Somebody Marry These Kids

Calah of Barefoot and Pregnant wrote a good post a little while back about the situations she and her husband found themselves in as she was trying to come into the Church and they were trying to get married under circumstances that were (as is often the way of events that push one into making massive changes in ones beliefs and moral life) a little messy:

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you know by now that our first daughter was conceived out of wedlock when I was a drug addict. Obviously, neither the Ogre nor I were living virtuous lives at the time, but the reality of a child on the way forced us to try and straighten ourselves out.

We began seeing a wonderful Cistercian priest who helped us work through that difficult time. One of the biggest issues facing us was the question of what to do when the baby was born. The Catholic Church doesn't allow couples who conceive a child out of wedlock to marry in the Church until the child in question is a year old. It's a wonderful rule, one that not only discourages shotgun weddings but also encourages the couple in question to spend that year discerning whether or not it is God's will that they should marry each other or marry at all. It also shows the Catholic Church's concern that people learn to live an open, fully integrated human life; no covering up the results of sin with quickie nuptials. No, the couple must learn to bear the consequences of their sin (the consequence historically being public shame, NOT the baby itself) and rectify their lives publicly.

But it left us with a dilemma. If we followed traditional moral advice (which we received unsolicited from several people), we should live apart during that year. Obviously the responsibility for caring for the baby would fall to me, the mother, and the baby would live with me. But this would leave all three of us in dire straits at best. I was emotionally and mentally unstable at the outset of the pregnancy, issues which only marginally improved during the pregnancy. The Ogre was trying to finish his undergraduate degree while working nearly full time at a steakhouse to support us. He would have very little time to see me and the baby if we lived somewhere else, and wouldn't be able to contribute substantially to her parenting for an entire year. I was in no state to live alone with a baby, but strained relationships with both of our parents left me with no viable alternative. Furthermore, there was no way the Ogre could afford to pay rent or utilities for two separate apartments.

The other option was that we live together but maintain a chaste relationship. "Live together like brother and sister" was the phrase we heard repeated over and over. This is a task that is widely acknowledged to require heroic virtue from even the most virtuous, yet the likelihood that two people who hadn't attempted to live virtuous lives basically ever would be able to accomplish it was somehow not of interest to solicitous advice-givers.

It was of interest to our priest, however. He was interested in a great many things everyone else overlooked. He spent hours with the Ogre and I, together and separately, figuring out our strengths, our weaknesses, our fears, our limits, our feelings for each other and our hopes for the future. I suspect he recognized that we had both lived in a state of chronic, habitual mortal sin for years and quickly decided that a quick "get out of mortal sin fast" card was not what we needed; at least, not then. I believe his ultimate goal for us was not short-term but long-term. He was trying to figure out how to bring both of us into a state of grace, how to practically, emotionally and spiritually help us learn to love God, each other and our child, and how to begin building a foundation that might one day support a solid family.

The whole post is worth reading. It gave me an incredible respect for the difficulties that priests face in providing moral direction to real people in difficult situations.

However, it also reminded me of a bit of an issue I have with the current practice in the church here in the US in regards to marriage, which I wrote about some years back in relation to a couple we know who got married under somewhat similar circumstances.

In part to try to stem the tide of divorce among Catholic couples, and to avoid marriages which might later claim to have grounds for annulment, many dioceses have come up with increasingly stringent guidelines for marriage. Most diocese enforce a six month waiting period for any couple between when they request to get married and when the marriage takes place. Some parishes and diocese specifically require that the couple be registered and actively participating at the parish they want to marry at for up to a year before even being able to request to be married there. There are very sensible reasons for this. The church doesn't want people who aren't actually practicing Catholics showing up and using the parish as a set for a church wedding, and given that so many people seem to go into marriage without thinking it out very carefully, you can see why it's thought a good idea for couples to have at least six months to think things over. However, I'm not sure that it's universally a good idea to make couples wait at least six months after getting engaged to get married, and for young couples who are often in a state of flux because of college/jobs/grad school, a rigidly enforced you-must-be-registered-in-the-parish-for-a-year-prior policy be a serious obstacle to getting married.

Similarly, one can very much see why the church is reluctant to officiate over "shotgun weddings", especially given the scandalously high rate of annulments in the US and the fact that being pregnant at the time of the wedding is often cited years later as a reason why the couple did not freely consent (and thus can be annulled.) Also, people who are pregnant out of wedlock have already made at least one or two bad decisions, and so in general it seems reasonable to want people to stop and really think about whether this is indeed the right person to marry.

However, taking these kind of general rules and making them absolute strikes me as really problematic. It strikes me that diocesan rules put the priest who was helping Calah and the Ogre in a very difficult position. Clearly, he came to the decision that it was best for the three of them to function as a family, yet he couldn't marry them, so he was put in the position of having to advise them on how to live as a family until they could marry in the Church. But what is marriage for other than to provide Christians with the grace of a sacrament in order to allow them to live out their vocations as a family? While I think it's admirable that the Church in the US is trying to get serious about marriage, it seems to me that such inflexible rules are actually a moderately serious problem.

Obviously, it's a whole other situation where there's some real obstacle to marriage -- such as one member of the couple being married already. (All sorts of heartache is caused by people dating and even getting engaged while one or both are, in the eyes of the Church, married to someone else.) But while I applaud the Church's efforts to reign in Catholic marriage breakdown by making sure that couples have thought seriously about it before getting married, I'm concerned that some of these rigid administrative rules on length of engagement and waiting a period of time after any child conceived out-of-wedlock is born actually make things harder on some couples when simply marrying them would be better for all.

Too Hot To Handle

There is little more dull than hearing others recite their perceived slights, and so I was at first unsure if I should bother posting about this. Still, it may be very mildly interesting to others, and as a cached browser managed to return to me that which I had strongly believed to have been lost, I thought I might as well get a post out of the situation.

Blogger David Wheeler has a post the other day over at Vox Nova, in which he talked about the difficulties he had as the liaison between his parish council and the Cincinnati Archdiocese on "green" topics.

I don’t know why, but my parish approached me last year about becoming the parish liaison between our parish council committee and the Archdiocese of Cincinnati’s Task Force on Climate Change. I guess it had something to do with the fact that I drive a Prius and use Buckeye Eco-Care on my lawn. But, honestly, I don’t know…

After a few meetings in Cincinnati, I finally had the opportunity to report back to our parish about what we as a parish are being asked to do about global warming by the hierarchy in the Church.

The gist is that several people on the parish council reacted very negatively to the diocese's suggestion that they become a flagship "green" parish, with solar panels, etc. Wheeler was frustrated that there was so much opposition to this, as he sees the command to be good stewards of the earth as a moral one.

Having spent time on a parish council, and feeling like I was able to give a fair approximation of why more conservative Catholics had trouble with the green=moral line of thinking, I left the following comment, and received the following response:

DarwinCatholic says:

May 26, 2010 at 12:43 pm

David,

FWIW, I would imagine that for many on the parish council who objected to the idea of being a “flagship green parish”, it seemed to them that that recommendation represented a tendency to focus on politics rather than morality. (And yes, I agree that the “how about if we frame greenness as supporting our troops” idea was downright moronic.)

As for why many “conservative” Catholics are not more eager to lead in applying environmentalism and other social teachings — and speaking as something of an insider to the conservative approach in this case — I think it has a lot to do with people finding it hard to envision environmentalism in the sort of moral terms they are used to. What most Catholics active in their parish are concerned about are basics of personal morality: don’t lie, don’t steal, don’t cheat, don’t use violence unjustly, don’t have sex before marriage, don’t get divorced, don’t commit adultery, don’t use porn, don’t use birth control, don’t have an abortion, etc. The moral framing of these rules is simple and clear: Action X is wrong because it violates natural and moral principle Y.

Environmental concerns seem harder to fit into that kind of formulation, especially because they seem so relative. So using rechargeable batteries is “more moral” than using one-use ones. But is it even more moral simply not to use the sound system? Does plugging in and recharging the batteries really use much less resources than buying new ones? Is using a solar panel more moral than using the electric grid? Is just setting the A/C to 80 instead of 76 better than using the solar panels, since after all building solar panels themselves is a messy and energy consuming process, which the panels themselves may not actually prevent enough pollution to justify?

These are all very relative trade-off discussions, and so while I think you would probably get little disagreement from most conservative Catholics that “be good stewards of God’s creation” is a moral law, most would not tend to see the choice between disposeable and rechargeable batteries as a moral choice, with one option being sinful and the other virtuous.

I think also, for political reasons, people are often concerned that there’s something very mee-too-ish about showy “green” measures by churches. Almost as if to say to a segment of society, “Sure, I know you disapprove of what we say about marriage and birth control and abortion — but look, we’ll be pretty quiet about that and talk about solar panels instead! Do we fit in now?”

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drdwheelerreed says:

May 26, 2010 at 1:04 pm

Good thoughts DarwinCatholic… but this brings me back to what my colleague said, “If we Catholic would’ve just obeyed our Scriptural mandate to take care of the earth… then these discussion would be irrelevant… we wouldn’t even be having them…”

David

Later in the day, when I checked back, I saw the above, plus a number of other comments, including several from a conservative commenter questioning whether there was in fact a scientific consensus over global warming, and Wheeler's responses to those comments, which cited Al Gore's writing several times. I left the following reply:

DarwinCatholic says:

May 26, 2010 at 5:16 pm

but this brings me back to what my colleague said, “If we Catholic would’ve just obeyed our Scriptural mandate to take care of the earth… then these discussion would be irrelevant… we wouldn’t even be having them…”

Well, this assumes a couple of things. For instance, I doubt that many people say, “If I thought we had a duty to take care of the earth, I would do so, but since we don’t I’m going to actively work to trash it.” Most people probably argue that they do a moderately good job of taking care of the earth, and it’s not entirely clear that some of the most popular “green” activities (building wind farms, putting up solar panels, driving hybrids) are necessarily less hard on the environment than simply using less. For instance, though China has an absolutely terrible record in regards to pollution (example) the fact that China is overall much poorer than the US means that the average Chinese actually has far less impact on the environment than the average US environmentalist. And similarly, Al Gore’s lifestyle is much more polluting than mine — though he buys “carbon offsets” and I don’t.

Nor is human impact on the environment a result only of technology. Humans were pretty clearly responsible for the extinction of a large number of species in Europe, America and Australia in the period 20-40 thousand years ago, and the combination of deforestation and soil exhaustion is believed to be a major cause of the “dark age” at the end of the Bronze Age around 1000 BC.

“And Global warming IS the scientific consensus.”

False.

That has not been proven beyond a reasonable doubt, beyond scientific scrutiny.

I think, Theresa, one can certainly argue about how much of global warming is actually caused by human activity (rather than natural cycles), to what extent continuing emissions trends will actually impact the climate (or whether natural dampening factors will kick in), and to what extent the amounts of change that we are likely, as a society, to be able to achieve would make any difference in the trend. However, I don’t think we can really deny that there is a scientific consensus, at this time, among those in the field, that global warming is real.

That said, scientific consensus and reality do not have a one to one correlation by any stretch, and many environmental advocates (Al Gore very much an offender in this regard) tend to distort the scientific consensus in order to make it more exciting and serve their own ends.

As you can clearly see, something is going on… something is causing the snow and ice to melt.

This is DATA, what used to be accepted among critical thinkers as FACTS! Today, opinion has become God, and facts, well… I guess we don’t use Reason anymore… maybe we don’t even use Faith…

The point is… you can disagree with global warming, but you’ve got to come up with an alternative to why glaciers are melting… and you’ve got to come up with an alternative as to what we’re going to do about it!

While your passion is admirable, it is at times the argument of amateurs that gives a movement a bad name. For instance, in regards to questions like “Why are the glaciers melting” someone can simply point out that through the majority of the history of life on earth there have not been glaciers. We are, still, at a period of abnormally high glaciation compared to Earth’s overall norm — an interglacial period in an ice age. And Earth has, at times, sustained CO2 levels significantly higher than what we currently have, with no damage to it as a planet. Compared to other disasters that have afflicted life on this planet (Permian/Triassic extinctions, KT impact, etc.) the effects of human civilization on this planet are as nothing.

Further, some popular environmentalists (such as Al Gore) tend to make statements about weather effects and speed of climate change which are drastically out of keeping with anything the IPCC puts out. For instance, claims that “catastrophic weather” has gotten worse because of global warming are very, very hard to sustain by any real data.

What should, however, concern people is not that we will destroy “the planet” but that our civilization as currently organized relies on the earth’s climate patterns not changing very much, regardless of whether than change is natural or anthropocentric. Comparatively sudden changes could result in widespread displacement or hunger, if they came, regardless of their origin. But the planet, qua planet, will be just fine.

Several hours later, both of those comments of mine had been deleted, and the thread closed, though oddly enough his reply to me remains in place. I'm not really sure why the comments suddenly were perceived to cross that threshold over which blog owners feel they cannot allow people to tread. But if nothing else it does certainly seem to be an example of how touchy people can become once they start demanding that people "look at the facts" and explain them.

Does It Matter How You Tithe?

Our parish is deploying "e-giving", and asking people to strongly consider setting up a weekly or monthly electronic donation rather than getting envelopes. (If you sign up for the e-giving, they stop mailing you envelopes.)

The benefits for the parish are pretty obvious: the expense of sending out envelopes to nearly a thousand families are pretty high, this regularizes their income and makes it smoother and more predictable, etc. In my case, there's actually an additional incentive to give electronically -- if I have the money deducted directly from my paycheck through my company's charitable giving campaign, they'll match my donations, doubling the amount.

I have a certain amount from each paycheck set up to be sent to the parish through the corporate matching program, but up till now I've been hesitant to do all our tithing that way. There are two reasons for this:

1) When donations are made via withholding, it becomes nearly invisible to us, our income is simply lower. It seems to me that there is probably some personal and moral value in accepting the discipline of having to set aside some of the money that actually hits our bank account for the parish and other donation recipients, rather than simply having it all happen out of our sight. The fact that we could simply use the cash some other way in a tight pay period seems like it makes the action more real.

2) As parents, we're not simply doing things for our own benefit, we also have to be conscious of how our actions model what we believe is moral living to our children. They're already required to put a portion of their allowances into the collection basket each week, but it seems like it is probably also good for them to see us actually writing a check to put in the basket. I remember being staggered at seeing my father write checks for what seemed to me princely sums such as $25 when I was a child, and having looked over my dad's shoulder as a child when he was writing checks before mass or during the sermon gave me a sense of what was expected of me when I was living on my own. I wouldn't want the kids to think that giving money to the church is one of those things which children are required to do but adults don't bother with -- and having them sit down with me once a year to set up charity witholding and file my taxes does not seem like a substitute for actually seeing one's parents spend real money every week on supporting the parish.

I see a certain value to 1), but I think it's easily outweighed by the fact that my employer would double my donations. The parish getting twice as much money seems a fairly major incentive. However, I'm not sure how much weight to give to 2). I'm strongly conscious of the fact that while we as adults have difficulty feeling the same about more abstract processes such as electronic tithing via paycheck witholding, it's necessarily entirely invisible to children. And I put a very high value on forming our children correcting in Christian living.

Thoughts? Has anyone else struggled with this question, and what sort of resolution did you come to, for what reasons?

The Little Children

Last year, when I was feeling free and easy about my future as my youngest was only growing older, my good friend J and I decided to teach a First Communion class at our parish. There was a slightly self-serving aspect to this: we wanted to make sure that our own second-graders had a solid class. More importantly, however, it's become more and more clear to me how important it is to work within the framework of our parish family. Do you know why pastors sometimes find homeschoolers hard to deal with? Because they often ask for exceptions.

So we became RE teachers (RE standing for Religious Education, of course; apparently the term CCD is no longer in vogue). And it's been an education for me. I've never done classroom teaching before, and it seems that the methods that are quite successful for homeschooling one or two children at a time are not that efficient for instructing 17 children at a time -- who'da thunk? But we manage, though some weeks are more difficult than others.

Let's talk a bit about boys -- seven-to-eight-year-old boys, specifically. Darwin has told me that he was always a great favorite with his CCD teachers back in the day, and he never knew why, because he found class boring and said so every now and then. I can tell him why now. Many of the young guys in my class (I have eight) are loud, slightly hyperactive, a little rude, and inclined to be silly. I can't blame them -- they're boys, after all, and class is at 4:30. They're hungry, they're tired of school, they want to go home. But there are a few boys in class who are bright, polite, focused, and can turn off the goofiness. These boys are the joy of my classroom time. They're willing to give answers, but they're not know-it-alls like the girls. They're fun, but they're not rambunctious, and they don't always have to draw attention to themselves. Some of them are quiet and some are more talkative, but I can tell they're giving me their attention. I've fallen in love with those boys.

Studies have shown that males fall across a wider spectrum of abilities and quirkiness than girls, and I can believe it. My girls are in basically two categories: either they know everything and need to tell you about it, or they're quiet. (I'm sorry to say that my own seven-year-old is in the know-it-all category, compounded by her inexperience with classroom ettiquette, such as raising one's hand and being called on before one shouts out the answer.) All my girls are basically competent at reading and writing and listening. The boys vary from rapt attention to la-la land -- not including the native Spanish speaker who can barely read English. I read all instructions to him.

The books we use in our class are mediocre at best, though they do seem tailored to a second-grade level. We find the most success in hands-on activities: looking at a Mass kit, passing around a book with pictures, coloring pages. One of the biggest hits in the classroom is practicing for receiving communion. It goes something like this:

"Okay kids, listen up: this is very important. We're going to get in a line and practice how we'll walk up to receive Jesus. Everyone stand up straight! Would you slouch like that in church? ("NOOO!") Here's how we'll hold our hands. We make a throne for Jesus with our left hand on top and our right hand underneath. This is the left hand, see? No, cup your hands, like a bowl. Otherwise, the host will fall on the floor. Wouldn't that be awful? "(YESSS!") Carlos, cup your hands. John, go to the back of the line. Next time you'll have to sit at the table.

"Okay. We're going to practice with small crackers. Listen, this is important: this is NOT Jesus. We're just practicing. I want you to pretend that you're in church. Make a sign of respect when the person in front of you is receiving. Bow your head. When the host is held up, the priest will say, 'The Body of Christ'. You answer, 'Amen.' What do you answer? ("Amen!") When the host is placed in your hand, you IMMEDIATELY pick it up gently with your right hand and put it in your mouth. Alexa, do not walk off with the cracker -- eat it right away. Come back and we'll try it again. Kyra, I said consume it IMMEDIATELY. Austin, you don't just shove the host into your mouth -- pick it up with your right hand. Don't forget to make the sign of the cross afterward..."

Good thing we're practicing for this -- I can't imagine what would have happened if the first time they had to try this was on the day of their First Communion...

Feast Day Grumblings

It inordinately annoys me that driving up "church row" (the street on which our church is situated has a Presbyterian church, a Bible church, an Episcopal church, and our Catholic church) I saw the Episcopalians advertising on their sign board an Epiphany service which is actually on Epiphany. Whereas we, of course, have Epiphany today, on the tenth day of Christmas so as to celebrate it on the nearest Sunday.

Sigh...

I understand the bishops' desire to have people actually at mass to hear about feast days, and thus to move them to nearby Sundays, but treating a feast day like a bank holiday to be rounded off to the nearest convenient day (especially a feast day which has always been celebrated specifically on the twelfth day after Christmas) seems to take away rather from the importance of the feast as well.

So if you can forgive my reactionary tendencies, I shall be wishing everyone a joyous epiphany on the sixth.

The Dangers of Hobby Catholicism

More years ago than it would be legal for me to confess, I fell in love with beer brewing as a result of reading the charmingly entitled An Essay on Brewing, Vintage and Distillation, Together With Selected Remedies for Hangover Melancholia: Or, How to Make Boozeby John Festus Adams. Adams opens with an extended discussion of what sort of hobby book this will not be, recounting his experience with a book on growing mushrooms. Written by the Brit who Took Food Seriously, it eventually became clear to Adams while reading this book that the author did not actually expect him to be able to master this most occult of gardening hobbies. It took skill. It took patience. It took a ton of fresh horse manure which simply be be obtained fresh (preferably from a ladies' riding academy) and in the quantity of about half a ton. And it must be composted for six months -- no more and no less. It must be turned every four weeks -- not three weeks and certainly not five. And if you weren't prepared to do all these things Right, there was really no point in doing it at all, because your mushrooms, if they even grew, would be No Good At All.

This, Adams promised, was not the sort of book he was setting out to write. His book was a book about brewing for those who actually wanted to brew. And it was based on the theory that they would brew, and the resulting beer would be pretty good when they did.

All of which is a somewhat self-indulgent introduction (though I do recommend Adams' book for the sheer joy of reading it, even if you have no intention of brewing) to a rather basic point: It is the inevitable danger of being deeply absorbed in some topic that one begins to draw lines in the sand and say, "If you don't do X, Y and Z in my favorite way, you are clearly not serious about this and should get out." And yet for those of us who make reading, talking and writing about the Catholic Church a hobby of sorts, this presents a serious danger. Those of us who are "Catholic geeks" need always to recall that however much the more abstruse corners of Catholic history or theology may fascinate us, that Catholicism is not a hobby or field of study -- the exclusive territory of those with sufficient levels of detailed knowledge and experience. Rather, the Church is the Body of Christ on earth, and the source of the sacraments which are channels of grace to those of us in the Church Militant.

Staying Rooted in Parish Life

I suspect that my family was hardly unique among serious Catholics in the 80s in that my parents often found working around our parish to be key to bringing their children up with a strong appreciation of the Catholic faith. When I was in 2nd and 3rd grade my mother helped teach CCD for a while, until the point where a fiat was handed down from the DRE on lent: There will be no discussion of Christ's suffering and death and crucifixes should not be on display in any classrooms for the younger kids -- that would be too scary. (I believe this was the same DRE who gave an inspirational talk about how one of her deepest spiritual experiences was cutting shapes out of construction paper. Nice lady, but not what you'd call a deep thinker in matters of religion.)

From that point on, my parents made a conscious decision to provide complete catechesis at home, and it was a good thing too as the quality of parish CCD classes only got worse as the years went on. There were liturgical issues as well. The 10:30 "rock mass" continued to rock out standard modern hymn as if they were early 80s hard rock well into the late 90s. And there was "Fr. Vaudeville" who was stationed at the parish every summer for several years. One of the high points I recall was his sermon on how the form and substance of sacraments didn't matter. "This stuff?" ask, splashing water from the baptismal font across the sanctuary. "Doesn't matter! Words? Don't matter! What's in your heart, that's all that matters!" Or the well-intentioned young priest who seemed to think that his vocation was similar to that of Mr. Rogers and gave all his sermons through puppets.

Some photos, and a liturgical music post

Music first.

This past weekend was our parish's ministry fair, in which all the ministries set up tables in the parish hall and try to convince the post-Mass-going hordes to sign up for their ministry. My job as hawker-in-chief for the Schola is to "build awareness" so that those interested in listening will know we exist, and those interested in singing (the few, the very few) can be winnowed down to those with the requisite ability. To that end, I utilized my mad calligraphy skillz and made a nice display board, of which I display a poorly-photographed selection here.


My table was in the music ghetto with the tables of the five weekend Mass choirs. I had a CD player set up to waft chant and polyphony to draw in the music lovers. As I stood at my station on my third go-'round, two guys with guitars hustled over to the table next to mine, dedicated to the choir whose Mass had just ended. They started playing some vaguely familiar yet distinctly non-liturgical instrumental. In another moment, another choir member sauntered over and started singing along with the guys in what she must have thought was a soulful, down-wit'-dat sort of style. Although I couldn't understand a word she mumbled, I finally recognized the tune: The House of the Rising Sun. After a while, they switched to Good Riddance by Green Day.

On the other hand, I had more people show interest in the Schola's music after that Mass than after any other.

And some photos:




These are our Greek charts, for the edification of the young ladies here. (Do you know that with a few small adjustments, you can sing the Greek alphabet to the tune of the Alphabet Song? Try it.) We keep them behind the computer so that when the girls sit down to play games, they're really picking up the Greek alphabet by osmosis!

Eleven tips for keeping yourself sane (in a less-than-sane parish)

Rich Leonardi offers some excellent advice for serious Catholics trying to make a difference within their own parish.

Every troubled diocese has at least one affinity parish known for its doctrinal orthodoxy and liturgical fidelity. Serious Catholics tend to gravitate toward them, either as frequent guests or parishioners. But many choose not to do so for various reasons, e.g, a sense of obligation to reforming their territorial parish, a fear that leaving would "let the terrorists win," a connection to a school, or a desire for a neighborhood parish. If this latter group includes you, here are ten tips in no particular order for keeping yourself sane: Read More

Presenting: The Church

As I mentioned, I'm giving a lecture in our Adult Catechesis series on "The Church". Well, for them that's interested, here's my PowerPoint presentation, though I don't know how much sense it will make given that it's mostly a visual for me to talk over.

Still I've tried to make the visuals good.



The presentation itself is here:

http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=dgjj8n7q_13g8tsnf6m

[It looks like on some slides the text goes off the bottom in the GoogleDocs version -- and my Greek text on one slide got lost. But hey, what can a fellow do?]

The outline that I'll be speaking from is here:

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dgjj8n7q_78fwh8f8d4

The Church in 90 Minutes

I'm on the team giving the Adult Catechesis lectures at our parish this year, and this coming Thursday is my first presentation. The topic is the "the Church", covering chapters 10-11 in the United States Catholic Catechism for Adults. I certainly won't lack for material...

Thus far, my plan is to deviate a bit from the way the book covers the topic. I'm going to spend the first 45 minutes doing an overview of Church history, and then after a 5-10 minute break I'll cover the doctrine covered in the catechism, using the history we've covered to provide concrete examples of what I'm talking about.

Given that we're supposed to be presenting with a target audience of those who have attended mass for most of their adult lives but have not had much formal Catholic education, I'm thinking that explaining how the Church is "one, Catholic, holy and apostolic" and other doctrinal elements from the catechism will make more sense after covering historical context.

I'll post my powerpoint deck and outline when its all done. (The which is front of mind right now because I'm trying to get the lion's share of the writing done this weekend.)

Does anyone have a recommendation for a fairly short and accessible history of the Church which might be listed as "further reading"?

A Short Halloween Rant

Today is Halloween, or for those traditionalists out there, All Hallows Eve. Not a bad day to put a jack-o-lantern in the window, put out a bowl of cream for your local hob or nob, and read some ghost stories around the fireplace. (Except here in Texas where it'll be 80 degrees today.)

The girls are eager to go to the parish Halloween party and lark about with their friends in princess costumes. And here, unfortunately, is where the rant comes in. Because the party at the parish tonight is not a Halloween party -- it's an All Saints Day Party. One is not supposed to come as a princess or fairy or night or (as our eldest ambitiously proposed) Lyle the Crocodile, but rather as one's favorite saint. Every year some people flaunt this and come in normal custumes, which is probably what will happen with us this year, but I'm assured by the daughter-in-law of one of the organizers that, "It really drives them nuts when people do that."

I don't have anything against the idea of having a saints themed costume party on All Saints Day -- there's no real tradition behind it, but it's not a bad idea. However, All Saints Day is Nov. 1st, not Oct. 31st. And I'm not really sure why we as Catholics should feel the need to counter-program against Halloween parties. Certain Protestant groups, certainly, are convinced that all that surrounds Halloween is evil superstition, but there's no reason for Catholics to go off the deep end about this stuff.

Indeed, as a Catholic, it annoys me a bit to see All Hallows Eve (with all of the cultural texture that originally surrounded that day) turned into an All Saints Day party. Not that modern American Halloween is much in touch with older traditions surrounding All Hallows Eve, but if we're going to insist on changing it as Catholics, we should get in touch with some original All Hallows Eve traditions, not do a All Saints counter program to American Halloween.

Bureaucratic hassles at the parish level: Baptismal edition

Here's the quiz of the day for Catholic parents: how long does it take you to schedule a baptism at your parish?

In the last months of my last pregnancy, I called up our parish to try and schedule the baptism. We had a tricksy time frame with godparents graduating from college and only having a few days of time overlap to be in the area, so I wanted to get in good and early. Baby was due in March, and we needed the baptism in May. The parish secretary said, "Oh no, we don't even have any classes available until June." No class, no baptism.

So I spoke with a priest who'd just been moved from our parish to a parish about 20 miles away, and he scheduled the baptism right then, over the phone, for the day we needed. We didn't have to take the baptism class, and I made sure I got the paperwork he needed to the office in good time.

Now it's time to schedule another baptism. As before, I'm starting before baby is born because it's very important to us to have the baptism as soon as possible. I'd like to do things the right way because Darwin is on parish council and it seems important to set an example, and yet I'm running into the same hassles. Seeing as once again both my godparents are coming in from out of state, it's important to me to be able to set a date as soon as possible, but one can't schedule the baptism until one's taken the class, which one can't even sign up for without the proper paperwork from the godparents, who need to know the baptism date so that they can take time off work and buy plane tickets... And then there's the issue of requiring a birth certificate, which, as I hope to have the baby baptized two weeks after the class (which we can't take until next month, four days before baby is due), is simply not going to be possible.

I appreciate the need to ensure that parents and godparents take their responsibilities seriously, and I can understand that our priest doesn't want to be granting exceptions left and right, but the laid-back time frame on which the parish seems to operate seems to de-emphasize the vital importance of baptism to a child's soul. I don't want to wait a year or six months or three months -- I want my child baptized right away. Even in these technologically advanced times, children can die unexpectedly. I'm not willing to take the chance of pushing out baptism until some parish bureaucrat has ticked off every last box on the checklist. For now I'm going to try and work with the system, but if takes pulling a few strings to ensure that my child's soul is cleansed of original sin as quickly as possible, then so be it.

UPDATE: You guys have some crazy stories in the comments, but I defy you to top Opinionated Homeschooler's anecdote:

But my friend got it worse from our parish. Her godparents, like all of her family, were Cuban refugees. They had no sacramental records, as Castro wasn't going to fax them over. The parish flat refused to allow them to stand as godparents. She is outraged to this day.

No Top Down Solution

Last night was our parish's Pastoral Council meeting -- a body which has the dubious honor of having me as a part of it. And at the meeting, someone brought up an announcement which had been made for the last several weeks before mass along with the usual "Please turn off all cell phones and pagers". This additional announcement was to the effect of: "For the parents of young children, there is a cry room available if your children become noisy. Please respect the worship of those around you."

Given that some of the other local parishes have a very aggressive "please leave your kids at the parish babysitting center -- if they make noise we will give you the evil eye" policy, and that our parish has generally been pretty family friendly, this announcement was not making any friends. And indeed, at the meeting, nearly everyone (most especially parents) agreed that it gave a negative impression. (It was decided to change or get rid of the announcement.)

However, a minority demanded, "If we can't have an announcement, what can we do about the occasional family where the parents shows no inclination at all to make their kids be quiet or take them out?"

This, I think, underscores a fundamental sort of problem that many communities face in regards to enforcing behaviors, especially positive behaviors or virtues. There is simply no effective way of quickly and effectively enforcing virtue.

Let's look at this issue of quiet in church as an example. Now when you get down to it, it's not just quiet that's at issue. The church would be quiet if no one was in it, but that's not the goal. Rather, the goal is that everyone have sufficient respect for the mass to remain quiet and pay attention, and teach their children to do the same (while taking small children out temporarily on those occasions when they are not persuadable.) So the goal is best summarized as: Everyone in the church should have a strong sense of the sacredness of the liturgy, and convey that sense to their children.

Now, there are lots of increasingly draconian things one could do to enforce silence. One could tell the ushers to escort out the family of any child making so much as a peep. The priest could stop saying mass and glare at offending children during mass. One could simply ban children from the church. However, none of these would foster that sense of the sacred -- indeed, quite the opposite. Such practices would deeply offend families, turn the mass into a battleground, and (through banish children from the church) completely fail to teach children anything about the mass.

Trying to force the desired results of virtue not only fails to cultivate the virtue, it actively frustrated the development of the virtue.

So what is one to do?

It seems to me that is exactly the issue. There simply is no way to quickly force through, without exception, the development of a virtue. And if you try to force the effects, you will often end up assaulting the very virtue you seek to cultivate.

And yet we very often find it emotionally impossible, in our rush to "do something", to recognize that the best thing we can do is not take drastic action, and work through the long process of educating and moving the community culture to where it needs to be in order to achieve our desires.

Liturgy of the Hours - The Basics

I forget if I'd mentioned before, but I'm helping to get a group together at our parish to say Vespers a few times a week. And since I'm one of those people who figures that every new project deserves a webpage, I set up a little information page for it via Blogger. So far there's only an article with a little basic information about the Liturgy of the Hours, but there should be a bit more coming over the next few days and weeks on the history of the Divine Office and such.

So if you're looking for the elevator pitch (or maybe the long walk down the corridor pitch) on what the Liturgy of the Hours are, take a look. And if you're local, do feel free to drop by once we've got a schedule up.

What to do with The Youth

The Liturgy of the Hours group, which I mentioned earlier, got approved at the parish council meeting last night, so things should be moving along again soon on that front. However, I found myself also drawn into an area of responsibility that I feel less sure on.

Being the youngest member of the council by almost ten years (and this even as the parish council has got much younger in the last few years) I got assigned to help our with the "youth and family ministries" committee, and what should the topic of discussion be but the efforts to form a new youth group.

Our parish is very heavy on families with school age children, so a good youth group seems like a need. However, the last few attempts have always fizzled for one reason or another. Now we've got a brand new youth leader, 70 teens showed up to her first meeting, and everyone's hoping things will work out.

So I'm young, do I have any advice? Well frankly, I never liked youth groups. The plague of the church youth group is that it seeks to be both formation and recreation. The trap is always that it is either not that much fun, or not very good formation, or worst of all: neither fun nor formative. My experiences with youth groups as a youth fell in this last and worst category.

One of the other difficulties with such things is that a group of teenagers whose main point of similarity is that their families are all in the same parish will oftentimes be at radically different levels of formation, and have rather different ideas of fun. Being "youth" is not necessarily that much of a point of similarity.

MrsDarwin had a somewhat happier experience of youth groups than I did. The format she dealt with was a 1.5-2hr meeting which had 60min or so of religious content: prayer followed by a bible study or a short talk (I believe the term in certain circles is "witness", but I'm terribly squeamish about such things) and then fun activities afterwards. This seems like a basically sound idea, though it still leaves open the rather tricky point of what level to do your prayer/bible study/talks at.

The fact is, we are often rather less likable versions of ourselves as youth. And if I seem elitist and intolerant now, that's nothing to what I was as a youth. Since my own ideas of what constituted an interesting discussion of prayer life at the time were rather heavy on theory and abstraction (or else argumentation, which is always fun for the young) I have a feeling that thinking, "What would I have enjoyed?" is simply not a very good way of figuring these things out now. Looking back, it must be acknowledged: I was simply not a fun teen.

If anyone has details on successful teen church group formats they've enjoyed, I'd be glad to hear about them.

Liturgy of the Hours Talking Points

A couple weeks ago a couple other members of our parish invited me in as an "interested lay person" to help get a group started to pray the Liturgy of the Hours as a group a couple times a week at the church.

As far as finding interested people and getting one of our priests to agree to help those of us who've only ever said the office un-officially or silently learn the proper way to saying it as a group, things have been going swimmingly. However, we've been advised we need to have the head of the "liturgy and spirituality commission" present the idea to the parish council for approval -- a bottleneck designed to keep overly small groups from hogging constantly over-booked rooms around the parish.

I'm on the council, as is one of the other people involved in putting the group together, so I don't really imagine we'll have any trouble, but I went ahead and wrote up a "one sheet" (as we call such things in marketing-speak) to be handed out to everyone in order to try to minimize problems and do a little education.

Lest anyone should find such a brief summary useful, it follows below.

We're planning on having people get the Shorter Christian Prayer, basically because it's easy, contains Lauds and Vespers (which are the only one's we're likely to be doing in parish at the moment) and most importantly: cheap.

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Proposal:

Begin a lay-run group which says the Liturgy of the Hours one or more days per week, probably Vespers said in the evening just after the end of the workday.

Purpose:

• Provide an opportunity for lay-led liturgical prayer.


• Familiarize parishioners with the ancient prayer of the Church which Vatican II has especially commended to the laity as well as priests and religious.


• Raise up to the Lord the intentions of the parish.

Background:

• The Liturgy of the Hours is the official prayer of the Church, said daily by all priests, deacons and religious. It is focused around praying the 150 psalms (on a four-week cycle).


• The origins of the LotH are very ancient: praying the psalms was an essential element of temple worship at the time of Jesus and the Apostles, and accounts as early as the 3rd Century AD describe both priests and laity pausing when getting up, at mid-day, and in the evening to pray the psalms.


• Vatican II significantly shortened and simplified the LotH, and specifically encouraged parishes and the laity to make it a part of their regular prayer life.


• Vespers (Evening Prayer) consists of two psalms, a short reading, a Canticle from the New Testament, and Intercessions/Prayers of the Faithful with the option of also including a hymn. It takes 10-15 minutes to say.

What the Church Says:

From the General Instruction on the Liturgy of the Hours:

“This liturgy of the hours or divine office, enriched by readings, is principally a prayer of praise and petition. Indeed, it is the prayer of the Church with Christ and to Christ.” (GILH, 1:2)

“Wherever possible, other groups of the faithful should celebrate the liturgy of the hours communally in church. This especially applies to parishes.” (GILH, 1:21)

“Lay groups gathering for prayer, apostolic work, or any other reason are encouraged to fulfill the Church's duty, by celebrating part of the liturgy of the hours. The laity must learn above all how in the liturgy they are adoring God the Father in spirit and in truth; they should bear in mind that through public worship and prayer they reach all humanity and can contribute significantly to the salvation of the whole world.” (GILH, 2:27)

On the Bright Side

We complain, every so often, about our parish. The architecture is nothing to write home about (unless you wrote: "What is this?") and the music of the ordinary just got switched out to some rather rambling and uninspiring modern, OCP-ish stuff.

But stuff also happens that makes us remember why we like it. For instance, this is the third year running that the Corpus Christi homily has actually been about the real presence. Which never happened to us at any of our other parishes. (On the down side, it turned into one of those rambling three-for-the-price-of-one sermons that went on for nearly 30 minutes and inspired a gread deal of comment in the baby -- who had to be taken out to finish her oration in the vestibule.)