Why Aren’t They Talking About It? Deep Thoughts About Aquinas, Prophecies & the Church
Intelligence is a prized quality in the Church. Where has this really gotten us, though?
It is worth the effort to feel part of the Church...to enter into dialogue with her….An honest, transparent critique is constructive and helpful.
Pope Francis’s address to the Synod Fathers at the opening of the Synod, October 3, 2018
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As we approach the Illumination, one significant dog is not barking. Why are the overwhelming majority of Church leaders silent about an event that will shake all of humanity to its core, will bring hordes of people to Confession, to Baptism, to Communion, to seek a relationship with God? It’s a non-topic within most parishes, within the Curia, within Catholic publishing companies. The Pope hasn’t said anything about it. Outside of Vigano, who was just excommunicated, has even one archbishop promulgated this Illumination?
When it occurs, people will be caught off guard. Catholic laity will probably wonder in exasperation, “What the hell happened here? Why didn’t the Church forewarn us about this Illumination? Prepare us for it?”
The reason for this silence is probably the most obvious one: the leadership on balance is completely unaware of what’s coming down the pike. Or, those leaders who do perceive its imminence know they’d get their hand slapped for preaching about something so outlandish.
Yet this Illumination of our Conscience is an enormous moment of mercy that will be befuddle and challenge many, and it has been explicitly prophesied over and over again. Why this failure to make a way for God and assist others? The answer in part may be due to the Church’s emphasis on the intellect and its relative disregard for the mystical.
Consider the place Saint Thomas Aquinas holds in the Church. He’s called the Angelic Doctor, and not only because he wrote a lot about angels. It’s a title of deference intended to exult him above the other 36 Church doctors, because his contribution to Church teachings are considered a notch or two or three above the rest. To a multitude of priests, Thomas Aquinas is a North Star of sorts who steers and guides homilies. To others, he’s the Ace in the Hole who they pull out and quote to win a theological argument. Some priests, we know all too well, mention Aquinas in a homily or lecture with such ridiculous frequency it’s as though they’re inviting listeners to play a drinking game and take a swig at every mention of this Angelic Doctor.
Yet never in any homily has a priest ever said, “Thomas Aquinas, now there was a man with a heart! Such a heart Thomas Aquinas had. May we all pray to have a heart such as his.” No, of course not. The reverence to Aquinas is due to his stupendous, gargantuan intellect. He’s written page after page, FULL of logical explanations on the nature of God and created beings, the cause of sin, the four cardinal virtues. He’s written PROOFS for the EXISTENCE OF GOD, based on REASON!!! He is really something, an intellect to be reckoned with, is the general assessment; someone we could never come close to imitating, but who we all must defer to in awe, for guidance and council. (Rarely do they mention that despite all his profundity, he got it wrong with the Immaculate Conception.)
Aquinas based his writings on the Greek philosopher Aristotle, who believes that humans understand reality through the intellect and the senses. This adulation of Aquinas, then, underscores the Church's prioritization of the intellect; from which it follows that reason is the supreme tool for explaining life and reality. The material; that which we can see and touch; provides the parameters for reality. A sharp intellect is a most desired quality for a Christian, it further communicates.
Modern philosophies, bearing down on and infiltrating the Church for centuries, perhaps account for its exultation of the intellect and reason. The philosopher Descartes propagated rationalism throughout Christian society in the 1500s, and two centuries later revolutionaries in France literally made Reason a Goddess, and kneeled before her. Communism, an ideology which purports there is nothing beyond the material, infiltrated the Church in the 1930s, when the former Communist Bella Dodd somehow managed to get over a thousand Communists to enroll in seminaries.
This deference to the intellect has a fallout. It dismisses anything that cannot be explained with reason, and subordinates other modes by which we experience reality. Yet the fact of the matter is that God created creation, and so exists outside of existence as we understand it. In order to communicate with us, he utilizes all these modes, including time, the senses, emotions, visions, dreams, coincidences, other people, everyday experiences, as well as the intellect and the heart. A holistic approach to interpreting life and reality incorporates all these modes. Pretty much every page of the Bible affirms that God guides, directs, councils and comforts us via dreams, visions and locutions. There are way too many examples to cite here, so I’ll mention only three. In Acts, Luke recounts a vision of St. Paul’s where a Macedonian asks for help. This vision, Paul interprets, is the Holy Spirit telling him to evangelize in Macedonia. In the story of Jesus’ birth, Joseph demonstrates remarkable deference to dreams and acuity to interpret them. Due to one dream, he decides to take Mary to be his wife, even though she is already with child. Due to council in another dream, he flees with his family in the middle of the night to protect Jesus from King Herod’s murderous intentions. There is no way Joseph could have followed so prudent a path; a path which in a very real way secured our salvation; had he been sheerly a man of intellect and reason.
The Gospels, further, implicitly affirm the supremacy of the heart over the intellect. If there ever was an intellect to be reckoned with, it would be that of Jesus; God in the flesh, the author of life; whose vision brought forth the earth; the animal kingdom, the seasons, the elements; the universe; stars, planets; and human kind. Yet the only time Jesus chose to manifest this profundity was as a twelve-year-old child in Jerusalem. As he sits in the midst of the teachers, Luke recounts how everyone who listened to Jesus is amazed at his understandings. The visionary Blessed Catherine Emmerich writes that Jesus’ discourse in the temple covers a breadth of topics; the human body, medicine, architecture, astronomy, agriculture, geometry, jurisprudence; relating everything back to the Promise of Scripture, and leaves his listeners agape (and a few mad with envy) at his brilliance. The Gospel account of Jesus’ public ministry two decades later recounts no such intellectual discourses. Rather, they portray a man entirely consumed with the affairs of the heart. As an adult, Jesus welcomes people, touches them, listens to them, heals them, forgives them. Nor does his Gospel message laud the intellect as some sort of cardinal virtue. In Matthew 25, rather, Jesus says that he will judge us entirely by extent to which welcome the stranger, visit the sick and imprisoned, shelter the homeless and clothe the naked.
Despite these clear Gospel messages, the current Church communicates a distorted message that subordinates mysticism and works of mercy and extols the intellect! This of course isn’t to say that the Church writes off mysticism, as, for example, it’s recognized multiple Marian apparitions and has affirmed the doctrine of transubstantiation over and over again. Yet, it’s undeniable that “mysticism” is regarded as woo-woo, inaccessible to ordinary people, or simply as a non-topic, really. Consider, by contrast, the number of times a Catholic hears a homily on the following topics:
Locutions: The various types, such as internal and external, where they come from, what they mean.
Dreams: The various types of dreams, how to interpret symbolism in dreams, how to listen to God and the spirit in dreams.
Visions: The purpose of visions, how to determine when they are valid and when they are hallucinations.
--If my own experience is any indication, not once, ever, over the entire lifetime of a practicing Catholic!
This distortion is spiritual blindness and it’s gotten us to where we are now: a Church deaf to God communing with his creation. It’s formed a leadership that cannot perceive or acknowledge the Illumination; God breaking through to his creation in an unprecedented manner; as it’s a fundamentally mystical phenomenon unexplainable by reason. More broadly, this distortion yields an immature Church, trapped with the Child Jesus in the temple, agog over intellectual prowess, unable or unwilling to mature into the realm of the adult Jesus, the realm of the heart.
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This is my dialogue about the Church, to the Church.
What is yours? What thoughts or critique do you bring to the table, at the invitation of Pope Francis?
Yes, the realm of the heart.
I am grateful for this post! I agree with you! The Illumination is coming soon. Pray and make reparations