Happy Feast of St. Thérèse of Lisieux

One of my favorite saints is St. Thérèse of Lisieux. She lived in an atmosphere of rigorous Christianity that could be very discouraging for those who don't have a strong disposition. However, she saw that it was her weakness that could actually draw her closer to Christ as she depended on him to make her into the saint she was to become.

One thing that I like that she said was when she was overwhelmed with the idea of climbing the difficult mountain of sanctity, she asked God to provide her an elevator to get to the top. She saw herself as a child, and so she would ask Jesus to pick her up because she could not reach him otherwise due to her small size.

Another message of hers that really speaks to me is rather than attempting to do great things for God, she says to do small things with great love. I think this is very important because when attempting great things, pride often gets in the way. If the focus is on the love rather than the impressiveness of the accomplishment, then humility has a chance.

So, today on her feast day, I ask for her intercession that God would help me accept the fact that I am weak and small. Rather than being concerned about how I stack-up compared to others, may I instead keep my eyes on Jesus so that his strength is manifest in my weakness.

Individualism and Subsidiarity

Today's email from my "Catechism in a Year" subscription is very interesting and worth commenting on.

What is more important, society or the individual?

In God's sight every individual matters in the first place as a person and only then as a social being.

Society can never be more important than the individual person. Men may never be means to a societal end. Nevertheless, social institutions such as the State and the family are necessary for the individual; they even correspond to his nature.

How can the individual be integrated into society in such a way that he nevertheless can develop freely?

The individual can develop freely in society if the "principle of subsidiarity" is observed.

The principle of subsidiarity, which was developed as part of Catholic Social Teaching, states: What individuals can accomplish by their own initiative and efforts should not be taken from them by a higher authority. A greater and higher social institution must not take over the duties of a subordinate organization and deprive it of its competence. Its purpose, rather, is to intervene in a subsidiary fashion (thus offering help) when individuals or smaller institutions find that a task is beyond them. (YOUCAT questions 322-323)

This principle of subsidiarity was a new thing to me when I became a Catholic, and I had not since heard anything really like it articulated outside of Catholic circles. Although, looking at the Wikipedia article on it, I see it was expressed by Alexis de Tocqueville and is a principle of the European Union. Even so, I don't hear it mentioned in the news or in the political discussions I hear in the secular media.

I'm fascinated by the fact that it doesn't seem to me to really fit modern liberal or conservative camps, nor is it exactly compatible with socialism or capitalism. It supports government aid to the poor when necessary, but prefers family and community based solutions. It is definitely against centralization because individuals tend to get lost as power gets concentrated at a regional, national, or international level. However, it is also against the tendency towards a hands-off approach to social problems that you can find in some conservative and capitalist schemes.

I'll leave it to the reader to decide what political and social systems best support subsidiarity, and would be interested in any comments you might have.

The Faith of an Atheist

I just finished reading His Master's Voice written by Stanislaw Lem in 1968. I want to comment on the faith that is expressed by the seemingly atheist main character at the end of the book, but to get there I will have to give some spoilers, so be prepared.

The book is written in the form of a memoir of a mathematician named Peter Hogarth, who worked on a U.S. government project called His Master's Voice (HMV). The purpose of HMV was to decode what appeared to be a message from an extra-terrestrial civilization that they referred to as “the Senders.” The book is a fascinating description of how scientists work and the politics of large, government-funded research projects. The book is also a fascinating reflection on the difficulties of communicating with a completely alien intelligence.

The message that HMV was trying to decode was discovered by accident. Some astronomers had been studying neutrino emissions and had recorded onto tapes a large amount of data from their neutrino detectors. When they had finished their observations, another party thought the data would be a good source for the generation of random numbers, and so used the tapes to generate tables of random numbers that could be published and sold. However, someone who bought these tables complained that the numbers repeated over a very long period, which led to the tapes being analyzed and it was found that the neutrino emissions were not random noise, but an extremely complex repeating pattern.

The HMV project assembled scientists and experts from a broad spectrum of disciplines and assembled them into several smaller groups, each attacking the decoding problem from a different angle. One group in the project operated under the assumption that the message included the description of the genome of the Senders, and this group was able to use part of the message to guide the synthesis of a mysterious gelatinous substance, which they nicknamed “frog eggs.” They subjected frog eggs to all kinds of tests, and indeed it had many unusual properties, but there was one property that caused great concerned, which they called the “TX effect”. Particles from a small nuclear reaction near a drop of frog eggs were teleported outside of the test chamber, even when the experiment was incased in lead. They realized that the TX effect could be used to teleport an atomic blast to another location at the speed of light, raising the concern that the military would want to use it to make a super weapon. Therefore they tried to keep the TX effect a secret while they performed tests to understand it better. Government representatives became suspicious and were going to bring in other scientists who were working on a parallel project studying the signal. Fortunately, right before the other scientists arrived, the testing revealed that the accuracy of the TX effect decreased as the energy of the blast increased, rendering it useless as a weapon.

Nonetheless, the attempt to hide the TX effect was exposed, resulting in some reorganization of the project, including the addition of some scientists from the parallel project. One of these scientists, Lerner, presented his view of the neutrino emissions and provided a rational, mathematically sound theory that the so called message was actually a completely natural phenomenon and that the Senders did not actually exist. According to Lerner, the Senders were merely the product of the other scientists’ wishful thinking.

The book ends with Hogarth's reflection on this theory, and his explanation of why he believed that the signal was indeed a message, and that it came from a benevolent and wise civilization. Hogarth had come to believe that if the human race had been sufficiently advanced, they would have been able to decode the whole message, and it would have included instructions on how to build a mechanism to communicate with the Senders. The TX effect of frog eggs was intended to enable interstellar communications, and was so designed that it could not be used as a weapon. Hogarth believed this property of frog eggs proved that the message came from an intelligent, benevolent, and wise source. They provided information that could be used by a sufficiently advanced civilization, but could not be used to harm that civilization.

Conversely, Hogarth said that he did not believe in a creator God because the universe this God supposedly provided does provide the means, via nuclear physics, for the human race to destroy itself. He thought that if there were a God, he would have protected the human race from such a dangerous power. (To properly appreciate Hogarth’s viewpoint, you must remember that the first half of the 20^th century had already seen two world wars, and the odds of a nuclear World War III, with the potential to destroy the human race, seemed very high in 1968.)

So, according to Hogarth, the Senders exist and are good because of the safety mechanism in frog eggs, but since the universe has no such safety mechanism, it could not be the product of an intelligent, benevolent creator.

I found it interesting that all of the scientists had no problem believing in the existence of the Senders simply because they discovered a neutrino emission that repeated a complex pattern. However, Lerner pointed out that nature contains complex patterns such as DNA, so there was no reason to believe that there wasn’t a natural explanation for the neutrino emissions. The only difference between the neutrino patterns and DNA patterns is that the neutrino patterns were newly discovered and came from a distant, unknown source.

Hogarth admits that he cannot prove his belief in the existence of the Senders in the face of Lerner’s skepticism, “Skepticism is like a microscope whose magnification is constantly increased: the sharp image that one begins with finally dissolves, because it is not possible to see ultimate things: their existence is only inferred.” Hogarth believes in the Senders, but not in God, not because there is more evidence for the existence of the Senders than there is for God, but because Hogarth likes the perceived morality of the Senders more than he does the perceived morality of God.

Here is my point: Christian faith is not the act of choosing to believe in God despite a lack of evidence or even evidence to the contrary. Rather, Christian faith is the act of interpreting the evidence in a particular way such that the existence of the creator God is acknowledged, and this God is trusted as good. The Christian looks at all of the evidence, not only in science, but in the reports of religious experience throughout history, including one’s own personal experience. The Christian sees a coherent picture of God emerge from the data taken from Jewish and Christian history and recognizes his own personal encounters with that same God. The Christian believes in the goodness of this God and so chooses to live his life in fellowship with God.

Many of the reasons why people believe or disbelieve a particular thing have nothing to do with rationality or evidence. Instead, it is a reaction to the implications of the truth or falsity of the thing. For example, if there is no God, then life has no ultimate meaning. If there is a God, then he may require me to live in a way I don’t want to live. I want to have sex with whoever I want, so I cannot believe in the Christian God who would say my behavior is wrong. Christianity is not cool, so I cannot believe. Islam or Zen is exotic and counter-cultural, so I’ll take up that religion. I feel lonely and unloved, but Christianity tells me God loves me and forgives me. I grew up in a Hindu, Christian, or Buddhist family, and I want to be faithful to the tradition of my parents.

In His Master’s Voice, Stanislaw Lem shows us that the scientific process is not automatic and it does not inevitably lead to the truth. Not only are there areas of knowledge that are unreachable via science alone, but humans do not reliably practice science due to politics, personalities, and prejudices. Therefore, I want to warn those who dismiss religion because it’s not scientific. You may be ignoring an important aspect of reality. Recognize the limits of your own knowledge and open your mind to the possibility that there is some truth to religious claims. It may lead you to discover a whole new dimension to life.

Taking Up Our Cross

I used to think that Catholics had an unhealthy attitude towards suffering, seeking it out and almost wallowing in it. The truth is, suffering is sometimes unavoidable. It is a part of human life. I have now come to believe that Catholics have the most healthy approach to suffering there is. When we encounter suffering, we unite it with the suffering of Jesus on the cross. The cross transcends time and space, touching every life that seeks union with God.

Why are we, too, supposed to accept suffering in our lives and thus "take up our cross" and thereby follow Jesus?

Christians should not seek suffering, but when they are confronted with unavoidable suffering, it can become meaningful for them if they unite their sufferings with the sufferings of Christ: "Christ ... suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps" (1 Pet 2:21).

Jesus said, "If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me" (Mk 8:34). Christians have the task of alleviating suffering in the world. Nevertheless, there will still be suffering. In faith we can accept our own suffering and share the suffering of others. In this way human suffering becomes united with the redeeming love of Christ and thus part of the divine power that changes the world for the better. (YOUCAT question 102)

The Whirlpool of Evil

I have subscribed to "Catechism in a Year", a daily email from Matthew Warner, and I had been posting some on Facebook that I thought would be of interest to people. Then I thought it would be better to put it on the blog, and then put the link on Facebook. That way it's available to more people.

How does God draw us out of the whirlpool of evil?

God does not just look on as man gradually destroys himself and the world around him through the chain reaction of sin. He sends us Jesus Christ, the Savior and Redeemer, who snatches us from the power of sin.

"No one can help me" - this maxim of human experience - is no longer accurate. Wherever man may have strayed by his sins, God the Father has sent his Son there. The consequence of sin is death (cf. Rom 6:23). Another consequence of sin, however, is the marvelous solidarity of God, who sends us Jesus as our friend and Savior. Therefore original sin is also called felix culpa (= happy fault): "O happy fault ... which gained for us so great a Redeemer!" (Liturgy of the Easter Vigil). (YOUCAT question 70)

The idea of felix culpa is to me an antidote to the idea I used to have that it is not fair that I should have to suffer for what Adam and Eve did. Rather, in response to what Adam and Eve did, God provided a Savior, by whom I am blessed.

Thomas Aquinas said that God only allowed evil because he would bring out of it a greater good. That greater good is the redemption Jesus obtained for us on the cross. As one of my favorite hymns says, "Amazing love, how can it be, that thou my God shouldst die for me."

Losing Hoctempus.com

I have decided to not renew Wordpress Premium and the hoctempus.com domain because I'm not active enough on this blog to warrant the fee. I will still keep the blog, and will try to post more, but starting in May, it will only be available through htempus.wordpress.com.

Remembering Fr. Matthew

When I started working at Cistercian Preparatory School in October 2007, Fr. Matthew's office was next door to mine. He did not teach anymore, but he did not want to retire, so he helped supervise in the lunchroom and the library.

Fr. Matthew called me his "neighbor", and almost every morning he would open his door and greet me when he saw me walk past his window. A couple of years ago he began to need help with his supervision duties, and I became one of his helpers, which meant that I heard a lot of stories. From his stories, I was able to piece together a picture of his life, and I was thinking I would try to write it down here, but then I saw his obituary, which covers most of what I know. Therefore I will just say a few things and then include the obituary.

The obituary says that Fr. Matthew was expelled from school for being a Catholic "ringleader." The story he told me was that the students were required to attend a speech given by an important Communist. The speech was full of slander against Cardinal Mindszenty, the leader of the Catholic Church in Hungary, so he and some other students walked out of the speech. For that they were expelled and not allowed to graduate from any school, and thus would be blocked from attending a university. Fr. Matthew told me he didn't care because he wanted to go into the seminary.

When he would tell me about being in the army, Fr. Matthew often used the motto, modus vivendi, which means "way of living." What he meant by it was that he had to find a way to survive among those who were radically and dangerously opposed to his beliefs. The officer he worked for knew he had earlier wanted to be a priest, but did not hold that against him. This officer told him that he should stick with him and thus be protected. Since Fr. Matthew didn't care about advancing his career in the army, he didn't get involved in the political intrigue that was common there, and instead just tried to do his job well. He worked as a clerk, handling a lot of classified documents, and developed a reputation of being reliable and dependable.

One morning Fr. Matthew asked me if I knew what famous event happened 60 years ago that day. It was March 5, and I had no idea. He told me that when he was a child, his family was too poor to own a radio. However, when the Communists took over, everyone got a "box". It only had one knob on it, used for turning it on, and it only picked up one radio station: the official Communist station. That day, 60 years ago, he turned on the box and heard funeral music. He knew someone important had died - it was Joseph Stalin.

Matthew G. Kovács

1929-2013

Born on February 19, 1929 in Hercegfalva (now Mezőfalva), Hungary as György Kovács, he lost his father as an infant, and was then brought up by his mother and stepfather, Mr. and Mrs. István Virágh. At the age of 11, at the initiative of the local pastor, he was sent to the Cistercian School in Baja, where he discerned and prepared to follow a vocation in the Cistercian Order.  After the Communist regime nationalized all Catholic schools, Fr. Matthew was expelled from the school together with other senior students, identified as Catholic “ringleaders,” and was not permitted to graduate from any school. He finished high school privately in the minor seminary of Győr. In August 1949, he entered the novitiate in the Cistercian Abbey of Zirc, experiencing the last ten months of the monastery’s existence before its suppression by the Communists. He took his first vows on June 22, 1950. After the suppression of the monastery, he hoped to continue his formation in the diocesan seminary of Székesfehérvár, but by decree of the Communist State, as a professed monk of Zirc he was rejected and was refused entrance to any institute of higher learning. The following five years he worked in factories, and then was drafted and served for more than two years in the Hungarian People’s Army. All along he persevered in his vocation, studying philosophy and theology in clandestine, private groups under the leadership of Fr. Lawrence ‘Sigmond, hoping that his call would eventually come to fruition.

After the defeat of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Fr. Lawrence, his acting major superior, suggested that he cross the poorly guarded Western border and emigrate to Austria. Before leaving, on November 30, 1956, Matthew was allowed to take his perpetual vows clandestinely. On December 3, he finally arrived to the Cistercian Abbey of Heiligenkreuz.

Fr. Matthew joined the other recent Cistercian refugees in Rome. In eight months he took exams and became eligible to be ordained a priest. He was ordained together with Fr. Pascal in the Abbey of Zwettl, Austria on July 21, 1957. While finishing his theological studies, he worked as chaplain in several Hungarian refugee camps in Austria and at the same time studied at the University of Graz.

On July 1, 1959 Fr. Matthew arrived to the newly constructed monastery of Dallas. From September 1959 until the summer of 1962 he lived in Ft. Worth, at the Mother House of the Sisters of Saint Mary of Namur (Our Lady of Victory), obtaining a Master’s degree in German Language and Literature at Texas Christian University.

From 1963 to 2006 Fr. Matthew taught German and Latin in the Cistercian Preparatory School. He served as assistant treasurer from 1963 to 1980. He regularly assisted in various pastoral assignments, including daily masses and weekly confessions at Holy Family Catholic church in Irving for many years. He often said the monthly Hungarian masses at the Cistercian Abbey.

By his untiring daily participation in the Divine Office, and his faithful and prompt priestly ministry, Fr. Matthew left behind a beautiful example of religious life. At every graduation Cistercian seniors recalled his cheerfulness, which turned the first year of Latin into a happy and memorable experience. He died unexpectedly but very peacefully in his sleep on July 12, 2013 at the age of 84.

The Rationality of Theology

The New Atheists often say that faith, religion, and theology are irrational because they are based on divine revelation rather than data obtained using the scientific method. In the next article of the Summa (I, 1, 2), St. Thomas addresses this very subject, asking the question, "is sacred doctrine (theology) a science?"

Thomas uses a broader definition of science than is used today. By science, he refers to a disciplined study of a subject using rational processes, whereas modern science implies study of the natural world, and uses more specific methods such as experimentation. For example, Thomas includes among the sciences mathematics, geometry, and music. Therefore, I do not maintain that Aquinas makes a case for theology being a science in the modern sense, but that he does make the case that it is a rational discipline. Even so, in my post, I will compare theology to examples from modern science because modern science is widely accepted today as a rational discipline.

St. Thomas begins his argument in the body of article 2 by pointing out there are two kinds of sciences practiced in his day. Those that begin from first principles known "by the natural light of intelligence," and those that build on principles given by "higher" sciences. Examples of the first kind of science are mathematics and geometry. Mathematicians and geometers in Thomas' day did not base their work on the results of any other discipline, but began with definitions and principles obvious and agreeable to all. Deductive reasoning would then be used to derive knowledge based on these principles. Today's study of Euclidian geometry, which is commonly taught in High School, follows the same pattern. The geometry student begins with definitions and postulates that can be agreed upon based on common sense. Then deductive reasoning is used to prove theorems based on the definitions and postulates. The same process is used to prove more theorems based on previously proved theorems. Using this process, an elaborate set of theorems can be produced.

The second kind of science that Thomas describes begins with knowledge gained from a "higher" science. By "higher", Thomas means a science that is closer to first principles. For example, the study of perspective in art began in the Middle Ages, and it made use of knowledge gained from the study of geometry. However, an artist did not have to start at the first principles of geometry and derive theorems about parallel lines before he could use them in his painting. Instead, he could take the results of the work of the geometer as his starting point. Similarly, a person building a pipe organ does not have to derive methods of manipulating ratios in order to determine the length of his pipes. He can make use of the methods developed by mathematicians.

We see this kind of layering of knowledge much more today because the body of knowledge is so much greater now than it was then. Physics makes use of mathematics; chemistry uses physics; biology uses chemistry; and medicine uses biology. A doctor does not start at the first principles of mathematics and work his way up to cancer treatment. He surely had some math and physics as an undergrad, but soon put much more focus on chemistry and biology in his education. In his day-to-day practice, he doesn't do the work of a chemist, but makes use of the work of chemists in the medications he prescribes.

So, St. Thomas says that theology is like the second kind of these sciences, except that rather than being based on the results of another human science, it is based on divine revelation. In other words, God provides the basic body of knowledge that the theologian works with, and then the theologian uses rational thought processes to work with that "data". A good theologian carefully examines the sources of revelation to make sure he has access to true revelation, and that it has been acurately received, passed along or recorded. He then must use rational methods of interpretation, including maintaining consistancy with other sources of revelation, in order to apply the meaning of it to a given situation.

Theology is very similar to other fields of study. It resembles fields in the humanities such as philosophy, history, anthropology, and psychology more than fields such as physics and chemistry because the subject of theology is a divine person, and the humanities deal with people where "hard sciences" like physics deal with things that can be experimented upon.

Now the crux for theology, then, is divine revelation. If there is not a God, then there can be no divine revelation, so that would invalidate the data on which theology is based. If there is a God, and he has revealed himself in the sources that theology studies, then it is just as sound of a study as any other. Indeed, it is the highest field of study because it concerns the highest subject: the Creator of the Universe. All other fields deal with things in the creation, rather than the Creator.

Here is an analogy. Lets say that an astronomer using a radio telescope picks up signals that he believes are coming from broadcasts from another planet around a star many light years away. He teams up with a linguist and other experts to decode and interpret the signals. If he is wrong, and he is only picking up radiation from some natural source, than he and his colleagues are wasting their time. However, if he is right, and he has found the communications of other intelligent life in the galaxy, he is doing some of the most important scientific work on the planet. Either way, his work is rational. There is nothing irrational about the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy, and he is using completely rational methods in his study.

Although there are atheists who think they have explained everything, and there is no need for God, their explanations do nothing to eliminate the possibility of God. And since most humans who have ever lived believe there is a God, and many claim to have heard from God in some form or another, then it is not unreasonable to study these claims. This is the conclusion I came to at age 16, and within a year, I had found convincing reasons to believe the Bible is a record of divine revelation. From there I learned about Jesus Christ as the Word of God who taking on human flesh and living and dying 2000 years ago gave us the fullness of divine revelation. It took over 25 more years of experience and study to come to understand the important and unique role the Catholic Church has in transmitting and interpretting the revelation that came through Christ. So, I'm really just a beginner in Theology. Although I've learned a lot in the last 30 years, I feel like most of my time has been spent on the front steps of the Cathedral, and I've only recently walked through the doors and have begun to admire the beautiful artwork that covers the walls and ceiling.