What We Owe to Caesar

       Deciding how to balance what we really owe to Caesar with what we owe to God is a perennial issue for a believing Christian.  In the age of Covid and related governmental tomfoolery that question has become, let us say, even more acute.  This coming weekend I'll take a more specific look at recent events; today I'm posting an updated version of something I first published a few years ago drawing upon the work of a certain Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger when he was head of Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.  It's an oldie (in keeping with Throwback Thursday), but, as they say, a goodie.

Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI)

One need not buy in to the confusing and often intentionally obfuscating "Wall of Separation" language here in the United States to understand that the proper role for a believing Christian in public and political life is not always clear. As in other areas of decision-making, we need to apply our personal judgment in determining how to act in specific situations, but we should form those decisions in the light of the moral law and the teaching of the Church.  An enormously helpful guide in sorting out these questions is the Doctrinal Note On Some Questions Regarding The Participation Of Catholics In Political Life [text here], published November 2002 with the authorization of Pope (now Saint) John Paul II, and under the name of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, then Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, now Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI.

     The Doctrinal Note, despite its brevity (it’s only about eight pages long) is a wonderfully rich yet concise discussion . . . 

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Why the Church is not a Granfalloon

    The word "community" must test well in focus groups. It pops up everywhere.  Pay attention to advertisements, and you'll find that all sorts of people and businesses are claiming to be able to provide it to you. Just one example: I heard an ad on the radio last week from a local savings bank suggesting I go there for "community" - and here I thought the bank was just a place to keep my money.  

   

  I'm not the only one to notice how often the term community is tossed around. Casey Chalk had an article in Crisis this past week called "The Problem with Peloton and Other Faux Communities." Peloton, apparently, is a self-proclaimed community in which one can commune online with other people around the world while pedalling a false bicycle that never actually goes anywhere . . . and the starting price is only $1,900.  Chalk contrasts the simulacrum of community offered by Peloton and other online entities  . . . 

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Aborigines, Atheists, and the Authenticity of the Gospels

 

A few years ago I ran across an amazing story ("Ancient Sea Rise Tale Told Accurately For 10,000 Years") from Scientific American, detailing how aboriginal Australians have preserved, via oral tradition, accurate information about geographical features that have been underwater since the end of the last Ice Age, circa 10,000 years ago. The article is fascinating for its own sake, but it also shows some of the limitations of the modern skeptical, ostensibly scientific (but more accurately “scientistic”) worldview.  Not only that, it has some relevance to our Faith, and particularly to the question of the veracity of Scripture.  In the post below I discuss how the amazing memories of Australia's oldest inhabitants inform our defense of the authenticity of the Gospels.

  Let’s start with the scriptural question.  A common line of attack by well-trained atheist enthusiasts is that the books of the New Testament weren’t even written down until 30-60 years after the death of Jesus: how can we expect them to be reliable?  There are a number of good answers to this . . .

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Welcome to Mission Territory

 "When a man stops believing in God he doesn’t then believe in nothing, he believes anything."

 

G. K. Chesterton

    You have probably run across the quote above, usually attributed to G.K. Chesterton.  While Chesterton never actually said it in quite those words, it does appear that he really did express this sentiment in a somewhat different form in several places (for more information, see this discussion on the website of The Apostolate of Common Sense).  More to the point, the events of the recent past have shown this observation by the  "The Prince of Paradox" to be tragically on target.

      In that regard, allow me to direct your attention to some other quotes (albeit somewhat less witty) that you have probably run across.  In the run up to last year's election yard signs started popping up with a rainbow colored litany that ran something like this . . . 

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God's Existence isn't a Dark Matter

 

"Ancient of Days" by William Blake,
 from Europe a Prophecy, 1794

Once upon a time I taught in a (more or less) Catholic high school.  Occasionally I was called upon to teach religion to the bright-eyed young men and women of the 9th grade. At the time the so-called "New Atheists" (Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, etc.) were in vogue, and so class usually contained two or three students eager to try out the  latest anti-Christian tropes that they had picked up online or wherever it is that aspiring atheist proselytizers hang out.  Needless to say, we had many a lively discussion. A number of these discussions became blog posts.

      In the course of these conversations I became aware just how much our educational system and our cultural institutions have become imbued with an unspoken materialist  orientation. Virtually all my students, even professed Christians, seemed to take it for granted that a transcendent God who cannot be measured or detected with scientific instruments could not be shown to exist . . .

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Something Strange is Happening: Holy Saturday

 Something strange is happening—there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness. The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep.

Those are the opening sentences in the non-scriptural reading in today's Office of Readings, an "ancient homily on Holy Saturday." It's true that Holy Saturday is not quite like any other day in the liturgical calendar.  There is a pause after the intense liturgical activity of Holy Thursday and Good Friday.  There is a sense of expectancy, and, as the author of the reading above put it, "a great silence and stillness."

     So it seems, to us.  If we read on, we see that the King may appear, to us, to be "asleep" but that is not really the case . . .

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Christ Came to Serve (Holy Thursday)

 He said to them, "But now, let him who has a purse take it, and likewise a bag. And let him who has no sword sell his mantle and buy one.  For I tell you that this scripture must be fulfilled in me, 'And he was reckoned with transgressors'; for what is written about me has its fulfilment." And they said, "Look, Lord, here are two swords." And he said to them, "It is enough." (Luke 22:36-38)

"St. Peter Cuts Off Slave's Ear" by Duccio (c. 1300)

      I often find it easy to identify with Peter and the other Apostles when they are slow to catch on to what their Master is saying.  In the passage above, from Luke’s account of the Last Supper, there’s an almost comical quality to their too literal understanding of Christ’s sword imagery.  I picture Jesus shaking his head, with just a hint of a wry smile, as he says “It is enough.”  And yet this is a very serious moment, the Lord’s last instructions to his closest associates before he goes out to meet a horrifying death.  And later that same evening, Peter uses one of those two swords to mutilate a man in the gang that has come to arrest Jesus; nobody smiles at that.

  In the passage below from John’s Gospel, one of the readings at this evening’s Mass of the Lord’s Supper, we see something very similar . . . 

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