Some thoughts on the Feast of St. Thomas Becket

I have been the pastor of two parishes which have as their patron saint a bishop who was slaughtered by knights in shining armor. St. Thomas Becket was one such bishop. He was a pliable friend of King Henry II of England. Thomas was in Holy Orders, a deacon I think, so the newly crowned king decided to appoint his old friend Thomas to be the leading bishop of the realm. No sooner than ordained, Thomas started being difficult. He zealously guarded the right of the church to try misbehaving clerics. He thought it a vital principle for guarding freedom of religion. He was hounded out of the country, and when he returned he was killed by a few of the king’s knights, with or without the collusion of the king. No one is quite sure.

St. Lambert has a similar story.  Lambert was a monk of an impeccably aristocratic background. Around 700 AD he was appointed bishop of Maastricht and Liege by Prince Pepin of Herstal. He promptly became less pliable and denounced Pepin’s carrying on with his mistress Alpaida. (You’ve got to love the names) Again, the retainers of Prince Pepin murder Lambert.

 In all of this you must be thinking, doesn’t the pope appoint bishops? Actually, he doesn’t. He usually approves candidates put forward by the local church. Until very recently the local powers had a lot to do with appointing bishops and even popes. Until modern times, the powerful have always interfered with the election of popes. The emperors of Constantinople had to approve the election of the Bishop of Rome by the clergy and people of that city until the 800’s. In 1059, Pope Nicholas II decided that only the pastors of the main churches in Rome (the cardinals) would elect the Bishop of Rome, because the whole thing was getting out of hand, riots, politics and all. The man elected still had to have the approval of the priests and people of Rome.

In 1139, the need for popular approval was dropped and the pastors would elect the pope, the Bishop of Rome. In 1274, it was decided that the cardinals would be locked up (conclave, meaning “with a key” or “lock down”) to reduce the chaos, politics and rioting in the streets. But they couldn’t keep out the powerful completely. Catholic kings had rights of election and claimed a veto over papal elections. Each king had a cardinal, who could apply the royal veto during a papal conclave. The last time the royal veto was us used was in 1903, when Austria opposed the election of Cardinal Rampolla, so the conclave elected Cardinal Sarto who ended up as St. Pope Pius X. Six months later Pius ended the practice.

Governments have always tried to control the elections of popes and bishops because the Gospel of Christ is the only thing more powerful than the state. Governments hate when their subjects have a higher loyalty than the loyalty rendered to the state. So, the power of governments over episcopal and papal appointments ended in 1903? Hardly! Francisco Franco, the Caudillo of Spain claimed the patronato real, the privilege of Spanish kings to name bishops and veto appointments from bishops all the way down to the parish priest. This only ended in 1973. Today the Chinese government claims the same exact privilege. At least this abuse has ended everywhere but China. Don’t count on it. We have a new kind of government. You may think that much of the world has adopted government by the people of the people and for the people. Nonsense!

We are governed by news agencies and talk show hosts. The constant flow of information and opinion that we carry around in our pockets on our no-so-smart phones tells us what to think, of whom to approve and for whom to vote. It tells us how many genders there are and how to define marriage and which children have the right to live and which children and old people should die. This same info-government tells us that priests who defy Catholic tradition regarding marriage and preference are heroic and those who hold to the Gospel preached these two thousand years are narrow-minded, fundamentalists and Pharisees. The yammering classes can hound any bishop or priest out of his pulpit, so we try to combat the whole usurpation of the freedom of the Gospel by beating them at their own game.

And so, somebody at the Vatican has just hire a company called Accenture to design and manage the Holy See's new internet news service. The have asked the fox to completely redesign the hen house. The company in question, Accenture, is famous throughout the world for promoting a political and moral agenda diametrically opposed to Catholic moral teaching. So, the new rulers of the world have just been given a veto power to elect and depose popes and bishops and priests just as governments have always wanted. 

When the Sadducees were asked, “Shall I crucify your king?” they shouted, “We have no king but Caesar.”  I guess we are there in the crowd with them. We have no king but the media. God help us.

Rev. Know-it-all

Is Nothing Sacred?

I have a book of humorous illustrations by the cartoonist Gahan Wilson titled “Is Nothing Sacred?”  Apparently the current generation thinks so. Christmas has become the joyous celebration of nothing in particular. The stupidity of the current age has reached a crescendo in this year’s “holiday” season. There was a “holiday” fundraiser for Planned Parenthood featuring celebrities Rory Scovel, Nick Thune, Chris Sullivan, Mandy Moore, Taylor Goldsmith, April Richardson, Daniel Van Kirk and of course, Colin Hanks.

I have no idea who any of these people are, but apparently they are film stars, musicians and comedians currently popular. Has the irony not occurred to any of these new lights of the culture that it is odd to celebrate the birthday of a baby who many think is the very image of God in human flesh, or anyone’s birthday for that matter, by promoting the foremost abortion provider in the country?  The advertising poster for the event is downright creepy. It shows Santa Claus being embraced and perhaps devoured by some horned green creature who is wearing what appears to be a snake. If that doesn’t say Christmas, what does?

The run up to Christmas has been filled with news that public figures in the sacred professions of news person and entertainer are guilty of making disgusting suggestions to those over whom they have power. The people who have taught us that there are no rules are now in trouble for breaking the rules. We’re talking crazy here. Perhaps the most amazing silliness of the season is the St. Peter’s square nativity scene by which the eye is drawn not to the child born in the manger but to a rather erotic sculpture that people are calling the “Nude Dude”. The whole thing is a busy, distracted collection of sculptures in the style of the Christmas scenes of Naples Italy.

The purported purpose of the display is to remind people of the seven corporal works of mercy. It reminds me of nothing so much as the Disney torture-chamber ride, “It’s a Small World After All”. The eye is drawn to nothing except the Nude Dude, reminding one to renew his gym membership so he is ready for swimsuit season or other clothing optional events. We say that anything goes in the name of tolerance, and then get upset when people do or say strange things. It is almost humorous that the same pundits who have been telling us all how immoral we Christians are find themselves being devoured by the forces that they themselves set in motion. 

Again, does it not occur to anyone that if you take away the Judeo-Christian ethic with its Ten Irritating and Intolerant Commandments, there is no real reason not to enjoy the perks that power brings? The people who smear Christians as conservative fundamentalists and Pharisees forget that fundamental is derived from the Latin word for foundation and the Pharisees were heroic defenders of revealed truth. Catholicism is an inherently reasonable religion. The secular worship of nothing in particular other than personal preferences and emotional experiences is inherently crazy. So what do we do?

St. Paul answers the question in his first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 14, verse 15. “What am I to do? I will pray with my spirit, but I will pray with my mind also.” Keep praying. Keep studying. Keep thinking. Be reasonable. Don’t get mad. Get smart. Remember what St James tells us, “The anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God.” (James 1:20)  It may be true that the lunatics are running the asylum. Don’t worry. They are in the process of burning the asylum down. If we preserve the fundamental foundations, it won’t be that hard to rebuild. We’ve done it before.

Yours,

The Rev. Know-it-all

How can you be monotheistic and believe in the Trinity?

Dear Rev. Know-it-all,

I have a non-Christian friend with whom I got into a big argument the other day. He is really offended by the idea of the Holy Trinity. He said that Jesus is not the Son of God, and belief in the Trinity is just too much to swallow. Jesus may be the Messiah, but He is just the Son of Mary and some other human being. He was only a messenger of God, if that. One should believe in God and His messengers, but there is no reason to believe that any of those prophets are God, only God is God. It is a contradiction of His transcendent majesty that He should have a Son. He went on to say that Christians have no right to call themselves monotheists (believers in one God) because they worship three Gods by claiming that God is a Trinity. I couldn’t answer him, so automatically I thought of you.

Yours,

Otto Mattock

Dear Otto,

Our difference with our fellow monotheists is not about the oneness of God, but about the nature of that oneness. The Trinity is a very reasonable idea if you believe what Jesus taught, that God is Love. Human beings can only long for perfect unity. God who is infinite can accomplish it. Who doesn’t want to be perfectly one with his or her spouse and their children? For us it is not possible, for God perfect diversity and perfect unity are possible if He is as, so many people say, absolutely sovereign. I remember meeting a holocaust survivor who was truly an amazing man. He was a good friend of a very dear nun who taught me Early Christian studies in grad school. She loved to bring her students to meet him and have him shake them up. We were having lunch when he looked at me and said, “You Christians! You say God has a Son. We Jews gave the world monotheism. This idea of God having a Son is step backwards to the religion of the Greeks and the Romans. God can’t have a Son!” I looked at him squarely and said who are you to say what God can and can’t do?” He was amazed. I was the first of Mother Mary Agnes’s students who had dared to challenge him. I hold to what I said.

Those who say that God is so absolutely sovereign that He can’t enter into real relationships effectually limit His sovereignty. If God wills to be relationship, then He can be. If God is love, true sacrificial self-giving love, then He reasonably has diversity within himself. If God is Love, then whom is He to love? If He IS love, but has only His creation as the object of His love, then He would be dependent on His creation for His very existence and would disappear along with the universe in a puff of logic! If you believe that God is love as Jesus of Nazareth taught, then God can be a Trinity, of Lover, Beloved and perfect Love itself, Father Son and Holy Ghost! The Trinity is a very reasonable idea, if (and only if) you believe what Jesus revealed, that God is love.

Belief in the Trinity also says a lot about humanity. Christians believe, as said by St. John Paul the Great, that God is the perfect family. Your family and mine attempt to be families, but God is family in its perfection. My destiny as a human being is to be adopted into that relationship which is God, the relationship that called all things into existence. The purpose for my existence and all existence is eternal and perfect love. It is the destiny, not the fate, of the universe and it is my destiny, should I choose to accept that destiny. 

The purpose of existence for the Christian is more than existence. The other monotheisms promise heaven, or at least the possibility of heaven. We Christians don’t just go to heaven. We go home to a Father who loves us and to a perfect family gathered from all time and space.  Even in this world, to believe in the Trinity means that we believe in the reasonableness of love. Spouses should be faithful, neighbors should be kind, parents should love their children and children should love their parents and the poor are our brothers. Life’s purpose and fulfillment is relationship, not just power and pleasure.

To believe that oneness of God excludes any real relationships is to isolate human beings and to demonize God. In his classic the Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis contrasts the absolute sovereignty of the Devil with the humility and self-giving of the Christian God. By “father below” he means the devil.

One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself - creatures, whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle that can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.

In other words, the devil insists that two things can be perfectly united only by one thing devouring the other. Two unique and separate things cannot be perfectly one and perfectly other. In our limited existence that may be true, but God who is absolutely and infinitely perfect can unite things which our limited power hold as completely separate, in other word for the devil, three cannot be one, unless one subjects the other two to its power. Unity must be a devourer “Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.”  (1Peter 5:8) 

The Trinity is reasonable. To hold that the creator of the universe is anything less is actually quite unreasonable –and a bit disturbing.

Yours,

the Rev. Know-it-all

I heard that Constantine started the papacy...

Dear Rev. Know-it-all,

A non-Catholic friend of mine told me that Peter doesn’t mean rock. It means more like a chip off the old block and that Jesus didn’t ever intend to start the papacy and that the papacy started in 325 with the takeover of the Church by the emperor Constantine. Is he right?

Yours sincerely,

Roland Stone

Dear Roland,

Your friend’s scholarship is about as deep as a puddle. First of all, the papacy certainly goes back to the first century of the faith. Allow me to quote St. Irenaeus of Lyon:

Since, however, it would be very tedious, in such a volume as this, to reckon up the successions of all the Churches, we do put to confusion all those who, in whatever manner, whether by an evil self-pleasing, by vainglory, or by blindness and perverse opinion, assemble in unauthorized meetings; we do this, I say, by indicating that tradition derived from the apostles, of the very great, the very ancient, and universally known Church founded and organized at Rome by the two most glorious apostles, Peter and Paul; as also [by pointing out] the faith preached to men, which comes down to our time by means of the successions of the bishops. For it is a matter of necessity that every Church should agree with this Church, on account of its preeminent authority, that is, the faithful everywhere, inasmuch as the tradition has been preserved continuously by those [faithful men] who exist everywhere. (Against heresies Vol.3 Chapter 3 sec 2)

 Irenaeus wrote these words around 180 AD. He had some pretty good credentials. He was the Greek bishop of a Roman city in southern France. He was born during the first half of the 2nd century AD, perhaps as early as 115 and was a native of St. Polycarp's church in Smyrna in Asia Minor. He had been raised as a Christian at a time when there were very few cradle Catholics.  St. Polycarp had been a student of St. John and Irenaeus had been a student of St Polycarp. You can’t get a better early Christian pedigree than that. Irenaeus states that the Church of Rome was the preeminent Church of Christianity a full two hundred years before Constantine. So much for the myth of Constantine making the bishop of Rome the Pope. I suspect that Constantine would much rather have had the bishop of his new capital as the leader of the Church. The bishop of Constantinople wasn’t even considered a patriarch of the church until 400 years after Christ.

The Council of Nicaea in 325 convened by the Emperor Constantine, recognized the primacy of the Church of Rome, followed by the churches of Alexandria and Antioch. The church of Constantinople was considered unimportant and certainly didn’t go back to the first days of Christianity.  The Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD recognized the diocese of Constantinople as “second in eminence and power to the Bishop of Rome”. This recognition certainly miffed the bishops of Antioch and Alexandria. Why? There had been only three churches which considered St. Peter their founder, and thus had Peter’s supervisory authority, Rome, Alexandria and Antioch. Antioch had been established as a church by St. Peter, Alexandria traced its origins back to St. Mark, the delegate of St. Peter but Rome was preeminent because both Peter and Paul had been its founders and St. Peter had been martyred and buried there. 

These lists of succession and such things as relics were quite important to the first Christians, no matter how we think of them. As to the Peter/Rock business, why would the first Christians make such a fuss about three cities, no less and no more, as having apostolic authority unless they could trace their ordination back to St. Peter? They were founded on Simon Bar Jonah, Peter the Rock. But I’m sure that your friend knows better than the first Christians.

As for this bit about Peter not meaning rock, it is nonsense. The fuss is made because in Greek the world rock is “petra”. Some languages, like ancient Greek, have gender, number and case. English words generally only have number.  A rock in English is neither feminine nor masculine. This doesn’t work in ancient Greek.  In order to know who you are talking about in Greek and for that matter Latin you have to use a masculine ending to refer to a man. Generally “-a” is a feminine ending in Greek and Latin.  The common ending for a male is “-os” in Greek and “-us” in Latin.  For Jesus to say that Simon Bar Jonah’s new name was “petra” would be like saying “Thou art Wilhelmina...”  William would be the more appropriate name for a man. It would avoid confusion, at least back then it would. To make His point clear that He was giving Simon Bar Jonah a new title as well as a new name, the translators of Jesus’ words would have had to stick a masculine ending on a feminine word.

That's how Greek and Latin work. However, the more important point here is that JESUS WASN’T SPEAKING GREEK OR LATIN!!! He was speaking Aramaic. Aramaic doesn’t have the gender problem that Greek does. Jesus called Simon bar Jonah “Kepha”. This title is repeated 19 times in the New Testament, so clearly it was noteworthy to the first Christians. In addition, St. Paul uses just the word Kepha eight times. When St. Paul wants to make a point, he uses the very word that Jesus used in Aramaic when talking about Simon bar Jonah. He is in effect conceding the title to St. Peter.  We can dispute what “petra” or “petros” or “kepha” mean, but the importance of the title and the importance of St. Peter to the first Christians are indisputable. He clearly appears as the leader of the apostolic band. 

More significant is the passage in which Jesus says that will give the keys of the kingdom to Simon bar Jonah who will control access to the court of heaven.  The Davidic monarch had an officer called the ‘al bayit, literally the “house supervisor”.  It was a continuous hereditary office and the keys of the house of David were its symbol. The first Christians perceived that Jesus was founding an institution that would have legitimate authority as prefigured in the Davidic royal court. People who try to redefine the words are simply trying to avoid the fact to which the first Christians and the Scriptures clearly attest: Jesus established a visible institution with legitimate authority.  That authority is limited to issues of faith and moral, but it is authority nonetheless.  Remember what St. Irenaeus said about “…those of perverse opinion who wish to assemble in unauthorized meetings”.

The history of the papacy is a catalogue of saints and sinners, of the strong and the weak. Its history reflects the life of its first incumbent who at one time Jesus called the rock and at another time called Satan. (Matt. 16:23) Despite their weakness and human frailty, and even sinfulness, the popes have been a stabilizing force in the unfolding of Christianity, regardless of the quibbles of those who think themselves more infallible than a pope.

Yours,

The Rev. Know-it-all