Father Rutler: Laughter

Father George W. Rutler

I think the heroic nineteenth-century archbishop in Cuba, Anthony Mary Claret, was off the mark when he disapproved of laughter because Jesus is not known to have laughed. I might be a bit glum, too, if I had barely escaped fifteen assassination attempts. But Ignatius of Loyola said, “Laugh and grow strong,” and John Bosco protested, “I want no long-faced saints.” Philip Neri kept a book of jokes, and Teresa of Avila prayed: “Lord, save me from these saints with sullen faces.”
 

The Bible is a cornucopia of laughter in all its forms. There is cruel laughter, as when the Philistines mocked the blinded Sampson (Judges 16:25). Sarah laughed cynically when told that she and Abraham would have a child. Jesus himself was the target of ridicule when he said that the daughter of Jairus was not dead, and most viciously when the soldiers crowned him with thorns. “Their laughter is wanton guilt” (Sirach 27:13).
 

Then there is gracious laughter, or “risibility,” which Aquinas said indicates human rationality. Reason can be misused, and so laughing at what is sad is insane, and artificial heartiness, accompanied by insincere guffaws and Falstaffian backslapping, is vulgar. Dostoyevsky named laughter as “the most reliable gauge of human nature.”
 

Did Jesus laugh? The Quaker theologian Elton Trueblood wrote a book, The Humor of Christ, inspired by his seven-year-old son, who burst into laughter upon hearing the Lord speak of the hypocrite who ignores the log in his own eye. For the first time, Trueblood recognized the pointed playfulness of the Master’s hyperbole.
 

The Suffering Servant (Isaiah 53:3; 1 Peter 2:24) wept when Lazarus died and when Jerusalem shuttered itself against him, and hardest of all in his Agony surrounded by twisted olive trees. But surely, he did not frown when he gathered children around him, or when he dined with disreputable people, for which he was criticized by the prune-faced Pharisees (Matthew 11:19). In the Beatitudes he promised that those who mourn would laugh, and he was most blessed of all.
 

As perfect man, his risibility was perhaps like the sound of a violin that most thrills someone with perfect pitch. Emerson said that “Earth laughs in flowers.” You might say that Jesus laughed with the wildest flowers because they were more splendid than Solomon. Mirth is an interior disposition for happiness, far different from frivolity, which is why Chesterton said that Jesus hid it, not compromising the outward protocols of Semitic gravity.   Laughing and weeping support each other. “A merry heart does good like a medicine” (Proverbs 17:22), and “Sorrow is better than laughter, for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better” (Ecclesiastes 7:3). That nearly perfect mortal, John Vianney, told an imperfect penitent: “I weep because you do not.” The Christ in him could also say: “I laugh because you do not.” 

Father Rutler: Divine Will, Not Spontaneous Generation

Father George W. Rutler

The exotic concept of spontaneous generation was taken seriously by astute thinkers for a long time before the invention of microbiology. Of course, they knew about the proximate process of birth, but the biological source of life itself exercised such minds as Anaximander six hundred years B.C. and Saint Augustine, Shakespeare, and the philosopher of fishing Izaak Walton, and was at least a puzzle to Darwin.

Spontaneous generation was the theory that living organisms could arise from inanimate matter, like fleas born from dust, or mice from salt and bees from animal blood and, in the speculation of Aristotle, scallops coming out of sand. I came across an unintentionally amusing comment from the 1920 proceedings of the American Philological Society published by the Johns Hopkins University Press: “Since insects are so small, it is not surprising that the sex history of some of them totally eluded the observation of the ancients.”

The advent of micro-imagery photography of infants in the womb destroyed eugenic propaganda that this is not a human life. Those who deny that are on the level of those who continued to insist on spontaneous generation after the Catholic genius Louis Pasteur disproved it in 1859.

Cold people who are not only credulous but cruel, admit that the unborn child is human, but say “So what?” At the recent White House Correspondents’ dinner, an astonishingly vulgar comedienne joked about abortion to the laughter of pseudo-sophisticates in evening dress. But even she slipped and used the word “baby.”
 
Christ used the image of the vine to explain that all life is contingent, not spontaneously generated, but dependent on other lives. “A branch cannot bear fruit on its own unless it remains on the vine.” Likewise, those drinking champagne at the fancy dress dinner are related to every fragile life in the womb by a common humanity. To mock that is to de-humanize the self.
 
On the recent feast of Saint George, there was born in England, whose patron he is, Louis, a prince of the royal house. There were celebratory church bells from Westminster Abbey and a salute of cannons. Rightly so, for the birth of every baby is a cause for rejoicing. That same day another baby, one with a neurological infirmity, was deprived of oxygen support by judicial decree and against the will of his parents, who brought him into the world by pro-creation, as stewards of the Creator and not by spontaneous generation. This was in defiance of an effort by Pope Francis to rescue him by military helicopter. As sons by adoption, little Louis and little Alfie are princes of the Heavenly King, not by spontaneous generation, but by divine will. Pope Leo XIII declared in Rerum Novarum: “The contention that the civil government should at its option intrude into and exercise intimate control over the family and the household is a great and pernicious error.”

Father Rutler: The Triumph of Divine Love

Father George W. Rutler

While it is easy to identify bold personalities that enjoy a good fight, and others that shrink shyly from any kind of confrontation, psychologists do not find it easy to define the middle type that tries to control without seeming to do so. If it is hard to define “passive aggression,” you can recognize the indirect expression of hostility when you see it at work: sullen, procrastinating, self-pitying, cold and silent in a way that is far from golden.
 

It is wonderful that the Risen Lord did not say to the trembling apostles in the Upper Room, “I told you so.” There is no tone of vengeful vindication or even the slightest condescension. He just serenely explains how these events had to be. The Lord has an assignment for the apostles, just as he offers each of us a plan for life. And he takes us seriously, only asking that we take him seriously in return. That is why he shows his wounds. They have not vanished in the glory of the Resurrection, for they are reminders that the new course of history will be fraught with challenges for which the Church must be prepared.
 

On June 28 in 1245, Pope Innocent IV convened an Ecumenical Council in Lyon, France, where he would stay for several years for safety from the emperor Frederick II. He opened the Council with a sermon on the Five Wounds of the Church. They were: 1) public heresy growing out of personal immorality; 2) the persecution of Christians by Muslims; 3) schism in the Church; 4) the invasion of Christian countries by unbelievers; and 5) attempts of civil governments to control the Church. Does this sound familiar?
 

In his day, lax and immoral Catholics were trying to justify their lifestyle by “paradigm shifts” in doctrine, Muslims were terrorizing Christians in the Middle East, the rift between Western and Eastern churches was growing and would not be checked even by the attempt of a second Council of Lyons some thirty years later, Mongol hordes were invading Hungary and Poland, and the Holy Roman Emperor was claiming political authority over the bishops.
 

The French philosopher and mathematician, Blaise Pascal, said: “Jesus will be in agony until the end of the world.” Having risen from the grave, he can die no more, nor can he suffer as he once did. But the Church is his body and “inasmuch as you have done it to one of the least of these little ones, you have done it to me.” Christ’s supernatural agony is a triumph of divine love for those whose salvation he bought with his own blood. He is not passively aggressive, because his confrontation in every age is a direct one against “the Devil and all his pomps.” There is no need for revenge, for to get even is never to get ahead.

Father Rutler: God's Perfect Consistency

Ralph Waldo Emerson had moments more perceptive than his vague religiosity: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” He spoke not of consistency itself, but of a “foolish” consistency. As True God and True Man, Christ was perfectly consistent, but from the platform of a fallen world, that consistency could seem inconsistent.
 

Consider how reluctant he was to let his divinity be known. He spoke of it cryptically in the synagogue at Nazareth, but insinuated enough to enrage his neighbors. Then he went into hiding. When he healed the leprous and blind, he ordered them sternly to tell no one. When he cured the paralytic at the Siloam Pool, he slipped into the shadows of the Temple like a fugitive. And he sternly ordered Peter and James and John not to reveal what they had seen on the mountain.
 

Was it inconsistent then that he made a spectacle of himself when he entered Jerusalem? It was a flagrant publicity stunt, encouraging the cheers of children who enjoyed a good show: with a theatrical entrance foolish enough for some to mock him with a crown of thorns, and shocking enough for others to cut his nerves with nails on a cross. If he was so reticent, why did he suddenly burst into the city in a way that seemed to some like a circus come to town, and to others like an anarchist about to blow everything up?
 

God is not inconsistent to those who listen carefully: “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:9). With a consistency more perfect than human consistency, because it is from outside time, the hour of which he spoke at the Wedding in Cana had come, and the only clock that could measure it was his Love. His human will dreaded that hour, but his divine will embraced it, and in that valiant act, the selfish pride that brought sin and death in the world was confused, confounded, and ultimately washed away in blood.
 

Jesus said that if the children singing to him were silenced, “the very stones would cry out” (Luke 19:4). Here in our neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen, the great glass skyscrapers now rising all around may seem indifferent, but the energy and skill that are building them cry out in testimony to God who
gave life and intelligence. Dante read over the gates of Hell: Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate—“Abandon all hope, you who enter here.” By entering the gates of Jerusalem, Christ opened the gates of Heaven where hope is fulfilled. That is God’s perfect consistency. “Lift up your heads, O gates! And belifted up, O ancient doors! That the King of glory may come in” (Psalm 24:7).

Faithfully Yours in Christ,

Fr. George W. Rutler

Father Rutler: A Fact More Fabulous Than a Fable

There are those of us who remember how as schoolboys, the clever use of rhythmic dactyls in Virgil's metrical Latin verses made unforgettable the sound of horses galloping. And one of my schoolmates gained fleeting fame when our French teacher announced that, as our classmate was recovering from an appendectomy, the first words he whispered as he came out of the anesthesia were from a line in LaFontaine's fable about the Crow and the Fox: "Maître Corbeau sur un arbre perché . . ."
 

Fables have always been entertaining ways to teach children to remember moral wisdom. LaFontaine in the late 17th century drew on stories of Aesop, a Greek slave in the fifth century before Christ. Many of those fables in the Aesopica were adopted along the way in Welsh (Chwedlau Odo—“Odo’s Tales”), Middle Low German, and even Middle Scots. Moral truths have no national borders or chronological barriers. Everyone in any place can learn a lesson from Aesop’s fable of the Tortoise and the Hare, in which the tortoise defies all odds and wins the race because the hare was so smug that it took a nap.
 

The parables of our Lord are different from fables, for they are about people, while fables make animals talk. Fables enliven moral consciences while Christ’s parables make moral points but also direct attention to eternal realities. When our Lord says, “The Kingdom of Heaven is like . . .” he describes a heavenly reality, and not a fantasy.
 

Commissioned as an apostle of the Good News, Saint Paul wrote: “Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? Run in such a way as to take the prize. Everyone who competes in the games trains with strict discipline. They do it for a crown that is perishable, but we do it for a crown that is imperishable” (1 Corinthians 9:24-25). This race is not a fable about tortoises and hares. Those are illusions, but Paul’s race is an allusion. He is speaking of real people in Corinth, where the Isthmian Games took place before and after the Olympic Games, and whose winner received a crown of wild celery instead of the Olympic olive leaf. And celery leaves fade fast.
 

Lent is a microcosm of life in its entirety, with all its trials. When Saint Paul speaks of discipline, he employs a Greek word used for wrestling and any struggle for victory—agonia, from which we get agony. The Anti-Christ wants us to surrender the race and tries to persuade us that life is nothing but agony without a prize. His plot is to discourage, while Christ’s Holy Church is constantly encouraging, through the Sacraments and the heavenly cheerleaders called saints and angels. Saint John Vianney was convinced of a fact more fabulous than a fable: “Not all the saints started well, but all of them ended well.”

Father Rutler: Righteous Anger vs. Sinful Anger

The tears of our Lord gazing on Jerusalem, cannot be separated from his violent whipping of the moneychangers in the Temple the next day. Both were acts of love, for he saw how the Holy City had been profaned, and he saw that profanation most glaring in the House of God itself. The word “profane” means to be “outside the holy place.” Distancing oneself from holiness is at its worst when it takes place in a sacred space: “. . . your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit . . .” 1 Corinthians 6:19. Philologists say that use of the term “profane” has declined about 80% in the last two centuries. Because Christ knew what Heaven is like, the fracturing of its reflection on earth was not a mere annoyance. It provoked him to wailing and whipping.
 

The violent cleansing of the Temple was an instance of righteous anger, using the strength of temper. Sinful anger, on the other hand, is a loss of that temper. Christ’s righteous anger at the Anti-Christ was far different from the crowd’s anger at Christ.
 

Observers of the human condition remark how our society seems so angry. Political debates degenerate into shouting matches; comedians abandon wit for coarseness; commentators on websites let loose all sorts of invectives. Unrighteous anger is anger for its own sake—rather like Homer’s Achilles who supposedly was angry at the Trojans, but in fact was angry at the world, shouting down King Agamemnon and even cursing a river when it did not flow his way.
 

The Ten Commandments temper passion like tempering steel. An intemperate society turns those Commandments backwards: worshiping false gods, blaspheming, killing, lusting, stealing, envying and coveting. It is no coincidence, for instance, that in the past fifty years, with their precipitous decline in moral certitudes, teen suicides have increased nearly 500%, and violent entertainments rival ancient blood lust. The anger of young men in street gangs, is not the anger of the young Christ with a whip.
 

Trying to correct this without God inevitably fails. When Hollywood personalities, having profited so long from intemperance, suddenly affect the mantle of righteousness, the result is hypocrisy instead of salvation, with witch hunts instead of reform. In his novel The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne describes the ambiguity of the Puritans: “No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.” Hawthorne’s daughter Rose, the widow of an intemperate husband, became a Dominican religious and founded a community for the care of dying cancer patients.
 

Sinful anger makes people into cowards, succumbing to the fads of the mob rather than the Gospel of Christ, which is why St. Gregory of Nyssa called that kind of anger a twisting of courage. It makes one a bully instead of a hero.

Father Rutler: Cardinal Stepinac

Father George W. Rutler

In March of 1937, Pope Pius XI issued two encyclicals within five days of each other. Mit Brennender Sorge condemned National Socialism, and Divini Redemptoris condemned Communism. These ideologies, attacking human dignity and replacing God with the power of the self-justifying State, were two sides of the same coin. That is a figure of speech. It is not a figure of speech to say that Christ was crucified between two thieves. Throughout their harsh history, the Slavic countries have known what it is like to be so crucified. The power of Saint John Paul II was burnished by his youthful experience of suffering in Poland under the Nazis, only then to endure Marxism. So too were the travails of Cardinal Mindszenty in Hungary and Cardinal Stepinac in Croatia.
 

My Lenten reading has included a biography of Aloyius Stepinac, who became archbishop of Zagreb six months after those papal encyclicals were published. He had been consecrated a bishop in 1934, just four months before his King Alexander I of Yugoslavia, on a state visit to France, was assassinated in Marseilles along with the French foreign minister. Alexander was a king kind and good, and such men are not invariably treated kindly and well. The diplomatic hopes for the unity of the Croatian and Serbian peoples began to unravel. The study of Balkan history is not for the weak of heart. Nor is the study of the Croatian language. One begins with the complicated accent marks for pronunciation, and things get worse from there.
 

Cardinal Stepinac now has a fine high school in our archdiocese named for him, albeit not pronounced “Stepinatz” as he did. His sufferings for five years after World War II in the frightening Communist prison of Lepoglava got the attention of the world. During that Cold War period, conflicting sides either championed him or vilified him, depending on their political inclinations. Some tried to protect the reputation of his persecutor Marshal Tito, just as the journalist Walter Duranty had protected Stalin in his accounts of Soviet forced famine and show trials on the pages of The New York Times.
 

Saint John Paul II knew the complicated loyalties and demands of those difficult years. No one, and certainly no nation, is angelic, but in 1998 at the shrine of Marija Bistrica, before half a million people, Pope John Paul II beatified Aloysius Stepinac as a martyr.
 

Stepinac had accepted the cardinalatial hat knowing that its red means blood, and is not just an excuse for a party as it sometimes is regarded in decadent times. Some pedants with a political bias complained that the tortured Stepinac did not smile much. But by papal decree, Holy Mother Church is now smiled upon by that successor of the holy Apostles. Walking along the road to Jerusalem these days of Lent, the faithful invoke the saints to cheer them along the way, and among them is Aloysius Stepinac.

Father Rutler: Beautiful, Inconsistent Switzerland

Father George W. Rutler

Few lands are more cheerful than beautiful Switzerland. There are the mountains, the blonde girls yodeling, the lads sounding Alpine horns across the canyons, St. Bernard dogs with brandy, and all that chocolate and material prosperity. The cynic would dismiss that as a caricature. Think of Orson Welles in the 1949 film The Third Man: “. . . in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
 

The cuckoo clock was actually invented in the Black Forest of Germany. And while thoughts of Switzerland evoke peace, its last strife being a brief civil war in 1847, it is highly militarized and was famous for its mercenaries (which is how the Holy See got the Swiss Guards), and it has mandatory conscription for all able-bodied males. With the lowest crime rate in the world, it ranks only below the United States and Yemen in per capita gun ownership. Switzerland is the second largest exporter per capita of assault weapons, ammunition and tanks to such countries as Saudi Arabia. No country has an unblemished history, and in 2013 the government formally apologized for the forced labor of half a million children in the past two centuries. Officially neutral in World War II, it profited greatly as a banker for Nazi gold.
 

While proud of its reputation for enlightened social policies, abortion is legal there and the first-trimester limit can be extended for “medical and psychological reasons.” In our time of mania for tearing down politically incorrect statues, there remains in the heart of Bern the 1546 Kindlifresser statue of an ogre devouring babies.
 

If the monstrous man were eating lobsters, the statue might be torn down because the Swiss government has passed a law effective March 1 that bans the boiling alive of lobsters, since it is claimed that lobsters can feel pain. Lobsters may only be cooked after first having been electrocuted or sedated. This will not have much impact, since Switzerland is land-locked, with negligible crustacean consumption; but imported lobsters must be shipped in seawater and not packed in ice. This runs parallel to California’s legislation banning foie gras, which requires the forced feeding of geese. But partial-birth abortion remains legal, even though human life in utero can feel pain after at least the first eight weeks of gestation.
 

We can eat lobsters even in Lent, by a revelation given to St. Peter (Acts 10:13-15). But the same God knew (Jeremiah 1:4-5) that unborn babies are sensate. That notwithstanding, there are places where lobsters and geese are safer than human babies. Inconsistent? As Sir Walter Scott wrote: “O, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive!” 

Father Rutler: The Continuing Agony of Christ

Father George W. Rutler

An engineer in Alexandria named Ctesibius is said to have invented the pipe organ around 265 B.C., originally an “hydraulis” using water to raise air pressure. Although there was a “water organ” in the narthex of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople for heralding the Emperor, one theory holds that organs are not commonly used in the Byzantine rite because they are reminders of the horrors endured by the holy martyrs as pagan entertainment. There were many places in the various circuses and amphitheaters throughout the Empire where these spectacles took place. Possibly the first to be sentenced to the damnatio ad bestias, or being fed to wild beasts, in the Flavian amphitheater of the Colosseum of Rome, was Ignatius, bishop of Antioch.

On February 24, that Colosseum will be floodlit red, along with churches in Syria and Iraq, to publicize the persecution of Christians in our own day. The sponsoring organization, Aid to the Church in Need, reports that in a dozen countries, conspicuously in Egypt and Turkey, anti-Christian persecution has reached a new peak. The situation has worsened in Nepal since new “blasphemy” laws were introduced. While crowds applaud the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang to the sound of music, around 70,000 Christians are languishing in North Korean labor camps. There is a faint echo here of the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, but at least they had Jesse Owens.

Floodlighting may be one vivid way to awaken the attention of people in more comfortable lands to what is happening. Much of our media, as they either willfully or uncomprehendingly ignore the persecution, are like the idols that “have mouths but cannot speak; eyes, but cannot see; ears, but cannot hear” (Psalm 115:5-6). Looking the other way can become a habit. For instance, much of the world ignored the deportations by the Nazis in 1942 from Lyons, France, when those marked for death were herded into the same Colosseum where the saints Blandina, Ponthinius, Epidodius and Alexander were brutalized in the second century.

The modest abstinences and disciplines of Lent should awaken the senses to perceive things of God more clearly. They can also alert somnolent consciences to harsh realities in other parts of the Church. In Holy Week the Church will remember how Christ awakened the three apostles as they slept through his agony. Pascal said, “Jesus will be in agony until the end of the world.” It was the triumphant risen Lord who asked Paul, “Why are you persecuting me?”—for heaven does not ignore earth: “… to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of mine, even the least of them, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:40). The Resurrection acclamation, “Christus vincit! Christus regnat! Christus imperat! – Christ conquers! Christ reigns! Christ commands!” was inscribed on the obelisk that is now in St. Peter’s Square, but that once stood in the Circus of Nero and cast its shadow on the suffering martyrs. 

Father Rutler: A Life's Goal

Father George W. Rutler

There are different theories as to why Schubert did not finish the Unfinished Symphony. Although his Symphony in B minor lacks two movements, it has two. And explaining why it began is as challenging as explaining why it did not end. Mozart did not finish his Requiem for the simple reason that he died. That also is why Thucydides did not finish his History of the Peloponnesian War, Raphael’s Transfiguration was incomplete, Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus was left for Titian to complete, and Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov had unrealized chapters.
 

A Roman soldier’s sword prevented Archimedes from resolving a mathematical problem. Chaucer did not finish his Canterbury Tales because he had to go back to work as a clerk in the Port of London, and Spenser did not finish the last six books of The Faerie Queene for political reasons. Coleridge could not complete his Kubla Khan because someone awoke him from a laudanum stupor. Perhaps the arrival of Alessandro de’ Medici caused Michelangelo to quit Florence without finishing the statue that still puzzles experts, who are not sure if it is Apollo or David. We do know that Donatello deliberately used his non finito technique to give a kind of emerging vitality to his figures.
 

Artists rarely think that they have completed a work. Tolkien, for example, kept re-writing The Silmarillion. At least they have an intuition, a mental sense, of what should be realized with paint or pen. But if life has no goal, there is nothing to complete. Chesterton said that man has always been lost, but modern man has lost his address and cannot return home. Far different was Saint Paul: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith” (2 Timothy 4:7). His faith was trust that life has a goal, and it is realized in the eternal existence offered by the Creator who made us in his image. “In him you have been made complete” (Colossians 2:10).
 

The days of Lent are like signposts toward the goal. Meanwhile, we are “works in progress.” The question is, “Can these bones live?” (Ezekiel 37:3). When Ash Wednesday is coincident with St. Valentine’s Day, there is a stark contrast between love and sentiment. The martyr Valentine loved so much that he sacrificed his life for the love of God. To reduce him to some sort of cupid, is never to finish the picture.
 

The world’s greatest Lover shouted from the cross: “It is finished!” That tetelestai is an accounting term meaning “paid in full.” The Son cried out to the Father that he had paid the debt incurred by human pride. It is what every composer, painter, writer or scientist wants to be able to say, but can only be said satisfactorily when Christ is seen “face to face, and not as a stranger” (1 John 3:2).

Father Rutler: Millennials

Father George W. Rutler

As a demographic cohort, “Millennials” are the last generation to have been born in the twentieth century. By conventional assessment, they are agile with technology, shaped by social media, self-absorbed, fixed in the moment and ignorant of history, morally immature and unaware that they have been shortchanged by inadequate and polemical educators. They are as vulnerable as Shakespeare’s “wealthy curlèd darlings of our nation.” Their lack of reason and their subservience to political correctness, can be astonishing. But these are generalizations, and one can be just as astonished by the integrity and spiritual vigor of many who are lumped together with their superficial contemporaries.
 

There has been a big drop in religious commitment among the Millennials, but youths predictably assert their independence and return to serious thoughts about God later on. What seems to be an abandonment of faith, may largely be due to the delay in maturation and marrying and the assumption of other responsibilities. Of those who lack a religious outlook, nearly ninety percent were never reared in a stable environment. The large number of Millennials who embrace Christianity are outnumbering the “Baby Boomers” who were warped by the trauma of the psychedelic 1960’s. They react against the moral chaos they have lived through in their own broken homes and decaying culture.
 

Many so-called mainline denominations are collapsing, but these almost invariably are those that have tried to “keep up with the Spirit of the Age” rather than with the Holy Spirit. Quoting one sociologist: “When the so-called ‘progressive’ churches question the historicity of Jesus, deny the reality of sin, support abortion, ordain clergy in same-sex relationships and perform their marriages, people desiring real Christianity head elsewhere.”
 

A joint study by researchers at Indiana and Harvard universities contradicts the impression that religion is in decline. The number of Americans who are the most vigorous in prayer and worship is actually increasing, from 39 percent in 1989 to 47 percent today. And another study estimates that the percentage of Americans who attend church regularly is four times greater today than it was in 1776.
 

Young people who engage in healthy friendships and religious worship, and who work responsibly, are far happier than those who spend a lot of time on the Internet. For Socratic philosophers before Christ, the goal of life was eudaimonia, or “happiness of soul.” Virtue alone could not attain that. “Fullness of joy” (Psalm 16:11) is to be found in Christ (John 17:13; 1 Peter 1:8-9).
 

Saint Augustine said that “happiness is itself a joy in the truth, and this is a truth in you, God, who are the truth . . .” For the Christian, happiness is not an option; it is an obligation. In some ways the young Augustine—like many Millennials—had been absorbed in himself,  but divine grace pulled him out of that, and none too soon: “Late have I loved thee, beauty ever ancient ever new.”

Father Rutler: The Living Word More Powerful Than Any Sword

Father George W. Rutler

The German word “kitsch” is hard to define, other than “tacky” or “tasteless,” but as Justice Potter Stewart said of prurience, “I know it when I see it.” It is indulged sometimes even by pious Catholics. Examples of kitsch abound in the sculpture garden of the United Nations. My favorite is a huge Colt Python .357 Magnum revolver with a twisted barrel by the Swedish sculptor Carl Reuterswärd. It runs afoul of the dictum vaguely attributed to Thomas Jefferson: “Those who hammer their guns into plows, will plow for those who do not.” There is one superior work, albeit by the Soviet Realist Yevgeny Vuchetich, showing a man hammering a sword into the shape of a plowshare.
    

That allusion, of course, is to verses in Isaiah, Joel and Micah. Communists could pick and choose bits of the Bible when convenient. The Prince of Peace warned that those who live by the sword will die by the sword (Matthew 26:52), but he also told his disciples to buy swords (Luke 22:36) and warned: “I did not come to bring peace but a sword” (Matthew 10:34). The apparent contradiction is resolved by understanding that Christ speaks of swords both as defensive weapons and, more intensely, as representative of moral suffering.
   

At the Presentation of Christ, Simeon told Our Lady that a sword would someday pierce her heart. This was fulfilled at the Crucifixion, for if there is a pain that can be as hard as physical suffering, it is the empathy one feels when watching the suffering of a loved one.
   

There is much suffering in the Church, and Our Lady of Sorrows endures that, for she is Mother of the Church. In the order of places where Christians are being tormented now, North Korea ranks first, followed by Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan, Pakistan, Eritrea, Libya, Iraq, Yemen and Iran, in a list that is not exhaustive.
   

As Our Lady was virtually abandoned at the foot of the Cross, so have those who are suffering atrocities and genocide been scandalously ignored by many in the West until recently. Our government has announced that it will stop the State Department’s policy of directing all relief funds through ineffective agencies of the United Nations, and will work with private organizations to aid vulnerable religious and ethnic minorities.
   

St. John Paul II said that Simeon’s prediction confirms Mary’s “faith in the accomplishment of the divine promises of salvation, [while] on the other hand it also reveals to her that she will have to live her obedience of faith in suffering, at the side of the suffering Savior, and that her motherhood will be mysterious and sorrowful.”
   

As the pen is mightier than the sword, in Bulwer-Lytton’s adage, so is Christ the Living Word more acute and powerful than any sword that pierces those who love him.

 

 

Father Rutler: Churches East and West

Father George W. Rutler

In the late 1990s I watched the rebuilding of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow, replicating the nineteenth-century cathedral that had been dynamited by Stalin in 1931. It can hold an estimated ten thousand worshipers (they stand throughout the long services, for pews are abhorrent to venerable tradition) and is the tallest Orthodox church in the world with a dome reaching 338 feet. Stalin’s plan to build on its site a Palace of the Soviets with a huge statue of Lenin atop its dome was never realized because of World War II. That recalls the statue of Zeus, “the Abomination of Desolation,” which the Greek ruler of Syria, Antiochus IV, erected in the Jerusalem temple after he despoiled its sacred vessels. Antiochus basked in the title Epiphanes, which means “radiance of God,” but the Jews punned that as Epimanes, or “the mad man.”
 

Two hundred churches are planned for Moscow, along with an estimated thousand across the nation, replacing and adding to those destroyed in the Communist period, during which priests were crucified on the church doors. These are in the classical Byzantine style, not the modern biscuit boxes and flying saucers that were the bane of the West over the last few decades. In some towns, the local people are taught iconography and mosaic art, so the churches really are the work of their own hands.
 

These days in China, where Christianity is oppressed, not especially for theological reasons, but because it is a threat to the political hegemony of the state, churches are being destroyed. Within the past few months, for example, in Henan Province an evangelical church was dynamited in Shangqiu, with a blithe ferocity paralleling that of Stalin.
 

In the West, churches are getting demolished for reasons other than political: redundancy, the lack of need for “ethnic” parishes, and the sheer cost of maintenance. Often, people who are much wealthier than their ancestors who built the churches sacrificially out of their penury, do not contribute enough for maintenance. Between 1995 and the present, the Catholic population in the United States has increased from 57 million to over 70 million.  New churches are being built in the South and West where populations are growing faster than the decline in other parts of the country.
 

There is another factor, however, in the loss of churches in much of our nation, and it is simply indifference. The vice of sloth is a spiritual malignancy, and many of our great metropolises have become hospices for lapsed believers. When I was sent to our parish here in “Hell’s Kitchen,” which is experiencing a phenomenal population growth, I was asked, “How many Catholics live there?” The proper question is, “How many Catholics will live there?”
 

The Ascending Lord did not send his disciples into Catholic neighborhoods, because there were none.

Father Rutler: Shattered Illusions and a Lesson in Persistence

Fr. George W. Rutler

The romantic soul of William Wordsworth thrilled over the French Revolution: “Oh! Pleasant exercise of hope and joy!  . . . Bliss was it in the dawn to be alive. But to be young was very heaven!” He crossed the Channel to see it in action, but when the Terror began he fled in horror. Then there is the story of Beethoven tearing up the first page of his Sinfonia Eroica, originally dedicated to Napoleon, upon news that his hero had succumbed to the vanity of a crown. The anarchist Emma Goldman hailed the Russian Revolution, but when fact obliterated her fantasy, she acidly described the Bolshevik State “crushing every constructive revolutionary effort, suppressing, debasing, and disintegrating everything.” The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact shattered the illusions of many armchair Communists.

Disillusionment can decay into cynicism, but it can also be a salvific dose of reality.  Eugenicists in the last century envisioned a demographic utopia, only to find that illusion cruelly mocked by the Nazi death camps and made macabre by abortion mills today. Arthur and Elizabeth Rathburn of Grosse Point, Michigan are just the latest of people on trial for trafficking in the body parts of unborn babies. In 2013 the FBI discovered in their warehouse over one thousand heads, limbs and organs of infants. Their indictment seems to have been delayed because of what was previously a political reluctance to implicate Planned Parenthood. Increasing numbers of our population are recognizing unpleasant truths.

Recent changes by our Executive Branch mark a shift in policy—reinstating the pro-life Mexico City Policy, moving to defund the United Nations Population Fund, expanding the religious exemption to the Health and Human Services Department’s contraception mandate, and favoring a Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act—as well as encouraging the annual March for Life this January 19, marking the 45th anniversary of the tragic Roe v. Wade decision. One does not want to be overly optimistic, but illusions are being shattered and, save for stone hearts, the consciences of many may be recognizing the consequences of naïvely underestimating the forces of evil cloaked as social progress.

The Scottish king Robert the Bruce provided a lesson in persistence. Defeated in battle, he was tempted to give up, but for three months he took refuge in a cave where he watched a spider persevere in building a web, after failing numerous times. “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, again.” The line has edified schoolchildren, but it also helped the Bruce secure his kingdom after victory at Bannockburn. Various places claim the site of the cave—Dumfriesshire, Arran Island, Craigie, Taitlin Island—but that cave is wherever people learn from their mistakes and do not succumb to cynicism. “Preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching” (2 Timothy 4:2).

 

Father Rutler: Epiphany and Contemplating the Stars

Fr. George W. Rutler

When The New Yorker magazine was peerless for its combination of erudition and wit, it ran a cartoon of Lilliputians contemplating Gulliver, whom they had fastened to the ground with ropes: “Either he’s very big or we are very small.”
 

That is what we might say of the Creator when Epiphany directs our eyes to the stars. But while man must be humbled by the size beyond measure of the galaxies, the Creator does not humiliate us. In an interview in 1930, Einstein said: “We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how.” With the humility of a scientist who knows that there is much he does not know, that same professor wryly remarked to R. A. Thornton that he did not want to be like someone, including so many physicists, “who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest.”
 

Well-meaning scientists have tried to calculate a physical explanation for the Star of Bethlehem. In 1604, Johannes Kepler proposed that at the time of Christ’s birth there was a supernova simultaneous with the conjunction of the planets Jupiter, Saturn and Mars. This often is a feature of Christmas programs in astronomical observatories. There may be something to that, but saints like Chrysostom were of the opinion that this was no ordinary phenomenon, given the way it moved and came close to earth, but was “of some power endowed with reason.” For Aquinas, it is “probable that it was a newly created star, not in the heavens, but in the air near the earth, and that its movement varied according to God’s will.”
 

Little is known of the Magi, and for that reason they are a mine easily plundered by romantics who make them so exotic that they seem too good to be true.  We do not even know their homeland; perhaps it was Persia or, according to one recent theory, what is now Yemen. We do know that God, unlike Gulliver, is beyond measure, and his grace has made us more than Lilliputians. Saint Hippolytus, before dying a hard death for Christ, said of him:

He wanted us to consider him as no different from ourselves, and so he worked, he was hungry and thirsty, he slept. . . . When we have come to know the true God, both our bodies and our souls will be immortal and incorruptible. We shall enter the kingdom of heaven, because while we lived on earth we acknowledged heaven’s King. Friends of God and co-heirs with Christ, we shall be subject to no evil desires or inclinations, or to any affliction of body or soul, for we shall have become divine.

Father Rutler: A Christmas Meditation

Fr. George W. Rutler

Saint Paul was converted by the risen Christ, who appeared as a blinding light. Later, he would meet Peter and James who had seen the actual risen body, which had changed from the way it appeared during Christ’s three years with them. 

The body of the resurrected Christ had four characteristics. First, it could no longer feel pain. This “impassibility” was a triumph over the horrors of the Passion. Second, by “subtlety” the body was no longer subject to the laws of physics. During his earthly life, Christ had to knock on doors to enter, but in the Resurrection, he could appear in a room though the doors were locked. Third, the “agility” of Christ’s body had a strength that freed him from the constraints of motion and enabled him to bi-locate. Fourth, the “clarity” of the risen body radiated a brilliance that emanated from the divine intelligence: “light from light.” This was glimpsed in the Transfiguration, and was what blinded Paul on the Damascus road.
 

These lines would seem to be an Easter meditation, but they are a Christmas meditation as well, for the two mysteries are inseparable. Without the Resurrection, the Nativity would be just another birthday, for even extraordinary people like Alexander the Great or Mozart had ordinary births. Because Christ is the Divine Word who created all things, the restrictions of his human nature are no less wonderful than the glory of his divine nature.
 

The infant in Bethlehem was not impassible: he hungered and cried like any other baby. Without subtlety, he was confined to the stable. While in the Resurrection his agility could cast aside the shroud, in the manger he was bound by swaddling clothes. And as for clarity, his infant body could be glimpsed in the darkness only by frail lamplight. As he has no beginning and no end, his divine glory was not something he attained as he grew up: rather, it was what he allowed to dim when he came into time and space. He “emptied himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men” (Philippians 2:7).
 

So Christmas is about two caves, and the birth in a stone stable would be only a sentimental reverie without the fact of the burial cave burst open. The Holy Infant in the manger is a kind of graphic hint for our limited intelligence, of the indescribable Ruler and Judge of the Universe. And the qualities of his risen body intimated what he would let us become in eternity.
 

That youngest of the apostles wrote in his old age: “Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not appeared as yet what we will be. We know that when he appears, we will be like him, because we will see him just as he is” (1 John 3:2).

 

Father Rutler: The Right Use of Reason

Fr. George W. Rutler As a chaplain in a state mental hospital, I quickly learned two things. First, sometimes it was easy to mistake a psychiatrist for one of the patients. Second, and more importantly, the mentally ill can be highly intelligent. If one begins with an illogical premise, one may convincingly make a fallacy seem cogent. An unfortunate man in a locked ward who thinks he is Napoleon Bonaparte can almost convince a visitor that he is there because he lost the battle of Waterloo. Insanity is not a lack of brains; it is a lack of judgment. The Second Sunday of Advent focuses on the right use of reason, in preparation for the coming of Christ the Logos, the source of all creation. He is the Righteous Judge because he is supremely logical, and it would be a form of madness not to expect the Logos to be so.  Our society has employed cleverness to justify moral madness, rationalizing a radical overhaul of social order as “hope and change.” George Orwell anticipated this in his “doublethink” which means holding two contradictory beliefs simultaneously and accepting both of them, so that, for instance, ignorance is strength, war is peace, freedom is slavery. Currently there are those who call censored speech “freedom of speech” and redistribution of wealth “income equality,” and who varnish anarchy as “resistance.” Infanticide is responsible parenthood, infidelity is independence, decadence is progress, common sense is bias, and natural law is hate speech. When the modern moral collapse euphemized as “sexual liberation” redefined vice as freedom, defective judgment unleashed a host of contradictions, so that the very institutions that promoted libertinism affect to be scandalized when celebrities are revealed to have done precisely what the euphemizers wanted. LikeCasablanca’s Captain Renault they are “Shocked! Shocked!” “Doublethinkers” cannot cope with the consequences of their manipulation of logic. Immature students riot when a professor disagrees with them, and voters scream at the sky when an election does not go their way. Their intolerance calls itself tolerance, but it is the false kind of tolerance which, as Chesterton said, is the virtue of the man without convictions. The same people who ask “Who am I to judge?” judge right judgment to be tactlessly judgmental, and they politicize the judiciary to appoint justices who will usurp the function of legislators. Certainly, our Lord forbids any attempt to judge the human heart or the fate of a soul (Matthew 7:2), but blurring the line between right and wrong, which the theologians call antinomianism, turns an entire culture into a raucous asylum.  “If I say to the wicked, ‘You shall surely die,’ and you give him no warning, nor speak to warn the wicked from his wicked way, in order to save his life, that wicked man shall die in his iniquity; but his blood I will require at your hand” (Ezekiel 3:18).

Father Rutler: The Expectation of Advent

Fr. George W. Rutler 

The explanation for your sense of expectation is that you have an imagination. Unlike animals guided by instinct, we can imagine past and future. Advent is the time of expectation. Since Christ is not limited by time, he can be born again in our lives at every Christmas.
 

Expectation requires thinking about the four most important matters of existence: Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell. These are the primary mysteries that arrest the attention of minds awake, more compelling than holiday shopping and attempts at partying before Christmas begins.
 

To look at death at the start of Advent is what we do on a small scale when we look at the end of anything, whether it be the end of the day or the end of some project we have been working on, or even the end of a movie or a song. The question is: Does the end of life have a purpose? C.S. Lewis answered that in a typically lucid way: “It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for a bird to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.”
 

Along with the sense of expectation is the intuition that what is expected is more vital than what we now have. On the day after Christmas in 1941, Winston Churchill stood before the joint houses of Congress and spoke of “. . . my life, which is already long, and has not been entirely uneventful.” Then a full twenty-four years later, his dying words were: “I’m bored with it all.” That was really wonderful because, though skeptical about the Gospel, he knew that things as they are, are not enough. He was a bit like Benjamin Franklin who, while far from an orthodox Christian, playfully wrote his own epitaph as a printer, comparing himself to a worn old book: “For it will, as he believ’d, appear once more, In a new and more perfect Edition, Corrected and amended, By the Author.”
 

There is a worthy movement now to rebuild the lamented old Pennsylvania Station, constructed on the site of our original church. That church was destroyed in 1963, in the arrogant period when many classical churches were wrecked by misguided liturgical experts who shared the modern contempt for anything old. The restoration of the old station would cost about $3.5 billion, an immense amount but small change compared to the $20 billion of innocuous glass boxes rising around us in the Hudson Yards development.
 

Jesus spoke of rebuilding the Herodian Temple in three days (John 2:19). That was at the price of his own blood, for he was speaking of his body. He did raise it. And he can do the same for us.

Father Rutler: The Feast of Christ the King

Fr. George W. Rutler

A professor told me of two experiences he had when civilization was picking up its pieces after World War II. He was in the crowd when King George VI visited Cambridge University and was greeted with loud cheers. Then, as a U. S. soldier in occupied Japan, he watched as a vast throng became stone silent when the Emperor alighted from the imperial train, all heads bowed and eyes downcast. Hirohito no longer had divine pretensions, but the customary reverence was palpable. The one king embodied the familial aspect of a monarch as father, and the other was a reminder of a ruler transcending the ordinary commerce of life.

On the Feast of Christ the King, the Church proposes a sovereignty both human and divine: the Holy One who walked the roads of this world as a man among men was at the same time of Heaven, the Supreme Being.

This mystery stretches the limited intellect, as in the case of Pontius Pilate, who remains a fascinating psychological study, as he tried to figure out if Jesus was a king. Why he posed the question is not clear, and Jesus asked if the question was his own or a reaction to the cynicism of the mob. Pilate was a paramount cynic himself, not a skeptic who doubts whether something is true, but a man who doubts that truth exists at all. That is why Nietzsche, whose only god was selfish power, considered Pilate the only powerful character in the Gospel. But then, it was Nietzsche who said, “I am no man, I am dynamite.” Consistent with his claim, he ended up insane.

Because Pilate was too vindictive even for the Roman imperium, the governor of Syria, Lucius Vitellius, removed him from the prefecture of Judea. One theory is that Pilate committed suicide in what is now Vienne in modern France. As for his birth, there is more confusion: possibly Tarragona in Spain, or more implausibly in the Perthshire Highlands of Scotland, or Forchheim in Germany, or most likely in the Abruzzi of Italy. You might say that he was born wherever men refuse to recognize truth when they see it, and destroy themselves when they have walked away from it. The moral chaos is more widespread now than in the academic groves of the classical world, and we see its effect in the campus riots of today and the mental floss of such philosophers as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.

This much can be said for Pontius Pilate: He inscribed that sign “King of the Jews” and would not remove it. It may have been sheer irony, the cynicism of a cynic. Or perhaps when he began to roam the hills of exile, he sensed that the ultimate and only choice in life is holiness or madness: “And they will go away to eternal punishment, but the virtuous to eternal life” (Matthew 25:46).