Confined to the Reservation?

    Korazym.org (here) published in Italian a sort of odd article expressing skepticism over the intent of the particular audiences granted by Pope Francis to representatives of the FSSP on last February 4 and to Rev. Davide Pagliarani the Superior General of the FSSPX on February 8 and the consequent steps or declarations emanating from the Holy See.

    Korazym does not seem to make much of the papal document of February 11, securing for the FSSP and seemingly for all the other Ecclesia Dei Institutes the guarantee that their constitutions are held upright and in their own churches or houses or with the blessing of the local ordinary they can continue their mission rooted in the ancient usage for Holy Mass, the Sacraments, the Breviary and devotions. The Italian Catholic news service compared the move by the Pope to the historical creation of reservations in the wastelands of the United States for the sake of confining the native American peoples.

   Regardless of what you might think of that comparison, Korazym's intent was to clearly write off these recent events as nothing more than a malevolent strategy of containment on the part of the Holy Father, which in no way detracts from his endgame very much still at odds with Church Tradition and bent on consigning our liturgical patrimony to the dustbin of history once and for all.

    I guess for my part I have always underestimated the visceral hatred of the last elements standing of a generation older than mine, which since the 1950's at least have mindlessly pushed forward the "Star Trek" agenda of venturing where no man has gone before. Condemnations of "rigidity" are no more than a smokescreen to cover an old vendetta, rooted as much in a petty modernist agenda as in hatred of all things starched and trimmed with lace.

    Desperately holding to the Novus Ordo and the delusion that it might represent a way forward must be in its death throws. With confidence we will hold for tradition and the hope that true religion will stand forth upon the rubble of the edifice of the last 60 years marred as it is by violence and dissimulation.

PROPERANTES ADVENTUM DIEI DEI

I place before you a blessing and a curse: choose life!

 

6^th Sunday in Ordinary Time

12-13 February 2022 – St. Lambert

Jer 17:5-8

1 Cor 15:12, 16-20

Lk 6:17, 20-26

 

Praised be Jesus Christ!

“Cursed is the one who trusts in human beings… Blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord, whose hope is the Lord.” That’s from the Old Testament Prophet Jeremiah!

        Our Gospel today presents the Beatitudes as they appear in St. Luke. They are about the same, but the wording is not as familiar obviously as that of those we know from St. Matthew’s Gospel. “Blessed are you who are poor… But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.”

        Blessed are you, cursed are you, woe to you! Both these accounts, that of the Prophet Jeremiah and that of the words of Jesus in the Gospel, are so constructed to balance out or contrast the blessings with the curses and the woes. The back and forth does just what it is intended to do; it brings clarity. With both the blessing and the curse on each topic you know just where you stand. You are blessed for being poor, for being hungry, for weeping, for being hated by people on account of the Son of Man. You are cursed, if you are rich, your stomach is full, if you are without cares, if people speak well of you.

Both with Jeremiah the Prophet speaking in God’s name and with the Lord Jesus speaking in His own name, if you listen attentively, you will know where you stand before God. There can be no mistaking about whether you are saved or you are at risk of being damned. Judgment is unavoidable; all of us will be judged by God. Divine judgment and retribution (reward or punishment) must come sooner or later, and it won’t come from the tribunal of popular opinion. “Woe to you when all speak well of you, for their ancestors treated the false prophets in this way.” Judgment always comes from God and from Him alone. Sadly, for the way our world today works, most people do not want to hear that message, and most people fear the judgment of men. Their heads are easily turned by words of praise from fellow human beings, and they tremble at the possibility of being criticized or, to use a popular word of our time, they are in utter dread of being cancelled by the media, by the powers that be in our world. They’ll gladly take the “blessed-are-you” part of the Beatitudes, but they tend to take it rather badly when they are condemned, even when the condemnation is not coming from man but from God the Judge of all. What can I say? That seems to be a common experience.

        Given this back and forth and the mentality of not few people today, I ask myself whether it is appropriate to spend a Sunday homily examining the question of where we stand before God. Do people really care about God’s judgment? Do they hope for His love and approval? Well done, good and faithful servant, come and share your master’s joy! No matter what anyone may tell you to the contrary, this world and the approval of men in society is not what counts. It is ultimately a question of whether we are blessed or cursed by God and not just for a day or a lifetime, but for all eternity.

Obviously, final judgment is the end of the process. We live in the hope of time and opportunity to grow beyond our mistakes, our sins, and shortcomings. We believe that correction is a good thing, especially when admonition brings us to our senses and puts us on the right path. Nobody likes being corrected or challenged, but in point of fact it is salutary. Thanks to making amends, to changing our ways, we can live in hope. As believing people we hope to be able to live forever with God in the joy of His Kingdom.

Perhaps the question is why does Luke concentrate on these four blessings? Since Matthew lists eight Beatitudes, we can conclude that Luke’s list of just four from the teaching of Christ is not exhaustive. It is not that the other four in Matthew are not equally important or that Luke had not heard about them, but rather that the Evangelist had a specific lesson in mind in choosing these four. You are blessed for being poor, for being hungry, you are blessed for weeping, for being hated by people on account of the Son of Man.

But these four things which ultimately mean suffering or misery for people, how can they be blessings? And how can their opposites, material wealth, enough to eat, freedom from sorrows, and the esteem of our colleagues and friends, how can these humanly good things be curses before God?  

The Church in its liturgy also had something in mind when it tied this Gospel passage to the blessings and curses uttered by the Prophet Jeremiah. “Cursed is the one who trusts in human beings, who seeks his strength in flesh, whose heart turns away from the Lord.” Even in the Old Testament wisdom and prophecy teach that having things too good cannot help but put us at odds with God. That is the gist really of the Exodus experience, of Israel’s 40 years of wandering in the desert and bemoaning the loss of the so-called fleshpots of Egypt and all the leeks and melons they could eat. Poverty, hunger, sorrow, and unpopularity are the yield in this life that comes from relying solely on the Lord. As we know from elsewhere in the Gospel, we know that it must be so, that you cannot serve both God and mammon.

The Letter to the Hebrews, Chapter 11, explains the Exodus experience and much more.

“All of these died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them. They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth, for people who speak in this way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of the land that they had left behind, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore, God is not ashamed to be called their God; indeed, he has prepared a city for them.” [Hebrews 11:13-16]

Time and again in the life of the Church, there have been crises followed by periods of renewal and genuine flourishing. Without exception the renewal has been marked by some kind of austerity or simply by the embrace of a life of poverty. The first great success of the Church was forged in the terrible furnace of persecution. As it is said, the blood of martyrs is the seed of Christians. No sooner had the Church replaced paganism as the established religion of the Roman Empire than heresy began to tear her apart. Thanks to all the desert fathers and monks, who renounced wealth and privilege to follow Christ in poverty, chastity, and obedience, the Church was able to recover her orthodoxy. Her next fall from grace in the Middle Ages was counterbalanced by the extreme poverty of the mendicant orders, like the Franciscans and the Dominicans.

My question to you and to myself would be, whence will come deliverance and renewal in our day in time, where once again the Church seems to be faltering? We need to turn toward Christ Who calls us blessed for being poor, for being hungry, for weeping, for being hated by people on account of His Name. Enough of being cursed for being rich, for having a full stomach, for having been spared the cares and sorrows of this life, for having enjoyed human respect and popularity!

As clear as the blessings and curses may be, the Church has always had to struggle to find the path forward. Besides clarity of thought, we need courage and confidence in God to follow Him into the desert. It is that time of year again in the Church. In the old Church calendar this Sunday marked the beginning of what was referred to as pre-Lent, which was supposed to ease us into the greater penance of the 40 days of preparation for Easter to start on Ash Wednesday. I would suggest that you start praying already now that the Lord may grant you the true blessings. May the Lord help us set our hearts on the life of the world to come! May we be spared the curses of those who choose the easy life and have nothing to hope for in Christ’s Kingdom!

Praised be Jesus Christ!

PROPERANTES ADVENTUM DIEI DEI

From our parishes and from our homes!

 

5^th Sunday in Ordinary Time

6 February 2022 – St. Lambert

Is 6:1-2a, 3-8

1 Cor 15:1-11

Lk 5:1-11

 

Praised be Jesus Christ!

        What do we mean by a divine or supernatural vocation? That question deserves more thought than what it gets in our time. What do we mean by a divine or supernatural vocation?

This last week I saw some more statistics about the increasing average age of our priests and religious in the Church, and most worrisome about the advanced age of parish priests in different states here in the US. The article talked about the overall decline in the number of practicing Catholics, as well as about the decline in the number of men studying for the priesthood in our country. Some dioceses are terribly short of young priests or priests in general, and others not, but in every place, it would seem that Catholic people and their priests and sisters are older. We are a ticking time bomb or rather a clock which may soon run out.

Not even South Dakota is without its worries. I remember years ago Bishop Carlson praying that all the men we had in seminary would persevere and promising to help not only with the military ordinariate, but also with our neighboring dioceses in Minnesota which were already in bad shape back then. Meantime sadly, we have similar issues here in our diocese, even if to be fair to all of you, it should be noted not only the sisters and the two priests which families of your parish have offered to the Church in the last couple of years, but the other hopeful sign that in the last few weekends here at St. Lambert all of the parish bulletins have been taken, and Tracie has had to print more bulletins. It would seem at least here at St. Lambert that folks have their general COVID anxiety behind them and are coming back to Mass on the weekends, and of course, that is very good news.

At the first of the year, I had a visit with Bishop DeGrood, and he told me he is worried both that the rural parishes especially continue to shrink, and that more and more of our priests are reaching retirement age. In terms of seminary numbers, we are all aware that if, please God, all four men possible are ordained to the priesthood this coming spring, then there will be no one ordained in the diocese for maybe three or four years. Other dioceses in the area which were famous for big numbers of seminarians, like Lincoln, Nebraska or Wichita, Kansas, also have noted a sharp drop in the number of candidates.

I ask myself, why? Where do vocations come from? How can we help men persevere in the seminary and in the priesthood?

Not so much that news article, but the readings for this 5^th Sunday in Ordinary Time provoked this line of thought in me. Both the Old Testament Reading and the Gospel today recount very dramatic vocations stories. Neither story is exactly typical for our day. Honestly, I can’t say as I have ever met a priest whose vocational experience was comparable to that of Isaiah the Prophet in the first reading.

“Then one of the seraphim flew to me, holding an ember that he had taken with tongs from the altar. He touched my mouth with it, and said, ‘See, now that this has touched you lips, your wickedness is removed, your sin purged.’ Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?’ ‘Here I am,’ I said, ‘send me!’” As I say, nobody has ever told me of such an experience on their path to priesthood. For several hundred years now, especially in Europe, the choice to study for the priesthood does not seem to be connected to visions of the heavenly court and angels coming down with burning coals to purify men and dispose them to say yes to God’s call.

No doubt this exceptional account from the Book of Isaiah has something to do with the exalted calling which the prophet received. As such, it may not exactly fit the profile of your average priest. “Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?’ ‘Here I am,’ I said, ‘send me!’” But then again, maybe it should?

Even the miraculous catch of fish in the Gospel today, which preceded Simon Peter’s profession of faith in Jesus as God’s Holy One; “Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.” Thereafter followed Christ’s call to Peter, James, and John to come after Him as fishers of men. Here too, the scene is spectacular in its own way and may not be something most of the priests I have known over the years could relate to. Being so struck by the holiness and power of God in Jesus Christ would be something we wished for all Catholics and especially for our priests, but it does not seem to be all that typical of people in the Church.  My own vocation, for example, was not accompanied by lightning and thunderbolts, or boatloads of fish but was and is a gentle kind of thing which has developed, and which has grown with me even up until today. And I guess generally, that is kind of what we expect from young men who aspire to priesthood. They need to be open to the promptings of the Holy Spirit, which means that generally they come to the seminary and priesthood not exactly sure of their calling, but with good will and a readiness to grow and be transformed by a very subtle grace. That is why many men talk about how for a time they resisted their call from God, either not recognizing it, because it was so subtle, or stubbornly refusing it as they personally seemed to want something other than what they themselves for whatever reason could not see as something which God wanted for them. They were convinced they wanted marriage and family, with some sort of a career, but were for the most part romanticizing about things far from real life or even farther from what God had created them and chosen them to be from all eternity. There are good reasons for resisting a call, as we see in the lives of saints like St. Andrew Corsini who was already a religious and hid himself when he was elected bishop of Fiesole. It goes without saying that such examples of humility are rather few and far between. Men are less apt to flee honors than they are to flee responsibility or duty.

[By way of an aside, the article I read reported a drop in the number of Catholic marriages as well. This is for me another symptom of the flight from responsibility in life and ultimately from the only real joy or consolation in this world, which is and by God’s will must be intimately bound up with self-sacrifice and life-long dedication.]

The question, I suppose, is where do we go from here?  I think all of us are called to have a response to my initial question. What do we mean by a divine or supernatural vocation? We need to do so against the assurances we have from Sacred Scripture that the Lord will not abandon us. He will not leave His flock untended. Or as some people say it, when it comes to priesthood, the Lord does not fail to call men to priesthood in sufficient numbers for the needs of His Church. If there is a priest shortage then it has to do with the freedom equation, namely that God forces no one to accept a calling and hence men can refuse and thereby deprive themselves of the happiness willed for them by God.

In the vocation equation we all have our part to play. The burden of responsibility lies with the young: with children and young people who need to open their eyes and ears, open their hearts to God’s call: “Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?’ ‘Here I am,’ I said, ‘send me!’” Even so, those advanced in age and those already settled in their life’s vocation, whether it be to marriage and family or to priesthood or the religious life need to make clear to all whom they meet [this goes especially for young parents with their children from little on up] their hunger, their profound desire for good priests who stand at the altar for them and for religious men and women, who dedicate themselves to Christ the Bridegroom with singleness of heart.

If I thought there was one particular reason for why young people resist or balk at the idea of embracing a supernatural vocation, it would be for lack of an example of self-sacrifice at home.

Lent will be here before you know it and it might be good as you choose your Lenten penance practices for this year to add to it a special intention, namely please God for priestly and religious vocations from our diocese, from our parish and, yes, from our homes. The Lord will not abandon His flock, but we need to help open ears and hearts to the call of the Good Shepherd.

Praised be Jesus Christ!

PROPERANTES ADVENTUM DIEI DEI

Shining a light into a dark place

Though it border on the sinful, perhaps for presumption, I confess that I wish I possessed the kind of intellectual and moral authority to be able to speak a word and clear the air in the present situation of controversy in the Church. Even without reference to the Supreme Authority in the Catholic Church, there seem indeed to be different camps and partial positions which have people pitted against each other and pointing fingers of blame at others they accuse of questioning the legacy of the Second Vatican Council or perhaps of espousing a neo-modernist agenda which perverts the faith and, well intended, the legacy of the Council (this to name only two factions or positions on the broad spectrum of conflict, which resembles less a field of battle and more a free for all). 

I found this short video (Here) quite articulate, even if strident, in grounding the defense for recourse to adherence to the tradition over and against the Novus Ordo experiment of 50+ years. I understand the reserve of NLM, but it is indeed time to throw in the towel and look again with a bit more detachment at what the Council Fathers had hoped to achieve in championing a pastoral agenda at the Council and at which they may just have failed miserably. 

There is something to be said for the advice that old, retired archbishops should just hold their tongues and keep their heads down... Living longer and having memories does not necessarily give one an edge or additional perspective on things. Let me however weigh in on the side of tradition and offer two examples of where I see older and experienced as indeed better: the first being rather innocuous and the other not so much. In doing so, my intent is to cast something upon the waters, regardless of its probable failure to contribute to easing the pain and division. I hope not to be hurtful in my description of the second case.

Just recently, I happened on a video explaining the revival of the practice of women and girls veiling in church. The presentation was very well done but seemed to go way beyond my childhood experience simply of both veils and hats as being just that, a head covering. The young lady in the video made no mention of the white round doilies I remember especially in elementary school, which small girls and young women tended to wear once they graduated from baby bonnets. At least in our part of the country, dress hats far outweighed in popularity the veil, and I doubt if few in my mother's generation would be able to address the topic of color-coding veils by the occasion: white, black, blue or beige. I never saw veils in the liturgical colors of red or green, let alone purple, when I was a child.  

Just the other day, young Dr. Taylor Marshall made an attempt in a video to wrap his head around the absolute hatred nurtured by Pope Francis against the tradition. Marshall sort of questioned or insinuated that maybe it could be traced back to an incident from his childhood or youth recounted by the pope in a children's book, in which he recounts falling down on the altar in front of everybody with the big missal. The good doctor seems oblivious to the fact that most scrawny little ten-year-old boys took a tumble on the altar. He also seems oblivious to the fact that the default position of a goodly number of people over 80 years of age is still one of virulent hatred against the tradition. They drank the "cool aid" of post-conciliar iconoclasm, wreck-ovation or whatever you want to call it. No doubt the urgency of the pope to press his agenda of hardnosed repression is fueled by the realization that the most virulent anti-traditionalists all have one foot in the grave. People my age and younger, if they are not neo-modernist supporting the agenda of rupture with the past, then they do so for opportunist motives, as seems evident in the case of some bishops and cardinals whose only stake in the game would be their quest for prestige or power. In his wisdom, with Summorum Pontificum, Pope Benedict XVI had all but succeeded in taking the sword out of the hands of the last diehards of the revisionist crowd, leaving hope for the recovery of those with no stake in the game and who did not understand that the Church lives in continuity with its past, rooted in the historical figure of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Do we find ourselves in the Church in a dark place and since when? Or maybe, why do so many people seem to prefer darkness to the light? Sinfulness is certainly a key factor. It is preposterous to attribute to the Council the intention of making of Christ's Church a sort of Starship Enterprise venturing out where no man had gone before. That is fantasy and has nothing to do with regular life and human culture, and even less to do with the mission entrusted by Christ to His Church.

I seem to have lost my courage for now to press the matter further. Let me repeat my appeal for the recovery of a genuine shepherding stance, which would live and let live. Until we can figure out how to do it, we need to foster the traditional Mass and Sacraments, traditional catechism and custom, in hopes of affirming and strengthening Catholic family life and promoting virtuous living. You might say that without pressing, repressing or the violence typical of the late '60's and '70's, I am hoping that younger generations might have the opportunity to be won over by the goodness, the beauty and truth of that fixed point in our turning world, which is light and life already for those who have discovered it.

Lord, save us from our enemies and restore us to grace!

PROPERANTES ADVENTUM DIEI DEI