Franciscan at Home

In this issue, On the Spot looks at the misunderstandings, which often arise concerning the Sacrament of Ordination, and offers suggestions to enrich our catechesis.

‘Today the word “ordination” is reserved for the sacramental act which integrates a man into the order of bishops, presbyters, or deacons, and goes beyond a simple election, designation, delegation, or institution by the community, for it confers a gift of the Holy Spirit that permits the exercise of a “sacred power”...which can come only from Christ himself through his Church.’ (CCC 1538)

Two frequently heard groups of comments, which arise from two different age ranges, can summarise what would appear to be common misunderstandings about the priesthood, its nature and function.

‘What does Father do all day? Isn’t it boring spending all the time praying and reading the Bible? Does he have another job for weekdays?’
‘Well, the priesthood is dying out. The Church is beginning to see that lay people can do everything a priest does. The Holy Spirit is changing things so we don't need priests; hence hardly any priests being ordained now.’

In the second part of his explanation of John Paul II’s teaching on Faith and Reason, Alan Schreck highlights the importance of philosophy for a sound catechetics and theology.

In the first three chapters of this encyclical letter, Fides et Ratio, Pope John Paul II has affirmed that the quest for truth, especially the truth about ultimate realities such as God, can be attained through reason (e.g. philosophy) and by faith in what God reveals to us, which achieves its climax in the person of Jesus Christ. These two sources of truth are not opposed, but together ‘lead us to truth in all its fullness’ (34).

Chapter IV of Fides et Ratio explores more fully the relationship between faith and reason as it has developed in history. Classical, pre-Christian philosophy sought to ‘purify’ human ideas about God of ‘mythological elements’ and ‘provide a rational foundation forbelief in the divinity’ (36). This is why some of the early Church fathers appreciated and even employed some forms of classical philosophy ‘which offered new ways of proclaiming and understanding the God of Jesus Christ’ (36). However, some Christians like Tertullian rejected philosophy as ‘outmoded in addressing questions about life’s meaning since Christian revelation gave direct and satisfying answers to them’ (37). Others, like St. Justin and Clement of Alexandria, found important truths in philosophy that could be employed to explain and defend the Christian faith (38). Origen employed the philosophy of Plato to shape his theological arguments against Celsus and others who criticized Christianity for being ‘irrational’ (39). Later church Fathers, including the Cappadocians and St Augustine, ‘Christianized Platonic and Neo-Platonic thought.’ St. Augustine produced ‘the first great synthesis of philosophy and theology,’ unsurpassed in Western thought for centuries (40). Pope John Paul summarizes the accomplishment of the early Church Fathers of both East and West: ‘They fully welcomed reason which was open to the absolute, and infused it with the richness drawn from revelation’ (41). Those authors distinguished elements in various philosophies that were consonant with revelation and those that were not.

In this article Fr. Michael A. Caridi givse us a reflection on the primordial bond and intrinsic link between the Eucharist and the Priesthood.

Shortly after being named Archbishop of Saigon in 1975, Francois-Xavier Nguyen van Thuan was arrested by the Communist authorities and imprisoned for the next thirteen years. In his account, Five Loaves and Two Fish, Cardinal Thuan tells of offering clandestine Masses while in prison, using meager amounts of bread and wine that had been smuggled in. After Mass, he would fashion a tiny container from the paper of cigarette boxes in which to reserve the Blessed Sacrament for later adoration. He would secretly carry the makeshift tabernacle with the consecrated Host within the breast pocket of his shirt, close to his heart.

While, over the course of those thirteen years in prison, the Communists time and again relentlessly tried to break the Cardinal and strip him of his emotional, spiritual and moral dignity, they couldn’t. Why? Because his was a priestly dignity, a dignity not based upon comfort, position, or honor, but on the fact that Jesus Christ is always close to the priest’s heart – an intense union stemming primarily from his ability to make Jesus present in the celebration of the Most Holy Eucharist, a bond that offers the priest the necessary strength to endure all the demands his vocation implies.

Simply put, Cardinal Thuan survived his years of imprisonment because he could find a way to offer Mass, thus keeping Jesus near to his heart.

But how is this authentic experience of grace appropriated without the negative side effect of disaffection from communion with the Roman Catholic Church and casting one’s hermeneutical loyalty in the arena of biblical fundamentalism? The answer is to be found in the early Patristic practice of uniting the spiritual sense, a highly personalized appropriation of the biblical message, with the living tradition of the community of faith.[ii] We shall begin by first noting some of the features of fundamentalism, both biblical fundamentalism and a peculiar manifestation of fundamentalism among Catholics.

It is all too easy to lose track of the ultimate reason as to why we catechize. What is the purpose of it all?

Our beloved late Pope John Paul II proclaimed the reason for catechesis profoundly, yet simply, in a single sentence: ‘The definitive aim of catechesis is to put people not only in touch but in communion, in intimacy, with Jesus Christ: only He can lead us to the love of the Father in the Spirit and make us share in the life of the Holy Trinity.’ (Catechesi tradendae 5)

We want people to encounter Christ. We do not want our students only to accumulate facts about the life of Jesus; we also want them to have a personal relationship with the incarnate Son of God.

In this issue Dr Alan Schreck introduces John Paul’s great Encyclical on the relationship between faith and reason, Fides et Ratio.

It is only a little more than a decade ago that Pope John Paul II issued his thirteenth encyclical letter Fides et Ratio, on September 14, 1998. The letter opens with an unforgettable image: ‘Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.’ Yet this is spoken to a ‘one-winged’ world in which faith is increasingly seen as unreasonable and unnecessary to apprehend truth and to live a good life. Nonetheless, the Holy Father completes this opening statement with a clear statement of faith:

‘…God has placed in the human heart a desire to

know the truth – in a word, to know himself –so that by

knowing and loving God, men and women may also

come to the fullness of truth about themselves. (Cf. Ex33:18; Ps 27:89,63:23; Jn 17:8;1Jn 3:2)’

This premise is continued in the encyclical’s introduction, entitled ‘Know Yourself.’

He observes that all the great world religions grapple with the basic human questions about good and evil, the meaning of our existence, and the possibility of an ‘after life.’ The Catholic Church, the Pope says, has a special diakonia or service of truth, which it undertakes especially in the proclamation of Jesus Christ as ‘the way and the truth, and the life’ (Jn 14:6) (1.2). Yet, our understanding of faith will remain partial until ‘the final Revelation of God’ at the second coming of Jesus Christ.

Church teaching helps us to see how to personally appropriate the Scriptures as living sources for our lives and for our catechesis.

John Paul II’s apostolic exhortation Catechesi Tradendae (CT) begins by underscoring the christocentricity of catechesis. Since a Person, the Person of the Lord, is at the heart of catechesis, then the “primary and essential object of catechesis is… ‘the mystery of Christ.’” Moreover, this means that “the aim of catechesis is to put people not only in touch but in communion, in intimacy, with Jesus Christ: only he can lead us to the love of the Father in the Spirit and make us share in the life of the Holy Trinity” (CT §5).

A deeper understanding of the mystery of Christ is tied significantly to the Word of God, as it is articulated in Scripture and Tradition. The catechumen and catechesis itself are to be “impregnated” with the word of Scripture (CT §§20, 27).[i] The Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) reinforces and deepens these points by teaching that “Christ … is the Father’s one, perfect, and unsurpassable Word…[in whom] he has said everything” (CCC §65) and that “through all the words of Sacred Scripture, God speaks only one single Word, his one Utterance in whom he expresses himself completely” (CCC §102).[ii]

Given the correlation between the living Word of God, Christ, and the Scriptures, it is not uncommon for catechumens and catechists to tell of reading or hearing Scripture in a way that speaks directly to their hearts and the circumstances of their lives. Those who have received this grace testify to the intense sense of meaning that is found in the personal appropriation of Scripture that now fills, spiritually feeds, and directs their lives. The Scriptures are for them no “dead letter” (CCC §111; cf. 2 Cor 3:6) but the living word of God (Hebrews 4:12).

As wonderful as this experience is, it raises two questions. First, how may we explain theologically the experience of personal appropriation of Scripture for one’s life? Second, how is such an interpretation of Scripture deeply personal and yet not private so as not to succumb to the literalism of biblical fundamentalism?

We have just finished celebrating the Year of St Paul, and it is fitting that the theme for this issue of The Sower is ‘Loving the Church’, for that is a wonderfully succinct way of summing up the essence of Saul’s conversion and of his receiving a new name rooted in a new calling. Saul was converted to an abiding love for the Church.

After all, what was Saul before his conversion? He was one who loathed the Church. He found the Church not so much irrelevant or simply unattractive, as deeply offensive and hateful—to himself and, he was convinced, to the God of his fathers. Saul, we know from the Acts of the Apostles, was present for the stoning of Stephen: those who had acted as the witnesses against Stephen, the first Christian martyr, ‘laid down their garments at the feet of a young man named Saul’ (Acts 7:58). ‘And Saul was consenting to his death’ (8:1). Following the death of Stephen, Acts describes how Saul ‘laid waste the Church’ (8:3). He ‘dragged off men and women and committed them to prison’ (8:3), ‘breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord’ (9:1).

Saul’s conversion was a complete turning around, a total change of direction, so that what was hated now became the occasion for his deepest and most ardent love. The Risen Jesus appeared just as Saul had apparently gained new powers for persecution of these followers of ‘the Way’ (9:2). After this meeting, Saul completes his journey to Damascus, no longer seeking those whom he might imprison but, in his own words, ‘a prisoner of Christ Jesus’ (Philemon 1). The capturer has been captured. His physical journey and destination is unchanged, but he has undergone a dramatic spiritual reversal of direction. He receives a new name, Paul, and a new vocation. There is a ‘new creation’ and now nothing else is to count for anything apart from this new reality, this new love (see Gal 6:15).mHis persecution of the Church is now to be remembered as his most reprehensible activity: he is ‘the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God’ (1 Cor 15:9).

In this issue we complete our introduction to John Paul II’s prophetic document on the Gospel of Life.

One of the most important initiatives of Pope John Paul II was his call for a ‘new evangelization’—a rekindling of the primary mission of the Church to proclaim, by word and deed, the Good News of Jesus Christ to all people. This would include the proclamation of the Gospel to those peoples and cultures which had received the Gospel in the past, but have ‘fallen away,’ (hence the need for ‘re-evangelization’).

In the final chapter of Evangelium Vitae, Pope John Paul reminds us of the Church’s identity as ‘the people of life and for life… because God, in his unconditional love, has given us the Gospel of life’ (78.3; 79.1). I am reminded of powerful words in the Gospel of John in which Jesus contrasts the thief ‘who comes only to steal and kill and destroy’ with himself, the Good Shepherd who said, ‘I came that they may have life and have it abundantly’ (Jn 10:10). Most of this encyclical has focused on the monumental struggle between the ‘culture of death,’ which like the thief ‘comes only to steal and kill and destroy’, and the mission of Jesus and the Church to bring and protect life. This final section focuses on the positive mission of the Church to promote a ‘new culture of human life’.

The lady sitting next to me at one of our parish sessions for adults clearly felt comfortable talking about her own Christian faith. She leaned over to me. ‘I was baptised a Catholic,’ she confided, ‘but I left the Church after some bad experiences. I never really stopped believing in God, and a couple of years ago I started going to a house church. I really learned what grace is there – something I never learned in the Catholic Church. Still, I’ve come back to the Church now…’
On the Spot highlights some of the complex positions, questions and comments experienced by catechists, teachers and parents. It outlines the knowledge necessary to be faithful to Church teaching and which will best help those we teach who call us to account for the hope that is in us (cf. I Peter 3:15).

Amette Ley looks at how we teach the Catholic understanding of the life of grace.

At that point the chatting groups were called to order and I never heard why she had moved from her house church back to our parish. The route from being a cradle Catholic, to finding a new sense of one’s faith through a Protestant denomination, and then returning to the Catholic Church, is not unusual, of course. But the whole experience of this lady seemed to me a good illustration of the confusion in many minds of how the Church understands the life of grace, and how we go about possessing it. Bringing people to understand this is, of course, at the very core of what catechesis must achieve.