Christ the King

From Fr. Z's blog: Act of Consecration of the Human Race to the Sacred Heart of Jesus Most Sweet Jesus, Redeemer of the human race, look down upon us humbly prostrate before Thine altar. We are Thine, and Thine we wish to be; but to be more surely united to Thee, behold each one of us freely consecrates ourselves today to Thy Most Sacred Heart. Many indeed have never known Thee; Many too, despising Thy precepts, have rejected Thee. Have mercy on them all, most merciful Jesus, and draw them to Thy Sacred Heart. Be Thou King, O Lord, not only of the faithful children, who have never forsaken Thee, but also of the prodigal children, who have abandoned Thee; Grant that they may quickly return to their Father’s house lest they die of wretchedness and hunger. Be Thou King of those who are deceived by erroneous opinions, or whom discord keeps aloof, and call them back to the harbor of truth and unity of faith, so that there may be but one flock and one Shepherd. Be Thou King of all those who are still involved in the darkness of idolatry or of Islamism, and refuse not to draw them into the light and kingdom of God. Turn Thine eyes of mercy towards the children of the race, once Thy chosen people: of old they called down upon themselves the Blood of the Savior; may it now descend upon them a laver of redemption and of life. Grant, O Lord, to Thy Church assurance of freedom and immunity from harm; give peace and order to all nations, and make the earth resound from pole to pole with one cry; praise to the Divine Heart that wrought our salvation; To it be glory and honor forever.

The Mysterious Sacrament

As a convert to the Catholic faith, I could not understand the Sacrament of Reconcilation (the Confessional). I had always just asked Jesus directly to forgive me of my sins and felt that was enough. It wasn't until I had read many articles and books and listened to the reasons for this sacrament that I finally was convinced that I needed to go. It wasn't easy. I didn't want to do it and felt extreme dread every time I sat in front of the priest to give an account of my actions that were considered sins by God. Finally, after much prayer and more reading, I realized that what God wanted from me was "Humility". It is pleasing to God for us to come to His representatives on earth, the Priests, and open up our hearts and minds and acknowledge that we have sinned - in all humility. Anyway...I read this article today, Bring Back the Box, by Jerome German about this very topic and felt that the article was so well written that I want to share it with others and save it. Here it is: The year was 1961. The confessional was dark, as it should be. A recalcitrant fifth-grade sinner, I had just poured my soul out to a family friend, the parish pastor. As he finished absolving me for what I was sure were the worst sins ever, he added, “Tell your mother that…” I can’t recall the rest of the message; I only remember my deep mortification. The whole purpose of the box was anonymity. How was this okay? It was perhaps borderline prideful on my part to think my sins that exceptional. And, as a frequent Mass server, he probably just recognized my voice. Still, I felt violated. What was routine for him was a very big deal for me. And still, I was compelled to seek the sacrament. In the end, it always seemed a journey from shadow to light. I was a repeat offender. My sins were monotonous, petty, and yet they oppressed me. Absolution was the light at the end of the tunnel. The confessional was repulsive yet enticing. A few short years later, face-to-face Confession was to become the norm—one might say, the preferred mode. I can’t help but wonder how many souls have been discouraged in the process. Confession is easily the most intimate spiritual thing imaginable. Is confidentiality really enough? Clearly, the creators of the box did not think so. Wouldn’t anonymity help the cause of confidentiality? How is it that in the age of psychology we have forgotten so much psychology? Surely, there are those among us who prefer a face-to-face encounter. Good for us. But personality differences alone will tell us that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to something so intimate. To be certain, the Saturday morning lineup for the confessional is not what it was a generation ago. I seriously doubt that the reason is that the current generation is less sinful; it is much more likely that fewer of us actually believe that sin is a thing. When face-to-face confessing was introduced, there was an effort to make sure that maintaining anonymity was still an option. But now that seems to be less and less the case. I say, bring back the box. The face-to-face experiment has been a noble effort to make the Faith more engaging, more personable—no scary black box. It hasn’t worked. The black box is not scary, except maybe to second graders, but I didn’t find it so. The lack of anonymity is plenty scary for many. My non-Catholic readers may, of course, find no necessity, no utility whatsoever in this discussion because they have embraced a direct avenue to forgiveness. Of course, we Catholics understand that it is God who forgives in the confessional just as surely as He forgives us when we go to Him directly. That being said, Christ’s command to the apostles concerning sin—“Whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven them; whose sins you shall retain they are retained”—is entirely devoid of context without confession, unless we are attributing to all of the apostles the ability to read souls, something that neither Scripture nor Tradition has ever claimed. And if the Church assigns no necessity to the process of confessing, then Christ was wasting words. The Word doesn’t waste words. It is one thing to confess your sins to God, it is another to receive counseling and an objective perspective of the weaknesses in your life in Christ, a perspective that serves to assist a soul in embracing another of Christ’s commands: “Go and sin no more.” Though the Sacrament of Reconciliation is probably the least popular of the seven sacraments, there is nonetheless a human obsession with confession. It requires humility, something perennially in short supply, and yet there is something in the human psyche, some craving, some absolute need to unload, as witnessed by police officers who record statements from the accused that go something like this: “Why am I telling you this? I don’t know. I just had to tell somebody—anybody!” Face-to-face confession began at the local precinct. If you’ve offended your spouse, God will forgive your sin; but that forgiveness will not heal the relationship with your spouse. Similarly, a need to confess to another human being, one of the many we offend nearly every day, is a dimension of spiritual healing that cannot be ignored. Our sins offend both God and humanity; the priest is there as the representative of both. What’s that? You don’t offend people? Immaculately conceived, eh? God knows us and our nature much better than any of us ever will, and that’s why he instituted this terrifyingly wonderful sacrament. When the non-Catholic sects abandoned the sacrament, it left a void, a wound that has only deepened with fewer and fewer Catholics availing themselves of the graces of the sacrament. Substitutes have been sought, but such are largely an exercise in self-deception: most often, absolution by blame. I’m talking, of course, about clinical psychology. Now, I fully recognize the potential good of that soft science, but the couch, as a replacement for the confessional, is often devoid of ample consideration of two irreplaceable elements: personal culpability and divine forgiveness. The blame game unleashes a spiritual and emotional tempest. If one is driven, by hatred of one’s own guilt, to confess sins, an obvious alternate approach is to hate the things or persons on which that guilt can be blamed: one’s virtual scapegoat—one’s sin offering. Father, mother, spouse, friend, sibling, teacher, supervisor, boss, lover—the scapegoats are legion. And that’s only the human ones. There’s another interesting blame vehicle; that is, a set of scapegoats that are not hated; they are embraced because they are ownable—ownable without guilt. They are one’s own genetics and life circumstances. Oh, and did I mention genetics? We instinctively know that we are different from the animals, and yet, as a race, we continue to think that we can play both sides of the court; that is, to be nothing more than animals when it’s convenient and to be the ordained custodians of the planet when it serves our purposes. That is to say that, on a personal level, people will dismiss their humanity to placate their guilt. We know instinctively that animals do not sin; they simply follow their nature, a nature easily coveted by some of us in an effort to alleviate a guilty conscience. It is a delusion that becomes a get-out-of-jail-free card. We think, “Yes, I did that; but my behavior is only the result of my genetics and environment.” Mysteriously, the same people who claim such are often the ones who play the opposite side of the court when they claim that humans are destroying the planet and the human population needs to be reduced. Does not such moralizing differentiate us from the animals? What animal moralizes? Or are we an invasive species? The amelioration of guilt wrought by such delusional mind games is, by its very nature, insufficient. Sinners still have a need to talk about their sins to someone. Self-justification never sufficiently quells the conscience, a reality that is brilliantly explored in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. To explore this subject further, I defer to Fulton J. Sheen. In a talk titled “Sin is in the Blood,” the good Archbishop starts by saying that, We are living in about the only period in the world’s history that there is a universal denial of guilt. This was foretold by Dostoevsky who wrote; “The time is coming where men will say that there is no sin, there is no guilt, only hunger. And they will come crying and fawning to our feet saying, “Give us bread.” It used to be that we Catholics were the only ones who believed in the Immaculate Conception. Now everybody believes that he is immaculately conceived. And concerning Macbeth, he goes on to say: …we have many complexes that are produced by sin without ever tracing the true cause, which is guilt. Take for example Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Shakespeare was born in 1554 as I recall, and died in 1616, long before there was any such thing as psychiatry; and yet in this tragedy Macbeth has a psychosis and Lady Macbeth has a neurosis. Both of them contrived to murder the King in order to seize the throne. Macbeth thinks that he sees the dagger before him, the instrument of murder, with the handle toward his hand. Lady Macbeth had the neurosis; she thought that she saw blood on her hands, spots. As anyone who has read or seen this brilliant play knows, Macbeth—though a seemingly moral character at the beginning of the play—once he has committed his first murder to gain power, rather than seeking divine forgiveness, launches a personal crusade of guilt abatement, each more horrifyingly murderous act intended to quell the psychosis produced by the former. In short, at every turn more tormented, he becomes a despicable tyrant. Who are the ones among us with heavily placated guilt? Observe them well, and watch them carefully, for they are tyrants in waiting. What they are already doing is tyrannical, but perhaps not in a way that directly effects our daily lives. That will change. Quiet tyranny never remains quiet. This is because guilt, if not forgiven from above, festers and festers until society drowns in its putrid puss. And what are these quiet tyrannies? They are mortal sins of lust and greed against the next generation, nature, neighbor, and God: pornography, fornication, adultery, contraception, abortion, infanticide, divorce, sodomy, pederasty, euthanasia, assisted suicide. They are sins against parent and progeny, nature and the supernatural, natural law and sacred tradition. The guilt load of our current culture is staggering, beyond the comprehension of the dulled minds of the guilty. In the short term, it will not end well. Thankfully, God will have the last word, for He is the first and the last Word. There is, of course, no evil that cannot be forgiven other than the proud refusal to accept forgiveness. We must dedicate our lives to prayer and penitence to obtain for ourselves and all other tyrants-in-waiting the gift of humility—especially for those who possess not the grace to see their own deep need for it. Bring back that dark, creepy, forsaken (but not God-forsaken!), magnificently enticing box.

The Dark Night of a Priestly Soul

This article is written by Fr. Gordon MacRae who was found guilty of molesting a young man, I think falsely, and is currently serving a very long prison term. I've read everything I can on this issue and agree that the charges leveled against him were without merit. He has always maintained his innocence. He writes a blog within his prison, Beyond These Stone Walls. It is very good. Here is the article about The Dark Night of a Priestly Soul: “It seems to the soul in this night that it is being carried out of itself by afflictions . . . This night is a painful disturbance involving many fears, imaginings, and struggles within a man. Due to the apprehension and feeling of his miseries, he suspects that he is lost and that his blessings are gone forever.” (St. John of the Cross, The Dark Night, Ch. 9, 5, 7) In his new book, Secular Sabotage (FaithWords, 2009), Catholic League President Bill Donohue wrote masterfully of the front lines of the culture war between the sacred and the secular. More than at any other time of the year, these two forces face off in the Christmas season in a culture seemingly at war with its own soul. When I was a younger priest, the period from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day always felt like a mixed blessing. The demands on a parish priest at Christmas are very great. A spiritual observance of Advent and Christmas is an exhausting challenge against an ever-advancing tide of secular materialism.We priests experience in the Christmas season both the hope of the Incarnation and the limits of our human condition. It’s a spiritually vulnerable time that can heighten the intensity of loneliness, the pain of personal struggles and alienation, the agony of loss. Christmas can bring with it a deeply felt awareness of suffering and shadow, of spiritual and emotional vulnerability. It’s a time when, for some, the spring of hope can feel a lot more like the winter of despair.When I was asked to write an article addressing the priesthood crisis,at Christmas time, I felt very limited in scope. I was about to mark my seventeenth Christmas in prison. Frankly, Christmas in here is simply not what it is out there. It’s a time when the people around me suffer a great deal. Those with families and children are separated from them by impenetrable prison walls. Those who are alone have their loneliness magnified by the onslaught of Christmas imagery.I set out to write something warm and fuzzy for other priests at Christmas, but, well, it just wasn’t coming. I kept being drawn to some unfinished business, something that has gnawed at me for eight years. Justice requires that I try to make some spiritual sense of it. Now is the time. What I am about to write may be very painful for some to read. Whether you are a lay Catholic, or a priest, deacon, or religious, if you are reading this, I beg you to read carefully and understand. Eight years ago on December 29, 2002, a brother priest in my diocese took his own life. Father Richard Lower was 57 years old. He was a popular and very gifted – and giving – priest and human being. Father Lower had served Our Lady of Fatima Parish in New London, New Hampshire for the previous thirteen years, and he was much beloved by his parish family.There was a lot that happened in Father Lower’s personal life over the preceding year. He had undergone his sixth painful back surgery. Then he developed septicemia for which he was hospitalized again. Father Lower’s mother died that November. These factors, and likely others that are unknown, left Father Lower physically, emotionally, and spiritually bereft to face the newest terror that was to enter his life two days after Christmas eight years ago.NO CRUELER TYRANNIES. On December 27th, every priest’s worst modern nightmare was visited upon Father Richard Lower. He was informed by a diocesan official that a claim of sexual abuse had been lodged against him from thirty years earlier in 1972. Father Lower had never been previously accused. The accusation stood alone, but was enough – three decades later – to abruptly end a life of ministry and priestly self-giving.Based on the single, uncorroborated thirty-year-old claim, Father Lower was informed that the police would be notified. In accordance with the “zero tolerance” policy of the U.S. Bishops’ new Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, he was suspended from ministry and told that he must immediately vacate the parish he had served for thirteen years. As was every priest in the Diocese of Manchester, Father Lower was also painfully aware of an announcement from his bishop and diocese made just weeks earlier. In an unprecedented agreement between the Diocese and the State announced in December, 2002, the files and details of every accusation against any priest – regardless from however long ago – would be included in a vast public release of documents in March of 2003. Any privacy rights of the individual priests under canon or civil law were summarily discarded and waived by the signing of this agreement.Two days after celebrating Christ’s birth with the parish community he loved and served for thirteen years, Father Richard Lower lived Christ’s scourging, and was about to live the Scandal of the Cross in a way for which he had no defense. Succumbing to the darkest night of his soul, this good priest, walking alone in the valley of darkness, took his own life. Father Lower died without having either acknowledged or denied the 30-year-old claim brought against him. He died alone, apparently having reached out to no one. He left no note. A lot of people – including a number of priests – lamented that they could only imagine what Father Lower went through in those three days after Christmas. I did not have to imagine anything. I knew exactly what he went through: the feeling of living in a vacuum, the sense of isolation, the feeling of powerlessness, the utter despair of never, ever being able to erase the scarlet letter indelibly marking the accused – guilty and innocent alike; the sheer impossibility of any defense after the passage of three decades; the overwhelming despair of exactly what Saint John of the Cross described in his Dark Night of the Soul: “Due to the apprehension and feeling of his miseries, he suspects that he is lost and that his blessings are gone forever.”Do you know what you were doing on any given day in 1972? Can you document your answer? If you’re a Catholic priest, you may have to, and your very life may depend on it. Innocent or guilty, what Father Richard Lower faced in those days after Christmas eight years ago is a hopelessness unlike anything one could imagine without going through it. It was for good reason that Dorothy Rabinowitz entitled her 2005 book about the power of false sex abuse claims, No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusation, False Witness, and Other Terrors of Our Times.In my prison cell a few days after Christmas in 2002, my eyes closed when I read the headline story. I knew Father Richard Lower. He was a priest I admired, and one of only three priests of my Diocese who ever wrote to me in prison. Nine months before he was accused, Father Lower wrote to another friend lamenting the terror being visited upon other priests. When so many others looked away in silence, Father Lower wrote courageously to challenge the lack of due process and presumption of guilt when other priests were accused. From an April, 2002 letter of Father Lower to a friend: “The minute a man is accused, he’s immediately suspended. He is forced to leave his rectory within the hour. The result of this horrendous policy is that the priest is seen to be guilty until proven innocent.” With reference to his back surgery and other pressures, Father Lower reacted to the media attack that had so consumed the priesthood that year. In the same letter, he wrote: “With all the bad press the Church has received lately, it is very difficult to either work as a priest in public or even to recuperate as a priest. …As Always, the press has had a heyday with this topic and reported things whether true or untrue. Because the Church did not handle it properly in the past, they now have a policy of no tolerance …Another fallout to the scandal is that a ‘witch hunt’ has begun. It feels like all priests are suspects and no one can be trusted. Please pray for us. After Father Lower’s tragic death, an official of the Diocese of Manchester acknowledged the truth of exactly what Father Lower-feared, but also defended the policy. In a local news article, Father Edward Arsenault was quoted thusly: “In parish communities where priests have been put on leave, parishioners already believe them guilty. I know there is some expense. But I am confident that our policy is fair.” TREASURE AND TRAGEDY. It has been documented that some twenty-five American Catholic priests have taken their lives after being accused. Some in the news media have implied that their despair is evidence of guilt. How sad and shallow. People of justice and conscience have expressed concern that our use of the death penalty in criminal cases may have resulted in the execution of some innocent men. Given the hundreds of innocent men who have been wrongly imprisoned for rape and other crimes, then exonerated by retesting DNA evidence, the concern is justified. But isn’t it just as likely that some innocent priests were on that list of twenty-five who lost hope? Isn’t it possible that what some of them despaired most was the apparent end of justice and fairness, the sheer impossibility of defending themselves? Believe me on this, accusations of sexual abuse are far more devastating for the innocent than for the guilty. I believe that others who have been falsely accused will corroborate this fact. Absent clear and convincing evidence – and there has been none – I presume Father Richard Lower’s innocence. It’s what the United States Constitution bids me to do. It’s what the rule of law – both Church and civil – bids me to do, and it’s what the Gospel bids me to do. To presume anything else, absent evidence to the contrary, would belie a heart too jaded to claim to live justly and fairly, to claim to live the Gospel of Mercy. After the tragic suicide of another priest, Father William Rosensteel, in June, 2007, Catholic columnist Matt C. Abbott published a powerful statement on http://www.RenewAmerica.com. It was from an unnamed supporter of Father Rosensteel: “We need to remember how important a person’s good name is. To knowingly harm a person’s reputation without cause and clear evidence is a serious violation of the Eighth Commandment. The consequences of such violations are far-reaching and irreversible. Even a priest who is known to be guilty of the crime of child abuse should not be required to forfeit his life to satisfy attorneys, insurance companies, the media and plaintiffs. How much more is this true of a priest whose ‘case’ has not yet been decided?” (RenewAmerica, August 7, 2007) As I held the local newspaper in my hand on December 30, 2002, with a headline declaring the scandal of a priest’s suicide, I would have given anything to be on that wooded path that day with Father Lower at what he feared was the end of all things he held dear. I now wish I had the means to write in 2002 what I am writing here. It may have saved this good priest’s life. Even now there is hope – for Father Lower and for us.First, there’s a lesson to be learned. It’s especially important that priests and lay people reach out to priests burdened with the tyranny of decades-old claims of abuse. In “The Sacred Priesthood,” an essay for the Year of the Priest Father John Zuhlsdorf wrote: “The sacred priesthood is the common treasure and responsibility of the whole Church.” Doesn’t that treasure warrant the benefit of the doubt for priests accused? Doesn’t it call us to support them with our words, our prayers, our mercy, and – if needed – our forgiveness? “Today, the Church prays for persons who have taken their own lives” (Catechism of the Catholic Church 2283) recognizing that people who commit suicide suffer from anguish that can mitigate moral responsibility. I don’t think anyone can look justly at what happened to Father Lower and not see anguish there.This Year of the Priest is a time to have hope for Father Richard Lower’s soul, and, from our practice of mercy, for ourselves. We owe it to him and other priests who lost all hope to assist them still with our prayers and Masses, with our Gospel mandate to be merciful. We owe it to our spiritual brothers and fathers in the priesthood to resolve to never again let another priest walk alone through the valley of darkness. For my brother, Father Richard Lower: “Softly and gently, dearly-ransomed soul, In my most loving arms I now enfold thee, And, o’er the penal waters, as they roll, I poise thee, and I lower thee, and hold thee. And carefully I dip thee in the lake, And thou, without a sob or a resistance, Dost through the flood thy rapid passage take, Sinking deep, deeper, into the dim distance. Angels, to whom the willing task is given, Shall tend, and nurse, and lull thee, as thou liest; And Masses on the earth and prayers in heaven, Shall aid thee at the throne of the most Highest. Farewell, but not forever! Brother dear, Be brave and patient on thy bed of sorrow; Swiftly shall pass thy night of trial here, And I will come and wake thee on the morrow. ”Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman,Conclusion: “The Dream of Gerontius.” Fr. Gordon MacRae writes weekly for http://thesestonewalls.com . His writings from prison have also appeared in First Things, The Catholic Response, Catalyst, and many online Catholic venues.

The Bearskinner: A Tale of the Brothers Grimm

"Man or bear? When a person gives up hope, is he still human? Such is the story of a soldier who has lost everything to war: his childhood home, his family and friends, his youth, and his innocence. Enter that sly opportunist, the devil, who wraps the soldier in the armor of a dead bear’s skin, fills its pockets with gold, and makes a dangerous and horrible wager. An unforgettable retelling of a classic Grimm tale, THE BEARSKINNER is a story about the struggle between the two sides of our selves, and the heroic strength it takes to claim a victory." (goodread review) Here is another review by Catholic All Year: My favorite children’s book is a retelling of a Grimm’s fairy tale called The Bearskinner. In it, a soldier makes a deal with the devil wherein the soldier has to wear a decaying bearskin and in exchange his pockets will be full of money for the rest of his life. To win, he can’t remove it, explain, kill himself, or pray for seven years. Of course the benefit of the money is overshadowed by the isolation and he despairs . . . until he realizes that he can give his pocket money to the poor and ask them to pray for him, since he can’t pray for himself. There’s a beautiful illustration in the book that shows the prayers as butterflies protecting him from the darkness.