Under the Fir Tree

There’s a way of talking about chastity that can make Catholicism sound mainly concerned with keeping teenagers from having sex. How far is too far? What counts as a mortal sin? Where exactly is the line? How long can you kiss? Where can your hands go? At what point should somebody’s father emerge silently from the woods? Some of those questions have real answers, and boundaries matter. But they’re too small to carry the Catholic vision of chastity. The deeper question is what kind of man you’re becoming. More specifically: Are you becoming the kind of man who can receive another person as a gift, desire her without possessing her, see her clearly without consuming her, and love her without using her? That’s harder. And it’s much more beautiful. Your Body Is Good Christianity begins somewhere modern people sometimes find surprising: the body is good. God made it. Male and female He created us. The Son of God took flesh. Jesus ate, slept, worked, wept, suffered, touched people, died bod...

A Continuation # # # The previous post asked whether the parish is developing the volunteers and lay leaders it needs to sustain and multiply the mission. This one asks about the deepest form of that question. Whether the parish is forming people whose encounter with Christ is deep enough, and whose faith is formed enough, that some of them begin to hear God calling them to give their whole lives. Vocations to the priesthood, religious life, and the diaconate aren't produced by vocation programs. They're produced by parishes that pray, form disciples, accompany people through the interior life, and take the question of total consecration seriously enough that it becomes thinkable. The Archbishop's Examen singled out the vocations question for special attention. He asked parishes to pay particular attention to when the last vocation to the priesthood, diaconate, or religious life came from their community. That question is worth sitting with before any program discussion be...

The words are small enough to pass unnoticed, like a match dropped in the dust: “ unclean spirits came out ” (Acts 8:7). There was no committee formed to study them, no delicate arrangement made to preserve their dignity, no little room left for them at the back of the house under the name of temperament, fatigue, realism, family history, or “the way I’ve always been.” They came out. That’s the intolerable simplicity of the Gospel. Christ doesn’t enter a soul as a guest invited to admire the curtains. He comes as fire comes into straw, as daylight enters a sickroom, as truth enters a mouth that’s grown tired of lying. And we, being reasonable people, have made our peace with so many little demons. Not the theatrical sort, no. We’re too respectable for that, too educated, too careful with our faces in public. Ours wear clean shirts. They pay the bills on time. They know when to smile at Mass, when to lower the eyes, when to say, “I’ll pray for you,” with just enough warmth to pass for ...