So, What Exactly is Father Nick Up To?

Sometimes it can seem kind of mysterious where it is your clergy seem to be going all the time––seminarians come and go, priests move about and disappear for months at a time. Most parishioners seem to take it all in stride; but perhaps there are some of you who are curious about how these things work. This post is for you.

As for how I myself have ended up back at the seminary after being ordained a priest for two years:

My undergraduate work took place at Thomas Aquinas College in CA, where I received a heavy background in philosophy in theology. When I applied to the seminary in 2006, the Vatican had just released a new set of guidelines requiring an extra year of philosophical education, bumping the normal seminary education track from 5 years to 6. My philosophy credits from college more than satisfied the requirements and so I was allowed to modify my course of studies to start on theological work right away.

This meant that I had worked my way through the theological curriculum in about 4 years, leaving me with extra time on my hands.

Fortunately, the seminary at which I was studying had, in addition to the theological faculty, what is known as a "pontifical" faculty––which doesn't refer to a separate group of instructors, but simply that the university has an accreditation to grant not just American degrees but Roman ones as well.

The American system grants seminarians a "Master of Divinity" degree (abbreviated M.Div); the PhD equivalent in this system is a Doctor of Divinity (D.D.). The American seminary system, for obvious reasons, is largely Protestant.  The Pontifical faculty, based in the Roman university system, grants a different set of degrees: the Baccalaureate, License, or Doctor in Sacred Theology (STB, STL, and STD). After completing the requirements for my M.Div., I began chipping away at a degree in the Roman system--taking a few extra exams, writing a few extra papers, and eventually receiving my S.T.B. and completing almost all my classwork for the S.T.L.  So, I graduated and was ordained with an M.Div and an STB degree––one American and one Roman degree.

The S.T.L., or Licenciate is somewhere between a Master's degree and a PhD in the American university system.  In addition to 2 years of classwork, one must demonstrate competency in Latin and at least one modern theological language (such as German, Italian, or French), serve as a teaching assistant, write a 60-80 page thesis, and take a comprehensive exam that demonstrates familiarity with the overall history of theology in general and a few select theologians in greater depth, in the areas of the doctrine of God, Christian anthropology, theological method, and sacraments. If you're really interested in the requirements, you can read about them  here. 

I really thought I had a shot to finish my STL while still in seminary, but I was wearing myself out getting the work done, preparing for ordination, etc.  Finally, I let go of the idea not long before getting ordained. I figured if the Lord wanted me to get the degree, he'd open a door, and let it at that.

Last summer, Father Brian and I were chatting and I mentioned that I had always had an interest in study. He asked why I had never finished the STL, and I informed him that I had very little left in order to complete the degree.  He was quite surprised at this, and immediately suggested I look into a summer study program to complete it.  (I took this as a divine sign and an answer to my previous prayer for God to open a door. The thought of Father Brian suggesting I leave the parish for 6 weeks two summers in a row to read some pretentious books would have been unthinkable by any stretch of the imagination.)  He spoke with the Archbishop, I checked with the registrar in the seminary, and two weeks later I had my academic schedule.  

Of course, this was all before there was any talk of Father Brian being transferred to a new parish.  My guess is that right now he is sincerely regretting his generous suggestion, being the only priest on hand to minister to the needs of the parish while trying to pack up and move!  Let's just say his life isn't neatly packaged into rubbermaid filing boxes; from what I can tell, for the most part it's crammed in large piles into the trunk of his car.

The plan for me, then, is to finish two classes this summer, and then return next summer for a final class and thesis preparation.  Hopefully I'll get a lot of the reading done for that during the year, as well; then, of course, at some point I'll need to take my comprehensive exams, which is a one hour oral interview with three professors.  That may sound intimidating, but it's nothing compared to being cornered by a parishioner after Mass who didn't like my homily!  If I can get through that, there's nothing to worry about ....

A Difficult but Important Topic

This was published in the parish bulletin on Sunday, April 21st, 2013.

Dear Parishioners,

In the Sunday edition of the Topeka Capital-Journal, a front-page article featured a number of problematic statements about the practice of conceiving children by means of assisted reproductive technology (commonly referred to as “in-vitro fertilization”, or IVF). This controversial subject deals with the most intimate aspects of a couple’s relationship, and gives rise to strong emotions: the desire for a child, for fruitfulness, for joy in the creation of new life in cooperation with the Lord of all life. The Church looks upon these desires compassionately, both when they are fulfilled, and most especially when they are frustrated. As many as one in six couples in the U.S. struggle with the cross of infertility.

But the intense emotions that childbearing awakens means that we must be particularly careful in thinking through its moral quandaries. The article in the Capital-Journal concludes with the statement, “God wouldn’t have given people the ability to do this if he didn’t intend for us to use it.” With this bold statement, all decision-making has been reduced to the principle, “if we can do it, we should.”  IVF and its associated techniques seem to be good; yet, artificially conceiving human life strikes at the very heart of what it means to be human. Just because we can doesn’t mean we should.

 

The Church’s position on this issue (partially quoted in the article) isn’t just old-fashioned stubbornness. Angelique Ruhi-López, co-author of the Infertility Companion for Catholics, puts it this way: “If I have symptoms of infertility, the Church encourages me to get to the bottom of why this is happening, be it physiological, hormonal, or just a matter of timing... The Church gets a bad rap with regard to accepting modern medical technology, but it really surprised me that the Church was ahead of the game in terms of wanting us to avail ourselves of technology as long as it truly helps to heal us.” Many such resources exist, unacknowledged in the newspaper article and by the quick-fix mentality of the highly profitable and largely unregulated fertility industry. 

The Church celebrates medical solutions along with those who benefit from them. But without ethical guidance, such solutions can become gravely dangerous. Something more than mere “good intentions” is necessary here. Just because someone does not intend to do harm does not change the fact that real and irreversible harm can be done. To proceed with a solution, we must have an assurance that indeed no harm will be done.

What is the harm that IVF does? Well, it is important to clarify first and foremost that the children so conceived are NOT somehow “less than human” on account of the procedure by which they were conceived. The result of IVF is a new human life. That life, once it exists, is inherently good, and its dignity is in no way "tainted" by the means by which it was brought into being. 

Nonetheless, we can easily distinguish between ethical and unethical means of bringing life about. Two people that conceive a child through adultery obviously conceive by unethical means. But the child that comes into being carries with it inherent dignity; it has a right to life, and in no way is "tainted" by its origin in the eyes of God; it is a unique life, with all the possibilities of grace that any other human being has. Each child is created in God’s image and likeness. To say so is not to imply that the adultery was somehow justified on account of the new life that resulted.

A woman once related to me how Father Frank Krische responded to news of a pre-marital pregnancy. She described how she had scheduled a meeting with him to inform him that she’d gotten pregnant and was going to be an unwed mother. She was dreading his disappointment, wondering what this meant for herself, her boyfriend, and her unborn child. When she finally broke the news, he responded with a beaming expression, “Well, now—you’re going to have a baby!” She knew then and there the difference between her sin and the blessing of new life God had chosen to draw from it. So too, we should draw a clear line between the blessing of children conceived through IVF technology and the technology itself.

What, then, is the harm IVF does? In the first place, human life is treated as a commodity to be bought and sold for profit. Children are perceived not as gifts, but as property to which one has a right, and disposed of at will. Women can be exploited for the sake of financial gain through the process of harvesting eggs to be anonymously donated to infertile couples. Often, additional embryos are implanted in the uterus and aborted when they prove unsuitable. Further, as the Capital-Journal’s article mentioned, extra living embryos are frozen, reserved for future undisclosed use, or discarded at the couple’s request.

But on an even deeper level, we know that IVF disrupts God’s pattern for human procreation.  That pattern has a dual purpose: the unity of the spouses and the procreation of children. As the opening chapter of Genesis proclaims, God both invites Adam and Eve to “be fruitful and multiply,” even as they cleave to one another and “become one flesh.” If we try to isolate either one of these from the other, we begin to tear apart the very fabric of life, love, and sex. So, for instance, contraceptives are objectionable because they isolate unity of the spouses from its life-giving potential. The use of IVF does just the opposite by isolating procreation from the loving embrace of spouses. 

Thus, the Church’s teaching on contraception and IVF present two sides of the same coin: God wishes that human life be passed on through the mutual self-gift of spouses. This gift of self can only take place in a personal, bodily encounter, not through the use of catheters and petri dishes, handled by laboratory technicians. In the end, IVF contributes to a culture in which love, sex, and new life simply have nothing to do with each other—despite the best of intentions.  With the support of family, friends, the Church, and heartfelt prayers, infertility can become a fruitful cross, whether it is carried temporarily or permanently. In cases when couples choose to adopt, families are transformed into beautiful portrayals of the gracious gift of our own salvation.

Father Nick Blaha

Additional resources:

www.ruhealthyruhappymd.com

www.catholicinfertilityjourney.com

www.naprotechnology.com

 

One Down, Countless More to Go

Today is the one year anniversary of my priestly ordination, so blessings on my classmates and fellow priests celebrating this day! A Mass has been offered for you all. What a gift to have so many memories of God's blessing on me and the people of Holy Mother Church.

At a recent ordination, a newly ordained priest asked for advice for the first year. All I could come up with was:

• Buy some good insoles for your shoes. You're going to be standing up and talking with people. A lot.
• Get an iPod or smartphone that will play podcasts in the car. The countless hours spent shuttling around will become fruitful opportunities for education, enrichment, and prayer.
• Don't make any plans, and get used to improvising on the spot. There's very little you can do to anticipate anything that will be expected of you. Just do it as best you can and take notes for the next time.
• As George MacDonald once put it, one of the most dangerous things for the spiritual life is handling the outside of sacred things. Boredom is inevitable. What's important is having a plan to prevent it from sucking the life out of everything!

Thanks to all who have been very supportive (and forgiving) this first year, especially the pastor of Most Pure Heart of Mary. Here's to many more.

totus  +  amdg  +  tuus

Convergence

It was gratifying to read this in John Allen's recent interview with Francis Cardinal George:

One of the things I most miss as a bishop is hearing confessions. The conversations that take place in the sacrament of reconciliation are the most important conversations on the face of the planet. There you meet a soul in the presence of God ... I would very much like to make that ministry a large part of my life. 

At the threshold of my own life of priestly ministry, I can honestly say that my early fascination with hearing confessions has not been diminished in the least: it is what I look forward to the most.  Quite encouraging to hear a 74-year old priest say the same.

The Church in Bondage to Therapy?

A recent “On the Square” web-exlusive at First Things makes for phenomenal reading.  Not too long ago, Rod Dreher pointed out the findings of the University of North Carolina’s National Study of Youth and Religion.  It summarized the general tone of American religious belief in three words: moralistic therapeutic Deism.  The article linked below takes up just what is meant by the term “therapeutic,” something I’d guessed at intuitively before, but probably couldn't have pinned down precisely.  John Buri makes it a little more specific. A sample:

Like the manager, the therapist is a specialist in mobilizing resources for effective action, only here the resources are largely internal to the individual and the measure of effectiveness is the elusive criterion of personal satisfaction. . . . Indeed, the very term therapeutic suggests a life focused on the need for a cure. But a cure of what?

The implications for ministry, preaching, liturgy (inculturation, anyone?) and evangelism are tremendous and far-reaching.  I look forward to reading your comments after you read the whole thing!

Like I Never Left

After innumerable train and plane rides, walking through strange cities in the rain with luggage in tow, and meeting up with a seemingly interminable catalog of remarkable and inspiring people, I am back.  It's hardly believable that this trip of a lifetime, which has been a part of my imagination and hopes for years, has finally ended.  Laying awake at 3:30 a.m. this morning, jetlagged and racing through all the things that need to be done to re-settle myself here at the seminary, an intense feeling of gratitude washed over me--with the sort of intensity that only comes when you're alone with your thoughts in the dark.  Some days it's the sense that I need to engage in spiritual warfare and pray the Exorcism prayer of St. Leo; others, I'm just happy.  Go figure.

Laying there on my back, suddenly acutely aware of how awash with blessing and grace I've been these last weeks and months, it was hard not to believe that I'm in exactly the right place with exactly what I need to live God's will.  Part of that is probably the endorphin-like high I get when my sleep cycles are messed up, but another part is pretty sure that this little intuition is spot on.  I'm thirty years old, and set to embark on the great adventure of my vocation, and such confirmations are incredible treasures.  And it's not simply a pleasure at having seen wonderful things and been to wonderful places.  Pilgrimage was difficult, though not on the day-to-day basis; our guides and faculty took care of most everything we needed (doing laundry was the only real problem we had to deal with ourselves).  The real difficulty lay in the confrontation of realities of which I was aware but had never presented themselves as forcefully as they arise in that holy city.

Perhaps the greater challenge was, in a sense, taking a "break" from the identity of a seminarian.  It was never intentional, but it required an interior effort to continue seeing myself--ourselves--as men in preparation for priesthood.  All supports of this identity, both interior and exterior, were pulled away, and the edifice was left to stand on its own foundation.  And I don't just mean things like wearing the Roman collar or being known by others as "a seminarian"—it was more that were were not able to exercise that identity in the normal ways, through outreach and apostolates which are such an integral part of our formation at Mundelein.  As a result, questions about identity and motivation began to float to the surface.  Why am I doing this?  Am I freely choosing it or just going with the flow?  What am I giving up?  What am I gaining?  Is this really what I want?  Is it really what God wants?

There were definitely some days where I didn't know how to answer those questions.  Toss in the fact that the Holy Land isn't exactly Catholic Disneyland, and you have a recipe for frustration and confusion of all sorts.  The Church suffers from a chronic lack of growth due to the cultural and legal constraints placed on it, and the attrition that inevitably follows keeps the population at around 1.2% of the general census. Over the last fifty years, this percentage fell from 10% of the general population—meaning a net loss of over two hundred thousand. Stir in virulent and long-standing divisions within the Christian community—many of which are far beyond the lived experience of the typical Protestant-Catholic divide here in the U.S.—and what many visitors experience is not quite the overwhelming spiritual refreshment you’d expect. It feels more like a stab in the heart.

There's nothing like a trip to Rome to cure what ails you.

I was certainly encouraged and inspired by the beauty and grandeur of the churches we visited, and the relics of so many outstanding saints (we prayed before the relics of St. Ignatius Loyola, St. Francis Xavier, St. Philip Neri, and St. Peter himself, all in one day), some well known and revered, others of which I'd never before heard.  I was bowled over by the frescoed naves bathed in light, opening up to a heavenly vision of angels and clouds and exquisitely posed figures absorbed in love and desire for the things of God, for His beauty and the peace it brings.  I received sacramental absolution on the Feast of the Chair of Peter in a small wooden confessional in the transept of St. Peter's while a soaring hymn of praise swelled to fill the towering spaces that dwarfed us.  The voices seemed to twist and dart playfully about the capacious dome, sidling down the fluted pilasters that sat on pedestals with footings the size of my room at the seminary.  Each edifice was more spectacular, more opulent, more jubilant than the last.  Inspiring as it all was, it wasn't giving the answers I was looking for.

The shadow of a hint of a clue to the answer came, as it usually does, in a far less dramatic setting. 

We were invited out to dinner by a priest who happened to be studying for his doctorate in dogmatic theology at the Angelicum.  Over delicious rigatoni and gnocchi, he related to us some of his experiences as a priest here in Rome, fully immersed in study and somewhat far removed from the daily pastoral responsibilities of a diocesan priest (a nice parallel to my own sense of having been cut off from what I'd been accustomed to doing and being as a seminarian).  He spoke to us of a series of short conversations he'd had with a young man employed in construction there at the American priests' residence in Rome, and of the reflection over his responsibilities as a priest in those conversations. 

Now, there was nothing deliberate about these encounters; he was a busy priest trying to finish his doctorate before departing the country and the Romanian fellow needed to work hard to keep his job, so there were no long soul-searching discourses being carried out.  But the attention and effort this priest was putting into these brief conversations demonstrated a deep care for the good of this young man.  It would've been easy for him to justify passing over the openings for a deeper exchange--the admissions that he'd been living with his girlfriend, for instance--and just telling himself that this wasn't the reason he'd been sent at great expense to Rome, or that it would be better to just build a relationship with the guy without launching into moralistic diatribes, or any number of perfectly reasonable trains of thought. 

But he would ask himself, what if this is the only spiritual connection this young man will ever have?  What if he's surrounded with people who will never speak to him of the grace offered to him in Christ? What if his only chance for a real encounter with Christ was to be on a scaffolding outside my window, and I missed it, or talked myself out of it, or just tried to ignore it?  If not me, a Catholic priest, then who?

This priest carried something with him that didn't disappear when he was engaged in mundane tasks or urgent matters of importance—an awareness that each and every person that came into contact with him was, in some sense, his responsibility, and that responsibility trumped everything else that he was accountable for.  In the midst of crafting a dissertation of some size, and all the deadlines and pressure that accompany this enterprise (not to mention offering hospitality to the droves of pilgrims passing through Rome and eager for a local connection), this priest was recollected enough to be attentive to the movements of grace that were eager to flow through us all, but find a conduit far too infrequently. 

And there it was—the shadow of a hint of a clue to my answer.  In my loss of identity, I'd turned inward, and there wasn't much there to sustain me, or even interest me, and that was scary.  It catalyzed some unhealthy navel-gazing when the antidote was to be found in an attentive turn outward, to the other.  It was then that I realized that on this pilgrimage, and by extension, during my time in seminary, I'd managed to lose sight of the mission.  

Those years of missionary work with FOCUS all came back to me—the months of preparation, the fundraising, the Bible studies, the awkwardness and the discomfort with my situation, the fraternity, the breakthroughs, the disappointments were all sought or endured on account of the mission, the hope against hope that the casual encounter we all usually miss would be caught, and something good, something divine, would enter into the world.  For all the struggle of those years, I realized that I missed it, because it had given form and purpose to my commitments.  It was the principle and purpose of everything we were doing.  It was the reason I wanted (and still want) to be a priest.  For whatever reason, I'd lost touch with it.  The consequences, while not drastic, certainly were real. 

I'm glad we've got priests around like the one I caught up with that night.  Oremus pro invicem.

Letter to the Students

This is the letter I sent to the sixteen high school students that spent their spring break serving the people struck by the Greensburg Tornado last year.

__________________

Well, it’s Sunday afternoon and I saw a few of you at Mass this morning, and so I’ve decided to sit down and write you all a little something. My hope is to give it to each of you Monday afternoon, but perhaps some of you won’t be there, so this might have found its way into your hands some other way.

What an emptiness I have felt since coming back from our trip! There is no way we could have sustained the pace of what we were doing for much longer, but isn’t it strange how I wish it hadn’t ended? Our bodies are too weak and fragile to do what we want them to, but still the desire for more is always there. Knowing what a difficult day Saturday would have been, I think I might have worked until I fell down in my tracks to hold off that day as long as I could.

Perhaps you have experienced the polite smiles and nods of those who couldn’t possibly understand the beauty of that week, no matter how many stories you tell or how enthusiastically you tell them. No doubt you’ve already asked yourself if it’s worth it to even try …. and it is, even if what we say cannot communicate the fullness and the breadth of that experience. As we struggle and fail to articulate our thoughts and feelings, however, we may come across someone else who has done what we thought impossible. This is the great pleasure of literature, and since our return, I’ve come back again and again to a book I read my first year in seminary entitled The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It is one of the classics of literature and I hope that you will all get the chance to read it one day—slowly, for pleasure and edification, rather than racing through it for some lit class that you need to graduate. Dostoyevsky put into words what I could not, and I wanted to pass along the words that captured so well for me the spirit of our time together.

The story ends with the death of a young boy named Ilyusha who was once the outcast of his group of friends on account of his poor, weak, foolish father. Through the slow process of dying, the other boys (probably right around Noah and Naomi’s age) begin to recognize what a noble and generous soul their schoolmate was, who felt his father’s humiliation keenly and responded with fury to the taunts the boys of the town would make at his father. Their grief over the loss of their friend was intensified by his passing so soon after they came to love him. After his death, one of the Karamazov brothers, by the name of Alyosha, a young man preparing to leave and enter the monastery, speaks to them near a stone outside their village (and so this speech has been named “the speech at the stone”). It is addressed to the young boys who befriended Ilyusha, but it could just as well be addressed to each of you, young women and men alike, who spent their break in service to a pair of Ilyushas and their parents:

Gentlemen, we shall be parting soon … I shall leave this town, perhaps for a very long time. And so we shall part, gentlemen. Let us agree here, by Ilyusha’s stone, that we will never forget—first, Ilyusha, and second, one another. And whatever may happen to us later in life, even if we do not meet for twenty years afterwards, let us always remember how we buried the poor boy, whom we once threw stones at—remember, there by the little bridge?—and whom afterwards we all came to love so much. He was a nice boy, a kind and brave boy, he felt honor and his father’s bitter offense made him rise up. And so, first of all, let us remember him, gentlemen, all our lives. And even though we may be involved with the most important affairs, achieve distinction or fall into some great misfortune—all the same, let us never forget how good we once felt here, all together, united by such good and kind feelings as made us, too, for the time that we loved the poor boy, perhaps better than we actually are … My dear children, perhaps you will not understand what I am going to say to you, because I often speak very incomprehensibly, but still you will remember and some day agree with my words. You must know that there is nothing higher, or stronger, or sounder, or more useful afterwards in life, than some good memory, especially a memory from childhood. You hear a lot said about your education, yet some such beautiful, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man stores up many such memories to take into life, then he is saved for his whole life. And even if only one good memory remains with us in our hearts, that alone may serve some day for our salvation. Perhaps we will even become wicked later on, will even be unable to resist a bad action, will laugh at people’s tears and at those who say, ‘I want to suffer for all people’—perhaps we will scoff wickedly at such people. And yet, no matter how wicked we may be—and God preserve us from it—as soon as we remember how we buried Ilyusha, how we loved him in his last days, and how we’ve been talking just now, so much as friends, so together, by this stone, the most cruel and jeering man among us, if we should become so, will still not dare laugh within himself at how kind and good he was at this present moment!

Again and again the word that rises up in the peaceful moments of recollection is “dignity”. This is what you all came to understand better than you ever have before—the dignity of the needy persists despite their own inability or unwillingness to act in accordance with it. It is a dignity that demands to be acknowledged. Yet there was another discovery—a dignity that you can now call your own. The great John Paul II said that we only discover ourselves in the authentic gift of ourselves. Think back on the consolations you experienced once you “pressed through” your initial frustration and disgust and got down to the dirty work of actually doing something to help. That was a taste of the joy that comes with an authentic gift of self, and that is something that we can experience each and every moment of our lives. That is Christ’s promise to us. Take him up on it.

Last April, I went to New York to visit the Pope when he came to America, and he had some stirring words for the youth. He referred to the prayer for the light to overcome the world’s darkness—a prayer that echoes the opening words of John’s Gospel, and that is prayed each Easter vigil (which is coming up for us in a few short weeks!). He asked,

What might that darkness be? What happens when people, especially the most vulnerable, encounter a clenched fist of repression or manipulation rather than a hand of hope? It pertains to the heart. Here, the dreams and longings that young people pursue can so easily be shattered or destroyed. I am thinking of those affected by drug and substance abuse, homelessness and poverty, racism, violence, and degradation—especially of girls and women. While the causes of these problems are complex, all have in common a poisoned attitude of mind which results in people being treated as mere objects—a callousness of heart takes hold which first ignores, then ridicules, the God-given dignity of every human being. Such tragedies also point to what might have been, and what could be, if other hands—your hands—reached out. I encourage you to invite others, especially the vulnerable and the innocent, to join you along the way of goodness and hope.

I think that now we all have a better idea of what it means to make that invitation.

Finally, there is no one right way to react to the sights and sounds of those two houses in Bucklin. Some process their reactions by putting them in plain view, holding nothing back; others need to retreat into the “inner chamber” and work through things in solitude in the days and weeks that follow. Sometimes we can be put off or disappointed by the sort of response we see in others to what did or did not move us individually. Let it unfold as it will, and don’t force yourself to conform to expectations. Be attentive to your own graces so that you can more readily recognize them in others.

So, let’s not forget that family, and let’s not forget one another! Thanks for the week that made me, for the time I was with you, better than I am.

In Christ our Brother,
NICK.

Multiculturalism at its Worst and Best

This past Friday, the seminary took a break from classes to explore questions of Church and culture in a seminar on the multicultural setting of ministry. Many issues were raised that are of profound importance to the Church’s self-understanding and therefore to her relationship with the cultures in which she finds herself. I raised a number of questions with the rector during a brief conversation, and he made it clear that what was presented was not being proposed as an ideal for us, but a perspective that was to be critically evaluated and reflected upon. What follows is my attempt to do both.

Our presenter raised a number of very important points, but I will confine myself to a more abstract critique of the overall flow of his perspective. This perspective can be outlined as a description of the possibilities for interaction between cultures in an age of globalization, and a claim for which of those possibilities is the best one.

First, though, we have to pin down how the word “culture” was being used in our seminar. (A grasp of this is crucial for the full weight of my critique to be felt.) As it was discussed, culture is the man-made component of the external world in which human beings live. There are four dimensions in which each culture manifests its own proper characteristics, the first being its material aspect: artifacts and architecture are prime examples of this. Certain social institutions arise from culture, including family, government, trade, and explanations of the whole (such as religion or philosophy). It also includes the symbols assembled in language, stories, rituals, or writing. Finally, culture places emphasis on certain values, spoken or unspoken, good or bad, and exerts influence on society by holding them up as worthy of imitation either in the abstract or in concrete particulars. Being of human origin, all cultures are inherently limited and therefore biased (so it is said) in their grasp of ultimate values and realities. In other words, no one culture (religious or otherwise) has a stranglehold on reality; all cultures must collectively approach one another to gain mutual insight and approach the ultimate. While the Gospel transcends any one culture, there is always a danger that one dominant culture will insert its own bias into the Gospel and thereby place itself in a position of inherent superiority over all others.

In our age, technology has made it easier for people of different cultural backgrounds to encounter one another than in any prior age. Broadly speaking, the types of encounters can be placed on a spectrum. On the one end is monocultural interaction. This is simply the presence of one culture whose members are mostly homogeneous and unaware or uninterested in the existence of other ways of being in the world. By nature, most of us are comfortable in this situation and seek to reestablish it when equilibrium is disturbed by the arrival of persons of a different culture. Next on the line is the bicultural, signifying the ability of persons to effectively live within two cultural settings without the difficulties of transition between them. Moving along further across the spectrum, the multicultural world is one in which many cultures exist side by side without any real interaction, in which each culture bumps up against the others but retains its own integrity. A cross-cultural interaction is one in which members of one culture insert themselves into another while doing no violence to it, operating within its own proper dimensions. Finally, on the other end of the spectrum is an intercultural encounter in which people of many cultures do not merely coexist but actively interact, seeking to understand one another’s cultural setting through dialogue, clarifications, common projects, and tolerance of ambiguity, pluralism, and mistakes.

So far, so good. It can be safely acknowledged that this last kind of interaction is something the Church can hold up as desirable; being the sacrament of unity between God and men, it follows that her mission requires her to set aside coercion and violence while re-establishing harmony within humanity as a sign of the ingression of the kingdom into our historical existence.

Yet there is reason for caution here. By viewing the intertultural ideal through the lens of the four cultural elements listed above, it becomes clear that this ideal is itself a sort of culture with its own artifacts, institutions, symbols, and values. In this respect, the spectrum I outlined above bends back on itself to form a circle or an ascending spiral in which intercultural symbols and values become established as the elements of an over-arching meta-culture that exerts its own influence on the colliding cultures and subcultures within it while resisting any influences that oppose.

We must recall at this point that, being products of human activity, cultures are inherently biased; this is no less true, then, of our ideal of interculturalism. To the degree that interculturalism imposes its values, symbols, and institutions on its constituent cultures and subcultures, and is not open to other perspectives, it is guilty of the same absolutism it is meant to ward off. Anyone with eyes to see is very familiar with this imperialist enforcement of cultural (and by extension, religious) relativism. The prevailing winds of our media and higher educational system reek of such dogma—the turgid and tiresome political correctness, the obligatory endowed chair of religious studies held by an agnostic, the at once prolific and banal prophets who sermonize on the glories of diversity while failing to catch through the sea of fluttering rainbow flags the ironic smiles on the faces of “fundamentalist partisans” shifting from foot to foot in the wings. It is precisely this ideology that a certain Joseph Ratzinger named the “dictatorship of relativism” in his opening homily to the conclave which elected him pope, and this dictatorship is itself an institutional artifact of the Culture of Death.

The reason why we as Christians must qualify our assent to the intercultural ideal, then, is that there a real possibility that the values, symbols, and institutions of this ideal be derived from attitudes and philosophies antithetical to the Gospel. We can see the results of a premature and naïve embrace of the ideal in those once great missionary orders that now confine themselves to teaching missiology instead.

Yet if this possibility exists, then there is also the possibility that the intercultural ideal be informed by the Gospel and hospitable to it. This possibility echoes out from among the “great multitude, which no one could count, from every nation, race, people, and tongue,” standing before the Lamb and the throne, crying out in a loud voice, “salvation comes from our God, who is seated on the throne, and from the Lamb” (Rev 7:9-10). The “stepping-out-of-oneself” which is so necessary for true intercultural harmony is a discipline integral to the giving of oneself that is humanity’s highest calling. Indeed, it is “law of the gift” that John Paul the Great so tirelessly preached, inspiring in the flock the paramount desire for the civilization of love that called upon each person—no matter how great or small in the estimation of the world—to discover herself through a sincere gift of herself (Letter to Families, 14). Yet this is not to be achieved through the de-mythologization of religion and the bracketing of our own very concrete origins in the person of Jesus, but through standing firmly upon those origins as upon rock. For the one who sees him “sees the Father” (Jn 14:9), and in him “the whole fullness of divinity dwells in bodily form” (Col 2:9). We ought not kid ourselves about the possibility of achieving for ourselves what is first and foremost the work of the Holy Spirit.

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Recommended reading and works referenced in this essay:

Cardinal Ratzinger’s homily to the conclave
“Relativism: The Central Problem for Faith Today” (PDF), an address given by Cardinal Ratzinger during the meeting of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith with the presidents of the Doctrinal Commissions of the Bishops' Conferences of Latin America, held in Guadalajara, Mexico, in May 1996. A very perceptive diagnosis of the conflict as it now stands, though light on solutions (as indicated by the title). You may disagree with Benedict but there’s few who can cast the conflict in such an illuminating posture. I would suggest this specifically to those who attended our seminar this past week.
John Paul II’s Letter to Families

An Elementary Mistake

It is bewildering to me the faith that people have in political solutions to moral problems. A wise gal told me recently that as she's grown older, she's come to regard the political process as more of a thermometer than a thermostat. That is, the outcomes of elections have more to do with where people stand than where this country is headed. Though at times this thought produces in me the desire to throw up my hands in disgust and be done with politics, there is a kernel of truth there. The real work is done in the hearts of people and not on the campaign trail or at the convention.

I wrote my bachelor's thesis on War and Peace, and some of Tolstoy's ideas about the true causes of the movement of history strike me as relevant. Tolstoy is convinced that the conventional explanations for major events (the march of Napoleon's army into Moscow, in particular) completely ignore the true causes of those events. He insists that attributing the private acts of bravery, cowardice, cruelty, and heroism of tens of thousands of men to the wishes of one person (say, Napoleon) is preposterous, and such historians merely put in the hands of one man what they refuse to put in the hands of God.

Contrasted with this is the Russian general Kutuzov, who sleeps through meetings and has little to no military strategy in mind. His finger is on the pulse of what Tolstoy refers to as the spirit of the army. The ebb and flood of his men’s spirits are what he acts upon, not the limited tactical perspectives he and his staff are capable of observing. And it is this wisdom—this experiential tasting—that gives the Russian army the power to repel the advance of the vastly more powerful French.

It is this wisdom that leads Tolstoy to conclude that historical events are manifestations of the will and character of individuals and nothing else. He declares,

The battle of Austerlitz was the result of all the complicated human activities of 160,000 Russians and French; all their passions, desires, remorse, humiliations, sufferings, outbursts of pride, fear, and enthusiasm.

Mutatis mutandis, would it be much of a stretch to substitute “the 2008 election” for Austerlitz? I think not. We’ve seen where the American people stand, and honestly, I’ve seen more “outbursts of pride, fear, and enthusiasm” over The One than I have seen over anybody in the public square in a long time.

The question on most people I know and love is, “What does this mean for our hard-won advances in the pro-life movement?” Conscious that what I'm about to say may sound incredibly callous and ignorant, I think very little is going to change in the grand scheme (just as very little has changed over the last 30-odd years). Whether or not Obama makes good on his promises to liberalize abortion to unheard-of levels, it will affect the numbers of abortions by only a small percentage of an annual toll in in the seven-digit range. On the other hand, this or that pundit opines about the effect Obama’s economic and welfare policies will have on the factors most influential on women getting abortions. Quite frankly, I find these ideas ludicrous. The implication that having more money in the bank or a better job or more food stamps are what determine a woman’s choice to keep or kill her baby is an insult to women. How do you put a dollar sign on that choice? How much money is at stake here, exactly? Do these pundits believe that there are women who think “if only I had $1,000 more in income per year, I would keep this child!” And if they do, perhaps they imagine we could persuade them to accept less?

Of course, precisely the same is true of the legal solution. Making a law forbidding abortions will certainly save untold lives, but there’s one catch—changing the law requires elected officials who are convicted about this cause. Elected officials are, as we know, elected by citizens, each of whom is subject to their own proper “passions, desires, remorse, humiliations, sufferings, outbursts of pride, fear, and enthusiasm.” What leads us to believe that we can ever change a law without bringing about a conversion in the hearts of the citizenry?

Hence the "highblown" rhetoric for which the pro-life movement is often criticized. Yes, yes, to simply bandy words about doesn't help people in real situations who feel as if there really is no option but to get an abortion. The fact that in our country the moral is equivalent to the legal doesn't help; see Solzhenitsyn's 1978 address to the graduating class at Harvard. But what few people are aware of is the fact that the people with the moral rhetoric are usually also the ones getting their hands dirty out on the streets in the largely volunteer-run crisis pregnancy centers. It is highly unfortunate that this effort receives less publicity than it should; these people are too busy doing real work, instead of raising money to promote widespread recognition of their good deeds.

Recently, I've been in touch with a couple of these centers in Chicago and I am simply overwhelmed with the unseen efforts of huge numbers of volunteers. One of them, The Women’s Center of Chicago, has a budget of $1.5 million per year. That amount is what they fundraise through private donations from the citizens of this local area. If I had not gotten involved directly with praying at the nearby abortion clinic and raising money for them through our firewood sales here on campus, I would never have known about the place, or the innumerable hidden sacrifices and acts of heroic generosity that occur on a daily basis.

This is what the political landscape boils down to for me: people vote their convictions, and convictions are formed not by headlines or catchy slogans but the desire for happiness and justice. To seek political solutions to moral problems—which are ultimately spiritual problems—is foolishness.

I, for my part, am ready to spend my life in the service of the God who speaks to the heart of every human being on this planet, calling each into the fullness of their humanity. I believe God speaks uniquely through the Scriptures and nourishes us in the sacraments, and that these are directed most pointedly to forming the heart and mind. I am confident that my life can be spent in no better way than to help the people I encounter to be receptive to that invitation to conversion.

And I am confident that for me, the priesthood is the way in which God has willed from all eternity for me to fulfill this mission.

Wednesday, Part Two

Here's the rest of what I've got. If you like it, you might enjoy another post about Ruth I wrote last January.
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Each Wednesday, the new seminarians take a hiatus from class and go out into the local community to get involved in some form of service; this is referred to by the formation faculty as “field education”. I’ve been assigned to a group called the Little Brothers, Friends of the Elderly, whose mission is visit isolated, homebound, or otherwise neglected elderly. Today is my first day on the assignment. After morning prayer and breakfast, I get in the car to drive down from the far northern Chicago suburbs, to the North Side, where I am to meet up with my program coordinator who will then introduce me to the first of the elders I am to visit regularly over this year.

Traffic has me in its clutches for an hour and twenty minutes. Inside my head, I rail at the drivers alone behind the wheel of each of the hundreds of cars obstructing my way, and then rail at myself for being one of them. Our lack of options does not absolve my conscience. Overhead, the sky is clear and solid. As I approach downtown, massive clouds hang low and thick over Lake Michigan, a snowbank corralled by the imposing skyline. Memories of the approach to Denver from the east drift along before me. Checking myself, the vista regains its immediacy. Say what you will about the Midwest and its paucity of grand scenery, but the vaulty sky reveals itself here in ways not glimpsed elsewhere. The crags and preposterous bluffs of the Cumulus Range are more precious for their precarity.

Stiff and cranky, I make my way into the central office of the Little Brothers, just inside the Loop. A National Geographic on the table occupies me as I wait for Seth, my program coordinator.

A perfunctory “You have a car?” jolts me from my world of burning sands and barefoot Bedouin guides.

We grab a few flowers from the cooler in the kitchen and throw them in the paper bag he’s got with him. On the way to our first visit, I learn a little about Seth in the awkwardly close quarters of the front seat of my vehicle. Having met him only moments before, we proceed to have somewhat of a disembodied conversation as I negotiate the traffic and pump the clutch. He’s a skinny guy, built pretty much like I am, and not much older. His arms swing through a long arc in time to his undulating gait. Three-day scruff grows in patches, and tones of enlightened foreign policy and human interest seep through his voice, the sort that would do well against a backdrop of ambient city noise or a hammer dulcimer on NPR.

“So, you like working with the … ah … old folks, huh?” I make a mental note to come up with better slang as I await the inevitable rejoinder: “Dude, ‘wrinkly hags’ is not the preferred nomenclature.” It doesn’t come.

He ended up with the Little Brothers after wandering a bit, getting ordained out in California from a school well known for its willingness (as he described it) to confer orders on pretty much anyone. As I stare down five years of post-graduate preparation for the priesthood, I teeter woozily at the edge of the chasm that runs roughly halfway between my passenger and me.

Seth’s not a Chicago native but has adapted well to the city life, with which I am not overly familiar. He recently moved after getting jumped by eight kids outside his apartment on his way to the corner ice cream stand one evening. He maced one.

“You maced him?”

“Yeah, I carry it all the time, now. I swear by it.”

This obviously isn’t terribly remarkable to him. I have to prompt him to get the facts that he doesn’t consider worth mentioning.

It turns out he had to use the mace another time on the ‘L’.

“A crackhead got in my face, yelling and screaming at me. I tried the apologetic back-down, telling how I didn’t know what I did to offend him, but that didn’t seem to work, so I got up and started screaming back at him.”

Chuckles.

“That didn’t work either. I sized this guy up, and he wasn’t that big, but who wants to roll around on the floor of the ‘L’ with a crackhead? So I maced him.”

More chuckles.

“Did you just leave him there?”

“Well, mace doesn’t really knock you out. I moved back in the train a couple of cars and hoped he wouldn’t come after me. A few minutes later, I saw him coming—is this Addison? Uh, take a left here—so yeah, I headed to the back of the train. I grabbed a bottle on the way. You never know. He was definitely coming after me. There’s a bottle in his hand. I had nowhere to go ‘cuz the train was moving, so we just … stand off, you could say.”

Seth hints at to some of the tactical maneuvering of two bottle-wielders in a stalemate, neither willing to risk losing his one element of defense in a bold projectile offensive. He ended up jumping through the doors of the train just as they closed, implying a studied familiarity with their timing. His adversary pounded them in frustration, screaming with sunken-eyed ferocity as the train rumbled, hotshoes arcing, from the platform.

We make our way to an apartment building run by the Chicago Housing Authority just a few blocks from the lake in one of the nicer parts of downtown. Seth is new to the job, too, and so we’ll both be meeting these folks for the first time. Ruth comes to the door with a smile on her face. That is good; you never know what’s on the other side of that door the first time you knock. The fear of a really difficult encounter subsides as we take in the décor—every horizontal surface is crowded with trinkets and fleamarket baubles. Around her neck are necklaces of every conceivable variety, obscuring the pins, buttons, and ribbons on her blouse. Her wiry hair is pinned up close to her head and twin folds of skin hang from her neck like they did on my grandma; there was a day when I would sit on her lap and play with them until she got tired of it. I never did. They were so soft and parallel. We only saw her once a year when I was young.

Ruth is sweet and chatty, so she is well into her life story by the time we have been there fifteen minutes. She doesn't offered us a seat as there is nowhere that isn't already covered with stuffed animals. She tells us of how she grew up in an orphanage, made her way to Florida working for a wealthy family as a nanny, then went west to Texas and up through Oklahoma and Fort Gibson where she met a soldier who never wanted kids but got her pregnant every time he was home on leave to visit his young wife. She couldn’t support them on the money she earned from waiting tables so she gave them up for adoption when he didn’t come back from the war, and was reunited with them both in her old age.

Later I found out that he had not died in the war, but simply left her; yet that was not how she told it, and therefore not how I remember it. I believe that it’s not how she remembers it, either.

As the years sweep by in her story, the circumference of her life gradually shrinks in on itself until it scarcely reaches beyond the walls of her little apartment, like the interplanetary wanderings of a comet that has slowed to a tight orbit around the star that would eventually swallow it up. All the kitsch is the last sentimental remnant of a more widely distributed existence; age and weakness had served to concentrate whatever freedom remained to her and bind it to her tightly, and so she had populated these few square yards with the things that could still please her.

And slowly it dawns on me, as it probably dawned on her at some point in the past, that she is preparing for herself a small army of attendants and well-wishers to see her on her way when at last the time came for her to lie on her bed, never to get up again, and let this life of hers dwindle to vanishing.

We leave her the flowers. I’d lucked out. Ruth is a peach.

The Cloud of Unfeeling

Samuel grew, and the LORD was with him,
and let none of his words fall to the ground.

1 Samuel 3:19

As I rounded the corner into her room with a red poinsettia in hand, the gold foil in which it was wrapped crinkled in my grip. Here, there was no smell to get used to. Both the nursing home and the senior housing project, my two previous visits, had rancid air that clung on me for several minutes after stepping outside into the crisp snowfall. In the hospital, nothing stayed around long enough to get rancid—a new bed, a spongebath, fresh sheets, then off to a new ward. Yet when left to themselves, the elderly do not change unless they have to. It is a survival mechanism, I think. At times I wonder if the only reason some people live so long is that dying would disrupt their routine.

For instance, I had called Larry (the one in the project) the night before to let him know I would be coming; the neutral voice of the phone lady informed me that 3-1-2-2-5-6-2-7-5-6 had been disconnected and that no further information was available. The only two possibilities quickly crystallized: a protracted stay at the VA precluded his usual timely bill payment, or the chronic pulmonary obstruction had finally asphyxiated him. Larry doesn't skip on his bills; quite the contrary. I have a hard time convincing him that I can't take any money from him when I run little errands he can't do himself. This time, I bought him a smaller poinsettia and didn’t buy him a box of chocolates like I did for the others, figuring that either way he’d be in no condition to enjoy them. The attendant at the door informed me he was still around, 313, same as usual. As I pounded on his door, hardly wanting to open my mouth for the taste of the air, there was no response, and the door was locked. I assumed I’d just missed him, until one of the neighbors stepped out and informed me he’d moved up to 413 two days earlier, and the phone company hadn’t hooked up his new line yet. (Apparently there was a third possibility.) I found him in 413 with his headphones on, leering into the TV set, and his pale eyes filled the lenses of his glasses as he tried to recognize the sound of my voice. I sat as he griped and cursed and laughed at my jibes, just like old times.

The elderly do not change unless they have to.

Ruth had sounded horrible on the phone the evening before, but she seemed happy about my promise to visit the next day so I assumed the subdued tone was because she had her teeth out. Seven hours after our conversation, a neighbor heard her shrieking for help and the paramedics brought her to the nearby hospital to recover from massive dizziness and pain from her recent falls. She had shrunken visibly since I saw her five months ago, now bent nearly double in her bed, the crown of each knob of bone whitening the skin along the horseshoe curve of her spine; speechless with pain and horrendous vertigo, unable to lift her head for more than a few moments to acknowledge that she recognized me—and in so doing she revealed through the neck of her shift bowls of skin hung around impossibly thin bones whose arrangement I did not recognize. Her chin sunk back to her breast, and she whimpered for the dizziness. As I greeted her son, who had driven many days to be with his mother during what may well be her last days, every word we exchanged in the vicinity of this contorted woman had the tone of a blasphemy.

There was not much time, as several inches of impending snow and a good portion of Chicago still lay between me and evening Mass. Ruth was insensible so we chatted for a few minutes as if she was not there, and the abyss gaped wider. This woman was in a sorrowfully shrunken world of her own, isolated from us, and we from her. I was as desperate as I was unable. When I took my leave, I put the beads that had slipped into a crease in the sheets back into her hand, and told her that he would be with her; keep fighting, it would be better soon.

As I uttered them my words rebounded back into my face as if I were speaking alone in a silent room with my nose against a plaster wall.

They dribbled off my lips and ran down my chin, splattering on the bedrail and running along the leg of the bed into a puddle on the floor, unnoticed, forgotten, dull, worthless, absurd, like the red poinsettia wrapped in gold foil that sat beside her, out of the range of her crippled vision, on the bed tray.

amdg