tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-143005992024-03-13T14:43:40.377-05:00Sacramentum VitaeMike Lhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09060404905348849140noreply@blogger.comBlogger1027125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14300599.post-34599047095504571882014-01-06T00:33:00.000-05:002014-02-12T08:45:11.996-05:00Christmas: the Eternal embraces the Finite<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px; line-height: 18px;"><i>The following is a Christmas-season meditation by Susan Anne, who will be joining me on this blog as a co-author.</i><br /><br />Beginnings and endings, finite measures of years meted out for us again and again, season after season, generation after generation, age after age - all amount to little more than markers of time. The clock strikes and we call it an hour; a calendar page turns while a bud blooms or leaves fall or icicles grow, and we call it a season. A baby is born and we say it is a new generation; teens pound </span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px; line-height: 18px;">the sidewalk with their pants falling off and we say it is a lost generation; a grandfather dies and we say that he belonged to a good generation. Fashions, inventions, and empires rise and fall, and we call it an age.<br /><br />In a world surrounded by measures of things begun and things ended, it is easy to forget the timeless eternity awaiting us as immortal souls. We only sojourn here, obedient to our positions on the musical score of life on earth, like notes on parchment, passionately scrawled onto staffs of the greatest symphony ever written. Yet the master composer is timeless in His timing, eternal in His positioning of notes, and unlimited in His creations.<br /><br />We long for the infinite and seek to imitate it in every way; we build the tallest buildings, run the fastest mile, lift the heaviest weights, earn the most money, and do the best we can in achieving all our goals. Measures of time assist our journey by giving us a sense of stability, for which of us can really comprehend eternity? Which of us does not shudder at the thought that when this life is done, whatever comes next is for EVER?<br /><br />Let us take into consideration the timelessness of Jesus Christ come to earth as a baby in a manger. Now is the season in which the eternal embraces the finite life of man; now is the generation of Life without end, the offshoot of Jesse; now is the age of Faith, Hope, and Love.<br /><br />Wishing you all a very Happy New Year, with many blessings on your journey. Thank you all for being with me in varying degrees on mine. God Bless you <i class="_4-k1 img sp_75mcuz sx_a33b6b" style="background-image: url(https://fbstatic-a.akamaihd.net/rsrc.php/v2/yf/r/vlKxhqEGtLc.png); background-position: 0px -3920px; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; background-size: 20px 4276px; display: inline-block; height: 16px; vertical-align: -3px; width: 16px;"></i> Happy New Year!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I'm taking the occasion of Pope Francis' birthday--which he's <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/17/pope-birthday-homeless_n_4458357.html">celebrating</a> by inviting some homeless people to breakfast--to talk about the hermeneutical challenge he seems to pose to so many traditionalist and conservative Catholics. Lapsed Catholics and standard-issue worldlings seem to love him, as if they just <i>knew </i>that his gestures and words are those of the kindly, sprightly grandpa they want in a pope. For such people, this pope is less about ideas than about their feeling understood and sought out. And they're correct to feel that way. But the very things causing the prodigal children to feel that way leave many of us older brothers and sisters in the house feeling suspicious. That's inevitable, and I'm not judging anybody in particular. But I do want to focus on what seems to have upset traditionalist and conservative Catholics the most in the new apostolic exhortation, <a href="http://www.vatican.va/evangelii-gaudium/en/index.html" style="font-style: italic;">Evangelii Gaudium</a><i>.</i><br /><br />EG seems addressed primarily to Catholic "intentional disciples" and pastoral workers. It explains why evangelization is and ought to be a joy; yet it spends at least as much time explaining various ways in which the joy gets killed, or is never even allowed to arise. To me, it seems that the chief of those is what Francis calls "spiritual worldliness" in §93-4. Before we get to that, note how he describes, in §82-3, its manifestation in the main audience he's addressing:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The problem is not always an excess of activity, but rather activity undertaken badly, without adequate motivation, without a spirituality which would permeate it and make it pleasurable. As a result, work becomes more tiring than necessary, even leading at times to illness. Far from a content and happy tiredness, this is a tense, burdensome, dissatisfying and, in the end, unbearable fatigue. This pastoral <i>acedia</i> can be caused by a number of things. Some fall into it because they throw themselves into unrealistic projects and are not satisfied simply to do what they reasonably can. Others, because they lack the patience to allow processes to mature; they want everything to fall from heaven. Others, because they are attached to a few projects or vain dreams of success. Others, because they have lost real contract with people and so depersonalize their work that they are more concerned with the road map than with the journey itself. Others fall into <i>acedia</i> because they are unable to wait; they want to dominate the rhythm of life. Today’s obsession with immediate results makes it hard for pastoral workers to tolerate anything that smacks of disagreement, possible failure, criticism, the cross.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And so the biggest threat of all gradually takes shape: “the gray pragmatism of the daily life of the Church, in which all appears to proceed normally, while in reality faith is wearing down and degenerating into small-mindedness”.<b> A tomb psychology thus develops and slowly transforms Christians into mummies in a museum. Disillusioned with reality, with the Church and with themselves, they experience a constant temptation to cling to a faint melancholy, lacking in hope, which seizes the heart like “the most precious of the devil’s potions”.</b> Called to radiate light and communicate life, in the end they are caught up in things that generate only darkness and inner weariness, and slowly consume all zeal for the apostolate. For all this, I repeat: Let us not allow ourselves to be robbed of the joy of evangelization! [Footnotes omitted; emphasis added.]</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">None of that is hard to understand for anybody who's been active in ecclesial ministry for any length of time. In fact, the bolded passage describes many of the educated Catholics I know, including myself. What does seem hard for some to understand, though, is how the Pope describes the underlying problem.<br /><br />He calls that problem "spiritual worldliness." Thus:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">93. Spiritual worldliness, which hides behind the appearance of piety and even love for the Church, consists in seeking not the Lord’s glory but human glory and personal well-being. It is what the Lord reprimanded the Pharisees for: “How can you believe, who receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?” (Jn 5:44). It is a subtle way of seeking one’s “own interests, not those of Jesus Christ” (Phil 2:21). It takes on many forms, depending on the kinds of persons and groups into which it seeps. Since it is based on carefully cultivated appearances, it is not always linked to outward sin; from without, everything appears as it should be. But if it were to seep into the Church, “it would be infinitely more disastrous than any other worldliness which is simply moral”.</span> </blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">94. <b>This worldliness can be fuelled in two deeply interrelated ways. One is the attraction of gnosticism, a purely subjective faith whose only interest is a certain experience or a set of ideas and bits of information which are meant to console and enlighten, but which ultimately keep one imprisoned in his or her own thoughts and feelings. The other is the self-absorbed promethean neopelagianism of those who ultimately trust only in their own powers and feel superior to others because they observe certain rules or remain intransigently faithful to a particular Catholic style from the past. A supposed soundness of doctrine or discipline leads instead to a narcissistic and authoritarian elitism, whereby instead of evangelizing, one analyzes and classifies others, and instead of opening the door to grace, one exhausts his or her energies in inspecting and verifying. In neither case is one really concerned about Jesus Christ or others.</b> These are manifestations of an anthropocentric immanentism. It is impossible to think that a genuine evangelizing thrust could emerge from these adulterated forms of Christianity.</span> </blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">95. This insidious worldliness is evident in a number of attitudes which appear opposed, yet all have the same pretence of “taking over the space of the Church”. <b>In some people we see an ostentatious preoccupation for the liturgy, for doctrine and for the Church’s prestige, but without any concern that the Gospel have a real impact on God’s faithful people and the concrete needs of the present time. In this way, the life of the Church turns into a museum piece or something which is the property of a select few. In others, this spiritual worldliness lurks behind a fascination with social and political gain, or pride in their ability to manage practical affairs, or an obsession with programmes of self-help and self-realization.</b> It can also translate into a concern to be seen, into a social life full of appearances, meetings, dinners and receptions. It can also lead to a business mentality, caught up with management, statistics, plans and evaluations whose principal beneficiary is not God’s people but the Church as an institution. The mark of Christ, incarnate, crucified and risen, is not present; closed and elite groups are formed, and no effort is made to go forth and seek out those who are distant or the immense multitudes who thirst for Christ. Evangelical fervour is replaced by the empty pleasure of complacency and self-indulgence.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I've noticed a curious contrast in the reactions to that account of spiritual worldliness among intentional disciples and pastoral workers: "progressive" Catholics don't seem to feel targeted in those passages, but conservative and traditionalist Catholics do. Why is that?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Clearly, as many "progressives" are being criticized as their opposites. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It's not as though the Pope isn't even-handed. There is, for instance, a certain faith-style that is indeed "gnostic" in a "subjective" sense: people believing what makes them feel good and smart, but which doesn't really change anything, least of all themselves. I know many baptized Catholics like that, especially ones who are into this-or-that "self-help" or "self-realization" program; and many of them are proggies. Some proggies are also being criticized implicitly when the Pope talks about "fascination with social or political gain." For instance, many proggie-Catholic academics are far more concerned about being considered respectable among their secular peers and friends than about witnessing to Truth. And last year, many Catholics bought the absurd argument that voting for Obama was being more effectively "pro-life" than voting for a candidate who, if elected, might reduce the rate of growth in spending on various social programs. Of course, it's also quite possible to be theologically and/or politically to the "right" and be guilty of "gnosticism" and/or of politicizing the Faith too. But that's the point. The Pope is less interested in singling out one "wing" as more guilty of spiritual worldliness than another than in warning us of a spiritual danger which is no respecter of ideology.<br /><br />Yet for some reason, Catholics more toward the rightward end of the spectrum are in conniptions about EG. That's due mainly to two things. One is what it says about economics, the reaction to which strikes me as overblown, based in part on mistranslation. The other is this sizzler: "</span><b style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">the self-absorbed promethean neopelagianism of those who ultimately trust only in their own powers and feel superior to others because they observe certain rules or remain intransigently faithful to a particular Catholic style from the past. A supposed soundness of doctrine or discipline leads instead to a narcissistic and authoritarian elitism, whereby instead of evangelizing, one analyzes and classifies others, and instead of opening the door to grace, one exhausts his or her energies in inspecting and verifying." </b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I've encountered a lot of grumbling about that from "right-thinking" Catholics. <a href="http://wdtprs.com/blog/2013/12/new-z-swag-i-am-a-self-absorbed-promethean-neopelagian-and-proud-of-it/">Fr. Z has even made a bitter joke-mug out of it</a> (depicted above).<br /><br />Of course they claim it's unclear: "What does he <i>mean</i> by 'self-absorbed promethean neopelagianism'? That's just nasty rhetoric with no clear thought behind it." But the rest of the quoted description is not nearly so unclear about <i>whom</i> the Pope has in mind when using that phrase. I know such people; one finds them on the Catholic "right," especially among self-described "traditionalists." And when such a person reads the above description, they know they are the target of the criticism, even if they protest that the criticism is unjustified. I don't need to name anybody. Still, there's deep content worth pondering in the phrase '</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">self-absorbed promethean neopelagianism'.<br /><br />According to Ben Mann, the notion of "Promethean" theology comes from Thomas Merton, in his book <i><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=fIAzq6xvnbgC&pg=PA15&lpg=PA15&dq=merton+promethean+theology&source=bl&ots=qeJfjjKHF0&sig=xYLOVAFU8EAsrpQ93cY-XFKInhU&hl=en&sa=X&ei=sqqwUqnLNZPnkAe1mYHQBQ&ved=0CFkQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=merton%20promethean%20theology&f=false">New Man</a>. </i>I've read the relevant chapter and have no doubt that Jorge Mario Bergoglio once did too. With that in mind, I think we can understand 'self-absorbed promethean neopelagianism'</span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">to mean an attitude which inclines certain people to earn their salvation by being rigorously right-thinking and virtuous in spite of God's mean-spirited reluctance to save them or even make life pleasant for them. One finds such an attitude more often on the Catholic "Right" than on the Catholic "Left", because viewing God chiefly as Judge and Taskmaster, from whom the fire of grace and the bliss of salvation must be wrested by force, is much more common on the Right than on the Left. In short, what the Pope is describing is a latter-day Pharisaism.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />One does of course find Pharisees on the Catholic Left, not just the Catholic Right. If one is not politically correct enough, or is not reliably Democrat, or even if one prefers more traditional forms of liturgy, one can find oneself the target of much scorn from professional "progressive" Catholics. But I find it most interesting that hardly any proggies seem to feel themselves targeted by any of the Pope's criticisms. Only traddies and conservatives feel hard done by.<br /><br />I believe that's the work of a high-up (better: low-down) spirit of division. Because proggies and worldlings seem so happy with the Pope--so rightist "thinking" goes--his message must be as much designed to diss us as to please them. And so many of the Pope's ambiguities and infelicities of expression, both formal and informal, are interpreted by some traddie and conservative critics in the worst possible light.<br /><br />My advice to such people, many of whom are my friends, is this: Calm down. Pray. Stop being so querulous and defensive. Be determined not to become a pawn of the spirit of division. The Pope knows he's not above criticism, and he doesn't hate or disrespect you. In fact, he agrees with you more often than you've been led to think.</span></div>
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...thank God. <a href="http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/damianthompson/100247936/pope-francis-reveals-his-radical-message-and-it-will-startle-conservatives/">Damian Thompson</a> has summed up <a href="http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/francesco/apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20131124_evangelii-gaudium_en.html"><i>Evangelii Gaudium</i> </a>well enough as the outline of the Pope Francis "radical" agenda for his papacy. In our politically-obsessed media world, most of the attention has gone to what the new "apostolic exhortation" says about economics. But there's really nothing new there: Paul VI was saying much the same in the 1960s and 70s, and it's fully in keeping with how the <a href="http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/justpeace/documents/rc_pc_justpeace_doc_20060526_compendio-dott-soc_en.html">"social doctrine of the Church"</a> has developed before and since. Its <i>empirical</i> premises may not all be correct, but that's not a new issue either. What is new, at least to me, is how the Pope rips into what he calls the "spiritual worldliness" of so many Catholics active in the Church.<br />
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That must be cauterized so that we can get out of ourselves, encounter Christ afresh, and evangelize with joy. That's what's important here, and radical. Few, be they right, left, or middling, escape the critique. Here's the part that hit me hardest:</div>
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93. Spiritual worldliness, which hides behind the appearance of piety and even love for the Church, consists in seeking not the Lord’s glory but human glory and personal well-being. It is what the Lord reprimanded the Pharisees for: “How can you believe, who receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?” (Jn 5:44). It is a subtle way of seeking one’s “own interests, not those of Jesus Christ” (Phil 2:21). It takes on many forms, depending on the kinds of persons and groups into which it seeps. Since it is based on carefully cultivated appearances, it is not always linked to outward sin; from without, everything appears as it should be. But if it were to seep into the Church, “it would be infinitely more disastrous than any other worldliness which is simply moral”.<br />
94. This worldliness can be fuelled in two deeply interrelated ways. One is the attraction of gnosticism, a purely subjective faith whose only interest is a certain experience or a set of ideas and bits of information which are meant to console and enlighten, but which ultimately keep one imprisoned in his or her own thoughts and feelings. The other is the self-absorbed promethean neopelagianism of those who ultimately trust only in their own powers and feel superior to others because they observe certain rules or remain intransigently faithful to a particular Catholic style from the past. A supposed soundness of doctrine or discipline leads instead to a narcissistic and authoritarian elitism, whereby instead of evangelizing, one analyzes and classifies others, and instead of opening the door to grace, one exhausts his or her energies in inspecting and verifying. In neither case is one really concerned about Jesus Christ or others. These are manifestations of an anthropocentric immanentism. It is impossible to think that a genuine evangelizing thrust could emerge from these adulterated forms of Christianity.<br />
95. This insidious worldliness is evident in a number of attitudes which appear opposed, yet all have the same pretence of “taking over the space of the Church”. In some people we see an ostentatious preoccupation for the liturgy, for doctrine and for the Church’s prestige, but without any concern that the Gospel have a real impact on God’s faithful people and the concrete needs of the present time. In this way, the life of the Church turns into a museum piece or something which is the property of a select few. In others, this spiritual worldliness lurks behind a fascination with social and political gain, or pride in their ability to manage practical affairs, or an obsession with programmes of self-help and self-realization. It can also translate into a concern to be seen, into a social life full of appearances, meetings, dinners and receptions. It can also lead to a business mentality, caught up with management, statistics, plans and evaluations whose principal beneficiary is not God’s people but the Church as an institution. The mark of Christ, incarnate, crucified and risen, is not present; closed and elite groups are formed, and no effort is made to go forth and seek out those who are distant or the immense multitudes who thirst for Christ. Evangelical fervour is re- placed by the empty pleasure of complacency and self-indulgence.<br />
96. This way of thinking also feeds the vainglory of those who are content to have a modicum of power and would rather be the general of a defeated army than a mere private in a unit which continues to fight. How often we dream up vast apostolic projects, meticulously planned, just like defeated generals! But this is to deny our history as a Church, which is glorious precisely because it is a history of sacrifice, of hopes and daily struggles, of lives spent in service and fidelity to work, tiring as it may be, for all work is “the sweat of our brow”. Instead, we waste time talking about “what needs to be done” – in Span- ish we call this the sin of “habriaqueísmo” – like spiritual masters and pastoral experts who give instructions from on high. We indulge in endless fantasies and we lose contact with the real lives and difficulties of our people.<br />
97. Those who have fallen into this worldliness look on from above and afar, they reject the prophecy of their brothers and sisters, they discredit those who raise questions, they constantly point out the mistakes of others and they are obsessed by appearances. Their hearts are open only to the limited horizon of their own immanence and interests, and as a consequence they neither learn from their sins nor are they genuinely open to forgiveness. This is a tremendous corruption disguised as a good. We need to avoid it by making the Church constantly go out from herself, keeping her mission focused on Jesus Christ, and her commitment to the poor.</blockquote>
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He shoots: he scores!<br /><br />Most "professional Catholics" can find something of themselves in that. If Pope John Paul II liked to repeat <i>Duc in altum!--</i>"Go out into the deep"--Francis is reminding us that what we need to go out from is ourselves--especially our churchy selves.</div>
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When it came out last week, I had intended to write a lengthy rebuttal of Peter Leithart's <i>First Things</i> piece "<a href="http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2013/11/the-end-of-protestantism">The End of Protestantism</a>." But if you know much about church history, reading it for yourself makes that unnecessary. For what Leithart is advocating, which he calls "reformational Catholicism," has been around since the 16th century. It's called "Anglicanism"--or more precisely, what used to be called "broad-church Anglicanism." C.S. Lewis would have been quite comfortable with it. Leithart's brand doesn't require England, but it's just the sort of <i>via media</i> of which traditional Anglicans are so uniquely proud.<br />
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The thing is, broad-church Anglicanism, whether English or not, is essentially Protestant--as Queen Elizabeth I rightly insisted. Like confessional Lutheranism and Calvinism, to be sure, it considers itself Catholic in the only sense that matters. In that sense of 'Catholic', Roman and Eastern Catholicism do not together constitute the Catholic Church, but are at most branches thereof, if not sects. But the belief that the communion of churches calling itself "the Catholic Church" is not, in fact, <i>the</i> Catholic Church is what makes Anglicanism in all its forms Protestant. Thus the terminus at which Leithart's "end of Protestantism" arrives is--well, Protestant.<br />
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It should be evident that all Protestant attempts to transcend the thing that used to be called Protestantism--such as "non-denominational" Christianity, or pentecostalism--end by coming similarly full circle. That is inevitable so long as those making the attempt fail to see that the Church Christ founded perdures as a visible and unitary whole, from which all other self-described "churches" are in varying degrees of schism--even as those degrees mark, inversely, the degrees of "imperfect communion" with the Church Christ founded.<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #141823; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14.399999618530273px; line-height: 18px;">Like all things human, the United States will eventually die. Since conquering it by force is not logistically feasible, its death will be <i>de facto</i> suicide. The culprit will be Americans' forgetting the truth that liberty is only sustainable by virtue. And they will have forgotten that truth because we no longer have a collective vision of what "the good" for man is, and hence no vision of what virtue objectively requires.</span></div>
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<a href="http://wallpaper.metalship.org/walls/animal-lust.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="http://wallpaper.metalship.org/walls/animal-lust.jpg" width="200" /></a>No corporate honcho went to jail for their admitted part in the massive financial meltdown of 2008, which was due to greed obscured by fraud. No Administration big shot is going to take a fall for the scandals of Benghazi, the IRS, the NSA, or the ACA rollout. The American people don't seem to hold elites accountable for anything more. I believe that's because they are gradually failing to hold even themselves accountable for anything anymore. And the roots of that lie in the "sexual revolution." The inexorable march of the vice of lust tramples not only chastity but all other virtues--especially honesty and prudence.<br /></div>
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It's too bad that the homily I heard this morning was boring even by the standard of that particular priest, who is a holy man all the same. But that's what's prompted me to write on the theme of <a href="http://usccb.org/bible/readings/021013.cfm">today's Bible readings in the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite</a>.<br />
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The theme is God's commissioning unworthy men to preach his saving word. In our jaded, increasingly post-Christian culture, the need for that is ever more urgent. It can and should be met by Christians in general and the clergy in particular. In a Catholic context, we need to focus on the particular means by which laity and clergy respectively must do so.<br />
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It's been noted for decades that the ambient culture in the West is no longer Christian, or even all that friendly to Christianity. That problem is not yet as acute in the U.S. as in Western Europe or Canada, but we are headed down the same path. Thus committed Christians, including Catholics, can no longer count on the Faith's being transmitted by osmosis, or even on what theologians call "implicit faith." That is especially evident in the breakdown of the traditional family, which has developed almost as much among believers as unbelievers. The only kind of Christianity that will last will be <i>intentional </i>and <i>missionary. </i>It will be intentional because, when it is not, it will continue dissipating in face of the secular culture's momentum. It will be missionary because Christianity is inherently a missionary religion. When Christians do not act accordingly, their religion becomes a museum piece for the culturally conservative minority and an increasingly inconvenient bit of cultural baggage for everybody else. But even though Catholic laity and clergy must both be intentional and missionary, the ways in which each must be that differ from each other. And those ways can be understood by contrast with how things generally are in the Church.<br />
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The laity are supposed to be the Church in and for the world. In fact, about 99% of the Church just is the laity. But most either don't know that or, if they do, don't really get it. For them, as for the rest of the world, "the Church" is really an institution or organization consisting of the clergy and their co-workers, working out of expensive physical plants called "churches" and "chanceries" and sponsoring social services that, while important, could in principle be replaced by government. Incredibly, the notion that the Church is mostly just <i>us</i>, the Body of Christ bringing Christ home to ourselves, our families, friends, co-workers, and wider communities, is still largely foreign to most Catholic laity--even half-a-century after Vatican II, which stressed "the universal call to holiness" and the corresponding importance of the laity. Most still instinctively identify themselves as Americans, or professionals, or spouses or parents, or even as fans of their sports teams, before identifying as Catholics. Religion is just one more compartment of life, one more box to check, whose main purpose is to provide fire insurance for the next life--assuming, of course, that fire insurance is needed, which more and more Catholics seem to disbelieve.<br />
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Over the same period of time, the situation hasn't been all that much better among the clergy. Normally the problem is not such ignorance of the Faith as results from and reinforces garden-variety worldliness, but another kind of worldliness. In my fifty-odd years, I have observed thousands of Catholic clergy and religious in many different environments. Aside from a public commitment to celibacy (with some canonical exceptions), the most common feature I've observed among them is not theological orthodoxy or personal holiness, but how <i>comfortable</i> they are. They have no worries about employment: Jobs and people come to them, sometimes in profusion. None have the sort of worry about health care that many laity do: They can expect adequate care paid for by the self-insured churchly entities to which they belong for life. They have no families to struggle to care for; in the majority of cases, even their major personal expenses such as housing and cars are paid for by contributions, not salary. And despite the sex-abuse-and-coverup scandal, clergy and religious still command respect and a presumption of good will from those they are meant to serve.<br />
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None of those things are bad in themselves; arguably, they facilitate the mission of the professionally religious. But one thing they entail is that the penalties for indifference, incompetence, or malfeasance are usually far less severe for clergy and religious than for laity. If you're a priest or religious, you basically have to be a convicted criminal to lose your employment and health care, because what you have is really an unusual "vocation" rather than a job, and such a vocation can be lived out through many different jobs and relationships. The result is that much indifference, incompetence, and malfeasance go unpunished and sometimes even unnoticed. That has allowed priests and religious to become too comfortable. It promotes the sort of worldliness evinced by the many bishops who covered up sexual abuse, and protected the abusers, so that the boat would not be rocked and the Church's prestige would be maintained. We've seen how that's worked out. And don't even get me started on the failure of so many priests and religious to inspire laity to be <i>Church,</i> as opposed to paying, associate members of the organization. They have not failed because their preaching is bad; sometimes it's good. They have not failed because they don't work hard enough; many work hard indeed. They have failed simply because their comfort is more evident than their holiness. That disparity does not go unnoticed.<br />
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Read and meditate on today's Bible readings. They apply equally to the professionally religious and to lay people. That they apply to the professionally religious needs no explanation: Such people just <i>are</i> those who have been specially called and commissioned by God to bring his truth and love to the rest of the Church. But laity need to realize that they are that too, for the world as a whole. We are "a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light" (<i>1 Peter</i> 2:9). As Pope John Paul II reminded us, we are to "put out into the deep water" in faith, trusting that we will be successful "fishers of men," starting with ourselves. I find that a far more inspiring vision of life than any accomplishments of mine that the world can recognize and approve. The latter are purely contingent matters. The former is what we are called to be in God, for God, so that we can become gods.<br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Fr. Al (Aidan) Kimel has a series up at his recently founded blog about St. Gregory of Nazianzen's trinitarian theology. For us theology geeks, it's well worth a read. What follows is a rewrite of a comment I posted on <a href="http://afkimel.wordpress.com/2013/02/08/st-gregory-the-theologian-and-the-one-god-part-3/">Part Three</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It seems to me that much of the apparent disparity between Eastern and Western trinitarian theology would disappear if we attended more to two points both sides could accept, consistently with Nicene-Chalcedonian orthodoxy..</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">First, being-three-persons is absolutely necessary to the divine essence, but being-creator is only hypothetically necessary to the divine essence. Both properties are eternal and unalterable, and thus of the divine essence, but the latter is the result of a divine decision that could have been otherwise, given what else belongs to the divine essence; while the former is not, but rather is itself a naturally necessary feature of the divine essence. So the Father is indeed Monarch <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">ad intra </i>and the Godhead monarch <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">ad extra</i>. But the Father is not Monarch <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">ad intra </i>in a sense that would be incompatible with saying that the divine essence is too. That’s because what accounts for the Father’s being Monarch <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">ad intra</i> is, precisely, the divine essence that necessitates his begetting and spirating the other two person respectively.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Of course we must affirm that begetting and spirating are activities <i>personal to</i> the Father. But if the above is correct, they are not personal to the Father <i>rather than </i>being absolutely necessary to, and thus necessitated by, the divine essence. They are both. Otherwise we'd have to say that the Father's origination of the other two persons is only hypothetically necessary to the divine essence, in the sort of way creation is. And I don't believe anybody wants to to say that.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Second and accordingly, we should say that the Father originates each of the other two persons only in relation to the other, even as the other two stand in different relationships to him and to each other. He begets and spirates both persons eternally and necessarily; but he spirates the Holy Spirit only <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">as</i> Father of the Son, and thus does so on account of and for the sake of the Son. He also begets the Son only <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">as</i> the Monarch who also breathes forth the Holy Spirit, for he begets the Son only in relation to the Spirit, inasmuch as the Son is he for the sake of whom the Father necessarily breathes forth the Spirit.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Of course, the implications of the above account for the person/nature distinction in God will put off those for whom only Cappadocian trinitarianism is acceptable. But that would just be to freeze the development of trinitarian doctrine in the 4th century. That is neither necessary nor desirable.</span></div>
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That's a question I was asked a few days ago by a Protestant commenter at Called to Communion. Readers who care to can read my initial reply <a href="http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2011/02/mathisons-reply-to-cross-and-judisch-a-largely-philosophical-critique/#comment-45629">here.</a> Of course the man complained that my explanation was "much too complex, intricate, and precarious," and indicated that he preferred the clarity of the "Word of God." Well, I know it's hard to argue people out of their comfort zones, but I'm always surprised when I run up against attitudes like his. Quantum physics too is "complex, intricate, and precarious," but that is not by itself a reason to believe it's false. When we're dealing with, like, you know, <i>God</i>, why expect things to be any different? Especially when Catholic theologians have had nearly two millennia to think collegially about the mysteries of faith.<br />
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Even so, I admit that my reply was not the easiest to follow. Perhaps that's all the poor man was reacting to. So I want to restate my explanation here, in the hope that reactions will be less dismissive. Please keep in mind that what's at issue is just another instance of the mysterious interaction of grace and human freedom.<br />
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Consider sin and freedom first. Original sin, even when washed away by baptism, has lingering effects which make it inevitable that each person who's reached "the age of reason" (i.e., of moral responsibility) actually sins at <i>some-or-other</i> time. That actual sin is inevitable for such people is, at any rate, a fact even non-believers may infer from experience. But given that people with moral responsibility, precisely as such, retain a measure of free will, it cannot be inevitable for them to sin at any <i>particular</i> times--save when some of their actual sins have been made inevitable by their previous, freely committed sins. Thus actual sin is <i>statistically inevitable </i>for the people in question (including anybody who's reading this), but not deterministic in a way that's incompatible with free will. For if it were the latter, we would not be morally accountable for at least some of our actual sins, which would be a conceptual absurdity. That's why the Council of Trent defined original sin with the word <i>reatum</i>, a legal term which means roughly "liability to punishment." Everybody who inherits original sin is liable to punishment because if they live past the age of reason, they will actually sin at some-or-other point--even though original sin itself is not actual sin, but only the inherited absence of that share in his own life for which God created humanity.<br />
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Now for the main question at hand. By virtue of the unbreakable promises of Christ, it is inevitable that both the Church as a whole and the Magisterium in particular--at least as long as the latter exists--preserve the apostolic deposit of faith complete and incorrupt. From that, it follows that neither the "ordinary and universal magisterium" nor the "extraordinary" magisterium will ever use its authority in such a way as to bind the Church to a heresy. But it is by no means inevitable that any <i>particular</i> bishop, including the bishop of Rome, will persevere in the Faith at all, never mind teach the Faith in its fullness. For each and every member of the Church, believing and professing the Faith in its fullness is the result of a free choice to accept the divine gift of faith. And just as faith is freely received and manifested, so too is formal heresy (material heresy, when that is the correct term for somebody's belief, is often unchosen, because it is often unreflective and thus unintentional). Hence any bishop, including the pope, can freely become a formal heretic. But the Catholic doctrine of the Church's indefectibility in the Faith entails that even when many bishops, including whoever's pope, fall away from the fullness of Faith, not all will. The Magisterium as a whole will never successfully manage to use his authority in such as way as to bind the Church to a heresy--and on Catholic doctrine, the pope in particular will never manage to do that, even if he chooses and aims to. Consequently, the divinely granted grace of the Church's indefectibility is a grace of providence for the Church as a whole, not for any of her individual members, including the members of the Magisterium. Individual free will is not thereby coerced within the soul, as Protestant monergists imagine by holding that grace is irresistible. For instance, if and when the pope's free will is overridden by such a providential grace, it is overridden only in the sense that his will's intention to bind the Church to his heresy is externally frustrated in its execution. That, I believe, is what actually happened when <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_John_XXII">Pope John XXII</a> tried to teach his heresy about "the beatific vision."<br />
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Now I realize that many non-Catholics will be unmoved such an explanation. Since they don't see reason enough to believe that Catholicism is true to begin with, they do not share the suppositions that frame the logical problem I've sought to resolve. But I do believe I've shown that Catholicism is internally consistent in the present respect. And that's the sort of thing that must always be shown, when there's a serious question about self-consistency.<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px; line-height: 18px;">Objection 1. God doesn't care who wins the Super Bowl. For sporting events are "of the world," and God calls us out of the world to share even now in his divine life.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px; line-height: 18px;">Objection 2. If God did care who wins the Super Bowl, he would be sucked into the world's rabid competitiveness and greed, which are beneath him.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px; line-height: 18px;">*Sed contra*: God is perfectly rational, and any agent even minimally rational would </span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px; line-height: 18px;">care who wins the Super Bowl, because so much ego and money are at stake; and where that much is at stake, so is the good of souls.<br /><br />*Respondeo*: God does not care who wins the Super Bowl *per se*, but only *per accidens*, insofar as one team's winning the game would help more souls to adhere to him than the other team's winning would.<br /><br />That suffices in reply to Objection 1 and the contrary.<br /><br />Reply Objection 2. God saved humanity from itself by letting people torture and execute him as a public threat, before rising from the dead. His involvement in the Super Bowl would serve the same end by less gruesome means.<br /><br /><b>Cross-posted at <i><a href="http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2013/02/03/super-bowl-a-pre-game-thomistic-meditation/" target="_blank">First Thoughts.</a></i></b></span></div>
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Today's Gospel reading in the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite concludes:<br />
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Rolling up the scroll, he handed it back to the attendant and sat down, and the eyes of all in the synagogue looked intently at him. He said to them, “Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.” <i>(Luke</i> 4:21)</blockquote>
If that audience was anything like one that I'm familiar with, somebody would have piped up at once: "Your development of doctrine has no basis in the text." To that, of course, Jesus could have replied: "I AM the text." And in his ministry, that is in effect what he asserted. To any Catholic familiar with conservative Protestantism, though, it should come as no surprise that most first-century Jews didn't see Jesus that way.<br />
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That brings up a point I have long pondered during my obscure career as an online Catholic apologist. Many Christian opponents of Catholicism often argue something like this: "Nowhere in the New Testament do we find your allegedly infallible Magisterium. The Magisterium's arrogant and self-serving claims for itself have no basis in the text." But it should go without saying that such a response proves nothing pertinent. It merely exhibits the fundamental difference between the conservative-Protestant interpretive paradigm (CPIP) and the Catholic interpretive paradigm (CIP).<br />
<br />
On the CPIP, it is in and through the Bible alone, not something called "the Church," that we encounter and recognize that divine authority by which the public, once-for-all divine revelation is given to us. When we render the assent of faith in that revelation, we are believing God, the ultimate authority, <i>by means of</i> trusting a book as that secondary authority which embodies God's primary authority and conveys the content of his revelation. Thus, for conservative Protestants, the biblical canon as they acknowledge it is the formal, proximate object of faith (FPOF). As their FPOF, the Bible is the sole "infallible" medium of doctrine. That is the basic meaning of <i>sola scriptura. </i>Individual believers can accept ecclesial authority as such only to the extent that it conforms to "Scripture." In practice, that amounts to judging the orthodoxy of any church by means of one's own <i>interpretation</i> of Scripture. It is the individual believer who judges the conformity of any non-scriptural authority to the FPOF. Of course, many conservative Protestants do not see this, because they assume that their often-divergent interpretations of Scripture are simply "what the Bible says." And they say the Magisterium is arrogant!<br />
<br />
On the CIP, however, it is the opposite. It is not the individual believer who gets to judge the Church's orthodoxy, but the Church that is the judge of the believer's orthodoxy. That is because, as the "Body of Christ" and "pillar and bulwark of the truth," the Church is a living embodiment of divine authority through her college of bishops, the successors of the Apostles, in union with the pope, the successor of Peter. On such an account, the FPOF is not the Bible alone, understood as self-attesting, but the triad Scripture-Tradition-Magisterium, understood as mutually attesting and interdependent. The first two together convey to us the content of divine revelation, and the last ensures that we identify and interpret that content reliably. The FPOF, as the Catholic Church understands it, thus bears the same divine authority of Jesus that is described in the New Testament.<br />
<br />
The basic dispute between conservative Protestantism and Catholicism, then, is about whether divine teaching authority is limited to its embodiment in a book, or whether the two other authorities in question are also necessary for constituting the FPOF. That dispute is similar to the one most Jewish scholars had with Jesus and the Christians. And the beauty of it is that we can compare, contrast, and evaluate the two IPs in terms of the means they offer for distinguishing between expressions of divine revelation <i>as such</i> and merely human opinions about how to identify and interpret the data in which we are given that revelation. Protestantism invests that means in the individual; Catholicism, in the Church. I know which seems more biblical, as well as more reasonable, to me.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgllwYX96YaDuEOJ53h4xqhKIxlwWXr6JrvUu29g-mhNJ674hANQGm4fC0bvYIN836wOPfjz0mNVi73qOYQw10TwOw73ydL6CTGZqutMOrAE2JOk-RY9IyY0BX-GjzWzTw8V9r3/s1600/St.+Paul.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgllwYX96YaDuEOJ53h4xqhKIxlwWXr6JrvUu29g-mhNJ674hANQGm4fC0bvYIN836wOPfjz0mNVi73qOYQw10TwOw73ydL6CTGZqutMOrAE2JOk-RY9IyY0BX-GjzWzTw8V9r3/s320/St.+Paul.jpg" width="220" /></a></div>
<h5 class="uiStreamMessage userContentWrapper" data-ft="{"type":1,"tn":"K"}" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 18px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding: 0px 20px 0px 15px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;">
<span class="messageBody" style="color: #333333; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.38;">Tonight at St. Matthew's Church in East Syracuse, NY, we celebrated a Novus Ordo High Mass for the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul. The pastor celebrated <i>ad orientem</i> those parts of the Mass addressed to God the Father. Our <i>schola cantorum,</i> in which I sing bass, sang the Ordinary in Latin and Palestrina's "Bonus est Dominus" as a communion motet. Instead of hymns, we chanted the "proper" antiphons in English.<br /><br />This is is the "Ordinary Form" as it should be.<br /><br /><br /><br /></span></h5>
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<a href="http://michaelatsovg.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/wrath-of-god.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://michaelatsovg.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/wrath-of-god.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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I recommend <a href="http://prodigal.typepad.com/prodigal_kiwi/files/alvin_kimel_finding_the_god_who_is_love_interacting_with_herbert_mccabe.pdf" target="_blank">this excellent meditation </a>by Fr. Al Kimel.</div>
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<br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px; line-height: 18px;">Lately I've been hearing, online and off, still more plaintive calls for "better adult catechesis." I'll say it one mo' time: The problem is not so much that they don't know as that they don't care; they'll only come to know if they care enough to learn. Here I shall add that you can't make anybody care. Some will come to care when the right questions occur to them; some, when they realize they've paid dearly for playing; some, when they finally meet someone truly holy. But all of that is grace. No program can manufacture it.<br /><br /><a class="g-profile" href="http://plus.google.com/115753208468512652394" target="_blank">+Roman Catholics</a> </span></div>
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...to support traditional marriage by means such as <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/301641/canadian-crackdown-michael-coren?pg=1" target="_blank">this</a>, and used it, the result would be called a new "Inquisition."</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!--
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<br />
The trad world is on tenterhooks. <a href="http://www.rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2012/06/rome-sspx-important-popes-response-to.html">An agreement with the SSPX is just around the corner</a>.
<br />
<br />
Methinks it always will be. As Mark Shea commented on my Facebook wall: " It's really hard for me to work up any interest in "Will this prissy enclave of prima donnas finally have their fussy demands met to their exacting standards?" Who cares? Drama queens wear me out."</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!--
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I've been accused of being too "liberal" by some traditionalist Catholics and some politically conservative Catholics. Well, I offer Mark Shea's reply to that, even though he seems to me to define and contemn "torture" with more severity than the Catechism of the Catholic Church:</div>
<blockquote>So a conservative Catholic who opposes abortion, euthanasia, and gay “marriage”, hates Communism, regards Obama as a tyrant, voted for Reagan and Bush twice, supports just war, supports capitalism (within just limits), says that all that the Holy Catholic Church believes, teaches, and proclaims is revealed by God, stands for monogamy and rejects artificial contraception, and thinks Benedict XVI is the bees knees? Yes, I am a “liberal” because I oppose torture and pre-emptive war and think it obscene that the strong prey on the weak in this country with increasing impunity, while middle class incomes flatline and vast amounts of wealth accumulate in fewer and fewer hands. That makes me a socialist, doncha know.</blockquote>
<b>Source</b>: <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/markshea/2012/02/national-review-vs-caelum-et-terra-re-me.html" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; text-align: left;">National Review vs. Caelum et Terra re: Me</a><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!--
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My title has the word 'liberalism' in scare quotes because I want to discuss the sort of liberalism that has grown scarier and scarier over the last several decades. I'm not talking about the liberalism of Locke and the American founding fathers, which stressed respect for natural rights and the consent of the governed as necessary conditions for a legitimate polity. I'm not talking about "classical" liberalism, which called for individual liberty, private property, and a free market as the best conditions for promoting the common weal. I'm not even talking about the liberalism of the early-20th-century "progressive" movement, of which New Deal liberalism was the direct heir and whose achievements, like those of prior liberalisms, have the overwhelming support of the American people. As Walter Russell Mead has argued, such liberalisms, while not reducible to each other, intersected in ways that together explain why each unfolded historically within something recognizable as an American moral consensus. That consensus was strong enough to constitute, in Robert Bellah's felicitous phrase, a kind of "civil religion." Requiring both the free exercise and the non-establishment of religion strictly speaking, the old consensus could itself be called 'liberal' in a broad and now-hoary sense. But since the 1970s, it's been unravelling along with the mainline Protestantism that had been its traditional custodian. The result is what I call The Thing that Used to Be Liberalism ('TUBL' for short; with thanks to Mark Shea, who likes referring to "The Thing that Used to Be Conservatism."). As I shall illustrate, TUBL is now out of control.<br />
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For that reason, the label 'liberalism', like 'feminism', has become a net political negative. Contemporary liberals and feminists accordingly prefer to eschew those labels in favor of 'progressive', sounding such rhetorically effective themes as "equal rights" and "fairness." And by its very nature, TUBL is hard to pin down philosophically. The main purpose of this post is to show how and explain why.<br />
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It is not news to conservatives that, on matters of domestic policy, today's "liberals" are actually authoritarian about everything except sex. On that score, they are as <i>laissez-faire</i> as can be. (E.g., it's become all but impossible to get them to see what's intrinsically wrong with incest and bestiality, apart from the "ick-factor" and the health risks involved. But hey, childbirth can be messy and dangerous too...) It's that discrepancy that's got out of control, and it's not so much liberal as hedonistic. Today's "liberals" want Nanny State to regulate every aspect of life except what goes on in our bedrooms, so that life is safe for the pursuit of a "happiness" understood as maximizing one's preferences consistently with others' maximizing theirs.<br />
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In such a scheme, complete sexual autonomy (within the bounds of a vaguely defined "mutual consent") is so important that marriage and family themselves are to be defined simply as what enough people want them to be. They can no longer be seen as having a form or nature prior to what civil law, as the expression of popular will, specifies. And now that all means of birth prevention are available to everybody, nobody should be expected to incur the natural consequence of ordinary intercourse or even cover the full cost of preventing it--unless, of course, one brings a child into the world anyhow, in which case one should be made to pay dearly, especially if one is the father, who might otherwise get off scot-free. But really, there's no reason why things should reach such a pass; if you're poor, they positively should not. Contraception, sterilization, and abortion are much cheaper than children, and if you're poor you'd better have recourse to them, because there's every reason to expect that you and your children, if any, will be net burdens to society (and to yourselves, for that matter). That expectation is not the only reason why "the right to choose" abortion is central to TUBL, but it is why the Obama Administration has decided to require, in the name of "women's health," religiously-sponsored institutions who object to contraception, sterilization, and abortifacient drugs to utilize health-insurance policies covering such things at no charge to the user. Planned Parenthood--which, needless to say, does not help people plan how they will actually parent--is the very embodiment of this mentality. In the bedroom we should all pursue our own vision of happiness, if need be at others' expense; outside the bedroom a <i>de facto</i> utilitarian calculus, enforced by state policy, should govern moral decision-making quite generally.<br />
<br />
Except when it shouldn't. I'm always amused when I hear Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton cite "universal values" against this-or-that foreign dictator. What makes them think that everybody <i>ought</i> to assign the same weight to certain values as they? The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Why is that more than a piece of paper whose appeal today is understandably weaker than when it was composed? The dignity of the human person? But where are we supposed to find a coherent and reasonable account of human dignity? In philosophy, a discipline whose practitioners cannot agree on whether it affords us knowledge of anything at all? In science, which is morally indifferent in itself? And if in religion, why should we find the deracinated, social-gospel Protestantism of Obama and Clinton more rationally cogent than other forms of religion?<br />
<br />
Even John Rawls, whose work has dogged philosophy graduate students for several generations now, admitted late in life that his vision of the ideal polity logically depended on a "comprehensive world view" he could not justify by reason alone. Many writers have indeed argued that secular liberalism is just living off the moral capital of the Judaeo-Christian tradition it's largely repudiated. As a more honest and radical sort of liberal, the late Richard Rorty knew that and admitted it, while rejecting not only Christianity but the very notion of what he called "Truth-capital-T." All that the acolytes of TUBL seem sure of, beyond the paramount importance of sexual autonomy, is that being an accredited "victim" gives one a special moral claim on one's "oppressors," who in most narratives are white, male, and Christian--a class which, by definition, cannot be victimized, because it represents everything about the past that victims are, and the rest of us should be, rebelling against. But that stance is just self-deconstructed Judaeo-Christianity. I postpone exploration of how the sense of sexual entitlement relates to that of victim-entitlement.<br />
<br />
In any case, lust and sentimentality are not enough to explain what's going on here. Consider the following two, rather typical examples of TUBL thought.<br />
<br />
Last fall, when the HHS contraception mandate for health insurers was drafted, Francis Beckwith <a href="http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/president-obama-ex-liberal.html">argued</a> that President Obama had thereby abandoned the liberalism he had embraced in speeches given in 2006 and 2009. Thus:<br />
<blockquote>
What one finds in these speeches are prescriptions for public discourse derived from a widely held understanding of liberalism that is often and correctly attributed to the late Harvard philosopher John Rawls. What the president is saying is that if you want to restrict another’s fundamental liberty based on reasons that those coerced would be reasonable in rejecting, your coercion is unjustified, even if it is not unreasonable for you to embrace those reasons for yourself.</blockquote>
That sounded reasonable enough at Notre Dame, when the President accepted his honorary JD by gamely defending the "pro-choice" position in essentially Rawlsian terms. But the new mandate abandons Rawlsian liberalism by defining 'religious organization', for purposes of granting "religious exemptions" from the rule, as follows:<br />
<blockquote>
(1) The inculcation of religious values is the purpose of the organization.<br />
(2) The organization primarily employs persons who share the religious tenets of the organization.<br />
(3) The organization serves primarily persons who share the religious tenets of the organization.<br />
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So, according to the U. S. government, a Catholic hospital, university, or charitable organization that believes its purpose is to actualize the moral commandments of Christ, to love its pre- and post-natal Catholic and non-Catholic neighbors as it loves itself, and to do so by welcoming with open arms all in need of its services, has ceased to be Catholic. The absurdity of this is palpable.</blockquote>
But here's the kicker. Not only does that absurdity, just by being absurd, abandon Obama's earlier espousal of Rawlsian liberalism; it contradicts his own current, stated understanding of the mission of religion in society! Recounting Obama's message at the National Prayer Breakfast not ten days ago, Charles Krauthammer <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/290699/gospel-according-obama-charles-krauthammer">points out</a>: "To flatter his faith-breakfast guests and justify his tax policies, Obama declares good works to be the essence of religiosity. Yet he turns around and, through [HHS Secretary Kathleen] Sebelius, tells the faithful who engage in good works that what they’re doing is not religion at all."<br />
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Is such obvious inconsistency a sign of insincerity? Many would presume as much. But I think it more likely that Obama just doesn't see the inconsistency. Why not? Because he's "in the grip of a theory": TUBL. Thus one should not impose on people what they could reasonably reject, unless what's at issue is sexual autonomy, which is not just eminently reasonable but also, on utilitarian grounds, important enough to warrant full subsidy. If the religiously retrograde don't see that, then their "conscience" is so irrational as to be unworthy of consideration, save when giving lip service to it is politically unavoidable. Those in the grip of TUBL see nothing untoward about pretending to be Rawlsian when it suits them and dropping the pretense when it no longer suits them. Nothing must be allowed to get in the way of sexual autonomy.<br />
<br />
Among so many I could pick, another example of TUBL run amok was brought to my attention by <a href="http://www.whatswrongwiththeworld.net/author.php?author_id=3" target="_blank">Paul Cella</a>.<br />
<br />
In his new book <i>Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960 - 2010</i>, Charles Murray makes the following observation:<br />
<blockquote>
Data can bear on policy issues, but many of our opinions about policy are grounded on premises about the nature of human life and human society that are beyond the reach of data. Try to think of any new data that would change your position on abortion, the death penalty, legalization of marijuana, same-sex marriage or the inheritance tax. If you cannot, you are not necessarily being unreasonable.</blockquote>
To be sure, Murray is not in the grip of TUBL. And by 'data', he seems to mean the results of scientific research. If so, I should think that new data could be quite relevant to the questions whether marijuana should be legalized and when the death penalty could be justified. But no amount of new data would change my mind about abortion and same-sex marriage. New data cannot affect the questions whether the fetus qualifies as a person and whether same-sex "marriage" qualifies as marriage. Both are essentially philosophical and theological questions for which the pertinent empirical data are already to hand.<br />
<br />
But last week, a correspondent for <i>The Economist</i> who signs him- or herself as 'W.W.' <a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/02/empiricism-politics">blogged thus</a> about the Murray passage:<br />
<blockquote>
I found this exceedingly odd. I can easily imagine what evidence would cause me to change my position on any of these issues....Abortion is far and away the hardest one. <b>I favour legal abortion. I don't think embryos or fetuses are persons, and I don't think it's wrong to kill them. I also don't think infants are persons, but I do think laws that prohibit infanticide are wise.</b> Birth is a metaphysically arbitrary line, but it's a supremely salient socio-psychological one. A general abhorrence of the taking of human life is something any healthy culture will inculcate in its members. It's easier to cultivate the appropriate moral sentiments within a society that has adopted the convention of conferring robust moral rights on infants upon birth than it would be in a society that had adopted the convention of conferring the same rights on children only after they've reached some significant developmental milestone, such as the onset of intelligible speech. The latter society, I suspect, would tend to be more generally cruel and less humane. This is just an empirical hunch, though I feel fairly confident about it. But I could be wrong. And I could be wrong in the other direction as well. If it were shown that societies which ban abortion, or which ban abortion beyond a certain point, exceed societies which don't ban abortion in cultivating a "culture of life", which pays off in terms of greater general humanity and diminished cruelty, I would seriously weigh this moral benefit against the moral cost of reducing women's control over their bodies. Also, if it were shown that abortion tended to damage women's mental and physical health more than forcing women to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, I would tend to look more favourably on restrictions on abortion, especially for minors. [Emphasis added]</blockquote>
Now at first I found that passage as "exceedingly odd" as WW finds Murray's. WW never tells us why he doesn't think either fetuses or infants are "persons," but there's nothing to suggest that he finds the very <i>concept</i> of personhood open to revision by new scientific research. Whatever his concept--and I have a fairly good suspicion as to what it is--it's a philosophical one that's "underdetermined" by the data, which only matter for helping determine which entities actually fall under the concept. (I wouldn't be surprised if WW thinks, with Peter Singer, that adult dolphins make it while human babies don't.)<br />
<br />
But even odder than such inadvertence is how WW simply takes for granted a particular view about the nature and basis of moral obligation. He thinks, e.g., that "society" can and should have essentially utilitarian reasons for having "adopted the convention of conferring robust moral rights on infants," who cannot be thought merit such rights by nature. But on WW's own showing, such reasons could conceivably be overturned by new data suggesting, somehow, that we'd all be better off for dropping that convention. And the question what counts as "better" cannot be answered, even in principle, by citing anything we <i>should</i> value as distinct from what we actually <i>do</i> value. What's better is simply what's apt to yield what "society" wants. But there's no transcendent criterion for assessing what society--ours or any other--wants. Ultimately, moral reasoning consists in discovering and prescribing the policies likeliest to yield what we want. "Ought" is always hypothetical, never categorical. And so, as Hume put it, reason is and ought to be "the slave of the passions."<br />
<br />
The question for the WWs of the world is this: Are there, or are there not, "data" that could determine whether that's the correct view of moral obligation? WW doesn't seem to have considered the question, but those in the grip of TUBL would reject it. It's supposed to be self-evident that freely pursuing the maximization of preferences--whatever they are--is the best we can do, and there can be no obligation higher than, or inconsistent with, the best we can do. Such is the ideal of the radical autonomy of the imperial self. The only admissible limits on such autonomy are those which are necessary in practice for collective preference-maximization. Those turn out to be considerable, of course, which is why TUBL is rather authoritarian. Except about sex.<br />
<br />
What makes TUBL so hard to pin down is that it combines sexual libertinism, which is distinctly not Judaeo-Christian, with a statism that's supposedly required for helping the unfortunate. As deconstructed Judaeo-Christianity, the latter requires a discipline and moral earnestness that are otherwise undermined by sexual libertinism and the calculus of preference-maximization generally. Since that combination is ultimately unsustainable, both theoretically and practically, the most fervent prescription of TUBL is to help the poor and the otherwise disadvantaged get rid of themselves by every means of birth prevention. Any amount of philosophical incoherence is accepted for the sake of implementing that prescription. We're only seeing the earliest stages.<br />
<br /></div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!--
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Even some liberals wonder what Obama's been thinking with this HHS contraception mandate. So I'll lay it out simply.<br />
<br />
When a church-sponsored organization provides "social services," that's good religion. When the church in question forbids abortion, contraception, and sterilization, that's bad religion. But we don't want to discriminate between types of religiosity. So we just say that church-sponsored organizations that do both good religion and bad religion aren't religious.<br />
<br />
Simple, isn't it? But if you want to understand the contradiction thus resolved, go <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/290699/gospel-according-obama-charles-krauthammer" target="_blank">here</a>.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!--
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A shibboleth of modern Anglo-American philosophy is a belief to the effect that "one cannot infer an ought-statement from an is-statement." The first explicit formulation of and argument for that occurs in Hume's <i>Treatise on Human Nature</i>, but there's <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume-moral/#io" target="_blank">much controversy</a> about how to interpret the relevant passages. So it's not always clear what the statement is supposed to mean, whether it's true on this-or-that construal, or even what the argument for it should be. "No ought from is" just seems to be one of those slogans that entrenches itself in the mind of philosophers when they're young, so that the corresponding, deceptively clear dogma rarely suffers critical scrutiny. Taken seriously, it runs counter to moral philosophies that are both cognitivist and non-utilitarian.<br />
<br />
But the matter does get critical scrutiny from time to time, such as in a <a href="http://alexanderpruss.blogspot.com/2012/02/inferring-from.html" target="_blank">post</a> I've just come across from Catholic philosopher Alexander Pruss of Baylor University. Pruss uses his blog to germinate and sketch philosophical ideas, with which he positively teems. Here, the general thesis is that "We have <i>prima facie </i>reason to conclude from the fact that something ought to be so that it is so." If that thesis can be further developed, disseminated, and defended, it would go a long way to removing what I consider a major obstacle to doing sound moral philosophy.<br />
<br />
It seems to me that Pruss' argument is valid, or can be made so on suitable restatement. What interests me is what his thesis, if true, says about philosophical argumentation generally. To say that one has "<i>prima facie</i> reason" to infer such-and-such is, I take it, to say that one is within one's epistemic rights to infer such-and-such unless a clear defeater is known. I'm uneasy about non-demonstrative arguments of that sort, for their conclusions are of interest less for learning what is the case than in learning what we have justification for believing is the case. It is possible to be justified in believing something that is not actually so, if one lacks grounds for inferring that it isn't so. But the interest of that lies more in its utility for defending one's intellectual virtue than in its utility for discovering facts.<br />
<br />
And yet, Pruss' ambitions for this thesis are apparently bigger than that. Thus he muses: "It is an interesting question whether the is-from-ought inference is at all plausible apart from a view like theism or Plato's Platonism on which the world is ultimately explanatorily governed by values. There may be an argument for theism (or Plato's Platonism!) here." If that musing turns out to be true, then the truth of the original thesis would itself serve as a premise in an argument for the existence of God, as well as removing a major <i>de facto</i> obstacle to natural-law and virtue theory in ethics.<br />
<br />
I need to think about this more. Do any readers have thoughts in the meantime?<br />
<br /></div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!--
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<br />
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<a href="http://www.eggertattorney.com/Portals/13/Images/Custody.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="212" src="http://www.eggertattorney.com/Portals/13/Images/Custody.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
The conclusion of new mega-meta-study, cited at the blog of Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse's Ruth Institute, is summed up by William West:<br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #555555; font-family: Verdana, 'BitStream vera Sans', Tahoma, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17px; text-align: -webkit-auto;"><br />A new study on divorce, looking at the complete spectrum of research on the subject, confirms what most people already know – even if they are not willing to admit it: divorce causes “irreparable harm” to the whole family, but particularly to the children. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #555555; font-family: Verdana, 'BitStream vera Sans', Tahoma, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17px; text-align: -webkit-auto;">There have been plenty of individual studies exposing one or more effects of divorce, but rarely do researchers give an overview of the findings to date – and it makes disturbing reading.</span></div>
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Read the rest <a href="http://www.ruthblog.org/2012/02/06/how-divorce-ruins-children%E2%80%99s-lives/" target="_blank">here</a>.<br />
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The topic named in my title is one that I've written about before, for<a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tiL3Iw5c4rC3WmqFVGGlnO1NquLNR06uA2kkZZK5zCM/edit?hl=en_US" target="_blank"> an academic journal</a>, on <a href="http://mliccione.blogspot.com/2005/06/robinson-blosser-debate-on-divine.html" target="_blank">this blog,</a> and in the course of combox defenses of Catholic doctrine. At his blog <a href="http://thomism.wordpress.com/2012/02/03/divine-simplicity-and-freedom/#comment-7963" target="_blank">Just Thomism</a>, philosopher James Chastek offers a new insight and a new mistake about the relationship between divine simplicity and divine freedom.<br />
<br />
The insight is that God's freedom is not that of "indetermination," which is the sort we have <i>in via </i>and, to a lesser extent, even <i>in patria. </i>That's because<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: #ffffe3; font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode', Tahoma, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17px;">If we consider the indetermination of the freedom so far as it does not possess some determinate good, then freedom is not a perfection or a good. The lack of good is not a good. So far as we take freedom in this way, we don’t call God free; and so far as freedom is taken as a perfection, and therefore said of God, we throw out the idea of indetermination-in-the-sense-of lacking-good and keep only the more central perfection (say, self- possession, or being the Lord of ones action.) We might even keep the idea of indetermination so far as we mean that God’s action is not forced by another, or so far as he is responsible for it.</span></blockquote>
Quite so. But orthodox theology affirms that God is free in some sense. So Chastek says:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: #ffffe3; font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode', Tahoma, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17px;">Again, the divine freedom, so far as there is a thing, cannot be defined without bringing in the notion of creation.</span><a href="http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1041.htm#article2" style="background-color: #ffffe3; color: #b26a16; font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode', Tahoma, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17px; text-decoration: none;"> The Son, for example, does not proceed from the Father’s will</a><span style="background-color: #ffffe3; font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode', Tahoma, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17px;">, but if this is the case, the divine freedom cannot be defined without relation to the imperfection of creation, and divine freedom is not taken as an absolute perfection, as though the possibility of freedom would remain if the imperfect (that is, creation) were not possible.</span></blockquote>
Now God needn't have created, yet would have been fully free if he had not. Chastek knows that, which why he says that divine freedom entails only the "possibility" of "imperfection,"—a possibility which, given God's absolute perfection, is logically equivalent to the possibility of creation. So God is free just in case he can produce something imperfect, i.e., not fully determined, whether or not he actually does so. And of course, the fact that he has actually done so doesn't make him any more, or less, free.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
From the standpoint of natural theology alone, that argument seems attractive. But even at that level, there's a Thomistic worry: since God cannot stand in a "real relation" to actual creation, it isn't even meaningful to say that he stands in a real relation to the possibility of creation, such that one of his essential attributes depends on that relation. That difficulty might be overcome with felicitous distinctions; but from the standpoint of Christian revelation, Chastek's argument surely contains a false premise, namely that God <i>in se,</i> being fully perfect and thus fully determinate, would lack freedom unless he were able to bring about imperfection <i>ad extra.</i></div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
Although the coming-forth of the Son and the Holy Spirit from the Father is by natural necessity, not by a choice that could have been otherwise, the love shared by the Persons with each other must in <i>some</i> sense arise from free choice, else it would not be love. One might say that such freedom is only the absence of coercion; but then it would be very hard to explain why natural necessity relevantly differs from absence of coercion.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
To make such a criticism stick, I needn't give an account of just <i>how</i> the Persons love each other with free choice. I claim no special insight into the inner life of the Trinity, and neither should anybody else reading this. But I do know that our capacities are but faint analogies of God's, and that for us, love entails freedom of the will. It must entail at least that within the Godhead, prescinding from the question of creation.</div>
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<br /></div>
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<i><b>Given recent events, I thought it worthwhile to re-issue this three-year-old post and ask for opinions from thoughtful Catholics.</b></i><br />
<br />
Everybody knows—OK, almost everybody who reads this blog—that the American bishops lack a unitary policy about giving the Eucharist to Catholics who reject and/or disobey the definitive teaching of the Church. For even better-known reasons, that fact always comes to the fore in a general election. Now that Senator Joe Biden, a Catholic who is as pro-abortion-rights as he is <a href="http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/roberts/080826">anti-men's-rights</a>, has "ascended to Barack Obama's right hand," the issue has resurfaced. As always, <a href="http://ncrcafe.org/node/2064">John Allen</a> has instructive things to say. But the recurrence of this familiar issue in the news cycle has prompted me to connect it with another, broader one that tends to interest readers of this blog even more.<br />
<br />
Like so many other such issues, the one I have in mind is ecclesiological: just what does being "in communion" with the Catholic Church consist in? What are the necessary and sufficient conditions? How and when are they met? And how, short of juridical excommunication, does a Catholic get herself out of communion with the Church? I once thought that debating such questions was just an arcane theological exercise, the sort that occupies people who don't have to worry about mere temporalities such as earning a living or changing diapers. But in fact it is anything but. The questions that arise here affect us all on the personal, pastoral, and political levels, which are intertwined in many ways. The issue is also very much an apologetical one. Since I can't do everything in one post, I shall focus on the issue mainly from that angle.<br />
<br />
One thing that I've consistently observed since Vatican II is that many people, Catholics as much as non-Catholics, have the impression the Church's teaching on membership in the Church is, or rather has become, incoherent. It is widely believed that the Church once taught that you had to be what we'd now call a "card-carrying Catholic" to be saved—and even for those people, the prospects were pretty dicey. Being such a Catholic entailed being "in communion with" the Church of Rome. But having been exposed to Vatican II and ecumenism, many people now believe that the Church no longer teaches that. The general impression seems to be that the Church now teaches that you can squeak into heaven, perhaps by way of purgatory, just by avoiding the grossest and blackest forms of wickedness and being vaguely contrite, in the end, about one's preferred forms of wickedness—or at least about those which one has managed to recognize as such. From this point of view it hardly matters what religion you profess, or even whether you profess any at all.<br />
<br />
Of course the above is a caricature I've devised for expository clarity. But it is not a terribly unfair caricature of how many people see these things. It is actually a reasonable summation of what I've been hearing for decades. And how such people see these things is not only wrong but terribly unfair to the Catholic Church, whose teaching on this subject is profound, nuanced, and still developing. Explaining why will help illustrate what being "in communion" with, and thus a member of, the Church actually means—and why that is important.<br />
<br />
It is true that the Catholic Church has taught, with her full authority, the doctrine <span style="font-style: italic;">extra ecclesiam nulla salus: </span>"outside the Church, there is no salvation" ('EENS' for short). For people who care about such facts, I don't even need to document that. It is also true that Vatican II did not repeat the words of EENS, at least as a pastoral matter. For what the Council did say, I always urge people to read the documents, especially <a href="http://tinyurl.com/3wxff"><span style="font-style: italic;">Lumen Gentium</span></a> and <span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://tinyurl.com/3xnyh">Unitatis Redintegratio</a>. </span>But for now, here are the three most pertinent statements (emphases added):<br />
<br />
<span style="color: #660000;">Basing itself upon Sacred Scripture and Tradition, [this sacred Council] teaches that <span style="font-weight: bold;">the Church</span>, now sojourning on earth as an exile, <span style="font-weight: bold;">is necessary for salvation </span>(LG §13).</span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #660000;">Even in the beginnings of this one and only Church of God there arose certain rifts,(19) which the Apostle strongly condemned.(20) But in subsequent centuries much more serious dissensions made their appearance and quite large communities came to be separated from full communion with the Catholic Church-for which, often enough, men of both sides were to blame. The children who are born into these Communities and who grow up believing in Christ cannot be accused of the sin involved in the separation, and the Catholic Church embraces upon them as brothers, with respect and affection. For <span style="font-weight: bold;">men who believe in Christ and have been truly baptized are in communion with the Catholic Church even though this communion is imperfect</span> (UR §3).</span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Those also can attain to salvation who through no fault of their own do not know the Gospel of Christ or His Church</span>, yet sincerely seek God and moved by grace strive by their deeds to do His will as it is known to them through the dictates of conscience (LG </span><span style="color: #660000;">§</span><span style="color: #660000;">16).</span><br />
<br />
The key development of doctrine here is this: those who are, for whatever reason, <span style="font-style: italic;">not culpable </span>for failing to become formally members of the Catholic Church, can still be saved by responding positively to that grace, won by and coming from Christ, which is given to humanity in and through the Church, i.e. the Catholic Church. (The <span style="font-style: italic;">Catechism of the Catholic Church's </span><a href="http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p123a9p3.htm#845">explanation</a> of EENS helps to make that clear.) The people so described are thus in <span style="font-style: italic;">"imperfect" communion with the Church.</span> Being "in communion with" the Catholic Church thus is, or often can be, a matter of degree—just as the journey of the "pilgrim Church" herself toward eschatological fullness is a matter of degree. And if you are objectively inculpable for that degree's not being full, then you're "in," at least to a degree that can enable your salvation.<br />
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That matters a lot for ordinary pastoral practice, evangelization, and missionary activity—for only God can really know who is culpable and who isn't. But the idea of imperfect communion remains very controversial in some quarters, probably because it is so widely misunderstood.<br />
<br />
It is often taken to mean that EENS has been, at least from the standpoint of logic, repudiated by the Catholic Magisterium. Of course I have vigorously argued that EENS has not been thus repudiated. My first formal argument to that effect was made in a 2006 post at the now-defunct version of <a href="http://pontifications.wordpress.com/">Pontifications</a>, where it evoked a combox running to well over 300 entries, many of which were scholarly. That post is preserved as the first dogma-specific entry in my long essay <a href="http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dd2cg4kp_4398xnd">Development and Negation</a>. The point the naysayers couldn't (or, in some cases, wouldn't) see was itself simple: it is one thing to say that there's no salvation <span style="font-style: italic;">outside</span> the Church; it's another to say what being <span style="font-style: italic;">inside</span> the Church can consist in. The former claim remains the teaching of the Church, now expressed by LG's formulation that she is "necessary for salvation." But the latter claim is that <span style="font-style: italic;">being in the Church, or at least being related to her in a salvific way, is often a matter of degree.</span> That is a real development of insight into the fixed content of the deposit of faith.<br />
<br />
What most interests me at the moment, however, is not how <span style="font-style: italic;">non-</span>Catholics can be in <span style="font-style: italic;">some</span> degree of communion with the Church, but how <span style="font-style: italic;">Catholics</span> themselves can fail to in <span style="font-style: italic;">full</span> communion—and why that matters.<br />
<br />
The Eucharist is, among many other things, an expression of the intimate unity between God and his people, between Christ and the Church. As such and perforce, it is also an expression of the full unity of faith and graced fellowship among those who share it. So even American Catholics are taught, <a href="http://www.usccb.org/dpp/Eucharist.pdf">rightly and in considerable detail</a>, that if they have sinned seriously in this-or-that way, they would be profaning the Eucharist by receiving it. That is because it is held, on the basis of Scripture and Tradition, that those who have abandoned their baptismal vocation by falling into mortal sin are no longer in full communion with the Church, and thus would be lying to the Church, and well as dishonoring the Body and Blood of the Lord, by receiving it into their bodies. Those who receive "unworthily" thus receive "unto their own condemnation" (cf. <span style="font-style: italic;">1 Cor</span> 11: 23-30). If they are thus <span style="font-style: italic;">and culpably</span> not in full communion with the Church, they can be saved only if they repent. So much used to be taken for granted by Catholics in general, and still is in some quarters. Most Catholics know that, if they have committed sins such as adultery or grand larceny, they need to do something to reconcile with God and the Church.<br />
<br />
Now even Catholics who only <span style="font-style: italic;">formally cooperate </span>with grave and intrinsic evils, such as abortion, are <a href="http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/apr/050419a.html">committing what is, objectively speaking, serious sin</a>. Hence and in particular, Catholic politicians who support laws giving wide scope to the practice of abortion are doing grave wrong. But it does not necessarily follow that they are <span style="font-style: italic;">guilty</span> of that sin, so that they profane the Eucharist if and when they receive it. That follows only when (a) they are aware of how the teaching of the Church applies in this case, or (b) if they are unaware, they are culpable for being unaware. And the same holds for Catholics in general about any sort of serious sin, especially that of heresy. This is where the problem of pro-abort Catholic pols really arises from.<br />
<br />
On a whole host of issues, mainly those having to do with sexuality, marriage, and procreation, many American Catholics do not actually believe the definitive teaching of the Church. And so, of course, they feel no obligation to live by it. The Catholic politicians they help elect are, by and large, no exception. The practical question which thus arises for the Church's pastors, especially the bishops, is whether such people should be presumed culpable for that or not, and thus whether they should be denied the Eucharist or not. In most cases, bishops and priests presume that people are not culpable for their infidelity to Church teaching. They presume either that people are approaching the Eucharist in good conscience or that it is not the role of pastors to judge the consciences of communicants when they march up to receive. And in the case of many ordinary Catholics, that presumption is correct. The depth of ignorance and deception among ordinary Catholics, which reached new lows in the decade or so after Vatican II, remains so great in many instances that such Catholics cannot be presumed culpable when, out of habit and sentiment, they receive the Eucharist. And so, even when such a Catholic is <span style="font-style: italic;">objectively </span>culpable for <span style="font-style: italic;">not</span> being in full communion with the Church, the <span style="font-style: italic;">appearance</span> of full communion on their part is generally kept up.<br />
<br />
Nevertheless, that poses a serious obstacle to evangelizing both ignorant Catholics and the culture at large. If, for what seem to be sound pastoral reasons, many Catholics who neither believe nor live by the moral teaching of the Church are receiving the Eucharist with apparent impunity, then how seriously are ordinary Catholics and the world at large to take such teaching? The general impression has become that such teaching is optional: a rather dismal section of the cafeteria line that one is free to bypass and that will, sooner or later, be tossed along with all the other food nobody buys. Thus <span style="font-style: italic;">the policy of keeping up appearances for the sake of pastoral economy has the effect of entrenching, on a wide scale, the very problem that occasioned the policy in the first place.</span> And so, the preaching of the full Gospel has been largely buried under a collective rationalization. That, I am convinced, is the basis of most of the other problems in the American Catholic Church, including the sex-abuse-and-coverup scandal that peaked five years ago. I blame the bishops for the fundamental problem as much as for its most egregious manifestation.<br />
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It can be argued that, given the sorry lack of adult catechesis, there is no practical alternative to the present policy of keeping up the appearance of full communion in the case of Catholics who are objectively not in full communion. That's what many bishops do argue, and the argument is cogent. One cannot just pick out, and pick on, the ordinary Catholics who are implicated in this mess. Most of them are not morally responsible for it, nor is it their role to clean it up. But one can and ought to pick out and pick on erring Catholics who have the education to know better <span style="font-style: italic;">and</span> the power to affect a great many lives by their actions. I mean, of course, the Nancy Pelosis and the Joe Bidens. Archbishop Chaput has had some <a href="http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/new.php?n=13625">especially trenchant things</a> to say about such people. If they have excuses, they shouldn't be left with them. Too much is at stake.<br />
<br />
But there is a still-more fundamental problem here. Having acknowledged and taken into account the reality of imperfect communion for many non-Catholics, Rome must do the same for many Catholics, if only for self-consistency's sake. If she does so, as she has done for decades, she only reinforces the Church's internal problem for the reason I've already stated. If she does not, she becomes pastorally inconsistent: ecumenism will apply only to those who were never formally Catholic, so that we'll end up with a much smaller, if purer, Church. The Pope seems headed, slowly, in the latter direction. How he and his successors will carry on with it remains, however, an open question. In the meantime, the American bishops continue to disagree about how to handle the Pelosis and the Bidens. Maybe that's inevitable.<br />
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Either way, they should be more concerned with the formation of ordinary Catholic adults. Almost a decade ago, the USCCB produced <a href="http://bit.ly/x4vCi9" target="_blank">a bracing document </a>which points the way. Little has been done to implement it. I'm waiting with my resumé in hand.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!--
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<a href="http://catholiclane.com/have-we-forgotten-about-satan/" target="_blank">By my fellow Dominican layman, Michael Seagriff</a>.</div>
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For the ever-growing majority without a classical education, my allusion to Scylla and Charybdis can be understood well enough with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scylla_and_Charybdis">the Wikipedia background</a>. Suffice it to say that, although those twin dangers often loom in theology, they can and should be avoided. They often appear under different pairs of names. One such is "fundamentalism and modernism," about which I've written <a href="http://mliccione.blogspot.com/2007/09/between-fundamentalism-and-modernism.html">before</a> and will again. We must and can steer between the Scylla of fundamentalism and the Charybdis of modernism. Another S/C pair is common, for pretty much the same reasons: <i>rationalism</i> and <i>fideism.</i> Adherence to either only runs faith aground.<br />
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How rationalism runs faith aground is easy enough to understand. If the only admissible religious beliefs are those which can be established or otherwise secured by human reason, then there is no room for the unmerited, freely accepted gift of divine faith. Nor is there any room for the object of such faith: divine revelation. For such revelation supplies us, among other things, with truths that cannot be established or otherwise secured by natural reason; but ruling out divine faith entails ruling out recognizing, and trusting, any religious authority as the conveyor of divine revelation. Religion thus reduces to a matter of opinion—for there are no methods of proof that even religionists agree on. That was pretty much the view of Thomas Jefferson and of many others influenced by the Enlightenment. It is still the view of many philosophers today.<br />
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At the same time, fideism has undergone something of a renaissance among unbelievers as well as believers. Fideism is the view that religion, and with it divine faith, has nothing to do with reason, in the sense that "reasons" for having faith are as unnecessary as they are insufficient. The most common reason some believers end up as fideists is their conviction that the ultimate object of divine faith, God, so far transcends our reasoning capacities that rational criteria cannot be used to assess beliefs about God. Such beliefs are thus seen as insulated from rational criticism, which in its turn is seen as either ignorance or blasphemy. Most Sunni Muslims, and not a few Protestant and Orthodox Christians, are fideists in such a way. But to those of a scientific or otherwise critical bent, fideism can itself count as a reason against religious belief. For if religion is held to have nothing to do with reason, so that no particular religious belief can or should be subjected to rational scrutiny, then religion itself appears as positively <i>irrational. </i>And a cognitive stance that's irrational is not worthy of rational credence. Thus can rationalism and fideism, like so many pairs of extreme ideas, converge in similar attitudes.<br />
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To me, it seems almost self-evident that fideism, every bit as much as rationalism, is incompatible with divine faith. If rational criteria are not applicable to religious beliefs, then the fideist can only see the content of such beliefs as established arbitrarily by the absolute will of God. But such radical voluntarism empties the transcendental concepts of truth and goodness of all intrinsic content, and thus of all intrinsic meaning. It reduces religion to the blind worship of power. Some may find that prudent, but it hardly even makes sense to call it admirable.<br />
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The only way to steer between Scylla and Charybdis here is to insist, like such thinkers as Thomas Aquinas, both that divine faith cannot be established by human reason and that such faith must all the same be a reasonable choice. "Reasons", called "motives of credibility" in traditional apologetics, thus render divine faith rationally <i>intelligible </i>but not rationally <i>necessitated. </i>Such faith matches creation, for creation itself is rationally intelligible yet not rationally necessitated. Both faith and creation are thus mysteries in a positive sense—mysteries that will never be entirely dissipated when we see God face to face.<br />
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