but helped.
It is a long path that the Church must complete. A process wanted by the Lord. Three months after my election the themes for the Synod were placed before me. It was proposed that we discuss what is the contribution of Jesus to contemporary man. But in the end with gradual steps - which for me are signs of the will of God - it was chosen to discuss the family, which is going through a very serious crisis. It is difficult to form it. Few young people marry. There are many separated families in which the project of common life has failed. The children suffer greatly. We must give a response. But for this we must reflect very deeply. It is that which the Consistory and the Synod are doing. We need to avoid remaining on the surface. The temptation to resolve every problem with casuistry is an error, a simplification of profound things, as the Pharisees did, a very superficial theology. It is in light of the deep reflection that we will be able to seriously confront particular situations, also those of the divorced, with a pastoral depth.
Why did the speech from Cardinal Walter Kasper during the last consistory (an abyss between doctrine on marriage and the family and the real life of many Christians) so deeply divide the cardinals? How do you think the Church can walk these two years of fatiguing path arriving to a large and serene consensus? If the doctrine is firm, why is debate necessary?
Cardinal Kasper made a beautiful and profound presentation that will soon be published in German, and he confronted five points; the fifth was that of second marriages. I would have been concerned if in the consistory there wasn’t an intense discussion. It wouldn’t have served for anything. The cardinals knew that they could say what they wanted, and they presented many different points of view that are enriching. The fraternal and open comparisons make theological and pastoral thought grow. I am not afraid of this, actually I seek it.
In the recent past, it was normal to appeal to the so-called ‘non-negotiable values’, especially in bio-ethics and sexual morality. You have not picked up on this formula. The doctrinal and moral principles have not changed. Does this choice perhaps wish to show a style less preceptive and more respectful of personal conscience?
I have never understood the expression non-negotiable values. Values are values, and that is it. I can’t say that, of the fingers of a hand, there is one less useful than the rest. Whereby I do not understand in what sense there may be negotiable values. I wrote in the exhortation ‘Evangelii Gaudium’ what I wanted to say on the theme of life.
Many nations have regulated civil unions. Is it a path that the Church can understand? But up to what point?
Marriage is between a man and a woman. Secular states want to justify civil unions to regulate different situations of cohabitation, pushed by the demand to regulate economic aspects between persons, such as ensuring health care. It is about pacts of cohabitating of various natures, of which I wouldn’t know how to list the different ways. One needs to see the different cases and evaluate them in their variety.
How will the role of the woman in the Church be promoted?
Also here, casuistry does not help. It is true that women can and must be more present in the places of decision-making in the Church. But this I would call a promotion of the functional sort. Only in this way you don’t get very far. We must rather think that the Church has a feminine article : ‘La’. She is feminine in her origin. The great theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar worked a lot on this theme: the Marian principle guides the Church aside the Petrine. The Virgin Mary is more important than any bishop and any apostle. The theological deepening is in process. Cardinal Rylko, with the Council for the Laity, is working in this direction with many women experts in different areas.
At half a century from Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae, can the Church take up again the theme of birth control? Cardinal Martini, your confrere, thought that the moment had come.
All of this depends on how Humanae Vitae is interpreted. Paul VI himself, at the end, recommended to confessors much mercy, and attention to concrete situations. But his genius was prophetic, he had the courage to place himself against the majority, defending the moral discipline, exercising a culture brake, opposing present and future neo-Malthusianism. The question is not that of changing the doctrine but of going deeper and making pastoral (ministry) take into account the situations and that which it is possible for people to do. Also of this we will speak in the path of the synod.
Science evolves and redesigns the frontiers of life. Does it make sense to artificially prolong life in a vegetative state? Can a living will be a solution?
I am not a specialist in bioethical issues. And I fear that every one of my sentences may be wrong. The traditional doctrine of the Church says that no one is obligated to use extraordinary means when it is known that they are in the terminal phase. In my pastoral ministry, in these cases, I have always advised palliative care. In more specific cases it is good to seek, if necessary, the counsel of specialists.
Will the coming trip to the Holy Land bring an agreement of intercommunion with the Orthodox that Paul VI, 50 years ago, nearly signed with Athenagoras?
We are all impatient to obtain ‘closed’ results. But the path of unity with the Orthodox means most of all walking and working together. In Buenos Aires, in the catechism courses, some Orthodox came. I spent Christmas and January 6 together with their bishops, who sometimes also asked advice of our diocesan offices. I don’t know if the episode you are telling me of Athenagoras who would have proposed to Paul VI that they walk together and send all of the theologians to an island to discuss among themselves is true. It is a joke, but it is important that we walk together. Orthodox theology is very rich. And I believe that they have great theologians at this moment. Their vision of the Church and of synodality is marvelous.
In a few years, the biggest world power will be China, with which the Vatican does not have relations. Matteo Ricci was Jesuit like yourself.
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We are close to China. I sent a letter to president Xi Jining when he was elected, three days after me. And he answered me. There are relations. They are a great people, whom I love.
Why doesn’t the Holy Father ever speak of Europe? What doesn’t convince you about the European design?
Do you remember the day I spoke of Asia? What did I say? I didn’t speak of Asia, nor of Africa, nor of Europe. Only of Latin America when I was in Brazil and when I had to receive the Commission for Latin America. There hasn’t yet been occasion to speak of Europe. It will come.
What book are you reading these days?
Peter and Magdalene by Damiano Marzotto, on the feminine dimension of the Church. It is a beautiful book.
And are you not able to see any nice films, another of your passions? “La Grande Bellezza” won an Oscar. Will you see it?
I don’t know. The last film I saw was “Life is Beautiful” from Benigni. And before, I saw “La Strada” of Fellini. A masterpiece. I also liked Wajda…
St. Francis had a carefree youth. I ask you, have you ever been in love?
In the book “Il Gesuita,” I tell the story of when I had a girlfriend at 17 years old. And I speak also of this in “On Heaven and Earth,” the volume I wrote with Abraham Skorka. In the seminary a girl made me lose my head for a week.
And how did it end, if I’m not indiscreet?
They were things of youth. I spoke with my confessor (a big smile).
Thanks Holy Father.
Thank you.
Tags: Corriere della Sera
This interview speaks for itself. For those interested in Catholic - Orthodox relations, note that he describes his move to Rome as a "transfer of diocese". He insists, to a degree that is new, that he is Pope BECAUSE he is bishop of a local church. Also, in his reform of Church structures he is looking at what the Holy Spirit has taught the Orthodox churches. We have already seen that he is also allowing the Orthodox treatment of divorce to influence his own thinking.
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THE FIRST SUNDAY IN LENT - A
LENT 2014: Reflection for the First Sunday of Lent, March 9
by Jim Forest
Genesis 2:7-9, 3:1-7 | Romans 5:12-19 | Matthew 4:1-11
“All these kingdoms I bestow on you if you prostrate yourself in homage to me.” (Matthew 4:10)
Jesus’ last temptation was to trade worship for power. Satan is shown as a power broker. His message: “Center your life on the prince of worldly power, and I will let you share in this power.”
Making the border crossing into Lent is an opportunity to leave the centers of power behind and to surrender powerful ambitions. At first glance, it seems like opting for weakness. Satan shows Jesus “all the kingdoms of the world in their magnificence” — an impressive, vast, dazzling vision. But the problem with long distance viewing is that the huge swallows up the tiny. From the top of the Empire State Building, human beings look like ants. From the height of a satellite, a city looks like an ant hill. Human beings are lost in the dust.
In the life of Jesus, human beings aren’t ants. They are ordinary people with names and faces, some with withered limbs and unseeing eyes, some with dead children, some with half-dead consciences, all wounded, all needing forgiveness. But limbs can’t be strengthened, eyes can’t be healed, children can’t be raised, and sins can’t be forgiven from a mountaintop or space station.
Entering the City of Lent, our eyes adjust to a dimmer light. We gradually discover the beauty of a subtler kind of landscape. Longing to participate in the peace of Christ, we learn to turn away from whatever blinds us to each other’s faces and wounds. In rejecting the kingdoms of this world and taking on the works of forgiveness and healing, we find to our astonishment that what we thought was weakness is instead a work of great courage and strength.
The Dutch writer and philosopher Abel Herzberg tells a story of a rabbi, who, upon entering a room in his home, saw his son deep in prayer. “In the corner,” he writes, “stood a cradle with a crying baby. The rabbi asked his son, ‘Can’t you hear? There’s a baby crying in this room.’ The son said, ‘Father, I was lost in God.’ And the rabbi said, ‘He who is lost in God can see the very fly crawling up the wall.’” (Brieven aan mijn kleinzoon [Letters to My Grandson], Amsterdam, Querido, 1985)
Jesus is drawn to those others prefer not to see — like the woman “with a bad name” who followed him into a Pharisee’s house and washed his feet with her tears. “I tell you,” said Jesus, “that her sins, her many sins, must have been forgiven or she would not have shown such great love. It is the one who is forgiven little who shows little love.” Then he said to her, “Your sins are forgiven.” (Luke 7:47)
The unforgiven person is trapped in destruction. The person who wants to participate in the peace of Christ has to become deeply sensitive to the need , often unrecognized and rarely discussed, for forgiveness. Peace work is healing work. Healing is tied to forgiveness.
What “centers of power” draw you most strongly? How do these centers affect your perception of others?
Do you agree with the rabbi in Herzberg’s story that a person lost in God “can see the very fly crawling up the wall”? Who in your life exemplifies this sensitivity?
How has your local church community been drawn this year to “those whom others prefer not to see”? Toward what groups might your church extend its concern in the future?
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Reading 1 GN 2:7-9; 3:1-7 The LORD God formed man out of the clay of the ground and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and so man became a living being. Then the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and placed there the man whom he had formed. Out of the ground the LORD God made various trees grow that were delightful to look at and good for food, with the tree of life in the middle of the garden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Now the serpent was the most cunning of all the animals that the LORD God had made. The serpent asked the woman, “Did God really tell you not to eat from any of the trees in the garden?” The woman answered the serpent: “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; it is only about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden that God said, ‘You shall not eat it or even touch it, lest you die.’” But the serpent said to the woman: “You certainly will not die! No, God knows well that the moment you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods who know what is good and what is evil.” The woman saw that the tree was good for food, pleasing to the eyes, and desirable for gaining wisdom. So she took some of its fruit and ate it; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized that they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.
THE LETTER TO DIOGNETUS
CHAPTER V — THE MANNERS OF THE CHRISTIANS.
For the Christians are distinguished from other men neither by country, nor language, nor the customs which they observe. For they neither inhabit cities of their own, nor employ a peculiar form of speech, nor lead a life which is marked out by any singularity. The course of conduct which they follow has not been devised by any speculation or deliberation of inquisitive men; nor do they, like some, proclaim themselves the advocates of any merely human doctrines. But, inhabiting Greek as well as barbarian cities, according as the lot of each of them has determined, and following the customs of the natives in respect to clothing, food, and the rest of their ordinary conduct, they display to us their wonderful and confessedly striking method of life. They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners. As citizens, they share in all things with others, and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers. They marry, as do all [others]; they beget children; but they do not destroy their offspring. They have a common table, but not a common bed. They are in the flesh, but they do not live after the flesh. They pass their days on earth, but they are citizens of heaven. They obey the prescribed laws, and at the same time surpass the laws by their lives. They love all men, and are persecuted by all. They are unknown and condemned; they are put to death, and restored to life. They are poor, yet make many rich; they are in lack of all things, and yet abound in all; they are dishonoured, and yet in their very dishonour are glorified. They are evil spoken of, and yet are justified; they are reviled, and bless; they are insulted, and repay the insult with honour; they do good, yet are punished as evil-doers. When punished, they rejoice as if quickened into life; they are assailed by the Jews as foreigners, and are persecuted by the Greeks; yet those who hate them are unable to assign any reason for their hatred. -Epistle to of Mathetes to Diognetus
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THE MELKITE CHURCH AND VATICAN II
L’Eglise Grecque Melkite au Councile (The Melkite Greek Church at the Council) was the original title of this book, first published in French in 1967. Then as now, twenty-five years later, it would be difficult to imagine a book of this title about the role of any other Eastern Catholic Church at Vatican II. At that time no other Eastern Church in communion with Rome had as yet played any significantly “Eastern” leadership role in the wider Catholic Church. In the case of the Ukrainian and Romanian Catholic Churches, this was prevented by persecution. In the case of other Churches, their insignificant numbers or the vagaries of their history rendered any such corporate role unlikely, though outstanding individual bishops from these Churches, such as Ignatius Ziade, Maronite Archbishop of Beirut, and Isaac Ghattas, Coptic Catholic Bishop of Luxor-Thebes, gave eloquent voice to the aspirations of these Churches too. But if size or persecution explains why other Churches played no notable corporate role at Vatican II, this does not explain why the Melkite Church did.
To what, then, can one attribute the remarkable role of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church at the Council? In his Preface to the 1967 French edition of this volume, Patriarch Maximos IV attributes it, first, to the fact that the Catholic Melkites had never lost contact with their Orthodox roots, and thus never became closed in on themselves. This allowed them to discern what is essential (i.e., Catholic) from what is contingent (i.e., Latin) in Catholicism, enabling them at Vatican II to witness to a pensee complementaire, another, complementary way of seeing things, as a counterbalance to Latin Catholic unilateralism. Maximos IV also offers a second reason: the synodal cohesion of the Melkite hierarchy (at that time the patriarch with sixteen bishops and four general religious superiors) in its pre-conciliar discussions preparatory to Vatican II, and the consequent unity of its voice at the Council. We see this exemplary Eastern conciliarity from the start, in the letter of August 29, 1959, accompanying the first Melkite response to the Preparatory Commission of the Council: “We have believed it more useful to give our proposals together, in common…” This was collegiality ante factum, long before the later work of the Council had made this ecclesiology common coin.
With the advantages of hindsight, I would suggest adding to Maximos’ list three other reasons that facilitated Melkite leadership at Vatican II: 1) education; 2) courageous, intelligent, innovative leadership; 3) imaginative and universal vision. None of these can be considered traditional clerical virtues. By training and tradition, the clergy are more inclined to conservatism, obedience, regularity, stability, the attributes of any social organization, where too much imagination is a liability, and routine is prized above initiative.
First, education – All of us are at once the beneficiaries as well as the victims of our background and training. Eastern Catholicism is often criticized, sometimes exaggeratedly, for its “Westernization,” an accusation, every honest person must admit, that contains some truth. This Westernization has brought with it obvious disadvantages, specifically a certain erosion of the Eastern heritage.
But every coin has two sides, and contact with the “West,” a term some Orthodox writers use like a “four-letter word,” has also had decided advantages. It is “Western” culture that invented “modernity” with its traditional values of pluralism, civility, respect for individuals and their rights, and an intellectual, artistic and cultural life that strives to be free of outside restraint or manipulation, and seeks to be objective, even-handed, and fair. These ideals may not always be realized, but in the West they are at least ideals, and one cannot always say the same for the Christian East, where it is not uncommon even for representatives of the intellectual elite to engage in the most grotesque caricatures of the Christian West. But from that same bugaboo one can learn the “Western” secular values of intellectual honesty, coherence, consistency, self-criticism, objectivity, fairness, dialogue; moderation and courtesy of tone and language even when in disagreement; and a reciprocity which, eschewing all “double-standard” criticism, applies the same criteria and standards of judgment to one’s interlocutor and his thought and actions that one applies to one’s own. Such “Western” values lead to cultural openness and the desire to know the other. Just look at the endless list of objective, positive, sympathetic—yes—”Western” studies and publications on the Christian East, its Fathers, its spirituality, its liturgy, its monasticism, its theology, its history. How preferable this is to the ghetto-like insularity, the smug self-satisfaction of those convinced they have nothing to learn from anyone else!
So a dose of the “West” can be good medicine for the East, and Melkite bishops at Vatican II, imbued with what was best in the superb postwar French Catholic intellectual tradition, speaking French fluently and thus accessible to personal contacts and dialogue, were enabled to understand and appreciate what was happening in the Catholic Church in a way they never could have done with a simplistic caricature-image and paranoid rejection of the “West.” That is why the Melkites at Vatican II were repeatedly called a “bridge” between East and West: they knew both sides of the river and could mediate between them. Those who would deny this should remember that it is a question here of the lived experience of the Catholic Church, and only Catholics can judge that. So if Eastern Catholics at Vatican II were not a bridge between Orthodoxy and Rome—and only the Orthodox can decide that—Catholics experienced them to be a bridge that allowed the voice of the East to be heard at the Council sessions.
Of the other qualities, courageous, intelligent, innovative leadership was not proper to the Melkite bishops alone but shared by all the great progressive leaders of Vatican II, to the discomfiture of the conservative minority and the astonished admiration of the rest of the world. Peculiar to the Melkites, however, was the disproportion between their conciliar leadership and their numbers, a patriarch and a mere sixteen bishops awash in a Latin sea.
Equally unique to the Melkite Council Fathers as a group was the truly remarkable imaginative and universal vision they showed. Altogether too often, Eastern Christians think only within their own frame of reference, address only their own problems, protest only against injustices done to them, further only their own interests. Not so the Melkites. In addition to being among the first to state categorically that the Council should avoid definitions and condemnations, the list of important items of general import on the Vatican II and post-conciliar agenda that the Melkite bishops first proposed is simply astonishing: the vernacular, eucharistic concelebration and communion under both species in the Latin liturgy; the permanent diaconate; the establishment of what ultimately became the Synod of Bishops held periodically in Rome, as well as the Secretariat (now Pontifical Council) for Christian Unity; new attitudes and a less offensive ecumenical vocabulary for dealing with other Christians, especially with the Orthodox Churches; the recognition and acceptance of Eastern Catholic communities for what they are, “Churches,” not “rites.”
But for the Melkites, perhaps none of the above qualities would have “worked” without the audacious yet unfailingly courteous courage of Maximos IV and his close collaborators. I first encountered this in 1959, I think it was, just after returning from three years teaching in Baghdad. I was doing Russian studies at Fordham University in New York, preparing for theological studies and ordination in the Byzantine-Slavonic Rite. With barely repressible glee the late Father Paul Mailleux, S.J., then superior of the Byzantine Jesuit Community of the Russian Center at Fordham, showed me a copy of a letter Maximos IV had sent to an American cardinal. For some time the Byzantine Rite Jesuits of that community had, on occasion, been following the lead of the U.S. Melkites in celebrating the Byzantine Divine Liturgy in English, in accordance with the age-old principle of the Byzantine Churches to use whatever language, vernacular or not, was deemed pastorally most suitable in the circumstances. The cardinal had written Patriarch Maximos to challenge this practice, surely not because of any special concern for the East, but, as with the issue of married clergy, from fear of “contamination.” This was before the vernacular debate at Vatican II, and if U.S. Catholics were exposed to Eastern Catholic Eucharists, especially in their own parish churches on the dies orientales or “Oriental Days” held in those years to acquaint Western Catholics with the East, they might be led to the ineluctable conclusion that vernacular liturgy was not only possible, but a good thing.
Here as elsewhere, Melkite attitudes and usage were prophetic, and the cardinal’s fears real. Maximos IV, fully conscious of being an Eastern patriarch and not some curial dependent, responded with dignity and courtesy, but with great firmness and unambiguous clarity, that the liturgical languages of the Byzantine Church were none of His Eminence’s business. It is of such stuff that leaders are made. And prophets too. For it is thus that in North America, Melkites and others, celebrated Catholic Eucharistic liturgies in English long before anyone ever heard of Vatican II.
But Maximos IV did not stand alone at Vatican II. He was the first to acknowledge the synodal, collegial nature of the Melkite enterprise, and other major Melkite council figures like Archbishops Elias Zoghby, Neophytos Edelby, Peter Medawar, and our own Archbishop Joseph Tawil, also made the trenchant and eloquent “Voice of the East” heard at Vatican II.
In this same context I must mention one of my own heroes, Archimandrite Oreste Kerame (+1983), who, though not a bishop, was a major source of Melkite thought at Vatican II. A former Jesuit, he left the order in 1941, in the name of a higher fidelity, when it was not so easy to be a member of a Latin religious order and at the same time a convinced ecumenist totally dedicated to preserving and living the traditions of the Christian East. In long conversations in French with him in his later years, I had confirmed what had always been a guiding principle of my own double vocation as an Eastern Rite member of a Latin religious order: whenever there is a conflict, real or apparent (i.e., so perceived by superiors), between the demands of my rite and those of the order, the rite, an ecclesial reality superior to the contingent customs of any religious order, congregation, or monastery, must always take precedence. Fortunately, the problem has never arisen for me in any substantive way, for times have changed since the early 1940s. The December 25, 1950, letter and decree of the Jesuit General John Baptist Janssens, Pro ramo orientali Societatis Iesu (On The Eastern Branch of the Society of Jesus), can be considered the Magna Carta of Eastern-Rite Jesuits. It legislates explicitly that they are to live their rite in its integrity, and elements of the Jesuit Institute that by nature pertain to the Latin Rite do not apply to them. Kerame, whose love for the Society of Jesus never lessened in spite of the painful choice he was forced to make, not only lived long enough to witness this greater openness in the Catholic Church. His life and thought prepared for it.
But when all is said and done, our basic point of reference will always remain the great figure of Patriarch Maximos IV and the role he played in his own and the broader Church during the twenty critical years (October 30, 1947-November 5, 1967) of his historic patriarchate. Among the dozen or so most quoted Council Fathers in the published histories of Vatican II, he gave from the start a hitherto unimaginable importance to the Eastern Catholic minority at the Council by the content and elan of his interventions. The legendary Xavier Rynne first brought him to the attention of Americans in his gripping account of Session I serialized in The New Yorker, awakening the Western mass-media to the importance of this hitherto ignored minority. Rynne described Maximos as “the colorful and outspoken Melchite patriarch, His Beatitude Maximus IV Saigh, of Antioch,” and spoke of His Beatitude’s conciliar interventions as “laying the cards squarely on the table as was his custom, and speaking in French, as was also his habit.”
At Session I of the Council, Maximos’ electrifying opening speech on October 23, 1962, set the tone for the Melkite onslaught on the one-sided, Latin vision of the Church. He refused to speak in Latin, the language of the Latin Church, but not, he insisted, of the Catholic Church nor of his. He refused to follow protocol and address “Their Eminences,” the cardinals, before “Their Beatitudes,” the Eastern patriarchs, for in his ecclesiology patriarchs, the heads of local Churches, did not take second place to cardinals, who were but second-rank dignitaries of one such communion, the Latin Church. He also urged the West to allow the vernacular in the liturgy, following the lead of the East, “where every language is, in effect, liturgical.” And he concluded, in true Eastern fashion, that the matter at any rate should be left to the local Churches to decide. All this in his first intervention at the first session! No wonder numerous Council Fathers, overcoming their initial surprise, hastened to congratulate him for his speech. And no wonder it hit the news. That was a language even journalists impervious to the torturous periods of “clericalese” could understand. Maximos spoke simply, clearly, directly—and he spoke in French.
Has the post-conciliar Melkite Church lived up to its promise at Vatican II?
Indeed, have any of us? Ideals always have a head start on reality—that is why we call them ideals, something not yet fully attained, that towards which we strive. So it is natural that certain Melkite ideas advanced at the Council remain undeveloped and unrealized in the Catholic Church: the principle that collegiality should be operative not just among bishops, but on the diocesan level, between the bishop and his presbyterate; that the laity, especially women, should be given their proper dignity and role in church life; that adequate hierarchical provision be made, as a pastoral right and not as a concession dependent on the good will of anyone, for the pastoral care of Eastern Catholics in the diaspora; that a more supple, nuanced view, like that of the Orthodox Churches, be allowed regarding the remarriage of unjustly abandoned spouses; that the problem of the date of Easter be resolved in ecumenical agreement with other Churches; that the Roman Curia assume its proper place within a healthy ecclesiology, no longer operating as a substitute for the apostolic college of bishops, or pretending to possess and exercise incommunicable powers which belong by divine right to the supreme pontiff alone, and cannot be delegated to or arrogated by anyone else.
As for the Melkite Church itself, there can be no denying that Melkites, like many others, are often better at giving speeches and making proposals than at observing them. Even before the Council, Melkite rhetoric and Melkite reality have often been miles apart.
So much work remains to be done. May this welcome translation of an historic book be a stimulus to getting on with it.
Robert F. Taft, S.J.
Pontifical Oriental Institute
Rome
1992
Notes
Cited in “Vatican II: 25 ans apres,” Le Lien 55.1-2 (janvier-avril 1990) 37.
Further documentation in N. Edelby, “The Byzantine Liturgy in the Vernacular,” in Maximus IV Sayegh (ed.), The Eastern Churches and Catholic Unity (New York: Herder & Herder 1963) 195-218.
X. Rynne, Letters from Vatican City (London: Faber & Faber 1963) 26, 85.
Ibid., 102-5.
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THE MELKITES AND VATICAN I
Patriarch Gregory II Youssef,
my source
also known as Gregory II Hanna Youssef-Sayour (October 17, 1823 – July 13, 1897), was Patriarch of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church from 1864 to 1897. Gregory expanded and modernized the church and its institutions[1] and participated in the First Vatican Council, where he championed the rights of the Eastern Catholic Churches.
Gregory is remembered as a particularly dynamic patriarch of the Melkite Church. He is recognized as one of the forerunners of interconfessional dialogue and as an advocate for preserving the traditions and autonomy of the Melkites.
In 1847, Pope Pius IX (1846–1878), reinstituted the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem in the person of the young, 34 year old, zealous Giuseppe Valerga (1813–1872), whom the indigenous hierarchs nicknamed "The Butcher" because of his fierce opposition to the Eastern Orthodox churches of the Holy Land. When he arrived in Jerusalem in 1847, there were 4,200 Latin Catholics and when he died in 1872, the number had doubled.
Under pressure from the Roman curia to adopt Latin Church practices, Patriarch Clement Bahouth introduced the Gregorian calendar used by the Latin and Maronite Churches in 1857; that act caused serious problems within the Melkite church, resulting in a short-lived schism.[16] Conflicts in the Melkite church escalated to the point where Clement abdicated his position as patriarch.
Clement's successor, Patriarch Gregory II Youssef (1864–1897) worked to restore peace within the community, successfully healing the lingering schism. He also focused on improving church institutions. During his reign Gregory founded both the Patriarchal College in Beirut in 1865 and the Patriarchal College in Damascus in 1875 and re-opened the Melkite seminary of Ain Traz in 1866. He also promoted the establishment of Saint Ann's Seminary, Jerusalem, in 1882 by the White Fathers for the training of the Melkite clergy.
Following the Hatt-ı Hümayun of 1856, decreed by Sultan Abdülmecid I, the situation of Christians in the Near East improved. This allowed Gregory to successfully encourage greater participation by the Melkite laity in both church administration as well as public affairs.
Gregory also took an interest in ministering to the growing number of Melkites who had emigrated to the Americas. In 1889 he dispatched Father Ibrahim Beshawate of the Basilian Salvatorian Order in Saida, Lebanon to New York in order to minister to the growing Syrian community there. According to historian Philip Hitte, Beshawate was the first permanent priest in the United States from the Near East from among the Melkite, Maronite, and Antiochian Orthodox Churches.
Gregory was also a prominent proponent of Eastern ecclesiology at the First Vatican Council. In the two discourses he gave at the Council on May 19 and June 14, 1870 he insisted on the importance of conforming to the decisions of the Council of Florence, of not creating innovations such as papal infallibility, but accepting what had been decided by common agreement between the Greeks and the Latins at the Council of Florence, especially with regard to the issue of papal primacy. He was keenly aware of the disastrous impact that the dogmatic definition of papal infallibility would have on relations with the Eastern Orthodox Church and emerged as a prominent opponent of the dogma at the Council.
He also defended the rights and privileges of the patriarchs according to the canons promulgated by earlier ecumenical councils. Speaking at the Council on May 19, 1870, Patriarch Gregory asserted:
After the First Vatican Council concluded an emissary of the Roman Curia was dispatched to secure the signatures of the patriarch and the Melkite delegation. Patriarch Gregory and the Melkite bishops subscribed to it, but with the qualifying clause of the used at the Council of Florence attached: "except the rights and privileges of Eastern patriarchs.".
He earned the enmity of Pius IX for this; during his next visit to the pontiff Gregory was cast to the floor at Pius' feet by the papal guard while the pope placed his foot on the patriarch's head. Despite this, Patriarch Gregory and the Melkite Catholic Church remained committed to their union with the Church of Rome.
Relationships with the Vatican improved following the death of Pius IX and the subsequent election of Leo XIII as pontiff. Leo's encyclical Orientalium Dignitas addressed some of the Eastern Catholic Churches' concerns on latinization and the centralizing tendencies of Rome. Leo also confirmed that the limitations placed on the Armenian Catholic patriarch by Pius IX's 1867 letter Reversurus would not apply to the Melkite Church; further, Leo formally recognized an expansion of Patriarch Gregory's jurisdiction to include all Melkites throughout the Ottoman Empire.
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Background
From a Melkite Greek Catholic press release (September 1996):
"The holy Synod of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church met in Rabweh, Lebanon, July 22-27, 1996 and, after studying the question of unity within the Patriarchate of Antioch, declared that communicatio in sacris = worship in common is possible today and that the ways and means of its application would be left to the joint decisions of the two Antiochian Church Synods - Melkite Greek Catholic and Greek Orthodox. The Synod of thirty-four bishops and four general superiors under the presidency of Patriarch Maximos V (Hakim) deliberated extensively on the topic of church unity particularly within the Antiochian Patriarchate which has been divided since 1724, and issued a document titled, Reunification of the Antiochian Patriarchate. This document is part of the official minutes of the Synod and was made public on August 15, 1996 in the Middle East....
"The Melkite Synod sees that the church of the first millennium could be the model for unity today. The Synod strongly affirms its full communion with the Apostolic See of Rome and that this communion would not be ruptured. The Fathers offered their thanks to the International Theological Commission as well as the Joint Synodal Commissions recently reestablished by Patriarch Maximos V and Orthodox Patriarch Ignatius IV."
Key to this initiative was the profession of faith made by the Melkite Greek Catholic Archbishop Elias Zogby:
"They offer special thanks to Archbishop Elias Zoghby whose 1995 Profession of Faith was the major force for reopening dialogue with the Orthodox brothers. Zoghby, the former archbishop of Baalbek and a long-time leader among the Melkite bishops, offered this brief statement in 1995 and it was subscribed to by 24 of the 26 bishops present at the 1995 Holy Synod:
1. I believe everything which Eastern Orthodoxy teaches.
2. I am in communion with the Bishop of Rome as the first among the bishops, according to the limits recognized by the Holy Fathers of the East during the first millennium, before the separation."
In October, 1996 the Holy Synod of the Antiochian Orthodox Patriarchate issued a statement which included these concerns on the Melkite proposal:
"In this regard, our Church questions the unity of faith which the Melkite Catholics think has become possible. Our Church believes that the discussion of this unity with Rome is still in its primitive stage. The first step toward unity on the doctrinal level, is not to consider as ecumenical, the Western local councils which the Church of Rome, convened, separately, including the First Vatican Council.
"And second the Melkite Catholics should not be obligated to accept such councils. Regarding inter-communion now, our Synod believes that inter-communion cannot be separated from the unity of faith. Moreover, inter-communion is the last step in the quest for unity and not the first."
In a letter to the Antiochian Archdiocese of North America, Metropolitan Philip also said:
"Please be advised that, while we pray for unity among all Christians, we cannot and will not enter into communion with non-Orthodox until we first achieve the unity of faith. As long as this unity of faith is not realized, there cannot be intercommunion. We ask you to adhere to the instructions which you receive from our office and hierarchs."
Next is the text of the letter with Rome's commentary on the Melkite Initiative. It has been translated from the French by Ken Guindon. It was reviewed by His Grace Bishop Nicholas Samra (who made a few corrections) and permission was given to publish this in English:
Congregation for the Eastern Churches
Prot. No. 251/75
June 11, 1997
His Beatitude
Maximos V HAKIM
Greek-Melkite Catholic Patriarch of Antioch and of all the East,
of Alexandria and of Jerusalem.
Your Beatitude,
The news of the project for "rapprochement" between the Greek-Melkite Catholic Patriarchate and the Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch has given rise to various echoes and comments in the public opinion.
The Congregation for Doctrine of the Faith, the Congregation for the Eastern Churches, and the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity have made an effort to study and closely examine the areas which fall within their competence in this domain; and the heads of these Dicasteries have been charged by the Holy Father to express some considerations to Your Beatitude.
The Holy See is greatly interested in and encourages initiatives which favor the road to a complete reconciliation of the Christian Churches. She appreciates the motivation behind the efforts undertaken for several decades by the Greek-Melkite Catholic Patriarchate, which is trying to hasten the coming of this full communion so greatly desired. The Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches recognizes the duty for every Christian (Can. 902), which becomes for the Eastern Catholic Churches a special duty (munus) (Can. 903), whose exercise will be governed "through special norms of particular law while the Roman Apostolic Church functions as the moderator for the universal church" (Can. 904).
This is all the more true for two communities which see themselves as being closely united because of the ties of common origin and common ecclesiastical tradition, as well as by a long experience of common initiatives which no doubt place them into a privileged situation of proximity.
The Church's desire is to find adequate ways and means to progress further along the road of brotherly understanding and, to encourage new structures which further such progress towards full communion.
Pursuing such goals, Your Patriarchate is motivated by a sensibility and a knowledge of the situation and an experience which are peculiarly its own. The Holy See desires to contribute to this process by expressing some considerations which she believes will eventually help the future progress of this initiative.
The Dicasteries involved appreciate very much that common pastoral initiatives are undertaken by Catholics and Orthodox, according to the instructions found in the Directory for the application of the principles and norms for Ecumenism, especially in the areas of Christian formation, of education, a common effort in charity, and for the sharing of prayer when this is possible.
As to experiences of a theological nature, it is necessary to labor patiently and prudently, without precipitation, in order to help both parties to travel along the same road.
The first level in this sharing concerns the language and the categories employed in the dialogue: one must be very careful that the use of the same word or the same concept is not used to express different points of view and interpretations of a historical and doctrinal nature, nor lends itself to some kind of oversimplification.
A second level of involvement necessitates that the sharing of the content of the dialogue not be limited only to the two direct participants: the Patriarchates of the Catholic Greek-Melkites and the Orthodox of Antioch, but that it involve the Confessions with whom the two Patriarchates are in full communion: the Catholic communion for the former and the Orthodox for the latter. Even the Orthodox ecclesiastical authorities of the Patriarchate of Antioch have brought forth a similar preoccupation. This global implication also will permit averting the risk that some initiatives, meant to promote the full communion at the local level, might give rise to a lack of understanding or suspicions beyond the generosity of the intentions.
Now we consider the elements contained in the profession of faith of his Excellency Kyr Elias Zoghby, Greek-Melkite Catholic Archbishop emeritus of Baalbek, signed in February 1995, and to which numerous hierarchs of the Greek-Melkite Catholic Synod have adhered.
It is clear that this Patriarchate is an integral part of the Christian East whose patrimony it shares. As to the Greek-Melkite Catholics declaring their complete adhesion to the teaching of Eastern Orthodoxy, it is necessary to take into account the fact that the Orthodox Churches today are not in full communion with the Church of Rome, and that this adhesion is therefore not possible as long as there is not a full correspondence in the profession and exercise of the faith by the two parties. Besides, a correct formulation of the faith necessitates a reference not only to a particular Church, but to the whole Church of Christ, which knows no frontiers, neither in space nor in time.
On the question of communion with the Bishops of Rome, we know that the doctrine concerning the primacy of the Roman Pontiff has experienced a development over time within the framework of the explanation of the Church's faith, and it has to be retained in its entirety, which means from its origins to our day. One only has to think about what the first Vatican Council affirmed and what Vatican Council II declared, particularly in the Dogmatic Constitution Lumen Gentium Num. 22 and 23, and in the Decree on ecumenism Unitatis Redintegratio Number 2.
As to the modalities for exercising the Petrine ministry in our time, a question which is distinct from the doctrinal aspect, it is true that the Holy Father has recently desired to remind us how "we may seek--together, of course--the forms in which this ministry may accomplish a service of love recognized by all concerned" (Ut unum sint, 95); however, if it is legitimate to also deal with this on a local level, it is also a duty to do this always in harmony with a vision of the universal Church. Touching this matter, it is appropriate to be reminded that in any case, "The Catholic Church, both in her praxis and in her solemn documents, holds that the communion of the particular Churches with the Church of Rome, and of their Bishops with the Bishop of Rome, is--in God's plan--an essential requisite of full and visible communion" (Ut unum sint, 97).
As to the various aspects of communicatio in sacris, it is necessary to maintain a constant dialogue in order to understand the meaning of the current regulation in force, in the light of underlying theological presuppositions; premature, unilateral initiatives are to be avoided, where the eventual results may not have been sufficiently considered, they could produce serious consequences for other Eastern Catholics, especially for those living in the same region.
In summary, the fraternal dialogue undertaken by the Greek-Melkite Catholic Partriarchate will be better able to serve the ecumenical dialogue to the degree that it strives to involve the entire Catholic Church to which it belongs in the maturing of new sensitivities. There is good reason to believe that the Orthodox in general so share the same worry, due also to the obligations of communion within their own body.
The Dicasteries involved are ready to collaborate in order to further the exchange of verifications and echoes; they express their satisfaction for these meetings which have been held on this subject with the representatives of the Greek-Melkite Catholic Church, and they hope and wish that these meetings continue and intensify in the future.
Not doubting at all that Your Beatitude would want to share these ideas, we beg you to accept the expression of our fraternal and cordial greetings.
Joseph Card. Ratzinger, Achille Card. Silvestrini, Edward Card. Cassidy
For more information about this topic please contact the Melkite Church in America
Copyright © 1998 http://www.byzcath.org - Last modified 1/18/98 16:30
FINALLY, THIS IS A COMMENTARY ON THE VATICAN I DOGMATIC DECREES BY A MELKITE CATHOLIC THAT IS SO GOOD, THE BEST I HAVE SEEN, SOMETHING I COULD NEVER EQUAL:
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Under pressure from the Roman curia to adopt Latin Church practices, Patriarch Clement Bahouth introduced the Gregorian calendar used by the Latin and Maronite Churches in 1857; that act caused serious problems within the Melkite church, resulting in a short-lived schism.[16] Conflicts in the Melkite church escalated to the point where Clement abdicated his position as patriarch.
Clement's successor, Patriarch Gregory II Youssef (1864–1897) worked to restore peace within the community, successfully healing the lingering schism. He also focused on improving church institutions. During his reign Gregory founded both the Patriarchal College in Beirut in 1865 and the Patriarchal College in Damascus in 1875 and re-opened the Melkite seminary of Ain Traz in 1866. He also promoted the establishment of Saint Ann's Seminary, Jerusalem, in 1882 by the White Fathers for the training of the Melkite clergy.
Following the Hatt-ı Hümayun of 1856, decreed by Sultan Abdülmecid I, the situation of Christians in the Near East improved. This allowed Gregory to successfully encourage greater participation by the Melkite laity in both church administration as well as public affairs.
Gregory also took an interest in ministering to the growing number of Melkites who had emigrated to the Americas. In 1889 he dispatched Father Ibrahim Beshawate of the Basilian Salvatorian Order in Saida, Lebanon to New York in order to minister to the growing Syrian community there. According to historian Philip Hitte, Beshawate was the first permanent priest in the United States from the Near East from among the Melkite, Maronite, and Antiochian Orthodox Churches.
Gregory was also a prominent proponent of Eastern ecclesiology at the First Vatican Council. In the two discourses he gave at the Council on May 19 and June 14, 1870 he insisted on the importance of conforming to the decisions of the Council of Florence, of not creating innovations such as papal infallibility, but accepting what had been decided by common agreement between the Greeks and the Latins at the Council of Florence, especially with regard to the issue of papal primacy. He was keenly aware of the disastrous impact that the dogmatic definition of papal infallibility would have on relations with the Eastern Orthodox Church and emerged as a prominent opponent of the dogma at the Council.
He also defended the rights and privileges of the patriarchs according to the canons promulgated by earlier ecumenical councils. Speaking at the Council on May 19, 1870, Patriarch Gregory asserted:
The Eastern Church attributes to the pope the most complete and highest power, however in a manner where the fullness and primacy are in harmony with the rights of the patriarchal sees. This is why, in virtue of and ancient right founded on customs, the Roman Pontiffs did not, except in very significant cases, exercise over these sees the ordinary an immediate jurisdiction that we are asked now to define without any exception. This definition would completely destroy the constitution of the entire Greek church. That is why my conscience as a pastor refuses to accept this constitution.Patriarch Gregory refused to sign the Council's dogmatic declaration on papal infallibility. He and the seven other Melkite bishops present voted non placet at the general congregation and left Rome prior to the adoption of the dogmatic constitution Pastor Aeternus on papal infallibility.[23] Other members of the anti-infallibilist minority, both from the Latin church and from other Eastern Catholic churches, also left the city.
After the First Vatican Council concluded an emissary of the Roman Curia was dispatched to secure the signatures of the patriarch and the Melkite delegation. Patriarch Gregory and the Melkite bishops subscribed to it, but with the qualifying clause of the used at the Council of Florence attached: "except the rights and privileges of Eastern patriarchs.".
He earned the enmity of Pius IX for this; during his next visit to the pontiff Gregory was cast to the floor at Pius' feet by the papal guard while the pope placed his foot on the patriarch's head. Despite this, Patriarch Gregory and the Melkite Catholic Church remained committed to their union with the Church of Rome.
Relationships with the Vatican improved following the death of Pius IX and the subsequent election of Leo XIII as pontiff. Leo's encyclical Orientalium Dignitas addressed some of the Eastern Catholic Churches' concerns on latinization and the centralizing tendencies of Rome. Leo also confirmed that the limitations placed on the Armenian Catholic patriarch by Pius IX's 1867 letter Reversurus would not apply to the Melkite Church; further, Leo formally recognized an expansion of Patriarch Gregory's jurisdiction to include all Melkites throughout the Ottoman Empire.
Patriarch Gregorios III
The Melkite Church owes its character to its triple loyalty to:
- first Seven Ecumenical Councils
- the Byzantine traditions
- communion with Rome
THE MELKITE INITIATIVE WITH THE ANTIOCHIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH
my source: ByzCath.orgBackground
From a Melkite Greek Catholic press release (September 1996):
"The holy Synod of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church met in Rabweh, Lebanon, July 22-27, 1996 and, after studying the question of unity within the Patriarchate of Antioch, declared that communicatio in sacris = worship in common is possible today and that the ways and means of its application would be left to the joint decisions of the two Antiochian Church Synods - Melkite Greek Catholic and Greek Orthodox. The Synod of thirty-four bishops and four general superiors under the presidency of Patriarch Maximos V (Hakim) deliberated extensively on the topic of church unity particularly within the Antiochian Patriarchate which has been divided since 1724, and issued a document titled, Reunification of the Antiochian Patriarchate. This document is part of the official minutes of the Synod and was made public on August 15, 1996 in the Middle East....
"The Melkite Synod sees that the church of the first millennium could be the model for unity today. The Synod strongly affirms its full communion with the Apostolic See of Rome and that this communion would not be ruptured. The Fathers offered their thanks to the International Theological Commission as well as the Joint Synodal Commissions recently reestablished by Patriarch Maximos V and Orthodox Patriarch Ignatius IV."
Key to this initiative was the profession of faith made by the Melkite Greek Catholic Archbishop Elias Zogby:
"They offer special thanks to Archbishop Elias Zoghby whose 1995 Profession of Faith was the major force for reopening dialogue with the Orthodox brothers. Zoghby, the former archbishop of Baalbek and a long-time leader among the Melkite bishops, offered this brief statement in 1995 and it was subscribed to by 24 of the 26 bishops present at the 1995 Holy Synod:
1. I believe everything which Eastern Orthodoxy teaches.
2. I am in communion with the Bishop of Rome as the first among the bishops, according to the limits recognized by the Holy Fathers of the East during the first millennium, before the separation."
In October, 1996 the Holy Synod of the Antiochian Orthodox Patriarchate issued a statement which included these concerns on the Melkite proposal:
"In this regard, our Church questions the unity of faith which the Melkite Catholics think has become possible. Our Church believes that the discussion of this unity with Rome is still in its primitive stage. The first step toward unity on the doctrinal level, is not to consider as ecumenical, the Western local councils which the Church of Rome, convened, separately, including the First Vatican Council.
"And second the Melkite Catholics should not be obligated to accept such councils. Regarding inter-communion now, our Synod believes that inter-communion cannot be separated from the unity of faith. Moreover, inter-communion is the last step in the quest for unity and not the first."
In a letter to the Antiochian Archdiocese of North America, Metropolitan Philip also said:
"Please be advised that, while we pray for unity among all Christians, we cannot and will not enter into communion with non-Orthodox until we first achieve the unity of faith. As long as this unity of faith is not realized, there cannot be intercommunion. We ask you to adhere to the instructions which you receive from our office and hierarchs."
Next is the text of the letter with Rome's commentary on the Melkite Initiative. It has been translated from the French by Ken Guindon. It was reviewed by His Grace Bishop Nicholas Samra (who made a few corrections) and permission was given to publish this in English:
Congregation for the Eastern Churches
Prot. No. 251/75
June 11, 1997
His Beatitude
Maximos V HAKIM
Greek-Melkite Catholic Patriarch of Antioch and of all the East,
of Alexandria and of Jerusalem.
Your Beatitude,
The news of the project for "rapprochement" between the Greek-Melkite Catholic Patriarchate and the Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch has given rise to various echoes and comments in the public opinion.
The Congregation for Doctrine of the Faith, the Congregation for the Eastern Churches, and the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity have made an effort to study and closely examine the areas which fall within their competence in this domain; and the heads of these Dicasteries have been charged by the Holy Father to express some considerations to Your Beatitude.
The Holy See is greatly interested in and encourages initiatives which favor the road to a complete reconciliation of the Christian Churches. She appreciates the motivation behind the efforts undertaken for several decades by the Greek-Melkite Catholic Patriarchate, which is trying to hasten the coming of this full communion so greatly desired. The Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches recognizes the duty for every Christian (Can. 902), which becomes for the Eastern Catholic Churches a special duty (munus) (Can. 903), whose exercise will be governed "through special norms of particular law while the Roman Apostolic Church functions as the moderator for the universal church" (Can. 904).
This is all the more true for two communities which see themselves as being closely united because of the ties of common origin and common ecclesiastical tradition, as well as by a long experience of common initiatives which no doubt place them into a privileged situation of proximity.
The Church's desire is to find adequate ways and means to progress further along the road of brotherly understanding and, to encourage new structures which further such progress towards full communion.
Pursuing such goals, Your Patriarchate is motivated by a sensibility and a knowledge of the situation and an experience which are peculiarly its own. The Holy See desires to contribute to this process by expressing some considerations which she believes will eventually help the future progress of this initiative.
The Dicasteries involved appreciate very much that common pastoral initiatives are undertaken by Catholics and Orthodox, according to the instructions found in the Directory for the application of the principles and norms for Ecumenism, especially in the areas of Christian formation, of education, a common effort in charity, and for the sharing of prayer when this is possible.
As to experiences of a theological nature, it is necessary to labor patiently and prudently, without precipitation, in order to help both parties to travel along the same road.
The first level in this sharing concerns the language and the categories employed in the dialogue: one must be very careful that the use of the same word or the same concept is not used to express different points of view and interpretations of a historical and doctrinal nature, nor lends itself to some kind of oversimplification.
A second level of involvement necessitates that the sharing of the content of the dialogue not be limited only to the two direct participants: the Patriarchates of the Catholic Greek-Melkites and the Orthodox of Antioch, but that it involve the Confessions with whom the two Patriarchates are in full communion: the Catholic communion for the former and the Orthodox for the latter. Even the Orthodox ecclesiastical authorities of the Patriarchate of Antioch have brought forth a similar preoccupation. This global implication also will permit averting the risk that some initiatives, meant to promote the full communion at the local level, might give rise to a lack of understanding or suspicions beyond the generosity of the intentions.
Now we consider the elements contained in the profession of faith of his Excellency Kyr Elias Zoghby, Greek-Melkite Catholic Archbishop emeritus of Baalbek, signed in February 1995, and to which numerous hierarchs of the Greek-Melkite Catholic Synod have adhered.
It is clear that this Patriarchate is an integral part of the Christian East whose patrimony it shares. As to the Greek-Melkite Catholics declaring their complete adhesion to the teaching of Eastern Orthodoxy, it is necessary to take into account the fact that the Orthodox Churches today are not in full communion with the Church of Rome, and that this adhesion is therefore not possible as long as there is not a full correspondence in the profession and exercise of the faith by the two parties. Besides, a correct formulation of the faith necessitates a reference not only to a particular Church, but to the whole Church of Christ, which knows no frontiers, neither in space nor in time.
On the question of communion with the Bishops of Rome, we know that the doctrine concerning the primacy of the Roman Pontiff has experienced a development over time within the framework of the explanation of the Church's faith, and it has to be retained in its entirety, which means from its origins to our day. One only has to think about what the first Vatican Council affirmed and what Vatican Council II declared, particularly in the Dogmatic Constitution Lumen Gentium Num. 22 and 23, and in the Decree on ecumenism Unitatis Redintegratio Number 2.
As to the modalities for exercising the Petrine ministry in our time, a question which is distinct from the doctrinal aspect, it is true that the Holy Father has recently desired to remind us how "we may seek--together, of course--the forms in which this ministry may accomplish a service of love recognized by all concerned" (Ut unum sint, 95); however, if it is legitimate to also deal with this on a local level, it is also a duty to do this always in harmony with a vision of the universal Church. Touching this matter, it is appropriate to be reminded that in any case, "The Catholic Church, both in her praxis and in her solemn documents, holds that the communion of the particular Churches with the Church of Rome, and of their Bishops with the Bishop of Rome, is--in God's plan--an essential requisite of full and visible communion" (Ut unum sint, 97).
As to the various aspects of communicatio in sacris, it is necessary to maintain a constant dialogue in order to understand the meaning of the current regulation in force, in the light of underlying theological presuppositions; premature, unilateral initiatives are to be avoided, where the eventual results may not have been sufficiently considered, they could produce serious consequences for other Eastern Catholics, especially for those living in the same region.
In summary, the fraternal dialogue undertaken by the Greek-Melkite Catholic Partriarchate will be better able to serve the ecumenical dialogue to the degree that it strives to involve the entire Catholic Church to which it belongs in the maturing of new sensitivities. There is good reason to believe that the Orthodox in general so share the same worry, due also to the obligations of communion within their own body.
The Dicasteries involved are ready to collaborate in order to further the exchange of verifications and echoes; they express their satisfaction for these meetings which have been held on this subject with the representatives of the Greek-Melkite Catholic Church, and they hope and wish that these meetings continue and intensify in the future.
Not doubting at all that Your Beatitude would want to share these ideas, we beg you to accept the expression of our fraternal and cordial greetings.
Joseph Card. Ratzinger, Achille Card. Silvestrini, Edward Card. Cassidy
For more information about this topic please contact the Melkite Church in America
Copyright © 1998 http://www.byzcath.org - Last modified 1/18/98 16:30
FINALLY, THIS IS A COMMENTARY ON THE VATICAN I DOGMATIC DECREES BY A MELKITE CATHOLIC THAT IS SO GOOD, THE BEST I HAVE SEEN, SOMETHING I COULD NEVER EQUAL:
Full regard for the Official Relatio as well as a contextual reading of the Vatican 1 Decrees demonstrates that, contrary to the Absolutist Petrine excesses:1) "Papal infallibility" cannot be separated from the infallibility of the Church, but is actually merely a unique exercise of the infallibility of the Church itself (explicitly stated in the definition itself).2) "Papal infallibility" cannot be exercised at merely the Pope's discretion, but always in response to the needs of the Church through the solicitude of the bishops of the Church (explicitly stated in the historic Proem).3) "Papal infallibility" does not permit the Pope to proclaim new doctrine (explicitly stated in the historic Proem).4) The Rule of Faith which is Apostolic Canon 34 applies even to the definitions of the Pope ex cathedra (explicitly stated in the Official Relatio).5) Papal primacy does not impede the authority of the local bishop (explicitly stated in the Decree itself).6) The Pope is not above an Ecumenical Council (affirmed by the Official Relatio).
We have explained the strong Orthodox influence in Vatican II and the way such words like "theosis" and "synergy" have become commonplace, and how "eucharistic ecclesiology" has become the main paradigm in our understanding of the Church, by speaking of the great influence that the group of French "ressourcement" theologians had on the Council, especially as Wojtylla and Ratzinger joined them and became their chief interpreters after the Council. They had practised their theology in contact with the Orthodox theologians who had gone to Paris as refugees from the Russian Revolution. Although I frequently heard of Patriarch Maximos IV during the Council and knew that he was one of the great figures of the Council, I did not know the extent of his influence and of that of his fellow Melkite bishops until I read Fr Robert Taft's Introduction above.
I believe that it demonstrates how much Pope Francis is in continuation with Vatican II and with his predecessors when he looks to the Orthodox tradition to help us with the pastoral care of the divorced, and he believes that the Orthodox doctrine of "sobornost" has so much to teach us about authority as it is exercised at a local, regional and world-wide level. He is merely "breathing with both lungs", as Pope John Paul II put it. We can also learn how problems that were suppressed by the misuse of Pope Pius IX's authority haven't gone away because they are dimensions of Tradition of which the pope is the servant and not the master, as Pope Benedict has taught us in relation to liturgy.
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BREAKING NEWS: PAN-ORTHODOX SYNOD, 2016 plus METROPOLITAN HILARION ALFEYEV: WILL THE ECUMENICAL CHURCH SINK? plus MY COMMENTARY
Orthodox Churches Will Hold First Ecumenical Council In 1,200 Years In Istanbul
ISTANBUL, March 9 (Reuters) - Patriarchs of the world's 250 million Orthodox Christians ended a rare summit in Istanbul on Sunday calling for a peaceful end to the crisis in Ukraine and denouncing violence driving Christians out of the Middle East.
Twelve heads of autonomous Orthodox churches, the second-largest family of Christian churches, also agreed to hold a summit of bishops, or ecumenical council, in 2016, which will be the first in over 1,200 years.
The Istanbul talks were called to decide on the council, which the Orthodox have been preparing on and off since the 1960s, but the Ukraine crisis overshadowed their talks at the office of spiritual leader Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew.
As the prelates left a special service at Saint George's Cathedral, a woman in the crowd called out in Russian "Pray for Ukraine!" Two archbishops responded: "You pray, too!"
In their communique, the patriarchs called for "peaceful negotiations and prayerful reconciliation in the ongoing crisis in Ukraine" and denounced what they said were "threats of violent occupation of sacred monasteries and churches" there.
The Russian Orthodox Church, with 165 million members by far the largest in the Orthodox family, last month issued a statement along with Moscow's Foreign Ministry about what they said were attacks on revered historic monasteries in Kiev and Pochayiv in western Ukraine.
Russia has used the alleged threat to Russian-speakers in Ukraine, including the faithful of the Moscow-backed church there, to argue it has the right to intervene to protect them.
Closely aligned with President Vladimir Putin on Ukraine policy, the Russian church has a partner Ukrainian Orthodox Church mostly in the Russian-speaking east of the country that is loyal to the Moscow patriarchate.
There are two rival Orthodox churches mostly in western Ukraine, both meant to be Ukrainian national churches. Neither is part of the global Orthodox communion and the patriarchs' communique expressed the hope they would one day join it.
MIDDLE EAST CHRISTIANS
On the Middle East, the patriarchs denounced "the lack of peace and stability, which is prompting Christians to abandon the land where our Lord Jesus Christ was born."
They demanded the release of two prominent Syrian Orthodox archbishops kidnapped near Aleppo in April 2013.
Unrest in the Middle East over the past decade has killed or driven out large numbers of Christians, many of them Orthodox. Christians make up about 5 percent of the region's population.
Metropolitan Hilarion, head of the Russian church's foreign relations, said before the meeting that "extremist forces (are) attacking Christians, exterminating them, kidnapping priests, bishops and nuns, destroying Christian churches and doing everything to make those who believe in Christ to leave the Middle East."
One of the main questions facing the 2016 council will be how to balance relations among the Orthodox now that the Russian church, after seven decades of subjugation under communism, has reemerged as an influential voice in world Christianity.
Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, who will meet Roman Catholicism's Pope Francis in Jerusalem in May, is the senior-most Orthodox leader, but his Istanbul-based church is tiny, with none of the resources the large Russian church enjoys.
Despite the prestige of his post, he has no authority over other churches, unlike the power the pope has in Catholicism, the world's largest church with 1.2 billion members.
The communique stressed that all decisions at the council would be taken by consensus, a position the Russians strongly defended in preparations for the meeting.
The 2016 council will be held in Hagia Irene, a Byzantine church building in the outer courtyard of the Ottoman sultans' Topkapi Palace. Now a museum, it has not been used as a church since the Muslim conquest of Constantinople in 1453.
Orthodox Christianity links 14 independent churches, based in Eastern Europe, Russia and the Middle East. The Damascus-based church of Antioch and the Czech and Slovak church did not attend the meeting because of disputes with other churches. (Tom Heneghan reported from Paris; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)
This interview took place at least eight years ago; but I don't think Metropolitan Hilarion's position has changed since then. Just to continue the dialogue, I shall write a personal comment afterwards.- Fr David
Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev: Will the Ecumenical Ship Sink?
Q: Doesn’t membership in the World Council of Churches (WCC) obligate acceptance of its fundamental principles which contradict Orthodox ecclesiology?
Membership in the WCC does not require from any Church the recognition of all the other member churches of the WCC as churches in the literal sense of the word. This is stated in the foundational documents of the Council. If we call one Protestant community or another a “church,” which in our point of view has lost all the main traits of church-ness, then it is only because this community calls itself a church. Among the members of the WCC there are more than a few such groups, which in our view long ago lost the fundamental properties of church-ness or which never possessed them in the first place. We are speaking here of such properties as apostolic succession of the hierarchy, the mysteries, faith in the reality of the Eucharist, etc.
At the same time, the WCC is not simply a council of some charitable agencies or organizations with some church ties. This is a council of Christian communities which consider themselves churches and respect each other’s ecclesiological self-recognition. The respect Protestants hold for Orthodox ecclesiological principles is expressed in particular by the fact that the WCC does not accept church groups which, from the point of view of Orthodox, are schismatic (for example, the “Kiev Patriarchate”). The Orthodox Churches form a unified, almost autonomous group within the WCC, for whom 25% of the places in any leading organ of the Council are reserved. These 25% form a sort of “Orthodox lobby” which counteracts the non-orthodox majority. Included in the group of Orthodox member Churches in the WCC are the pre-Chalcedonian churches, which, though they are not in Eucharistic unity with the Eastern Orthodox Churches, share their theological, ecclesiological and moral positions.
Also, there are certain theological criteria in the WCC which are required for acceptance as Council member. A church group seeking membership in the WCC must confess faith in the Triune God-the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, confess Christ as God and Saviour, share the theological tenets of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. Organizations that do not meet these criteria cannot become members of the WCC. Despite all the differing positions, viewpoints, ecclesiological tenets, moral principles between Orthodox and Protestants, faith in the Holy Trinity and Jesus Christ as God and Saviour remain as the platform which unites the member churches of the WCC.
Q: What is the attitude of the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate to the “branch theory?”
The attitude of the Russian Orthodox Church towards the “branch theory” is defined in no uncertain terms in the same document “Basic Principles of Towards the Non-Orthodox,” as follows: “The Orthodox Church cannot accept the thesis that despite historical divisions, the essential, profound unity of Christians allegedly remained inviolate and that the Church must be perceived as coinciding with the entire “Christian world,” that Christian unity exists above denominational barriers and that the fragmentation of the churches is simply a result of the imperfect level of human relations. This concept states that the Church remains one, but that this unity is insufficiently apparent externally. In this model of unity, the task of Christians is not seen as re-establishing lost unity, but expressing unity which exists and cannot be taken away. This model repeats the teaching borne of the Reformation of the “unseen church.” Just as unacceptable is the concept, connected with the above idea, of the so-called “branch theory,” which supports the normalcy and even providential nature of the existence of Christianity as separate “branches.” It would be difficult add to this definition.
Q: Why has the General Assembly in Porto Alegre gone practically unnoticed by Orthodox society?
I wouldn’t say that it went unnoticed. Some Orthodox and church- focused media outlets commented. One internet site posted a photo- gallery entitled “Hot sun, warm sea, the embrace of ecumenical friends.” There was no warm sea at Porto Alegre, of course: the city is two hundred kilometres from the sea. But the sun was indeed hot. There were long hours of meetings over the course of ten days, and tense discussions, and the exhausting flights of the delegates from Europe and Latin America and back. If anyone thinks that this is all entertainment and leisure, he is deeply mistaken. This is work – difficult work, draining and thankless. It is thankless because within the “ecumenical concordance” you are considered either a retrograde or a conservative, and they quarrel with you and criticize you, while “at home,” you are accused of betraying Orthodoxy for the mere fact of participating in such an event.
The photo-gallery on that site was aimed at demonstrating a deliberately anti-Orthodox and frivolous spirit of the event. For instance, the camera photographed a normal discussion: people sitting on a chair and talking. The caption, however, reads: “Orthodox delegates during an ecumenical prayer.” Or a photograph depicting Brazilian dancing (during breaks in the meetings, in fact, local dance groups did perform). The caption reads: “Fire worship becomes a mandatory rite of ecumenism.”
It goes without saying that when the Russian Orthodox Church’s participation in inter-Christian dialogue is portrayed by the press in this manner, there is a concrete aim in mind: to spur mistrust for the hierarchy, to coax schismatic feelings. Such propaganda, as a rule, comes from the various schismatic structures: for example, the Old Calendar Greeks, or the “alternative Orthodox structures” at home. In the past, such propaganda caused no small trouble in the relationship between the Moscow Patriarchate and the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, and I am truly happy that at the present time we have the opportunity to discuss this problem face to face, in open and good-willed dialogue.
Q: Why does the ROC/MP continue to participate in the WCC?
The Moscow Patriarchate continues to participate in the WCC for a whole series of reasons. Some of them I mentioned in my previous explanation. In deciding the question of whether to remain in the WCC or withdraw, the Moscow Patriarchate is guided by the following tenets of the “Basic Principles of the Attitude Towards the Non-Orthodox,” namely: “In the matter of membership in various Christian organizations, the following criteria are to be met: the Russian Orthodox Church cannot participate in international (regional/national) Christian organizations in which a) the by-laws, rules or traditions require a rejection of the teaching or traditions of the Orthodox Church; b) the Orthodox Church does not have the opportunity to bring testament that it is the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church; c) the method of decision-making does not take into account the ecclesiological self-recognition of the Orthodox Church; d) the rules and procedures assume the force of “majority opinion.” The level and forms of participation of the Russian Orthodox Church in international Christian organizations must consider the internal dynamics, the agenda, priorities and character of these organizations as a whole. The scope and measure of the participation of the Russian Orthodox Church in international Christian organizations is determined by the Hierarchy based on notions of benefit to the Church.”
At the present time, the WCC does not fall under any of the four categories listed as criteria which make the participation of our Church in an international Christian organization impossible. We recognize the fact that in the period between the Harare and Porto Alegre Assemblies, the WCC did everything possible to address the wishes and demands of the Orthodox Churches with full responsibility. In this situation, withdrawal from the WCC would have been unfounded.
This does not mean that the Russian Orthodox Church will always remain members of the WCC. This organization is evolving: today it suits us more, tomorrow it may suit us less. In that case, membership will once again be an acute problem, as it was in the mid-1990′s.
I would like to share one observation I made over my ten years of participation in the WCC and other inter-Christian dialogues. Today, the Christian world is more clearly divided into two groups. On one hand is the group of Churches which insist on the need to follow Church Tradition: this group includes, mainly, the Orthodox Churches, the pre-Chalcedonian Churches and the Roman Catholic Church. On the other end of the spectrum are those Protestant communities in which following Tradition was never the norm, in which there is a rapid liberalization of doctrine, of moral principles and church practice. The latter group includes in particular, the majority of Protestant communities of the North. The chasm between the “churches of Tradition” and the churches of a “liberal bent” is now so significant, and it is widening so quickly, that it is difficult for me to foresee how this “inter-Christian collegiality” can be preserved in the near future.
The fact that our church already broke dialogue with the Episcopal Church of the USA and the Church of Sweden attests to the fact that the inter-Christian community, if you will, is “bursting at the seams.” It is difficult to doubt that other Northern Protestant Churches will follow the lead of the American Episcopalians and Swedish Lutherans, and that soon the bonds will tear on a regular basis. In this case, one fine day, “the union of Protestants and Orthodox,” as the WCC is today, will simply not bear the weight of accumulated differences, and the “ecumenical ship” will sink.
There are now two obvious essentially-differing versions of Christianity — the traditional and the liberal. The abyss that now exists divides not so much the Orthodox and Catholics, or the Catholics and Protestants, as the “traditionalists” and “liberals” (with all the conventions of such labels). Of course, there are defenders of traditional values in the Protestant camp (especially in the Southern churches, that is, Africa, Asia, Latin America). But a liberal attitude prevails among the Protestants.
In this situation, I suppose that a consolidation is needed in the efforts of those churches which consider themselves “Churches of Tradition,” that is, the Orthodox, Catholics and pre-Chalcedonians. I am not talking about the serious dogmatic and ecclesiological differences which exist between these Churches and which can be considered within the framework of bilateral dialogue. I am talking about the need to reach an agreement between these Churches on some strategic alliance, pact, union for defending traditional Christianity as such — defense from all modern challenges, whether militant liberalism, militant atheism or militant Islam. I would like to underline that a strategic alliance is my own idea, not the official position of the Moscow Patriarchate.
We do not need union with the Catholics, we do not need “intercommunion,” we do not need compromise for a doubtful “rapprochement.” What we do need, in my opinion, is a strategic alliance, for the challenge is made to traditional Christianity as such. This is especially noticeable in Europe, where de-Christianization and liberalization are occurring as persistently as the gradual and unswerving Islamization. The liberal, weakened “Christianity” of the Protestant communities cannot resist the onslaught of Islam; only staunch, traditional Christianity can stand against it, ready to defend its moral positions. In this battle, the Orthodox and Catholics could, even in the face of all the differences accumulated over the centuries, form a united front.
The strategic alliance I propose must first of all defend traditional moral values such as the family, childbirth, spousal fidelity. These values are subjected to systematic mockery and derision in Europe by liberals and democrats of all types. Instead of spousal fidelity, “free love” is promoted, same-sex partnerships are equated with the union of marriage, childbirth is opposed by “planned families.” Unfortunately, we have serious differences in these matters with most Protestants, not to speak of fundamental theological and ecclesiological character.
I will use as example a conversation with a Lutheran bishop, held within the framework of a theological dialogue with one of the Northern Lutheran churches. We tried to prepare a joint document in the defense of traditional values. We began to talk about abortion. I asked: “Can we put in the joint document that abortion is a sin?” The Lutheran bishop responded: “Well, of course, we don’t promote abortion, we prefer contraception.” Question: “But abortion is in the opinion of your church, a sin, or is it not?” Reply: “Well, you see, there are various circumstances, for example, the life of a mother or child could be in danger.” “Well, if there is no threat to either the mother or the child, then is abortion a sin, or not?” And the Lutheran bishop could not concede that abortion is a sin.
What is there to talk about then? Abortion is not a sin, same-sex marriage is fine, contraception-wonderful. There it is, liberal Christianity in all its glory. Besides Orthodox Christians, only the Catholics preserve the traditional view of family values in Europe, and in regard, as in many others, they are our strategic partners.
Q: In your opinion, what forms of ecumenism are acceptable, and which are utterly unacceptable in church life?
Intercommunion is unacceptable, the performance of “ecumenical services” together with churches with which we do not have Eucharistic communion is unacceptable, the “branch theory” is unacceptable, unacceptable are any compromises in theological, ecclesiological or moral matters. Unacceptable is theological syncretism, when the foundations of the Christian doctrine are diluted, when the fundamental postulates of the Orthodox faith are questioned.
Allowable, and necessary, are those forms of inter-Christian dialogue which give the Orthodox Church the possibility of freely witnessing the truth in the face of the non-orthodox world. One shouldn’t forget what the “Basic Principles” states: “Witness cannot be a monologue, since it assumes the existence of listeners and therefore of communication. Dialogue implies two sides, a mutual openness to communication, a willingness to understand, not only an “open mouth,” but also a “heart enlarged” (II Cor. 6:11).
Source: The Official Website of the Synod of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia.
He writes:
We do not need union with the Catholics, we do not need “intercommunion,” we do not need compromise for a doubtful “rapprochement.” What we do need, in my opinion, is a strategic alliance, for the challenge is made to traditional Christianity as such. This is especially noticeable in Europe, where de-Christianization and liberalization are occurring as persistently as the gradual and .unswerving Islamization.The difference between Zizioulas and Alfeyev is expressed in the phrase, "We do not need union with the Catholics." The Russian Orthodox authorities are putting this on hold. Why?
- There is the reason given by Metropolitan John Zizioulas, that any authority recognised in the Pope would have to ceded to the Patriarch of Constantinople as " first among equals", and the two patriarchates are rivals. However, the only alternative to the papacy that is on offer is the rather unedifying spectacle of two patriarchates jostling for first place. However, caritas urget nos to look for a better explanation.
- My problem is that I have no way into the minds of the Patriarch and of Metropolitan Hilarion; but I can put myself in their shoes and ask what would alarm me, from an Orthodox hierarch's perspective, whether I favoured communion with Rome or not.
- What would alarm me is that these talks may well succeed within a life time; and nothing would be worse than abandonment of Orthodox - Catholic relations, except for a premature agreement before the two churches are ready for it. About a thousand years ago, Metropolitan Hilarion has said, both sides agreed that it had no need for the other. Until both Churches realise in their guts that they need each other, enough to forgive past wrongs, enough to change the perspective that each has of the other, an agreement would work havoc on the unity of both Churches, especially in the Orthodox Church. You only have to read what the abbots of Mount Athos have to say about Catholicism or remember the protests by monks in Rhodes to realise that there is a long way to go. However much you disagree with them, however xenophobic they may be, they are Orthodox too; and the first task of a bishop is to nurture the unity of the Church and oppose anything that might endanger that unity.
- Also, these conversations are happening just at a time when the Russian Orthodox Church needs to direct all its energies and all its personel to the re-conversion of Russia. For the first time since 1917, the State is supporting them, the people are willing, lots of good will but an appalling ignorance of things Christian among the majority of the population. It would be a terrible tragedy if the upheaval brought about by a Christian Unity that only some want would interfere with this golden opportunity to evangelise.
- The solution is not to abandon the search for Orthodox - Catholic unity, but to let the search for doctrinal unity take second place and to look for areas where, whatever the attitude to that unity, all can agree that Orthodox and Catholics need each other. Metropolitan Hilarion suggests that opposing the advancing secularism and re-converting people in the New Evangelisation are tasks too big for either Church alone. Hopefully, as long as each side respects the rules for churches not in communion, no one will feal his identity threatened by this collaboration, and all, little by little, will come to realise how much we need each other. When, from needing each other we come to love each other, then will be the time for the theologians to take over.
This requires patience from those Catholics and Orthodox who love each other already. It also requires humility because both sides believe they are already living the fullness of Catholicity and know that the other side is lacking.
Personally, I believe both positions are true, because the fullness of Catholicism comes from the participation on both sides in the sacramental life of the Church and that the Christ of the sacraments IS the fullness of Catholicism; and our lack comes from the fact that we are lungs that should be breathing together but are, in fact, breathing separately.
We look at each other and see the other´s faults very clearly. A papacy without synodality (a horrible word - I prefer the Russian word "sobornost") would not be acceptable to any Orthodox; but it is argued by some Orthodox that, for synodality to work, there is need of a "protos" to call it and to be a focus of its unity. If "sobornost" is of the essence of the Church, based on its eucharistic nature, then it is of the essence of the Church that there be a "protos" wherever "sobornost" manifests itself, whether at a local, regional or world-wide level. This justifies their rejection of the papacy that wished to exercise its Petrine authority independently of synod, but accepts a papacy, even by divine right, that works within the context of the world-wide communion of bishops whose unity is also divinely willed. This view coincides with the desire of Catholic reformers, and especially Pope Francis, who want to re-model the Church according to Vatican II, and it answers the Orthodox problem - which many voice when they are not disputing with Rome - that the regional Orthodox churches simply cannot act together as one body. "Oh Father David," said Archimandrite Barnabas, "We Orthodox talk about ´sobornost´ most and practise it least!"
Pope Francis says quite constantly that we must learn from what the Holy Spirit has taught the Eastern Churches and consider Eastern solutions among our options when striving to solve our own Western problems. This, together with the often repeated opinion that the Orthodox should not be required by us to accept dogmas that have been proclaimed by popes or councils since the separation, means that the area of disagreement has been reduced, and the western councils and papal decrees would be reduced in status by that very fact. Actually, both Pope Francis´ inclusion in our pastoral options the positions adopted by the Orthodox, and the idea that western decisions made since the schism are not binding on the Orthodox, are based on the same doctrine, that Tradition springs from the synergy of the Holy Spirit and the Church and that it is chiefly expressed in liturgy; that the liturgy is the source of all the Church's powers and the goal of all its activity; that the universal Tradition takes shape and is chiefly expressed in various liturgical traditions; that all these traditions are the same Christian Mystery in depth, but answer different questions according to the situation of each church; and thus discrepancies has arisen due to schism. Hence, Pope Francis recognises that Orthodox traditions are a true and authentic variant of the Tradition we have in common, even if we don't agree on all things
All this strengthens the Russian argument about the dangers of too hasty an optimism which can cause pain and disunity within the Orthodox Church (and, perhaps, the Catholic Church as well.) Pope Francis too has emphasised that we must get to know one another before unity can take place. In the end, unity will not be brought about by merely solving problems, but by a Spirit-filled ecclesial love of those who agree because they share the same Spirit-given vision.
Finally, this is the first time that I have heard the Pan-Orthodox Synod being called an ecumenical council. Many would hold that it is history that decides whether a synod like this is an ecumenical council in the full sense of the word.
Personally, I believe both positions are true, because the fullness of Catholicism comes from the participation on both sides in the sacramental life of the Church and that the Christ of the sacraments IS the fullness of Catholicism; and our lack comes from the fact that we are lungs that should be breathing together but are, in fact, breathing separately.
We look at each other and see the other´s faults very clearly. A papacy without synodality (a horrible word - I prefer the Russian word "sobornost") would not be acceptable to any Orthodox; but it is argued by some Orthodox that, for synodality to work, there is need of a "protos" to call it and to be a focus of its unity. If "sobornost" is of the essence of the Church, based on its eucharistic nature, then it is of the essence of the Church that there be a "protos" wherever "sobornost" manifests itself, whether at a local, regional or world-wide level. This justifies their rejection of the papacy that wished to exercise its Petrine authority independently of synod, but accepts a papacy, even by divine right, that works within the context of the world-wide communion of bishops whose unity is also divinely willed. This view coincides with the desire of Catholic reformers, and especially Pope Francis, who want to re-model the Church according to Vatican II, and it answers the Orthodox problem - which many voice when they are not disputing with Rome - that the regional Orthodox churches simply cannot act together as one body. "Oh Father David," said Archimandrite Barnabas, "We Orthodox talk about ´sobornost´ most and practise it least!"
Pope Francis says quite constantly that we must learn from what the Holy Spirit has taught the Eastern Churches and consider Eastern solutions among our options when striving to solve our own Western problems. This, together with the often repeated opinion that the Orthodox should not be required by us to accept dogmas that have been proclaimed by popes or councils since the separation, means that the area of disagreement has been reduced, and the western councils and papal decrees would be reduced in status by that very fact. Actually, both Pope Francis´ inclusion in our pastoral options the positions adopted by the Orthodox, and the idea that western decisions made since the schism are not binding on the Orthodox, are based on the same doctrine, that Tradition springs from the synergy of the Holy Spirit and the Church and that it is chiefly expressed in liturgy; that the liturgy is the source of all the Church's powers and the goal of all its activity; that the universal Tradition takes shape and is chiefly expressed in various liturgical traditions; that all these traditions are the same Christian Mystery in depth, but answer different questions according to the situation of each church; and thus discrepancies has arisen due to schism. Hence, Pope Francis recognises that Orthodox traditions are a true and authentic variant of the Tradition we have in common, even if we don't agree on all things
All this strengthens the Russian argument about the dangers of too hasty an optimism which can cause pain and disunity within the Orthodox Church (and, perhaps, the Catholic Church as well.) Pope Francis too has emphasised that we must get to know one another before unity can take place. In the end, unity will not be brought about by merely solving problems, but by a Spirit-filled ecclesial love of those who agree because they share the same Spirit-given vision.
Finally, this is the first time that I have heard the Pan-Orthodox Synod being called an ecumenical council. Many would hold that it is history that decides whether a synod like this is an ecumenical council in the full sense of the word.
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THE KENOTIC PRESENCE OF THE FIRST AMONG EQUALS
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2nd SUNDAY OF LENT, celebrating the TRANSFIGURATION in the West and ST GREGORY PALAMAS in the East
THE MASS
The Mass opens with the introit of the Feast of the Transfiguration:
My heart said to You, I have sought Your countenance; I will seek Your countenance again, Lord. Do not turn Your face away from me. Ps. The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom will I fear?
All that is most authentic in Christianity takes place in the heart: the heart of Jesus in which God meets humanity, and from which eminates a love that is both divine and human; the heart of Mary which embraced the newly conceived Jesus in faith and humble obedience, from which eminates a love for Jesus and for the whole of humankind, a love which is a reflection of Jesus' love as the moon reflects the light of the sun; and, finally, the heart of each one of us,, a temple made for Christ to live in and whom we receive in Communion. The more we seek his face in our heart, the more his presence will transform us, the more Christ's Transfiguration will become our mystery as well as His. We seek Him through PRAYER and LECTIO DIVINA.
“Virtues are formed by prayer. Prayer preserves temperance. Prayer suppresses anger. Prayer prevents emotions of pride and envy. Prayer draws into the soul the Holy Spirit, and raises man to Heaven.” – St. Ephrem of Syria
Reading 1 GN 12:1-4AAbram went as the Lord directed him.
The LORD said to Abram: “Go forth from the land of your kinsfolk and from your father’s house to a land that I will show you. “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you. All the communities of the earth shall find blessing in you.”
Sin has made it necessary, if we wish to receive a blessing, to detach ourselves from what we were in order to become what the Transfiguration wants us to be. Hence, to be authentic, we need this time of Lent. To become heirs of God's covenant with Abraham, we must answer God's command to "Go forth from the land of your kinsfolk and from your father’s house to a land that I will show you." The paradox is that we must become detached from this world in order to learn to love it as Christ loves it. The more we love this world as Christ loves it, the more Christ is present in this world in and through us, the more we and the world around us share in Christ's transfiguration by Grace. However, we cannot share in the Transfiguration without detachment, or fully share in the Paschal feast without Lent.
The call and sending forth of Abraham became a metaphor for the monastic life. People are called by God to leave the superficial life of the "world" to go on an interior journey to find their deepest centre, the "heart" where Christ dwells. First, they are accepted into a community of those who are called, the only real reason why they are together, and are given the benefit of experience of the community and are supported on their quest in the spirit of Abraham. The Irish monks went even further: many of them chose to go on actual, physical pilgrimage, separating themselves from their own beloved communities and lands to seek God in a strange land.
In the Celtic monks of Ireland the geographical pilgrimage and inner journey were more closely linked than was often the case with other wandering monks on the continent. They saw three forms of pilgrimage. Firstly, a geographical pilgrimage in body only where the spirit remains unchanged. Secondly, an inner pilgrimage, where, though the spirit and soul journey towards God, the body remains physically stable. Thirdly, the perfect pilgrimage where a man leaves his country in both body and soul and journeys in search of the absolute, the very source of being. So the ideal for the Celtic monks was both the geographical pilgrimage and the inner journey. Their pilgrimage was not a pilgrimage to a shrine and afterwards to return home, no, their ideal was the man who "for his soul's welfare abandoned his homeland for good or at least for many years." (5) The Celtic monk who withdrew "from home and kindred, even from the larger religious community" (6) to pass his life, or a period of his life, in solitude became one of the most important aspects of Irish asceticism and one of its chief legacies to later ages.
(Celtic Monks and Thomas Merton)
Reading 2 2 TIM 1:8B-10
Beloved:
Bear your share of hardship for the gospel with the strength that comes from God. He saved us and called us to a holy life, not according to our works but according to his own design and the grace bestowed on us in Christ Jesus before time began, but now made manifest through the appearance of our savior Christ Jesus, who destroyed death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.
In the Gospel we are going to meet Christ manifesting his glory as Son of God, as God incarnate on Mount Tabor. It is the second of three theophanies in the synoptic gospels, the first being at his Baptism, and the third being his Crucifixion; and all three are inter-connected. In fact, the first and second show us the true glory of the Crucifixion in which the faithfulness of Christ, constant to the shedding of the very last drop of his blood, manifests the faithfulness of his Father, and reveals the true Nature of the Tri-une God as self-emptying Love. It is impossible in this world to portray the Crucifixion as glorious, even though, from God's perspective, it was: hence the need for the Baptism and Transfiguration theophanies. Only in the Resurrection will we see the self-emptying Love of God as the source of all divine Power as Creator and Redeemer and the source of all eternal happiness. It is also the source of all power and authority in the Church; but that will have to wait for another post.
To share in the self-emptying Love of God, the very life of the Blessed Trinity, involves us having to accept radical changes in our own lives. Hence, in the second reading St Paul bids us: "Bear your share of hardship for the gospel with the strength that comes from God." The hardship that comes from our striving to live in harmony with Christ who lives in us shall be borne with a strength that comes from Christ. Our status as Christians is pure gift and is made manifest in Christ.
The Transfiguration: Law Through Moses,
Grace &Truth Through Jesus Christ
This is an excerpt from a homily by St. Leo the Great (Sermo 51, 3-4, 8: PL 54, 310-311, 313) explaining the meaning of the Transfiguration of the Lord Jesus Christ on Mount Tabor. Saint Leo contrasts the law, symbolized by Moses, with the grace of the gospel brought by Jesus Christ, providing a great Lenten reading used in the Roman office of readings for the 2nd second Sunday in Lent, given that the gospel of the day is the Transfiguration.
The Lord reveals his glory in the presence of chosen witnesses. His body is like that of the rest of mankind, but he makes it shine with such splendor that his face becomes like the sun in glory, and his garments as white as snow.
The great reason for this transfiguration was to remove the scandal of the cross from the hearts of his disciples, and to prevent the humiliation of his voluntary suffering from disturbing the faith of those who had witnessed the surpassing glory that lay concealed.
With no less forethought he was also providing a firm foundation for the hope of holy Church. The whole body of Christ was to understand the kind of transformation that it would receive as his gift. the members of that body were to look forward to a share in that glory which first blazed out in Christ their head.
The Lord had himself spoken of this when he foretold the splendor of his coming: Then the just will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Saint Paul the apostle bore witness to this same truth when he said: I consider that the sufferings of the present time are not to be compared to the future glory that is to be revealed in us. In another place he says: You are dead, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, your life, is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory.
This marvel of the transfiguration contains another lesson for the apostles, to strengthen them and lead them into the fullness of knowledge. Moses and Elijah, the law and the prophets, appeared with the Lord in conversation with him. This was in order to fulfil exactly, through the presence of these five men, the text which says: Before two or three witnesses every word is ratified. What word could be more firmly established, more securely based, than the word which is proclaimed by the trumpets of both old and new testaments, sounding in harmony, and by the utterances of ancient prophecy and the teaching of the Gospel, in full agreement with each other?
The writings of the two testaments support each other. The radiance of the transfiguration reveals clearly and unmistakably the one who had been promised by signs foretelling him under the veils of mystery. As Saint John says: The law was given through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. In him the promise made through the shadows of prophecy stands revealed, along with the full meaning of the precepts of the law. He is the one who teaches the truth of the prophecy through his presence, and makes obedience to the commandments possible through grace.
In the preaching of the holy Gospel all should receive a strengthening of their faith. No one should be ashamed of the cross of Christ, through which the world has been redeemed.
No one should fear to suffer for the sake of justice; no one should lose confidence in the reward that has been promised. The way to rest is through toil, the way to life is through death. Christ has taken on himself the whole weakness of our lowly human nature. If then we are steadfast in our faith in him and in our love for him, we win the victory that he has won, we receive what he has promised.
When it comes to obeying the commandments or enduring adversity, the words uttered by the Father should always echo in our ears: This is my Son, the beloved, in whom I am well pleased; listen to him.Amen.
Light for the World: the Life of St. Gregory Palamas (1296–1359)
On the second Sunday of Great Lent, there is a great feast in the blessed city of Thessalonika, Greece. It is the feast of St. Gregory Palamas. On this day, the holy relics of the saint are taken from the Church of St. Gregory in a procession throughout the city, escorted by bishops, priests, sailors, policemen, and thousands of faithful. One wonders why his earthly remains are still held in such great veneration. How could his bones remain incorruptible more than six hundred years after his death? Indeed, St. Gregory’s life clearly explains these wondrous facts. It illustrates the inspired words of the apostles that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit (see 1 Corinthians 6:19) and that we are "partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4).
A Childhood Passion for the Eternal
St. Gregory Palamas was born in the year 1296. He grew up in Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey) in a critical time of political and religious unrest. Constantinople was slowly recovering from the devastating invasion of the Crusades. It was a city under attack from all sides. From the west, it was infiltrated by Western philosophies of rationalism and scholasticism and by many attempts at Latinization. From the east, it was threatened by Muslim Turkish military invaders. The peace and faith of its citizens were at stake.
Gregory’s family was wealthy. His father was a member of the senate. Upon his father’s sudden death, Byzantine Emperor Andronikos II Paleologos (1282–1328), who was a close friend of the family, gave it his full financial support. He especially admired Gregory for his fine abilities and talents, hoping that the brilliant young man would one day become a fine assistant. However, instead of accepting a high office in the secular world, Gregory sought “that good part, which will not be taken away” from him (Luke 10:42).
Upon finishing his studies in Greek philosophy, rhetoric, poetry, and grammar, Gregory, at only twenty or twenty-two years of age, followed a burning passion in his heart. Like a lover who strives to stay alone forever with his loved one, Gregory was thirsty for this living water (see Revelation 22:17). Therefore, no created thing could separate him from the love of God (see Romans 8:39). He simply withdrew to Mount Athos, an already established community of monasticism. He first stayed at the Vatopedi Monastery, and then moved to the Great Lavra.
Gregory’s departure was not a surprise to the rest of his family. Many priests and monks, friends of the family, frequently visited the family home. The parents were careful to pass on to their children the “pearl of great price” (Matthew 13:46). Great wealth and high education were not a hindrance, but an excellent tool in their pursuit of salvation. As a result of their way of life and belief, Gregory’s mother, two brothers, and two sisters soon distributed all their earthly possessions to the poor and entered different monasteries.
Living the Spiritual Experience of the Church
In Athos, the novice Gregory took as his spiritual guide St. Nicodemos of Vatopedi Monastery. This holy man of prayer guided Gregory on the path of ascetic labor: prayers, vigils, fasting, continuous repentance, and monastic obedience. The young novice Gregory was especially attached to the prayer of the heart, also known as the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner” (see Luke 18:38).
The experienced practice of the Jesus Prayer, requiring solitude and silence combined with physical exercises and breathing methods, is called "hesychasm" (from the Greek hesychos, meaning inner stillness, peace, or silence). Those practicing it are called "hesychasts." Inner silence of this kind makes us capable of listening to the whispers of the divine within us. "The kingdom of God is within you" (Luke 17:21). Therefore, the Jesus Prayer is the prayer of the whole person, involving the human body, mind, soul, and heart.
The hesychasts spoke and wrote about their unique experience. They taught people to pray without ceasing, as the Apostle Paul commands all Christians to do (1 Thessalonians 5:17). They explained that in prayer, man is filled from within with the eternal glory, with the divine light beheld at the Transfiguration of Christ on Mount Tabor. The hesychast Gregory explains:
For, on the day of the Transfiguration, that Body, source of the light of grace, was not yet united with our bodies; it illuminated from outside those who worthily approached it, and sent the illumination into the soul by the intermediary of the physical eyes; but now, since it is mingled with us and exists in us, it illuminates the soul from within. (Triads I. 3.38)
The Jesus Prayer is not a mantra, as in Eastern religions, and it cannot be taken as such. The prayer’s call for “mercy” involves inner repentance and change. It is also a prayer practiced within the sacramental life of the Church, a prayer combined with Holy Communion, confession, reading the Word of God, fasting, loving one’s neighbor, and so forth. Finally, it is not a prayer using “vain repetitions” or babble, but a prayer recited again and again, in persistence (Luke 18:1), from the inner heart of man reaching the divine heights of glory, confessing Christ as the Lord and Savior, in sincerity, humility, and faith.
For that prayer (the Jesus Prayer) is true and perfect. It fills the soul with Divine grace and spiritual gifts. As chrism perfumes the jar the more strongly the tighter it is closed, so prayer, the more fast it is imprisoned in the heart, abounds the more in Divine grace. . . . By this prayer the dew of the Holy Spirit is brought down upon the heart, as Elijah brought down rain on Mount Carmel. This mental prayer reaches to the very throne of God and is preserved in golden vials. . . . This mental prayer is the light which illumines man's soul and inflames his heart with the fire of love of God. It is the chain linking God with man and man with God. (Palamas, “Homily on how all Christians in general must pray without ceasing,” in E. Kadloubovsky and G. E. H. Palmer, Early Fathers of the Philokalia, London: Faber and Faber, 1981, pp. 412–415)
Such prayer was practiced from the early Christian period. The hesychasts were drawn by God's unconditional graceful love (Romans 5:15) to fill a certain human need around them. Many hesychasts abandoned their solitude to serve their brothers, “since he who loves God must love his brother also” (1 John 4:21). Some cared for the sick in hospitals, like St. Basil the Great in Caesarea; others helped the poor, like St. John the Almsgiver in Alexandria; and yet others welcomed the faithful for confession. Nevertheless, they did not abandon the Jesus Prayer and their inner silence. In this sense, all Christians are called to follow this hesychast way leading to salvation.
Let no one think, my brother Christians, that it is the duty only of priests and monks to pray without ceasing, and not of laymen. No, no; it is the duty of all of us Christians to remain always in prayer . . . every Christian in general should strive to pray always, and to pray without ceasing . . . this very name of our Lord Jesus Christ, constantly invoked by you, will help you to overcome all difficulties, and in the course of time you will become used to this practice and will taste how sweet is the name of the Lord. . . . For when we sit down to work with our hands, when we walk, when we eat, when we drink we can always pray mentally and practice this mental prayer—the true prayer pleasing to God. (“Homily on how all Christians in general must pray without ceasing”)
In addition to his spiritual practice and daily scriptural readings, St. Gregory studied the works of the great Fathers, theologians, and ascetics of the Church. Just as a scientist builds on the evidence and data provided to him by his predecessors, Gregory made a fascinating synthesis of the scriptural and patristic teaching on the prayer of the heart, combined with his personal experience.
Although the monk Gregory in his youth had diligently studied Greek philosophy, he was not influenced by its views on matter. Ancient Greek philosophy believes that the body imprisons the soul, and thus it detests matter. Christians respect the body, since Christ made the flesh a source of sanctification, and matter (water, oil, etc.) a channel of divine grace. In his writings, St. Gregory affirmed that man, united in body and soul, is sanctified by Jesus Christ, who took a human body at the Incarnation. “When God is said to have made man according to His image,” wrote St. Gregory, “the word man means neither the soul by itself nor the body by itself, but the two together.” In another place, he added:
Thus the Word of God took up His dwelling in the Theotokos in an inexpressible manner and proceeded from her, bearing flesh. He appeared upon the earth and lived among men, deifying our nature and granting us, after the words of the divine Apostle, “things which angels desire to look into” (1 Peter 1:12). (A Homily on the Dormition of the Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary)
Father Gregory, Teacher
His unquenched thirst for God’s sweetness experienced in prayer moved the righteous Gregory to live as a hermit in a cell outside the monastery. In the year 1326, the threat of Turkish invasions forced him, along with his Athonite brothers, to retreat to Thessalonika. There he was ordained to the holy priesthood.
As a priest, Gregory did not abandon his spiritual labor and hesychasm. He spent most of the week alone in prayer. On the weekends, he celebrated divine services and preached sermons. He cared for the youth, calling them to discuss religious issues with him. Father Gregory was not concerned about abstract problems of philosophy, but about Christian faith experienced in prayer. He wanted to preach solely about problems of Christian existence, which are more attractive and meaningful to the young.
Soon, many of his spiritual sons expressed their desire to live in a monastic setting. So in the serene area of Vereia, near Thessalonika, he established a small community of monks, which he guided for five years. In 1331 the saint withdrew to Mt. Athos and lived in solitude at the Skete of St. Sabbas. In 1333 he was appointed abbot of the Esphigmenou Monastery in the northern part of the Holy Mountain. In 1336 he returned to the Skete of St. Sabbas, where he devoted himself to theological writing, continuing with this work until the end of his life.
But amidst all this, in the 1330s events took place in the life of the Eastern Church that placed St. Gregory among the most prominent teachers of Orthodox spirituality.
The Challenge of Rationalism
Around the year 1330, a certain monk Barlaam arrived in Constantinople from Calabria, Italy. He was a famous scholar, a skilled orator, and an acclaimed Christian teacher. Barlaam visited Mt. Athos and became acquainted with hesychasm.
Barlaam valued education and learning much more than contemplative prayer. Therefore, he believed the monks on Mount Athos were wasting their time in contemplative prayer when they should be studying. He ridiculed the ascetic labor and life of the monks, their methods of prayer, and their teachings about the uncreated light experienced by the hesychasts. Countering the traditional stance of the Church that “the theologian is the one who prays,” Barlaam asked: “How can an intimate communion of man with the Divine be achievable through prayer, since the Divine is transcendent and ‘dwelling in unapproachable light’ (1 Timothy 5:16)? No one can apprehend the essential being of God!” Barlaam was convinced that God can be reached only through philosophical, mental knowledge—in other words, through rationalism.
The words of Barlaam were not merely a challenge to a few monks. They defied the experience of the Church as a whole. The West, with its rationalistic tendencies, has associated the image of God with man’s intellect. Barlaam’s mind was full of rational arguments, but his heart was cold. Certainly, life with God is not just information, but also experience. Our living God cannot be conceived and described only by study, but must be spoken about from experience. “Did not our heart burn within us while He talked with us on the road, and while He opened the Scriptures to us?” (Luke 24:32).
Journeying from Mt. Athos to Thessalonika and Constantinople, Barlaam clashed with the monks, refusing to test their way of vigils, prayer, and fasting, or to accept their spiritual experience. Unfortunately, many monks were swayed by his arguments and stood by his side. Deceived by considering the living faith as mere rational knowledge, Barlaam waged a war against the ascetics.
At the request of the Athonite monks, St. Gregory countered at first with verbal admonitions. But seeing the futility of such efforts, he put his theological arguments in writing. Thus appeared the Triads in Defense of the Holy Hesychasts in the year 1338.
The Presence of God in Prayer
In his Triads, Palamas interpreted the experience of the Church by presenting logical arguments, based on the Scripture and the writings of the Fathers. Addressing the question of how it is possible for humans to have knowledge of a transcendent and unknowable God, he drew a distinction between knowing God in His essence, or nature, and knowing God in His energies, actions, or the means by which He acts.
To elaborate more, he made a comparison between God and the sun. The sun has its rays, God has His energies (among them, grace and light). By His energies, God creates, sustains, and governs the universe. By His energies, He transforms creation and deifies it, that is, He fills the new creation with His energies as water fills a sponge. These actions or energies of God are the true revelation of God Himself to humanity. So God is incomprehensible and unknowable in His nature or essence, but knowable in His energies. It is through His actions out of His love to the whole creation that God enters into a direct and immediate relationship with mankind, a personal confrontation between creature and Creator.
Towards the year 1340 the Athonite ascetics, with St. Gregory’s assistance, compiled a general reply to the attacks of Barlaam, the so-called Hagiorite Tome. Since the heated arguments flared everywhere in the churches, a general council was held at Constantinople in the year 1341. In front of hundreds of bishops and monastics, St. Gregory Palamas held an open debate with Barlaam in the halls of the Great Church of Hagia Sophia. On May 27, 1341, the council accepted the position of St. Gregory Palamas that God, unapproachable in His essence, reveals Himself through His energies, which are directed towards the world and are able to be perceived, like the light of Tabor, but which are neither material nor created. The teachings of Barlaam were condemned as heresy, and he himself was anathematized and returned to Calabria.
Second Triumph of Orthodoxy
But the dispute between the Palamites and the Barlaamites was far from finished. Politics came into play, and the politicians used the disputed religious issue as a threatening tool against those who supported Palamas. The great turmoil led to five consecutive church councils. One of the many scholars who advocated Barlaam’s position was the Bulgarian monk Akyndinos, who wrote a series of tracts against St. Gregory. Emperor Andronikos III Paleologos (1328–1341) was Akyndinos’s friend. Fearing the emperor, Patriarch John XIV Kalekos (1341–1347) backed Akyndinos, calling St. Gregory the cause of all disorders and disturbances in the Church (1344). He had St. Gregory locked up in prison for four years. In 1347, John XIV was replaced on the patriarchal throne by Isidore (1347–1349), a friend of St. Gregory. He set St. Gregory free and ordained him archbishop of Thessalonika.
In 1351, a sixth and final council was held to settle the heated controversial issues in the church. The Council of Blachernae solemnly upheld the orthodoxy of Palamas’ teachings and anathematized and excommunicated those who refused them. The anathemas of the council of 1351 were included in the rite for the Sunday of Orthodoxy in the Triodion. This council was considered the second triumph of Orthodoxy (the first being the restoration of icons). Later on, the memory of St. Gregory Palamas came to be celebrated in the Church on the second Sunday of Great Lent.
Imprisoned by Muslims
Gregory’s suffering for Christ did not end here. Again, because of the political influence of the West in Thessalonika, its citizens were divided upon the issue proclaimed by the councils. They did not immediately accept St. Gregory as archbishop, so that he was compelled to live in various places. On one of his travels to Constantinople, the Byzantine ship on which he was sailing fell into the hands of the Turkish Muslims. They took Archbishop Gregory as a prisoner, but displayed tolerance toward him. Even in captivity, St. Gregory preached to Christian prisoners and even held many debates with his Moslem captors. His love and respect for all men made his captors admire him and treat him with reverence. A year later, St. Gregory was ransomed and returned to Thessalonika.
The Proclamation of His Sainthood
St. Gregory was a living Gospel. God gave him the gift of healing, especially in the last three years before his death. On the eve of his repose, St. John Chrysostom appeared to him in a vision. St. Gregory Palamas fell asleep in the Lord on November 14, 1359. The Virgin Mary, the Apostle John, St. Dimitrios, St. Antony the Great, St. John Chrysostom, and angels of God all appeared to him at different times. Nine years after his repose, a council in Constantinople headed by Patriarch Philotheos (1354–1355, 1362–1376) proclaimed the sainthood of Gregory Palamas. Patriarch Philotheos himself compiled the life and services for the saint.
When we hear in the Lenten Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts, “The Light of Christ illumines all,” may we remember the call of the illumined Gregory for unceasing prayer and ascetic labor, that we be truly illumined by the light of the Resurrection.
This article originally appeared in AGAIN Vol. 27 No. 1
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IRENA SENDLER: HEROINE
Bless the Lady Plumber
Irena Sendler
Remember this lady?
Sendler, a Roman Catholic, was born in Otwock, outside Warsaw, on February 15, 1910. Her father was a physician who directed a spa hospital. Sendler remembered him as someone who taught great compassion: “If you see someone drowning, you must try to rescue them, even if you cannot swim.”
She was an administrator in Warsaw’s welfare department in 1940, when Nazi Germany occupied Poland. Nearly half a million Jews were sequestered in Warsaw’s tiny ghetto, where conditions were appalling. The Nazis ordered a stop to normal social services, such as food and health care. Charged with warding off typhus and tuberculosis, Sendler had official permission to move freely in the ghetto. She convinced Jewish parents to let her hide their children. She used an ambulance to smuggle children in burlap sacks and coffins. A dog seated next to her would sometimes bark to drown out the children’s cries. She received aid from the Zegota, the Polish Council to Aid the Jews.
Died: May 12, 2008 (aged 98)
Warsaw , Poland
my source: an e-mail
During WWII, Irena, got permission to work in the Warsaw ghetto, as a Plumbing/Sewer specialist. She had an ulterior motive.
Irena smuggled Jewish infants out in the bottom of the tool box she carried. She also carried a burlap sack in the back of her truck, for larger kids
Irena kept a dog in the back that she trained to bark when the Nazi soldiers let her in and out of the ghetto.
The soldiers, of course, wanted nothing to do with the dog and the barking which covered the kids/infants noises.
Irena Sendler of the Chasidei Umos HaOlam
by guest blogger
Yad Vashem was established in 1953 by Israel's Remembrance Authority with the stated mission of honoring the Chasidei Umos HaOlam. As part of their answer to the dilemma of how to memorize the victims Yad Vashem established a program which honors the Righteous Among the Nations -- gentiles who put their lives at risk to rescue Jews.
Over the years Yad VaShem has honored tens of thousands of people including, in 1965, a Polish woman by the name of Irena Sendler. Sendler is credited with having saved over 3000 Jewish lives, almost two thirds more than the more well-known Oskar Schindler of "Schindler's List" renown.
In 1999 a group of students from Kansas City researched the events surrounding Sendler's activities, documented their findings and actually met with the then-98-year-old Sendler before creating a project "Life in a Jar" which relates the Irena Sendler story.
Irena Sendler was a young social worker in Poland when the Germans invaded in 1939. She joined the Zagota -- a Polish underground group that specialized in assisting Jews. Over the course of the first two years of the war Sendler helped forge documents and locate hiding places for Jews who were fleeing the Nazis -- accounts estimate that she helped over 500 Jews escape from the Nazis.
In 1941 Sendler obtained false documents which identified her as a nurse. She was able to enter the Warsaw Ghetto with food and medicines but once she saw the situation in the ghetto Sendler's mission turned into what she could bring out of the ghetto rather than what she could bring in. She realized that the Nazis intended to murder the Jews and she felt that the best chance for saving lives lay in removing as many children from the ghetto as possible. Sendler began to smuggle children out of the ghetto, picking up orphans from the street and bringing them out by sedating them and ferrying them in luggage, bags, toolboxes, and even under carts filled with garbage.
Sendler then began to go door to door in the ghetto. She begged parents to allow her to take their children. This was traumatic for the parents, who had to decide where their children's best chance of survival lay, and also for Sendler herself who later told historians "I talked the mothers out of their children" Sendler described the heartwrenching scenes that she experienced, day after day, as she took children from their families. "Those scenes over whether to give a child away were heart-rending. Sometimes, they wouldn't give me the child. Their first question was, 'What guarantee is there that the child will live?' I said, 'None. I don't even know if I will get out of the ghetto alive today."
As perilous as smuggling the children out of the ghetto was -- via a secret passage through the Old Courthouse that stood on the edge of the ghetto, under tram seats and even through the sewer pipes that ran under the city -- the next part of the rescue operation was just as difficult. Sendler and her Zagota comrades had to forge documents for the children and find suitable hiding places for them. Many children were placed in convents or orphanages while others were hidden with sympathetic Polish families.
Jewish children in a Polish convent 1943
Sendler carefully recorded the names of the children on tissue paper which she then closed in glass jars and buried in her neighbor's garden. She wanted to ensure that, after the war, the children could be reunited with their families if possible or, if not, at least with their Jewish community.
In October 1943 Sendler was arrested by the Germans who interned her in the infamous Pawiak prison. Throughout the torture which included breaking both of her legs Sendler never divulged any information about "her" children. Zagota members obtained her release by bribing a guard just as Sendler was being led to her execution. She lived out the rest of the war in hiding.
In addition to the 1965 Yad Vashem commemoration Sendler was honored by the Life in a Jar project run by the LMC. Life in a Jar includes a book, a website and a performance which has been viewed by audiences throughout the world.
Irena Sedler with survivors
my source: the e-mail
In 2007 Irena was up for the Nobel Peace Prize. She was not selected. Al Gore won, for a slide show on Global Warming.
Later another politician, Barack Obama, won for his work as a community organizer for ACOR
In MEMORIAM - 65 YEARS LATER
I'm doing my small part by forwarding this message. I hope you'll consider doing the same. It is now more than 67 years since the Second World War in Europe ended.
This e-mail is being sent as a memorial chain, In memory of the six million Jews, 20 million Russians, 10 million Christians and 1,900 Catholic priests who were murdered, massacred, raped, burned, starved and humiliated!
Now, more than ever, with Iran, and others, claiming the HOLOCAUST to be 'a myth', it's imperative to make sure the world never forgets, because there are others who would like to do it again.
This e-mail is intended to reach 40 million people worldwide!
Join us and be a link in the memorial chain and help us distribute it around the world.
WARSAW, Poland – Elzbieta Ficowska leaned forward to place red roses on a new grave in Warsaw's Powawazki Cemetery. The 66-year-old woman also lit two votive candles. They were in memory of Irena Sendler, the person to whom she owes her very existence.
'A truly heroic act'
Ficowska was spirited out of the ghetto in a wooden carpenter's box when she was just six months old. Hidden on a truck beneath a pile of bricks – arranged to allow air to reach her – she had been drugged to prevent her from crying. With her in the box was a silver spoon engraved with her name and date of birth, probably put there by the mother she never knew.
"It was a truly heroic act for my mother to give away her baby with no guarantee it would survive," Ficowska said. "That was the painful decision my mother made." She did so because thousands of Jews were being sent each day to the gas chambers at Treblinka and other death camps in occupied Poland.
The infant girl was brought to Stanislawa Bussoldowa, a Roman Catholic midwife who also delivered the babies of Jewish women in hiding. Bussoldowa, a member of Sendler's clandestine network, adopted Ficowska and raised her as a Catholic.
The only physical trace of Ficowska's rescue is the spoon, which she keeps in a dark-blue velvet box on her mantle piece next to a photograph of her late husband, Jerzy, a poet.
But there are other reminders, she says, one of which is her life-long fear of close spaces. "That's why I think I'm so claustrophobic," she said, reflecting on having been hidden in the wooden box. "I'm always opening windows and doors wherever I go."
Professor Michael Glowinski in his Warsaw apartment.
'She saved my mother's life'
Another survivor saved by Sendler's heroic acts took a different path.
Professor Michal Glowinski, 74, always knew he was Jewish. When he was eight, he was taken out of the ghetto with his parents by a German soldier who had been bribed.
He recalls his childhood with intense clarity. "The color of the ghetto is the color of the paper that covered the corpses lying on the street before they were taken away," he wrote in his memoir, "Black Seasons." The book is a blend of two voices – that of Glowinski as a young child and as an adult.
We recently spoke in his narrow living room, the shelves crammed with books and scholarly journals. A professor of literature at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, he described with animation how he and his mother pursued a tortuous escape route to avoid capture by the Gestapo.
Sendler eventually found his mother a job as a maid, using forged identity papers. "She saved my mother's life," Glowinski said. At the same time, Zegota, the umbrella organization of Sendler's underground railroad, arranged for him to be placed in an orphanage in eastern Poland where he was protected by impoverished nuns. Glowinski's father, meanwhile, found work as a day laborer, part of a deliberate plan to separate the family in hope of improving their individual chances of survival.
'Dominant element of my life'
In the orphanage, Glowinski said, he shut out the world that had existed before, never expecting his family to be reunited. He prepared himself only for bad news.
"I had grown deadened and indifferent," he wrote in his memoir. As a result, he did not rejoice when his mother came for him suddenly in February of 1945. His father also survived the war, and the whole family was reunited later that year. Glowinski revived the love for his parents he had smothered as a defense mechanism during the war and even dedicated his memoir, "Black Seasons," to his mother and father.
But, his experience during the Holocaust still affects him deeply.
"If one spends his life in the ghetto and then hiding, locked in a closet or in a stack of potatoes, his whole life is marked by that experience," he said. "It is the dominant element of my life that puts everything else in perspective. The childhood trauma remains the most important element of my biography."
Glowinski and Ficowska are just two of the thousands of Jews who are the beneficiaries of Sendler's heroism. Her far-reaching legacy extends to today's children.
"If she didn't save you," Ficowska's 10-year-old grandson, Karol, told his grandmother, "my mother would not be here, and I wouldn't be here either."
Don Snyder was a longtime NBC News Producer who is now retired and is a freelance writer.
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CHRISTIANITY EAST, CHRISTIANITY WEST by Rod Dreher
If you’re a newcomer to Orthodox Christianity, one thing you hear a fair amount of is a deep hostility to Latin Christianity at the theological level. I’m not talking about being ugly to Catholics; I’m talking about a strong and abiding sense that the West went off the theological rails in the High Middle Ages, and lost their way such that the differences between the churches of the East and West are profoundly irreconcilable. There’s something to this — the irreconcilability, I mean. As a Catholic who looked with admiration to Orthodoxy, even before the idea of becoming Orthodox had ever crossed my mind, I didn’t grasp the depth of the theological divisions separating us.
If the High Middle Ages were the crucial turning point in the East-West ecclesial history, then Thomas Aquinas, the greatest Roman Catholic theologian of that period, and probably the greatest theologian Latin Christianity has ever produced, is considered by the Orthodox to be the epitome of What Went Wrong. Put crudely, he is seen as the best example of a hyperrationalism that overtook Western Christianity, and that led to the undoing of the faith, over time. Is this true? Honestly, I’m not in any position to say. I don’t have the theological chops. But I do know that among many Orthodox, to the extent they think about Aquinas at all, it is unfavorably.
So imagine my surprise in reading the Divine Comedy, especially Paradiso, to find that there’s so very much in there reconcilable with Orthodox Christianity. I mean, the entire Paradiso is an exploration of the concept of salvation/sanctification as theosis. I knew that Dante’s theological base in writing the Commedia was Scholasticism, so I did not expect that the mysticism would be so overwhelming.
One of you readers sent me the other day a link to a review of a recent theological book about Orthodox readings of Aquinas. Look at this:
The book’s second part concerns the largely favorable Byzantine reception of Aquinas, which came about both because of Aquinas’ intrinsic fidelity to the Fathers and the Constantinopolitan “care for terminological exactitude that can scarcely be denied the label ‘scholastic’” (48). His overview of the Dominican’s reception by Byzantine scholasticism shows that this affection did not come from eccentrics on the fringes, but from some of “the Empire’s finest scholars and foremost statesmen” (67). But in contrast to enthusiastic emperors, bishops and theologians, there are also detractors who find Thomas overly reliant on logic and pagan philosophy. In evaluating these complaints, Plested shows that their writings often reflect a limited or shallow reading of Thomas, for which they were often swiftly chastised by other Byzantines.
The book’s third part concerns the Orthodox reception of Aquinas from the fall of the Byzantine Empire to the Ottomans (A.D.1453) until the present day, where the historical narrative turns from a stunning and varied tour of Greek and Russian readers to the rigid dichotomies born in the 19th Century, which have become, “very much the preserve of the modern Orthodox mindset and do not accurately reflect the Byzantine legacy” (224). He blames this abruptly negative and deviant reading of Aquinas (and all things Western) largely on the Slavophile movement, which was exacerbated when Diaspora theologians encountered the stagnant Thomism of the early 20th Century and found Thomas to be a “convenient whipping boy” (194). This habit became at times a decrepit via negativa where an oppositional Orthodoxy began defining itself only by was it was not; this often resulted in a “theology of reaction” (206) or at worst, “little more than a faith constituted by anti-papalism” (184). Plested acknowledges that this paradigm of opposition reflects more modern culture than theology, because, “In a bipolar world, nothing seems more natural than a dichotomy” (225). He concludes his study with a survey of today and a note of hope that the miasma of dichotomy will dissipate and that the fruitful dialogue between Aquinas and the Orthodox will resume.
Fascinating. Again, I’m in no theological position to judge this stuff. Would you readers who are knowledgeable enough to pass judgment please weigh in?
Another East-West issue: PEG tweeted this story from the Catholic magazine Crisis, in which author Gabriel Sanchez offers a strong caution on Pope Francis’s recent suggestion that the Catholic Church has a lot to learn from the Orthodox about how to run a decentralized church. Not so fast, says Sanchez, who discusses the current bitter rivalry between the Ecumenical Patriarch in Istanbul and the Moscow Patriarchate over who is the leading figure in world Orthodoxy, as well as other examples of jurisdictional squabbling. Excerpt:
Some might see these recent events as unfortunate aberrations in the otherwise healthy governance life of the Orthodox Church, but they would be wrong to do so. Since the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Orthodox history has been littered, and some might uncharitably say defined, by internecine strife and factionalism as those few local Orthodox churches which were not under the Muslim heel rose in practical importance while the more ancient patriarchates receded into obscurity. In the 20th Century large swathes of Orthodox remained out of communion with particular churches for a mixture of jurisdictional, doctrinal, and chauvinistic reasons. While the situation has improved, one has to wonder how long it will last. In addition to the aforementioned dispute in Qatar, there is ongoing acrimony in Estonia, Macedonia, and Ukraine which currently has three different Orthodox churches vying for control. With the EP and MP currently at each other’s throats, how long until they break communion with each other?
The point of summarizing these events is not to provide Catholics with a cheap opportunity to engage in triumphalism over the Orthodox but rather to offer the Church of Rome and the sui iuris churches in communion with her an opportunity to reflect on what collegiality and synodality has meant, as a practical matter, to the second largest Christian communion in the world. While outside afflictions in the form of Islamic invasions and Communist oppression warrant more than a bit of the blame for Orthodoxy’s woes, it cannot be denied that its confederate model of governance—loose, self-driven, and unreliable as it is—has neutralized the Orthodox Church’s attempt to collectively assert itself against the rising tide of secularism while also addressing a myriad of matters which bear directly on faith and morals.
Sadly, he’s right. We don’t feel this sort of thing on the parish level, thank God, but it’s there, and it’s a scandal.
There is more from Sanchez:
Take, for instance, the issue of contraception. It is no exaggeration that a faithful Orthodox Christian can go to three different priests in the same American city and receive three disparate answers expressing everything from absolute prohibition to prohibition of abortifacient only to complete permissibility. Who is right? Who is wrong? Even if the local ruling bishop of a given priest speaks authoritatively on the matter (which is rare), there’s always another hierarch of another jurisdiction who may go the other way. The problem does not stop there. Fr. John Whiteford, a prominent priest and commentator in ROCOR, recently opined that one of the possible motivators for his church’s decision to distance itself from the Bishops’ Assembly was because other North American Orthodox jurisdictions “have laymen in good standing, and even clergy, who are openly advocating for gay marriage, and proclaim that committed monogamous homosexual relationships are not sinful.” What authority exists in Orthodoxy to tell them otherwise?
Fr. John Whiteford is right about that, I regret to say. I leave it to the better informed Orthodox readers of this blog to explain to the rest of this readership “what authority exists in Orthodoxy to tell them otherwise.” The way authority works within Orthodoxy is complex, and if I try to explain it, I’ll surely get something wrong. I would point out, though, that Orthodoxy really doesn’t have the Roman urge to define things so sharply. What the Romans may in some cases see as a bug, Orthodoxy may see as a feature.
I do want to push back, respectfully, against Sanchez’s holding up of Catholic ecclesiology as handling this better. On paper, it seems clear to me that Catholicism, with its clear lines of authority, ought to work better. In practice, though, it’s as bad or worse than the weakness Sanchez accuses Orthodoxy of suffering. At least in this country, it is. Let me explain.
Refugees fleeing to Rome from the chaos and liberalism of mainline Protestant churches see in Rome a doctrinal rock in which to shelter against the storm and stress of modernity. In theory, this is true. What many new converts find surprising, even shocking, is that despite the theoretical orthodoxy in the Roman church, the orthopraxy, including the teaching of orthodox Catholic doctrine, is extremely hit or miss, varying from parish to parish, diocese to diocese. You will rarely if ever find a bishop speaking out against Catholic orthodoxy — but this is often a matter of keeping up appearances. In practice, many bishops allow all kinds of heterodoxy in their dioceses. You really can parish-shop and find a priest, and a confessor, who will tell you what you want to hear. There should be doctrinal unity in Catholicism, but in practice, this is fairly nominal. I argued in the confessional once, in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, with a priest who told me that my wife and I should start using contraception. I wouldn’t say something like that is normative, but that kind of laxity is far, far more common in American Catholicism in practice (versus in theory) than outsiders believe.
I hasten to say that this is not entirely the fault of Catholic governance, or misgovernance. All churches have to live today in the modern secular world, a world that has a radically different idea of authority than in ages past. This accounts for why so many American Catholics, both laymen and priests, take Rome’s doctrinal teachings as suggestions, not pronouncements that have the ring of truth.
It is also true that Catholics frustrated by the de facto heterodoxy in the lives of their parishes and local Catholic communities sometimes look to Orthodoxy as a model of, well, orthodoxy, and liturgical seriousness. They’re right — to a point. As Fr. John Whiteford revealed, gay rights are a rising issue in some US Orthodox jurisdictions. I’ve only been Orthodox for seven years, and my experience in American Orthodox parishes is very limited. I say that as a caution about taking my evaluation with appropriate seriousness. My view is that Orthodoxy has depended so heavily on the sense of the faithful about these things, and on a strong, shared conviction about the weight of tradition, such that it does not really know how to deal with life in modernity. I mean, Orthodoxy doesn’t seem to me to know how to effectively deal with the effects of modernity on the sensus fidelium, in an era and culture that produces Christians who believe they have the right to pick and choose what they want to believe, and to resist submitting themselves to the authority of Scripture, Tradition, or the Church.
Nobody has figured this out. Neither side has the right to feel triumphalistic. Rome may think it has, but its record over the last 50 years is pretty sorry. Orthodoxy looks better to beleaguered traditionalist and conservative Catholics, but I think that’s largely because Orthodoxy is thin on the ground in the West, and has not had to face the full power of modernity, with its emphasis on individualism and consumerism. It’s one thing to face down the Bolsheviks; nobody loved them. It’s another thing to face down the shopping mall, which everybody loves. Besides, there can be a big difference between the Orthodoxy you find in heavily convert parishes, and the Orthodoxy you encounter in one of the old ethnic parishes of the Northeast. When I was one of those frustrated Catholic laymen sick of bad liturgy and doctrinal chaos, and looking to the East with uncritical admiration, an Orthodox friend pointed out that my only experiences of Orthodoxy had been among American converts, and in an Orthodox popular culture dominated by convert enthusiasm. If I were to go to Catholic parishes that were dominated by converts, if such things existed, I would find the same level of enthusiasm for the traditions and theology of Rome. It was an important point, I thought.
I’m not offering these thoughts to defend Orthodoxy against Catholicism, or vice versa. Me, I’d love to see a greater reconciliation — an “ecumenism of the trenches,” as the practical cooperation between orthodox Catholics and conservative Protestants on issues of common concern (e.g., pro-life activism) has been called. I wrote a column in the Wall Street Journal back in 2001, then as a faithful Catholic who admired Orthodoxy, but who was greatly irritated by the absurd hostility Athonite monks showed to Pope John Paul II as he visited Greece. Excerpt:
Unlike his Orthodox counterparts, this pontiff lives in the real world. He understands that if Christianity is to survive, much less thrive, in the third millennium, believers cannot afford quarrels over past grievances. There are deep theological divisions between East and West, and any ecumenism that pretends otherwise is false. But isn’t working more closely to combat the functional nihilism that accompanies the spread of consumerist values a more pressing concern than fussing over the fate of the Filioque clause? The pope knows that the key question in the era of post modernism and globalization is not what brand of Christianity the world will follow; it is whether the world will follow Christianity at all.
It is said that the Greek Orthodox regard John Paul as a symbol of the Westernization they despise. Who are they kidding? The pontiff who was the scourge of the militant atheist ideology that made martyrs of millions of Orthodox believers is the same man who is the fiercest enemy of the secular Western juggernaut. Have the Orthodox been paying attention for the past two decades? Do they read his stuff? Maybe not. The late Alexander Schmemann, the eminent Russian Orthodox theologian, lamented his faith’s “complete indifference to the world,” claiming that official Orthodoxy lived in a “heavy, static, petrified” world of “illusion.” Orthodox consciousness “did not notice the fall of Byzantium, Peter the Great’s reforms, the Revolution; it did not notice the revolution of the mind, of science, of lifestyles, forms of life,” Schmemann wrote in his private journal. “In brief, it did not notice history.” John Paul does.
Thirteen years later, I am an Orthodox Christian, but I still largely stand by what I wrote then. Pope John Paul II hadn’t successfully resisted modernism either, not even in his church (though he and his successor, Pope Benedict, laid the groundwork for authentic resistance). But John Paul and Benedict have had to deal with cultural forces that have to a significant degree bypassed the Orthodox world, but which now are sweeping over them, and will continue to. Within Orthodoxy, I look to visionary leaders like Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev , who serves as a kind of secretary of state for the Moscow Patriarchate. He told Crisis magazine in 2012:
The theological differences between Rome and the Orthodox East are well known. Apart from a number of aspects in the realm of dogmatic theology, these are the teaching on primacy in the Church and, more specifically, on the role of the bishop of Rome. This topic is discussed within the framework of the Orthodox-Catholic dialogue which has been taking place for several decades at sessions of a joint commission specially established for this purpose.
But today a different problem is acquiring primary importance – the problem of the unity of Orthodox and Catholics in the cause of defending traditional Christianity. To our great regret, a significant part of Protestant confessions by the beginning of the 21st century has adopted the liberal values of the modern world and in essence has renounced fidelity to Biblical principles in the realm of morality. Today in the West, the Roman Catholic Church remains the main bulwark in the defence of traditional moral values – such, for example, as marital fidelity, the inadmissibility of artificially ending human life, the possibility of marital union as a union only between man and woman.
Therefore, when we speak of dialogue with the Roman Catholic Church, I believe that the priority in this dialogue today should not be the question of the filioque or the primacy of the Pope. We should learn to interact in that capacity that we find ourselves in today – in a state of division and absence of Eucharistic communion. We ought to learn how to perceive each other not as rivals but as allies by understanding that we have a common missionary field and encounter common challenges. We are faced with the common task of defending traditional Christian values, and joint efforts are essential today not out of certain theological considerations but primarily because we ought to help our nations to survive. These are the priorities which we espouse in this dialogue.
I agree one thousand percent. I don’t believe it’s squishy ecumenism to say that both Catholicism and Orthodoxy have much to learn from each other’s successes, and much to learn from each other’s mistakes. Gabriel Sanchez is not wrong to highlight the jurisdictional squabbling within Orthodoxy, and the lack of a unified magisterium (teaching authority), as significant problems with Orthodox ecclesiology. It would be a mistake, though, to believe that Rome has solved this problem through its ecclesiological structure; on the ground, there is much less unity in Catholic doctrine than one would think.
On the other hand, Sanchez does not seem to dispute this, which is why he finds it so disturbing that Pope Francis wishes to devolve power back to the local dioceses, given how heterodox many are in practice. I see his point, and share his concern as a sympathetic outside observer of Catholicism. Given the cultural realities of life in the West, what is presently merely a significant ecclesiological problem for Orthodoxy could be a doctrinal catastrophe for Catholicism if it adopted a more Orthodox model — even if, from the Orthodox point of view, the decentralized model is more historically faithful. It will be fascinating to observe how well the Orthodox ecclesiological model serves to maintain the faith in the decades and centuries to come as the Orthodox lands become more modernized, which is to say, imbued with a secular consciousness and capitalist dynamism. If that happens.
I invite your commentary. Please, be charitable to those on the other side of the theological divide. If you’ve gotten this far in this blog entry, you may have forgotten that I started it off by making remarks about Thomas Aquinas and Orthodoxy. I’d still love to know what the Catholic and Orthodox theologians who read this blog think about that issue.
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LET US PRAY FOR PEACE BETWEEN RUSSIA AND THE UKRAINE
This has been put together by Jim Forest, biographer of Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day, of the Orthodox Peace Fellowship.
A LENTEN APPEAL FOR PEACE
Source: The Economist
What happens when different parts of a church (and in this case, a church which generally believes in obedience to earthly power) find themselves on opposite sides of a looming conflict? Over the centuries, the Orthodox church has found ingenious ways of preserving the spiritual bonds between its fractured sons and daughters while accepting that in earthly affairs, they were deeply divided. During the Russo-Japanese war of 1905, Russia's Orthodox church was happy to let its small but vigorous outpost in Japan pray for a Japanese victory; no religious ties were broken in the process. Bear all that in mind when contemplating the latest religious moves in Ukraine.
Last week, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, the country's largest religious structure, responded to the country's dramatic political change by appointing a new acting leader. As I mentioned in an earlier posting, the cleric is question is a declared friend of Russia who enjoys the approval of Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, under whose ultimate spiritual authority he serves. Metropolitan Onufry is also, of course, an office-holder in the Ukrainian capital and the things he says will inevitably take into account of the new climate in the earthly affairs of that city. And yet, with due allowance for all those conflicting pressures, there was something poignant about the appeal (link in Russian) he made over the weekend for the avoidance of conflict between the two Slavic nations. In a message to Patriarch Kirill, he said:
Today Ukraine is without exaggeration undergoing the gravest moment in her modern history. After three months of socio-political crisis, bloody clashes in the centre of Kiev and the deaths of dozens of people, we find ourselves facing yet another trial which is no less grave. On March 1 statements were heard from office-holders in the Russian Federation about the possible despatch to Ukraine of a limited contingent of Russian troops. If that happens, the Ukrainian and Russian peoples will find themselves drawn into a confrontation which will have catastrophic consequences for our countries. As the locum tenens of the Metropolitan See of Kiev I appeal to you, Your Holiness, to do everything possible so as not to allow bloodshed on the territory of Ukraine. I ask you to raise your voice for the preservation of the territorial integrity of the Ukrainian state. At this grave hour we raise our fervent prayers to Our Lord Jesus Christ that He, through the intercessions of his most pure Mother, should protect from confrontation the fraternal peoples of Russia and Ukraine.
In response, Patriarch Kirill declared that he would indeed do everything in his power to prevent civilian deaths in "a land so dear to my heart". He offered an analysis of the unfolding drama which both converged and diverged with that of the Ukrainian prelate.
These events are rooted in the internal political crisis [of Ukraine], and in political forces' inability to tackle problems in a non-violent way. Our flock is made of people of various political views and convictions, including those who stand at opposite sides of the barricades. The Church does not side with any party in the political struggle...The blood shed in Kiev and other Ukrainian cities is the fruit borne by the seeds of hatred which the conflicting parties allowed Satan to plant in their hearts..."
Wearing a more political hat, Patriarch Kirill also contacted Oleksandr Turchynov, Ukraine's stand-in president, and voiced concern over the treatment of ethnic Russians in the country; the acting leader, a Baptist as it happens, duly responded that there was no ground for concern.
The bishops' messages were exchanged at the beginning of Lent, a time when Orthodox Christians are supposed to engage in a rigorous effort at self-examination and repentance. The fasting season begins with a ceremony in which Orthodox Christians beg forgiveness of one another for any wrongs they have committed. Whatever political expediencies may lurk in the background, the season lends extra moral weight to the prelates' appeal for peace. The sub-text of both episcopal texts is that their common flock can still belong to the same spiritual community even if they are citizens of different states that are locked in conflict.
07 March 2014
Pray for peace between Russia and Ukraine
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In Russia, Ukraine and the contested area of Crimea, passions have been running high for months, leading to many deaths and injuries. Honest and well-informed observers offer very different perspectives on what is happening and what the causes are. The injustices are many on all sides.
Without taking sides, one thing Orthodox Christians can do is pray with fervor that more bloodshed can be avoided. To help parishes and individual believers with resources for prayer, we are providing several links.
As this page develops we will try to provide helpful information that furthers understanding of the events taking place in the region to help bridge the gap through better understanding.
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Special Petitions for the Increase of Love:
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On February 26, the First Hierarch of the Russian Church Abroad, His Eminence, Metropolitan Hilarion, issued a statement encouraging the clergy of the Eastern American Diocese to add further petitions for the increase of love during the Divine Liturgy on Forgiveness Sunday. The petitions may also be used as part of a moleben that can be served upon completion of the Divine Liturgy. A special service “For the Increase of Love” can be found in the Great Book of Needs or by following the links below:
http://eadiocese.org/News/2014/march/increaseoflove.en.pdf
http://eadiocese.org/News/2014/march/kievpetitions.en.pdf
A short sermon by Fr Sergei Ovsiannikov given at the Moleben for peace held March 4 at St Nicholas of Myra Russian Orthodox Church in Amsterdam:
http://www.incommunion.org/2014/03/17/prayers-for-peace/
A selection of prayers for peace:
http://www.incommunion.org/2004/10/18/prayers/
An album of photos of the peace demonstration in Moscow that took place Saturday 15 March 2014:
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.655866497784545.1073741945.157033337667866&type=3
In Russia, Ukraine and the contested area of Crimea, passions have been running high for months, leading to many deaths and injuries. Honest and well-informed observers offer very different perspectives on what is happening and what the causes are. The injustices are many on all sides.
Without taking sides, one thing Orthodox Christians can do is pray with fervor that more bloodshed can be avoided. To help parishes and individual believers with resources for prayer, we are providing several links.
As this page develops we will try to provide helpful information that furthers understanding of the events taking place in the region to help bridge the gap through better understanding.
* * *
Special Petitions for the Increase of Love:
On February 26, the First Hierarch of the Russian Church Abroad, His Eminence, Metropolitan Hilarion, issued a statement encouraging the clergy of the Eastern American Diocese to add further petitions for the increase of love during the Divine Liturgy on Forgiveness Sunday. The petitions may also be used as part of a moleben that can be served upon completion of the Divine Liturgy. A special service “For the Increase of Love” can be found in the Great Book of Needs or by following the links below:
http://eadiocese.org/News/2014/march/increaseoflove.en.pdf
http://eadiocese.org/News/2014/march/kievpetitions.en.pdf
A short sermon by Fr Sergei Ovsiannikov given at the Moleben for peace held March 4 at St Nicholas of Myra Russian Orthodox Church in Amsterdam:
http://www.incommunion.org/2014/03/17/prayers-for-peace/
A selection of prayers for peace:
http://www.incommunion.org/2004/10/18/prayers/
An album of photos of the peace demonstration in Moscow that took place Saturday 15 March 2014:
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.655866497784545.1073741945.157033337667866&type=3
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COMMUNION AND OTHERNESS by METROPOLITAN JOHN ZIZIOULAS plus St Peter Damian from the DOMINUS VOBISCUM plus CARDINAL RATZINGER on EUCHARISTIC ECCLESIOLOGY
Communion and otherness — how can these two be reconciled? Are they not mutually exclusive and incompatible with each other? Is it not true that by definition the other is my enemy and my “original sin,” to recall the words of Jean-Paul Sartre?
Our western culture seems to subscribe to this view in many ways. Individualism is present in the very foundations of this culture. Ever since Boethius in the Fifth Century ad identified the person with the individual (“Person is an individual substance of a rational nature”), and St. Augustine emphasized the importance of self-consciousness in the understanding of personhood, western thought never ceased to build itself and its culture on this basis. The individual’s happiness has even become part of the American Constitution.
All this implies that in our culture protection from the other is a fundamental necessity. We feel more and more threatened by the presence of the other. We are forced and even encouraged to consider the other as our enemy before we can treat him or her as a friend. Communion with the other is not spontaneous; it is built upon fences which protect us from the dangers implicit in the other’s presence. We accept the other only insofar as he does not threaten our privacy or insofar as he is useful to our individual happiness.
There is no doubt that this is a direct result of what in theological language we call the “Fall of Man.” There is a pathology built into the very roots of our existence, inherited through our birth, and that is the fear of the other.
This is a result of the rejection of the Other par excellence, our Creator, by the first man, Adam, and before him by the demonic powers that revolted against God.
The essence of sin is the fear of the Other, which is part of the rejection of God. Once the affirmation of the “self” is realized through the rejection and not the acceptance of the Other — this is what Adam chose in his freedom to do — it is only natural and inevitable for the other to become an enemy and a threat. Reconciliation with God is a necessary pre-condition for reconciliation with any “other.”
The fact that the fear of the other is pathologically inherent in our existence results in the fear not only of the other but of all otherness. This is a delicate point requiring careful consideration, for it shows how deep and widespread fear of the other is: we are not afraid simply of certain others, but even if we accept them, it is on condition that they are somehow like ourselves. Radical otherness is an anathema. Difference itself is a threat. That this is universal and pathological is to be seen in the fact that even when difference does not in actual fact constitute a threat for us, we reject it simply because we dislike it. Again and again we notice that fear of the other is nothing more than fear of the different. We all want somehow to project into the other the model of our own selves.
When fear of the other is shown to be fear of otherness, we come to the point of identifying difference with division. This complicates and obscures human thinking and behavior to an alarming degree, with serious consequences. We divide our lives and human beings according to difference. We organize states, clubs, fraternities and even Churches on the basis of difference. When difference becomes division, communion is nothing but an arrangement for peaceful co-existence. It last as long as mutual interests last and may easily be turned into confrontation and conflict as soon as these interests cease to coincide. Our societies and our world situation today give ample witness to this.
If this confusion between difference and division were simply a moral problem, ethics would suffice to solve it. But it is not. St. Maximus the Confessor recognizes in this cosmic dimensions. The entire cosmos is divided on account of difference, and is different in its parts on the basis of its divisions. This makes the problem of communion and otherness a matter organically bound up with the problem of death, which exists because communion and otherness cannot coincide in creation. The different beings become distinct beings: because difference becomes division, distinction becomes distance.
St. Maximus makes use of these terms to express the universal and cosmic situation. Diaphora(difference) must be maintained, for it is good; but diaresis (division), a perversion of difference, is bad. The same is true of distance which amounts to decomposition, and hence death.
This is due, as St. Gregory of Nyssa observed, to the distance in both space and time that distinguish creation ex nihilo. Mortality is linked with createdness-out-of-nothing; this is what the rejection of the Other — God — and of the other in any sense amounts to. By turning difference into division through the rejection of the other we die. Hell, the eternal death, is nothing but isolation from the other.
We cannot solve this problem through ethics. We need a new birth. And this leads us to ecclesiology.
ecclesial communion
Because the Church is a community living within history and therefore within the fallen state of existence, all our observations concerning the difficulty in reconciling communion with otherness in our culture are applicable also to the life of the Church. The Church is made up of sinners, and she shares fully the ontological and cosmic dimension of sin which is death, the break of communion and final diastasis (separation and decomposition) of beings. And yet we insist that the Church in her essence is holy and sinless. On this Orthodox differ from other Christians, particularly of the Protestant family.
The essence of Christian existence in the Church is metanoia — repentance. By being rejected, or simply feared by us, the other challenges or provokes us to repent. Even the existence of pain and death in the natural world, not caused by anyone of us individually, should lead us to metanoia, for we all share in the fall of Adam, and we all must feel the sorrow of failing to bring creation to communion with God and overcoming death. Holiness in the Church passes through sincere and deep metanoia. All the saints weep because they feel somehow personally responsible for Adam’s fall and its consequences for innocent creation.
The second implication of the Orthodox position concerning the holiness of the Church is that repentance can only be true and genuine if the Church and her members are aware of the true nature of the Church. We need a model by which we can measure our existence; the higher the model, the deeper the repentance. This is why we need a maximalistic ecclesiology with a maximalistic anthropology — and even cosmology — resulting from it. Orthodox ecclesiology, by stressing the holiness of the Church, does not and should not lead to triumphalism but to a deep sense of compassion and metanoia.
What is the model? From where can we receive guidance and illumination in order to live our communion with the other in the Church?
faith in the Trinitarian God
There is no other model for the proper relation between communion and otherness either for the Church or for the human being than the Trinitarian God. If the Church wants to be faithful to her true self, she must try to mirror the communion and otherness that exists in the Triune God. The same is true of the human being as the “image of God.”
What can we learn about communion and otherness from study of the Trinity? First, otherness is constitutive of unity. God is not first One and then Three, but simultaneously One and Three.
God’s oneness or unity is not safeguarded by the unity of substance, as St. Augustine and other western theologians have argued, but by the monarchia of the Father. It is also expressed through the unbreakable koinonia (community) that exists between the three Persons, which means that otherness is not a threat to unity but the sine qua non of unity.
Study of the Trinity reveals that otherness is absolute. The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are absolutely different, none of them being subject to confusion with the other two.
Otherness is not moral or psychological but ontological. We cannot tell what each Person is; only who He is. Each person in the Holy Trinity is different not by way of difference in qualities but by way of simple affirmation of being who He is. We see that otherness is inconceivable apart from a relationship. Father, Son and Holy Spirit are all names indicating relationship. No person can be different unless it is related. Communion does not threaten otherness; it generates it.
faith in Christ
We cannot be the “image of God” unless we are incorporated in the original and only authentic image of the Father, which is the Son of God incarnate.
This implies that communion with the other requires the experience of the Cross. Unless we sacrifice our own will and subject it to the will of the other, repeating in ourselves what our Lord did at Gethsemane in accepting the will of His Father, we cannot reflect properly in history the communion and otherness that we see in the Triune God. Since God moved to meet the other — His creation — by emptying Himself and subjecting his Son to the kenosis(self-emptying) of the Incarnation, the “kenotic” way is the only one that befits the Christian in his or her communion with the other, be it God or neighbor.
This kenotic approach to communion with the other is not determined in any way by the qualities that he or she might or might not possess. In accepting the sinner into communion, Christ applied the Trinitarian model. The other is not to be identified by his or her qualities, but by the sheer fact that he or she is, and is himself or herself. We cannot discriminate between those who are worthy of our acceptance and those who are not. This is what the Christological model of communion with others requires.
faith in Holy Spirit
The Holy Spirit, among other things, is associated with koinonia (II Cor 13, 13) and the entrance of the last days into history (Acts 2, 17-18), that is eschatology.
When the Holy Spirit blows, He does not create good individual Christians, individuals “saints,” but an event of communion which transforms everything the Spirit touches into a relational being. The other becomes in this case an ontological part of one’s identity. The Holy Spirit de-individualizes beings wherever He blows. Where the Holy Spirit blows, there is community.
The eschatological dimension, on the other hand, of the presence and activity of the Holy Spirit affects deeply the identity of the other: it is not on the basis of one’s past or present that we should identify and accept him or her, but on the basis of one’s future. And since the future lies only in the hands of God, our approach to the other must be free from passing judgment on him. In the Holy Spirit, every other is a potential saint, even if he appears be a sinner.
faith in the Church
It is in the Church that communion with the other reflects fully the relations between communion and otherness in the Holy Trinity. There are concrete forms of ecclesial communion that reflect this:
Baptism: This sacrament is associated with forgiveness. Every baptized person by being forgiven ceases to be identified by his or her past and becomes a citizen of the city to come, the Kingdom of God.
Eucharist: This is the heart of the Church, where communion and otherness are realized par excellence. If the Eucharist is not celebrated properly, the Church ceases to be the Church.
It is not by accident that the Church has given to the Eucharist the name of “Communion,” for in the Eucharist we find all the dimensions of communion: God communicates Himself to us, we enter into communion with Him, the participants of the sacrament enter into communion with one another, and creation as a whole enters through Man into communion with God — all this taking place in Christ and the Holy Spirit Who brings the last days into history and offers to the world a foretaste of the Kingdom of God.
The Eucharist does not only affirm and sanctify communion; it sanctifies otherness as well. It is the place where difference ceases to be divisive and becomes good. Communion in the Eucharist does not destroy but affirms diversity and otherness.
Whenever this does not happen, the Eucharist is distorted and even invalidated even if all the other requirements for a “valid” Eucharist are satisfied. A Eucharist which excludes in one way or another those of a different race, sex, age or profession is a false Eucharist. The Eucharist must include all these, for it us there that otherness of a natural or social kind can be transcended. A Church which does not celebrate the Eucharist in this inclusive way loses her catholicity.
But are there no limits to otherness in eucharistic communion? Is the Eucharist not a “closed” community in some sense? Do we not have such a thing as exclusion from eucharistic communion? These questions can only be answered in the affirmative. There is indeed exclusion from communion in the Eucharist, and the “doors” of the synaxis are indeed shut at some point in the Liturgy. How are we to understand this exclusion of the other?
Eucharistic communion permits only one kind of exclusion: the exclusion of exclusion: all those things that involve rejection and division, which in principle distort Trinitarian faith. Heresy involves a distorted faith that has inevitable practical consequences concerning communion and otherness. Schism is also an act of exclusion; when schism occurs, the eucharistic community becomes exclusive. In the case of both heresy and schism, we cannot pretend that we have communion with the other when in fact we have not.
Ministry: There is no area of Church life where communion and togetherness co-exist so deeply as in the Church’s ministry. Ministry involves charismata of the Holy Spirit, and charisms involve variety and diversity. “Are we all apostles? Are we all prophets? Are we all teachers? Do all of us have the charisms of healing?” Such questions posed by St. Paul receive blunt negative answers from him. The body of Christ consists of many members and these members represent different gifts and ministries. No member can say to the other, “I need you not.” There is an absolute interdependence among the members and the ministries of the Church: no ministry can be isolated from the “other.” Otherness is the essence of ministry.
Yet at the same time otherness is acceptable only when it leads to communion and unity. When diaphora becomes diaresis, returning to the terminology of St. Maximus, we encounter immediately the fallen state of existence. In order to avoid this, the Church needs a ministry of unity, someone who would himself be needful of the “others” and yet capable of protecting difference from falling into division. This is the ministry of the bishop.
There is no Church without a bishop, nor is it by chance that there can be only one bishop in a Church, as declared by Canon Eight of the Council of Nicea. More than one bishop creates a situation in which difference may become division. The present-day situation of the Orthodox Diaspora, allowing cultural and ethnic differences to become grounds of ecclesial communion centered on different bishops, is thus unfortunate, dangerous and totally unacceptable.
personhood
Theology and Church life involve a certain conception of the human being: personhood. This term, sanctified through its use in connection with the very being of God and of Christ, is rich in its implications.
The Person is otherness in communion and communion in otherness. The Person is an identity that emerges through relationship (schesis, in the terminology of the Fathers); it is an “I” that can exist only as long as it relates to a “Thou” which affirms its existence and its otherness. If we isolate the “I” from the “Thou,” we lose not only its otherness but also its very being; it simply cannot be without the other. This is what distinguishes the person from the individual.
The Orthodox understanding of the Holy Trinity is the only way to arrive at this concept of Personhood: the Father cannot be conceived for a moment without the Son and the Spirit, and the same applies to the other two Persons in their relation with the Father and with each other. At the same time each of these Persons is so unique that their hypostatic or personal properties are totally incommunicable from one Person to the Other.
Personhood is inconceivable without freedom; it is the freedom of being other. I hesitate to say “different” instead of “other” because “different” can be understood in the sense of qualities (clever, beautiful, holy, etc.), which is not what the person is about. In God all such qualities are common to the each three Persons. Person implies not simply the freedom to have different qualities but mainly the freedom simply to be yourself. This means that a person is not subject to norms and stereotypes and cannot be classified in any way; its uniqueness is absolute. This means that only a person is free in the true sense.
And yet one person is no person; freedom is not freedom from the other but freedom for the other. Freedom becomes identical with love. God is love because He is Trinity. We can love only if we are persons, allowing the other to be truly other and yet be in communion with us. If we love the other not in spite of his or her being different but because they are different from us, or rather other than ourselves, we live in freedom as love and in love as freedom.
The other is a condition of our freedom. Freedom is not from but for something other than ourselves. This makes the person ec-static, going outside and beyond the boundaries of the self. But this ecstasis is not to be understood as a movement towards the unknown and the infinite; it is a movement of affirmation of the other.
This drive of personhood towards the affirmation of the other is so strong that is not limited to the “other” that already exists but wants to affirm an “other” which is totally free grace of the person. Just as God created the world as free grace, so the person wants to create its own “other.” This is what happens with art: the artist creating a totally other identity as an act of freedom and communion. Living in the Church in communion with the other means, therefore, creating a culture. The Orthodox Church has always been culturally creative.
Finally, we must consider the ecological problem. The threat to God’s creation is due to a crisis between the human being and the otherness of the rest of creation. Man does not respect the otherness of what is not human; he tends to absorb it into himself.
This is the cause of the ecological problem. In a desperate attempt to correct this, Man may easily fall into the pagan alternative: to absorb Man into nature. We have to be very careful. Out of its tradition, Orthodoxy is called to offer the right Christian answer to the problem. Nature is the “other” that Man is called to bring into communion with himself, affirming it as “very good” through personal creativity.
This is what happens in the Eucharist where the natural elements of bread and wine are so affirmed that they acquire personal qualities — the Body and Blood of Christ — in the event of the communion of the Holy Spirit. Similarly, in a para-eucharistic way, all forms of true culture and art are ways of treating nature as otherness in communion, and these are the only healthy antidotes to the ecological illness.
We live in a time when communion with the other is becoming extremely difficult not only outside but inside the Church. Orthodoxy has the right vision of communion and otherness in its faith and in its eucharistic and ecclesial existence.
It is this that it must witness to in the midst of Western culture. But in order to be a successful witness, it must strive to apply this vision to its “way of being.” Individual Orthodox Christians may fail to do so, but the Church as a whole must not. This is why the Orthodox Church must watch carefully her own “way of being.” When the “other” is rejected on account of natural, sexual, racial, social, ethnic or even moral differences, Orthodox witness is destroyed.
Metropolitan John Zizioulas teaches theology in both London and Thessaloniki. This is a shortened version of a lecture given at the European Orthodox Congress given in October, 1993. The full text, as well as the text of other lectures given at the Congress, is available (in English, Dutch, French and German editions) from the Apostle Andreas Press, de Vrièrestraat 19. B-8301 Knokke-Heist, Belgium.
Reprinted from Orthodox Peace Fellowship’s Occasional Paper nr. 19, summer 1994. my source: In Communion
ST PETER DAMIAN LOOKS AT COMMUNION FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF A CAMALDOLESE HERMIT
Indeed, the Church of Christ is united in all her parts by such a bond of love that her several members form a single body and in each one the whole Church is mystically present; so that the whole Church universal may rightly be called the one bride of Christ, and on the other hand every single soul can, because of the mystical effect of the sacrament, be regarded as the whole Church
And so the priest before he offers sacrifice and prayers to God shows by this mutual greeting that he is bound to the faithful by the bond of brotherly love; he does this so that he may make this commandment of the Lord clear by his outward actions, as well as keeping it in his heart. Because of this, he sees as present with the eyes of the spirit all those for whom he prays, whether or not they are actually there in the flesh; he knows that all who are praying with him are present in spiritual communion. And so the eye of faith directs the words of his greeting and he realizes the spiritual presence of those whom he knows to be near at hand. Therefore let no brother who lives alone in a cell be afraid to utter the words which are common to the whole Church; for although he is separated in space from the congregation of the faithful yet he is bound together with them all by love in the unity of faith; although they are absent in the flesh, they are near at hand in the mystical unity of the Church (Chapter 18, 73-74).
EUCHARISTIC ECCLESIOLOGY
by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger
Let us go back and look at developments in the pre-Conciliar era. Reflection on the Mystical Body of Christ marked the first phase of the Church's interior re-discovery; it began with St Paul and led to placing in the foreground the presence of Christ and the dynamics of what is alive (in Him and us). Further research led to a fresh awareness. Above all, more than anyone else, the great French theologian Henri de Lubac in his magnificent and learned studies made it clear that in the beginning the term "corpus mysticum" referred to the Eucharist. For St Paul and the Fathers of the Church the idea of the Church as the Body of Christ was inseparably connected with the concept of the Eucharist in which the Lord is bodily present and which He gives us His Body as food. This is how a Eucharistic ecclesiology came into existence.
What do we mean today by "Eucharistic ecclesiology"? I will attempt to answer this question with a brief mention of some fundamental points. The first point is that Jesus' Last Supper could be defined as the event that founded the Church. Jesus gave His followers this Liturgy of Death and Resurrection and at the same time He gave them the Feast of Life. In the Last Supper he repeats the covenant of Sinai—or rather what at Sinai was a simple sign or prototype, that becomes now a complete reality: the communion in blood and life between God and man. Clearly the Last Supper anticipates the Cross and the Resurrection and presupposes them, otherwise it would be an empty gesture. This is why the Fathers of the Church could use a beautiful image and say that the Church was born from the pierced side of the Lord, from which flowed blood and water. When I state that the Last Supper is the beginning of the Church, I am actually saying the same thing, from another point of view. This formula means that the Eucharist binds all men together, and not just with one another, but with Christ; in this way it makes them "Church". At the same time the formula describes the fundamental constitution of the Church: the Church exists in Eucharistic communities. The Church's Mass is her constitution, because the Church is, in essence, a Mass (sent out: "missa"), a service of God, and therefore a service of man and a service for the transformation of the world.
The Mass is the Church's form, that means that through it she develops an entirely original relationship that exists nowhere else, a relationship of multiplicity and of unity. In each celebration of the Eucharist, the Lord is really present. He is risen and dies no more. He can no longer be divided into different parts. He always gives Himself completely and entirely. This is why the Council states: "This Church of Christ is truly present in all legitimate local communities of the faithful which, united with their pastors, are themselves called Churches in the New Testament. For in their locality these are the new People called by God, in the Holy Spirit and with great trust (cf. 1 Thes. 1,5).... In these communities, though frequently small and poor, or living in the diaspora, Christ is present, and in virtue of His power there is brought together one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church" (Lumen Gentium, n. 26). This means that the ecclesiology of local Churches derives from the formulation of the Eucharistic ecclesiology. This is a typical feature of Vatican II that presents the internal and sacramental foundation of the doctrine of collegiality about which we will speak later.
For a correct understanding of the Council's teaching, we must first look more closely at what exactly it said. Vatican II was aware of the concerns of both Orthodox and Protestant theology and integrated them into a more ample Catholic understanding. In Orthodox theology the idea of Eucharistic ecclesiology was first expressed by exiled Russian theologians in opposition to the pretensions of Roman centralism. They affirmed that insofar as it possesses Christ entirely, every Eucharistic community is already, in se, the Church. Consequently, external unity with other communities is not a constitutive element of the Church.
Therefore, they concluded that unity with Rome is not a constitutive element of the Church. Such a unity would be a beautiful thing since it would represent the fullness of Christ to the external world, but it is not essential since nothing would be added to the totality of Christ. The Protestant understanding of the Church was moving in the same direction. Luther could no longer recognize the Spirit of Christ in the universal Church; he directly took that Church to be an instrument of the anti-Christ. Nor could he see the Protestant State Churches of the Reformation as Churches in the proper sense of the word. They were only social, political entities necessary for specific purposes and dependent on political powers—nothing more. According to Luther the Church existed in the community. Only the assembly that listens to the Word of God in a specific place is the Church. He replaced the word "Church" with "community" (Gemeinde). Church became a negative concept.
If we go back now to the Council text certain nuances become evident. The text does not simply say, "The Church is entirely present in each community that celebrates the Eucharist", rather it states: "This Church of Christ is truly present in all legitimate local communities of the faithful which, united with their pastors, are themselves called Churches". Two elements here are of great importance: to be a Church the community must be "legitimate"; they are legitimate when they are "united with their pastors". What does this mean? In the first place, no one can make a Church by himself. A group cannot simply get together, read the New Testament and declare: "At present we are the Church because the Lord is present wherever two or three are gathered in His name". The element of "receiving" belongs essentially to the Church, just as faith comes from "hearing" and is not the result of one's decision or reflection. Faith is a converging with something I could neither imagine nor produce on my own; faith has to come to meet me. We call the structure of this encounter, a "Sacrament". It is part of the fundamental form of a sacrament that it be received and not self-administered. No one can baptize himself. No one can ordain himself. No one can forgive his own sins. Perfect repentance cannot remain something interior—of its essence it demands the form of encounter of the Sacrament. This too is a result of a sacrament's fundamental structure as an encounter [with Christ]. For this reason communion with oneself is not just an infraction of the external provisions of Canon Law, but it is an attack on the innermost nature of a sacrament. That a priest can administer this unique sacrament, and only this sacrament, to himself is part of the mysterium tremendum in which the Eucharist involves him. In the Eucharist, the priest acts "in persona Christi", in the person of Christ [the Head]; at the same time he represents Christ while remaining a sinner who lives completely by accepting Christ's Gift.
One cannot make the Church but only receive her; one receives her from where she already is, where she is really present: the sacramental community of Christ's Body moving through history. It will help us to understand this difficult concept if we add something: "legitimate communities". Christ is everywhere whole. This is the first important formulation of the Council in union with our Orthodox brothers. At the same time Christ is everywhere only one, so I can possess the one Lord only in the unity that He is, in the unity of all those who are also His Body and who through the Eucharist must evermore become it. Therefore, the reciprocal unity of all those communities who celebrate the Eucharist is not something external added to Eucharistic ecclesiology, but rather its internal condition: in unity here is the One. This is why the Council recalls the proper responsibility of communities, but excludes any self-sufficiency. The Council develops an ecclesiology in which being Catholic, namely being in communion with believers in all places and in all times, is not simply an external element of an organizational form, it represents grace coming from within and is at the same time a visible sign of the grace of the Lord who alone can create unity by breaching countless boundaries.
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NEW EVANGELISATION: FRS VACLAV HALIK & ROBERT BARRON and G. K. CHESTERTON, PROPHET OF PARADOX
Theologian of paradox: Reflections on Tomas Halik
We Christians everywhere are still in the Easter season, celebrating the central event of our faith - the resurrection of Christ.
The Czech Catholic priest Tomas Halik, in his latest book Night of the Confessor: Christian Faith in an Age of Uncertainty, says the Easter story can be read in one of two ways. On one hand, it can read quote simply as a drama in two acts in temporal succession: the passion and death of Jesus followed by his resurrection. Alternatively, it can be read as a drama in one act "in which both versions of the story take place at the same time." The latter is his preference, and hence:
"a great deal within ourselves, within the Church, within our faith, and within our certainties has to die off, to be crucified, in order to make room for the Resurrected one."
This single-act drama of death and resurrection resonates with the deep and abiding paradox of human existence, resurrection being a reinterpretation of death and "not its subsequent happy outcome," the paradox of victory through an absurd defeat.
For Halik, the believer, with hope rather than mere optimism, is able to enter into the Jesus story "and in the light of it to understand and live one's life afresh, to be capable of bearing its paradoxical character, and not to fear the paradoxes that life presents."
All human beings live with paradox. Some, like Halik, believe they can wrestle more authentically with the paradoxes of life as members of a community of faith, even one that takes seriously ideas of tradition and authority, as well as individual conscience and cultural authenticity - being bound, in other words, to membership of a hierarchical Church rather than being adrift as an isolated self-determining individual.
In July last year, I joined Tomas Halik in conversation for Radio National's Encounter program. He is urbane, well educated and very well connected, often being in the right place at the right time.
For example, he recalled being with Pope John Paul II the day before the Berlin Wall fell. The Pope turned away from the television and said, "This is the end of communism, and you must be prepared, it will come very soon." Halik was on sufficiently good terms with the Polish pontiff to joke, "Holy Father, excuse me, I don't believe that papal infallibility works in the political affairs. I think there will be some five years of perestroika in our country." John Paul II thought differently: "No, no, you must be prepared, it will come very soon." It came in ten days.
Halik was also a close friend of Vaclav Havel and helped to orchestrate the official invitation for John Paul to visit their home country, which was "regarded, on the basis of census returns, as the most atheistic country not only of the European Union but possibly of the entire planet." He then spent a month with the Pope as he prepared for his first visit to the post-Communist world.
Halik, by training a psychotherapist, knows more than his prayers. Night of the Confessor is a collection of essays from Halik's annual retreat which he makes at a remote hermitage with time for reflection, contemplation and amusement. He confesses, "Self-mockery is something I practice all the time, and I have often cast an ironic gaze on this 'playing the hermit' that I do every summer." As a globe-trotting lecturer and active Czech citizen he says:
"It is necessary for us Christians to learn contemplation once more: the art of inner silence, in which God will be able to speak to us through our own lives and His unique events."
It is immediately apparent that Halik is not one for religious optimism and pious answers. In fact, he finds hope in the crises of religion which provide "enormous windows of opportunity opened to us by God."
Hence, he writes neither for those certain in their faith nor for those certain in their antipathy or indifference to faith. His intended audience is neither the Pell cheer squad nor the Dawkins acolytes. He reaches out to those who find kernels of truth and seeds of doubt in both. He imagines the reader who is "prepared to suspend for the time being the moment of agreement or disagreement."
Halik thus makes his appeal both to believers and non-believers, who find themselves perplexed and tantalized by the mystery and paradox of life. He often recalls Oskar Pfister's response to Freud's question as to whether a Christian could be tolerant of atheism:
"When I reflect that you are much better and deeper than your disbelief, and that I am much worse and more superficial than my faith, I conclude that the abyss between us cannot yawn so grimly."
It is telling that, although he was a close friend of John Paul II, Halik does not have much time for the worldviews of most of his fellow priests and bishops. He says he hates attending clergy conferences - seeing them as a form of penance - largely because he sees his fellow attendees as old, tired and stale.
He sees plenty wrong with the institutional church but he is no iconoclast. He sees the Church as "a community of the shaken" rather than a collection of people "sharing en masse an unproblematised tradition that is accepted as a matter of course." Acknowledging the polarized nature of the Church, he cannot identify with either pole.
"Although I am in favour of calm and sober discussion of the issues raised by groups of liberal Catholics and I believe that on certain matters they are right, I radically oppose the view that democratization and liberalization of the structures, discipline, and certain areas of moral teaching of the Church will usher in a new springtime of Christianity and avert the crisis of the Church."
Following such a course, he believes the Church would lose its distinctiveness and "gradually dissolve in the limitless pap of postmodern society and would have nothing to offer." But neither does he want the Church to "turn into a stale sect of backward looking fuddy-duddies and oddballs." In a slightly patronising manner, he admits to great sympathy
"with those believers who treat the institutional aspects of the Church - the powers that be - in the way that mature adults treat their aging parents; such a relationship brings more freedom but entails more responsibility."
Some of us watching events like the Vatican's treatment of Bishop William Morris in Australia and now the nuns in the United States can see room for more due process, natural justice and transparency, if not democratization, in a Church committed to the dignity of all.
Having been the general secretary to the Czech Conference of Bishops, Halik knows what he is talking about when he considers the state of the institutional church:
"Viewed overall, the state of the Church is not too encouraging. In the space of a single generation, the deepening dearth of priests will lead to the collapse of the entire structure of parish administration, and I cannot see sufficient courage or creativity among those who have assumed responsibility for running the Church as an institution to find some real alternatives or at least to systematically prepare the community of believers for a situation in which they will soon have to live their faith without support of many things that the Church has regarded for centuries as essential and matter of course."
And so he warns:
"We must not allow ourselves to be drawn into the murky waters of cynicism, passivity, and bitterness. However, nor must we don the rosy spectacles of illusory optimism."
Halik's self-described "favourite theologian" is Nicholas Lash from Cambridge University (apparently, they love catching up over a whisky). One of his essays follows the contours of Lash's book Holiness, Speech and Silence in which he speaks of the rabbit on the violin:
"If you come across a rabbit playing Mozart on the violin, you can bet your bottom dollar that the rabbit is acting supernaturally. Rabbits have not got it in them to play the violin. Moreover, things being the way they are with human sinfulness, if you come across human beings acting with consistent kindness, selflessness, and generosity, the same assumption is in order."
At home with paradox, Halik does not only seek to carve out a private domain for religious communities outside the free and secular public square. He thinks religious citizens make a real contribution to the common good of society. So he claims:
"The oft repeated assertion that Christianity benefits from persecution is true only to a certain extent; when the Church is squeezed out of public life for too long, there tend to be negative consequences for society as a whole."
He even thinks religion can be good for atheists, claiming that atheism suffered in Czechoslovakia
"due to the lack of free and objective discussion about religion. It lacked the requisite self-reflection that can come only from a dialogue of partnership."
While Halik sees the Church as a community that can instil a person's original, untested, unreflective faith, he also regards it as a privileged space in which those whose original faith has been shaken can arrive at a "second-wind faith" - a faith that is at home with paradox, engaged with the world, and accepting of the inevitable shortcomings of the Church.
Halik is not one for the certainties of the Catechism or the latest Vatican declaration. The certainty of doctrine and submissiveness to religious authority are no substitute for facing the hard reality of true religious experience. This well-connected cleric in good Vatican standing proclaims:
"The religion that is now disappearing has tried to eliminate paradoxes from our experience of reality; the faith we are maturing toward, a paschal faith, teaches us to live with paradoxes."
Tomas Halik has learned how to live with paradox, and he writes with a mature sense of hope. He is one confessor worth attending to, by day and by night.
Father Frank Brennan SJ is professor of law at the Public Policy Institute, Australian Catholic University and adjunct professor at the College of Law and the National Centre for Indigenous Studies, Australian National University.
THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY
by G. K. Chesterton
(click the title to listen)
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Why I Believe in Christianity
by G.K. CHESTERTON
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I mean no disrespect to Mr. Blatchford in saying that our difficulty very largely lies in the fact that he, like masses of clever people nowadays, does not understand what theology is. To make mistakes in a science is one thing, to mistake its nature another. And as I read God and My Neighbour, the conviction gradually dawns on me that he thinks theology is the study of whether a lot of tales about God told in the Bible are historically demonstrable. This is as if he were trying to prove to a man that Socialism was sound Political Economy, and began to realise half-way through that the man thought that Political Economy meant the study of whether politicians were economical.
It is very hard to explain briefly the nature of a whole living study; it would be just as hard to explain politics or ethics. For the more a thing is huge and obvious and stares one in the face, the harder it is to define. Anybody can define conchology. Nobody can define morals.
Nevertheless it falls to us to make some attempt to explain this religious philosophy which was, and will be again, the study of the highest intellects and the foundation of the strongest nations, but which our little civilisation has for a while forgotten, just as it has forgotten how to dance and how to dress itself decently. I will try and – explain why I think a religious philosophy necessary and why I think Christianity the best religious philosophy. But before I do so I want you to bear in mind two historical facts. I do not ask you to draw my deduction from them or any deduction from them. I ask you to remember them as mere facts throughout the discussion.
1. Christianity arose and spread in a very cultured and very cynical world -in a very modern world. Lucretius was as much a materialist as Haeckel, and a much more persuasive writer. The Roman world had read <God and My Neighbour>, and in a weary sort of way thought it quite true. It is worth noting that religions almost always do arise out of these sceptical civilisations. A recent book on the PreMohammedan literature of Arabia describes a life entirely polished and luxurious. It was so with Buddha, born in the purple of an ancient civilisation. It was so with Puritanism in England and the Catholic Revival in France and Italy, both of which were born out of the rationalism of the Renaissance. It is so to-day; it is always so. Go to the two most modern and free-thinking centres, Paris and America, and you will find them full of devils and angels, of old mysteries and new prophets. Rationalism is fighting for its life against the young and vigorous superstitions.
2. Christianity, which is a very mystical religion, has nevertheless been the religion of the most practical section of mankind. It has far more paradoxes than the Eastern philosophies, but it also builds far better roads.
The Moslem has a pure and logical conception of God, the one Monistic Allah. But he remains a barbarian in Europe, and the grass will not grow where he sets his foot. The Christian has a Triune God, “a tangled trinity,” which seems a mere capricious contradiction in terms. But in action he bestrides the earth, and even the cleverest Eastern can only fight him by imitating him first. The East has logic and lives on rice. Christendom has mysteries-and motor cars. Never mind, as I say, about the inference, let us register the fact.
Now with these two things in mind let me try and explain what Christian theology is.
Complete Agnosticism is the obvious attitude for man. We are all Agnostics until we discover that Agnosticism will not work. Then we adopt some philosophy, Mr. Blatchford’s or mine or some others, for of course Mr. Blatchford is no more an Agnostic than I am. The Agnostic would say that he did not know whether man was responsible for his sins. Mr. Blatchford says that he knows that man is not.
Here we have the seed of the whole huge tree of dogma. Why does Mr. Blatchford go beyond Agnosticism and assert that there is certainly no free will? <Because he cannot run his scheme of morals without asserting that there is no free will>. He wishes no man to be blamed for sin. Therefore he has to make his disciples quite certain that God did not make them free and therefore blamable. No wild Christian doubt must flit through the mind of the Determinist. No demon must whisper to him in some hour of anger that perhaps the company promoter was responsible for swindling him into the workhouse. No sudden scepticism must suggest to him that perhaps the schoolmaster was blamable for flogging a little boy to death. The Determinist faith must be held firmly, or else certainly the weakness of human nature will lead men to be angered when they are slandered and kick back when they are kicked. In short, free will seems at first sight to belong to the Unknowable. Yet Mr. Blatchford cannot preach what seems to him common charity without asserting one dogma about it. And I cannot preach what seems to me common honesty without asserting another.
Here is the failure of Agnosticism. That our every-day view of the things we do (in the common sense) know, actually depends upon our view of the things we do not (in the common sense) know. It is all very well to tell a man, as the Agnostics do, to “cultivate his garden.” But suppose a man ignores everything outside his garden, and among them ignores the sun and the rain?
This is the real fact. You cannot live without dogmas about these things. You cannot act for twenty-four hours without deciding either to hold people responsible or not to hold them responsible. Theology is a product far more practical than chemistry.
Some Determinists fancy that Christianity invented a dogma like free will for fun -a mere contradiction. This is absurd. You have the contradiction whatever you are. Determinists tell me, with a degree of truth, that Determinism makes no difference to daily life. That means – that although the Determinist knows men have no free will, yet he goes on treating them as if they had.
The difference then is very simple. The Christian puts the contradiction into his philosophy. The Determinist puts it into his daily habits. The Christian states as an avowed mystery what the Determinist calls nonsense. The Determinist has the same nonsense for breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper every day of his life.
The Christian, I repeat, puts the mystery into his philosophy. That mystery by its darkness enlightens all things. Once grant him that, and life is life, and bread is bread, and cheese is cheese: he can laugh and fight. The Determinist makes the matter of the will logical and lucid: and in the light of that lucidity all things are darkened, words have no meaning, actions no aim. He has made his philosophy a syllogism and himself a gibbering lunatic.
It is not a question between mysticism and rationality. It is a question between mysticism and madness. For mysticism, and mysticism alone, has kept men sane from the beginning of the world. All the straight roads of logic lead to some Bedlam, to Anarchism or to passive obedience, to treating the universe as a clockwork of matter or else as a delusion of mind. It is only the Mystic, the man who accepts the contradictions, who can laugh and walk easily through the world.
Are you surprised that the same civilisation which believed in the Trinity discovered steam?All the great Christian doctrines are of this kind. Look at them carefully and fairly for yourselves. I have only space for two examples. The first is the Christian idea of God. Just as we have all been Agnostics so we have all been Pantheists. In the godhood of youth it seems so easy to say, “Why cannot a man see God in a bird flying and be content?” But then comes a time when we go on and say, “If God is in the birds, let us be not only as beautiful as the birds; let us be as cruel as the birds; let us live the mad, red life of nature.” And something that is wholesome in us resists and says, “My friend, you are going mad.”
Then comes the other side and we say: “The birds are hateful, the flowers are shameful. I will give no praise to so base an universe.” And the wholesome thing in us says: “My friend, you are going mad.”
Then comes a fantastic thing and says to us: “You are right to enjoy the birds, but wicked to copy them. There is a good thing behind all these things, yet all these things are lower than you. The Universe is right: but the World is wicked. The thing behind all is not cruel, like a bird: but good, like a man.” And the wholesome thing in us says. “I have found the high road.”
Now when Christianity came, the ancient world had just reached this dilemma. It heard the Voice of Nature-Worship crying, “All natural things are good. War is as healthy as he flowers. Lust is as clean as the stars.” And it heard also the cry of the hopeless Stoics and Idealists: “The flowers are at war: the stars are unclean: nothing but man’s conscience is right and that is utterly defeated.”
Both views were consistent, philosophical and exalted: their only disadvantage was that the first leads logically to murder and the second to suicide. After an agony of thought the world saw the sane path between the two. It was the Christian God. He made Nature but He was Man.
Lastly, there is a word to be said about the Fall. It can only be a word, and it is this. Without the doctrine of the Fall all idea of progress is unmeaning. Mr. Blatchford says that there was not a Fall but a gradual rise. But the very word “rise” implies that you know toward what you are rising. Unless there is a standard you cannot tell whether you are rising or falling. But the main point is that the Fall like every other large path of Christianity is embodied in the common language talked on the top of an omnibus. Anybody might say, “Very few men are really Manly.” Nobody would say, “Very few whales are really whaley.”
If you wanted to dissuade a man from drinking his tenth whisky you would slap him on the back and say, “Be a man.” No one who wished to dissuade a crocodile from eating his tenth explorer would slap it on the back and say, “Be a crocodile.” For we have no notion of a perfect crocodile; no allegory of a whale expelled from his whaley Eden. If a whale came up to us and said: “I am a new kind of whale; I have abandoned whalebone,” we should not trouble. But if a man came up to us (as many will soon come up to us) to say, “I am a new kind of man. I am the super-man. I have abandoned mercy and justice”; we should answer, “Doubtless you are new, but you are not nearer to the perfect man, for he has been already in the mind of God. We have fallen with Adam and we shall rise with Christ; but we would rather fall with Satan than rise with you.”
Reprinted in The Religious Doubts of Democracy (1904) and “The Blatchford Controversies” (in The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, Vol. 1)
Why I Am A Catholic
by G.K. CHESTERTON
The difficulty of explaining “why I am a Catholic” is that there are ten thousand reasons all amounting to one reason: that Catholicism is true. I could fill all my space with separate sentences each beginning with the words, “It is the only thing that…” As, for instance, (1) It is the only thing that really prevents a sin from being a secret. (2) It is the only thing in which the superior cannot be superior; in the sense of supercilious. (3) It is the only thing that frees a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age. (4) It is the only thing that talks as if it were the truth; as if it were a real messenger refusing to tamper with a real message. (5) It is the only type of Christianity that really contains every type of man; even the respectable man. (6) It is the only large attempt to change the world from the inside; working through wills and not laws; and so on.
Or I might treat the matter personally and describe my own conversion; but I happen to have a strong feeling that this method makes the business look much smaller than it really is. Numbers of much better men have been sincerely converted to much worse religions. I would much prefer to attempt to say here of the Catholic Church precisely the things that cannot be said even of its very respectable rivals. In short, I would say chiefly of the Catholic Church that it is catholic. I would rather try to suggest that it is not only larger than me, but larger than anything in the world; that it is indeed larger than the world. But since in this short space I can only take a section, I will consider it in its capacity of a guardian of the truth.
The other day a well-known writer, otherwise quite well-informed, said that the Catholic Church is always the enemy of new ideas. It probably did not occur to him that his own remark was not exactly in the nature of a new idea. It is one of the notions that Catholics have to be continually refuting, because it is such a very old idea. Indeed, those who complain that Catholicism cannot say anything new, seldom think it necessary to say anything new about Catholicism. As a matter of fact, a real study of history will show it to be curiously contrary to the fact. In so far as the ideas really are ideas, and in so far as any such ideas can be new, Catholics have continually suffered through supporting them when they were really new; when they were much too new to find any other support. The Catholic was not only first in the field but alone in the field; and there was as yet nobody to understand what he had found there.
Thus, for instance, nearly two hundred years before the Declaration of Independence and the French Revolution, in an age devoted to the pride and praise of princes, Cardinal Bellarmine and Suarez the Spaniard laid down lucidly the whole theory of real democracy. But in that age of Divine Right they only produced the impression of being sophistical and sanguinary Jesuits, creeping about with daggers to effect the murder of kings. So, again, the Casuists of the Catholic schools said all that can really be said for the problem plays and problem novels of our own time, two hundred years before they were written. They said that there really are problems of moral conduct; but they had the misfortune to say it two hundred years too soon. In a time of tub-thumping fanaticism and free and easy vituperation, they merely got themselves called liars and shufflers for being psychologists before psychology was the fashion. It would be easy to give any number of other examples down to the present day, and the case of ideas that are still too new to be understood. There are passages in Pope Leo’s Encyclical on Labor [also known as Rerum Novarum], released in 1891] which are only now beginning to be used as hints for social movements much newer than socialism. And when Mr. Belloc wrote about the Servile State, he advanced an economic theory so original that hardly anybody has yet realized what it is. A few centuries hence, other people will probably repeat it, and repeat it wrong. And then, if Catholics object, their protest will be easily explained by the well-known fact that Catholics never care for new ideas.
Nevertheless, the man who made that remark about Catholics meant something; and it is only fair to him to understand it rather more clearly than he stated it. What he meant was that, in the modern world, the Catholic Church is in fact the enemy of many influential fashions; most of which still claim to be new, though many of them are beginning to be a little stale. In other words, in so far as he meant that the Church often attacks what the world at any given moment supports, he was perfectly right . The Church does often set herself against the fashion of this world that passes away; and she has experience enough to know how very rapidly it does pass away. But to understand exactly what is involved, it is necessary to take a rather larger view and consider the ultimate nature of the ideas in question, to consider, so to speak, the idea of the idea.
Nine out of ten of what we call new ideas are simply old mistakes. The Catholic Church has for one of her chief duties that of preventing people from making those old mistakes; from making them over and over again forever, as people always do if they are left to themselves. The truth about the Catholic attitude towards heresy, or as some would say, towards liberty, can best be expressed perhaps by the metaphor of a map. The Catholic Church carries a sort of map of the mind which looks like the map of a maze, but which is in fact a guide to the maze. It has been compiled from knowledge which, even considered as human knowledge, is quite without any human parallel.
There is no other case of one continuous intelligent institution that has been thinking about thinking for two thousand years. Its experience naturally covers nearly all experiences; and especially nearly all errors. The result is a map in which all the blind alleys and bad roads are clearly marked, all the ways that have been shown to be worthless by the best of all evidence: the evidence of those who have gone down them.
On this map of the mind the errors are marked as exceptions. The greater part of it consists of playgrounds and happy hunting-fields, where the mind may have as much liberty as it likes; not to mention any number of intellectual battle-fields in which the battle is indefinitely open and undecided. But it does definitely take the responsibility of marking certain roads as leading nowhere or leading to destruction, to a blank wall, or a sheer precipice. By this means, it does prevent men from wasting their time or losing their lives upon paths that have been found futile or disastrous again and again in the past, but which might otherwise entrap travelers again and again in the future. The Church does make herself responsible for warning her people against these; and upon these the real issue of the case depends. She does dogmatically defend humanity from its worst foes, those hoary and horrible and devouring monsters of the old mistakes. Now all these false issues have a way of looking quite fresh, especially to a fresh generation. Their first statement always sounds harmless and plausible. I will give only two examples. It sounds harmless to say, as most modern people have said: “Actions are only wrong if they are bad for society.” Follow it out, and sooner or later you will have the inhumanity of a hive or a heathen city, establishing slavery as the cheapest and most certain means of production, torturing the slaves for evidence because the individual is nothing to the State, declaring that an innocent man must die for the people, as did the murderers of Christ. Then, perhaps, you will go back to Catholic definitions, and find that the Church, while she also says it is our duty to work for society, says other things also which forbid individual injustice. Or again, it sounds quite pious to say, “Our moral conflict should end with a victory of the spiritual over the material.” Follow it out, and you may end in the madness of the Manicheans, saying that a suicide is good because it is a sacrifice, that a sexual perversion is good because it produces no life, that the devil made the sun and moon because they are material. Then you may begin to guess why Catholicism insists that there are evil spirits as well as good; and that materials also may be sacred, as in the Incarnation or the Mass, in the sacrament of marriage or the resurrection of the body.
Now there is no other corporate mind in the world that is thus on the watch to prevent minds from going wrong. The policeman comes too late, when he tries to prevent men from going wrong. The doctor comes too late, for he only comes to lock up a madman, not to advise a sane man on how not to go mad. And all other sects and schools are inadequate for the purpose. This is not because each of them may not contain a truth, but precisely because each of them does contain a truth; and is content to contain a truth. None of the others really pretends to contain the truth. None of the others, that is, really pretends to be looking out in all directions at once. The Church is not merely armed against the heresies of the past or even of the present, but equally against those of the future, that may be the exact opposite of those of the present. Catholicism is not ritualism; it may in the future be fighting some sort of superstitious and idolatrous exaggeration of ritual. Catholicism is not asceticism; it has again and again in the past repressed fanatical and cruel exaggerations of asceticism. Catholicism is not mere mysticism; it is even now defending human reason against the mere mysticism of the Pragmatists. Thus, when the world went Puritan in the seventeenth century, the Church was charged with pushing charity to the point of sophistry, with making everything easy with the laxity of the confessional. Now that the world is not going Puritan but Pagan, it is the Church that is everywhere protesting against a Pagan laxity in dress or manners. It is doing what the Puritans wanted done when it is really wanted. In all probability, all that is best in Protestantism will only survive in Catholicism; and in that sense all Catholics will still be Puritans when all Puritans are Pagans.
Thus, for instance, Catholicism, in a sense little understood, stands outside a quarrel like that of Darwinism at Dayton. It stands outside it because it stands all around it, as a house stands all around two incongruous pieces of furniture. It is no sectarian boast to say it is before and after and beyond all these things in all directions. It is impartial in a fight between the Fundamentalist and the theory of the Origin of Species, because it goes back to an origin before that Origin; because it is more fundamental than Fundamentalism. It knows where the Bible came from. It also knows where most of the theories of Evolution go to. It knows there were many other Gospels besides the Four Gospels, and that the others were only eliminated by the authority of the Catholic Church. It knows there are many other evolutionary theories besides the Darwinian theory; and that the latter is quite likely to be eliminated by later science. It does not, in the conventional phrase, accept the conclusions of science, for the simple reason that science has not concluded. To conclude is to shut up; and the man of science is not at all likely to shut up. It does not, in the conventional phrase, believe what the Bible says, for the simple reason that the Bible does not say anything. You cannot put a book in the witness-box and ask it what it really means. The Fundamentalist controversy itself destroys Fundamentalism. The Bible by itself cannot be a basis of agreement when it is a cause of disagreement; it cannot be the common ground of Christians when some take it allegorically and some literally. The Catholic refers it to something that can say something, to the living, consistent, and continuous mind of which I have spoken; the highest mind of man guided by God.
Every moment increases for us the moral necessity for such an immortal mind. We must have something that will hold the four corners of the world still, while we make our social experiments or build our Utopias. For instance, we must have a final agreement, if only on the truism of human brotherhood, that will resist some reaction of human brutality. Nothing is more likely just now than that the corruption of representative government will lead to the rich breaking loose altogether, and trampling on all the traditions of equality with mere pagan pride. We must have the truisms everywhere recognized as true. We must prevent mere reaction and the dreary repetition of the old mistakes. We must make the intellectual world safe for democracy. But in the conditions of modern mental anarchy, neither that nor any other ideal is safe. just as Protestants appealed from priests to the Bible, and did not realize that the Bible also could be questioned, so republicans appealed from kings to the people, and did not realize that the people also could be defied. There is no end to the dissolution of ideas, the destruction of all tests of truth, that has become possible since men abandoned the attempt to keep a central and civilized Truth, to contain all truths and trace out and refute all errors. Since then, each group has taken one truth at a time and spent the time in turning it into a falsehood. We have had nothing but movements; or in other words, monomanias. But the Church is not a movement but a meeting-place; the trysting-place of all the truths in the world.
From Twelve Modern Apostles and Their Creeds (1926); reprinted in The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, Vol. 3 Ignatius Press, 1990
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