The Biggest Lessons in Marriage

Over the years I have done much marriage preparation and marriage counseling.  I have searched for many different techniques and programs to best hit at what marriage in the Catholic Church is about.  Some I have found lacking.  For example, I am not a big fan of FOCCUS.  It is a good compatibility survey, but does not treat marriage as a sacrament  as it does a civil contract. It is the limitation in such a survey.  I used the Theology of the Body course, which was good.  I am currently using Beloved from St Augustine Institute.  I love it.  It has programs for both those to be married and those who are married.

From this, I will extrapolate the following that I have learned:

 The fuel of marriage is self giving love.  Love isn't an emotion, it is a virtue.  It is not something we fall in and out of of.   It is one of the theological virtues.  This means is requires God's grace to grow.  It is a conscious discipline where the spouse, through sacrifice, self-giving, and even a willingness to suffer offers themselves up for the good of the other.  This happens on all levels: physically, mentally, and spiritually.  This is why we believe that the use of human sexuality is reserved to marriage; it is the place where such self-giving can achieve the ends (unity and procreation) for which it exists.

I see so many marriages break down when either an essential question was never really asked or quit being asked: How can I make your life better?  Many times in marriage counseling I will hear a torrent of the opposite: he/she doesn't do this for me.  This orientation changes  can do little more than create a fatality.  It struck me in one of the marriage enrichment videos where Dr. Edward Sri remarks that the persons within a marriage can not be like vacuum cleaners: they can't be perpetual sucking machines always demanding to be satiated.  This will never lead anywhere good.  In the course of marriage counseling I try to invite the couple to stop worrying about what the other does or doesn't do in the relationship, but what they are bringing and doing to strengthen or weaken the relationship.

Why?  Because no human being possesses the ability to make another person do anything.  We do not posses the power to make the correct series of synapses fire off to make a person see or correctly choose.  We do, however, have the ability through discipline to do this to ourselves.  With couples to be married, I try to convey that the focus needs to be oriented to the good of the other.

This self giving love is a reflection of the love of God Himself.  This is why a sacrament is needed to bind the man and woman into a bond that unifies and creates.  The latter may not be possible for all couples because of physical problems.  But the openness to this divine self giving love is crucial.  We are told in St. John letters that God loved us first; our love for Him is a response.  In a powerful way that repsonse is lived in marriage.

The willingness of the two spouses in the marriage to cultivate the virtue of love will determine the health and longevity of the marriage.  Health comes and goes.  It is a fact that in a marriage that lasts, one spouse will watch the other die.  There will be illnesses, sometimes chronic, that will test the family.  Wealth comes and goes.  So do jobs and careers.  Even the children grow up and move out.  Life comes with its stresses and tragedies.  A couple who cultivates the virtue of love weathers these storms.  That takes work...it can never depend upon the fickleness of emotion.

That love is the central witness to the children.  Children see the love of God most powerfully on display in the love that their mom and dad have for each other.  The parents teach them that love is important and what real love looks like.  The parents show how love is truly oriented.

Finally, to make this love truly work, God has to be a part of the equation.  We cannot cultivate the virtue of love without His assistance.  No one can...not a spouse...not a cleric...no one.  In Catholicism, it is the primary reason we have the sacraments: to help grow in the virtues of faith, hope, and love.  We are given concrete avenues for the necessary grace.  That's why you're not at Mass to hear a good homily (good when it happens) or good music (also good when it happens), but to get the grace of the Eucharist.  You need God to make this work.  Marriage is hard.  If it wasn't, there would be such thing as divorce.   Being a person who truly loves is not easy.  God knows this.  He gives grace, sacramental grace, to help you.  Your ability to love needs to be nourished by the sacraments.  Love is not about merely tolerating the spouse.  It is about a willingness to sacrifice for the good of the other.  This is what Jesus does on the Cross.

I tell my couples when they come in for their first marriage prep session that my job over the next 6 months is to keep you out of someone's annulment pile. However, I want so much more than that for them...I want a happy marriage that thrives regardless of the circumstances that life throws at them. That takes the virtue of love...that takes a relation ship with God Himself. 
   

19 years in the Fields of the Lord

19 years today.  19 years ago I sought the grace of God to make good on a commitment I made to God that I would give my life in service of His flock as He had called me to do.  I didn't choose God, He chose me.  As God as my witness,  I haven't the foggiest notion why other than its was His will.  I wasn't the holiest guy around, nor was I the smartest.  I'm still not.  I didn't go joyfully either.  I fought it and fought it hard.  I am proof that God can be awful persistent....and patient.  He knows far better than I.  Pride and fear blinded me to what joy could be found.  Thank God I was really wrong about being a priest.

In those 19 years, I have lost track of how many weddings, baptisms, confessions, funerals, and anointings I have done.  All the hours preaching and teachings seem but a moment in time.  The most important things I do aren't giving what I can give, but giving what God alone can give.  My feeble meanderings are no match for the grace given through the sacraments.  It is why I feel compelled to make those sacraments as widely available as is allowed.  Being a priest is more about what God can do than what I can do. 

The 19 years have been an exhilarating ride.  There have been times of great joy and times of being crushed.  I will admit that the sex scandals in the Church in 2002 were crushing.  Men I had known and admired as a boy were among the accused.  Men I had gone to school with were among the victims.  I thank God I was with the people of Edina and Baring at the time.  I do not know if they appreciate or know how much their support and prayers got me through that time.  Even the depths of that time pales in comparison to the immense amount of joy that has been an almost constant companion in the 19 years of ministry.

What gives me joy as a priest?  Watching someone embrace conversion.  What sorrows me as a priest?  Watching someone walk away from conversion.  19 years and I know that I am far from a finished product and that God will continue to aid me by His grace to become fully what He calls me to be.  I know this to be true for anyone who will open their hearts and minds to Christ.  I know fear gets in the way.  I know pride gets in the way.  They sure got in my way.  Doing vocation work for all 19 years has taught me this over and over again.

So today I start my 20th year in the fields of the Lord. I pray that what God begun on that June day 19 years ago will continue to expand as I grow.  To all those who have helped me in these years, I thank you.  To all those I have hurt over those same years, I apologize.  To all, I ask for your continued prayers as I enter my second decade serving in the fields of the Lord.

Why Priestly Vocations Matter

Introduction
There is no way to really sugar coat this anymore.  We need priests.  We need them like we need air.  Why?  Because we need their leadership?  Because we need their teaching and preaching?  Because we need their prayers of intercession?  All good reasons, but no, not primarily.  We need them because we are a sacramental Church.  We need them because we need the Eucharist.  We need them because we need  confession.  We need them because we need to be able to have Last Rites.  In short, the primary need isn't what they stand to offer us, but what Christ offers through them.  Through them, Christ offers us...all of us...forgiveness and reconciliation.  This happens because upon the grace of the sacrament of Holy Orders, a priest's soul is ontologically changed so that the priest may act in the person of Christ so that we can be forgiven by Christ and receive the eternal sacrifice of the Cross in the Eucharist.

We are not Pelagians.  We can not work ourselves into heaven.  We are in need of the unmerited grace of God to assist us in living as His adopted brother or sister.  God makes these realities concrete and sensible through the sacraments of the Church.  The priests have the responsibility to make these sacraments available to as many as possible.  Those who are appointed pastors have additional duties as well.  But any priest has the duty to make accessible the sacraments.  As the number of priests shrink the access to the sacraments shrink as well. Why?  Because as the number of priests fall, the number of churches shrink as well.  The more physical distance between the nearest priest and his widely scattered flock, the less likely that Last Rites can happen.  The lesser the number of priests, the more unlikely shut ins and hospital patients will get anointed as the priests will be stretched so thin as to leave wide open cracks for many to fall through.  These are just the harsh facts.

The Chickens are coming home to roost 

I will use my home diocese as an example.  My home diocese is 110 parishes and missions spread throughout 38 counties over 22,000 square miles.  6 of the counties have no priest residing in them.  34 parishes and missions have no resident priest. There are 87 priests active in the diocese (1/3 of which are not priests of this diocese) to serve the 80,000+ Catholics which make up less than 10% of the overall population.  Within 5 years 1/3 of the priests of this diocese will be 70+. WE already have a few priests who are well past the age of 75 still serving as pastors.  We have 7 seminarians spread throughout 8 years of seminary.  Only two of them are in college.  The chickens are coming home to roost.  It will not be pretty.

This diocese will be 60 years old this November.  It has never produced enough vocations to man its parishes.  Never.  Of the 61 active diocesan priests, 30 are not from this diocese.  Some of the most densely Catholic areas of the diocese have given us no priests in the 60 years of this diocese.  11 parishes in this one county (with 6 parochial schools) has not produced one single priests for this diocese since its inception.  Not one.  One was ordained for another diocese.  Otherwise, no.  There are no living priests that can call the parishes of this county their home parish.  There are no seminarians from this county and there have not been in years. While this county is not the sole cause of our problems, they provide a nice microcosm of the problem.  For the reader, 60 years predates Vatican II.

It does get personal...very personal

As a pastor, this does get very personal.  I think people wonder why I get into such a tither about vocations.  I do.  I have been trying for my entire priesthood to recruit good holy young men to think about the priesthood.  It is hard.  My perseverance gets tested on a regular basis.  There are days I really do wish that I could let it go and just give up and move on with vocation recruitment.  I could right a book on the different variations of no, not me, not my son that I have heard over the last 19 years.   I could write an encyclopedia load of conversations in which I bit my tongue clean off to hide my frustration.  One might well think me mad (the jury is still out) for continuing to do this.  Why do I do it?

1) I love Christ and His Church.  I love the people I serve as a pastor.  Part of that love is looking to the long term.  I know that in any parish I am serving that inevitably I will not always be their pastor. I want someone to replace me...to pick up where I leave off.  I want my parish taken care off well for years to come.  I want my flock to have access to the sacraments in abundance.  I want them to be able to have those avenues of grace.  I want them to be able to grow in faith.  I will not always be there to do it.  They will need a father of the parish.  If the numbers decrease, the likelihood of this diminishes.  It pains me to think that some of them will not get Last Rites because the nearest priests will be a good hour drive away.

2) I believe we should be going in the opposite direction.  Regardless of population shifts, I do not think there is a parish in the diocese that shouldn't be expanding through evangelization.  If half of all Americans are unchurched, we should be reaching out for them.  There are millions of fallen away Catholics.  We should be reaching out for them as well. However, we are not congregationalists.  We are a sacramental church.  How on earth will be able to address greater sacramental need with fewer priests?  Our evangelical zeal for the truth of our Catholic faith should be filling the churches...we will need priests for this.

3) I love being a priest.  I do.  Yes, it is exhausting and frustrating at times, but it is so full of joy, that the moments of frustration are eclipsed by the good.  I can not help must take it personally when people act as my asking them to be a priest is an imposition on their happiness. It is hard not to get tedious when my joy is met with a boatload of melancholy feelings and bargaining.  What God has planned for us is not loathsome imposition to be bargained with like a auctioneer trying to drive down a bid.

Getting past the blame game

It seems that when this topic comes up, a blame game ensues.  Some want to blame bishops.  Some want to blame Vatican II or that Vatican II didn't go far enough.  Some want to blame things being too this or that.  Bottom line: ego non serviam.  I will not serve.  As a society we do not value serving, we value being served.  Serving is seen as an imposition.  Status comes in being served.  We want free stuff.  We want leisure.  We fixate on the eternally inconsequential (sports, gaming, celebrity, power, money) and lose sight of the eternally consequential (relationship with God, family, neighbor).  The eternally consequential is service oriented because its genus and end are the love of God.  The eternally inconsequential are all about personal achievement and self satisfaction.

We wait for pristine conditions for us to finally get our act together.  Perhaps, when nothing pans out, maybe we'll think about priesthood.  Times up though for so many places.  How long it lasts is up to whether we desire to serve or be served.  We need to quit looking for excuses and start finding obedience.  We need to quit telling God how to solve the problem and get about to listening to what He wants.

When the time comes for parishes to get closed, I will ask the complaining one question: When was the last time your parish gave the Church a vocation to the priesthood?  I have been to the Bishop's house many times.  He does not have a cabbage patch nor a secret lair where he is stockpiling priests and withholding them from us just to be obnoxious.  He can't send you priests if you don't send him priests.  Mark my words, we get what we give.  If your parish has not sent at least a solid young man to the seminary in decades: You.are.part.of.the.problem!  If your reaction to either you or your son to being asked to consider priesthood is one of scrambled bargaining or outright anger...you are writing checks that other people will have to cash.

In ending, many will say that' my diocese is a mess'. Perhaps.  Perhaps not.  But tell me what institution has ever been reformed from the outside?  If we are get the church the country back on the road to not just recovery, but thriving, then we must man up and get about the business of the kingdom.  We didn't get to the point we are by God's will, but by our disobedience to that will.  Make no mistake, that disobedience will be judged.  No more excuses.  No more bargaining.  We are a sacramental church and there is work to do, souls to save, and a society to transform.   Complaining does not make things better.  Let us get about doing what is bold, forthright, and holy!

   

Liberals and Conservatives: Clash of the Titans

My first year in major seminary, one of my professors, who happened to be the Academic Dean, had enough of us seminarians.  We seminarians liked to throw the words 'liberal' and 'conservative' like poisoned darts at each other.  He reprimanded us for misusing the words incorrectly. He told us the following"  From a philosophical standpoint, liberal and conservative refer to where one's locus of authority is.  For a conservative, the locus of authority is someone or something other than themselves.  For a liberal, the locus of authority is themselves. He pointed out that you can have right and left wings of both.  For example you could have left wing conservatives who locus of authority was the state and right wing conservatives whose locus of authority was the Church.  In the words of Inigo Montoya from the Princess Bride, "You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means."

The difference is how a person uses objective truth.  The more conservative a person is, the more objective truth is the center and they rely less and less upon opinion.  The more liberal a person is, the more personal opinion and tastes weigh in on decision making.  A strict conservative can lean towards being rigid whereas a strict liberal will embrace anarchy. 

People will attach specific traits to either side.  It is a fallacy.  Rarely in life are all A =B.  Love, rationality, mercy and such are not traits specific to one side.  They are exercised in different ways.

Christianity is by its nature a conservative faith.  The locus of authority is God.  What He says is the way life is to be lived.  This is passed on through the Scriptures and the teachings and beliefs of the Church.  Because the locus of authority is outside the person, then it is up to the person to conform to that belief.  Most of the tension within our churches comes from trying to make Christianity a liberal faith.  We see this in the desire for the Church to get with the times; that it is the Church and the Scriptures that have to conform with the society...to become relevant to the society.  To do this requires that the Church move away from objective truth (something that is true by its own merit) and replace it with subjective truth (something that is true because I say it is true).  The more that this move is made, the more that the teachings of the church are first treated as a cafeteria and later as irrelevant to life.  The quicker the move, the emptier the churches become.  Why?  Because in losing their authority, they lose their relevance.

What rises in its stead is the tyranny of opinion.  The worth of something is based on what I like and/or believe.  We see this clash in multiple arenas in our society.  The tyranny of opinion, of philosophical liberalism will lead to this.

Let's take our politics.  The words republican and democrat really mean very little any more.  There are really liberals and conservatives, with the vast majority being liberal.  The telltale sign is this: for a true conservative, he or she holds their beliefs as true and do not need other agreement with it to validate their beliefs.   There is room to debate ideas without personal attacks.  A  TRUE conservative can walk away from a debate without feeling as animosity to the other side.  He of she doesn't need to shut down or censor the other side.  The same cannot be true for a true philosophical liberal. Because they are their own locus of authority, they need outside approval of their ideas to validate them.  Alternative voices must be conquered or silenced!  Hello, safe zones!  Hello censorship.  The tyranny of opinion can only lead to division.  Debates are personal as disagreement equals personal attack.

If we as Catholics are to rise back up again and refill our churches, it is going to be through adhering to the authority of Christ and His Church.  This means conforming ourselves to Christ and His teachings instead of wanting the church to change its teachings to conform to what I desire.  this is much harder to do, but unlike expecting God to change truth to suit me, it is not an exercise in futility.

In today's Gospel, when Jesus is asked is asked what is the greatest of the commandments, his reply is the shema: Deuteronomy 6:4-9..."in essence, "You shall love the Lord with ALL your mind..." with the addition that you shall love your neighbor as yourself."  It is  a complete submitting of our will to God.  It is making God the locus of authority in our lives.  We priests and those charged with teaching the faith within the Church must (and I mean MUST) teach an complete adherence to the Gospel, especially when that adherence is difficult.  If we are true to the faith, then we must have God as He has revealed His will as the locus of authority in our lives.  In this we will find the union that escapes us when we become our own locus of authority.        

But We're Too Smart to Believe

The mantra of the modern world.  Belief in the supernatural is for children and fools. It is for the hayseed, the uninformed, the superstitious, and feeble.  It is an opium for the masses, a crutch for the unimaginative and weak.. We're just far too intelligent and urbane to believe.  We know that such an attitude does exist strongly in some sectors of the country.  It is worn as a badge of honor, a trophy for coming of age as a species.  Yeah, I am not buying it.  I'm not buying it because at one time in my life I did.  In my early twenties I was an agnostic.  I could not buy the intellectual premise of atheism that all we see just spontaneously came into existence and so ordered itself to produce life as we know it.  I did not buy that whatever created was personal in nature or gave a rat's behind about how certain of that creation fared.  Hence, this post is not about ridiculing those who are in those situations now.  Rather, this is directed at the consequences of these beliefs and how people got there.

The concept of God is as old as humanity itself.  Every society from the ancients on showed some understanding that all they saw was not all there was.  They looked for ways to fill this understanding.   For many early societies, they looked at the natural order and saw the capricious nature sometimes of it, how the same weather that made agriculture possible also could bring death.  The supernatural they built came from such observations.  In these faiths, though, the gods were not interested in mankind's happiness, they were not disposed to humanity's good.  No, they were to be appeased with sacrifices and kept at bay.  In Judaeo-Christianity, you have one God who is disposed to his creation's good and keeps reaching out for his wayward creation like a husband for his wife.  Sacrifice wasn't to appease God, but to restore a relationship lost through infidelity.  All these religions had moral codes, expectations of behavior.

The arbiters of these moral codes, throughout history, were not so good at upholding the moral codes themselves.  Corruption, simony and graft always seemed to rear its ugly head.  For millennia, though, because of the intense fear most had of the natural world, very few strayed.  Then came the rise of science.  In this rise we changed a question that dominated humanity.  Before, it was 'why are things they way they are?' which changed to 'how are things the way they are?'   The corruption of the professional religious class became all the more an intolerable blight in this new light.

A shift from the supernatural to the natural occurred with an assumption that the two were mutually exclusive.  The natural order we could measure, weigh, observe, and experiment with. The natural order seemingly had no moral code to it.  The natural order could be manipulated.  This wasn't always a bad thing.  Cures were found for many ailments, the benefits of hygiene came into being once we understood how germs and viruses worked.  But where it was bad...because of advances in warfare, for example, the 20th century was the bloodiest in history.  Hundreds of millions died through warfare, revolutions, genocides, and abortion.


Humanity's modern vision rose out of these violent times numb.  Increasingly, man was the problem.  This started in the late 19th century and caught fire in the early 20th century with the eugenics movement.  Humanity would have to weeded like an overgrown garden.  As there was no creator anymore, there was no inherent dignity to respect anymore.  We were livestock that could build our own homes.  As western society grew further and further away from the supernatural, the natural order now was something to be manipulated so that the supernatural heaven could be replaced by a natural one.  What arose?  Well, one man's heaven is another man's hell. The focus on material wealth rose to absurd amounts, so absurd that only governments and revolutions against governments could restore balance.  We see the rise of socialism, communism, and other forms of totalitarianism; forms that renounced the supernatural.  So much of the global warming/ climate change philosophy arises from this philosophy that humanity is the enemy.  Of course, only government can save us.  In the order purged of the supernatural, government fills the void.

But governments can also be capricious gods. That yearning as old as humanity can not satiated by such entities.  Our answer is to numb the pain from this emptiness.  Is it any wonder that drug and alcohol abuse are as rampant as they are?  The desire to decriminalize drugs comes from the 'they are going to do it anyway' belief.  They are right. Life without the supernatural will demand something fill the void; whether that something is sex, drugs, gluttony, or wealth.  However it is never enough, is it?  Our being too smart to believe leads to frustration  and emptiness.  This is a dangerous place to be, because malignant earthly messiahs will rush into that void, promising all sorts of things if only we give them complete allegiance.  It takes very little to understand why the western societies are so very angry.  It takes very little to understand why so many (not all) atheists are angry people.

We created this monster.  Once we dismissed the supernatural, we were going to replace it with something else.  Why I moved from agnosticism to 'spiritual but not religious' for awhile, is that what I replaced the supernatural with didn't work at all.  It was an exercise in futility that was leading to be a person I didn't want to be.  The lure of no supernatural is that morality becomes a  matter of opinion or mob rules.  This is the opium of secularism.  Life without discipline.  The problem with this opium is that every decision has a consequence.  Choice doesn't happen in a vacuum.  Others are effected. Parties with different vested interest war until the society inevitably breaks down.  Selfishness is the ultimate drug.  Many can't break the habit.

I ended up moving from 'spiritual but not religious' to actively searching.  I was in St Augustine's "our hearts are restless until they rest in thee" mode. It made more logical sense to me that whatever created us would have an intent than not have an intent.  It made more sense that with intent came a positive interest in that creation.  This led me back to Christianity.  I looked elsewhere, trying to be my own locus of authority.  I failed.  God, as presented in Christianity, is so well disposed to humanity.  Our problems aren't things he shields us from but that he helps us through.  Because we are at the mercy of each others choices, bad things were going to happen.  I moved back to Catholicism (not willingly at first) because it best understood the human condition and best presented how God does love us.

So why do our churches empty out in the west where in Africa they are expanding?  Is it because the Africans are superstitious mental midgets who just don't get it their superstition?  No.  They didn't lose what we lost: an understanding of the supernatural.  They understand that the transcendent God makes Himself visible through Jesus.  Whereas ancient religions had the gods take on a human form (not become human mind you)  it wasn't to save us but to cause trouble for us.  God becomes flesh to save us.  However, we in the west have replaced the supernatural with a much more malleable natural God.  Our churches are social clubs and businesses.  They have morphed into country clubs and entertainment extravaganzas with dry ice and effects appropriate to rock concerts.  They are emptying out and well they should.

What we are seeing is unsettling to professional church types: where the supernatural and transcendent is focused upon, the numbers grow.  For example, among many young Catholics in this country, interest in Eucharistic Adoration and extraordinary form Masses is growing.  Congregations at these have a tendency to much younger than normal.   Professional church types will dismiss this as a fluke, as people not appreciating or understanding  the 'superior' product they offer.  Do those going to these things do so because they inherently love Mass in another language?  No, I don't think so.  I believe it is because those rituals have a greater emphasis on God as transcendent, something they often do not see in their local parish.  They have seen the moral ambiguity and the havoc it has wreaked.  They want something else.  It is not as if the Mass of Paul VI (Novus Ordo or ordinary rite) is absent of transcendence as written, but as practiced in many places.

At the end of the day, it isn't that the majority of the irreligious really believe that they are too smart to believe.  They are searching.  This is especially true of the millennial generation.  They may not be able to put words to what they are searching for.  Their conflict is going to be having to either give up a self-styled morality or a transcendent God.  If we do not show them the latter (and in many churches we do not) they we adhere to the former. Our job is to help them see the transcendent.

   

The Poison of Being Nice

Nice.  I hate the word nice.  In fact, I really hate the word nice.  It means to be inoffensive.  Milquetoast. Essentially it is a blandness of personality.  People think it is a really a synonym of kind.  It is not.  Kind/kindness is an action where one is altruistic to another person regardless of that person's merit.  Kindness is a quality of love, as St Paul reminds us I Corinthians 13.  Nice is just there.  Being nice is a virtue in this society.  I hate it.

Why?  Because love is not nice.  It is not inoffensive.  Sometimes when you love someone you must risk giving offense in order to say what another person needs to hear.  Niceness is an excuse to hide behind; an act of selfish self preservation, whereas I will condone bad behavior if the person will like me.  Our Catholic Faith is not nice.  It offends the hell out of people...lots of people.  Pick a subject, really any subject, and someone will take offense.  It could be our teachings on marriage and family, sexual ethics, the nature of salvation, the sacraments, priesthood...the list is massive.  Nice wants things to be easy.  There is nothing easy about our catholic Faith.  No, our Catholic faith challenges us to excellence, to the development of virtue, to growth in self giving, and in the exercise of restraint.  God gives us His grace to accomplish these things, which should say something of what He desires for us.

The teachings of the Church have not changed on these issues, even though you would be hard pressed in most parishes to know that.  No, many have become the church of nice.  A milquetoast arena of  self help platitudes and bland enabling morality.  A place where we are absolutely terrified of saying anything of consequence lest people abandon the pews and take their money with them.  The church of nice is a business which sells happy thoughts and moral numbness.  It is the cotton candy of religion.  Given what we are seeing in statistics released by such groups and Pew and CARA,  the church of nice might be selling, but fewer and fewer people are buying.  The church of nice is absolutely filled with the worse kinds of poison.  It would be the height of delusion to believe that God would bless the church of nice.

Why?  Because Jesus wasn't nice!  He was kind. merciful, forgiving, loving...but NOT nice.  Jesus offended the hell out of people.  Many of the Scribes and Pharisees were repeatedly offended by Him, to the point where they wanted Him dead.  Nice guys don't merit such wrath.  Jesus was no hapless victim, He provoked and called to excellence. He offered His life on the Cross.  The Cross...a symbol of horror and violent execution.  He re-appropriates it to the new tree of life.  talk about offending the sensibilities of His world!  Jesus adhered to the truth and taught the truth regardless of the suffering it brought.  His love of us provoked beyond any fear of suffering.  His desire to see us in heaven meant telling us the truth, calling us to a new life, challenging us beyond our selfishness, and giving totally of Himself, even to the point of giving us His Flesh and Blood!

I left the church of nice as young man.  Why?  Because it offered nothing to help me combat the problems of life.  Jesus was reduced to hippie, powerless and emasculated, in the church of nice.  I needed a champion.  I want to be a champion.  Once I understood that Jesus is the Lion of Judah and not the puppy of Candyland, I desired Him.  I knew that if I were to do priesthood correctly, that my life would have to be modeled after His.  There could be no being nice.  The people He would place under my care needed the truth even if it offended them. That segued into an understanding that the Gospel was a medicinal salve that prevented disease and cured disease brought on by sin.  I couldn't apply this salve by being scared whether the patient would feel a sting.

All this said, even though we are not called to be nice, we are not called to be jerks either.  Truth is to be applied with charity, always with the good and salvation of the person in mind.  I'm not called to Nurse Ratchit, applying truth like a weapon of mass destruction to punish people.  When Pope Francis calls repeatedly for mercy, he is not saying to be nice.  There is nothing of mercy in being nice.  To worry about the negative reaction of somebody so much so that you let them die is as merciless as actively attacking them.

As a pastor, I want all of my parish in heaven.  Every. Single. One. Of. Them!  If I love them, I will tell the truth and help them reach that truth.  I will teach and preach about the controversial matters and exhort them the greatness to which they are called.  If I love them, I will call out bad behavior and call them to holiness.  I will afford them the means of reconciliation, sacramentally and otherwise.  To call out behavior without affording them the means  is being a horrible shepherd.

I know people fall.  I did.  I continue to do so.  I know I don't always appreciate the truth about my actions but thank God for my friends and Church who believe I am capable of better.  In this lies the most deadly poison of nice: The nice person doesn't give the chance for the possibility that person can be greater that what they are.  Christ looks at us and KNOWS the greatness of which we are capable with His help.  Nice doesn't cut it, love does!

So quit telling your children to be nice.  Tell them to be kind, respectful, patient, and so on.  I can tell you as a man, I find being told to be nice as an attempt as emasculation. We are to call to virtue!  Let us lay aside nice, and become the warriors of faith we are called to be.

The Surest Road to Damnation

The teaching of Jesus Christ are extraordinarily clear.  When he teaches how to pray and gives us the Our Father, the following line appears "Forgive us our trespasses AS we forgive those who trespass against us."  This morning's Gospel ends with the line, "When you stand to pray, forgive anyone against whom you have a grievance, so that your heavenly Father may in turn forgive you your transgressions.” (Mark 11:26)  Matthew 6:15. Matthew 18:35. " For with the measure you use it will be measured back to you" (Luke 6:38).  Do you want to solidify your chances of going to hell?  Then carry grudges and withhold forgiveness!

Seem strong?  Absolutely! Notice in the parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32) that it ends open; will the older son forgive his younger brother?  The older brother, not the younger brother, is now on the outside looking in.  It is by his own hand that he is there.  Multiple times we are told that to love God is to love our neighbor as well.  The two are intimately bound.  Love is a theological virtue in which we grow through the intentional cooperation with God's grace to love as God loves.  We are told that God is rich in mercy; that His divine wrath is reserved for those who refuse His mercy.  To forgive, especially those who do not merit it, is to act in cooperation with the love of God.

When we pray the Our Father, we pray that we be forgiven in the same measure with which we forgive.  For us to do this is to recognize that we do not deserve nor merit the forgiveness of God for our own ongoing sins; yet, He is disposed to forgive us over and over again because He loves us.  Recall in John 13:34, taken from the Farewell Discourse, Jesus commands us to love one another.  What does this mean? To have the same disposition to others as God has towards us.  In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells us that if we love only our friends, there is no merit in that.  No, it is in the love or our enemies and persecutors that we show ourselves the adopted sons and daughter of God. Where there is love, there is forgiveness.  Where there is no forgiveness, there is no love.  The one without mercy is like the child that rebels against his parents...I want all the benefits of being your child (food, shelter, love) without actually being your child (showing obedience, love, deference to the parent).  We can't want heaven while consigning others to hell.  To withhold forgiveness attempts such a despicable desire.  However, it will be our own hand that we consign ourselves to hell!

No true Catholic can engage in the revenge business; whether it be passive aggressive or aggressive.   Revenge is only capable of begetting revenge.  Jesus on the cross intercedes for his executioners, "Father, forgive them, they know not what they do." St Stephen asked God not to hold his death against those stoning him. This is the call to excellence to which we are called through baptism.

We must be cautious.  How do we withhold forgiveness and mercy?  There are the obvious examples when we withhold forgiveness against those who have directly harmed us.  There are the less obvious examples when we show disdain for those who, even though they have not directly harmed us, have made foolish and destructive decision and find themselves in need.  At no time are we to condone sin or these poor choices, but neither are we to go to the other side and let them swelter in their own foolishness and misery.  No Catholic can meld social Darwinism and the Catholic faith together.  Sins of omission will just as assuredly damn us as sins of commission.

I know I am in constant need of God's mercy and forgiveness.  That is why I try to be generous with mercy and forgiveness.  I do believe that the person who withholds forgiveness will more likely than not forego seeking forgiveness for their own sins.  I do believe that frequent confession so disposes us to being quick to forgive as well.  This isn't about falling into scrupulosity.  It is about growing in relationship with God; the more we model our lives on His , the more we orient our lives to heaven.  The more fruit of faith, hope, and love are present in our lives.  Whether it be Jesus cursing the fig tree for its lack of fruit (today's Gospel) or telling us that branches who produce no fruit will be cut from the vine, Jesus demands fruit...the fruit of love and mercy, and will excise those who do not bear said fruit.

I end with this to my brother priest:  When we limit to a very short time at the most inconvenient time access to the Sacrament of Reconciliation, what are we saying to our flock about the importance of mercy and forgiveness?  We hide behind 'or by appointment' as a way of actually having little confession time and then blaming the people of God for their lack of presence in confession.  We can't have it both ways.  We cannot on the one hand demand they forgive and then make being forgiven a near impossibility.  I know we are busy, but priorities are to be modeled on the life of Christ.  Jesus came so that we might be reconciled to the Father through being forgiven in the name of Christ.  To us alone, by virtue of our faculties given by our bishops who also possess this duty, has been given the ability to be the Persona Christi in the role of forgiving sin.  The person who sees little need for mercy in their own life, will see little need to extend mercy to others.