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From Death to Life

Sat, 19 Apr 2014 00:00:00 -0400

Science teaches that the cosmological line between death and life is tenuous and fragile: Were the earth to wander beyond her normal orbit, her florid and rich life would be destroyed by excessive heat or cold. On our planet torrential rains or droughts are all that is needed to destroy vegetation and animal life. Each day tears of sorrow are shed as thousands of human beings pass out of this world, while at the same time tears of joy accompany the birth of thousands of new lives into the world.

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Seeing the Whole in the Part

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

The subtlety of the Second Vatican Council’s statement in Nostra Aetate that the “Catholic Church rejects nothing of what is true and holy in [other] religions” has often been missed by Catholics on both sides of the ecclesial aisle. Some on the right have seen this statement, and the subsequent practices that have resulted from it, both as a departure from the Church’s past teachings and an ingredient for softening Catholic doctrine. Some on the left, by contrast, have perceived this statement as a manifesto for the equality of Catholicism with other religions.

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What’s Wrong With Dies Irae?

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 00:01:00 -0400

November 2, All Souls Day, is the one of last liturgical remnants of the doctrine of Purgatory and the need to pray for the souls therein. Since the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, which called for funeral rites to “express more clearly the paschal character of Christian death,” the homilies and general aura of Catholic funerals have often ignored Purgatory and instead canonized the deceased among the heavenly blessed.

In reaction to this distortion some Catholics have longed for the funerals of old, whose black vestments and antiphons made clear that the deceased’s journey to God was at its beginning rather than its final end. At the center of this funeral Mass remains the Dies irae ”the towering sequence before the gospel that foretells the second coming of Christ as the frightful “day of wrath and doom impending . . . when the Judge His seat attaineth, and each hidden deed arraigneth, nothing unavenged remaineth.” Cowering before the “King of majesty tremendous,” the Sequence pleads for salvation by the merits of Christ’s sufferings on the cross.

The great scholar Father Adrian Fortescue rightly labels the Dies irae as “the finest of all” liturgical sequences. He traces its composition to one of St. Francis’ original companions, who intended the poem for private devotion. By the fifteenth century much of Europe had incorporated it into funeral Masses, a move that required six concluding lines to be “added awkwardly to fit it for this purpose.” So it remained in every Catholic funeral until 1970. Today it survives liturgically in the same funeral Mass of the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite and as an optional hymn for the Liturgy of the Hours on All Souls Day, with an added refrain asking God to join us with his blessed.

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger sees in the Dies irae “the tendency to such a false development” that leads Christians away from the joyful cry of “Our Lord, come” ( Maran atha ) toward a “terrifying ‘day of wrath’ ( Dies irae ), which makes man feel like dying of woe and terror, and to which he looks forward with fear and dread.” This fear pushes aside “a decisive aspect of Christianity, which is thus reduced for all practical purposes to moralism and robbed of that hope and joy which are the very breath of its life.”

For all its splendor and internal dignity, and even with its subsequent additions, the Dies irae does not fit the theological tenor of the Catholic funeral, which while mourning the dead and begging for pardon ultimately looks beyond human mortality to the immortality promised in Christ’s resurrection. The Preface for the Dead”used along side the Dies irae in the Extraordinary Form and also in the Ordinary Form”strikes the right balance between these two realities: “In Christ the hope of a blessed resurrection has beamed upon us: so that those who are saddened by the certainty of dying may be consoled by the promise of a future deathless life. For to Your faithful people, Lord, life is changed, not taken away; and when the home of this earthly sojourn is dissolved, an eternal dwelling is made ready in heaven.”

As the Dies irae solemnly warns, the dead will be judged and will have to render an account of their stewardship during their life on earth. Sins will be exposed and will have to be accounted, and their consequences may well lead to temporary purification or even eternal punishment. For good reason, then, does St. Paul caution to “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.” But this fear is not the cowering fear of a slave before a cruel master, but the pious timor Domini that is the gift of the Holy Spirit, who strengths us to look to God with awe, reverence, and humility. We can approach our judgment with this same spirit, teaches Cardinal Ratzinger, precisely because he who is our judge is also our brother. “Thus over the judgment glows the dawn of hope; it is not only the day of wrath but also the second coming of our Lord.”

All Souls Day reminds us that some who have gone before us have been judged worthy of a place at the heavenly banquet, but they still must pay the price for the sins they committed. For them we pray, mourn, and sacrifice that their purification may be soon completed. Our prayers this day point to the necessary balance that our theology and funerals must maintain between salvation and hope, on the one hand, and judgment and punishment on the other. Hope detached from the realities of sin, accountability, and judgment leads to naïve assumptions of salvation for the wanton, and judgment without faith in Christ the judge causes anxiety contrary to the good promised to us.

The middle of the Dies irae begs Christ the judge to pardon our sins based on the suffering he endured for our salvation. This is precisely the function of funeral Masses and of All Souls Day. It is the paschal mystery re-presented in the sacrifice of the Mass, above all else, that is the ultimate reminder of the promise of salvation and the true nature of judgment and redemption that, at root, is not about wrath, but love.

David G. Bonagura, Jr. is Adjunct Professor of Theology at the Seminary of the Immaculate Conception, Huntington, NY.

RESOURCES Dies irae

Fortescue, Adrian, The Mass: A Study of the Roman Liturgy

Ratzinger, Joseph, Introduction to Christianity

Vatican II, Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy

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Receiving a Pope and a President

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 00:10:00 -0400

Within only a few hours on September 22, Pope Benedict XVI and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gave major addresses in front of two bodies, the German Bundestag and the United Nations General Assembly, respectively. These two very different men gave two very different speeches, yet their presence and words generated an identical response: boycotts and walk-outs by assembly members.

Domestically and internationally, Ahmadinejad is regarded by not a few as a capricious dictator whose presidency has included serious human rights violations, routine defiance of the United Nations, development of capabilities for nuclear weapons, and massive student protests against his government. His speech to the U.N., stylized as an analysis of the current international order, was a screed attacking the global policies of the United States and her NATO allies. Diplomats representing more than a dozen countries walked out in response.

In some circles the pope is viewed as unfavorably as the Iranian president. They see him as the head of a backward-looking, misogynistic organization that continues to thwart social progress by her stands against homosexual relationships and the use of prophylactics to thwart the spread of AIDS. A week before his visit to Germany, a petition presented to The Hague’s International Criminal Court sought to prosecute Benedict for crimes against humanity due to his perceived negligence in halting the abuse of minors by clergy. Protesters lined the streets surrounding the Reichstag Building in Berlin during Benedict’s address to the legislature, whose seats were vacated by boycotters and other walk-outs.

Were the visits and speeches of Ahmadinejad and Benedict really controversial enough to cause such hysteria? Or do the protests of the respective diplomats reflect more the views and prejudices of their hearers?

Ahmadinejad, as he had done a year earlier before the same assembly, intentionally provoked western diplomats with his comments, particularly those attacking Zionism and insinuating that the attacks of September 11, 2001, were caused by a U.S. government conspiracy. But those who walked out were largely American and western diplomats whose relations with Iran were already tenuous. The president’s remarks were certainly caustic and wildly off-base, but a dozen protesting nations out of 193 is not an overwhelming percentage.

Benedict’s address, by contrast, was deemed a snoozer by the New York Times for its lack of controversy and its academic orientation. Indeed, Benedict’s “thoughts on the foundations of a free state of law,” which explained how politicians can discern good from evil, is hardly a matter worthy of protest. That Benedict went on to praise the ecology movement, a sacred cow for many liberals, makes the walk-outs even more striking. Because of his premature departure, the Times reports that Hans-Christian Ströbele of the Green Party missed the pope’s lavish praise of his work.

No prophet is without honor except in his native place, but among the intelligentsia the reception of Benedict in Germany was particularly cold. The Bundestag walk-outs attest that the wider opposition to Benedict on display in the press and on the streets was just not to his particular message, but to his person as the living embodiment of his message. For these deniers of the transcendent, Benedict is not the Antichrist, but an inimicus , a personal enemy whose life long work threatens to undercut their myopic Weltanschauung at its very foundations.

A majority of Germans and other Europeans may well be indifferent to religion, but the fury with which the generals and soldiers of today’s Kulturkampf greeted Benedict suggests that these people are not blithe secularists, but rabid apostates from the Christian faith. They have consciously rejected their heritage, even if they never understood what it truly means. In its place, in Benedict’s words, they have created an “artificial world” that “resembles a concrete bunker with no windows, in which we ourselves provide the lighting and atmospheric conditions, being no longer willing to obtain either from God’s wide world.” Having fought hard to create this artificial world, they remain on guard against challenges from believers who seek to restore balance to a wayward reason divorced from faith.

Achieving this restoration is the theological and cultural project of Benedict XVI. For decades he has wielded his pen against this apostasy, and now as pope he marshals tens of thousands to his cause with each appearance abroad. But what makes Benedict’s counter-attack especially fearsome to the German intelligentsia is more than just the depths of his work, which offers a formidable challenge to their position. Rather, it is the fact that he is Germany’s native son who has escaped from their artificial world to see the truth of God, of reason, and of nature that they have long denied. And even more devastatingly, he has done so always with a gentle and warm smile. The dreariness of the concrete bunker cannot withstand the explosive power of genuine happiness wedded to truth, and Benedict’s critics know this.

Benedict’s person and message are one. By his very presence last week he offered his fellow countrymen a path out of the bunker and into the light of truth. It is no wonder that the lawmakers in the Bundestag did not bother to hear his speech: they knew what he had to say before he uttered a word, and they did not want to hear it.

David G. Bonagura, Jr. is Adjunct Professor of Theology at the Seminary of the Immaculate Conception, Huntington, NY.

RESOURCES

New York Times , Abuse Victims Ask Court to Prosecute the Vatican

New York Times , Pope Weathers Protests and Boycotts in First Official Visit to Germany

Visit to the Bundestag: Address of His Holiness Benedict XVI

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