Is the Brown Scapular "Biblical"?

On its face, the question sounds ridiculous. Anyone even vaguely familiar with the Brown Scapular of Our Lady of Mount Carmel knows that the small, woolen sacramental goes back to Carmelite St. Simon Stock’s vision of 1251 A.D. The earliest account, in the Carmelite Sanctoral, recorded how the Blessed Mother showed St. Simon the Scapular and made the promise that “He who dies in this will not suffer eternal fire.” (Some will liken the promise to magic or superstition, but the Church’s interpretation will be explained later.) I readily acknowledge that the Brown Scapular will not be found in the pages of the Old or New Testaments. What we do find in both, however, are its material and spiritual precursors – images that show us how its wearing today is in complete harmony with the written Word of God.

In the Law of Moses, Jewish men were commanded to attach tzitzit, or tassels, to the edge of their garments. “It shall be to you a tassel to look upon and remember all the commandments of the Lord, to do them, not to follow after your own heart” (Num 15:37-39). They acted as tactile and visual reminders directing hearts to the Lord. In the New Testament we read of these tassels on Jesus’s garments, recognizing that both the garments and tassels would have been woven by His Blessed Mother. Earlier in life, Mary would have done the same for Joseph, and later in life for the Apostle John. We read how the sick were healed simply by reaching out in faith to touch the tassels on Jesus’s garments (Mt 14:36; Lk 8:43-48).

In the Acts of the Apostles, we read how the Lord continued to evoke people’s faith for the purpose of healing, not through tzitzit but other articles worn by the apostles. “Handkerchiefs or aprons were carried away from [Paul’s] body to the sick, and diseases left them and evil spirits came out of them” (Acts 19:11-12). The Church of today refers to such objects as sacramentals, explaining that they “do not confer the grace of the Holy Spirit in the way that the sacraments do, but by the Church's prayer, they prepare us to receive grace and dispose us to cooperate with it” (CCC 1670). They do this by evoking our faith in God’s power.

In the vision granted to St. Simon Stock, the Church received a new sacramental. The Brown Scapular, originally an addition to the Carmelite Order’s religious habit, has been extended by the popes for use by all of the faithful. Like the tzitzit created and sewn by Mary to Christ’s garments – the sacramental that evoked faith and brought healing to the sick of Palestine – so we, Christ’s mystical Body, are now clothed in another garment stitched, so to speak, by Mary’s hands. And the Scapular has never been understood by the Carmelites or the Church’s theologians to be a talisman guaranteeing eternal life. Rather, as a sacramental, its wearing is a concrete expression of faith that Jesus has entrusted the wearer to Mary’s heart. One cannot wear the Scapular and persist in sin, presuming upon God’s mercy (see Heb 6:4–9). Such a thought is abhorrent to the hearts of Jesus and Mary. A person, however, who wears the Scapular as a sign of his consecration to Jesus through the love and intercession of Mary’s immaculate heart—and perseveres in his discipleship, repenting when he falls—will receive the grace to die in the Lord’s friendship, and thus enter eternal life. Wearing the scapular serves the same purpose as the tzitzit; it is a biblically-grounded reminder to follow Jesus and Mary in placing the Father’s divine will before that of our own human hearts (Nm 15:39; Mt 26:39; Lk 1:38). This is why the young visionaries at Fatima saw Mary extend the Brown Scapular. Our goal is to realize the full life of heaven, to love Christ with the Immaculate Heart of His mother. “Blessed are the pure [or ‘immaculate’] in heart, for they shall see God” (Mt 5:8).

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Adapted from The Biblical Roots of Marian Consecration: Devotion to the Immaculate Heart in Light of Scripture (TAN Books, 2022).

Immaculate Conception: Saved by Grace

The Immaculate Conception – our Catholic conviction that Mary was preserved from contracting original sin at her conception – is something that seems to set us apart from our Protestant brothers and sisters. The truth, however, is that it expresses a point of faith particularly dear to the Protestant Reformers: We are brought into relationship with God, or justified, not through any works or merit on our part but solely by the grace of God. Mary was saved from sin as a result of Christ’s redemptive work. . .reaching back through time to preserve her from sin and unite her soul to God from the first instance of her existence. And we Catholics have strong biblical precedents that we can share with separated brothers and sisters to help illuminate this Marian dogma.

Let’s begin with a principle that is embraced by all Christians: The realities of the New Testament far surpass their “shadows,” their prefigurements, in the Old (Heb 10:1; 8:5-6; 12:22-24). Saint Paul, for example, referred to Adam – God’s created son, the physical head of our race – as “a type of the one who was to come,” Jesus (Rom 5:14). So too, Christ is the head of a new, redeemed humanity; but in a glorious contrast to Adam: Adam was God’s son by adoption, but Christ by divine filiation. The first man was of earth, the second of heaven (1 Cor 15:45-49). “As one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to acquittal and life for all men” (Rom 5:18). The New does not just equal, but vastly surpasses the Old; and what is true of Adam and Jesus is also true of Eve and Mary.

When we meet Eve in Scripture, she comes to us fresh from God’s creative hand. She was a daughter bearing His image and likeness (Gen 1:26; 5:3), living in intimate friendship with God. When her sin, however, placed her under the dominion of death and the devil (Gen 3:3; Wis 2:24; Eph 2:1-3; 1 Jn 5:19), God immediately spoke of another Woman – one at “enmity” with the devil – and her Seed, who would crush the serpent’s head (Gen 3:15). In the Gospel of John we find Jesus referring to Mary as the prophesied Woman (2:3-4; 19:26-27), with this point reinforced in John’s Book of Revelation (12:1-5, 17). If the first woman, the “mother of all the living” (Gen 3:20), was created in God’s friendship; the biblical principle we have observed up until this point, would say that the same was true of Mary. When we turn to the annunciation narrative we find the Angel Gabriel addressing Mary exactly as we would expect – “Hail Kecharitōmenē”(Lk 1:28) – meaning one who has been, and is now, absolutely filled with the grace, the supernatural life, of God.

But how could Mary experience such freedom from Original Sin and union with God prior to Christ’s incarnation and redemptive sacrifice? It was because her Son is the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world (Rv 13:8). Jesus is a divine Person, Who offered himself to the Father “through the eternal Spirit” (Heb 9:14). His redemptive sacrifice reached forward in time to embrace us; but it also reached backward, meriting God’s mercy toward Abraham and his descendants (Heb 10:3-4; 9:24-26; 11:1-2, 17-19, 39-40).  Christ’s merits – and they alone – redeem man from the curse of the Fall. There is no supernatural life, no union with God, apart from Him, whether we are talking about the saints of the Old Covenant or the New. We can do nothing to merit this gift of divine adoption, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast” (Eph 2:8-9). And at times, God does not even require our faith to appropriate this gift of grace – He is free to distribute His gifts however He wishes (Mt 20:15)!

We see this in the Old Testament and the New. God’s grace, given in view of the merits of Christ, cleansed the prophet Jeremiah of original sin and “consecrated” him a prophet in utero (Jer 1:5). It caused St. John the Baptist to be “filled with the Holy Spirit, even from his mother’s womb” (Lk 1:15).  God extended this grace to Jeremiah and John to mold them for the divine work that lay ahead. He did the same for Mary when He called her to the most sublime work, the most intimate union possible between God and a creature - her divine motherhood. Jesus’ sacrifice reached back to not just cleanse Mary of original sin as in the case of Jeremiah and John, but to preserve her from even contracting that damage to our nature that inclines us toward selfishness and sin. She was saved by grace – as are we – but in the most radical way possible; and that grace consecrated her as the New Eve, the new mother of all the living!

After centuries of pondering God’s Revelation the Church came to the point where it could clearly enunciate the truth of Mary’s “Immaculate Conception” to itself and the world. It was not adding something new to the deposit of Faith (Jude 3) from the outside but clearly articulating a truth implicit since the beginning. On December 8, 1854, Pope Pius IX invoked his authority as the Successor of Peter to teach infallibly:

We declare, pronounce, and define that the doctrine which holds that the most Blessed Virgin Mary, in the first instance of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege granted by Almighty God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Savior of the human race, was preserved free from all stain of original sin, is a doctrine revealed by God and therefore to be believed firmly and constantly by all the faithful. (Ineffabilis Deus)

When the Church calls us each year to celebrate what God did for Mary, we recognize and praise what He has done for us too: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. He destined us in love to be his sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace which he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved [Christ]” (Eph 1:3–7).

Adapted from  The Biblical Roots of Marian Consecration: Devotion to the Immaculate Heart in Light of Scripture (TAN Books, 2022).

Pope Benedict XVI on the Historicity of the Magi and Star

It is obviously popular to question the historicity of the Gospels’ portrait of Jesus. Scholars who practice the historical-critical method of biblical study devoid of faith – and thus rejecting the possibility that God entered our world in Christ – object to the historicity of a multitude of events recorded in the Gospels and propose a different Jesus than the one communicated by the four evangelists. Pope Benedict XVI, himself a master of the tools of historical-critical scholarship, wrote his three volume Jesus of Nazareth to answer such skepticism. By wedding the tools of historical-critical scholarship to the Church’s faith, he demonstrates to all who will listen that the Jesus of the Gospels is in fact “the real, ‘historical’ Jesus in the strict sense of the word. . .[T]his figure is much more logical and, historically speaking, much more intelligible than the reconstructions we have been presented with in the last decades” (Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration, xxii).

With the Church celebrating the great feast of Epiphany, it is the perfect time to see how Pope Benedict argues the star and magi in Matthew’s infancy narrative are historical. These “are not a meditation presented under the guise of stories [i.e., Jewish haggadah], but the converse: Matthew is recounting real history, theologically thought through and interpreted” (Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives, 119). Mind you, Benedict agrees with Jean Daniélou who, even though he held the star and magi are historical, stated that, if it were somehow proved that Matthew intended them only as theological symbols, it would not affect the Church’s faith since these elements do not pertain to any essential truth of Christian faith (Infancy Narratives, 118).

Benedict recounts a number of details showing that it was historically possible that magi, purveyors of religious, philosophical, and astronomical knowledge, traveled from Persia in search of the newly born king of the Jews. He points out that the Roman historians, Tacitus and Seutonius, both recorded the speculation that the ruler of the world would soon emerge from Judah (Infancy, 95). Such speculation was surely fueled by the spread of Judaism throughout the Mediterranean. The Holy Father points out how long such speculation had been spreading; he recalls the ancient prophecy of the pagan prophet Balaam, recorded in Numbers 24:17, “I see him, but not now; / I behold him, but not nigh: / a star shall come forth out of Jacob, / and a scepter shall rise out of Israel; / it shall crush the forehead of Moab, / and break down all the sons of Sheth.” Extrabiblical confirmation of Balaam’s existence and reputation as a middle eastern prophet were recently uncovered, pointing to the historicity of the prophecy recorded in Numbers as well as its being defused throughout the region hundreds of years before the birth of Jesus (Infancy, 91).

In regards to the Star of Bethlehem, Benedict reviews different theories explaining it as an astronomically identifiable occurrence. Benedict earlier expressed his conclusion that Jesus was born around 7-6 B.C., and notes how Johannes Kepler calculated that a conjunction of Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars occurred at that same time. Kepler likewise postulated that this may well have been accentuated by a supernova – a point that appears confirmed in Chinese chronological tables (Infancy, 98-9). Closer to our own time, twentieth century astronomer Ferrari d’Occhieppo believed the star could be explained by a 7-6 B.C. conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in the constellation Pisces (Infancy, 99). Benedict sees the star implying that “the cosmos speaks of Christ, even though its language is not fully intelligible to man in his present state” (Infancy, 100).

Such a conjunction would surely have caught the attention of Persian wise men, devoted to astronomy and knowledgeable of religious matters such as the prophecy of a ruler coming forth from Judah. Even more than catching their attention, however, they felt moved to seek this ruler out. Pope Benedict sees the magi as representing “the inner dynamic of religion toward self-transcendence, which involves a search for truth, a search for the true God and hence ‘philosophy’ in the original sense of the word” (Infancy, 95). It was only natural that they would seek the newborn king in Jerusalem, in Herod’s palace. Benedict finds the turmoil experienced by Herod and Jerusalem by the magi’s appearance to coincide with the historical portrait of Herod as a paranoid ruler looking to kill anyone he perceived as a threat to his rule, even his own sons (Infancy, 103, 108).

The magi, through the chief priests and scribes summoned by Herod, are directed to God’s Revelation, to Micah’s prophecy (5:1) that the Messiah was, like David, to be born in Bethlehem (Infancy, 104). Their philosophy and natural religion brought them to a certain point, but Revelation was needed to reach their final destination. The star then reappears and they follow it directly to Jesus. Benedict sees in these events, “Creation interpreted by Scripture” (Infancy, 105-6). With so many historical indicators of the plausibility of Matthew’s narrative, Pope Benedict concludes that the wise exegete should accept Matthew’s account as historical, until unassailable proof is put forward that Matthew intended the narrative to be understood as haggadah (Infancy, 119).

First Saturday Devotion: Sharing Jesus and Mary’s Sabbath

In the third apparition at Fatima, the Blessed Mother told the little seers that, to save souls and avert war, she came to request not just the praying of the Rosary and consecration to her Immaculate Heart, but a “Communion of reparation” on the first Saturdays of the month. In 1925, in a later vision to the surviving visionary, Sr. Lucia, Mary asked that her children console her Immaculate Heart, grieved by men’s blasphemies and ingratitude, by committing to the following on the first Saturday of five consecutive months: going to Confession, receiving Holy Communion, reciting five decades of the Rosary, and keeping her company for fifteen minutes while meditating on the mysteries of the Rosary, with the intention of making reparation to her.[1] Sister Lucia later explained that the Five First Saturday devotion was requested by Jesus to make reparation for the five kinds of offenses and blasphemies uttered against His mother: (1) blasphemies against her Immaculate Conception, (2) her perpetual virginity, (3) her divine maternity and identity as the mother of men, (4) the desecration of images of her, and (5) those who seek to plant scorn, indifference, or hate of Mary in the heart of others.[2]

While the element of five consecutive Saturdays was new, the recognition of Saturday as a day specially devoted to Mary had a long history in the Church. In the tenth century we hear of Saturday Masses being celebrated in her honor in churches in Italy, France, and Germany. The Franciscans and Benedictines spread the devotion, and by the seventeenth century the Dominicans had started the practice of honoring Mary with special acts of devotion on the fifteen consecutive Saturdays preceding the feast of the Holy Rosary. The popes attached an indulgence to the Fifteen Saturdays for anyone who: (1) went to Confession, (2) received Holy Communion, and (3) prayed five decades of the Rosary. Also in the seventeenth century, St. John Eudes and Ven. John J. Olier began to speak to their spiritual sons of the first Saturday of the month as a day of reparation for blasphemies against the Blessed Mother.[3]

It has been suggested that Saturday became a day of devotion to the Blessed Mother in memory of the desolation she suffered on Holy Saturday. While not denying this impulse, I wish to suggest another reason for the practice – the Saturday Sabbaths shared between Mary and Jesus. As Christians we look to Sunday, the first day of the week, as the day to worship and renew our consecration to the Lord in the celebration of the Eucharist (Acts 20:7; Rev 1:8; CCC 2190). But Saturday was the day that, by divine command, Jesus and Mary set apart to the Lord (Ex 20:8-11; Dt 5:12-15). “This is a sign between me and you throughout your generations, that you may know that I, the LORD sanctify you [mekoddishkem, ‘consecrate you’]” (Ex 31:13). Saturday was the day that no work was done. The Sabbath dinner, the finest meal of the week, was prepared by Mary in advance. She and Jesus attended the synagogue where they prayed and meditated upon Scripture, and then returned home to spend the rest of the day enjoying one another’s company as they prayed and discussed God’s revelation and their daily lives.

After Jesus’s ascension Mary shared the Saturday Sabbath with the Apostle John, marking Saturday as the day when the Church experienced her maternal care in a special way. And for Mary, those Saturdays continued to be the day that her Son showered her with His affections – communicated to her through John. When we today undertake the Five First Saturdays, what we ultimately seek through its practices is the intimacy shared between Jesus and Mary on those days. It is a sign, and its various practices a means of deepening, our total consecration, in union with the Immaculate Heart, to Jesus. It is also a means for the Sacred Heart to express, through us, His love for His mother and soothe the wounds inflicted upon her heart.

Adapted The Biblical Roots of Marian Consecration: Devotion to the Immaculate Heart in Light of Scripture (TAN Books, 2022).

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Marriage as an Analogy for Marian Consecration

The idea of “consecrating” oneself to Mary, meaning to entrust one’s life and success as a disciple of Christ to Mary’s love and intercession, may seem strange to many within the Catholic Church, not to mention our large number of separated brothers and sisters. Why would God want to unite our hearts with Mary’s? Why not deal with us solely as individuals? My response is that this is the way Scripture shows God working throughout salvation history and that the New Testament’s teaching on the shared life of Christian husbands and wives offers an effective analogy for understanding the spirituality of Marian Consecration.

Let us begin, however, by looking at what St. Paul wrote about marriages between Christians and unbelievers. It is stunning:

If any woman has a husband who is an unbeliever, and he consents to live with her, she should not divorce him. For the unbelieving husband is consecrated through his wife, and the unbelieving wife is consecrated through her husband. Otherwise, your children would be unclean, but as it is they are holy. But if the unbelieving partner desires to separate, let it be so; in such a case the brother or sister is not bound. For God has called us to peace. Wife, how do you know whether you will save your husband? Husband, how do you know whether you will save your wife? (1 Cor 7:13–16)

Paul knew full well that it is Christ alone Who saves; but in His hands, believing wives and husbands can become instrumental causes in the salvation, the consecration, of their spouses and children (see also 1 Pet 3:1-2). If the Lord can use one spouse to bring the other and their children to the waters of Baptism, then think of how He uses the sacramental marriage of two Christians to deepen their consecration to Him throughout their shared years.

Paul wrote of the purpose of Christian husbands’ and wives’ mutual submission to each other – it manifests the great mystery of love between Christ and the Church (Eph 5:21, 32)! Husbands image the Lord in loving their wives “as their own bodies” and wives are to be subject to their husbands “as to the Lord” (Eph 5:28, 24–25). Christ loves the Church in this way so that “she might be holy and without blemish” (5:27). This is the mission of Christian spouses: By the grace of God, husbands and wives vow their love and entrust one another with their property, bodies, and hearts for the purpose of growing in Christ’s love and helping the other pass through the Cross to the glory of the Resurrection. Such entrustment does not hinder a soul’s union with the Lord but furthers it! A wife is not an obstacle to a husband’s union with Jesus. No, the spousal relationship is a God-given means for husbands and wives to appropriate graces meant to propel us toward final salvation, of making their “call and election firm” (2 Pt 1:10). This is also true, and to an eminent degree, of our relationship with Mary. Our spiritual mother is very much alive and joined to us in the communion of saints, acting on our behalf (see Rom 12:4-5; Heb 12:1, 22-24; Rev 5:8)

Billions of people have walked the earth, but there is only one to whom the Father entrusted the life of His only begotten Son. Mary was predestined for her role and consecrated to God’s work at the moment of her conception. She cooperated with God’s grace to give her fiat at the Annunciation, and by grace she remained faithful even at the foot of the Cross. It was there that Jesus formally extended Mary’s motherhood from Himself to His mystical Body. He made this entrustment in the person of John, one of the apostolic foundations of His Church. “When Jesus saw his mother, and the disciple whom he loved standing near, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, behold your son!’ Then he said to the disciple, Behold, your mother!’ And from that hour the disciple took her into idia [literally ‘his own’]” (Jn 19:26-27). John took Mary into all that was his – his home, heart, prayer, life as an apostle, etc. You and I continue to reap the fruits of this entrustment in John’s Gospel, his unique penetration into the mystery of Christ’s Person.

John’s life of union with Mary – not to mention t other apostles – did not hinder his union with Christ but facilitated it! The entrustment that Jesus made of John to Mary was part of Christ’s salvific work on the Cross (see Jn 19:28, “…after this, knowing that all was now finished…”). When we renew our baptismal consecration to Jesus, through Mary, we are asking to share her receptivity for receiving Christ into ourselves – both to dwell in our hearts and be born into the world through our words and actions. Just as the spousal union of hearts yields grace, so too our union with the Immaculate Heart. Mary is not the end, the goal of our devotion, anymore than a spouse – Jesus is, and through Him fullness of life in the Trinity.

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Adapted from The Biblical Roots of Marian Consecration: Devotion to the Immaculate Heart in Light of Scripture which is available from TAN Books.

Marian Consecration: It's All About Jesus

Like Mary, everything we have is by the grace of God; and in Mary, we see the fullness of life to which each of us is called. Her Immaculate Heart is truly the heart of the Church – simultaneously mother, disciple, and bride. It is completely fixed upon Jesus.  We now turn our attention to the means Jesus has given us so that, with Mary, we may reach this fullness. One, in truth, can only be “consecrated” to God. The term means to be dedicated to God, solely for His use. This first takes place in Baptism (1 Cor 6:11; Eph 5:25-27), but it is meant to be deepened throughout our lives (Rom 12:1; Heb 2:11). When we speak of being consecrated to Mary, we are speaking by way of analogy. We are trying to convey that we, like Jesus in His humanity, wish to be completely entrusted to Mary’s love and activity on our behalf. When we pray an act of “Marian” consecration, we entrust ourselves to her heart and motherly intercession as, united with her, we renew and intentionally deepen our baptismal consecration to Jesus.

The Church has never proposed devotion to Mary as an end in itself. Saint Louis Marie de Montfort, the great apostle of Marian Consecration, was quite blunt about Mary’s position in relation to God, “With the whole Church I acknowledge that Mary, being a mere creature fashioned by the hand of God is, compared to his infinite majesty, less than an atom, or rather simply nothing, since he alone can say, ‘I am he who is.’”[1] And yet, as De Montfort goes on to say, it was God’s free and sovereign choice to give “his only Son to the world only through Mary.”[2] Scripture portrays her as the Ark of the New Covenant (2 Sam 6:9-14; Lk 1:35, 39-43), the personification of Daughter Zion (Zeph 3:14-17; Lk 1:28), the New Eve (Gen 3:15; Jn 19:26-27; Rev 12:1-6), the ideal disciple and intercessor (Lk 1:38, 45; Jn 2:1-11), and a sharer in Christ’s passion (Lk 2:35) and glorification (Rev 11:19-12:5), who is enthroned beside Christ as Queen (1 Kgs 2:19-25; Lk 1:32-33, 43; Rev 12:1-2). She is the Church come to full stature in Christ, and this is the reason for Marian devotion. As De Montfort wrote, “Of all God’s creatures Mary is the most conformed to Jesus. It therefore follows that, of all devotions, devotion to her makes for the most effective consecration and conformity to him. The more one is consecrated to Mary, the more one is consecrated to Jesus.”[3] To be “devoted” to Mary means to love her as the mother of our Lord – to come to love her as Jesus loves her – and to emulate her discipleship, her love for Him. Christ Jesus is the alpha and omega of Marian devotion.

Such devotion recognizes that everything Jesus did at the Cross was ordered toward our salvation, including His entrustment of John to Mary (Jn 19:26-27). As an apostle, one of the foundation stones of Christ’s Church (Rev 21:14), this entrustment of John has a universal scope – a gift extended to the entire Church. All that is required is for individual souls to, like John, accept Christ’s gift: “from that hour the disciple took her into idia [literally ‘his own’]” (Jn 19:26-27). John took Mary into all that was uniquely his – his home, heart, prayer, life as an apostle, etc. You and I continue to reap the fruits of this entrustment in John’s Gospel, in his penetration into the mystery of Christ’s Person. His deep relationship with Mary did not lead John to make an idol of her; rather, their shared life was a catalyst opening his heart to understand and communicate Christ’s life and teaching in an utterly unique and profound way. John’s shared life with Mary – an extension of Christ’s shared life with her – is accessible to each of us in the mystical Body of her Son. She is a spiritual mother who is very much alive, joined to us in the communion of saints, and acting on our behalf (see Rom 12:4-5; Heb 12:1, 22-24; Rev 5:8). Like John, our goal in entrusting our lives as disciples to Mary’s heart is to come to share her total receptivity to God – to let Christ be formed in the womb of our hearts and be born into the world through our words and actions.

Adapted The Biblical Roots of Marian Consecration: Devotion to the Immaculate Heart in Light of Scripture (TAN Books, 2022).

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[1] Louis Marie de Montfort, True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary (Bay Shore, NY: Montfort Publications, 1996), no. 14.

[2] Ibid.

[3] True Devotion, no. 120.

A Morning in the Hearts of Jesus and Mary

I'm honored to be partnering with the Institute of Catholic Humanism in St. Louis to celebrate the Memorial of the Immaculate Heart. Here is a flyer for the event, and you can register at THIS LINK.

"You Will Be Repaid"

 I have heard and read the Gospel passage for this Sunday's Mass many times in my life, but its ending struck a completely different cord with me this morning - one that is quite humbling.

On a sabbath Jesus went to dine at the home of one of the leading Pharisees. . . .he said to the host who invited him, "When you hold a lunch or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or your wealthy neighbors, Rather, when you hold a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind; blessed indeed will you be because of their inability to repay you. For you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous." (Lk 14:1, 12-14)

So what struck me? It was that if, at the end of time, I find myself invited into the wedding feast of the Lamb (Rev 19:7-9), then I will recognize that I am the poor, the crippled, the lame, and blind that our Lord was talking about! If the Lord "repays" me for inviting the earthly poor, crippled, and blind to feast, then His repayment will take the form of inviting me to feast with Him — me who, even after years of His patience and grace is still so poor in terms of good works, often crippled and lame when it comes to loving others, and sometimes willfully blind to what needs to be done. 

Jesus calls each of us to humility, to recognize our true state before Him. We need to thank Him for all the good that He has already done in our souls, but we also have to be cognizant of how much is still left to be done. All of us are poor, completely in need of His grace. All of us have been interiorly crippled and lame when it came time to do what is right and good; and all of us have been guilty of being willfully blind to the truth at certain times. But God overcomes our destitution and sin by His grace. In Jesus the Father give us what we have no right to in strict justice. When Jesus calls us to meet the needs of poor, the crippled, the lame, and blind; He asks us to do what He is constantly doing for us. He invites us to let the grace with which He floods our souls become truly effectual, to change us. And God, generous Father that He is, "rewards" our cooperation with the Strength at work in us (Eph 2:8-9; Phil 2:12-13)! The truth is that, as we cooperate, we are changed into the image of the Bridegroom. He makes our souls clean and vibrant, able to engage in heavenly feasting. (And blessed be God for the gift of purgatory!)

I should spend time marinating in these other statements from Luke's Gospel:

“If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. And if you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the selfish. Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful.

“Judge not, and you will not be judged; condemn not, and you will not be condemned; forgive, and you will be forgiven; give, and it will be given to you; good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap. For the measure you give will be the measure you get back.” (Lk 6:32-38)

God's Timing: The Story of a Book

Each of us has dreams that we work to see realized because we believe God has planted them in our souls. We become confused, however, when obstacles arise. We ask ourselves whether these dreams have their source in the Lord or in our own wishes. I had an experience like this that I want to share.

In the summer of 2014, I approached a handful of Catholic publishers with an outline and sample chapters for a book on consecration and devotion to Mary’s Immaculate Heart. The book was to be a fusion of apologetics and devotion, grounding Marian consecration and other expressions of devotion to the Immaculate Heart (e.g., the Rosary, wearing the Brown Scapular, First Saturdays) in Scripture: all elements that flow to us from the earthly lives of Jesus and Mary. I had just finished a book on the human prayer of Jesus, and this seemed to be the natural next step in my writing. Plus, if I started working immediately, a publisher would be able to offer it to readers in time for the Fatima centenary in 2017. The only problem was that all of the publishers I contacted were either just releasing books on the Blessed Mother, or my focus wasn’t what they were interested in publishing at the time.

As summer turned to fall, I took these difficulties to prayer. I recall lying in bed one night and saying, “Lord, I felt like this book about the Blessed Mother was something You wanted me to do, but I could be wrong. Maybe You don’t want me to write any more books. And honestly, that is fine. If You would let me know, though, one way or the other, I would be very grateful.” As I continued to lie in bed, a friend’s words came back to me.

My pal Tony, a coworker, had been reading the Epistle to the Hebrews and dropped by my room every now and then to ask me a question about the text. In the course of our conversations, I shared how, over a decade before, I had developed a five-part study on Hebrews for a prayer group and occasionally thought of turning that into a book. Tony loved the idea and, when he returned the following week with another question remarked, “Man, I hope you write that book!” As I laid in bed praying, those were the words that popped into my head. I realized that if I did pursue the topic, I would want it to focus upon seven elements in Hebrews instead of my original five. Hmm...was this something the Lord wanted me to pursue?

I received the Lord’s answer two days later, in the form of an email from my friend and collaborator, Dr. Kevin Vost: “In your last email you mentioned St. Thomas, and I seem to recall your special interest in Hebrews. Well, when I ordered the beautiful Latin and English Commentaries on the Letters of Saint Paul, they "accidentally" sent me two copies of St. Thomas's Commentary on Hebrews and did not request it back. I supposed the other was for you, so I've been holding this to give to you if you don't already have a copy.” Within a week I had contacted Angelico Press with the proposal for The Epistle to the Hebrews and the Seven Core Beliefs of Catholics and received the green light to proceed. The book was released in May, 2016 and was so well received that, by August, Marcus Grodi and I were discussing it on EWTN’s The Journey Home!

I continued to purchase and read books about the Blessed Mother and Marian Consecration, adding to my notes, in the hope that the Lord might still allow me to write on the subject. Again, however, the timing didn’t seem right. Before the end of 2016, the Lord opened the door to publish a book on “marrying” the praying of the Rosary to that of the Divine Mercy Chaplet. I then found myself starting work on a master’s program in theology, and soon thereafter writing a book on the Epistle of James that was released in 2021.

Shortly after its release, my dear friend Michael Vento phoned to say that he had been catching up with an old buddy who had just gone to work as a content manager at TAN Books. Michael knew of my desire to write about a book on Marian Consecration and, thinking that TAN would be a good fit, said he would like to introduce me to this editor.

Perhaps a month later I received an email, completely out of the blue, from a content manager at TAN Books named Patrick O’Hearn. The gentleman who edited my book James for another publisher had been approached by TAN with a special project – updating the entire text of a large, older catechism with footnotes referencing the 1994 Catechism of the Catholic Church. He was not able to take on the job for TAN but, for some reason, recommended that they contact me about it. Patrick O’Hearn . . . that sounded like the same name that my friend Michael had mentioned to me. (A quick call to Michael confirmed that it was, but he had not yet had the chance to speak to Patrick about me. Needless to say, I sensed the Lord’s hand.) I emailed Patrick back to say that I was interested in hearing more about the Catechism project and told him how we shared a mutual friend. As Patrick and I began to correspond, I mentioned the book on Marian Consecration and how, once I completed the editing project, I would love to submit a proposal to TAN. He asked me not to wait but to go ahead and send it. Three months later we had signed a contract stating that I would deliver a completed manuscript by December 1, 2022. 

Ah, but that was not the end of the story. I went to work on the manuscript in August 2021, and completed my first draft on January 1, 2022 – giving me eleven months to make changes before the due date. I still felt driven to work and completed my content editing by February. I shared the manuscript with a few trusted friends; and as they began reading, I started double-checking my thousands of scriptural citations. Then, completely out of the blue, on March 15, Pope Francis announced his intention to consecrate Russia and Ukraine to the Immaculate Heart on the Solemnity of the Annunciation! He asked the world’s bishops and all of the world’s faithful to gather in their parish churches and join him in the consecration. As I was at Mass the weekend before the consecration, the thought occurred to me to contact TAN and see if, since the manuscript was ready, they wanted to move it into production. They did. I had until the end of the week – the same week I was already scheduled to be off work for spring break – to finish checking scriptural citations. TAN immediately went to work and this October, the month of the Rosary, The Biblical Roots of Marian Consecration: Devotion to the Immaculate Heart in Light of Scripture will be released.

I share this story because I want to encourage you: Yes, God truly grants us the deepest desires of our hearts. But He does so in a far better way than we could envision. He is the Lord of time, Who with infinite wisdom moves each piece into position. We walk in the darkness of faith, but with the firm conviction that darkness is not dark to Him; rather, it is as bright as day (Ps 139:12). I do not know the next step or even how many steps I have left in this world, but I know that I have great reason to trust Him - as do you. “He who did not spare his own Son but handed him over for us all, how will he not also give us everything else along with him? . . . What will separate us from the love of Christ? Will anguish, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or the sword? . . . No, in all these things we conquer overwhelmingly through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present things, nor future things, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 8:32-39).

Interview with Dr. James Papandrea

In 2012, Dr. James Papandrea published his textbook introducing beginners to the writings of the early Church Fathers, the key players in the Church from the time of the apostles up to the Council of Nicea (325 A.D.). Papandrea, a convert to Catholicism and professor of Church History and Historical Theology at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Chicago, has just released a newly revised and expanded version of the text, Reading the Church Fathers: A History of the Early Church and the Development of Doctrine (Sophia Institute Press, 2022) which leads readers up through the year 1200 A.D. Dr. Papandrea was kind enough to field a few questions for us.

Kapler: It’s not every day that I speak with a Catholic scholar who is employed at a United Methodist seminary. Can you share a little bit about your experience at Garrett-Evangelical Seminary?

Papandrea: Our faculty and leadership are very diverse and committed to ecumenism – I am living proof of that. It’s kind of ironic, actually, that a traditional Catholic can represent diversity, but in the liberal Protestant world, that is sometimes how it plays out. In any case, I am the one Catholic on the faculty of an otherwise very progressive Protestant seminary. But I can honestly say that when my colleagues say they value different points of view, the very fact that I’m there proves that they practice what they preach. On the other hand, in this kind of culture it can be true that traditional points of view carry no more weight than the newest ones, and having stood the test of time is often more something to be skeptical about than something that earns trust.

Having said all that, I see it as my mission in that context to be one of the voices who call people back to the foundation, who speak for the Tradition of our faith, and for orthodox doctrine, in order to provide a part of our students’ formation that will keep them grounded, or anchored. I teach a class that every student has to take – the first of two required courses in The History of Christian Thought and Practice. As the name implies, this includes both doctrine, as well as the more outward aspects of the faith. For my part, I focus primarily on the early Church, as the time of the most important development and clarification of doctrine – everything from the doctrine of the Trinity to ecclesiology, which is the Church’s understanding of itself. 

In my job, I have the privilege of participating in a small way in the ecumenical project. On the one hand, I get to bust all the myths about Catholicism that might allow a Protestant preacher to perpetuate misleading stereotypes about our faith, or worse, that might prevent Protestants from working side by side with Catholics for causes of social justice and for works of mercy. On the other hand, I get to promote unity in the universal Body of Christ, and one of my favorite ways to do that is to lead ecumenical pilgrimages to Rome. I get to lead tours of Rome where people from different Christian traditions can explore the early roots of our faith side by side, and find common ground.

Kapler: What inspired you to make the Church Fathers and historical theology your academic focus?

Papandrea: When I first came into my PhD program, I was at the time an ordained United Methodist deacon, and I had the same motivation that drives a lot of evangelical Protestants, which is to see what so-called original Christianity was all about. I reasoned (and I still think) that it should be important to us to know how the earliest Christians practiced their faith and what they believed, since they were closest in time to Jesus and the apostles. In fact, when I was coming up in the Lutheran and Methodist denominations, I was told that the Protestant reformation was all about getting back to an original version of Christianity, so I always had this desire to find out what that original version of Christianity was like.

As I soon learned, it was the earliest bishops who were in direct succession from the apostles, and they make up a big part of who the Church fathers are, along with the other earliest theologians and catechists. These earliest Church fathers had a direct connection to people who knew Jesus personally, and so they were the ones handing on his teachings, along with the teachings of the apostles, which means they were in the best position to know the difference between truth and heresy.

So I started reading the writings of the Church fathers, and studying the early Church, and here’s what I found out. First of all, I learned about the concept of apostolic succession – that in fact, original Christianity is exactly what was preserved by the early bishops, and handed on to their successors, and that becomes our Tradition. Then I discovered that the idea that there was some kind of original version of Christianity that pre-dated Catholicism is just not true. There is no such thing as “pre-Catholic” Christianity, and Catholicism is not something made up of a lot of superstitions that were added in the Middle Ages (as the myth goes). And finally, I learned that the concept of “sola Scriptura” never existed until the Protestant reformation. This doctrine, if you can call it that, was invented to separate Scripture from Catholic Tradition, but the problem with that is that you can’t faithfully interpret Scripture without the help of Tradition. So to be clear, the Church fathers and earliest Christians did not read the Bible the way proponents of “sola Scriptura” do today.

All this is to say that I started with a kind of Protestant “restorationist” point of view, as though I was going to enter into this Protestant project of recreating the apostolic Church, but what I found out was that the Protestants who do this usually limit themselves to the study of the New Testament for what the early Church was like, and they don’t pay enough attention to the early Church fathers. In fact, many Protestants will say they limit themselves to the first century, but they exclude other important first century documents such as the Didache and the first letter of Clement of Rome. So I realized that the key to the original Church is in the Church fathers, and it’s there where you will find original Christianity, and where you can understand how the Church fathers handed down the teachings of the Church so that they would not be corrupted. And then it became clear to me that the Catholic Church is, in fact, the best expression of original Christianity there is, and I found myself in a place where I couldn’t not come back to the Catholicism of my baptism.

Kapler: What moved you to revise Reading the Church Fathers, and why now? How does this edition differ from the first?

Papandrea: I first wrote the book Reading the Early Church Fathers when I had been teaching for only a few years. I had crafted my lectures so that I was pretty happy with them, and the book was written from those lectures. But now here we are a decade later, and so I’ve got another ten years of research and teaching under my belt. That’s also another ten years of students’ questions and discussion, and so the revised version incorporates a lot of that, and anticipates and answers a lot of questions that were not answered in the first version of the book. I’ve also added some material that is based on subjects I hadn’t quite “mastered” when I wrote the first version.

So I thought it was time that I updated the book. The book now has a slightly different title: Reading the Church Fathers: A History of the Early Church and the Development of Doctrine. The new title more accurately describes how the book really tells the story of the early Church. It’s not just about the Church fathers and their writings, but it covers the historical context that gave rise to those documents – things like the Roman background, the persecutions, as well as the controversies within the Church. It’s all in there, laid out like a story, which makes it easy to follow.

And on top of all that, I was able to do a lot more of my signature myth-busting, especially when it comes to the chapter on the Christian Bible and the New Testament. I was able to use some of the latest scholarship to demonstrate how some recent trends in biblical scholarship actually distort our understanding of the early Church and the development of our Scriptures. So all that is in there, and now it’s kind of a one-stop-shop for everything about the early Church. I feel like I was really able to find the balance of making it both faithfully Catholic, and faithful to the historical evidence.

Kapler: Your writing is incredibly accessible, but for those who still feel intimidated at just the thought of beginning a study of the early Church, what encouragement would you give them?

Papandrea: Well, thanks for saying so. It’s always been my goal to make the Church fathers and the early Church accessible to everyone. I would say that you don’t need to be a scholar to understand the history and theology of the early Church. You don’t even need to be a scholar to understand doctrine – in fact, if people read this book, they will get a pretty solid understanding of all the important doctrines of our faith, at least in the sense that we find them in the early centuries. You’ll understand the Nicene Creed, and you’ll understand certain aspects of the liturgy as well. This book is not short, but it is written for beginners (that’s who takes an intro class, after all), and so you don’t need any prior knowledge to read this book. It starts from scratch and catches you up all along the way. Anyone can understand it, and everyone who reads it will be introduced to all the important early Church fathers (and mothers – and there are some!).

The other thing to keep in mind is that all the heresies that were tried and found wanting in the time of the Church fathers are still around today, in one form or another. So I think it’s extremely important for faithful Catholics, and faithful Christians of any expression, to know and understand our common Tradition, and the history of the early Church, so that lay people won’t be taken in by the modern-day heretics who come to your door, or leave tracts on your car. And I would go so far as to say that if we don’t understand where we came from as Christians, it’s much harder to pass the faith on to the next generation, so that they will hold on to it as we have.

Reading the Church Fathers: A History of the Early Church and the Development of Doctrine is available now from Sophia Institute Press.

Interview with Patrick O'Hearn

 

As Catholic parents we want to do absolutely everything in our power to help our kids develop a relationship with the Blessed Trinity that will sustain them into eternity. In short—we want to raise saints. But how do we do that? Well, I recently met a gentleman, Patrick O’Hearn, who spent the last three years trying to figure that out. He looked to the people who had already done it—fifty sets of parents who raised canonized saints. The fruit of his exhaustive research is the new book, Parents of the Saints: The Hidden Heroes Behind Our Favorite Saints. He was gracious enough to answer a few questions for readers.

Shane Kapler: Patrick, I’m sure that the first thing readers will want to discover from your extensive research is whether or not you were able to identify consistent characteristics in the lives of these parents; and if so, what were they?

Patrick O’Hearn: Holiness was the most consistent theme, and it was manifested in seven identifying characteristics, or what I call “hallmarks.” Each of the seven hallmarks is given its own chapter in the book: (1) Sacramental Life, (2) Surrender, (3) Sacrificial Love, (4) Suffering, (5) Simplicity, (6) Solitude, and (7) Sacredness of Life. Certainly there were other virtues, such as humility and courage, but these were incorporated in the hallmarks above. These hallmarks were passed onto their children, the saints.

Kapler: You structured your book in such a creative way. Instead of relating the lives of one set of parents and then moving onto the next, you structured your book around the hallmarks identified above, and then circled back, chapter after chapter, to show how the hallmark was concretized in the same core group of parents. The effect was that, by the end of the book, I experienced this growing intimacy with these parents of the saints. What couples did you develop the deepest “friendship” with while writing the book?

O’Hearn: Saints Louis and Zélie Martin, the parents of St. Thérèse are my favorite parents of the saints because we have shared many of the same experiences and trials, such as wanting to be in religious life, and also losing children. During college when I was actively discerning religious life, I used to jokingly call St. Therese my girlfriend. But after God called me to marriage, St. Therese was pointing me to her parents. I also have a great love for St. Jose Maria Escriva’s parents. They too experienced setbacks and trials, but Jose’s father was said to have kept his cheerfulness. 

Kapler: I thought I knew a fair amount about the home life of Thérèse of Lisieux, but you provide details I’d never come across before. For example, the death of Thérèse’s sister Mélanie-Thérèse was a particularly difficult cross for her parents. Would you share a bit about her passing and how her parents were able to continue on?

O’Hearn: St. Therese’s sister Mélanie-Thérèse died due to neglect from St. Zélie’s wet nurse. Later in life, Zélie had a condition which prevented her from breastfeeding, and which eventually led to her death in her mid-forties. When she lost Melanie-Therese, St. Zélie experienced what we call today, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. She refused to pass by the house where her daughter died.  Thanks be to God, she did have another baby in her future – St. Therese, who was named after her departed sister. What helped St. Zélie the most was the hope that she would see her little ones in Heaven. Saint Zélie and her saintly husband lived for Eternity. They knew this life was temporary, but still the pain of losing four children weighed heavily on their hearts. Without faith, St. Zelie could have easily abandoned God. 

Kapler: As I was reading, I couldn’t help but feel my own inadequacies as a parent. How do you respond to the parent who says, “I’ve already blown it”?

O’Hearn: These parents of the saints were not without their own faults. They made many mistakes, which we can all learn from, such as letting society or secular relatives influence their children. They were not perfect, but they imperfectly sought perfection.  Some of them even had children that left the Faith. But what separated them from most parents is that the Holy Eucharist and Marian devotion were everything to them. Above all, they longed for Heaven, and wanted their children to be with them in Eternity to praise God forever. And so, when we read their lives, we ought to be inspired by their great holiness, but at the same time, aware that they too struggled with their weaknesses and sins.

Kapler: Patrick, Parents of the Saints both challenges and encourages me; you’ve given me a lot to mull over. Thanks for taking time out to share some of the fruits of your research with us.

A Reminder: We MUST Change

It happened again: I was reading through a gospel passage I'd been through a hundred times before, and the Holy Spirit emphasized two words - just two words!- that completely set my mind going in a new direction. First, the passage: "Jesus said to them in reply, 'Those who are healthy do not need a physician, but the sick do. I have not come to call the righteous to repentance but sinners.'” 

For my entire life I've read that passage and taken tremendous consolation, and rightfully so, in knowing that Jesus came to call a sinner like me, "I have not come to call the righteous to repentance but sinners." But this morning, what jumped out at me were the two words my mind hadn't seemed to register, "I have not come to call the righteous to repentance, but sinners." It's something we all know from various other places in the New Testament, but it's also right here in one of the great announcements of mercy.

Yes, God loves us, even in our sin; but He loves us too much to let us stay there! And the sad truth is that we'd often be more than happy to remain in the mud. But that's not the life of heaven. We're called to union with a Being whose beauty, purity, and greatness are beyond all our powers of comprehension. And for that very reason we must, "Strive for peace with all men, and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord" (Heb 12:14). God takes this incredibly seriously. Because He love us as His children, He disciplines us. Scripture tells us, "For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant; later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.Therefore lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees, and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be put out of joint but rather be healed" (Heb 12:11-13). Take in that image: God is pushing us forward, toward heaven; if we dig in our heals, the force is such that our limbs will be dislocated!

And what happens if we continually fight Him, if we refuse to be changed by the action of His grace? Jesus, in his loving mercy, was terribly blunt: "I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. Every branch of mine that bears no fruit, he takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit. You are already made clean by the word which I have spoken to you. Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me" (Jn 15:1-4). Jesus comes to us sinners and calls us to "repent" - to literally (in Greek) turn around and begin walking with Him in the opposite direction. We don't earn this call, this mercy; it is all grace. But it is not cheap; and there is this terrible, prevalent distortion that grace is.

Deitrich Bonhoeffer, the great German pastor and theologian who did so much to oppose the Nazi regime wrote:

Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church. The essence of grace, we [wrongly] suppose, is that the account has been paid in advance; and, because it has been paid, everything can be had for nothing….Cheap grace means grace as a doctrine, a principle, a system. It means forgiveness of sins proclaimed as a general truth…. [It] means the justification of sin without the justification of the sinner. Grace alone does everything they say, and so everything can remain as it was before… Well, then, let the Christian live like the rest of the world, let him model himself on the world’s standards in every sphere of life, and not presumptuously aspire to live a different life under grace from his old life under sin….

Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession…. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.

Costly grace, [on the other hand], is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man’ will gladly go and self all that he has. It is the pearl of great price to buy which the merchant will sell all his goods. It is the kingly rule of Christ, for whose sake a man will pluck out the eye which causes him to stumble, it is the call of Jesus Christ at which the disciple leaves his nets and follows him… It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of his Son: “ye were bought at a price,” and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us. Above all, it is grace because God did not reckon his Son too dear a price to pay for our life, but delivered him up for us. (The Cost of Discipleship, p.45-48)

So today the Holy Spirit reminded me - and I dare say wishes to remind you - of Jesus's beautiful, merciful, sober words: "I have not come to call the righteous to repentance, but sinners." That's me, that's you - but, thanks be to God, it doesn't have to be for all eternity. Lent is the perfect time for the Spirit to remind us.

Redemptive Suffering & the Early Church

In Part 1 of this series we looked at the Epistle of James’s revolutionary teaching on the value of suffering upon our souls, and in Part 2 we saw how St. Paul expands upon this insight to show how our sufferings also benefit the souls of others. In this final article we want to explore these apostolic insights were faithfully communicated to the next generation of Christians.

Ignatius, the Bishop of Antioch, Syria, wrote of suffering and martyrdom during his transport to Rome, on his way to die in the Colosseum (AD 110). Many of Ignatius’s statements echo Paul’s teaching on suffering. In Ignatius’s Epistle to the Ephesians he wrote, “My spirit is in sacrificial service for the cross, which is a scandal to unbelievers [1 Cor 1:18]”; and he told the Magnesians, “If we do not willingly embrace dying for his passion, neither is his life in us [Rom 8:17].”[1] When Ignatius wrote to the Christians in Rome, he asked that they not attempt to intervene on his behalf: “Permit me to be an imitator of the sufferings of my God. If anyone possesses [Christ] in himself, let him consider what I want and let him suffer with me.” Like Paul, he saw his life being poured out as a “libation,” a drink offering (Phil 2:17; 2 Tim 4:6). He linked his martyrdom to the offering of Christ, re-presented to the Father in the Church’s Eucharist: “Permit me to be food for the beasts, through them I will reach God. I am the wheat of God and I compete through beasts’ teeth to be found the pure bread of Christ.”

Ignatius’s sacrifice consisted of more than the act of martyrdom. It had already begun in the mistreatment he suffered at the hands of his Roman captors (Rom 5:1). Kenneth Howell, in his masterful translation and commentary on Ignatius’s epistles, highlights the bishop’s use of antipsuchon, or “substitute soul.”[2] Appropriating Paul’s words to the Colossians, Ignatius knew that his suffering benefitted more souls than just his own. He told the Smyrneans: “My spirit and my bonds are your substitute soul”; and their bishop Polycarp, “I and my bonds that you love are your substitute soul in every way.” To the Trallians he wrote, “My spirit makes you pure not only now but also when I attain to God.” He expounded upon Paul’s theology of the mystical body in his letter to the Philadelphians, “My brothers, I am being completely poured out for love of you and with exceeding joy I try to make you secure. It is really not I but Jesus Christ who does so. In him, as a prisoner I am all the more afraid because I am still incomplete. However, your prayer will make me complete for God so that I may obtain a share in the lot where I received mercy.” Ignatius made it clear that it was Christ who accomplished all of this in his body. Union with Christ would make the Philadelphians’ prayer for Ignatius efficacious and his perseverance in suffering meritorious for them.

The early Church knew that God’s providence extended to every area of their lives. The Didache, or The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles (c. AD 100), directed readers to “accept as blessings the casualties that befall you, assured that nothing happens without God.”^[3] Cyprian of Carthage (d. 258) taught that God made use of calamity to correct the erring; but he also recognized some sufferings as no more than the consequence of life in a fallen world: “[W]e are all, good and evil, contained in one household. Whatever happens within the house we suffer with equal fate, until, when the end of the temporal life shall be attained, we shall be distributed among the homes either of eternal death or immortality.” It is our union with Christ that injects meaning and purpose into these common sufferings.

The Church’s meditation upon suffering has continued down through the centuries. In the thirteenth century, for instance, St. Anthony of Padua sagely remarked, “God sends us afflictions for various reasons: First, to increase our merit; second, to preserve in us the grace of God; third, to punish us for our sins; and fourth, to show forth his glory and his other attributes.” In our own time, Pope St. John Paul II reflected deeply upon the subject in his apostolic letter Savifici Doloris, or On the Christian Meaning of Human Suffering. John Paul was intimately acquainted with suffering. His mother died when he was only eight years old, and his father and brother before he turned twenty-one. He lived decades of his life under Nazi and Soviet occupation. He survived an assassin’s bullet and endured the debilitating effects of Parkinson’s disease. John Paul descended into some of the darkest experiential places known to man, only to discover that he was not alone; the Crucified was there, awaiting him:

Christ does not explain in the abstract the reason for suffering, but before all else he says: “Follow me! Come! Take part through your suffering in this work of saving the world, a salvation achieved through my suffering! Through my cross.” Gradually, as the individual takes up his cross, spiritually uniting himself to the cross of Christ, the salvific meaning of suffering is revealed before him. He does not discover this meaning at his own human level, but at the level of the sufferings of Christ. At the same time, however, from this level of Christ the salvific meaning of suffering descends to man’s level and becomes, in a sense, the individual’s personal response. It is then that man finds in his suffering interior peace and even spiritual joy.^[4]

This is the wisdom of the Cross (1 Cor 1:23–24)—the rich fruit borne of the Epistle of James’s admonition to “count it all joy, my brethren, when you meet various trials” (1:2). The Church of the twenty-first century needs to re-appropriate this wisdom. Praise be to God, who gives generously to all who ask (James 1:5).

This article was adapted from James: Jewish Roots: Catholic Fruits (Angelico Press, 2021).

 

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[1] Kenneth Howell, Ignatius of Antioch and Polycarp of Smyrna: A New Translation and Theological Commentary (Zanesville, OH: CHResources, 2009); all subsequent quotations from the epistles of Ignatius were taken from this source.

[2] Kenneth Howell, Ignatius of Antioch, 14.

[3] Johannes Quasten, ed., The Didache, The Epistle of Barnabus, the Epistles and the Martyrdom of St. Polycarp, the Fragments of Papias, the Epistle to Diognetus, Ancient Christian Writers, trans. James A. Kleist (New York: Paulist Press, 1948).

[4] John Paul II, Savifici Doloris, 26.