Yesterday marked the 100th anniversary of the papal decree which lowered the age of first communion in the Roman Catholic Church. Instead of waiting until the age of 12 or 13, first communicants are now allowed to receive the Eucharist at the “age of reason”, which is usually interpreted to be around 7 or 8 years old. This decree has been a wonderful blessing in the Church and I know that I am very thankful that my own children have been able to receive the Eucharist before they reach their teen years. However, at the risk of sounding ungrateful for this decision, I do have to say:

I wish children could receive the Eucharist at an earlier age, even as infants.

Some might argue that communion should not be given to someone until he understands what it is that he is receiving; in fact, this is one of the primary arguments for waiting until the “age of reason.” However, this fails to appreciate the mystery involved in all the sacraments, including the Eucharist. After all, does anyone really understand what they receive at communion? Sure, we can acknowledge that it is the Lord Himself, body, blood, soul and divinity that we receive in the Eucharist, but it is impossible for the human mind to comprehend this great mystery. Reason simply is unable to grasp what is happening. So connecting the Eucharist to “reason” seems to me to be a tenuous connection at best.

Another argument against an earlier communion age is that one should receive confession before receiving communion. And it is true that once one has reached the age of reason, he should go to confession before making his first communion. Since a person can truly sin after they can reason, they should learn that confession is an integral part of receiving our Lord in the Eucharist. But obviously an infant cannot commit actual sin, and since he is baptized, he has been washed clean of the stain of original sin. So in fact such a child would be more pure to receive the Eucharist than most adults.

A third argument for waiting for the age of reason is that small children might not be properly respectful of this great gift – they may simply look at it as a “treat” they receive at Mass and not as the life-giving food it really is. However, children have always received the Eucharist in the Eastern churches (including Eastern Catholic churches) and they have never encountered this problem. Furthermore, this argument sounds much like the apostles’ protests about children “bothering” our Lord during his ministry. Christ told them, “Let the children come to me, and do not prevent them; for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these” (Matthew 19:14). Jesus treated little children as co-heirs to his kingdom, not as “extras” that needed to wait until they were mature to be full members of it.

The Western practice today is to baptize infants, give first communion at the “age of reason” and confirm in the teenage years. Aside from the ages that these sacraments are given, there is something irregular about this setup, as it changes the ordering of the Sacraments of Initiation from its original order of baptism, confirmation, then communion. This order is still preserved for adult converts such as myself, who receive confirmation at the Easter Vigil before they receive their first communion. But for cradle Catholics, it is communion first, then confirmation. So I would argue for embracing the complete Eastern practice of infants receiving all three Sacraments of Initiation at once: baptism, confirmation, then first communion. In today’s world I believe our children need as much grace as possible, and as early as possible, to withstand the enormous obstacles to holiness that they will face growing up. Receiving all three sacraments soon after birth, and regular reception of the Eucharist after that, would go a long way in helping them. Our Lord wants all children to come to him, and infant communion would be one way to obey that command.

Obviously, I submit to the practice of the Church and I follow her rules in this matter. Individuals like myself do not have any authority to change such practices and should never break the guidelines set out by the successors to the apostles. But I do wish and pray that one day the Church will change the practice of the Latin rite so that even the smallest children can be part of the Eucharistic feast.

Jesus ascends
    Peter, James, John follow
    Alone with Jesus
    On the mountain, away from all.
Jesus transfigured
    Glory from glory
    God from God
    Light from Light
The Law and the Prophets testify
    ”This is he of whom we speak”
The Beloved Son
    All of the Father within
    ”Listen to him and you listen to me”
Coming down
    Back to the world, the cross to come
    Glory pointing to sorrow, leading to glory
The three to be transfigured:
    Peter, the rock, ruling in love
    James, the son of thunder, soon to drink Christ’s cup
    John, the eagle, the beloved son of Mary
Alone with Jesus
    Transfigure me
    Make me your beloved
    Let me enjoy your favor
- written on retreat, summer 2008

I just received the following email:

We just received a call from the American Embassy in Copenhagen, Denmark saying that Fr. Francis Martin has had a heart attack, is in ICU on a ventilator and unconscious.

Fr. Francis Martin is the chaplain at the Mother of God community here in Gaithersburg, and he is also one of the brightest Catholic Scripture scholars on the planet. He was recently in Uganda on a mission trip and must have had the heart attack while traveling home.

Please pray for Fr. Francis!

Today’s Gospel reading, which recounts the famous scene of Christ and his apostles at Caesarea Philippi, puts our intellectual life in a stark contrast: we can either think like God or we can think like man. One way leads to illumination, the other to destruction. And Peter, that great apostles of extremes, demonstrates both ways to us in the span of about 30 seconds.

First, the leader of the apostles displays an insight that is not possible by human means:

[Jesus] said to them, “But who do you say that I am?”
Simon Peter said in reply, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”
Jesus said to him in reply, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah. For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my heavenly Father. (Matthew 16:16-17)

Note carefully what Jesus said to Peter: the apostle did not come to a realization of the true identity of Christ by means of deep intellectual thinking or reasoning; he came to it by divine inspiration. Reason alone cannot acknowledge the divinity of Christ; it is necessary to have God Himself reveal it to us.

But then Peter quickly falls back into a more base way of thinking:

From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples
that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer greatly
from the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes,
and be killed and on the third day be raised.
Then Peter took Jesus aside and began to rebuke him,
“God forbid, Lord!  No such thing shall ever happen to you.”
He turned and said to Peter,
“Get behind me, Satan!  You are an obstacle to me.
You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.” (Matthew 16:21-23)

When faced with the prospect of his Lord suffering, Peter reverts to relying on his own intellectual prowess to determine the way things should go. He rejects such a path and decides on his own how Christ should come into his kingdom. But Jesus immediately rebukes Peter, telling him that he no longer is allowing God to illumine his mind, but instead is following the way of man, which in this fallen world is also the way of Satan.

None of this is to say that man should not use his intellect in life; quite the contrary: man should allow his intellect be illuminated and guided by God’s revelation. As St. Paul wrote,

Do not conform yourselves to this age but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and pleasing and perfect. (Romans 12:2)

If we depend solely on our own powers, we are sure to follow the highway to destruction. But if we follow God’s way, we can be transformed and follow the path that leads to eternal life and light.

Cardinal Ratzinger asked to resign in 1997, become Vatican librarian

Any mature Christian knows that the path to sanctity travels through suffering. No servant is greater than his master, and our Lord suffered to bring us salvation, and suffering is part and parcel of being a follower of Christ. Likewise, any good parent wants their child to grow in holiness and become a saint. But how many parents want their children to suffer?

Thus the dilemma of the parent: we want our children to be saints, and we know saints must suffer, but we don’t want our children to suffer. What is the parent to do?

I think this is where many modern parenting methods fall woefully short. Countless times I have seen parents employ what I call the “switcheroo” method of parenting; by this I mean that if they want to deny their child something he or she wants, they simply switch that item with something else the child wants. “Johnny, you can’t play with that knife, but here play with this remote control instead.” In order to prevent the child from a negative reaction (i.e. screaming his head off), the parent avoids this by immediately satisfying the child’s desires in another way. In doing so, however, they are often missing the opportunity to teach the child a lesson in self-denial. If they just said, “Johnny, you can’t play with that knife”, period, they would demonstrate to the child that not all of his or her personal desires must be fulfilled (although the child will still scream his head off).

Another problem with modern parenting is the decline of chores. I admit that growing up in a suburban neighborhood in the 70′s I had few chores myself (and I can see the negative results of that fact in my own life even today), but today it seems that few children have any significant chores to speak of. But giving a child responsibility over certain age-appropriate tasks is a great way to build the discipline into their life necessary for the Christian life.

I’m not saying that parents should go around finding ways to deny their children the pleasures of life or to work them to death. But life is not about satisfying one’s personal desires, it is about taking up our cross and following Christ. If a child is never denied any of his or her desires in their youth, how is he or she going to one day be able to practice the self-denial necessary to pursue holiness?

If we truly want our kids to be saints, we need to acknowledge that their life will require self-denial and will contain suffering. As parents, we should not impose suffering on them, but we should give them the foundation for handling suffering in a mature, Christian fashion and for denying themselves for the sake of Christ.

(A great resource for practical ways to raise kids to be saints is Good Discipline, Great Teens by Dr. Ray Guarendi.)

I received the proofs for my book “Who is Jesus Christ?” yesterday, and I was happy to see that Our Sunday Visitor obtained an imprimatur for the work. An imprimatur (which is Latin for “I’m the bishop and I say that you really need to buy this book if you are a Catholic and if you don’t I might excommunicate you, and if you are not Catholic, you should still buy this book” or something like that) is not required for such a book as mine, but I felt it would be nice to have to make clear that nothing in the book is contrary to the Catholic Faith.

When I asked Fr. Benedict Groeschel to write the Foreword to my book, he told me an interesting story. An old friend of his, who was a Cardinal, was asked to write the Foreword to a friend’s book and he did gladly. However, he didn’t actually read the whole book and it ended up containing heresy. The Cardinal, needless to say, was mortified. Fr. Benedict said that because of that incident he never writes a Foreword or endorsement for a book without reading it entirely. I told him that if he did happen to find any heresy in my book, please tell me and we’ll trash the book immediately! Fortunately, “Who is Jesus Christ?” survived his close examination.

Recently, the Archdiocese of Washington had a “Seminarian Family Day” in which current seminarians and their families gathered to celebrate Mass and enjoy a picnic. The purpose of the day was to recognize the importance of the family in a young man’s decision to pursue the call to the priesthood. Our diocesan paper reported on the event, and something struck me about the families of the three seminarians they profiled:

Doug Powell, the father of seminarian Jonathan Powell, said he is proud of his son’s decision to explore a vocation to the priesthood…

He and his wife, Tam, the parents of 12 children, have tried to foster vocations in their home by being open about faith, committing to family prayer and homeschooling their children, he said…

Kimberly Schnitker, the mother of seminarian Max Schnitker and a parishioner of St. John Vianney Parish in Prince Frederick, said her family fosters vocations by attending daily Mass, praying the rosary, homeschooling their children and maintaining friendships with priests who are an “inspiration to them.”

Michael Berard, a parishioner of St. Hugh Parish in Greenbelt whose son, Jack Berard, is a seminarian at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg, said he and his wife, Pat, fostered vocations in their home by striving to be living examples for their 10 children.

Did you notice what I highlighted? One seminarian family has 12 kids and homeschools, another homeschools, and the third has 10 children. What is common about these three families? They are counter-cultural.

In today’s society, there is probably nothing more counter-cultural than a religious vocation. Choosing to be celibate, obedient and poor is the trifecta of counter-cultural choices in the over-sexed, rebellious and materialistic culture of death in which we live. Those who are immersed in our culture are going to have an extremely hard time hearing the call to the religious life, which is why parents need to live in counter-cultural ways. Do your kids watch the same TV shows, wear the same clothes, go to the same schools, have the same number of siblings and entertain themselves the same way as every other child? Not every Catholic family is going to homeschool or have a large number of children, but every Catholic family is called to counter the culture of death in which we live in some way. Along with giving their children a more solid path to holiness, parents may very well be helping to solve the vocations crisis in our country as well.

God bless Linda Gibbons:

Linda Gibbons is explaining why she has decided to refuse bail and spend the past 550 days in prison instead of opting for freedom. We are at the Vanier Centre for Women in Milton, an hour west of Toronto, sitting on beige plastic chairs around a small beige table. We are in a secure room and there are guards outside. It is just a precaution but at 62, and prematurely frail, Ms. Gibbons poses no physical threat.

One of Canada’s longest-serving anti-abortion protesters no longer thinks of being locked up as anything out of the ordinary.

Since Aug. 30, 1994, when a temporary injunction was placed around several abortion clinics in downtown Toronto at the request of the provincial Attorney-General, Ms. Gibbons has been arrested roughly 20 times and has been behind bars eight of the past 16 years — more time than Karla Homolka.

She served an earlier six-month stint for a protest in front of a Morgentaler clinic in 1992.

Her most recent stint behind bars began in January 2009. Instead of standing back the required distance from a clinic as her fellow protesters had done for years, she once again walked within the forbidden bubble zone.

She held up a sign that showed a drawing of a baby that read: “Why Mom, when I have so much life to give?”

If she would only comply, Ms. Gibbons could be out on $500 bail in mere days, thereby breaking her tortuous 16-year cycle of arrest and imprisonment. But until the injunction is quashed, she will refuse bail, insisting that would be “compromise and complicity with evil” and, to her, unthinkable.

To those inside Canada’s anti-abortion movement, Linda Gibbons is a quiet hero whose sacrifice is to be admired.

“I didn’t have the courage to break the injunction,” says retired high school teacher John Bulsza, of London, Ont., who was named in the original injunction in August 1994. “Everyone of us should have protested with her and this case would be history. She’s our Gandhi and we’re letting her take the fall for the rest of us.”

To her detractors, though, she is a self-aggrandizing pain in the ass who has no respect for the rights of others. They see nothing honourable in her commitment to the cause. She is simply another self-delusional fanatic with a martyr complex.

“What people like her do is creepy,” says Celia Posyniak, an abortion clinic director in Calgary. “They don’t even have to say anything. It’s intimidating just to have someone standing there.”

“Why is it acceptable to intimidate women making a personal and legal decision?”

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by obtaining a plenary indulgence!