Catholic Sensibility

My first bridge night in about a month. I played a good bit in college, then began to play again when I lived in Iowa. It has a rep for being an old person’s game. It’s probably deserved. It also has a rep for attracting, or at least giving rise to titanic fits of temper. That’s undeserved. Bridge players are competitive like any sort of competitor. But we have a zero tolerance policy in effect. When I returned to play duplicate bridge in 1998, I found everyone’s manners were light years ahead of what they were in 1980. Not to mention better than the poker players on ESPN or my college chess club. Now if you fuss, you get penalized. And if you fuss too much, you’re out.

Bridge is a good game in that not everything is in one’s control. I don’t mean the luck of the draw, though. In your serious bridge club, the hands are “duplicated” for each set of four sitting at a table, so every pair is compared in score with all the other pairs playing the same cards. So if I make one extra trick for an extra thirty points that none of my other nine competitors did, my partner and I score eight out of eight on that hand.

The out of control part is one’s partner, of course. Partner is an unknown quantity, and when I play with a new one, it can be guesswork to assess if she or he knows what’s going on. They probably feel the same about me. Good bridge takes good communication and understanding. Plus it is a good sleuthing exercise to assess what the opponents have or don’t have.

Anyway, it’s a good game. Anita prefers me playing bridge over backgammon or poker. (You should’ve heard the scene when I came home with backgammon winnings my second–and so far last trip–to the backgammon club.) Maybe it’s those women in golden bikinis serving drinks on Bravo’s Celebrity Poker. She knows we don’t have those in bridge.

Then I get to figure out how to help our youth minister engineer the video presentation from NCYC at Mass this weekend. That’s tomorrow, of course.

Enjoy your Friday night, folks.

Another human race to the moon. NASA targets 2018 as the year. The Chinese go one better, according to this story. At least the NASA motto isn’t “Been there, done that.”

On the NASA site, check out the “interactive features,” especially the video on the proposed return to the moon.

According to Emerson, “Each is a good half, but an impossible whole.”

Emerson’s essay “The Conservative,” found here, linked by the outstanding Science Musings Blog.

“Each exposes the abuses of the other, but in a true society, in a true man, both must combine.”

CNS reported earlier this week on Latin, fading from use, even in official circles, most notably last month’s synod.

Vatican Radio, which broadcasts in more than 30 languages, including Esperanto, has no programming in Latin. But it does feature a one-man Latin campaign: U.S. Carmelite Father Reginald Foster, who has been a Latin secretary to four popes.

A conspiracy of a liberal liturgical cabal? Not according to Foster, “(Latin) hasn’t really been squelched — ‘oppressa est’ — but it’s just been neglected — ‘neglecta est,’ put off to the side.”

Like when I was in high school. I wanted to take a third year of Latin, but only one other classmate and I were interested in signing up for it. The school administration didn’t really want to have a class for just the two of us. Vince opted for Spanish. I took German.

Esperanto? Sheesh.

AA 23 begins “chapter five” of the document, a larger section dealing with “External Relationships”

Whether the lay apostolate is exercised by the faithful as individuals or as members of organizations, it should be incorporated into the apostolate of the whole Church according to a right system of relationships. Indeed, union with those whom the Holy Spirit has assigned to rule His Church (cf. Acts 20:28) is an essential element of the Christian apostolate. No less necessary is cooperation among various projects of the apostolate which must be suitably directed by the hierarchy.

On one hand, the hierarchical nature of the Church is reinforced. But also, direction from bishops and clergy must be “suitable.” All in the name of unity. Read on a bit …

Indeed, the spirit of unity should be promoted in order that fraternal charity may be resplendent in the whole apostolate of the Church, common goals may be attained, and destructive rivalries avoided. For this there is need for mutual esteem among all the forms of the apostolate in the Church and, with due respect for the particular character of each organization, proper coordination. This is most fitting since a particular activity in the Church requires harmony and apostolic cooperation on the part of both branches of the clergy, the Religious, and the laity.

The second sentence above is often a tough one. “Mutual esteem” is particularly lacking today as the Church has grown more polarized in ideology. And both bishops and laity share blame for competing tendencies in the Body. Priests have squandered some good will for significant numbers involved in financial and sex scandals. It’s sad that such scandals have probably always been going on. Most all lay people were (and a majority still are) willing to give a cleric the benefit of the doubt. In other words, a new priest or bishop coming in usually doesn’t find himself having to prove himself. But parishes and dioceses hard hit by mismanagement or scandal are much tougher crowds than they used to be.

And the much-maligned groups, CTA and VOTF: one was formed in conert with clergy and bishops, and the latter was formed only because one cardinal had bungled his ministry to a shockingly immoral degree unheard-of since the sixteenth century popes.

What do you think AA said about them?

“Deserving of special honor and commendation in the Church …”

Really. Read on.

” … are those lay people, single or married, who devote themselves with professional experience, either permanently or temporarily, to the service of associations and their activities. There is a source of great joy for the Church in the fact that there is a daily increase in the number of lay persons who offer their personal service to apostolic associations and activities, either within the limits of their own nation or in the international field or especially in Catholic mission communities and in regions where the Church has only recently been implanted.”

Especially in mission work. That’s fitting. That such apostolates have continued to grow and thrive after Vatican II is no doubt a continuing testimony to the fruitfulness of the council.

And, oh, look at this note:

“The pastors of the Church should gladly and gratefully welcome these lay persons and make sure that the demands of justice, equity, and charity relative to their status be satisfied to the fullest extent, particularly as regards proper support for them and their families. They should also take care to provide for these lay people the necessary formation, spiritual consolation, and incentive.”

I gather that a certain Vatican report might be released just before or after you read this (making my post more or less relevant, who can say?).

Part III of my humble series suggested, after a consideration of St Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians, that a good sermon must be about reconciliation, since God “has reconciled us to himself through Christ and given us the ministry of reconciliation” (2 Cor 5:18). But what is reconciliation? And, if we preach reconciliation, do we risk detracting from the importance of evangelization and the urgency of conversion? I’d like to reflect on reconciliation by looking at a recent article by the Orthodox theologian Petros Vassiliades.

Dr Vassiliades tells us that conversion must include reconciliation. While admirable in many ways, 19th and 20th century missionaries had a narrow conception of making disciples of all nations as a “holy burden” that would be their own human response to God’s command. This, then, tended to focus on the human effort to solve the ills of the world and bring individuals to Christ, and, concurrently, denigrated the “other” that would stand in the way: the “primitive,” the “unreasonable,” the “unscientific.” More recently, Dr Vassiliades says, theologians have recovered an awareness of the role of the Holy Spirit in making Christ known to us. The Holy Spirit is eschatological (Acts 2:17) and manifested in fellowship (2 Cor 13:13). This means that we must always be converted to an eschatological “coming together” of the reconciled people of God – and an openness to the “other.”

If we are to arrive at truth, we must enter into the life and work of Jesus Christ, the Messiah whose coming inaugurated the “last days” when God would “gather the dispersed of Israel” (Ps 147:2). Jesus established a new eschatological dodekaphylon (twelve tribes) of the New Israel. And St John affirmed the words of the High Priest’s prophecy that Jesus would indeed die “not only for the nation, but also to gather into one the dispersed children of God” (Jn 11:52). This theme of “gathering” a reconciled community into unity was also emphasized in the early Church – part of the Eucharistic prayer in the Didache reads: “Even as this broken bread was scattered over the hills, and was gathered together and became one, so let Thy Church be gathered together from the ends of the earth into Thy kingdom …”

We do encounter Christ’s presence through the Spirit in a special way in the Eucharist, and the importance of reconciliation as a primary element in any turning towards God can be seen in the Eucharistic life of the church. A condition for participating in the Eucharist is to be “reconciled with your brother” (Matt 5:24) and St Paul says that the Lord’s Supper cannot be completed where nobody shares and “each one goes ahead with his own supper, and one goes hungry while another gets drunk” (1 Cor 11:21). More recently (as Todd reminded us), John Paul II, in his Apostolic Letter Mane Nobiscum Domine, said that our “mutual love” and “concern for those in need” would actually be the “criterion by which the authenticity of our Eucharistic celebrations is judged.” The sacrament of baptism is also a conscious act of reconciliation. The “one baptism” corresponds to “one Lord” and “one faith” – and the “one body” whose unity we are always to strive to preserve (Eph 4:3-5).

We still await the full coming of God’s kingdom. This will be the reconciled community brought to completion. The Book of Revelation speaks of the city to come, whose lamp is the Lamb: “The nations will walk by its light, and to it the kings of the earth will bring their treasure. During the day its gates will never be shut, and there will be no night there” (Rev 21:24-5). All of this means that a good preacher cannot imagine him or herself preaching before so many isolated individuals, each separately trying to live according to church teaching. A good sermon must rather be consciously preached before a “gathered” communion that strives to become more and more reconciled in Christ through the Spirit, thus pointing to the fullness of God’s reign.For Metropolitan John of Pergamon, whose work has inspired Dr Vassiliades’, has claimed that the very essence of sin is rejection of the “other,” rooted in the rejection of the “Other” par excellence, our Creator: “Once the affirmation of the ‘self’ is realized through the rejection and not the acceptance of the Other — this is what Adam chose in his freedom to do — it is only natural and inevitable for the other to become an enemy and a threat.”

A good sermon will show how otherness can lead to communion, not rejection. The Metropolitan says that, where the Spirit blows, we experience “an event of communion which transforms everything the Spirit touches into a relational being.” And giving and listening to a sermon must be an entrance into the movement of this reconciling Spirit. This does not mean that a good sermon cannot be against anything. A good sermon can oppose sexism, racism, and threats to the poor and defenseless, but this should always be in the name of a greater reconciliation. It is a very bad sermon that draws its very strength from being against something, that strives to build unanimity on the basis of exclusion rather than forgiveness, on the projection of a God who expels rather than the God who “has reconciled us to himself through Christ and given us the ministry of reconciliation” (2 Cor 5:18). We really do need one another.

What do you think?