Month: May, 2010Faithful priests are too busy… What do I do? How can I find a spiritual director?Q: Dear Dan, My director is a wonderful, caring person but is also quite a bit less inclined to follow the magisterium than I am. I wish I had the opportunity to see a faithful priest from time to time. I have tried hard to find a priest willing to provide me with spiritual direction (especially now, as I am going through some severe moral crises and sufferings); A: I would begin by saying that not all priests regard spiritual direction as a burden. Many priests that I know consider it one of their main priorities. In fact, after celebrating the sacraments and preaching the Word, it is one of the best ways that a priest has to help others. And perhaps herein we find one possible reason for your experience that priests just don’t have time: they may have many Masses to celebrate (especially on Sundays) and multiple confessions to hear, especially if we reflect on the fact that most priests help out in at least one other parish than their own on a regular basis. When you throw in the preaching that must be prepared, the time begins to add up. The biggest burden for the priest, however, is usually parish administration. Before being ordained, he probably does not realize the amount of time this will pilfer from his apostolate and, in many cases, how much worry it will cause. All of this may leave him wary about taking on more and more stable commitments. But enough about reasons or excuses; there are many more than I mention here – objective as well as subjective ones. The fact remains that spiritual direction is a vital help and you have not been able to find a priest director. This must be very frustrating. You are not alone in this challenge. Aside from giving you insight into the burden most priests carry, another way I can think to assist you is to point out a few options for finding a director that you may not have considered. Here are a few ideas:
An important thing to remember is that this might be a long process and if you are called to it, you need to maintain your commitment for as long as it takes. Our God knows your needs and desires to bring you closer to himself, and he will do so as long as you keep striving and stumbling towards him. Sometimes the painstaking search for an orthodox director is just as important to the process as spiritual direction itself. A semi-shortcut through this maze can be found in the many faithful movements and orders within the Church. Those that have maintained a solid grip on magisterial faithful Catholicism often provide means for their members to deepen their faith in many helpful ways, including spiritual direction. Essentially, when approaching these organizations we are looking to adopt a rule of life. That is, we are looking for a specific spiritual path that can help to focus our spiritual disciplines and practice of virtue. Often these organizations follow the fruitful paths of the saints who founded them (like Saint Francis and the Franciscans) or those who played significant roles within them (like Saint John of the Cross in the Carmelite order). Obviously, becoming a third-order or lay Carmelite or Franciscan is a serious commitment. However, for those who take their faith seriously, these commitments have benefits that far outweigh any related challenges. To be clear, it is not necessary to become a cloistered nun or a hermit to reap the benefits of these beautiful gifts to the Church. Most of them have lay organizations for people just like you. A few good examples of more recent spiritualities that have emerged in the Church are Apostles of the Interior Life (www.apostlesofil.org), Opus Dei (www.opusdei.org), and Regnum Christi (www.regnumchristi.org). The constitutions or canonical provisions of these and many more are approved either by the Holy See or local bishops, and the direction they provide for the spiritual life can be of enormous spiritual value. You can contact these organizations via their Web sites to find information about activities in your area. Spiritual direction is making a comeback in the Church, and seminary formation programs are rediscovering its tremendous value. Hopefully, little by little the challenges that we are facing in this area will be a thing of the past. Don’t get discouraged. The obstacles you are facing might be the very thing you need right now to deepen your faith. Christ is at work in you. Yield to that work and continue to strive to know him. Struggling with end of life issues… what does the Church teach?
A: This question addresses a moral issue more than a spiritual issue. Yet it is the kind of difficulty that should be brought up in spiritual direction – a practical, where-the-rubber-meets-the-road kind of issue. It’s also happening more and more frequently. And so I think would be helpful to try and answer it. The Church offers solid principles regarding end-of-life issues. But it is not always easy to apply those principles to particular situations. Let me review the principles, then reflect a little bit on how they may have applied to your mother’s final week. Guiding Principles Human life, because each of us is created in God’s image and invited to everlasting friendship with God, is sacred. Because of this human dignity, it is never justified to directly will or cause the death of an innocent person, nor is it justified to purposely try to damage or lessen the quality of a person’s life (through maiming or kidnapping, for example). To defend this sacred dignity of human life, the Church has always taught that abortion and euthanasia (direct killing in order to alleviate suffering) are morally wrong, just as wrong as any other form of murder. Nevertheless, in this fallen world, death is inevitable. At some point, we all will die. When it becomes clear that someone is dying, therefore, we do not have a moral obligation to do everything possible to extend their life as long as possible. Now, in some cases, there may be a particular reason why we would indeed want to keep someone alive, even at great cost or pain. For example, take the case of a father and son who have been estranged for decades and live on different sides of the globe. The father is facing heart failure, and the doctors agree that intervention at this point would most likely be useless, though some extreme measures may keep the heart functioning for another couple of weeks or a month. The family members, or the father himself, may request that those extreme measures be taken, so that the estranged son can have time to travel to the hospital, in hopes of a final reconciliation. That particular family may decide to use aggressive treatments, whereas a family already at peace may not. Each would be justified. Accepting the inevitable, however, does not mean abandoning a dying person or hastening their death. That would constitute willing that a person die, just to “get it over with,” rather than humbly accepting death as a natural end of life. Therefore, if someone is dying, it would be immoral to willingly deny them the fundamental necessities that we owe to every human being, for example: shelter and room temperature, clothing, basic nutrition and hydration. In many cases, as a person is dying, their system will no longer accept nutrition and hydration. If that’s the case, it would most often be futile and disproportionate to try and force-feed them. In some cases, the dying process is so painful that the amount or type of palliative medicine required to relieve the pain may actually hasten the death. Nevertheless, such palliative care is acceptable (indeed, even an expression of love), if the person truly is dying. Again, however, if the dying person wants to remain alert in order to be able to converse with his estranged son, for example, they may choose to forego the pain-relievers. Those are the basic principles: the sacredness of human life, the inevitability of death, the moral duty to provide basic necessities, when possible, but not to provide futile or disproportionate treatments. Here is how the Catholic Catechism summarizes the issue (#s 2278, 2279):
This Specific Case From the brief description of your mother’s case, it seems that she was truly dying. This is an important factor. She was not in a persistent vegetative state, for example, in which a person’s system can still sustain itself with basic nutrition (in those cases, “pulling the plug” constitutes actually killing them). Your attitude towards the situation was one of acceptance – you were accepting her death, not striving to hasten it. It seems that your conscience is unclear on one point, however: Did you unjustifiably deny her basic nutrition? I cannot make a judgment on that, as it would depend on specific medical factors. If in the doctor’s estimation, her system was no longer accepting hydration and nutrition, then it may have been futile to force her. But if she was still accepting basic nutrition, it probably would have been better to continue supplying it. If the doctors did not make these distinctions with you (and, sad to say, most doctors are not given careful formation in these ethical issues), you may not know even now what the situation really was. In fact, even in the face of these medical distinctions, theologians and ethicists sometimes disagree about the best way to proceed. If you would like to read a thorough treatment of the moral complexities, you may find this recent article useful. Practical Conclusions As you can see, moral decisions are not always clear, and they are not always easy. This is one reason it is so important for the mature Catholic to make a strong commitment to ongoing formation. What we learned in CCD and what we hear on Sundays is simply insufficient for the battles of life in the modern world. Our Church has a vast treasure of wisdom and the most dependable moral guidance available on earth, but it doesn’t translate well into sound bites. We need to keep ourselves informed. We need to be as responsible and proactive in this area as we are with our professional life, or with our favorite hobbies. As a priest, I can honestly say that it can be nothing less than heart-wrenching to see adult Catholics – intelligent, well-adjustment human beings – facing life’s major crises with only a rudimentary knowledge of their faith. If you are looking for more ways to inform yourself and gradually go deeper in your understanding of Catholic wisdom and teaching, I can recommend our own biweekly, national newspaper as an excellent starting place. The National Catholic Register is designed to help intelligent, active Catholics be able to see current issues and events from a truly Catholic perspective. You may want to sign up for three free issues to test it out. God bless you! Yours in Christ, Father John Bartunek, LC Q: Recently my mother passed away. She suffered from an irregular heartbeat and congestive heart failure. A week before she passed, she was rushed to the hospital where the ER doctor counseled us to have her put on hospice care and let nature take its course. After that, she was put on morphine and a sedative and had no food or fluids. It took her 5 days to die and it was not a peaceful death. I can’t help thinking that, in a sense, we “pulled the plug” on her. While there appeared to be no hope, it still didn’t feel right. What does the Church counsel on matters such as these? A: This question addresses a moral issue more than a spiritual issue. Yet it is the kind of difficulty that should be brought up in spiritual direction – a practical, where-the-rubber-meets-the-road kind of issue. It’s also happening more and more frequently. And so I think would be helpful to try and answer it. The Church offers solid principles regarding end-of-life issues. But it is not always easy to apply those principles to particular situations. Let me review the principles, then reflect a little bit on how they may have applied to your mother’s final week. Guiding Principles Human life, because each of us is created in God’s image and invited to everlasting friendship with God, is sacred. Because of this human dignity, it is never justified to directly will or cause the death of an innocent person, nor is it justified to purposely try to damage or lessen the quality of a person’s life (through maiming or kidnapping, for example). To defend this sacred dignity of human life, the Church has always taught that abortion and euthanasia (direct killing in order to alleviate suffering) are morally wrong, just as wrong as any other form of murder. Nevertheless, in this fallen world, death is inevitable. At some point, we all will die. When it becomes clear that someone is dying, therefore, we do not have a moral obligation to do everything possible to extend their life as long as possible. Now, in some cases, there may be a particular reason why we would indeed want to keep someone alive, even at great cost or pain. For example, take the case of a father and son who have been estranged for decades and live on different sides of the globe. The father is facing heart failure, and the doctors agree that intervention at this point would most likely be useless, though some extreme measures may keep the heart functioning for another couple of weeks or a month. The family members, or the father himself, may request that those extreme measures be taken, so that the estranged son can have time to travel to the hospital, in hopes of a final reconciliation. That particular family may decide to use aggressive treatments, whereas a family already at peace may not. Each would be justified. Accepting the inevitable, however, does not mean abandoning a dying person or hastening their death. That would constitute willing that a person die, just to “get it over with,” rather than humbly accepting death as a natural end of life. Therefore, if someone is dying, it would be immoral to willingly deny them the fundamental necessities that we owe to every human being, for example: shelter and room temperature, clothing, basic nutrition and hydration. In many cases, as a person is dying, their system will no longer accept nutrition and hydration. If that’s the case, it would most often be futile and disproportionate to try and force-feed them. In some cases, the dying process is so painful that the amount or type of palliative medicine required to relieve the pain may actually hasten the death. Nevertheless, such palliative care is acceptable (indeed, even an expression of love), if the person truly is dying. Again, however, if the dying person wants to remain alert in order to be able to converse with his estranged son, for example, they may choose to forego the pain-relievers. Those are the basic principles: the sacredness of human life, the inevitability of death, the moral duty to provide basic necessities, when possible, but not to provide futile or disproportionate treatments. Here is how the Catholic Catechism summarizes the issue (#s 2278, 2279): ·Discontinuing medical procedures that are burdensome, dangerous, extraordinary, or disproportionate to the expected outcome can be legitimate; it is the refusal of “over-zealous” treatment. Here one does not will to cause death; one’s inability to impede it is merely accepted. The decisions should be made by the patient if he is competent and able or, if not, by those legally entitled to act for the patient, whose reasonable will and legitimate interests must always be respected. ·Even if death is thought imminent, the ordinary care owed to a sick person cannot be legitimately interrupted. The use of painkillers to alleviate the sufferings of the dying, even at the risk of shortening their days, can be morally in conformity with human dignity if death is not willed as either an end or a means, but only foreseen and tolerated as inevitable. Palliative care is a special form of disinterested charity. As such it should be encouraged. This Specific Case From the brief description of your mother’s case, it seems that she was truly dying. This is an important factor. She was not in a persistent vegetative state, for example, in which a person’s system can still sustain itself with basic nutrition (in those cases, “pulling the plug” constitutes actually killing them). Your attitude towards the situation was one of acceptance – you were accepting her death, not striving to hasten it. It seems that your conscience is unclear on one point, however: Did you unjustifiably deny her basic nutrition? I cannot make a judgment on that, as it would depend on specific medical factors. If in the doctor’s estimation, her system was no longer accepting hydration and nutrition, then it may have been futile to force her. But if she was still accepting basic nutrition, it probably would have been better to continue supplying it. If the doctors did not make these distinctions with you (and, sad to say, most doctors are not given careful formation in these ethical issues), you may not know even now what the situation really was. In fact, even in the face of these medical distinctions, theologians and ethicists sometimes disagree about the best way to proceed. If you would like to read a thorough treatment of the moral complexities, you may find this recent article useful. Practical Conclusions As you can see, moral decisions are not always clear, and they are not always easy. This is one reason it is so important for the mature Catholic to make a strong commitment to ongoing formation. What we learned in CCD and what we hear on Sundays is simply insufficient for the battles of life in the modern world. Our Church has a vast treasure of wisdom and the most dependable moral guidance available on earth, but it doesn’t translate well into sound bites. We need to keep ourselves informed. We need to be as responsible and proactive in this area as we are with our professional life, or with our favorite hobbies. As a priest, I can honestly say that it can be nothing less than heart-wrenching to see adult Catholics – intelligent, well-adjustment human beings – facing life’s major crises with only a rudimentary knowledge of their faith. If you are looking for more ways to inform yourself and gradually go deeper in your understanding of Catholic wisdom and teaching, I can recommend our own biweekly, national newspaper as an excellent starting place. The National Catholic Register is designed to help intelligent, active Catholics be able to see current issues and events from a truly Catholic perspective. You may want to sign up for three free issues to test it out. God bless you! What does it mean to have a “personal relationship” with Jesus?
A: Maybe, but maybe not. Let’s start answering your question with a question: When you “pray and go to Mass regularly,” why do you do it? Take a moment to answer that question for yourself before you continue reading… Why do you carve time out of your busy schedule to pray and worship God the Father through Jesus Christ in union with the Holy Spirit? Most likely, your personal answer fits into one of the following three generic answers. Falling into Routine First, we can pray and worship out of routine. It’s like punching our spiritual time-clock. We have always gone to Mass and always prayed, ever since we were kids, and we feel a kind of comfortable inertia in continuing to do so. We have a vague sense that one ought to do such things, and we have a vague sense that if I fail to do them we will feel guilty for some reason, and we don’t want to add an uncomfortable guilty feeling to our already over-stressed emotional world. So we keep going through the motions of being a Catholic. Just as it would strike an American citizen as somehow incongruent not to celebrate the Fourth of July, it strikes a cultural Catholic as somehow incongruent not to engage in some basic spiritual practices. If you “say your prayers” just because doing so has become part of your internal comfort zone, you may have fallen into what theologians call spiritual routine. When I was in eighth grade I remember sleeping over at a friend’s house. As we went down to the basement to go to bed, his parents were sitting on the couch watching television, the wife cuddling against the husband, who had his arm around her. They looked like a happy couple. Two months later they were divorced. I asked me friend how they could be so happy together, and then get divorced. My friend told me that they just kept up appearances for the kids’ sake, but there was no love in it. That’s falling into routine. Fright School Second, we can pray and worship out of fear. This can be akin to superstition. We have the idea in our heads that if we stop going to Mass, praying the Rosary, or making our morning offering, God will become angry, punish us, make our lives miserable, and maybe even send us to Hell. In this case, our spiritual commitments (prayer and worship) are like paying taxes to a tyrant, or being extorted by a strong-man: if we pay our dues, the Boss won’t bother us. In ancient pagan religions, proper worship depended on following formula perfectly. A priest had to offer an elaborate ceremony with perfect execution, or the god would not be pleased and it would go to waste. If during the ceremony the priest sneezed, for example, he would have to start all over again. In this religious vision, people are not children of a loving Father, but slaves of angry, fickle, and aloof deities. Connected by Conviction Third, we can pray and worship out of conviction. The word “conviction” comes from the same word that gives us “convinced.” Religious conviction is an internal state of assurance with regard to religious truth. The primary reason a convinced Christian prays and worships is because they sincerely believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, our Lord and Savior, Creator and Redeemer, and that he deserves our praise and we need his grace. If our spiritual life flows from conviction, then the actual activity we engage in during our times of prayer is conscious: we pay attention to the meaning of the words, we search the Scriptures for wisdom and guidance, we lift our hearts to God in thanksgiving and adoration, and we strive to conform how we live to what we discover in prayer – to what God wants for us (God’s will). In this case, our faith actually connects our mind and heart to God during our prayer. We are not just going through motions, and we are just paying our dues; we are actually encountering the God who speaks to his beloved children through the revelation of Jesus Christ. The Bible Reminds Us Praying and worshipping mainly out of conviction (as opposed to routine or fear), is what it means to have a “personal relationship with Christ.” On the one hand, we know that he knows us and is interested in our life (“I no longer call you slaves… I have called you friends… It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you and appointed you to go out and bear fruit…” (John 15: 15-16). Or, as St Paul put it, “I live by faith in the Son of God who has loved me and given himself up for me” (Galatians 2:20). And on the other hand, we put forth our own effort to follow his example and teaching, as a way to stay close to him, accept his invitation to become a disciple, and participate in his great project of building up the Church for the glory of God and the salvation of souls: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments…” (Jon 14:15). Christianity is about knowing, loving, and following a person, Jesus Christ. The essence of our religion is a personal relationship of faith, hope, and love. The Pope Hits the Nail on the Head As Pope Benedict XVI put it in his inaugural homily: “The Church as a whole and all her Pastors, like Christ, must set out to lead people out of the desert, towards the place of life, towards friendship with the Son of God, towards the One who gives us life, and life in abundance… There is nothing more beautiful than to be surprised by the Gospel, by the encounter with Christ. There is nothing more beautiful than to know Him and to speak to others of our friendship with Him… If we let Christ into our lives, we lose nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing of what makes life free, beautiful and great. No! Only in this friendship are the doors of life opened wide. Only in this friendship is the great potential of human existence truly revealed. Only in this friendship do we experience beauty and liberation” (Pope Benedict XVI, 24 April 2005). Of course, we are all on our way to spiritual perfection, and so sometimes we fall into routine – at least, on the surface of our minds we can fall into routine; our conviction still exists, but it’s submerged under distraction or anxiety. That prayer is still valuable, and still pleasing to God – the remote motivation is right on target. But the more we can keep our convictions fresh, strong, and vibrant, the better. Likewise, I may find myself crawling out of bed on Sunday to get ready for Mass just because I know that missing Mass is a mortal sin, and I really don’t want to go to Hell. Some Christian faith and conviction is still present even in that slavish motivation. God can work with that. Yet, the more we understand what Mass really is, the more we will see obeying the precept to attend Mass as a joy, a relief, a mysterious encounter with eternity, and an opportunity to please God and build up his Kingdom. When we pray and worship out of conviction, we connect better with Christ, and his grace has more room to work in our souls. Having a “personal relationship with Christ” doesn’t mean regularly having visions of him sitting on the easy chair in the living room or hearing him give us directions while we’re looking for the right exit off the Interstate. Rather, it simply means gradually learning to live our Christianity more and more from heart to Heart. Root sin classifications… which one is right?
A: This question illustrates how rich our Catholic faith really is; it transcends our ability to comprehend it; there is always more for us to discover. This is why the concept of “root sins” can be approached, explained, and understood from different perspectives, just as a diamond shows forth its beauty through many different facets. The different facets don’t contradict each other, they actually enrich the diamond’s beauty. The apparent contradiction between a 7-way and a 3-way categorization of the root sins needs to be understood like that. Welcoming the Spiritual Wealth But before I explain how, I want to illustrate this point with a different topic. The Catechism circles back to key ideas frequently. For example, in #45, it teaches us the purpose of human existence: “Man is made to live in communion with God in whom he finds happiness.” That simple sentence is like a atomic bomb: small, yet immensely powerful. But later, in #1721, the Catechism gives an apparently different explanation of the purpose of human existence: “God put us in the world to know, to love, and to serve him, and so to come to paradise.” Is there really a contradiction here? In the words, yes; in the meaning of the words, no. The reality of our purpose as human beings is something so wonderful, deep, and multifaceted that it can be described in myriad ways, as can many other aspects of God’s revelation. Whenever we begin to use our intelligence to delve into the deeper meaning of our faith, we must keep this in mind. Otherwise, we may become unduly attached to certain formulations, thereby missing the point. Throughout the Church’s history, such undue attachments have yielded extremely bitter fruit – heresies, schisms, libels, executions, and riots, to name a few. Deriving Seven from Three Now, back to root sins. The section of the Catechism that deals with the seven capital sins that you mention in your question is discussing the concept of vice. Vices are the contrary of virtues. Where virtues are habitual behavior patterns in harmony with God’s will and purpose for our lives, vices are habitual behavior patterns contradicting that purpose. The Catechism explains that, “The repetition of sins… engenders vices, among which are the capital sins.” Categorizing vices according to the capital sins goes way back in our Catholic tradition, and even reflects philosophical ethics as taught by Plato and Aristotle. These vices are called “capital” because they give rise to so many other sins (“caput” in Latin means “head” or source). If I allow myself to be carried away by anger, for example, I may commit vengeance through murder. If I covet someone’s position at work, I may slander them so that their boss fires them. The murder or the slander are sinful result of other, capital, sins. When speaking of “root sins,” however, spiritual writers are looking at the deep-seated tendencies toward selfishness that we have inherited because of original sin. These are tendencies to seek our happiness outside of communion with God. They are not vices per se, because they didn’t come about as the result of repeated personal sins. Rather, they make up the raw material from which vices spring. We can correct vices by forming virtues, but we can never completely eradicate (“de-root”) our tendencies to selfishness. They always remain to be battled against. The capital vices, in fact, flow from those self-centered tendencies, those root sins. Gluttony (inordinate attachment to the pleasures of food and drink), slothfulness (inordinate attachment to comfort and ease), and lust (inordinate attachment to sexual pleasure) grow out of the root sin of sensuality. Each of them seeks happiness through material goods or experiences. Envy (willful resentment of another’s success or good fortune) and covetousness (willful desire to possess what rightfully belongs to others) can flow from vanity (seeking fulfillment from the approval and praise of other people), if the reason I resent others, for example, is because they get more attention than I do. But they can also flow from pride (seeking fulfillment in my own excellence and achievements), if my reason for desiring another person’s position, for example, is because I want to assert my superiority over that person. Just to make things more complicated, covetousness can also be a manifestation of sensuality: I can be greedy, for example, because I simply want to enjoy life instead of having to work hard all the time. This slippery nature of covetousness is one reason St Paul reminds us that “the love of money is the root of all evils” (1 Timothy 6:10). By now, if you aren’t thoroughly confused (and here we have just been scratching the theological surface: St Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae catalogues more than a hundred vices and virtues, and also, by the way, ends up tracing EVERY vice and sin back to pride), you will probably have perceived why many spiritual writers encourage us to focus on the three root sins. If we just focus on counteracting the vices themselves, we may simply be snapping off branches from the stubborn weed of selfishness, instead of whittling down its trunk. In the end, however, the main reason for trying to categorize the different types of sins (vices) and the disordered tendencies which gives rise to them (root sins) is to help us work intelligently in our efforts to follow Christ more closely. To that end, you should feel free to use whichever categorization helps you most. Yours in Christ, Father John Bartunek, LC What about your experience with spiritual direction?
More than 500 of you have told us that you are in an active spiritual direction relationship right now. Would you mind answering a few questions about your experience? I am about half way through a book project on the topic and want to be sure that it is a valuable service to the Church. Regardless of whether you are in an active relationship now, if you have had experience in spiritual direction, feel free to answer any or all of the questions by replying to this post via the comment feature below. Any feedback is welcome – even if it answers a question I did not ask. Thank you in advance for your help!
He is real, present, and good, may He always be so to you. Dan |
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