A GREAT Communion Gift!

April 3, 2012 By Elizabeth Scalia

It’s almost time for all the little girls in white and the little boys in blue (or white) to make their First Holy Communion, and every year I get folks writing me asking, “what is a good gift?” The kids usually get rosaries and prayerbooks in their “Communion Kits” so, what else is good?

This. This is good

Amy Welborn Dubruiel and Ann Kissane Engelhart collaborated on this charming, delightfully illustrated chronicle of a meeting between Pope Benedict XVI (who has often discusses his own fond memories of his first Communion when talking to kids) and a group of First Communicants.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Ann Kissane Engelhart recently for Patheos, and she shared a favorite moment:

This was one of my favorite interactions. A child named Andrea says, “My catechist told me that Jesus is present in the Eucharist, but how? I can’t see him!” The pope laughed, and pointing to his microphone, went on to use a metaphor of electricity. He explains that “we don’t always see the very deepest things . . . but we can see and feel their effects.” “We do not see the electric current, but we the light.” He said, “People change, they improve—therefore, we don’t see the Lord himself but we see the effects of the Lord: so we can understand that Jesus is present.” He continued to respond to the questions using these kinds of metaphors that children can relate to. He said that going to confession is like cleaning our rooms to prevent the dirt from building up, and to get a fresh start.

Now, come on? How perfect is that, for a First Communion gift?

I would have loved it!

Meanwhile, for the grown-ups, Amy Welborn’s new book Wish You Were Here: Travels Through Loss and Hope — which I just received in the mail, and which, in my first gleanings, looks to be a gorgeously written little volume — seems like it would be a really good gift for “Communion Mom,” too.

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Spiritual Communion

August 25, 2011 By Elizabeth Scalia

It seems like a small thing, but this story stirred something in me, and gave me hope:

More than a million young Catholics learned the hard way about a venerable Catholic tradition: “spiritual Communion” or the “Communion of desire.”

After a wild storm Aug. 20 at World Youth Day in Madrid left six people injured — including two with broken legs — Spanish police collapsed the tents where most of the unconsecrated hosts for the next morning’s Mass were being kept.

Without the hosts in the tents, organizers had 5,000 ciboriums holding 200 hosts each; they were consecrated by the pope at Mass Aug. 21 and distributed to pilgrims in the section closest to the altar.

Distributing Communion to just 100,000 people wasn’t a decision anyone took lightly, and apparently there were long discussions with World Youth Day organizers and Vatican officials trying to find a solution. In the end, it just wasn’t possible logistically to locate another 1.5 million hosts.

A couple of hours before the Mass, organizers announced that most of the people present would not be able to receive; they asked the pilgrims to offer up that sacrifice for the pope’s intentions and told them they could receive Communion later in the day at any church in Madrid.

The decision to cancel Communion for most Mass participants was reached “with the greatest pain,” Yago de la Cierva, director of World Youth Day Madrid, told reporters Aug. 21.

Whenever there is a huge crowd for a Mass, whether in St. Peter’s Square or at a World Youth Day, there always are some people unable to get to the Communion distribution point in time to receive. But in Madrid, de la Cierva said, “almost everyone” was among those not receiving.

Obviously, receiving Communion is the way to participate most fully in the Mass, but it’s not always possible for everyone to receive at every Mass, nor do many Catholics in the world even have regular access to Mass.

The idea of “spiritual Communion” — inviting Jesus into one’s heart and soul when receiving the actual sacrament isn’t possible — is part of Catholic tradition.

You can read the rest here.

I can’t rightly say why this makes me hopeful, but it does. It almost feels like a “training day” — a necessary lesson to impart, for those times in our not-too-distant future when the church is smaller, and persecuted, and Holy Communion is not always available to us. It just makes me feel like, yeah…the Holy Spirit is seeing to things.

Others will likely disagree.

Related:
How Benedict Has Influenced WYD
10 Amazing Young Catholics
Genies in Bottles; Toothpaste in Tubes
Where the Mass comes from

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Five Little Words

August 23, 2011 By Elizabeth Scalia

My column at First Things this week brings me back to a retreat experience that I am still processing and learning from:

How does one assist at adoration and not feel inclined to bash all anger, all fear, all frustration, temptation, hopelessness, upon the cross of Christ—which can bear all things—and simply consent; simply allow him to recreate, revive, restore to make everything, everything, new.

His majesty will do it; He will not wait to discuss all the ways you have failed him—there is time for that, an eternity for that, later. If you allow him to, if you let him in, he will change you, and bathe you in his immense tenderness. If you are laying in a gutter, like Eszterhas, you can call on him, trusting in the words of Isaiah 38:17: “ . . . you have saved me from the pit of destruction, when you cast behind your back, all of my sins.”

It is beyond all of our knowing, which is why—no matter how tempted we are in our increasingly polarized church to stand with the Pharisees—we cannot. We must, ultimately err on the side of mercy, because mercy is what we all seek, and leave justice to the One who may be trusted to know what that is.

The rest is here

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Unbearable

July 18, 2011 By Elizabeth Scalia

It’s not about sex. Sex abuse and rape are always about asserting power and dominance and control. (H/T)

And it is always evil.

Today, despite his hospital treatment, Jean Paul still bleeds when he walks. Like many victims, the wounds are such that he’s supposed to restrict his diet to soft foods such as bananas, which are expensive, and Jean Paul can only afford maize and millet. His brother keeps asking what’s wrong with him. “I don’t want to tell him,” says Jean Paul. “I fear he will say: ‘Now, my brother is not a man.’”

It is for this reason that both perpetrator and victim enter a conspiracy of silence and why male survivors often find, once their story is discovered, that they lose the support and comfort of those around them. In the patriarchal societies found in many developing countries, gender roles are strictly defined.

“In Africa no man is allowed to be vulnerable,” says RLP’s gender officer Salome Atim. “You have to be masculine, strong. You should never break down or cry. A man must be a leader and provide for the whole family. When he fails to reach that set standard, society perceives that there is something wrong.”

Often, she says, wives who discover their husbands have been raped decide to leave them. “They ask me: ‘So now how am I going to live with him? As what? Is this still a husband? Is it a wife?’ They ask, ‘If he can be raped, who is protecting me?’ There’s one family I have been working closely with in which the husband has been raped twice. When his wife discovered this, she went home, packed her belongings, picked up their child and left. Of course that brought down this man’s heart.”

Read the rest, if you can bear it.

When I made my First Holy Communion, I recall Sister telling us that our prayer, upon reception, could be about our own concerns, but the most powerful prayer at that moment would be the one we offered for “the whole world,” and its suffering. “Make Jesus welcome, and then beg for the whole world.” I can still hear her saying it.

There is so much suffering, it feels like there can never be enough prayer; so much sin there can never be enough penance. All we can do is plunge ourselves into God’s wide mercy and beg for all of humanity.

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Sacramental Joy of the Priesthood and of Vows

July 13, 2011 By Elizabeth Scalia

Via New Advent, Msgr. Charles Pope gives a glimpse of the joy he finds in his priesthood, particularly in conferring sacraments among the faithful — worshiping with them, communing with them, receiving them, anointing them. It is a look at one day in his life, an atypical one, surely, which also happened to include his own birthday celebration. His pleasure in all of it, his gratitude for the ability to confer these sacramental gifts, is evident in every word as he describes a day that brought four Eucharistic masses, heard confessions, performed two marriages, a baptism, a confirmation and an anointing:

Well, there you have it. My gift in a “strange package,” a sacramental six-pack, every sacrament I can possibly celebrate. It was a bone-crusher of a day but God is so good. I don’t suppose a priest could have any better gift that to be reminded so powerfully of his purpose on the eve of his 50th birthday.

But God knows me well enough to realize that he had to send a prophet to decode it all for me, just to make sure I got it. It came on Sunday afternoon, the evening of my birthday. Two of the Sisters came from the Convent presented me with a cake and sang happy birthday.

Innocently they asked me how my birthday weekend had gone. “Do you have a few minutes Sisters?” I said. And I told them the whole story.

One of them looked at me and said, “Do you see what God was saying to you on your 50th birthday? He was saying, ‘This is why I created you.’”

Yes, that is what he was saying alright. And it was the best gift I could have received.

A priest lives not to himself, but for the life of the Body of Christ, which he feeds and serves within community. Thank you, Msgr. Pope, for your faithful, daily willingness to live outside of yourself, for consenting to live outside of yourself, wholly for Christ, to the purpose for which you were created.

Along similar lines, as we approach the season of clothings and professions and vows, Sr. Lisa Doty shares the remembrance of her own solemn profession and the words she wrote then:

One of the most important things I have learned in all my years of preparation for my final vows was that despite my sin – doing the things I don’t want – God continues to love me. Our humanity is so used to judging people based on what they do, or in religious circles, how good one is. My experience of God has taught me that despite my weakness, my failure, my small capacity to love as Jesus loves, Christ still loves me and desires me to belong fully to Him. I have found that I will never be perfect or worthy to belong to Christ Himself; but I have also found that God wants me anyway. He takes me as I am and I find that it is His love that perfects me. And slowly, with His grace which flows always through the Sacraments, I am being transformed to be more like Him and more able to love like He loves. This new awareness has prepared me to choose a life of belonging to the One who is Love, with a desire to live my life so to make Him known.


Thanks, too, to Sr. Lisa, for her faithfulness.

And now, go take a look at the exquisitely lovely and touching ceremony of a young Passionist Nun making her first vows — the Passionist Rite is very different from most monastic ceremonies, and the pictures are gorgeous, as is Sr. Rose Marie, who is radiant in the great joy of her obedience. I don’t have permission to use any of them, so do check it out!

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Eucharist in Soho

June 30, 2011 By Elizabeth Scalia

A great story from George Weigel. Kind of wish it was about SoHo, in New York!

As my colleague Stephen White puts it, Soho today is a “world-class spiritual wasteland … a playground of the middle and upper classes, a trendy night spot that sells just about anything a man could want. It’s not so much a poor neighborhood as it is a wicked neighborhood. It’s a place dedicated to the appetites and built on prodigality.” And in the midst of that prodigality is St. Patrick’s—a model Catholic parish and one of the flagships of the New Evangelization.

Led for the past decade by Father Alexander Sherbrooke, a man of no small dreams, St. Patrick’s has just completed a magnificent restoration that has turned a once-drab church into a golden gem of architecture and decoration: for Father Sherbrooke believes, with Benedict XVI, that beauty is a privileged pathway to God in a secular age. While the church was being restored, its dank basement was dug out and a state-of-the-art community center built for the parish’s extensive work with the homeless and the destitute. Up in the church’s bell tower is a chapel for Eucharistic adoration, where volunteers pray from 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. every night, and where two telephones bring requests from all over the world to an “SOS Prayer Line.”

Read it all, it’s heartening! Another story here and another from the great Anna Arco!

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Panis Angelicus & our Priests

April 11, 2011 By Elizabeth Scalia

Two must-reads for you this morning: start with Max Lindenman’s intimate and fresh encounter with a bishop he was prepared to dislike, because our media-constructed bogeymen are almost as dear to us as our consciences, sometimes:

The final scene in Dumas, père’s Three Musketeers brings young D’Artagnan, the hero, face-to-face with Cardinal Richelieu, a man he judges a usurper of royal authority and (at several degrees’ remove) a murderer. Within a few short paragraphs, the cardinal’s commanding presence and generosity bring the swashbuckler literally to his knees, from which he swears lifelong fealty.

That scene is far from a perfect analog to the five-second audience I enjoyed last year with the Most Reverend Thomas J. Olmsted, Bishop of Phoenix. To state the obvious, I am not a bonny brawler to match Dumas’ Gascon squireen. Olmsted, I am confident, does not dispatch branded floozies to steal diamonds or assassinate foreign dignitaries.

But the parallels are numerous and compelling enough to stick. At the time of our meeting, for reasons we’ll consider presently, Olmsted was as infamous among contemporaries as the Red Duke had been. Our brief encounter transformed my share in that disgust into something like a qualified affection. Exactly what that says about the human heart, its fickleness, and the role the common touch plays in tweaking it to the good are questions I leave to the reader.

Then head over to Heather King’s Shirt of Flame where she writes of her encounter with a 90 year-old, cigar-smoking priest with presence. I love this part:

And then this world-famous, globe-trotting, by all accounts universally-respected priest took time out of his day to tell a weary undistinguished traveler of celebrating Mass all over the globe: in submarines, the North Pole, little out-of-the-way spots, tropical, subtropical. But he won me over completely when he reported that in some shabby outpost with about three communicants, a bystander had once had the temerity to inquire, “Who are saying the Mass for?” Father had whirled around, stared the guy down, and replied: “The whole bloody world.”

(photo source) Our priests are so beset and besieged that we forget, sometimes, what they are made of and how they fight and die for the church (that’s us), the mass and the Eucharist, the Panis Angelicus, the Bread of Angels.

I wonder if we’ll see any heroic, presence-filled priests emerge from this effort; I hope so.

Heather ended her piece with a video and I am going to swipe it because I love it, and because it is a brilliant way for us to continue our attempt in this space to “quiet down” and reclaim Lent. And because people appear to be enjoying the lack of noise, I think comments will remain closed for at least one more day.

But enjoy this – Luciano Pavoratti and Sting in a very haunting performance of Panis Angelicus, which is made all the more touching for Sting’s endearing seriousness, and for how he holds and contorts his buff body to get the notes out purely, in order to keep up with the far-from-buff Pavoratti!

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