The Agony of Priesthood

Of the many battles raging within the increasingly beleaguered Anglican Communion today, women’s ordination is perhaps the most conspicuous. In saying this I do not mean to imply that the question of whether women can be validly ordained as priests is the pivotal issue facing Anglicanism in the 21st century; its allowance is merely a symptom of a more general breakdown in agreement within the communion’s ranks about what is and isn’t orthodox Christianity. Nor am I asserting that the subject has garnered a more significant amount of media attention than have others. Even the Episcopal Church’s 2006 enthronement of Katherine Jefferts Schori as the first female Anglican bishop received far less coverage than its appointment of Gene Robinson to the same office in 2004.

Corpus Christi (Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ)

Today is the Feast of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, more commonly known as Corpus Christi, the day set aside by the Church in honor of the Eucharist. Traditionally, the celebration of Corpus Christi includes the Lauda Sion sequence, which I was fortunate enough to hear sung in Latin at Mass today. The words were written by St. Thomas Aquinas; what follows is an English rendition, compliments of Wikipedia.

Oh, and to actually hear the chant—compliments of Archive.org—simply follow this link. Gotta love the internet.

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Sion, lift up thy voice and sing:
Praise thy Savior and thy King,
Praise with hymns thy shepherd true.

All thou canst, do thou endeavour:
Yet thy praise can equal never
Such as merits thy great King.

Chance Meetings

Spring of 2006 marked the end of my four years at UC Berkeley. By early May I was in the process of finishing up my remaining requirements and bidding farewell to friends and familiar surroundings. I had spent most of my final semester working at a psych lab and ignoring my classwork in favor of foosball and Futurama reruns; life was sweet.

Fr. Alvin Kimel on Ecclesiological Relativism

Fr. Alvin Kimel’s outstanding blog Pontifications needs little in the way of introduction. Started in 2003 as a place for the author—an ordained Episcopalian priest—to explore the Anglican Communion’s ongoing collapse, its focus gradually shifted to the question with which Cardinal Newman grappled in the years before his conversion: where is the true Church established by Christ to be found?

Romano Amerio on the Role of Public Opinion in the Church

From the English translation of Iota Unum: A Study of Changes in the Catholic Church in the XXth Century, published in Italy in 1985:

Cardinal Suenens [a Belgian prelate and an influential liberal at the Second Vatican Council] asserted in an interview that “most importantly, after the council there was a recognition of public opinion in the Church. This is something that is relatively new in the Church.”

Peace

Da pacem, Domine, in diebus nostris
Quia non est alius
Qui pugnet pro nobis
Nisi tu Deus noster.

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Give peace, O Lord, in our time
Because there is no one else
Who will fight for us
If not You, our God.

Exultet

Rejoice, heavenly powers! Sing, choirs of angels!
Exult, all creation around God’s throne!
Jesus Christ, our King, is risen!
Sound the trumpet of salvation!

Rejoice, O earth, in shining splendor,
radiant in the brightness of your King!
Christ has conquered! Glory fills you!
Darkness vanishes for ever!

Rejoice, O Mother Church! Exult in glory!
The risen Savior shines upon you!
Let this place resound with joy,
echoing the mighty song of all God’s people!

My dearest friends,
standing with me in this holy light,
join me in asking God for mercy,

that he may give his unworthy minister
grace to sing his Easter praises.

Deacon: The Lord be with you.
People: And also with you.
Deacon: Lift up your hearts.
People: We lift them up to the Lord.
Deacon: Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.
People: It is right to give him thanks and praise.

It is truly right
that with full hearts and minds and voices
we should praise the unseen God, the all-powerful Father,
and his only Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.

For Christ has ransomed us with his blood,
and paid for us the price of Adam’s sin to our eternal Father!

This is our passover feast,
when Christ, the true Lamb, is slain,
whose blood consecrates the homes of all believers.

This is the night
when first you saved our fathers:
you freed the people of Israel from their slavery
and led them dry-shod through the sea.

This is the night
when the pillar of fire destroyed the darkness of sin!

This is the night
when Christians everywhere,
washed clean of sin and freed from all defilement,
are restored to grace and grow together in holiness.

This is the night
when Jesus Christ broke the chains of death
and rose triumphant from the grave.

What good would life have been to us,
had Christ not come as our Redeemer?
Father, how wonderful your care for us!
How boundless your merciful love!
To ransom a slave you gave away your Son.

O happy fault,
O necessary sin of Adam,
which gained for us so great a Redeemer!

Most blessed of all nights,
chosen by God to see Christ rising from the dead!

Of this night scripture says:
“The night will be as clear as day:
it will become my light, my joy.”

The power of this holy night dispels all evil,
washes guilt away, restores lost innocence,
brings mourners joy;
it casts out hatred, brings us peace,
and humbles earthly pride.

Night truly blessed when heaven is wedded to earth
and man is reconciled with God!

Therefore, heavenly Father,
in the joy of this night,
receive our evening sacrifice of praise,
your Church’s solemn offering.

Accept this Easter candle,
a flame divided but undimmed,
a pillar of fire that glows to the honor of God.

(For it is fed by the melting wax,
which the mother bee brought forth
to make this precious candle.)

Let it mingle with the lights of heaven
and continue bravely burning
to dispel the darkness of this night!

May the Morning Star which never sets
find this flame still burning:
Christ, that Morning Star,
who came back from the dead,
and shed his peaceful light on all mankind,
your Son, who lives and reigns for ever and ever.
Amen.

Odds and Ends

The Sarabite, whom I’ve mentioned before as being a favorite blogger of mine, recently wrote a brief but worthwhile post centered around a quote from Henri Cardinal de Lubac’s book Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man. Here’s an excerpt:

There is a danger in many circles to mistake certain traditions for things that are given universally at the point of the propagation of the Apostolic tradition. It seems that many would have a certain age, phraseology, or style of art as constitutive of the essence of Christianity. For de Lubac, such prejudices are untenable. There are not certain times where the ethos of Christianity is entirely under the assured guidance of the Holy Ghost, and other times when the Holy Ghost abandons average Christians to their own devices. The wrestling between Divine Grace and human nature is a constant phenomenon that requires discernment on our part as thinking Christians. There is no point in apotheosizing one part of our past while rejecting another.

Read the rest at its source.

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In other news, this blog will be going on hiatus for Lent. I will be back after Easter Sunday. Pax Christi.

Trust and Tradition

Ash Wednesday approaches, and with it the season of Lent. The 40 days between Ash Wednesday and Easter are a time of fasting and sacrifice during which we clear our hearts and minds and bodies of that which distracts us from God and do penance for our part—for we all have a part—in Christ’s crucifixion.

That which the Church asks of us during this time is certainly doable, especially if one is Roman Catholic. Yet we are a fallen race; to paraphrase F.J. Sheed, we are a people whose bodies are in rebellion against our souls. Thus, Lent, by virtue of being a penitential season, is a time of profound trust in God. For the catechumens and candidates, this is especially true: becoming Catholic or fully entering into the life of the Church is an act of faith for which a trusting heart is necessary. And those of us who have already walked this path are given a chance to walk it anew: if we have allowed ourselves to be distracted by the pleasures of the world, to turn our minds, our hearts, and our bodies versus Dominum, toward the Lord.

Good News from Vietnam

Catholic World News reports the following:

Vietnamese government officials have tentatively agreed to return the former offices of the apostolic nuncio in Hanoi to the Catholic Church.

In a stunning victory for Catholic activists who had been organizing daily prayer vigils outside the former nunciature in Hanoi, pleading for return of the building that had been confiscated by the Communist leadership in 1959, the government has agreed to turn the building over to Church leaders.

The concession by the Vietnamese government came just hours after the publication of a letter from Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican Secretary of State, urging Hanoi’s Catholics to avoid confrontation with police. Informed sources in Hanoi said that the government had agreed to allow the Catholic archdiocese to resume use of the building, in exchange for a promise that the daily prayer vigils would stop.

Read the story in its entirety for more details.

The Jesuit who taught freshman Scripture at my high school was Vietnamese. Short by American standards, he cut an imposing figure and commanded the respect of the 14-year-olds he taught. His thickly-accented English at times presented a challenge to the untrained ear, and deciphering his lectures was a skill my fellow students and I had to acquire in the first few weeks of class. A stickler for details, he employed an insane grading scale to our exams: more than one or two wrong answers out of, say, thirty questions, and our chances of getting a passing grade diminished rapidly. He had a short fuse and didn’t hesitate to call students out for laziness or disruptive behavior; my introduction as a Protestant to the Catholic priesthood, he was the first teacher I had encountered who occasionally swore at his students.

Of course, we all loved him. Engaging and at times even playful, he also revealed to us an intellectual seriousness that I had never before encountered in the study of Scripture. And, though I couldn’t articulate this at the time, he conveyed to me the spiritual depth and sincerity of the Catholic faith. (Neither did he shy away from talking about evil: we watched The Exorcist in class near the end of the year.) From ninth grade on, I became an outspoken defender of Catholics to my fellow Protestants, due at least in part to his witness.

Furthermore, he clearly cared about and enjoyed talking to his students. Warm and approachable outside of class, he was an adult whom I sensed that I could trust—which, for a young teenager, was saying a lot. This may have been due in part to his vocation as well: I didn’t necessarily understand the Reconciliation or hold to its efficacy, but I was keenly aware that he had not only to listen to confessions but keep silent about them as well. Each year, probably during Lent, the school held penance services where several priests would make themselves available for confession. At one of these services, compelled by guilt over sins I had committed, I actually went in to speak with him; he didn’t absolve me, of course, but he gave me some advice and a blessing. (I had forgotten that incident until recently, and now I can’t help but see it as foreshadowing my conversion to Catholicism. Though I didn’t understood its necessity or historical precedence until recently, the Sacrament of Penance has always made a lot of sense to me on an intuitive and emotional level.)

As the year drew to a close, he eased up on the workload somewhat and devoted class time to regaling us with stories of his homeland. He was one of many South Vietnamese who had been airlifted out of Saigon in 1975. Yet his tales only touched on the war incidentally, and the bulk of what he told us focused on his life as an ordinary teenager there—he was 16 when Saigon fell. He spoke wistfully of the young women who rode their bicycles to school, their long dresses rippling in the wind. He recalled the rivalries between high schools that would flare up when a boy from one campus started seeing a girl from the other; he showed us the scars on his arms that were the result of these rivalries. (Bicycle chains were apparently the weapon of choice. Like I said, Father cut an imposing figure.) Finally, at the end of the year, he told us his birth name, which we’d been asking him about almost from day one: up until that point we only knew the name he had taken as a priest. We saw this revelation as a concession, though I’m sure he was just holding it back to keep us in suspense.

Life hasn’t been easy for Catholics in Vietnam—since the communists took over, certainly, but apparently in the centuries prior to that as well. It’s a country from which the Church can claim thousands and thousands of martyrs, many of whom have been canonized as saints. I’m no expert in such matters, but I get the impression that Catholics made up a disproportionately percentage of those who left the country in the American war’s aftermath; I don’t know if this particular priest has been back there since.

What has happened in Hanoi is something I find meaningful because I care about Catholic matters and, I like to think, about human freedom. But to the men and women who fled the country at least in part because of their faith—I wonder what the return of these offices means to them? Light in the darkness, perhaps: a visible sign of God’s justice and mercy for His adopted children. And perhaps, for such as my freshman Scripture teacher, the sign that home will one day feel like home again.