Men of the Legion of Valor, thank you to the many of you who have expressed support and encouragement in last week’s content and time with Bishop Paprocki. Thanks, also, to all who joined the video meeting Saturday. It was wonderful to see a true shepherd engaged with his flock Saturday, helping us to digest the challenging teaching of Christ that he felt called to share with us.

We’d like to pick up the dialog today with Bishop’s central message to us:

You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you…for if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?

Mt 5:43-46

This is a hard teaching. How can we possibly live up to this standard? The answer is, we can’t…if we trust in ourselves. We can only do this if we trust in God and cooperate with His grace. “With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.” (Mt 19:26) The power of the Holy Spirit dwelling in us and the gift of sanctifying grace—not our own, natural power—will enable us to embrace and fulfill this hard teaching. So we must begin by asking for His help.

But what, precisely, are we asking for His help with? We need to be clear on the obstacle we’re seeking to overcome so that we can be specific in our request for help—and so that we can be intentional in our own efforts to cooperate with that grace.

So, why is this teaching so hard?

The answer lies in a toxic cocktail of disordered anger and pride. Today, we’ll tackle the issue of anger, the obstacles anger presents to us, and how to overcome them. We’ll come back to the issue of pride in a subsequent post.

The Problem: Anger is a passion of the soul that, if unchecked, tends toward Sin (even mortal sin)

Anger, itself, is not a sin. Anger is a passion placed in the human soul by God to prompt us to confront objective evil and promote justice and charity—and to avoid error and protect our loved ones from moral and physical danger. In fact, the absence of anger in the face of an objective evil points to a defect in the soul. (See CCC 1762-1775)

Since anger is a proper response to objective evil, and, since there is no shortage of objective evil in our world today, there is much for the righteous man to be angry about. For instance, nearly a million innocent children are slaughtered in abortion each year, with an increasingly expansive political and cultural effort to normalize, even celebrate, this holocaust. Confused and heretical notions of human nature are being foisted upon our families and communities with aggressive tactics of intimidation, including unjust laws, that demand we forgo our beliefs and get with the program. The list goes on, and the issues are grave. We are right to be angry.

But what do we do with our anger? How do we direct it? Are we in command of it—or is it in command of us?

Anger, like all other passions, must be rightly ordered and subjected to the intellect and the will. Reason must rule and direct anger toward actions that are proportionate to the evil and in harmony with justice and charity. The will must choose those acts that are proper and reject those that are not. Otherwise, like all other passions, anger tends toward sin—even mortal sin.

This tendency toward sin is a result of our fall from grace. We are tainted with concupiscence—a tendency to indulge the passions, a tendency toward a disordered choosing of lesser goods over higher goods, and a tendency toward subjecting the intellect and will to the passions rather than vice versa. In a state of original grace, our intellect and will exercised dominion over our lesser faculties and powers, ordering the passions always toward the highest good. In a fallen state, however, our intellect is darkened and our will is weakened. Thus our command over the passions is a struggle, involving no small effort on our part, to grow in virtue and eradicate vice.

As if that challenge weren’t enough, Satan is keenly aware of the vulnerability of our fallen state and is a master at manipulating our passions. Like a spiritual martial artist, he takes the energy of our God-given appetites and redirects them against God and us. He takes our appetite for food and twists it into gluttonous over-indulgence. He takes our sexual appetite, which is ordered to make a gift of ourselves and cooperate with God in the creation of human life, and he turns it in on itself, toward selfishness and indulgence of pleasure detached from its proper end.

The same is true of anger. When our anger is stimulated by an injustice, Satan twists it toward vengeance, rage, hatred, and, ultimately, violence. Our darkened intellect is prone to self-justification and rationalization of the evil that we know to be wrong but desire to choose. So we are susceptible to unwitting cooperation with evil.

Anger in our soul, therefore, like all passions must be guarded with intense vigilance. This is particularly true for the masculine soul, which has a bias for action and a protective instinct. Consider this piercing insight from Venerable Louis of Granada:

There is no time more unfavorable for action, yet there is no time in which we feel ourselves more strongly impelled to act than when in anger. This is an additional reason for opposing, with all our strength, the suggestions of this passion. For as a man intoxicated with wine is incapable of acting according to reason, and afterwards repents of what he has done in such a condition, so a man beside himself with passion, intoxicated with anger, is incapable of any action of which he will not repent in his calmer moments. Anger, wine, and sensuality are evil counselors.

Venerable Louis of Granada

Ouch. As Christian men, surrounded by objective evil, and prone to manipulation of our passion of anger. We find ourselves in a vexing predicament, with traps set on all sides…including—in fact, most perilously—within our own soul. If unchecked, our anger tends toward hatred of our neighbor, rather than love for our neighbor. The battle for holiness, therefore, necessarily engages the front of anger in the soul.

The Remedy: Meekness and Patience

So, how do we engage the battle on this front? What is the remedy to this ailment in the masculine soul? What is the help of the Holy Spirit that we should seek to pray for and cooperate with? What’s the plan of attack?

We must pray for growth in meekness and patience and actively seek to cooperate with the grace to grow in these virtues.

Consider the following passage from Father Dennis Kolinski, SJC (a Canon of St. John Cantius in Chicago) from his “Manual for Conquering Deadly Sin”…

The primary virtue that helps neutralize the vice of anger is meekness, which moderates anger in accord with reason. Many people think that meekness is the same as weakness, timidity, or cowardice, but it is not. Jesus once said, ‘I am gentle and lowly in heart,’ yet we don’t at all get the impression from the Gospels that he was a wimp. Rather, the Catholic understanding of meekness is strength with gentleness, as seen in the account of Jesus driving the merchants and money-changers from the Temple. Filled with righteous (i.e., not sinful) anger, his meekness moderated his anger.

Meekness, as one of the forms of the virtue of temperance, doesn’t necessarily eliminate anger but rather controls it so that you can express yourself, when angry, according to the dictates of right reason. In other words, meekness tempers anger.

You must be always vigilant lest you be overtaken by a sudden burst of emotion that would cause you to violate justice and charity. That’s why the virtue of meekness should, in turn be generously supplemented by the virtue of patience. Anger often results in a quick-tempered reaction that not infrequently tries to satisfy itself through some kind of vengeance. The virtue of patience aids the virtue of meekness by enabling you to calmly and patiently resolve the conflict that evoked the anger. St. James wrote, ‘Know this, my beloved brethren. Let every man be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger, for the anger of man does not work the righteousness of God.’

pp 56-57

Returning to our reflections last week, if we engage in acts that do not “work the righteousness of God,” then we work against God. In seeking to address a wrong, we commit further wrong—and, being Christians, we add the weight of scandal to our sin. We must pray for and intentionally seek to cultivate growth in the virtues of meekness and patience.

We must concentrate with great vigilance on the movement of anger in our soul and honestly examine whether it tends toward violations of justice and charity. We must equally watch our tendency toward self-justification and rationalization. The reality of an objective evil rightly prompts anger, but it does not justify that passion running unchecked in our soul.

With all the evil present in the world—and with suppression of rights and free speech—many otherwise righteous men will find the passion of their anger, rightly evoked, twisted into sin. We witnessed a profound and disturbing manifestation of this recently in the violent invasion of the capitol. Notwithstanding the undeniable bias of media coverage of this relative to the looting and violence of last summer, the Capitol raid showed disordered rage and anger manifesting in violence, death, and a direct assault on constitutional democracy. (In turn, this evil, in and of itself, demands a reaction of anger in our soul—which, rightly ordered, demands that the perpetrators be arrested and tried for their crimes.) Regrettably, temptations toward similar rash and disordered anger appear likely to increase in the days and months ahead.

Father Kolinski offers this profound insight with regard to the propensity toward rage in our culture:

We live in an age filled with anger that is different in many respects from that of past ages. We face challenges and occasions of sin in dealing with anger that people in past times did not have to deal with such as e-mail, social media, and the comment sections of websites, which provide a volatile medium for a revolting lack of civility and unfettered rage that so typifies much of post-modern society. The anonymity of social media allows people to express themselves angrily, free of any consequences for what they write.

It is plain to see that we live in a wrathful age when anger is thought the appropriate response to every frustration. This is dangerous, for it is also one in which the distinction between righteous and sinful anger is no longer grasped as it was in the past. Much of this confusion can be traced to the self-centeredness that so pervades our culture, coupled with the pervading influence of television and movies, in which anger is the norm.

p 56

Given these toxins in the air we breathe, we must pray fervently for growth in the virtues of meekness and patience. We must also seek actively to cultivate those virtues through our own efforts. In part, this likely means we must intentionally seek to avoid sin and all that causes us to sin. If the media we’re ingesting is a cause for sin, we must avoid it.

Perhaps this presents us with a timely and appropriate focus for Lent: an intentional effort to grow in meekness and patience; an intentional effort to grow in mastery of the passion of anger in our soul. More concretely, perhaps we should fast from any form of media that provokes an anger in our soul that tends toward sin. In fasting from time spent on these media, perhaps we should redirect that time and energy toward reading that will help us grow in meekness, patience, and all other manner of heroic virtue.

We strongly recommend Father Kolinski’s “Manual for Conquering Mortal Sin” as a fitting place to start.

This effort will not be easy for any of us, and for some it may be a severe mercy that reveals some serious barriers to growth in holiness. Father Kolinski notes, “In extreme cases, if you are habitually angry, there may be deeper issues that you will need to address with regular, more formal spiritual direction (over and above frequent confession) or professional help, because if you don’t get to the source of your anger, it will be very difficult to control it, to say nothing of conquering it.” (p 60-61) If you find yourself coming to this awareness, seek the assistance you need. The stakes are too high to ignore it.

We close today with this exhortation from Father Kolinski: “Above all, strive for inner tranquility and always cultivate good will toward others…A great help in conquering sinful anger is to not take yourself so seriously. Try to root out the inordinate love of self that springs from pride.” (p 60)

Two words leap out from this exhortation: tranquility and pride.

Tranquility. This is the state of peace, trust, and confidence we seek—and the stable state from which we will be capable of loving our enemy.

Pride. This is the next hurdle to clear. We’ll pick that up in a subsequent post.

Onward,
The Legion of Valor Leadership Team