“Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I do my share on behalf of His body, which is the church, in filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions” (Colossians 1:24)

Every time we proclaim the Apostles’ Creed, that most ancient summary of the Christian Faith, we declare our belief in “the communion of saints“. But what does this doctrine mean?

The best nutshell definition was given by the Latin theologian Hugh of St. Victor centuries before Dumas of the romances: singula sint omnium et omnia singulorum, one for all and all for one! a phrase that surely befits  the high adventure of Catholic truth.  Among modern thinkers, one of the best explanations of the communion of saints was written by Karl Adam in his (we dare say) magisterial work from the 1920′s, The Spirit of Catholicism, which is online on EWTN.com.  Thus does Adam, in chapter vii,  summarize the ancient Christian teaching:

“By this doctrine… [is meant] a community of spirit and of spiritual goods among the saints on earth, that is among all those who are incorporated by faith and love in the one Head, Christ. More than that, she means also the vital communion of these faithful Christians with all those souls who have passed out of the world in the love of Christ, and who either as blessed souls enjoy in glory the Vision of their God, or as souls in the state of purgation await that Vision… the whole mass of the redeemed, who in the various stages of development, as members of the militant, suffering or triumphant Church, are conjoined through their one Head, Jesus Christ, in one single family and fellowship, in one single sacred Body.” (Adam, chapter vii)

As may be seen from the foregoing, the communion of saints is not limited to Christians who have entered the glory of heaven–some of whom the one true Church publicly proclaims, or canonizes, to be worthy of honor and emulation–but includes all the “holy ones” (Latin sancti) of God in heaven, on earth, and in purgatory, living in Christ and in one another, suffering together and being saved together, an ever-flowing, ever-interceding communion of love in which–

“no good can be done, no virtue practiced by individual members, which does not redound also to the salvation of all” (Pope Pius XII, Mystici Corporis Christi, 89).

For in supernatural fact we are none of us isolated believers, lonely sinners “in the hands of an angry God” (pace Edwards).  Rather,  we are, by baptism into the body of Christ (cf. 1 Corinthians 12:12-13),  integral members of the one true Church. Each of us has a vital place in the Church and a vital role in each other’s transformation in Christ:

“[T]he members should have the same care one for another. And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honoured, all the members rejoice with it.” (1 Corinthians 12:25-26)

Thus Adam, citing Scripture, explains that

“there is no grace that may be a purely personal possession, no blessing that does not belong to all.  “If the foot should say, Because I am not the hand, I am not of the body: is it therefore not of the body? And if the ear should say, Because I am not the eye, I am not of the body: is it therefore not of the body?” (1 Cor. xii, 15-16). The ultimate meaning of every vital Christian function lies precisely in its close relation to the complete organism, in its solidarity with the whole.” (Adam, chapter vii).

“And so it may happen,” Adam continues, “that,

though for the external history of the Body of Christ the activities of the structural organs, the official activities of pope or bishop, may be more manifest to the eye, yet the joyful poverty of a St. Francis of Assisi, the vigils of a St. Ignatius of Loyola and the charity of a St. Vincent de Paul may claim greater importance for its inner history, for the realization of the fullness of Christ.” (Adam, chapter vii)

The key phrase was the last, “the fullness of Christ”.  The expression comes from the Epistle of St. Paul to the Ephesians, where the Apostle declares that

“He put all things under His feet, and gave Him to be head over all things to the church, which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all.” (Ephesians 1:22-23, KJV).

Hence, the Church is the fullness or completion (Greek pleroma) of Christ. His saving action is inseparable from that of His Body the Church, to Whom He joins Himself as Bridegroom to Bride; and as we are members of the Body of Christ, so we can, by His grace, complete His work of saving the world and each other:

“Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I do my share on behalf of His body, which is the church, in filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions” (Colossians 1:24).

For this reason, indeed, St. Paul teaches that human action in the Church plays a key role in all our salvation,

“For the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ: Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Ephesians 4:12-13 KJV).

But isn’t this all pantheism? a non-Catholic might object, as indeed many objected when Tony Campolo affirmed the strongly communitarian (non-individualist) tenor of Scriptural teaching on the unity of believers.  We must answer that being of the Body of Christ does not make us essentially Divine, which is what pantheism means.  Rather, we partake of the Divine nature (2 St. Peter 1:4) and become children of the Father not in ourselves but by participation, because we share in the life and mission of Christ our Divine Lord.

“There is but one God, the Triune God, and every created thing lives in awe of His mystery. But this one God is a God of life and of love. So great, so superabundant is this love, that it… by the precious gift of sanctifying grace, summons [man] from his state of isolation to an unparalleled participation in the Divine Nature and in Its blessings, to a sort of active co-operation in the work of God, to effective initiative in the establishment of the Kingdom of God.” (Adam, chapter vii)

“The creature”, continues Adam, “remains always a creature and can co-operate in the work of salvation only through God’s power”, but–

“looking at the matter as a whole, the true Kingdom, whence comes all blessing, is not God alone, not the divine “One” (hen) alone, but the “One and all” (hen kai pan) or rather the totality of all the members whom Christ, their Head, introduces into the Divine Life of God, who is fruitful in His saints.” (Adam, chapter vii)

This is not absorption into God, nor mere imputation of justice to purely passive humanity, but grace-generated transformation in Christ with our active, free, grace-generated participation:

“[W]ork out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God which worketh in you” (Philippians 2:12-13 KJV).

This, says Adam, is the main difference between Protestantism and the Christian Faith of one true Church.  Protestantism pays lip-service to the Incarnation, yet continues to imagine the Lord our God as a totally transcendent deity, Who saves us without any participation by the human nature that Christ made one with His Divine Person.  But in response to the atomizing Protestant principle (the child of Nominalism’s union with St. Augustine’s residual Manicheanism) that we must not “absolutize” what is merely earthly, we affirm that human beings in all their weakness are, by grace, necessary co-participants in Christ’s saving work, because in Him the Word was made flesh (St. John 1:14), our flesh.  Therefore, Adam notes,

“The Catholic cannot think of the good God without thinking at the same time of the Word made Flesh, and of all His members who are united to Him by faith and love in a real unity. The God of Catholicism is the transcendent, absolute God, who became Man for us in His Son, and therefore no solitary God, but the God of angels and saints, the God of fruitfulness and abundance, the God who with a veritable divine folly by the incomprehensible decree of His most free Will takes up into Himself the whole creation that culminates in human nature, and in a new, unheard of supernatural manner, “lives in it,” “moves” in it, and in it “is” (cf. Acts xvii, 28)” (Adam, chapter vii)

We are the communion of saints, a consecrated people joined to the Church, the fullness of Christ, by baptism, the Eucharist (see St. John 6:53-56) and all her other sacramental actions, as well as her teaching (see 1 St. Timothy 3:15), guidance, and prayer. By thus joining us to His ecclesial Person, Christ joins us to the Father Who begets Him in eternity and the Spirit Who proceeds from the Father and Christ in eternity; and also to the Mother and the  People that begot him in time, to His relatives and friends in 1st century Palestine, to the saintly and sinful laity, rulers, nuns, priests, bishops,  popes Who became members of His Body over 2,000 years of very chequered and very sacred history.

“For I say, through the grace given unto me, to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think; but to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith. For as we have many members in one body, and all members have not the same office: So we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another. Having then gifts differing according to the grace that is given to us…” (Romans 12:3-6 KJV)

The holiness of any one of  us benefits all, and the sin of any member harms all (cf. 1 Corinthians 12:25-26), for we are joined to one another, as we are all joined to Christ.  Blessed be God in His angels and in His saints!

(All rights reserved. Reprinted (several times) from our 3 November 2009 post, with minor modifications, in honor of the beatification of Blessed John Paul II, Bishop of Rome. All quotations from The Spirit of Catholicism are taken from the online edition published on EWTN.com, copyright 1954 by Doubleday & Company, Inc.  All quotations from the King James Version are taken from the Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library.  We believe that our reproduction of non-substantial portions of the works for non-profit purposes constitutes fair use; but if we are mistaken, we stand ready to remove all objectionable content upon request. Deus vobiscum.)

To express our national unity and sovereignty, even as the Philippines proudly rattles its wee little saber over the (South China/West Philippine/Eastern/Southeast Asia) Sea, we must repudiate all nomenclature that reeks of foreign hegemony.

Take Pancit Canton, named after a province of China. Because it has become Filipino in character, we should rename it Freedom Noodles or Pancit Kalayaan. Thus will we defy the Chinese imperialists with an original gesture that owes nothing to the American imperialists’ repudiation of the French imperialists.

And Pancit Shanghai should be renamed Pancit de Masinloc. Viva las Islas Filipinas!

*But, kidding aside, we support the call of the Secretary of Foreign Affairs of the Philippines for a rules-based approach to the disputes in the ASEAN Sea; for the institutionalization of the rule of law, applying universal conventions (like UNCLOS and the Charter) and customary norms (particularly on friendly relations among states and the renunciation of war), will help ensure the peaceful resolution of disputes in the western Pacific littoral. We also advocate the establishment of a binding rule of conduct over title-owners and claimants, and the adoption of a multilateral approach based on the sovereign equality of states; and we oppose the attempt of any state to establish or re-establish any form of hegemony in the region.

Every time we proclaim the Apostles’ Creed, that most ancient summary of the Christian Faith, we declare our belief in “the communion of saints“. But what does this doctrine mean?

The best nutshell definition was given by the Latin theologian Hugh of St. Victor centuries before Dumas of the romances: singula sint omnium et omnia singulorum, one for all and all for one! a phrase that surely befits  the high adventure of Catholic truth.  Among modern thinkers, one of the best explanations of the communion of saints was written by Karl Adam in his (we dare say) magisterial work from the 1920′s, The Spirit of Catholicism, which is online on EWTN.com.  Thus does Adam, in chapter vii,  summarize the ancient Christian teaching:

“By this doctrine… [is meant] a community of spirit and of spiritual goods among the saints on earth, that is among all those who are incorporated by faith and love in the one Head, Christ. More than that, she means also the vital communion of these faithful Christians with all those souls who have passed out of the world in the love of Christ, and who either as blessed souls enjoy in glory the Vision of their God, or as souls in the state of purgation await that Vision… the whole mass of the redeemed, who in the various stages of development, as members of the militant, suffering or triumphant Church, are conjoined through their one Head, Jesus Christ, in one single family and fellowship, in one single sacred Body.” (Adam, chapter vii)

As may be seen from the foregoing, the communion of saints is not limited to Christians who have entered the glory of heaven–some of whom the one true Church publicly proclaims, or canonizes, to be worthy of honor and emulation–but includes all the “holy ones” (Latin sancti) of God in heaven, on earth, and in purgatory, living in Christ and in one another, suffering together and being saved together, an ever-flowing, ever-interceding communion of love in which–

“no good can be done, no virtue practiced by individual members, which does not redound also to the salvation of all” (Pope Pius XII, Mystici Corporis Christi, 89).

For in supernatural fact we are none of us isolated believers, lonely sinners “in the hands of an angry God” (pace Edwards).  Rather,  we are, by baptism into the body of Christ (cf. 1 Corinthians 12:12-13),  integral members of the one true Church. Each of us has a vital place in the Church and a vital role in each other’s transformation in Christ:

“[T]he members should have the same care one for another. And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honoured, all the members rejoice with it.” (1 Corinthians 12:25-26)

Thus Adam, citing Scripture, explains that

“there is no grace that may be a purely personal possession, no blessing that does not belong to all.  “If the foot should say, Because I am not the hand, I am not of the body: is it therefore not of the body? And if the ear should say, Because I am not the eye, I am not of the body: is it therefore not of the body?” (1 Cor. xii, 15-16). The ultimate meaning of every vital Christian function lies precisely in its close relation to the complete organism, in its solidarity with the whole.” (Adam, chapter vii).

“And so it may happen,” Adam continues, “that,

though for the external history of the Body of Christ the activities of the structural organs, the official activities of pope or bishop, may be more manifest to the eye, yet the joyful poverty of a St. Francis of Assisi, the vigils of a St. Ignatius of Loyola and the charity of a St. Vincent de Paul may claim greater importance for its inner history, for the realization of the fullness of Christ.” (Adam, chapter vii)

The key phrase was the last, “the fullness of Christ”.  The expression comes from the Epistle of St. Paul to the Ephesians, where the Apostle declares that

“He put all things under His feet, and gave Him to be head over all things to the church, which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all.” (Ephesians 1:22-23, KJV).

Hence, the Church is the fullness or completion (Greek pleroma) of Christ. His saving action is inseparable from that of His Body the Church, to Whom He joins Himself as Bridegroom to Bride; and as we are members of the Body of Christ, so we can, by His grace, complete His work of saving the world and each other:

“Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I do my share on behalf of His body, which is the church, in filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions” (Colossians 1:24).

For this reason, indeed, St. Paul teaches that human action in the Church plays a key role in all our salvation,

“For the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ: Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Ephesians 4:12-13 KJV).

But isn’t this all pantheism? an Evangelical might object, as indeed many objected when Tony Campolo affirmed the strongly communitarian (non-individualist) tenor of Scriptural teaching on the unity of believers.  We must answer that being of the Body of Christ does not make us essentially Divine, which is what pantheism means.  Rather, we partake of the Divine nature (2 St. Peter 1:4) and become children of the Father not in ourselves but by participation, because we share in the life and mission of Christ our Divine Lord.

“There is but one God, the Triune God, and every created thing lives in awe of His mystery. But this one God is a God of life and of love. So great, so superabundant is this love, that it… by the precious gift of sanctifying grace, summons [man] from his state of isolation to an unparalleled participation in the Divine Nature and in Its blessings, to a sort of active co-operation in the work of God, to effective initiative in the establishment of the Kingdom of God.” (Adam, chapter vii)

“The creature”, continues Adam, “remains always a creature and can co-operate in the work of salvation only through God’s power”, but–

“looking at the matter as a whole, the true Kingdom, whence comes all blessing, is not God alone, not the divine “One” (hen) alone, but the “One and all” (hen kai pan) or rather the totality of all the members whom Christ, their Head, introduces into the Divine Life of God, who is fruitful in His saints.” (Adam, chapter vii)

This is not absorption into God, nor mere imputation of justice to purely passive humanity, but grace-generated transformation in Christ with our active, free, grace-generated participation:

“[W]ork out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God which worketh in you” (Philippians 2:12-13 KJV).

This, says Adam, is the main difference between Protestantism and the Christian Faith of one true Church.  Protestantism pays lip-service to the Incarnation, yet continues to imagine the Lord our God as a totally transcendent deity, Who saves us without any participation by the human nature that Christ made one with His Divine Person.  But in response to the atomizing Protestant principle (the child of Nominalism’s union with St. Augustine’s residual Manicheanism) that we must not “absolutize” what is merely earthly, we affirm that human beings in all their weakness are, by grace, necessary co-participants in Christ’s saving work, because in Him the Word was made flesh (St. John 1:14), our flesh.  Therefore, Adam notes,

“The Catholic cannot think of the good God without thinking at the same time of the Word made Flesh, and of all His members who are united to Him by faith and love in a real unity. The God of Catholicism is the transcendent, absolute God, who became Man for us in His Son, and therefore no solitary God, but the God of angels and saints, the God of fruitfulness and abundance, the God who with a veritable divine folly by the incomprehensible decree of His most free Will takes up into Himself the whole creation that culminates in human nature, and in a new, unheard of supernatural manner, “lives in it,” “moves” in it, and in it “is” (cf. Acts xvii, 28)” (Adam, chapter vii)

We are the communion of saints, a consecrated people joined to the Church, the fullness of Christ, by baptism, the Eucharist (see St. John 6:53-56) and all her other sacramental actions, as well as her teaching (see 1 St. Timothy 3:15), guidance, and prayer. By thus joining us to His ecclesial Person, Christ joins us to the Father Who begets Him in eternity and the Spirit Who proceeds from the Father and Christ in eternity; and also to the Mother and the  People that begot him in time, to His relatives and friends in 1st century Palestine, to the saintly and sinful laity, rulers, nuns, priests, bishops,  popes Who became members of His Body over 2,000 years of very chequered and very sacred history.

“For I say, through the grace given unto me, to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think; but to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith. For as we have many members in one body, and all members have not the same office: So we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another. Having then gifts differing according to the grace that is given to us…” (Romans 12:3-6 KJV)

The holiness of any one of  us benefits all, and the sin of any member harms all (cf. 1 Corinthians 12:25-26), for we are joined to one another, as we are all joined to Christ.  We believe in the communion of saints!

(All rights reserved. Reprinted from our 3 November 2009 post, with minor modifications, in honor of the beatification of Blessed John Paul II, Bishop of Rome. All quotations from The Spirit of Catholicism are taken from the online edition published on EWTN.com, copyright 1954 by Doubleday & Company, Inc.  All quotations from the King James Version are taken from the Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library.  We believe that our reproduction of non-substantial portions of the works for non-profit purposes constitutes fair use; but if we are mistaken, we stand ready to remove all objectionable content upon request. Deus vobiscum.)

The mystery of the Resurrection is, to modern society, one of the most incomprehensible mysteries of Christianity. Modern society can understand the joy of Christmas, for the birth of Christ is easily analogous to our experience of beginnings, and appeals to our love of all things young and new and innocent. Even the Crucifixion, that stumbling-block and contradiction, can be understood as an expression of love in its highest, most sublime form–a love that gives without question and without reserve, the kind of love we immortalize even as we fall short of living it.

But the Resurrection of Our Lord? It seems to violate our apparent experiences, our scientific prejudices–for we know, or think we know, that what is dead cannot live anew, that what is lost is lost forever. We live one moment, and it is gone; the stream we pass through is never the same one to which we return. Our experience of life is that it is a series of fleeting, dying instants, a Heraclitean journey within a Heisenberg universe. As Pedro Calderon de la Barca once wrote, “life is but a dream, and dreams are but dreams.”

Yet I think this prejudice against renewed life is but the result of the limitations of our experiences as an urbanized society. In contrast, the ancients–except for St. Paul’s urbanely skeptical Areopagites–seems to have had less trouble with the idea of Resurrection because they retained the primeval closeness with nature; and nature is literally brimming with prophecies of the Easter mystery.

“WE have familiar experience of the order, the constancy, the perpetual renovation of the material world which surrounds us. Frail and transitory as is every part of it, restless and migratory as are its elements, never-ceasing as are its changes, still it abides. It is bound together by a law of permanence, it is set up in unity; and, though it is ever dying, it is ever coming to life again. Dissolution does but give birth to fresh modes of organization, and one death is the parent of a thousand lives. Each hour, as it comes, is but a testimony, how fleeting, yet how secure, how certain, is the great whole. It is like an image on the waters, which is ever the same, though the waters ever flow…” (John Henry Newman, “The Second Spring“, from Newman Reader.org)

The Church proclaims Christ as the Divine logos and Firstborn of all creation; and so, as C.S. Lewis wrote in his essay on Miracles, we see in the phenomena of nature so many anticipations and expressions of His life, death and resurrection. Little wonder that all the world before modern times found the Resurrection and its analogues so easy to integrate into their respective beliefs, for God gives creation as a general revelation and preparatio evangelica of His love and His promise: that He will give His only Son, and whoever believes in Him shall have everlasting life.

We moderns fail to see all this because have so divorced ourselves from creation that (as explained by Carolyn Merchant in her eco-feminist essay The Death of Nature) we have even replaced the organic cosmology of the Ancients and the Latins with a mechanistic view of the world. We thus treat nature as a thing to be exploited and otherwise ignored, rather than as a revelation of the invisible things of God, a mysterion that declares His glory and proclaims His handiwork.

But a way is opened even by mechanistic science, which shows us that the breakdown and decomposition of one thing is but the birth of another. The U-235 atom breaks up, and the fruit is Krypton and Barium and electromagnetic quanta (or waves, depending on your perspective); the sugars we imbibe are broken down into sources of chemical energy for forming proteins, the bricks that effectively make up our bodies. From the organisms that produce nitrates to the debris of a supernova, life is crucified and in dying makes new life, ever singing in a different way the joyful cry of the Easter liturgy: The Lord is Risen!

“Change upon change—yet one change cries out to another, like the alternate Seraphim, in praise and in glory of their Maker. The sun sinks to rise again; the day is swallowed up in the gloom of the night, to be born out of it, as fresh as if it had never been quenched. Spring passes into summer, and through summer and autumn into winter, only the more surely, by its own ultimate return, to triumph over that grave, towards which it resolutely hastened from its first hour. We mourn over the blossoms of May, because they are to wither; but we know, withal, that May is one day to have its revenge upon November, by the revolution of that solemn circle which never stops—which teaches us in our height of hope, ever to be sober, and in our depth of desolation, never to despair.” (John Henry Newman, “The Second Spring“, from Newman Reader.org)

Christ is Lord and God, and He is truly risen! And His Resurrection is both promise and fulfillment: It is His guarantee that we who live His truth and love even unto the Cross will share His new life; and it is His new life that we share when, baptized into His body (1 Corinthians 12:13), we join the communion of grace that is the Church, the fullness of the Risen Christ (cf. Ephesians 1:23). Thus, with groans too deep for words, all creation declares that the world is being made new, as we are being made new, because

“Christ has died! Christ is risen! Christ will return in glory!”

He has risen! Alleluiah! Alleluiah! And happy Easter to all!

(Re-published, with modifications, from our earlier post “Reminders for Lent: Mortification” dated February 23, 2009. Continued from Prayer)

Q1. What is mortification?

The New Catholic Encyclopaedia defines mortification as “the deliberate restraint that one places on natural impulses in order to make them increasingly subject to sanctification through obedience to reason illumined by faith”. To explain further: Mortification is a ‘deliberate restraint’ because it’s something we freely choose or accept for the sake of God. It involves ‘natural impulses’ because mortification is something we do in addition to avoiding sin¹; that is, through mortification we purify our desires even before they turn us to sin.

Q2. Why should we practice mortification?

This means that we should practice mortification for the following reasons:

1) It makes us better prepared to obey God. The presence of God in our souls is conditioned on our obedience to His commandments (St. John 15:10)–that is, our continued obedience (I St. John 2:24)–, “because the design of that mystery which was ordained for our restoration before the eternal ages, was not to be carried out without human weakness and without Divine power”². Hence, just as soldiers are drilled at peacetime that they may be ready to fight on the battlefield, so must we train our appetites to readily obey God what commands even in the midst of trial. “An ounce of self-denial will work miracles in a sluggard, cowardly soul.”³

2) It prepares us to resist temptation. Because of our first parents’ Fall, our appetites have a weakened capacity to do what God tells us is right. Therefore we must make our desires more ready to obey reason elevated by faith⁴; and the Scriptures tell us:

“Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth” (Colossians 3:5)

Otherwise, if we do not train our desires to self-denial, they may drag us to sin, even to sins that leads to spiritual death (1 John 5:16-17), which the Church therefore calls mortal sins. St. Paul the Apostle himself practiced self-discipline for this purpose, for he knew that, with his God-given freedom, he could sinfully reject his God-given salvation by grace:

“I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection: lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway” (I Corinthians 9:27).

3) It is a fit offering to God in union with Christ. Our Lord Jesus Christ is Himself the perfect and complete sacrifice to God. By baptism we become members of His Body (I Corinthians 12:13), the Church that completes His being (Ephesians 3:22-23); and thus we enter into His life (see Galatians 3:27), His death (Romans 6:3), and His resurrection⁵. Therefore He declares,

“If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me” (Luke 9:23).

Thus it is fitting that we make ourselves “a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God” (Romans 12:1). This is rooted in God’s free choice to join human freedom, which He gave to man and moves by His grace, to the completion of His sovereign purpose. Human beings in all their weakness are, by grace, necessary co-participants in Christ’s saving work, because in Him the Word was made flesh (St. John 1:14), our flesh. As explained by Karl Adam:

“There is but one God, the Triune God, and every created thing lives in awe of His mystery. But this one God is a God of life and of love. So great, so superabundant is this love, that it… by the precious gift of sanctifying grace, summons [man] from his state of isolation to an unparalleled participation in the Divine Nature and in Its blessings, to a sort of active co-operation in the work of God, to effective initiative in the establishment of the Kingdom of God.” (Spirit of Catholicism, chapter vii)

4) It contributes to our final salvation and to the saving purpose of the whole Church. Through mortification, we obey part of the Scriptures’ command to “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God which worketh in you” (Philippians 2:12-13 KJV). We also contribute to the welfare and salvation of the whole Church:

“For as we have many members in one body, and all members have not the same office: So we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another. Having then gifts differing according to the grace that is given to us…” (Romans 12:3-6 KJV)

Therefore the holiness of any one of  us benefits all, and the sin of any member harms all (cf. 1 Corinthians 12:25-26), for we are joined to one another, as we are all joined to Christ; and every merit of every Christian, obtained in Christ and by His grace, benefits the whole Church (see I Corinthians 12:13, 26), in communion with the merits of Christ. Thus the Apostle Paul tells us:

“I fill up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh for his body’s sake, which is the church” (Colossians 1:24).

Thus do we make ourselves and our brethren ready to join Christ’s offering of the Church to the Father (see I Corinthians 15:24):

“For the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ: Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Ephesians 4:12-13 KJV).

5) It is an act of repentance and a penance for sin. In the Scriptures, mortification such as fasting (see I Samuel 12:6) and the wearing of sackcloth (see Jonah 3:5) was the outward expression and sign of inner repentance. Thus Christ our Lord declares,

“Woe unto thee, Chorazin! woe unto thee, Bethsaida! for if the mighty works, which were done in you, had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes” (St. Matthew 11:21).

Therefore the one true Church affirms that “[b]y divine law all the faithful are required to do penance”⁶.

Q3. How should we practice mortification?

In light of the foregoing, we may remember the following considerations when we practice, as we ought to practice, mortification:

1) The practice of mortification must be accompanied by inner conversion and obedience to the other commandments of God, especially those on justice and charity, which must ever coincide with piety. Thus Our Lord told the Pharisees:

“[T]hese ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone” (St. Matthew 23:23).

2) We should begin our mortification not with the austerities that we ourselves have chosen, but rather, with the joyful fulfillment of our duties to God and neighbor, and by patiently making the sacrifices required by our daily lives. For our devotion begins not in some distant mission country but where we are right now, in our families and communities, amidst persons who bear the image and likeness of God Himself, but whose familiarity may perhaps lead us to take them for granted.

“Therefore the Church… insists first of all that the virtue of penitence be exercised in persevering faithfulness to the duties of one’s state in life, in the acceptance of the difficulties arising from one’s work and from human coexistence, in a patient bearing of the trials of earthly life and of the utter insecurity which pervades it… The Church, however, invites all Christians without distinction to respond to the divine precept of penitence by some voluntary act, apart from the renunciation imposed by the burdens of everyday life.”⁷

3) When we choose the austerities we add to our everyday mortifications, we must choose those that are appropriate to our circumstances and capacities⁸. (Note that, with God-given wisdom, the Church does not ordain a uniform discipline beyond the minimum of fasting and abstinence, but rather commands that we mortify ourselves “each in his or her own way.”⁹)

I submit that one fruitful way to determine the appropriate mortification is this: that we find out which is our strongest desire that is not either sinful (which we should avoid anyway) or a duty (which we may not avoid, such as being with our family, a source of joy that is also an obligation before God), and then to restrain that desire. For example, if we take great pleasure in the company of friends, then we may meet them less frequently during Lent. In my own case, because my delight in books brought me close to neglecting my duties, I was advised (and correctly, I think) to restrain my reading during a penitential period.

4) When choosing our discipline, it would be best–indeed, it would be indispensable–to seek the guidance of our spiritual director or superior if we have one, or any priest, religious, or lay leader whom we trust. This is the best means to be guided away from harmful austerities that would make us less able to do our lawful duties, as would happen if they are more severe than we require or can sustain, or otherwise do not fit our condition in life. As explained by St. Thomas Aquinas:

“The mortification of one’s own body, for instance by vigils and fasting, is not acceptable to God except in so far as it is an act of virtue; and this depends on its being done with due discretion, namely, that concupiscence be curbed without overburdening nature… Since, however, man is easily mistaken in judging of matters concerning himself, such vows as these are more fittingly kept or disregarded according to the judgment of a superior”¹⁰

Needless to say, we must obey the guidance that our spiritual director or senior in Christian life gives to us, even if it seems ill-fitted to our desires. As with prayer, mortification requires the dispositions of love and humility; and there is no greater danger in mortification than pride, which may even lead us to think ourselves better than others because of our austerities (as the Flagellants did in the 14^th century¹¹). The best antidote to such pride is continued obedience, both in the will and the understanding, to God and to His representatives in the Church (see Luke 10:16), including our spiritual director or superior; for let us remember, beyond all austerities of mind and body, it is the submission of our proud wills that constitutes the truest mortification¹².

5) I submit that mortification is best done in conjunction with the liturgy, especially in the sacrament of confession and in the Divine Liturgy of the Mass. The liturgy is the communal prayer of the Church, which desires that “all may be joined together in a certain common practice of penance”¹³; and mortification in harmony with the liturgy manifests the communal reality of the Church–that is, that grace and salvation are not bestowed upon isolated individuals but on persons united with Christ as one Church. For we are the communion of saints, a consecrated people joined to the Church, the fullness of Christ, by baptism, the Eucharist (see St. John 6:53-56) and all her other sacramental actions, as well as her teaching (see 1 St. Timothy 3:15), guidance, and prayer.

“Since the Church is closely linked to Christ, the penitence of the individual Christian also has an intimate relationship of its own with the whole ecclesial community. In fact, not only does he receive in the bosom of the Church through baptism the fundamental gift of ‘metanoia,’ but this gift is restored and reinvigorated, through the sacrament of penance, in those members of the Body of Christ who have fallen into sin… And in the Church, finally, the little acts of penitence imposed each time in the sacrament become a form of participation in a special way in the infinite expiation of Christ to join to the sacramental satisfaction itself every other action he performs, his every suffering and sorrow.”¹⁴

If there is error in the foregoing, I beg the reader to correct me; and in any case, I submit without reservation to the teaching office of the Church. May God bless us all.

Continued in Fasting and Abstinence.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

—–

1 St. Augustine, Reply to Faustus, xxx, 6.

2 Pope St. Leo I, Sermo LIV.

3 John H. Stapleton, Explanation of Catholic Morals (New York: Benzinger, 1904), chap. lxxx

4 Pope Leo XIII, Encyclical “Exeunte Iam Anno”, no. 11, December 25, 1888.

5 Pope Paul VI, Apostolic Constitution “Paenitemini”, February 17, 1966, chap. i

6 Pope Paul VI, Apostolic Constitution “Paenitemini”, February 17, 1966. See also the Code of Canon Law, canon 1249.

7 Pope Paul VI, Apostolic Constitution “Paenitemini”, February 17, 1966, chap. iii.

8 See St. Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life, trans. John K. Ryan (Garden City, NY: Image, 1966), p. 43-44.

9 Code of Canon Law, canon 1249.

10 S. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 2a 2ae, q. 88, art. 2, ad 3.

11 See Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (New York, Oxford U.P., 1970), p. 137

12 St. Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life, trans. John K. Ryan (Garden City, NY: Image, 1966), p. 45-46.

13 Code of Canon Law, canon 1249

14 Pope Paul VI, Apostolic Constitution “Paenitemini”, February 17, 1966, chap. i.

Sources explain that the North Koreans did try to plant similar agents as early as 2004, but that they were usually detected whenever they chose the Zerg race in tournaments and resorted to “newbie rushes” across the map.

“I wouldn’t have expected silent_killer69 to be a North Korean spy,” narrates one tournament competitor. “He was using Terran surgical strikes, a combination of Siege Tank-Marine-Medic advance, and aggressive economic building [which] was uncharacteristic of how NKs usually play. I was really surprised when the news came out.”

One wonders if it is really too incredible, given the apparent lack of adaequatio between some policies of Kim Jong Il and, well, objective reality. (Or is it the case that he’s really ultra-brilliant in a Dark Knight Joker sort of way?)

This reminds us of Chesterton’s definition of insanity as the absence of anything but reason: a reason so closed in upon itself that it has ceased to be open to truth; that is, it has ceased to be rational. To be sure, the definition includes all forms of fundamentalism, be it rationalism (the denial of “non-empirical” knowledge, as though human values like love and justice themselves were empirical), secularism and modernism (the denial of transcendent values for socially acceptable shibboleths) and Evangelicalism (the idolatrous disregard for any truth outside the written word–as though the written word did not tell us to ‘hear’ as well as ‘read’, Luke 10:16). But it also includes the State when it forgets that its power is subject to a law higher than itself. As Pope Pius XI declared against Hitler:

Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community – however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things – whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God

Thus the insanity of Kim Jong Il.

But seriousness aside, the post I linked is funny in a geeky-gamer way…

770 years ago, Pope Gregory IX ruled that beer cannot be used for baptism instead of water. From Catholic eBooks Project:

“Unfortunately, the Scriptures don’t interpret themselves (see 2 Peter 3:16). Thus, some time in the 13th century, someone slightly misinterpreted the Biblical teaching on being reborn of water and the Spirit. Therefore the Pope was forced to lay down the law:

“’Since as we have learned from your report, it sometimes happens because of the scarcity of water, that infants of your lands are baptized in beer [!], we reply to you in the tenor of those present that, since according to evangelical doctrine it is necessary “to be reborn from water and the Holy Spirit” [John 3:5] they are not to be considered rightly baptized who are baptized in beer.” (From the letter Cum, sicut ex of Pope Gregory IX [in office 1227-1241] to Archbishop Sigurd of Nidaros, July 8, 1241, in Denzinger 447*. Boldface mine.)

“…  for the sake of those poor children, I thank Christ our Lord that He gave us the Church to stand for truth (1 Timothy 3:15), and the rock of St. Peter (Matthew 16:18) to confirm our faith (Luke 22:32)… even in the small things”

My one-person parallel magisterium hereby DISSENTS from the above-quoted teaching, for the following reasons:

First, the Pope’s prohibition against baptizing with beer was not an infallible exercise of the extraordinary magisterium. Therefore, I can follow my conscience and use beer for baptism.

Second, the Pope assumed antiquated Platonist essentialism and Aristotelian physicalism to differentiate beer from water. But modern science shows that beer is at least 90% water, and experts don’t agree on what minimum molarity of water is required for water to remain water. So the “actual” distinction between beer and water is, in “truth”, nothing but an arbitrary logocentric convention imposed by the hegemonic elite that controls the dominant semantic discourse. Therefore, to be liberated from socially constructed “reality”, we should use beer as baptismal water.

Third, many of today’s Christians drink beer like it was water, making these liquids phenomenologically equivalent. Therefore, the institutional Church should follow the sense of the faithful (sensus fidelium) and baptize with beer.

Fourth, the Pope was an Italian who probably drank wine as the Apostles advised (1 Timothy 5:23). What does he know of my life and my needs as a beer-lover, that he presumes to judge my desire to use liturgical beer?

Fifth, the Popes have no business keeping beer out of baptism, when they can’t even keep sexual abuse scandals out of the priesthood. The Pope‘s apologies, his decrees to strictly police clergy ranks, his tighter standards for ordination, his championing of prayer and ascetic self-discipline for priests, his punishment of prominent Church leaders, his admission of non-clergy to high positions; his visitations/investigations and other measures to make the clergy accountable–these are NOT enough. The Pope still hasn’t done real reform like letting us choose whether we want to be baptized with tequila or beer, or to have our Mass by our bartender: in short, he hasn’t overhauled Catholic dogma from its outdated God-centeredness to modern me-principle. Until the Church has done enough, it has no moral authority to judge my use of baptismal beer.

Sixth, the population explosion, which objective science has informed us is actually happening, has increased demand for fresh water. Also, beer has alcohol whose disinfectant properties can help fight modern pandemics. So it’s more humane, considerate, and compassionate to use beer in baptism. By not doing it, the Popes are to blame for drought and disease.

Seventh, the Pope is keeping people away from the Church, with his preconciliar idea that the Church must stand for principle amid the secular world. But applying “meaningful and  love-centered postconciliar and postmodern ecumenical theology” (theologia invertebrata merdataurana misinterpretativaque egocentrica atque vacua)*, if we baptized with beer, billions would sign up to convert overnight. Therefore we must drop the purity-fetish on baptismal water and baptize with beer.

*(We thank Fr. Charles Edouard, SD for this beautiful phrase, from his classics Theology of Accommodation: a New Faith for a New Audience (Sodalitas Domini Press, 1985) and Dissent for Showmanship: Refounding Christianity to Ingratiate with the World (co-written with Fr. Hansel Koenig. Anthony Mary Publications, 1991). Both works testify to the intellectual courage of a remarkable man.)

Eighth, the Bible was written by pastoral people whose use of water in baptism was specific to their culture. But we should follow the innovating spirit of the last ecumenical council, whose most progressive interpreters have brought such renewal to the Church. So, rather than perpetuate an outdated tradition, we should subject it to a functional critique and modernize the liturgy by baptizing with beer.

Ninth, the Biblical writers–all males–required water for baptism to exclude wymyn power; for herstory shows that wymyn dominated the pre-Christian orgiastic cults that used intoxicating substances in initiation rites. Also, the very existence of the prohibition against baptismal beer, which is herstorically directed toward males, shows the male-orientedness of Church policy. To protect wymyn’s dignity and fight the patriarchy, we should baptize converts and catechumyn with beer.

Tenth, using water for baptism shows the effeminate slave morality that, according to Nietzsche, is perpetuated by Christianity. Everybody knows masterful men would prefer baptism with strong beer.

Eleventh, the Pope’s ruling cited the Gospel of John. But modern biblical scholars, who have doctorates in textual and form criticism and therefore know better than all the ancient witnesses (including Irenaeus, the student of the John’s pupil Polycarp), question that Gospel’s authorship by the John the Apostle. So we can’t be sure if the historical John’s record really said ‘water’ and not ‘beer’. Therefore the Pope’s ruling is uncertain, and we can baptize with beer.

Twelfth, the Pope based his non-diachronic ruling on the idea of baptismal regeneration with “water and the Holy Spirit” is the Christian rite of initiation. But this disregards the dialectical relationships of the apostles and their communities within the Nazarene Movement. In this case, the Johannine alliance’s choice of water-baptism (supported by the deutero-Pauline coalition) is obviously contradicted by the preference for river-water-baptism–and therefore water-and-suspended-river-particulates-baptism (!)–of the united federation of Petrine-Jacobean churches and the common extra-Marcan source of the Mattheo-Lucan armada. Clearly, the Pope wrongly interprets the Bible as a unitary whole in light of apostolic tradition, on the simplistic basis that it was the same God who inspired the Biblical writers and lives in the Church. While modern experts are still reconstructing the Biblical books with their personal deconstructive paradigms, we may ignore the Pope and use beer-baptism as a rite of initiation.

Thirteenth, the Pope and bishops who codified the Biblical books deliberately excluded the secret gnosis of Heinekensis of Henessios, whose alternate Christianity was less narrow-minded on liturgical beer. The Catholics triumphed only because they connived with Constantine to set the councils in the morning when the Heinekensians were still sleeping off their hangover (as revealed to me by my spirit guide Colt the 45th Ascended Master).

Fourteenth, it’s the interiority of my faith that counts, not the physical matter and form of the sacraments. So if I truly believe, then it’s perfectly okay if I get baptized with beer.

Fifteenth, Christianity isn’t about religion with its dogmas and do’s and don’ts, but about relationship; and I’d feel happier with God if I was baptized with beer.

Lastly, under the principle of totality, we should look at the whole Christian life and not at particular wrong acts. In my case, using beer for baptism would deepen my Christian life, for then I’d renew my baptism everyday.

Therefore, on exegetical, historical-critical, theological, pastoral, missiological, ecclesiological, epidemiological, semio-linguistic, scientific, phenomenological, anthropological, gender-egalitarian, epistemological, and faith-based grounds, I dissent from the Pope’s ruling against baptism with beer. I have also established Catholics for Baptismal Choice (CBC), a non-profit, non-stock, tax-shelter (501c) people’s organization, to pressure the hierarchy to relax its rigorist stance against baptismal beer.

Our manifesto “Baptism of Human’s Desiring: A Theo-Historical Semiosis of the ‘Waters of Life’ in Scriptural Text and Context” has been published on Chamelium, the journal for cutting-edge theology, and will appear in abridged form on the progressive magazines Conformwill and United States. Help us petition Message and Ministry Review, Apostle, and Prime Matters to publish the manifesto without amendments. Unfortunately, it was rejected by Sensus Communis, the conservative journal, because we refused to let their editorial demands threatened our uncompromised independence.

Yours sincerely,

Johannes Edouard Chaplin

With special thanks to our corporate sponsors, on whose support we completely rely. We also thank our grassroots partners who have fed us our much-needed lines: Americans for Dividing Principle from Power (ADPP), Profitable Non-Godparenthood Federation (KKK), New World Catholic Synod, Voice of the Expanding Agenda (VOTE-A), and Stoneraiser Foundation.

(This is reposted and slightly abridged from our original post, “In Criticism of Easth Hour“)

With due respect to the advocates of Earth Hour (in solidarity with whom our own family too will turn off all lights and equipment), we submit that the Earth Hour Movement is harmful to the goals of environmentalism. For it diverts people’s attention towards a symbolic non-solution and away from the real source of, and the real solution to, the ecological problems faced by humanity at large. We do not say this to detract from the real achievements of the movements for environmental reform, nor to deny the undoubted good faith of its proponents and organizers, but to warn against the dangers posed by false directions for activism.

And what is the real source of the problem? It is the unsustainable and immoderate (and we submit, catastrophically immoderate) consumption and production patterns engendered by contemporary industrial capitalism. To explain:

The Real Problem: Capitalist Patterns of Consumption and Production

The ecological problem, in sum, lies in the negative effects of the physical, chemical, and biological transformations in the non-human environment caused by human material activity. Without entering into the controversies on certain cases (for example, on the proportional relationship of anthropogenic CO₂ emission to rising atmospheric temperatures), we may acknowledge the negative effects that some of these transformations pose to human beings and their environment.

Therefore, whatever contributes to the increase in such material activity would also contribute to the increase of environmental transformation. Seen on a per capita (or per individual) basis, the most important cause of its increase in modern times has been the immoderate material consumption and production patterns that prevail in modern industrial capitalist societies. This is by no means a unique or novel idea, and it may be seen even in our experiences as consuming individuals, families, and other groups such as societies.

For instance, with surplus income we buy a new computer, mobile phone, or other electronic product, or a new car, appliance, or other ware–even though our legitimate duties as parents, merchants, employees, etc. do not actually require the new product or the increased speed and number of features it promises. Hence, if we objectively look at how we consume in industrial capitalist societies, we will see that our material-use patterns have the following general characteristics:

1. We purchase newer products without regard for their objective value or their real contribution to material and non-material betterment;
2. We discard older products without regard for their remaining utility (“Nah, it’s old; get rid of it”);
3. We accumulate material products without regard for their objective necessity, and limited only by our capacity to purchase them and to store them (“Can I afford it? “Where will I put it?”);
4. We uncritically use, as standards for such purchasing and discarding, the increased amount (such as the use of aggregate and per capita GDP as the index of an economy’s “health”), speed, short-term pleasure, “convenience” they supposedly provide;
5. We uncritically obey social and technological trends in material consumption, without examining them based on a standard other than the trend itself;
6. We are willing to listen to biased sources like advertising and corporate-backed media for product information; and, perhaps worst of all,
7. We often avoid social uses of surplus income–such as giving to an impoverished family, to desperately ill persons, or to an organization or effort that would help them.

In sum, our material culture manifests (a) the absence of objective limiting standards other than capacity, and (b) the prevalence of subjective and self-directed standards of consumption and possession that have no real relation to the material health, psychological happiness, and spiritual growth of individuals, families, and other groups. This means the absence of any self-limitation: material consumption and production have no barrier to indefinite constant increase.

Is in any wonder, then, that the United States has 25% of the world’s CO₂ emissions with only 5% of its population? Note how the American media is massively polluted by advertising and other marketing strategies that often use emotional, sexual, or social pressure–in a word, propaganda–to manufacture the “need” for things that have no qualitative benefit, things that do not actually make us healthier, happier or better in ourselves, or help us to help other people.

If we might so add, we also submit that we will see a continued global per capita increase in material consumption and production in the long term. Capitalist societies will not renounce capitalism in the foreseeable future (notwithstanding the present financial crisis, which will end in a return to former material-use patterns when money becomes less tight), so their material-use will remain constant. However, new countries are adopting American-style capitalism and its patterns of material consumption and production, including Western marketing strategies, which will increase their per capita consumption.

In light of these trends, we will also see a continued increase in quantitative environmental transformations (especially macro-ecological ones like CO2 concentrations), though recycling and other byproduct-processing methods might cause a reduction in the rate of qualitative (especially micro-ecological) transformations.

The Real Solution: Reject Capitalism in its Present Form

Hence, if our per capita consumption and production pattern is the primary cause of increased quantitative and, especially, macro-ecological environmental transformations with their attendant problems, then what is the real solution? The solution is a sustained global and local effort to moderate consumption and production patterns in capitalist countries; to propagate objective limiting standards for the purchase of products and their use; and, more fundamentally, to combat “consumptionist” ideologies that set up material activity and accumulation, or “success”, as the primary standard of human value. In short, the solution to environmental problems is to promote a general change in thought and behavior relative to material action and use.

Any other solution is bound to be useless. Such useless pseudo-solutions include tree planting (which has little effect on global CO₂ reduction, which is more dependent on marine plankton activity anyway) and turning off lights for a mere hour, if we do not also tell ourselves not to buy a new iPad or Droid, a flashy new Toyota or a Chrysler SUV, or a new amplifier unless we objectively need it for our legitimate responsibilities. Every such product has a carbon footprint, which is especially large in highly technical goods because of the sheer amount of energy and wastage involved in making them. Has anyone computed how many joules or BTUs it takes to manufacture a single dual core microprocessor from raw silica? And what about telling people to stop driving cars or to drive less if they have alternative transport?

This includes even population control; for, considering that 5% of the world’s people produce 25% of its Greenhouse gases, how we influence the environment depends less on our number than on our behavior. If we go on buying more and newer at the same rate, and in an increasing number of countries, then even with a population one-tenth of today we will still have global warming. However, if we limit our consumption to what we need, use our surplus money to benefit the destitute, and re-adopt non-materialistic ideologies that deny the primacy of wealth and social standing as values, then even with a population ten times of today we may have sustainable patterns of material use.

Unless we actually change our buying and using behavior, any other “solution” is, in fact, worse than useless, because it diverts our energies while achieving nothing of any objective value. On this score, the 60′s social movements like hippie culture was better than some modern environmentalism: the 60′s emphasized behavior and ideology, but modern ecologism ignores them, and therefore misses the point.

So why aren’t we pursuing the real solution? Why do we resort to useless gestures like Earth Hour and tree planting and diversionary issues like population? Simply, we do not want to change our thinking or our behavior. We are willing to turn out the lights for an hour, or to have fewer children, because these do not demand any self-discipline or denial on our part. We neuter the poor to make people fewer, because we do not want to admit that it is we, the moneyed, who are destroying the earth with our self-indulgent and wasteful ways! We want to continue on our merry way, buying and consuming whatever we want, and we expect the environment to be righted without our making any REAL sacrifices ourselves.

Yet how, for instance, would the targets in the Kyoto Protocol be achieved without people opting en masse for public transport and rejecting private cars, or simply saying ‘no’ when Steve Jobs, his successor, or his competitor proposes to further expand our iLife? If we buy an a Droid when our old unit is still working, or an iPad if our desktop is still serviceable; if we get a car to look cool, or new clothes to look hot, when we’ve never had problems with taking the bus and using our old wardrobe—then it is we who are destroying the earth. Let’s not blame anyone else.

To conclude: Environmentalism will achieve nothing, and certainly no reform* of ecological transformation, unless we stop worshiping products and technologies for their own sake (wanting more and newer and embracing bigger and more “advanced”), and instead see material things as a means–as an aid to BEING better and loving more rather than as a primary value in themselves. In the end, then, we can save the world of matter only if we reach beyond it to the spirit, and we can make material activity “ecological” only if we reject materialism and prioritize the non-material and trans-ecological value of seeking and contemplating the holy and true, the good and beautiful. The old philosophies and religions across the centuries, even in the West before it turned greedy and gluttonous, told us to flee material things: maybe it’s time we took their message seriously.

Needless to say, if we have erred anywhere here, Dear Reader, we beg your pardon and would welcome your due correction.

May God bless us all.

*We use ‘reform’ and not ‘stop’, because not all ecological transformation is necessarily evil.

We share the following prayer against disasters/calamities in view of the recent disasters in Japan, China, New Zealand, which brought death and misery to thousands of our fellow human beings, and in obedience to Pope Benedict XVI’s call to pray for the victims. The prayer had been ordained by a Christian community after the loss of life caused by tropical storm Ondoy/Ketsana in northern Philippines*, and is text is reproduced thus from the weblog of Pinoy Catholic:

Oh God our Father:

In faith we acknowledge Your paternal care over us, Your sons, daughters and children. In hope we trust in Your divine providence of giving us wisdom and courage as we face the challenges in life. In love we invoke Your help and guidance during these difficult days of death and destruction in our dear country.

Our is a prayer of thanksgiving for once again reminding us that ours is an imperfect world, that heaven is not on earth, and that nature every now and then tells us not to abuse her. Ours too is a prayer of repentance for calling upon You when we are in need and desperation but forgetting You in favourable times and pleasing occasions. Ours as well is a prayer of petition as we say:

Grant eternal peace to those who lost their lives. Embrace the children who died in their innocence. Help those who are hurt and cure those who are sick.

Encourage those who suffer the destruction of their homes and properties, and to once again stand up and rebuild their future.

Bless all those who extend their helping hands to those in need of food, shelter and clothing, who share their time, talents and resources with others.

Inspire more people to be men and women for their neighbors, convinced that the more they are for others, the taller they stand before you.

Spare us please from other natural disasters and devastations if this be according to Your will and for our own spiritual good and growth.

[Through Christ our Lord. Amen]

As quoted by the Catholic News Service, the bishop of Rome, Pope Benedict XVI, has called thus for prayers and for solidarity with the victims:

“May the bereaved and injured be comforted and may the rescue workers be strengthened in their efforts to assist the courageous Japanese people… I want to renew my spiritual closeness to that country’s dear people, who with dignity and courage are dealing with the consequences of the calamity. I pray for the victims and their families and for all who are suffering because of these terrible events. I encourage all those who, with laudable speed, are working to bring help. Let us remain united in prayer.”

Therefore, let us all pray for the victims of the disasters in Japan, China, and New Zealand, and for the brave men and women who are helping them, particularly the fifty anonymous heroes who struggled for days amid fluctuating  radiation levels to stop the ongoing nuclear malfunction in Japan. Let us pray that the nuclear malfunction may end without further casualties; and let us do so in faith, for, as the angel assured our Blessed Mother, “with God nothing is impossible” (St. Luke 1:37). And let us not forget to  pray for the victims when we assist in the most holy Sacrifice of the Mass, where Christ becomes truly present to unite us to Himself as one body, and where our prayers are united in the offering of His love.

Let us also give what aid we can to those who lost family and friends, especially the newly orphaned children, those whose homes and means of livelihood were destroyed, and those who are even now in danger from new threats. Already the Pope has given aid through the Japanese bishops’ conference, despite the Roman see’s own dependence on (essentially uncertain) donations and its years-long budget deficit, joined by Christians throughout Asia. As members of the one true Church, baptized into the body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12:13), we are called in grace to love as Christ loved us (St. John 13:34), and to aid the needy through whom we serve our suffering Lord (St. Matthew 25:31–46).

May God bless us all.

*Background on the prayer: The outgoing Lingayen-Dagupan Archbishop enjoined his flock to pray this oratio imperata for the victims of the Ondoy/Ketsana disaster. ‘Oratio imperata’ literally means an ‘ordained/commanded prayer’ (from the Latin oratio, ‘prayer’ and imperare, ‘to command’); in the usage of the one true Church (cf. Catholic Culture, citing John A. Hardon, S.J.), an oratio imperata is a special prayer, not otherwise included in the liturgy, that the Pope or the local ordinary may direct to be said at the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. It is therefore not an official prayer of the one true Church, except in the diocese or eparchy where its praying is ordained by the bishop, but it remains a prayer of faith, especially when Christians offer it together.

Tumingin ang PSG sa lalaki at sumagot, “‘Tay, hindi na po Presidente si Gloria at wala na siya dito.”

Sabi ng matandang lalaki, “Sige, iho, salamat”, at lumakad papalayo.

Kinabukasan, bumalik ang lalaki sa Gate 1 ng Malacanang at sinabi sa parehong opisyal ng PSG, “Iho, gusto ko lang  makausap si Presidente Gloria.”

Sabi ulit ng PSG sa lalaki, “‘Tay, gaya po ng sabi ko kahapon, hindi na po Presidente si Gloria at wala na siya dito.”

Nagpasalamat muli ang lalaki at lumakad papalayo.

Nang sumunod na araw, bumalik ang matandang lalaki sa Gate 1 ng Malacanang at sinabi uli sa parehong opisyal ng PSG, “Iho, gusto ko lang makausap si Presidente Gloria.”

Medyo nainis na ang nakabantay na PSG, kaya sinabi niya sa lalaki, “Tatay, pangatlong araw na kayong bumalik dito para kausapin si Presidente Gloria.  Sinabi ko na po na hindi na Presidente si Gloria at wala na siya dito. Naiintindihan niyo po ba?”

Ngumiti ang matandang lalaki at sumagot, “Oo, iho, naiintindihan ko.  Kaya lang kasi, ang sarap pakinggan.”

Sumaludo ang opisyal ng PSG at sinabi, “Bukas ulit, sir.”

*Adapted and translated (not entirely literally) from a Gordon Brown joke posted by a commenter on The Times Online.  Note that it has anti-Obama (and no doubt anti-Dubya) versions as well.

**See also “Remembering Ninoy Aquino“

The Lord is Risen! Alleluia! He is truly risen! Alleluia! Alleluia!

The mystery of the Resurrection is, to modern society, one of the most incomprehensible mysteries of Christianity. Modern society can understand the joy of Christmas, for the birth of Christ is easily analogous to our experience of beginnings, and appeals to our love of all things young and new and innocent. Even the Crucifixion, that stumbling-block and contradiction, can be understood as an expression of love in its highest, most sublime form–a love that gives without question and without reserve, the kind of love we immortalize even as we fall short of living it.

But the Resurrection of Our Lord? It seems to violate our apparent experiences, our empiricist prejudices–for we know, or think we know, that what is dead cannot live anew, that what is lost is lost forever. We view life as a series of fleeting, dying instants, a Heraclitean journey within a Heisenberg universe. We live one moment, and it is gone; the stream we pass through is never the same one to which we return. In the words of Pedro Calderon de la Barca, la vida es sueño, y los sueños, sueños son. “Life is but a dream, and dreams are but dreams.”*

Yet I think this prejudice against renewed life is but the result of the limitations of our experiences as an urbanized society of  individuals increasingly isolated from God, nature, society, and ourselves. In contrast, the ancients–except for St. Paul’s urbanely skeptical Areopagites–seems to have had less trouble with the idea of Resurrection because they retained the primeval closeness with nature; and nature is literally brimming with prophecies of the Easter mystery.  As the John Henry Newman pointed out in his homily “The Second Spring“,

“WE have familiar experience of the order, the constancy, the perpetual renovation of the material world which surrounds us. Frail and transitory as is every part of it, restless and migratory as are its elements, never-ceasing as are its changes, still it abides. It is bound together by a law of permanence, it is set up in unity; and, though it is ever dying, it is ever coming to life again. Dissolution does but give birth to fresh modes of organization, and one death is the parent of a thousand lives. Each hour, as it comes, is but a testimony, how fleeting, yet how secure, how certain, is the great whole. It is like an image on the waters, which is ever the same, though the waters ever flow…”**

The one true Church proclaims Christ as the Divine logos and Firstborn of all creation; and so, as C.S. Lewis wrote in his essay on Miracles, we see in the phenomena of nature so many anticipations and expressions of His life, death and resurrection. Little wonder that all the world before modern times found the Resurrection and its analogues so easy to integrate into their respective beliefs, for God makes creation preambula fidei, a general revelation and of His love and His promise–that He will give His only Son, that whoever believes in Him, receives Him and perseveres in Him may have everlasting life.***

We moderns fail to see all this because have so divorced ourselves from creation that (as explained by Carolyn Merchant in her eco-feminist essay The Death of Nature) we have even replaced the organic cosmology of the Ancients and the Medieval Latins with a mechanistic view of the world. We thus treat nature as a thing to be exploited and otherwise ignored rather than as a revelation of the invisible things of God, a mysterion worthy of reverent contemplation, which declares His glory and proclaims His handiwork.

But a way is opened even by mechanistic science, which shows us that the breakdown and decomposition of one thing is but the birth of another. The U-235 atom breaks up, and the fruit is Krypton and Barium and electromagnetic quanta (or waves, depending on your perspective); the sugars we imbibe are broken down into sources of chemical energy for forming proteins, the bricks that effectively make up our bodies. From the organisms that produce nitrates to the debris of a supernova, life is crucified and in dying makes new life, ever singing in a different way the joyful cry of the Easter liturgy: The Lord is Risen!

“Change upon change—yet one change cries out to another, like the alternate Seraphim, in praise and in glory of their Maker. The sun sinks to rise again; the day is swallowed up in the gloom of the night, to be born out of it, as fresh as if it had never been quenched. Spring passes into summer, and through summer and autumn into winter, only the more surely, by its own ultimate return, to triumph over that grave, towards which it resolutely hastened from its first hour…” (John Henry Newman)**

Christ is Lord and God, and He is truly risen! And His Resurrection is both promise and fulfillment: It is His guarantee that we who live His truth and love even unto the Cross will share His new life; and it is itself His new life being shared with us through the sacraments of His Church, which is the body and fullness of Christ (cf. Ephesians 1:23). Thus, with groans too deep for words, all creation declares that the world is being made new, as we are being made new, because

“Christ has died! Christ is risen! Christ will return in glory!”

He has risen! Alleluiah! Alleluiah! And happy Easter to all!

*La vida es sueño, Act II. The quoted line is from Wikipedia, corrected according to the online text on Ciudad Seva.  The translation is likewise from Wikipedia.

**The quotations from John Henry Newman‘s homily “The Second Spring” are from the online text on Newman Reader.org.

***Believes in, St. John 3:16; receives, St. John 6:51; perseveres, St. Matthew 24:13.

N.B., All quotations are made in a manner that this blogger believes is consistent with fair use.  Should the blogger be in error, or if it is otherwise necessary to remove the texts, please notify the blogger immediately by comment or by email that the offending passages may be taken down.

Tomorrow, February 17, 2010, is Ash Wednesday, on which day the season of Lent will begin for Catholics of the Latin Rite.  For most Catholics of the Eastern Rites, the season of Great Lent began yesterday on Clean Monday, February 15, 2010.  The two lungs of the Church, as  His Holiness Pope John Paul II had called western and eastern Christendom, consider Lent a penitential season, a time to repent of our sins, to prepare to renew the vows of our baptism, to meditate on the sufferings and death of Christ our Lord, and to prepare to celebrate the festival of His Resurrection.

In the devotional tradition of the Church, fasting (and abstinence) constitute one of the three pillars of Lenten observance, alonside prayer and almsgiving.  (For more, please see also our post on prayer.)  Thus, fasting and abstinence are mandated for Catholics of the Latin Rite on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, and abstinence is mandated many other days.  (See our summary of the underlined norms below.)  But what is the purpose of these practices?  What is their relevance to our lives as Christians of the one true Church?

I. Understanding fasting and abstinence

Fasting, the reduced intake of food and drink, and abstinence, the avoidance on certain days of certain categories of food, are the most frequently used modes of mortification in Christianity.  (For more, please see our post on mortification.) And with good reason, for they are the bodily bass that makes tangible the soaring sopranos of prayer. For human beings are meant to be creatures of both spirit and body, both in this world and in the world to be ushered in when Christ returns. Therefore, when we pray, we must do so with our bodies as well as our souls, making our bodies “a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God” (Romans 12:1), filling up in our flesh “that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ” (Colossians 1:24). We kneel and bow with our bodies, even as our souls acknowledge the kingship of God; we raise our hands, even as we lift up our hearts. In the words of St. Thomas Aquinas,

“Man’s good is threefold. There is first his soul’s good which is offered to God in a certain inward sacrifice by devotion, prayer and other like interior acts: and this is the principal sacrifice. The second is his body’s good, which is, so to speak, offered to God in martyrdom, and abstinence or continency…”[1]

Hence the aptness of accompanying prayer with fasting and abstinence; for as food is one of our most basic bodily needs, to deny ourselves of nourishment is to express our fundamental allegiance to God. It shows that He is more important to us than even our earthly lives, that we would gladly sacrifice all to follow Him (see St. Matthew 16:24). Also, to deny ourselves of the food that God gave to us allows us to physically experience our emptiness without Him, reminding us of our total dependence on His goodness.

“[F]eed me with food convenient for me: Lest I be full, and deny thee, and say, Who is the LORD?” (Proverbs 30:8-9)

As Moses reminded the people of Israel:

“And he humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna, which thou knewest not, neither did thy fathers know; that he might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the LORD doth man live.” (Deuteronomy 8:3)

Fasting and abstinence have especial import for Christians, because by grace we have a new and higher life, which is the life of Christ in His Church (1 Corinthians 12:13); and in some mysterious way, perhaps somewhat as we are human by having both soul and flesh, to partake of Christ’s life requires that we be baptized by water and the Spirit (St. John 3:5), and that we eat Him in the Blessed Eucharist (see 1 Corinthians 10:17).  In the frank words of our Lord that scandalized His listeners and gave His Apostles a chance to prove their faith:

“Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you. Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him.” (St. John 6:53-56)

For these reasons, St. Paul warned the Corinthians against unduly indulging in, and otherwise abusing, the agape feast that, in antiquity, accompanied the Eucharist or, as the early Church called it, the Breaking of the Bread;

“For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body” (1 Corinthians 11:29).

Over the centuries this led to the rule against receiving communion with unabsolved mortal sin (see 1 St. John 5:16-17), as well as the observance of the communion fast before receiving Christ in the Divine Liturgy of the Mass.

In the Scriptures, therefore, we see fasting being practiced to accompany solemn prayer (Ezra 8:23), to express sorrow (Psalm 35:13), to express repentance (Joel 2:12), and to prepare for a holy work (Acts 13:2); as indeed, our Lord Himself fasted for 40 days before starting His public ministry (St. Matthew 4:2), and He commended fasting as being necessary for spiritual warfare (St. Mark 9:29).  For we deny ourselves food to physically express our desire to be filled with the Bread of Life, and we empty ourselves so that, being hungry, we may be worthy to be filled with good things (see St. Luke 1:53).

Likewise, it may be noted, Christians were commanded to abstain even from foods that are morally lawful (i.e., food offered to idols, see Romans 14:14) in order to signify their allegiance to Christ and their abandonment of false gods (Acts 15:29) and as a necessary sacrifice for love of others (I Corinthians 8:13); for we practice abstinence not to condemn the nature of some foods, but because we acknowledge them to be good[2], and it is precisely their goodness that makes their sacrifice for the sake of God and others an act of devotion.

We should remember, of course, the command of the Church that fasting and other devotions are to be practiced together with works of justice and mercy[3]:

“But woe unto you, Pharisees! for ye tithe mint and rue and all manner of herbs, and pass over judgment and the love of God: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone” (St. Luke 11:42).

For when we rightly view the whole of God’s revelation in its fullness and totality, then we shall see that the sacraments (see St. John 3:5; 6:53-56), the obedience of the understanding (see II Corinthians 10:5), prayer and devotion (see St. Matthew 17:21), and works of justice and mercy (see St. Matthew 16:27; St. James 2:26) are to be practiced together as the four pillars of that lifelong conversion that is the Christian life.

“And they continued steadfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers” (Acts 2:42).

II. Norms for Fasting and Abstinence

In sum, because they are fitting acts of love for the Lord our God and for our neighbor, as we learn from Divine Revelation, especially the witness of Christ our Lord and His Apostles, the one true Church has ordained fasting and abstinence for Christians.  In particular, these general norms are to be strictly observed by Christians of the Latin Rites[4]:

a) On Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, Christians aged 18 years and older but below 60 years old must practice fasting[5]; that is, they must eat only one full meal, and while they may take some food in the morning and evening, they must observe as to quantity and quality the approved local custom[6].

b) On Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, Christians aged 14 years and older must abstain from meat[7], though they are not required to abstain from eggs or the products of milk or condiments made of animal fat[8]. Some other food may be abstained from as determined by the Episcopal Conference[9].

c) On all Fridays of the year, except those on which a solemnity falls, Christians aged 14 years and older must abstain from meat, though they are not required to abstain from eggs or the products of milk or condiments made of animal fat.[10] Some other food may be abstained from as determined by the Episcopal Conference[11].

d) On any day of the year that they receive communion, Christians must fast from all food and drink, except water and medicines, for one hour before receiving our Eucharistic Lord. The elderly, the ill, and those who are caring for them are exempt from this norm, as well as priests before they celebrate their second or third Mass of the same day.[12]

The foregoing rules on the discipline of Lent do not cover Eastern Catholics, who are subject to the rules prescribed by their Patriarchs and synods in accordance with their canons and liturgical traditions.  Also, the norms under letters (a) to (c) may be modified by the legislation of Episcopal Conferences and are subject to lawful dispensations by bishops, priests, and superiors[13].  Therefore, we need to inquire with the bishops of our countries to determine if they have enacted legislation changing the obligations under (a) to (c), as well as to ask what is the approved local custom regarding the Lenten fast. If no legislation has been enacted, then the foregoing general norms apply with undiminished force. Where there is some uncertainty as to the norms, then we should seek the guidance of our bishop, parish priest, or superior.

Note that these norms are just the minimum, and we may, subject to advice from our spiritual director, observe additional times and further measures of fasting and abstinence. We may also do well to remember to follow the law in good faith.  For instance, I submit that, when practicing abstinence, we should not then feast on permitted foods or eat them richly cooked, lest we follow the letter without “the spirit that giveth life” (2 Corinthians 3:6) and be judged for lying to God with our actions (see Acts  5:1-11). For fasting and abstinence are intended to unite us to our Lord Who emptied Himself of visible majesty for our sake (Philippians 2:6-8), and so we should accompany them with the observance of simplicity and, unless stricter austerities are permitted, of moderation (see Proverbs 30:8-9).

If you’d like to read further:

• The norms on fasting and abstinence for Latin Christians may be found in Canons 1249-1253 and Canon 919 (communion fast) of the 1982 Code of Canon Law, supplemented by the 1966 Apostolic Constitution Paenitemini of Pope Paul VI. One may also examine the relevant canons of the 1917 Code of Canon Law, some of whose rules are used to interpret the existing legislation (as explained here).

• The said rules, as well as their rationale, are discussed in the very enlightening essay “Lent: Discipline and History” by Catholics United for the Faith (CUF), and in the excellent summary of the relevant norms published by Women of Faith and Family (WFF).

• A simple explanation of the specific legislation for the United States is provided by the above-mentioned CUF and WFF webpages.  Its basis is the 1966 Pastoral Statement on Penance and Abstinence of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), supplemented by the issuance Penitential Practices for Today’s Catholics.

• The specific norms applicable to the Philippines were discussed in the news article “Canon lawyer says fast, abstinence on Good Friday is mandatory” (March 19, 2008), which is also available here.  However, I have not been able to find the issuance (if any) of Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) on fasting and abstinence, and have therefore been unable to verify to what extent, for instance, the  Friday abstinence remains binding on Filipinos of the one true Church.

May God bless us all.

(All rights reserved.)

[1] Summa Theologica, 2a 2ae, q. 85, art. 3, ad 2

[2] See Pope St. Leo I, Sermo XLII, v. ll

[3] See Pope Paul VI, Apostolic Constitution “Paenitemini“, February 17, 1966, chap. 2

[4] That is, those subject to the jurisdiction of the Pope as Patriarch of the West as well as Supreme Pontiff. In contrast, Eastern Catholics are under the jurisdiction of other Patriarchs, Primates, or Metropolitans-Major, subject to the supreme authority of the Roman Pontiff. We avoided the term ‘Latin Church’, though it was used in the Code of Canon Law, to avoid confusion with the particular churches of Latin America.

[5] Code of Canon Law, canon 1251 (“The law of fasting binds those who have attained their majority, until the beginning of their sixtieth year), in relation to canon 97 §1 (“A person who has completed the eighteenth year of age has reached majority; below this age, a person is a minor”). Note that this amends Paenitemini, under which the norm of fasting started to be binding at the age of 21 years

[6] Pope Paul VI, Apostolic Constitution “Paenitemini“, February 17, 1966, III, 2

[7] Code of Canon Law, Canon 1251

[8] Pope Paul VI, Apostolic Constitution “Paenitemini“, February 17, 1966, III, 1

[9] Code of the Canon Law, Canon 1251

[10] Code of Canon Law, Canon 1251; Pope Paul VI, Apostolic Constitution “Paenitemini“, February 17, 1966, III, 1

[11] Code of Canon Law, Canon 1251

[12] Code of Canon Law, canon 919

[13] Pope Paul VI, Apostolic Constitution “Paenitemini”, February 17, 1966, VI-VII; Code of Canon Law, canon 1253

The following is re-published from our December 22, 2009 post “When will Gibo give up?” on our other weblog epikeia, in view of its connection to current issues.  ‘Makes me wonder what would happen on the 8th week after its date.

I estimate about 8 weeks before the administration completely jettisons Teodoro and puts its machinery behind Villar.  Gibo has performed dismally in every survey–another one digit showing in the last one, as GMA 7 just reported–; and if his time-to-shine moments amid natural disasters and horrific massacres raised his profile without substantially raising his numbers, then nothing will help him.  It’s not his time, any more than it was the more charismatic Escudero’s.

Which leaves the administration one choice: Villar.  Moneyed, ideologically vague Manny Villar, who’s already lined up Manny Pacquiao and Michael V in his campaign arsenal [not to mention Bongbong Marcos and Satur Ocampo, in a remarkable display of political flexibility].  It’s only logical.  Unlike in the US with its (predominantly) 2-party system, where beat-up Republicans had little choice between Palin-McCain (I mean, I like McCain, but it’s pretty clear who held the base) and going Obamacon, in the Philippines the administration has 2 strong non-Noynoys and a gaggle of lesser lights to choose from .

And if they’re desperate enough to pick Edu Manzano as VP, then they’ll be ready to make deals with Villar and abandon S.S. Gibo. After all, democracy’s just political capitalism: the only question is where the supply-demand curves (which has at least probabilistic value in statu concupiscentiae) will leave the price, and when the deal will be struck.

Okay, so why the somewhat arbitrary 8-week  timetable, which places us at about late February?  Because the signs of the times are ever clearer, Exhibit “A” being the sudden cessation of attacks on Villar by his fellow Senators [subsequently rendered less relevant by the  revival of the C-5 issue in January 2010]; because that’s long enough bleeding of money and people for KAMPI to squirm; because that’s long enough for Estrada to prove the point that he’s still a force to reckon with and also to accept that he’s not as popular as he used to be (assuming he’s  seriously running to begin with), leaving a field of two where only one will even smile at the President.

And then we count the days till Gibo says goodbye.  By then he’ll have guaranteed himself a Senate seat in 2013 (assuming there’d still be a Senate) and solidified his new nickname, so it’s not a total loss.

So, Dear Reader, who’s your bet?

(The following republishes, with notes, our August 14, 2008 post “Catholic newspapers embattled in Malaysia” in view of its renewed topicality, with apologies for our lack of time to write more on the issue.)

“I was surfing about for news on Christians in other countries when I read a report on The Star Online (here) that a Malaysian Catholic newsletter,  the Herald, was being threatened with revocation of license for publishing an editorial on a coming election.  Its editor protested that the Malaysian Home Ministry had not read the editorial–for he had only asked people to pray for honest elections–but the Home Ministry was adamant, for The Herald had dared to publish articles dealing with politics.  Now, says anilnetto.com, another paper, Catholic Asian News, has received the same warning for the same “offense”: writing about politics.

“At first, I though this was part of the worldwide assault on Christian values and institutions, but further reading told me that this was not the case, the Malaysian situation being light years away from, for instance, the strange Canadian persecution of Christianity (see Lifesite for an example). Instead–but please correct me, Dear Reader, if I’m wrong, as I’m just an overseas observer–, I think there are 2 other ways to interpret the situation.

“First, it may simply be an attempt to curry favor with strict Muslims given upcoming polls.  This might be plausible given the controversies surrounding the Herald, particularly its attempt to use the Arabic word ‘Allah’ for ‘God’ (blessed be His Name), but I still have my doubts [which have since largely vanished].

“To begin with, I find it hard to credit the Malaysian authorities with any form of  State “extremism”  or “fundamentalism” (to use the ill-used terminology of Western media) beyond what is strictly enjoined by the Qu’ran and Hadiths.  Muslim Malaysians adhere to the relatively unrigorist Southeast Asian schools of Sunni Islam [to which the studies of Anthony Reid, among others, amply testify]; and in any case, (though Christians may not know this) many Muslim countries, including Malaysia, have accorded Christians a good degree of fairness and security. They were many times deprived of full equality, but those rights of Christians that were recognized were religiously enforced.

“At most, therefore, the emerging policy could me merely an opportunistic  attempt to attract the Islamic vote, in which case it could backfire:  For it  is my belief that Southeast Asian Muslims, whether or not they advocate State enforcement of shariah, are generally not followers of al-Wahhab, and will likely look askance at an attempt to suddenly adopt a rigorist policy against non-Muslims. [Unfortunately, this may be less true now than in the past; for the rise in prominence of strict Islamic schools since the 1980s has not left Malaysia unaffected, especially given the decline of older ideological contenders like  Nasserism and Kemalism.

Nonetheless, it may be inappropriate to view the increased influence of Wahhabi interpretati0n as the sole cause of the dispute. Rather, it appears to be a phenomenon allied to an eruption of Malay integrism, both leading to and feeding from it.  The firebombing of nine churches shows that this is a potentially violent mix, albeit Malaysia will not yet see anything of the intensity of Indonesia's pogroms.  ]

“The second and, I think, more likely interpretation is that the threats are simply a lashing out at a vulnerable minority by an increasingly paranoid State that, for instance, recently re-arrested then quickly re-released  former Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim for obviously ill-conceived reasons.  This seems conceivable in light of the situation of Malaysian politics, which has been in flux since the (nominal) departure of former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad of the nationalist UMNO.

“To be sure, the policy seems irrational because, as Mustafa K. Anuar rightly points out, all religions call for right acts and, therefore, personal and social justice, but maybe that’s the real problem. Put in social justice into the equation, and you would have a clear clash between its State-sponsored and Religion-supported visions; the monopoly of power of a State and its ruling party/faction would be challenged by a factor more ideological, and hence more dangerous, than mere pragmatic politics.  In such a case, unless they’re made up of fair-minded people like Konrad Adenauer, the State and its ruling party/faction will be sorely tempted to use its coercive power to remove the challengers from the field and force them to become nicely Liberal irrelevancies that vote politely at elections and don’t ask questions in between.

“From a Christian viewpoint, the fact that Catholic papers are targeted may seem doubly unfair, but it is an injustice that, sadly, authentic Christians should expect.  For one, we are a minority; and more, some form of persecution should be expected even in nominally Christian nations. Quite simply, the one true Church stands as one of the great (and annoyingly visible) barriers to the Hegelian apotheosis of the omnicompetent Total State and its ruling party/faction. Her faith in an authority above, and not represented by, the State; her transnational organization manned by  well-educated clergy; her willingness to oppose even governments in the name of faith and morals–all these make her an alternate power base that invites repression.  Tito’s Yugoslavia, Diocletian’s Rome, Bismarck’s Germany all persecuted her for this reason; and in a fluctuating political environment with populations to mobilize, the Church is simply too tempting a target.

“Hence, Malaysians in general, and Malaysian Christians in particular, may be justified in fighting the threatened sanctions if they are–as I fear they may be–part of an irrationally conceived but all-too-usual bid for more party or social power.  It often starts with a drive against political and religious minorities; it nearly always ends with heavier chains on all the People; and it it is my firm belief that no country,  particularly a nation of our fellow Malays, deserves to be thus victimized by arbitrary acts of misgovernment. However, if I am wrong, I would heartily welcome due correction.

“May God in His justice and mercy bless us all.”

[Spoiler warning]

Let 2r=the diameter of the embolism you get when you realize that the theme reproduces that of Abyss (that fascinating movie) down to the big bad militarists and the scientists willing to die for inter-species understanding;

Let f=the frequency of the shout you want to make when you see Ellen Ripley in a movie with aliens in it;

Let t=number of seconds into the film when you realize that it will reproduce the archetypes of the washed out soldier, the traitor to the cause, the disgusted turning-away of the woman loved, and the expiatory rescue (See Umberto Eco’s essay on Casablanca on the the mechanics of cliches/tropes dancing);

Let G=Gaea; and

Let c=speed of light in a vacuum,  at least 800 parsecs from the nearest planet-sized mass, barring dark matter (because absolutely nothing will linger 15 minutes after finishing the movie);

And we derive the formula* thus:

(1)

(2)                                                              !

(3)                                                                                       !

Which upon substitution yields the result: d=848,991,560 m or 848,991.56 km.  We therefore conclude that you can see the ending of Avatar from about 8.49 x 10⁵** km (or 5.28 x 10^5** miles) away, corrected for blue shift (because the ending hurls itself at your face).

But don’t worry, the graphics are pretty enough that you’d stick with the movie to the end (albeit your mileage may vary).  So enjoy it if you’ll watch it, Dear Reader, and down with capitalism!

*In keeping with the ever-emerging novus ordo saeclorum we shall call the formula novum modum imperatoris.  Unfortunately, only a monk named Jorge of Burgos can see it.

**Actually, that’s 10 to the 5th power, but exponents don’t seem to appear on DePo.

(This faux review was originally posted as “528,000 miles: A reaction to “Avatar”” on epikeia.  All rights reserved.)