One of the principal goals of the Albacete Forum is to gather and disseminate Msgr. Albacete's written works, primarily through a series of books. Selected excerpts from his uncollected writings will also appear on this page.

A Child and His Mother

An excerpt from the new book Cry of the Heart by Lorenzo Albacete.

The redemption of suffering and the mystery of love are inseparable. The response to suffering is not to stop caring—that, in fact, is hell—but to experience a caring that sustains us in our humanity as it was meant to be. This is the redemption that the heart seeks.

The following example should help us understand the argument. A little boy falls down while playing and scratches his knees and arms. For a brief moment, he stays down on the pavement as if considering his condition. Then he looks around and sees his mother at a distance. He gets up and, crying loudly—as if in the most agonizing despair—he runs into his mother’s arms. She kisses and consoles him with soothing remarks. The child’s cry seems first to intensify, as if coming from deep inside his soul, but then it winds down rapidly. It is not surprising that, within a couple of minutes, he is even smiling. The wounds remain untreated—the pain has not disappeared—but something has happened such that the child is no longer suffering. Why?

Human suffering has two dimensions: subjective and objective. In our example above, the objective suffering of the child clearly relates to the pain of his scratches. This is the physical source of suffering. There is, though, another aspect to this suffering. Let us call it the psychological one. In our example, it would be the pain of not being able to continue playing—or the embarrassment, maybe, of being seen falling down.

Yet this is still not all. There is something else experienced for the first time, perhaps during those moments of surprise before the child cries. Yes, it could be that the child, frightened by his fall, has not fully realized what has happened. But I don’t think this is all. In whatever way we can imagine it in a small child, his surprise also contains a perception of injustice, of unfairness. This should not happen. Why do these things happen?

Perhaps this wondering, this protest, intensified when he noticed his mother because she reminds him of everything that is good and beautiful in life as he knows it. That, precisely, is why he begins to cry then. Some might think it is only to call attention to himself. I suggest that this is not all. His cry is also a cry of protest, and, for the moment, his mother’s attention (when he sees her and when she begins to comfort him) intensifies this protest. However, this is what his mother’s love has conquered. For, in the end, suffering is transformed by love.

The little child in our example is right: he should not have fallen down. Little children playing should not fall down and get hurt. Awareness of this little, perhaps insignificant, evil is but a hint of what can really happen in this world: the suffering of children dying of famine or in a natural disaster. Moral suffering, the experience of this evil, cannot be dealt with by physical and psychological therapies. Moral suffering is ultimately perceived as an absurdity: the why of evil can neither be answered within the physical nor even psychological orders because evil has its roots in something beyond.

That is why human suffering cannot be totally relieved by medicine and psychotherapy. It can appear to be so if the immediate occasion for suffering can be removed or if its deepest dimension is suppressed. But this is not real healing. Real healing takes place when the spiritual dimension of suffering is dealt with. This is why healthcare appropriate for human beings must seek the relief of suffering which may occur even if it is not possible to relieve physical or psychological pain directly. How is this done?

We can begin to understand this by returning to our example of the little child. Nothing was done by his mother to heal his physical pain. Whatever psychological suffering the child is enduring has not been treated directly. His mother need not say anything intelligible to him; in fact, if she tried to explain to him that he should have been more careful or how it is that the ground is slippery for some reason or another, the child probably would cry even more.

What the mother does touches the depths of his suffering. She touches and soothes the wound in his soul. She does this by affirming the relation of love between the two of them. Love enables her to share her son’s burdens and thus to lighten them, indeed, to lift them altogether. This interior healing touch made possible by her love relieves even her son’s psychological and physical suffering.

Disdain for Star Trek

From The Relevance of the Stars by Lorenzo Albacete.

The “disdain for self” of which Saint Augustine speaks is the result of that amazement or wonder at the inexpressible beauty and attraction of the revelation of God’s glory in the humanity of Christ. It is the experience of a person who falls in love with someone and then forgets all about himself, forgets to have lunch or dinner in order to be with the one who has so attracted him. It’s what happens when “you can’t even watch Star Trek,” as a scientist-companion of mine said to me back in the Sixties when he couldn’t participate in our discussions about the show, which was in its first season, because he had fallen in love.

This attraction of grace, the attraction of this exceptional presence, makes one forget about oneself. The Christian disdain for self is the consequence of the overwhelming attraction of the mystery revealed in the humanity of Christ, that most precious of pearls that moves us to rid ourselves of all the other pearls in order to buy the field where it was found. It becomes manifest when we seek that glory and beauty and happiness for which our hearts were created, seek with every effort of which we are capable, every tactic we can think of, but without success. And then suddenly, it is simply there—not as the fruit of our efforts, but as an entirely free gift from a love we never suspected. That attraction is what moves us to build the City of God in this world.

The Relevance of the Stars

An excerpt from The Relevance of the Stars, a new book of essays by Lorenzo Albacete, published by Slant Books.

An encounter with Christ will lead to an interest and a passion and a love for reality that will surprise us because that thirst is what defines the human heart, and that doesn’t age. When the heart encounters Christ, that thirst comes out from within you with the same force that it could have when you were fifteen years old—only you’re now sixty-six. The link with eternity does not change. All of those desires are activated. The religious sense is jump-started and headed in the right direction, and it shows itself again in an interest in all that exists.

There are other signs, but to me this one is fundamental in the way we face the culture. The culture is defined in terms of how we look at and experience reality. The real choice is between a dualism that separates the sacred and the secular—the flesh and the spirit—and a unified, incarnational vision. All of this is sustained by the grace of the encounter with Christ. It’s unexpected, but it isn’t a purely mental op-eration, or purely spiritual. It occurs through someone in a given place, at a given time. Fidelity to that particularity is essential because that keeps us within the orbit of the encounter, sustaining our approach to the real. Christians are not here to show a specifically Catholic genius or to engage in a battle. We are here to give witness to our faith, yes, but also to really to live with the confidence that that same faith gives us, to understand what is real, what is being seen, what is being lived. Again, this awakens interest, and with interest, light. This is the only way.

Faith in the Unseen

The staff and volunteers of the Albacete Forum wish you a Blessed Easter! As Pope Francis reminded us during last night's Easter Vigil, "He is not here... he is raised! And he awaits you in Galilee. He invites you to go back to the time and place of your first love and he says to you: Do not be afraid, follow me." For your further reflection during this holy season, we share a short selection from an Easter homily that Monsignor Albacete delivered in 1993.

We would be wrong to think that those who believe without seeing have greater faith than those who have seen. Faith is always faith in the Unseen; otherwise it would not be faith! Those who believed in Our Lord did not believe because they saw Him; after all, Mary Magdalen saw Him and at first she did not recognize Him! The disciples on their way to Emmaus saw Him, and they did not recognize Him at first either.  It is not enough to see the Risen Lord in order to believe in Him.  Something more is required: first, Our Lord has to reveal Himself, that is to say, He has to offer us the opportunity to recognize Him, better, He has to offer us the gift or grace of recognition. And second, we must have the interior dispositions that will allow us to accept this gift, and those interior dispositions are themselves a gift from God!  The "advantage" of those who have not seen Him and believed must refer to something else; it cannot be a matter of greater faith...

A revealing encounter with Our Lord Jesus Christ  takes place through the mediation of something external to us, something which is the fruit of the faith of those who have faith.  Those who come to believe in Him this way are "blessed," or "fortunate," more so than those who first saw Him, precisely because those who come later have at their disposal the testimony of the former ones. They have at their disposal the Tradition of believers, the Tradition of the Church, embodied in Sacred Scripture.

Lorenzo Albacete, Easter homily, April, 1993.

A Season of Desire

As the celebration of the birth of the Savior approaches, we offer this selection from an article Msgr. Albacete wrote for Traces magazine in December, 2001.

Advent is the season of desire. It points us to Christmas. Christmas is the appearance of the new, of the unimaginably “more.” Christmas is the revelation of the Eternal Father, the Eternal Origin. The Incarnate Son, born on Christmas Day, is the “revelation of the Father and of his love” (Gaudium et Spes, 22). The Eternal Son made flesh bears the imprint of the Origin. But because they cannot bear origins, ideologies cannot grasp the mystery of Christmas.

Without an identity grounded in a true origin, the “I” is mortally weakened, wounded. It can no longer defend itself from the power of those with the resources to build a future according to their will to power. It is not “God” that is dead in such a world. It is the “Father” from whom all origins (all paternity and maternity) proceed that disappears.

As the revelation of the Father and of his love, Christmas, the Incarnation and our share in the Son’s sonship, is the Event that redeems the human “I,” the human reality.

What happened at Christmas is what allows us for the first time to say, “Abba, Father, through the motherhood of the Church, the motherhood of Mary, Mother of the Son.” Thus all ideology is destroyed, and we are set free to be free.

The Christmas liturgy exclaims, Beata viscera Mariae Virginis quae portaverunt aeterni Patris Filium (Blessed the womb of the Virgin Mary, that bore the Son of the Eternal Father). And we pray, “Come Holy Spirit! Come through Mary!”

Lorenzo Albacete, "Christmas: A New Beginning," Traces: Communion and Liberation International Magazine, no. 11, 2001

Thursday Thanks and Friday Frenzy

Today, we give thanks to the Lord for you, the supporters of The Albacete Forum! As people finish their Thanksgiving meals and stores begin to open with early Black Friday eve bargains, we offer this short Albacete reflection courtesy of ilsussidiario.net. 

I wonder what the sharks in the sea are saying today about us humans.

I have in mind the sharks that appeared in a New Yorker cartoon some weeks ago. (I tried to save the page on my iPad but I really don't know how to use this instrument so I saved the entire issue on my New Yorker library and now I can't remember which one it is.) In any case, the cartoon showed two sharks looking for something to eat and one of them says to another: "Why is it that when they (humans) eat a good meal they are said to be just eating but when we do it they say we are on a feeding frenzy?"

If those sharks were looking at TV news this Thanksgiving extended weekend they certainly would be angry after seeing the frenzy of which we are capable.

At least the sharks were eating for their survival, the mobs on TV were hoarding up on big flat screen TV sets, the latest Apple products, magic refrigerators, etc. and the buyers were not satisfied with one item of the same product. I saw an elderly lady carry off three television sets in her almost already full shopping cart. Scenes like this were repeated mega-store after mega-store, in downtown and uptown, in shopping malls and strips.

This year the crowds were larger and larger because the traditional shopping bargains season had been extended from the day after Thanksgiving Thursday (Black Friday as it is traditionally called). Instead, the stores opened at midnight or even earlier, and the shoppers had to cut down on the time set apart to rest and give thanks to God, relatives and friends for all we have received from and through them, inviting as many as can do it to join in the preparation and consumption of the Thanksgiving turkey. Instead, many were thinking about those iPhones waiting at the superstore.

Now, I have never been accused of being a Puritan and I don't intend to become one. I envy the lady who was able to grab those phones and television sets, but I am too lazy and tired.

Still this year I felt that this shopping frenzy was a troubling revelation of a profound spiritual wound, a wound in our hearts that doesn't allow us to recognize what really can make us happy. Indeed we have lost our sense of the importance of the Sabbath, of Sunday, of worshipful celebration.

A Jewish friend of mine told me that, when his Jewish friends say that they must ignore the Sabbath in order to maintain a good standard of living for their elderly parent, wife and children, he invites him to his house to join him at his Sabbath meal. Then he takes them around his property that goes all the way down to the banks of the Hudson where you can see his pier and boat. Back in front of the house he shows them his two luxury cars and he says: "as you see the Sabbath, which I celebrate every week, has not hurt my standard of living."

Our concern for the world around us would be much easier if we were to regain respect for the Sabbath.

Lorenzo Albacete, "Thanksgiving/Human Feeding Frenzy", ilsussidiario.net, November 28, 2012

Why a New Evangelization?

We offer an extended selection from a priest retreat that Monsignor Albacete led in Lincoln, Nebraska in 1993. The topic of the New Evangelization is one that Albacete would turn to again and again during his life. In this excerpt, he explains why a "new evangelization" is needed at this moment of history.

     For what is it all about, this New Evangelization? What is really new about it? Is this still another pastoral trick, along the lines of all those "new" old products: the new toothpaste, the new soft drink, the new taco? Do we really have anything new to say? Should we?...

     It is true that God seems to be making a comeback; and that "religion" has once again become fashionable. But is it the religion of the Biblical God? Of course not. That God seems to exist only in the mind of religious fanatics and psychological deviants. The fact is that what Feuerbach said last century still holds. The witness given by Christians, he said, was the testimony of a "great lack," a great need, an absence. They longed for the past that was gone forever. They lived, he said, "from the alms of centuries long gone by...."

     Indeed, this may not correspond to your pastoral experience. There are still places where the situation is not as critical, where God still is perceived as a living, personal reality. But for how long?

     For example, the collapse of Communism does not necessarily mean a victory for our God. Actually, communism had preached the existence of an absolute, of a god, namely Communist Man himself. Consider these words of Feuerbach again, who influenced Marx: "I do not say absolutely: God is nothing, the Trinity is nothing, etc.; I only show that these mysteries are not what theological illusion thinks. They are internal mysteries, and not external; mysteries of nature, and not of an external being ... (God is) the idea of the species conceived of as an individual." Revelation, he said, is summed up in these words: Homo homini Deus (from "The Essence of Christianity").

     The ideology of atheist humanism is not dead; it has simply gone further than its communist phase by eliminating the god of the communist man. For the moment, it is being hampered by the emergence of the unresolved nationalistic and ethnic conflicts which communist dictatorships had suppressed, tied as they are to religion. It is also threatened by the strengthening of the Islamic consciousness. But with the help of science and technology at the service of consumerism, atheist humanism may overcome this latest set-back.

     It would be a great mistake to believe that the people assigned to your pastoral care cannot fall victim to the way of thinking of atheist humanism. The culture of electronic communications makes it very difficult to protect ourselves. In any case, the cultural proposal of atheist humanism does not identify itself as such. The term itself is passé. Religion is tolerated, even welcomed in the new order, re-defined, of course, to serve its purposes. We shall have to understand this well, for it is at the heart of the blindness of many Church leaders to what is happening. It still gives them the illusion that they matter, that they have something to contribute.

     The encounter between faith and this way of thinking is taking place at the level of language. It is a matter, as the novelist Walker Percy observed, of the "evacuation of the sign." "Words have been deprived of their meaning," Percy explains through the crazy priest in "The Thanatos Syndrome." The same words are used: love, justice, peace, spirituality, religion, God, man, family, and so forth. But they no longer mean what they once did. They mean less. Percy compares it to the devaluation of money: a hundred-dollar bill looks the same as it did ten years ago, but it is not worth nearly as much. As a symbol or sign of resources at our disposal, the devaluation is an example of the "evacuation of the sign." The crucial words that express how we experience no longer mean as much as they once did.

     Another American Catholic novelist, Flannery O'Connor, wrote extensively about this problem. In one particular essay with great implications for the current debate on medical ethics, O'Connor pointed out how "tenderness" or "sentimentality" has taken the place of faith. "In this popular pity, we mark our gain in sensibility, and our loss in vision. If other ages felt less," she wrote, "they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long since cut from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror" ("A Memoir of Mary Ann," in "Mystery and Manners").

     This is an important observation. "Theory" has replaced fact. What does not fit the ruling theory is not acknowledged to exist; it is not even seen or perceived. That is why so many are unable to perceive the personhood of the unborn child or the terminally ill. "Theory" cannot account for what is unique and unrepeatable, what does not fit its expectations or prejudices. In the name of compassion or tenderness, wrapped in theory, the unborn and the terminally ill are killed. "Tenderness leads to the gas chambers," she said, a sentence repeated verbatim by Walker Percy without realizing that she had said the same thing. (Of course, it is the application of the technological and scientific way of thinking to all areas of reality that has led to the replacement of the unique and unrepeatable by "theory," for science cannot see the unique and unrepeatable, and technology is oriented to mass production, to large numbers.)

     What does this imply for the Church, entrusted with the proclamation of the gospel, the gospel based on the Incarnation or embodiment of an absolutely unique and unrepeatable Word, the Word of God? Christianity is, above all, a "language event." It is about the embodiment of a Word, therefore about a meaning-full sign or symbol. What can we do then, if words no longer signify?

     "Could you preach?" the psychiatrist in The Thanatos Syndrome asks the crazy priest. "Preach...," he answered, "no, no... because it doesn't signify." The psychiatrist asks him what he means. Does he mean that the words of the sermon and of the Mass no longer mean anything to people? Why? The priest replies: "Do you think that it is possible that words could be deprived of their meaning?" "What words," asks the doctor? "Name it!" says the priest, "Any word. Tom, USA, God, Simon, prayer, sin, heaven, world." The psychiatrist offers the explanation that perhaps the people have stopped believing in the things the words signify. But the priest answers: "It is not a question of belief or unbelief. Even if such things were all proved, if the existence of God, heaven, hell, sin were all proved as certainly as the distance to the sun is proved, it would make no difference...to people! To unbelievers and so-called believers...because the words no longer signify...the words have been deprived of their meaning."

     In his book "Introduction to Christianity," Cardinal Ratzinger recalls the description of the pastoral situation given by Harvey Cox in "The Secular City." Cox compared our predicament to that of a circus clown in a new town who realizes that the town is threatened by an approaching forest fire. He runs into the town to warn the people without wasting the time to change his clown outfit. As a result, the do not take his warning seriously. They laugh. They think it is part of the circus propaganda. Our situation, comments Ratzinger, is actually worse. It is not just that our outfit, our "garb", our external appearance leads modern people to misinterpret our message. What has happened is that the people do not understand what the message is all about! Our words no longer signify. Following Cox's example, it is as if the people in the town did not even know what a fire was, or better, what they understood as fire was not what the clown had in mind.

     This is the pastoral situation, I repeat, that led to the Second Vatican Council, and in the light of which we should consider and interpret is teachings. Pope Paul VI, whose approval gave to the Council its validity, said this clearly in his talk at the end of the Council's last session. In it, he also outlined the pastoral response of the Church. It was to be the "spirituality of the Good Samaritan," he said. Like the Samaritan, the Church appears as an outsider in the modern world. Still, it is only this outsider who will come to the help of wounded man, not its religious and political leaders. This has been the proposed pastoral agenda of the Church since the council, all the way to John Paul II's insistence that "man is the way for the Church." The Church will encounter the present age at the level of the discussion of what it means to be a human person.

     But how? What language is the Church to use? How can it find the words to be understood? Part of her pastoral mission, therefore--at the heart of the New Evangelization--is the redemption of language itself! This is to be done, I propose, by the RETRIEVAL of the fundamental human experiences which our basic words express. It is a matter of "filling up the sign" with the experiences which the gospel words. And this is what we propose to do with our meditations this week: to retrieve the experience at the basis of the doctrine of the Church concerning what it means to be a Catholic priest. For the agenda proposed by the Council has been impeded by the discovery that the "mentality of theory" had also made great inroads within the Church itself. So much of what appeared to be the impressive edifice of Catholicism turned out to be as Feuerbach and others observed. And in spite of all kinds of post-conciliar programs and efforts, it continues as such, covered up now by Church activism. If the New Evangelization is not to be one more fruitless slogan, it has to start at this fundamental level of the retrieval of the foundational or defining Christian experiences. Nothing can be pre-supposed except what we proclaim in the first reading of the midnight mass for Christmas: "the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all, training us to renounce impiety and worldly lusts, and in the present age to live sensibly and righteously and piously, expecting the blessed hope and appearance of our Great God and Savior, Jesus Christ. He it is who gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from all iniquity and purify for himself a people of his own who are eager to do what is good." (Titus 2, 11-14).    

 Lorenzo Albacete, from a retreat for priests, Lincoln, Nebraska, 1993

The Wedding Feast

This is the text of a homily that Monsignor Albacete delivered in October, 1992. One of the goals of The Albacete Forum is to track down all remaining written or audio copies of Monsignor's homilies and other works before they disappear forever.

We pray for the victims of the terrible massacre in Las Vegas. Inevitably when such a tragedy occurs we see the same endless arguments between gun owners and gun control advocates that, depressingly, seem to lead nowhere and leave everyone in our society feeling helpless. Faced with this impasse, we would like to share an excerpt from an article Monsignor Albacete wrote for the Italian online journal Il Sussidiario. Like most of Monsignor’s writings, it invites us to look at the problem from a fresh perspective.

     Why was the affirmation of a right to bear arms seen as necessary to defend the rights listed in the First Amendment…?

     Were the founders worried about a counter-revolution? Organized and fought by whom? Or perhaps they realized that a Government elected democratically could turn tyrannical and violate the rights of the people affirmed in its constitution…

     The problem with this way of defending human rights is that it is based on whoever holds the most deadly power, as the Second Amendment sees it. Indeed the only other way of defending these human rights is encouraging the dialogue that will help citizens see that these rights originate in man's relation to God as reason can grasp it when its scope of analysis is not reduced by ideologies of power sustained by violence.

     In this country the debate about gun violence has dominated a large part of the public discussion (this past) week, but both sides can only refer to the problem of violence in the country… in terms of power to attack vs. power to defend…

Lorenzo Albacete, from "Sandy Hook and the right to bear arms," ilsussidiario.net, February 6, 2013

Like Falling in Love

Next we have an excerpt from a July, 2008 Traces article, written after Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to the United States that year. Here Monsignor speaks specifically about interreligious dialogue, but the attitude he describes is important in other cultural contexts as well, including the search for personal or political understanding between people.

     The purpose of a dialogue motivated by faith is not the discovery of a “common ground” between different or conflicting opinions. Rather the purpose is the common love for truth and the deepening of the bonds of solidarity that this devotion to reality creates. The first moment of such a dialogue is an affirmation of the value of the quest itself.

     This was clear in the Pope’s speeches during his visit to the United States. In his meeting with followers of different religious traditions at the Pope John Paul II Cultural Center in Washington, DC, the Holy Father praised the United States for its respect of religious pluralism. Religious pluralism is not a problem to be overcome; it is a reality in the human quest for truth. From this perspective, dialogue expresses the conviction that such pluralism does not mean that there is no ultimate truth or that we will never be able to know it with certainty. Dialogue requires confidence in its success!

     Indeed, faith in Christ is a form of knowledge that comes to know truth in Him. Faith allows us to recognize Christ as the Incarnate Truth, and it inspires us to seek to know Him more and more. It’s like falling in love with someone—you seek to discover the one you love in the contacts he or she has with other people. We have encountered the truth in Christ, but precisely because of this certainty, there is so much we want to know. The Holy Father spoke about the ardor with which faith propels our passion in reason’s quest for truth. This determination not to give up in the search for truth is one of our main contributions to the dialogue.

Lorenzo Albacete, from "Toward an Authentic Dialogue," Traces: Communion and Liberation International Magazine, no. 7, 2008

Monsignor’s interest in other people, his confidence in his connection with others, was one of his most striking features. Below we have an excerpt from a long talk that young Lorenzo Albacete gave at the parish of St. Catherine’s in Wheaton, Maryland on December 12, 1967. He was 26 years old, a doctoral student in aerospace physics. It is interesting to see him attempting to describe something that we would today call “the religious sense” by using a scientific vocabulary. The full text will become part of a “personal” book that we are preparing that will tell the story of Albacete’s life through a varied selection of his writings and interviews with people who knew him.

     I think that it is possible to speak of a “value field,” a “judgment field” or a way of being field” associated with every person. Our own field determines how we look at things, what we consider good or bad, beautiful or ugly, just or unjust. In a sense we can say that each of us is a value field. The moment something or someone comes to our awareness, it “feels” the effect of our field, that is, it will be judged or valued by us. We will say, not immediately perhaps, but often using the characteristics of our field, (applying our “field equations” as it were) we will say: “I agree, I disagree, I like you, it is wrong, it is fair, etc...”

     Everyone has a field, everyone has a reason for living, everyone has reasons for doing as they do, for hoping as they hope, for judging as they judge. To say that things have no meaning is contradicting because such a statement is in itself more meaningful to you than to say that there is meaning—just like the man who says “there is not law” without realizing that that is much a law as any other.

     So you see, this mystery is inescapable, it is always present, we cannot hide from it. It is, in fact, almost a field itself. A field which judges us, which is present in all that we do or think. We are silent before it, because we know it is greater than us. And yet, it is an attractive field. The force, which we feel when we become aware of this field, is a force of attraction: it is a call that leads us on and on without ever exhausting itself. But we are not objects, we are persons. Therefore, the call of this field is a call to a person—for only two persons can truly call each other.

Lorenzo Albacete, from "The Existence of God," St. Catherine's Parish, Wheaton, Maryland, December 12, 1967

The following article was written by Msgr. Albacete for Traces magazine in 2013. In light of recent events, particularly the devastating hurricane in Monsignor's homeland of Puerto Rico and the spate of natural disasters in our region, we find the piece more timely than ever. (We will update this post in the coming days with information on where to send relief donations.)

     Recent times have been marked by devastating tornadoes and other natural disasters that have stunned the American people. Amidst the issues discussed and questions raised in the news media’s coverage of all this horror, the ultimate question was bound to arise in its many forms. Why? This is how Pope John Paul II put it in the first book ever published by a Pope, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, published (1994):

     This question "is the source of recurring doubt not only in regard to the goodness of God but also in regard to His very existence. How could God have permitted so many wars, concentration camps, the Holocaust? Is the God who allows all of this still truly Love, as Saint John proclaims in his First Letter? Indeed, is He just with respect to His creatures? Doesn’t He place too many burdens on the shoulders of individuals? Doesn’t He leave man alone with these burdens, condemning him to a life without hope? So many incurably ill people in hospitals, so many handicapped children, so many human lives completely denied ordinary happiness on this earth, the happiness that comes from love, marriage, and family."

     It seems a list that could go on forever.

     All of these questions were asked in recent weeks, even by representatives of the secular media. These, of course, had no answers, but who can blame them? Public officials dealt with the question by referring to the new formula about their "thoughts and prayers" to be elevated to an unidentified god. Some of the suffering victims continued to affirm their faith in God, even in Jesus Christ. And, in a way, it was moving when they did so before the sympathetic and in some cases patronizing gaze of the anchors and reporters. The suffering proclaimed their faith, but it seemed to require the silencing of a critical mind. The Protestant split between faith and reason was so clear to me, and so painful.

     Here then is the John Paul II’s treatment of the question. Of course, it is not an answer, because the question touches a Mystery that exceeds our capacity to understand it, as Job learned. Still, this line of thought may be useful: "Stat crux dum volvitur orbis (The Cross remains constant while the world turns)."

     That is, the drama of the defeat of Satan (of evil in this world enthroned in fallen nature) becomes present as time moves on toward eternity. John Paul II writes that “we find ourselves at the center of the history of salvation.” In us, the freedom of the spirit and the processes of nature are inexorably bound. In fact, in creating this kind of “free” creature, the evil resulting from our free initiatives disturbs nature, and the evil caused by natural processes reaches our inner life. Indeed, God has put Himself under the judgment of man and the history of salvation currently taking place in our world is in fact the history of our continual judgment of God.

     "Could God have justified Himself before human history, so full of suffering, without placing the Cross of Christ at the center of human history?" "Love desires to justify Himself to mankind," explains the Pope. "He is not the Absolute that remains outside of the world, indifferent to human suffering." He shares the destiny of man fully. The divine omnipotence, the omnipotence of His love is shown when He descends into hell and brings to it an anticipation of His Easter victory. He is the measure with which we must judge the suffering of the world.

Lorenzo Albacete, "While the World Turns," Traces: Communion and Liberation International Magazine, no. 6, 2013

A Failure in Awareness

2017 saw the publication of Disarming Beauty by Fr. Julián Carrón. We next offer an excerpt from a lecture that was found among Monsignor Albacete's papers after his death. It touches on many of the same themes that Fr. Carrón deals with in his excellent book, which he will present on a US book tour in October, including at the annual Albacete Lecture in New York City on October 13. The play that Monsignor refers to is Our God's Brother, by St. John Paul II. When Monsignor taught at the John Paul II Institute, the Pope told him that students who wanted to understand his theology should read that play.

     My proposal to you is this: something has happened in our society, our country, our world such that there has been a change in our experience of what it means to be a human person. More precisely: our experience has been diminished; an aspect of it that was there is no longer there! It has been suppressed. (Do not be deceived by our growth in awareness of human rights, of the rights of individuals. Maybe there has been such a growth and this is very good. But I suggest to you that persons may have more rights acknowledged today than in the past, but personhood itself has been diminished. It no longer means as much as it did before. Something terrible has happened, and that is what lies behind our problems.)

      What we have, then, is a failure in awareness. There are aspects of the life of persons of which we once were aware but are not any more. All the people who support euthanasia and assisted suicide are not evil. (The same goes for abortion.) Oh yes, some are and some will always be. As I said, that is not the problem. The problem is not really a moral problem at all! No one is saying that we were better morally in the past, when no one thought about the legalization of euthanasia or assisted suicide or abortion. In so many other areas (take slavery, for example, and other forms of legalized racism) people today exhibit a better moral disposition than before. The problem is at another level, to repeat, the level of awareness, of experience. There has been an impoverishment in our experience of the meaning of personhood.

     In order to explain it let me turn to a theatre play, to a drama. Actually, it is the story of a real person. This man, called Adam (that was his name in real life!), suddenly discovered the extent of the misery in which so many people in his city lived. The experience overwhelmed him and from that moment on it tormented him not to know how best to respond to it. He was an artist, a painter, very well established in society, very successful. He thought about and discussed the situation with his friends. He considered giving everything he owned to the poor. He thought about using his influence to speak for them and demand recognition of their plight. He thought about possible economic and political solutions to the problem. He was even strongly attracted by revolution. One of the characters in the play with which he discusses the problems is called "The Other." According to the playwright, The Other represented "pure intelligence," namely, the ability to formulate problems logically in order to solve them. The Other keeps insisting that Adam is not acting responsibly by considering all kinds of dramatic emotional responses to what is, in fact, a social problem to be dealt with intelligently through analysis and logical solutions. Adam is convinced that is not enough. On one occasion Adam sees a destitute man by the lamp post and when he points him out to The Other, it turns out that The Other cannot see him! He's not interested in him! He's "gone past him," he says. Adam then suddenly makes an important discovery: Intelligence can deal with ''the poor" an abstract category, but it cannot even see a concrete, unique, unrepeatable poor person! Intelligence cannot grasp concrete persons. For Intelligence, persons are simply individual samples of a larger category with which it can deal both to understand and to solve problems. Intelligence goes "past" the concrete person present before it at a precise place and moment in order to worry about the generality, the abstraction! Adam, realizing this, says that he is glad to be free from "the tyranny of intelligence."

     Going back to our topic, I suggest to you that our problem is this: we are living under the tyranny of intelligence. We have lost the ability to perceive the presence of a concrete, unique, and unrepeatable person. We "go past" the concrete into abstractions, generalizations, "problems" to be analyzed and solved. We have reduced our thinking to what can be grasped in such a way that technology can provide solutions to problems. That which once was held to be only a way of knowing applicable to certain situations has become our dominant, indeed our only way of knowing! No one denies the value of the scientific way of knowing which must abstract and generalize in order to understand and make problems solvable through technology. The problem is that this way of knowing has become the only one we have. And remember, persons are invisible to this way of perceiving reality. Only that which can be a replaceable part of a larger grouping is perceived; the rest is ignored; it is not even seen.

Lorenzo Albacete, from "Euthanasia, Assisted Suicide, and the Tyranny of Intelligence," Lecture date and location unknown. 

A Mystic on the Lord's Prayer

We offer the following article by Monsignor Albacete simply because it is so HIM!  This is one of a series of articles he wrote about the Our Father for a larger project on the Catechism of the Catholic Church. As with the previous piece, we have not yet been able to place when it was written or where (or if) it was published. If you have any insight or possess any other Albacete materials you are willing to share, please contact us. We are seeking Monsignor's homilies, lecture transcripts, letters, etc., along with audio recordings, photos and video tapes. Our goal is to preserve all surviving material for posterity. We know there are many treasures like this piece yet to be discovered!

     In certain circles I’m known as a mystic. (Well, actually, one person thought I was one.) A few years ago I went to lunch with this person who thought I was a full-blown mystic and I was feeling depressed, down, sad, nervous, afraid, worthless, exhausted, paralyzed, and finished. I told her and she said: "You are going through the dark night of the soul."

     "That can’t be," I said. I explained that in terms of "mystical stages" I had not even approached the moat of the Interior Castle, and that I was lost in the plains hundreds of miles away from Mount Carmel. She, however, said the dark night felt like that.

     And so went our lunch conversation to the amazement of the people at the table next to us who heard everything. When I finally got home that night I checked my mail and found a letter from a friend whom I had not heard from in years. My friend said that he had won a little money in the lottery and wanted to thank the Lord by sending me a cheque "for my private charities" (namely me!).  A cheque for one thousand dollars was enclosed.

     I immediately felt wonderful, excited, happy, confident, bold, refreshed, energetic, and daring. I called my lunch friend and told her I had discovered a new mystical stage, the one in which I was at lunch. It was the dark night of the wallet. Now I had surpassed it, I said, wrapped in the brilliant light of wealth.

     I remembered this when I read the Catechism’s introduction to the Our Father.

     One usually associates advanced prayer with all kinds of weird emotions and trances characteristic of so-called "mystics." And yet, the greatest mystics of the Catholic Church have always said that in prayer it is impossible to surpass the Our Father, for it is the prayer that surpasses all, the Lord’s own prayer!

     Now I find that quite an amazing thing. Just think of it: the prayer taught to us by Jesus, taught to us by Him Who is the Eternal and Pure Word from and to the Invisible Father, the prayer taught to us by Him Who is Light from Light, true God from true God, contains a petition for those who hunger - not for Truth, or the Good, or the Beautiful, or the Immortal, or the Eternal - but for bread, for earthly food, which we must have "this day" or we will die. I really like that!

     Here is the heart of the Mystery of the Christian faith: Verbum caro factum est, the Word was made flesh, mortal flesh, flesh and bones. The Word became a fact (factum) of this world. And henceforth, the highest, most sublime, most "spiritual," prayer of all concerns our needs in this world, the needs of the flesh.

     How different this is from the escapist and otherworldly ethos of "religious souls" not bound to earth by the historical fact of the Incarnation. Indeed, the "dark night of the wallet" is acknowledged in the Our Father (the dark night of having nothing with which to buy food and clothing and pay rent so as to live a decent life on this earth) more than any "dark night of the soul" (the absence of the Eternal Presence).

     Sure, the main petition of the Our Father is the glory of God, the praise of God (sanctificetur Nomen Tuum), the establishment of the rule or kingdom of God, the realization of His will: but all of this "on earth as it is in heaven." The Eternal Son prays that earth be turned into the heaven where His Father is!

     But human life on earth is not only a matter of eating. There is another aspect of earthly, daily life without which it becomes subhuman. It is our need of others, life in companionship with others, with friends, our need for acceptance and love. And this too is His petition as taught to us. He teaches us to pray that we experience forgiveness and mercy so that we can extend it to others and heal the wounds that hurt human friendships and life together.

     And yes, there is that ever-present threat. Everything seems so fragile, so uncertain. One terrible but very brief moment, a second, and it is all over. Tragedy strikes, and life seems no longer worth anything. This is the greatest of temptations: the temptation to despair, to give up. We cannot live without hope. And so the Lord’s prayer includes that too: Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

     And nothing else is asked for, because nothing else is needed to make of this our earth a good home for our flesh and bones, the "groaning of the present age." No wonder the Lord said that those who think that progress in prayer is a matter of adding more and more words are wrong. His prayer is so incredibly brief, so simple, so basic, so innocent even, that it can be learned and said by a little child. And that is indeed the point, isn’t it? Unless you become like this child you cannot enter the kingdom. It can also be said by the poor and the tired, who have no energy and no resources for programs in “spirituality.” That is why, as the Catechism reminds us, the Our Father is “the summary of the whole gospel."

One last point: divine life is communicated to us sacramentally, that is, through realities and events in this world, “in the flesh.” It makes sense, therefore, that the Our Father, as the prayer of the flesh, be an integral part of our sacramental life. That is why the rites of the “sacraments of initiation” contain the “handing on of the Lord’s prayer," and it occupies an important place in the Eucharist.        

Lorenzo Albacete, from an article on the Catechism of the Catholic Church, date and publication unknown.   

An excerpt from “Reflections on the 25th Anniversary of Humanae Vitae”, a fascinating address Monsignor Albacete gave at Christendom College, Fort Royal, VA, in April 1993. Full text

"...when I recognized the astounding coherence of the Church's teaching in spite of the enormous pressures for change, I decided that the time for discussion had ended, and I had to take a stand. It was then that I recognized my vocation to the priesthood and agreed to respond to the call. This year, the 25th anniversary of “Humanae Vitae”, is my 20th anniversary as a priest. The relation between the two is not accidental for me. “Humanae Vitae” contained the last word I needed to hear before I could hear clearly the call from the Lord. But to repeat, not because of the subject of contraception. It was rather because I recognized a deeper issue behind that debate, the one behind my questions concerning the possibility of building a just society. The issue was that of “responsibility for the power given to man to domesticate and humanize nature”, to discover its secrets through science and put them at the service of human development. I am still convinced that the most important issue behind “Humanae Vitae” is the issue of the nature of “human dominion over nature” for the development of man. I suggest that the context of human dominion over creation provides a privileged access to the truth about human sexuality. This, of course, should not be surprising. For in the book of Genesis, gender differentiation and human dominion over creation are inseparable. After all, Adam's solitude is first introduced as the need for a helper in the task of human dominion.    

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