Notes Upon the Feast of Saint Joseph

One of the things I've been doing lately is cultivating my relationship with Saint Joseph.

He brought the Messiah into Egypt, anointing balm into the land of sin & jahiliyah

I have a short litany of saints I invoke at the end of every rosary, of saints that have a particular meaning to me.  I have begun beginning it with him, then going to SS Joachim and Anne, then SS Anne and Simeon, then SS Elizabeth & Zacharias et S. Jean Baptiste, then SS Charles Borremeo, de Foucauld, of Austria and Wotyla, and so on, all the way through to Saint Philip Neri and Father Solanus Casey. I always end with those two, because I love them.

Anyway, in the course of this prayer, I have been thinking how great he is, Joseph:  a silent saint, whom we know relatively little about.  He may not even have been alive during Christ's public ministry. He is I suppose then of the Old Testament order, like John the Baptist.

He's mysterious, isn't he? Like so many things about the Faith, I like how his role seems best understood axiomatically.

You start with a recognition, a reality, a revelation "Blessed are you, Simon Bar Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you.." then the truth unfolds from it, by implication. The Incarnation is radical in this way. Faith in it is the greatest revolution then, in all human history. It is a transfiguring and radicalizing reality. If this is true, then..

So many other amazing things are, too. 

For example, Mary: her title, her role in salvation, is expressed by way of a simple syllogism. Her son is God. Therefore, she is the Mother of God.  So then is it likewise true that Joseph is the husband of Mary. The patriarch of her family. He is therefore the patriarch of the mother of God. Likewise, he is thus the patriarch of her son. Quod erat demonstrandum.

He becomes what he is through her, and she through her son.

سلام عليك  يا مريم الرب معك

It is interesting, because she in herself is nothing. A mere frail reed, an insignificant vessel. But through her faith and humility, she becomes the means by which our history is redeemed.  The eternal cycle of meaninglessness in its great grinding nihilism is caught and brought to a cataclysmic halt by the assent of a young woman to the will of God. God, who is always independent and transcendent and sufficient to all things unto himself, chooses this thin reed to span all the works of hell, and smash them. The empty eternal void is filled by the grace over- welling this tiny vessel. Her gentle acceptance of this will, that incredible prophetic burden, is an act of this grace.

It is the same with her betrothed, Joseph. He is asked to accept the putatively impossible, the incredible. And he does.     

It's also interesting how the protestants usually ignore him, and her. They talk and talk, babble on for hours in those talkathons they call church about any other person in the Bible - finding the oddest characters (like, say, Jabez) to fixate on. The only time I seem to hear Joseph brought up in that quarter is when they are stridently denying the Blessed Virgin's perpetual virginity. That terrifying chastity.. It's too much for them, the poor buggers. I understand them.

Because it is rough. Rough, just like the grain of the cross. But when Joseph realizes that he has been betrothed to the Spouse of the Holy Spirit, he has to imitate her: offer himself in total surrender to that same Spirit. He has to gird his loins like a man, and offer his life in complete surrender, just as she has already done.

In this way, he is her first devotee. Every one of us who has since been entrusted to her, and had her entrusted to us (cf. John 19:26-27) is therefore following after him, except that his relation to her is not one of discipleship, but is rather one of husbandship, of authority.

He takes her, then offers her intimately to God, our Father. And then he is entrusted with her son, the Only Son of the Father, and receives him intimately into his own hearth. His home becomes the hearth of God himself (le Foyer de Dieu lui meme) in the most literal ways.

"Lord, I am not worthy to receive you under my roof.. "

Think of how Paul says that the family, marriage, images the relation of Christ to the Church (cf. Ephesians 5) and therefore somehow images the inner life of the Trinity itself. In the Holy Family this mystery is  manifested in the most primordial manner. 

It's again interesting how so much about the early history of the Faith is hidden.  We do not know much about the intimate life of the Holy Family. It's similar to how the Acts of the Apostles just ends in mid-story. There are so many things you think they would have told us. Why are there no canonical records of the apostles' martyrdoms? The life of John and the Blessed Virgin at Patmos and Ephesus? Her ascension or dormition? What about Christ's childhood and adolescence, then his young adulthood prior to his baptism and Cana? We have the odd tale of his being lost then found at the Temple, and nothing more.

Why do we not a have a few more books of the infinite library (cf. John 21:25) that we would need to recount all the stories of his life and the life of his Church?  John 20:30 tells us there were *many* other things that Christ did that are not recorded in the Bible.  Not just a few.  Many.  What is this about?  Why must we be left so tantalized, gazing through all this glass so darkly?  

I am certain that it is because the things that are cloaked are so good, too very good for us to understand. We have been told enough to draw us toward that revelation. What is obscure is hidden for our own good.

It speaks to the sacred nature of the life of Joseph's family, this cloistered quietude and anonymity. That great scriptural silence testifies to his humility. He is one of those great silent saints.  Most of the saints are hidden.  I believe most of the greatest saints are hidden. They are unnoticed by the world, and have no interest in drawing any attention to themselves. Joseph is exactly like this. Very likely the greatest saint apart from his bride, and just as humble as she is.  He retires in silence and is consumed by prayer.

The world gets all exercised over the question of whether they had sexual relations.  What they fail to see is that the Holy Family is eschatologically ordered, a prophetic intimation of what is coming, when there will be no male or female, no marrying nor giving in marriage (cf. Galatians 3:28, Matthew 22:30), when we will be like angels in transfigured bodies, and all of our relations will be characterized by utter charity.

I suspect the sexual pleasure we're so obsessed with now will be somehow obsolete then. Just a gut hunch, that.

So, Joseph.  The saint who was the patriarch of the Blessed Virgin, the patriarch of her son.  In the economy of grace and humility this is the meanest office.  How is it that our God is so humble as to accept the authority of a man in this fashion?  Because he did. As he still does, see Matthew 16:19 for that incredible gift of authority. "What you loosen is loosened, what you bind is bound.." Isn't that astounding?

Joseph's name, incidentally, means "God increases, adds" or "God does it again"- the idea is one of divine augmentation, intensification. Like with Joseph the son of Israel in the court of Pharaoh, God's grace is manifested in the life of this quiet man in ways exponential infinitely beyond our poor hope and understanding.

And as I say, that my friends is why we don't know much about him. Because that knowledge is far too great for us.

Passover Consummate: Israel's Universal - "Orthodox Ecumenical Catholic" - Triumph.

And that reality should make you very glad and create in you great hope. Rejoice, and be not afraid.

This my friends is why today is a great feast. The Feast of the Patriarch of Humility, Our Dear Saint Joseph. 

Happy St. Joseph's Day everyone.

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Miserando Atque Eligendo: Lowly And Yet Chosen - A Few Brief Reflections On Our New Pope

Tonight, before bed, I proffer a few thoughts on our adorable new Holy Father.  He keeps growing on me, the more I read and pray for and about him.  Details, such as that his first act as pope the morning after the election was to visit Maria Maggiore, which is the great Roman shrine to our Lady, just sing to me.  He arrived by stealth, with ten minutes notice, eschewing the usual papal motorcade. That is simply beautiful.

Note that the title of this post is his episcopal motto.  Again, like almost everything I read about him, I think it is great.

He reminds me of John Paul I - unassuming, exuding gentle kindness, but with a hint of toughness.  Not at all radiating with the charismatic charm of John Paul II, not even the calmer, nebbish charisma of Benedict.. He seems often impassive, expressing little emotion.  Subdued, humble in appearance.  Not the type of fellow you'd tend to notice in a crowd, unlike his two recent predecessors.  

But that common air is perfect.  Very apt in a priest:  "He had no majestic bearing to catch our eye, no beauty to draw us near him.." Exactly.  Just so.  

I think in practical terms his election is explained by two things.  First, Rome is an Italian archdiocese.  It should have an Italian pastor, or at least a pastor who knows them and their language.  And too, the curia is dominated by Italians, and Italian ways.  The curial voting block in the conclave, and those cardinals who would like to see them disciplined in light of the scandals that are festering there, would both want someone who would will relate well to all of that, immediately.  Second, the Church is now no longer mostly European.  We need leadership from the larger world.  A universal pastor from Europe, or worse Italy, would be a parochial choice..

How to solve this paradox?  In Francis we have the perfect resolution.  An Italian, but from outside Italy. Better, one from Latin America, where the strength of the Church now resides.

He has chosen the name Francis, which means of France, or Frank.  Many have commented that it's a homage to Francis of Assisi whose ministry reinvigorated the late medieval Church, and Francis Xavier, the great Jesuit who converted the East. It is of course both of these things.  

But it is also interesting to think how the German Franks, the French, while the "first daughter of the Church" were also simultaneously the great antagonists of Papal supremacy throughout the Middle Ages.. In that great struggle between the Holy Roman Empire and the Papacy over rule of Europe - Guelphs versus Ghibellines - dating back to the moment Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne Emperor on Christmas 800, where the pope surprised the king by refusing to hand the crown to him for him to place it on his own head, the pope himself crowning the Emperor in a symbolic act of supremacy over the secular power.. Through to the moment that Napoleon seized the crown from the hands of Pius VII and crowned himself Emperor in 1804.. 

The term "emperor" of course signifies Emperor of Rome, which is shorthand for the civilized world.  The fact that the Franks, the Germans, had the temerity to claim that title while the historical line of emperors descending from Constantine was still extant in Constantinople, was not exactly appreciated in Byzantium.  Indeed, it is the single most important catalyst creating the Schism we still suffer from today between the Orthodoxy and Catholicism.

This is a major theme I want to continue to treat here on the blog, that I have yet to touch upon at all: the role of political power and ethnic divisions in creating the great schismatic blocks in the Church -Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant.. The struggle over the imperium, the legacy of Rome, is at the heart of that.  

I think the name Francis may in a sense resonate somehow in terms of that struggle - Our new pope may in some way be signaling that that struggle is finally over.  That the papal claim to secular imperium is finally utterly dead. Our Pope Francis reconciles that tension in himself and resolves it.

The pope is now asserting the plenitude of spiritual power.  The reason the Church exists is because people respond to Christ. His humility. God comes to us as a child. Then he offers himself to us, up for us, on the cross. 

This is what love is. This is the form that true power takes. This is our God.

When the Church is humble like this, she conquers the world. When we surrender all pretension to worldly power, and bear the cross with the suffering and poor, we triumph.  

In Christ, like Francis and all the other saints.  Francis of Assisi's example, however, is one of the most radical. Our new Holy Father Francis is calling us to that extremity of love and humility.

Pope Francis has only one lung.   Odd fact, that.  Pope John Paul II always used to use the metaphor of two lungs of the Church in discussing our Orthodox brothers.  That we are one organism, breathing through two lobes.  

Here, we have a pope who as Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires was also bishop of the Eastern Rite in Argentina.  This is unusual, usually the Eastern Rites have their own separate bishop.  

And he has got only one lung.. A single pnuema if you like.  Like I say, odd..  Isn't it?

I'll end this rumination by quoting our Holy Father's first public homily as pope, given at mass on Wednesday, March 13th.  I really thought it was good, so I'll share an excerpt.  The extended homily is pithy - I read it aloud to myself and it took me 2.5 minutes - and profound.  That's the essence of good preaching.  Succinct and powerful.  

I give you about half of it here, what I think the best part:

[W]e can walk as much we want, we can build many things, but if we do not confess Jesus Christ, nothing will avail. We will become a compassionate NGO, but not the Church, the Bride of Christ. When one does not walk, one stalls. When one does not build on solid rock, what happens? What happens is what happens to children on the beach when they make sandcastles: everything collapses, it is without consistency. When one does not profess Jesus Christ – I recall the phrase of Leon Bloy – “Whoever does not pray to God, prays to the devil.” When one does not profess Jesus Christ, one professes the worldliness of the devil.

[...]

The same Peter who confessed Jesus Christ, says, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God. I will follow you, but let us not speak of the Cross. That has nothing to do with it. I’ll follow you on other ways, that do not include the Cross.” When we walk without the Cross, when we build without the Cross, and when we profess Christ without the Cross, we are not disciples of the Lord.  We are worldly.  We may be bishops, priests, cardinals, popes, but not disciples of the Lord.

I would like that all of us, after these days of grace, might have the courage – the courage – to walk in the presence of the Lord, with the Cross of the Lord: to build the Church on the Blood of the Lord, which is shed on the Cross, and to profess the one glory, Christ Crucified. In this way, the Church will go forward. My hope for all of us is that the Holy Spirit, that the prayer of Our Lady, our Mother, might grant us this grace: to walk, to build, to profess Jesus Christ Crucified. So be it.

So (utterly not mote) be it, indeed.  I love this man.  I think we have ourselves a wonderful new pastor.  Thank God.

May God bless and keep our Holy Father.

Now it's midnight.  Sleepytime.  Goodnight, everyone.

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On the Wealth & Autonomy of the Church, Part I.

I wrote the following in response to a bit by Matthew Yglesias over at Slate on the wealth of the Church.  (Aside: his last name in the byline of this article is bracing mild irony, no?)  It's buried in the comment thread there, along with another comment that I post below.  See the head of the next post for more commentary on that.

Here I skewer the stupid vulgarity of people who spew criticism at the Church for being rich, especially  attacks on priests and bishops (note that secular/diocesan only earn between 20 and 30k a year in the United States, being the richest Catholic church on the planet, and religious/monastics usually receive much less than that) and the criticism that the "Church should sell all its priceless art to feed the poor."

My mom says that I shouldn't use the word idiot here.  She's right, but it felt good to throw some skat back, you know?  My comment:

The art and culture that is the Church's patrimony doesn't "belong to" the Church. It belongs to, and is meant to succor all humanity. It is merely the Church's gift to humanity. It doesn't belong in some rich jerk's private collection. It belongs where it is: In the case of the really historically significant stuff in the few museums and archives maintained, like national archives or museums, to edify us all. In the more significant case of the iconography common to our churches, it is meant to do what *we generation upon generation* of faithful have created it for: to help us worship the God who made us, and made all such beauty possible.  

This lame argument, "that the priceless treasures" should be sold to feed the poor is exactly the line that hypocrite Judas fed Christ when the repentant woman poured her expensive unction on Christ's feet. All the rich schmuks who salivate at the idea of using their filthy lucre to collect the beauty of the Church to their own vanity use Judas's same argument. As if the Sistine Chapel and Chartes were created, and exist, to enrich the pope or something, and would be better used as the private preserve of billionaires who have truly *earned* it. That's intellectually and spiritually idiotic.  

That beauty exists because we believe. Because the faithful have created it to worship God, and it is almost without exception freely accessible to anyone who cares to go seek it out. Rich or poor. I've been to hundreds of Catholic churches, and the only one I ever paid to enter was the Sistine Chapel, and that is not normally used for worship, and is effectively a museum. You will never pay to enter a Catholic church where the Blessed Sacrament is reserved. That - the most important presence in the world, as sacred as we human beings ourselves - can be encountered for free everywhere. 

Because the poor need beauty too, and we the Church give it to them. 

As for the idea that the Church is merely a charity, it's not. But its charitable works are greater by far than any other organization in the world. We feed, teach, and heal the poor, and rich, everywhere they come to us.  

There is corruption, but it is - in the context and scale of the work - small. The idea that the Congress should confiscate the wealth of the Church - which is mostly in real estate, most of that for charity or worship - is risible. The Congress is far more corrupt than the Church, financially. Anyone who thinks the rich buying our patrimony, or the government spending it for us is a good idea is simply an idiot.  



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On the Wealth & Autonomy of the Church, Part II.

I am well into my promised post on What Happened in Caracas.  It's gotten unwieldily, and needs to be edited with a good re-write, and then split into two parts, one about Chavez and my inchoate take on the politics and such down there, and then one with the straight narrative of my trip.  I've been too busy the last few days to get that accomplished, but will try to tonight and tomorrow.

In the meantime, I'm going to post a couple things I wrote in a comments thread over at Slate under an interesting article by Matt Yglesias about the wealth of the Church.  I spent too much time on them to have them get buried in a thread for no one to read.

One of the main problems I have in starting to write on the things I've been mulling and want to express, is that on the one hand I have quite a lot to say, while on the other the basic thrust boils down to essentially a half dozen "tricks" or themes that I am going to play over and over again a few dozen times with various inflections.  I've been hesitating because of this, but there's really nothing for it but to just put on my show and hope that all the acrobatics don't get repetitive and boring.  So here we go, my first flip:

Yglesias suggests in his article that the Church (a word that in my usage always refers to the apostolic Church, all the churches in union with Rome, and the Orthodox and other Eastern Churches that descend from the apostles - protestants are merely heretics who relate to the Church by virtue of their baptism and faith alone. Their organizations are not Churches in the sense that they are vested with any true authority like apostolic bishops have), should be subject to taxation and auditing by the State.

I disagree. This is why:

Another point: Mr. Yglesias and many commenters here seem to think that the State curtailing Church's freedom and power would be an unambiguous good. That is in effect what giving the State the power to tax and financially audit the Church (and divers churches and other religious groups) would do.  

But he misses an important thing: the separation of Church and State is not merely an innovation of the American Constitution. It's deeply embedded in the Christian, which is to say European, hence Western, experience. ("Give unto Caesar what is Caesar's, give unto God what is God's.")  Unlike in Islam where the Ummah theoretically constitutes the government and there is therefore no public distinction between the sacred and secular spheres; or in the Orthodox annoiting of the imperium, which has stunted the political life of Russia and made the Church there essentially a department of the state, creating an incestuous relationship between political and religious power; the Catholic Church has effectively created a tension in Western society that creates a sphere for conscience and then even legally legitimate political action *supported by the churches* as institutions. The churches act as catalysts or spaces for political action that have often counterbalanced, even frequently opposed, the otherwise overwhelming power of the State. This is counter the Enlightenment narrative of Catholic obscurantism, of course; but I submit that the Catholic Faith - with its doctrine of freedom of individual conscience (human beings are ontologically free, our fate is not predetermined, our actions have meaning) which is concomitant with the doctrine of the  sacredness of the human person; as well as the doctrine that political sovereigns are bound *legally* by the Church's law, which demands fair treatment of the poor and places critical limits on use of power such as just war doctrine (which essentially still constitutes the basis for modern international law and human rights doctrine) - is at the core of the Western cultural ascendency.  

See Boniface VIII's (the sucessor of the last pope who resigned, Celistine V, whom Boniface imprisoned) 1302 bull Unam Sanctam. It articulates the principal of dual authority. I argue that dichotomy vitally reinforces the moral and spiritual authority and freedom that the churches have had in our society to agitate for everything from emancipation to suffragism, from economic justice for the poor to opposition to war, from prohibition to opposition to (and support for) abortion flows from the legacy of that dichotomy. 

The universities are incidentally adjunct institutions that are utter creatures of the Church, and until now have provided a intellectual clerical caste (with authority in the sciences, medicine, law and humanities that is preeminent in our culture) that grew out of, and has now secularized the prior Christian clerical ascendancy. As we eradicate the influence of the Church, the authority of this class will - I predict - also be called into question and eroded. That our universities are now behaving like hedge funds; and tenure is being eroded, only to be replaced by teachers for hire; and universities are now being re-cast as businesses (U of Phoniex type abuse of the student loan system); is actually symptomatic of this. The dogma that human beings are iconic of God; are always ends, never mere means; is fading. Now, the market and cash, and homo economicus are all that is left. 

Absent this lingering Catholic dichotomy where an institution like the UN apes the Church in moderating the power of states and arbitrating disputes peacefully between them; we are utterly in the world ruled by the logic of Stalin, Hitler, Hobbes and Machiavelli. Just because we bourgeois think we are just too darn nice to be baldly brutal like them, does not mean that we should glibly dispense with the Church - and the various Christian splinter churches and other religious authorities - merely because we see them as backward and irrelevant in light of progress, which means merely because we disagree or think them ridiculous. 

Civilization is a thin skein, and it was woven by religion. Tear at it at our collective risk.



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