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Virtues

Selfless love, happy marriage among the fruits of chastity

Russell Shaw

September 12, 2023 7:03 am September 12, 2023

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The two old friends were discussing their marriages. After so many years, the first man said, he still loved his wife, and he supposed his friend loved his. The second…

The two old friends were discussing their marriages. After so many years, the first man said, he still loved his wife, and he supposed his friend loved his.

The second man paused and thought a moment. “You know, I believe it’s something beyond ‘love’ in the conventional sense. A husband and wife who have been together a long time experience a bonding that makes them like the two halves of a psychological and spiritual whole. Neither is quite complete without the other. That’s when you really start to understand what Jesus meant when he said husbands and wives become ‘two in one flesh.’”

His friend agreed.

The virtue of chastity, cherished as an ideal and practiced through thick and thin, is a necessary part of marriage as these two men had lived it. That’s a hard saying for lots of people at a time when chastity is widely ignored — and mocked when it isn’t ignored. Thanks largely to the worldview promoted in the media, few elements of the Christian tradition are today probably less understood and accepted than chastity. It’s a terrible loss.

Sin of lust

Sins against chastity are hardly new, of course. The vice most obviously opposed — lust — has been around since Adam and Eve. Dante’s treatment of lust in his great poem of the late Middle Ages, “The Divine Comedy,” is a literary landmark on this subject. He situates lustful sinners in the first circle of hell, where fierce winds blow them to and fro.

Like as the starlings wheel in the wintry season

In wide and clustering flocks wing-borne, wind-borne

Even so they go, the souls who did this treason.

Hither and thither, and up and down, outworn,

Hopeless of any rest …

Author and Dante translator Dorothy Sayers explained the striking symbolism: “As [the lustful] drifted into self-indulgence and were carried away by their passions, so now they drift forever. The bright, voluptuous sin is now seen as it is — a howling darkness of helpless discomfort.”

But if lust isn’t new, the self-conscious, ideology-driven assault on chastity now under way is. There’s something about chastity that the secularized modern mind finds deeply offensive — and this offensive something, one suspects, is self-control in sexual matters.

A while back, I asked one of my daughters why so many people get downright nasty about the Catholic Church when speaking of its views on sexual morality. Being a tough-minded realist, she said, “Guilt.”

It stands to reason. The sexual revolution that erupted in the 1960s was marketed as liberation — throwing off the repressions and restraints of the ancient Puritan code that supposedly ruled people’s lives before then.

Unfortunately, as we’ve learned to our regret, abandoning self-control in sex has been anything but liberating. For many people, sex has become an obsession, sometimes an addiction, as one sees in the unhappy experience of men who’ve become hooked on Internet pornography at the cost of their self-respect and their relationships with their wives.

Decline of marriage

Note, too, that while the technology of this Web-based addiction is new, the addiction itself isn’t. St. Augustine, no stranger to sexual addiction in his youth, wrote in his “Confessions,” “When lust is pandered to, a habit is formed; when habit is not checked, it hardens into compulsion. These were like interlinking rings forming what I have described as a chain … .”

Rejecting chastity hurts not only individuals but society. In particular, its destructive impact on the institution of marriage is clear.

That marriage is in trouble in the United States and countries like it can hardly be doubted. Marriages in America fell from 2.44 million in 1990 to 2.08 million in 2009, while the population was rising by 60 million. As of 2011, just 51 percent of Americans were married compared with 57 percent in 2000.

Things are no better in the Catholic sector.

Back in 1990, with American Catholics numbering 55 million, there were 334,000 Catholic marriages. By 2010, when the Catholic population had jumped to 68.5 million, Catholic marriages had fallen by nearly half, to 179,000.

Of course many factors contribute to the marriage decline. Reducing it all to contraception and the contraceptive mentality would overstate the case. Easy divorce and economic pressures are part of the picture, as are ongoing efforts to sell Americans on same-sex marriage, which robs traditional man-woman marriage of the unique place it’s always occupied up to now in the life of society.

But alongside factors like these, the campaign against chastity has had a crucial role in the undermining of marriage.

Some people avoid marriage because of the restrictions it imposes on sexual activity, while others, having married, find those restrictions distasteful and, claiming an unconditional right to sexual fulfillment, abandon spouses (and often children) and divorce.

Chastity is the realistic antidote to all this. St. Thomas Aquinas, reflecting on it, makes the point that this virtue is fundamental to “self-possession” in sexual matters, whereas unchastity weakens and destroys it. Philosopher Josef Pieper, contrasting self-possession with its opposite, writes: “An unchaste man wants above all something for himself. … Unchastity … is selfishly intent upon the ‘prize,’ upon the reward of illicit lust.”

Selfish, self-interested, deadly cold: here’s the heart of unchastity and lust. But the virtue of chastity preserves that openness to the other in self-giving love that stands at the heart of healthy relationships, above all marriage.

The chaste man or woman possesses the necessary freedom to make the gift of self that is part of, but by no means limited to, the loving sexual encounter of husband and wife.

Pope Benedict XVI in his encyclical Deus Caritas Est (“God is Love”) goes so far as to extend the reach of chastity to the relationship with God. “Love … is a journey,” he wrote, “an ongoing exodus out of the closed inward-looking self toward its liberation through self-giving, and thus toward authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God.”

Seeking real chastity

Chastity also is necessary to a healthy spiritual life.

St. Josemaría Escrivá, founder of Opus Dei, places his discussion of chastity — “holy purity,” he calls it — near the start of his guide book to sanctity, “The Way.” There’s no mystery about that: Progress in the interior life is nearly impossible unless a person sets out seriously to acquire chastity, since that’s the only way to break the chain of compulsive self-seeking forged by a habit of unchastity.

How to go about it?

Grace is indispensable, and God will give the grace of chastity to those who truly want it. But that really wanting it is essential. Much as God wishes to give this gift, his respect for human freedom won’t allow him to do that unless we want it.

The sincere desire for chastity requires much more than simply saying now and then, “Wouldn’t it be nice … ?”

There are things we can and must do for ourselves.

Prayer and mortification — saying an occasional no to some small thing like a dessert or a merely self-indulgent nap — are both required. Prayer keeps us in touch with God. Mortification is practice in the self-discipline required to resist temptations to instant gratification.

Frequent and regular use of the sacrament of Penance also is an obvious necessity. And for those who suffer from sexual addiction or something like it, professional help from a counselor who understands the importance of chastity may be required.

These days, too, people who are serious about this virtue may have to separate themselves in whole or part from the popular culture, either sharply limiting their intake or, if necessary, eliminating exposure to it almost entirely from their lives.

Face it, a man who routinely settles down in the evening to some beer and watch whatever turns up on TV is inviting trouble for himself. So is someone who mindlessly surfs the Internet, scanning whatever happens to catch his fancy. Do people like these truly want to be chaste?

Probably not. For them, chastity is wishful thinking at best: “Wouldn’t it be nice … ?”

The rewards of chastity are enormous.

Self-possession and self-control. The capacity to give oneself to another in disinterested, selfless love. The possibility of enjoying a happy and fruitful marriage as God wants marriage to be. And finally the fulfillment of all relationships and all loves in everlasting life with God.

Not a bad deal.

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

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Virtues

How to battle the silent killer of spiritual life

Russell Shaw

September 8, 2023 11:26 am September 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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Vatican

Vatican II: Then and Now

Russell Shaw

August 16, 2023 6:19 am August 16, 2023

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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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Virtues

Does every moment count?

Russell Shaw

June 3, 2023 7:06 am June 3, 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

Biblical guidelines to Christian cheerfulness

Russell Shaw

May 25, 2023 7:06 am May 25, 2023

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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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8 min read

Virtues

Catholics can give glory to God through their labor

Russell Shaw

May 15, 2023 11:52 am May 15, 2023

8 min read

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8 min read

Most people have mixed feelings about work. When speaking of their jobs, it’s not uncommon for them to grouse about “the rat race” and “the grind.” Yet many people —…

Most people have mixed feelings about work. When speaking of their jobs, it’s not uncommon for them to grouse about “the rat race” and “the grind.” Yet many people — often, the very same ones — also take great satisfaction from their work.

Both of those things, satisfaction and frustration, are linked to a fundamental fact. For better or worse, most of us draw much of our self-identity from work.

Notice how often new acquaintances, introducing themselves, start by naming their jobs: “I’m a computer programmer,” “… an accountant,” “… a teacher,” “… a housewife.” In many cases, it seems, identity equals work. Which is why, incidentally, the high unemployment rate of recent years, along with hurting people in the pocketbook, has for many been a blow to their self-image.

A kind of prayer

Less obvious perhaps, but no less important, work also occupies an important place in our spiritual lives.

Ora et labora — “pray and work” — is a famous monastic motto. It’s a beautiful thought, of course, but also somewhat questionable to the extent it’s taken as suggesting a sharp distinction, a split, between prayer and work. In the life of virtue, the two things go together and merge into one, so that work itself is a kind of prayer.

In a broad sense, everyone has work to do. “Work” isn’t just paid employment, a job. It includes volunteer work, housework, schoolwork, baby-sitting for family and friends, helping out around the parish — the 1,001 useful things that people do to be of service, build a better world and give glory to God.

A number of individual good habits — virtues, that is — are obviously relevant and important in regard to work. Those that come immediately to mind include honesty, punctuality and perseverance. Underlying them are basic beliefs and attitudes pertaining to work and forming a kind of matrix within which the virtues can take hold and operate.

Longtime bond

But before looking at all that, let’s pause briefly to reflect on the fact that historically the Catholic Church, for the most part, has managed to take a practical, down-to-earth approach to the question of work. A crucial episode in the history of American Catholicism in the latter years of the 19th century involving Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore and the Knights of Labor illustrates the point.

Cardinal Gibbons, the leading American Catholic churchman of his day, was archbishop of the primatial see of Baltimore from 1877 all the way until his death in 1921. The Knights of Labor was the first mass labor organization in the United States. Its president and many of its members were Catholics.

There was a problem, though. Viewing the situation in the United States from far away, the Vatican had come to fear that the Knights of Labor was one more secret society hostile to the Church. A papal document condemning the group and forbidding Catholics to join was in preparation.

Then Cardinal Gibbons stepped in. He persuaded Pope Leo XIII that condemning the Knights would be a serious mistake that would drive many Catholic working men away from the Church. The papal document was never published. The cardinal’s intervention helped forge a bond between the Church and workers that long endured.

The same approach of affirming work and workers was reflected in Pope Leo’s landmark 1891 social encyclical Rerum Novarum (“On the Condition of Workers”). Here the Church can be seen — somewhat belatedly, alas — confronting the consequences of the Industrial Revolution by setting out a body of social teaching in response to the challenges of modern times. Since then, many other encyclicals and teaching documents have been published with the same aim in view by later pontiffs, including Popes Pius XI, Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI and Benedict XVI.

Spiritual dimension

But special attention undoubtedly should go to Pope St. John Paul II.

Previous treatments of work by the papal magisterium dealt with work largely as a socioeconomic reality. Pope John Paul brought something new into the discussion. In 1981, he published an encyclical called Laborem Exercens (“On Work”) that reflects upon what might be called the existential dimension of work.

Perhaps reflecting the pope’s own experiences as a working man during the Nazi occupation of Poland in World War II, the encyclical speaks of two meanings or purposes of work when considered from a spiritual point of view.

First, work is co-creative — a form of human participation in the creative activity of God himself in building up the world. Second, considered especially in its painful and unpleasant aspects, work is co-redemptive — a way to cooperate with Christ in redeeming the world and its human inhabitants.

A Christian engaged in work, said the pope, finds there “a small part of the Cross of Christ and accepts it in the same spirit of redemption in which Christ accepted his Cross for us” (No. 27).

In no way does this view of work downplay or belittle reasons for working like earning a living to support yourself and your family, achieving a measure of success and recognition, and simply doing something worthwhile with of your time. These are sound reasons that readily lend themselves to working virtuously. Still, to comprehend the specifically Christian meaning of work, we need to bear in mind those two purposes identified by Pope St. John Paul: co-creation and co-redemption.

In that regard, it’s helpful to be aware not only that Jesus worked but that his work had the same two purposes at its core.

During his public life, he worked as a kind of rabbi or traveling teacher. Before beginning his public life, he worked as a carpenter. And it wasn’t just the work that he did during the public life, climaxed as it was by his death and resurrection, that had creative and redemptive value. Those meanings were present in his work throughout his life, including during the years spent working at the carpenter’s trade in Nazareth.

One lesson that has for us is that the kind of work you do doesn’t matter nearly as much as your intention in doing it. St. Josemaría Escrivá put it like this: “Before God, no occupation in itself is great or small. Everything gains the value of the love with which it is done.”

Vocational component

It’s also extremely important that people understand their work as a way of living out their vocations. Priests and sisters aren’t the only ones with vocations — laypeople have them too. And a central component of anyone’s vocation is his or her work.

Here let me turn it over to a woman who took a course I gave on the role of the laity. I’ve told this story before, but I tell it again here because it illustrates the point so well. This is what she said in an email to me:

“Last week I gave a lecture to a group of women, and as an opening exercise I asked them to write on one side of the page all the everyday things they do in the course of a day or two. Then I asked them to write on the other side all the things they do in the same time frame that they consider to be holy.

“Without exception, they made up two entirely different lists — on the one hand, daily chores and activities, and on the other hand things associated with what they consider to be ‘ministry’ — serving as minister of Communion or lector, attending Mass, things like that.

“Many had only one or two items in that second column. No one simply drew an arrow from the daily activities to the list of ‘holy’ things.

“My lecture was about the apostolate of the laity. If nothing else, I wanted the women to come away from it with a sense of the dignity of our mission as laypeople. That includes understanding that everyday activities really are holy when we do them as faithful Christians … .

“When the women took a second look at their lists and reflected on their everyday work as a vehicle for spreading the Gospel and acting as Christ’s missionaries and apostles, they began to personalize what apostolate meant for them.”

What could I add to that? Only that those women had begun to understand the full virtuous potential of their work.

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

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