On True Belief, False Mysticism, and Reading the Cosmos, Part I

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, in his Introduction to Christianity, yokes believer and unbeliever in a common lot; for both, doubt is an inevitability. This perhaps unsettles us, although it shouldn't. Strictly speaking, faith rests on an order far superior to anything attainable by unaided human knowing; to hold otherwise is to veer into Pelagianism. As a theological virtue, faith implies the substantially supernatural light of Truth, supersensory and infused, abiding intimately in the soul, most often in darkness. “Faith... is a certain and obscure habit of soul,” teaches John of the Cross; drawing directly on Aquinas, he adds: “It is an obscure habit because it brings us to believe divinely revealed truths that transcend every natural light and infinitely exceed all human understanding.” And just as no man's atheism can presume ironclad self-assuredness in the face of death, in mystery, or in a foxhole, so the apophatic realms of the believer expose to him, in the words of Ratzinger, “the insecurity of his own faith, the oppressive power of unbelief in the midst of his own will to believe,” as if he were adrift at sea and clinging for dear life to the flotsam of a wrecked vessel.

Small echoes of the one terrible Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani pierced the souls of Thérèse of Lisieux, Teresa of Calcutta, Paul of the Cross, and all saints known and unknown through the ages. Temptations against faith specifically are part of the ordinary progression of the way of sanctity. However passive these purifications of nature may be, they are often inflicted on the soul through religion itself. As regards the Spanish Inquisition alone, Teresa of Ávila was investigated; Ignatius of Loyola was arrested, twice; Bartolomé de Carranza, a prominent Council father at Trent widely renowned for holiness, was locked away for seventeen years. Stories of just such persecution are as numerous as their protagonists, from Joan of Arc to Gerard Majella to Christ himself.

While I make no claims to sanctity at all, I can personally verify the experience of doubt in the Christian life. There have been mornings where retaining my faith through to the end of the day did not seem to be a foregone conclusion. I have such days still. Being close to the Church, seeing how things really are on a daily basis, let alone the coming-to-light of one grievous scandal after another, has disabused me summarily of any naiveté. This is painful, disorienting and traumatic, but ultimately in itself no real obstacle; the chosen band of Apostles had a catastrophic failure rate of eight and one-third per cent.

Sed contra: The witness of service of Christians like Peter Claver; the ardor of self-sacrificing love at work in martyrs like Jean de Brebeuf; the engagement with peoples and cultures universally; the magnificent art; the cohesion of the liturgy; above all, the luminous beauty of the person of Jesus – all of these are compelling. Add to this the limpid brilliance of great theology, the claim of religio vera for which the intellect pines: groundedness in being; the liberation of religion from motivations in the temporal sphere; “the victory of myth-removal, the victory of knowledge and, with that, of truth... not as a specific religion repressing others by virtue of a type of religious imperialism but as the truth which renders the apparent superfluous,” as Ratzinger's Truth and Tolerance proclaims.

For me, as no doubt for many others, the real scandal is constituted by the appearance of this religio vera violating itself. In late summer of this year, on the Solemnity of the Assumption to be precise, I was treated to a multi-directional religious bushwhacking. I was so happy to have confidently cantored the psalm at Mass, and was enjoying immensely being in the company of my confrères up in the loft, with the golden late-afternoon August sunshine streaming through. With little provocation (basically, however rightly or wrongly, someone requested that a couple of unruly small children be reined in), a large man in an authority-wielding profession started cursing a blue streak and insinuating violence, fresh off the Communion line, all in the name of family values and Catholic orthodoxy. (This had nothing to do with me, but it happened in my presence and was enough to shake me up.) Shortly thereafter, I was contacted by an individual in the Midwest who (despite advertising to the contrary on a respectable Catholic platform) established himself as soliciting free work in service of his truly execrable art. In the course of investigating “Tony,” I stumbled, via a series of unlikely associations in the way-too-small Catholic world, upon information that the campus priest at a local university, to whose weekday Masses I had once travelled faithfully (at great cost of time, fuel and stress on the oh-so-easygoing Connecticut roads) for years, was seriously implicated in a situation in which 133 unusually vulnerable children were abused, culminating in a $60 million settlement. So I thought I would drown my sorrows in a soothing decaf and the New York Times crossword, when an op-ed from an aggressively Catholic pundit extolling the spiritual value and virtue of Hollywood entertainment preoccupation with the demonic hit me between the eyes while I was scrolling to the puzzle. Shell shocked and sickened to be sure, but so far so... okay. Sort of.

Somehow, in the throes of it all, it came to my attention that the USCCB (yes, that would be the USCCB, as in the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops) had formally advanced the canonization process of Cora Evans, a housewife, a former Mormon, and promoter of something called the “mystical humanity of Christ” … which means what? Our Lord was not “mystically” human; he was actually human. Attempts to explain this notion by its advocates may be generously construed as follows: “The indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the souls of those in sanctifying grace entails the presence of Christ and the Father by concomitance, and since Christ is the one undivided Christ, further entails the presence of Christ’s humanity wherever Christ is present even by concomitance, and thus the presence of the humanity of Christ in the souls of persons in sanctifying grace” – which is perhaps an arguable theological position, and is admittedly a mouthful, but bears no relationship whatsoever to the words “mystical humanity of Christ.”

Moreover, Mrs. Evans is said to have transcribed thousands of pages of her transports, with her cause having subsequently been initiated by the Diocese of Monterey, California. In these transports, details unknown to history were revealed to Cora Evans, like the childhood pets of our blessed Lord: Bobin the Rabbit and Twitchy Ears the trained mouse. Those revelations are among the more plausible and the less disturbing. You don't want to know. I wish I didn't.

Take this, from a secular gazette: “She even transcended the boundaries of space and time with which we construct our very reality, and outside of those bounds talked directly with Jesus. The year was 1947. They met up on a bridge, see, and Jesus was getting ready to give her a private violin concert (yes, he plays) but just before he lowered his bow a dove came and perched on his instrument’s strings, snapping one of them. Jesus smiled a wry smile at Evans then, and told her the concert would have to wait. It was just as well. He’d told her before, another time when they were hanging out, that when she heard him play the violin it would mean she was dying, and it was time for her to go to heaven with him.”

And this, from (gasp) the diocesan newspaper of the Catholic Archdiocese of San Francisco: “Inspired by the evocative portrayals of the life and times of Jesus in her best-known work, ‘The Refugee from Heaven,’ published in 2014, [current Diocese of Fresno seminarian Scott Borba] traded sinful stints as a Hollywood jet-setter for simple service as a St. Patrick’s seminarian.

‘When I read how Granny Mary, Joseph’s mother, would feed the boy Jesus cookies that he loved, all of a sudden I understood He was not a myth but just like us in every way except in His divinity,’ Borba related.”

That’s quite an “except” – maybe one could construe Mr. Borba’s epiphany as the realization that the one divine person of Jesus Christ, in his human nature, was a man like us in all things but sin… but who is this “Granny Mary” person, and what does she have to do with two thousand years of Christian tradition? I suppose one could strain endlessly to rationalize all of this. Such Disneyfied narratives might be charming for some (how spiritually healthy that is, is another matter), and are certainly quirky enough, but the writing gets positively disturbing in a dark, more horror-genre way pretty regularly as well.

Do I need to make explicit that this arrant nonsense (a different two-syllable descriptor comes to mind) confounds every presupposition I've structured my life on, and shatters my world? This is not what the saints suffered for, the martyrs gave their lives for, the Fathers and Doctors wrote of. The victory of myth-removal? – quite the opposite.

These sorts crop up. Every man is an exorcist, every woman a stigmatist, and the whole lot of them are said to be redolent with the perfume of flowers. Each one, uniquely and singularly, is accorded knowledge such as no one before has ever had, nor no one hence ever will have, and are told as much, repeatedly. On each one, again uniquely and singularly, hinges the salvation of the entire world. As for Mrs. Evans's stigmata, per an interview in Catholic World Report: “One weekend when I [personal friend Darryl Hackman] was visiting, for example, she was building a grotto to St. Francis of Assisi. She was placing rocks at the statue’s feet, using a trowel and wet cement. I sat and talked with her, and as I did, I noticed an open, gaping wound on her left hand. It was an inch-and-a-half long and a half-inch wide, but it was not bleeding. I asked her, ‘Is that what I think it is?’ She had a great sense of humor, and made light of it. She put some of the wet cement over top of it, and told me it was no big deal.” Very interesting. St. Francis, himself a stigmatist and patron of the archdiocese in which St. Patrick’s Seminary is located, would probably have died before slopping the Wounds of Christ with construction materials as a sight gag. Nor is to do so humility by any construal.

As John of the Cross extols the Poverello: “Let us return to the work of that seraph, for he truly inflicts a sore, and wounds inwardly in the spirit. Thus, if God sometimes permits an effect to extend to the bodily senses in the fashion in which it existed interiorly, the wound and sore appear outwardly, as happened when the seraph wounded St. Francis. When his soul was wounded with love by the five wounds, their effect extended to the body, and these wounds were impressed upon the body, which was wounded just as his soul was wounded with love.” This is an authentic, glorious, frightful depiction of stigmata, as with St. Paul, “whose immense compassion for the sufferings of Christ redounded in the body, as he explained to the Galatians: I bear the wounds of the Lord Jesus in my body.” That this be confounded with a display blithely dismissed at will is difficult to comprehend.

I attended Sunday Mass some years back at an ordinary parish in a mill town in a remote corner of our metropolitan diocese, and the celebrant gave a homily on one Heidi, a Pentecostalist who “resurrects” people from the dead. Father castigated his congregants for our failure to imitate such prodigies. I tried (against good sense, though there was not much to lose in that department) to distinguish between the miraculous quoad modum and quoad substantiam. It didn't go well. It went badly, really badly. What of it, if Teresa of Ávila or Gerard Majella or the Prophet Elijah restored children to their grieving parents? A non-glorious resuscitation and resurrection are in no ways commensurate, and humble sanctity would have proscribed such claims, ego displays and online branding as we find with the aforementioned Heidi. And besides the fact that modern medicine can thankfully pull off such feats pretty regularly, at every Mass there's something that is greater than the Prophet Elijah (and quite independent of the quality of the preaching.)

And again, innocently entering a church just last week, there it was, tacked to the wall, a single-color paper flyer associated with a mystic who (per her Wikipedia entry) “received the gifts of supernatural knowledge, healing, visions, discernment of spirits, locution, ecstasy, levitation, the odor of sanctity, the stigmata, and the ability to read the hearts of others. Witnesses claim to have seen her levitating during Mass and engaging in bilocation. Her legend also recounts that [she] received the spiritual direction and the mantle of Father Pio, and received in the presence of her husband a bilocated visitation from Pio the day before he died.” Said mystic also “births” (her word) roses from her sternum.

It's less of an issue for my faith that someone among the better-than-one-billion Catholics on the planet purports to sprout vegetation like a human Chia Pet – I must credit Paul with quipping that for a human-horticultural chimera, “getting poison ivy” would have an altogether different meaning. It takes all kinds. Nor, for that matter, is it such a challenge that a young-ish cleric in a rural border area get a little isolated and develop odd ideas. But why must the arbiters and keepers of the Faith actually mock it through permissiveness? Twitchy Ears the Mouse is by no means benign. Seeing a Church marred with human sinfulness is one thing – I, too, am sinful, and that first and foremost. Seeing a theology in self-refuting contradiction is another. This militates against reason; it makes the mind go tilt. And further, a slapstick stigmata is a slap in the face to the saints – and indeed all – who perished at Auschwitz, who died in the arenas, who stood for justice. Suffering is not so cheap as such revelations make even God himself out to be. As Ratzinger continues in the discourse on faith in Introduction to Christianity: “God has become so near to us that we can kill him and that he thereby, so it seems, ceases to be God for us.” The particular contempt that such presumptuous familiarity breeds kills God. It utterly discredits him, and with him the Church, by way of the argumentum ad logicam, also known as the fallacist's fallacy; in other words, the reasoning set forth for a true conclusion is so bad, so demonstrably false, that you run away screaming from the premises. Persons such as Mrs. Evans and the one with the roses coming out of her chest are not isolated incidents. A surprising amount of this stuff slips through the cracks, or is tolerated for decades before formal suppression, by which point it is too late. Just try uprooting deeply established religious knotweed from minds and hearts.

I did have the opportunity to bring my concerns regarding Mrs. Evans to a local ordinary. He was not familiar with the matter, having left the recent USCCB meeting early, before the vote was taken, but has encouraged me to write to the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, which I hope to do with alacrity, brevity and decency. Sorting things out, however, is something I wish to use in the service of sharpening relevant theological distinctions and analyzing the current lay of the land. This work is forthcoming, and Paul's previous post furnishes an especially helpful lead-in. In the meantime, I want to share with you the inimitable genius of Thomas Merton, absolutely spot-on for all of its New York-y witticisms:

After reading the lives of the saints and the experiences of the mystics, some people become convinced that the mystical life must be something like a Wagnerian opera. Tremendous things keep happening all the time. Every new motion of the spirit is heralded by thunder and lightning. The heavens crack open and the soul sails upward out of the body into a burst of unearthly and splendid light. There it comes face to face with God in the midst of a huge Turnverein of flying, singing, trumpet-playing saints and angels. There is an eloquent exchange of views between the soul and God in an operatic duet that lasts at least seven hours, for seven is a mystical number. All this is punctuated by earthquakes, solar and lunar eclipses, and the explosion of supersubstantial bombs. Eventually, after a brief musical preview of the end of the world and the Last Judgement, the soul pirouettes gracefully back into the body and the mystic comes to himself to discover that he is surrounded by a hushed, admiring circle of fellow religious, including one or two who are surreptitiously taking down notes of the event in view of some future process of canonization.

Stay tuned! The real work has yet to begin.