What bowing before the Cross means to Catholics

By means of the wood of the cross Christ won the salvation of us all

Imagine you're in the midst of a storm so severe that you have to leave home to reach a place of safety. You are not sure that your car will be able to make it through the floodwaters, but it's all you have to rely on. You take your family and essential documents with you and abandon your home. Though the buffeting from the wind is frightening and the other challenges to the car's ability to cope are numerous and extreme, it excels in passing through all the life-threatening dangers and it carries you to the haven you had hoped to reach. 

Given the car's outstanding performance, would you and your family have a new-found respect for that piece of machinery that had preserved your lives? I'm sure you would. And in the past, when families kept vehicles for a longer time than is the custom now, you might have bestowed a name on it to express your bond with it, and you might pat it in an affectionate way.

In a somewhat comparable way Catholics over Easter have shown a profound respect of, or a deep sentiment toward, and express their close bond to, the cross that Jesus Christ died on. The cross is the means of our redemption, so that we are saved from punishment for our offences against God, who is Being itself, far beyond our comprehension, but by means of the cross, able to be identified as the "tremendous lover" of every single one of us. 

At the recent solemn Good Friday ceremonies, whereas during Lent the crucifix and statues of the saints, those heroes in the service of God and humanity, have been covered in a mournful purple cloth, the celebrant gradually uncovers the cross, exposing once again the figure of Christ. But the focus is as much on the cross itself. The celebrant intones: "Behold the wood of the cross, on which hung the Saviour of the world." To which the congregation responds: "Come let us adore." Cue Protestant outrage as the people then go forward to bow or genuflect before the cross, even kiss the figure of the Christ or the wood on which the figure hangs.  This part of the Good Friday ceremony is sometimes described as the "adoration" of the cross, at other times as "veneration". As to terminology, we have to note the variations in the rich Latin and Greek usage the Church follows.

Harking back to the analogy above with the car that has earned respect, we respond to the cross in our parish church or chapel because of what it symbolically represents as to our redemption. The Church requires churches to always display a crucifix because it "calls to mind for the faithful the saving Passion of the Lord". For centuries before Luther tried to put paid to this kind of pious practice in his battle with the Church's application of the granting of indulgences, Christians had been honoring the cross with processions and acts of honor, even "creeping to the Cross", which was encouraged by kings of France and England. This entailed crawling on one's knees.  

The human responds to the material as much as any other creature of the animal world; we learn through our senses; we understand complex ideas when we can apply them or compare them to the practical or to something our environment. Therefore:

Few events are more emotional for a Catholic than assembling with hundreds of others and in procession adoring our crucified Jesus on the cross, to see individuals genuflect, kiss his feet, watch as parents lift up their children to do the same. Despite our grief, we know that without the crucifixion, without the instrument of salvation, there is no Resurrection – which means no life for us. Every blessing, every grace, every sacrament we have results from Christ's sacrifice on Calvary.

Is this adoration of the cross, this reverent homage before the symbol of the means of our redemption, to be equated with bowing before idols, meaning gods? Nonsense!  

Having applied our heart and mind to what the cross means, and so strengthened by this sign of God's love, we can take up our own cross each day and continue in a positive way our journey through life: "To journey through life, in imitation of the One who 'endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God' (Letter to the Hebrews 12:2). 

By his use of the wood of the cross, "by every step of the condemned Christ, every action and every word ... he reveals to us the truth about God and humankind". We have to observe, learn, and respond with a reverence for the ordinary evoked by the awe-inspiring outcome made possible by a mundane "tree", which provided beams that lifted up the suffering servant to glory. The cross is at the centre, so we pray: May we hear the astonished seraphic voices calling to each from other around the cross, “Holy, Holy, Holy, is the LORD of hosts! The whole earth is full of His glory!” 

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IVF — Does 'can do' mean 'should do'?

Infertility can be an incredibly painful challenge. But is IVF the answer?

On the podcast this week, I sit down with Dr. Lauren Rubal, a former IVF doctor, to discuss the real world of IVF, her transformation, and her new approach to holistic & compassionate women's healthcare. pic.twitter.com/mocOkRDrfv

— Lila Rose (@LilaGraceRose) April 8, 2023

God in human flesh — evidence that rings true

An intense life...betrayed by Judas's kiss. From The Taking of Christ by Caravaggio (1602)

Happy Easter-time to you and your loved ones!

Here's something I read over the weekend:

Isn’t it amazing that even the name Jesus Christ can cause tension and discomfort?

Some people say it’s because that name reminds people of negative experiences they had at church or of violent Christian history. But the words “Christianity” or “Catholic Church” don’t cause the same anxiety. I would argue that this name stirs strong feelings in people because the name itself has power. And the name of Jesus has power because the person who bears that name is God in human flesh and has infinite power.

Why should we believe such an incredible claim? Here are three reasons:

1. Jesus believed he was God and he’s someone we can trust.

Jesus saw himself as more than a human prophet or teacher. For example, Buddha said, “Be ye lamps unto yourselves . . . hold fast to the truth as a refuge,” whereas Jesus said, “I am the light of the world” (John 8:12). Jesus also said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me” (John 14:6).

Another clue to Jesus’ divine identity is that Jesus acted like God. For example, he forgave sins, which is something that only God has the authority to do (Mark 2:5-7). In John 20:28, Jesus’ disciple Thomas addressed him as “My Lord and my God.” Jesus did not correct Thomas, because what Thomas said was true.

2. We can trust the New Testament documents.

There currently exist over 5,500 copies of Greek New Testament manuscripts. There are also 15,000 copies written in other languages like Latin, Coptic, and Syriac. The first complete copy of the New Testament can be dated to within 300 years of the original documents. Now, compare this to one of the most famous examples of ancient Greek literature: Homer’s Iliad. It was written in the eighth century B.C. and, although a few fragments of the Iliad can be dated to within 500 years of Homer, the oldest complete copy was written in the tenth century A.D., or 1,800 years later!

Because there were so many copies of the New Testament in the ancient world (including thousands more that didn’t survive to the present day), no single person or group could have gathered them all up and changed the story of Jesus. Also, unlike the biographies of people like Alexander the Great or Buddha, which were written centuries after those figures died, the Bible’s descriptions of Jesus were written within a few decades of his death either by eyewitnesses or people who knew the eyewitnesses to Jesus’ ministry.

The Biblical scholar F.F. Bruce put it bluntly: “There is no body of ancient literature in the world which enjoys such a wealth of good textual attestation as the New Testament.”

3. The first Christians worshipped Jesus as God.

The earliest Christian writings show that they believed Jesus was the “image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15), in whom the fullness of deity dwells bodily (Col. 2:8-9). Jesus had the “form of God” and a name to which every knee shall bend (Phil. 2:5-11). The Bible even calls Jesus “our great God and savior” (Titus 2:13).

When a second-century Roman governor named Pliny the Younger asked Christians to worship the gods of Rome, they refused. In a letter explaining this behavior to the Roman emperor, Pliny said that Christians “were in the habit of meeting on a certain fixed day before it was light, when they sang in alternate verse a hymn to Christ as to a god, and bound themselves to a solemn oath.”

Remember also that the first Christians were converts from Judaism. For over a thousand years the Jewish people made themselves distinct from their pagan neighbors by refusing to worship an animal or a man as God. The Jews of Jesus’ time would never have believed Jesus was God unless his miracles, including his Resurrection from the dead, proved it.

Since Jesus did prove he was God, we can trust him when he says: “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?” (John 11:25-26)
​​​

This is an excerpt from Trent Horn's bestselling book Why We're Catholic. Read the book for yourself - it's concise and cheap, though it's the product of an experienced exponent of Catholic insights into God among us. Go here to buy your own ebook version. Other versions are available. 

Without God we struggle in vain to live life to the full.

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She's Here! Amazing UNMEDICATED BIRTH Video!

New parents overwhelmed by the joy of new life, and full of amazement at their role in the process that has given them a daughter.

See, too, how parenting provides a more intense life experience, and a greater degree of happiness:

Parents and the childfree: A neuroscientist explains who is happier | BBC Science Focus Magazine

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God — who died out of love for us

In Passion Week, God dies for us. Graham Sutherland's Crucifixion 

New Testament writings scream out that Jesus is God, if one is prepared to accept the message the written word seeks to convey. An accidental crossing of paths with the outfit called Spirit and Truth, which has created its own Bible version, drew my attention anew to the number of "Christian" outfits that have gone their own way and believe neither that Jesus is both man and God, two natures in the one person, nor in the existence of the Trinity of Father, Son, and Spirit, three persons in the one Godhead.  

Local churches or groups like Spirit and Truth celebrate their modern-day exegetical brilliance but, in fact, are merely harking back to the theories espoused by Alexandrian priest Arius (died 336) that the Council of Nicaea of 325 condemned as not part of the deposit of teaching of the Apostles. Typical of the Unitarian brand of Protestantism, which, as a whole, labors under the burden of sola scriptura, where everyone wants to be their own rabbi, as Luther himself put it, is this from Spirit and Truth:

GOD 

Yahweh our heavenly father alone is God. He is loving, kind, good, just, merciful, faithful, and righteous.

JESUS

The son of God and Messiah whom God made Lord over all. He was born of the virgin Mary and did not personally exist prior to his birth. He lived a sinless life, and through his sacrificial death on the cross, he atoned for sin and inaugurated a new covenant.

HOLY SPIRIT

One of God’s many titles in Scripture is the Holy Spirit. Scripture also uses “holy spirit” to describe God’s gift to all who believe. The holy spirit unites believers together as his people in Christ. Believers with God’s holy spirit can demonstrate that spirit in a variety of ways to show the power and presence of God in them as God inspires and energizes them.

I'm not going to give a link to this group because its distance from the apostolic deposit of what Christians belief is so great, and its exegesis is so wayward. I'm using it somewhat as a strawman. As one writer put it:

The Bible very seldom says in so many words “Jesus Christ is God” [cf. John 1:1, Matt11:27, Matt 16:16, John 20:28]. For the most part, we have to be willing to follow the implications of the language to see what the authors are really saying.

It’s possible, of course, to try to avoid the implications of this language by reinterpreting titles such as “Son of God,” “Lord” and so forth to refer to something other than divinity. Arian-type sects such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons do it all the time.

To dwell a little on the gospels' language referring to Jesus, the divine person – Jesus is not a human person, though he has both human and divine natures; his humanity was united to the divinity of the pre-existing God the Son, and God did not change.

Spirit and Truth uses Matthew's account of Jesus before the Sanhedrin as a proof that Jesus is not God. According to that group's perspective, the high priest was convulsed with anger at Jesus' response because Jesus claimed to be the messiah.

However, it is clear the text shows that it was the subsequent statement that the Sanhedrin would "see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Power" and  "coming on the clouds of heaven" that drew the dramatic rending of garments and loud condemnation of Jesus as a blasphemer.

As the Jerusalem Bible states in its footnotes at this point, "the blasphemy lay not in Jesus' claim to be the Messiah but in his claim to divine rank". It explains why this is so: 

"The Power" is equivalent to "Yahweh". At this critical moment Jesus abandons his policy of "messianic secret" (cf. Mk 1:34), and unequivocally acknowledges – as he had already acknowledged to his intimates (Matt 16:16) – that he is the Messiah. But he goes further and reveals himself not as the human Messiah of traditional expectation but as the Lord of Psalm 110 (cf. Matt 22:41 fol), and the mysterious personage of heavenly origin whom Daniel had seen in vision (Matt 8:20). Henceforth the Jews will not see him except in his glory which will be manifested first in the victory of the resurrection and subsequently in the victory of the Church (cf. Matt 23:39 and 24:30).

Scripture scholar Raymond Brown (died 1998), not always a stalwart of moderate biblical readings, all the same gives a valuable overall view of how the Church's historical insight into the ontological (concerning being) reality of Jesus is crucial to understanding God's love for human beings. He writes in An Introduction to New Testament Christology (1994):

If Jesus is not "true God of true God", then we do not know God in human terms. Even if Jesus were the most perfect creature far above all others, he could tell us only at second hand about a God who really remains almost as distant as the Unmoved Mover of Aristotle. Only if Jesus is truly God do we know what God is like, for in Jesus we see God translated into terms we can understand. A God who sent a marvelous creature as our savior could be described as loving, but that love would have cost God nothing in a personal way.

Only if Jesus is truly of God do we know that God's love is so real that it reached the point of self-giving. This is why the proclamation of Nicaea was and is so important — not only because it tells us about Jesus, but because it tells us about God. Indeed, were it otherwise, the Nicene proclamation would scarcely be faithful to a Jesus who preached the kingship of God.

So also  the proclamation of Chalcedon about Jesus as true man (as well as true God) has enduring value, even for those who cannot pronounce Monophysitism*. Again, unless we understand that Jesus was truly human with no exception but sin, we cannot comprehend the depth of God's love. If Jesus' knowledge was limited, as indicated prima facie in the biblical evidence, then God loved us to the point of self-subjection to our most agonizing infirmities. 

A Jesus who walked through the world with unlimited knowledge, knowing exactly what the morrow would bring, knowing with certainty that three days after his death his Father would raise him up, would be a Jesus who could arouse our admiration, but a Jesus still far from us. He would be a Jesus far from a humankind that can only hope [as to] the future and believe in God's goodness, far from a humankind that must face the supreme uncertainty of death with faith but without knowledge of what is beyond.

On the other hand, a Jesus for whom the detailed future had elements of mystery, dread, and hope as it has for us and yet, at the same time, a Jesus who would say, "Not my will but yours"— this would be a Jesus who could effectively teach us how to live, for this Jesus would have gone through life's real trials.

Then his saying, "No one can have greater love than this: to lay down his life for those he loves" (John 15:13), would be truly persuasive, for we know he laid down his life with all the agony with which we lay ours down. We would know that for him the loss of life was, as it is for us, the loss of a great possession, a possession that is outranked only by love.

In the 4th and 5th centuries the question of Jesus as God and man was not an abstract question debated in the scholars' chambers; it was a question of what God and Christianity were all about.  

* This is the thesis condemned as heresy that Jesus had only a divine nature, not two, namely, human and divine.

To conclude, but staying with Brown's understanding of who Jesus Christ is arising from his exegetical research, we can come to know God in his essence because of the revelation of the life of God that Jesus reveals. Brown writes in the text cited above:

For John, Jesus' previous existence with God is more than a creedal dogma; it is the linchpin in understanding the whole Christian life. 

A human child gets life from a father and mother and has the same kind of life that they have. The divine Son has the same kind of life that the Father has, and so Jesus not only brings a word to be believed but embodies a life to be shared. We may sum up Johannine christology in these words of Jesus (6:57):

Just as the Father who has life has sent me,
and I have life because of the Father,
so the person who feeds on me
will have life because of me.

 What a future awaits us! The nature of the transformation of our entering into his own divine life that Jesus speaks of is termed "divination" or "deification" or theosis in Greek. This aspect of our future has a long history in Christian mediation. Though we never share ontological union with God, by our striving to "feed on" the divine Jesus, we are endowed with intimate fellowship with the Father and the Holy Spirit, and with Jesus Christ himself, God who became human to reveal the depth of God's love for us.

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Oscar win casts clarity on disability notions

James Martin, centre, shares the joy of starring in an Oscar-winning film

When James Martin was born, his parents were told he would probably never speak. He has now made Oscars history. He is the first actor with Down Syndrome to star in an Academy Award winning film, An Irish Goodbye, which won best live action short film.

The Irish Times reported that following the ceremony, he and his costar Seamus O’Hara, along with the film’s writers and directors, sang the Belfast song I’ll Tell My Ma to reporters before heading to the Elton John after-show party.

“It doesn’t matter if you have Down syndrome, as long as you’re doing what you do,” Martin told the BBC. “I do what I can to be funny.”

Martin has been attending a drama group in Belfast for almost 20 years and recently brought in the BAFTA award he received after the same comedy film won best British short film.

Frances Nelson, who teaches the group for adults with learning disabilities, said she prefers to describe it as a class for “an amazing bunch of adults who have ability and do drama and come to socialise”.

Martin says he wants to return to his day jobs as a barista at Starbucks and chef at an Italian restaurant in Belfast.

As an ambassador for the learning disability charity, Mencap – which he thanked in his post-Oscar interviews – Martin has campaigned against EU funding cuts and potential job losses, the Times reports.

He is also a keen runner and has taken part in community ‘park runs’ with The Falcons, a group of young adults with learning difficulties.

Among his acting credits are lead roles in the BBC drama Ups and Downs, and a part in the ITV and Netflix drama Marcella.

“James is an amazing independent person with dreams,” Nelson added.

Martin's father, Ivan, who stayed at home while his mother went to the Oscars, described the accolade as an “amazing feat” and reflected on the challenges they faced when his son was born.

“I feel that ultimately, the person who said to me, ‘Look Mr Martin, you’re going to have to realise that James will probably never speak… ' And here we are. James not only speaks, but once he started speaking he hasn’t shut up since,” he told BBC Radio Ulster.

Asked what the Oscars win means for people with a disability, and those with Down Syndrome, Ivan told ITV: "He has spent his life pushing the envelope.

"People are very good at saying, 'You can't do this and you can't do that'... He's done it and he does it consistently."

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What mob rule says about our future

From The Blind Leading the Blind, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, completed in 1568.

With the sad mob rule on display this month in Australia and New Zealand in preventing a speaker on a hot public topic from having her say, and in depriving the right to hear of hundreds (or more) of others, more attention needs to be given to the growth of intolerance among the young.

A very apposite essay, therefore, is one delivered in Persuasion online magazine considering the implications of the disruption by law students at the elite Stanford University that prevented a federal judge speaking to a private group of law students at the university. Their action was condemned by the law school's dean who imposed special training for all students on “freedom of speech and the norms of the legal profession”.

The essay, by Alex Morey, provides disheartening statistics on an increasingly apparent incomprehension as to the norms of dissent and the value of freedom of speech:

In 1969, Belgian economist—and self-described “revolutionary Marxist”—Ernest Mandel was denied a visa for a planned speaking tour to American universities on the grounds that deviations from his itinerary on a previous trip constituted “a flagrant abuse of the opportunities afforded him to express his views in this country.”

A group of American professors—determined to “engage him in a free and open academic exchange”—took Mandel’s case all the way to the Supreme Court. Though Mandel lost on a point related to immigration law, the case is now best remembered for Justice Thurgood Marshall’s impassioned, stirring dissent. “The freedom to speak and the freedom to hear are inseparable; they are two sides of the same coin,” Marshall wrote. “The activity of speakers becoming listeners and listeners becoming speakers in the vital interchange of thought is ‘the means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth.’”

Marshall’s “freedom to hear” is an arresting idea and a useful guide in making sense of the fracas at Stanford Law School earlier this month.

On March 9, a group of Stanford law students shouted down Kyle Duncan, a Trump-appointed federal appeals court judge, as he tried to deliver remarks at a campus event hosted by the Federalist Society. Duncan’s rulings restricting access to abortion and implicating trans-rights have elicited harsh criticism, including from many at Stanford. In the lead-up to the Federalist Society event, signs were posted around campus accusing Duncan of delivering transphobic, homophobic, and racist rulings, and at the event itself, a crowd of several dozen protestors heckled Duncan relentlessly, forcing him eventually to give up on his prepared remarks. And in a uniquely troubling twist, Stanford Law’s Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Tirien Steinbach, took over Duncan’s podium after he had asked for an administrator to help restore order and, in her remarks, openly questioned whether Stanford ought to rethink its existing free expression policies. “Is the juice worth the squeeze?” Steinbach asked of the Federalist Society’s event. “Is this worth it?”

At the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), where I direct our Campus Rights Advocacy work, we’ve spent more than 20 years pushing back against all manner of censorship from administrators. But the Stanford incident stood out as something new and different. For FIRE, it was a frightening coalescence of several trends within a particular strain of illiberalism that we’ve seen creep onto campuses and spread over the last decade. These appear rooted not in administrative overreach but in a desire by the students themselves for ideological and emotional safety. New in the last few years, and caught on video in all its brazenness at Stanford, is a growing penchant for using authoritarian tactics to obtain it.

Ten years ago, we saw the occasional “civility” initiative. Students who felt “unsafe” encountering ideas they disagreed with were asking faculty for in-class “trigger warnings” or demanding that speakers with unpopular views be disinvited. A few years later, we saw disinvitations dip and were briefly hopeful that students might be getting more tolerant. Not so. Potentially controversial speakers had simply stopped being invited at all. Now, with the widespread popularity of campus “equity” initiatives, calls for tolerance by means of intolerance have reached a fever pitch—of which the shoutdown at Stanford is a perfect illustration.

The essay goes on to examine the trend toward intolerance on campus and is worth reading in order to get a full picture of the likely nature of Western societies of the near future, if elites continue on their present track of blocking open discourse over important issues such as the welfare of women and children.

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