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Shae Slaven

RST 291 – Fr. Wathier

December 9, 2019

The Catholic Heritage

The Catholic Heritage contains within itself the greatest love story, the brightest

thinkers, and the most intimate community that our world has to offer. It is a drama

that stretches over two-thousand years and exists in eternity. It is more than just the

story of the Catholic faith; the Catholic Heritage has helped the world understand the

human person and the human experience and has shaped the world around us in

ways that we will not fully realize until we reach the intimate union with the Triune

God in Heaven. Understanding that I cannot possibly grasp at the depth the Catholic

Heritage has to offer, I hope I can at least do it some justice in diving into what I have

found to be some of its most significant elements. I will do this by not simply picking

out three elements, but by listing truth statements about the Catholic Heritage that

highlight elements that must be recognized. With confidence, I intend to convey that

the Catholic Heritage is rooted in the Incarnation, consists of and needs

transformative intellectuals, and is communal.

First, I believe that the most important and crucial element of the Catholic

Heritage is that it is rooted in the incarnation of Jesus Christ. In an effort to join us to

himself, God gave us himself in the person of Jesus so that relationship with him

could be accessible to us as flawed humans tarnished by sin and worldly things.

Jesus becoming man shows us that God created humanity with inherent goodness,

otherwise Jesus would not have become one of us. This singular action tells us

everything we need to know about our human experience: the Incarnation informs the
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Catholic Anthropology. In his book on Catholic Anthropology, Thomas Rausch

explores the understanding of the human person in relation to the Christian God. He

looks at what we seem to know about this relationship: God is both transcendent and

immanent, creation is both flawed and graced, grace builds upon nature, and God

respects our freedom. From there he digs into what this means for us. On the

immanence of God he writes:

“God’s presence is reflected in nature, disclosed in symbol, sensed in the

human heart. Most of all, in the mystery of the incarnation Christians confess

that God has spoken his eternal word into space and time and human history

in the person of Jesus, the Word become flesh. Not only is God immanent, in

Jesus God has entered completely into our experience, even unto the death that

each of us must one day face.” 1

God is near to us, often in ways that we do not see, and most importantly through the

person of Jesus. If the God of the universe is willing to become man, it is not for his

own sake, it is for us. That means that there must be something demanded of us as

well and we are called to something more than the life we have been living. Rausch

summarizes this into a single question: “What is the life that God calls us to?” He then

very clearly lays out what he has found the answer to be after considering the intricate

relationship between God and man. He explains that God, while respecting our

freedom, calls us to share in the divine life and that it is a self-gift of both sides to do

so. And sharing in this divine life is rooted in Jesus – living in partnership and

fellowship with him.2

1
Rausch, Catholic Anthropology, 35.
2
Ibid., 42-43.
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I think it is once we realize that it our responsibility to be in partnership and

fellowship with Christ, it is easier to see how it fits into the Catholic Heritage. It is not

complicated to see how conceptions of human dignity then arise out of the Incarnation

and catholic anthropology. Honoring human dignity is at the forefront of Catholic

thought and has shaped the Catholic Heritage. One place this is evident is in the

example of Catholic Social Teaching (CST). Although it is a fairly recent development,

CST seeks to address and promote the dignity of all people across the spectrum of life,

from the moment of conception to natural death. In honoring each person’s dignity, we

are untied to the mission of Christ in reaching out to the margins of society and giving

God’s love to those that would not know it otherwise. This of course if not easy to do

and may even sound like crazy talk to some. But in faith, we know that we are not

alone in this. God left his holy spirit to support and guide us, along with the Eucharist

to nourish us. The Eucharist, the Body and Blood of our Incarnational Lord, again

leads us to the humanity and divinity of Christ. And it is regular reception of the

Eucharist that we are then able to continue to mission of drawing all into the divine

life that Christ entrusted us with. In his encyclical on the Eucharist, Pope John Paul II

wrote these powerful words:

“The Church's mission stands in continuity with the mission of Christ: “As the

Father has sent me, even so I send you” (Jn 20:21). From the perpetuation of

the sacrifice of the Cross and her communion with the body and blood of Christ

in the Eucharist, the Church draws the spiritual power needed to carry out her

mission. The Eucharist thus appears as both the source and the summit of all

evangelization, since its goal is the communion of mankind with Christ and in

him with the Father and the Holy Spirit.” 3

3
Pope John Paul II, Ecclesia de Eucharistia, 22.
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It is from Christ himself that we continued to be strengthened and nourished to

present ourselves as a gift for the world. Knowing ourselves and what the world needs

through the lens of the Incarnation then sets up my next claim that the Catholic

Heritage is shaped and upheld by transformative intellectuals and that the church will

always need them.

In Dangerous Memory: The Transformative Catholic Intellectual, Russell Butkus

defines the transformative intellectual as one who “passionately exposes and critiques

prevailing ideologies and social practices that destroy creation and produce injustice

and… commits to forms of political solidarity with those groups engaged in the

struggle for freedom.”4 Considering then the mission of Christ, it is the unique mission

of his church to live the gospel and to be the countercultural force that is needed for

change at the macro level. Butkus notes that it is the Church’s intellectual activity

that has the duty to be transformative in the culture in preparation for the coming of

the kingdom.5 Because we know the truth of the Incarnation, we are then called to

more like we learned from Rausch’s analysis of Catholic anthropology. This more we

are called to as transformative intellectuals is to live the Gospel and live it fully. 6 In a

separate book from Rausch, he writes this words on what it means to be the church:

“The church is more than an experience of community or a place of worship.

Nor can it be reduced to some form of Social Gospel. The church makes the

transcendent immanent, bringing the numinous into the midst of the human,

disclosing it in symbol and rite, joining time and eternity. The risen Jesus is not

4
Russell Butkus, Dangerous Memory: The Transformative Catholic Intellectual, 52-53.
5
Ibid., 53.
6
Jean Vanier mentioned “wanting to live the gospel” as a reason for leaving the Canadian navy, and he truly did
that with his life. He could have been used as a good example in any of the points I make in this essay.
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just remembered but encountered in a holy communion that incorporates us

into his paschal mystery.”7

With the help of transformative intellectuals, the church must combine community,

worship, and social justice, with the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, otherwise

those things are simply of this world. Uniting community, worship, and the Social

Gospel in the name of Christ is where encounter with him will take place and the

responsibility has and will fall onto those that have has their lives transformed by

Christ and seek to transform the world around them. I would call it the ecclesial

responsibility to foster intellectuals seeking to transform in order to show that the

kingdom is already, but not yet and that there is still work to be done.

One person that truly exemplified what it means to be a transformative

intellectual with his life was St. Thomas More. More had experience with the law and

politics and was a very highly respected citizen in England during in the late 15 th and

early 16th centuries. Close to Henry XIII, More was faced with a moral dilemma when

the king demanded a divorce from his wife. More, who could have very easily just

agreed with the king, refused to support him in his effort to undermine the sanctity of

marriage and what God had bound together. He was then accused of treason and

effectively martyred for the faith. An intellectual from the beginning, More sought to

use his ability for good, which in the case of his death, meant that he had to counter

the culture that had much more power to honor the truth found in the church. Even

at his death, he was reported as saying: “I die the king’s good servant, and God’s

first.”8

7
Thomas Rausch, Eschatology, Liturgy, and Christology, 158.
8
James Duggan, Individual Presentation, November 26, 2019.
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Another transformative intellectual I was struck by was the example of St.

Alphonsus Liguori. Liguori was a highly successful lawyer during that 1700’s and had

not lost a case until 8 years into his practice. Soon after this loss, he claims to have

heard “leave the world, and give yourself to me” which marked the beginning of his

religious vocation. After becoming a novice in the oratory of St. Philip Neri, Liguori felt

the call to evangelize to the poor and destitute, people that had been rejected by

society. He later founded the Redemptorists with the mission to preach in slums and

other poor areas. He was also known for fighting the excessive moral rigorism of

Jansenism and his work in developing the moral theology of the church. 9 A man of

great intellectual capacities, he devoted his life to seeking Christ and showing Christ

to others. He left the world a better place, in his effort to leave it behind.

St. Thomas More and St. Alphonsus Liguori were most definitely transformative

intellectuals, but their examples should not lead us to think that we are not capable of

being one ourselves. They lived us to it in s profound way, but we are simply called to

say no to what the world is offering us and yes to those that seek the freedom that

God has to offer.

My final truth claim then is that the Catholic Heritage is communal. Not in the

way that there is community found in sports teams or in a tight-knit neighborhood,

but something much deeper. This community that I speak of extends beyond our

conceptions because, once again, we find it rooted in the Incarnation. The community

that exists in the Catholic Heritage is the Body of Christ. In the words of Paul in 1

Corinthians 12:12, we make up that one body: “As a body is one though it has many

parts, and all the parts of the body, though many, are one body, so also Christ.” 10 It is

9
Catherine Koetz, Individual Presentation, November 19, 2019.
10
1 Corinthians 12:12
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through this community in Christ that we are called to live. Each part is dependent on

the others and each plays a crucial role in the function of the body. I find this theme

to be especially prominent in CST and Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’. As I have

already mentioned, CST seeks to promote the inherent worth and dignity found in all

people, but Pope Francis has helped to show us that that same respect is due to the

entirety of creation as well. In a quote we have heard several times this semester,

Francis highlights the interconnectedness of creation: “Human life is grounded in

three fundamental and closely intertwined relationships: with God, with our neighbour

and with the earth itself.”11 These relationships are foundation to living the life God

calls us to. We cannot fall prey to individualism. Our livelihood, prosperity, and joy are

wrapped up in how we relate to God and the other people and things he has loved into

existence. And we know that when our happiness is dependent only upon ourselves,

true joy is never an option.

If I am going to make the claim that the Catholic Heritage is actually communal,

I think it is important to highlight the way the tradition lives it out. Often in CST, the

term the “common good” comes up quite often and for good reason. In paragraph 156

of Laudato Si’, Pope Francis defines the common good as “the sum of those conditions

of social life which allow social groups and their individual members relatively

thorough and ready access to their own fulfilment.”12 In honoring an individual’s or a

group’s dignity, we are promoting the common good and living in support of the

common good is central to community. This idea seems to flourish in the Catholic

Intellectual Tradition (CIT). Because promoting the common good is a part of the CIT’s

mission, there is a great deal of cooperation and unification to be found within it. The

intellectual tradition seeks to provide truth in relation our human experience. This
11
Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, 66.
12
Ibid., 156.
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means that every facet of life is taken into consideration. The CIT unites faith and

reason through studies in the arts, politics, environmental science, medicine, biology,

philosophy, and so many more. The unity of disciplines present in the CIT is an

example we could all learn from. Honoring the common good binds together and

sustains communities.

One person that has taught us quite a bit on this subject is Yves Congar. A

huge force in the Second Vatican Council, Congar helped develop some important

ideas that we still maintain today. One item of emphasis he brought to the world was

returning to St. Paul’s words in seeing the church as the Body of Christ. He saw the

need for unity and brought people’s attention back to it. Congar was also a big

proponent of active participation of laity in the Church and salvation. 13 To be the one,

holy, catholic, and apostolic church, there must be activity on the part of all. The

church does not only consist of ordained and consecrated men and women, the

church is all followers of Christ and the laity have an obligation to the community of

God just as much as any other member.

The Catholic Heritage is rich will truth, goodness, and beauty, but it is surely

not limited to what I was able to write in nine pages. The heritage stems from the

Incarnation and all the rest flows from there. There is truth to be sought and the

Catholic Heritage seeks to do so and it seems to be doing a decent job at it. There is

significant value present here if we have eyes to see. 14

13
Stephen Richert, Individual Presentation, September 5, 2019.
14
While this essay focuses on three important elements of the Catholic Heritage, I felt that it was appropriate to
dedicate a large section to the Incarnation because I believe that everything in the Catholic Heritage rests upon it
and nothing else that I write about would matter without it.
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Bibliography

Rausch, Thomas. Eschatology, Liturgy, and Christology. Collegeville: Liturgical Press,

2012.