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| EWTN’s Father Mitch Pacwa, SJ, spoke to more than 600 attendees at the third annual Pilgrim Center of Hope prayer breakfast at the OMNI Hotel Dec. 6.
Photo provided |
J. Michael Parker
For Today’s Catholic
SAN ANTONIO • Catholics must learn the facts of their faith and proper discernment of God’s will for their lives if they are ever to transform American culture, Father Mitch Pacwa, SJ, said recently in the Alamo City.
Father Pacwa, founder and president of Ignatius Productions and a popular author, speaker and talk show host on the Eternal Word Television Network, spoke Dec. 6 at the Pilgrim Center of Hope’s annual prayer breakfast at the Omni Hotel. More than 600 people attended.
“It’s very difficult for many people today to discern God’s will because, since 1968, there’s been a decrease in teaching of the facts of our faith,” the Jesuit priest said. He told a story of a lunch conversation a group of U.S. bishops once had with Pope John Paul II in which one bishop said that many American young people are not morally culpable of mortal sin when they commit adultery and fornication because they don’t know it’s sinful.
“The pope,” Father Pacwa said, imitating John Paul’s Polish accent, “replied, ‘no, the young people are not culpable — but for the bishops who do not teach the faith, it’s a very big sin.’” The audience responded with enthusiastic applause.
Then the priest made the point: “If you don’t know about God, if you don’t know about the facts of our faith, the commandments of God and the church, if you don’t know the Gospel and the history of God’s relationship with people, how are you going to do any kind of discernment?”
Believers today cannot take for granted that the culture around them accepts assumptions founded on Judeo-Christian principles as they have in the past.
“We see increasing attempts to get anti-Christian and non-Christian mentality to influence our culture,” Father Pacwa said.
But the Judeo-Christian tradition has thousands of years of God revealing himself to humanity and commanding people to do amazing things that changed the world, he added. He cited St. Benedict.
“Is it any wonder that Pope Benedict XVI named St. Benedict Europe’s patron saint? If it weren’t for St. Benedict’s community, European culture would’ve have been lost, including the classics of ancient Rome. Benedictine monks copied down many books that remain classics to this day,” the priest said.
Monks in the Middle East transcribed the works of Plato, Aristotle and many other Greek philosophers, scientists and scholars that otherwise would have been lost.
Although atheists often portray faith as opposed to reason and many modern universities ridicule faith in God, Father Pacwa pointed out that it was the Catholic Church, inspired by Muslims, that established the first universities in the West and invented the concept of school systems.
“Discernment of what God wants is part of our biblical history, but it’s also inherent in the history of the church. Its assumptions are that God is good and that he wants to speak to us and guide us,” the priest said.
Atheist writers like Christopher Hitchings and Richard Dawkins attack faith and ridicule Christianity, calling Jesus “a baby dictator,” he said. “The pro-atheist industry is instilling in college students that you can ridicule Christianity and say that God is not good,” Father Pacwa said.
God, he declared, is much more powerful than the desires of the culture and the forces arrayed against him.
The worst century by far was the 20th century for its numbers of martyrs, Father Pacwa said. “It made the Romans look like amateurs” and was filled with horrible persecutions of people for their faith.
“But who is still around, the Catholic Church or the Third Reich? Who is still around, the Catholic Church or the Empire of Japan? Who is still around, the Catholic Church or the Soviet Union?
“Even with persecution, finding God’s will will be a way he uses us to transform culture so that individuals will be holy and culture will be Christianized,” he said, adding: “I’m unabashedly in favor of that, Pope John Paul II was unabashedly in favor of that and even the Second Vatican Council explicitly said that it is our duty to be a part of that.” The issue of discernment, he said, is that, as fallen creatures, it is very easy to be sinners.
“We can take any good thing and misuse it. Eating is good, but overeating is a sin. Alcohol is good, but when we misuse it, we threaten our life and health. Sexuality is a good thing, but we see a culture that so misuses sexuality and has become so sexually gluttonous that 25 percent have sexually transmitted diseases.
“The culture doesn’t want to talk about that because it wants to encourage misuse of sexuality, not chastity and the proper direction of human sexuality,” the priest said.
Christian discernment starts with a set of objective norms that are wrong always and everywhere, for everyone, he said. One is a commitment to the commandments of God and the church.
“We can’t cease to go back to them, learn them and teach them to others,” Father Pacwa said. “Don’t ever say, ‘Maybe this is good at this time.’ That would preclude discernment. You don’t even need to discern whether to steal things or to lie in court or somewhere else.”
“You may have to discern at times whether to tell the whole truth because that can be sinful, too. It’s called gossip. You have to be alert to follow God’s law. Precisely at a time when culture doesn’t want to follow God’s law, we have to become more committed to it,” he said.
It’s part of nature that all human beings are tempted to break different commandments at different times. Father Pacwa brought down the house in laughter when he referred to the genealogy of Jesus — “one sinner after another” — as his favorite biblical passage, then added: “If you’re mentioned in the Bible and you’re anybody but Jesus or the Blessed Virgin Mary, your sins are in there, too, and they even read them in church — for the rest of history.”
He added that he has enough trepidation about Judgment Day without the burden of having to think of his sins being read in church for 3,000 years.
Father Pacwa said that each person must examine his or her own life in a straightforward manner as the apostles did.
Peter owned up to having denied Jesus three times and run away from the Garden of Gethsemane, James and John confessed to pride in having desired to be higher in Jesus’ esteem than the others and Paul to having persecuted Christians and watched as Stephen was stoned to death.
“We have to have this same kind of openness with God. We cannot ignore our own history of sinfulness or try to delude ourselves with pop psychology, saying, ‘I need to have a good self-image so I won’t mention my sins,’” he said.
Without sober and frequent examination of conscience, it becomes very easy to excuse the tendency to sin as unimportant, Father Pacwa said. If one justifies sin, it can become easy to think of a particular sin as even being God’s will.
“When I start thinking about what God wants and I’m also more committed to what I want, when and how I want it, that stops discernment from happening.
“Only when I come to the point of having the freedom to say, ‘It doesn’t matter to me which of these things you want me to do,’ that’s the moment that God can give us the kind of peace to realize that something is his will.”
The priest said that putting conditions on doing God’s will — not necessarily bad things, but preferred things — can block out some option that God might intend and limits one’s ability to hear what God is saying.
While one may want to do God’s will, he said, we may be resistant to specific commands of God. He cited biblical examples of this, such as the prophet Jeremiah pleading that he was too young to do as God asked and nobody liked him when he worked for God.
Father Pacwa also cited an experience from his own 50-year priestly ministry when he was assigned to teach in a Catholic high school in Cincinnati but didn’t want to do so.
Only the realization that being true to his vocation as a Jesuit entailed accepting assignments under obedience and being detached from personal preferences prompted him to resolve his dilemma.
“The Lord asks us to look for which doors open up, not to go around with a battering ram trying to break doors down. We have to be detached from specific desires so we may have one door close but something else opens up.
“Discernment ends up being a pilgrimage through life,” Father Pacwa said, noting that pilgrims proceed along each step seeking to find God, not just taking pictures as tourists do without looking for the lessons in the journey.
He said that when Catholics begin looking for God at every step of their spiritual journey, “we’ll be serving the culture better than it wants to be served. It doesn’t want us to put our commitment to God and our faith at the head of our values and make God’s laws our laws. Its desire is to change laws from the Judeo-Christian tradition to a relativized, secularized approach.”