It is very difficult to get all the information one needs on religious matters in the secular press. This has been particularly true when it comes to the Pope's recent lifting of excommunication from a group of men illicitly ordained by a breakaway French Archbishop in 1988. Here's a letter to the editor that appeared in the Friday March 6, 2009 issue of the Idaho Catholic Register that does a good job of clarifying matters. I trust that neither the Register nor the author of the letter will mind my passing it along to you.
Two separate, distinct issues
Editor, the ICR:
I was dismayed to read in the Feb. 20 ICR, under the "From the Vatican" heading, a news report from Catholic News Service that traditionalist Bishop Richard Williamson has recently denied some aspects of the Holocaust within days of Pope Benedict XVI remission of Bishop Williamson's excommunication.
Unfortunately, the secular media has linked these two otherwise unrelated stories and the Catholic News Service article you reprinted did little to correct this misrepresentation. Bishop Williamson was identified as a "traditionalist," yet the article should have pointed out that he is a member of the Society of St. Pius X and one of the four bishops ordained without papal authority by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre in 1988. For this act of disobedience, Archbishop Lefebvre and his four bishops were excommunicated by the pope. As such, Bishop Williamson has not been in communion with the Roman Catholic Church, a situation that Pope Benedict XVI has recently strived to right by lifting the 1988 excommunication of the four bishops. He trusts this act of forgiveness will be the first step toward reconciliation with the society and facilitate the return of members to communion with Rome. The remission of Bishop Williamson's excommunication had nothing whatsoever to do with his errant views of the Holocaust. Such misreporting was painful to many of our Jewish friends and has caused apologies to be issued by the Pope and Bishop Bernard Fellay, superior general of the society.
I just thought Idaho Catholics should be aware of this.
Richard Smith
Garden Valley
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Some Thoughts on the Second Sunday of Lent: The Transfiguration
The readings for this Sunday are dramatic to say the least, and they are many layered as well. There is so much meaning that I can’t hope to unpack very much that is in them. So I’ll just comment on a couple of points that I think are critical.
First, with respect to Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac: it is a strange story to say the least. Human sacrifice was common in the pagan religions of the Middle East. In fact, a book I read a few years ago asserted that the origins of our practice of capital punishment have little to do with deterrence of crime or punishment of criminals. The practice comes from the pagan notion of a spirit world that becomes seriously out of balance and can only be made right again by an extreme act like a human sacrifice. Our attachment to the practice is the residue of ancient pagan beliefs.
I think at least a part of the significance of this story about Abraham is that it begins as if the God who would establish the Abraham’s descendants as the chosen people, guide them out of Egypt, give them the Law, and establish them in the Promised Land were just the same as the imaginary, anthropomorphic gods that formed the center of pagan worship – bruised, needy, wounded, and sometimes hateful beings. But the story ends with a new kind of relationship between God and humanity, a relationship in which God steps forward and takes the initiative to make things right with us. God puts our world in order; we don’t put God’s world in order.
There is some dispute about where the mountain of Moriah referred to in the story actually was. Some say it was the mountain in Jerusalem where the temple would be built about 1,000 years after Abraham. Others maintain that it was the somewhat higher nearby mountain later called Golgotha. Just as Isaac, a totally innocent victim carried up the hill a heavy burden of wood, the wood on which he was to be sacrificed, Jesus carried up the hill a heavy burden of wood, the wood on which he would be sacrificed. But in Jesus’ case, it wasn’t a human sacrifice to appease an angry god, but God in the second person of the Holy Trinity sacrificing himself to guide us to eternal salvation, taking the initiative, reaching out, loving us more that we could ever imagine.
Walking up that mountain must have been the darkest time ever for Abraham. His son’s life meant more to him than his own. All his hopes and dreams were embodied in that boy. But his willingness to give everything to God led to a new life for him, for his descendants, and ultimately for all of us.
Peter, James, and John were in something like the same position. The events of tonight’s Gospel reading follow by six days Jesus’ first revelation to the Apostles that he would soon suffer and die. Not only that, he had warned his followers that each of them was called to pick up their own cross and follow him. Peter was so upset by Jesus’ words that he actually rebuked Jesus. Jesus had called Peter "Satan" and pushed him away.
We don’t know for sure what Peter and the other Apostles had in mind when they left everything behind to follow Jesus. Some of them apparently thought they would be important in a new a glorious earthly kingdom that they expected Jesus to establish. If they had any such fantasies, they were rudely destroyed now. They had left everything behind to follow Jesus. It turned out that following Jesus meant taking the path to the cross, to crucifixion and death. But they followed him anyway. And the day described in our reading, their sacrifice led to glimpse of the reality that underlay Jesus and his ministry. They saw Moses, their ancestor in faith who had brought the law down from Mount Sinai, and they saw Elijah, the prophet who never died, whom God carried off in a flaming chariot, the prophet whom Jewish legend said would return when God was ready to make everything right in our world. They saw Jesus, not merely as the human they had come to know, but as the shining Son of the Father. And they heard the voice of God.
None of this could have happened if they hadn’t made the sacrifices they had made. They wouldn’t have been there on that mountain. They would have given up and left Jesus long ago. They would still have had minds and hearts so attached to things of this world that they could not have been open to what God wanted to tell them, to what God wanted to do in their lives, to the work of the world’s salvation that God wanted them to take part in.
Lent is supposed to prepare us to experience God. We don’t give things up because we love discomfort or because we think that God wants to see us suffer. We give things up because we have to get them under control. They are blocking our vision. They are smothering our souls. We give things up because we want to go to the mountaintop, and all these bad habits and worldly attachments are weighing us down.
We’re just a week and a half into Lent. We have quite a ways to go, but a week and a half is plenty of time for our resolve to weaken. Let us renew our intention to use this time well, to establish right priorities, to make right what we need to make right in our lives, to be truly ready to greet our Risen Lord on Easter Morning.
First, with respect to Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac: it is a strange story to say the least. Human sacrifice was common in the pagan religions of the Middle East. In fact, a book I read a few years ago asserted that the origins of our practice of capital punishment have little to do with deterrence of crime or punishment of criminals. The practice comes from the pagan notion of a spirit world that becomes seriously out of balance and can only be made right again by an extreme act like a human sacrifice. Our attachment to the practice is the residue of ancient pagan beliefs.
I think at least a part of the significance of this story about Abraham is that it begins as if the God who would establish the Abraham’s descendants as the chosen people, guide them out of Egypt, give them the Law, and establish them in the Promised Land were just the same as the imaginary, anthropomorphic gods that formed the center of pagan worship – bruised, needy, wounded, and sometimes hateful beings. But the story ends with a new kind of relationship between God and humanity, a relationship in which God steps forward and takes the initiative to make things right with us. God puts our world in order; we don’t put God’s world in order.
There is some dispute about where the mountain of Moriah referred to in the story actually was. Some say it was the mountain in Jerusalem where the temple would be built about 1,000 years after Abraham. Others maintain that it was the somewhat higher nearby mountain later called Golgotha. Just as Isaac, a totally innocent victim carried up the hill a heavy burden of wood, the wood on which he was to be sacrificed, Jesus carried up the hill a heavy burden of wood, the wood on which he would be sacrificed. But in Jesus’ case, it wasn’t a human sacrifice to appease an angry god, but God in the second person of the Holy Trinity sacrificing himself to guide us to eternal salvation, taking the initiative, reaching out, loving us more that we could ever imagine.
Walking up that mountain must have been the darkest time ever for Abraham. His son’s life meant more to him than his own. All his hopes and dreams were embodied in that boy. But his willingness to give everything to God led to a new life for him, for his descendants, and ultimately for all of us.
Peter, James, and John were in something like the same position. The events of tonight’s Gospel reading follow by six days Jesus’ first revelation to the Apostles that he would soon suffer and die. Not only that, he had warned his followers that each of them was called to pick up their own cross and follow him. Peter was so upset by Jesus’ words that he actually rebuked Jesus. Jesus had called Peter "Satan" and pushed him away.
We don’t know for sure what Peter and the other Apostles had in mind when they left everything behind to follow Jesus. Some of them apparently thought they would be important in a new a glorious earthly kingdom that they expected Jesus to establish. If they had any such fantasies, they were rudely destroyed now. They had left everything behind to follow Jesus. It turned out that following Jesus meant taking the path to the cross, to crucifixion and death. But they followed him anyway. And the day described in our reading, their sacrifice led to glimpse of the reality that underlay Jesus and his ministry. They saw Moses, their ancestor in faith who had brought the law down from Mount Sinai, and they saw Elijah, the prophet who never died, whom God carried off in a flaming chariot, the prophet whom Jewish legend said would return when God was ready to make everything right in our world. They saw Jesus, not merely as the human they had come to know, but as the shining Son of the Father. And they heard the voice of God.
None of this could have happened if they hadn’t made the sacrifices they had made. They wouldn’t have been there on that mountain. They would have given up and left Jesus long ago. They would still have had minds and hearts so attached to things of this world that they could not have been open to what God wanted to tell them, to what God wanted to do in their lives, to the work of the world’s salvation that God wanted them to take part in.
Lent is supposed to prepare us to experience God. We don’t give things up because we love discomfort or because we think that God wants to see us suffer. We give things up because we have to get them under control. They are blocking our vision. They are smothering our souls. We give things up because we want to go to the mountaintop, and all these bad habits and worldly attachments are weighing us down.
We’re just a week and a half into Lent. We have quite a ways to go, but a week and a half is plenty of time for our resolve to weaken. Let us renew our intention to use this time well, to establish right priorities, to make right what we need to make right in our lives, to be truly ready to greet our Risen Lord on Easter Morning.
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