Category: The Catholic Weekly

All that matters is what’s in your heart, right? Not so fast

Many Catholics will tell you that taking the Lord’s name in vain doesn’t mean using it as a curse word when someone cuts in front of you in traffic. Instead—they argue—taking the Lord’s name in vain is when you use it to justify ugly human behavior.

They will try to convince you that taking the Lord’s name in vain is when you declare you are pro-life—because humans are made in the image of God—but then you refer to immigrants as sub-human. They say that taking the Lord’s name in vain is when you hold a protest sign that says, “God hates gays,” or when you insist that real Catholic women never ever say  “no” to their husbands.

The truth is, of course, taking the Lord’s name in vain is both these things.

What we say ought to reflect what we believe, and what we believe ought to be shaped by what we say. We are what we do, and we are what we say. We are what we believe, and we are what we hold in our secret hearts that only the Lord can know.

If we are in the habit of being gentle and loving and generous and self-sacrificial toward others, then why would we not make the extra effort to also control our tongue? Why would we not use our voice to be gentle, loving, and generous towards our fellow humans and also towards God?

Using God’s name in vain is what you were taught in beginning catechism class; and it’s also something more subtle and more comprehensive.

Here’s another example of an updated understanding of virtue that corrects one error but makes a new one: It has become common for enlightened Catholics to insist that modesty is entirely an interior disposition and has nothing to do with the clothes we wear.

I understand how we got here  … Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly (and for context, recall that, in Australia, their hot season is just beginning!).

What else can Trump do to persuade Catholics he’s on their side?

American Catholic voters, the cheapest of cheap dates, went absolutely bananas the other day on Michaelmas when someone on Donald Trump’s social media team posted the prayer to St Michael.   

Because I am slightly more sentient than a banana myself, I feel qualified to explain this phenomenon: This is called “pandering.” It is what you do when you are equal parts ignorant of and contemptuous toward something (like how Trump is ignorant of and contemptuous toward the Catholic faith) but you know that you need those people to vote for you, and you know a lot of them are absurdly gullible and desperate for affirmation. So you throw them a scrap and watch them scramble.  

On the same day the prayer made a splash on Facebook and X, Trump himself made a remark in person wherein he sounded more like his old familiar self, not praying humbly as in the St Michael prayer, but longing for “one really violent day” in which police could get “extraordinarily rough” against shoplifters who are allegedly swarming over our fair country.   

Trump himself, of course, is notorious for walking away without paying for what he takes; in his personal life and in his campaign; and despite the fear and frenzy he habitually tries to whip up—”[P]olice aren’t allowed to do their job. They’re told if you do anything, you’re going to lose your pension. You’re going to lose your family, your house, your car.”—both violent and property crimes (like the theft Trump constantly complains about) have declined dramatically across the entire country.   

But he shared a prayer! And on Mary’s birthday, he shared a picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe! And the two failed assassination attempts took place on the feast days of Our Lady of Sorrows, and also on the Feast of St Henry, which, y’know, is probably also significant somehow if you have eyes to see! And Melania is Catholic! 

So very Catholic. 

As a Catholic, that’s all the evidence anyone could need. Sure, Trump’s no angel, but God’s been workin’ on his heart, and we’re clearly mere moments away from the best conversion you people have ever seen, a really big, beautiful conversion; you won’t believe your eyes. Not even the late, great Hannibal Lecter could have a conversion like this.   

Maybe you’re still somehow unpersuaded by the overwhelming evidence that Trump is doing the work of God. Maybe you’re still a tad skeptical that there is some kind of sincere searching going on in his soul.  

Frankly, I’m sad for you. It must be hard to live in such a cynical world when you can’t even see what’s so plainly right before your eyes. What would it take to make you see the burgeoning grace at work inside this happy warrior? What more could this lion of God do to melt your hearts of stone and show you who he really is? 

I have a few ideas … Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

Image source 

Pro-life voters are now entirely free

For almost as long as I can remember, voters who understand the vital importance of the pro-life cause have had their consciences held captive by politics. Every election year, pro-lifers have been bullied, and have bullied each other, into voting for one candidate and shunning the other, with their very souls allegedly on the line.

People who more or less held the same views were invited or outright commanded to denounce each other as the enemy. But now that’s over. It’s done. We’re free.

Oh, folks on both sides are still arguing that it’s crystal clear we absolutely must vote this way or that way if we want to call ourselves pro-life. But now, neither party is willing to even fake an interest in actually being pro-life. The masks have come off entirely.

“But Simcha,” you may say. “I thought Trump and the Republicans were the pro-life party? Sure, Trump isn’t perfect but we’re looking for a politician, not a saint, and he’s clearly the only one who is willing to stand up to protect the unborn. At least compared to the alternative.”

Except that he just said into a reporter’s microphone that six weeks is “too short; there has to be more time … I want more weeks”; ie, the law should give women more time to decide whether or not to get an abortion (or, as often happens, more time to get pressured or coerced into an abortion). He said he would vote for just that in the upcoming Florida election.

Then, when people got upset, his campaign said he didn’t really mean it or really say anything and we’re just dumb for thinking he said anything.

He also said that, if he’s elected, his government will cover the cost of IVF for anyone who wants it, because “we want more babies.” IVF is intrinsically immoral because it replaces a sacred, creative act of love with a mechanised act of production in a lab. But even if that doesn’t bother you, IVF means millions of extra embryos are made, and then either imprisoned in a freezer indefinitely, or thrown away.

There is no IVF that is untainted by this wholesale murder of tiny humans. Babies are good; but cranking out babies like widgets and then throwing most of them away? That’s wrong.

This same Republican party absolutely lost their minds a few years ago when President Barack Obama said he was going to require Catholic employers to include contraception in their insurance coverage for employees. We were told this was a direct violation of religious freedom, and we must vote for Trump so he can liberate us from a government that would spend our tax dollars on the culture of death.

And now here we are. Maybe you will reply, “Well, this is all a shame, but you have to admit, he appointed judges to the supreme court who did what he promised, and they overturned Roe v Wade! Hard to argue with that as a pro-life win!”

Except that since this happened, the numbers of abortions have gone up. Yes, really. Why? My guess is this…

Read the rest of my latest (which I wrote before the debate, but nothing has changed) at The Catholic Weekly. 

Image: James Boast Creative Commons

Sometimes the secret ingredient is time

It’s one of my favorite stories, so I’m glad it’s apparently true. The Vienna Beef company makes a certain kind of hot dog that is bright red, and it has a particular smoky flavor and a particular snap when you bite into it. It was very popular, so they made it in exactly the same way year after year, decade after decade.

Eventually the company became successful enough to upgrade to a new facility, where everything was streamlined and efficient and top of the line. But they knew better than to mess with success: The hot dog recipe stayed the same.

Except it didn’t. The hot dogs produced in the new facility weren’t as good. The color was off, the texture was feeble, and the taste just wasn’t the same; and nobody could figure out why. They hadn’t changed anything—not the ingredients, not the process, not the order of operations. It was a hot dog mystery.

They finally solved it by painstakingly recreating how they had done it in the old factory—and it turned out that, at one point, the processed ground meat was slowly trucked from one part of the factory to another, through several rooms, around corridors, and on an elevator. It seems that this arduous process, which everyone assumed was nothing but an inconvenience that ought to be streamlined away, was an essential step. The meat got warmed slowly as it went, gradually steeping in the smoke and moisture of the rooms that it travelled through. When they made the production more efficient, they eliminated this part of the process. And that ruined the hot dogs.

The secret ingredient, it turned out, was time. I thought of this story as I sat chatting with an old friend, someone I’ve known online for over two decades, and we only met in person for the first time last week. When we first got to know each other, we were in the thick of having babies and wrangling toddlers, both fairly starry-eyed about the possibilities of how to build a Catholic marriage and raise a holy family.

Now we both have several adult children, and our “babies” are almost as tall as we are. We talked about what we expected our lives to look like, what we were so sure about, and how differently things have turned out. We talked about our struggles and also our successes, and how we seem to know less and less as time goes on.

And we talked about how sometimes, the secret ingredient is time…Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

Photo by ArtHouse Studio

To rest in liminal spaces

I follow a Facebook page called “Liminal Spaces.” It does give me interesting images, but also some frustration, because lots or even most of them aren’t liminal at all—at least, not in the way I’m familiar with.

The Latin word “limen” means “threshold,” and thus liminality has to do with things that are neither this nor that, or perhaps both this and that, because they are transitional, in-between.

But apparently there is something called “liminal aesthetics,” which just means “eerie” or “otherworldly in an unsettling way.”  In any case, no matter how you’re using the word, liminal places do tend to be eerie or unsettling, and that’s because humans share a desire to know where they are and what is going on.

So it was especially odd to see a photo of a chapel posted on Liminal Spaces. It was one I’ve never seen before: The Traveler’s Chapel in Wall Drug, which is a kitschy, tourist-driven little mall in the tiny town of Wall, South Dakota, that began as a drug store, and grew from there.

It has lots of souvenirs, a few restaurants, an 80-foot statue of a brontosaurus, various hot dogs and homemade doughnuts, and free ice water, which is apparently famous. The more I read about it, the more I think the appropriate word is not “liminal” but “baffling.”

But then there is the chapel. It is extremely simple in design: Just a single, narrow corridor with perhaps 12 pews flush to the wall on the left and an aisle down the right. The walls seem to be made of earth-toned brick, and the ceiling is slightly vaulted and fashioned of highly polished wooden beams. A low, raised platform at one end holds a minimalistic wooden altar flanked by two chairs. Most of the light comes from a rose window under the peaked roof, and under that, taking up about half the wall, is an unadorned wooden cross. That’s all.

I suppose it qualifies as a liminal space because, as the person who posted the photo noted, it was “taken at a s***** strip mall in South Dakota,” and the sheer quiet unexpectedness of something like this in such a setting knocks you back on your heels a bit. Wall Drug has become a destination in itself; but originally it was conceived of as a way station for travelers headed for famous spots like Mount Rushmore. Literally an in-between spot, something so unremarkable in itself that offering free ice water to passers-by was considered a brilliant marketing move.

But one of the top commenters said, “I’m an extremely unreligious person but something about this space feels so comforting to me” and another responded, “I think it’s because it’s single task. Purpose driven. Nothing can happen here without absolute focus to a specific spot. I like it too.”

Just some throwaway comments made in passing on a Facebook group, I know. But notice….Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

Image by Konrad Summers via Flickr

The apostles after Judas

People like to make fun of the apostles for sort of bumbling around and having silly arguments and not getting the point. But let’s be fair. How could they be anything else but in a shambles?

I was struck recently by the Gospel passage where, after the ascension, the remaining 11 apostles were trying to choose a replacement for Judas. They talk it over and narrow it down to two men, and then cast lots, asking the Holy Spirit to show them which one it should be.

This is a story we all know. Judas betrays Jesus, Jesus dies, Jesus rises again, and the apostles find a replacement so there are 12 of them again. It sounds straightforward and sensible because we’re familiar with it.

But they weren’t! They had no idea what would happen next, but it must have seemed like anything was possible. Think of what they had been through just in the last several weeks.

Just a very short time after they met Jesus and found out who he was and left their old life utterly behind, they saw him betrayed by one of their own, and then arrested and tortured and executed. Then they buried him, and then they saw him alive again, and then they had various insane conversations with him, and then, just as they were expecting him to restore the kingdom of Israel, he went back up to heaven. Talk about religious trauma. I’m actually amazed that they managed to function at all, much less hold a meeting and rationally figure out what to do next.

I’ve been thinking specifically about how shaken up they must have been by the realization that Judas, who lived and ate and travelled with Jesus just as they did, was capable of such monstrous betrayal. I wonder whether this inexplicable horror put their own faith into doubt, or made them wonder how a person can tell when they’re first diverging from Jesus, and what can be done about it. It’s an especially awful pain when you’re wounded by one of your own. It changes not only how you think of the aggressor, but how you think about yourself.

In Acts, they say that Judas “turned aside to go to his own place,” indicating that what he did was a choice (and one they’ve clearly been talking about with each other); but previously, Jesus said, “None [of the apostles] has been lost except the one doomed to destruction so that Scripture would be fulfilled.” It is hard to avoid the idea that, even as he turned aside from Jesus, he was still acting as part of God’s plan. He had free will, because every human being does—but at the same time, God’s work of salvation is sometimes carried out by people who aren’t trying to do any such thing.

These are deep waters. I am not up to the theological task of addressing how God’s plan and free will work together. But I do know that, when we are in deep waters, God gives us something to keep us afloat.

As I said, the apostles must have felt like everything they thought they knew had been called into question. But what they did next was, for once, the best possible course of action. They discussed the situation and the possibilities, and then they prayed for guidance, and then they moved ahead.

There is really no other way to proceed in life, when you’re not sure what to do next: Talk it over with people who know the Lord, and do our best to use our intellect, and then leave it up to God to bring good out of what we ultimately decide. For people who believe both in providence and free will, what else can we possibly do?

But I wasn’t kidding when I said the apostles had been traumatized. Far too many Catholics know how it feels when someone you thought you could depend on turns out to be a traitor, and does something so unspeakable that it makes you feel like absolutely anything could happen, and nothing is secure, and everything you thought was solid ground can shake and tremble and even crumble into dust. And they know what it feels like to realize that, in the aftermath of that earthquake, you have a decision ahead of you: You can either live in the rubble, or you can start to rebuild.

Neither one is appealing when you’ve been wounded. Both are overwhelming. Just when you’re starting to realize how weak and confused and helpless you really are, that’s when you’re confronted with an enormous task.

And this is why I’m especially impressed with how calmly the apostles moved forward as they chose a replacement for Judas….Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

Image: Duccio di Buoninsegna, Appearance On the Mountain In Galilee Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Staying in your lane is the easy way out

For the last several days, my social media feeds have been wall-to-wall responses to Harrison Butker—maybe about 60/40 jeers and adulation, respectively. I saw such a varied response because I make a deliberate effort to stay in touch with people with all kinds of opinions. I know how easy it is to slip into a bubble, and I don’t want to do that.

If you have somehow blessedly evaded this news story, Harrison Butker is a Catholic football star who gave the commencement speech at little Benedictine College, and even though it was kind of dumb and fairly boring, we can’t seem to stop talking about it.

To address the most odious parts of Harrison Butker’s notorious commencement speech—the blithe dismissal of women toward a life of keeping house and the antisemitic dog whistles—I would direct you to Emily Stimpson Chapman, who has written a clear-eyed and charitable response, as well as a series of essays explaining how men like Butker ended up where they are.

But I’ve been mulling over his recurring theme of “staying in your lane,” and I think he’s actually put his finger on something more apt than he realises.

I fully believe that this is a sincere man who thinks he has arrived at indisputable, bedrock principles of how to live a good, Catholic life, and he wants to share them with the audience because he thinks they need to hear encouragement to do what he does. That’s good, as far as it goes, and he’s definitely right about quite a few things.

One thing was apparently invisible to him, and to much of his approving audience, though: The incredibly thick walls of the bubble he lives in. His speech wasn’t primarily a Catholic speech. It was a bubble speech.

One example…Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

Image by Theonewhoknowsnothingatall, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Restored order of sacraments works best with whole family faith formation

My youngest child, who is nine, was recently confirmed, and then she received her First Holy Communion at the same Mass. She is the first kid in our family who has participated both in the “restored order of sacraments,” and in whole-family faith formation.

Most of my children received their sacraments in the same order as I did: First baptism as babies, then first confession and first Communion at age eight or nine, and then confirmation at about age 15. And my kids have been through possibly every style and program of catechesis available. The best combination I have seen is restored order of sacraments in conjunction with whole-family catechesis.

I understand why there is often resistance to the restored order of sacraments. One of the reasons parishes began to push confirmation back, uncoupled from First Communion and baptism, and made it into a sort of coming-of-age sacrament for teens, is because families would show up when there was a big ceremony, and then disappear again, and never set foot inside a church again until it was time to get married with a pretty backdrop.

And so confirmation turned into a second chance to give some catechesis to kids before they turned 18. It was an opportunity to teach them something beyond a young child’s level of catechesis.

What predictably happened was that some kids would show up for their First Communion, and then disappear for eight years and expect to be confirmed, even though they had been AWOL the whole time. Some parishes began piling on requirements before a person could be confirmed: They had to attend a certain number of classes or years of classes, write letters to the bishop, write essays or design projects, log community service hours, go on overnight retreats, and so on.

The intention was to get the kids actually involved and educated, rather than just going through the motions; it created the impression that confirmation is something that one can earn, like a bonus for working overtime.

All sacraments are free gifts of the Holy Spirit, and not only should we not require people to earn them, there is no way we can earn them. Still, it didn’t seem right to confirm young adults who could barely tell you how many persons of the Trinity there are. A dilemma!

The restored order of sacraments… doesn’t solve this dilemma. But it provides an opportunity for parents to solve it, for their kids and sometimes for themselves…Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

Activism without ego

The other day, I happened across a brief summary of the stories of Ida and Louise Cook, a pair of British sisters. They were a secretary and a romance novelist who lived with their parents. And they quietly saved the lives of dozens of European Jews in the 1930’s.

“Quietly” is the operative word. They knew they were plain-looking, dowdy and unremarkable, and they finagled that knowledge into a scheme.

On Friday nights, they would fly into Germany, and then return home by another route before Monday morning, having spent the weekend secretly working with persecuted people trying to flee.

They would find someone in England to vouch for the person in danger, and secure their legal status as refugees; and they would travel back home wearing the soon-to-be refugees’ furs and jewels, which could later be sold to help them start a new life after they escaped.

They were smugglers, and directly responsible for making the difference between death and survival. But their whole operation depended on not drawing attention to themselves. If they did gain attention, they encouraged people to think of them as harmless and rather silly, the last person you’d suspect of being a radical activist.

Who do you know who is like this? Probably somebody! But you probably don’t know what they’re up to. That’s the point. They’re effective because they don’t draw attention to themselves.

It’s probably very easy, however, to name several people you know who are extremely noisy activists, who make a huge point of taking selfies wearing the colors or flag or scarf of the day, or putting trending frames on their profile pictures, or writing posts or making videos or putting up lawn signs telling the world what side they are on.

It’s very easy to get sucked into some form of this behavior, especially if we frequently spend time on social media. In some circles, you can actually get lambasted for not behaving this way.

Noisy, public activism isn’t always bad. Sometimes it even takes some courage, if the people who do this kind of thing are surrounded by pushy crowds who think otherwise. As I said, when trying to untangle the difference between “speaking the truth even though your voice shakes” and simply engaging in empty virtue signaling:

I have heard from people who identify with the victims—from people raising black kids, for instance—that it gives them great comfort to hear a crowd of people loudly defending them. It would hurt, and be frightening, not to hear it. That in itself is good reason to speak up.

I have also heard from people who’ve said, “I have been too timid to speak up in the past. I’ve let racist jokes slide, and I’ve let insults go unchallenged. Now I see where silence leads, and I’m not going to be silent anymore.” This isn’t posturing; this is conversion of heart. Not virtue signaling, but a sign of actual virtue.

But in general, I’m intensely skeptical of heroism that is deliberately designed to look like heroism, and activism that draws attention primarily to the activist. And I’m skeptical of groups and movements that encourage everybody to speak and act in a certain way, and that condemn anyone who doesn’t speak or act in that exact way.

I keep returning to two ideas that mesh with what we’re taught as Catholics… Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

image: Detail of photo by Karolina Grabowska

On speaking the Holy Name

I’m a big believer in small, achievable goals. There are times when it’s appropriate to take a giant leap and commit to drastic changes, and there are times when drastic changes are forced upon us, and we have to decide whether to handle it poorly or well. But most of life is about little things. It’s the little things that end up being big.

The name of Jesus is one such “little thing.” I say it’s little because it comes into our life so rapidly, and then disappears again. It takes a fraction of a second to say; it takes up a tiny space in print or on your phone screen. Just a little breath of air, a precarious second on the lips and tongue, or a little sliver of dark pixels on a bright field, and then it’s gone again: Jesus.

So, how do we treat this name? Carefully. Carefully, is my advice. I hope that most Catholics will, at least, refrain from using the Holy Name as a curse word, or as an exclamation of surprise. If not, that’s the place to start. When you say “Jesus,” mean Jesus, and not anything else.

(I’m thinking of my mother, who willingly took her elderly Jewish parents into our home to care for them, but eventually got fed up with hearing her father use “Jesus” as an expression of irritation. She eventually blurted out, “You know, Dad, if you keep calling him, he’s going to show up.” That made him stop!)

If you can eradicate actual profane use of the name of Jesus from your own vocabulary, a reasonable next step is to make a commitment to show reverence to the name when other people use it, either rightly or wrongly. Some people will say “Blessed be the name of Jesus” as a small act of reparation, if they hear someone using the name irreverently.

If you’re not up for that (and it can be very awkward, depending on the situation), you can probably manage to bow your head whenever you hear the name. Bowing one’s head at the name of Jesus is a good practice on any occasion, whether you’re making reparation for irreverence, or simply showing reverence when someone uses the name appropriately. It doesn’t have to be a big, showy thing. Just lower your eyes and bow your head briefly.

What is the point of all this? It’s a practice that I think of as putting things in their proper order. Order doesn’t sound like much until you’ve lived with profound disorder…Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

Image: A male face with head bowed, expressing veneration. Engraving by M. Engelbrecht (?), 1732, after C. Le Brun.  CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons