This year marks the 40^th anniversary of graduations from St. Francis of Assisi School.  And, let’s face it, 1967 was a different world from 2007.  In 1967, 65% of Catholics attended church on Sunday.   In 2007, 25% of Catholics participate at Sunday Mass.  In 1967, every teacher in St. Francis School was a religious sister of St. Joseph in full religious garb.  In 2007, all of our teachers are dedicated lay persons.  In 1967 opening a store on Sunday was illegal; now shopping on Sunday is almost a family pastime.  Then abortion was a crime; now abortion is a constitutionally protected civil right.  Same-sex marriage was an oxymoron forty years ago; now one New England state grants it legal status.  Nowadays tobacco is considered a scourge; but marijuana is being extolled by some as a blessing.  It is indeed a different world.

       But life is not all bleak in the first decade of the third millennium.  The graduating class of 1967 was thrilled to receive a new typewriter.  The graduating class of 2007 takes computers, cell phones, DVDs, text messaging and electronic games for granted.  Nowadays gall-bladders and kidney stones can be removed without a doctor even touching a knife.  The year after 1967 some American men would land on the moon; now in 2007 a woman is preparing this week to return to earth after having spent six months in space.  There is a lot for which these graduates can be grateful.

       The most significant transformation, however, that distinguishes the class of 1967 from the class of 2007 is the change from a tradition-oriented society to an individual-oriented society.  The class of 1967 inherited 2000 years of Christian tradition; in fact, they inherited 3500 years of the Judeo-Christian tradition.  Faithful attendance at Mass, the indissolubility of marriage; life from conception to natural death; the keeping of the Sabbath; the authority of the Church; the distinct roles of clergy and laity; a clear division between vice and virtue -- these traditions might not always have been observed perfectly in 1967; but when persons offended against them, they knew they were wrong; they still had a sense of tradition

       The graduates of 2007 are entering a world that almost has contempt for tradition; a world in which the supreme value is no longer the faith of our fathers but rather the choice of the individual; a world in which immediate secular values eclipse time-honored Christian principles; a world in which earthly fulfillment obscures the promise of heaven. 

       Forty years ago, while Church and state in the USA were certainly separate, they did largely share common values left over from our American Protestant roots.  Our laws somewhat protected Sundays and family and marriage and unborn life.  Peoples’ choices were wisely limited.  Today’s graduates, on the other hand, will enter a world of unparalleled and unlimited choices.  Many of these choices, especially in the fields of education, employment, friendships and residence are to be welcomed as ennobling and enabling.  But without the knowledge and the support of two thousands years of Christian tradition many of today’s choices will not be recognized as the vain effort, the hollow undertaking, the dead end street they truly are.

       Some words of Moses, spoken 3500 years ago, underline the value of a strong faith tradition:  “For this command that I enjoin on you today is not too mysterious and remote for you.  It is not up in the sky, that you should say, ‘Who will go up in the sky to get it for us and tell us of it, that we may carry it out?’  Nor is it across the sea, that you should say, ‘Who will cross the sea to get it for us and tell us of it, that we may carry it out?’ No, it is something very near to you, already in your mouths and in your hearts; you have only to carry it out.”  The greatest gift the graduates of yesteryear, the older members of society, can confer upon the graduates of today, here at St. Francis and elsewhere, is a strong  appreciation for our Catholic faith tradition, our Catholic way of life, our Catholic culture.       COMPLETE

       The Most Reverend Donald W. Trautman, Bishop of Erie, PA, has taken great exception to the proposed new translation of the Mass into English.  In a recent article in America Magazine, his Excellency quoted the following Advent prayer as an example of the new rendering of the text:  “Accept, O Lord, these gifts, and by your power change them into the sacrament of salvation, in which the prefiguring sacrifices of the Fathers have an end and the true Lamb is offered, he who was born ineffably of the inviolate Virgin.”  Apparently references to the prefiguring sacrifices, Christ’s ineffable birth and Mary’s inviolate virginity stuck on the prelate’s tongue.  What will John and Mary Catholic make of these phrases, he asks.  The bishop takes exception to other phrases employed by the English translators:  God, who suffused blessed John with the spirit of mercy…Cyril, an unvanquished champion of the divine motherhood… consubstantial to the Father…incarnate of the Virgin Mary…sullied…unfeigned...gibbet…wrought…thwart.  The bishop points out that elsewhere in the liturgical translations the priest is provided with a sentence eleven lines long and a phrase totaling fifty-six words. 

       Translators are facing two separate challenges: one committee is translating the liturgy; another committee is translating the Bible.  The work of neither is appreciated.  English speaking priests, deacons and lectors can sympathize with the bishop’s remarks.  The Scriptural translations into English have been particularly lamentable – no so much because of vocabulary but because of style.  And rare is the priest who might choose an alternative collect for a Sunday Mass.  They are a glossary of mixed metaphors.  Yet, with all due respect for the episcopal office, the bishop from Erie seems to be calling for a further dumbing down of America’s liturgical life.  The Church in the United States has already gone through its burlap banner and polyester vestment stage.  Earthen goblets substituting for chalices and ceramic candy dishes passed off as ciboria have happily seen their day.  Kum-Bye-A and Michael Rowed His Boat are an embarrassment better forgotten.  The American clergy have been relentless in bringing the liturgy down to the level of the people and the result is a drop of 40% Mass attendance in one generation.

       A celebrant does not have to challenge his congregation with obfuscating verbiage.  But worshippers should realize that they are in church – not at the water cooler or inside a convenience store.  A word or two might be unfamiliar the first time they hear it, but how can the Church promote an authentic air of mystery, of the supernatural, of the transcendent, if the Mass never surpasses the level of a backyard picnic?  It is precisely because the Church brought the Mass down to the level of the people that the people stopped going to Mass.  Why go to Mass if the Mass is just business as usual?  The ambiance, the decorum, the manner and the utterances at Mass should all speak powerfully of another world.  The ceremonies of the Mass should be elevating if they are truly to be enlightening. 

       A priest recently shared a quote from the writings of President John Adams which notes perfectly the supernatural atmosphere which should permeate a Catholic Church and a Catholic Mass:  “Went in the Afternoon to the Romish Chappell and heard a good discourse upon the Duty of Parents to their Children, founded in justice and Charity. The Scenery and the Musick is so callculated to take in Mankind that I wonder the Reformation ever succeeded. The Paintings, the Bells, the Candles, the Gold and Silver. Our Saviour on the Cross, over the Altar, at full Length, and all his Wounds a bleeding. The Chanting is exquisitely soft and sweet.”  This Roman liturgy apparently touched Adam’s heart and mind because it employed the finest elements that the late eighteenth century had to offer.  And, apart from the sermon, not an intelligible word was uttered.  Certainly the Mass should not be mere smoke and mirrors.  But it should lead the worshipper to a greater appreciation of that other world, the Kingdom of God, the heavenly Jerusalem, the eternal life which Christ’s death and resurrection restored to the worshipper.  Indeed, some things are ineffable: eternity, grace and God among them.  The Mass should celebrate this.   COMPLETE

       Perhaps unwittingly, on second thought, almost certainly unwittingly, RI Attorney General Lynch has expressed the essence of Western Civilization’s most current and most critical ethical crisis.   In an op-ed piece for the Providence Journal, the state’s chief attorney wrote that we are all free “to define our own morals.”  Whether Attorney Lynch knew it or not, he was echoing the equally fateful words of the United States Supreme Court on whose behalf Justice Kennedy wrote, “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”  The lawyer and the justice are sadly reflecting the present secular view of society which understands mankind to be an countless number of isolated individuals, determining their own relationship with one another and, more provocatively, determining their own relationship with God – or worse still, denigrating their own relationship with one another and denying their relationship with God.   John Donne notwithstanding, every man becomes an island, isolated from neighbor, from Western civilization, from the Judaeo-Christian tradition and, especially, from God himself.

       Some might argue that Attorney Lynch and Justice Kennedy may not introduce God and certainly not the Judaeo-Christian tradition into their legal decisions given the pluralistic society found in the USA today.  But this is precisely the point.  Mankind has talked itself or decreed itself into a Godless society.  Perhaps not officially but nonetheless practically, the USA is an atheistic culture.  Mottoes on our coins, invocations at public meetings, time off on Good Friday and Christmas, and crosses in military cemeteries might endure, but in critical, ethical decisions eternal wisdom has no place.  As Attorney Lynch writes, we are all free “to define our own morals.”

       Reconciling the enduring Christian tradition with the diversity of the modern world is a task better left to the Pope than to The Quiet Corner.  Happily Benedict XVI is relentless in tackling this problem of moral relativism and secularity.  What The Quiet Corner can address, however, is how easily the average Catholic American can be deceived by this popular notion of moral freedom.  Morality is entirely up for grabs in today’s society.  The faith of our fathers, the Western consensus, the perennial philosophy, is seen as an infringement on liberty.  Modern America’s supreme value is not what is chosen but rather the act of choosing.  Choice, which is actually a means, has become an end in itself.  That a man may choose is more important than what he chooses.  Thus a man or a woman may choose absolutely to abort, to sodomize, to divorce, to cohabit, to experiment biologically, to terminate life, to ignore worship, publicly to curse God.  Yet even in this libertarian age, there are some curious inconsistencies.  A man may absolutely drive his girlfriend to an abortion mill – just as long as he wears a seatbelt while on the road.  A man and a woman are legally free to cohabitate – provided they recycle their cans and bottles.  A couple is free to skip church and go to Bickford’s for breakfast on Sunday morning – but they better not smoke while they’re in there.

        Clearly the state and the federal governments do not have any trouble making decisions for the common man if they are fashionable decisions – nowadays unfounded theories on stem cell research are accorded more respect than Divine Revelation. Again, so-called same-sex marriage, which provoked Attorney General Lynch’s words above, is a fashionable cause that has inexplicably become the darling of the media.  Such unions are absolutely without precedent in civilization.  But, like abortion, so-called same sex marriage celebrates the supreme right of the individual to stand apart, to fly in the face of tradition, to insult religion, to defy God, and to pervert marriage, the very basis of society, in the process.  In this light the Independent Man over the State House takes on a new meaning never intended by Roger Williams. 

       The secularist or moral relativist cannot admit of a higher power because then obedience, submission and duty would enter into the picture.  Mankind’s choices would be restricted.  Like Lucifer, the secularist must cry out loudly, “I will not serve!”   The Christian on the other hand recognizes that conformity to God’s Supreme Will is man’s noblest and most ennobling choice.              COMPLETE

       The word Limbo usually brings to mind the situation conjured up by medieval theologians to explain the eternal status of unbaptized infants.  When Europe was introduced to the Moslem world during the Crusades and later to the natives of the Western Hemisphere after Columbus, religious thinkers were hard pressed to explain the final condition of those who may have died without personal sins.  Yet there is another Limbo, the Limbo of the Fathers.  Again, theologians were presented with the virtuous lives of those many characters of the Old Testament, those good Jews like Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rabekah, Jacob and Rachael.  These patriarchs certainly did not deserve condemnation when they died; yet Jesus Christ had not yet died on the Cross for their salvation so they could not go to heaven.  The eternal gates were still closed, so to speak.  These blessed men and women, it is believed, awaited their redemption in a place of natural happiness, not seeing God face to face as they would in heaven, but rather living happily in hope of ultimate salvation and redemption.   The ancient Creeds bear witness to this belief when they testify that Jesus Christ “descended into hell” after his death, that Christ went to this nether world, this Limbo of the Fathers, to release the souls of those just Jews and pagans who were expecting deliverance.  The Limbo of the Fathers, like the Limbo of the Unbaptized, is a tribute to the seriousness with which our ancestors in the faith dealt with their beliefs.  Theirs was truly a “no loose ends” theology. 

       With all due respect, the fly in this theological ointment was no one less than the Blessed Virgin Mary.  If good Jews like Abraham and Sarah, Moses and Miriam, the Maccabee brothers, et al., had to wait for Jesus Christ to die on the Cross and rise from the dead to be released from the consequences of Original Sin, then how did Mary take advantage of Christ’s saving grace when she was immaculately conceived in the womb of St. Anne?  Christ had not even been born yet, let alone die and rise.  Or was Mary saved by someone other than her Son Jesus?

       Again the medieval theologians put their collective heads together and arrived at the inspiring notion of what they called “preveniant grace,” or what might be called anticipatory grace.  God the Father took advantage ahead of time of the saving grace that Christ would earn by his death on the Cross and graciously applied that saving grace in advance to Mary, rescuing her from the consequences of Original Sin, endowing her with sanctifying grace from the very first moment of her existence.  Mary never risked any time in Limbo of any sort; her entire existence from conception until she “completed her earthly journey,” as Pius XII happily phrased it, was lived in totally in the Divine Presence. 

       The Solemnity of the Assumption this year fortunately occurs midweek so American Catholics may celebrate with full enthusiasm this feast which is truly the logical and gracious result of Mary’s Immaculate Conception.  Since Mary was spared original sin, Mary should be spared the consequences of original sin.  Since no spiritual or moral corruption ever beset the soul of Mary, it is most appropriate that no bodily or physical corruption should ever blemish her flesh and bones.   The medieval theologians were not the only ones who shunned loose ends.  God the Father could be as neat and as systematic as Saint Albert the Great and Saint John Damascene ever were.   Pope Pius XII well noted that all of Mary’s great privileges were the result of God’s love of “harmony and order,” her one privilege building on the other. 

       The Father kept Mary’s soul intact at her conception, by preserving her from original sin.  The Father kept Mary’s virginity intact when she became the Mother of His Son, by engendering the child in her womb by the power of the Holy Spirit.  And now, through the Assumption, the Father keeps Mary’s physical body intact by welcoming her wholly and immediately into the fullness of heavenly beatitude.  The Father would not allow sin or decay or even a physical relationship to compromise Mary’s integrity as His unique spouse.  When God had the angel address her as “full of grace,” he really meant it.     COMPLETE

       Everyone’s cellar is no doubt filled with items that the homeowner put neatly away thinking that someday that lawn chair or bookcase or Tiffany chandelier might come in handy.  Picture frames seem especially to accumulate since who knows when one might have to replace some shattered glass with some wisely stored glass.  Finding myself in this circumstance recently, I fingered the surplus of old frames in the cellar and came a across a painted-over photograph signed by a Wallace Nutting.  I recalled the picture from my youth but had frankly lost track of its existence over the years.  When I entered Mr. Nutting’s name into Google, I discovered that he was a popular photographer at the beginning of the last century who recorded country scenes with his camera and then painted over the finished photograph with oil colors.  The result was a rather pleasant, muted, Impressionistic depiction of roadside America, everything the word bucolic might summon up.  Nutting’s scenes are not as all inclusive of detail as Currier and Ives’ prints were in the nineteen century; but neither are they as cloying as Thomas Kinkade’s offerings sold at shopping malls in this century.  Nutting’s are quiet, restful, peaceful rural episodes inviting the viewer to take a modest break from the work-a-day, citified world.

       Jesus Christ probably did not leave any paintings behind, but he did have a knowledge of country life as in this Sunday’s Gospel when he instructs his disciples to enter the Kingdom of God “through the narrow gate.”  Jesus contrasts the Kingdom on the other side of the “narrow gate” with the busy, hectic, sophisticated life of the many people he came to save.  Jesus’ anxious audience who are in danger of missing the Kingdom cite their frequent contacts with Jesus’ as their pathway to redemption.  “We ate and drank in your company and you taught in our streets,” the astonished but rejected listeners argue.  But Jesus reminds them that simply being in Jesus’ company is not enough.  True believers must retreat on occasion from the world of eating and drinking, from the world of talk and discussion, and enter through the “narrow gate” into the world of peace and quite, the world of recollection and meditation, the world of prayer and contemplation.

       In the countrified world of Jesus Christ, especially in rural Galilee, the narrow gate led not to the pastures where the animals would roam freely and need their master’s attention.  No, the narrow gate led to a flower garden where a believer could be alone with himself and with God.  A wide gate symbolized business as usual – farming, grazing, herding, shepherding.  The “narrow gate” represented a break from the pressures of the day, a moment of solitude and self-examination, a time to appreciate the graces of life, a time for prayer and for God.  The “narrow gate” led to a momentary Eden, a spiritual oasis away from life’s draining anxieties.

       Jesus was an activist in the finest sense of that word.  Jesus and his disciples trudged the roads of Palestine from Galilee to Judea, from Cana to Jerusalem, time and time again.  Christ encountered people in Nazareth, in Capernaum, in Jericho, in Samaria, and in the capital city.  He frequented the homes of Martha and Mary, of St. Peter, of Simon the Pharisee and many others.  He was daily in the temple precincts teaching and daily in the streets healing.  Yet it is also clear that Jesus entered often, indeed daily, through the “narrow gate” that allowed him intimate, personal access to God.   Jesus would steal away at night; he would trek up the mountain; he would shake off the crowds and sometimes even loose his disciples to enjoy the Divine Presence, drawing strength from the nearness of God.  Jesus was clearly a man of prayer, a man of quiet, a man found regularly on the far side of the “narrow gate.”

       In the second reading at Mass this Sunday, the author of Hebrews admits that the discipline of the spiritual life may seem at times daunting.  Believers are not always swept off their feet into the heights of prayer.  Life on the other side of the “narrow gate” can be a struggle.  “At the time, all discipline seems a cause not for joy but for pain, yet later it brings the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who are trained by it,” reads the letter to the Hebrews.  Yes, the discipline of regular prayer can be demanding.  But the fruits of sincere prayer can be, frankly, overwhelming.                         COMPLETE

       The new Wal-Mart on Silver Spring Street in Providence is very handy for anyone, like me, who is heading toward Woonsocket.  Route 146 is a minute from the superstore’s parking lot.  The other main attraction at this Wal-Mart is the availability of movies on DVD for a dollar each.  Most of the movies are action/adventure films probably made for cable TV with a lot of car chases and gun fights.  But lately older classical films have been offered for a buck.  “Meet John Doe” debuted in 1941 with Barbara Stanwyck and Gary Cooper taking the lead roles.  Somewhat akin to “It’s a Wonderful Life” featured on TV every Christmas, the movie exalts, in a folksy manner, the potential of the American common man in opposition to the Fascist dictatorships that had then seized Europe.  Gary Cooper, as John Doe, goes about the country preaching civility, cooperation and community involvement.  The nation responds and Doe becomes a hero.  Discouraged when he discovers that he was being used by higher-ups for political purposes, he arrives at city hall threatening to jump to his death as a protest against corruption in high places.  Needless to write, good triumphs over evil and Gary and Barbara conclude the film in a warm embrace. 

       “Meet John Doe” is not a religious movie in the way that “The Bells of St. Mary’s” or “Come to the Stable” are.  It is not at all churchy.  Nor is “Meet John Doe” a fully Christian movie.  There is nothing of revelation in it.  Nonetheless, the movie’s overriding theme of neighborliness and teamwork is thoroughly imbued with what T.S.Eliot labeled the “Christian myth.”  While the movie’s theme was utterly humanitarian, its trappings were astonishingly Christian.  John Doe’s initial speech that won the hearts of the nation developed at length Christ’s words on the mount: “…the meek shall inherit the earth.”  Corrupt politicians were compared to Pontius Pilate; John Doe’s complicity with the mighty was described as a sell out for “thirty pieces of silver.”  Choristers sang “Silent Night” through a snowy window.  A minister called not for a “moment of silence” but for a “moment of silent prayer.” But the ultimate Christian sermon was left to Barbara Stanwyck who convinced Gary Cooper not to jump off the tower of city hall by telling him that there was no need for him to die.  Without a hint of apology Miss Stanwyck reminded Gary Cooper that “the real John Doe died two thousand years ago,” and his good example has strengthened mankind ever since.  It mattered little that Gary Cooper’s John Doe was just a publicity stunt.  The spirit of “the real John Doe” was still guiding humanity and all Mr. Cooper did was to call attention to it.  His charade underlined basic Christian insights about human nature so his pretense was worth it – in Miss Stanwyck’s and the supporting cast’s opinion. 

       Audiences around this nation viewed this movie sixty-five years ago and most were able to catch all the Biblical references and take them in stride – let alone take offense at them.  The USA truly was a Christian nation in the sense that the trappings of Christianity were the framework within which citizens lived their lives.  True, some possibly visited their bookie every Friday after work, maybe some did fall asleep during sermons, perhaps an unexpectedly pregnant girl left town for a few months to stay with an aunt – things were not perfect “in the old days.”  But there was a frame of reference, a meeting of the minds, a consensus, based, at least remotely, on the teachings of Jesus Christ.  Our parents and grandparents had a spiritual structure inherited from an age of great faith which they could call upon in times of struggle and testing.  Our current age which glories in opinion and dissent is in danger of having no common resource to draw society together.  Religion especially and Christianity in particular are rapidly loosing their place in the public realm.  America is becoming forgetful of its Christian roots.

       Contemporary American Christians must neither compromise nor apologize for their beliefs but rather modern Christians must evangelize with their beliefs.  Their personal commitment to Jesus Christ must be coupled with a readiness to show the unity between Christian beliefs and human aspirations, between faith and common sense.  There is no conflict between nature and grace.  It is true that America’s present cultural and moral diversity is indeed a challenge.  But that just make evangelization an even more pressing Christian responsibility.                                                                   COMPLETE

       It was probably about twenty-five years ago that Values Clarification techniques first appeared on the educational scene – including public schools, parish schools and religious education programs.   Values Clarification is closely related to the fashionable self-esteem motif that attempts to strengthen a child’s resolve to resist negative behavior by getting them to appreciate and embrace the principles, standards and ideals which they discover within themselves.  Values Clarification employed various ice-breakers, games, and self-examination that brought a child’s personal values into clearer light and then hopefully fortified him or her to stick by these values in spite of any external stress – peer-pressure, teasing, gang conformity, fashion.  “To thine own self be true” is certainly a time honored axiom that still has a lot of merit.  A measure of self-confidence is integral to anyone’s happiness.

       Yet, while Values Clarification techniques might be aggressive in encouraging a child to appreciate him or herself, its techniques remain impartial regarding the worth of these values.  A child might be clear about what he or she esteems, but Values Clarification provides no basis for judging whether that self-estimation is suitable.  Nazi youth groups certainly had clear values, but their values were far from worthy.  Urban street gangs might know exactly where they stand on territory, power and camaraderie, but these values differ greatly from the common good.  The modern child could easily grow up thinking that recreational drug use, cohabitation, homosexuality, and divorce are all commendable pursuits.  The modern child could also grow up believing that abortion, ignoring church attendance, and employing crude language are constitutionally protected rights.  Values Clarification might be psychologically positive; but it is sadly morally neutral.

       Catholic educators, including many priests, who embraced Values Clarification probably had the good sense to recognize that not all values are equally admirable.   Nonetheless there are many values that are essential to the Christian message that Catholic children should learn and appreciate.  The nature of God, the value of prayer, love of neighbor, compassion toward the poor, a sense of church community, Scripture, the reality of sin and the promise of eternal life would certainly be among the primary Christian values.  No one could object were every Catholic child to understand and hold these values.  Similarly conservative elements within secular society have over the past decade celebrated and defended so called “family values.”    The integrity of the family unit, the sanctity of marriage, two parent, heterosexual families, protection of the unborn, public education along traditional lines, suitable employment, and other issues affecting home life have been promoted.  It would be difficult for the believing Catholic to disagree with these ideals.

       But, strange as it might seem, Catholicism is not primarily about values – neither Christian values nor family values nor personal values.  Authentic Catholic values arise out of a deeper reality which is a personal relationship with Christ revealed through his Church.  Hence, Christianity is not chiefly about values.  Christianity is chiefly about Christ – thus the name.  Jesus did not enter into history to teach mankind values.  Jesus did not enter into history to clarify man’s inner ideals.  Jesus did not enter into history to promote one’s self-esteem.  Jesus became man and instituted his sacraments so that every man, every woman, every child, every generation, might enter into a personal, knowledgeable, and committed relationship with Him.  Values that are not the fruit of an earnest relationship with Christ turn, in the long run, into a cheat and a disappointment.  Faith in Christ and in his Church is the root and foundation of every authentic value, all genuine esteem, each enduring society.

       Using the examples of the building contractor and warring king, this Sunday’s Gospel urges every believer to make sure that he or she has the spiritual resources to insure a full Christian life rather than be disappointed and embarrassed by falling short of the mark.  The Christian life begins with Christ, leads to an authentic sense of self and then bears fruit in sharing Christ (not just His values!) with others.     COMPLETE

       No belief from ancient paganism endures more than the notion that mankind has somehow to win the attention and love of God.  It was precisely this conviction that God had to be enticed into heeding man’s needs that Jesus denounced when he advised against the lengthy, loud and lurid prayers that constituted pagan worship.  “Do not rattle on like the pagans who try to win God over by the sheer multiplication of words.  Your Father in heaven knows what you want before you even ask Him.”  Even at prayer humanity’s innate selfishness manifests itself by acting as if successful religious practice begins with man and leads to God.  Just the opposite is true.  All authentic religious activity begins with God and then finds a response in man.  Mankind does not earn or produce the love of God.  Rather mankind discovers the love of God always being offered through nature and grace, through history and the Church.

       The three very familiar parables proclaimed in this Sunday’s lengthy Gospel vividly and touchingly demonstrate what Biblical commentator William Barclay describes as “the seeking love of God.”  Barclay insists that the idea of a God who seeks out the sinner in opposition to the sinner searching frustratingly for God is one of Christianity’s most exceptional beliefs.   A chief conviction among Christians is not so much that man finds God as that God finds man and draws him closer to himself.  The colorful lessons of the Gospel reading are introduced by the witness of St. Paul in the second reading.  “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners,” the Apostle writes. “Of these I am the foremost.”  St. Paul acknowledges that his own conversion was the result of Christ’s taking the first step.  Christ broke into this world to save sinners.  This occurred through Christ’s initiative, not at man’s invitation.  Christ is the incarnation of “the seeking love of God.”

       In the triple parables of the Good Shepherd, the Diligent Housewife and the Merciful Father, Jesus illustrates “the seeking love of God” in assorted yet pointed tales taken from country life, home life and family life.  A foolish sheep has followed his nose nibbling grass and is in danger from the wolf, the precipice, and the briars.  The alarmed shepherd pursues his lost charge even before the animal is aware of his tight spot.  A coin, through no fault of its own, has been lost in a peasant dwelling.  Clearly the coin does not have the wherewithal to express its plight.  The exploration begins with the diligent housewife.  She, not the errant coin, takes the initiative.  And of course the impressive and moving account of the merciful father and his wayward son emphasizes the same, basic Christian belief in “the seeking love of God.”

       “While he was still a long way off, his father caught sight of him, and was filled with compassion,” records St. Luke.  “He ran to his son, embraced him and kissed him.”  Then, without any bitterness or spite, the father explains to the flabbergasted elder son, “But now we must celebrate and rejoice, because your brother was dead and has come to life again; he was lost and has been found.”  Before the younger son had any opportunity to express his change of heart, before he could beg forgiveness, before any display of contrition was evident, the receptive father was off, down the road, to grip his imprudent son with a warm and welcoming hug.  The indomitable “seeking love of God” triumphs once again.

       Two thousands years of Christian faith and practice still have not laid to the rest the pagan notion that God’s love has somehow to be earned.  Even among believers, God the Father is often viewed as a deity who is fickle, favoring some and neglecting others; or as capricious, teasing and even torturing mankind with suffering and anguish; or as indifferent, oblivious to the human condition.  This mistaken outlook has little in common with the God of the Old Testament who sought out Abraham and the Jews before they even knew his name.  This misguided attitude shares none of the compassion and mercy made evident in Jesus Christ who “…came to seek and to find what was lost.”  Recall the clear words of Jesus:  “It was not you who chose me; it was I who chose you.”  Salvation is the free gift, the unsolicited gift, the lavish gift of our God who always initiates.  The good shepherd, the diligent housewife, the merciful father are instructive and normative Scriptural motifs revealing both gently and powerfully “the seeking love of God.”                         COMPLETE

       Every once in a while the Roman Catholic Church shakes up the popular religious consciousness by reminding the world that there is and can be only one true Church.  This boast is not a claim for moral or historical excellence.  Church members have made a lot of mistakes and, in fact, have committed many sins.  But the Church does intend to teach that the fullness of revelation, the original Apostolic legacy, the earthly reign of God, endures undiminished within its ranks.  The Church in the third millennium certainly eschews the sad exclusivism of, say, Boston Jesuit Father Leonard Feeney who at one time closed the gates of heaven to all but a handful of the baptized.  The Second Vatican Council rightly acknowledged the rays of truth that shone out from other Christian ecclesial communities (Scripture, baptism, prayer) and even from the world’s non-Christian religions (right living).  Nonetheless, for all the faults the Church might posses and for all the virtues other communions may exercise, the Roman Catholic Church still has the obligation to make effective in our own day the words of St. Paul found in this Sunday’s second reading:  “For there is one God.  There is also one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as ransom for all.”  St. Paul then adds: “This was the testimony at the proper time.”  And it still is the testimony – whether the time be proper or not.

       Jesus Christ is the sole link between God and man, between heaven and earth, between eternity and time.  “I am the way, the truth and the life,” Jesus insists to St. Thomas.  “There is no other name under heaven by which man is to be saved,” insists St. Peter with equal conviction.  The mediatorship of Jesus Christ does not mean that all non-Catholics are tottering on the brink of hell.  Notice that in the same reading this Sunday worshippers hear St. Paul declare that God “wills everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.”  So the universality of salvation is just as much a part of Catholic teaching as the exclusive mediation of Jesus Christ.  And it is precisely because the modern Church wants everyone to be saved that it urges time and again that mankind take a second look at the world’s unique savior, the God-man Jesus Christ, whose saving message is found in its fullness in the Roman Catholic Church.

       Our Roman Catholic Church truly believes itself to be apostolic, possessing and proclaiming the full and original deposit of faith entrusted by Christ to his first disciples.  While the Church cannot compromise the truths entrusted to it by Christ, the Church must express these truths afresh in every generation.  Consequently, this deposit of faith has been deepened, broadened, and heightened over the centuries by saints and students, by preachers and pontiffs, by contemplatives and Council fathers.  As St. Paul wrote of himself in Sunday’s reading: “For this I was appointed preacher and apostle — I am speaking the truth, I am not lying — teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth.”  Now the Catholic Church must continue this same mission to teach the nations in faith and truth.

       An obvious reason that there can be only one true Church lies in the nature of truth itself.  There cannot be two or more competing truths about a given revelation.  Either the Body of Christ is present in the Blessed Sacrament or it is not.  Either the Scriptures are God’s inspired word of they are not.  Either marriage is indissoluble or it is not.  Either the Pope is the visible head of the Church on earth or he is not.  Either man looks forward to death, judgment, heaven or hell or he does not.  Either Mary was a perpetual virgin or she was not.  These fundamental truths, and many others, are immutable; to have rival churches differ on these elemental issues would deny the very nature of truth.  While the believing communities of the world do esteem many of the same truths, the fullness of truth, the essential Divine Revelation, the deposit of faith, is uniquely preserved through the oral and written Tradition of the Catholic Church.  Since the truth is necessarily one, the modern Church wisely promotes the growth of all people into the truth.  Thus, sooner or later, probably later, the whole world may arrive at the fullness of truth that has been entrusted to the Church all along.  The Church must never apologize for its treasures or shrink from its mission.  Like Christ, the Church must bear proud witness to the truth.           COMPLETE      

       Catholics have long been taught that sin falls into various categories.  There is the original sin of our first parents and the actual sins committed everyday.  There are mortal sins with grave consequences and then there are venial sins of lesser implication.  And then of course there are sins of commission and sins of omission.  Sins of commission result from the exercise of vices; sins of omission derive from the neglect of virtue.  These contrary sins of doing evil or ignoring good are called to the Catholic mind daily at Mass: “…I have sinned … in what I have done and in what I have failed to do…”  The same dichotomy between evil embraced and good disregarded is mentioned in the contemporary Act of Contrition promoted nowadays:  “My God, I am sorry for my sins with all my heart.  In choosing to do wrong and in failing to do good, I have sinned…”   So wickedness is not all evil deeds that are readily labeled like theft, violence, calumny and infidelity.  Sometimes sin does nothing.  St. James says it best of all, “He who has a chance to do good and does not do it, commits sin.”

       This Sunday’s Gospel passage concerning the well dressed and well fed rich man at whose door the leper Lazarus sat in dire need is a lesson on sins of omission.  Recall first of all the industrious farmer who had a successful harvest and built bigger silos for his grain and whose life was demanded of him on the day of his success.  This Gospel was proclaimed a couple of weeks ago.  Recall that this productive farmer did nothing wrong.  His wealth was not ill-gotten.  He was simply a hard-worker whose diligence inclined him more towards earthly accomplishments than toward spiritual maturity.  In the end, he was caught short and his piled up wealth brought him no consolation.  His sins, if any, were sins of omission, sins of spiritual neglect, sins of eternal insensitivity.  The rich man in this coming Sunday’s Gospel takes neglect of the good and raises it to the Nth degree.

       St. Luke informs his readership that the rich man (sometimes called “Dives” which is simply the Latin word for a rich man) dressed in “purple and fine linen.”  Purple, of course, was the color of choice for ancient royalty since it was derived from a very select dye.  For Catholics, obviously, purple continues to a symbol of rank and prestige.  The man also sported “fine linen,” a comfortable cloth much opposed to the coarse homespun that most of Jesus’ contemporaries would have worn.  The Evangelist also emphasizes that the rich man feasted “sumptuously” every day.  Conversely, a peasant’s bill of fare in those days (and probably into the last century) would have been a monotonous diet of bread, vegetables and the rare piece of meat.  Still, in spite of his affluence, the rich has yet to do anything especially wrong.  And that is precisely his sin.  He did not do anything.  Dives was totally self-absorbed and completely apathetic toward the beggar Lazarus who sat at his door.  He was not rude, abusive or cruel toward his needy neighbor.  He was indifferent toward him.

       St. Luke is equally concerned about the hapless Lazarus.  He outlines the leper’s plight in great detail.  Scripture scholars point out that Lazarus is the only person in any of Jesus’ parables that is actually given a name.  St. Luke, following Jesus’ lead, will not let his readers be indifferent toward him.  He does everything he can to draw attention to this man.  Leprosy was certainly a great physical and social scourge in the ancient world.  There was no purple or fine linen attached to his station in life.  And there was no feasting either.  Mongrels and curs rather feasted off his sores while Lazarus longed for a tossed off scrap of bread.  Although the leper dies and goes to heaven, the parable passes no judgment on Lazarus’ virtue.  Perhaps he too had his sins.  But, characteristic of St. Luke, poverty alone should be enough to attract attention and consequently earn benevolence from any sensitive person.

       Both love and hatred involve strong acts of the human will.  They imply deep decisions regarding life’s relationships.  Between them is that vast wasteland of indifference, apathy, unconcern and coldness that separates man from man, neighbor from neighbor and nation from nation.  Lazarus still sits at mankind’s doorstep, too often unheeded and still longing for the scraps that fall from our festive board.                                                              COMPLETE

       Consider these words of a well-known woman religious:  “It is not without reason that I have dwelt upon this period of my life at such length. I know well that nobody will derive any pleasure from reading about anyone so wicked, and I sincerely hope that those who read this will hold me in abhorrence, when they see that a soul which had received such great favours could be so obstinate and ungrateful. I wish I could be allowed to describe the many occasions on which I failed God during this period through not having leaned upon this strong pillar of prayer.  I spent nearly twenty years on that stormy sea, often falling in this way and each time rising again, but to little purpose, as I would only fall once more. My life was so far from perfection that I took hardly any notice of venial sins; as to mortal sins, although afraid of them, I was not so much so as I ought to have been; for I did not keep free from the danger of falling into them. I can testify that this is one of the most grievous kinds of life which I think can be imagined, for I had neither any joy in God nor any pleasure in the world. When I was in the midst of worldly pleasures, I was distressed by the remembrance of what I owed to God; when I was with God, I grew restless because of worldly affections. This is so grievous a conflict that I do not know how I managed to endure it for a month, much less for so many years.”

        These are not the thoughts of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, soon to be canonized for her life of dedication to the Eucharist and to the poor.  In spite of Time Magazine’s recent exposé of Mother Teresa’s inner turmoil, these words do not express her grim spiritual experiences but rather the bleak decades in the spiritual life of the Great St. Teresa of Avila.  That’s right.  For twenty years, the great Spanish mystic Saint Teresa literally went through hell, even as she said her prayers, sang the Divine Office, attended Mass, meditated on the eternal mysteries and did her share of Carmelite community life.  Having endured this trial, the great St. Teresa then employed her spiritual maturity in reforming the Carmelite convents of Spain and in no small way preserving Spain from the advance of Protestantism.

       Some readers who have no inkling of the science of the saints are horrified to learn that Mother Teresa and the Great St. Teresa and St. Theresa the Little Flower as well along with any other saint worth the honor endured extended periods of great testing.  The “dark night of the senses” and the “dark night of the soul” are fundamental to the authentic Christian spiritual life.  At times, and perhaps for some time, God deliberately withholds himself from the devout believer to ensure that the interior life is truly a pursuit of the God of consolation and not merely a quest for the consolations of God.  This purgative way cleanses the soul of all earthly considerations.  Deprived of all gladness, all satisfaction, all feeling, and certainly all sin, the soul is prepared for God’s fulfilling arrival.

       Missionaries of Charity Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, who has collected Mother Teresa’s letters in anticipation of her canonization thinks these grim letters may act as an antidote to a cultural problem. "The tendency in our spiritual life but also in our more general attitude toward love is that our feelings are all that is going on," he says. "And so to us the totality of love is what we feel. But to really love someone requires commitment, fidelity and vulnerability. Mother Teresa wasn't 'feeling' Christ's love, and she could have shut down. But she was up at 4:30 every morning for Jesus, and still writing to him, 'Your happiness is all I want.' That's a powerful example even if you are not talking in exclusively religious terms."

       The first reading this Sunday from the prophet Habakuk speaks of his harsh spiritual experiences:  “How long, O LORD? I cry for help but you do not listen! I cry out to you, "Violence!" but you do not intervene. Why do you let me see ruin; why must I look at misery?  Then the LORD answered me and said: Write down the vision clearly upon the tablets, so that one can read it readily. For the vision still has its time, presses on to fulfillment, and will not disappoint; if it delays, wait for it, it will surely come, it will not be late. The rash one has no integrity; but the just one, because of his faith, shall live.”  Saints old and modern testify that the just ones still life by faith and not by feelings.             COMPLETE

       Front page coverage was recently accorded by the Providence Journal to the plight of a contemporary atheist who felt intimidated by vocal believers from both a Christian and a Moslem background.  This high-school teacher from England who admits to being a fallen away Anglican claims to have left aside any semblance of his former faith and thinks now merely of the day ahead.  The number of atheists, still very small but sadly increasing, is seen by some as a reaction to the militancy of conservative Christians and belligerent Moslems.  The self-avowed English atheist, speaking for like-minded unbelievers, observed that “there is a feeling that religion is being forced on an unwilling public…”

       Hello! Religion is being forced on an unwilling public?  What about secularism, humanism and free-thinking being forced on an unwilling public?  Massachusetts has gay marriage today because five justices rejected twenty centuries of Western Civilization.  Abortion on demand is the law of the land because the nation’s Supreme Court embraced a procedure outlawed since pagan times.  Sodomy has been successfully defended in the courts.  Divorce is permitted at the whim of the individual.  Celebrities adopt or propagate children completely outside a family context.  Stem cell research is promoted entirely on an emotional rather than a scientific foundation.  Adultery, promiscuity, cohabitation, disrespect for parents (especially fathers), vulgarity, and even blasphemy are the sum and substance of prime time television programs.  The sex, drugs and rock & roll of the 1960s have ripened into the ubiquitous condoms, rehab centers and rap lyrics of the twenty-first century.  Exactly who is being forced into a corner? 

       Dinesh D’Souza, Washington columnist and also a Roman Catholic, in his recent book, The Enemy At Home, suggests that the disasters of September 11^th were a cultural reaction from the non-Western world toward the entertainment industry’s glorification of secular values – or lack of values.  When the great civilizations of the world – Moslem, Buddist, Hindu, Shinto, Orthodox Jewish, along with traditional Christians – consider Western society, they find fatherhood regularly ridiculed as inept, drugged up celebrities, children with two moms or two dads, prayer denied any place in public life, daughters going off to Junior High school dressed like prostitutes, their brothers beefed up on steroids, crude language, the exaltation of personal freedom at the expense of public responsibility.   And it is not just the world at large that finds itself disgusted with American popular culture.  Many Americans themselves – often dismissed as the religious right or religious conservatives – do not know what to make of the nation around them – a nation more and more influenced by the escapades of entertainment, sports and political figures.  Secularity, or what used to be called worldliness, is indeed the enemy at home.

       Another author, Philip Jenkins, professor at Penn State, offers sad statistics in his latest work, God’s Continent, concerning popular culture in Europe.  The impression is sometimes taken that Europe will be entirely Islamic within a decade or two.  Actually all of Europe from Ireland to the Urals is only 4% Moslem.  France has the greatest percentage in Western Europe at 8%.  What should rather be a matter of great concern is the inroad that secularism or atheism is making in old Europe.  From 1973 to 1994, the ratio of French persons claiming no religion grew from 11% to 34%.  In England in 2004 35% claimed no belief and 21% did not know; among those aged 18 through 34, 45% claimed to be atheists.  Although Professor Jenkins sees definite signs of renewed religious life in Europe (pilgrimages, youth rallies), it should be clear that the biggest threat to Catholic Christianity in Europe is not some other religion – not Islam, not Protestantism, not fundamentalist Christianity.  Religion’s biggest problem in both Europe and America is clearly secularism, that godless popular culture promoted certainly by the entertainment media, sometimes by science and academia, often by political correctness, and sadly by the ignorance, superstition and indifference of Christians themselves. 

       Pope Benedict XVI, with characteristic wisdom, has observed that the main challenge for the thinking Church today is not the separation between faith and faith (Catholic vs. Protestant, Christianity vs. Islam); the main challenge facing the Church today is the separation between faith and reason.  Secularists see faith as the enemy of reason, as a denial of the material world’s validity.  Faith actually illuminates the secular universe, revealing to man his full potential under God as a spiritual as well as a material being.  Authentic religion enlightens man’s reason exposing his true vocation.   There is no conflict between grace and nature.  Grace builds on nature.                                                                                                         COMPLETE

       Two Blackstone Valley men were recently featured on the front page of the local press celebrating their same-sex nuptials formalized in nearby Massachusetts.  Some of their justification for entering into the legal novelty of a same-sex union focused on the little harm that their lifestyle imposed on their neighbors and their community.  They go off to work and eat at nearby restaurants and conduct much of their lives as any other couple might. “What fault is there in that?” they might suggest.  And, of course, on an individual basis, there probably is very little mischief that can be laid at their doorstep.

       Yet, while these two men (and others) might not be doing any immediate damage to the family next door or down the street, they are doing grave injury to the institution of marriage whose roots are sunk deep in human nature and in Divine Revelation.  The modern exaltation of the individual over any institution is the source of the same-sex union discussion, the cohabitation debate, the abortion controversy, the divorce dilemma, the immigration crisis and, yes, the fall off in religious practice.  Individual rights are absolute today.  Diversity is vigorously commended as the hallmark of modern society.  The greater the departure from the norm, the modernist muses, the better off civilization will be.  Students at Rhode Island College can mock Jesus Christ, illegal aliens can plead their civil rights, a sports hero can father babies from two women without loss of prestige.  The institutions of religion, of international law, of marriage are dishonored with impunity while the individual perpetrators are applauded with delight.    In the popular mind, the institution has become a drag on individual potential. 

       Christians and other members of the Western world and even humanity in general have developed certain institutions that have proven down through the centuries to strengthen, to enhance, to improve human life.  Marriage, family, religion, government, education, business, the military, among others, are institutions that have fostered and protected and nurtured human society since the Stone Age.  Some of these institutions have taken distinct forms in different eras.  Polygamy and concubinage pre-dated modern marriage.  Charles I, Louis XVI and Nicholas II can testify that monarchies are not the eternal form of government.  The Christian Church drew heavily from Jewish tradition.   So institutions do evolve.  Yet as they evolve, institutional precedent must be respected.  The status quo, the perennial philosophy, the universally accepted myth, must not be fractured at the whim of the individual.  Perhaps Louis XVI and Nicholas II’s time had come; but the terrors that followed them in France and Russia illustrate tragically what happens when mankind pretends to begin again by despising traditional values.  Perhaps the neat Tridentine Church of our youth needed rejuvenating, but the upheaval in Mass attendance, priestly vocations, religious communities and Christian marriages is a prime example of too much, too soon.  As may happen with same-sex unions, the wisdom of the ages yielded to transitory pressure.  The big picture was eclipsed by a single point of view.

       In the second reading this weekend, St. Paul advises the young Timothy, “Remain faithful to what you have learned and believed, because you know from whom you learned it, and that from infancy you have known the sacred Scriptures, which are capable of giving you wisdom for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.”   Not all mankind appreciates Divine revelation nor even the Bible.  Yet believers must accept that God has truly enlightened successive generations of Christians with certain truths rooted in God’s own Nature and in the nature of man.  The duty of Divine Worship, reverence for authority, the sanctity of life, appreciation of marriage and family, respect for private property, esteem for another’s reputation, virtuous living – these are the very fabric of society.  To amend these goals out of convenience or sentiment or fashion is to fly in the face of God Himself. 

       Institutions like marriage and family, like religion and liturgy, like law and order, are not the residue of antiquity burdening mankind with obsolete practices.  Institutions are the collective human memory distinguishing the beaten path from the dead-end street, the narrow gate from the broad thoroughfare, the ladder to heaven from the road to hell.                                                                        COMPLETE

       It’s a safe bet that most people reading this Quiet Corner article are not axe murderers, terrorists or guilty of laying violent hands on the Holy Father.  Few readers will have sins as colorful as the Biblical scarlet.  An examination of conscience most likely will reveal the dishonesty, infidelity and materialism of the work-a-day world.  Hedging on the truth to spare people’s feelings, the occasional immodest glace, an eagerness in satisfying appetites, neglect of prayer, the ill tempered remark – the stuff of everyday life constitutes the waywardness that most believers experience.  True, serious sins have sadly found their way into every life, but most of these have no doubt been long ago or quickly expiated.  The sins of day to day living probably generate few deep regrets and less salutary contrition.

       In this coming Sunday’s Gospel, a Pharisee enters the temple and considers his own daily life as a ranking member of Jewish society.  His conclusion of general innocence is probably accurate.  ”O God, I thank you that I am not like the rest of men -- greedy, dishonest, adulterous -- or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week, and I pay tithes on my whole income.’   The modern Catholic might remark that he too is free of serious greed, dishonesty and unchastity.  To justify himself he might observe that he goes to Mass each week and donates to the Catholic Charity Fund.  Perhaps he even reads the Rhode Island Catholic. 

       So how is the average Catholic, the less-than-hardened sinner, who probably tells the priest in confession, “Father, I can’t think of any sins,” how is this lamb among wolves ever to arrive at real contrition, real sorrow, real repentance?  How much emotion can be stirred up when one’s offences are wrong but routine?  As long as the average sinner focuses only on himself or, like the Pharisee, only on his neighbor, his compunction will always be tempered.  It is only when the sinner takes his mind off his own faults  and off his neighbor’s failings and reflects on the exalted supremacy of God that authentic and effective repentance will begin to seize the soul.  Genuine repentance does not begin with a consideration of the imperfections of man but rather with a reflection on the excellence of God. 

       In 1943 Pope Pius XII lamented that the greatest evil of his day was the loss of the sense of sin.  This loss of the sense of sin is directly related to mankind’s loss of a sense of God.  With no perfect Being to contemplate, With no ultimate standard as a measurement, with no lofty sense of duty toward a Supreme Deity, man’s conscience grows dull.  Where there is no awe at virtue, there is no horror at vice.  Ignoring God and forgetting Christ, mankind sets his standards too low and fails to grasp the magnitude of every sin.  Missing Mass seems not so bad in today’s irreligious environment.  But missing Mass is the height of ingratitude when one considers the brilliance of the sacrifice re-enacted there.  The pan-sexualism of today’s society may seem a laughing matter when viewed on the screen or in the tabloids.  But that same risqué business becomes sordid when understood as a perversion of the creative energy of God.  Indifference to social issues may appear to be just a distinction between a liberal and a conservative mentality until the fatherhood of God is understood to embrace and provide for all peoples.

       The repentant tax collector in this Sunday’s Gospel is rightly the icon of Biblical sorrow for sin.  His fear of God – in the finest sense of that phrase – prevents this publican even from approaching the center of the holy building.  His dutiful reverence for God humiliates him before the Divine Presence.  He dare not approach the Holy Place because his sins have come into such stark relief when contrasted with the purity of the Supreme Being.  The conscientious Christian should be doubly struck with an awareness of his own sinfulness when he contemplates the excellence of God but also when he ponders the saving death of Jesus Christ.  In Christ’s embrace of the Cross, the superiority of God becomes tangible, palpable, even physical.  In contemplating this, any man should be driven to his knees.

       Neglect of God’s excellence leads to complacency with man’s transgressions.  Man gets very self-satisfied when he has no heavenly ideal with which to compare himself.  The fear of God, notes Proverbs, is the beginning of wisdom – and contrition.                                                        COMPLETE

        On October 28, in Rome’s St. Peter's Square, 498 martyrs of the religious persecution in Spain (1936-1939) were beatified. It was the largest group ever to be beatified at the same time.  As the Catholic world celebrates All Saints Day, the Pope is doing Catholics a favor by highlighting this bleak and neglected moment in Church history. A survey of the handy website Wikopedia reveals that in 1931, the Spanish monarchy was overthrown by Republican forces.  The new Republican government was miserably disorganized and a rival Nationalist front, led by Francisco Franco and supported by Hitler and Mussolini, attempted to remedy the situation hoping to return Spain to its traditional structures.  To enforce this Nationalist regime it is estimated that 200,000 to 800,000 people died.  However the Spanish Civil War was marked by atrocities on both sides.  The Republicans (supported by the Soviet Union) opted for radical economic and structural change in Spain resulting often in anarchy.  Much of the Republican wrath fell on the Catholic Church.  Religious buildings were burnt and others were turned into Houses of the People.   It is estimated that in the course of the Republican terror, 6,832 members of the Catholic clergy were killed.  Another source breaks down the figures as follows: 282 nuns, 13 bishops, 4172 diocesan priests, 2364 monks and friars. In some dioceses, the numbers are overwhelming. In Barbastro 88% of the secular clergy were murdered. There are accounts of the faithful being forced to swallow rosary beads, being thrown down mine shafts and of priests being forced to dig their own graves before being buried alive.  A priest of Cienpozuelos was thrown into a corral with fighting bulls where he was gored into unconsciousness. Afterwards one of his ears was cut off to imitate the feat of a matador after a successful bullfight.  The claim that the Spanish clergy were corrupt and deserved harsh treatment is false. In fact, they were quite sincere and heroic.

       The Spanish Civil War could easily be understood as a class conflict – the rich versus the poor, the conservatives versus the liberals, the establishment versus the marginalized.  Franco’s fascistic Nationals included the majority of the Catholic clergy and practicing Catholics (outside of the Basque region), important elements of the army, most of the large landowners, and many businessmen. The communistic Republicans included most urban workers, much of the educated middle class, especially those who were not entrepreneurs, and most peasants.   Clearly the Nationals feared anarchy while the Republicans focused on poverty.  Yet one author cautions that the Spanish Civil War was not an irrepressible outpouring of hatred by the man in the street for his oppressors, but a semi-organized activity carried out by sections of nearly all the communist-leaning groups.    Clearly the Republican’s communistic allies in Spain had the same agenda that became all too clear in Eastern Europe after World War II.  They used a veil of legitimate democratic institutions to outlaw the establishment hoping to convert the state into a Soviet people's republic with total Communist domination.  Recalling the persecution that would plague the Church in Eastern Europe after the Second World War, readers should understand the maltreatment of the Church in Spain was not simply a hatred of the Church but more deviously a hatred of God Himself fed by systemic atheism.  The Spanish martyrs were not slain because they were members of the bourgeois establishment.  They were slain because they were vivid reminders of the Presence of God in history.  They, like God, had to be eliminated.

       Despite the fact that the Church suffered appalling persecution behind Republican lines, these historical events have been met by much silence and even attempts at justification by some scholars and historians.  In the 1980s Pope Paul VI placed a moratorium on all saintly causes dealing with the Spanish Civil War.  Remember that the Soviet Union was still a world power during that decade and perhaps the Pope did not want to antagonize the Communist regimes by reviewing their sordid pasts.  When European Communism faded into history, Pope John Paul II lifted this ban so that the sufferings of dedicated, hard-working, sympathetic Spanish bishops, priests, religious and laity could be explored more openly.  Massive persecutions during the twentieth century occupy a great but tragic place in the history of mankind.  The senseless persecution of these rank and file Spanish Catholics, spawned by an atheistic hatred of God Himself, must not be overlooked.                  COMPLETE

       It has been a few months since the glorious feast of the Resurrection.  The fresh lilies, the lyrical alleluias, and the glow of the Paschal candle have long lost their splendor.  Easter has changed from a festive celebration of risen life into a sublime doctrine pondered by the devout.  Yet so essential is the mystery of the resurrection to the Christian life that the Church’s liturgical year re-introduces the worshipping community to the prospect of eternal life on high, body and soul, in the joy of heaven.  The persecution of the Maccabees in late Judaism and the wiseguy question posed to Jesus about life after death this Sunday will draw the faithful back to a consideration of one of Christianity’s central mysteries.

       The ancient Jews had a very fuzzy notion of the afterlife.  They viewed death largely as a descent into the grave, into the pit, at best, into a netherworld of shadowed existence.  If the ancient Jew lived on at all it was through his offspring, through his children, through his moral influence on the generations to come.  Shortly before the birth of Christ, the notion of the bodily resurrection of the dead began to be introduced by the Holy Spirit to Jewish religious thought.  While the immortality of the soul was by this time a fairly accepted view within the Greek world, the resurrection of the body is uniquely Jewish, or better, uniquely Judaeo-Christian since Jesus Christ brought to fulfillment the seed of the Resurrection sown by the Maccabees and later Jews.  Even in the time of Christ, the Jewish community was unsure of the full extent of this novel doctrine.  The Pharisees accepted the bodily resurrection of the dead as a basic belief.  Having a spiritual bent, they also believed in the soul and in angels.  The Sadducees on the other hand rejected any belief in life after death, resurrected or otherwise.  Being rather materialistic in their thinking, the thought of a spiritualized body was beyond them.  Fulfillment was found in this world or not at all.

       Enter the Maccabees, truly great Jewish heroes, the last heroes of Biblical Judaism.  Refusing to worship pagan gods, they managed to throw off the Greek rule of the Holy Land and ushered in a century of peace and religious renewal.  Their greatest lament was the profanation of the Temple by the pagans and their greatest joy was the rededication of the Temple by the priests, an event still commemorated each year by the Jewish festival of Hanukkah.  Once religious life centered on the Temple was re-established, the Jewish community was divided regarding the continuance of any war.  Those who would later be called Pharisees wanted to stop fighting since religious freedom had been secured.  The future Sadducees wanted to continue the battle until full independence had been won.  It was the Maccabees who took up this effort for full independence and were successful.   The Maccabees also introduced certain beliefs to Judaism that matured in Christianity.  Prayers for the dead, the value of martyrdom, the intercession of saints and, of course, the resurrection are first revealed in the Scriptural books of the Maccabees.  Somehow, by the time of Jesus, the Sadducees curiously lost these noble ideas about heavenly life first introduced by their Maccabean forebears. 

       It was Jesus Christ, of course, who revealed the fullness of resurrected life to the early Church.  Not only did Jesus rise gloriously from the grave himself but he promised eternal spiritual and corporeal happiness to all who would call upon his name.  St. John writes most clearly when he pens the words, “Jesus said to them, "Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day.”   The Christian who is united to Christ in belief and in sacrament can expect the fullness of life beyond the grave.  The body that shared the joys and sorrows of earthly existence along with the soul here in this world can anticipate the same mutual satisfaction in the next world.  Man does not just have a body.  Man is a body.  And for man to be fully happy in heaven it is fitting that his whole being, his whole personality, his whole essence, should participate.  The resurrection of the body is not just a bookish doctrine for Christians.  The resurrection is the completion of the Christian life, when man in his fullness will see God in his fullness.               COMPLETE

       No word has fallen on harder times in present day Roman Catholic circles than the word soul.  Think of how common expressions containing the word soul were in Catholic life just a few short years ago.  Catholics struggled to save their souls; Catholics were earnest to cleanse their souls of sin; Catholics worked to fill their souls with grace.  Now the word soul is rarely heard from preacher or teacher.  This Sunday’s Gospel passage is a good case in point.  The passage from St. Luke concludes: “By your perseverance you will secure your lives."  Honestly now, are these words an improvement at all over the older translation, “By your patience you will save your souls”?  What does “secure your lives” mean?  Is the reference to life in this world?  In the next world?  And what does “secure” imply?  St. Jerome originally phrased it: “By your patience you will possess your soul…”  The thought of taking charge of one’s soul, possessing it, makes nice sense.  Securing it sounds too mechanical, too technical.  The older English phrasing, “By your patience you will save your souls” is clear and rich and inspiring.  St. Jerome was not alone in choosing the word soul (he used the traditional Latin word for soul, anima) to express the Savior’s idea.  St. Luke also thought along similar lines since he places the Greek word psyche on the lips of Jesus.  Psyche means soul or spirit in Greek.  The English word life unfortunately does not have the religious connotation, the spiritual orientation, the suggestion of piety that the word soul has.  While the word life is used richly in St. John’s Gospel, it is much too bland, too featureless, too ordinary, in this passage from St. Luke.

       For generations the word soul was synonymous with the individual’s spiritual life.  The Blessed Virgin Mary chose the word soul to express her full inner being:  “My soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.”  Jesus himself used the word soul to convey his inner life: “My soul is sad even unto death.” Some religious writers, now alas quite dead and dated, looked upon the spiritual life as tending the garden of the soul.  The soul was a spiritual garden which could be beautified by prayer, by virtue, by sacrifices, by the sacraments, by spiritual reading, by acts of charity.  The soul truly could be tended, cultivated and eventually harvested.   Conversely the garden of the soul could be wilted by impiety, ravaged by sin, destroyed by vice.  Clearly the garden of the soul school of spirituality had minimum community orientation.  It was a classical God and Me expression of the spiritual life.  It was probably too individualistic.  But the quiet garden of the soul spirituality has been sadly replaced by a busyness that views religion simply as projects, events and services.  Religion has become what the Christian does rather than what the Christian is.  The cart has been placed before the horse.  Action flows from being, the philosophers taught well.  The modern Catholic tends to skip being and to move directly into action.  He is too impatient to tend the garden of his soul, too impatient to take possession of his soul.  Traditional works of the interior life are neglected: private prayer, self-denial, repentance, and growth in virtue take a back seat to community involvement, liturgical celebrations, discussion groups and parish committees.  The cart has almost replaced the horse.

       The greatest names of the modern Church are persons who have drawn strength from time spent tending the garden of the soul and who have directed their energies toward the betterment of the Church and world community.  Pope John XXIII, the darling of the post-Vatican II activist Church, prayed all fifteen decades of the Rosary every day.  Mother Teresa never ventured out into the streets of Calcutta until she had spent an hour before the Blessed Sacrament.  Edith Stein was fortified by the thought of Christ himself whom she pictured “praying alone in the silence of the night, on open hills or in uninhabitable deserts.”   Dorothy Day often turned to the great saints of prayer – Teresa of Avila, Therese of Lisieux, John of the Cross, Francis of Assisi and Catherine of Siena – for inspiration in her own spiritual life.  Certainly Pope John Paul II was the visible embodiment of an intense interior life.  The authentic Christian cannot choose between cultivating the soul and serving the Church.  The interior life and the active life nourish one another.  But in the current religious environment, the garden of the soul is in painful need of cultivation.                                                                                       COMPLETE

       Although Jesus himself never treasured nor even accepted the title King, this royal identity is a logical result of centuries of Christian belief.  Jesus was born into the line of King David.  Jesus was worshipped by the three Persian noblemen.   Jesus was nominated “Son of God” and “King of Israel” after the briefest encounter with Nathaniel.  Jesus was celebrated by the crowds eager to crown him after the multiplication of the loaves.  Even Jesus’ enemies had suspicions about his regal status.  The assembly before Pilate frankly accused him of maintaining that he was the Messiah and “a king.”   Pilate himself had his fears about Jesus’ grand status:  “So then you are a king?”  The Christian world accordingly took up this inclination to enthrone Jesus, often portraying him victorious on a jeweled Cross.   Later theologians reached for Christ’s fullness by referring to him as priest, prophet “and king.”  And the latest in this litany of majestic tributes was accorded to Christ by Pope Pius XI when the pontiff instituted the feast of Christ the King in 1929.  Overwhelmed by the loss of traditional authority among the nations of Europe after World War I and fearful of the rise of the dictators who would fill that void, Pius called the world’s attention to the one authentic source of law and order, Jesus Christ.  As the preface for the solemnity promises, Jesus would establish “a kingdom of truth and life, a kingdom of holiness and grace, a kingdom of justice, love and peace.”

       These thoughts are exactly what the Catholic worshipper expects to hear from the pulpit on this last solemnity of the Church’s year.  And indeed they would be well spoken.  The first and second readings for this year’s solemnity confirm this majestic portrait of Jesus Christ.  The first reading relates Jesus to his royal Davidic lineage.  The second reading goes a step beyond Jesus’ right to an earthly kingdom and proclaims him to be none other than the “image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.”  He is acclaimed as greater than “thrones or dominions or principalities or powers.”  He is “before all things;” he is “the head;” he is “preeminent;” in him “all the fullness was pleased to dwell.”  St. Paul certainly appreciates the royal, or one may write, the imperial status of Jesus Christ. 

       It is all the more curious then that the Gospel passage from St. Luke chosen for this solemnity aligns Jesus with the criminal element of his day rather then with his royal Jewish roots or his heavenly pedigree.  The true kingship of Jesus Christ’ consists neither in earthly supremacy inherited from David nor in the spiritual dominance of an ancient god.   The root of Jesus’ kingship is his Sonship, his obedience to his Father.  One criminal mocks Jesus, taunting him to reveal his true nature by freeing the three of them from the horror of the Cross. But Jesus knows that his kingship is characterized not by freedom but by fidelity.  The second criminal appreciates that Jesus’ kingship is not a mere earthly advantage but something that he wants to share with his pious followers.  "Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom," the insightful thief begs – the only time in the Scripture when Jesus is addressed solely by his given name, without any title.  Jesus’ familiar answer, “…today you will be with me in Paradise," sheds perfect light on the nature of Christ’s kingship and kingdom. 

       Christ’s kingship does not consist in lording it over his subjects as is the prerogative of earthly royalty.  Christ’s kingship consists in sharing his happiness with his constituents.  Today you will be “with me” in paradise.  Christ does not merely promise the man heaven – although that would not be a shabby pledge.  Rather Christ reveals to the man – and to all believers – that the very goal of the Christian life is not just to learn from Christ or to imitate Christ or to ride on Christ’s coattails into heaven.  The goal of the Christian life, the prize to which the Christian aspires, is personal intimacy with Christ.  Christ will not only remember his brothers and sisters when he comes into his kingdom, they will actually share that kingdom with him: “Today you will be with me  in paradise.”   “…with me...”  Jesus insists.  Jesus’ kingship is not a stand-offish regency whereby he receives tributes from his subjects.  Jesus’ kingship is a loving embrace of his brothers and sisters whereby he shares with them the heavenly fruit of his enduring fidelity toward the Father.                                           COMPLETE

       Patrons of the Quiet Corner should put aside for one evening their reading of Will Durant’s History of Civilization and watch a couple of half-hour situation comedies on network television.  The so-called comedies, many of them broadcast at 8pm, are appalling.  They abound, in fact, they consist entirely of bathroom humor and sexual innuendo.  Two and a Half Men and How I Met your Mother, judging from the commercials, are simply prolonged dirty jokes.  Last week, I deliberately watched a new show (on at 8pm – the old family hour) entitled Carpoolers.  The narrative centered on four men who drive to work together every day.  The theme of the week was sperm count.  That’s right.  Mom, Dad and the kids were entertained by four grown men arguing over the relative potency of their sperm.  One protracted scene had one gentleman trying to find a condom in his nightstand.  Since he had already taken off his contact lenses, he could discover only small packets of aspirin, cough drops and handi-wipes.  Another scene had the four men remark that securing the sperm was quite a refreshing practice on their mid-afternoon visit to the clinic.  These were not sleazy men one might see entering a porn store with a pulled down baseball cap.  These were all regular guys who probably serve up tasty burgers and icy Heinekens on a summer Saturday.  The message is that recreational sex (alone or with others) is just as much a part of life as football or weekend camping in New Hampshire.

       My family got our first television set on December 8, 1951.  Since it was a holy day there was no school, so I spent the day watching the appliance man install the TV and erect the antenna.  The very first picture I saw on that TV was a brief advertisement for “Your Show of Shows,” with Sid Cesar and Imogene Coca.  The appliance man remarked that they were very funny and that I would enjoy them.  And indeed I did.  No doubt most people reading this column did.  The memory of Sid Cesar, Imogene Coca, Jackie Gleason, Eve Arden, William Bendicks, Joan Davis, is one of laughing so hard tears came to the eyes.  No one was funnier than Lucille Ball stuffing chocolates into her mouth and no one was wittier than Groucho Marx using his quiz contestants as foils.  Alas, American television has gone from the hilarity of Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance to the vulgarity of David Spade and Charlie Sheen.

       Humor in the Golden Age of network television was based on the situation, the dilemma, the predicament, in which the comedians found themselves.  Lucy trying to cope with a speeding assembly line was funny no matter where it was acted out.  A fruitless search for condoms or an argument over sperm’s vigor is funny only because it is enacted on television.  It is the surprise value, the shock value, that elicits astonished laughter.  Pardon the reference but it is like passing gas in church.  The act itself is not funny but the incongruity of the circumstances is.  America has lost its sense of humor and replaced it with a sense of impropriety.  The coarser the dialogue, the more boorish the scenes, the more unsuitable the subject matter, the more the networks serve them up.  Talent has been replaced with titillation and humorous quips with suggestive remarks.  Clearly writers have become tired and audiences have become tainted. 

       The Scripture readings for the First Sunday of Advent speak eloquently of the world-weariness that characterizes much of American public life.  The cynicism of American network television, the attraction of internet pornography, the scantily dressed celebrities that catch the eye, the gay agenda, the mockery of family life, the demeaning of the male gender, and the ridiculing of traditional institutions are the stuff of popular culture.  St. Paul did not spare the Roman society of his own day in denouncing their excesses:  Let us then throw off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light;  let us conduct ourselves properly as in the day, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in promiscuity and lust, not in rivalry and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the desires of the flesh.  St. Luke has milder but still cautious words as well:  In those days before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day that Noah entered the ark. They did not know until the flood came and carried them all away.  Frankly the flood is already here and much of American society is being carried away – some unwittingly.  It is indeed time to put on the armor of light – the armor of civility, the armor of decency, the armor of self respect.            COMPLETE

       “Hello, Father Kiley?  This is Peter Gilmore.  My aunt said that I should call you about being a God-parent for my cousin Patrick’s baby.  The trouble is, Father, I’ve never been confirmed.  I was baptized at Holy Redeemer and made my First Communion at St. Mary Magdalene’s.  I started the Confirmation classes but the lady in charge said that had missed too many classes due to hockey and baseball so I dropped out and never went back.  I really haven’t been to church much either.  I believe in God and I really got a lot of nice memories about Sister Agnes John and Father Hayes.  And I’ve been going out with this girl who goes to the Gospel Temple in West Greenwich and sometimes I go to church with her.  And the truth is when I leave there I feel like I’ve really been to church.  The music is so powerful and the people are really into it.  A couple of times we went to Mass, but she said she didn’t know what was going on and didn’t understand why she couldn’t receive Communion and the priest mentioned money or something.  She also couldn’t understand what all the statues were about.  When she goes to church she prays to God.  She said when Catholics go to church they pray to Mary and the saints, and I really didn’t have an answer for her.  She said Jesus kind of put his mother in the background: ‘Whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is mother and brother and sister to me.’  I remember her quoting the Bible.  And that’s another thing.  Everything’s the Bible with them.  With us it’s the Pope and the Church and the priests.  That’s what she says anyway.  I mean I really want to be a godfather to Patrick’s baby.  They’re having their marriage blest and everything.  They want to bring the kid up right.  They don’t go to church much but they’re still Catholics.   She has an aunt a nun in Canada and Patrick graduated from LaSalle so they want to stay Catholic.  The godmother is her best friend.  They grew up together in Pawtucket.  Her friend is Jewish but they are going to talk to the priest to see if something can’t be done.  She’s a very good person.  I like her.  She helps out at a food pantry in downtown Pawtucket.  So she can set a good example for the kid.  I want to set a good example, too.  But I’ve got so many questions.  My sister and her boyfriend got married by the justice of the peace.  They said the priest wouldn’t marry them because they were living together.  They said that a lot of their friends who had gotten married in the church were divorced already so a church marriage really didn’t make that much difference.  But I think they would still like to get married in the Church.  They plan to have a baby and then buy a house and then have a big wedding in Saint Bernadette’s Church.  They went to a wedding there once for some friends and the aisle was so long and the flowers looked so nice on the altar that they figured that’s the church for them.  You remember Andrew Morrison.  He’s a Baptist minister now.  I remember when we were serving Mass together that he always paid better attention then I did.  He was always telling me what to do.  He was very religious.  Then he got involved with drugs and alcohol.  He went to some rehab place in New York and they got him reading the Bible.  He said he didn’t see anything in the Bible about confession or about praying to the saints or about Cardinals or about purgatory and Masses for the dead.  He also said that there were a lot of bad Popes and that the Church put a lot of people from other religions to death a thousand years ago and that the Vatican has a lot of gold and silver hidden way that could be given to the poor.  He said the Baptist preachers don’t wear any special clothes like the priests do.  No offense, Father.  But he said the cassock you wear was something from the middle ages.  It makes you different from other people.  Jesus wasn’t different.  He was a man of the people.  And I know Jesus wasn’t married but the Apostles were. And that’s a manmade rule that priests can’t marry.  My aunt said that’s why there’s no vocations.  The Church should let people marry.  Jesus’ mother Mary was married and, oh, by the way, it says right in the Bible that Jesus had bothers and sisters.  It says it a couple of times.  So Mary being a virgin is something the Church made up later on.  They thought it would make Jesus more special than he was.  My uncle told me that I could start being a good Catholic again by going to Church this Saturday.  He said it was the feast of the Immaculate Conception, a holy day.  I didn’t think they had them anymore.  I though the bishops did away with them because nobody was going to church on those days anymore.  But me and my friend Frankie went to get ashes last year and the church was packed.  So maybe they’re still on.  We had to wait ‘til the Mass was over though to get the ashes.  So, Father, can you help me out?  I’d really like to bring this kid up a good Catholic or a good Christian or whatever”                     COMPLETE    

       It might seem a little premature to celebrate the great solemnity of Pentecost, but there is a valid connection between the spirit of Advent and the arrival of the Holy Spirit on the Apostles after Jesus’ return to heaven.  Pentecost truly celebrates the return of prophecy to the Church.  It was a belief of Judaism in the time of Christ that prophetic utterances had died out within the Jewish community after the death of the prophet Malachi.  Giving witness to this were the sad words of Judas Maccabeus who, after discovering the remains of the vandalized Jerusalem Temple, ordered that these relics be hidden “until a prophet should come and decide what to do with them.”  Gone where the voices like Joseph, Moses, Nathan and Jeremiah.  The Jews were anxiously awaiting a “prophet like Moses” who would come and instruct the people once again in the ways of God.  Pentecost marked the end of this time of waiting. 

       St. Peter’s fearless proposal to the assembled crowds was gladly welcomed, heralding two millennia of courageous voices that would speak to man on behalf of God.  The Apostles through their evangelizing work, the martyrs through their courage in the arena, the early missionaries standing up to pagan hoards, the monks and friars who taught and spoke as Europe came of age, the loyal Churchman who withstood the Reformers’ wrath, the modern advocates for justice, peace and equality – all of these embody the prophetic office received first by the Apostles, enshrined preeminently by Jesus Christ and foreshadowed admirably by St. John the Baptist.  It is clear that prophecy should be a perennial part of Church life in every era, as it was critical to God’s work in the Old Testament, central to the ministry of Jesus Christ, and clearly, if tragically, embraced by John the Baptist in advance of Jesus Christ.

       The task of the modern prophet within the Catholic community is the same task entrusted by God to the Old Testament prophets and to John the Baptist.  Like them, the authentic Christian prophet always bears witness to Jesus Christ, Son of God, Son of Mary.  The genuine Christian prophet is not merely intent on defending orthodox doctrines and applying time-honored principles.  Certainly this is part of prophecy.  After all, Jesus himself defined his own prophetic ministry as bearing witness to the truth.  But, with all due respect, perhaps John the Baptist is a better model than the Savior when discerning the true nature of Christian prophecy.  John the Baptist was charged from the womb with bearing witness to Jesus Christ.  As yet unborn, he leapt with the joy of recognition when Christ entered his presence through Mary.  John it is who designates Jesus clearly as the long awaited Messiah: "Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.”   John himself sees this as his chief mission: “The reason why I came baptizing with water was that he might be made known to Israel."   And John makes his own act of faith in Jesus:  “Now I have seen and testified that he is the Son of God."

       Even the prophetic faith of John the Baptist is put to the test however.  In this Sunday’s Gospel passage, John, in prison, sends his disciples to Jesus to enquire whether or not Jesus is indeed the long awaited Savior.  Was John actually having second thoughts ?  Or was he kindly sending his discouraged disciples to Jesus to discern for themselves that after John’s demise that man was the one with whom to align themselves.  If John did indeed hesitate, it was only a momentary pause.  He courageously gave his life, surrendering his head to the chopping block, rather than deny the mission entrusted to him by God – preparing the way for Jesus Christ.

       While there are many courageous men and women who stand for the truth in the face of injustice and error, those who exercise the genuine Christian prophetic charism will always communicate dedication to Jesus Christ as the foundation of lasting justice and enduring truth.  Jesus himself is “the Way, the Truth and the Life.”  To seek truth, to desire life, apart from Jesus Christ is the ultimate frustration.  Leading others to Christ and through him to truth and life is always the task of the faithful prophet.       COMPLETE

       After twenty centuries of Christianity, the edge has been somewhat taken off St. Matthew’s insightful designation for Jesus Christ:  “and his name shall be called Emmanuel, which is God with us.”  The reader should also note that this description of the nearness of God through Christ neatly concludes St. Matthew’s Gospel as well.  The ascending Jesus Christ proclaims to his puzzled Apostles:  “Behold I am with you always until the end of the age.”  So the nearness of God, the presence of God, the closeness of God to his people through Christ is fundamental to the Gospel message.

       Although the God of the Old Testament is not the fearful God that people who do not read the Old Testament make him out to be, believers in Old Testament times certainly had to keep their respect for the Divine Presence.  Moses was told to remove his shoes because he was standing on holy ground.  The prophet placed a veil over his face to lessen the effect of the Divine encounter.  The hapless Uzzah was struck dead for merely touching the Ark of the Covenant, the sign of God’s presence with the traveling Jewish community.  The High Priest was allowed but once a year to enter the Divine Presence in the Holy Place and utter the Name of YHWH.  The holiness of God, the otherness of God, the separateness of God was the Old Testament’s way of expressing the uniqueness of God, the supremacy of God, the exaltedness of God.

       But even if the standoffishness of God is a recurrent theme in the Old Testament this is all by way of shocking the world when the Incarnation of Jesus Christ would finally take place.  The God who hitherto dwelt on the heights of Mount Sinai, the God who before this was reserved in the Temple’s inner sanctum, the God whose name dared not be uttered was now in Christ made present to all mankind.  God himself would take flesh through the Virgin.  God himself would walk the roads of Galilee and the streets of Jerusalem.  God himself would touch the tongue of the mute, the eyes of the blind, the ears of the deaf.  God himself would eat with sinners, argue with authorities, and accept the homage of the disadvantaged.  And finally God himself would experience betrayal, endure suffering and undergo that most earthly occurrence, death.  In Christ, God and man would indeed meet.

       The Judeo-Christian tradition began with an appreciation of God’s fearsome majesty in the heavens.  While never compromising this majesty, God did condescend to meet man in history.  God favored the dutiful Noah.  God justified the faithful Abraham.  God liberated the luckless Hebrews. God guided the wanderings Jews.  God raised up David and Ezra and the Maccabees.  This same tradition then gave that splendid but caring God the human face of Jesus Christ at the Incarnation.  Jesus would continue to guide, guard and direct the people of God as YHWH had in the Old Testament but now Jesus would actually share the lot of humanity, meeting mankind on every level save sin.  Truly Jesus would fulfill the prophecy of Isaiah.  Christ would indeed be God-with-us.  The Divine Presence was sealed within human flesh and confirmed in human history.

       The Catholic believer, measuring the gradual descent of God into the continuing story of mankind, cannot help but reflect on God’s sustained presence to the human family through the Church.  God is unfailingly near in the celebration of the Sacraments.  God is compellingly at hand in the words of Scripture.  God is infallibly close in the solemn teachings of the Church.  God is reassuringly approachable to the faithful at prayer.  God is as handy as the beggar at one’s doorstep.  And clearly God is overwhelmingly present to his people through the Eucharist.  The presence of God to his people which began with the conversations in Eden marvelously culminates in the dialogue of the soul with Christ who has just been received in Holy Communion.  The Eucharist is the Old Testament come true with a vengeance.  God is indeed with us.  God is in fact one of us and he invites us to become one with him.  God assumed our humanity that we might assume God’s Divinity.  Christ is the means through which this interchange takes place.          COMPLETE