Theology on Tap in Belleville

With the summer winding down, the Theology on Tap sessions in Belleville will feature a talk by Fr. Shawn Hughes of St. John the Evangelist in Gananoque

In this Year of the Priest, it is only fitting that Fr. Hughes will speak on the Patron Saint of Priests, St. Jean-Marie-Baptiste Vianney, affectionately known as The Cure d'Ars.

Please join us on Thursday, 27 August 2009 @ 7 p.m. at the new and roomy Holy Rosary Parish Hall in Belleville what will undoubtedly be an inspiring and edifying evening!

A Sexual Revolution: 40 years since Humanae vitae

Pope Benedict XVI has characterised his predecessor, Paul VI's efforts in the sixties as truly superhuman. Many people are now beginning to see the deep wisdom in that short little encyclical on the pill. One of the testimonies that I have come across is in an article by Jennifer Fulwiller in America Magazine, touching less on the phenomena of artificial contraception and more on abortion. She suggests that those who are pro-abortion have not been deluded about the real nature of the fetus inside. Few can really hold that it is not human or just a clump of cells. They understand what it is, but they value sex without responsibilities more. They can't swallow the idea that sex might have something to do with making babies: it is quite literally throwing out the baby with the sexual bathwaters... It is one of the most impressive arguments against abortion, but simultaneously against the contraceptive mentality behind it. You'll like it.

Without the Trinity we'd be Egotists

It is Trinity Sunday, the solemnity that speaks to us about how God revealed himself to us. He told us he is Father, Son and Holy Spirit; one God in three persons. We would never have figured this out had he not told us this. Augustine meditated on it for hours and he couldn’t figure it out. Pope Benedict XVI knows Augustine pretty well, and did his doctorate on him. He loves Augustine and quotes from him often. And not only quotes, even symbols connected with the great doctor appear in the Pope's entourage, like the symbol of the sea-shell. This might be a bit of a stretch, but think back to April 24, 2005, the day he was installed as Pope in St. Peter’s Square. You might have noticed that his chasuble featured sea-shell designs. A few weeks later we saw that his new papal shield has prominently featured a sea-shell as well. Now here’s the stretch: This sea-shell apparently comes from a story in the life of St. Augustine (+430). You’ve probably heard the story. He’s a bishop by now and he was trying to come to grips with the Trinity for what became his multi-volume work De Trinitate. As he was walking along the beach, trying to take in God's infinity through the infinite horizon of the sea, he saw a young girl going back and forth into the sea, filling a scallop shell with water that she proceeded to pour into a hole she had dug in the sand. "What are you doing," Augustine tenderly asked. "I'm trying to empty the sea into his hole," the child replied. "How do you think that with a little shell," Augustine retorted, "you can possibly empty this immense ocean into a tiny hole?" The little girl countered, "And how do you, with your small head, think you can comprehend the immensity of God?" As soon as the girl said this, she disappeared, convincing Augustine that she had been an angel. St. Augustine, as smart as he was, and our new Holy Father, as great a theologian as he is, both recognize that before the mystery of the Blessed Trinity, one can never understand everything

So we can’t fit the vast mystery of the Blessed Trinity into our heads. Understanding it perfectly is way beyond the capacity of our little nuggins.
Yet once he tells us, we can sense intuitively that it could be no other way. Yes we are monotheists, but if God were not a Trinity, we would not be able to say that God is Love. If he were all alone, his love of himself would be an exarcerbated form of narcissism and egoism. It wouldn’t be real love. God is love in himself, before time, because there is eternally in him a Son, the Word, whom he loves from an infinite love which is the Holy Spirit. Raniero Cantalamessa said it beautifully:



In every love there are always three realities or subjects: one who loves, one who is loved and the love that unites them. Where God is understood as absolute power, there is no need for there to be more than one person, for power can be exercised quite well by one person; but if God is understood as absolute love, then it cannot be this way.

Which points to the whole question of relations in our life. Without relations there is no love.

The divine persons are defined in theology as “subsistent relations.” This means that the divine persons do not “have” relations, but rather “are” relations. We human beings have relations -- of son to father, of wife to husband, etc. -- but we are not constituted by those relations; we also exist outside and without them. It is not this way with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We know that happiness and unhappiness on earth depend in large part upon the quality of our relationships. The Trinity reveals the secret to good relationships. Love, in its different forms, is what makes relationships beautiful, free and gratifying. Here we see how important it is that God be seen primarily as love and not as power: love gives, power dominates.

Seeing the Church from the Inside

My favorite moment during the Pope's April visit to the US was the stunning image he evoked in his homily at St. Patrick's basilica in New York City:

From the outside, those windows are dark, heavy, even dreary. But once one enters the church, they suddenly come alive; reflecting the light passing through them, they reveal all their splendor. Many writers – here in America we can think of Nathaniel Hawthorne – have used the image of stained glass to illustrate the mystery of the Church herself. It is only from the inside, from the experience of faith and ecclesial life, that we see the Church as she truly is: flooded with grace, resplendent in beauty, adorned by the manifold gifts of the Spirit. It follows that we, who live the life of grace within the Church’s communion, are called to draw all people into this mystery of light.

That, that no doubt is what must happen to the person who walks into the famous Saint Chapelle in Paris, built by King Louis IX in 1239 to house some a rare series of relics. It is a the high point of Gothic architecture in the rayonnante style.

If it is a daunting task to do this in a spectacular church building, how much more for us in the mystical body of Christ:

This is no easy task in a world which can tend to look at the Church, like those stained glass windows, “from the outside”: a world which deeply senses a need for spirituality, yet finds it difficult to “enter into” the mystery of the Church. Even for those of us within, the light of faith can be dimmed by routine, and the splendor of the Church obscured by the sins and weaknesses of her members. It can be dimmed too, by the obstacles encountered in a society which sometimes seems to have forgotten God and to resent even the most elementary demands of Christian morality.

So if you want a dazzling experience in Montreal, go see the most beautiful church in the city, which many people don't know about: Saint Leon de Westmount, with mesmerizing stained glass by the great Guido Nincheri. Don't crane your neck too much, you be left sore...

Peggy Noonan says Something Beautiful Has Begun

Here's an excerpt from a Wall Street Journal article by Peggy Noonan that makes an interesting comparison between JP 2 and B16:

At the open-air mass in St. Peter's on April 2, the third anniversary of the death of John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI spoke movingly – he brought mist to the eyes of our little group of visiting Americans – of John Paul's life, and the meaning of his suffering. "Among his many human and supernatural qualities he had an exceptional spiritual and mystical sensitivity," said the pontiff, who knew John Paul long and intimately. (Those who hope for swift canonization please note: "supernatural." Benedict the philosopher does not use words lightly.)

He spoke of the distilled message of John Paul's reign: "Be not afraid," the words "of the angel of the Resurrection, addressed to the women before the empty tomb." Which words were themselves a condensed message: Nothing has ended, something beautiful has begun, but you won't understand for a while.

Benedict was doing something great leaders usually don't do, which is invite you to dwell on the virtues of his predecessor.

We did. You couldn't hear Benedict without your eyes going to the small white window in the plain-walled Vatican where John Paul's private chambers were, and from which he spoke to the world. Quick memory-images: the windows open, the crowd goes wild, and John Paul is waving, or laughingly shooing away a white bird that repeatedly tried to fly in and join him, or, most movingly, at the end, trying to speak and not able to, and trying again and not able to, and how the crowd roared its encouragement.

Oh, you miss that old man when you are here! You feel the presence of his absence. The souvenir shops know. They sell framed pictures and ceramic plates of the pope: John Paul. Is there no Benedict? There is. A photo of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger being embraced by . . . John Paul. It's now on my desk in New York. They have their hands on each other's shoulders and look in each other's eyes. A joyful image. They loved each other and were comrades.

When I was writing a book about John Paul, I'd ask those who'd met him or saw him go by: What did you think, or say? And they'd be startled and say, "I don't know, I was crying."

John Paul made you burst into tears. Benedict makes you think. It is more pleasurable to weep, but at the moment, perhaps it is more important to think.

A Vatican reporter last week said John Paul was the perfect pope for the television age, "a man of images." Think of the pictures of him storm-tossed, tempest-tossed, standing somewhere and leaning into a heavy wind, his robes whipping behind him, holding on to his crosier, the staff bearing the image of a crucified Christ, with both hands, for dear life, as if consciously giving Christians a picture of what it is to be alive.

Benedict, the reporter noted, is the perfect pope for the Internet age. He is a man of the word. You download the text of what he said, print it, ponder it.

Connect to your Soulmate in Montreal

Looking for a soulmate?  Many people are desperately looking for someone they can love and give themselves to completely, for life.  Indeed, it is not infrequent to find some good Catholics who would love to settle down and get married, but they just don’t find the person that shares their most basic principles. Lifelong fidelity in marriage is one of the beautiful fruits of a holy matrimony, so it is logical that one would want to facilitate that fidelity as much as possible. How do you find someone who shares the same basic principles of what is truly important in life, like faith, openness to life, work, etc? Some people have looked long and hard, but are just not ready to settle for someone who is nice, kind, enjoyable, but does not have an active or vibrant faith. Websites have gone a long way to match people up. Some of them charge considerable fees and are not always successful. And what is the point of finding Mr. or Ms. Right when they live half way across the globe? So there here is an initiative in Montreal for people who live here or around here and would like to meet other practicing Catholics and see if they can connect. It is just in its beginnings, but may prove successful in bringing about those lifelong connections. The site is called The Montreal & South Shore Catholic Meetup. Clearly, the name says it all. It is totally free; all you have to do is register and participate in any of the events you prefer. It is not the most traditional way to meet people, but if works, why not?

Abortion debate shut down in Canada

You may have heard about the abortion debate that never happened at York University because it was shut down by the powers of the Graduate Students Association. Two debaters we’re going to discuss one of the most important issues of our time, and yet unbelievably, such a debate was deemed not to have a place in our universities. It would seem that it is a closed issue: the supreme court has decided it so just forget it. At first I was very disappointed, but then I thought about what happened to Pope Benedict XVI who had been invited to speak at the University of La Sapienza in Rome on January 17, 2008 but was forced to cancel due to the rather violent outcry and protest of some of the faculty and a few students. In the end he sent the prepared talk to the rector and the attention brought about a far greater exposure than one would have imagined. Here too, the debate refusal ended up on the cover of the National Post. The essence of the Pope’s talk was precisely about the nature and of the role of the university: we all know now that he focused on the need to respect others in their search for the truth, all within a civil debate. What else is the university for? Thousands of students we’re on hand to support the Pope’s courage. The entire text can be found here. It says something about the inferiority complex of those who can’t even bring themselves to debate with those they disagree with, labeling them and presuming upon the arguments they might use. Maybe they’ll be proven wrong in a rational debate, so they’d prefer to shut it down before that happens. So get your solid, rational, philosophically-nuanced arguments ready, for a debate at your local pub. At least there we can talk: there is only the background music to contend with.