By Father Robert Barron
On the first day of my vacation last week, I perused N.T. Wright’s latest book, a collection of essays on contemporary issues in light of the Bible. A point that Wright makes in a number of the articles is that modernity and Christianity propose fundamentally different meta-narratives in regard to the meaning and trajectory of history. Modernity — at least in its Western form — is predicated on the assumption that history came to its climax in the mid- to late-eighteenth century, with the definitive victory of empirical science in the epistemological arena and liberal democracy in the political arena.
Basic to this telling of the story is that modernity emerged victorious only after a long twilight struggle against the forces of obscurantism and tyranny and that the matrix for both of these negative states of affairs was none other than the Christian religion, which enforced a blind dogmatism on the one hand and an oppressive political arrangement on the other. For an extreme but very clear expression of this point of view, consider Diderot’s famous remark: “Men will not be free until the last king is strangled on the entrails of the last priest.”
For a more benign expression of the modern myth of origins, Wright suggests, take a dollar bill out of your wallet and turn it over. You will see a pyramid topped by a single human eye, and at the base of that structure, you will notice the motto novus ordo seclorum (the new order of the ages). This represents the founders’ extraordinary conviction that they were launching, not simply a new political arrangement, but an entirely new way of seeing the world.
Now Christianity proposes a completely different account of how history comes to a climax and what precisely constitutes the new order of the ages — which helps to explain why so many of modernity’s avatars, from Diderot to Christopher Hitchens, have specially targeted Christianity.
On the Christian reading, history reached its highpoint when a young first century Jewish rabbi, having been put to death on a brutal Roman instrument of torture, was raised from the dead through the power of the God of Israel.
The state-sponsored murder of Jesus, who had dared to speak and act in the name of Israel’s God, represented the world’s resistance to the Creator. It was the moment when cruelty, hatred, violence, and corruption — symbolized in the Bible as the watery chaos — spent itself on Jesus. The resurrection, therefore, showed forth the victory of the divine love over those dark powers. St. Paul can say, “I am certain that neither death nor life, neither angels nor principalities, nor any other creature can separate us from the love of God,” precisely because he lived on the far side of the resurrection.
This is also why Paul and so many of his Christian colleagues can speak of “new creation” and “a new heavens and a new earth.” For all of Paul’s spiritual descendants, therefore, the eighteenth century might indeed signify a leap forward in science and political arrangements, but it can be by no stretch of the imagination construed as the climax of history. I believe that N.T. Wright is correct when he maintains that this “battle of narratives” is far more crucial for the Church today than any of our particular arguments about sex and authority, but that’s an article for another day.
All of this was swimming in my mind when, on the evening of the first day of my vacation, I went to see the new cinematic iteration of the Hercules story, starring Dwayne Johnson (aka The Rock). Now don’t get me wrong: I don’t think this summer popcorn entertainment is trading in grand ideas. However, it does represent in its own surprising way a telling of the modern metanarrative.
In classical mythology, of course, Hercules is the son of Zeus, and his grand exploits are a function of his supernatural status. But in the current film, Hercules is an ordinary man around whom a legend has been cynically built, and his “mythic” opponents are frauds and deceptions. Hence Cerberus the three-headed dog is just three rather fierce wolves that have been leashed together; the many-headed Hydra is just a group of soldiers with a clever disguise; the centaurs are ordinary mounted warriors who have been misperceived, etc.
At the climax of the film, a “seer” tells Hercules that, though he is not divine, he will find sufficient strength to save the day if only he “believes in himself.” Moreover, as he utters his last “prediction,” the seer mutters with a shrug, “but what do I know?”
In a word, everything has been flattened out, rendered mundane, any reference to the properly supernatural expunged or explained away. And the political part of the modern myth is not forgotten, for the kings over whom Hercules triumphs are tyrants, who have been using religion to cover up their own criminal machinations.
Again, I don’t think the makers of “Hercules” have particularly high intellectual ambitions, but their film joins a long line of recent movies—“300,” “Agora,” the various reboots of “Star Trek” and “Clash of the Titans”—which tell the story of the triumph of “reason” over “mysticism” and the natural over the supernatural. If N.T. Wright is correct about the battle of narratives, we Christians should be sensitive to the many and very effective ways that the popular culture tends to out-narrate us.
(Father Robert Barron is the founder of the global ministry, Word on Fire, and the Rector/President of Mundelein Seminary. Learn more at www.WordonFire.org.)

Word On Fire
By Father Robert Barron
John Green’s novel “The Fault in Our Stars” has proven to be wildly popular among young adults. A one-time divinity school student and Christian minister, Green is not reluctant to explore the “big” questions, though he doesn’t claim to provide anything like definitive answers. In this, he both reflects and helps to shape the inchoate, eclectic spirituality that holds sway in the teen and 20-something set today.
The story is narrated by Hazel Grace Lancaster, a teenager suffering from a most likely terminal form of cancer. At her mother’s prompting, Hazel attends a support group for young cancer patients that takes place at the local Episcopal Church. The group is presided over by a well-meaning but nerdy youth minister who commences each meeting by rolling out a tapestry of Jesus displaying his Sacred Heart. “We are gathering, literally, in the heart of Jesus,” he eagerly tells the skeptical and desultory gaggle of teens. At one of these sessions, Hazel rises to share her utterly bleak, even nihilistic philosophy of life: “There will come a time when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. […] There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does.”
At one of these meetings, Hazel meets a handsome, charming cancer-survivor named Augustus Waters, and the two fall almost immediately in love. Though they both consider the support group fairly lame, there is no denying that they were brought together over the heart of Christ. Kind, encouraging, funny, and utterly devoted, Augustus (Gus) draws Hazel out of herself and lures her into a more active engagement with life. They both love a novel called “An Imperial Affliction,” written by a reclusive author named Peter Van Houten. After establishing e-mail contact with Van Houten, they arrange to fly to Amsterdam to commune with their literary hero. Just before the encounter, Gus says that he believes in God and in some sort of life after death; otherwise, he argues, “What is the point?” Still clinging to her bleak materialism, Hazel retorts, “What if there is no point?”
The next day, the young couple, filled with enthusiasm, comes to Van Houten’s home only to find that their hero is a depressed alcoholic who has no interest in talking to them. When they press him for answers about mysteries in his novel, he comments on the meaninglessness of life, effectively mirroring Hazel’s nihilism back to her. Just after this awful conversation, the two teenagers make their way to the attic where Anne Frank hid from the Nazis. In that room, evocative of both horrific, meaningless violence and real spiritual hope, Hazel and Gus passionately kiss for the first time. It is as though their love, which began in the heart of Jesus, asserted itself strongly even in the face of darkness.
But we are not allowed to dwell on this hopeful moment, for Gus reveals, just before they return home, that his cancer has reasserted itself and that his condition is terminal. Not long after they return, Gus dies, at the age of eighteen, and Hazel sinks into profound sadness: “Each minute,” she says, “is worse than the previous one.” Hazel just goes through the motions, pretending to find comfort, precisely for the sake of her family and friends. But some days after the funeral, she discovers that Augustus had written a note to her just before his death. It closes with the words, “Okay, Hazel Grace?”  To which the young woman responds, while gazing up into the sky, “Okay.”  With that word, the film ends.
The question that haunts the entire movie is how can there be meaning in the universe when two wonderful young kids are dying of cancer? A kind of answer can be found precisely where Hazel and Gus met, that is to say, in the sacred heart of Jesus. The central claim of Christianity is that God became one of us and that he shared our condition utterly, accepting even death, death on a cross. God entered into our suffering and thereby transformed it into a place of springs, a place of grace. I don’t think it is the least bit accidental that Waters (Gus’s last name) and Grace (Hazel’s middle name) met in the sacred heart of Christ and thereby, despite their shared suffering, managed to give life to one another. And is this why I think Hazel effectively repudiates her nihilism and materialism as she responds across the barrier of death to Gus’s “Okay.” I’m convinced that Hazel senses, by the end of the story, the central truth of Christian faith that real love is more powerful than death.
Is this film a satisfying presentation of Christianity? Hardly. But for those who are struggling to find their way to meaning and faith, it’s not an entirely bad place to start.
(Father Robert Barron is the founder of the global ministry, Word on Fire, and the Rector/President of Mundelein Seminary. He is the creator of the award winning documentary series, “Catholicism”  and “Catholicism:The New Evangelization.” Learn more at www.WordonFire.org.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
In a new book entitled, “Jesus of Nazareth,” famed German scripture-scholar, Gerhard Lohfink, describes how people in the gospels relate to Jesus in different ways. Not everyone was an apostle, not everyone was a disciple, and not everyone who contributed to Jesus’ cause even followed him. Different individuals had their own way of connecting to Jesus. Here’s how he puts it:
“We may say that the gospels, especially Mark, are aware of a great variety of forms of participation in Jesus’ cause. There were the Twelve. There was a broader circle of disciples. There were those who participated in Jesus’ life. There were localized, resident adherents who made their houses available. There were people who helped in particular situations, if only by offering a cup of water. Finally, there were the beneficiaries who profited from Jesus’ cause and for that reason did not speak against it.”
Lohfink then makes this observation: “These structural lines that run through the gospels are not accidental. …  In today’s church, because it is a shapeless mass, we can find all these forms expressed. It is a complex pattern, as complex as the human body. The openness of the gospels, the openness of Jesus must warn us against regarding people as lacking in faith if they are unable to adopt a disciple’s way of life or if it is something completely alien to them. In any event, Jesus never did.”
If what Lohfink says is true, this has implications as to how we should understand the church, both as it is conceived in the abstract and how it is understood practically within our parish structures. Simply put, the similarity to Jesus’ time is obvious. When we look at church life today, especially as we see it lived out concretely within parishes, it is obvious that it is made up of much more than only the core, committed congregation, namely, those who participate regularly in church life and accept (at least for the main part) the dogmatic and moral teachings their churches. The church also contains a wide variety of the less-engaged: people who practice occasionally, people who accept some of its teachings, guests who visit our churches, people who don’t explicitly commit but are sympathetic to the church and offer it various kinds of support, and, not least, people who link themselves to God in more-privatized ways, those who are spiritual but not religious. As Lohfink points out, these people were already around Jesus and “they were not unimportant” to his mission.
But we must be careful in how we understand this. This does not mean that there are tiers within discipleship, where some are called to a higher holiness and others to a lower one, as if the full gospel applies only to some. There were some centuries in church history where Christian spirituality suffered from exactly this misunderstanding, where it was common to think that monks, nuns, contemplatives, priests, and other such people were called to live the full gospel while others were exempt from the more demanding of Jesus’ invitations. No such exemptions. The church may never be divided into the perfect and less perfect, the better and the half-baked, full-participation and partial-participation. The full gospel applies to everyone, as does Jesus’ invitation to intimacy with him. Jesus doesn’t call people according to more or less.  Christian discipleship doesn’t ideally admit of levels, notches, layers, and different tiers of participation … but something akin to this does forever happen, analogous to what happens in a love relationship. Each individual chooses how deep he or she will go and some go deeper than others, though ideally everyone is meant to go its full depth.
And, given human history and human freedom, this is not surprising. There will always be a great variation in both depth and participation. Each of us has his or her own history of being graced and wounded, formed and deformed, and so we all come to adulthood with very different capacities to see, understand, love, accept love, and give ourselves over to someone or something beyond us. None of us is whole and none of us is fully mature. All of us are limited in what we can do. Hence, religiously, no one can be expected to respond to something that is completely outside of his or her sphere of possibility and so we will inevitably gather around Jesus in very different ways, depending upon our capacity to see and to give ourselves over. Jesus, it seemed, was okay with that.
In his view, there was no such category as a Cafeteria-disciple or a Disciple-light.  There shouldn’t be such categories either in our understanding. We are all around Jesus in our different ways and we must be careful not to judge each other, given that Donatism and her adopted children are forever on the prowl.
(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX.)

Millennial reflections
By Father Jeremy Tobin, O.Praem
There are thousands of children crossing the border, fleeing inhumane conditions in their home countries especially El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras as well as Mexico. This was not entirely unexpected by those who advocate for immigrants and who push for reform.
What is unusual is the age of these refugees, some very young. They tell of no hope back home. This was the last desperate attempt by their parents to try at least get some of the family to survive.
For years some Guatemalans that we serve told me there is no meaningful work in Guatemala.
The same could be said for much of Central America and Mexico. Much of this has its roots in American trade policy. There will be no substantial immigration reform until we rethink and redo our trade policies with Latin America. They insure vast importation of American grain and other goods which drive out local farms and businesses.
The governments of these countries and the wealthy benefit, but the people suffer. Some years back they were rioting in Mexico over the price of tortillas after NAFTA was fully felt in Mexico.  This woke up some people, but had little effect. Every time things go bad south of the border the only hope is migrate to “El Norte.” Nothing changes that. We have got to stop exploiting Latin America.
The Dignity Campaign, among other things, advocates a revision of trade policies. It emphasizes fair trade, not just free trade. It emphasizes the local producer over corporate interests. Unless conditions improve in Mexico and Central America there can be no real immigration reform. We need to hold hearings about the effects of CAFTA and NAFTA and collect evidence about the way those agreements displace people.
Now we have a humanitarian disaster. The Catholic bishops have asked the White House and Congress to protect unaccompanied children from other countries and respond to the root causes of poverty.
Bishop Eusebio Elizondo, Auxiliary Bishop of Seattle and head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) Committee on Migration, urged the government to protect these children from the dangers of human trafficking, smugglers, gangs and organized crime. The bishops stress this as a humanitarian issue and not one to be used to make political points.
Further, a delegation from the USCCB Committee on Migration visited Mexico and Central America to examine factors driving child migration to the United States. Bishop Elizondo said, “It is truly a humanitarian crisis which requires a comprehensive response and cooperation between the branches of the U.S. government. Young lives are at stake.”
A draft memo from Homeland Security said that 90,000 children could be arrested trying to illegally cross the Mexican border. This is more than three times the number of children apprehended last year. They declare this a “crisis.”
“People that live north have no idea what’s going on down here, and if they did, they would be appalled by what the government is letting happen,” said Chris Cabrera, vice president of the National Border Patrol Council in the Rio Grande Valley, a U.S. Border Patrol Workers Union. They are overwhelmed. Needed resources are lacking. There are not enough immigration court judges to do the work. These children have rights.
The word we need to incorporate into this discussion is ‘compassion.’ We need to treat these children and their families with compassion.
Relief agencies are reaching out, but they need more help. The Catholic Church is speaking up. We can do better. No church in the country has more Latino members than we do. It is imperative that every way we can, we raise consciences to this problem.
First, by reaching out to the children to ensure that they are treated in a fair, just and legal manner, and receive fair due process. Second, support efforts to reunite families. Third, lobby the government to provide legal relief. Fourth, to push for fair and just immigration reform that goes beyond what is called comprehensive.
The bills in the works today do not really address a meaningful path to citizenship. Workers are not fully protected. The underlying causes, like those mentioned in the beginning, are not addressed.
(Father Jeremy Tobin, O.Praem, lives at the Priory of St. Moses the Black, Jackson.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Today, for a number of reasons, we struggle to be generous and prodigal with God’s mercy.
As the number of people who attend church services continues to decline the temptation among many of our church leaders and ministers is to see this more as a pruning than as a tragedy and to respond by making God’s mercy less rather than more accessible. For example a seminary professor whom I know shares that after 40 years of teaching a course designed to prepare seminarians to administer the sacrament of penance today sometimes the first question that the seminarians ask is “When can I refuse absolution?” In effect, how scrupulous must I be in dispensing God’s mercy?
To their credit their motivation is mostly sincere, however misguided. They sincerely fear playing fast and loose with God’s grace, fearing that they might end up dispensing cheap grace.
Partly that’s a valid motive. Fear of playing fast and loose with God’s grace, coupled with concerns for truth, orthodoxy, proper public form and fear of scandal have their own legitimacy. Mercy needs always to be tempered by truth. But sometimes the motives driving our hesitancy are less noble and our anxiety about handing out cheap grace arises more out of timidity, fear, legalism and our desire, however unconscious, for power.
But even when mercy is withheld for the nobler of those reasons we’re still misguided, bad shepherds, out of tune with the God whom Jesus proclaimed. God’s mercy, as Jesus revealed it, embraces indiscriminately, the bad and the good, the undeserving and the deserving, the uninitiated and the initiated.
One of the truly startling insights Jesus gave us is that the mercy of God, like the light and warmth of the sun, cannot not go out to everyone. Consequently it’s always free, undeserved, unconditional, universal in embrace, and has a reach beyond all religion, custom, rubric, political correctness, mandatory program, ideology and even sin itself.
For our part then, especially those of us who are parents, ministers, teachers, catechists and elders, we must risk proclaiming the prodigal character of God’s mercy. We must not spend God’s mercy, as if it were ours to spend; dole out God’s forgiveness, as if it were a limited commodity; put conditions on God’s love, as if God were a petty tyrant or a political ideology; or cut off access to God, as if we were the keeper of the heavenly gates. We aren’t. If we tie God’s mercy to our own timidity and fear, we limit it to the size of our own minds.
It is interesting to note in the gospels how the apostles, well-meaning of course, often tried to keep certain people away from Jesus as if they weren’t worthy, as if they were an affront to his holiness or would somehow stain his purity. So they perennially tried to prevent children, prostitutes, tax collectors, known sinners and the uninitiated of all kinds from coming to Jesus. However, always Jesus over-ruled their attempts with words to this effect. “Let them come! I want them to come.”
Early on in my ministry I lived in a rectory with a saintly old priest. He was older than 80, nearly blind, but widely sought out and respected, especially as a confessor. One night, alone with him, I asked him, “If you had your priesthood to live over again, would you do anything differently?” From a man so full of integrity, I fully expected that there would be no regrets. So his answer surprised me. Yes, he did have a regret, a major one, he said: “If I had my priesthood to do over again, I would be easier on people the next time. I wouldn’t be so stingy with God’s mercy, with the sacraments, with forgiveness. I fear I’ve been too hard on people. They have pain enough without me and the church laying further burdens on them. I should have risked God’s mercy more!”
I was struck by this because, less than a year before, as I took my final exams in the seminary, one of the priests who examined me, gave me this warning: “Be careful,” he said, “don’t be soft. Only the truth sets people free. Risk truth over mercy.”
As I age, I am ever more inclined to the old priest’s advice. We need more to risk God’s mercy. The place of justice and truth should never be ignored, but we must risk letting the infinite, unbounded, unconditional, undeserved mercy of God flow free.
But, like the apostles, we well-intentioned persons are forever trying to keep certain individuals and groups away from God’s mercy as it is offered in word, sacrament and community. But God doesn’t want our protection. What God does want is for everyone, regardless of morality, orthodoxy, lack of preparation, age or culture, to come to the unlimited waters of divine mercy.
George Eliot once wrote: “When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.”
(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX.)

Word on Fire
By Father Robert Barron
I don’t know what possesses me to watch “Real Time With Bill Maher,” for Maher is, without a doubt, the most annoying anti-religionist on the scene today. Though his show is purportedly about politics, it almost invariably includes some attack on religion, especially Christianity. Just last week, his program included a brief conversation with Ralph Reed, the articulate gentleman who used to run the Christian Coalition and who is now a lobbyist and activist on behalf of faith-related causes.
For the first three or four minutes, Reed and Maher discussed the social science concerning children raised in stable vs. unstable families, and Reed was scoring quite a few points in favor of the traditional understanding of marriage. Sensing that he was making little headway, Maher decided to pull the religion card, and from that point on things went from bad to worse.
Maher said, “Now you’re a man of faith, which means someone who consciously suspends all critical thinking and accepts things on the basis of no evidence.” Astonishingly, Reed said, “yes,” at which point, I shouted at the TV screen: “No!” Then Maher said, “And I believe that you take everything in the Bible literally,” and Reed replied, “yes,” at which point I said, “Oh God, here we go again.”
Maher then did what I knew he would do: he pulled out a sheet of paper which included references to several of the more morally outrageous practices that the God of the Bible seems to approve of, including slavery. Pathetically, Reed tried to clear things up by distinguishing the chattel slavery of the American south from the slavery practiced in the classical world, which amounted to a kind of indentured servitude. “Oh I get it,” Maher responded, “God approves of the good kind of slavery.” The audience roared with laughter; Reed lowered his head; Maher smirked; and the cause of religion took still another step backward.
I would like, in very brief compass, to say something simple about each of the issues that Maher raised. Faith, rightly understood, does not involve any surrender of one’s critical intellectual powers, nor is it tantamount to the acceptance of things on the basis of no evidence. What Bill Maher characterizes as “faith” is nothing but superstition or credulity or intellectual irresponsibility. It is an ersatz “knowing” that falls short of the legitimate standards of reason. Real faith is not infra-rational but rather supra-rational, that is to say, not below reason but above reason and inclusive of it.
It is beyond reason precisely because it is a response to the God who has revealed himself, and God is, by definition, beyond our capacity to grasp, to see, fully to understand. It involves darkness to be sure, but the darkness that comes, not from an insufficiency of light, but from a surplus of light.
If you are ever tempted to agree with Bill Maher on the nature of faith, I would invite you to read any page of Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, John Henry Newman, C.S. Lewis or G.K. Chesterton and honestly ask yourself the question, “Does this sound like someone who has suspended his critical faculties?”
As for the Bible, the moment you say, as Ralph Reed did, that you take the entirety of the Scriptures literally, you are hopelessly vulnerable to the kind of critique that Bill Maher raises. In its marvelous statement on Biblical interpretation, Dei Verbum, Vatican II says that the Bible is the Word of God in the words of men. That laconic statement packs a punch, for it clarifies why the fundamentalist strategy of Scriptural interpretation is always dysfunctional.
God did not dictate the Scriptures word for word to people who received the message dumbly and automatically; rather, God spoke subtly and indirectly, precisely through human agents who employed distinctive literary techniques and who were conditioned by the cultures in which they found themselves and by the audiences they addressed.
Thus one of the most basic moves in Scriptural exegesis is the determination of the genre in which a given Biblical author was operating. Are we dealing with a song, a psalm, a history, a legend, a letter, a Gospel, a tall tale, an apocalypse? Therefore, to ask, “Do you take the Bible literally?” is about as helpful as asking, “Do you take the library literally?”
A further implication of Dei Verbum’s statement is that there is a distinction between, as William Placher put it, “what is in the Bible and what the Bible teaches.” There are lots of things that are indeed in the pages of the Scriptures but that are not essential to the overarching message of the Scriptures, things that were in the cultural milieu of the human authors but that are not ingredient in the revelation that God intends to offer.
A good example of this would be the references to slavery that Maher cited. The institution of slavery was taken for granted in most ancient cultures and therefore it is not surprising that Biblical authors would refer to it or even praise it, but attention to the great patterns and trajectories of the Bible as a whole reveals that the justification of slavery is not something that “the Bible teaches,” which is precisely why the fight against slavery in the western culture was led by people deeply shaped by the Scriptures.
Suffice it to say the kind of conversation that Bill Maher and Ralph Reed had is decidedly not the best way forward.
(Father Robert Barron is the founder of the global ministry, Word on Fire, and the Rector/President of Mundelein Seminary. He is the creator of the award winning documentary series, “Catholicism”  and the recently released documentary, “Catholicism:The New Evangelization.” Learn more at www.WordonFire.org))