Author: Ron Belgau

Tish Harrison Warren: True Love Dies

Posted by

2

80897

In Christianity Today, Tish Harrison Warren writes about this year’s juxtaposition of Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day:

In John 15, Jesus said that the greatest form of love is to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. Strikingly, he holds up the highest ideal of love as friendship, not erotic love. And, perhaps more shockingly, the highest form of love is not “happily ever after,” but love that results in suffering and death for your friends.

I have a number of very close friends who are celibate, which inevitably entails some degree of loneliness, grief, and suffering. They have chosen to forestall some happiness, in the short-term at least. The false promise of Valentine’s Day—that life begins and ends with finding your romantic “soulmate” —is radically rejected by my friends’ decision to embrace celibacy. And yet, it’s not all doom and gloom and solitary sadness for them, because their choice is born of love and conviction, and though there are days of very real sorrow and pain, they also experience profound joy. Through both suffering and joy, my friends witness to the wonder and glory of friendship with God and also to the friendship and love of a community.

Many married couples, too, if they’re honest, will confess that they have also faced long stretches of catastrophic loneliness—times when they sat on a marriage counselor’s couch, white-knuckling their wedding vows, times when divorce seemed the happiest of all bad options—and yet they remained in the marriage. If marital love is to last, it will inevitably require the couple to lay down their lives for each other.

Jesus goes on to say, “You are my friends if you do whatever I command you” (John 15). Amidst the howling loneliness found both in marriage and celibacy, we face a kind of death born of obedience. Married and celibate Christians face different types of loneliness, yet they somehow match one another. Each calling lends its own joys, and each calling demands suffering. Each reveals the hope and redemption of the God of love, and each will require us to cling to him for dear life.

Image credit: J. McGuire, taken from Christianity Today article.

Benedict XVI: Do Not Be Afraid of Friendship with Christ

Posted by

1

Pope Benedixt XVI

On February 11, 2013 Pope Benedict XVI announced that he would resign the Papacy. Last week, I shared a reflection on friendship Benedict shared in 2011, on the sixtieth anniversary of his ordination. Today, in honor of the fifth anniversary of his resignation, I offer another reflection on friendship with Christ, this taken from his 2005 homily marking his installation as the Bishop of Rome:

Are we not perhaps all afraid in some way? If we let Christ enter fully into our lives, if we open ourselves totally to him, are we not afraid that He might take something away from us? Are we not perhaps afraid to give up something significant, something unique, something that makes life so beautiful? Do we not then risk ending up diminished and deprived of our freedom? And once again the Pope said: No! If we let Christ into our lives, we lose nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing of what makes life free, beautiful and great. No! Only in this friendship are the doors of life opened wide. Only in this friendship is the great potential of human existence truly revealed. Only in this friendship do we experience beauty and liberation. And so, today, with great strength and great conviction, on the basis of long personal experience of life, I say to you, dear young people: Do not be afraid of Christ! He takes nothing away, and he gives you everything. When we give ourselves to him, we receive a hundredfold in return. Yes, open, open wide the doors to Christ – and you will find true life. Amen.

Benedict XVI on Friendship with Christ

Posted by

2

Benedict XVI blessing a child in Zagreb, Croatia

On Tuesday, Pope emeritus Benedict XVI sent a letter to an Italian newspaper. In response to a question about his well-being, Benedict wrote of the “slow waning” of his physical strength, and spoke with hope of his “pilgrimage toward home.”

“It’s a great grace, in this last, at times tiring, stage of my journey, to be surrounded by a love and goodness that I could have never imagined,” he wrote.

Continue reading →

An Important Translation Issue

Posted by

2

An important passage* in the 1986 Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons was translated into English as follows:

The human person, made in the image and likeness of God, can hardly be adequately described by a reductionist reference to his or her sexual orientation. Every one living on the face of the earth has personal problems and difficulties, but challenges to growth, strengths, talents and gifts as well. Today, the Church provides a badly needed context for the care of the human person when she refuses to consider the person as a “heterosexual” or a “homosexual” and insists that every person has a fundamental Identity: the creature of God, and by grace, his child and heir to eternal life. (§16)

The official text of the Letter is in Latin, promulgated in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis (79 [1987], pp. 543-554). In the Latin text, there is a word—unice, often translated as ‘only’—which is missing from the English translation. Thus, a more accurate translation of the last sentence would be:

Today, the Church provides a badly needed context for the care of the human person when she refuses to consider the person only as a “heterosexual” or a “homosexual” and insists that every person has a fundamental Identity: the creature of God, and by grace, his child and heir to eternal life.

Continue reading →

Reflections on Reformation Day

Posted by

2

As most of my readers will be aware, Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of a Church in Wittenberg, Germany on this day, five hundred years ago.

95 Theses

No informed Catholic should deny that there were very serious problems in the Church in the time leading up to the Reformation. To see this, we need only read what Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, or any of the other Counter-Reformation saints had to say about the abuses they saw and the opposition they faced when they tried to correct them. We could also look at the reforms of the Council of Trent, or the biographies of Renaissance Popes for examples of corruption within the Church.

On the other hand, no serious Protestant should deny that the Reformation led to a fracturing of the Church and a proliferation of conflicting theologies that none of the original Reformers would agree with. I don’t think many Protestants would want to defend the purity of Henry VIII’s motives in breaking the Church of England away from Rome. And Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli soon found themselves divided against each other almost as much as against Rome.

Also, everyone hated the Anabaptists.

Continue reading →

Notes for University of Dallas Talk

Posted by

3

SB Hall

I am speaking at University of Dallas tonight on “Friendship and Homosexuality,” sponsored by the Office of Campus Ministry. Given time limits, a talk like this can only briefly touch on topics which I have written about in much more depth here on Spiritual Friendship. This post provides a handy reference for people who heard my talk to read more about what I said. (And for those who weren’t able to make it to the talk, it still provides a handy reference to several important posts I’ve written over the years.)

First, I shared a bit about my own story. This post tells a bit about how I started to realize I wasn’t attracted to women. You might say that I “backed” my way into the Catholic Church, first by recognizing the link between accepting contraception and accepting same-sex marriage, and only later recognizing the flaws of the “slow motion sexual revolutionaries” I grew up with in the Southern Baptist Church. This post, perhaps the most important for setting the stage for my later thinking about chastity, relates more about my experience of falling in love with a friend in college. An important theme in all of this is the difference between talking with and talking about.

Aelred of Rievaulx is one of the most important influences on my vision for the Spiritual Friendship blog. I’ve written about his typology of friendship, as well as the distinction between true and false friendship. With respect to Catholic teaching on friendship and homosexuality I’ve written about various Catholic documents that commend friendship for men and women with homosexual inclinations, as well as what the Catechism means by “disinterested friendship.” Another important influence on my thinking is Blessed John Henry Newman’s sermon on the “Love of Relations and Friends.”

I closed by reflecting on two experiences I had in France: seeing a painting by Gabriel Girodon depicting the martyrdom of the brothers Crepin and Crepinien at Soissons, and a pilgrimage to Lourdes I took 15 years ago with an older friend of mine who was dying of pancreatic cancer.

Speaking @ University of Dallas 10/10

Posted by

0

SB Hall

For those in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area, I will be speaking at University of Dallas on Tuesday October 10, 2017. The talk will be at 6:30 p.m. in the Multipurpose Room, SB Hall, sponsored by the Office of Campus Ministry

From the event flyer:

The Catholic Church has frequently recommended friendship as a part of her pastoral care to same-sex attracted Catholics. In this talk, Ron Belgau will reflect on his own experiences with realizing he was gay and how a close friend helped him to choose chastity. He will also explain the Church’s teaching on friendship and homosexuality more clearly, and how the virtue of chastity “blossoms in friendship” (CCC 2347).

The speaker, Ron Belgau, is an internationally known speaker who lectures on Biblical sexual ethics and his own experiences as a celibate gay Christian. He is the cofounder, with Wesley Hill, of Spiritual Friendship, an increasingly popular group blog dedicated to exploring how the recovery of authentic Christian teaching on friendship can help to provide a faithful and orthodox response to the challenge of homosexuality.

In 2015, during Pope Francis’s visit to Philadelphia he and his mother, Beverley, were invited by Archbishop Charles Chaput, O.F.M. Cap., to speak at the World Meeting of Families about how Catholic families can better respond to gay, lesbian, and bisexual persons in their midst.

Hope to see you there!

The Benedict Option and the Nashville Statement

Posted by

5

Over the weekend, I wrote a long email to Rod Dreher in response to some things he had said about the Nashville Statement. This morning, he published it on his blog, along with some responses of his own. Although I don’t agree with everything he said in response, I will think through what he has to say before responding in more depth. In the meantime, I share my letter and encourage you to check out his responses. At the end of this post, I’ve also included several important points from online discussion of the letter, from Rod Dreher, Justin Taylor, Matthew Schmitz, Denny Burk, and Dan Mattson. I am grateful for the thoughtful discussion I have seen in response to the letter. 

The Benedict Option

Dear Rod,

I’m writing in reply to your response to criticisms of the Nashville Statement. Although some of your other responses, like the email from Chris Roberts and the piece on the cost of the divorce culture, addressed some of my concerns, I think it would be helpful to explain my worries about your response in more depth.

In the first place, I was surprised by this post because, when I read The Benedict Option, I was particularly impressed with your analysis of the sexual revolution in Chapter 9. You spelled out the ways that it has not only corrupted the surrounding culture, but has also penetrated into the church, undermining many Christians’ faith. Like Russell Moore’s 2014 keynote on “Slow Motion Sexual Revolutionaries,” you spoke prophetically of the ways that Christians have been co-opted by the sexual revolution. You made clear that we need to recover a distinctly Christian way of thinking about sexuality and living in sexual purity. Your whole book is about how we need to stand apart from the anti-Christian ethos of modern culture, and do better at building community practices that enable us pass on the faith, catechize, and keep us from turning into moralistic therapeutic Deists.

But there are two ways of distancing ourselves from the ethos of the broader culture.

The first—which I understood you to be advocating in The Benedict Option—is a repentance which recognizes that we have been drawn away from God and into worldly ways of thinking. We need the purification that can only come through asceticism, and so we seek the encouragement and accountability of other Christians to be faithful and to pass on the faith.

The second, however, is to become a self-righteous clique, whose members don’t call each other out, but instead focus on blaming all their problems on those outside the clique, whether other Christians who fall short by the clique’s standards, or non-Christians.

Continue reading →

Matthew Lee Anderson on the Nashville Statement

Posted by

13

Some of our readers may have heard of the Nashville Statement, put out by the Southern Baptist Convention’s Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. The statement advertises itself as a defense of Biblical teaching on marriage and sexuality, yet fails to address some of the most serious threats to the sanctity of marriage, precisely because the Southern Baptists have already surrendered to the spirit of the age on divorce, reproductive technologies, and the like.

In a series of tweets this morning, Ryan Anderson pointed out one of the problems at the heart of the statement: its drafters’ failure to articulate in full what Christianity teaches about the virtue of chastity:

I will be interested to see if Denny Burk and others from the CBMW take the time to respond to Ryan’s question. I will not prejudge their answers, but given the other ways in which the Nashville Statement fails to articulate what the Bible teaches about marriage, it would not surprise me to find that they neither understand what the virtue of chastity is nor are able to articulate what it requires in marriage.

Matthew Lee Anderson (no relation) has a very good, in-depth response to the statement that spells out why he will not sign:

The failure of this document, then, is (again) not merely rhetorical. The omissions are as significant as what it explicitly includes. Nor do I think those omissions are merely a matter of differing prudential judgment about what our times require: I have described the statement as failing to meet the minimum conditions for public judgment, because I think there are actual Bible verses that indicate as much. While evangelicals practice self-loathing more than they ought, a statement from churchmen that asserts that a particular view of sexuality is essential to the faith mustacknowledge our own complicity and entanglement in the very spirit that is being denounced. Otherwise, it fails to bear the authority of the Gospel it proclaims, an authority which stems from the confession of our sins and the proclamation of Christ’s saving work. Such a dual announcement is the necessary and indispensable precondition for our judgment of the world. The absence of such a confession leaves the affirmations and proclamations withering on the vine, without the grace and life of humility which allows us to see that we, the evangelical churches, have helped make this world as well. If the confidence and courage that the statement enjoins sound forced or hollow, this is why.

It’s one of the best essays on how Christians should respond to the sexual revolutions I’ve seen. Please check it out.

What Language Shall I Borrow to Thank Thee, Dearest Friend?

Posted by

0

“Greater love has no man than this: that He lay down his life for His friends.” John 15:13.

Crucifixion

One of the most beautiful of the Good Friday hymns is “O Sacred Head now Wounded.” It is often attributed to Bernard of Clairvaux, but was more likely written by another Cistercian named Arnulf of Leuven (c. 1200–1250). The English translation below was done in 1830 by James Waddel Alexander (1804-1859).

The words of the hymn remind us not only of the depth of Christ’s love, but also that He suffers because of our sins.

One of the criminals who were hanged railed at him, saying, “Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us!”

But the other rebuked him, saying, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed justly, for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong.”

And he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”

And He said to him, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.” (Luke 23:39-43).

Continue reading →