Catholicism

Every time a Holy Day of Obligation rolls around, the e-mails and comments start to roll in: "What right does the Church have to force me to go to Mass on a weekday?" "How can it be a mortal sin not to attend Mass?" "Why do we have all these man-made rules? Don't they just distract us from what Christ actually taught?"

The questions tend to be particularly pointed around Ascension, when Catholics in several ecclesiastical provinces in the United States don't understand why they have to go to Mass on Ascension Thursday, while, for Catholics in the rest of the United States, the celebration of the Ascension is transferred to the following Sunday.

"It's bad enough that I'm required to attend Mass on a Thursday; it's even worse that others don't have to!" From there, it's a quick jump to dismissing our Sunday Duty as just an arbitrary imposition by "old men in dresses" who have nothing better to do than to make life hard for us Catholics in the pews.

But is that really what these "man-made rules" are all about? Could it be that the Catholic Church actually has a reason for requiring us to join in the communal worship of God on Sundays and on the chief feasts of Our Lord and the Blessed Virgin Mary? Might Christ have known what He was doing when He gave Peter the power to bind and to loose (Matthew 16:19)?

You can find the answer in Why Does the Catholic Church Have So Many Man-Made Rules?

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The idea of offering prayers for nine consecutive days recalls the nine days that the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Apostles spent in prayer between Ascension Thursday and Pentecost Sunday. When Christ ascended into Heaven, He told them He would send His Holy Spirit, and so they prayed for the coming of the Spirit.

Their prayer was granted when the Spirit descended upon them in tongues of fire on Pentecost, and thus the novena was born.

Since Ascension, the 40th day of Easter, was yesterday, there is really only one possibility for the Novena of the Week: the original Novena to the Holy Ghost.

In it, we pray to receive each of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit and all of the twelve fruits of the Holy Spirit.

You should begin praying the novena on Friday, the day after Ascension Thursday, so that you will complete it on the following Saturday, the eve of Pentecost. To make it easier to remember to pray the prayers each day, I have set up a convenient e-mail reminder. Simply sign up today, and each day's prayers will be e-mailed to you, along with additional information on Ascension, the gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit, and Pentecost.

(A dove perched in a hole in the wall outside the Basilica di Sant'Agnese Fuori le Mura (Basilica of St. Agnes Outside the Walls), Rome, Italy. The dove is the traditional Christian symbol for the Holy Spirit. Photo © Scott P. Richert)

If you have a favorite novena that you'd like me to choose as Novena of the Week, or if you'd like me to suggest a novena for a particular intention, send me an e-mail, and I'll work it into the rotation.

More on Ascension, Pentecost, and the Holy Spirit:

• The Ascension of Our Lord
• Is Ascension a Holy Day of Obligation?
• Ascension Thursday Sunday?
• Pentecost 101
• When Is Pentecost Sunday?
• The Gifts of the Holy Spirit
• The Fruits of the Holy Spirit
• Why Holy Ghost?

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Thursday, May 17, 2012, is the 40th day of Easter. In other words, it is Ascension Thursday, the day on which (the Bible tells us) Jesus Christ, having risen from the dead on Easter Sunday, ascended into Heaven.

Historically, the Ascension of Our Lord has been a Holy Day of Obligation--and it still is. However, in most parts of the United States today, Catholics will not attend Mass on Ascension Thursday--and they won't be violating the Precepts of the Church, which say that we have to assist at Mass on Holy Days, under pain of mortal sin. How can that be?

The answer is simple but confusing. The bishops of the United States, recognizing that attendance at Ascension Thursday Masses had dropped dramatically for years, petitioned the Vatican to allow them to transfer the celebration of Ascension to the following Sunday (the 43rd day of Easter). The Vatican agreed, but the decision was left up to each ecclesiastical province in the United States.

Several provinces continue to celebrate Ascension on Ascension Thursday, and you can find a list of them in Is Ascension a Holy Day of Obligation? Most provinces, however, transferred the celebration to the following Sunday, where it is still a Holy Day of Obligation. Since it coincides, however, with our Sunday Duty to assist at Mass, many people don't realize that they are, in fact, also fulfilling their duty to attend Mass on a Holy Day of Obligation.

(A stained-glass window of the Ascension of Our Lord in Saint Mary's Church, Painesville, OH. Photo © Scott P. Richert)

More on the Ascension and Holy Days of Obligation:

• The Ascension of Our Lord
• Is Ascension a Holy Day of Obligation?
• Ascension Thursday Sunday?
• What Is an Ecclesiastical Province?
• The Precepts of the Church
• Date of Ascension 2012
• Catholic Liturgical Calendar 2012

At any given time, there are roughly 5,000 Catholic bishops in the world. Collectively known as the College of Bishops, these men—the heirs to the apostles—are responsible for the shepherding of souls. It's a breathtakingly awesome responsibility, and we lay Catholics all too often forget what it means to say that God has called a man to the episcopate.

There's nothing quite like an episcopal ordination to remind you.

On May 14, 2012, the Feast of Saint Matthias, Apostle, my son Stephen and I had the privilege of attending the episcopal ordination and installation of Bishop David J. Malloy as the ninth bishop of the Diocese of Rockford, Illinois. In the presence of somewhere between 5,000 and 6,000 faithful from the diocese, 28 bishops, 200 priests, and 150 deacons gathered to confer the Sacrament of Holy Orders on Monsignor Malloy. The chief consecrator was Francis Cardinal George, metropolitan archbishop of Chicago, with Archbishop Jerome Listecki of Milwaukeee and Bishop Emeritus Thomas Doran of Rockford as co-consecrators.

The ordination and installation took place in the BMO Harris Bank Center, a sporting arena in downtown Rockford, and featured a choir of almost 400 voices. For an event its size, and given the venue, it was remarkably reverent and beautiful. The procession of clerics, led by over 100 Knights of Columbus, lasted at least 20 minutes, and perhaps closer to half an hour.

It is customary, when possible, to hold episcopal ordinations on the feast of an apostle. Among all the possible feasts, that of Saint Matthias struck me as particularly appropriate. Matthias, of course, was the apostle chosen to replace Judas Iscariot (Acts 1:21-26), which means that he was the first apostle to whom apostolic succession applied. Or, to put it another way, Matthias's story is the basis for the Church's doctrine of apostolic succession. For a man who is already a bishop and is simply being installed in a diocese, the feast of another apostle would work just as well; but for a man being elevated from the priesthood to the episcopacy, as Monsignor Malloy was, the Feast of Saint Matthias provides a certain symbolism that no other feast of an apostle could provide.

I cannot do the ordination and installation justice through mere words, nor properly express my deep gratitude at having been able to be present on this momentous occasion. One image will remain forever in my mind: Monsignor Malloy, prostrate before the altar for several minutes, while all of the assembled prayed for him as he prepared to receive his episcopal ordination. It is hard to imagine what joy he must have felt in those minutes, nor the burden that he must have felt descending upon his shoulders. He had entered the arena as a pastor of St. Francis de Sales parish in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin; he would leave as the shepherd of over 450,000 Catholics in 11 counties covering almost 6,500 square miles between the Fox River and the Mississippi.

The crozier—the staff that every bishop receives as a symbol of his office—is meant to signify his duty as shepherd of our souls; it is not a walking stick. Yet every bishop I have ever seen seems to lean, however slightly, on the crozier, and as he left the arena, Bishop Malloy was no exception. Is it any wonder?

May God grant Bishop David J. Malloy many happy years, as he faithfully preaches the Word of His Truth!

More on Bishop Malloy:

• Pope Benedict Makes Three Interesting Appointments

In a recent issue of the twice-weekly About Catholicism newsletter (you do subscribe, don't you?), I wrote:

Many people--even some Catholics--do not realize that there are multiple levels of ordination. We're familiar with ordination to the priesthood, and those who have either permanent or transitional deacons in their parish know that deacons receive ordination, too. But since we talk most often about the elevation or installation of a bishop, the fact that he receives the Sacrament of Holy Orders once again tends to get ignored.

I was writing those words in the context of the (then upcoming) episcopal ordination of Msgr. David J. Malloy as the ninth bishop of the Diocese of Rockford, Illinois. (For more on Bishop Malloy, see Pope Benedict Makes Three Interesting Appointments.) But taken from that context and presented as they are here, those words can be misleading, as reader Thai Tran pointed out in an e-mail.

When a man who is currently a priest is installed as a bishop, he receives the Sacrament of Holy Orders, as he did when he was ordained to the priesthood. That was the situation with Monsignor Malloy, when he was ordained to the episcopacy on May 14, 2012 (the Feast of Saint Matthias, Apostle).

However, when a man who has already received episcopal ordination is installed as a bishop in a diocese, he does not receive the Sacrament of Holy Orders again. He cannot: Like baptism and confirmation, ordination places an indelible mark upon the soul of the man who receives it. That is what paragraph 1582 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church means when it says that "The sacrament of Holy Orders . . . cannot be repeated or conferred temporarily."

A man can receive the Sacrament of Holy Orders more than once, but he can only receive it once at each level: diaconate, priesthood, episcopate. Once a priest, always a priest; once a bishop, always a bishop. "Reordination," at any level, is like "rebaptism"—a logical impossibility.

My thanks to Thai Tran for giving me the opportunity to clear up any potential confusion that my discussion of Bishop Malloy's ordination may have created.

More on the Sacrament of Holy Orders and the Office of the Bishop:

• The Sacrament of Holy Orders
• The Office of Bishop in the Catholic Church

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A reader writes:

Why is Ascension Thursday a Holy Day of Obligation in some areas [of the United States] and not others?

This is a very good question. The simple, but confusing, answer is that Ascension is a Holy Day of Obligation everywhere in the United States. It's just that, in most dioceses, the celebration is transferred from Thursday (40 days after Easter) to the following Sunday. (So, in 2012, Ascension Thursday will be May 17, but Ascension will be celebrated in most dioceses on Sunday, May 20.) Since Catholics are already obligated to attend Mass on Sunday, most people don't realize that Ascension is a Holy Day of Obligation--they think they're in church just for Sunday Mass.

The reader continues:

I know it is up to the diocese but WHY would it be a choice at all? I have many friends from other states and I am the only one who is obligated to attend Mass on Thursday.

Now, we're getting to the heart of the matter. The reader is not quite correct: The decision is not left up to each diocese; rather, each ecclesiastical province in the United States is allowed to decide whether to transfer the celebration of the feast. (An ecclesiastical province is basically one large archdiocese and the dioceses that are historically associated with it. Generally, in the United States, there's one ecclesiastical province per state, with a few exceptions for historical reasons.) All of the ecclesiastical provinces in the United States have chosen to transfer the celebration except for Boston, Hartford, New York, Newark, Philadelphia, and the state of Nebraska. With the exception of Nebraska, each of these is one of the oldest Catholic provinces in the United States, which may explain why they've chosen to stick with tradition.

But why is it a choice at all? The answer, whether we like it or not, is a combination of convenience and pastoral considerations. Attendance at Ascension Thursday Masses had been falling for years before the bishops of the United States, in accordance with canon law, petitioned the Vatican to allow the celebration to be transferred to the following Sunday. That meant that a lot of priests were celebrating extra Masses, while a lot of Catholics were violating a precept of the Church by not celebrating a Holy Day of Obligation.

Which takes us to the reader's final remark:

My feeling is that this is just one more reason for the Catholic Church failing in numbers. People have decided that if these rules can be changed they must not be important and they ignore the other rules as well.

What do you think? Does transferring the celebration of the Feast of the Ascension to the following Sunday downplay its importance? Does it inadvertently undermine the authority of the Church on other matters? Click on the "Comments" link below to join in the discussion!

More on the Ascension:

• The Ascension of Our Lord
• Is Ascension a Holy Day of Obligation?
• When Is Ascension 2012?
• Reader Question: What Is an Ecclesiastical Province?
• Ecclesiastical Province - Definition of an Ecclesiastical Province

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On May 13, 1917, on a hillside outside Fatima, Portugal, three shepherd children saw a lady "brighter than the sun, shedding rays of light clearer and stronger than a crystal glass filled with the most sparkling water and pierced by the burning rays of the sun." For the next six months, on the 13th day of each month, Our Lady of Fatima appeared to Lucia dos Santos and her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto.

The final apparition, on October 13, 1917, was accompanied by the "Miracle of the Sun." As many as 70,000 people saw the sun dance in the sky, then plunge toward the earth. The sheer number of witnesses weighed strongly in the decision to proclaim the apparitions at Fatima "worthy of belief" in 1930.

Sixty-four years after the first apparition, on May 13, 1981, Mehmet Ali Agca attempted to assassinate Pope John Paul II in St. Peter's Square. Despite massive blood loss, the Holy Father survived, a fact he credited to Our Lady of Fatima: "For in everything that happened to me on that very day, I felt that extraordinary motherly protection and care, which turned out to be stronger than the deadly bullet."

There is no better way to celebrate the 95th anniversary of Fatima than to pray the rosary, which the Blessed Virgin asked the children to recite every day. In fact, most Catholics incorporate into the rosary a prayer known as the Fatima Prayer, which was revealed by Our Lady to the children on July 13, 1917. Recited at the end of each ten Hail Marys, it is also known as the Decade Prayer.

In this month of May, dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary, may Our Lady of Fatima intercede for us!

More About the Rosary:

• How To Pray the Rosary
• The Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary
• The Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary
• The Glorious Mysteries of the Rosary
• The Fatima Prayer
• Rosary Prayers

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On Wednesday, May 9, 2012, President Barack Obama admitted, to the utter surprise of approximately three people in the entire United States, that "I think same-sex couples should be able to get married." Or rather, he hemmed and hawed for about 15 seconds before finally getting to the point of his "revelation," in a convoluted sentence that Thomas Fleming, writing for the London Daily Mail, characterized as "six degrees of subjectivity":

At a certain point, I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.

There's nothing quite like having the courage of your convictions.

The media, predictably, has referred to President Obama's statement as an endorsement of "marriage equality," which makes it sound like he has taken a stand against, say, laws prohibiting miscegenation. In reality, President Obama has endorsed the ongoing campaign to redefine the word marriage as something other than what it has meant for millennia in law, custom, and tradition: a union between a man and a woman with the primary purpose of procreation. Marriage law and customs reflect that historical meaning, designed as they are to emphasize and protect the connections between successive generations—a word that is itself pregnant with meaning, making the radical nature of this redefinition of marriage all the more clear.

In recent years, and even more so in recent months, surveys have shown that many Christians are willing to throw in the towel on the battle over the redefinition of marriage, so long as the redefinition applies only to marriage in secular law, and churches are left alone to maintain the historical definition of marriage. But President Obama quashed any hope that the battle will stop at the church door, when he argued that the "evolution" of his views on "same-sex marriage" stemmed from his (and his wife's) Christian beliefs:

This is something that, you know, we've talked about over the years and she, you know, she feels the same way, she feels the same way that I do. And that is that, in the end the values that I care most deeply about and she cares most deeply about is how we treat other people and, you know, I, you know, we are both practicing Christians and obviously this position may be considered to put us at odds with the views of others but, you know, when we think about our faith, the thing at root that we think about is, not only Christ sacrificing himself on our behalf, but it's also the Golden Rule, you know, treat others the way you would want to be treated.

I have personally made the argument that the Catholic Church should refuse to recognize secular marriage licenses and should insist, instead, that marriage, in the eyes of the Church, will be what the Church says it will be. I still think that such an approach may be necessary, but I realize now that giving up the political battle would be a mistake. (Whether that battle was lost already in the George W. Bush years, when the Bush administration allowed the federal courts to consider cases that may eventually overturn all state laws upholding the historical definition of marriage, is a different question. Sometimes losing battles still need to be fought.)

If, in the midst of a tough reelection cycle, President Obama is willing to attempt to redefine marriage, knowing that he will alienate a significant number of voters (after having already alienated many others over his contraception mandate), what would he be willing to do once he is reelected? It is by no means farfetched to think that his Justice Department, which has already attempted to tell Christians that the federal government has the authority to decide who counts as a minister in their churches, might pursue antidiscrimination lawsuits against Christian churches that refuse to perform "gay marriages."

"When words lose their meaning, people lose their freedom." The saying is supposedly 2,500 years old, commonly ascribed (as so many such sayings are) to Confucius. In any case, the ancient origins of this saying make it all too clear that such battles never really end, and that freedom, too, is another word that long ago lost its meaning, to be replaced with licentiousness.

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On Friday, May 4, 2012, Georgetown University announced the speakers for its 2012 commencement ceremonies. Such announcements are often timed to generate the maximum news coverage. Not this time: It would seem that the officials in charge at Georgetown hoped that the announcement—or at least part of it—would get lost in the weekend news cycle.

That part was the acknowledgment that Kathleen Sebelius, President Obama's secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), would be the speaker at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute's commencement event.

Sebelius, a professed Catholic, is radically pro-abortion, and as secretary of HHS, she has been the public face of the Obama administration's contraception mandate. As I wrote three years ago, her appointment was a slap in the face of Catholics that signaled the Obama administration's developing hostility to one of the largest groups of Democratic voters. Placing a woman who had received extensive funding from the late-term abortionist George Tiller in a position where she would vocally dissent from Catholic teaching was not simply a public-relations mistake; it was a calculated move to undermine Church authority on moral issues.

The backlash among Catholics regarding the HHS contraception mandate has been fierce and near-unanimous. It has united the Catholic Church in the United States even more completely than did President Obama's commencement address at Notre Dame. Yet now Georgetown University, the nation's first Catholic institution of higher education, has signaled its dissent not only from the Church's moral teaching on artificial contraception but from the American Catholic consensus on the Obama administration's attack on religious freedom.

In a way, Georgetown's decision to include Secretary Sebelius in one of the university's commencement events is even worse than Notre Dame's decision to invite President Obama to deliver the 2009 commencement address. President Obama is the most pro-abortion president in the history of the United States; but he's not a Catholic.

Kathleen Sebelius is. While Notre Dame's invitation to President Obama sent a message that Notre Dame President Fr. John Jenkins denied he intended to send, there can be no doubt about the message that Georgetown intends to send: Dissent from Catholic moral teaching is acceptable, and the state can define the limits of Catholic belief.

Every Catholic bishop in the United States should denounce this invitation. And if Secretary Sebelius is allowed to take part in the Georgetown Public Policy Institute's commencement event on May 18, every Catholic bishop in the United States should instruct his flock that the university has forfeited its right to be considered a Catholic institution.

This isn't just one little event; this is another battle in the Obama administration's war on religious freedom that I have documented in The Obama Administration's Contraception Mandate. If President Obama is reelected in November, that war will continue.

The last thing the Catholic Church in America needs is a fifth column fighting to subject her to the rule of the state.

(Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius attends a "Women For Obama" town hall meeting at the Macomb County Community College, August 19, 2008, in Warren, Michigan. Photo by Bill Pugliano/Getty Images)

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Of all the saints of the Church, perhaps no one is more closely associated with the loving intercession of a mother than Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430). For years, his mother, Saint Monica, prayed for the conversion of Saint Augustine, her only son; when her prayers were answered, he became not just a Christian, not just a priest and a bishop, but a saint and a doctor of the Church.

How appropriate, then, that this Prayer of Saint Augustine to the Blessed Virgin, which I have chosen for our novena this week, is ascribed to the great saint. In it, Saint Augustine proves that he understands the power of a mother's love and intercession, asking Mary to intercede before God for the pardon of our sins and the salvation of our souls.

In this month of the Blessed Virgin Mary, we should be ever mindful of the love of the Mother of God, who is our mother, too. And as we in the United States also celebrate Mother's Day, we can dedicate our novena this week to the physical and spiritual health of our own mothers, who model for us the love of Christ's mother for her Son.

(An icon of the Mary, the Mother of God, Intercessor for All Mankind. Egg tempera on wood, Central Russia, mid-1800's. Photo © Slava Gallery, LLC; used with permission.)

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