A Sound of Sheer Silence

COVID, and COVID-tide, has been very kind to me as an objective matter.  No one close to me has died of the Coronavirus, only two people I am close to contracted the virus, and both appear to have recovered completely.  I still have my job, and my employer is doing quite well.  COVID, ultimately, has been mostly an inconvenience, at least in terms of the direct impact it has had on me.   And, yet, COVID-tide has coincided with a crisis of faith for me.  Like many things, this has become only apparent to me as I have started to climb out of it in the last few weeks, with the help of a couple of old friends, and one new one.  If I have to describe it, I would call it a spiritual depression, in the sense that I had all of the now-familiar to me symptoms of depression, but only as it related to matters relating to faith.  That strange combination of lassitude and anxiety greeted me every time I tried to watch a service via streaming, or engage with ot...

Perhaps the most beautiful passage in Scripture is the 13th chapter of Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians.  It is, ultimately, a beautiful ode to love and the qualities of love.  Perhaps its most famous part, often read in the context of weddings, is verses 4 through 7: Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. That part is undoubtedly lovely, but for me the most interesting section comes at the end of chapter 13.  There, it seems to me that Paul is making a case for prioritizing love as a religious principle (or, really, a principle for anything) above any other possible religious principle.  This is because, Paul argues, all of those other principles are one way or the other grounded in some form of knowledge...

Happy Environmental Encyclical Day !  Or, as it is known in some circles, liberal Catholic Schadenfreude Day.  I recognize that I should probably take a measured tone and not rejoice in watching our conservative and traditionalist brothers and sisters squirm.  And I think with this post I have succeeded.  Sort of. You will hear in the days to come the word "cafeteria Catholic" thrown around, and perhaps you are not familiar with that term.  Well, the ever-zealous folks at Catholic Answers  say "[a] cafeteria Catholic is typically defined as one who picks and chooses what Catholic teaching he wants to believe. Catholics are not free to choose which teachings (on faith and morals) to obey."  Hmm, interesting. Sounds like some folks are bellying up to the cafeteria line, as can be seen here and here and of course here . As a frequent and long-term diner at the cafeteria, I would point out that there are two kinds of folks that are grouped into th...

Here was the First Reading at Mass yesterday (in the Revised Common Lectionary, it was the third paragraph only, but the same basic idea): When Peter entered, Cornelius met him and, falling at his feet, paid him homage. Peter, however, raised him up, saying, “Get up. I myself am also a human being.” Then Peter proceeded to speak and said, “In truth, I see that God shows no partiality. Rather, in every nation whoever fears him and acts uprightly is acceptable to him.” While Peter was still speaking these things, the Holy Spirit fell upon all who were listening to the word.  The circumcised believers who had accompanied Peter were astounded that the gift of the Holy Spirit should have been poured out on the Gentiles also, for they could hear them speaking in tongues and glorifying God. Then Peter responded, “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people, who have received the Holy Spirit even as we have?”  He ordered them to be baptized in the name of Jesus Chri...

Martin O'Malley, the former governor of Maryland, wants to run for President of the United States.  In doing so, he is going to be asked about gay marriage.  But, Governor O'Malley has a problem--he's a Catholic.  So, he is going to be asked about how the Catholic position of the question impacts his own views. He gives a typically political, mealy-mouthed answer .  And, equally typically, he gets slammed for it by people like Deacon Kandra.  Indeed, Kandra cites to some document from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which purports to outline obligatory standards for what Catholic politicians should do in the context of the gay marriage debate.  And this document is unambiguous: When legislation in favour of the recognition of homosexual unions is proposed for the first time in a legislative assembly, the Catholic law-maker has a moral duty to express his opposition clearly and publicly and to vote against it. To vote in favour of a law s...

Celibacy has a very long and prestigious pedigree in Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.  The vast majority of saints in both traditions were celibates.  All priests and bishops in the Western Church are required to be celibate; all bishops in the Eastern tradition must be celibate.  As a result, by definition, everyone who has ultimate leadership in both traditions is a celibate. In the face of this tradition, I have come to what, for some, is a controversial position--I think celibacy is a bad idea.  I believe, based on my experience, that adopting celibacy is more often harmful to the spiritual development of men and women than supportive of that development.  I believe celibacy is more likely to poison one's view of God than to illuminate it.  Celibates are more likely to do damage to the People of God than to lift them up.  I believe that it would be better, not simply to allow  non-celibates to be priests and bishops (though, that would be ...

A couple of days ago, Rachel Held Evans posted a beautiful reflection on her experience of being a "post-evangelical."   As she points out, the term is inherently negative, insofar as it defines you in reference to this thing that you were, but no longer are.  At the same time, for the reasons she lays out, some of that negative space is always with you whenever you leave something, especially something so significant as a religious tradition.  Your view of the world is defined by the place from which you start.  Even if you move on from that place--and all of us do, to one extent or another--that move will always be in reference to the starting point.  You can't avoid it. As Rachel's husband Dan so perceptively observed, "we are always post something." In reading her piece, I wondered whether I was willing to consider myself "post-Catholic."  Simply vocalizing the question provided the answer--I wasn't as far down the "post" path...

I've talked before about Ross Douthat's recent comments about the Synod on the Family.  Recently, he and James Martin, S.J., had what I thought was a very thoughtful and interesting exchange that was reproduced in America  Magazine (hat tip to Fr. Justin for sending it my way).  It is very much worth reading.  A couple of things struck me in reading this exchange--threads running through the conversation that are unspoken, but informing what is being said. The first involves the idea that the Catholic Church holds marriage to be inviolable.  Certainly, that is the official position--marriage is for life and cannot be dissolved--and the need to protect that principle is at the heart of Douthat's objections to the Synod.  On the other hand, everyone understands that there is a way for one to "get out from underneath" a first marriage and enter into a second one with the full blessing of the Church, and that way is an annulment.  Now, I understand th...

[ Edit:  A less charitable, but very much worth reading take, can be found here .] Cardinal Sean O'Malley sat down for an extended interview with Norah O'Donnell of 60 Minutes, which was shown last Sunday.  Never say never (after all, there are people who don't like ice cream), but it seems impossible to me that you could come away from that interview with a negative opinion of "Cardinal Sean" (as he prefers to be called).  He came across as funny, charming, kind, and very, very candid.  He admitted that he was "terrified" being sent to the toxic waste dump that was the Archdiocese of Boston in 2003, despite having already served two tours as the clean-up guy in dioceses decimated by sex abuse scandals (Fall River, Massachusetts and Palm Beach, Florida).  He was unabashed in his enthusiasm for his friend Pope Francis.  He more or less said that Bishop Finn of Kansas City, who has been convicted of failing to report/covering up for an abusive priest, ne...

Again, I continue to give Ross Douthat enormous credit for his honesty, particularly in this post from last week .  In it, he basically cops to the notion that he is a Catholic because of the Politics of Certainty.  As a former devotee of that school of thought, I understand very well the attraction of that view, and I will never throw stones at someone else for it. Instead, I would like to focus on the extended quote from Richard John Neuhaus.  The short version of the quote is that if you "go soft" on the social issues of the day, then it is essentially inevitable that you will give up on traditional liturgical and sacramental practices.  In other words, the Politics of Certainty is the only bulwark against the devolution of Christianity into an undifferentiated mass of feel-good pablum.  And the example of this phenomenon is the so-called Mainline Protestant churches, who don't really believe in anything. I used to believe this as well . . . until I start...

So, Ross Douthat, predictably, expressed his views on the Synod on the Family in the pages of the New York Times Sunday editorial page yesterday .  I like Douthat, even though I don't agree with many, many of the things he says, and this piece was a good example of what I like about him.  In this piece, Douthat says what has been apparent for a while, but no one has been willing to actually admit/threaten---the conservative/traditional wing of Catholicism (i.e. Cardinal Burke, EWTN, Douthat, etc.) are not going to stand for a return to status quo pre-John Paul II, and they are prepared to walk, or at least consider walking, if that looks like Pope Francis (or whomever) is actually going to push things in that direction. To understand the Douthat piece, it's important to understand the theology of history used by conservative, EWTN-style Catholics to understand the last 50 years of Catholicism.  It goes something like this.  In the beginning, there was the pre-Vat...

The preliminary relatio (emphasis mine) : 50.   Homosexuals have gifts and qualities to offer to the Christian community. Are we capable of providing for these people, guaranteeing [...] them [...] a place of fellowship in our communities? Oftentimes, they want to encounter a Church which offers them a welcoming home. Are our communities capable of this, accepting and valuing their sexual orientation, without compromising Catholic doctrine on the family and matrimony?      51.        The question of homosexuality requires serious reflection on how to devise realistic approaches to affective growth, human development and maturation in the Gospel,  while integrating the sexual aspect, all of which constitute an important educative challenge.  Moreover, the Church affirms that unions between people of the same sex cannot be considered on the same level as marriage between man and woman.  Nor is it acceptable that the pastor’s outloo...

Despite the fact that this is my third post in a week about the Synod on the Family, I find that I am not all that engaged in what is going on in Rome.  I don't really care one way or the other.  Part of that is that I am skeptical anything of substance coming out of this Synod, but my ennui  is much deeper than that.  It's taken me a while to figure out what has been turning me off to the Synod, but I think I have figured it out.  And, like all good insights, it came to me in an unexpected place--listening to the radio driving home yesterday. When I get bored with the stations on my satellite radio in the car, I often find myself turning to EWTN radio.  It's kind of like picking at a scab--I know I shouldn't do it, but I can't help myself.  Anyway, the topic was pornography, and they had a bishop on talking about some document he had recently written about the topic.  I am sure this will come as no surprise, but the bishop took the position...