Irenikon

ST. THERESE OF LISIEUX

2011-06-09T18:39:00.001-04:00

"God's Mercy is Greater!"
THE TEACHING OF ST. THERESE OF LISIEUX
ON PURGATORY

by Father Dr. Hubert van Dijk, ORC¹

http://www.franciscan-sfo.org/ap/litfwrpu.htm

Doctor of the Church for the third millennium

St Therese of Lisieux, who was declared Doctor of the Church by Pope John Paul II on October 19, 1997, felt the calling in the monastery to teach others and wanted to be a teacher (docteur)¹ Early on, God revealed the mysteries of His Love to her. She writes about this: "Ah! Had the learned who spent their life in study come to me, undoubtedly they would have been astonished to see a child of fourteen understand perfection's secrets, secrets all their knowledge cannot reveal because to possess them one has to be poor in spirit!" ²

In his apostolic letter Divini Amoris Scientia, published when St Therese was declared Doctor of the Church, the Holy Father says that one should not look for a scientific revelation of God's mysteries. "Thus we can rightly recognize in the Saint of Lisieux the charism of a Doctor of the Church, because of the gift of the Holy Spirit she received for living and expressing her experience faith, and because of her particular understanding of the mystery of Christ... That assimilation was certainly favored by the most singular natural gifts, but it was also evidently something prodigious, due to a charism of wisdom from the Holy Spirit."³

Her writings offer an abundance of ideas concerning practically every field in theology and spirituality, a multitude which even a hundred years after her death bas been far from exhausted. As the popes repeatedly express: Therese of Lisieux is a gift to the Church. Before the year 2000, she was declared Doctor of the Church, becoming the third woman amongst the thirty-three recognized Doctors of the Church. She died young. Not only is she the youngest of all, but also the best known, loved, and read! Already she has given the Church a lot, and in the dawn of a new millennium, she will continue to bless the faithful with her many gifts. Thus, she is also known as "Doctor of the Church of the third millennium."

"One does not need to go to Purgatory"

Little Therese's theology is a theology that springs from life, a theology of experience. She received a fervent Catholic upbringing at home, in her parish community, as well as at the school of the Benedictine nuns in Lisieux, and thus, she was familiar with the teaching of Purgatory. Being lead by-the Holy Spirit, thoughts, notions, and ideas developed which finally became, "The teaching of the Little Flower on Purgatory."⁴
The common teaching within the Church is that Purgatory can hardly be avoided. While still only a novice, the saint commented about this with one of the sisters, Sr. Maria Philomena, who believed in the near impossibility of going to heaven without passing through purgatory:
You do not have enough trust. You have too much fear before the good God. I can assure you that He is grieved over this. You should not fear Purgatory because of the suffering there, but should instead ask that you not deserve to go there in order to please God, Who so reluctantly imposes this punishment. As soon as you try to please Him in everything and have an unshakable trust He purifies you every moment in His love and He lets no sin remain. And then you can be sure that you will not have to go to Purgatory.⁵

She even said that we would offend God if we didn't trust enough that we would get to heaven right after dying. When she found out that her novices talked occasionally that they would probably have to expect to be in Purgatory, she corrected them saying: "Oh! How you grieve me! You do a great injury to God in believing you're going to Purgatory. When we love, we can't go there."⁶ Now, this is a new doctrine, but only for those who don't know God, who are not childlike, who don't trust. It is so correct to see things this way. It is true that God will judge us at one point, but He is always and first our Father Who... suffers when He has to punish His child and sees its suffering. The child should do His will just out of love, and not to avoid punishment. And this really means that God does not want Purgatory! He allows that His children suffer, but only as if He had to look away.⁷

   If St. Therese is correct that one does not need to be in Purgatory because God Himself does not want this and would love to help us, the thought that Purgatory can be avoided is suddenly not so far-fetched anymore. But first there is the problem of the . aforementioned opinion which says that only few will avoid Purgatory. This is confirmed by great saints and mystics like St. John of the Cross who says, "Only a small number of souls achieve perfect love"⁸ (perfect love is necessary to go straight to heaven). St. Teresa of Avila also had the experience that only few will be able to avoid Purgatory.⁹ St. John Vianney said, "It is definite that only a few chosen ones do not go to Purgatory and the suffering there that one must. endure, exceeds our imagination."¹⁰

One also has to take into consideration that even practicing Christians are convinced that even the good and faithful and those consecrated to God will have to be exposed to purification in Purgatory for a certain amount of time. The reason for this is always the same: "It is not easy to avoid Purgatory. No one is a saint, and I will certainly have to spend some time there myself." They add to this that "God is just" or "we certainly deserve this."

Therefore, it is even more amazing what St. Therese has to say. Once she encouraged her novice, Sr. Marie de la Trinire to have the faith that it was possible even for her to get to heaven right away. She wondered "If I fail even in: the smallest things, " may I still hope to get straight to heaven?" St Therese, who knew well the weaknesses of her novice, replied: "Yes! God is so good. He will know how He can come and get you. But despite this, try to be faithful, so that He does not wait in vain for your love."¹¹

God is Father rather than Judge.
Once St. Therese had a confrontation regarding this topic with Sr. Marie Febronia, who not only was sixty-seven years old but also was sub-prioress. She had heard that St. Therese encouraged the novices to believe that they could go straight to heaven. She did not like this as she considered this kind of confidence presumptuous, and thus she reproached St Therese. St Therese tried lovingly and calmly to explain to Sr. Febronia her point of view but with no success as Sr. Febronia clung to belief. For St. Therese God was more Father than Judge, and she took the liberty of finally responding, "My sister, if you look for the justice of God you will get it. The soul will receive from God exactly what she desires."

The year had not passed when, in January 1892, Sr. M. Febronia together with other sisters fell prey to the flu and died. Three months later Sr. Therese had a dream which she related to her Mother Prioress and which was then documented: "O my Mother, my Sr. M Febronia came to me last night and asked that we should pray for het:. She is in Purgatory, surely because she had trusted too little in the mercy of the good Lord. Through her imploring behavior and her profound looks, it seemed she wanted to say, You were right. I am now delivered up to the full justice of God but it is my fault. If I had listened to you I would not be here now."¹²

St. Therese's "doctrine" in 7 key words

1. Purgatory became a rule rather than the exception.
An infinite number of souls who suffer in Purgatory and for whom the Church prays daily after consecration did not need to go there. If we think in human terms, God does not wish for us to need Purgatory. God does not put us here on earth, where we are tested and are suffering after the fall, only to let us suffer again--and much worse--in Purgatory. Everyone receives enough graces in order to go straight to God after passing the trials on earth. However, Purgatory is an emergency entry to Heaven for those who have wasted their time. However, what God considered the exception became the rule, and the rule--to go straight to heaven--became the exception.

2. To cope with the "inevitable" is a grave error.
Since God does not really want Purgatory, He does not want it for me either! But then I also have to not want it! Nobody would expose themselves to the danger of Purgatory by living a mediocre and--as is the case so often today--a sinful life. If they only thought of the intense sufferings in Purgatory. In this regard, the mystics unanimously say that the least suffering in Purgatory is much greater than the greatest suffering here on earth! The reason for this is that once in Purgatory, one does not go through the time of God's Mercy but of God's Justice. Here, the Lord's word applies: "1 tell you, you will not get out until you have paid the very last copper' (Lk 12:59). The many who carelessly say, "I will probably spend some time there," are gravely wrong. Nobody just spends some time there, one has to suffer there like one has never suffered nor could have suffered while on earth. One often even suffers a long time there also. If the Poor Souls in Purgatory had known on earth what to expect in eternity, Purgatory would have remained empty.

3. Purgatory is a waste of time.
   This is what St. Therese says, "I know that of myself I would not merit even to enter that place of expiation since only holy souls can have entrance there. But I also know that the Fire of Love is more sanctifying than is the tire of Purgatory. I know that Jesus cannot desire useless sufferings for us, and that He would not inspire the longings I feel unless He wanted to grant them."¹³ It is true that Purgatory is a wonderful grace, for if needed, without the purification in Purgatory we would not go to Heaven, and the work of art which God intended and created us to be would not be completed. But St. Therese is right: at the moment of our death we already have our place in Heaven. Afterwards, there is no growing in grace anymore. Whoever does not go through Purgatory does not miss anything.

4. We need a more positive image of God.
We already know that St. Therese told her novices that they offended God when they thought they would go to Purgatory. That is a very shocking statement: for if this is correct millions of Christians are offending God or at least hurt Him. And yet this is the case. They are focused only on themselves, thinking--not without reason--that they deserve Purgatory. They do not notice God Who is by their side and would love to help them so much. The fact that we fear Purgatory so much also has to do with a rather negative image that we have of God. We, Christians of the 20th Century, were like so many, raised with the image of a strict God, anxious to punish us as often as we deserve it. This thinking goes back to heresies like Jansenism. Quietism, or Calvinism. ¹⁴

5. Love banishes fear
The question of whether Heaven will follow right after death is a question of trust. God does not need our merits in order to take us straight to Him but He needs all of our trust. Or the other way around--it is not -our sins that can prevent God from giving us this grace but rather our lack of trust. Therefore, we must draw the conclusion that everything depends solely on trust. There is no trust without perfect love. And vice versa, there is no love without trust.

And this is exactly what the Apostle John writes in his first letter, "In this is love perfected with us, that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as He is so are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and he who fears is not perfected in love" (1 Jn. 4:17-18).

This text enlightens our topic very much. Judgment Day is the day of our death. Whoever achieves perfect love at the moment of their death sees God as so merciful and generous that they cannot believe in punishment in Purgatory. We are dealing with the same kind of grace in the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick. St. Thomas Aquinas teaches us that this Sacrament has as its real fruit the wiping out of punishment due to our sins.¹⁵ After those who have received the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick, others present often notice that the sick enter a period of growing peace and trust, together with a great surrender to the Will of God, and even serenity and desire for Heaven. This also applies to those who up to that point did not believe or even lived in mortal sin. Even these people, as the great theologians of the scholastics say--for example, St. Albert the Great or St. Bonaventure--go straight to Heaven without having to go through Purgatory first. This shows the wonderful grace coming from the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick.¹⁶

6. The last will be the first.
While many Christians do receive the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick, experience tells us that they do not go straight to Heaven. The mystics often relate that many priests and religious suffer a long time and have to wait for their release. However, all of them or almost all of them have received the Sacrament of the Anointing. What is the reason for this? The answer is certainly that they did not receive the Sacrament with the necessary repentance or surrender to the Will of God, or that they did not want to change their flaws and vices a long time before their death.

St. Therese of Lisieux tells us that she heard that sometimes great saints with many merits come before the Judgment of God, but have to go to Purgatory because our justice before God is often unclean. That is why she recommends to give immediately away all the merits of our good deeds, and that it is better to appear before God empty-handed.¹⁷ She recommends to her oldest sister and godmother Marie, to be given Heaven free of charge by God.¹⁸

While on the one hand the first ones don't always get to Heaven first, on the other hand there are enough examples that the last ones become the first ones. Therese refers in her writings to the Lord's mercy towards the good thief,¹⁹ and wishes that the story from the "desert fathers," about how a great sinner called Paesie died out of love and is being taken straight to heaven, should be added to her autobiography, "Souls will understand immediately, for it is a striking example of what I'm trying to say."²⁰

When our great hour comes, as St. Therese writes to Abbe Roulland, missionary in China, if only we trust, the Blessed Virgin will obtain "the grace of making an act of perfect love" should we have "some trace of human weakness" and so will we reach heaven immediately after death.²¹

7. St. Therese's teaching, a great message for the third millennium
One can rightfully say that Therese is turning all common opinions on Purgatory upside down.²² She wants to appear before God empty-handed and explains why it can be easier for sinners who have nothing to rely upon, to reach Heaven than the great saints with all their merits.. She emphasizes that trust alone is enough, that merits are no guarantee but often an obstacle for the straight way to Heaven, and that sins do not need to be an obstacle. After a 'messed-up' life, God can still take one straight to Heaven if the dying person only has trust. And how easy it can be to trust if there are no merits but only one's misery! Through trust she shows the shorter way to Heaven to the small and humble. And so many can and will go that way. She writes about this to her sister Marie: "... what pleases Him (God) is that He sees me loving my littleness and my poverty, the blind hope that I have in His mercy... That is my only treasure, dear Godmother, why should this treasure not be yours?..."²³

As has been said, she has made sanctity available for everyone through her little way, and this is also true for the straight way to Heaven... This will no longer be an exception. Once those who are smart enough to gather from the treasures of our new Doctor of the Church will walk this way easily, especially those who want to be part of the legion of little souls which St. Therese asked God for at the end of her manuscript B, "I beg You to cast Your Divine Glance upon a great number of little souls. I beg You to choose a legion of little Victims worthy of Your LOVE!"²⁴ Yes, by listening to her wonderful message there will be many, many souls... and with that, Purgatory stops being the unavoidable detour to Heaven!

Conclusion

    St. Therese of the Child Jesus gave us a lot to think about. There are yet many new thoughts to be understood in terms of theology. For us, however, the most important, even existentially significant of everything she wrote is the message on Purgatory. The question of what happens to us after death should move us deeply. Let us just remember Sr. Febronia and her suffering in Purgatory; her silent message from the next world should move us. "It seemed," says Therese, "as if she wanted to say: If I had listened to you I would not be here now." This is actually shocking when you think about it. One has to admit that Sr. Febronia entered the next world through the wrong door. And with her, thousands and millions who would have managed to avoid Purgatory. And why did they not achieve this? The simple reason is that nobody showed them the correct way. Considering this, one does understand that Therese is a true gift to the Church. God gave her to us as leader and comforter for the apocalyptic days in which we very obviously live. Her message concerning Purgatory is a true grace of God' s merciful love for the moment of our death. One can apply the urgent exhortation of our LORD: "'He who has ears to hear. let him hear" (Lk. 8:8).

Father Dr. Hubert van Dijk, ORC

Footnotes:
1. I would like to enlighten souls-as did the Prophets and the Doctors.' St Therese of Lisieux. Story of a Soul. ICS. Washington
    DC, 1996, Ms B, 2v, pg. 192.
2. St. Therese of Lisieux. Story of a SOUL, ICS, Washington DC, 1996, Ms A, 49r. Jig. 105.
3. Divini Amoris, I.c., Nr. 7.
4. Philippe de la Trinite, La Doctrine de Sainte Therese sur Ie Purgatoire. Editions du Parvis, CH-1648 Hauteville/Suisse 1992,
    pg. 16. .
5. Annales de Sainte Therese, Lisieux. Nr. 610, Febr. 1982. Translated from the German.
6. Last Conversations, ICS. Washington DC. 1971, pg 273..
7. La Doctrine, l.c. pg 16. Translated from the German.
8. St. John of the Cross, The Dark Night, IT. ch. XX.
9. Ferdinand Holbőck. Das Fegefeuer, Salzburg 1977, page 94f. Translated from the German.
10. La Doctrine, I.c.page 22f. Translated from the German.
11. Lucien Regnault, La Pensee de Ste. Therese de 1'Enfant Jesus sur Ie Purgatoire in Annales de Sainte Therese, 1986, Suppl. Nr
    101, pages 21-29, quote on page 26. Translated from the German.
12. Annales de Sainte Therese, Nr. 610. Feb. 1983, page 5. Translated from the German.
13. Story of a Soul, Ms A, 84v, pg.181.
14. La Pensee, l.c., page 23. Translated from the German.
15. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Suppl. Qu. 30, art. 1. Translated from the German.
16. P. Philipon. Vie Spirituelle, Jan./Feb. 1945, pages 21-23; 16-17. Translated from the German.
17. La Doctrine, l.c. page 13. Translated from the German.
18. St. Therese of Lisieux, Letters St. Therese of Lisieux, ICS, Washington DC, 1913, Vol. II, pg 998, LT 197.
19. Pious Recreations, RP 6, 9v, translated from the German.
20. Last Conversations. pg. 89. CJ, 11.7.6
21. Letters of St. Therese of Lisieux. Vol. II, pg. 1093, LT 226.
22. La Pensee, l.c., pg. 28. Translated from the German.
23. Letters of St. Therese of Lisieux, Vol. II, pg. 999, LT 197.
24. Story of a Soul, pg. 200. Ms B, 5v.

(1) Webmaster's Note: This article, in German, appears in the December 2001, and the January 2002 issue of "Der Fels" (A German Catholic Publication) - see www.der-fels.de/2001/12-2001.pdf and www.der-fels.de/2002/01-2002.pdf respectively. It was translated into English by Père (Father) de la Trinité, ocd. Fr. Van Dijk, confirmed the authenticity of his writing - which I had requested because it appears that our website is the only place where this article appears in English. We have checked the references noted in the Footnotes, they all check out. Fr. Van Dijk hopes that we can make his paper known to the world. We shall try to do that. / Fred Schaeffer, SFO, webmaster.

BENEDICT XVI ON PRAYER PART 2

2011-05-14T12:24:00.000-04:00

ON PRAYER: 2nd AUDIENCE

VATICAN CITY, MAY 11, 2011 (Zenit.org).- Here is a translation of the Italian-language catechesis Benedict XVI gave today during the general audience held in St. Peter's Square. With his address the Pope continued the new series of catechesis on the subject of prayer.

* * *
Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Today I would like to continue reflecting on how prayer and the religious sense have been a part of mankind throughout history.

We live in an age in which the signs of secularism are evident. It seems that God has disappeared from the horizon of many persons or that he has become a reality before which one remains indifferent. However, at the same time we see many signs that indicate to us an awakening of the religious sense, a rediscovery of the importance of God for man's life, a need of spirituality, of surmounting a purely horizontal, material vision of human life. Analyzing recent history, the prediction has failed of those who in the age of the Enlightenment proclaimed the disappearance of religions and exalted absolute reason, separated from faith, a reason that would have dispelled the darkness of religious dogmas and dissolved "the world of the sacred," restoring to man his liberty, his dignity and his autonomy from God. The experience of the last century, with the two tragic World Wars, put in crisis that progress that autonomous reason, man without God, seemed to be able to guarantee.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church affirms: "In the act of creation, God calls every being from nothingness into existence. [...] Even after losing through his sin his likeness to God, man remains an image of his Creator, and retains the desire for the one who calls him into existence. All religions bear witness to men's essential search for God" (No. 2566). We could say -- as I showed in the previous catechesis -- that there has been no great civilization, from the most ancient times up to our days, which has not been religious.

Man is religious by nature, he is homo religiosus as he is homo sapiens and homo faber. "The desire for God," the Catechism also affirms, "is written in the human heart, because man is created by God and for God" (No. 27). The image of the Creator is imprinted in his being and he feels the need to find a light to give an answer to the questions that have to do with the profound meaning of reality; an answer that he cannot find in himself, in progress, in empirical science. Homo religiosus does not emerge only from the ancient world, but he crosses the whole history of humanity.

To this end, the rich terrain of human experience has witnessed the emergence of different forms of religiosity, in the attempt to respond to the desire for plenitude and happiness, to the need of salvation, to the search for meaning. "Digital" man and the caveman alike seek in religious experience the ways to overcome his finitude and to ensure his precarious earthly adventure. Moreover, life without a transcendent horizon would not have complete meaning, and the happiness to which we tend, is projected toward a future, toward a tomorrow that is yet to be attained.

In the declaration "Nostra Aetate," the Second Vatican Council stressed it synthetically. It states: Men expect from the various religions answers to the unsolved riddles of the human condition, which today, even as in former times, deeply stir the hearts of men: What is man? What is the meaning, the aim of our life? What is moral good, what sin? Whence suffering and what purpose does it serve? Which is the road to true happiness? What are death, judgment and retribution after death? What, finally, is that ultimate inexpressible mystery which encompasses our existence: whence do we come, and where are we going?" (No. 1). Man knows that he cannot answer on his own his fundamental need to understand. Even if he is deluded and still believes that he is self-sufficient, he has the experience that he is not sufficient unto himself. He needs to open himself to the other, to something or someone, which can give him what he lacks, he must come out of himself toward the One who can fill the extent and profundity of his desire.

Man bears within himself a thirst for the infinite, a nostalgia for eternity, a search for beauty, a desire for love, a need for light and truth, which drive him toward the Absolute; man bears within himself the desire for God. And man knows, in some way, that he can address himself to God, that he can pray to him. St. Thomas Aquinas, one of the greatest theologians of history, defines prayer as the "expression of man's desire for God." This attraction toward God, which God himself has placed in man, is the soul of prayer, which is cloaked in many forms and modalities according to the history, time, moment, grace and finally the sin of each one of those who pray. In fact, man's history has known varied forms of prayer, because he has developed different modalities of openness toward the on High and toward the Beyond, so much so that we can recognize prayer as an experience present in every religion and culture.

In fact, dear brothers and sisters, as we saw last Wednesday, prayer is not linked to a particular context, but is found inscribed in every person's heart and in every civilization.

Of course, when we speak of prayer as man's experience in as much as man, of the homo orans, it is necessary to keep in mind that this is an interior attitude, rather than a series of practices and formulas, a way of being before God, rather than carrying out acts of worship or pronouncing words. Prayer has its center and founds its roots in the most profound being of the person; that is why it is not easily decipherable and for the same reason, it can be subject to misunderstandings and mystifications. Also in this sense we can understand the expression: it is difficult to pray. In fact, prayer is the place par excellence of gratuitousness, of the tension towards the Invisible, the Unexpected, the Ineffable. Because of this, the experience of prayer is a challenge for everyone, a "grace" to be invoked, a gift of the One whom we address.

In all the periods of history, in prayer man considers himself and his situation before God, from God and in regard to God, and he experiences himself as being a creature in need of help, incapable of achieving by himself the fulfillment of his existence and his hope. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein reminded that "to pray means to feel that the meaning of the world is outside the world." In the dynamic of this relationship with the One who gives meaning to existence, with God, prayer has one of its typical expressions in the gesture of kneeling. It is a gesture that bears in itself a radical ambivalence: in fact, I can be obliged to kneel -- condition of indigence and slavery -- or I can kneel spontaneously, confessing my limit and, hence, my need for the Other. To Him I confess that I am weak, needy, a "sinner."

In the experience of prayer, the human creature expresses all his awareness of himself, all that he is able to understand of his existence and, at the same time, he addresses himself wholly to the Being before whom he is, he orients his soul to that Mystery from which he awaits the fulfillment of his most profound desires and help to surmount the indigence of his life. In this looking at the Other, in this addressing "the beyond" is the essence of prayer, as experience of a reality that surpasses the sentient and the contingent.

However, the full realization of man's search is found only in the God who reveals himself. Prayer, which is the opening and raising of the heart to God, becomes a personal relationship with Him. And even if man forgets his Creator, the living and true God does not fail to call man to the mysterious encounter of prayer. As the Catechism affirms: "In prayer, the faithful God's initiative of love always comes first; our own first step is always a response. As God gradually reveals himself and reveals man to himself, prayer appears as a reciprocal call, a covenant drama. Through words and actions, this drama engages the heart. It unfolds throughout the whole history of salvation" (No. 2567).

Dear brothers and sisters, let us learn to spend more time before God, let us learn to recognize in silence the God who has revealed himself in Jesus Christ, to recognize in the depth of ourselves his voice that calls us and leads us back to the profundity of our existence, to the fount of life, to the source of salvation, to make us go beyond the limits of our life and to open ourselves to the measure of God, to the relationship with Him who is Infinite Love. Thank you!

BENEDICT XVI ON PRAYER PART 1

2011-05-07T13:25:00.000-04:00

ON PRAYER: 1ST AUDIENCE IN NEW SERIES

"Virtually Always and Everywhere, People Have Turned to God"

VATICAN CITY, MAY 4, 2011 (Zenit.org).- Here is a translation of the Italian-language catechesis Benedict XVI gave Wednesday during the general audience held in St. Peter's Square. With his address the Pope began a new series of catecheses on the subject of prayer.

* * *

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Today I would like to begin a new series of catecheses.

After the catecheses on fathers of the Church, on great theologians of the Middle Ages, on great women, I would now like to choose a subject that we all have very much at heart: It is the subject of prayer, specifically, Christian prayer, which is the prayer that Jesus taught us and that the Church continues to teach us.

It is in Jesus, in fact, that man is made capable of approaching God with the depth and intimacy of the relationship of fatherhood and sonship. Together with the first disciples, we now turn with humble trust to the Master and ask: "Lord, teach us to pray" (Luke 11:1).

In the forthcoming catecheses, approaching sacred Scripture, the great tradition of the fathers of the Church, the teachers of spirituality, and the liturgy, we will learn to live yet more intensely our relationship with the Lord, as though in a "school of prayer."

We know well, in fact, that prayer cannot be taken for granted: We must learn how to pray, almost as if acquiring this art anew; even those who are very advanced in the spiritual life always feel the need to enter the school of Jesus to learn to pray with authenticity.

We receive the first lesson from the Lord through his example. The Gospels describe to us Jesus in intimate and constant dialogue with the Father: It is a profound communion of the One who came into the world not to do his will but that of the Father who sent him for man's salvation.

In this first catechesis, by way of introduction, I would like to propose some examples of prayer present in ancient cultures, to reveal how, virtually always and everywhere, people have turned to God.

I begin with ancient Egypt, as an example. Here a blind man, asking the divinity to restore his sight, attests to something universally human, as is the pure and simple prayer of petition on the part of one who is suffering. This man prays: "My heart desires to see you ... You who made me see the darkness, create light for me, that I may see you! Bend over me your beloved face" (A. Barucq -- F. Daumas, Hymnes et prieres de l'Egypte ancienne, Paris, 1980, translated into Italian as Preghiere dell'umanita, Brescia, 1993, p. 30).

That I may see you; here is the heart of prayer!
Prevailing in the religions of Mesopotamia was a mysterious and paralyzing sense of guilt, though not deprived of the hope of rescue and liberation by God.

Hence we can appreciate a supplication by a believer of those ancient cults, which sounds like this: "O God who are indulgent even in the most serious fault, absolve my sin ... Look, Lord, to your weary servant, and blow your breeze on him: Forgive him without delay. Alleviate your severe punishment. Free from the shackles, make me breathe again; break my chain, loosen my ties" (M. J. Seux, Hymnes et prieres aux Dieux de Babylone at d'Assyrie, Paris, 1976, translated into Italian in Preghiere dell'umanita, op. cit., p. 37).

These are expressions that show how, in his search for God, man intuited, though confusedly, on one hand his guilt and on the other, aspects of divine mercy and kindness.

At the heart of the pagan religion of ancient Greece we witness a very significant evolution: prayers, though continuing to invoke divine help to obtain heavenly favor in all circumstances of daily life and to obtain material benefits, are oriented progressively toward more selfless requests, which enable believing man to deepen his relationship with God and to become better. For example, the great philosopher Plato reported a prayer of his teacher, Socrates, who is justly regarded as one of the founders of Western thought. Socrates prayed thus: "Make me beautiful within. That I may hold as rich one who is wise and possess no more money than the wise man can take and carry. I do not ask for anything more" (Opere I. Fedro 279c, translated into Italian by P. Pucci, Bari, 1966).

Above all he wanted to be beautiful and wise within, and not rich in money.

In the Greek tragedies -- those outstanding literary masterpieces of all time that still today, after 25 centuries, are read, meditated and performed -- there are prayers that express the desire to know God and to adore his majesty. One of these reads thus: "Support of the earth, who dwell above the earth, whoever you are, difficult to understand, Zeus, be the law of nature or of the thought of mortals, I turn to you: given that, proceeding by silent ways, you guide human affairs according to justice" (Euripide, Troiane, 884-886, translated into Italian by G. Mancini, in Preghiere dell'umanita, op. cit., p. 54).

God remains somewhat nebulous and yet man knows this unknown God and prays to him who guides the affairs of the earth.

Also with the Romans, who constituted that great Empire in which a large part of the origins of Christianity was born and spread, prayer -- though associated to a utilitarian conception fundamentally bound to the request for divine protection on the life of the civil community -- opens at times to admirable invocations because of the fervor of personal piety, which is transformed into praise and thanksgiving.

Apuleius, an author of Roman Africa of the 2nd century after Christ, is a witness to this. In his writings he manifests contemporaries' dissatisfaction at comparing the traditional religion and the desire for a more authentic relationship with God. In his masterpiece, titled Metamorphosis, a believer addresses a feminine divinity with these words: "You, yes, are a saint, you are at all times savior of the human species, you, in your generosity, always give your help to mortals, you offer the poor in travail the gentle affection that a mother can have. Not a day or a night or an instant passes, no matter how brief it is, that you do not fill him with your benefits" (Apuleius of Madaura, Metamorphosis IX, 25, Translated into Italian by C. Annaratone, in Preghiere dell'umanita, op. cit., p. 79).

In the same period the emperor Marcus Aurelius -- who was as well a thoughtful philosopher of the human condition -- affirmed the need to pray to establish a fruitful cooperation between divine and human action. He wrote in his Memoirs: "Who has told you that the gods do not help us even in what depends on us? Begin then to pray to them and you will see" (Dictionnaire de Spiritualite XII/2, col. 2213).

This advice of the philosopher-emperor was put into practice effectively by innumerable generations of men before Christ, thus demonstrating that human life without prayer, which opens our existence to the mystery of God, is deprived of meaning and reference.

Expressed in every prayer, in fact, is the truth of the human creature, which on one hand experiences weakness and indigence, and because of this asks for help from heaven, and on the other is gifted with extraordinary dignity, as, preparing himself to receive divine Revelation, he discovers himself capable of entering into communion with God.

Dear friends, emerging from these examples of prayer from various periods and civilizations is the human awareness of his condition as a creature and his dependence on Another superior to him and the source of every good.

The man of all times prays because he cannot fail to ask himself what is the meaning of his existence, which remains dark and discomforting, if he is not placed in relationship with the mystery of God and of his plan for the world.

Human life is an interlacing of good and evil, of unmerited suffering and of joy and beauty, which spontaneously and irresistibly drives us to pray to God for that interior light and strength which aid us on earth and reveal a hope that goes beyond the boundaries of death. The pagan religions remain an invocation that from the earth awaits a word from Heaven.

Proclus of Constantinople, one of the last great pagan philosophers, who lived already at the height of the Christian age, gave voice to this expectation, saying: "Unknowable, no one contains you. Everything that we think belongs to you. Our ills and goods are from you, every breath depends on you, O Ineffable One, may our souls feel you present, raising a hymn of silence to you" (Hymn,ed. E. Vogt, Wiesbaden, 1957, in Preghiere dell'umanita, op. cit., p. 61).

In the examples of prayer from the various cultures that we considered, we can see a testimony of the religious dimension and of the desire for God inscribed in the heart of every man, which receive fulfillment and full expression in the Old and New Testaments. Revelation, in fact, purifies and leads to fullness man's original longing for God, offering him, with prayer, the possibility of a more profound relationship with the heavenly Father.

At the beginning of this journey of ours in the "school of prayer" we now wish to ask the Lord to illumine our minds and hearts so that our relationship with him in prayer is ever more intense, affectionate and constant. Once again, let us say to him: "Lord, teach us to pray" (Luke 11:1).

[Translation by ZENIT]

[The Holy Father then greeted pilgrims in several languages. In English, he said:]

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

The new series of catecheses which we begin today are devoted to prayer and, in particular, the prayer proper to Christians. Christian prayer is grounded in the gift of new life brought by Christ; it is an "art" in which Christ, the Son of God, is our supreme teacher. At the same time, prayer is a part of the human experience, as we see from the ancient cultures of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome. There we find eloquent expressions of a desire to see God, to experience his mercy and forgiveness, to grow in virtue and to experience divine help in all that we do. In these cultures there is also a recognition that prayer opens man to a deeper understanding of our dependence on God and life's ultimate meaning. The pagan religions, however, remain a plea for divine help, an expression of that profound human yearning for God which finds its highest expression and fulfilment in the Old and New Testaments. Divine revelation, in fact, purifies and fulfils man's innate desire for God and offers us, through prayer, the possibility of a deeper relationship with our heavenly Father. With the disciples, then, let us ask the Lord: "[t]each us to pray" (cf. Luke 11:1).

I welcome all the English-speaking visitors present at today's Audience, especially those from Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Japan, Singapore and the United States. My particular greeting goes to the pilgrimage group from the Archdiocese of Kampala, led by Archbishop Cyprian Kizito Lwanga. Upon all of you I invoke an abundance of joy and peace in the Risen Christ!

No Greater Love

2011-05-03T18:32:00.000-04:00

Benedict XVI Homily at Beatification Mass of John Paul II

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Six years ago we gathered in this Square to celebrate the funeral of Pope John Paul II. Our grief at his loss was deep, but even greater was our sense of an immense grace which embraced Rome and the whole world: a grace which was in some way the fruit of my beloved predecessor’s entire life, and especially of his witness in suffering. Even then we perceived the fragrance of his sanctity, and in any number of ways God’s People showed their veneration for him. For this reason, with all due respect for the Church’s canonical norms, I wanted his cause of beatification to move forward with reasonable haste. And now the longed-for day has come; it came quickly because this is what was pleasing to the Lord: John Paul II is blessed!

I would like to offer a cordial greeting to all of you who on this happy occasion have come in such great numbers to Rome from all over the world – cardinals, patriarchs of the Eastern Catholic Churches, brother bishops and priests, official delegations, ambassadors and civil authorities, consecrated men and women and lay faithful, and I extend that greeting to all those who join us by radio and television.

Today is the Second Sunday of Easter, which Blessed John Paul II entitled Divine Mercy Sunday. The date was chosen for today’s celebration because, in God’s providence, my predecessor died on the vigil of this feast. Today is also the first day of May, Mary’s month, and the liturgical memorial of Saint Joseph the Worker. All these elements serve to enrich our prayer, they help us in our pilgrimage through time and space; but in heaven a very different celebration is taking place among the angels and saints! Even so, God is but one, and one too is Christ the Lord, who like a bridge joins earth to heaven. At this moment we feel closer than ever, sharing as it were in the liturgy of heaven.

“Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe” (Jn 20:29). In today’s Gospel Jesus proclaims this beatitude: the beatitude of faith. For us, it is particularly striking because we are gathered to celebrate a beatification, but even more so because today the one proclaimed blessed is a Pope, a Successor of Peter, one who was called to confirm his brethren in the faith. John Paul II is blessed because of his faith, a strong, generous and apostolic faith. We think at once of another beatitude: “Blessed are you, Simon, son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven” (Mt 16:17). What did our heavenly Father reveal to Simon? That Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God. Because of this faith, Simon becomes Peter, the rock on which Jesus can build his Church. The eternal beatitude of John Paul II, which today the Church rejoices to proclaim, is wholly contained in these sayings of Jesus: “Blessed are you, Simon” and “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe!” It is the beatitude of faith, which John Paul II also received as a gift from God the Father for the building up of Christ’s Church.

Our thoughts turn to yet another beatitude, one which appears in the Gospel before all others. It is the beatitude of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of the Redeemer. Mary, who had just conceived Jesus, was told by Saint Elizabeth: “Blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfilment of what was spoken to her by the Lord” (Lk 1:45). The beatitude of faith has its model in Mary, and all of us rejoice that the beatification of John Paul II takes place on this first day of the month of Mary, beneath the maternal gaze of the one who by her faith sustained the faith of the Apostles and constantly sustains the faith of their successors, especially those called to occupy the Chair of Peter. Mary does not appear in the accounts of Christ’s resurrection, yet hers is, as it were, a continual, hidden presence: she is the Mother to whom Jesus entrusted each of his disciples and the entire community. In particular we can see how Saint John and Saint Luke record the powerful, maternal presence of Mary in the passages preceding those read in today’s Gospel and first reading. In the account of Jesus’ death, Mary appears at the foot of the cross (Jn 19:25), and at the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles she is seen in the midst of the disciples gathered in prayer in the Upper Room (Acts 1:14).

Today’s second reading also speaks to us of faith. Saint Peter himself, filled with spiritual enthusiasm, points out to the newly-baptized the reason for their hope and their joy. I like to think how in this passage, at the beginning of his First Letter, Peter does not use language of exhortation; instead, he states a fact. He writes: “you rejoice”, and he adds: “you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy, for you are receiving the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls” (1 Pet 1:6, 8-9). All these verbs are in the indicative, because a new reality has come about in Christ’s resurrection, a reality to which faith opens the door. “This is the Lord’s doing”, says the Psalm (118:23), and “it is marvelous in our eyes”, the eyes of faith.

Dear brothers and sisters, today our eyes behold, in the full spiritual light of the risen Christ, the beloved and revered figure of John Paul II. Today his name is added to the host of those whom he proclaimed saints and blesseds during the almost twenty-seven years of his pontificate, thereby forcefully emphasizing the universal vocation to the heights of the Christian life, to holiness, taught by the conciliar Constitution on the Church Lumen Gentium. All of us, as members of the people of God – bishops, priests, deacons, laity, men and women religious – are making our pilgrim way to the heavenly homeland where the Virgin Mary has preceded us, associated as she was in a unique and perfect way to the mystery of Christ and the Church. Karol Wojtyła took part in the Second Vatican Council, first as an auxiliary Bishop and then as Archbishop of Kraków. He was fully aware that the Council’s decision to devote the last chapter of its Constitution on the Church to Mary meant that the Mother of the Redeemer is held up as an image and model of holiness for every Christian and for the entire Church. This was the theological vision which Blessed John Paul II discovered as a young man and subsequently maintained and deepened throughout his life. A vision which is expressed in the scriptural image of the crucified Christ with Mary, his Mother, at his side. This icon from the Gospel of John (19:25-27) was taken up in the episcopal and later the papal coat-of-arms of Karol Wojtyła: a golden cross with the letter “M” on the lower right and the motto “Totus tuus”, drawn from the well-known words of Saint Louis Marie Grignion de Montfort in which Karol Wojtyła found a guiding light for his life: “Totus tuus ego sum et omnia mea tua sunt. Accipio te in mea omnia. Praebe mihi cor tuum, Maria – I belong entirely to you, and all that I have is yours. I take you for my all. O Mary, give me your heart” (Treatise on True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin, 266).

In his Testament, the new Blessed wrote: “When, on 16 October 1978, the Conclave of Cardinals chose John Paul II, the Primate of Poland, Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński, said to me: ‘The task of the new Pope will be to lead the Church into the Third Millennium’”. And the Pope added: “I would like once again to express my gratitude to the Holy Spirit for the great gift of the Second Vatican Council, to which, together with the whole Church – and especially with the whole episcopate – I feel indebted. I am convinced that it will long be granted to the new generations to draw from the treasures that this Council of the twentieth century has lavished upon us. As a Bishop who took part in the Council from the first to the last day, I desire to entrust this great patrimony to all who are and will be called in the future to put it into practice. For my part, I thank the Eternal Shepherd, who has enabled me to serve this very great cause in the course of all the years of my Pontificate”. And what is this “cause”? It is the same one that John Paul II presented during his first solemn Mass in Saint Peter’s Square in the unforgettable words: “Do not be afraid! Open, open wide the doors to Christ!” What the newly-elected Pope asked of everyone, he was himself the first to do: society, culture, political and economic systems he opened up to Christ, turning back with the strength of a titan – a strength which came to him from God – a tide which appeared irreversible. By his witness of faith, love and apostolic courage, accompanied by great human charisma, this exemplary son of Poland helped believers throughout the world not to be afraid to be called Christian, to belong to the Church, to speak of the Gospel. In a word: he helped us not to fear the truth, because truth is the guarantee of liberty. To put it even more succinctly: he gave us the strength to believe in Christ, because Christ is Redemptor hominis, the Redeemer of man. This was the theme of his first encyclical, and the thread which runs though all the others.

When Karol Wojtyła ascended to the throne of Peter, he brought with him a deep understanding of the difference between Marxism and Christianity, based on their respective visions of man. This was his message: man is the way of the Church, and Christ is the way of man. With this message, which is the great legacy of the Second Vatican Council and of its “helmsman”, the Servant of God Pope Paul VI, John Paul II led the People of God across the threshold of the Third Millennium, which thanks to Christ he was able to call “the threshold of hope”. Throughout the long journey of preparation for the great Jubilee he directed Christianity once again to the future, the future of God, which transcends history while nonetheless directly affecting it. He rightly reclaimed for Christianity that impulse of hope which had in some sense faltered before Marxism and the ideology of progress. He restored to Christianity its true face as a religion of hope, to be lived in history in an “Advent” spirit, in a personal and communitarian existence directed to Christ, the fullness of humanity and the fulfillment of all our longings for justice and peace.

Finally, on a more personal note, I would like to thank God for the gift of having worked for many years with Blessed Pope John Paul II. I had known him earlier and had esteemed him, but for twenty-three years, beginning in 1982 after he called me to Rome to be Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, I was at his side and came to revere him all the more. My own service was sustained by his spiritual depth and by the richness of his insights. His example of prayer continually impressed and edified me: he remained deeply united to God even amid the many demands of his ministry. Then too, there was his witness in suffering: the Lord gradually stripped him of everything, yet he remained ever a “rock”, as Christ desired. His profound humility, grounded in close union with Christ, enabled him to continue to lead the Church and to give to the world a message which became all the more eloquent as his physical strength declined. In this way he lived out in an extraordinary way the vocation of every priest and bishop to become completely one with Jesus, whom he daily receives and offers in the Church.

Blessed are you, beloved Pope John Paul II, because you believed! Continue, we implore you, to sustain from heaven the faith of God’s people. You often blessed us in this Square from the Apostolic Palace: Bless us, Holy Father! Amen.

© Copyright 2011 - Libreria Editrice Vaticana

Rockin' and a'Rollin' Shoehorn Blues

2011-04-19T16:05:00.000-04:00

This is an interesting article if you are not going to insist on substantial merit. It's merit as Catholic commentary is limited as far as I am concerned because any time that you have to work THIS hard to make a shoe fit: chances are you have not found the princess!!
++++++++++++++++++++++++

Ayn Rand's Attack on Christian Morality | James Kidd | April 14, 2011 | Ignatius Insight

http://www.ignatiusinsight.com/features2011/jkidd_aynrand_apr2011.asp#_ednref1

The April 15 release of the film Atlas Shrugged: Part I brings the Russian-born novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand (1905–1982) back into the spotlight. Her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged (1957), continues to sell more than half a century after its publication. The novel even topped Amazon.com's fiction sales at one point in 2009 and is required reading among Tea Party activists.[1] Staffers at the libertarian Cato Institute who have not read the novel are called "virgins."

But orthodox Catholics have a love/hate relationship with Rand. Political conservatives, with whom they traditionally align, find much to like in Rand's writings on government and economics. Few have made the case for limited government as persuasively and intelligently as Rand.

But Rand's views on organized religion, making it the major villain of history, gives pause to many religious conservatives. Her diatribes against religion often border on the delirious. Catholics might be surprised to learn, then, that Objectivist ethics is actually reconcilable with Catholic teaching.

Rand's "Selfishness" Defined

Objectivist ethics is defined more by what it opposes than what it proposes. In Rand's view, the entirety of the world's problems can be traced back to altruism, which she defines as "the doctrine which demands that man live for others and place others above self." What's wrong with that? "The man who attempts to live for others is a dependent. He is a parasite in motive and makes parasites of those he serves. The relationship produces nothing but mutual corruption."[2]

Rand believes that there are two classes of people: the "creators" (inventors, intellectuals, businessmen, and all others who use their minds to create something useful) and those she calls looters or second-handers, inferior beings who spend their pitiful lives mooching off the creators and their creations like parasites.

According to Rand, "looters" have always been around and have always been dependent on the kindness and compassion of the creators for their own sustenance. But centuries ago, the looters made the creators' benevolence toward them obligatory. In other words, one man's need placed a moral burden on the one who had the resources to relieve it. Ever since then, anything and everything the creators produced was claimed as the rightful property of everyone else. Thus was born the evil of altruism.

This conception of altruism, taken to its logical conclusion, leads to some heinous results, as Rand explains:

Your code [altruism] hands out, as its version of the absolute, the following rule of moral conduct: If you wish it, it's evil; if others wish it, it's good; if the motive of your action is your welfare, don't do it; if the motive is the welfare of others, then anything goes. ...

For those of you who might ask questions, your code provides a consolation prize and a booby-trap: it is for your own happiness, it says, that you must serve the happiness of others, the only way to achieve your joy is to give it up to others, the only way to achieve your prosperity is to surrender your wealth to others, the only way to protect your life is to protect all men except yourself—and if you find no joy in this procedure, it is your own fault and the proof of your evil; if you were good, you would find your happiness in providing a banquet for others, and your dignity in existing on such crumbs as they might care to toss you.[3]

Rand places religion—especially Christianity—at the heart of the great deception that made every man a servant but none a master. It was religious belief, by supposedly rejecting reason and replacing it with an irrational "faith," that gave birth to altruism. From then on, self-interest was discouraged and self-giving was required. Of course, part of the reason for religion's ascent, according to Rand, was that it appealed to those at the bottom of the social ladder. It gave them an opportunity to revel in their worthlessness and justified their demands on those at the top.

From this was born socialism, which sought to take power away from natural leaders and place it in the hands of the unwashed masses. In fact, Rand sees religious believers and socialists as two sides of the same coin: Religionists (or "mystics of spirit," as she calls them) preach that all man's activities should be in service to God, while socialists (or "mystics of muscle") preach that all man's activities should be in service to "society."

In reaction to its conception of altruism, Objectivism takes the other extreme. Rand proposes what she calls "rational self-interest":

The basic social principle of the Objectivist ethics is that just as life is an end in itself, so every living human being is an end in himself, not the means to the ends or the welfare of others—and, therefore, that man must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. To live for his own sake means that the achievement of his own happiness is man's highest moral purpose.[4]

One may object at this point that rational self-interest logically leads to hedonism, which leads to social chaos. But Rand explains:

The Objectivist ethics ... holds that the rational interests of men do not clash—that there is no conflict of interests among men who do not desire the unearned, who do not make sacrifices nor accept them, who deal with one another as traders, giving value for value.[5]

Of course, Rand never demonstrates how aggressively taking advantage of others is not in one's own self-interest; she simply declares that it is.

"Acts of Good Will"

One might think at this point that selfless acts are strictly verboten in Objectivism. But Rand does allow for what Christians call "acts of charity"—reluctantly, it seems, and only with certain preconditions.

Taking the example of a drowning person, Rand declares: "If the person to be saved is a stranger, it is morally proper to save him only when the danger to one's own life is minimal; when the danger is great, it would be immoral to attempt it: only a lack of self-esteem could permit one to value one's life no higher than that of any random stranger."[6]

But what about actions that benefit others while providing no benefit to (or even harming) oneself? Rand provides for this possibility as well:

Suppose one hears that the man next door is ill and penniless. Illness and poverty are not metaphysical emergencies, they are part of the normal risks of existence; but since the man is temporarily helpless, one may bring him food and medicine, if one can afford it (as an act of good will, not of duty) or one may raise a fund among the neighbors to help him out. But this does not mean that one must support him from then on, nor that one must spend one's life looking for starving men to help.[7]

The discerning reader will point out, though, that the phrase "act of good will" in the quote above does not fit with the concept of "rational self-interest"; in fact, it could be seen as an outright contradiction. These justifications by Rand of selfless acts thus seem to be an attempt to shoehorn what is universally recognized as virtuous into her otherwise selfish philosophy. But shoehorn or not, Objectivism cannot be accused of forbidding acts of charity.

Charity as an Obligation

Getting back to Rand's indictment of altruism, while it is a caricature, it is accurate in at least two respects.

First, her critique of socialism is largely correct. The basic idea of socialism is taking charitable motives and sentiments and codifying them into law. The goals of socialists and "progressives" can be characterized as taking from the "haves" and giving to the "have-nots," all in the name of justice.

Second, Rand's attack on religion is true insofar as the attitude that charity is an obligation permeates religious belief. Many Christians (and even many Catholics) subscribe to this idea—and not just those on the religious left who preach "social justice." It is not uncommon to hear in Sunday homilies that we have an "obligation of charity" to help the poor, that charity toward one's neighbor is "a moral duty," that we are "required" to help our neighbors.

Indeed, it is easy to read Christ's words regarding charity as commands. Take, for example, John 15:9: "This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you" (emphasis added).

So is Catholic morality guilty of Rand's charges? Does it mandate self-donation, corrupting both the giver and the recipient and destroying the very concept of charity? If not, how are we to understand the words of Christ and of the Church regarding the virtue of charity?

The Catholic View of Charity

A proper understanding of charity recognizes the difference between the cardinal virtue of justice and the theological virtue of charity. Justice consists of what is required of us, or giving each man his due. Charity, on the other hand, goes above and beyond what is required of us.

Thus the phrase "obligation of charity" is an oxymoron. The concepts of obligation and charity are mutually exclusive: If something is obligatory (say, adhering to the terms of a contract), then fulfilling it is not an act of charity; if an act is recognized as charitable (say, holding an elevator for a stranger), then it is not mandatory in any way.

So what does Christ mean in the quote from John 15? Here let's take a step back to properly understand the relationship between the Old Law and the New Law. The Old Law consisted of many obligations that God required of his people. Christ initiated the New Law, which did not replace the Old but only added an exhortation to go above and beyond it. In the words of the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

The Law of the Gospel fulfills the commandments of the Law. The Lord's Sermon on the Mount, far from abolishing or devaluing the moral prescriptions of the Old Law, releases their hidden potential and has new demands arise from them: it reveals their entire divine and human truth. It does not add new external precepts, but proceeds to reform the heart, the root of human acts, where man chooses between the pure and the impure, where faith, hope, and charity are formed and with them the other virtues. The Gospel thus brings the Law to its fullness through imitation of the perfection of the heavenly Father, through forgiveness of enemies and prayer for persecutors, in emulation of the divine generosity.[8]

So in the same way that charity exceeds justice while not replacing it, the New Law of Christ goes above and beyond the Old Law without wiping it out. Christ institutes the New Law not as a set of new mandates but as an exhortation to go above and beyond the existing ones. In other words, Christ does not add to the virtue of justice; he adds the virtue of charity on top of it. But charity remains distinct from justice. Or, in terms of the old theological dictum, grace does not destroy nature; it presupposes and perfects it.

Unfortunately, though, a lack of clarification has led to a misunderstanding of charity. Today, the impression is left that Christianity mandates benevolence toward one's neighbor.

A Difference of Emphasis

This more refined notion of charity, combined with Rand's shoehorning of charity into her philosophy, allows us to reconcile Objectivist ethics with true Christian charity. The difference is only a matter of emphasis.

Rand stresses the non-obligatory nature of charity and, by her reluctance to highlight them, de-emphasizes the goodness of charitable acts. Catholicism, on the other hand, emphasizes the commendability of charitable acts, even as many Catholics may be under the impression that these acts spring from an obligation.

Of course, this does not mean that Objectivists and Catholics can hold hands and sing Kumbaya. There are many Objectivist positions that are diametrically opposed to Catholic teaching, such as its atheistic rationalism and its belief that religious belief is the root of all major problems in the world today.

Nevertheless, Rand's devastating critique of altruism serves to help clarify the nature of true charity: It is not required, but it is still good. Rand is not that far off base after all.

ENDNOTES:

[1] Alex Spillius, "US Midterms: Essential Reading for the Budding Tea Party Activist", The Telegraph, October 25, 2010, accessed April 8, 2011.
[2] Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (New York: Penguin, 1943), p. 680.
[3] Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (New York: Penguin, 1957), pp. 943–44. All emphases in quotes from Rand are in the original.
[4] Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness (New York, Penguin, 1964), p. 30.
[5] Ibid., p. 34.
[6] Ibid., p. 52.
[7] Ibid., p. 55.
[8] Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1968.

James Kidd is editor of PublicSquare.net. He worked as an assistant editor of This Rock magazine and is former managing editor of The Philadelphia Bulletin. He holds a bachelor's degree in philosophy from the University of Dallas. He lives in Falls Church, Virginia, with his wife and five-year-old son.

Behold the Bridegroom Comes

2011-04-17T18:33:00.000-04:00

Thirty years among us dwelling
His appointed time fulfilled,
Born for this he meets his passion,
For that this he freely willed;
On that cross the Lamb is lifted,
Where his lifeblood shall be spilled.

He endured the nails, the spitting,
Vinegar, and spear, and reed:
From that holy body beaten
Blood and water forth proceed:
Earth and stars and sky and ocean
By that flood from stain are freed.

Faithful Cross above all other,
One and only noble Tree!
None in foliage, none in blossom,
None in fruit thy peer may be;
Sweetest wood and sweetest iron!
Sweet the Weight that hangs on thee!

Bend thy boughs, O tree of Glory!
Let thy rigid sinews bend;
For a while the ancient rigor,
That thy birth bestowed, suspend;
And the King of heavenly beauty,
On thy bosom, gently tend.

Thou alone was counted worthy
This world's ransom to sustain;
That a shipwrecked race forever
Might a port of refuge gain;
With the sacred Blood anointed
Of the Lamb for sinners slain.

Glory be to God, and honor
In the highest! as is meet,
To the Son, and to the Father,
and eternal Paraclete,
Whose is boundless grace and power
Through the ages infinite. ~ Monastic Diurnal

Invocabo nomen tuum, Domine: ne avertas faciem tuam a clamore meo!

I will invoke Thy Name, O Lord, turn not thy face away from my cry!

In nomine Jesu omne genu flectatur caelestium, terrestrium, et infernorum: et omnis lingua confiteatur, quia Dominus Jesus Christus in gloria et Dei Patris.

At the name of Jesus every knee shall bend of those in heaven, on earth and under the earth, and every tongue shall confess that the Lord Jesus Christ rests in the glory of God the Father.

Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen

2011-02-26T14:41:00.003-05:00

Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen

Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen,
Mit der ich sonst viele Zeit verdorben,
Sie hat so lange nichts von mir vernommen,
Sie mag wohl glauben, ich sei gestorben!

Es ist mir auch gar nichts daran gelegen,
Ob sie mich für gestorben hält,
Ich kann auch gar nichts sagen dagegen,
Denn wirklich bin ich gestorben der Welt.

Ich bin gestorben dem Weltgetümmel,
Und ruh' in einem stillen Gebiet!
Ich leb' allein in meinem Himmel,
In meinem Lieben, in meinem Lied!

I am lost to the world

I am lost to the world
with which I used to waste so much time,
It has heard nothing from me for so long
that it may very well believe that I am dead!

It is of no consequence to me
Whether it thinks me dead;
I cannot deny it,
for I really am dead to the world.

I am dead to the world's tumult,
And I rest in a quiet realm!
I live alone in my heaven,
In my love and in my song!

Thanks to Joe Koczera, SJ for the reference to this poem.
http://jesuitjoe.blogspot.com/

Friedrich Rückert (1788-1866)

With a musical setting by

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)

Emily Ezust translates

2011-01-26T18:01:00.000-05:00

Father Gabriel (Bunge) “Orthodoxy is the Fruit of My Whole Life as a Christian and a Monk”
By Archpriest Pavel Velikanov
Jan 25, 2011, 10:00

http://www.pravmir.com/article_1220.html

A famous Swiss Catholic theologian, Hieromonk Gabriel Bunge, converted to Orthodoxy on August 27th 2010 in Moscow, on the Eve of the Dormition of the Virgin Mary. It was Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk who received Fr. Gabriel into the Orthodox Church. We are glad to offer our readers translations of two interviews with Fr. Gabriel. The first interview “I came to the faith owing to my peers” was conducted by Archpriest Pavel Velikanov, the editor-in-chief of the scientific theological website “Bogoslos.ru” in 2008. At the time Fr. Gabriel was still a Catholic hieromonk. The second interview “One Can't Learn to Pray Sitting in a Warm Armchair” Fr. Gabriel had right after he had converted to Orthodoxy. It was conducted by a Russian Orthodox Christian Journal for Doubting Thomases – Foma.

For Some of Us This Is Not News

2011-01-12T09:08:00.002-05:00

Where's the Media? L.A. Attorney Declares Many Abuse Accusations Against
Catholic Priests Are 'Entirely False'

By Dave Pierre | January 02, 2011 |

In a stunning ten-page declaration recently submitted to the Los Angeles County Superior Court, veteran attorney Donald H. Steier stated that his investigations into claims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests have uncovered vast fraud and that his probes have revealed that many accusations are completely false.

Read more:
http://www.newsbusters.org:80/blogs/dave-pierre/2011/01/02/wheres-media-la-atty-declares-many-abuse-accusations-against-catholic-p#ixzz1Amx64c98

Does Our Image Change

2011-01-09T12:29:00.002-05:00

I thought myself into a question today and decided that I'd post it
here as well.

Asteriktos :
If someone believes that they will suffer eternally in hell if they
choose against God, are they really free to choose in favor of God?
Isn't there some degree of coercion involved in such a case? I realise
that one possible answer is that telling people about hell is merely
letting people know that there will be consequences for the choices
they make. However, I don't know that this changes things, for even if
the intention is not to use coercion, it still seems like there is a
problem if someone acts or believes based on fear or perceived threats
of torment and suffering. Am I just looking at this bass ackwards...?
[/quote]

Elijahmaria:

To me the question is much simpler: If God is freedom, and the good
of his creation is free, and sin is the antithesis of that freedom,
then how can I choose the slavery of sin and expect to be free?

Well that addresses the general question of freedom at its source.

But the question that we, as religious beings, ask more specifically
is: Can I choose freely or without coercion...external coercion? And
the answer comes back for us as children of God, "Yes!"

Now a more nuanced question and one that is addressed frequently by
the desert fathers is one that suggests that the deeper one advances
into sin, the more alienated he or she becomes from God, and thereby
more distanced from the good and freedom. So for me, one of the more
compelling questions is: Can the one whose soul is deadened and darkened by sin choose freely?

And again, I believe and my Church teaches, the answer is "Yes!"
because we are made in God's image and though we lose his likeness,
we, as creatures and children of God, never lose the image and it is
in the truth of this image that we always remain free.

Now: If we are in hell...done...no way out...does our image change?

Romanian Greek Catholics: Memorandum pt. 2

2010-05-07T09:09:00.004-04:00

More from the 2002 Memorandum from Romanian Greek Catholics to the government of Romania:

II. Historic-religious Arguments

The unification of Transylvania with Romania has consigned a spiritual bind of all Romanians with the rest of Europe, with the cradle of the Latin and universal civilization. This unification took place in the 1700's through the Romanian Greek-Catholic Church United with Rome. We do not deem the fact that there are two separate beliefs, a Catholic and an Orthodox one, but a Christian one. The right to choose a place of actual manifestation of either of these is one of the essential liberties of each human being.

Through the unification of the Romanian Church from Transylvania with Rome, the Romanians gained access to the Western schools of thought and culture, and the priests had received their education in the Latin language in Rome, and not in Tarigrad which maintained an education in the Slavonic language. Greek-Catholic Bishop Inochentie Micu, an emblematic personality for our entire nation, pronounced for the first time the name of our nation as "Romanian," and fought to his death for the rights of all Romanians in Transylvania, not only for the Greek-Catholic ones.

From a political perspective and for the first time in world history, due to the recognition given to the Romanians from the Pope and from Europe as a self-sufficient European nation within the Austrian Empire, the Romanian nation had become the fourth recognized nation, although Romanians were not considered to be a tolerated nation within Transylvania. This was an event of great importance in those times, somewhat comparable with the present entrance and acceptance of Romania into the European Union.

The Romanian Greek-Catholic disciples were given the true revelation pertaining to the true Latin origin of our nation through their studies completed in Rome and through the thorough knowledge achieved of our Latin origins. These origins have been proved through many studies and specialized analytical works. This is how the Ardelean School was born, which generated patriotic pride, this being the light that provoked an awakening to the Romanian national conscience.

The Ardelean School was the first and true Romanian movement through which the Romanian people have been defined: origin - daco-roman, language - of Latin origin, alphabet - Latin, name - Romanian, tri-colored flag - the three Romanian provinces. The leaders of this School were Samuil Micu, Gheorghe Sincai, Petru Maior, whom were all Greek-Catholics. Due to this perspective, it is important to remark the fact that the official birth act of the modern Romanian European nation was written by Greek-Catholicism!

Nobody up until these great teachers of the Ardelean School had ever pointed out clearly our true Latin origin. And nobody else has ever identified us as well as they did as a people. Exactly because of this the Romanian people should never forget or attempt to minimize the fundamental role that was really played by Greek-Catholicism in the history of our country. The Ardelean School was not only a cultural movement but a political one as well. It had an enormous impact on the development of our nation. Its importance was crucial in the formation and emancipation of the modern Romanian people, which is comparable to our ethno-genesis after the prevailing of the Romans over Dacia.

In the beginning of the 19th century, Gheorghe Lazar and Gheorghe Asachi, being strongly influenced by the Ardelean School, had established the first public Romanian schools of systematic education in Muntenia, and respectively in Moldova, with professors that had been educated at the Ardelean School! It should be with great dignity to remark on the fact that during this period the spoken language in the few established schools was not yet Romanian. The Romanian edification only develops later in history, with the contribution of the professors trained in the spirit of the Ardelean School. It becomes evident, therefore, that Romanians from the separate regions of the country owe the creation of the Romanian education system to the first established Greek-Catholic schools!

Greek-Catholicism has given Romania an impressive list of cultural and religious personalities: Inochentie Micu, Samuil Micu, Gheorghe Sincai, Petru Maior, Gh. Baritiu, Timotei Cipariu, Andrei Muresanu, Ioan Ratiu, I.G. Pop de Basesti, Vasile Lucaciu, George Cosbuc, Liviu Rebreanu, Ion Agarbiceanu, Iuliu Maniu, Iuliu Hossu, Cornel Coposu and many, many more.

It is also evident that the reinvigoration of the Romanian Greek-Catholic Church United with Rome will truly be a great cause for the Church of Christ. This Church has always been a bridge between Christianity of Occidental and Oriental traditions.

Public Preacher Faces Charges of Hate Speech

2010-05-04T12:27:00.000-04:00

Preacher arrested in UK for calling homosexual conduct sinful

Not a topic particular to the purpose of Irenikon, but certainly something that should be of concern to all Christians who take seriously the magisterial charge to go and make disciples. [Matthew 28:19]

Romanian Greek Catholics: Memorandum pt. 1

2010-04-29T17:19:00.004-04:00

The following is taken from the Summary Content of a Memorandum sent to all major members of the Romanian Government in 2002 addressed from the Greek-Catholic Believers from Romania and from the Entire World.

It is a difficult document to read.

Anyone who has suffered the demeaning yoke of oppression, of ANY kind, will recognize the extreme effort that it takes to approach the oppressor possessed of the full dignity of the human condition, and demand your right to operate freely and without restraint and surely without fear of imprisonment and loss of life and property, knowing that you will be ignored, mocked in public or in private, and perhaps even subjected to more intense pressures because of your daring to challenge the authority born of economic, political and military might. It is an important background document for those who have an interest in Orthodox-Catholic dialogue and the health and well being of eastern Catholic Churches in central or eastern European countries. The Romanian Greek-Catholic Church played a pivotal and courageous role in the firm establishment of Romanian language and culture within the geopolitical boundaries that constitute modern Romania. For that alone she should not be consigned to the dustbin of history. I will post more on that in a subsequent article. The outcome of the memorandum has not resulted in much change in circumstance over the ensuing eight years to the present.

MEMORANDUM CONTENT

Most respected Representatives of Romania,

With great regret we have reached the firm conclusion that, even though more than 12 years have passed since the Anti-Communist Revolution in 1989, the Romanian Greek-Catholic Church United with Rome in Romania continues to be extremely discriminated against.

This discrimination is mostly based on political and religious reasons, and is manifested through the following conducts:

* Complete limitation on the rights to justice of the Romanian Greek-Catholic Church Unite with Rome, in Romania.

* Refusal by the State of Romania to return all nationalized and confiscated goods to the Romanian Greek-Catholic Church United with Rome, in Romania.

* Legislative acts drawn to limit even in our present times the nationalization and confiscation that took place in 1948.

* Allowing incitement to take place on religious motives and reasons.

* Refusal by the State of Romania to apply the established laws and permitting for these to be disrespected by some members of staff and by other diverse pressure groups.

* Authorizing the illegal demolition and destruction of religious edifices and peripheral establishments that are part of our Church.

*Consenting to sell and destroy the goods of our Church, even when some of them were declared
to be valued objects of the National Treasury...

Due to the loss and dereavement of the churches, rectory homes and all pertaining properties, the Greek-Catholic believers feel as though there is no appropriate place of prayer and recollection for their spiritual lives and desires. The present government of Romania continues to practice the same politics as the Communist one, which in 1948 terminated all the functions of the Romanian Greek-Catholic Church United with Rome, and confiscated all of its goods. Out of the over 2030 churches that initially belonged to the above-mentioned, only 136 of them were returned, making it impossible to practice the religion freely and in a normal manner, the priests and the faithful celebrating the Holy Sacraments in more than 350 improvised places (such as chapels, garages, refectories, heating stations, etc.). We did not succeed in receiving back neither the cathedral churches from Oradea, Baia-Mare, or Gherla, nor the vicariate church from Bucharest.

The State of Romania sustains through its central and local institutions an atmosphere of a so-called "active non-intervention" via which it tries to throw its entire legal obligation to the restitution of the goods to the Romanian Greek-Catholic Church towards beneficiaries of these goods. These beneficiaries are represented by either its own created institutions or by the Romanian Orthodox Church. The above described is an actual abuse that creates disintegration, grief, confusion, and sometimes even violence amongst the citizens of Romania. Due to the hostile policy practiced by the State of Romania towards the Romanian Greek-Catholic Church United with Rome, of the multiple intimidating actions, many believers do not dare to declare themselves Greek-Catholics for fear of losing their jobs! This fact has become obvious from the 2001 Report of the Bureau for Democracy, Religious Liberty and Work of the American Government, as well as from the Report of the American State Department which is referenced in regards to the religious freedom in Romania, presented in the attached addendum's.

We are aware of the fact that the Romanian Orthodox Church is the majoritarian representative and that almost all of the employees of the State of Romania are of the Orthodox religion. However, even though we are a minority in the country, along with the Roman-Catholics, Reformed, Neo-Protestants, Mozaics, we consider ourselves free citizens that have the right to live boundless and full of demnity in Romania, having the right for protection from the authorities of the State.

The Romanian Orthodox Church is our sister Church, and she is not the one to be held liable for the nationalization and confiscation of our goods. The responsible party is the State of Romania! We cannot accept this dismemberment between our Greek Catholic and Orthodox believers, a dismemberment that is directly or indirectly created by the State of Romania. The present State of Romania is the direct and rightful inheritor of the Communist State, which tried to make extinct the Romanian Greek-Catholic Church United with Rome between the years 1945-1989. It was the Communist State that confiscated the goods, liquidated the parishes, persecuted and prosecuted the clergy and part of the active population. The Communist State was the one to constantly and systematically stalk and persecute, for a time amounting to over four decades, the Romanian Greek-Catholic Church United with Rome. This was done with extreme detail and consistency, and the end result was a complete eradication of the existence of this Church.

We would like to point out to the Romanian State that the great majority of the Episcopalian buildings, schools, academies, monasteries, churches and functional buildings and forestry areas were all built out of the funds, strength and will of the Romanian Greek-Catholic Church United with Rome, or they might have been received from church-like authorities other than the State of Romania, and foremost, they were acquired long before the final formation and unification of the National State of Romania in 1918! Another issue we would like to point out is that in our whole history, there has never been a power, foreign or not, that has even attempted to confiscate the goods and properties of the Romanian Greek-Catholic Church United with Rome! It was through all types of abusive acts that the State of Romania brutally took and then donated the properties to which they had not contributed in the very first place!

Furthermore, in its constant trials of suppression of the Romanian Greek-Catholic Church United with Rome, the State of Romania permits, even in our present times, the overly abusive demolition (dismemberment, burning) of many of our churches, as well as the destroying of other mobile or immobile goods that are still part of the Church's patrimony and treasure. Based on these reasons, and hoping that justice still exists in Romania, the direct party of dialogue for the Greek-Catholic followers is and will always remain the State of Romania.

In the 21st century, at the portal of the entrance of Romania into NATO and the European Community, such abuses cannot be tolerated by rights or by facts! Furthermore, with the great hope that the situation in Romania will re-establish itself to a normal level and that the human rights will finally be respected, the Romanians that reside in the country and outside of it, including the Greek Catholic ones, support fully the entrance of Romania into NATO. We have to keep aware of the fact that the representatives of the Romanian Greek-Catholic Church United with Rome have remained faithful to the document signed in Snagov, and continue to support the integration of Romania into the European and Euro-Atlantic structures.

An organization was also founded in the Chicago area of the United States, under the name of "Romania NATO Alliance," which has as its founders a considerable amount of Greek-Catholics. In December of 2001, this community-like organization had exerted great influence in an extremely decisive manner on the motion supported by Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois, so that Romania would be accepted into NATO.

Due to the fact that many processes of legislative procedures had already been initiated and filed in the past with the State of Romania by the high ranking officials of the Romanian Greek-Catholic Church United with Rome, and all have unmistakably failed, we, the parishioners of the Romanian Greek-Catholic Church United with Rome, from Romania and the entire world, feel it is our obligation of conscience to initiate our own process and action in order to defend our rights. Therefore, based on the main principles of freedom, as well as the historic, social, cultural and religious arguments enumerated in the completion of this document, we directly address to you this MEMORANDUM.

We firmly demand that the State of Romania:

Respect the constitutional rights of existence and practice of the Romanian Greek-Catholic Church United with Rome, the right to celebrate and practice its own religion in respectable locations, the right to propagate the given beliefs, and the right to openly communicate the beliefs and laws of the religion. This includes the right to freely express the self identity of all Greek-Catholic believers, as well as those of Greek-Catholic descent and religious background.

Immediately stop the discrimination and the constant attempt of suppression of the Romanian Greek-Catholic Church United with Rome.

To stop the demolition and dismemberment of our churches and to immediately provide security to all Greek-Catholic Churches and other buildings from the 18th and 19th centuries, which under Law NR. 422/18.07.2001, are stated to be historic monuments that shall be fully protected.

Immediate and unconditional restitution to the Romanian Greek-Catholic Church United with Rome, all of the goods that were nationalized and confiscated by the Communist State of Romania. This shall be done by creating and forming firm legislative statements, which shall conform to the Constitution of Romania and with all the international treaties to which the State of Romania is bound to respect.

The State of Romania shall do restitution of the goods without the intervention of any intermediary party (i.e. various third parties or current beneficiaries of the confiscated goods). The dialogue between the Orthodox and Greek-Catholic representatives should only pertain to the actual final identification of the goods and of the practices through which this restitution will take place. The issue of future access and usage of the properties by the Orthodox parishes will only be resolved at the time when all restitution was finalized with the Greek-Catholic parishes. This is the decent and normal way that will ensure Christian and brotherly love between the two religions. This procedure of restitution was expressed and manifested by the representatives of the Romanian Greek-Catholic Church United with Rome ever since 1990.

The immediate abolition of Law-Decree NR. 126/1990, for its unconstitutionality reason. The transfer of the juridical duties of a State to a mixed ecclesiastic committee, which would carry out the restitution, is illegal, abusive and curtailing the right to justice for the Romanian Greek-Catholic Church United with Rome. It also eludes the constitutional right and obligation of a State.

To apply through practice the actual abrogation and consequences of Decree-Law NR. 9 from December 31, 1989, due to the fact that this is considered to be an act "against the Romanian people," and cannot constitute a source of human rights. Nothing and nobody, let alone someone in an abusive possession of power or in the possession of unconstitutional legislative acts, can operate or put into practice the actual process of changes for the properties.

To rush the restitution of the property rights (and placing immediately in possession) of all agricultural and forestry occupied land belonging to the Romanian Greek-Catholic Church.

To return a given amount of funds in order to rebuild the infrastructure of the Romanian Greek-Catholic Church United with Rome, which would stand as a mending act. These funds were initially taken away from the above-mentioned at the time it was dismounted by the Communist State.

It was 110 years ago, in 1892, when Greek-Catholic Romanians from Transylvania belonging to the Memorandum Movement were demanding equal rights for the Romanian nation and all in one voice would pronounce that: "The existence of a nation cannot be discussed! It can only be affirmed!"

Therefore, today, all of us in one voice are asking for our legitimate and lawful right for the Romanian Greek-Catholic Church, by paraphrasing the famous declaration, we pronounce that: The existence of a Church cannot be discussed. it can only be affirmed!

We consider that these are our lawfully given rights, and we ask of the State of Romania to respect them fully. We do not wish to entreaty the international forums, so we can finally have our rights given to us in our own country! If the State of Romania does not intervene urgently in this matter, we will see it necessary to address the issue as an international concern.

We demand that the Romanian State follow the example of other states in the region and proceed to an immediate and unconditional restitution to the Romanian Greek-Catholic Church United with Rome of all goods that were nationalized and confiscated by the Communist State of Romania.

We would like to mention the fact that we wish to resolve the situation of our Church by October 25, 2002. After this given date, we will consider that everything that should and could have been done through civilized negotiations has already taken place and that our only solution to stop the discrimination against the Romanian Greek-Catholic Church United with Rome is to address this issue to the international forums.

At this point, we want to remind you of the words that were spoken by IPS Nicolae Corneanu, Archbishop of Timisoara and Orthodox Mitropolit of Banat, whom with lots of courage and feelings of brotherhood had said: "We have not entered into your churches to steal them away from you, but to return them to you when the time has come."

THE TIME HAS COME NOW!

© 2003-2009 Romanian Catholic Diocese of Canton, PO Box 7189 Canton OH 44705-0189

Orthodox Constructions of the West Update

2010-04-28T18:01:00.002-04:00

Second International Conference of the Orthodoxy in America Lecture Series; Co-Sponsored by the Center for Medieval Studies, Fordham University June 28-30, 2010, at the Rose Hill campus of Fordham University in the Bronx. Conference update here

Hope in the Grace of God and Guard Your Thoughts

2010-04-28T09:59:00.001-04:00

It was said that some philosophers came one day to test the monks. One monk, a Libyan, passed by, and they said to him, "You old scoundrel of a monk, come here," and they compelled him to come. They gave him a box on the ear, but he offered them the other cheek. At once the philosophers arose and prostrated themselves before him, saying, "Truly this is a monk." Then they sat him down in their midst and questioned him, "What do you, in the desert, do more than we? You fast, and we also fast; you keep vigil, and we also keep vigil; and all you do, we do also. What more do you who live in the desert do?" The old man said to them, "We hope in the grace of God and guard our thoughts." They said to him, "We are not able to do that." Edified, they took their leave.

Senseless-Systematic Destruction of Greek Catholic Property in Romania

2010-04-27T13:33:00.005-04:00

NOTE: Be sure to read the comments for this article, which serve to open the situation to more than one perspective.

The homepage of the Romanian Greek Catholic Association has a photo of this parish church in Sapanta (above) that does not at all appear as though it is being renovated. With due respect, if my home were renovated in like manner I'd be living out in the yard very soon.

The destruction of confiscated Romanian Catholic parish churches in Romania is an ongoing tragedy of familial proportions. Sadly these instances are occurring in the immediate moment. They are not forty or sixty years old, and there is no indication that their frequency is declining. A website in English highlights this one case out of many:

"The Romanian Greek-Catholic Community is facing with a cultural and religious wipe-out: the Greek-Catholic churches are systematically destroyed by the Orthodox Church representatives, whose actions are supported and accepted by the Romanian authorities, the Romanian Greek-Catholic Association accuses in a letter addressed to Hillary Clinton, the US state secretary.

Romanian Greek-Catholic Association, Inc. is a non-for-profit association registered in the United States of America, aiming to support the Greek-Catholic communities.

Head of the association priest Cristian Terhes argues that "the citizens are harassed and threatened because they declare themselves Greek-Catholic; the rights and freedoms of the Greek-Catholics are systematically infringed, without the State interfering".

The quoted letter draws attention upon the situation of the Geek-Catholic church next to the Merry Cemetery from Sapanta, Maramures (North Romania, Transylvania) and upon the fact that "the Romanian state institutions could not find the time for the last two weeks to enforce a court decision that specifically demands an end to the demolishing and building actions".

"Since the abolition of Communism in 1989, the Romanian authorities haven’t done anything to return the assets confiscated by the communists to their rightful owners", the association claims. The organisation requests the State Department to reintroduce "the situation of violating the human rights and the civil rights in case of the Romanian Greek-Catholic community" on the discussions agenda that the US politicians will have with Romanian officials in the future.

All documents referring to the situation in Sapanta can be downloaded from the following address: Romanian Orthodox Church is destroying the "Merry Cemetrey” in Sapanta."

In 1948 the Romanian Church United with Rome, Greek-Catholic was outlawed, and all its assets, including churches, were handed over to the Orthodox church. After the fall of the Communist regime, the Greek Catholics requested that their churches be returned, but so far only 16 of the 2600 claimed churches have been returned. There are reports that several old Greek Catholic churches were demolished while under the administration of the Orthodox Church. The map of Romania here shows the areas in Romania were there is a significant number of Romanian Catholics. Clicking on the image will allow you to enlarge the image so that you can read the legend in the upper right hand corner.

In a CNEWA [Catholic Near East Welfare Association] article, author Ronald Roberson says:

"After 41 years underground, the fortunes of the Greek Catholic Church in Romania changed dramatically after the Ceausescu regime was overthrown in December 1989. On January 2, 1990, the 1948 decree which dissolved the church was abrogated. Greek Catholics began to worship openly again, and three secretly ordained bishops emerged from hiding. On March 14, 1990, Pope John Paul II reestablished the hierarchy of the church by appointing bishops for all five dioceses.

Unfortunately the reemergence of the Greek Catholic Church was accompanied by a confrontation with the Romanian Orthodox Church over the restitution of church buildings. The Catholics insisted that all property be returned as a matter of justice, while the Orthodox held that any transfer of property must take into account the present pastoral needs of both communities. In 1998 a bilateral commission between the Orthodox and Greek Catholics was established to resolve property issues, but progress was slow and only 16 churches were returned as a result of its work. It has practically ceased activity since 2004. Altogether less than 200 former Greek Catholic churches had been returned by 2006, many of them in the Banat region where Orthodox Metropolitan Nicolae was more willing to allow the return of Greek Catholic property. More than 200 worshipping communities are still without a church and compelled to meet in public places. In the meantime the Greek Catholic Church has reduced its property claims from an initial list of 2,600 to less than 300."

The case of Romania is one of particular interest to me, and the reasons for that interest will become more apparent during the lifetime of the blog. I can say in brief that Father Dimitru Staniloae, out of all of the contemporary Orthodox fathers, has had a significant impact over the decades, on my own personal openness to Orthodox spirituality and doctrinal teachings. So in that way I have a sense of being personally invested in what happens between Romanian Orthodox and Romanian Catholics in Romania.

Daniel (Alexandrow) of Erie, Eternal Rest

2010-04-26T14:30:00.002-04:00

His Grace, the Right Reverend Bishop Daniel (Alexandrow) of Erie is a vicar bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, serving as Vicar President of the Synod of Bishops for the Old Believers under his jurisdiction's care.
Life

Bishop Daniel was born Dimitri Borisovich Alexandrow in Odessa, Russia, in 1930. Due to anti-Communist family connections, Dimitri's father, Boris Alexandrow, decided to move the family to Zlatoust in the Ural Mountains in 1938. Within just a few months of the move, Boris was arrested and disappeared; it was later found out he was executed. Mrs. Alexandrow then moved her family back to Odessa. In 1944 they left westward with the fleeing German Army, and within two years found themselves living in the Alps. Thanks to family in the United States, the Alexandrows were able to emigrate to America, and came to New York in 1949. From 1952 to 1958, Dimitri studied at Holy Trinity Orthodox Seminary (Jordanville, New York), finishing with the first graduating class, along with the future Metropolitan Laurus (Skurla). From his early years, Dimitri Borisovich was interested in the pre-Nikonian "Old Rite" of the Russian Orthodox Church, and decided to work toward somehow healing the schism of the Old Believers. In August of 1965, he was ordained deacon, and soon afterwards, priest. In 1988, he received the monastic tonsure and the new name of Daniel. On August 13, 1988, Hieromonk Daniel was consecrated as a vicar bishop for the Diocese of Eastern America, with the title "Bishop of Erie, Pennsylvania, Defender of the Old Rite". The Church of the Nativity is his Cathedra, whose congregation he played an integral role in reuniting with the Russian Orthodox Church. He was temporary administrator of the Diocese of Australia and New Zealand from 1995 to 1997.

Bishop Daniel is a man of many talents, which have been extremely useful to many people. He is a master iconographer, having studied in his youth with the famed Old Believer iconographer Pimen Sofronov, and knows the ancient methods with which to obtain all-natural pigments. He is one of the few people left who can read the znamenny ("kriukovoi", or "hook-style") musical notation, which fell out of general usage in Russian Church singing in the early 18th century. He is also an experienced architect, having designed such churches as the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Washington, D.C. (ROCOR). Also, simply doing his own extensive research on ancient rites came in useful during the elevation of Metropolitan Philaret in 1964. This was the first time the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia had elected a successor who was not a Metropolitan in episcopal rank, and inasmuch as the remainder bishops were of lesser rank themselves, many were unsure of the elevation in such a situation. However, thanks to the research of Bishop Daniel, who was yet a reader, the Synod of Bishops was able to essentially replicate the office of elevation of a Metropolitan as performed in 15th century Russia.

In the morning of 4/26/2010 Bishop Daniel reposed in the Lord.

The Martyrdom of the Apostle St. Mark the Evangelist

2010-04-25T07:38:00.000-04:00

Martyrdom of the holy Mark, and his preaching in the city of Alexandria.

In the time of the dispensation of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, after his Ascension into heaven, all the countries were allotted among the apostles, by the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, that they might preach in them the words of the good tidings of the Lord Jesus Christ. And after a time it fell to the lot of Mark the evangelist to go to the province of Egypt, and the great city of Alexandria, by the command of the Holy Ghost, that he might cause the people to hear the words of the gospel of the Lord Christ, and confirm them therein; for they were in error and sunk in the service of idols, and in the worship of the creature instead of the Creator. And they had many temples to their contemptible gods, whom they ministered to in every place, and served with every iniquity and magical art, and to whom they offered sacrifices among themselves. For he was the first who preached in the province of Egypt, and Africa, and Pentapolis, and all those regions.

So when the holy Mark returned from Rome, he betook himself first to Pentapolis and preached in all its districts the word of God, and shewed many miracles; for he healed the sick, and cleansed the lepers, and cast out devils by the grace of God which descended upon him. And many believed in the Lord Christ through him, and broke their idols which they used to worship, and all the trees which the devils used to haunt, and from which they addressed the people. And he baptized them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, the One God.

And so the Holy Ghost appeared to him, and said to him: "Rise and go to the city of Alexandria, to sow there the good seed which is the word of God." So the disciple of Christ arose and set out, being strengthened by the Holy Ghost, like a combatant in war; and he saluted the brethren, and took leave of them and said to them: "The Lord Jesus Christ will make my road easy, that I may go to Alexandria and preach his holy gospel there." Then he prayed and said: "O Lord strengthen the brethren who have known thy holy name that I may return to them rejoicing in them." Then the brethren bade him farewell.

So Mark journeyed to the city of Alexandria; and when he entered in at the gate, the strap of his shoe broke. And when he saw this, he thought: "Now I know that the Lord has made my way easy." Then he turned, and saw a cobbler there, and went to him and gave him the shoe that he might mend it. And when the cobbler received it, and took the awl to work upon it, the awl pierced his hand. So he said: "Heis ho Theos"; the interpretation of which is, "God is One". And when the holy Mark heard him mention the name of God, he rejoiced greatly, and turned his face to the East and said: "O my Lord Jesus, it is thou that makest my road easy in every place."

Then he spat on the ground and took from it clay, and put it on the place where the awl had pierced the cobbler's hand, saying: "In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, the One living and eternal God, may the hand of this man be healed at this moment, that thy holy name may be glorified." Then his hand at once became whole.

The holy Mark said to him: "If thou knowest that God is one, why dost thou serve these many gods?" The cobbler answered him: "We mention God with our mouths, but that is all; for we know not who he is."

And the cobbler remained astonished at the power of God which descended upon the holy Mark, and said to him: "I pray thee, O man of God, to come to the dwelling of thy servant, to rest and eat bread, for I find to-day thou hast conferred a benefit upon me." Then the holy Mark replied with joy: "May the Lord give thee the bread of life in heaven!" And he went with him to his house. And when he entered his dwelling, he said, "May the blessing of God be in this house!" and he uttered a prayer.

After they had eaten, the cobbler said to him: "O my father, I beg thee to make known to me who thou art that hast worked this great miracle." Then the saint answered him: "I serve Jesus Christ, the Son of the ever living God." The cobbler exclaimed: "I would that I could see him." The holy Mark said to him: "I will cause thee to behold him."

Then he began to teach him the gospel of good tidings, and the doctrine of the glory and power and dominion which belong to God from the beginning, and exhorted him with many exhortations and instructions, of which his history bears witness, and ended by saying to him: "The Lord Christ in the last times became incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and came into the world, and saved us from our sins." And he explained to him what the prophets prophetised of him, passage by passage.

Then the cobbler said to him: "I have never heard at all of these books which thou speakest of; but the books of the Greek philosophers are what men teach their children here, and so do the Egyptians."

So the holy Mark said to him: "The wisdom of the philosophers of this world is vanity before God." Then when the cobbler had heard wisdom and the words of the Scriptures from the holy Mark, together with the great miracle which he had seen him work upon his hand, his heart inclined towards him, and he believed in the Lord, and was baptised, he and all the people of his house, and all his neighbours. And his name was Annianus.

And when those that believed in the Lord were multiplied, and the people of the city heard that a man who was a Jew and a Galilean had entered the city, wishing to overthrow the worship of the idols, their gods, and had persuaded many to abstain from serving them, they sought him everywhere; and they appointed men to watch for him. So when the holy Mark knew that they were conspiring together, he ordained Annianus bishop of Alexandria, and also ordained three priests and seven deacons, and appointed these eleven to serve and to comfort the faithful brethren. But he himself departed from among them, and went to Pentapolis, and remained there two years, preaching and appointing bishops and priests and deacons in all their districts.

Then he returned to Alexandria, and found that the brethren had been strengthened in the faith, and had multiplied by the grace of God, and had found means to build a church in a place called the Cattle-pasture [Ta Boukolou], near the sea, beside a rock from which stone is hewn. So the holy Mark greatly rejoiced at this; and he fell upon his knees, and blessed God for confirming the servants of the faith, whom he had himself instructed in the doctrines of the Lord Christ, and because they had turned away from the service of idols.

But when those unbelievers learnt that the holy Mark had returned to Alexandria, they were filled with fury on account of the works which the believers in Christ wrought, such as healing the sick, and driving out devils, and loosing the tongues of the dumb, and opening the ears of the deaf, and cleansing the lepers; and they sought for the holy Mark with great fury, but found him not; and they gnashed against him with their teeth in their temples and places of their idols, in wrath, saying: "Do you not see the wickedness of this sorcerer?"

And on the first day of the week, the day of the Easter festival of the Lord Christ, which fell that year on the 29th of Barmudah, when the festival of the idolatrous unbelievers also took place, they sought him with zeal, and found him in the sanctuary. So they rushed forward and seized him, and fastened a rope round his throat, and dragged him along the ground, saying: "Drag the serpent through the cattle-shed! [Syromen ton boubalon en tois Boukolou!]" But the saint, while they dragged him, kept praising God and saying: "Thanks be to thee, O Lord, because Thou hast made me worthy to suffer for thy holy name." And his flesh was lacerated, and clove to the stones of the streets; and his blood ran over the ground.

So when evening came, they took him to the prison, that they might take counsel how they should put him to death. And at midnight, the doors of the prison being shut, and the gaolers asleep at the doors, behold there was a great earthquake and a mighty tumult. And the angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and entered to the saint, and said to him: "O Mark, servant of God, behold thy name is written in the book of life; and thou art numbered among the assembly of the saints, and thy soul shall sing praises with the angels in the heavens; and thy body shall not perish nor cease to exist upon earth."

And when he awoke from his sleep he raised his eyes to heaven, and said: "I thank thee, O my Lord Jesus Christ, and pray thee to receive me to thyself, that I may be happy in thy goodness." And when he had finished these words, he slept again; and the Lord Christ appeared to him in the form in which the disciples knew him and said to him: "Hail Mark, the evangelist and chosen one!" So the saint said to him: "I thank thee, O my Saviour Jesus Christ, because thou hast made me worthy to suffer for thy holy name." And the Lord and Saviour gave him his salutation, and disappeared from him.

And when he awoke, and morning had come, the multitude assembled, and brought the saint out of the prison, and put a rope again round his neck, and said: "Drag the serpent through the cattle-shed!" And they drew the saint along the ground, while he gave thanks to the Lord Christ, and glorified him, saying: "I render my spirit into thy hands, O my God!" After saying these words, the saint gave up the ghost.

Then the ministers of the unclean idols collected much wood in a place called Angelion, that they might burn the body of the saint there. But by the command of God there was a thick mist and a strong wind, so that the earth trembled; and much rain fell, and many of the people died of fear and terror; and they said: "Verily, Serapis, the idol, has come to seek the man who has been killed this day."

Then the faithful brethren assembled, and took the body of the holy Saint Mark from the ashes; and nothing in it had been changed. And they carried it to the church in which they used to celebrate the Liturgy; and they enshrouded it, and prayed over it according to the established rites. And they dug a place for him, and buried his body there; that they might preserve his memory at all times with joy and supplication, and benediction, on account of the grace which the Lord Christ gave them by his means in the city of Alexandria. And they placed him in the eastern part of the church, on the day on which his martyrdom was accomplished (he being the first of the Galileans to be martyred for the name of the Lord Jesus Christ in Alexandria), namely the last day of Barmudah according to the reckoning of the Egyptians, which is equivalent to the 8th day before the kalends of May among the months of the Romans, and the 24th of Nisan among the months of the Hebrews.

And we also, the sons of the orthodox, offer glory and sanctification and praise to our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, to whom is due laud and honour and worship, with the Father and the Holy Ghost, the Giver of Life and Consubstantial One, now and forever

Wilt Thou Be Made Whole

2010-04-24T14:41:00.003-04:00

Acts 9:36-43 In Joppa there was a disciple named Tabitha (which, when translated, is Dorcas), who was always doing good and helping the poor. 37 About that time she became sick and died, and her body was washed and placed in an upstairs room. 38 Lydda was near Joppa; so when the disciples heard that Peter was in Lydda, they sent two men to him and urged him, "Please come at once!" 39 Peter went with them, and when he arrived he was taken upstairs to the room. All the widows stood around him, crying and showing him the robes and other clothing that Dorcas had made while she was still with them. 40 Peter sent them all out of the room; then he got down on his knees and prayed. Turning toward the dead woman, he said, "Tabitha,get up." She opened her eyes, and seeing Peter she sat up. 41 He took her by the hand and helped her to her feet. Then he called the believers and the widows and presented her to them alive. 42 This became known all over Joppa, and many people believed in the Lord. 43 Peter stayed in Joppa for some time with a tanner named Simon.

~ ~ ~

The Epistle reading for the Sunday of the Paralytic concerns the woman Dorcas as she is called in Greek, or Tabitha as she is known in the Syro-Chaldaic languages. As the story is told Dorcas takes ill suddenly and dies, and the body is prepared for burial and laid out in an upper room in a house in Joppa. The community in Joppa is so stunned and shaken by the loss of Dorcas that they call for Peter, whom they know is nearby in Lydda. They send two disciples out to bring him to Joppa by the sea. There is no indication that they think that Peter can restore her to life, so Peter is called upon to come as an elder and authority among the Christian communities to help to fill a significant lacuna left by the woman, Dorcas. They call him to come and help to show them the way forward without her.

The name Dorcas is a name meaning "gazelle." Because of the gentle and lovely appearance and temperament of the female gazelle, the name Dorcas was common among female children, and the Dorcas of the story in Acts apparently lived up to that name in many exceptional ways. She apparently was a most compassionate of women. She made disciples by her acts of kindness and generosity, by her ability to move about in the community with the common people experiencing their lives as her own and filling in what was lacking as she was able. She was a woman devoted to those in need and she was recognized as a significant leader in the budding Christian commune of Joppa. Her passing would leave confusion and disintegration in its wake, for clearly the people called upon Peter to come to them, for they did not know how to go on without Dorcas.

Compassion is a virture strongly identified with the Incarnate Christ for it is more than simply being kind to someone or showing a great deal of sympathy or even empathy. Compassion means to put yourself in the place of the suffering of another, and at all costs to self, to do something to alleviate that suffering. It means to walk with those whose welfare you have in mind and at heart. Compassion places us and keeps us on the road to Emmaus, and draws all who will follow along with us, and insures that they will be fed and clothed and given a chance to live their own lives in the imitation of Christ.

And so Peter goes to Joppa and to Dorcas, and as he kneels and prays by her bier, he does so in the hopes that the Christian community at Joppa may find guidance, and with all confidence that the already Risen Christ will restore Dorcas and her newly forming Christian community. Luke lingers a while on this story in Acts, realizing the implications of the fact that Peter, for the first time since Pentecost, has invoked the power of the resurrection to bestow new life not only on Dorcas but also on the little body of Christians newly in her care.

Finally, this story about spirit filled life in the early Body of Christ is strategically told in juxtaposition to the story of the Paralytic who looks at Christ and cries "I have no man!"   Compare the reaction to the sickness and death of the gentle and generous Dorcas, and the reaction of Christ to the cramped and twisted being that sits at the edge of the pool bereft of all companionship, of all compassion.

To the Paralytic Jesus says "Wilt thou be made whole?" But through Peter, Dorcas is reanimated without question!

Dorcas is raised up to a renewed life, in and by the grace of Christ, through the power of the Holy Spirit.

The Paralytic is forgiven and healed in body, but he is sent away with Christ's warning to him, "Sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee."

We leave Dorcas knowing that she will return to her little flock and will take them with her along the pathway to Jesus Christ. We leave the paralytic not knowing whether he will heed the words of Jesus or not. The fact that we are all here by the grace of Jesus Christ is never a guarantee that we will use that grace to do his will, but rather turn it to our own will and to satisfy our own purpose and our own inability to show forth in holy compassion.

Wilt Thou Be Made Whole?

The Holy GreatMartyr George the Victory-Bearer

2010-04-23T09:59:00.002-04:00

Today we commemorate the life and holy death of The Holy GreatMartyr George the Victory-Bearer! There are few other saints of the ancient Christian world who have captured the imagination and fervor of both the Christian east and the Christian west. Because St. George must regularly be excavated out from under a mountain of myth and legend, we will examine one full text that tells the story of his brief life and the astonishing wonder-works that God achieved through him in his Martyrs Hours.

Whether he is was one man capable of withstanding torture in a super-human manner or whether he became a metaphor for all of the strong and brave and faithful martyrs under Diocletian's murderous rule truly does not matter. We do know that he is said to have appeared, a generation after his death, to have influence on the life and sanctity of St. Anastasius I of Antioch whose life's achievements and wonder-working sanctity were commemorated on April 20th.

I have chosen to use the text from the translation work of Father S. Janos to tell the story of St. George. It is long and it is faithful to the ancient texts, such as they have come down to us. I also wish to use his texts today as an excuse to thank Father Janos for all of the wonderful hours of pleasure he's afforded me with so many of his translations of of the works of Nikolai Berdyaev and the maintenance of the on-line bibliotek, and his hagiographic translations of the saints here on the Internet. I have never met Father Janos and perhaps never will, but he is always in my heart and prayers for his good and generous work. I don't know that any of us could ever thank him enough.

The Holy GreatMartyr George the Victory-Bearer

Commemorated on April 23

The Holy GreatMartyr George the Victory-Bearer, was a native of Cappadocia (a district in Asia Minor), and he grew up in a deeply believing Christian family. His father had accepted a martyr's death for Christ, when George was yet a child. His mother, owning lands in Palestine, resettled there with her son and raised him in strict piety.

Having grown up, Saint George entered into the service of the Roman army. He was handsome, brave and valiant in battle, and he came to the notice of the emperor Diocletian (284-305) and was accepted into the imperial guards with the rank-title of "comites" – one of the higher military officer ranks.

The pagan emperor, while having done much for the restoration of Roman might, and who was quite clearly concerned, as to what sort of danger the triumphing of the Crucified Saviour might present for pagan civilisation, in especially the final years of his reign intensified his persecution against the Christians. Upon the advice of the Senate at Nicomedia, Diocletian afforded all his governors full freedom in their court proceedings over Christians and in this he promised them all possible help.

Saint George, having learned about the decision of the emperor, distributed to the poor all his wealth, set free his servants, and then appeared in the Senate. The brave soldier of Christ spoke out openly against the emperor's designs, he confessed himself a Christian and appealed to all to acknowledge the true faith in Christ: "I am a servant of Christ, my God, and trusting on Him, I have come amidst ye at mine own will, to witness concerning the Truth". "What is Truth?" – one of the dignitaries said, in repeating the question of Pontius Pilate. "Truth is Christ Himself, persecuted by ye", – answered the saint.

Stunned by the bold speech of the valiant warrior, the emperor – who loved and had promoted George, attempted to persuade him not to throw away his youth and glory and honours, but rather in the Roman custom to offer sacrifice to the gods. To this followed the resolute reply of the confessor: "Nothing in this inconstant life can weaken my resolve to serve God". Then by order of the enraged emperor the armed-guards began to jostle Saint George out of the assembly hall with their spears, and they then led him off to prison. But the deadly steel became soft and it bent, just as the spears would touch the body of the saint, and it caused him no hurt. In prison they put the feet of the martyr in stocks and placed an heavy stone on his chest.

The next day at the interrogation, powerless but firm of spirit, Saint George again answered the emperor: "Thou wilt become exhausted sooner, tormenting me, than I being tormented of thee". Then Diocletian gave orders to subject Saint George to some very intense tortures. They tied the GreatMartyr to a wheel, beneathe which were set up boards inset with sharp pieces of iron. With the turning of the wheel the sharp edges tore at the bared body of the saint. At first the sufferer loudly cried out to the Lord, but soon he quieted, not letting out even a single groan. Diocletian decided that the tortured one was already dead, and he gave orders to remove the battered body from the wheel, and set off then to a pagan temple to offer a thank-offering. But at this very moment it got dark all over, thunder boomed, and a voice was heard: "Fear not, George, for I am with thee". Then a wondrous light shone, and at the wheel appeared an Angel of the Lord in the form of a radiant youth. And just as he lay his hand upon the martyr, saying to him: "Rejoice!" ‑- Saint George stood up healed. And when the soldiers led him off to the pagan temple, where the emperor was, the emperor could not believe his own eyes and he thought, that in front of him was some other man or even a ghost.

In confusion and in terror the pagans looked Saint George over carefully, and they became convinced, that actually a miracle had occurred. Many thereupon came to believe in the Life-Creating God of the Christians. Two illustrious officials, Saints Anatolios and Protoleon, – secretly Christians, therewith openly confessed Christ. And right away, without a trial, by order of the emperor they were beheaded with the sword. Present also in the pagan temple was the Empress Alexandra, the wife of Diocletian, and she too knew the truth. She was on the point of glorifying Christ, but one of the servants of the emperor took her and led her off to the palace.

The emperor became all the more furious. But not having lost all hope of swaying Saint George, he gave him over to new quite fiercesome torments. Having thrown him down a deep pit, they covered it over with lime. Three days later they dug him out, but found him cheerful and unharmed. They shod the saint in iron sandals with red-hot nails, and with blows they drove him back to the prison. In the morning, when they led him back to the interrogation, cheerful and with healthy feet, he said to the emperor, that the sandals had fit him. Then they beat him with ox-thongs so much, that his body and blood became mingled with the ground, but the brave sufferer, strengthened by the power of God, remained unyielding.

Having decided, that magic was helping the saint, the emperor summoned the sorcerer Athanasias, so that he should try to deprive the saint of his miraculous powers, or else poison him. The sorcerer gave Saint George two goblets with drugged ingredients, the one of which should have quieted him, and the other – to kill him. But the drugs also did not work – and the saint as before continued to denounce the pagan superstitions and glorify the True God.

To the question of the emperor, what sort of power it was that helped the saint, Saint George answered: "Think not, that the torments do me no harm thanks to human powers, – I am saved only by calling upon Christ and His Power. Whoso believeth on Him hath no regard for tortures and is able to do the deeds, that Christ did" (Jn. 14: 12). Diocletian asked, what sort of deeds were they that Christ did. – "To give sight to the blind, to cleanse the leprous, to grant walking to the lame, and to the deaf – hearing, to cast out devils, and to raise up the dead".

Knowing, that never whether by sorcery, nor by any of the gods known to him, never had they been able to resurrect the dead, and wanting to test the trust of the saint the emperor commanded him to raise up a dead person right in front of his eyes. To this the saint replied: "Thou wouldst tempt me, but for the salvation of the people which shalt see the deed of Christ, my God wilt work this sign". And when they led Saint George down to the graveyard, he cried out: "O Lord! Show to those here present, that Thou art the One-Only God throughout all the world, let them know Thee as the Almighty Lord". And the earth did quake, a grave opened up, the dead one came alive and emerged from it. Having seen with their own eyes the Almighty Power of Christ, the people wept and glorified the True God. The sorcerer Athanasias, falling down at the feet of Saint George, confessed Christ as the All-Powerful God and besought forgiveness of his sins, committed in ignorance. The obdurate emperor in his impiety thought otherwise: in a rage he commanded to be beheaded both the new-believer Athanasias and likewise the man resuscitated from the dead, and he had Saint George again locked up in prison.

The people, weighed down with their infirmities, began in various ways to penetrate the prison and they there received healings and help from the saint. There resorted to him also a certain farmer named Glycerios, whose ox had collapsed. The saint with a smile consoled him and assured him, that God would restore his ox to life. Seeing at home the ox alive, the farmer began to glorify the God of the Christians throughout all the city. By order of the emperor, Saint Glycerios was arrested and beheaded.

The exploits and the miracles of the GreatMartyr George had increased the number of the Christians, and therefore Diocletian decided to make a final attempt to compel the saint to offer sacrifice to the idols. They began to set up a court at the pagan temple of Apollo. On the final night the holy martyr prayed fervently, and when he dozed off, he beheld the Lord Himself, Who raised him up with His hand, and hugged him in giving him a kiss of greeting. The Saviour placed on the head of the GreatMartyr a crown and said: "Fear not, but rather make bold and be vouchsafed My Kingdom".

In the morning at the court the emperor offered Saint George a new test – he proposed to him to become his co-emperor. The holy martyr with a feigned willingness answered, that from the very beginning the emperor had seemed inclined not to torture him but rather shew mete mercy, and with this he expressed the wish to go forthwith into the pagan temple of Apollo. Diocletian decided, that the martyr was accepting his offer, and he followed after him into the pagan temple with his accompanying retinue and the people. Everyone waited, whether Saint George would offer sacrifice to the gods. He however, in going up to the idol, made the sign of the Cross and turned towards it, as though it were alive: "Thou wishest to receive from me sacrifice befitting God?" The demon inhabiting the idol cried out: "I am not God and none of those like me are God. The One-Only God is He Whom thou preachest. We are of those servant-angels of His, which became apostate, and in the grips of jealousy we do tempt people". "How dare ye to be here, when hither have come I, the servant of the True God?" – asked the saint. Then was heard a crash and wailing, and the idols fell down and were shattered.

There began a general confusion. In a frenzy pagan-priests and many of the throng pounced upon the holy martyr, they tied him up and began to beat him and demand his immediate execution. Into the noise and the shouts rushed the holy empress Alexandra. Pushing her way through the crowd, she cried out: "Thou God of George, help me, in as Thou Alone art All-Powerful". At the feet of the GreatMartyr the holy empress glorified Christ, Who had humiliated the idols and those worshipping them.

Diocletian in a rage immediately pronounced the death sentence against the GreatMartyr George and the holy Empress Alexandra, who without being accompanied, followed Saint George to execution. Along the way she collapsed and slumped senseless against a wall. Everyone thought, that the empress was dead. Saint George offered up thanks to God and he prayed, that he should end his path worthily. At the place of execution the saint in heated prayer besought the Lord, that He would forgive the torturers that knew not what they did, and that He would lead them to the knowledge of Truth. Calmly and bravely, the holy GreatMartyr George bent his neck beneathe the sword. This occurred on 23 April 303.

In confusion the executioners and the judges catch glimpse of their Conqueror. In a bloody agony and mindless thrashing about ended the era of paganism. It lasted for all of ten years more – up until the time of the holy Equal-to-the-Apostles Constantine, who was one of the successors to Diocletian upon the Roman throne, and who gave orders to imprint the Cross on his military-banners, as a testament also sealed by the blood of the GreatMartyr George and that of the blood of thousands of unknown martyrs: "By this sign thou wilt conquer".

Of the many miracles, worked by the holy GreatMartyr George, the most famous are depicted in iconography. In the native-region of the saint, at the city of Beirut, were many idol-worshippers. Outside the city, near Mount Lebanon, was situated a large lake, in which lived an enormous dragon-like serpent. Coming out of the lake, it devoured people, and there was nothing the people could do, since from one of its nostrils it infected the very air.

On the advice of the demons inhabiting the idols, the ruler there adopted this decision: each day the people would draw lots to give over as food their own children, and when the turn reached him, he promised to hand over his only daughter. That time indeed did come, and the ruler, having dressed her in her finest attire, sent her off to the lake. The girl wailed bitterly, awaiting the moment of death. Unexpectedly for her, the GreatMartyr George rode up on his horse and with spear in hand. The girl implored him not to leave her, lest she perish. But the saint, having caught sight of the serpent, signed himself with the Sign of the Cross and with the words "In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit", he rushed off after it. The GreatMartyr George pierced the throat of the serpent with his spear and trampled it with his horse. Then he bid the girl bind the serpent with her sash, and like a dog, lead it into the city. The people fled in terror, but the saint halted them with the words: "Be not afraid, but rather trust on the Lord Jesus Christ and believe in Him, since it be He Who hath sent me to you, to save you". Then the saint killed the serpent with a sword, and the people burned it outside the city. Twenty-five thousand men, not counting women and children, were then baptised, and there was later built a church in the name of the MostHoly Mother of God and the GreatMartyr George.

Saint George went on to become a talented military officer and to amaze the world by his military exploits. He died, when he was not even 30 years old. Hastening to unite with the Heavenly army, he entered into the history of the Church as the Victory-Bearer ("Pobedonosets"). With this title he was glorified in early Christianity and Holy Rus'.

Saint George the Victory-Bearer was the patron saint and protector of several of the great builders of the Russian state and Russian military might. The son of holy Equal-to-the-Apostles Vladimir, Yaroslav the Wise – in holy Baptism Georgii (+ 1054), much advanced the veneration of the saint in the Russian Church. He built the city of Yur'ev [i.e. "of Yurii" – "Yurii" being the diminutive of "Georgii", as "Ivan" is to "Ioann" (John)], he founded likewise the Yur'ev monastery at Novgorod, and he erected a church of Saint George the Victory-Bearer at Kiev. The day of the consecration of the Kiev Georgiev temple, done on 26 November 1051 by Sainted Ilarion, Metropolitan of Kiev and All Rus', entered forever into the liturgical treasury of the Church as a special churchly feastday – Yur'ev Day, beloved by the Russian people as an "Autumn Saint George's Day".

The name of Saint George was indeed also borne by the founder of Moscow – Yurii Dolgoruky (+ 1157), who was the builder of many a Georgiev church, and the builder of the city of Yur'ev-Pol'sk. In the year 1238 the heroic fight of the Russian nation against the Mongol Horde was headed by the Vladimir GreatPrince Yurii (Georgii) Vsevolodovich (+ 1238, Comm. 4 February), fallen into eternal rest in the Battle at the Sita River. His memory, just like that of Egor (Igor) the Brave, and defender of his native-land, was reflected in Russian spiritual versification and ballads. The first great-prince of Moscow, in the period when Moscow had become the centre of the gathering together of the Russian Land, was Yurii Danilovich (+ 1325) – son of Saint Daniel of Moscow, and grandson of Saint Alexander Nevsky. From that time Saint George the Victory-Bearer – the horseman, smiting the serpent – became the coat of arms of Moscow and emblem of the Russian state. And this has more deeply strengthened the connections with Christian peoples and especially with the same-believing Iveria (Gruzia, or Georgia – the Land of Saint George).

© 1996-2001 by translator Fr. S. Janos

The Monk Theodore Sikeotes, April 22, and a Eucharistic Miracle

2010-04-22T12:55:00.015-04:00

Today we commemorate the life of a sixth century monk, born in the village of Sikea, not far from the city of Anastasiupolis (Asia Minor). The story of the monk St. Theodore begins early in his childhood with a holy call to a strict asceticism which he followed obediently, even at the risk of loosing his earthly life. This particular saint lived in the historical period that overlapped the reign of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian recently discussed here and here

"...The Monk Theodore then fled human glory and he withdrew into complete solitude. Under a large boulder not far from the church of the GreatMartyr George, he dug out a cave and persuaded a certain deacon to cover over the entrance with ground, leaving only a small opening for air. The deacon brought him bread and water and he told no one, where the monk had hidden himself. For two years the Monk Theodore lived in this seclusion and complete quiet. His kinsfolk bewept the saint and they thought, that he had been devoured by wild beasts. But the deacon finally revealed the secret, since he was afraid that the Monk Theodore would perish in the narrow cave, and moreover he pitied the weeping mother. They plucked the Monk Theodore out of the cave half-alive."

So great was the sanctity of this monk's being that it is recorded that:

"The sanctity of the monk was so evident, that during the time of his celebrating the Eucharist, the grace of the Holy Spirit, in a visage of radiant porphyry, overshadowed the Holy Gifts. One time, when the monk lifted the discus with the Divine Lamb and proclaimed "Holy Things unto the Holy", – the Divine Lamb raised itself up into the air, and then resettled itself again upon the discus.
All the Orthodox Church venerated the Monk Theodore as a saint, even while he was yet alive."

The more complete hagiograpic record may be found here, translated by Father S. Janos.

Over the years, I have been struck by the number of Orthodox clergy who have told me without malice of any kind that they are absolutely certain, and that Orthodoxy teaches, that Eucharistic miracles as recorded in the west are always demonic in origin.

The miracle of Lanciano is one of the oldest, and certainly the most famous and well documented and scientifically tested of the Eucharistic miracles. This transformation of the Eucharist occurred in the year 700 which is well within the time period when the Church was one, and it happened to a monk of St. Basil's rule.

What follows is a story that is more compelling to me even than Lanciano, because it is more complex in its action and richer in its symbolism and happens to a young laywoman and her faithless husband. It happens to a young woman who was about to step outside of her faith and trust to cultic sorcery to save her marriage. Yet she was restrained by a miracle that essentially said to her, 'No. Please. Allow me to help instead.'

Do I personally trust that consecrated bread, now the body of Christ, bleeds and pulsates light, among other things? I expect I might suspend disbelief for long enough to accept that there are those who do benefit from such divine action and those who need such signs and wonders to buttress their own lagging or lukewarm faith.

Frankly I am more impressed that wild animals would come and take food from the hand of monk St. Theodore and that he loved the Lord enough to risk his life so as to take on severe ascetic action, as he was asked.   All works of wonder in one's life should be taken in thanksgiving with the starkness of absolute humility. In that Light, there is nothing demonic that can ever overcome us.

~ ~ ~

The Most Holy Eucharistic Miracle of Portugal

In the village of Santarém Portugal, just a half hour drive from Fátima, there occurred the Church's second most famous Eucharistic Miracle after Lanciano. The miracle occurred on February 16th in the year 1247 when a woman married to a man who frequently committed adultery in desperation had turned to a Jewish Sorceress to seek a solution to her problem. The sorceress promised her a magical potion but demanded a Consecrated Host as payment. The woman did as she was instructed, and faked an illness in order to receive Holy Communion on a weekday since at that time Mass was only celebrated on Sunday. She went to the Parish Church of Saint Stephen, received communion and then as she was leaving the Church, removed the Host from her mouth and tied it in a knot in the veil covering her head. It was then that the Miracle occurred.

The Host suddenly began to bleed profusely. The blood flowed so heavily that it the people in the streets inquired about her sickness. Frightened, she ran home and placed the Host still wrapped in the veil in a wooden trunk where she kept her clean linens. Her husband discovered the secret when a miracle occurred that night: From the chest came a brilliant light that illuminated the entire house. The Host was freed from the Knot and elevated by angels who sang Divine Praises. The parish priest was called, and the pulsating Host was taken back in procession to the Church of Saint Stephen where the Clergy in order to stop the bleeding decided to seal it in a ball of melted bees wax.

Nineteen years passed and in 1266 when a canonical investigation was held, it was discovered that a second miracle had occurred. The Host had freed itself from the wax ball and was now in a little crystal ampoule.

Kings, Queens and Saints venerated the Relic of the Miraculous-bleeding Host with great splendor over the centuries and the object of national adoration. No fewer than half a dozen Popes granted indulgences to the Cult and Saint Francis Xavier came on pilgrimage before becoming the great apostle of India.

Miraculous phenomena occurred throughout the centuries involving the same Miraculous Host. Images were seen and new emissions of blood were common. All of this stopped however after the North American pilgrimages in the late 1950's began visiting the Shrine very frequently and abusively handling the Host. During this time the crystal ampoule was broken through the sacrilegious practice of the touching of rosaries and other religious items to It to take away as relics. By the 1970's half the glass of the ampoule had been broken off and the silver stopper removed, taken away as relics. The Host subsequently corrupted due to exposure to the air and today only particles of blood and solidified flesh are found clinging to the inside what remains of the glass ampoule.

The Relics were scientifically analyzed in 1997 for the 750th anniversary celebrations of the Miracle and proven to be genuine and of a supernatural origin. The relics of the Host and blood soaked wax were then sealed and placed in a bulletproof case atop the Eucharistic Throne above the main altar. In 1997 the Church of Saint Stephen of the Holy Miracle was recognized as the Shrine of the Most Holy miracle.

(Based on"The Story and Relics of the Most Holy Miracle of Santarém" by Prof. Carlos Evaristo, Curator of the Museum of the Shrine of the Most Holy Miracle of Santarém. Photos Copyright: Carlos Evaristo 1997)

Mother Maria Skobtsova

2010-04-21T09:58:00.001-04:00

This quick post is primarily for the Catholics reading here who do not know this Russian saint, but really ought to get to know her:

On January 18, 2004, the Holy Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Istanbul recognized Mother Maria Skobtsova as a saint along with her son Yuri, the priest who worked closely with her, Fr. Dimitri Klépinin, and her close friend and collaborator Ilya Fondaminsky. All four died in German concentration camps.

Read HERE

And HERE

Sainted Anastasias I the Sinaite, Patriarch of Antioch, April 20

2010-04-20T12:47:00.000-04:00

There is a connection between this post and the earlier posting on Popes and Princes of Men here. This is very important part of the history of Justinian's Imperial reign, since it is tempting in most secular histories to lionize Justinian as the great scourge of heretics, an assertion that does not hold up well under ecclesiastical scrutiny.

And also there is a connection between this particular time period of St. Anastasias the Sinaite and the Theopaschite Formula (5th Ecumenical Council) that will in part be the subject of the next post here at the Skete.

From the Prologue of Ochrid:

While a monk on Mt. Sinai, Anastasius was elected patriarch of Antioch during the reign of Emperor Justinian. He was elevated to this rank by virtue of his charity, chaste life, great spiritual learning and a staunch faith. The Emperor Justinian fell into the heresy of Docetism [this heresy taught that Christ's sufferings were apparent and not real], which Eutychius the Patriarch of Constantinople and this Blessed Anastasius sharply rebelled against. The emperor banished Eutychius and also wanted to banish Anastasius but he was unable to find any reproach in his life. However, when Justinian died, repenting beforehand and re-instating Eutychius to the throne, then his successor Justin succeeded in banishing Anastasius on the basis of some spurious calumnies. Anastasius remained in exile for twenty-three years and was re-instated to the throne of Antioch during the reign of Maurice. He governed the Church of God for six years and ended his earthly sojourn in the year 599 A.D.

From the Menologion:

Sainted Anastasias I the Sinaite, Patriarch of Antioch, began his monastic deeds on Mount Sinai, wherefore he was called the Sinaite. He entered upon the Patriarchal throne in the year 562 during the reign of the emperor Justinian (527-565).

The Monophysite heresy was spreading about during this time. The emperor himself inclined towards the side of the heretics. Sainted Anastasias was outspoken against the heresy. He distributed a missive throughout all the churches and daily elucidated in his own temple the Orthodox teaching about the two natures of the Lord Jesus Christ. All those questioning or wavering in the faith awaited with hope the words of the holy Patriarch Anastasias.

Justinian, angering upon learning of this, wanted to depose Sainted Anastasias from the Antioch throne, but suddenly he became grievously ill. Before his death he made Church penance and composed the beautiful prayer "Only-begotten Son Word of God", which has entered into the order of the Divine Liturgy. In it he expressed the Orthodox teaching about the two natures of the Lord Jesus Christ.

After Justinian, there came upon the throne emperor Justin the Younger (565-578), who resumed the persecution against Sainted Anastasias and in 572 sent him into imprisonment. Returning from exile in 593, Sainted Anastasias governed the Church for six years and died peacefully (+ 21 April 599).

From the Prologue of Ochrid

In exile, Saint Anastasias wrote several dogmatic and moral works, and even rendered into the Greek language the work of Sainted Gregory Dialogus (+ 604, Comm. 12 March) "About Pastoral Service".

Troparion of St Athanasios Tone 3

Thou art a pillar, a wall, a battlement/ and a shelter for thy flock,/ O holy and glorious Athanasios./ Protect with the wings of thy prayers/ those who lovingly praise thee.

A Muse of Bats

2010-04-19T11:12:00.001-04:00

Over time I have come to appreciate bats. They fly across my porch by the hundreds at eventide. If I stay outside I am bound to be careened into by a baby or have some tired soul light on my back or front...They are not too particular.

There is a kind of wonderment now. Not at their microscopic beatitudes but at the loss of my former terror. The more I remain outside over time the less they are inclined to avoid me. Therefore I only experiment on the rare occasion. Just enough to reassert my courage under flyer!!

See the story of this stunning photo here.

Trinity, Filioque and the Monarchy of the Father

2010-04-18T18:20:00.001-04:00

For one of the finest most complete briefs of the teaching concerning Catholic and patristic understandings of filioque and Trinity please follow this link. An excerpt from the discussion follows below. I am exceptionally grateful to the author for his insight and his integrity!

April 16, 2010 at 10:39 am

…With regard to the procession of the Holy Spirit, I think that what John Bekkos taught was essentially the doctrine that was taught by St. Maximus the Confessor, six and a half centuries earlier. There were people in St. Maximus’s day who were claiming that the filioque was a heresy; St. Maximus said that this teaching was rather due to the peculiarity of the Latin language, that the Latins do not mean to assert two causes in God, that they are aware that the Father is the one cause, of the Son by generation, of the Holy Spirit by procession; he also noted that the Latins, legitimately, cite the example of St. Cyril of Alexandria in support of their usage.

In another text, St. Maximus states that, “Just as Mind is cause of the Word, so it is also [cause] of the Spirit, but by means of the Word. And just as we cannot say that a word is ‘of the voice,’ so also we cannot say that the Son is ‘of the Spirit.’” (Quaestiones et dubia I.34: Ὥσπερ ἐστὶν αἴτιος τοῦ λόγου ὁ νοῦς, οὕτως καὶ τοῦ πνεύματος, διὰ μέσου δὲ τοῦ λόγου. καὶ ὥσπερ οὐ δυνάμεθα εἰπεῖν τὸν λόγον εἶναι τῆς φωνῆς, οὕτως οὐδὲ τὸν υἱὸν λέγειν τοῦ πνεύματος.) Although Bekkos did not know of this text, it gives a succinct and accurate statement of his position. The Father is the one cause, but he causes through the Word. The Father’s causing of the Spirit through the Word is not merely a matter of manifestation, “energetic procession”; it has to do with being. St. Maximus had lived in the West, he was aware of what people in the West were teaching, and yet he did not condemn the Western position as heresy. Rather, he wrote about the doctrine of the procession in such a way as to mediate between the Latin and the Greek positions.

Bekkos saw that Photius’s syllogisms made such a mediating, irenic position impossible, so he criticized Photius. He thought that Photius’s syllogisms against the West were based on logical premises that had no patristic basis. And I have to say, that Photius’s basic dilemma — that, if you assert that the Holy Spirit exists from the Father and the Son, either you imply that the Father and the Son are two separate causes, two archai, of the Holy Spirit, which is a kind of Manichaean dualism, or else you imply that the Father and the Son have coalesced into one person, which is Sabellianism — this basic dilemma seems to me closely akin to what the Arians in the early fourth century were saying about the homoousion itself: they also were saying that, if the Son is homoousios with the Father, then either the Father and the Son are two separate archai, or else they are melded into one person. It was heretical and illogical in the fourth century; somehow, when Photius asserts it in the ninth century, it becomes the touchstone of Orthodoxy for all time.

So, no, I do not agree that my argument is like having Arius tell St. Athanasius that there was no Church Father before him who had claimed that the Father and the Son are consubstantial. The position of St. Athanasius, that the Father and the Son are consubstantial, was upheld by an ecumenical council of the whole Church, East and West, as being a faithful statement of the universal, catholic teaching of the one Church of Christ. Neither Photius’s diatribes against the West nor Gregory Palamas’s dogma about essence and energies can show that kind of validation. And, if one takes Photius’s and Gregory Palamas’s positions as infallible criteria of orthodoxy, it becomes difficult to see why East and West were ever in communion with each other in the first place.

Neither of these men makes any serious effort to show that the doctrines especially associated with them — the “from the Father alone,” on the one hand, the “ineffable real distinction in God between essence and energy,” on the other — agree with anything that Latin-speaking Christians had ever believed. The point was simply irrelevant to them. But harmony and agreement with the Latin-speaking Church was not irrelevant to St. Athanasius, or St. Maximus, or the Cappadocian fathers, just as it was not irrelevant to John Bekkos. All of these men understood that the survival and growth of the Christian Church in a hostile and dangerous world is not an automatic given, that peace among Christians has to be actively, intelligently maintained, in some cases repaired when it has been broken. For this reason, I think your analogy of Arius and St. Athanasius radically misses the mark.

For this reason, I also brought up the point about the Turban and the Tiara. No, I do not possess any special information about threats to Christianity. I do know that the European Union, by its economic policies, has brought about in a few decades a demographic transformation of Western Europe that appears to be irreversible, and that Mehmed the Conqueror and Suleyman the Magnificent would have found very gratifying. How to respond to that transformation in a genuinely Christian manner is obviously a difficult and complex question; but it is one issue among many that raise for me profound concerns about the future of Christianity — indeed, I think that anyone who is informed about the present state of the world ought to be concerned about the future of humanity itself. A healing of the division between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches seems to me a most urgent need if the Church is to give a credible, united witness to its faith before a sceptical and cynical world. I agree with you that the Fourth Crusade was a gross crime (although the murder of some thousands of Venetians in Constantinople a few years earlier was not the work of angels!).

I do not agree with you that the policy of unionists like Bekkos had mainly secular motivations, or that it was an abandonment of the faith of the fathers, or that it was in any way to blame for the fall of the Byzantine state. The last Byzantine emperor, who died defending the walls of Constantinople, was a unionist, and an Orthodox saint. And when you say, “there was no Greek nation at that time,” it is clear that you misunderstand what the English word “nation” means: it does not refer chiefly to a political entity, but to an historical, linguistic, and cultural one, to a people. In that sense, there certainly existed a Greek nation at that time, and it certainly became enslaved. I think that men like Joseph Bryennios and Mark of Ephesus bear some share of the responsibility for that catastrophe, by helping to make Christian reconciliation impossible by their polemics. And those who continue those polemics will bear some responsibility before the throne of Christ for the next catastrophe, whenever and wherever it comes.

That there is an order in the Trinity was expressly taught by many statements of the saints, one of them being the very citation from St. Maximus I quoted above: the Spirit is “of the Son,” and not vice versa. Another is found in St. Basil’s Adversus Eunomium I.20 (PG 29b, 557B-C); St. Basil asks, concerning Eunomius:

”For what reason, then, does he deny that order holds good in God? He supposes that, if he can show that being ‘first’ in the case of God can be thought of in no other way, he will be able to show the rest, that this is a precedence according to essence itself. But as for us, we say that the Father is placed before the Son according to the relation which exists among causes and things from them, but never that it is according to a difference of nature, or according to a priority of time. Otherwise we would even be excluding God’s very being Father, since, were they differentiated in essence, this would exclude a natural conjunction.”

St. Basil here does not deny the Father’s being first. As for you, you seem to think that being first can only be conceived of in the way that Eunomius does, as a difference in nature. St. Basil does not agree with you.

~ ~ ~

Who is misrepresenting the fathers here, me or you? You confidently assert that, “No, there is no order in the Trinity.” You represent any assertion of order in the Trinity as a denial of Christ’s statement, “I and the Father are one.” In Basil’s Letter 52.4 (PG 32, 396B-C), he asks:

“But what madness is this, when one is the Unbegotten, to say that there is another one that is above the Unbegotten? For there is nothing that stands in the mean position between Son and Father…. Thus, this innovation concerning order holds forth a negation of the very existence [of the Trinity], and is a denial of the whole faith. It is equally impious, either to reduce [the Holy Spirit] to the level of a creature, or to set him above either Son or Father, either with respect to time, or with respect to order.”

How does this stand next to your assertions that it is legitimate to teach that the Son is “from the essence of the Father and the Spirit,” or that the Father is “from the essence of the Spirit and the Son” — that, essentially, since the essence is the same, it doesn’t matter who is from the essence of whom?

St. Gregory of Nyssa, at the end of Book One of his Contra Eunomium (PG 45, 464B-C), writes:

“Our account of the Holy Spirit is the same, with a difference only of order. As the Son is joined to the Father, and having his being from him does not come afterwards in existence, so in turn the Holy Spirit holds close also to the Onlybegotten, who only in terms of causation is thought of as prior to the existence (hypostasis) of the Spirit; temporal measures have no place in preeternal life. So with the exception of the idea of cause, the Holy Trinity has no variation in itself at all.” (Tr. by Stuart G. Hall.)

What do you think? When St. Gregory says here that, in the case of the Holy Spirit, there is only a difference of order (μόνῃ τῇ τάξει τὴν διαφορὰν ἔχων), do you really think that he agrees with you that “there is no order in the Trinity”? When he says that the Onlybegotten is thought of as prior to the hypostasis of the Spirit only in terms of causation, do you really suppose that he thinks of such priority only in terms of a “manifestation” or “energetic procession,” not in terms of real, hypostatic being?

I do not deny that there are ambiguities in the fathers, that sometimes the statements of the fathers in one place are difficult to square with their statements in another. What I am saying is that, in the mind of any honest reader of the fathers, such passages ought to raise questions about the absolute sufficiency of the Photian reading, the view that poises East and West in everlasting, diametrical opposition. And I don’t know that one is being unfaithful to the Orthodox Church for asking such questions.

~ ~ ~

When you say that “what the faithful receive from Christ is the Holy Spirit as energy and not as person,” you state a position which St. Cyril of Alexandria explicitly rejects.

In Book VII of his Dialogues on the Holy and Consubstantial Trinity (PG 75, 1088D-1089A), St. Cyril writes:

“But if the grace conferred by the Holy Spirit is something divorced from his essence, why did the blessed Moses not state clearly, when the living creature was being brought into being, that the Creator of all things then breathed in grace, the grace which came through the breath of life; or why did Christ not say, ‘Receive grace by the ministry of the Holy Spirit’? But what was breathed into him was named ‘the breath of life,’ for the true life is the nature of the divinity, if in fact it is true that in him we live, and move, and exist; while, by the Savior’s expression ‘Holy Spirit,’ the very Holy Spirit, in truth indwelling and abiding in the souls of the faithful [is signified].”

The fact that St. Cyril does not say here what you think he ought to be saying, the fact that he teaches that it is the Spirit himself whom Christ bestows, not just an energy or grace, gives me little confidence that you know what you are talking about when you interpret Cyril’s statement at PG 75, 600C as though it were a denial of the things he says elsewhere, e.g., that the Spirit exists from the Son (Θεὸς ἄρα τὸ Πνεῦμά ἐστιν, ὡς ἐν τάξει Θεοῦ, κατοικῶν ἐν ἡμῖν, καὶ, ἵν᾽ οὕτως εἴπω, τῆς ἀνωτάτω πασῶν ἐξέρπον οὐσίας ἐν ἰδίᾳ τε ὑπάρξει καὶ ἐκ Πατρὸς νοούμενον, δι᾽ Υἱοῦ τῇ κτίσει χορηγούμενον: “Therefore the Spirit is God, as being in the rank of God, dwelling in us and, so to speak, emerging forth from the highest essence in his own existence, and understood as from the Father, bestowed through the Son upon the creation.” Your paraphrase of this as “Cyril saying that the existence of Holy Spirit from the Father” is misleading: it is, literally, from the highest essence that the hyparxis of the Spirit is here said to come forth.).

You say that, “it is also as plain as day that in saying that the Spirit is from the essence of the Son, Cyril refers to their consubstantiality.” Yes, clearly the main point of Cyril’s argument in these sections of the Thesaurus is that the Spirit is consubstantial with the Father and the Son; but in saying that the Spirit exists “from the essence of the Son,” he means more than just that they are consubstantial. For Cyril, the divine and the human in Christ interpenetrate; the fact that Christ breathes forth, not just some non-hypostatic grace, but the Holy Spirit himself, manifests an eternal relationship between the two.

St. Cyril is a subtle, dense writer, and the meaning of his expressions is not always transparent; but at least one recent, exhaustive study of his trinitarian language supports the reading I am presenting here. Marie-Odile Boulnois, in her book Le Paradoxe Trinitaire chez Cyrille d’Alexandrie (Paris 1994), argues that all of Cyril’s statements about trinitarian relations, including those which speak of the Spirit’s relationship with the Father, refer, in the first place, to the divine economy. We have no access to the transcendent life of God except through what he has done and revealed here in time. But she also thinks that, because of the hypostatic union in Christ of the human and the divine natures, these temporal facts, the things of the economy, are, for Cyril, genuine manifestations of God’s eternal, triune relationships. So, when St. Cyril says that the Spirit exists from the essence of the Son, or when he says that God breathes forth the Spirit from the Son, as from a mouth, these things do point to something not unlike the Latin doctrine — certainly something more than mere consubstantiality.

You write:

“Do you believe that the Orthodox Church fell short of Fathers after 800 AD or do you believe that her Fathers are those who abandoned her and those who were cut off from her? Does such a position seem Orthodox to you?”

As stated above, I believe that the theological position Bekkos enunciates in the thirteenth century, on the subject of the Procession, is basically the position St. Maximus the Confessor enunciated in the seventh century. I cannot believe that it was an Orthodox position when St. Maximus enunciated it, and Unorthodox or Heterodox when Bekkos enunciated it six centuries later. I know that Bekkos did not “abandon” the Orthodox Church; he tried to heal the schism between the Orthodox Church and Rome. The failure had less to do with the value of his arguments (most of which his contemporary opponents never seriously examined, just as you have not) than with the deep distrust that infected both sides, the unfortunate early death of Pope Gregory X and his replacement by a series of men who did not share his wisdom and patience, and, perhaps most importantly, with the immovable force of popular, nationalistic hatred, that was unwilling to consider Latins as fellow Christians.

St. Maximus faced a fair bit of nationalistic hatred himself; that is why, when he was brought back to Constantinople from Rome, he had his tongue cut out and his thumbs cut off; Bekkos was merely sent to jail. I believe that God is merciful, and that most Orthodox Christians are too busy with the practical business of life to study those people you refer to as the later Fathers; they acknowledge their holiness, celebrate their memories, and leave their speculations for other people to worry about. If, as I think is the case, there are some genuine problems with some of those speculations, I do not think that that has had a great effect upon the piety of the majority of the Orthodox faithful; it has not prevented the appearance of real examples of holiness, and it has not prevented the sacramental life of the Orthodox Church from embodying saving divine grace. But, no, I do not think that being an Orthodox Christian means holding people like St. Photius, St. Gregory Palamas, and St. Mark of Ephesus as immune from rational criticism, as though their canonization meant that any interpretations they give of earlier Christian tradition must necessarily be true. When they misrepresent people, I do not follow them; to do so is not pious, but stupid, just as it is stupid and wicked to acquiesce in anything one knows to be a lie.

I have written you a fairly long reply, in part because I ended the last one somewhat rudely, but mainly because you ask serious questions. You believe that the conditions of belonging to the Orthodox Church are agreement with the dogmatic positions of Sts. Photius and Gregory Palamas, those who condemned the Catholic West as heretical. Anyone who does not condemn the Catholic West as heretical is not, in your view, an Orthodox Christian. It is all very simple and tidy, it separates humanity neatly into Them and Us, and it saves one the trouble of looking very deeply into historical fact. I believe that when one looks deeply into historical fact, the neat categories of Us and Them tend to dissolve and blur, which can be very frightening: it might mean that we would end up having to love our neighbor as ourselves, if we actually understood who our neighbor was. Could that be a task that is actually laid upon us, that would make our Christianity a living reality instead of a dead relic of medieval debates? I wonder…Peter

Popes and Princes of Men

2010-04-17T09:10:00.004-04:00

Sainted Agapitus I, Pope of Rome

Born in Rome, Agapitus was the son of a priest named Gordian, who was murdered during riots in Rome. Agapitus was Archdeacon of the priests of Rome, Italy. Elected pope when a very old man, he reigned for less than a year, and he died while on a failed mission to prevent the invasion of Italy by Justinian. In his tenure as pope he succeeded in having the Monophysite Patriarch of Constantinople, Anthimus, replaced by the more orthodox Mennas.

~ Commemorated on April 17 [22] --Sainted Agapitus I, Pope of Rome, was a zealous adherent of Orthodoxy. By his pious life he won the general esteem and was elevated to the papal throne in the year 535. The Gothic king Theodoric the Great dispatched Pope Agapitus to Constantinople for peace negotiations. Along the way Saint Agapitus encountered a lame and speechless man. He healed him from his lameness, and after partaking the Holy Mysteries the mute one spoke. At Constantinople the saint healed a blind beggar. In Constantinople at this time was convened the Local Church-Council. Saint Agapitus took part in it and zealously defended the Orthodox teaching against the heretic Severus, who taught, that the Body of the Lord Jesus Christ was subject to decay similar to every man's body. Saint Agapitus died at Constantinople in the year 536.
© 1996-2001 by translator Fr. S. Janos. ~

More detailed data can be found here.

More of the history of this period to be found on Irenikon here.

An Arian Baptistry in Ravenna:

Background: The Ostrogoths or "bright" Goths were the branch of the Goths that were subjected to the Hun army. Upon the withdrawal of the Huns from Europe, the Ostrogoths existed as a powerful Germanic tribe. In 489AD, Theodoric became King of the Ostrogoths. By 493AD, the Ostrogoths had become the sole Barbarian rulers of Italy. Theodoric had an enlightened reign that returned order to Italy, a reign that has been called by some the first Renaissance. National disorder returned once again upon Theodoric's death in 526AD. Finally in 541AD, the Eastern Roman Empire invaded Italy engaging the Ostrogoths for twenty years.

The Arian Christian Ostrogoths eventually were defeated in 563AD leaving a disastrous power vacuum in Rome, something that St. Pope Agapitus the First desperately had tried to forestall by risking his life, essentially, to make the journey to Constantinople to plead with Emperor Justinian to allow the peninsula and Rome, with the Ostrogoths, to grow and develop and come to the faith in a natural way without war and conquest.

The idea that the nasty Ostrogoths were driven out by the luminous Justinian is not precisely a balanced view of what was really happening in Rome under the rule of Theodoric. In fact Justinian, egged on by his wife the Emperess Theodora, waged a brutal and bloody campaign of counter-expansion and forced religious conversion against the west, that raged across Europe all the way to Britain. Pope Agapitus I foresaw the damage that kind of attack would do to the region and he little trusted Empress Theodora who was more than happy to put a heretic on the Patriarchial throne in Constantinople, a move which her compliant husband barely noticed.

The face of the conflict between Rome and Constantinople changes aspects somewhat when history, on the rare occasion, is told by the conquered rather than the conquerers. From the point of view of genuine and lasting faith and religious conversion, the greatest lesson to Constantinople from that period, at a price the west continues to pay, ought to be that forced conversions and the spread of Christianity by the power of the sword, is a lost and dangerous cause...to those whose souls are only partially captured. Warped and twisted faith is often far worse than no faith at all. The current Orthodox idea that the west is the only one guilty of such behaviors is simply not upheld in the history of the Church.

Sacral Languages Have Essential Liturgical Purpose

2010-04-16T08:57:00.000-04:00

Thanks to John Sandinopolis for this news article. Sacral languages have traditionally been as much a form of liturgical rite and ritual as any other element. It could be argued that language is the foundational form, the essence of the work. It seems to me that we have witnessed and will continue to witness a loss of the sacred due to a careless proliferation of liturgy in a multitude of untried and untrue vernaculars: untrue in the sense that they have not been tried and tested in the long ages of traditional liturgical meaning, and they can never be so tested because they are limiting in their lexicon rather than catholic or universal. It is not all who serve the liturgy. It is the liturgy that serves all.

Friday, April 16, 2010

Greek Synod Condemns Liturgy in Modern Greek

April 15, 2010
Ansamed
Athens, Greece

The Greek Orthodox Holy Synod has condemned the Liturgy in the modern language which is officiated in the diocese of Nicopolis, claiming that it puts "the Church's unity" at risk.

Bishop Meletio of Nicopolis, in the northern region of Epirus, a long time ago authorized the translation of the Liturgy from liturgical Greek (close to the ancient Greek language and once spoken by the upper classes) into modern or "popular" Greek. Because, as he justified his decision, "otherwise the faithful don't understand the Divine Liturgy".

But the Synod has ruled that translating the holy texts is forbidden; it is only allowed "as an exception and after the authorization" of the Church. In the absence of a joint version, according to the Orthodox leaders, a spontaneous and casual translation of the liturgy "could jeopardize the Church's unity".

The Synod has taken its decision despite the fact that Meletio seems to enjoy the support of his faithful and has obtained the official support of other bishops.

Grail Psalms from Conception Abbey

2010-04-15T16:24:00.001-04:00

Recognitio Received From Rome, Revised Grail Psalter Approved

Tuesday, 13 April 2010 22:21

Jarrod Thome

Edited by Br. Jude Person, O.S.B.

On Friday, 9 April 2010, the Most Rev. Arthur J. Serratelli, Bishop of Paterson, NJ, and Chairman of the Bishops’ Committee on Divine Worship of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, informed the bishops of the United States that The Revised Grail Psalms had received an official recognitio from the Vatican’s Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. This final approval, dated 19 March 2010, makes The Revised Grail Psalms the official English-language liturgical Psalter for the United States. These Psalm texts will thus be the ones used in all future editions of liturgical books published for the United States, and, as it happens, for most other English-language countries as well. In his letter Bishop Serratelli expressed his gratitude for this work undertaken by the monks of Conception Abbey under the direction of Abbot Gregory J. Polan, O.S.B., producing this translation which is to play such an important part in the liturgy in years to come.

This revision of the 1963 Grail Psalms was undertaken by the monks of Conception at the request of the Bishops’ Committee on the Liturgy (now the Committee on Divine Worship). In a process taking over ten years to complete, the Grail Psalms were revised (and re-translated where necessary), bringing them in line with up-to-date principles of Scripture scholarship, matters of authentic translation and requirements for appropriate rendering for liturgical use. Of particular concern was that this new version of the Psalms meet the requirements established in Liturgiam Authenticam, the 2001 Instruction issued by the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments enunciating principles for preparing translations of liturgical texts.

Background

Without question, the Psalms are one of the most treasured components of Sacred Scripture. They voice our longing for the Infinite and resonate with the broad range of emotions that flow through our lives. As such, they have for ages been at the heart of Judeo-Christian worship—including the liturgical prayer that has been engaged by the Order of Saint Benedict for over fifteen centuries. Widely recognized as the father of western monasticism, Saint Benedict exhorted his followers to live by the motto ora et labora (“prayer and work”). In his Rule for Monks, he makes clear that the Psalms are an essential element of the ora of monastic life. To this day, Benedictines carry on the tradition of their founder, and the Order is well known for its dedication to the liturgy. It should be no surprise, then, that when the U.S. Bishops’ Committee on Divine Worship wanted a new translation of the Psalms, they approached a Benedictine monk to undertake this most important work. This monk was Abbot Gregory Polan of Conception Abbey, and his task was to revise the 1963 Grail Psalter.

What are the Grail Psalms?

In the years leading up to Vatican II, when the liturgy was still in Latin, moves were being made to foster greater participation on the part of the laity. Permission was granted to sing the Psalm responses of the Mass in the vernacular. Jesuit Father Joseph Gelineau prepared a French translation of the Psalms with a rhythm well suited to oral recitation and chant. In response to his work, a community of lay women in England formed a secular institute called The Grail which undertook an English translation of Fr. Gelineau’s work. Scholars and musicians worked on the project, and through the 1950s their work was released in a series of books, each containing the translations of a few Psalms. The full version of all 150 Psalms was finally released in 1963.

Just like their French predecessors, the 1963 Grail Psalms in English proved to be very well suited to choral recitation, singing and chanting. The Grail translation was soon incorporated into the English edition of the Liturgy of the Hours. Eventually, three other English versions of the Psalter were approved for use in the lectionary: those of the New American Bible, the Revised Standard Version, and the Jerusalem Bible.

Why was a new translation needed?

The 1963 Grail Psalms provided a comfortable transition from Latin to English; the translation was clear and easily understood, the text had a straightforward poetic rhythm and the Psalms could be recited and sung with ease. These qualities had been important objectives for the Ladies of the Grail when they had set about their work. While the 1963 Grail Psalter was highly successful in this regard, however, the decision to adhere to a specific rhythmic pattern had led them in places to paraphrase the original Hebrew rather than render a precise translation of the source texts. Since Vatican II, the Church has insisted that authenticity in translation requires accuracy.

Secondly, since the 1950s, when most of these Psalms were composed, much has happened in the area of biblical scholarship to enable us to understand better both the structure of Hebrew poetry and some of the more problematic texts. This scholarship makes a more accurate translation possible.

Additionally, and perhaps most significant for the Catholic in the pews, the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments in the instruction Liturgiam Authenticam (2001), mandates that a single consistent translation be used in all forms of the liturgy, which is currently not the case. Catholics will now hear the same version of the Psalms at Mass, in the Liturgy of the Hours, and in the texts for all books of the sacraments. Anywhere a Psalm is found in the liturgy here in the U.S. (and in most other English-speaking countries as well), it will be from the Grail Psalter as revised by the Benedictine monks of Conception Abbey.

Some History of the Project

Why were the monks of Conception chosen to bring this work to fruition? The mere fact that Conception Abbey is a Benedictine monastery is a primary reason. But it was the particular combination of scholarly pursuits engaged by Abbot Gregory Polan that had prompted the initial request in June of 1998 from the U.S. Bishops Committee on the Liturgy (now the Committee on Divine Worship), and for the same reason he remained the obvious choice.

Abbot Gregory is first and foremost monk and abbot of Conception Abbey, and thus responsible for the spiritual and temporal welfare of his community. But he also has formal training as both a Scripture scholar and musician. He had translated a section of the Book of Isaiah for the Revised New American Bible, so the staff at the Bishops’ Conference, having been apprised of his musical background, recognized that his particular combination of talents suited him well to undertake the revision, such that the resulting text would retain those qualities that had made it so suitable for choral recitation, singing and chanting.

Abbot Gregory enlisted the help of other monks of Conception Abbey. After four years an initial draft was completed and brought before the Bishops’ Committee on Divine Worship in November 2002. It was there approved to undergo the rigorous process that would deem it an acceptable translation. The full assembly of the USCCB approved the use of The Revised Grail Psalms on 11 November 2008, in a vote of 203-5. The text was then sent off to the Vatican for final approval.

Until now, much of this has been old news as the Church has anxiously awaited the recognitio from Rome approving The Revised Grail Psalms. On Easter Monday, Msgr. Anthony Sherman, Executive Director of the Secretariat of Divine Worship, informed Abbot Gregory of the good news that the recognitio had been granted. Basking in the joyous light of Easter, the Church has yet another reason to let ‘Alleluia!’ resound.

What does this mean for the Church?

For Conception Abbey, the production of The Revised Grail Psalms is another response to the needs of the Church, in a manner that resonates directly with St. Benedict’s words “Ut in omnibus glorificetur Deus” – “That in all things God may be glorified.” For the Faithful who attend any liturgy in English, The Revised Grail Psalms means consistency in what they’ll hear. For musicians and those who use the Psalms for choral recitation or chanting, it means a translation well suited to these uses while retaining integrity of translation. All in all, the consistency and fidelity to the ancient texts of the Psalms means that the Revised Grail Psalter will help promote a more effective, unified liturgy and catechesis.

As faithful souls glorify God with every utterance of these sacred verses, may the merits of this work reciprocate abundant blessings upon them and upon the Church.

To learn more about Conception Abbey, visit www.conceptionabbey.org.

To pre-order a copy of the Revised Grail Psalter when it becomes available, go to Conception Abbey’s Printery House website: www.printeryhouse.org

The copyright for The Revised Grail Psalms is held jointly by Conception Abbey and The Grail (England). GIA Publications serves as the international literary agent for this new version of The Grail Psalms.

Holy Face of Manopello

2010-04-14T21:42:00.000-04:00

The Mystery of Veronica's Veil

Interview With Author Saverio Gaeta

By Jesús Colina

ROME, APRIL 14, 2010 (Zenit.org).- A fascinating mystery envelops "Veronica's veil," the relic that shows the image of Christ. It is not a second shroud, almost in competition with the Shroud of Turin, but the cloth with which, according to tradition, a woman wiped the Master's face during the Passion.

According to journalist Saverio Gaeta, the veil presently kept in the Italian shrine of Manoppello, has an interesting history linked with the iconography of Christ.

Gaeta, editor-in-chief of Famiglia Cristiana and author of numerous religious essays (including the recent biography of John Paul II "Perche e Santo"), reflects further on this fascinating topic in the book "L'Enigma del Volto di Gesu" (The Enigma of Jesus' Face), published contemporaneously with the ongoing exposition of the Shroud of Turin.

ZENIT spoke with the author about his study of the veil.

ZENIT: According to your reconstruction, how did these two relics exist in the Middle East in the first Christian centuries?

Gaeta: In the mid-first millennium, the present Shroud was known as Mandylion and was in Edessa (today Urfa, in Turkey), whereas the Holy Face was kept in Camulia (in the present Turkish city of Kayseri). Their nearness is demonstrated by the sequence of coins in Constantinople. In 692 Byzantine emperor Justinian II had the face of Christ engraved in a "Semitic" type, as that of Manoppello. In 705, after the veil had been taken to Rome by Patriarch Callinicus, blinded and exiled, the new face was again similar to the image of the gods of the "Hellenistic" tradition.

In 869, after the end of the iconoclast struggles, the representation of the Man of the Shroud prevailed on coins, as Basil I's golden solidus shows. This is demonstrated by the feet that protrude from the mantle, the left stretched forward and the right rotated 90 degrees: precisely the impression the Shroud gives, where one leg seems shorter than the other because of the cadaverous rigidity that fixed the superimposed left foot over the right foot.

ZENIT: Is the Shroud and the Holy Face linked with the iconography of Jesus?

Gaeta: Certainly. In fact these two images were at the origin of Christian iconography. This has been demonstrated by Father Heinrich Pfeiffer, professor of Christian art history at the Pontifical Gregorian University, who has documented how the face of the Shroud emphasizes more the bony structure, whereas that of the Manoppello seems more round. Thus, all the mosaics of Christ Pantocrator in Constantinople, in Greece and in Sicily represent the type that reveals primarily the Shroud as model. The images of Christ in Flemish art of the 15th century are, instead, more in relation with the Holy Face of Manoppello.

ZENIT: The cover of your book shows a superimposition between the face of the Shroud and the Holy Face. What does this mean?

Gaeta: It is the discovery made by Trappist Blandine Schlomer, who found numerous "points of congruence" between the face of the Shroud and that of Manoppello, after pointing out some precise criteria as a common denominator of the ancient icons that represent Jesus: the asymmetric face, the beard cut with a double point, the asymmetric sides of the nose, the ocular orbit visible under the iris, the tuft of hair at the center of the part of the hair. Subsequently, Father Andreas Resch, working with a computer, refined the superimposition even more, delineating several areas that represent the useful "points of reference" also to compare the two images with the ancient artistic representations. Bequeathed thus is a perfect level of superimposition, which shows a true and proper fusion between the two faces.

ZENIT: According to your reconstruction, the Holy Face arrived in Rome in the 8th century and then began to be exhibited in St. Peter's in the 13th century. What happened afterward?

Gaeta: In the collective imagination, the Holy Face has always had great importance. It was thus above all beginning in 1300, when the first Jubilee of Christian history was proclaimed, which had one of its most outstanding aspects in the frequent exposition of "Veronica's veil." On May 6, 1527, the so-called sacking took place in Rome, during which very many precious objects were stolen even from St. Peter's: among them, certainly, was the Holy Face. However, the Vatican never admitted this disappearance, as the construction of the new St. Peter's Basilica was under way, and it was convenient for the flow of pilgrims to continue -- people who arrived to see the Holy Face, and whose alms were indispensable to provide for the very expensive work.

ZENIT: And, meanwhile, the veil arrived in the Abruzzi?

Gaeta: Yes, after some ups and downs, the true image of Christ arrived in Manoppello in 1618, with a purchase by Dr. Donato Antonio De Fabritiis, who in 1638 donated it to the Capuchins. It was exhibited for the first time for the public veneration of the faithful on April 6, 1646. On Sept. 1, 2006, during his visit to the shrine, Benedict XVI was the first Pope to be able to see again and venerate the relic, half a millennium after its disappearance from the Basilica of St. Peter.

ZENIT: Are there also scientific tests that confirm the extraordinary characteristics of the fabric?

Gaeta: In fact, several studies have been made on the veil. Professor Donato Vittore demonstrated that in the space between the thread of the warp and of the woof there are no colored residues. Professor Giulio Fanti of the University of Padua revealed that the image on the two sides of the veil is not identical. For example, the tuft of hair in the middle of the forehead is one of the particularities in favor of the theory of an image not made by the hand of man. It cannot be explained how an artist was able to paint a sign on the face of this very subtle veil, and a different sign on the opposite face. Research with Wood's lamp enable one to affirm that on the fabric there are no natural organic substances such as oils, grease and wax, traditionally pictorial agglutinates, whereas the Raman spectroscope has manifested that the nature of the fiber is of the protean type -- as sea silk -- and not vegetable -- as, instead, linen would be.

[Translation by ZENIT]

Why Seek The Living Among The Dead

2010-04-13T10:58:00.001-04:00

Christ is Risen!

Once an ascetic of the Kiev Caves Lavra went on Pascha day to the famous caves where hundreds of monks are buried, and, from his abundance of Paschal joy, exclaimed, “Christ is risen!” “In truth He is risen!” came a brotherly, jubilant response. It was a greeting from another world, from the reposed monks abiding in the coffins of the caves; citizens of the Heavenly Kingdom.

Today, in obedience to the Holy Church, we also observe the Paschal day of the commemoration of the dead which we call “Radonitsa,” calling out to the them, CHRIST IS RISEN! And we hear their response.

One of these responses was the life and death of one ascetic of the Pskov Caves Monastery—Archimandrite Antipas.

Fr. Antipas came to the monastery after the war. He was amongst the small number of officers and soldiers whom the Lord helped survive the war and called to monastic service. Another such person was the Superior of the monastery, Archimandrite Alipy. Father Antipas became the spiritual son of Schema-abbot Savva. He struggled many years in the monastery, was exceedingly kind, always friendly to everyone. No one ever saw him angry, even though multitudes of people came to him everyday for confession and council. At night Fr. Antipas performed his most cherished labor—prayer (he loved most of all to read the Psalter and akathists), the endless commemoration of the living and the dead. He used to tell us young novices how important the Church commemorations are. “The main thing is to die and have the Church commemorate you! The prayers for the living and the dead at the Liturgy and the kathismas of the perpetual Psalter readings have an unseen power that conquers the demons, softens hearts, and begs the Lord’s mercy so greatly that He brings sinners out of hell.”

Fr. Antipas was in charge of the “Unsleeping Psalter.” If it would happen that someone could not read the Psalter during his assigned hour due to illness or work (the reading never ceased even for an hour), then Fr. Antipas would come and read it himself, along with the commemoration books. He himself had four hours of Psalter reading every night, it seems.

He also prayed with his whole heart for people when he read the akathists. People would sometimes order special akathist services containing as many as twelve to fifteen akathists. Many monks did not like these long services very much—long akathists, and then endless lists of names… But Fr. Antipas would shine during these long, hard services; he so rejoiced, and felt how important the Church’s prayers are for the living and the dead.

Well, the time came when Fr. Antipas was no longer able to climb the long stairway leading to St. Michael’s cathedral on the hill. Batiushka celebrated his final service tearfully. The parishioners also wept, because they loved Fr. Antipas very much, and were grieved that this great man of prayer would no longer be present at the akathist services. Fr. Antipas also grieved because he would be deprived of the possibility to read his beloved akathists. This was during the mid 1980’s, when akathist books were not being published; people read from hand-written notebooks in those days. The suitcase full of akathists that Fr. Antipas had always governed was now being delegated to other clergymen.

At the end of this sorrowful service, a group of foreign tourists came into the church. They stood for a short time, but before departing, one woman pulled a little book out of her purse, showed it from a distance to Fr. Antipas, and placed it on the solea. When Fr. Antipas left the church accompanied by the weeping parishioners, he took the book… It was a book of akathists published in Brussels. For his great love for his fellow man, for his many labors of prayer for the living and the dead, the Lord consoled Fr. Antipas. We recall how Fr. Antipas would sit with this book on the bench outside his cell on the holy hill, and, donning his large eye-glasses, pray with great concentration and fervency as if it were the first time, and then read his thick, weathered commemoration book after each akathist or kathisma.

Before he died, Fr. Antipas took to his bed. He was given confession and Holy Communion. But as they recall, he found the inner strength to rise and go to the caves, to the grave of his spiritual father, Fr. Savva. He took his cross and Gospels with him, confessed to his reposed spiritual father, asked for his prayers before the great journey ahead, and then returned to the infirmary to die.

When I came to Pechory from Moscow for his funeral, I was surprised not to find his coffin in the chapel where the blessing of the water was served, for that is where they usually read the Gospels and Psalter over newly reposed monks. The chapel was being repaired, and the Superior blessed the coffin containing Fr. Antipas’ body to be placed in the caves. It was placed right next to the grave of Schema-abbot Savva, whom even death could not separate from Fr. Antipas for all these many years. Now both their relics and their spirits were together. I say “relics” not because someone can be called a saint before he is canonized by the Church, but simply because the body of any Orthodox Christian is called relics in the church.

Thus, the life and death of this remarkable struggler impart God’s blessing to us for the fervent commemoration of the reposed. This is needful not only to the reposed, but also to our own souls for healing and upliftment. His life and death are also an answer to our exclamation today, “CHRIST IS RISEN!” directed at the reposed. In truth Christ is risen, Who “by His ineffable wisdom and love for mankind orders all things and grants to all what is beneficial,” and confirms us in our faith in the future age—the true goal of our earthly life. Amen.

CHRIST IS RISEN!

Arichimandrite Tikhon (Shevkunov)

A sermon by Arichimandrite Tikhon (Shevkunov), given after the pannikhida on Radonitsa

The Vulnerable Speak

2010-04-12T10:09:00.008-04:00

Over the last day or so I posted the comments that follow below, here, and when I awakened this morning and checked in with Dr. Blosser, he referred me to a wonderful post from Father Zuhlsdorf here that has all kinds of good data and links that help to redress the excessively deceitful spin of the secular media concerning the sexual predations of members of the Catholic clergy.

The post below this one is the Zenit article here which calls for healing and truth, and not just the truth concerning abuse but also truth concerning the internal realities of the ones tampered with, raped and reduced to victim status in their own minds.

This, naturally, means that there needs to be an outlet for these victim voices so that reality replaces the lie and half-truth, and morality serves as part of the healing process, and not just a hammer with which to beat those who do not accept secular norms of behavior as inherently more good or more just that those morals and principles of Catholic tradition and faith.

To a victim of sexual predation, alienation is the scourge of their lives, and to have the national and international media sources encourage further alienation is hate speech and should be called precisely what it is.

The fact that people who are inherently charged with an especial call to be moral, no more negates the substance of the morality, than a corrupt government official, negates the principles which constitute a nation.

Healing comes first and foremost from within and for Catholics and Orthodox and other Christians, it comes by grace, and grace is mediated by all of us as the Body of Christ. You cannot wish that away or order it away. It is greater than the law of any land, and as broad and deep as the heavens. To attack the Church does nothing but attack the very means and source for spiritual and psychological healing available to those who are so deeply wounded.

When young children, and youthful men and women are sexually awakened by sexual predators there is a radical change in the life course of those children and youths. There is no doubt of that. The memories and automatic responses to certain stimuli are with that person for life. So to pound the drums of destruction and retribution does NOTHING to help that person and actually does a great deal to slow that healing process and can in some cases insure that the healing never takes place, due to continued alienation from the very source of that healing.

Lady of the Sign, pray for us!

~ ~ ~

Comments: For some of us, what is going on in the media, and the tendency to partial truth and outright lie, is extremely damaging and hits several old triggers that are common to many who have survived abuse, and done so reasonably well.

It is not necessary to say much but I do think the voices of some of the survivors need to be heard as well as those whose outrage is many times removed from the actual experience.

It has been my experience that personal guilt is far more devastating than any reserved rage against the perpetrator. I am sure there is rage in some, but I'd not believe a report that said that was the most debilitating response.

http://irenikontheskete.blogspot.com/2010/04/faith-foul-deeds-and-falsehoods.html

Indeed! For Catholics, in particular, we can say forthrightly that compassion and forgiveness and empathy is the Truth. It is part of the Great Command, and it is not well known to the exclusively secular segment of any and all peoples.

It is part of the reason that there was victim-related complicity in the disposition of sexual predators,in the days when it was believed that these men and women could be released from that particular bondage to sensual degradation.

Catholics have good hearts and minds and they were willing to give a fellow human being another chance. They were also caught up in the guilt that I mentioned earlier, thinking perhaps they had been materially complicit or failed in some way to protect their own.

There are those others in the world whose cosmologies are sufficiently theological that loving the sinner makes sense to them. They too can grasp the theology of empathy and compassion and mercy even if they miss the theology of Incarnation.

The Pain Stream Media grasps none of it, and in fact rejects it, save as a curiosity, and that I believe is purposeful, calculated and in fact does grave and criminal harm to the survivors and victims of sexual predation.

To a survivor of sexual exploitation, any kind of lie or separation from reality is a kind of rape. It is an appropriation of the experience of the one who suffers, for material and political gain. It is hate speech that has direct impact on the abused.

Where do we begin a counter-measure that will be heard by more than a few friends and family, I wonder?

EM

Patient and Solid Love of Truth is Necessary

2010-04-11T21:30:00.000-04:00

Seems to me that someone in the Vatican is reading my mind:

“Patient and Solid Love of Truth Is Necessary”

VATICAN CITY, APRIL 11, 2010 (Zenit.org).- Here is a translation of a statement from Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, director of the Vatican press office, regarding the situation of sexual abuse of minors. The statement was published Friday by Vatican Radio.
* * *
The debate concerning sexual abuse, and not only that committed by the clergy, continues with news items and comments of various kinds. How can we sail through these stormy waters while maintaining a secure course and responding to the evangelical motto 'Duc in altum' -- Put out into the deep?

In the first place, by continuing to seek truth, and peace for the victims. One of the most striking things is that today so many inner wounds are coming to light, wounds that also date to many years (sometimes decades) ago, but evidently still open. Many victims do not seek financial compensation but inner assistance, a judgment on their painful individual experiences. There is something that we have yet to fully understand; perhaps we need a more profound experience of events that have had such a negative impact on the lives of individuals, of the Church and of society. One example of this, at the collective level, is the hatred and violence of conflicts between peoples which are, as we see, so difficult to overcome in true reconciliation. Abuse opens wounds at a deep inner level. For this reason, certain episcopates were right when they courageously resumed developing ways and places in which victims could express themselves freely, listening to them without taking it for granted that the problem had already been faced and overcome by the workshops established sometime ago. For this reason also, other episcopates and individual bishops were right to intervene paternally, showing spiritual, liturgical and human concern for victims. It seems certain that the number of new accusations of abuse is falling, as is happening in the United States, but for many people the road to profound healing is only now beginning, and for others it has yet to start. In the context of this concern for victims, the Pope has written of his readiness to hold new meetings with then, thus sharing in the journey of the entire ecclesial community. But this journey, in order to achieve profound effects, must take place in respect for people and the search for peace.

Alongside concern for victims we must continue to implement, decisively and truthfully, the correct procedures for the canonical judgment of the guilty, and for collaborating with the civil authorities in matters concerning their judicial and penal competencies, taking the specific norms and situations of the various countries into account. Only in this way can we hope effectively to rebuild a climate of justice and complete trust in the ecclesiastical institution. It has happened that a number of leaders of communities and institutions, through inexperience or unpreparedness, have not had a ready understanding of the protocols and criteria for intervention which could have helped them intervene decisively even when this was very difficult or painful for them, also because they were often surprised by the accusations. But, while civil law intervenes through general norms, canon law must take account of the specific moral gravity of an abuse of the trust placed in persons who hold positions of responsibility within the ecclesial community, and of the flagrant contradiction with the conduct they should show. In this sense, transparency and rigour are urgent requirements if the Church is to bear witness to wise and just government.

The formation and selection of candidates for the priesthood, and more generally of the staff of educational and pastoral institutions, is the basis for an effective prevention of the risk of future abuses. Achieving a healthy maturity of the personality, also from a sexual point of view, has always been a difficult challenge, but today it is particularly so, although the best psychological and medical knowledge is of great help in spiritual and moral formation. It has been observed that the greatest frequency of abuses coincided with the most intense period of the 'sexual revolution' of past decades. Formation must take account of this context and of the more general context of secularisation. In the final analysis, this means rediscovering and reaffirming the sense and importance of sexuality, chastity and emotional relationships in today's world, and doing so in concrete, not just verbal or abstract, terms. What a source of disorder and suffering their violation or undervaluation can be! As the Pope observed in his Letter to Irish Catholics, a Christian priestly life today can respond to the requirements of its vocation only by truly nourishing itself at the wellspring of faith and friendship with Christ.

People who love truth and the objective evaluation of problems will know where to seek and find information for a more overall comprehension of the problem of paedophilia and the sexual abuse of minors in our time, in different countries, understanding its range and pervasiveness. Thus they will be able to achieve a better understanding of the degree to which the Catholic Church shares problems that are not only her own, to what extent they have particular gravity for her and require specific interventions, and, finally, the extent to which the experience the Church is going through in this field may also be useful for other institutions or for society as a whole. In this context, we truly feel that the communications media have not yet worked sufficiently, especially in countries in which the Church has a stronger presence and in which she is more easily subject to criticism. Yet, documents such as the national U.S. report on the mistreatment of children deserve to be better known in order to understand what fields require urgent social intervention, and the proportions of the problem. In the U.S.A. in 2008 alone, 62,000 people were identified as having committed acts of abuse against minors, while the proportion of Catholic priests was so small as not to be taken into consideration as a group.

The protection of minors and young people is, then, an immense and unlimited field, which goes well beyond the specific problem concerning certain members of the clergy. People who sensitively, generously and attentively dedicate their efforts to this problem deserve gratitude, respect and encouragement from everyone, especially from the ecclesial and civil authorities. Theirs is an essential contribution for the serenity and credibility of the education and formation of young people, both inside and outside the Church. The Pope rightly expressed words of great appreciation for them in his Letter to Irish Catholics, though naturally with a view to a vaster horizon.

Finally, Pope Benedict XVI, a coherent guide along the path of rigour and truth, merits all respect and support, testimony of which is reaching him from all parts of the Church. He is a pastor well capable of facing -- with great rectitude and confidence -- this difficult time in which there is no lack of criticism and unfounded insinuations. It must be said that he is a Pope who has spoken a lot about the Truth of God and about respect for truth; and he has become a credible witness of this. We accompany him, learning from him the constancy necessary to grow in truth and transparency, continuing to open our horizons to the serious problems of the world and responding patiently to the slow and gradual release of partial or presumed 'revelations' which seek to undermine his credibility, and that of other institutions or individuals of the Church.

This patient and solid love of truth is necessary, in the Church, in the society in which we live, in communicating and in writing, if we wish to serve rather than confuse our fellow men and women.
[Translation by the Vatican Information Service]

Faith, Foul Deeds, and Falsehoods

2010-04-10T12:26:00.001-04:00

What mainstream media fails to accommodate is the fact that to survivors of childhood sexual tampering, abuse and rape, the truth is the most essential element of healing. The horror that the survivor lives through is made up of three parts personal guilt and one part dislocation from reality.

The thing that strikes me, as a survivor of early tampering and later life abuse, is that there are so few of our voices ever included in the rush to publish these attacks against the Catholic Church. And, when these attacks are only partial truths or made up of whole lies, that actually does further damage to the very population for whom these reports pretend to advocate.

~ ~ ~

Mean Men

The priesthood is being cast as the refuge of pederasts. In fact, priests seem to abuse children at the same rate as everyone else.

By Pat Wingert | Newsweek Web Exclusive

The Catholic sex-abuse stories emerging every day suggest that Catholics have a much bigger problem with child molestation than other denominations and the general population. Many point to peculiarities of the Catholic Church (its celibacy rules for priests, its insular hierarchy, its exclusion of women) to infer that there's something particularly pernicious about Catholic clerics that predisposes them to these horrific acts. It's no wonder that, back in 2002—when the last Catholic sex-abuse scandal was making headlines—a Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll found that 64 percent of those queried thought Catholic priests "frequently'' abused children.

Yet experts say there's simply no data to support the claim at all. No formal comparative study has ever broken down child sexual abuse by denomination, and only the Catholic Church has released detailed data about its own. But based on the surveys and studies conducted by different denominations over the past 30 years, experts who study child abuse say they see little reason to conclude that sexual abuse is mostly a Catholic issue. "We don't see the Catholic Church as a hotbed of this or a place that has a bigger problem than anyone else," said Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. "I can tell you without hesitation that we have seen cases in many religious settings, from traveling evangelists to mainstream ministers to rabbis and others."

Since the mid-1980s, insurance companies have offered sexual misconduct coverage as a rider on liability insurance, and their own studies indicate that Catholic churches are not higher risk than other congregations. Insurance companies that cover all denominations, such as Guide One Center for Risk Management, which has more than 40,000 church clients, does not charge Catholic churches higher premiums. "We don't see vast difference in the incidence rate between one denomination and another," says Sarah Buckley, assistant vice president of corporate communications. "It's pretty even across the denominations." It's been that way for decades. While the company saw an uptick in these claims by all types of churches around the time of the 2002 U.S. Catholic sex-abuse scandal, Eric Spacick, Guide One's senior church-risk manager, says "it's been pretty steady since." On average, the company says 80 percent of the sexual misconduct claims they get from all denominations involve sexual abuse of children. As a result, the more children's programs a church has, the more expensive its insurance, officials at Guide One said.

The only hard data that has been made public by any denomination comes from John Jay College's study of Catholic priests, which was authorized and is being paid for by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops following the public outcry over the 2002 scandals. Limiting their study to plausible accusations made between 1950 and 1992, John Jay researchers reported that about 4 percent of the 110,000 priests active during those years had been accused of sexual misconduct involving children. Specifically, 4,392 complaints (ranging from "sexual talk" to rape) were made against priests by 10,667 victims. (Reports made after 2002, including those of incidents that occurred years earlier, are released as part of the church's annual audits.)

Experts disagree on the rate of sexual abuse among the general American male population, but Allen says a conservative estimate is one in 10. Margaret Leland Smith, a researcher at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, says her review of the numbers indicates it's closer to one in 5. But in either case, the rate of abuse by Catholic priests is not higher than these national estimates. The public also doesn't realize how "profoundly prevalent" child sexual abuse is, adds Smith. Even those numbers may be low; research suggests that only a third of abuse cases are ever reported (making it the most underreported crime). "However you slice it, it's a very common experience," Smith says.

Most child abusers have one thing in common, and it's not piety—it's preexisting relationships with their victims. That includes priests and ministers and rabbis, of course, but also family members, friends, neighbors, teachers, coaches, scout leaders, youth-group volunteers, and doctors. According to federal studies, three quarters of abuse occurs at the hands of family members or others in the victim's "circle of trust." "The fundamental premise here is that those who abuse children overwhelmingly seek out situations where they have easy and legitimate access to children," he said. "These kinds of positions offer a kind of cover for these offenders."

Priests may also appear more likely to molest children because cases of abuse come to light in huge waves. One reason is delayed reporting: less than 13 percent of victims abused between 1960 and 1980, for example, lodged a complaint in the same year as the assault. Two thirds filed their complaints after 1992, and half of those were made between 2002 and 2003 alone. "Offenders tend to be manipulative, often persuading children to believe that this is their fault," said Allen. "As a result, the children tend to keep it to themselves. There are countless victims who thought they were the only one." So what looks like high concentrations of abuse may simply reflect long and diffuse patterns of abuse that mirror those among all males.

Another reason is that the church has historically been bad at punishing (or preventing) molesters, so that many cases might come to light when just one priest is finally exposed. A single predator priest with ongoing access to children might be responsible for an immense raft of abuse cases. (Marie Fortune of the Faith Trust Institute, which focuses on clerical-abuse issues, says Roman Catholics tend "to have many more schools and other programs that involve children." "Plenty of other congregations have these problems, for instance, if they have a youth ministry.") That helps explain the 200 children who were abused at a school for the deaf. It didn't happen because the school was full of rapists; it happened because one man was never stopped. Overall, the John Jay study found that 149 priests were responsible for more than 25,000 cases of abuse over the 52-year period studied.

Allen suggests a final reason we hear so much more about Catholic abuse than transgressions in other religions: its sheer size. It's the second largest single denomination in the world (behind Islam) and the biggest in the United States. (Fifty-one percent of all American adults are Protestant, but they belong to hundreds of different denominations.) "When you consider the per capita data," says Allen, "I don't think they have a larger incidence than other faiths."

Benedictines Once Removed: Mount Athos Rising

2010-04-10T09:55:00.001-04:00

This is old news but I am using it as a placeholder while I put another article together today, I hope. Warm weather has hurried along the need for doing major yard work that never did get finished last fall. The effects of my encounter with the Killer Peach Tree last summer have not gone away so back and leg pain are as ordinary to me now as breathing out and breathing in, but they are not conducive to being eager to go out and mow, weed and chop down the wild wood that emerges over night when ignored for even the blink of an eye. Also the aged lawn tractor blew up just before the last mow of the season so there's that...Ora est Labora....and a very good thing it is too!!!

BENEDICTINE HAGIORITES by Dom Leo Bonsall osb

Eastern Churches Review 2:3 (1969), pp. 262-7 (footnotes omitted)

BENEDICTINE contacts with the Church of the East have been many and varied, but the foundation of the abbey of St Mary on Mount Athos and its continuing existence during a period when official relations between Rome and Constantinople were at a very low ebb isB perhaps the outstanding example of monastic co-operation transcending the estrangement of East and West. The full history of the monastery has never been written, for much of it is shrouded in mystery. There are very few documents and the dating of some of these is difficult; all that visibly remains of the buildings is a tower and a few walls on the eastern side of the Athonite peninsula. It is hardly surprising that one of the first Benedictine foundations in the East should have been made by monks from the maritime city republic of Amalfi: Amalfitan merchant ships were trading throughout the area, and monks from that city continued their founding work with the monastery of St Mary the Latin in Jerusalem, and another monastery in Constantinople itself.

The first mention of the followers of St Benedict coming to the Holy Mountain is contained in the lives of the Georgian saints John and Euthymius who founded, round aboout 980, the lavra of Iviron (that is, Iberon, the monastery of the Iberians or Georgians). The following account is given in a Greek akolouthia from Athos:

Before the foundation of the lavra of Iviron, the monk Beneventus, the brother of an Italian prince, arrived on Athos with six of his disciples, wanting to live there. He became an intimate friend of John and his son Euthymius and all three decided to leave the lavra of Saint Athanasius, where they lived, and found an independent lavra. The [Amalfitans] returned home to obtain the things needed for the construction of a new monastery. Being held up, however, on their journey, they found when they returned that the lavra of Iviron had been established and was being governed by Euthymius, to the displeasure of his father, John. Then Beneventus bought a piece of land and built a new monastery which had many monks, the greater part coming from Amalfi; in fact the monastery took the name of the Amalfitans, and was consecrated to the memory of the Most Holy Mother of God.

The official life of the two Georgian saints was originally written by another monk of Iviron, George the Hagiorite, about 1045, or thirty years after the death of Euthymius. The Bollandist Paul Peeters, SJ, published in 1922 a definitive Latin translation of this work, in which there is a passage telling how the founders of Iviron reacted to the arrival of the Latin monks:

Further, while Father John was alive, a certain monk arrived from the land of the Romans, a man famous for his virtue, to whose worth the lands of both the Romans and the Greeks bore witness, the brother of the duke of Benevento, of a most noble family. This man arrived with six disciples this Holy Mountain in order to pray. When our fathers saw that he was outstanding in the gifts of grace they received him as a friend and one of themselves. They treated him with the greatest kindness and invited him to make his home among them, saying ‘Both you and we are alike pilgrims’. They persuaded him with great difficulty, for he desired to live in a separate monastery . . . . And so he built a pleasant monastery in which he gathered many brothers. With the help of our fathers the whole work was completed . . . and to this day there exists onon the Holy Mountain this monastery of the Romans, who live a regular and edifying life [probe ac rite] according to the Rule of Holy Benedict whose life is described in the Book of Dialogues.

One of the great figures on Athos at this period was St Athanasius: monks flocked to hear and speak with him from all over the world and the Benedictine founders were no exception. Athanasius’ biographer tells how the western monks brought the saint a jar of caviar, which, of course, the saint did not eat, though he accepted it so as not to offend them. It is very interesting to note the friendship of the Benedictines with St Athanasius, for one finds in the rules of his followers many signs of the influence of the Rule of St Benedict.

Modern commentators are unanimous that the account of the arrival of the western monks given by George the Hagiorite is to be preferred to the first one cited above. Peeters holds that it is to be regarded as a document ‘of great importance not only for the religious history of Athos, but also for the political and religious history of the period.’ So the arrival of the Latin monks has to be placed not only during the lifetime of St John but also during that of St Athanasius. St John and St Euthymius arrived on Athos about the year 970 and began building Iviron about 980, so the foundation of St Mary’s took place some time between 980 and 1000. A. Pertusi narrows this down further to 985-90, and quotes a document of the Great Lavra dated 984, signed by two of the Latin monks, John and Arsenius

The monastery of Iviron was famous for its learning, and the extant works of the Latin monks lead us to believe that they were of comparable intellectual standing. This could explain the continuing friendship between the two monasteries. As examples of literary activity in the Amalfitan monastery, we have Latin versions of several hagiographical works, certainly including the ‘Account of the miracle of St Michael in Chonae’ translated by one Leo, who calls himself a monk of the Latin monastery on Athos; other similar manuscripts may well be from the same source, and it has been suggested that the transmission to the West of the legend of Barlaam and Joasaph links Iveron and the Amalfitan monastery.

The Benedictine historians of the 11th century do not mention the Amalfitan foundation: in fact, they rather confuse matters. The chronicler of Monte Cassino, Leo of Ostia, tells of the election of Manso, twenty-eighth abbot of Monte Cassino, in 986: ‘He became abbot through the influence of the princes of his family and not through the vote of the monks.’ He goes on to tell bow after Manso had taken up his office several of the best monks decided that they could not live under him and left the monastery; among them was one Joannes Beneventanus who went to the East, to Jerusalem, Sinai, and then to Mount Athos. Leo is quoted in the Dialogues of Pope Victor II:

. . . He went to Jerusalem, and then spent six years on Mount Sinai in the service of God. Then he went to Greece, where he remained some time on the mountain which is called the Holy Mountain (in monte qui Hagionoros dicitur).

However, Leo says that John was a hermit on Athos, and far from founding and ruling a monastery on his own, it seems that John was under an abbot on the Holy Mountain and that it was due to this man’s advice that he returned to Monte Cassino:

Not long afterwards the most holy Father Benedict appeared in a vision to that same John, giving him the pastoral staff which he was holding in his hand, and advising him to return as quickly as possible to Monte Cassino. At the first light of dawn he explained religiously to the abbot of the monastery the vision which he had seen. The abbot, being a man of foresight and discretion, seeing the will of God in this vision, looked at him and said: ‘Brother John, return with all speed to your monastery, lest you seem disobedient to the great father who has appeared to you in a vision. It seems to me that almighty God has decided to place you over his flock, and has chosen you, in his mercy, to watch over his sheep.’ In obedience, therefore, to this vision and advice he returned across the sea, with Christ as his guide, and returned to his monastery. He was made prior by the most holy John (who was then abbot, but through infirmity was unable to bear such a great burden). Not long afterwards, by the counsel and choice of the brethren, he was appointed abbot by the same venerable father.

So John of Benevento, though certainly on Athos during the period, would seem not to be the founder of St Mary’s.

There was on Athos at the same time a Georgian hermit called Gabriel, from whose life a little more information can be gained about the early Latin monks:

The venerable priest Gabriel had a great spiritual love for the holy old man, the great Leo the Roman, who, each time he came to visit our fathers, used to take a cell next to that of Gabriel and there spend the day.

From the eastern sources, therefore, the founder of the monastery was Leo the Roman, a brother of the duke of Benevento. There is, it must be noted, no other record of the duke of Benevento of the period, Pandulf II, having a brother called Leo who was a monk. The John of Benevento, it would seem, was a monk of Monte Cassino who came to the Holy Mountain at the same period, between 993 and 996-7, for spiritual advice (possibly from the abbot of St Mary’s) and then returned to Monte Cassino to become abbot.

This is the only information available on the founding of the monastery. It used to be thought, for example by Dom Rousseau, that much more information was probably to be found in the archives the Great Lavra. Pertusi, however, assures us that the documents published by himself, P. Lemerle, and A. Guillou are all that the Great Lavra possesses on St Mary’s.

The first documentary evidence we have of St Mary’s is the signature in Latin of John of Amalfi, presumably the successor of Leo, on a document dated 991. Perhaps it was still this same John who signed documents in 1012, 1016, and May 1017. As stated above, it was about 1045 that the Georgian monk George described the western monks as living ‘probe ac rite’ according to the Rule of St Benedict. At the same period a minute of imperial civil service notes and approves the decision of the Grand Council of Mount Athos to allow the monks of St Mary’s to possess a boat, not for any commercial usage but for the needs of the monastery.

In 1081, Benedict, abbot of the imperial monastery of the Amalfitans, signs a document, and the emperor of the period, Alexius I, confirms to the convent of the Amalfitans certain lands which are described in great detail. The words ‘imperial monastery’ should be noted; they indicate a very flourishing period for the Benedictines, as they now have the same title as the Great Lavra, Iviron and Vatopedi, the three most ancient lavras on the Holy Mountain. In 1083 another act of the Athonite Council, about the reconstruction of the monastery of Xenophon, has the signature of the monk Demetrios, abbot of the Amalfitan monastery. It is remarkable that, contemporary with the increasing tension typified by the quarrel between Cerularius and Rome, the Benedictines of Athos were not only living their lives peacefully, but taking a full part in the government of the Holy Mountain and enjoying imperial patronage.

Another collection of acts, of the council dated 1097, bears the signature of Vitus, abbot of the Amalfitan monastery. There is a further reference to the monastery in acts dated 1169, on the acquisition of the monastery of St Pantileimon of Thessalonika by the monastery of Rossikon onAthos. This carries among others the signature in Latin of the abbot of St Mary of the Amalfitans.

Agostino Pertusi published in 1958 three new documents on the Amalfitan monastery, [24] preserved in the Great Lavra of St Athanasius. It is very difficult to date the documents, but after extensive researches Pertusi formed the opinion that they date from about the year 1287. Their authenticity has been confirmed since his first publication. They tell of the donation of the monastery of the Amalfitans to the Great Lavra and the confirmation of that transfer by the patriarch and the emperor. At the time that the donation was made the convent was very poor, the house was in ruins, and the remaining monks had no one capable of taking responsibility for its upkeep. A lot of factors may have contributed to this sad situation: the source of vocations much have been drying up, the republic of Amalfi declined politically after 1137, religious tensions and conflicts between East and West were becoming more and more intense, and Andronicus II pursued an anti-Roman policy.

It is interesting to speculate what happened to the survivors, if there were any, at the time of donation. We do not know. The local tradition says that they all left, taking with them their belongings, but this tradition seems dubious in the light of the documents of donation. It seems more probable that they did not leave but were absorbed in the Great Lavra. So ended Benedictine life on Athos, after lasting about three hundred years.

As Dom Rousseau pointed out, the monks of the Holy Mountain have good reason since the demise of St Mary’s to be suspicious of the West: for example, the foundation of Propaganda, in 1636, of a school on Athos to educate the monks, and the attempts of the Jesuits in the 17th century to found a mission there to convert them! Other similar activities have not helped the relations between western and eastern monasticism. Consideration was given by the West to refounding a Benedictine monastery on Athos, but this idea was so displeasing to the monks of the Holy Mountain that in 1924 they incorporated a clause into the constitution by which they are governed, forbidding such a foundation. How different from the arrival of the Amalfitans, when the Athonites not only gave them one of the most beautiful sites on the mountain, but helped them to build their monastery! But now that the ecumenical patriarch himself, on whom the Holy Mountain directly depends, has done so much to change the old atmosphere of suspicion, may it be no longer a vain hope that co-operation between East and West might again become a reality here, in one of the most holy places in the world?

Note: Article originally transcribed for Eirenikon

Such as I have, Give I thee: An Evening Prayer

2010-04-09T16:09:00.001-04:00

Acts 3:1-8

     1 Now Peter and John went up together into the temple at the hour of prayer, being the ninth hour. 2 And a certain man lame from his mother's womb was carried, whom they laid daily at the gate of the temple which is called Beautiful, to ask alms of them that entered into the temple; 3 Who seeing Peter and John about to go into the temple asked an alms. 4 And Peter, fastening his eyes upon him with John, said, Look on us. 5 And he gave heed unto them, expecting to receive something of them. 6 Then Peter said, Silver and gold have I none; but such as I have give I thee: In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise up and walk. 7 And he took him by the right hand, and lifted him up: and immediately his feet and ankle bones received strength. 8 And he leaping up stood, and walked, and entered with them into the temple, walking, and leaping, and praising God.

            Lord Christ,
            You have no body on earth but ours,
            No hands but ours,
            No feet but ours.
            Ours are the eyes through which your compassion
            Must look out on the world.
            Ours are the feet by which you may still
            Go about doing good.
            Ours are the hands with which
            You bless people now.
            Bless our minds and bodies,
            That we may be a blessing to others.
                            Amen....St. Teresa of Avila

Feast of the Life-Giving Spring, Bright Friday

2010-04-09T08:38:00.011-04:00

The Feast of the Life-giving Spring which is kept on the Friday of Renewal Week according to the Patriarchate of Constantinople usage has its origins in the 5th century. It is the feast that commemorates the consecration of the Church of The Life-giving Spring outside of Constantinople.

The very large and beautiful church named in honour of the Theotokos of the Life-giving Spring was built about the middle of the fifth century by the Emperor Leo the Great (457-474 AD), outside of Constantinople. Emperor Leo was a pious man (he is commemorated on January 20) and before he became Emperor, he had encountered a blind man, who being tormented with thirst asked him to help him find water.

Leo felt compassion for him and went in search of a source of water, but found none. As he was about to cease his search, he heard a voice telling him there was water nearby. He looked again, and found none. Then he heard the voice again, this time calling him "Emperor" and telling him that he would find muddy water in the densely wooded place nearby; he was to take some water and anoint the blind man's eyes with it. When he had done this, the blind man received his sight.

After Leo became Emperor, as the most holy Theotokos had prophesied, he raised up a church over the spring, whose waters worked many healings, as well as resurrections from the dead, by the grace of the Theotokos. From this, it came to be called the "Life-giving Spring." The Church of Constantinople celebrates the consecration of this church on the Friday of Renewal Week.

Justinian the Great (527-565 AD) was also cured by the waters of “The Life Giving Spring” and in gratitude built a new Church, larger than the first. It was destroyed by earthquakes and rebuilt. After the fall of Constantinople to the Moslem Turks, this church was razed to the ground and the materials from it were used for building the mosque of Sultan Bayezid.

Nothing remained of that church’s ancient beauty, except for a small chapel, almost completely buried in the ruins. This chapel had twenty-five steps going down into it, and a transom window on roof, from which it received a little light. Toward the western side of the chapel was the holy Spring, fenced about with a railing, and with fish swimming in it.

In 1821 even that little remnant was destroyed, occasioned by the uprising of the Greek nation against the Ottoman Empire. The sacred Spring was buried with it and disappeared altogether. But in the days of Sultan Mahmud, when those subject to him were rejoicing in their freedom to practice their religion, permission was sought by the Orthodox Christian community to rebuild at least the chapel. Permission was granted to build a Church which was consecrated in 1835. On September 6, 1955, however, it was desecrated and destroyed again by the Moslem Turks; it has been restored again, but not to its former magnificence........by Fr. Panagiotes Carras

NOTE: Article with pictures of the Church of the Theotokos Zoodochos Pigi [Pege] in Baloukli.

Dismissal Hymn
Third Tone. Awed by the beauty

A life-giving fount, thou didst conceive the Dew * that is transcendent in essence, 0 Virgin Maid, * and thou hast welled for our sakes the nectar of joy eternal, * which doth pour forth from thy fount * with the water that springeth up * unto everlasting life * in unending and mighty streams; * wherein, taking delight, we all cry out: Rejoice, 0 thou Spring of life for all men.

Kontakion of the Mother of God
Plagal of Fourth Tone. To thee, the Champion Leader

From thine unfailing fount, 0 Maid supremely graced of God, * thou dost reward me by the flow of the unending streams * of thy grace that doth surpass human understanding. * And since thou didst bear the Word incomprehensibly, * I entreat thee to refresh me with thy grace divine,* that I may cry to thee:* Rejoice O Water of salvation.

Person, Trinity, and Trampling Death by Death, part 3

2010-04-08T16:49:00.002-04:00

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger from Introduction to Christianity

This leads us to the next step. We have seen so far that man has no permanence in himself. And consequently can only continue to exist in another but that his existence in another is only shadowy and once again not final, because this other must perish, too. If this is so, then only one could truly give lasting stability: he who is, who does not come into existence and pass away again but abides in the midst of transience: the God of the living, who does not hold just the shadow and echo of my being, whose ideas are not just copies of reality. I myself am his thought, which establishes me more securely, so to speak, than I am in myself; his thought is not the posthumous shadow but the original source and strength of my being. In him I can stand as more than a shadow; in him I am truly closer to myself than I should be if I just tried to stay by myself.

Before we return from here to the Resurrection, let us try to see the same thing once again from a somewhat different side. We can start again from the dictum about love and death and say: Only where someone values love more highly than life, that is, only where someone is ready to put life second to love, for the sake of love, can love be stronger and more than death. If it is to be more than death, it must first be more than mere life. But if it could be this, not just in intention but in reality, then that would mean at the same time that the power of love had risen superior to the power of the merely biological and taken it into its service. To use Teilhard de Chardin's terminology; where that took place, the decisive complexity or "complexification" would have occurred; bios, too, would be encompassed by and incorporated in the power of love. It would cross the boundary--death--and create unity where death divides. If the power of love for another were so strong somewhere that it could keep alive not just his memory, the shadow of his "I", but that person himself, then a new stage in life would have been reached. This would mean that the realm of biological evolutions and mutations had been left behind and the leap made to a quite different plane, on which love was no longer subject to bios but made use of it. Such a final stage of "mutation" and "evolution" would itself no longer be a biological stage; it would signify the end of the sovereignty of bios, which is at the same time the sovereignty of death; it would open up the realm that the Greek Bible calls zoe, that is, definitive life, which has left behind the rule of death. The last stage of evolution needed by the world to reach its goal would then no longer be achieved within the realm of biology but by the spirit, by freedom, by love. It would no longer be evolution but decision and gift in one.

But what has all this to do, it may be asked, with faith in the Resurrection of Jesus? Well, we previously considered the question of the possible immortality of man from two sides, which now turn out to be aspects of one and. the same state of affairs. We said that, as man has no permanence in himself, his survival could. only be brought about by his living on in another. And we said, from the point of view of this "other", that only the love that takes up the beloved in itself, into its own being, could make possible this existence in the other. These two complementary aspects are mirrored again, so it seems to me, in the two New Testament ways of describing the Resurrection of the Lord: "Jesus has risen" and "God (the Father) has awakened Jesus." The two formulas meet in the fact that Jesus' total love for men, which leads him to the Cross, is perfected in totally passing beyond to the Father and therein becomes stronger than death, because in this it is at the same time total "being held" by him.

From this a further step results. We can now say that love always establishes some kind of immortality; even in its prehuman stage, it points, in the form of preservation of the species, in this direction. Indeed, this founding of immortality is not something incidental to love, not one thing that it does among others, but what really gives it its specific character. This principle can be reversed; it then signifies that immortality always" proceeds from love, never out of the autarchy of that which is sufficient to itself. We may even be bold enough to assert that this principle, properly understood, also applies even to God as he is seen by the Christian faith. God, too, is absolute permanence, as opposed to everything transitory, for the reason that he is the relation of three Persons to one another, their incorporation in the "for one another" of love, act-substance of the love that is absolute and therefore completely "relative", living only "in relation to". As we said earlier, it is not autarchy, which knows no one but itself, that is divine; what is revolutionary about the Christian view of the world and of God, we found, as opposed to those of antiquity, is that it learns to understand the "absolute" as absolute "relatedness", as relatio subsistens.

To return to our argument, love is the foundation of immortality, and immortality proceeds from love alone. This statement to which we have now worked our way also means that he who has love for all has established immortality for all. That is precisely the meaning of the biblical statement that his Resurrection is our life. The--to us--curious reasoning of St. Paul in his First Letter to the Corinthians now becomes comprehensible: if he has risen, then we have, too, for then love is stronger than death; if he has not risen, then we have not either, for then the situation is still that death has the last word, nothing else (cf. I Cor 15:16f.). Since this is a statement of central importance, let us spell it out once again in a different way: Either love is stronger than death, or it is not. If it has become so in him, then it became so precisely as love for others. This also means, it is true, that our own love, left to itself, is not sufficient to overcome death; taken in itself it would have to remain an unanswered cry. It means that only his love, coinciding with God's own power of life and love, can be the foundation of our immortality. Nevertheless, it still remains true that the mode of our immortality will depend on our mode of loving. We shall have to return to this in the section on the Last Judgment.

A further point emerges from this discussion. Given the foregoing considerations, it goes without saying that the life of him who has risen from the dead is not once again bios, the biological form of our mortal life within history; it is zoe, new, different, definitive life; life that has stepped beyond the mortal realm of bios and history, a realm that has here been surpassed by a greater power. And in fact the Resurrection narratives of the New Testament allow us to see clearly that the life of the Risen One lies, not within the historical bios, but beyond and above it. It is also true, of course, that this new life begot itself in history and had to do so, because after all it is there for history, and the Christian message is basically nothing else than the transmission of the testimony that love has managed to break through death here and thus has transformed fundamentally the situation of all of us. Once we have realized this, it is no longer difficult to find the right kind of hermeneutics for the difficult business of expounding the biblical Resurrection narratives, that is, to acquire a clear understanding of the sense in which they must properly be understood. Obviously we cannot attempt here a detailed discussion of the questions involved, which today present themselves in a more difficult form than ever before; especially as historical and--for the most part inadequately pondered--philosophical statements are becoming more and more inextricably intertwined, and exegesis itself quite often produces its own philosophy, which is intended to appear to the layman as a supremely refined distillation of the biblical evidence. Many points of detail will here always remain open to discussion, but it is possible to recognize a fundamental dividing line between explanation that remains explanation and arbitrary adaptations [to contemporary ways of thinking].

First of all, it is quite clear that after his Resurrection Christ did not go back to his previous earthly life, as we are told the young man of Nain and Lazarus did. He rose again to definitive life, which is no longer governed by chemical and biological laws and therefore stands outside the possibility of death, in the eternity conferred by love. That is why the encounters with him are "appearances"; that is why he with whom people had sat at table two days earlier is not recognized by his best friends and, even when recognized, remains foreign: only where he grants vision is he seen; only when he opens men's eyes and makes their hearts open up can the countenance of the eternal love that conquers death become recognizable in our mortal world, and, in that love, the new, different world, the world of him who is to come. That is also why it is so difficult, indeed absolutely impossible, for the Gospels to describe the encounter with the risen Christ; that is why they can only stammer when they speak of these meetings and seem to provide contradictory descriptions of them. In reality they are surprisingly unanimous in the dialectic of their statements, in the simultaneity of touching and not touching, or recognizing and not recognizing, of complete identity between the crucified and the risen Christ and complete transformation. People recognize the Lord and yet do not recognize him again; people touch him, and yet he is untouchable; he is the same and yet quite different. As we have said, the dialectic is always the same; it is only the stylistic means by which it is expressed that changes.

For example, let us examine a little more closely from this point of view the Emmaus story, which we have already touched upon briefly. At first sight it looks as if we are confronted here with a completely earthly and material notion of resurrection; as if nothing remains of the mysterious and indescribable elements to be found in the Pauline accounts. It looks as if the tendency to detailed depiction, to the concreteness of legend, supported by the apologist's desire for something tangible, had completely won the upper hand and fetched the risen Lord right back into earthly history. But this impression is soon contradicted by his mysterious appearance and his no less mysterious disappearance. The notion is contradicted even more by the fact that here, too, he remains unrecognizable to the accustomed eye. He cannot be firmly grasped as he could be in the time of his earthly life; he is discovered only in the realm of faith; he sets the hearts of the two travelers aflame by his interpretation of the Scriptures and by breaking bread he opens their eyes. This is a reference to the two basic elements in early Christian worship, which consisted of the liturgy of the word (the reading and expounding of Scripture) and the eucharistic breaking of bread. In this way the evangelist makes it clear that the encounter with the risen Christ lies on a quite new plane; he tries to describe the indescribable in terms of the liturgical facts. He thereby provides both a theology of the Resurrection and a theology of the liturgy: one encounters the risen Christ in the word and in the sacrament; worship is the way in which he becomes touchable to us and, recognizable as the living Christ. And conversely, the liturgy is based on the mystery of Easter; it is to he understood as the Lords approach to us. In it he becomes our traveling companion, sets our dull hearts aflame, and opens our sealed eyes. He still walks with us, still finds us worried and downhearted, and still has the power to make us see.

Of course, all this is only half the story; to stop at this alone would mean falsifying the evidence of the New Testament. Experience of the risen Christ is something other than a meeting with a man from within our history, and it must certainly not be traced back to conversations at table and recollections that would have finally crystallized in the idea that he still lived and went about his business. Such an interpretation reduces what happened to the purely human level and robs it of its specific quality. The Resurrection narratives are something other and more than disguised liturgical scenes: they make visible the founding event on which all Christian liturgy rests. They testify to an approach that did not rise from the hearts of the disciples but came to them from outside, convinced them despite their doubts and made them certain that the Lord had truly risen. He who lay in the grave is no longer there; he--really he himself--lives. He who had been transposed into the other world of God showed himself powerful enough to make it palpably clear that he himself stood in their presence again, that in him the power of love had really proved itself stronger than the power of death.

Only by taking this just as seriously as what we said first does one remain faithful to the witness borne by the New Testament; only thus, too, is its seriousness in world history preserved. The comfortable attempt to spare oneself the belief in the mystery of God's mighty actions in this world and yet at the same time to have the satisfaction of remaining on the foundation of the biblical message leads nowhere; it measures up neither to the honesty of reason nor to the claims of faith. One cannot have both the Christian faith and "religion within the bounds of pure reason"; a choice is unavoidable. He who believes will see more and more clearly, it is true, how rational it is to have faith in the love that has conquered death.

Person, Trinity, and Trampling Death by Death, part 2

2010-04-07T22:20:00.001-04:00

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger from Introduction to Christianity

At the same time it is proof of what only immortality can create: being in the other who still stands when I have fallen apart. Man is a being who himself does not live forever but is necessarily delivered up to death. For him, since he has no continuance in himself, survival, from a purely human point of view, can only become possible through his continuing to exist in another. The statements of Scripture about the connection between sin and death are to he understood from this angle. For it now becomes clear that man's attempt "to be like God", his striving for autonomy, through which he wishes to stand on his own feet alone, means his death, for he just cannot stand on his own. If man--and this is the real nature of sin--nevertheless refuses to recognize his own limits and tries to be completely self-sufficient, then precisely by adopting this attitude he delivers himself up to death.

Of course man does understand that his life alone does not endure and that he must therefore strive to exist in others, so as to remain through them and in them in the land of the living. Two ways in particular have been tried. First, living on in one's own children: that is why in primitive peoples failure to marry and childlessness are regarded as the most terrible curse; they mean hopeless destruction, final death. Conversely, the largest possible number of children offers at the same time the greatest possible chance of survival, hope of immortality, and thus the most genuine blessing that man can expect. Another way discloses itself when man discovers that in his children he only continues to exist in a very unreal way; he wants more of himself to remain. So he takes refuge in the idea of fame, which should make him really immortal if be lives on through all ages in the memory of others. But this second attempt of man's to obtain immortality for himself by existing in others fails just as badly as the first: what remains is not the self but only its echo, a mere shadow. So self-made immortality is really only a Hades, a sheol": more nonbeing than being. The inadequacy of both ways lies partly in the fact that the other person who holds my being after my death cannot carry this being itself but only its echo; and even more in the fact that even time other person to whom I have, so to speak, entrusted my continuance will not last--he, too, will perish.

Road to Emmaus

2010-04-07T20:20:00.000-04:00

"Judge us not, O favored races,

From the heights we have attained;

Rather measure our progression

By the depths from whence we came."

THE WALK TO EMMAUS

'Twas eventide. Along the dusty road
Two weary travelers passed with aching feet
And heavy hearts, while each in saddened tones
The story of their Lord would oft repeat.

We yearn for Him, and is it not three days
Since first He lay within the silent tomb?
Yet when we hastened to His resting place,
Our Lord had gone; His grave was wrapt in gloom.

Communing thus, these weary travelers went.
Their hearts oppressed by mingled doubt and fear;
When lo! along the road to Emmaus
Their Lord, the risen Christ Himself, drew near.

With gentle voice He asked of them their grief,–
"Why are ye sad? and O, what troubleth thee?"
They knew not that the loving Master spoke,
Their eyes were holden, that they could not see.

And one replied: "We know not where He is,–
Our Lord, who promised Israel to redeem.
Art thou a stranger in Jerusalem?
And knowest not what marvelous things have been?"

Then Jesus spoke. "Why are ye show of heart?
Did not the prophets in the days of old
Proclaim that Christ must die and live again,
That ye His wondrous power might behold?"

Their hearts were touched; the Master's thrilling words
Dispelled their fears and cleared their darkened sight.
And while the Holy Scriptures He declared,
There came sweet peace and filled their souls with light.

The Master ceased, and now the journey o'er
He still would further go along the road.
But they constrained Him, saying: "Tarry here;
Abide with us and enter our abode."

He deigned to pass within that humble home,
His holy presence filled the place with light;
He sat at meat and brake and blessed the bread,
And ere they know it vanished from their sight.

They said, with gladdened hearts, "It is our Lord,
Our risen Christ for whom we long have yearned;
We knew Him not when walking by the way,
And yet our hearts within us sweetly burned.

O Christian! walking o'er Life's rugged road,
Thou too, like His disciples, oft shall say,–
"Did not our hearts within us sweetly burn
When Jesus talked with us beside the way?"

Original Poems by Olivia Bush [aka Olivia Ward Bush-Banks] (1869-1944). Providence, RI: Louis A. Basinet Press, 1899; Reprinted in The Collected Works of Olivia Ward Bush-Banks, compiled and edited by Bernice Forrest (formerly Bernice Forrest Guillame), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

West Virginia Mining Disaster, Eternal Rest

2010-04-07T17:56:00.001-04:00

If I Make My Bed In the Depths, You Are There!

Both American and Chinese officials are racing against the clock in two catastrophic mining accidents, working desperately to find survivors. In West Virginia, 25 have already been presumed dead as rescuers frantically tried to drill ventilation holes. Please join us in praying for these families, as these small communities cling to their faith in these dark hours. "Every time you turn your lights on at home," said miner Kevin Lambert, "you should think about them guys." And pray for them too. Each day, men we don't know brave one of the deadliest jobs on earth so that you and I can have power. They deserve our support and appreciation for risking their lives in an often thankless--and fatal--line of work. " Though you have made me see troubles, many and bitter, you will restore my life again; from the depths of the earth you will again bring me up." (Psalm 71:20)

Psalm 139

O LORD, you have searched me
       and you know me.
You know when I sit and when I rise;
       you perceive my thoughts from afar.
You discern my going out and my lying down;
       you are familiar with all my ways.

Before a word is on my tongue
       you know it completely, O LORD.
You hem me in—behind and before;
       you have laid your hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,
       too lofty for me to attain.

Where can I go from your Spirit?
       Where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
       if I make my bed in the depths, [a] you are there.
If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
       if I settle on the far side of the sea,
Even there your hand will guide me,
       your right hand will hold me fast.

If I say, "Surely the darkness will hide me
       and the light become night around me,"
Even the darkness will not be dark to you;
       the night will shine like the day,
       for darkness is as light to you.
For you created my inmost being;
       you knit me together in my mother's womb.

I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
       your works are wonderful,
       I know that full well.
My frame was not hidden from you
       when I was made in the secret place.
       When I was woven together in the depths of the earth,
Your eyes saw my unformed body.
       All the days ordained for me
       were written in your book
       before one of them came to be.

How precious to me are your thoughts, O God!
       How vast is the sum of them!
Were I to count them,
       they would outnumber the grains of sand.
       When I awake,
       I am still with you...

Search me, O God, and know my heart;
       test me and know my anxious thoughts.
See if there is any offensive way in me,
       and lead me in the way everlasting.

Person, Trinity, and Trampling Death by Death, part 1

2010-04-07T09:42:00.002-04:00

Death was swallowed up in victory

At Thy resurrection from the dead, O Christ.

Hence, glorying in Thy passion,

And always celebrating it, we rejoice.

With jubilation let us cry out,

"The Lord is risen."

Thou, O Savior, didst come forth unbegotten

From the Virgin's womb, leaving her virginity unsullied;

Just so now Thou hast abolished Death in death.

Thou hast left in the tomb the fine linen of Joseph,

But Thou hast raised from the tomb the ancestor of Joseph;

For Adam came following Thee; Eve came after Thee,

All the earth is prostrate before Thee

As it sings the song of victory:

"The Lord is risen"

from the First Kontakion on the Resurrection

St. Romanos the Melodist, 6th century

~ ~ ~

How often do we hear someone question the fact that redemption comes to us by the suffering and death of Jesus Christ? 'Certainly', the conversation goes, 'God could have redeemed us in any number of ways!'

In this brief three part series, as it is presented here, from Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger [now Pope Benedict XVI] it becomes apparent that there is an integral, masterful, and absolutely transcendent Theo-Logic in the Passion, Death and Resurrection without which the dominion of death could not have been absolutely transfigured into everlasting life. In this first section he introduces the theological concepts of love and other.

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger from Introduction to Christianity

To the Christian, faith in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is an expression of certainty that the saying that seems to be only a beautiful dream is in fact true: "Love is strong as death" (Song 8:6). In the Old Testament this sentence comes in the middle of praises of the power of eros. But this by no means signifies that we can simply push it aside as a lyrical exaggeration. The boundless demands of eros", its apparent exaggerations and extravagance, do in reality give expression to a basic problem, indeed the" basic problem of human existence, insofar as they reflect the nature and intrinsic paradox of love: love demands infinity, indestructibility; indeed, it is, so to speak, a call for infinity. But it is also a fact that this cry of love's cannot be satisfied, that it demands infinity but cannot grant it; that it claims eternity but in fact is included in the world of death, in its loneliness and its power of destruction. Only from this angle can one understand what "resurrection" means. It is" the greater strength of love in face of death.

At the same time it is proof of what only immortality can create: being in the other who still stands when I have fallen apart. Man is a being who himself does not live forever but is necessarily delivered up to death. For him, since he has no continuance in himself, survival, from a purely human point of view, can only become possible through his continuing to exist in another. The statements of Scripture about the connection between sin and death are to he understood from this angle. For it now becomes clear that man's attempt "to be like God", his striving for autonomy, through which he wishes to stand on his own feet alone, means his death, for he just cannot stand on his own. If man--and this is the real nature of sin--nevertheless refuses to recognize his own limits and tries to be completely self-sufficient, then precisely by adopting this attitude he delivers himself up to death.

Pray Without Ceasing

2010-04-06T09:17:00.005-04:00

We are now more than forty-eight hours away from those ecstatic moments that come with the first acclamation of "Christ is Risen!" and the glorious jubilation of The Angel Cried. Already we are in danger of spiritual lassitude as we breathe a sigh of relief and go in search of food and comforts denied for so many weeks. The cycle of liturgies drops back to its ordinary hum from the roar of Great and Holy Week, and people are sleeping again at night rather than coming together in prayer. Even I have been out in the world going here and there on errands for those who need my help and attention, and those hours are lost to prayer, not to be regained, or so it seems sometimes. But it is possible to practice the presence of God even in the Ho-Hum Dither of ordinary life.

These words from St. Gregory Palamas are both a balm and a goad, to ease us back into the mundane and remind us that is not only possible but also necessary to pray unceasingly:

Let no one think, my brother Christians, that it is the duty only of priests and monks to pray without ceasing, and not of laymen.

No, no; it is the duty of all of us Christians to remain always in prayer.

For look what the most holy Patriarch of Constantinople, Philotheus, writes in his life of St. Gregory of Thessalonica. This saint had a beloved friend by the name of Job, a very simple but most virtuous man. Once, while conversing with him, His Eminence said of prayer that every Christian in general should strive to pray always, and to pray without ceasing, as Apostle Paul commands all Christians, "Pray without ceasing" (I Thessalonians 5:17), and as the prophet David says of himself, although he was a king and had to concern himself with his whole kingdom: "I foresaw the Lord always before my face" (Psalms 15:8), that is, in my prayer I always mentally see the Lord before me. Gregory the Theologian also teaches all Christians to say God’s name in prayer more often than to breathe.

So, my Christian brethren, I too implore you, together also with St. Chrysostom, for the sake of saving your souls, do not neglect the practice of this prayer. Imitate those I have mentioned and follow in their footsteps as far as you can.

At first it may appear very difficult to you, but be assured, as it were from Almighty God, that this very name of our Lord Jesus Christ, constantly invoked by you, will help you to overcome all difficulties, and in the course of time you will become used to this practice and will taste how sweet is the name of the Lord. Then you will learn by experience that this practice is not impossible and not difficult, but both possible and easy. This is why St. Paul, who knew better than we the great good which such prayer would bring, commanded us to pray without ceasing. He would not have imposed this obligation upon us if it were extremely difficult and impossible, for he knew beforehand that in such case, having no possibility of fulfilling it, we would inevitably prove to be disobedient and would transgress his commandment, thus incurring blame and condemnation. The Apostle could have had no such intention.

Moreover, bear in mind the method of prayer – how it is possible to pray without ceasing, namely by praying in the mind. And this we can always do if we so wish. For when we sit down to work with our hands, when we walk, when we eat, when we drink we can always pray mentally and practice this mental prayer – the true prayer pleasing to God. Let us work with the body and pray with the soul. Let our outer man perform his bodily tasks, and let the inner man be entirely dedicated to the service of God, never abandoning this spiritual practice of mental prayer, as Jesus, God and Man, commanded us, saying: "But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret" (Matthew 6:6).

The closet of the soul is the body; our doors are the five bodily senses. The soul enters its closet when the mind does not wander hither and thither, roaming among things and affairs of the world, but stays within, in our heart. Our senses become closed and remain closed when we do not let them be attached to external sensory things, and in this way our mind remains free from every worldly attachment, and by secret mental prayer unites with God its Father. "And thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly," adds the Lord. God who knows all secret things sees mental prayer and rewards it openly with great gifts. For that prayer is true and perfect which fills the soul with Divine grace and spiritual gifts. As chrism perfumes the jar the more strongly the tighter it is closed, so prayer, the more fast it is imprisoned in the heart, abounds the more in Divine grace.

Blessed are those who acquire the habit of this heavenly practice, for by it they overcome every temptation of the evil demons, as David overcame the proud Goliath. It extinguishes the unruly lusts of the flesh, as the three men extinguished the flames of the furnace. This practice of inner prayer tames passions as Daniel tamed the wild beasts. By it the dew of the Holy spirit is brought down upon the heart, as Elijah brought down rain on Mount Carmel. This mental prayer reaches to the very throne of God and is preserved in golden vials, sending forth their odors before the Lord, as John the Divine saw in the Revelation, "Four and twenty elders fell down before the Lamb, having every one of them harps, and golden vials full of odors, which are the prayers of the saints" (Revelation 5:8).

This mental prayer is the light which illumines man’s soul and inflames his heart with the fire of love of God. It is the chain linking God with man and man with God. Oh the incomparable blessing of mental prayer! It allows a man constantly to converse with God. Oh truly wonderful and more than wonderful – to be with one’s body among men while in one’s mind conversing with God. Angels have no physical voice, but mentally never cease to sing glory to God. This is their sole occupation and all their life is dedicated to this.

So, brother, when you enter your closet and close your door, that is, when your mind is not darting hither and thither but enters within your heart, and your senses are confined and barred against things of this world, and when you pray thus always, you too are then like the holy angels, and your Father, Who sees your prayer in secret, which you bring Him in the hidden depths of your heart, will reward you openly by great spiritual gifts.

But what other and greater rewards can you wish from this when, as I said, you are mentally always before the face of God and are constantly conversing with Him – conversing with God, without Whom no man can ever be blessed either here or in another life?

Finally, my brother, whoever you may be, when you take up this book and, having read it, wish to test in practice the profit which mental prayer brings to the soul, I beg you, when you begin to pray thus, pray God with one invocation, "Lord have mercy," for the soul of him who has worked on compiling this book and of him who helped to give it to the public. For they have great need of your prayer to receive God’s mercy for their soul, as you for yours. May it be so! May it be so!

St Gregory Palamas, from "Early Fathers From the Philokalia," translated from the Russian text, "Dobrotolubiye," by E. Kadloubovsky and G.E.H. Palmer, eighth edition, (London: Faber and Faber, Ltd., 1981), pp. 412 - 415

Blessing of Novosibirsk Carmel in Russia

2010-04-06T00:03:00.001-04:00

March 29th, 2010 by William

Communicationes
Novosibirsk – Russia (2010-03-11).- On 19th December 2009 Bishop Joseph Werth of Novosibirsk blessed our Carmelite Nuns’ Monastery of the Resurrection of Christ in this, Russia’s third largest city, after Moscow and St. Petersborough. The blessing took place during a solemn celebration with the Apostolic Nuntio, Mons. Antonio Mennini, among those present.
Despite the Siberian weather a large number of invited guests crammed the convent chapel for the concelebrated Eucharist. The Nuncio, who travelled from Moscow for the occasion, preached at the Mass and delivered the Pope’s Apostolic Blessing to the community.
Among the large number of priests in attendance it was particularly significant that two Orthodox priests came from the neighbouring diocese. As a special gift from their own Bishop to the Carmelite Community, they brought a relic of St. Martirii, one of the early monks in the Kiev-Pechersk monastery. His relic has been reserved in the Carmelite altar alongside those of St. Teresa and St. Raphael Kalinowski. Kiev-Pechersk monastery is considered to be the cradle of Russian monasticism, while the deacon-monk Saint Martirii is one of the Saints venerated by both the Catholic and Orthodox churches.
The gift of the relic is seen as a special ecumenical gesture. The Nuncio referred to this fact in his homily and compared both the Carmelite community and the relic to the mustard seed of the Gospel, insofar as both signify development in unity between the two Churches. The Nuncio also noted that this particular Carmel, hidden in the middle of Russia, is dedicated to prayer for such unity.

A Strength Not Our Own

2010-04-05T07:49:00.000-04:00

But now the power of Easter has burst upon us with the resurrection of Christ. Now we find in ourselves a strength which is not our own, and which is freely given to us whenever we need it, raising us above the Law, giving us a new law which is hidden in Christ: the law of His merciful love for us. Now we no longer strive to be good because we have to, because it is a duty, but because our joy is to please Him who has given all His love to us! Now our life is full of meaning!

… To understand Easter and live it, we must renounce our dread of newness and of freedom!

From: Seasons of Celebration by Thomas Merton (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 1986), Pages 145-46.

Mark 16:1-8 - When the Sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. And they were saying to one another, "Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance of the tomb?" And looking up, they saw that the stone had been rolled back--it was very large. And entering the tomb, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, dressed in a white robe, and they were alarmed. And he said to them, "Do not be alarmed. You seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen; he is not here. See the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you." And they went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

Christos Voskrese!

2010-04-04T00:05:00.000-04:00

Let God arise, let his enemies be scattered; let those who hate him flee from before his face! As smoke vanishes, so let them vanish; as wax melts before the fire, So the sinners will perish before the face of God; but let the righteous be glad. This is the day which the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it!

Christos voskrese! iz mertvych, smertiju smert poprav,
i suscim vo hrob'ich zivot darovav.

Christos voskrese! iz mertvych, smertiju smert poprav,
i suscim vo hrob'ich zivot darovav.

Christos voskrese! iz mertvych, smertiju smert poprav,
i suscim vo hrob'ich zivot darovav.

The angel cried to the Lady Full of Grace:

Rejoice, O Pure Virgin! Again I say: Rejoice!

Your Son is risen from His three days in the tomb!

With Himself He has raised all the dead!

Rejoice, all you people!

Shine! Shine! O New Jerusalem!

The Glory of the Lord has shone on you!

Exalt now and be glad, O Zion!

Be radiant, O Pure Theotokos, in the Resurrection of your Son!

"...You that have kept the fast, and you that have not, rejoice today for the Table is richly laden! Feast royally on it, the calf is a fatted one. Let no one go away hungry. Partake, all, of the cup of faith. Enjoy all the riches of His goodness!

Let no one grieve at his poverty, for the universal kingdom has been revealed. Let no one mourn that he has fallen again and again, for forgiveness has risen from the grave. Let no one fear death, for the Death of our Savior has set us free.

He has destroyed it by enduring it.

He destroyed Hades when He descended into it. He put it into an uproar even as it tasted of His flesh. Isaiah foretold this when he said, "You, O Hell, have been troubled by encountering Him below."

Hell was in an uproar because it was done away with. It was in an uproar because it is mocked. It was in an uproar, for it is destroyed. It is in an uproar, for it is annihilated. It is in an uproar, for it is now made captive. Hell took a body, and discovered God. It took earth, and encountered Heaven. It took what it saw, and was overcome by what it did not see.

O death, where is thy sting? O Hades, where is thy victory?

Christ is Risen, and you, O death, are annihilated! Christ is Risen, and the evil ones are cast down! Christ is Risen, and the angels rejoice! Christ is Risen, and life is liberated! Christ is Risen, and the tomb is emptied of its dead; for Christ having risen from the dead, is become the first-fruits of those who have fallen asleep.

To Him be all Glory and Power unto ages of ages. Amen!"

....from the Resurrection Homily of St. John Chrysostom

Icon courtesy of www.eikonografos.com used with permission.