My Response to 'Save Flint Dollar'

It has been several months since this has occurred, after such time I believe that I can discuss this with rational thought and loving attitude.

The school in question

At the Catholic High School, Mount de Sales Academy(MDS), many people in association with the school
(whether student, alum, or teacher) reacted strongly to the dismissal of one Flint Dollar, a band teacher.  This was due to the fact that he publicly announced via social media that he was going to 'marry' his boyfriend.

Because so many have asked my thoughts over the situation (most know of my B.A. in Sacred Theology). As stated above I've waited to respond because everyone has been high on being emotional and thus irrational.  I will endeavor to explain as best I can.  Bear in mind "what I have now said in regard to abstaining from wanton looks should be carefully observed, with due love for the persons and hatred of the sin, in observing, forbidding, reporting, reproving, and punishing of all other faults." (St Augustine, Letter 211)

An article, the link of which is found below, said that Mount de Sales' employment policy states that the school does not discriminate based on sexual orientation. Mr. Dollar stated in the article that MDS was aware of his orientation when they hired him, so in this way, MDS upheld this anti-discrimination policy that deals with employment.  The school would have violated their policy if they did nor hire him solely based on his orientation.

At this point I would like to point out a distinction between sexual orientation and sexual actions with regard to employment and termination of employment. As stated previously, MDS adhered to the anti-discriminatory policy in that the school hired him with full knowledge of his orientation. If one studies the clause closely, no where does it say that MDS does not reserve the right to fire an employee based on actions of a sexual nature that the school does not approve of (i.e., Mr. Dollar announcing publicly that he was 'marrying' his partner). If MDS fired Mr. Dollar for the reported reason, then MDS is acting in accordance with Catholic teaching.  MDS hired Mr. Dollar as a homosexual individual, but chose to terminate his employment based on Mr. Dollar's decision to publicly announce his upcoming marriage to his partner.

Allow me a moment to veer off into a theological tract. In Declaration on Certain Questions Concerning Sexual Ethics, it states that "[N]o pastoral method can be employed which would give moral justification to these acts on the grounds that they would be consonant with the condition of such people. For according to the objective moral order, homosexual relations are acts which lack an essential and indispensable finality. In Sacred Scripture they are condemned as a serious depravity and even presented as the sad consequence of rejecting God. (Rom 1:24-27) This judgment of Scripture does not of course permit us to conclude that all those who suffer from this anomaly are personally responsible for it, but it does attest to the fact that homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered and can in no case be approved of."

Essentially, it is important to realize that homosexuals do not have complete, voluntary control over their desires. Of course, they have control over their actions, as do heterosexuals. After a person has been conditioned to homosexual responses, it is impossible to simply wish away the desires, just as it is impossible for an alcoholic to wish away his desire to be drunk. Homosexuals also do not make a conscious choice to have homosexual tendencies. It should be noted that heterosexuals do not have complete control over their desires either.  We ALL suffer from temptation, it is when we act on those temptations that we come way to sin.

It is likely that the same decision, in regards to the school's decision, would have been made if a heterosexual teacher publicly announced he or she was living with his girlfriend or her boyfriend because of the nature of the relationship.  As Catholics, we must stand up for our religious beliefs while being compassionate towards those of orientations different from ourselves. That does not mean that we abandon our faith because it makes other people uncomfortable, nor does it mean that we hate and damn people because we disagree with them.

For further reading on the Mother Church's teachings I highly recommend Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons.

May God grant us pardon and peace, and most of all, reconciliation with one another.

I will end with this thought:  Love, in it's purest form, is an act of the will in which we will the good of the other for the sake of the other.  Sin cannot be ignored because what good does that do for people? "When the good are overly merciful to the bad, the  good eventually become the bad."

This post is in relation to this news article.

Post Script: Now will you people stop asking me!!!!

The Development of the Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception

The feast of the Immaculate Conception of Mary was celebrated on the 8th of December.

From the very moment of her conception she was free from the all stain of original sin and in a state of grace. Immaculate means 'without stain'. But she still suffered from the effects of sin – sorrow, illness, death.

How is this possible?

Well, Mary received grace same as us via Christ's death on the cross; His death is an eternal event meaning that the effects of it reach back in time as well as forward. Same as with the Sacrifice of the Mass it cannot be confine to time. God granted her freedom from sin to make her a fitting mother for His Son.

If was officially declared on 8 December 1854 by Pope Pius IX. So does that mean that the Pope just thought of it one day and said to himself 'that's a good idea'?

No it does not.

Let's first start with the Bible (I'm using the Dewey Rheims translation); Genesis 3:15 “I will put enmities between thee and the woman, and thy seed and her seed: she/he shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel.”

There is a parallel between Eve and Mary; If there is to be complete enmity between the woman and the serpent, then she never should have been in any way subject to him even briefly. This implies an Immaculate conception.

Luke 1:28 “And the angel being come in, said unto her: Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.”

An angel declared her 'full of grace'; it indicates an unique abundance of grace in her person.

There are a lot angels visiting people in the Bible, but Mary is the only one greeted by 'Full of Grace”

As I've said before the doctrine was not invented in 1854, it was defined or declared. That only happens for two reasons; firstly being that there is a controversy that needs to be cleared up or secondly when the Magisterium believes that the faithful can be helped by a particular emphasis on an already preexisting belief.

The declaration was prompted by the latter of the two. Pius IX had a great devotion to Mary and hoped that the declaration would inspire others in their devotion to Mary.

Let's us now turn to the Fathers of the Church. Now who exactly are these guys? Simple answer: they are men who lived before 750 and are called as such because of their leadership in the early Church, especially in defending, expounding, and developing Catholic doctrines. For the first two centuries, most of these men were bishops, although in later years certain priests and deacons were also recognized as Fathers. They were closes to the sources than we are today.

Many of them make very blatant statements about Mary's immaculate nature.

• St. Justine Martyr (d.165) the Church’s first major lay apologist, remarks on Mary's obedience to God (her willingness to do His will) in opposite to Eve's disobedience.
• St. Irenaenus (2^nd century) Bishop in Gaul, expands on that saying that Mary's obedience undid what Eve's disobedience brought to man.
• Origen (184/5-253/4) calls her worthy of God, immaculate of the immaculate.
• The Syrian Fathers wouldn't shut up (as it were) about her sinlessness.

The Syrians were really the first to have a feast day commemorating this, since about the 5^th century. It becomes wide spread by the 7^th century in the East and by the 8^th it is celebrated in parts of the Western Church.

The feast day became very deeply rooted in Anglo-Saxon monasteries by the 11^th century. We even find an old calendar in Winchester dating 1030 with 'Conceptio S'ce S. Mariae'. The monks celebrated it and it was encouraged to the devotion of the individual.

But then, cue ominous music please, the Normans arrived.

For the Normans the feast appeared to be very English, too English; they considered it a product a product of insular simplicity and ignorance (the celebration, not the idea behind it mind you). Thus we can thank the Normans for stopping public devotion, but it lived on in the devotion of the individual. Thank you Normans (sarcasm in abundance here).

It was reestablished, however, by Anselm the Younger, nephew of St. Anselm (Yeah, that's not confusing).

It is after this, going into the 12^th century, that we begin to see a confusion over the idea of the Immaculate Conception.

St Bernard of Clairvaux protested what he perceived to be a new way of honoring Mary and reproved the canons (those are people of a religious order who are attached to a particular church) of the Cathedral of Lyons for acting without the authority of Rome when they started celebrating it in 1240. He saw it as a foreign to the traditions of the Church, but here's the kicker – he didn't know that the Church in Greece and Syria had been celebrating the feast with a rich tradition regarding the sinlessness of Mary. (There's no phone system, email, facebook, twitter, or texting)

He was not wrong in wanting a careful inquiry into the reason for observing the feast.

Even St Thomas Aquinas, one of the foremost philosophers and theologians of the Medieval Church, had difficulty grasping the concept. As seen in the Summa Theologica (III.27:2,a2), mostly along the lines of Mary's redemption, how could she be redeemed if she had not sinned.

For some reason, the major philosophers and theologians at the time were stuck on two possibilities:

One, the sanctification of Mary happened before the fusion of the soul into the body; or

Two, the sanctification happened after the union of soul and body.

None of them ever truly considered the moment between – the sanctification of the soul at the moment of conception. The idea of both the sanctification and the fusion of the soul could be simultaneous in time.

This is a good example of how science and faith work together.  When conception was better defined by science it aided in a clearer understanding of the doctrine.

Of course there were some issues, because people always have issues.

St Paul in Romans (5:12) states that all men have sinned via Adam. That would include Mary, right? By this declaration, St. Paul is trying to explain that all men need redemption via Christ. Mary is no exception to this rule as stated before.

Then the silence of the Church Fathers. Well, as we have seen the Church Fathers were not silent, just the ones that most people in the West were reading. There was limited access to those sources and some were lost to them, but not to us today.

It was Blessed John Duns Scotus (d. 1308)(a Franisican) who provided the answer of the simultaneous sanctification and conception. He stated that God had sanctified Mary at the moment of her conception in His foreknowledge that the Blessed Virgin would consent to bear Christ. In other words, she too had been redeemed—her redemption had simply been accomplished at the moment of her conception, rather than (as with all other Christians) in baptism. It was essentially Scotus who laid the foundation of the doctrine that we see to day and Pius IX referenced him when declaring the feast.

After Scotus the doctrine became commonplace at all the major universities and the feast was fast spreading. Most religious orders took up the celebration, except the Dominicans – why? They're sticking with Aquinas.

In 1439 the University of Paris asked the Council of Basle for a dogmatic definition. After 2 years the bishops declared the Immaculate Conception : a doctrine which was pious, constant with Catholic worship, faith, right reason and Holy Scripture and no one could declare contrary to this.

Problem solved, right? 

But wait – this is 1441. The problem? Council of Basle was not an ecumenical council, meaning that anything it declared only effected the area that those bishops lead, not for the Church as a whole. So disputes and discussions continued.

In 1661 P. Alexander VII promulgated in 'Sollicitudo omnium Ecclesiarum' the true sense of the word 'conceptio', and that the immunity of Mary from original sin in the first moment of the creation of her soul and its formation into the body was the subject of the feast. This was when it was finally universally accepted within the Church. So by the time Pius IX promulgated the dogma on 8 December 1854 there was a ring of 'about time'.

In the decades that followed an octave was attached to the feast then became a holy day of obligation, then was allowed a vigil. All of which were in practice in local tradition in many areas.

Our Lady of Immaculate Conception was decreed By the First Council of Baltimore (1846) as the principal Patron of the US.

(This is a rough transcript of a lecture I gave to the RCIA class at my church for the Feast Day.)

A Morbid Connection to Heaven:

An Investigation of Relics & The Modern Need for Them

Chapter Two: Relics Today and Their Defense

 

In the movie Singing in the Rain there is a moment near the beginning in which fan-girls start attacking the lead male character and rip his clothing in an attempt to have a piece of him to keep as a memento. It is interesting to note that a culture filled with autograph hounds and with those who become star struck whenever a celebrity comes by can consider the Catholic veneration of relics a joke. A lovely dish is just a lovely dish, but one owned by your grandmother is a special treasure. A pocket-watch gotten at a pawn stop is just a time piece, but one given to you by a grandfather is one you dread losing and would mourn if that were to happen. People are willing to pay a ridiculous amount of money for an article of clothing worn by some famous person, faint at Beatles concerts, and engage in riotous behavior to get their hands on an article of clothing or some other item belonging to a new pop icon; but when a relic of Saint Catherine is mentioned, people snicker.

Especially today, in a world filled with atheists and misinformed Catholics, the snickering gets louder. In the year 2009, some of the relics of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux went on tour around England, even going to a correctional facility, after visiting forty other countries. Many English pilgrims came to see and touch the remains of the French saint. Simon Jenkins, a self proclaimed “Dawkins-ite”, wrote an article concerning the saint's visit to his country. Jenkins finds the whole event rather distasteful, crediting the frenzy that the faithful display towards the relics as “brainwashing of unreason.” But Jenkins decided to be gracious towards the less rational of his fellow man and take up the mantle of courtesy, the same he “would show a Hindu elephant worshiper or a Polynesian medicine man.” Such a mantle is hard to see in the rest of his article, which consists of a rather snarky description of how the relics came across the English channel and what the faithful would do once in reach of the relics. He blatantly states that relics are nothing more then “jujus, [or] religious placebos for the credulous classes” while most rational people “find them ghoulish.”

One of the members of the committee which arranged for Saint Thérèse to visit England, Father Stephen Wang, quickly responded to Jenkin's article. Wang quickly goes into an explanation of why so many come to the relics. People “come to pray; to find inspiration in the life of an extraordinary woman; to deepen their sense of community and belong; to connect with a person they love”; basically people are coming because they are seeking spiritual help. Wang explicitly states that relics are not, as Jenkins says, 'jujus', which are magical charms. A common misconception about relics held by non-Catholics and some Catholics is that relics possess magical powers; there is a supernatural aspect to relics, but there is no 'hocus-pocus' involved with them. The relics are part of the physical aspect of the faith, it is “not just about abstract spiritual truths.” The very act of the Incarnation confirms this – people were able to touch the Word of God and interact with Him. It is of little wonder then that Christianity developed with tangible ways to express the faith; this includes church architecture, polyphonic music and statues alongside of relics.

Today, relics are found in several different states in general. The first is relics lost and forgotten in a museum, where people gawk and wonder why there is a skull in a glided box. Next, the relics become a tourist attraction, like Pope Blessed John XXIII; the Swiss guards usher people along as they take pictures of a partially decomposed man under an altar. The last state, which is probably the most common, is that of relics in some form of a storage room, whether it be in a church or in a museum's back closet; they are hidden away out of sight, and the only way to see them is if one knows somebody with connections to the relics. But above all these states is that in every altar in the churches there has to be a relic, inside according to Cannon Law.

There are three classes of sacred relics depending on the closeness of the object to the saint. The first class are instruments of the Passion of Christ or a part of a saint's body. The relics found in church altars are first class, most likely one of a martyr. Then, the second class relics is a piece of the saint's clothing or something used often by the saint, such as the letters written by Saint Teresa of Ávila. Lastly, third class relics are objects touched to first class relics.

To venerate the relics of the saints is a profession of belief in several doctrines of the Catholic faith. The first of these is the belief in everlasting life for those who have obediently witnessed to Christ and the Holy Gospel whilst on earth. Next is the truth of the resurrection of the body of all persons on the last day, which relates to the doctrine of the splendor of the human body and the respect which all should show toward the bodies of both the living and the deceased. Also, there is the belief in the special intercessory power which the saints enjoy in heaven because of their intimate relationship with God. Last is the truth of our closeness to the saints because of our connection with the communion of saints, since we are all part of the same Church.

To understand how to venerate relics, one must understand the difference between latria, dulia and hyper-dulia. Latria is sacrificial in character, and may be offered only to God. Catholics offer other degrees of reverence to the Blessed Virgin Mary and to the Saints; these non-sacrificial types of reverence are called hyper-dulia and dulia, respectively. Hyper-dulia is essentially a heightened degree of dulia provided only to the Blessed Virgin since she is the revered Mother of God. 

End of Part One.
To Be Continued............
(Copyright: Belongs to the Wanderer)
(If interested in research please contact me.)