Bl. John Paul II to be named a saint?

There was big news yesterday about the author of the Theology of the Body audiences, Bl. John Paul II:

The Vatican doctors approve the miracle to make Wojtyla a saint

The medical council has recognized one healing as inexplicable If the theologians' OK were to arrive, John Paul would become a Saint only eight years after his death

Andrea Tornielli
Vatican City  

"A saint now!" The canonisation of Wojtyla is getting closer quickly and it could be celebrated next October. In fact, in the past few days, the medical council of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints has recognized as inexplicable one healing attributed to the blessed John Paul II. A supposed "miracle" that, if it is also approved by theologians and the cardinals (as it is very likely), will bring the Polish Pope, who died in 2005, the halo of sainthood in record time, just eight years after his death. ....

The full article from La Stampa here.

Beyond marriage? Other primal signs that benefit from The Theology of the Body

From the book:

The challenge of the Theology of the Body for theologians is that to speak of the re-reading of the body is not to work in the realm of metaphor. Metaphor has an honored place in religious language, but to speak of the ensouled body as a pre-given language is more primal than metaphor: the creation of the human being, by a God who graciously communicates in every means possible his desire for union with humanity, is its own sign that points to God, a pre-verbal language that is seen most clearly through the lens of Christian revelation. But as spiritual sign, there are other primal human experiences that benefit from the insights of the Theology of the Body: the act of giving birth, the reality of being limited (or impaired), and the process of physically dying. Indeed, if the ensouled body is natural and intentional sign, then these realities not only could have meaning, they do communicate meaning. The question is not whether they are meaningful, but rather, what do they mean? As “first language,” the sphere of the sign must be taken seriously as essential to understanding God's plan for the universe. John Paul reflects on this reality to evocative effect in the second half of the audiences: what it means to be man, woman, and called or not called to earthly marriage. But as spiritual sign, there are other primal human experiences that benefit from the insights of the Theology of the Body: the act of giving birth, the reality of being limited (or impaired), and the process of physically dying. Indeed, if the ensouled body is natural and intentional sign, then these realities not only could have meaning, they do communicate meaning. The question is not whether they are meaningful, but rather, what do they mean?
  ...

The text continues as a constructive project: what would it mean to interpret childbirth, impairment, and dying as primordial spiritual signs? How could the background and insights of the Theology of the Body literature help us to perceive the spiritual reality of these three experiences? My presumption is that these realities are not on the same level as John Paul's reflection on the sign (and sacrament) of marriage. But they are vocational realities, like marriage. They are calls to God. And I will argue that they were designed or shaped by God to draw us to Himself, through entering the depths of the law of the ekstasis. They express the reality of our call to receive and to give. As such, they are spiritual signs to ourselves and the world of God's continuously enticing love.

On Pope Benedict XVI's abdication: a different understanding of dying as sign

From the book, the beginning of the chapter on the sign of dying:

Pope Benedict XVI, Feb 2013

As I mentioned earlier, my father-in-law died a very long and disabling death, suffering mini-strokes that affected his balance, strength, and memory.  After years of peaks and valleys, he moved into his last days at home, with the help of hospice and his family.  My husband broke away from our family travels to fly home and be with his parents and siblings for the last five days.  There was prayer, waiting, brief talking, observation, prayer, sacramental anointing, more prayer, more waiting, steps away to take a brief walk, and more prayer.  Finally, his father died, and hours later, I asked my husband how he was.  He smiled wanly and shook his head in wonder, saying “That was the most intense retreat I have been on in my entire life.” 

In a less intense manner for most of us, there was a kind of long, observed dying of Pope John Paul II as well.  John Paul was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease years before his death in 2005.  Over the years, many commented on how he seemed to be dying in a very emphatically public fashion: traveling until near the end, meeting people, giving audiences, allowing the world to see him grow increasingly frail and shaky, a rather active Pope until close to the very end.  There were people who questioned that choice, commenting that he should step aside and allow a healthier man to serve in such a crucial leadership role.  But there seemed to be something very deliberate in this prayerful living out of his final days, a bodily ars moriendi for the world.  When he died in his apartment, many thousands were holding candles and praying in a multi-day vigil in Saint Peter’s Square—and I wouldn’t be surprised if many of them named it one of the more intense retreats of their lives.

As Pope Benedict surprised the world by resigning his Papal ministry (technically, abdication) due to the challenges of extreme old age, many have remembered that Pope John Paul II stayed in the Papal office until the very frail end, and some have lamented that we will not see that witness within Pope Benedict's papacy.  Personally, I respect the Pope's conscience on this decision, and think that as the human race ages into increasing length of life and mental frailty, this will become more common, if not the norm.  But Pope Benedict is teaching us, by example, a great deal about dying this week.  Renouncing a ministry he has served faithfully for years, for love of the Church, despite considerable old age, is a kind of dying.  Choosing to abdicate (no long goodbye, no last Easter, etc.) and retire to a cloistered setting to devote himself to study and prayer for the Church: that is a kind of dying.  Even making a decision--that is, to abdicate--that he knew would be hard on many of the faithful and almost scandalous to a few is also a kind of dying.  

In his few public statements since the announcement, he has underscored that the Church belongs to Christ and he has full trust that the Holy Spirit will guide us toward a fruitful path.  One of the questions animating this chapter on dying as sign is from A. Reimers: "How is the dying body given in love?"  Although it is clear that Pope Benedict XVI has no disease that is in itself mortal, it is also clear: he is dying.  In the largest sense we all are, but he is closer to it than most and is keenly aware of that.  The events of the past few days offer us a touching example of trust and humility and show us, in a different manner than John Paul II's death, how we live and die by giving ourselves to God.

Childbirth as hospitality: "The beginning of her ministry of hospitality was the hospitality of the womb."

As we observe the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade: a section from the second chapter on childbirth.

Hospitality. Many people are familiar with the story of Servant of God Dorothy Day (1897-1980), co-founder of the Catholic Worker, a radical movement dedicated to serving the needs of the homeless and vulnerable through depending on God’s providence.  As a young adult Dorothy-- a strong-willed young woman in love and living with a man named Forster Battingham, writing for socialist and communist papers in New York City, and joining marches for women’s suffrage and worker’s rights--found herself pregnant.  In fact, she was pregnant for the second time; she had an abortion of an earlier pregnancy by another man.  This pregnancy, wholly unexpected since she had thought she was barren after the earlier abortion, she was determined to bear--despite Forster’s objections and her own precarious financial situation.  While pregnant, she decided that the baby must be baptized in a faith she wished she could fully embrace herself.  She was attracted to Catholicism—sitting in the backs of churches full of people she was trying to stand in solidarity with, the working poor of New York City—but she hesitated to become Catholic, in significant part because it would mean the end of her relationship with Forster.  When recounting this story, Jim Forest, a friend of Dorothy Day as well as her biographer, said “And this birth, the birth of Tamar Teresa, was a turning point, the beginning of her ministry of hospitality.  It all began with the hospitality of the womb.”^[1]

The striking beauty of this insight--that the radical hospitality of the Catholic Worker began with the hospitality of the womb--is also a sad comment on modern realities.  More than any time in history, we can deny children the hospitality of the womb.  Much of the first trimester, in many clinics, is spent determining whether to extend the hospitality of the womb or not to any given child.  At this writing, a new noninvasive prenatal test for Down Syndrome has been developed, which detects Down Syndrome with accuracy at nine weeks gestation, and is planned to be available at relatively low costs in 2012.^[2]  While some will take the test, receive a “positive” for Down syndrome, and use the remaining months to prepare for a child with special needs, it is likely than most will choose to abort the child.^[3]  It is a new and fearsome control, and one that denies not only the dignity of the child, but also the spiritually formative powers of maternal hospitality: the crucible of otherness.

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[1] Jim Forest lecture, March 2002, Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota (Winona, MN).  Forest’s most recent biography of Dorothy Day is All Is Grace: A Biography Of Dorothy Day, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books 2011.

[2] Rupert Shepherd, “New Blood Test for Down Syndrome – During Early Pregnancy,” Medical News Today, http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/236256.php.

[3] The current abortion rate of women whose unborn children test positive for DS through amniocentesis and CVS is approximately over 90%.  See Amy Harmon, “Prenatal Test Puts Down Syndrome in Hard Focus,” The New York Times, May 9, 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/09/us/09down.html

Normalcy and Belonging

"But this natural desire to belong to God, and to belong to another person, becomes warped when a God-absent and fickle normalcy becomes the price of belonging."  --from Chapter 3

Family as model of Church and as sign

I was listening today to a National Public Radio interview with Joel Kotkin, who recently co-authored a study called The Rise of Post-Familialism: Humanity's Future?  I must say, it was a depressing hour.  Kotkin struck me as a statistician and was without bias, but the numbers, the impact, the reasons people gave for not only choosing to be childless but to be family-less: he said at minimum it should give people cause for pause.  Listen to the whole thing, but the upshot was: imagine a society with no aunts, no uncles, no siblings, no cousins, few if any kids to play with nearby, and littered with people who have been so damaged by their experience of family they choose to opt out.  We're all singles together, sort of.  And he points out: we don't need to imagine this: we can see it in Japan, in China, and increasingly in Europe.

The hour focused on the economic impact of such an impending reality, but I immediately thought of the theological impact.  If the family serves, even very imperfectly in this fallen world, as a sign that points to God's desired union with humanity, what happens when we lose yet another sign given us by God?  Do we lose a window, another opportunity to perceive God? 

The understanding of Church as God's Family is indeed part of the text:

Edith Stein, also known as St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, wrote in her Essays on Woman that every human being has a threefold vocation: a universal vocation as a beloved child of God; a gendered vocation as a son or daughter of God; and an individual vocation (which begins with a call to a state of life, and moves from there: marriage, or consecrated life, or deaconate/priesthood; then perhaps to mother or father, activist, teacher, or other possibilities).^[1]  We are all born to God’s family, and called to be family to each other.

The ancient call to be brothers and sisters to each other sounds like a wooden bell in a culture where families are, by definition, broken.  Many have written of the challenge of accepting the Fatherhood of God, in the experience of children with an abusive father.  Or the motherhood of Mary, given all the mixed messages we receive about the value of motherhood.  Part of the prophetism of the body, as John Paul sometimes called it,^[2] is the message of the spiritual value of fatherhood and motherhood.  How beautifully we have, body and soul, been created for this gift.  How we are called to participate in the mystery of creation, the intensity of labor, the joy of new life.  When we participate with our vocational call, the path is not made perfectly straight: but there is nothing ultimately to fear. 

One embodiment of the Church that explicitly names the call to be God’s family is the Church in Africa.  John Paul II’s Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Ecclesia in Africa notes the work of the African bishops over four weeks in 1989, and underlines with enthusiasm the synod’s call to image the Church as God’s family: a way of understanding Church and relationships which is culturally derived, but also scriptural and universal.  The Church as God’s family could be profoundly compatible with the purpose behind the images of Church asserted by the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium:   "By her relationship with Christ, the Church is a kind of sacrament or sign of intimate union with God, and of the unity of all mankind."^[3]

 Not only did the Synod speak of inculturation, but it also made use of it, taking the Church as God's Family as its guiding idea for the evangelization of Africa. The Synod Fathers acknowledged it as an expression of the Church's nature particularly appropriate for Africa. For this image emphasizes care for others, solidarity, warmth in human relationships, acceptance, dialogue and trust. The new evangelization will thus aim at building up the Church as Family, avoiding all ethnocentrism and excessive particularism, trying instead to encourage reconciliation and true communion…. "It is earnestly to be hoped that theologians in Africa will work out the theology of the Church as Family with all the riches contained in this concept, showing its complementarity with other images of the Church.”^[4]

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[1] Edith Stein, The Collected Works of Edith Stein, Vol II, Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, Discalced Carmelite, trans. Freda Mary Oben (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1987), ch. 2 (especially 57-59).

[2] Man and Woman He Created Them #104.

[3] Lumen Gentium 1.1, cited in Ecclesia in Africa #63.

[4] Ecclesia in Africa #63