iacobusm Faith and Culture

More Than a Building: A Church is Much, Much More

More Than a Building:

Basilica Lewiston Maine
                    Red Mass at the Basilica of St.s Peter and Paul, Lewiston, Maine (https://www.sunjournal.com/)

  Christ is Our Model in All Things  

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God . . . And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us . . . (John 1:1,4)

 

     Any truly Christian anthropology needs to start with the Gospel of John, chapter 1.  The incorporeal Eternal Word, the second Person of the Holy Trinity, takes on human flesh and lives a material existence in the world. In a similar (albeit limited and human way) we are composed not only of flesh and blood, but also an immaterial soul that God has created to last for eternity, for an immeasurable time after our earthly bodies are gone. In this, as in other things, Christ is our model.

     One consequence of our body/soul composition is that we need tangible things to help us grasp abstract or spiritual realities.  That’s why Jesus taught with parables, and with images such as the mustard seed, or salt that has lost its savor.  For the same reason we use spoken prayers, liturgical gestures, sacred music and art, and a whole range of sacramentals.  No doubt Jesus chooses to use Sacraments as a means of bestowing Grace for this reason as well.

     Needless to say, it follows that church buildings are also an important means of communicating, in a nonverbal and non rational way, the truths of the faith.  I touched on this idea in last year’s piece, “Has Tradition become a Dirty Word?” I’m returning today to an article I published a number of years ago.  I discuss these issues in the context of a particular church, the beautiful Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul in Lewiston, Maine.

The Basilica: a Beacon on a Hill

Basilica of St.s Peter and Paul
Basilica of St.s Peter and Paul, Lewiston, Maine (ladphotography.com)

     Many a visitor to the old textile city of Lewiston, Maine, experiences surprise when, driving through a run-down neighborhood of shabby old New England triple-decker tenements, he suddenly finds an enormous and beautiful church looming over him.  This is the Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul, formally consecrated in 1938.

   Its location is not at all as incongruous as it might at first seem. It was the most natural thing in the world for the inhabitants of those cheap apartment houses to put all their extra money and effort into building the most magnificent church possible. At the time, the parishioners were mostly French Canadian immigrants who had come to Lewiston to work in the dark red-brick mills that lined the Androscoggin River.

     And yes, it was those poor laborers, not wealthy benefactors or (Heaven forbid) government grants, that built the Basilica.   “Religion is the opiate of the people” is not the least foolish of the foolish things Karl Marx said.  Opiates deaden the soul and weigh down the limbs: nobody pushes themselves to the limit to build monuments to those.  No, the Faith these humble workers brought with them from Quebec didn’t numb them into acquiescence, it gave them real assurance that they had something worth working toward: admittance to the presence of the living God.

 More Than a Building: Enormous Sacramentals 

     And so naturally it was a Church that they chose as the focus of their devotion.  Churches are much more than just buildings.  They are enormous sacramentals, consecrated objects that can help connect us to the Grace of a God who is pure Spirit. Churches are iconic representations that teach us at an unconscious level about an ordered Universe with God at the apex . . . or at least they used to be.  They are also places closely connected to some of the deepest experiences of our lives, such as baptisms, weddings and funerals.  Finally, they are places that gather communities together.  Sometimes families and communities build these connections over many generations.  That’s why the closing of a church is so much more traumatic than the closing of a movie theater, for instance, or a department store.  The local church is, for most people, their concrete connection to transcendent realities.

TLM Lewiston Basilica
                    Current Portland Bishop Robert Deeley (far right) attends a Traditional Latin Mass at the Basilica (https://latinmassme.com/)

     The Basilica of Peter and Paul, fortunately, is still going strong. It no longer draws its community, however, mostly from the immediate neighborhood.  People have come from miles away to attend Mass in the Extraordinary Form every Sunday since 2008.  That’s when then-Bishop Richard Malone designated it as one of two churches (the other being the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Portland) to host a new Latin Mass Chaplaincy.  There is also a Mass in the Ordinary Form celebrated with a reverence that draws worshipers from a wide area, and a French language Mass that is very well attended by French speakers from all over southern Maine.   Many other churches, to the great sorrow of parishioners who have been orphaned, have not been so lucky.

 The New, New Evangelization 

     It’s in that connection that this post on Fr. Z’s blog (here), about parishioners in Buffalo who have enlisted the Vatican’s help in their attempts to keep their parish open, first caught my eye.  Buffalo Bishop Richard Malone is the same man who, as Bishop of Portland, helped keep the Basilica thriving. Here, he comes off as the Bad Guy of the piece.*  As it happens, Bishop Malone also oversaw the closing of many parishes in Maine, a practice he seems to have continued in Buffalo. Unfortunately, that appears to be one of the first lessons they teach in Bishop School these days. In any case, Fr. Z’s post made me wonder.  Would it have made a difference if some of those other parishes had thought to appeal to the Pope?

     There are bigger questions, of course.  Fr. Z asks:

What sort of faith in an effort of “New Evangelization” do we evince if, while chattering about it, we are closing the churches we need to fill in the very places where the “New Evangelization” needs to be pursued?

 More Like Evangelists 

Saints Peter and Paul Basilica towers over Lewiston, ME. Franco Center (formerly St. Mary’s Church) in foreground. (photo http://www.danmarquisphotography.com/)

     That’s a good point.  Today, all those triple-deckers around the Basilica in Lewiston still overflow with people.  The difference is, they are no longer (mostly) people who actually attend the church that dominates their neighborhood. We can say the same of many churches we are decommissioning.  The populations around them are (mostly) as large as when the churches boasted full congregations every Sunday. The difference is, they aren’t making up for the shortfall with people from further afield. And, yes, bishops and their staffs around the country should certainly learn to think more like Evangelists and less like Administrators.  We lay Catholics, also, (and I include myself) need to do our part. What more we can do to invite all those people on the outside into the Church? If earlier generations with fewer resources but great faith could build the basilicas, could we not at least put enough people in the pews?

 

*A few years later, sorry to say, Bishop Malone’s tenure in Buffalo ended very badly indeed.  Happily, that’s beyond the scope of this discussion.

iacobusm Uncategorized

Practical Apologetics: The Geometry of Faith

Once upon a time I was a teacher in a (more or less) Catholic school, where I was occasionally called upon to teach an introductory theology course to the bright-eyed young men & women of the ninth grade.  Of the roughly 16 students per class there would usually be 2-3 Catholic students whose families attended Mass at least weekly, and a like number of non-Catholic Christians who were regular church goers.  The rest were raised in a secular environment, ranging from occasionally religious to explicitly atheist.  

     I soon found that most of these young people, even many of the regular church attendees, had been so indoctrinated into a materialist way of thinking by teachers, mass media, and society in general that I found it difficult to explain even basic religious ideas.  It was almost like speaking a foreign tongue.  Some of these students were fans of the then-popular “new atheists” (Dawkins, Hitchens, etc.), and most had been affected to some degree by “scientistic” thinking, that it, the idea that scientific explanations were the only serious or valid explanations. I found that I had to get them outside of these narrow ways of understanding reality before they could even begin to understand the purpose of or the need for religious faith.

      Many of my blog posts grew out of discussions with these students, including some republished here (“Has Pascal’s Wager Really Been ‘Debunked’?“, “God’s Existence Isn’t A Dark Matter“).  The post below is another of these, in which I try to get my students to look at the world from a different – ahem – angle:          

What is both seen and unseen?   


“The Catholic Church,” according to G.K. Chesterton, “is much larger on the inside than it is on the outside.”  Those of us who have been out and now are in (back in, for some of us) know how true it is.  And it stands to reason: as both a worldly and a spiritual entity, the Church cannot be contained within purely physical bounds.

“The Catholic Church is much larger on the inside than it is on the outside.” -G.K. Chesterton

  This sounds like sheer nonsense, of course, to those who are formed in a materialist worldview, because they reject a priori the existence of a non-physical reality.  It may be a decided minority who consciously embrace such a worldview, but many, many more unthinkingly see the world in the same way.  Explaining Catholicism and the Catholic Church under these circumstances (except, maybe, in the most zealously orthodox Catholic schools) sometimes feels like trying to converse with someone who speaks a completely different language.

    Instructing the unknowing, however, is one of the Spiritual Works of Mercy, so we must always search for new ways to communicate the experience of faith.  In the “Dark Matter’ post, for instance, I use the cosmological theories of “dark matter” and “dark energy”  as an analogy to answer the common idea that, because we can’t detect God directly using scientific instruments, it’s unreasonable to believe in him.  I point out that scientists believe that 95% of the matter and energy in the universe is completely undetectable, but they are convinced it is there because of its observed effects on things we can detect; likewise, we can be sure of the existence of God, even though he is beyond this world, because of his effect on things (and people) that we are able to see.

The Faith Postulate

     In a similar way, there are things we can know only by experiencing them: the love of God as we experience it in His Church is a prime example.  The outsider will often dismiss this sort of knowledge as requiring an irrational, unsupported belief, since the proof comes after our initial commitment.  We might ask such skeptics to consider geometry as an analogy.  Euclidean Geometry, for instance, starts with the parallel postulate, which requires that parallel lines never meet.  It’s not proven, you simply have to take it as a given.  Once you do, of course, you find that the entire system is consistent, which validates your starting assumptions.  More importantly, you find that when you apply it to the real world, for measuring property lines, for instance, it is absolutely reliable.  

Likewise the Catholic Faith: once you “step inside” and see the results, the most “reasonable” response is belief (this is Blaise Pascal’s proscription for those who remain unconvinced by the logic of his famous wager).  We can see it in our own lives, where despair and dysfunction give way to joy and productivity; we can see it in large and loving families of believers. We can even see it in the fact that, as measured by consistently higher birthrates, religious societies show greater confidence in the future. Faith works.

     All analogies are imperfect, of course, and a skeptic might point out that, while the Catholic Church claims to hold immutable truths, we can change the parallel postulate and still come up with other internally consistent systems of geometry, systems which may not work on a plane, but work perfectly well in other contexts.  In spherical geometry, for instance, parallel lines (which are actually lines of longitude) meet exactly twice, at the poles.  This system is much more accurate than Euclidean geometry for measuring on a globe.  Spherical geometry shows us, for example, that what looks like shortest distance from, say, Seattle to London (a straight line from west to east) on a flat map is actually much longer than a route which loops north (or appears to “loop” north) over Greenland.

The “great circle” route looks longer on a “flat” mercator projection . . .
. . . but on the gnomonic map, which measures global distances more accurately, we can see that it’s really more direct*

The Fullness of Truth

     The fact that there are different geometries, however, doesn’t weaken the analogy at all: if anything, it develops it further.  Like Euclidean geometry, which only works on a two-dimensional plane, the scientific worldview is an accurate and quite useful tool for interpreting reality . . . within a certain narrow focus.  It enables us to learn about and work with things that are physical and measurable, but it cannot tell us about things like love, justice, or any other reality that might exist outside of the purely physical realm. Just as a bathroom scale can tell us how much we weigh but can’t tell us our age, scientific knowledge cannot alone tell us anything about things outside of its set boundaries.  The Christian Revelation, on the other hand, reaches beyond the material world and gives us access to a much fuller reality, and once we accept its premises, we can see both its internal consistency and its Truth when applied to our experience.

“Archimedes Moves the World”, the title page of The Mechanic’s Magazine London, 1824

     Maybe when we look at it in this way, it can help us explain what St. Paul means when he says: “Let no one deceive himself.  If anyone among you thinks that he is wise in this age, let him become a fool that he may become wise.  For the wisdom of this world is folly with God” (1 Corinthians 3:18-19).  He is not rejecting reason, but saying that, to someone who thinks in only two dimensions, three-dimensional reasoning is incomprehensible.  Likewise with Chesterton: those on the outside of the Catholic Church often think they are looking at a plane, while from the inside we can see it in all its three-dimensional fullness.

  Finally, one last quote, from one of the greatest of geometricians, Archimedes: “Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world!”  Everything depends on that “place to stand”, and there’s no firmer ground than the Church founded by Jesus Christ.

*images from https://outdoors.stackexchange.com/questions/15424/what-is-the-minimum-knowledge-to-navigate-with-only-a-compass

iacobusm Faith and Politics

What We Owe to Caesar

       “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” (Mark 12:17)

     Deciding how to balance what we really owe to Caesar with what we owe to God is a perennial issue for a believing Christian.  In the age of Covid and related governmental tomfoolery that question has become, let us say, even more acute.  This coming weekend I’ll take a more specific look at recent events; today I’m posting an updated version of something I first published a few years ago drawing upon the work of a certain Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger when he was head of Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.  It’s an oldie (in keeping with Throwback Thursday), but, as they say, a goodie.

Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI)

One need not buy in to the confusing and often intentionally obfuscating “Wall of Separation” language here in the United States to understand that the proper role for a believing Christian in public and political life is not always clear. As in other areas of decision-making, we need to apply our personal judgment in determining how to act in specific situations, but we should form those decisions in the light of the moral law and the teaching of the Church.  An enormously helpful guide in sorting out these questions is the Doctrinal Note On Some Questions Regarding The Participation Of Catholics In Political Life [text here], published November 2002 with the authorization of Pope (now Saint) John Paul II, and under the name of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, then Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, now Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI.

     The Doctrinal Note, despite its brevity (it’s only about eight pages long) is a wonderfully rich yet concise discussion, as we have come to expect from Joseph Ratzinger.  It deserves a much fuller treatment than I can give it here, but it’s worthwhile to consider a couple of its main points.

First of all, participating in public and political life is a good thing:

It is commendable that in today’s democratic societies, in a climate of true freedom, everyone is made a participant in directing the body politic. Such societies call for new and fuller forms of participation in public life by Christian and non-Christian citizens alike . . . The life of a democracy could not be productive without the active, responsible and generous involvement of everyone, “albeit in a diversity and complementarity of forms, levels, tasks, and responsibilities”. (sec. 1, citations omitted)

As Catholic Christians, however, we have a particular mission to fulfill, a “proper task”:

By fulfilling their civic duties, “guided by a Christian conscience”, in conformity with its values, the lay faithful exercise their proper task of infusing the temporal order with Christian values, all the while respecting the nature and rightful autonomy of that order, and cooperating with other citizens according to their particular competence and responsibility. (sec. 1, citations omitted)

In other words, we need to recognize our mission to be Salt and Light to a world in desperate need of the Truth (see Matthew 5:13), while at the same time respecting the freedom of those who might disagree.

     The Doctrinal Note goes on to say that such involvement on our part is not only good, but is in fact essential if democratic governance is to survive:

At the same time, the Church teaches that authentic freedom does not exist without the truth. “Truth and freedom either go together hand in hand or together they perish in misery.” In a society in which truth is neither mentioned nor sought, every form of authentic exercise of freedom will be weakened, opening the way to libertine and individualistic distortions and undermining the protection of the good of the human person and of the entire society. (sec. 7, citations omitted)

That is to say, without the Christian witness of the truth about God and man, society will devolve into a self-indulgent free-for-all: amoral, undisciplined people are incapable of self-government.

Joseph Ratzinger was not the first to point this out.  In fact, it was the accepted wisdom prior to the establishment of the United States two and a half centuries ago that republics in general, and democracies in particular, would eventually collapse in a self-destructive orgy of unrestrained appetites.  That’s the traditional understanding that Abraham Lincoln was invoking “four score and seven years” after the American founding in his Gettysburg Address. Lincoln described the Civil War as a “testing” of whether a nation “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal . . . or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

The founders themselves were aware of the dangers, but saw the Christian faith of the American people as the key to overcoming those perils . . .as long as Americans held to that faith.  John Adams warned that men “may plan and speculate for Liberty, but it is Religion and Morality alone, which can establish the Principles upon which Freedom can securely stand.”  George Washington was very emphatic on this same point in his farewell address:

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens . . . Let it simply be asked: Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice ? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.

“It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.” -George Washington

  Both the Church and American founders agree that the freedom to govern themselves is only possible for people who know, and who have been formed in, the Truth.

     And that leads us to the limits of politics and government.  Our actions as citizens in a republic are guided by, and in that sense subordinate to, our properly formed consciences; likewise, the policies of the government are subject to a higher moral law.  If our consciences are not properly formed, no law can make us good.  At best, we can hope to encourage good behavior by providing incentives for it, and discourage bad behavior by providing disincentives.  And when you have a large number of people with improperly formed consciences combined with government incentives to bad behavior, you face societal and political chaos.

      What that means for us is that our first and most important task is to be the best Catholic Christians we can be, before we ever cast a vote or sign a petition.  To the degree that we create a more Christian society, we make possible a more just government. We should approach direct political action with the understanding that whatever we do politically (and not, certainly, to subordinate our consciences to majority opinion or the party platform), it is guided by, and in service to, the Higher Truth. This may seem ironic, particularly to an unbeliever, but the first and foremost thing that a Christian citizen owes to Caesar is that he or she be, in fact, a faithful Christian: without that, nothing else is enough.

Finally, it’s good to keep in mind that God and Casesar each have a claim on us, but that doesn’t mean that they have equal claims. Government can do many good and essential things: provide for a common defense, nurture a secure environment for civil society to flourish, build and maintain infrastructure, help alleviate the temporary effects of poverty and abuse.  Government cannot do everything, however, nor should it try: in keeping with the Principle of Subsidiarity [link], we should beware of the government subsuming responsibilities that rightfully belong to individuals or other associations, especially the family or the Church.  The very real dangers of government overreach of this sort have come into particularly sharp focus over the past year. And, of course, as Christians we have to know that, however much the state can do, only Jesus Christ can bring about the Kingdom of God.

iacobusm The Church

Aborigines, Atheists, and the Authenticity of the Gospels

    A few years ago I ran across an amazing story (“Ancient Sea Rise Tale Told Accurately For 10,000 Years“) from Scientific American, detailing how aboriginal Australians have preserved, via oral tradition, accurate information about geographical features that have been underwater since the end of the last Ice Age, circa 10,000 years ago. The article is fascinating for its own sake, but it also shows some of the limitations of the modern skeptical, ostensibly scientific (but more accurately “scientistic”) worldview.  Not only that, it has some relevance to our Faith, and particularly to the question of the veracity of Scripture.  In the post below I discuss how the amazing memories of Australia’s oldest inhabitants inform our defense of the authenticity of the Gospels.

Port Philip Bay today (photo from https://melbournedaily.blogspot.com/)

    Let’s start with the scriptural question.  A common line of attack by well-trained atheist enthusiasts is that the books of the New Testament weren’t even written down until 30-60 years after the death of Jesus: how can we expect them to be reliable?  There are a number of good answers to this.  I used to point out to my skeptical students, for instance, that I had been married for about 30 years, and I still remembered the events of my wedding day quite well, and also events of my childhood and adolescence even further back. My parents still remembered things that had happened 70 years prior, or more.  While the average life span was far lower two thousand years ago than it is today (as best we can determine), there were still plenty of people who lived into their 70’s and 80’s – so the events recounted in the Gospels were still within living memory when they were written down.

    It’s also a fact that people in ancient societies had much better powers of memory (as people in less literate societies do today), because they needed to rely on memory much more than we do.  It should be no surprise, then, that in the 19th century Heinrich Schliemann disproved the rationalist scholars who insisted that the Iliad and Odyssey could not possibly have any real historical background when he excavated the sites of Troy and Mycenae, right where Homer’s epics said they would be (both poems existed for centuries before they were written down).  

“A Reading From Homer” by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1885

Likewise, in the early 20th century Milman Parry refuted the scholarly assertion that it was impossible for ancient rhapsodes to memorize with accuracy long epic poems such as Homer’s works when he located and recorded Croatian bards who accomplished similar feats of memory.  And now we see Aborigines who have transmitted information accurately over not merely decades, but millennia:

Without using written languages, Australian tribes passed memories of life before, and during, post-glacial shoreline inundations through hundreds of generations as high-fidelity oral history. Some tribes can still point to islands that no longer exist—and provide their original names.

That’s the conclusion of linguists and a geographer, who have together identified 18 Aboriginal stories—many of which were transcribed by early settlers before the tribes that told them succumbed to murderous and disease-spreading immigrants from afar—that they say accurately described geographical features that predated the last post-ice age rising of the seas.

     There’s more to these examples, however, than simple powers of memorization.  I found this passage from the Scientific American article about the Aborigines very intriguing:

“There are aspects of storytelling in Australia that involved kin-based responsibilities to tell the stories accurately,” Reid said.  That rigor provided “cross-generational scaffolding” that “can keep a story true.”

How much more important to “tell the stories accurately” if they are about God-become-Man, and to forget means eternal oblivion?

“The Four Evangelists”, Frans Floris I, mid-1500s

In other words, older people who know the story will correct the story-teller who messes it up, and it’s a “kin-based responsibility” because these stories are a crucial part of the group identity: they tell people who they are. To forget is to become nobody. How much more important to “tell the stories accurately” if they are about God-become-Man, and to forget means eternal oblivion? And when the elders checking the story-tellers’ accuracy were eye witnesses . . . or when the story-tellers themselves were witnesses or participants in what they are describing?  

     Believing Catholics, of course, trust in the guidance of the Holy Spirit in preserving the truth, but that won’t help to convince those who don’t share our Faith.  Natural reason, however, and the available evidence, show that the earliest Christians were not only quite capable of preserving the story of Jesus accurately, but also were extremely unlikely to do otherwise.  That, at least, is the rational conclusion: what evidence can the doubters offer to the contrary?

(I published an earlier version of this Throwback Thursday post 12 February 2015)

Feature image above: photo by Lefteris Pitarakis, from website https://www.ancient-code.com/