Comforting Words on the Festa di Marco

In the second half of the fourth century AD, a non-Christian emperor took the throne. We Christians call him Julian the Apostate.

The new emperor took delight in the internal strife of the Church, which seethed in factions right before his eyes. He thought Christianity would destroy itself. But St. John Henry Newman notes:

In indulging such anticipations of overthrowing Christianity, Julian but displayed his own ignorance of the foundation on which it was built. It could scarcely be conceived that an unbeliever, educated among heretics, would understand the vigor and indestructibility of the true Christian spirit; and Julian fell into the error, to which in all ages men of the world are exposed, of mistaking whatever shows itself on the surface of the Apostolic Community, its prominences and irregularities, all that is extravagant, and all that is transitory, for the real moving principle and life of the system.

The thousand of silent believers, who worshiped in spirit and in truth, were obscured by the tens and twenties of the various heretical factions, whose clamorous addresses besieged the Imperial Court.

(from The Arians of the Fourth Century, Chapter 5, Section 1)

Today we keep the feast of my beloved evangelist patron. St. Mark founded the See of Alexandria, Egypt.

Three centuries later, St. Athanasius sat as one of St. Mark’s successors in office. Through the Arian controversy, the Church in Alexandria held fast to the orthodox faith, even when Pope Liberius wavered. (The pope succumbed only under threat of physical torture, not willingly.)

…Anyhoo, if you’re like me, when you get stressed, you lose yourself in the speeches of William Shakespeare’s Richard II.

Like Act III, Scene 2…

No matter where; of comfort no man speak:
Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;
Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth,
Let’s choose executors and talk of wills:
And yet not so, for what can we bequeath
Save our deposed bodies to the ground?
Our lands, our lives and all are Bolingbroke’s,
And nothing can we call our own but death
And that small model of the barren earth
Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.
For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;
How some have been deposed; some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poison’d by their wives: some sleeping kill’d;
All murder’d: for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear’d and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable, and humour’d thus
Comes at the last and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!
Cover your heads and mock not flesh and blood
With solemn reverence: throw away respect,
Tradition, form and ceremonious duty,
For you have but mistook me all this while:
I live with bread like you, feel want,
Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus,
How can you say to me, I am a king?

Here’s the great Derek Jacobi doing the speech:

Feast of St. George

Our Holy Father Pope Francis’ baptismal patron died as a martyr 1,717 years ago today. The emperor Diocletian sentenced George to death, because the saint refused to recant his Christian faith.

The Father loves the Son and has given everything over to him. Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life.

(John 3:35-36, which we read today at Holy Mass.)

During the ensuing century, after St. George’s martyrdom, the persecutions of Christianity by the Roman emperors ceased. In Milan, in AD 313, the emperor Constantine declared Christianity tolerable.

But the fourth century saw tumult within the Church. Tumult the likes of which we could hardly imagine now. The college of bishops convulsed with party factions; the U.S. Senate of today looks like a club of polite, like-minded friends by comparison.

St. John Henry Newman narrated the hugely complicated business in his book, The Arians of the Fourth Century. I highly recommend reading it. To all past, current, and potential seminarians. (Others might find it rough sledding.)

John Henry Newman

The original faith of the Church needed a word to express itself. Homoousion in Greek, consubstantialem in Latin. With that word, we Christians confess the Incarnation and the Trinity, the essential mysteries of our faith.

Eh, Father?

Let me put it like this: The Son of God shares in the God-ness of God. To practice religion honestly, man must always divide everything that exists into one of two categories. 1. God. 2. Things created by God out of nothing. The eternal Son falls into Category 1, not 2.

We think of this question as settled forever at the Council of Nicaea in AD 325. The Council did settle the question, doctrinally. But not Church-politically.

In ten days, we will keep the anniversary of the death of St. Athanasius. He held fast to the Nicene Creed, through all the internal strife the Church faced in of the fourth century. Newman wrote of Athanasius: “he was the principal instrument, after the Apostles, by which the sacred truths of Christianity have been conveyed and secured to the world.”

Athanasius held fast to the Nicene Creed; he confessed the Trinity and the Incarnation. For his pains, he was excommunicated and exiled five times. All of this after the Council of Nicaea.

The one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church survived the fourth century. She continued, full of life, on Her pilgrimage through time. How? She clung with desperate love to Jesus Christ, the Word of God made flesh.

St. George Day selfie, with the paschal candle still lit after Mass

The Corrupt Generation

After Jesus rose from the dead, He filled St. Peter and the other Apostles with courage. Then they declared to the world the resurrection and the triumph of Jesus. Some who heard the news, and believed it, asked them: “What must we do, then?”

John Henry Newman

St. Peter answered: “Save yourselves from this corrupt generation…Repent and be baptized in Christ for the forgiveness of your sins.”

Save yourselves from this corrupt generation. Now, what exactly does this mean? Should we translate it loosely as, “Run for your lives!” Maybe not exactly.

Is this particular generation more corrupt than any other? We might wince at the thought of the things they did at Woodstock, or during the reign of the Roman Emperor Caligula. But all of human history bears witness to the deeper meaning of this phrase, “corrupt generation.”

The corrupt generation is: Us. Mankind as a whole, the entire kit and caboodle; lock, stock, and barrel. The late, great Cardinal Newman put it like this:

We must each become a new creature; love, fear, and obey God; be just, honest, meek, pure in heart, forgiving, heavenly-minded, self-denying, humble, and resigned. Yes, man is confessedly weak and corrupt. But the Bible enjoins us strictly to be religious and unearthly.

Christ, risen from the grave, can make us serious. Serious about eternal life—the life He Himself now lives. He pours that life out upon us, through His manifold gifts. Jesus can make us holy. Then maybe we can eat a couple pieces of Easter candy and have some wholesome, uncorrupted fun.

Plowing Through A Thousand Difficulties

No one who sets a hand to the plow and looks to what was left behind is fit for the kingdom of God. (Luke 9:62)

Faith doesn’t swerve. Faith reaches the most solid ground, God. We believe; we don’t let go; we don’t fudge, hedge bets, go by halves. To believe in God and in His Christ is to invest everything, our souls, in His truth.

John Henry Newman

Indeed, for us to know anything = knowing a tiny part of what God knows. When we wrap our minds around anything at all, we do it with the God in Whom we believe.

Believing means that every act of our minds co-operates with God; nothing ever happens in there without Him. All knowledge, even if it is something after which we have striven with great effort—all of it is ultimately His gift. For us to doubt Him would be like the 10th floor of a building getting the idea that there is no such thing as a 9th floor, or a 1st-8th floor, or an earth.

Does this mean, though, that the intellectual life of a Christian flows smooth all the time, like melted butter in a little ramekin for dipping your lobster-meat? Not exactly.

When the Lord Jesus prohibited in the strongest terms any defection from faith, He did not simultaneously promise that we would always understand everything. Quite the contrary. He said: “The wind blows where it wills. You hear the sound, but you know not where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”

Faith in God comes as a gift from God. Easiness sometimes comes with it. Often it does not.

When John Henry Newman entered the Catholic Church after decades of inquiry, he did not understand all the Church’s doctrines. In fact, Newman struggled with the most basic doctrines about God’s existence. But he never doubted. As he wrote, “a thousand difficulties do not equal one doubt.”

Newman believed based on the authority of the One in Whom He believed, as we do. Understanding comes as it comes. Again, to quote the great Cardinal:

A man may be annoyed that he cannot work out a mathematical problem…, without doubting that it admits of an answer, or that a certain particular answer is the true one.

On the hard days—on the days when we find ourselves annoyed that we cannot work out the problem—we keep our hands on the plow anyway. We are not dealing with an equal or lesser intelligence, after all; we are dealing with the mountain upon which the little fern of my own mind is growing. Tomorrow is another day. And tomorrow, like today, belongs to the one, true God.

Superstitious?

Leave it to LeBron to talk like he has a ring on his finger, when, in fact, the Heat must still face two teams from Central Time. May the the MVP and Co. stuff King James in a four-game sweep. Then LeBron can sit and watch the Finals with Kobe and their respective hand-puppets…

…Our Holy Father started a new series of catecheses on prayer last Wednesday, and continued it the day before yesterday. Don’t miss.

Here is a good part–about the universality of prayer throughout history, and of kneeling in prayer:

“Digital” man and the caveman alike seek in religious experience the ways to overcome his finitude and to ensure his precarious earthly adventure…In the dynamic of this relationship with the One who gives meaning to existence, with God, prayer has one of its typical expressions in the gesture of kneeling…The posture of kneeling at prayer expresses this acknowledgment of our need and our openness to God’s gift of himself in a mysterious encounter of friendship.

…Thirty years ago today, somebody shot the blessed pope.

Ten years ago, Theodore Cardinal McCarrick laid hands on a tall, kneeling goofball, after the goofball promised to serve the holy altar for life. Happy Friday the 13th!

…If a Jesuit named Conroy has to be the chaplain of the US Congress, I wish it could have been Father Jim Conroy.

…How about if we discuss A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, by Mark Twain?