SMU Catholic Weekly Blogs

Don't Forget the Almsgiving Part

In Ash Wednesday’s Gospel reading, Jesus refers to three ancient spiritual practices: almsgiving, prayer and fasting. When practiced with openness and consistency, each can lead to a deeper encounter with the Divine Mystery of God. Thanks to meatless Fridays and the practice of “giving up” something for Lent, most of us are familiar with fasting during Lent. Likewise, during Lent many of us may be inspired to spend some extra time in prayer, perhaps by meditating on the Stations of the Cross or attending a reconciliation service before going to confession. Both practices offer worthy ways to make an extra effort during Lent. Hopefully some will bear fruit well after its 40 days are up. But what about the practice that Jesus begins with in the Gospel reading: Almsgiving? How will we stretch to go beyond spiritual practices that are often focused on ourselves and reach out to serve others?

Here are just a few ways to help us focus on almsgiving this Lent.

Operation Rice Bowl: A little spare change can go a long way, especially if all of us are collecting it. Operation Rice Bowl is a national project that benefits both the local and international aid efforts of Catholic Relief Services. After Mass, pick up your own “Rice Bowl” coin box and start putting your spare change in it instead of in between the sofa cushions.

Tutoring in Vickery Meadow: Beginning this week, meet at the Catholic Center at 3:00 p.m. every Wednesday to head over to help kids for Vickery Meadow with their homework and make some friends along the way.

Service Projects: Throughout Lent, pitch-in on other worthwhile projects in Vickery Meadow like a field day with games and fun for the children.

For more details on all of these opportunities contact Laura at larellan@smu.edu.

Irenaeus of Lyons

As a youth in Turkey Irenaeus relied on his father's business connections to acquire intensive training in Greek philosophy and literature as well as the Christian scriptures. After witnessing the martyrdom of St. Polycarp in 155 CE, Irenaeus journeyed to France, serving as bishop of Lyons among the Gauls. In France he confronted Christian communities immersed in Gnosticism. The allure of Gnosticism, according to Irenaeus, lay in its aura of secrecy and hidden knowledge. He relied on his classical education to, in his words, "strip the fox," by revealing the dualism at the core of Gnostic teachings, which claimed that an evil Demiurge (pictured) imprisoned human souls in creation. Humans could attain "Gnosis," or knowledge, and therefore liberation, through a combination of secret passwords and rituals. According to Irenaeus, God's entry into the world as Jesus Christ affirmed, rather than rejected, the goodness of creation.

Sources: Butler, Alban. Butler’s Lives of the Saints: Concise Edition, Revised and Updated. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991.

 

 

Be a Smart Catholic

Next time you're at the keyboard, putting off getting started on a paper, kill some time on these sites. I picked them on their ability to educate relatively quickly on important burning questions. When you’re done, you won’t be any closer to being finished with the paper, but you may have learned a few things nonetheless.

Where in the Bible does it say that!?
ScriptureCatholic.com
Catholics don’t have a reputation for knowing their bible. Now we have some help from scripturecatholic.com. The author of this site has created an easy to navigate site that lays out scripture references related to the basics of Catholic belief. He also includes excerpts from ancient Christian writings that give evidence to early church practice. The site could use commentary that interprets the scriptures in context but it still provides a helpful beginning point for studying scripture and church tradition.

How can we prove God exists?
www.peterkreeft.com
This site contains essays and audio from a much more seasoned Catholic writer and apologist, philosopher Peter Kreeft. Kreeft is the author of more than 45 books and lectures around the country. The site’s “featured writings” tackle tough topics like the existence of God, the divinity of Christ and Heaven and Hell while offering insightful essays on prayer, time and love. Go hear when you’re ready to think hard – remember Kreeft is a philosopher – and go beyond simplistic answers.

What is the Catholic position on ________ (fill in the blank)?
www.usccb.org/sdwp/projects/csmg2007.htm
If you are looking for solid material on contemporary issues like the war in Iraq or poverty in America, check out these “backgrounders” issued by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. The page lists position papers and congressional statements that spell out the American Church’s stance on a wide range of domestic and international social concerns based on our Catholic social and moral principles.

How can I do something meaningful to help?
campus.crs.org
Catholic Relief Services – the American Church’s international relief agency – provides a website specifically geared to a campus audience. Their Campus Connections site contains resources for college students, faculty and staff on the most pressing international issues like the genocide in Darfur, fair trade, and the AIDS pandemic in Africa. Go there to be informed and moved to take action.

Athanasius of Alexandria

"We believe in one lord, Jesus Christ…begotten, not made, one in being with the father." Early Christian communities grappled with pre-Christian, Jewish, and Gnostic interpretations of Jesus the man and the god. When Arius of Alexandria posited that Christ was not equal to the father, early church bishops realized that a centralized definition of who Christ was, as well as who he was not, would help challenge the diverse perceptions of Jesus's divinity circulating within the Mediterranean world. It was Athanasius, a bishop from Alexandria in North Africa, who relied on Greek philosophy, rhetoric, and logic to coin the phrase, "one in being with the father (homoousios)," thereby offering substantial opposition to Arius's theology. At the council of Nicea in 325 CE bishops from all over the Mediterranean world agreed to adopt Athanasius's terminology, eventually incorporating his words into the Nicene Creed.

Sources: Bokenkotter, Thomas. A Concise History of the Catholic Church. Revised and Expanded Edition. New York and London: Doubleday, 2005. Pp 50-52.

Why has Ash Wednesday become so important?

Since I have been chaplain, which is about four years now, I have noticed that Ash Wednesday is a big religious day at SMU. This year it falls on Feb. 21.

Sometimes I see students, who are not at Mass every Sunday, but they show up for Ash Wednesday services and they are willing to stand in a long line to get their ashes. I have had students who come late for either our noon liturgy at the Chapel of the Annunciation (at the Neuhoff Catholic Center) or our 5:15 pm liturgy at Perkins Chapel, and --- even though they missed the Mass --- ask me for ashes afterwards. Helping students express their faith in this way has led to one of my own special personal, spiritual experiences at SMU.

The importance of Ash Wednesday in the minds of many Catholics now rivals Christmas and Easter as the holiest and most well-attended liturgies in the church calendar.

Why Ash Wednesday has taken on these dimensions when it is not a holy day of obligation nor a major feast day is an interesting topic of discussion.

One cleric suggested to me that Ash Wednesday is a well-attended liturgy at SMU and elsewhere because it is a particularly “Catholic thing.” However, that seems to belie the fact that other Christian denominations celebrate Ash Wednesday and at SMU the day is marked with the distribution of ashes at non-Catholic services, such as the university ecumenical services, and at Methodist, Lutheran, Episcopalian and even at some non-traditional church services.

Most SMU students by the end of the day on Feb. 21 will have little ash crosses or smudges on their foreheads, it seems to me.

This interest in Ash Wednesday is a good thing. Certainly, we as Christians begin the Lenten season in the right way by getting our ashes and also by fasting --- eating no meat and only one main meal --- on Ash Wednesday. Lent is our penitential period when we prepare ourselves for our holiest day, Easter --- the day we mark to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus the Christ. On the way of the cross, we remember the passion of Jesus.

The name dies cinerum (day of ashes) probably dates from at least the eighth century. On this day all the faithful according to ancient custom are exhorted to approach the altar before the beginning of Mass, and there the priest, deacon or lay minister, dipping his thumb into ashes previously blessed, marks the forehead of each the sign of the cross, saying the words: "Remember that thou art dust and unto dust thou shall return." The ashes used in this ceremony are made by burning the remains of the palms blessed on the Palm Sunday of the previous year.

There can be no doubt that the custom of distributing the ashes to all the faithful arose from a devotional imitation of the practice observed in the case of public penitents. In the books both of the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, the men (Why not women, too?) who repented of their sins bestrewed themselves with ashes and clothed their bodies with sackcloth.

We don’t do the sackcloth thing here at SMU (Does anyone know what sackcloth is?). However, we do take ashes as a sign of our humanity and our repentance for the sins that we have committed as humans.

So Ash Wednesday has become as real visible sign of our religious feelings and yearnings. If you have ashes publicly on your head, it is hard to deny that you are Christian. It is a little act of brave faith in the modern world, I think.

I, as your chaplain, admire your faith and will remain available on Ash Wednesday until the last student has his or her ashes.

Maximilian Kolbe

During World War II Nazi Germany and its allies focused massive bureaucratic, technological, and military resources on the annihilation of the Jewish people, as well as homosexuals and other ethnic minorities. One man, however, offers an extraordinary example of how love of God and humanity safeguards life. Maximilian Kolbe was a Polish Franciscan friar interred at Auschwitz, an extermination camp where the Nazis gassed millions of people. In 1941 when the camp guards assembled 10 prisoners for death by starvation, Kolbe stepped forward to take the place of a married man. After two weeks in solitary confinement the guards executed Kolbe by lethal injection. Witnesses reported that during their ordeal Kolbe offered hope to the 10 men by leading them in prayer and song, staving off despair to the end.

Sources:

Treece, Patricia. A Man for Others: Maximilian Kolbe, Saint of Auschwitz, in the Words of those who Knew Him. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1982.

My life as a professional Catholic

I am a professional Catholic. It is literally my job to be Catholic at SMU. Same goes for Erin and Flip. It’s not a bad gig, if you can get it. It can be very demanding, though. It requires the ability to loiter with purpose; the capacity to eat pizza several times a week; and a working facebook account. Despite the clear job requirements, I still come across folks regularly who are not sure what to make of a guy who is a Catholic “minister”, but isn’t a priest. Just this week, I received an email addressed to “Father Santoni”. Each time this happens I laugh and reply with the same awkward “Just call me Frank, I’m not a priest” message.

The technical term for what I am in the eyes of the Church is “lay ecclesial minister”. “Lay” refers to the fact that I am not ordained, like a priest or deacon. “Ecclesial” means my ministry is recognized as a role of leadership in the church. “Minister” may seem to need the least amount of defining on its own, but it helps call to mind the vocational dimension of lay ecclesial ministry. In other words, this is more than just a job: it is a calling that defines our whole way of life, in a way similar to the call of the priesthood or to life as a nun.

Just last year the American bishops issued a document intended to guide the development of lay ecclesial ministry in the church. Even the bishops had a hard time making sense of the term “minister” when referring to someone who is not a priest. During the discussion about the document, the bishops engaged in extensive debate about whether or not the word “ministry” ought to be applied to activity done by laypersons, men and women who are not ordained. The debate ended only when Cardinal Avery Dulles, a respected voice in the American church, rose in defense of the term.

In their statement, the bishops acknowledge that this emerging reality is a “sign of the Holy Spirit’s movement.” As a church, we are now recognizing the unique contribution of a new crop of church leaders. Like St. Francis of Assisi who sought the pope’s blessing upon a new way of life, lay ecclesial ministers are forging a new way of advancing Christ’s mission in the world. A recent study showed that two-thirds of parishes in the United States have lay ecclesial ministers on the parish staff. In many areas of the country where there are more parishes than priests, lay ecclesial ministers coordinate the daily life of local church communities, while ordained ministers travel from parish to parish, focusing on the sacramental needs of the faithful. On their own, neither ministry is complete, but in collaboration, both are made full, making the most of their unique gifts in the service of others.

Our community at SMU, with Deacon Bronson as chaplain, our wonderful visiting priests, lay campus ministers and countless volunteers, is one example where collaboration in leadership is thriving. I am learning that when we are open to leadership from all sources – ordained and lay, volunteers and professionals, newcomers and veterans – then we become open to the fullness of what God is calling all of us to. If being in college is about preparing for the future, then our model of church at SMU is doing just that.