Stratford Caldecott's Website

HC Catholic Community, if you're looking for a serious website regarding Roman Catholic issues, please look at Stratford Caldecott's website: 


http://beauty-in-education.blogspot.com/.  


I've never had the privilege of meeting Caldecott, but we've corresponded, and I've thoroughly enjoyed his books and articles on Tolkien as well as on the liberal arts.  Frankly, it's rare to have a person of this quality in any generation.  


So, enjoy.

120! Happy Birthday, Professor Tolkien!

One of the greatest converts to Catholicism in the twentieth century, J.R.R. Tolkien, would've turned 120 today.  


May he enjoy the good company of friends, a few pints, and some excellent pipeweed today in the heavenly Bird and the Baby.


Happy Birthday, Ronald!

Mary Moorman's Conversion

Mary graduated from Hillsdale roughly a decade ago.  This is a great conversion story.  Enjoy.

http://chnetwork.org/2011/11/why-i-am-a-catholic-conversion-story-of-mary-moorman/

Catechism and Bible on Purgatory

III. THE FINAL PURIFICATION, OR PURGATORY

1030 All who die in God's grace and friendship, but still imperfectly purified, are indeed assured of their eternal salvation; but after death they undergo purification, so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven.

1031 The Church gives the name Purgatory to this final purification of the elect, which is entirely different from the punishment of the damned. The Church formulated her doctrine of faith on Purgatory especially at the Councils of Florence and Trent. The tradition of the Church, by reference to certain texts of Scripture, speaks of a cleansing fire: 

As for certain lesser faults, we must believe that, before the Final Judgment, there is a purifying fire. He who is truth says that whoever utters blasphemy against the Holy Spirit will be pardoned neither in this age nor in the age to come. From this sentence we understand that certain offenses can be forgiven in this age, but certain others in the age to come.

1032 This teaching is also based on the practice of prayer for the dead, already mentioned in Sacred Scripture: "Therefore [Judas Maccabeus] made atonement for the dead, that they might be delivered from their sin." From the beginning the Church has honored the memory of the dead and offered prayers in suffrage for them, above all the Eucharistic sacrifice, so that, thus purified, they may attain the beatific vision of God. The Church also commends almsgiving, indulgences, and works of penance undertaken on behalf of the dead:

Let us help and commemorate them. If Job's sons were purified by their father's sacrifice, why would we doubt that our offerings for the dead bring them some consolation? Let us not hesitate to help those who have died and to offer our prayers for them.

Scripturally, we have to go through "the fire" as St. Paul tells us in his first letter to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 3: 11-20, New English) says and have our works tested.  If they are like gold, we pass through unharmed.  If they are like straw, they burn and we suffer. Exact quote from the New English version: 

There can be no other foundation beyond that which is already laid; I mean Jesus Christ himself.  If anyone builds on that foundation with gold, silver, and fine stone, or with wood, hay, and straw, the work that each man does will at last be brought to light; the day of judgement will expose it.  For that day dawns in fire, and the fire will test the worth of each man’s work.  If a man’s building stands, he will be rewarded; if it burns, he will have to bear the loss; and yet he will escape with his life, as one might from a fire.  

KJV: 

For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ.  Now if any man build upon this foundation gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble;  Every man's work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man's work of what sort it is.  If any man's work abide which he hath built thereupon, he shall receive a reward.  If any man's work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire.

Catholicism and Salvation

That they who sin had been cut off from God, may be disposed through His quickening and helping grace to convert themselves to their own justification by freely assenting to and cooperating with that grace, so that, while God touches the heart of man through the illumination of the Holy Ghost, man himself neither does absolutely nothing while receiving that inspiration, since he can also reject it, nor yet is he able by his own free will and without the face of God to move himself to justice in his sight.

--Council of Trent, “Decree Concerning Justice,” Sixth Session, 13 January 1547.

Pope Benedict on Communio

In other words, common human nature creates the very possibility that we can communicate with one another. We are not only nature but also persons, and in such a way that each person represents a unique way of being human different from everyone else. Therefore, nature alone is not sufficient to communicate the inner sensibility of persons. If we want to draw another distinction between individuality and personality, then we could say that individuality divides and being a person opens. Being a person is by nature being related. But why does it open? Because both in its very depths and in its highest aspirations being a person goes beyond its own boundaries towards a greater, universal “something” and even toward a greater, universal “someone.” The all-embracing third, to which we return so often can only bind when it is greater and higher than individuals. On the other hand, the third it itself within each individual because it touches each one from within. Augustine once described this as “higher than my heights, more interior than I am to myself.” This third, which in truth is the first, we call God. We touch ourselves in him. Through him and only through him, a communio which grasps our own depths comes into being. 

[Ratzinger, Joseph Cardinal. "Communio-a Program." Communio 19 (1992): 436-449.]

Tolkien's Profound Love of the Eucharist

When the potential producer of a movie version of The Lord of the Rings showed Tolkien the script, Tolkien was aghast. In addition to too many oversimplifications and wrong-headed ideas, which ran contrary to the spirit of the tale, Tolkien discovered that the script writer had changed the “Lembas,” the food given by Galadriel to the Fellowship to sustain themselves for their journey, to a “food concentrate.” No chemical analysis, Tolkien wrote back, could uncover its properties. Instead, it “has a much larger significance, of what one might hesitatingly call a ‘religious’ kind.”[1] Properly translated, lembas means “way-bread” or “life-bread.”[2] In his “On Fairy Stories,” Tolkien notes that fairy allows us to see everyday things as something more than everyday things. One of his examples is of “wine and bread.”[3] As Frodo struggles up Mount Doom to destroy the Ring, the lembas sustains him.

The lembas has a virtue without which they would long ago have lain down to die. It did not satisfy desire, and at times Sam’s mind was filled with the memories of food, and the longing for simple bread and meats. And yet this way bread of the Elves had a potency that increased as travellers relied on it alone and did not mingle it with other foods. It fed the will, and it gave strength to endure, and to master sinew and limb beyond the measure of mortal kind.[4]

The lembas plays a vital role throughout the entirety of The Lord of the Rings. Not only does it sustain Frodo and Sam as they complete their mission, but it also protects and feeds the wills of Merry and Pippen as captives of the orcs, and Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli as they search for the demonic enemies who have captured the two Hobbits.[5] Conversely, evil refuses to partake of it, and when some orcs find the lembas on Frodo’s person, they attempt to destroy it.[6]


Lembas also appears several times in The Silmarillion and the History of Middle-earth. The first man to receive it, Turin Turambar, received it from a Maia, Melian, mother of Lúthien. In no way, Tolkien wrote, could Melian have paid Turin a greater honor. It served Turin and his company well, as it quickly healed all wounds and illnesses during their mission. Rarely, though, did the Elves share it with men.[7] The men of Númenor also made a form of lembas, but it never equaled the quality or enchantment of the Elven lembas. Tellingly, Isildur carried the man-made substitute en route to his death on the Gladden Fields.[8]


As Charles Columbe has written, such stories regarding a supernatural substance enhancing and embracing the good and Godly reflect numerous medieval legends surrounding the Blessed Sacrament.[9] Indeed, the Elven lembas arguably serves as Tolkien’s most blatant symbol of Christianity in The Lord of the Rings; it is a representation, though pre-Christian, of the Eucharist. For Tolkien, nothing represented a greater gift from God than the actual Body and Blood of Christ. “I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament,” Tolkien wrote to his son Michael. “There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves upon earth.”[10] Like all devout pre-Vatican II Catholics, Tolkien always attended confession before receiving the Sacrament.[11] Indeed, the sacraments for Tolkien served as the best and, perhaps, only effective means of preventing Satan from taking over the world. Tolkien encouraged his children to receive it daily, as it “must be continuous and grow by exercise.”[12] Even the screaming children of others failed to distract or taint Tolkien’s reception of the Blessed Sacrament.[13] The Sacrament wielded so much power, that only the most corrupt soul would lose faith after taking it, he believed. To deny it, was to “call Our Lord a fraud to His face.”[14]


Even more powerfully to a devout Catholic, Tolkien once experienced a holy vision while praying before the Blessed Sacrament. “I perceived or thought of the Light of God and in it suspended one small mote (or millions of motes to only one of which was my small mind directed), glittering white because of the individual ray from the Light which both held.” Tolkien also witnessed his guardian angel in the vision, not as a go-between but as the personalization of “God’s very attention.”[15]

Notes [all taken from J.R.R. Tolkien's Sanctifying Myth (copyright, 2003 by Brad Birzer and ISI Books):
[1]Carpenter, ed., Letters, 274-75.
[2]J.R.R. Tolkien, The Peoples of Middle-earth, ed. Christopher Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), 404.
[3]Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” 113.
[4]Tolkien, The Return of the King, 213.
[5]Tolkien, The Two Towers, 29, 31.
[6]Tolkien, The Two Towers, 92; and Tolkien, The Return of the King, 190-91.
[7]Tolkien, The Silmarillion, 202-5, 207.
[8]Tolkien, Unfinished Tales, 276.
[9]Columbe, “The Lord of the Rings–A Catholic View,” 57.
[10]Carpenter, ed., Letters, 53.
[11]Sayer, “Recollections,” 10.
[12]Carpenter, ed., Letters, 338.
[13]Carpenter, Tolkien: A Biography, 143.
[14]Carpenter, ed., Letters, 338.
[15]Carpenter, ed., Letters, 99.

B16 and Morality in a Fallen World

“Accordingly, the refusal to refer to God in the Constitution is not the expression of a tolerance that wishes to protect the non-theistic religions and the dignity of atheists and agnostics; rather, it is the expression of a consciousness that would like to see God eradicated once and for all from the public life of humanity and shut up in the subjective sphere of cultural residues from the past. In this way, relativism, which is the starting point of this whole process, becomes a dogmatism that believes itself in possession of the definitive knowledge of human reason, with the right to consider everything else merely as a stage in human history that is basically obsolete and deserves to be relativized. In reality, this means that we have need of roots if we are to survive and that we must not lose sight of God if we do not want human dignity to disappear.” (44-45)

“This means that both parties must reflect on their own selves and be ready to accept correction. Christianity must always remember that it is the religion of the Logos. Christianity is faith in the Creator Spiritus, from whom comes everything that is real. Precisely this ought to give Christianity its philosophical power today, since the problem is whether the world comes from an irrational source, so that reason would be nothing but a ‘by-product’ (perhaps even a harmful by-product) of the development of the world, or whether the world comes from reason, so that its criterion and its goal is reason. The Christian faith opts for this second thesis and has good arguments to back it up, even from a purely philosophical point of view, despite the fact that so many people today consider the first thesis the only ‘rational’ and modern view. A reason that has its origin in the irrational and is itself ultimately irrational does not offer a solution to our problems. Only that creative reason which has manifested itself as love in he crucified God can truly show us what life is.” (49)

“We need men whose intellect is enlightened by the light of God, so that their intellect can speak to the intellect of others and their hearts can open the hearts of others. It is only by means of men who have been touched by God that God can return to be with mankind.” (52)

“This is why morality, which beings with this look directed to the other, is the custodian of the truth and the dignity of man: man needs morality in order to be himself and not lose his dignity in the world of things.” (70) 

“In reality, morality is always embedded in a wider religious context in which it ‘breathes’ and finds its proper environment. Outside this environment, morality cannot breathe; it weakens and then dies.” (70)

“We too succeed in looking at others in a manner that respects their personal dignity if we experience how God looks at us in love.” (71)

“Christianity is the remembrance of the look of love that the Lord directs to man, and that look preserves the fullness of his truth and the ultimate guarantee of his dignity” (71).

“For Paul, the moral decadence of society is nothing more than the logical consequence and the faithful reflection of this radical perversion. When man prefers his own egoism, his pride, and his convenience to the demands made on him by the truth, the only possible outcome is an upside-down existence. Adoration is due to God alone, but what is adored is no longer God; images, outward appearances, and current opinion have dominion over man. This general alteration extends to every sphere of life. That which is against nature becomes the norm; the man who lives against he truth also lives against nature. His creativity is no longer at the service of the good: he devotes his genius to ever more refined forms of evil. The bonds between man and woman, and between parents and children, are dissolved, so that the very sources from which life springs are blocked up. It is no longer life that reigns, but death. A civilization of death is formed (Rom 1:21-32). The description of decadence that Paul sketches here astonishes us modern readers by its contemporary relevance.” (95)

“The knowledge of God has always existed. And everywhere in the history of religions, in various forms, we encounter the significant conflict between the knowledge of the one God and the attraction of other powers that are considered more dangerous or nearer at hand and, therefore, more important for man than the God who is distant mysterious. All of history bears the traces of this strange dilemma between the non-violent, tranquil demands made by the truth, on the one hand, and the pressure brought to make profits and the need to have a good relationship with the powers that determine daily life by their interventions, on the other hand. Again and again, we see the victory of profit over truth, although the signs of the truth and of its own power never disappear completely. Indeed, they continue to live, often in surprising forms, in the very heart of a jungle full of poisonous plants.” (98)

The above from: Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Christianity and the Crisis of Culture (San Francisco, California: Ignatius Press, 2005).

This Sunday, CSL Lewis, Father Jeff Wielding Battle Axe

Dear Students and members of the HC community, 


This is just a reminder that we will resume our discussion on the meaning of Catholic theology this Sunday, September 18, in the parish hall, from 1-2:30. I have a study guide entitled "By Grace Alone" that I will post later today or early tomorrow.


I thought it would also be good to post a few quotes from C.S. Lewis's Cambridge Inaugural Address, 1954.  I've read this address many times over the last two decades, and it never fails to open an older and lost world for me.  


Before posting, those quotes, however, please let me remind you that Father Jeff will be wielding traditional Norwegian ethnic attire and demonstrate the use of a battle axe AFTER the Catholic Inquiry class this coming Sunday.  


Father Jeff is concerned that we might have to do this in the back parking lot, as the eating area might have too low of a ceiling.  He also needs to look up the regulations on weapons in a rectory and church.


Watch this space for further details.  


Well, about the first two things.  I actually don't know if Father Jeff owns a battle axe.  But, wouldn't he look great with one?  So cool.


Yours, Brad

*******

Lewis, C.S. "De Descriptione Temporum." In Selected Literary Essays, ed. Walter Hooper, 1-14. Cambridge, ENG: Cambridge University Press, 1969.

"Of course the un-christening of Europe in (4) our time is not quite complete; neither was her christening in the Dark Ages.  But roughly speaking we may say that whereas all history was for our ancestors divided into two periods, the pre-Christian and the Christian, and two only, for us it falls into three-the pre-Christian, the Christian, and what may reasonably be called the post-Christian." (5)

"Christians and Pagans had much more in common with each other than either has with a post-Christian.  The gap between those who worship different gods is not so wide as that between those who worship and those who do not." (5)

"It is by these steps that I have come to regard as the greatest of all divisions in the history of the West that which divides the present from, say, the age of Jane Austen and Scott.  The dating of such things must of course be rather hazy and indefinite.  No one could point to a year or a decade in which the change indisputably began, and it has probably not yet reached its peak.  But somewhere between us and the Waverly Novels, somewhere between us and Persuasion, the chasm runs." (7)

"If I wished to satirise the present political order I should borrow for it the name which Punch invented during the first German War: Govertisement.  This is a portmanteau word and means 'government by advertisement.'" (8)

"It is hard to have patience with those Jeremiahs, in Press or pulpit, who warns us that we are 'relapsing into Paganism.'  It might be rather fun if we were.  It would be pleasant to see some future Prime Minister trying to kill a large and lively milk-white bull in Westminster Hall.  But we shan't.  What lurks behind such idle prophecies, if they are anything but careless language, is the false idea that the historical process allows mere reversal; that Europe can come out of Christianity 'by the same door as in she went' and find herself back where she was.  It is not what happens.  A post-Christian man is not a Pagan; you might as well think that a married woman recovers her virginity by divorce.  The post-Christian is cut off from the Christian past and therefore doubly from the Pagan past." (10)

"Lastly,  I play my trump card.  Between Jane Austen and us, but not between her and Shakespeare, Chaucer, Alfred, Virgil, Homer, or the Pharaohs, comes the birth of the machines.  This lifts us at once into a region of change far above all that we have hitherto considered.  For this is parallel to the great changes by which we divide epochs of pre-history.  This is on a level with the change from stone to bronze, or from a pastoral to an agricultural economy.  It alters Man's place in nature." (10)

"But I submit that what has imposed this climate of opinion so firmly on the human mind is a new archetypal image.  It is the image of old machines being superseded by new and better ones.  For in the world of machines the new most often really is better and the primitive really is the clumsy.  And this image, potent in all our minds, reigns almost without rival in the minds of the uneducated.  For to them, after their marriage and the births of their children, the very milestones of life are technical advances.  From the old push-bike to the motor-bike and thence to the little car; from the gramophone to radio and from radio to television; from the range to the stove; these are the very stages of their pilgrimage." (11)

"And now for the claim: which sounds arrogant but, I hope, is not really so.  I have said that the vast change which separates you from Old Western has been gradual and is not even now complete.  Wide as the chasm is, those who are native to different sides of it can still meet; are meeting in this room." (13)

"It is my settled conviction that in order  to read Old Western literature aright you must suspend most of the responses and unlearn most of the habits you have acquired in reading modern literature.  And because this is the judgement of a native, I claim that, even defence of my conviction is weak, the fact of my conviction is a historical datum to which you should give full weight.  That way, where I fail as a critic, I may yet be useful as a specimen.  I would even dare to go further.  Speaking not only for myself but for all other Old Western men whom you may meet, I would say, use your specimens while you can.  There are not going to be many more dinosaurs." (14)

Guardini and the Christian Encounter with the Modern World

Totally technical events and unleashed forces can be mastered only by a new human attitude that is a match for them. We must put mind, spirit, and freedom to work afresh. . . .

We must take our place, each at the right point. We must not oppose what is new and try to preserve a beautiful world that is inevitably perishing. Nor should we try to build a new world of the creative imagination that will show none of the damage of what is actually evolving. Rather, we must transform what is coming to be. We can do this only if we honestly say yes to it and yet with incorruptible hearts remain aware of all that is destructive and nonhuman in it. Our age has been given to us as the soil on which to stand and the task to master. At bottom we would not wish it otherwise. Our age is our own blood, our own soil. We relate to it as ourselves. We love it and hate it at one and the same time. As we are, so we relate to it. If we are thoughtless, we relate to it thoughtlessly. If we say yes to it in the form of a decision, then it is because we have had to come to a decision vis-à-vis ourselves.

We love the tremendous power of the age and its readiness for responsibility. We love the resoluteness with which it hazards itself and pushes things to extremes. Our soul is touched by something great that might well emerge. We love it, and our soul is touched, even though we see clearly its questionability relative to the value of the past age. We must be able to see very plainly what is at issue if with fixed heart we are ready to sacrifice the inexpressible nobility of the past.

Nor is it true that what is taking place is not Christian. The minds at work in it may often be non-Christian,but the events as such are not. It is Christianity that is made possible science and technology and all that results from them. Only those who have been influenced by the immediacy of the redeemed soul to God and the dignity of the regenerate, so that they were aware of being different from the world around them, could have broken free from the tight nature in the way that this has been done in the age of technology.…

But the forces, of course, have broken free from the hands of living personalities. Or should we say that the latter could not hold them and let them go free? These forces have thus fallen victim to the demonism of number, machine, and the will for domination. . . .

The new science may be monstrous, the economic and political organization gigantic, the technology powerful when measured by the standards of living science, economy, politics, and technology, but they are only raw material. What we need is not less technology but more. Or, more accurately, we need stronger, more considered, more human technology. We need more science, but it must be more intellectual and designed; we need more economic and political energy, but it must be more mature and responsible, able to see the details in the whole contexts to which it belongs. . . .

Our age is so uncertain, skeptical, seeking, and homeless that there are not a few today, I believe, who stand directly before God. Those who stand in the world have need of this stance in themselves and in something deeper than themselves from which to come to grips with the world again. And indeed a wave is moving out from God and reaching our innermost limit beyond which is the other. It is possible that people may talk together and act and spin out their destinies without a single mention of God, and yet be full of him. In this context the question that faces us will be decided. Will we come to God from the depths of our being, lead ourselves to him, and in his freedom and power master chaos in this coming age? Will there be people who placed themselves totally at God’s disposal and alone with and before him make the true decisions?

I detect all of these forces at work. A powerful upsurging, and inner self–opening, and emergence of form on every hand.

Dear friend, what I have written this letter is weak compared to the question in the others. At bottom I do not know what else to say except that from my heart’s core I believe that God is at work. History is going forward in the depths, and we must be ready to play our part, trusting in what God is doing and in the forces that he has made to stir within us.

--Monseigneur Romano Guardini, Autumn 1925.

Pope Benedict on Liberal Education

APOSTOLIC JOURNEY OF HIS HOLINESS POPE BENEDICT XVI TO MADRID - 26th WORLD YOUTH DAY
Meeting with Young University Professors, Basilica of the Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial. Address of the Holy Father Friday, 19 August 2011

Your Eminence, My Brother Bishops, Dear Augustinian Fathers, Dear Professors,
Distinguished Authorities, Dear Friends,

I have looked forward to this meeting with you, young professors in the universities of Spain. You provide a splendid service in the spread of truth, in circumstances that are not always easy. I greet you warmly and I thank you for your kind words of welcome and for the music which has marvellously resounded in this magnificent monastery, for centuries an eloquent witness to the life of prayer and study. In this highly symbolic place, reason and faith have harmoniously blended in the austere stone to shape one of Spain’s most renowned monuments.

I also greet with particular affection those of you who took part in the recent World Congress of Catholic Universities held in Avila on the theme: “The Identity and Mission of the Catholic University”.
Being here with you, I am reminded of my own first steps as a professor at the University of Bonn. At the time, the wounds of war were still deeply felt and we had many material needs; these were compensated by our passion for an exciting activity, our interaction with colleagues of different disciplines and our desire to respond to the deepest and most basic concerns of our students. This experience of a “Universitas” of professors and students who together seek the truth in all fields of knowledge, or as Alfonso X the Wise put it, this “counsel of masters and students with the will and understanding needed to master the various disciplines” (Siete Partidas, partida II, tit. XXXI), helps us to see more clearly the importance, and even the definition, of the University.

The theme of the present World Youth Day – “Rooted and Built Up in Christ, and Firm in the Faith” (cf. Col 2:7) can also shed light on your efforts to understand more clearly your own identity and what you are called to do. As I wrote in my Message to Young People in preparation for these days, the terms “rooted, built up and firm” all point to solid foundations on which we can construct our lives (cf. No. 2).

But where will young people encounter those reference points in a society which is increasingly confused and unstable? At times one has the idea that the mission of a university professor nowadays is exclusively that of forming competent and efficient professionals capable of satisfying the demand for labor at any given time. One also hears it said that the only thing that matters at the present moment is pure technical ability. This sort of utilitarian approach to education is in fact becoming more widespread, even at the university level, promoted especially by sectors outside the University. All the same, you who, like myself, have had an experience of the University, and now are members of the teaching staff, surely are looking for something more lofty and capable of embracing the full measure of what it is to be human. We know that when mere utility and pure pragmatism become the principal criteria, much is lost and the results can be tragic: from the abuses associated with a science which acknowledges no limits beyond itself, to the political totalitarianism which easily arises when one eliminates any higher reference than the mere calculus of power. The authentic idea of the University, on the other hand, is precisely what saves us from this reductionist and curtailed vision of humanity.

In truth, the University has always been, and is always called to be, the “house” where one seeks the truth proper to the human person. Consequently it was not by accident that the Church promoted the universities, for Christian faith speaks to us of Christ as the Word through whom all things were made (cf. Jn 1:3) and of men and women as made in the image and likeness of God. The Gospel message perceives a rationality inherent in creation and considers man as a creature participating in, and capable of attaining to, an understanding of this rationality. The University thus embodies an ideal which must not be attenuated or compromised, whether by ideologies closed to reasoned dialogue or by truckling to a purely utilitarian and economic conception which would view man solely as a consumer.

Here we see the vital importance of your own mission. You yourselves have the honour and responsibility of transmitting the ideal of the University: an ideal which you have received from your predecessors, many of whom were humble followers of the Gospel and, as such, became spiritual giants. We should feel ourselves their successors, in a time quite different from their own, yet one in which the essential human questions continue to challenge and stimulate us. With them, we realize that we are a link in that chain of men and women committed to teaching the faith and making it credible to human reason. And we do this not simply by our teaching, but by the way we live our faith and embody it, just as the Word took flesh and dwelt among us. Young people need authentic teachers: persons open to the fullness of truth in the various branches of knowledge, persons who listen to and experience in own hearts that interdisciplinary dialogue; persons who, above all, are convinced of our human capacity to advance along the path of truth. Youth is a privileged time for seeking and encountering truth. As Plato said: “Seek truth while you are young, for if you do not, it will later escape your grasp” (Parmenides, 135d). This lofty aspiration is the most precious gift which you can give to your students, personally and by example. It is more important than mere technical know-how, or cold and purely functional data.

I urge you, then, never to lose that sense of enthusiasm and concern for truth. Always remember that teaching is not just about communicating content, but about forming young people. You need to understand and love them, to awaken their innate thirst for truth and their yearning for transcendence. Be for them a source of encouragement and strength.

For this to happen, we need to realize in the first place that the path to the fullness of truth calls for complete commitment: it is a path of understanding and love, of reason and faith. We cannot come to know something unless we are moved by love; or, for that matter, love something which does not strike us as reasonable. “Understanding and love are not in separate compartments: love is rich in understanding and understanding is full of love” (Caritas in Veritate, 30). If truth and goodness go together, so too do knowledge and love. This unity leads to consistency in life and thought, that ability to inspire demanded of every good educator.

In the second place, we need to recognize that truth itself will always lie beyond our grasp. We can seek it and draw near to it, but we cannot completely possess it; or put better, truth possesses us and inspires us. In intellectual and educational activity the virtue of humility is also indispensable, since it protects us from the pride which bars the way to truth. We must not draw students to ourselves, but set them on the path toward the truth which we seek together. The Lord will help you in this, for he asks you to be plain and effective like salt, or like the lamp which quietly lights the room (cf. Mt 5:13).

All these things, finally, remind us to keep our gaze fixed on Christ, whose face radiates the Truth which enlightens us. Christ is also the Way which leads to lasting fulfilment; he walks constantly at our side and sustains us with his love. Rooted in him, you will prove good guides to our young people. With this confidence I invoke upon you the protection of the Virgin Mary, Seat of Wisdom. May she help you to cooperate with her Son by living a life which is personally satisfying and which brings forth rich fruits of knowledge and faith for your students.

B16: Saved by the Crucified One

The Church as a whole and all her Pastors, like Christ, must set out to lead people out of the desert, towards the place of life, towards friendship with the Son of God, towards the One who gives us life, and life in abundance. 

The symbol of the lamb also has a deeper meaning. In the Ancient Near East, it was customary for kings to style themselves shepherds of their people. This was an image of their power, a cynical image: to them their subjects were like sheep, which the shepherd could dispose of as he wished. When the shepherd of all humanity, the living God, himself became a lamb, he stood on the side of the lambs, with those who are downtrodden and killed. 

This is how he reveals himself to be the true shepherd: “I am the Good Shepherd . . . I lay down my life for the sheep”, Jesus says of himself (Jn 10:14f). It is not power, but love that redeems us! This is God’s sign: he himself is love. How often we wish that God would make show himself stronger, that he would strike decisively, defeating evil and creating a better world. All ideologies of power justify themselves in exactly this way, they justify the destruction of whatever would stand in the way of progress and the liberation of humanity. 

We suffer on account of God’s patience. And yet, we need his patience. God, who became a lamb, tells us that the world is saved by the Crucified One, not by those who crucified him. 

The world is redeemed by the patience of God. It is destroyed by the impatience of man.”—Pope Benedict, April 25, 2005

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn and the Energy of Existence

After Father Jeff's outstanding and inspiring homily yesterday, I couldn't help but think of the words of one of the greatest men of the last century, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn.


“Dragged along the whole of the Western bourgeois-industrial and Marxist path,” Solzhenitsyn stated to a somewhat stunned Harvard audience in 1978,

A dozen maggots can’t go on and on gnawing the same apple forever; that if the earth is a finite object, then its expanses and resources are finite also, and the endless, infinite progress dinned into our heads by the dreamers of the Enlightenment cannot be accomplished on it . . . All that ‘endless progress’ turned out to be an insane, ill-considered, furious dash into a blind alley. A civilization greedy for ‘perpetual progress’ has now choked and is on its last legs.

Only by embracing a transcendent order and the true Creator, Solzhenitsyn argued, can mankind save itself from the follies and murders of the ideologues. 

In his famous 1983 Templeton address, he took his arguments against the modern world even further.

Our life consists not in the pursuit of material success but in the quest of worthy spiritual growth. Our entire earthly existence is but a transition stage in the movement toward something higher, and we must not stumble or fall, nor must be linger fruitless on one rung of the ladder . . . The laws of physics and physiology will never reveal the indisputable manner in which the Creator constantly, day in and day out, participates in the life of each of us, unfailingly granting us the energy of existence; when the assistance leaves us, we die. In the life of our entire planet, the Divine Spirit moves with no less force: this we must grasp in our dark and terrible hour.

Armor and Swords

Finally, brethren, be strengthened in the Lord, and in the might of his power.  Put you on the armour of God, that you may be able to stand against the deceits of the devil.  For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood; but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in the high places.  Therefore take unto you the armour of God, that you may be able to resist in the evil day, and to stand in all things perfect.  Stand therefore having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of justice, And your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace: in all things taking the shield of faith, wherewith you may be able to extinguish all the fiery darts of the most wicked one.  And take unto you the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit.

--Saint Paul to the Ephesians

The Virtues

First, the Christian is one who, in faith, becomes aware of the reality of the triune God.  Second: the Christian strives, in hope, for the total fulfillment of his being in eternal life.  Third: the Christian directs himself, in the divine virtue of love, to an affirmation of God and neighbor that surpasses the power of any natural love.  Fourth: the Christian is prudent; namely, he does not allow his view on reality to be controlled by the Yes or No of his will, but rather he makes this Yes or No of the will dependent upon the truth of things.  Fifth: the Christian is just; that is, he is able to live “with the other” in truth; he sees himself as a member among members of the Church, of the people, and of any community.  Sixth: the Christian is brave, that is, he is prepared to suffer injury and, if need be, death for the truth and for the realization of justice.  Seventh: the Christian is temperate; namely, he does not permit his desire to possess and his desire for pleasure to become destructive and inimical to his being. 


--Josef Pieper