Monday, April 18, 2016

Fourth Sunday of Easter C



April 17, 2016

We are surrounded by many voices.
There’s rarely a moment within our waking lives that someone or something isn’t calling out to us and, even in our sleep, dreams and nightmares ask for our attention. 
And each voice has its own particular cadence and message.
Some voices invite us in, promising us life if we do this or that or buy a certain product or idea; others threaten us.
Some voices beckon us towards hated, bitterness, and anger, while others challenge is towards love, graciousness, and forgiveness.
Some voices tell us that they are playful and humorous, not to be taken seriously, even as others trumpet that they are urgent and weighty, the voice of non-negotiable truth, God’s voice.

Within all of these: Which is the voice of God? How do we recognize God’s voice among and within all of these voices?

That’s not easy to answer.
God, as the scriptures tell us, is the author of everything that’s good, whether it bears a religious label or not.
Hence, God’s voice is inside of many things that are not explicitly connected to faith and religion, just as God’s voice is also not in everything that masquerades as religious.
But how do we discern that?

Jesus leaves us a wonderful metaphor to work with, but it’s precisely only a metaphor:
He tells us that he is the “Good Shepherd” and that his sheep will recognize his voice among all other voices.
In sharing this metaphor, he is drawing upon a practice that was common among shepherds at the time:
At night, for protection and companionship, shepherds would put their flocks together into a common enclosure.
They would then separate the sheep in the morning by using their voices.
Each shepherd had trained his sheep to be attuned to his voice and his voice only.
The shepherd would walk away from the enclosure calling his sheep, often times by their individual names, and they would follow him.
His sheep were so attuned to his voice that they would not follow the voice of another shepherd, even if that shepherd tried to trick them (shepherds often did this to try to steal someone else’s sheep) by imitating the voice of their own shepherd.
Like a baby who, at a point, will no longer be cuddled by the voice of a babysitter, but wants and needs the voice of the mother, each sheep recognized intimately the voice that was safeguarding them and would not follow another voice.

So too with us: among all the voices that surround and beckon us, how do we discern the unique cadence of God’s voice?
Which is the voice of the Good Shepherd?

There’s no easy answer and sometimes the best we can do is to trust our gut-feeling about right and wrong.
But we have a number of principles that come to us from Jesus, from scripture, and from the deep wells of our Christian tradition that can help us.

What follows is a series of principles to help us discern God’s voice among the multitude of voices that beckon us.
What is the unique cadence of the voice of the Good Shepherd?
  • The voice of God is recognized both in whispers and in soft tones, even as it is recognized in thunder and in storm.
  • The voice of God is recognized wherever one sees life, joy, health, color, and humor, even as it is recognized wherever one sees dying, suffering, poverty, and a beaten-down spirit.
  • The voice of God is recognized in what calls us to what’s higher, sets us apart, and invites us to holiness, even as it is recognized in what calls us to humility, submergence into humanity, and in that which refuses to denigrate our humanity.
  • The voice of God is recognized in what appears in our lives as “foreign,” as other, as “stranger,” even as it is recognized in the voice that beckons us home.
  • The voice of God is the one that most challenges and stretches us, even as it the only voice that ultimately soothes and comforts us.
  • The voice of God enters our lives as the greatest of all powers, even as it forever lies in vulnerability, like a helpless baby in the straw.
  • The voice of God is always heard in privileged way in the poor, even as it beckons us through the voice of the artist and the intellectual.
  • The voice of God always invites us to live beyond all fear, even as it inspires holy fear.
  • The voice of God is heard inside the gifts of the Holy Spirit, even as it invites us never to deny the complexities of our world and our own lives.
  • The voice of God is always heard wherever there is genuine enjoyment and gratitude, even as it asks us to deny ourselves, die to ourselves, and freely relativize all the things of this world.

The voice of God, it would seem, is forever found in paradox.

Tuesday, April 12, 2016

We bring gifts (Easter 3 C)





Note: during Easter season we are allowed to deviate at times from preaching on the scripture readings. The following addresses what gifts we bring to the altar.


Despite the fact that shopping for Christmas gifts can be stressful, and that choosing the right gift for a neighbor whom we may not know well enough causes a bit of anxiety, we like giving gifts.
We know that making or purchasing and wrapping a gift is a physical manifestation of a spiritual reality: an appreciation of the person to whom it is given, a celebration of this person and what she or he means to us, a symbol —the gift and the giving—that not only expresses the love that we have for the person but that actually deepens that love, widens it, strengthens it, inspires it, invigorates it.
I give you a gift because I have come to know that you are a gift, a gift to me, a gift to the world; that no one ever or anywhere else is you, that no one gives me what you give me, means to me what you mean to me.
And thus, despite the anxiety that making or purchasing gifts for each other causes, we nonetheless enter into gift-giving with at least a modicum of enthusiasm, a bit of excitement, an ounce of hope that the love that we share is indeed what is ultimate.

And so it is in the assembly of the church.
And so it is when we—as individuals, yes, and more so, as a people— give our gifts to God.
But what do we give to a god?
What do we give to the Living God who made everything and has everything and needs nothing?
We offer the simple things of bread and wine, "which earth has given and human hands have made."
We used to call the point in the Mass when the bread and the wine are brought forward "the offertory."
But now we call it the preparation, because that's in fact what happens then:
We prepare the Lord's table and we prepare our gift of money for the poor and for the church, and we prepare our gifts of bread and wine to give to God. The offering of these gifts happens later, in the great eucharistic prayer.

So what is being offered under the sign of bread and wine?
What is the gift behind the gift?
We take our clue from what the priest says to begin the great prayer of thanksgiving: "Lift up your hearts."
That is what is invested in our bread and in our wine—our hearts, that lovely ancient metaphor for "all of me," for "all of us."
That, in fact, is the gift that we bring.
That is what we offer—our hearts, our very selves under the sign of bread and wine.
And that is what God accepts.
That is what the mighty Creator, the awesome Shekinah, the ultimate Mystery and holy Wisdom accepts from us.
And that is what the God of Jesus changes into Christ's body and blood to give back to us.

The offering in the great Eucharistic prayer becomes an exchange.
We give to God our hearts, under the sign of bread and wine.
In return God gives back to us the body and blood of Christ, under the same sign.
And so we have the old, lovely image in the Eucharistic prayer called "the Roman canon": "We pray that your angel may take this sacrifice to your altar in heaven. Then as we receive from this altar the sacred body and blood of your son, let us be filled with every grace and blessing."

We must not be stingy when we enter into this divine exchange of gifts. We must prepare to give God the full gift: our whole heart, as individuals and as a church.
We must see in this bread our successes and our struggles, and see in this wine our passion and our pain.
These experiences are given to God and changed and given back to us. And we are changed in the giving and in the receiving, changed for the sake of the world, changed for the sake of the reign of God that is now and not-yet, here and still-to-come.
We become a living sacrifice of praise, bread for the world, wine for the weary.
So when you come into church, stop by the gifts table.
Extend your hands over that bread.
Place onto that bread your accomplishments of this week, the job that you did well (the wall that you painted, the meal that you prepared), the simple acts of kindness that you performed, the work in which this par­ish engages (food delivered to the needy, children taught to read).

Then this is consecrated with the bread, returned to you as your life made holy, to us as our life made holy, so that this parish, this city, this world may be made holy: the mystical body of Christ.
Extend your hands over that wine.
Place in that carafe your struggles: the addiction you resisted, the harm you healed.
Place in that flagon this parish's struggles: halting steps toward being a more inclusive community, small attempts to be more faithful to the gospel.
Then this is consecrated with the wine, returned to us a cup of salvation: this blood poured out once and for all so that the blood of our children may never again stain our streets, so that the blood of the convict need not be shed in revenge, so that the blood of soldiers need never be wasted in far-away fields.

And when we are invited to lift up our hearts, let us—each of us and all of us—do so consciously, remembering what we have invested in these gifts, what it is in fact that we are bringing to God.

And let us pray without hesitation, with sincerity and with great devotion, "And so Father, we bring you these gifts. We ask you to bless them and to make them holy."

Wednesday, April 6, 2016

Second Sunday of Easter (or Sunday of Divine Mercy)

Image: Caravaggio at Hermanoleon

April 3, 2016


Our tradition has let the apostle Thomas off easy.
"Doubting" is really a kind of description of this aberrant apostle.
He was out of place, out of step, out of it.
He not only doubted—he denied.

The final fidelity of reluctant Thomas is a good reminder to us that faith is often a matter of doubts overcome.
If we never have any doubts, our own ideas may coincide with God's, or we may not have any personal ideas at all.
In either case, in the absence of doubt, it is difficult to know whether we believe in god or in our own cleverness.

But when there is a difference of opinion between God and us, just when we think we may be losing our faith, then is the opportunity to believe in something beyond us, to plead, "Help my unbelief!"
Doubts are absolutely mandatory to mature faith.
None of us can have a deep faith without doubts.
Theologian Romano Guardini wrote: FAITH IS THE CAPACITY TO BEAR YOUR DOUBTS, TO DEAL WITH YOUR UNCERTAIN­TIES, TO BELIEVE FIRM­LY ENOUGH TO LIVE WITH YOUR QUESTIONS.
WITHOUT SUCH QUESTIONS, THERE IS NO FAITH.

Many people today have no trouble with faith because faith does not bother them.
In the early church, faith meant leaving family, job, perhaps even life itself.
But being a Christian today is an acceptable thing,
so it may be difficult to distinguish between faith and convenience.

I am merely noting that, in the first century, people clearly knew they were marked for death,
whereas in the 20th century it requires special discernment to spot a Christian since most of them do not seem to be marked for anything special.
Many who call ourselves Christian are merely deists.
We do not believe in Christ so much as in a remote God who creates and rewards and punishes and keeps order.
That is, they have a tough time believing in the God of the gospels, but bow most often to the God of the Old Testament who controls and manipulates the forces of nature to God's own end.


Until recently, our reliance of God was based on our dependence on nature.
Our god might thunder and terrify us, but we could appease this god by prayer and sacrifice and going to church
We even talked about God in terms of nature: power and majesty.

But, since we have mastered nature, we have outgrown that god.
They say people become atheists when they become better than their god.
So, having become better than the god of nature, we are forced to either stop believing in god, or return to the gospels and believe in a God of weakness, of humility, of friendship, of tenderness.

Twenty centuries ago, Jesus revealed the true religion for this century: a God who does not manifest in power and glory
A God who is not offended by human progress,
A God who serves his servants
A God who dies so that God's people might live.

Modern faith poses us a critical choice.
We can hand ourselves over to the new, powerful gods of technology
or we can throw our lot with the unnatural God of the gospels.
That would, of course, require a different kind of faith.
It would not be the consoling faith of our fathers and mothers.

Faith can no longer be a sentimental reaction to a cruel world.
God can no longer be a buffer against outrageous fortune.
Prayer can no longer be a consolation prize for coming in last.
Religion can no longer shield us from facing up to a hard world and a crucified God.

Modern faith leaves us with a battered earth to salvage, prisoners to free, starving families to feed, wars to stop.
What we formerly asked God to do for us, a grown-up God now tells us to do for ourselves.

It is not that God no longer cares—God cars in a different way.
This happens every time someone reaches maturity.
When we were children, our parents fed us, clothed us, kept us from harm.
That was the way they expressed their love.
And we responded the only way children can: we called it "love" but it was more like grateful dependency.
It was a wonderful, symbiotic, mutually beneficial relationship.
But it was built for obsolescence.
Parents are not supposed to dominate forever; they are to form children for freedom.
Children are not supposed to receive forever; they are to learn the joy of giving.

Our God is like that.
We are not created to be the pawns of a powerful tyrant or spoiled chil­dren of a pampering parent.
We are images of God.
Therefore, we ought to reflect God's face.
                                                                       
Faith is doing what we believe our God does: COMPASSIONATE, HELPING, FORGIVING, SUFFERING, TRIUMPHANT.
Faith is believing what Jesus told us his God was like,
.........instead of what we think God ought to be like.

Not much difference, then, between us and Thomas.

Monday, April 4, 2016

Are we living in sin?


By Father Paul Keller, C.M.F.| 

Are you living in sin? The answer to that question is “Yes”—we are all living in sin. We are all sinners. We all live in a world that forces us to deal with the consequences of our own sins and the sins of others. However, the phrase “living in sin” has traditionally been applied to couples who live together without being validly married. This phrase has normally been applied to: 1) Couples who are living together but are not married, 2) Catholics who are civilly married, but not married in the Catholic Church, and 3) Catholics who, after being married in the church, have divorced and remarried civilly (although anyone, not just a Catholic, who is divorced and remarried would fall into this same category). Of course, it is not sinful to merely live with someone else. In order for these couples to be “living in sin,” they must be sexually intimate.
 
Last October in Rome, the Extraordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops on the Family took place. During this synod some bishops suggested the church drop the use of language such as “living in sin,” “intrinsically disordered,” and “contraceptive mentality.” The final report from this synod, which also serves as the working document for the Ordinary Synod to take place this October, does call for a critical examination of the language the church uses when addressing the people who would normally have these terms applied to them. Many of those critical of this idea see it as a cowardly concession to political correctness. However, there are good reasons to drop this kind of language. 
 
First of all, this phrase is used inconsistently. As I previously noted, we are all “living in sin.” We are all sinners. To apply a phrase like this to only one kind of human behavior, as if others are not also “living in sin,” is an arbitrary and deceptive misrepresentation of people’s circumstances and the reality of sin. For example, are not those who fail to care for the poor also living in sin? Why should we apply this phrase to only one kind of misbehavior? The church is not fairly representing all the complexities of any relationship when it focuses on only one aspect of that relationship (i.e., sexual intimacy outside of a valid marriage), as important as this aspect might be, and tells the couple they are “living in sin.” 
 
The church loses credibility because most people know couples who are not married in the church. The experience of these couples is that they can be committed, prayerful, generous, loving, and kind to each other, to their children, and to others. It sounds insulting, dismissive, and inaccurate when the church labels these couples as merely “living in sin.” Identifying sinful aspects of any (or all) relationships is very different than claiming that there is only one significant aspect of the relationship, or that the entirety of the relationship can be fairly categorized as only sinful, which is what this phrase seems to imply.
 
Do you know what Catholics used to call Protestants? Heretics. Technically speaking, according to Catholic teaching, Protestants are still heretics. However, when was the last time you heard your priest or bishop use that term to refer to Protestants? There was a big shift during the Second Vatican Council. In the decree from Vatican II on ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio (1964), the church began referring to Protestants as “brothers [and sisters] in the Lord” or “separated brothers [and sisters].”  Notice the difference? Without changing doctrine, the church changed its language. The church recognized that the term heretic, with all its associated emotions and images, was not an adequate or appropriate description for our Protestant brothers and sisters. The church recognized that using a word that comes across as an insult is not a fitting way for members of the Body of Christ to speak. As the psalmist pointed out, it is God’s will that truth and kindness must always accompany one another (Ps. 85:10). Truth without kindness can be arrogant and cruel. Kindness without truth can be cowardly and cruel. Both are ineffective when it comes to proclaiming the gospel. It is not enough to only proclaim truth; it is absolutely essential to make sure that our proclamation of the truth is wrapped in the language and reality of loving kindness.
 
Just as the Catholic Church has changed the language it uses concerning our Protestant brothers and sisters in the Lord, the church should also change the language it uses concerning couples whose relationships fail to symbolize the fullness of marriage. It is time to recognize the reality that holiness and sin coexist in the life of every human person and in every human relationship. Language that obscures that truth should be abandoned. It is time for kindness and truth to meet.
- See more at: http://www.uscatholic.org/articles/201507/are-we-living-sin-30269#sthash.5gAXYDId.dpuf

Should Catholics get an F in science?

Should Catholics get an F in science?

By Ruth Graham| 


When Heather Camm, a chemistry teacher at an all-girls Catholic high school, began designing a new, year-long course in scientific ethics, she knew she would have to address the one issue that could undercut the rest of her lessons. Before she could get to evolution, reproductive technology, nuclear energy, and the origins of the universe, she would have to discuss Galileo.
“There’s a lot of misinformation,” she said last summer, as she prepared to head into her second year teaching the class at Padua Academy in Wilmington, Delaware. “That’s what’s at stake with this course—correcting a lot of that mis-information.” She went on to quote Catholic writer George Weigel: “No incident had done more to sustain the image of the Catholic Church as an authoritarian enemy of human progress than the 17th-century Galileo case.”
The 400-year-old case of Galileo is notorious; one of his most well-known conflicts with the church resulted when the great scientist, who had invented the telescope, began arguing in “The Starry Messenger” in 1610 that the sun was the center of the solar system. It was not his own theory, but it was an unproven and unpopular one. (Of course, it also happened to be correct.) The Catholic Church declared heliocentrism heretical in 1616, and Galileo’s conflict with the church hierarchy escalated in the coming years. Finally, he was tried for “holding as true the false doctrine taught by some that the sun is the center of the world.” The scientist lived under house arrest for eight years before his death, eventually recanting his heliocentric views.
Today, both the true story of the Galileo incident and funhouse mirror versions of it loom large over the church’s reputation. Camm says when she asks adults about it, many wrongly say the church burned Galileo at the stake. The case lives on in popular culture and even within Catholic culture, as evidence of the church’s hostility to science and reason.
“The Galileo affair seems to cast a pall of doubt over everything else,” says Chris Baglow, a professor of theology at Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans. “It sits in the background and everything else seems to be window dressing. It’s as though [people think], ‘This is really what the church is.’ ”
But the lingering power of a juicy episode from 17th-century history is not the only problem for the church’s contemporary scientific reputation. “There’s a considerable deficit in scientific learning and understanding among American Christians,” says Darren Sherkat, a sociologist at Southern Illinois University who has conducted research on scientific literacy and religion. “It’s really not a point of debate outside of people who feel offended by it.”
Sherkat’s 2011 paper, published in Social Science Quarterly, is not good news for American Christians. Sherkat uses data from the General Social Survey, which includes a section of 13 questions on very basic scientific literacy, covering topics including continental drift, male determination of the sex of a baby—and heliocentrism. Sherkat finds that although Catholics performed better than sectarian Protestants, they performed worse than both non-Christians and the non-religious. The paper concludes: “Religion plays a sizeable role in the low levels of scientific literacy found in the United States, and the negative impact of religious factors is more substantial than gender, race, or income.” In particular, Catholics’ “scientific proficiency does not match their educational position.”
When it comes to scientific literacy, American Christians—Catholics included—have both an image problem and a reality problem. That reputation is partly the result of misunderstanding and partly a result of a real phenomenon in both American and American Catholic culture.
How has scientific illiteracy become an American crisis, and why should it concern Catholics in particular? Can a basic understanding of science illuminate a Christian’s understanding of God?
In a year in which Pope Francis issued a clarion call for attention to climate science, these are questions that seem more pressing now than ever.
A problem of national culture
Scientific illiteracy is not just a problem for Christians, let alone just for Catholics. To share just a few of the dramatic and alarming statistics that regularly make headlines in the United States: twenty-six percent of Americans do not know the Earth orbits the sun. Only 50 percent of Americans say climate change is due primarily to human activity (that’s compared to 87 percent of scientists). Just 37 percent of people think it’s safe to eat genetically modified foods (88 percent of scientists say it’s safe). Barely more than half of Americans know that astrology—yes, astrology—is “not at all scientific,” a share that has actually been declining in recent years.
You get the picture. Intriguing, however, is that Americans profess to be highly interested in science. Four out of five of us say we’re interested in “new scientific discoveries,” according to a large survey by the National Science Foundation; that’s a higher level of interest than Europeans show. STEM—the acronym referring to the disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and math—has become the favorite child of education experts in recent years. Earlier this year, the Obama administration touted the fact that its Educate to Innovate program has resulted in more than $1 billion for STEM programs nationwide; it’s a theme he has raised in several State of the Union addresses. When Pew Research Center and Smithsonian magazine polled Americans in 2013 on which subjects they thought schools should emphasize more, almost half named a STEM subject.
So there’s a paradox: Americans seem to have low levels of scientific literacy even as they have high respect for science. For Catholics, the picture is even more complicated. As Sherkat’s research suggests, Christians as a whole display lower levels of scientific literacy than the general population. On some fine-grained measures, however, Catholics in particular aren’t doing so badly. According to a 2013 Pew survey, for example, 68 percent of white non-Hispanic Catholics (correctly) say that humans have evolved over time, compared with 60 percent of American adults overall. Fifty-three percent of Hispanic Catholics agree—and that still makes them almost twice as likely as white evangelical Protestants to hold the scientifically sound view.
Still, Sherkat’s research suggests Catholics do have lower levels of overall scientific literacy than non-Christians. He offers two explanations for this: First, the American Catholic population has a large cohort of immigrants, who have different educational backgrounds. And second, Catholic schools, while often strong in overall academics, traditionally tend to focus more on the humanities than the sciences. Since people usually associate with people similar to themselves, this creates a sort of feedback loop of scientific apathy, if not illiteracy. “They’re going to law school,” Sherkat says of top Catholic students. “They’re not going to MIT.”
In other words, the issue of Catholics and scientific literacy is not an issue that can be completely blamed on American culture as a whole. “The statistics are distressing because it means Catholic educators are failing at a goal of Catholic education, the integration of scientific understanding and Catholic knowledge,” says Baglow, the author of Faith, Science and Reason: Theology on the Cutting Edge (Midwest Theological Forum), a 2009 textbook for Catholic high school and college students. “A primary goal of a Catholic education ought to be not simply to teach doctrine correctly . . . but to make the Catholic faith the lens through which all the paths to knowledge and truth are seen and appreciated.”
A problem of association
Scientific literacy is not easy to define. Is literacy a simple matter of understanding scientific methods and findings, or does it require a broader embrace of the fruits of scientific research? Is someone who has some knowledge of reproductive technology or embryonic stem cell research, but rejects their use based on religious beliefs, hostile toward science, as some might accuse them?
Stephen Barr, a physicist at the University of Delaware and the author of Modern Physics and Ancient Faith (University of Notre Dame Press), says that lumping together attitudes toward evolution, embryonic stem cell research, and climate change—three areas in which conservative Christians are often thought to be science-deniers—is like comparing “an apple, an orange, and a pear.” Questioning climate-change orthodoxy is something some scientists are still doing, he says; it doesn’t make all such questioners rubes.
Objecting to technology like stem cell research is a moral issue, not an empirical one. (As Pope Benedict XVI put it in 2007, “Scientific research must be encouraged and promoted, so long as it does not harm other human beings, whose dignity is inviolable from the very first stages of existence.”) Of these three frequently cited sticking points, it’s really only evolution, as Barr sees it, in which it’s fair to say scientific illiteracy is at play.
That raises a fact that should be encouraging for Catholic thinkers: The church is not caught up in defending young-earth creationism, and it is not hostile to evolutionary theory. Rather, Protestants have been by far the most aggressive in promoting the idea that creation happened in seven literal days and have insisted that Darwinian evolution is incompatible with the Christian faith. One of the most well-known opponents of evolutionary theory is Ken Hamm, the founder of the Creation Museum, who debated science educator Bill Nye on evolution at a highly publicized event in 2013.
But it’s not fair to call anti-Darwinism a strictly Protestant problem. Barr says that anecdotally, he has noticed an increase in this belief among American Catholics in recent years. One cause is a result of something he sees as generally positive: Catholics and evangelical Protestants get along much better than they used to. Some prominent evangelicals have converted to Catholicism, and there is simply less bad blood between the two Christian traditions than there was even a few decades ago. The downside to this encouraging trend, Barr says, is that “by interacting with evangelicals closely, some Catholics pick up their anti-evolution views . . . .  And since they haven’t learned some of the Catholic ways of looking at things, they’re somewhat susceptible to evangelical Protestant ways of looking at things.” He calls it a “failure of catechesis,” and says it’s been going on for decades.
As Barr sees it, there are two possible ways to remedy the problem. One is to reach opponents of evolution—but that’s an uphill battle, to put it mildly. The other is to make sure Catholics understand the theological traditions of their own church. “There needs to be more to explain to ordinary Catholics how to think about evolution,” he says. “There’s been a vacuum of writing at the level of ordinary people.”
A problem of theology
John Cavadini, a professor of theology and director of the Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame, noticed a troubling trend in undergraduate courses he teaches at the University of Notre Dame. “So many of [the students’] questions came from a misunderstanding of what the church teaches, especially in relation to what science has discovered,” he says. That was particularly true when it came to the doctrine of creation. “Students had the idea that what the church has is a myth and what science has is actual knowledge. When they compare myth with knowledge, as they see it, they pick knowledge.”
Cavadini views that perception of conflict as a failure of theological education and a misunderstanding of doctrine. The story of creation isn’t primitive, disproven science, but the first chapter in a story about meaning and purpose—which science doesn’t say anything about.
By separating science and scripture and showing young people how both have meaning, “you can ease this tension people feel between science and religion and show that religion is not just a myth or a superstition,” Cavadini says.
“You just start getting them to reflect: Where’s the meaning in their lives? Does it come from science, even though science adds a lot of programmatic knowledge that helps human life flourish? In the end, what do you mean by flourish? If a pill for immortality became available, so you lived life forever in health on earth, would you be happy? If you’re bored eternally or your life leads nowhere, that’s a definition of hell.”
Baglow, too, chalks up perception of any tension between science and faith to a lack of knowledge of existing doctrine. “There’s a misunderstanding between how God creates and how creatures participate in the process of creation,” he says. “That’s the biggest sticking point for most people.” Too many people, he explains, believe that if something has a physical explanation it is therefore not part of the spiritual world. “If we can explain the physics and mathematics involved in the emergence of the universe, that means we’ve taken the universe out of the list of things God created. Then the question is: Does God do anything?” That faulty view, he says, “comes from a deep weakness in understanding the Catholic doctrine of creation.”
A history of compatibility
Despite some laypeople’s belief that faith and science are often in conflict, the good news is that Catholic theology is uniquely positioned for compatibility with scientific knowledge. Rather than assuming that the Bible is something like an historical and scientific textbook that can be interpreted in a straightforward way, Catholicism allows for and embraces different levels of interpretation. Although Catholic tradition recognizes God is revealed in scripture, “It’s not as simple as me just reading it and saying, ‘Seven days equals seven days,’ ” as Baglow puts it.
It’s no coincidence that some of the most important scientists in history have been Catholics, including René Descartes (who developed analytic geometry), Gregor Mendel (the father of modern genetics), and Louis Pasteur (the chemist who discovered how diseases spread). The 16th-century Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, who developed the heliocentric theory that later got Galileo in so much trouble, was a canon in good standing with the church. His book, De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres), was not banned by the church until more than 70 years after his death.
Jesuits in particular have a long history of involvement with the sciences. As Jonathan Wright summed it up in his 2004 book, The Jesuits: Missions, Myths, and Histories (HarperCollins), the church has also been a steady promoter and funder of serious scientific endeavors. Major cathedrals in the 17th and 18th centuries were designed for use as solar observatories. The church founded its own scientific research academy in 1603; its current iteration as the Pontifical Academy of Sciences was established in 1936. In 1996, Pope John Paul II delivered a speech to the group that made clear he accepted the theory of evolution. More recently, the academy has hosted a workshop on research that could imitate embryonic stem cells without using actual human embryos—advanced science, without the same moral hazard.
“The church’s record in the history of science is very good,” Barr says, but “this is not widely known because there have been 200 years of propaganda to make it go the other way.”
Today, despite the widespread notion that faith and modern science are irrevocably in conflict, the picture on the ground is much more congenial. “Most educated Catholics accept evolution and they’re not particularly troubled by it,” Barr says. The church supports high tech medical facilities all over the world. Pope Benedict was known as the “green pontiff” for his commitment to the environment. Last year, Pope Francis reminded Catholics that neither evolution nor the Big Bang are incompatible with the idea of a divine creator, and that God is not “a magician with a magic wand.”
The friendliness flows both ways, as it turns out. “There are a lot of scientists who are religious, it’s not uncommon,” Barr says. “Some keep it under wraps because there’s prejudice in the academic world against those who are religious . . . but it’s not like I’m an oddball.”
Barr can recall only two occasions in his long career where fellow scientists gave him any kind of grief about his faith. Indeed, recent research by sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund found that 18 percent of scientists attend weekly religious services, compared with 20 percent of the general population, and 19 percent pray multiple times a day, compared with 26 percent of the U.S. population. When it comes to religion, the scientific community doesn’t look so different from the rest of us. And Barr emphasizes that the Catholic Church in particular is not poorly perceived among actual scientists. “To the extent it has a bad reputation, it’s just echoes of Galileo.”
What’s next?
Nicanor Austriaco is a molecular microbiologist at Providence College, with a Ph.D. from MIT. He is also a Dominican friar. Austriaco says that in the 21st century, religion and science should be more allied than ever, because both believe in real truths. “We live in a culture in which so much about reality is reduced to preference and belief,” he says. Both science and religion push against that kind of relativism and insist on the existence of certain phenomena, from cells to a sovereign God.
“If God is the way, the truth, and the life, then this truth thing matters,” says Paul Mueller, an American-born Jesuit priest who is now a member of the research staff at the Vatican Observatory. “That’s where science and religion are on the same side.” Mueller is the coauthor of Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial?, a 2014 book for laypeople on questions at the intersection of faith and science. The title was prompted by a theoretical question posed to Pope Francis last year.
Lately, educators, scientists, and theologians have been working to speak more directly to the general public on these kinds of thorny questions. Austriaco, for example, belongs to Thomistic Evolution, a team of Dominican friars and scholars working on a series of parish bulletin inserts that will engage evolution from a Catholic perspective. They tackle issues like the historicity of Adam and Eve, God’s “providential governance of creation,” and the church fathers’ interpretations of the Genesis creation stories. (The group’s work is available online at ThomisticEvolution.org.)
Austriaco sees the work he does in his lab as connected to his spiritual life. “When I do science I’m looking at my creator, in the same way as when you go the Louvre you’re looking at the creator,” he says. “By studying the creation, you’re getting an idea about the creator.”
Some Catholic schools are both beefing up their STEM offerings and integrating the Catholic worldview into those classes. Baglow, for example, is currently working with a Dominican high school in New Orleans, which is building a new science center and wants to integrate religious training into its lessons. Expanding the popular acronym STEM, its new program is called STREAM: science, technology, religion, engineering, arts, and math. Baglow’s book began as a curriculum commissioned by a Catholic high school in Mobile, Alabama that was also building a new science center and wanted to ensure that the religion curriculum wouldn’t be left behind.
For the past two years, Cavadini’s Institute for Church Life has hosted a weeklong summer seminar for science and religion teachers at Catholic high schools all over the country. Last summer, about 90 teachers from 23 dioceses attended. Gianna Iannucci, who teaches neuroscience, biology, and chemistry at Mercy High School in Middletown, Connecticut, attended for the first time last summer. She says the seminar “made me realize I have a community of people all over the country I can tap into.”
Baglow sees the encouragement of Catholics to invest in science education as a key part of the work that’s left to be done. It’s not just about promoting science, but about new ways of appreciating faith. “When a student finds God in the things that he or she loves, it’s much more likely that they’ll come to find God,” he says. “If a student loves science and fears that perhaps this embrace of science would mean a stepping away from what is sacred or holy or good in the eyes of the church, then obviously there’s going to be a separation within themselves that will not ultimately be helpful for them to live their lives as Catholics who are also scientists. But if they see these things together and see how they shine a light on each other . . . then both disciplines are strengthened.”
In 1992 Pope John Paul II spoke before the Pontifical Academy of Sciences to attempt to formally close the book on that notorious 17th-century case that still dogs the Catholic Church’s reputation. The church, he said, had made a mistake when it condemned Galileo. By then, the move should have been no surprise. As he had put it four years earlier in a 1988 letter to the director of the Vatican Observatory, “Science can purify religion from error and superstition; religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes. Each can draw the other into a wider world, a world in which both can flourish.”
- See more at: http://www.uscatholic.org/articles/201603/do-catholics-get-f-science-30575?utm_source=March+5%2C+2016&utm_campaign=March+5%2C+2016&utm_medium=email#sthash.JqI9xErX.dpuf

The Resurrection of the Lord The Mass of Easter Day


March 27, 2016

A man was driving along the road when he saw the Easter Bunny hop into his lane. He swerved to avoid hitting the bunny, but couldn’t do so.
The basket of eggs went everywhere.
The driver felt guilty and began to cry.
A woman saw the man and pulled over.
AWhat=s wrong?@ she asked.
AI accidentally killed the Easter Bunny,@ he explained.
The woman knew exactly what to do.
She went to her car, pulled out a spray can, walked over to the Bunny, and sprayed the entire contents over the little furry animal.
Miraculously the Easter Bunny came back to life, jumped up, picked up his eggs, waved at them and hopped on down the road.
Not far away the Easter Bunny stopped, turned around and waved again.
He kept doing this for as far as they could see. 

The man was astonished. 
AWhat in heaven=s name is in that can you sprayed on the Easter Bunny?@
The woman showed the man the label.
It said: AHair spray. Restores life to dead hair. Adds permanent wave.@

For many of our children the bunny and its eggs are the most important thing about Easter.
Over the millennia, Christianity has had a gift for domesticating local traditions and festivals, bringing them on board and making them our own.
The name Easter comes from the Anglo Saxon spring festival in honor of the goddess Eostre.
Her symbol was the rabbit and the giving of eggs were signs of new life bursting forth as winter withdrew.
These associations only make sense in the northern hemisphere, but we can see why the early Christians could be so adaptable and enculturated with this local festival.

In both hemispheres Christians today celebrate Jesus being raised from the dead.
In the New Testament there are two traditions about how the disciples come to know about Jesus= resurrection:
the empty tomb and the apparitions of Christ.

Today=s Gospel belongs to the empty tomb tradition.
On Magdalene=s urging, Peter and John run to the tomb, find it empty and come to at least an initial belief about the resurrection of Jesus.



We do not believe that God simply revived Jesus= corpse in the tomb, as our driver resuscitated the bunny in today=s story.
Easter Sunday does not celebrate the resuscitation of Jesus, but his Resurrection.

 We know his Aglorified body@ was not the same as his human body because Jesus= presence could be encountered in several places simultaneously and he is reported to walk through walls and to vanish.
The link between both resurrection traditions is the importance of Jesus= death.
In the empty tomb accounts, as in today=s gospel, the writers give us extraordinary details about the grave clothes.
In the apparition narratives there are usually references to Jesus= wounds.

Whatever way they came to experience the Resurrection of Christ, the disciples knew that this was Jesus who actually died and was buried and that their personal encounter was with the one who was crucified.
What God did through the death and resurrection of Jesus is what Christians have done with local customs and festivals ever since:
he entered into it, understood it, took it on board, domesticated it and vanquished its power.
As a result we believe that God empathizes with the full limitations of our human mortality and promises to remain faithful to us in death as he remained utterly faithful to Jesus.

That is why on this day 1,600 years ago, St. John Chrysostom could say on behalf of us all:

AHell took a body, and discovered God.
It took earth, and encountered Heaven.
It took what it saw, and was overcome by what it could not see.
O death, where is your sting?
O Hell, where is your victory?
Christ is Risen, and you, O death, are destroyed!
Christ is Risen, and evil is cast down!
Christ is Risen, and angels rejoice!
Christ is Risen, and new life is set free!
Christ is Risen, and the tomb is emptied of its dead;
for Christ having risen from the dead, becomes the first-fruit of those who have fallen asleep.

To Him be Glory and Power forever and ever. Amen!@

The Resurrection of the Lord Vigil



March 27, 2016




During Holy Week, we spend a lot of time recounting the story of Jesus, especially as it pertains to the last days of his life.
But on the night of the Easter Vigil, the story we tell stretches back to the dawn of creation and fast- forwards through to the resurrection and beyond.
I say "beyond," because it is no longer a static story of what took place in the past.
All of us stand at the entrance of the tomb this very evening, like the three women and Peter, trying to make sense of what we see.
Some of us stand here for the first time as those newly embracing the faith, peering into a surprisingly empty place and saying, "Dare I, even now, believe this news?"
Some are new only to this community of the church, and stare into the unknowable commitment they have made and wonder, "What will I find here when the morning comes?"
For most of us, who have stood here again and again over many years, the darkness of the cave may hold less terror, but no less wonder.
After all these years, the tomb is still full of unanswered questions, hair-raising doubts, and mystery.
What will we find when we come looking for Jesus this time?

Imagine what each of the characters of the gospel story found.
Mary Magdalene had known Jesus, first as the man who freed her from her demons, and later as her Lord and friend.
When she went with her friends carrying spices to the tomb at dawn, she hoped only to return a favor to one whom she loved.
But she got more than she ever bargained for.
She got an empty tomb.
She got angels in dazzling robes.
She got a gospel of resurrection and a commission to proclaim it!

Joanna had made an investment in the ministry of Jesus.
Literally an investment:
she was one of the women whose resources funded the out-of-pocket expenses of Jesus and his mission ( see Luke 8: 1-3)
She was the wife of King Herod's steward, and as such an unlikely candidate for discipleship.
One must wonder what it did for her marriage to be a known supporter of a rival king.
Joanna made her choices, and they brought her all the way to the empty tomb.
Her husband may have banked his future on Herod's court, but she was speculating in another kind of kingdom, and her stock was about to go sky high.

Mary, the mother of James, is not to be confused with Mrs. Zebedee, the mother of two disciples, James and John.
More likely she is the mother of James, son of Alphaeus ( see Luke 6: 12-16) , who is later known by the rather humble name James the Lesser.
Though her son will one day be the leader of the Jerusalem community, at the moment he is cowering in an upper room in town with the rest of the Twelve.
No matter.
She has made the choice to take the risk and be here, where the action is, where unsuspecting new life has just emerged from death.
As a mother, she understands that no life is delivered without pain and sacrifice; —but life from crucifixion?
A birth of unimaginable hope!

Peter brings up the rear, maybe no less incredulous than the others when they hear the women's testimony, but at least willing to seek verification of their story.
He's late to the party, sees no angels, hears no pronouncements.
But he sees the tomb, the stone, the cloths, and the kernel of faith is planted through his efforts.
We all come to the tomb tonight, the sinners, the investors, the life bearers, the latecomers.
Each of us arrives with a dream        

and comes away with more than our wildest hopes.

Good Friday C

Image: 
"According to the Burial Custom,"
Jan Richardson, 2012
.

March 25, 2016


Given that we have just heard the greatest story ever told, let us reflect on three great questions in John’s Passion:
                  “Who are you looking for?”
                  “What charge do you bring against this man?”
                  “Aren’t you another of that man’s disciples?”

In the Passion the answers run:
                  “Jesus of Nazareth”
                  “King of the Jews”
                  “I am not.” 

We would not be here this afternoon if our answer to the first question was not the same as the soldiers.
For vastly different reasons we also seek Jesus of Nazareth.
Rather than arrest him, however, we’re here because his love has arrested us.
 Rather than mock the Kingdom he proclaimed, we are heirs to it, servants of his reign.
Rather than condemn him to be crucified, we see in his death our path to freedom.

“Who are we looking for?” Jesus of Nazareth IS the one we seek.

The second question belongs to Pilate.
On the basis of the charge that Jesus is a rival king to Caesar, he is condemned to death.
All these years later we know Jesus still presides over a Kingdom of justice and peace.
He remains a threat to anyone in our world, anyone here today, who stands against faith, hope and love.
“What charge do you bring against this man?”
We stand accused of claiming his reign in our lives.

The third question is to Peter.
Although Peter wanted to remain faithful to Jesus, fear got the better of him. Most of us can be empathetic to his plight.
Faced with a choice between Jesus and death, how many of us would choose death?
And because actions always speak louder than words, every time we compromise the goodness of God within us
or work to undermine another person’s rights to dignity and life,
we join Peter around that fire denying that we are a disciple of Jesus.

“Aren’t you another of that man’s disciples?”
If only we were more so.
The good news today is that apprehension, accusation, and denial were not the last words in Jesus’ life.
And because of Him they’re not the last words in our lives either.

No matter what we’ve done or what we’re doing, nothing can separate us from the love of God poured out in Jesus Christ the Lord.
No matter what particular crosses we carried with us into the Church this evening, we believe that God’s commitment to us was such that he even went to suffering and death to reveal his saving love.

If we feel apprehensive, allow Christ to arrest us with his peace.
If we stand accused of destructive behavior, allow Christ to convert our hearts and change our lives.
If we deny Christ by what we say or how we live, let’s decide today to be as faithful to him as he is to us.

I promise you that by doing this a surprising thing will happen.
Even in the midst of carrying our own particular crosses we will feel the weight lifted as the one who loves us helps shoulder our burdens as well.

It’s no wonder we call today “Good Friday.”

What greater goodness could we know than that the Cross of Jesus reveals that our God, whether named or not, is our companion at every step of life’s journey?