Church, It's Time.

I will be out of town helping my father and step-mom move into their new apartment in Branson MO starting tomorrow morning. So, for the next few days I may not be blogging much. As a result of this family obligation I will also miss the big celebration going on tomorrow in St. Paul.

No, I'm not talking about the Taste of Minnesota. I'm talking about the 30 bishops and numerous other clergy who will be joining several thousand other people to wlecome Co-Adjutor Archbishop John Neinstedt to our Archdiocese tomorrow.

Sorry, Archbishop Neinstedt.

In this case family comes first, and I imagine you would approve. I will miss all the pageantry of being there when the papal legate reads the Letter of Appointment from His Holiness Benedict XVI.

The choirs, The music, The Mass, The party afterwards.

[Sigh]

But I'll use the occasion to get up on the soap box now and preach one more time about the need for unity in the Church.

Church, it's time.

We need to rally around our visible point of unity. We need to do it, because our new Archibshop has chosen as his motto "Ut Unum Sint" = "That They May Be One." It will appear prominently on his Episcopal coat of arms. Yes, I know that coat-of-arms stuff sounds kind of old-fashioned, but it's also kind of cool.

That's also the prayer of our Lord Jesus for His Church, as recorded in John 17:21-22. He prays this prayer for us before the Father.

It's also the title of Servant of God John Paul II's 1995 letter, appealing for unity inside the Catholic Church and also seeking reconciliation with our closest Christian cousins, our Eastern Christian brothers and sisters, as well as with other ecclesial bodies.

But, it's not only that. It's also a way of life, of thinking and living in and with the Church.

You know, I didn't start life as a Roman Catholic out this way almost a decade ago. I was more the "cafeteria-style" Catholic back then. Like Julie Andrews, I had a "few of my favorite things" which I clung to. Eucharist. Social Justice. Reconciliation.

I held these treasures close to me when I felt inscure in the storm. Everything I disagreed with or just didn't understand in the Catholic faith, I had little time for.

But as I got more comfortable with the Faith I began to do some exploring. Then, I found to be true what G.K. Chesterton reported in his little treatise The Catholic Church and Conversion:

"At the last moment of all, the convert feels as if he were looking through a little crack or a crooked hole that seems to grow smaller as he stares at it; but it is an opening that looks toward the Altar.

Only, when he has entered the Church, he finds that the Church is much larger inside than it is outside. He has left behind him the lop-side-edness of lepers' windows and even in a sense the narrowness f Gothic doors; and he is under vast domes as open as the Renaissance and as universal as the Republic of the world."
Ironically, I have found greater freedom and expansiveness in submitting myself (I hate even to use that phrase but is the only one that fits) to the Church's living magisterium. This new freedom is greater by far than anything I ever knew in all my years of academic research, theological exploring or pastoral free-lancing. I only wish that I had come to this place earlier in my life.

We all have the opportunity to do that, to renew that commitment to Catholic truth, in a significant way with the arrival of our new Shepherd and Teacher.

Democracy of the Dead

I sit here among my books in the middle gloaming between the feasts of two great churchmen, Cyril of Alexandria and Irenaeus of Lyon.

I sit quietly, humbly wondering how we could be so privileged to belong in the very same Church which graced the world with these men and their lofty thoughts. Indeed, very little of what I read today in theology even approaches what they did. Were they closer to the fount of Wisdom? Yet, we have the same sacraments, the same God, the same Spirit.

I understand once again the wisdom of G.K. Chesterton, who wrote in chapter 4 of his book Orthodoxy

"Tradition means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about."

In honor of the Bishop Martyr of Lyon, from Irenaeus I have chosen a most poetic creedal statement and a humble prayer to the Virgin. In this last age of the world I find very little that can compare with this exalted Christology and humble Marian devotion.

With regard to Christ,

the law and the prophets and the evangelists have proclaimed

that He was born of a virgin,

that He suffered upon a beam of wood,

and that He appeared from the dead;

that He also ascended to the heavens,

and was glorified by the Father,

and is the Eternal King;

that He is the perfect Intelligence,

the Word of God, who was begotten before the light;

that He was the Founder of the universe,

along with it (light), and the Maker of man;

that He is All in all:

Patriarch among the patriarchs

Law in the laws;

Chief Priest among priests;

Ruler among kings;

the Prophet among prophets;

the Angel among angels;

the Man among men;

Son in the Father;

God in God;

King to all eternity.

For it is He who sailed [in the ark] along with Noah

and who guided Abraham;

who was bound along with Isaac,

and was a Wanderer with Jacob;

the Shepherd of those who are saved,

and the Bridegroom of the Church;

the Chief also of the cherubim,

the Prince of the angelic powers; God of God;

Son of the Father; Jesus Christ;

King for ever and ever. Amen.

Take Me As Your Servant!

O very tender Virgin and Mother of the Savior of all Times,

take me as your servant starting

from this very day and for ever more.

From now on, in all circumstances,

be my merciful advocate;

come unceasingly to my rescue.

Indeed, after God,

I do not want to prefer anybody else to you any more

and, of my own free will,

I devote myself to you as your servant for eternity.

Athanasius and the God who is Love

I found the following in a local newsletter called "Got Culture?" Chesterton speaks very eloquently of the meaning of the Incarnation.

G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) provides the following insight into the depth of St. John’s words, “God is love” (1 John 4:8).

"There had arisen in that hour of history [ca. 325 A.D. the Arian heresy], defiant above the democratic tumult of the Councils of the Church, Athanasius against the world. We may pause upon the point at issue; because it is relevant to the whole of this religious history, and the modern world seems to miss the whole point of it. We might put it this way.

If there is one question which the enlightened and liberal have the habit of deriding and holding up as a dreadful example of barren dogma and senseless sectarian strife, it is this Athanasian question of the Co-Eternity of the Divine Son.

On the other hand, if there is one thing that the same liberals always offer us as a piece of pure and simple Christianity, untroubled by doctrinal disputes, it is the single sentence, “God is Love” [1 John 4:8].

Yet the two statements are almost identical; at least one is very nearly nonsense without the other.

The barren dogma is only the logical way of stating the beautiful sentiment. For if there be a being without beginning, existing before all things, was He loving when there was nothing to be loved? If through that unthinkable eternity He is lonely, what is the meaning of saying He is love? The only justification of such a mystery is the mystical conception that in His own nature there was something analogous to self-expression; something of what begets and beholds what it has begotten. Without some such idea, it is really illogical to complicate the ultimate essence of deity with an idea like love.

If the moderns really want a simple religion of love, they must look for it in the Athanasian Creed. The truth is that the trumpet of true Christianity, the challenge of the charities and simplicities of Bethlehem or Christmas Day, never rang out more arrestingly and unmistakably than in the defiance of Athanasius to the cold compromise of the Arians.

It was emphatically he who really was fighting for a God of Love against a God of colourless and remote cosmic control; the God of the stoics and the agnostics. It was emphatically he who was fighting for the Holy Child against the grey deity of the Pharisees and the Sadducees. He was fighting for that very balance of beautiful interdependence and intimacy, in the very Trinity of the Divine Nature, that draws our hearts to the Trinity of the Holy Family. His dogma, if the phrase be not misunderstood, turns even God into a Holy Family. "

---G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, CW2:359-360; cf. "The Endless Empire" in The New Jerusalem