Before my wife and I married, I read a book by the late Larry Burkett called “The Complete Financial Guide for Young Couples” . Burkett, who was a popular Evangelical financial adviser, recommends a very old-fashioned financial plan for couples just starting off in life: spend less than you make. We followed the advice of the book (we even did the “envelope system” in which you have different envelopes of cash for each category of spending) and it was one of the best decisions we ever made. Even the wise sages at Saturday Night Live realize the wisdom of this advice:

I thought of Burkett’s book while reading this article in the Atlantic about Dave Ramsey, who appears to be an up-to-date version of Burkett. Ramsey travels around the country preaching the “no-debt” gospel, and his work has moved beyond Evangelical circles, as can be seen in this profile in the Atlantic:

There was, of course, a great deal of talk about money, and what to do with it. But the format was more tent revival than accounting seminar, with the first 90 minutes or so mostly devoted to Ramsey’s personal story of ruin and redemption. We heard how, during the second half of the 1980s, a young Ramsey built up a multimillion-dollar real-estate empire—then lost it all as the bank got nervous and called his loans, ultimately forcing him and his wife into bankruptcy. How, searching for help in his hour of need, he turned to the Bible and discovered Proverbs 22:7: “The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is slave of the lender.” At that moment, he told an audience so hushed that we could hear the ice squeak, Ramsey decided to never borrow another dollar again…

Ramsey offers some investment advice (much of which would have struck horror in my business-school professors), but for most of his followers, the main attraction is a simple program: give 10 percent of your income to charity, save 15 percent for retirement, build up a sizable emergency stash and a college fund for your kids, and above all, stop borrowing money. Ramsey devotees pay cash for everything they can. They are allowed only one exception to the no-more-debt rule: a 15-year fixed-rate mortgage. He is so serious about shunning debt that his Web site takes only debit cards; try to pay with a Capital One Visa, and the system rejects the card, then tut-tuts at you. These simple, austere, unbreakable rules are, as Ramsey likes to say, “the advice that God and Grandma gave you.”…

When you pay for something with a credit card, or even a debit card, you can easily spend a few extra dollars here and there. But as Ramsey explained—while waving a handful of hundred-dollar bills to illustrate the point—if you have to actually hand over some of your dwindling cash supply, you tend to ponder every purchase. That impulsive latte buy becomes a little less enjoyable when every time you haul out your wallet, a quavering voice inside your head asks, “You want to send Uncle Abe away?” And sure enough, though we thought we’d budgeted conservatively for just the necessities, we nonetheless finished the month with extra money in every envelope.

It’s also hard to spend cash, because so many people look at you funny when you try. The very first day, I spent almost 20 minutes trying to check out in the “better dresses” section of a department store. The saleslady stared at the hundred-dollar bill in her palm as if I’d just handed her an eel. After a series of plaintive looks at my obviously card-free wallet, she started stabbing at the cash-register keyboard with a sort of bleak despair. To my immense surprise and relief—and clearly, also to hers—the cash drawer eventually opened.

And then the “money line”:

Ramsey calls this “being weird.” The phrase came up over and over again in his five-hour spiel, always punctuated with the same rejoinder: “Normal is broke.”

Be sure to read the entire article. I have often been scandalized by the fact that Christians seem to live no differently than the rest of society when it comes to money (as well as just about everything else). We have a responsibility to be, well, responsible with our money. Can you imagine the parable of the talents told today? “I know you gave me 10 talents, Lord, but I leveraged that into 100 talents so I could buy a nice house and a vacation to Disneyworld for the kids. But then the bank called my loan and so now I’m in the hole. Could I borrow another 100 talents?”

By living within our means we are also evangelizing: we are showing people by our actions that accumulating “stuff” isn’t the most important thing in life, that there is something out there that fulfills us unlike the temporary fulfillment we get when we buy something. Hopefully Mr. Ramsey’s work will increase our awareness of this fact.

National Geographic has an interesting profile of Mount Athos, the “Holy Mountain” of Eastern Orthodoxy. Some excerpts:

The holy peninsula of Mount Athos reaches 31 miles out into the Aegean Sea like an appendage struggling to dislocate itself from the secular corpus of northeastern Greece. For the past thousand years or so, a community of Eastern Orthodox monks has dwelled here, purposefully removed from everything except God. They live only to become one with Jesus Christ. Their enclave—crashing waves, dense chestnut forests, the specter of snowy-veined Mount Athos, 6,670 feet high—is the very essence of isolation.

Living in one of the peninsula’s 20 monasteries, dozen cloisters, or hundreds of cells, the monks are detached even from each other, reserving most of their time for prayer and solitude. In their heavy beards and black garb—worn to signify their death to the world—the monks seem to recede into a Byzantine fresco, an ageless brotherhood of ritual, acute simplicity, and constant worship, but also imperfection. There is an awareness, as one elder puts it, that “even on Mount Athos we are humans walking every day on the razor’s edge.”

…after two world wars and communism reduced the monastic population to 1,145 in 1971, the past decades have seen a rebirth. A steady influx of young men—often with college degrees, a number from the former Soviet bloc—has dramatically increased Mount Athos’s ranks to nearly 2,000 monks and novices, while Greece’s entrance into the European Union in 1981 made the peninsula eligible for EU preservation funds.

“There are 2,000 stories here—everyone has their own spiritual walk,” says Father Maximos, whose own walk began in Long Island as a teenage devotee of edgy musical artists like Lou Reed and Leonard Cohen, and who later became a theology professor at Harvard before resigning to “live my life closer to God.”

The following passage worries me, however:

Mount Athos has survived by bending where it must, though never without fretfulness. St. Athanasios, who founded the Megistis Lavras monastery in 963, infuriated the hermits by introducing audacious architecture into an otherwise rustic landscape. Roads and buses, then electricity, then cell phones have all been sources of angst. The latest encroachment is the Internet. A few monasteries have conducted ever so timid forays into cyberspace—ordering spare parts, communicating with lawyers, obtaining scholarly research. “It’s a great danger to be connected to the outside world,” cautions one monk. “Most of the monks weren’t even informed about 9/11.”

Not long ago I was talking to a friend who is a member of a (Catholic) religious order. He told me that they were considering the possibility of having the Internet available on one of their computers in their house. Some of the younger novices need it for their studies. I told him frankly: do everything you can to keep the Internet out of your houses! As I mention in my previous post, it is possible to be contemplative while in the world, but to me the Internet seems completely contrary to the religious life they are trying to lead. Hopefully the introduction of many of these modern conveniences to Mt. Athos will not harm their spiritual life.

I recently read a great article on contemplation and work. Some might immediately think these two things to be in opposition: do not work and contemplation struggle against each other? How can one be both contemplative and busy with work?

This apparent opposition does have some validity. Traditionally, Catholics have seen monks and cloistered nuns as the models of a contemplative life. They focus their energies primarily towards prayer and thus are able to achieve contemplation. Their lack of distractions help to foster a contemplative outlook. And if there is one thing the modern work world does not lack, it is distractions. I was on a silent retreat this past weekend, and in many ways it fostered this conception: I had no distractions and was therefore able to dig more deeply into prayer, meditation and contemplation. Scriptural passages leapt off the page in ways they never do normally, and insights came to me in prayer instead of the normal distractions I usually encounter.

Yet every Christian is called to a contemplative life, no matter their state in life and not just when they go on retreat. This call to contemplation includes housewives, truck drivers, CEOs and software developers. As Vatican II emphasized, all Christians are called to holiness, and contemplation is part of a holy life. The ways in which followers of Christ practice this holiness depends on their state of life, but there is no delineation in the call to be perfect, as God is perfect.

So how can we be contemplatives in the midst of the world? First, we should ask: what exactly is contemplation? There are many good definitions, but I think I would define contemplation as “looking at God”. As the Catechism states,

Contemplation is a gaze of faith, fixed on Jesus. “I look at him and he looks at me”: this is what a certain peasant of Ars in the time of his holy curé used to say while praying before the tabernacle. This focus on Jesus is a renunciation of self. His gaze purifies our heart; the light of the countenance of Jesus illumines the eyes of our heart and teaches us to see everything in the light of his truth and his compassion for all men. Contemplation also turns its gaze on the mysteries of the life of Christ. Thus it learns the “interior knowledge of our Lord,” the more to love him and follow him. (CCC 2715)

Turning our gaze towards God does not require that we are in a church, nor does it mean that we have to be performing a traditional practice of piety such as the Rosary or Stations of the Cross (although those are all great helps towards contemplation). We can turn our gaze towards God at any time of the day, no matter what we are doing (provided it is not a sinful activity). The article I noted above states:

The discovery of God in the ordinary activities of each day gives our life its ultimate value and full meaning. Jesus’ hidden life at Nazareth comprised “years of intense work and prayer, years during which Jesus led an ordinary life, a life like ours, we might say, which was both divine and human at the same time.”[3] Thus he teaches us that our professional, family, and social life is not a hindrance to praying always,[4] but rather an opportunity to stay very close to God, until a moment comes when it is impossible to distinguish between work and contemplation…

This is what contemplation means: an active prayer without words, intense and serene, deep and simple. It is a gift God grants to those who seek him sincerely, who put their whole heart into fulfilling his will with deeds, and who try to remain in his presence. “First one brief aspiration, then another, and another… till our fervor seems insufficient, because words are too poor… then this gives way to intimacy with God, looking at God without needing rest or feeling tired.”[16] All this can take place, St. Josemaria insists, not only in the periods dedicated expressly to prayer, but also “while we carry out as perfectly as we can (with all our mistakes and limitations) the tasks allotted to us by our situation and duties.”[17]…

Modern society leads many people to live on externals, ever anxious to acquire things, to move around, to look, to distract oneself, perhaps seeking to mask one’s inner emptiness, the loss of the transcendent meaning of one’s life. But we, having discovered the divine call to holiness and apostolate, should have the opposite experience. The more agitated our exterior activity, the more intense should be our inner life, our interior recollection, seeking to dialogue with God present in our soul in grace, mortifying the desires of the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life.[34] To contemplate God one needs a clean heart. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.[35]

Our modern society has made contemplation very difficult, as we have many distractions to fill our minds and keep them from gazing at God. But we can – and we must – turn our gaze towards God in the midst of our normal life and live a life of contemplation. Only then will we be able to “see God”.

I’m still trying to decide if I think this is funny or offensive:

This year Fr. Benedict Groeschel celebrated his 50th anniversary as a priest. Below is a great video honoring this amazing man:

Today is the anniversary of the promulgation of Dei Verbum, the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation issued at the Second Vatican Council on November 18th, 1965. Dei Verbum is my favorite document from Vatican II, but it was not without controversy, as it made a theological declaration that contradicted a common (but not infallible) teaching of Catholic theology of the time.

Many people like to call Vatican II a “pastoral” council, implying that it was not a dogmatic council. By this they mean that Vatican II, unlike every other council, didn’t make any dogmatic declarations but instead just issued pastoral documents to guide the faithful in the modern world. To a large extent this is true, but it is too sweeping of a statement, and it does not apply completely to Dei Verbum, which did in fact settle an important theological debate.

One of the debated issues in the mid-20th century Catholic theological world was the issue of the sources of revelation. Were both Scripture and Tradition sources of revelation, and if so, were they completely independent? Most Catholic theologians in the post-Trent Church argued that Scripture and Tradition were two separate sources of revelation. They based their belief on the Council of Trent, which declared “both saving truth, and moral discipline…are contained in the written books [Scripture] and the unwritten traditions”. Note that it just simply states that “saving truth” and “moral disciple” are contained in both “written books and the unwritten traditions” – there is no comment on how much saving truth is found in either form of transmission. In the original draft of this decree, it stated that revelation is found “partly” (partim) in the written books and “partly” (partim) in tradition, but that language was removed before the text came up for a final vote. If that language had made it to the final decree, it would be hard to argue with the “two-source” belief about revelation.

However, at Vatican II the Council Fathers went a different direction. In Dei Verbum, they declared that the “Gospel” was the “source of all saving truth and moral teaching” (DV 7). (Note that “the Gospel” does not equal “the [four] Gospels”; it is the content of the saving message of Jesus Christ – the “Good News” he proclaimed and lived). Both Scripture and Tradition pass on this Gospel and it is not possible to separate them: “there exists a close connection and communication between sacred tradition and Sacred Scripture. For both of them, flowing from the same divine wellspring, in a certain way merge into a unity and tend toward the same end” (DV 9). Finally, Dei Verbum declares that “Sacred tradition and Sacred Scripture form one sacred deposit of the word of God, committed to the Church” (DV 10). Note the integral unity between Scripture and Tradition and the common source of them both. You cannot have a division between the two any more than you could have a division between your two legs; they work together for a common purpose.

From this, the door was definitively shut on the “two-source” theory of divine revelation. But note that the teaching of Dei Verbum was not a new teaching, invented in the 1960′s. It dates back to the 2nd century and St. Irenaeus, where he lays down the same structure in Book 3 of Against Heresies: the “Gospel” was handed on by Jesus to the apostles, and then the apostles by both Scripture and Tradition handed it on to future generations. The “source” of revelation is not either the Scriptures or Tradition, but the Gospel itself. This Gospel contains all the saving truths of our salvation and it is handed on to us through Scripture and Tradition.

Irenaeus’ teaching, however, was mostly forgotten in the Catholic world by the early 20th century, and it was only by a “return to the sources” (ressourcement) that it was recovered. But it was not recovered without some resistance: the controversy it aroused during the Council can be seen in the long history of Dei Verbum; it was one of the first constitutions debated at Vatican II but one of the last to be approved. Somewhat surprisingly though, it has become one of the least controversial of the documents in the post-Vatican II world. I think that is because most theologians recognized the declaration’s brilliant resolution to the debate; it rises above the 16th century Protestant-Catholic debates and shows that we cannot equate the content of the Gospel with the means in which it is passed on to us.

If you have some time today or in the next week, I strongly recommend that you read Dei Verbum. It is a short document but packed with beautiful insights regarding how God has revealed Himself to us.

If you are looking for the latest news about Hollywood celebrities, this blog is the last place to look. Frankly, I don’t understand our national obsession regarding the comings and goings and views of movie and TV actors. This obsession has infected Catholics as well: we too often obsess about whether or not this or that actor is Catholic, what actors think about Catholicism and whether or not a movie or show is pro- or anti-Catholic. We place an incredibly inordinate amount of importance on people whose main talent is playing make-believe.

That being said, I just read an interesting interview with actor Jim Caviezel regarding his latest endeavor (a “re-creation” of the 1960s show The Prisoner). Caviezel appears to be a fine chap and of course I enjoyed his work in The Passion of the Christ. But what struck me most about this interview was the following statement he made (emphasis added):

[I]t reflects on the economy, on the world lack of trust. People become so disconnected. There was a time when people would sit down and have dinner together and they would say, “How are you,” and they would have to deal with one another. They don’t have to deal with each other anymore. They deal with their iPods and their Blackberries. And they’re missing a lot of opportunities here, watching people that they could have met earlier who would have changed their life, that’s gone because their head is somewhere else. I’m in Manhattan, New York, and walking across the street with your Blackberry is kind of a death wish, don’t you think?

I find Caviezel’s connection between trust and technology to be very insightful, and I’m impressed that someone who most likely lives surrounded by this type of technology could see this so clearly.

Technology has supposedly “connected” us in new ways, but we are actually more disconnected than ever before. We don’t know our neighbors and we often don’t even know the members of our own family as we keep our eyes on our gadgets instead of on other people. Yet Christ calls us to make deep connections with others so that we can truly share God’s love with them. This can only be done on a limited level on the Internet, and it can never replace the deep connectivity that comes from true interpersonal relationships.

A lot of reminders today about the close connection between being a follower of Christ and helping the poor.

First, today’s saint is St. Elizabeth of Hungary, who gave up her wealthy lifestyle to help the poor.

Second, today’s Gospel reading is about rich Zacchaeus who gave up at least half of his possessions as his way of following Christ. And what was Christ’s response? “Today salvation has come to this house” (Luke 19:9).

Finally, the pope recently stated,

“Opulence and waste are no longer acceptable when the tragedy of hunger is assuming ever greater proportions“

Or, in other words:

“Living like a typical American is no longer acceptable when the tragedy of hunger is assuming ever greater proportions“

Hopefully, American Catholics will not respond to the pope’s words like some of Christ’s disciples did: “This saying is hard; who can accept it?” (John 6:60).

I think Archbishop Chaput best summed up our obligation to the poor when he bluntly stated, “We’ll go to hell if we don’t care for the poor.”

St. Elizabeth of Hungary, pray for us!
St. Zacchaeus, pray for us!

It is not that we have so little time, but that we have wasted so much of it.

- Seneca, De brevitate vitae, 1, 3

I have been on this earth for almost 40 years now and I admit I still don’t know how to describe my personal music tastes.

On the one hand, on a long drive this weekend I enjoyed listening to Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis.

On the other hand, I can’t help but smile and sing along when listening to the following song (which Francis Beckwith suggests might be the “worst Christian pop song ever” ):

When I was in college during the early 1990′s, there was a great surge in pro-life activism. Led by the preaching of Randall Terry and the witness of Joan Andrews, many thousands of prolifers were praying and rescuing at abortion clinics across the country. However, after the draconian FACE law went into effect in 1995, making blockading an abortion clinic a federal crime, the number of rescues dropped to almost nothing and even those praying at clinics dropped severely. Whereas before you could find hundreds of pro-lifers at certain clinics on Saturday mornings, by the late 1990′s you only saw a handful of people – usually middle-aged and older Catholics praying the Rosary.

Fortunately, it appears that the tide is turning (or returning, as the case may be), at least here in DC. I mentioned two weeks ago that Archbishop Wuerl recently prayed outside an abortion clinic. Now, the students of Christendom College organized a massive prayer vigil in front of an abortion clinic in DC:

Shield of Roses, the pro-life student group at Christendom College, reports that it held its largest protest ever when more than 200 people protested at the Planned Parenthood clinic just north of the White House in Washington, D.C.

Students, faculty, staff and others traveled to the U.S. capital on Oct. 31. While the group protests at the same clinic each Saturday morning during the academic year, normally only 20 to 30 students participate.

Once a semester the group organizes what it calls a “Mega Shield” event to encourage as many as possible to participate. Last year’s event drew as many as 125 students, according to Christendom College…

Christendom Admissions Director Tom McFadden, an attendee at the Oct. 31 protest, said it is hard to tell the effect of the annual March for Life held on the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision.

In contrast, McFadden said the Saturday protest made a difference.

“Through the grace of God and our physical presence, we ended up saving the lives of two babies because their mothers chose not to enter the clinic that day. It doesn’t really get much better than that!”

That final point is why I don’t like to call these events “protests” like the article does. The term “protest” implies a political agenda, replete with slogans and chanting. These prayer vigils, on the other hand, are spiritual events whose primary purpose is to confront the unseen powers of darkness, save the lives of the children scheduled to be killed that day and convert the hearts of the women and workers at the clinic. There is nothing wrong with working within the political system to protest for the end of legalized abortion, but that is not what these prayer vigils are for.

Hopefully Christendom College will be able to continue to have many students be a prayerful presence at the abortion clinics in DC. God bless them!

Our Lady of Guadalupe, pray for us!

Today the Catholic Church celebrates the feast of St. Josaphat, who was the first Eastern Catholic canonized by the Roman Catholic Church. He lived in the 16th century, during the first years of the Union of Brest, which brought large parts of the Ruthenian Orthodox church into communion with the bishop of Rome. Living in a difficult time, Josaphat was controversial to his contemporaries and continues to be a point of contention between the Orthodox and Catholic believers today.

During his lifetime, Josaphat angered many Roman Catholics by his insistence in maintaining Eastern traditions. However, he also angered those Eastern believers who did not want union with Rome. But the exact details of his life depends on who is telling the story. To Catholics today, he is seen as a saintly bishop who heroically strove to bring people into union with Rome while maintaining the legitimate traditions of the East. To Orthodox, he was a “butcher” who violently tried to force Orthodox Christians to abandon their faith for the Papist heresy. For an example of the strong emotions Josaphat still engenders, see this thread at an Orthodox forum.

This is not the only way in which St. Josaphat is an uncomfortable saint for us today. He strove to implement “uniatism”, which the Joint International Commission for the Theological Dialogue between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church in 1993 at Balamand, Lebanon declared was no longer an acceptable model for seeking union between East and West (although the existing Eastern Catholic Churches still have a right to exist). The very cause of his life which led to him being canonized has now been abandoned as an inadequate form of ecumenism.

St. Josaphat was in many ways a product of his times: he was born into a time of great division and open hatred between Eastern and Western Christians. He did what he thought was best to advance unity in the Church, and although we might no longer support some of his methods, we Catholics should ask his prayers in the cause of East-West relations. But we should not be surprised if our Orthodox brothers and sisters do not join us in asking for his intercession.

Throughout Pope John Paul II’s pontificate, the pope had a great desire to visit Russia. For a number of reasons, the Russian Orthodox Church was cool to this idea and the Pope wisely decided to abide by their wishes and refrained from making the trip. The relationship was so problematic that there was never even a meeting between Pope John Paul II and Russian Patriarch Alexis, even though JPII met with just about every other Orthodox (and Protestant and non-Christian) leader in the world.

However, now there is a new Pope and a new Patriarch, and the two men know each other and have much in common personally. Furthermore, Pope Benedict – again, for a number of reasons – is seen more favorably in Russia than his predecessor. So hopes have been building that there can be a meeting between these two men – and now the influential Russian Archbishop Hilarion, the head of the patriarchate’s Department for External Church Relations, has confirmed that a meeting might very well take place soon. This would be an extraordinary meeting between the leaders of the two largest Christian Churches in the world and could have incredible consequences.

One thing that Archbishop Hilarion said that I found interesting, however, was that Pope Benedict is a “very reserved, traditional man who does not seek the expansion of the Catholic Church to traditionally Orthodox regions”. This seems to me to be a swipe at Pope John Paul II, who was seen as more of a “charismatic” figure whose very presence in Russia could possibly cause many Russians to consider joining the Catholic Church. I think his point about Pope Benedict not seeking expansion in Orthodox countries is true to a certain extent. The Pope does not wish to work towards the “conversion” of Orthodox believers to the Catholic Church, but instead towards a corporate reunion between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. There is a difference.

Pray for the continued relations between these two Churches and that all Christians might one day be united in one communion.

Fr. Michael Sinnott, the Irish Columban priest stationed in the Philippines who was abducted a month ago, has been released!

Praise God!