Tag: Virtues

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Virtues

Biblical guidelines to Christian cheerfulness

Russell Shaw

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

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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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Virtues

Confession: A great opportunity to get right with God

Russell Shaw

July 27, 2022 7:01 am July 27, 2022

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When Dr. Bernard Nathanson died of cancer in February 2011, the obituary writers dutifully recorded that he’d become a Catholic back in 1996. Some even recalled the reason he gave…

When Dr. Bernard Nathanson died of cancer in February 2011, the obituary writers dutifully recorded that he’d become a Catholic back in 1996. Some even recalled the reason he gave for taking that step.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Nathanson, a New York OB-GYN, had been a national leader in the campaign to legalize abortion. Then he saw the light, turned against abortion, and became a pro-life crusader. Joining the Catholic Church was another stage in his conversion process.

But why become a Catholic? Because, Nathanson explained, the Catholic Church has the best developed system for seeking and receiving God’s forgiveness. And as someone who’d performed 5,000 abortions himself and shared responsibility for many thousands more, he had much need to be forgiven.

Following conscience

It’s a moving story. But most of us aren’t sinners on that scale and so, we may reason, perhaps we don’t have as much cause as Nathanson to worry about sin and forgiveness.

Tempting as it may sometimes be to think like that, it clashes head-on with the first epistle of St. John: “If we say, ‘We have no sin,’ we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we acknowledge our sins, he [God] is faithful and just and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say, ‘We have not sinned,’ we make him a liar, and his word is not in us” (1 Jn 1:8-10).

Today powerful forces in the surrounding culture encourage people to ignore or downplay their sins and, if they’re Catholics, to skip the Sacrament of Penance. Confused ideas about conscience often have much to do with that. “I do what my conscience tells me,” people say, “and that’s good enough.”

People said the same thing in Blessed John Henry Newman’s time. But the distinguished British convert sharply criticized the idea of conscience that implied. Calling it a “counterfeit” of genuine conscience, Newman wrote in 1875:

“When men advocate the rights of conscience, they in no sense mean the rights of the creator nor the duty to him … They demand what they think is an Englishman’s prerogative, for each to be his own master in all things and to profess what he pleases, asking no one’s leave and accounting priest or preacher, speaker or writer unutterably impertinent who dare to say a word against his going to perdition … in his own way.”

Risky business, you might think. Especially in view of a point made by another British convert-author, Msgr. Robert Hugh Benson, concerning serious sins we may culpably ignore: “We need … the pardon that descends when we are unaware that we must have it or die. … Only God, who knows all things, can forgive us effectively.”

Dramatic drop-off

Some years ago a much-discussed book by the social critic Christopher Lasch argued that our society is dominated by a “culture of narcissism.” The label seemed to fit. Narcissists, though notorious for self-absorption, steer clear of self-examination in any meaningful sense. This makes narcissism the deadly enemy of contrition and confession considered as elements of a virtuous life.

Whether you accept or reject Lasch’s social analysis, the numbers leave no doubt that a serious problem does exist these days where penance is concerned. To such an extent, in fact, that it’s often said to be a sacrament in crisis.

There is a crisis here all right, but it isn’t really with the sacrament — it’s with the people who need it but ignore it.

In one recent survey, fully 75 percent of those identifying themselves as Catholics said they received penance — went to confession — less than once a year. Many said they never did. (Not surprisingly, 75 percent is about the same percentage as the figure for Catholics who don’t attend weekly Mass.)

The problem isn’t new. Sacramental confession has been in steep decline for years.

In the 1950s and 1960s, about 80 percent of America’s Catholics went to confession at least once a year. A study in the early 1960s found that 70 percent had been to confession in the previous month. But by 1986, confession in the previous month had fallen to 23 percent. Among Catholics aged 18-30, it was 14 percent.

Down and down. By 2005, fewer than half the Catholics reported confessing their sins as often as once a year.

Rationalizing sin

What accounts for the dramatic falling-off? One highly credible theory holds that it’s related to the rise of contraception among Catholics. I sometimes call this the “elephant in the living room” explanation — everybody knows it’s there, but few care to acknowledge the fact.

About 80 percent of American Catholics now say they approve of contraception, despite the Church’s teaching that it’s wrong. Believing — or saying they believe — that contraception is all right, these people resist confessing it. But knowing the Church says differently, they don’t want to go to confession and not confess it. For many, it appears, the non-solution to their dilemma is to stay away from the sacrament entirely.

Often, though, a sense of guilt remains. And then? Then things get peculiar. Rationalization and denial set in. There may be other false moves. A few years ago, somebody launched an Internet confession site (I don’t know if it’s still there). Web surfers could “confess” their sins by typing them in, then make them disappear — lost in cyberspace, I guess — by clicking the mouse.

Perhaps that made a few people feel better, but I doubt it helped many. Like rationalizing sin, clicking sins away is a lazy and ineffectual way of evading truth. Whereas honestly confessing sins to a priest in the Sacrament of Penance requires facing up to their reality, feeling honest sorrow, and resolving not to commit them again.

Even so, people often insist that confessing sins isn’t necessary. God can forgive sins without that, and if you’re sorry in your heart, that’s enough.

Glorious opportunity

It’s true that God can and does forgive sins apart from the Sacrament of Penance. But the case for the sacrament rests upon the simple fact that Christ instituted it as the normal, natural means for his followers to use in seeking forgiveness for sin. And if that’s what Jesus intended, no Catholic with even a superficial education in the faith is entitled to turn his or her back on penance.

Quite possibly, though, the best way of selling people who have abandoned the sacrament on the idea of confessing sins and being forgiven is to present this as an opportunity more than just an obligation. Indeed, a great and glorious opportunity it most surely is.

Consider first of all what any sacrament fundamentally is — in the words of the Baltimore Catechism, an “outward sign instituted by Christ to give grace.” Yes, God could, and sometimes does, deal with human beings in other ways, meeting them on a purely spiritual level. In the sacraments, however, God generously chooses to deal with us just as we are — human persons composed of body and soul who live in community with others in a concrete, tangible world. A kind of divine realism can be seen at work in the sacramental system.

As far as penance is concerned, all that is true — and something more besides. Along with the Eucharist, this is one of the sacraments in which the priest acts in persona Christi — in the person of Christ. What the priest does is secondary; the primary action is the action of Christ, which the priest performs on his behalf as his proxy. It is Christ above all who is present and acting in penance, Christ who tells repentant sinners, “I absolve you.”

Obviously, though, Jesus isn’t physically present, saying “I absolve you” in his own voice. Instead, we have the sacrament — Jesus present and acting through the priest. It’s no great stretch to call this another kind of “real presence” of Christ, different from his presence in the Eucharist yet also astonishingly real.

Considered this way, the opportunity to confess sins to a priest in penance and have them forgiven by Christ is an extraordinary privilege. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says this sacrament of reconciliation with God “brings about a true ‘spiritual resurrection’” (No. 1468).

If more Catholics understood that, we might again start seeing penitents lined up outside confessionals waiting to take advantage of this extraordinary opportunity to receive God’s merciful pardon.

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

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Virtues

The spiritual benefits of prayerful play

Russell Shaw

June 30, 2022 8:54 pm June 30, 2022

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Did the Holy Family take vacations? I can hear the answer now (spoken, no doubt, in a huffy tone of voice): “Certainly not. There wasn’t any Disneyland in Galilee back…

Did the Holy Family take vacations? I can hear the answer now (spoken, no doubt, in a huffy tone of voice): “Certainly not. There wasn’t any Disneyland in Galilee back then. And even if there had been, these were simple, hard-working folk, with nothing left over for vacation trips.”

I expect that’s true. But even though it is, the question’s not as simple-minded as it may sound. Look at Luke’s Gospel, Chapter 2.

“Each year his parents went to Jerusalem for the feast of Passover, and when he was 12 years old, they went up according to festival custom” (Lk 2:41). And when they miss Jesus on the way home: “Thinking that he was in the caravan, [Joseph and Mary] journeyed for a day and looked for him among their relatives and acquaintances” (Lk 2:44).

There’s a lot of information packed into that, and even more is implied, including the fact that the yearly pilgrimage to Jerusalem for the Passover was the practical equivalent of a vacation for the poor, pious Jews of that time and place. Among them was the Holy Family, along with those “kinsfolk and acquaintances” who were with them on this occasion and others like it.

Mixing good times, faith

Historian Henri Daniel-Rops describes the Passover pilgrimage in his book “Daily Life in the Time of Jesus” (Servant Books, 1981):

“All the roads that led to the holy gates were filled with almost uninterrupted strings of caravans which would meet, greet one another and go on in company. There was a continual singing, the sound of innumerable voices chanting the famous psalms of pilgrimage to the tune of popular songs … The Passover was a very cheerful feast.”

This spontaneous knack for combining a good time with the living of their faith wasn’t confined to the Jews of Jesus’ day. You find it, for instance, in the Christian culture of the late Middle Ages, reflected in Chaucer’s classic “Canterbury Tales,” where pilgrims traveling to the shrine of St. Thomas à Becket at Canterbury entertain one another by telling some of the best stories ever.

Our crabbed, modern way of thinking makes it hard to imagine a deeply felt religious ritual that was also a lot of fun. That’s our loss. I have no doubt that for Jesus, Mary and Joseph, the yearly pilgrimage to Jerusalem was, along with much else, a happy family outing — a vacation, in other words.

A human good

At first it may strike someone as odd to discuss recreation and vacations in what’s supposed to be a discussion of “worldly” virtues — virtues suited to life in the world. But hold on. Recreation and the spiritual life are, in reality, closely linked.

To put the matter technically, it might be said that the central meaning of a vacation or other recreational activity, rightly understood, is participation in the fundamental human good (or purpose) of play. And participating in human goods is the heart of mortality and the key to human fulfillment. Recreation’s special significance is suggested in the title of a well-known book by philosopher Josef Pieper — “Leisure: The Basis of Culture” (Ignatius, $14.95).

Pieper writes that the “soul” of leisure — recreation, that is — is “celebration.” And all celebration worthy of the name is essentially religious: “There is no feast that does not draw its vitality from worship and that has not become a feast by virtue of its origins in worship. … A feast ‘without gods,’ and unrelated to worship, is quite simply unknown.”

Yet for well over two centuries, since the time of the French Revolution, the ideological proponents of secularism have labored to replace religious feasts and festivals with civic celebrations drained of religious content. That effort has achieved considerable success in the case of something like the Fourth of July and Halloween, and lately even Christmas has been targeted for secularization.

But even when it succeeds, the secularization of our recreation tends to be a self-defeating enterprise. For as Pieper pointed out, “the vacancy left by absence of worship is filled by mere killing of time and by boredom.”

A matter of vocation

And that helps explain the way many people today approach recreation in general and vacations in particular.

On the whole — and leaving aside amusements that are plainly immoral — I’d say there are two basic ways of recreating badly.

The first way is destructive busyness. One common version is taking work with you during what should be a time of rest. I’ve had the experience — probably you have, too — of overhearing people at some vacation spot talking business on their cell phones, in great detail and at inordinate length, with someone in an office back home. “Call me later,” those conversations often end, “tell me if that flies, and then I’ll take it from there.” Some rest!

Another kind of busyness involves overscheduling a vacation, running yourself ragged, trying to take in all the sights, do everything — and all in the name of slowing down. I have no quarrel with people who enjoy long automobile trips. But it’s disturbing to encounter some of these poor souls at a rest stop, frazzled and exhausted and checking their watches to see if it’s time to hit the road.

The second kind of bad recreation is marked by deadly boredom. Pieper said idleness gives rise to “that deep-seated lack of calm which makes leisure impossible … since it might be described as the utter absence of leisure.” Here, too, it’s a sorry sight to see people on vacation who are suffering from terminal boredom and have taken to boozing and/or quarreling just to pass the time.

Face it then — even though contemporary ideas conditioned by secularization find it hard to grasp, in order really to enjoy themselves people need to integrate recreation with the spiritual life. The residue of Manichaean-Jansenism inside us all — that tendency to place what’s enjoyable and what’s good in separate boxes and keep them there — complicates that.

Yet, contrary to this deeply un-Christian way of thinking, the question of recreation — when and where and how — is at bottom a matter of vocation.

That shouldn’t come as a surprise to someone who understands that all of life, without exception, lies within the scope of personal vocation, and everything one chooses to do, including even small everyday things, should be chosen in light of one’s understanding of God’s will for one’s life, here and now.

“For in truth,” said the great Blessed John Henry Newman, “we are not called once only, but many times; all through our life Christ is calling us. … His call is a thing which takes place now.” It goes without saying that our listening for God’s call should also take place all day, every day.

“Even when the matter involved is as mundane as where to go on vacation?” you may ask. Yes, even then.

Scheduling God time

That calling is easy to see if you’re a father or mother planning the family vacation. Here your vocation to your family — not just any family, but your own particular one, with these particular persons as its members — comes directly into play. The last family member whose preferences should be consulted is yourself (although, paradoxically, forgetting about your preferences is what will make you happiest in the end).

There’s no one “right” answer to planning a vacation. The vacation that’s right for your family will be the one that best suits its particular needs and interests. Negotiating skills may be required: If some of the kids want the mountains and some want the beach, maybe you can do the mountains this year and the beach next year. Proceeding like that is living your vocation.

Be sure, too, to include God in the schedule. My family has gone for years to a family-oriented beach town where, weekday after summer weekday, 8:30 a.m. Mass at the local Catholic church draws at least 200 people. It’s a beautiful sight and a daily testimony that many people do indeed invite God to join them on their vacations.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph certainly did that during those cheerful Passover pilgrimages long ago.

Today the rest of us should also make our vacations and times of recreation happy interludes of prayerful play.

Russell Shaw is an OSV contributing editor. This is the sixth in a series on virtues that originally appeared in Our Sunday Visitor.

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Virtues

Catholics can give glory to God through their labor

Russell Shaw

March 27, 2022 11:52 am March 27, 2022

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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, Blessed John XXIII, Paul VI and Benedict XVI.

Spiritual dimension

But special attention undoubtedly should go to Blessed 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 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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Virtues

Selfless love, happy marriage among the fruits of chastity

Russell Shaw

February 7, 2022 7:03 am February 7, 2022

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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

Seeking truth in the struggle with sin

Russell Shaw

August 29, 2021 8:27 am August 29, 2021

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8 min read

Sincerity is life blood of a robust spiritual life. It’s one of those good habits I call worldly virtues, meaning virtues essential for living a good life in the middle…

Sincerity is life blood of a robust spiritual life. It’s one of those good habits I call worldly virtues, meaning virtues essential for living a good life in the middle of the world — in this case, by being honest about our weaknesses along with our strengths, our confusions along with our certainties.

But honest with whom? With God, obviously. With other people no doubt. But first, as the basis and starting-point for honesty with God and others, we have to be consistently sincere with ourselves.

That isn’t as easy as it sounds. Not everything that passes for sincerity is the genuine article.

Pope John Paul II got to the heart of the problem in its contemporary form in a 1993 encyclical (Veritatis Splendor — “The Splendor of Truth”). He wrote of “currents of modern thought” that consider a judgment regarding a moral question to be true “merely by the fact that it has its origin in conscience.”

Where that kind of thinking prevails, Blessed John Paul said, “sincerity, authenticity and ‘being at peace with oneself’” replace fidelity to objective truth. It’s what people used to call letting it all hang out.

We see examples every day.

‘Difference of opinion’

Not long ago, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), a Catholic who was and is Speaker of the House of Representatives, spoke to a reporter about her differences with the Church on abortion and gay rights. “I feel what I was raised to believe is consistent with what I profess,” she said, “and that is that we are all endowed with a free will and a responsibility to answer for our actions. And that women should have that opportunity to exercise their free will.”

Some time later, disputing Catholic opposition to forcing Church-related institutions to provide coverage for contraceptives and abortifacients in health care plans, Pelosi remarked dismissively that Catholics “have this conscience thing.”

I don’t question the lady’s sincerity. Millions of other Catholics, including Republicans, apparently think like her. But what is she really saying?

One thing she’s saying is that the gulf between the Church’s ancient, solemn condemnation of abortion as a grave evil and the views of a pro-choice Catholic like herself is just a “difference of opinion.” Nancy Pelosi’s opinion vs. the opinion of the Christian tradition — take your pick. As opinions, both carry pretty much the same weight — though, of course, Pelosi thinks hers is correct.

She’s also saying that the right to choose abortion (or, it would seem, just about anything else) — which she calls the “opportunity to exercise … free will” — is absolute, definitive and conclusive for someone who makes that choice. If you choose something you think is right for you, that settles it. There’s no arguing with all-powerful individual conscience.

Pope John Paul rejects that out of hand. He says that to have a “good conscience” — to be genuinely sincere — people “must seek the truth and must make judgments in accordance with that same truth” (Veritatis Splendor, No. 62).

Today, nevertheless, it’s widely supposed that in matters of morality there is no such thing as objective truth. There’s your truth and my truth and everybody else’s separate version of truth, and each one is as good as any other.

Instead of simplifying the quest for sincerity, this makes it nearly impossible to be sincere — honest with God, with other people, and with oneself. Seeking the truth and judging and acting in its light are difficult enough for imperfect people in a fallen world. Today’s moral relativism and subjectivism only make it harder.

Open eyes

There’s a powerful illustration of self-deception and its cure in a memorable short story called “Revelation” by the Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor.

The central character is Mrs. Turpin, a middle-aged farm woman who scorns poor whites and blacks and anyone else who doesn’t meet her personal standards. But one day a series of events shakes her complacency. At day’s end, Mrs. Turpin has a vision — “a vast horde of souls … rumbling toward heaven.”

Prominent in this multitude are “whole companies of white-trash,” crowds of blacks, “battalions of freaks and lunatics.” Bringing up the rear is a cluster of upstanding personages very much like herself.

“They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away. She lowered her hands and gripped the rail of the hog pen, her eyes small but fixed unblinkingly on what lay ahead.”

Most of us won’t have our eyes opened to the truth about ourselves in a manner as dramatic as that. It will be an arduous, lifelong process. “We often do wrong, and what is worse, we excuse ourselves,” says “The Imitation of Christ.”

Sincerity is crucial to overcoming this tendency to self-deception. People serious about the spiritual life generally do try to be sincere, knowing that a famous passage in the first letter of St. John speaks the simple truth when it says, “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.”

But if we face up to our sinfulness, the passage continues, God “will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 Jn 1:8-9).

God’s forgiveness waits on our acknowledgment of sin. That acknowledgment is a key part of being sincere.

A clear picture

Usually it isn’t difficult for good people to recognize the specific, concrete evil actions they perform. Sins like anger, stealing and lust are ordinarily hard to overlook.

But it’s different with sins of omission — the failures of love, honesty, compassion and generosity that easily escape our notice. For instance: a husband and father who’s consistently patient and kind with his wife and children but shortchanges them when it comes to giving them his time. He buries himself in unnecessary after-hours work (“That’s how you get ahead,” he rationalizes) along with frequent socializing with colleagues (“We need to relax once in a while”). The result is a persistent neglect of home and family obligations that he chooses to ignore.

This man needs to take an honest look at what he’s doing. Or, more precisely, not doing. He needs to be sincere with himself.

And how crucial that is! Blessed John Henry Newman in one of his homilies declares: “Without self-knowledge you have no root … you may endure for a time, but under affliction or persecution your faith will not last.”

This, he reasons, is why people become “infidels, heretics, schismatics, disloyal despisers of the Church … .They endure not, because they never have tasted that the Lord is gracious; and they never have had experience of his power and love, because they have never known their own weakness and need.”

Examination of conscience and spiritual direction are the two principal means of acquiring sincerity. They are — or ought to be — key parts of the spiritual lives of all who aspire not just to be good enough to scrape by and make it into heaven after a long stay in purgatory, but to be true saints, as the Second Vatican Council said they should. Neither is intended only for a small number of elitists. Supposing otherwise is a serious, destructive and all-too-common mistake.

Examination of conscience is ordinarily a daily affair, a few minutes spent in prayerful review of the day’s successes and failures in the ascetical struggle, capped off with a concrete resolution for improvement. Daily examination is remote preparation for sacramental confession, which also should be part of the schedule — say, every two weeks. (Longer, more in-depth examination is appropriate on special occasions such as retreats and days of recollection.)

Spiritual direction also should be a regular exercise, perhaps once a month. The sessions needn’t be lengthy, but they should be honest and to the point: serious conversations with a reliable guide (a committed Christian, of course, who shares the same values and beliefs as oneself) that help us achieve a clearer picture of our spiritual selves than we’re likely to get alone. Direction doesn’t replace the sacrament of penance, but is complementary to it.

To get good results, we have to use the means.

Examination of conscience and spiritual direction are means to becoming and remaining sincere.

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

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