The Catholic Thing

The Catholic Thing
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The Catholic Thing is a daily column rooted in the richest cultural tradition in the world, i.e., the concrete historical reality of Catholicism.

  1. 23H AGO

    'The Sanctifying Power of this Night'

    By Michael Pakaluk "And it came to pass – when Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the two tables of the testimony in Moses' hand, when he came down from the mount – that Moses knew not that the skin of his face sent forth beams while He talked with him." (Exodus 34:29-30) This is the best translation I can find of these verses from the Jewish Publication Society of 1917: The skin of his face sent forth beams. It's a great translation because it leaves open an ambiguity in the Hebrew. Were these beams of light, or of something else? Famously, St. Jerome in the Vulgate rendered the word for "beams" with extreme literalness as "horns": "And when Moses came down from the mount Sinai, he held the two tables of the testimony, and he knew not that his face was horned from the conversation of the Lord." (Douay-Rheims) That's why Michelangelo's Moses displays horns. But other venerable translators rendered otherwise, as for instance the Septuagint: "Moses knew not that the appearance of the skin of his face was glorified." Moses's skin was radiant with unreflected light, anticipating, then, how he would appear at the Transfiguration. It's not a silly mistake to suppose that Moses grew horns. In the ancient world, including throughout the Hebrew Bible, horns were an image of power and honor. And yet, that the Hebrew locates the beams explicitly in the skin of Moses's face tips the scales decisively, to my mind. Horns, after all, must grow out from the skull, at the top of the head, not from the skin on the face. Try to imagine Michelangelo's statue with horns growing out from all over Moses's face. But I say all this by way of preface. Assume that Moses's face indeed radiated powerful beams of light. Such was the effect of his being in the presence of God. The question then arises for us: Should Catholics expect that attendance at Mass, where God becomes truly present, will have a similar effect on them? At a Mass, we "are not come to a mountain that might be touched, and a burning fire" (Hebrews 12:18), but to something even greater. Let's make the question more focused. The Easter Triduum, which we have just celebrated, comprises the holiest days and the greatest liturgies of the year. Did your presence and mine at these liturgies leave an impression of holiness upon us? What I have in mind is a generalized effect which is independent of our will, our actions, our emotions, or our merit. I am thinking of an effect that operates not unlike a physical cause. The effect I have in mind would come not from our "participation" at these liturgies – that is, what we sing or say, or our standing or kneeling. The reception of Our Lord in Holy Communion, of course, implies a wellspring of countless graces. But I am not interested, here, in that effect, but in something else. I mean, rather, this logic: you are in the presence of holy things, and, as a result, you are made holy. Plato thought that punishment worked like that. To punish someone justly, he said, is to impose the formal character of justice on his soul, regardless of whether the sufferer wills to be made just or not. This is why punishment is medicinal, he thought. Someone treated justly will become more just as a result. We clearly believe that nature works like that. We go out into the wilderness for a few days, hiking and camping, in part because we believe that we are made better, through being "in nature," because we are made more like the purity and wildness we find there. We think that children are like that, too. We spend time with children, in part, because we think that from being in their presence, we become more youthful, more full of life, and more innocent. They "leave an impression" upon us. We use clothing to bear witness to an effect like that: we place a white garment on a newly baptized infant to signify the holy effect of Baptism. People used to dress up to go to church, yes, to show respect, but also to display what they believed the sacred liturgy made o...

    7 min

  2. 1D AGO

    On Doing the Right Thing

    By Francis X. Maier. For Christians, this week is the heart of our liturgical year. Easter week is a time of gratitude and celebration; a time of joy that rises above the frictions of everyday life and reminds us of our eternal destiny. But of course, a fallen world rarely cooperates. Sages from Heraclitus to Hobbes have claimed that "war is the father of all things" and the natural state of man. So it has seemed throughout history. So it seems now, in our own time. This Easter week marks the 81st anniversary of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's death. A gifted Lutheran pastor and theologian, Bonhoeffer cofounded Germany's Confessing Church movement in the 1930s to oppose the Nazification of his country's Evangelical Lutheran Church. The Third Reich hanged him at Flossenbürg concentration camp on April 9, 1945. The charge was treason, based on his rescue of Jews and spreading information about anti-regime resistance, but finally – and decisively – on his links to the July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler. Bonhoeffer was a skilled writer and teacher. And among his most widely known comments is this: "Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act." The words are memorable. Whether he actually said them is disputed. But it doesn't matter. They're true in their meaning, and Bonhoeffer's life and death embodied them. I remembered those words over the Easter weekend, reading a Wall Street Journal editorial. The Journal is not a fan of the current occupant of the White House. Its pages are filled with criticism of the man in charge, his manner, and his policies. But in "The North Korea Lesson for Iran," it outlines 40 years of failed diplomacy with a committed, intensely dangerous enemy, and warns of "what happens when the US puts conflict avoidance above all else." Starting in the early 1980s, the Pyongyang regime systematically lied to, outmaneuvered, and threatened the international community while pursuing its nuclear weapons program. The United States responded with indecision. As a result, North Korea is now believed to possess: some 50 warheads, and it tests ICBMs that will one day be able to reach the continental U.S. The latest missile test came [last] Sunday. The lesson is that U.S. Presidents waited too long to stop North Korea. The risks of war were always said to be too high, it was never a good time, and there was always another diplomatic option to exhaust. North Korea is now a nuclear power, which means it could escalate to devastating effect in any conflict. There's more: This is more or less the path that at least four presidents took with Iran. Talks, deals, and economic relief were in ample evidence, with sanctions used as a negotiating tactic but without a credible threat of force. Like Pyongyang, Tehran agreed to a deal that didn't require it to come clean about past nuclear activities and left [its] nuclear infrastructure intact for the future. Iran's regime never stopped pursuing the bomb. And finally: "We don't know how the current Iran conflict will end, but we do know Iran's radical regime will not have a nuclear program when it's over." One can hope. My own views on the Iran conflict, at least as it stands to date, are detailed elsewhere. So far, criticism of the U.S.-Israeli effort has been an alloy of serious and urgent moral concern; common sense anxiety for the outcome; and chronic loathing of the man at the desk in the current Oval Office – with a pinch of anti-Jewish hatred for Israel tossed in from both left and right. Mentioning Dietrich Bonhoeffer in connection with any of this, of course, risks a very unpleasant response. We remember Bonhoeffer as a martyr, not the conspirator in a planned tyrannicide. The differences between his time and ours, between the Germany of April 1945 and our own world of April 2026, are too many to count. And a gulf of moral character and heroism separates a man like Bonhoeffer from every recent U.S. p...

    7 min

  3. 2D AGO

    Space Exploration and the Cosmic Liturgy

    By Daniel B. Gallagher Around the corner from my old office in the Apostolic Palace is the Torre dei Venti, a sixteenth-century tower housing the sundial Pope Gregory XIII used to correct the Julian calendar. Aided by a team of brilliant Jesuits, Gregory tracked the movement of sunlight across the floor to ascertain the precise timing of the vernal and autumnal equinoxes. This led to the removal of ten days from the month of October in 1582. With very few exceptions (Iran being one of them), the "Gregorian calendar" has been the standard mode of computing the annual cycle ever since. Few people know that the Vatican continues to collect astronomical data assiduously for the international scientific community. Its primary instrument is the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope (VATT) located in southeast Arizona, which observes light in the optical and infrared ranges. Among the notable discoveries made by VATT are astronomical bodies in our neighboring Andromeda Galaxy called Massive Compact Halo Objects (MACHOs), which may help explain the presence of the mysterious and controversial "dark matter" that keeps our galaxy together – "dark" because it does not emit, absorb, or reflect light, and is thus invisible to telescopes. A public-school product of the 1970s, I had neither heard of Gregory XIII nor known of the Vatican Observatory's existence. My fourth-grade teacher taught me that Columbus set sail to prove Catholic monarchs wrong for believing the world was flat and that Galileo was locked up for thinking the sun was at the center of the universe. The former is patently false, and the latter is a gross simplification. Georges Lemaître, the twentieth-century priest and astronomer, was also entirely unknown to me until I took an astronomy class in college. It was Fr. Lemaître who first hypothesized that the universe was formed from a single particle that exploded at a definite point in time. His theory, which eventually became known as the "Big Bang" theory, continues to emerge as the best cosmological model for explaining the expanding universe. I've been obsessed with space exploration ever since watching the Apollo 17 mission unfold on television, an event I am barely old enough to remember. So, it was only with great enthusiasm that I listened to NASA recently announce plans for a permanent lunar base. The Artemis II mission is, even as this column appears, carrying a crew around the Moon. If all goes according to plan, we'll be watching humans walk on the moon again in 2029. In 1969, Pope Paul VI hailed the famed Apollo 11 mission for opening "a threshold to the wide expanse of boundless space and new destinies." The saintly pontiff entrusted a handwritten copy of Psalm 8 to astronauts Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins to be left on the Moon. There it still sits, silently proclaiming, "I will sing of your majesty above the heavens with the mouths of babes and infants." How easy we forget the primacy of "singing God's majesty" in the Christian life. "Praise," we read in the Catechism, "is the form of prayer which recognizes most immediately that God is God." (2639) If we principally know God from His works and praise Him thereby, how much more elevated our praise should be when we recognize the grandeur of His works. In Dante's Paradiso, Beatrice directed the pilgrim's gaze to the Moon to demonstrate the insufficiency of man's sensory and intellectual powers for understanding Paradise. Three centuries later, Galileo pointed his telescope at the Moon and found it irregular and mountainous, something that deeply troubled the prevailing opinion that the Moon was perfectly smooth and reflective of the Earth's surface. In a famous letter to the Grand Duchess of Tuscany, Galileo lamented that his detractors "seemed to forget that the increase of known truths stimulates the investigation, establishment, and growth of the arts; not their diminution or destruction." By "the arts," Galileo meant everything that contributed to t...

    7 min

  4. 3D AGO

    The Reconsecration of Man

    By Robert Royal The days immediately following Easter are usually a period of interior peace for believers, but also mystery. The Resurrection's afterglow, of course, but also a lingering question, especially this year as wars and civic unrest trouble the whole world. "The strife is o'er," as in the hymn, set beautifully by Palestrina. Jesus has conquered sin and death. But why, then, does so much "strife" – and sin and death – continue? A good question, but God's answer is clearly different than what we expect. Even in Jesus' day, some followers "went away" because He didn't restore the earthly kingdom of Israel. In fact, within a few decades, the Romans obliterated – literally, not as in current presidential rhetoric – Jerusalem and Israel. The God of the Bible works in time and through people, as we see in both the Old Testament and Church history. Despite its contemplative dimension, Christianity is not Hinduism or Buddhism or postmodern "spirituality," which can exist anywhere, just anyhow. Christianity, too, deals in the Spirit, and preeminently. But also in the flesh, the "world," and everydayness. Which it shapes, slowly, or not, over generations. God could, like some tyrant, impose peace on the world. But to do so, He would have to abolish free will, the very possibility of sin, and therefore also of love. And that, we know, He chose not to do. Instead, the Gospel must be preached and make it's ways in the hearts of fallen human beings. Against all human odds, over time, a Word carried by a few fishermen, tax collectors, seemingly random disciples, here and there, converted the greatest empire in existence and large parts of the rest of the world. The great age of missionaries – the sixteenth century – was also the hard century of the Protestant Reformation and the Wars of Religion. As in many human things, turmoil and conflict can also produce daring and resolve. The Jesuits of that age were, simultaneously, the greatest Catholic educators in Europe and evangelizers to the whole world. It hardly needs saying that we need something similar today. Desperately. Most of the talk about the New Evangelization and synodality revolves around the mission to formerly Christian peoples. That could be a good thing, properly managed. But it can't be managed if the evangelizers don't believe in the urgency of God's message to all peoples. A sentimental niceness towards the Other isn't enough. Even Jesus grew impatient about the process: "I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!" (Luke 12:29) Our Western civilization has talked itself into idiocy. It lost its soul in the materialistic pursuit of knowledge and power. And now realizes its spiritual poverty and hopes to save itself via machinery and AI. So what are we to do? Two things. Understand what has happened, and pursue – with intelligence and energy – reversing what needs reversing. Carl Trueman's The Desecration of Man, which officially appears tomorrow, is a scintillating guide to both. His title echoes The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis's penetrating little study of how, already in the 1940s, we were – via false logic and psychologizing tendencies – doing away with many of the things that make us human. But in Trueman's reading, we're now doing something much worse. Lewis was responding to errors. Trueman says we have moved on to desecration of the good and the holy – and our own humanity. We hear all the time these days of transgression of established norms and practices as something good and bold. But the whole process has gone so far that transgression itself has become a kind of establishment, to the point that there's almost nothing left to push against. In Trueman's telling, it was Nietzsche's "Madman" who first saw what had happened. Western people thought they could do away with God and still keep the "good" Christian values, a "humanism" based on nothing. That began to percolate in our very notions about the world and oursel...

    7 min

  5. 4D AGO

    Easter: God, Love, Life

    By Msgr. Charles Fink. But first a note: All of us at The Catholic Thing wish all our readers a happy and blessed Easter. He is Risen! Now for today's column... During the first half of the 20th century, there emerged an extraordinary constellation of English Catholic writers, many of them converts, who had the great gift of being able to explicate the Catholic faith on a popular level without watering it down. Names like Chesterton, Knox, Sheed (originally from Australia), and Houselander come to mind. Among these was a Jesuit priest named C.C. Martindale, who, after having spent five years of internment under the Nazis, was asked by the BBC to deliver six talks on radio during Holy Week of 1946. Father Martindale ended his first talk with these words: whether it be the problems set by long history or by the present hour, whether it be the problems set by our own soul and our inner experience, whether it be the Sufferings and Death of Christ – the Christian has but one starting point, that is to say God, His Love, and His will that we should live. This truth never changes, however much we may change. God wishes not the death even of the sinner, but that he should live. I cannot say it too often, nor too emphatically. . .that at the origin of all things, during all things, and at the end of all things are God, and Love, and Life. Fr. Martindale was able to say those words, even after having endured the horrors of war and prison, because he had assimilated and made his own the bright, shining message of Easter. It was this message that helped transform the cringing apostle Peter into the courageous and forceful preacher we meet in the Acts of the Apostles. It was this message that prompted Paul to write to the Colossians, "If then you were raised with Christ, seek what is above," and "you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God." Paul understood that Christ hadn't risen from the dead just for Himself but for us, that united to Him, we might already begin to rise with Him. Our feet might be mired in the grime of earth, but our heads and hearts are with Christ in Heaven. What had Peter, what had Paul to fear on earth when already they shared in the risen life of Christ? When Mary Magdalene, Peter, and John found the tomb empty on Easter morning, Christ's burial clothes still lying there, the Gospel tells us that John believed, but also that "they did not yet understand the Scripture that he had to rise from the dead." John believed that Jesus was risen but did not yet fully comprehend all that was implied in the monumental fact of the resurrection. Understanding would come, however, and the only apostle to escape violent martyrdom would spend sixty more years on earth preaching the God who is love and who wants us to have life to the full, not only now, but forever. The message of Easter is not that there will be no more crosses but that all our crosses, even death, can lead to new and eternal life, an eternal life begun here and now by our union with the risen Lord. We are like divers in those old movies, who are lowered into the sea from a ship, "strangers in a strange land," surrounded by darkness, but all the while receiving life from above, our share in the risen life of Christ. Easter must be for us what it was for Peter, Paul, Mary Magdalene, and all the saints, not just something we believe once happened and will someday benefit us. It is that but so much more. It is a present reality, something we share in here and now. Let the world do its worst. It can never do worse than to kill the Son of God, and we know what came of that. And we share in His life. We are all familiar with the expression "Rise and shine." It can, of course, be just an annoying cliché or the interruption of a good night's sleep. But for Christians, it can be a reminder that, sharing in Christ's life, we have already begun to rise and must manifest that by radiating Christ's light and life and love in all we do. Remember the words of...

    5 min

  6. 5D AGO

    The Lord's Descent into Hell

    By An Ancient Author. What is happening? Today there is a great silence over the earth, a great silence, and stillness, a great silence because the King sleeps; the earth was in terror and was still, because God slept in the flesh and raised up those who were sleeping from the ages. God has died in the flesh, and the underworld has trembled. Truly He goes to seek out our first parent like a lost sheep; He wishes to visit those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death. He goes to free the prisoner Adam and his fellow-prisoner Eve from their pains, He who is God, and Adam's son. The Lord goes in to them holding his victorious weapon, His Cross. When Adam, the first created man, sees him, he strikes his breast in terror and calls out to all: "My Lord be with you all." And Christ in reply says to Adam: "And with your spirit. Amen!" And grasping his hand, He raises him up, saying: "Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give you light." "I am your God, who for your sake became your son, who for you and your descendants now speak and command with authority those in prison: Come forth, and those in darkness: Have light, and those who sleep: Rise." "I command you: Awake, sleeper, I have not made you to be held a prisoner in the underworld. Arise from the dead; I am the life of the dead. Arise, O man, work of my hands, arise, you who were fashioned in my image. Rise, let us go hence; for you in me and I in you, together we are one undivided person." "For you, I your God became your son; for you, I the Master took on your form; that of slave; for you, I who am above the heavens came on earth and under the earth; for you, man, I became as a man without help, free among the dead; for you, who left a garden, I was handed over to Jews from a garden and crucified in a garden." "Look at the spittle on my face, which I received because of you, in order to restore you to that first divine inbreathing at creation. See the blows on my cheeks, which I accepted in order to refashion your distorted form to my own image." "See the scourging of my back, which I accepted in order to disperse the load of your sins which was laid upon your back. See my hands nailed to the tree for a good purpose, for you, who stretched out your hand to the tree for an evil one." "I slept on the Cross and a sword pierced my side, for you, who slept in paradise and brought forth Eve from your side. My side healed the pain of your side; my sleep will release you from your sleep in Hades; my sword has checked the sword which was turned against you." "But arise, let us go hence. The enemy brought you out of the land of paradise; I will reinstate you, no longer in paradise, but on the throne of Heaven. I denied you the tree of life, which was a figure, but now I myself am united to you, I who am life. I posted the cherubim to guard you as they would slaves; now I make the cherubim worship you as they would God." "The cherubim throne has been prepared, the bearers are ready and waiting, the bridal chamber is in order, the food is provided, the everlasting houses and rooms are in readiness; the treasures of good things have been opened; the kingdom of heaven has been prepared before the ages." A reading from an ancient homily for Holy Saturday Prayer Almighty, ever-living God, whose Only-begotten Son descended to the realm of the dead, and rose from there to glory, grant that your faithful people, who were buried with him in baptism, may, by his resurrection, obtain eternal life. (We make our prayer) through our Lord. (Through Christ our Lord.) Prepared by Pontifical University Saint Thomas Aquinas

    4 min

  7. APR 3

    The Seven Last Words of Christ

    By Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen. It seems to be a fact of human psychology that when death approaches, the human heart speaks its words of love to those whom it holds closest and dearest. There is no reason to suspect that it is otherwise in the case of the Heart of hearts. If He spoke in a graduated order to those whom He loved most, then we may expect to find in His first three words the order of His love and affection. His first words went out to enemies: "Father, forgive them," His second to sinners: "This day thou shalt be with Me in Paradise," and His third to saints, "Woman, behold thy son." Enemies, sinners, and saints – such is the order of Divine Love and Thoughtfulness. The congregation anxiously awaited His first word. The executioners expected Him to cry, for everyone pinned on the gibbet of the Cross had done it before Him. Seneca tells us that those who were crucified cursed the day of their birth, the executioners, their mothers, and even spat on those who looked upon them. Cicero tells us that at times it was necessary to cut out the tongues of those who were crucified, to stop their terrible blasphemies. Hence the executioners expected a cry but not the kind of cry that they heard. The Scribes and Pharisees expected a cry, too, and they were quite sure that He who had preached "Love your enemies," and "Do good to them that hate you," would now forget that Gospel with the piercing of feet and hands. They felt that the excruciating and agonizing pains would scatter to the winds any resolution He might have taken to keep up appearances. Everyone expected a cry, but no one with the exception of the three at the foot of the Cross, expected the cry they did hear. Like some fragrant trees which bathe in perfume the very axe which gnashes them, the great Heart on the Tree of Love poured out from its depths something less a cry than a prayer, the soft, sweet, low prayer of pardon and forgiveness. . . . The next two words, the fourth and the fifth, betray the sufferings of the God-man on the Cross. The fourth word symbolizes the sufferings of man abandoned by God; the fifth word the sufferings of God abandoned by man. . . .When Our Blessed Lord spoke this fourth word from the Cross, darkness covered the earth. Truly, all was darkness! He had given up His Mother and His beloved disciple, and now God seemingly abandoned Him. "Eli, Eli, lamma sabacthani?" "My God! My God! Why hast Thou forsaken Me?" It is a cry in the mysterious language of Hebrew to express the tremendous mystery of a God "abandoned" by God. The Son calls His Father, God. What a contrast with a prayer He once taught: "Our Father, Who art in Heaven!" In some strange, mysterious way His human nature seems separated from His Heavenly Father, and yet not separated, for otherwise how could He cry, "My God, My God"? He atoned first of all for atheists, for those who on that dark midday half believed in God, as even now at night they half believe in Him. He atoned also for those who know God, but live as if they had never heard His name; for those whose hearts are like waysides on which God's love falls only to be trampled by the world; for those whose hearts are like rocks on which the seed of God's love falls only to be quickly forgotten; for those whose hearts are like thorns on which God's love descends only to be choked by the cares of the world. It was atonement for all who have had faith and lost it; for all who once were saints and now are sinners. It was the Divine Act of Redemption for all abandonment of God, for in that moment in which He was forgotten. [The fifth word] is the shortest of the seven cries. Although it stands in our language as two words, in the original it is one. . . .He, the God-Man, who threw the stars in their orbits and spheres into space, who "swung the earth a trinket at his wrist," from Whose finger-tips tumbled planets and worlds, who might have said, "The sea is Mine and with it the streams in a thousand valleys ...

    8 min

  8. APR 2

    St. John Paul II, Priest

    By Stephen P. White. Beginning in 1979, Pope John Paul II took up the habit of writing an annual letter to priests which would be published on, or just before, Holy Thursday. These letters allowed John Paul II an outlet for repeated meditation on the nature of the priesthood. Read together, they provide a detailed account of his understanding of the priesthood and thus, necessarily, of both himself and the Lord. The tone of these letters was always fraternal. He wrote, not as a superior addressing his subordinates, but as a priest writing to priests about common concerns, hopes, fears, and joys. These were letters among brothers. As he put it in his first letter, "I think of you all the time, I pray for you, with you I seek the ways of spiritual union and collaboration, because by virtue of the sacrament of Orders, which I also received from the hands of my Bishop. . . .you are my brothers." He went on, cribbing from St. Augustine: "I want to say to you today: 'For you I am a Bishop, with you I am a Priest.'" Holy Thursday, of course, is a natural occasion for reflections on the nature of the ministerial priesthood, being the day on which Christ Himself instituted both the Eucharist and the order of the priesthood which flows from and serves that same reality. And as one might expect, writing to the same audience every year on the same occasion, in the same liturgical setting, leads to some thematic repetition. But reading these letters together allows us to see, precisely in that repetition, what Pope John Paul II saw as most important to share with his brother priests. In his first letter, in 1979, John Paul wrote of the importance of priestly perseverance, not only as a matter of personal fidelity, but as an example and witness to those whose vocation leads them along a different sacramental path: Our brothers and sisters joined by the marriage bond have the right to expect from us, Priests and Pastors, good example and the witness of fidelity to one's vocation until death, a fidelity to the vocation that we choose through the sacrament of Orders just as they choose it through the sacrament of Matrimony. (Emphasis original) This theme of perseverance and fidelity emerges again and again in the Holy Thursday letters. When one remembers that tens of thousands of men voluntarily left the priesthood in the decade following the Second Vatican Council (and the subsequent collapse in Catholic marriage rates across most of the West) Pope John Paul II's words take on an added significance. During the Great Jubilee of 2000, Pope John Paul II wrote his Holy Thursday Letter from the Cenacle, the Upper Room, in Jerusalem. This letter is especially poignant, both because of the setting from which it was sent – the physical space with all its tangible reminders of the historical events we commemorate in this season – but because of his sense of the human inadequacy of the men God calls to be priests: Many times, the human frailty of priests has made it hard to see in them the face of Christ. Here in the Upper Room why should this amaze us? Not only did the betrayal of Judas reach its climax here, but Peter himself had to reckon with his weakness as he heard the bitter prediction of his denial. In choosing men like the Twelve, Christ was certainly under no illusions: it was upon this human weakness that he set the sacramental seal of his presence. And Paul shows us why: "We bear this treasure in earthen vessels, so that it might be clear that this extraordinary power comes from God and not from us." (2 Corinthians 4:7) The frailty of men was not a stumbling block for Pope John Paul II's view of the priesthood; it was an entry point into the mystery of Christ's own priesthood. The Word Incarnate washes the feet of sinners. He pays out his life in service and sacrifice. And He invites us all – and his priests in a unique way – to do the same. Great indeed is the mystery of which we have been made ministers. A mystery of love without limi...

    6 min
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About

The Catholic Thing is a daily column rooted in the richest cultural tradition in the world, i.e., the concrete historical reality of Catholicism.

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  • Creator
    The Catholic Thing
  • Years Active
    2020 - 2026
  • Episodes
    60
  • Rating
    Clean
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    The Catholic Thing

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