Caritas et Veritas

Pope Benedict XVI

The day before Pope Benedict XVI resigned from his office, I was honored to participate in a colloquium on his legacy at Immaculate Conception Seminary School of Theology at Seton Hall University, where I teach. A portion of the colloquium was filmed and is available online here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baZbrzLvzFA&feature=player_embedded

After some opening words by Msgr. Joseph Reilly and by Dr. Dianne Traflet, the first

Fr. Pablo Gadenz

presentation is by my dear friend and colleague, Fr. Pablo Gadenz. Fr. Pablo’s wonderful talk is entitled, “Pope Benedict: Leading Us to Jesus,” and deals with Benedict’s work on Scripture as it focuses on bringing us in contact with the living Jesus.

I give the second presentation, “Pope Benedict and the Interior Life,” where I discuss some

Jeff Morrow

points concerning the importance of the Eucharist, frequent Confession, personal prayer, and devout reading of Scripture, in the thought of Benedict XVI.

St. Peter's Basilica

In light of all the media buzz about Pope Francis, I have encountered a surprising number of criticisms aimed both at Pope Francis and at the Catholic Church, specifically concerning the wealth of the Vatican and the lack of the Pope’s “real” concern for the poor. In response, I’ve hastily written this overly large post. Hopefully someone will find it beneficial.

John Allen explains, in his National Catholic Reporter article, “Challenges to vision of a ‘Poor Church for the Poor,’” available here, http://ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/challenges-vision-poor-church-poor, that “the legendary wealth of the Vatican is to some extent more myth than reality.” He then points out the often ignored fact that the yearly budget for operating the Vatican is less than $300 million. He contrasts this with Harvard University (which he labels as “the Vatican of elite secular opinion”) whose annual budget is $3.7 billion. Allen points out further that the patrimony (or endowment) of the Vatican is about $1 billion. Harvard, on the other hand, as a whopping $30.7 billion endowment. Allen concedes that the Vatican bank is in charge of the equivalent of over $6 billion, but then points out how the majority of that money is not actually the Vatican’s, and thus the Vatican would not be at liberty to use most of that amount for any purpose whatsoever.

Aslan

In light of the hurricane that we just experienced, and the difficulties that came along with it, I thought I would post on one implication of considering our divine filiation (our becoming children of God) with which the first paragraph of the Catechism opened. First, as Fr. Federico Suarez explains, absolutely everything

“that happens to us is foreseen by God, and is ordained to his glory and to the salvation of man. If what happens to us is good, God wants it for us. If it is bad, He does not want it for us, but allows it to happen because He respects man’s freedom and the order of nature; in such unlikely circumstances it is nonetheless in God’s power to obtain good and advantage for the soul—even bringing it out of evil itself.”¹

This is not a simple “god-of-the-gaps,” but rather the providential workings of our loving Father in heaven acting on earth. As Fr. Francis Fernandez explains:

 “Our sense of divine filiation should lead us to discover that we are in the hands of a Father who knows the past, the present and the future. He has ordered everything for our good, even though his plans may not coincide with our plans of the moment….No one could do a better job of watching out for us: God never makes mistakes.”²

Have you ever asked the question, “What is the meaning of life?”  The very first paragraph of the Catechism provides the Catholic answer to this question: the reason for human existence, the reason for your existence, and the reason for my existence:

“God, infinitely perfect and blessed in himself, in a plan of sheer goodness freely created man to make him share in his own blessed life. For this reason, at every time and in every place, God draws close to man. He calls man to seek him, to know him, to love him with all his strength. He calls together all men, scattered and divided by sin, into the unity of his family, the Church. To accomplish this, when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son as Redeemer and Saviour. In his Son and through him, he invites men to become, in the Holy Spirit, his adopted children and thus heirs of his blessed life” (no. 1).

Pope Benedict XVI

Today marks the beginning of the Year of Faith proclaimed by Pope Benedict XVI. Today also marks the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of the Second Vatican Council convened by Blessed Pope John XXIII, which opened on October 11^th, 1962. The similar dates are not a coincidence. Only a few years after Pope Paul VI brought the Second Vatican Council to a close (in 1965), Paul VI proclaimed a Year of Faith which began in 1967 and ended on June 30, 1968, on the Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul—less than a month prior to releasing his controversial papal encyclical, Humanae Vitae (July 25, 1968). Paul VI’s Year of Faith was a commemoration the 19^th hundred year anniversary of the martyrdoms of Sts. Peter and Paul, but it was also clearly an attempt to provide an opportunity for the Church to receive the teachings of the Second Vatican Council and implement them, particularly by the Catholic faithful spending the year deepening in their understanding of the Catholic faith. Few people I run into—including priests and professional theologians—have ever heard of the Year of Faith of 1967; and this is true even of those priests and theologians who were alive back then. A priest I know, Fr. Bob Connor, once told me that Fr. Sal Ferigle—an incredible priest by all accounts, who died in Boston in 1997—claimed that the reason Humanae Vitae was not received but was rejected by so many, was because the Year of Faith called by Paul VI was not lived. Benedict XVI has called a Year of Faith at a time when many of the teachings in Humanae Vitae are in the public mind again, at least in the U.S. because of the controversial HHS mandate among other things. Like Paul VI, Benedict hopes that this will be a year where the Catholic faithful spend some time learning more about the Catholic faith, and hopefully appropriating and receiving the teachings of the Second Vatican Council, which he thinks have not been really assimilated or understood. In his words from Porta Fidei: