For example, if one were to set a Lenten goal and were not be able to make it despite intentions to the contrary, the Church is wise enough to realize that in many things, the intentions are as important, if not more important, than the actual action. And that is why I can write this exhausted post and still feel I’m keeping my Lenten promise.
Any Catholic space is a feast for the eyes. There’s so much to look at that it’s almost overwhelming: stained glass, statues, icons, frescoes, murals, carvings — a traditional (i.e., old, European) Catholic church is filled with visual stimuli.
Even the simplest wooden church is filled with details that drawn individuals to get a closer look. And entering a great cathedral like Notre Dame of Strassbourg is an overwhelming visual experience.
Yet it’s not just what individuals see now that sets apart Catholicism; there’s a history of visions throughout the Church: corporal visions, imaginative visions, intellectual visions, visions of saints, visions of demons, and probably, at least once, visions of visions. They’ve happened all over the world, and they continue occurring today, so there’s something in Catholicism that either encourages this or encourages believers by causing this. It’s either wish fulfillment or genuine experience — or a mixture of both.
Now I’m not going to suggest that this impresses me. I don’t know whether these seers actually had an experience or whether it was all suggestion and will. That’s not something I can decide. However, I find it striking how very important vision is in the Catholic faith, especially compared to other faiths. Seeing is not believing, but it helps, and Catholicism realizes that and makes use of it.
One of the reasons there are so many Protestant denominations is that they don’t recognize a common authority beyond Scripture. The problem with that is simple: whose interpretation is correct? When we look at the varied beliefs of Christians and the doctrines that are contentious (infant baptism, baptismal regeneration, the nature of justification, salvation, divorce and remarriage), it’s sometimes difficult to wonder how they can all claim to be within the same religion.
When Luther broke with the Catholic Church, he expected most believers to follow him and that would have been that. No one was supposed to break from him, and in fact, he anticipated mass conversions of Jews to his purified Christianity.
What he got instead was not a reformed church but reformed churches.
What’s more, he set a precedent: when one claims that the Bible alone is one’s authority, then one necessarily and inescapably adds one’s interpretation into the mix. Sola scriptura might more accurately be “by scripture and interpretation alone” (try as I may, I can’t figure out what that would be in Latin). Without an authority to determine which interpretation is appropriate and which is not, we’re lost. To suggest, as some do, that the Bible somehow interprets itself doesn’t solve the problem at all, for any and all reading requires interpretation. To read is to interpret, and to read one part of a text in order to interpret another part doesn’t magically lift us out of the interpretation quagmire.
The Catholic Church, though, claims to have that authority. Other groups do as well, to be sure, but not many other groups can trace their history back as far as the Church. Not many other groups can claim to have made the decisions about which books and epistles to include in the canonization process and which to exclude. Not many other groups can claim an unbroken line of successive authority back to 32 AD.
Father Robert Barron is what one might call a rising star in Catholic apologetics and philosophy. A professor of Systematic Theology at The University of St. Mary of the Lake in Mundelein, Illinois, Barron runs the Word On Fire website, which includes an enormous number of resources. What’s striking about Barron is how he manages to balance theology, philosophy, literature, and culture in each and every lecture, sermon, or talk he gives. He is one of those rare intellectuals who doesn’t sound like an intellectual.
Here’s a prime example: his discussion of “All Along the Watchtower.”
He also discusses everything from The Matrix to Christopher Hitchens — in a word, everything.
Kotlet schabowy z ziemniakami. She loves the pork — though we sell it to her as chicken — but she has to give the potatoes a bit of thought.
Still, she’s a Polish girl, through and through. Her favorite meal, the thing she would eat daily, the dish that gets her squealing with delight when she learns it’s on the day’s dinner menu: barszcz.
My first, indirect exposure to Catholicism was in a friend’s living room in Knoxville, Tennessee sometime in the early 1990s. Several of us were staying over with this friends family, and as we sat talking that evening, she put on Enigma’s debut album, MCMXC a.D. It was the first time I’d really heard plainsong, though it was layered under so much sampling and shallow lyrics that I really didn’t know the power of what I was hearing. But I was curious: I wanted to hear pure chant, without all the drum machines and pan flute melodies.
It seemed such a simple idea: a single melody, often limited to a handful of individual tones, sung by dozens of voices. No harmonies; no differentiation whatsoever. Polyphonic choral music– the famous SATB — seemed overly complicated in comparison.
The Girl likes to refer to herself as an artist. Just a few days ago, she was proclaiming that she’s an artist but that it’s a secret.
This morning, as I was planning some lessons, she came into the study from downstairs, picture in hand.
“Here Tata. I’m an artist.”
I glanced at the picture, saying the obligatory, “I know honey,” then stopped what I was doing to take a closer look.
“Did you help her with this?” I called out to K downstairs.
“No,” came the reply.
“Not even a little bit?”
I think I can be forgiven my initial skepticism.
The church I grew up in was founded in 1934. My best friend growing up attended a church that was twenty years older. My next door neighbor attended a church with a denomination that was founded in 1609. A good friend from high school traces her denomination’s roots to 1521. Yet the Catholic Church, by its reckoning, is older than all of these combined and doubled.
Of course many Protestants — particularly many here in the south — hold that Catholicism was a perversion of the original church, and thus the founding of the Church cannot be traced by to the first century. Yet even if we take the official start of the Catholic Church as late as 313, with Constantine’s Edict of Milan, it still has 1,200+ years’ experience over the first major Protestant division. (I’m leaving aside the Great Schism of 1054, which led to the division of the Orthodox and Catholic Churches. By and large, though, the theologies of the Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church have a great deal in common.)
That’s a lot of time for doctrinal evolution.
What’s most amazing is that during that time, the core Catholic theology has never come into question. The papacy might have descended into immoral chaos, the bureaucracy of the church might have condoned, encouraged, and even committed awful acts, and corruption might have been rampant, but the doctrines remained steady. What we find in the early Church Fathers is eerily similar to the theology we see in the Catholic Church — a fact that has led to several notable Protestant-to-Catholic conversions during the last few decades.
What does it take for an institution to last so many centuries?
“Catholic” means “universal,” and that is an apt description.
Fr. Dwight Longenecker, a local priest with a reputation that extends well beyond the region, explains it better than I could:
We had confirmation at Our Lady of the Rosary parish on Tuesday. What I love about the Catholic Church is her universality. In the congregation were Vietnamese, Palestinians, Nigerians, Poles, Philippinos, Mexicans, El Salvadoreans, French, German and more…why there were even a few converts there too.
We were all united in one church, one faith, one baptism. The bishop was there and our priesthood was united with his and with the gift of Our Lord to the Apostles.
In addition to the ethnic mix there was the socio-economic mix–executives from Michelin and BMW mixing with Mexican immigrants and everyone in between. (Source)
Another measure of the universality of the faith is the number of languages used to celebrate Mass at a given church. The church we attend has Mass in English, Spanish, and, once a month, Polish. Other, larger cities certainly have even more variety.
Poland produces a revolution every five hundred years, and it’s always the same revolution: a man comes along and challenges the way we all look at the universe, challenges us to stop thinking we’re the center of the universe and that all things circle around us.
Copernicus was the first to suggest that the Earth was not the center of the universe. He dethroned the heady notion that literally everything revolved around us, and modern science has pushed us to the point of virtual cosmic insignificance.
Karol Wojtyla, with his famous words, “Do not be afraid,” challenged us to stop thinking of ourselves as the center of our own worlds. Love is the greatest of all these, said Saint Paul, and John Paul, in his insistence on the universal recognition of human dignity and freedom, showed how to put that into practice.
“Nie lekajcie sie!”
Don’t be afraid.
Fear not.
How can we not fear? Look at the world, and the injustice that hounds it, and it seems the only thing we can do is be afraid. How can that possibly work? Perhaps when we start following John Paul’s example and love others more than ourselves, we will stop fear. After all, what is fear? It’s fear of what will happen to me. When I start loving others more, I stop thinking of my self so much, and I stop fearing.
John Paul in that sense was a Copernicus for the soul.
Excerpted from a post dated 5 April 2005.
Catholicism is centered around a sacred calendar, which means there is a notion of sacred time. Indeed, the whole reason I’m attempting to write daily about something positive in Catholicism is due to our being in the midst of Lent, one of several periods of the year that are juxtaposed to “ordinary time.” Additionally, sprinkled among the various holy and ordinary times are saints’ days and holy days, serving as temporal mile markers throughout the year.
Yet like many things in Catholicism, it’s not simply that there are periods of the year that are holy while others are ordinary. Time itself has a sacrality about it because of the historical nature of the religion. Christianity is based on events that happened in time, and Catholicism punctuates time with the offering of the various sacraments, but most especially through the daily Eucharist.
This heavy reliance on time gives a rhythm to Catholicism that is lacking in many forms of Protestantism. Because of the recurring holy times, a pattern emerges: Lent leads to Easter, with the Feast of Corpus Christi and a handful of other holy days  punctuating the long period leading to Advent and Christmas. And then the cycle repeats. The overall effect of this is not immediately obvious, but essentially Catholics are commemorating the story of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection on a yearly basis.
It’s no wonder Catholics use the various feast days as temporal references for memories. One thinks of the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet discussing Juliet’s age with Lady Capulet:
LADY CAPULET
Thou know’st my daughter’s of a pretty age.
Nurse
Faith, I can tell her age unto an hour.
LADY CAPULET
She’s not fourteen.
Nurse
I’ll lay fourteen of my teeth,–
And yet, to my teeth be it spoken, I have but four–
She is not fourteen. How long is it now
To Lammas-tide?LADY CAPULET
A fortnight and odd days.
Nurse
Even or odd, of all days in the year,
Come Lammas-eve at night shall she be fourteen.
Perhaps one reason I like this sense of temporal rhythm is that it reminds me of my youth and our church’s peculiar insistence on observing Jewish feasts. Those festivals provided a sense of continuity from year to year, something to look forward to and something to reminisce about.
I would imagine some are tiring of the Tiber: it’s turned into All Catholic All the Time around here. It’s simply too difficult for me to post doubly on a regular basis, and I want to keep this Lenten promise to myself. Only a few more weeks…
Catholicism is steadfast. There are simply some things — many things — that are non-negotiable. Whether or not I agree with all of those particular positions, I admit that I admire the Church’s willingness to take stands on issues that it knows will not easily or immediately win converts and may in fact drive some people away. It doesn’t seek popularity; it seeks truth. It is, in other words, the exact opposite of contemporary politics, where compromise is everything.
Yet the Church is not unreasonable. The Church teaches abortion to be a sin so grave as to warrant immediate and automatic excommunication. However, far from being absolutist on the issue, the Church admits several reasonable exceptions:
To actually incur the excommunication one must know that it is an excommunicable offense at the time of the abortion. Canon 1323 provides that the following do not incur a sanction, those who are not yet 16, are unaware of a law, do not advert to it or are in error about its scope, were forced or had an unforeseeable accident, acted out of grave fear, or who lacked the use of reason (except culpably, as by drunkenness). Thus a woman forced by an abusive husband to have an abortion would not incur an excommunication, for instance, whereas someone culpably under the influence of drugs or alcohol would (canon 1325). (Source)
Even the excommunication for abortion is not the final response to the act the Church so consistently teaches and campaigns against. Like all sins, it is something that can be confessed and forgiven, with absolution for the excommunication.
The pro-choice response to this would likely be, “Well, the Church shouldn’t excommunicate for abortion to begin with; it’s the woman’s body and the woman’s choice.” That strikes me as more unbending, more absolute that the Church. For pro-choice advocates, the Catholic Church’s preaching against abortion is always and forever wrong, and as such unforgivable; for the Catholic Church, the purposeful ending of a pregnancy is always and forever wrong, but it is forgivable.
The Catholic Church’s reasonableness is not limited to social issues. Its theology is circumspect as well. One of the most troubling doctrines of Christianity is the existence of hell. An extreme Protestant position always struck me as unreasonable: individuals who have not heard of Jesus and his sacrifice are unquestionably condemned to the flames, thus adding great impetus to proselytization. The Catholic position is much more nuanced: it simply states that, apart from saints, humans can’t know who will be condemned and who won’t. While not a pluralistic theology (i.e., all are saved no matter what), it is much more respectful of the simple fact that it would be God, not humanity, making such decisions. It’s a frank admission of a quirky religious agnosticism.
The Billies was an acoustic duo from the Asheville area who became infamous on my small, Presbyterian college campus for the liberalism (political and social) of their lyrics. They performed in the chapel as an opening act for David Wilcox, another acoustic artist, when I was a senior. I missed the show but heard about it the next week.
“Can you believe they sang that in the chapel?!” seemed to be the common sentiment about a song called “Bread,” a less-than-clever attempt to write a wittily profound song about the union, sexual and emotional, of two opposites: a granola man and a “mall muffin” he meets at the cinema. They end up going home together, having sex and making bread. The song uses the making of bread as a metaphorical basis for the sex that came before. One doesn’t have to think long about what those metaphors might have been.
The whole campus was shocked that they would sing it in the chapel. It wasn’t a holy place — for only God is holy — but it was where the student body gathered twice a week for devotions, Christian concerts and drams, and all sorts of religious education. “It just left a bad feeling in my soul,” one girl told me.
I was perplexed. Growing up in a church that didn’t even have its own building (we rented), the notion of sacred space was even more foreign to me than the average Protestant. “It’s just a building,” I wanted to say. After all, didn’t we attend services weekly in a union hall?
Much of Christendom would have had the same reaction as the students of my college, if not stronger. The church might not be holy, Protestants would contend, but what goes on there is worship of God, the one thing in the universe that is holy. In practical terms, then, the building is sacred in some slightly indefinable sense.
Yet for Catholics, the church is holy in a very definable, specific sense: it is the house of Jesus in the Eucharist. It’s yet another aspect of the uniqueness of Catholicism that traces directly back to the teaching of the Real Presence in the Eucharistic host. If one believes that the communion wafer becomes, on consecration, the “body blood soul and divinity” of Jesus, as the Catholic church teaches, then one is obliged to treat the building holding said host in a manner befitting its most holy inhabitant. And that’s just what Catholics do. In other words, they believe the church is sacred because they believe that God is literally, physically — not merely symbolically, metaphorically, or spiritually — in the church.
This has many practical consequences, the most immediately obvious coming at the end of Mass. In the church of my youth, after services, congregants would mingle and chat (sometimes for unbelievably long stretches) in the hall where services had just been held. I suspect it’s largely the same in most Protestant churches. First-time visitors to a Catholic church, though, notice that as soon as the Mass concludes, everyone leaves. There is almost no mingling, no socializing. Many interpret this as a lack of a sense of community in the church, but that is certainly not the reasoning behind most Catholic’s quick exit.
Yet in a traditional Catholic culture, such as Poland, it’s not just churches that represent sacred spaces. Sit on any bus going on any journey of 20 kilometers or more and you’ll notice all the head-scarfed babcias crossing themselves every time the bus passes a church, a cemetery, a small shrine, a commemorative cross, or any other space that through tradition or church teaching — direct or indirect — has come to be considered holy. For these pious women, the whole world, in a sense, is sacred.
I am aware of the tactile sensations of my body in a Catholic church in a way that I never was in any Protestant church.
Part of this goes back to my first experiences with Catholicism in Poland. Going to a Mass with someone — most often, K — I knew would be painful. It was not that I hated the liturgy or thought it a waste of time. I knew it would be physically painful: there was very, very rarely free space in any pew, so we spent the Mass standing or kneeling. On a stone floor, this was always tough on my already-injured knees and prematurely-paining back. It added an ascetic dimension to Mass.
Yet mortification of the flesh is not the only — or most common — sense that I think of Catholicism as tactile. Anointing, genuflecting, crossing oneself, baptizing, and kneeling all heighten, in one for or another, one’s awareness of the body. As a non-Catholic, I often feel the distinctness of my lack of action when the individual before me genuflects before entering the row of pews and I don’t, or when my neighbor crosses herself along with everyone else and I don’t.
I wonder if that would change were I to follow suit…
Image via Wikipedia
Walking into an ancient Catholic church can be overwhelming to the senses: the magnificence of the architecture, the completeness of the silence punctuated by echoing footsteps, the cool damp air on one’s skin. Yet for first time visitors, the most distinctive surprise is the odors of a church.
A mix of old incense, wood, dampness, stone, cleaning solutions, humanity, and a thousand other mysterious odors almost seduce me from the moment I first entered an historic Catholic church. The stone has been gathering the breath of believers for ages, and the natural dampness of the air activates these strong, earthy odors in the walls and floors. Incense, one of the most noticeable Catholic/Orthodox distinctive practices, lingers from Mass to Mass, mixing with the stones and damp to form a redolence that can only be described as the smell of tradition.
The first time I attended a church other than the one I grew up in, I was shocked at how utterly different the service was compared to what I was used to. When the pastor began, “Our scripture for today is…”, I immediately began wondering how in the world one could possibly have a sermon with one scripture. I was so accustomed to sermons that often amounted to an artillery barrage of verses that having a sermon with only one verses seemed like having a car with only one wheel.
As I visited other churches, I found that not only did every denomination have its own liturgy but also every single church within a denomination might have its own version. Going to churches in other countries, I imagined, might uncover even more differences.
Today, one can find a liturgy to fit whatever mood one might be in. Looking for something heavy on entertainment? Head to the nearest mega-church. Looking for a calm, quiet, predictable service? Look for Methodists or Presbyterians. Want a little danger in your worship? Seek out the few remaining snake-handling, strychnine-drinking Pentecostals in the hills of Appalachia.
The Catholic Mass, however, is different because it’s the same. No matter the country, no matter language, no matter the culture, the Mass is the same. Before Vatican II and the introduction of Mass in the vernacular, it would literally be the same wherever one went. And here’s the thing that really impresses me: it’s been that way for centuries. The Mass of today would be recognizable, more or less, to Thomas Aquinas as much as it would be to G. K. Chesterton. Certainly, the hymns would be different, and the use of the vernacular (as opposed to Latin) would probably seem odd, but the heart of the Mass itself would be comfortingly familiar to both men.
I realize I’m using broad strokes here: there are certainly minor cultural differences in the Mass, and the Catholic church isn’t the only church to achieve this liturgical homogeneity. But one thing is certain: it’s had this homogeneity longer than any other institution in the West, and there’s something to be said for an institution that can be that grounded in the past and the present.
“I’m an artist,” L declares as she’s drawing on the driveway. “No one knows I’m an artist at school, and I have to keep it a secret,” she continues. “If anyone finds out, they’ll tell the teacher. Then the teacher will come to me and ask if I’m an artist.” She pauses for a moment, inspecting her work, then continues the creation and the explanation.
“If they ask that, I’ll have to tell them that I am but that it was supposed to be a secret.” She looks up, holds her hands out to her sides, palms up, lowers one eyebrow, and does her best to look adult: “That’s why I have to keep it a secret.”
Even those who know nothing about Catholic theology know about Catholic cathedrals. Religions in general have a way of inspiring great architecture, for sacred objects and sacred time requires sacred space. St. Peter’s, Notre Dame, Hagia Sophia, Canterbury, Chartres, Reims, St. John the Divine, Westminster Abbey, and seemingly countless others tend to be top tourist destinations even for non-believers. Everyone wanders in, looks about, and inevitably looks up — which, at least in the case of Gothic architecture, was the whole point.
The scale is impressive enough, but for the faithful, cathedrals can be only grand, for they house the “body, blood, soul and divinity” of Jesus, according to the doctrine of the Real Presence. Whether one believes the doctrine or not is somewhat irrelevant: the designers, builders, and curators of the cathedrals did, and those attending services did and still do believe it. If one believes that Jesus is really present in the host (which is the heart of the doctrine of the Real Presence), then it’s only logical to build the best tabernacle imaginable to house said host.
This goes a long way in answering the objection a friend from the States raised as we wandered in and out of churches in Krakow just K’s and my wedding. “How does this help anyone spiritually?” he asked. The Catholic answer is, “They weren’t built primarily for man but for God.”
Whomever they were built for seems almost irrelevant when I’m standing in the middle of a soaring cathedral, wondering at the engineering required both to design and to construct such spaces.
