Words on the Word
Erik Varden is a monk and bishop, born in Norway in 1974. In 2002, after ten years at the University of Cambridge, he joined Mount Saint Bernard Abbey in Charnwood Forest. Pope Francis named him bishop of Trondheim in 2019.
Please find below a selection of homilies:
Time of Strontium Write each of your poems
as if it were your last.
In this century, saturated with strontium,
charged with terrorism,
flying with supersonic speed,
death comes with terrifying suddenness.
Send each of your words
like a last letter before execution,
a call carved on a prison wall.
You have Read More
as if it were your last.
In this century, saturated with strontium,
charged with terrorism,
flying with supersonic speed,
death comes with terrifying suddenness.
Send each of your words
like a last letter before execution,
a call carved on a prison wall.
You have Read More
29 Sunday A 
Isaiah 45.1-6: I have called you by your name.
1 Thessalonians 1.1-5: You have persevered through hope.
Matthew 22.15-21: Give to God what belongs to God.
So the Pharisees pose the question about taxes in order to ‘trap’ Jesus. They want to unmask Read More
1 Thessalonians 1.1-5: You have persevered through hope.
Matthew 22.15-21: Give to God what belongs to God.
So the Pharisees pose the question about taxes in order to ‘trap’ Jesus. They want to unmask Read More
Anne Carson Last week, Anne Carson was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature ‘for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature‘. Much will be written about her now by Read More
Fukuyama Who would have thought that P.D.Q. Bach was an influence of Francis Fukuyama, the eminent political scientist surely close to the top of the list of authors-abundantly-cited-by-people-who’ve-never-read-them? Michael Berkeley gets to the bottom of this in last week’s episode of Private Read More
Laetitiae Amor On the feast of St Joseph this year, Pope Leo XIV announced his wish to convene all presidents of the world’s bishops’ conferences to Rome to discuss the impact of Amoris Laetitia ten years after its promulgation.
The Holy Father asked Read More
The Holy Father asked Read More
28 Sunday A Isaiah 25.6-10: On this mountain the Lord will prepare a banquet.
Philippians 4.12-20: I know how to be poor, I know how to be rich.
Matthew 22.1-14: Those who were invited would not come.
The Jesuit Fr Paul Mankowski encouraged people to pray Read More
Philippians 4.12-20: I know how to be poor, I know how to be rich.
Matthew 22.1-14: Those who were invited would not come.
The Jesuit Fr Paul Mankowski encouraged people to pray Read More
Amoris Laetitia ‘The indissolubility of marriage […] should not be viewed as a yoke imposed on humanity, but as a gift’ (62). ‘Jesus, who reconciled all things in himself, restored marriage and the family to their original form’ (63). ‘The married couple Read More
Time of Strontium
Write each of your poems
as if it were your last.
In this century, saturated with strontium,
charged with terrorism,
flying with supersonic speed,
death comes with terrifying suddenness.
Send each of your words
like a last letter before execution,
a call carved on a prison wall.
You have no right to lie,
no right to play pretty little games.
You simply won’t have time
to correct your mistakes.
Write each of your poems,
tersely, mercilessly,
with blood—as if it were your last.
Блага Николова Димитрова, Обратно време: стихове
as if it were your last.
In this century, saturated with strontium,
charged with terrorism,
flying with supersonic speed,
death comes with terrifying suddenness.
Send each of your words
like a last letter before execution,
a call carved on a prison wall.
You have no right to lie,
no right to play pretty little games.
You simply won’t have time
to correct your mistakes.
Write each of your poems,
tersely, mercilessly,
with blood—as if it were your last.
Блага Николова Димитрова, Обратно време: стихове
29 Sunday A
Isaiah 45.1-6: I have called you by your name.
1 Thessalonians 1.1-5: You have persevered through hope.
Matthew 22.15-21: Give to God what belongs to God.
So the Pharisees pose the question about taxes in order to ‘trap’ Jesus. They want to unmask him as a revolutionary. Jesus turns the question elegantly round and convicts them. He asks them to consider the currency of taxation. It carries the image and name of Caesar. So let Caesar have it!
Jesus is not naive when it comes to money. He knows that love of money can turn into a passion that drives out piety. We cannot ‘serve both God and mammon’ (Mt 6.24). We are to use money responsibly, to assume our share in the carrying of society’s burden — that’s what taxes are for. But we must remember the categorical distinction between God’s claim and Caesar’s. No amount of cash will gain us access to the kingdom of heaven.
Jesus’s conversation with the Pharisees has a symbolic dimension as well. The word used to denote the ‘image’ of Caesar is eikōn. It carries deep resonance in Biblical language. The same word is used to state that the human being is created ‘in the image of God’. We might say that it is minted by God.
‘Give to God what belongs to God’. Do we?
The Gospel sets out from our debt to society, from civic duty. But its deeper concern is to show that God likewise places just demands on us.
We like to think of God as a generous, tender, forgiving Father. He is. The Bible makes this quite clear. But he is also THE LORD. He expects things of us. He bids us live as adults, presuming that our Yes will mean Yes, our No mean No.
On Thursday I returned from Rome after taking part in the meeting the Holy Father had called to mark the tenth anniversary of Amoris Laetitia, the exhortation ‘on love in the family’ that Pope Francis issued in 2016. The text has many beautiful (and useful) things to say about Christian marriage, about the relationship between parents and children, about the family’s role in the transmission of faith. When it was published, however, almost all attention was directed, especially in the press, towards a single topic, often made out to be a bone of contention: the Church’s teaching on the indissolubility of marriage. Had Amoris Laetitia changed that teaching? No. Yet some insisted it had. Much ink was spilt.
When Pope Leo XIV convoked bishops and families to speak about Amoris Laetitia, it was with a broader remit, with a view to strengthening the family’s role as an agent of mission.
I find Catholic families are hungry for this message; they are conscious of their evangelising task. Still, what the press harps on about, also after last week’s meeting, is the same old business of indissolubility and what happens when marriages fail. That issue is widely perceived as one that might ‘trap’ the Church in our day. So it might be good to say a word or two about it.
It is moving to attend a Catholic wedding and to hear bride and groom promise to love and honour each other for the rest of their lives, ‘for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health’ until death. To think that it is possible to give a Yes that can anchor one’s whole existence and become the criterion by which all other considerations and decisions are made!
In the Yes of marriage we see an image — it’s the eikōn again — of Christ’s eternal covenant with his Church. A sacramental marriage makes God’s fidelity visible. That sounds lovely. It is lovely. But we all know that lived fidelity is costly.
Any unconditional Yes to Christian consecration, be it in marriage or priestly life, involves a Yes to share mystically in the Lord’s cross, by which the world is saved.
We all know happy and unhappy marriages. We know people who, after a failed relationship, find great happiness in another. In such cases the Church’s teaching about the definitive character of marriage can seem hard. Let me be clear: such situations are painful; and the Church, which together we make up in Christ, shares that pain. No one is left to carry it alone. And one fully remains a member of the Church even if, on account of complex personal circumstances, one cannot for the time being have access to the sacraments
I wish to express reverent respect for all those who, for one reason or another, cannot receive Communion but who faithfully attend Mass, take part in the community, and come up to receive a blessing. Their fidelity is a precious testimony to the whole Church. It bears witness to the holiness of the sacraments, to the definitive Yes the sacraments enable; at the same time it bears witness to trust in God’s patient mercy. Such witness truly edifies.
And do remember: it’s not that some are ‘worthy’ to receive Communion while others are ‘unworthy’. We are all unworthy, that’s what binds us together. We confess as much each time we celebrate Mass: ‘Lord, I am not worthy!’ May that never become just an empty phrase.
A covenantal promise can sometimes seem heavy. Such a promise shows that a Yes given in God’s name truly carries: a lasting character is imprinted on our lives by a Yes given freely. Freedom is fundamental to it, a precondition for the validity of marriage. That is why the Church, in cases where a marriage ends unhappily, first examines whether freedom was present to begin with.
‘Give to God what belongs to God’. The commandment becomes very concrete, and outwardly visible, in circumstances like the ones I have considered. But it is every bit as valid in our inward, invisible lives.
If I yield to anger, if I speak a spiteful word, if I slander, lie, or steal, I effectively spit on Gods eikōn in me. By my attitude or acts I say No where I have pronounced a fundamental, lasting Yes. Such incidents are not trivial. They require reconciliation. That is why God has given us the wonderful sacrament of penance, so that what is broken can become whole, that what is sick can be healed.
This is what is so wonderful about the Catholic Church!
In the Church it is given us to build a community based on truth. We’re called, by grace, to holiness but needn’t pretend we’re perfect. We can acknowledge our failings and still be part. We can extend a helping hand to each other, provide a shoulder to cry on when one is needed. We can bring one another comfort and encouragement.
It is by being purified through humility, penance, and reconciliation that the Church appears splendidly as an expression of God’s mercy in the world. ‘Give to God what belongs to God’. That includes our most intimate needs, our anxieties, our sins.
Surrendered to him, even the darkness in us can become light. What we’re ashamed of can become something beautiful.
God’s purpose for us is blessed. He has entrusted us to one another to realise that purpose.
Amen.
The West Wall of Nidarosdomen this afternoon, in glorious autumn light. Adam and Eve, in the centre, are driven out of Eden, but the saints surrounding them are proof that new access is possible.
1 Thessalonians 1.1-5: You have persevered through hope.
Matthew 22.15-21: Give to God what belongs to God.
So the Pharisees pose the question about taxes in order to ‘trap’ Jesus. They want to unmask him as a revolutionary. Jesus turns the question elegantly round and convicts them. He asks them to consider the currency of taxation. It carries the image and name of Caesar. So let Caesar have it!
Jesus is not naive when it comes to money. He knows that love of money can turn into a passion that drives out piety. We cannot ‘serve both God and mammon’ (Mt 6.24). We are to use money responsibly, to assume our share in the carrying of society’s burden — that’s what taxes are for. But we must remember the categorical distinction between God’s claim and Caesar’s. No amount of cash will gain us access to the kingdom of heaven.
Jesus’s conversation with the Pharisees has a symbolic dimension as well. The word used to denote the ‘image’ of Caesar is eikōn. It carries deep resonance in Biblical language. The same word is used to state that the human being is created ‘in the image of God’. We might say that it is minted by God.
‘Give to God what belongs to God’. Do we?
The Gospel sets out from our debt to society, from civic duty. But its deeper concern is to show that God likewise places just demands on us.
We like to think of God as a generous, tender, forgiving Father. He is. The Bible makes this quite clear. But he is also THE LORD. He expects things of us. He bids us live as adults, presuming that our Yes will mean Yes, our No mean No.
On Thursday I returned from Rome after taking part in the meeting the Holy Father had called to mark the tenth anniversary of Amoris Laetitia, the exhortation ‘on love in the family’ that Pope Francis issued in 2016. The text has many beautiful (and useful) things to say about Christian marriage, about the relationship between parents and children, about the family’s role in the transmission of faith. When it was published, however, almost all attention was directed, especially in the press, towards a single topic, often made out to be a bone of contention: the Church’s teaching on the indissolubility of marriage. Had Amoris Laetitia changed that teaching? No. Yet some insisted it had. Much ink was spilt.
When Pope Leo XIV convoked bishops and families to speak about Amoris Laetitia, it was with a broader remit, with a view to strengthening the family’s role as an agent of mission.
I find Catholic families are hungry for this message; they are conscious of their evangelising task. Still, what the press harps on about, also after last week’s meeting, is the same old business of indissolubility and what happens when marriages fail. That issue is widely perceived as one that might ‘trap’ the Church in our day. So it might be good to say a word or two about it.
It is moving to attend a Catholic wedding and to hear bride and groom promise to love and honour each other for the rest of their lives, ‘for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health’ until death. To think that it is possible to give a Yes that can anchor one’s whole existence and become the criterion by which all other considerations and decisions are made!
In the Yes of marriage we see an image — it’s the eikōn again — of Christ’s eternal covenant with his Church. A sacramental marriage makes God’s fidelity visible. That sounds lovely. It is lovely. But we all know that lived fidelity is costly.
Any unconditional Yes to Christian consecration, be it in marriage or priestly life, involves a Yes to share mystically in the Lord’s cross, by which the world is saved.
We all know happy and unhappy marriages. We know people who, after a failed relationship, find great happiness in another. In such cases the Church’s teaching about the definitive character of marriage can seem hard. Let me be clear: such situations are painful; and the Church, which together we make up in Christ, shares that pain. No one is left to carry it alone. And one fully remains a member of the Church even if, on account of complex personal circumstances, one cannot for the time being have access to the sacraments
I wish to express reverent respect for all those who, for one reason or another, cannot receive Communion but who faithfully attend Mass, take part in the community, and come up to receive a blessing. Their fidelity is a precious testimony to the whole Church. It bears witness to the holiness of the sacraments, to the definitive Yes the sacraments enable; at the same time it bears witness to trust in God’s patient mercy. Such witness truly edifies.
And do remember: it’s not that some are ‘worthy’ to receive Communion while others are ‘unworthy’. We are all unworthy, that’s what binds us together. We confess as much each time we celebrate Mass: ‘Lord, I am not worthy!’ May that never become just an empty phrase.
A covenantal promise can sometimes seem heavy. Such a promise shows that a Yes given in God’s name truly carries: a lasting character is imprinted on our lives by a Yes given freely. Freedom is fundamental to it, a precondition for the validity of marriage. That is why the Church, in cases where a marriage ends unhappily, first examines whether freedom was present to begin with.
‘Give to God what belongs to God’. The commandment becomes very concrete, and outwardly visible, in circumstances like the ones I have considered. But it is every bit as valid in our inward, invisible lives.
If I yield to anger, if I speak a spiteful word, if I slander, lie, or steal, I effectively spit on Gods eikōn in me. By my attitude or acts I say No where I have pronounced a fundamental, lasting Yes. Such incidents are not trivial. They require reconciliation. That is why God has given us the wonderful sacrament of penance, so that what is broken can become whole, that what is sick can be healed.
This is what is so wonderful about the Catholic Church!
In the Church it is given us to build a community based on truth. We’re called, by grace, to holiness but needn’t pretend we’re perfect. We can acknowledge our failings and still be part. We can extend a helping hand to each other, provide a shoulder to cry on when one is needed. We can bring one another comfort and encouragement.
It is by being purified through humility, penance, and reconciliation that the Church appears splendidly as an expression of God’s mercy in the world. ‘Give to God what belongs to God’. That includes our most intimate needs, our anxieties, our sins.
Surrendered to him, even the darkness in us can become light. What we’re ashamed of can become something beautiful.
God’s purpose for us is blessed. He has entrusted us to one another to realise that purpose.
Amen.
The West Wall of Nidarosdomen this afternoon, in glorious autumn light. Adam and Eve, in the centre, are driven out of Eden, but the saints surrounding them are proof that new access is possible.
Anne Carson
Last week, Anne Carson was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature ‘for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature‘. Much will be written about her now by people who have read a lot of Carson in a hurry. So it’s good to return to a piece by someone who’s engaged with her patiently over time. In a splendid essay published in The Nation in 2024, Emily Wilson wrote about the laureate: ‘Much of her work is classified by booksellers and publishers as poetry because they have to put it somewhere, although her work usually has deeper ties to the essay. […] Throughout her long, prolific career, she has specialised in unexpected juxtapositions—between ancient and modern, sense and nonsense, the lyrical and analytical modes. […] It was during her adolescent Wilde phase that Carson experienced her magic spider bite, the moment she was infected with her superpower: She discovered, in a shopping mall in Ontario, a copy of Sappho’s poetry […]. The experience of painful desire, she contends in Eros, has been the same for all people in all times and places—and it also always had something essential to do with writing and with art in general. […] Like many people whose childhoods were partly shaped by the Catholic Church, Carson has a mystical yearning for spiritual fulfilment combined with a strong spirit of rebellion. […] A running theme of Carson’s work has always been the desire to cut words down to the knucklebone, to find the simplest, shortest way of telling the truth.’
Fukuyama
Who would have thought that P.D.Q. Bach was an influence of Francis Fukuyama, the eminent political scientist surely close to the top of the list of authors-abundantly-cited-by-people-who’ve-never-read-them? Michael Berkeley gets to the bottom of this in last week’s episode of Private Passions. There’s a lot of Bach in Fukuyama’s list of favourite music. How lovely that he also includes Rosales’s Zamba para no morir. Of course, he has incisive things to say about the state of the world: about the way in which current political trends repeat war-time injustices; about the ‘end of history’ and the ‘last man’ (who stands in such contrast to Camus’s premier homme); about the ambivalence of communal passions; about Die Entführung aus dem Serail as parable; about the distrust of government and the cost of breaking with established political opinion. Fukuyama comes across as ever as courteous, delightful company. And he’s an accomplished carpenter! ‘I live in a completely abstract world of ideas’, says he, so ‘there’s something satisfying in being able to produce material objects that are useful.’ He also finds it convenient to build his own computers.
Laetitiae Amor
On the feast of St Joseph this year, Pope Leo XIV announced his wish to convene all presidents of the world’s bishops’ conferences to Rome to discuss the impact of Amoris Laetitia ten years after its promulgation.
The Holy Father asked us to consider how we might more effectively proclaim the Gospel to families.
The week-long meeting concluded yesterday. A report will be published when the Holy Father has recovered from his illness — a recovery we pray will be swift and complete — but Pope Leo XIV has asked participants to share their experience of the meeting with their conferences and dioceses without delay.
The meeting unfolded according to a framework built on five main themes. Each provided material for a full day’s exchanges. Below are my personal reflections on these themes.
These reflections do not speak for the assembly, the richness of whose work all will discover in due course. They are simply the contribution of a single voice, a second viola, to this large, well-composed orchestra.
* * *
Families Today
Family life today is under stress for all sorts of reasons — sociological, financial, and cultural. We are keenly aware of these. All deserve consideration.
The most persistent stress, though, runs deeper. In a remarkably short time, we have lost our collective sense of humanity. Except within interest groups, it is hard, now, to find shared words to describe what a human being is. We no longer agree on what makes a woman, a man, a child.
Tech transhumanists project a future in which man will probably be left behind by ‘progress’ as long as his nature is not ‘enhanced’. Having abandoned thoughts of redemption, we now place our hope in upgrades. We take it for granted that today’s parameters won’t apply tomorrow. As a result, the idea of permanent commitment of any kind seems absurd.
Alliances and covenants yield to ‘deals’ in politics and trade. The same holds for human relationships, increasingly viewed as pragmatic transactions: I stick with something, or someone, as long as I derive benefit or pleasure from doing so. Then I move on.
In such a setting, the family, as a basic unity of human society, cannot but disintegrate. It no longer seems axiomatic that families should be stable units constructed on the life-long bond of one woman and one man in the hope of begetting children.
A woman and a man may still club together — it’s a free world, after all; but such a union is not seen as categorically distinct from that of two women or two men, or of two individuals who consider themselves to be of fluid gender. Indeed, why restrict the unit to two individuals? Demands for legal recognition of polyamory are spreading.
We are in a state of metaphysical eclipse.
Faith in God as benevolent Creator has largely been lost. We no longer believe we have been wanted into being. How, then, can we keep a sense of our own life as a gift we can in turn give, even consecrate, to another? Ours is a time of desecration sprung from literal hopelessness, from ruling out the very possibility of ‘hope’.
I see these developments in my social environment, in my correspondence and conversations, in the confessional.
I also ascertain a counter-trend. I meet many young, and not-so-young, people who are tired of the ephemeral. They refuse to let ‘hope’ go. They dare to think there might be such a thing as ‘truth’ upon which they might build their lives.
By nurturing and supporting such people, helping them flourish, we may bring about a renewal of family culture. After all, everyone wants to be happy. A lot of people aren’t. On this point sociologists agree. The sight of a thriving family will make others wish to thrive.
To thrive is not the same as being continuously delirious with happiness.
Human life is hard, in whatever articulation. I find most people to be lucid on this score. As a result, they can get a bit tired of a well-meant but repetitious vocabulary of ‘accompaniment’, of ‘being on a journey’, of ‘being listened to’. They wish of course to be met to with attention and respect, but what they want is direction, the indication of a goal, being taught how to live well.
God became man for this purpose: to show us what life is about and where it is going, to teach us, by counsels and commandments, how to conduct good, fruitful lives. When Christ met the Samaritan woman at the well, he did not say, ‘Now, do let’s sit down and you can tell me everything’. He told her ‘all [she] had done’ (cf. John 4.29).
That is what enabled her to start a new life.
We need to let Christ tell us who we are, point out our wrong turns, convict our faults, direct us to the end for which we were created.
Christ is our Saviour, but that is not all. He is also the Image in which we were made, the Prototype who reveals us to ourselves. We shall be pastorally effective in so far as we stay lovingly obedient to him. We may even stand a chance of reinvesting society with hope.
Young People and the Discovery of Marriage
A study published by the American College of Paediatricians a couple of years ago reported that 54% of teens had seen pornography by the time they were 13, 15% before the age of 11. Those figures have certainly risen since. Use of pornography is fairly generalised among young adults, men and women, the world over. It impacts massively on how young people interact affectively.
When one has been haunted since childhood by a universe of lust in which sex is matter for consumption, in which one’s object of desire is constantly exchangeable (but ever physically perfect), from which romance is absent, and where there are no rules, it is a massive, perhaps insuperable step to enter a lasting, faithful relationship with a concrete, fallible, needy human being whose otherness cannot be abstracted.
The pornographic universe is transgressive. It suggests boundaries only to lure consumers across them, insinuating prospects of protean power. The classical paradigm of boy-meets-girl has long since been surpassed. Homoeroticism, which not so long ago was linked to notions of a sexual ‘orientation’, is now an option available to all, integrated into mainstream entertainment. Trends of gender fluidity manifest fantasies gestated, often out of interior anguish, in the marketplace of eros unbound, where momentary desire is enthroned as god, where objective reality yields to the forms subjective imagination imposes and provokes.
We deplore the allurements of the virtual and unreal, but that is not enough. We must extend a friendly hand to young men and women caught up in compelling forms of unreality, pull them out of the morass and let them rediscover the world as it is. To do so, we must be able to show that this true world is better and in fact more interesting, apt to make one happy.
Three years ago I published a book called Chastity. I was ridiculed then by some people, mainly elderly European men, who assured me that this was a subject of interest to no one.
I have been struck, though, to find myself, in country after country, talking to large crowds of largely young people eager to hear what this nearly-forgotten, apparently embarrassing virtue is about. Far from being seduced by hyper-eroticised substitutions for relationships, many young people are weary of them. They’re in search of friendship and stable love. I’m not saying they represent the mainstream; but they’re numerous enough to evidence a trend.
To help the young see the value of marriage, we must speak into this trend, first by helping young women and men establish peace with themselves. In one of St Paul’s main texts about marriage, in the letter to the Ephesians, he likens the wedded couple to a body, then remarks, ‘no man ever hates his own flesh’ (5.29).
The trouble is, lots of people do, these days, and feel estranged from their bodies. In a secular optic, the body is a sack of sinews that may be repurposed. The remarkable, freeing Christian message is that I am my body, and that my body, no less than my soul, is made in the image of God, deserving of reverence.
If we wish to ready the young for marriage, we must first assist them to find their embodied identity as women and men. Before we try to help others, we must realise this work ourselves.
It can be salutarily humiliating to find, even in maturity, that we still have a way to go in this regard.
What language helps young people grow affectively?
A language of truth that calls things by their name serenely, without violence, never despairing of God’s mercy. This language honours wounds without idealising victimhood. It springs from faith in Jesus’s will to save.
Marriage manifests salvation. To be fit for it, one must first find oneself salvageable.
The First Years of Married Life
A couple I know told me of a decision they made when they saw that their courtship was getting serious. They went together to a cabin in the woods for a long weekend. During that time, they told one another their lives. Both wanted the other to know their whole story with its lights and shadows, triumphs and failures. Were they to pledge their futures to each other, they’d make sure no obstacles might arise, down the line, from an unacknowledged past.
Such an undertaking is courageous and wise. The essence of love is to know I can be who I am, unmasked, and yet be cherished. God loves us that way. To learn to love as he does is to do likewise. Marriage will thrive if both parties can entrust their intimate self to the other.
At the beginning of the marriage rite, the priest asks: ‘Have you come here of your own free will?’ The freedom on which the sacrament’s validity hinges requires that the spouses know who they are marrying. Many challenges tending to arise in the early years of marriage can be forestalled by pursuit of honest transparency before the marriage covenant is ratified.
The spouses are themselves the agents of the sacrament. They nonetheless make it in church, before the cross. To say yes to the question, ‘Will you love and honour each other all the days of your life and accept with love the children God may send?’, is to consent to a share in the cross. Any spousal and parental love involves suffering. It will pierce the heart. It will require one’s life to be poured out that others may live.
To embrace this reality knowingly from the start, consenting to a share in Christ’s life-giving cross, will give spouses strength to carry their burdens, making even heavy things seem light. The horizontal relationship between husband and wife, parents and children, will be sustained by a sure, dependable vertical axis.
I love the rite for which the Latin rite allows when the priest, having witnessed the marriage vows, wraps the couple’s joint hands in his stole and says: ‘What God joins together man must not separate.’
Each time he puts on the stole, the priest recites the beautiful vesting prayer: ‘Lord, restore the stole of immortality, which I lost through the actions of our first parents’.
The covenant of marriage lets us glimpse the glory that rested on Adam and Eve before the fall. In some Eastern rites, spouses are crowned in acknowledgement of their regained royal dignity of filiation.
In our hyper-secular climate, which sentimentalises marriage and has a consumerist view of children, regarded as goods to be ordered for a convenient time, preferably produced to set specifications, this supernatural perspective is helpful. It recalls the fact that marriage is not just about a woman and a man. It incorporates the two into a living communion with God; indeed, it establishes them together as an image, a living icon, of God’s holy Church.
To know that Christ is constitutionally present in their union inspires them in the arduous work of relinquishing the first person singular for the first person plural, no longer to say ‘I want’, but ‘we want’; not ‘I have’, but ‘we have’. It can help them negotiate the raw power and deep vulnerability of sex, to integrate both its unitive and procreative aspects well. It will prepare them to receive children with reverence as God’s gracious gifts.
A married couple needs to be held by a community. It is false to regard the couple as self-sufficient, expecting it to generate all its own resources and contentment: such a view just applies secular individualism to a collective unit that will teeter under the burden.
Here the Catholic community and parish come into their own, called to provide the care, practical help, humour, and compassionate advice that larger family units, now largely extinct, could formerly offer.
Families in Complex Situations
We talk about the ‘joy and beauty’ of marriage. We are right to do so. These qualities do stand for an ideal. But we should also be cautious and avoid platitudes.
We’ve only to read Anna Karenina or watch Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage to see that a married couple can make life hell for each other. That must be remembered, too.
Before a monastic clothing, the postulant often reads from Sirach: ‘My child, when you come to serve the Lord, prepare yourself for trials’. Fiancés might do the same. Trials will come.
Pope Francis wrote about ‘Evangelii gaudium’ but ‘Amoris laetitia’. That’s an interesting semantic distinction.
The basic sense of the Latin root laet-, which gives us laetus and laetare, is ‘happiness’. However, already in classical Latin the root had an agro-ecological meaning indicating the ‘flourishing’ of plants and ‘fertile’ soil. This makes good sense. ’Happy’ vegetation grows in soil that has been worked to become nutritious. So the root laet– could also produce the noun laetamen, ‘fertiliser’. In Antiquity fertiliser was tantamount to manure, which stinks. The laetitia of love presupposes a stone-picked, well-ploughed terrain and a sufficiency of rich dung.
To make this point is not to take delight out of marriage and the family; it is to insist that this delight will spring from labour; and that such labour is hard, often seemingly ungratifying.
The monastic and married states presuppose and mirror one another. I believe, and ascertain, that families can be helped by the inherited wisdom and experience of monastic life.
Monastics live by a rule that enshrines the covenant of common life, making its purpose and end explicit. When husband and wife agree on the finality of their family, they’ll be better equipped to negotiate obstacles than if they have not formulated their union as a task.
This is especially the case if their shared finality is transcendent. Then they’ll let God act in them. They’ll see hardships as occasions for conversion, for stepping outside the musty cell of self.
Monks and nuns are realistic about the struggles that pertain to their vocation. The first literature of monasticism, the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, tackle the standard battles head-on. The Sayings allow monks to look up ways of resolving concrete issues they happen to struggle with under matter-of-fact headings such as ‘Dispossession’, ‘Patience’, ‘Lust’, ‘Forbearance’.
The practical applicability of these counsels after 1,500 years remains astonishing.
Much could be gained, I’d say, from putting together a terce, experience-based, faith-informed compilation of Apophthegmata for families, showing how trials may be handled constructively in the clarifying light of Christ’s commandments and his effective grace.
When things are tough, we contract our perspective. We see only our present pain, not the path that may extend beyond it.
A principal pastoral concern in such situations is to recall the bigger picture, letting sufferers discover the potentially productive sense of their troubles, which may serve to lessen selfishness and purify love. Marriage, no less than monastic life, is a school of conversion.
Concerning ‘irregular’ relationships, I find our Catholic communities normally embrace these maturely and well. It can be liberating for persons in such situations to be in a setting where their ‘irregularity’ is acknowledged, not relativised; and where they are yet embraced with Christian friendship, enabled to contribute to the community.
I think of the example of many faithful people I know who, Sunday after Sunday, come up for a blessing at the time of Communion, knowing they cannot accede to the sacrament, yet entrusting themselves to God’s mercy at work in the Church.
Their example of fidelity does much to build up the Christian community. It testifies to the vital realism of the sacrament and to the virtue of hope. Sacramental exile sustained over time can prepare a joyful homecoming.
Christ gave us his rigorous commandments to educate us and to liberate us from ourselves, ‘that we might live no longer for ourselves but for him who died and rose again for us’ (Fourth Eucharistic Prayer). His intention is to make us grow in stature into new, divinised life.
That life must always be the aim we propose to people, not merely human affirmation — though we all need a bit of that as well.
Families as Agents of Mission
What separates the worldview of the Christian from that of secularists?
The conviction that through all the vicissitudes of history, all the changes wrought by nature’s evolutions and man’s ingenuity, God’s fidelity to humankind, created in his image, is absolute. Whatever else happens, God’s love, definitively revealed in Jesus Christ, is sure. It is the rock on which a life, a society, can be built. Storms may come, winds may blow and beat, but this foundation stays.
The first mission of the family is to testify to this stable love. That’s why the indissolubility of marriage has to be seen as a gift and a high task, a vote of confidence on God’s part (cf. AL 62). By promising to remain faithful to each other until death, husband and wife instantiate in history the reality of God’s love.
Human nature, wounded by sin, is marked by selfishness and promiscuity: we look for our own advantage and don’t mind pursuing it in many directions at once. We may enjoy a few thrills this way; but we’re unlikely to find peaceful contentment. We keep yearning for a single, defining love: there’s evidence of this in the popular songs of every age, also in those of our own, generally godless one.
A family is missionary, therefore, primarily by its fidelity. Right now, when so many traditional structures of social cohesion are breaking down around us, this mission is vitally important.
A second form of family mission is hospitality. Even as a monastery is ‘never without guests’ (RB, 53) — it’s not to be a self-referential club for the sole benefit of members — a Christian family invites others in. ‘I was a stranger, and you welcomed me’ (Matthew 25.35). By wise, responsible commitment to this ideal, the family’s own cohesion can be strengthened in a spirit of service and courtesy.
The question is sometimes raised: how can families contribute to the formation of priests? Not primarily by trooping to the seminary armed with powerpoint-projections about family life, but by inviting seminarians, priests (who knows, perhaps even bishops?) into their lives. The celibate priest true to his calling reminds a family of its supernatural dimension; the family reminds the priest that his celibacy is for the sake of fruitfulness. Mutual, joyful benefit ensues.
Testimony to fruitfulness is needed. Birth-rates are plummeting globally. Our race is not reproducing itself. Thirty years ago, sociologists fretted about over-population, pouring vitriol on Catholic teaching about birth control. We now see that the opposite tendency prevails. The confident wish to reproduce is waning fast on every continent.
Catholic family planning, now, must focus on enabling families to say yes to children. This calls for practical measures: affordable provision of housing, child-care, and schools — the mission has a political aspect. But above all it touches the conversion of hearts.
To wish to found a fruitful family now is counter-cultural, tantamount to wanting to be a punk in the heady 1970s. The Church is called to support this healthy revolution, enabling the young to choose and commit to life.
Naturally, any attempt to speak of the family as a missionary agent comes up against an exegetical quandary.
Christ’s attitude to the family can be challenging. He calls James and John away from their family ties, leaving poor old Zebedee perplexed behind in his boat (Mark 1.19-21). His healing of Peter’s mother-in-law makes us ask what happened to Mrs Peter when Cephas was called (Mark 1.30-31)? We shudder at the words: ‘He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me’ (Matthew 10.37).
Such statements do not downplay the family’s value; but they exhort us to consider the family in the light of radical discipleship.
‘Seek first the kingdom of heaven!’ (Matthew 6.33).
That principle applies to families, too. When realised, a family may mystically but plausibly manifest that kingdom.
* * *
On the day following the Roman assembly, as we who were blessed to take part look back on it with gratitude, the Church celebrates, as providence would have it, that incomparable Doctor of the Church, St Teresa of Ávila. Today’s Office of Readings gives us a passage from her Autobiography that begins like this:
One in whom Christ Jesus dwells as a friend and noble leader can endure all things. Christ helps and strengthens us and never abandons us. He is a true friend. And I clearly see that if we expect to please him and receive an abundance of his graces, God desires that these graces must come to us from the hands of Christ, through his most sacred humanity, in which God takes delight.’
That is a wonderful perspective in which to consider the graces and challenges of family life. In the collect for today’s feast, we pray: ‘Kindle in us the longing for true holiness.’ Amen!
But isn’t such a call too high for us ordinary, poor folks?
Not if we let God work his redemption in us, and if we remember the high significance of ordinary, daily acts of fidelity that enact and renew a resolve, given once for all, to love faithfully.
The last word goes to Tevje and Golde.
Jean-François Millet, Paysan répandant du fumier, in the North Carolina Museum of Art.
The Holy Father asked us to consider how we might more effectively proclaim the Gospel to families.
The week-long meeting concluded yesterday. A report will be published when the Holy Father has recovered from his illness — a recovery we pray will be swift and complete — but Pope Leo XIV has asked participants to share their experience of the meeting with their conferences and dioceses without delay.
The meeting unfolded according to a framework built on five main themes. Each provided material for a full day’s exchanges. Below are my personal reflections on these themes.
These reflections do not speak for the assembly, the richness of whose work all will discover in due course. They are simply the contribution of a single voice, a second viola, to this large, well-composed orchestra.
* * *
Families Today
Family life today is under stress for all sorts of reasons — sociological, financial, and cultural. We are keenly aware of these. All deserve consideration.
The most persistent stress, though, runs deeper. In a remarkably short time, we have lost our collective sense of humanity. Except within interest groups, it is hard, now, to find shared words to describe what a human being is. We no longer agree on what makes a woman, a man, a child.
Tech transhumanists project a future in which man will probably be left behind by ‘progress’ as long as his nature is not ‘enhanced’. Having abandoned thoughts of redemption, we now place our hope in upgrades. We take it for granted that today’s parameters won’t apply tomorrow. As a result, the idea of permanent commitment of any kind seems absurd.
Alliances and covenants yield to ‘deals’ in politics and trade. The same holds for human relationships, increasingly viewed as pragmatic transactions: I stick with something, or someone, as long as I derive benefit or pleasure from doing so. Then I move on.
In such a setting, the family, as a basic unity of human society, cannot but disintegrate. It no longer seems axiomatic that families should be stable units constructed on the life-long bond of one woman and one man in the hope of begetting children.
A woman and a man may still club together — it’s a free world, after all; but such a union is not seen as categorically distinct from that of two women or two men, or of two individuals who consider themselves to be of fluid gender. Indeed, why restrict the unit to two individuals? Demands for legal recognition of polyamory are spreading.
We are in a state of metaphysical eclipse.
Faith in God as benevolent Creator has largely been lost. We no longer believe we have been wanted into being. How, then, can we keep a sense of our own life as a gift we can in turn give, even consecrate, to another? Ours is a time of desecration sprung from literal hopelessness, from ruling out the very possibility of ‘hope’.
I see these developments in my social environment, in my correspondence and conversations, in the confessional.
I also ascertain a counter-trend. I meet many young, and not-so-young, people who are tired of the ephemeral. They refuse to let ‘hope’ go. They dare to think there might be such a thing as ‘truth’ upon which they might build their lives.
By nurturing and supporting such people, helping them flourish, we may bring about a renewal of family culture. After all, everyone wants to be happy. A lot of people aren’t. On this point sociologists agree. The sight of a thriving family will make others wish to thrive.
To thrive is not the same as being continuously delirious with happiness.
Human life is hard, in whatever articulation. I find most people to be lucid on this score. As a result, they can get a bit tired of a well-meant but repetitious vocabulary of ‘accompaniment’, of ‘being on a journey’, of ‘being listened to’. They wish of course to be met to with attention and respect, but what they want is direction, the indication of a goal, being taught how to live well.
God became man for this purpose: to show us what life is about and where it is going, to teach us, by counsels and commandments, how to conduct good, fruitful lives. When Christ met the Samaritan woman at the well, he did not say, ‘Now, do let’s sit down and you can tell me everything’. He told her ‘all [she] had done’ (cf. John 4.29).
That is what enabled her to start a new life.
We need to let Christ tell us who we are, point out our wrong turns, convict our faults, direct us to the end for which we were created.
Christ is our Saviour, but that is not all. He is also the Image in which we were made, the Prototype who reveals us to ourselves. We shall be pastorally effective in so far as we stay lovingly obedient to him. We may even stand a chance of reinvesting society with hope.
Young People and the Discovery of Marriage
A study published by the American College of Paediatricians a couple of years ago reported that 54% of teens had seen pornography by the time they were 13, 15% before the age of 11. Those figures have certainly risen since. Use of pornography is fairly generalised among young adults, men and women, the world over. It impacts massively on how young people interact affectively.
When one has been haunted since childhood by a universe of lust in which sex is matter for consumption, in which one’s object of desire is constantly exchangeable (but ever physically perfect), from which romance is absent, and where there are no rules, it is a massive, perhaps insuperable step to enter a lasting, faithful relationship with a concrete, fallible, needy human being whose otherness cannot be abstracted.
The pornographic universe is transgressive. It suggests boundaries only to lure consumers across them, insinuating prospects of protean power. The classical paradigm of boy-meets-girl has long since been surpassed. Homoeroticism, which not so long ago was linked to notions of a sexual ‘orientation’, is now an option available to all, integrated into mainstream entertainment. Trends of gender fluidity manifest fantasies gestated, often out of interior anguish, in the marketplace of eros unbound, where momentary desire is enthroned as god, where objective reality yields to the forms subjective imagination imposes and provokes.
We deplore the allurements of the virtual and unreal, but that is not enough. We must extend a friendly hand to young men and women caught up in compelling forms of unreality, pull them out of the morass and let them rediscover the world as it is. To do so, we must be able to show that this true world is better and in fact more interesting, apt to make one happy.
Three years ago I published a book called Chastity. I was ridiculed then by some people, mainly elderly European men, who assured me that this was a subject of interest to no one.
I have been struck, though, to find myself, in country after country, talking to large crowds of largely young people eager to hear what this nearly-forgotten, apparently embarrassing virtue is about. Far from being seduced by hyper-eroticised substitutions for relationships, many young people are weary of them. They’re in search of friendship and stable love. I’m not saying they represent the mainstream; but they’re numerous enough to evidence a trend.
To help the young see the value of marriage, we must speak into this trend, first by helping young women and men establish peace with themselves. In one of St Paul’s main texts about marriage, in the letter to the Ephesians, he likens the wedded couple to a body, then remarks, ‘no man ever hates his own flesh’ (5.29).
The trouble is, lots of people do, these days, and feel estranged from their bodies. In a secular optic, the body is a sack of sinews that may be repurposed. The remarkable, freeing Christian message is that I am my body, and that my body, no less than my soul, is made in the image of God, deserving of reverence.
If we wish to ready the young for marriage, we must first assist them to find their embodied identity as women and men. Before we try to help others, we must realise this work ourselves.
It can be salutarily humiliating to find, even in maturity, that we still have a way to go in this regard.
What language helps young people grow affectively?
A language of truth that calls things by their name serenely, without violence, never despairing of God’s mercy. This language honours wounds without idealising victimhood. It springs from faith in Jesus’s will to save.
Marriage manifests salvation. To be fit for it, one must first find oneself salvageable.
The First Years of Married Life
A couple I know told me of a decision they made when they saw that their courtship was getting serious. They went together to a cabin in the woods for a long weekend. During that time, they told one another their lives. Both wanted the other to know their whole story with its lights and shadows, triumphs and failures. Were they to pledge their futures to each other, they’d make sure no obstacles might arise, down the line, from an unacknowledged past.
Such an undertaking is courageous and wise. The essence of love is to know I can be who I am, unmasked, and yet be cherished. God loves us that way. To learn to love as he does is to do likewise. Marriage will thrive if both parties can entrust their intimate self to the other.
At the beginning of the marriage rite, the priest asks: ‘Have you come here of your own free will?’ The freedom on which the sacrament’s validity hinges requires that the spouses know who they are marrying. Many challenges tending to arise in the early years of marriage can be forestalled by pursuit of honest transparency before the marriage covenant is ratified.
The spouses are themselves the agents of the sacrament. They nonetheless make it in church, before the cross. To say yes to the question, ‘Will you love and honour each other all the days of your life and accept with love the children God may send?’, is to consent to a share in the cross. Any spousal and parental love involves suffering. It will pierce the heart. It will require one’s life to be poured out that others may live.
To embrace this reality knowingly from the start, consenting to a share in Christ’s life-giving cross, will give spouses strength to carry their burdens, making even heavy things seem light. The horizontal relationship between husband and wife, parents and children, will be sustained by a sure, dependable vertical axis.
I love the rite for which the Latin rite allows when the priest, having witnessed the marriage vows, wraps the couple’s joint hands in his stole and says: ‘What God joins together man must not separate.’
Each time he puts on the stole, the priest recites the beautiful vesting prayer: ‘Lord, restore the stole of immortality, which I lost through the actions of our first parents’.
The covenant of marriage lets us glimpse the glory that rested on Adam and Eve before the fall. In some Eastern rites, spouses are crowned in acknowledgement of their regained royal dignity of filiation.
In our hyper-secular climate, which sentimentalises marriage and has a consumerist view of children, regarded as goods to be ordered for a convenient time, preferably produced to set specifications, this supernatural perspective is helpful. It recalls the fact that marriage is not just about a woman and a man. It incorporates the two into a living communion with God; indeed, it establishes them together as an image, a living icon, of God’s holy Church.
To know that Christ is constitutionally present in their union inspires them in the arduous work of relinquishing the first person singular for the first person plural, no longer to say ‘I want’, but ‘we want’; not ‘I have’, but ‘we have’. It can help them negotiate the raw power and deep vulnerability of sex, to integrate both its unitive and procreative aspects well. It will prepare them to receive children with reverence as God’s gracious gifts.
A married couple needs to be held by a community. It is false to regard the couple as self-sufficient, expecting it to generate all its own resources and contentment: such a view just applies secular individualism to a collective unit that will teeter under the burden.
Here the Catholic community and parish come into their own, called to provide the care, practical help, humour, and compassionate advice that larger family units, now largely extinct, could formerly offer.
Families in Complex Situations
We talk about the ‘joy and beauty’ of marriage. We are right to do so. These qualities do stand for an ideal. But we should also be cautious and avoid platitudes.
We’ve only to read Anna Karenina or watch Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage to see that a married couple can make life hell for each other. That must be remembered, too.
Before a monastic clothing, the postulant often reads from Sirach: ‘My child, when you come to serve the Lord, prepare yourself for trials’. Fiancés might do the same. Trials will come.
Pope Francis wrote about ‘Evangelii gaudium’ but ‘Amoris laetitia’. That’s an interesting semantic distinction.
The basic sense of the Latin root laet-, which gives us laetus and laetare, is ‘happiness’. However, already in classical Latin the root had an agro-ecological meaning indicating the ‘flourishing’ of plants and ‘fertile’ soil. This makes good sense. ’Happy’ vegetation grows in soil that has been worked to become nutritious. So the root laet– could also produce the noun laetamen, ‘fertiliser’. In Antiquity fertiliser was tantamount to manure, which stinks. The laetitia of love presupposes a stone-picked, well-ploughed terrain and a sufficiency of rich dung.
To make this point is not to take delight out of marriage and the family; it is to insist that this delight will spring from labour; and that such labour is hard, often seemingly ungratifying.
The monastic and married states presuppose and mirror one another. I believe, and ascertain, that families can be helped by the inherited wisdom and experience of monastic life.
Monastics live by a rule that enshrines the covenant of common life, making its purpose and end explicit. When husband and wife agree on the finality of their family, they’ll be better equipped to negotiate obstacles than if they have not formulated their union as a task.
This is especially the case if their shared finality is transcendent. Then they’ll let God act in them. They’ll see hardships as occasions for conversion, for stepping outside the musty cell of self.
Monks and nuns are realistic about the struggles that pertain to their vocation. The first literature of monasticism, the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, tackle the standard battles head-on. The Sayings allow monks to look up ways of resolving concrete issues they happen to struggle with under matter-of-fact headings such as ‘Dispossession’, ‘Patience’, ‘Lust’, ‘Forbearance’.
The practical applicability of these counsels after 1,500 years remains astonishing.
Much could be gained, I’d say, from putting together a terce, experience-based, faith-informed compilation of Apophthegmata for families, showing how trials may be handled constructively in the clarifying light of Christ’s commandments and his effective grace.
When things are tough, we contract our perspective. We see only our present pain, not the path that may extend beyond it.
A principal pastoral concern in such situations is to recall the bigger picture, letting sufferers discover the potentially productive sense of their troubles, which may serve to lessen selfishness and purify love. Marriage, no less than monastic life, is a school of conversion.
Concerning ‘irregular’ relationships, I find our Catholic communities normally embrace these maturely and well. It can be liberating for persons in such situations to be in a setting where their ‘irregularity’ is acknowledged, not relativised; and where they are yet embraced with Christian friendship, enabled to contribute to the community.
I think of the example of many faithful people I know who, Sunday after Sunday, come up for a blessing at the time of Communion, knowing they cannot accede to the sacrament, yet entrusting themselves to God’s mercy at work in the Church.
Their example of fidelity does much to build up the Christian community. It testifies to the vital realism of the sacrament and to the virtue of hope. Sacramental exile sustained over time can prepare a joyful homecoming.
Christ gave us his rigorous commandments to educate us and to liberate us from ourselves, ‘that we might live no longer for ourselves but for him who died and rose again for us’ (Fourth Eucharistic Prayer). His intention is to make us grow in stature into new, divinised life.
That life must always be the aim we propose to people, not merely human affirmation — though we all need a bit of that as well.
Families as Agents of Mission
What separates the worldview of the Christian from that of secularists?
The conviction that through all the vicissitudes of history, all the changes wrought by nature’s evolutions and man’s ingenuity, God’s fidelity to humankind, created in his image, is absolute. Whatever else happens, God’s love, definitively revealed in Jesus Christ, is sure. It is the rock on which a life, a society, can be built. Storms may come, winds may blow and beat, but this foundation stays.
The first mission of the family is to testify to this stable love. That’s why the indissolubility of marriage has to be seen as a gift and a high task, a vote of confidence on God’s part (cf. AL 62). By promising to remain faithful to each other until death, husband and wife instantiate in history the reality of God’s love.
Human nature, wounded by sin, is marked by selfishness and promiscuity: we look for our own advantage and don’t mind pursuing it in many directions at once. We may enjoy a few thrills this way; but we’re unlikely to find peaceful contentment. We keep yearning for a single, defining love: there’s evidence of this in the popular songs of every age, also in those of our own, generally godless one.
A family is missionary, therefore, primarily by its fidelity. Right now, when so many traditional structures of social cohesion are breaking down around us, this mission is vitally important.
A second form of family mission is hospitality. Even as a monastery is ‘never without guests’ (RB, 53) — it’s not to be a self-referential club for the sole benefit of members — a Christian family invites others in. ‘I was a stranger, and you welcomed me’ (Matthew 25.35). By wise, responsible commitment to this ideal, the family’s own cohesion can be strengthened in a spirit of service and courtesy.
The question is sometimes raised: how can families contribute to the formation of priests? Not primarily by trooping to the seminary armed with powerpoint-projections about family life, but by inviting seminarians, priests (who knows, perhaps even bishops?) into their lives. The celibate priest true to his calling reminds a family of its supernatural dimension; the family reminds the priest that his celibacy is for the sake of fruitfulness. Mutual, joyful benefit ensues.
Testimony to fruitfulness is needed. Birth-rates are plummeting globally. Our race is not reproducing itself. Thirty years ago, sociologists fretted about over-population, pouring vitriol on Catholic teaching about birth control. We now see that the opposite tendency prevails. The confident wish to reproduce is waning fast on every continent.
Catholic family planning, now, must focus on enabling families to say yes to children. This calls for practical measures: affordable provision of housing, child-care, and schools — the mission has a political aspect. But above all it touches the conversion of hearts.
To wish to found a fruitful family now is counter-cultural, tantamount to wanting to be a punk in the heady 1970s. The Church is called to support this healthy revolution, enabling the young to choose and commit to life.
Naturally, any attempt to speak of the family as a missionary agent comes up against an exegetical quandary.
Christ’s attitude to the family can be challenging. He calls James and John away from their family ties, leaving poor old Zebedee perplexed behind in his boat (Mark 1.19-21). His healing of Peter’s mother-in-law makes us ask what happened to Mrs Peter when Cephas was called (Mark 1.30-31)? We shudder at the words: ‘He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me’ (Matthew 10.37).
Such statements do not downplay the family’s value; but they exhort us to consider the family in the light of radical discipleship.
‘Seek first the kingdom of heaven!’ (Matthew 6.33).
That principle applies to families, too. When realised, a family may mystically but plausibly manifest that kingdom.
* * *
On the day following the Roman assembly, as we who were blessed to take part look back on it with gratitude, the Church celebrates, as providence would have it, that incomparable Doctor of the Church, St Teresa of Ávila. Today’s Office of Readings gives us a passage from her Autobiography that begins like this:
One in whom Christ Jesus dwells as a friend and noble leader can endure all things. Christ helps and strengthens us and never abandons us. He is a true friend. And I clearly see that if we expect to please him and receive an abundance of his graces, God desires that these graces must come to us from the hands of Christ, through his most sacred humanity, in which God takes delight.’
That is a wonderful perspective in which to consider the graces and challenges of family life. In the collect for today’s feast, we pray: ‘Kindle in us the longing for true holiness.’ Amen!
But isn’t such a call too high for us ordinary, poor folks?
Not if we let God work his redemption in us, and if we remember the high significance of ordinary, daily acts of fidelity that enact and renew a resolve, given once for all, to love faithfully.
The last word goes to Tevje and Golde.
Jean-François Millet, Paysan répandant du fumier, in the North Carolina Museum of Art.
Books
This week saw the launch, in Paris, of two books: the French translation of the retreat preached before Pope Leo XIV and the Roman Curia in February and a conversation with Nicolas Diat based on the lecture Pope Benedict XVI gave at the Collège des Bernardins, first set up as a Cistercian house of studies, in 2008. There has been some resonance in the press. Should you wish, you can follow these links to Le Journal du Dimanche, Le Point, Aleteia, Le Figaro, Valeurs actuelles, La Croix, and En quête d’Esprit. ‘Human beings crave understanding. They are defined by their need to ask: ‘Why?’ They need the Church’s clear thinking and Christ-centred hope. They need her confident sense of direction. They need her symbols, which are realistic, different from the world’s, focused on an historically wounded body, on the dying of death, on the eternal destiny of ‘the whole of man, composed of body and soul’. The sublime perspective of our faith is founded on realities that happened and that, within the communion of Christ’s mystical body, happen still. We profess that a transforming Benevolence has saturated human suffering even in its most extreme manifestations, reaching down into the very depths of hell, and that therefore no desolation is final. Such is our Gospel’ (Alight with Hidden Glory).
28 Sunday A
Isaiah 25.6-10: On this mountain the Lord will prepare a banquet.
Philippians 4.12-20: I know how to be poor, I know how to be rich.
Matthew 22.1-14: Those who were invited would not come.
The Jesuit Fr Paul Mankowski encouraged people to pray the divine office by telling them: ‘It’s good to have Iron Age words in your mouth every day.’ We who recite the Psalter day in, day out, know what he was getting at. There’s something about the taste of substantial ancient utterance that trains our palate to appreciate excellence and recognise mush. That’s always been the case; but how much more now, when God-knows-what percentage of the words we take in hasn’t even been conceived by a human mind, but churned out by an engine. That said, as any reciter of the Psalms knows, we may well utter certain Iron Age phrases for years without getting at what they mean. Then one day, suddenly, the penny drops.
I was well into my monastic life before I saw the tragic import of a verse in Ps 105, the second of two that tell of Israel’s exodus from Egypt. The previous Psalm, number 104, recounts the story in an idealised key: it is all about the joys of liberation, grace, and homecoming. Ps 105 is more nuanced. It invokes Israel’s murmuring and rebellion, recalling that divine favour is not unfailingly met with an appropriate human response. The people, we are told, forgot God, their Saviour, dethroned him in their hearts, and preferred to worship the golden calf, a more manageable deity. And they lost interest in the goal for which they were bound: pro nihilo habuerunt terram desiderabilem: ‘They counted as nothing the desirable land’. A terrible affirmation! The Grail Psalter renders the verse, ‘They scorned the land of promise’, but that doesn’t carry the force of Jerome’s Vulgate.
How can anyone recognise a thing as objectively desirable, and still spurn it? Ah! We know only too well. The impact of the existential and epistemological wound we know as ‘sin’ distracts us from choosing what will make us happy. ‘I do not do what I want, I do the very thing I hate. I do not understand my own actions’ (Rm 7.15). Paul’s weary admission will resonate, I dare say, with all of us.
What knots we tie ourselves into; how weirdly, and absurdly, we impede our own thriving, silencing God’s ever new call by turning up the samey inner noise.
Our Gospel tells of a marriage feast, an image used in Scripture for the joyful communion of eternal life, and explicitly presented in this text as a simile for the kingdom of heaven, an already present reality ‘within’ us (Lk 17.21). The groom’s proud father invites his friends, ‘but they would not come’. It seems they did not even observe the RSVP, which would have been a minimum of courtesy. The host sends out further invitations. The newly summoned ‘were not interested’ either. Not that they were detained by engagements; they just preferred their predictable routine down at the farm, in the business. They couldn’t be bothered to iron a shirt, think of a gift, talk to other people. It’s humiliating to plan a party, then to find yourself alone with the canapés and fizz while the hired band plays morosely to itself in a corner. The happy couple, in this scenario, must have been mortified.
So we can understand the groom’s father’s grand, slightly aggressive gesture when, having had no response from the nice people for whom the festivities had been planned, he tells his staff to go to the crossroads and invite everyone in.
Todos! There’s magnificent magnanimity in this word, and this is, of course, where the parable assumes theological significance. Picking up a promise made by Isaiah, another sharply distinct voice from the Iron Age, the Lord would have us remember that any particularism in God’s providential plan of salvation has a universal purview. The mount of the Lord that epitomised ‘the desirable land’, the mount designated by David as God’s earthly throne, to which the tribes went up with rejoicing, was destined, ultimately, to provide rich foods, fine wines for all peoples. God hates nothing, and no one, he has made (Wis 11.24). He does invite everyone in, wanting all to be saved (1 Tm 2.4). On this point, Scripture is clear.
Let’s not forget, though, how the parable ends, on a note of caution. The host opens his door freely, glad to share his riches with all; but that’s not to say all can turn up just as they are. A gracious invitation calls for a gracious response. There’s a dress code to be observed. The wedding garment stands for resolve not to take God’s gift for granted, to live up to it. Whether we’re of the group first called or turn up just as the feast is about to start, we must be fit for the banqueting hall, having washed off and left life’s dirt and sweat. Our garment may be frayed, we’re poor fellows, after all, but it must be orderly and clean, worthy of our host.
The wedding garment is our baptismal robe. Let’s take good care of it. And let’s daily nurture our desire to find our home in the desirable land, to know the fulfilment, there, of the promise of which that garment is a pledge, so as not perversely to stay roaming alone outside, exposed to the dark, surrounded by howling jackals, as the marriage feast begins.
Amen.
Sir John Everett Millais (1829–96), ‘The Marriage Feast’ from The Parables of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Philippians 4.12-20: I know how to be poor, I know how to be rich.
Matthew 22.1-14: Those who were invited would not come.
The Jesuit Fr Paul Mankowski encouraged people to pray the divine office by telling them: ‘It’s good to have Iron Age words in your mouth every day.’ We who recite the Psalter day in, day out, know what he was getting at. There’s something about the taste of substantial ancient utterance that trains our palate to appreciate excellence and recognise mush. That’s always been the case; but how much more now, when God-knows-what percentage of the words we take in hasn’t even been conceived by a human mind, but churned out by an engine. That said, as any reciter of the Psalms knows, we may well utter certain Iron Age phrases for years without getting at what they mean. Then one day, suddenly, the penny drops.
I was well into my monastic life before I saw the tragic import of a verse in Ps 105, the second of two that tell of Israel’s exodus from Egypt. The previous Psalm, number 104, recounts the story in an idealised key: it is all about the joys of liberation, grace, and homecoming. Ps 105 is more nuanced. It invokes Israel’s murmuring and rebellion, recalling that divine favour is not unfailingly met with an appropriate human response. The people, we are told, forgot God, their Saviour, dethroned him in their hearts, and preferred to worship the golden calf, a more manageable deity. And they lost interest in the goal for which they were bound: pro nihilo habuerunt terram desiderabilem: ‘They counted as nothing the desirable land’. A terrible affirmation! The Grail Psalter renders the verse, ‘They scorned the land of promise’, but that doesn’t carry the force of Jerome’s Vulgate.
How can anyone recognise a thing as objectively desirable, and still spurn it? Ah! We know only too well. The impact of the existential and epistemological wound we know as ‘sin’ distracts us from choosing what will make us happy. ‘I do not do what I want, I do the very thing I hate. I do not understand my own actions’ (Rm 7.15). Paul’s weary admission will resonate, I dare say, with all of us.
What knots we tie ourselves into; how weirdly, and absurdly, we impede our own thriving, silencing God’s ever new call by turning up the samey inner noise.
Our Gospel tells of a marriage feast, an image used in Scripture for the joyful communion of eternal life, and explicitly presented in this text as a simile for the kingdom of heaven, an already present reality ‘within’ us (Lk 17.21). The groom’s proud father invites his friends, ‘but they would not come’. It seems they did not even observe the RSVP, which would have been a minimum of courtesy. The host sends out further invitations. The newly summoned ‘were not interested’ either. Not that they were detained by engagements; they just preferred their predictable routine down at the farm, in the business. They couldn’t be bothered to iron a shirt, think of a gift, talk to other people. It’s humiliating to plan a party, then to find yourself alone with the canapés and fizz while the hired band plays morosely to itself in a corner. The happy couple, in this scenario, must have been mortified.
So we can understand the groom’s father’s grand, slightly aggressive gesture when, having had no response from the nice people for whom the festivities had been planned, he tells his staff to go to the crossroads and invite everyone in.
Todos! There’s magnificent magnanimity in this word, and this is, of course, where the parable assumes theological significance. Picking up a promise made by Isaiah, another sharply distinct voice from the Iron Age, the Lord would have us remember that any particularism in God’s providential plan of salvation has a universal purview. The mount of the Lord that epitomised ‘the desirable land’, the mount designated by David as God’s earthly throne, to which the tribes went up with rejoicing, was destined, ultimately, to provide rich foods, fine wines for all peoples. God hates nothing, and no one, he has made (Wis 11.24). He does invite everyone in, wanting all to be saved (1 Tm 2.4). On this point, Scripture is clear.
Let’s not forget, though, how the parable ends, on a note of caution. The host opens his door freely, glad to share his riches with all; but that’s not to say all can turn up just as they are. A gracious invitation calls for a gracious response. There’s a dress code to be observed. The wedding garment stands for resolve not to take God’s gift for granted, to live up to it. Whether we’re of the group first called or turn up just as the feast is about to start, we must be fit for the banqueting hall, having washed off and left life’s dirt and sweat. Our garment may be frayed, we’re poor fellows, after all, but it must be orderly and clean, worthy of our host.
The wedding garment is our baptismal robe. Let’s take good care of it. And let’s daily nurture our desire to find our home in the desirable land, to know the fulfilment, there, of the promise of which that garment is a pledge, so as not perversely to stay roaming alone outside, exposed to the dark, surrounded by howling jackals, as the marriage feast begins.
Amen.
Sir John Everett Millais (1829–96), ‘The Marriage Feast’ from The Parables of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Amoris Laetitia
‘The indissolubility of marriage […] should not be viewed as a yoke imposed on humanity, but as a gift’ (62). ‘Jesus, who reconciled all things in himself, restored marriage and the family to their original form’ (63). ‘The married couple are […] a permanent reminder for the Church of what took place on the cross’ (72). ‘[The child born of the mutual love of spouses] does not appear at the end of a process, it is present from the beginning of love as an essential feature, one that cannot be denied without disfiguring that love itself’ (80). ‘When the search for pleasure becomes obsessive, it holds us in thrall and keeps us from experiencing other satisfactions’ (126). ‘To believe that we are good simply because we feel good is a tremendous illusion’ (145). ‘Families should not see themselves as a refuge from society, but instead go forth’ (181). ‘God has given the family the job of domesticating the world’ (183). ‘Nothing is more volatile, precarious and unpredictable than desire. The decision to marry should never be encouraged unless the couple has discerned deeper reasons that will ensure a genuine and stable commitment’ (209). ‘Each must set aside all illusions and accept the other as he or she actually is: an unfinished product, needing to grow, a work in progress’ (218). ‘In order to avoid all misunderstanding, I would point out that in no way must the Church desist from proposing the full ideal of marriage’ (307).