God is Patient and Merciful, but He Wants Change

An article by Fr. Jack Peterson at Catholic Exchange:

“God bears with imperfect beings even when they resist His goodness. We ought to imitate this merciful patience and endurance. It is only imperfection that complains of what is imperfect. The more perfect we are, the more gentle and quiet we become toward the defects of other people.” Bishop Francois de Fenelon, the archbishop of Camray, penned these words in the 18th century, but they speak just as loudly to us today.

If God’s approach to us, His children, was determined simply by His justice, we would be in a hopeless situation. When I think of the number of times that I have gone to confession, stated my sins and sincerely pledged to never commit them again, I am brought to my knees as I ponder God’s patience with me. God has every right to be perfectly upset with me, to treat me as an ungrateful, hard-hearted, spoiled brat. He has blessed me in countless ways, and I have rebelled in so many ways. In God’s justice, I should be nothing but dried up bones, but in His love, I am the recipient of abundant patience and mercy.

[...]

Our response to God’s amazing patience and mercy should be a heightened desire to change our lives and live completely for Christ. ...

It is true that God must satisfy the demands of justice. That is why He sent his only-begotten Son who died and rose for us. Christ became our justice. Now, God, in His great mercy, constantly invites us back to Him after we wander. He is remarkably patient.

A good reminder that God's loving patience is for our repentance and conversion, not to remain as we are, ambivalent and mediocre.

Natural Family Planning Awareness Week, July 22-28

Children are blessings, not burdens - gifts, not rights. Fr. Ubel, pastor, St. Agnes Catholic Church

This is NFP Awareness Week! I would like to pass on to all of you the truth of human sexuality that has so transformed my marriage and my life.

My wife and I were not Catholic when we were engaged or married, but at college my then-fiancee had Christian friends who decided to pracitice NFP. My wife's reaction was, "I guess they'll be having a baby soon!" After she learned that NFP can be practiced at the 99% effectiveness level, it appealed to her. When Amy brought it up to me on the phone my first thought was, "Are you telling me that even after we're married we'd have to not have sex sometimes?!" It was such a selfish reaction. I knew that sex before marriage was wrong, but my understanding went no deeper. I didn't have any idea what marriage was for, nor how the marital embrace related to it, nor did I have any moral compass to direct my actions as a married man. I thought that any kind of sex within marriage was fine. I felt angry that my future wife was suggesting that I have some kind of self control once we had wed.

Thankfully, God softened my heart and we took an NFP class from the Couple to Couple League. We learned what God created marriage for, and just what we were about to enter into. We learned that all Christian churches condemned contraception until 1930. We also had light shed on the tremendous good of human sexuality, and what the union of a husband and wife communicates about God and about love. We've enjoyed the blessing of NFP our entire marriage. First we used it to postpone pregnancy for three years, then to acheive pregnancy, then to space our children using total breastfeeding.

The most important fruit I see from our practice of natural family planning is the innoculation it provides against the "contraceptive mentality." There is a key difference between NFP and contraception.

While both may seek to limit family size:
- Contraception actively severs the God-given relationship between sex and procreation. It contradicts the meaning of sex, and thus the meaning of marriage.

- Natural family planning never interferes with the natural consequences of sexual relations at any time. It cooperates with the natural cylces which God has designed as part of a woman's fertility.

I know that this may seem subtle, but I cannot overemphasize how crucial it is. The difference is made apparent when a husband and a wife are asked how many children they would like to have.

Are children a burden which require us to consider how many we can bear? Do we have a right before God to have children when we desire them? Can we achieve true "birth control" by using contraception when we don't want to get get pregnant and then go off it when we feel ready? If so, then a couple might say, "We plan to have two kids spaced three years apart."

Are children a blessing from God on a couple's marriage? Is a child a gift given by God, created and cared for by the cooperation of a mother and a father? Must we respect the integrity of our bodies as the expression of our personhood and the image of God we bear? If so, then a couple might say, "We receive our children one at a time from God. We don't think God is asking us to be more open to another baby right now, but we'll prayerfully consider this every month as we are aware of the fertile time when we might conceive."

I was reminded of this difference last week as I listened to a radio broadcast of Focus on the Family. Dr. Dobson interviewed three women who had experienced surprise pregnancies. All three were Christian women, but all three were simply shocked that they had become pregnant while using "birth control." All three were afraid and thought about abortion to some degree, and one decided to go through with it. The tone of the whole show was somber. The show was entitled, "Hope in the Midst of Unexpected Pregnancies" (Part 1, Part 2).

If a child is treated as an unwanted side-effect of sex to be surpressed with a pill prescribed by a doctor, then there is no need to think about the chances of having another baby when a husband and wife have sex. Abortion becomes the logical, even if abhorred, next step when a woman is faced with a surprise pregnancy. This is the contraceptive mentality.

If a couple is reconsidering every month whether God is calling them to greater generosity in family size, and they are sacrificing by abstaining from relations during the fertile time, then an unplanned pregnancy should never be unexpected. That is was sex was designed for! The couple may of couse have many fears and questions regarding the future care of an
unexpected child, but they always remained open to the possiblity. They never closed their relationship to children by manipulating the language of their bodies.

I encourage everybody to learn more about NFP and the meaning of human sexuality within marriage. Your relationships to each other and to God will be transformed forever.

Further reading:
Marriage: A Communion of Life and Love by Bishop Victor Galeone

Our consciences can err, the Church cannot

Michael J. Bayly, Executive Coordinator of the Catholic Pastoral Committee on Sexual Minorities, has posted recently some of his Thoughts on Authority and Fidelity. Near the end, Mr. Bayly proclaims the "good news" that "the loving and transforming presence of God is not limited to the impoverished teachings and rules of the Vatican". The thoughts he shared follow closely his earlier post concerning the primacy of conscience. I excerpt from his earlier entry:

Our moral choices should be the result of an informed or “educated” conscience.

Yet some within the church insist that it is only the “official” church which can properly “educate” and “inform” the Catholic conscience.

Such Catholics are adamant that one knows if one’s conscience is rightly formed if it conforms with what the Magisterium, the official teaching office of the church, says about various moral matters.

Yet if this was really the case, why have a conscience? What’s the point of it when we have the Magisterium?

Also, if we relinquish our personal conscience in favour of the Magisterium , what do we do with statements like the following:

“Above the pope as an expression of the binding claim of church authority, stands one’s own conscience, which has to be obeyed first of all, if need be against the demands of church authority.”

Such a statement explicitly differentiates between one’s “own conscience” and “church authority”. Yet is this statement simply the ramblings of a dissident theologian, a “militant secularist” in a Catholic disguise?

Actually, no, it’s not.

They are, in fact, the words of Fr. Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI), and he is explaining the authentic Catholic understanding of the primacy of conscience. The pope’s explanation is excepted from a commentary on “Gaudium et Spes” (“The Church in the Modern World”) published in Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II (Vorgrimler, Herbert (Ed.), Burns and Oats, 1969, p. 134.)

So, one can, in good conscience, dissent from the church’s official moral teaching. But, of course, one can only do so as a result of an “informed” conscience. Which brings us back to the crucial question: How does one go about properly informing one’s conscience?

Believe it or not, I think we should allow the church to inform our consciences, but I don’t limit “the church” to the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. In it’s broadest and, I believe, most catholic sense, the church is the entire people of God; the whole Body of Christ, in other words.

For instance, in forming my conscience on how I am to live as a gay man – a living that includes the expression of my sexuality – I am compelled to be open to the experiences and insights of the entire people of God, not just the teachings of the Magisterium. These experiences and insights are just as important as the doctrines of the church when it comes to informing my conscience. The tragedy is that the Magisterium itself, as the teaching office of the church, should be similarly engaged in such a universal, i.e. catholic, process of discernment.

Notice the quote from Ratzinger. He dropped the exact same text as a footnote of his recent post. Bayly uses the quote to justify his assertion that "one can, in good conscience, dissent from the church's official moral teaching." But is this Ratzinger's intention? Of course not! Let's look at some more context from the Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II where Ratzinger comments on Gaudium et Spes 16:

Over the pope as the expression of the binding claim of ecclesiastical authority there still stands one's own conscience, which must be obeyed before all else, if necessary even against the requirement of ecclesiastical authority. This emphasis on the individual, whose conscience confronts him with a supreme and ultimate tribunal, and one which in the last resort is beyond the claim of external social groups, even of the official Church, also establishes a principle in opposition to increasing totalitarianism. Genuine ecclesiastical obedience is distinguished from any totalitarian claim which cannot accept any ultimate obligation of this kind beyond the reach of its dominating will.

[...]

As well as the transcendence of conscience, its non-arbitrary character and objectivity are emphasized. The fathers were obviously anxious ... not to allow an ethics of conscience to to be transformed into the domination of subjectivism, and not to canonize a limitless situation ethics under the guise of conscience. On the contrary, the conciliar text implies that obedience to conscience means an end to subjectivism, a turning aside from blind arbitrariness, and produces conformity with the objective norms of moral action.

[...]

As regards the binding force of erroneous conscience, the text employs a rather evasive formula. It mere says that such a conscience does not lose its dignity. We must note here that the thesis emphatically asserted by J.B. Metz in particular, that Aquinas was the first definitely to teach to obligatory force of an erroneous conscience, is historically and objectively the case only to a certain extent and with considerable qualifications. Historically speaking, Aquinas here is following Aristotelian intellectualism, according to which only what is presented to the will by reason can be its object; and the will is always in the wrong if it deviates from reason. It cannot once again control the reason, it has to follow it; it is consequently bad if it contradicts reason, even if reason is in error. In reality, Aquinas's thesis is nullified by the fact that he is convinced that error is culpable. Consequently guilt lies not so much in the will which has to carry out the precept laid upon it by reason, but in reason itself, which must know about God's law. The doctrine of the binding force of an erroneous conscience in the form in which it is propounded nowadays, belongs entirely to the thought of modern times.

So, it is clear that Mr. Bayly has no ally in his dissent with then-Fr. Ratzinger. In general, Ratzinger affirms the necessity of obeying one's conscience taught in Gaudium et Spes 16 but is critical of the ambiguity of the text. In the end he notes how an erroneous conscience obeyed is still often culpable of guilt, since the judgement of reason can be due to one's previous neglect or prior sin. Instead of justifying us in our sin, conscience levels the playing field between man and God, for we all know the requirements of God and we all know when we do wrong:

For God shows no partiality. All who have sinned without the law will also perish without the law, and all who have sinned under the law will be judged by the law. For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified. When Gentiles who have not the law do by nature what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. (Romans 2:11-14)

Although Michael Bayly and others of CPCSM claim to be "Catholic, Liberal, Faithful", what they mean is "I self-identify as Catholic, but I am self-liberated from the rules of the Vatican, and I am faithful to what my own conscience tells me is right." Anybody who happens to think that "Catholic" should mean more than "I say I'm Catholic"; anybody who thinks the Catholic Church clearly teaches certain absolutes; anybody who thinks that the Pope has the authority to bind and loose the people of God, is stuck in "the ghetto of neo-scholastic thinking" which is a "narrow and abstruse way of thinking", resorts to "equating ecclesiastical fidelity with passive toadyism", and responds to reality with "distrust and fear".

I find it a bit ironic that St. Thomas with his "narrow and abstruse" scholasticism was the first one to teach definitely (with qualifications) that one's conscience should be obeyed even if in error, the very principle the Mr. Bayly holds up in justification of his dissent from the Magisterium!

In truth, while a person indeed must obey his conscience when it speaks of doing good or avoiding evil, we must acknowledge that conscience can err (CCC 1790). Christ, speaking through the Magisterium of his Church, cannot err (CCC 888-92). We are to inform our consciences with the truth of God by means of what we know is certain:

In the formation of conscience the Word of God is the light for our path, we must assimilate it in faith and prayer and put it into practice. We must also examine our conscience before the Lord's Cross. We are assisted by the gifts of the Holy Spirit, aided by the witness or advice of others and guided by the authoritative teaching of the Church. (CCC 1785, emphasis added)

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Edit: Typo "Vorgrimler" changed in original, and reflected here.

Unworthy, yet sanctified in Christ

Vespers ended last night, the 3rd Sunday in Lent, with the prayer,

Father,
you have taught us to overcome our sins
by prayer, fasting and works of mercy.
When we are discouraged by our weakness,
give us confidence in your love.

It expresses something that I often feel - frusteration with my own faults and frequent sins, but trust in God for the hope and life he gives us in Christ Jesus. Also, from the prayer of St. Ambrose before mass,

Lord Jesus Christ,
I approach your banquet table
in fear and trembling,
for I am a sinner,
and dare not rely on my own worth,
but only on your goodness and mercy.

What an amazing revelation, that God has chosen to share his life with us sinners! Why, one will hardly die for a righteous man -- though perhaps for a good man one will dare even to die. But God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us. (Rom 5:7-8)

Training the mind and the will

I teach science at a Catholic school. Our motto is "Faith, Knowledge, Virtue". A common phenomena to all teachers is the student who is very bright. He understands the material quickly and can perform well on tests. However, he constantly neglects homework assignments. As a result, he earns a grade of perhaps a C or even a D when he could easily make an A with simple effort. Many of us say, "He COULD earn an A, but he just doesn't try."

I've come to realize that he really CAN'T get a better grade on his own. Just like another student who really exerts himself but struggles to understand the material really CAN'T get a better grade on his own. BOTH require significant effort on their part and significant guidance on the part of teachers and parents.

The reason is that a person has two spiritual faculties of his soul: the intellect and the will. By his reason, [the human person] is capable of understanding the order of things established by the Creator. By free will, he is capable of directing himself toward his true good. (CCC 1704) A student who really works hard and scraps it out all quarter to earn a C+ is struggling particularly with a fallen intellect. I often recognize this struggle in students and council extra effort and practice for them to achieve a better grasp of a given concept. Another student who immediately understands a topic but fails to do his homework is struggling particularly with a fallen will. But, I have a default attitude of "Just get it done!" with this second student.

I'm realizing more and more that the second student needs to exert additional effort and practice (along with external structure and monitoring) just as much as the first. The will must be trained just as hard as the intellect. There is no switch to flip from "slacker" to "on the ball". Human virtues are firm attitudes, stable dispositions, habitual perfections of intellect and will that govern our actions, order our passions, and guide our conduct according to reason and faith. ... The moral virtues are acquired by human effort. They are the fruit and seed of morally good acts. ... Human virtues acquired by education, by deliberate acts and by a perseverance ever-renewed in repeated efforts are purified and elevated by divine grace. With God's help, they forge character and give facility in the practice of the good. (CCC 1804, 1810, emphasis added)

I'm starting to get the "Faith, Knowledge, VIRTUE" thing a little better. Now, how do I teach it?