A Tale of Two Sundays: God's Love is Universal

This Throwback Thursday post was first published on Sept 5th 2015

The Universal Church

The Martyrdom of St. Ignatius of Antioch

   The word “catholic”, meaning “universal” (from greek κατά, “according to” and ὅλος, “the whole”) has been associated with the Christian Church almost from the beginning.  It’s first surviving written appearance is in the letters of St. Ignatius of Antioch, who was martyred in the year 107 A.D., less than eighty years after the death of Christ.  The matter-of-fact way in which he uses the term suggests that it was already familiar to his readers.  In chapter 8 of his letter to the Smyrnaeans, for instance, he says:

Let that celebration of the Eucharist be considered valid which is held under the bishop or anyone to whom he has committed it. Where the bishop appears, there let the people be, just as where Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church.

The term initially was meant to identify the Church, along with all the doctrines and practices, that was authoritative for all Christians, as opposed to heresy, from the Greek αἵρεσις, “a choosing”.  A heretic was someone who chose only certain things from the Universal Church, while rejecting others, thus cutting himself off from the ecclesial body and the tradition established by Jesus Christ himself and handed on by his Apostles.

    We can also say that the Church is "catholic" in other senses as well.  It is “universal” in that it embraces the entire history of Christianity, for instance: not only the experiences of our forebears contained in Holy Scripture and the generations of believers since the Bible was codified, but also those believers themselves, who still participate in the life of the Church as members of the Church Suffering in Purgatory and the Church Triumphant in Heaven.

   The primary place in which those of us alive here on Earth (in the Church Militant) experience the catholicity of the Church is in the Holy Eucharist, where we are all joined to our One Lord by partaking in His Body and Blood (hence the term “Communion”).  I have suggested previously [here] that the use of Latin in the Western Church reinforced, in a very effective, concrete way, the reality of that communion, but it is the Mass itself (and really Christ through the Mass, particularly in the Eucharist) that unites us.  Whether we attend the Extraordinary form in Latin or the Ordinary form in any language you could name, we are participating in the One Sacrifice of Calvary, and also in the liturgy that unfolds eternally before the throne of God in Heaven.  I had a beautiful reminder of how the Mass can embody the catholicity of the Church over the past two Sundays, when I and my family celebrated the Eucharist away from our home parish.

At The VA Hospital

Togus VA Medical Center, Augusta, ME

    The first Mass was was at a Veterans Administration hospital, where every Sunday volunteers from the Knights of Columbus, along with their families, take turns bringing wheelchair-bound veterans to the Eucharistic celebration.  The veterans seemed to appreciate our company, and it was a very moving experience for us.  The Liturgy itself was inspirational as well, in spite of the unadorned, institutional blue cinder block walls of the non-denominational chapel.  There was only one tangible external detail, aside from the priest’s vestments, to remind us of the transcendent nature of what we were doing: father placed a crucifix in front of him on the altar, on which he fixed his gaze as he offered the Eucharistic Sacrifice.  Pope Benedict has recommended this practice in response to the criticism that the Mass versus populum (facing the people) gives the impression that priest and congregation are addressing each other, rather than together directing our prayers to God.  This is the first time, at least that I can recall, that I’ve seen a priest adopting Papa Benedetto’s simple expedient for orienting ourselves toward our Our Lord with this arrangement. The Gospel reading on this particular Sunday was the Bread of Life Discourse from John Chapter 6, and Father spoke eloquently on the True Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.  While he didn’t deal explicitly with our surroundings, our gratitude for God’s gift of his own body to us was all the more powerful for the testimony of the severely disabled men worshipping with us, who had also sacrificed their bodies for others.

At The College

The Chapel at Thomas More College

    This past weekend we attended a very different Mass at Thomas More College in Merrimack, New Hampshire.  It was a beautiful celebration of the Ordinary form, simple and understated but still incorporating many traditional details that brought to mind the timelessness of the Eucharistic Liturgy, and which helped to redirect our attention from ourselves to our Lord: celebration ad orientem, some of the prayers in Latin, an altar server holding a patten under the chin while we knelt for communion, etc. (for a fuller discussion, see my post here on a previous Mass, which was the same in most particulars).  On this occasion, the second reading was from the letter of James:

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this:

to care for orphans and widows in their affliction

and to keep oneself unstained by the world.

And Father accordingly spoke in his homily of the need for us to live out our faith, and particularly our obligation to make the love of Christ a reality in our lives.

God Is Love

The Crucifixion by Marco Palmezzano

    There is an interesting symmetry here: in the first Mass, with few external signs of the transcendent, and which many of us were attending for the purpose of “caring for” (as the Apostle James says) the hospital patients, the Gospel and the homily invited us to look beyond the here and now to Jesus Christ. In the second mass, where much loving attention was devoted to the external details that emphasize the reverence due to the Real Presence of the Second Person of the Trinity, we were asked to direct ourselves to the material needs of the less fortunate among us.  

    The common thread is love: Christ’s love in offering himself for us, our love for him as expressed in the reverence of our worship, and our love for each other as manifested in our care for others.  The Beloved Disciple tells us that “God is Love” (1 John 4:8), and Jesus himself says:

A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another. (John 13:34-35)

Piety and Charity, then, aren’t opposites, or even separate: in fact, for followers of Jesus Christ they are inseparable, two sides of the same coin.  And we encounter them in every Mass, wherever it is offered, and whatever it looks like.  God’s Love is universal.

What's So Funny 'Bout Peace, Love, & Ecumenism?

An earlier version of this Worth Revisiting post was first published December 14th, 2014. To enjoy the work of other faithful Catholic bloggers see Worth Revisiting Wednesday, hosted by Elizabeth Reardon at theologyisaverb.com and Allison Gingras at reconciledtoyou.com.  

“I do not pray for these only, but also for those who believe in me through their word, that they may all be one; even as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee, that they also may be in Us, so that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.” (John 20:16-27)

Benedict XVI and John Zizioulas, Orthodox metropolitan of Pergamon

 It seems clear from the scripture passage above that Christ does not want his body (i.e., the Church) to be divided, and that the failure of “those who believe” in Him to be one is an impediment to evangelization. And yet the division of His Mystical Body into numerous different churches and communities is an ongoing scandal.  We might well wonder whether any sort of unity is really possible.  How could it come about?  What would it look like?

     As it happens, Pope Benedict XVI gave a talk on just this topic to a gathering of Protestant and Orthodox Christians in Cologne, Germany, nine [now eleven] years ago (story and full text here), drawing in part on St. John Paul II’s encyclical Ut Unum Sint [text here], in part on his own reflections.  Benedict warns his listeners (and us) that unity is something that we ourselves can’t make happen, but that “it it is the Lord who gives unity, that we do not create it, that it is he who gives it but that we must go to meet him.”  
     He does suggest that part of the answer lies in Christians of different communities uniting against common adversaries in the wider world:

Our divisions are contrary to the will of Jesus and they disappoint peoples' expectations. I think that we must work with new energy and dedication to bring a common witness into the context of these great ethical challenges of our time.  

     At the same time Benedict recognizes that there are real differences between different Christian traditions: he points out that, from the Catholic perspective, “This unity, we are convinced, indeed subsists in the Catholic Church, without the possibility of ever being lost”. Real unity can only be achieved within the Church established by Jesus Christ, and in accordance with the Truth handed on by Christ. At the same time, he recognizes that we Catholics cannot reasonably demand that Protestants, for instance, simply jettison their entire  experience of faith:

On the other hand, this unity does not mean what could be called ecumenism of the return: that is, to deny and to reject one's own faith history. Absolutely not! It does not mean uniformity in all expressions of theology and spirituality, in liturgical forms and in discipline.

This looks like something of an impasse: how can we do both of these things?  Well, we can’t. Pope Benedict goes on to say:

It is obvious that this dialogue can develop only in a context of sincere and committed spirituality. We cannot "bring about" unity by our powers alone. We can only obtain unity as a gift of the Holy Spirit. Consequently, spiritual ecumenism – prayer, conversion and the sanctification of life – constitutes the heart of the meeting and of the ecumenical movement (cf. “Unitatis Redintegratio”, n. 8; “Ut Unum Sint”, 15ff., 21, etc.). It could be said that the best form of ecumenism consists in living in accordance with the Gospel.    [my bold]

Unity, then, will only come as a form of Grace, which we cannot create, but with which we must cooperate if is to be fruitful.  Our cooperation here, as in the rest of the Christian life, takes the form of fidelity, that is, “living in accordance with the Gospel.”      

     In his closing, Pope Benedict describes what fidelity of this sort looks like:

I see good reason in this context for optimism in the fact that today a kind of "network" of spiritual links is developing between Catholics and Christians from the different Churches and Ecclesial Communities: each individual commits himself to prayer, to the examination of his own life, to the purification of memory, to the openness of charity.  

Prayer, first of all, which is calling upon God’s help and submitting to his will; examination of life and purification of memory, in order to remove obstacles emanating from pride, resentment, or decisive emotional attachments, and third, as a sort of summation (just where St. Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians 13:13), charity, love.  All must be done in a spirit of love toward our separated brethren in Christ.

Russell Moore

     I was reminded of this decade-old talk by the now Pope Emeritus when I ran across an interview the other day that Kathryn Lopez conducted with Russell Moore [here], president of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.  Moore had just returned from the Vatican where he had spoken at a conference on men, women, family, complementarity and various other related unfashionable topics.  There are some interesting connections between his comments and some of the points Benedict made in his talk.

     First of all, when Lopez asks “What was the ecumenical dynamic like”, Moore answers: “Well, this wasn’t one of those ‘let’s pretend we all agree on everything’ ecumenical gatherings, and that’s one of the reasons it was so productive.” He goes on to explain that

Jewish leaders  . . .  Mormons and Taoists and Buddhists spoke from their perspective, without pretending to be part of some generic “faith-based community.” The pope was Catholic. This was one of the few such gatherings I’ve attended where theology was taken seriously, both in our agreements and in our differences. Probably more important than the actual sessions, though, were the coffee breaks and the meals, where we had deep conversations about things that mattered. By the end of the week, I think many of us learned to love one another more.

What stands out for me here (aside from the encouraging endorsement of Pope Francis’s Catholicity: more on that below) is, first of all, the fidelity of all the participants to their own traditions.  Without such fidelity, there can be no authenticity, and without authenticity there can be no love.  And of course as Christians we recognize the importance of personal relationships: do we not come to know and love God through the person of the Man Jesus Christ?  Notice also, for Moore as for Benedict, the key thing is Love, which can only happen between persons, not institutions.

     Moore’s comments on the Catholic Church are of interest as well, particularly in light of Pope Benedict’s talk.  When Lopez asks why “it is important for the Catholic Church to lead on these things”, he answers

For most of our history, English and American Baptist Christians thought the greatest threat to religious liberty would come from the Roman Catholic Church. Now we find that some of our greatest allies on religious freedom are Roman Catholics. The threat to our religious liberties comes from a different papacy than we thought — that of a secularizing statism that seeks to pave over consciences with government power.

This would seem to be an example of what Benedict meant by bringing “common witness into the context of these great ethical challenges of our time.”   Of Pope Francis in particular Moore says:

I was especially cheered by his comments on marriage, especially given the media confusion just weeks earlier over the synod deliberations on the family. Pope Francis made it clear that he believes male/female complementarity is essential to marriage and that this cannot be undone or erased by modern ideologies. He also made clear that he believes that every child has the right to both a mother and a father.

It’s worth noting that the Baptist leader not only welcomes papal leadership in the cultural struggle, but seems as disappointed as many of us Catholics about the confusion emanating from the recent Synod on the Family.

     There is much else that is of interest in Lopez’s interview with Russell Moore, more than I can discuss here, but I’ll look at one last thing.  In response to a question about Christmas, Moore makes the following observations:

. . . the Christmas season ought to drive us to the biblical text, which is not all tinsel and garlands. Instead, the Christmas narrative is set in the context of spiritual warfare, of a light that is shining out of darkness.

For several years, I’ve been convinced that the model we most need in this day is that of Joseph of Nazareth. In a day when fathers are seen as expendable, we should look at Joseph, who sacrificed his own future for his wife and child. In a world filled with orphans in need of families, we should look at the example of this adopting father who poured out himself to become a father to one who was of no biological relation to him.

The Holy Family

It’s refreshing to hear a prominent Baptist speaking of St. Joseph in this way; he sounds almost Catholic (as it happens, I have made similar observations about the importance of St. Joseph: here for instance).  

     Of course, I’m not saying that we are seeing the end of the Reformation era divisions in the Church, or even the beginning of the end (to paraphrase Winston Churchill).  I do believe that such signs of the thawing of emotional barriers, and the working of the Power of Love, are reasons for Hope.  I propose that during this upcoming Advent, the Season of Hope, we make a point of praying for the intercession of St. Joseph, Foster-father of the Son of God,  Watchful defender of Christ,  Head of the Holy Family (and hence for the entire Christian Family), for healing the divisions in his Son’s Mystical Body.

O God, who in Thine ineffable providence didst vouchsafe to choose blessed Joseph to be the spouse of Thy most holy Mother: grant, we beseech Thee, that we may have him for an intercessor in heaven, whom we venerate as our protector on earth. Who livest and reignest world without end. Amen.