The Grace of Preaching

Today (August 8) the Church's calendar commemorates Saint Dominic (c.1170-1221), the Spanish canon who adopted an apostolic evangelical way of life to combat the heresies of his time and founded the Order of Preachers (the Dominicans). Like many of my contemporaries, I was taught by Dominican Sisters in elementary school (specifically grades 2, 5, 6, 7, and 8). Based on the initials "O.P." after their names, students sometimes jokingly referred to the Sisters as "Our Problem." To elementary school students, perhaps all teachers sometimes seem so, but in fact the Sisters they were for the most part good teachers and dedicated religious.
What at that time most fascinated me about the Dominicans, however, was that they were the only religious order that I had any personal experience of which had its own liturgical rite. Every year or so, a Dominican priest would come to preach a novena or it would be the turn for a Dominican mission band to preach the annual parish mission. As an altar boy, I would get the rare experience of watching up close as Mass was celebrated in a different rite - not radically different, of course, but different enough to require us altar boys to learn some different moves. As my interest in all things liturgical matured, I continued to be interested in how the Dominican Rite came to be and where it fit into the larger story of the development of Latin liturgy.
As the Dominican Rite's website  says, the ancient Dominican Rite "represents a rather ancient branch of the Roman Rite.  In other important respects, however, it captures and expresses the spirit of the early generations of the Order" (http://www.op-stjoseph.org/preaching/dominican_rite/home/)
Having begun as canons, the Dominicans naturally took their liturgy very seriously, but the animating principle of the order has always been preaching and the study required to preach effectively. In his "Treatise on the Formation of Preachers,"  Dominican Master General Humber of Romans (1200-1277) wrote: "Of all the spiritual exercises commonly practiced by spiritual men, those who have the grace for it ought to prefer the practice of preaching." 
Living practically next door to the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, DC, during my seminary years, I was duly impressed by the Dominicans' intellectual commitment and how it continues today to enrich the Church's life. This too was part of Dominic's original evangelizing impulse, which combined a commitment to proclaiming authentic Catholic doctrine in a communicable way with an apostolic life of evangelical simplicity.
As a seminarian I was surprised to learn that the Dominicans were the first Religious to separate obedience to the Religious Rule from obligation under pain of sin. Both in the evangelizing impulse which animated their founding and in the spiritual freedom at the heart of their common life, I came to see something similar to what motivated Servant of God Isaac Hecker in how he shaped his Paulist community in the different (but not incomparably unique) setting and circumstances of mid-19th-century American society.
Among his confreres, Hecker himself was not a particularly outstanding preacher, which ought to be of some consolation to those among us who are less entertaining but who nonetheless share his - and Dominic's - vocation to live out the grace of preaching in the totality of life and ministry.

(The photo above is of the Basilica of Santa Sabina on the Aventine Hill in Rome, famous for being the Stational Church for Ash Wednesday but also as the Dominican convent where Saint Dominic himself lived, as later did such Domincan luminaries as Saint Thomas Aquinas and the future Pope Saint Pius V).

The Childless Society

The U.S. is admittedly nowhere near being a childless society - at least not yet. This isn't  yet Italy where nearly one-quarter of women are childless. Still the U.S. birthrate is now the lowest in its history and likely to get lower - the fertility rate having dropped a full 9% between 2007 and 2011. These numbers are from an article in the August 12 issue of Time, tellingly entitled "None Is Enough," by Lauren Sandler.

Sandler cites the standard critiques of this troubling trend. She references Jonathan V. last's book What to Expect When No One's Expecting, which warns of the potential economic calamity of having fewer consumers and taxpayers. She cites Ross Douthat's argument that the "retreat from child rearing is, at some level, a symptom of late-modern exhaustion" revealing "a spirit that privileges the present over the future."

Sandler's sympathies are suggested, however, by her referring to such comments as childless women "being scolded." One gets the sense from the article that the problem lies more in a culture which still prizes motherhood. Anecdote after anecdote tells the liberating tale of women who have transcended such cultural norms to embrace being not child-less (which implies a lack) but child-free.

That this freedom is indeed very much all about "a spirit that privileges the present over the future" is evident from such testimonies as the following. "I get to do all sorts of thing: buy an unnecessary object, plan trips with our aging parents, sleep in, spend a day without speaking to a single person, send care packages to nieces and nephews, enroll in language classes, go out for drinks with a friend on the spur of the moment ... free from all the contingencies that come with children." Of course, these are all nice things to do. None of them are bad. Some (attending to aging parents, sending packages to nieces and nephews)are genuinely other-regarding. Most. however, are quite self-regarding. While perfectly legitimate activities in themselves, as personal priorities they seem amazingly self-absorbed and in many case incredibly trivial compared with the larger life-project of raising a family.

Now, of course, not everyone is meant to be a parent. Historically, many religions have recognized this, providing a fulfilling alternative vocation. Thirty-one years ago today, I made my First Profession as a member of a Roman Catholic religious society, committed to a celibate life in community in service to the Church. Certainly many priests and religious feel the lack of family quite deeply. (One seminarian in my time even referred to not having children as "the pain of loss," which accompanies a religious vocation - clearly a sense of being child-less rather than child-free.). On the other hand, there can be no doubt that for many - historically for many women especially - religious life offered a welcome (and interesting and fulfilling) alternative to the burdens of marriage and family life and the physical dangers of childbirth. Even so, such vocations (however plentiful in previous periods) were never seen as the norm. Fatherhood and motherhood remained the normal vocations for most people. And the religious vocation was perceived by the larger community as making its own valued contribution to society. (The decline in such vocations in the Western world today is surely due in at least some measure to a diminished sense that such vocations really do contribute something to society).

Above and beyond the economic consequences of a possible demographic desert, what happens when a society privileges its present over its future to such an extent that the pursuit of personal self-actualization acquires en ethical value equal to the vocation of parenthood? The modern world is embarked on an historically and morally novel path - the first society ever to attempt to organize itself on an individualistic basis, free from the encumbrances of religion and family. It remains yet to be seen whether such a project can seriously succeed over any long term and what such a brave new world might look like. 

History

On this date in 1942, Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands addressed the U.S. Congress – the first Queen ever to do so. The Dutch monarch was one of several heroic figures of that era who had refused to accept the apparent inevitablity of German victory in World War II – people like King Haakon of Norway, General Charles De Gaulle of France, and of course Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Britain.

I am constantly reminded of those heroic figures from another (and, for later generations, increasingly incomprehensible) age, every time I hear that frequently employed but nonetheless absurd expression about being “on the right side of history.” In 1940, when Wilhelmina, Haakon, and De Gaulle fled to establish exile governments in London where the British government and people opted to follow Churchill rather than those tainted by appeasement, the direction of history was obvious. It was imminent and total German victory. Still they resisted in the belief – or at least hope – that history’s direction could be changed. In the end, of course, they won. So someone could say that they ended up “on the right side of history,” but that just shows that “the right side of history” can change – and change quickly. (It also suggests that, with effort and good luck, human beings can change the direction of history, that “the right side of history” really is not pre-determined, which also makes it ultimately uncertain).

The notion that secular history has some purpose – presumably leading to progress – was particularly popular in the 19^th century, right up until World War I seemed to prove the contrary to many disillusioned disciples of modernity. The idea of history’s inevitable direction was, however, a key component of the 19^th century’s most notoriously lasting delusion, Marxism.  “Communism,” the young Marx wrote in 1844, “is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.” As a meaningful movement, communism is gone; but the lasting effects of Marx’s theory of history linger when supposedly secular people persist in invoking history’s directedness.

It is, of course, commonly claimed that Marx’s theory of history represents a secularized distortion of Christian apocalyptic. It is, indeed, true that both Christianity and Marxism share a linear view of history, culminating in a desired end. There is, however, little in the Christian conception of history that suggests that specific secular trends possess inherent salvific significance. On the contrary, much of what passes for human history suggests alienation and estrangement from the final fulfillment promised to the faithful at history’s end.

Even Marx, when he wrote more journalistically, commenting on contemporary events in their context, sometimes toned down his determinism - as, for example, in his 1852 interpretation of the rise of Napoleon III, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. In the various great and trivial conflicts which contemporaries feel compelled to choose up sides about, the motives underlying any individual position may be noble or ignoble, wise or foolish, moral or immoral, but they cannot claim to be based on the inherent meaning of history, much less on any certainty of its direction beyond the temporary and transient.

Salus Populi

A few years ago, as I was trying to get my Italian up to speed for my course at the Congregation of the Causes of Saints in Rome, I discovered a veritable treasury of old Italian newsreels on YouTube – everything from King Victor Emmanuel III opening the Italian Parliament in the 1930s to Pope Pius XII’s visit to the famous Dominican church of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva in April 1940 as part of his (unsuccessful) strategy to keep Italy neutral in World War II. Among the many videos I found were several from the 1950 Holy Year – including the events surrounding Pope Pius XII’s solemn definition of the dogma of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary on November 1, 1950. One video shows how on the previous evening, for the first time in almost a century, the famous image of Maria Salus Populi Romani ("Mary, Safety of the Roman People") was carried in solemn procession from downtown Rome to St. Peter’s, where it remained overnight at the papal altar over St. Peter’s Tomb.

 

That famous image is ordinarily housed in the Borghese Chapel in the Papal Basilica of Saint Mary Major. It was there that the future founder of the Paulists, Isaac Hecker, went to pray before that image after his expulsion from the Redemptorists in August 1857, and it was there that Pope Francis went to venerate that same image on the day after his election as pope last March.  Today the Church commemorates the Dedication of that Basilica by Pope Sixtus III (432-440). Built to commemorate the Council of Ephesus (431) which affirmed the Blessed Virgin Mary’s title as “Mother of God,” the Basilica of St. Mary Major is one of Rome's four principal papal basilicas (along with Saint John Lateran, Saint Peter’s, and Saint Paul’s Outside the Walls). 

The smallest of the four, Saint Mary Major is a classical basilica with a wide nave, two side aisles, and a semicircular apse at one end of the nave (the basic model Isaac Hecker was attracted to in planning his design for the Paulist Mother Church in New York). Its 14th-century bell tower is Rome’s highest. Its 16th-century ceiling is gilded with gold, supposedly brought back from Spain’s newly conquered American empire. Under the papal altar is a crystal reliquary which supposedly contains wood from the original crib of Jesus in Bethlehem. Back in the glory days of the Roman “stational churches,” this was the site of the Pope’s Christmas Eve Midnight Stational Mass (as well as many other major occasions during in the Church's calendar). The future founder of the Jesuits, Saint Ignatius Loyola celebrated his first Mass in that crypt on Christmas Day in 1538.

That annual recurrence of this day deserves more attention that it may otherwise get, for Saint Mary major is the "mother church" of all churches - great basilicas, monumental cathedrals, ordinary parish churches, little shrine chapels - that are named for the Mother of God under whatever title. That includes, of course, my own church of the Immaculate Conception here in Knoxville. According to The Catholic Church in Tennessee: The Sesquicentennial Story, by Thomas Stritch (Nashville: The Catholic Center, 1987):

“The declaration of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception took place in 1854. This assertion by the Church of Mary’s unique sinlessness electrified the Catholic world, especially the United States, which placed itself under the special patronage of the Mother of God under that title. So there was no question of what the new church in Knoxville was to be called…”

After more than a century and a half, the "Church on Summit Hill" still stands, smaller than Saint Mary Major to be sure, but a comparably eloquent witness to Mary's motherly patronage of God's People.

 

Greed

“Teacher, tell my brother to share the inheritance with me” [Luke 12:13-21].

It's an old story – a family conflict over inheritance, something we’ve all seen happen so many times. What better advertisement for Jesus’ famous advice to give everything away – now!

Perhaps that someone in the crowd who wanted Jesus to take his side in his family’s quarrel may well have had a good case. Who knows? That’s a concern for a lawyer – a role Jesus refused to play. “Friend,” Jesus replied, “who appointed me as your judge and arbitrator?”

Jesus certainly made judgments about many things. But in this instance he looked beyond the immediate case at hand – to the bigger problem of what wealth (and our obsessive preoccupation with wealth) does to us. So Jesus warned: “Take care to guard against all greed, for though one may be rich, one’s life does not consist of possessions.”

The problem with that, as we all know of course, is that possessions are important. Possessin at least some things – sufficient food, some sort of shelter – having at least some things really is important, if we just want to survive. And possessing more things, while maybe not so necessary, certainly seems to make life a lot easier. Jesus didn’t deny that, but, like Qoheleth, the teacher in the book of Ecclesiastes [Ecclesiastes 1:2; 2:21-23],  Jesus understood how limited – and limiting – wealth’s benefits can actually be. For time too is limited. When we’ve only a limited amount of time, the length of which we cannot know for certain, what we actually do with that time, how we choose to live, the objectives we pursue, the priorities we express in the way we choose to live, all these become important questions – questions that concern who we really are, regardless of what or how much we have.

Greed (which Saint Paul equated with idolatry) - and its equally corrupting cousin, envy – can totally take over a person, leading to a seemingly obsessive need to compare oneself with others and a compulsive desire to acquire and acquire and acquire. There’s always that bigger house or cooler car or the latest model phone or whatever!

And yet it’s always a race against time – a race one can only lose.

“You fool,” Jesus says, “the things you have prepared, to whom will they belong?”

Life is like a race that someone else always wins. Even the inheritors will lose the race in the end. Either it’s all maybe just one long meaningless vanity (as Qoheleth warned). Or it has some purpose beyond its apparent end. But, in that case, what we get to take with us will not be what we have (or, rather, at that point, what we had), but rather who we are, who we have become by the way we have chosen to live.

As Christians, our lives are shaped by the reality of the risen Christ, who is already (as Saint Paul tells us) seated at the right hand of God. Shaped by and focused on that reality, we can begin to look at our lives, already in the here and now, with a perspective that the greedy man in the parable obviously lacked – not just a resigned fatalistic acceptance of life’s limits, like what we heard from Qoheleth, but a freedom to face life and live it fully, based not on what we have, but on who we can become in Christ.

Homily for the 18th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Holy Ghost Church, Knoxville, TN, August 4, 2013.