John Paul II - Third Anniversary of Death - 4/2/05

Totus Tuus

“At Peace”

“World Stops to Honor Pope”

“Amen” Was Last Word of Man Who ‘Showed Us How to Live’[1]

[4,000,000 View Body]

“Do not let hope die! Stake your lives on it!
We are not the sum of our weaknesses and failures;
We are the sum of the Father’s love for us and our real capacity to become the image of his Son.”[2]

Benedict XVI on John Paul II

a) March 30, 2008

Dear brothers and sisters:

During the Jubilee Year 2000, the dear Servant of God John Paul II established that in the whole Church the Sunday after Easter, besides being the Sunday "in albis" would be designated Divine Mercy Sunday. He did this together with the canonization of Faustina Kowalska, a humble Polish woman religious, who was born in 1905 and died in 1938, a zealous messenger of merciful Jesus.

Mercy is in reality the central nucleus of the Gospel message; it is the very name of God, the face with which he has revealed himself in the old covenant and fully in Jesus Christ, the incarnation of creative and redeeming love. This merciful love also illumines the face of the Church, and is manifested, both by way of the sacraments, in particular that of reconciliation, and with works of communitarian and individual charity.

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

Like Sister Faustina, John Paul II became in turn an apostle of divine mercy. On the night of that unforgettable Saturday, April 2, 2005, when he closed his eyes to this world, precisely the vigil of the Second Sunday of Easter was celebrated, and many observed the unique coincidence, which brought together a Marian dimension -- the first Saturday of the month -- and that of divine mercy.

In fact, his long and multifaceted pontificate finds here its central nucleus; all of his mission at the service of the truth about God, about man and peace in the world is summarized in this proclamation, as he himself said in Krakow-Lagiewniki in 2002, in inaugurating the great Shrine of Divine Mercy, "Apart from the mercy of God there is no other source of hope for mankind." His message, like that of St. Faustina, presents the face of Christ, supreme revelation of the mercy of God. To contemplate constantly this face: This is the inheritance that he has left us, which we welcome with joy and make our own.

There will be special reflection about divine mercy in the coming days, due to the World Apostolic Congress on Divine Mercy, which will take place in Rome and will be inaugurated with the holy Mass, which, God willing, I will preside over in the morning of Wednesday, April 2, on the third anniversary of the death of the Servant of God John Paul II.

b) October 16, 2005: Holy Father, finally a very personal question: Do you continue to feel the presence of John Paul II, and if you do, in what way?

Benedict XVI: “Certainly. I'll begin by answering the first part of your question. Initially, in speaking of the Pope\'s legacy, I forgot to mention the many documents that he left us -- 14 encyclicals, many pastoral letters, and others. All this is a rich patrimony that has not yet been assimilated by the Church. My personal mission is not to issue many new documents, but to ensure that his documents are assimilated, because they are a rich treasure, they are the authentic interpretation of Vatican II. We know that the Pope was a man of the Council, that he internalized the spirit and the word of the Council. Through these writings he helps us understand what the Council wanted and what it didn’t. This helps us to be the Church of our times and of the future. Now for the second part of your question. The Pope is always close to me through his writings: I hear him and I see him speaking, so I can keep up a continuous dialogue with him. He is always speaking to me through his writings. I even know the origin of some of the texts. I can remember the discussions we had about some of them. So I can continue my conversations with the Holy Father. This nearness to him isn't limited to words and texts, because behind the texts I hear the Pope himself. A man who goes to the Lord doesn’t disappear: I believe that someone who goes to the Lord comes even closer to us and I feel he is close to me and that I am close to the Lord. I am near the Pope and now he helps me to be near the Lord and I try to enter this atmosphere of prayer, of love for our Lord, for Our Lady and I entrust myself to his prayers. So there is a permanent dialogue and we're close to each other in a new way, in a very deep way.”

John Paul II

· First words: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Mt. 16, 16). “Be not afraid!”

Meaning: John Paul II was not Karol Wojtyla. He was Peter (Rock) naming Jesus Christ as “Cornerstone.”

· 3/4/79: Redemptor Hominis #8 citing Gaudium et Spes #22: Jesus Christ is the meaning of man (not an exception to man): “Christ, the Redeemer of the world, is the one who penetrated in a unique, unrepeatable way into the mystery of man and entered his ‘heart.’ Rightly therefore does the Second Vatican Council teach: ‘The truth is that only in the mystery of the Incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. For Adam, the first man, was a type of him who was to come (Rom. 5, 14), Christ the Lord. Christ, the new Adam, in the very revelation of the mystery of the Father and of His love, fully reveals man to himself and brings to light his most high calling.”

· 6/2/79: Warsaw: “‘Christ cannot be kept out of the history of man in any part of the globe, at any longitude or latitude of geography. The exclusion of Christ from the history of man is an act against man. Without Christ it is impossible to understand the history of Poland, especially the history of the people who have passed or are passing through this land…’ Even those who ‘appeared to be at a distance, outside the Church,’ those who ‘doubted or opposed,’ lived within the Christian context of Polish history and culture. Anyone who tried to deny this or to uproot it damaged the Polish nation. For Poland and its history – ‘from Stanislaw in Skalka to Maximilian Kolbe at Oswiecim’ – could not be understood without ‘reference to Jesus Christ. That was why he had come to Poland: to reaffirm that ‘Christ does not cease to teach the great cause of man,’ for Christ was ‘an ever-open book on man, his dignity, and his rights…’ Today, in Victory Square, he and his countrymen were asking, in the supreme prayer of the Mass, ‘that Christ will not cease to be for us an open book of the life for the future, for our Polish future…. ‘(T)here can be no just Europe without the independence of Poland marked on its map!’ Polish soldiers had fallen on numerous battlefields ‘for our freedom and yours.’ Was history thus absurd? No. For that spirit of sacrifice was emblematic of ‘every seed that falls into the earth and dies and thus bears fruit. It may be the seed of the blood of a soldier shed on the battlefield, or the sacrifice of martyrdom in concentration camps or in prisons. It may be the seed of hard daily toil… in the fields, the workshop, the mine, the foundries, and the factories. It may be the seed of the love of parents who do not refuse to give life to a new human being and undertake the whole task of bringing him up. It may be the seed of creative work in the universities, the higher institutes, the libraries and the places where the national culture is built. It may be the seed of prayer, of service of the sick, the suffering and abandoned – “all of that of which Poland is made.”

“All of that, he concluded, was in the hands of the Mother of God – ‘at the foot of the cross on Calvary and in the Upper Room of Pentecost.’ All of Poland’s suffering and triumph; all of the history of the peoples who had lived on this land, ‘including those who died in their hundreds of thousands within the walls of the Warsaw ghetto;’ all that was what he – ‘a son of this land… who am also Pope John Paul II’ – offered to God in this Eucharistic sacrifice.

…And I cry from all the depths of this millennium, I cry on the vigil of Pentecost:
‘Let your Spirit descend.
Let your Spirit descend,
And renew the face of the earth,
The face of this land.
Amen.

Weigel continues: “Throughout the Pope’s sermon, the crowd responded rhythmically: ‘We want God, we want God, we want God in the family, we want God in the schools, we want God in books, we want God, we want God…’ Seven hours after he had arrived, a crucial truth had been clarified by a million Poles’ response to John Paul’s evangelism. Poland was not a communist country; Poland was a Catholic nation saddled with a communist state.
“Poland’s ‘second baptism,’ which would change the history of the twentieth century, had begun.”[3]

· 1979: Trip to the UN (+1995)

· 5/13/81: Shot on the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima

· November 28, 1982: Opus Dei erected as a Personal Prelature: “Ut Sit.”

· 1983: Josef Ratzinger made head of Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Showdown with the Sandinistas

· 3/25/84: Consecration of the world (Russia) – with the entire Church – to the Immaculate Heart of Mary

· 1987-1988: Marian Year, “Mother of the Redeemer” “Christifideles Laici.”

· 1989: Economic and political Marxism falls.

· 1992: Publication of the “Catechism of the Catholic Church:” the new logic of the Faith in terms of the dignity of the human person.

· 14 encyclicals centered on the truth of the human person understood Christologically, i.e. as self-gift.

· 2000: trip to the Holy Land (and Greece)

· 2001: publication of “Novo Millennio Ineunte” as “blueprint” of the third millennium to “experience” the Person of Jesus Christ.

· 2003: Second Encyclical on Our Lady – Luminous Mysteries.

· 2004: Encyclical on the Eucharist: “Mane Nobiscum Domine.”

· Last published non-Magisterial work: “Memory and Identity:”

Comment of Benedict XVI: “In his last book "Memory and Identity" (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2005), he has left us an interpretation of suffering that is not a theological or philosophical theory but a fruit that matured on his personal path of suffering which he walked, sustained by faith in the Crucified Lord. This interpretation, which he worked out in faith and which gave meaning to his suffering lived in communion with that of the Lord, spoke through his silent pain, transforming it into an important message.

Both at the beginning and once again at the end of the book mentioned, the Pope shows that he is deeply touched by the spectacle of the power of evil, which we dramatically experienced in the century that has just ended. He says in his text: "The evil... was not a small-scale evil.... It was an evil of gigantic proportions, an evil which availed itself of state structures in order to accomplish its wicked work, an evil built up into a system" (p. 189).

Might evil be invincible? Is it the ultimate power of history? Because of the experience of evil, for Pope Wojty³a the question of redemption became the essential and central question of his life and thought as a Christian. Is there a limit against which the power of evil shatters? "Yes, there is", the Pope replies in this book of his, as well as in his Encyclical on redemption.

The power that imposes a limit on evil is Divine Mercy. Violence, the display of evil, is opposed in history - as "the totally other" of God, God's own power - by Divine Mercy. The Lamb is stronger than the dragon, we could say together with the Book of Revelation.

At the end of the book, in a retrospective review of the attack of 13 May 1981 and on the basis of the experience of his journey with God and with the world, John Paul II further deepened this answer.

What limits the force of evil, the power, in brief, which overcomes it - this is how he says it - is God's suffering, the suffering of the Son of God on the Cross: "The suffering of the Crucified God is not just one form of suffering alongside others.... In sacrificing himself for us all, Christ gave a new meaning to suffering, opening up a new dimension, a new order: the order of love.... The passion of Christ on the Cross gave a radically new meaning to suffering, transforming it from within.... It is this suffering which burns and consumes evil with the flame of love.... All human suffering, all pain, all infirmity contains within itself a promise of salvation... evil is present in the world partly so as to awaken our love, our self-gift in generous and disinterested service to those visited by suffering.... Christ has redeemed the world: "By his wounds we are healed' (Is 53: 5)" (p. 189, ff.).

All this is not merely learned theology, but the expression of a faith lived and matured through suffering. Of course, we must do all we can to alleviate suffering and prevent the injustice that causes the suffering of the innocent. However, we must also do the utmost to ensure that people can discover the meaning of suffering and are thus able to accept their own suffering and to unite it with the suffering of Christ.

In this way, it is merged with redemptive love and consequently becomes a force against the evil in the world.

The response across the world to the Pope's death was an overwhelming demonstration of gratitude for the fact that in his ministry he offered himself totally to God for the world; a thanksgiving for the fact that in a world full of hatred and violence he taught anew love and suffering in the service of others; he showed us, so to speak, in the flesh, the Redeemer, redemption, and gave us the certainty that indeed, evil does not have the last word in the world.”


John Paul II’s Suffering As Perceived At Lourdes (August 2004): The Itinerant Goodbye in the eyes of John Allen, Jr.:

“All papal trips are equal, but some are more equal than others. That is, all John Paul's travels may be motivated by the same pastoral and apostolic impulses, but some have a special historical significance. The pope at the Wailing Wall, for example, or on the Acropolis in Athens, were electric moments. On the other hand, if someone were to ask me now about the trip to Azerbaijan, I'd be a bit stumped, and I was there.

I suspect that John Paul's Aug. 14-15 visit to Lourdes, the 104th foreign trip of his papacy, belongs on the A-list. What we saw in Lourdes, I believe, was the apotheosis of his transformation from "supreme pastor of the Catholic church," to quote the formula in the Code of Canon Law, into a living symbol of human suffering, in effect, an icon of Christ on the cross.
Lourdes is Christianity's premier healing shrine, a place where sick people come to find camaraderie and hope. Here "the sick are royalty." The streets have red strips signifying paths restricted to the sick, and roving bands of young volunteers shoo others out of the way with gusto. Volunteers port the sick around in a special wheeled cart that looks something like a rickshaw. It's nothing to walk into a restaurant where half the patrons are in wheelchairs. This is a place where pilgrims arrive in conveyances such as the "Jumbulance," a "jumbo ambulance" with 16 seats down one side and eight beds down the other for people too seriously ill to fly. The Jumbulance carries nebulizers, oxygen concentrators and electric feeding pumps, along with a medical staff.

"In Lourdes, it's the sick people who are real," said Redemptorist Fr. Terry Creech, who hears confessions in Lourdes four months out of every year. "It's the rest of us who are unreal."
As I walked through the crowd of 200,000 people gathered for John Paul's Sunday morning Mass on Aug. 15, I saw tens of thousands of people using canes and walkers and in wheelchairs. When the ailing, elderly John Paul II appeared, declaring himself a "sick man among the sick," many in the crowd recognized one of their own.

"My mother had Parkinson's disease for 30 years, and I was with her," said Irish pilgrim Lyla Shakespeare. "When I looked at the pope today, all I could see was my mother." But, she added, "I also saw Christ."

The pope's weakness was clear throughout the two-day trip.

When he arrived at the Grotto of Massabielle on Saturday, to pray in the spot where the Virgin Mary is believed to have appeared to a 14-year-old French peasant girl named Bernadette Soubirous in 1858, he was helped to his knees. Within moments, the pope slumped, prompting his private secretary, Archbishop Stanislaw Dzwisz, to come to his aid. John Paul finished the brief devotion, but at his next public appearance French Cardinal Roger Etchegaray read the pope's speech.

(Believe it or not, I spent the better part of an hour with colleagues from broadcast and wire services debating whether or not this event could be described as a "collapse.")

During his homily at a Mass for some 200,000 pilgrims Sunday morning, John Paul struggled again. He could be heard muttering "Jesus and Mary" under his breath in Polish, and once mumbled "help me" to no one in particular. Later John Paul seemed confused during the Eucharistic prayers, and had to be reminded to elevate the host at the consecration. At another point, the pope muttered, "I have to finish," almost as if to will himself forward.

In a sense we've seen all this before, as John Paul's physical decline has been playing out on the public stage for years. Three things, however, were special about Lourdes.

First, papal handlers are no longer bothering to deny or minimize the extent of the pope's physical difficulties. After John Paul's Saturday slump, for example, spokesperson Joaquin Navarro-Valls shrugged it off: "It's normal. We have to get used to it."

Second, the trip seemed to ratify a theological reading of John Paul's suffering as iconic of Christ's. French Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger put it this way: "The pope, in his weakness, is living more than ever the role assigned to him of being the Vicar of Christ on earth, participating in the suffering of our Redeemer. Many times we have the idea that the head of the church is like a super-manager of a great international company, a man of action who makes decisions and is judged on the basis of his effectiveness. But for believers the most effective action, the mystery of salvation, happens when Christ is on the cross and can't do or decide anything other than to accept the will of the Father."

Third, the trip put into full public view the unique bond John Paul now has with the sick and suffering of the world. For example, French-Canadian layman Jean Vanier was at the pope's side on Saturday afternoon and evening, helping to lead a rosary procession. Vanier is the founder of the L'Arche community that works with severely disabled people, and at the end of the procession, John Paul embraced him and gave Vanier the rosary he had been praying, as if to say: "I'm part of your community now." That spirit was ubiquitous during the two-day trip.

For all the ink that's been spilled about John Paul the politician or John Paul the globetrotter, in the long run it may be this period of his papacy, John Paul the invalid, that leaves the deepest impression. We may find that 50 years from now, it's not his role in the collapse of Communism that we remember, but these years of decline and public suffering. John Paul has not allowed himself to be shunted off to a home, the normal fate of elderly and infirm people. He has refused to spare us the embarrassment of his saliva and his slurred, unsteady speech. He makes us watch him slump, and wince, and become confused, and thereby forces us to confront the reality of decline and death - our own and that of our loved ones.”

Joaquin Navarro-Valls issued a press statement late April 2 regarding the pope’s death: “The Holy Father died at 9, 37 p.m. this evening in his private apartment. At 8 p.m. the celebration of Mass for Divine Mercy Sunday bagan in the Holy Father’s room, presided by Archbishop Stanislaw Dziwisz with …

“During the course of the Mass, the viaticum was administered to the Holy Fahter and, once again, the sacrament of anointing of the sick.

“The Holy Father’s final hours were marked by the uninterrupted prayer of all those who were assisting him in his pious death, and by the choral participation in prayer of the thousands of faithful who for many hours had been gathered in St. Peter’s Square.”




[1] New York Post, April 4, 2005, 2.
[2] John Paul II, Toronto, WYD 2002.
[3] George Weigel, “Witness to Hope,” Cliff Street Books (1999) 293-294.

Priestly Soul and Correct Exegesis

The problem of the exegesis that consists in either the extrinsicism of abstractive-conceptual philosophy, or the historicism of contingent facts, finds it resolution in the consciousness of experiencing the Person of Christ as an intelligible absolute taken from historical facticity. And this resolution depends on the meaning of Catholic priesthood.

What is emerging clearer and clearer for me is the connection between the exercise of the so-called “priestly soul” and the way exegesis is performed. In its simplest form, Benedict XVI’s presentation of the recognition of the Person of Jesus Christ by the apostle Bartholomew (Nathanael) is most revealing. It works on two levels of experience: sense (hearing) and coming and seeing (self-giving).

Having only hearsay of Christ from his fellow apostle Philip, Bartholomew (Nathanael) asks if anything good can come from Nazareth. Philip replies: “Come and see.” When Jesus sees Nathanael approaching, he exclaims: ‘Here is a true Israelite. There is no duplicity in him’ (John 1:47). It was praise that recalls the text of a psalm: ‘Happy those to whom the Lord imputes no guilt, in whose spirit is no deceit’ (Psalm 32:2), but which arouses Nathanael's curiosity, who, surprised, replies: ‘How do you know me?’ (John 1:48a). Jesus' answer at first is not understood. He said to him: ‘Before Philip called you, I saw you under the fig tree’ (John 1:48b). In John's narration there then comes the confession of faith that Nathanael professes at the end in a limpid way: "Rabbi, you are the Son of God; you are the King of Israel!" (John 1:49). Joseph Ratzinger comments: “Although it does not reach the intensity of Thomas' confession with which John's Gospel ends: "My Lord and my God!" (John 20:28), Nathanael's confession has the function to open the terrain to the fourth Gospel. In the latter a first and important step is taken on the path of adherence to Christ. Nathanael's words present a double and complementary aspect of Jesus' identity: He is recognized both by his special relationship with God the Father, of whom he is the only-begotten Son, as well as by his relationship with the people of Israel, of whom he is called King, an attribution proper of the awaited Messiah. We must never lose sight of either of these two elements, since if we only proclaim the heavenly dimension of Jesus we run the risk of making him an ethereal and evanescent being, while if we only recognize his concrete role in history, we run the risk of neglecting his divine dimension, which is his proper description.”[1]

These two levels of experience – the one sensible and historical, the other personal, subjective and ontological as “going and seeing” (as in going out of one’s comfort zone and habitual conceptual furnishings) yields a full penetration into the reality of the Absolute of the divine Person present in the historical figure before one Who is the man Jesus of Nazareth. In a word, in order to find Jesus the Christ, the Son of the living God, one must go out of self in order to study the texts of Scripture and live the life of the liturgy for 24 hours of daily ordinary work.

Ratzinger connects this double way of knowing that alone is adequate to the figure of the God-man to the two dimensions of Catholic priesthood. The one dimension is the “social-functional view (that) defines priesthood in terms of ‘service,’”[2] a service that is principally the ministry of the Word (“for this… I have come” [Mk. 1, 39]). The other, “the sacramental-ontological view, without denying the aspect of service, sees priesthood as rooted in the minister’s being itself, and this being, in turn, as determined through a gift bestowed by the Lord through the Church, known as a sacrament.”[3]

The major difficulty with these two notions of Catholic priesthood is not that they are irreconcilable, but that secularization and the cultural loss of the sacred have weakened the understanding of the sacramental-ontological view and its exercise as self-gift. That once weakened, the experience and the consciousness that accrues to it all but disappear and the noetic field is co-opted and overgrown with the hegemony of the conceptual, the analytic, the objectified, the reduced, the ideological and the rationalistic, in a word, the positivism of the bad Modernism that was condemned by Pius X. The objective and the subjective, the contemplative and the conceptual, are now at odds with each other instead of being complementary. As Ratzinger says it: “Such views derived from modern exegesis somehow presuppose hermeneutical decisions developed in the period of the Protestant Reformation and endow them with new force. A basic key in the new reading of Scripture which has been born in these times [secularized] must be found in the opposition between Law and Gospel which was deduced from Pauline theology. The Law which has been abolished is opposed to the Gospel. Priesthood and cult (sacrifice) would seem to belong to the category of law: the Gospel is said to express itself in the figure of the prophets and in the preaching of the Word. For this reason the categories law-priesthood-sacrifice-cult acquire a negative connotation because they lead man to the letter that kills and to works which cannot justify. The essence of the Gospel, on the contrary, would consist in the hearing of the Word and in faith, which alone can render a man just. Thus the figures of the prophet and of preaching are alone congruent with the Gospel, while priesthood would pertain to the Law and should be thoroughly excluded from the Church of the New Testament.”[4]

If I am portraying the situation correctly, the experiential way of living the one priesthood of Christ that is radical self-giving for all the baptized and ordained, is the hermeneutical key to the comprehension of Scripture as the “result” of Revelation – the Person of Christ being the Revelation itself. That is, Scripture must not only be preached, read and studied, but also experienced in the self-gift of prayer.

How do Word and Cult fit together?

Ratzinger’s major insight that runs through all his works is that Christ as Person-Gift is His own Word and Act. He says: “Jesus does not convey a knowledge that is independent form his own person, as any teacher or storyteller would do. He is something different from, and more than, a Rabbi. As his preaching unfolds, it becomes ever clearer that his parables refer to himself, that the ‘Kingdom’ and his person belong together, that the Kingdom comes in his person. The decision that he demands is a decision about how one stands toward him, as with Peter, who said, ‘You are the Christ’ (Mark 8, 29). Ultimately, the message of his preaching about the Kingdom of God turns out to be quite clearly Jesus’ own Paschal mystery, his destiny of death and resurrection…. We can now understand that Jesus’ preaching can be called ‘sacramental’ in a deeper sense than we could have seen before. His word contains in itself the reality of the incarnation and the theme of the Cross and the Resurrection. It is ‘deed/word’ in this very profound sense, instructing the Church in the mutual dependence of preaching and the Eucharist, and in the mutual dependence, as well, of preaching and an authentic, living witness.”[5]

The preaching of the Word of God – evangelization - is the first mission of priesthood. But since that Word is the Person of Christ Himself as self-gift, preaching itself must be self-gift. But self-gift is the sacrifice of the Cross. In a word, they are one and the same.

Conversely, to penetrate to the Person of Christ in Sacred Scripture, the priesthood of self-gift that is total dedication to the critical-historical method which works on the level of the sensible and the analytic, must be complemented by the prayer life of contemplative self-giving – which is the very Person of Christ as relation to the Father, and to us.




It was not evident from the beginning that priesthood was sacramental-ontological. It was understood to be functional.
The reason for this is the experiential nature of Catholic priesthood. Non-Catholic ministry which would be functional and not ontological would not intrinsically experience the Person of Christ from within. It would deal with Him on the level of sense experience and description.


[1] Benedict XVI, September 6, 2006.
[2] J. Ratzinger, “The Ministry and Life of Priests,” October 24, 1995. A lecture given during the International Symposium organized by the Vatican Congregation for the Clergy on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the promulgation of Presbyterorum Ordinis.
[3] J. Ratzinger, “The Ministry and Life of Priests,” ibid.
[4] Ibid
[5] Ibid.

Dazzled by the Light of the Resurrection.... or Bored?

The Office of Readings for Monday after Easter [554-555]:


“The Lord, though he was God, became man. HE suffered for the sake of those who suffer, he was bound for those in bonds, condemned for the guilty, buried for those who lie in the grave; but he rose from the dead, and cried aloud: Who will content with me? Let him confront me. I have freed the condemned, brought the dead back to life, raised men from their braves. Who has anything to say against me? I, he said, am the Christ; I have destroyed death, triumphed over the enemy, trampled hell underfoot, bound the strong one, and taken men up to the heights of heaven: I am the Christ.

“Come, then, all you nations of men, receive forgiveness for the sins that defile you. I am your forgiveness. I am the Passover that brings salvation. I am the lamb who was immolated for you; I am your ransom, your life, your resurrection, your light, I am your salvation and your king. I will bring you to the heights of heaven. With my own right hand I will raise you up, and I wil show you the eternal Father” (From an Easter Homily by Melito of Sardis, bishop)


1) Is there any real interior life out there? This was a question asked by a priest who heard many off-the-street confessions in the middle of New York City. Another priest responded that probably the two main areas of sin that erupts on the surface are impurity and anger, but quickly argued “How could it be otherwise?” being that the great bulk of the Catholic population, both lay and clerical, have not been evangelized concerning heroic sanctity as the reason for living.

2) Concomitant with this silence is an aggressive disease that Archbishop Chaput, speaking recently in Australia, called “vampiric” in its aggrandizing the human ego and withering the capacity for heroic greatness in self-giving: consumerism. He said:

“The fifth sign of our times is that the society we live in breeds a practical, workaday atheism... There's a hole now in the modern heart. It's a void left by the absence of God. People fill that hole with all the sights and sounds and trinkets of our consumer culture. James' character calls these things "my consolations." But there's something vampiric about the way consumerism works to "console" us for the loss of God. It keeps us absorbed in the unimportant while it drains out the life of the soul.

“The rise of consumerist culture was one of the great worries of John Paul II in the later years of his pontificate. In his 1999 World Day of Peace message. John Paul writes: "The history of our time has shown in a tragic way the danger which results from forgetting the truth about the human person. Before our eyes, we have seen the results of ideologies such as Marxism, Nazism, and Fascism. . . . No less pernicious, though not always obvious, are the effects of materialistic consumerism . . ." Those are strong words. John Paul argued that the habit of consumerist greed is "no less pernicious" in its effects than Nazism, Marxism, and Fascism. The effects are as deadly and as destructive as the murderous systems of the 20th century-ideologies that gave us the Holocaust, the gulag and the killing fields of Cambodia. John Paul finishes this quotation with a comment on what materialist greed entails. With this ideology, he says, there is an "exaltation of the individual and the selfish satisfaction of personal aspirations become the ultimate goal of life." This habit of consumerism forms the mind of the people we [priests] are called to serve. It's so damaging because it makes people prisoners of their selfishness. It invites them to create their own chains, to be willing addicts to their appetites and passions. It keeps them away from the only questions that matter: why we're here, and where we're heading.”

3) Concomitant with that is the reduction of evangelical Jesus, the Christ, the Son of the living God, to the mere Jesus of Nazareth as “bland philanthropist.”[1] Cardinal Ratzinger notes: “Today in broad circles, even among believers, an image has prevailed of a Jesus who demands nothing, never scolds, who accepts everyone and everything, who no longer does anything but affirm us… The presence of the figure of Jesus itself is becoming diminished – also with regard to the on-Christian contemporaries who surround us; the figure is transformed from the ‘Lord’ (a word that is avoided) into a man who is nothing more than the advocate of all men. The Jesus of the Gospels is quite different, demanding, bold. The Jesus who makes everything okay for everyone is a phantom, a dream, not a real figure.”[2]

Boredom: This state of affairs that permits the ascendancy of “acedia” that is at the core of all sin, since at its root it is the failure of self-mastery of the self over self. It is sadness. “According to the classical theology of the Church, acedia is a kind of sadness… - more specifically, a sadness in view of the divine good in man. This sadness because of the God-given ennobling of human nature causes inactivity, depression, discouragement (thus the element of actual ‘sloth’ is secondary).
The opposite of acedia is not industry and diligence, but magnanimity and that joy which is a fruit of the supernatural love of God.”[3]

Walker Percy: “The Bored Self: Why the Self is the only Object in the Cosmos which Gets Bored:” “The word boredom did not enter the language until the eighteenth century. No one knows it etymology. One guess is that bore may derive from the French verb bourrer, to stuff…. Boredom is the self being stuffed with itself.”[4]

Dust

Bernanos: “Well, as I was saying, the world is eaten up by boredoms. To perceive this needs a little preliminary thought: you can’t see it all at once. It is like dust. You go about and never notice, you breathe it in, you eat and drink it. It is sifted so fine, it doesn’t even grit on your teeth. But stand still for an instant and there it is, coating your face and hands. To shake off this drizzle of ashes you must be for ever on the go. And so people are always ‘on the go.’ Perhaps the answer would be that the world has long been familiar with boredom, that such is the true condition of man. No doubt the seed was scattered all over life, and here and there found fertile soil to take root; but I wonder if man has ever before experienced this contagion, this leprosy of boredom: an aborted despair, a shameful form of despair in some way like the fermentation of a Christianity in decay.

“Naturally I keep these thoughts to myself….”[5]


Bernanos Again: Examining to the CORE: “Used as I am to the confessions of simple seminary students, I still cannot manage to understand what horrible metamorphosis has enabled so many people to show me their inner life as a mere convention, a formal scheme without one clue to its reality. I should imagine that once they have ceased to be adolescents, few Catholics go in mortal sin to communion. It’s so easy not to go to confession at all. But there are worse things. Petty lies can slowly form a crust around the consciousness of evasion and subterfuge. The outer shell retains the vague shape of what it covers, but that is all. In time by sheer force of habit, the least ‘gifted’ end by evolving their own particular idiom, which still remains incredibly abstract. They don’t hide much, but their sly candour reminds one of a dirty window-pane, so blurred that light has to struggle through it, and nothing can be clearly seen.
What then remains of confession? It barely skims the surface of conscience. I don’t say dry rot has set in underneath; it seems more like petrification…


“And of course people always refuse to see beyond the individual fault. But after all the transgression itself is only the eruption. And the symptoms which most impress outsiders aren’t always the gravest and most disquieting.

I believe, in fact I am certain, that many men never give out the whole of themselves, their deepest truth. They live on the surface, and yet, so rich is the soil of humanity that even this thin outer layer is able to yield a kind of meager harvest which gives the illusion of real living. I’ve heard that during the last war timid little clerks would turn out to be real leaders; without knowing it, they had in them the passion to command. There is, to be sure, no resemblance there with what we mean when we use the beautiful work ‘conversion’- convertere – but still it had sufficed that these poor creatures should experience the most primitive sort of heroism, heroism devoid of all purity. How many men will never have the least idea of what is meant by supernatural heroism, without which there is no inner life! Yet by that very same inner life shall they be judged: after a little thought the thing becomes certain, quite obvious. Therefore? …Therefore when death has bereft them of all the artificial props with which society provides such people, they will find themselves as they really are, as they were without even knowing it – horrible undeveloped monsters, the stumps of men.

"Fashioned thus, what can they say of sin? What do they know about it? The cancer that is eating into them is painless – like so many tumours. Probably at some period in their lives most of them felt only a vague discomfort, and it soon passed off. It is rare for a child not to have known an inner life, as Christianity understands it, however, embryonic the form. One day or another all young lives are stirred by an urge which seems to compel; every pure young breast has depths which are raised to heroism. Not very urgent perhaps, but just strongly enough to show the little creature a glimpse, which sometimes half-consciously he accepts, of the huge risk that salvation entails, and gives to human life all its divinity. He has sensed something of good and evil, has seen them both in their pristine essence unalloyed by notions of social discipline and habit. But of course his reactions are those of a child, and of such a decisive solemn moment the grown-up man will keep no more than the memory of something rather childishly dramatic something mischievously quaint, whose true meaning he never will realize, yet of which he may talk to the end of his days with a soft, rather too soft a smile, the almost lewd smile of old men …."


Jesus of Nazareth is Jesus the Christ, Son of the Living God: The meaning of “parousia” is “presence.” It has normally been taken to mean the “presence” of Christ at the end of the world. Therefore, it is a presence that is not yet present but still to come. Joseph Ratzinger clarifies – and it seems to be the large motif of his life – that the word “Advent” is the translation of the Greek “parousia.” He says: “In antiquity the word was a technical term for the presence of a king or ruler and also of the god being worshipped, who bestows his parousia on his devotees for a time.”[6] He emphasizes the point: “Advent tells us that the presence of the Lord has already begun but also that it has only begun….” But it has begun. That means that the divine Person, the Son of the living God is present in His creation, i.e. within it. He stands before me and calls me to leave my boat and walk on water.

The audible founding of Opus Dei was the locution Escriva heard within him on August 7, 1931: “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.” And two months - October 16, 1931: “You are my son, you are Christ.” And I only knew how to repeat: Abba, Pater!, Abba, Pater! Abba!, Abba!, Abba!

The call that went out from Jesus Christ 2,000 years ago is the identically same call as now. It is the same living Christ, the divine Person Who is the Son of the living God, calling us to be Him, not just toward the future, for a future encounter, but for a present identity

Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you? You were within me, but I was outside, and its there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. Create d things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you they would not have been at all. You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness. You breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in breath and now I pant for you. I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for your peace” (Augustine).

[1] J. Ratzinger, “On the Way to Jesus Christ,” Ignatius (2005) “Foreword” 7.
[2] Ibid 8.
[3] J. Pieper, “On Hope” Ignatius (1986) 54.
[4] Walker Percy, “Lost in the Cosmos” Noonday Press (1983) 70-71.
[5] Georges Bernanos “The Diary of A Country Priest,” Image (1954) 2.
[6] J. Ratzinger, “Dogma and Preaching,” Franciscan Herald Press (1985) 71-72.

Holy Thursday 2008

“Two Immeasurably Profound Sayings:”

“This is My Body, this is my Blood”

“These two immeasurably profound sayings, which stand for all time at the heart of the Church, at the heart of the Eucharistic celebration, the sayings from which we draw our life, because these words are the presence of the living God, the presence of Jesus Christ in our midst, and thereby they tear the world free from its unbearable boredom, indifference, sadness, and evil. “This is my Body, this is my Blood:” theses are expressions taken from the Israelite language of sacrifice, which designated the gifts offered in sacrifice to God in the Temple. If Jesus makes use of these words, then he is designating himself as the true and ultimate sacrifice, in whom all these unsuccessful strivings of the Old Testament are fulfilled. What had always been intended and could never be achieved in the Old Testament sacrifices is incorporated in him. God does not desire the sacrifice of animals; everything belongs to him. And he does not desire human sacrifice, for he has created man for living. God desires some thing more: he desires love.”[1]

The Temple

The Temple is the Locus of “Extrinsic” Sacrifice of Animals. Perhaps the root of the bloody sacrifice of animals was to prevent the further corruption of Israel in its tendency to worship animal “god” of the surrounding nations. Michael Barber posts the following on his blog:

“Ever wonder why God asked the Israelites to sacrifice animals like cattle, sheep and goats? It’s not because God loves the smell of burning meat.Moses explains to Pharaoh why the Israelites must be allowed to go out to the desert to offer their sacrifices to the Lord; their sacrifices would be “abominable” to the Egyptians (Ex. 8:25-27). In other words, Israel was to sacrifice to the Lord the very animals the Egyptians worshipped as gods.In fact, we know that worshipping these gods was a major temptation for the Israelites. The Israelites end up worshipping a golden calf in Exodus 32.God wanted Israel to renounce the gods of Egypt and worship Him as the one true God. No longer would Israel serve other gods – God wanted them to serve Him.When Pharaoh refused to let the people go, God responded by sending 10 famous plagues on Egypt. The plagues symbolize judgment on the gods of Egypt.
● In turning the Nile to blood, God symbolizes his victory over Egyptians gods like Hapi, who governed the Nile (cf. Exodus 7:14-25).● With the plague of the frogs, the frog goddess Heket is mocked (Ex. 8:1-15).● The bull gods Apis and Hathor are judged in the destruction of the cattle (Ex. 9:1-7).● With the plague of darkness, the sun god Re is defeated (Ex. 10:21-23).But even after nine plagues Pharaoh refuses to let God’s firstborn son, Israel, go. Because of this God threatens the firstborn of the Egyptians, as He promised Moses he would. The Lord tells Moses that he will send his angel of death to slay the firstborn sons in Egypt and the firstborn male offspring of all livestock (Ex. 11:4-9).Yet, God gives Israel a way to save their firstborn sons - the Passover (Ex. 12:1-27).By slaying these animals God symbolically slaughters the gods of Egypt. The Lord explains, “I will smite all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and on all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgment” (Ex. 12:12). This is the event that finally breaks Pharaoh (Ex. 12:30-31). Moses leads God’s people out of Egypt, through the Red Sea and into the desert.”

The Temple: Non-existent in Exile: All the animal sacrifices took place in the Temple at Jerusalem. “With the Babylonian exile, Israel had lost its Temple. It could no longer worship God; it could no longer offer up its praises; it could no longer present the sacrifices of atonement; and it was bound to ask what should happen now, how its relationship with God could be kept alive, how order could be maintained in the world’s affairs. For that was what the cult was about, in the final analysis: maintaining the correct relationship between God and man, since only thus can the axis around which reality turns be kept true[2].”[3]

Israel as a People (defective) Replaces the Temple (“Intrinsic Sacrifice”): “This suffering of Israel is the true sacrifice, the great new form of worship, with which it could come before the living God on behalf of mankind, on behalf of the whole world. But there is still one point at which this remains incomplete: Israel is the suffering servant of God, who accepts God in his suffering and stands before God on behalf of the world, and yet it is at the same time stained and guilty and selfish and lost. It cannot play the part of the servant of God properly and completely.”[4]

Jesus Christ, the New Temple [the Definitive Subject/Locus of Worship]: “Jesus, in accepting his death, gathers together and condenses in his person the whole of the Old Testament; first the theology of sacrifice, that is, everything that went on in the Temple and everything to do with the Temple, then the theology of the Exile, of the Suffering Servant.”[5] This intrinsicism of becoming Himself the sacrifice is the import of Hebrews, chapter 9: “But when Christ appeared as high priest the good things to come, he entered once for all through the greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made by hands (that is, not of this creation), nor again by virtue of blood of goats and calves, but by virtue of his own blood, into the Holies, having obtained eternal redemption. For if the blood of goats and bulls and the sprinkled ashes of a heifer sanctify the unclean unto the cleansing of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the Holy Spirit offered himself unblemished unto God.
“And this is why he is mediator of a new covenant…As it is, he has appeared for the destruction of sin by the sacrifice of himself.”

Jesus Christ, the New Covenant: Jeremiah predicted the new Covenant (31,31) “which will no longer be limited to physical descendants of Abraham, no longer to the strict keeping of the law, but will spring from out of the new love of God that gives us a new heart. This is what Jesus takes up here.”[6] He who is both God and man, by dying “institutes true blood brotherhood, a communion of God and man; he opens the door that we could not open for ourselves.”[7] The ontological strength of the Covenant between God and man is the one Person, God, who is God and man with the two distinct and autonomous natures dynamized by the same divine Person of the Logos. The divine Person of Jesus Christ is both cry and response in Himself.

Keep in mind that Jesus Christ is not an exception to man, but the prototype: “In reality it is only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of man truly becomes clear. For Adam, the first man, was a type of him who was tot come, Christ the Lord, Christ the new Adam, in the very revel ation of the mystery of the Father and of his love, fully reveals man to himself and brings to light his most high calling.”[8] Therefore, since Christ is the intrinsic gift in and of Himself, so also every man is called to make the sacrifice of his very self as “another Christ.”

Christ as Temple Is Kingdom

The major orientation of Ratzinger-Benedict XVI is the recovery of the experience and knowledge of God. That experience and that knowledge come from revelation as the very Person of Jesus Christ. He resolutely insists that Revelation as Person is not reducible to words and propositions. Or, as he says it: “I have my doubts as to whether the quintessentially Catholic, as a living structure, can be captured in a formula.”[9] Or, in remarking about his habilitation thesis of the 1950’s, “the term ‘revelation’ was applied only, on the one hand to that ineffable act which can never be adequately expressed in human words, in which God makes himself known to his creature, and, on the other hand, to that act of reception in which this gracious condescension of God dawns upon man and becomes relation. Everything that can be grasped in words, and thus Scripture, too, is then testimony to that revelation but is not revelation itself”[10] (underline mine).

The Core of the Message of Jesus Christ: The Kingdom

Before Easter, It is All Kingdom:

“The core content of the Gospel is this: The Kingdom of God is at hand. A milestone is set up in the flow of time; something new takes place. And an answer to this gift is demanded of man: conversion and faith. The center of this announcement is the message that God’s Kingdom is at hand. This announcement is the actual core of Jesus’ words and works. A look at the statistics underscores this. The phrase ‘Kingdom of God’ occurs 122 times in the New Testament as a whole; 99 of these passages are found in the three Synoptic Gospels, and 90 of these 99 texts report words of Jesus.”[11]

After Easter, It is All Christology: “In the Gospel of John, and the rests of the New Testament writings, the term plays only a small role. One can say whereas the axis of Jesus’ preaching before Easter is the Kingdom of God, Christology is the center of the preaching of the Apostles after Easter.”[12]

The Modernist Alfred Loisy commented on this: “Jesus preached the Kingdom of God, and what cam was the Church.” Benedict XVI remarked: “These words may be considered ironic, but they also express sadness. Instead of the great expectation of God’s own ZKingdom, of a new world transformed by God himself, we got something quite different – and what a pathetic substitute it is: the Church.

“Is this true? Is the form of Christianity that took shape in the preaching of the Apostles, and in the Church that was built on this preaching, really just a precipitous plunge from an unfulfilled expectation into something else? Is the change of subject from ‘Kingdom of God’ to Christ (and so to the genesis of the Church) really just the collapse of a promise and the emergence of something else in its place? Everything depends on who we are to understand the expression ‘Kingdom of God’ as used by Jesus, on what kind of relationship exists between the content of his proclamation and his person, as the proclaimer. Is he just a messenger charged with representing a cause that is ultimately independent of him, or is the messenger himself the message? The question about the Church is not the primary question. The basic question is actually about the relationship between the Kingdom of God and Christ. It is on this that our understanding of the Church will depend.”

The Answer: “Jesus himself is the Kingdom; the Kingdom is not a thing, it is not a geopraphical dominion like worldy kingdoms. It is a person; it is he. On this interpretation,. The term ‘Kingdom of God’ is itself a veiled Christology.”


And What Does This Mean? Benedict responds: “When Jesus speaks of the Kingdom of God, he is quite simply proclaiming God, and proclaiming him to be the living God, who is able to act concretely in the world and in history and is even now so acting. He is telling us: ‘God exists’ and ‘God is really God,’ which means that he holds in his hands the threads of the world. In this sense, Jesus’ message is very simply and thoroughly God-centered.
The new and totally specific thing about his message is that he is telling us: God is acting now – this is the hour when God is showing himself in history as its Lord, as the living God, in a way that goes beyond anything seen before. ‘Kingdom of God’ is therefore an inadequate translation. It would be better to speak of God’s being-Lord, of his lordship.”[13]

When Is This To Happen? Now! “We see, then, that the divine lordship, God’s dominion over the world and over history, transcends the moment, indeed, transcends and reaches beyond the whole of history. It inner dynamism carries history beyond itself. And yet it is at the same time something belonging absolutely to the present. It is present in the liturgy, in Temple and synagogue, as an anticipation of the next world; it is present as a life-shaping power through the believer’s prayer and being; by bearing God’s yoke, the believer already receives a share in the world to come….

“Something new is here, something that finds expression above all in such statements as ‘the Kingdom of God is at hand’ (Mk. 1, 15), it ‘has already come upon you’ (Mt. 12, 28), it is ‘in the midst of you’ (Lk. 17, 21). What these words express is a process of coming that has already begun and extends over the whole of history. It was these words that gave rise to the thesis of ‘imminent expectation’ and made this appear as Jesus’ specific characteristic.”


Conclusion: The Kingdom of God is the Person of Jesus Christ. The Kingdom of God is present wherever the Person of Christ is present. But each of us is baptized into Christ in order to become Christ little by little. And since the Christology of the divine Person is to be pure relation to the Father, the anthropology (cf. Gaudium et Spes #22) that implies that Jesus Christ is prototype from Whom Adam is a “type”) translates this into a becoming Christ by the “sincere gift of self” (Gaudium et Spes #24). And so, one is Christ by imaging and baptism, but not fully yet. And to that measure, the Kingdom of God is already begun, but fully achieved yet.

And this is the specific of the vocation and mission of Opus Dei. Jesus Christ wants to be placed at the summit of all human activities by each person becoming “another Christ.” By becoming Christ (by progressive self-giving), the Kingdom of God becomes present. God becomes present and active in the world as “Lord” via the ordinary secular activity of those who are in development to become Christ.

The Sacrifice of the Mass: The Mass is Calvary. Calvary is the action of Jesus Christ obeying the Father – to death. The divine Person of the Logos, who is Jesus Christ, has never ceased being the Son “at the right hand of the Father.” When He assumes the human nature of the man Jesus of Nazareth, He does not cease to be the Son eternally at the right hand of the Father. He does not cease to be eternal while He is active in time. Hence, the activity of obedience (the Personal mastering of His human will and raising it to the power of self-gift) to death on Calvary that took place in time 2000 years ago, continues to be the activity of a divine Person who is eternal, and hence instantiates that Personal act whenever, and wherever, His Flesh and Blood are made present in time and space. That is, the one and same Personal act of radical self-gift to death is repeatedly taking place wherever there is the Transubstantiation of bread into Flesh, and wine into Blood. That is the action of God as Lord that becomes immanent in history as “Kingdom.” This is the meaning of “Thy Kingdom come!”

To share in and receive this act of Christ is to begin to live it out in the street as our own personal act of work – and secular, remunerated work. As it stands, we are in a position of “non-posse” (not able) to make the gift of self. We literally don’t have it in us as created and sinful to perform such a radically perfect act. We need to receive the power from Christ to make His act our own so that we can live it out continuously, even in the small, secular activities of ordinary life. Hence, the Mass must be the center and root of daily life that is aching to be filled with the Self-transcendence of God



[1] J. Ratzinger, “God Is Near Us,” Ignatius (2003) 32.
[2] Dennis Prager, “Judaism’s Sexual Revolution: Why Judaism(and then Christianity) Rejected Homosexuality,” Crisis 11, no. 8 (September 1993: “When Judaism demanded that all sexual activity be channeled into marriage, it changed the world. The Torah’s prohibition of non-marital sex quite simply made the creation of Western civilization possible. Societies that did not place boundaries around sexuality were stymied in their development. The subsequent dominance of the Western world can largely be attributed to the sexual revolution initiated by Judaism and later carried forward by Christianity.”
[3] J. Ratzinger, “God is Near Us,” op. cit 32.
[4] Ibid 34.
[5] Ibid. 38
[6] Ibid 38.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Gaudium et spes #22.
[9] J. Ratzinger, “Salt of the Earth,” Ignatius (1997) 19.
[10] J. Ratzinger, “Handing on the Faith and the Sources of Faith,” in Handing on the Faith in an Age of Disbelief Ignatius (2006) 29.
[11] J. Ratzinger, “Jesus of Nazareth,” Doubleday (2007) 47.
[12] Ibid 48.
[13] Ibid 56.

Holy Saturday 2008: The Death of God

God is Dead: Nietzsche

"Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market-place, and cried incessantly: "I am looking for God! I am looking for God!" As many of those who did not believe in God were standing together there, he excited considerable laughter. Have you lost him, then? said one. Did he lose his way like a child? said another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? or emigrated? Thus they shouted and laughed. The madman sprang into their midst and pierced them with his glances. "Where has God gone?" he cried. "I shall tell you. We have killed him - you and I. We are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is it not more and more night coming on all the time? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God's decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become gods simply to be worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whosoever shall be born after us - for the sake of this deed he shall be part of a higher history than all history hitherto." Here the madman fell silent and again regarded his listeners; and they too were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern to the ground, and it broke and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time has not come yet. The tremendous event is still on its way, still traveling - it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time, the light of the stars requires time, deeds require time even after they are done, before they can be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the distant stars - and yet they have done it themselves." It has been further related that on that same day the madman entered divers churches and there sang a requiem. Led out and quietened, he is said to have retorted each time: "what are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?"

God Lives!

God cannot die in His Divine Nature. But He can die as Divine Person through His human nature. Actiones sunt suppositorum. One cannot kill God. But God can die as a divine Personal act by willing to die through His human nature. Cardinal Newman says: “Nor did He die, except by an act of the will; for He bowed His head, in command as well as in resignation, and said, `Father, into Thy hands I commend My Spirit;’ He gave the word, He surrendered His soul, He did not lose it.” He went on to say: “God was the sufferer; God suffered in His human nature; the sufferings belonged to God, and were drunk up, were drained out to the bottom of the chalice, because God drank them; not tasted or sipped, not flavored, disguised by human medicaments… What He suffered, He suffered because He put Himself under suffering, and that deliberately and calmly. As He said to the leper, `I will, be thou clean;’ and to the paralytic, `Thy sins be forgiven thee;’ and to the centurion, `I will come and heal him;’ and of Lazarus, `I go to wake him out of sleep;’ so He said, `Now I will begin to suffer,’ and He did begin. His composures is but the proof how entirely He governed His own mind. He drew back, at the proper moment, the bolts and fastenings, and opened the gates, and the floods fell right upon His soul in all their fullness…. `They came,’ (Mark) says, `to the place which is called Gethsemani; and he saith to His disciples, Sit you here while I pray. And He taketh with Him Peter and James and John, and He began to be frightened and to be very heavy.’ You see how deliberately He acts; He comes to a certain spot; and then, giving the word of command, and withdrawing the support of the God-head from His soul, distress, terror, and dejection at once rush in upon it. Thus He walks forth into a mental agony with as definite an action as if it were some bodily torture, the fire or the wheel.”[4]


Cardinal Ratzinger:

“Should we not turn to see that …Holy Saturday stands liturgically in the Church’s year, is particularly close to our day and is to a particular degree the experience of our century” On Good Friday our gaze remains fixed on the crucified Christ, but Holy Saturday is the day of the `death of God,’ the day which expresses the unparalleled experience of our age, anticipating the fact that God is simply absent, that the grave hides him, that he no longer awakes, no longer speaks, so that one no longer needs to gainsay him but can simply overlook him. `God is dead and we have killed him.’ This saying of Nietzsche’s belongs linguistically to the tradition of Christian Passiontide piety; it expresses the content of Holy Saturday, `descended into hell.’”

“This article of the Creed always reminds me of two scenes in the Bible. The first is that cruel story in the Old Testament in which Elias (Elijah) challenges the priests of Baal to implore their God to give them fire for their sacrifice. They do so, and naturally nothing happens. He ridicules them, just as the ‘enlightened rationalis’ ridicules the pious person and finds him laughable when nothing happens in response to is prayers. Elias calls out to the priests that perhaps they had not prayed loud enough: ‘Shout louder, Ball s indeed a god. But perhaps he is deep in thought, or has gone out; or perhaps he is asleep and will wake up!’ (1Kings 18, 27). When one reads today this mockery of the devotees of Baal, one can begin to feel uncomfortable; one can get the feeling that we have not arrived in that situation and that t he mockery must now fall on us. No calling seems to be able to awaken God. The rationalist seems entitled to say to us, ‘Pray louder, perhaps your God will then wake up.’ ‘Descended into hell;’ how true this is of our time, the descent of God into muteness, into the dark silence of the absent.

“But alongside the story of Elias and its New Testament analogue, the story of the Lord sleeping in the midst of the storm on the lake (Mark 4, 35-41) we must put the Emmaus story (Luke 24, 13-35). The disturbed disciples are talking of the death of their hope. To them, something like the death of God has happened; the point at which God finally seemed to have spoken has disappeared. God’s envoy is dead, and so there is a complete void. Nothing replies any more. But while they are there speaking of the death of their hope and can o longer see God they do not notice that his very hope stands alive in their midst; that ‘God,’ or rather the image they had formed of his promise, had to die so that he could live on a bigger scale. The image which they had formed of God, and into which they sought to compress him, had to be destroyed, so that over the ruins of the demolished house, as it were, they could see the sky again and him who remains the infinitely greater.”[5]

God is Hidden in Plain Sight

Insert here the experience of John the Baptist who preached thundering the visible presence of divine justice in the world. While in prison, he heard nothing. He sent messengers to Jesus: “Are you he who is to come or should we look for another?” The response of Christ: “The mute speak, the lame walk, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and blessed is he who takes no scandal in me.” The point is that Christ has been present all along, hidden and silent, but in act.


The same holds for the Kingdom of God. Those without eyes to see or ears to hear overlook him and it. “If it is by the finger of God that I cast out demons then the Kingdom of God has come upon you” (Lk. 11, 20). “Jesus is the Kingdom, not simply by virtue of his physical presence but through the Holy Spirit’s radiant power flowing forth from him. In his Spirit-filled activity, smashing the demonic enslavement of man, the Kingdom of God becomes reality, God taking the government of this world into his own hands. Let us remember that God’s Kingdom is an event, not a sphere. Jesus’ actions, words, sufferings break the power of that alienation which lies so heavily on human life. In liberating people, they establish God’s Kingdom. Jesus is that Kingdom since through him the Spirit of God acts in the world.”[6]

The deep epistemological reason for the absence of God in the 20th, and now 21st century, is the hegemony of positivism, the acceptance of only one kind of experience, that of the external senses, and the non-discovery of the self and the experience of the self as gift. God can only be discovered experientially by the conversion of the self from the visible to the invisibility of being gift to the other, and therefore experiencing Being on a different horizon and in a different key. To experience being as the self in the act of transcendence of obedience and service is to experience the God whom the self images. This is the major recovery that has to be made in this century, and it is the task of the new evangelization.

At the moment, God is dead in our consciousness. He may be there conceptually, but not consciously as “presence” because we are not experiencing giftedness and thoughtfulness to others as social ethos. However, if we make that gift, He will rise early on Sunday morning and appear to us after appearing first to His Mother. We will know it by the joy that begins to be aroused in us.



[4] John Henry Newman, “Mental Sufferings of Our Lord in His Passion,” to Discourses to Mixed Congregations in A Newman Treasure 200-201. Ibid 202-203.
[5] J. Ratzinger, “Introduction to Christianity,” (1990) 224-225.
[6] J. Ratzinger, “Eschatology,” CUA (1988) 34-35.

Theology of Incarnation - Theology of the Cross

The epistemological fault line that must be crossed in the consciousness of the Church and in the world at large is the reconciliation of the static and the dynamic, of concept (dogma) and history (the existential). The solution is to see that experience is not simply that of the external senses, but of the self as ontological subject. Both are essential to conform our way of knowing to reality. This dichotomy was at the root of the “Modernist” crisis, and it is at the root of the crisis the Church is in at the present moment, i.e. between so-called conservatism and liberalism.

Ratzinger began an article called “Faith and History” with the following: “History always becomes problematical for us when a crisis occurs in a particular historical configuration. When that happens, we become conscious if the distance – or, indeed, the contradiction – between history and being, between our historical and our ontological nature; we must search again for the union between our being and history, either by invalidating history as it has been up to the present or by conceiving it anew from its roots.”[1] He ends the article with the following:

“(T)he Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, which, as God’s action, is antecedent to every theology, does not insist on an empty ‘in-itself-ness’ but is oriented to the center of human existence…. The Resurrection is the reawakening of him who had first died on the Cross… All salvation history is gathered here, as it were, in the one point of this ultimate Passover that thus includes and interprets salvation history, … For it is evident that this whole history is likewise an exodus history: a history that begins with the call to Abraham to go out from his country – and this going-out-from himself toward the other even to the radical delivery of himself to death so that it can be explained in the words: ‘I am going away and shall return’ (Jn. 14, 28) – by going, I come. The ‘living opening through the curtain,’ as the epistle to the Hebrews explains the Lord’s going-away on the Cross (Heb 10, 20), reveals itself in this way as the true exodus that is meant by all the exoduses of history. Thus we see how the theology of Resurrection gathers all salvation history within itself and concentrates it on its existence-oriented meaning so that, in a very literal sense, it becomes a theology of existence, a theology of ex-sistere, of that exodus by which the human individual goes out from himself and through which alone he can find himself [cf. Gaudium et Spes #24]. In this movement of ex-sistere, faith and love are ultimately united – the deepest significance of each is the Exi, that call to transcend and sacrifice the I that is the basic law of the history of God’s covenant with man and, ipso fact, the truly basic law of all human existence…. God’s action is, precisely in the objectivity of its ‘in-itself-ness,’ not a hopeless objectivity, but the true formula of human existence, which has its ‘in-itself-ness outside itself and can find its true center only in ex-sistere, in going-out-from itself.”[2]

It must be boldly stated yet again that the meaning of “Being” is not the “in-itself-ness” of Hellenic (Aristotelian) “substance.” That is a metaphysic that conforms to our mode of thinking, namely, conceptualizing. As Ratzinger is offering above, the metaphysic of salvation, where the relationality of the divine Person of the Son becomes Flesh, is to be man as total relation of obedience as a total going out self, even unto death. This going out of self can only be experienced as real in the realm of the “I” that until now has been conceptualized as mere “consciousness,” but in reality is “the privileged locus for the encounter with the act of Being” (Fides et Ratio #83). Hence, the only formula which approximates the dynamic of the human person as image of the divine Person of the Son – i.e. an adequate anthropology – is Gaudium et Spes #24: “man, the only earthly being God has willed for itself, finds himself only in the sincere gift of himself.”

The Predominance of Being as Substance and the Cross as Rendering Justice to God: “As False as It is Widespread”[3]

Anselm’s “Satisfaction Theory” (Ratzinger)

The “satisfaction theory” “was developed by St. Anselm of Canterbury on the threshold of the Middle Ages and moulded the Western consciousness more and more exclusively. Even in its classical form it is not devoid of one-sidedness, but when contemplated in the vulgarized form which has extensively moulded the general consciousness it looks cruelly mechanical and less and less feasible.

Text

“Anselm of Canterbury (c. 1033-1109) had been concerned to deduce the work of Christ by a train of necessary reasons (rationibus necessariis) and thus to show irrefutably that this work had to happen in the precise way in which it in fact did. His argument may be roughly summarized like this: by man’s sin, which was aimed against God, the order of justice was infinitely damaged and God infinitely offended. Behind this is the idea that the measure of the offence is determined by the status of the offended party; if I offend a beggar the consequences are not the same as they would be if I offended a head of state. The importance of the offence varies according to the addressee. Since God is infinite the offence to him implicit in humanity’s sin is also infinitely important. The right thus damaged must be restored, because God is a God order and justice; indeed, he is justice itself. But the measure of the offence demands infinite reparation, which man is not capable of making. He can offend infinitely – his capacity extends that far – but he cannot produce an infinite reparation; what he, as a finite being, gives will always be only finite. His powers of destruction extend further than his capacity to reconstruct. Thus between all the reparations that man may attempt and the greatness of his guilt there remains an infinite gulf which he can never bridge. Any gesture of expiation can only demonstrate his powerlessness to close the infinite gulf which he himself opened up.

“Is order to be destroyed for ever, then, and man to remain eternally imprisoned in the abyss of his guilt? At this point Anselm hits on the figure of Christ. His answer runs thus: God himself removes the injustice; not (as he could) by a simple amnesty, which cannot after all overcome from inside what has happened, but by the infinite Being’s himself becoming man and then as a man – who thus belongs to the race of the offenders yet possesses the power, denied to man, of infinite reparation – making the required expiation. Thus the redemption takes place entirely through grace and at the same time entirely as restoration of the right. Anselm thought he had thereby given a compelling answer to the difficult question of `Cur Deus homo,’ the wherefore of the incarnation and the cross. His view has put a decisive stamp on the second millennium of Western Christendom, which takes it for granted that Christ had to die on the cross in order to make good the infinite offence which had been committed and in this way to restore the damaged order of things.

“Now it cannot be denied that this theory takes account of crucial biblical and human perceptions; anyone who studies it with a little patience will have no difficulty in seeing this. To that extent it will always command respect as an attempt to synthesize the individual elements in the biblical evidence in one great allembracing system. Is not hard to see that in spite of all the philosophical and juridical terminology employed, the guiding thread remains that truth which the Bible expresses in the little word `For,’ in which it makes clear that we as men live not only directly from God but from one another, and in the last analysis from the One who lived for all. And who could fail to see that thus in the schematization of the `satisfaction’ theory the breath of the biblical idea of election remains clear, the idea that makes election not a privilege of the elected but the call to live for others? It is the call to that `For’ in which man confidently lets himself fall, ceases to cling to himself and ventures on the leap away from himself into the infinite, the leap through which alone he can come to himself. But even if all this is admitted it cannot be denied on the other hand that the perfectly logical divine-cum-human legal system erected by Anselm distorts the perspectives and with its rigid logic can make the image of God appear in a sinister light. We shall have to go into this in detail when we come to talk about the meaning of the cross. For the time being it will suffice to say that things immediately look different when, in place of the division of Jesus into work and person, it becomes clear that with Jesus Christ it is not a question of a piece of work separate from himself, of a feat which God must demand because he himself is under and an obligation to the concept of order; that with him it is not a question… of having, but of being human. And how different things look further on when one picks up the Pauline key, which teaches us to understand Christ as the `last man (’έσχατος Άδάμ: 1 Cor. 15, 45) - the final man, who takes man into his future, which consists of his being not just man but one with God.”[4]

The Cross and Atonement: The New (intrinsic) Priesthood of Jesus Christ.

“What position is really occupied by the cross within faith in Jesus as the Christ… As we have already established, the universal Christian consciousness in this matter is extensively influenced by a much coarsened version of St. Anselm’s theology of atonement, the main lines of which we have considered in another context. To many Christians, and especially to those who only know the faith from a fair distance, it looks as if the cross is to be understood as part of a mechanism of injured and restored right. It is the form, so it seems, in which the infinitely offended righteousness of God was propitiated again by means of an infinite expiation. It thus appears to people as the expression of an attitude which insists on a precise balance between debit and credit; at the same time one gets the feeling that this balance is based on a fiction. One gives first secretly with the left hand what one takes back again ceremonially with the right. The `infinite expiation’ on which God seems to insist thus moves into a doubly sinister light. Many devotional texts actually force one to think that Christian faith in the cross visualizes a God whose unrelenting righteousness demanded a human sacrifice, the sacrifice of his own Son, sinister wrath makes the message of love incredible.

“This picture is as false as it is widespread [my emphasis]. In the Bible the cross does not appear as part of a mechanism of injured right; on the contrary, in the Bible the cross is quite the reverse: it is the expression of the radical nature of the love which gives itself completely, of the process in which one is what one does, and does what one is; it is the expression of a life that is completely being for others. To anyone who looks more closely, the scriptural theology of the cross represents a real revolution as compared with the notions of expiation and redemption entertained by non-Christian religions, though it certainly cannot be denied that in the later Christian consciousness this revolution was largely neutralized and its whole scope seldom recognized. In other world religions expiation usually means the restoration of the damaged relationship with God by means of expiatory actions on the part of men. Almost all religions center round the problem of expiation; they arise out of man’s knowledge of his guilt before God and signify the attempt to remove this feeling of guilt, to surmount the guilt through conciliatory actions offered up to God. The expiatory activity by which men hope to conciliate the divinity and to pout him in a gracious mood stands at the heart of the history of religion.

“In the New Testament the situation is almost completely reversed. It is not man who goes to God with a compensatory gift, but God who comes to man, in order to give to him. He restores disturbed right on the initiative of his own power to love, by making unjust man just again, the dead living again, through his own creative mercy. His righteousness to grace; it is active righteousness, which sets crooked man right, that is, bends him straight, makes him right. Here we stand before the twist which Christianity put into the history of religion. The New Testament does not say that men conciliate God, as we really ought to expect, since after all it is they who have failed, not God. It says on the contrary that `God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself’ (2 Cor. 5, 19). This is truly something new, something unheard of – the starting-point of Christian existence and the center of New Testament theology of the cross: God does not wait until the guilty come to be reconciled; he goes to meet them and reconciles them. Here we can see the true direction of the incarnation, of the cross.

“Accordingly, in the New Testament the cross appears primarily as a movement from above to below. It does not stand there as the work of expiation which mankind offers to the wrathful God, but as the expression of that foolish love of God’s which gives itself away to the point of humiliation in order thus to save man; it is his approach to us, not the other way about. With this twist in the idea of expiation, and thus in the whole axis of religion, worship too, man’s whole existence, acquires in Christianity a new direction. Worship follows in Christianity first of all in thankful acceptance of the divine deed of salvation. The essential form of Christian worship is therefore rightly called `Eucharistia,’ thanksgiving. In this form of worship human achievements are not placed before God; on the contrary, it consists in man’s letting himself be endowed with gifts; we do not glorify God by supposedly giving to him out of our resources – as if they were not his already! – but by letting ourselves be endowed with his own gifts and thus recognizing him as the only Lord. We worship him by dropping the fiction of a realm in which we could face him as independent business partners, whereas in truth we can only exist at all in him and from him. Christian sacrifice does not consist in a giving of what God would to have without us but in our becoming totally receptive and letting ourselves be completely taken over by him. Letting God act on us – that is Christian sacrifice.”[5]

The Two Theologies: Resolved in a Metaphysic of Being-As-Relation

“The insights so far acquired also provide access to those basic assertions of Christology that still remain to be considered. In the history of the Christian faith two divergent lines of approach to the contemplation of Jesus have appeared again and again; the theology of the incarnation, which sprang from Greek thought and became dominant in the Catholic tradition of East and West, and the theology of the cross, which based itself on St. Paul and the earliest forms of Christian belief and made a decisive break-through in the thinking of the Reformers. The former talks of `being’ and center’s round the fact that here a man is God and that accordingly at the same time God is man; this astounding fact is seen as the all-decisive one. All the individual events that followed pale before this one event of the one-ness of man and God, of God’s becoming man. In face of this they can only be secondary; the interlocking of God and man appears as the truly decisive, redemptive factor, as the real future of man, on which all lines must finally converge.

“Theology of the cross, on the other hand, will have nothing to do with ontology of this kind; it speaks instead of the event; it follows the testimony of the early days, when people did not yet enquire about being but about the activity of God in the cross and resurrection, an activity which conquered death and pointed to Jesus as the Lord and as the hope of humanity. The differing tendencies of these two theologies result from their respective approaches. Theology of the incarnation tends towards a static, optimistic view. The sin of man appears quite easily as a transitional stage of fairly minor importance. The decisive factor is then not that man is in a state of sin and must be saved; the aim goes far beyond any such atonement for the past and lies in making progress towards the convergence of man and God. The theology of the cross, on the other hand, leads rather to a dynamic, topical, anti-world conception of Christianity, a conception which understands Christianity only as a discontinuously but constantly appearing breach in the self-confidence and self-assurance of man and of his institutions, including the Church.

“Anyone at all familiar with these two great historical forms of Christian self-comprehension will certainly not be tempted to try his hand at a simplifying synthesis. The two fundamental structural forms of `incarnation’ and `cross’ theology reveal polarities which cannot be surmounted and combined in a neat-looking synthesis without the loss of the crucial points in each; they must remain present as polarities which mutually correct each other and only by complementing each other point towards the whole. Nevertheless, our reflections may perhaps have given us a glimpse of that unity which makes these polarities possible and prevents them from falling apart as contradictions. For we have found that the being of Christ (`incarnation’ theology!) is actualitas, stepping beyond and out of oneself, the exodus of departure from self; it is not a being that rests in itself, but the act of being sent, of being son, of serving. Conversely, this `doing’ is not just `doing’ but `being;’ it reaches down into the depths of being and coincides with it. This being is exodus, transformation. So at this point a properly understood theology of being and of the incarnation must pass over into the theology of the cross and become one with it; conversely, a theology of the cross that gives its full measure must pass over into the theology of the Son and of being”[6]

[1] J. Ratzinger, “Faith and History,” Principles of Catholic Theology, Ignatius (1987) 153.
[2] Ibid 189-190.
[3] J. Ratzinger, “Introduction to Christianity,” Ignatius (1990) 214.
[4] J. Ratzinger, “Introduction to Christianity,” op. cit. 172-174.
[5] J. Ratzinger, “Introduction…” op. cit. 213-215.
[6] J. Ratzinger, “Introduction to Christianity” Ignatius (1990) 170-172.