BIG C CATHOLICS

By Father Thomas Mattison When God (or anyone at all) makes a promise it is for one purpose only, to provide certainty about a future that is either hopeless or so uncertain as to make life just too scary for living. Whatever might happen between the moment of the promise and the delivery on the promise, the one to whom the promise is made is invited to want and to trust the promise more than anything else. Thus the promise creates a series of demands without which the promise fades into irrelevance. Since the reliability of the one making the promise is the only assurance offered, the making of a promise invites the creation of a relationship of trust and demands trustworthiness in the maker of the promise. When we talk about God and his promises, we use the word covenant. The first reading for each weekend of Lent holds up for consideration a covenant, a promise made by God in former times. We used to talk of the Old Testament as if there were but one covenant; lately, the te

By Father Thomas Mattison  Charles Dickens did a world of good by bringing the plight of Victorian children to the forefront of everyone’s consciousness; Tiny Tim, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist and Pip were real-life characters somewhere in that world. There they were seen and treated as tools and opportunities for unscrupulous and grasping grownups. But the swing of the pendulum went a degree or two too far – children suddenly became sentimentalized. When people like Churchill and W.C. Fields and Cardinal Newman had slighting things to say about the beauty, cuteness and innocence of children (respectively) they were pretty well tut-tutted as curmudgeons and misanthropes. This sentimentalizing of children is at the root of such things as the currently popular “right to a child” at any cost. You would think that a child was a new car or a better phone, to which one might also have a right, especially the thousands of frozen embryos whose ownership is often the sticking point

Father Thomas Mattison There are so many remedies for those who suffer unjustly that we have begun to imagine that suffering itself is wrong. Worse! We begin to think that those who suffer willingly or without complaining must be “sick” or uninformed or, maybe, getting what they asked for when they didn’t take care of themselves at some earlier time. In a fixable world, sufferers lose any right to compassion. Those of us who are of a certain age learned a different answer: Offer it up! We may want to laugh at that, but it holds a profound spiritual truth. Compared to what others can do and have, I may be impoverished. But that impoverishment does not diminish the reality of God’s love for me. Nor does it rob me of the ability to be brave, to be generous, to be patient, to be forgiving, to be compassionate, to be loved, to be grateful. Some impoverishments may even provide me with the ability to inspire others; isn’t that what a support group is about? Suffering can make me m

By Father Thomas Mattison It does not take much thought to come up with the names of a half-dozen of political heroes whose sexual adventuring has been quietly ignored so that their marble memorials need not be torn down because of their exploitation of others and the hurt visited upon families who need fathers – no matter how bad they may be as husbands, and movements that need leaders – no matter how sleazy and seamy their “private” lives may be. The recent spate of revelations about what goes on in the upper reaches of the entertainment and news industries in this country may seem disconcerting, but these folks have almost always moved from marriage to marriage to marriage and no one batted an eye. The priests who have exploited and even assaulted minors and needy parishioners are no better. Wouldn’t you think that the rich and powerful could get along without such unseemly and shameful exploits? Or maybe that is just the problem! Behind the public face that each of us

By Father Thomas Mattison When thinking about childlessness and celibacy and voluntary renunciations of various sorts, let us take note, too, of those deprivations, hurts, injustices and differences that seem to be visited so unjustly on so many. Even the most basic human concern asks: Must one suffer these lacks? When so posed, the question begs the answer: One must not so suffer. In an age that worships technology’s – medical, pharmacological, legal – ability to ‘fix’ what is judged to be broken. The clear implication of that response is that one who suffers has a right to be fixed, to be changed, to have others changed, to have the whole culture changed and to have the ‘justice’ system arrange for the costs to be borne by someone else. And if that cannot be arranged, then they right to be helped to die! There are so many remedies for those who suffer unjustly that we have begun to imagine that suffering itself is wrong. Worse! We begin to think that those who suffer willi

By Father Thomas Mattison We have been conditioned by years (centuries?) of teaching to think of love/charity as a virtue, something to do or not. But St. John tells us God is love. He does not tell us that God does love. I want to suggest that this is the insight – although never spoken – that makes Israel think of God as Elector/Electing; having no other identity than the one who chooses his own people. I do not think that we go far wrong when we assert that the only God we know is the one who loves/chooses us. With those observations in mind, I might like to revise the translation of John’s phrase and say that God is Loving, not as an attribute, but as the very dynamic of His being. You may want to reread this paragraph in order to forge ahead. If God is Loving, then all of creation is something like a love letter. You and I are words in that love letter. I don’t mean to sound like a song from the Seventies, but we must bite the bullet on this one and admit it: Unloving un

By Father Thomas Mattison There is no such thing as a Church teaching that is not social. Once upon a time the bishop of the Diocese of Burlington was named Robert F. Joyce. He was a native of Proctor and installed as bishop of Burlington in 1957. He resigned as bishop after 15 years at age 75. He would not have been grateful to be called an ecclesiologist — an expert in the theology of the Church — but he was just that. At every Confirmation ceremony he gave the same sermon -- every one! And he would make everyone in church repeat the message after him: Don’t go to heaven alone; take someone with you. RFJ clearly understood that there is in each of us a tendency — a temptation — to think of ourselves before thinking of anyone else and, even, to the exclusion of everyone else. But he understood, too, that such a focus on the single self was absolutely antithetical to Christianity. Just being a Christian means being — at very least — connected to Jesus. We have no connect

By Father Thomas Mattison So, you will ask me — legitimately — how about the Crusades and the clashes between the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire etc.? Were these not instances of meddling in politics by the Catholic Church? As you can imagine, my answer will be, “No.” The Middle Ages represent the vacuum created in the western world by the collapse of the old and totalitarian Roman Empire. Hostages to their political past, and lacking in political imagination, both sides of these conflicts claimed as their due the mantle of European supremacy. They called it “ ius divinum ” (divine right). They both claimed it — the emperor no less than the pope. The collapse of the Holy Roman Empire and the rise of what we call the nation states of the modern world left the Church still claiming its ius divinum in the face of new claimants to the same right — the kings and parliaments of emerging countries. For background on this check out the internet’s treatment of such figures as P

By Father Thomas Mattison Galileo created a new hierarchy of truths. Tradition, authority, Scripture, philosophy, theology, all the well-known sources of truth, goodness and beauty were now to be subjected to one single new criterion – scientific proof. Thus, did the good become the useful; the true, the practical; and the beautiful, the appealing. Modern science has challenged Galileo’s deductions, but modern education and, certainly, the education that many of us received, is still frozen in the icy grip of the 16th century. Which brings me to yoga. A world and culture that values nothing but its own material-based experiences cares nothing for the claims of religion or the origins of classical spiritualities and the views of God and man that underlie them. Thus, any eighth grader will tell you that he likes this part of this religion but another part of another; and the fundamental incompatibility of the religions that he has dismembered and reassembled into what he calls