Author Archive: Clement Wee

Benedict XVI: Reconciling diversity

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The pope who started to reach the peripheries outside of Rome

It has been three months since Pope Emeritus Benedict died in Rome. There are three things, in my opinion, that characterises his life as Pope.

The first, as many have pointed out, is his Christology and the theology associated with it. The influence of his theology has been felt not only in the Catholic Church, but even among adherents of the Orthodox Church and Protestants. Just before his last birthday, a group of Protestant theologians published an anthology of essays discussing his theology. They appear to be thoughtful appraisals.

The second is his resignation which shocked the world and will mark his papacy far into the distant future. He was the fifth pope to abdicate and the first in 600 years, and like Celestine V did so voluntarily without the force of extenuating circumstances. Of course, there has been speculation this was not the case. This, despite Benedict XVI giving his reasons for stepping down: “After having repeatedly examined my conscience before God, I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry.”

The third, is that he was placed between two Popes whose reigns involve major events within and without the Church. Pope John Paul II is noted for standing up against European communism that eventually fell. Pope Francis is overseeing a structural reform of the Church.

Compared to that Pope Benedict XVI is what the College of Cardinals had hoped for in the 1950s when they elected John XXIII as Pope. Benedict XVI, before and during his papacy, was noted as a shy and reserved man who practised a quiet piety to the status quo. As Joseph Ratzinger and head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of Faith previously, he was a safe choice against an increasingly radical world.

This third is his contribution to the conceptual remodelling of the Church. There are two reasons why this element will be neglected for some time. The first is the reason above and second is that there is an obsessive focus in the secular media on the part Nazism played in the early life of Joseph Ratzinger.

And the energy Church apologists paid to counter this Nazi Pope narrative prevents them from looking at the other interesting aspect of Germany. The country was the homeland to the Reformation in the 1500s, and since the end of the Thirty Years’ War from 1618 to 1648, has had an almost even balance of Protestants and Catholics. Unlike England, which had granted Catholics emancipation, or France, which was stridently secular, Catholics and Protestants in Germany had been interacting with each other regularly by the time Ratzinger was born in 1927.

No Longer Heretics

Protestant and Catholic scholars alike have recognised that Benedict’s theology was very much influenced by the Tubingen School of Protestant theology, even though it was loyal to the concept of papal authority.

Beyond those understandable influences, though, there was also his personal sentiment. As early as 1960, he published his book titled The Meaning of the Christian Brotherhood, where he made this stunning claim:

There is no appropriate category in Catholic thought for the phenomenon of Protestantism today (one could say the same of the relationship to the separated churches of the East). It is obvious that the old category of ‘heresy’ is no longer of any value. Heresy, for Scripture and the early Church, includes the idea of a personal decision against the unity of the Church, and heresy’s characteristic is pertinacia, the obstinacy of him who persists in his own private way. This, however, cannot be regarded as an appropriate description of the spiritual situation of the Protestant Christian.

In the course of a now centuries-old history, Protestantism has made an important contribution to the realisation of Christian faith, fulfilling a positive function in the development of the Christian message and, above all, often giving rise to a sincere and profound faith in the individual non-Catholic Christian, whose separation from the Catholic affirmation has nothing to do with the pertinacia characteristic of heresy. Perhaps we may here invert a saying of St. Augustine’s: that an old schism becomes a heresy. The very passage of time alters the character of a division, so that an old division is something essentially different from a new one.

Something that was once rightly condemned as heresy cannot later simply become true, but it can gradually develop its own positive ecclesial nature, with which the individual is presented as his church and in which he lives as a believer, not as a heretic. This organization of one group, however, ultimately has an effect on the whole. The conclusion is inescapable, then: Protestantism today is something different from heresy in the traditional sense, a phenomenon whose true theological place has not yet been determined.

Pope Benedict XVI

This entire paragraph can be summed up in one line: Protestants today are not heretics because they are not actively working against the unity of the Church. In fact, in the early 1910s and 20s, Protestants had worked towards the unity of the Church, but in a way that the papal administrations of Pius X and Pius XI failed to perceive.

However, the most important phrase in this paragraph is the “positive ecclesial nature”. It would haunt Ratzinger four decades later. In 2000, a mini-controversy erupted over the decision in Dominus Iesus to refer to Protestant churches as “ecclesial communities”. When the German press questioned him about this, he was puzzled that Protestants reacted so vehemently to a simple academic categorisation.

Their response is easily attributable to the Protestants believing that Ratzinger the academic was making a socio-political categorisation. Certainly, his supporters as well as his opponents in the secular media were quick to exploit this misconception. To Ratzinger, however, his was a technical categorisation to recognise that Protestants do not consider a specific hierarchical structure as an essential component of the faith, even as they recognise the presence of biblical offices such as pastor and prophet, and even apostle.

It is a testament to Ratzinger’s sharpness that he distinguished a rejection of fixed hierarchy from the tendency to anarchy. Because of this order, therefore, Protestants can be said to live within their ecclesial communities as bona fide Christian believers.

It is clear that between 1960 and 2000, and in fact up to 2007 when the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith published a clarification on Dominus Iesus, his opinion of Protestants didn’t change, nor did his opinion on how “cramped” the thinking in the Holy See was before Vatican II.

His attitude on Protestants was no doubt also influenced by the effect of the Nazi regime. With many Germans, he shared the horror of Nazism, but concurrently he also experienced the heroism of Protestants as well. Catholic lay and clergy were not the only ones who resisted the Nazi regime.

This presumably allowed him to empathise with later Popes’ concept of the “Ecumenism of Blood”.

No Longer Roman

During his papacy, Benedict performed one action that probably barely registered on the radar of the Catholic press, but irritated the Orthodox Church. That act was dropping the title of “Patriarch of the West”. The Russian Patriarch issued an official complaint to the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity that the Pope was breaking olive branches with Eastern Orthodox Church for failing to acknowledge his historical jurisdiction.

Benedict didn’t respond, as he did not over this issue of “ecclesial communities”.

There was a very logical reason to drop the title: the West no longer exists. At least, it does not exist in the sense of the Church as it refers to the long-defunct Western Roman Empire. In the logical mind of an academic like Ratzinger, the terms “Western Church” and “Eastern Church” are anachronisms.

There is also a more sociological reason to drop the title. The Orthodox protested because they operate from the milieu where the Roman people and Roman Church were joined at the head, since that is how the Orthodox Churches perceive themselves. Russian Orthodox, for instance, sees itself as the Church for Russians and by Russians. So, when the Russians or other Orthodox adherents look at the Catholic Church around the world, they see some sort of Church outside of Rome, rather than a local Church in communion with Rome. In the Russian Orthodox world, there is actually an institution called the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR).

The Catholic milieu is different because of the Lateran Treaty that was signed in 1929. Prior to this, the Holy See held that the Pope was head of state of the Papal States, which included Rome. In that scenario, the Roman people were joined with the Roman Church at the head, which was the Pope. With the advent of the Lateran Treaty, the Pope was placed outside the boundaries of Italy, and the Roman people were now headed by the King of Italy instead of the Pope.

Ratzinger hence came of age in this setup where the Pope was now in Rome, but not head of the city. As the title “Patriarch of the West” reflects this national link, the title has become irrelevant.

Benedict is the Pope who marks the end of the transition from the old throne-altar milieu into the new pastoral milieu.

This provided him with a vantage point from which to build his signature concept of reconciled diversity. He demonstrated this in practice with his establishment of the Anglican ordinariate, as well as his participation in many ecumenical endeavours.

By freeing the Papacy from Roman chains, this milieu enabled Benedict XVI to conceive the Papacy anew as an exchange terminus for different ways of living as a Christian under the same Truth of Christ. Pope Francis has developed this further into the concept of the Church as a polyhedron that he has written into some of his encyclicals.

This brings us back to “De-Hellenisation”. In warning against it, Benedict was cautioning against excluding the old Aristotelian patrimony entirely from this new diversity. He wasn’t asserting that it should have returned to its previous privilege that it had possessed since the beginning of the Counter-Reformation.

Rome Off-Centre

The final position of Benedict XVI on the Church can be clearly seen in a response to Cardinal Walter Kasper that he wrote in the America Magazine when he accused Ratzinger and Pope Saint John Paul II of turning back the clock on Vatican II by covertly endorsing Roman centralism in Dominus Iesus.

Ratzinger’s response was unequivocal: neither John Paul II nor he wished to overturn Vatican II’s recognition that the Roman Church is not identical to the Universal Church. And as Pope, he was the bishop of the Universal Church, not the Roman Church.

And now, it would seem that Pope Francis has paid the best possible kudos to his predecessor by reaching to the peripheries outside of Rome.

No wonder both of them were on such good terms after Benedict’s resignation!

Saint Teresa of Calcutta’s dark night of the soul

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Despite feeling God’s absence during long periods of her life, she never lost faith

Earlier this month the Catholic Church celebrated 25 years of Mother Teresa of Calcutta’s sainthood on her feast day on 5 September.

That she is a saint is a fact pretty much universally accepted, even outside the Catholic Church. Among the hordes of secular media, the Economist, in particular, waxed lyrical about the petite South-eastern European native. It is unusual because the news fraternity doesn’t normally have a fondness for religious figures or groups, much less Christianity.

Born on 26 August 1910 in Skopje, Mother Teresa started helping the poor, destitute and hungry in the slums of India while on a retreat in Calcutta in 1946. A group of young women joined her and four years later she founded the Missionaries of Charity dedicated to this work. Her religious congregation expanded around the world and today has over 5,000 sisters continuing her mission among the poor.

Despite her dedication to the destitute and dying, there was a minority few who were fiercely vocal against the canonisation of the naturalised Indian nun who died on 5 Sept 1997. And they did not only come from leading New Atheist figures such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins but from some prominent Catholic commentators as well.

Mother Teresa dedicated her life to caring for the poor, sick and destitute.

Why were they critical of her?

A likely reason is what she wrote in the book, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light. In it, the saint disclosed that throughout a long period in her life, she had felt a great distance between her and God. This flew in the face of most people’s perception of saints. In the popular imagination, they are thought to be people with halos around their heads to signify their closeness to God. They are supposed to walk in His presence and favour all the time. Perhaps, they are even supposed to see visions of angels!

The dark night of the soul

Instead, Mother Teresa seemed to be confessing to some sort of spiritual emptiness. Literally, the absence of God in her life! What, then, was behind her impassioned speeches and works of charity? Were they spiritual frauds?

There is a tradition in the Church to understand and explain this: it is the Dark Night of the Soul – a stage of spiritual purification where the Christian feels that God is severely absent from her or his life. An example is Job in the Old Testament. He was an extremely upright and virtuous man, and yet subjected to torments as though God was not present in his life. Scripture does not tell us how long his dark night lasted, but it seems to have been long enough for his wife to give up faith in God and for his friends to regard it as something serious. That is, it lasted for more than a single night.

The term “dark night” is not a reference to chronological time. It is a reference to the Bible verse that “weeping endures only in the night, and joy comes in the morning” (Psalms 30: 5). In Mother Teresa’s case, the dark night seems to have lasted for her entire adult life.

Saint John of the Cross described this concept in his poem Dark Night of the Soul. According to the mystic, it is a stage of purgation or purification of a soul from sin. It is when the sinner is exposed fully to how sinful and far away from God he is that he can make the path to heavenly virtue. As the saying goes, God reveals to redeem. There are two stages in this purgation: the physical stage which deals with appetites for material goods and the spiritual stage, which deals with spiritual tendencies.

The dark night of the soul is when God withdraws all spiritual and physical consolations from a person so that the Almighty refiner’s fire can work on him. God makes the person feel as if he has been abandoned by Him. However, the best analogy is to imagine that there is a river between God and the person, and the Lord is cheering for the subject to swim over to Him. And this is the last hurdle, like the final boss on a video game level.

The dark night of the soul does not occur at the beginning of a faith journey. It happens when a person is reaching the end of one level of a relationship.

Despite her dark nights, Mother Teresa remained dedicated to her mission.

One of the Canterbury Tales, the Clerk’s Tale, tells of a man, who, after being impressed by his wife’s fortitude, decides to test her. First, he removes their children by pretending to kill them and then finally decides to divorce his wife and marry a younger girl. When she takes all this in submissive stride, he finally relents and reveals the younger girl is in reality their daughter. Divorce and remarriage are, therefore, shams. This allows the wife to ascend into the next stage of the husband’s affections.

God does not abandon a soul

In the same way, this is what a dark night of the soul is. It is God’s issuing a final ordeal before a person achieves the status of saint. Without undergoing it, there is no justification to stand before the Throne of God.

Because the dark night of the soul is primarily a spiritual phenomenon, a person can still be strong enough, as Mother Teresa was, to do supreme acts of charity. The purpose of the dark night, after all, is to strengthen and not destroy the soul. This is unlike depression, which is a tool of the Devil to destroy the spirit.

This explains how Mother Teresa could still be so inspiring to others even while supposedly being distant from God. This is because He was still in her, even though to her, it seems this was not the case.

Far from being fraudulent, Saint Teresa of Calcutta was experiencing a closeness to God that most people can only dream of. Her experience proves to us, as believers, the true degree of her sanctity while still living on Earth.

It is something we all should aspire to.

A sovereign God of nations and the universe

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He governs by Divine Providence, intervenes in human affairs at specific moments

Not a day passes by that when we watch the news on television or read the newspapers there is always something contentious going on somewhere in the world that causes us to worry. Wars, threats of conflict, the rise of dictators and autocrats, terrorists killing innocent people or some kind of catastrophe that threaten the safety and survival of communities.

Often, it seems as though we are approaching the Parousia or Second Coming of Christ that 2 Tim 3:1-5 says will be preceded by,

Terrifying times in the last days. People will be self-centered and lovers of money, proud, haughty, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, irreligious, callous, implacable, slanderous, licentious, brutal, hating what is good, traitors, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, as they make a pretense of religion but deny its power. Reject them.

But, in our trepidation, we forget that we have a loving God who is in control of everything. Sometimes we forget this even when we seem to remember the point because we unconsciously limit God to what He controls in our lives. But our lives are small and insignificant in comparison to the big things like COVID or the Russia-Ukraine War. Our God is in control of everything, but not truly everything.

So, let us return to the Book of Genesis, to the chapter that literally titled “The Table of Nations”. And let’s read each of the words there. They are not just words or names of people but of countries in the ancient world. Adam, Noah and Abraham were not only individuals, they were also the founding fathers – in a literal sense – of nations.

The Book of Genesis’ stories are about individuals and their relationship with God. At the same time, they are allegories and folk histories of the relationships between Israel and her neighbours in the exilic and post-exilic periods. For example, Esau’s countenance could be used to explain why Persians are tough people.

Abraham, along with Adam and Noah, was the founding father of nations

God intervenes in history when He wills

In his catechesis on 11 March 1998, Pope John Paul II teaches that “As we face the rather slow growth of God’s kingdom in the world, we are asked to trust in the plan of the merciful Father who guides all things with transcendent wisdom”.

Jesus, he says, “invites us to admire the ‘patience’ of the Father, who adapts His transforming action to the slowness of human nature wounded by sin. This patience was already revealed in the Old Testament, in the long history which prepared Jesus’ coming. It continues to be revealed after Christ, in the growth of his Church”.

Jesus speaks of “times” (chrónoi) and “seasons” (kairoí). These two words for time in biblical language have two nuances which are worth recalling. Chrónos is time in its ordinary course and is also under the influence of divine Providence, which governs everything. But into this ordinary flow of history God makes his special interventions, which give a particular saving value to specific moments. These are precisely the kairoí, God’s seasons, which man is called to discern and by which he must allow himself to be challenged.

Pope St John Paul II, 11 March 1998

If we bear in mind this perspective, the Old Testament becomes an epic of international history told through the eyes of Israel – and of God. This God determines the fate of nations by moving people around. If you are a millennial, you may compare this to positioning a hero unit in a real-time strategy game.

In Genesis, God moves Joseph out of Canaan to Egypt. This single action ends up affecting the fates of not one, but two, nations: Israel and Egypt. In Exodus, God takes Moses up the Nile to the Pharoah’s Palace and orchestrates a new season for Israel and Egypt again. As Israel moves through the desert, they encounter many other smaller tribes and nations, and their histories are likewise affected.

The Book of Jonah seems to tell the story of a single errant prophet. As it turns out, however, Jonah was no amateur prophet. He was employed as a professional court prophet in Israel. So he took his embassy to Nineveh not only as a personal mission to the King of the city, but also as a diplomatic mission between Israel and Nineveh, which was the capital of one of Israel’s most fearsome enemy, the Assyrians. At the time Assyria was a superpower just as America and China are today.

And again, in the Book of Esther, God raises Esther to be Queen of Persia. She becomes a bridge between Israel and the Persian Empire. The Jews also believed another Persian, Cyrus the Great, was sent by God to liberate Israel from the Babylonians.

We could say that God works on a chessboard of nations, like a big Risk board. And He knows which pieces to move in order to produce effects in history we can only dream of. God is like an expert chess player who thinks of moves several moves or years in advance.

If we try to look at things from His perspective, we may have a different outlook on history. While much of it may be speculation, it is a good exercise, nonetheless.

Let’s take a normal history question: Why did the British surrender Singapore to the Japanese? The secular reasons, if you are around Asia, should be quite well known. But let’s try a theological spin on the question: Why did God allow the British to lose Singapore to the Japanese? Could we apply a Bible verse to this historical event?

As it turns out, there are two that can fit:

“So, the last shall be first, and the first last”. (Mt 20:14)

“Pride goeth before destruction, and haughtiness before a fall.” (Proverbs 16:18)

The second can work because the British were proud of their belief in the 1930s of their “Empire on which the sun never sets”. They didn’t think much of the threat posed by the Japanese, the Empire of the Rising Sun. And, so, we could speculate that God used the Japanese to bring down Britain’s empire in the East.

If we follow this line of reasoning from Proverbs, the British loss of Singapore, Malaya and Burma was a punishment for their imperial over-confidence.

Matthew 20 can also fit because the Japanese were perceived as the last of the Allies at the end of the First World War, even after they had defeated the Russians. In the Second World War, they became the first in the Far East, eclipsing even China in the process.

But Matthew’s verse also works because of another reason that would not be obvious to a secular historian. After the Second World War, Britain lost its position as the world’s leading superpower.

The country that replaced Britain was the United States, which broke away from the United Kingdom in the 18th Century because they perceived that England was bullying them. From then and right up to the 20th Century, the US was the last of the world’s superpowers, even technically after Japan.

Along these lines, we could speculate that God used the Second World War to reshuffle the balance of power between Britain and the US!

Christ’s vicar, the Pope, is a sovereign religious leader. Image: Unsplashed, Agatha Depine.

Outside the realm of secular nations, in Christianity, we are also taught that the Church is a “holy nation” or the New Israel. Catholicism goes a step further to say that the Church is a visible sovereign government headed by the Pope.

Lumen Gentium (1964) defines the Church as such: “This Church constituted and organised in the world as a society” (LG 76).

The Catholic Church is sovereign

The Church is a society that is complete. That is, She preserves sovereignty separate from all other powers on Earth. The Pope is not just a religious leader, he is a sovereign religious leader. His sovereignty differentiates him from all other religious leaders, including those of other Christian communities. The Church, like the United Kingdom, Singapore, the US or China, is a sovereign nation. Just that it is not one defined by territorial boundaries, but by allegiance given to Jesus Christ.

As the Church is sovereign, She operates at the same level as secular states. When we think of God as literally sovereign, we can understand why the Church is so adamantly against the “privatisation” of religion. As a sovereign society, the Church possesses Her own public sphere that is distinct from the private sphere of Her members, including the clergy.

Participation in the public sphere is an acknowledgement of sovereignty since only a sovereign possesses a public sphere to operate in.

The sovereign interacts with subjects is his sole discretion. In the case of the Church, the true Sovereign is Jesus Christ, and – as taught in Scripture – He seeks to form a personal, brotherly relationship with all of us who are His subjects.

As Catholics, sometimes we hear our Protestant brethren talking about having a personal relationship with God, and may see some Catholic apologists argue against that belief. We may also see the Pope recently very frequently talking about Catholics building a personal relationship with God.

Is the Pope becoming more Protestant, or are those apologists making a mistake? Pope Francis is definitely not becoming more Protestant. The apologists may be making a mistake in some cases, but in most cases, they are trying to argue something totally different.

Sometimes, the Protestant approach risks turning Jesus into some sort of Agony Uncle or coffee shop buddy. But Christ is more than any Christian’s personal assistant or Good Samaritan. He is the Sovereign over all of creation. Therefore, our moral and faith life is not only a matter of private, secret practice, but also something in the public sphere – of laws and government.

Note the term “laws and government”. To govern is more than passing laws and enforcing them. Governing, like other types of leadership, also has a ‘softer’ side. Too often, however, Christians – Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox alike – tend to focus just on the legal aspect. This presents a picture of a God Who is cold, formal and distant, rather than One who cares to establish a familial relationship with His creation.

God is a God of Nations. But, more precisely, He is a God of people organised into Nations and, so, He values interpersonal connections more than procedures and rubrics.

The most important thing to remember is: Nations are first and foremost people before they are procedural administrative structures.

Desiderio Desideravi: Christ’s passion for all humanity

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In Apostolic Letter, Pope Francis takes us to the heart of the Eucharist in the Mass

If you translate the title of Pope Francis’ latest Apostolic Letter, Desiderio Desideravi, it reads “With desire I have desired”. The significance of a repetitive word may not be apparent to the English reader.

But in Latin, as in some Asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese and even Malay-Indonesian, it captures the essence of what it means. Desiderio Desideravi is taken from the Church’s Latin Vulgate of Luke 22:15, “et ait illis desiderio desideravi hoc pascha manducare vobiscum antequam patiar.” In English it is, “And he said to them: With desire I have desired to eat this pasch with you, before I suffer”.

To emphasise its meaning, the bibles of most Catholic dioceses around the world translate it as “I have ardently longed” (New Jerusalem Bible) or “I have eagerly desired” (New American Bible).

So, “With desire I have desired” can also be understood as a “passionate desire”.

It recalls the overwhelmingly successful movie, “Passion of the Christ”. Yup, that Mel Gibson movie. Not that he is a big fan of Pope Francis, as he has been stirring up discontent against the Holy Father’s motu proprio, Traditionis Custodes, that restricts celebration of the Traditional Latin Mass.

Since it was released in July 2021, there has been much unhappiness among TLM followers. They accused the Pope of being a heretic for tampering with the “Mass of the Ages”, among other things. This is the underlying reason why the Holy Father wrote Desiderio Desideravi, which is addressed to all Catholics — clergy, religious and lay.

Rubrics’ purpose in the Mass

With his usual depth, the Pope sees the outroar over the TLM as not just about the Latin language or Mass. It goes far deeper than that. In his Apostolic Letter, Pope Francis takes us back to the heart of what the Eucharist is about, beneath all the rubrics.

In essence, the Holy Father points to Christ’s two great commandments: The first and greatest is “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind”. And the second, “Love your neighbour as yourself”.

Both were not meant to supplant or justify the 10 Commandments (or ten thousand, as the Pharisees would have it), but to indicate what the entire Law was supposed to achieve. Christ did that because the Pharisees had reduced the Law to burdensome, hard-to-follow rules.

Rubrics guarantee the beauty of the Eucharistic celebration. Image: Unsplash, Josh Applegate

This is exactly what Traditionis Custodes’ opponents have done. They are obsessed with rubrics to the point of forgetting why they are there. In Desiderio Desideravi, Pope Francis reminds us of the role they perform in the primary reason why the Eucharist exists.

The rubrics guarantee the beauty of the Lord’s Last Supper in the Mass: that it performs all its purposes. This is because the Eucharist is full of symbolic language, as it is based on the Passover, which is replete with symbolism.

When Christ said, “Do this in memory of me”, the “this” didn’t simply refer to the acts of breaking bread and sharing wine. It refers to the entire Passover celebration. This is why we call Christ the “Passover Lamb”.

In Desiderio Desideravi, Pope Francis explains how Christ coopted the Passover symbolism for Himself.

The first element is a celebration of God delivering the Jews from Egypt. In the Last Supper, Christ elevates the symbolism to God delivering all of mankind from the clutches of the Devil. Pope Francis highlights that the Eucharist is meant to be for “every man from every tribe, every nation” (Rev 5:9, cited in Desiderio Desideravi, Para 4).

In the original Passover, the Matzah bread is broken to denote the parting of the Red Sea in Exodus. As Pope Francis narrates, the Eucharist has replaced this with the breaking of Christ’s Body and Blood on the cross in cavalry.

And all of this is connected by the desire of Christ to be God-with-Us. As the Pope explains, the core of the Good News is that Christ desires to share this Last Supper with every person in the world due to the intensity of God’s love for us. In this sense, the Eucharistic celebration is the embodiment and the manifestation of Christ, “more than just a representation” (DD, Para 9).

The Old and New Creation link

The Church, as an assembly, is part of this ongoing Supper until Christ’s Second Coming. Our participation in this unfolding of God’s love begins when we are baptised and inducted into the Body of Christ. Pope Francis shares that water in the baptismal rite is a symbol of life and rejuvenation all the way from Genesis, where the Spirit of God hovered over the waters of formless creation.

And since Jesus is also the Water of Life, the baptismal font is the Christian’s first experience of the same Paschal Mystery of the Last Supper. At the Eucharist, we are plunged into the depths of God’s love just as we are plunged into water at baptism. What is common to both is the experience of being totally immersed in something. Because since God gave his full passion and dedication to us, we are obliged to return the same.

In the event of the Passion, the Church bursts forth from Christ’s side on the Cross, just as Eve bursts forth from the side of Adam in Genesis. Here, Pope Francis applies the famous metaphor of the Church as bride of Christ in a fresh way. Although, as Christians, we are nominally familiar with regards to Eve as Adam’s bride, but we don’t quite automatically make that link on the lance that pierced Christ’s Body.

There were no bridal salons in Eden, after all! Nonetheless, Pope Francis use of this reminds us of the eschatological link between the old creation in Genesis and the New Creation made by Jesus in the Gospel.

The liturgy is an event where God is with Us as Jesus was with His disciples at the Last Supper.

With this understanding at the core, we can approach the Eucharist from a proper perspective. The Eucharist must demonstrate the transcendent beauty of the Last Supper and provide for the participation of all members of Christ’s Mystical Body.

Although the Real Presence is real, the other elements of the ritual are also symbolic, bearing the transformed symbolism explained earlier in this article. Even the bread and wine are, in a certain sense, symbols. Although they are the true Body and Blood of Christ in the Eucharist, they are also symbols of the entire Body of Christ, the Church.

Liturgy is where God is with us

Returning to the Apostolic Letter, the focus is on Christ, not on any individual Christian. The Liturgy, as an Event, is a free gift from Christ. It comes from God to man. It is not a performance of man for God. At the same time, it is a gathering. The physical bread that is broken as the Body of Christ is united again in the Mystical Body of Christ, which is that all believers are gathered to worship Him as one Body.

Pope Francis emphasises to us that the Liturgy is about the group, and not about individuals. If we forget this, then we fall into a Gnostic subjectivism, which is one of the results of secular post-modernism, with its focus on subjective feeling. Or else, we fall into a salvation-by-works neo-Pelagianism, where we believe a specific form of prayer achieves salvation.

In a sense, then, the Liturgy is neither made-for-us or made-for-God, but is an event where God is with Us as Jesus was with His disciples at the Last Supper.

The latter is the core problem with the opponents of Traditiones Custodes. They have focused too excessively on specific rubrics, such as the priest facing the altar instead of the people. In doing so, they have missed the spirit of the rubrics. Although Pope Francis does not make any allusions here, this is precisely the spirit of the Pharisees who chastised Christ for healing people on the Sabbath. It was for such that Christ provided the Two Great Commandments.

The key part of the Pope’s reflection is found in paragraph 31, where he comments that the point of the liturgical reform at the Second Vatican Council was to enable the Liturgy to allow Christians to “better grow in our capacity to fully live the liturgical action”.

With this in mind, the Church can consider how to help priests to properly understand what the Liturgy entails, which attains its perfection when it fully reveals the glory of God to all present. The rubrics are there to ensure perfection, so they cannot be improvised. And yet they are not totally irreformable, because liturgy is an art with its own intrinsic beauty. There is flow and pattern in the liturgy and all its various ritual gestures. This is the Art of Celebration, or Ars Celebrandi.

The rubrics are there to provide norms, just as when a professional artist trains his protégé in drawing forms and filling in colour.

This finally brings us to the position of the celebrant, who takes on Persona Christi at the liturgical celebration. The presiding role of the celebrant is itself a symbol of Christ’s presence at the Last Supper. And the rubrics are there to guide the priest on embodying this presence in the celebration, since this presence is the “highest norm” (DD, Para 57).

What we get ultimately is a unique channel of grace directly from Heaven to the entire body of Christ, where the celebrant – priest or bishop – is not the mediator of Lord Jesus, but His instrument or sign instead. And, in particular, he is the sign of God’s fathomless love for us.

Main Image: Unsplash, Ashwin Vaswani

Is God so vain that we must glorify Him?

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Our Creator does not need anything from us, but giving Him praise is for our sake

As Christians, we hear many times over that we are supposed to give glory to God in all things. At Mass, we even have an entire prayer that begins with “Glory to God in the Highest”. After a while, we may begin to wonder: for things that we really put serious effort in, why can’t we claim just a little credit?

It would seem the Catechism of the Catholic Church doesn’t answer the question either:

[293] Scripture and Tradition never cease to teach and celebrate this fundamental truth: “The world was made for the glory of God.” St. Bonaventure explains that God created all things “not to increase his glory, but to show it forth and to communicate it”, for God has no other reason for creating than his love and goodness: “Creatures came into existence when the key of love opened his hand.” 136 The First Vatican Council explains:

This one, true God, of his own goodness and “almighty power”, not for increasing his own beatitude, nor for attaining his perfection, but in order to manifest this perfection through the benefits which he bestows on creatures, with absolute freedom of counsel “and from the beginning of time, made out of nothing both orders of creatures, the spiritual and the corporeal.

[294] The glory of God consists in the realization of this manifestation and communication of his goodness, for which the world was created. God made us “to be his sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace”, for “the glory of God is man fully alive; moreover man’s life is the vision of God: if God’s revelation through creation has already obtained life for all the beings that dwell on earth, how much more will the Word’s manifestation of the Father obtain life for those who see God.” The ultimate purpose of creation is that God “who is the creator of all things may at last become “all in all”, thus simultaneously assuring his own glory and our beatitude.

At first glance, the message here is all glory comes from God, what you do means nothing at all, so zip your mouth, just genuflect and say, “All glory to God”.

And there are non-Catholic groups who will teach you just that: human effort counts for nothing because even this is a gift from God. Such an answer, though, seriously downplays the gift of free will to humans. If all effort came from God alone, then there is no choice available to us as to whether to apply that effort or not.

So let’s start again from the basics.

God’s glory is in that He is omnipotent and perfect in every dimension. His unlimited ability to create new things is a portion of that glory too. And the crown of His glory is His ability to create beings with free will who also can exercise part of that creative ability. These beings definitely include humans.

According to the Catechism, St Bonaventure teaches that God creates in order to demonstrate his glory. This makes sense because that creative ability is part of God’s glory. God created the Universe and everything in it, everything corporal and spiritual.

Did God create the Universe to boast to someone? That is impossible, because there was no one else present before God created the Universe.

Did God create the Universe and living beings to have someone to boast to? That is slightly more logical than the first suggestion, but is still problematic. Why would God have to boast when He has nothing to prove about His glory?

As the Ultimate Creator, He creates beings not in order for them to affirm His glory, but so that, out of love, He may replicate his glory in each of them. Or, as the Catechism teaches, “so that He may become ‘all in all’”.

This statement, if taken literally, would contradict the Church’s stance against pantheism, where God and the Universe are made to be identical to each other. That is an incorrect belief because God is still separate from creation.

Rather, this statement should be taken metaphorically. God does not become one with the Universe, but rather reveals His existence through the glory He displays and imbues in creation. God is the source of every goodness in our lives, the reason why possibility exists for goodness.

When we give glory to God, we are affirming that all these potentials derive from the glory of His creation. Pexels, Joshua Woroniecki

Every source of beauty and happiness comes from God.

When we give glory to God, we are affirming that all these potentials derive from the glory of His creation. In doing so, we are not sacrificing the fruits of our efforts, which still belong to us according to the purpose of God as spelled out in a famous verse from the Book of Jeremiah:

For I know well the plans I have in mind for you—oracle of the LORD—plans for your welfare and not for woe, so as to give you a future of hope.

(Jer 29:11)

Rather, we are avoiding the trap of making ourselves into the source of all this goodness. We accept our positions as created beings, rather than as the Creator. In so doing, we avoid falling victim to a spirit of arrogance, and destroying our communion with God and with others around us.

History is replete with examples of people who did horrible things because they believed they were gods. From the tyrants of several millenia ago who actually formally claimed divinity, to today’s dictators who claim that they created their own glories and hence deserve to do with them what they please. All these have caused untold suffering to many people around them.

In our age and our region of Asia, some of this even manifests in the cultural sphere. There are legions of youth every year who chase after pop idols, getting drawn in by the allure of their popularity and glory in culture. The most dedicated fandoms advance from purchasing props – like pillows and perfume with their pop idols’ faces on it – to trying to live lives exactly like their pop idols.

This can go to crazy extremes. On Internet platforms like ebay, there are people who hawk old T-shirts and even used soap and perfume of these pop idols, and these can reach the price of a month’s salary. These sales may continue even if the star confirms they are not authentic items. These fans will go to such extents to live the exact life of their idol – or part thereof. Nothing is off-limits barring lack of money: earrings, hairdos, clothing, shoes, perfume, smoking, foul language, drugs, disrespect to elders and so on.

All source of beauty comes from God. Pexels, Matheus Bertelli

In ascribing all glory to their pop idols, these Asian youth are destroying their uniqueness and lives,as well as damaging those around them through their reckless behaviour.

This demonstrates the benefit of us giving all glory to God instead of ourselves or each other. When we ascribe all glory solely to God, we gain a perspective that allows us to assess our positive and negative qualities, and those of others more objectively.

So let us all reflect on how God’s glories eclipse each of us today!

Main Image: Pexels, Joshua Woroniecki

Sacred Heart heals all wounds

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Christ’s heart of love bears our pain to save us from ruin and hell

(Editor’s note: June is dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Solemnity is on 24 June)

“May you live in interesting times.” I learnt from a book on the history in China that this sentence is considered a curse in Chinese culture. Just because peace is boring, and war is interesting. Indeed, the heart of every story is a conflict between the protagonist and someone or something else.

In which case, I suppose modern Chinese must feel rather unfortunate to be living in an age with wars, plagues and other tragic events. And, as in many other epochs of history, the Apocalypse industry is back up again: pray, tell me, which COVID variant is God’s Divine Punishment, or are there different variants because each is meant to punish a different sin?

In the midst of all this chaos, it is important for Christians to refocus on the fact that our God is a God of Love, not a God of Judgement. In fact, as the Gospel of John teaches us, God loved the world so much that He sent His Only Son to die for mankind’s sins. The keyword here is “mankind”. Christ didn’t only die for Jews. He died for gentiles, including the Chinese people.

In such times, it is a huge temptation for us to lapse into conspiracy-theory mode. With COVID-19, we might ask whether the virus came from Communist bioweapons. Or was it planted by the Pentagon, James-Bond style? For the other major event, the Russia-Ukraine War, the theories may swing around whether the Russians are really brutal, or Ukraine is making use of liberal Western propaganda machines to paint themselves as more saintly than they actually are.

Conspiracy theories are instruments of the Devil. The Lord sees mankind as mankind, and not in our various nations. As Scripture teaches us, He takes on the burdens of our sins onto Himself. He is the Lord who cares for the widows of Ukraine and the unwilling soldiers of Russia. He cares as much for the Texan veteran who has COVID Beta as He does for the teenager in Shanghai who is down with Omicron. God does not do Real Politick.

One of the best ways to focus on the love of God is by meditating on the Sacred Heart of Jesus. This is a devotion that was developed by the French saint, Bernard of Clairveaux. The devotion gained prominence in the Catholic Church after the apparitions to Saint Margaret Alacoque more than a few centuries later.

This virtuous nun was given the privilege of lying against the Heart of Christ and told to spread the message of His love around the world. Her position allowed her to hear Christ’s heartbeat.

When interviewed about her apparitions, she said:

And He [Christ] showed me that it was His great desire of being loved by men and of withdrawing them from the path of ruin that made Him want to manifest His Heart to men,

This demonstrates how close Christ wants to be to each and every one of us. And in the Gospel, he demonstrated this closeness and love by sacrificing Himself on the Cross at Cavalry. This heart of Love is a heart of pain as well, the heart that bears all our pains so that we can be saved from the path of ruin that leads to Hell.

To get a real sense, imagine a stream of blood flowing out from the centre of the Sacred Heart. The Precious blood of Christ that purifies, cleanses and heals all our wounds from sin. As you meditate on the Sacred Heart, cast your pains onto him and imagine all the pains that dissolve in His Precious Blood.

Let us all remember then that Christ is the Prince of Peace that rescues us from the burden of “Interesting Times”.

Culture: Seeing Christ in the games we play

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Hero of world’s most popular computer game has a Messiah-like character

Although many of us despair about secular media, sometimes they contain elements that prompt us to reflect on our Catholic faith. This includes video games.

This is the case with Thoma, a playable character in the world’s most popular computer game to date, Genshin Impact. The name of the game is Japanese, but the producer is Chinese. “Genshin” translated into English means “The Original Deity”.

Thoma has two key designations that describe his prowess as a hero. The first, Blazing Defence, is the firepower that he has been given to fight monsters, and connected with his in-game skill, Blazing Blessing. The second, Protector from Afar, is about the game’s main storyline.

He is a foreigner who has been accepted as the servant of an heiress to one of the three great clans who rule the country. He is gentle and unassuming, but yet assertive. The first time a player and the character meets, Thoma helps him get a visa to enter the closed country. But he soon discovers his official position is the housekeeper for the heiress. He also runs errands for his mistress. These “errands” include trade negotiations, breaking up gang fights and investigating espionage. Not your average grocery shopper.

Thoma is not a perfect analogy, but in certain key aspects, he resembles Christ.

In-game, while he is among the best of the characters, his storyline shows that the most impressive thing he manages to do for the people at court is to conduct a housekeeping class for them. This recalls the story in the Gospels about Christ not being able to do any miracles in Nazareth because nobody believed He was the Messiah. They refused to call him anything other than “son of the carpenter”. Admittedly, a carpenter in the time of Christ was still more prestigious than a housekeeper, but they were not part of the learned classes like the Levites and Scribes.

Both Christ and Thoma share similar experiences of being under-appreciated because of who they appear to be. Thoma also suffers double because he is a foreigner. Our analogy here can remind us that we are called to be “in this world, but not of this world”.

Despite the abuse that he receives at the hands of the courtiers, he is still affable and kind towards them, telling the player that they are just the way they are as courtiers. When he gets angry, it is at the real ruffians and the monsters. Christ is also forgiving and merciful, even to the soldiers who arrest him. When Peter cuts off the ears of the high priest’s servant in the arresting party, Christ heals his ears. Of course, Christ goes several steps ahead of Thoma in that He eventually sacrifices his life for the salvation of all mankind on Good Friday.

Thoma possesses fire-element powers in the game. His normal skill is a lunging attack with a flaming spear. His second ability is an offensive-and-defensive fire power called “blazing blessing” which deals fire damage to enemies and creates a flaming barrier around him and his friends.

Fire is a potent image in the Scriptures. In the Old Testament, a pillar of fire leads the Israelites out of Egypt. God also shames the prophets of Baal with fire from Heaven. Christ brings a different sort of fire to the mix – a fire of the heart. The Holy Spirit that descends on the Apostles on Pentecost is described as tongues of fire in the Book of Acts.

There are also a few times when Christ is associated with strong lights or burning fire. In the Book of Revelations, John sees Christ standing with “eyes like a fiery flame” and “feet like polished brass in a furnace”. Earlier on in the Gospels, Christ appears with a burning visage during the Transfiguration.

So, He effectively dispenses “blazing blessings” to all of us.

The depiction “Protector From Afar” is ironic when applied to Thoma. Usually when one thinks of someone being “afar”, it is of someone who has cut off contact with all people and maybe lives in a monastery or somewhere similar. But Thoma is exactly the opposite. Everybody in the neighbourhood knows him and recognizes his face. However, they don’t know that he is also the legendary “Fixer”. In that sense, he is “afar” from everyone.

Similarly, Christ’s other name is “Emmanuel” or “God is With Us”, yet many times we feel He is far away and fails to recognize His presence in the people around us. He is also “afar” in another way. As the Second Person of the Trinity, He watches us from a context bigger than the 3D setting of our daily routines. He is able to work wonders in our lives because He has more resources than we can imagine.

The final similarity between Thoma and Christ, though, will probably be the most unique. It is also the one that inspired this article.

In Thoma’s quest, he brings the player to a tree in the middle of town where he feeds stray puppies every morning. He has developed a very close bond with the animals to the point of giving each of them names. In addition, he has not merely invited the player to feed the puppies but to also help knit sweaters for each of them, whom he loves. What is even more amazing is that he is the one who gathered all the puppies to the tree in the first place from different corners of the city!

Are you able to guess the analogy here? If you can’t, it is probably because the puppies are a distraction. (Boy, are they adorable!)

This aspect of Thoma dovetails very well with the parable of the Good Shepherd. Like Thoma, Christ as the Good Shepherd goes around the country seeking out the lost sheep and gathering them back into the sheepfold. However, thinking about Thoma’s tree, we could have another insight. While it is commonplace to believe that the Shepherd has one sheepfold, perhaps what the Shepherd really does is gather the lost sheep into many Sheepfolds all under His ownership.

This ties in with the doctrine of subsidiarity in the Catholic Church, where every local Church is the Church of Christ by itself and is not part of another local Church, including the Church of Rome. So, in that way there are many Churches but also just one Church. And all are the same in that they have Christ as their Shepherd!

So, if you are Genshin Impact player or have children who play the game, you can use Thoma as a weak cipher of Christ.

A Table of Plentiful Mercy

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The symbol of unity that binds men to each other, and to God

“But now do not be distressed, and do not be angry with yourselves for having sold me here. It was really for the sake of saving lives that God sent me here ahead of you.” (Gen 50:20)

These were Joseph’s reassuring words to his brothers who, in previous chapters and several years earlier, sold him to slavery in a foreign country. An amazing act of forgiveness isn’t it?

How many of us, if in Joseph’s position, are tempted to inflict some sort of vengeance against such conniving brothers. After all, the hurt from being abandoned by your closest family members is a cut too deep to heal. But Joseph chose to recognise something else instead: God’s infinite mercy.

And, not only that, he commanded his servants to throw a feast for them! Unbelievable. But, Joseph demonstrated one clear point: God seeks the good of everyone. In the New Testament, Christ echoes this. He teaches us to forgive our enemies because this is God’s nature. He lived this out, dying for all men, not just some.

Our true enemies are not physical, but spiritual.

Joseph’s altruistic action has a link to another striking verse in the Old Testament: “I will prepare a table in the presence of your enemies.” (Ps 23:5)

This is exactly what took place with Joseph for his brothers. It wasn’t a table of vengeance, with scorpions and poison served on a platter, as you would see on Fear Factor. It was a genuine table of love and plenty.

It was a literal feast.

Feasts are connected in Scripture with tables since they are meals. The table is where we offer things to God, and where God presents things to us.

The Passover table is the most important symbol in our religion because it is the table of the Last Supper. And the Eucharist is the body of Christ.

Saint Paul stresses the importance of the Eucharistic meal in a very famous verse: “Therefore whosoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord unworthily shall answer for the Body and Blood of the Lord“ (1 Cor 11:27)

“Therefore my brothers, when you come together to eat, wait for one another. If anyone is hungry, he should eat at home, so that your meetings may not result in judgement.” (1 Cor 11:33-34)

What St Paul is thinking of in 1 Cor is not readily apparent to us. In our day, the Eucharist has already become stylized, ceremonialised and ritualised. In the early Church, the Christians actually did break actual loaves of bread. St Paul is dealing with a sort of desecration that would be a joke if anyone tried it today. The Corinthians were eating the bread before the ceremony began!

If we translate what St Paul says in 1 Cor 11 to modern speak, it could be like this:

“Please remember, the Bread in the Eucharist is the Body of Christ. It is not the bread at a buffet, where you can grab and chomp down. If you treat it as such, you are not worthy to receive the Sacrament.”

When St Paul mentions the phrase “discerning the body” earlier on, he isn’t merely talking about it in a moral sense, that is teaching that when eating the bread, they are eating the body of Christ, and so they shouldn’t disrespect it. Instead, he is pointing out something else that is equally important: the Eucharistic meal is a sign of the spiritual unity of the Church. It is in partaking of the Bread that we show that we are One Church.

Discerning the body refers to recognizing that all the believers together make one whole.

Given that today we have split up the bread into small hosts, that significance may be somewhat lost on us.

The most significant split in Christian unity occurred with Martin Luther’s Reformation in the 16th century. There have been other divisions in various degrees since then. In Asia, the most prominent is in China between the Communist government-controlled Patriotic Church, established in 1957, and the Underground Church, which retains allegiance to the Pope.

In this unfortunate situation, both groups are forced to exist separately. Our feeling of scandal should deepen by noting that despite the division, their worship of God is identical. In fact, no Pope has accused Catholics in the Patriotic Church as heretics.

In fact, although Pope Benedict XVI acknowledges they are under the control of the CCP, he nevertheless said:

“In China, too, the Church is called to be a witness of Christ, to look forward with hope, and – in proclaiming the Gospel – to measure up to the new challenges that the Chinese People must face.”


Pope Benedict XVI,
2007 Apostolic Letter to Catholic clergy and lay in China

The tenuous relationship between China and Christianity has little to do with the atheism of the Communist Party, as it arose from the Rites Controversy during the Ming Dynasty and the Taiping rebellion towards the end of the Qing Dynasty.

In short, the division is because of the fractious relationship between China’s communist authorities and Western countries whose clergy, they felt, when they were there in the past, exported their personal political views.

The situation in China, then, is probably more analogous to the Investiture Controversy in medieval France as opposed to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in Revolutionary France. Therein exists a defence of Pope Francis’s attempt at establishing ties with China. Without attempting to second guess his or the Holy See’s intentions, there is a case to make that it is to unite all Catholics so that they can worship openly as one.

As Christians, we need to recall the eschatological promise that in the New Jerusalem everyone will be ringing out praises to God in public. Yes, we should embrace martyrdom as a cross when we have to bear it. And we need to hail those holy men and women of China, and elsewhere who have bravely stood up for the faith with their lives.

But, it is a distortion of Church teaching to say that the aim of a Christian in life should be to seek martyrdom. Doing so would mutate God’s promise of Eternal Life into one of Eternal Death, and be a grave disrespect to the martyrs whose love of God we claim to emulate.

In the end, we all wish to be fully alive and visible at the Great Heavenly Banquet of God.

Image: Christopher Ryan, Unsplash