Moving

This blog is moving to http://lovebeingcatholic.wordpress.com/. Please update your links. Thanks!

Church Fathers on Apostolic Succession

Hat tip: Principium Unitatis (a blog you should follow).

Early Church Ecclesiology

Great post by Tim Troutman on the ecclesiology of the early church as evidenced by the creeds.

Incarnation 101

What does the incarnation mean? How does it affect us? kkollwitz at Smaller Manhattans spells it out.

HT: Crossed the Tiber

Lent

I’ll be away from the blog during Lent. Comments will be closed. I’ll see you again after Easter.

Update: It seems the only way to disable comments is to make my posts private. They’ll be back up after Easter.

Eucharistic Analogy

Contrarian 78 posted a great analogy to show how Protestant views of the Eucharist don’t match up with Scripture.

Worship vs. Honor; Defining Worship

I was recently accused of worshiping Mary.  This might be the most popular accusation for Protestants to make against Catholics. The Catholic response is that we don’t worship Mary or the other saints, but we do honor them. Most non-Catholics do not understand how we can say this. We sing songs to Mary, and to other saints. We pray to them. We have statues of them in our churches, schools, and homes and often these statues are placed in shrines. Many Catholics place flowers or other gifts at the feet of these statues. We light candles to them. In the Protestant mind, these actions constitute worship, and many of them a particularly pagan style of worship.

The difference between our treatment of Mary and the other saints and our treatment of the Godhead can be understood if you understand how we think of the Eucharist. Catholics believe the bread becomes Jesus’ body and the wine becomes His blood. These are offered to God as a sacrifice, in union with the sacrifice Jesus made of Himself at Calvary. We offer this blood sacrifice to God. I learned recently that there was a heretical group in the days of the early church that did offer their Eucharist to Mary. This heresy was condemned by the Catholic church, because Catholics know that it is wrong to worship Mary. We never, ever offer the Eucharist to anyone other than God. Not Mary. Not other saints. Not angels. Only God.

Of course, Protestants do not believe the Eucharist is really Jesus’ body and blood. Because of this, the highest form of honor they give to God is to sing songs about Him and to Him, pray to Him, preach about Him, give money to promote His church, and participate in a symbolic meal. Even Protestants who believe in some form of the real presence do not believe their meal is a sacrifice being offered to anyone. This is why Protestants, who also do not want to worship Mary or other saints or angels do not sing songs to them, or talk to them/pray to them, etc.

But Protestants are perfectly comfortable singing love songs addressed to their boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse. Does that mean they are worshiping their boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse? We all understand that the lecture about Edgar Allan Poe I listened to in college was not remotely a form of worship. When I take flowers to my grandmother’s grave, I am not worshiping her. The images carved in the side of Mount Rushmore are not idolatrous. Does the man who talks to his dead mother, asking her to put in a good word for him on the other side, worship his mother? Has he crossed the line if he kisses her picture, or if he keeps some trinket of hers next to his heart? Surely we all know these actions do not constitute worship. They are ways of honoring people.

Catholics use these same ways of honoring people to honor Mary and the other saints. We offer our sacrifice to God alone. That is why we can say that we honor Mary and the other saints, but we do not worship them.

1400-Year-Old Monastery

HT: The Way of the Fathers

A 6th-century monastery has been found in Iraq. You really should click that link and read the Smithsonian article because this is fascinating stuff. There are a few things I want to highlight for my own purposes:

Inside the plain walls of the chapel, one shell-shaped niche is decorated with intricate carvings and an Aramaic inscription asks for prayers of the soul of the person interred beneath the walls. Shades of a cobalt blue fresco can be found above the stepped altar. (snip)

After World War I, the monastery became a refugee center, according to chaplain and resident historian Geoff Bailey, a captain with the 86th Combat Support hospital. Christians supposedly still came once a year in November to celebrate the feast of St. Elijah (also the name of the monastery’s founding monk).

We have a monastery from the late 500′s, founded by a monk named St. Elijah, with frescos above the altar, and a request for prayers to prayed by the deceased at a grave. Monasticism, saints, images, altars, praying to the dead.

Almost all non-Catholics (Anglicans and Episcopals excepted, I think) would claim that these are all signs of gross apostacy. Yet many of these same non-Catholics would claim that the Church did not apostatize until the 1000′s or later. How, in the absence of any evidence that any orthodox Christians saw these practices as apostacy, and in the presence of their widespread use throughout history, and in the presence of explicit defenses of these practices by orthodox Christians, can these Protestants claim to practice the true ancient faith? If you’re going to say that these practices are un-orthodox, you must also say the Church apostatized sometime before this monastery was built. And this is just ONE monastery. There are scores more, and much, much more such evidence in other places. (The catacombs for one example.)

The Orthodox Church is the only other contender even in the ballpark for the title of The Historic Church. This is precisely the sort of thing that brought me to the Catholic Church.

God Does Not “Overlook” Our Sin

Growing up in the Church of Christ, I thought that after baptism, every time I sinned, I had to pray to God for forgiveness. In response, the ever-patient and forgiving God would wipe my slate clean (the slate on which He kept track of my demerits) because of His inexplicable love for me. So every time I prayed for forgiveness, I was starting over – getting a second chance. One of the most difficult things to understand was why God would be willing to pass out “second” chances when we all knew I was on chance number five million. It was my job to stop sinning. Sanctification was understood in terms of the most basic definition of the word – a setting apart. So when God sanctified me, He excluded me from the class of people who are the “world” and included me instead in the class of people who make up his church. So I lost my sanctification every time I sinned and was re-sanctified every time I was forgiven.

When I became a Calvinist, I believed something a bit different. I believed that God had chosen me specifically (and many other people) out of the entire human family to be saved from my sin. I believed that because I was one of the chosen ones, it was impossible for me to die without having repented of all sin. The repentance and forgiveness still worked basically the same way in my new belief system. The reason God kept giving me chances was that He had chosen to save me, and His will would prevail even over my sinfulness. My sanctification was something that God was working out in my life so that I will sin less and less as my life goes on. However, I could not expect to reach complete sanctification in this life.

Now that I’m Catholic, I understand this entire process differently. I do not believe that God ever “overlooks” my sin. He forgives it, yes. But He doesn’t ever pretend it doesn’t exist or that it didn’t happen. He looks unflinchingly on what I am and sees both what I was designed to be and the horror that I have become. God works my sanctification, declaring me righteous only after I become truly holy. My holiness may be achieved in this life or after it (in Purgatory), but it will be achieved. (This, incidentally, is why I find Purgatory comforting, rather than scary.) The good news of Christianity is that it’s not my job to make myself perfect, but God’s. And the great promise is that God will not give up on my sanctification.

Poor in Spirit

From Jesus of Nazareth by Pope Benedict XVI, in the section on the Beatitudes.

The poverty of which this tradition speaks is never a purely material phenomenon. Purely material poverty does not bring salvation, though of course those who are disadvantaged in this world may count on God’s goodness in a particular way. But the heart of those who have nothing can be hardened, poisoned, evil — interiorly full of greed for material things, forgetful of God, covetous of external possessions.

On the other hand, the poverty spoken of here is not a purely spiritual attitude, either. Admittedly, not everyone is called to the radicalism with which so many true Christians — from Anthony, father of monasticism, to Francis of Assisi, down to the exemplary poor of our era — have lived and continue to live their poverty as a model for us. But in order to be the community of Jesus’ poor, the Church has constant need of the great ascetics. She needs the communities that follow them, living out poverty and simplicity so as to display to us the truth of the Beatitudes. She needs them to wake everyone up to the fact that possession is all about service, to contrast the culture of affluence with the culture of inner freedom, and thereby to create the conditions for social justice as well.

The Sermon on the Mount is not a social program per se, to be sure. But it is only when the great inspiration it gives us vitally influences our thought and our action, only when faith generates the strength of renunciation and responsibility for our neighbor and for the whole of society — only then can social justice grow, too