He Spoke to Us: Discerning God in People and Events

Foreword

Father George Rutler In Excelsio

Recently, in search of light summer reading, I decided to dip into Tobias Smollet’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771)—a book I had not opened since my antediluvian twenties—and I came upon a passage describing divines on vacation that reconfirmed all of my old admiration for the unsparing Georgian satirist.

The musick and entertainments of Bath are over for this season; and all our gay birds of passage have taken their flight to Bristolwell, Tunbridge, Brighthelmstone, Scarborough, Harrowgate, &c. Not a soul is seen in this place, but a few broken-winded parsons, waddling like so many crows along the North Parade. There is always a great shew of the clergy at Bath: none of your thin, puny, yellow, hectic figures, exhausted with abstinence and hardy study, labouring under the morbi eruditorum, but great overgrown dignitaries and rectors, with rubicund noses and gouty ancles, or broad bloated faces, dragging along great swag bellies; the emblems of sloth and indigestion.

By contrast, I thought of the subject of this foreword, the Reverend George Rutler, a spry, athletic, ebullient man, who, far from laboring under any morbi eruditorum, is positively suffused with the joy of learning, especially when it helps him to illuminate the love of God, what Blessed John Henry Newman called the one thing needful.

Many of my readers will know Father Rutler as the New York pastor who brought pastoral vitality and administrative aplomb, first, to the Church of Our Saviour on Park Avenue and, then, to the Church of Saint Michael on West Thirty-Fourth Street. Others will know him as the witty proponent of faith and reason on EWTN or the author of many entertaining and instructive books, including his most recent, the highly acclaimed Powers and Principalities, a brilliantly original study of the Second World War, which exhibits an understanding of the moral uses of history that far too many professional historians either travesty or neglect. The Father Rutler of whom I should like to speak here is the writer of essays, a form of writing perfectly suited to his supple, far-ranging, discriminating wit.

In sharing with his readers his uncommonly insightful views of history, literature, society, and the faith, to name just a few of the subjects essayed in this collection, Father Rutler shows why he continues to exert such a formative influence not only over the faithful and the unfaithful but on those most difficult customers of all, the formerly faithful. It is to the last of these that the piece that opens the collection is addressed, a rather sobering piece, entitled, The Transfiguration of the Church.

Perfectionists are easily scandalized by what is not good. Saints are only scandalized by what is not glorious. We may say in cliché, Nobody’s perfect, but the fact is, saints are perfect, and they are precisely so because they do not try to be good, better, and best. On the contrary, the more they are transfigured by the Light, the more they seem to themselves bad, worse, and worst.

How frequently we hear lapsed Catholics giving out that they have lost faith in God’s Church because they have lost faith in his less than perfect servants. For the benefit of these misguided precisians, Father Rutler offers useful home truths.

In his last Angelus address, Benedict XVI said that he is now going up the mountain as did Peter, James, and John, and there he will pray. He knows that at the foot of the mountain are all kinds of noise and foaming, and these are the growls of the Prince of Darkness paying the Church a tribute he pays no other reality: his hatred. While he mocks men and scorns their pretensions, he reserves his bitterness for the Church, which is the only thing he fears in this world.

Besides hitting its target with pinpoint accuracy, this passage is characteristic of the essays as a whole in having the grace of good conversation. And this calls to mind another of Father Rutler’s virtues: he is an enviably deft polemicist, who never allows the follies or the provocations of his subjects to disconcert his serene gunnery. For the sort of rhetorical poise that I have in mind, readers should see the essay here entitled The Moral Exploitation of Penguins, which confounds those who defend what they imagine the moral acceptability of unnatural unions with marvelous suavity. No one in our time has come to the defense of truth with so much good sense or good humor as Father Rutler.

This readiness to champion truth necessarily involves the author in animadversions on our public men, many of whom treat truth as an infinitely malleable thing. In The Shore of Tripoli, Father Rutler points out how President Obama wildly misrepresents Thomas Jefferson’s view of Muslims. He also points out how ignorance of early American history is not the president’s only blind spot.

Another essay here, Governor Pliny and Governor Cuomo, in response to Andrew Cuomo telling pro-life and pro-marriage New Yorkers that they are unwelcome in the Empire State because they do not share the governor’s fondness for abortion and homosexual marriage, is an equally good case in point. When the politicians of New York distort the truth, which they do with an almost compulsive frequency, the Catholic clergy of New York are not always quick to refute them. That Father Rutler takes the time to call these erring oracles to account shows what true Christian charity animates the man. Certainly, he has done the governor an immense service by pointing out to him how his readiness to insult and indeed persecute his opponents vitiates his government, not to mention what ought to be his obedience to the faith of his fathers. Then, again, that Father Rutler calls the governor to account with witty reference to Pliny and Trajan puts the misconduct of the present State of New York in a wider, historical context. And since history for Father Rutler is never a matter of barren antiquarianism but a living guide to sound moral judgment and sound moral action, his invocations of history are always of great practical import. Plutarch would approve.

Indeed, by giving Governor Cuomo and his administration the benefit of his own sound moral judgment, Father Rutler exemplifies something Cardinal Newman once wrote about the Church in her relation to the State, with which I am sure he is familiar. The great principles of the State, the great convert wrote in his lecture on Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans (1850), are those of the Church, and, if the State would but keep within its own province, it would find the Church its truest ally and best benefactor. Why? Because the Church upholds obedience to the magistrate; she recognises his office as from God; she is the preacher of peace, the sanction of law, the first element of order, and the safeguard of morality, and that without possible vacillation or failure; she may be fully trusted; she is a sure friend, for she is indefectible and undying. The problem, however, as Father Rutler understands so clearly, is that the usurpatory State will not confine itself to its proper limits. As Cardinal Newman observed, "it is not enough for the State that things should be done, unless it has the doing of them itself; it abhors a double jurisdiction, and what it calls a divided allegiance; aut Caesar aut nullus, is its motto, nor does it willingly accept of any compromise. All power is founded, as it is often said, on public opinion; for the State to allow the existence of a collateral and rival authority, is to weaken its own."

And this nicely explains the inordinate interest that the State currently takes in abortion and other transgressions against the moral law. It takes this interest, not because it has any solicitude for the well-being of unborn children or homosexuals, but because it knows that by taking the stance it takes it can aggrandize its own power and undermine that of the Church. Of course, this epitomizes a certain type of humbug, at which the progressive servants of the State are such shameless masters. Yet, in essay after essay in this wonderful collection, Father Rutler exposes the impostures of these and other public men in order to commend the truths of the Redeemer, convinced, as Saint Bernard of Clairvaux was convinced, that What we love we shall grow to resemble.

For example, in one piece here, entitled Speaking Well of the Dead, Father Rutler remonstrates with those who chose to eulogize Justice William J. Brennan in a way that blatantly falsified the legacy of the man who crafted the legal argument of Roe v. Wade. Here, there is a Johnsonian gravity to Father Rutler’s writing, which puts this collection in an entirely different league from the usual run of essays.

The noble pagans flattered their dead because they could not absolve them. De mortuis nil nisi bonum is not a Christian dictum; speaking nothing but good of the dead bespeaks the Spartan decency of Chilon, who lived six centuries before the Incarnation of the Redeemer. Chilon may have been a wise magistrate himself and as merciful as a Spartan could be, but his mercy was not that of Christ the Judge, for Chilon had no power to summon the dead: Come forth! The noble pagan tried to make the best of a bad thing by recommending a social convention born of pessimism. The mercy of God changes pessimism to hope, and hope is the engine of honesty.

This, by any chalk, is good writing. When I said that it reminded me of Johnson’s work, I was thinking primarily of the great moralist’s Rambler essays, though I could easily have cited something that Boswell once said of Johnson, which also describes the essayist in Father Rutler: His superiority over other learned men consisted chiefly in what may be called the art of thinking, the art of using his mind; a certain continual power of seizing the useful substance of all that he knew, and exhibiting it in a clear and forcible manner; so that knowledge, which we often see to be no better than lumber in men of dull understanding, was, in him, true, evident, and actual wisdom.

A good deal of Father Rutler’s wisdom is evident in his altogether salutary criticism of the extent to which his co-religionists have betrayed the obligations of their Catholic faith, especially in relation to the deeply anti-Catholic culture of the now tentacular State. In page after page of this collection, readers will see that this is one Catholic clergyman who does not have his head plunged in the sand when it comes to the consequences of Catholics refusing to defend the moral teachings of the Church. In an essay entitled Laughing with Caesar, Father Rutler could not be clearer about the nature of this dereliction of duty. "We can dance to Caesar’s intolerable music, but he will call the tune. We can feast with Caesar, but he will soon feast on us. We can laugh with Caesar but he will soon laugh at us. Risus abundat in ore stultorum. There is abundant laughter in the mouth of the foolish."

Another distinction of these essays is their charm. Evelyn Waugh, in the opening to his great comic novel The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (which he based on one of his more traumatic vacations), praised authors who, as he said, exhibited so much will and so much ability to please. Certainly, in his account of his own vacations, Father Rutler shows how he possesses that will and that ability himself in excelsio. Waugh wrote some incomparably good travel books, but I do not know that the author of Labels, Remote People, Ninety-Two Days, or Waugh in Abyssinia ever managed anything funnier than the essay of Father Rutler on the subject. I realize that comparing Father Rutler to Evelyn Waugh, not to mention Samuel Johnson, is high praise. Does the author of these essays that you now hold in your hands deserve to be spoken of in such illustrious company? I should say that he does, though now you must see whether I am right by reading these sprightly essays for yourself.

Edward Short

Feast of Saint Gregory the Great

September 3, 2014

Astoria, New York

Author’s Note

Authors may not be the best judges of their written thoughts, and the role of the critic is to remind them of that. Such advice is not of great help once the deed has been done, but it is gratifying that readers have at least read what was written. In our computer age, their comments come quickly. I have learned a lot from unsolicited opinions, and one hopes that electronic communication might lead to some glimmer of spiritual communion. A communion most intimate took place when the Risen Lord spoke to the men on the Emmaus road. They asked him to stay with them, and when he spoke to them and broke the bread, they united with the Word behind their feeble words. If we pay attention to personalities and events, and even trivialities and controversies, we may find in them ways that the Lord is speaking to us and communicating some sort of message.

My files are somewhat disordered, and so it seemed useful to assemble some of the things I have written either for particular occasions or as mental dalliances, discerning in them the lordly voice of the One who speaks through art and politics and every aspect of daily life, for nothing is outside the economy of God and man: Nihil humanum mihi alienum est. Wherever that Emmaus road was in fact, it stretches for all of us from the start of our lives to its setting. Those men tried to make sense of the Man who suddenly appeared walking with them. The men walking along the way include not only Cleopas and the one not named, but everyone who breathes, whether perceptive or obtuse, for that other man may be our surrogate. If the human race is too dull to recognize Christ on those occasions when he appears in the events of each day and in curiosities we stumble upon, he patiently explains to us who are slow of heart what is going on.

In selecting some of the essays I have written mostly in recent years, I have drawn from the overly large pile some that address a variety of subjects. Winston Churchill complained at a dinner that the pudding had no theme. Publishers often shy from anthologies for the same reason. The essays I have chosen cover a range of subjects that may seem unrelated and even eclectic, and the serious reader may find some unsettling whimsy creeping in. All that I write is written as a parish priest, and I am happy that is all I have ever been, and so I have had the privilege of being edified by souls in the daily traffic of their lives. If various passages in my essays are pedestrian, my one defense is that the men on the Emmaus road were pedestrians and the Man who walked with them was kind enough to explain that he had planned each step they were taking.

And they said to one another, Were not our hearts burning within us when he spoke to us on the road, and when he made the Scriptures plain to us?

—Luke 24:32    

1

The Transfiguration of the Church*

Years ago, an Oxford don, not rare as an eccentric but singular in his way of being one, kept in his rooms a small menagerie including a mongoose, to whom he fed mice for tea, and an eagle that flew one day into the cathedral and tried to mate with the brass eagle-shaped lectern, which was cold and unresponsive. It is claimed that the choristers at that moment were singing O for the Wings of a Dove, by Mendelssohn, who had recently dedicated his Scottish Symphony to Queen Victoria. No dove is safe around an eagle, and the dove and the eagle represent in iconography very different aspects of the spiritual life. The oldest eagle lectern in Oxford is not in the cathedral but in nearby Corpus Christi college chapel, and there are eagle lecterns all over the world, symbolizing Saint John, whose record of the saving Gospel soars on wings not of this world.

Curious it is, then, that Saint John is the only evangelist who does not record the ethereal mystery of the Transfiguration, and especially so since he was there: We have beheld his glory, glory as of the only-begotten Son from the Father (1:14). Some of the mystical writers explain that the entire Fourth Gospel is one long and radiant transfiguration. If the event is a lacuna for John, he makes up for it by being the only evangelist to record the marriage at Cana, which in some ways is a prototype of the Transfiguration. Before both events, Jesus had assured his apostles that they would see a great glory, and on both occasions he spoke of an approaching hour that was his destiny. This, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory; and his disciples believed in him (Jn 2:11).

In a sort of yin-yang contrast, the wedding miracle is soon followed by the violent cleansing of the Temple, just as the Transfiguration leads to a wild encounter at the foot of the mountain with an epileptic. A Russian proverb holds that when the Lord builds a church, Satan pitches a tent across the street. The endless agony of Lucifer without the Light is that he cannot get far enough away from the eternal brightness, and yet he is helplessly drawn to it, like an ugly moth to a lovely flame. There is some of that tension in those who talk incessantly about why they will have nothing to do with the Church. A Christ who does not inspire will seem to haunt. But only ghosts haunt, and Christ is not a ghost, for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as he has. This strange obsession is from a darker source.

The Church Militant, which in its weakest moments may seem like a scattered and tattered regiment of the Church Triumphant, has supernal guarantees that the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Any reformation of the Church that is not a transfiguration by the light of that confidence becomes a deformation. With the best intentions, sectaries spring up to fix the cracks they see in the Rock which is Peter, using some principle other than his power to bind and loose. This is not to impugn the moral protocols of those denominations, which often excel the practice of Catholics. Ronald Knox observed, and almost boasted, that only Catholic churches had signs saying, Mind your umbrella. But the Catholic Church, by being Catholic, cannot succumb to polemic, for she is not founded on any theory, and when the Antichrist attacks in ways carnal or psychological, his battering rams only bolster the barricades. Sinners in the Church’s ranks sin most easily when times are easy, while martyrs, apologists, and doctors flourish best in the worst times.

Christ’s glory filled the sky as he predicted his death in order to strengthen his disciples for the time when the sky would be darkened. Peter wanted to stay on top of Mount Tabor in its afterglow, like a fly in amber. Christ had more in mind: not nostalgia, but tradition, which passes the glory on to the disciples, filling them with all the fulness of God (Eph 3:19). Nostalgia is the climate of Quietism, the anemic spirituality that basks in God’s goodness without doing anything about it. It does not go down from Tabor to go up to Jerusalem. It inverts the Christian life by being of the world but not in it. This is religion as a virtue turned into religiosity as a vice, confusing grace with uncompromising rectitude and sanctification with unrelenting perfectionism. The perfectionist wants to be good, and that is a subtle blasphemy: Why do you ask me about what is good? One there is who is good. If you would enter life, keep the commandments (Mt 19:17). This same Christ, who cannot contradict himself, had already said: You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect (Mt 5:48). Goodness is from within, while perfection is from without. The perfectionist wants to make himself good, better, and best. But the Perfect Man said, apart from me you can do nothing (Jn 15:5). That is why he gave us the Church as his Body and, by so doing, saves mortal man from the degradation of trying to feel good about himself.

Perfectionists are easily scandalized by what is not good. Saints are only scandalized by what is not glorious. We may say in cliché Nobody’s perfect, but the fact is, saints are perfect, and they are precisely so because they do not try to be good, better, and best. The more they are transfigured by the Light, the more they seem to themselves bad, worse, and worst. Perfectionists resent the weaknesses of which saints boast: My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness (2 Cor 12:9). The perfectionist misses this whole point, and so, like the narrow kind of Pharisee, he casts a cold eye on the failings of humans, as if the failings abolish the humanity. The saints, having seen the glory on the mountaintop, do not gaze at themselves but see only Jesus, who, rather than transforming them into goodness, transfigures them into glory. From his own lofty height, Saint Maximos the Confessor could say, All that God is, except for an identity of being, one becomes when one is deified by grace. And he was not the first