Marriage Today

At Jesus the King Church, this past Friday I led a discussion with more than 30 adults both young and older about love of couples and marriage today. The discussion was inspired by an interview/Web-chat on TVO’s The Agenda which can be seen here:

http://theagenda.tvo.org/blog/agenda-blogs/our-web-chat-lessons-learned-love

I wish to thank all participants who provided insights into their own experience on this morally important topic. We started the session with a reading from Genesis 2: 18-24 that reminded us of the reason a woman fulfills man’s desire for joy and life, and he too is her joy; for the woman complements man; their love to each other in marriage transcends the ups and downs of emotions and commits them together for a lifetime. “That is why a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, and the two of them become one body.” (Gen. 2: 24). We also ended the session with a hymn sung by Ivan and played by Sonia.

The Discussion

It is impossible to summarise every thought. I will give below some examples.

A bright single young man revealed how women, both single and married, chase him in the office through suggestive text messages in order to kiss him or make love with him. He explained that this kind of temptation is available in North America and Europe, and, we are sure, in the Middle East too. TV and the Internet are used to promote individual instant pleasure in some of their channels. Schools are sometimes too liberal for Christians. In a way, this reflects a trend in Western society where observance of strict sexual moral values has declined since the sexual revolution of the 1960s.

When asked what criteria she has in mind for selecting a suitable partner for life, a single young woman said she looks for a smart and caring man who is well cultured and probably of the same culture. Did a prospective spouse have to be rich? Most single persons said ”no.” I asked individuals of a group of recently married couples “What was the most important characteristic that made you choose your spouse?” One said “Her balanced personality” but did not deny that she looked pretty to him. A female spouse said “What matters is love and harmony. We help each other as much as we can” Other married couples echoed the importance of the good/wise personality.

When I asked a married lady whether she would leave her husband if she found her soul mate, her answer was no. Yet, without suspecting any lady or man in the meeting, I am aware of cases where the husband cheated on his wife and left her with their kids to live with another woman.  The negative impact of separation of spouses on children is enormous, said a married lady echoing recent studies that show how children of divorced parents become more prone to mistrust the other and divorce their spouses.

Older people in the meeting gave advice to the younger ones. One lady said her children introduced to her the girls they were planning to marry because in marriage a harmony between the families of both sides helps marriage. In the expensive life we live, both husband and wife usually have to work until retirement. During their work hours, they entrust their little kids to the grandparents where they are nourished and taught the basic Christian behaviour and manners.

As a husband for 30 years I spoke about my own experience. It is true that my wife and I have made sacrifices, for example not having a car for the first 9 years in Toronto, yet were able to give our kids the best education in moral and academic excellence in spite of my health condition. My wife has always supported me in the good and hard times and in all times when I was hospitalized.  What happened with us is in my opinion a blessing from God. As in any marriage, ups and downs in emotions are a fact of life but what matters is commitment and faithfulness beyond solely emotional or sensual attractions. To my young ones I say love is larger than infatuation although it may start with it. Marriage is for life! I will have to write more about it in another time.

Near the end, I asked Fr. Youhanna Hanna to give us a word since he is also a parent. It is amazing how the Lord called him to be father of a family and also of the community. Fr. Youhanna spoke about his experience and God in the middle of the love experience. After all, it is true love that comes from God that really matters. I will have to ask him to send a little word of what he said.

Georges Farah: He must increase, but I must decrease.

Today June 24 is the feast day of John the Baptist, the forerunner of Christ. What is the significance of John the Baptist? 

“He must increase, but I must decrease.” John the Baptist said of Jesus (John 3:30). “The entire Gospel is summarized in this sentence” said Fr. Georges Farah in his homily today. In our life, the more we give space to God the more we see our need for him.  And the more we see our need for God, the more we realize his love for us.

Do we dare to say with John the Baptist “He must increase, but I must decrease”? Do I dare to let the other person increase while I decrease? Do I dare to risk my own "dignity" for the sake of building the other who is in need of Christ? Do I dare to preach Christ as John the Baptist preached him, a man who was martyred for the truth by the king who feared him?  

Fifty Years After Vatican II - Reassessing Unity in Truth

Vatican II was the great Council of the 20th century. While it sought unity with separated Christians, we still see this unity is not realized yet among Christians. In my opinion, some polarized positions whether in the Liberal/Progressive or Conservative/Traditionalist camps reinterpreted the Council's documents to accommodate their own positions.

Within the Catholic fold there have been many issues related to misinterpretation of the Church's position on numerous issues both doctrinal and moral. Here are a few:

Following Vatican II, a few theological opinions distorted presentation of the Catholic doctrine on the Church. In response, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a declaration approved by the Supreme Pontiff for publication in 1973:
http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19730705_mysterium-ecclesiae_en.html

With the outbreak and spread of the Sexual Revolution and its questions around sexual ethics, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a declaration approved by the Supreme Pontiff for publication in 1975: 
http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19751229_persona-humana_en.html

On questions about the position of the Catholic Church regarding Masonic Associations, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a declaration in 1983 emphasizing the grave status of Catholics who enroll in Masonic Associations. See it here:
http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19831126_declaration-masonic_en.html

With the spread of meditations of Eastern religions and philosophies such as Buddhist meditation, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith warned Catholic bishops of the dangers of confusing a negative outlook or escape from the world as expressed in these philosophies with Christian prayers whose goal is to sanctify the world:
http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19891015_meditazione-cristiana_en.html

The Vatican also published "A Christian Reflection on the 'New Age'" in 2003:
http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/interelg/documents/rc_pc_interelg_doc_20030203_new-age_en.html

One of the most known cases was Liberation Theology in Latin America that used Marxist tools to increase Catholics commitment to the poor. See the response of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith here:
http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19840806_theology-liberation_en.html

Another was the radical Feminists attempts to improve women's status in a Western society that is increasingly becoming liberal. After questioning the Church's position on the dignity of women, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith responded with a letter approved for publication by the Holy Father to the bishops of the Catholic Church on the collaboration of men and women in the Church. See it here:
http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20040731_collaboration_en.html
Feminists staunchly demanded and attempted the ordination of women to the sacrament of Orders. The response of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith came in its decree approved by the Supreme Pontiff and dated December 21, 2002:
http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20021221_scomunica-donne_en.html


On the Conservative/Traditionalist side, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre caused a schism by ordaining bishops without Rome's approval for which he was excommunicated from the Catholic Church in 1988. Traditionalist continue to demand a restoration of the Church to pre-Vatican II atmosphere where the Roman Curia was in charge of the entire Catholic Church. You can sense the polarization too in the attitudes towards the Holy See whenever the Pope makes statements that support the Jewish faith or the Muslim faith. If the Pope supports Israel, then Arabs scream at him. If he shows a stand with Arab Palestinians then Israelis condemn him.

Yet we still hope that every thing will be well. Reunion is not as easy as we thought 50 years ago. Dialogue with the Orthodox Churches shows that Catholics and Orthodox are in agreement on probably 95% of their common heritage. Much of the perceived differences between Catholics and Orthodox are to a great extent due to memories of events of rivalry or proselytism in the past. Dialogue with some Communions of the Reformation has shown that in essential things they agree with the doctrines of the Catholic Church.  In addressing the World Council of Churches, John Paul II emphasized the faith of Catholics that Jesus Christ alone is the Saviour of all. As for dialogue with major religions, advances have been made in prayers at Assisi and elsewhere. All moderates on all sides seem to agree that the only way to go forward is to work together. This is particularly important as atheism and materialism creep in the global village.

The Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist

Today is the Solemnity of Corpus Christi (celebration of the Body of Christ) in the Roman Catholic tradition. The feast was officially proclaimed by Pope Urban IV in 1263 after being requested by the mystic Juliana of Liège on repeated visions of Christ in which, according to her recorded confessions, the Saviour asked for a celebration of the act of his sublime love to humanity in which he gives life to those who partake in  the Holy Communion i.e. The Eucharist or the Mystery of Thanksgiving. St.Thomas Aquinas, the greatest of Catholic intellectuals in history, composed a liturgy for the feast and prepared a hymn that is still sung today in adoration of Christ present in the Eucharist.  Thomas was so absorbed by the beauty of the Eucharist that he had a vision after which he said that all what he wrote which amounts to the works of a lifetime of genius is like a straw compared to what was revealed to him. If such a great intellectual could, in humility, confess his utter lack of knowledge of the Mystery of God, and yet fall in so much love of his Saviour and God, how about us who claim to know much?

Here are words of the hymn Pange Lingua 
Down in adoration falling,
Lo! the sacred Host we hail,
Lo! o'er ancient forms departing
Newer rites of grace prevail;
Faith for all defects supplying,
Where the feeble senses fail.
To the everlasting Father,
And the Son Who reigns on high
With the Holy Ghost proceeding
Forth from Each eternally,
Be salvation, honor, blessing,
Might and endless majesty.
Amen.


You can listen to the hymn here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8fVgqTtPfA&feature=fvwrel

There is more evidence to show our brothers who do not believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. One of the miracles took place in 700 AD when a Basilian Monk celebrating Mass started to have doubt as to whether Christ could possibly be present in the bread on the altar after consecration. The Miracle of Lanciano took place at the altar. In it the priest saw the bread change into living flesh and the wine change into 5 globules of blood. has been scientifically verified in 1970 by Professor Edoardo Linoli and Professor Bertelli of the University of Siena. In 1973, the World Health Organization  appointed a commission to verify Linoli's conclusions. The WHO commissioned work was carried out over 15 months with a total of 500 experiments and came out to the same conclusions of Professors Linoli & Bertelli. 
What were the conclusions? 

The flesh is real flesh, and the blood is real blood belonging to human species; the flesh consists of the muscular tissue of the heart; the flesh and blood have the same blood type AB. 

The above was  documented online (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_of_Lanciano ) and presentation is already available on YouTube here:

The Miracle of the Eucharist in Lanciano:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PJ8BORx1p8

Let us adore the divine man, The Word, eternally begotten of the Father, whose presence in the Mystery of thanksgiving is available to all in the Eucharist.  

Henri de Lubac: Catholicism

I have been reading "Catholicism" a volume written by the great Jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac in 1937 well before the reforms of Vatican II to which Henri de Lubac contributed substantially. In his "Catholicism", de Lubac retrieves the meaning of the Body of Christ as interpreted by the Fathers of the Church and the great medieval scholars including St. Thomas Aquinas. While Pope Pius XII interpreted the mystical body of Christ to be the institution of the Catholic Church, the Fathers believed it referred to the Eucharist, the most important sacrament of communion for the life of Christians. This is only the beginning on which de Lubac builds his "New Theology" where the "Supernatural" is not separate from "Nature." In Henri de Lubac, "Human nature [the Church] tells us at the outset, is certainly sick, infirm, but it is not totally depraved...The divine likeness in it may be dimmed, veiled, disfigured, but it is always there." (Henri de Lubac, Catholicism, Chapter IX, Page 145).  On the non-Christian religions including the Gentiles de Lubac expounds the universality of the Catholic Church not only geographically but also theologically:  "Ever since the day when, full of the strength and the promises of the Holy Spirit, the Church issued from the Cenacle to overrun the earth, she has encountered everywhere in her progress countries that are already, in the religious sense, occupied... Must everything be jettisoned to give place to the Gospel?...False religions, therefore, are religions that stray from the truth to become engulfed in error, rather than religions whose whole direction is misleading and whose principles are wholly false. They are based on childish ideas more often than evil ones." 

Let's look anew at the New Theology ushered by Henri de Lubac. His efforts at retrieving the early Biblical scholarship of Origen, the Fathers and the Scholastics have three important dimensions in the continuing development of understanding in the Catholic Church:

First: God works in every created human person. The Holy Spirit is not bound by any particular theology for "the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles" (Acts 10: 45). If the Spirit leads persons and communities such as Cornelius to Peter before their baptism, then the Church proposes to all non-Christians that salvation is always possible to those who, following the dictates of their conscience, search for God. It is with this in mind that, from the beginning, the Church married the good elements she found in the Greek philosophies with what she believes is revealed Hebrew tradition.While she started with Peter, Paul and the other disciples as a little Jewish group of followers of Christ, she continued to preach the good news to non Jews too, always in the hope that they will find salvation through Jesus Christ the only way to heaven. On this basis too, the grace that the Holy Spirit bestows on persons and communities includes many Pagans that the Spirit prepared for Christ's coming. The Magi may saw his light in their own cultures and therefore came to Bethlehem to pay homage to the Saviour of all. The preparation for Christ's coming could also be understood as the preparation for the Second Coming of Christ in which the New Jerusalem or the Kingdom of God reaches out to the world at the end of time.

Second: The Church, according to Vatican II, is not only the Mystical Body of Christ, but also the People of God from the earliest monotheist faith of Abraham to the end of the ages and in the cultures which receive Christ. Let me add that according to the CDF declaration Dominus Iesus or "The Lord Jesus" approved for publication by Blessed John Paul II in 2000, the following is stated: 
"Above all else, it must be firmly believed that 'the Church, a pilgrim now on earth, is necessary for salvation: the one Christ is the mediator and the way of salvation; he is present to us in his body which is the Church. He himself explicitly asserted the necessity of faith and baptism (cf. Mk 16:16;Jn 3:5), and thereby affirmed at the same time the necessity of the Church which men enter through baptism as through a door'.⁷⁷ This doctrine must not be set against the universal salvific will of God (cf. 1 Tim 2:4); “it is necessary to keep these two truths together, namely, the real possibility of salvation in Christ for all mankind and the necessity of the Church for this salvation”. The Church is the “universal sacrament of salvation”, since, united always in a mysterious way to the Saviour Jesus Christ, her Head, and subordinated to him, she has, in God's plan, an indispensable relationship with the salvation of every human being. For those who are not formally and visibly members of the Church, 'salvation in Christ is accessible by virtue of a grace which, while having a mysterious relationship to the Church, does not make them formally part of the Church, but enlightens them in a way which is accommodated to their spiritual and material situation. This grace comes from Christ; it is the result of his sacrifice and is communicated by the Holy Spirit'; it has a relationship with the Church, which 'according to the plan of the Father, has her origin in the mission of the Son and the Holy Spirit'.
21.  With respect to the way in which the salvific grace of God — which is always given by means of Christ in the Spirit and has a mysterious relationship to the Church — comes to individual non-Christians, the Second Vatican Council limited itself to the statement that God bestows it 'in ways known to himself'.  Theologians are seeking to understand this question more fully.  Their work is to be encouraged, since it is certainly useful for understanding better God's salvific plan and the ways in which it is accomplished. However, from what has been stated above about the mediation of Jesus Christ and the 'unique and special relationship⁸⁴ which the Church has with the kingdom of God among men — which in substance is the universal kingdom of Christ the Saviour — it is clear that it would be contrary to the faith to consider the Church as one way of salvation alongside those constituted by the other religions, seen as complementary to the Church or substantially equivalent to her, even if these are said to be converging with the Church toward the eschatological kingdom of God." The Declaration continues:"Certainly, the various religious traditions contain and offer religious elements which come from God, and which are part of what “the Spirit brings about in human hearts and in the history of peoples, in cultures, and religions”. Indeed, some prayers and rituals of the other religions may assume a role of preparation for the Gospel, in that they are occasions or pedagogical helps in which the human heart is prompted to be open to the action of God. One cannot attribute to these, however, a divine origin or an ex opere operato salvific efficacy, which is proper to the Christian sacraments.⁸⁸ Furthermore, it cannot be overlooked that other rituals, insofar as they depend on superstitions or other errors (cf. 1 Cor 10:20-21), constitute an obstacle to salvation.
22.  With the coming of the Saviour Jesus Christ, God has willed that the Church founded by him be the instrument for the salvation of all humanity (cf. Acts 17:30-31). This truth of faith does not lessen the sincere respect which the Church has for the religions of the world, but at the same time, it rules out, in a radical way, that mentality of indifferentism “characterized by a religious relativism which leads to the belief that ‘one religion is as good as another'”. I have removed the notes for easier reading but you may wish to look again at this rich document. See http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20000806_dominus-iesus_en.html.  

Third: Henri de Lubac's work is at the same time a reminder to all of Christian Humanism which developed in Western Christian culture starting in the 12th century with the retrieval of the Roman and Greek Classics. It is an expression of the beauty of creation as we find in the paintings of Michael Angelo and Rafael, the polyphonic music and chants of Palestrina and Bach, and the architecture of St. Peter's in Rome as well as Notre Dame in Paris.  We may recall here the enormous work of Blessed John Henry Newman on the development of doctrine, and before him the humanist work of St. Thomas More in his "Utopia" of the 16th century. In fact we could go back to St. Francis of Assisi  in the 12th century, probably the first Christian Humanist in the West. While we are at it, let's recall to memory yje work of St. Basil the Great, Archbishop of Constantinople in the 4th century who built a city with hospitals to serve the poor.

When we think of Christian unity which is a dear goal for all committed Christians, let's recall to  mind that the doctrinal and liturgical developments in the entire Catholic Church remain a treasure to hold. 

For many reasons, historical and theological, I remain convinced that every human person who seriously searches for the truth is, according to Dominus Iesus, in a mysterious way, linked to the Mystery of the Church i.e. The Catholic Church. That is how open and far-reaching is Catholicism. Henri de Lubac certainly contributed to such openness.