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Virtues

Does every moment count?

Russell Shaw

February 12, 2023 7:06 am February 12, 2023

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Several years ago, while talking to a group of men, I shook up my listeners a bit — and perhaps also myself — by speaking in praise of wasting time…

Several years ago, while talking to a group of men, I shook up my listeners a bit — and perhaps also myself — by speaking in praise of wasting time or doing what many people would consider wasting it. After all, I said, most normal individuals were busy at that very moment doing their jobs, mowing their lawns, buying groceries, washing the laundry, saving the world. And here we sat talking about making good use of time but not getting anything done.

I’ll come back to that. For the moment, let’s agree that one person’s good use of time is another person’s waste. But it would be a mistake to leave it at that. Instead, let’s consider an obvious question: Is there any common factor in using time well?

At first sight, it looks as if there weren’t. Good, sincere, conscientious people obviously use time in very different ways and feel they’re right to do so. Taking a nap or running in a marathon, watching a ballgame on television or listening to an opera — people do one thing and not the other all the time and feel perfectly justified. Countless different behaviors represent good use of time for countless different people.

Individual callings

So, does using time well come down to a matter of personal taste?

One ancient answer is that most things people consider good uses of time aren’t really so good. You find that way of thinking in some older books of ascetical practice. According to this view, very nearly the only people who consistently use time well are contemplative religious, most of whose time is devoted to meditation and prayer, with a little manual labor and study on the side.

But although that may be an excellent lifestyle for contemplative religious, it’s surely not suited to laypeople living active lives in the world. Leaving aside practical considerations like the need to support yourself and a family, the reason that’s so is vocation. To put it briefly, your vocation is the key to what constitutes good use of time for you.

That calls for a closer look. At one level, everyone is called to love God and neighbor, and that is his or her vocation. True as that is, though, it’s too general to be of much use. All good people must try to love and serve God and neighbor. But how am I supposed to do that — right here and now, in the circumstances of my life?

At another level, the answer is that you do this by performing the duties of your state in life. Husbands and fathers do what husbands and fathers do, wives and mothers do what wives and mothers do, and so on for priests and religious and everybody else: Do what the duties of your state require.

But that, too, is not nearly specific enough to be of much practical use. Carry out the duties of your state in life, yes; but exactly what does that mean here and now?

Matter of discernment

At this third level, then, we come to the unique personal vocation of each individual. Here using time well means loving God and neighbor, fulfilling the duties of state in life, and doing God’s will for me in regard to all of the above in the present concrete circumstances of my life. Father Jean-Pierre de Caussade, a famous Jesuit spiritual director of the early 18th century, had a name for it: He called it “the sacrament of the present moment.”

From that point of view, the question of what constitutes good use of time has no single answer applicable to everyone. The answer will instead be different, depending on God’s will for each of us and on our ongoing discernment of his will.

To be sure, a prudent person will be guided by the norms of Christian morality as these are embodied in the teaching of the Church and also by the counsel of a reliable spiritual adviser. In the end, though, the only answer suitable for everyone is this: Do what God is asking of you to live out your personal vocation here and now.

And be sure always to bear in mind St. Paul’s advice: “So whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Cor 10:31).

Out of duty

There are of course certain more or less obvious mistakes for everyone to avoid. For people who are serious about the interior life, one of these is doing good things only out of a sense of duty, with no higher motive than that.

A priest letting his hair down once explained how that looked in his case: “I’m no saint. Yes, I work hard and I get a lot of things done. But the fact is I do it because I wouldn’t feel comfortable otherwise.”

He’s hardly alone. “As Americans,” a wise cardinal once remarked to me, “we’re all Puritans and all disciples of Immanuel Kant. We do things out of a sense of duty. And ‘duty’ is something defined externally — an obligation imposed from outside. Keeping busy and doing our duty is essential to our peace of mind. Busyness — activism — is a typically American fault.”

This isn’t an argument against doing your duty. That’s important in itself and important also as a starting point for much else. But it isn’t sufficient for an interior life of growing friendship with God. Duty may not be precisely the enemy of love, but unless one is careful, it can pretty much crowd love out of the picture. But spiritual progress absolutely requires that the driving force of one’s life increasingly be love.

I told the cardinal I didn’t know much about Puritans and Kant, but I did recognize what he was describing as the product of a compulsive personality (easy to recognize because I’ve got one myself). Whatever you attribute it to, it boils down to the same thing in the end: doing what you do because you feel you have to do it. And for people thus afflicted, that is good use of time.

Today the temptations that lead in this direction are probably subtler than ever. It’s easy, for example, to become ensnared by our electronic tools and toys — television, Internet and the rest. You think they’re helping you make good, efficient use of time, but beware: A few years ago I realized that email was leading me down this particular primrose path.

I was starting each day by reading my messages and replying to them. Then, naturally, I’d check the news on the Internet and catch up with some favorite websites. Thus I was spending an hour to an hour-and-a-half of prime time every day on email and Internet instead of doing my work.

The solution was to shift email and Internet to a time slot after work. It’s not only more efficient — it takes some of the pressure out of my schedule and helps me organize my day in light of the real priorities.

Time with the divine

As I suggested at the start, at the top of the priorities list is, or should be, “wasting” time on God. That includes things like regular Mass attendance and reception of the sacraments, daily prayer and meditation, retreats and days of recollection, reading the Bible and other spiritual literature. These aren’t just pious options; they are absolute necessities for anyone interested in maintaining and developing a friendship with God.

“I just don’t have the time,” some people say to that. Heaven help the man who some day has to stand before Jesus and explain, “I didn’t have time”!

Still, there is consolation in the fact that on some deep level, people even today continue to intuit spontaneously the importance of time. My evidence for that is the perennial popularity of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.”

At bottom, it’s a parable about the passing of time — nostalgic happiness recalling times past, an anxious sense of the fleetingness and preciousness of time here and now, a mix of hopefulness and dread about the future depending on how we use the time that’s given us.

Like words for a poet, color for a painter and sound for a composer, time is everybody’s medium for shaping a life devoted to loving and serving God and neighbor.

Russell Shaw is an OSV contributing editor. This is the eighth part of a monthly Year of Faith series on virtues that originally ran in Our Sunday Visitor.

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Virtues

How to battle the silent killer of spiritual life

Russell Shaw

February 8, 2023 11:26 am February 8, 2023

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Hypertension, otherwise known as high blood pressure, is often called a “silent killer.” That’s because elevated blood pressure provides few, if any, warning signals before a massive, hypertension-induced stroke causes…

There also is a silent killer of the spiritual life. Its name is lukewarmness.

As high blood pressure enters the body without declaring its presence, so also lukewarmness worms its way quietly into people’s minds and hearts, whispering inducements not to work so hard at living a virtuous life.

“There’s no need for you to spend so much time on prayer,” it says. “No need for examination of conscience — after all, you don’t do anything seriously wrong. No need … ”

Cut back here, go easy there, and on and on. Until eventually not much is left of the interior life. The silent killer has claimed another victim.

Tepid faith

We can’t say we haven’t been warned. Recall the second and third chapters of the Book of Revelation, which contain warnings aimed by Christ at seven Christian communities of Asia Minor located in Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia and Laodicea.

Little more than ruins now, in the late first century A.D. these were thriving towns in which Christianity was thriving. But not without problems. Consider what the Lord says to the church in Laodicea:

“I know your works; I know that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either cold or hot. So, because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. For you say, ‘I am rich and affluent and have no need of anything,’ and yet do not realize that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. … Those whom I love, I reprove and chastise. Be earnest, therefore, and repent” (Rv 3:15-17, 19).

Opus Dei founder St. Josemaría Escrivá, who did so much to promote the idea that laypeople living in the world could and should lead holy lives of virtue, devotes an entire chapter to lukewarmness in his spiritual classic “The Way.” He notes these symptoms:

“You are tepid if you carry out listlessly and reluctantly those things that have to do with our Lord; if deliberately or ‘shrewdly’ you look for some way of lessening your duties; if you think only of yourself and of your comfort; if your conversation is idle and vain; if you act from human motives.”

Indifference to duties

Outside the setting of spiritual direction and the confessional, lukewarmness is usually not a very noticeable failing, so it’s helpful to turn to literature for an example and analysis of the problem. Edwin O’Connor provides what we’re looking for with his portrait of a 50-something priest and pastor who is the narrator and central character of his 1961 novel “The Edge of Sadness.”

O’Connor is best remembered for “The Last Hurrah,” his boisterous tale of Irish-American politicians and politicking.. But “The Edge of Sadness” is no less insightful — and at times, deeply moving — in its picture of Catholic life in a subculture already experiencing nerve-racking change that was soon to turn traumatic.

The priest at the center of the story falls into depression after the death of his father and becomes a secret drinker. Increasingly, he is isolated from his fellow priests, his parishioners and the world around him and cut off from the sources of spiritual sustenance that had formerly been central elements of his life.

Attempting later to understand the roots of this painful episode, he recalls himself as a young priest — “zealous, devoted, with fresh and unimpeded hopes, whose parish was his life, whose days were active and busy and full of joy” — and contrasts this with what he became under the influence of alcohol — “indifferent to his people, irresponsible in his duties, a spiritually arid priest for whom the wellsprings had dried up.” What happened to account for the change? This is his answer:

“[A busy priest] may find fewer and fewer moments in which he can absent himself from activity, in which he can be alone, can be silent, can be still — in which he can reflect and pray. And since these are precisely the moments which are necessary for all of us, in which spiritually we grow … then the loss of such moments is grave and perilous. Particularly so … for a priest who suddenly finds that he can talk more easily to a parish committee than he can to God. Something within him will have atrophied from disuse; something precious, something vital.”

Spiritual sloth

By no means do only the clergy suffer from lukewarmness. But it may indeed be that priests and people in consecrated life are more likely than the rest of us to become lukewarm.

After all, it’s the quest for holiness that led them into the priesthood and consecrated life, thereby opening them to the temptation to give it up. Whereas even today laypeople seldom are encouraged to pursue holiness seriously, so that their failings may not rise much above the level of mere sluggishness and neglect. Still, this laziness — sloth is its name — is a serious matter if it involves shirking serious obligations: to a spouse, say, or to children or one’s work.

Beyond this laziness lies lukewarmness. The Catechism of the Catholic Church describes it as “hesitation or negligence in responding to divine love,” adding that it “can imply refusal to give oneself over to the prompting of charity” (No. 2094). Further along on the downward slope comes spiritual sloth (“acedia” is the name given it by spiritual writers in earlier times), which the Catechism says “goes so far as to refuse the joy that comes from God and to be repelled by divine goodness” (ibid.).

As in the case of the priest in “The Edge of Sadness,” lukewarmness frequently enters the picture under the cover of activities and preoccupations that are good in themselves but that, unless one is careful, can easily become distractions that override and eventually snuff out things essential to the spiritual life — meditation, prayer, and meaningful participation in the Mass and sacraments.

Uneasy about confronting what’s happening, a person then may abandon spiritual exercises or else trivialize practices like examinations of conscience, spiritual direction and the Sacrament of Penance that are needed to recognize and root out faults.

Antidote

Let’s face it — the practices of the interior life and the life of virtue really are difficult at times. In one of his Anglican sermons, St. John Henry Newman makes the point that even those who “set about the work of religion in good earnest” sometimes find it wearisome:

“In spite of their knowledge of the truth, and their faith, in spite of the aids and consolations they receive from above, still how often do their corrupt hearts betray them! Even their privileges are often burdensome to them, even to pray for the grace which in Christ is pledged to them is an irksome task. … Not only the mass of mankind, but even the confirmed servants of Christ, witness to the opposition which exists between their own nature and the demands of religion” (“Religion a Weariness to the Natural Man,” Parochial and Plain Sermons).

Truly, those “corrupt hearts” of which Newman speaks are the portals through which lukewarmness so easily enters.

But the solution, according to St. Josemaría Escrivá, could hardly be more simple: “Fall in love, and you will not leave him” (“The Way,” No. 999).

Russell Shaw is an OSV contributing editor. This is the 10th part of a monthly Year of Faith series on virtues that originally appeared in Our Sunday Visitor.

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Virtues

Standing up for the Faith when it counts

Russell Shaw

November 20, 2022 9:30 pm November 20, 2022

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A while back I heard a homilist quote a cardinal who headed a major American archdiocese: “I will die in my bed, my successor will die in prison, and his…

A while back I heard a homilist quote a cardinal who headed a major American archdiocese: “I will die in my bed, my successor will die in prison, and his successor will die a martyr in the public square.”

The homilist didn’t leave it at that. “The persecution of the Church in America isn’t coming,” he told the congregation grimly, “it’s already here.”

This is a man not much given to flamboyant rhetoric. His text was from St. Paul’s Second Letter to Timothy, with its exhortation to Christians to “bear your share of hardship for the Gospel with the strength that comes from God” (2 Tm 1:8).

Bearing hardship for the Gospel is central to fortitude. American Catholics soon may be called to practice fortitude by bearing more of it than many suppose.

Fortitude is the virtue that disposes people to stand up in defense of the good, to the point of being ready even to lay down their lives if that becomes necessary. It’s the virtue that moves men and women to fight the good fight. A sheriff confronting bad guys in the streets of a Western town. Soldiers fighting to defend their homeland against invaders. That’s fortitude.

The homilist that day was speaking of the secularist assault on institutions of the Church, to force them to accept, and even to support, secularist causes like abortion and same-sex marriage or suffer penalties if they refuse.

The best-known instance so far is the Department of Health and Human Services mandate pushed by President Barack Obama’s administration and requiring Church-sponsored colleges, hospitals, charities and other programs to make their employee health plans vehicles for the delivery of contraception, sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs.

Defending the Faith

As similar cases multiply, as seems likely to happen, Catholics will increasingly face the need to practice fortitude in defense of the Faith.

But there are many other ways besides resisting aggressive secularism in which people are called to do that. Here’s one I won’t soon forget.

It was Feb. 20, 2005, shortly before noon. I was standing along with a few thousand others in St. Peter’s Square in Rome, waiting for Pope John Paul II’s weekly Sunday Angelus. The crowd was comparatively small but that wasn’t surprising. This was one of those raw winter days when a damp chill seeps into your bones, and many people understandably prefer to stay in and keep warm.

Thus the question on the minds of many in the square was whether there would even be a papal Angelus that week. Earlier in the month, the pope, far advanced in Parkinsonism, had been hospitalized for what was officially called bronchitis. No one would have blamed him for skipping today’s routine ceremony.

Nevertheless, promptly at noon, the window of the papal apartment overlooking the square opened, and there stood the familiar figure in white. After a pause, he began to speak.

It was agony for him and agony for those listening as he struggled through his short prepared remarks, gasping for breath after nearly every syllable.

“It’s like hearing a voice from the tomb,” I thought. And then: “I wonder if it’s a good idea for him to be doing this on a such a cold, nasty day.”

It wasn’t. Four days later Pope John Paul was rushed to the hospital and an emergency tracheotomy was performed to allow him to breathe. That was the beginning of the end. He died April 2.

Now, some people might call the pope’s action that Sunday in February bad judgment, even foolhardy. I call it fortitude. If I read the man correctly, this was one more way for him to do what he’d done for years — accept God’s will and live out his personal vocation as Christ’s vicar regardless of the cost, including, if it came to that, the cost of his life.

In the eyes of the world, that’s foolishness. Seen with the eyes of faith, it’s something vastly different — a form of fidelity backed by fortitude. Its supreme model is Christ on Calvary. Its supreme expression on the part of his followers is martyrdom.

Reflecting on martyrdom

Today, though, you have to be careful about that word martyr. Everyone who suffers a bit is likely to be called a martyr, even if the suffering is self-inflicted. There’s a good account of real martyrdom in St. John Paul’s encyclical on moral principles, Veritatis Splendor (“The Splendor of Truth”).

In honoring the martyrs, he writes, “the Church has canonized their witness and declared the truth of their judgment, according to which the love of God entails the obligation to respect his commandments, even in the most dire of circumstances, and the refusal to betray those commandments, even for the sake of saving one’s own life” (No. 91). The witness of martyrdom, he says, makes a hugely valuable contribution to the common good by resisting “the most dangerous crisis which can afflict man: the confusion between good and evil” (No. 93).

Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI added his contribution to this discussion in the first volume of his “Jesus of Nazareth” trilogy. Reflecting on the Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes, he recalled the bitter contempt for this way of thinking expressed by the 19th-century philosopher of nihilism Friedrich Nietzsche.

Nietzsche’s thinking about morality focuses on the “will to power.” In time past it guided Adolf Hitler, and it guides many today.

In profound conflict with it is the morality of Christ, with fortitude a central part of it. Pope Benedict wrote: “Behind the Sermon on the Mount stands the figure of Christ, the man who is God, but who, precisely because he is God, descends, empties himself, all the way to death on the Cross. … [Here is] the correct image of man and his happiness.”

Guiding principles

Few are called to be martyrs or popes, but everyone is called to practice everyday fortitude. Two principles stand out.

One is that fortitude should be guided by the virtue of prudence. This is important to avoid errors of rashness — such as the sort of intemperate, self-defeating apologetics in which “winning” the argument is actually losing it.

Recently I had occasion to read some religion texts from before the Second Vatican Council that erred this way. So preoccupied were the authors with showing that Protestants were wrong that they missed seeing where Protestants had worthwhile insights. Catholic faith as they presented it came across as harsh and defensive.

The second principle is that where fortitude is lacking, toleration easily deteriorates into cowardice. That happens with people who don’t oppose what they recognize as wrong because they might suffer for opposing it.

Take the case of a man who is physically brave yet consistently fails to discipline his children and leaves that to his wife. Hassling with the kids upsets him, it seems. That’s a failure of fortitude.

Still, many people do routinely practice fortitude. Women who bear children in the face of dire warnings concerning the harm that may do to their health. People who speak up against unethical policies and practices at work. Teachers who refuse to shade the truth in the classroom for the sake of political correctness.

Particularly strong today, as noted, are the challenges aggressive secularism poses to the fortitude of Catholics and other religious believers. But although they’ve grown worse lately, such challenges aren’t new.

An incident a half-century ago illustrates that. Newly graduated from a premier secular university with a doctorate in philosophy, a friend of mine was looking for a job. He hoped to introduce the philosophical tradition of St. Thomas Aquinas into a similar environment and was pleased to be invited for an interview at a large secular school in the Midwest.

It went well. When it was over, the chairman of the philosophy department volunteered to drive him to the airport to catch his plane home. Arriving early, the chairman suggested a cup of coffee.

After a few minutes’ chitchat in the coffee shop, the chairman made his move. “You don’t really believe all that Catholic stuff, do you?”

“You bet your life I do,” the young man replied.

The department chairman looked sad. “Then I’m afraid there’s no place for you here.”

More American Catholics may face experiences like that in the years ahead. One option is conformity. The other is fortitude.

Russell Shaw is an OSV contributing editor. This is the seventh part of a series on virtues.

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Virtues

Following Christ’s model for unity of life

Russell Shaw

September 16, 2022 6:00 am September 16, 2022

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The state or condition called unity of life isn’t a virtue in itself. It can even serve bad ends. So what’s it doing as the subject of an article on…

The state or condition called unity of life isn’t a virtue in itself. It can even serve bad ends. So what’s it doing as the subject of an article on virtues for people trying to lead good lives out in the secular world? That needs explaining.

One thing that’s obvious is that a life without unity is a sorry spectacle, a kind of existential blob that lacks focus. People with this life typically flit from one activity or one relationship to another, waste time, get on others’ nerves, never accomplish much. Of such a person it’s often said, “Nice guy, but … ”

Still, the opposite error can be even worse. The pages of history, to say nothing of everyday life, are full of people who manifest unity of life by their fanatical concentration on the pursuit of power or wealth or pleasure, regardless of the cost to themselves and others. Lots of unity there, but put to bad use.

Good vs. bad unity

Evidently, then, we need to know the difference between unity that’s good and unity that’s bad. An example may help.

The most moving display of unity of life I’ve personally witnessed was an incident seven years ago in St. Peter’s Square in Rome. It was a cold, raw Sunday morning in February, the kind of day when most people would rather stay indoors. A small crowd had assembled in the square to wait for Pope John Paul II’s weekly Angelus — or, more precisely, to see whether there would be an Angelus this week.

The pope had recently been hospitalized for what was officially described as bronchitis. His Parkinsonism was getting worse. Everybody knew he was a sick man in failing health. Would he brave the damp chill this particular Sunday to come to his window and speak?

The answer was yes. Promptly at noon, John Paul appeared at an open window high above the square and began. It was agonizing to hear him struggle for each syllable — each breath. As he did, I asked myself, “Is it really a good idea for him to be doing this at an open window on such a miserable day?”

In one sense, it pretty clearly wasn’t. A few days later, he was rushed to the hospital again. A tracheotomy was performed so that he could breathe. He died April 2 at the Vatican.

As far as I can tell, that Sunday morning in February marked the beginning of the end. So, why did he do it? Why would a man in weakened health expose himself to the elements for the sake of conducting a routine ceremony?

The answer, I believe, can be found in St. John Paul II’s strong sense of personal vocation. For several years, he’d been making use of his illness — exploiting it, if you will — as a catechetical tool for showing others how a Christian should handle sickness and the approach of death. That had become part of his special ministry as pope, and the Sunday Angelus was one element of it. He was determined to go on teaching, praying and giving public witness to faith just as long as he could. In light of his vocation as Supreme Pastor of the Church and Vicar of Christ, he believed he could do no less.

And that was unity of life as John Paul II lived it.

Personal vocation was the key to it. But it’s necessary to understand that this is something vastly different from the lust for power, wealth or pleasure that drives some people.

Rooted in the commitment of faith, personal vocation embodies an individual’s determination to serve God in whatever way God is calling him or her. “Every life is a vocation,” several recent popes have said. Pope John Paul had his personal vocation. Each of us has his or her own. And no two personal vocations — or lives — are exactly alike.

Using discernment

Personal vocations are discerned — generally, with the help of a reliable spiritual advisor — through study, investigation and prayer centered on the Eucharist and the sacramental life of the Church. The discernment of the vocation is followed by a special kind of choice — a commitment — to walk the life path God intends for oneself.

Even though the discernment is sound and the commitment is sincere, living out a personal vocation is a complex, sometimes difficult task. Our inner conflicts and divisions guarantee that. St. Paul expresses the universal human plight in a famous passage in his letter to the Romans:

“I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. … I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. … I of myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin” (Rom 7:15,18,25).

Fortunately, there’s a solution to that, and Paul speaks of it, too: “Hence, now there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has freed you from the law of sin and death” (Rom 8:1-2).

St. Augustine is another case of a divided mind and divided heart working against unity of life. Even after experiencing conversion (up to a point), this great doctor of the Church famously prayed, “Lord, make me chaste, but not just yet.”

True unity of life grounded in personal vocation comes to those who not only would like to have it but who labor, with the help of grace, to achieve it. It is God’s gift, but given to those who work for it.

The calling to a personal vocation doesn’t occur only once. It’s a repeated, lifelong process. Blessed John Henry Newman underlined that in a homily on the reality of vocation: “All through our life Christ is calling us. He called us first in baptism; but afterwards also; whether we obey his voice or not, he graciously calls us still … .He calls us again and again, in order to justify us again and again — and again and again, and more and more, to sanctify and glorify us” (“Divine Calls”).

Yet many good people organize their lives more or less loosely around a shifting group of purposes and goals. “I’m doing this for my wife, I’m doing that for my children, I’m doing other things for the sake of my career, my parish. … ” And so forth. That isn’t wrong exactly, but it does fall a bit short of the ideal of unity of life.

In other cases, people have a high degree of unity derived from devotion to an activity requiring intense discipline together with skillful performance. That’s how it is, for instance, with professional athletes, concert pianists, strongly motivated doctors and lawyers, and others. Nothing wrong with that either, yet it also is something less than the ideal.

For a serious Christian, to repeat, real unity of life comes above all from the commitment of faith — the determination to make love of God and love of neighbor as part of it the organizing principle of their lives and to carry out that decision consistently within the framework of personal vocation.

Jesus as our model

That doesn’t mean becoming a religious fanatic. It means that everything one does — family and professional duties, friendships, along with specifically religious activities — is situated within the fundamental commitment to love and serve God and neighbor. The specifics of personal vocation then supply the form and content for living out this commitment of faith.

Several things are essential to the successful carrying on of this struggle. They include not only the continuing grace of conversion but also self-examination, prayer and spiritual direction. In the end, however, not our efforts but God’s healing grace, and only that, is the key to success.

As with everything else in Christian living, Jesus is our model of unity of life. Reading about his life in the New Testament, we are impressed by his single-minded focus on doing the Father’s will. Everything else must either be related to that or else be discarded. “My food is to do the will of the one who sent me,” Jesus says. That same determination to do the Father’s will, come what may, undergirds the unity of life of a committed Christian living in the world.

Russell Shaw is an Our Sunday Visitor contributing editor. This is the second part of a monthly Year of Faith series on virtues that originally appeared in Our Sunday Visitor.

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Vatican

Vatican II: Then and Now

Russell Shaw

August 3, 2022 6:19 am August 3, 2022

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As the Second Vatican Council got underway, it was commonly supposed that the assembled bishops — 2,400 of them filed into St. Peter’s Basilica for the opening session on Oct….

As the Second Vatican Council got underway, it was commonly supposed that the assembled bishops — 2,400 of them filed into St. Peter’s Basilica for the opening session on Oct. 11, 1962 — would meet for a few weeks, ratify some documents written for them in advance, and then go home.

Nothing much would change. The council would be declared a success. That would be that.

When Vatican II came to a close on Dec. 7, 1965, after four momentous sessions, everyone realized that something historic had occurred. Today, 50 years later, the 21st ecumenical council in the history of the Church is widely considered the most important Catholic event in centuries — arguably, the most important since the Council of Trent more than 400 years earlier.

Understanding the Council

The most readily visible answer can be found in the 103,000 Latin words of its 16 documents. Among the topics covered are, to mention only a few, the nature of the Church, understanding the Bible, renewing the liturgy, and the role of the Catholic Church in the modern world. Taken together, the documents of Vatican II offer a sweeping agenda for updating Catholicism (aggiornamento) by means of a return to the sources of Christian faith and practice (ressourcement).

Early in the game, another view emerged as a competitor to the emphasis on the council’s actual decisions. It argued that what really mattered wasn’t what the council said, but the conciliar process itself. This view came to be called “the spirit of Vatican II.” Marking a sharp break with the past, it sought to open the door to ongoing, open-ended change.

That viewpoint was roundly rejected by Pope Benedict XVI. As a young theologian, Father Joseph Ratzinger had an important role at the council. In December 2005, addressing the Roman Curia, Pope Benedict pointed to two different ways of interpreting Vatican II. One he called “a hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture,” which he accused of causing “confusion” in the years since the council; the other was a “hermeneutic of reform” rooted in tradition and committed to “renewal in the continuity of the one subject-Church.”

This second approach is the correct way of understanding Vatican II, Pope Benedict said. (Pope Francis, the first pope since Vatican II not to have been a council participant, has said he agrees.)

The Major Issues

What, then, was the council all about? In a famous speech opening the council, Pope St. John XXIII, the man who convoked it, said its primary purpose was “that the sacred deposit of Christian doctrine be guarded and taught more effectively.” Speaking at its closing session, Pope Paul VI, Pope John’s successor, said, “His great purpose has now been achieved.”

Along the way, nevertheless, Vatican II did a great deal else besides. Many volumes have been written spelling out — and sometimes arguing over — what that was. What follows here are highlights to just a few major issues.

It is sometimes said the great central theme of the Second Vatican Council was the Church itself. Indeed, Vatican II’s doctrinal centerpiece, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church (Lumen Gentium is its Latin name), discusses the nature and structure of the Church at length and makes important theological and pastoral points.

The constitution considers the Church in its aspect as a communio, or communion — a community of faith whose members, hierarchically structured and uniquely joined to one another by the action of the Holy Spirit, work together on behalf of the glory of God, the spreading of the Gospel and the salvation of souls.

In speaking of the Church, Vatican II revives the ancient principle of collegiality. This is the doctrine that today’s bishops, like Jesus’ Twelve Apostles, whose successors they are, make up a “college” whose members share in the task of teaching and governing the universal Church in union with the pope. During the council, Pope Paul acted to implement this insight by establishing a new collegial body — the world Synod of Bishops — to advise the Bishop of Rome.

Vatican II also set a new task for itself as an ecumenical council in undertaking to produce another document — the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes — Joy and Hope). This pastoral constitution, at more than 23,000 words the council’s longest document, takes up a broad range of contemporary issues extending from marriage and family life to economic development, modern warfare and nuclear weapons. This marked the first time an ecumenical council had sought to address the secular world of its time regarding a host of social, political and economic problems it faced.

Perhaps because this had never been done before — as well as because of some of its analyses and judgments — Gaudium et Spes was controversial from the start and the final verdict on it was mixed. The consensus view was that it was a good first try. In a newspaper report at the time, later published in a book called “Theological Highlights of Vatican II,” Father Ratzinger wrote the following concerning the pastoral constitution: “What was important … was that it recognized these problems and moved toward solving them. We must go on from there.”

Vatican II also broke new ground in its discussion of the laity and their place in the Church. This was the first time an ecumenical council had devoted so much attention specifically to laypeople, with the laity receiving their own chapter in the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church in addition to being the subject of an entire document — the Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity (Apostolicam Actuositatem).

In view of developments since Vatican II emphasizing ministries performed by laypeople in their parishes and other structures of the Church, it’s noteworthy that the council gives pride of place to the laity’s apostolate in and to the secular world.

Declaring that the call to apostolate comes to laypeople directly through their reception of the Sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church says this: “The lay apostolate … is a participation in the salvific mission of the Church…. The laity are called in a special way to make the Church present and operative in those places and circumstances where only through them can it become the salt of the earth” (No. 33).

Possibly the most important thing Vatican II said about the laity, however, was to affirm that they, just as much as priests and religious, are called to holiness. The Church had always recognized this fundamental fact, but for a long time, as a practical matter, it was common to propose a legalistic, minimal version of spirituality to laywomen and men. Its principal elements: go to Mass on Sunday; obey the laws of the Church; try to avoid serious sins; be sure to confess sins if you nevertheless fall.

These are all obviously good and necessary things to do. But the council also offered lay members of the Church a loftier vision.

There is “a common dignity as members from their regeneration in Christ, having the same filial grace and the same vocation to perfection; possessing in common one salvation, one hope and one undivided charity” (No. 32). And again, “Thus it is evident to everyone, that all the faithful of Christ of whatever rank or status, are called to the fullness of the Christian life and to the perfection of charity; by this holiness as such a more human manner of living is promoted in this earthly society” (No. 40).

What the council says about the liturgy and about sacred Scripture can best be understood against this background.

For example, the Constitution on the Liturgy, declaring public worship to be the “summit” toward which all the Church’s activity is directed and the “fount” from which all its power comes, instructs pastors to make sure the faithful participate in the liturgy “fully aware of what they are doing, actively engaged in the rite, and enriched by it” (see Sacrosanctum Concilium, Nos. 5-13).

And the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, recalling St. Jerome’s saying that “ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ,” urges greater efforts to make study and use of the Bible an integral part of the prayer and worship of lay Catholics (see Dei Verbum, No. 25).

In his firsthand account of Vatican II, Father Ratzinger remarked that the decisions of an ecumenical council are “a beginning.” A council’s real importance, he explained, “is only achieved in its translation into the realities of everyday Church life.”

In the last 50 years, much has been done to “translate” Vatican II principles like the ones sketched here into Church life. Conflict and controversy have often accompanied the effort. Much remains to be done.

That’s hardly a surprise. “The century following each council has ever been a time of great trial,” Father John Henry Newman wrote at the time of Vatican Council I (1869-70). At the half century mark since Vatican II, that leaves another half century to go. It should be interesting.

Russell Shaw is a prolific author and is former communications director for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. He also serves as Our Sunday Visitor’s Washington correspondent.

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8 min read

Virtues

Biblical guidelines to Christian cheerfulness

Russell Shaw

July 30, 2022 7:06 am July 30, 2022

8 min read

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8 min read

Albert Camus (1913-1960) was a French philosopher of the existentialist school and a novelist of note who won the 1957 Nobel Prize for literature. Numbered among his philosophical works is…

Albert Camus (1913-1960) was a French philosopher of the existentialist school and a novelist of note who won the 1957 Nobel Prize for literature. Numbered among his philosophical works is a volume, published in 1942, called “The Myth of Sisyphus.” The title refers to a character in Greek mythology who is eternally condemned to roll a huge rock up a hill, see it roll back down and start all over again.

Camus took that wretched fate as a metaphor of the human condition. The book’s famous opening sentence reads: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.”

Albert Camus may have been more blunt than most, but he’s hardly alone. During the last two centuries, many writers — angry and rebellious or simply depressed — have formed a gloomy chorus proclaiming the demise of religious faith in significant intellectual sectors of Western culture.

Writing in the Victorian era, British poet and critic Matthew Arnold summed it up in his poem “Dover Beach.” Speaking of the supposedly diminished “Sea of Faith,” he wrote: “But now I only hear/Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,/ Retreating. … ”

A crucial value

Today, too, the trickle-down effects of this erosion of belief among secular elites casts a pall of sadness over countless people’s lives. One result has been the rise of a kind of neo-paganism bereft of faith and hope and joy. Pope Benedict XVI calls Europe’s “demographic winter” — a steep drop in births and accelerating population decline — a sign that Europe is “losing trust in its own future.”

All of which underlines how important the virtue of cheerfulness really is. A distinctive feature of our contemporary entertainment-obsessed secular culture is the profound sadness that underlies it. To oppose this encircling gloom with cheerfulness has become a Christian duty.

Camus concluded that suicide wasn’t the appropriate answer to his “philosophical problem.” Instead, his answer was to “live in revolt.” That meant an attempt — heroic, but ultimately doomed to fail — to impose meaning upon essentially “absurd” human life. Other writers followed suit. American writer Ernest Hemingway’s popular 1952 novel “The Old Man and the Sea” is an existentialist parable that illustrates this idea in fictional terms.

Others afflicted by the decline of faith propose different answers. One of these is the dolce vita of physical and psychological gratification. Many people seek to escape, or at least to mask, their dread of meaninglessness with things like alcohol, drugs and the loveless and uncommitted sex epitomized in Internet pornography, or simply by killing time in mind-numbing pursuits like watching endless hours of television. Sometimes it does the trick. But not for long.

Secular utopianism represents another approach. Karl Marx and the Marxists are its classic examples in modern times. Imagining that there is no such thing as heaven or eternal life, the Marxists held that the fulfillment of human aspirations necessarily had to come in this life and this world. And that would happen when the dialectic of history reached its conclusion in a radically egalitarian heaven on earth called the classless society.

Many millions of lives have been sacrificed on the altar of this secularist vision. Observing the cultlike character of Marxist orthodoxy, a critic remarked that for many Western intellectuals of the 20th century Marxism was a “god that failed.”

What does Christianity say in reply to all this? If cheerfulness is central to its response, what reason or reasons does faith provide for being cheerful in a world where so much pain and suffering exist?

Start with the fact that Christianity doesn’t deny the reality of evil. Rather, it situates it in the context of faith. G.K. Chesterton put the idea succinctly. Speaking of the doctrine of original sin, he insisted that at bottom it’s good news since it means that human beings have “misused a good world, and not merely been entrapped into a bad one.”

Original sin, Chesterton explained, “refers evil back to a wrong use of the will, and thus declares that it can eventually be righted by the right use of the will.” Christian cheerfulness is rooted in this idea that what is so obviously and painfully wrong with the world can finally be overcome by placing human freedom at the service of goodness and truth. Jesus Christ showed the way. And in the Christian view, the process of setting things right that he began leads to resurrection and eternal life.

Hope in Christ

No one expresses it better than St. Paul in his first epistle to the Corinthians.

“If Christ has not been raised,” St. Paul concedes, “your faith is in vain … If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are the most pitiable people of all” (1 Cor 15:19).

That state of disbelief is the point reached by secular culture today. St. Paul, however, doesn’t leave it there.

“But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. … Then shall come to pass the saying that is written: ‘Death is swallowed up in victory.’ ‘O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting?’” (1 Cor 15:12 ff.).

Faith in resurrection — Christ’s resurrection and ours — is the source and substance of Christian cheerfulness. Looked at from the perspective of virtue, it’s a product of faith and hope. But it’s important to grasp the difference between the virtue properly so called and merely natural cheerfulness. Both are desirable, but they’re not the same.

Natural cheerfulness comes from temperament or external circumstances or some combination of both. Some people are just naturally upbeat. It’s an attractive trait, but it can be carried too far. Think of the man who compulsively cracks jokes on solemn occasions.

Unlike natural cheerfulness, Christian cheerfulness has its eye fixed on the next life as well as this one. It can and should coexist with sorrow. The Catholic philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand makes the point in his book “Transformation in Christ”:

“True, Jesus by his crucifixion has redeemed the world and cleansed all suffering from its poisonous sting. Yet, Jesus also spoke the words, ‘If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross’ (Mt 16:24).

“The cross awaits us inescapably on our life-path; and we have to accept it. We should, however, take it in imitation of Christ. … If governed and shaped by those two eminently Christian attitudes of mind — resignation to God’s will and patience — all suffering will become transfigured and pleasing to God.”

The largest obstacle to cheerfulness isn’t sorrow but pride. “Continual peace is with the humble,” says The Imitation of Christ, “but in the heart of the proud is frequent envy and indignation.” St. James supplies practical advice: “Is any one of you sad? Let him pray” (Jas 5:13). Prayer puts us in touch with God, who is the source of our faith and hope — and humility.

Not only our own peace of mind but our effectiveness in leading others to God depends largely on cheerfulness. St. Francis de Sales tells his readers, “we should contribute to holy and temperate joy and to pleasant conversation, which may serve as a consolation and recreation to our neighbor, so as not to annoy him with our knit brows.” And of course we have Jesus’ own words about fasting: “Do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces that their fasting may be seen by men. Truly, I say to you, they have their reward” (Mt 6:16).

In the end, Christian cheerfulness is about much more than just feeling good. It’s a way of giving witness to faith — part of the challenge to evangelize the gloomy secular culture all around us.

Albert Camus and the existentialists weren’t the only French intellectuals who thought about these things. Paul Claudel (1868-1955), poet, dramatist, diplomat and fervent Catholic, said, “Tell them their only duty is cheerfulness! Because joy is the sign that we love God, and thus we do a great good for others and for ourselves. We must be happy, and others should know that we are.”

The name for that is “cheerfulness.”

Russell Shaw is an OSV contributing editor. This is the fourth part of a monthly Year of Faith series on virtues that originally appeared in Our Sunday Visitor.

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