I’ve read a lot of commentary on the Pope’s latest encyclical Cartitas in Vertitate. Much of the commentary admits that this is a “hard” Encyclical. It is hard for two reasons. First, its style is dense, very theological, very nuanced, quite technical in places. It requires something of an expansive background and history of the social teachings of the Church. It is also hard for many because it runs against the grains of the political views of many. To be sure, there are things hard to swallow for both the politically conservative as well as the politically liberal. When we confront the often intractable social problems and issues of our day politics is very much in the mix. How best to solve them, big government solutions, marketplace and private sector initiatives? There is strident social and political disagreement among reasonable people.
All this makes Veritate in Caritate a “hard” encyclical. Fr. Robert Barron has a video commentary on the letter below. As always he is a master and taking complicated teaching and distilling from it lots of good “take away” stuff. This video is longer than his average, it is close to 9 minutes. If you don’t have time to see it all I direct you especially to the last three minutes wherein he deals with the “hard” aspects of this encyclical. What about the “World Government” notions in the letter and why does this letter seem so oddly “non-Ratzinger” in its style?
The following video features Fr. Robert Barron and his Commentary on Batman “The Dark Night.” Here he ponders the problem of violence and critiques the world’s notion of how to fight violence.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., once remarked that if everything is going to be an eye for an eye, then we will have a world full of blind people. He also said, “Dark cannot drive out darkness only light can do that. Similarly, hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.”
Fr. Barron Makes a similar point from the Christian Tradition here:
St. Paul used the image of an athlete to describe the Christian life in Several places. Consider this one:
Do you not know that the runners in the stadium all run in the race, but only one wins the prize? Run so as to win. Every athlete exercises discipline in every way. They do it to win a perishable crown, but we an imperishable one.Thus I do not run aimlessly; I do not fight as if I were shadowboxing. No, I drive my body and train it, for fear that, after having preached to others, I myself should be disqualified. ( 1 Cor. 9:25-27)
Clearly there are many virtues necessary to the athlete that are also of great necessity to the Christian:
Discipline – The athlete must carefully and persistently train the body. Without a clear and repetitive discipline the sport will not be mastered and neither will the body have proper stamina, strength and coordination. Athletes train every day and work to perfect their mastery of the sport. So too must Christians undertake a clear discipline and persistently train in the ways of faith through prayer, scripture, sacraments, moral virtue and self mastery. The Christian must practice every day.
Persistence – The Athlete must follow discipline all the time, not just occasionally. To fail in persistent training not only jeopardizes good performance but it risks injury. So too for the Christian. We cannot expect much progress with an on again, off again regimen. Without a persistent good habit of prayer, scripture, sacraments and practicing of moral virtue the Christian not only stunts progress but also risks injury (sin).
Rules – every sport has rules that must be accepted and followed. The athlete is not free to reinvent the game. They must play by the rules or risk exclusion and disqualification. S0 too the Christians must play by the rules set by God. If we are going to be on the winning team and secure the victory we have to abide by the rules. To refuse this is to risk being disqualified. We are not free to reinvent Christianity as so many try to do today. There is only one playing field and one game. Follow the rules or be ejected.
Alert for Injury – A good athlete listens carefully to his or her body and any signs of injury. If injury is detected they see the team doctor quickly and take measures to heal as quickly as possible. Further they avoid injury by learning proper form, stretching etc. So too for the Christian. We must monitor ourselves for injury and upon discovery of even minor injury we should consult our team physician, the priest and get on the mend quickly. Further we should avoid injury by learning proper Christian form (moral life) and avoiding what ever leads us to sin (a kind of stretching to avoid moral injury).
Teamwork – many sports involve learning to work together for the goal. Athletes cannot merely seek glory for themselves, they must have the good of the whole team in mind. They must learn to work with others toward the common good and overcome any idiosyncrasies or selfishness that hinders the common goal. So too Christians must strive to overcome petty and selfish egotism and work for the common good, learning to appreciate the gifts of others. The team is stronger than the individual alone. Life is about more then just me. When others are glorified so am I if I am on the same winning team.
Well, you get the point. Why not add a few of your own thoughts on how sports is a good analogy for the Christian life?
There is a new movie making the rounds in Christian Circles called Fireproof. It is about a young couple who experience that their marriage is falling apart. There is anger, resentment, accusations, and disappointment. But God isn’t done with them, He’s just getting started.
The husband Caleb is a fire f ighter who often reminds his fellow fire fighters to enter a buring building in teams and NEVER to leave their partner behind. Now he must learn the same thing in his marriage. Under the guidance of his earthly father Caleb receives wise help in saving his marriage but until he meets his Heavenly Father his efforts fall short because his heart is not in it. At a critical point in the movie he receives from Jesus the new heart he needs.
I know some of you may think this sounds a little cheesy and sentimental but the movie does not present any of this in a simplistic or merely sentimental way. Caleb comes to the Lord only with difficultly and the breakthrough he experiences is both realistic and moving. His wife’s struggle too is powerfully and credibly depicted.
In the following scene you see a moment of conversion for Caleb. He is frustrated that his wife is not responding to all his efforts and that she rejects his love. How can he go on loving some one who doesn’t love him and offers no gratitude or love in return? With his earthly father’s help he comes to see that this is exactly what he does to God, who loves him anyway. He rejects God, is ungrateful, and undeserving, but God loves him still. It is a breakthrough for Caleb. I don’t think it will spoil the movie for you to see this scene which is a very powerful description of the unmerited Love of God for us and our need to experience this if we will ever be able to love others.
Make it a priority to see this movie. It is for everyone, married or not; struggling or secure. It’s about love, it’s about marriage, it’s about miracles and it’s about breakthroughs. You won’t be disappointed that you saw Fireproof.
The History Channel has been running a series called Life After People It depicts what would happen to our cities and landmarks if all humans suddenly disappeared. As you might imagine, things tend to fall apart pretty quickly. What the series depicts rather graphically is the Second Law of Thermodynamics which is:
What? You might say! Well, consider a cup of hot coffee that is placed on the counter. Over time the coffee will lose its heat (this is entropy) until it returns to room temperature (equilibrium). It is not in the nature of a cup of coffee to keep its heat or to get even warmer unless acted upon but some outside factor such as man or strong sunlight etc. This is the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the cup of coffee must follow it. Stated in a broader way, the Second Law of Thermodynamics and in particular entropy means that complex things tend to fall apart and go back to their basic elements without something outside them to maintain them. Lets illustrate this using an example you might see on the series “Life After People.”
We’re at the Sears tower in Chicago, one of the tallest buildings in the world. The massive building is like a small city with lots of complex systems that maintain it. It is January 1, 2010 and suddenly all humans disappear from the planet. In the first moments there is little difference to the building except an eerie quiet. Music still plays in the elevators and the escalators in the lobby move along. At 2:30 pm a small alarm goes off in the basement indicating to the boiler mechanic that the boiler needs a minor adjustment. But the boiler mechanic is not there. Heat slowly builds in the boilers and other alarms go off. But no one is there to hear or respond. The heat reaches a critical point by 3:30 pm and two major pipes burst spewing steam and boiling water. By 4:30 pm the boiler room has flooded to the point that several electrical panels short out causing a major portion of the building to lose power. In the building above the temperature begins dropping. Outside it is a frigid January day. As the sun sets mid afternoon, the once well lit and warm building descends into darkness and increasing chill. By 5:00pm the next day portions of the building near the external walls have begun to drop below freezing. Outside the temperature is hovering in the lower teens. Overnight the water in some of the pipes near the external walls begins to freeze. By noon the next day there is some thawing and then refreezing as the night temperatures drop. After several days of this pattern, several large pipes begin to break and water begins to flow freely in the upper floors and starts to leak out some of the window casements. The freezing and thawing begins to loosen some of the windows and, several months after man the glass starts falling to the streets far below. The building is now increasingly open to the weather and more and more the building suffers deterioration.
Well you get the point: Entropy is at work. This are falling apart and returning to their basic elements. In the months and years ahead rust and other corrosion will take a toll and the building will deteriorate to the point that it will begin to collapse. Finally, in the decades ahead complete collapse will have occurred and steel and rubble will be strewn all over State Street. In the centuries to come even the steel and rubble will return to dust and be overgrown by trees and forest. Without an indwelling intelligence and energy to maintain equilibrium, the Sears tower cannot stand. It looses its complexity and returns to the dust from which it came. This is the Second Law of Thermodynamics and particularly the principle of entropy illustrated.
But don’t you see, as the Sears Tower in Chicago needs Man, so the created universe needs God. Without God’s indwelling intelligence and maintenance, entropy would cause all kinds of disorder in the universe and ultimately failure. The complex systems of this world would fail and return to their basic elements without some outside force acting upon them. Even the atheists who so love to talk about evolution have to see that evolution, in a way, is the opposite, of entropy. The evolution of simple things into complex things cannot take place without an outside energy (and intelligence) causing it. Otherwise the Second Law of Thermodynamics is violated. A cup of coffee does not heat up on its own. The Sears Tower would not suddenly or even gradually appear out the earth as a fully functioning little city without a lot of outside energy and intelligence. It does not pertain to sand and rocks to evolve into steel and then take shape as a fully functioning building with plumbing, electricity and computers. For this to evolve takes energy and intelligence, some force from the outside to act upon it. The Sears Tower or a hot cup of coffee cannot explain themselves. Something outside of them must explain them. The atheists want you to think that all this order came it to existence by itself and organizes itself. Well if you can tell me how the Sears Tower could suddenly or even gradually come into existence all by itself as a fully functional building, I might start to believe the atheist and secularists arguments. But as it is I think it takes a lot more “faith” to believe the atheist arguments than simply to admit the obvious, that this world has order that resists entropy because it is designed and indwelt by God who sustains it. A cup of hot cannot explain itself or maintain itself something or someone from the outside does this. Our bodies are far more complex that even the Sears Tower. What caused entropy to reverse and for the complexity to evolve? It had to be something outside of and this world bound by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Maybe it’s God!
So here is my Argument for the Existence of God Based on the Second Law of Thermodynamics:
The entropy of an isolated system not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time until it returns to equilibrium. (i.e. things tend to fall apart and return to their basic elements without someone or something to cause their evolution into more complex things or to halt their tendency to entropy)
But this world does manifest substantial complexity that manifests an evolution from the simple to the complex, a kind of reverse entropy.
Therefore this world must be acted upon by someone or something outside itself that orders it and pushes back entropy.
The New Yorker Magazine recently published a hateful essay by playwright Paul Rudnick. I will not reproduce the venom here. However I would like to post excerpts from the Untied States Conference of Bishops Website. You can view the whole article Here: USCCB Full Article
Here are excerpts of that article followed by a few of my own comments:
The New Yorker, the magazine of urbane Americans, proves once again that anti-Catholicism still lurks in U.S. society. This time it’s in an article by the playwright Paul Rudnick, who seems to get his kicks by bashing religion. It is bizarre that someone who uses his literary skills to decry prejudice and stereotyping of gays opts to indulge his own prejudice against another group, Catholics….Rudnick’s recent rap on Catholics comes in snide remarks about religious sisters in “Fun With Nuns,” in the July 20 issue of the New Yorker. …Apparently the editors, who even are heralding the essay on the New Yorker Web site, don’t find any problem with Rudnick’s gratuitous slam: “Nuns can be dictatorial, sexually repressed, and scary—and therefore entertaining.” Nor did they bother to edit out a remark about which nuns should be “f…able.” ….
Historian Arthur Schlesinger Sr. once noted that anti-Catholicism is “the deepest-held bias in the history of the American people.” Anti-Catholicism also has been called the “anti-Semitism of the liberal.” It seems on the rise now….
Last week, the USA Today Faith & Reason blog was rampant with anti-Catholic comments in response to Pope Benedict XVI’s ground-breaking encyclical on the economy “Caritas in Veritate” (“Charity in truth”). Because the blog has a “Report Abuse” button…. some of the initial offensive remarks are gone. Yet more than a week later, [comments] can still be read asking if you spell pope with “one or two ‘o’s,” advising the pope to do something that’s unprintable here and ought to be unprintable in a family newspaper’s blog, remarking that “someone needs to give the pope his meds” and opining that “the pope is disgusting and sickening,” adding for good measure, “Catholic is DISGUSTING.” Even more slurs and canards to be found on the Website, including “I guess the Vatican is finally going public with its plot to control the world.”At least USA Today can be blamed only for not keeping up with its obligation to watch what bloggers post. The New Yorker, on the other hand, despite its history of fine literary criticism, intentionally runs Rudnick’s comments and even boasts of them on its Web site.
So there it is, the ugly face of bigotry. But I ask you, would anyone dare to speak this way about a Jews, Muslims, African Americans, Latinos, et. al.? Do you see the double standard? Most of this ugly and hateful speech gets a pass in the media and entertainment world. Part of it is that we Catholics aren’t the type to take to the streets in protest.
But in an odd sort of way I want to say that I am glad to belong to a Church that is so hated by the world. It means we stand for something and are not simply going to compromise and be silent as the world chooses to go morally insane. And the world hates us for this. Did not Jesus promise hatred and persecution: If the world hates you know that it hated me before you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own, but I have called you out of the world and so the world hates you. No pupil is greater than his teacher, If they have hated me they will hate you too. (John 15:18-20) And Jesus also warns us, “Woe to you if all people speak well of you, for it was in this way that they treated the false prophets. (Luke 6:26). So in a way I am glad to be in good company, with Jesus. If we were a compromising, equivocating Church the world would welcome us. As it is they hate us and I suspect they are so angry because deep down inside they know we are right.
Despite my paradoxical peace in the face this hatred I DO want to finish by what I consider to be a necessary rebuke: Shame on you Paul Rudnick for speaking of our religious sisters as you did. Shame on you for your scurrilous and hypocritical attack. And shame on all those who wrote hate-filled things about our Holy Father and our Holy Faith at USA Today Blog. Shame on all of you and remember, God is watching.
Here is a video that gives the full context of John 15 and the Scripture quotes I listed above.
I grew up with dogs. Dogs, generally speaking, have a great outlook on life. This list is an oldie on the internet but, if you haven’t read it, it is really rather instructive. Dogs DO have a lot to teach us. God teaches us not only out of the Bible but in creation. In that spirit here are
Fifteen Things We can Learn from Dogs:
1. Never pass up the opportunity to go for a joy ride.
2. Allow the experience of fresh air and the wind in your face to be pure ecstasy.
3. When loved ones come home, always run to greet them.
4. Let others know when they’ve invaded your territory.
5. Take naps and stretch before rising.
6. Run, romp, and play daily.
7. Eat with gusto and enthusiasm.
8. Be loyal.
9. If what you want lies buried, dig until you find it.
10. When someone is having a bad day, be silent. Sit close by and nuzzle them gently.
11. Thrive on attention and let people touch you.
12. Avoid biting when a simple growl will do.
13. When you’re happy, dance around and wag your entire body.
14. No matter how often you’re scolded, don’t buy into the guilt thing and pout…. run right back and make friends
15. Delight in the simple joys of a long walk.
And here is one of the most amazing videos I have ever seen. It’s about “Faith the two legged dog”:
Wow! In case you haven’t been keeping up, the“Marriage Can Wait???”post has 35 responses! I think Msgr. Pope hit a chord.
To continue the conversation, let’s just imagine that Boy X and Girl Y meet at a party. They get into a great conversation (she’s flirting and making it obvious that she’s interested) and he asks for her number. They go on a date, it’s a great time, and they are both excited about going on a second date. Now what?
Well, let’s talk about friendship! Certainly, taking initiative and asking a person out is a big deal. But the process of becoming friends is where the relationship really starts to take shape and where a deeper discernment begins.
Does she have strong relationships with the women in her life? Does he have strong relationships with the men in his life? Do they know how to begin a friendship with someone of the opposite sex? Will this person be a faithful husband or wife? Will this person be a loving father or mother? Do I see virtues in this person that I admire? Will this person help or hinder our journey toward Christ?
All of our friendships, whether romantic or non-romantic, have as their goal God who is Love. What does this mean to you? Leave your comments and attend our next Relationship Speaker and Discussion Series! Working with insights from Pope Benedict’s Deus Caritas Est as well as Scripture, Dr. Yohe will speak on how to be a good friend, the importance of same-sex friendships, and the importance of opposite-sex friendships as a groundwork for dating and marriage.
Sunday July 19 – 6:30pm (after the 5:30 Mass)
Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle – North Conference Room
The Essential Groundwork of Friendship
Dr. Katherine Yohe received her Ph.D. in Historical Theology with a focus on spirituality from Catholic University of America. Her dissertation was on human friendship as a means to grow in union with God, and most of her publications and lectures have centered on the lay vocation and friendship. She has taught at Catholic University and LaSalle University and is presently teaching Scripture and Catholic Doctrine at Trinity School at Meadow View. She has been married for fifteen years and has a thirteen year-old son.
