I think the stories of Friday noon (the motu proprio) and Tuesday noon (the USCCB scandal) are meaningfully connected.
Dr. Larry Chapp and Kale Zelden began to explore the connection in a YouTube conversation today.
I think the connecting point is the inherent power of eros, the thirst for the beautiful, an ascending desire.
On Friday noon, the chief shepherd told some of the sheep to be ashamed of their desire.
So to whom will the sheep turn to slake their thirst of soul?
A thirst that is declared shameful does not die: it simply will seek other avenues of fulfillment. When an authentic wellspring is dammed up, it’s not as though thirst itself dies. The thirst often simply goes underground, where it can seek to be met in undetected ways. A double-life is sometimes born to resolve the untenable predicament. And the result can be the story of Tuesday noon.
For sixty years now, the post-conciliar church has, in many quarters, been asking people to survive without living waters. Sure, there’s been Tang, Coke Zero, and Red Bull available. But none of these quench a real thirst. The thirst endures. Granted, that thirst ends up pursuing all kinds of counterfeit streams, but the thirst endures.
The fact that the thirst endures should be counted a strange sign of hope, not a desiccated sign of unbelief: it is good news that the thirst has not been destroyed.
Should living waters be offered again, it’s not impossible that the thirsty would choose again to drink from a wellspring of life.
“All the time — such is the tragi-comedy of our situation — we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more ‘drive’, or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or ‘creativity’. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”
C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, “Men Without Chests”
“Jadedness and boredom and an absence of vibrant prayer comprise one reason among others that the great novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky was right on target when he made the comment that “to live without God is nothing but torture.” Not everyone admits this, of course. One reason is pathological denial. Another is that when people are so submerged in self-centered pleasure seeking, they cannot see what some silence and solitude and honesty would make obvious to them. A third explanation for the denial is that bored people often use pleasures, both licit and illicit, as so many narcotics that tend to dull the deep inner pain of their emptiness. This human aching is always lurking in the center of their being, but it is faced only in honest silence. The print and electronic media offer endless proof day after day that Dostoevsky was right, but few care to see and to listen. Facing reality as it is requires honesty. As Jesus himself put it: We cannot serve both God and mammon (Mt 6:24). If it is not the first, it will be the second. Nature abhors a vacuum.
This famous novelist went on to remark that atheists should actually be called idolators. Why? When one rejects the real God, he inevitably substitutes lesser things to fill his inner emptiness. Everyone, we should notice, has one or more consuming interests that occupy his desires and dreams. If we are not captivated by the living God and pursuing him, we will center our desires on idols, big or small: vanities, pleasure seeking, prestige, power, and others we have already noted. While the idols never satisfy, they often do serve as narcotics that more or less deaden the inner pain of not having him for whom we were made and who alone can bring us to the eternal ecstasy of the beatific vision.
Yes, if you and I are not seriously pursuing the real God, inevitably we will focus on things that can never satisfy us. We are chasing after dead ends. Prayer is the path to reality/Reality.”
Father Thomas Dubay, Prayer Primer: Igniting a Fire Within, “Thirsting and Quenching”
”…Eros and agape — ascending love and descending love — can never be completely separated. The more the two, in their different aspects, find a proper unity in the one reality of love, the more the true nature of love in general is realized. Even if eros is at first mainly covetous and ascending, a fascination for the great promise of happiness, in drawing near to the other, it is less and less concerned with itself, increasingly seeks the happiness of the other, is concerned more and more with the beloved, bestows itself and wants to “be there for” the other. The element of agape thus enters into this love, for otherwise eros is impoverished and even loses its own nature. On the other hand, man cannot live by oblative, descending love alone. He cannot always give, he must also receive. Anyone who wishes to give love must also receive love as a gift. Certainly, as the Lord tells us, one can become a source from which rivers of living water flow (cf. Jn 7:37-38). Yet to become such a source, one must constantly drink anew from the original source, which is Jesus Christ, from whose pierced heart flows the love of God (cf. Jn 19:34).”
Pope Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 7
“Why is it that so many Catholics of deep faith have grown weary of the “business as usual” Catholicism of our parishes and have felt the need to flee to an older iteration of the faith, in both liturgy and in theology, and who do so, not out of nostalgia for a past they never knew, but because they have found something there that rips open their souls with the passion of a lover? We can prattle-on with spittle flecked outrage about the audacity of those who dare reject Vatican II or who dare criticize the Novus Ordo, but it will come to nothing unless we own up to the fact that the Church has failed to recognize that the anomic and nihilistic cosmos of post-modernity has laid waste to all of our standard structures of meaning, all of the traditions that embodied and made “real” that meaning, and all of the moral and spiritual weight of everything that came before five minutes ago. The Church has failed to even notice and, therefore, to acknowledge, that modern Catholics in the West are drowning with a slow gurgling death in the chaotic waters of modernity’s hegemonic enchantments. That we live in a collective of concupiscence that enslaves us to the morbid regime of death and the allure of immortality through pleasure. The Church has failed to recognize that all “ultimates” have been killed as effective realities by the Mammon and Moloch of modernity and have been replaced with an endless panoply of penultimate counterfeits. The Church has failed to recognize the “abyss” that Ratzinger outlines which has now opened up below us and into which we all feel inexorably drawn as we flail our arms about desperately trying to grasp hold of something (anything!) solid.”
Dr. Larry Chapp, “The Hermeneutics of the Abyss: Some Thoughts on Traditionis Custodes”
Our Lord was cruelly taken away at Calvary, to the utter devastation and dismay of the Twelve. But there was a greater plan afoot that they could not see at the time. We must trust the Lord is always leading, and his ways are not our ways.