Dein Reich Komme!
Milestones
I wrote in the seminary's summer newsletter that my summer reading would include Milestones: Memoirs 1927-1977 by then-Cardinal Ratzinger. Since benefactors and alumni of Kenrick all read that, I figured for once I'd better read what I said I would over the summer. The book has not disappointed, thus far (it's not long, and I'm about 3/4 through with it). One of the things that strikes me about it is how different Joseph Ratzinger's family life was from that of his predecessor. Karol Wojtyla lost his mother and his only brother very early, and was entirely alone in the world by the time he was 20. Ratzinger, on the other hand, has a brother and a sister both still living, I believe, and his parents both lived until well after he was ordained; in fact, in his early years of priesthood, his aging parents lived at his house in Freising.
The other interesting contrast is their coming to their vocation; Karol Wojtyla seems to have only given serious consideration to the priesthood as a young man, having earlier intended to be an actor, while Josef Ratzinger (like myself) pretty much knew from childhood that he wanted to be a priest, and he entered the seminary at age 12.
That makes Ratzinger's vocation story a little more typical of his time, but when it comes to the hardships involved in being a seminarian during WWII, Ratzinger had it just as hard as Wojtyla did. He at various times had to serve in an anti-aircraft battery, do forced labor near the Russian front, resist attempts at recruitment by the SS, and eventually deserted the army when he could easily have been shot for it. Pretty amazing to think how if things had just gone a little bit wrong, both of these popes wouldn't have lived even to ordination!
The other interesting thing I discovered about the young Ratzinger was that his habilitation thesis (a sort of extra doctorate they have in Germany) very nearly wound up being rejected entirely, and the crushed young professor had to subject it to several more months of re-writing. Should be encouraging for those of us who will soon be agonizing over MA theses!
Adveniat Regnum Tuum!
O Roma Felix! Thoughts on Peter and Paul
It has been fairly quiet here at the Cathedral Basilica this week, because so many people, including the Archbishop, have gone to Rome, where every right-thinking person would naturally want to spend the Solemnity of Sts. Peter and Paul. This is one of those days that has multiple festivities attached to it for the Church and various people I know; I enumerate them as follows.
-The name day of two of my brothers (we have a Paul, 22, and a Peter, 16).
-The conferral of the pallium by Pope Benedict on Archbishops Joseph Naumann (Kansas City, KS, formerly an auxiliary here in St. Louis), Wilton Gregory (Atlanta, formerly Belleville, IL), and 31 others including two archbishops from Texas.
-The dedication of the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis in 1926.
-The priestly ordination of Pope Benedict XVI in 1951.
-The priestly ordination of Archbishop Raymond Burke 30 years ago in 1975.
-The definitive approval of the constitutions of the Legionaries of Christ in 1983.
-And of course, this year, the opening of the cause for the beatification of John Paul II.
Beyond such an assemblage of anniversaries, the great solemnity with which the Church celebrates this day makes me reflect on what exactly it all means. A minimialist Puritan mindset might ask why any saints should be celebrated so highly, and why the Roman Church makes such a big deal today about the Pope, the archbishops, and their palliums (for those who might not know, the pallium is a strip of white wool given by the Pope to an archbishop to wear during Mass as a symbol of his tie with the Holy See). Shouldn't it all just be about Jesus?
Well of course--but the feast of these or any apostles makes us realize how true it is to call the Church "the extension of Christ in time" (as my eighth grade religion teacher put it). After all, Jesus himself never publicly preached the good news of his resurrection. The Paschal mystery was the culmination of what he came for, but for some mysterious reason he left it to the apostles to get the word out. Without the witness of the apostles, led by Peter, to the Risen Lord, most of the world wouldn't have known Jesus as any more than a crucified rabbi who said some nice stuff. Without the mission of St. Paul to the Gentiles, Christianity could have remained a mere sidebar to Second Temple Judaism, rather than becoming a leaven throughout the Greco-Roman world. Without Paul's letters, huge pieces of our understanding of what Christ's cross and resurrection even means would be missing.
The point is that celebrating saints like this is really a celebration of the fact that we can have faith in Christ at all, because in the unfathomable plan of God he left it up to men like Peter and Paul--and John Paul and Benedict XVI and all the archbishops in Rome today and, yes, even my seminary brothers and me--to make his Passion bear fruit in people's lives. What more appropriate than that the Peter of our time should today publicly recognize men from around the world who are the next link in handing on what the apostles left us? And as if to emphasize the point that he could do this even with sinners like us, Christ deliberately chose men who would not have looked good on a resume, Simon Bar-Jonah having denied his Lord when the chips were down, Saul of Tarsus having long been the early Church's public enemy number one. That anything entrusted to such men could have lasted is surely a proof of Christ's divinity, and that thought should encourage all Christians who feel overwhelmed by the task of the New Evangelization. The feast of Peter and Paul, and all the solemnity that the Church in Rome attaches to it, only serves to glorify God, who is the author and finisher of every good work.
Thy Kingdom Come!
A comment below asks if I have removed the post on relativism, by which I presume is meant my as-yet-unpublished letter to the NY Times on the current judicial mentality of many of our Supreme Court justices. I removed the post upon learning that letters submitted to the Times are asked not be published elsewhere, including on the Internet. So I shall wait for about a week and see if they publish it (the chances of which are minimal); if not, I will post it back up.
Sorry to any who were confused by this "now-you-see-it-now-you-don't"!
Adveniat Regnum Tuum!
Unexpected Blessings
I spent this evening in a most enjoyable fashion, with Fr. Tom Keller, the associate here at the Cathedral where I'm staying this summer. It so happens that this Friday, the Institute of Christ the King will celebrate their first Solemn High Mass in their new home at St. Francis de Sales, "the Cathedral of the South Side." Fr. Keller, who is a good friend of the Institute, will be taking the role of the deacon during the Mass, and is furiously trying to learn the details of the old rite in preparation. So we spent the evening watching a DVD that showed Solemn High Mass on Easter Sunday, 1940, at Mundelein Seminary in Chicago, with then-Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen giving theological and liturgical commentary in the background.
I wouldn't have space on this post to dwell at length on my love for the Tridentine Mass and what my thoughts are on the state of liturgy in the Church today. But as we sat there this evening watching that old Mass and trying to pick up all we could (I have hopes of acting as the subdeacon in the not-so-distant future), I couldn't help thinking that I'd never expected to be doing this as a seminarian.
I remember first encountering the Tridentine Mass in Pittsburgh when I was a freshman at Franciscan University of Steubenville. I was quickly captivated by it, but I also realized that even among very well-meaning people at the university and in the Church as a whole, such an interest was looked on with some suspicion. Pre-theology students in particular (of whom I was not one) had to be very careful about their interest in the Tridentine Mass, lest they risk being branded as reactionaries.
However, it almost seemed I ran into the old Mass everywhere I went: my roommate freshman year, still a good friend of mine, was a lifelong devotee of it, and when we spent a semester in Austria as sophomores, we discovered right on our campus a small chapel upstairs where a low Mass was said every morning at 6:00. There, I really become accustomed to the rite. When I went to Oxford the next year, I found the Oxford Oratory, where the Novus Ordo was celebrated in Latin every Sunday with the utmost solemnity, and the Tridentine Mass from time to time. As the old Mass seemed to follow me everywhere I went, I couldn't help wondering if I wasn't being called to priesthood in one of the many groups which celebrate according to the 1962 Missal.
Much as I loved the Tridentine Mass, I didn't feel I was being called to leave the rite I grew up with in order to celebrate it, and I proceeded to apply to the archdiocese of St. Louis. However, I didn't want to have to hide who I was, and I remember making it clear to our vocation director when we first met that I was a "traditionalist" liturgically, and that I even had a great appreciation for the Latin Mass. I am told there are dioceses where such an admission would be the kiss of death for any candidate; imagine my surprise when I got nothing but encouragement from everyone at the seminary, and even heard Archbishop Rigali himself speak to myself and some visitors about the liturgy in a way that didn't seem at all threatened by the Tridentine Mass.
When I started at the seminary, I was amazed at the number of fellow students who were enthusiastic about traditional liturgy. None of these guys wanted to act as if the Council had never happened, but they also didn't feel threatened in any way by the old liturgy. Amazingly enough, several of our professors at times spoke highly of the "Mass of Pius V", and even encouraged us to attend the old liturgy. Then came Archbishop Burke to St. Louis, and quickly invited here both the Institute of Christ the King and the Canons Regular of the New Jerusalem to offer Mass according to the 1962 Missal. Myself and the seminarians of my generation who love the old liturgy have found our concerns and our sentiments echoed in the Archbishop, who told me that even priests who will celebrate the Mass of Paul VI most of the time should be familiar with the old rite and absorb from it the spirit of reverence and awe that can often be lacking in our time.
And then came Benedict XVI. No, I'm not expecting an instant return to celebration ad orientem, or a universal indult for the Tridentine Mass (though I wouldn't rule such things out), but certainly there is no man who could have been elected who is more keenly aware of the crises of the Church's worship, and more resolved to preserve the continuity of the Church's tradition.
So here I am, without having really sought it out at all, being steeped in the liturgical tradition of the Church. If you told me five years ago that Cardinal Ratzinger would be Pope, that the archbishop of St. Louis would be such a friend of tradition, that I would find my liturgical interests echoed and encouraged by fellow seminarians and important priests of the archdiocese, I'd have thought it was wishful thinking. But God seems to have brought it about thus. It is for me a striking exemplification of the fact that we can safely entrust our plans to his care, as long as we seek to follow his will. And it gives me confidence that for some reason the Holy Spirit has been moving myself, and many young men like me, to drink deep from the fountain of the Church's liturgical tradition in order to the renew the Church through our priesthood.
Adveniat Regnum Tuum!
Another Good Link
I have posted at the side a link to another excellent blog, maintained by Fr. Alvin Kimel. Fr. Kimel, known on his blog as "the Pontificator," is/was an "Anglo-Catholic" priest in, I believe, North Carolina. He, like many Anglicans, has long wrestled with the current state of the Anglican communion. He has commented on issues within Anglicanism, and Christianity as a whole, for some time, and one can find some rather high quality discussion on his blog between evangelicals, Anglicans, Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox. Recently, Fr. Kimel announced his resignation from ministry in the Anglican communion and his intention to be received into the Catholic Church, and possibly to seek ordination under the pastoral provision. Some of you may enjoy reading his "Pontifications."
Adveniat Regnum Tuum!
On Saints in England--and America
My friend Scott Hastings mentioned in reply to my post on More and Fisher that "it is good to see writing about some English saints. The Germans and the Irish get altogether too much credit, or at least that is the opinion of a Hastings."
I have to agree entirely with Scott--although I have, ethnically, practically no English in me, and quite a bit of German. Of course, most American Catholics (here in St. Louis, anyway) are German or Irish (or Italian, or Polish, etc.), so it's only fair that each appreciates the saints of its own heritage. But a tragic result of the English Reformation is that hardly any of us even think of England as a historically Catholic country, with a host of its own saints.
One of the things that struck me most at St. Aloysius where I went to Mass in Oxford was that about every other week or so there seemed to be the memorial of an English saint who wasn't in the universal calendar. Ancient figures like Cuthbert, Chad, and Dunstan, or medieval mendicants like Bl. Agnellus of Pisa (despite the name, he's buried in Oxford--under what's now a shopping center!)--who would have realized that the land of Dickens, Sherlock Holmes, and Churchill had such Catholic heroes! One gets a similar experience reading the old edition of the English priest Alban Butler's lives of the saints. The fact that England was Catholic for almost twice as long as it's been Protestant makes the final break all the more tragic--although the many martyrs of the English Reformation, both the canonized and the anonymous, bear witness to the depth of an English Catholicism that wouldn't go down without a fight. Nonetheless, so thoroughly was the English mind Protestantized that Newman felt utterly alone, almost like a traitor to his own people, when he finally made the long journey into the Catholic Church, which at that time had been reduced to an insignificant flock ministered to by Italian missionaries, and seen by the English as thoroughly foreign to their way of life.
The Catholic experience in America was similar at first--associated mostly with poor immigrants of Irish or Italian extraction, and viewed as the outpost of a hostile foreign power. It took some time before Catholicism could be seen as a normal thing for Americans. And in a sense we have it tougher than English Catholics. We have never been persecuted outright here, but unlike English Catholics, we cannot look back to a past when being American and being Catholic were one and the same--our nation was Protestant (or at least non-denominational) in its inception, and Catholics have always had, to some degree, to fight for a place at the table. It could be so again, someday, as the Church's stand for the Gospel of Life makes her ever more counter-cultural in American society. But we can look at the Catholic roots of the Western world, at the Catholic heritage of America from Columbus to Lafayette to Fulton Sheen, and be confident that it is only the truth of Christ's Church which will set any nation free, from England to America.
Thy Kingdom Come!
"It's greatly to his credit that he is an English martyr."
(Apologies to Gilbert and Sullivan for the parodied lyrics above.)
Today is one of my favorite days in the liturgical calendar. While it is the optional memorial of St. Paulinus of Nola, I am pretty sure (unfortunately for the good St. Paulinus) that all English-speaking Catholics choose rather to celebrate the optional memorial of Sts. John Fisher and Thomas More. These men, especially More, have always been favorites of mine. Part of it has to do, I'm sure, with the fact the "A Man For All Seasons" with Paul Scofield is probably one of the best saint movies ever made. But that film, and the play it is based on by Robert Bolt, derive most of their power from the man himself. More was a Renaissance humanist well versed in the great learning of his time, and a successful statesman. As a former student at Oxford and a lifelong lover of all things English, I've always loved this brilliant Oxford grad who loved England as much as any man ever did. But he also loved his faith even more, and when England's king and England's Church, which for nine centuries had been faithful to Rome, though not without some storms, decided to strike out on a path of schism, More showed himself to have a faith as deep and simple as the humblest English peasant woman. More's final speech to his judges, as William Roper recorded it in his biography, contains an eloquent yet simple protestation of faith in the power given to St. Peter and his heirs "by the mouth of our Savior when he was personally present on this earth" (a line which the non-Catholic Bolt cut out in the play but which was, thankfully, restored in the film).
Just as interesting, in its own way, is John Fisher's story. In a country which had as its most popular saint the bishop and martyr Thomas a Becket, who had died with his vestments on rather than let the king dominate the Church, there was only one bishop willing to resist Henry VIII's divorce of Queen Catherine, and his subsequent takeover of the Church. The rest knuckled under--which is instructive for our time, when conferences of bishops as a whole can sometimes seem equally afraid to take a firm stand on controversial issues, or perhaps even desirous of getting out from under Rome's authority. The parallels of the English Reformation with the post-Vatican II era are indeed remarkable, especially in the way that beautiful churches were gutted and religious houses emptied almost overnight. But in our time too, we have John Fishers, and indeed it was very encouraging for me to see men like my own Archbishop Raymond Burke take a firm stand against the self-contradiction of Catholics supporting abortion in the last election cycle. The national conference as a whole made statements more clear than ever before--and it was not without its effect.
Anyway, this feast gives us some great heroes to pray for many needs: for lawyers and politicians to be just and courageous in defending the truth of the Gospel in the public arena, for the grace to combine great learning with deep faith, for bishops to be strong in adhering to the Rock of Peter and resisting the encroachments of the world, and for England, the great Christian nation which gave us these two men to return to its Christian and Catholic roots.
ART!
I mentioned below a certain Dana Christensen. Fr. Christensen is a friend of mine from Kenrick, whose ordination I was recently privileged to witness in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. While at Kenrick, he maintained a well-known blog entitled "The Meandering Mind of a Seminarian." It has now been duly retitled as "White Around the Collar: The Meandering Mind of a Prairie Priest." I have posted a link at the side.
Adveniat Regnum Tuum!
June 20, 2005
Well, here goes nothing. I've never considered myself much of a computer person, and I have no more cyber know-how than is standard for my generation, but I am going to give the world of blogging a shot. First, because now that my friend Dana Christensen is a priest , someone has to take his place as the web's premier seminarain blogger:) And because for years I have "logged" and journaled my random thoughts on matters of all kinds, and I figure I might as well start putting them out there for anyone who might find them interesting. I hope some of you might.
A word of introduction: I am a 23 year old Roman Catholic seminarian for the Archdiocese of St. Louis, Missouri. I am a proud alumnus of Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio, where I earned a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy and classics before joining the seminary. Having completed two years of demanding theological studies at Kenrick Seminary, I am now hanging out at the beautiful Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis for the summer, awaiting my internship assignment for next year.
As for this blog, I have not yet determined precisely what it will deal with. Certainly , you can expect to find things focusing on the Catholic Christian faith, which is the heart of my life, and related topics of importance to the Catholic Church and all Christians today. But I may also bring in my other interests, from the sublime (literature, music, philosophy, and history,) to the banal (such as Star Wars and the once and future World Champion St. Louis Cardinals).
A final note: you may have noticed two bits of Latin up top. Above this post is "Adveniat Regnum Tuum!", which is the Latin for the second petition of the Lord's Prayer, "thy kingdom come!" This has been a motto of mine ever since my high school seminary days at Immaculate Conception Apostolic School in Center Harbor, NH. You will probably see it on here in various languages and abbreviations, depending on what mood I'm in that day. The second is the title of the blog, "Ego vos elegi." This is from John 15:16, and means "I have chosen you." The thought that Christ has indeed chosen us long before we were worthy of it is a great inspiration to me in my priestly vocation, and I believe is of great importance to all Christians who seek to live up to their baptismal calling.
I look forward to hearing your thoughts on my blog. God bless.
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