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Ecclesiology 2: The Church from the top-down

Alright, so the view of the Church from the bottom-up is in your brain now if you read the Ecclesiology 1 post. Now we have to talk about the Church more in its hierarchy: the view of how it works from the top-down. This is the only way many people perceive it to work but the more you read this article the more you’ll see how this structure could not exist on its own, from the top-down that is, without the laypeople… and God’s help as well to be humorous. It’s not infallible, there are plenty of bad people who climb high in the Church.

Let’s get that out of the way right off the bat. Since the 1800s there has been this misconception about how the Church works: namely that everything it says, or everything the Pope says is infallible. In other words the Pope can do no wrong. This is a perception that the power brokers in the Church don’t always care to push back on for less than admirable reasons. But the reality is that infallibility is something that only exists in a very specific theological way that is not nearly as silly and all-encompassing as you’ve probably been told.

Of course everything comes back to Jesus somehow in the Catholic Church. All Christians I hope can agree that Jesus Christ is God made flesh and his teachings, and his authority are why we’re doing any of this to begin with. Therefore we believe Jesus is infallible, that is he didn’t teach anything wrong. We Catholics also acknowledge a certain continuing teaching authority passed down to his followers, generation to generation, called the tradition and, more specifically a leadership position under his apostle St. Peter. If you read the ecclesiology 1 article you’ll remember that formal versus informal distinction. The papacy, as we’ll discuss here, is a formal office in our belief system that goes right back to Jesus.

Papal infallibility then is simply the belief that in some conditions the Pope can speak infallibly by the authority vested in him by Jesus Christ via the line of St. Peter. As Papal infallibility was defined in the First Vatican Council (1870-1871) it’s really narrow actually. Only when conferring with theological experts, scripture, and tradition can a Pope then define a certain teaching as a truth without error within the whole teaching of the Church. This papal infallibility has only been used twice: in 1854 to enshrine the Immaculate Conception of Mary and in 1950 to enshrine the Assumption of Mary into heaven.

So yeah, the Pope isn’t going around infallibly declaring the Boston Bruins evil as much as I might enjoy that. It’s sparingly used and most developments of Church teaching, including these, are done over time with a lot of input. Remember this as we go ahead with this article. Nothing here is forced, even the politics of the higher rungs of the Church hierarchy, because Jesus Christ never stopped working with us: formally and informally. When we talk about the Church, particularly these higher levels we’re talking about here, this is this blog’s namesake: a Sign of Unity.

However clumsy and incomprehensible at times, this formal, hierarchical body of the Church is unmistakable sign of unity for all Catholics, and indeed all Christians who see the need for a unity in our chaotic, ever splintering world today.

We’re now within a week of the 2025 papal conclave as of the posting of this article so buckle up, let’s talk about how the Catholic Church works from the top-down in normal times when everything is in place including a Pope at the top.

Church structure basics

Let’s do the basics first. There are really only three ranks within the clergy in spite of how all the fancy garb and awesome titles might make you think. There are Bishops, Priests, and Deacons. Everything else is a subdivision therein. This includes the Pope who is really just a Bishop of first importance compared to all the rest: that is, the Bishop of Rome. The priesthood, or Holy Orders, contains both Bishops and Priests. Deacons are ordained as well but in a different way that we certainly would not call the priesthood.  

Before Christianity was legalized in the Roman Empire there wasn’t really a distinction between Bishops and Priests actually. The Church was small and heavily persecuted, so local Church leaders were all Bishops and there weren’t enough believers to necessitate a vast group of priests serving the bishop. Deacons also date back to the earliest years of the Church, but they never held the power to consecrate the elements of the Mass among other things. Deacons were and are in some mystical way the human bridge between the clergy and the laypeople.  

The whole priesthood, Holy Orders that is, carries onto the present day via another one of those formal links back to Jesus Christ. We Catholics believe, as Jesus gave power to his Apostles multiple times over the course of his ministry, and indeed after his resurrection, he gave them formal power and created of them a Holy Order: the priesthood. This is passed down, just like the teachings of the faith, generation to generation, via ordination also known as Holy Orders or the laying-on-of-hands if you want to get really mystical about it. Just as we believe the Pope is the successor of St. Peter, so too do we believe Bishops and Priests are successors to the Apostles, albeit in a less regnal succession kind of way.

Let’s go back to deacons now. In the earliest centuries of Church history this office was held by both men and women. Not only that but in the beginning the deacons held the “purse strings” of the Church if you will. That is they handled the collection of donations and helped focus the Church’s giving to the poor, an essential function of any Church claiming to belong to Jesus Christ which I foolishly left out of Ecclesiology 1. Deacons helped direct charitable giving, but they also assisted the Bishops and Priests with many functions including the Mass and other liturgies.

We talk about deacons as a human bridge between the clergy and laypeople for very practical reasons. Even in the early Church, long before clerical celibacy was a rule written in black and white, the Bishops and Priests struggled to juggle the dangers and responsibilities of leading the Church with the challenges of family life. From this very early phase the deacons were the folks who were the hybrids. They had the flexibility to be less aloof than the other clerics and struggled a lot less with family life. In another way, they lived lives that helped the rest of the faithful see how the faith could be carried out in the difficult realities of lay life.

How the permanent deaconate completely disappears from the 11th century until the Second Vatican Council in the 20th century is a historical discussion we will have in Ecclesiology 3. For the time being it is worth noting that deacons swear the same loyalty to bishops that priests do. This is important because to be docile and open to Christ, we Catholics also believe there must be a certain docile openness to submitting to the authority of his Church. In the local setting the Bishop is the highest-ranking expression of that.

Let’s jump back to those Bishops because I still have not answered some important questions. How are Bishops chosen and how is it decided what Diocese they will lead? This is where we start talking about Rome and the papacy which is that City’s local Bishop as well. To be very blunt: the Pope decides what Bishop goes where and who even gets to be a Bishop in the first place. The Pope oversees the whole Catholic Church worldwide, so he needs some help knowing what’s going on in different places in order to organize the deployment of Bishops.

The Pope has numerous Apostolic Nuncios. A Nuncio is an ambassador to a country on one hand, and the Pope’s advisor on that country’s clergy on the other hand. Each Nuncio, normally a high-ranking Bishop themselves, does the duties of an ambassador but also keeps records and stays in touch with various local clergy, Bishops and others, in the nation they’re assigned to. The Nuncio helps the Pope pick out Bishops.

Who the Nuncio is can tell you a lot about what the Pope is trying to tell a country. For example, the Nuncio to the United States under Pope Francis was a peace-focused French prelate named Christoph Pierre. He often found himself reeling in the pugnacious Bishops of this country with reminders of the Pope’s peacefulness and pastoral focus. But this also leads into another organizational question: beyond the Nuncio how do all the Bishops of a country organize themselves? All the Bishops from a country must work together on some things that affect them all as countrymen?

Yes! Ever since the Second Vatican Council almost every nation on earth has been asked to form a Bishop’s Conference. This is probably the simplest part for an outsider to understand. Here in the US our Bishop’s Conference looks a lot like a democratic system; that is, there is an elected President, Vice President, Secretary, and so on and so forth. There are also numerous committees and sub-committees in which the Bishop’s Conference work to address the unique challenges of their country and its faithful. The Nuncio works with the Bishop’s Conference frequently and at least twice a year when the Bishop’s Conference gathers in person.

Brief sidebar: all Bishops worldwide must make a pilgrimage to Rome to meet with the Pope every five years. This is for the purpose of the Pope knowing who the Bishops are but also for the purpose of Bishops knowing who the Pope is. I put it that way because you will encounter numerous Bishops the world over who do not seem to have the priorities of the Pope in them. That is a natural reality in a Church this big and universal but one to remedied, nonetheless. Sidebar over.

At the beginning of this article I tried to keep it simple, telling you about how the clergy is really just Bishops, Priests, and Deacons. As you can imagine I did that to lay the groundwork before it got more complicated. Even with Nuncios and Bishop’s conferences working on what is going on in the life of the Church there is still a need for yet more communication. Yes, there are Bishop’s Conferences at the State level here in the US as well to further the Church’s mission and assist the Pope in understanding how Bishop’s might deployed.

This is all well and good but at that level personal relationships and direct communication is a whole lot more possible. That’s why episcopal provinces (episcopal as in Bishops, not as in the Protestant denomination) exist. For example, here in New York State we have eight Diocese. Some are obviously smaller than the others. New York City is the biggest, so it gets the title of Archdiocese. That also means the Bishop there is an Archbishop. Moreover, in this case that Bishop is a Metropolitan Archbishop, that is an Archbishop who also oversees the other Bishops in his province or conference for the aforementioned purposes of Church unity and advising the Nuncio and therefore the Pope.

Another sidebar, this time a somewhat political sidebar, because this is ultimately a political blog after all: if you are a priest and you get the call from the Nuncio asking you to become a Bishop you can say No. Outside the evil of the abuse crisis the whole Church is a great pact of consensual love. In fact, here in the United States it is increasingly common for priests to refuse the elevation to Bishop because so much of being a Bishop in this country right now is managing abuse settlements and declining Church properties and ministries. It’s not appealing that way to be a Bishop. That sad sidebar is over now.

The New York Archdiocese currently has Cardinal Timothy Dolan as the Metropolitan Archbishop. He oversees not only his own archdiocese but also keeps in close contact with the seven other Bishops in this episcopal province of New York. All these smaller Diocese he keeps an eye on are called suffragan Dioceses. I live in a suffragan Diocese under Cardinal Dolan called Rochester, New York. My local Bishop is Salvatore Matano.

Cardinal? We haven’t talked about that word yet, have we? With a papal conclave election next week you are probably hearing that word quite a bit these days. Let’s go there next and, by extension, go to Rome! But first, we must take a very necessary and grievous detour back into the clergy sex abuse crisis. I promised I would cover it in each Ecclesiology article, and I am a man of my word!

The fact of the matter is that for decades the clerical cone of silence was all but stated policy. In Ecclesiology 1 I mentioned that the very incorrect belief that pedophile Priests could be rehabilitated and returned into the circulation was widespread until 2002. That reality was by far the biggest flashpoint of the clergy sex abuse crisis in North America. But another reality is that Bishops, Archbishops, and yes, even those elevated to the rank of Cardinals were even less judicious about abusers in their ranks than many local clergies.

Abuse in seminaries, the schools for young men on the way to becoming priests, was a harder nut to crack for the secular media and an even harder nut to crack for the Conferences of Bishops all the way up to the Vatican. This was in large part because without many laypeople in these settings you could say the clerical cone of silence was airtight. This and the spiritual abuse, that is sexual or physical abuse that took advantage of vulnerable moments in victim’s spiritual lives (like in the confessional for example), would scar victims in the context of committed communities like cloisters, abbeys, convents, and the aforementioned seminaries.

Abuse in the upper levels of the hierarchy has been more stubborn to remove due to the amount of self-policing it requires in these communities. Currently in the news from time to time is the horrific case of Fr. Marko Rupnik. He is a Slovakian priest who committed spiritual and sexual abuse for decades. His art is so ubiquitous that still adorns Catholic landmarks like the Shrine Basilica in Lourdes, France. There is a decent chance you have seen his work. Rupnik’s case is still processing through the highest levels of the Vatican legal system but the whole fiasco has laid bare the lack of transparency and efficiency in that justice system.

A more terrifying example of this level of abuse is Mexican Fr. Marcial Maciel who ran the now defunct Legion of Christ for decades after which it came out he abused numerous boys and maintained secret, abusive relationships with at least four women. He fathered six illegitimate children, one of which he would also later abuse.

More relevant to the American context is the case of Cardinal, yes Cardinal, Theodore McCarrick. He was a serial abuser who two Popes (John Paul II and Benedict XVI) were aware was known to have intimate relationships with seminarians and nonetheless promoted him continuously. Pope Francis acted quickly after the secular media got ahold of the story and produced the most thorough public report on an abuser in the history of the Church in 2020. Not only was McCarrick the first person to ever be ejected from the College of Cardinals (that is he was stripped of the title of Cardinal), but he was also laicized which is when Holy Orders are stripped from a priest, making them a layperson again. In a clerical world often obsessed with privileges, that is a titanic thing to do.

When it comes to Bishops and other high-ranking prelates in the Church I do not have a widely effective systemic measure like the Dallas Charter to tell you largely fixed the issue. To be very blunt I think the institutional Church above your local Bishop has some serious work still to do. It seems as though the abuse crisis has been largely stemmed where it effects laypeople but abuse where laypeople are not often found is still very much a live issue. Pope Francis passed Mos Estes in 2019, a document attempting to establish new protocols for the worldwide Church to fight abuse from the top-down but it’s an open question whether this framework will work or not.

I pray we see this horrific scourge gone from the entire hierarchy of the Church. As long as it persists it is the most abhorrent institutional sin the Church bears and the most acute hinderance for the Gospel message of Christ to be believed coming out of the mouths of the Church’s clerics. It is often the first or second reason lapsed Catholics will give for their distance from the Church. But, far more importantly, it is a sin against the very image of God for which we are all created and truly the most corrosive challenge the Church has faced since the Reformation.

While in Ecclesiology 3 I will not have this many detailed cases, it is safe to assume the issue of abuse has been an institutional ill through the history of the Church. This article is largely about chains of command and titles so it does not feel right for me to talk about abuse as a mere hinderance to submission to authority. Abuse is a reality that is the exception, not the rule, when it comes to the actual mission of the Church: a mission of spreading the love and Gospel message of Jesus Christ.

From Rome with love

So what is a Cardinal? To call it a rank above Bishops is a misleading explanation. A Cardinal is really just a Bishop whom the Pope has elevated into a specific group of Bishops called the College of Cardinals. In a certain sense it is just a title that way, but it is normally a powerful title. Cardinals under the age of 80 vote in papal elections, Conclaves that is, and the Pope chosen therein, have been exclusively selected from among the College of Cardinals for the last five centuries.

Popes have historically elevated the Archbishops of certain major cities to the title of Cardinal, or “red hat” to use the popular euphemism. New York, LA, Baltimore, and Washington DC have historically been “Cardinalate Sees” here in the US and in some cases Cardinals are often the ones picked by Popes to move to Rome to be part of the powerful Vatican bureaucracy known as the Roman Curia.

Who gets to be a Cardinal is a huge indicator of a Pope’s priorities. Pope Francis for example has taken special attention to naming Cardinals from far flung corners of the world which historically have not had Cardinals. This has balanced out the College of Cardinals considerably and made this coming Conclave next week the most geographically diverse Conclave ever.

But I don’t want to get too deep on Conclave stuff. I will have a preview article on this 2025 Conclave we are about to see up shortly. What I won’t discuss there as much, ironically I guess, is the Pope as the leader of the Church in normal times. In the beginning of this article we dispelled the old myth about papal infallibility. But what does a Pope do then if he isn’t some kind of divine speaker for God on earth?

The Pope is head of the Holy See. Yes, let’s go back to that funny word I dropped a couple paragraphs back and didn’t elaborate on. What is a “See”? That term is used to refer to the teaching authority of a Bishop. Every Bishop who is Bishop over a specific diocese sits in the See of that place. Bishops, after all, do make a lot of the day-to-day decisions about how Catholic education and the Sacraments will be carried out in their diocese: in other words they are teachers who represent the teaching authority of the Catholic Church. It then follows that the Holy See, the See of the Bishop of Rome, the Pope, is the most important See. The Holy See is a whole legal body as well, but that confusion can wait for another article someday down the line.

If you’ve got a Protestant bone in your body, which I think even the most devoutly Catholic Americans have some calcium of just by value of culture, the question naturally arises why a Pope is needed at all? The first and most obvious answer, particularly in our globally interconnected world today, is to be the world’s pastor: a teacher everyone can call on as needed for spiritual guidance and religious leadership. But even our Orthodox brothers and sisters do not have one guy at the top of it all to make the final decision if nobody else can agree.

Anyone who understands the basic idea that religion exists in some basic way as the preservation of a set of moral and spiritual beliefs originated by a founder can probably grasp why a final authority is useful. How to have a “final decider” is a sticky question. In Ecclesiology 1 we covered the importance of Apostolic succession in denominations founded before the fourteenth century, that is a formal connection back to Jesus Christ himself built into the leadership of the Church. Apostolic succession also establishes the papal succession rooted back with the Apostle Peter. We have touched on this but let’s state it more clearly.

The word Pope would not come along for centuries after Jesus. However the Catholic assertion is essentially that the Apostle Peter was designated a leader among the Apostles naturally and by the direct designation of Jesus on at least three occasions in the Gospels. By our understanding Peter had successors in his office like all the other Apostles did where they founded Churches. Peter founded the Church in Rome where he would be martyred and there you go: the Bishop of Rome is the successor of Peter.

The knee jerk response to that is always something like “even if St. Peter was the leader of the Apostles how are we to believe a permanent office was established in him which necessarily had successors”? Phraseology is critical in understanding this. Some of the diction Jesus uses in the aforementioned passages were dead giveaways in their time but are lost on those of us separated from that original context.

There are many examples of this but the one I always come back to is the usage of word that essentially means “Prime Minister” in English. If you understand how that governing system works this reference to Jewish scriptures Jesus uses will be clear as day. Basically Jesus is the King, God incarnate indeed, who then has designated a Prime Minister to run the government if you will. That is Peter and that is distinctly the establishment of an office that necessarily had successors and continues on.

But beyond those literary details it’s also evident in how Christianity was traditionally understood in the first millennium of the faith that if Jesus expected us to follow some clear set of moral priorities there had to be leading Bishops who would hold that “deposit of faith” together for the ages to come. I brought up the Orthodox Church earlier because they will correctly tell you that for much of the first five centuries of the Christian faith there were at least five Dioceses, or Sees as it were, that together held that “final decider” and leadership power: Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. This was called the Pentarchy. As power generally goes, disagreements arose, and division unfortunately resulted.

 Coptic Christians for example hold that Alexandria is the most superior See and their Pope resides there: Tawadros II currently. Rome and Constantinople, even back then, were held to be the top of the Pentarchy and until the Great Schism in 1054 they were often at loggerheads. After that unfortunate date Rome and Constantinople have been formally apart. The See of Constantinople is occupied by the most important Bishop, or Patriarch in this context, in the Orthodox religion to this day: the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I.

Remember in all this that all these claimants to final authority actually do have lines of succession that go all the way back to their chosen Apostle, and therefore Jesus. The Catholic claim of “papal supremacy” is simply that Rome is the most important of these Sees as through the formal connection back to St. Peter the Apostle. As you’ve noticed there are other prelates out there who claim the title Pope. Though the Catholic Church is the biggest in adherents to the faith, outside of Western society the word Pope is not reserved solely for the Bishop of Rome.

Since the Second Vatican Council there has been great Ecumenical progress made. I think it is worth mentioning that the relations between all these aforementioned Church leaders is quite fond excluding a certain Patriarch of Moscow. All the excommunications that once formally separated these Churches have been lifted and it is totally valid to hold out hope full communion can be restored, even within the century as that millennium anniversary of the Great Schism approaches. So don’t start fights where our leaders aren’t fighting anyway.

This is all background to say that for we Catholics the Pope is the designated final earthly authority on matters in the Church that require final authority. We often think about that in theological terms, like what the Pope needs to say or not say about moral issues, but I chose the name of this blog for a reason: Peter’s successors, the Popes are a sign of unity. Indeed the Pope is the visible sign of unity for Catholics who are invited to believe that God did not stop working in human life after the books of the Bible were finished and compiled.

Conclusion: Love unifies us all

We Catholics believe in a living tradition. God reveals himself to us not just through the sacred scripture of the bible (which the Church compiled by the way), but also through the tradition of the continued teaching authority of Christ’s Church and those who hold Jesus dear through it. There is something very acute and cutting there about what it means to be Catholic. Jesus Christ, and the divine love he communicates to us, is what this is all about.

Love unifies us all and I don’t mean that in some squishy, overly sentimental way. Second only to the Eucharist and that profound communication of love, I think the biggest anchoring matter of faith which keeps so many Catholic in today’s world is taking Jesus at his word, that is including the more seemingly legalistic, continuity-based stuff. Jesus wants to relate to us so why would he not provide us a living, present-day interpreter of his message?

Read that again. I believe in the bible just as much as any Protestant. The question here is why would Jesus not give us a teaching authority that understands the present moment and every present moment along the way to him coming back again one day? The bible is powerful, divine, and fully useful for speaking to today’s challenges; but to depend upon it as if God is restricted to work only through its words is a limitation of the powerful love he means for us by sending his son Jesus Christ in the first place. God knows we have thick heads, and I think he meant to give us a clarifying authority to endure through the ages and keep us near to him in what we actually, formally believed beyond all the beautiful informal ways Jesus works in our hearts on a personal level.

Sincerely I believe Jesus Christ envisioned one, single Church to be the formal, universal speaker on his behalf. He certainly meant for his Church to be united, that is clear in scripture by most measures, and to reach for that necessarily leads to establishing some authority to bring the diversity of God’s people into a specific unity. God’s love unifies all Christians, but Jesus wants us to be united in a deeper, more formal way than just reading scripture and shooting from the hip with it.

Call that sectarian but this is a blog about the ecclesiology of the Catholic Church after all! I have more to come before the 2025 Papal conclave begins on Wednesday. Before Monday is done I will post Ecclesiology 3, which will be a rather fast-paced tour of Church history. Then, on Tuesday or early Wednesday depending on how I manage my time, I will also post a Conclave Preview to talk about how a conclave works and how this one might go! And, beyond what I have stated previously, I am adding yet another blog post in this momentous moment in Church history: a Conclave Debrief at some point in the days and weeks after we meet the new Pope.

Thanks for reading! My book “How to catch feelings for Jesus” is available online. This book is a sharing of my own spiritual journey in the hopes of helping others know Jesus even if they tried once and failed or feel some serious internal resistance. Check it out and share this article! I would love to hear your input. Did I help you understand anything about the Catholic Church? Did the article enlighten you on something else? I ask so I can make more sense the next time around. Did you really read all this to not leave some kind of thought afterwards?

[andrewuttaro]

Ecclesiology 1: The Church from the bottom-up

When I introduced this new blog series, “Sign of Unity” last month, I knew of the Holy Father’s illness, but I certainly did not anticipate he would be gone from us this soon. In the interest of giving anyone who reads my work a complete picture before Pope Francis’ successor is elected, I have decided to streamline these first three articles on ecclesiology over the course of the next three weeks. Ecclesiology is how the Church works to put it bluntly, how it works from bottom to top and top to bottom. Perhaps this summary appraisal of everything helps put what lies ahead in perspective.

Another disclaimer I think is necessary given these circumstances: I intended for this blog series, “Sign of Unity”, to draw out this idea that politics make up all human institutions and how they interact with each other. Politics in and of itself is not sinful. This blog series is looking at the Church as a political organization at its most basic level. There is a much greater spiritual depth I will only scratch the surface of in these particular posts. So don’t get mad at me if things seem a bit reductive here. Without any further ado, let’s get started.

So what is the first thing that comes to mind when you think about the Catholic Church? If you answered Churches I am curious what kind of Church building popped into your head. If you answered Mass, well I am proud of you for thinking of going: most Catholics don’t! If you answered Sacraments then you are going to really like the first few paragraphs of this article! If you answered the priest abuse crisis, trust me, we’ll get there.

Despite all the smells and bells the Catholic Church really is all about the person at the center of it all: Jesus Christ. The most enigmatic figure in human history? I don’t know, I don’t think Jesus Christ needs that much introduction but for the sake of this article here’s a quick tour of the essentials according to we believers: this guy is God incarnate, literally the One God come into our human form in the context of a Jewish heritage who proceeded to live a holy life, teach a ministry, and finally complete the great work of salvation in his suffering, death and resurrection for all humanity. Spoiler alert for the most widespread religion in the world I guess.

Needless to say, we’re going to be coming back to Jesus quite a bit… throughout this whole blog if I am doing my job. For now we should talk about Jesus as the founder of the Catholic Church. Yes, if you sincerely believe in any Christian Church you probably believe Jesus Christ founded your Church in some way. We Catholics think Jesus founded our Church in a really formal way: right there in the bible with a line of succession all planned out with a chain of command and the like.

Not to be sectarian but most Christian groups which were founded prior to the 14th century felt their Church needed a formal tie to Jesus like that: an apostolic succession, that is a line of successors that dates back to an Apostle who knew Jesus personally. Call it pedantic and unnecessary but that is certainly the historical reality. Continuity is going to be a theme in these three courses of Catholic ecclesiology, might as well get acquainted with it.

Sacraments, Jesus’ actions, and how they form the Church

The continuity-based view of Christianity lends itself to Sacraments. Consider Sacraments, in the context of ecclesiology, as the things the Church does: the most basic, essential actions of the Church. The Seven formal Sacraments are Communion, Baptism, Confirmation, Marriage, Holy Orders, Confession, and Anointing of the sick. Within each of those there is a lot of meaning, formal and informal, even some things we could call sub-sacraments or parts of said sacraments. The first one listed there is most important. Communion, Holy Eucharist, the Blessed Sacrament: that one is the central sacrament which all the other orbit around.

Why is that? Well, the subtle formal/informal distinction is helpful here. Also helpful: Jesus Christ. See: we’re already back to the main man. Along with that formal chain of command I mentioned earlier, we Catholics also believe Jesus gave us his very self in several ways. That is to say Jesus, God himself, did not lower himself into human form to do party tricks at wedding receptions his mom wanted him at, although he would definitely do a fair amount of miracles and signs along the way.

Jesus gives us everything: his very life on the cross for redemption and his resurrection from the dead to abolish the power of death to name the big ones. Jesus is certainly powerful enough to work with each one of us in brilliantly unique and everyday ways. The Christian life would be unbearable if he didn’t! What I am trying to say is that even if its not a formal sacrament of the Church, that does not mean however you encounter Jesus, within reason, is not totally valid. This is a personal relationship as well.

But beyond the informal ways Jesus is with us he certainly wanted to give us some formal connections as well. Consider the 7 Sacraments, like many of the other things we’ll talk about in this blog, formal ways God works in our lives.

The Eucharist is the top of this stack for several reasons: the main one being that we believe that at the Last Supper Jesus was giving us himself in a very tangible, real way. If the diction of the passages covering this event, the other Eucharist-related passages, and the early church who practiced it are to be believed, Jesus is using a word that means “chew” when he said the blessing at the Last Supper. He was making that bread and wine his body and blood as a fulfillment of Old Testament prophesy and a foreshadowing of his passion the following day on Good Friday. The diction chew is important here because for we Catholics it’s a dead giveaway that Jesus is giving us his actual body and blood via the transformation of the elements of bread and wine.

It is quite a bit more beautiful and complex than I can summarize here. For more on the Eucharist consult your local Priest or a lengthy blog post I wrote about it earlier this month if you want to stick to my work. Yeah no, go to a priest if you want a qualified person answering those deeper questions. For the sake of this article just know that the Eucharist is the source and summit of Catholic life: the privileged form of worship at the center of the Mass and indeed, the center of Catholic life in general.

To some extent the whole Catholic Church is designed with the hierarchy it is, right down to your local priests and parish, to administer these formal sacraments. This is a blog series about the Church as a political organization so to be totally rigid that way: sacramental discipline and teaching the Gospel message is what the Church does. Every cleric who is an ordained priest or has achieved a higher clerical rank than that is able, as part of the mission of their Holy Orders, to conduct the fullness of a Mass and all the other Sacraments. Sacraments and preaching are the essentials.

In this sense the Church’s mission is to bring Christ to as many people as possible both formally in the sacraments, and informally in the conversion of souls to the faith which then feeds back into the sacramental life, at least theoretically, by the rates of baptisms, Mass attendance, and yes of course the financial figures coming out of the collection basket. Ah yes, the collection basket. That will have to be a blog post all its own at some point down the line.

While you might stick up your nose and laugh that a Catholic Church might ever need your money, depending on where you live it might actually desperately need your money. Most Parishes, particularly in the United States and Canada, are more or less separate financial organs from the wider global Church and even the local Diocesan offices. In many ways, politically speaking, the Church is a united whole when it wants to be and a collection of thousands of smaller entities when it wants to be. Theres some criticism for you!

Enough about money! Let’s get down to the reality on the ground: or at least some broad strokes of what the reality on the ground probably looks like for you.

The Church locally

This is Ecclesiology 1; we’ll focus more on the top-down hierarchy of the Catholic Church in Ecclesiology 2. Let’s keep it bottom-up for this article. The Church is, after all, is a collection of believers. What the average layperson (laity or laypeople is just a Church word for non-clergy normal folk) does is what makes the most difference for the life of the Church. The faithful many determine just how the Church will mediate their relationships with Jesus because those essential functions of the Church are ultimately why anyone walks in the door in the first place. You could think of the Church hierarchy as an upside-down pyramid with the biggest part, otherwise the base of the pyramid, representing the laity. In a way, its all to serve the needs of we normies.

Don’t believe me? There are 2.4 billion Christians worldwide, of that number 1.4 billion are Roman Catholic or another form of Catholicism which is in communion with Rome. How everything looks and works for the portion of that group in South America will look far different than it does up here in the American Northeast where I live. If you just chalk that up to cultural differences you’re missing the point: the Church exists as a global/universal whole because of that rich, internal diversity. We believe Jesus founded a Church he wanted to be one whole, not divided that is, as well as a Church that can speak to the local realities of belief in whatever cultural milieu we find ourselves in.

So let us talk about the Church locally. The Catholic Church is as ubiquitous as McDonalds in the United States. Seldom anywhere in the continental United States are you outside of a 30-minute drive from a Catholic Church. The building, whatever it looks like, has some physical things that you will find no matter where you are. They all are designed to, at the bare minimum, host a Mass, the central act of worship in the Catholic faith.

All Catholic churches will have a tabernacle where the consecrated body of Christ, the bread and wine transformed into body and blood, are reserved when Mass is not happening. Every Church also has a sanctuary candle that should always be lit if that precious body and blood is present in the tabernacle. The tabernacle can look all kinds of ways, sometimes its even built into the superstructure of the Church itself. Generally it’s the fanciest adorned thing in the whole building. It contains the most sacred treasure the Church has to offer so you might be able to understand why it looks nice.

Normally nearby to the tabernacle is one or two altars. Churches built prior to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s will often have a rather ornate “back altar” containing the tabernacle. The “front altar”, as in the one that is generally off by itself facing where the congregation sits, is a product of those reforms and most masses said in the contemporary form of the Mass will mainly occur here and at the nearby lectern you might hear called an “Ambo”.

Sidebar here that is useful as you find your way around a Catholic Church: everything involved in the Mass and some stuff that is not has a latin or latin derivative name even if you know it has as simpler name. Altar is table for example. That napkin used on the communion cup the blood of Christ (wine) is in? That is a purificator! I am not trying to mock any of this, I truly love the Mass, but God does not mind us being amused if it leads us closer to him. Reverence is always good when we’re talking about Jesus and this ritual he gave us, but he also wants you there no matter what. This sidebar is over.

You will also see multiple chairs up in the vicinity of the altar. Usually the nicest one is where the priest who is presiding over the Mass sits with one or two directly next to that one for another priest or assisting deacon. Behind those chairs, often on both sides of the altar you will see other chairs, these are where lay altar servers, lectors, and other people involved in the Mass sit.

Depending on how the Church is constructed there are then pews, long benches in other words, radiating out in one or multiple directions away from the altar. Most Churches also have vestibules, or double door entries before entering the Church itself. This is something that even loyal Mass-goers are surprised to find out are heavily recommended in the Church’s canon law. Another thing you might be surprised to learn is that seldom any Mass said in the contemporary form these days does not involve us laypeople in some way.

That’s right, we non-ordained normies are often involved in a number of central, even critically important parts of the Mass. Whether that be lectors (those reading the first two readings from the bible), Eucharistic ministers (those helping the clergy distribute communion), gift bearers (those bringing up the unconsecrated bread and wine before it is transformed), or of course altar servers assisting the clergy on the altar throughout the Mass. This was a critical reform of the Second Vatican Council that made this whole central ritual of the Catholic faith far more accessible to the average person… well that and translating the Mass into local languages.

Before we move past the Church building itself its worth mentioning some other things that are not directly connected to the Mass. Almost every Catholic Church you enter will have the fourteen stations of the cross somewhere in the building where Mass happens, usually dotting the spaces between windows. These fourteen stations, as you might have guessed, are a little mini pilgrimage we can go on through the suffering and death of Jesus, a big part of the central mysteries of our faith.

Another thing I like to tell people is that the altar where Mass happens always has a relic of a Saint, that is something left behind by them: whether that is a body part or something less visceral like clothing or a sacramental object like a ring. Usually this relic is a relic of the Saint for whom the Church is named after. But don’t let me go too deep on this or this article will get unmanageably long. There are also supposed to be private confessionals somewhere in the Church building although I have generally discovered improvised confessionals in many places as the sacrament has seen shrinking attendance in recent decades.

But the Church locally is a lot more the merely things in a place. The Church is people: the “Body of Christ” as we say in the Catholic Church. The local Parish Priest and maybe a secondary Priest as a vicar of some kind, yes, but that’s only where we start with your average local Church’s “Parish people”. The people you meet at a Catholic Church serve varied roles and highly active parishioners fall into a few common “archetypes” I have noticed over the years. All in the service of the many ministries a local Church carries out beyond the Mass and the core of the faith in the Mass and teachings.

Yes, I must remind you this is a political blog. Dig deeper please, but how people interact with each other is at the heart of how I am describing the Church in this series. Remember, God made us political beings even if that nature is poisoned by sin in so many examples. And yes, let’s touch on that big cloud of the abuse crisis that is  hanging over anything when you talk about the Church in recent years.

The Parish People

The Parish Priest, the Pastor is actually the official title in the Catholic Church, is the highest-ranking cleric in the distinct smallest cell of the Church’s superstructure. To put it in English, the pastor is the leading priest who runs the most local part of the Church beyond the family unit itself: the parish. Parish sizes and shapes vary so much place to place so I can’t really dwell on that too much. Let’s talk about priests.

Here in the United States the widespread standard is for pastors to be moved after 6–12-year terms at parishes. This wasn’t always the case, it only really dates back to the 1980s, but you would be hard pressed to find an American Diocese today that does not operate this way barring special circumstances. Local Bishops, who we’ll talk about more in the next post in this series on Church ecclesiology, are supposed to try to match the priest with the parish thoughtfully. Ideally the Bishop considers personality and the needs of the parish congregation wisely. As you can imagine this is not always true and great wrongs are done in this deployment process sometimes.

Full disclosure: I plan to address the clergy sex abuse crisis at every step of the way along this three-part series on Church ecclesiology. This issue predates the 2002 scandals which catapulted the issue of abusive priests to the front of mind again. At this local, Parish level of the Crisis we saw local Bishops moving around abusing priests under antiquated beliefs that you could send a pedophile to rehabilitation for a little while and then get him back into circulation. This approach was grievously wrong, but it was widespread for many decades.

As with schoolteachers and all those who interact with others according to an up-down power dynamic, abusing priests used their authority to groom their victims and, in some cases, take advantage of them for years. I could never type up all the instances of this terrible plague on humanity and the Church, all of the dignity disrespected, and innocence trampled upon. And let me be clear: I mean to make no apology for the Church which it cannot make on its own. Abuse in the Church is just as evil as it is outside the Church.

What I can say is that after the 2002 scandals that were exposed following the Boston Globe’s spotlight articles, the Catholic Church in the United States did make substantive, systemic reforms with the Dallas Charter and the changes that followed from it. Local Bishops cannot transfer around abusers anymore, not legally under Church law at least. Every Diocese now has elaborate child and vulnerable adult protections and trainings for all clergy and anyone who works with the Church and her ministries in anyway. Here in Rochester, New York where I live we call this “CASE training” and it has to be renewed every three years. There are designated coordinators of this training and everything.

The zero-tolerance policy has largely extinguished contemporary abuse cases in the last two decades. Again, I am not trying to defend the Church, that is a statement of fact according to the best data we have. On the local, Parish level at least, the scourge of child sex abuse is largely now a discussion of survivor compensation and terrible events that happened decades in the past. As we move up the hierarchy we will be talking about a more complex story unfortunately. Nonetheless, I don’t think its foolish to expect transparency and accountability from the Church on this going forward.

To transition back to parish priests more broadly, they were historically local men. With the American priest shortage in recent decades you are much more likely to see priests born in far off lands which has enriched those parishes in many ways I have witnessed personally. Nonetheless the priest shortage is increasingly subsiding and another twenty years down the line you are likely to see more home-grown priests once again.

The local Parish Priest, the Pastor, has to oversee any deacons (a clerical level just below priests that can be permanent or a seminarian who will one day be a priest) and other ministries assigned to his parish whether that be a school, a convent of nuns, or any number of charitable and devotional ministries. He’s also responsible for the Church finance and physical property as well. The buck stops with the pastor. Mandated by the highest levels of the Church however is the Pastor’s participation in Parish Council and Finance council in order to create a parish environment we laypeople feel like we have some say in. After all, we’ll likely be around longer than the pastor will be.

And this is where we get into all the fun archetypes you encounter in your local Parish! Forgive how flippant I am but this is honestly something I enjoy. I sat on a Resident’s Council back in my Youth Ministry days and have since experienced them through others. In a multi-Church Parish there is always at least one representative, normally multiple, representing the different communities associated with each Church.  This is a distinctly political thing as you might be able to imagine.

If there is both a big church community and a smaller church community in the parish you are likely to see some dynamics at play on the Parish Council, particularly when Finance council crosses the Rubicon to make presentations… or worse: there needs to be an adjustment to the Mass schedule. Somebody will often have a chip on their shoulder. God willing disputes are handled amicably but Parish councils and Finance Councils are normally a significant test for the pastor in either managing personalities or marshalling support for new projects.

In some parts of the United States the business of the parish councils is growth: adding Masses, expanding religious education, meeting needs with new ministries and the like. In other parts of the United States the opposite is true: masses getting cut, religious education shrinking, and ministries are getting shuttered. Where I live in the Northeast US the story is often the latter. One of the first considerations a pastor might be faced with when getting assigned to a new parish might be how to manage a shrinking collection leaving fewer funds to support what might be more property than needed and more ministries than are actually active and serving those who need them.

In the next article in this series we will talk about how this same dynamic effects many Bishops as well among other things. Before wrapping up this article I think it’s worth noting some more of those other parish personalities you’re going to see. This is pulled from my experience in Parish life, but I have heard from others that these dynamics are widespread.

There is normally a nucleus of several volunteers who feel strongly about a ministry or two at the parish. Whether that be music, fundraising, greeters, ushers, or religious education folk, most parishes rely on a few people to lead the way with groups of other volunteers in these ministries that might be less motivated. I find these devoted volunteers generally do it for the love of the faith community but every few parishes or so you’ll find one or two of these people who go above and beyond.

If you know somebody in your life who takes their Catholic faith seriously I would bet my bottom dollar they could tell you someone who fits the “super-volunteer” mold. This is someone who is so motivated they might lead the whole Youth Ministry program single handedly or have been playing the organ for decades. They are the stalwarts in a parish community who are second only to the pastor in making everything continue to move along with a mission. Some of these people, thank God, do get paid for their work in the crazy world of lay ecclesial ministers.

There is a term called “voluntold” that sticks with me. There is a certain level of engagement in parish ministries that others notice to be beyond a certain point of no return. It is at this point a volunteer might be informally, “voluntold” to help with something else in addition. It’s forceful but it’s generally done in good faith. It is a term I use in jest, but I know more than a couple people who didn’t know how to say no and got voluntold there way into running half a parish. Self-care is critical, even Jesus stepped away from ministry regularly to pray and keep himself sane. Make sure you’re doing the service with love and you’re not pouring from an empty pitcher.

Finally its worth mentioning our dearly departed Pope Francis formalized some of these roles in the Church recently. The position of catechist was given the honors of a formal ministry in large part to recognize the growing world of volunteers and lay ecclesial ministers who do so much work that the clergy simply could not do on their own. As it was from the beginning: the Church is a group project.  

Conclusion: Faith unifies us all

I wrote very broadly in this first of three articles on ecclesiology. I did that intentionally because not only is this the physically largest layer of the Catholic Church, but it is also the most diverse. Not only are there numerous different rites in the Church which all look different and do things somewhat differently in Mass and other liturgies, but Catholic parish life is lived differently for practical reasons. In some immigrant parishes you find more screaming babies than pews but in others there are unnecessary, stern glares awaiting the exhausted parent.

More than sociological tolerances, the difference between a really ethnically polish parish and a Filipino for example are reflections of how the faith in Jesus everyone is there for is so universal. You can find different cultural traditions, but you will always find the Mass. You can find similar paragons of volunteer and paid service in parishes, but you always find love of the Gospel behind their continued efforts. As the Book of Acts says: “In every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to God” (Acts 10:35).

I called the world of lay ecclesial ministers crazy a couple paragraphs back because the pay rates are all over the place for working in a Parish depending on where you are and what you’re doing. I’ve seen these folks paid like paupers and treated as such and others who are so powerful in their parishes that the pastor’s Holy Orders is the only thing keeping him in charge. That may just provide us with more cynicism about the Church, trust me I battled some of that when I have, on multiple occasions, been chewed up and spit out by this system. But the deeper meaning of the Church always draws me back in.

The deeper meaning is Jesus. And I don’t invoke his name as a panacea to make myself or others simply “get over it” when the going gets tough in the life of a parish or the broader universal Church. I say Jesus is the deeper meaning because he really is when it comes to how the Catholic Church and we Catholics think of what we are doing staying in this messy flock in spite of all its woes.

The Church is a living organism consisting of all those who choose Christ and decide to live and worship in his Church. The Church also grows and learns over time, not just spreading the Gospel to evermore people, but understanding that Gospel message deeper. At one time missionaries wondered whether the faith was compatible with ceremonies of honoring ancestors in China for example. The Church assimilated what was within Jesus’ call according to honoring your parents and excluded what couldn’t be accepted. This same dynamic repeats itself throughout history. But more on Church history in Ecclesiology 3!

I trust, deep in my bones, that the Church’s political machinations are being steered, sometimes in a chaotic way, by the Holy Spirit. If the Church is to remain Christ’s gathering place for those who believe in him than it has to broaden the net, expand the tent as time goes on. I trust my qualms today will be understood anew and resolved in some way tomorrow. We believe in God and the Church is God’s work, even if it isn’t done yet.

Finally the faith that brings us into the Church and unites us all shows us that the Church has at least three meanings: a liturgical assembly gathering to celebrate the Mass, a local community of mutual assistance, grace and forgiveness, and thirdly a universal communion of believers in the same transformative figure and message that has so touched each one of us. The Church is very much human, but nonetheless continually divine because Jesus is at work in it.

Pope Paul VI put it this way: “[The Church] is the visible plan of God’s love for humanity… that the whole human race may become one People of God, form one Body of Christ, and be built up into one temple of the Holy Spirit.” This is the fertilizer for the Church at the grassroots, bottom-up level. Next week we’ll contemplate how the Church works from a more top-down perspective in Ecclesiology II.

Thanks for reading! My book “How to catch feelings for Jesus” is available online. This book is a sharing of my own spiritual journey in the hopes of helping others know Jesus even if they tried once and failed or feel some serious internal resistance. Check it out and share this article! I would love to hear your input. Did I help you understand anything about the Catholic Church? Did the article enlighten you on something else? I ask so I can make more sense the next time around. Did you really read all this to not leave some kind of thought afterwards?

[andrewuttaro]

Pope Francis (1936-2025)

At approximately 1:35 AM eastern standard time (7:35 AM Rome time) this morning, April 21st, 2025, Pope Francis passed away in his residence at the Vatican guest house as a result of a stroke which compounded a cardiocirculatory collapse. The 266th Pope of the Catholic Church had been hospitalized for more than a month earlier in the year but was well enough to make several public appearances over the course of Holy Week in spite of his doctor’s requests for him to commit to two months of recouperation. Rather poetically his last address as Pope was the Easter blessing yesterday from the same balcony he was debuted from in 2013. The last months of his life really do indicate the way this Bishop of Rome lived his whole life:

He could not help but be among the people.

Pope Francis is widely being hailed as a Pope of firsts, a Pope of the people, and of course a Pope of the poor and marginalized. One may be tempted to think these are superlatives based off a certain vibe he gave off. Yes, he was incredibly approachable by all accounts, but don’t get it twisted: this Pope was a shepherd who smelled like his sheep in ways much deeper than disposition and cordial impressions.

If one word could summarize this pontificate I could only dream of submitting one: mercy. Pope Francis believed in the Church as a “field hospital” out in the brutalities of life in the world today, afraid of no ugliness like his Church’s founder: Jesus Christ.

Pope Francis visited the sick and outcast. His very first Papal trip was to the Italian island of Lampedusa which is infamous in Italy as the place where migrants attempting to cross the Mediterranean wash ashore dead or clinging to life. On that very first trip he decried the “globalization of indifference” saying if we all insist such awful failings of our society are not our responsibility than they are, in fact, everyone’s responsibility. This Pope had a moral fierceness that named the sins and called for action.

Pope Francis had meals with the trans community in Rome on more than one occasion. That would have been completely unthinkable in any other papacy. But there are hundreds of examples like this of the Holy Father going out to where the Church has so often put our pearl-clutching moralizing pride above what Jesus Christ actually called us to do. Many will recall him saying “who am I to judge” when asked about gay priests on one flight early in his papacy. There are dozens of those stories that make him beloved, including paying his own hotel bill after his election and living in the humble, Vatican guest house for his whole pontificate instead of the lavish Apostolic Palace.

But I chose for the thumbnail image on this blog an image less reported in the secular media, an image from the first year of his papacy. Pope Francis embraced a man with severe leprosy (now known as Hansen’s disease) who had mourned his exclusion from society not unlike the lepers of Jesus’ time. Within that same year Pope Francis visited a mental institution and preached with the sounds of mental illness echoing around him in an episode that has stuck with me ever since.

As his papacy went on the actions of solidarity turned into actions of reform. A woman now governs the Vatican City State because of him. Numerous women now occupy high leadership roles in the Vatican’s bureaucracy, the Roman Curia, in a reform that was methodically planned and legislated in a way that would take a truly regressive successor to undo. He said that problems get solved when women are involved. Though he never extended the deaconate or priesthood to women, he has taken a quantum leap forward in terms of how women are seen across the Catholic Church.

His reforms to combat clerical sex abuse were too numerous to recount here, certainly more than any prior Pope. In 2019, after years of intense consultation with survivors he published new rules enshrining a zero-tolerance policy across the entire universal Church and abolished the “pontifical secret”, the highest level of Vatican classification in the interest of complete and total transparency. The ongoing Synod on Synodality has made reform a group project of all Catholics and has brought the whole body of the Church into close contact with himself and the upper rungs of the hierarchy. Laypeople, that is those not ordained in anyway, men and women, were given equal time around the table with Cardinals discussing the Church’s place in the modern world and yes, where change is necessary.

Pope Francis made inroads with the Muslim world that were undreamt of when he was elected: principle among these is the Abu Dhabi Declaration he signed with the highest authorities among Sunni Muslims during the first ever papal visit to the Arabian peninsula in 2019. This Pope was a figure of fondness among almost every reasonable Christian sect in the world to the point that the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew, the most widely recognized leader in the Eastern Orthodox world, was in advanced talks on a unified date for Easter and planned excitedly for a group trip with Pope Francis to Türkiye for the 1700th anniversary of the landmark Council of Nicaea later this year.

I kid you not: as I write this obituary I am seeing an ad served to me from an Anglican Church about a Mass in the late Pope’s honor scheduled for later this week. This will not be the last non-Catholic service for the late Holy Father I will see. Pope Francis has made real several hopes of the Second Vatican Council sixty years ago in ways his predecessors failed to, namely ecumenical progress with fellow Christians in this case.

It is difficult to speak of this leader as someone who neatly fits into any mold we would like to put on him. He frustrated both self-described progressives and conservatives. Beyond those failing categories, the number of professed nonreligious and lapsed Catholics who I have encountered speaking of him as a high moral example who they feel personally connected to is shocking. The speech and Eucharistic adoration in the empty St. Peter’s Square at the height of the COVID19 pandemic, when we still didn’t know how apocalyptic it would be, is a high point for many people no matter what faith they profess, if any faith at all.

For the many gay Catholics who have long been treated as a contagion for simply wishing to remain with their Church, the 2023 declaration “Fiducia Supplicans” allowing for blessings of same-sex couples came as a ray of sunshine they rarely see from Rome. In many places in the world where homosexuality is criminalized the Pope’s calling it a “human condition” was a lifeline. Mercy first was the mindset, and that simple shift swung open the doors without massive theological changes to Church teachings.

But this is where we see yet another theme of Francis’ papacy arises: the intense right-wing opposition he has faced as his reign went on. In 2018, the now excommunicated Bishop Mario Vigano circulated a call for him to resign, the culmination of years of opposition resulting from the Pope’s efforts on everything from the natural environment to the Latin Mass, all couched in a bad faith case that the pontiff had covered up the sex abuse of one prominent American prelate Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. In that moment of extreme negative attention, Francis was cornered on the papal plane returning from Ireland and bravely chose not to defend himself; instead opting for the slow and methodical investigation which not only led to a comprehensive report and the aforementioned reforms, but also saw that abusing Cardinal laicized, the first time a prelate of that high standing has been ejected from the College of Cardinals.

His critics were ever louder but Pope Francis never gave into the siren call of clerical privilege and therefore was never apt to believe he was not a good enough Pope just because he applied the mercy of Christ in the Gospels from the highest office in the Church. A generation of Catholics, particularly in the French and English-speaking worlds, had grown up under the relatively more conservative Popes St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI and had come to believe Catholicism was, in essence, a certain kind of conservatism. For them Francis was the nemesis from within. His legacy will be their bane and indeed the late Holy Father was a sacred thorn in the side of the rising tide of autocratic politicians the world over.

For me, his willingness to rebuke secular leaders was the charming frosting on top of a towering cake of religious depth. Pope Francis will certainly be remembered as messenger of mercy, true in the many ways we’ve already reviewed, but also true in the way he preached a simple, forgiving spirituality for each of us as individuals. “Rigidity in the Church is a sin against the patience of God” is one quote that jumps to mind immediately. Another is “A Church that teaches must be firstly a Church that listens.” What a maxim of his papacy that one is. Yet another quote: “The Gospel is the most humanizing message known to history.”

He knew his power as Bishop of Rome is a healing power at best: “As Christians we are called to nurture tomorrow’s hope by healing today’s pain.” And for me personally I was always touched by the following quotation: “To be saints is not a privilege for a few, but a vocation for everyone. In God's great plan, every detail is important, even yours, even my humble little witness, even the hidden witness of those who live their faith with simplicity.” The words of this great teacher will be spoken by merciful lips for generations to come long after you and I are done breathing.

Pope Francis was the first Pope from outside Europe since Pope Gregory III who was elected in the year 731 AD. He was the first Pope from the Jesuit order of Priests and first Pope from the Western Hemisphere. He was not without scandal. He remained a contentious figure in Argentina due to his actions as a provincial Jesuit in that country’s “Dirty War” in the late 1970s. He never returned to his native Argentina after his election. He fumbled the discipline of another notorious abuser: Fr. Marko Rupnik whose art still adorns papal media and properties in some places. He was known on multiple occasions to use slurs he certainly understood but nonetheless spoke aloud. Yet his kindness and aversion to power led him to put off reforming the papal election, the Conclave as we will see in a few weeks’ time, in this age of hyper-partisan, predatory, and falsifying media: a diet of anger that not even the Cardinal electors are safe from.

But this Pope of firsts will be remembered as a turning point figure in my estimation. Pope Francis spoke to the sufferings of the modern world today and, in many ways, preached ahead of a post-modern spiritual state the world is still seeing take shape among our young and most vulnerable, whether that be environmental degradation or the aforementioned media world of hate and division. He was ahead of his time in ways we will not understand for several more years to come.

This man truly saw the thankful divine sparks in every little part of this world God has blessed us with. “Todos todos todos”, “Everyone everyone everyone” as he often sloganized his inclusiveness will be the cry of those seeking Christ in his Church for many years to come. Pope Francis saw the possibilities of a grateful faith that does not talk down to anyone and that truly lets Jesus Christ’s light shine from the highest auspices of the Catholic Church. We have lost a transformative figure today.

May he rest in peace. May his soul be taken up in eternal beatitude with our Resurrected Lord Jesus Christ. Eternal rest grant to him, O Lord. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

[andrewuttaro]

The Sacrament of Sacraments: The Holy Eucharist

Jesus Christ was more than a great moral teacher. He certainly taught many great things that have defined moral thinking in most of the world in the centuries since he walked the earth. But if you really and truly apply yourself to understanding his message front to back you will inevitably be confronted with a few tough teachings that don’t neatly fit on an inoffensive quote list of history’s greatest moral philosophers.

No such greater tough teaching exists than the Blessed Sacrament: Eucharist, communion, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. If you’ve even encountered Christianity, even just in passing, you have probably encountered some version of it. However every day and ordinary this sacrament may seem, scripture states many followers left Jesus due to this teaching. It seems so benign when you just view it as the snack at Church. For Catholics and many other Christians it is a whole lot more. It is so profoundly deeper that one St. John Vianney said “There is nothing so great as the Eucharist. If God had something more precious, he would have given it to us.” Yeah, lot to unpack here.

Catholic missionaries and apologists will beat this drum that the way Jesus talked about this sacrament demands you abandon him as a mere moral philosopher. They say this because what he commands in the Eucharist is so patently insane that if he isn’t telling the truth about it he is either completely crazy or utterly devious. Make no mistake: in this Paschal Sacrifice Jesus is asking us to eat his flesh and drink his blood.

Many Protestants will rightly say if we Catholics have Jesus wrong on the Eucharist than we are committing grave idolatry. Forgive me for throwing down a sectarian gauntlet but this is the big one for we Catholics. This is the devotion of all devotions. This is the finale. If Jesus isn’t telling the truth about this than everything else he teaches is merely kind words.

I don’t disagree with the assertion that this sacrament makes Jesus irretrievably subversive. But in a world where morality is often treated as a quite expansive buffet you get to pick all your favorites from, most people will not be swayed by that argument. Jesus claiming to be God via the Son of God title makes that argument in a much more compelling manner. Either way, I wanted to get this piece out of the way because as a devotion which the Catholic Church lends a whole month to, really its whole sacramental life to actually, it is so much deeper and more powerful than a cudgel of sectarianism. It is essential but oh so very sublime at the same time.

The Holy Eucharist is the sacrament of all sacraments, directing and organizing the rest of any faithful Catholic’s lifestyle. The Catechism of the Catholic Church does not hold back when it comes to communion: “For in the blessed Eucharist is contained the whole spiritual good of the Church, namely Christ himself…” (CCC 1324). The Catechism also calls it the ritual, sacramental action of thanksgiving to God which constitutes the principal Christian liturgical celebration of, and communion in, the Paschal Mystery of Christ. Paschal, by the way, is a term referring to the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Think of it as a shortcut term for talking about Easter and the events immediately proceeding it, in the most basic sense at least. In fact, in most languages Easter is not referred to with that word “Easter”: in most languages Easter is referred to as some version of Paschal. It’s an etymological callback to the Passover of Judaism which is of course the context of the Paschal events which Christianity is built around.

But over the course of this article we’re going to focus on some other words. Specifically we are going to hold onto the words “thanksgiving” and “celebration” because that’s where we have to start with this before we even get into the devotional outgrowths of this central Catholic sacrament.

In some ways it feels as though the Eucharist is the perfect way to end this twelve-month journey of blogs. In other ways it feels as though such a topic shows just how little I have actually covered in the prior eleven posts. To varying degrees of success I have told you about things people have done, rituals, to connect deeper to their Catholic faith: devotions. The Eucharist is that… quintessentially. I feel like I am just gushing now, let’s begin. I can get all sappy about the completion of this twelve-month blog cycle at the end.

Source and Summit

The Eucharist goes all the way back to Jesus’ Last Supper on Holy Thursday, the eve of the Crucifixion, in the Gospels. It is very dear to Catholics that this sacrament and the sharing of it in communion as the central element of the Mass, the primary form of worship for us, is an unbroken line of continuity to the present day. This is big, really big. This is more important than the papacy and I mean that with total seriousness. The Eucharist, the bread and wine made into Jesus’ flesh and blood, is the entire source and summit of Catholic life. The technical, theological term is transubstantiation but I am trying to keep this theology lesson brief and comprehensible so let’s stick with source and summit.

That phrasing, source and summit, is the snappy, concise way the principle document of the Church’s most recent Council, the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), described our most precious sacrament. And yes, the belief is that the consecrated bread and wine is Jesus Christ himself so no, this does not take away from the central person of Christianity. We believe it is Jesus himself, and that Jesus gave us this gift, this memorial of himself to us, as preface and expression of that Paschal mystery he was about to begin the very next day. Source and Summit is an evocative turn of phrase that tells you what it means almost completely in a flat, plain English kind of way.

It is our source of Christian life because it is Jesus. It is our summit of Christian life because it is Jesus. I am oversimplifying, of course, this is a blog post not a book.

It is the aforementioned Vatican II document Lumen Gentium paragraph 11 that uses that terminology: Source and Summit. The average observer might point to the cross as the central thing about Christianity and they would be right. The Eucharist is that. Jesus gives us this sacrament to perpetuate his sacrifice on the cross throughout time and space. Without getting too bogged down in the theology of the crucifixion let’s lean on another document of the Second Vatican Council, Sacrosanctum Concilium, Vatican II’s document on the Sacraments, which clarifies what exactly the Eucharist is meant to do in the process of expressing that sacred centerpiece of Christianity in paragraph 47:  

The Eucharist is a memorial of Jesus suffering, death and resurrection (Paschal Mystery) for us: this is to say a commemoration of God’s ultimate giving of himself to us. It is divine solidarity in a way.

The Blessed Sacrament is a sacrament of love: the great expression of the divine reaching out across the divide to be intimate with humanity out of sheer, gratuitous love for human beings.

The communion feast is a sign of unity: Jesus connecting humanity with the heavenly feast that he so passionately desires us to take part in and give up our petty differences among ourselves to come together in. The Sacrament is indeed a foretaste of “…when God will be all in all” (CCC 1326).

The consecrated bread and wine are a bond of charity: God was made flesh in Jesus Christ and so this embodiment of God among us in this Sacrament is a calling, a command, to observe the sacred core of each individual person and serve one another with the love that suggests Jesus found us worthy of coming among us.

The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is a “Paschal banquet”: by way of viscerally, tangibly consuming Christ Jesus we are given the assistance needed to better emulate him and participate in the mission he gives us along with the pledge of future glory with him in the eternal paschal banquet.

There really is a direct correlation, if you ask me, between how Catholic you claim to be and how intimate you feel with God via the Blessed Sacrament. This sacrament is everything to this precious relationship we are to have with Jesus. I could write whole individual blog posts on each of those five points above. The Eucharist is an absolute powerhouse of a sacrament the more you dig deeper. And it all comes back to Jesus: Jesus wanting to be close to us in this absolute, eternal, but so very tangible way.

The Eucharist is so essential to how Jesus identifies himself that it is how he is identified by the travelers on the Road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13-35). In a very concrete way the Eucharist gives origin to the Church itself: “In order to leave them a pledge of his love, in order to never depart from his own and to make them sharers in his Passover, he instituted the Eucharist as a memorial of his death and Resurrection, and commanded his Apostles to celebrate it until his return; thereby he constituted them priests of the New Testament.” (CCC 1337).

Let’s jump back to those words “thanksgiving” and “celebration”. The Eucharist is a thanksgiving and a celebration. In some way all true religion is just an ultimate focus of gratefulness: the focus of which we lift up our blessings to the divine to say thank you. This the reason the Catholic Church is very specific about the elements of bread and wine that can be used in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Bread and wine are, in a symbolic way, the blessings God gives us in the natural world which we have then forge into new, more powerful goods. This is God and humanity cooperating in a way that is almost religious in itself.

The return sign of God’s participation in this feast of thanksgiving is to transform what his children have already gathered up and make them more then symbolic: to make them the very flesh and blood of God’s humanity Jesus Christ. That is certainly a thanksgiving, and it is certainly a celebration. How could it be anything less than a celebration with God?

Let’s take a break from this prolonged bout of theology. Those two words: “thanksgiving” and “celebration” are some of my passions. I’ve considered myself at least nominally religious since I was ten years old, and I think the most transformative moments in my own faith journey are found at the intersection of thanksgiving and motivating circumstances. On retreats with my Church in my High School years Mass would be celebrated on an evening buttressed by plenty of reflection time, the opportunity for confession, and plenty of those little moments of precious whispered memories sitting with your friends.

At that point in my life I was certainly not a regular confession-goer and when I did partake in the sacrament on those retreat occasions I usually did it out of social desirability and… well they give you a little crucifix necklace afterwards and I loved those as mementos. Everybody got one of them before those evenings were done but somewhere along the way I came to associate getting the cross necklace with going to confession, it didn’t feel right to me to take it if I hadn’t gone to confession and Mass. To this day I wear these necklaces: without any exaggeration I don’t think I’ve gone without one in fifteen years.

Those quiet, but very talkative, powerful evenings on retreats growing up, those were a celebration and a thanksgiving built around that primary Catholic celebration and thanksgiving, the source and summit if you will. It certainly was the source and summit of those retreats thanks to the efforts of an incredible Youth Minister who may never understand how many blessings she unleashed on the world.

But moreover those retreat evenings with confession and Mass were the first time I assigned worth to the Eucharist and recognized just what can happen if you meet Jesus in this sacred place he specifically designed for us to meet him in. My venerable mother would tell you I was religious a long time before those retreats, but those nights were the very beginning of anything resembling piety in me. I am grateful to God and all the others who made them happen for helping me find the source and summit for the first time sincerely, personally, in that way.

And don’t misread me for naïve either. Those whispers among friends before Mass as confessions were unfolding across the room were not always the holiest conversations. Among that quiet, uniquely teenage gossiping, I confessed at least one crush on a classmate and was outed for it not too long after. That is another beauty at this source and summit of our faith: just like we celebrate with the Christmas time incarnation, the Blessed Sacrament is God getting down into the messiness of humanity.

Coming to the table

Generally these monthly devotion blogs have a section dedicated to the history of the devotion. We could discuss a multitude of Saints who have had special devotions to the Eucharist, most of them have been labeled as mystics by historians centuries later because of how said devotion can look quite odd from the outside looking in. The weirdness of what we’re talking about here is not lost on the many centuries since its institution.

But I think the history of this all-encompassing devotion is much better served focusing on the basics. This history of the Blessed Sacrament as a devotion is as widespread and ancient as the Mass. That is a long way back; and the history also points to thanksgiving and celebration with this sacrament of sacraments. From the very beginning the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass was held high as the most special sacrament; so much so that it would often be what outed Christians during the early centuries of persecution.

St. Justin Martyr was born around the year 100AD. His Christianity was formed by a generation of people before him who would have known Jesus’ Apostles personally. We call this period within living memory of the Apostles, the Sub-Apostolic age. As a wave of persecution against Christians intensified in the Roman Empire St. Justin Martyr wrote about his faith. More than that he wrote to explain the Mass to those who heard the craven, vampiric and cannibalistic rumors of what Christians were doing in their secret, underground gatherings.

What St. Justin Martyr recounted in his texts “Apologies” and “Dialogue with Tryphon” was, even by the accounting of later secular historians, all the hallmarks of the Mass; everything from the coming to the table, the readings, the sign of peace, and of course the Eucharistic feast. At this point during the centuries of early Church persecutions, Christians met underground and in private homes. It is clear in the writings of this roman saint of the second century that in that setting, under that persecution, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass was already being practiced in much the same way we know it today. Believers came to a table and shared in the thanksgiving feast given to them by Jesus just a century prior.

As the name suggests St. Justin Martyr would die for his faith in 165 AD, working to convince the roman citizenry of the Gospel message all the while, largely using the background of the Greek philosophy the wealthy patrician class there would be well acquainted with. Through the writings of St. Justin Martyr and his contemporaries, we have historical proof the great coming to the table of the Eucharistic feast was practiced by Christians well before it was legal and often in spite of risking their own lives to do so.

Coming to the table is a terminology I am emphasizing because it contains these prior meanings we covered with thanksgiving and celebration and puts some social weight on it. I am not talking about the social weight of Catholic guilt or even the weight of risking your life to go to Mass. This call to the Eucharistic Feast, dating all the way back to Christ’s own last supper, is a call of inclusivity and the collecting in of all peoples. St. Justin Martyr died trying to bring the wizen roman thinking class to the table. Jesus after all, called all manner of outcasts and sinners to the table during his ministry.

This is the divine solidarity of this sacrament. It’s a continuity of God made flesh giving himself to all people. It is a memorial therein of the Paschal mysteries. When you read it like this you begin to clock just how precious it is. The early Christians picked up on that too and veneration of the Blessed Sacrament outside of the context of Mass would develop soon after the persecutions ended. As with many of the realities of Christian life, there was naturally going to be changes and new needs to be met once we could come out in the open.

Functionally speaking, there was no meaningful difference between Bishop and Priest before Roman legalization. With much of the general public exposed to the faith and joining in large numbers, a handful of the ordained in each city wasn’t sufficient anymore. Certainly Bishops were always Bishops, but the everything grew after Churches began being built and congregations swelled to many thousands. For the first time there were folks who were just doing this as their routine. What a change! Monotony was introduced to the Sacrament of Sacraments!

This new context helps us re-examine the Eucharist yet again. Adoration of the Sacrament is something that is quite a bit more confronting than getting in line for communion as routine. Without all the pomp and ritualism of the liturgy of the Mass… well now I am just staring at Jesus… quite literally. It hits on personal level. It’s you and him now. Any background biases or beliefs are something you have to insert into this one-on-one experience you have in adoration.

Adoration pulls me into an introspective space that isn’t judgmental as much as it is contemplative. I have a weekly adoration “Holy Hour” as we say which occurs in the 7am hour. My wife always mocks me for being a morning person but actually being rather sleepy in those morning hours I wake up for. I don’t drink coffee so let’s just say the Apostles falling asleep in the Garden of Gethsemane when Jesus asked them to keep awake with him often confronts my conscience.

But we also risk being a little bit too reserved to ourselves with this precious sacrament, particularly in the consumer societies of our modern world. The Eucharist is a noun and a verb!

As the great St. John Chrysostom once wrote: “If you cannot find Christ in the beggar at the Church door, you will not find him in the chalice.” When Jesus said “Do this in memory of me” at the Last Supper, that first Christian Mass, he wasn’t giving us a treasure to horde, but rather a gift to share. As privileged a heavenly gift this Sacrament is, you fundamentally miss the point if you don’t see how it also dignifies all those stripped of their dignity.

That same St. John Chrysostom said judging the other as unworthy dishonors the table of the sacrament (CCC 1397). The Eucharist is how we share in Christ’s pledge of heavenly glory (CCC 1402) and it is distinctly un-Christian to then look down on someone and imagine they are not worthy of such a divine pledge. We are all works in progress in God’s hands every day in every way except sin. Therefore, there is nothing but equality among humanity in the sacrament of his body and blood for us.

We come to the table of this precious Holy Offering to consume Jesus’ earthly substance. God elevates human substance in becoming the same substance with us. Moreover, his substance became poor among us: feeble like an infant but also destitute in poverty like the proverbial beggar at the door. This sacrament calls us together in Christ in order to be divinely fed before turning back around and going back out with eyes opened to how God can work in the world.  

Devotion of Devotions

Honestly and truly I cannot imagine any greater usage of my time and attention than the giving of Christ’s own self to me. That’s why the social element of the Mass and the private element of Adoration both have a great impact on me: there is no part of life I don’t want a God that generous to come into. As I have aged in my faith that St. John Vianney quote from the beginning of this article has made more and more sense.

God is fully present and expressed to us, even in his Trinitarian nature, in the Eucharist: thanksgiving and praise for the father, a sacrificial memorial of Christ and his human body, and the presence of his Holy Spirit in acting then and there in the sacrament (CCC 1358).

I remember May of last year when I wrote about Mary to start this series of blogs I was overcome with a sense of grace. God is always reaching out to us and in the interest of as broad an appeal as possible we often focus our perceptions of holiness on moments of personal revelation and turning point. These graced moments that the devotions we have covered built around show us that its powerful and beautiful in a different way to join in a practice of prayer and loving contemplation that predates you and will outlive you.

This devotion of all devotions, the Eucharist, is something of an antidote to just wanting to be a part of something bigger than myself too. The Eucharist is this universal sacrament that brings you into one, eternal whole founded by Jesus Christ alive forever through the centuries. It is brought to the ill and dying for the same reason we collect our offspring at our deathbed: we want a legacy greater than ourselves that is still very much of ourselves. The Eucharist is our opportunity to be of Christ!

It doesn’t get any better than this and I mean that to the fullest extent when it comes to the Blessed Sacrament! It is to honor Jesus and the powerful, continuing presence of his words. For each of us to reach out in faith and believe him there in the Eucharist is an embrace of his cross and resurrection as well. By faith we encounter God where two wills, his and ours, meet and nowhere does this happen as acutely as in the greatest of all Sacraments.

Thanks for reading! My book “How to catch feelings for Jesus” is available online. Admittedly it is not a deep dive into the great Sacrament of Sacraments like this, but I definitely hit on the themes of this post in other ways. Share this article! I would love to hear your input. Did I help you understand anything about this highest Catholic devotion? Did it enlighten you on something else? I ask so I can make more sense the next time around. Did you really read all this to not leave some kind of thought afterwards?

[andrewuttaro]

The Real Joseph: devotion to St. Joseph

Anyone who knows me will tell you that quietness is not exactly my strong suit. I grew up in a family that never kept their thoughts to themselves and had a strong penchant for humor. I thrived a little bit too much growing up this way. One of my decisive character flaws always was, and still is, to a degree, my tendency to talk faster than I can think. It has certainly left me in some compromising situations on more than a couple occasions.

When I was confirmed, the final sacrament of initiation, the sacrament was being completed with 7th graders: 12-year-olds in many cases. Even at that age I knew I had a problem. The thing underpinning my motor mouth in my younger years was a certain sense of urgency. I wasn’t humble enough to realize everything I thought didn’t need to be broadcast in short order: in other words I really lacked patience.

Part of the sacrament of Confirmation is deepening your relationship with the third person of the Trinity: the Holy Spirit. This entails acquainting yourself with the Gifts and Fruits of the Holy Spirit. There are seven gifts and twelve fruits, so I won’t recap them all here. When I was going through Confirmation preparation they encouraged us to pray for a specific fruit of the Holy Spirit for ourselves. I picked patience and… well I think it was actually given to me in spades actually.

Say what you will about self-fulfilling prophesies. I certainly still talk myself into a corner every now and again. But through the emotional trials of High School and into my college years I really think it was patience, the Holy Spirit answering my prayer, that kept me sane and walking in the right direction. Who knows if the woman who became my wife would have even tolerated my eccentricity if it weren’t for the way my newfound patience had tempered me socially and spiritually. Without exaggeration I must say, on a mental health level, I do not know what I would have done without that divine intervention during my first job out of college.

While many characters in salvation history have definitive conversion moments, before and after moments which they started on the way of God’s calling afterwards, few if any have as little to say after that moment than St. Joseph, the earthly father, or foster father more commonly, of Jesus. He has no recorded words in scriptures and simply disappears after the episode when twelve-year-old Jesus was lost in the Temple. Nonetheless, Catholicism has developed a spirituality, a network of devotions in fact, around the wordless earthly guardian of Jesus Christ.

St. Joseph is very personal to me. We Catholics also take a confirmation name upon receiving the sacrament, the first name we get to give ourselves intended to signify an intentional, personal commitment to the faith. As with any name, it’s a certain kind of dedication: declaring yourself for God with the spirituality, the example of a certain Saint. Yes, the name chosen is almost always the name of a Saint, it makes it easier to replicate the spirituality involved. Yes, I took the name Joseph.

St. Joseph is not just the father of the Church in a certain way. He’s not even just the earthly, adoptive father if you will, of Jesus. Joseph is the great example of responding to God not with more words, more achievement, more prideful feats of supposed holiness; but with the humility to put yourself second, in service, in ways that simply do not come naturally to us so much of the time. St. Joseph’s wordlessness… yeah that speaks to me on a deep level.

The devotions that have grown up around St. Joseph, particularly in more recent centuries, show a level of self-awareness by devotees you don’t normally see with religious devotions: they’re introspective in a way that doesn’t lend itself to scrupulosity. That’s my opinion coming more from my education in religious studies than in any religious piety. St. Joseph is, like his wife but to a lesser extent, a model for how we give ourselves to God: not with building mountains of good deeds, but in a service that seeks no recognition except in intimacy with God like a father and a son. There’s no room for excessive self-centeredness or excessive self-hate in that.

And now I am in the habit of disclaimers in this blog series so here’s a St. Joseph related disclaimer: death stuff. Yes, St. Joseph is also the patron saint of a holy death as we’ll get to later so tread lightly if that sounds like it might be difficult for you. With no further ado, let’s get to my favorite Saint!

Wordless Holiness

As we touched on last month in the article on the Holy Family, prior to the early Renaissance, St. Joseph was viewed as a somewhat homely, repulsive figure. As I alluded to last month this was something of a perception of its time. Joseph’s quietness in scripture did not fit the middle ages when tales of knights and bravery were the focus of stories the illiterate masses passed around for entertainment. Before that, in the imperial age of Christianity, there was hardly any time to think of Jesus’ foster father when clarifying the Trinity and other core doctrines were far more concerned with Jesus’ heavenly father.

Tradition had always held Joseph was many years Mary’s senior, so romance was rarely something ascribed to Joseph or his marriage. But that was changing. It was 1488 when the Santo Anello, the Holy Ring, arrived at its current home in the Italian city of Perugia. This ring was venerated as the Blessed Virgin Mary’s wedding band, a gift from St. Joseph at their wedding. Pope Sixtus IV had to intervene to settle what had become a contentious debate over where the ring would remain in decades prior.

According to a lost manuscript rediscovered in the 1800s in the Angelica library in Rome, one of the other Italian cities who laid claim to the ring had propagated a legend to fortify their claim to the ring. The story goes that around the year 985 a Jewish merchant had gifted the ring to a local goldsmith after returning from the Holy Land. This merchant allegedly said his family had kept it in their possession very reverently for generations and had wanted to eventually sell it to Christians. The Christian goldsmith who bought it doubted its authenticity until a series of miracles, including the apparent resurrection of his son, made him a believer.

As with most relics and the tales they tell, the important matter here isn’t whether or not the story is true, or if the relic is authentic for that matter. What matters is the effect it has on piety and holiness. The Catholic peoples of central Italy were interested in this relic because there was a growing realization of what the ring represented, particularly in reference to St. Joseph. A wedding ring is a sacramental: a piece of religious wear that calls to mind a sacramental grace, a sacramental bond in your life. Consider for a moment what Joseph’s mandate was as the father in the Holy Family as expressed in that Holy Ring.

Pope Leo XIII would write sum it up well in his 1889 encyclical “Quamquam Pluries” (On the devotion to St. Joseph): “Thus in giving Joseph the Blessed Virgin as spouse, God appointed him to be not only her life's companion, the witness of her maidenhood, the protector of her honor, but also, by virtue of the conjugal tie, a participator in her sublime dignity. And Joseph shines among all mankind by the most august dignity, since by divine will, he was the guardian of the Son of God and reputed as His father among men. Hence it came about that the Word of God was humbly subject to Joseph, that He obeyed him, and that He rendered to him all those offices that children are bound to render to their parents.”

Joseph was trusted by God with a divine mission in the Holy Family that was not thrust upon him demanding his loud and combative patronage. This isn’t a knight’s tale. He just had to be a diligent and loving husband and father. There is virtue then in simply the way Joseph took it. He was made aware of the divinity of this son and did not demand heroic majesty from God for the responsibility the role thrust upon him. Quite contrarily Joseph was so diligent and heroically virtuous that he is never credited with his own words in the bible. For a jew of that time and place in history this would have been a profound submission to the will of God, an unparalleled sign of humility.

He could have leveraged this divine son given to him to raise an army or start a revolution: he simply chose to follow God with humility and patience, in spite of some steep difficulties I might add.

Joseph lived a quiet life doing his diligent mission from God of fatherhood for Jesus in spite of an awfully rough beginning: the initial shock of learning of Mary’s pregnancy, the nativity, the flight to Egypt, and Joseph’s pious respect for his wife’s divinely appointed vocation throughout it all (See the Seven Agonies and Joys of St. Joseph). Needless to say he was certainly inspired by his wife as well, in her fiat, that is her perfect yes to the will of God. All of this was a vocation God gave to this simple carpenter from backwater Nazareth in a dusty Roman protectorate. He certainly felt blessed but he didn’t lord it over anyone.

The medieval Christians were changed for this realization. And so as art of the Holy Family contributed to the Renaissance, Marian devotion exploded across the Church in reaction the Protestant Reformation, so too St. Joseph’s edifying force in Christian life was unleashed. St. Joseph’s Day in March, always falling in the midst of the liturgical season of Lent, saw March become St. Joseph’s month as St. Joseph’s virtues naturally aligned with the sacrificial, humbling practices of the penitential season of Lent. As if continuing to be his son’s vanguard for eternity, his spirituality is noted during the Lenten season leading into Holy Week observances of Jesus’ saving passion.

Christianity’s First Gentleman

It is safe to say that the Blessed Virgin Mary is the first Christian in the basic fact that she was the first human being to accept Jesus Christ into her life at the Annunciation. However, both chronologically and spiritually, St. Joseph is certainly the second Christian, the very next one after his wife. All the grandeur of being the Holy Family’s dad we’ve already covered makes it somewhat clear he is Christianity’s first gentleman.

To be clear, I don’t use the term gentleman in this austere, over-polished kind of way. In the three hearts of the Holy Family devotion it is the most chaste heart of Joseph along with the Immaculate heart of Mary and the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The key thing to understand in Catholic veneration of St. Joseph in general is chastity. Chastity might just be the most misunderstood concept in the whole body of Catholic teaching, at least in today’s culture, and that is why it is so hard to understand St. Joseph from the outside looking in.

The most chaste heart of St. Joseph is a private devotion: that is, you won’t find widespread public devotions or religious sites dedicated to it. I think that is subtly insightful. Like all the devotions we have explored over the last ten months there is an element of self-motivation. The Holy Spirit reaches out to us suggesting a relationship with God in numerous ways, many of which might only make sense to us as individuals, but it is always in our court to answer. Recall the enormous power of Mary’s Yes in the May devotion. In many ways, being self-motivated springs from a certain chastity which Joseph is an excellent teacher of.

Chastity is that yes to God that backs the yes with action. Chastity is only partly about sexuality. Yes, chastity is about moderating one’s sexual appetite but its also about taking control of how we relate to others in general: it is choosing the dignity God puts in every human being over our own gratification as a consistent personal virtue. In that sense Joseph’s most chaste heart has to be a private devotion because it is, in effect, a devotion to build up our individual self-control in the light of what God is calling us to. Self-motivation is so much easier when you are working toward someone that makes you better everyday for pursuing them the humble way.

You can see why St. Joseph was such a powerful choice for preteen Andrew. The most chaste heart of St. Joseph was not so because of feats of holiness I knew I couldn’t achieve at that age: St. Joseph was perfect for me because humility colored everything about him.

That is what real love is by the way. The humility bound up in chastity enough to truly and honestly care for the other person as a being unto themselves without expectation that you get something in return from them like a mere transaction. This is how St. Joseph teaches us how to love. Chastity is so maligned because in some way it is not fun in the short term: it requires us to submit ourselves to patience and humility in order to love more truly in the long term.

What we submit to in life speaks volumes about who we are and what we think of ourselves. Chastity is saying to ourselves: I can tolerate wanting something and not pursuing it immediately in the interest of a higher calling. We’re submitting ourselves to something better, even if we don’t have a complete view of it yet. This is how chastity isn’t necessarily celibacy. If the vocation in life God calls you to involves celibacy like the Priesthood or religious life then sure, it does. But every married person is also called to chastity. Part of my vow to my wife when I got married was chastity, it’s everyone’s marriage vow because most people value faithfulness in a marriage.

Take that a step further. Not cheating on my wife is the bare minimum expectation. Chastity is also deciding to unload the dishwasher, excavate the kitty litter, or clear the snow off the car for my wife. Chastity isn’t simply not doing bad things, its also deciding to do good things that advance the good of your spouse in this example. Moreover, it’s the capacity to do that. Chastity is the virtue of submitting all your desires to a mission given in service of some kind of love in your life. That’s marriage yes, but that’s also just life lived in any community of love: from marriage, to family, to community, and so on.

When we talk about St. Joseph’s most chaste heart we’re talking about how he not only had the desire to say yes to Mary’s pregnancy, but he also had the capacity to do the work and go be Mary’s husband and Jesus’ dad for all that those two roles entailed. It’s delayed gratification to use a modern term but on a much deeper level it is recognizing the love that you are actually called to serve with your own life. That is a giving, not a demand for receiving anything in return necessarily, nothing except to do the will of God.

We moderns are not a people of delayed gratification. We’re not even generally a people of foregoing gratifying ourselves in any way. If it comes naturally and it doesn’t hurt anyone we’re conditioned to think it’s morally good and right too. You can’t be the husband of the Blessed Virgin Mary that way. You can’t raise the savior of humanity that way. Before even considering the Holy Family it’s worth also saying this: you can’t really be happy without a certain amount of chastity. In the language in which the bible was written and Christianity grew up in there was no meaningful difference between happiness and holiness here.

Without chastity, we’re really just going around dodging addiction in life. Chastity makes us holy and prepares us to do what God is calling us to.

Joseph is Christianity’s first gentleman because he had chastity in spades enough to answer the call of God when it shocked him profoundly at the discovery of Mary’s pregnancy. Even before the angel came to him in his sleep to assure him of the baby’s identity and Mary’s sincerity Joseph did not lambaste Mary: quite to the contrary he made provisions for her protection (Matthew 1:19) in a deeply patriarchal society that would have had the stones ready for her execution if it became public. Joseph was an all-around good dude to put it bluntly.

The Real Joseph

Christian love is built on not expecting anything in return, but we are not doormats, and we are not left abandoned because we love with chastity. St. Joseph is the patron saint of a happy death for a mere implied reality of his life. He disappears from scripture and it’s safe to assume, if not implied in the text, that he died before Jesus public ministry based on what such a public life of Jesus would have called on him for. Therefore the image we have is of this most chaste spouse dying in the company of the two people he loved most in life: Jesus and Mary.

We all generally want to die with loved ones nearby, but could you imagine those two transcendent figures being at your bedside? Could you imagine if that was your end after having given your all to them in love for most of your life? There is no deeper consolation at the end because Jesus was literally and spiritually right there. It’s a profound reframing of death but its also just this intimate and holy sign that chastity is worth it because the love it buoys you for does not leave you behind.

This is the real St. Joseph you generally don’t get a feel for with the rosy-cheeked illustrations or the stern-looking statues. He is not the theological afterthought of the Christians of late antiquity. He is not the ugly older man the medievals imagined. He’s not even just the father of Jesus who taught him a useful trade like the fond popular image today suggests. St. Joseph is the embodiment of Christian chastity, devotion, and the premier guide for all Christians behind only his son and wife.

Last year around the time of my sixth wedding anniversary I did the consecration to St. Joseph and now I pray a St. Joseph prayer as part of my daily routine. The foster father of Jesus has colored my life in a new way as an adult that is distinct from how he helped me as a teenager and a young man. My line of work involves going into nursing homes and meeting with people who are not only aged, but also often in some degree of physical or mental distress. Even in life’s fragile, declining phases it is still life imbued with divine dignity from God. Keeping diligent on the mission in those settings calls on a certain degree of focus and insistence on that divine dignity. That is a personal devotion that speaks to chastity. That is St. Joseph.

For St. Joseph’s example of humble chastity he is met with so many recognitions in Catholicism, especially Italian Catholicism if I am being blunt here, that he’s really only behind the likes of his wife and son. He has been declared the patron of the whole Catholic Church and so many numerous other things. You might be wondering then: why did you just say devotion to St. Joseph is always a personal devotion? How can that be if you also say he has many recognitions and patronages?

The answer is that long before a third of modern Christianity was obsessed with the personal relationship with God there was this groundswell of personalized devotion that emerged around St. Joseph to orient ourselves toward God with a personalized passion. It was appealing more than it was ever imposed. These prayers and devotions fit well in many cultures as civilization changed in the last five centuries to the point that the widespread recognition of St. Joseph’s virtue and intercession came after it was already a personal devotion to so many. Take in some of these devotions and you can tell they didn’t come from the top down like so many honorifics tend to flow. I recommend my daily St. Joseph prayer which I used for the thumbnail to this article. That’s the one I pray every day.

While the St. Joseph prayer I pray daily really emphasizes the holiness and mercy St. Joseph can teach us, many other devotions emphasize the family man. The Litany of St. Joseph is a good example of that. The Holy ring from earlier is another. The ones that emphasize his marriage tend to be most popular in Italy I’ve discovered. I am not just saying that because its my ancestry, devotion to St. Joseph takes on this “be a good dad in spite of everything” vibe over there. I say that lovingly as this spirituality grows up in high times for Italy, the renaissance, and it seems that such an emphasis was really about giving Joseph the respect they feel they had long denied him in centuries prior.

St. Joseph is one of those people in our faith who has a slightly different cult in every time and place he’s been introduced to. When I just said cult there I was using the other meaning by the way: little “c” cult as in a fanbase or set of related observances. Everyone who loves St. Joseph will randomly spring to defend his honor at times and that just got me. I think St. Joseph would have been more hostile to a big “C” cult than your average religious person for a few reasons, not the least of which being his understanding of the importance, the belovedness by God, of each individual person. Individuals get eaten up and spit out by big “C” cults. St. Joseph is never compelled against love.

St. Joseph, destroyer of cults, hmm… maybe I will start a new devotion.

There is so much out there on my guy that you will have your pick of dozens of devotions if you go looking as St. Joseph’s Day approaches later this month. That’s Wednesday, March 19th for your information. That’s two days after St. Patrick’s Day in case you were wondering. The popular celebratory vibe around the Irish people’s Saint might just help you frame the importance of St. Joseph actually. Either way, humility and chastity are yours with St. Joseph! He has done great things in my life, he can in yours too.

Allow me to leave you with the words of St. Teresa of Avila on Joseph: “Of all the people I have known with a true devotion and particular veneration for St. Joseph, not one has failed to advance in virtue; he helps those who turn to him to make real progress. For several years now, I believe, I have always made some request to him on his feast day, and it was always been granted; and when my request is not quite what it ought to be, he puts it right for my greater benefit.”

Thanks for reading! My book “How to catch feelings for Jesus” is available online. Admittedly it is not a deep dive into a devotion like this, but I definitely hit on the themes of this post in other ways. Share this article! I would love to hear your input. Did I help you understand anything about this Catholic devotion? Did it enlighten you on something else? I ask so I can make more sense the next time around. Did you really read all this to not leave some kind of thought afterwards?

[andrewuttaro]

Introducing: Sign of Unity

Confession is a sacrament I have found very useful in my spiritual life over the past five years or so. The general intimidation of the concept which steers so many away from the sacrament has long ago worn off for me. I am not going to say I never get tongue tied in the confessional; in fact sometimes I really have to engage in a deep examination of conscience to prepare. However I refuse the idea that it’s not for everyone: sacraments are for everyone.

I do think there is something very healthy about holding yourself to a standard where you can honestly say nothing you do is so bad you are not willing to confess it to another person. Go right to God, Amen, my Protestant siblings in faith, but our sins have a social dimension just like they effect our relationship with God. There is a certain admission in going into a confessional: an admission that you want to not just clear your conscience, but also clean up your moral life. This is a lifelong journey, so don’t think my moral life is much cleaner than yours!

Why am I talking about confession? I have two confessions for you. One, I am a messy bitch who loves drama. You might not get that vibe from me if you know me personally because I don’t like drama in my own life. Hey, a generation of reality TV was built on that way of consuming drama, eh? Secondly, I am a political junkie. I am the kind of political junkie that sees politics in everything for better or for worse… but not the way you’re thinking. I’ll tell you what I mean by that later.

Once more, I have matured in both my politics and faith enough to come to a certain realization I want to share…

Politics and Faith do not necessarily corrupt one another

Politics isn’t a nasty thing which by its very nature lands us in the confessional. No, politics is part of a grand sweep of human pursuits and experiences that could be classified under “human flourishing” in Catholic thought. Those are good things that aren’t neatly defined as religious devotion that sing to the goodness of our creator: excellence in sports, artistic beauty, a mean pasta primavera on a breezy spring day. All good things come from God.

Moreover, in the last century or so Catholic social teaching has modernized to the point that we can point to certain principles like solidarity and subsidiarity as political guidelines for those who aim to follow the Gospel of Jesus Christ in politics. I love the beatitudes as much as the next Christian but sometimes I like complicated things explained to me without a parable. Politics is not intrinsically bad. Politics is only bad when you do it wrong. It is supposed to be about how all of us can work together, right?

Not only that, but politics is an integral part of the Catholic Church.

Yes, I am such a political junkie I got into the politics of the Catholic Church. No, not the otherizing ideological divides of American politics, that’s what I was alluding to earlier. Those secular politics we all suffer through the moment we turn on the news are not the apple of my eye. I am not interested in being a pundit prognosticating about the latest piece of outrage fodder. Frankly I find the culture wars flatly repulsive and corrosive to the soul if they become a significant part of your personality or work.

I am more interested in the politics of working together. I am more interested in a Sign of Unity! There’s some heavy-handed foreshadowing for you.

The politics I will be talking about here is that of who gets to be a Bishop, who gets to be a Cardinal, and most interestingly of all: who gets to be the Pope! Those are just the most plainly political things I got into. There is a wide world of Catholic lay and clerical organizations that interact in a range of ways that can be messy more often than not. Literacy in this political world is lost on a lot of us, even many of us observant Catholics… at least until something happens that we find objectionable.

Just because its religious doesn’t mean its holy… but hopefully it pulls us heavenward. When the politics of the Catholic Church is not bringing us closer to God that actually becomes somewhat clear if you are in the loop and know the motion in the ocean. If you know what’s going on in Church politics it can be edifying knowledge, even edifying to read the news believe it or not.

To be a Church politico is a great release valve at the very least. What frustrated me about the Catholic Hierarchy made a whole lot more sense once I took a peek behind the curtain into the… incense filled room? Get it, instead of the smoke-filled room? Forgive my attempts at levity throughout this whole thing. Humor is in the eyes of the beholder, right? Okay, I’ll stop now.

And yes, there is no topic you handle with rose colored glasses if you are worth your salt doing this: the Clerical Sex abuse scandal is a worldwide problem and its not going to get magically declared over any day soon. If an institution claims any kind of moral objectivity then it better have its own morality as an objective! The same desire for moral objectivity informs the way I consume Church politics, which means being clear eyed about the Church’s wrongs. Yes, even devout Catholics are able to acknowledge when the Church and her leaders do things wrong: and no, it is not a sin to do so.

Yes, there is an opinion mixed into any analysis, just like in secular politics. I consider myself quite a proponent of Pope Francis’ whole program for the Church. I have my favorite United States Bishops and a watchlist saved on my phone naming the ones I think aren’t that great or worthy of any promotion when the Nuncio comes calling. I will be honest and open about those opinions when they come up.

What exactly am I doing here?

Sign of Unity: a Church politics blog

I am starting a new blog series. This one won’t be a neat analysis series on monthly devotions. This one is going to be messy and as regular as the unpredictable church politics junkie that I am. This blog series is going to focus on the politics of the Catholic Church, particularly in the United States which I know best, and the Vatican because how could I not being in a religious group with such a neatly arranged hierarchy?

In fact, I am calling it Sign of Unity because of that hierarchy we all love and hate and sometimes love to hate. I will certainly be talking about the guy at the top, the Pope. That “Petrine office” as it’s called is understood to be the visible sign of unity for the Catholic Church. The day I am posting this first article in the blog series is the feast of the Chair of St. Peter. This feast day dates back long before the papacy was clothed in the grandeur we know today to at least the fourth century. The early Christians didn’t know the date of St. Peter’s martyrdom, so they left a chair open for him on this date. Yes, this feast about celebrating the papacy actually hails from a time the office, and just being Christian for that matter, normally came with martyrdom.

We Catholics believe Jesus Christ himself endowed the Apostle Peter and all his successors whom we would later call Popes with a certain final authority. This is a principle of ecclesiology or Church-ology if you will: how the Church is structured and conceived of. As you can imagine, ecclesiology will come up in almost every article in this series. You couldn’t teach government without at least a glancing tour of law, right?

This day felt like the right one to start this blog series I have long wondered if I should do. Admittedly I have thought I have nothing insightful to say on these topics. I think I am finally doing it because if it’s just a crash course series that helps friends and family understand what’s going on a little better then it will be worth it for me.

Let’s have some grace with each other in this. Not just because all politics seems to lack it these days but also because I am figuring this out as I go along too. This series is really about conversations. I want to give readers enough tools to make sense of Church politics on at least a cursory level. My religious studies degree is coming up on a decade old and it certainly wasn’t geared toward Church politics. Most of this is really self-taught and I do not mean that as a brag at all: quite the opposite in fact.

Faith starts with relationships. Unity starts with conversations. We might find ourselves learning a bit about all those things over the course of this blog! One can only hope. I will pray I do more harm than good writing this, I have my doubts I can break even in that regard. Some input here or there would certainly be helpful.

I will try to make each article as accessible as possible, even using some attempts at humor. There will be a few sub-series within the overall blog series Sign of Unity. If these posts get read at all I might even try to do some Q & A stuff down the road. I will often do a few blogs in a row that build on each other to give you context on an important but expansive topic.

That will start with the first three articles in the series: Ecclesiology I, II, and III. Remember: Ecclesiology is the way the Church works. The first post will be very basic for the born and raised Catholic and hopefully an easy primer for those with less background on the Catholic Church. The latter posts will cover the stuff less talked about until we get so high on the hierarchy we get back to the stuff that is talked about again at the top!

Finally, before I wrap up: a word from our sponsor. That’s me and my book! My book is called “How to catch feelings for Jesus” and it is available online. If you read it from front to back like you normally read books it roughly goes from simple to more complex too. Buy my book and maybe there will be another one day, maybe on Church politics! Share this article while you’re clicking things online. I would love to hear your input. I ask so I can make more sense the next time around. Did you really read all this to not leave some kind of thought afterwards?

[andrewuttaro]

Hearts of the Family: the Holy Family devotion

Family is a beautiful thing when it’s healthy. Family is something we always have opinions about. Family is necessarily one of those sociological things we think of with health in mind. In my education it was nature versus nurture: you are genetically given many good and bad things by your birth parents, but you might be more formed as a person for who does the hard work of raising you from birth up until you come of age and start making decisions for yourself in some significant way.

The monthly Catholic devotion of February is the Holy Family. This devotion actually focuses on three distinct but completely intertwined devotions (like how a family works but we’ll come back to that later): The Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and the Most Chaste Heart of St. Joseph. In other words, the devotion of this month is to focus on the hearts of the Jesus’ family. These three together form a family unit that is, in some spiritual way, the quintessential natural commitment of people as a unit of mutual love. I am running out of different ways to say family already!

But there is naturally a discomfort in speaking so spiritually about the family: to call if a unit of mutual love. Many people have suffered through dysfunctional and abusive family situations. For many there is more to be gained spiritually, and very bluntly for one’s mental health, to pick a “Found Family” of friends or like-minded individuals who have loved you no matter what. Indeed, there are oftentimes healthier mutual love units “Found families” out there for many. But to some extent this is where the health mindset breaks down. Family isn’t just about health. Love is far deeper than health.

My family exists in the shadow of the healthcare sector. My mother is a nurse who has had a majority of the different jobs you can have as a nurse in her long career. My older sister is an occupational therapist who works with children. My younger sister is a speech pathologist who works with children in speech therapy among other things. My wife and myself to a lesser extent work in healthcare in social work: the part of healthcare you don’t need an exhaustive knowledge of biology to work in. My brother is a teacher for high school aged kids which is technically not healthcare but… I don’t have time here to discuss how education predicts healthcare outcomes. Finally my father works in sales, which is the only profession in the family that is clearly not a healthcare profession.

I go through that list not to out my family in any way. No, I run down that list because when any family is heavily engaged in one line of work there is a certain professional intimacy, if you will, that comes with that specialization. At any given time a family gathering can turn into a conversation of inequities in the healthcare system. These conversations are loud often times, and not just because of our Italian blood! There is more disagreement than you think. In other words, just because we all work in similar fields does not mean that we are all in lockstep opinion wise: sometimes we find agreement but it’s not a guarantee my any stretch.

This way my family exists always made the Holy Family a bit of a curiosity to me. For one, I am setting aside my bias against only child families because this is Jesus we’re talking about after all. Forgive my bigotry, I have never gotten along well with people who were only children. If you are one then reach out to me and hopefully you can be the first! For two, how does that dynamic of submission to your parent’s authority work with Jesus, God incarnate himself, being the kid and Mary without sin being the mother? Joseph… man what a life he must have lived!

All these questions and more as we go into this month’s devotion! Perhaps this is another devotion with a trigger warning: talking about family dynamics can feel dire in a way akin to death. I did a trigger warning for the devotion involving death in November, so it feels appropriate here. Without further ado, let’s talk about family matters.

Family is the everyday art

The underlying spirituality of all devotion to the Holy Family is based in this belief that the family is the first school of mercy for all of us. Even if a family clears the most basic definition of family, mutual aid enough to nurture its members to some degree, that family will still naturally have moments of tension. We’re human beings, we’re never going to be totally hunky-dory with each other all the time. This is the training ground for being merciful.

The example I always go to is my very unmerciful behavior as a child toward my younger brother. Long story short I had a bad speech impediment until well into Elementary school which is still noticeable today if you really get me talking fast on something I’m into. When my younger brother came along with the same speech impediment I made fun of him ruthlessly for it. You can call that siblings being siblings if you want, but don’t call it merciful.

In this understanding it would be hard to conceive of any family that could be a greater school of what Christian mercy means, outside the Trinity that is if you’re being really generous with your definition of family. The Holy Family must be so mutually merciful that it was a light to its community and a model for Christians. Perhaps a brief aside on mercy is necessary here. I can sense some furrowed brows on the other side of the screen.

Mercy, in the Christian sense, is not merely a feeling. It’s also not simply taking it easy on someone who you could have been much crueler with a la what I lacked when I bullied my brother. Mercy is a certain understanding of human dignity that values each other person enough to truly do what’s best for them. To play with the health metaphor again, mercy is the active ingredient in love: the Christian virtue so essential God is made of it!

In Christian parlance mercy is mandatory to a certain extent because God was so merciful to us as to become one of us and wipe away the gulf between ourselves and his divine perfection. If we’re serious about our faith we work to imitate Jesus and that therefore requires mercy. The Holy Family demonstrates this to us. I have heard longtime parents react to the story of preteen Jesus being found in the Temple in very revealing ways.

In a bible study some years ago two sets of parents agreed they would struggle to not physically discipline Jesus if they found him after three days and he proceeded to tell them he simply had to be in Church. The parenting implications of that aside, mercy informs situations with a graceful love that is completely self-giving. Mercy here is recognizing God is doing something with Jesus and there’s no need to punish an action born of pure intent.

What that means in practice for us is that we bear with each other’s challenges as much as we rejoice in their dreams and accomplishments. We also get out of the way when God is at work. There is a certain give and take, a graceful at times kind of reciprocity with the family unit that we see in superb form with Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.

Most functional families I’ve encountered are able to do that at least passably well. But the Holy Family is that next step toward God: not just mutual aid amplified to be reasonably self-giving, rather family as a school of mercy so intentionally graceful that it makes everyone holier in a way that almost looks like art. I use that word, art, because the Holy Family devotion seems to have grown in the Church in large part hand-in-hand with art.

Unlike the other devotions I have documented along this blog series going back to last May, this one seems to arise primarily on the North American continent and in large part due to artwork about the Holy Family. And there is also a certain sense of humor to the origins of this.

Ironically the story of this devotion starts in part the same way all families start: with a set of parents. In the Middle Ages the perception of St. Joseph was somewhat mocking. In art and common piety the earthly father of Jesus was shown as a cantankerous, sleepy old guy compared to Mary’s youthful, divine visage. Some of the earliest Nativity scenes we associate with St. Francis of Assisi would have shown St. Joseph sleeping.

That “sleeping Joseph” motif is not unbiblical (as a more respectful devotion it has actually re-emerged in recent decades), but it also gave rise to this negative view of him. This began to change as the Renaissance dawned. Italian, Dutch, and Flemish painters began rendering the Holy Family more and more. In a still very illiterate world this had a huge spiritual impact. As the spiritual fruits of considering the Holy Family as a moral model grew St. Joseph’s image was rehabilitated.

An aside from Art history here: the Coptic Church in Egypt had already had a rather distinct devotion to the Holy Family dating back many centuries prior to this. The Holy Family’s flight to Egypt is a formative belief for many Coptic Christians and to this day you can visit Coptic Churches in Egypt which will claim to be consecrated by the Holy Family or Baby Jesus himself. Don’t look down on this, the tangible reality of this is secondary to the spiritual power of it, as with all devotions… as it is with family too… we’ll come back to that little nugget.

Let’s jump across a couple oceans. In what we would today recognize as Quebec in Canada, the Association of the Holy Family was established in 1663 Montreal. St. Francois de Laval, the first Bishop of Quebec (called New France at the time) and the first Bishop of all of Canada for that matter, brought with him to North America the devotion which was concurrently emerging in France as in Quebec. As numerous artistic renditions of the Holy Family grew the devotion in Europe, devotion to the Holy Family was thoroughly more widespread among all Canadian Catholics.

Even after the British conquest of New France a century later and subsequent repressions, the devotion to the Holy Family became so engrained in Canadian Catholicism that devotion to St. Anne, the mother of the Blessed Virgin Mary, was grafted onto it in some quarters.

To the degree that Catholicism was adopted by the native peoples of Canada, even before the brutality of the residential schools starting in the nineteenth century, St. Anne had been enculturated. That is to say, instead of being forced upon them, this grandmother figure in the family of Jesus neatly fit into the cultural respect for elders, particularly female elders, already existent among many native groups in Canada.

The versatility of this devotion is clear the more you read this history. Family is this uniquely relatable social experience that lends itself to artistic interpretation and devotion. We get family photos not just to remember what our family members look like, but also to capture moments in time along the journey together. Moreover, the Holy Family devotion fortified family units in spiritual practice across at least three very different groups: European artisans growing up in patrician families, Canadian settlers holding families together in the difficulties of that life, and even native families finding a new way to express a spirituality deeply respectful of their matriarchal ancestors.

All of these different expressions of the same devotion are a sort of common art: the everyday art of family life. We all participate in it and, though we are all different in family makeup and history, we create something beautiful by being family together.

These hearts of the family and whatever the natural law is

Striking in the actual story of the Holy Family is that their most difficult moments are actually some of the most grace-filled, monumental moments we commemorate. In the Rosary, for example, four of the five Joyful mysteries are directly related to the Holy Family and one of those is the loss of the Child Jesus in the Temple! Quite a parental nightmare to be emphasized for spiritual significance!

But you know this is not an accident because far more tragic moments in the life of this family found their way into the devotional life of Catholicism. Mary appears on the Way of the Cross during Jesus’ crucifixion in the fourth station of the cross for example. On a less brutal level, none of the events surrounding Jesus’s birth are particularly easy for first time parents either. Imagine giving birth in an animal stable!

Family is essential in many other moments along the way of Jesus’ saving mission. The Second Luminous Mystery is the Wedding at Cana where Jesus turned water into wine: a wedding! Mind you this first public miracle of Jesus was done at the recorded behest of his mother. John the Baptist, Jesus’ cousin who recognized his divinity in utero during the Visitation (the Second Joyful Mystery), is the one who baptizes Jesus: this profound moment Jesus submits himself to a baptism he does not need to show us his solidarity and mission. The whole work of salvation springing from Jesus Christ is a family affair.

The Presentation of Jesus is the 2nd of February this year. It’s also known as Candlemas for the centuries-old practice of blessing candles on this feast day, in the depth of winter in the Northern hemisphere. Believe it or not, Groundhog day is tangentially related to the Feast of the Presentation in a non-religious way. This Feast Day is also deeply interwoven with devotion to the Holy Family and indeed the fabric of what it means to be a human being in the larger, grand scheme of humanity.

In the Presentation of Jesus (the Fourth Joyful mystery) we see something more subtle and understated about the family unit: continuity. In this event Joseph and Mary, going through the difficulties of having a newborn, submit themselves to consecrating Jesus at the Temple. Think of this event as the familial equivalent of baptism for us today. By that little act of submission, Simeon and Anna, two elders of the temple, see what they have long waited for: their long-promised Savior.

Three generations are prophetically engaged here in what we might see as a perfunctory, even burdensome act imposed by tradition. Any parent knows any child under six months of age is just unbearable to bring out of the house for anything. Not just that, but one of those elders gives a whole prophecy that Jesus will cause great discord in the nation of Israel and indeed cause his own mother quite a bit of suffering. Ritual cleansing forty days after birth and elders telling you you’re in for some struggles? Sounds like an emotionally charged imposition on a new family just trying to get by. When we think that way, in such a flatly functional, individualistic way, we miss the point: not just about the Presentation of Jesus, but of the spiritual meaning of family in continuity with its beginning and end.

Call me a weirdo, but I think the Holy Family is where theology gets a lot less stuffy and a lot more grounded in what it means to be human. The Holy Family really humanizes all this normally inaccessible theological speak that makes the faith difficult sometimes. On some level we’re just talking about a family here: parents and a kid, doing their best.

Whether or not we have kids of our own, it required 8-16 people having kids within the last century for any individual one of us to be born. Think about your parents, and their parents, and their parents, and so on. Go back further and it gets into the hundreds really fast: hundreds of people needed to choose a family for one of us to be born! Each one of us, we are the links in a chain that stretches back eons and, God willing, reaches countless more eons into the future. Family, by its very existence is a cooperation with God’s grace. It is a sacrament of history and future, individuals and the much larger whole of humanity.

That is theology right there, wrapped up in plain old reality! That’s about the least stuffy example I could possibly describe the theology around Natural Law. That is the way theologians talk about how God designed humanity and the universe we live in with a purposefulness. Family is this fundamental cell by which God progresses humanity through history. Family is the core of that theology. The Holy Family is the pinnacle of that theology.

If you can get a grasp on this devotion it’s probably a pretty great spiritual starting point for diving deeper into Natural Law theology. Although I’d recommend you tread lightly with great sources in that field: there’s a lot of people who bring their own bigotries into talking about how God designed the world to be as you can imagine.

In the article for June’s devotion I went in depth on Jesus’ Sacred Heart and in the article for August I went in depth on Mary’s Immaculate Heart. Next month, March, is about devotion to St. Joseph so you bet I will dive deep into his Most Chaste heart then. Rather, here let’s discuss how these three hearts together transcend the mere tangible reality of family life into a deeper world of love and mercy.

When we tell stories about our childhood or dare to express something along the lines of “how I was brought up” we’re asserting a certain cultural transmission. “This is how things were for me, and I think that is important.” But beyond the shallow waters of our notions of how things should be on a cultural level, there is a far deeper reality about family. Every family is different: you might look at something my family does and think we’re crazy. As long as it’s not abuse or something grossly unhealthy it’s just another one of these pseudo-cultural artifacts.

My family is quite loud and boisterous when we gather together for a meal. I’ve encountered families that are very different in that regard. Though my less religious siblings might disagree, there is a spiritual power that matters more than the meal itself or even whatever conversations we are sharing there. The spiritual power is the comfort and confidence that practice imbued in us. In other words, we develop certain virtues in this everyday art of family life. Family is not just our first school of love and mercy, its our first school for understanding what it means to be religious: a relationship with the intangible that makes us better, and more intimate with that intangible – divine – relationship as well.

In Catholic circles we call that the domestic Church: the first and best instruction in the faith will come from your family of origin. But I could write all day on that, I have to keep this blog post to a readable length. Family of origin instructs us no matter what.

I have more empathy because I grew up with strong women in my life. I have a certain suspicion of powerful, profit-motivated types that came from my mom’s grounded view of the healthcare system. I have a thirst for knowledge that came directly from my father’s newsiness and my older sister’s bookishness. Certainly we also take on some negative traits from those we grow up with but that’s the reality of being human. It is also a great way to understand the Holy Family.

When we talk about the hearts of the Holy Family we are recognizing their souls, the intentionality of their beings. The Immaculate Heart of Mary for example is how we conceive of Mary’s way of being that resulted from her being sinless. She was a mother nonetheless, so sinless doesn’t mean statuesque or without any struggles. Joseph’s most chaste heart referred to his chastity, which contrary to certain cultural assumptions we have now, does not refer to him being some kind of prudish, sleepy pushover.

St. Joseph’s most chaste heart meant he was committed to his wife and child in a way so deep it directed his actions and character in a holy way. The two parental hearts here then would have had a very interesting, dare I say fun dynamic. I don’t think Mary would have been inaccessible in her sinlessness at all. I think she’s actually more relatable and spousal because of it. St. Joseph, though not without sin, was heroically virtuous in his most chaste heart. I could imagine Joseph trailing behind Mary trying to keep up with her sometimes but that’s all good couples if you ask me.

Jesus was also sinless, but I don’t think that means he never cried or was burdensome to his parents with his behavior. This family nonetheless had a long silent period that scripture doesn’t record. Both Mary and Joseph were very observant Second-Temple Jews so they would have prayed at least twice as well as recitations from what we Christians know as the books of Psalms and Deuteronomy. Joseph would have instructed his son in his trade, carpentry, to at least some extent. To some extent there three would have been praying constantly as a way of life, not as a mere chore of religious piety.

The Holy Family is our model in all these dynamics of close, human relationships. It is also our model in charity which, to use a broader definition, also means being charitable enough to recognize another person’s failings and need for a little mercy from time to time. To act charitable toward our family members can be the hardest because we know their behaviors so well; but it is an essential expression of Christian values.

So for those keeping score, the Holy Family shows us how family is all of a school for mercy, love, charity and… okay one more.

The family that forgives together, stays together

Family is still also a school of forgiveness. We need to be forgiving of these people we live in such close contact with. Christian forgiveness bears with the other as far as it is good and holy to do so. Terrible addiction and other illnesses can grip a family and sometimes the need for repentance for a wrongdoing can be the more fruitful emphasis before the automatic forgiveness. That is a certain discernment to obtain along the way. But indeed forgiveness is also one of these essential Christian virtues the Holy Family ought to teach us.

There might be no virtue more Christian than forgiveness. Considering the goal of Jesus’ whole mission of salvation for us was forgiveness, that divine forgiveness communicated therein calls us to in turn forgive as a critical way we express our Christianity. Few things teach you to forgive better than knowing someone your whole life and seeing what exactly they’re going to do to upset you or actually harm you a mile ahead of time, and then mustering the divine grace to forgive nonetheless. This alone makes family life a divine, sacramental power in our lives.

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph are the par excellence of all these sanctifying, holy functions of the family unit. When we look at it this way, its clear why God made families: they make us holier in route back to him. When we look at it through the lens of this devotion we see how Jesus’ mission was best served by incarnating into the family unit and beginning the great work of salvation there. If you ever grow frustrated with how family life can hold you back, how it can discourage you from doing what you want to do for better or for worse, remember Jesus, God himself incarnate among us, chose to live in a family from infancy to the end, with all the ups and downs therein.

The Holy Family is a family that is not just healthy, its well… holy! I don’t think that even qualifies as a dad joke as much as a clumsy lack of synonyms on my part. The Holy Family shows us how family life can bring us all closer to God. It is an opportunity for holiness so accessible it would be a shame if we didn’t even try. Let’s pray we have the courage, patience, and faith to do just that.

Thanks for reading! My book “How to catch feelings for Jesus” is available online. Admittedly it is not a deep dive into a devotion like this, but I definitely hit on the themes of this post in other ways. Share this article! I would love to hear your input. Did I help you understand anything about this Catholic practice? Did it enlighten you on something else? I ask so I can make more sense the next time around. Did you really read all this to not leave some kind of thought afterwards?

[andrewuttaro]

What is a name: The Holy Name of Jesus

What is a name? Whenever I find myself in the awkward situation of explaining why my name is Andrew I pull out the fun explanation my mother told me years ago. You can do anything with Andrew: a President or a rockstar named Andy. I almost exclusively go by Andrew. Every once in a while there’s someone who goes with Andy and I don’t bother stating my preference. The last name is normally the heavier lift of an explanation anyway.

There is a story on my dad’s side of the family that the first-born child was always named Salvatore or Peter back and forth going back generations in Italy. My father’s name is Salvatore but the first-born child in my family was my older sister. Allison was the name, not Peter or some feminine version of Peter. To be very honest I did not encounter the female version of Peter until well into adulthood: I guess its Petra?

The way we name our children is always an interesting look into what is going on in any culture at any given time. Allison is one of those names that you could probably guess her age just based off that. When I met one of my wife’s friends, by the name Priscilla, I was just about blown away having not met anyone by that name who did not have numerous decades of life experience. The most popular boy name of all-time is Mohammed which tells you how much the most sacred things in our life factor into how we name our offspring.

Moreover, a name is probably the most lasting non-sacramental impact any parent will ever have on their kids. It’s with you forever. Not only that, but a name is also an empowerment of a person to some extent. In the worst prison camps in history they took away names and replaced them with numbers. Personal power taken away. We define ourselves as we define the name we were given.

Jesus Christ is of course a Joe the Plummer kind of name and title combination. Christ in Greek essentially means anointed one: specifically a savior his people were waiting on. Jesus on the other hand was a name that would have not been very uncommon in his day. Nowadays its basically nonexistent in the English-speaking world while still fairly common amongst Spanish language peoples. But there is obviously a lot more going on here than commonality when we talk about how sacred this name is.

If you’ve ever seen “IHS” stamped in a Church setting you may not have even realized it is a monogram for the first three letters of Jesus’ name in Greek. This is the visual symbol most often associated with the Catholic devotion for the month of January: the Holy Name of Jesus. There is power in a name. That is why this devotion focuses on the Divine Praises and the Jesus Prayer which we discussed a couple months back in October regarding the Rosary. More on those here.

January is a very powerful month for this devotion to be in if you ask me. Chronologically coming right after the sublime glamour of Christmas, January tends to be a relative letdown from that fanfare. We make resolutions for the new year, many planning to abandon them before the month is done. You take down all the lights and frills and you’re just left in another dark, cold month, at least up here in the Northern hemisphere.

Dare I say the distraction of Christmas is stripped away? Perhaps what remains, and what can affect us most in January, is the essential power of what that luminous holiday gave us: the name of God. The Holy Name of Jesus is really a call to remember who has reached out to us, and reach back out by calling on that powerful, holy name. This is a return to the essential push and pull tension of all faith, religious or otherwise. A beckoning and a response: the fundamental dynamic of relationship.

There is power in the name. We don’t yell out insignificant names when we stub our toes, do we? If we do it normally requires the effort that just lending respect to Christ’s name would in the first place. Advent and Christmas teach us how important the person behind the name is, now we have this time as life begins anew and the calendar flips to actually call upon the name and learn what that means in a deeper way.

What is in the name

This devotion is rooted directly in the New Testament. In the Gospel of Matthew 1:21 Joseph is visited by an angel telling him to take Mary as his wife in spite of the inexplicable pregnancy he had just been informed of. Combined with the Annunciation to Mary in Luke 1:31 we realize the Sacred name of Jesus is given to both of Jesus’ parents individually as if to make it clear how important this baby was to be.

In a phenomenological way you could even run this devotion all the way back to the Ancient Judaism of the Old Testament. After the Exodus the four-letter name of God in Hebrew was given such reverence that it was not to be spoken in regular company. You have almost certainly heard the English transliteration of this name, but I won’t write it here out of respect for the Jewish tradition.

This supreme deference was not rooted in a particular ritual or belief in some kind of spell casting power of the name; rather there was an idea that what we speak comes from our hearts. That sincerity of ours has a certain power, at least regarding our own spiritual health. If my spiritual health is inseparable from my relationship with God then speaking his name is powerful by definition. It naturally leads to the question: when could our hearts possibly be ready to utter the name of the almighty?

It is into this tradition that the idea of the Christ developed as the people of ancient Israel were periodically overrun by distant conquerors and yearned for deliverance. Indeed God is also Christ Jesus, co-eternal since before time, but the way that title, the Christ, and the role that came with it was understood, is a fascinating reflection of changing time and place.

By the time Jesus comes along in the flesh, it was overlords hailing from Rome dominating the Holy Land. Contrary to the prevailing understanding of who Christ would be at the time: this Savior was not coming to lead an armed revolution. Jesus Christ was a revolutionary figure of a different variety.

I don’t think it is even necessarily a religious statement to say Jesus Christ is the most influential single human person of all history: just on sheer impact on the world outside religious contexts. Oceans of ink have been spilled on who Jesus was. What you do with that is ultimately your business but taking the name in vain is inextricably linked to the impact of the bare historical fact of Jesus Christ the human person. The human person who not only existed by proof of non-religious sources but also happened to be at least the inspiration for the founding of the most widespread religion in the world.

When Paul’s letter to the Philippians states “…that in the name of Jesus every knee should bend of those in heaven, and on earth, and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the father” (Phil. 2:10-11), it came after a long, poetic preamble about who Jesus is and what he came to do. This plea for humility to his readers comes across like a call to be like Jesus and worship him for the God he is. The name is the person because in it contains the vision of the grace he came to give us. The name matters because it contains a certain divine power; at the very least at the level of that aforementioned essential relational level.

Jesus claimed to be the Son of God: this meant God in effect to those who would have heard the claim at the time. To say his name is something of an affirmation, at the time and now: an affirmation that he wasn’t lying. Jesus is a nice philosopher, a nice moral teacher by most measures, but he also demands we make a decision about him by the authority with which he gives those very nice teachings. If someone says they’re God and they’re not then I don’t think I would want much of anything to do with them. To say his name and title as this devotion does is to affirm that he is God, and he is telling us the truth. That is the power that the name brings: Jesus is God, he is truthful, and we must follow him.

The great run in with the name of Jesus in antiquity is Emperor Constantine of course. In 312 AD the legend goes, he saw the Chi-Rho in the sky, another monogram for Jesus’ name, with the message that in this name you shall conquer. Emperor Constantine went on to win the Battle of the Milvian Bridge and eventually ended that particular period of Roman Civil Wars. Constantine went onto decriminalize Christianity the following year with the Edict of Milan granting religious freedom to the empire although the man himself would not accept Jesus until his deathbed.

We have evidence the monograms for Jesus’ name were used on vestments and other liturgical trappings throughout the first millennia of Christian history, but it did not come with the devotion we know today. St. Anselm of Canterbury in England and St. Bernard of Clairvaux on the European continent wrote extensively about the Holy Name. Even their writings around the turn of the twelfth century were not as coherent an explanation as the devotion would become.

They did, however, inspire others to regard the Holy Name with a greater spiritual depth. The English mystical hermit Richard Rolle regarded the Holy Name as a sort of healing balm writing: “If you think on the name Jesus continually and hold it stably, it purges your sin and kindles your heart.” While the devotion was still something of a wild mysticism at this point Pope Gregory X (p. 1271-1276) went as far as to officially recognize it as licit in the life of the Church at the Council of Lyons in 1274.

When St. Bernardine of Siena preached the devotion in a way more recognizable to us it was received with some suspicion. Pope Martin V (p. 1417-1431) summoned Bernardine to explain himself. The testimony of Bernardine’s pupil, St. John Capistran, ultimately assured the devotion would have official Church assent forevermore. Pope Martin V was so convinced he led the first processions in honor of the Holy Name of Jesus.

As anyone even adjacent to the Society of Jesus, otherwise known as the Jesuit order of Priests, would know: the Holy Name of Jesus “IHS” monogram features centrally in their imagery and spirituality. St. Ignatius of Loyola, the Jesuits founder, put the monogram at the center of a radiant sun with a cross and nails representing Jesus’ passion. The Jesuits, arising in the era of the Protestant Reformation, focused on a very personal relationship with Jesus Christ. The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius remain the formative meditative experience of all Jesuits and, in multiple places, asks the listener to put themselves within the stories of the life of Jesus.

After arising in the days of Pope Martin V, the Litany of the Holy Name of Jesus would grow in popularity until Pope Pius IX (p. 1846-1878) formally approved its public recitation in 1862. That particular prayer had been spearheaded along with the Holy Name Novena and Chaplet by an order of lay Catholics under Dominican care known as the Society of the Holy Name. The devotion was now fully realized in the life of the Church. In all its many expressions, devotion to the Holy Name of Jesus was here to stay by that point.

What the Holy Name of Jesus practically means

The Christmas season ends in January actually, January 12th this year, with the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord. In fact, in many Christian traditions around the world the more significant day of celebration and gift giving is Epiphany, Sunday January 5th. That day commemorates the visitation of the three Wise Men. In this shift of focus you can see a little bit of what we’re talking about with the January devotion: the day Jesus Christ becomes known for who he is, outside his immediate family at least, is the bigger day.

Moreover, the supreme blessing that is Christmas takes on its all-encompassing grandeur once we get to these January feasts. Jesus’ coming, God’s incarnation into our human condition, is not just for his own people but for all people, Jews and Gentiles alike, all humanity! This is declared by the bare fact that these three wise men were so foreign to Jesus’ own people of birth that their genocidal, client King Herod recognizes them as outsiders and tries to recruit them against Jesus. He thinks the Three Kings don’t understand the context of the situation and will be persuaded to be his pawns. Even further, they’re following the stars like astrologers, a practice that read as particularly pagan and evil to the Jewish people.

These Three Wise Men, total outsiders to Jesus’ own culture, are the first to come to Jesus knowing who he is. The first people outside of the divine or the Holy Family to speak the sacred name of Jesus would have been outsiders, unwelcome in the same synagogues Jesus would be raised in. The profound truth of the Holy Name therein, is that it’s not the kind of sacred that implies exclusivity: No, Jesus is God, God of all the nations, all in all. Wow, sit with that for a moment.

When it comes to the actual practices of this devotion it’s remarkably easy. The Jesus Prayer was something I covered back in the October installment of this series talking about the Rosary, so a more in-depth explanation is there. However, to summarize: the Jesus prayer orients us toward God properly. That is God is God, and we are not. Our sinfulness, in the sight of Jesus, cries out for mercy not damnation because of his passion, death and resurrection. However, as with all relationships, we must at least put in the effort of reaching out and speaking it.

The Divine Praises are categorized very highly in a group of prayers for worship outside of the Mass. For we Catholics, Mass is the source and summit, the great act of worship, the great thing we get to do, weekly at least and daily if we can. Outside of that innermost sanctum of prayer are still other ways to worship God. The Divine Praises are an almost creedal prayer that would not be out of place in Mass. Here is the prayer:

Blessed be God. Blessed be his holy Name.  Blessed be Jesus Christ, true God and true man. Blessed be the Name of Jesus. Blessed be his most Sacred Heart. Blessed be his most Precious Blood. Blessed be Jesus in the most holy Sacrament of the altar. Blessed be the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete. Blessed be the great Mother of God, Mary most holy. Blessed be her holy and Immaculate Conception. Blessed be her glorious Assumption. Blessed be the name of Mary, Virgin and Mother. Blessed be Saint Joseph, her most chaste Spouse.  Blessed be God in his Angels and in his Saints.

The refrain of Blessed Be is critical. That is really we the ones praying the prayer lending our ascent to these precious realities of Jesus and his Holy Family. We recognize the holiness of each of the following people and mysteries with our utterance of Blessed Be. Think of it like “Amen”, which basically means “so be it” or “I do”, except at the start of a prayer instead of the end. 

The Holy Name figures into the first four lines of the Divine Praises in different ways. In a more religious period of history this would have hit us all a bit harder. In the Ancient World it was not uncommon to encounter polytheists, those who believe in many Gods, who would identify the particular god they were praying to early in their prayers. The Holy Name of Jesus here early on in this prayer not only affirms the oneness of the God being praised but also extends out in the later lines to praise how God extends his divinity out to at least two critical participants in his grace: Joseph and Mary.

In all this I must ask you not to overthink this devotion. The power contained in the Holy Name is not mere referential, symbolic power… but its not magical either. The profound truth here that is oh so very practical in our lives, implied in the repetition of the Jesus Prayer and epitomized in the Divine Praises, is that God willed that his name be known to us as an act of barrier-breaking solidarity. God became human at Christmas and humanity was given the name, as intimate a connection as that is, to the Savior coming to our rescue.

We overthink things so much, particularly around the New Year. With each changing of the calendar we are liable to have a mini mid-life crisis about what we’re doing with our life. We think if I change this behavior or set that goal that I will achieve this better version of myself I imagine. Goal setting is great and useful, but God is found right here with us, not at the summit of some achievement we have to submit to him.

The great tragedy of how religion is perceived, and let’s be direct here, Catholicism specifically, is that we are given the impression we have to do or be something for God to love us. The Holy Name of Jesus is one simple reason this is not the case. God gave us his name so we could call on him. That’s so sublime and simple in its intimate beauty!

All graceful changes, making us into more Christlike people, is the result of the work of God in us. The Holy Spirit lift us and prompts us. We utter the Holy Name at the start of each prayer as the first mark of our commitment to the push and pull of a divine relationship.

The key to the devotion is really as simple as calling out. We see holy people and we think they must have discovered something or had an epiphany all their own. Perhaps they have but the holiness you can sense is not the result of hidden knowledge or an exemplary number of pious prayers heaped up toward heaven: it is just taking God seriously and relating to him sincerely.

Don’t overthink that: if you have in your mind right now a practice, prayer, or any other act of communication or devotion to God that you think might be worth the effort, do it! God is not far off; he is right there waiting for you to move toward him. That idea you have might be your soul reaching out to him and when we reach out to God he rarely delays in reaching back out to us! To know a name is that very first step of friendship, the very first gift given toward bringing two beings closer together.

Fixed high above the Altar of my wife’s childhood Church is the HIS monogram. My sister-in-law will be married in that Church next year. This devotion is such a simple blessing I have come to desire to see affixed above all endeavors in my life. Particularly apt is it there, fixed above the place where two people will make a lifelong sacramental commitment to one another. Yes, that exact monogram is the thumbnail for this blog post.

Thanks for reading! My book “How to catch feelings for Jesus” is available online. Admittedly it is not this theological throughout, but I definitely hit on the themes of this post in other ways. Share this article! I would love to hear your input. Did I help you understand anything about this sublime and simple Catholic practice? Did it enlighten you on something else? I ask so I can make more sense the next time around. Did you really read all this to not leave some kind of thought afterwards?

[andrewuttaro]

Conceived Differently: The Immaculate Conception of Mary

The holidays are here. I work with at least one holiday celebrations purist who refuses to play the Christmas music or get a Christmas tree and what not until after Thanksgiving, really not until December. This is funny because I have another coworker, cubicle neighbors to the holiday purist, who goes all out well in advance of each holiday. We’ll call her the holiday maximalist. She decorates her cubicle for the holidays in ways which most of us don’t do beyond displaying the occasional greeting card.

I am sure I once had an opinion on this standoff. The vainglory of my generation is that if you are sufficiently driven you can dig into my social media history and find something on the topic. At the moment right now I just don’t have a strong line in the sand to draw on this one. Although I might know what the peace accord between the two sides entails. No, this isn’t a “Keep Christ in Christmas” article. I will settle for putting Christ back in Christians.

Christ is involved though. He is thoroughly involved in this peace deal. The December monthly Catholic devotion is the Immaculate Conception of Mary and if that sounds like a repeat to you: yes, I have talked about Mary thrice before in this series on the monthly Catholic devotions. This will be the last one directly about Mary before we come full circle in April, but this one is less about Mary and more about what is done for her.

The practice often associated with this month isn’t distinctly Marian like the Rosary, Seven Sorrows, Miraculous Medal, or the May Mary crowning. No, this month the practice is going to the Sacrament of Confession before Christmas. That’s curious: a practice focused not on her day, December 9th, but on her son’s birthday commemorated at Christmas. Where are we going with this one?

Nothing against Mother Mary, but the thing about motherhood, through all the sufferings and joys, is a mom being selfless and learning to nurture another. The Immaculate Conception, although it is in fact about how Mary was conceived without sin, very Catholic I know, is really about the “why” of that. This is about why Mary’s Immaculate conception has a lot to say about Jesus and our relationship to his loving grace. Let’s savor some metaphysical theatrics on this one and get out your spiritualizing imagination here.

We find Jesus Christ, Mary’s beloved son, breaking free of the confines of time. It’s fun, since we’re in a silly holiday mood now, to imagine these things being done by the baby version of Jesus. I don’t know, it’s just my sense of humor that it’s amusing to think of a baby flying through time and space setting the table for his life’s mission. Baby Jesus starts with preemptively freeing his own mother from the bondage of sin pre facto, giggling with delight. They call that a “sight gag” in the comedy business ladies and gentlemen.

Here indeed is where the peace treaty between the holiday purists and maximalists might be found. We must prepare ourselves for a distinct moment in the bigger story we’re telling here but we’d be fools to limit the underlying work, the “reason for the season” if you will, to a neat set of dates on the calendar. The message at the end of this hallmark card is that the spirit of the holiday should be a year-round attitude but if it was Christmas everyday there would be no Christmas. So… I guess the terms of the peace accord are to follow the holiday vibe in general? Ah, maybe I will have more to say on that rivalry before the end of the article.

Technically, as of the posting of this article, the Catholic liturgical year has not even got into the Christmas season yet, Advent comes first. But there is no other non-Christmas season that has quite the yuletide vibes that Advent does. Yet, Advent is purple like Lent and calls us to the sacrament of confession like Lent: why? The Immaculate Conception of Mary, why Mary was conceived differently if you will, is a devotion that tells us more about Jesus than it does about Mary. I think the call to the confessional will make sense at the end, if not the armistice between the holiday maximalists and purists.

One quick disclaimer: when we talk about Mary’s Immaculate Conception we are talking about her being preserved from sin from the moment of her animation or conception, this is not to say she herself was a virgin birth like her son. Moreover, the thumbnail of this blog post is of the stained-glass window depicting the Immaculate Conception in St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church in downtown Rochester, New York. I attend Mass there sometimes and it’s a favorite conversation starter for me.

The history of a worthy difference

I don’t think I have ever pretended that religion can be some inoffensive, sanitized thing. Nothing that changes us and helps us grow can really be completely inoffensive. Religion is inherently offensive if it is to make any sense at all because it helps us prioritize and decide what differences truly matter and how to balance them all: family and friends, work and life balance, self-care and self-gift. Difference can be the door to all manners of sin when we use it for pride and bigotry, certainly in religious contexts as well; but when it is a grace for spiritual and personal growth it is a powerful grace far more than the bigots ever use it for division and conflict.

This devotion attests to this trying truth about religious devotion and practice in its history. The belief in the Immaculate Conception of Mary is far older than its official infallibility as a dogma was declared by Pope Pius IX in 1854. The very earliest roots of this belief that Mary, in her very human conception was nonetheless conceived immaculately without sin, are in scriptures… at least in a grasping, somewhat blurry way.

Genesis 3 features a passage where God declares enmity between the serpent and womankind via Eve. The serpent being the one who brought her the fruit from the forbidden tree. This is a symbolic story so its as if the serpent is sin itself here. But when you read closely you notice something about this passage.

There is the implication that one of Eve’s descendants would crush the serpent once and for all (Genesis 3:15). The meaning suggested here, particularly as it was first translated into the latin vulgate, is that Eve’s descendant, via Mary, was Jesus Christ who would ultimately conquer sin. More than that, the way “she” is translated is interpretative. In other words, she is a very significant part of the grace being given here. Her son, destined to bring about the redemptive grace that would defeat the serpent, would have to be free of the stain of sin which all humans have.

That reference is extremely subtle but the implication of a sinless vessel to bring about salvation is peppered throughout salvation history. For Israel this is the Ark of the Covenant, a physical, gold-plated box they put the Ten Commandments and their other sacred objects in. Don’t read that as an insulting comparison for Mary. Mary isn’t just some really special womb come to simply incubate the next great treasure of humanity: she is a force for grace herself. These comparisons for Mary we’re talking about are central foci of her people’s religious life.

The quietest implications become more perceivable as scripture progresses toward Jesus Christ. Later in the Old Testament, the “wisdom of God” is given possessive feminine pronouns as if it were a living, breathing human woman in Proverbs 8 and Ecclesiastes 24. But the most compelling scriptural evidence for the Immaculate Conception is in the New Testament at the Annunciation in Luke 1:28.

Here the Archangel Gabriel announces Mary is of a unique, supernatural abundance of grace in her soul when Gabriel greets her “Hail, full of grace!” The Archangel is identifying Mary’s soul as set apart in a very special way. Angels had only come to make very decisive pronouncements in the history of the Jewish people: think Jacob wrestling with the Angel all night and being given the name Israel as a result.

Granted, none of these scriptural points are irrefutable proofs, but they show a pattern and a direction. Mind you, the Trinity, a fundamental belief on the triune nature of God across almost the entire Christian world, is never bluntly stated anywhere in the bible but comes together, much like Mary’s Immaculate Conception, as a conclusion obvious in the text but simply never named conclusively.

History will argue as we’ll see, but any text will need to be interpreted to some degree. The interpretive work is part of what makes any scripture sacred to begin with. The bible isn’t dead: it’s the living, breathing word of God. It’s okay that takes time because it is part of God’s work to help us understand things as we grow: as individuals and as groups of people together as societies and civilizations, pulling in the same direction.

Mary’s unique place in the progression of Salvation is clear in the second century writings of Sts. Justin and Irenaeus. At least six other Early Church Fathers similarly articulate Mary’s status as the “New Eve” to Jesus’ “New Adam” and therefore free from sin in order to bring about a new humanity. Eighteen others in the Patristic tradition before the year 600 also made the conclusion that Mary was conceived with an absolute purity. The belief was commonplace enough that by the seventh century there were monasteries in Palestine celebrating a liturgical feast fashioned around Mary’s conception.

Acolytes of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), in his time and up to the present, have spilled oceans of ink on whether he denied Mary’s Immaculate Conception, but no survey of his many writings seem definitive one way or the other. In 1476 Pope Sixtus IV tried to defang the vigorous debates on the topic by decreeing that those of either opinion who accused their opponent of heresy should be excommunicated! In 1546 the Council of Trent, the Church Council which dealt most directly with the Protestant Reformation, expressly did not rule on the subject, leaving it inexplicit while religious orders and Monasteries across Christendom increasingly embraced it. Protestants opted out of the discussion altogether and you would be hard pressed to find any Protestant-identifying denomination embrace the Immaculate Conception of Mary.

By the nineteenth century disputes on the topic had disappeared among all of theologians, laypeople, clergy, and the religious orders in the Catholic world. This title for Mary was being used in dedications far and wide: the first Bishops of the United States of America even adopted her as their principal national patron in 1847. Centuries of timidity and divisiveness on the topic were finally coming to an end which allowed for Pope Pius IX’s 1854 infallible declaration of what had become an ironclad theological conclusion.

Call me a weirdo, but this divisive history of the devotion really buoys my belief in it. Tempted to believe such a belief unnecessarily deifies Mary or further fortifies Jesus from the touch of the sinful humanity he came to save, we’re reminded a meaningful difference is worth it for the sacred thing at the center. Both the holiday purist and maximalist in my office would agree the yuletide accoutrements don’t belong in July. There is a meaningful difference here that is worth keeping in order to keep the special, cozy, core-memory-making season of Christmas somewhat sacred, even if in a superficial, decorative way.

Jesus is the ultimate worthy difference. God entered human fragility through Mary in Jesus: the profound lowering of the divine to us in the Incarnation might fool us into thinking our humanity is capable of divinity without God. Alas, we are not God, and we cannot even contain God within ourselves without a pure and extravagant work of grace by God himself a la Mary’s Immaculate Conception. God is initiating the work and that matters so much to us on the receiving end. God is at work for us, and he loves us too much to spare any act of sanctifying solidarity along the way.

You may be wondering: How is it solidarity, how is it sanctifying to us that Mary is immaculately conceived? The short answer is that it is a pointed effort to help us get over ourselves long enough to think of God and others. That is certainly sanctifying and that also happens to be the seed of solidarity. Choosing to stick together for a greater good, solidarity, begins with someone initiating an authentic encounter between people with similar wants and needs.

Offensive though it might be to say humanity is not capable of all things, it reminds us we need the same salvation of Jesus which pre-facto preserved Mary sinless. We do not have the grace of total freedom from sin like she did but that is what makes her so able to intercede and help us on the way to her son. She knows how to do this being-human-thing without all the sin along the way. In a really sentimental kind of way you can think of Mary, conceived without sin, as an ultimate spiritual mother to guide you on the way to holiness.

How else could our sinful, human egos respond to Jesus except by divisiveness and resistance? I don’t need help! I am independent to the core! It’s hard to choose humility when we already feel as though life is taking advantage of us. We’ll always find a way to fight over something in our lives, modern America proves that to anyone with eyes and ears, but there is a time and place to put the hatchets down and say this is just too sacred to treat flippantly. We all have to choose humility at some point, or we’ll choose our own destruction in one way or another.

To be led as a spiritual child by a sinless mother is what Jesus will later call all his followers to when he tells us to have faith like that of a little child. What humility!

In the Immaculate Conception of Mary we find the grace of that precious, basic standing before God that is setting our pride aside long enough to be open to what Jesus Christ is up to in us. We have to listen. We have to be willing to accept the undeserved grace or our hostility to God will only become more bitter and arrogant. A mother does not become a better, more edifying, loving mother by sheer force of will: it’s a process of love, getting help from others, and a fair bit of the unmerited grace of God along the way. I can’t imagine how my mother put up with some of things she put up with raising me! Thank God, she stuck with it through and through and I think I turned out pretty well.

Indeed, no mother truly controls her child’s destiny. Nonetheless she must pour herself into the loving work of childrearing and depend on enough grace from others and God that the child is given everything they need to be the great person they can be. Any parent who has gotten their children through some tough times will tell you there was some grace involved along the way. Mary’s Immaculate Conception is, to some extent, the affirmation to humanity that all the grace possible was put into our salvation.

Through the course of this devotion’s journey through Church history it was gradually realized, by the ongoing grace of God, that this difference is a worthy difference because God is at work and that work is sanctifying us out of sin and closer to himself. Mary’s Immaculate Conception is perhaps the most beautiful expression of that. This reality that self-giving love ripples grace through time and space itself dovetails with some facts of life.

Conception as grace

Without getting too clinical, our conception isn’t really about us born by it is it? Yes, we enter the realm of existence thereafter, but it is the result of the action of others. Without getting too personal, there is something that hits especially close to home about this when you are in your late 20s and early 30s seriously contemplating children of your own, even as a man. The conception is the moment of grace: the part nobody actually has control over. I know the science; this isn’t a conversation about fertility methods. No fertility doctor actually controls the fact of conception whenever it happens. We’re talking about the grace of it.

When love becomes real in such a powerful, tangible way as conception, it’s clear that those involved, usually at least two people to be funny again for a moment, cannot accomplish all that lies ahead by themselves without any help whatsoever. In a way, conception is always an opportunity for more grace, because if it isn’t the trail only gets sadder and uglier from here a la the terror of an unplanned pregnancy. If we weren’t meaning to welcome a child into the world then it’s a fun little ops in the best-case scenario and a complete crisis in the worst case. Either way there is quite a bit of grace needed.

Even in the absence of conception itself there is an echo of it: the indentation on reality that the potential grace makes like gravity around objects in space. Those trying to have kids, those struggling to do so for whatever reason, those are efficacious moments all their own. That is to say, life giving works have all kinds consequences whether or not life is given… but it’s much more productive to think of them as graces rather than consequences. No child, or any person for that matter, wants to be thought of as an unwanted burden.  

Even before we became sinful beings, God made us with this whole dynamic. He created us with this Rubicon of creation he knew we could cross intentionally or completely accidentally if we were reckless enough. In either scenario he does not lighten the world-changing impact of the grace of conception. If the baby comes than it is going to come and demand a lot out of caregivers in the short and long term.

In all these challenges we can remember Mary’s Immaculate Conception makes her perfect to receive the grace needed for being Jesus’ mom. The worthy difference is the grace empowering the love to do the hard work. There is something so poetic and lovely about that. Baby Jesus helping his own mother care for him is such a mind-bending spiritual reality in the Christian faith I still grapple with myself.

Therein is the acknowledgement of another pre-sin created reality we need to reckon with in this devotion: we need each other to be anything we dream of in life. Hopefully these are not selfish, using relationships, but even the healthiest ones can look that way sometimes. All we really have in life is each other as I always say. Mary’s immaculate conception is a deep meditation on the grace of conception itself via who was to be conceived: Jesus Christ.

Jesus, in becoming human among us, was committing to the ultimate quest of solidarity with us. He was not going to spare any lived human reality along the way to fully engage in the mission of the incarnation. It was previously established in one of the other months with a Marian devotion, May to be specific, that Mary’s immaculate nature, that is being without sin, does not make her less human, only more human. If sin is the dehumanizing force than indeed it starts to dawn on us what the space-time defying baby Jesus might be up to: preparing the way. In this case preparing the way in a literal human being’s bodily and spiritual composition.

Jesus Christ died on the cross and rose again to throw open the doors of heaven and rain grace upon anyone who would accept it. He knew that his Mother Mary would accept that grace… so he stepped out of space and time to get her in on this from the very start of her worldly existence. Baby Jesus brought his mother a gift before she herself was conceived in her mother’s womb. Baby Jesus preserved his mother without sin. The grace at work here become a loving circle in a reciprocation between mother and son for an incredible purpose.

To the degree we invite babies into our lives this is one of the most profoundly beautiful things one can imagine. The savior of humanity decided his mother, for all the burdens motherhood entails, should be as free from sin as he was. And this wasn’t selfishness on his part, actually it was giving us all a spiritual mother who would come to believe in him. The Immaculate Conception is not just freedom from sin for Mary and the ultimate toolkit for her motherhood, it is a thank you gift for saying yes and a guide for her to give to anyone else who might say yes to Jesus Christ.

The Great Yes: Mary’s Sacred Yes as I put it in the May article. Indeed human consent was requested before divine action, in a repudiation of the violent Gods we have sometimes fashioned for ourselves, and indeed the brutality of human pride inherent of sinful human nature. This is why she had to be Immaculately conceived: to be the perfectly free human being to lend the consent. God, I’m sorry I mean the Baby Jesus we’re imagining defying space time right now, did not force Mary or even compel her via circumstances to any choice; rather she was preserved so free to make the choice that perhaps no other human being has even been so free.

While theologians posit Jesus as the new Adam, undoing the spiritual consequences of his sin, Mary as the new Eve is a profoundly feminist action of God: woman is given the power to undo the original choice to sin for herself. The decision is not made for her. She prepares the way for the great Incarnation becoming humanity’s great boast. Mary chooses against sin in the Christian way her son Jesus Christ would bring about, before anyone else. In the way of her own conception she is the most human human who ever humaned.

And that, my friends, is the attitude you take into the confessional. You certainly want to have some concept of what you are confessing and a sense of contrition therein, but the coming of Jesus is to be prepared for like parents preparing for a child. That preparation requires a clearing the way within ourselves: that is not everything that made sense for me before children will make sense for me now.

You physically babyproof and bring in the baby supplies but you also adjust expectations for how your time will be spent and how everything in your life will be prioritized going forward. That sounds like the Sacrament of Confession moonlighting as a maternity store. Here is how I used to be, and here is how I will be going forward: confession and penance. God gives us the grace to do it.

Conception is a beautiful grace that can bring us closer to God just as it brings new life.

We human beings are willed into existence by love, and we are saved by love as well. The conception matters because every human being’s conception is the most tangible inflection point of divine grace. Divine grace begins at conception to put it in a clunky way. Mary’s Immaculate conception is a worthy difference from the rest of humanity for the reason of Jesus Christ which typifies divine action: that is she points us to Jesus by the grace of her own conception. The Incarnation of Jesus Christ thereafter is, by way of Mary’s consent, the central grace of Christian thought. Love begetting grace begetting love and so on and on.

Perhaps we Catholics are just carrying the grace of Mary to its furthest logical spiritual parameters with belief in the Immaculate Conception. If we Christians believe in Jesus Christ as our great redeemer and gateway of grace than Mary’s Immaculate conception is the ultimate advocacy before that divine child she bears. In other words: believe in the Immaculate Conception because Jesus Christ means to share the ever-greater grace with us by way of his mother.

Thanks for reading! My book “How to catch feelings for Jesus” is available online. Admittedly it is not this theological throughout, but I definitely hit on the themes of this post in other ways. Share this article! I would love to hear your input. Did I help you understand anything about this very Catholic practice? Did it enlighten you on something else? I ask so I can make more sense the next time around. Did you really read all this to not leave some kind of thought afterwards?

[andrewuttaro]

Skepticism, space for God, and that election

There is something truly good and righteous about a curious mind. We modern people so often pose faith and religious belief against science and reasonable skepticism. It seems to those of us who have been blessed with a good education understand from experience that a curious skepticism that tests hypotheses and asks hard questions is a helpful mindset in many areas of life. From science to politics, from relationships to business, we have to have a critical mindset, right?

The idea of doing my research in a Presidential election seemed utterly useless if I did not apply the harshest and most critical skepticism possible of those seeking my vote. Right? RIGHT!?

Indeed so much of our modern world leans heavily on a critical mindset towards everything from holding down a job to making thoughtful entertainment choices. We are taught to be skeptical consumers to avoid recalled products and anything that might make us look like we support something we don’t. I think I speak for many of my age peers when I say it’s hard to put a finger on any moment when righteous skepticism failed us.

Alas, it does. Righteous skepticism easily gives way to unjust cynicism.

A serious relationship with God uses righteous skepticism as an accent more than an entrée. It’s certainly there in the right places but where it fails is clear: when we shake our fists up at God wondering why he let some peril fall into our lives. Like Job of the Old Testament we sometimes only look up to God when we are in torment… or when we want a favor as one musical artist named Jellyroll sings.  

Socially speaking, righteous skepticism fails us when we use it as a reason to not empathize with our fellow human beings long enough to encounter them for their true self. That is the starting point for any good faith effort in life, at least any such social endeavor. That is, we must believe there is more to a person than what is immediately, outwardly obvious. We humans are not logical beings, or at least we are not in every area of who we are and how we want to live our lives. If we are too skeptical of those who are in our corner, so to speak, we tend to close ourselves off in isolation.

Skepticism will lead you to cynicism if that’s your only lens. To be serious about knowing others for who they actually are we need a different lens. This is also the space we have to leave open if we ever want to truly know God in a personal way. To those who place God outside their grasp, a la faith, this is why: God is encountered in trust, not skepticism. We might cling to skepticism a bit too hard for fear of being a fool in the end. But some of life’s greatest loves involve making ourselves fools. More on that later.

Where righteous skepticism fails is the same place religious faith most often fails us: in the public sphere when we abandon the good faith agreement necessary for both endeavors, often because we confuse righteous skepticism with unjust cynicism. No group project is successful if we both assume who the slackers are and then treat them like slackers without demanding anything better from them.

In that situation we leave no space for the sustaining spiritual truth underneath the willingness to cooperate in the first place: humanity in the former, God in the latter.

This is too nebulous to start. Let’s be brutally real. On the whole we are in a place culturally that is defined by a willful alienation. We groan at the call to cross the divides because our comfort zones have never been more comfortable. We look across the divide and construct a cynical stereotype of our chosen outsiders and then call it righteous skepticism. The truth is that it’s killing us, or at least the social order we fancy in this country.

The Election and a vaguely hopeful outlook

Let’s get this out of the way in blunt terms: we talk past each other in politics here in America lately. The information age has entered a phase where we have tuned our echo-chambers so keenly that essential new information comes as a surprise. News is something I have enjoyed from a young age: I am a news media junkie. In an electoral cycle like the one we just made it through that felt more like a crippling addiction to me than any kind of resourcefulness: a hobby the way vomiting in alleyways outside bars is a hobby.

To say we live in a post-factual political reality in the United States, and an increasing segment of the broader world for that matter, I think is cynical and ultimately a vast oversimplification of a spiritual moment we’re in as a country. The good faith cooperation that our political system always depended upon here in the United States, that is an adherence to non-legal, procedural norms rooted in mutual respect, was always a profound weakness wrapped up in a familial joy. Now the norms are all but dead because we are thoroughly insulated from any sense of familial joy toward our opponents.

In other words the echo chambers don’t overlap at all anymore. Two generations ago we assumed our politicians wouldn’t get too brutal with each other because their kids played together at social gatherings. Now our politicians accuse each other of every crime imaginable with regularly and they are insulated from dissenting opinions in echo chambers like the rest of us. Their kids certainly don’t play together anymore for fear of catching the other side’s moral ills as if politics is cultural contagion.

The truth is you cannot expect everyone to have all the facts, even in the information age. People will make the decision they will make based on the facts they comprehend. A wise confessor once told me that in smarter sounding words. Prepare for that in all the endeavors of your life. Encounter is the expectation to hold everyone to whether or not all the facts are known. Encounter being a shorthand we use in religious circles for this aforementioned looking past initial impressions to a more accurate understanding of who a person actually is.

There is a familial joy that a high-functioning nation-state can produce within a healthy body politic: an almost religious commitment to see each other as three-dimensional human beings with hopes and fears, that is what keeps a democracy healthy. Empathy acted upon: encounter. But this is so out of style you might read that with levels of disgust breaking the scales, who could possibly believe my opponent is good in anyway?

We outsource a sense of community strictly within our echo-chambers nowadays and wow, did it show in this election.

Call me naïve but I truly believe this kind of encounter can save us. Had we all genuinely encountered one another for who we really are in the aftermath of that deeply isolating global pandemic that occurred a few years back, then we are probably on a different road today. And I am not even necessarily saying the Presidential election would have been different. But let’s call a spade a spade here.

We have decided against genuine encounter with each other. We have decided that authoritarianism is more tolerable than the slightest want or meaningful contact with someone who wouldn’t fit in within our preferred cultural caste. Our society is rapidly re-segregating along ideological lines before our eyes and the scariest part is nobody of any political stripe really seems to be all that interested in fixing it. It’s as if we are perfectly content to find entertainment in the misfortune of our political and cultural opponents to the detriment of everything including the stability of the government itself.

Have mercy. People have dignity imparted on them by God and we cannot steal from them the room to be wrong and the room to will for something else if they have second thoughts. Unjust cynicism under the guise of some righteous skepticism is undoing the empathy needed to make government work at all. Forgive my gloominess here. Government and politics are always a tenuous project and if this one fails we’ll start another one… unless this choice earlier this month is truly irreversible in a despotic kind of way.

In democracy choices are not supposed to be irreversible. But then again the United States of America is not a normal democracy. That’s not for any structural, cultural, or even demographic reason: it’s pure geography.

Our country sits upon the North American continent in such a way that no other political entity can seriously challenge its power here, economically or politically, without appealing to the conscience of the nation. Our government supposedly governs according to our conscience as a people, that’s the underlying implication of representative government. That body politic needs to be quite healthy to bear the responsibility of this place on earth. Yes, there is a geographic danger to our elections we don’t talk about.

Two enormous oceans border America’s two coasts and the continental nations bordering her to the north and south are weakened by having a fraction of her arable land, population, and navigable waterways. The East Coast, from the Southern tip of Texas to the northern tip of Maine is fortified almost continually by barrier islands anchored by two enormous deep-water bays. The nation’s geography also allows for functional energy and agricultural independence. This is all before you even talk about the external power projection of the most advanced military in human history.

To the extent that this country is a force for good, this geographic fortification was never a true concern of the rest of the world; rather it was a resource. The arsenal of democracy! But if there is ever a truly authoritarian government on this continent, something truly unaccountable and undemocratic, it will be a menace to humanity for centuries that our species would be lucky to contain to just our planet. This is the research I would invite you to because I don’t think I am exaggerating in the slightest on this point.

American elections have a bit more weight when you consider the geographic over-powered nature of the country. But authoritarianism will never happen here, right? Right?

But hopefully we all take our vote seriously enough to not need to go to that particular thought bubble. I don’t know, I’ve never been more unsure our country will avoid that fate then when an insurrectionist reclaimed the highest office in the land earlier this month. Not to mention that person has a governing trifecta, functional control of the Courts, and an opposition party that has consistently proven impotent to counter his movement effectively. Hopefully I’m overreacting. Frankly I pray I am overreacting. So yeah… let’s hope democracy remains strong and holds those it elects to account.

Space for God is space for each other

Pope Francis recently said “To grow in life one must overcome fear and embrace trust.” To the degree we stereotype and oversimplify the world around us and the people in it we give into fear. Sometimes it seems our righteous skepticism is ordered toward fear more than trust. We rush to identify what is fearful and don’t bother risking trust when we don’t have to. Perhaps that is the brakes on our growth as people and as groups of people.

Life is changing for me. This is my last article with a distinctly political edge. I’ve seen enough. I am calling it, so to speak, on my own ability to say anything insightful about my country’s politics, at least enough to feel the need to post them on the eternal repository of the internet. I will soldier through what comes next because I believe in a God beyond my control. I want to grow in that trust for what lies ahead, not build any walls of fear.

That is not a banner I wave. In fact sometimes I fear I hide my belief in God too much. Part of that belief however is the trust in God enough to give all his other children the space to not be cajoled into thinking like me. When we use politics to enforce our worldview, as opposed to using it to impose the best possible policy, we turn the shared space of public life into a warzone in a matter of time. No political party is innocent of this.

The opening contemplation on righteous skepticism is, to some extent, a letter to the college-educated liberal circles I find myself in more often than not. But the mindset we’re talking about with that is the baseline of most modern people regardless of their political identification. If we live in some kind of godless age, which I don’t believe we do by the way, its simply because our starting point is so hostile to that patient encounter required to know anything not cleanly scientific. Want to know something not cleanly scientific? People!

Righteous skepticism comes after the objective foundation. We believe in the scientific method because we believe the universe is knowable. We continue living life day in and day out in spite of its difficulties because we believe life is worth living. Those are assumptions so basic to human life in the 21st century that we don’t ever really question them unless we’re in a deep dark place… or we’re religious. Those baseline assumptions are clearly broken.

Yes, the one about our nation being a collection of committed believers in rule of law, separation of powers, and basic human decency was clearly wrong but that’s not what I am talking about anymore. Our baseline assumptions about what people want are broken. I mean this on a philosophical, spiritual level: we lost the plot at some point. Cynicism about the intentions of public institutions was once a regrettable duty strictly for watchdogs; now it is such a national pastime that few public institutions are not completely hated by some segment of the public.

Of course human institutions will always have at least some ill intent because they’re made up of humans with some ill intent! But our righteous skepticism has so fortified us from anything we fear might make us look a fool that we are nearly to the point of giving up basic joys of life like holidays with family members we disagree with. And I don’t just mean the government as we’ve imagined it in this country for decades: I mean meaningful human interaction!

I am not going to lecture anyone to get off their phones. I had a smart phone in middle school, I am all the way gone on that front. What I will say is touch grass in the jargon of the chronically online: encounter something real and tangible that makes you feel uncomfortable! Pull apart the neat, pejorative boxes you’ve put every type of person into and find the common good!

To put it another way I find the advertising for Artificial Intelligence (AI) products fascinating. It honestly makes me think we are starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel of the isolated mind typical of this echo-chamber phase of the information age. One ad really sticks with me. Google wants you to buy a product to help your child write a letter to their role model, or at least that’s what the ad shows off. It tidies up the diction, grammar, and punctuation to the point the receiver of the letter will soon think AI is spamming them with actual, physical letters.

An experience that could be instructive for being a more mature soul, like writing a letter, is just another homework assignment that you kinda feel like you cheated on as to not risk human vulnerability. On an individual what a loss that is for being human, leaving space for that faith in ourselves. In San Francisco the self-driving cars are being tested in the wild. I saw it firsthand in September. That felt like the next public space after the supermarket check outs where the robots had to colonize, eh?

I have seen the future, and it does not have staying power! Even in a world where the infrastructure and technological kinks are worked out the anti-social concept breaks a baseline assumption that would otherwise leave space for human beings to be human beings. If you give all these jobs to AI then nobody will have the money to afford AI in the first place. Do you see where I am going with this?

Even on the societal level we’re so alienated from each other that its tearing apart society at the seams. We’re either cruising toward the ultimate pre-communist starter world where society is only affordable for the owning class or we’re heading for a human lived experience so detached from all perspective and humanity that we’ll opt to be plugged into the proverbial matrix excitedly. We might be a generation away from fighting tooth and nail to not to be unplugged from our preferred reality. I am not that pessimistic. I think we do have the power to decide the society we want to live in. But I do think we’re coming to the breaking point.

You can only cut so many friends and family out of your life for not towing the same worldview bonafides  before the whole social structure is unlivable. Perhaps this recent presidential election was simply won by the coalition that was more unplugged? No, I said I was done with the political commentary. That’s it.

The light at the end of the tunnel is trust. We are going to have to leave space for each other to exist without the rigors of righteous skepticism breathing down our necks, at least not in the world of baseline human interaction. This might necessarily lead us to faith in one another again. That is faith in one another to start, but faith, nonetheless. That is the first building block to restoring the necessary norms of political cooperation that makes that whole mess look generally more hospitable to the untrained eye.

We are better for putting a little faith in each other. We’re also better for having a little faith in what we can’t even faintly understand: in other words, God.

Leaving space for each other is leaving space for God. No, God is not something that science will ever disprove just like science is not something that God will ever disprove. That was a false conflict from the start. We ate it up though, didn’t we? We seek moral permission slips whether or not we consider ourselves even remotely moral or religious people. My wife hates it when I overeat, so trust me, this is hard for me to admit too. The slightest physical exertion gets the water on the burner to boil pasta for me.

We’ll eat up any permission structure that gives us what we want. It’s time to start pursuing what we need instead. We can, we’ve done it before, as a society and as individuals when commitment comes knocking in life. Leave the space open for human beings to be human.

If you are even kind of open to faith in God then maybe that starts with simply leaving the space open for him. In the beginning that will be just a space without righteous skepticism, as it grows that will become faith as you get to know him better. At some point you will realize the righteous skepticism is useful in this newfound relationship you’ve trusted your way into.

The Closing Plea

To close the loop on this article I suppose its worth saying God has done crazier things with the United States of America. In the 1930s this country was a deeply isolationist place with racism and antisemitism running amok in politics and civic life. By the end of the following decade, though America had to come kicking and screaming, she was the principle material conqueror of the industrialized antisemitism of the holocaust and the primary rebuilder of the European continent which she had previously been reviled to get involved with. Who says a God who sees something good in the American idea might not go somewhere dramatically better within a few years?

To be clear I think Christian nationalism is not of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and I believe no self-respecting, serious country should elect those who tried to overthrow that exact same government. But as a matter of fact those are the directions we’re going in right now and I can only control what I can control. To leave space for faith, for each other, and for God is not to shrink away from those realities as if in prayerful isolation. It is an effort to humanize the whole structure that led to this mad situation in the first place.

The closing plea here is for heroic patience. The preservation of self-giving love requires a belief in the basic goodness of a critical mass of people and in each individual’s inmost heart. That’s called hope. Call it naïve if you like but without hope righteous skepticism degrades into mere unjust cynicism and a healthy democracy degrades into an autocratic oligarchy run by the consumerists best equipped to feed into enough people’s delusions.

Perhaps Hope and the heroic patience it requires is too much to ask in these times. That’s okay. You know you better than I know you. Leave yourself the space to sit with it long enough to seriously consider it. If you decide to take up hope then I welcome you back into the world of those with the crazy belief that all will be well at some point. We pray and work our way there; but hope is the first step.

[andrewuttaro]

Thanks to the Dead: Praying for the Souls in Purgatory

The first time you encounter the Mexican traditions around “Dia de los Muertos” or the Day of the Dead, you might be forgiven for being a bit creeped out. To chalk it up to cultural difference feels like a cavernous understatement. We Americans have such a different relationship with death that we scarcely employ such imagery of skulls and skeletons outside of horror and… well Halloween time!

I am not interested in making an in-depth cultural comparison here. I am only culturally literate about Day of the Dead as much as it pertains to religion and even that I am sure my literacy is lost in translation in places. What I am interested in is a discussion of death that is healthy for those who are not dead. All human beings underrate a healthy relationship with death. It is inevitable after all. You, me, and everyone both of us know will die at some point. Isn’t it worth having more than a passing familiarity with the ramifications of it? I’m not trying to be grim, it’s just that we work so hard to have a healthy relationship with everything else about ourselves, why not this? What does a healthy relationship with death even look like?

You read the title. We’re not just talking about death. We’re talking about Purgatory too! Purgatory is such an esoteric thing, isn’t it? You might be tempted to think it’s a holdover, an anachronism of a bygone time of religious beliefs, an outdated theology. I am here to tell you it is not antiquated in the slightest, not in the Catholic Church at least. In fact, November’s monthly devotion is directly tied to it: praying for the souls in purgatory. Praying for dead people!? How edgy! How Catholic!

In the cycle of the Church calendar we are now very nearly at the end of the Liturgical calendar year. In that light it makes sense to talk about the last things before the Church calendar flips and we begin reflecting on the birth of the savior in Advent and Christmas. To the timing point, the first two days of November are also All Saints Day and All Souls Day which are all about praying for the dead and all they have to teach us.

So yeah, it’s Purgatory time! Forgive my excitement, I have just the tiniest bit of goth in me. Plus you might just see why such a possibility might make one happy if I do a good enough job explaining it. Purgatory is a cool idea on top of just being theologically edifying. Hey, if you’re not reading this out of belief in the concept, at least read it for educational purposes I guess.

Why Purgatory?

Right off the bat I want to make it clear that I think a loving God cannot exist in the universe without purgatory. If we believe in a loving, merciful God, I really think Purgatory has to be something we sincerely believe in. If God is both all-good (omnibenevolent) and all-powerful (omnipotent), the being which no greater being can be thought of, then he has to give us every chance to prepare ourselves for eternity with him.

Yes, that would be heaven. Literally that is the definition of heaven: eternity with God. Really think about what God must be like. We can never wrap our heads around him but if he is this ineffable being that is made of love and transcends space and time itself… well then we might be overwhelmed by being in his full presence to put it lightly. We mortal beings might not be readily prepared for that just because we died.

We ought to prepare ourselves as much as we can in life through a relationship with God. To be fully in the presence of God… how do you prepare for that? This is the simplest possible way to get yourself interested in holiness and sainthood. On a very basic level, if we desire to be with the God Christianity describes then holiness is the way there. Holiness is the purification we do here in our mortal lives for that eternity with God. Purgatory is that pursuit after death. We might need some extra purification after death assuming we are not saints in life, few of us are, and further, if we have chosen we want to be with God in the end.

That last point is too crucial to paper over: “…if we have chosen we want to be with God in the end.” That is the possibility of the bottom place: Hell. Yes, we Catholics believe in all three post-death places as you probably knew from every stereotype of us ever. Hell has to exist too. The reason for that is practical just as much as it is theological. Sidenote: Hell is the worst evangelizing tool, and I am not interested in scaring anyone to God. That’s counterproductive in the long run if you ask me. Sidebar over.

We Christians say God is love. God’s very being is love. Assuming God is all-loving he had to create us with free will. Why? Well I don’t think beings without free will, robots, are capable of giving or receiving love. If that lands me in some kind of forced labor camp after A.I. takes over the world I think I can live with that.

God did not make us robots designed to love and worship him automatically without thought. He gave us free will because he wanted to give us the choice to love him or not. Love does not exist without the freedom of that decision-making power. If that is true and God is indeed loving then he would have to preserve a place where those who chose against him, persistently throughout their lives up to and through the end, could go to be away from him. That’s hell. No torture is implied in its mere definition but if you contemplate a God who is all-loving long enough you might see why simply being apart from that presence is the torture. Bitterness chills that place into a frigid alienation.

That is all the need I feel to talk about Hell. Do remember that point about free will. That is an underrated essential for Christian life. With Hell out of the way it literally and figuratively can only go up from here. Back to purgatory.

Purgatory is where we go if we die having fallen short of being a Saint. That’s about as simple a definition as we’re going to get. Unless you attain to levels of holiness that merit the formal big “S” Saint designation, then you’ll probably take a trip to purgatory after death. This again assumes you want to be with God in the end. I think the vast majority of people, religious or not, want to be in the company of divinity for eternity. Again, if we are talking about a God who is literally love in his being then I don’t think you even necessarily need to be religious to want that. I am willing to believe Purgatory is a whole lot more crowded than the lower place.

That’s just me, I am sure theologians and biblical rigorists might disagree. There is a range of allowable positions in the Catholic Church on the population numbers in the afterlife: I land more toward the hopeful end of the spectrum. Don’t get me wrong, Jesus himself said the gate to destruction is wide and the gate to life is narrow, but in spite of how much Jesus talked about Hell and damnation there is nowhere in scripture where he leads his followers to believe he is not trying to get as many people into eternal life with him as possible. Again, there is a range of acceptable opinions on this in Catholic thought.

Think of Purgatory itself then as a sort of training camp for a professional sports team. You are training for the greatest event: heaven. You have to practice and purify your skills from error to put it a clunky way. My father and older sister would go to Buffalo Bills training camp occasionally when I was growing up and they always told me it was awesome with some sizable, and frankly dissuasive, caveats. The August heat can really knock you down a peg and the wait times can be brutal they told me. I did not go to Bills Training camp until I became a full-blown adult. They did too good a job telling me the drawbacks.

Let’s try some new metaphors. You can tell it’s the middle of autumn and I got sports on the mind.

Purgatory was once described to me as the happiest place you’ve ever been to and the saddest place you’ve ever been to at the same time. So… I guess it’s like the end of the longest line at Disneyworld to put an American spin on it. On the happy side, you’re there because you’re on track for heaven. Awesome! I like to imagine heaven is visible from Purgatory in some celestial way. On the sad side, nobody likes purification. Even the most dedicated athletes will tell you training is hard and some of them work so hard they vomit like it’s nothing. I was never that level of athlete.

Alright, now I really am going to drop the sports metaphors. I kind of lied there a moment ago, didn’t I? I will take it to confession. Ah yes, there is another part of this worth explaining: the penance angle.

Penance is not a fun thing no matter how much we are used to it. For those less accustomed to the confessional, penance is the part you do after confession. Penance is the assignment the priest gives you to help purify your soul from the effects of the sin you were just forgiven of. A lot of priests just throw a seemingly random number of Hail Marys and Our Fathers at you, but I’ve received some more interesting penances as well.

Yes, Jesus’ death on the cross, ultimate solidarity, secured our forgiveness of the consequence of sin: separation from God. That separation might have a deeper meaning after that little talk we had about the lowest place. Jesus saves us from that insidious separation, but our sin still has consequences. If you shoot someone, confess it, and are forgiven, you in fact have still shot someone. Penance is about working to restore oneself or the other affected by our sins.

Our sins, like our lives in general, have a social dimension. Even the most isolated hermit has a social responsibility in the Catholic Church. The whole idea of penance is not some selfish effort to get to heaven, its truly an effort to integrate into relationships in a deeper way: with God of course, but with others too if heaven is indeed a communion of saints with a God in three persons at the center. Purgatory is the penance boot camp and it’s actually a bit of a group project.

Praying for the dead

Not to be antisocial, but perhaps that is the most hellish thing about purgatory: the group project element. That is key to understand, this is why we Catholics pray for the dead. But before trying to wrap our heads around that let’s just come back down to earth briefly. Life is a group project too whether we like it or not.

Even cloistered sisters and monks in the Catholic tradition have a vocation, a calling in life, that demands their solidarity with other human beings. Nobody is an island in the wise words of the surely-will-be-a-saint Thomas Merton. There are sins of action and omission in this life. In other words, we will make mistakes as human beings by what we do and what we fail to do. That’s not meant to be anxiety-inducing, it is meant to make us look outside ourselves in solidarity. We sin when we’re being selfish. We become holier for being selfless. Solidarity is Godly.

When I was first beginning to learn my faith I also happened to be at the same age I thought it was okay to mercilessly mock my younger brother for his speech impediment… a speech impediment I had when I was his age. Yeah, that sucks. A preteen at the time, I had not yet got into my faith at depth enough for me to turn outward in a meaningful way. If I was avoiding sin in anyway it was the sins of my own actions, personal stuff. I had no concept of sins of omission, sins against solidarity, the sins I committed because I lacked charity for others, namely my brother in this example.

Jesus came to save all of us socially and each of us individually. But so much sin comes from a focus on ourselves that it turns out that social dimension of Jesus’ Gospel message quickly comes into focus for anyone who becomes serious about their faith. This is not to mention the command Jesus gives us to spread the Good News of that Gospel message to others. Maybe two thirds of a mature Christian faith is outward looking. Ergo, the Christian life and therefore our ultimate destination is a group project.

But all this might still not justify the idea of praying for the dead in your mind. They’re dead, what could I really do for them? Allow me to answer that question with another question: What do they do for you?

There is a rather funny theologian who is relatively close in age to me who made a joke on social media that sticks with me on this topic. Prepare yourself because this is a very religion-nerd kind of joke: Tradition is just peer pressure from dead people. Are you laughing? I am slapping my knees right now at that one. Like most good jokes there is a crass kernel of truth in it, or at least a vibe that feels real. The true vibe in this is that most things we continue on from the past come with a certain empowerment from those who are no longer with us.

Think about all the things you love that you didn’t create. Even the things we do create are often reinventions of older things. This is the human experience. It’s unavoidable and most of the cultural objects and uplifting traditions that come down to us are not controversial. We’re not just talking about memories here: so much tradition comes through in our own life choices and the world we want to build for the future.

In the words of the social sciences: nature versus nurture. Come to think of it, is either side of that not tradition? Our nature is genetic in so many ways, passed down from our predecessors, but the nurture part is also literally how others have taught us. I digress, even the people who we aren’t super close to impact us, even after they’re gone.

My maternal grandfather died almost nine years ago now and there is a whole collage of things that remind me of him. He was the financial and moral backing for our big family vacation every summer when I was growing up. I associate the whole ocean with him as a result, remembering how he taught us to swim in wavy waters. The generosity of his life, at least the part of it I got to see, inspires me still. I am a Yankees fan today not because he told me to or even intentionally share it with us much at all. No, the mere vibe of the sport I otherwise find crushingly boring evokes Grandpa for me.

Certainly our beloved deceased are not paragons of moral uprightness… or at least seldom few are. The dead affect us in very tangible ways, personally and practically. It is not a big spiritual leap then to believe we can help them from across the divide of this vagueness called death. Death which our savior Jesus Christ conquered after all. If my description of purgatory was at all informative perhaps you might also now realize how exactly we could be helpful to them.

Praying for the dead assists them on their journey through purgatory toward the ultimate summit of eternal beatitude with Jesus in heaven. This is not only why we Catholics pray for the dead, its why we have masses said for them, and ultimately get weirdly sensitive about how human remains are honored. That last one is a story for another day perhaps. Nonetheless, it might also be clearer now why Day of the Dead can take on a joyous, almost yuletide vibe even though the skull and skeleton imagery is all-encompassing.

Thanks to the Dead

I work with older adults for a living. If God grants me enough years of life to truly count myself among Older adults I will consider it a great blessing. You learn some hard truths when you work with Older adults for a while. For one, our healthcare system is broken. That’s definitely a blog for another day. Secondly, you learn that the substance of maturity is not connected to age much at all. I’ve met folks over a century old who have all their mental facilities but seem to have decided they are the only ones who matter a la toddler behavior.

We might be tempted to delay the harder questions of life until one day when we’re older and wiser. Perspective does come with age, I have learned that in my brief time here, but perspective does not mean that you are wiser or even the least bit more driven to get your spiritual health in order. That is a sobering reality that drives some to a rather forced religiosity in the later years of life. The “cramming for the final exam” approach, in practice or planned decades in advance, misunderstands both God and death.

The confronting truth that is death is actually comforting. God loves us sincerely, greatly exceeding our power to comprehend it but also not unlike the way we humans love each other. God wants a relationship with us. Each one of us. He does not want to be appeased as if he is the operator of a toll booth, and you just have to pay him the right amount to get through into his nice, gated community. Despite the fire and brimstone some preachers release, he certainly would prefer not to use scare tactics to get you to look to him.

Praying for the dead reminds us of this actually very comforting truth about God: he exists in relationship. God himself, the Trinity, is a relationship. God in his very being is a relationship of three. Activating the loving relationships we possessed in life to vouch for us in the next is a holy, edifying thing for all involved. It can only center you as a living person and it can do no harm to the dead. That’s a win-win! Thanks to the Dead for that.

And yes, this is why 16th century indulgences were wrong. You can’t buy that holy, edifying effect of genuine prayer for the dead. That is also why indulgences, the kind you don’t pay for, still exist to this day but that is some deep lore Catholic stuff I won’t bore you with right now. If you want to pester me about it I might just write about that too though.

Our beloved deceased are not gone. They are on a different, more focused spiritual journey than us. That journey does not separate them from us, it actually lends itself to contact with us still living. This isn’t just a comforting story about life’s hardest truth either. This is a practical way to jump start your spiritual growth right now. How would you live if you wanted your loved ones, friends and family, to pray for you after you died? It makes you think about how you get along with others, doesn’t it? It makes you think about what kind of life you want to live now, not just when you see the end on the horizon.

With spooky season out of the way and Thanksgiving season upon us it is actually a great time of year for this in our cultural context here in the United States. That dreadful election will be over in a few days and no matter the outcome you can be thankful for what life has given you, burdens and blessings, as they fortify you on your spiritual journey. You can live like you know what to do after you die. And let me speak from personal experience when I say gratefulness really is an effective key to happiness, in this life and the next. I don’t have any experience in the next life but alas, Happy Thanksgiving a few weeks in advance!

Thanks for reading! My book “How to catch feelings for Jesus” is available online. Admittedly it is not this theological throughout, but I definitely hit on the themes of this post in other ways. Share this article! I would love to hear your input. Did I help you understand anything about this very Catholic practice? Did it enlighten you on something else? I ask so I can make more sense the next time around. Did you really read all this to not leave some kind of thought afterwards?

[andrewuttaro]

What the Holy Rosary tells us about worshipping God

Honesty is the best policy. To be very honest: I felt like the Holy Rosary was something only Grandmas do until I was a full-blown adult. My grandma prayed the Rosary, but my family was only anecdotally religious growing up, so the practice was never something I learned in any great depth. That is not to mention even as a child I realized it required a level of repetition, and therefore focus, which I would scarcely possess until adulthood.

Something changed in college as I went on service trips and retreats. While I had also done both those things in my High School Youth Ministry there was a whole different vibe to that in college. In college everyone is there by their own free will, no parents dropped them off threateningly, at worst someone was dragged on retreat by a friend. But there was more to it than that. Some of these trips exposed me to religious for the first time, that is Nuns, Monks, and even an odd oblate here or there.

To be exposed to people who prayed as if it wasn’t a chore allowed me to move outside my previous, very exclusively conversational way of praying. Conversational prayer isn’t inferior, I still do that daily as well, but rote, that is recited or scripted prayer, hit me differently as a college student. Allow me to be frank: I had now realized my very hyperactive, autistic brain, had found a use for repetitive prayer. The “calming of the monkey mind” as the Buddha put it.

Seventy years ago the Rosary was the undisputed centerpiece of Catholic devotional life. This was in no small part because Catholics did not have the Mass in their native languages before the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). That meant that if you wanted to be pious or feel closer to God at Mass before communion then you probably wanted to have some kind of prayer routine. That generation had the Rosary at the center of their devotional life as a result. My own grandmother gave me her mother’s Rosary which dates back to this period (forgive me for showing it off in the thumbnail). October has the Rosary as its monthly Catholic devotion.

Perhaps such a widely known devotion, easily still the most recognizable, distinctly Catholic devotion in our culture, needs a month of focus just to remember what it’s all about. I say that because even when I first picked up praying the rosary in college it didn’t stick, and I have never approached daily rosary reciting like the hardcore folks do. Nonetheless the practice has grown on me more than anything else in the intervening years.

The Rosary is so rich in the mystery of the faith that it reorients you to what faith is in the first place and why we worship the God we do at all. Put another way, the Rosary tells us something about how we ought to worship God. Yes, on the surface its repetition does wonders for the hyperactive mind; but the deeper you go the more you encounter the life-giving stuff the story of our faith is made of. Mystery is one word to use for this, the word that I think gets the point across better in English is peace. Just as mystery is an opportunity for faith, so too is the Rosary an opportunity for deep, spiritual peace.

A brief history of praying unceasingly

Long before anyone knew what a Rosary is there was the fundamental Christian call to “pray without ceasing” (1st Thessalonians 5:17). Echoing the practice of Jesus who frequently both prayed communally with his apostles and privately when he withdrew from them; this is taken as something of a command of the New Testament if not an overarching theme of the whole bible for a holy life (Catechism of the Catholic Church 2742-2745). How this call to unceasing prayer has been answered is an interesting prism through which to view the history of the Church.

You could say prayer was the unceasing practice of the Church as early as the first Christian communities in the book of Acts who persisted in breaking bread and praying together (Acts 2:42). The breaking of the bread was the Mass, and the praying together certainly involved rote prayers in addition to conversational prayer. These practices undoubtedly involved recounting their articles of faith in Jesus Christ and making petitions and intercessions in prayer. While further systematization would come, prayer was this constant practice of faithful Christians from the start.

The great third century scholar Origen equated the fundamental call of prayer to action when he wrote: “He ‘prays without ceasing’ who unites prayer to works and good works to prayer. Only in this way can we consider as realizable the principle of praying without ceasing.” As monasticism developed, first in the Near East and later in Western Europe, the call was answered with the classic eight fixed times a day when psalms, scriptures and other prayers were recited. The formalization of the Canonical Hours, better known as the Liturgy of the Hours or simply the Breviary today, occurred sometime in the early middle ages.

Think of the breviary as a daily devotional book with a little bit of everything prayed multiple times daily. This would be, theoretically at least, the constant prayer of the whole Church for a time. But the Church is a big place with a lot of different people and vocations.

By the sixteenth century revisions to the breviary were needed. As with the Mass and other liturgies, clerics will tell you many rote devotions grab onto the regular prayers of the church like barnacles onto the hull of a ship. Things had gotten unwieldly. Many priests, those who are mandated by their ordination to pray the Breviary, had fallen out of the practice which had long been their answer to the fundamental call. Though the Council of Trent successfully reformed the breviary to the point it was not changed significantly again until the 1960s, there were other prayer practices that were growing throughout the history of the Church.

Call it the Holy Spirit, there were always common ways to pray unceasingly. The Breviary had long been inaccessible to the illiterate masses. Knotted prayer ropes date back to the first centuries of the faith. The monks of the east, also known as the Desert Fathers, would use them to keep track of praying the 150 Psalms or just the Jesus Prayer (More on that gem later). Such rote, repetitive prayer styles evolved and changed based on who was praying them where and for what purpose. By the thirteenth century there existed a folk practice of praying 50-150 Ave Marias (AKA Hail Marys). It was here when St. Dominic comes into the picture.

In the year 1208, Dominic was praying and experienced a vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary as the story goes. In this vision Dominic is given the Holy Rosary as a way to pray the central mysteries of the life of Jesus Christ as if with Mary herself. We Catholics see Mary as the central figure of the Communion of Saints which means we can think of her as something like the greatest pray-er out there, our greatest intercessor before God’s throne. It is like calling her the captain of the all-star team in a way. If the Saints are good at praying than she is their Great One. I have at least three other articles at this point about the Blessed Mother so by all means learn more and draw nearer to our Sacred Mommy.

Anyway, the Holy Rosary became the central devotion of the Order of Preachers (Dominican Order of Priests) which St. Dominic founded. The devotion was widespread by the end of the century and became exceedingly commonplace to the point that in 1569 Pope St Pius V (p. 1566-1572) made it an official devotion of the Church. At that point it had grown so popular that there were secondary and tertiary devotions built around the Rosary like Our Lady of Victory which commemorated a naval victory over an Ottoman fleet. It is difficult to call to mind a prayer technique outside of those explicitly spelled out in the New Testament that have reached the level of universal adoption the Rosary has.

Pope Leo XIII (p. 1878-1903) probably put the simple grandeur of it best when he said the rosary is how devotees accompany Mary in her contemplation of Christ. The more you think about Mary’s relationship with her son the more that affects you. Pope St. Leo XIII was the pontiff who instituted the custom of praying the rosary daily during the month of October. At that point in history this would have been like telling people to spend at least an hour a day on their cell phone to we moderns. People already did it quite a bit.

The Rosary historically had three sets of five mysteries: the Joyful, Sorrowful, and glorious. However in 2002, Pope St. John Paul II added a fourth set, the Luminous or Mysteries of Light, after St. George Franco Preca’s 1957 reflections adding five more mysteries of the faith taken from the life of Jesus Christ. The Rosary had now firmly become the people’s unceasing prayer of the Church to the Clergy’s breviary. I don’t think it is unfair to say the Rosary has eclipsed the Breviary, even among clergy.

Crash Course Holy Rosary

If there is any barrier to entry with the Rosary beyond merely knowing the prayers and the patience to pray them all, it is just learning how to let rote prayer open your heart. That little quote from the Buddha mentioned earlier about calming our monkey minds really provided me with an epiphany, my ah-ha moment, about rote prayer. The Rosary’s repetition helps you enter into a spiritually open mental state. Even if your mind can wander while praying the prayers themselves, the mysteries along the way demand your contemplation.

There are simply too many of those mysteries to discuss each in depth and still keep this article within the length of a blog post. Most Christians will recognize 75% of the mysteries of the Rosary right off the bat. Catholics should be able to recall 100% of them if their religious education was worth its salt. I thought a broad overview of the Rosary itself would be appropriate to frame what this all means for how we worship God if we are to be serious about our devotions and relationship with God as a whole.

You start with the sign of the cross and say the Apostles Creed. This is where I often incorporate some kind of dedication: who I am dedicating this Rosary to or what intercession, what I am praying to God for, as I pray the whole Rosary to follow. After that the practice Rosary, or mini-Rosary as I like to call it starts, that is a tour of the repetitive prayers used in each decade, or ten Hail Mary grouping, but only five prayers long minus any specific mystery.

I just made that sound way more complicated than it is. The practice Rosary is an Our Father followed by three Hail Marys capped off with a Glory Be: the shortened version of each decade of the rest of the Rosary. Its simple really.

Now we arrive at the first bead with a mystery attached to it. More on which mysteries to pray on what days in a little bit. After you recite the mystery you’ll be contemplating during the ensuing decade of Hail Marys and perhaps contemplating what fruit this mystery might provide you or some other attached devotion, you then pray an Our Father before the ten Hail Marys of the decade, one Hail Mary for each bead. After completing a decade you pray a Glory Be and boom, you’re at the next big bead where you recite the next mystery. This cycle repeats itself until you go through all five mysteries at which point you have a closing prayer, usually a Hail Holy Queen, at the three-way intersection of the Rosary.

There is an exceptionally devoted practice of praying all the Rosary mysteries at once in a 20-decade rosary. You rarely see this outside the confines of a religious convent or monastery. If you ever come across a 20-decade rosary you might do a double take because it really does look like a factory error.

Depending on the Church season different sets of mysteries are prayed each day. However the traditional schedule is Joyful Mysteries on Monday and Saturday, Sorrowful Mysteries on Tuesday and Friday, Glorious Mysteries on Wednesday and Sunday, and the Luminous Mysteries on Thursday. If you get in the habit of praying the Rosary I recommend being very flexible with this schedule.

My general rule is also that I pray the Sorrowful Mysteries more frequently during the Lenten season and the Glorious and Luminous Mysteries more frequently during the Easter season. I almost never pray the Rosary without some kind of complementary reading on each mystery as I go, it helps remind me the importance of what I am reflecting on as I pray each decade.

Finally, here are those mysteries I have talked up so much. Again, even a lapsed Christian will recognize most of these. See how many you know off the top of your head as we go through these:

Joyful Mysteries:

The Annunciation (Mary is told she’s going to give birth to Jesus)

The Visitation

The Nativity

The Presentation (Jesus’ dedication as an infant)

Finding Jesus in the Temple

Luminous Mysteries:

Baptism of Jesus

Wedding at Cana

Proclaiming the Kingdom (The Apostles sent two by two)

The Transfiguration

The Institution of the Eucharist (Last Supper)

Sorrowful Mysteries:

The Agony in the Garden

The Scourging at the Pillar

The Crowning with Thorns

Jesus carries the Cross

The Crucifixion

Glorious Mysteries:

The Resurrection

The Ascension

The Descent of the Holy Spirit (Pentecost)

The Assumption of Mary (into heaven)

The Coronation of Mary

What the Rosary tells us about worshipping God

Beyond the spiritual openness to God the Rosary can help us establish in our prayer lives, there is something deeper rote prayer practices like this tell us about who and why we worship the way we do. There comes a point in everyone’s spiritual growth as a Christian, or at least there should come a point, when the whole pursuit of religious faith stops being about us as individuals and starts to flow outward. That is outward horizontally to others in service and outward vertically to God in worship.

I could talk all the livelong day about the value of service, it is how the foundation of my faith was built over Service Camps and by way of several Vincentian Priests, but when we’re talking about the Rosary I think its insightful to look to worship. What do we mean when we claim to worship God? What is worship all about, particularly for us modern people, so predisposed to independence and righteous skepticism?

There was an interesting thing I uncovered while brushing up on my Rosary facts for this article. Apparently in some high-liturgy Lutheran circles, Lutherans correct me if I’m wrong, the Rosary is prayed without any Hail Marys. Instead the Jesus Prayer is said in place of the 53 Hail Marys in your average Rosary. This is called a Lutheran Rosary apparently. I found this very interesting, and not just for the normal sectarian reasons.

I found that so interesting because the Jesus Prayer substituting into the Rosary really drives home the point about what the worship element is all about in this. The Jesus Prayer is super easy, I can say it for you before this paragraph is done… Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. That’s it. That’s the whole prayer. There is simplicity there obviously; but stop and take in the humility and the orientation toward God it imposes in just a handful of words.

If one is to believe in God they must also believe they are not God. The Mosaic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) share an understanding of God as “the being which no greater being can be thought of” (St. Anslem of Canterbury) or in more philosophical terms: the four-A God who is all-knowing (omniscient), all-powerful (omnipotent), all-present (omnipresent), and all-loving (omnibenevolent). If such a being does exist, and they have created us with free will to choose for or against them as it would seem they have, that God is indeed all-loving because… well wow, think about that. Such a God is worthy of worship even if you contemplate him/her on a very brief, cursory level like that.

To be very blunt, none of us weary humans fit that bill. We are not God and if that God exists we ought to worship him as such. Frankly, if you have read this far into an article about praying the Rosary I would imagine you already believe God exists. If not, well then wow, thank you for spending this much time on my blog.

Humility before God is the right orientation of worship and all meaningful prayer.

Back to the Jesus Prayer: this ancient prayer is the distillation of that right orientation towards God. If we are to seriously worship God we have to take seriously his godliness and our humanity and the profound blessedness that relationship implies. If God wants a relationship with we human beings that alone is such an incredible blessing worthy of the response of worship. To then take the Christian step to say God was incarnate in Jesus Christ and committed the ultimate act of atoning solidarity with us should bring us to our knees just by believing in such a truth.

The Jesus Prayer orients us toward God properly, and that is why I think the Lutherans really did create something nice there with their version of the Rosary even if I feel somewhat slighted for my divine mother by it. The Rosary, Lutheran or Catholic, provides us with a unique combination of centering repetitive prayer and contemplative belief material to then pray over. In both motions of the Rosary then we find something of a blueprint for how to worship God.

One: clear the chaos of our mind and lives, casting aside what drives us away from being with God via repetition and practice. Two: once open to God’s action in ourselves and in humanity, dive into the sacred mysteries of his action which he has already done for us. Simplified even more we can consider these two steps a simple two-word cycle between conversion and transformation.

Knowing is one thing; believing, loving, and following God is another. To believe, love, and follow God we must be constantly converted out of old and or sinful ways of doing and living into what Jesus Christ has for us: transformation. Conversion is the movement of the heart, the willfulness, to a new way of doing things while the transformation is the work of actually changing. God helps with that, don’t worry.

Fun translation fact I always love to drop in during this discussion is the biblical command to repent. In English the word repent sounds very scolding and possessive. In the original Greek for repent, metanoia, the word is much closer to something like changing your thinking or changing your mind. For we fiercely independent and educated moderns that might be a little bit more palatable. Have the humility to change your mind and embrace God’s Will. If knowing that helps you worship God any more than before than I’ve more than done my job with this article even if you never pray a Rosary.

If nothing else worshipping God is a part of my life I would never want to give up. It is not an intellectual effort for me; though sometimes I must choose faith over the flatly logical choice just because real world relationships are built on faith more than they are built on facts. If my wife asked me if I was faithful to her on a business trip she really only has faith to go on. What I say in response is a mystery to have faith in or not. She could go to lengths to investigate my behavior on said business trip, but would that not defeat the purpose of the faith of the relationship? Can real, tangible love exist without such a foundation of faith?

For me there is a certain kind of joy in worshipping God every time I go to Mass or give him his due in prayer. It is not unlike the joy I feel at a family gathering or when I see my wife after a long trip away from her. Worship practiced in the context of relationship, particularly after some time with it, really becomes a thankful joy. The “pearl of great price” (Matthew 13:45-46) to use biblical analogy. That is the peace I think of when I think of praying the Holy Rosary.

My favorite late night comedian Stephen Colbert put his belief in God in terms of thankfulness as well asking: “If I didn’t believe in God where would all the thankfulness go?” St. John Chrysostom puts the finer point on that same idea: “Prayer is the place of refuge for every worry, a foundation for cheerfulness, a source of constant happiness, a protection against sadness.” That is a place of peace. That is what the Rosary is good at.

That is a prayerfulness worth unceasingly doing. I might try to pray the Rosary daily for the first time this month but even if I am unsuccessful the joyful thing the Rosary does will still be there for me whenever I pick it up. I understand now, after years of maturing, what its spiritual usefulness really is. I now understand how monks and nuns otherwise occupied with far more interesting life pursuits are so enthusiastic and dedicated to their prayer, their rosary praying, than what was apparent to me as a younger man. The joy of the Rosary is the love and faith of God rightly worshipped.

Thanks for reading! My book “How to catch feelings for Jesus” is available online. Share this article! I am in the swing of writing on a monthly basis now and would love to hear your input. Did you really read all that about the Holy Rosary to not have something to say about it?

[andrewuttaro]

Sorrows relatable: The Seven Sorrows of Mary

Let’s start with a confession. I was a scaredy cat as a kid. In a lot of ways I still am. I had a nightlight in my bedroom well into my teen years and requested a small radio I could listen to as I fell asleep each night. Part of my spiritual origin story was tuning that radio into local bible studies through which I did a fair bit of self-teaching the bible. But this is a confession not a brag.

The real confession is that long before I was tuning into bible studies at bedtime I was listening to a soft rock/adult contemporary music station… okay, full honesty, it mainly played love songs listeners called in requesting. The host was a music and radio personality named Delilah who would venture into relationship advice on some of these calls. If I am not mistaken she is still on the air doing her thing.

You could imagine a kid who was afraid of the dark, and heights, and getting a tummy ache, would enjoy something so intentionally calming. I don’t remember when I switched to the bible studies, but that phase certainly colored my approach to music, spirituality, and even what I was willing to share with others. I was gently mocked about this by my siblings, but this article is the first time anyone else will hear about this.

Those Delilah years gave me a like long interest in those little bits of relational wisdom you hear all the time. A wise woman once said: “Grief can’t be deeper than love. It’s precisely how hard we love that causes that anguish of grief.” That is not a quote from Delilah but like Delilah it colors my spirituality in a subtle way. Mary, the mother of God, is the brush of that color.

I have always had a certain quandary about the Blessed Mother. What did she know when? Without sounding like the Watergate hearings about it I really wonder how much of this divine plan for her son she was in the loop about. It seems like the consensus opinion in most theological circles is that she knew everything that was going to happen or almost everything. I have no real qualm about that, but it makes the above quote a bit sharper, doesn’t it?

If she knew everything… well what a life to sign up for.

I wrote about the Blessed Mother last month for the August devotion: the Immaculate Heart of Mary. I also wrote about her back in May for Mary’s month. There is a lot of additional Mary lore in those articles and there is far too much about her to reflect upon in one article, so I’d recommend going back to those. Spoiler alert now: those articles are not nearly as grim as this one might come across. The September monthly devotion is the Seven Sorrows of Mary.

Before we dive headlong into this I think it’s worth a bit of check-in on ourselves. How are you doing? You feeling mentally healthy? At least reasonably so within a normal range of dispositions? Talking about grief is uncomfortable all on its own but when you add in some of the more specific stuff we’ll be talking about here I thought a trigger warning was in order. Trigger warning for sadness, violence, loss, and generally enormous human sorrows.

With that said let’s keep this question in the back of our mind as we recount the seven sorrows of Mary: what does it mean for her, however without sin she may be, to knowingly face a life of suffering? Namely, what does it mean to choose a path of sorrow? We might be tempted to think it’s wrong or masochistic to choose such a life on the face of it. But Jesus’ own mother did… Jesus himself did for that matter.

Perhaps sorrow, grievous predictable sufferings, are not something to be fled from just because they’re sorrowful. The human condition, particularly when you don’t have many of the privileges and comforts of fully developed modern life like we have here in our country, is so often buttressed by so much suffering.

Life can’t be less worth living just because there is lots of suffering in it, right? We would be gravely insulting so many people suffering with chronic conditions or brutal life circumstances if we judged them in such a way.

Perhaps in Mary’s Seven Sorrows we might find something intrinsic about the human condition, perhaps something profoundly relatable? Unfortunately I don’t have a sarcastic quip to cut the tension of this opening section so let’s get into this.

First Sorrow: Prophesy of Simeon

The Seven Sorrows start here because they have to. If you are looking for biblical proof Mother Mary knew all that she was signing up for in relation to her son this is it: the Gospel of Luke 2:22-38. Mary and Joseph bring the baby Jesus to the Temple for his dedication as was tradition and encounter two elders there who have been waiting to see the savior their whole lives. Simeon was promised by the Holy Spirit he would not see death before he had seen the Lord’s messiah (v. 25-26).

Simeon’s prayer of thanksgiving at receiving the infant Jesus brings joy and amazement to the new parents, at least for a moment. Simeon blessed the nascent family before telling Mary a couple key prophetic truths about her son: Jesus will be destined for the falling and rising of many in Israel (v. 34), Jesus will be a sign opposed (v. 34), Jesus will reveal the thoughts of many [think moral leader] (v. 35), and a sword will pierce your own soul too (v. 35). Yes, that last one is where all the imagery of swords going into Mary’s heart comes from. Simeon essentially tells Mary your son is going be quite divisive and you’ll suffer for it too.

A prophetess named Anna, also a temple dweller waiting for the coming of the Lord’s messiah, then comes and rejoices with Mary and Joseph as well. Perhaps the interaction is awkward now for the couple after Simeon’s prophesy? However stoic and rock solid you may imagine Mary it feels unlikely there was not a certain human sorrow to an affirmation your child will do great things… but those great things will lead to discord and demise. The Prophesy of Simeon might be considered the most tangible confirmation of what Mary and Joseph already knew from their own prophetic encounters with the divine prior to Jesus’ birth: a great mission lay ahead, and it will be painful.

That said, I think it might be edifying to be reminded that the Prophesy of Simeon is encapsulated in the Fourth Joyful Mystery of the Rosary. That’s right, the Fourth Joyful Mystery, which devoted daily rosary prayers will recount every Monday and Saturday. There is joy in what might seem like a dreadful prophecy, how can this be?

Hope was fulfilled for Simeon and Anna because they got to meet Jesus, even as an infant. Moreover, a little act of obedience to their religious law in bringing that divine baby to the Temple allowed a young family to fulfill the lifelong hope of two people decades their senior. In this we find the hidden ray of continuity in the Seven Sorrows: hope that persists through sorrow can be the point of contact of God’s most intimate love.

How do we face situations that we know are painful with hope? How do we face facts of life that we know are going to be painful? How do we accept a treacherous road if we know it is the right one?

Second Sorrow: Flight to Egypt

This is the sorrow of Mary for which we have the least to go on. If you don’t count the Massacre of the Innocents they were fleeing from or the brief passage on their return after King Herod’s death, then we only really have three verses on the Flight to Egypt (Matthew 2:13-15). As a fulfillment of the Prophet Hosea (Hosea 11:1) and an echo of the earlier Exodus story there is a certain symmetry of God’s Word in this: God delivers his people even if the road is difficult through foreign lands or out of bondage. But if you ask me the more efficacious way to think about this sorrow is on the micro level: the individuals in this story going through some rough stuff.  

If we gave each one of these sorrows a more specific descriptor, say the Prophesy of Simeon was the emotion dread for example, then the Flight to Egypt is anxiety. Imagine you are a mother with a newborn being told by your partner that you have to flee the country. Suddenly you are a refugee who needs to cross borders illegally to escape violence at the hands of a genocidal monarch. This is not to mention the environmental difficulties of fleeing across a desert which a generation of your people died in. You may have a divine baby, but that is still several frightening obstacles to overcome that would probably be hard for anyone, especially a woman still recovering from the physical rigors of childbirth.

We might imagine Mary going along with this trusting the angel that had appeared to Joseph telling them to flee, after all an angel vouched for her with Joseph in another dream after she became pregnant. She wasn’t going on nothing. Nonetheless, she is taking the warning second hand. One might call that faith.

Mary had faith in the God she was now closely familiar with and, moreover, was willing to go through some difficulties on that faith. Mary could have gotten tied up in the what ifs of the situation, anxiety could have paralyzed her and it would have made logical sense given all she was going through. Faith isn’t logical: faith is relational. Mary cooperated with the grace of God by faith, and it saved her and her nascent family.

To those who have known great struggles, faith in something becomes a necessity, because faith leads to hope. Hope defeated anxiety as the Holy Family made haste for Egypt. And indeed hope deepened the bonds of love on that journey: the proving ground of the devotion among them that the sorrow of the whole experience gave genesis to. In a certain way the anxiety of the whole thing deepened the love of the Holy Family in this sorrow.

How might we fight off the paralyzing grip of anxiety? Do we have the kind of faith that can be tested by difficulties and buoy us through ordeals? To what lengths will we go if we think God is telling us to do something difficult?

Third Sorrow: Loss of the Child Jesus in the Jerusalem Temple

Many English translations of the story of a twelve-year-old Jesus lost in the temple employ the word anxiety (Luke 2:41-52). This feels like a classic biblical mistranslation if you ask me. We’re talking about losing your child for three days in the largest city you’ll ever go to. That is the definition of desperation. Consider the added weight of the fact that your baby is God’s own son. This search has eternal, spiritual, and cosmic implications. The pressure Mary must have felt in this instance… but also in general raising the child Jesus, must have been a whole different level of parenting.

The first 7-12 years of a child’s life is the time they are the most impressionable. The kind of examples you put before them is a top priority in any parent’s mind. Now imagine your child, pretty much from the age they can speak onward (perhaps earlier with Jesus?), is making more of an impression on you the parent than the other way around. My mother always told me every one of her four children came out with an entirely different personality, quirks and all. One can only imagine what Jesus was like to parent.

To then lose this super-precious child and find him teaching in the temple… well it’s hard to imagine a wider mix of emotions hitting a person in a single moment in time. Preachers have spilled oceans of ink on Jesus’ response to his parents in this moment: “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” The piece often missed in considering Jesus words is that Mary and Joseph did know he must be in his father’s house: from before the child’s birth they knew he was here to participate in God’s plan every step of the way. In this light we might think of the boy Jesus’ words as coming in a healing tone. Perhaps the message was more something like: “Why the desperation, mom and dad? You know God is at work in us.” Mary and Joseph are both confirmed and rebuked in this moment.

How do we deal with desperation-inducing confusion? What does that confusion mean in the light of our faith? Is desperation a way we miss God at work right in front of us?

The lost in the Temple story is the last we hear of Joseph, a very subtle sign of a shift in the story. Mary is a widow now: set aside in a certain way by the culture of her time and place. The first three sorrows seem to be informative for Mary, all her supports in tow, while the back four are pieces of the central paschal realities she was preparing for all along. Going forward her son is now engaged in the most sorrowful throws of the passion, her most loyal and chaste spouse no longer at her side, Mother Mary is now at the epicenter of salvation using all the grace she has to faithfully follow along the toughest stretches of the path she began down at the Annunciation; indeed in some primordial, divine way all the way back at her own immaculate conception.

Fourth Sorrow: Meeting Jesus along the Way of the Cross

Now we fast forward quite a bit in the life of Jesus Christ. Consider all Mary has been through with Jesus as an adult and as a rogue preacher. She invited him to start his public mystery in the most generous way at the Wedding in Cana. She was with his band of Apostles. She was a faithful follower too, in a very different way. She certainly helped Jesus disciples follow him: a divine kind of teacher’s assistant if you will. More on this later.

She knew this was coming but perhaps she did not know how or when. She must have sensed the tension in a packed Jerusalem that Passover week, the Last Supper was a family seder meal, so she had likely been there and felt the drama of that moment. How did she find out he had been arrested? She must have followed as much of the circus show trial as she could, perhaps even the flogging and crowning with thorns, but now she reunites with him again in the midst of his passion.

Parents live to see what their kids grow up to be. The tragedy of this moment on the Way of the Cross is that no matter how prepared she ever could have been for the salvific work her son came to do, she was never prepared enough for the sting of this sword in her heart.

Anguish defines this moment. All the Gospel accounts of the Passion narrative describe some crowd of mourners dismayed to tears and wailing at this fate befalling Jesus. One can only imagine Mary walking along Jesus’ way to Golgotha shedding her grace on all these other devotees of her son. She had been with him since before Day One, all these others found him later, she must have felt the strangest sense of solidarity with them as she felt every physical and mental pain her divine son went through.

In moments of impenetrable, inescapable anguish where do our hearts turn? Are we faithful in solidarity with others suffering and the divine master who always suffers with us? Does suffering turn us inward or outward?

Fifth Sorrow: Jesus’ Crucifixion

Execution is one of the clearest and unholiest expressions of human sin. Every execution is an offense against the image of God, Imago Dei, which all human beings possess no matter what sins they may have committed. Execution is a sinful failure at the very best, while at its very worse it is the execution of God himself made flesh. It is as if our inborn original sin we all deal with as humans was trying to repel divinity itself from the human form in Jesus Christ. Nobody felt the magnitude of this execution echo through all humanity, and through the intimate terror of that moment, quite like the Blessed Mother. For her it is truly terror, as her beloved son suffers the execution reserved for enemies of the Roman Empire.

What more could be said as a parent watches her son die? Alas, the Son of God speaks. Jesus said a handful of things from the cross, but he reserves two sentences for his mother, and the Apostle John concerning her, in John 19:25-27. “Woman, here is your son… [John] Here is your mother.” Jesus makes provision for his mother and his apostles by giving them to each other to care for. What Jesus does here is profound. While the crucifixion is undoubtedly another sorrowful sword in Mary’s heart, it is also her elevation.

Mary Clopas, Mary Magdalene, the Apostle John, and Mother Mary are the ones at the foot of the cross throughout the whole ordeal with Jesus. Jesus addresses the latter two directly giving Mary as an efficacious co-mediatrix of grace to his Apostles, and by extension his Church, and that Church founded by his Apostles to Mary. That second part hits particularly hard: Jesus rewards the gracefulness of his mother with extending her motherhood to the Church he establishes forever.

Nobody in this situation is thinking this is some kind of forced adoption as if Jesus is making John take in his mother. This is a spiritual commission. Mary becomes the Apostles’ spiritual mother and indeed the spiritual mother to the Church. She is, by Jesus own words from the cross, the Queen of all graces they might need in doing her son’s mission for the rest of time. Jesus did not want to leave his mother unrecognized: especially after all she had done for him in raising him and throughout his ministry. There is so much hope and love in this moment even as Jesus is literally dying on the cross.

Does death and violence force us into a surrender to terror? How might we be better beacons of grace in the face of profound injustice? Are we prepared for our own death?

Sixth Sorrow: Descent from the Cross – Mary receives Jesus’ dead body in her arms

The gruesome spectacle is over. The crowd that watched Jesus’ execution has dispersed and an obscure follower of Jesus named Joseph of Arimathea comes to secure the descent from the cross. Joseph Arimathea’s request of the roman authorities is a work of mercy, the romans would regularly leave crucifixion victims up for days as a bloody example, even letting wildlife pick at the bodies. Jesus now lifeless body will not face this indignity and as Jesus is lowered from the cross he lands in the arms of the Blessed Mother, her heart torn asunder now more than ever.

Mary’s heart is pierced with sorrowful grief while Jesus’ heart, pierced with the spear, is quiet now close to hers in one last maternal embrace in the mortal realm. This moment is desolation for Mary who bore this divine heart into the world. Jesus’ last words echo in her mind: “It is finished” (John 19:30). What was finished? Mary knew this was not a reference to his life ending but the sealing of the new covenant: humanity would never again have to wonder if it were right with God, Jesus definitively bridged the gap and opened God up to all. In Mary’s desolation in this moment she receives Jesus’ body she also understands the divine mission is accomplished, her immaculate heart and Jesus’ sacred heart are here united in this sorrowful moment.

That certainly did not wipe away her immense sorrow at this point. That is the thing about suffering, even if it is for a greater good it is still a burden to bear because of love. Again remember “Grief can’t be deeper than love. It’s precisely how hard we love that causes that anguish of grief.” Love of God, and thereby her son, drove Mary throughout her life. Indeed love drove her along the way of the cross up to Golgotha and her son’s crucifixion. Mary chose a life with suffering around every turn, and she didn’t flee coming face to face with it at any point. Just as we speak of Jesus’ passion, his suffering, death, and eventual resurrection, so we will see Mary’s passion, a narrative extending before and after her son’s corporeal time on this earth.

Do we allow ourselves to see the love that animates our grief? How can our suffering be united with Christ’s as we endure our own trials and tribulations? How can we comfort the grief-stricken?

Seventh Sorrow: Burial of Jesus

The end comes now, the final sorrow to pierce Mary’s heart. How would she have helped prepare him for burial with the others? Beyond Joseph Arimathea and the other followers of Jesus who had followed along the way of his passion, they are now also joined by Nicodemus. Nicodemus was a rabbi who recognized Jesus early, meeting him by night and receiving the famed saying of John 3:16. One might wonder why he did not muster the courage to follow Jesus more closely throughout his public ministry. The small crowd now helping Mary bury her son must have only amplified the sense of oblivion in this moment.

All her dread from the Prophesy of Simeon had been confirmed. The anxiety of the Flight to Egypt returned. The desperation of the lost son in the temple ultimately frustrated in that son’s death. The anguish of finding her son on the way of the cross complete. The intimate terror of the crucifixion realized. The desolation of her son’s descent from the cross meeting its final conclusion here in his burial.

There is no way to avoid suffering in life, so we need to stop trying. Modern psychiatry has confirmed what so many millions of people down through history have experienced firsthand: we cannot avoid feeling the sufferings of life difficulties. We must face them, feel them, and then finally process them enough to take whatever the next steps will be. Suffering is not to be avoided unnecessarily like we can live forever charmed lives: no, we are better off embracing sorrows relatable.  

Mary affirmed in her sorrows, particularly at the completion of this final great sorrow of her life, that Jesus is Lord. Her life and times confirmed it, and she would proclaim it for the rest of her days however God led her, never leaving the side of at least one of his Apostles.

Sorrows relatable

If there was one mystery in her son’s life Mary might not have been privy to ahead of time it could have only been the Resurrection. This is the central truth of Christian faith and the mystery, or opportunity for faith, that is the reason for everything from complex theological truths later canonized by Jesus’ Church to the reason why we worship on Sundays. The Resurrection is the joy from which all Christian joy comes. Mother Mary was with the Apostles when news of the resurrection comes via Mary Magdalene, she was a primary witness to the Resurrection depending on which Gospel narrative we’re talking about.

Mary’s story merges into that of the Early Church from here on out. Just like her husband’s story disappears from scripture when he has fulfilled his protagonist work, now Mary enters the realm of devotion, influencing the Church how Jesus called her until her own Assumption into heaven and beyond. Mary’s Seven sorrows show a concise solidarity, a gracefulness originating with her divine son, radiating love through grief and faithfulness in the face of some of life’s deepest possible sufferings.

But in order to contemplate this devotional journey for as efficacious as it really is we have to step outside ourselves, particularly those of us who live some of the most privileged lives in world history here in our place in time and space as 21st century Americans. Most humans throughout history worked hard just to survive, most humans still today struggle greatly as a fact of life. Mary’s choice to endure a life of suffering in faithfulness to God’s plan via her son is a divine solidarity with the human experience which can so often become a meager existence defined by just getting by.

Life is worth living no matter how much suffering there is in it. To say one lives less life if they spend a great proportion of it struggling and suffering is to mock countless millions of human beings who live in relative squalor with great love. It is not masochistic to approach difficult things intentionally, in fact it’s the beginning of a lot of character growth for many. But beyond mere motivational gym posters about overcoming difficulty there is this profound truth that faith, hope, and love run through all worthy sufferings.

Worthy suffering? What is that? Are you telling some people that their suffering is unworthy? Unworthy of what?  No. I chose the word worthy because good seems a little too simplistic with a topic like this. There is an intrinsic truth about being human that we don’t like to talk about in a time and place where we have so many of our needs accounted for and so many of our wants satisfied. Suffering humbles us to our basic human poverty spiritually, and it is there where we are most true to ourselves and therefore closer to God.

Listening to Delilah on my bedroom radio as a child exposed me to the radio-edited realities of many people’s sorrows and adjacent hopes, faith, and of course: love. In retrospect I think I might recall when I started switching over to the bible studies. I was too young then to be sure now, but I think I yearned for the purpose of all that love if it was so often met with suffering and sorrow.

Did Delilah lead me closer to Jesus? God works in mysterious ways, eh?

That is where sorrow became relatable. Once I turned to the bible studies, and much later when I learned to love the Blessed Mother for real, all the sorrow became relatable. In Mary we find sorrows relatable. The Blessed Mother and her Seven Sorrows speak to all manner of suffering: dread, anxiety, desperation, anguish, terror, desolation, and oblivion. Mary shows us a strong faith that begets a hardy hope and the greatest love in human history.

We Catholics often go back to Mary’s response to the shepherds coming in from the fields while she was still in the manger with baby Jesus… well I should say lack of response: “But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart” (Luke 2:19). That lack of response isn’t timidity or some chauvinistic slight against women: it is Mary contemplating Jesus Christ as she does throughout her life and particularly in these Seven Sorrows. Is there anything more holy and prayerful than simply contemplating Jesus Christ? Is there any more intimate contemplation of Jesus than the mother adoring her child?

When I throw around a fancy, theological word like co-mediatrix that’s all I really mean. Mary points us to Jesus in a way that is so relatable and human as a mother’s relationship with her child.

There is so much faith, hope, and love running through all these sorrows of Mary’s life because the purpose of all of it is a divine solidarity, a peaceful grace emanating from the incarnate God. Confronted with both foreboding sorrow and the rejoicing of the shepherds Mary responds with that overflowing of grace that prompted her Yes at the Annunciation.

Sometimes that response looks like silence. Sometimes that response looks like crying. Sometimes that response is singing and dancing. But you never channel that grace in the first place if you don’t have the faith to preserve some hope. Without hope reinforcing faith, life can become loveless and banal. For the one who bore the incarnate God very tangibly in her own flesh, loveless life was never an option. Love makes all sorrow painfully visceral but so very much worth it. That grief just shows the depth of love after all.

Love is what makes all our struggles in life bearable. Love is what makes Jesus Christ real to us: very physically in Mary’s body and very spiritually in the way she followed him through sorrow after sorrow with faith in his mission. Love animated her parental calling and hope that he would not let her down. Mary put her faith in the right place, and it buoyed her through all her sorrows. We too can find our authentic faith, a steadfast hope, and finally true love when we allow sorrows to turn us back to the grace of God. Who wouldn’t want to hold that in their heart? Who wouldn’t want that kind of relationship with God? Who wouldn’t find solace in that Jesus Christ.

[andrewuttaro]

Warning from Trieste - Decision 2024

Is the free world in crisis? In many countries with at least some tradition of democracy, there has been a surge of hard right-wing candidates who seemed disinterested in such institutions, many of which won power: Vicktor Orban in Hungary, Andrzej Duda in Poland, Ferdinand Marcos Jr in the Philippines, Yoon Suk Yeol in South Korea, Narendra Modi in India, Javier Milei in Argentina, Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, and of course Donald Trump in the United States of America.

Within 10-15 years of a financial crisis there always seems to be a political crisis bound up in populist ideas of national identity and the injustice done to the national spirit by a threatening outsider group. Political scientists will tell you when there is profound insecurity in people’s livelihoods, particularly in basic necessities like food and housing prices, cost of living matters if you will, revolution and chaos are not too far behind.

That might all seem like old news for those of us in the U.S. We endured the COVID19 pandemic with one of the aforementioned leaders contradicting public health directives almost non-stop. But if you ask me something has changed more recently here in American politics. Yes, the right-wing trendline is the same here as it is worldwide but distrust in the institutions of democracy has grown more widespread across the spectrum of political opinion.

What was once just an eye-catching survey result years ago, widespread distrust in institutions including the government, has morphed into doubt about the very project of democratic governance, to the point that it is seemingly baked into American political culture at this point. Do we believe that our government system works anymore?

Since the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s the Catholic Church has formally endorsed representative democracy, or at least governance that empowers peoples to have control of their own destiny. In the shadow of the madness of the Second World War the thousands of Bishops gathered at that Council felt some sense of moral responsibility. They had failed to prevent the totalitarianism that authored genocide and the deadliest conflict in human history.

Declarations that would have been thought unnecessary a century earlier, against antisemitism and totalitarianism, were more uniformly accepted than the theological documents about the stuff you think about when you call the Catholic Church to mind. In retrospect it’s quaint and charming imagining that many people agreeing on anything, particularly with the added layer of religious discourse.  

On politics and peace, what emerged from the Council was clear. Whether it was Pope John XXIII writing against nuclear war in 1963 or his successor Pope Paul VI actively pushing for treaties on trips abroad, the peacemaking tune out of the highest levels of the Catholic Church has been unmistakable since Vatican II. More than that, in recent decades the criticisms of war and autocracy has gotten so acute that it may seem impossible for the world’s political leaders to obey if they wanted to.

Just-War theory has been so narrowed by recent Popes that you might wonder if any war is justified. The Death Penalty has been explicitly condemned by the Vatican. Neat idea, eh?  Pope Francis goes even further to decry predatory housing practices, denial of healthcare, and ignorance of the elderly as gravely sinful behaviors on a societal level. That last one played no small part in my own decision to do my current work in the regulation of Nursing homes and other facilities designed for older adults which often become warehouses.  

For the current Pope politics is not off limits but it’s  also never partisan. It should come as no surprise then that Pope Francis struck a chord that will ring loudly in the ears of Americans on a trip earlier this summer in the northern Italian city of Trieste. In an election year such as ours I felt too moved to not write about it.

Pope Francis in Trieste

Pope Francis is not the miserly, scolding grandpa his critics would have you believe. He is generally attuned to the needs of a time and place before the people affected know what to ask of him. Within the first year of his papacy he said something that sticks with me to this day and cuts across all facets of the human experience: “If nobody is to blame, everyone is to blame.” Sit with that for a moment and get back to me.

That quote was part of a speech on the Italian island of Lampedusa where migrant boats and the bodies of those who didn’t survive the journey wash ashore regularly. For however bad you think the migrant crisis is here in North America its far more gruesome in Europe where a stormy sea is the main obstacle. Francis knows how to moralize without proselytizing, a rare balance from any minister, never mind the Pope.

On July 7th in Trieste, the Pope was speaking to Catholic Social Week, an annual gathering of civic minded activists discussing the state of Italy and the world since 1907. He delivered another classic speech that feels to me like a clear warning for every person blessed with the vote and political agency in their civic context. I encourage you to read the text of the brief speech with the link here below because he covers a lot with not many words.

Early on Pope Francis acknowledges that world democracy today is not in good health. This is couched in the Italian context but extended out to the whole free world. Specifically he says this after quoting the founder of the social week he was speaking at, Blessed Guiseppe Toniolo, who said democracy is “…that civil order in which all social, legal and economic forces, in the fullness of their hierarchical development, cooperate proportionally to the common good, flowing in the last result to the prevailing advantage of the lower classes.”

You can already tell Pope Francis has a higher standard for democracy than even great patriots here in America. Democracy is not just government by the people oriented toward freedom and liberty, for Francis, democracy is a governing system aimed at the common good and helping the less advantaged. You can see how this would clarify one’s perspective on socio-economic disparities, healthcare, the environment, and many other issues that unnecessarily create suffering for those living under democracy.

Personally I think it goes a long way to clarifying some erroneous practices we take for granted here in the US that ultimately make us less free, perhaps leading us toward a more dictatorial system, but I am saving my editorializing for later.

Where the Pope’s speech goes next is very touching: he uses this image of a wounded heart as a metaphor for what he calls a crisis of democracy today. Marginalization of various people groups hurts the whole social body and makes the whole system less effective and more self-referential. This is like any number of ailments that make the literal human heart work harder and eventually lead to heart failure.

That term, self-referential, is a term Francis uses often. In religious contexts he uses it to refer to all manners of religious people who think so highly of themselves and the religious identity they inhabit that they turn inwards in corrosive selfishness. One example is clergy and laypeople obsessed with the latin mass and fighting him to the detriment of Church unity. Their vanity then has a certain parallel in the secular world when we become so absorbed in our chosen socio-political identities that we become worse for them.

If you consider yourself an avid follower of news and politics then I imagine you know what we’re talking about here. In particularly difficult electoral cycles I have seen friends and politicos I follow spiral into mental health crises over a political agenda. This is not to diminish important political priorities, only to point out how they might be costing us too much of ourselves.

After this metaphor, the pontiff goes onto quote a former Italian prime minister, Aldo Moro, emphasizing, in essence, that democracy is not democracy unless it is at the service of our humanity: that is, human dignity, freedom, and autonomy. Moreover, even if one has the right to vote, are the conditions being created in their body politic to vote knowledgably and wisely, allowing evermore people to vote?

That message hits pretty hard on its own but then Pope Francis speaks of “…freeing ourselves from the waste of ideology…” He is criticizing the lionization of ideologies themselves in political thought. He means that familiar drive to align yourself with a certain, longstanding party or political philosophy to the automatic forsaking of countervailing viewpoints. In short, he is saying that sticking to these too closely will affect us negatively on a human level. Beyond politics you will find the pontiff criticizing ideological rigidity but when he turns it on politics it feels very relevant here in such a starkly divided America.

Circling back to the Aldo Moro bit for a moment, we might ask ourselves how our political viewpoints impact human dignity. If we believe some people shouldn’t vote, what does that say about how we view their humanity? Even further, if we believe others would vote like we do if they were simply smart enough to understand our viewpoint, are we not subtly telling ourselves we are better than?

It only gets sharper when the Holy Father says: “Ideologies are seductive... but they lead you to drown yourself.” Remind yourself these are the words of one of the most well-regarded religious figures in the world today. This warning highlights the earlier quotation pushing the idea that democracy needs to serve our humanity. If we participants in democracy degenerate our humanity through excessive participation in ideology, do we not then degenerate the democracy we live under?

Entering the back half of the speech, his holiness goes onto remind listeners of solidarity and subsidiarity. These are the two bedrock principles of Catholic Social teaching. In this context they refer to the importance of people acting with regard for each other’s plight (solidarity) and the maintenance of political systems that allow everyone to have a say in the policymaking closest and most relevant to their time and place in life (subsidiarity). A disappearing generation of hippie Catholics here stateside could rattle these off for you like second nature.

These principles are invoked to remind us that valuing every person is critical for democracy to persist. Healthy democracy, moreover, requires a practiced ability to transition “…from cheering to dialogue” as the Holy Father puts it. This is to say democracy falls apart when campaigning is eternal, and governing is the afterthought. One specific former American President comes to my mind at that, but I am trying to hold off my analysis at this point in the article. It is tough.

We are roused by campaigning, excited by the thrill of feeling seen and represented, but we are challenged by the task of governing. We are being called to allow ourselves to be challenged instead of fixating on the thrill of increasingly tribal political connections. Good governance is almost always a balancing of different views and possibilities for the maximum possible benefit of constituents.

You don’t have to read too deeply between the lines here to see how Pope Francis is saying that a exceptional love for ideologies in democracies leads to erosion of democracy and the undermining of the dignity of individuals and our humanity as a whole.

Something in that transcends politics into a cultural moment we Americans are in that feels quite sick. Too many of us are so culturally fortified that we begin to see democracy itself as a mere threat to our echo-chambers. Some of us view democracy itself as undermining the common good. This is a fringe trend that has seen some mainstream adoption in the last 8-9 years here in the US. Perhaps it subsides with this election cycle? Let’s get back to the Pope’s warning from Trieste.

The dialogue Pope Francis is advocating for here is in service of inclusion. Once again, democracy is healthy in so far that it is in the service of as many of its constituent people as possible. Those who feel left out are liable to be taken by hopelessness which feeds so many of the flaws that can arise in democracies like militarism, welfarism, hypocrisy, and indeed the tribalism that seems to have generated the crisis of democracy we’re talking about here.

This is where the connection to that 2013 speech in Lampedusa returns to my mind: “If nobody is to blame, everyone is to blame.” In that same speech, the newly elected Pope also spoke about the “globalization of indifference”. We can think of this as his way of talking about the current phase of the information age when we have so much news, facts, and opinion at our fingertips and yet seem more disconnected from each other than ever before. Mind you, he was saying that in 2013.

How have we become so disconnected? How do our disconnections, even within our own political contexts, within our own communities, affect our culture of democracy?

Who is being left out of democracy? Everyone registered above the age of 18 can vote, yes, but who is being left out of the fruits of our system? Those who we leave out intentionally are signs of a deep political illness within us. Those who we leave out unintentionally are the next frontier of inclusion and representation. This is, in some way, a good checkup we can always do on the health of our democracy.

The home stretch of Pope Francis’ Trieste speech turns the wounded heart into the healed heart. He gives hopeful examples of creative efforts to set aside indifference and include as many people as possible in the project of democracy. Examples he uses include recent Italian legislation giving those with disabilities more access to financial services as well as technological innovations designed to assist the protection of the natural environment.

The Holy Father says bluntly at this point: “The heart of politics is participation.” This fraternity requires courage to think of ourselves beyond ever narrower “clan groups” and as broader, more diverse and inclusive people groups. How he is using that word, people, is somewhat lost in translation. A people group is not the sum of individuals but the collective sharing in a dream, a vision for a distinct time and place and those who inhabit it. That is to say, the political entity of a nation-state may or may not be representing all the peoples within it or forging peace within and outside their borders.

The pontiff contrasts this against populism, the political calling card of this crisis of democracy we have found ourselves in. That populism, and the many darker things it can bring (as Europeans are better at calling to mind for obvious historical reasons) prefers easy solutions that ultimately work against ever greater inclusion in favor of increasingly self-referential policy goals: the slow, formal erosion of democracy. Moreover, populism requires an ever-narrower definition of the people group resulting in more exclusion. Us versus them thinking, the bane of existence for diverse democracies, is essential in how populism works in most places.

Underrated point within these closing sentences for me is when the Pope says “Democracy is not an empty box…” He says to speak up with a faith that is not private but is also not interested in defending privileges. The primarily Catholic audience for this speech understood the Pope was taking a swipe at Italian populism specifically here. Populism pits the majority group of a place in defense of perceived lost privileges. In Italy the majority is Catholic. The message is global though: we religious people must not be private about our faith while also being humble enough to not participate in the political process exclusively for the gain of our own distinct in-group.

Moreover, Francis states political love requires us to address causes more than effects, choosing responsibilities over polarizations. We are to make value judgments on responsibilities, not the party line decided by our chosen political tribe. When you’re politically active in defense of a set of societal privileges you like then you are liable to often find yourself on the wrong side of history in a diverse democracy.

A closing word on politicians themselves sneaks up on you at this point. Good politicians have civil passion according to Pope Francis, leading from among the people, perhaps back with the stragglers, to use a shepherding metaphor.

Lastly, the Holy Father speaks to efforts to “organize hope” as the basic command of Catholics, and really all people, who believe in democracy. In a comparable sentiment to the Martin Luther King Jr wisdom we are familiar with here in the US, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”, Francis says time is superior to space. That is to say that the raw pursuit of positions of power can miss the crucial, more powerful work of doing what it takes over time to do what is right in the end.

Hope, we find at the end of the Pope’s speech in Trieste, is required to build the future. Without hope we are mere administrators of the present, disconnected from building any kind of worthy future for democracy or the dignity, freedom, and autonomy that a more perfect fraternity forms in healthy democracies. All of these high ideals for democracy are just more preaching from the Pope unless we possess the boldness to hope for them and then organize that hope into a movement.

The United States in peril – the World in peril

There is so much here to note and take to heart. I really don’t know where to start. Just contemplating when this speech was given will make your head spin. July 7th was the Sunday after transformative elections in Britian which ended fourteen years of the rule of the right-wing party there. That same day the second round of French parliamentary elections saw a stunning reversal of fortunes against the far-right National Rally party which gave birth to a hung parliament that will force French MPs to work together or face another election in the very near future.

For us in the context of the United States of America, July was a decade unto itself in our politics. Recounting it now feels like the first draft of a history lesson.

After President Joe Biden struggled through a debate with former President Donald Trump in June, there was a relative panic attack among the Democratic Party, horrified the aged Biden could not beat the insurrectionist returned to finish the job. The calls to step aside eventually dislodged the presumptive nominee for his younger Vice President. To inhabit that moment you have to contemplate the stakes involved.

The fear about how best to defeat the creeping authoritarian who is now advocating for concentration camps for migrants and pardons for insurrectionists was palpable throughout the month. Yes, this is where I begin editorializing. The upshot on the November Presidential election was not good before President Biden dropped out; at least for those of us who see some existential risk in re-electing a former President who felt the institution of democracy itself was an obstacle to him at least on one January day in 2021.

On July 9th one Volodimir Zelensky, President of embattled Ukraine, spoke at a summit of the leaders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). He said what everyone understands bluntly: the world’s eyes look to November. If my perspective about what a second Trump term in the White House would do to America seems verbose then consider the message when it comes out of the mouth of President Zelensky.

Donald Trump has stated he will not defend NATO from Russia if reelected. Where does that leave Ukraine actively trying to fight off Russian invasion? President Zelensky has signaled he would go down with his country if it came to it. With U.S. aid being the logistical make or break for his nation’s war effort Zelensky really is saying that our election will decide whether he lives or dies. Something about solidarity from the Pope’s speech in Trieste might be coming to mind again for you here.

On July 13th, a mere six days after Pope Francis’ speech in Trieste, a gunman with no apparent motive as of the writing of this blog, tried to assassinate former President Donald Trump outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Political violence undermines democracy in few acts more vivid than a political assassination. We may never know the shooter’s motive, he was killed at the scene, but he was only 20 years old and suffice to say he grew up in this current national climate of political hatred. What impact had this period had on him? I know we will never know but as someone who also grew up in it I struggle to think there was no impact.

We were centimeters away from entering what would have definitively been the darkest timeline. But our politics here in America are so sick now, no matter who you blame it on, that what would have otherwise been the central topic of American political life for months if not a year plus, an assassination attempt on a former President and current presidential candidate, was set aside within weeks. Call that the election year news cycle or, as I prefer, think of it as a deep illness of American political life.

Before the month was out the new presumptive Democratic Party nominee solidified intra-party support and began a more rigorous campaign schedule than her President. That presumptive nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, will be accepting her party nomination formally in Chicago later this month. With that, the final form of the 2024 Presidential election will take shape. With Pope Francis’ warning from Trieste in mind I wonder if we should ask ourselves some tough questions.

A warning for America?

Institutional distrust, that is distrust in the very organization of American democracy, is at such an apocalyptic fever pitch with even your average American that it threatens the project of this country itself. Authentic hope is out of the picture. Self-giving love is practically gone from the world of American politics.

That seems trivial unfortunately for we political junkies embroiled in this stuff on a daily basis, but draw your mind back to human dignity as Pope Francis did in Trieste: What does our terminal institutional distrust do to the system’s ability to do good for people, their dignity, autonomy and the common good?

In President Biden’s speech exiting the race for re-election he posited the idea that character in public life should still matter. That is to say: America must still pick her leaders based on an appreciation for their objective goodness and humanity. What a hopeful idea. We all seem to have the sins of our leaders on our fingertips as if a dagger ready to defend ourselves from their supporters. That isn’t organizing hope, is it? Quite the opposite I would say.

Are we too cynical as a people to define our politics by hope and character? If healthy democracy is to serve our common humanity then it would require great character and at least a general rejection of cynicism, no? Maybe I’m naïve. The alternative these days seems to be deciding that human frailty makes no person truly moral so nobody can be trusted with power. I know I am speaking in sweeping moral generalizations here but look at where we are as a country politically. Measured rhetoric doesn’t seem to catch on these days.

The initial reactions I saw to Biden highlighting character in public life was scoffing and patronizing doubt. To be clear, those were reactions I saw from people who generally supported the now lame duck President and his party. That was disheartening. In the same speech abdicating the 2024 campaign Biden reached to the epicenter of so much of contemporary American political cynicism...

“America is an idea – an idea is stronger than any army, bigger than any ocean, more powerful than any dictator… We’ve never fully lived up to this sacred idea [of the USA], but we’ve never walked away from it either. And I do not believe the American people will walk away from it now.”

Forgive me for being proud of one of my co-religionists, but President Biden ending his political career this way sings more eloquently to the Catholic political experience in America than anything I have ever seen or learned about previously. I wrote another article entitled JD Vance Catholicism on this same blog site and you should read if you want a synopsis of that history. In the meantime, consider Biden’s biography as he says this.

A man who fueled himself with the doubt of his detractors all the way to the White House, stepped aside when he realized it was necessary. A man who attends Mass more regularly than most everyday Catholics I know, chose humility in the face of what he and his political allies say is a moment of existential political danger for the country. I know in my heart that man prayed about this. He has suffered a great deal in his own life and was not about to allow more suffering fall upon his countrymen just because of the pride one feels possessing the most powerful job on earth.

President Biden knows the Holy Father’s warning from Trieste even if he did not hear it before his dropout speech. If our democracy is sick, we need to heal it now before the ailment gets worse. You can tell that even Biden knows there is a sickness to be healed in his speech, even speaking of dictatorship like it’s a possibility here in the USA.

There is also hope in Biden’s farewell; hope we as a people can sustain a healthy democracy that centers and elevates the best of our humanity, not the worst of it. I certainly don’t agree with everything Biden believes politically but the hope he speaks to in this moment is nothing short of essential. We need to be a nation of solidarity for all this country’s peoples and create policy with humanity in mind more than any individual or group of people’s privileges. Humanity comes before anyone’s privileges.

Now Biden’s Vice President Kamala Harris, whom he endorsed to take up this mantle of American democracy, is campaigning against an opposition candidate who has already shown his willingness to subvert the basics of that democracy to try to remain in power. Please, recall January 6th seriously for a moment, and contemplate what that view of America in a President would mean in the context of the Pope’s warning from Trieste.

Go vote on Tuesday, November 5th if you are registered and so able. Vote absentee or however best works for you. But take it seriously, not just because your political tribe has put absurdly high stakes on the outcome. Take it seriously because in the free world we are given this incredible civic sacrament to participate in making the world a better place.

Hold out hope that such a better world is possible. Fortify yourself in hope, not ideology. Democracy is healed when we “organize hope” in the words of Pope Francis; when we choose to work on causes more than effects, choose responsibilities over polarizations, and solidarity over ideology. Those are choices we must make long after election day no matter what the result is.

We are too big and diverse a country to give up on democracy. We are too big and diverse a country to treat hope like a fanciful ideal. Cynicism doesn’t save you. That’s what hope does. What I see in the Pope’s warning in Trieste is a blueprint to not just save democracy but heal it of the illness of cynicism which got us here in the first place. That is a warning to both sides of the aisle, and every free person preparing to vote. Heed the warning from Trieste.

[andrewuttaro]

Immaculate Simplicity

Few sports memories I possess are as distinct and lasting as those of the 2008 Summer Olympics. Specifically the memory that comes to mind is that of the famed American swimmer Michael Phelps. He was at his peak. These memories are aided by being largely concurrent with a family vacation I enjoyed quite a bit in Virginia Beach; that and I was going into Junior Varsity swimming that Fall, my freshman year in High School.

That summer it seemed like every other day I was watching something new about Michael Phelps. He would become the most decorated Olympian of all time with what many posited were in-born skills. I am not kidding when I say the man has partially webbed toes and biologist seemed to agree his body was uniquely designed to be good at swimming. I can still see that perfect butterfly stroke in my mind’s eye. He was the perfect swimmer.

I never made it to varsity swimming. I was bad enough that in a less forgiving program they might have sent me back down to the modified team I’d been on in Middle School. Within the same year I had been marveling at the swimming perfection of Michael Phelps I was swearing off competitive swimming myself due to a combination of hazing, lack of talent, and a newfound passion for Cross-Country running. I never got close to the same waters of swimming perfection.

We have a funny understanding of perfection don’t we? Plainly we imagine some sterilized vision of faultless grace unreachable to our kindest conceptions of ourselves. We pick up an instrument and imagine a symphony orchestra in a concert hall. This thinking infects our cultural understandings of Christianity as well: heaven is a collection of cloud-bound harpists, the Saints are wise paragons illustrated like military generals, and for we Catholics there is Mary Immaculate conceived without sin.

The Immaculate Heart of Mary (referencing Mary’s Immaculate conception i.e. conceived without sin) is really the final boss of absurdly perfect religious ideas. On the face of it even the well-versed Christian might ask: Why do we need a sinless mother when the son she bore was sinless? Does that not make her less relatable? Does that not make her less human in a certain way?

When I gushed about the Blessed Mother back in May I touched on this briefly. The monthly Catholic devotions circle around to familiar themes. This is intentional in a way: prayer often involves repetition and what better things to repeat than the inner truths of the faith? What I wrote back in May was that Mary’s perfection did not make her any less human, it made her MORE human. Sin pulls us away from complete human flourishing, not towards it.

But this monthly devotion isn’t about her immaculate conception, that comes in December. No, this is about Mary giving us the grace to be more human… and dare I say less sinful? More than that: Mary gives us the graces to be more. Maybe not Michael Phelps level graces, but graces that glow vibrantly in us, nonetheless. Yes, there will be shiny things in this article! But don’t be blinded by the light, the simplicity of this devotion is what will keep you coming back.

This feels like an old habit now, but it has served me well: let’s dive into history to start!

The Miraculous Medal

Paris in 1830. The July Revolution is unfolding. Yes, the revolution Victor Hugo was writing about in Les Misérables. This revolution replaced one monarch with another. Charles X wanted to be a more dictatorial, absolute monarch so a good old fashioned French revolution threw him out for a cousin, Louis Philippe who accepted a constitution. He would preside over a decline in French living standards, so he was himself thrown out eighteen years later in another revolt of the French people.

The same year, in the same city, something miraculous was happening. Catherine Laboure, a daughter of Charity (the female religious order to the Vincentians established two centuries earlier by the great French Saint Vincent De Paul) had just entered the convent. On July 18th she was beckoned into the chapel by what she described as a child’s voice. Once there, the Blessed Virgin Mary spoke to her saying: “God wishes to charge you with a mission. You will be contradicted, but do not fear; you will have the grace to do what is necessary. Tell your spiritual director all that passes within you. Times are evil in France and in the world.”

Four months later, the Blessed Mother actually appeared to Laboure during evening meditations. This time she displayed herself in an oval, the details of which are all laid out in the Miraculous medal itself. The most notable feature of the miraculous medal (see the thumbnail image of this post) is the words around the outside: “O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.”

Mary was adorned with gems, most of which glistening out radiant light. Catherine asked why some of the gems were not shining and the Blessed Mother responded: “Those are the graces for which people forget to ask.” More on this exhortation in a moment. Mary told Catherine to bring a description of the image she appeared within to her confessor who would make medallions for which graces would come to those who possessed them. This Catherine did.

After some time assessing the sincerity of Catherine’s visions, her confessor did bring the visions to the Archbishop anonymously, hoping to protect Catherine from backlash. The Archbishop approved the visions and medallions were made. The devotion spread rapidly and had a big impact on the tumultuous but soaring Catholicism of the nineteenth century. The devotion was influential in the 1854 proclamation of the Immaculate Heart of Mary by Pope Pius IX, the biggest “long time coming” proclamation in the history of the Catholic Church which we’ll talk more about in December.

For her part Catherine Laboure would spend the next forty years of her life caring for the elderly and infirm outside Paris to the point she would be recognized as the Patron Saint of Seniors when she was canonized a Saint in 1947. Except for the four years immediately preceding her death in 1876 as she fell ill, Laboure gave her life exclusively to service, not the attention her visions had gained.

Nowadays you are likely to encounter the miraculous medal, in numbers, in any explicitly Catholic store or shrine. French Catholics practically throw them at you I’ve discovered. Just going to a Catholic shrine or on a retreat here or there I have come into a dozen of them. I also went to a Vincentian college, Niagara University, which helped my odds I suppose. The image itself, and its reverse, are densely packed with symbolic, prayerful meaning. Few devotions pack so much into such a little package.

The bottom of the front side has Mary standing atop the year 1830 which is a plain reference to the year of St. Catherine Laboure’s visions. The first words she spoke to Catherine are written around the outer parameter here. Mary’s arms are outstretched, symbolizing recourse to her, and the shining rays of light shine out from her hands extending the graces she told Catherine about.

As with most Marian depictions, Mary is standing on a globe representing her queenship of heaven and earth. Upon that globe is the serpent she strikes with her heel in reference to Genesis 3:15. We Catholics consider her the mysterious new eve discreetly referenced in that verse who crushes the forces of evil and sin by way of her brave acceptance of Jesus Christ before anyone else.

Before going to the symbolism on the reverse side of the medal I want to touch on this ability of Mary to dispense graces. All of Catholic Marian dogma really comes back to this idea that Mary is a mediatrix of the grace of God, indeed the premier mediatrix of that grace. Yes, God’s grace shines upon all who seek his face, but Mary is the original co-mediatrix with Christ. She is the great guide to Jesus Christ and the primary conduit of the graces he so desperately wants to impart on us.

Worth the distinction here, particularly for my non-Catholic readers, Mary is a co-mediatrix with Christ, that is she helps dispense his grace (like a true mom) like she does in so many small, personal ways and in big ways with these Marian visitations we talk about. Mary is not co-redemptrix, that is she is not herself a redeemer of humanity, that is a title and role reserved entirely for Jesus Christ. This is a critical distinction and worth repeating when you find someone scandalized by Mary’s prominence in Catholic life. Pope Francis reaffirmed this co-mediatrix/co-redemptrix distinction as recently as 2020.

Onto the reverse side of the Miraculous Medal. Around the parameter is the twelve stars crowning Mary from Revelation 12:1. While Protestants take a more agnostic understanding of this passage, it is the belief of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches (and most non-Protestant churches for that matter) that this pregnant woman giving birth referenced is Mary. The twelve stars then become a loaded metaphor, a crown unique among all Saints, a sign of her queenship over the communion of Saints, all those who pursued Jesus in exemplary ways.

This is for the same deeply relational reasons I gushed about back in May, that Mary bravely chooses Jesus before any other human being; but also because the stars indicate a sacred continuity between Jews and Christians and of the character of God himself forever. In one sense, the stars are a symbol of eternity for the ancients, as far as they knew stars lasted forever. God is eternally with us and wants to extend his saving grace to us.

The number twelve is a reference to God’s original chosen people, the nation of Israel, and their twelve tribes. The twelve stars also represent the Twelve Apostles, the foundation of Christianity and the tangible origin of the Church itself. The Twelve Apostles reference with the stars is also bluntly literally when we consider Mary a constant feature of Jesus’ earthly ministry. Those original twelve would have known Mary’s holiness quite well personally.

The twelve stars meaning goes so much deeper than I can fit in this article. Suffice to say Mary’s queenship which they represent is an honor and a grace given to all humanity via her intercession for us. Mary continually pleads our case to God outside of time and space in the realm of eternity. In the ancient world the most powerful queen in a royal court was usually the king’s mother for various reasons. Mary’s Queenship would have made perfect sense in that period of history.

Central on the reverse side is the Marian Cross. This is a regular cross with the letter M beneath it, sometimes with a crossbar linking the two. The Marian Cross is meant to represent the Blessed Mother’s presence for her son all the way through the passion, especially the crucifixion. Mary and only two of Jesus’ followers were there throughout, the ultimate fruition of Mary’s devotion to Jesus which began when she accepted his conception at the Annunciation before he was born.

The two hearts beneath the Marian Cross are the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary. In June I went in depth on the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and I invite you to go back to that profound image of Jesus’ love for us in that article. The Immaculate Heart of Mary is shown with a sword piercing it. This sword represents Mary’s sorrows, namely the suffering she had to endure for her son.

Sidenote: the September devotion is the Seven Sorrows of Mary. That devotion dives deep into Mary’s experience of the salvific mission of her son. Moreover, the image itself is seven swords piercing her heart so we will explain this in much more detail next month.

I don’t need to explain why the death of a child is a traumatic suffering. However, when we consider all that Mary went through we see how profound her motherly devotion was: after all she knew the mission her son was on. She was told before he was even born. She went ahead with it all anyway and felt every joy and suffering along the way, nonetheless. Mary’s Immaculate Heart is what this month’s devotion is really all about.

Simplicity Immaculate

What are the graces “for which people forget to ask”? That is the big question left open when you first encounter this devotion. As far as I have been able to ascertain there are no specific graces frequently missed being referenced here. Rather this is an invitation to be brave like Mary was and ask for God’s grace. There is a simplicity to this worth noting. If you have a question, ask it. If you need help, request assistance. If you knock, the door will be opened for you. There is no magical thinking here: just an exhortation to be humble enough to ask for God’s help.

I could go on and on about how powerful that message would have been in St. Catherine Laboure’s moment in history in a France clutched by revolution for the second time in many people’s lifetime, “Times are evil in France and in the world” as the Blessed Mother said to Laboure, but I already went down the history hole once in this article. Still we might want to take on the comfort of that message: the ugliness of the times come and go. Divine grace always awaits us when we’re willing to accept it.

The kicker of the graces not asked for bit is the emphasis of a spiritual, almost psychologically heavy, chasm we feel between God and ourselves; the same chasm that often stops us from contemplating any personal ascent towards God or… dare I say perfection, Christian perfection. We don’t consider that magnitude of holiness something we could ever do so we simply don’t try or worse, perpetuate the idea its all an inaccessible religious standard of a bygone era.

I think I still love swimming. They normally capture my attention the most at every summer Olympics. Michael Phelps has now retired from competition. I got all excited to see him in the commentator’s booth for the U.S. Olympic Trials this go around. He isn’t defensive about his records. Michael Phelps is actually in regular contact with some of the most promising American swimmers in the pool these days.

Principal among those is one Katie Ledecky who is a handful of medals away from becoming the most decorated female Olympian of all time, an honor not far off from Phelps’ own title as the most decorated Olympian of all time. The fun thing here is that Ledecky was a fan of Phelps since she was a child. She got his autograph when he was hardly twenty-one years old, in the early phases of stunning the swimming world. Ledecky was only nine years old at that time. That 2006 autograph was before those legendary Beijing Olympics that stick in my memory.

Ledecky took that inspiration and became the greatest female swimmer ever. She did not consider Phelps an unattainable standard of perfection hindering her own striving for swimming excellence. That may sound like a ridiculous proposition: why would inspiration, a role model, discourage her from swimming? Bingo.

Now you see how grace works. Graces are God’s way of working with us if we only choose to cooperate. To put them off is in some ways taking an utterly positive thing and letting it rot on the vine. Grace is simple, beautifully simple.

No, I am not comparing Michael Phelps to God or Katie Ledecky to the Blessed Mother. The point here is that we have to overcome this existential awkwardness for lack of a better term. Christian perfection is possible with grace. We have to overcome a very human but nonetheless unhelpful compulsion that God’s callings for us are not doable or even conceivable at that. Immaculate is not a synonym for unattainable. Mary’s Immaculate Heart is our home base for the kind of striving that helps us approach Christian perfection if we only choose to cooperate with God.

It is really that simple. It is immaculate simplicity. Effort the approach to divine grace and you are likely to come away with something shiny. Your mind might really get blown when you discover the grace of God in a talent you possess just waiting to be activated by the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

Thanks for reading! My book “How to catch feelings for Jesus” is available online. Admittedly it is not this focused on the Blessed Mother, but I definitely hit on the themes of the devotion in other facets. Share this article! I am in the swing of writing on a monthly basis now and would love to hear your input. Did you really read more than 2800 words to not have something to say about it?

[andrewuttaro]

JD Vance Catholicism

On July 15th, 2024, Donald Trump selected JD Vance as his running mate: potentially the next Vice President of the United States for a President who is the second oldest candidate to run for that office behind only the current occupant of said office, the rival candidate, Joe Biden. This man who I understand a little too well religiously, only nine years my senior, could be a heartbeat away from the most powerful office on the planet. I believe he embodies a very particular moment in the religious history of this country and, more specifically, a tenuous moment for those who share his religious creed: Catholics.

Religion in America

The United States of America has always been a religious frontier. Just as the core premises of liberty and equality envisioned in this nation’s founding have been struggled and fought for over the course of her history, so too has religious diversity been a dream more than a reality for most of our national antiquity. Just as suffrage for all America’s peoples was a slow process that required a Civil War and a dozen civil rights movements still ongoing, so too has true religious toleration often eluded American life.

Every colony in Pre-Revolution America had a favored Christian denomination written into their charter. In the Early Republic nativism toward immigrants from non-British countries was thinly veiled phobia for those who were not children of the Anglican communion or the acceptable branches of Presbyterianism. Yes, most of the founding fathers were deists, believers in a vaguely Christian clockmaker God that modern American Christians would find foreign strange, but most of those same founders were members of a mainline Christian denominations, nonetheless.

For we Catholics, assimilating into this country was near impossible in the early republic.

Anti-Catholic riots were so common in pre-Civil War America that you can still go and see the bullet marks in the Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City.  In 1834, an anti-Catholic mob set fire to an Ursaline convent in Massachusetts. The infamous Klu Klux Klan had Catholics on their hit list alongside blacks and jews; all were the strange foreigner come to steal something from good old WASP (white Anglo-Saxon protestant) America.

After the Civil War this hate was welled up again as Irish and Italian immigrants came to the US in large numbers. Al Smith, the first Catholic to win a major party nomination for President in 1928, lost the race largely because of cartoonishly stupid anti-Catholic rhetoric. One of these attacks claimed he was taking orders directly from the Pope via New York City’s Holland Tunnel which he had made happen as governor of New York.

After World War Two anti-Catholic animus began a slow decline. By the time John F. Kennedy became the second catholic to win a major party nomination in 1960 the Catholic question was still a live enough issue that he felt the need to famously declare: “I am not the Catholic candidate for President; I am the Democratic party’s candidate for President who happens also to be Catholic.” That speech feels completely out of place to us nowadays. He declared religion was of no consideration in his decision making. He proceeded to win the Presidency.

The Kennedy standard on religion seems like basic separation of church and state to us today but it was revelatory for his generation of politicians. How does one separate their conscience from their religious convictions? Neither Kennedy nor his contemporaries would ever have the time or need to formulate an answer. Catholics specifically seemed to use the Kennedy Doctrine to boost their cultural normalization in the ensuing decades.

In 1984, President Ronald Reagan did something that would have been unthinkable just a few decades earlier: he established formal diplomatic relations with the Vatican City, the heart of the Catholic world. By that point it was hardly controversial, on either side of the political aisle. Pope John Paul II was seen as an ally in the Cold War struggle against the great evil of atheistic communism to the right wing. They were also allies in those early days of the fight against abortion rights. Catholics were largely welcome in left wing politics as the peacemaking stream of hippie Catholics like Dorothy Day. The protest movement against nuclear proliferation often featured Catholic public figures, many times clerics themselves openly protesting nuclear arms!

When John Kerry became the third Catholic nominated to a major party’s ticket for President in 2004 his Catholicism was largely an afterthought. By the time Joe Biden was elected President in 2020, only the second Catholic president ever, most of the religious reaction came from clerics of his own faith who now saw the endgame of the Kennedy Doctrine as clear as day: appeals to conscience by authorities of the faith like bishops were largely powerless.

Here was a Catholic President who supports the legal right to abortion, something implausible in Kennedy’s time. American Bishops wondered if they had any sway at all anymore with powerful laypeople who claimed their faith. In that now legendary Kennedy speech on religion the late President also said: “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute.” Sixty years on from that speech the absolute separation was complete among Catholics and an inflection point was at hand for the faithful on both sides of the aisle.

JD Vance

JD Vance was only 32 years old when he became something of a public figure. In the contentious political year that was 2016 he had promoted his book, “Hillbilly Elegy”, as a true ode to the plight of rural America, specifically Appalachia. The book was popular enough to later be made into a movie and Vance was briefly an expert on America’s proverbial forgotten man. So much so in fact was Vance’s supposed knowledge of rural America that many political commentators, surprised by the election of Trump that year, looked to Vance for explanation.

At this point Vance was no Trump supporter, calling him “noxious” and a superlative I only hear in left-wing circles these days: “America’s Hitler”. Things were about to change dramatically: in the United States and in JD Vance.

In August 2019, Vance converted to Catholicism. Vance was hardly 35 at this point and had previously stated he was not an active participant in any Christian denomination after being raised in a conservative, evangelical branch of the faith. For any millennial who identifies with a religious community as an adult, this story will sound familiar. He was searching for something and found it, saying in an article the same year in the prolific Christian journal First Things: “The core Christian insight into politics is that life is inherently dignified and valuable…” Vance took the name Augustine of Hippo for his confirmation name, saying the great fourth century saint gave him “…a way to understand Christian faith in a strongly intellectual way.”

That second quote he said in a special interview with his good friend writing for the American Conservative, a former Catholic who I can only describe as reprehensible: Rod Dreher. Be careful with the googling about this guy. Dreher is a special kind of extremist. It takes a special kind of person to find Catholicism too tolerant, convert to Orthodoxy (no offense meant to my orthodox brothers and sisters), divorce his wife, leave his kids behind, and move to Hungary to be closer to a beloved authoritarian Viktor Orban. Dreher is the sort of extremist that believes there are justifiable kinds of sexual assault. I have not scratched the surface of Dreher’s perversity with whom Vance maintains a friendship.

But don’t let me get into the editorializing just yet. Back to the current Republican Vice-Presidential nominee. JD Vance’s millennial Catholicism is not out of the ordinary. Increasingly more young people who find their way into the faith as converts or reverts these days cite an intellectual conversion stemming from the discovery of the works of a saint like Augustine or Thomas Aquinas. The type is so familiar to me that I can imagine what books are on his shelf. It is a type I have struggled to see eye to eye with while feeling so much sympathy for the basic religious thirst apparent there.

These folks often have a Dreher type they legitimize by holding them in their lives at an arm’s length. Most of these folks I encounter hold Donald Trump as this person they are willing to excuse.

Indeed the Ohio native was not done converting to a new way of thinking after becoming Catholic. He soon proclaimed his 2016 positions on Trump had been completely wrong. JD Vance became an outspoken supporter of Trump in the chaotic election cycle of 2020. Ejected from power thereafter, Vance did not desert Donald Trump. Vance saw a political career in his own future. Trump rewarded the new convert to his cause and endorsed him in a run for US Senate in 2022. Vance won and today is not through his first full term in the U.S. Senate.

Now he might be the next Vice President of the United States and all that comes with that.

JD Vance has a photo with just about every Catholic celebrity an American millennial Catholic might recognize. Smiling next to Scott Hahn on a county fairground somewhere is a red meat photo for a certain type of Catholic; a certain type of Catholic who I will bet my bottom dollar likes Donald Trump and doesn’t like Pope Francis. This all hits a little too close to home for we coreligionists of Vance’s who struggle to see the value in an artful discussion of theology devoid of the mercy the understands the human experience.

JD Vance, at least by the bedfellows he’s made, practices a Catholicism that is increasingly visible in American life for better or for worse. JD Vance’s Catholicism salivates at the destruction of the Kennedy Doctrine. As a generation of hippie Catholics begins to disappear and Millennial Catholics are increasingly politically unwelcome in an American left-wing that requires the Kennedy Doctrine as a ticket for entry, JD Vance Catholicism is here to stay.  

The end of the Kennedy Doctrine and a brutal new calculus

Let me be very clear in saying that I believe the separation of church and state is a critically important component of American democracy. Even the Catholic Church advocated for “freedom of conscience” in that same vein at the Second Vatican Council. The Kennedy Doctrine as I put it in this article is a step beyond. Separation of church and state in this country is primarily a reference to the Establishment Clause of the Constitution where the Bill of Rights states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” That clause was considered religion’s protection from government, not the other way around, for the founding fathers and most legal scholars in the first century and a half of our national history.

Third President Thomas Jefferson coined the term we often use today, “separation of church and state”, in a letter to a friend. Jefferson had fought for the disestablishment of the Anglican Church as the established Church of the colony of Virginia before the revolution. This is the earliest we see something resembling our modern conception of the idea. That said, President Jefferson mixed church and state by our standards sending ministers to try to convert native Americans. Clearly the concept was yet to be fully envisaged.

The contemporary idea we have really does not emerge until after World War Two in a spate of cases the Courts used to define the concept including Emerson v. Board of Education (1947) and Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971).

The latter case, Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971) established three conditions for laws dealing with religion to be constitutional: 1, there had to be a secular, legislative purpose, 2, the law’s principal effects must not be to advance or inhibit religion, and 3, the law must not foster an excessive entanglement between government and religion. These together became known as the Lemon test (I am not joking, that is the term) and in the 1997 case Agostini v. Felton the latter two principles were combined into one. By 2005 there also arose the legal principle that any perception of favoritism towards one religion in government must be avoided when an Alabama courthouse was compelled to remove their Ten Commandments monument. This legal background will become important in a moment.

Kennedy however was talking about his own conscience more than any formal policy. Kennedy’s absolute separation tears the conscience from the accountability that comes from subscribing to an organized moral system overseen by a formal religious body. Everyone, including our elected officials, makes decisions out of a set of values they have. It is not against the Establishment Clause of the constitution to acknowledge trying to remove all religious values from that personal calculus is a fool’s errand.

In Kennedy’s day America was such an overtly religious, and frankly more morally clairvoyant nation that such a lack of accountability was inconceivable. On social structures alone, nobody would have become less accountable in their communities because of a lack of adherence to their conscience via some kind of religious authority. There were hypocritical religious folks and politicians of course, but the absolute separation Kennedy spoke of did not threaten America’s moral center of gravity.

Sixty years of that moral separation has diluted most Americans understanding of what the separation of church and state is, in both rhetorical directions. Contemporary right wingers will say America was founded as a nation with explicitly Christian ideals and should therefore be governed as such, an idea JD Vance shares. This supposition is historically dubious but also legally against all those court precedents we just went over. What is the endgame with that anyway? A restoration of a cultural moment many decades gone? That sounds well outside the realm of government’s job.

Contemporary left wingers will say America is about total liberty and that means freedom from any encounter with religious values whilst interacting with the government. This supposition is just as historically dubious and takes the aforementioned legal precedents to an end that seems unenforceable. Which moral values are not religious? At what point does policing that become an exclusionary effort all its own?

Both these predominate views of religion in American political life are the result of the Kennedy doctrine in my estimation. Moreover, they have led us here to an impasse.

While left wingers are rarely interested in fighting over religion in this country, the same is not true for right wingers, namely JD Vance. Even the devoutly religious among left wingers understand that strength in diversity requires a respectful avoidance of imposing religious beliefs on one another. That respectful avoidance is fading on the right wing every year in this country and JD Vance is just the Catholic embodiment of it.

JD Vance Catholicism forces us into a militant stance that looks very unlike the Gospel of Jesus Christ. That is not to mention this kind of Catholicism is too American in that it rejects all authority it has no recourse to disagree with, namely the Pope. JD Vance Catholicism believes it is more Catholic than the Pope. I shutter to learn Vance’s thoughts on Pope Francis.

Without the Kennedy Doctrine, thrown out for its impracticality, what seems to be replacing it is an authoritarian approach to Catholicism in political life: follow this Americanized JD Vance version of the faith or be exiled from the major parties. For more on that look up the fresh debates about whether pro-choice Catholic politicians like Joe Biden should be denied communion from 2020, the ugliest expression of an idea called Eucharistic coherence as we Catholics say.

Shivers go down my spine at the idea of a second Trump Presidency without Vance on the ticket. The supremacy of JD Vance Catholicism in such a position of power adds a new, uniquely personal edge to that fear.

This brutal new calculus might not be our future. There is an inverse of JD Vance on the other side of the political aisle in an increasingly diverse and young group of Catholics in political life, the most notable of which being U.S. House Representative from New York Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (widely known simply as AOC). AOC says her Catholicism has an impact on her moral decision making, specifically in reference to criminal justice reform in a 2018 interview with Catholic newspaper America.  

As much as I would love to end on that optimism I must admit the comparable is paper thin. JD Vance might be the Vice President of the United States this time next year while AOC has openly mused about retiring from politics, hated as a straw man by the right wing and patronized by her own party. The state of religion, just like the state of politics at large in America today, is in a moment of massive change. Where we end up is still very unclear.

That is religion though, right? It’s all about hope. Perhaps hope might be a real feature of politics in this nation as well.

[andrewuttaro]

The Code of Jesus' Most Precious Blood

You would be hard pressed to find someone who calls themselves Christian who does not have some grasp of salvation. The central focus of all Christianity is Jesus Christ and the saving work of the paschal mystery: His suffering, death on the cross, and resurrection on Easter Sunday. That Paschal Mystery has a purpose, namely, all of humanity’s salvation. This is not a salvation just on the grand scale, but personally to every individual human being willing to open their heart to Jesus.

Now in my third month of this review of the monthly Catholic devotions, I find myself engaging with them in the framework of THE WORLD TODAY; or at least how we might look at the world around us with a fresh set of eyes by way of devotion to Jesus Christ in these various ways. At the end of the day I truly believe God calls us out into the complicated world, not into a safe enclave walled off from unbelievers.

July’s devotion is the Precious Blood of Jesus Christ. The Precious Blood of Jesus is invoked as a reflection on the saving power of Jesus’ sacrifice. His mission was our salvation, and he spilled his blood, the blood of God made flesh, for that great divine mission. How much God must love us if he is willing to shed his own, divine blood for us?

There might be a fly in the ointment there. I should say, a philosophical question implied by the spilling of divine blood that both the cynic and devotee may find themselves struggling with: why? If God is all powerful why does he need suffering and sacrifice to rectify the relationship between God and humanity split asunder by humanity’s rebellion?

The short answer is twofold: we humans wouldn’t have it any other way, we wouldn’t believe God was truly interested in healing us of the sins that separate us from him and each other if he did not pour himself out as a sacrifice. Also, God wants to be in a relationship with us, not our genie in a bottle or Santa Claus employing magical acts to change reality without actually relating to us in a visceral way first.

Without getting too deep in the vast problem of evil there, the Precious Blood of Jesus can be thought of us as a devotion to the sanctity of life, a code of rhetorical engagement with one another demanding we recognize God’s love in each other. God goes all out to save us. God does not want us to look flippantly upon human suffering and death as if we have no worth. Moreover, if divine blood which has worth greater than any other is to be spilled for even the most wretched sinner, well then indeed our lives mean a great deal.

We are not dust in the wind, not to God. We are treasures dearly loved. Creations of God’s own image, worthy of sacrifice like all worthwhile relationships demand sacrifice. And here is the kicker: all of us, even the ones we don’t like for various social reasons, have this divine human dignity, this innate worth. The code explicit in Jesus’ Precious blood is that no blood ought to be spilled by his beloved children because that was his job.

There are some significant ramifications to unpack there.

Jesus spilled his blood at the hands of every power of his time, political and religious. He was delivered to the Roman authorities by a rancorous, divided Sanhedrin. Rome authorized the execution that implicated all humanity’s sin. Jesus’ band of followers deserted him except for two who escorted his mother along the way of his torturous final hours. Power trampled the all-powerful God who humbled himself to powerlessness for our sake, for the sake of reminding us of our dignity, for the sake of saving us from ourselves.

Power, the root of humanity’s first rebellion, the driving principle beneath every sin, crucified Jesus. In a way, Jesus rescues us by submitting himself to the wrath of Original Sin itself. Naked love of power is counter to what Jesus was all about, counter to the salvific will explicit in Jesus’ precious blood. Only the precious blood of Jesus saves, nothing resembling the pursuit of power. Power for power’s sake is against the code. What am I getting at here?

Before I can answer that I have to tell a story. To discuss the precious blood of Jesus and what it means in the context of our time and place in history we have to know the devotion has always been political to some degree. Forgive me, I won’t be discussing the Divine Mercy Chaplet in this article though I recommend you check that out if you are looking for a good prayer application for all this.

The Pope on the run

In 1848, political revolution was sweeping across Europe. The revolutionary fervor saw the French monarchy deposed again, Poland, Austria and Hungary achieved constitutional reforms, upheaval in the German states which led to some menial reforms, and a distinct anti-monarchical fervor in countries yet to be unified into what we would recognize today. In Italy this meant the First Italian War of Independence.

In February the Minister of Justice for the Papal States, Pelligrino Rossi, was assassinated and a triumvirate of three revolutionaries installed themselves as the new government of Central Italy, the Roman Republic or for clarity’s sake: the Roman Commune. Pope Pius IX fled Rome as a result (to my Italian ancestors’ hometown, Gaeta, in what was then the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies) and spent a little more than four months in exile. While there the Superior General of an Order of Priests called the Fathers of the Most Precious Blood implored the Pope to make his congregation’s devotion to Christ’s blood a universal devotion of the whole Church if he was restored to the Eternal City.

When a French siege succeeded in dislodging the Roman Commune and he returned to Rome in July, Pius IX did just as his exile companion had asked and made the Most Precious Blood of Jesus a Feast Day which would later evolve into the July devotion I am writing this article about. Notice the condition there for Pius IX was returning to power in the Papal States.

This is not meant to be Catholic triumphalism. I’m not saying everything the revolutionaries did was wrong, most of their reforms were rather mild by modern standards actually. They wrote the first constitution in the world to make Capital Punishment illegal and legislated universal freedom of religion a full century before the Catholic Church itself would affirm that right. These revolutionaries were generally trying to modernize a political status quo in Europe that had refused to change after the tumult of the Napoleonic Wars.

Nonetheless Pope Pius IX balked at their modernization efforts, particularly after his exile. While his election had encouraged many revolutionaries, the exile would make the Pope their enemy for the remainder of his long reign. The winds of political progress were not moving the Vatican as long as Pius IX was in charge and I think honest historians, even those on the payroll of the Vatican, would tell you that was not for the better.

Pope Pius IX had a nickname in Italian that evolved after the exile that we might find rather humorous nowadays: Pio No No, literally Pope No-No. Politically speaking he was an unmoving rock in the worse way. Religiously he vilified this amorphous concept of modernism that became shorthand for any modern thing he could spin as an enemy of the faith. To this day the least self-aware traditionalists among us Catholics still accuse each other of whatever they determine is modernism this week.

I think it is fair to consider Pope Pius IX the stereotypical grouchy, backward-looking Pope you might call to mind when imagining the papacy, at least the most contemporary example. That says something when you discover his predecessor, Pope Gregory XVI supposedly thought trains and gas streetlamps were sinful (though that was probably a mean-spirited piece of speculation).

I am not dragging Popes for giggles here. If we choose to think of Pope No-No as a guy acting sincerely in good faith then this becomes more than just a religious cudgel against modernizing political forces. We might even see the relevance of the Most Precious Blood of Jesus devotion for a Pope on the run.

Though Pius IX largely stood against reform for the remaining thirty years of his papacy you can see the most subtle, quietest spiritual surrender in universalizing this devotion. Jesus affirmed our dignity with his blood and that is a powerful code against the often-violent tendencies of reformers in the nineteenth century. Two of Pius IX’s recent successors had been led to their fate by conquering revolutionaries. One of them was nicknamed “the Last Pope” because the ancient Catholic power center seemed to be getting subverted by rising tides of change.

If Pius IX had a Christian bone in his body he must have empathized with those on the receiving end of the tide of change in those days. The message was to choose precious human life over the pursuit of evermore political power: allow the human dignity Jesus affirmed from the cross inform your demands for a better world. Pius IX knew the heart of the revolutionary fervor had good intentions; he had been the cause of some excitement at his election for these same revolutionaries after all.  

You could also see how the devotion could have been leveraged as a panacea against all reform. No matter how you slice it, this devotion was political from the day it reached the horizon of the whole Church. But that’s okay because the politics of the thing is the point. With religion and politics, the most transformative stuff is often found in the tense dance of countervailing truths. Lust for power never made religion or politics better.

Good politics affirms human dignity and even engages the prophetic voice of religious faith a la Martin Luther King Jr when Jesus’ Gospel message lifts up the poor and outcast. Good religion makes politics more inclusive, and peace oriented when the religious people in that equation are not seduced by the desire for power. Religion and politics harmonize beautifully without trampling anyone if you’re doing them right.

Yeah, I don’t see much of that in today’s America either.

The United States of America in an election year

My brother, his fiancé, my wife, and I are going on a little weekend trip to Washington DC later this month. I haven’t been since my 8th grade year and my brother is a teacher. All involved thought it would be a fun adventure while we are all relatively available in the summer. We’re nerds and Washington DC is a city of nerds when you strip back all the clout chasing within the Greek revival architecture.

You can’t plan a trip to DC without thinking of the calendar. We avoided holidays and checked what conventions might be in town. It is not lost on us that this trip happens in an election year at one of the most contentious political moments in decades for the nation.

Setting aside discussion of the election itself, the temperature in Washington these days is hot year-round. In a political system dominated by two major parties in a winner-take-all electoral setup for an extremely powerful executive, there was historically a sense of needing to balance the scales by those who make a living in the nation’s capital. That is, there was always an inclination to turn down the political heat when the highs were starting to overcook the pie and damage the sacred good everyone was there for (at least theoretically): the republic which preserved the peace and rights of all.

In this country we were generally able to avoid large scale political violence because we understood there was a need to talk to each other in good faith, that is without employing bombastic lies and or talking past each other. We always understood that even if we disagreed we had to talk to each other constructively and accomplish mutually beneficial compromises to keep this awesome thing we built together.

To the degree that we are in the midst of an election that will decide on the future of American democracy itself it is all wrapped up in that. What is more important to us: our political teams as if politics is just another club sport with associated fanfare or the republic which has at its core a dignifying mission even if we didn’t always live up to it? I hope enough of us still believe there is something fundamentally good at the core of our nation without it becoming too much an article of faith.

To be clear here I do think there is a right and wrong here: a correct candidate to vote for and a correct baseline political vision for a country that has always been strong for its diversity, both religious and otherwise. Alas, this is not a political manifesto. I am not sure that would be helpful. There is however a manifesto to discuss here

Once again if divine blood was spilled for even the most wretched sinner then we must not push our political opponents into the category of mortal enemy without the dignity God imbues. Yes, even the reprehensible bigot you have in mind opposing your viewpoint is loved dearly by God. I am not asking you to love them, that’s Jesus’ highest calling we all struggle with, but I am asking you dignify them as God dignifies them with his most precious blood. That’s hard nowadays because we don’t understand the old code.

To turn up the heat the way this and the last two presidential elections have in the United States you have to cross a series of lines. If you stick with me here this might read as a recap of the last 8-9 years of American politics if I am diagnosing this right.

The first of these lines is just basic cynicism: all politicians lie and break promises. Sure, that is broadly right but not a productive way to approach politics if you really want good results for yourself or anyone else. Remember: I am not writing about the cynicism masquerading as realism you might be accustomed to. Most Americans long ago accepted the reality of dishonest politicians. The problem is we took it further.

The second line is prioritizing yourself. If you don’t think about anyone else’s plight when participating in this amazing blessing we call voting you’re doing it wrong. Sure, everyone votes in some kind of self-interested way. But if you have no empathy mixed in there anywhere then you’ll be worse for it too. Less holy I might add too. This kind of empathy is treated like the blissful ignorance of children in the politics of 2024 America. It’s a real shame. That kind of cynical power delivered Jesus over to Rome, the power that had the ultimate earthly authority there: execution.

The third line is a lack of basic stoicism. If every defeat on your agenda is a personal injury then you will be more combative each time you face the possibility of failure. The problem with that is that success in any venture generally requires a lot of failure first. Even the pursuit of Christian holiness demands some perseverance. The success of a multi-ethnic, large scale representative democracy? Oh that requires religious levels of perseverance. That gets sapped away when you worship at the altar of your political imperatives, an idol worshipped by exerting power for it. Since 2016 I have watched the idea of “country over party” become a punchline.

Finally the last line crossed into the dissipation of our political peace is dehumanization. This one should be easy to spot but if you have already crossed the last three lines then you might be blind to it when it finally happens. The younger major presidential candidate this cycle has taken to calling immigrants vermin in a line that echoes some of history’s greatest evil doing political leaders. Too many people I know, deeply religious people, are so desensitized to this level of dehumanization that it only turns the heat up more for them instead of prompting a sobering reflection on how we got here.

The precious blood of Jesus gives us that sobering perspective. America needs it this year.

After dehumanization all that remains is for the heated rivals to decide the peaceful processes are no longer useful. That’s when we decide these sacred political teams of ours are our salvation. This is where we profane the most precious blood of Jesus. Nobody talks you down when political violence becomes a live option. No, at that point the salvific work of Jesus’ precious blood is a quaint ornament of your life, not anything with any relevance to your soul now addicted to power.  

Political violence is political failure

Life is beautiful even when it is ugly. Life is beautiful even if we disagree with its worldview. Life is beautiful even when it is not in perfect harmony. Too many people in America today have decided that their extra-political worldview, as in cultural preferences and self-conception, are more important than a political order that keeps the peace and magnifies the dignity of human life (at least in the aspirational sense). Too many people have decided diversity and inclusion is a prequel to their own annihilation. Too many people have decided the outsider is a reprehensible opponent of all that is good.

This is the same backdrop that Jesus found himself arrested in front of.

In Political Science there is this concept called “monopoly on violence”. It is the idea that one of the hallmarks of a government truly having political authority within a territory is that government’s ability to do violence against those who live there. Yes, taxes are a big indicator of government sovereignty as well, but violence often comes first unfortunately. Recognizing a king is simply a form of homage that comes last in the civilization formation checklist, but I get the feeling we’ll be coming back around to that point.

Most political scientists agree monopoly on violence is actually a good thing: we don’t want anyone with a weapon and the will to be allowed to harm others (hold your comments on gun control). If only the government via the enforcement of just laws can commit violence then hopefully that establishes lasting peace and minimizes overall violence (hold your comments on policing). Here in the United States and the greater free world today we also insist those laws must be passed as the will of the people in a representative democracy (hold your conspiracy theories on the 2020 election).

Consider Jesus again: he is the victim of the political authority of his time and place. A political failure precipitated political violence against God incarnate. The crucifixion is about all humanity’s sins, but few were more in the forefront of that moment as it was experienced than the lust for political power. That seems very relevant in the United States of 2024.

We figuratively crucify everyone except ourselves and expect to live in a more perfect union. This predates elections where we always tell ourselves to pick the lesser of two evils. We want political warriors and are surprised when we find ourselves on the precipice of political war.

Political science gives us another concept a bit more uplifting than the monopoly on violence: the social contract. It has long been understood in that field that political organizations are held together by a shared willingness to play by the same rules: the social contract. Think of it as a collection actual rules and more informal social norms that provide boundaries and peaceful space for forming constructive understandings. In a big nation like ours, diverse in every way, those rules, formal and not, have to do some heavy lifting, but as long as we’re all patient with those we won’t break the social contract. What really leads to political violence is the abandonment of the social contract.

Luckily I don’t think our politics have failed to the point of the collapse of the social contract but without a hint of exaggeration I really must admit it feels like that’s where we’re going. I think its safe to say the social contract that saw our nation become the beacon of hope for refugees and immigrants, the model of a modern democracy, and the friend of international cooperation everywhere is something the code of Jesus’ Precious blood endorses. I don’t think Jesus would have to endorse a political party to say that.

Political violence is always a political failure. Jesus’ blood testifies to that and a whole lot more. Contemplate the meaning of that blood the next time you are entranced by a politician pledging to be your retribution or your savior against the forces of oppression. And this is where all of this devotion, the Pope on the run, and this country in an election year intersect: no political end will save us. The Precious Blood of Jesus Christ saves us, and the code implied there is that we do not lend worshipful obedience to anything short of salvation; particularly not, in this difficult political moment in the US, a political agenda.

What we worship

It is the Catholic understanding that the heart of true religion is worship. This is a statement of priority if nothing else. Moral theology, education in the faith, biblical knowledge, those are essentials of our faith as well; but who and how we are worshiping is the most essential part of practicing the faith. That is Jesus Christ and rightly worshiping him is the core of the whole thing.

To our modern minds, particularly with American sensibilities, this can feel degrading. We are independent people! We blaze our own trail! We make our own lives! To prioritize religious worship always forces us to be interdependent, humble, and discerning in our usage of our time and energy. So much of how religion works in the United States of America is explained by this tense dynamic between a national independent spirit and worship. You see, the former often interferes in the latter.

Instead of going on a long tangent about how our preferred religious practices reflect our cultural proclivities more than maybe anything else I will jump straight to the point: we all will worship something in life. We may not call it worship but we will all subconsciously and consciously prioritize what we care about the most in life to the point of raising it up as something sacred. What does that mean in the real world?

Most of the most pious people in my life, at least those relatively close in age to me, are not religious. That is to say they are very adamant about a few core beliefs they have and do not tolerate dissent well. Those beliefs just aren’t of a religious nature. These people, I know too many to count on all my fingers and toes, are worshipping something. To be fair, this is a very human fault and I think we all battle idols in our lives, but this phenomenon is something that crosses all social barriers in this country. Many of us act as if our political team just gets a few more wins than the whole world will be a demonstrably better place. Many of us worship a political ideology or the latent vibes of one.

When considering the devotion to the Precious Blood of Jesus we ought to wash away these lesser foci of our worship. They are not God. They will not save you like the blood of Jesus Christ will. Honestly, I think this clear-eyed, humbling approach to our own belief systems, whether or not you believe in Jesus Christ, might do an awful lot of good at this moment in America.

Don’t forget the code

Sure, Pope Pius IX was a real piece of work and almost certainly had more self-interested motives in mind for universalizing this devotion, but its only got more relevant where politics has become a sacred worship. If you think I am being hyperbolic I would invite you to turn your sight to so many people’s willingness to endorse political violence to protect their chosen political/cultural idol clothed in glorious vibes.

Yes, there is a right and a wrong choice in this Presidential election and it just requires a little bit of reason and good faith dialogue to see it. If we can’t talk constructively anymore and plunge headlong into political violence then we have utterly lost both our republic and the right grasp of our religion. We will have lost the code.

The Precious Blood of Jesus Christ demands we think of our opponent’s dignity and realize there is no salvation to be found in beating them in political contests or worse, a political conflict. Worship what saves, everything else is a secondary concern at best or an idol at worst. Just like with this political moment in America: I truly believe we are all capable of better.

And if you find yourself wondering where the boundaries of decency and consensus are with an opponent so abhorrent to your values, I invite you to look to the only crown I recognize: the crown of thorns on Jesus’ head extracting his precious blood. The code of that precious love is self-gift and patience over all lust for power and status. If times are going to get tough these next few months before, during, and after another election, don’t forget the code.

Thanks for reading! My book “How to catch feelings for Jesus” is available online. Admittedly it is not this political throughout, but I definitely hit on the themes of the devotion in other facets. Share this article! I am in the swing of writing on a monthly basis now and would love to hear your input. Did you really read more than 3500 words to not have something to say about it?