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[Geoff explained difficulties trusting some of the teaching and implementation of Vatican II. I respond at length. Mid conversation ...] Geoff: the Assisi incident made an impact on you. Truth is, I don’t know anything about it, at all. If you want to send a link or something, I’ll read about it. But off the top of my head, I can’t respond intelligently, although the incident was important to you. I’d like to describe three incidents, and I’d be interested in your reactions. The first was decades ago, and involved a gradual change over a couple of years. I read Evelyn Waugh’s biography of Edmund Campion, and was deeply impressed. A detail: when he left his 15-year stint teaching philosophy and rode toward his new assignment in England, the average life expectancy of Catholic priests in England was six weeks. He rode from Prague happily, and was a delight to travel with, his companions said. But also, they said, he dropped back from the group to ride alone to pray the Office ...

I have been trying to find a way to understand the extended period of time, several hundred years, when the teaching and practice of the Catholic Church regarding hospitality was defensive and inward-looking. I see and understand four patterns of hospitality in our history: first a national response in the Old Testament, then (second) a personal response in the New Testament, and then (third) a church response in the Patristic era and Middle Ages – then a gap, a puzzle – and then (fourth) a global response starting with Pope Leo XIII and confirmed by Vatican II. What happened between the third and the fourth? I am not sure, but I think perhaps I have a handle on it. The third pattern, from the early Church up through Aquinas and beyond, had an architectural face. Beginning with St. Jerome, monasteries built guest houses to welcome strangers. What most people did about the grave responsibility to welcome strangers was to delegate the responsibility to clerics and monks, esp...

When I noticed four years ago that Jesus had spoken with shocking force about the importance of welcoming strangers (do so and meet my Father or don’t and go to hell), I was baffled. Where did that come from? So I spent some months exploring the Old Testament to understand the teaching about welcoming strangers before Jesus. The Old Testament teaching was another shock: it is abundant, clear, and forceful. To miss the teaching about hospitality, you have to miss or mangle: Abraham, Moses, Elijah, the Prophets, the Babylonian Exile. (See “Sign of the Crossing” and “21 Stranger Claims in the Old Testament,” Amazon or Kindle.) Welcome strangers, because – remember! – you too once were a stranger in a strange land! But a detail: hospitality in the Old Testament was a national responsibility. If it was so abundant in the Old Testament, where was it in the New? So I returned to the New Testament, with the lessons from the Old Testament fresh in my mind. It’s there and vibrant, and d...

Liz Di Nunzio (not a Trump enthusiast) posted a short item yesterday about understanding your opponents; she defended Trump supporters from blanket charges of racism and xenophobia. She is emphatically not a Trump supporter, but is serious about understanding the other side. Understanding: it’s admirable. I saw a good friend at Mass this morning. Fr. Francis Martin is slip-sliding toward the fullness of the life, and so he’s not celebrating Mass in the morning any more; I went to St. John Neumann. There, I saw Susan Abel, who spends many mornings in front of the Germantown third-trimester abortion clinic. She shared a vignette. There was a woman approaching clinic, with someone already inside doing paperwork for her. She avoided the pro-life counselors outside, stood off by herself. After some tension and hesitation, Susan walked over to about ten feet away from the troubled woman, and said quietly, “I understand the pain of abortion.” The woman came over immediately, talked a b...

  The sale of church vessels controversy One of the best known incidents in the rich and tumultuous life of St. Ambrose was his decision to ransom captives with treasures from the church. What are the riches of the Church? In explaining his decision, St. Ambrose referred to the six precepts of the Lord in his description of the Last Judgment. But he was drawing on the spirit of the precepts – serve those in need – not on a specific item. Later in Church history, the six precepts in Matthew’s Gospel became the foundation of a teaching tool called the seven “corporal works of mercy.” (The seventh, burying the dead, is based on the Book of Tobit.) The seven works of mercy drifted away from the six precepts a little, and “visit the imprisoned” became “ransom captives.” And to understand how the Church’s teaching on hospitality changed over the ages, it helps to see how Ambrose and others thought about the six precepts. In 379, amidst a growing civil war in the Roman Empire...

                       Friday, December 30, the Church celebrated the Feast of the Holy Family. Usually, it’s celebrated on a Sunday, but when Christmas falls on a Sunday, it gets bumped. The Gospel for the day is about Joseph, who dreamt of angels and acted on what he heard. An angel told him in a dream that Herod was trying to kill Jesus, and that he should get up and flee. He got up, took his small family, and fled to Egypt. Later, in Egypt, he dreamt that an angel said it was safe to return, so he did, although Bethlehem was still dangerous and so he settled in Nazareth. Joseph showed up in Egypt – a foreigner, unemployed, with a wife and a child. We know nothing about what he did there, other than that he and his family survived. Centuries before, there was another Joseph who left Israel and went to Egypt, and by that change was able to protect his fami...