On These Two Things...

...hang all the law and the prophets. The two things are the two essential commandments that we love God and love our neighbor. 

One of the problems in the church is between two groups of people: the God lovers and the people lovers. The God lovers focus on liturgy, spirituality, prayer, adoration, consecrated life, vocation, religion and worship. The people lovers focus on peace and justice, the church as the pilgrim people of God, the fellowship of the brothers and sisters, the ministry of the sacraments to one another. 

The God lovers see the Mass as a solemn sacrifice that takes us to the very threshold of heaven. They want fine liturgy an esoteric, magnificent and otherworldly worship. For the God lovers worship is to lift us from this vale of tears to transport us to the worship of the cosmic sphere. For them the Mass is the great sacrifice that applies the eternal act of redemption to souls in need of salvation.

The people lovers see the Mass as the fellowship meal of the people of God. The worship is warm and comforting. It is designed to make everyone feel good about themselves and each other. The content is all about helping one another and making the world a better place. The church is in this world and is of this world and needs to adapt to this world so that more and more people can be helped.

As you read this you are probably already, instinctively choosing which of these two models you like best. You will believe that yours is the best and that, at best, the other one is faulty, and at worst it is heretical and damaging to the church and should be stopped.

In fact we need both don't we? We're supposed to love God and love our neighbor. So why all the division if there really is the division I see? It is not because one is right and the other wrong, but because we have not prioritized properly.

The lovers of people may not like to hear this, but the love of God is the first priority. Love of neighbor comes after the love of God and is dependent on the love of God. We cannot love our neighbor if we do not love God first. Why? Because we have not motive, no power and no grace to love our neighbor if we have not loved God first.

Therefore the love of God is the Catholic priority. Loving our neighbor is mandatory and cannot be overlooked, but it comes after the love of God. If this is true, then we must ask ourselves where we properly love God and where we properly love our neighbor. The answer is that we love God primarily within the life of prayer and worship: within and through the liturgy. 

If we love God in church, then we love our neighbor outside of church. Most of the problems with modernist liturgy and worship is that they have brought into the church what rightly belongs outside the church. In other words, the fellowship, the peace and justice, the social activism, the missionary enterprise, the education and health care and family concern--all of this is the proper activity of the people of God outside of the liturgy, and we have brought it all into the liturgy.

As a result, the liturgy has become all about loving people and not loving God. Why is this? Because too many Catholics have not simply put the love of God elsewhere, they have replaced the love of God with the love of people. Clever theologians thought that the supernatural, otherworldly aspect of worship seemed too much of a stretch for ordinary, modern, scientific people, and in a move of breath taking condescension, made the liturgy folksy and people centered and dumbed down the whole thing.

The result has been a disaster. Catholics therefore love people, but have lost the language for loving God, and of course, once you no longer love God, it is not very long before you are no longer able to love people either, for what do you find to love in them if you have not loved God first, for the only thing I find lovable in my neighbor is the image of God in him, and the only way I can discern this is by first learning to love God. 

The final result of all this is that we not only have forgotten the art of loving our neighbor, but we have been left with the only remaining remnant which is love of ourselves. Thus what was once the glorious worship of Almighty God has become a mish mash of comfort hymns and self help therapy which is all about how good God makes me feel.

The only remedy is to return to Christ's priorities: to learn once more how to put the love of God first in our lives so that we may eventually learn again how to love our neighbor.

A Sudden Certainty

I just got news from Leslie Kauffman at Kauffman Publishing that she is going ahead with the publication of my volume of poems later this month. It's called A Sudden Certainty - Priest Poems. The cover is pictured here and is done by Chris Pelicano--a parishioner at St Mary's who also did the illustrations for Praying the Rosary for Inner Healing.

If you'd like to read some samples of my poetry, click on the 'My Poetry' label for a link to some that have been published here.

Christianity Richly

Here is a smart new blog by convert from Evangelicalism Richard Peck. Get the title? The aim is to provide comment, resources and links for Evangelicals who are curious about Catholicism. Check it out, and tell your friends.

Pope on Palm Sunday

Palm Sunday

Holy Week Processions in Spain

Check out the processions with hooded people in Spain.

Can anyone out there explain to this poor convert what all this is about?

Palms

Fr Ray has some cool pictures of Palm Sunday at the Vatican. This is my favorite. Boy, I am so jealous of those purple birettas.

Love and Marriage

This afternoon I con-validated a marriage for the first time. It was very short and sweet, but it reminded me of all the glory of marriage and horror of divorce.

Some time ago a friend of mine was contemplating divorce. He and his wife were having a hard time and he wanted out. So I asked him, "Jimmy, who benefits from this divorce?"

"I do." he said.

"Anybody else?"

"The kids."

"No Jimmy, the kids do not benefit. All the research shows that the kids never benefit from divorce. Divorce always divides them in two. Who else benefits."

He was silent.

The fact of the matter is, nobody benefits. What Jimmy didn't understand was that his marriage breakdown not only affected him, his wife and his kids, but it also affected everyone else they know. This is because marriage is a public act. It is a public sacrament. When a couple divorces the whole world knows. Jimmy was a high school teacher. All the kids in his high school would be badly affected, at least a little, by his divorce. The other married people he knew would be negatively affected by his bad example. The people in his parish would be affected. The young people and young married couples and children would be scandalized.

Divorce is ugly and selfish and sinful. It hurts people. It rarely solves problems. It usually creates more. It rarely helps people face reality. It is more often a run from reality. 

Most of all, I had to tell Jimmy that as a Catholic he was sinning against a sacrament designed and provided by God. Divorce is therefore also a sacrilege. It's spitting on something sacred. Jimmy took sacred vows before God to love and honor his wife for better or for worse, in sickness and in health. Selfish Divorce denies all that and therefore denies God's grace, and we know what happens to people who deny God's grace: they go to the place where there is no grace of God.

Jimmy changed his mind.

Caption Competition

Give us back our clown Masses or the Holy Father gets it...

Add your caption in the combox

Todd Unctuous Comments

The latest column from our MSM correspondent Todd Unctuous:

Have you seen that Prince Charles and Lady Camilla are to visit the Pope of Rome? It is inspiring to see the courageous heir to the British throne take such a forward step in inter-faith relations. 

I am not personally a religious person, but I admire people like Prince Charles, who have a strong faith combined with a real concern for the environment. He's the future head of the Church of England, and like most Anglicans he is strongly into other religions. He understands Islam, Buddhism and practices acupuncture and reiki. He is also very interested in the existence of leprechauns.

These are the sort of inspiring leaders the world needs, and with any luck he will be able to convince the Pope of Rome to move forward with the times a bit more. Along with global climate change they will doubtless have a few private words about the Pope's disastrous comments on condom use in Africa. Prince Charles, who has long had an interest in the development of Africa for a long time may be able to gently persuade this Pope, who has so far resisted all diplomatic efforts to get him to change his mind. Then, perhaps the Catholic Church will stop condemning millions to death in Africa and who knows, the Church itself will start to grow, rather than dwindling to an ineffectual group of old white people.

Some critics of the visit have commented that the Pope should refuse to meet Lady Camilla. These puritanical backward Catholics say that she is divorced from a Catholic man, and without a Vatican divorce decree (called an annulment) she should never have married Prince Charles. First of all, they should know that the Church of England was founded by a monarch who was divorced and re-married. There should therefore be no problems. This question was settled long ago and it was decided that divorce and re-marriage in England is permitted. The second answer to the purse lipped old grouches is that Lady Camilla will be wearing a special outfit to meet the Pope. She will wear a long black dress and black head covering called a flotilla to show that she is a sinful woman. 

Rather than criticizing Prince Charles' visit to the Pope people should be more compassionate. After the tragic death of his beautiful young wife the man was a single parent. He's done a terrific job of bringing up his two sons in what must have been very difficult circumstances. Their lives were divided between boarding school, a palace in London and five different country residences. The poor boys probably didn't know if they were coming or going! 

When Prince Charles finally married again, these same negative people criticized him again. It couldn't have been easy for him and his sons to have a new lady of the house. When Camilla stepped on to the royal stage people painted her as the ugly stepmother in the fairy tale. These heartless people said she was a scheming old battle axe who broke up a marriage, and that must have been hard for Charles and the boys. It is true that Lady Mantilla is no match for Lady Di in the cover girl stakes, but she is doubtless a kindly and well meaning person who likes horses and does an awful lot for charity.

I say we should be open minded and optimistic about this visit. Who knows what might come of it? Perhaps the Catholic Church will move closer to reunification with the Church of England. Part of the reunion deal could be that the Pope would accept the courageous move of the Anglican Church to have women priests. That would be a first step towards equality of women in the Catholic Church. 

This visit should remind everyone that God is found within each one of us. No one has a monopoly on the Almighty. God is like a great mountain and all the different religions are just different paths up the same mountain. Prince Charles and Lady Camilla are examples of that and it is good that they are visiting with the Pope of Rome.

Todd Unctuous is forty two

Obama in Prague

I think somebodty should tell our President not to make that particular gesture when visiting areas of Europe that were in the Third Reich.

Groovy good Mornings!

This article from the Daily Telegraph says priests in the Diocese of Leeds in England have been advised to stop saying 'Good Morning' to their congregations at the beginning of Mass. 

We have to get rid of the Tonight Show approach to liturgy. Guy comes on stage, "Howya'all doing? Anybody heard any good jokes this week? The Lord be with you..." I knew one priest who would discuss the baseball games of the weekend, give out the birthdays in the parish that week, sprinkle in a few jokes, then introduce the penitential rite with something like, "I know we've all done things this week that we thought better of afterwards, let's tell God about it." He would also make personal comments while distributing communion, "The Body of Christ, hey Mike, I like your new mustache. The Body of Christ, great new Lexus you've got in the parking lot Sally"

First Communion Letter

I arrived at the church office to find a pile of letters from the second graders whose first confessions I heard last week. Here's one:

Dear Father Longenecker, Thank you for helping me in first confession. You fill my heart with joy. God bless you. Amen. Love, Joey.

The feeling's mutual Joey.

Apocalypse Now?

Once a month I visit Sister Mary Lucy--a hermit at a Poor Clare monastery to hear her confession. Today we got talking about prophecies and the end of the world.

She asked if I thought the end of the world was nigh. I was skeptical. "I grew up in a fundamentalist church." I explained "where we heard terrible prophecies about the Rapture and the tribulation and the end times and how there was a big computer in Brussels called 'The Beast' which had everyone's number, and how San Francisco would fall into the sea because of a big earthquake and this would be God's punishment and maybe New York City too etc. etc. etc."

When I became a Catholic the apocalyptic stories were even more stupendous. The three days of darkness, the prophecies of St Malachy that there is only two pope until the end of time, Fatima, consecrations of Russia to the Blessed Virgin, etc. etc. The exciting thing about the Catholics is that they actually had visions of Mary and stigmatics and visionaries and miracles and lots more to boot.

Added to the religious apocalyptic prophecies there has always been a secular apocalyptic story in currency. When I was growing up it was the threat of nuclear war. Then it was the new ice age that was coming. Then it was the population explosion and we would all starve by the mid 1980s, then it was AIDS which would destroy the world, then the millennium bug, now it is global warming and global economic meltdown and added to all this there has always been the threat of meteors hitting the world, earthquakes and tsunamis and terrorist outrages.

I don't really know if we're headed for apocalypse now, but I somehow doubt it. We may come in for hard times, persecution and terror. It has happened before, but what interests me more than the actual possibility of apocalypse is the apocalypse mentality.

Why is it that in virtually all places and at all times and all cultures there is a cloud hanging over everyone? Why is there the fear of disaster, death and destruction? I think it is just part of human psychology. We are all aware of death and so we project the reality of our own eventual death on our culture--even on our whole human race and our whole world.

What to do? Live with it. It's part of being human. Realize that whatever you fear, it probably won't happen. Take moderate precautions, but most of all, live in hope. Christ is (soon to be) risen from the dead. He the Phoenix. He rises from the ashes. Behold he makes all things new.

And this is what Sister Mary Lucy said in her quiet, sweet way, "I'm always excited to think that Our Lord said he 'makes all things new' and not that 'he makes all new things.' It's much better that he will bring it all back to a much better and more glorious existence out of the destruction we bring about. That's much better than him just starting again, and if he is going to make all things new, well, that includes me too."

Chaplain to NARAL

Ms Ragsdale, (that is she in the light blue blazer) the Episcopal wimmin priest whose sermon praising abortion as a blessing, has taken the offending sermon down from her blog. Never mind. You can still read the odious opinions here on NARAL's website. NARAL is one of the largest pro-abortion lobby groups in the USA.

Ragsdale, you may have learned, has just been appointed President of Episcopal Divinity School in Massachusetts. This means she will be in charge of training the next generation of Episcabortionists. 

Why did Kate take down the 'repeat after me, abortion is a blessing' sermon? Does she now retract her awful opinions? 

New Archbishop of Westminster

The Archbishop of Birmingham, Vincent Nichols (on the right) is to be the new Archbishop of Westminster, and the leader of Catholics in England and Wales.  I guess Catholic Traddies ought to at least be happy with his dress sense.

In England he had a reputation as a liberal and somewhat of a smoothly ambitious man, but in my travels with the St Barnabas Society, I once had dinner with the Archbishop (clang! as the name is dropped) and found him relaxing in front of a football game on TV. (Soccer to readers here) He is a very genial and genuine fellow, who seemed open to more conservative movements in the church, and I'm convinced that he'll do good things at Westminster and be a good pastor.

Damian Thompson has more here.

Fourth Anniversary of the Death of JP2

The Logic of Hell - 2

After the last post on hell someone asked, "So did God create Hell just so there could be the cross?" No, the logical connection between the cross and hell assumes that hell already existed and that is why the cross was necessary.

So did God create Hell? Not really. The Bible does say that hell was 'prepared' for the Devil and his angels, but I don't think Hell is created in the same active way that God created the world. instead Hell is a sort of a by product of God's creation. The logic works like this: God is Love. Love is not only what He is but what He does. Love is not only what He does, but what He is. One of the most important attributes of Love is that it is fruitful. Therefore God is a creator. He creates man and woman in his image. Part of being in God's image is that we are given a little smidgen of his omnipotence. This is called free will. Within the boundaries of our human condition we can do what we like.

We can therefore reject God. If we reject God then we cannot be in his presence. Indeed if God were to make us go to heaven it would not be heaven for us because in rejecting God we also (ultimately) reject all things good and beautiful and pleasurable and true. If we reject all those things we will end up with all things miserable and ugly and painful and false.

If we are created in God's image, then we not only have a smidgen of his omnipotence, we also have a smidgen of his eternal life. That means we will live forever somewhere. If we reject God and all that is good, where will we spend eternity? We must spend it in a place where God is not, where good is not, where beauty is not and where love is not. This is the place we call Hell.

Christ died on the cross to save us from this place.

Petition ND

Over 220,000 people have now joined the protest against Notre Dame's commencement invitation to President Obama. If you haven't signed the petition and wish to go here.

Trouble Reading

Do you have trouble reading this blog? It's Internet Explorer.

Download Firefox. It is free and this blog will read perfectly and it is a much better browser for all your web work.

Hell and Depression

Sorry for another thought about hell, but I've been wondering on the connection between the modern disbelief in hell and the financial crisis.

If you believe in hell you believe that you have to pay what you owe. There will be a reckoning. There's no free lunch. If you don't believe in hell you think you're going to get away with it. You can have what you want without paying for it and you can run up your debts and never really have to pay.

The former worldview makes you sober financially. The latter gives you the impression that you will never have to pay up. 

Does a belief in hell make one more financially prudent? Does disbelief in hell make people financially stupid?

It makes sense to me.

First Confessions

Earlier this week I helped to hear the first confessions of our children at St Mary's. This is the first I've done this, and what a sweet privilege it was! I was meditating not only on the privilege I had to hear these confessions, but on the advantages of first confession at a tender age. Here they are:

1. At an early age the child learns that he or she is not perfect

2. At the dawning of the age of accountability the child learns that he must be responsible

3. Right up front the child learns that God is loving and forgiving

4. The little child learns that when things go wrong forgiveness (not cover up) is the answer

5. The child steps up to the plate and does something difficult

6. In the self examination that is necessary the child begins the life long task of examining his life. (The unexamined life is not worth living)

7. He is introduced to the mystery of the sacramental life.

8. He begins to understand and accept the mysterious working of grace and providence.

9. The grown ups involved are reminded that unless they come like these little first communicants they cannot enter the kingdom

10. The little ones remind us that 'little' sins are not necessarily little in God's eyes.

The Logic of Hell

A friend commented the other day, "I was doubting the reality of hell. I wondered how it could be that an all loving God would be able to allow for hell. Then, at Mass, I gazed at the crucifix and it all clicked. I had an 'aha' moment. If there were no hell there would be no need of the cross. Why the cross if we did not need salvation, and what were we to be saved from if not hell?"

Indeed. The next day, having dinner with some friends a fellow priest commented, "The most deadly heresy of our day, a heresy that is destroying our church and our culture is the heresy of universalism. This sentimental belief that God will not condemn anyone to hell and that everyone is going to heaven undermines everything. It is a lie direct from the Father of lies."

I've often thought that the people who think that God will not send anyone to hell really believe that God will not send someone like them to hell. It's all couched in suitably sentimental concern for other people. They're really just worried about their own skin.

Finally, it has always seemed incongruous to me that atheists blame believers for being on Fantasy Island and that we are duped into wishful thinking--that God is our big Sugar Daddy in the sky who will take us to glory one day. That may be the God of the eternal security born again crowd, but the Catholic God is the Almighty Judge before whom all will tremble one day. Before him none shall stand and every knee shall bow, and he might send us to hell.

This doesn't sound very much like wishful thinking to me. Instead, the person who imagines that there is no life after death, no heaven to win and no hell to pay and that they can just quietly ride off into the sunset without paying their debts. 

Now that really sounds like wishful thinking. to me.