Saints Monica and Augustine
Yesterday we celebrated St. Monica, the mother of St. Augustine, and today is the feast day of her son. Monica’s rebellious teenager gave his mother the slip and ran off to Milan and Rome to become a most gifted orator, but for all his worldly success he could not escape his addiction to lust. “Lord,” he prayed, “make me chaste, but not yet.” During his 15 years of bondage to both the flesh and also to a sexy “new age” sect (the Manicheans), his mother prayed and wept for his deliverance. A kind bishop assured her that “it cannot be that the son of such tears should perish.” In the end, Augustine surrendered to grace, as he describes in his Confessions, history’s first literary autobiography. Augustine went on develop the theology of Christianity’s most central mysteries, such as the Holy Trinity, the natures of Christ, free will, nature and grace, and the just war theory. He wrote his last work, The City of God, as the imperial cities were collapsing around him. Alaric the Goth destroyed Rome in 410, and the last twenty years of Augustine’s life witnessed the accelerated decline of Roman civilization. Only the “City of God” can survive the rise and fall of cultures, and indeed the Catholic Church remains, weary and war torn but intact, a sacrament of the Holy City awaiting us in the next world.
 
Tradition and Traditionalism
I relate a bit of history this morning because “those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it.” Children in our postmodern era, in fact, are not taught history but rather a disdain for everything that happened before the 21st Century. Catholic schools used to teach history, and in particular the lives of the saints, but now few of us know much about people like Augustine and Monica and their times. Those who do know the lives of the saints cannot become holy, for their stories are our stories, and their lives are given for our instruction and edification. We call sacred history “tradition,” from the Latin word tradere, “to transmit" or "hand on.” Originally the word referred to how the runners in a relay race hand on a baton from one runner to the next, as the Olympic runners still hand on the torch. The human race is a relay race, handing on knowledge and skills from one generation to the next. The smartphones we use, the cars we drive, the languages we speak, are gifts handed on from those before us. A healthy love for tradition, however, can become ossified as “traditionalism,” encasing the gifts of the past in amber, rejecting change or adaptation. Various papal decrees rejected traditionalism, with its definitive condemnation in the First Vatican Council’s decree Dei Filius of 1870.
 
Authentic Development
The Church’s Tradition is essential, but so is legitimate theological development, guided by the Holy Spirit. St. Augustine developed the doctrine of the Holy Trinity by applying human reason to Biblical teachings, articulating anew the ancient belief. St. Thomas Aquinas developed the doctrine of transubstantiation by applying Aristotelian metaphysics to Christ’s teaching in John 6. “Traditionalists” rejected the teachings of both Augustine and Aquinas in their own time, but the Church ultimately recognized their teachings as authentic developments in Christian doctrine.
 
We try to avoid both “traditionalism,” which rejects change and development, and “progressivism,” which rejects tradition and history. Traditionalism dismisses anything after 1970, and progressivism dismisses anything before 1970. Traditionalists tend to be mean-spirited and progressives tend to be arrogant. Traditionalists emphasize truth but lack compassion, while progressives emphasize compassion but lack truth. But, as St. Edith Stein said, “Do not accept anything as the truth if it lacks love. And, do not accept anything as love which lacks truth.” Catholicism is a Living Tradition, building on the gifts of previous generation.   
 
The Church is not a museum or historical society, but neither is it a new world order or progressivist club. The word for “Church” in Greek is Ek-Klesia, from which we get the Latin word ecclesia, and in Spanish iglesia, Italian chiesa, etc. “Ek-Klesia means a people “called out” of the world. God has made us different than those who have no faith, and in particular, we don’t fall into the worldly categories of “right” and “left.” We are neither a traditionalist club nor a progressivist club. God gives us the best of both right and left, and the Church has always been a synthesis of all that is good in this world while rejecting the bad. The Catholic impulse is fundamentally “both-and” rather than “either-or.”
 
Old Mass, New Mass
Let’s consider now the situation in our own time, when the Vatican seems to be rejecting the traditional Latin form of the Mass. The vast majority of the Church’s saints worshipped God in this form of the Roman Rite, which developed around the time of St. Augustine in the 5th Century and lasted more or less unchanged until 1970. Pope Benedict declared that form of the Mass good and beautiful, but Pope Francis declares the opposite. We have to trust that the Holy Spirit will eventually straighten things out, but for now we have the “liturgy wars,” not unlike the doctrinal wars in the time of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas.
 
Turning Toward the Lord
In the discipline of divine worship, what is essential for Catholics, in whatever form that worship takes, is the worshipper’s focus on God rather than on ourselves. Our parish offers Mass in both the new and the old forms, but in all of our Masses, priest and people face the same direction, ad orientem, “to the east,” striving to focus minds and hearts on God. Very few Catholic parishes do this, but both the new and the old missal instruct the priest to turn toward the altar, with the people, during the Eucharistic Prayer. The most important element of worship is focus: to whom are we pointing? God or ourselves? Are we celebrating the mercies of God or are we celebrating ourselves? In both forms of the Mass, it is essential that the priest and people not face each other when we pray to God, but all face the Lord together. The liturgy wars will continue until the Second Coming, because the world, the flesh, and the devil continually try to deform right worship of God. But here at Star of the Sea, under my leadership and the leadership of Archbishop Cordileone, we will continue to offer Mass in both forms, towards the altar of God, with minds and hearts fixed on the Christ who offers himself on that holy table.

Not long ago a quite pious member of my congregation asked, a bit breathlessly, whether her beloved pet would be in heaven with her. Her dog’s name was not Fido, but that’s a good name for a dog, because domesticated canines are nothing if not “faithful.” I’m sure this breathless woman’s pet was doggedly faithful to her, and she apparently felt that she didn’t want a heaven absent such a loyal friend.

What could I say? “Ma’am, I’m quite sure all dogs go to heaven.” But that would compromise my teaching mandate from the Roman Catholic Church. I came up with something like: “Ma’am, God will provide the best for your dog, and the best for you. When you get to Heaven (by God’s grace), you, and Fido, will be perfectly happy.” I didn’t mention that Fido will have ceased to exist by that time, presuming she didn’t precede her beloved pet in death. But how can a loving pastor speak those harsh words to such a delicate member of the congregation?

I grew up with dogs, and in fact, one of them died in my arms (after having been hit by a car). I heard her last wail of agony, and I felt her last breath. Misty’s death hit my parents like a freight train, and they never had another dog after her. Domesticated dogs (and even cats) are one of God’s greatest consolations to us, and I can understand how people want their pets to have immortal souls, so as to live forever with them in heaven.

But here’s the thing: we all have to die someday. And death means letting go, and letting God. To ask the question of “what will I have in heaven with me?” betrays a certain attitude of control that we must surrender before sister death comes for us, lest she have to forcibly wrest if from us. In the end, we must trust God, absolutely. We must learn to stop telling him what we will need in heaven, kind of like the pharaohs of old who piled up all the toys and food they needed for heaven in their burial chambers.

God will provide for us in heaven, and we will be supremely happy, with or without our dogs (and cats). If we fret about what heaven will have or not have, it means simply we are not ready for heaven. So try to stop fretting. Heaven will be …. hmmmm …. “what no eye has seen and no ear has heard.”

This morning’s Mass commemorated St. Joachim, Jesus’ grandfather. Joachim was the husband of St. Anne and therefore father of Our Lady, the mother of the Christ. God has a grandfather! We often overlook our grandfathers, who have a unique role to play in our human development. Often quietly in the background, grandfathers provide a super-paternal presence, a wise and understanding heart when we are confused about our own fathers. A wise grandfather helps us realize our own place in the world, our self-worth and our identity as a child of God. Grandfathers have seen social confusions come and go and have learned not to take them too seriously. They are often our only stable point of reference when cultures verge on the edge of collapse. We especially need grandfathers today, when our very sexual identities are in such trauma. A grandfather can say to a confused adolescent: “Son, someone is trying to sell you something you don’t want. Just say no.”

We Americans are quite good at selling things. We create new products and new markets, convincing large numbers of people that they can’t live without something that we are more than ready to sell them. Think of the smart phone and its deliverable, the world wide web. People cannot go a day without “the world’s largest ad agency” (Google) at their fingertips. We clever Americans, in fact, have become so good at selling things that we have learned how to shape entire populations’ thinking to fit our markets. Take “gender theory,” for example. The post-modernist concepts that make gender theory possible were dreamed up by European academics, but Americans lost no time capitalizing on them.

It costs a lot of money to “change” one’s biological sex. Scott Newgent reports that he and his insurance company spent $900,000 trying to make him the opposite sex, along with seven surgeries, 16 rounds of antibiotics, 17 months of recurring infection, and ten acute medical complications. Those who wish to change their sex must take lifetime doses of synthetic hormones and often pay for hundreds of visits to expensive therapists. There’s lots of money to be made in convincing boys that they should grow breasts and girls that they should cut them off. Gender theory was not invented by plastic surgeons and pharmacological companies, but these professionals quickly realized that there was money to be made from it. This booming “transgender industry” is aggressively marketed by social media companies and protected by big government.

The other day a friend asked me if I had seen a documentary called “What is a Woman?” It asks some questions about the transgender phenomenon. My friend said I could probably find the video on the internet for free. After all, the internet was invented to provide a free exchange of ideas. I found the video on a site that provides free documentaries on all sorts of topics, but after about 50 minutes the video froze. I tried to reload it, and Google told me that the page could not be found. I persisted, and I finally found the page again. I reloaded and began watching from where the screen had locked, but every ten minutes the site would lock up again. I had to reload five times, working around Google’s claim that “this site does not exist.”
Certainly those who make money on “gender reassignment” don’t want the public to see a documentary that questions gender theory. It’s bad for business. Despite the relatively light censorship I experienced, however, the internet is still free enough to find things, if you persist. At the moment, anyway, those who censor the internet count on our pusillanimity. They expect us to give up when a video is knocked offline. But we can persevere, insisting on our right to ask questions. Most of us, however, as comfortably-entertained and well-fed consumers, have meekly accepted progressive censorship. (After watching this video, I made a donation to the group that produced it, for certainly the worker deserves his pay.)

What can motivate us, and clarify for us what is happening in the marketplace of ideas today? As always, follow the money trail. Who is out to make money? Someone who produces a video questioning gender theory, or someone who produces a video enforcing it? There are very simple economic reasons for blocking certain videos on the internet, and for moving other videos to the top of search engines.

But there is another aspect to the transgender phenomenon: the many people who suffer confusion about their sexuality. Most of us feel awkward, embarrassed, and underconfident just before and during puberty, but we get through it with the support of our parents and mentors. A mother told me that her 12-year-old girl, upon seeing blood on her underwear, shouted from her room “God hates me!” It was her mother’s constant love and affirmation that got this girl through the trauma of adolescence, not surgery or chemicals. But note well that a mother’s love can’t be monetized like surgery and puberty blockers.

The acute sexual insecurity that used to be suffered only by teens has been pushed on pre-teens and post-teens, largely through social media. And it has been monetized. People suffering from sexual insecurity do not need puberty blockers or mastectomies. They need something that costs very little: the love of their parents and friends, and the courage to accept their bodies as naturally good and beautiful. They need a grandfather and a grandmother that cares for them as whole persons, body and soul.

Today we celebrate St. Dominic, who went to God from this little earth in 1221, just fifty years old. It is said that he spent his nights listening to God, and spent his days sharing with others what he had heard the night before. Contemplatio et praedicatio: to contemplate God’s wonders, and then to preach God’s wonders, has been motivating the Order of Preachers (the “Dominicans”) for the last 800 years. To “contemplate,” we must focus, and that’s hard these days with a thousand distractions and countervailing ideologies constantly besieging us.

When riding my bike over the crowded Golden Gate Bridge, I usually focus on the road, not the people. Sometimes I look up in wonder at the beauty of the Bridge itself. The other day the GGB was packed with more visitors than usual. It was the second day of San Francisco’s biggest rock concert, which takes over Golden Gate Park and fills the entire the city with extra cars, bikes, and monowheeled gyroscopes. It’s tempting to despise tourists when they stop their rental bikes in the middle of the narrow bikeway to take a picture. The other day, however, rather than shaking my head in disgust, I looked into the face of the offender. He looked like quite a likable fellow. And I began looking at the faces of all the people I normally zoom past on my bike.

The Golden Gate Bridge is fascinating, but far more fascinating are the people who built it—people like you and me, people like those tourists parking their rental bikes at the very narrowest part of sidewalks. After all, one person is worth more than twenty Golden Gate Bridges. The least interesting person is vastly more fascinating than anything made by man, or for that matter, any other order of the natural world made by God.

These days, it is fashionable to despise the human race. In a fit of self-loathing, one of my neighbors scrawled these words on a 7-foot plywood board in front of his house: “Save the planet. F— the human race.” I suppose Marshall (normally a nice enough chap) had seen one too many news reports on climate change or Monkeypox or some other proof that “we” are the enemy.
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People are a problem, to be sure, ever since the disaster in Eden. Every one of us is selfish and dishonest and hypocritical. I’m writing this on a jetliner where the flight attendants talk about “recycling” our soda cans to save the planet while the throbbing engines beneath us burn through 26,000 pounds of carbon fuel per hour. Not one of us, from Al Gore to Donald Trump, is willing to significantly sacrifice our wants to “save the planet,” and anyone who claims to “care for the planet” while flying about on jetliners is also a liar (well, perhaps just clueless). Every last one of us desperately needs a savior. Could we even just admit that we cannot save ourselves? But the good news is that every human being is also an image of God: a wondrous act of creation, providing endless discovery and fascination for biologists, physicists, psychiatrists, poets, philosophers, and theologians. Every human person has been given the potential to bestow godlike gifts upon the natural order. People are the problem, but people are also the solution, by the grace of God. I have to remember that, to look at people rather than just zooming past them on my very fast bicycle.

The Golden Gate Bridge is a thing of beauty, but consider how much more beautiful the creatures that made it, by the grace of God.

I often take my daily exercise by cycling up through the Presidio and down to San Francisco’s “Wave Organ.” Peter Richards, artist-in-residence at the City’s Exploratorium, built this structure in 1986 from cast-off granite monuments from the old Laurel Hill Cemetery. It beautifully caps a spit of land extending into the Bay, affording both spectacular views and shelter from the prevailing winds. It’s the only spot on my daily bike rides that I can make phone calls without being overcome by maritime gusts.

The Wave Organ was paid for by the Exploratorium, San Francisco’s “temple of innovation.” Over the years I’ve taken many groups of kids to this wonderful hands-on museum of the most fascinating inventions that move the modern world. My favorites include the cut-away automobile differential that shows how cars turn both wheels on a single axle at different speeds, the scale model of the Golden Gate Bridge showing how suspension support and stresses are equalized, the tornado and icy comet chambers, and the gearbox that starts with a small spinning wheel and ends up with a large wheel that makes one revolution every 13.7 billion years. All of these gadgets “work” in some way, contributing to the beauty, intelligence, and function of the world in which we live.

But not all bright ideas actually prove themselves functional. Probably most of mankind’s innovations do not achieve their intended results in the long run. Yesterday at the Wave Organ, as I sat down to do my midday prayers, a Brit-tish tourist was explaining the Wave Organ in her charming cockney. “When the tides rise and fall,” she confidently announced to her family, “the 25 PVC pipes produce various organ-like sounds.” Well, not actually. I’ve never heard anything more than occasional gurgle from these pipes, and I mean occasional—maybe once every 50 times I’ve sat next to them to catch up on phone calls. The Wave Organ was a fetching concept on paper, winning a large grant of public monies for its construction. Its granite funerary monuments, skillfully arranged, recall the elegant history of our City, and its position overlooking Alcatraz, the Bridges, and the City charms the heart. But in fact it does not do what it was designed to do. Maybe we should change its name from “wave organ” to “portals of the past" or something more accurate.

Successful projects require different types of people: idea people (to visualize innovation), political people (to raise the money and get the permits), worker bee people (to get the job done), and critical people (to troubleshoot problems). Innovation alone is not enough. But here in California, "innovation" has come to be an end in itself. The Wave Organ was a fascinating concept, so it must work! After all, we spent so much money on it!

Social media was a brilliant idea, but does it do what it was designed to do (enrich our personal relationships)? Does that great innovation of the Third Decade of the New Millennium—curing the common cold—actually work? Have we found a cure for the SARS-CoV virus, or are we just taking innovative vaccine technology simply because "it’s a good idea?" Even leftist leaders are now conceding that the Covid vaccine is mostly a placebo.

Placebos have their own value, I suppose. I wanted to stand up yesterday and say to our lovely tourists: “The Wave Organ doesn’t work.” But that would have darkened their glittering experience of this lovely City by the Bay.