Pentecost: Messiah, Incarnation, Church and Trinity

     “Christ the Lord has promised us the Holy Spirit:

        come, let us adore him, alleluia.”

                           
Pence writes:

St. Augustine said the coming of the Holy Spirit – exactly ten days after the 40 days of Christ’s risen presence – signifies that the Spirit fulfills the Law (Ten Commandments) in Christ.  The obligatory presence of adult males in Jerusalem for the Jewish Pentecost crowded the city square with men speaking the different languages of the nations, but sharing the unified liturgical memory of Israel.  “For as of old on the fiftieth day after the sacrifice of the lamb, the Law was given to the Hebrew people on Mount Sinai – so after the sacrifice in which the True Lamb of God was slain on the fiftieth day after his resurrection, the Holy Spirit descended upon the apostles and those who believed” [from a sermon of Leo the Great].
                               

The Holy Spirit is the Soul of the Church, the Giver of Life, and the great binder of communions. He animates matter with life, draws the living to the Church, and indelibly configures the baptized to the Body of Christ. He was a co-conspirator with Christ throughout his life on earth, as they plotted to confound Satan in the desert and build the Kingdom of God on earth. The presence of the Spirit was activated on Pentecost as it is sacramentally for us in Confirmation.  That distinct Catholic sacrament of initiation “confirms in the Spirit” the soul of the Christian to the physical liturgical presence of the Bishop as the local head of the Apostolic Church. Like baptism, confirmation orders the soul with a permanent seal of character in ecclesial communion with Christ.  After confirmation there is no such thing as a vocation to the single life.  Baptism in one sense, and confirmation in a deeper way, calls each of us out of the single life into a new communal identity as a practicing Catholic.

The days before Pentecost, the Twelve had been corporately restored by the election of Mathias (the opening chapter of the Book of Acts.) On Pentecost the Spirit filled the apostles, and their shouts of praise were heard in the tongues of many nations (second chapter of Acts.)  It was Peter – surrounded by his apostolic brethren constituting the restored twelve tribes of Israel – who formally addressed the “Men of Judea” gathered in their holy city.  He announced that the Messiah promised to them as Jews had come to deliver them from their enemies, but had been killed by those He came to save. He offered them repentance and incorporation in the new Kingdom under Christ the Lord. The universality of the Church’s Kingdom message to the nations, the fact that the Messiah was not another human prophet but the God of nature become man, and the mystery that God is One in Three Persons: these three truths became the reflections of Pentecost Sunday sermons down through the ages. Like all of us, the 3,000 baptized Jews of that day did not fully appreciate the extent of the miraculous events that engulfed them. The developing realization that this coming of the Spirit was the action of a distinct Person of a triune God gave a name and special time for reflection to the octave Sunday of Pentecost: Trinity Sunday.

Minnesota, marriage, and the majorities

[Earlier this week Minnesota governor Mark Dayton signed into law a bill legalizing homosexual marriage, saying: "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness certainly includes the right to marry the person you love."]

by Dr. David Pence

                             

The legal designation of same-sex couplings as marriages is a shameful day in Minnesota History.

A solid majority of our elected officials have enacted a law to honor what is immoral and to degrade what is sacred. This is not an elite going against a “moral majority.” This is a trendy people going against God and Nature. We recall the Tower built at Babel when great majorities thought themselves and their building project as bigger than God.

We remember how the great majority of Israelites were caught up in the frenzy of worshiping a golden calf in the place of God who had delivered them from slavery. Today we witness a people caught up in a popular frenzy. They have confused the historical Christian movement for interracial brotherhood with today’s masquerade of disordered desires disguised as civil rights.

We ask God to forgive us our trespasses. Let Christians pray and fast in reparation for this public act which so dishonors the Lord our God, who is the source of both the authority of the State and the sanctity of marriage.        

Ivy League spies offered up their ‘lives, fortunes, and sacred honor’ for Stalin

                                       

“Alger Hiss was not the victim of a witch hunt; he was a witch.”  

                                      (Garrison Keillor)

                                                                                    

The always-fascinating historian, Philip Jenkins, fleshes out Keillor’s point – as well as the broader menace of influential Americans who were so enamored of the “social justice” of Communism that they ended up having no scruple about betraying their own country.

Two of the examples given by Professor Jenkins:

• Harry Dexter White (Stanford & Harvard) who died of a heart attack in Aug 1948, while in his mid-fifties.

[This article from ‘Time’ magazine lays out White’s role in persuading the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor].

• Laurence Duggan (Phillips Exeter prep school & Harvard), who committed suicide in Dec 1948, at the age of 43.
  
  
  

[This site gives a biographical background of the man that Henry Wallace would have made his Secretary of State].

“There was a Soviet espionage network in our government and the fact that Joseph McCarthy was a drunk, a bully and a cynical opportunist doesn’t change that.  Along with a lot of other Democrats, I’ve wasted a lot of time on these issues that I was, in fact, wrong about.”  

                                          (Keillor)

Thus began “his participation, in his humanity, in God's power and authority”

"Yea, angels tremble when they see 

how changed is our humanity; 

that flesh hath purged what flesh had stained, 

and God, the flesh of God, hath reigned."

                                 

Pence writes on this feast of the Ascension:


An old nun reflecting on the Ascension said it had always been her least favorite mystery of the rosary.  “We wait two thousand years for the Messiah.  He comes. He is killed, but he conquers death and rises victorious from the dead. He is back for just forty days and then He’s gone again—and we call that a joyful mystery?”

But finally we see Adam where he was meant to be – in communion with the Father through the Son. “The nature of our Humility in Christ was raised above all the host of heaven, over all the ranks of angels, beyond the height of all powers, to sit with God the Father,” said Leo the Great (d. 461).

The netherworld of Death has been lit up. The Prince of this world witnessed the greatest prison-break in history, as the King returned and claimed as his own all the space where man enters the land of the dead.

One kind of absence allows His Presence everywhere else. One Divine Person goes behind a cloud, and the Person of the Spirit becomes more prominent.

There has been a righting of the spiritual universe with the Son reunited with the Father and real men in ‘theosis’ with the Son. And the angels (who seem to appear whenever a ladder is extended from Heaven for them to ascend or descend) have the final word. As they assured Jacob that his descendants would be blessed and restored to this very Land, they designate the Apostolic Church as the site of His Return:

“This Jesus who is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come, as you have seen him going into heaven.”

Paul's Letter to the Romans refutes Luther's innovation

                                 

Martin Luther (d. 1546) declared sola fide – ‘faith alone’ – as being “the article with and by which the church stands.”

Several years ago, Pope Benedict said: “Luther’s expression of sola fide is true if faith is not opposed to charity, to love.”

In other words, as Galatians 5:6 has it, “faith working through love.”

The obedience of faith: Saint Paul never separates the two.  Proclaiming “faith alone” is like speaking of the mercy of God, and never bothering to mention His justice!


This is how Paul begins the Letter to the Romans:

“…we received grace and apostleship to call people from among all the Gentiles to the obedience that comes from faith.”  (1:5)

And how Paul ends it:

“…the mystery that was kept secret for long ages but has now been disclosed…according to the command of the eternal God, to bring about the obedience of faith..”  (16:26)

Of course Saint James, in his letter (2:24), explicitly states “that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone.”

[Saint Paul, who didn't hesitate to employ the word “alone” when necessary, chose not to include it in Romans 3:28 (“For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law.”)
But that did not prevent Martin Luther from inserting the word.  Here is how he defended that move in part:
“I know very well that in Romans 3 the word ‘solum’ is not in the Greek or Latin text – the papists did not have to teach me that… If the translation is to be clear and vigorous, it belongs there.”]

Dusting off “il poverello d’Assisi” from the sentimental shelf

                 

For Saint Francis (d. 1226), his love and devotion for the Holy Eucharist was paramount.  The humble deacon admonished the priests of his day: "Let all who administer such holy mysteries," clean your altar linen and polish your chalices!  

The Poverello always reserved his harshest words for those who ignored the Eucharistic presence.  In a recent biography of Assisi's famous son, the Dominican author says:

"The locus of Francis's 'mysticism,' his belief that he could have direct contact with God, was in the Mass, not in nature or even in service to the poor... For him, the change of the elements from bread and wine to Christ's Body and Blood was like the Incarnation."

It's funny about those who are always tooting their horn of "multi-culturalism” -- their understanding of Saint Francis on his own terms is weaker than a man who claims to know about the Father of our Country because he can parrot back an apocryphal tale or two from Parson Weems!
                               

Red Cardinals and Bloodied Copts: True Ecumenism

by Dr. David Pence


                                           

The escalating murders of Copts in Egypt (the largest Christian group in the Middle East) reveal the continuing emasculation of Christian authority in public life that followed the separation of Church and State as religious and protective institutions.

It is good there has been a separation. But it has been a disaster for the most vulnerable – because the Christian men in the nations and the men of the Church have not formulated a more effective protective strategy for those who face religious persecution. (“Religious persecution” here is the old-fashioned kind: you get murdered trying to worship God.) The strategies for the unarmed Church and the armed nations must be very different, and yet complementary, to face this growing threat. Jesus reminded Pilate that if His Kingdom were of the world, his men would have fought back.  Nations are of this world. We are of the time (the real meaning of secular). The nations must use the sword justly and prudently – at home and abroad. Blessed are the Peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.

The churchmen do not use the sword. Their Kingdom is of a higher order – their weapons more powerful. But if they will not organize military protection for the slain, certainly they must place themselves in nonviolent confrontation with the slayers. How long can a white cardinal ask that yet another dark-skinned woman fill his place of martyrdom? The meaning of the red garments of the cardinals of the Catholic Church is that they are willing to be martyred. This was the Christian witness of Reverend Martin Luther King. Non-violent confrontation with the evil of racism was “meant to create tension.” It was a strategic tactic to dramatize an evil, and involve onlookers in an injustice that for years had seemed another’s problem. The middle-class black ministers and their flocks put themselves, as Christ had, in the place of the persecuted.

The non-violent protesters never asked the state legislators to disband their police departments! They were not fighting for a universal pacifism. Their non-violence was a way of placing them in a redemptive encounter with evil. They did not ask legitimate authority to renounce the use of force, but illegitimate authority to renounce hatred. No one in that deeply religious movement objected to President John Kennedy sending federal troops in 1962 to integrate the University of Mississippi. The armed federal marshals he first sent did not have enough protective force to prevent violence -- so he sent more military firepower to establish the tranquility of order which was necessary for justice.

The bravery of the nine children who integrated an Arkansas high school a decade earlier was supplemented by airborne federal troops and a nationalized state guard under the orders of President Eisenhower. They were all armed. No one asked to “give peace a chance.”

                                         

Sending a few cardinals to Saint Mark’s Cathedral in Cairo (seat of the Coptic Orthodox Pope; the late holder of the office is shown welcoming John Paul in 2000) would be an ecumenical gesture of unprecedented force and meaning. It would be the kind of action that could also change the kind of man seeking the cardinal’s red. Martyrdom has always been an antidote to ecclesial careerism, which Pope Francis so abhors.  We know Cardinal Mahony has no public duties to keep him tethered to Los Angeles, and he showed us he could travel by showing up at the papal conclave. There will be some old curial hands who could join him in this act of witness for a year or two.

These intramural Catholic concerns aside, the Copts of Egypt need a strong gesture from the papal office of Christian unity.  Church unity can mean nothing if it does not mean their danger is our danger. These risky acts of witness are another reason that bishops are celibates.

Who will play the role of armed authority? Will it be Pharaoh or will a new Exodus be necessary? That is a question for the nations. Only dramatic action by the Church will force them to answer. This will cleanse the nations as well, by forcing Islamic nationalists to show their true colors – while focusing the protective authority of once Christian nations on more fundamental freedoms than the strange concerns which have become hobbyhorses of the elites.