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The Ordination Of Women — Michael Coren

December 16, 2011

The issue of the ordination of women is not as complex as some people would like us to believe and is really one of basic humility. The Church simply does not have the authority to ordain women. It’s not a question of what anybody would like or want or even need but an issue of scripture and the teaching of Christ.

This might not be important for non-Christians but is extremely relevant to those who worship and follow Jesus Christ. It is interesting, of course, how many who not only don’t believe in Christ or God but despise Catholicism seem concerned about changing the Church when it comes to the subject of women clergy.

The first and more important fact is that Jesus being born male was not some chance event or an accidental decision. God has a purpose in everything He does. Within the sacrificial system of Israel and the Jewish people, the Sin offering and Passover Lamb had to be males without blemish, and since Christ fulfills these sacrifices He had to be a man.

The Church is seen in scripture and tradition as a bride with God as the bridegroom — the roles are there for a reason and out of God’s plan for us and for the Church. We don’t have to believe in God, but if we do we surely have to believe that He knows more about His plan than we do. In Catholicism, the priest acts in persona Christi (in the person of Christ) as Jesus celebrates the sacraments for His bride, the Church, through the actions of the male priest. It is not a question of equality but of divinity.

It has also been argued that Christ was only observing the cultural norms of His day and that two thousand years later we need to adapt just as we have in many other areas where ideas of what is acceptable have changed. Or to put it another way, Jesus was a prisoner of His age and just didn’t get it. Apart from the obvious dangers and sheer silliness of such a relativistic approach, the basic premise is fundamentally flawed.

Christ ignored or rejected many social and cultural aspects of his time, which is one of the reasons — though not the main one — that He was opposed by the theological and political establishment. He was not a conformist and had no problem at all with interacting with women, much to the annoyance of many of the religious reactionaries of His time.

Indeed, not only women but women of dubious reputation and questionable pasts were welcomed into his group, an inclusion that was positively shocking to many of His contemporaries. In numerous other areas, He broke with custom and tradition but chose to observe it as well when it mattered and when it was important and necessary for the plan of salvation to do so — culture and tradition were forced to adapt to Him, not He to them.

This is extraordinarily important. Christ ordained only men and chose them as His disciples for precise reasons and not out of some peculiarity or banality of time.

He was also well acquainted with priestesses, who were common in the religions of the era and His homeland, at least outside of Judaism. If He’d wanted to ordain women there was no stronger and more qualified candidate than Mary, who is the only other person who could have spoken the words “This is my body. This is my blood” and been literally accurate.

Yet He chose specifically and deliberately to ordain only men, while giving women enormously prominent positions in His ministry and teaching. Catholics are frequently criticized because of the prominence and respect given to the Virgin Mary while simultaneously condemned for not giving enough prominence and respect to women.

While the Pope is, obviously, the Pope and can only be a man, he is not as honored within Catholicism as the saints and the doctors of the Church. There are hundreds of female saints, many of them the most important and beloved. There are also three women doctors of the Church. If this is misogyny, then the Catholic Church has a lot of learning to do.

Christ’s vision for the place of women in the church both during and after His life on earth is centrally important. It is women who first tell of His resurrection, thus being the first people to spread the ultimate good news. Remember that the same Church that is accused of being opposed to powerful women was the body that accepted the Gospels as we know them with their emphasis on the Virgin Mary, the dignity of women accused by men of immorality and sin, and their role in believing in Christ being alive when others doubted — all hugely significant and world-changing.

Why would this be if Catholicism was opposed to female influence? It is not opposed at all but merely obedient to Christ’s teaching about everything. And everything includes never excluding women from the very epicenter of the Church while embracing the exclusively male nature of the priesthood.

Another argument, a favorite today, is that it’s just not fair that men can have what women cannot. This is a little like a man complaining that he can’t give birth but a woman can, an argument that could be made only by a man who has never stood next to his wife as she delivers their child!

Sorry and all that, but men and women are different and gender-bending may work in some areas of life but not in the institution that will take you back to God, the creator of the universe. To loosen and reform the priesthood to include women would be to destroy the priesthood. If you desire a broken cup, you can have it, but the cup is no longer whole or complete and is no longer a cup. Nor is gender the only obstacle as all sorts of men do not qualify for the priesthood, including for the most part those who are married. Or men who are not Catholic, or men who cannot make the sacrifices necessary to be a priest, or men who are considered ill-equipped to be priests.

We are all equal in the eyes of God, and baptism gives us the same dignity, but we cannot all be clergy. With regard to influence in the Church, women such as St. Bernadette or Mother Teresa have had a far greater impact and significance than most men and this includes most clergymen, who live glorious but often anonymous lives.

Because of the fashion for claiming sameness in every occupation, there are all sorts of activists who will claim that the Church adopted all-male clergy late in its history and that the early church ordained women. I suppose it would be nice for these zealots if this were the case, but then it would be nice if rainwater were beer and if taxes were paid to us by the government rather than the other way round. Not going to happen. Never did happen.

Read the Church fathers, any of the Church fathers, to understand very quickly that priests have always been men and never women. There were certainly women in the early church who belonged to orders of virgins and widows but these were precursors to modern nuns and had nothing to do with early or later priests.

In 1994, Pope John Paul II declared, “Although the teaching that priestly ordination is to be reserved to men alone has been preserved by the constant and universal Tradition of the Church and firmly taught by the Magisterium in its more recent documents, at the present time in some places it is nonetheless considered still open to debate, or the Church’s judgment that women are not to be admitted to ordination is considered to have a merely disciplinary force. Wherefore, in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church’s divine constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren (cf. Luke 22:32), I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.”

The first as well as the last word. The Pope gives us the answer here, and if we refuse to listen to or accept it we can go elsewhere, join another church, and even be ordained in it as a woman minister, a divorced minister, a homosexual minister, or pretty much whatever minister you like. Variety is wonderful but so is Catholicism, and sometimes the two don’t mix.

Posted in The State of the Catholic Church | Tagged fairness, God as the bridegroom, Luke 22:32, Pope John Paul II, The Ordination Of Women | Leave a Comment »

The Importance Of Ritual Part III — Fr. Aidan Nichols O.P.

September 9, 2011

“Formal traditional forms of rite cannot be dismissed as being inherently culturally incredible. These rites only become incredible when they are deemed to be so…”

That is also very much the Gospel according to the English Catholic social anthropologists who have devoted thought to our issue: Professor Mary Douglas of London University and the late Professor Victor Turner, who at the end of his professional career crossed the Atlantic to a chair at the University of Chicago.

Mary Douglas opened her study Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology with an essay entitled Away from Ritual, which had appeared in somewhat different form in the house journal of the English Dominicans as The Contempt of Ritual in the summer of 1968. [M. Douglas, The Contempt of Ritual, New Blackfriars 49, nos. 577-78 (1968)] She warns that contempt for ritual forms eventually leads people to take a purely private view of religious experience, from where it is only a short step to the frank avowal of humanism.

One feature distinguishing social anthropologists from sociologists is that the former have a much more formidable, not to say sometimes impenetrable, conceptual apparatus at their disposal. The most easily grasped aspect of Douglas’ essay is her critique of the abolition by the bishops of England and Wales of compulsory abstinence from fleshfoods on Fridays, and this contains at any rate some major clues helpful in unraveling her approach.

The Friday abstinence is the only ritual that brings Christian symbols into kitchen and larder. Taking away one symbol that means something in that domain is, she pointed out, no guarantee that the spirit of a generalized charity will reign (as the bishops piously hoped) in its stead. It would have been preferable to have built upon this weekly ritual rather than to have sought platitudinous substitutes for it. Her explanation, as an anthropologist, for the bishops’ decision to abandon Friday abstinence is not especially flattering.

Owing to the manner of their education — she refers to the embourgeoisement of those whose families were once working class — the bishops were predictably peculiarly insensitive to nonverbal signals. The decision symptomizes this age of the Church: “It is as if the liturgical signal boxes were manned by color blind signalmen.” [M. Douglas, Natural Symbols].

The issue of Friday abstinence raises for her the whole question of the contemporary Church’s approach to ritual — to symbolically intense bodily activity as used in the worship of God. Her deeper argument is that the cosmos — the fundamental order of reality, including social reality — is always seen through the medium of the body, and notably through the kinds and range of actions in which the body intersects with nature and other people. Appealing to the exploration of family structure made in the 196os by her secular colleague Basil Bernstein, [B. Bernstein, Social Class and Psychotherapy, British Journal of Sociology 15 (1964)]

Douglas proposes that children whose families are “personal” rather than “positional” — children, that is, who come from families where common life and hierarchy are minimized in favor of, at least ideally, a unique communication between parent, on the one hand, and, on the other, each individual child — are likely to grow up with ears unattuned to the unspoken messages of ritual codes. And yet, as there is in fact no human being whose life does not need to “unfold in a coherent symbolic system”, those who resist ritual are missing out on something essential to humanity as such.

Such non-verbal symbols are capable of creating a structure of meaning, in which individuals can relate to one another and realise their own ultimate purposes…. Alas for the child from the personal home who longs for non-verbal forms of relationship but has only been equipped with words and a contempt for ritual forms. By rejecting ritualized speech he rejects his own faculty for pushing back the boundaries between inside and outside so as to incorporate in himself a patterned social world. At the same time, he thwarts his faculty for receiving immediate, condensed messages given obliquely along non-verbal channels.
M. Douglas, Natural Symbols

This statement, incidentally, tells us much about the new phenomenon of Catholic individualism understood as the systematic disparagement of common structure, hierarchical authority, and traditional liturgy alike.

Among the causes of anti-ritualism, then, Mary Douglas places first and foremost social change. But if social change naturally tends to prompt a new cosmology, a new set of spectacles for looking at the world, then those concerned for the health of Catholic Christianity, which has its own cosmology based on traditional ritual, on the sacraments, and ultimately on the Incarnation, must try to break this causal chain.

The slackening of group and grid whereby change in social patterns, especially in the family, brings about contempt for rite, the lack of strong social articulation in an increasingly amorphous, excessively personalized, individualized, and de-hierarchicalized world: these processes, left to themselves, will tend to produce a “religion of effervescence”, incompatible with a sacramental faith. Writing in the immediate aftermath of the appearance of a euphoric Western European and North American radicalism in the late 1960s, she comments:

This is the sector of society which we expect to be weak in its perception of condensed symbols, preferring diffuse, emotive symbols of mass effect. The religious style is spontaneity, enthusiasm and effervescence. Bodily disassociation in trance, induced by dance or drugs, is valued along with other symbols of non-differentiation. Distinguishing social categories are devalued, but the individual is exalted. The self is presented without inhibition or shyness. There is little or no self-consciousness about sexual or other bodily orifices and functions. As to intellectual style, there is little concern with differentiated units of time, respect for past or program for the future. The dead are forgotten. Intellectual discriminations are not useful or valued.
M. Douglas, Natural Symbols

And she concludes:

The general tone of this cosmological style is to express the current social experience. In the latter there is minimum differentiation and organization: symbolic behavior reflects this lack. In the field of intellect it is disastrous.
M. Douglas, Natural Symbols

Relating all this to the Church, Douglas maintains that anti-ritualism is of a piece with the “generous warmth” of the “doctrinal latitude” of “reforming bishops and radical theologians”, their “critical dissolving of categories and attack on intellectual and administrative distinctions”. [M. Douglas, Natural Symbols] In her view, all these developments are generated by a particular social experience, that of unrestricted personalism, but the cosmology they promote is manifestly deficient from the standpoint both of the life of the mind at large and more especially that of the Christian intelligence.

In her own idiom, “The value of particular social forms can only be judged objectively by the analytic power of the elaborated code”: in other words, to decode that remark (!), the mediocrity of the spiritual and theological life typically produced by an anti-ritualist Church is the best possible proof of the inadequacy of the form of life in civil society that such a Church presupposes and represents.

The implication of Douglas’ work would seem to be, then, that we shall not get back an authentic liturgical life until we recover a rightly ordered society on the level both of the family, the micro-society, and of macro-society, society at large. A “rightly ordered society” in this context is one that gives due place to common life, hierarchy, and shared authoritative public doctrine as well as to personal freedom and creativity.

Here we can recall how for David Martin it is the error of the ideology of spontaneity not to realize that the second set of these terms positively requires the first. If this thought, that liturgical malaise will not be fully rectified until a Christian society is reinstituted, seems somewhat daunting, we can turn for counterbalance to a last British anthropologist, Victor Turner, who appears to allow a greater autonomy or shaping power to what he calls in the title of a major book “the ritual process”. [V. Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca, 1969)]

In Turner’s view, traditional liturgy, precisely because of its archaic quality, has a power to modify and even reverse the assumptions made in secular living.

If ritual is not to be merely a reflection of secular social life, if its function is partly to protect and partly to express truths which make men free from the exigencies of their status-incumbencies, free to contemplate and pray as well as to speculate and invent, then its repertoire of liturgical actions should not be limited to a direct reflection of the contemporary scene.
[V. Turner, Passages, Margins and Poverty: Religious Symbols of Communitas, Worship 46(1972)]

Insisting that the archaic is not the obsolete, Turner maintains that, on the contrary, archaic patterns of action are necessary to protect what he calls “future free spaces”.

In this perspective he finds the de facto liturgical reform of the 1960s and 1970s somewhat incongruous. The reformers failed to appreciate the need of believers for repetition and archaism. He would not have appreciated the emphasis of Archbishop Annibale Bugnini, in his chronicle of the reform, on the “effort to make the rites speak the language of our own time”, [A. Bugnini, The Reform of the Liturgy, 1948-1995 (Collegeville, Minn., 1990)] even though Bugnini wrote his exhaustive account from a commanding height as Secretary Of The Commission For Liturgical Reform established by Pius XII in 1948; Secretary Of The Preparatory Commission On The Liturgy At The Second Vatican Council (1960-1962); Peritus of that Council and its Commission On The Liturgy; Secretary Of The Concilium For The Implementation Of The Constitution On The Liturgy (1964-1966); and Secretary Of The Congregation for Divine Worship (1969-1975).

Like Flanagan later, Turner held that pastoral liturgists were intimidated by the reigning “structural functionalism” in sociology. For that school, just as ritual structure reflects social structure, so ritual should change as society changes. Turner’s own anthropological scheme, by contrast, privileges significant intervals where we cross what he calls limina (thresholds) in our passage between social experiences. In so doing, we periodically find ourselves separated from our statistically normal experience of identification with some limited group and enter at least for a while a state of what he terms communitas, a form of sociability where our capacity for identification with others is unrestricted by space, time, and even their biological dying, and we enter the experiential continuum he names “flow”.

Typically, ritual stands out from mundane culture in its use of a high language that abounds in lexical and grammatical forms no longer current in everyday speech. Optimally, ritual is a symphony of expressive genres, rather as opera works simultaneously through a multiplicity of art forms in prose and poetry, music and acting. Unlike opera, however, ritual escapes theatricality by the seriousness of its ultimate concerns.

In principle, what Turner says could be applied to the ritual activity of any society, Christian or not, in its religious dimension, and indeed his ideas were in part formulated through fieldwork among the Ndembu in Zambia. But in his essay “Ritual, Tribal and Catholic”, Turner applies these notions more especially to the Western Mass.

The traditional liturgy displayed an essential concern for proper form in the representation of sacred mysteries and the performance of symbolic acts. This was the fruit of popular wisdom fertilized by developing doctrine, and shaped by esthetic as well as legalistic principle. Ritual traditions of any depth or complexity represent the consolidated understanding of many generations. They embody a deep knowledge of the nature of flow, and how and where to break it in order to instill truths about the nature of time, the human condition, and evil. They reveal an understanding of the religious benefit of flow as much for individuals in their interior meditations as for eliciting the spirit of communitas, or shared flow, in congregations at worship.
V. Turner, “Ritual, Tribal and Catholic”, Worship 50 (1976)

And he continues:

A complete liturgical system represents an organized system of spiritual and rational achievements. It is a work of ages, not a hackwork of contemporaneous improvisation. In its multiplicity and variety (controlled, nevertheless, by hard-won rules), it exemplifies the many-faceted yet single spirit of mankind at prayer, of homo religiosus. Although each nacreous [vocab: 1: consisting of or resembling mother-of-pearl;2: having a play of lustrous rainbow-like colors.] increment which composes this pearl has been laid down at a particular time, the total liturgy is liberated from historical determinations. When men and women enter the “liminality”, the tract of sacred space-time, which is made available to them by such a traditional liturgy, they cease to be bound by the secular structures of their own age, and confront eternity which is equidistant from all ages.
V. Turner, “Ritual, Tribal and Catholic”, Worship 50 (1976)

Whereas, so Turner pessimistically proposes, the “flow” elicited by the reformed Liturgy too often “bubbles on the surface” as a “transient communication”.

A motif running through all these authors is the claim that the theological strategy of cultural modernism is misconceived. Modernism — I use the word in the sense of an intellectual style, not that of a heresy in the doctrine of revelation — is too indebted to those features of the Enlightenment and Romanticism that set those movements at odds with the Catholic Church or at any rate presented obstacles (as well as, to some extent, opportunities) for an authentic ecclesial reform and renewal.

In the realm of liturgiology, if the eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century discussion of liturgical revision had been better known and its lessons more fully pondered, if the foundational principles suggested by Trapp and shared by such leaders of the interwar liturgical movement as Casel and Guardini had been consistently applied to contemporary sensibility in the 1960s and 1970s, much harm might have been avoided. As it was, and despite the wonderful erudition liturgical scholars brought to the remaking of the rites, liturgists, in Flanagan’s words, “managed to back modernity as a winning ticket, just at the point when it became converted into postmodernism”. [Flanagan, Sociology and Liturgy]

This statement at least makes the point that there is now nothing particularly modern about cultural modernism. It may also be interpreted as hinting that the postmodernist phase into which, in literary theory, philosophy, and a wider sensibility, a significant portion of the Western intelligentsia has now passed could have formed a happier context in which both to transmit and in various discreet and prudent ways to enhance a traditional rite.

Statements of what postmodernism is are generally both elliptic and obscure, so much so that questions of how precisely it differs from modernism, what intellectual virtues it recommends, and whether it contains, at least implicitly, any broad truth-claims about the nature of reality are, at least for the present writer, unanswered. But let me mention on the basis of recent research at Cambridge some ways in which one liturgist writing in a confessedly postmodernist manner would find neglected resources in a traditional rite. Catherine Pickstock, of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in her analysis of the old Roman Eucharistic rite, stresses the mobile character of the liturgical “I”, the self that worships. In liturgical action, I am not simply and in straightforward fashion myself: hence the inappropriateness of attempting to fit the Liturgy to the needs of the extra-liturgical personality, to make liturgy “relevant” to the ordinary persona of the self. Commenting on the Fore-Mass of the 1962 Missal, from the prayers of preparation to the Gloria, Pickstock writes:

By means of its dispossessed and impersonating character, its taking on of the roles of other characters thereby unsettling the claim to a secure poetic voice, the worshipping I is designated by the act of forgetting itself, by the forgetting of ordinary identity.
[C. Pickstock, The Sacred Polis: Language, Death and Liturgy (Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge, 1996)]

And again:

This complex assuming of different voices leads to an interlacing of voices or polyphony at whose centre [here she refers to the opening of the Gloria] are the seraphic voices which are heard, alluded to, and intermingled with the human voices.
[C. Pickstock, The Sacred Polis]

Impersonation, she stresses, “precedes an authentic voice”: that is, our Christian persona is formed by the way an extra-liturgical sense of the “I” is modified and extended by the Liturgy itself. “This is a de-centered `I’ which constantly moves from one identity to another, from immanent to transcendent locations, breaking the quarantining of the two worlds, but without ever compromising their difference” [C. Pickstock, The Sacred Polis] In a pithy axiom: “In giving (doxologically) we become (ontologically).” In other words, by worship our Christian selves are forged; so worship is not to be judged by what our secular or non liturgical identity may desire or demand.

In her critique of the reform of the Roman rite, Pickstock argues that criticisms of the mediaeval Liturgy by conventional historians of the rite such as Theodor Klauser are misplaced. [T. Klauser, A Short History Of The Western Liturgy, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1979). One may add to Klauser's name that of the Italian liturgiologist influential in the drafting of the new anaphoras, Dom Cyprian Vagaggini, for whom the historic Roman Canon is disunified and illogical: "hardly a model of simplicity and clarity", The Canon of the Mass and Liturgical Reform (London, 1967), 96. But note the criticism of these criticisms by the Anglican liturgiologist Geoffrey Willis, who wrote that they may arise from a "failure to understand the processes by which the Roman Canon Missae reached its present form and even a failure to apprehend the basic principles of its structure": The New Eucharistic Prayers: Some Comments, in A Voice for All Time: Essays on the Liturgy of the Catholic Church since the Second Vatican Council, ed. C. Francis and M. Lynch (Bristol, 1994), 91]

For Klauser the repetitious and sometimes seemingly random structure of the pre-conciliar rite (one thinks especially of the often attacked Offertory prayers) bears witness to a debasement of pure Liturgy, as does the concomitant emphasis on purification and requests for mercy. Pickstock, on the other hand, treats a certain randomness and repetitiveness as reassuring signs of the oral provenance of the Roman Liturgy, intrinsic aspects of a flow typical of speech rather than a written structure whose meanings are “spatially” compartmentalized in discrete sections. In similar fashion, she takes the repeated requests for purification as signs of an underlying apophaticism [vocab: the belief that God can be known to humans only in terms of what He is not] that stresses our distance from God, not just our sinfulness, and emphasizes what she calls “the need for a constant re-beginning of liturgy because the true eschatological liturgy is in time endlessly postponed”. [Pickstock, The Sacred Polis]

That early fourth-century text so important for the makers of the reformed Roman rite, the Paradosis apostolike, or Apostolic Tradition, ascribed to Hippolytus, being as it is more of a treatise on Liturgy than a Liturgy itself, proved misleading, she thinks, for the program of liturgical recovery, not least in these respects.

Rather like Douglas, Pickstock holds that to reform an ancient Liturgy successfully in radical guise would ultimately entail remaking the entire social order, for earlier Liturgies formed part of a culture itself ritual in character. What the Church could have done, however, was to refrain from assimilating “linguistic and structural forms” from modernity, for these are precisely the elements most inimical to liturgical goals. The “clear and linear purpose” of modern Liturgy is, in her view, sadly of this age of the world and hence in its connotations immanent when compared with traditional rites she characterizes as “a liturgical stammer in the face of the sublime excess of God”.

For a Catholic Christian, in matters of the mind illumined by grace it is theology — sound and solid theology, drawn from Scripture and tradition under the guidance of the Magisterium — that is the queen of the sciences and not the cultural sciences that the writers whose ideas I have been rehearsing represent. That is not to say, however, that these benevolent warning voices can safely be disregarded.

On the basis of her bi-millennial experience, the Church has in the past been credited by sympathetic observers with a definite store of human wisdom. Like her divine Founder, she has known what is in man. The largely independent and convergent testimony of the men and women whose work I have described in this chapter suggests that of late the Church, which must mean here her members, has shown an uncharacteristic deficiency of such wisdom, in part in the conception of the liturgical reform, but even more in its execution. This is something the clergy and laity of the next century will eventually need to address.

Posted in Fr. Aidan Nichols, Sacraments, The State of the Catholic Church | Tagged Catherine Pickstock, causes of anti-ritualism, Christian persona, communitas, David Martin, Friday abstinence, limina, Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols, Ritual, The Contempt of Ritual, The Ritual Process, The Sacred Polis, traditional forms of rite, traditional liturgy, Tribal and Catholic, Victor Turner | Leave a Comment »

The Importance Of Ritual Part II — Fr. Aidan Nichols O.P.

September 8, 2011

Hagia Sophia had been built during the reign of the Emperor Justinian between the years 532-537 AD and was the largest church in the world.

The first concept to be rendered questionable by both this definition [To repeat from the previous post: Liturgy [wrote I. H. Dalmais in Principles of the Liturgy] belongs in the order of doing (ergon) not of knowing (logos). Logical thought cannot get far with it; liturgical actions yield their intelligibility in their performance, and this performance takes place at the level of sensible realities, not as exclusively material, but as vehicles of overtones capable of awakening the mind and heart to acceptance of realities belonging to a different order.] and the sea change in sociological thinking charted by Flanagan is the notion of simplicity as a criterion for sound liturgical practice. To the sociologist, it is by no means self-evident that brief, clear rites have greater transformative potential than complex, abundant, lavish, rich, long rites, furnished with elaborate ceremonial. Noble simplicity of rite has been a theme of liturgical reforms since the Enlightenment, as the previous chapter noted. It had not commended itself, however, purely as an anthropological desideratum. It was also regarded as a hallmark of the primitive Church. Though falling outside the sociologist’s provenance, this too is now a matter of question.

The decision of the post-conciliar reformers to return to a pre-Carolingian Roman tradition as earlier and therefore simpler and so better was predictable given the influence on the tradition of liturgical scholarship of the “comparative liturgy” approach pioneered by the South German historian of liturgy Anton Baumstark. Baumstark’s book with that title was both liturgiologically pioneering and enormously successful; it was translated into various languages and enjoyed numerous reprintings. However, the work of F. S. West on Baumstark’s Comparative Liturgy [A. Baumstark, Liturgie comparee, 3d ed. (Chevetogne, 1953); the work's original is French, since it began life as lectures to Bauduin's monks at Amay.] in its intellectual setting has shown that his comparative method was itself drawn, somewhat strangely, from the biology of the German Naturphi!osophen (like Goethe) as well as from the comparative anatomy of such nineteenth-century natural scientists as Georges Cuvier and Charles Darwin. [F. S. West, Anton Baumstark's Comparative Liturgy in Its Intellectual Contex", doctoral thesis (Notre Dame, Ind. 1988), described in P. Bradshaw, The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship: Sources and Methods for the Origins of Early Liturgy (London, 1992)]

It assumed as a law, consequently, that liturgical evolution moved from simplicity and brevity to richness and prolixity, even though Baumstark had to admit that one could also see evidence of a contrary movement, a tendency later to abbreviate what earlier had been fuller. As the Anglican liturgiologist Paul Bradshaw, now professor of Liturgy at Notre Dame, Indiana, has pointed out:

This admission that liturgical development might in fact proceed in either direction robs [Baumstark's] classification of any predictive power. We cannot judge a liturgical phenomenon …..’late’ simply because it exhibits prolixity.
[Bradshaw, Search for the Origins]

Nor, a fortiori, can we make an adverse value judgment on some liturgical rite, text, or practice because it lacks that dubiously reliable hallmark of primitive authenticity. One member of the post-conciliar Consilium who found the eagerness to apply the criterion of simplicity quite excessive, the Premonstratensian liturgist and author of a standard study of the sources of the Roman Liturgy Dom Boniface Luykx, signified his displeasure rather strongly by transferring to the Byzantine ritual church where he is now abbot of the Byzantine-Ukrainian monastery of the Transfiguration in northern California. [18R Galadza, "Abbot Boniface Luykx as Liturgist and liturgisatel", in Following the Star from the East: Essays in Honor of Archimandrite Boniface Luykx, ed. A. Chirovsky (Ottawa, Chicago, Lviv, 1992)].

A second concept that Flanagan would see as treated by Churchmen with a marked degree of sociological naivete is that of intelligibility in rite. The notion that the more intelligible the sign, the more effectively it will enter the lives of the faithful is implausible to the sociological imagination. It cannot simply be assumed that people will naturally assent more deeply once they have comprehended.

As Flanagan explains, a certain opacity is essential to symbolic action in the sociologists’ account, so that to attempt to render symbols wholly transparent is, to their mind, a thoroughly misguided proceeding. “[Symbols] proclaim that which transcends the conditions under which clarity through intervention is possible. They embody that which is unavailable to rational manipulation. [Flanagan, Sociology and Liturgy] And if total vernacularization of liturgical language and the insistence on translation styles that win comprehension at the cost of banality were too frequently the result of the principle of immediate comprehensibility in the realm of the spoken word, an insistence on the complete visibility of every detail of what was happening at the altar (and hence not only the removal of rood screens but also the eventual victory of versus populum celebration) was its counterpart in the visual realm.

Here, as Flanagan remarks, it was not realized that, sociologically, “veiling”, “marking a distance”, and “tactful reticence” are necessary to reverence. But such terms as reverence, with its connotations of restraint, deference, and awe, soon became prominent by their absence in liturgical discussion.

A third key concept, community, has already been touched on apropos of Gueranger. To Flanagan, the concept of community as such — just like that, without any further qualification — is too vague to bear a specifically Christian meaning. Moreover, it can easily degenerate into the creation of a transiently benevolent atmosphere through (literal or metaphorical “glad-handing” (an eloquent Americanism). What liturgists needed but failed to find was a concept of community defined distinctively as the product of a ritual assembly itself keyed into a mystery exceeding that assembly’s limits.

As the English priest-sociologist Anthony Archer had pointed out in his study The Two Catholic Churches, the preconciliar Liturgy at least imposed a ritual authority on all classes and individuals, [A. Archer, The Two Catholic Churches: A Study in Oppression (London, 1986)] thus preventing the emergence of groups who would seize the Liturgy for their own purposes or of figures who would treat it as an opportunity for the display of their communications skills. It is not really clear whether clericalism, defined as the undue prominence, within an ecclesial community, of the sacramentally ordained, is less apparent or more apparent in a liturgical rite where the priest is constantly face to face with the congregation and encouraged to introduce some at least of the Liturgy’s salient parts, rather than being absorbed impersonally into a ritual role.

A fourth crucial idea, after simplicity, intelligibility, and community, an idea not so much this tune in the Council’s Liturgy Constitution or any official text as in the commentators who took it upon themselves to interpret the reformed rite to the clergy and others, was that of liturgical agency, in other words, the role, increasingly personalized and sometimes in a pejorative sense theatrical, to be played by the celebrant of the Liturgy and other liturgical ministers. Here Flanagan notes that, sociologically, a priest cannot as celebrant present himself at Mass in the same fashion as that in which he greets his parishioners afterward. The liturgical role must conceal or at least detract attention from the person, so as to focus it the more strongly elsewhere.

The liturgical actor wishes to cast glory onto God in acts of worship that somehow minimize or preclude these elements of worth falling onto himself. Like the self, the social has to be present to enable the act to appear, but it has to disappear if the end of reverence is to be realized.
[Flanagan. Sociology and Liturgy]

To the sociological eye, rites work best when they are repetitive and formalized, so that the liturgical actor can practice a certain forgetfulness of self, “playing into his role, as Flanagan puts it, “embodying the possibility of its existence”. In this he may need a certain distance, at least at points, from other worshippers. As Flanagan explains, too unilateral an emphasis on proximity is sociologically misplaced. Rites that do not allow a sense of distance deny to the people, paradoxically, a means of appropriating the act of worship, crippling them just at the point where they could be taking off Godward by a leap of religious imagination. For liturgical actors, though presented within a social frame, have to convey properties of what lies beyond that frame, a rumor of angels.

But where does this leave the notion of participation, which is so key not only to the Enlightenment and Catholic Revival discussions in their different ways but also to that modern movement begun in the years before the Great War as well as, and not least, in the papacy’s gradual acceptance of its proposals in the pontificates of the last three “Pian” popes, Pius X, Pius XI, and Pius XII? For Flanagan, active, outward participation is to be evaluated according to “the degree to which it generates inner appropriation, interior assent”. An English Benedictine liturgist, Dom Bernard McElligott of Ampleforth, founder of the Society of Saint Gregory, had commented on the philology as early as the year of the introduction of the Novus Ordo, 1970.

By using the word “active” for actuosa the Church’s intention has been misunderstood, and generally, if perhaps unconsciously, taken to mean bodily activity; whereas what the Church really asks for is full, sincere, mental activity, expressed externally by the body.
[B. McElligott, "Active Participation", in A Voice for All Time: Essays on the Liturgy of the Catholic Church since the Second Vatican Council, ed. C. Francis and M. Lynch (Bristol, 1994)]

As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger has emphasized, the term actuosa participatio at the Council included silence as well as speaking and singing and hence disqualifies any activist misconstrual of “living participation” (as Trapp had called it — See his liturgical essays in The Feast of Faith (San Francisco, 1986). Flanagan’s interpretation is, evidently, not unwarranted.

The absence in the postconciliar Liturgy of the atmosphere of intense silence and devotion once so striking to observers raises the question as to whether actuosa participatio, assessed in terms of Flanagan’s criterion, is more advanced or less advanced than it was before the Council opened. Here of course tricks of memory and nostalgia, as well as wishful thinking based on ecclesiastical partisanship, may deceive us. Not every eucharistic worshipper at a celebration according to the Missale Pianum before 1962 was burning with fervor, just as not everyone at a celebration according to the Missale Paulinum after 1970 is manifestly bored. But a German sociologist’s investigation of a large suburban parish in 1960 provides an example of the relatively objective testing possible. As Flanagan comments,

Many of his subjects reported that they came to Mass to find a space in which to reestablish their spiritual equilibrium, the calmness of the rite — a re-iterated notion — giving a context in which they could adjust the proportions of an often confused existence.
[Flanagan, Sociology and Liturgy]

Nor could one accuse Msgr. J. D. Crichton, the doyen of living liturgists in England, of insouciance toward the new rites, yet he has spoken recently of a loss of reverence which ultimately leads to a loss of the sense of the transcendent God who is the supreme Object of all worship. In a way we are in danger of forgetting what worship is about. It is not just a heartwarming experience for those who like that sort of thing. [J. D. Crichton, Worshipping with Awe and Reverence, Priests and People]

Or, as Father Anthony Conlon, a London parish priest, has put it in a paper read to the International Eucharistic Congress at Seville in 1994:

The overemphasis on active participation, which only conceives of worship in terms of the community realizing its group dynamic through a bias in favor of “doing things”, is a serious hindrance to any understanding of the Mass as essentially a liturgical setting of an historic action of divine mercy and sacrifice.
[A. Conlon, The Participation of the Faithful in the Post-Conciliar Liturgy: A Critical Perspective on Contemporary Practice in XLV Convenlus Eucharisticus Internationalis, Sevilla 1-13. Vi .1993, Christus Lumen Gentiuci, Euchanstia el Evangelizatio (Vatican City, 1993)]‘

Here then it is not simply a question of failing to advert properly to the divine transcendence in general. More devastatingly, when the Mass is at issue, there is inadequate advertence to that supreme act whereby the divine transcendence engaged itself in Trinitarian fashion for our definitive salvation on Calvary, when the Son offered himself to the Father in the Spirit so that his Sacrifice could be fruitful in the renewed pouring out of himself in the propitiatory intercession of the Eucharist and its foundation in his High Priestly prayer in the heavens.

Too much can be centered on the contribution made by the participants as though that alone made for the efficacy of the Eucharist and less attention — if any — may be paid to the sacramental offering of the great High Priest.
[A. Conlon, The Participation of the Faithful in the Post-Conciliar Liturgy: A Critical Perspective on Contemporary Practice]

The fact that in many parish celebrations the church building is evidently regarded as simply an assembly point before Mass starts and a place of concourse when Mass ends, in sharp contrast to the former practice when many people made prayers of preparation before Mass and prayers of thanksgiving after it and certainly were not disabled in so doing by other worshippers, points toward the same conclusion. If active participation is rightly evaluated by the quality of inner participation it arouses, then, it would seem, it has not yet succeeded in its task.

What from the sociologist’s standpoint has been overlooked is that, as Flanagan remarks, liturgical forms operate in the manner of icons — opening up a sense of the presence of the divine, not of course by the painterly means of color and line, but through social actions believed to be endowed and intended to be endowed with “holy purpose”.

Flanagan’s overall conclusion is that the Roman Liturgy has fallen into the hands of “convivial Puritans”. For these, procedures for worship are to be kept as simple as possible so as to maximize social relationships in the production of the rite. A ritual minimalism serves to sustain a relaxed atmosphere where all may contribute informally. “Bind us together” is the theme song of a liturgical life where hierarchy and ceremony are treated as deleterious to happy togetherness.

To Flanagan, as to Martin, this is simply wrongheaded.

Informal or endlessly adaptable Liturgy may be beau mais ce nest pas la guerre. The shape of the rite takes on “unfruitful unpredictability”, impairing its claim to constitute, indeed, a public order of worship. As the phenomenologist of religion Rudolf Otto saw at the beginning of this century, an undisciplined rite clamantly [vocab: loudly]asserting direct links with the production of the numinous has little chance of representing the latter successfully when compared with one that humbly petitions the holy in solemn mode.

Such tacit, mysterious qualities of rite, Flanagan continues, are, moreover, what permit its endless replaying. He likens to this the way a literary classic (The Brothers Karamazov, Moby Dick) can be endlessly reread if it be in a positive sense “ambiguous”, namely, not increasing the reader’s uncertainty about meaning but rather maintaining openness to ultimate meaning (the sacred).

Repeated use, so Flanagan concludes: “generates a passage of growth into understanding the implications of what cannot be grasped, and at the same time fuels a wish to have more revealed from what is concealed.” [Flanagan, Sociology and Liturgy] The message is that the adhesive that holds rites together has become too diluted to stick, and Flanagan looks to older forms of the Latin Liturgy for assistance when he writes: “Formal traditional forms of rite cannot be dismissed as being inherently culturally incredible. These rites only become incredible when they are deemed to be so .” [Flanagan, Sociology and Liturgy]

Posted in Church History, Fr. Aidan Nichols, Sacraments, The State of the Catholic Church | Tagged a concept of community, actuosa participatio, Anton Baumstark, intelligibility in rite, liturgical agency, liturgical development, participation, simplicity, Sociology and Liturgy | Leave a Comment »

The Importance Of Ritual Part I — Fr. Aidan Nichols O.P.

September 7, 2011

Fifty years earlier on the feast of the Conversion of St. Paul, January 25, 1959, Pope John Paul XXIII had announced the convocation of a general council for the universal Church. And the Second Vatican Council was born.

Reporting on the world of British scholarship, it is a remarkable fact, which has not been as noticed as it deserves, that both Catholic and Anglican social anthropologists and sociologists have tended to take, from the standpoint of their own disciplines rather than simply from personal preference, a somewhat negative attitude toward the mid-twentieth-century liturgical reform that has had so marked an influence on both communions. They have a tendency to think that in the broader lines of its departures from the traditional Liturgy reform may, in certain of its characteristic emphases, rest on a mistake — not doctrinal mistake, but a failure in human prudence.

The idiom of the writers I shall be expounding is not easy, so perhaps we might begin relatively gently with a text written by an Anglican sociologist whose marks are, however, highly pertinent to the Catholic practice of Liturgy in the Western Church today. In Two Critiques of Spontaneity, Professor David Martin of the London School of Economics attacked what he called the “popular local heresy” of that “cult of choice” that wherever possible opts against an order of rules and roles in the name of spontaneity. [D. Martin, Two Critiques of Spontaneity (London, 1973)]

Though this “cult” has some respectable origins – he mentions religious notions of conscience and personal decision, and moral ideas of political liberty and existential authenticity, as well as the Romantic concept of genius and the psychoanalytical ideal of autonomy — the tree that grows from these roots has become stunted and deformed. Basically, one truth, or one collection of truths, has been stressed at the expense of the complementary truths that are their necessary counterpart. The result is a dangerous and destructive imbalance.

Libertarians stressing spontaneity — and Martin makes clear that such figures operate not only in civil society but also in ecclesial society and not least in its worship — ignore the preconditions of freedom in a determinate order of stable rules and defined roles that constitute, in Kantian language, the social a priori of personal identity, the latter’s necessary condition. In their anti-institutionalism, extreme personalists are sawing off the branch on which they are sitting.

“Institutions”, in the various senses of that word, are needful if persons with a definite sense of identity are to exist at all. When all is said and done, man, though he may not be as context-bound as an animal, is not as context-free as an angel. It is then the embedded character of freedom that is ignored by the partisans of spontaneity, and here we must include liturgical advocates of multiple choice, of endless adaptation and unscripted presidential intervention for the establishment of free rapport with others. For such libertarians, “the noumenal self [Martin means the underlying or essential `self'] is already full of experiential potency. Traditional modes are mere automatic transfers: everyman must start afresh.”[D. Martin, Two Critiques of Spontaneity (London, 1973)]

In the critique Martin is rejecting, traditional churches (that is, churches with traditional worship) are regarded as diverting the impulse to authenticity into “silted channels of alienated tradition and super-imposed forms”. Their “received rituals” and “automatic repetitions” are “frozen icons of freedom, stories from which the dynamism has been drained”. What the proponents of spontaneity would substitute for these Martin writes of scathingly as a “total and easy immersion in the All”. As he warns, “total immediacy produces total relativity.” Where each and every chosen experience is regarded as equally valuable, each by the same token may just as well be described as equally worthless.

Writing as a sociologist, Martin asserts the imperative need to defend discipline, habit, continuity, the located and familiar, the bounded and particularized, rules, roles, and relations. A rule, as he puts it, indicates the “existence of a regularity”: something that enables one to anticipate and so to act. Anticipating, acting, knowing where and who you are turn on the due existence of rules. The stability and definition of the latter are generative of psychological health, just as authority and hierarchy, rightly exercised, are necessary for the flourishing of that social health which Scripture calls “justice”. Without rules there would be only what Martin terms “unidimensional determination by peers”, the law of the jungle. [D. Martin, Two Critiques]

Martin regards the ideas of meaningful relationship and significant personal encounter as wholly impotent when considered as bases on which to found the life of groups or even individuals. Why? Because these concepts are virtually without content. “One seeks for the personally significant [but] nothing is signified.” The ideology of the experiencing self, in whose name traditional forms, including traditional liturgical rites, are rejected, is “literally self-defeating”, for beyond a certain point the emphasis on direct experience diminishes the very possibility of experience at all. How constricting, not least experientially, is a liturgy that insists on expressing the experience, the concrete self-understanding, of the immediate group that enacts it.

The experiential illumination of the Gospel depends, Martin considers, on rote and rite. As he puts it: “What is done by rote and performed in ritual provides the necessary substratum of habit on the basis of which experience becomes possible.” And invoking the literary critic George Steiner, [G. Steiner, Bluebeards Castle (London, 1971)] he asks what must it mean for a civilization to hear the Gospels repeated time and time again in the central rites of the Church. Not only, then, are repetition and ritual form not to be set over against authentic identity. More than this, they cannot be counterposed to creativity either. As Martin writes: “The shortest way to creativity is habituation to technical means of expression and steady soaking in an historical context.”[Martin, Two Critiques] And in a daring comparison with the Incarnation of the divine Word, he concludes: “Those who have accepted the conditions of confinement find they are present at a miraculous birth, limited by time and place, fully human, before which even angels cover their faces.” [Martin, Two Critiques]

A fuller account in the shape of a Catholic counterpart to Martin’s criticism is Kieran Flanagan’s Sociology and Liturgy, which marries an Anglo-American sociological tradition to the Germanophone theology of Joseph Ratzinger and Hans Urs von Balthasar. [K. Flanagan, Sociology and Liturgy: Representations of the Holy (London, 1991)] Flanagan, an Irishman who is a lecturer in sociology at the University of Bristol, rejects what he regards as a consensus of practical liturgists who favor the maximizing of active participation so as to confer a democratic quality on rite and would keep liturgical symbols and actions as simple and intelligible as possible.

Stressing by contrast the ceremonious, formal, and allegorical qualities of ritual as well as what he terms ritual’s “ambiguity”, Flanagan describes the pastoral-liturgical consensus in bald terms as “sociologically misconceived”. It ignores the question of “how the cultural is domesticated and harnessed in a ritual performance that proclaims a distinctive witness.” [K. Flanagan, Sociology and Liturgy] Emphasizing the functions of ceremony, the opacity of symbols, the complexity of actions, and the qualities of beauty and holiness that give the social form of rite a distinctive coloration, Flanagan echoes Martin in deploring

the rise of consumer-friendly rites and a demand for loose and lax “happy clappy” events full of meet and greet transactions. These trivialize the social, preclude deeper meanings being read into the action, and skate along the surface of some very thin ice where all attention to danger, awe and reverence is bracketed. These are rites of the immediate that demand instantaneous theological results.”
[K. Flanagan, Sociology and Liturgy]

“Liberal” liturgists are in fact dismantling the entire sacred superstructure that rites exist to serve.

The apparent theological strong point of such pastoral liturgical approaches lies, Flanagan remarks, in the notion of the missionary significance of duly adapted rites. A century and more earlier, Dom Gueranger had also spoken of the evangelical power of the Liturgy, but he had seen this as expressed indirectly in its spiritual beauty. Now, however, it is to be expressed directly in a conscious opening of the Church to the world.

Unfortunately, so Flanagan explains, this “delivers Christianity to a school of sociological thought that regards rituals as social constructions shaped to express and to mirror the ideological sensitivities of the age”. [K. Flanagan, Sociology and Liturgy] The result is that the rite comes to be seen as the projection of the dispositions of the actors involved in the act of worship rather than as first and foremost the work of grace, a bestowal of transcendence that (to be sure) makes use of human agents for its enactment but does not, Pelagius-like, consist of such agency. In favor of traditional ritual, by contrast, is the fact that the quality of habit (one of Martin’s favorite words) endows liturgical action with “an impunity, an absence of worry about the credibility of what is represented”.

As Flanagan would see things, the Second Vatican Council simply took place too early so far as the history of sociology is concerned. In a retrospective view of the revisionist phase of the liturgical movement in the period from the Second World War to the Council and the subsequent reform, he writes:

Theology inserted the notion of cultural praxis into its approach to liturgy, but failed to secure the sociological instruments through which this could be monitored and understood. The relationship of rite to the cultural was far more ambiguous and complex than had been understood at the time of the Council. The question of the significance of the social came from within theological efforts to renew liturgical form — not from sociology. Only recently has a form of sociology emerged that could offer a means of understanding liturgical operations in a way that is compatible with their theological basis.’
[K. Flanagan, Sociology and Liturgy]

The principal schools of sociology “available” when the Council opened were positivist, empiricist, or functionalist. Only in the course of the 1960s and 1970s did the stress of the late-nineteenth-century German philosopher of method Wilhelm Dilthey on the distinctive nature of the cultural sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) have its impact on sociology, as sociologists began to realize the need for a sociological imagination if they were to grasp the meaning of social forms for those human subjects who live in and with them. At last they started to ask themselves how belief systems, now taken seriously even or especially if they were religious, succeed in having cultural expression. Alas, it was then too late for such sociologists to be of use to the actual liturgical reformers. The postconciliar Consilium ad exsequendam Constitutionem de Sacra Liturgia was wound up in 1975 through absorption into the Congregation for Divine Worship, that year coinciding more or less with a real turning point in the anthropology of religion as new schools of thought began to emphasize meaning, not explanation, the non-rational as well as the rational, and ritual’s transformative power: all of which led to a new respect for the formal, ceremonious ordering of rite, the very thing that avant-garde liturgists most abhorred and the liturgical reform itself preserved only in severely truncated guise.

Yeats’ rhetorical question “How but in custom and in ceremony are innocence and beauty born?” was suddenly grasped in the academy as it ceased to be understood in the Church. And Flanagan suggests (albeit cautiously) that the consequent mishandling of the modernization of rite accelerated the decline of such traditional churches as his own.

He contrasts the impoverished concepts used to “deliver rite to the cultural” — simplicity, intelligibility, adaptation to “modern man” — with the subtle description of the Liturgy given by the Dominican liturgiologist Irenee-Henri Dalmais in his contribution to Canon Aime Martimort’s four-volume study The Church at Prayer.

Liturgy [wrote Dalmais] belongs in the order of doing (ergon) not of knowing (logos). Logical thought cannot get far with it; liturgical actions yield their intelligibility in their performance, and this performance takes place at the level of sensible realities, not as exclusively material, but as vehicles of overtones capable of awakening the mind and heart to acceptance of realities belonging to a different order. [I. H. Dalmais, "The Liturgy as Celebration of the Mystery of Salvation", in Principles of the Liturgy, vol. 1 of The Church at Prayer, ed. A. G. Martimort (London, 1967)]

Posted in Church History, Fr. Aidan Nichols, Sacraments, The State of the Catholic Church | Tagged anti-institutionalism, David Martin, Kieran Flanagan, Liturgy reform, rote and rite, Sociology and Liturgy, Two Critiques of Spontaneity | Leave a Comment »

Reading Selections From “Christianity Lite” by Mary Eberstadt

May 4, 2011

Mary Eberstadt, American author and a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

MARY EBERSTADT is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a contributing writer to First Things. She has an incredible knack for writing incisive commentary on Church issues. This piece was written a year and a half ago and deserves a reread. While it purports to be reportage on the rise of the phenomena of “Christianity Lite,” you will find it truly deals with a phenomena first recorded some eighty years ago by Ronald Knox, “The Decline of Dogma and the Decline of Church Membership.” It turns out the good Monsignor knew all along about the power of a strong moral code and the simple calculus that those who cannot obey in difficult matters really don’t obey in easier ones either.

“The more decadent the age, the more does the forceful insistence that there is a right and wrong about matters of sex exert a gravitational pull all its own. The failure to recognize that power — one experienced by converts from St. Paul, to St. Augustine, to some of the Anglicans studying the Catechism today — may be one final and under-appreciated factor that has led to Christianity Lite’s undoing.” Long after the Churches of Christianity Lite have morphed into reading rooms, shelters, mosques, nightclubs and concert halls the Catholic Church will draw God’s People to its magnificent structures. Bet on it.

The Anglican Gambit
Once in a while comes an historical event so momentous, so packed with unexpected force, that it acts like a large wave under still water, propelling us momentarily up from the surface of our times onto a crest, where the wider movements of history may be glimpsed better than before.

Such an event was Benedict XVI’s landmark announcement in October 2009 offering members of the Anglican Communion a fast track into the Catholic Church. Although commentators quickly dubbed this unexpected overture a “gambit,” what it truly exhibits are the characteristics of a move known in chess as a “brilliancy,” an unforeseen bold stroke that stunningly transforms the game. In the short run, knowledgeable people agree, this brilliancy of Benedict’s may not seem to amount to much. Some 1000 Church of England priests may convert and some 300 parishes turn over to Rome — figures that, while significant when measured against the dwindling numbers of practicing Anglicans there, are nonetheless mere drops in the Vatican’s bucket.

The Longer Run Of Christian History And Christian Lite
But in the longer run — say, over the coming decades — Rome’s move looks consequential in another way. It is the latest and most dramatic example of how orthodoxy, rather than dissent, seems once again to have taken the driver’s seat of Christianity. Every traditionalist who joins the long and already illustrious history of reconversion to the Catholic Church just tips the religious balance more toward Rome. This further weakens a religious communion battered from within by decades of intra-Anglican culture wars. Meanwhile, the progressives left behind may well find the exodus of their adversaries a Pyrrhic victory. How will they possibly make peace with the real majority of Anglicans today — the churches in Africa, whose leaders have repeatedly denounced the Communion’s abandonment of traditional teachings? Questions like these are why a few commentators now speak seriously about something that only recently seemed unthinkable: whether the end of the Anglican Communion itself might now be in sight.

Even so, it is the still longer run of Christian history whose outlines may now be most interesting and unexpected of all. Looking even further out to the horizon from our present moment — at a vista of centuries, rather than mere decades, ahead of us — we may well begin to wonder something else. That is, whether what we are witnessing now is not only the beginning of the end of the Anglican Communion but indeed the end of something even larger: the phenomenon of Christianity Lite itself.

Christian Lite Vs. Traditional Teachings
By this I mean the multifaceted institutional experiment, beginning but not ending with the Anglican Communion, of attempting to preserve Christianity while simultaneously jettisoning certain of its traditional teachings — specifically, those regarding sexual morality. Surveying the record to date of what has happened to the churches dedicated to this long-running modern religious experiment, a large historical question now appears: whether the various exercises in this specific kind of dissent from traditional teaching turn out to contain the seeds of their own destruction. The evidence — preliminary but already abundant — suggests that the answer is yes.

If this is so, then the implications for the future of Christianity itself are likely to be profound. If it is Christianity Lite, rather than Christianity proper, that is fatally flawed and ultimately unable to sustain itself, then a rewriting of much of contemporary thought, religious and secular, appears in order. It means that secularization itself may be fundamentally misunderstood. It means that the most unwanted and unfashionable traditional teaching of Christianity, its sexual moral code, demands of the modern mind a new and respectful look. As a strategic matter, it also means that the current battle within the Catholic Church between traditionalists and dissenters must go to the traditionalists, lest the dissenters or cafeteria Catholics take the same path that the churches of Christianity Lite have followed: down, down, down.

All these are just preliminary examples of what is at stake in contemplating the great experiment of Christianity Lite — which is why the evidence for its failure is so compelling and important.

Let us note at the outset that this use of the phrase Christianity Lite is not intended to describe all of contemporary Protestantism — far from it. Plenty of non-Catholic churches have not rejected the traditional Christian moral code, including some of the most vibrant in the world today. Nor is the phrase intended to imply that sexual issues are the only theological issues dividing Christendom these days. Obviously, all kinds of differences — at least, official differences — remain over perennial lightning rods: papal infallibility, the theological status of Mary, the role and ordination of women, predestination, justification, and the rest of the theological controversies historically responsible for tearing Christendom apart.

The Key Issue: Sexual Morality
But standing once again atop that wave in time prompted by Benedict’s announcement, we can see clearly that these are not the kind of issues that divide the Catholic Church from the churches of Christianity Lite today. As of now — and as has been true for some time — those churches have increasingly defined themselves as dissenting on one issue above all others: They have jettisoned one or another or all of the teachings of traditional Christian sexual morality.

Certainly ordinary parishioners see things this way. Ask any contemporary Mainline Protestant what most distinguishes his or her version of Christianity from that of Roman Catholicism, and you will likely get some version of this response: Catholics are still hung up on sex, and we’re not. They prohibit things like divorce and birth control and abortion and homosexuality, and we don’t. Moreover, this rendition of the facts would be essentially correct. At this particular moment in Christian history, it is sex — not Mary or the saints or predestination or purgatory or papal infallibility or good works — that is the Rubicon no one can really imagine these particular Protestants crossing again.

Background
How did sex, of all subjects, come to occupy such a prominent place in the division of Christendom? In a sense, the potential was always there. From the first believers on up, the stern stuff of the Christian moral code has been cause for commentary — to say nothing of complaint. “Not all men can receive this saying,” the disciples are told when Jesus puts divorce off limits. Observers throughout history, Christian or not, have agreed: that particular moral teaching and its corollaries are hard indeed. From pagan Rome two thousand years ago to secular Western Europe today, the Church’s rules about sex have amounted to saying no, no, and no to things about which non-Christians have gotten to say yes or why not.

Even so, there is no denying that the traditional rules do seem more problematic now than ever before. Widespread abortion, ubiquitous pornography, diminished social opprobrium, and above all easy and effective contraception: All have divided recreation from procreation as never before in history. They have also been the driving force behind the embrace of Christianity Lite itself. After all, many would say, hasn’t this explosion of sexual expression made what was once a difficult moral code practically an impossible one? Shouldn’t the proper Christian response be one of mercy, rather than censure — including a merciful rewriting of the moral rules in these particularly difficult times?

The Anglican Turn on Divorce
Yet to say that the sexual revolution made Christianity Lite inevitable, as many people would, is to miss an important historical point. It was the Anglicans who first started picking apart the tapestry of Christian sexual morality — hundreds of years ago, long before the sexual revolution, and over one particular thread: divorce. In fact, in a fascinating development now visible in retrospect, the Anglican departure over divorce appears as the template for all subsequent exercises in Christianity Lite.

For about two centuries, and despite its having been midwifed into existence by the divorcing Henry VIII, the Church of England held fast to the same principle of the indissolubility of marriage on which the rest of Christian tradition insisted. According to a history of divorce called Untying The Knot, by Roderick Phillips, “no bishop, archbishop, or incumbent of high Anglican office in the first half of the seventeenth century supported the legalization of divorce.”

Even so, this early dedication to principle would turn out not to hold, ultimately eroding one priest and one parish at a time. In the United States, Phillips reports, Anglican churches soon were relaxing the strictest restrictions, making divorce more or less easy to come by depending on where one lived. Meanwhile, although the Church of England lagged behind the Episcopalians, by the mid-eighteenth century divorce was theoretically and practically available by an act of Parliament — a recourse that, although not widely exercised, went to show that exceptions to the indissolubility principle could be made.

Then came another turn of the theological wheel that could not have been foreseen by the first reformers. As of the General Synod in 2002, divorced Anglicans could now remarry in the Church. A spokesman noted carefully at the time: “This does not automatically guarantee the right of divorced people to remarry in Church.” But such cautions were plainly a matter of whistling in the dark. If Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles can now marry in the Church — having already married and been divorced from other people — why should every other Anglican not enjoy the same mercy?

Thus does the Anglican attempt to lighten up the Christian moral code over the specific issue of divorce exhibit a clear pattern that appears over and over in the history of the experiment of Christianity Lite: First, limited exceptions are made to a rule; next, those exceptions are no longer limited and become the unremarkable norm; finally, that new norm is itself sanctified as theologically acceptable.

The Anglican Turn on Contraception
Exactly that pattern emerges in another example of the historical attempt to disentangle a thread of moral teaching out of the whole: the dissent about artificial contraception. Here, too, Anglicans took the historical lead. Throughout most of its history, all of Christianity — even divided Christianity — upheld the teaching that artificial contraception was wrong. Not until the Lambeth Conference of 1930 was that unity shattered by the subsequently famous Resolution 15, in which the Anglicans called for exceptions to the rule in certain difficult, carefully delineated marital (and only marital) circumstances.

Exactly as had happened with divorce, the Anglican okaying of contraception was born largely of compassion for human frailty and dedicated to the idea that such cases would be mere exceptions to the theological rule. Thus Resolution 15 itself — for all that it was a radical break with two millennia of Christian teaching — abounded with careful language about the limited character of its reform, including “strong condemnation of the use of any methods of conception control from motives of selfishness, luxury, or mere convenience.”

And also as had happened with divorce, the effort to hold the line at such carefully drawn borders soon proved futile. In short order, not only was birth control theologically approved in certain difficult circumstances but, soon thereafter, it was regarded as the norm. Nor was that all. In a third turn of the reformist wheel that no one attending Lambeth in 1930 could have seen coming, artificial contraception went on to be sanctioned by some prominent members of the Anglican Communion not only as an option but in fact as the better moral choice. By the time of Episcopal Bishop James Pike, only a quarter century or so later, it was possible for a leading Christian to declare (as he did) that parents who should not be having a child were not only permitted to use contraception but were, in fact, under a moral obligation to use the most effective forms of contraception obtainable.

Bishop Pike was only one of many leaders of Christianity Lite to participate in this same theological process leading from normalization to sanctification. Although the Eastern Orthodox churches sided generally with Rome on the issue of contraception, most Protestant churches ended up following the same script as the Anglicans — moving one by one from reluctant acceptance in special circumstances, to acceptance in most or all circumstances, and finally (in some cases) to complete theological inversion. No less an authority than the Baptist evangelist Billy Graham, for example, eventually embraced birth control to cope with what he called the “terrifying and tragic problem” of overpopulation.

In just a few decades, in other words — following the same pattern as divorce — contraception in the churches of Christianity Lite went from being an unfortunate option, to an unremarkable option, to the theologically preferable option in some cases.

The Anglican Turn on Homosexuality
Now consider a third example of the same historical pattern holding in another area: dissent over traditional Christian teachings against homosexuality.

Although homosexuality may be the most explosive current example of the effort to reshape Christianity into a religion more congenial to modern sexual practice, it is actually new to that party. As many on both sides of the divide have had occasion to remark, homosexual behavior has been proscribed throughout history, by Judaism as well as Christianity, until very, very recently — including in the churches of Christianity Lite. (Henry VIII, to name one prominent example, invoked the alleged homosexuality of the monks as part of his justification for appropriating the monasteries.)

Yet “extraordinarily enough,” as William Murchison puts it in his book Mortal Follies: Episcopalians and the Crisis of Mainline Christianity (2009), “a question barely at the boundary of general consciousness thirty years ago has assumed central importance to the present life and future of the Episcopal Church.” Why this remarkable transformation? In part, because the reformers at Lambeth and elsewhere did not foresee something else that in retrospect appears obvious: The chain of logic leading from the occasional acceptance of contraception to the open celebration of homosexuality would prove surprisingly sound.

That is precisely why the change in doctrine over contraception has been used repeatedly by Anglican leaders to justify proposed changes in religious attitudes toward homosexuality. Robert Runcie, for example, former archbishop of Canterbury, explained his own personal decision to ordain practicing homosexuals on exactly those grounds. In a BBC radio interview in 1996, he cited the Lambeth Conference of 1930, observing that “once the Church signalled . . . that sexual activity was for human delight and a blessing even if it was divorced from any idea of procreation . . . once you’ve said that sexual activity is . . . pleasing to God in itself, then what about people who are engaged in same-sex expression and who are incapable of heterosexual expression?”

Similarly, archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has also retrospectively connected the dots between approving purposely sterile sex for heterosexuals on the one hand and extending the same theological courtesy to homosexuals on the other. As he observed in a lecture in 1989, three years before he became bishop, “In a church which accepts the legitimacy of contraception, the absolute condemnation of same-sex relations of intimacy must rely either on an abstract fundamentalist deployment of a number of very ambiguous texts or on a problematic and non-scriptural theory about natural complementarity, applied narrowly and crudely to physical differentiation without regard to psychological structures.”

Thus, in retrospect, does the modern Anglican path — from careful, even reluctant line-drawing over contraception at Lambeth in 1930, to divorced noncelibate homosexual Bishop Gene Robinson today — appear not only unsurprising but practically inevitable. Put differently, the rejection of the ban on birth control was not incidental to the Anglicans’ subsequent implosion over homosexuality. It was what started it.

Moreover, as of the December 2009 ordination in Los Angeles of the Episcopal Church’s second noncelibate gay bishop, it is clear that homosexuality’s theological status — like that of contraception before it — is now moving from an option to a religiously approved option. It therefore joins divorce and contraception in the signature religious cycle of Christianity Lite, conferring on a once prohibited sexual practice a theological seal of approval.

Another clear pattern has also emerged in retrospect from the ongoing experiment in Christianity Lite: Rewriting the rules about sex does not, historically speaking, end with sex. Time and again, that rewriting has coincided with departures from traditional teaching in other areas too.

Consider, for example, the aforementioned Episcopal bishop James Pike, whose religious career is one of many that could be cited to illustrate the point. As noted, his views on contraception perfectly fit the cycle of Christianity Lite. He not only approved of the use of artificial birth control but sometimes insisted on it and even became chairman of the clergymen’s national advisory committee of the Planned Parenthood Federation.

Yet Pike’s dissent from traditional Christian teaching, far from being confined to matters of sexual morality, only widened over the years. By the 1960s, this pioneer of sexual ethics had also come to question other longstanding Christian beliefs — the virgin birth, the Incarnation, the Trinity, and original sin among them. In 1966, Bishop Pike was even formally censured by the Episcopal House of Bishops — a highly unusual outcome that speaks volumes about just how theologically radical he had become, even by the elastic and forgiving standards of the Episcopalians of America.

Now consider the related example of professor Joseph Fletcher, another ordained Episcopal priest who contributed intellectually to Christianity Lite. Thirty-six years stand between the Lambeth Conference of 1930 and the publication of his landmark book, Situational Ethics. Primarily concerned (of course) with matters sexual, Fletcher argued that there is “nothing intrinsically good or evil per se in any sexual act” and that, on such grounds, conventional sexual morality deserved jettisoning.

Yet the example of Fletcher shows clearly how such dissent has a way of spreading into other doctrinal areas. By the end of his life, this Episcopal priest — who would later identify himself as an atheist — had parted company with Christian orthodoxy on one hot-button issue after another: abortion, infanticide, cloning, euthanasia, and more.

The same is true of the theological journey of one more prominent Episcopalian whose religious journey began — but did not end — with lightening up Christian sexual morality: Bishop John Shelby Spong of Newark. Time magazine called his Living in Sin: A Bishop Rethinks Human Sexuality (1988) “probably the most radical pronouncement on sex ever issued by a bishop.” It advocated the by-now familiar list of sexual selections from the contemporary cafeteria menu — from blessing homosexual unions to all the rest of “freeing the Bible from literalistic imprisonment.”

Yet Bishop Spong’s radicalism, though obviously jumpstarted by sex, did not end there any more than Bishop Pike’s or Reverend Fletcher’s did. It, too, has broadened to include wide-ranging dissent over practically everything else. Spong says he believes in God but is not a theist, for example, and he also denies that Jesus either performed miracles or rose from the dead. So consistent is his record that Albert Mohler, the traditionalist president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, once remarked of Spong that “heretics are rarely excommunicated these days. Instead, they go on book tours.”

Dissent over Sex or Doctrine: The Chicken or the Egg
These examples are among many that could be cited to illustrate an important point: Even in the hands of its ablest defenders, Christianity Lite has proven time and again to be incapable of limiting itself to the rules about sex alone. Once traditional sexual morality is dispensed with in whole or in part, it is hard, apparently, to keep the rest of Church teaching off the chopping block. To switch metaphors, which came first, the egg of dissent over sex — or the chicken of dissent over other doctrinal issues? We do not need to know the answer to grasp the point: History shows that Christianity Lite cannot seem to have one without the other.

The Institutional Decline Of The Lutherans
This same pattern of dissent over sexuality, followed by decline in both numbers and practice, also appears clearly in the other churches dedicated to Christianity Lite, those of the Protestant mainline in addition to the Episcopal Church. Here, too, the speed with which both practice and principle have unraveled bears scrutiny.

In 1930, for example, the initial reaction among America’s Lutherans to Lambeth’s Resolution 15 was disbelief bordering on hostility. Margaret Sanger was denounced in an official Lutheran newspaper as a “she devil,” and numerous pastors took to the pulpits and op-ed pages with blistering complaints about the Anglicans’ theological capitulation. Nonethless, by 1954, the Lutherans, too, were encouraging contraception in order to make sure that any child born would be valued “both for itself and in relation to the time of its birth.” By 1991, the Evangelical Lutheran Church was not only okaying contraception but also officially urging widespread instruction in “sex education” and pregnancy prevention for youngsters.

In all, it has been an about-face that certainly would have shocked the Lutherans of yesteryear — beginning with Martin Luther himself, who once called contraception “far more atrocious than incest or adultery.”

Also like the Anglicans, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has proven that one thread could not be teased out of the moral garment without pulling others out too. In 1991, a Social Statement found that abortion — regarded as murder almost universally throughout Christian history — could be a morally responsible choice in certain circumstances. That same year, the Churchwide Assembly (CWA), the leading legislative body of the church, affirmed that “gay and lesbian people . . . are welcome to participate fully in the life of the congregations of the Evangelical Lutheran Church.” Less than two decades later, in 2009, official tolerance for individuals with homosexual tendencies had transposed into something else: official approval of the sexual practice of homosexuality, enshrined in the decision to allow noncelibate homosexuals to serve as pastors.

This leads to a third pattern arising from the experiment of Christianity Lite: the ongoing and inarguable institutional decline of the churches that have tried it. Today, the ELCA — the largest and most liberal of the Lutheran bodies of America — faces the same fate as the Anglican Communion: threats of schism, departing parishes, diminishing funds, and the rest of the institutional woes that have gone hand in hand with the abandonment of dogma.

The Mainline Protestant Churches
The same fate also threatens the rest of the mainline Protestant churches — in addition to the Episcopal Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the United Church of Christ, the United Methodist Church, and the American Baptist Church. As Joseph Bottum observed last year in these pages, in his wide-ranging essay about the collapse, “The death of the Mainline is the central historical fact of our time: the event that distinguishes the past several decades from every other period in American history.” In December 2009, the Barna Group was the latest to report that all the mainline churches appear to be “on the precipice of a decline.” Across the board, funding is down, numbers are down, numbers of the young are especially down, and missionaries — one particularly good measure of the vibrancy of belief — are diminishing apace. Even the kind of social work for which Christian churches have been renowned is also down: Mainline volunteerism, according to the new Barna numbers, has dropped a shocking 21 percent since 1998.

Yet, as Bottum and others have observed, even as decline and disarray have so ruthlessly visited the churches of the mainline — the same churches that are now wholly owned subsidiaries of Christianity Lite — so have the more traditional-minded Protestant institutions proved comparatively robust. Since Dean Kelley’s work in the 1970s, culminating in the book Why Strict Churches Are Strong, observers have tried to make sense of that phenomenon. Interestingly, traditional Protestant churches and pastors are holding the institutional line today as Christianity Lite is not. Some are also actively seeking to recover aspects of the moral code that they themselves once jettisoned.

Abortion — about which some traditional-minded Protestant churches are more absolutist now than they used to be — is one example. Even more unexpected is the rethinking by some prominent Protestants of artificial contraception. This ongoing reconsideration is one of the least followed and potentially consequential religious stories of our day. It is happening in part because these leaders do not want their churches to go the way of the Anglican Communion and the mainline, and in part because of what some religious leaders now take to be the lessons of experience. The sexual revolution has been polarizing indeed — leading some churches into abandoning the old rules about sex altogether, even as it sends others back to a new understanding of why they may have existed in the first place.

The Decline of Dogma and the Decline of Church Membership
Does the relaxing of dogma drive people from church, or does the decline in attendance push leaders to relax dogma? As with the previous discussion of dissent, we do not really need to know the answer in all its causal complexity. All we really need to know — as the brilliant convert and teacher Monsignor Ronald Knox observed in an essay some eighty years ago, “The Decline of Dogma and the Decline of Church Membership” — is that “the evacuation of the pew and the jettisoning of cargo from the pulpit” have been going on side by side for as long as Christianity Lite has been attempted. As with doctrinal dissent, it seems, where one appears, the other is sure to follow.

Christianity Lite has left enough evidence in its wake for us to judge the final outcome of that great experiment: It is a failure. The effort to throw out the unwanted bathwater of the sexual code has taken the baby — the rest of Christian practice and belief — along with it.

What accounts for this epochal, perhaps even counterintuitive outcome — one that surely would have shocked the original architects of this grand religious experiment, most of whom longed only for a Christianity with a happier human face?

One answer appears obvious enough. If enough people over enough time turn their backs on the injunction to be fruitful and multiply, eventually their churches will cease being fruitful and multiplying, too. Recent sociology confirms this elementary if perhaps unwelcome point. In research published in 2005 in Christian Century, three sociologists (Andrew Greeley, Michael Hout, and Melissa Wilde) argued that “simple demographics” between 1900 and 1975 explained around three-quarters of the decline in mainline churches (Episcopal, Lutheran, Presbyterian, and Methodist). By contrast, they pointed out, during those same years membership rose in more conservative Protestant churches (Baptist, Assembly of God, Pentecostal, and so on). The difference was that women in the former churches were using artificial contraception before or instead of women in the latter ones — in sum, that “the so-called decline of the Mainline may ultimately be attributable to its earlier approval of contraception.”

A second reason that the experiment of Christianity Lite seems destined sooner or later to self-destruct may be this rule of thumb: People who cannot be expected to obey in difficult matters cannot be expected to obey in easier ones either. In the 1950s, almost half the population of the Church of England attended services on Sunday. By 2000, that figure was around 7 percent, and that includes Charismatic and Pentecostal affiliates. Such declines, of course, have become common across the churches of Christianity Lite. Clearly, making life easier for those in the pews has not made them any likelier to sit there, and probably less so.

The Hidden Power of the Moral Code
One final reason also suggests itself for why Christianity Lite is in decline while orthodoxy seems comparatively energetic — this despite the fact that Catholicism itself still reels from years of devastating sexual scandals, coupled with constant assault from secularism. That is what might be called the hidden power of the Christian moral code: its by now undeniable resonance with at least some human beings.

In his classic work A History of Christianity, first published in 1953, Kenneth Scott Latourette ponders one great puzzle of history:

How shall we account for the fact that, beginning as what to the casual observer must have appeared a small and obscure sect of Judaism, before its first five centuries were out had become the faith of the Roman state and of the vast majority of the population of that realm and had spread eastward as far as Central Asia and probably India and Ceylon and westward into far away Ireland?

Of course there is no single answer to his question. Nonetheless, the master historian himself cites Christianity’s surprisingly strong combination of flexibility and inclusivity on the one hand and “uncompromising adherence to its basic convictions” on the other. “In striking contrast with the easy-going syncretism” of the time, he emphasizes, “Christianity was adamant on what it regarded as basic principles.”

And right from the beginning, those principles were understood to include matters of sexual morality — especially matters of sexual morality. The pagans, the early Christians were instructed, could have it all: their idols, their infanticide, their contraception, their abortion, their homosexuality; the Christians couldn’t. The Jews could have their divorce; the Christians couldn’t. And on the list of forbidden practices went. Of course, these were not the only features that distinguished Christianity from other sects. But from the beginning, they were not only fundamental features of Christianity, and not only features that put many people off. They were also, and are still, features that drew other people in.

The Right And Wrong About Matters Of Sex
“The age had in it much of moral corruption,” Latourette wrote, speaking of the Roman Empire. “Yet it also had consciences which revolted against the excesses of the day. A religion that offered high moral standards and the power to attain them would be welcomed by the more serious.” What was true as Christianity took the Greco-Roman world by storm remains true today. The more decadent the age, the more does the forceful insistence that there is a right and wrong about matters of sex exert a gravitational pull all its own. The failure to recognize that power — one experienced by converts from St. Paul, to St.Augustine, to some of the Anglicans studying the Catechism today — may be one final and underappreciated factor that has led to Christianity Lite’s undoing.

As a cautionary note, nothing about this analysis of where we are now guarantees Christian orthodoxy any kind of victory. Many modern Catholics, perhaps a majority, are themselves cafeteria Catholics — the in-house version of Christianity Lite. Over time, their churches can be expected to drift and decline like those of the theological experiment of which they are a part. Nor will the demise of Christianity Lite happen dramatically enough for today’s traditionalists to gain momentum from it. No doubt centuries will be required before the experiment’s churches finally become whatever they will ultimately become — shelters, mosques, nightclubs, concert halls. Meanwhile, other questions about the future shape of Christianity — about what will become of traditional-minded Protestants, say, beginning with the Global South Anglicans — remain just as dim. From the top of any historical wave, we can see only so much.

But the one thing we can spy as of this moment is noteworthy enough: the beginning of the end not only of Anglicanism as the world has known it in the past century but also of the other churches that similarly joined their fates to that of Christianity Lite. It is hard to overstate how momentous their unraveling is — or how bracing a slap in the modern face. After all, if there is a single point to which modern, enlightened people have been agreeing for a long time now, it is that the antiquated sexual notions of the Catholic Church are an anachronism that had to go for the sake of a kinder, gentler Christianity.

It would be more than passing strange if, at the end of the day, that very anachronism were to turn out to be something that could not be sacrificed after all — not without having everything else fall down, anyway. Then again, it wouldn’t be the first time in Christian history that a piece rejected by the builders turned out to be the cornerstone.

Posted in The State of the Catholic Church | 1 Comment »

Christians and Postmoderns by Joseph Bottum

March 24, 2011

Joseph Bottum

Joseph Bottum is the Books & Arts editor of The Weekly Standard. A native of South Dakota, he is a graduate of Georgetown University, with a Ph.D. in philosophy from Boston College. His essays, reviews, and poetry have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic Monthly, Nineteenth-Century Literature, First Things, Commentary, National Review, Philosophy & Literature, and elsewhere. In addition to duties at The Weekly Standard, he is poetry editor of First Things, and host of Book Talk, a nationally syndicated radio program.

At A Time Near The End Of The World
We are living at a time near the end of the world. Not that our age is apocalyptic: apocalypse means an uncovering, a revelation, and revelation is what we lack. And not that our age is eschatological: eschatology means the discourse, reason, science, the logos of last things, and all that kind of scientific discourse is coming to an end now. All we have left is the eschaton itself and the disquietude of decline.

The atom bomb, I think, hid this from us for a while, for the atom bomb was such a modern thing. I do not mean just that it was expensive, technologically elegant, and an overwhelming demonstration of mathematical physics; or just that it was bound up with “wargasms” and all the strange destructive sexuality of modern times; or even just that it was modernity’s last sick attempt to master nature. I mean that the atom bomb hid from us the ending going on all around us, and that far from destroying modern times, the atom bomb kept modern times alive for nearly fifty years.

The threat of global nuclear destruction made the eschaton intelligible. All those good-hearted people who demonstrated outside nuclear bases, who signed petitions and held parades-all of them knew why they felt so close to the edge, and all of them knew why their dreams were filled with visions of the world’s end. They had someone to blame; they had an explanation-the sort of explanation modernity had always promised we would have: rational, true, and morally convincing.

The Eschaton Has Slipped Its Leash
But with the diminished threat of nuclear destruction, the eschaton has slipped its leash. The ending all around us has no logos and no science. There is no one to blame, no explanation, and no knowledge. Modern times is collapsing, and all we have left are ironic juxtapositions: looters with cellular telephones, Van Gogh paintings in insurance company boardrooms, crucifixes in vials of urine.

Or, rather, for the modern man and modern woman there is no explanation (though perhaps environmental pollution now replaces the atom bomb in the fully modern eschatology). But to be a Christian is always to have known, in some way, that it would come to this: that there must be a retribution, that the modern atheistic project was corrupt from its beginning, that the godless present age embraces self-destruction and is doomed to be destroyed.

We Cannot Revert To The Premodern Or Age Of Faith
We were all of us raised as moderns, however, and even as I write these words, my own modernness rises up to make me blush. To speak about doom and retribution, about the godless present age, is to sound distinctly premodern, distinctly dated, distinctly benighted and reactionary. It is to sound like the anti-humanistic enemy against whom modernity has campaigned for three hundred years. And I ought to blush, for I profit fully from the modern. I drive my car, keep iced tea in my refrigerator, get my vaccinations, use my computer, turn on my air conditioner in the summer heat.

Suppose, however, that we were nonetheless to declare ourselves against modernity. Suppose we were with wild eyes to denounce the present age, and trumpet doom and retribution through the streets of our cities: brand-new Savonarolas burning brand-new vanities. The state would send armored tanks to take our children, and we would seem no more than madmen filmed by TV crews for the evening news. Or suppose we were to withdraw from the irony of being Christians in these late times and build our medieval communes in the woods. Still the state would come to vaccinate our children, and tourists would come for photographs. No, these are distasteful options, and ineffective anyway. Rebels are bound to that against which they rebel, and were we to rebel against the modern we would find in our anachronisms no positive past, but only a negated present. More, it is in rebellion against the modern that we would find ourselves most truly modern-extra-modern, hyper-modern. Modernity is shaped by its deliberate rejection of the past, and modernity itself is our past. We cannot revert to the premodern, we cannot return to the age of faith, for we were all of us raised as moderns.

And yet, though we cannot revert, we nonetheless have resources that may help us to advance beyond these late times. The modern project that attacked the Middle Ages has itself been under attack for some time. For some time, hyper-modern writers have brought to bear against their modern past the same sort of scarifying analysis that earlier modern writers brought against the premodern past. These later writers, supposing the modern destruction of God to be complete, have turned their postmodern attacks upon the modern project of Enlightenment rationality.

Premodern, Modern, And Postmodern
In some sense, of course, these words premodern, modern, and postmodern are too slippery to mean much. Taken to refer to the history of ideas, they seem to name the periods before, during, and after the Enlightenment; but taken to refer to the history of events, they seem to name the period from creation to the rise of science, the period from the rise of science until World War II, and the period since the war. It is tempting to define the categories philosophically, rather than historically, around the recognition that knowledge depends upon the existence of God. But the better modern philosophers (e.g., Descartes and Kant, as opposed to, say, Voltaire) recognize that dependence in some way or another. Perhaps, though definitions based on intent are always weak, the best definition nonetheless involves intent: it is premodern to seek beyond rational knowledge for God; it is modern to desire to hold knowledge in the structures of human rationality (with or without God); it is postmodern to see the impossibility of such knowledge.

There is thus a curious parallel of thought between premodern thinkers and postmodern prophets of modernity’s destruction. This parallel could be drawn precisely, I think, between the medieval Christian neoplatonists (Dionysius, Eriugena, St. Bonaventure, Eckhart, Cusa) and certain contemporary critics of systematic rationality (Derrida, Foucault, Jameson). But all medievals, even such “rational” philosophers as Averroes, Moses Maimonides, and St. Thomas Aquinas, share certain philosophical ideas that are closer to the postmodern than the modern.

The premoderns said that without God, there would be no knowledge, and the postmoderns say we have no God and have no knowledge. The premoderns said that without the purposefulness of final causation, all things would be equally valueless, and the postmoderns say there is no purpose and no value. The premoderns said that without an identity of reality and the Good, there would be no right and wrong, and the postmoderns say there is neither Good nor right and wrong. Though they disagree on whether God exists, premoderns and postmoderns share the major premise that knowing requires His existence. Only for a brief period in the history of the West-the period of modern times-did anyone seriously suppose that human beings could hold knowledge without God.

By itself, this parallel between premodern and postmodern does us no good, for we cannot use it to return to the age of faith. Postmodernity is still in the line of modernity, as rebellion against rebellion is still rebellion, as an attack on the constraints of grammar must still be written in grammatical sentences, as a skeptical argument against the structures of rationality must still be put rationally. Our conceptions of the premodern and the postmodern turn equally on the modern project. Though the postmodern attack on modernity may move our historical imagination to a periphery from which to view the center, it does not remove us from the circle. The failure of the present age is not cured by recognizing it as failing. We need, rather, a different center in order to hold knowledge.

Epistemology
I choose the phrase “to hold knowledge” deliberately, for the massive scientific advance of modernity reveals how easy it is to discover facts, and modernity’s collapse reveals how hard it is to hold knowledge. We have an apparatus for discovery unrivaled by the ages, yet every new fact means less than the previously discovered one, for we lack what turns facts to knowledge: the information of what the facts are for.

Epistemology, the branch of philosophy that studies how we know, gives us a technical vocabulary with which to describe this missing piece of information. Aristotle originally describes knowledge as a grasp of cause and essence: to know a thing, we must know the four causes of its existence and the essential genus and difference of its species. He discovers, however, that the fourth of the causes-the final cause, “that for the sake of which”-is already enfolded in the essence itself. The fullest knowledge of a being is thus, in Aristotle’s description, a grasp of what that being is for. When Francis Bacon and all the other founders of modern science reject final causation, they reject the entire idea of essence: the “beingness” of knowable things.

Yet while epistemology may give us a name for the missing information, it fails to give us a way to demonstrate the necessity for this information. The technical reason for epistemology’s failure is the impossibility of forming a strict genus-and-difference definition of knowledge. Certainly we can define the psychology of knowing, but a definition of the logical content of that knowing soon becomes circular: the act of knowing may belong to the genus of mental acts, but we have no genus for the knowledge thereby known.

It might seem, however, that we do not need to enter into the technicalities of epistemology in order to see the necessity of final causation for knowledge, but we could discover this necessity by examining history instead. As Etienne Gilson once observed, history is the only laboratory we have in which to see the consequences of thought. The empty pit into which the modern project has fallen may well reveal Bacon’s failure far more convincingly than any purely epistemological argument ever could. This is the reason, as I understand it, that Michel Foucault pressed his postmodern attack on modernity by writing histories. The Foucault by whom we are first moved to question modernity, the Foucault by whom we are first shown the absurdity of the modern project from its beginning, is not the Foucault of the epistemological Order of Things and Archaeology of Knowledge, but the Foucault of the historical Discipline and Punish, Madness and Civilization, and Birth of the Clinic. To read these histories is to see the evil of the systematic, the cruelty of impersonal human ingenuity, and the prison of the Enlightenment’s constraining rationality.

The Failure Of The Modern Project
But the history of thought is finally about thought rather than history. The failure of the modern project is a failure of theory, not just practice, and so Foucault wrote epistemology, not just history. Historical studies may point us towards the source of modernity’s collapse, but they do not prove it. We would need, of course, a large book to cover accurately and fairly the thousand shades of modern epistemology, and another large book to demonstrate their failure, and yet another to propose an alternative. Once historical studies have pointed us in the right direction, however, it is actually quite easy to sketch (in a very loose and general way) the epistemological absurdity of the attempt to found knowledge without the transcendental final cause that is God.

To the medieval eye, beings disclose their purposes precisely as they imitate God. God moves things as their final cause: the aim of their growth and motion, the object of their desire. Everything is thus an image of God, for the perfection of a thing would be to be God. “He is Himself the proper type of each,” writes St. Thomas. “The divine essence contains in itself the excellences of all beings, not indeed by way of composition, but by way of perfection.” Even in their imperfections things reveal the hidden Exemplar of their being.

The consequence of this medieval view is that objects of knowledge seem simultaneously real and unreal. They have, enfolded in their presence, an absence that makes them knowable. When we see a face reflected in a mirror, we recognize not only that the reflection is a real reflection, but also that it is not a real face. Similarly, images are real as images, but not real as that of which they are the image. For medieval men and women, knowable things have the strange dual status of being really existing images. But this is what allows them to be known: insofar as they are images, there is something knowable there; insofar as they really exist, there is something knowable there.

We Must Learn To Live After Truth
Francis Bacon’s rejection of purpose, however, is also a rejection of lack. The modern scientist sees the objects of investigation as complete, lacking nothing, wholly what they are. Things are real here before us, and have no absence that requires God. The imagination as an image-former (rather than an image-reader) is the proper faculty of human knowing. Facing fully real things, we render them knowable in the images of language, art, and mathematical science. As an attempt to found an epistemology, this is bizarre.

The logic of knowing tells us that we must abandon any claim to have complete knowledge of whatever it is we have taken as fully real. Between us and whatever is real, a gap opens up. We may discern, perhaps, that the real is, but what it is (its essential “beingness”) retreats behind the impossibility of knowing its purpose. The consequence of this modern view is that things are not what they are said to be. Any time a modern tells us what something is, we are told more about language and its speaker than about the thing of which that speaker speaks, and we ought to recognize the speaker’s hunger for power and desire for domination. Any modern use of essences is philosophically unjustifiable: an attempt to force a unique unknowable individual into a controlled category of knowledge.

And so “we must learn to live after truth,” as a group of European academics wrote in After Truth: A Postmodern Manifesto. “Nothing is certain, not even this. . . . The modern age opened with the destruction of God and religion. It is ending with the threatened destruction of all coherent thought.” Nietzsche may have been the first to see this clearly, though the Marquis de Sade came close in Philosophy in the Bedroom. But, even in the fundamental thinkers of high modernity, hints can be found that knowledge requires God: Descartes uses God in the Meditations in order to escape from the interiority where the cogito has stranded him; Kant uses God as a postulate of pure practical reason in order to hold on to the possibility of morality.

God Is Discovered By Thought To Be Beyond Thought
And yet I am convinced that any attempt to “use” God is self-defeating, and that the very appearance of an epistemologically useful God in the writings of Descartes and Kant contributes to the Death of God described by Nietzsche, and thus to the collapse of knowledge. (This point is made brilliantly by Jean-Luc Marion in God Without Being.) Thanks to the postmodern critique, we can see this collapse with historical clarity; but the fact of our seeing it does not give us God. In the real psychology of conversion, no one comes to believe merely for the sake of guaranteeing knowledge. This has an analogue in the theological realization that God is not mastered by the thought of Him, but discovered by thought to be beyond thought: He is silent where thought most needs Him to speak. And it has an analogue in the epistemological realization that the Divine defeats knowledge for the sake of which we suppose the Divine: God (posited as a transcendental condition for the possibility of knowing) must Himself be unknowable-else we would need to posit some further God as the condition for the possibility of knowing Him. And it has its most accurate analogue in the historical realization that we are not premoderns: we cannot cease to be moderns by rebelling against modernity.

A Distrust Of Modern Claims To Knowledge
But this leaves us in a perilous position. On the one hand, without an unthinkable God who illuminates thinking, we cannot maintain knowledge. On the other hand, the desire to maintain knowledge will not conjure the God who reveals Himself only to faith. The ceremonies of suspicion, in which we have all been trained since Descartes, make falling to a postmodern denial of knowledge easier than climbing to an un-modern belief.

What believers have in common with postmoderns is a distrust of modern claims to knowledge. To be a believer, however, is to be subject to an attack that postmoderns, holding truthlessness to themselves like a lover, never have to face. The history of modernity in the West is in many ways nothing more than the effort to destroy medieval faith. It is a three-hundred-year attempt to demolish medieval (especially Catholic) claims to authority, and to substitute a structure of science and ethics based solely on human rationality. But with the failure to discover any such rational structure-seen by the postmoderns-the only portion of the modern project still available to a modern is the destruction of faith. It should not surprise us that, in very recent times, attacks on what little is left of medieval belief have become more outrageous: resurgent anti-Semitism, anti-Islamic broadsides, vicious mockery of evangelical preaching, desecrations of the Host in Catholic masses. For modern men and women, nothing else remains of the high moral project of modernity: these attacks are the only good thing left to do. The attackers are convinced of the morality of their attack not by the certainty of their aims-who’s to say what’s right or wrong?-but by opposition from believers.

Three hundred years of this attack have created in believers an attitude both deeply defensive and deeply conservative. But the defensiveness springs from the attempt by believers to defend their belief against a “progressive” philosophy that is already rejected intellectually by nearly all cultural commentators, and, I suspect, despised intuitively by nearly all young people in America. Believers should not become entangled in the defense of modern times. This is the key-the postmodern attack on modernity is right: without God, essences are the will to power. Without God, every attempt to call something true or beautiful or good is actually an attempt to compel other people to agree.

Of course believers are tempted, when they hear postmodern deconstructions of modernity, to argue in support of modernity. After all, believers share with modern nonbelievers a trust in the reality of truth. They affirm the efficacy of human action, the movement of history towards a goal, the possibility of moral and aesthetic judgments. But believers share with postmoderns the recognition that truth rests on a faith that has itself been the sole subject of the long attack of modern times. The most foolish thing believers could do is to make concessions now to a modernity that is already bankrupt (and that despises them anyway) and thus to make themselves subject to a second attack-the attack of the postmodern on the modern. Faithful believers are not responsible for the emptiness of modernity. They struggled against it for as long as they could, and they must not give in now. They must not, at this late date, become scientific, bureaucratic, and technological; skeptical, self-conscious, and self-mocking.

Simultaneously Historical And Ahistorical
At the same time we ought to be wary of the immediate practical effect of making common cause with the postmodern. For instance, an attempt to root out modern elements in the church ought to be viewed with the same suspicion we should have for any systematic program of destruction. Nothing in the rejection of modernity tells us how we ought to view the ecumenical movement or the ordination of women. A postmodern critique of the Catholic Church would find less grist in current controversies than in modern elements already present in the Church: the substituted vernacular mass, or the presence of national flags on church daises.

The problem for the Catholic believer in particular is precisely the claim of the Catholic Church to be a catholic church-not a culture or a heritage, but the mystical bride of Christ-a universal and eternal possibility for conversion. It cannot relegate itself to a self- consciously historical role as some gracefully surviving anachronism, some museum of dead forms. The Church militant must somehow be simultaneously historical and ahistorical. However, the problem for every believer, Catholic or not, is the impossibility of choosing to cease being modern. We cannot decide to revert to a community of faith, because the decision requires a self-consciousness that contradicts the unself-consciousness of such community. Any rejection of modernity must step gingerly around this contradiction.

Similarly, we ought to be wary of the theological effect of the postmodern. Certainly no one actually believes for the sake of knowing, or holds irrational faith for the sake of holding rational thought. But the postmodern critique of modernity tempts us to reject rationality rather than surpass it. The relation of Christianity to rationality is, at one extreme, St. Justin Martyr’s claim, “Whatever things are rightly said among all men are the property of us Christians,” and, at the other extreme, Tertullian’s question, “What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” If the tendency of contemporary theology is to give too much to Justin and the efficacy of rational thought, the tendency of postmodern theology is to give too much to Tertullian and the irrational.

But there is perhaps a use we might make of the postmodern in apologetics, for the collapse of modernity may allow believers to speak once again about God without defensiveness or self-consciousness, may allow believers both to escape political categorization as liberal or conservative and to escape the modern view that sees political categories as fundamental. And there is certainly a use for the postmodern in catechetics. The critique of modernity offers the possibility of reclaiming the long history of belief, the possibility of critically reading medieval authors without supposing them to be involved in the attempt to master God.

St. Anselm and St. Thomas Aquinas
St. Anselm, for instance, puts in his Proslogion what a typically modern reading takes as the “ontological argument”: an attempt to prove, by examining the meaning of the word “God,” the existence of a useful transcendental guarantor of thought, whose existence is itself guaranteed by thought. And Anselm seems to invite this sort of separation of the logical argument from its place in his text. He had long sought, he writes, an argument that “would suffice to demonstrate that God truly exists” and grant understanding superior to faith: “I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand.” Indeed, Anselm gave the title Faith Seeking Understanding to early drafts of the Proslogion. Many thinkers-Gaunilo, St. Thomas, Caterus, Kant, Russell-have pointed to certain logical difficulties with Anselm’s demonstration. But we are not committed to resolving these logical difficulties merely by asserting that the modern reading is wrong. Rather, there is opened for us a different way of reading Anselm. The Proslogion has more the structure of prayer than the structure of proof: it begins in the blind depths of unilluminated incomprehension; it ends in worship of the blinding Light. Anselm does not seek as a modern to guarantee knowledge, he seeks as a premodern for the God beyond the guarantee.

Similarly, St. Thomas Aquinas puts in the Summa Theologica his famous Five Ways. A typically modern reading, whether by a believer or a nonbeliever, takes these Ways as five separable attempts to demonstrate the existence of God. St. Thomas sets out, according to this sort of reading, to prove the “God of the Philosophers”: a transcendental guarantor of thought, onto Whose demonstrable features (Prime Mover, Most Necessary Being, Designer of the Universe, etc.) may be super-added the additional features held by faith (appearing in the Burning Bush, descending in the flesh, speaking to Muhammad, etc.).

For the modern believer and nonbeliever alike, there is an unconvincingness about such demonstrations that has little to do with their logic. We know that the existence of God cannot be proven. We come prejudiced against the possibility of demonstration, and are suspicious even where we find no flaw. And we are right to be suspicious. Modern debates about the existence of God are primarily about whether or not a “useful” God is necessary to guarantee the possibility of ethical action. Both sides in the debate take as fundamental that the moral order stands outside of God, and that the God about Whom they argue would operate as a guarantor of that order if He existed. To such debates St. Thomas contributes nothing. A world of interpretation is opened to us when we consider instead that Thomas is not concerned with God’s guarantee of knowledge (though he notices it in passing), but with moving through thought to the unthinkable. The purpose of the premodern Five Ways is not to settle us in modern knowledge, but to move us toward God.

This, of course, is the greatest use for the postmodern. Though we cannot revert to the premodern community of faith, we can reestablish our communion with that community. Modernity was the effort to destroy the claims of the medieval church to authority in order to put its own conceptions of human rationality at the center of human thought. And it is the mocking deconstructive critique of the postmoderns that shows the bankruptcy and the will to power of modern times. Freed from modernity, we can resume faith’s interrupted search for understanding.

Posted in The State of the Catholic Church | Tagged Age Of Faith, And Postmodern, Learning To Live After Truth, Modern, Premodern, The Eschaton, The Failure Of The Modern Project | Leave a Comment »

Authority and Dissent in the Catholic Church by Dr. William E. May

November 8, 2010

Archbishop Pelosi

I wrote a paper on the magisterium that I posted earlier on Paying Attention to the Sky. I happened to read this the other day and decided that it was head and shoulders above what I had written. So let me make amends by offering Dr. William E. May’s article here. He is the Michael J. McGivney Professor of Moral Theology at the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family at The Catholic University in Washington, D.C. He is also the author of a dozen books, and contributed to Why Humanae Vitae Was Right: A Reader, edited by Dr. Janet Smith. Dr. May served on the International Theological Commission from 1986 through 1997 and during those years worked closely with Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI.

What is the role of the Church as moral teacher, and what is the obligation on the part of the faithful (including the pope, bishops, theologians, and ordinary laypeople) to choose in accordance with the moral norms proposed by the Church’s teaching authority? Can dissent from such teaching be legitimate? To answer these questions Dr May considers:

The Teaching Authority In The Church;
The Ways In Which This Authority Is Exercised;
Whether Specific Moral Norms Have Been Taught Infallibly By The Church’s Teaching Authority;
The Kind Of Response Due To Moral Teachings That Have Not Been Proposed Infallibly;
The Question Of Dissent (Archbishop Pelosi)

In a Meet the Press interview on August 24, Archbishop Pelosi responded to a question from Tom Brokaw about when human life begins, saying “as an ardent, practicing Catholic, this is an issue that I have studied for a long time. And what I know is over the centuries, the doctors of the church have not been able to make that definition . . . St. Augustine said at three months. We don’t know. The point is, is that it shouldn’t have an impact on the woman’s right to choose.”

Cardinal Edward Egan of New York became the latest prelate to denounce Ms. Pelosi’s comments when he said on Tuesday, “Like many other citizens of this nation, I was shocked to learn that the Speaker of the House of Representatives of the United States of America would make the kind of statements that were made to Mr. Tom Brokaw of NBC-TV on Sunday, August 24, 2008.”

Not only was Cardinal Egan shocked, but he went on to say that, “What the Speaker had to say about theologians and their positions regarding abortion was not only misinformed; it was also, and especially, utterly incredible in this day and age.”

The crystal-clear photographs and films that give people the ability to see babies in their pregnant mothers’ wombs make it impossible for anyone with “the slightest measure of integrity or honor” to fail to know what these “marvelous beings manifestly, clearly, and obviously are, as they smile and wave into the world outside the womb,” Cardinal Egan asserted.

“In simplest terms, they are human beings with an inalienable right to live, a right that the Speaker of the House of Representatives is bound to defend at all costs for the most basic of ethical reasons. They are not parts of their mothers, and what they are depends not at all upon the opinions of theologians of any faith.”

The head of the Catholic Church in New York closed his statement by saying that anyone who defends abortion is not fit to be a leader in a civilized democracy. “Anyone who dares to defend that they may be legitimately killed because another human being ‘chooses’ to do so or for any other equally ridiculous reason should not be providing leadership in a civilized democracy worthy of the name.”

Ouch.

Teaching Authority (Magisterium) Within The Church
As scholars such as the late great Dominican theologian, Yves Cardinal Congar, have noted, the term magisterium has such a long history and during the Middle Ages it referred to the teaching authority proper to theologians, i.e., those who by study and diligence have achieved some understanding of the truths of the faith and their relationship to truths that can be known without the light of faith.

But today this term has a very precise meaning, one given it by the Church herself in her understanding of herself as the pillar and ground of truth (see Timothy 3:15) against which the gates of hell cannot prevail (Matthew 16:18; Galatians 1:8), and as the community to which Christ himself has entrusted his saving word and work. According to her own understanding of the term, the Church teaches that the magisterium is the authority to teach, in the name of Christ, the truths of Christian faith and life (morals) and all that is necessary and/or useful for the proclamation and defense of these truths (see Dei verbum, 8). This teaching authority is vested in the college of bishops under the headship of the chief bishop, the Roman Pontiff, the “concrete center of unity and head of the whole episcopate,” [2] the successor of the Apostle Peter (see Vatican Council II, Lumen Gentium, 22; Vatican Council I, DS 3065-3074).

This magisterium, moreover, demands assent to its teachings by the faithful in virtue of the divine authority vested in it and not simply in virtue of the contents of the message it teaches (Vatican Council I, DS 3020). It has authority in teaching all the faithful in keeping with the inner constitution of the Church itself (Lumen gentium, 23-24). Its teaching, moreover, is an exercise of its pastoral office, its munus (a term much richer in connotation than our English “office,” connoting a privileged honor and mission), to care for the “souls” of all the faithful, i.e., to safeguard the divine life within them.

The Different Ways In Which The Magisterium Is Exercised
At times the magisterium proposes matters of faith and morals infallibly, i.e., with the assurance that what is proposed is absolutely irreformable and a matter to be held definitively by the faithful. At other times the magisterium proposes matters of faith and morals authoritatively and as true, but not in such wise that the matter proposed is to be held definitively and absolutely. But still the matter proposed is to be held by the faithful and to be held as true. Note that the proper way to speak of teachings proposed in this way is to say that they are authoritatively taught; it is not proper to say that they are fallibly taught.

Infallibly Proposed Teachings
The magisterium can propose matters infallibly in two different ways.
First, a matter of faith or morals can be solemnly defined by an ecumenical council or by the Roman Pontiff when, “as the supreme shepherd and teacher of all the faithful, he . . . proclaims by a definitive act some doctrine of faith or morals” (Vatican I, DS 3074).
Secondly, and this is most important to recognize, the magisterium can propose matters of faith or morals infallibly in the ordinary, day-to-day exercise of its authority when specific conditions are fulfilled. These conditions are clearly stated in the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church of Vatican Council II (Lumen Gentium). In a centrally important passage of that document the Council Fathers declared:

Although the bishops individually do not enjoy the prerogative of infallibility, they nevertheless proclaim the teaching of Christ infallibly, even when they are dispersed throughout the world, provided that they remain in communion with each other and with the successor of Peter and that in authoritatively teaching on a matter of faith and morals they agree in one judgment as that to be held definitively (25).

This teaching of Vatican II on the infallible character of authoritative magisterial teaching in the day-to-day or ordinary exercise of its authority was by no means a novel teaching of Vatican II. It had been set forth in the 1917 Codex Iuris Canonici (c. 1323, #2), a canon repeated as canon 74, #2 in the new Codex Iuris Canonici promulgated in 1983, and drawn almost word for word from Vatican I’s solemn teaching on the same matter (cf. DS 3011). Canon 749, #2 in the new Codex reads as follows:
“The College of Bishops also possesses infallibility in its teaching . . . when the Bishops, dispersed throughout the world but maintaining the bond of union among themselves and with the successor of Peter, together with the same Roman Pontiff authentically (or authoritatively) teach matters of faith or morals, and are agreed that a particular teaching is definitively to be held.”

This key teaching of Lumen gentium makes it quite clear that the magisterium can (and does) propose teachings on moral matters when the conditions so clearly described are met.

Teachings Authoritatively But Not Infallibly Proposed
The magisterium, moreover, is an authoritative teacher of Catholic faith and morals when it exercises its teaching authority in a manner that is not clearly intended to be infallible. When the bishops teach on matters of faith and morals in their capacity as bishops, they “speak in the name of Christ and the faithful are to accept their teaching and adhere to it with a religious assent (obsequium religiosum) of soul. This religious submission of will and mind must be shown in a special way to the authentic teaching authority of the Roman Pontiff, even when he is not speaking ex cathedra. That is, it must be shown in such a way that his supreme teaching authority is acknowledged with reverence, the judgments made by him are sincerely adhered to, according to his manifest mind and will” (Lumen gentium).

Specific Moral Norms Cannot Be Taught Infallibly?
Every Catholic theologian acknowledges that certain very general moral norms are infallibly proposed (e.g., one ought to love God and one’s neighbor). But today a key claim made by a good number of Catholic theologians is that no specific moral norms have been infallibly taught; indeed, they claim that such specific moral norms (e.g., one ought never to commit adultery; one ought never intentionally to kill an innocent human being) cannot be taught infallibly.

Some theologians, for example, Charles E. Curran, appeal to the Code of Canon Law to support their claim. Thus Curran and several of his associates appealed in 1969 to paragraph 3 of canon 1323 of the old 1917 Code (in fact, they erroneously cited canon 1223, or perhaps this was a typographical error), which corresponds to paragraph 3 of canon 749 in the new 1983 Code. [4] This paragraph says that “No doctrine is to be understood to be infallibly defined unless this is manifestly demonstrated” (emphasis added). But appeal to this paragraph does not settle the matter. The paragraph to which Curran (and others) appeal is explicitly concerned with teachings infallibly defined; it is not concerned with teachings infallibly proposed by the ordinary, day-to-day exercise of the magisterium. Curran and others who deny that specific moral norms can be infallibly proposed never consider whether the conditions for teachings infallibly proposed in this way have been met. As we shall see, evidence supports the position that the core of Catholic moral teaching has been proposed in this way.

These theologians likewise contend that we come to know all specific moral norms inductively, by reflecting on shared human experiences in company with others. They then argue that, since “we can never exclude the possibility that future experience, hitherto unimagined, might put a moral problem into a new frame of reference which would call for a revision of a norm that, when formulated, could not have taken such experience into account,” norms of this kind cannot be universally true and hence cannot be fit subject matter of infallible teaching. Here I simply wish to point out that these theologians have not properly identified the way we come to know specific moral norms. As St. Thomas and the Catholic tradition hold, the truth of many specific moral norms, e.g., the precepts of the Decalogue, can be shown in the light of the primary principles of natural law.

A final reason advanced by these theologians to support their claim that specific moral norms are rooted in the “concrete” nature of human beings, not in their “transcendental” or “metaphysical” nature, and that man’s “concrete” nature is subject to radical change. This position, rooted in Rahnerian thought, ignores the fact that human nature cannot substantively change if men are to remain men and if Christ shared Adam’s and our human nature. It also ignores the truth that the goods perfective of human persons, the goods to which we are ordered by our natural inclinations, the goods at stake in moral choices, are the same for us as they were for Adam, goods such as life itself, living in harmony and fellowship with others, knowledge of the truth, etc.

On the other hand, many theologians today (and the whole body of theologians prior to Vatican Council II) recognize that the core of Catholic moral teaching, as set forth in the precepts of the Decalogue as these precepts have been and are understood within the Church itself, has been infallibly proposed by the ordinary, day-to-day exercise of the magisterium by bishops dispersed throughout the world yet in union with one another and with the Holy Father.

For this magisterium has proposed, as a matter definitively to be held, that it is always gravely immoral intentionally to kill the innocent, to commit adultery (or fornication or sodomy), etc. This was the understanding of the Church Fathers, of medieval theologians such as Thomas Aquinas, etc. It was the firm teaching of the Catechism of the Council of Trent, and it was commonly taught by all theologians prior to Vatican II, as attested to in a remarkable text of Karl Rahner in his book Nature and Grace, published in English in 1963. Although he never formally repudiated what he had said in that book, Rahner subsequently claimed that the magisterium cannot infallibly teach specific moral norms insofar as they are concerned with man’s concrete human nature. But, as we have seen, this view cannot be sustained. What caused Rahner to change his mind, apparently, was Humanae Vitae; for nothing in the text of the documents of Vatican II can be used to support this view.

Moreover, and this is very important, Pope John Paul II in Evangelium Vitae explicitly referred to the key passage in Lumen Gentium, 25, identifying the conditions under which the ordinary, day-to-day exercise of the magisterium can propose truths infallibly. He did so in affirming as solemnly as he could without making an ex cathedra pronouncement the truth of the Church’s teaching on

a. the absolute inviolability of innocent human life from intentional attack (Evangelium Vitae, 57),
b. the intrinsically evil character of intentional abortion (Ibid., 62) and
c. the intrinsically evil character of all forms of euthanasia or mercy killing (Ibid., 65).

The Response Due Moral Teachings Authoritatively But Not Infallibly Proposed
I have argued that the central core of Catholic moral teaching has been infallibly proposed by the ordinary magisterium. Even if one were to disagree with this argument (which I believe is sound), one must acknowledge that the magisterium does teach with a more than merely human authority on moral questions. Moreover, it proposes moral norms not as legalistic rules but as truths of Christian life. Moral teachings authoritatively but not infallibly proposed as true are binding upon the consciences of the faithful, including pope, bishops, theologians, and ordinary laypeople. All the faithful are to give these teachings a religious submission (obsequium religiosum) of will and mind. Teachings authoritatively proposed are proposed as true, not as opinions or “prudential guidelines.”

Still, such teachings are not infallibly proposed; they are not proposed as “definitively to be held.” This raises the question of the nature of the “religious submission” of will and mind and the question of dissent. Precisely what does this entail?

The Nature Of The “Obsequium Religiosum” And The Question Of Dissent
It is interesting to note that the term “dissent” did not appear in theological literature prior to the end of Vatican Council II. The “approved” manuals to which the three bishops, who wanted Lumen gentium 25 to say something about the nature of the obsequium religiosum required for teaching authoritatively but not infallibly proposed, were referred did not speak of legitimate theological dissent from such teaching. [8] Rather, they recognized that a theologian (or other well-informed Catholic) might not in conscience be able to give internal assent to some teachings. They thus spoke of “withholding assent” and raising questions, but this is a far cry from “dissent.”

The Instruction on the Ecclesial Vocation of the Theologian issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has addressed this matter. It recognized that theologians (and others) might question not only the form but even the substantive content of some authoritatively proposed magisterial teachings. It held that it is permissible in such instances to withhold assent, to raise questions (and present them to the magisterium), to discuss the issues with other theologians (and be humble enough to accept criticism of one’s own views by them). Theologians (and others) can propose their views as hypotheses to be considered and tested by other theologians and ultimately to be judged by those who have, within the Church, the solemn obligation of settling disputes and speaking the mind of Christ.

But it taught one is not giving a true obsequium religiosum if one dissents from magisterial teaching and proposes one’s own position as a position that the faithful are at liberty to follow, substituting it for the teaching of the magisterium. But this is precisely what has been occurring. Dissent of this kind is not compatible with the obsequium religiosum. In fact, those who dissent in this way really usurp the teaching office of bishops and popes. Theologians, insofar as they are theologians, are not pastors in the Church. When they instruct the faithful that the teachings of those who are pastors in the Church (the pope and bishops) are false and that the faithful can put those teachings aside and put in their place their own theological opinions, they are harming the Church and arrogantly assuming for themselves the pastoral role of pope and bishops. See my Archibishop Pelosi example above…

Dissent, understood in this sense, is thus completely incompatible with the obsequium religiosum required for teachings authoritatively but not infallibly proposed.

Posted in The State of the Catholic Church | Tagged obsequium religiosum, the Magisterium | 1 Comment »

Reading Selections from The Persistence of the Catholic Moment by Fr. Richard John Neuhaus

November 3, 2010

A familiar pose

The Persistence of the Catholic Moment by Richard John Neuhaus was originally printed in the February 2003 issue of First Things. It came to me as I was preparing it as a reading selection for Paying Attention To The Sky, that this article encapsulates much of what Fr. Neuhaus’ public ministry was. One of my problems as a Catholic convert has been to figure out the lay of the land in the politics of the Catholic Church. I can’t imagine a better summation of that than what is written here.

Being an ecclesial Christian seemed to be part of what being Catholic was but more of my fellow Catholics seemed to define themselves in ways I could not fathom. On the one side was Church teaching and on the other was a group who adamantly seemed to say “No, no, that’s not what it means…” I had to learn to take care navigating the scholarship and personal opinions of people like Luke Timothy Johnson or Garry Wills.

This article is eight years old but I wish I had had it four years ago when my journey to become Catholic began.

The Catholic Moment
In 1987, while I was still a Lutheran, I published a book titled The Catholic Moment: The Paradox of the Church in the Postmodern World. There I argued that the Catholic Church is the leading and indispensable community in advancing the Christian movement in world history. In evangelization, in furthering the Christian intellectual tradition, in the quest for Christian unity, in advocating the culture of life, and in every other aspect of the Christian mission, this was, I contended, the Catholic Moment. I am frequently asked whether I still believe that, or whether the Moment has been missed, or derailed, or simply delayed. The short answer is: If the Catholic Church is what she claims to be — and about that I have no doubt — then every moment from Pentecost to Our Lord’s return in glory is the Catholic Moment. But the degree to which that Moment is realized in the little span of time that is ours depends on whether contemporary Catholicism has the nerve to be fully and distinctively Catholic.

Being Catholic
To be Catholic is not a private preference but a matter of ordering one’s loves and loyalties to the very public communal reality that is the Catholic Church. For others, religion may be what a person does with his solitude, or what people do together with their solitudes, but Catholicism is a corporate reality. It is what Catholics used to call a “perfect society” within the imperfect societies of the world, or what Vatican II, with essentially the same intention, calls the People of God. It understands itself to be an apostolically constituted community, and its distinguishing mark is communion with the Bishop of Rome who, alone of religious leaders in the world — and this is a matter of the greatest symbolic and practical significance — is not a citizen or subject of any temporal sovereignty.

Catholicism In The Public Square
It is suggested by some that the public influence of Catholicism has been greatly weakened, not least by the scandals of the past year. The question of Catholicism in the public square, however, is not — at least not chiefly — the question of Catholic influence in social change or public policy, never mind electoral politics. Catholicism in the public square is a matter of being, fully and vibrantly, the public community that is the Catholic Church. More than by recent scandals, Catholicism in the public square is weakened by its gradual but certain sociological accommodation to a Protestant ethos — also in its secularized forms — that construes religion in terms of consumer preference and voluntary associations in support of those preferences. It is weakened also by what is aptly called the totalitarian impulse of the modern state — including democratic states — to monopolize public space and consign religion to the private sphere, thus producing what I have called the naked public square.

The second dynamic is evident on several fronts, and is now at crisis level in Catholic education, especially higher education, and in health care. At issue is the freedom of the Church to govern herself. It is not enough that there be a flourishing network of voluntary associations called Catholic parishes confined to doing religious things on Sunday morning and other appointed times. That is not what the Second Vatican Council meant by the apostolically constituted public society called the People of God. The great Catholic battle of the modern era has been for libertas ecclesiae – the liberty of the Church to govern herself. In America today, for reasons both internal and external to the life of the Church, that battle is being lost on some fronts.

Catholicism Is Flourishing
In many ways, Catholicism in America is flourishing. It is far and away the fastest growing religious community in the country, with almost 200,000 adult converts per year, and patterns of immigration and youthful adherence that will likely expand its numbers far beyond the present sixty-three million. Contrary to the fears of some, and the hopes of others, there is no evidence that the events of the past year will impede this growth. In this country and worldwide, the two most vibrant and growing sectors of the two billion-plus Christian movement are Catholicism and evangelical/pentecostal Protestantism. John Paul II speaks of the new millennium as a “springtime of evangelization,” and there is reason to believe that is much more than wishful thinking.

In this country and elsewhere, we witness the beginnings of historic convergences between Catholics and evangelicals. Such cultural and moral convergences are not without political consequences, but more important are the spiritual and theological convergences that could reshape the Christian reality in the century ahead. (In this connection, I warmly recommend a careful reading of Philip Jenkins’ recent book, The Next Christendom.) So Catholicism is flourishing. The question is, with specific reference to America, how and in what ways will Catholicism be vibrantly, or even recognizably, Catholic?

Liberal Catholicism
Three years ago, marking the seventy-fifth anniversary of Commonweal magazine, its former editor Peter Steinfels wrote an article that is, I believe, both wise and courageous, “Reinventing Liberal Catholicism: Between Powerful Enemies and Dubious Allies.” Since the dawn of modernity, said Steinfels, liberal Catholicism has been marked by several characteristics: a devotion to libertas ecclesiae; an eagerness to critically engage the culture; an understanding that the Church is in history and therefore necessarily involved in change and development; a devotion to unfettered intellectual inquiry; a recognition of the integrity and autonomy of distinct spheres of human activity; and an interest in reforming the structures of the Church in support of her apostolic mission through time. Heroes of this liberal Catholicism, according to Steinfels, are such as John Henry Newman and Jacques Maritain. If this depiction of liberal Catholicism is accurate, we should all want to call ourselves liberal Catholics. Which is another way of saying that, although Mr. Steinfels and others may have problems with this, we should be John Paul II Catholics.

Liberal Catholics, says Steinfels, have been riding high since the Council; they have largely defined what is meant by the post-Vatican II Church. But now they are facing the “powerful enemies” mentioned in his subtitle, and, in this pontificate, liberal Catholics are viewed as suspect by Rome. “The most obvious and fundamental working difference between these [enemy] groups and liberal Catholics,” he writes, “turns on the possibility that the pope, despite the guidance of the Holy Spirit, might be subject to tragic error. Liberal Catholics believe that this possibility, which all Catholics recognize as historical fact, did not conveniently disappear at some point in the distant past, like 1950, but was probably the case in the 1968 issuance of Humanae Vitae and cannot be ruled out in the refusal of ordination to women.”

To which this liberal Catholic (as defined above) responds that of course this pope can and has made mistakes. But what is now called liberal Catholicism is besieged and suspect because of its refusal to honestly receive the teachings of Vatican II as authoritatively interpreted by the Magisterium, and not least by the pontificate of John Paul II. Liberal Catholics joined with what Steinfels calls their “dubious allies” on the left in claiming that Vatican II called for a revolution, and they acted accordingly. It is now obvious that it was a revolution that was not to be.

Vatican II And The Catholic Left
The now failing revolution predictably provoked reactions of retrenchment, resulting in the toxic discontents of both right and left in American Catholicism. What has not been received, what has not been embraced, what has not been internalized, what has not been tried is the bold proposal of renewal and reform advanced by John Paul II. Although the future of the proposal is uncertain, those bishops who have in recent months been calling for a plenary council in the United States to solemnly receive the Second Vatican Council and its authoritative interpretation are, it seems to me, exactly right. The way forward is the way of the Council that was and is. Thirty-seven years is enough, and more than enough, of bitter contention over the imagined Vatican II of leftist enthusiasms and rightist fears.

For decades, the Catholic left has called for a Vatican Council III to “complete” the work of Vatican II. Others on the left, such as Garry Wills, dissent from that call, claiming that Vatican II put the teaching Magisterium out of business once and for all, “diffusing” ecclesial authority throughout the Spirit-guided private opinions of the People of God. This move is implausibly presented as what is meant by the sensus fidelium.

The burden of Steinfels’ argument is that liberal Catholicism made a great mistake since the Council in not distinguishing itself and, when necessary, separating itself, from its “dubious allies” of the Catholic left. Turning from its intellectual and theological tasks, liberalism got bogged down in the canonical litany of leftist complaints about contraception, homosexuality, women’s ordination, and clerical celibacy, along with endless agitations aimed at “power sharing” in church government — and all of these linked to the larger question of papal teaching authority. Moreover, sectors of the Catholic left became increasingly part of a political and cultural left that is increasingly secularist and post-Christian, and even explicitly anti-Christian. Liberal Catholics, says Steinfels, should have made it clear that, in very important respects, these dubious allies of the Catholic left were not allies at all.

The association with the Catholic left created, he wrote, a crisis of irony, a crisis of intellect, and a crisis of inclusiveness. The absence of irony and historical perspective led to fanaticism and a sectarian spirit. The refusal to make serious arguments nurtured anti-intellectualism and an emphasis on an ever-expanding inclusiveness which emphatically excluded those not of like mind and resulted in a loss of Catholic identity. The Catholic left, he says, has no patience with liberalism’s devotion to “compromise, incrementalism, or extended analysis and debate.” “The Catholic left,” he writes, “is an offspring of liberal Catholicism, but is rooted in the dramatic appeals and confrontations of the 1960s” rather than the liberal, and mainly European, tradition of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But so smugly triumphalistic were liberals following the Council, while at the same time — and somewhat contradictorily — so fearful of their powerful enemies on the right, that few were, and few are, prepared to challenge the dubious alliance with the Catholic left. The old maxim applied: the enemy of my enemies . . .

Steinfels point about Catholic identity is of particular importance. One has waited for a long time for a persuasive answer to the question of why, if the canonical litany of left-liberal demands were met, Catholicism would not be very much like old-line liberal Protestantism. Perhaps like the Episcopal Church, except very much bigger and with shabbier liturgical practices. The Catholic left has little interest in, or capacity for, addressing the question of what makes Catholicism distinctively Catholic, and liberal Catholics have not called them to account on that score. With respect to Catholic identity, Steinfels writes, the attitude on the left takes the form of the question, “Isn’t [the question of what is authentically Catholic], after all, a task we can leave to church authorities, whom we will then feel free to criticize?”

Cradle Catholics And Ecclesiastical Fundamentalism
There is among cradle Catholics of a left-liberal bent — and perhaps this is more evident to those who come into the Church later in life — an astonishing insouciance about the solidity and perdurance of Catholicism. Catholic identity, what makes Catholicism Catholic, is a question that will take care of itself or is somebody else’s worry. It is not our job, they seem to be saying, to maintain the ecclesiastical playground in which we pursue our deconstructive games. This apparent insouciance may be a form of unshakable faith in the promise that the gates of hell shall not prevail. But I think not.

Rather, it seems to me, this insouciance — or to call it by another name, this recklessness — reflects an ecclesiastical fundamentalism that is akin to the Bible fundamentalism of some other Christians. It is indifferent to the incarnational reality of a Church subject to the trials, testings, distortions, inspirations, and mistakes of history. I do believe that the gates of hell shall not prevail against the Church, but the ravages of the reckless confidence that no serious harm is done by unbounded criticism, conflict, and contradiction should not be ignored. There is the harm of souls misled — and possibly lost — of intellectual and artistic traditions trashed, and of innumerable persons denied the high adventure of Catholic fidelity.

Jacques Maritain’s The Peasant of the Garonne
I recently had occasion to reread Jacques Maritain’s The Peasant of the Garonne, a book written in the months immediately following the conclusion of Vatican II in December 1965. Critics at the time called it a cranky book of disillusioned hopes, and there is truth in that; but it is also a stunningly prescient book that recognized what might be termed the hijacking of liberal Catholicism and its long-term consequences. As a liberal, Maritain had no illusions about what came to be called “the pre-Vatican II church.” He knows about the anti-intellectualism, the suspicion of scholarship and science, and the stifling juridicalism of disciplinary measures. “All this,” he writes, “was going to build up, in the unconscious of a great many Christians, clerics and laymen, an enormous weight of frustration, disillusionment, repressed doubts, resentment, bitterness, healthy desires sacrificed, with all the anxieties and pent-up aspirations of the unhappy conscience.

Comes the aggiornamento. Why be astonished that at the very announcement of a Council, then in the surrounding of it, and now after it, the enormous unconscious weight which I have just mentioned burst into the open in a kind of explosion that does no honor to the human intelligence?” The explosive reaction to the earlier repression, says Maritain, resulted in interpretations of the Council marked by a “kneeling to the world.” He leaves no doubt that he believes these interpretations are, in fact, misinterpretations — sometimes innocent, sometimes deliberate. As for the Council itself, it “appears as an island guarded by the Spirit of God in the middle of a stormy ocean that is overturning everything, the true and the false.”

Humanae Vitae
The storm and its aftermath were powerfully evident a few years later in events surrounding Humanae Vitae, the 1968 encyclical on human sexuality. That moment marks, among other things, the point at which bishops largely — albeit in most cases inadvertently — surrendered their role as teachers. An orchestrated campaign of theologians and other academics publicly rejected a solemn magisterial pronouncement on faith and morals, and the world held its breath to see what would happen. A few bishops tried to impose discipline, but they were not supported by Rome, and the result was that nothing happened. Except that it was now established in the minds of many that the Church pretends to teach with authority, but bishops, theologians, priests, and the faithful are free to ignore what is taught.

Humanae Vitae, it is important to underscore, does not stand alone. The teaching that the conjugal act of love should be open to new life and not be negated by contraceptive means is deeply rooted in centuries of tradition. Humanae Vitae reaffirmed that tradition, as did Pius XI when it was first thrown into question in 1930, and as has every pontificate since then. There is, I would suggest, no new argument that has not been addressed in papal teaching. It is true but entirely beside the point that most Catholics do not adhere to the teaching; most Catholics have never had the teaching explained to them in a manner that invites their assent. It is simply not plausible that liberal Catholics such as Newman and Maritain would not affirm that this teaching of the Church is binding upon the Catholic conscience.

Obedience
Critiques of liberal Catholicism — where it went wrong and how it might be set right — such as that offered by Peter Steinfels are to be warmly welcomed. The concern for Catholic identity is on the mark, but I suggest that no identity is recognizably Catholic if it skirts the question of obedience. Here, too, we need the intellectual honesty and civil discussion for which Steinfels calls.

We need to revive what Newman called the “grammar of assent” in recognizing that, on controverted questions such as artificial contraception and the Church’s inability to ordain women, the Church calls for the obedience of external and internal assent. I know that intellectual obedience is a scandalous idea in our time. And not only in our time, for it has been a stumbling block to many over the centuries. What is sometimes called “ecclesial faith,” as distinct from “divine faith” or “religious submission,” is an inseparable part of what it means to be Catholic, of what it means for our loves and allegiances to be rightly ordered. Contrary to modern doctrines of autonomy, there is nothing demeaning about obedience. The word is from the Latin ob-audire and means “to give ear to, to listen to, to follow guidance.”

The Relationship Between Freedom And Faith
Accepting full intellectual and moral responsibility for his decision, the Catholic decides who to listen to, who to follow, and, come the crunch, to whom to submit. The Catholic believes that, in the apostolically constituted community of faith, the Bishop of Rome is Peter among us. The Catholic believes that the words of Jesus, “He who hears you hears me,” have abiding historical applicability until the end of time. The bishops teaching “with and under” Peter can teach infallibly. Infallibility means that the fullness of apostolic authority will never be invoked to require us to believe anything that is false. The relationship between freedom and faith is set forth in Vatican IIs Constitution on the Church in the Modern World:

It is only in freedom, however, that human beings can turn to what is good, and our contemporaries are right in highly praising and assiduously pursuing such freedom, although often they do so in wrong ways as if it gave a license to do anything one pleases, even evil. Genuine freedom is an outstanding sign of the divine image in human beings. . . . Human dignity demands that the individual act according to a knowing and free choice, as motivated and prompted personally from within, and not through blind internal impulse or merely external pressure.

I may not understand an authoritative teaching of the Magisterium, I may have difficulties with a teaching, but, as Newman understood, a thousand difficulties do not add up to a doubt, never mind a rejection. I may think a teaching is inadequately expressed, and pray and work for its more adequate expression in the future. But, given a decision between what I think the Church should teach and what the Church in fact does teach, I decide for the Church. I decide freely and rationally — because God has promised the apostolic leadership of the Church guidance and charisms that He has not promised me; because I think the Magisterium just may understand some things that I don’t; because I know for sure that, in the larger picture of history, the witness of the Catholic Church is immeasurably more important than anything I might think or say. In short, I obey. The nuances of such obedience, of what is meant by “thinking with the Church” (sentire cum ecclesia), are admirably spelled out in the 1990 instruction of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, “The Ecclesial Vocation of the Theologian.” It is an instruction that can be read with enormous benefit also by those who are not professional theologians. My point is this: Liberal Catholicism cannot be reinvented, it cannot be rehabilitated, it will not be vibrantly Catholic, until it candidly and convincingly comes to terms with obedience.

Freedom And Truth
The great question, a question that has ramifications that go far beyond assent to Catholic teaching, is the relationship between freedom and obedience — or, more precisely, between freedom and truth. The question includes ecclesial obedience to the truth, as Catholics believe the truth is made known. We are bound by the truth, and when we are bound by the truth, we are bound to be free. The relationship between truth and freedom is as true for non-Catholics or, indeed, for non-Christians as it is true for Catholics, as is magnificently argued by John Paul II in Veritatis Splendor (The Splendor of Truth).

What went wrong with aspects of liberal Catholicism has its roots in what went wrong long before the 1960s. What went wrong was the submission to an Enlightenment or rationalist tradition — found also in a romanticism that too often mirrored what it intended to counter — of the autonomous self. Still today there is a liberal Catholic reflex, shared by secular liberalism, against the very ideas of authority, obedience, and the truth that binds. The Catholic insight about human freedom, an insight that we dare to say has universal applicability, is that we are bound to be free. The truth, in order to be understood, must be loved, and love binds. And so also with the apostolic community that embodies and articulates the truth.

Coming to terms with the question of obedience means coming to terms with the one who said, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” The modern regime of secular liberalism adopted the slogan “The truth will make you free,” but pitted it against the one who is the truth. More radically, it pitted truth and freedom against any authoritative statement of truth, and against authority itself. The liberal ideal was that of the autonomous, untethered, unencumbered self. The consequence of that impossible ideal is conformism to the delusion of autonomy or, as the history of the last century so tragically demonstrates, blind submission to totalitarian doctrines that present themselves as surrogates for the truth that makes us free.

The “Dubious Ally”
The “dubious ally” that has done in liberal Catholicism again and again is the conceptual regime of secular liberalism, and its misconstrual of the connection between freedom and truth. The result is liberal Catholics who insist that they belong — “Once a Catholic, always a Catholic” – but it is a belonging without being bound. Let it be admitted that this is true of all of us — in different ways, and to a greater or lesser extent. There is perhaps no greater obstacle to our entering upon the high adventure of Catholic fidelity than modernity’s perverse idea of freedom, an idea that we breathe with the cultural air that surrounds us. And there is important truth in the maxim “Once a Catholic, always a Catholic.” The baptism by which we are indelibly marked is an abiding bond, and a magnetic force drawing us always toward the completeness of the conversion to which we are called. That conversion is perfected in obedience to the truth that freedom is discovered in obedience to the truth. For the Catholic, such obedience can in no way be separated from the community that St. Paul describes as “the household of God, which is the Church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth” (1 Timothy 3:15).

Will Catholicism Be Catholic?
And so I end where I began. The question is whether Catholicism will be Catholic. The historical and sociological dynamics to which I alluded earlier have led to a serious unraveling, an unraveling gleefully celebrated and encouraged by the Catholic left. Liberal Catholicism, rightly understood, is an honorable tradition and could today be a source of renewal, but that depends upon its capacity and readiness to receive the invitation — an invitation so powerfully and persistently issued by this pontificate — to enter upon the high adventure of fidelity to the truth.

At the end of his aforementioned essay, Peter Steinfels lists five developments the Church must address in the new millennium: human sexuality, technological control over genes and minds, relations among world religions, changes in historical consciousness and cultural pluralism, and the meaning of individual freedom and democracy. Through encyclicals and other teaching documents, John Paul II has for twenty-four years, in obedience to the spirit and the letter of Vatican II, addressed each of those questions comprehensively, repeatedly, with formidable intelligence and persuasive force. But, with notable exceptions, his witness has not been received. Not by bishops, not by priests, not by catechists, not by traditionalists who think Vatican II was a mistake, and not by liberal Catholics who incessantly pit Vatican II against the living Magisterium of the Church.

We very much need bishops who are teachers of the fullness of the faith. Perhaps God has given us the bishops we have in order to test our faith, but we know that the purpose of the episcopal office is not limited to providing spiritual trials, as salutary as spiritual trials may be. Above all, and this applies to all, we need a conversion to ob-audire — to responsive listening, to lively engagement, to trustful following, to the form of reflective faith that is obedience. The word went forth from the Second Vatican Council, and I believe in the promise of Isaiah 55 that “the word shall not return void.”

After more than three decades of confusion, contention, and conflicts that have long since become a bore to serious people, we are perhaps on the edge of genuinely receiving the Council and the living Magisterium of which the Council is part; the living Magisterium apart from which there would be no Council, apart from which the Council cannot be rightly understood. If so, the Catholicism that is flourishing now and will likely flourish in the future will be believably and vibrantly Catholic. If so, the consequences for the Christian movement in world history are inestimable. I believe this could happen. In fact, were I writing a book about this promise and possibility, I might very well borrow a title from myself and call it The Catholic Moment.

Posted in Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, The State of the Catholic Church | Tagged Being Catholic, Catholicism In The Public Square, Cradle Catholics, Ecclesiastical Fundamentalism, Freedom And Faith, Freedom And Truth, Humanae Vitae, liberal Catholicism, Obedience, the Catholic left | 5 Comments »

Homosexualist Ideologue Andrew Sullivan Slanders Pope Benedict XVI

October 13, 2010

Andrew Sullivan, Atlantic Monthly Senior Editor, Homosexualist Ideologue

Two nights ago on Charlie Rose Homosexualist ideologue Andrew Sullivan “reflected” on his faith and the Church:

ANDREW SULLIVAN: “I’m a Catholic. But I am also — my estrangement from the institution I love and brought up into is deeper than ever before.”

CHARLIE ROSE: Is that because of what?

ANDREW SULLIVAN: “Partly it’s because of the way they have responded to the homosexual question, obviously. But also the revelation that they essentially — and this is a huge revelation — this moral institution aided and abetted and committed the rape and abuse of countless thousands of innocent children.

Now, if any institution did that it would be beyond belief. But that the church, the representative of Jesus, would be doing that, has done that and hidden it and defended it, and no one has really taken responsibility. If this were a secular institution, my friend Christopher Hitchens is correct, the police would have gone in and closed it down by now.

And I think I’m not the only Catholic to feel they have lost any moral authority in the way they’ve conducted themselves. And I’m still completely befuddled at how on earth they could have thought or behaved this way, including the current Pope. How do you — Charlie, how do you know that someone has abused a child and reassign him to another parish where he goes on to abuse others? That’s what this Pope did personally in Munich. I mean, I don’t know how you do that. I just don’t know how you do that.

So here I am struggling to kind of find a way to — I have stopped going to mass because the anger and the frustration overwhelms me, and those are things I don’t want to feel when I’m there. But that’s forced me, like a lot of other people, to develop my faith for myself in prayer, meditation, exploring the historical scholarship behind the scriptures, thinking about science, Darwin, and what that means for things like natural law, engaging in a dialogue in my own head with the church I wish existed.

But, look, church is also a human institution and it’s always been full of humans. So it will last. The truth will in the end come out, but I think that’s what happened to my and a lot of other people’s faiths. And they haven’t gone away, but we are — we are strangers in our own homes.”

Where to begin…. How ‘bout with the slander against the Pope: “That’s what this Pope did personally in Munich.” (Knowing that someone has abused a child and reassigned him to another parish where he goes on to abuse others.) As others have written: “This is a reference to a Bavarian case, Cardinal Ratzinger’s alleged “misconduct” where his 1980 approval of a transfer of an accused priest to the Munich Archdiocese so the priest could be given psychiatric treatment. As though psychiatric treatment were wrong? We may have learned that it has not proven effective for the treatment of pedophilia, but that was an empirical lesson still to be learned 30 years ago. Hindsight may be 20-20, but we live our lives and make our decisions in the quiddity of the present.” Here is a complete narrative of the Munich situation as reported by the Catholic press:

“The second major charge brought against the Pope involves Fr. Peter Hullerman from the German Diocese of Essen, who was accused of abusing boys in 1979. According to Christopher Hitchens, however, the “cleric was transferred from Essen to Munich for ‘therapy’ by a decision of then-Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger, and assurances were given that he would no longer have children in his care.” Tragically, Father Hullerman was later returned to the ministry and continued to abuse boys.

Debate has swirled over whether Archbishop Ratzinger knew that Father Hullerman was to be reassigned to pastoral work. “It is certain that Archbishop Ratzinger knew that Hullerman had sexually assaulted children in Essen and that he was living in Church premises while undergoing therapy in Munich,” writes Sean Murphy on the Catholic Education Resource Center website. “This would not have been out of order, since, at the time, it was believed that therapy could be effective in curing sex offenders.”

But it was the Vicar-General of the Munich Archdiocese, Mgr. Gerhard Gruber, and not Cardinal Ratzinger, who permitted Father Hullerman to return to pastoral work. Mgr. Gerhard Gruber has stated that the pope was not aware of his decision.

The Vatican has confirmed this statement, saying that “the then archbishop [Ratzinger] had no knowledge of the decision to reassign Father H[ullerman] to pastoral activities in a parish. The then vicar general, Msgr. Gerhard Gruber, has assumed full responsibility for his own erroneous decision to reassign Father H[ullerman] to pastoral activity.”

Some have argued that Archbishop Ratzinger must have been informed of the decision because he was close-copied on a memo informing him of the decision. Mgr. Gruber, however, has said that because the diocese was so large at the time, having many hundreds of priests and thousands of religious, Archbishop Ratzinger left many decisions to lower-level officials; there is no clear evidence to show he would have read the memo. “The cardinal could not deal with everything,” Mgr. Gruber said.”

What is truly malevolent about Sullivan’s slander here is how it is couched in terms of his “overwhelming anger and frustration,” “his estrangement from the institution he loves.” The real truth is that this committed Homosexualist is driven to discredit the Church by smearing its record on dealing with the abuse crisis so as to question the Church’s moral authority. Yes the Church is responsible for grievous faults. But look at the real crisis and the Church’s 2009 annual audit. Get a grip.

Just to remind those who may question this record, I offer you George Weigel’s vigorous defense along with a reasoned response of the Church’s responsibility:

“The sexual and physical abuse of children and young people is a global plague; its manifestations run the gamut from fondling by teachers to rape by uncles to kidnapping-and-sex-trafficking. In the United States alone, there are reportedly some 39 million victims of childhood sexual abuse. Forty to sixty percent were abused by family members, including stepfathers and live-in boyfriends of a child’s mother — thus suggesting that abused children are the principal victims of the sexual revolution, the breakdown of marriage, and the hook-up culture.

Hofstra University professor Charol Shakeshaft reports that 6-10 percent of public school students have been molested in recent years—some 290,000 between 1991 and 2000. According to other recent studies, 2 percent of sex abuse offenders were Catholic priests—a phenomenon that spiked between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s but seems to have virtually disappeared (six credible cases of clerical sexual abuse in 2009 were reported in the U.S. bishops’ annual audit, in a Church of some 65,000,000 members).

Yet in a pattern exemplifying the dog’s behavior in Proverbs 26:11, the sexual abuse story in the global media is almost entirely a Catholic story, in which the Catholic Church is portrayed as the epicenter of the sexual abuse of the young, with hints of an ecclesiastical criminal conspiracy involving sexual predators whose predations continue today.

That the vast majority of the abuse cases in the United States took place decades ago is of no consequence to this story line. For the narrative that has been constructed is often less about the protection of the young (for whom the Catholic Church is, by empirical measure, the safest environment for young people in America today) than it is about taking the Church down — and, eventually, out, both financially and as a credible voice in the public debate over public policy. For if the Church is a global criminal conspiracy of sexual abusers and their protectors, then the Catholic Church has no claim to a place at the table of public moral argument. [This is Sullivan’s endgame enabled by a powerful media lobby: Charlie Rose, PBS, NYTimes, BBC, among others]

The Church itself is in some measure responsible for this. Reprehensible patterns of clerical sexual abuse and misgovernance by the Church’s bishops came to glaring light in the U.S. in 2002; worse patterns of corruption have been recently revealed in Ireland. Clericalism, cowardice, fideism about psychotherapy’s ability to “fix” sexual predators — all played their roles in the recycling of abusers into ministry and in the failure of bishops to come to grips with a massive breakdown of conviction and discipline in the post-Vatican II years.

For the Church’s sexual abuse crisis has always been that: a crisis of fidelity. Priests who live the noble promises of their ordination are not sexual abusers; bishops who take their custody of the Lord’s flock seriously, protect the young and recognize that a man’s acts can so disfigure his priesthood that he must be removed from public ministry or from the clerical state.

That the Catholic Church was slow to recognize the scandal of sexual abuse within the household of faith, and the failures of governance that led to the scandal being horribly mishandled, has been frankly admitted — by the bishops of the United States in 2002, and by Pope Benedict XVI in his recent letter to the Catholic Church in Ireland. In recent years, though, no other similarly situated institution has been so transparent about its failures, and none has done as much to clean house. It took too long to get there, to be sure; but we are there.

These facts have not sunk in, however, for either the attentive public or the mass public. They do not fit the conventional story line. Moreover, they impede the advance of the larger agenda that some are clearly pursuing in these controversies. For the crisis of sexual abuse and episcopal malfeasance has been seized upon by the Church’s enemies to cripple it, morally and financially, and to cripple its leaders. That was the subtext in Boston in 2002 (where the effort was aided by Catholics who want to turn Catholicism into high-church Congregationalism, preferably with themselves in charge).

And that is what has happened in recent weeks, as a global media attack has swirled around Pope Benedict XVI, following the revelation of odious abuse cases throughout Europe. In his native Germany, Der Spiegel has called for the pope’s resignation; similar cries for papal blood have been raised in Ireland, a once-Catholic country now home to the most aggressively secularist press in Europe.”

Andrew Sullivan is a scoundrel who is aided and abetted by a left-wing media conspiracy that is out to cripple the Church and its leaders. For the Times, this is nothing new. It has been on yellow journalism witch hunt against the Church for years now.

Examples of New York Times yellow journalism:

New York Times Caught in Abortion-Promoting Whopper – Infanticide Portrayed as Abortion

New York Times Bias Exposed Again as Company Caught in Donation to Planned Parenthood

New York Times Totally Ignores Pro-Life March of 300,000

BBC, NY Times and Guardian Appear to Have Stage-Managed Muslim Anti-Pope Hatred

My comments on NY Times malfeasance here.

Posted in Homosexualism, The State of the Catholic Church | Tagged Andrew Sullivan, Cardinal Ratzinger's alleged "misconduct", George Weigel, Homosexualism | 5 Comments »

The Teachings Of The Church, The Teachings Of The Bible

August 3, 2010

It’s amazing how reading one thing answers a question to another or gives an interpretation to a third. I spend some of my time on religious forums and from time to time run across atheists whom I engage in dialogue. You get used to the things they say and I have spent not a small amount of time on these pages digging up answers to their questions (accusations).

A familiar charge I run across is the Jesus-against-Christianity game, as Bottum refers to it. To whit (he explains): Critical scholars often explain the overlay of Christological affirmations in the gospel by recourse to a theory that, to a great extent, St. Paul theologized Jesus, and, under his influence, there emerged the doctrinally rigid faith of the Church.

R.R. Reno has explained the rationale for theological exegesis by way of this syllogism:

The true Church of Christ teaches the gospel.
The Bible is the sacred and canonical witness to the gospel.
Therefore, the teachings of the Church accord with the teachings of the Bible.

The above would appear to be simple and straight forward, were the teachings of the Church to accord so easily with the teachings of the Bible. But recall the Catholic doctrines of the Immaculate Conception and the bodily Assumption of Mary to see the problems that occur between doctrine and scripture. “Difficulties stimulate the mind,” as Reno puts it, and the assumption that Scripture and doctrine teach a single, unified truth is simply one of the challenges of being a thinking Christian. Needless to say, atheists enjoy exploiting some of these difficulties to form a rationale for undermining of faith by establishing the general unreliability of the gospels.

Theological exegesis is a legitimate activity and a perfect example of it can be seen in the early Church Fathers seeking to explain The Easter Faith and Its Meaning in History, the post that precedes this one.

Joseph Bottum, the editor of First Things, was reviewing a particularly nasty book by the man who poses as an anti–C.S. Lewis, Philip Pullman. I had never heard of the fellow but it appears he is the author of the Dark Materials Trilogy, a set of children’s books written between 1995 and 2000 with the express purpose of undoing Christianity for the young, and to refute what he called, in Lewis’ Narnia books, “one of the most vile moments in the whole of children’s literature.” Let me take up Bottum’s review here:

Then, in 2004, Pullman ran across the archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who observed that Pullman’s children’s books may be a reasonable attack on religious abuses, but they lacked any sense of Jesus. The gentle attention flattered the fantasist, who, in response, has now published his answer: The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ — an adult novel that begins, “This is the story of Jesus and his brother Christ, of how they were born, of how they lived and of how one of them died.”

Ah, me. In Pullman’s novelistic version, a naive young woman named Mary delivers two boys. The first of the twins turns out to be Jesus, a wise preacher of moral truths who comes to realize the lack of God from those truths only on his way to crucifixion. The other twin is Christ, a darker, smarter boy who grows up to become the founder of the Church based on his brother and who negotiates power with the Romans and the priests. He is also his brother’s Judas — Christ betraying Jesus to get him out of the way so Christ can go on to establish Christianity.

This is not an uncommon story – the-Jesus-had-a-brother-who-died-on-the-Cross-while-he-escaped has been told before. I think John Updike referred to it somewhere and the Japanese have even cashed in on the retellings . I always wonder where these stories come from, and, for that matter, where the thought “Paul invented Christianity.” or “The only true Christian was Jesus.” Well I found a wonderful little exposition on this in Bottum’s review of the Pullman book:

“[For] this is, after all, pretty tired, old stuff — very tired, and very old. Over the last century and a half, the impulse has often found root in the gardens of critical history, sifting through the gospel stories with the promise of identifying the “real Jesus,” as distinct from the figure so thoroughly embedded in the Church’s account.

In 1892 the Lutheran theologian Martin Kähler gave this project its most influential expression, distinguishing between the “Christ of faith”– the figure found in the Church’s belief in his saving death and resurrection — and the “Jesus of history.” The idea is to come up with a critical principle that allows a scholar to determine when the New Testament authors are reading later theological formulations back into the remembered stories of Jesus’ life and ministry. And the purpose is to allow the modern commentator to filter out the dogmatic content of Scripture.

The problem is that we tend not so much to discover the historical Jesus as to create a blank spot on which to project our spiritual fantasies, as Albert Schweitzer recognized when he surveyed the nineteenth century’s efforts to get back to the “real Jesus” in his famous 1906 book The Quest for the Historical Jesus. The historical Jesus turns out to be whatever the questing historian wants to find: a moral teacher or revolutionary prophet or kind preacher of love (see, for example, Marcus Borg’s picture of Jesus as a 1960s anti-establishment activist).

Critical scholars often explain the overlay of Christological affirmations in the gospel by recourse to a theory that, to a great extent, St. Paul theologized Jesus, and, under his influence, there emerged the doctrinally rigid faith of the Church. F.C. Bauer, for example, speculated in the nineteenth century that Paul was in conflict with the disciples. Nietzsche and others latched onto the idea, boldly declaring that Paul had “invented Christianity” and thereby betrayed the real Jesus.

In fact, in the Jesus-against-Christianity game, it’s usually the inauthentic Paul who gets played off against the authentic Jesus. You can see it from Ernest Renan’s nineteenth-century “The writings of Paul have been a danger and a hidden rock, the causes of the principal defects of Christian theology,” to George Bernard Shaw’s “No sooner had Jesus knocked over the dragon of superstition than Paul boldly set it on its legs again in the name of Jesus,” to the Episcopal Bishop John S. Spong’s “Paul’s words are not the Words of God. They are the words of Paul — a vast difference.”

There is, of course, an intrinsically anti-dogmatic and anti-ecclesial undercurrent to all these readings of the Bible. D.F. Strauss set aside the miraculous and supernatural dimensions of the New Testament in The Life of Jesus to achieve the effect, and Reimarus, whose On the Intention of Jesus and His Teaching was published posthumously in 1778, expressed a historical skepticism about the reliability of the gospels that was shocking in its day.

The key here is that phrase in its day. The frisson of blasphemy has grown too thin in all this stuff; it’s worn down to nothing. Nothing, except the author’s self-congratulation at his own bravery — a feature with which Philip Pullman’s comments about his novel abound. The slow, patient work of scholars has undone this goofy storyline so many times, and still it comes creeping back every twenty years or so. Pullman’s Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ mostly proves that no idea dies, no matter how soundly defeated.”

So it seems all of this was wrapped up together: My struggles with a Christologically pure Gospel teaching; Fr. Jose Granados’ story of the Easter Faith and Its Meaning in History; and the taunts of atheists telling me that Paul “invented” Christianity. Talk about three birds with one stone…

Posted in Catholicism For Atheists, The State of the Catholic Church, Theology, Understanding Paul | Tagged St. Paul theologized Jesus, theological exegesis | Leave a Comment »

Paying Attention To The Sky

Archive for the ‘The State of the Catholic Church’ Category

The Ordination Of Women — Michael Coren

The Importance Of Ritual Part III — Fr. Aidan Nichols O.P.

The Importance Of Ritual Part II — Fr. Aidan Nichols O.P.

The Importance Of Ritual Part I — Fr. Aidan Nichols O.P.

Reading Selections From “Christianity Lite” by Mary Eberstadt

Christians and Postmoderns by Joseph Bottum

Authority and Dissent in the Catholic Church by Dr. William E. May

Reading Selections from The Persistence of the Catholic Moment by Fr. Richard John Neuhaus

Homosexualist Ideologue Andrew Sullivan Slanders Pope Benedict XVI

The Teachings Of The Church, The Teachings Of The Bible

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