Censorship Revisited - Under God's Word - The Tough Sayings

 

The Holy Bible – Douay‐Rheims version

Psalm 136

 A psalm of David, for Jeremias.

1 Upon the rivers of Babylon, there we sat and wept when we remembered Sion:

2 On the willows in the midst thereof we hung up our instruments.

3 For there they that led us into captivity required of us the words of songs. And they that carried us away, said: Sing ye to us a hymn of the songs of Sion.

4 How shall we sing the song of the Lord in a strange land?

5 If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand be forgotten.

6 Let my tongue cleave to my jaws, if I do not remember thee: If I make not Jerusalem the beginning of my joy.

7 Remember, O Lord, the children of Edom, in the day of Jerusalem: Who say: Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof.

8 O daughter of Babylon, miserable: blessed shall he be who shall repay thee thy payment which thou hast paid us.

9 Blessed be he that shall take and dash thy little ones against the rock.

     Watching a Ralph Martin video got me to thinking about my own experience of the post-conciliar regime of censorship which has deprived us Catholics of not few passages of Sacred Scripture at least since that faraway year when I was a freshman in college (here). Martin does an excellent job of shining a light into this dark place in the so-called liturgical reform.

    I remember very clearly when, even before the edition of the new breviary, our spiritual director in college seminary issued an ultimatum, banning verse 9 of the otherwise beloved Psalm 136 [9 Blessed be he that shall take and dash thy little ones against the rock.]. The poor priest, who abandoned ministry shortly thereafter, would nearly foam at the mouth and stomp out of the chapel if the hebdomadary would by distraction forget to cancel Ps. 136 from our Friday night common recitation of Compline. Personally, I found his antics exaggerated and stupid. Any child could understand the bitterness of the exiles rendered in the words of the psalm. And besides, it was God's word and must have been put there by wisdom for some reason.

   Verse 9 of Psalm 136 may just be the toughest sentence in the whole Bible to swallow as inspired word of God, but perhaps no other sentence of the Bible so renders the bitter sorrow, the rancor of a people in exile.

    In the video, Ralph Martin gives easier examples of the scandal arising from censorship of the canon of Scripture within the canon. He's right and Catholics deserve to know that for the most part, whether it is the Breviary or the voluminous Lectionary for Mass there are glaring omissions sadly intent on keeping us from that which makes the Word of God that which it should be, a two-edged sword, for our sanctification: "Indeed, the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And before him no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account." [Hebrews 4:12-13]

    Hard hearts may be closed to the Word even when proclaimed, but woe to those who withhold the Word! They are depriving the children of the Kingdom of proper nourishment! 

PROPERANTES ADVENTUM DIEI DEI

Let the Feast Begin!

 

FOURTH SUNDAY OF LENT

26-27 March 2022, St. Lambert Parish

Jos 5:9a, 10-12

2 Cor 5:17-21

Lk 15:1-3, 11-32

Praised be Jesus Christ!

        Today from St. Luke’s Gospel, the famous chapter 15, which between the introduction we just heard, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.” and our passage today about the Prodigal Son there are recounted Jesus’ parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin, both with invitations to rejoice and celebrate with the housewife or with the shepherd for having found what was lost. Our parable too of the father’s joy at recovering his runaway son tells us among other things of the feast (slaughter the fatted calf, let there be music, and dancing…) with which the father welcomed home his delinquent but obviously now repentant younger boy!

As you could imagine, on this LAETARE Sunday rejoicing plays no small role in the liturgy of the Church. The first reading also from the Old Testament recounts another feast, that of the Children of Israel’s first Passover celebrated in the Promised Land. The Chosen People had completed a long journey, a process of repentance and purification. On the plains of Jericho, they marked the end of their regime of manna in the desert with a celebration. There would be no more Exodus fare but from now on real food replacing the bread from heaven which had nourished the people during their forty years of wandering. For the first time after Egypt God’s People celebrated by eating from the crops of the land promised to them by God!

        The message seems to be that God is ready and eager to celebrate with us. As I see it, we have a double challenge facing us in the Christian life, if we would celebrate in the Heavenly Father’s House. Thinking of the parable in Luke’s Gospel, we are urged to face up to, to confess and repent of that which is prodigal in our lives, of our sins, our ingratitude, our unfaithfulness. God is ready to forgive and take us back. Moreover, Jesus tells us that He wants all heaven to rejoice at our recovery. That is why sincere and humble repentance, true conversion would be a good, typical Lenten program; it can help put us where God is eager for us to be in this life, namely with our hearts set on our heavenly home and on entering into the joy of God’s kingdom. Like the prodigal son we need to turn toward home, to confess and repent, to change our ways, and then be embraced by the father’s joy. In the words of the first reading: “The Lord said to Joshua, ‘Today I have removed the reproach of Egypt from you.’”

As I say, there is a double challenge, in that, part two, we are called not only to identify and own that reproach which falls upon our heads as well because of where we have been in life. We need to move beyond sincere repentance and accept full reintegration into the family circle both for ourselves and for others. Now you might say that you cannot identify with either of those challenges, that you don’t see yourself in need of rescue and recovery and you are not convinced of the power of grace to restore you and other repentant sinners to the fullness of life and grace. Rather, you see yourself in the person of the older son reproaching the father for being slack with others. You see yourself like the big brother who has always stayed home and worked hard in obedience to his father. The older of the two sons accuses himself of nothing. Rather the elder son is critical of his father and accuses him of ingratitude in the face of the older boy’s hard work and dedication to the family project. Most of Jesus’ listeners could easily see in the older son that righteous man praised throughout the Scriptures. That explains His listener’s criticism of Jesus “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.” which occasioned Him to teach with these three parables. Jesus’ listeners and many today who call themselves Christians or Catholics in good standing seem to identify with the older son’s lack of comprehension for his father. They sympathize with this man’s lack of approval for the father’s prodigality in welcoming the delinquent younger brother back home after squandering family wealth.

        On the level of parables, I guess all of this is easier to sort out. We find no small measure of consolation and hope in the father’s eager and total forgiveness of the younger boy, in response to his act of contrition. “Then the son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’” Nonetheless, in our own lives and in the life of the world, it all shakes out as much more complicated. Most likely that is because the sadness of our plight has not really dawned on us, most likely because of our rebellious pride. We are still far from home on foreign territory reduced to feeding the swine and maybe not yet aware of the real food we are missing out on and perhaps less than appreciative that despite our big or little rebellions we still enjoy the Father’s care and can be returned to the fullness of joy in His company.

        It is not seldom that you will hear people saying they have given up on Church because of the failures of priests and bishops. Often it is suffering in the life of a person or someone they love, which triggers this response of walking away from our duty to give God due worship within the community of His Church. People who take the part of the older brother in the parable are as common today as they were in Jesus’ time. This sense of betrayal which excludes us from the feast, stubbornly insists on our own righteousness. The older brother mentality divorces us from celebrating with God’s, yes, holy people; this stubborn unwillingness to accept guilt in ourselves and to forgive others, regardless of whom they might have harmed or offended, is easy to identify in a parable but not so much in real life. We need to challenge ourselves to an honest and thorough examination of conscience. Beyond our own repentance for sin, properly confessed or owned as our own, we need to hope that others can convert as well. For over half a millennium Mother Church used Lent for public sinners to do public penance. Publicly wicked people, notorious sinners were publicly humiliated. When they took that humiliation upon themselves freely during all of Lent, then on Holy Thursday, they were given absolution from their sins and publicly reintegrated into the community of the faithful. Such a public witness probably made it easier for the faithful to rejoice with repentant sinners, but the dynamic is still the same as that of the parable. People hesitate to forgive and tend to blame God rather than trust in His judgement and power to save.

I think our second reading’s passage from St. Paul’s 2^nd Letter to the Corinthians can be of help in negotiating the workings of God’s forgiveness far exceeding our sincere repentance and the eager and unexpected invitation of God in His Church to rejoice and celebrate heartily with every sinner who repents.

        “Whoever is in Christ is a new creation: the old things have passed away; behold, new things have come. And all of this is from God, who has reconciled us to himself through Christ…”

        We’re called to rejoice this Sunday, yes, because we are halfway through the penance of Lent, but maybe more so out of love and respect for our Heavenly Father, Who forgives and restores life, thus enabling us to enter into His joy.

“Whoever is in Christ is a new creation: the old things have passed away; behold, new things have come. And all of this is from God, who has reconciled us to himself through Christ…”

Praised be Jesus Christ!

PROPERANTES ADVENTUM DIEI DEI

Joseph Our Patron

 

SAINT JOSEPH,

SPOUSE OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY

Solemnity, 19 March 2022, at St. Lambert

2 Sm 7:4-5a, 12-14a, 16

Rom 4:13, 16-18, 22

Mt 1:16, 18-21, 24a

 

Praised be Jesus Christ!

St. Joseph! Pray for us!

St. Joseph, the foster Father of Jesus, and the Patron of the Universal Church! Those are exalted titles for a descendant of David the King, but for a man with none of the trappings of royalty! Just an ordinary guy, you might say, Joseph was an artisan, a carpenter, who earned a living by the sweat of his brow? Two thousand years later: St. Joseph’s feast today ought to amount to a high-water mark in the Church’s jubilee celebration of the last year. Among the possible gains in terms of faith and devotion, that we could hope for from the observance of this year, would be that during this jubilee Catholic people everywhere might have gained a new and deeper attachment and understanding for Joseph, the protector of the Christ and His Virgin Mother.

As terrible as it sounds, I ask myself if the Church could not have hoped for more from a yearlong reflection on him. What should we have been doing during this year dedicated to St. Joseph to gain something more for ourselves by coming to better know and love St. Joseph?

Okay, maybe “should” is the wrong word. Using the word “should” amounts to setting limits on the goals of our reflection and devotion. I imagine that in such a jubilee multiple gains were possible, all kinds of possibilities existed for deepening our appreciation of St. Joseph and coming better to draw strength and enthusiasm from him for our individual lives. Truth to be told, I have had a kind of personal prayer intention for this year’s encounter with the foster Father of the Savior of the world, with Joseph the patron saint to whom we recommend our cause for a happy death, both for ourselves and for those whom we love. I have been praying this year that St. Joseph would kind of take us under his arm, not so much for dying but rather for living.

        The Collect for today’s Mass helps some with clarifying what I mean by that intention. It reads:

        “Grant, we pray, almighty God, that by Saint Joseph’s intercession your Church may constantly watch over the unfolding of the mysteries of human salvation, whose beginnings you entrusted to his faithful care.”

        In that sense, my personal prayer would be that that [watch(ing) over the unfolding of the mysteries of human salvation] might be a thing with us all, but especially that it would be more a part of the lives of men and boys. I pray that through the intercession of St. Joseph Catholic men and boys might come to better own the mission of the Church in their everyday lives… watch(ing) over the unfolding of the mysteries of human salvation.

        These days there are all kinds of surveys out there which take note of the number of people who have simply abandoned Church practice, who have become disaffected with the Church for reasons their parents might find hard to explain. Mom and Dad may have thought they did what they could to raise their children in the faith, but despite Catholic school the children have fallen away from the Church. One of the things which has surfaced in these studies is that dads play a key role in passing on the faith to their children. Mom can work very hard at imparting the faith to the children, but if Dad is absent on that account or does not give a credible witness of faith, the children often do not seem to persevere.

        I won’t exactly try to outline to parameters of a living and manly faith, which would convince children that the faith is indeed the pearl of great price, but I guess I am ready to believe the statistics. A dad may not be perfect; he may not even have a faith which is all that articulated and filled with devotional practice, but if Sunday Mass is an absolute and he is seen at home as well to be a man of prayer, that faith of his seems to be more than enough to give children’s faith a rock-like, a St. Joseph type foundation. I think of my own father, who beyond a solid basic faith practice, was able to share with me, his oldest, as an adolescent boy, his absolute faithfulness to his bride, our mother, and his uncompromising respect for her as the love of his life and the mother of his children. It was right and it was more than sufficient for us children.

        Join me in entrusting our men and boys to the intercession of St. Joseph. I think Pope Pius IX gave St. Joseph the title of Patron of the Universal Church partly at least because of this guarantor role which is typically manly and which St. Joseph fulfilled so well. By the grace of God Joseph protected and steadied the Holy Family.

Let us in turn today pray for our men, the men of this parish and of our families, that all might be supported and encouraged to find their vocation in support of the Christian family, the building block of the Church!

Praised by Jesus Christ!

St. Joseph, the Husband of the Blessed Virgin Mary! Pray for us!

PROPERANTES ADVENTUM DIEI DEI

Simple Catholicism down from the Heights of Tabor

 

2^nd Sunday of Lent

12-13 March – St. Lambert

Gn 15:5-12, 17-18

Phil 3:17-4:1

Lk 9:28b-36

 

Praised be Jesus Christ!

        “This is my chosen Son; listen to him.” After the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone. They fell silent and did not at that time tell anyone what they had seen.

        The 2^nd Sunday of Lent in all three years of the readings cycle focuses on the mystery of the Transfiguration. Human psychology would have us maybe wishing for a like experience in our lives to confirm us in faith and reassure us concerning God’s power to save. That is not exactly how it worked for those three chosen disciples. In Year C we read of it as recounted by St. Luke: they [Peter, James, and John] had seen Jesus on top of Mount Tabor in His fullness and glory, true God and true Man, our Creator and our Redeemer. They saw things they could not rightly comprehend [there were Moses and Elijah, and then there was the bright cloud, and of course the Voice which spoke]. The whole experience is very much out of the ordinary and maybe that it why it took place on top of a mountain with just three chosen witnesses. According to the accounts of the Transfiguration in both Matthew and Mark, Jesus admonished Peter, James, and John afterward to keep silence until after the Resurrection about what they had witnessed. This reads somewhat different from our account today from St. Luke [They fell silent and did not at that time tell anyone what they had seen]. The utterly extraordinary event of the Transfiguration did not translate into something sustaining their everyday life in union with their Lord and Master, Jesus Christ.

From the point of view of religious experience and wonder, our Gospel has parallels to the First Reading from the Book of Genesis which recounts Abram’s covenant sacrifice sealing his agreement with Almighty God, giving to the Patriarch and to his descendants the land from the Wadi of Egypt to the Great River, the Euphrates. In both Luke and Genesis, we find ourselves in the realm of promise unto future fulfillment. Abram as yet childless at this point was to have descendants as countless as the stars and God promised him a land for himself and his descendants after him for all time. In the darkness Abram put his faith in God.

Whether we are talking about Old Testament Promise or Gospel Truth marked by the glorious presence of Moses and Elijah, the least we can say is that we are dealing with things bigger than life, matters really too mysterious to be simply comprehended at face value. Abram’s covenant sacrifice and wonderous experience of God in the darkness was just as confounding as it was reassuring for him. In the course of the Old Testament, from our perspective we benefit from the history of the Chosen People and can see fulfilled God’s promises of land and progeny for Abram. Fulfillment is there too in the case of the New Testament, but not in such concrete fashion. Salvation is less tangible than are land and countless descendants. The new covenant in the Blood of Christ, despite the Resurrection and the return of Jesus to His Father’s right Hand in glory still remains obscure by comparison to the promise God made to Abram, our father in faith. The mystery of Christ’s Transfiguration points yes to Good Friday and Easter Sunday, but still needs to be explained as does its fulfillment in the glorious Cross of Our Lord Jesus.

        The point I wish to make may seem obscure and far from the everyday life of most Christians, but my hope would be that we can reflect together for a moment on this aspect of our baptismal calling [I am talking about how communicating with God in Christ is supposed to work in our lives]. The historical distance between us and Jesus [2000 years] and God’s seeming silence in our lives is real and can be burdensome, His seeming lack of engagement when it comes to answering our prayers may cause us suffering. The point is that this silence of God, His failure to engage us as He did Peter, James and John on Mount Tabor does not justify our sadness or bitterness any more than it justifies one person’s agnosticism or another’s atheism, whether it be practical or theoretical. To live without God or simply to neglect Him in our daily lives because we have not seen any sparks not only greatly impoverishes human existence, but it is nonsense, bent on annihilating us in our very nature as human beings. Human life is not ecstatic; it is constant and every day. We are, we exist in and for God, because in the great plan of things God from all eternity wanted to share His life and love with us, who are created in His image and likeness. This life is a leadup to our ultimate end which is no less than to find ourselves where we are destined to belong, namely in God Himself. From childhood, we know this from the first question of the old catechism, “Why did God make me? God, in His infinite goodness, made me to know, love and serve Him on this earth, so as to enjoy happiness forever with Him in heaven.”  

        Most of us are not mystics, we don’t fall into a trance like Abram before a God Who reveals Himself in mysterious ways. We are reassured or confirmed in God’s presence and love thanks to the mediation of other people here on earth, normally by our parents and other faith-filled, often truly holy people who build us up or encourage us through life. We don’t hear voices either in the dark or coming forth from bright clouds. It says something to say very simply that we rest in God.

Believe it or not, when it comes to dealing with the God experience in the life of your average Catholic most priests spend a goodly part of their ministry trying to keep people realistic by keeping them from getting all sorts of wild ideas in their heads about God and how he reveals Himself in our world. The legitimate longing for God, for a personal relationship with Him in Jesus is one thing, but a totally other, which seems more a temptation or a distraction would be expecting manifestations of God in our lives like the scene at the Transfiguration. For His own purposes, God may gift someone with an extraordinary life event, but it is neither our right, nor exactly parr for the course to expect such, as if it were an essential part of our baptismal heritage. The key word in that phrase is “expecting”. The Church would caution us against seeking or expecting the spectacular in our life of faith. The kind of expectation I am referring to and which is discouraged would be at cross-purposes to the Gospel, to our Christian vocation, to what and who we are called to be in union with Christ.

        Neither the very mysterious Genesis covenant sacrifice, with blazing fire passing through the midst of this line of sacrificial offerings cut in half and laid out on the ground, nor Abram falling into a trance amidst the surrounding darkness, nor the brightness of Christ on Mount Tabor can reassure us for our daily task. That perhaps explains the silence of Peter, James, and John, or Jesus inviting them to hold the secret until after the Resurrection. The extraordinary or glorious tends rather to separate us from the everyday of this world of ours and from its joys and consolations, which are meant to be sufficient for us ordinary folk.

        A good Lenten practice is built around rather ordinary things and does not drift far from the tried and true: simple, straightforward prayer, penance, and almsgiving. Amidst the joys and sorrows of this life, you might say we plug along until the Day of Resurrection. We leave Peter, James, and John to keep the secrets and silence of the glory to be revealed in Christ at His Coming.

 Praised be Jesus Christ!

PROPERANTES ADVENTUM DIEI DEI

 

FIRST SUNDAY OF LENT

5-6 March 2022 - St. Lambert Parish

 

Dt 26:4-10

Rom 10:8-13

Lk 4:1-13

 

Praised be Jesus Christ!

        This, our First Sunday of Lent has a set of powerful Scripture Readings which make an undeniable and I would hope also irresistible statement, capable of feeding and carrying us all the way to Easter and to a much fuller faith and practice of our Catholicism. The Gospel passage from St. Luke, recounting Jesus’ 40 days of fasting and prayer in the desert, the prelude to His public ministry, says all we really need to know about rejecting Satan and walking in the footsteps of our Redeemer.

This Sunday’s readings deserve from each of us more attention even outside of Mass time. This is true also because more or less ten-minute homilies cannot be teaching sessions or long lectures; they cannot exhaust a topic or leave us with the last word on anything. It is also true because, as we know from our catechism and from our Catholic upbringing, what makes up a good Lent takes in more than the Gospel account of Jesus’ battle with Satan in the desert. There’s more to being a good Catholic and broader attention to all three readings can help us with that.

May I recommend that, if you have a subscription to Magnificat or if you have some other resource for the Sunday readings at home, you go back to them today and during this week! It would be a good Lenten practice anyway, either preparing the readings before you come to Mass or going back and reading them again at your leisure after Sunday Mass, later at home (a very good way to keep holy the sabbath!). I assure you in the particular case of this Sunday the reading and rereading of our Scripture passages will offer you a wealth to reflect upon. That being said, I hope you will pardon me if I pick out just one point to focus on in this homily here at Mass. So! Here goes!

        (Jesus) ate nothing during those days, and when they were over, he was hungry. The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread.” Jesus answered him, “It is written, One does not live on bread alone.”

        In Luke’s Gospel that is the first of the three major temptations which Jesus endured and resisted during His forty-day fast in the desert. We note that Jesus rebuffs old Satan in absolute terms. Even so, you might say that the Lord plays it particularly cool with the devil and understates His case: “It is written, One does not live on bread alone.” No shouting, no gesticulating, just very simply: “It is written, One does not live on bread alone.” Obviously, the Lord Jesus is sovereign; He is in charge of the situation. Jesus’ response to the devil in St. Luke is shorter than what we read in St. Matthew where we read: “It is written, One does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes forth from the mouth of God.” That helps us to understand more, but there is something to be said for sticking to the shorter version of Jesus’ response in Luke and that is what we are going to do. “It is written, One does not live on bread alone.”

        These days, in trying to follow a bit the horrendous story on the news of Putin’s Russia invading Ukraine, I have noticed that much of the political commentary on the internet is critical of American or Western foreign policy vis-a-vis this Russian attack on another sovereign nation. The question is, what to do in the face of such a great tragedy, and the claim is that to repulse the unjust aggressor economic sanctions will not be enough, as they have never worked in the past. As I say, “What to do?” Our political leaders are selling us a bill of goods pretending that economic sanctions do work. People comment that even the harshest sanctions will not be enough to make Putin back down and go home. A lot of ordinary and very poor Russians will have the higher price to pay and at least for a time at the gas pump we will too.

One reason given by way of a critique of Western values and their focus on economic sanctions would be that a goodly part of the rest of the world, unlike us, is not primarily moved by material or commercial interests. It is not that you cannot hurt people or countries and maybe bend them to your will with economic sanctions, but just depriving people of bread can never be decisive, often because their leaders will never be deprived and really don’t care about the poor and defenseless, nor do they feel themselves responsible to ordinary citizens. The flipside of this observation comes in seeing how important true patriotism is to the fight. A la David and Goliath, Russia might have an enormous advantage in terms of military arms and trained soldiers, but all those people of Ukraine and many volunteering to come back from abroad to fight are doing so not for money or a comfortable lifestyle, but out of love for the homeland, out of a truly heroic patriotism. “It is written, One does not live on bread alone.” Understated perhaps, but still an eloquent statement on what is fundamentally at stake for a people, whose identity was forged back in the 2014 revolution of dignity.

        Let us switch gears and turn our attention to ourselves and to our life in Christ! As we think about the practice of Lent, or think about evangelizing, about proclaiming and spreading the Gospel, how do we get beyond “bread alone” and whatever that is supposed to mean?

        I don’t know about you, but when I do penance, I end up kind of like Peter, James, and John, they being the super-select and the three closest to Jesus from among the 12 Apostles. They are the same three who repeatedly failed the test of watching and waiting with the Lord. On Mount Tabor at the Transfiguration, Peter, James, and John fell asleep. In the Garden of Gethsemane, as Jesus in anguish prayed and sweat blood, they snoozed off. The Evangelist says they did so out of sheer distress, but Jesus reprimanded them just the same for not being able to stay awake and watch with Him for even an hour.

         “It is written, One does not live on bread alone.” I love these zealous young men, especially, who theorize about building themselves up to total fast and abstinence, like Jesus. They see it as doable and express, at least on their podcasts, their resolve to build themselves up to such a challenge, to not eating at all for 40 days, just like Our Lord. I wish them well and hope they don’t starve themselves while trying to accompany Jesus in His Temptation and His Fast, “It is written, One does not live on bread alone.”

        My own advice for Lent and for life to the bold and brave among you would be to observe the moderate fasting and abstinence prescribed by the Church, starting with the one hour fast before Holy Communion and for the rest, be zealous about watching and praying. Don’t fall asleep on Jesus!

Praised be Jesus Christ!