"A Devout, Learned, and Useful Clergy"

Of all the currently reigning monarchs of Europe (including the Pope), only one - Elizabeth II - enjoyed the benefits of a traditional coronation service. Her coronation - 62 years ago this month - employed a ritual more than one thousand years old, which has experienced some major and many minor modifications since Saint Dunstan first adapted an even older Frankish service for the coronation of the Anglo Saxon King Edgar in 973. Thanks to the Protestant Reformation, it was translated into English in 1603, and since 1689 has been set within a Book of Common Prayer Communion service. As a classic Anglican service, it contains some priceless prayers. Among them, one of my personal favorites is the "Prayer of Benediction," which comes shortly after the actual crowning. In it, the Archbishop of Canterbury prays God to bless the newly crowned sovereign with the sorts of people and things we would want God to bless a sovereign (and his or her country) with, but which may at times seem to be in limited supply: 

The Lord give you faithful Parliaments and quiet Realms; sure defence against all enemies; fruitful lands and a prosperous industry; wise counsellors and upright magistrates; leaders of integrity in learning and labour; a devout, learned and useful clergy; honest peaceable and dutiful citizens.

All of these are important, of course, and much to be desired. Within this this lovely little list, however, it is inevitably the petition for a devout, learned, and useful clergy, which immediately invites my further attention. (Actually, from 1760 until 1937, the text prayed for a pious and learned and useful clergy. But, for the 1953 coronation, pious was, for whatever reason, replaced by devout, a distinction without much of a difference in this context, at least as far as I can sense. So here at least I will treat the two words as effectively interchangeable.)

How edifying to consider that for centuries successive Archbishops of Canterbury have asked God to bless their sovereigns with a devout, learned, and useful clergy! Given the increasingly perilous present state of the Church of England (and of religion in contemporary Western societies in general), one might be tempted to repeat that prayer perhaps even more earnestly today, well before any anticipated next coronation.

Needless to say, as a clergyman myself, I should certainly aspire to be devout, learned, and useful. But what precisely is meant by being devout, learned, and useful? And useful to whom, or for what? And how does one become such, or more so, or at least sufficiently so?

As I look ahead to summer's somewhat more contemplative pace, to my upcoming retreat with my community, and to some alternative time with friends and family, I plan to think more about the meaning of those words and expect to return to consider some of those questions both for myself at my stage in life and in terms of the broader needs of today's Church in this time of traumatic change.

Corpus Christi

Thursday, June 4, was the 60^th anniversary of my First Holy Communion.  While I can’t claim to remember all that happened that day, I do remember some of it. Certainly I remember the rehearsals we had beforehand. The Dominican Sisters were perfectionists when it came to such things, and everything was going to go just so! And I remember being taken to the photographer’s studio to pose for pictures, and how my mother fussed about that and made sure she knew which side of the church I would be on, so she would see me walking back to my pew and then I would see her in turn when she went up to the altar rail. 

Finally the big day dawned, Saturday, June 4, 1955. Dressed up in the prescribed outfit, I was out of the house early - to the safety of the school (where there was no danger of anyone inadvertently breaking the fast). Finally, we all lined up, and all those rehearsals paid off as we walked in absolutely perfect formation into the church at exactly 8:00 a.m. It was, as I later learned, a solemn Mass, with deacon and subdeacon, although I honestly don’t remember any of that. But I do remember walking two by two up the marble sanctuary to kneel before the main altar, then returning by the Epistle side, And I remember seeing my mother go to Communion, just as she had wanted me to.

Napoleon Bonaparte - the revolutionary Corsican soldier who eventually turned himself into an emperor and successfully persuaded/compelled poor Pope Pius VII to come to Paris in person to watch Napoleon crown himself - that Napoleon, who presumably enjoyed many successful and happy days in his adventurous life, famously described his First Communion as the happiest day of his life. 

Of course, what many – maybe most – of us remember best about our First Communion Day, is all the frills: the outfits, the photos, the presents. Those are all perfectly nice things, of course, and should not be disparaged. As for the actual act of Communion itself, it may perhaps stand out less because it in fact merges in memory with so many other subsequent trips to the altar rail - for many of us  (brought up post-Pius X) at least once a week, for those of us in religious life, likely as often as once a day. That's a lot of Communions!

So, if the first one merges in memory with all those subsequent Communions, that may be as it should be. As I always like to say to First Communicants on their big day, the key word to remember about the experience is first – the first time they are doing what (hopefully) they are going to be doing many more times, over and over again, at least once each week, all the rest of their lives.

Today the Church celebrates the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, the feast commonly called Corpus Christi. The meaning and spirit of this festival is succinctly summarized in the familiar collect – so familiar because it is also the collect traditionally sung after the hymn at Benediction: O God, who in this wonderful Sacrament have left us a memorial of your Passion, grant us, we pray, so to revere the sacred mysteries of your Body and Blood that we always experience in ourselves the fruits of your redemption.

This prayer reminds us that the sacrament of the Eucharist is intimately connected with Jesus’ Passion, Death, and Resurrection.  The Mass of the Lord’s Supper on Holy Thursday recalls the anniversary of the institution of the Eucharist, but there is so much else going on then that over the centuries it was thought appropriate to accent the Church’s joy in this wonderful sacrament on a day all its own. Hence, this feast – established by Pope Urban IV in 1264 with its Mass and Office specially composed for the occasion by the great 13th-century Dominican Doctor of the Church Saint Thomas Aquinas.

The prayer he composed calls on us to revere the sacred mysteries of Christ’s Body and Blood. Hence the special traditions of Eucharistic veneration associated with today – the traditional outdoor procession, for example, which elaborately marks this occasion in Catholic countries. As a seminarian in 1984, I had the privilege of witnessing the impressive outdoor Corpus Christi procession in Montreal’s Old City. In Germany, they have a tradition of the procession stopping at four altars erected along the way, at each of which is read the beginning of one of the four gospels before Benediction is given with the monstrance. It is a symbolic way of suggesting that the entire story can be summed up in some sense in the sacrament of the Eucharist.

But along with our veneration of this wonderful sacrament, the primary point is for us to experience its benefits. One particular ancient Roman prayer expresses this idea very eloquently in the Canon of the Mass:

In humble prayer we ask you, almighty God, command that these gifts be borne by the hands of your holy Angel to your altar on high in the sight of your divine majesty, so that all of us, who through this participation at the altar receive the most holy Body and Blood of your Son, may be filled with every grace and heavenly blessing.

In other words, by participating in the Eucharist and receiving Holy Communion, we, like Christ’s offering of himself, are, so to speak, carried along, to the Lamb of God’s heavenly altar, as a pledge of our future glory.

In the beautiful words of Saint Thomas Aquinas, which the Church recites this evening at Vespers: 

How holy this feast, in which Christ is our food; his Passion is recalled; grace fills our hearts, and we receive a pledge of the glory to come.

Homily for the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ (Corpus Christi), Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, June 7, 2015.

60 Eucharistic Years

Today was the 60^th anniversary of my First Holy Communion.  I'll be reminiscing a bit about that event in my homily for Corpus Christi (transferred in the United States from its proper day, today, to this coming Sunday.) So I'll spare such details today. 

Napoleon Bonaparte - the 18th-century Corsican soldier who eventually turned himself into an emperor and successfully persuaded/compelled poor Pope Pius VII to come to Paris in person to watch Napoleon crown himself - that Napoleon, who presumably enjoyed many successful and happy days in his adventurous life, famously described his First Communion as the happiest day of his life. 

Of course, what many – maybe most – of us remember best about our First Communion Day, is all the frills: the outfits, the photos, the presents. Those are all perfectly nice things, of course, and should not be disparaged. As for the actual act of Communion itself, it may perhaps stand out less because it in fact merges in memory with so many other subsequent trips to the altar rail - for many of us  (brought up post-Pius X) at least once a week, for those of us in religious life, likely as often as once a day. That's a lot of Communions! So, if the first one merges in memory with all those subsequent Communions, that may be as it should be. As I always like to stress with First Communicants on their big day, the key word to remember about the experience is first – the first time they are doing what (hopefully) they are going to be doing many more times, over and over again, at least once each week, all the rest of their lives. (In Napoleon's time, that was less so, of course, which may have especially elevated the event in theconsciousness of late 18th-century children.)

Unlike Baptism, Confirmation, and Holy Orders, which are defining, once-for-all events, unlike matrimony, which for many is a once-in-a-lifetime event and is normally at most celebrated only rarely in one's life, and unlike the "healing" sacraments of penance and anointing, which are occasional, as needed, events, the Eucharist really is meant to be the regularly repeated sacrament. That sense may have been lost for much of our history, but that was always contrary to the plain sense of the liturgy, e.g., so many of the  post-communion prayers. As Saint Thomas Aquinas explained, by Baptism a person is ordered to the Eucharist, so that by virtue of being baptized one is destined for the Eucharist by the Church (Summa Theologica, III, q. 73, art. 3)

I understand, of course, the new problems the practice of frequent communion may have inadvertently created. Even so, in this most important respect, I count myself very fortunate to have come of age in the post-Pius X Church.

Happy Birthday, Dante Alighieri!

No one knows the exact date, but Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), who did for Italian what Shakespeare and the King James Bible did for English, was born in Florence sometime between mid-May and mid-June 750 years ago. To mark the anniversary, numerous commemorative events are taking place this year - from the minting of a new 2-euro coin with Dante's profile to a reading in outer space last April 24 of the opening canto of Paradiso by Italy's first female astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, followed 10 days later by actor Roberto Benigni's recitation of the closing canto to the Italian Senate. Pope Francis, in a message to the President of the Pontifical Council for Culture, joined “the chorus of those who believe Dante Alighieri is an artist of the highest universal value, who still has much to say and to give, through his immortal works, to all those who are willing to walk the path of true knowledge.”

The "chorus" to whom Pope Francis referred also includes his great 20th-century predecessor Pope Benedict XV (one of my favorite modern popes), who in 1921 marked the 600th anniversary of Dante's death with the encyclical In Praeclara Summorum, from which I quote the following 2 paragraphs in praise of the poet:

4. … while he did not neglect any branch of human learning, at the same time he drank deeply at the founts of Sacred Scripture and the Fathers. Thus he learned almost all that could be known in his time, and nourished specially by Christian knowledge, it was on that field of religion he drew when he set himself to treat in verse of things so vast and deep. So that while we admire the greatness and keenness of his genius, we have to recognize, too, the measure in which he drew inspiration from the Divine Faith by means of which he could beautify his immortal poems with all the lights of revealed truths as well as with the splendors of art. Indeed, his Commedia, which deservedly earned the title of Divina, while it uses various symbolic images and records the lives of mortals on earth, has for its true aim the glorification of the justice and providence of God who rules the world through time and all eternity and punishes and rewards the actions of individuals and human society. It is thus that, according to the Divine Revelation, in this poem shines out the majesty of God One and Three, the Redemption of the human race operated by the Word of God made Man, the supreme loving-kindness and charity of Mary, Virgin and Mother, Queen of Heaven, and lastly the glory on high of Angels, Saints and men …

8. Wonderful, therefore, is the intellectual enjoyment that we gain from the study of the great poet, and no less the profit for the student making more perfect his artistic taste and more keen his zeal for virtue, as long as he keeps his mind free from prejudice and open to accept truth. Indeed, while there is no lack of great Catholic poets who combine the useful with the enjoyable, Dante has the singular merit that while he fascinates the reader with wonderful variety of pictures, with marvelously lifelike coloring, with supreme expression and thought, he draws him also to the love of Christian knowledge, and all know how he said openly that he composed his poem to bring to all "vital nourishment."

In any praise of Dante, the poet, mention must necessarily also be made of his critical role in the consolidation of Italian as a literary language. In Dante's day, of course, Latin was still the universal European literary language. Dante likewise wrote in Latin - his famous political treatise, De Monarchia, for example, and also a treatise on the vulgar, or as we now call it, the vernacular language, De Vulgari Eloquentia. But he wrote his literary masterpiece in Italian. More precisely, he wrote it in the common dialect of his region, Tuscany. Then - and, to a significant extent, still now - Italy remains a nation more in name, a collection of regions, that share certain things in common, but still remain somehow incomplete as a political community. But one of the things that Italians all now do share in common is the literary language that Dante's Tuscan dialect became. As John Kleiner wrote in The New Yorker last month ("Dante Turns Seven Hundred and Fifty," May 20, 2015), referring to the italian astronaut reading Dane from outer space: "The fact that people in Venice and Palermo could understand Cristoforetti as she read from the Paradiso in space was due, in a quite literal sense, to the poem that she was reading."

That alone might merit more than sufficient praise. That alone makes this anniversary (whatever its precise day) truly worth celebrating.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

With the end of the Easter season, the Paschal Candle and the icon of the Resurrection have been returned to the Baptistery, and the Resurrection's place has been taken by Andrei Rublev’s famous 15th-century icon of the Trinity. Sometimes referred to as “The Old Testament Trinity,” its theme is the familiar story in Genesis of the patriarch Abraham’s three angelic visitors, a visit subsequently interpreted in Christian tradition as an image of the three persons of the Trinity. In it, the second Person of the Trinity - the Son, the Word, who reveals God to the world - is portrayed prominently in the center, pointing out into the world. The Father is seated to one side, looking lovingly at the Son, who in turn looks lovingly at the Father, while the bright-robed Holy Spirit is seated on the other side. The three Persons gaze at each other in mutual loving communication, into which we in turn are also meant to be drawn by the Son.

Well, you might say, that’s all very nice, but what of it? For so many (maybe most) of us, the Trinity has always seemed somewhat abstract – a doctrine duly believed in, of course, but not something otherwise given a lot of thought.

But I say this in spite of the obvious fact that we were all baptized in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. On that occasion, we – or our parents and godparents - all made a profession of faith in the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Our sins have been forgiven in the sacrament of Penance, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Those of us who are married – including those couples being honored at this Mass today - have exchanged wedding rings in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. The principal prayers of the Mass are mostly addressed to the Father, through the Son, in the unity of the Holy Spirit. And we have all, over and over again, been blessed in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. In short, our entire religious lives, both individually and collectively as a Church community, have been defined, formed, shaped by this awesome Trinitarian mystery of who God is, that defines God’s ongoing relationship with us and ours with God.

In short, the doctrine of the Trinity is our uniquely Christian insight into who God is.  As human beings, created in God’s image and likeness, we all have a built-in, natural, longing for God. That God exists is something we can experience naturally.  But who God is - who God is in himself - is something we could never completely come to know on our own.  That had to be revealed to us by God himself. And God has done so, revealing who he is in himself – one God in three distinct Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

We do not worship three gods, but one God – a unity of Persons in one divine nature or substance. Each of the three Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is truly God, each distinctly God, but existing eternally in relationship to each other: the Father to the Son, the Son to the Father, the Holy Spirit to both. The very names Father, Son, Holy Spirit are relational names. By analogy, the titles “husband” and “wife” are names that are only understandable in terms of the relationships they signify.

On the one hand, the doctrine of the Trinity expresses our uniquely Christian insight into the ultimately incomprehensible inner life of God – where the Son is the image of the Father, the Father’s likeness and outward expression, who perfectly reflects his Father, while the Holy Spirit in turn expresses and reveals the mutual love of Father and Son. At the same time, the Trinity also expresses something fundamental about how God acts outside himself, how he acts toward us. Who God is in himself is how God acts; and thus how God acts in human history reveals who God ultimately is. Already in the Old Testament, God was revealing himself – as Moses testified in today’s 1st reading [Deuteronomy 4:32-34, 39-40] - as one who repeatedly reveals himself in how he acts toward us. 
                                          

It is, of course, the Son, consubstantial with the Father, who for our salvation came down from heaven, and who, seated at the right hand of the Father, has sent the Holy Spirit upon his Church, making her the Body of Christ and the Temple of the Holy Spirit. Led by the Holy Spirit – as Saint Paul told the Christians in Rome and through them tells us  [Romans 8:14-17]  - we become true sons and daughters of God the Father and joint heirs with Christ.

The Holy Spirit unites us with the Father in the Body of Christ, the Church. Through the sacraments, Christ continues to communicate the Holy Spirit to the members of his Church. Thus, at Mass the Church petitions the Father to send the Holy Spirit to sanctify the bread and wine that they may become the body and blood of Christ and that, filled with the same Holy Spirit, we who receive Christ’s body and blood may then be transformed into one body in Christ, participants in the mission of his Church.

That mission is nothing less than to make disciples of all nations - in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit  [Matthew 28:16-20].

Homily for Trinity Sunday, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, May 31, 2015.