From the cross, Jesus sees his mother and the beloved apostle, an important individual, but more importantly a prefigurement of loved people and especially all priests.

“The Second Vatican Council invites priests to see Mary as the perfect model of their existence,” the Pope added.

“The Curé d’Ars, who we think of this year especially, loved to repeat that after Jesus Christ gave us everything he could give, he wanted to make us heirs of what was most precious to him, his holy mother,” the Pope continued. “This applies to all Christians, but especially for priests.”

Thanks, JD, for the kind words.

Not that schooling is bad mind you, it just aint quite schooling no more. It is that thing we lovingly refer to as “self-esteem building” where the day used to begin with the Pledge of Allegiance but now starts with some collective notion that everybody is GRAND as long as the Federal Standards for the non-leaving behind of children are met.

It is the Dog Days of August my “cheer-spreading” friend, time for lemonade, a dip in the ocean or maybe gathering the second cut of hay on the off chance that it wasn’t dusted with mold by the relentless and unceasing deluge this year. The other day, I watched a Great Blue Heron perched on a vanishing boulder in the middle of the Housatonic River as it muddily reached the top of its banks and he had a look of helpless disappointment that reminded me of an honest man disembarking the train at the Washington D.C. station. Not that there are no honest men or woman in Washington, they’re just perched precariously on a boulder watching a flood of hustlers and mountebanks rush by.

I see there was a typo in my last comment, which I have corrected. The relevant sentence should read “In a manner of speaking, the more closely we conform ourselves to the figure of Christ, the more [not most] we shall resemble Mary.”

I can see you are looking for a more interesting answer that I can give; for this claim does not enter into questions of Co-Redemption (at least so far as I can see, or rather, at least not directly) but of the uniqueness of Christ as God and on the limits of our final communion with the divine, our sanctification, in which we would join the Communion of Saints itself and contemplate the face of God.

To be brief, saints imitate Christ; indeed the Christian life is formed on the form of Christ, as a sketch of a chair is formed on a chair itself, but is not in fact the chair. When Christ died on the cross, he literally died with our sins upon him and for those sins. When a martyr died, thereby becoming a saint, his death does not in itself accomplish anything; however as a witness (which is what “martyr” means), his death testifies, witnesses, in a word, signifies the death of Christ. He does not become Christ, but becomes merely a sign of him.

All Christians recognize this as a noble act. We respect it indeed, technically, we venerate him for it. Hence the great fittingness of the canonization of saints, where we offer our dearest veneration to those whose lives in a particular way signal Christ to us. This is distinct from, and infinitely less than, being Christ.

If we do not make this radical distinction, then we are confronted with a number of heretical conclusions: a) if I could become Christ rather than just Christ-like through martyrdom or any action, then that would mean I could redeem myself by my own will (Pelagianism); b) or we would reduce the life of Christ to strictly human actions, i.e. calling Christ a Saint rather than the very source and end of our sanctification (Arianism); and c) we would lose a means of appreciating the rich mediating reality of Sainthood, which connects all creation into one pageant performed in the love of God, and thus would fail to distinguish adequately between worship and veneration, would miss the singularity of Christ as well as the imitative goodness of the life of infused virtue. There’s a grave confusion that has been introduced into a lot of non-Catholic Christian theology because of its inability to make these distinctions; human life gets devalued by being inadequately venerated, while sometimes we see this tendency unfold in the lowering of what should be the worship of Christ to the mere veneration of Jesus as man (or “Saint”).

And so, my phrasing: clearly, we are called to take up our cross and follow Christ. But when we do that, what we resemble most closely is Mary, the one who was absolutely docile before the order of God’s love, who was united with God, not as the Son is with the Father, but as as a mother is with her child (He was in her, and she was of Him without Being him). And so our imitation of Christ makes us, at our best, to look spiritually like Mary (the nuances required here because of Mary’s Immaculate Conception and consequent Assumption are another day’s work, but not essential to clarifying my point).

I hope that helps.

I am not being snarky, but could you explain the above sentence…a blog if necessary and feel free to be as theological as you will and please go into the Co-Redemption (doctrine/dogma?) if necessary. I believe you just opened a thread.

Justin: Surely most of what you say gets to the very heart of my argument; it is not mere pedantry that requires me to point out, however, that Christ was not a Saint. If Christ is the Logos, who forms all things, then it must be the very defintion of a saint to conform to Him. If He were merely a saint, in imitating Christ we could be Christ, and if we could be Christ He would not have had to become incarnate and die for us, nor would there have been any humiliation in His having done so. But he did and there was. In a manner of speaking, the more closely we conform ourselves to the figure of Christ, the more we shall resemble Mary.

Thanks again.

-J

As our society shows time and time again, the prelude to severe persecution is the making of persons into unintelligible commodities; once we cease to read a person as a person we feel freer to read him as a menace worthy of extermination.

Scary, but true, considering the time we live in. Among other things, we are grimly prosecuting the War On The Unexpected. Any oddball doing something unintelligible is at least suspected of harboring ill intent, if not of being outright dangerous. Eccentricity is becoming out-of-bounds.

In my earlier comment, I kind of latched on to the general idea of eccentricity apart from the notion of saintliness, and perhaps I implied that eccentricity, in and of itself, was some sort of absolute good. Not so. The saints are not saintly because they are eccentric, but they are eccentric because they are saintly. Nonetheless, I think the general experience of the eccentric can illuminate the more rarefied experience of the saint, and make the saint more intelligible.

My argument and John Paul II’s actions are related. John Paul said on several occasions that one reason for the increase in canonizations was that our times were in especially desperate need of the examples of the saints; watching the decreasing intelligibility of sainthood and holiness unfold in his lifetime, John Paul did what he could to reverse it. By the nature of his office, he was uniquely positioned to counter that trend by canonizing more saints. Whether this had the desired effect is another question.

Needless to say, my essay does not indict John Paul II for failing to understand sainthood, but our culture more generally. I should also add that John Paul frequently explained the increase in canonizations also in terms of the particular barbarity of our age. Not only did we need saintly examples more than ever, but, because of the particular evils of the Twentieth Century, more saints were being “made” by being unmade. I haven’t bothered to count, but thinking back to his Pontificate, I recall that the vast majority of saints he canonized were martyrs; in this respect, John Paul was prophetic in his choices of canonization, for already we see that Christianity has entered a new age of martyrdom: outside the West, Catholic Nuns are being raped and killed, priests and missionaries persecuted and executed, and Christian communities “cleansed.” In the West, they are being harrassed and penalized by bureaucratic means, mocked in effigy in the mass media, and, as the essay emphasized, becoming generally unintelligible to most de-Christianized persons. As our society shows time and time again, the prelude to severe persecution is the making of persons into unintelligible commodities; once we cease to read a person as a person we feel freer to read him as a menace worthy of extermination. Good and evil alike are founded on exegesis, aren’t they?

Thanks to everyone for the kind comments. This is a favorite short essay of mine, and I’m glad it found sympathetic ears. If anyone else wishes to compare me to Chesterton or Sayers, please don’t hesitate to write!