Father Valentine

Just had the privilege of an interview with Michael Dixon, host of "The Bishop's Hour," which is a local-interest radio show produced here in Phoenix by Immaculate Heart Radio.

SPOILER ALERT! If you want to wait to hear the interview afresh, it will be on Monday, February 14th, at 10 am on 1310 AM in Phoenix.

But otherwise, I'll tell you what we spoke about: Love, baby, love (In honor of Valentine's Day). He asked about my experiences working with young couples preparing for marriage, as well as my work with college students. My basic refrain was this: as a Catholic priest, I encourage young people to embrace the greatness of love. In a youth culture in which dating is non-existent because emotional and physical promiscuity is the norm, young people need great encouragement.

Of course, the greatness of love between a man and woman is demands the greatness of commitment, sacrifice, and selflessness. As I told Michael, many young people either don't know this, or fear it. I feel I spend half my time with engaged couples speaking about what marital love is...and the other half of my time telling them not to be afraid of how great love really is. When I speak to engaged couples of the Church's vision for conjugal love, I usually see on their faces equal parts hope, fascination, and fear...that it's simply too great, beyond them.

Once a young man who was considering a vocation to the priesthood said to me: "Father, don't know if I could be a priest. I love marriage too much."

My response surprised him, I think, as I shot back: "Good! Priests need to love marriage more than anyone else. I spend a great deal of my life encouraging young men and women to love marriage as much as I do."

After all, St. Valentine was a priest, wasn't he? Happy Valentine's Day, all.

2011 musings

Whoa, time flies. I was hanging out this evening with some college students. One of them said that she had left some comments on my blog. My immediate thought was, "My what?" The time to blog is upon me, without a doubt.

The great tidal wave of university life has been taking me along a fascinating ride thus far. In general, I feel as though I am still getting a feel for my role as a priest in the world of ASU.

But there have been so many wonderful moments. Students react and grow so fast to things that we as priests say and do. Some students that I met in the fall, honestly, I hardly recognize, so much have they grown and changed (for the better, I think). It's less a testament to our job as priests, and more to students' malleability and God's grace at this time of their lives.

Yesterday, my day off, I was walking "incognito" around some parts of campus I had not seen yet. I was simply observing the students walk around. There is a strange sadness here, a malaise--even on a bright sunny day as students walk around the "farmer's market." A report I saw the other day said that 43% of college students struggle with depression. Wierd, that statistic kept popping into my mind as I spectated a normal Tuesday afternoon at ASU.

Then the words of Our Lord seemed to respond: "I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full!" There is so much promise of "fun" in college, perhaps especially at this college. Is there a promise of joy, though? Does that promise mean anything to students today? Many of the students I have had the privilege of working with so far this year do, I believe, know what joy is, on some level--the joy of knowing God--and are hungry to seek and follow this joy wherever it leads them, even if the cost is great. But it must be real.

Sex and a seismic shift: how badly we (all) understand the Church's teaching on contraception

The ticker on the bottom of the news broadcast caught my eye: "...seismic shift in Catholic Church teaching...."

Were Pope Benedict's words regarding condom use published in Ignatius Press' "Light of the World" a seismic shift in Church teaching? Or does the fact that many perceive it to be a seismic shift betray that many people--in the secular media as well as normal Church-going Catholics--don׳t have a properly nuanced understanding of the Church's teaching? I think it's the latter.

Here's why. Many think that the Church's teaching on contraception or artifical birth control can be summed up this way: "The use of artificial contraception is evil, always. Don't do it, ever."

But this isn't what the Catholic Church teaches, either in Humanae Vitae or in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. The Holy Father is revealing that many people don't understand the teaching. Before these brass tacks, here is a telling story, somewhat self-incriminating.

I was sitting in a seminary classroom in a moral theology class several years ago. The professor--a faithful, orthodox, and good priest and theologian--asked us, his class of eager and zealous seminarians, this hypothetical:

A band of violent guerrilla soldiers attack a small village in Africa. It is very likely that they will attack and perhaps rape members of a women's religious order, young nuns in their 20's, and 30's. Assuming that the nuns cannot escape this terrible situation, is it morally permissible for the nuns to take the "pill" or to demand that their attackers wear condoms, in order to prevent conception?

By a show of hands, almost the entire class said that the nuns would not be morally permitted to do this. We thought we were boldly and bravely supporting the Church's teaching.

The professor was totally shocked. Almost speechless. I was shocked that he was shocked. Either the entire class was wrong, or he, a professor with a pontifical doctorate, was wrong.

Stumbling to find words, he asked some students to defend their view, and the answer came back: "Artifical birth control is always intrinisically evil. The unitive and procreative elements of sex can never be separated. Sexual intercourse must always be open to life."

Then he said something that shocked us in its simplicity and its power to illuminate this issue: "Gentlemen, the Catholic Church teaches that intentional sterilization is always intrinsically evil when performed before, during, or after the conjugal act."

He pointed out the obvious fact that Humanae Vitae addresses the regulation of births within marriage. The Church's concern is to protect the dignity of the conjugal act, which is the marital act between a husband and a wife. The Church has no interest, from a moral or spiritual perspective, of protecting the "dignity" of other forms of sexual intercourse, whether fornication, homosexual acts, rape, incest, prostitution, etc. For illustration, look up "contraception" in the Catechism's index and it reads: "see Marriage: purpose of". When the Church considers the moral issue of contraception, she does so within the context of marriage.

Back to my seminary classroom-full of shocked theologians. In our zeal to protect the Church's black and white teaching on contraception with respect to the marital act, we had actually distorted it by hastily misapplying it to de-humanizing forms of sexual expression.

Many have pointed out that the Pope was, in "Light of the World," speaking about the hypothetical case of a male prostitute, so that the Church's teaching on contraception would still univocally apply to any heterosexual sexual encounter. While there is a distinction between the depravities of these homosexual "relations" and heterosexual intercourse, this is not the fundamental issue here.

For example, some translations of the Pope's words refer to the hypothetical prostitute as "he" and some as "she". Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi reported, "I asked the Holy Father if there was a serious distinction in the choice of male instead of female, and he said, 'No.'"

The key distinction, then, is not the between homosexual and heterosexual sex; it is between marital and non-marital sex. Why? Because the Church never separates the unitive and procreative elements of the conjugal/marital act. The unitive component demands marriage; the procreative component demands marriage. Sexual intercourse is too intimately linked to love and life for it to be employed anywhere except the humanizing structure of marriage.

If you lose one dimension (the procreative or the unitive), you've already lost the other, and you no longer are dealing with the conjugal act. A prostitute, a rapist, and even--brace yourself--a cohabitating and fornicating engaged couple are all incapable of the conjugal act because they are not married. In these we're dealing with sexual encounters of varying degrees of brokenness and disorder. Into these situations, the Church--embodied by the Pope's recent beautiful fatherly comments--speaks words of compassion and, at least as importantly, conversion.

By the way, this "narrow" application of the Church's prohibition of contraception within marriage does not, on my reading, necessarily promote or prohibit any kind of sexual morality for non-marital sex acts. In other words, the Church isn't all that interested in how people can best fornicate, or how they can employ prostitutes with the least amount of damage. Jesus didn't argue with the Pharisees about details regarding the disorder of divorce, and the Church doesn't legislate details over sex that takes place outside of marriage, either. She calls us to conversion.

For the record, did the Pope say that condom use outside the marital act is morally justifiable, to prevent AIDS, for example? No, he didn't. (He said it may be a "first step in the direction of a moralization" but not a "moral solution.")

Did the Pope say that condom use is a good, practical solution to spreading STDs and unwanted pregnancies? No, he didn't. Not even close. Look carefully at his words in the new book. Dr Janet Smith has a good piece on it at: www.catholic.org/national/national_story.php?id=39277

Unlike my moral theology professor from years back, I doubt that the Holy Father is shocked at the prevading ignorance on this issue, whether within the ranks of the secular media or well-intentioned Catholics. He's way too smart far that.

If this little flare-up of press gets people to crack open their Catechisms or to read Humanae Vitae in order to investigate this issue for themselves, perhaps many will come to understand the clear, beautiful, humanizing, and unchanging teaching of the Catholic Church which forbids the intentional sterilization of the conjugal act.

That would be a seismic shift indeed.

Maggies place video

Here's my video from my running the maggies place run. Enjoy.

www.YouTube.com/watch?v=7Jg0dqW_sTE

Is single life a vocation?

I recently exhorted a group of young adults to be open to discovering their vocations (see the previous post--it's from a modified homily, actually). I specifically mentioned priesthood, marriage, consecrated religious life.

The next morning I received a very thoughtful, fair, and clear email from a young adult at the Newman Center in which she expressed the following concerns, which my homily had brought up by omission. She wrote (by the way, she gave me permission to use excepts) that I "neglected one other vocational state: Single, just single; i.e., not called to marriage and not called to be a religious brother or sister, or third order whatever."

In her opinion, Catholic singles are the "forgotten vocation."

She went on to explain that, in her view, "the great majority of Catholics view all single people as in tension; i.e., trying to decide whether to choose the married life or to choose the priesthood/religious life."

And more, that "It never occurs to them that a single man or women might not be trying to decide anything. They’ve already chosen to be single."

The bottom line for my friendly and concerned interlocutor seems to be expressed when she writes: "it would be nice if the Catholic community at large, both priests and laity, recognized that the unconsecrated, unattached single life is a legitimate vocation too."

How would you respond to these comments? Can single life be dubbed a "vocation" in the same way as marriage, priesthood, and consecrated life?

Here's three elements of a good response.

1) Baptism is the fundamental "vocation" of each Christian, a consecration to be priest, prophet, and king through union with Christ. It is has a nuptial significance already, oriented as it is to completion (i.e., full initiation) by Holy Communion. From this perspective, there is no such thing as an "unattached" or "single" Christian.

This means priests and consecrated religious are not a special "caste" of those called to holiness and lay people are the lowly second-class citizens called to spiritual mediocrity. Why not? Because they are all baptized, and therefore consecrated to God.

Nonetheless, priesthood and marriage constitute two unique consecrations at the service of Communion in the Church. Far from downplaying baptismal dignity, these actually highlight it in specific ways.

2) To remain unmarried for the Lord is, in some sense, preferable and normative, in a symbolic though not statistical way. Recall that St Paul says in I Cor 34: "An unmarried woman or virgin is concerned about the Lord's affairs: Her aim is to be devoted to the Lord in both body and spirit." So in a way my friend is dead right: no one should be shocked at the unmarried status of Christian women, assuming that her virginity helps her to be concerned about the Lord's affairs, i.e., as we would say, living out her baptismal promises.

This "preferable" or "normative" dimension of Christian virginity we see in St Paul does not mean that a majority of Christians are to remain unmarried; rather, it points to the profound and thorough "texture" of baptismal, and in fact all authentic Christian, spirituality. Hey, we belong to the Lord, married or unmarried. Once in awhile I like to remind people of the radicality of Jesus Christ by saying something like, "If you've met Jesus Christ, how can you possibly think about any body else?" It gets the point across...even if it's totally unnuanced. All this being said, I'd gently offer one corrective to my emailing friend:

3) Virginity, to be properly ordered "to the Lord," benefits greatly from, and perhaps is ordered to, an ecclesial form.

I don't want to sell short the spontaneous reactions that my friend received from average Catholics. She wrote: "it would be nice if the Catholic community at large, both priests and laity, recognized that the unconsecrated, unattached single life is a legitimate vocation too."

Would it be nice? Perhaps what causes some hesitation in Catholics in general toward easy recognition that the unattached single life is a vocation is just that--its unattached. Sure, it's "attached" to Jesus, interiorly, spiritually. But as Catholics we are used to (rightly, I think) the invisible becoming visible, the interior becoming exterior. If you are attached to Jesus, you want to show it--and our instinct is to show it (the attachment to Christ) in some form in the Church.

The Church document which addresses this is Vita Consecrata. It says in paragraph 7:

7. It is a source of joy and hope to witness in our time a new flowering of the ancient Order of Virgins, known in Christian communities ever since apostolic times. Consecrated by the diocesan Bishop, these women acquire a particular link with the Church, which they are committed to serve while remaining in the world. Either alone or in association with others, they constitute a special eschatological image of the Heavenly Bride and of the life to come when the Church will at last fully live her love for Christ the Bridegroom.

If priests or lay people raise eyebrows at the validity of "single vocations," perhaps it is because they simply don't see the "witness" aspect, linked as it is to the public, ecclesial consecration of the diocesan Bishop. Note that this allows the single woman to "acquire a particular link with the Church, which they are committed to serve...." This is huge. It resolves the tension, to some degree. Because after all, as Pope JP II reminded us, every man is called to be a husband and father and every woman a wife and mother, physically, spiritually, or both. Everyone is called to love, to "lay down their lives for their friends." This requires commitment; it demands attachment.

Granted, we can always grow in our appreciation for the dignity of any baptized person, and be sensitive to those who feel "left out" of more popularly understood forms of consecration. But I wonder if we also need to remind folks who have discerned an authentic call to permanent virginity outside of priesthood and religious life that the Church has a place which may be for them, and that they are not forgotten: the ancient, and now newly growing, Order of Virgins.

An Icon of Life: Two men going up to the temple

Throughout the long and rich Catholic spiritual tradition there are any number of images to describe the “work” of the spiritual life. Dante’s Divine Comedy, Thomas Merton’s Seven Story Mountain, and St Theresa of Avila’s Interior Castle all come to mind. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus gives a number of parables which provide tightly-packed images of what He Himself does in human souls, and how we respond, and what the great consequences are.

The parable of the Pharisee and Tax Collector is one of these tightly packed images, reflecting three basic moves of the spiritual life, the life of a disciple of Christ. Using and modifying Fr Barron’s three steps (from his excellent “Three Paths of Holiness” DVD—did you see it on WGN recently?), I’d like to look at this parable as a picture of these three steps. Here’s how I see the three basic moves of the spiritual life:

1) Turn to the Lord. 2) Know you’re a sinner. 3) Find your mission.

The first one: turn to the Lord. This is the most foundational move of our hearts, the most necessary. It’s the dirt floor. This is where we “turn”, spiritually, interiorly, from all the good things in our life—including our very life itself—to God who is, even now, creating me, loving me, giving rise to my very existence. In the early centuries of the Church, there was a public call to prayer: “Conversi ad dominum!” Turn to the Lord!

We see this move on display in the two men in the gospel today, the Pharisee and the Tax Collector. Both “went up to the temple to pray.” What they do physically—physically turning to Jerusalem, to the Temple, the physical place where the Most High dwelt—we are called to continuously do spiritually, just we physically turn to the altar at Mass. This is the deep meaning of our prayer at Mass, when the priest says, “Lift up you hearts,” and we respond “We lift them up to the Lord.” Life with the Holy Trinity is our origin and goal: at this moment we offer our free “yes” to this “direction.” We must strive to turn to the Lord, interiorly, at every moment of our lives.

The second move: know you’re a sinner. Think of the tax collector in the gospel today. He doesn’t even lift his eyes to heaven, says Jesus, yet he says, “O God, have mercy on me a sinner.” Now having turned interiorly to the Lord, the pure Light of God, he sees clearly where he is off, where there are smudges on the windshield. But he has learned a new way of seeing, a vision which sees not only his sinfulness, but God’s mercy and power to heal, implied in his unlimited confidence to proclaim his sinfulness publically.

The Pharisee—renowned as a religious expert—never managed to turn to the Lord interiorly, so what does he notice in his blindness? His illusory greatness, and other people’s sinfulness. He prays not to God but to himself. And his pseudo-prayer recounts not God’s greatness but his own litany of marvelous deeds: “I fast twice a week, I tithe, etc”. He also proclaims the sinfulness of the tax collector: greedy, dishonest, adulterous. He perceives the Tax Collector lacks the three things that matter: hope, faith, and love.

And at first blush, he's dead right. Tax Collectors were notorious for those vices.

But the irony is that the Pharisee is all of these things as well—like the Tax Collector, sure—but he is worse off because he cannot see it. Though he tithes, he is greedy, self-centered, unable to be truly giving and generous in his prayer. Though he fasts, he gorges himself in lies about himself and his self-sufficiency; though he goes to the temple to pray, he commits perhaps the worse form of spiritual adultery: self-adoration. He worships himself. Isn’t this form of idolatry—the terrible closed-circle of self-worship and community-centered worship—among our greatest temptations today?

Humans on earth can't be divided between sinners and saints, but only between those sinners who know it and those who don't (yet). G.K. Chesterton said something much like that.

Finally, the third move: find your mission. This parable may not seem to be a tale of mission, but look--Jesus says of the two men:

"I tell you, the latter went home justified, not the former."

To be “justified” means to be untwisted; to be brought into a dynamic relationship to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. To dwell in God, which is to dwell in love, and so be healed of our self-adoration. The implication? The tax collector has been healed; he has turned to God, he knows he is a sinner, and now he has discovered his mission—and off he goes! He leaves the temple, exalted as an apostle of God’s power and mercy. He truly “went home justified,” he went home healed; while the Pharisee remains a slave to himself and his lies.

Jesus calls himself our “physician.” Think of these three steps in this analogy: we turn to the doctor’s office, we tell him what is ill, and he heals us so that we can begin to live our lives, knowing and fulfilling His wonderful will for us.

How often in our fear we are like the man—like the Pharisee—who has a massive cancerous growth on his pancreas or liver, and goes to the doctor to brag about his healthy diet and exercise routine. Either this man is delusional, or does not trust his doctor’s skill.

Any of these three steps are happening all the time in our lives; we enter in at any step. Which one are you most in need of right now? Perhaps an experience of addiction has deflated you; perhaps an experience of beauty has captivated you; perhaps discovering that Christ is calling you to the priesthood, religious life, or married life is enflaming your soul with a desire to turn to God in a new way. The "steps" all go together, and form the single experience of our life as disciples of Jesus Christ.

Turn to the Lord. Know you’re a sinner. Find your mission.

talkin' angels to a bunch of (curious) materialists

Recently an upper-level religious studies class at Arizona State University came to the Catholic Newman Center, where I work as a priest, as part of a class observation project. They came to observe the strange and exotic behaviors of us Catholics in our native environment, the Mass. Afterwards, they wished to engage in a two-hour question and answer session with me, a priest.

So that is exactly what we did. It was very interesting.

ASU is in many ways a typically twenty-first century American university: a surface-level pluralism appears across the student body, while what actually pervades their way of thinking and believing (very generally speaking) is a vague and often unreflective--but strong nonetheless--brand of materialism and Enlightenment-style suspicion of religion.

What the heck am I supposed to preach to these kids at Mass? That's what I thought as I prepared for Mass that day. Part of me was hoping for a nice, vaguely spiritual ordinary-time feast which wouldn't cause too much cognitive dissonance to my young materialist and anti-Catholic compatriots. So I opened the "ordo" to check the feast day and got the exact opposite of what my bashful side wished for: a feast of great Catholic verve, color, and snappiness.

The Feast of The Archangels, Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael.

I'll spare you the details of my homily and talk with the students and say this: Catholicism is at its most fascinating, most riveting, most attractive when it doesn't re-package itself to suit modern intellectual tastes. I was tempted to tuck tail and say the squishy swill they wanted to hear: "Catholicism like everything else out there...it's about being nice, and just being yourelf!"

But, alas, a) that's really boring and b) that's totally not true. Heck, Catholicism is about angels, in a huge way. The more I spoke this, the more interesting things became, the more confident I felt, and (it seemed to me) the more the non-Catholic group sat up and showed some curiosity about it all.

Catholicism becomes inviting when its "thick" worldview--God, angels, heavenly temples, exorcisms and all--is presented without the weak-sauce blushing demanded by Enlightenment-style philosophical systems that can't understand it. With all the proper intellectual nuance, to be sure. But without blushing. If St. Michael is real (which he is), there's no need for it.

Do we really believe in angels? Uh, yeah, we do. Shoot, we know their names (a few of them), for crying out loud. To speak to a large group of students of any number of religious, ethnic, and ideological backgrounds is a privilege. But to speak about angels and archangels was a true delight. It snapped me out of my own fearful tendencies to pander to the intellectual pre-commitments of an audience, in exchange a more reasonable and Catholic model in which I proposed to them a more Biblical and historical (and less Cartesian) worldview.

I challenged my open-eyed interlocutors to consider reality on the broadest possible spectrum (perhaps angels are real after all), and to also consider that maybe, just maybe, materialism (the belief that only physical things are real) is a narrow-minded and weird and rationally untenable position to hold.

Strangely, the topic that garnered the most attention is the existence, nature, and attributes of angels. Maybe it was safer for these students than asking questions about God and Jesus Christ and the Catholic Church. But that's fine, isn't it? The students were, as far as I could tell, authentically interested and curious. They seemed a little surprised that much of what Catholics believe about angels comes less from the Bible and more from philosophy (e.g., the nature of how angels know things intuitively, choose, move, etc.)

They giggled--but only a little--when I told them that, if they wish, they can pursue their questions about angels in a field called "Angelology," which is a rich and impressive field in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions.

If, like Blessed John Henry Newman said, a University is a meant to be a place where all the human areas of knowledge and understanding come in contact with one another, then perhaps Angelology at ASU isn't so strange after all.