If I had a nickel for every time I’ve received mail, messages, comments, or other communications over the past few years—often in response to something I’d written but not infrequently unsolicited and à propos of nothing more than the sender’s sense of pique or peeve—about some problem with “the synod” that “nobody is talking about” or some inconsequential thing Pope Francis said that “proves” he’s a Commie plant alien impostor and quite possibly a vegetarian, well, I mightn’t be retired but my car loan could be extinguished.
I don’t have anything to say about that except maybe that it’s hot out these days and tinfoil hats don’t breathe well, so maybe take ’em off?
Here’s a cool thing, instead.
A parish in town has begun perpetual adoration. It’s been in the works for a good, long while. Plans were in place way before Cardinal Cupich’s odd decision to restrict exposition of the Blessed Sacrament when the Eucharistic procession passes through the Archdiocese of Chicago on its way to the US bishops’ Eucharistic Congress next year. Pope Francis’s full-throated appeal for a recovery of adoration as a key element of Catholic piety came after the project was a fait accompli.
In other words, it’s just a thing a local parish is doing, and it is awesome.
I signed up for a nocturnal hour during the week. That’s the best decision I’ve made in a long time. I’ve been reading in Thomas à Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ during my hour, a book with which I hadn’t spent any real time since I was in high school. Exactly no one should be taking advice from the likes of me, let alone spiritual direction. Just believe me when I say it’s making me a little less terrible at being human.
So, there’s that.
It’s been pretty hot and muggy around these parts, but nowhere near as bad as it’s been in the parts of the US that are under the “heat dome” and sweating through double-digit stretches of days with triple-digit temperatures. We got a steady, soaking rain between Thursday and Friday morning. By the afternoon, things were dry and my daughter cut the grass.
It needs cutting again, but that’s what happens in the summer when it rains, isn’t it?
The weeds need whacking between the bricks in the driveway, too. I feel like I just did that. Maybe I really did, and maybe I didn’t. When one has the management of some concern, be it a home or a business or a state or a diocese or a whole country or a Church, the fact that one just dealt with something or other means little and the fact one feels one just dealt with it means nothing at all. If it needs doing again, it needs doing.
By the way, it’s really hot in Rome these days, too. It’s always unbearably hot and muggy in August, but friends and relatives report temperatures of 43° C—that’s close to 110° F—and air that’s mostly dead still, moving only slightly in the evenings.
Pope Francis once compared reforming the Roman curia to the work of cleaning the Sphinx with a toothbrush. His remark may have stung the curial officials to whom he made it, gathered as they were for Christmas greetings in the Apostolic Palace in 2017, if memory serves. It was a departure from his prepared text, and a riff on a line from the hard-boiled Xavier de Merode, who served the government of the Papal States in the waning days.
Merode was a talented fellow, with better than pretty good prospects for a career in the French army, who gave it up to train for priesthood and found his way into ecclesiastical service at Rome. Merode was the guy who posted the bull of excommunication the exiled Pius IX had issued for participants in the anti-clerical hijinks of Holy Week in 1849, when the so-called Roman Republic marked Good Friday with fireworks in St. Peter’s Square and held a raucous republican “victory” celebration in St. Peter’s Basilica on Easter Sunday.
Merode was also a friend of the people and even something of a progressive in politics, who oversaw major infrastructure projects in some pretty poor and neglected city neighborhoods. He didn’t like the French occupying army in the 1860s and never quite believed they were really in Rome to help the pope except insofar as doing so somehow served French interests. He was a clear-eyed fellow, and also a frank one. He said so, out loud and to the wrong people, who had him fired.
Merode went into retirement with Pope Pius IX, but in his retirement founded a school and continued to defend papal and ecclesiastical interests as best he could under the circumstances. He caught pneumonia and died in 1874, just a few months before he was slated to receive the red hat.
I may be wrong, but Pope Francis doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy who drops such references lightly or casually.
In any case, one lesson from the life Merode led is that there’s always something to do.
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BRAVO Chris!!!! Kudos to you on this brilliant article!!!!
I think it’s very poor form to mock those who take the time to express their ideas to you. It elevates you to a lofty stature that you might want to examine as the fall from great heights can be greatly incapacitating. That said, I applaud everything you’ve written after the second paragraph. And now, after tipping my tinfoil hat to you, I’ll move on.
Our country is obsessed with weed whacking and lawn mowing; be sure and leave the pollinators some flowering plants, please.
Mr. Altieri, You’ve set my tinfoil hat a’tingling.
Your piece was well-written… personalized, lazy, calm, leading to threat.
I had to look up ‘almoner.’ Silly me. The answer was right there in the word. Maybe that’s a clues to why a sphinx of stone needs cleaning by the likes of Francis fortified by bathroom sink accoutrements.
[How does a car loan ‘extinguish’?]
What’s a nickel?
The Imitation of Christ is all about love of God above all else. Am pretty sure its author is not all that keen on anyone reading it instead of losing themselves in love of God, which is the point of being in front of the Blessed Sacrament, and Holy Mass as well. Libraries and living-rooms make great reading rooms. When God is right there, front and center, and ignored for a book, phone, tablet, missal, or another person, you have the explanation for the collapse of the Church and the rise of “pastors” such as Francis.
As for the tinfoil crack, even paranoids have enemies and they are looking for help with those very real enemies. But go ahead and be tritely dismissive and insulting, they can handle it, accustomed as they are to such from most branch managers, err, “pastors”.
Hi Bob,
I too do some reading during my Holy Hour and worried about it being okay. My pastor assured me it was good if the (good) reading led me to God or if God led me to (good) reading. Part of being in His Presence is simply being in His Presence, another very special, important, divine person, in the presence of very special, important, divine person/s in the same room together. You do not even have to purposefully hold your breath. That will happen naturally.
I found a good section about ‘adoration’ at the CatholicCulture website: http://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=6558. This article also appeared in Homilitic and Pastoral Review (Ignatius Press) in 2005.
Noteworthy are some observations about how people ‘adore’ the presence of Christ during Mass. At the Our Father in the NO, people hold hands and gift each other peace. Upon entering the Church for Mass, they often greet each other, and they sometimes applaud the choir, the musicians, or even a great homily. Some people dress immodestly. Some habitually arrive late or leave early. Christ is present in the Tabernacle. Do we gesture to acknowledge HIM?
If the words of St. Thomas a Kempis (or any other saint) take our minds or hearts to Christ and lead us to new appreciation or adoration of Him, how is that wrong? If we need help in raising our minds and hearts to Christ, a prayer to the Blessed Virgin Mary, a reading from a saint’s life, prayer to our Guardian Angel, are all acceptable alternative and helpful methods to open our ears, heart and mind so we may adore His real and Eternal Presence more perfectly. God bless.
As a tin-foil hat wearer, wanting to discuss with him problems with the synod that no one is talking about, I did not feel offended in the least by Mr. Altieri’s first paragraph. I can use all the help I can get, even coming from the sighs of Carl Olson.
I recommend the article on adoration. God bless.
Holy reading is good and worthy IF it lifts the heart to contemplate God.
The problem is that this happens all too infrequently, Catholics constantly assured that being there is enough and all that matters, and so that is all which happens, them more seeing the religion as one of meeting minimum obligations, whether weekly Mass or weekly “adoration”, where little to no adoration/love actually is happening.
Most parishes visited when there is any adoration available at all, have the majority there with distracting glowing screens front and center, with a shrinking minority of magazine and book page flippers, and those scribbling away writing letters to kids/grandkids, and of those reading holy works, the majority find it far easier to read of others being holy than striving to become holy themselves.
All too often reading is an impediment rather than aid, as loving God is hard work while reading of love is easy and brings only fleeting, transient feel-goodism.