Vocations Crisis, vocations prayer

My Pod-O-Matic account is quickly filling up, so I've been reviewing older podcasts and pondering which can be erased. . .

. . .in my reviewing, I ran across "An Exhortation for Vocations" from a year back. Listening to it again, I am more convinced than ever that my sense of the "crisis" is dead-on.

I work one-on-one with a number of young men here at U.D. who feel the call to ordained ministry but who also feel plagued by doubt, fear, and hesitation. Some of this anxiety is formed in ignorance of the what being priest is all about. Some is formed b/c of family pressures or peer expectations. But for the most part, their anxiety is about not having the Certainty that they think they need to say YES.

Once again, I want to suggest a different way to pray for vocations to the priesthood. We demonstrate a certain lack of faith in our Father's generosity when we ask Him to send us more vocations. He is sending us more than enough men to serve as priests. The crisis is a crisis of courage on the part of those called. So, we need to pray like this:

Father, we know that you give us all that we need
to grow in holiness, to come to Christ whole and pure,
and to live with you forever.

Father, we accept as a blessing for your church
all the young men you have called to serve
as priests; we give you thanks for this
abundance and ask you to encourage
their hearts to say YES to your call.

Send your Holy Spirit among them,
drive away their anxiety, fear, hesitation,
and doubt and show them the work
they have to do among your people.

With all gratitude, Father, we lift up
your call to service and give you thanks
and praise for the ministry of our priests.
Keep them holy, keep them strong.

We ask this in the name of Jesus the Lord. Amen.

The theological basis for this prayer is the immediate acceptance of our Father's blessings even when those blessings are not immediately evident. A gift cannot be a gift until it is accepted as such. This is why we say "amen" when given the Body and Blood at communion. When the minister says, "The Body of Christ" and we say "Amen," we are accepting as fact and blessing that we are eating the Father's gift of the Body of Christ.

The promise becomes an offering and our acceptance of the offering makes the promise a gift. When we pray for "more vocations," we are in effect saying, "Lord, you are not providing for us. Send us more!" We need to accept that our Father always gives us enough. Accept the blessing He has given us. And offer thanks and praise! I'm convinced that we must see vocations work in this light.

God bless, Fr. Philip, OP

Video for the Angelicum

Check out this video promoting the Angelicum. . .my soon-to-be alma mater and employer. . .

Though I am excited about going to Rome to study and teach at the Angelicum. . .I am worried about the living conditions, meaning, specifically, I am very worried about the lack of A/C! I am VERY hot-natured. Pretty much any day above 65 degrees is too hot for me.

Hated for Jesus' Sake

33^rd Sunday OT(C): Malachi 3.19-20; 2 Thes 3.7-12; Luke 21.5-19
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
Monastery of Mary the Queen, Elmira NY

It was a Friday afternoon after school. We were right outside the Ms Shear’s house—she was the one with the indoor pool with that the glass roof. She would open her gates and let us run our bikes down her driveway into the dead-end cove. At the bottom of the driveway that Friday just as I was spinning around to ride back up, my best friend, Teddie asked me, “Do you know Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior?” I stared at him for a second, mildly embarrassed, murmured something unintelligible, and headed back up the hill. He followed and asked me at the top, “Have you ever heard of the Tribulation?” No. “The Second Coming of Jesus.” No. “The Rapture?” No. “The war at Armageddon?” No. He stared at me, open-mouthed. I felt like a circus-freak, an dime-store exhibit, one of those werewolf boys or eight-legged cows you see at the state fair. And just as I was starting to think Teddie was going to slap a sign on me and start selling tickets, he said, “You need to come to Vacation Bible School at Fremeaux Ave. Baptist Church.” I distinctly remember his tone. He pronounced this possibility like a highly-effective cure for a particularly ugly disease, like suggesting radical plastic surgery to the eight-legged cow or laser-hair removal for the werewolf boy. Vacation Bible School will fix ten-year old-Jesus-stupid-Philip.

Jesus knows how to get and hold the attention of a crowd. Pointing to the temple, the very heart of the Jewish people, he says, “All that you see here—the days will come when there will not be left a stone upon another stone…” And the people wonder, “Teacher, when will this happen?” Notice how Jesus answers. Typically, Jesus doesn’t answer the question asked of him; rather, he answers the question we would ask if we were less clueless! Rather than tell the crowd who or what destroys the temple, or how the temple is destroyed, or even when it is pulled down, Jesus says, “See that you are not deceived, for many will come in my name, saying ‘I am he’ and ‘The time is come.’ Do not follow them!” This isn’t an answer. And neither is any of the rest of his response. War. Famine. Earthquakes. Awesome sights and mighty signs. Persecutions of the church. These have been going on since the beginning of the Church. Before the Church even. And long after her founding. And not only that, but the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans some seventy years after the resurrection of Christ, making this passage from Luke’s gospel essentially an interesting but ultimately pointless historical curiosity for us in 2007, right? Wrong! Jesus’ response to the crowd is an answer to the ages. To us. He is speaking to us right now.

You see, our faith, done right, is a dangerous thing. It is a worm in the shiny apple of the world. A pest that buzzes ‘round the emperor’s head. Our faith is a still small voice that never stops whispering for the Lord’s justice. Never stops praying for the world’s sick, hungry, lonely, oppressed, sinful. Our faith, our firm trust in the Lord and our sure hope of resurrection, annoys; it burns to clean; it names those who would set themselves on the altar of the temple, and it pulls down the idols of the stomach. Through our faith we see clearly, hear cleanly the chaos and racket of a world infused with the spirit of the Now and the New. Easy salvation. Cheap grace. No-challenge Church. Invent as you go, believe as you wish, do as you please. Please yourself, please me! Here’s a new prophet, a new priest to tickle our ears, to scratch our curiosities. I am he. The time has come. I am he. The time is now. The time is new. I am he who comes in the name of the Lord. I am he whose time is now and I come in the name of a new Lord!

Do not be deceived. Do not follow him. Or her. Or it—a spiritual program, a method, a style or a fashion, a theological trend, or a “new thing in prayer,” the latest thing to demand your allegiance, your time and energy, your soul. Do not be deceived by easy fixes, quick cures, elaborate models of living the faith, or fanciful devotions that take your eyes from Christ. Do not be deceived by the shiny, flickering world of cable-TV commerce or media-born politics or the brain-rotting candy of cultural relativism. Your faith is old. Your trust in the Lord is sparkling new. For us, Christ is the wisdom of the ages. Always fresh, always innovative, always the original.

So, Jesus-stupid-Philip went to Vacation Bible School. A week of verse-memorization, macaroni art, disciple-tag, fevered altar calls in church, intense pressure to “come to Jesus.” On the last day, I caved. I walked the aisle to the rail. In a Baptist version of confession, I muttered a few sins to the preacher. He asked me if I accepted Jesus into my heart as my personal Lord and Savior. I said, “Yes.” But I thought, “Sure. Anything to get outta here!” Later, Teddie asked me if I felt different. I said, “No. Not really.” Again, he stared at me like I had grown a third eye. He said sadly, “Well, you didn’t get saved then. You would feel it.” All I could do was shrug and say, “Maybe next time.” He showed me the Book of Revelation where the blood of those killed in the war against the Beast flowed as high as a horse’s bridle. He pointed to the whore of Babylon and told me that was really the Catholic Church. He read out to me the parts about the angels and the seven seals and the ten-headed dragon and the number 666. And he managed to scare Jesus into me. Or maybe he scared me into Jesus.

Jesus warns us that we will be persecuted. Arrested and executed for our faith. This was made clear to me by Teddie when he showed me the chaos of the apocalypse. The energy, the fervor of his belief propelled me to seek out, to question, to look more deeply into the faith. I didn’t stop at the fundamentalist vision of the end times. I kept reading, praying, asking questions. And I found the Church…eventually. Before that though I let every alien philosophy out there, every puny little god with a creed and a priest tell me how to live. We are the Church, the Body of Christ. We are his Body and Blood. The blood of the martyrs’ faith. The faith of our ancestors in covenant with the Father. And a Father who has not abandoned us to novelty, to trendy religious nonsense. We are given the word of wisdom against whom no adversary can stand. We are given the trust of the Creator and His recreating Love. On these, we endure. With these, we persevere. And what promise we do have? This one: “You will be hated b/c of my name, but not a hair on your head will be destroyed.” Nothing cheap or easy about that!

Pic credit: John B. Wright

Miscellany, etc. & etc.

Miscellany & Commentary. . .as I browse around the Net catching up. . .

Transformed. Citing a story in the UK Telegraph on the "failure" of women in the Anglican priesthood, Uncle Di does his usual excellent job of dissecting the issues:

"It's true that women have made an immense and invaluable contribution to Christian churchmanship in recent years, but this contribution has nothing whatsoever to do with ordination. It is a consequence of the Internet, which has brought readers together with part-time and non-professional writers -- many of whom write nonsense, but many of whom on the contrary are women of deep piety, insight, and wisdom, and whose thoughts had little chance for expression fifteen years ago.

But women's ordained ministry, even on its own terms, has been an undeniable flop. Putting aside the fact, enunciated by Catholic doctrine, that sacramental priesthood is void for women, one might still expect that the opportunities provided by non-sacramental ministries would have thrown up someone of substance -- or at least lasting influence -- over the past couple decades. Yet we find no Margaret Thatchers and no Hannah Arendts and no Jeanne Kirkpatricks among the clergy but, in their place, a inordinately high number of women who are just plain daft.

[. . .]

The flakiness of women ministers is a flakiness with a characteristic edge to it. It flirts with paganism and expresses itself with a facetious worldliness. I suspect this is partly due to the fact that the churches that ordain women are pro-abortion, which means the whole spiritual dimension of maternity must be amputated. The glint of the new-sharpened knife is never far from their feminism. And as if by compensation for this ideologically obedient cruelty, the same persons often display a quasi-pagan sentimentalism about nature. Katharine Jefferts Schori, we're told, dresses like a sunrise, and many other priestesses cultivate a rapturous 'wind in the face' emotivism that takes the place orthodox Christian liturgy gives to the worship of God."

Margaret Sanger. A telling pic of the foundress of Planned Parenthood drawing inspiration from her philosophical and political roots.

Humility and Hospitality. Tom K. has up a nice little reflection on the gospel from the 32nd Sunday OT. We should all write to Tom and encourage him to produce homily helps for preachers. . .he's a Dominican after all!

Ratzinger, Scripture and the development of doctrine. Mike L. has a great post up about our Holy Father's take on the interpretation of scripture. In fact, most everything I read on Mike's site is great. You need to add him to your blogroll if you haven't already!

With theologians like these. . . Gerald has up a post on Elizabeth Johnson's receipt of an award from Barry University's theology department. Just google E.J.'s name for all the reasons you will need for why this was a bad idea. Should anyone think that E.J.'s "theology" is out of the ordinary in contemporary academic theology circles these days, I got news for you: she's tame. Downright old-fashioned even. E.J. represents the Feminist Academic Establishment-- mainline 70's political feminism, "work within the system to change it," language=reality, so change the language and you change reality. Pretty boring stuff, actually. If you want the really, REALLY cutting edge theology, you need to be reading Richard Kearney's work, or Robert Barron's. Both of these guys are very well-read in literature and use novels, poems, films, etc. in their theological and philosophical work. Just darned good reads.

Fr. Z links to a pastoral letter written by Bishop Arthur Serratelli (Paterson, NJ) to his priests, exhorting them to be faithful to the rubrics of the liturgy. I think the Good Bishop has it all exactly right. . .well, except for that stuff about religious priests needing to wear an alb over their shiny white habits. . .

Dutch Dominicans. Fr. Ed Ruane, OP, Vicar for the Master of the Order of Preachers, has written a response to that brochure our Dutch brothers published earlier this year. If you will recall, the Dutch OP's were arguing that the Catholic Mass should become a Protestant memorial service, complete with lay presider (even in the presence of a priest) who is rotated out on a weekly basis. Fr. Ruane is a great Dominican and excellent theologian. . .but I have to say that the statement is a bit anemic. Of course, politics being what they are. . .

Also, I've added a few items to the PHIL & THEO Wish List. My mom bought me my Christmas gift back in May, so now I have to hit Pop up for a book or two before I jet off to my wonderful new Roman life. Check it out!

God Bless, Fr. Philip, OP

P.S. I should add: if you have a Facebook account, look me up and add me as a friend!

Reading List for THEO5317: Post-metaphysical theologies

Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Derrida and their band, "The Categorical Imperatives"

For U.D. students who are thinking about registering for my senior/grad seminar in the Spring 2008 (THEO5317), here's a partial reading list :

J.L. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition

G. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine

J.-L. Marion, God Without Being

J. Milbank, Radical Orthodoxy

M. Wrathall, Religion After Metaphysics

There will be many other articles and book chapters assigned, including work from Caputo, Vattimo, Derrida, Heidegger, and many others. There will also be a few on-line articles to read such as this one.

Please contact me if you have any questions about written assignments or presentations. Leave a comment here or email me: ppowell(at)udallas(dot)edu.

Nuns, resurrection, metaphysics, and Tom

The Dominican Nuns of the Monastery of Mary the Queen in Elmira, NY have invited me to give a series of lectures this coming weekend. (I will also endeavor to teach them to fry chicken and bake biscuits.)

They are sponsoring several lectures on the Nicene Creed for broader distribution to other OP monasteries.

I am lecturing on ". . .the resurrection of the dead. . ." This is going to be a wonderful trip! Please pray for me and the sisters as we plumb the depths of Mystery this weekend.

Speaking of Mystery. . .I could use the four books on my Wish List that deal with Thomas' metaphysics. Not only to help me get a better grasp for the sake of better grasping but also to be of more use to my students.

I have to beg at least once a week, or Tom will revoke my license.

Fr. Philip, OP

On not being sinned against

St. Josaphat: Wis 1.1-7 and Luke 17.1-6
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory

Aside from the crucifixion itself, there is perhaps no other moment in the gospels that shows our Lord’s ridiculous excess of love for us that this teaching on forgiveness. Only his love for us as he hangs on the cross surpasses the sheer magnitude of excessive love that we must muster in order to follow his teaching on daily forgiveness. If your brother sins, rebuke him. If he repents, forgive him. Repeat as often as necessary. We know this, of course! Doing it is something else. But if you think mustering the love required to forgive the same offense seven times a day is difficult, let me suggest an even more difficult way: strive to become that sort of person who cannot be sinned against, that sort of person against whom there is no offense. If charity requires that we forgive an offense, it seems only reasonable that the demands of excessive love would also push us toward becoming “inoffensible.” But then again maybe reason has nothing to do with it and what we’re really getting at here is a question about the limits of that good habit of trusting in God’s promises: the limits of faith.

The Apostles say to the Lord, “Increase our faith.” I’m sure Jesus smiles a little at this and probably thinks to himself, “Oh really? Increase your faith? Are you really asking me to expand your capacity for trusting in our Father’s promises? Really, now? Think about this for a moment: the larger your capacity for faith—the more faith I give you—the more faith you will be required to cooperate with. More faith, more work. More faith, more trust! More letting go, more just letting be.” Instead of all that, Jesus tells his apostles this: “If your faith is just the size of a mustard seed, you can uproot the mulberry tree with a word and replant it in the sea. Knowing that, do you really want more faith? Remember what I said about faith and moving mountains? You guys are having trouble with simple stuff like not putting stumbling blocks in front of one another and forgiving one another’s offenses. You want to uproot mulberry trees and replant them in the sea? And move mountains too? Tell ya what! You find a better way to put the faith I’ve given you to good use and then we’ll talk about more faith. Deal?”

Deal! Without becoming too much the cultural theorist/critic here, let me suggest a way of taking the faith we have and sharpening it like a fine-edged sword for forgiveness. Our culture, our American milieu, and we Americans thrive with a kind of Extended Wounded Ego—a sore psyche that pokes out there like a delicate nose, sniffing out offense…like French pigs rooting for truffles! How easily we are offended. How simple it is for us to be sinned against. Our eccentricities, weirdnesses, preferences, odd-ball opinions and fantasies—everything I think is essential to my ME-ness becomes an overripe fruit, too sweet, too tender, so soft and ready to be bruised by the slightest chiding touch, the most subtle word of the kind reprove that I spiral into sputtering indignation and collapse into a weeping heap. Am I exaggerating? Yea, just a little to make a point. And here’s my point: if faith requires you to tell me that I have sinned and then requires me to repent and then requires you to forgive me no matter how many times I sin…how much sharper will your faith become if you willed NOT to be offended, willed not to be sinned against? In other words, your daily work with the trust God has already given you becomes the work of building that sort of spiritual life where the sore, offensible, easily bruised ME-ness of You is emptied out, poured out like a libation (Paul says) and all that emptied space in your heart is made ready for a Larger Christ, a Bigger Jesus! How difficult is that? Very difficult. But also very necessary. Love requires it of us. . .and makes it possible.

Struggle with this: the grasp of your love is limited only by the reach of your trust in God’s promise of mercy to you. How far will His promise reach to grasp you? All the way to the cross…and back.

Pic credit

We are Christians NOT Platonists

32^nd Sunday OT(C): 2 Macc 7.1-2, 9-14; 2 Thess 2.16-3.5; Luke 20.27-38
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
St Paul Hospital and Church of the Incarnation

We affirm it every week at Mass. We claim to believe it as a fundamental tenet of our faith. Without it everything we hold to be true about Christ, our lives with him now and for eternity makes no sense whatsoever. In fact, this event, and the promise of its eventual repetition for us all, gave the apostles what little courage they had to hang on after Jesus’ death, the steadfastness they needed until the Holy Spirit swept through them like a brushfire and gave birth to the Church! In answer to the Sadducees’ attempt to confound his faith, Jesus teaches them and us a rock bottom basic truth of our ancestors’ faith: the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob is “not a God of the dead, but a God of the living. . .to Him all are alive!” As the killer of Death, Jesus announces to anyone with ears to hear and eyes to see that the God and Father of all is Himself alive, a living and loving God; and for those for whom He is Lord and King, He is creator and ruler of the living, source and end of all life everlasting. We will say it again this morning/evening, so let me quote it to you now: “We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.”

Without knowing it most of you are religious Platonists when it comes to what you believe about your death and your life after death. I am willing to bet that most of you believe that you are your soul; that is, who you are as a person is best described as “my soul.” My soul is who I am. And I bet that most of you believe that when you die your soul is separated from your body and your body goes into the ground and your soul travels to heaven (or to purgatory or hell). Most of you believe that eternal life is a life lived for a really long time as a spiritual entity, some sort of indestructible ghost. Immortality then is the promise of living forever as a spirit, a soul without a body, a ghost without its machine.

This false notion is the root of our sometimes obsessive disdain for the body while we are alive here on earth. Religious Platonists believe we must temper the body in order to exalt the soul. The body is a trap, a cave, an anchor holding the pure spirit down, weighing down our mournful souls who want nothing more than to be free of the flesh and soaring unimpeded back to God who is pure spirit, pure soul. How often do you lament the weaknesses of your body? How often you do attribute your sinfulness to a tempted body, your flesh enticed and conquered by the flashy but ultimately empty promises of passing disobedience? Wouldn’t we all be better Christians, more pure, just better people in general, if we did not have to contend with the appetites of these smelly, disease-prone, slowly dying and decaying bodies?

If you think this Platonism is limited to Christians, think again. Our materialist culture holds to a rather perverse version of this heresy. Being happy is about controlling the body. Diets. Exercise. Plastic surgeries. Props, potions, pills, powders, ointments, lotions, gels, needles, patches—a whole pharmacology of chemical mixtures designed to give us control of the body b/c we believe that absolute control of the body is the key to our happiness. If you think the religious zealot is hateful to the spiritually indifferent or to those who actively reject his belief, just try to talk to a true Gym Bunny or a Gym Jock. Their utter distain for your physical weakness, your lack of motivation, your ill-defined abs and flabby butt, their venomous contempt for your high calorie, high fat diet and your ignorance of proper supplementation—all of these combine in a heart so spiritually pure in its hatred for the body that these Gym Bunnies and Jocks would scare the dungeon masters of the Spanish Inquisition with their zealotry! Make no mistake: their torturous routines on those robotic machines are not about loving the flesh…no, no, the flesh must be denied, tamed, shaped, and beaten into submission. And who or what is it that must conquer these mushy muscles? The will. The wanting. The desire. Yes, yes. It is the soul. Thank God we are Christians and not Religious Platonists!

Jesus is confronted by a party of Jewish philosophers and theologians known as the Sadducees. This group of highly educated men reject the recent developments of Jewish religious thought and argue vehemently against the resurrection of the body after death. Jesus and the Pharisees, appealing more to the common people and accepting recent theological progress, preach and teach the resurrection of the dead. The question posed to Jesus about the woman with multiple marriages is designed to expose the trendy teaching on the resurrection of the dead as scripturally unsound. Think of the question as a sort of “what if” problem. The Sadducees think that Jesus is going to have to answer them in one of two ways: 1) either deny the resurrection and say that the woman is not married to all those men simultaneously or 2) affirm the resurrection and say that she is married to them all at the same time. Either way the Sadducees are proven correct in their rejection of the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead. Jesus, being Jesus and no one’s fool, does the unexpected. He affirms the resurrection and denies that the woman is married to seven men at the same time. How? Death marks the end of this life. The resurrection is the sure sign of new life. Those who are resurrected no longer marry nor do they die. In other words, a marriage is ended at death. Once we are dead and come to see the Lord face-to-face, we no longer need sacraments as external signs of His presence and grace. We are His presence and grace!

So, what is the resurrection of the dead? Or, as the Apostles’ Creed puts it “the resurrection of the body”? If you are not just your soul but your body AND your soul, then for You to share in the divine life, for You to partake of the divine nature in heaven, You must be You, that is, your soul AND your body, whole and entire, the complete person, the completed You. Our God is the God of the living not the dead “because to Him all are alive.” With the suffering, death, and resurrection of Christ, we too are made worthy to suffer, die, and rise with him. Just as he was given a body glorified and transfigured, so will we. Just as he was lifted into heaven, so will we. Just as Moses called “Lord” and just as Christ cried out “Lord,” so we too shout out “Lord!” Knowing that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Lord of Lord, and King of Kings is the God of the living—those who live always under His dominion!

If any of this is true for us, then we have to think carefully about how we live now. What is the moral theology of living now as dead folks who will live in transfigured glory? In other words, what does it mean for you right now to be a man or woman or child who has died with Christ in baptism, risen again to his eat and drink at his altar, and now live renewed until your natural death to rise again with him body and soul? It means we wait in joyful hope for the coming of the Lord—praying, fasting, believing, daily, hourly; working, sleeping, eating, daily, hourly; dressing, loving, feeding the hungry, daily, hourly; healing, forgiving, listening to the Word; daily, hourly waiting, waiting, waiting on the coming of the Lord; doing daily, hourly what Christ has given us to do as if we were with him now because we ARE with him now. We are with his Body now doing what we the Body of Christ does: offering to our Father thanks and praise for the gift He made of Himself to us. Our God is the God of the living not the dead because for Him we are all, always living, always alive in the Spirit that is life everlasting!

BREAKING NEWS!

The Angelicum

BREAKING NEWS!!!

I heard from my provincial tonight about my assignment for next year. . .

I will be moving to Rome to study philosophy at the Pontifical University of St Thomas (Angelicum). Upon completion of the required degrees, I will join the faculty and teach philosophy until assigned otherwise.

My thanks for all the prayers and please continue to pray for me and the Order as we preach the Good News!

Help me celebrate this good news by adding to my philosophy library! Click over to the PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY Wish List and send me a book to take to Rome! (cheesy grin) Trust me: these books will get a tremendous workout in Rome. . .

Fr. Philip, OP

Catholic Dollars for Anti-Catholic Activities???

My education about the involvement of the Church in various nefarious "social justice" activities continues on unabated! Recently, I ran across several articles on the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD). These articles noted that several agencies that receive the hard-earned dollars of believing Catholics are in fact often not only anti-Catholic but anti-Christian!

This weekend Catholics all over the country will be asked to contribute to the CCHD. Do your homework first!

You don't have to believe me or anyone else. . .just do a google.com search and you will find more than enough evidence to withhold your dimes and quarters. . .here's a short piece from my fav Catholic magazine, First Things:

Time for a Step Further

The criticism of CCHD is fine so far as it goes, says an old hand at inner-city community organizing here in New York, but it doesn’t go far enough. CCHD is, of course, the Catholic Campaign for Human Development. In response to critics, the word Catholic was recently added to the name in order to indicate that it is, well, Catholic. The aforementioned old hand doesn’t think it means very much. He criticizes the critics of CCHD for concentrating on those cases where funding is given to organizations that directly violate the Church’s teaching, notably on abortion. The problem with that, says our old hand, is that it segregates the "life questions" from the fullness of the Church’s social teaching, giving the impression that abortion and a few other things are no more than Catholic "hang-ups" to which those receiving Catholic money need to be sensitive.

In an earlier life long ago, before he was converted to the gospel of life, our old hand was an executive with Planned Parenthood. That organization, he notes, would never dream of giving support to a group that did not back its entire agenda, and it is assumed that when a major lobbying effort is needed PP will call in its chits. Not so with Catholics. Through CCHD many millions of dollars are given each year to organizations that, while avoiding the hang-up questions, are indifferent and frequently hostile to the Church’s mission. In inner-city community organizing, Catholics provide, in addition to the funding, the great majority of the people and the bulk of parish-based institutional support.

Our old hand thinks part of the problem is with the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), an effort launched more than thirty years ago by the late Saul Alinsky of Chicago, who made no secret of his strategy of hijacking the resources of the Catholic Church for his self-declared revolution. IAF is, under various names, still very much a force in community organizing around the country. But why are Catholic dioceses and CCHD so hesitant to insist that assisted programs be commensurate with Catholic support and teaching? Part of the answer is a good ecumenical impulse gone awry. In many urban areas, liberal Protestant churches are a small minority in community coalitions but exercise a large influence, often because Catholics don’t want to offend them by pressing issues such as support for crisis pregnancy centers or opposition to partial-birth abortion. Another part of the answer is that it is naively assumed that more "inclusive" groups will more impartially serve "the common good," when, in fact, any viable organization has its particular goals-a.k.a. "interests"-for good or ill.

The Catholic interest, one might suggest, is to serve the common good, as that is richly and amply defined in the Church’s social doctrine. But to insist on that requires a measure of confidence in that doctrine, and such confidence is in short supply. The World Council of Churches had the slogan "The world sets the agenda for the Church." There is an analogue in the Catholic understanding that grace perfects nature and, by extension, the Church’s mission is to support the good things already happening under other auspices. There is important truth in these claims, of course. But they are truths too easily subverted and turned to alien purposes when the Church’s people and resources are placed at the disposal of those who define the good in ways that are frequently unsympathetic to or at odds with the Church’s teaching. So what our old hand is suggesting is that the criticism of some of the more egregious abuses in CCHD funding is having its effect, and that’s good. But now it’s time to go further and make the case that the "Catholic" in the Catholic Campaign for Human Development should indicate more than the source of the monies and other resources employed. It should be an honest indicator of all the ends to which they are employed.

"Going green" = "dying on the vine"?

Bow before your new goddess!

Sean Cardinal O'Malley, cardinal archbishop of Boston, addresses a disturbing trend in his own Capuchin wing of the Franciscans. Noting that the next big chapter of the order is slated to amend its consititutions to be more "social justice, ecology friendly," he writes:

I have not seen the recommendations for the new Constitutions. I am told that there is a desire to introduce more Peace and Justice and Ecology into the Constitutions. I believe the Capuchins should be very much embodied in promoting the social Gospel of the Church. I would like to express two caveats. First of all there is the danger of a false sense of security. In other words by talking a lot about the social justice themes we might think that we are living a radical form of the Gospel Life. I see many religious communities in my country produce documents worthy of the Green Party, but they are dying on the vine themselves. Was it Saint Francis who said the saints did all the work and we get the credit by talking about them?

I have to think that group-think projects like the U.N. Millennium Development Goals, the Earth Charter, all that gobbly-goo about "the New Universe Story," and the Gaia movement among women religious is the death-knell of 70's religious life. Let's pray that we younger religious will not be fooled into worshiping at the altars of all these alien god/desses and lift up instead Christ the Lord as our unique source of life and goal in death.

We've been warned!

via Rocco

We are temples NOT flea markets

The Dedication of the Lateran Basilica in Rome
Eze 47.1-12; 1 Cor 3.9-11, 16-17; John 2.13.22
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory, Irving, TX

Jesus went to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover. When he went to the temple are he found a thriving flea market, a bazaar for selling sacrificial animals and bankers to change common money into temple cash. Seeing all of this, he whipped them all out, crying after them: “Take these out of here, and stop making my Father’s house a marketplace.” John notes that the disciples immediately recall Psalm 69.9: “Zeal for your house will consume me.” And the Jews, they ask for a sign. Jesus tells them to destroy “this temple” and he will raise it again in three days. Many years later, Paul, by way of questioning the alleged ignorance of the Corinthian church, teaches us that we are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells within us. He says, “Brothers and sisters, you are God’s building…If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy that person; for the temple of God, which you are, is holy.” How do we, the holy temples of God, turn our temples into marketplaces, into buildings that serve commerce rather than God? And, how do we drive out the unclean merchants and restore our temples to their proper purpose?

In the angelic vision, Ezekiel is shown that the temple is the center of life-giving water and fruit, the heart of the nation to which and from which the waters of the world flow, “Wherever the river flows, every sort of living creature that can multiply shall live” and there will be God’s abundance. For our ancestors in faith, the temple was more than a church, more than a place to gather. The temple was the dwelling place of the Most Holy, the physical site of Heaven touching Earth. No wonder then Ezekiel is shown the temple as a source of life and abundance! And no wonder Jesus is furious with the mercantile desecration of its holy purpose.

It is not great leap to the 21^st century and our own contemporary desecrations of God’s holy temples: how do we profane the person in name of commercial gain? How do we collaborate with those who would set up shop in our temples? Think about the ways our culture commercializes the body. Think about our ever-failing social norms for sex, eating, drinking, dressing. Think about how we lend our temples to these marketplaces, sell our finest bodies to the highest bidder at the auction of fashion and convenience. Think about artificial contraception as “family planning,” abortion as “optional pregnancy,” person as “product of conception.” Every merchant knows that marketing is all about perception, illusion, finding common ground for working together, the lowest common denominator.

For cash and the bottom-line, we are meat. For the culture of death—ruled by Mammon—we are cattle and lab rats, control groups and experiments. Those temples among us who are blind or lame or crippled or poor, they are all “targets for development goals” or “the means of measurable outcomes given variables.” What we cannot be and still be temples of the Most High is a means to anything else but ourselves. Make me a means and I quickly become an obstacle needing to be removed. Make you a means to an end and you become a tool for manipulation. Turn the human person into a product, a site of commercialization, and the body becomes a snack, a tiny morsel to be gobbled up, a temple for little more than the empty calories of our consumerist liturgies of self-destruction and denigration.

Hear Paul again: “Do you know that you are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy that person…” Why? “…for the temple of God, which you are, is holy.” You are, we are temples, where Heaven touches Earth, sites of God’s abundance, moments of God’s gracious outpouring of spirit and life; we are both the source and goal of all that water, flowing in and out to feed life inside and outside our walls. Let nothing defile the holiest of God’s dwelling places: you, consumed by zeal for the presence of the Lord!

UN's New Paradigm is not Christian

from CRISIS Magazine, April 10, 2006

Facing Down the New Paradigm:
The Family Planning Agenda of the United Nations’ ‘Millennial Goals’

The Most Reverend John C. Nienstedt

This past September, 170 world leaders gathered at the headquarters of the United Nations in New York for the 60th session of its General Assembly. The media focused on President Bush’s speech on terrorism and Secretary General Kofi Annan’s struggles with the oil-for-food scandal that had recently tainted his administration.

But one thing on the official agenda did not get much media notice—the evaluation of the millennial goals, adopted by 189 world heads of state in the year 2000, which proposed to end extreme poverty by the year 2015. The September gathering hoped to evaluate progress made on the goals and to determine how best to move forward on them.

In all, there are eight millennial goals:

1. to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
2. to achieve universal primary education
3. to promote gender equality and empower women
4. to reduce child mortality
5. to improve maternal health
6. to combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases
7. to ensure environmental sustainability
8. to develop a global partnership for development.

The first seven goals concentrate on the specific strategies for eliminating poverty, while the eighth implies that it will be done by wealthy countries delivering aid, providing debt relief, and establishing free-trade policies. One of the underlying concerns behind the millennial goals—not explicitly mentioned but never far from the surface—is the question of overpopulation.

Following President Bush to the podium was the Vatican secretary of state, Angelo Cardinal Sodano, who raised the moral and ethical issues behind the program:

We cannot offer an ambiguous, reductive or even ideological vision of health. For example, would it not be better to speak clearly of the “health of women and children” instead of using the term “reproductive health”? Could there be a desire to return to the language of a “right to abortion”?

His concerns were well-founded. In late August 2005, the Vatican Holy See had to issue a warning that a document titled “Religious Declaration on the MDG’s, Women’s Rights and Reproductive Health” was being circulated prior to the September UN meeting for the purpose of broadening the terms “reproductive health” and “reproductive rights” to include abortion, contraception, and other illicit means of family planning. The Holy See raised public awareness of the initiative because it knew that—if adopted—the resolutions would strip the Church’s efforts to defend human life.

The vigilance displayed by Rome is motivated in large part by what another Vatican prelate, Javier Lorenzo Cardinal Barragán, has called the “New Paradigm” in international health care. Speaking as the president of the Pontifical Council for Pastoral Assistance to Healthcare Workers at the Vatican-sponsored World Day of the Sick on February 10, 2004, the cardinal sounded an alarm that this New Paradigm is completely closed to the transcendent. Refusing to acknowledge a vertical reference point, it consequently fails to give an absolute value to human life.

While recognizing that proponents of the New Paradigm do accept some notion of a divinity, the cardinal noted that theirs is but a “poetic and aesthetic god” that each individual makes up for him- or herself. This is certainly not the God of the Bible. Rather, it is evidence of a new global ethic that seeks to replace all previously known religions with a spirituality concerned with the global wellbeing of all human persons within a world order of “sustainable development”:

By sustainable development is meant a development where the different factors involved (food, health, education, technology, population, environment, etc.) are brought into harmony so as to avoid imbalanced growth and the waste of resources.

As the Pontifical Council for the Family points out, however, it is the developed countries of the world that will determine the criteria for “sustainable development” for the other nations. Thus certain rich countries and major international organizations are willing to help developing nations, but only on the condition that they accept public programs that systematically control birth rates.

In the New Paradigm, Cardinal Barragán asserts, “sustainable development” becomes the supreme ecological value. He said:

It is spiritually without God, at the secular level. Its ultimate objective is the viability of the present world, and man’s well-being in it. Practically speaking, it is a new secularist religion, a religion without God, or, if one wishes a new god, that would be the earth itself, to which the name Gaia is given. This divinity would have man as a subordinate element.... The series of values upheld by the New Paradigm are values subordinated to this diversity, which is translated into the supreme ecological value that it calls sustainable development. And within this sustainable development is the supreme ethical objective of well-being.

According to Cardinal Barragán, the grave danger of this New Paradigm is its lack of an objective standard for truth. Consensus on what to do or not to do rests on subjective opinions, which in turn gives rise to an ethic or bioethics that has no consistency.

Christianity, on the other hand, offers a “True Paradigm,” based on an objective and universal ethics. The first principle of this ethics is that human life is created by God, and from this is derived the second principle: that human life is received, not as property, but as something to be cared for. He concluded:

The human person is the synthesis of the universe and is the reason for everything that exists. Present-day biomedical sciences and technologies must be at the service of human life and not vice-versa. They are to construct man, not to destroy man.

The United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) are the two major forces behind the New Paradigm and its secular ethic. These institutions have allies in various Non-Governmental Organizations (referred to as NGOs), which are prominent promoters of an anti-natalist global ideology, among whose number are the Women’s Environment and Development Organization, Earth Council Green Peace, and the International Planned Parenthood Association. Their efforts have had far-reaching effects.

Questions regarding overpopulation have concerned the UN since its inception. Two years after the UN’s charter was ratified in 1945, the Population Commission of the Economic and Social Council was established to gather data on populations, to analyze the influence of population policies, and to study the interplay of demographics on social and economic factors. This commission helped to formulate a World Population Plan of Action at its conference in Bucharest in 1974, continued to monitor its progress at the 1984 International Conference on Population in Mexico City, and again in Cairo at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development. It finally reviewed its overall progress at the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing.

At first the commission was only involved in gathering and analyzing demographic statistics. But by the mid-1960s, its emphasis shifted to a more aggressive agenda in providing governments with advisory services, as well as training and action programs, including fertility planning.

While not the UN’s first International Conference on Population and Development (commonly referred to as ICPD), the 1994 Cairo conference is considered by most commentators a watershed moment for the advancement of secular forces to stem population growth in third-world countries (its action points were later incorporated into the millennial goals).

At the Cairo conference, 11,000 registered participants, representing some 180 governments, and more than 1,000 NGOs agreed that population issues must be addressed more forcefully if development policies were to succeed. A great emphasis was placed on the concepts of women’s empowerment and gender equality as the primary building blocks for population and development.

>From the language used in the formulation of the Cairo agreement, one begins to appreciate just how the issues of empowerment and equality begin to impact the moral decision-making of the persons who are said to benefit from such policies. The broad results aim at: (1) reduced mortality of infants; (2) broader life choices and opportunities for women; (3) the promotion of women’s rights; and (4) an increased financial investment in reproductive health and family planning. While apparently noble, the real results of these efforts are forced, manipulative programs to promote sterilization, contraception, and abortion—all of which are justified under a rationale for achieving peace, economic development, and social justice. Nowhere in the official language do you find the UN documents acknowledging the negative fallout from these radical anti-natalist policies.

The 1994 ICPD in Cairo was followed up by the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing in September 1995. During the drafting of the conference’s Platform of Action, the influence of NGOs took on a decidedly pro-feminist perspective. Commenting on the outcome, Robert H. Bork observes:

At the Beijing conference, for instance, the word “family” was not to appear in the Platform. Instead, the word “household” was used. The significance of this is to be found in the feminist insistence upon use of the word “gender” [referred to 216 times in the text]. There being five genders [i.e., man, woman, lesbian, gay, and bisexual], unions or marriages involving any gender or genders are legitimate. These unions are called households. The traditional family is then presented as a household, just one form of living arrangement, not superior to any other. Indeed, since feminists view the family as a system of oppression, and since feminism contains a large lesbian component, the marriages of men and women are often seen as morally inferior to unions involving the other three genders.

Given such a political context, it was no surprise that the Beijing conference also pushed for greater expansion of legalized abortion as a legitimate method of family planning.

In February 2005, the Beijing +10 conference (i.e., ten years after the Beijing conference) drew governmental and non-governmental delegates to New York City to review the implementation of the action items agreed to at the original conference.

The United States delegation—now pursuing the pro-life position of the Bush administration—created a great deal of controversy by proposing a resolution that affirmed that the Beijing documents “do not create an international right to abortion.” The delegation hoped to draw attention to the pressure that had been placed on member countries by courts, legislatures, and NGOs to change abortion laws in accord with this supposedly agreed upon international “right.” The amendment failed on the grounds that it was unnecessary. This was tragically untrue. In July 1999, the UN General Assembly itself adopted proposals to curb the world’s population growth by means of greater “access” to abortion. The proposal was hailed by pro-abortion groups as “a giant advance beyond what was agreed to at the landmark 1994 UN population conference in Cairo.”

After last year’s meeting of Beijing +10, pro-life NGOs were barred by UN officials from speaking to or lobbying member states at the preparatory sessions for the Millennium Summit +5 Conference held this past September. At the same time, the International Planned Parenthood Federation, the National Youth Network for Reproductive Rights, and Family Care International (all abortion proponents) were invited to speak to the participants. Many believe this change of approach reflects the displeasure of UN officials with the interventions of the United States and the Holy See representatives.

Speaking to the general secretary of the World Conference on Population in 1974, Pope Paul VI said:

All population policies and strategies, in the judgment of the Holy See, must be evaluated in light of the sacredness of human life, the dignity of every human being, the inviolability of all human rights, the value of marriage and the need for economic and social justice.

Surely each person and couple has a responsibility to the local and world community; but to see all progress as dependent on the decline of population growth betokens shortness of vision and failure of nerve. Economic aid for the advancement of people should never be conditioned on a decline of birth rates or in participation in family planning programs.

Not surprisingly, in 1996, the Vatican suspended its annual donation to UNICEF, citing evidence of the organization’s involvement in abortion and pushing contraceptives on teenagers. A study released in 2004 by the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute cited numerous documents in which UNICEF appears to endorse abortion or to have sent funds to groups that market the RU-486 abortion pill.

In its 1994 reflection Ethical and Pastoral Dimensions of Population Trends, the Pontifical Council for the Family advised caution when reviewing the information on demographics produced by population-control programs. The council listed a number of specific practices that should be actively challenged by the Church and
her members:

1. the many attempts on the part of the “population crises ideology” to influence international agencies and governments
2. invoking so-called new “women’s rights” while underestimating a woman’s vocation to give life
3. invoking environmental questions in an excessive or improper way to justify coercive population control
4. the attempts to spread abortifacient products such as RU-486 in developing countries
5. the promotion of sterilization
6. the distribution of anti-life technologies, such as the intrauterine device
7. violating the absolute and inalienable rights of individuals and families
8. abusing moral, intellectual, and political power
9. promotion of drugs, pornography, violence, and the like.

The council urges Christians and all people of good will to educate themselves on the many ways the population-control movement uses the media to project economic and demographic statistics that are both simplistic and inexact. Professionals should be encouraged to provide correct information that both rejects a fear of life and respects the human person and the family. Governments must oppose false concepts of reproductive health that promote different methods of contraceptives or abortion; they should instead promote respect for a woman as wife and mother.

The “anti-baby” mentality, so characteristic of population-control programs, refuses to acknowledge God as the sole creator of life, and thus contributes to the culture of death. This is the New Paradigm that rejects the notion of a transcendent God and reduces moral decision-making to the realm of subjectivism. As Pope Benedict XVI has proclaimed, this kind of relativism is the challenge to the gospel in the 21st century, and it will require the efforts of every Christian to overcome.

In the words of Pope Paul VI, “You must strive to multiply bread so that it suffices for the tables of mankind, and not favor an artificial control of birth…in order to diminish the number of guests at the banquet of life.”

---

The Most Reverend John C. Nienstedt is the bishop of the Diocese of New Ulm, Minnesota.

UN Development Goals and abortion

Quite coincidentally I've bumped into the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals three times in the last two weeks. All three times have been in Dominican publications or on Dominican websites. I have to confess that I don't pay much attention to the U.N. And what little I knew of the U.N.'s development goals, I dismissed as little more than expensive utopian socialist engineering.

It wasn't until my O.P. brothers and sisters in the Peace and Justice biz started cooing about the MDG's that I did a little research and discovered that. . .surprise!. . .the MDG's contain several innocuous "goals" that when translated into Real-Life Language mean "guaranteeing free access to contraception and abortion on demand."

The really disturbing thing here is the number of Catholic universities and colleges that have signed on to the MDG's w/o much critical engagement with the context and long history of the MDG's. You have to do a little digging to discover that, for example, Goal #5--improving maternal health care--is really just a way of disguising universal abortion rights and free access to contraception. The meat of the goals is found in the implementation reports and by carefully reading the "Reservations" issued by signatory nations. Several predominately Catholic nations have signed onto the MDG's but have publicly stated that they will not interpret Goal #5 to include abortion or contraception.

This sounds like an excellent topic for Catholic bloggers to tackle! No doubt faithful Catholics need more info and better teaching on the Church's social justice ministry. . .but it doesn't seem to me that MDG's is the way to go.

Devil in a giftbox

31^st Week OT(M): Romans 11.29-36 and Luke 14.12-14
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory

The clock is ticking down to Christmas Eve and my mom and I are in some nameless store full of the same stuff that gets stuffed into every other nameless store at Christmas, and we’re both staring holes in our gift lists, hoping, praying that the long line of names will somehow magically shrink or just disappear; but, if anything the queue of hungry gift-getters seems to get longer with each gift we buy and our frustration and aggravation grows as we come to the firm conclusion that we are no longer Shopping for Gifts but Hunting for Sacrifices to throw into the growling maw of the idol of seasonal expectation and social niceness, sacrifices meant to appease some distance deity of mercantile exchange, a god or goddess who feeds on the living impatience of the ungifted, the stress of the holiday procrastinator, and the anxiety of the absent-minded. You are freed from this monster when you realize that you are no longer looking for gifts for people you love and respect but shopping for merchandise to exchange with those most likely to present you with a wrapped box at a holiday party or family event. Your “gift” is really just a hedged bet against the almost certainty that Bob or Sue or Bill or Jack will hand you Something. You had better have Something to hand back. The moment you let go of the idea that gifting has anything at all to do with exchanging, you are free from the slavery of the holiday shopping goddess.

This notion that gifting is a species of exchanging is not limited to Christmas present-giving. We find the temptation to appease the goddess of exchange in most of our social doings. Jesus is invited to one of these doings and takes the opportunity to teach those gathered a little lesson in the true nature of gifting. He tells his Pharisee host and the other guests that a truly gracious dinner, that is, a God-graced banquet, will not be attended by friends, family members, and wealthy neighbors—those, in other words, who can and will invite you to their place in return. The truly God-graced banquet will be packed full of the poor, the crippled, the lame, and blind—those, in other words, who cannot and will not invite you to a dinner party in exchange for your initial generosity. Though you will not be invited to their place for dinner, you will be “blessed indeed…because of their inability to repay you.” This is soul of the gift.

This is one of Jesus’ more straightforward teachings on the nature of generosity. Not too far underneath or too far behind this teaching on gifting is another teaching on the nature of our salvation. Deeply seated in the Jewish religious imagination is the ritual power of exchange, gifts changing hands under the terms of a covenant. Gifts are given to God in the temple to strengthen belonging, to maintain purity or to reestablish purity, for healing and health. From the creature’s side of the covenant nothing divine is free. The New Covenant is a theological, philosophical, spiritual coup, overthrowing the older means of belonging, purifying, and healing. As the perfect gift, we are given Christ on the Cross once. There is no exchange. Our Father, as the wealthy host, has invited us—the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, the sinful—has invited us to His banquet with no expectation of receiving anything in return. What could we give God in return for His gift of Himself? The only possibility is for us to bundle ourselves up into His gift of Himself and give ourselves back in Christ. And so you are here to add yourself, we are here to add ourselves to the sacrificial offerings of the altar, placing ourselves under the hands of Christ’s priest as the priest prays, “Lord, send your Spirit upon these gifts that they may become for us the Body and Blood of our Lord, your Son, Jesus Christ.” Though we are not worthy to receive the Lord into our house, we are made worthy of His irrevocable gifts, His irrevocable call, made worthy by His mercy.

Walk out that door this morning having offered yourself as a gift to the Father, fully prepared and empowered to invite to your table all those who cannot repay your gift to them: the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. You will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.