Bishop Robert Barron on Pope Francis' "Amoris Laetitia"

In the Wedding: Scott Hahn Reflects on the Second Sunday in Ordinary Time

The following comes from Scott Hahn:

Readings:
Isaiah 62:1-5
Psalm 96:1-3, 7-10
1 Corinthians 12:4-11
John 2:1-12 (see also "’On the Hour’”)

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Think of these first weeks after Christmas as a season of "epiphanies." The Liturgy is showing us Who Jesus is and what He has revealed about our relationship with God.

Last week and the week before, the imagery was royal and filial - Jesus is the newborn king of the Jews who makes us co-heirs of Israel's promise, beloved children of God. Last week in the Liturgy we went to a Baptism.

This week we're at a wedding.

We're being shown another dimension of our relationship with God. If we're sons and daughters of God, it's because we've married into the family.

Have you ever wondered why the Bible begins and ends with a wedding - Adam and Eve's in the garden and the marriage supper of the Lamb (compare Genesis 2:23-24 and Revelation 19:9; 21:9; 22:17)?

Throughout the Bible, marriage is the symbol of the covenant relationship God desires with His chosen people. He is the Groom, humanity His beloved and sought-after bride. We see this reflected beautifully in today's First Reading.

When Israel breaks the covenant she is compared to an unfaithful spouse (see Jeremiah 2:20-36; 3:1-13). But God promises to take her back, to "espouse" her to Him forever in an everlasting covenant (see Hosea 2:18-22).

That's why in today's Gospel, Jesus performs His first public "sign" at a wedding feast.

Jesus is the divine Bridegroom (see John 3:29), calling us to His royal wedding feast (see Matthew 22:1-14). By His New Covenant, He will become "one flesh" with all humanity in the Church (see Ephesians 5:21-33). By our Baptism, each of us has been betrothed to Christ as a bride to a Husband (see 2 Corinthians 11:2).

The new wine that Jesus pours out at today's feast is the gift of the Holy Spirit given to His bride and body, as today's Epistle says. This is the "salvation" announced to the "families of nations" in today's Psalm. 

Vindication for the Broken

The following comes from the Catholic Exchange:

January 17, 2016
First Reading: Isaiah 62:1-5
http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/011716.cfm

Breaking up stings. It is not just the pain of loss, but the embarrassment of having a relationship that we wanted taken away. It is embarrassing to tell your friends that you were the one rejected or that you got fired or that you got the raw end of a deal. The embarrassing pain of rejection cannot easily be reversed. It feels like a blot on one’s character, a permanent mark. Yet to allow the pain to become permanent involves losing hope, rejecting new possibilities, forgetting who you really are. Unfortunately, many of us import these ways of thinking into our relationship with God. We know we are sinners and have made many mistakes and even after repenting and receiving His forgiveness, we can hold on to our failures as if they define us and hang on to our losses as if they show us our true character. We can even find ourselves in a place of refusing to let God love us because we feel ourselves to be unworthy. This dark struggle with coming to accept oneself, receive God’s love, and allow our troublesome past to be forgotten in the light of his presence is what redemption is all about.

A Broken People

In this Sunday’s first reading from Isaiah 62, we see the prophet announcing a message of great hope to a broken, exiled and disappointed people. He addresses the people as “Zion,” the nickname for the capital city, Jerusalem. The latter half of Isaiah relates to a period when the Jews were exiled from their homeland. The Babylonians smashed and destroyed the city of Jerusalem before they exiled the Jews. Zion, the desolate, broken city, is now the center of the vindication of God’s people, the mouthpiece of her cause. They have been undergoing the dark struggle of rejection. They thought they were God’s people, but their homes were destroyed, the Temple was in ruins and they have been sent away from the land the Lord promised to their father Abraham. They were thoroughly embarrassed by their enemies. The Babylonians deposed their king and poked out his eyes (2 Kgs 25:7). The people of God were ashamed, downcast, humiliated.

Vindication

The prophet speaks up to announce their vindication—the restoration of their honor, “her vindication goes forth as brightness” (Isa 62:1 RSV). Vindication is hard to explain. It often means to be exonerated, to be cleared of wrongdoing, but in this case, it means something different. It means to defend the right of God’s people to be God’s people. Even though the people of God had been embarrassed and humiliated by their enemies, even though they had been punished for their sins, they were still God’s people and he would come to their aid and defend them. He would avenge their honor and claim them for himself.

A Reunited Couple

What would their restoration look like? The formerly exiled people would come back to their land. They would be restored to their home. Their enemies, the Babylonians, would themselves be crushed and humiliated by foreign armies. The Jews would reclaim their rightful place as God’s people, blessed and honored in the land he set aside for them. No longer would outsiders be able to scoff at the Jews as “Forsaken” or “Desolate,” but rather, the Jewish people would now be called Hephzibah, which means “my delight is in her”—an actual name in 1 Kings 21:1. Also, their land would be calledBeulah, which means “married.” The forsaken, desolate, embarrassed people who seemed to be without hope, lost in exile in a foreign land, will be reunited with their original “spouse.” The break-up would be over and a reunion would be in order.

Freedom from Shame

Sin embarrasses us. When we sin and fall away from God, we can fixate on our own mistakes of judgment and weaknesses of character. It is embarrassing to realize that your desires have a hold on you. Yet when God restores us to relationship with himself through Baptism and Confession, he frees us from that embarrassment. His forgiveness blots our ours sins and restores us to a place of honor. The dishonor of having failed, fallen and damaged our relationship with him is undone by God’s mercy. He releases us not only from the guilt of having sinned, but from the attending shame. He truly sets us free from the humiliation of sin and gives us an honored place in his presence. His gracevindicates us and restores our honor.

Finding Freedom in Knowing God’s Love

Fairytales end with the famous trope: “…and they lived happily ever after.” Here Isaiah’s portrait of God’s restored relationship with his people is similar:

For as a young man marries a virgin,
so shall your sons marry you,
and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride,
so shall your God rejoice over you.

(Isa 62:5 RSV)

While Isaiah had used the marriage metaphor before to explain the wrath of God against his people in terms of the anger of a betrayed spouse (Isa 5:1-7), now he builds on the idea he had introduced earlier of God taking back the wife that he had only temporarily abandoned (Isa 54:1-7). He returns to her, woos her, marries her, and rejoices over her. Marriage brings an end to the shame of rejection, loneliness and the nagging question at the back of one’s mind, “Does anyone really love me?” Here, Godmarries his people (imaged as the Jews “marrying” Jerusalem), bringing an end to their shame and an assurance of his love and fidelity to them. He has not abandoned them. Similarly, when we come to realize that an all-powerful, omniscient, eternal deity would deign to care about us, love us, seek us, redeem us, and yes, even marry us, we should be overwhelmed. His great love for us vanquishes all of our self-doubts. It cleanses us of our shame and guilt and frees us from embarrassment. God means to redeem us and to liberate us from our past sins, and let us finally rest in his presence and in the knowledge of his great love for us.

A Great Chesterton Quote

"Whenever monks come back, marriages will come back."  G.K. Chesterton

Fr. Robert Barron: Marriage and the Room of Tears

The following comes from Word on Fire:

Just last week, I had the privilege of spending four hours in the Sistine Chapel with my Word on Fire team. Toward the end of our filming, the director of the Vatican Museums, who had accompanied us throughout the process, asked whether I wanted to see the “Room of Tears.” This is the little antechamber, just off of the Sistina, where the newly-elected Pope repairs in order to change into his white cassock. Understandably, tears begin to flow in that room, once the poor man realizes the weight of his office. 

Inside the small space, there were documents and other memorabilia, but what got my attention was a row of impressive albs, chasubles, and copes worn by various Popes across the years. I noticed the specially decorated cope of Pope Pius VI, who was one of the longest serving Pontiffs in history, reigning from 1775 to 1799. Pius was an outspoken opponent of the French Revolution and its bloody aftermath—and his forthrightness cost him dearly. French troops invaded Italy and demanded that the Pope renounce his claim to the Papal States. When he refused, he was arrested and imprisoned in a citadel in Valence, where he died six weeks later. In the room of tears, there was also a stole worn by Pius VI’s successor, Pius VII. This Pope Pius also ran afoul of the French, who, under Napoleon, invaded Italy in 1809 and took him prisoner. During his grim exile, he did manage to get off one of the greatest lines in Papal history. Evidently, Napoleon himself announced to the Pope that he was going to destroy the Church, to which Pius VII responded, “Oh my little man, you think you’re going to succeed in accomplishing what centuries of priests and bishops have tried and failed to do!”

Both popes find themselves, of course, in a long line of Church people persecuted by the avatars of the regnant culture. In the earliest centuries of the Church’s life, thousands—including Peter, Paul, Agnes, Cecelia, Clement, Felicity, Perpetua, Sebastian, Lawrence, and Cyprian—were brutally put to death by officials of the Roman Empire. In the fourth century, St. Ambrose was opposed by the emperor Theodosius; in the eleventh century, Pope Gregory VII locked horns with the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV; in the nineteenth century, Bismarck waged a Kulturkampf against the Catholic Church in Germany, and in the twentieth century, more martyrs gave their lives for the faith than in all the previous centuries combined. 

Now why am I rehearsing this rather sad history? In the wake of the United States Supreme Court decision regarding gay marriage, a not inconsiderable number of Catholics feel beleaguered and more than a little afraid. Their fear comes from the manner in which the decision was framed and justified. Since same-sex marriage is now recognized as a fundamental human right guaranteed by the Constitution, those who oppose it can only be characterized as bigots animated by an irrational prejudice. To be sure, Justice Kennedy and his colleagues assure us that those who have religious objections to same-sex marriage will be respected, but one wonders how such respect is congruent with the logic of the decision. Would one respect the owners of a business who refuse to hire black people as a matter of principle? Would not the government, in point of fact, be compelled to act against those owners? The proponents of gay marriage have rather brilliantly adopted the rhetoric of the civil rights movement, precisely so as to force this conclusion. And this is why my mentor, the late Francis Cardinal George, so often warned against the incursions of an increasingly aggressive secular state, which, he argued, will first force us off the public stage into privacy and then seek to criminalize those practices of ours that it deems unacceptable.

One reason that this has been rather shocking to American Catholics is that we have had, at least for the last century or so, a fairly benign relationship with the environing culture. Until around 1970, there was, throughout the society and across religious boundaries, a broad moral consensus in our country, especially in regard to sexual and family matters. This is one reason why, in the 1950’s, Archbishop Fulton Sheen could find such a wide and appreciative audience among Protestants and Jews, even as he laid out fundamentally Catholic perspectives on morality. But now that consensus has largely been shattered, and the Church finds itself opposed, not so much by other religious denominations, as it was in the 19^th century, but by the ideology of secularism and the self-defining individual—admirably expressed, by the way, in Justice Kennedy’s articulation of the majority position in the case under consideration. 

So what do we do? We continue to put forth our point of view winsomely, invitingly, and non-violently, loving our opponents and reaching out to those with whom we disagree. As St. John Paul II said, the Church always proposes, never imposes. And we take a deep breath, preparing for what could be some aggression from the secular society, but we take courage from a great cloud of witnesses who have gone before us. The Church has faced this sort of thing before—and we’re still standing.

Pope Benedict calls for a "reasoned defense of marriage as a natural institution"

Fr. Robert Barron comments on Marriage and Relationships

Vocation Crisis