Ratzinger-Newman on the Living Church

“His (Ratzinger’s) initial attraction to Newman may have been to Newman’s theological writing, but his strongest attachment to him is surely to the man of faith, a man who could say of himself: ‘I understood… that the exterior world, physical and historical, was but the manifestation to our senses of realities greater than itself. Nature was a parable. Scripture was an allegory, pagan literature, philosophy and mythology, properly understood, were but a preparation for the Gospel. The Greek poets and sages were, in a sense, prophets.’”

Hear Newman again on the Church-of-all-times:

“Now, the phenomenon, admitted on all hands, is this: that great portion of what is generally received as Christian truth is in its rudiments or in its separate parts to be found in heathen philosophies and religions. For instance, the doctrine of a Trinity is found both in the East and in the West; so is the ceremony of washing; so is the rite of sacrifice. The doctrine of the Divine Word is Platonic; the doctrine of the Incarnation is Indian; of a divine kingdom is Judaic; of Angels and demons is Magian; the connection of sin with the body is Gnostic; celibacy is known to Bonze and Talapoin; a sacerdotal order is Egyptian; the idea of a new birth is Chinese and Eleusinian; belief in sacramental virtue is Pythagorean; and honors to the dead are a polytheism. Such is the general nature of the fact before us; Mr. Milman argues from it – ‘These things are in heathenism, therefore they are not Christian:” we, on the contrary, prefer to say, “These things are in Christianity, therefore they are not heathen.” That is, we prefer to say, and we think that Scripture bears us out in saying, that from the beginning the Moral Governor of the world has scattered the seeds of truth [spermatikoi] (my underline and parenthesis) far and wide over its extent; That these have variously taken root, and grown up as in the wilderness, wild plants indeed but living; and hence that, as the inferior animals have tokens of an immaterial principle in them, yet have not souls, so the philosophies and religions of men have their life in certain true ideas, though they are not directly divine. What man is amid the brute creation, such is the Church among the schools of the world; and as Adam gave names to the animals about him, so has the Church from the first looked round upon the earth, noting and visiting the doctrines she found there. She began in Chaldea, and then sojourned among the Canaanites, and went down into Egypt, and thence passed into Arabia, till she rested in her own land. Next she encountered the merchants of Tyre, and the wisdom of the East county, and the luxury of Sheba. Then she was carried away to Babylon, and wandered to the schools of Greece. And wherever she went, in trouble or in triumph, still she was a living spirit, the mind and voice of the Most High; “sitting in midst of the doctors, both hearing them and asking them questions;” claiming to herself what they said rightly, correcting their errors, supplying their defects, completing their beginnings, expanding their surmises, and thus gradually by means of them enlarging the range and refining the sense of her own teaching. So far then from her creed being of doubtful credit because it resembles foreign theologies, we even hold that one special way in which Providence has imparted divine knowledge to us has been by enabling her to draw and collect it together out of the world, and, in this sense, as in others, to “such the mild of the Gentiles and to such the breast of kings.”

How far in fact this process has gone is a question of history; and we believe it has before now been grossly exaggerated and misrepresented by those who, like Mr. Milman, have thought that it existence told against Catholic doctrine; but so little antecedent difficulty have we in the matter, that we could readily grant, unless it were a question of fact not of theory, that Balaam was an Eastern Mahol, or Moses was a scholar of the Egyptian hierophants. We are not distressed to be told that the doctrine of the angelic host came nor that the vision of a Mediator is in Philo, if in very deed he died for us on Calvary. Nor are we afraid to allow, that, even after his coming, the Church has been a treasure-house, giving forth things old and new, casting the gold of fresh tributaries into her refiner’s fire, or stamping upon her own, as time required it, a a deeper impress of her Master’s image.

The distinction between these two theories is broad and obvious. The advocates of the one imply that Revelation was a single, entire, solitary act, or nearly so, introducing a certain message; whereas we, who maintain the other, consider that Divine teaching has been in fact, what the analogy of nature would lead us to expect, “at sundry times and in divers manners,” various, complex, progressive, and supplemental of itself. We consider the Christian doctrine, when analyzed, to appear, like the human frame, “fearfully and wonderfully made;” but they think it some one tenet or certain principles given out at one time in their fullness, without gradual accretion before Christ’s coming or elucidation afterward. They cast off all that they also find in Pharisee or heathen; we conceive that the Church, like Aaron’s rod, devours the serpents of the magicians. They are ever junting for a fabulous primitive simplicity; we repose in Catholic fullness.”[1]

[1] John Henry Newman, “Essays Critical and Historical,” XI: Milman’s View of Christianity (1871), vol. 2, 232-233. Also in the Appendix of DeLubac’s “Catholicism,” Ignatius (1988) 431-433

What It Means To Be Christ

St. Cyprian:[1] “Humility in our daily lives, an unwavering faith, a moral sense of modesty in conversation, justice in acts, mercy in deed, discipline, refusal to harm others, a readiness to suffer harm, peaceableness with our brothers, a wholehearted love of the Lord, loving in hi what is of the Father, fearing him because he is God, preferring nothing to him who preferred nothing to us, clinging tenaciously to his love, standing by his cross with loyalty and courage whenever there is any conflict involving his honor and his name, manifesting in our speech the constancy of our profession and under torture confidence for the fight, and in dying the endurance for which we will be crowned – this is what it means to wish to be a coheir with Christ, to keep God’s command; this is what it means to do the will of the Father.”
[1] Treatise on The Lord’s Prayer, Nn. 13-15.

79th Birthday of the Prelate of Opus Dei

“If I slept, it would mean I don’t love you. It’s my affection that makes me lose sleep”[1]

The mission of the prelate of Opus Dei is to continue engendering sons and daughters as did St. Josemaria Escriva. The life of divine filiation is the life of Christ, i.e. to be “another Christ.” The vocation to Opus Dei is the call to activate in deeds that call to divinization, and to communicate it to the others. It is an active adoration of God in the ordinary secular work and family life of every day.

Near a birthday of Escriva in January 1965: “he was getting ready to bless the first linotype press in the little print room in Villa Tevere. While Father Javier Echevarria [the present Prelate] helped him to pout on the surplice, he said to those around him, ‘The Father is old. I am sixty-three!’

“The next second he corrected himself vehemently. ‘No! I’m young! I am only a little over thirty years old, which is the time I have spent serving our Lord Jesus Christ’…

“In his Intimate Notes of 1931, only twenty-nine at the time, he was already writing with remarkable confidence, ‘Jesus, help me live our Mass, help me celebrate the Holy Sacrifice with the calm gravity and composure of a venerable priest. Even if I were to experience the dark night, may I not lack light when I am another Christ.’

“Much later, he would joke with his children about calculating ‘how old the Father really is.’ On February 6, 1967 he said to a group of women, ‘I’m far older than you imagine.’ They had celebrated his sixty-fifth birthday less than a month before. Escriva smiled.

‘Shall we work it out? Let’s see, I need a pen and paper. Have you a piece of paper?’

Mary offered her pocket diary, and Escriva made quick notes. ‘Eighty years: how I pleaded with Our Lord to grant them to me! Sixty-five years on the outside. Two thousand more or less, we can round it up. As alter Christus, because we are all of us other Christs. We all have to be, ought to be, saints…all of us.’

He wrote:

on the inside: 80

on the outside: 65

Alter Christus: 2000

Total: 2,145.

We can do the same with Bishop Javier Echevarria:

on the inside: 80

on the outside: 79

Alter Christus: 2,000

Total: 2,159 years old today.


St. Josemaria Escriva: “Father”

The reality and mission of St. Josemaria was not the order, unity, apostolic effectiveness of Opus Dei. It was its very existence. Rodriguez says: “what is decisive is neither his ‘jurisdiction’ nor their obedience. Rather, what truly defines Opus Dei’s prelate is his ‘fatherhood,’ his role as a pastor who is a father to all the prelature’s faithful. That is why in Opus Dei he is usually called ‘Father.’ The prelate’s role in the life of Opus Dei deeply configures the prelature. Therefore it is important to consider it when determining the ecclesial profile of the social arrangement lived therein…. We could say that, in Opus Dei, the image or dimension of the Church’s mystery that most stands out in its ecclesial experience is that of ‘family,’ the ‘Church as family of God.’”[9]

In a word, if the Prelate of Opus Dei were not “father” to the point of affirming each person, layman or priest, man or woman with the heart of Christ which is radical in love to the point of death, Opus Dei could not be “one,” and therefore could not persist in its particular mission to be a leaven for the entire Church who’s very identity is to be “Bride” to the Bridegroom.” Notice that the Church is a “person.” She is a woman. Benedict XVI wrote:

“…(T)he Church is not an apparatus, nor a social institution, nor one social institution among many others. It is a person. It is a woman. It is a Mother. It is alive. A Marian understanding of the Church is totally opposed to the concept of the Church as a bureaucracy or a simple organization. We cannot make the Church, we must be the Church. We are the Church, the Church is in us only to the extent that our faith more than action forges our being. Only by being Marian, can we become the Church. At its very beginning the Church was not made, but given birth. She existed in the soul of Mary from the moment she uttered her fiat. This is the most profound will of the Council: the Church should be awakened in our souls. Mary shows us the way.”[10]

As the Church “was not made, but given birth… [she] should be awakened in our souls.” So is with Opus Dei. And this is the mission of the Prelate. The shoes that he had to fill and fills them read thus:

“‘Father, you have to try to get some sleep. His answer was, “‘if I slept, it would mean I don’t love you. It’s my affection that makes me lose sleep.’”[11]
“In dealing with his children he acted with complete trust and naturalness, with the naturalness of a father and a friend. He would address them affectionately as rogues, scoundrels, bandits, rascals, tugging at the depths of their hearts….

“Querido Quinito – Que Jesús se me guarde! ‘Who loves you more than the Father, you bandit? On this earth, no one. Is that clear…’?

“The Father strove vigilantly to be detached from everything in this world – from everything except his children, who were, as he put it, his ‘near occasion’ for stopping working, to spend time in a get-together with them. Then again, their affection for him, the delicate love with which they responded to his fatherly solicitude, helped him grow in his interior life, as he confided to them:

‘My heart attaches itself to my children – I don’t hide it, and I think you notice it – but it’s something that leads me to God. You drive me on to greater fidelity, and I always want to be more faithful, also for you…

‘When the Lord calls me into his presence, almost all of you – by the law of life – will still be here on earth. Remember then what the Father told you: I love you very much, very much but I want you to be faithful. Don’t forget this: be faithful. I will still continue loving you when I’ve already left his world to go, by the infinite mercy of the Lord, to enjoy the Beatific Vision. You can be sure that I will then love you even more.’”[12]

After being in an Italian dental office [a wicked experience in my time in the 60’s], he returned home in pain and called his sons: “I love you because you are children of God, because you have freely decided to be my children, because you are trying to be saints, because you are very faithful and “majos” – all of my children are. I love you with the same affection that your mothers do. I care about everything about you: your bodies and your souls, your virtues and your defects. My children, it gives me a lot of joy to speak to you this way? When I see you out there, I won’t be able to do that, and I admit, at times I have to force myself not to get sentimental, not to leave you with the memory of tears, not to keep repeating to you that I love you so much, so much… For I love you with the same heart with which I love the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and the Blessed Virgin; with the same heart with which I loved my mother and my father. I love you like all the mothers of the world put together – each of you equally, from the first to the last.”[13]

[1] Andres Vazquez de Prada, “The Founder of Opus Dei” III, Scepter (2005) 271.

79th Birthday of the Prelate of Opus Dei

“If I slept, it would mean I don’t love you. It’s my affection that makes me lose sleep”[1]

The mission of the prelate of Opus Dei is to continue engendering sons and daughters as did St. Josemaria Escriva. The life of divine filiation is the life of Christ, i.e. to be “another Christ.” The vocation to Opus Dei is the call to activate in deeds that call to divinization, and to communicate it to the others. It is an active adoration of God in the ordinary secular work and family life of every day.

Near a birthday of Escriva in January 1965: “he was getting ready to bless the first linotype press in the little print room in Villa Tevere. While Father Javier Echevarria [the present Prelate] helped him to pout on the surplice, he said to those around him, ‘The Father is old. I am sixty-three!’

“The next second he corrected himself vehemently. ‘No! I’m young! I am only a little over thirty years old, which is the time I have spent serving our Lord Jesus Christ’…

“In his Intimate Notes of 1931, only twenty-nine at the time, he was already writing with remarkable confidence, ‘Jesus, help me live our Mass, help me celebrate the Holy Sacrifice with the calm gravity and composure of a venerable priest. Even if I were to experience the dark night, may I not lack light when I am another Christ.’

“Much later, he would joke with his children about calculating ‘how old the Father really is.’ On February 6, 1967 he said to a group of women, ‘I’m far older than you imagine.’ They had celebrated his sixty-fifth birthday less than a month before. Escriva smiled.

‘Shall we work it out? Let’s see, I need a pen and paper. Have you a piece of paper?’

Mary offered her pocket diary, and Escriva made quick notes. ‘Eighty years: how I pleaded with Our Lord to grant them to me! Sixty-five years on the outside. Two thousand more or less, we can round it up. As alter Christus, because we are all of us other Christs. We all have to be, ought to be, saints…all of us.’

He wrote:

on the inside: 80

on the outside: 65

Alter Christus: 2000

Total: 2, 145.

We can do the same with Bishop Javier Echevarria:

on the inside: 80

on the outside: 79

Alter Christus: 2,000

Total: 2,159 years old today.


St. Josemaria Escriva: “Father”

The reality and mission of St. Josemaria was not the order, unity, apostolic effectiveness of Opus Dei. It was its very existence. Rodriguez says: “what is decisive is neither his ‘jurisdiction’ nor their obedience. Rather, what truly defines Opus Dei’s prelate is his ‘fatherhood,’ his role as a pastor who is a father to all the prelature’s faithful. That is why in Opus Dei he is usually called ‘Father.’ The prelate’s role in the life of Opus Dei deeply configures the prelature. Therefore it is important to consider it when determining the ecclesial profile of the social arrangement lived therein…. We could say that, in Opus Dei, the image or dimension of the Church’s mystery that most stands out in its ecclesial experience is that of ‘family,’ the ‘Church as family of God.’”[9]

In a word, if the Prelate of Opus Dei were not “father” to the point of affirming each person, layman or priest, man or woman with the heart of Christ which is radical in love to the point of death, Opus Dei could not be “one,” and therefore could not persist in its particular mission to be a leaven for the entire Church who’s very identity is to be “Bride” to the Bridegroom.” Notice that the Church is a “person.” She is a woman. Benedict XVI wrote:

“…(T)he Church is not an apparatus, nor a social institution, nor one social institution among many others. It is a person. It is a woman. It is a Mother. It is alive. A Marian understanding of the Church is totally opposed to the concept of the Church as a bureaucracy or a simple organization. We cannot make the Church, we must be the Church. We are the Church, the Church is in us only to the extent that our faith more than action forges our being. Only by being Marian, can we become the Church. At its very beginning the Church was not made, but given birth. She existed in the soul of Mary from the moment she uttered her fiat. This is the most profound will of the Council: the Church should be awakened in our souls. Mary shows us the way.”[10]

As the Church “was not made, but given birth… [she] should be awakened in our souls.” So is with Opus Dei. And this is the mission of the Prelate. The shoes that he had to fill and fills them read thus:

“‘Father, you have to try to get some sleep. His answer was, “‘if I slept, it would mean I don’t love you. It’s my affection that makes me lose sleep.’”[11]
“In dealing with his children he acted with complete trust and naturalness, with the naturalness of a father and a friend. He would address them affectionately as rogues, scoundrels, bandits, rascals, tugging at the depths of their hearts….

“Querido Quinito – Que Jesús se me guarde! ‘Who loves you more than the Father, you bandit? On this earth, no one. Is that clear…’?

“The Father strove vigilantly to be detached from everything in this world – from everything except his children, who were, as he put it, his ‘near occasion’ for stopping working, to spend time in a get-together with them. Then again, their affection for him, the delicate love with which they responded to his fatherly solicitude, helped him grow in his interior life, as he confided to them:

‘My heart attaches itself to my children – I don’t hide it, and I think you notice it – but it’s something that leads me to God. You drive me on to greater fidelity, and I always want to be more faithful, also for you…

‘When the Lord calls me into his presence, almost all of you – by the law of life – will still be here on earth. Remember then what the Father told you: I love you very much, very much but I want you to be faithful. Don’t forget this: be faithful. I will still continue loving you when I’ve already left his world to go, by the infinite mercy of the Lord, to enjoy the Beatific Vision. You can be sure that I will then love you even more.’”[12]

After being in an Italian dental office [a wicked experience in my time in the 60’s], he returned home in pain and called his sons: “I love you because you are children of God, because you have freely decided to be my children, because you are trying to be saints, because you are very faithful and “majos” – all of my children are. I love you with the same affection that your mothers do. I care about everything about you: your bodies and your souls, your virtues and your defects. My children, it gives me a lot of joy to speak to you this way? When I see you out there, I won’t be able to do that, and I admit, at times I have to force myself not to get sentimental, not to leave you with the memory of tears, not to keep repeating to you that I love you so much, so much… For I love you with the same heart with which I love the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and the Blessed Virgin; with the same heart with which I loved my mother and my father. I love you like all the mothers of the world put together – each of you equally, from the first to the last.”[13]

[1] Andres Vazquez de Prada, “The Founder of Opus Dei” III, Scepter (2005) 271.

IVF - Not Pro-(Human) Life

What to Think About IVF and The Test Tube Baby? Response: Although IVF seems to be pro-life, it is not pro-human life. Human life is constitutively relational as imaging the three divine Persons of the One God. Therefore, the central principle of engendering human life is double ended: There can be no life without the spousal relation of human love [No Life Without Love (In Vitro)], and no spousal relation of human love without openness to life [As No Love Without Life (Contraception)].

The Event: Noble Price for IVF

On the occasion of awarding the Nobel Prize to Robert Edwards for his pioneering work on IVF.

British physiologist Robert Edwards (L) is seen attending the 30th birthday celebrations of Bourn Hall, a fertility clinic he co-founded in Cambridge, with Lesley Brown, her daughter Louise - the first baby to be conceived by in vitro fertilization (IVF) - and Louise's son Cameron, in this July 12, 2008 handout file photograph, received in London on September 4, 2010. Edwards, who helped revolutionize the treatment of human infertility, has clinched the 2010 Nobel prize for medicine or physiology, a Swedish daily reported on Monday.

By Mia Shanley

STOCKHOLM Mon Oct 4, 2010 5:09 pm EDT

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - British physiologist Robert Edwards, whose work led to the first "test-tube baby", won the 2010 Nobel prize for medicine or physiology, the prize-awarding institute said on Monday.

Sweden's Karolinska Institute lauded Edwards, 85, for bringing joy and hope to the more than 10 percent of couples worldwide who suffer from infertility.
Known as the father of in-vitro fertilization (IVF), Edwards picked up the prize of 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.5 million) for what the institute called a "milestone in the development of modern medicine".

As many as 4 million babies have been born since the first IVF baby in 1978 as a result of the techniques Edwards developed, together with a now-deceased colleague, Patrick Steptoe, the institute said in a statement.
"Bob Edwards changed the way we think about having babies," said Dr Alan Thornhill, scientific director of the London Bridge Fertility, Gynaecology and Genetics Center.

The Roman Catholic Church strongly opposes IVF as an affront to human dignity that destroys more human life than it creates because scientists discard or store unused fertilized embryos.

"In vitro fertilization has led directly to the deliberate destruction of millions of human embryos," said Professor David Albert Jones, director of the Anscombe Bioethics Center, a Catholic research institute in Oxford, England.

Nevertheless, Edwards and Steptoe, a gynecologist, pursued their work despite opposition from churches, governments, many in the media and skepticism from scientific colleagues.

They struggled to raise funds and had to rely on private donations but in 1968 they developed methods to fertilize human eggs outside the body.

Working at Cambridge University, they began replacing embryos into infertile mothers in 1972. But several pregnancies spontaneously aborted due to what they later discovered were flawed hormone treatments.

In 1977, they tried a new procedure which did not involve hormone treatments and relied instead on precise timing. On July 25 of the next year, Louise Brown, the first IVF baby, was born.

"We hold Bob in great affection and are delighted to send our personal congratulations to him and his family at this time," she said in a statement released with her mother.

The 32-year-old, who has stayed in touch with Edwards all her life, is married and has one son who was conceived naturally.

Her birth caused a media sensation as it raised questions about medical ethics, drew religious concerns and piqued basic human curiosity. Many wondered in the early stages of treatment whether an IVF baby would grow up normally.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

The Response


The first thing to think is to ask the question: what is a human person? If a human person is not a “thing,” then we have a problem since we have just “engineered” a human person, reducing him to a function instead of an end and value in himself. The problem is not simply moral or immoral action. It is a question of Who is the Creator of the human person. If God is the Creator of the human person who is autonomous free spirit and matter formed into a human body, then we have replaced the Creator by technology and reduced person to thing that can be “used” and manipulated – or discarded – as “thing.” Usurping the place of God by the technology of “making” a human is an atheistic act. It contradicts the most profound ontological tendency in man to seek love, truth, beauty and the Absolute as his source and ultimate end.

This is a moment to become conscious of what is going on before we are herded into an unconscious conformity that will be cemented into our thought patterns while mesmerized by the sensible images on the screen.

If we understand the human person to be created by God in the image and likeness of the Persons of the Trinity, then the nature of the person is constitutively relational. The Person must be created by and in love and for love.

The Catholic Church has consistently taught that love and life cannot be separated. It has taught this because the very nature of the divine Persons revealed by Jesus Christ are the meaning of love and life, and that they are relations constitutively. That is to say, that the very Being of the Father is the act of engendering the Son, and the very Being of the Son is the action of obedience and glorification of the Father, and the Person of the Spirit is the Personification-Love of the mutual irreducible, Self-gift of the Two. We are made in the image and likeness of this relationality. Hence, the origin of the human person as image and likeness of the divine, must be another, or other, persons.

Therefore, the Church teaches through the SCDF (Sacred Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith): “b)… the procreation of a person must be the fruit and the result of married love. The origin of the human being thus follows from a procreation that is linked to the union, not only biological but also spiritual, of the parents, made one by the bond of marriage. Fertilization achieved outside the bodies of the couple remains by this very fact deprived of the meanings and the values which are expressed in the language of the body and in the union of human persons.

“c) Only respect for the link between the meanings of the conjugal act and respect for the unity of the human being make possible procreation in conformity with the dignity of the person. In his unique and unrepeatable origin, the child must be respected and recognized as equal in personal dignity to those who give him life. The human person must be accepted in his parents’ act of union and love; the generation of a child must therefore be the fruit of that mutual giving which is realized in the conjugal act wherein the spouses cooperate as servants and not as masters in the work of the Creator who is Love.

“In reality, the origin of a human person is the result of an act of giving. The one conceived must be the fruit of his parents love. He cannot be desired or conceived as the product of an intervention of medical or biological techniques; that would be equivalent to reducing him to an object of scientific technology. No one may subject the coming of a child into the world to conditions of technical efficiency which are t o be evaluated according to standards of control and dominion.

“The moral relevance of the link between the meanings of the conjugal act and between the goods of marriage, as well as the unity of the human being and the dignity of his origin, demand that the procreation of a human person be brought about as the fruit of the conjugal act specific to the love between spouses The link between procreation and the conjugal act is thus shown to be of great importance on the anthropological and moral planes, and it throws light on the positions of the Magisterium with regard to homologous artificial fertilization.”[1]

Borrowed Quotes from Nathan Davis

1) When the unstoppable bullet hits the impenetrable wall, we find the religious experience. It is precisely here that one will grow...Heroism could be redefined for our time as the ability to stand paradox.
[Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow]

Like: finding self by giving self away (Gaudium et spes #24)
--


2) “The Catholic writer, in so far as he has the mind of the Church, will feel life from the standpoint of the central Christian mystery: that it has for all its horror, been found by God to be worth dying for.”

[Flannery O’Connor]


In search of reckless romantics!

Monday Update on Tom Mahala, Jr.

Thomas had his 2nd angiogram this morning to begin treating the AVM. They were able to embolize approx 25- 30% of it. The next 24 hours are critical, and he will be monitored closely for his recovery from today's procedure. Once Thomas is stable, hopefully later this week, they may attempt to remove the catheter which has been in his skull since he was admitted last Thursday. The catheter continues to drain the residual blood from the original rupture. No decisions on next steps have to be made right now. Possibilities are more embolizations to reduce the size of the AVM and follow that up with radiation (stereotactic radiosurgery aka Cyberknife which might take an extended time, months or years). What we have learned is that an AVM must be fully eradicated because it recruits other cells from the brain and it will grow. We are going to send the films to other neurosurgeons for their input/opinions on the course of treatment. As we have found this neuroscience field is an interesting one and no 2 of these are alike. As is the case with any brain bleeds, Thomas will be here for at least 2 weeks. It will be a long haul and we are headed down a different road from the one we started on last Thursday. We seek Christ’s light to show us the way. We are forever thankful for your prayers and we ask that you please continue.

God bless you!

With prayers and affection,Tom and Bonnie

Update on Tom Mahala, Jr.

Thomas had a 2nd angiogram this morning. He is out of surgery and stable.The vascular neurosurgen attacked the posterior of his AVM and cut off(embolize) approximately 25% of the blood flow in the AVM. That is about what they hoped for in the phasing out of this AVM. So the procedure was successful. Thomas is stable, breathing on his own, knows his name, raises his hands, squeezes fingers and toes etc...for this we are so thankful! The next 24 to 72 hours are very important! They will be monitoring any bleeding or clotting that could cause a stroke. We're not out of this deepforest yet, but a long pathway is developing and some light is beginning to shine upon it. I can't begin to explain and describe the fear and helplessness that envelopes us. But I can tell you that your prayers and good wishes are our lifeline!.. please keep them coming.

We are forever grateful! Thank you! All the best, Tom and Bonnie

Mary's Magnificat and The Sin of Our First Parents

I want to show the contrast in attitude of our first parents induced in them by the Demonic, and the attitude of Our Lady. In the former, it is jealousy of God in that He is keeping something back from them and therefore they distrust His goodness. The Demonic does not deny the existence of God or portray Him as evil. He simply insinuates that God may be keeping something back, and therefore they are to distrust Him. Hence the Covenant is weakened as faith is undermined.

On the other hand, Mary’s sees that God’s greatness is not competition, a holding something back from her. That He be great in no way means that she is less. The contrary: the greater God is, the greater she is. And so it is: by her submission and gift of herself, she becomes divinized as the Mother of God.

So also with us!



Ratzinger on Sin:

“Temptation does not begin with the denial of God and with a fall into outright atheism. The serpent does not deny God; it starts out rather with an apparently completely reasonable request for information, which in reality, however, contains an insinuation that provokes the human being and that lures him or her from trust to mistrust: ‘Did God say, “You shall not eat of any tree of the garden?’ The first thing is not the denial of God but rather doubt about his covenant, about the community of faith, prayer, the commandments – all of which are the context for living God’s covenant. … It is so easy to convince people that this covenant is not a gift but rather an expression of envy of humankind and that it is robbing human beings of their freedom and of the most precious things of life. With this doubt people are well on their way to building their own worlds. In other words, it is then that they make the decision not to accept the limitations of their existence; it is then that they decide not to be bound by the limitations imposed by good and evil, or by morality in general, but quite simply to free themselves by ignoring them.”[1]


Mary’s Magnificat:

“It begins with the word "Magnificat": my soul "magnifies" the Lord, that is, "proclaims the greatness" of the Lord. Mary wanted God to be great in the world, great in her life and present among us all. She was not afraid that God might be a "rival" in our life, that with his greatness he might encroach on our freedom, our vital space. She knew that if God is great, we too are great. Our life is not oppressed but raised and expanded: It is precisely then that it becomes great in the splendor of God. The fact that our first parents thought the contrary was the core of original sin. They feared that if God were too great, he would take something away from their life. They thought that they could set God aside to make room for themselves. This was also the great temptation of the modern age, of the past three or four centuries. More and more people have thought and said: "But this God does not give us our freedom; with all his commandments, he restricts the space in our lives. So God has to disappear; we want to be autonomous and independent. Without this God we ourselves would be gods and do as we pleased." This was also the view of the Prodigal Son, who did not realize that he was "free" precisely because he was in his father's house. He left for distant lands and squandered his estate. In the end, he realized that precisely because he had gone so far away from his father, instead of being free he had become a slave; he understood that only by returning home to his father's house would he be truly free, in the full beauty of life. This is how it is in our modern epoch. Previously, it was thought and believed that by setting God aside and being autonomous, following only our own ideas and inclinations, we would truly be free to do whatever we liked without anyone being able to give us orders. But when God disappears, men and women do not become greater; indeed, they lose the divine dignity, their faces lose God's splendor. In the end, they turn out to be merely products of a blind evolution and, as such, can be used and abused. This is precisely what the experience of our epoch has confirmed for us. Only if God is great is humankind also great. With Mary, we must begin to understand that this is so. We must not drift away from God but make God present; we must ensure that he is great in our lives. Thus, we too will become divine; all the splendor of the divine dignity will then be ours. Let us apply this to our own lives.

[1] J. Ratzinger, “ ‘In the Beginning…’ - A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the FAll” Eerdmans (1995) 66-67.

Tom Mahala, Jr.

From Tom, Sr.

As mentioned in my note last night, Thomas has AVM arteriovenousmalformation. This is usually something you are born with, and can live your whole life without ever knowing you have one. It is a tangle of bloodvessels, veins and arteries in the brain. It can cause neuro signs, seizures, headache, and in Thomas' case, it bled onto his brain. He is at the age that this is most likely to happen.

The angiogram this morning (Friday) showed that there is an aneurysm in the midst of the tangle. They want to embolize the aneurysm (which is a weak outpouching of a blood vessel) and cause it to clot off and become neutral, by inserting a coil thru a very tiny catheter into the AVM tangle and injecting a glue to block it off. They thought Thomas would have to stay in an induced coma to allow his brain to rest this weekend, but believe it or not, he woke and they liked the way he was breathing. They then decided to extubate him, taking him off the breathing tube. We've spoken to Thomas and he knows his birth date and wants to know when he can go home... for this we are thankful! Thomas will undergo another angiogram on Monday to attempt to embolize the brain vessels and this may have to be done in several stages. They will wait a month after Monday's procedure to let his brain heal, before they continue to treat it, so we're in for the longhaul.We are forever grateful for your prayers and good wishes!...please continue. All the best, Tom

Benedict's Theology of the Ascension and the Charism of Escriva

The presence of Christ in the world (which has been forgotten because Christians had lost the experience of it) is unknown. Consciousness comes from experience. If the experience is lost, the consciousness and the conceptual doctrine disappear. Hence, when Escriva arrived in Rome to have this charism approved, he was told that he had come 100 years too soon. Benedict XVI and Escriva are speaking the same language. Consider:


The Joy of the Apostles: Why? Jesus Christ disappears after having given them a mission that could not possibly perform.

“Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and lifting up his hands he blessed them. While he blessed them, he parted from them, and was carried up into heaven. And they worshiped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and were continually in the temple blessing God”[1]

Benedict XVI: “This conclusion surprises us. Luke says that the disciples were full of joy at the Lord’s definitive departure. We would have expected the opposite. We would have expected them to be left perplexed and sad. The world was unchanged, and Jesus had gone definitively. They had received a commission that seemed impossible to carry out and lay well beyond their powers How were they to present themselves to the people in Jerusalem, in Israel, in the whole world, saying: ‘This Jesus, who seemed to have failed, is actually the redeemer of us all’?”[2]

Explanation: “The disciples do not feel abandoned. They do not consider Jesus to have disappeared far away into an inaccessible heaven. They are obviously convinced of a new presence of Jesus. They are certain (as the risen Lord said in Saint Matthew’s account) that he is now present to them in a new and powerful way.”[3]

The Cloud: This is theological language. The cloud is sign of entrance into the mystery of God. The cloud at the Transfiguration, the overshadowing of Our Lady with the power of the Most High at the Annunciation, the tent in the Old Covenant, the cloud leading the people out of Egypt and through the desert. The cloud “presents Jesus’ departure, not as a journey to the stars, but as his entry into the mystery of God. It evokes an entirely different order of magnitude, a different dimension of being…. It does not refer to some distant cosmic space, where God has, as it were, set up his throne and given Jesus a place beside the throne. God is not in one space alongside other spaces. God is god – he is the premise and the ground of all the space there is, but he himself is not part of it. God stands in relation to all spaces as Lord and Creator. His presence is not spatial, but divine. ‘Sitting at God’s right hand’ means participating in this divine dominion over space.”[4]

The entire point that Benedict wants to make is that the Eschaton is not only to take place at the end of the world, but is already here, alive, working and powerful. He refers to Christ being off in the mountain after the multiplication of the loaves and fish and the apostles struggling on the lake in the storm. Christ seems to be far away, but He is not. “Because he is with the Father, he sees them. And because he sees them he comes to them across the water; he gets into the boat with them and makes it possible for them to continue to their destination. This is an image for the time of the Church – intended also for us.”[5]

Bernard of Clairvaux: The Lord comes three times: the first is birth. The second is at the end of the world. The third comes between the other two. “If a man loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him” (Jn. 14, 23). The interim time is not empty.

Opus Dei: Escriva hears the following internal locutions. The vocation to Opus Dei consists in becoming Christ Himself in the middle of the world. That is the “interim” between creation and the end of the world is the call to the transformation into Christ by everyone in the world:

August 7, 1931: Locution: “Et si exaltatus fuero a terra, omnia traham ad meipsum” (Ioann. 12, 32). “A voice, as always, perfect, clear… And the precise concept: it is not in the sense in which Scripture says it; I say it to you in the sense that you put me at the summit of all human activities, so that in all the places of the world, there may be Christians with a personal and most free dedication, that they be other Christs.”
October 16, 1931: Locution: “You are my son, you are Christ.” And I only knew how to repeat: Abba, Pater!, Abba, Pater! Abba!, Abba!, Abba!”

Escriva’s “The Way” (584) “Stir up the fire of your faith. –Christ is not a figure who has passed. He is not a memory that is lost in history.
He lives!: Jesus Christus heri et hodie: ipsae et in saecula! says Saint Paul: Jesus Christ yesterday and today and for ever!

[1] Lk. 24, 50-53.
[2] Benedict XVI “Jesus of Nazareth” II Ignatius (2011) 280.
[3] Ibid 281.
[4] Ibid 282-283.
[5] Ibid.284.

Only Prayer

Benedict XVI On Moses' Intercessory Prayer


"A Man Stretched Between Two Loves"

VATICAN CITY, JUNE 1, 2011 (Zenit.org).- Here is a translation of the Italian-language catechesis Benedict XVI gave today during the general audience held in St. Peter's Square. The Pope continued with his new series of catecheses on prayer, reflecting today on prayer in sacred Scripture, in particular on the prayer of Moses.

* * *

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

In reading the Old Testament, one figure stands out among others: that of Moses, the man of prayer. Moses, the great prophet and leader during the time of the Exodus, carried out his role as mediator between God and Israel by becoming, among the people, the bearer of the divine words and commandments, by guiding them toward the freedom of the Promised Land, and by teaching the Israelites to live in obedience and trust toward God during their long sojourn in the desert; but also, and I would say especially, by praying. He prays for Pharaoh when God, through the plagues, was trying to convert the Egyptians' hearts (cf. Exodus 8:10); he asks the Lord to heal his sister Miriam who was struck with leprosy (cf. Numbers 12:9-13); he intercedes for the people who had rebelled, fearful of the scouts' report (cf. Numbers 14:1-19); he prays when fire was about to devour the camp (cf. Numbers 11:1-2) and when poisonous serpents were killing the people (cf. Numbers 21:4-9); he addresses himself to the Lord and reacts by protesting when the burden of his mission had grown too heavy (cf. Numbers 11:10-15); he sees God and speaks with him "face to face, as a man speaks to his friend" (cf. Exodus 24:9-17; 33:7-23; 34:1-10,28-35).

Also at Sinai, when the people ask Aaron to fashion for them a golden calf, Moses prays, thus carrying out in an emblematic way the true role of an intercessor. The episode is narrated in Chapter 32 of the Book of Exodus and has a parallel account in Deuteronomy Chapter 9. It is this episode that I would like to dwell upon in today's catechesis; and in particular on the prayer of Moses that we find in the Exodus account.

The people of Israel were at the foot of Mount Sinai while Moses, on the mountain, was awaiting the gift of the tablets of the Law, fasting for forty days and forty nights (cf. Exodus 24:18; Deuteronomy 9:9). The number forty has symbolic value and signifies the totality of experience, while fasting points to the fact that life comes from God, that it is he who sustains it. The act of eating, in fact, involves taking in the nourishment that sustains us; therefore fasting, or the renunciation of food, acquires in this case a religious significance: It is a way of indicating that man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord (cf. Deuteronomy 8:3). Fasting, Moses shows himself to be awaiting the gift of the divine Law as a source of life: It reveals the Will of God and nourishes the heart of man, enabling him to enter into a covenant with the Most High, who is the fount of life, who is life itself.

But while the Lord, upon the mountain, gives the Law to Moses, at the foot of the mountain the people transgress it. Unable to withstand the mediator's delay and absence, the Israelites ask Aaron: "Make us a god, who shall go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him" (Exodus 32:1). Tired of a journey with an invisible God, now that Moses, the mediator, has also disappeared, the people ask for a tangible, touchable presence of the Lord, and find in the molten calf made by Aaron, a god made accessible, maneuverable, within man's reach. It is a constant temptation on the journey of faith: to elude the divine mystery by constructing a comprehensible god, corresponding to one's own plans, to one's own projects. What occurs at Sinai demonstrates all the foolishness and the illusory vanity of this demand since, as Psalm 106 ironically affirms, "they exchanged the glory of God for the image of an ox who eats grass" (Psalm 106:20).

Therefore the Lord responds and orders Moses to go down the mountain, revealing to him what the people were doing, and ending with these words: "Now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them: but of you I will make a great nation" (Exodus 32:10). As with Abraham in regard to Sodom and Gomorrah, so also now God reveals to Moses what he intends to do, as though not wanting to act without his agreement (cf. Amos 3:7). He says: "Let me alone, that my wrath may burn hot." In reality, this "let me alone, that my wrath may burn hot" is said precisely so that Moses might intervene and ask him not to do it, thereby revealing that God's desire is always to save. As with the two cities in the time of Abraham, punishment and destruction, in which the wrath of God is expressed as the rejection of evil, point to the gravity of the sin committed; at the same time, the intercessor's request is meant to manifest the Lord's will to forgive. This is the salvation of God, which involves mercy but together with it also exposes the truth of the sin, of the evil that is present, so that the sinner, aware of and rejecting his own sin, can allow himself to be forgiven and transformed by God. Intercessory prayer makes divine mercy so active within the corrupted reality of the sinful man, that it finds a voice in the supplication of one who prays and through him becomes present where salvation is needed.

Moses' prayer is wholly centered on the Lord's fidelity and grace. He at first relates the history of the redemption that God initiated with Israel's departure from Egypt, in order then to recall the ancient promise given to the Fathers. The Lord wrought salvation by freeing his people from Egyptian slavery; why then -- Moses asks -- "should the Egyptians say: 'With evil intent did he bring them forth, to slay them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth?'" (Exodus 32:12). The work of salvation begun must be brought to completion; if God were to allow his people to perish, this could be interpreted as a sign of a divine inability to bring to completion the project of salvation. God cannot permit this: He is the good Lord who saves, the guarantor of life, he is the God of mercy and forgiveness, of liberation from sin which kills. And so Moses appeals to God, to the interior life of God, against the exterior pronouncement. But then, Moses argues with the Lord, if his elect were to perish, even if they are guilty, he might appear incapable of conquering sin. And this is unacceptable. Moses had a concrete experience of the God of salvation; he was sent as a mediator of divine liberation, and now, with his prayer, he voices a twofold concern -- concern for the fate of his people, but alongside this, concern for the honor that is owed to the Lord, for the truth of his name. The intercessor, in fact, wants the people of Israel to be saved, because they are the flock that has been entrusted to him, but also because, in that salvation, the true reality of God is manifested. Love of the brothers and love of God interpenetrate in intercessory prayer; they are inseparable. Moses, the intercessor, is a man stretched between two loves, which in prayer overlap into but one desire for good.

Moses then appeals to God's faithfulness, reminding him of his promises: "Remember Abraham, Isaac and Israel, thy servants, to whom thou didst swear by thine own self, and didst say to them, 'I will multiply your descendants as the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have promised I will give to your descendants, and they shall inherit it forever'" (Exodus 32:13). Moses recalls the founding history of [Israel's] origins, of the fathers of the people, and of their wholly gratuitous election in which God alone had had the initiative. Not by reason of their merits did they receive the promise, but through the free choice of God and of his love (cf. Deuteronomy 10:15). And now, Moses asks that the Lord faithfully continue his history of election and salvation, by forgiving his people.

The intercessor does not make excuses for the sin of his people; he does not list presumed merits either of his people or of himself; rather, he appeals to the gratuitousness of God: a free God, who is total love, who never ceases to go in search of the one who has strayed, who always remains faithful to himself and offers the sinner the possibility of returning to him and of becoming, through forgiveness, just and capable of fidelity. Moses asks God to show himself stronger than sin and death, and by his prayer he brings about this divine self-revelation. A mediator of life, the intercessor shows solidarity with the people; desiring only the salvation that God himself desires, he renounces the prospect of becoming a new people pleasing to the Lord. The phrase that God had addressed to him, "but of you I will make a great nation," is not even taken into consideration by the "friend" of God, who instead is ready to take upon himself not only the guilt of his people, but also all of its consequences.

When, after the destruction of the golden calf, he will return to the mountain once again to ask for Israel's salvation, he will say to the Lord: "But now, if thou wilt forgive their sin -- and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written" (verse. 32). Through prayer, desiring God's desire, the intercessor enters ever more profoundly into the knowledge of the Lord and of his mercy, and becomes capable of a love that reaches even to the total gift of self.

In Moses, who stands upon the mountain height face to face with God, who becomes the intercessor for his people, and who offers himself -- "blot me out" -- the Fathers of the Church saw a prefiguration of Christ, who on the heights of the cross truly stands before God, not only as a friend but as Son. And not only does he offer himself -- "blot me out" -- but with his pierced heart he is blotted out, he becomes, as St. Paul himself says, sin; he takes our sins upon himself in order to spare us; his intercession is not only solidarity, but identification with us; he carries us all in his body. And in this way his whole existence as man and as Son is a cry to the heart of God, it is forgiveness, but a forgiveness that transforms and renews.

I think we should meditate upon this reality. Christ stands before the face of God and prays for me. His prayer on the cross is contemporaneous with all men, contemporaneous with me: He prays for me, he suffered and suffers for me, he identified himself with me by taking on our human body and soul. And he invites us to enter into his identity, making ourselves one body, one spirit with him, because from the heights of the cross he brought not new laws, tablets of stone, but rather he brought himself, his body and his blood, as the new covenant. He thereby makes us one blood with him, one body with him, identified with him. He invites us to enter into this identification, to be united with him in our desire to be one body, one spirit with him. Let us pray to the Lord that this identification may transform us, may renew us, since forgiveness is renewal -- it is transformation.

I would like to conclude this catechesis with the words of the Apostle Paul to the Christians in Rome: "Who shall bring any charge against God's elect? It is God who justifies; who is to condemn? Is it Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised from the dead, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us? Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? [ … ] neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities [ … ] nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Romans 8:33-35, 38, 39).

Only Lovers Know

The Gospels are full of it. Consider Jn. 14, 24: “He who has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. But he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.” Or Jn. 2, 3: “And by this we can be sure that we know him, if we keep his commandments. He who says that he knows him, and does not keep his commandments, is a liar and the truth is not in him.”

So, the only way to know God is to be like God, and God has revealed Himself to be Three Persons that are so in relation that they are One God. Not that they are “one being,” but that they are irreducibly Three Persons – which means that you cannot one without the other. And this because there is an ontological connection that is who their very Selves is. That is, the Father is not the Son since the Son says: “The Father is greater than I” (Jn. 14, 28). But at the same time, “I and the Father are one” (Jn. 10, 30).
The only way to understand this is to change epistemological wavelengths, viz. the “Being” of the Father is the act of engendering the Son, such that no Father, no Son; and vice versa: no Son, no Father.

Benedict XVI:

Consider Benedict XVI’s recent remark summarizing the scriptural presentation of the Person of Christ:

“Recent theology has rightly underlined the use of the word ‘for’ in all four accounts, a word that may be considered the key not only to the Last Supper accounts, but to the figure of Jesus overall. His entire being is expressed by the word ‘pro-existence’ - he is there, not for himself, but for others. This is not merely a dimension of his existence, but its innermost essence and its entirety. His very being is a ‘being-for.’ If we are able to grasp this, then we have truly come close to the mystery of Jesus, and we have understood what discipleship is.”[1]

Once you can handle that - i.e. to be is not simply to be “there” as a static “Dasein” but to be relation “for” (which is other than the way we see things) – then it becomes “clear” that the only way to “know” a divine Person is to experience oneself to be relating, such as love as going out of self.

You would also have to understand that there is another kind of knowing than through the senses. We all know this kind of knowing since it is what we understand by consciousness but we cannot explain it by going to what we normally understand and explain by “knowing” in terms of ideas/concepts. Wojtyla explains that consciousness is that background “knowing” that is the experience of the self that is somehow in motion, such as sensing, acting, receiving. This is the knowing of such internal experiences such as good, bad, responsible, guilt, peace, joy, etc.



Scripture:

The first reading of the Office of Readings today (Memorial Day, 5/30/2011 says: “The way we can be sure of our knowledge of him is to keep his commandments. The man who claims, ‘I have known him,’ without keeping his commandments, is a liar; in such a one there is no truth. But whoever keeps his word, truly has the love of God been made perfect in him. The way we can be sure we are in union with him is for the man who claims to abide in him to conduct himself just as he did….The man who claims to be in light, hating his brother all the while, is in darkness even now. The man who continues in the light is the one who loves his brother” (Jn. 1-11).
What could this knowledge of Christ be except the experience of the obedience to the commandments, the first of which is to love? The CCC #2558 quotes St. Therese of Lisieux: “For me, prayer is a surge of the heart; it is a simple look turned toward heaven, it is a cry of recognition and of love, embracing both trial and joy.” And why is this exodus of the self a source of knowledge except that it is an experience of the being that is the self?

Wojtyla burrows deep to find the source of this knowledge. He finds it in experience and asserts apodictically: “Experience is always the first and most basic structure of the cognizing subject, and this experience, in keeping with the dual structure of the cognizing subject, contains not only a sensory but also an intellectual element. For this reason, one could say that human experience is already always a kind of understanding. It is thus also the origin of the whole process of understanding, which develops in ways proper to itself, but always in relation to this first stage, namely, experience. Otherwise I see no possibility of a consistent realism in philosophy and science. The image of the world that we produce in them could then be basically at odds with reality.

“This also applies to the human being as the object of philosophical anthropology. The basis for understanding the human being must be sought in experience – in experience that is complete and comprehensive and free of all systemic a priories. The point of departure for an experience of human action that includes the lived experience of moral good and evil as an essential and especially important element; this experience can be separately defined as the experience of morality. These two experiences – the experience of the human being and the experience of morality – can really never be completely separated, although we can, in the context of the overall process of reflection, focus more on one or the other. In the case of the former, philosophical reflection will lead us in the direction of anthropology; in the case of the latter, in the direction of ethics.”[2]

Wojtyla continues with the process of self-determination. The power of self-determination appears to be the will, but by the “will” he understands “the whole person.” “When I say that the will is the power of self-determination, I do not have in mind the will all alone, in some sort of methodical isolation intended to disclose the will’s own dynamism. Rather, I necessarily have in mind here the whole person. Self-determination takes place through acts of will, through this central power of the human soul. And yet self-determination is not identical with these acts in any of their forms, since it is a property of the person as such. Although my whole discussion here takes place on the phenomenological plane of experience, still, in the light of the discussion, St. Thomas’ distinction between substance and accident and between the soul and its powers (in this case, the will), becomes especially apparent. My analysis, however brief, shows that self-determination is a property of the person, who, as the familiar definition says, is a naturae rationalis individua substantia. This property is realized through the will, which is tan accident. Self-determination – or, in other words freedom – is not limited to the accidental dimension, but belongs to the substantial dimension of the person: it is the person’s freedom, and not just the will’s freedom, although it is undeniably the persons’ freedom through the will.”

Wojtyla’s point is to suggest that “Self determination reveals that what takes place in an act of will is not just an active directing of the subject toward a value. Something more takes place as well: when I am directed by an act of will toward a particular value, I myself not only determine this directing but through it I simultaneously determine myself as well. The concept of self-determination involves more than just the concept of efficacy: I am not only the efficient cause of my acts, but through them I am also in some sense the ‘creator of myself.’ This is huge. We have here a major point. When I determine myself and own myself, and I make the gift of self, I literally become who I am. Being the image of God, if I make the gift relationally, I become “good” as God is “Good.” I experience and know myself as “good” and therefore love myself . We have here also the theology of work whereby the working person by self mastery and self-gift becomes “another Christ.” By the experience of self-mastery I know myself and I know God being the image of God.

Let me add then-Josef Ratzinger's remarks [L'Osservatore Romano n. 22, 3 June 1998 p. 16] on Christian faith as experience:"My observations refer to the question of experience and faith, and to the problem of instituion and life. Various Fathers have correctly stated that for the proclamation of Christ's Gospel one's own spiritual experience is a fundamental condition. Only those who know God through a personal encounter can make God known to others: only those who live in a deep relationship with Christ can guide others to communion with the Lord. However, it is important to distinguish between faith and experience. Faith is a gift from God, almost an anticipation given to the us by diivne love, which precedes our action. IN faith, God opens his heart to us and communictes himself; experience is thus the appropriation and personalization of faith. Therefore, faith is common and universal; the experience of it is in itself personal and individual. Only faith unites and synthesizes our always fragmentary experiences; faith is the criterion and measure of experience, the guide that gives its light on the path of our experience.

In addition, true faith and humility go together. Faith is not a merit of mine; it is not the fruit of the depth of my interior journey, but an anticipation given by God to our poverty. To believe is to submit to divine sovereignity, an insertion into the common measure of the Wor od God. An arrogant faith would be a contradiction, would seem an absolutizing of one's own doctrine, whereas faith is actually a strippoing of oneself and communion with Jesus Christ, the Son of God and our servant.

Maritain


This is very different from, say, Maritain’s “preconscious life of the intellect.” He writes: “we possess in ourselves the Illuminating Intellect, a spiritual sun ceaselessly radiating, which activates everything in intelligence, and whose light causes all our ideas to arise in us, and whose energy permeates every operation of our mind. And this primal source of light cannot be seen by us; it remains concealed in the unconscious of the spirit.

“Furthermore, it illuminates with its spiritual light the images from which our concepts are drawn. And this very process of illumination is unknown to us, it takes place in the unconscious; and often these very images, without which there is no thought, remain also unconscious or scarcely perceived in the process, at least for the most part.

“Thus it is that we know (not always, to be sure!) what we are thinking, but we don’t know how we are thinking; and that before being formed and expressed in concepts and judgments, intellectual knowledge is at first a beginning of insight, still unformulated, a kind of many-eyed cloud which is born from the impact of the light of the Illuminating Intellect on the world of images, and which is but a humble and trembling inchoation, yet invaluable, tending toward an intelligible content to be grasped.”

“I have insisted upon these considerations because they deal with the intellect, with reason itself, taken in the full scope of its ife within us. They enable us to see how the notion of a spiritual unconscious or preconscious is philosophically grounded. I have suggested calling it, also, musical unconscious, for, being one with the root activity of reason, it contains from the start a germ of melody. In these remarks, on the other hand, we have considered the spiritual unconscious from the general point of view of the structure of the intellect, and with regard to the abstractive function of intelligence and to the birth of ideas. It was not a question of poetry. It was even a question of the origin and formation of the instruments of that conceptual, logical, discursive knowledge with which poetry is on bad terms. Well, if there is in the spiritual unconscious a nonconceptual or preconceptual activity of the intellect even with regard to the birth of concepts, we can with greater reason assume that such a nonconceptual activity of the intellect, such a nonrational activity of reason, in the spiritual unconscious, plays an essential part in the genesis of poetry and poetic inspiration. Thus a place is prepared in the highest parts of the soul, in the primeval translucid night where intelligence stirs the images under the light of the Illuminating Intellect, for the separate Muse of Plato to descend into man, and dwell within him, and become a part of our spiritual organism.”[3]


[1] BXVI, “Jesus of Nazareth” II, Ignatius (2011) 134.
[2] K. Wojtyla, “The Personal Structure of Self-Determination,” Person and Community, Lang (1993)190.
[3] J. Maritain, “Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry,” Meridian Books – Noonday Press (1955) 73-74.

Faith and Reason: St. Justin Martyr

I offer that St. Justin Martyr found Christianity to be the “true philosophy,” not because Christian concepts completed philosophic concepts but because the faith experience of becoming “another Christ” transformed the believer himself into the Being and light that reason is and has always been seeking. That is, instead of the being grasped in the senses being the prius of philosophic amazement, the being of the self in the experience of faith that is self-transcendence, is what dazzles the mind in the pursuit of the absolute.

Faith is not a series of ideas. It is act of the self responding to and receiving the Self of the revealing Christ within. It is the “intellegere” of the real as “reading the real” ab intus “from within” the self.

This is what I take to be the meaning of Justin’s discovery of Christianity as the faith-experience of being and the real. Hence, without this faith experience, reason cannot be fully reason since reason is not fully exposed to the real when exposed only to sense perception. The beginning of the exodus from the self that is Christian faith certainly involves sense experience, but it is only when that experience has become acceptance and response of the “I” to the revealing God in this man Jesus Christ that being becomes writ large as “I,” and now becomes a true consideration of being as being.

Ratzinger has called this consideration “theological epistemology” and develops it in his “Third Thesis” of “Behold the Pierced One.” There he explains that, since like is known by like, only one can know the Person of Christ when one begins to pray since the Person of Christ as pure relation to the Father is prayer. Prayer as the first act of faith becomes the key to doing a true ontology of being.

Benedict XVI’s Remarks on St. Justin in 2007:

Justin, and with him other apologists, adopted the clear stance taken by the Christian faith for the God of the philosophers against the false gods of the pagan religion.

It was the choice of the truth of being against the myth of custom. Several decades after Justin, Tertullian defined the same option of Christians with a lapidary sentence that still applies: "Dominus poster Christus veritatem se, non consuetudinem, cognominavit — Christ has said that he is truth not fashion" (De Virgin. Vel. 1, 1).

It should be noted in this regard that the term consuetudo, used here by Tertullian in reference to the pagan religion, can be translated into modern languages with the expressions: "cultural fashion", "current fads".

In a time like ours, marked by relativism in the discussion on values and on religion — as well as in interreligious dialogue — this is a lesson that should not be forgotten.