Words and Reality

Words and Reality
By
George Rutler
Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Lewis Carroll anticipated the word games that demagogues play when he had Humpty Dumpty say, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.” There are a lot of Humpty Dumptys around in our time, turning words inside out to turn the moral order upside down. They call vice “liberation” and infanticide “health care.” A few years ago, a major chain of bookshops listed a book on how to commit suicide under the category “Self-Improvement.”

George Orwell updated Lewis Carroll in his brooding book 1984. By now “Orwellian” has become a neologism for Humpty Dumpty talk. In a famous essay called “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell wrote: “A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”

Foolish thoughts can also be criminal and destructive. Recently the press reported the death of a retired Massachusetts congressman who, despite having been censured for perverse and predatory sexual offences with a youth, was re-elected to office and given major leadership offices. One senator called him “a role model.” The New York Times and the Boston Globe obituaries said that he was survived by his husband. His husband. The syntax reminded us that we are a couple of decades past 1984 and language rot is now a received style. It is not just Humpty Dumpty silliness: It is a deliberate attempt to alter reality by altering the language which describes reality.

Orwell optimistically thought that the decay is reversible, but “to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration.” By definition, however, regeneration is not the desire of the degenerate. The clarity of thought urged, for instance, by Pope Benedict is considered scandalous. The historian Toynbee said that civilizations die, not by invasion, but by suicide. Under the guise of sophistication, the moral lights of culture begin to dim when wordplay is considered an amusing game and not a sinister plot.

Gazing upon the ruins of Timgad in North Africa, a city founded as Thamugas by the emperor Trajan in 100 a.d., and destroyed by the Vandals after it had lost its cultural balance, Hilaire Belloc wrote: “We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on these faces there is no smile.”

Fr. George Rutler is pastor of the Church of Our Saviour in New York City. He is also the author of A Crisis of Saints.

© First Things 2006-2007

The Spirit of Vatican II

The Spirit of Vatican II
by George W. Rutler

March 2008

A Challenging Reform: ­Realizing the Vision of the Liturgical Renewal

1963-1975 by Piero Marini

Liturgical Press, 205 pages, $15.95 (paper)

To young people today, Vatican II reposes in a haze with Nicaea II and Lateran II. Their guileless ignorance at least frees them from the animus of some aging liturgists who thought that the Second Vatican Council defined a whole new anthropological stage in the history of man. The prolix optimism of many interpreters of that council has now taken on a ­patina—not that of fine bronze but more like the discoloration of a Bauhaus building. Reflective minds, ever grateful for the more important contributions of Vatican II, have had to reconcile a declaration (on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Sacrosanctum Concilium) that the vast majority of the faithful enthusiastically have welcomed liturgical changes with subsequent pontifical acts of reparation for liturgical confusion.

In his new book, A Challenging Reform, Archbishop Piero Marini has done historians a service in tracing the development of the modern liturgy. The result is a highly revealing account of the intentions of prominent players, and the author shows a genuine innocence in his assumption that readers will share his preference for theory over practice. His polemical tone will agitate those whom Marini calls “reaction-aries” to think that their misgivings about the events of 1963 to 1975 were not totally hallucinatory.

Marini worked in the secretariat of the Consilium ad Exsequendam Constitutionem de Sacra Liturgia with Annibale Bugnini, who started as a modest bureaucrat and gradually shaped the advisory committee into a rival of—and, eventually, a replacement of—the Congregation for Rites. The Consilium was suppressed in a latter period of the Pauline pontificate, which, Marini implies, was not as good as the pontificate of John XXIII. The talented author began as secretary to the hero of his narrative as a young priest, but, like a son of Noah, he never mentions that Bugnini eventually was relieved of his curial post and went on to write what may be the definitive history of Catholicism in Iran.

A more disinterested remembrancer of those heady days would not have had such access to the intricate workings of the Consilium, and this thin, even epistemologically anorexic, book will long be of interest to ecclesiologists as they study its awkward ballet of resentments and vindications of the sort commonly found in youthful diaries that were not burned in maturity. There are no grays in the book: Champions like Lercaro, Giobbe, and Larraone were “brilliant” and “charismatic” and “progressive,” while anonymous members of the Congregation for Rites were “anchored in the past” and often “overplayed their hand.”

Bugnini was indefatigable in his work and followed the path of his namesake Hannibal crossing the Alps: “We will either find a way, or make one.” The “progressives” promoted an ineffable “spirit of the council” and “knew that the path would not be easy.” Their project was bold: “The liturgy inspired by the council needed to leave behind Tridentine forms in order to embrace the genuine expression of the faith of the whole church.” This involved a malleable treatment of tradition, by which reform became rupture and development meant invention, with little regard for the sensibilities of others, including the Eastern ­churches.

Not disdaining the machinations of politics, the Consilium even assumed some of the work of what is now the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Prescinding from the claim that the liturgists did their preparatory work “patiently and humbly since October 1963 with the pope’s support” in order to be “more pastoral,” Marini fuels the suspicions of conspiracy theorists by admitting: “Unlike the reform after Trent,” the liturgical reform after Vatican II “was all the greater because it also dealt with doctrine.” On May 24, 1964, the pope instituted “an innovation in the administrative structure of the Curia” when he instructed the Congregation for Rites to grant juridical approval to the changes proposed by the ­Consilium.

Marini is not a slave to the principle of noncontradiction. The Consilium was “to reflect the hopes and needs of local churches throughout the world,” but two sentences later Holy Mother Church becomes something of a nanny: “In order to renew the liturgy, it was not enough to issue new directives; it was also necessary to change the attitudes of both the clergy and the lay faithful to enable them to grasp the purpose of the reform.” In case the people thought something was being done to them instead of for them, various means of social communication would be required “in preparing the faithful to welcome the reform.”

The result was implemented on March 7, 1965, with the instruction Inter Oecumenici. Busy hands then set to work in their laboratory to introduce the “broad innovations” that the author says were desired by the council. Some of these matched propositions of the 1786 Synod of Pistoia that Pius VI condemned for its Jansenism. These included vernacularism, elimination of side altars, didactic ceremonial, and astringency of symbols. The versus populum ­posture of the celebrant was taken for granted in the romantic archeologism that Pius XII warned against in Mediator Dei. Translation of the ­lectionary gradually expanded to a practical neglect of Latin. Regrettably, the author seems to take an unedifying satisfaction in how the Congregation for Rites was “marginalized” and “now had to submit to the authority of the Consilium and accept its reform unconditionally.”

To resolve questions between ­plenary meetings, seven bishops of “Consilium Presidentiae” were elected: They were “among the most open-minded and supportive of the Consilium’s role. None of them belonged to the Roman Curia.” In fact, there seem to have been few if any among the reformers who had been pastors. Prelacy was not lost in the move toward “noble simplicity.” Eventually, the author himself was made a titular archbishop while remaining Master of Pontifical Liturgical Celebrations, and he fulfilled his duties diligently, but it was a clerical arrangement in tension with the council’s description in Christus Dominus of a pastoral and evangelical episcopacy.

In 1969, the apostolic constitution Sacra Rituum Congregatio divided the Congregation for Rites into a Congregation for Divine Worship and a Congregation for the Causes of Saints, and, “although Pope Paul VI founded the Congregation for Divine Worship, the idea was conceived and carried out by Bugnini. He was undoubtedly responsible for the appointment of the gentle, collaborative Cardinal Benno Gut.” This halcyon arrangement ended in 1974 with the formation of a Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, which was “probably one of the first signs of a tendency to return to a preconciliar mindset that has for years now characterized the Curia’s approach. As more and more time passes since the Second Vatican Council, an event charged with such hope and desire for renewal, its distinctive contributions seem to be increasingly questioned.” These events were “witnesses to the prophetic vision as well as the limitations of [Paul VI’s] pontificate.”

Considerable erudition was at work in those years, but too often its populism overruled the people. It was like Le Corbusier sketching a new metallic Paris. Marini complains about “a certain nostalgia for the old rites.” In doing so, he contradicts Pope Benedict’s distinction between rites and uses, and he also fails to explain why nostalgia for the 1560s is inferior to nostalgia for the 1960s, except for the dentistry.

The editors of Marini’s A Challenging Reform explain that their aim is to “keep alive” the “vision” of the Consilium, but their diction is a voice in a bunker, embittered by the failure of people to be grateful. If an organism is truly healthy, it does not need a life-support system. Before he became pope, Cardinal Ratzinger said plainly: “We abandoned the organic living process of growth and development over the centuries, and replaced it, as in a manufacturing process, with a process, with a fabrication, a banal on-the-spot product.” In consequence, the fragile construction must be pumped up by multiple Gnostic-Docetic innovations such as dancing (referred to in a prescriptive text as “pious undulations”). Hula dancers at the beatification of Father Damien in 1995 hardly gave a sense of verisimilitude in Brussels. The papal flabella and burning flax having been eliminated as the detritus of imperial Rome, it was even more anachronistic to trumpet the Great Jubilee in modern Rome with costumed men affecting familiarity with the art of blowing elephant tusks.

For all its proponents’ goodness of intention, this kind of thing confuses universality with internationalism, treats the awesome as picturesque, suburbanizes the City of God, and patronizes nations and races. Explaining the ceremonial invented for the papal visit to the people of Mexico in 2002, Marini spoke of “respect for the indigenous” and told an interviewer: “Just as we use holy water, which for us recalls the waters of baptism, forgiveness of sin, and the resurrection, so for them this element of smoke can have a sense of liberation and forgiveness.”

Acts deracinated from the Divine Drama risk becoming the sort of baroque theatre Louis Bouyer disdained in the operatics of an earlier century. As Ratzinger said, “It is a sure sign that the essence of liturgy has totally disappeared and been replaced by a kind of religious entertainment.” Cult becomes cabaret and applause usurps amen.

Perhaps greater contact with pastoral reality would have anticipated the chaos that comes when ardent but misbegotten theories are imposed on the people of God who do not regularly read Notitiae. The blithe obliviousness of many experts to damage all around them is, nonetheless, breathtaking. At times in various lands it is like watching a venerable procession of Alcuin, Ivo of Chartres, Gueranger, Fortescue, and Jungmann and finding, at the end Inspector Clouseau.

Those entrusted with so great a project as the Second Vatican Council would have done better had they not felt obliged to act with such haste. One problem in the frantic rush for deadlines was the inconvenience of the Italian postal system. There will never be another ecumenical council without email.

Copyright (c) 2008 First Things (March 2008).

Confession of a City Priest

Christendom Students Hear Confession of City Priest

October 15, 2002

"Every day I could write a book about what happens in a parish in New York City and I don't mean that as any kind of exaggeration. It would make the world's greatest soap opera. I could make a fortune, of course, if I were not bound by the seal of the confessional," playfully confessed Rev. George Rutler to the Christendom College community on October, 7, 2002.

Speaking on the topic of "The Public Diary of a City Priest," Fr. Rutler, pastor of The Church of Our Saviour in Manhattan, NY, spoke about the important role that priests play in the world today and particularly about the work that he does in the city of New York.

Born in 1945 and reared in the Episcopal tradition in New Jersey and New York, Father Rutler was an Episcopal priest for nine years, and the youngest Episcopal rector in the country when he headed the Church of Good Shepherd in Rosemont, Pennsylvania. He was received into the Catholic Church in 1979 and was sent to the North American College in Rome for seminary studies.

Fr. Rutler was ordained to the diaconate in Rome by His Eminence William Cardinal Baum in 1980 and received priestly ordination in St. Patrick's Cathedral at the hands of His Eminence Terence Cardinal Cooke in 1981. He served as Associate Pastor of St. Joseph's Bronxville; Our Lady of Victory in the Wall Street area; and St. Agnes, Manhattan. He was a university chaplain for the Archdiocese, and also chaplain to a general hospital and a psychiatric hospital. For ten years he was National Chaplain of Legatus, the organization of Catholic business leaders and their families engaged in spiritual formation and evangelization. A board member of several schools and colleges, as well as an advisor to the Board of Christendom College, he is also Chaplain of the New York Guild of Catholic Lawyers and has long been associated with Mother Teresa and her Missionaries of Charity, and other religious orders, as a retreat master. For thirteen years his weekly television program has been broadcast worldwide on EWTN. Cardinal Egan appointed Fr. Rutler pastor of The Church of Our Saviour, effective September 17, 2001.

According to Fr. Rutler, despite what many may think, a parish is the heart of the Church, not the Chancery. The reason the parish is so important is because each parish is made up of many different people and families, and the family is the "domestic church." As a pastor, said Fr. Rutler, one needs to keep reminding oneself of that.

Speaking about the diversity of many parishes, Fr. Rutler explained that Our Lord said that the Church would be like a mustard bush into whose branches all manner of birds would gather. "There is the canary, but there is also the cuckoo; the peacock, but also the vulture. Every parish is this way. This is the glory of the Catholic Church. The more we forget this and the more we neglect it, the more the parish will reflect the kind of subtle protestant eyes of our society, which sees the faithful as a gathering of the righteousness, rather than the ability to be constantly absolved."

Fr. Rutler stressed to the audience the need for and the importance of confessions. "If you only knew what happens in the confessional during lunch hours throughout the week; how lives are changed. So often when I feel I have to leave the confessional because either it's too hot in there or I've had too much tea," quipped Fr. Rutler, "somebody comes in and says ‘Bless me Father, I've never been to confession before,' or ‘Bless me Father, it's been thirty years.' The life changing confessions that happen every day would absolutely astonish our media. It's absolutely true that when a priest has the urge to leave the confessional, it is the devil trying to get him out. It is a tremendous compliment the devil pays the Catholic Church."

But Fr. Rutler believes that one of the many reasons that people do not go to confession very often anymore is that confession times are reduced to sometimes a mere thirty minutes a week in some parishes, if at all. Additionally, the churches themselves are not very aesthetically pleasing or welcoming so many people just never enter them. "It depresses me sometimes to visit other parishes and see Churches that look like living rooms or country clubs, not Catholic churches," remarked Fr. Rutler. "Some have fireplaces, and catering halls, while others have large grand pianos in the center of their buildings. I suppose they think Liberace saved mankind!"

Ending his discussion of priestly work, Fr. Rutler recounted how, on September 11, 2001, as then-pastor of St. Agnes Parish in Manhattan, he spent most of his day at what's now called Ground Zero, hearing confessions and administering the last rites to the many firemen who were to risk their lives for the many victims. In fact, he had been working right next to the one priest who was killed, Fr. Michael Judge. "Everyone who was there was very changed. After this, people began realizing that there is holiness in this world, and there is also evil. These are two things that people have neglected for a long time," concluded Fr. Rutler.

Source: http://www.christendom.edu/news/archives/archives02/georgerutler.shtml

Fr Rutler on William F. Buckley, Jr.

MASS FOR THE REPOSE OF THE SOUL OF WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR.

CATHEDRAL OF SAINT PATRICK

NEW YORK CITY

4 April 2008

Father George William Rutler

"NOW BETHANY WAS NEAR JERUSALEM…." John 11:18

In the village of Bethany was the house of Mary and her sister Martha and their brother Lazarus. There Jesus wept when Lazarus died, and then he called into the tomb and Lazarus came forth alive.

Here is a paradox of holy religion: such utter domesticity is so close to the unutterable mystery of Temple. Bethany was near Jerusalem. About fifteen furlongs. Furlongs. William F. Buckley Jr. could have translated that. It is just a little more than the distance between the corner of Park and 73rd Street and this cathedral. In the life of the one we remember today, his home was never far from Jerusalem. Park Avenue and 73rd Street was near Jerusalem and so were Sharon and Camden and Stamford. The key to all that William was and did is that wherever he was and whatever he did, reading a book or writing one, opening a bottle of wine or sailing some sea, he was near Jerusalem. He left this world from his desk in the garage of the house of the one he most loved who had died less than a year before. Their Bethany was near Jerusalem.

After our friend had published a book about sailing across the Atlantic Ocean, an interviewer on television showed a certain condescension about yachting as a socially useless activity. He found tedious the long descriptions of navigation and asked the author if there is any real difference between sailing from east to west and from west to east. There came from Buckley a response as from an oracle: "Yes. They are opposite directions." Bethany lies east of Jerusalem and to reach the holy city you must travel west. William F. Buckley Jr. has now traveled west. But he started in Bethany where our earthly home is.

He did his work using such domestic tools as words, and though some thought them only amusing and clever, those words were strong enough to help crack the walls of an evil empire. A fatal flaw in the materialist dialectic of Marxism was its underestimation of the power of evil, embracing it like a useful energy. When cynics mocked the very idea of evil, he mocked the mockers, and angered them most by their inability to stay angry in his congenial presence. It was as if an ancient voice could be heard speaking through him: "Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world" (John 16:33).

His indignation at the wrong ways of men was not savage like that of Jonathan Swift, for it was well-tempered and confident of victory. He fit Newman's definition of a gentleman as one who is "merciful towards the absurd." Nearly fifty years ago he wrote, "We deem it the central revelation of Western experience that man cannot irradicably stain himself, for the wells of regeneration are infinitely deep. . . . Even out of the depths of despair, we take heart in the knowledge that it cannot matter how deep we fall, for there is always hope." Once on a retreat, he led the others in praying the Stations of the Cross. The Third Station: Jesus falls a first time. The Seventh Station, Jesus falls a second time. Then with a solemn and astonished voice: the Ninth Station, Jesus falls a third time. He knelt and all of us knelt, and then he got up, and we got up with him.

When he wrote his first book about God and man at the age of twenty-five, and launched his magazine at twenty-nine, the inspiration could have seemed the naïveté of callowness, but now we know it was the courage of innocence. At long last, when he sold his boat and silenced his harpsichord, he suddenly seemed much older. It is inadequate to say that he lasted eighty-two years. It is more resonant with his sonorous life to say that he began four score and two years ago. By one of those quirks which are either inexplicable fate or explicable providence, as a young boy he passed by an airfield in Britain at the very moment the prime minister was waving a piece of paper and proclaiming peace in our time. The rest of his life testified that there can be no concord with evil, for evil always seeks to devour the good, and peace at any price is very expensive.

His first and formative academy was his father's dinner table where he was taught that the most important things in life are God, truth, and beauty. This reverses the classical order of beauty, truth, and goodness, because in Athens the philosophers searched the heavens for a beauty that would explain truth and reveal what is good, while in Sharon the Buckleys believed that the eternal logic of the heavens had come to earth, and by showing goodness in the radiance of his Holy Face, Christ touched us with the truth, and those who were touched became beautiful. Since William Buckley's death, many people have told how he brought them to belief in God, and there are those who became priests because of him. His wide circle of friends encompassed those of different beliefs, but its width was the measure of his own unfailing confidence in the Holy, Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Church. Faithfulness and patience as husband and father, and goodness to others, were joyful because of this. With the Psalmist (Psalm 45:1) his tongue was the pen of a ready writer, and while some write well but do not speak well, or speak well and do not write well, he did both, in a consistent crusade against reducing any human enterprise to a merely human calculus; for then the right to life itself would be at best constitutional but not sacred. Secular humanism is vestigial humanism, charity without a cross, and because it will never lead man up the ladder to heaven, it builds little hells for man on earth. Politics is a bore if it is only politics, and so with any art or science that sees only itself. Our friend knew that Communism was worse than a social tyranny because it was a theological heresy. His categories were not right and left but right and wrong. What graces he had to change a century came by his belief in Christ who has changed all centuries.

At more than a month's remove from his death, a homily yields to that kind of eulogy which he would call precisely a panegyric. The Greeks like Lysias or Isocrates developed this form of speech for Olympiads and other public sporting occasions to see how far an orator could go in praising the dead without actually lying. This does not suit here today for two reasons. Our friend, skier and sailor, was not drawn to public sports arenas. When a friend invited him to a Yankee game, he declined, saying that he had already seen one. More importantly, in the record of his life is little tension between praise and honesty to tease the art of lauding him. By a moral adaptation of a law of optics, he loomed larger the closer you examined him. From his own side of the lens, he saw not according to worldly size or influence. He could write at length on immanentizing the eschaton and also pray the rosary for a schoolboy who was having difficulties with his homework.

One night, he announced it was time for his confession, and we stumbled around the church looking for the light switch. Then he said, "No problem. I can get around this church in the dark." He would have disdained turning that into a cheap metaphor, but he did walk his way through the dark by remarkable paths. Many times the college boy in him still sang "We are poor little lambs/ Who have lost our way. . . . We are little black sheep/Who have gone astray." He may have sung that with perfect insincerity, for he never lost the way, and while he has passed he is not forgotten with the rest. We commend him to his Lord who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. May he now be numbered among the elect, and in this heavenly election he will not demand a recount.

The Lord raised Lazarus from the dead in Bethany and Bethany is not far from Jerusalem. William, who frequently had the last word, wrote this: "Granted, that to look up at the stars comes close to compelling disbelief – how can such a chance arrangement be other than an elaboration – near infinite – of natural impulses? Yet, on the other hand, who is to say that the arrangement of the stars is more easily traceable to nature, than to nature's molder? What is the greater miracle: the raising of the dead man in Lazarus, or the mere existence of the man who died and of the witnesses who swore to his revival?"

Portrait: © Brett Noel, with permission.

The Price of Mediocrity

"The Price of Mediocrity"

by

Father George W. Rutler

"If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me."

Your unworthy preacher comes to this paradisiacal valley by way of a part of New York City called "Hell's Kitchen." So I preach to you from a universal perspective. St. Thomas More said in Utopia that the way to heaven out of all places is of like length and distance. Our Lord spoke of the cross in Caesarea Philippi which is no closer to heaven than this College. But by force of logic we then have to admit, nor is it any closer to hell than this College.

That's the whole point of what he said to Peter and the apostles in words that Matthew and Mark use almost identically. "If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me." Do that and, as St. Teresa of Avila used to say, "You are already in heaven on earth." Don't do that and you are already in hell on earth.

Our Lord said this right after he had asked his apostles who they thought he was. Peter made his confession of faith, "You are the Christ." "Blessed are you Simon Bar Jonah for flesh and blood have not revealed this to you but my Father in heaven." Christ here was using more than a rhetorical device but not less than a rhetorical device: "Blessed are you."

Cicero said the first object of a public orator is to make his audience well disposed. Christ who is Himself the living Word disposes his hearers to consider the mysterious realms of eternity. "Blessed are you Simon Bar Jonah for flesh and blood have not revealed this to you but my Father in heaven."

In one of his Dublin lectures on university education, John Henry Newman said, "Neither Livy nor Tacitus nor Terence nor Seneca nor Pliny nor Quintilian is an adequate spokesman for the Imperial City. They write Latin. Cicero writes Roman." He means that Cicero spoke heart to heart. That was an expression of St. Francis de Sales. Cardinal Newman made that his Cardinalatial motto.

When Christ speaks to us, the Sacred Heart speaks heart-to-heart, and here then is the interplay of the Love that made all things with all things He has made. The Sacred Heart speaks of the cross. It has been said that the crucifixion of Christ is the only drama in history - not the greatest drama, but the only drama. All our great and little adventures define themselves and become tragic or divinely comic according to how they tie in with the cross. So He says we must take up our crosses, and they only become the way to heaven when we carry them through life along the path pointed out by Christ.

There is a jargon-term for rejecting the cross; it is "self-affirmation." Peter did not affirm himself, he affirmed Christ: "Thou art the Christ." Only then could he begin to grasp what he himself was. To deny the self is simply to reject the superficial estimation of who I am.

An old maxim holds that when you are all tied up in yourself, you become a very small package, very small. Such smallness is called mere existence. Denial of the self does not deny our existence. (There are some oriental religions that actually do that, and some forms of modern philosophy, too.) Self-denial means knowing we are all things with Christ and nothing without Him. Self-denial turns existence into life. St. Paul says, "It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me. Pope John Paul II says, "Become what you are." That is a paradox. But paradoxes exist because there is a heaven as well as an earth.

The noblest thinkers of the ancient pagans understood self-denial. It was the key to the life of the virtues and could be summed up in the timeless ideal of the Golden Mean. The seven sages of Greece understood how life is not lived without following the straight and narrow path of integrity. Horace praised those who loved well the Golden Mean, "Auream quisquis mediocritatem diligit."

This life of moderation is not what we popularly mean by moderation. The classical Golden Mean, which Christ transfigured into a life of holiness, is the choice of the good over the convenient and commitment to the true instead of to the plausible. Liberal education is tutelage in that golden path. It is liberal by freeing the scholar from the slavery of the lowest common denominator. Any civilization so wrapped up in itself that it settles for the lowest common denominator quickly bottoms out and rarely rises again, and then only at a dreadful cost to souls. This self-absorption instead of self-denial is what William James scorned when he said, "Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for the better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities."

Virtue then is the desire to observe the Golden Mean. Courage is the mean between cowardice and bravado; magnificence, the mean between vulgarity and miserliness; noble pride, the mean between vanity and servility. In the 18th century, Bishop Berkeley called religion the mean between superstition and incredulity.

Like all gold, the Golden Mean is purified by fire. This is the meaning of the cross. St. John Vianney said, "The worst cross is to have no cross." Common place mediocrity is life without a cross, lukewarmness, and moral tepidity. And the Book of Revelation holds up the Laodiceans as examples of that. Check out your Bible commentaries, they will tell you that Laodicea was a prosperous commercial city southeast of Philadelphia. Anachronistic is he who supposes that means Atlantic City. It is not anachronistic for doctors of souls to spot the Laodicean disease in every modern city.

Mediocrity poses as inclusiveness, populism, condescension, tolerance, modesty, empathy with your pain, broad-mindedness, cheerfulness, and even charity. Mediocrity mumbles from the vapors of moral anesthesia that it does feel your suffering. And this is why modern secular humanism has been called charity without a cross. Mediocrity, that kind of mediocrity, is only the etiquette of sloth, a little road by Laodicea to indecision. And as a sadness of spirit, sloth is an offense against charity. Did the Romans crucify Christ? Did the Jews crucify Christ? No. Sloth crucified Christ.

Pontius Pilate and Herod Antipas finally became friends when they saw in each other their mutual mediocrity. The encyclical Centesimus Annus names the Yalta Conference at the end of the second World War as a paramount symbol of deadly death-dealing compromise. The Pope of that encyclical grew up in a nation crucified because diplomats thought it diplomatically unwise to take up their own crosses. Christ was crucified millions of times in the 20th Century. For every choice of the self over against the will of God is a crucifixion of some soul. When Christ looks back on the 20th Century and all its glorious inventions, inhumane advances notwithstanding, He surely says, "Get behind me Satan."

The Golden Mean is the narrow gate to Jerusalem the Golden. Slothful mediocrity is self-indulgence: the choice of choice for the sake of the choosing. Mediocrity has no standard higher than self-justification. It screams the euphemism pro-choice to exhaust all moral argument. On such a bucolic day as this do not think me unmeasured when I say that mediocrity leads to death. Higher voices than mine have called this a culture of death. And that expression seems ridiculous only to the mediocre.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt said that the Nazi architect of so many horrors, Adolf Eichmann, incarnated the banality of evil. He did not look dramatically wicked. He did not speak with the decibels of deep darkness. He was a mediocrity. His system massaged the economic and philosophic conceits of his age.

That's what made him the tool of the prince of lies whose hell is the unholy hall of half-life where mediocrity is not a little way at all, it's the only way. The acid rejection of the Way, the Truth and the Life. And that is why the Lord said to Peter, "get behind me Satan." For it was Satan who moved Peter in his weak moment right after his exalted confession of faith. He analyzed Christ only according to his own standards of happiness and success. And Peter wanted to prevent Christ from taking up His cross. He was not denying himself, he was denying God.

The doleful days of our culture of death are distinguished in this. For all the words uttered, and never have there been so many, they are almost entirely forgettable. Our age of communication is not an age of communion. The rhetoric of cyberspace speaks heartlessly not heart to heart as our Lord spoke in Caesarea Philippi. In the civil order, after years in public office, it is possible for political leaders to have said nothing lapidary, no phrase worthy of granite, no sentence to be cherished in the national memories valiant, not a maxim decent to great government, nary a motto with which any father could make a brave benediction over his sons or could serve a mother in delighting her daughters.

Surely our age has no lack of great events to inspire great declarations or grand challenges to provoke grander deeds. But the bold words and heroes of the words are few. The Golden Mean has been counterfeited by gilded meanness. Virtuous souls speak words worthy of great legacies-but souls that have bargained for less than virtue speak words that are sleek and not serene, spinning the truth but not telling the truth. Gandhi listed seven tragedies in such a gilded life: politics without principle, wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without charity, commerce without morality, science without humanity, and worship without sacrifice.

The lazier people are, the more will they allow mediocrity to serve the government, the courts, the arts, and even the churches. Mediocrity is mellow, it's diction mellifluous. Mediocrity wants to be dazzled but not enlightened. It begs the consolations of power estranged from its obligations. It demands in every act the right to choose without the duty to choose life. It claims freedom to express the self but not to express things higher than the self. It marks no division between feeling good and being good. It prays for godliness without god and a temporal world without end. Mediocrity unwinds history and withers the drama of man, so that thousands of years after Moses heard the voice saying, "I am Who I am," compromised men ask what "is" is.

There are lesser and wrong forms of self-denial. There was for instance the pessimistic asceticism of the Gnostics, the Puritans, the Jansenists. It was summed up in that greatly misguided line from the film The African Queen when the missionary lady says "nature is what we are put on earth to overcome." And there is a dangerous tendency to that among many Catholics who consider themselves conservers of the Sacred Tradition. Sometimes the pessimism actually takes the form of suicide, sometimes cultic suicide, sometimes medical suicide.

A few years ago the Hemlock Society published a book on how to kill yourself called Final Exit. When that book was first published our nations largest chain of bookstores placed it in the section called Self-Improvement. There is also a wrong kind of social self-denial when the problems of society are analyzed without reference to the reality of evil at the root of all crime and injustice and despair. That was summed up in the words of the Mayor of one of our greatest cities who said, "The crime rate isn't so bad if you just don't count the murders."

Christ calls us to another kind of denial. It is summed up in the Easter Vigil, "Do you reject Satan?" At one Easter Vigil, and during the infelicities of a bad English translation, I was surprised to hear a priest ask the congregation, "Do you reject Satan, using option number one?" Well there is no option number two or three. There is only the option to live or die.

The Golden Mean is hard to find and to live it heroically is even harder; it is even impossible without the grace of God. While so great a man as Aristotle thought the greatest happiness could be found in a life of virtue, St. Thomas Aquinas and all the saints have known that blessed joy comes finally in union with God. For the Golden Mean truly is Christ Himself.

I suppose every college calls itself alma mater but not every college is like this in knowing what alma mater means. The beloved Mother teaches the art of living by teaching the art of dying to the self. Mothers save things and pass them on; mothers remember things and sing them to us, sometimes in cradle songs, sometimes in the greatest symphonies of culture.

After my mother died recently, I had the hard and also inspiring task of going through closets and finding what she had counted as treasures. But which were in a worldly sense nothing at all. She had not saved my doctoral diplomas but she did save the first words I ever wrote. Going through all those boxes I remembered once when we were in disagreement about something that should be done, and she said, "Remember, however old you are, I am still your mother." I regret to say that I replied starchily that Christ had said, "Who is my mother?" And she replied, "Well, I am sure He did not say it in that tone of voice."

Holy Mother Church passes on the word of God. In the Scriptures Jesus says, "Take up your cross." He meant a real cross but he did not say it crossly. His tone of voice was different from those voices which have rattled history from the lips of demagogues and tyrants. These are the words of love without which we cannot know much, however clever we may be. It is a love worth dying for so that we might live forever.

Source: http://www.thomasaquinas.edu/news/newsletter/2001/summer/rutler.htm

Baccalaureate Homily, Thomas Aquinas College, Santa Paula, California, June 9, 2001

Souls and Bodies

SOULS AND BODIES

George W. Rutler

Christendom College Commencement Address,

May 14, 1989

On this happy occasion in such verdant countryside, you will not think it odd, I hope, if I begin by saying something about the ancient Egyptian method of embalming. Given the superior education you have received here, you most likely are familiar with this and with most other things. But it is interesting to me, at least, that when a Pharaoh or some other celebrity of the Nile Valley was mummified, everything was preserved except the brain. Ornate receptacles were prepared for the liver, heart and lungs because each of these was considered important. But the brain was thrown away; for no one, not the royal physicians or the priests of Isis could figure out what it was for.

The situation is different today. We do preserve the brain. I understand that a few miles up the road in our nation's capital there even are think tanks. In higher education, the system of mummifying brains is an expensive process called academic tenure. But for all that, we have not progressed. You could actually say we have frightfully regressed. For now there is another part of the human being which is discarded by scientists and even by theologians who have forgotten its purpose: I speak of the soul. The whole body is preserved now, but the soul is lost. There are schools for brains, and health clubs for the body, hearts can be transplanted and bodies frozen, the seed of life is juggled in test tubes and yet the soul is thrown away. A nation will rivet its attention on efforts to preserve even the bodies of whales, while professional voices deny that the soul of a baby means anything.

It may seem that the soul is no more fitting a subject for a commencement address than Egyptian embalming. The great Duke of Wellington said it is a dreadful thing when religion begins to interfere with the conduct of one's private life. I say not so. The crisis in education today is caused by the ignorance of the holy economy which fits body and soul together. Secular education has tried to feed the organs of the body while starving the soul. What has been the result? Writers secular and religious have admitted that universities and colleges at the end of the modern age have become factories of childish moralism and the welcoming refuge of arrested development. Some of the most distinguished complainers, like Professor Alan Bloom of the University of Chicago, only compound the problem: they make a good appeal for a classical revival, but in an aesthetic sense without a higher moral authority. They speak of virtue apart from grace. Their heroes are charming figures like Rousseau and Kant who were moral frauds and who largely caused the form of ignorance called modernism which we are beginning to scorn in retrospect. As you graduate, you may take pride in the knowledge that your college has been founded as part of the rediscovery of the soul in the life of the intellect.

The history of Christian doctrine in large measure has been the history of defining the mutual dignity of souls and bodies. Sad but impassioned sagas of Christian heresies have been stories of how people give wrong accounts of what happened when God Himself took flesh. An obligation to form the moral person is binding on what is known as secular education as much as it is on religious education. But humility should make Catholics so free of human respect that they are willing to assert this truth: education is incomplete if it does not conclude in the vision of God. The universal intuition of Catholicism gave the world the university, and only a renaissance of Catholic thought, regardless of the cost in human terms, can bring scholarship to its full potential. Thus John Henry Newman spoke: The Catholic Creed is one whole, and Philosophy is one whole; each may be compared to an individual, to which nothing can be added, from which nothing can be taken away. They may be professed, but there is no middle ground between professing and not professing. A University, so called, which refuses to profess the Catholic Creed, is, from the nature of the case, hostile both to the Church and to Philosophy.

—Now by "Philosophy" Newman meant not wisdom or knowledge or science or judgment, but a habit of mind which sees through ideology. It is an illumination which challenges the pedant, cracks the cliche, and enables the intellect to meet what Newman called the great infidel questions of the day. The questions of his day remain the questions of day, and are written even more darkly on the cracking walls of the modern age: is there a difference between the liberal arts and secular liberalism? is there a difference between moral freedom and political liberation? is there a difference between truth and utilitarianism? Only the Catholic vision is wide enough to give full answers. Therefore academic freedom is free precisely when it is freedom for Christ's truth and not freedom from it. Surely there is no particular way to be a Catholic engineer or a Catholic lawyer; but there is a way to be an engineer or a lawyer who is a Catholic; and that is to be a good one. This cannot be done unless the result of one's work conforms to the law's of God's universe.

To this end, the Holy See has mandated a profession of faith and a new oath of fidelity to the Teaching Church. They cannot compromise the freedom of the intellect; they can only form that freedom while exiling any deformation of it. Newman required all officers and professors of his new Catholic University of Ireland to make a profession of the Catholic faith according to the formula of Pope Pius IV. In American history, the Declaration of Independence only declared independence from another order; it became the guarantor of freedom when its assertions were obeyed according to sacred honour. In a culture riddled with academies which have liberated themselves from humane discourse and the life of the virtues, the authentic Catholic college is a beacon of moral freedom because it obeys the Truth. Colleges such as Christendom will secure freedom so long as their teachers affirm that they share the mind of Christ, a thing arrogant to say by one's self, but sane when one shares the mind of the holy Doctors of the Church and the Vicar of Christ.

The twilight of this century broods over a dying form of intellectual slothfulness known as modernism. Its essence is subscription to ideology instead of truth. Albert Einstein warned his generation not to expect the intelligentsia to be brave in a moral crisis. As the modernist rejected the prophetic demands of sacred tradition, so does the reactionary who invokes that tradition to canonize his own prejudices. Honest Catholic scholars hold neither false progressivism nor reaction against the future. They abide by the truth which will sanctify the future. On the campuses of the world today, from the venerable halls of the Western nations to the greatest square of China, students once again are rebelling; but this time the rebellion is against the rebels, challenging the false orthodoxies of materialism which denied the existence of the soul. The present academic order is threatened and angry because it boasted of being a perpetually new order. Tin sages who taught that God was dead and man had come of age now hear rumours of new saints as they watch themselves aging beyond maturity into oblivion. This is the time for Catholic scholars to speak the truth, for some have been to speak. Indeed, they let the cynics speak for them, and so in these recent years they came close to bartering the entire patrimony of Catholic scholarship for the abbreviated social vision of the 1960's. The current educational reforms by the Holy See would redress this capitulation.

As a response, untutored neo-conservatism is no more valid than modernism, nor will the Yuppie redeem the Yippie. The truth which secures the health of souls and bodies in the year 1989 will be the truth which secures it in the year 2089, and secured it when Newman entered his last year teaching it in 1889, and when Anselm proclaimed it against Rufus in 1089, and when Augustine prayed it on the sands of Tagaste in 389, and when John the Apostle thundered it beneath Asian skies in 89. I do not know what sense any of them would have made of the term "academic freedom". I should think each would have said: any freedom in the academy is a form of obedience to the laws of the academy, and that the academy is not an academy at all whose laws are not true to God Who is the Truth.

A popular motion picture this year tells the story of an American high school which had become a virtual den of everything except learning. To this day, the sociologists and politicians and educators of the last generation whose theories encouraged that school's degeneration are still not indicted for their social delinquency. With whatever flawed methods, only that school's principal had the courage to try to invoke some kind of institutional reform based on character reform. I have keen memories of my high school: the opportunities it offered regardless of race or rank, its graduates who included world famous poets, athletes, actors, and a winner of the Nobel Prize for curing polio; its honest and healthy sporting life, its curriculum which opened the world of Latin letters to me when I was twelve years old, its stern and sacrificing teachers, and the pride the old town took in it. Of the two best friends in my class, one is a distinguished rabbi and the other an aid to the Dalai Lama. Everyone I suppose embellishes one's golden school days. But here is my point: that school shown in the film, riddled with drugs and patrolled by security guards is the same school I attended. Only twenty years marked the change. In one generation that kind of thing can happen. Not because of poverty, not because of crime, not because of social change, but because of a loss of moral vision. And until that is repaired, as only the splendour of virtue can repair it, more barbarians will smash more gates. Demagogues and vulgarians are chanting on the campuses of America, "Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western culture's got to go". The time has come for the heirs of the scholastic tradition to cry with a recovered voice: "You who say that must go."

I do not want to end these remarks as I heard a college president end not long ago. He raised his arms and said to the graduates, "May you find satisfaction." That is the way to send robots out into a world of neon lights and stainless steel. I trust you have learned why Socrates found truth in discontent, and why the unsatisfied heart of Augustine became happy when it rested in God. You are Bachelors of Arts, and you have learned quite a lot. But I hope you have learned what to do with the restless intellect, and the restless imagination, and the restless will. For you are entering a world which does not know what to do with these articles of the soul, as those ancient Egyptians did not know what to do with the brain. When they find their proper rest in God our Creator, you do not have a mummy, you have a saint.

At a ceremony, I watched the face of Bishop Ignatius Kung Pin Mei of Shanghai who spent some thirty years in prison for confessing his loyalty to the Roman Catholic Church and the Roman Pontiff. There were distractions on that occasion and the air was full of the trivial rhetoric which too frequently marks gatherings in our comfortable part of the Church. But the Bishop of Shanghai sat quietly praying his rosary, with an ineffable smile on his face. Perhaps we should give posthumous degrees in theology to Lenin and Hitler and Mao, because they have shown the world despite themselves how to educate heroic men and women in the peace which surpasses all understanding.

There are those who say the liberal arts are useless. They say that who are slaves of this world. Your diploma is most useful: it is a license to go out now and be holy. You do not need a degree to do it. But you do need a body and soul. You have both.

Rev. George W. Rutler holds his doctorate in theology from the Angelicum University in Rome. He is currently Associate Pastor of St. Agnes Church in New York City.