Tag: Virtues

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Virtues

The spiritual benefits of prayerful play

Russell Shaw

April 15, 2023 8:54 pm April 15, 2023

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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

Standing up for the Faith when it counts

Russell Shaw

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Defending the Faith

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reflecting on martyrdom

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

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

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

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

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

Guiding principles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Virtues

Following Christ’s model for unity of life

Russell Shaw

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

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

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

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

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

Good vs. bad unity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Using discernment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jesus as our model

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

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

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

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

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Saints

5 ways in which St. John Paul II embodied the Rosary’s fruits

By Gretchen R. Crowe

August 1, 2022 7:34 pm August 1, 2022

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It wasn’t long after his Oct. 16, 1978 election that the new Pope John Paul II — the former Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla — began promoting Mary and the Rosary…

It wasn’t long after his Oct. 16, 1978 election that the new Pope John Paul II — the former Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla — began promoting Mary and the Rosary as one of the best ways to proclaim Christ to the world. In a General Audience on Oct. 28, less than two weeks after his election, Pope John Paul II declared the Rosary to be “my favorite prayer.” He also called it a “marvelous prayer — marvelous in its simplicity and in its depth.”

Throughout his pontificate, Pope John Paul II remained close to the Blessed Mother, signaled in his motto — an adaptation of St. Louis de Montfort’s phrase “Totus Tuus” (“Totally Yours”)— describing his complete devotion to Mary and desire to be closer to her and her Son. He also had a deep love for the spiritual fruits of the mysteries of the Rosary as outlined by St. Louis de Montfort and promoted them in his 2003 apostolic letter on the Rosary, Rosarium Virginis Mariae. He wrote: “… it is worthwhile to note that the contemplation of the mysteries could better express their full spiritual fruitfulness if an effort were made to conclude each mystery with a prayer for the fruits specific to that particular mystery. In this way the Rosary would better express its connection with the Christian life” (No. 35, emphasis in original).

Like all saints, we can turn to the example of Pope St. John Paul II, who incorporated vividly the spiritual fruits of each mystery of the Rosary into his life. Here are 5 ways in which Pope St. John Paul II lived these out.

Pope St. John Paul II was humble. From the beginning of his papacy, Pope St. John Paul II habitually kissed the ground upon arriving in every country to which he traveled. This gesture, learned from St. John Vianney, the patron saint of parish priests, was a sign of great humility, and it was an action that conveyed respect, affection, and that showed him to be at the faithful service of those he was visiting.
Pope St. John Paul II had a great, lifelong love for the Eucharist. His encyclical Ecclesia de Eucharistia was dedicated to the Blessed Sacrament, and he directed the Church to dedicate an entire year — October 2004 to October 2005 — to deeper reflection on, and growth in, love of the Eucharist.
Pope St. John Paul II sought conformity to God’s will. When John Paul II was elected pope in 1978, he responded with the greatest obedience, wholeheartedly accepting God’s will for his life. Upon accepting the papal responsibility, he simply stated: “In the obedience of faith before Christ my Lord, abandoning myself to the Mother of Christ and the Church, and conscious of the great difficulties, accepto.”
Pope St. John Paul II showed patience in carrying his cross. Suffering was a significant part of John Paul II’s life, particularly in his final years as he battled Parkinson’s disease. But through infirmity and illness, John Paul II displayed a beautiful perseverance and humility, and he offered a witness to what it looks like to bear one’s cross with patience and purpose.
Pope St. John Paul II had a lively faith. John Paul II was a gifted teacher, and he was especially gifted when it came to teaching on matters of doctrine. His arguments were clear and compelling, and always rooted in Scripture and Tradition. Through his clarity and consistency, despite facing much resistance at times, he helped all who encountered him better know and understand the teachings of Christ and his Church.

Gretchen R. Crowe is editorial director for periodicals at OSV and author of “Praying the Rosary with Pope St. John Paul II.”

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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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8 min read

Virtues

Seeking truth in the struggle with sin

Russell Shaw

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

8 min read

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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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