Working the Beads Fumbling towards holiness, one rosary at a time

Time 2021-01-10 21:11:48

Web Name: Working the Beads Fumbling towards holiness, one rosary at a time

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Working the Beads Fumbling towards holiness, one rosary at a time Dorothy Day protesting with farm workers in 1973. It only took four police officers to arrest a seated, unarmed, seventy-five year old woman.Today is Labor Day in the United States, and up down my street there are American flags flying high and proud. This happens every time there is a national holiday of some patriotic significance, so I am glad to see it today, because if the last six months has taught us anything it is that our good fortune as a nation is borne on the backs of workers. Yet right next to those flags are overturned trash cans because our local garbage collectors do not get the day off today, just as they do not get off on Christmas, Easter, or any other federal holidays. It is a stark reminder that we have a long way to go in this country to get our reality to match our rhetoric.Labor Day may be a holiday specific to the United States, but it is built on principles that are deeply ingrained in Catholic social teaching. In 1891, Pope Leo XIII issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum which addressed the growing inequality in industrialized societies. “Workers are not to be treated as slaves; justice demands that the dignity of human personality be respected in them” (31). The pope insisted that meaningful work is part of what drives each person towards meeting their potential as a child of God. Therefore, governments ought to protect the rights of workers, and employers ought not only to treat their employees fairly, with a mind towards their quality of life, but also to make sure that they have an equitable share in the benefits of their work. “When men know they are working on what belongs to them, they work with far greater eagerness and diligence. Nay, in a word, they learn to love the land cultivated by their own hands, whence they look not only for food but for some measure of abundance for themselves and their dependents” (66).These sentiments did not come out of nowhere. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as more and more laborers transitioned to work in factories under the control of a shrinking number of wealthy individuals and burgeoning corporations, they faced increasingly harsh conditions. Workers often found themselves working around the clock, seven days a week, in poor ventilation and unsanitary work spaces, facing extreme cold and heat. In many places, children were employed under similar circumstances. Wages were meager and stagnant. Getting sick meant losing your job. Many people fell ill and died in the factories, never even leaving the assembly lines. Rerum Novarum insisted that laborers must be treated as human beings, not simply as cogs in a system.The pope’s call did not go unheeded. As the labor movement in America and around the world began to grow, many Catholics participated. A group of American bishops issued a “Program for Social Reconstruction” in 1919 that made an early call for the establishment of a minimum wage, unemployment protections, and the participation of workers in management decisions that affected them.In 1933, Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin established the Catholic Worker Movement. The movement not only fought for the rights of workers but established communities in which people could live out a commitment both to Catholic social teaching and Catholic devotion. “The Gospel takes away our right forever to discriminate between the deserving and undeserving poor,” said Day.Over the course of the one hundred and twenty-nine years since Rerum Novarum, the Church’s magisterial teaching on these issues has repeatedly been strengthened. “Whatever insults human dignity,” said the Second Vatican Council, “such as subhuman living conditions… as well as disgraceful working conditions, where men are treated as mere tools for profit, rather than as free and responsible persons; all these things and others of their like are infamies indeed. They poison human society, but they do more harm to those who practice them than those who suffer from the injury” (Gaudium et Spes, 27). While the abuse of workers may harm them in this life, the spiritual self-harm suffered by employers who inflict such abuse has eternal consequences.The means for combatting such inequities, such as those provided by labor unions, are praised by the Church. “The experience of history teaches that organizations of this type are an indispensable element of social life,” wrote Pope St. John Paul II in Laborem Exercens. While the pope insists that unions avoid politicization or anything that will take them away from their fundamental task of ensuring the rights of workers, he is adamant that the tools they have for carrying out their primary task must be protected. “Workers should be assured the right to strike, without being subjected to personal penal sanctions for taking part in a strike” (20).Celebrating and protecting the rights of workers is not only a patriotic duty but a Christian moral responsibility. Labor Day was established in the United States in 1894, just a few years after Rerum Novarum, long before most of the goals of the labor movement would be accomplished. It was meant to be a sign of hope for a future in which protecting the dignity of work and workers would be seen as a bedrock principle of a free society. There have been great strides since then, but our own era shows us that there is a long way still to go. Workers for major corporations around the world today face some of the same harsh conditions that the labor movement fought to eradicate more than a century ago, while workers here in our own country face a situation in which long-held benefits, like sick leave and the forty hour work week, have begun to erode. Over the past six months of the Covid-19 pandemic, we have discovered time and time again just how essential many of our “essential workers” are, including medical professionals, but also the people who risk their lives to cut our lawns, sanitize our buildings, deliver our groceries, and teach our children. At a moment of extreme economic stress around the world, it is more important than ever that we celebrate and protect the dignity of workers.  Jesus says in Matthew 16:13-20, “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church… I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” Peter is being given the authority to govern the Church. Catholics understand this to be about the papacy, but my Protestant friends often point out that the reason Peter is given this authority is because of his faith, because he confesses that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, not because of anything particularly wonderful about Peter himself. Faith, they say, is what should govern the Church, not some man sitting in a building in Rome, claiming to be Peter’s  successor. Faith in Jesus Christ, built only upon the Word of God in Scripture, should be sufficient. Yet there is another way of looking at the papacy that avoids this unhelpful division. What the papacy gives to us is not merely a means of governing the faithful, but a focal point for expressing our love and gratitude.The pope does, of course, carry out a very important governing function. He’s the pastor of pastors, the bishop of bishops, and we need that kind of accountability. The buck has to stop somewhere. Otherwise, if every person is his or her own authority, we end up with chaos. Even if we say that the individual must be directed by the clear teaching of Scripture how do we adjudicate disputes when my idea of “clear teaching” conflicts with yours?Contrary to popular belief, the pope does not have unlimited power. He cannot just say something and then it becomes so. He exercises his authority through established means that make clear the difference between when he’s speaking with the full teaching authority of his office, backed up by centuries of precedent, and when he’s only offering an opinion or sharing an idea. And yet, guided by the Holy Spirit, he’s able to speak a word that settles an argument. He’s a living authority, capable of making sure that the Church never strays from her true teaching.All of that is often where discussion of the papacy gets stuck, but the role of the pope is much more than that. He’s the embodiment of the Church.Over the course of two thousand years, most Catholics haven’t been reading papal encyclicals. In fact, for most of history, in most of the world, about the only thing that the average Catholic knew about the pope was his name. But knowing the Holy Father’s name was a big deal, because it meant that you could pray for him. Popes are just human beings. Like Peter himself, they have all had their foibles. Some have been good, some have been bad, some have been downright scoundrels who kept mistresses, had their enemies murdered, etc. But the pope is always a living, breathing man, which is what allows him to stand as the embodiment of the Church in any given age. Just as every priest is an icon of Christ, the pope is an icon of the Church.I was living in Philadelphia in 2015 when Pope Francis made his famous visit to America, celebrating Mass in front of the steps of the Philly Art Museum. I was with the throngs of people who made their way through the security checkpoints. They say there were over a million people. I’ve never been in a crowd that large before. Yet there was so much joy, even though we were packed in like sardines. Some of the Dominican sisters from Nashville were leading people in singing “Ave Maria,” “God bless America,” and whatever else happened to pop into their heads. When I finally saw the Holy Father, from a great distance but still unmistakable in his white cassock, I felt a great swell of love in my heart. It was love for him, but it wasn’t really about him. It was love for Jesus, love for the Church, love for the grace and blessing that God pours out for us in the Sacraments, and most of all just immense gratitude. Here before me was all of that, in a living man who I could see and hear, who prays for me even as I pray for him. And I knew in my bones that this is what it means to be Catholic.I love the Bible, but I cannot be grateful to it, nor can I expect it to love me back. I love the sacred tradition of the Church as well, but the great genius of the Catholic Church is that she is alive, organic, real. The pope is not a concept. He stands in Peter s place as an actual living out of the apostolic calling that Our Lord gave to Peter when he was first handed those keys.It isn’t about choosing between being governed by faith or by a man. It’s about recognizing that as human beings, we need more than just abstractions. We need flesh and blood. We need solid symbols that point us towards the unity and healing that we can only know in Jesus Christ.Note on the text: This was originally written to be a homily for Sunday, August 23, 2020, however I have been in quarantine since Wednesday because of a possible Covid exposure. Nevertheless, I wanted to share this brief reflection. The Rev. Charles Fugue Lowder, SSCThe Anglo-Catholic tradition within Anglicanism is the handmaiden that nurtured many of us who have since taken the journey into full communion with Rome. Much of the liturgical flourishing associated with Anglo-Catholicism developed in the second wave of the movement, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, that became known as Ritualism. Two things became emblematic of the Anglo-Catholic movement from that time forward. The first was an extraordinary embrace of long lost High Church aspects of worship, including candles, incense, vestments, bells, and many related things. The second was a great devotion to serving the poor.At first glance, these two ideas may seem contradictory. It is hard to justify golden chalices and silk chasubles when the people in your neighborhood are out of work and starving. Moreover, the Anglo-Catholic tradition prior to the 1860s was not exactly egalitarian. The movement had been started in the 1830s by men like St. John Henry Newman and John Keble, academics with strong Tory backgrounds. It drew its inspiration at least in part from the High Churchmanship of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that was often as invested in preserving monarchy and the social order as it was in orthodoxy and tradition.Nevertheless, the Ritualists were deeply committed to serving the poor. Many Ritualist priests were sent to serve poor slum parishes by strongly Protestant bishops who wished to banish them to obscurity. Yet the Ritualists embraced the opportunity and often thrived ministering to the poor, the needy, outcasts, foreigners, and others who had been forgotten by the establishment of the established Church. The Rev. Charles Fugue Lowder, for instance, was sent to the East End of London. The neighborhood in which his parish was found was deeply impoverished and overrun with crime. Children were left uneducated and malnourished. The parish did not accept Fr. Lowder easily. When he first arrived in 1856, he was shouted down during his sermons and faced regular attacks by the sailors and prostitutes who made up much of the community. On one occasion, while preaching, Lowder had to dodge a dead cat that was thrown at his head. But he persevered, staying for decades, ministering to the needs of each person without prejudice, so that when he died he was called “the poor man’s friend” and his body was carried in procession through the streets. Lowder’s interest in the poor was not in spite of his Ritualism but because of it. He believed that the mysteries of the Sacraments were the path to salvation and that the Church of England was woefully derelict of duty in neglecting to provide them to the East Enders for so long. He described the point of Christian mission thusly:In spite of the far greater attraction and popularity of general schemes of benevolence, of attempts to brighten the surface of society by plans of amusement or social recreation, of physical exercise or domestic economy, by friendly meetings of the poor, by lectures, concerts, or tea-meetings; however praiseworthy and useful such schemes are in their proper place, and not lost sight of in our own Mission work; yet we have ever felt that our great object must be to save souls. [Emphasis his.]For this reason, Lowder founded the Society of the Holy Cross (Societas Sanctae Crucis or SSC), to develop a fraternity of priests who understood both the power of the Sacraments and the need to minister to those in need. The SSC was hardly the only Anglo-Catholic organization to adopt this mission though. Numerous religious orders, devotional societies, and volunteer organizations arose to meet the challenge. At Fr. Lowder’s urging, Elizabeth Neale founded an order of sisters that ministered to the poor and the sick of London, particularly during the Cholera epidemic of 1866. St. Saviour’s in Leeds, a parish established by the great early Anglo-Catholic leader E.B. Pusey, also ministered to Cholera victims and founded an orphanage. “We dare not deck our walls with pictures,” preached Pusey, “while man, the image of God and representative of Christ, [we] clothe not.”Others were more pointed in their observations. F. D. Maurice wrote that Jesus did not offer His sacrifice on the cross “to give a few proud Philosophers or ascetical Pharisees some high notions about the powers of the soul and the meanness of the body,” but rather He “entered into the state of the lowest beggar, of the poorest, stupidest, wickedest wretch whom that Philosopher or that Pharisee can trample upon,” so that He could “redeem the humanity which Philosophers, Pharisees, beggars, and harlots share together.” For Maurice, the doctrine of the Incarnation forms the basis for both a high view of the Sacraments and the Christian responsibility not only to care for the poor but also to ask why they are poor in the first place.There is an obvious resonance between this Anglo-Catholic approach to mission and Catholic Social Teaching. “Love for others, and in the first place love for the poor, in whom the Church sees Christ himself, is made concrete in the promotion of justice,” said St. John Paul II in Centesimus Annus. That encyclical marked a hundred years since Pope Leo XIII’s ground breaking 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum in which the pope wrote, “It is shameful and inhuman to use men as things for gain and to put no more value on them than what they are worth in muscle and energy.” An incarnational understanding of the dignity of the poor and the Church’s duty towards them is reflected in the lives of many great figures in the life of the Catholic Church over the last century and a half, including St. Teresa of Calcutta, St. Katharine Drexel, St. Oscar Romero, Dorothy Day, and many others.Catholic Social Teaching offers a context into which the Roman Catholic Church can receive that part of the Anglican Patrimony that pertains to mission. A decade ago, when Pope Benedict XVI issued the apostolic constitution that created the Ordinariates, he made clear that their purpose was “transmitting Anglican patrimony” in ways that are “in full harmony with Catholic tradition.” There has been a lively conversation ever since over just what fits into that patrimony. Elements of Anglican liturgical practice have already been embraced and subsequently found a home in Divine Worship the Missal. But liturgy never exists in a vacuum. For the Ritualists, embracing Catholic teachings naturally led to both a recovery of the beauty of liturgy and a great sense of duty to the poor. For Roman Catholics today, especially in the Ordinariates, it should be no less so.As with liturgy, the Catholic Church need not accept every nuance and detail of the Anglo-Catholic approach to mission. Catholic Social Teaching can organically sort the wheat from the chaff, allowing that which is consonant with the Church’s teaching to grow while that which needs correction will either change or wither away.At the same time, though, a fuller engagement with the Anglo-Catholic tradition’s pairing of high liturgy with mission to the poor could be quite beneficial for the Catholic Church in our time. It is assumed by many Catholics in the west today that we can either embrace social justice or the Church’s liturgical heritage but not both. On its face, this is a false choice. Goodness and beauty, reflected in the Church’s worship and mission, are not two items on a menu of possibilities but two complementary aspects of the mystery of God. If the Anglican Patrimony can help us to recover that understanding and put it into practice, it will have more than served its purpose. Wearing masks in public places is now strongly recommended by public health experts. It could significantly reduce the risk of transmitting the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 to somebody else without knowing it. Therefore, in Catholic terms, choosing to wear a mask in public right now is an act of charity and a work of mercy.Nevertheless, many Americans are opposed in principle to wearing masks, some expressing their opposition vehemently and even violently. The reasons offered vary quite a bit, but many of the arguments seem to come down to liberty. Wearing a mask is uncomfortable, unlikely to be much of a deterrent to my own getting sick (and may even make it more likely since I will be touching my face more), and infringes on my rights.I will leave it to the courts to decide about the thorny legal issues surrounding enforcement of policies that require the wearing of masks. As a Christian, and particularly as a Catholic, I am much more interested in the theological question that this issue raises. Assuming for a second that it is both true that the wearing of masks can help slow the spread of the disease and that it infringes upon our liberty to wear them even in a voluntary capacity, which one of those goods should win out? If both charity (love) and liberty (freedom) are things that Christians ought to practice and value, which one is more important?First, a couple of definitions.For Christians, charity refers not merely to any sort of altruistic action but to what St. Paul points to as the greatest “abiding” gift of God in 1 Corinthians 13. According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, charity is “the theological virtue by which we love God above all things for his own sake, and our neighbor as ourselves for the love of God.” Unlike other virtues, such as prudence or temperance, which human beings can develop within themselves simply through the building of good habits, theological virtues require the grace of God to become effective. We cannot just will ourselves to be loving. God has to plant love in us. Yet our love grows when we cooperate with God’s grace. It is the greatest of all the virtues because God Himself is love. Jesus specifically calls us to “love one another” as a way of becoming more like Him and thereby participating in the divine life (John 15:9-12).In Scripture, the Greek word eleutheria can be translated both as “liberty” and “freedom,” two words that are not entirely interchangeable in English but close enough to be more or less synonymous. Liberty is not a virtue like charity is, but it is a gift from God. According to the Catechism, “Freedom is the power, rooted in reason and will, to act or not to act, to do this or that, and so to perform deliberate actions on one s own responsibility… Human freedom is a force for growth and maturity in truth and goodness; it attains its perfection when directed toward God, our beatitude.” In other words, we may have the ability to make choices about how we live our lives, but we are not truly free until we choose to live in union with God.Are liberty and charity in competition? Perhaps on the surface they seem to be. Certainly, when we engage in acts of charity, we necessarily accept limits and make sacrifices. If I give my money away to the poor, I cannot then use that same money for my own personal benefit. If I choose to get married or have a child, I am bound by love to tend to the well-being of those other people and must give up some of my own liberty in the process.Nevertheless, if this offering up of our liberty is done not by coercion but voluntarily, as an act of love for another human being, it does not ultimately diminish our freedom but rather allows us to become free at a far deeper level. “The more one does what is good,” says the Catechism, “the freer one becomes. There is no true freedom except in the service of what is good and just.” When we seek the good of others ahead of our own, we become more loving and therefore more free to be fully human. Or as St. Paul puts it, “For you were called to freedom, brethren; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love be servants of one another” (Galatians 5:13).Regarding the wearing of masks then, the question cannot be whether we privilege liberty or charity. We have to have basic liberty in order to be able to choose to be charitable, but only one choice actually leads to the fulfillment of both. It is only when we accept the duty to be charitable that we arrive at true freedom. The well respected microbiologist and theologian, Fr. Nicanor Austriaco, OP, made a lengthy post earlier this week explaining the science behind how transmission of Covid-19 takes place and why masks are effective as a deterrent. In referring to the decision of the White House to require the wearing of masks internally to stem an outbreak, he said, “This is morally justifiable, and some may even argue, morally obligatory once you know that masks could minimize viral spread from respiratory droplets.”Of course, life is more complicated than that. There are always exceptions. Some people are not able to wear masks for medical reasons. There also may be times when the good of wearing a mask is outweighed by some other pressing good, the need to communicate in an emergency for instance. Individuals and private entities, including churches, will have to make prudent choices about just when and how to make use of masks for the safety and well being of others.Still, the basic theological and moral principle at play is clear. We cannot grow in knowledge and love of God without also growing in love for other people, including strangers. Jesus models for us the greatest exercise of human freedom when he freely chooses the cross for the sake of the world.Photo by Nickolay Romensky. Used under Creative Commons License. I had the privilege this past week of appearing as a guest on the radio program Theology on Air. It is hosted by a Lutheran pastor and aimed mostly at young Protestants, so while the purpose of my visit was theoretically to talk about comic books, many of the questions posed to me were about differences between Catholic and Protestant theology. This inevitably included discussion of the doctrine of justification and whether or not Catholics believe that what we receive through Christ is sufficient for our salvation or needs a little help from us.I find these kinds of conversations tricky, not because I lack for things to say but because I want to avoid the danger of re-litigating the sixteenth century. I do not believe it does us much good to get stuck there, either defending or excoriating bits of history that are never going to change no matter who wins the debate. Nevertheless, there is spiritual fruit that can be harvested from an honest conversation on this topic, if we can stay in the mode of theology rather than apologetics, that is to say if we can stay in a mode of prayer, since theology is impossible where prayer is absent.So, cards on the table: I receive, believe, and teach, to the best of my ability, what the Catholic Church teaches, which means that I do not believe in justification by faith alone. Truth be told, I was only ever a Johnny-Come-Lately to that particular doctrine anyway. By the time I graduated seminary, I was a full-throated Anglo-Catholic, albeit with an Eastward orientation to my spirituality. My understanding of salvation then as now was largely through the lens of theosis, beautifully summarized by the words of St. Athanasius: “God became man so that men might become gods.” We are saved by being united with God and thereby participating in the divine life of the Trinity.It is not impossible to draw together some version of justification by faith alone with theosis. The Finnish theologian Tuomo Mannermaa, for instance, did some interesting work creating a bridge between Luther’s work and that of the Eastern Fathers. But most renderings of justification by faith alone require letting go of something that is crucial to Catholic doctrine, the idea that we participate in our own salvation. There is no part of what Jesus does for us on the cross that we can take credit for. Even the choice we make to cooperate with the grace of God is a choice that, as St. Thomas Aquinas tells us, is entirely contingent upon God’s graceful action. Yet, that choice is a real choice, and the change that takes place within us is a real change. God does not just decide to treat us as if we were holy but leave us internally rotten. He actually transforms us through union with Christ, rendered possible through the cross and made manifest in the Sacraments. My Lutheran friends like to say, “Sanctification is just getting used to your justification.” Perhaps in a way they are right, but the means by which that unfolds is real transformation, not merely a surface-level realization that we have been passively accepted.All of that said, I think that what is spelled out in the Joint Declaration on Justification made by Lutherans and Catholics in 1999 is helpful in dispelling common myths about where Catholics and Protestants differ on this topic. We tend towards different emphases, which leads us to different pastoral practices. There is a good deal that Catholics can learn from Protestant theology on this topic, particularly from Lutheran theology. There is an absolute emphasis on the cross there that is refreshing in an age when so many churches want to hide the harsh reality of the cross from view. Another of the things my Lutheran friends like to say: “If Jesus didn’t die in your sermon, you didn’t preach the Gospel.” That one requires nuance as well, but it is nevertheless a helpful tool that I still use to evaluate my preaching.Perhaps most helpful is the Protestant insistence on the gift of justification. Catholic doctrine is clear that our salvation is something we can only receive freely from God and could never earn, that “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). Yet we do not always stress this enough. We can give off the impression that salvation is a joint venture in which we are equal partners with God. In the formation of Catholics, we do not always emphasize as we should that the Gospel is not something we are required to do for God (or for others) but something that God has done for us in Christ.Having said that, one of the most beautiful parts of Catholic teaching is the fact that God is presented not as a competitor with humanity but as the one who makes humanity authentically human. It has often felt to me, when listening to the way some Protestants describe justification, that they see it as an either/or situation in which either God acts or we do. We must never work for our own salvation because if we do, that must mean we are taking up the space that rightfully belongs to God. For Catholics, especially if we accept a thomistic view of the nature of God as being itself, the concept that our work could be in competition with God’s work does not make sense. Fr. Nicanor Austriaco explains why:Consider an author writing a note with a pen. Who wrote the note? Yes, the author wrote the note, but in a very real sense, the pen “wrote” it too. Both the author and the pen were needed to write the note. In the language of philosophy, the author is the principal cause of the note, while the pen is the instrumental cause. Both are real causes that explain the existence of the note.Fr. Nicanor is using this analogy in order to explain the way God acts in creation, but it works just as well for the way God acts in our salvation. We are justified by the work of Christ on the cross which is applied to us in the Sacraments. We may or may not have chosen to be baptized, but when we go to Confession, we are certainly choosing to receive this grace from Jesus. In that sense, we are active participants, as is the priest who absolves us. When we go to Mass, we become active players in our own salvation too, though we add nothing to the work of Jesus made manifest in the Sacrament. When we pray for others, we participate in their salvation, as do the saints when they pray for us. When we do good works, we grow in holiness as our love increases. None of this makes us competitors with God any more than the pen is in competition with the author.We are not pens, of course. We have the capacity to say no to the gift of God’s grace. Yet when we say yes, it is not so that we may put on a show for God but so that He may truly be at work in us, changing us from the inside out into what we were always meant to be, prisms that reflect His light. In His generosity and love, God seeks to bring about real transformation in us by allowing us to take part in the mystery of salvation. That is part of the Good News too, not just that we are sinners who have been rescued, but that we are sons and daughters who are being prepared by a life of holiness for that day when the light will shine through us unimpeded. Privacy Cookies: This site uses cookies. 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