Things we need to have serious discussions about in the Church to start moving from reacting to problems to genuine healing:

1) Pastors need to stop being appointed as "Pastors pro tem" so that they can have the guarantee of stability and freedom to do what they see best🧵 2) the norm for diocesan priesthood ought to be living in community. Even just the minimum of 2 priests. For SO many reasons.

3) Priests need to be better formed in the Church's understanding of authority

4) Seminaries need to ramp up human formation. Emotional intelligence is

Benedict XVI's inaugural lecture in 1958 was like an earthquake when given. As the new chair of Fundamental and Dogmatic Theology, the young Ratzinger gave a lecture entitled "The God of Faith and the God of the Philosophers". It is still not translated in English. THREAD 1/8 There is much missed when people hear or read this lecture, at least in the English speaking context.

1) Dogmatic theology dealt at the time with theology "ad intra", while fundamental theology dealt exclusively with ecclesiology and the theology of revelation "ad extra" 2/8

Schleiermacher’s influence on the idea that “religion is sentiment” and contributing to the privatization of religion is alive and well!

cbc.ca/radio/quirks/d… and a massive dose of materialism. this whole idea that God is measured is ludicrous and proves nothing at all because the tools it uses to find God are self defeating: the tools and methods don’t match their object.

One thing we are trying differently this year in my parish: we have scrapped religious Ed as it exists. This is no judgment on the coordinator or catechists, but there is a real retention problem in the classroom model of religious Ed. Instead we are trying family catechesis 🧵 Family catechesis will be initially one stream only this year (I can only do so much) but eventually (next year?) it would be 2 streams: those needing help to catechize for confirmation and first communion (grade 2 for us) and everyone else

History is a vital theological category, one of the most important to re-emerge in 20th century theology.

Yet there is often a strong rejection of the category of history because it gets overemphasized in such a way that meaning, like history, changes. (Small 🧵, I promise!) If history determines meaning without being rooted in something greater, then indeed everything is relativized, and thus does become meaningless.

And there are many in the church who use history in this way to justify change for almost anything, especially in moral theology.

So i watched this. And found it so unhelpful.

In a way, this is what I attempted to address in this week’s @clericalpod (though admittedly I struggled to get there this week. Too many ideas floating still)

Anyways: thread 🧵

As with all things there are elements of truth. I’ve always been struck by how people have been drawn by Peterson’s Bible lectures. I’ve always been struck because i think “why do people find his take more fascinating than the Tradition’s?”

Whether you like it or not…

Jean Danielou’s chapter on the Magnalia Dei is enchanting. Essentially, that is his attempt: to re-enchant.

His major focus is around the wrath of God, but shows how the image is meant to demonstrate most clearly God’s transcendence and that the Cross reveals wrath IS love That is to say: there is a radicalness in biblical revelation that we need to submit to, that wrath means love cannot exist with sin, that God’s being is an intensity that sin cannot survive, and this becomes realized on the Cross when God enters enemy territory—Hell—to rescue us

The fact that we often see things only as “problems with policy” and yet simultaneously talk about how bureaucracy is death is a sign that we use forensic solutions for existential problems of the heart.

The issue isnt policy. Its that we lack heart for culture to change If its policy, then there is someone to blame and it isn’t me. But if we all share a responsibility for our brother and sister, then any issue that arises where they’re hurt means our culture lacks something and, as a member of a culture, the accountability starts with me

What intrigues me from the Office of Readings today is how much the question of Doctrine is always referred to as “interpretation of the Scriptures” for Cyril (and in general for the Fathers).

Ratzinger has pushed this question in various ways. It starts most explicitly 1/ In his book on Bonaventure’s Theology of History where tradition—The Fathers—and Scripture are seen as a unified whole as revelation. He says this needs to be investigated more and leaves it at that

In many essays he talks about how Doctrine exists to explain and… 2/

The worst thing in life is to not take the risk of love.

Too many refuse to risk. They think it virtuous that they have never argued when in reality it demonstrates that they have never loved. Because love wants more out of both parties.

We are in a desireless society. Modernity tricks us to think that because we have more options, we have more means to fulfill desire. It’s a lie

Desire is only fulfilled when it touches the fundamental experience of human life. The Experience behind & in all experiences. I am happiest when I am in relationship

The Church must rediscover the mustard seed principle. She must become small.

By this I dont mean that she lose members or even institutions.

Rather, she must encourage small local activities and groups outside the parish building, especially in the home. The days where all activity flowed from the parish building are over. They had a place because they had a cultural experience where localness mattered.

Modernity kills localness. Intensely. So we need to give people that place to rediscover communion with one another.

Once again, Ratzinger is the 🐐

(This is, I think, the 6th time I’m reading this essay in the last year) I have a crazy idea about how we structure parishes. I’m praying through it right now & letting it form, mould, & letting the Holy Spirit do His work

This right here is the theological basis. We do not experience the Church as a place, a history, where salvation is experienced

“What man cannot understand totally, he can do fully, and it is in doing it that he keeps living in him the consciousness of that reality still half obscure to him” -Maurice Blondel

Blondel is fighting the notion of “pure thought” in Christian tradition. 1/3 No word or phrasing, based on the analogy of being, can truly encompass the reality it is expressing. Thus our understanding is always partial.

We may not fully comprehend what “loving God” may mean, for example. But we can do it fully with the vigour of the saint 2/3

I had a rough go with ADHD meds in December. Got on a new, more flexible medication this week. But a few lessons I’ve been learning very quickly:

1) adhd meds aren’t magic. You still need to CHOOSE to clean, write, pray. They help focus on choices made, but not choices.

🧵 2) for a priest, flexibility in meds is key. 12 hour daily doses + stress of November and December didn’t do me a lot of good. Flexibility is what I need so that when things are stressful, I can just take 1 for work that needs focusing and deal with stress off meds.

I am moving away from the whole notion of baptism classes because I've found them pastorally very unfruitful.

Starting over next couple months to implement my idea: a non-practicing family has dinner or coffee or play date at park or something with a practicing family. 1/2

https://twitter.com/HannahBrockhaus/status/1481856253378838529

Notion is to have a real personal encounter, talk about baptism, talk about faith and its importance, and, most importantly, build friendships.

#1 reason I've heard from young couples why they don't go to church: they don't know anyone. This is an attempt to help that. 2/2

One last thing.

Yes, sinfulness is still at work in our lives. And sometimes it gets mixed up with really difficult things. We think “oh, it’s because of my sinfulness I did x” when sometimes it’s a whole mesh of things. This is part of the messiness of growing in holiness 🧵 The fact is, the messiness is learning to separate. And that takes time. And it’s amazing how patient God is with that. Because he does make even sin, though wrongly chosen, work towards good if we give it to him.

So we don’t need to think “oh I should be this way or that”…

I figured out the solution to all my writing problems, and it’s 100% what I tweeted earlier: write it out by hand first, then type it.

In about an hour I got 3.5 typed pages (eventually) of writing done by hand for my thesis. This method worked so well!! 1/3 I have large margins on the right for notes, footnotes, corrections, etc.

As I typed it out, I was able to notice some sentences not making sense, so I would go back, correct by hand, then put the corrected sentence in the word document. Plus typing it out gave me… 2/3

When we value institution-building over & against culture (because we too often believe culture can only be built by institution), we're going to do whatever we can to save the face of institution. It's why such face-saving is so often heartless: it's disconnected from culture (institution, is, in fact, good, but modernity has really forced it to be the bearer and creator of culture (homo-faber) rather than being rooted in the anthropological a priori of man as receiver and thus seeing institution flowing organically out of and the fruit of culture)

Sometimes prayer seems rough, distracted, too many cares and concerns to give the focus you want.

But, honestly, truly: is that not Christ revealing your heart to you? We so often run away from these things thinking them distractions when they are in fact a revelation Me: "ugh this is frustrating, this parish care is showing up when I'm trying to pray, this concern is showing up, I keep focusing on these other things"

Jesus: "I'm here too, you know. To show what needs to be worked on in your heart to love me more purely"

This is a @jdflynn & @canonlawyered appreciation tweet. I pray Mass for them once a month. We need what they’re doing. We need reform

We too often want just performative outrage because it means we don’t actually need to change

The basic truth, though, is: we all need to repent Why do we have outrage cycles? We do we get the way we do? Because it’s way easier than actually looking at our own heart.

The problem is, the Sermon on the Mount is precisely the invitation from Jesus to take our heart seriously. And this moment has helped me take my heart

The pandemic taught me how useless these means can be, and we haven’t actually asked ourselves the more fundamental question: why is it that our first instinct with a problem is a technological solution?

Facebook’s Next Target: The Religious Experience nytimes.com/2021/07/25/us/… Over the year I got more and more weary of using online means of communication for parish activity

And I think the underlying problem is the presumption that a) religion and social media exist to create community b) does social media actually do that in a real way?