I’ve been thinking about returning to blogging in some form. It’s always good to get your thoughts down (whether anyone actually read them or not).
Consider this the test post (if only to ensure that I’ve successfully de-hacked my site). Is anyone still out there in Catholic blogdom?
Unfortunately, my old theme is no longer compatible. And this default one just will not do.
This is simply the e-mail I sent out to my students and others on my mailing list. I’m still struggling to come up with more to say:
It is with incredibly mixed feelings that I’m still trying to figure out how exactly to process this history-making event of Pope Benedict’s abdication of the papacy. Even before he was pope, I had great respect for Cardinal Ratzinger. For those who don’t know, long before he was a cardinal, Ratzinger was an extremely influential theologian; I’ve heard it said that we had the greatest philosopher in the Church as pope (John Paul II) followed by the greatest theologian in Benedict XVI. Ratzinger was a key voice in favor of reform as a peritus or theological expert at the Second Vatican Council. After the Council, while he was still a university professor, he co-founded the theological journal Communio with Hans Urs von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac, and other giants of 20th century Catholic theology, and the journal (focused on interpreting Vatican II) is now published in 15 different language editions.
I was a senior at Notre Dame when our beloved JPII died, and was absolutely jubilant that Ratzinger, who was in many ways his “right-hand man” succeeded him. As a graduate student at the John Paul II Institute at CUA, I studied Benedict’s theology in more depth, from his time at Vatican II all the way up to his beautiful Encyclical Letters as pope (hint: you should read them – his first two are really quite short, while Caritas in Veritate is a longer response to the economic crisis). I was even blessed to be able to sing in the choir at his Mass at Nationals Stadium during his visit to Washington, DC (note that I’m not that good of a singer…it was a choir of several hundred people).
Having studied his theological writings to the point where I feel like I almost know him, he’s an intensely introverted person. It’s rumored that he actually asked to retire under JPII (a move which most likely would have prevented his being elected pope), but his resignation was not accepted. He would have loved to quietly return to his academic life, writing and perhaps teaching, but instead he followed the call of the Holy Spirit to shepherd the Church through a pretty rough time (not to mention following in the footsteps of the incredibly charismatic and energetic John Paul II). While he may not have made the news as much as JPII did, his pontificate will have a lasting effect on the Church. While, due to his former job as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he came into the papacy with nicknames like “PanzerKardinal” and “God’s Rottweiler,” he has led with humility and by example, showing us God’s love for the world. His first Encyclical was titled Deus Caritas est – God is Love.
Though I’m sad to see him go, on the whole, I think it is a good for the Church. As many have noted, this pope was not shy about charting new territory, and as life expectancies continue to increase it is probably a good thing to have a more recent precedent for a pope being able to step aside. While JPII was more publicly and obviously in failing health, we can’t forget that Benedict is 85, and is already the fourth-oldest pope in history. My guess is that he will quietly retire to a monastery, and continue to pray for Church and world.
We’ll be talking more about this, and what will happen next, at our Dinner & Discussion Monday night.
If anyone still actually reads this, or is subscribed via RSS…I am hoping to start blogging again. My plan is to focus especially on how we, as Catholics, should engage the world, as well as how we must retreat from the world – basically, a look at the friction between Vatican II and John Paul II’s call to more effectively evangelize the world by “opening her doors,” and the calls from folks such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Wendell Berry, Rod Dreher, Cardinal Stafford, and other more Augustinian thinkers who view our culture as quickly progressing to a second set of Dark Ages through which we must preserve Christian culture.
At any rate, my biggest challenge right now is that I need to change my WordPress theme, as it is six years and several WP upgrades old, and is not fully compatible with many new features added since then. Unfortunately, I’ve not been able to find any themes I really like on the WordPress site. Any reader suggestions on places to find (preferably free, or at least cheap) themes?
A great post by John Médaille at the Distributist Review: Can Mises Be Baptized?
I had been reflecting quite a bit recently on the issues surrounding this, and the post put my brain into overdrive.
One of the greatest generational divides I have seen among church-going Catholics is the older generation’s perceived dichotomy between the Church’s tradition of social justice and its traditional piety and teachings on various sexual and gender issues, etc. Older progressives see anyone who likes the Rosary, going to Confession, EWTN, and praying for an end to abortion, and their automatic presumption is that the person is a neo-conservative Republican capitalist who has no care for the poor whatsoever. ((Maybe I’m exaggerating a bit, but time and time again I have been amazed at how much this is the case. The first speaker at an orientation conference I attended a couple years ago for new campus ministers devoted a large section of his talk to trying to convince the group – a slight majority of whom were on the other side of 50 – that young people will actually go to a Latin Mass and then go serve at a soup kitchen afterward. There were audible murmurs of amazement.)) I believe the politicization of the Church’s teaching on social justice from both sides lies at the heart of this divide. As Médaille writes, Weigel, Novak, and the crew have numerous well-funded institutes, journals, and magazines that all get their views out into the crowd. The only alternatives espousing the Church’s view of social justice in a comprehensive way are mostly highly academic and lack the financial support of the neo-cons. ((The Rockford Institute and, increasingly it seems, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, are about the only two, and they are hardly household names. You can throw The Catholic Worker in there as well, though Dorothy Day’s name has been so venerated by extreme progressives in the Church that many won’t give her a second look.)) Instead, the social justice mantle has been largely taken up by those who would read it through a left-liberal lens, causing the opposite problem of the Novaks and Weigels of the world who read it through a right-liberal lens. “Conservative” Catholics of an older generation hear the term “social justice” and think of the platform of the US Democratic Party, because those who have assumed the term in the past were politicians like Mario Cuomo and John Kerry, as well as the folks who bandied about Cardinal Bernardin’s “seamless garment” ideal to justify support for radically pro-abortion politicians because they support a higher minimum wage and increased funding for public education.
Regardless of our current situation, though, the fact remains that Christ, as the fulfillment of the Law, is the concrete and personal moral norm by which all actions must be judged. ((“Christ is the concrete categorical imperative. He is the formally universal norm of ethical action, applicable to everyone. But he is also the personal and concrete norm, who, in virtue of his suffering for us and his eucharistic surrender of his life for us (which imparts it to us – per ipsum et in ipso), empowers us inwardly to do the Father’s will together with him (cum ipso)” (Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Nine Propositions on Christian Ethics,” in Ratzinger, Schurmann, von Balthasar, Principles of Christian Morality.) c.f. also Livio Melina, Sharing in Christ’s Virtues.)) No one denies that economics is an extremely complex field or that in modern times there must be a certain macro “plan” that has broad-reaching effects that in many cases would help the poor even when it may not look like it a a lower level (e.g., a lower minimum wage to stimulate job growth for small business) , but nevertheless there is an ideology at work within the right-liberal schools of thought that not only ignores Catholic social teaching, but puts Christ to the side altogether.
For the two of you who still read this…
One of the things that solidified my attraction to my current position was attending our Wednesday night student Mass. It has traditionally always been a candle-lit liturgy with a generally quiet tone. The piety and demeanor of the students the first night I attended when visiting campus for my formal interviews reminded me of Saturday mornings at Notre Dame in Alumni Hall chapel with the Children of Mary.
Aside from Solemnities and a couple of the rotating priests who occasionally chant the Kyrie or Agnus Dei, it has always been without music. Attendance has been slightly down this year, so I was thinking that we might ratchet things up a bit with some simple music (probably just entrance, Ordinary, and a recessional) in keeping with the tone of the liturgy. It would also serve as a good catechetical chance to introduce students to the seasonal Marian antiphons, as well as some of the traditional evening/night hymns of the Church.
Adam Bartlett’s recent post asking for ideas for his list of 150 indispensable Catholic hymns gave me the thought to solicit suggestions for a small music supplement to use for Wednesday nights. I will probably do a simple, folded program until the new translations come out to see what works and what doesn’t, then put together something more permanent next year. The focus will be on music that could be sung easily without accompaniment, or perhaps occasionally with light strings.
So, what are your suggestions? Public domain works are highly encouraged, though I’m okay with using some onelicense.net materials as well.
Here is my list so far:
Jubilate Deo Mass
Missa de Angelis
Congregational Mass Gloria (Lee) – Will this be revised?
German Mass (Schubert/Proulx)
New Plainsong Mass (Hurd) – Will this be revised?
Alma Redemptoris Mater
At the Lamb’s High Feast We Sing
Attende, Domine
Ave Regina Caelorum
Ave verum Corpus
Come Down, O Love Divine
Come, Holy Ghost
Come, My Way, My Truth, My Life
Come Ye Faithful, Raise the Strain
Conditor alme siderum / Creator of the Stars of Night
Go Make of All Disciples
Hail Thee Festival Day
Holy God, We Praise Thy Name
I Received the Living God
Jesu Dulcis Memoria
The King of Love My Shepherd Is
The Lamb’s High Banquet We Await
My Song Is Love Unknown
O Come O Come Emmanuel
O Radiant Light, O Sun Divine
Regina Caeli
Salve Regina
Sing of Mary
Te lucis ante terminum / To Thee Before the Close of Day
Veni Creator Spiritus
Victimae Paschali Laudes
Virgin Great and Glorious
Ubi Caritas
What Wondrous Love is This
Ye Sons and Daughters
David at Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex has recently posted his thoughts on the notion that the sin of Adam and Eve was somehow contraceptive sex. I have the cd from Christopher West in which he expounds this view, and it is certainly a very thought-provoking argument. In fact, West’s analysis is actually very academic, and I find it to be some of his better work.
My one question was always what exactly the attraction toward contraception would be for Adam and Eve, never having had children or perhaps any sexual relations at all. David provides a good answer for this:
But one would have to ask why Adam and Eve would be tempted into this? It wasn’t like they would be afraid that college costs for their progeny would require them to give up the winter home in Aspen. The Genesis text says that Eve saw that it was good for food, a delight to the eye, and desirable to make one wise. Certainly knowledge, especially this marital knowledge is a good but Adam and Eve would have had to have been able to see that somehow this act without its procreative fruitfulness was preferable to the authentic act. I think that the answer here is to realize that they were tempted into falling into Satan’s prideful sin. They tried to achieve their destiny, to become God-like, without God. I suggest that they thought that “knowing†one another on their own terms, without God’s “interference†(i.e. His law and the law of the order of nature) was the only way to really authentically experience their “freedom to choose.†Isn’t this the continuing problem today. We can often be so blinded by our need to freely choose, and this is a real human need, that we are drawn to ignore the structure by which this choosing leads to authentic human happiness.
This seems to gel very well with John Paul II. The language shared by Adam and Eve’s relations was completely transparent, so they would have had to fully sense the presence of God in their sexuality. Satan positing some sort of contraceptive act as a way for them to come to know one another more fully due to the absence of God’s plan is a reasonable theory. It’s interesting that the reasoning behind this act would have to take into account the link between the bona of marriage. I don’t think it would make much sense for Adam and Eve to have explicitly chosen contraceptive sex for the purpose of frustrating procreation, but it does fit well with a fuller logic in which offspring, union, and faithfulness are linked (and likewise the unitive and procreative ends of sex). Whereas in modernity, the tendency is to try to separate these, Satan’s original plan would have been to frustrate the entire operation by tempting the couple to explicitly and intentionally remove God from the act. It’s a lot to think about.
Two Notre Dame legends have passed away recently, so I wanted to stop in for some quick remembrances.
First, Ralph McInerny passed away in January. I was very blessed to take two courses from the man, one an introduction to the thought of Aquinas, and the other on the thought of Kierkegaard and Newman. Despite spending two whole semesters with him, though, I’m deeply saddened by the fact that I didn’t take the time to get to know him better.
Professor McInerny was among the first to introduce me to many of the great Catholic thinkers of the 20th century, even if only in passing comments – he had the wonderful and rare ability to go off on tangents that actually mattered – or in a random lecture in McKenna Hall: thinkers like Maritain, Newman, Bernanos, and Gilson, not to mention some of the legendary former faculty of my alma mater (most notably Yves Simon) and the great Catholic literary figures of the 20th century – Flannery O’Connor, Evelyn Waugh, and so on. One of my fondest memories at Notre Dame was this talk McInerny gave on G.K. Chesterton’s visit to campus. In just a brief lecture, I was introduced for really the first time to the broader history of Notre Dame (aside from football), to Chesterton’s poetry, especially The Arena, and to the idea of Chesterton as an author open to serious academic study.
And hearing Professor McInerny speak is itself an amazing treat, especially in a more intimate setting. His words were always carefully crafted, and he told a story so well:
As we go about the present day campus it is well to recall the giants who walked here in the past. We have, I suspect, an insufficient sense of the history of this place. A visit to the community cemetery off the road that runs from the grotto to St. Mary’s is to a kind of Arlington Cemetery of the Congregation of Holy Cross. There one finds the graves of the first generation, Father Sorin and his companions, and of all subsequent generations of Holy Cross religious lyng row after row under crosses of identical size….Frank O’Malley is one of the few lay professors buried in the community cemetery, but a visit to Cedar Grove Cemetery on Notre Dame Avenue, just south of the bookstore, can seem, to someone of my vintage, a kind of faculty meeting of the departed. The coordinates of space we occupy are haunted by this past, and its influence on us goes largely unrecognized, when not willfully ignored. It is an oddity of this place that it constantly sees itself as at Square One in a way that verges on impiety.
To recent students, McInerny was truly the rock that held the Catholic identity of Notre Dame together. He taught at Our Lady’s university for more than fifty years, and though he expressed sadness with the direction our school is taking, he always seemed to have a profound, though usually unspoken, sense of hope. For me personally, his mere presence on campus seemed a verification of the reasons we were there, both in the broader scope as well as in the more practical (e.g., why there instead of Franciscan or Ave Maria or Thomas Aquinas or Christendom or Dallas, etc., a question with which many of us were frequently confronted, even in those days before monologues or Obama). Professor McInerny had seen it all, and stayed on to fight the fight through some very bad times, and (while I was a student, anyway) the times seemed to be changing. After all, several key departments are getting better rather than worse, the young C.S.C. priests are wonderful, and more and more students truly interested in the Catholic intellectual tradition seem to come to Notre Dame year after year.
In a video of a lecture he gave at a previous Center for Ethics and Culture Fall Conference, Professor McInerny said,
When parents come and talk to me about their kids coming to Notre Dame, and they’re concerned about their faith and so forth, I’ve never hesitated to urge them to come here. All my kids went to Notre Dame…I never hesitated, so it’s not as if, if one wishes things had pursued another path, that you would say that what we’re here for cannot be done; of course it can be.
It is largely due to McInerny’s presence over the past half-century that that statement is true today – that the true ends of education can still be pursued at Notre Dame. Generations of domers owe an immense gratitude to a true Notre Dame icon. Ralph McInerny made me appreciate the wonderful gift of the education I received at Notre Dame, and he deepened my love for the place at least tenfold. It is hard to imagine a Notre Dame without him.
—
I unfortunately have much less to say about Gail Walton, director of the Notre Dame Liturgical Choir, which primarily sings at the 10:00 a.m. Mass at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart. I only met her a couple times, and was only conducted by her once, while playing saxophone for Commencement Mass.
While Gail’s impact on my time at Notre Dame was perhaps more indirect than McInerny’s, it was also much more primary. The beautiful Basilica Masses were at the very center of my Notre Dame experience, and if not for the knowledge that there was a chance for something better in the liturgies at ND than what I had experienced in 18 years of parish life, I very well may have ended up elsewhere.
The truth is, I briefly considered auditioning for the Liturgical Choir when I was a freshman, but ultimately decided that a) I had no singing experience in a group with harmony since my voice had changed and b) it would probably be very tough to juggle with marching band. Not auditioning is really one of my greatest regrets from college, as I’ve since gained so many great friends who were involved with liturgical music at ND.
If we’re really serious about liturgy being the true first expression of the Faith, then liturgical musicians have to be acknowledged as some of the most important stewards of the Faith outside the clergy. Gail was responsible for my first real experiences of liturgical beauty, and thus had an unpronounceable impact on my life.
For more on Gail Walton, check out the reflections of my friends Mary Liz and Brian
For the three of you who would like to see me posting more, may I suggest a trip over to PrayTell, where director of the Notre Dame Center for Liturgy and contributor to Gilbert Magazine David Fagerberg is now blogging. Much of my material (especially on liturgy) is stolen from Prof. Fagerberg, so now you can get it directly from the source. Also blogging there is another former professor of mine, Max Johnson.
PrayTell looks to be a curious enterprise, as they claim to represent the “liberal” side of the liturgy debate. The caveat is that most of the liberals among them ((I don’t think Fagerberg could be classified with the term, and I’m sure there are other contributors for whom that term would not speak particularly well)) favor some reform to the reform, would recognize the tackiness of liturgy in typical parishes, and in general would be supportive of some of the steps being taken for a better “ars celebrandi.” Jeffrey Tucker classifies them as moderates. So it should be an interesting blog.
ISI has a new (?) online lecture library, including a debate between David L. Schindler (Dean of the JPII Institute) and Doug Bandow (formerly of the Cato Institute). Some great stuff from Dr. Schindler here, especially in his closing:
The incapacity to pay attention is very dangerous, and I think that’s probably the fundamental problem of our society, and it has severe consequences, and that inability to pay attention reflects an inadequate anthropology. If I grasped, for example, that the inner meaning of freedom was to say ‘forever’ in response to the act of Creation and the covenant implied there: God says ‘forever’ to us and we say ‘forever’ – the inner ordering of our freedom is to say forever, it takes the form of a vow, normally in marriage and so on. My point is, you say, ‘forever,’ and really say it, it entails a transformation into a kind of patience and enables you to allow eternity to enter into every moment and every time and every place, and therefore to give meaning to your work. The last thing I will say is that the first change in this anthropology would be, without a vast change, everybody would do better what they do now because they would find meaning in it. That would be the first start, and that would be very, very significant – if you went to the store, and you were all a sudden treated in a certain way. ((Hat tip to my old roommate, Eric.))
The purpose of the Christian life is to come to the understanding that the purpose of our freedom is the greater glory of Divine Love. ((Hans Urs von Balthasar, Love Alone is Credible)) This must involve an entry into eternity, and there are only two ways in which we do this: in our personal lives by means of vows taken before God (marriage, consecration), and in our corporate life as a Church by entering into the Eighth Day through liturgy. I think, in a certain sense, insofar as we adopt this anthropology of love into our lives, our whole lives become liturgical. When we really mean what we do, we cannot help but mean it as prayer. That’s what “Ite, missa est” is.
It is true that I am of an older fashion; much that I love has been destroyed or sent into exile.
- G.K. Chesterton
One of the few drawbacks I have discovered in the four months I’ve spent in my current occupation is the problem of style. I’ve always been fond of wearing suits and other dress clothing, but my instinct for style as an indicator of respect for one’s position has grown even stronger after spending two years in a graduate school with a dress code (no matter how loose). The dress code of campus ministry (as of college students) is jeans and a t-shirt, and while I generally do attempt to dress a bit above that so as to not be mistaken for a student if for nothing else, I still miss wearing suits. I greatly enjoy breaking them out (especially with hat, though I need more) for Sunday Mass, even if I’m the only man wearing one, whether at a parish or at the Newman Center.
I could, of course, just ignore convention, but the daily suit just isn’t practical here. For one thing, I would be culturally very far out of place. I think dress clothes in general have become associated with attempts to place oneself in a position of authority. It is important for students to feel comfortable talking with a campus minister, and I’m not sure wearing dressing up really fits that bill (though, with my own personality, this makes no sense; to me, dressing up would demonstrate that someone has a greater degree of respect for what he does and for those he serves, as well as demonstrate added effort to do a job well).
In addition, I do have to deal with maintenance issues from time to time, as well as, your occasional pick-up game of football or what have you.
But I can still peruse online retailers longingly 