Profaned Among the Nations

The Second Commandment, that of not taking the Lord’s name in vain, is, like all the Ten Commandments, a summary of a deeper, tangled web of sinful thoughts, actions and tendencies which plague fallen humanity. For example, we all know that the Fifth Commandment, which forbids killing, has always required nuance: even the Old Law itself makes sharp distinctions between homicide, what we would call manslaughter, and the killing which takes place in war and capital punishment. All of the Commandments over the centuries have been the subject of extended moral analysis. They have a remarkable place in Divine Revelation, because they are both simple and profound, very much like the nature of God himself. The simplicity of the form imitates the nature of God’s own simplicity. The depth of its meaning reveals the unfathomable breadth of God’s own wisdom and goodness.

The Second Commandment, I learned as a child, simply meant I was not supposed to use God’s name as a curse. Yet then I learned more nuance; indeed, both the Scriptures themselves, as well as the tradition of the Saints and even the example of Christ, see God and his Name invoked to curse and to deprecate. As much as we may try to whitewash this from modern Lectionaries, it is a fact that there are some, relatively rare times and places where God’s name may be invoked as a curse upon something. Not only does the human desire for justice exist, making us desire the downfall of evil and the exaltation of what is good, but also the supernatural instinct which exists in the Christian Soul, a prelude to the day when we will judge through, with, and in Christ. We will desire the same mercy and justice which he does: our wills will be as one.

On the other hand, Christ seems to possess a real disdain for both formal hypocrisy and lukewarmness. I say formal hypocrisy because every man or woman alive is a hypocrite, if we define hypocrisy as not practicing exactly what you preach. We all fall short of the glory of God. By formal hypocrisy I mean something closer to it’s etymological root: the use of virtue, or goodness, or religion, specifically to advance something evil.

Invocations of the name of God are also strongly linked to the use of oaths. To swear by God, although technically acceptable, is such a dangerous venture that Christ, in one of his hyperboles, urges us never to swear at all, by anything whatsoever; not only because human nature is labile, but because we drag the other persons, places and things by which we swear into the complicated, often deceitful web of human speech. But just like we still call our male parent our “Father”and most Christians still have intact eyes and limbs, the prohibition against oaths has never been intended to be absolute, although the Church has always taken oaths quite seriously. Interestingly, just as the Fourth Commandment is the first one with a promise, as Saint Paul reminds us, so the Second Commandment is the first one with an explicit threat, that God will not hold the man blameless who misuses his name.

I was recently listening in my office to the background noise of Dr. Jordan Peterson’s series on the Book of Exodus. I usually listen to books or podcasts when I work in my office, and occasionally a word or turn of phrase captures my attention. His analysis of the Second Commandment is extremely powerful and deeply moved me, because it at long last gave me some sort of conceptual framework to understand something many people have been feeling in the past decades, without being able to explain why. His idea is thus: to take God’s name in vain is not merely or solely to use the sound or form of words associated with him in an impious or disrespectful manner. The deeper understanding of this sin, the one for which he will hold no man blameless, is to use the things of God as an appearance, as a front, all the while intending nothing of what God and his Name mean. Even worse, to purposefully use God and his affairs to advance the cause of the World, Flesh or the Devil is quite literally a profanation, to take the holy “out of the temple” and to expose it to the ridicule of the nations, like pearls before swine.

I have written time and again about various problems occurring all at once: the abysmal morale of the modern clergy, the dismay of all the faithful in the face of heresy and liturgical abuse, the mixed signals of our leaders, both in and outside the Church, and above all, the ambivalence and doublespeak which even the Vicar of Christ on earth exercises his Office. It is relatively easy to understand all these phenomena from the perspective of injustice and apostasy. The fact is that we live in a lawless age in many ways, and we live in an age where the hearts of men grow cold, and the men and women who are supposed to have faith, act as if they do not. Yet there is something literally even more outrageous at work here that I don’t think anyone has been able to identify explicitly, which I would like to attempt today.

I wrote about Moral Injury as the psychological wound which is festering at the heart of so much of the post-Dallas Charter Priesthood in America, and in much of the world. But there is something else, which I think is worse. It is the deep sorrow, and possibly feeling bordering on despair, that somehow, someway, our Church and the name of God have been deeply profaned. God complained of the people of Israel that on account of their behavior his name was profaned among the nations, and I can’t help but think God has a similar complaint about us today. What does it mean to profane the name of God? It goes back to our discussion of the deeper meaning of using God’s name in vain. Blasphemy and sacrilege of course are grave sins which offend God’s majesty and goodness, but to profane God’s name is a particularly pernicious sin, because it treats God, his Name, or the things of God as if they are not what they are. Profanity is more subtle than blasphemy. It is blasphemous to desecrate the Eucharistic Species. It is profane to treat the Eucharist as if it were not the Body and Blood of Christ. While we may debate to some degree about what form of adoration we owe the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of our Savior, there should be no debate that we do owe it. That is the justice, the natural piety, which is the source of the virtue of religion, even among the pagans. It is a quality of a sincere and upright spirit.

Permit me to furnish another example, at the risk of sounding pedantic. Let’s say we talk about the reception of Holy Communion. We may have a good and holy debate about whether reception of Communion kneeling or standing is more reverent. It is abundantly clear that the norm for most of Latin Christianity has been to kneel, and for most of Eastern Christianity, to stand. Different Rites of the Church historically have had bitter and divisive fights regarding the superiority or inferiority of one or another liturgical or spiritual practice: but one thing we cannot doubt is that both sides were, without a doubt, seeking what they understood to be God’s Glory. All sides wanted to worship Him with the best of ourselves, to approximate as best as we could on earth the total worship of the Saints in Heaven. Our worship here will always be imperfect until it is taken up, subsumed, into the endless perfect praise of the Eternal Trinity. The only praise that is perfect is God’s praise of Himself. All else is derivative and/or participatory.

In the past, in eras of greater faith, we could take for granted that most people who claimed to be religious, even if their motives or ideas were confused or mixed, genuinely desired the Glory of God. Although zeal without reason is often the seedbed of fundamentalism, zeal with reason is the seedbed of revolutions of sanctity. When we want to bring God glory and have at least some conception of why or how, this is an instinct that deeply pleases God and elevates the Church, because it is in the adoration of the Triune Godhead that we meet, as the Church and as Humanity, our highest destiny and truest end.

I think what is the source of so many good people’s disillusionment and anxiety is that there is something deeply perverted about our discourse in much of the contemporary Church. We profane the name of God with a frightening regularity. We have been used to people acting badly, even people who ought to know better. There is much forgiveness in the heart of Christ for human weakness. Yet the malice and the intentionality of perverting the meaning of faith, hope, love, and even the nature of “God” himself, is an offense which strikes at the heart of the pious soul, the man or woman who loves God. It is one thing to betray something that someone loves. It is another thing to cynically discard or defile its remains, and this involves sort of unspoken hatred and disdain, the final putrid flower of a soul that has lost its faith, and resents the belief it once possessed.

I would like to provide a few examples to explain how this applies, and how dangerous it is to the body politic of the Church. A good public example of this recently was Cardinal Cupich’s public threat that he would ban the Eucharistic Procession in his Diocese of Chicago as it passed by on its way through the country for the National Eucharistic Congress and Revival. His reason? It detracts from people’s reverence for the Mass. Is he for real? Ask a single man, woman or child who attends a Eucharistic Procession why they are there; such a voluntary participation in an act of devotion is indicative of more than a routine, perfunctory act of religion. If less than a fifth of Mass goers in this country believe in the true presence at an average Mass, I would bet money that that number would rise to at least 50%, if not more, if people at a Eucharistic Procession are polled.

But what is so disturbing about this is not the absurdity of the statement, but the risible, outrageous reasoning at the heart of it, by a Senior Churchman. Moreover, it was not enough for him that the Procession not take place: he felt he must do something to prevent or destroy it. For who in his heart can participate in a good Eucharistic Procession, to see people at prayer, to hear the Psalms, to see the banners, to smell the incense, to sense the reverence, and honestly say that this somehow detracts from God’s Glory? That it is a threat to his worship? This coming from a man and a Diocese which openly admits the archheresy of wokeism and modernism to run rampant in his own Diocese, attracting national infamy? To treat a holy thing as it it were unholy is the heart of profanation. To turn against something holy and good is supreme perversity. “O Good, be thou my evil!”

Pope Francis’ semi-recent interview with Spanish speaking teens and young adults recently is another example. Let’s review what we believe about the Papacy: 1) that he is the Vicar of Christ on earth. 2) That he is the Supreme Judge and Lawgiver on earth in the Church. 3) He is the guardian of the Sacred Deposit of Faith, whose mission like that of St. Peter is to “confirm the brethren”. Instead of this, what did we see? We witnessed the humiliation of the Papal Office, a man who allowed his own person, office, and the Church at large put on trial by the standards of the world, even though in fact it is the Church who will judge the world, and judge apostate angels. We saw a man who dropped verbal profanity (the f-bomb in Spanish) in front of Seminarians as well as underage youth. The Papal Office is degraded, our faith is profaned, Holy Orders is profaned, and behavior that would get a standard cleric sent to a psychiatric institution or on permanent leave for ‘boundary issues’ is being done by the very Pope himself.

Some may say that the Pope did this in the name of humility, to show how approachable or ‘real’ he is. But this reminds me of the same wickedness and profanity which leads Priests to celebrate Mass in bars and in swimming pools: perhaps it may be true that someone may have more in common with a crass or tasteless man, but the fact remains that now that he has sunk to your level, his capacity to elevate you, to bridge the gulf between the sacred world and the profane world, has evaporated. To put the Papacy on a pedestal is not idolatry, or even pride. The same thing is true of how we elevate the Mass, the Eucharist, the Sacraments, and more. We elevate that which we cherish and value. In the house of the Church, we have many precious things that Christ himself gave to us. Yet when we see those who ought to know better, in the name of humility, ‘give away the store’, how is the average Christian supposed to interpret such behavior?

It is not enough to say such behavior is scandalous, although it is. This is the precise result of the warning given by Our Lord about salt losing its savor: without it, it has no purpose but to be thrown aside and trodden by men. How prophetic and wise Our Lord’s words are. It is interesting that Our Lord says that the destiny of the flavorless salt is not just its non-use. Bad salt isn’t just useless: it is violently thrown away. It is despised.

Recently I read some articles on the archaeological study of the Easter Isles, the islands in the Southern Pacific which host the famous standing stone heads, carved over centuries. Archaeologists have long been puzzled by a strange occurrence: why were these statues, which to the native people were the totems of the protective spirits of their ancestors, all found toppled down? We know from the first European explorers and from the surviving myths of the native peoples that these stones once all stood proudly. But somewhere in the history of that people, after interacting with Europeans, and being ravaged by disease and slavery, began to tear down these cherished monuments, one by one. The thesis among some scholars is that this act of profanization was a cynical act of a people who had begun to lose its faith, and so they tore down and derided the culture and beliefs their fathers spent centuries building.

I could not help but see an analogous phenomenon among us and our Rites. There were men and women during the initial Liturgical Reform who were brilliant intellects and holy souls, who desired to know Christ in the Liturgy of the Church, and to share that with all who would hear. Yet we also had among us what I call the “profaners”, the ones who wanted to cast the holy out of the temple, and bring the profane into the sanctuary. This movement in my mind reached its pinnacle in the shameful cult of Pachamama in the Basilica of Saint Peter, and in the Churches of Rome.

It was in response to such an “abomination of desolation” in the Holy Place which caused the revolt of the Maccabees, and the fact that so few of our Senior Leadership were not outraged to celebrate an idol on the Tomb of the Prince of Apostles, where he shed his crimson martyr’s blood in confession of the only true and living God, is a scandal and a disgrace which will be held in contempt by all generations, and before Christ’s judgment seat. The pain in the heart of Priests and lay faithful now is more than just the outrage of injustice or the scandal of impurity. There is a groaning, a lamentation in the heart of the Church today, that Jerusalem desolata est, our Holy Places are being despoiled, our deepest convictions betrayed, and we have in our day no “prince, prophet or leader” to whom to look for guidance.

I do not want to end this piece without a note of hope. There is a way to remedy this, although the road is arduous, and full of obstacles. Aim to reconsecrate or ‘deprofane’, your daily life: firstly, by keeping the Lord’s Day Holy, both in the attendance of Holy Mass and in dedication to prayer, charity, and the pursuit of leisure and relationships with family, friends and neighbors. Mark off some part of your day as time dedicated as a votive offering to God, specifically for prayer, if you don’t already. Promote processions and devotions to your Priests and Churches, and offer to lead them, wherever possible. Whenever you do something in Church, do it as if you go to an encounter with the living God, because you are. Whatever you do in the world, do as if you will be held accountable for every word and deed, for you will be.

And although we are capable of countless oversights and negligences, many of which are involuntary, God loves us. Our weakness should not discourage us. But at the very least, whenever we see the sacred treated as common and profane, when the treasures of our faith, whether in teaching or in practice, are under threat, I daresay we need a little more of the Maccabean spirit in us; that is, to resist, and indeed even to overthrow, the idols in our midst.