Obama @ ND

“I can think of no better way of redeeming this tragic world today than love and laughter. Too many of the young have forgotten how to laugh, and too many of the elders have forgotten how to love. Would not our lives be lightened if only we could all learn to laugh more easily at ourselves and to love one another.”

- Fr. Theodore Hesburgh, President Emeritus, U. of Notre Dame

I graduated from the U. of Notre Dame in 2004, and I liked it so much that I stuck around for 2 years of grad school in Theology. I loved my college experience, and being back at ND brings emotions out of me that no other place on earth can. I love the Masses, the quarter dogs, and the vicious sprinklers.

But there are a few things about Notre Dame that have made me sad:

1. Our football program of late. Yikes. Better this year, right? Please, Charlie?

2. The weather. Give us our sun back, Michigan!

3. ND inviting President Obama to speak at commencement.

Now, let me be very clear. Yes, I was saddened that ND invited an aggressively pro-choice politician to such a public platform. But I was even more saddened by the backlash that I knew would result from the Catholic community. ND is a part of me, and the insults against ND are tough to brush off these days.

Probably the most vociferous group in speaking out against the so-called "Notre Dame scandal" has been the Cardinal Newman Society, a group dedicated to renewing Catholic higher education in the U.S. Now, a few years ago the CNS released a study on the Catholic identity of some major colleges and universities; and it was fairly well done. And ND was such an anomaly to them that they dedicated an entire chapter just to the Catholicism of Notre Dame. (Read it here.) Basically, what the CNS said was that Notre Dame is the most academically prestigious of any Catholic school, and the most Catholic of any academically prestitious school.

And that's the dichotomy that ND is forced to face; nearly every day, someone at the University is making a decision that can either be true to Catholic doctrine or further ND's academic prestige, but not both. And contrary to popular belief, the latter option isn't always chosen.

In this singular situation, Notre Dame chose prestige over Catholic identity. But couldn't we have said the same when ND invited President Bush to speak at commencement in 2001? The man who was Governor of Texas (which executes 3x more humans than any other state), declared a war that was criticized by Pope John Paul II, and constantly acted against Church teaching on immigration reform certainly wasn't a "Catholic" speaker. Granted, abortion is one of the only moral teachings of the Church that is unequivocal; abortion is never ok. But nevertheless, where was the massive petition against Bush's anti-Catholic stances?

And even more poignantly, if we're looking to invite only public figures that are perfectly aligned with Catholic teaching, who'll be speaking at commencement from now on? Only practicing Catholics in good standing with the Church? Only priests, bishops and Stephen Colbert (I could deal with that!)? But seriously, ND would sacrifice quite a bit if they were ever to go to those lengths; maybe that's a sacrifice some would expect of ND, but I personally wouldn't.

I will never defend President Obama's actions against the pro-life cause, and I don't necessarily believe that Notre Dame should have invited him so soon after his inauguration. But I'm hopeful that Obama can deliver some Catholic action on immigration, health care and social services and that this invitation can open a dialogue on other issues, such as abortion and marriage.

Tangent 1: When did it become the "Catholic" thing to publicly criticize our nation's leader? And when did the Republican Party become the Catholic party? The Democratic Party clearly supports abortion, embryonic stem cell research and gay marriage, but isn't every other plank in their platform mostly Catholic? (Just FYI, I'm neither Rep nor Dem - they both drive me crazy.)

Tangent 2: Wouldn't it be great if we could all agree on a common moral basis (i.e. don't kill babies, etc.) and let the politicians actually make political decisions? Since when did suits in Washington form the moral framework of our country?

Tangent 3: Finally, there's no way that ND (or any other school) will ever uninvite the President of the United States from any event. I understand the efforts of the petitioners, but if you're a University, you just don't do that.

Lemme know what you're thinkin'!
Peace, y'all.

PM

P.S. The new DMB single, "Funny The Way It Is" is out. Awe. Some.

"He is not here."

Now let the heavens be joyful, Let earth her song begin:
Let the round world keep triumph, And all that is therein;
Invisible and visible, Their notes let all things blend,
For Christ the Lord is risen, Our joy that hath no end.
- St. John of Damascus

Everything that happened before Christ's Resurrection, including the whole Old Testament, was a precursor to Easter morning. Everything that's happened since can only be viewed in light of that moment.

Everything that we do as Christians leads us to Easter morning, and everything we do afterward is in response to the Resurrection.

We are an Easter people!

In the story of the Resurrection from Mark's Gospel, the women who loved Jesus show up on Easter morning to perform the traditional Jewish anointing rites for a dead body. They loved Jesus, and they deal with their grief by focusing on concrete, practical jobs as many of us do. What they don't realize is that while they're looking for a dead body, the Jesus that they love is risen and very alive. The women were "amazed" and probably a bit afraid; they could have never imagined this to be possible.

How often are we stuck searching for Jesus in the tombs of our own lives? When are we most afraid to change the way that we pray, think, or live, even when we hear the call from God to do so? How easy can it be to convince ourselves that Jesus is right where we left him - at the church, in our childhood, with another group of friends?

Mark assures us on this most important day of the year that if our Jesus is anything, he's certainly NOT predictable and static. Christ is rarely right where we left him. Instead, he is constantly "going before you to Galilee; there you will see him." This Easter, may we leave behind the tombs of our own sin and safety and look for the exciting, vivid, living Christ in new and beautiful places.

Peace, y'all. Happy Resurrection!
PM

P.S. Speaking of the importance of the Resurrection, the truth of the Resurrection has gripped even the literary greats throughout history; suffering, death and Resurrection drive many of the great stories throughout the past 2000 years. Including Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, I might add! (*Spoiler Alert*) For all of her ceaseless criticism of Christianity, her hero, John Galt, rises from his own version of a tomb - a torture chamber. Rand unwittingly uses the truth of Easter in her attempt to deny it. For more, here's the blog on Atlas's economic failures.

P.P.S. How was your Easter? What'd you do to celebrate? Open for comments...

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The Devil's Temporary Triumph

"The gradual extinction of all light in The Basilica symbolizes the temporary triumph of the Prince of Darkness over the Light of the World."
- Tenebrae worship aid, Basilica of St. Mary, Minneapolis

This is the weekend to end all weekends for a Catholic Christian. This is why we do what we do - for the experience of Holy Week, the Triduum and Easter Sunday. And one of my favorite liturgies during the course of the Triduum is the celebration of Tenebrae, which means "darkness" in Latin. I don't just love Tenebrae because they turn out all the lights at the end and you get the bang on the pews to represent the earthquake after Jesus' death (although that is a highlight). During Tenebrae, we use darkness, Scripture and song to remember the time between Jesus' death and resurrection; we remember the time that Jesus was not in the world.

I'm a fan of reflecting on the circumstances and people surrounding Jesus in the Passion narrative. Tonight, at Tenebrae, I couldn't get my mind off of Satan's "temporary triumph" over God on Good Friday. This is a pretty intriguing idea to me, mostly because of the interplay between power, wisdom and love.

Throughout all of the Scriptures and Tradition of the Church, we have the constant message that everything we do begins and ends with love. God is Love. We know that God's love offers us many gifts, one of which is wisdom. And any power that we possess as Christians comes first from our love and God's love in us, and second from the wisdom that we're given. Jesus got this progression right. Satan couldn't have gotten it more wrong.

Jesus' great triumph was in putting love before power. Could he have come down from the cross under his own power? Of course - nothing kept him on that cross but love for us. Satan's great folly was in putting power (and everything else) before love.

I wonder sometimes if the devil understood, at least on some level, that the whole crucifixion situation wasn't going to turn out well for him in the end. I wonder if he had some glimpse of Christ's victory over death, but was too greedy to pass up watching the Son of God die. It's like a drug addict on probation knowing the serious consequences he faces if he touches heroin again; and then doing whatever it takes to get the next fix, because he can't see past the immediate obsession.

I love C.S. Lewis for about a million reasons, one of them being the way he goes about this idea in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, after Aslan comes back to life:

"It means," said Aslan, "that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor's stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backward."

What Lewis was wondering was whether the devil had too little wisdom to understand the end result of the crucifixion (salvation). What I'm wondering if whether the devil had plenty of wisdom, but ignored it for the sake of immediate gratification.

So that brings us to Holy Saturday. Today of all days, let's wait in joyful hope for the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ. This day of anticipation and near despair while Christ is in the tomb is nothing compared to the joy of Easter!

...and also the joy of eating chocolate again. :)

Peace y'all,
PM

P.S. They dropped rose petals from the ceiling of the Basilica during Tenebrae tonight. A little over the top? For sure. Still pretty cool? Yup.

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Roman vs. Trojan: The Pope in Africa

The first two facts which a healthy boy or girl feels about sex are these: first that it is beautiful and then that it is dangerous. - G.K. Chesterton

Is an 81 year old man able to identify with the suffering of AIDS? Is a lifelong academic stupid enough to think that condoms cause AIDS? Just how out of touch is the Church?

Yes, no, and not (respectively).

There's been tons of buzz lately about the Pope's recent comments on the AIDS epidemic in Africa, and the inadequacy of condoms to solve the problem. Some of this buzz has come from straightforward media coverage (like here and here), some has been a little more straightbackward (like here), and most has been personal speculation and cynicism by Catholics and non-Catholics alike. And all of it prompted a lot of personal reflection and reaction on my part, and so...without further ado, a personal interpretation of the two sides of the Pope's condom comments!

1) The Rational Side, or "The Pope cares about your body"

The Pope is clearly NOT saying that condoms are some kind of superconductor for STDs, as if wearing one during sex increases the likelihood of transmitting HIV. What he's saying is that condoms are never 100% effective in protecting against STDs. And Benny is just agreeing with the CDC when he says that - according to a survey they did in Haiti (a third-world country, like much of Africa), "1 of 42 uninfected partners (2%) became infected with consistent condom use." And for any intelligent person, 1 out of 42 is one too many.



Too many people believe that using a condom = zero chance of disease or pregnancy. For you Friends fans out there, you can remember the famous "Well, they should put that on the box!" quote by Ross (above, 2 minutes in). And those misconceptions exist in the U.S., where there's even better sex ed than in Africa.

Abstinence is the only failsafe form of STD prevention. But don't take my word for it - Trojan condoms and the CDC both agree. And even beyond that, abstinence education has been extremely effective in lowering cases of HIV through programs like Abstinence Africa and Stay Alive. It only stands to reason that if we're serious about eliminating HIV for good, we ought to use the most effective means possible - abstinence.

2) The Spiritual Side, or "The Pope cares about your soul"

The fact of the matter is that condoms are morally unacceptable in every situation. They interfere with the procreative aspect of sex, degrading the beauty of sexuality. Condoms provide the illusion of consequence-free sexual encounters: "We definitely won't transmit disease if I wear a condom." They take the beauty of sex out of God's hands and force it into human control. So while the disease-prevention aspects of condoms are admirable, the immoral aspects make condom use wrong no matter what - it's the basic moral principle that the ends NEVER justify the means.

Neither is it valid to argue, as a justification for sexual intercourse which is deliberately contraceptive, that a lesser evil is to be preferred to a greater one… - Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI

The Church doesn't want her children to settle for "good enough." If we're called to be like Christ (1 Peter 1:16) and to "be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect" (Matthew 5:48), then we should never settle for anything less. The argument that "people are just going to have sex" just isn't good enough. Human nature can settle in and sin can overtake us, but it's our call to always strive for holiness - whether we live in Minnesota (brr!), Africa (warm!) or anywhere in between.

And behind all this is the crazy idea that an old German man in Rome loves us enough to challenge us - and I kinda like that idea!

PM

P.S. I'm on page 1057 out of 1168 of Atlas Shrugged... And I can't WAIT to post about how much I love to hate Ayn Rand!


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"In the beginning..."

Whatever this Christian phenomenon was, it was certainly not the beige system of thought that had been presented to me. Rather it seemed to me the strangest, most exotic, surprising, and uncanny of all the religious paths I had encountered. For at the very center of it is…a God who comes after us with a reckless abandon, breaking open his own heart in love in order to include us in the rhythm of his own life. ~ Fr. Robert Barron

<-- This is me, metaphorically speaking. Or maybe literally? Wouldn't it be sweet if this were actually a picture of me in the womb 27+ years ago? Although I doubt they had this kind of technology back in '82. But back to metaphors, I am but a fetus in the blogosphere, full of potential and life. I've been leery of the idea of blogging for a good while, but I figure with a specific focus and a specific audience, I can avoid being too self-serving (although I don't promise to avoid soapboxes).

Hence, welcome aboard the "U.S.S. Through Catholic Eyes", a vessel for blogging from a Catholic perspective, challenging elements of the country and world with a worldview that starts and ends with the Church in a real and accessible way! Thanks for joining me!

I've always liked the image of the Church as being "radically moderate"; daring to radically avoid the extremes that threaten humanity and the earth. i.e. A Catholic...

- Lives in and through the Trinity regardless of the situation
- Avoids the extremes of addiction and puritanism
- Finds a spirituality that's unique to their personal call
- Lives a morality that lies between relativism and scrupulosity
- Realizes that being Catholic looks different for everyone (i.e. the theology of vocation)
- Doesn't embrace the material world as totally fulfilling or reject it as completely evil
- Can't, in good conscience, be a full-platform Republican or Democrat

So there's the theology I'm working with, flavored with the spice of my own life and ministry experiences... Like it? Disagree? Don't just sit there, let me know!

And I can't think of a more appropriate way to end this flagship post than with this little guy right here! I think he embraces the truth and love of the Church, don't you?

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