The Church's First Decision and The First Successor to the Apostles: St. Mathias

 Not everyone, it would seem, is pleased with the current Roman Pontiff.  If that hadn't been clear to me already, it would certainly be apparent in many of the comments some of my recent posts (this one and this one, for instance) have received in various online venues.  Who would have thought it?

     Happily, I'm not writing today to discuss the worthiness (or lack thereof) of Pope Francis for his current job.  Instead we're looking at St. Mathias, whose feast we are celebrating. I mention the current Pope because our discussion of St. Mathias will necessarily involve the papal office, if not the papal personality.

    St. Mathias was the thirteenth Apostle, chosen to replace Judas Iscariot after Judas betrayed the Lord then took his own life. It's interesting that our scriptural sources actually tell us very little about St. Mathias himself.  The only place he is mentioned by name is the passage is the Acts of the Apostles that describes his election:

In those days Peter stood up among the brethren (the company of persons was in all about a hundred and twenty), and said . . .

[click HERE to continue reading this post on Spes in Domino] 

The Power of Christ: Saint Paul vs Caesar

We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose. (Romans 8:28)

    The boxer Robert Fitzsimmons, who was slated to fight the much larger James J. Jeffries in a heavyweight title match in 1902, supposedly quipped: “The bigger they come, the harder they fall.”  While Fitzsimmons failed to demonstrate the truth of his remark on that occasion (he lost the bout to Jeffries in the 8th round), it has become something of a proverb.  How many times have we seen that the more formidable the opponent, the more dramatic the impact when he comes crashing down?

    The nascent Church faced just such an opponent in the days after the ascension of Jesus, an opponent much more formidable than James Jeffries and Robert Fitzsimmons put together.  This man “was ravaging the church, and entering house after house, he dragged off men and women and committed them to prison” (Acts 8:3).  Not satisfied with terrorizing the followers of Christ in Jerusalem, “still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, [he] went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any belonging to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem” (Acts 9:1-2). And yet this man, Saul of Tarsus, reached Damascus a very different man, because on the way he met the Risen Christ:

Now as he journeyed he approached Damascus, and suddenly a light from heaven flashed about him. And he fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?" And he said, "Who are you, Lord?" And he said, "I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting; but rise and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do." The men who were traveling with him stood speechless, hearing the voice but seeing no one. Saul arose from the ground; and when his eyes were opened, he could see nothing; so they led him by the hand and brought him into Damascus. (Acts 9:3-8)

“Oh what a fall was there!”, as Shakespeare’s Mark Antony says of the death of Caesar.  And when Saul fell to the ground it was indeed a great fall, one which the Church commemorated yesterday, as it does every January 25th, as the Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul.  Saul, of course, later calls himself Paul, and goes on to become Saint Paul. While both might have been great falls, each in its own way, Saul's was a very different fall than Caesar's.  Caesar pursued greatness to satisfy his own ambitions, and any lasting good that came of it was simply a happy consequence God’s working everything for good (see the quote from the same St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans at the top of this post).  This working for good  took a very different form in the case of St. Paul himself. When Paul arrives in Damascus the Lord tells a man named Ananias to “come in and lay his hands on him so that he might regain his sight” (Acts 9:12).  Ananias has heard about Paul, and is afraid of him, but the Lord assures him that “he is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the sons of Israel” (Acts 9:15).  Unlike Caesar, who lived only for his own glory, Paul now lives for the Glory of God or, as he himself puts it: “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:20). While Caesar's fall was the end of his life ("Now die, Caesar!"), Saul's was the beginning of new, more glorious life.

The laying on of hands: Joseph Ratzinger (later
Pope Benedict XVI) is made a cardinal

    Likewise, any power that St. Paul and the other Apostles wielded was very different from the sort of power that Caesar fought for.  Caesar’s power died with him under the jealous daggers of conspiratorial senators, and it would take almost two decades of ongoing civil war before another man, his great-nephew Octavian, seized supreme command in the Roman Empire and had himself proclaimed Augustus, the first emperor.  It generally happened that emperors after Augustus gained power through violence and bloodshed, and lost it in the same way.
St. Paul, on the other hand, was simply a conduit for the power of Christ, who tells him "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness" (2 Cor 12:9).  It is a power that comes from outside of him, which was before him, and which continues after him.  We can see this in the fact that yesterday’s feast of the Conversion of St. Paul is usually followed by today’s memorial of Saints Timothy and Titus, just as Timothy and Titus themselves followed Paul (since today is a Sunday, we are not observing the customary feast of Timothy and Titus).  St. Paul made both men bishops by the laying on of hands, just as Ananias had laid hands on him, and wrote letters addressed to both that are now included in the canon of Sacred Scripture. Timothy and Titus likewise passed the power of Christ on to other bishops.  This power is still working through our bishops today, centuries after the bodies and the power of the Roman Emperors have crumbled into nothing.

    The bigger they come, the harder they fall.  We all fall at some point in our lives.  Let us pray that we fall not like Caesar, in a futile pursuit of worldly ambitions, but like St. Paul, born to a new life in Christ.

Pentecost Sunday: Christ's Message is For Everyone and Veni Sancte Spiritus

 Today is Pentecost, one of the great Feasts of the Church, in which we remember how Jesus sent the Holy Spirit upon his Disciples to guide them in their mission of Evangelization and in the governance of his Church.  In the second chapter of the Acts of the Apostles we read that the Apostles, Mary and others were gathered in the Upper Room when there was a rush of mighty wind and tongues of flame.  Not only that, those gathered began speaking “in other tongues”.  The international crowd gathered in Jerusalem, on hearing them, was 

. . .  amazed and wondered, saying, "Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us in his own native language?  Parthians and Medes and Elamites and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphyia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabians, we hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God." (Acts 2:5-11)

Referring to this event, St. Gregory of Agrigentum said:

           

Therefore if somebody should say to one of us, “You have received the Holy Spirit, why do you not speak in tongues?” his reply should be, “I do indeed speak in the tongues of all men, because I belong to the body of Christ, that is, the Church, and she speaks all languages. What else did the presence of the Holy Spirit indicate at Pentecost, except that God’s Church was to speak in the language of every people?”

The Church speaks to everyone because Christ is for everyone, and his language is universal.  Today we have ways of reaching people all over the globe that St. Gregory Agrigentum could not have imagined back in the 6th century, but it's the same Gospel, the same proclamation that the Apostles made 2,000 years ago.

Good Friday: Is It I, Lord?

"The Crucifixion", Rubens

    It seems all too easy for us sometimes to see the Apostles, in their bumbling humanity, as almost comic figures. There are a number of times, for instance, when they are arguing over which is greatest (Luke 22:24, Mark 9:33, and others), clearly missing the point of their Master's teaching. We see another example in last evening's Holy Thursday reading from John’s Gospel (John 13:6-10), where Peter just can’t understand what Jesus means when he washes the Apostles’ feet. Matthew shows us yet another instance of Apostolic confusion in his account of the Last Supper.  After the Apostles have assembled for the meal with Jesus, the Lord says a remarkable thing: "Truly, I say to you, one of you will betray me." (Matthew 26:21).  Were it not so serious a moment, we might be tempted to laugh a little at the Apostles all frantically asking "Is it I, Master?" (Matthew 26:24).  On the one hand, you would think that they know their own hearts, on the other, well . . . maybe they're on to something.

    As it happens, not all of them doubt.  Peter confidently asserts, "Though they all fall away because of you, I will never fall away." (Matthew 26:33)  He’s in for a rude awakening:  Jesus gently corrects the man he named “the Rock”, saying "Truly, I say to you, this very night, before the cock crows, you will deny me three times" (Matthew 26:34). And of course he does. The other Apostles, as it turns out, had a better understanding of their own weakness.

    Yes, it tempting to put a comic spin on the Apostles’ reactions, but that would be a mistake, and not simply because they are holy people to whom we owe respect.  When Jesus says to them, "You will all fall away” (Matthew 26:31), he’s not speaking only to his Apostles, but to all of us who have been his disciples in the millennia since, as well as all those in the years  to come.  They all betrayed him; we all will betray him; I betray him.  Constantly.  That’s why we need the Sacrament of Confession.

    That’s also why we venerate the Cross and meditate on Christ's suffering on Good Friday: because on the Cross Jesus died for us, because of our betrayals, because we fall away . . . because I fall away, not just three times, but over and over again.

O Jesus, Who by reason of Thy burning love for us

hast willed to be crucified

and to shed Thy Most Precious Blood

for the redemption and salvation of our souls,

look down upon us here gathered together

in remembrance of Thy most sorrowful Passion and Death,

fully trusting in Thy mercy;

cleanse us from sin by Thy grace,

sanctify our toil,

give unto us and unto all those who are dear to us our

daily bread,

sweeten our sufferings,

bless our families,

and to the nations so sorely afflicted,

grant Thy peace,

which is the only true peace,

so that by obeying Thy commandments

we may come at last to the glory of heaven.

Amen.

10th Day of Christmas: A God the Unexpected

The Mighty God: The Birth of Christ by Federico Barocci

    Merry Christmas!   Today is the Tenth Day of Christmas.  This is a good day to reflect on the fact that the God revealed in the Nativity is a God who defies our expectations.  Who would expect the infinite, almighty Deity to manifest himself as a tiny baby, born in a cattle stall with the beasts? Who would have thought that wise and exalted visitors would come to this baby from strange lands many miles away with their rich gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, as we will commemorate Sunday in the liturgical celebration of Epiphany?

     Nor did the child grow up to be the sort of Messiah that people expected, not even his own disciples: he rebukes Peter, his chief Apostle, with “Get behind me, Satan!” (Matthew 16:23) because the man who will become the first Pope can’t accept that The Christ must suffer and die in order to save humanity.  And nobody on earth was really expecting what happened on Easter Sunday.

     Of course, none of the above should have been a surprise: it was all foretold by the Prophets, as we saw over and over again in the Advent readings and prayers.  In other words, he’s a God Of The Unexpected mostly because we insist on setting ourselves up to be taken by surprise. But that’s the way we imperfect, broken human beings are: we think we can simply make reality be what we want it to be . . . but God usually has other plans. 

     We can glimpse something of this stubborn arrogance in the story of two of today’s Saints, Zosimus and Athanasius (n.b. – this Athanasius is not the more well-known Athanasius of Alexandria):

Zosimus and Athanasius (d.303) + Martyrs in Cilicia (modern Turkey). They were executed during the persecutions of Emperor Diocletian (r. 284-305). According to one account, Zosimus was tortured and Athanasius, a witness, was so moved that he converted to the faith. Both were then tortured but survived and died in peace after being released. They became hermits. (from www.Catholic.org )

The Roman authorities thought that, if they were brutal enough, they would discourage people from embracing Christianity, but – surprise! – seeing the torture of Zosimus instead drew Athanasius to the Faith.  And his is not an isolated incident: “The blood of the martyrs”, wrote Tertullian, “is the seed of the Church.” Up to the present day, we see that Christianity is strongest when it is under attack.

     We would do well to remember these things when we contemplate the Child in the Manger.  However bad, even disastrous, things may seem (and in a world insistently moving further away from God, they do), we should remember that the same child grows up to promise that the Gates of Hell will not prevail against his Church (Matthew 16:18).  
     Prepare yourself for the unexpected.

Star Trek, Secularism, and Christian Faith

This Throwback post was first published on the blog Principium et Finis on July 25th 2015

   One of the great entertainment success stories of the past half-century has been the Star Trek television and film franchise.  I've enjoyed watching its various iterations since I was a child, at first because it's great fun, but more recently for another reason as well.  I've discovered that, although most of the action is set several centuries in the future, Star Trek provides a useful window into the world-view of late twentieth and early twenty-first century cultural elites, a world-view spread and reinforced through the popular media.

    

Data talks to Worf about faith

In later versions of Star Trek, for instance, perhaps as a reflection of the way that western opinion makers want to celebrate every culture in the world but their own (which they tend to treat with disdain), Earth seems to be the only planet whose inhabitants have "outgrown" their need for religion; everyone else in the galaxy is still fully engaged with the traditions of their forebears.  The interactions of the (mostly human) main characters with these other beings nicely illustrate how our secular friends view those of us who take religion seriously.

    The episode "Rightful Heir" from the series Star Trek: The Next Generation is a good example. It focuses on the the religious practices and beliefs of the fictional alien race of Klingons, in particular their expectation that Kahless, who had founded their empire 1,000 before, would return to them in the flesh.  A Klingon claiming to be Kahless does indeed make an appearance, and a DNA test confirms his identity.  There are incongruities, however, and he is eventually discovered to be a clone created by Klingon priests.  Nevertheless, desite the disappointment of their hopes and the trickery of their religious leaders, at the end we see most of the Klingons still confidently awaiting the coming of their savior.

    I found one scene at the end of the show to be particularly interesting.  It is a dialogue between two of the regular characters: Data, who is an android (a human-like robot who has, apparently, achieved something like consciousness - this is science fiction, after all), and Worf, the only main character of Klingon parentage. The events surrounding Kahless have raised some questions in Data's mind:

Data: May I ask a question?  In the absence of empirical data, how will you determine whether or not this is the real Kahless?

Worf: It is not an empirical matter, it is a matter of . .  . (pause) . . . faith.

Data: (musing) Faith . . . (gesturing to Klingons kneeling before the empty throne of Kahless) They insisted upon waiting here until they see Kahless again.  Their "faith" appears unaffected by his inability to defeat Gowron. They still believe. (thoughtful pause)  I once had what could be considered a crisis of the spirit.

Worf: You?

Data: Yes. The Starfleet officers who first activated me on Omicron Theta told me I was an android - nothing more than a sophisticated machine with human form. However, I realized that if I was simply a machine, I could never be anything else; I could never grow beyond my programming. I found that difficult to accept. So I chose to believe... that I was a person; that I had the potential to be more than a collection of circuits and subprocessors. It is a belief which I still hold.

Worf : How did you come to your decision?

Data: I made . . . a leap of faith.

 

Two thoughts immediately came to mind when I saw this scene again the other night.  First, this is just how secularists perceive religious faith, either pure intuition, as in Worf's case: feelings based on no "empirical evidence"; or a "leap of faith" in the sense that Data uses the term, in which the leaper simply chooses to believe that what he desires to be true is actually the truth.  

     The second thing that struck me is that neither of these versions of "faith" correspond to the Catholic meaning of the word.  To see the difference, compare the scene above to the following passage from the gospel of Matthew:

And in the fourth watch of the night he came to them, walking on the sea.  But when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were terrified, saying, "It is a ghost!" And they cried out for fear.  But immediately he spoke to them, saying, "Take heart, it is I; have no fear."  And Peter answered him, "Lord, if it is you, bid me come to you on the water."  He said, "Come." So Peter got out of the boat and walked on the water and came to Jesus; but when he saw the wind, he was afraid, and beginning to sink he cried out, "Lord, save me." Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, "O man of little faith, why did you doubt?" And when they got into the boat, the wind ceased.  (Matthew 14: 25-32)

   Peter does not need to take a “leap of faith” in the sense that Data means it, nor is he relying on intuition.  He not only sees with his own eyes Jesus walking on the water, he actually walks on water himself, before his faith falters and he sinks.  You can’t get much more empirical than that.  When Jesus tells him that his faith is weak, then, he clearly is not talking about believing something with no evidence: he means trusting what you have truly seen and experienced. Christian Faith is not blind faith.

Allessandro Allori's St. Peter Walking On The Water

    St. Peter himself would later write “Always be prepared to make a defense to anyone who calls you to account for the hope that is in you” (1 Peter 3:15), and in fact there is no shortage of reasons, and no lack of evidence, for God and for Christianity.  There are cogent philosophical arguments from St. Thomas Aquinas and others, well-attested miracles, and the witness of countless Christians whose lives were transformed when they put their trust in the promises of Christ.  The evidence is there.  What is lacking is the will to see it for what it is, to trust what we have seen and heard.

    It is important to bear this distinction in mind when discussing faith with those who don't share it, or who have not been well-formed in their faith.  If we accept the Star Trek version of Christian faith we put ourselves in the position of having to defend a position built on fantasy.  The reality, however, is that we do have the Truth, and we really are prepared to give an account of the hope in us. Let's leave the science fiction explanations to the other guys.

Dionysius the Areopagite: a Believer Among The Skeptics

Icon of Dionysius the Areopagite

Today (October 9th) is the feast day of Dionysius the Areopagite.  We know very little for certain about this Saint, who is often confused with St. Dionysius of Paris (St. Denis), Patron of France, and also with a mystical writer living half a millennium later known as the Pseudo-Dionysius.  We do know that today’s Saint was among a handful of listeners converted by St. Paul when he spoke in Athens (Acts 17:16-34).  Luke gives him the title “Areopagite”, which suggests that he was one of the legal scholars or philosophers who frequented the Athenian assembly place known as the Areopagus (Hill of Mars). This is where he heard St. Paul speak.  

    An Areopagite was an unlikely convert, and the fact that Dionysius heard St. Paul at all was the result of a string of (seemingly) random events.  As Luke tells it in Acts, Paul doesn’t originally seem to have intended to go to Athens at all: he went there fleeing from hostile crowds in Thessalonika and Beroea.  Once he was there, however, the Apostle went about doing what he usually did:

Now while Paul was waiting for them at Athens, his spirit was provoked within him as he saw that the city was full of idols. So he argued in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons, and in the market place every day with those who chanced to be there. (Acts 17:16-17)

Athens being Athens, there were some who took a professional interest in what St. Paul had to say:

Some also of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers met him. And some said, "What would this babbler say?" Others said, "He seems to be a preacher of foreign divinities"--because he preached Jesus and the resurrection. And they took hold of him and brought him to the Areopagus, saying, "May we know what this new teaching is which you present? For you bring some strange things to our ears; we wish to know therefore what these things mean." (Acts 17:18-20)

    The traditional designation of what comes next as the “Sermon on the Areopagus” can be misleading.  The Greek word that we see translated as “took hold of him”, in the passage above, ἐπιλαβόμενοι, comes from a word that means to “seize” or “arrest”. St. Paul, then, was not so much invited to come share his views as he was brought in for questioning.  However he got there, he saw an opportunity to evangelize, and he made the most of it.  Like any good teacher he knows his audience, and so he starts out with some praise to put them in a receptive frame of mind:

"Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious.” (Acts 17:22)

He quickly uses this opening to bring them in the direction he wants to go, using their own religious observance to introduce Jesus Christ:

For as I passed along, and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, 'To an unknown god.' What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you (Acts 17:23).

He goes on to tell the Athenians that this God, “unknown” no longer, is the Creator of the Universe and, in contrast to the Olympian gods of the Greeks, is completely apart from and beyond His creation; he has made us to seek him out; we are fashioned in his image, as opposed to pagan idols that we model after ourselves. Paul assures them that he forgives our previous worship of these false divinities because we knew no better, but warns that now that the full truth has been revealed, we will be held responsible, and that he has given us a sign of all these things by raising Jesus Christ from the dead (Acts 17:24-31).

St. Paul On The Areopagus, by Mariano Fortuny

    This last point proves to be a little too much for some of his listeners, who “mocked” when “they heard of the resurrection of the dead” (Acts 17:32); others seemed at least to keep an open mind, saying "We will hear you again about this"(Acts 17:32).  A small number went further:

But some men joined him and believed, among them Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris and others with them (Acts 17:34).

A small beginning, it seems, but Jesus tells us in another place in Scripture that small beginnings often lead to something much greater:

"The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed which a man took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches." (Matthew 13:31-32)

    It’s not difficult to see in the learned sceptics of the Areopagus the forerunners of today’s cultural leaders and opinion makers.  As we saw above, St. Paul finds a way to respect his listeners without watering down his own message, even when most of them seem to reject the Good News, just like those in John’s Gospel who say “This is a hard saying.  Who can listen to it?” (John 6:60).  And just as Jesus allows those doubting disciples to walk away, Paul doesn’t try to water down his message to win back the scoffers.  And of course not all of them turn a deaf ear: Dionysius, Damaris, and a few others will be the seed of a much greater Christian community in Athens.

    The spirit of our age would probably look familiar to the crowd on Athens’ Mars Hill, an age sceptical of everything except its own cleverness.  We can take heart from St. Paul’s boldness in proclaiming the Gospel, and St. Dionysius’s courage in the face of the hostility or indifference of his peers.  May God grant us all their steadfast Faith.

Why Jeopardy Doesn't Know Judas

(This Throwback post was first published May 15th, 2015.)

     Sometimes a single detail captures and gives flesh to something much larger.  For instance, today a person of my acquaintance (a non-Catholic Christian) told me with evident disgust that he recently saw a television quiz show in which not one of three contestants could name the betrayer of Jesus.  Just think about that.  What do you think the odds were forty years ago of picking three reasonably well educated adults in the United States at random and finding that none of them could name Judas Iscariot?  We might in fact have been mildly surprised (at least) to find even one such person, because the Christian worldview, and the Christian story, had been so deeply embedded in the culture for so long that even the non-religious and non-Christians generally had a pretty good idea of the major players in the Biblical drama. No longer.

Who is that guy, and why is he kissing Jesus?
(The Taking of Jesus by Caravaggio)

     Lest you think I’m just another old-timer pining the “good old days” that never were, take a look at this recent report, “Five Trends Among The Unchurched”, from the Barna Group, a Christian-oriented research firm.  Barna’s five trends are that 1) “Secularization is on the Rise”, which is to say that each generation is not simply less religious in terms of numbers, but also more radically separated from religion; 2) “People Are Less Open to the Idea of Church”, as measured by the number of unchurched who are open to appeals from their believing fellow citizens; 3) “Churchgoing Is No Longer Mainstream”: the percentage of Americans who have never attended church regularly increased by more than 50%, from 15% of the adult population to 23% of the adult population, from 1993 to 2013; 4) “There Are Different Expectations of Church Involvement”, or more simply people are much less clear on what “church-going” is all about, including the importance of Sunday worship, or staying in a particular faith community; 5) “There Is Skepticism about Churches’ Contribution to Society”, as Barna explains:

Although many of the churchless hold positive views of churches, a substantial number also have no idea what Christians have accomplished in the nation, either for the better or for the worse.  When the unchurched were asked to describe what they believe are the positive and negative contributions of Christianity in America, almost half (49%) could not identify a single favorable impact of the Christian community, while nearly two-fifths (37%) were not able to identify a single negative impact.

Overall, Barna’s report paints a picture of a society that is increasingly “indifferent” to religion, comprised of a growing number of people who live unaware of any religious dimension to their lives, and who don’t perceive any need for it. Moreover, while most unchurched people today have at least some knowledge of, and experience with, Christian belief, the report shows that with every generation we are seeing more and more people with no direct connection to Christianity at all.  As I said a few years ago in an essay I wrote for Catholic Exchange:

Our civilization has been shaped by Christianity for almost two thousand years.  Christian beliefs, attitudes, and moral convictions (commonly referred to as the Judeo-Christian worldview) are woven into all of our customs and institutions . . . anyone raised in the West over the last two millennia has been formed, to a large degree, by that Christocentric worldview, whether they consciously embrace it or not.  More than one commentator has remarked that even the “new atheists” such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have not jettisoned principles such as the dignity of the human person (not a universal value by any stretch) or a Judeo-Christian concept of justice – they employ these very ideas, in fact, as weapons against Christianity . . . Without its source and foundation of Christian belief, however, the worldview itself will quickly wither . . . a society that abandons faith will soon be resubmerged in paganism.

The loss of that worldview will have a profound impact (what we have seen so far is just the beginning).  In his eye-opening book Who Really Cares Arthur C. Brooks copiously documents the fact that believing Christians are not just more generous, but much more generous, of both their time and their treasure than other people, and correspondingly more honest, courteous, etc.  Any objective observer would have to conclude, based on the data, that a less Christian society would be proportionally less generous, honest, and courteous.  Not only that, but people who are so disconnected from any experience of religion at all, and perceive no need for any religious dimension in their life, are going to be much harder to evangelize. At the same time, greater efforts at evangelization will be necessary, because our Western Society, which at one time could with some amount of truth be called Christendom, is quickly reverting to Mission Territory.

     Evangelizing a neo-pagan culture presents a very different challenge than did the conversion of the original pagans.  The ancient pagans found Christianity to be strange, and sometimes counterintuitive (“love your enemies” [Matthew 5:44] is still tough for us to swallow), but the neo-pagans believe that Christianity has been tried and found wanting, and most of what they hear from the media and popular culture is negative, which is why barely half of the unchurched people cited above could think of a single good thing the Church has done, while almost two-thirds could think of something bad.  We need to work as never before at being “wise as serpents and as innocent as doves” (Matthew 10:16), to be that city on a hill (Matthew 5:14) without looking like hypocrites, to preach without “preaching”.  How to do that I don’t know, except that we’ll get nowhere without prayer, the sacraments (especially Confession and the Eucharist . . . and Confession),  and a firm reliance on love and God’s Providence.  Lord, have mercy on us.

Bach Ascension Oratorio

Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and lifting up his hands he blessed them. While he blessed them, he parted from them, and was carried up into heaven. And they worshipped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and were continually in the temple blessing God. (Luke 24:50-53)

Benjamin West, "The Ascension"

 Today we celebrate the event described in the passage above from Luke’s Gospel in the Feast of the Ascension.  I have heard the Ascension of Jesus compared to a graduation or commencement, an event that marks somebody moving on to higher level.  Following the Ascension Christ would now be working not just in Galilee and Judea, but in and for the whole world, and for all time. It also marks a new level for His followers, who will now be not merely disciples, but The Church, the Mystical Body of Christ, which will be see its official inauguration ten days later at Pentecost.     

    The the clip below of the magnificent opening to Bach's Ascension Oratorio seems a fitting way to celebrate today’s feast.  It's a beautiful performance, but the equally beautiful painting used in the Youtube clip is actually a depiction of the Transfiguration.  To make amends, I'm posting Benjamin West’s dramatic depiction of the Ascension as well.

(Also today on Principium et Finis - Does God force Salvation on us at gunpoint? “Our Eternal Destiny: Armed Robbery, or A Warm Place By The Fire?”)