Franciscan at Home

A brief survey of our world should be evidence enough that we are sorely in need of virtue. In need of a disposition for the good, beautiful, and true, as well as strength to choose them over what is bad, ugly, and false. Even within our own personal lives, the call to holiness requires both supernatural grace (what God does) and human virtue (what we do to participate in becoming who God made us to be). One of the principal responsibilities of any parent, teacher, or catechist is to help form their children/students with a vision of what a virtuous life looks like and how to acquire and grow in virtue. Most of us are familiar with the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love, as well as the cardinal virtues of prudence, temperance, justice, and fortitude that build from and are strengthened by the theological virtues. However, many are not as familiar with virtue of magnanimity: the virtue of desiring and doing great things

I grew up in a relatively large Catholic family who never missed Sunday Mass. I was sent to Catholic elementary and high schools, where school Masses were celebrated with regularity. I also had what I now believe to be a special grace of faith from the Lord, where I never questioned the existence of God or Church teaching (as I understood it to be at the time)—even though by young adulthood many of those around me were questioning both. I also was a faithful altar-server straight up until college, serving at many Masses during the school year. Considering the trajectory of my life, I had received Communion nearly one thousand times by the time I went away to college.

But in reality, the effects that receiving my Lord in communion had on me were minimal. I went to Mass faithfully, and I even went prayerfully, but I was not coming away changed by the encounter in any visible way. While I had a personal faith in God, I was lacking in a personal understanding of what it meant to give my life to him, to desire to live a new life in Christ, and ultimately, to have this change of life flow from personal repentance and conversion. Sherry Weddell points out that any of these four obstacles “can block the ultimate fruitfulness of valid sacraments,”[1] and I was missing three out of four.

This stymied the flow of sacramental grace in my life. It would do the Lord a disservice to say that I had no spiritual benefit at all: I was going to Mass weekly, doing so in a spirit of faith, and offering sincere prayers during the liturgy. All the same, I can say with certainty that the spiritual effects of Communion for me were minimal. In terms of grace, I was collecting a dime each week at best, but the Lord had been offering me a dollar. And a central reason that I benefited so little was precisely because I had attended Mass in my parish so often.

Counterintuitive as that might sound, it’s true. This was because in my culturally Catholic parish, no one had ever modeled for me in my Catholic schooling or in my parish a discipled life flowing from the Eucharist, complete with active and visible spiritual fruit. Regularly observing and participating in a parish culture of churchgoing Catholics taught me to expect little transformation from receiving communion (either personally or in the community), and so I never did. Participation was the clear focus, not fruitfulness. Therefore, any catechesis on the Real Presence I received in a classroom setting was always obstructed by what my experience was teaching me—namely, that receiving the Lord in Communion was not meant to result in immediate spiritual fruit that could be visibly perceived in the community.

Uno de los signos de la experiencia contemporánea es un sentido muy extendido de quebrantamiento, una especie de pesadez de ser. Por lo mismo, una de las afirmaciones menos debatidas de la cristiandad es que tenemos necesidad de sanación, tanto a nivel personal como a nivel social. Los analistas sociales buscan sin cesar las causas de este descontento individual y colectivo. Mientras existan factores culturales que contribuyan a la enfermedad posmoderna, la teología cristiana siempre ha ofrecido una causa de raíz del descontento de la humanidad: el pecado original que heredamos y los pecados personales que cometemos. Si el pecado fuera el fin de la historia, la Cristiandad ofrecería un panorama bastante desolador. Según sugiere su mismo nombre, sin embargo, la Cristiandad no termina con nuestro quebrantamiento, sino que señala hacia arriba y hacia afuera a Cristo, quien vino a este mundo precisamente para salvarnos de nuestro pecado y del peso de sus efectos.

Aunque siga el debate sobre las raíces de los problemas de la humanidad, el punto central de la Buena Nueva del Evangelio es la verdad de que Jesús vino para que nosotros pudiéramos tener vida (Cf. Jn 10,10). Esta participación en la vida divina por medio de la gracia, recibida de manera especial por medio de la oración y de los sacramentos, se nos ofrece gratuitamente. La gracia es un don divino que a la vez sana nuestro quebrantamiento y nos eleva a la verdadera grandeza espiritual. Santo Tomás de Aquino escribió sobre este doble efecto de la gracia en la Summa Theologiae: “…el hombre para vivir rectamente necesita un doble auxilio de la gracia de Dios. El primero es el de un don habitual por el cual la naturaleza caída sea curada y, una vez curada, sea además elevada, de modo que pueda realizar obras meritorias para la vida eterna, superiores a las facultades de la naturaleza. El segundo es un auxilio de gracia por el cual Dios mueve a la acción. Ahora bien, el hombre que está en gracia no necesita otro auxilio de la gracia, en el sentido de un nuevo hábito infuso. Pero sí necesita un nuevo auxilio en el segundo sentido, es decir, necesita ser movido por Dios a obrar rectamente.”[1] Estos efectos curativos y transformativos de la gracia son precisamente el antídoto contra nuestros corazones rotos y nuestro mundo roto.

One of the marks of contemporary experience seems to be a widespread sense of brokenness, a sort of heaviness of being. Therefore, one of the least debated claims of Christianity is that we need healing, both personal and societal. Social analysts repeatedly look for the causes of this individual and collective discontent. While there are cultural factors that contribute to postmodern dis-ease, Christian theology has always offered a root cause for humanity’s discontent: original sin that we inherit and the personal sins that we commit. If sin were the end of the story, Christianity would indeed be rather bleak. As its name implies, however, Christianity does not stop with our brokenness but rather points us upward and outward to Christ, who came into this world precisely to save us from our sin and the weight of its effects. While debate may continue regarding the roots of humanity’s problems, central to the message of the Good News of the Gospel is the truth that Jesus came that we might have life (see Jn 10:10). This sharing in divine life by grace, received especially through prayer and the sacraments, is freely offered to us. Grace is a divine gift that both heals our brokenness and uplifts us to true spiritual greatness. Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote of this two-fold effect of grace in the Summa Theologiae: “In order to live righteously a man needs a twofold help of God—first, a habitual gift whereby corrupted human nature is healed, and after being healed is lifted up so as to work deeds meritorious of everlasting life, which exceed the capability of nature. Secondly, man needs the help of grace in order to be moved by God to act.”[1] These curative and transformative effects of grace are precisely the antidote to our broken hearts and our broken world.

Socrates and Plato and Aristotle and Buddha and Confucius and Lao Tzu all gave us their minds; Christ gave us his body. They all tried to save the world from ignorance by their philosophies; Christ saved the world from sin and death and hell by his body and blood—both on the cross and in the Eucharist. Christ said, “Come unto me.” Buddha said, “Look not to me, look to my dharma, my teaching.” The others said, “I teach the truth,” but Christ said, “I AM the truth.” When we receive the Eucharist, we eat the Truth. Christ is the meaning of life. When we receive him, we receive the meaning of life into our bodies, not just into our minds.

The Gospel is a series of events, culminating in a marriage. The bridegroom, Christ, and his bride the Church (us) both come a long way to meet and marry each other. He comes from eternity to time, from heaven to earth, from spirit to matter, from perfection to a world full of sin and into lives full of sin. He brings us from absolute nothingness into being by creation and, eventually, our birth; and then into his Church, into his Body, by the sacraments, beginning with baptism, which is our second birth. These are dramatic events, good news, gospel. Since our religion is essentially the Good News, it is proper to ask the same five questions a news reporter would: who, when, what, why, and where? These are the five questions I set myself to answer in this series about our meeting with Christ in the Eucharist. We’ll address the first two questions in this issue.

The distress has been palpable. Important voices within the Church decry clericalism as the cause of the current scandal. Others point to the Church’s teaching concerning sexuality not being lived or taught with clarity.

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