Per Christum

Today most people regard the Catholic Church’s cult of relics to be an old, antiquated practice that is the result of ignorance and superstition. Most Catholics themselves are embarassed by it.

But in the age of the Fathers, it was not uncommon for learned men to honor and revere sacred relics. We find, for example, Cyril of Jerusalem making constant references to the True Cross in his Catechetical Lectures. St. Augustine says in opposition to the pagans of his day: “The truth is that even today miracles are being wrought in the name of Christ, sometimes through His sacraments and sometimes through the intercession of the relics of his saints.” (City of God, XXII, 8) He then goes on to recount a miraculous incident in Milan of which he was a witness:

“This, however, was not the case with a miracle that took place in Milan while I was there. A great many people managed to hear of a blind man whose sight was restored because the city is big and, besides, the Emperor was there at the time and an immense multitude of people was gathered to venerate the relics of the martyrs, Protasius and Gervasius, and so witnessed what took place. The relics had been hidden, and no one knew where they were until the hiding place was revealed in a dream to Bishop Ambrose, who thereupon went and found them. It was on that occassion that the long-enduring darkness dropped from the blind man’s eyes and he saw the light of day.” (ibid)

In Basil of Caesarea’s only extant letter to St. Ambrose, we find an excellent testimony to the veneration of relics in the early church. Ambrose and Basil were good friends, although they had never met each other in person. Ambrose was an avid reader of Basil’s works, and his theology therefore bears some unique Cappadocian characteristics.

First a little background. In 355, the Arian Auxentius had been appointed to the Milanese episcopate. St. Dionysius, the rightful holder of that office, was sent into forced exile at Cappadocia by the Emperor Valentianian I, where he died in 374. Auxentius died in 374, and Ambrose was installed as the bishop of Milan later that year. Ambrose then wrote a letter to Basil, the bishop of Caesarea, as a request that the dead body of St. Dionysius be restored to his native city. Basil’s reply is dated to the year 375.

Here is the text of Basil’s letter and my comments:

“The gifts of the Lord are ever great and many; in greatness beyond measure, in number incalculable. To those who are not insensible of His mercy one of the greatest of these gifts is that of which I am now availing myself, the opportunity allowed us, far apart in place though we be, of addressing one another by letter. He grants us two means of becoming acquainted; one by personal intercourse, another by epistolary correspondence. Now I have become acquainted with you through what you have said. I do not mean that my memory is impressed with your outward appearance, but that the beauty of the inner man has been brought home to me by the rich variety of your utterances, for each of us ’speaketh out of the abundance of the heart.’ “

i) Although Basil has never met Ambrose in person, he has become intimately acquainted with him through their letters.

“I have given glory to God, Who in every generation selects those who are well-pleasing to Him; Who of old indeed chose from the sheepfold a prince for His people; Who through the Spirit gifted Amos the herdman with power and raised him up to be a prophet; Who now has drawn forth for the care of Christ’s flock a man from the imperial city, entrusted with the government of a whole nation, exalted in character, in lineage, in position, in eloquence, in all that this world admires. This same man has flung away all the advantages of the world, counting them all loss that he may gain Christ, and has taken in his hand the helm of the ship, great and famous for its faith in God, the Church of Christ. “

i) Basil refers to Ambrose as “a man from the imperial city, entrusted with the government of a whole nation” because he had previously been a civil magistrate and had lived in Rome. In that case, he would be using hyperbolic language.

ii) It is possible that here Basil is praising the emperor Valentinian II. Valentinian had ratified Ambrose’s election as bishop, and therefore it could be said that Ambrose owed his episcopate to the good will of that emperor. If this interpretation is right, then Basil would here be praising Valentinian for appointing Ambrose to the episcopate. However, it is unlikely because Basil goes on to speak of Ambrose himself as having been transferred “from the judges of the earth to the throne of the Apostles.”

“Come, then, O man of God; not from men have you received or been taught the Gospel of Christ; it is the Lord Himself who has transferred you from the judges of the earth to the throne of the Apostles; fight the good right; heal the infirmity of the people, if any are infected by the disease of Arian madness; renew the ancient footprints of the Fathers. “

i) Auxentius had ruled as bishop of Milan for nearly twenty years, so it was now Ambrose’s job to renew the Catholic faith in the city.

“You have laid the foundation of affection towards me; strive to build upon it by the frequency of your salutations. Thus shall we be able to be near one another in spirit, although our earthly homes are far apart. “

By your earnestness and zeal in the matter of the blessed bishop Dionysius you testify all your love to the Lord, your honour for your predecessors, and your zeal for the fairly. For our disposition towards our faithful fellow-servants is referred to the Lord Whom they have served. Whoever honours men that have contended for the faith proves that he has like zeal for it. One single action is proof of much virtue. “

i) This is a perfect example of the attitude we Catholics are to have in regards to the saints that have gone before us. We do not serve God in a void; we offer worship to God in communion with the entire church of Christ and with a “cloud of witnesses.”

ii) We Christians are required to venerate the saints. To do otherwise would be an insult to Christ himself, because they too are members of Christ. This is in sharp contrast to that type of religion, especailly found in Protestantism, that sees in any such veneration the stench of ‘idolatry.’

“I wish to acquaint your love in Christ that the very zealous brethren who have been commissioned by your reverence to act for you in this good work have won praise for all the clergy by the amiability of their manners; for by their individual modesty and conciliatoriness they have shewn the sound condition of all. Moreover, with all zeal and diligence they have braved an inclement season; and with unbroken perseverance have persuaded the faithful guardians of the blessed body to transmit to them the custody of what they have regarded as the safeguard of their lives. And you must understand that they are men who would never have been forced by any human authority or sovereignty, had not the perseverance of these brethren moved them to compliance. “

i) Basil is alluding to the men that Ambrose has sent to recover St. Dionysius’s relics. He praises their manners, zeal, and perseverance in persuading the guardians of Dionysius’s corpse to yield it to them. These temporal guardians appearently were very reluctant to do so; they “would never have been forced by any human authority or sovereignty” to give it up.

ii) See in what high words Basil describes the relic - the “safeguard of their lives.” How many Catholics today would describe any relic with such high language?

“No doubt a great aid to the attainment of the object desired was the presence of our well beloved and reverend son Therasius the presbyter. He voluntarily undertook all the toil of the journey; he moderated the energy of the faithful on the spot; he persuaded opponents by his arguments; in the presence of priests and deacons, and of many others who fear the Lord, he took up the relics with all becoming reverence, and has aided the brethren in their preservation. These relics do you receive with a joy equivalent to the distress with which their custodians have parted with them and sent them to you. Let none dispute; let none doubt. Here you have that unconquered athlete. These bones, which shared in the conflict with the blessed soul, are known to the Lord. These bones He will crown, together with that soul, in the righteous day of His requital, as it is written, “we must stand before the judgment seat of Christ, that each may give an account of the deeds he has done in the body.” One coffin held that honoured corpse. None other lay by his side. The burial was a noble one; the honours of a martyr were paid him. Christians who had welcomed him as a guest and then with their own hands laid him in the grave, have now disinterred him. They have wept as men bereaved of a father and a champion. But they have sent him to you, for they put your joy before their own consolation. Pious were the hands that gave; scrupulously careful were the hands that received. There has been no room for deceit; no room for guile. I bear witness to this. Let the untainted truth be accepted by you. “

i) Therasius was a Cappadocian presbyter who freely offered to aid the men sent by Ambrose in their task of transporting the relics to Milan.

ii) Basil emphasizes the synergy of the body and the soul in the process of salvation. This principle is completely opposed to all forms of gnostic anti-sacramentalism. “These bones, which shared in the conflict with the blessed soul, are known to the Lord. These bones He will crown, together with that soul, in the righteous day of His requital …” Redemption concerns the entire cosmos, including its physical aspects. This is the basis upon which the Church’s theology of relics is founded.

iii) We can sense the great sadness that many Cappadocians felt when they gave up the relics of St. Dionysius. This is why Basil writes: “These relics do you receive with a joy equivalent to the distress with which their custodians have parted with them and sent them to you”, and “They have wept as men bereaved of a father and a champion.” Yet they possesed the selflessness to give them up to St. Ambrose, for “they put your joy before their own consolation.”

iv) Basil emphasizes that the relics are geniune; they are not spurious. He says, “Let none dispute; let none doubt. Here you have that unconquered athlete…There has been no room for deceit; no room for guile. I bear witness to this. Let the untainted truth be accepted by you.”

FACT: All descriptions of graffiti, architecture and clerical responses in this blog post are accurate.

Vandals leave movie-related graffiti (sic) on Bozeman church

By The Associated Press
BOZEMAN — Vandals painted words from “The Da Vinci Code” on the front doors of a Bozeman Catholic church late Tuesday or early Wednesday, church members said.

A groundskeeper at Holy Rosary Catholic Church discovered the graffiti around 11 a.m. Wednesday.

The spray-painted message read, “So dark the con of man.” The words are a clue in the plot of “The Da Vinci Code,” a novel by Dan Brown.

The vandals also painted a black circle near the front doors. Members of the church quickly had the graffiti removed.

I was pointed by one Holy Rosary parishioner to this response by their pastor Fr. Leo Proxell:

As you have all heard, our church was vandalized last week with a spray-painted quote from the Da Vinci Code. It is a sad and scary event to see a church desecrated by angry and malicious people. First they are uninformed about the truth and wonder of our Faith tradition. Secondly they are using violence to cover their own inadequacies and fear.

Be proud of our wonderful Catholic tradition and faith. Do not believe the ““fiction”” of Mr. Brown’’s wildly popular novel. He is part of a larger group who use the bias of anti-Catholicism to inflame fear and the titillation of conspiracy theories to explain the unexplainable or the mysterious.

Brown is simply using lots of boldly untrue statements to present an exciting story. (One amazing error is to say there are ““monks” in Opus Dei. That organization is a lay group of people.) Unfortunately, we live in an age in which truth has been shrunk to the smallest possible understanding. Rampant individualism and a relativist outlook have led us to the conundrum of personal and private interpretation as a valid form of truth. We known in our tradition that ““Truth”” is from God and is much larger than we are. We can know truth only by being open to the power of God’’s Spirit and believing in the much larger ““Big picture”” that we belong to.

Actually, this weekend with the feast of the Holy Trinity, we have the opportunity to reflect on our understanding of God. The Divine Presence is so much larger than we, yet so much a part of our own heart and soul. Rejoice over that, instead of looking for all the terrors, conspiracies and evil that might exist in the world. Christ has conquered evil. Our Catholic Church is protected by the power of the Holy Spirit. That does not make us perfect; it simply makes it possible for us to be holy. If we concentrate on that process of becoming holy, I believe we can overcome all the darkness in the world.

Enjoy the summer (movies or not!) and be proud of our true Catholic heritage.

Amen. Enjoy the summer and be proud of our true Catholic heritage. SO BRIGHT THE SON OF MAN!

(hat tip to Kim)

Al Kimel, the Pontificator, has quoted part of a former post of mine into his recent post entitled Searching for Plain Meaning. He has expanded on the theme of the “plain meaning of Scripture” and produced an excellent essay, as usual.

Today is The Feast of the Most Holy Trinity, also known as Trinity Sunday. Now is a time to celebrate and commemorate the reality that all creation looks toward: the Holy Trinity, God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Below is the collect for Trinity Sunday, and the famous icon of the Trinity by Rublev.

Father,
you sent your Word
to bring us truth
and your Spirit to make us holy.
Through them we come to know
the mystery of your life.
Help us to worship you,
one God in three Persons,
by proclaiming and
living our faith in you.
We ask you this,
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,
one God, true and living,
for ever and ever.

From Prayers to the Trinity and for Trinity Sunday

Penetrate into the mystery, plunge into the darkness which shrouds that birth, where you will be alone with God the Unbegotten and God the Only-begotten. Make your start, continue, persevere. I know that you will not reach the goal, but I shall rejoice at your progress. For He who devoutly treads an endless road, though he reach no conclusion, will profit by his exertions. Reason will fail for want of words, but when it comes to a stand it will be the better for the effort made.

St. Hilary of Poitiers, On The Trinity Book II (appropriate as Trinity Sunday approaches)

Well, to those who were received at Easter, including Jason, Danny, and others, you have made it through your first 50 days! Your sacramental seal of confirmation is now permanent as the 50-day money-back guarantee period is over (that’s a joke). Now we enter the long period of Ordinary Time.

I know books have been written about how Ordinary Time need not be “ordinary,” but the truth is, Ordinary Time is a long haul which honestly does lack some of the frills of the other cycles of the Church Year. Many of us pine for Christmas and Easter; rarely do we pine for Ordinary Time. During Ordinary time, choirs go on vacation, the colors stay green for months, and unlike with Christmas and Easter, secular America doesn’t take notice of our holidays. This is not to say Ordinary Time lacks some major feasts or high points. Trinity Sunday, Corpus Christi, The Assumption of Mary (Dormition), All Saints Day, and All Souls Day fall within Ordinary Time. Plus, I admit it is nice to kind of just go through the regular Ordinary Time Liturgy of the Hours cycle again. I started seriously exploring the Catholic Church during the summer Ordinary Time, and I began using the Catholic version of the Liturgy of the Hours then, so it has a special place in my heart. Additionally, Ordinary Time stands in contrast to the other cycles, making the other cycles even more meaningful.

So sit back and enjoy Ordinary Time.

Today is Pentecost, the celebration of the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles in the book of Acts, making manifest the Church. Here is a prayer for Pentecost, taken from the Book of Common Prayer (and the Anglican-Use version I am sure):

O God, who on this day didst teach the hearts of thy faithful people by sending to them the light of thy Holy Spirit: Grant us by the same Spirit to have a right judgment in all things, and evermore to rejoice in his holy comfort; through the merits of Christ Jesus our Savior, who liveth and reigneth with thee, in the unity of the same Spirit, one God, world without end. Amen.

From ChurchYear.Net’s Pentecost Prayers and Collects

I was thinking last night:

There is no plain meaning of Scripture, as the phrase is commonly understood

Maybe it is the postmodern in me, but my contact with Christians of all denominations has convinced me no such thing exists, at least not as popularly understood. If there were a “plain sense” of Scripture, an obviously clear reading that can’t be missed, a reading that is available if one just tries hard enough in humility, the hundreds of denominations that appeal to the “plain meaning” of Scripture would be in agreement. Even in matters of the so-called essentials or salvation issues, denominations appealing to the “plain sense” of Scripture can’t agree (the Calvinist-Arminian debate proves this). Wars could have been avoided, thousands of gallons of ink conserved, and millions of trees saved. Let me put it this way: If I had computer installation instructions that hundreds of different groups interpreted hundreds of different ways, I would question how plain these instructions were. While talking of the “plain meaning” of Scripture may work in theory, in reality, the Bible’s ultimate meaning is anything but clear if the number of denominations is any indication.

Now, I do believe in an objective meaning to the Bible; I just don’t believe that one can always find this by simply appealing to the “plain meaning” of the Bible, whatever that even is. This objective meaning is only fully known in the context in which the Bible was produced: the Church. As Jason Sims said in the comments to this post:

All Christians will harp about context, but I think the context that is often missing is the one you point to: the Church. Just like entries in a diary or an overheard conversation between old friends might leave an outsider clueless or even with the opposite meaning of what is being said, reading the scripture outside the context of the Tradition and Authority can leave us as confused and in error.

So yes, there is a plain meaning to Scripture, in a sense, but it only becomes plain when understood in the context of the Church. Thus, an individual picking up the Scriptures and reading them outside Apostolic Tradition can only get so far. Perhaps he will find the basics (we hope), or perhaps not. How clear is the Bible with regard to the Trinity? According to many denominations who read the Bible “plainly,” it is not so plainly there. However, Apostolic Tradition tells us it is there, and if you don’t find it there, you are wrong. To use the computer installation example again: if you wanted to understand the computer installation manual that a company had written, you would ask the company that wrote it what the manual meant, not an outsider.

So are biblical studies pointless? No. Biblical Studies help the Church better understand the Scriptures, and the Apostolic Community provides the limits within which faithful biblical studies must operate. The balance is certainly delicate, but rigorous Scripture study has been done for years by faithful theologians with the blessing of the Church. So yes, we can do Bible study, study it for ourselves, comment on Scripture, etc, but I think we have to have recognize that just because we see something in Scripture, doesn’t mean that is the objective meaning, no matter how “plain” to us. So to repeat: I am not denying that there is a real meaning to Scripture, but rather that the nebulous “plain meaning” we hear so much about, where any person can read the Bible “for himself” and understand it, really isn’t a reality.

Now, I have heard “well, the meaning is plain, if you just read it right, do X, don’t read it like group Y, etc.” Of course, this is troubling, because I thought the meaning was plain. You add in the views of the esteemed Dr. so-and-so, the Confession of [fill in Continental European City], and the way group whatnot has interpreted Scripture since 18__, suddenly you are leaving “plain meaning” territory and adding externals.

So no, I don’t believe in the “plain meaning” of Scripture, nor do appeals to it convince me. And when someone says “just read Scripture and its plain meaning,” they mean “read it like I read it, which is plain enough to me (obviously), and if your ‘plain reading’ doesn’t line up with my ‘plain reading,’ you are deceived or need to be enrolled in Special Education classes” even though the message is supposedly plain to begin with!

When I tell friends and family that I’m becoming Catholic, one of the first questions I get is:

“How does your wife feel about all this?”

I should probably answer, “why do you ask?”, because I really am curious. Maybe it’s because they know she knows me well and that her opinion will be more balanced than mine. Maybe some want to know how convincing the whole Catholic thing really is; if the conversion is having a ripple effect then they should wake up and take notice, and not dismiss me as a weirdo doin’ his individualistic thang.

Maybe they just want some context for my drastic decision. Maybe they’re stalling so they don’t have to bring up Mary Worship™. Maybe they want to hear some juicy intra-marital religious conflict, replete with local Kansas Citene Councils and dueling, mutual anathemas being hurled from the opposing faith traditions contained in one apartment.

Or maybe they just genuinely care about me and my family and think I should too.

Cross posted at Chad Is Not Enough.

Taylor Marshall, over at Canterbury Tales has entered full communion with the Catholic Church. His apologia is here. Welcome Taylor and God bless you as you experience the richness of the Catholic Tradition.

I think we need to start taking bets on the odds of Anglo-Catholic bloggers becoming Catholic. There is money to be made here folks! ;)

Jennifer and I were praying from the Office of the Dead last night (for her deceased father), and these verses were partially quoted. I think they are appropriate for the Easter (Resurrection) season, especially as we wrap up this part of the Church Year and enter Pentecost and Ordinary Time:

Lo! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable nature must put on the imperishable, and this mortal nature must put on immortality. When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written: “Death is swallowed up in victory.” “O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting?” The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. 1 Corinthians 15:51-57 (RSV)