I'm glad to let you know that I've been modernized, and after receiving much advice, I've decided to move my blog to another platform.

You can find my stuff on www.actingpersonblog.wordpress.com and you can follow me on facebook www.facebook.com/actingpersonblog. I am writing this on June 20, and I don't know if the new blog and pictures is any help.

I'm trying to learn how to post the pictures that are worth 1,000 words. I put up Bp. Barron on Pope Francis' Amoris Laetitia which is very helpful  I'm sure he will have more to say. And I will have something to say after this. Thanks for putting up with the inconvenience for the switch. Fr. Bob

Barron: Amoris Laetitia

On a spring day about five years ago, when I was rector of Mundelein Seminary, Francis Cardinal George spoke to the assembled student body. He congratulated those proudly orthodox seminarians for their devotion to the dogmatic and moral truths proposed by the Church, but he also offered some pointed pastoral advice. He said that it is insufficient simply to drop the truth on people and then smugly walk away. Rather, he insisted, you must accompany those you have instructed, committing yourself to helping them integrate the truth that you have shared. I thought of this intervention by the late Cardinal often as I was reading Pope Francis’s apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia. If I might make bold to summarize a complex 264-page document, I would say that Pope Francis wants the truths regarding marriage, sexuality, and family to be unambiguously declared, but that he also wants the Church’s ministers to reach out in mercy and compassion to those who struggle to incarnate those truths in their lives. 

In regard to the moral objectivities of marriage, the Pope is bracingly clear. He unhesitatingly puts forward the Church’s understanding that authentic marriage is between a man and a woman, who have committed themselves to one another in permanent fidelity, expressing their mutual love and openness to children, and abiding as a sacrament of Christ’s love for his Church (52, 71). He bemoans any number of threats to this ideal, including moral relativism, a pervasive cultural narcissism, the ideology of self-invention, pornography, the “throwaway” society, etc. He explicitly calls to our attention the teaching of Pope Paul VI in Humanae Vitae regarding the essential connection between the unitive and the procreative dimensions of conjugal love (80). Moreover, he approvingly cites the consensus of the recent Synod on the Family that homosexual relationships cannot be considered even vaguely analogous to what the Church means by marriage (251). He is especially strong in his condemnation of ideologies that dictate that gender is merely a social construct and can be changed or manipulated according to our choice (56). Such moves are tantamount, he argues, to forgetting the right relationship between creature and Creator. Finally, any doubt regarding the Pope’s attitude toward the permanence of marriage is dispelled as clearly and directly as possible: “The indissolubility of marriage—‘what God has joined together, let no man put asunder’ (Mt 19:6) —should not be viewed as a ‘yoke’ imposed on humanity, but as a ‘gift’ granted to those who are joined in marriage...” (62).

In a particularly affecting section of the exhortation, Pope Francis interprets the famous hymn to love in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians (90-119). Following the great missionary Apostle, he argues that love is not primarily a feeling (94), but rather a commitment of the will to do some pretty definite and challenging things: to be patient, to bear with one another, to put away envy and rivalry, ceaselessly to hope. In the tones of grandfatherly pastor, Francis instructs couples entering into marriage that love, in this dense and demanding sense of the term, must be at the heart of their relationship. I frankly think that this portion of Amoris Laetitia should be required reading for those in pre-Cana other similar marriage preparation programs in the Catholic Church. Now Francis says much more regarding the beauty and integrity of marriage, but you get my point: there is no watering down or compromising of the ideal in this text.

However, the Pope also honestly admits that many, many people fall short of the ideal, failing fully to integrate all of the dimensions of what the Church means by matrimony. What is the proper attitude to them? Like Cardinal George, the Pope has a visceral reaction against a strategy of simple condemnation, for the Church, he says, is a field hospital, designed to care precisely for the wounded (292). Accordingly, he recommends two fundamental moves. First, we can recognize, even in irregular or objectively imperfect unions, certain positive elements that participate, as it were, in the fullness of married love. Thus for example, a couple living together without benefit of marriage might be marked by mutual fidelity, deep love, the presence of children, etc. Appealing to these positive marks, the Church might, according to a “law of gradualness,” move that couple toward authentic and fully-integrated matrimony (295). This is not to say that living together is permitted or in accord with the will of God; it is to say that the Church can perhaps find a more winsome way to move people in such a situation to conversion.

The second move—and here we come to what will undoubtedly be the most controverted part of the exhortation—is to employ the Church’s classical distinction between the objective quality of a moral act and the subjective responsibility that the moral agent bears for committing that act (302). The Pope observes that many people in civil marriages following upon a divorce find themselves in a nearly impossible bind. If their second marriage has proven faithful, life-giving, and fruitful, how can they simply walk out on it without in fact incurring more sin and producing more sadness? This is, of course, not to insinuate that their second marriage is not objectively disordered, but it is to say that the pressures, difficulties, and dilemmas might mitigate their culpability.  Here is how Pope Francis applies the distinction: “Hence it is can no longer simply be said that all those in any ‘irregular’ situation are living in a state of mortal sin and are deprived of sanctifying grace” (301). Could the Church’s minister, therefore, not help such people, in the privacy of the rectory parlor or the confessional, to discern their degree of moral responsibility? Once again, this is not to embrace a breezy “anything-goes” mentality, nor to deny that a civil marriage after a divorce is objectively irregular; it is to find, perhaps, for someone in great pain, a way forward.

Will Amoris Laetitia end all debate on these matters? Hardly. But it does indeed represent a deft and impressive balancing of the many and often contradictory interventions at the two Synods on the Family. As such, it will be of great service to many suffering souls who come to the Field Hospital.

The Ultimate Reality: Jesus Christ, and Therefore, The Epistemic Trump.

All authentic indicators point to Jesus Christ - God Man - as the ontological center of all that is.  Therefore, Christ is the Epistemic Trump and only key to authentic Knowledge. 1) Joseph Ratzinger: " Psalm 18... It begins like this: “In aeternum, Domine, verbum tuum constitutum est in caelo... firmasti terram, et permanet”. This refers to the solidity of the Word. It is solid, it is the true reality on which we must base our life. Let us remember the words of Jesus who continues the words of this Psalm: “Sky and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away”. Humanly speaking, the word, my human word, is almost nothing in reality, but a breath. As soon as it is pronounced, it disappears. It seems like nothing. But already the human word has incredible force. It is words that create history, it is words that form thoughts, the thoughts that create the word. It is the word that forms history, reality.       "Even more, the Word of God is the foundation of everything, it is the true reality. And to be realistic, we must rely upon this reality. We must change our notion that matter, solid things, things we can touch, is the most solid, the most certain reality. At the end of the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord speaks to us about the two possible foundations for building the house of one’s life: sand and rock. He who builds on sand only builds on visible and tangible things, on success, on career, on money. Apparently these are the true realities. But all this one day will vanish. We can see this now with the fall of two large banks: this money disappears, it is nothing. And thus all things, which seem to be the true realities we can count on, are only realities of a secondary order. Who builds his life on these realities, on matter, on success, on appearances, builds upon sand. Only the Word of God is the foundation of all reality, it is as stable as the heavens and more than the heavens, it is reality. Therefore, we must change our concept of realism. The realist is he who recognizes the Word of God, in this apparently weak reality, as the foundation of all things. Realist is he who builds his life on this foundation, which is permanent. Thus the first verses of the Psalm invite us to discover what reality is and how to find the foundation of our life, how to build life" (Keynote Address, Synod on the Word of God, October 6, 2008). 2) Robert Barron (commenting on Col. 1, 15): “In this Jesus, all things have come to be; he is the prototype of all finite existence, even of those great powers that transcend the world and govern human affiars. If we re tempted to understand his influence as only a thing of the past, we are corrected: 'in him all things hold together' v. 17).  Jesus is not only the one in whom things were created but also the one in whom they presently exist and through whom they inhere in one another. And if we are inclined to view the future as a dimension of creation untouched by Christ, we are set straight: ‘Through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross’(v. 20). Individuals, societies, cultures, animals, plants, planets and the stars – all will be drawn into an eschatological harmony through him. Mind you, Jesus is not merely the symbol of an intelligibility, coherence, and reconciliation  that can exist apart from him; rather, he is the active and indispensable means by which these realities come to be. This Jesus, in short, is the all-embracing, all-including, all reconciling Lord of whatever is to be found in the dimensions of time and space;" "The Priority of Christ" Brazos (2007) 134-135.  3) Romano Guardini: "The person of Jesus is unprecedented and therefore measurable by no already existing norm. Christian recognition consists of realizing that all things really began with Jesus Christ; that he is his own norm - and therefore ours - for he is Truth.    Christ's effect upon the world can be compared with nothing in its history save its own creation: 'In the beginning God created heaven, and earth.' What takes place in Christ is of the same order  as the original act of creation, though on a still higher level. For the beginning of the new creation is as far superior to the love which created the stars, plants, animals and men. That is what the words mean: 'I have come to cast fire upon the earth, and what will I but that it be kindled"' (Luke 12, 49). It is the fire of new becoming; not only 'truth' or 'love,' but the incandescence of new creation" ["The Lord" Henry Regnery (1954) 306-307] Barron's Conclusion: “Now what follows from these breathtaking descriptions is a centrally important epistemic claim: that Jesus cannot be measured by a criterion outside of himself or viewed from a perspective higher than himself.”[1] Blogger: That is, you cannot apply a metaphysic of “being” taken “from below” – i.e. from the experience of the created world [except the created human person going out of himself]. And this because there cannot be any created things without the Creator. The Being of God and the being of things have two totally different meanings save that they are (or can be). Barron writes: “He cannot be understood as one object among many or surveyed blandly by a disinterested observer. If such perspectives were possible, then he would not be the all-grounding Word or the criterion than which no more final can be thought. If we sought to know him in this way, we would not only come to incorrect conclusions but also involve ourselves in a sort of operational contradiction. To be consistent with these accounts, we must say that Jesus determines not only what there is to be known (since he is the organizing principle of finite being) but also how we are to know what is to known (since the mind itself is a creature, made and determined through him).                 “A Christ-illumined mind in search of Christ-determined forms seems to be the epistemology implicit in Colossians and the Johannine prologue. Further, as Bruce Marshall has argued, this primacy implies that the narratives concerning Jesus must, for Christians, be an epistemic trump, that is to say, an articulation of reality that must hold sway over and against all rival articulations, be they scientific, psychological, sociological, philosophical, or religious. To hold to Colossians and the prologue to John is to have a clear negative criterion concerning all claims to ultimate truth: whatever runs contrary to the basic claims entailed in the narratives concerning Jesus must certainly be false.”[2] [1]Ibid 135. [2]Ibid And now, Richard Rohr:  Dying and Living in Christ Thursday, April 7, 2016

Paul uses the phrase en Christo, in Christ, around seventy times. He's trying to describe this larger life in which we are participating. He speaks of belonging to Christ, of being possessed by Christ, captured by Christ, apprehended by Christ. He says, "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me" (Philippians 4:13). Paul speaks of being clothed by Christ. He tells us to put on Christ. He says he suffers with Christ, he's crucified with Christ, he dies with Christ, he's buried with Christ. He's raised up with Christ, he lives with Christ, and Paul says he's making up in his body the afflictions which still must be undergone by Christ. Paul writes, "All belongs to you, you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God" (see 1 Corinthians 3:21-23). He's grasping at mystical language for describing how we participate in this reality that is larger than our individual lives. Being "in Christ" will eventually lead us to join in the universal pattern of death and resurrection that Christ went through. This is the universal initiation experience, the transformative experience that all human beings go through whereby we come to know what's real. We must go into the death of the small self in order to discover the Big Self, the True Self. At the mystical level, all the world religions say this. In contemplation we're consciously choosing to let go of our identification with our mind and our identification with our life situation or our false self so that we can fall into the One True Life, which is bigger than each of us, which is moving into a different body, a different state, a different consciousness that Christians call Christ consciousness. For Paul it is his participation in Christ which gives him the courage to walk through each state: passion, death, and resurrection--all of which are brought to focus in the life of Jesus. Most people were told to love Jesus without being invited to love Christ. "The Christ" is the Big Picture of God's enfleshment in all of creation since the beginning of time (Colossians 1:15-20); Jesus is the distilled, personal enfleshment that brings this primal "anointing" of the material world to one concrete loving and loveable moment.

Dying To Self

Dying to Self Wednesday, April 6, 2016

In truth, we must change our very self-image rather than just be told some new things to see or do. To be a Christian is to objectively know that we share the same identity that Jesus enjoyed as both human and divine, which is what it means to "follow" him. In fact, I believe that this is the whole point of the Gospel and the Incarnation! (Read John 14 and 15 in their entirety, lest you think I am overstating my position; or study the early Fathers and Mothers of the Eastern Church, who understood this much more clearly than the Western Church.) This realization that Someone is living in us and through us is exactly how we plug into a much larger mind and heart beyond our own. Afterward, we know in a different way, although we have to keep relearning this truth over and over again (the point of daily prayer). But it demands a major dying of our own small self, our ego. Maybe that's why so few go there. As Jesus clearly puts it, one "self" must die for another "Self" to be born. That message is quite explicit in all four Gospels (Matthew16:25; Mark 8:35; Luke 9:24; John 12:24). In the practical order, this mostly feels like taking my "self," my ego--both its hurts and its importance, which are largely manufactured by my mind--less seriously day by day. Growth in salvation is growth in liberation from the separate self and falling into ourfirst nature, which is our "foundational holiness" or original, ontological union with God. God has always--and only--been in union with an obviously imperfect humanity. That is the essential character of divine mercy. Salvation is always pure and total gift from God's side. Living and thinking autonomously, separately, or cut off from such a Vine or Source is what Paul means by being foolish and unspiritual. Living in union is wisdom. One must fully recognize that mystics like Francis and Clare were speaking from this place of conscious, chosen, and loving union with God, and such union was realized by surrenderingto it and not by any achieving of it. Surrender to Another, participation in Another, and divine union are finally the same thing. Once we are aware that we participate in this union, we look out at reality from a much fuller Reality that now has eyes beyond and larger than our own. This is what it means to "live in Christ" (en Christo), to pray "through Christ," or to do anything "in the name of God," phrases with which Christians are quite familiar. Rohr

Deals Make Contracts; Covenants Engender Identities

How Covenants Make Us

David Brooks APRIL 5, 2016

When you think about it, there are four big forces coursing through modern societies. Global migration is leading to demographic diversity. Economic globalization is creating wider opportunity but also inequality. The Internet is giving people more choices over what to buy and pay attention to. A culture of autonomy valorizes individual choice and self-determination.

All of these forces have liberated the individual, or at least well-educated individuals, but they have been bad for national cohesion and the social fabric. Income inequality challenges economic cohesion as the classes divide. Demographic diversity challenges cultural cohesion as different ethnic groups rub against one another. The emphasis on individual choice challenges community cohesion and settled social bonds.

The weakening of the social fabric has created a range of problems. Alienated young men join ISIS so they can have a sense of belonging. Isolated teenagers shoot up schools. Many people grow up in fragmented, disorganized neighborhoods. Political polarization grows because people often don’t interact with those on the other side. Racial animosity stubbornly persists.

Odder still, people are often plagued by a sense of powerlessness, a loss of efficacy. The liberation of the individual was supposed to lead to mass empowerment. But it turns out that people can effectively pursue their goals only when they know who they are — when they have firm identities.

Strong identities can come only when people are embedded in a rich social fabric. They can come only when we have defined social roles — father, plumber, Little League coach. They can come only when we are seen and admired by our neighbors and loved ones in a certain way. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds.”

You take away a rich social fabric and what you are left with is people who are uncertain about who they really are. It’s hard to live daringly when your very foundation is fluid and at risk.

We’re not going to roll back the four big forces coursing through modern societies, so the question is how to reweave the social fabric in the face of them. In a globalizing, diversifying world, how do we preserve individual freedom while strengthening social solidarity?

In her new book “Commonwealth and Covenant,” Marcia Pally of N.Y.U. and Fordham offers a clarifying concept. What we want, she suggests, is “separability amid situatedness.” We want to go off and create and explore and experiment with new ways of thinking and living. But we also want to be situated — embedded in loving families and enveloping communities, thriving within a healthy cultural infrastructure that provides us with values and goals.

Creating situatedness requires a different way of thinking. When we go out and do a deal, we make a contract. When we are situated within something it is because we have made a covenant. A contract protects interests, Pally notes, but a covenant protects relationships. A covenant exists between people who understand they are part of one another. It involves a vow to serve the relationship that is sealed by love: Where you go, I will go. Where you stay, I will stay. Your people shall be my people.

People in a contract provide one another services, but people in a covenant delight in offering gifts. Out of love of country, soldiers offer the gift of their service. Out of love of their craft, teachers offer students the gift of their attention.

The social fabric is thus rewoven in a romantic frame of mind. During another period of national fragmentation, Abraham Lincoln aroused a refreshed love of country. He played upon the mystic chords of memory and used the Declaration of Independence as a unifying scripture and guide.

These days the social fabric will be repaired by hundreds of millions of people making local covenants — widening their circles of attachment across income, social and racial divides. But it will probably also require leaders drawing upon American history to revive patriotism. They’ll tell a story that includes the old themes. That we’re a universal nation, the guarantor of stability and world order. But it will transcend the old narrative and offer an updated love of America.

In an interview with Bill Maher last month, Senator Cory Booker nicely defined patriotism by contrasting it with mere tolerance. Tolerance, he said, means, “I’m going to stomach your right to be different, but if you disappear off the face of the earth I’m no worse off.” Patriotism, on the other hand, means “love of country, which necessitates love of each other, that we have to be a nation that aspires for love, which recognizes that you have worth and dignity and I need you. You are part of my whole, part of the promise of this country.”

That emotion is what it means to be situated in a shared national life.

Feast of the Annunciation – April 4, 2016 (because Good Friday and the Annunciation of Our Lady fell on the same day: the date of the Incarnation of God and the date of His death].

1)      Our Lady is the first Christian believer. What she has done is the meaning of Christian faith. The absence of sin in her made her capable of saying “Yes” to the invitation to receive God in her, and to give Him a complete humanity. All the humanity of Christ [soul, body, faculties of intellect and will, etc.] are all from her. Not that she creates the soul of Christ, but the egg from her and therefore all the DNA must have an organizing principle reasoned to by the Greeks, and that must be present for the material of the body to be body.  The soul, however, is not the Person. The soul is created; the Person is uncreated. The gift that she was asked to give was her entire humanity. Any demurral in her faith would have meant a lack in Christ’s humanity, which would have jeopardized a full redemption.

2)      Consider that Christ wants to be incarnated  again  - and over and over again – throughout history in each one of us. If you make the same gift of yourself as she, and you therefore become Ipse Christus, Creation has achieved the fullness of its meaning.

3)      This act of faith is not ideological but anthropological. Faith is not a book you can put in your pocket. It is a living act of divinization whereby you become what you were meant to be: God as Son of God, “another Christ.” Faith as obedience set the Jews apart as “the People of God.” It creates a culture, a people. Sokolowski writes:

“The Jewish religious understanding was centered on Yahweh, who was taken to be different from any of the gods worshipped by other nations. The understanding, however, did not concern only God; it also concerned God as having elected Israel and as having made a Covenant with them, a Covenant that raised them to responsibility and obligation and not just to privilege. The understanding was about God in his actions, about the people toward whom he acts, and about the world as a setting for these actions. In all this the Jews sharply distinguished themselves and their God from other people and their gods; indeed, the myriad distinctions enjoined by the Torah – between different kinds of animals and different kinds of food, different periods of time, different forms of clothing and utensils – may have been not just ceremonial rubrics or practices useful for preserving health and public order; they may have served as a training for the Jews in the very habit of seeing that this is not that, so that they would be all the more able to realize that ‘they, the other nations, are not ‘us,’ because their ‘gods’ are not Yahweh…

                NOW, “Within this Jewish tradition, which had already distinguished itself so sharply from the others, another distinction was drawn when Christ and his Church appeared. The new distinction, between the New Covenant and the Old, was not like that between Israel and the Gentiles. The God of the New Covenant is the same as that of the Old. The Father whom Jesus addresses is not somehow the truth of which Yahweh is only the shadow: the Father by whom and from whom Jesus was sent is Yahweh, And yet a slight new distinction is drawn between the God  who could not eer become part of this creation – it would be degrading to hm and blasphemous to make him part of what he created – and the God who became incarnate. It isnot just that we must now distinguish between the Father and the Son, but that we must now distinguish a deeper sense of the divinity, a deeper sense of the Godhead. It is not another and different God, as Yahweh is other than and different from the ‘elohim, from Baal and Moloch and Zeus, but it is the same God newly understood. No new proper name is revealed, but Yahweh is now called Father in a distinctive way; he is called Father instead of being called Yahweh. There is a change in the way the transcendence of God is understood. Not only does God create the world and sustain it, not only does God act toward his people, but he also enters into his creation, without diminishing his divinity. He is so transcendent that even this will not compromise the God-head. The Old Covenant educated Israel in the transcendence of God by preventing any embodiment of the divinity, even any image of it. This pedagogy was necessary to distinguish Yahweh from the gods of the Gentiles. But in Christ the New Covenant shows that God could become incarnate, that he could humble himself and take on the form of fallen man and become obedient even to death on the cross, and this humiliation, rather than dishonoring the divine majesty, showed forth its glory in a way that no other act of power could have done.[1]

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[1] Robert Sokolowski, “Eucharistic Presence,” CUA (1994) 144-147.