The Lady Militant

No, I don't mean Sarah Palin, though I would enjoy applying that theme to her. I mean the Mother of God.

Today is the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, instituted by Pope Pius V in thanksgiving to Mary for the victory of the Catholic fleet over the Turks at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. All that victory did was save Western Christendom from conquest by the Ottoman Empire, which had extirpated the Byzantine Empire in the previous century. I have said my rosary today for victory over the culture of death in the West, which is a much bigger killer today than Muslim terrorists. Our Lady of Medjugorje is reported to say that the Rosary is the only way to defeat Satan.

Prof. Ralph McInerny says that the young should memorize GK Chesterton's poem Lepanto. For the convenience of the young of all ages, I present its full text here:

White founts falling in the courts of the sun,
And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run;
There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared,
It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard,
It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips,
For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships.
They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy,
They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea,
And the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and loss,
And called the kings of Christendom for swords about the Cross,
The cold queen of England is looking in the glass;
The shadow of the Valois is yawning at the Mass;
From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish gun,
And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.

Dim drums throbbing, in the hills half heard,
Where only on a nameless throne a crownless prince has stirred,
Where, risen from a doubtful seat and half-attainted stall,
The last knight of Europe takes weapons from the wall,
The last and lingering troubadour to whom the bird has sung,
That once went singing southward when all the world was young.
In that enormous silence, tiny and unafraid,
Comes up along a winding road the noise of the Crusade.
Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far,
Don John of Austria is going to the war,
Stiff flags straining in the night-blasts cold
In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold,
Torchlight crimson on the copper kettle-drums,
Then the tuckets, then the trumpets, then the cannon, and he comes.
Don John laughing in the brave beard curled,
Spurning of his stirrups like the thrones of all the world,
Holding his head up for a flag of all the free.
Love-light of Spain - hurrah!
Death-light of Africa!
Don John of Austria
Is riding to the sea.

Mahound is in his paradise above the evening star,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
He moves a mighty turban on the timeless houri's knees,
His turban that is woven of the sunset and the seas.
He shakes the peacock gardens as he rises from his ease,
And he strides among the tree-tops and is taller than the trees,
And his voice through all the garden is a thunder sent to bring
Black Azrael and Ariel and Ammon on the wing.
Giants and the Genii,
Multiplex of wing and eye,
Whose strong obedience broke the sky
When Solomon was king.

They rush in red and purple from the red clouds of the morn,
From temples where the yellow gods shut up their eyes in scorn;
They rise in green robes roaring from the green hells of the sea
Where fallen skies and evil hues and eyeless creatures be;
On them the sea-valves cluster and the grey sea-forests curl,
Splashed with a splendid sickness, the sickness of the pearl;
They swell in sapphire smoke out of the blue cracks of the ground, -
They gather and they wonder and give worship to Mahound.
And he saith, "Break up the mountains where the hermit-folk may hide,
And sift the red and silver sands lest bone of saint abide,
And chase the Giaours flying night and day, not giving rest,
For that which was our trouble comes again out of the west.
We have set the seal of Solomon on all things under sun,
Of knowledge and of sorrow and endurance of things done,
But a noise is in the mountains, in the mountains, and I know
The voice that shook our palaces - four hundred years ago:
It is he that saith not 'Kismet'; it is he that knows not Fate;
It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey in the gate!
It is he whose loss is laughter when he counts the wager worth,
Put down your feet upon him, that our peace be on the earth."
For he heard drums groaning and he heard guns jar,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
Sudden and still - hurrah!
Bolt from Iberia!
Don John of Austria
Is gone by Alcalar.

St. Michael's on his Mountain in the sea-roads of the north
(Don John of Austria is girt and going forth.)
Where the grey seas glitter and the sharp tides shift
And the sea-folk labour and the red sails lift.
He shakes his lance of iron and he claps his wings of stone;
The noise is gone through Normandy; the noise is gone alone;
The North is full of tangled things and texts and aching eyes
And dead is all the innocence of anger and surprise,
And Christian killeth Christian in a narrow dusty room,
And Christian dreadeth Christ that bath a newer face of doom,
And Christian hateth Mary that God kissed in Galilee,
But Don John of Austria is riding to the sea.
Don John calling through the blast and the eclipse
Crying with the trumpet, with the trumpet of his lips,
Trumpet that sayeth ha!
Domino gloria!
Don John of Austria
Is shouting to the ships.

King Philip's in his closet with the Fleece about his neck
(Don John of Austria is armed upon the deck.)
The walls are hung with velvet that is black and soft as sin,
And little dwarfs creep out of it and little dwarfs creep in.
He holds a crystal phial that has colours like the moon,
He touches, and it tingles, and he trembles very soon,
And his face is as a fungus of a leprous white and grey
Like plants in the high houses that are shuttered from the day,
And death is in the phial and the end of noble work,
But Don John of Austria has fired upon the Turk.
Don John's hunting, and his hounds have bayed -
Booms away past Italy the rumour of his raid.
Gun upon gun, ha! ha!
Gun upon gun, hurrah!
Don John of Austria
Has loosed the cannonade.

The Pope was in his chapel before day or battle broke,
(Don John of Austria is hidden in the smoke.)
The hidden room in a man's house where God sits all the year,
The secret window whence the world looks small and very dear.
He sees as in a mirror on the monstrous twilight sea
The crescent of his cruel ships whose name is mystery;
They fling great shadows foe-wards, making Cross and Castle dark,
They veil the plumed lions on the galleys of St. Mark;
And above the ships are palaces of brown, black-bearded chiefs,
And below the ships are prisons, where with multitudinous griefs,
Christian captives sick and sunless, all a labouring race repines
Like a race in sunken cities, like a nation in the mines.
They are lost like slaves that swat, and in the skies of morning hung
The stairways of the tallest gods when tyranny was young.

They are countless, voiceless, hopeless as those fallen or fleeing on
Before the high Kings' horses in the granite of Babylon.
And many a one grows witless in his quiet room in hell
Where a yellow face looks inward through the lattice of his cell,
And he finds his God forgotten, and he seeks no more a sign -
(But Don John of Austria has burst the battle-line!)
Don John pounding from the slaughter-painted poop,
Purpling all the ocean like a bloody pirate's sloop,
Scarlet running over on the silvers and the golds,
Breaking of the hatches up and bursting of the holds,
Thronging of the thousands up that labour under sea
White for bliss and blind for sun and stunned for liberty.
Vivat Hispania!
Domino Gloria!
Don John of Austria
Has set his people free!

Cervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath
(Don John of Austria rides homeward with a wreath.)
And he sees across a weary land a straggling road in Spain,
Up which a lean and foolish knight forever rides in vain,
And he smiles, but not as Sultans smile, and settles back the blade. . .

(But Don John of Austria rides home from the Crusade.)

- G.K. Chesterton

The Marian Papacy

I had meant to post this yesterday, the feast of Mary's birthday, but got rather full of myself writing about freedom. Still, I remain pleasantly surprised.

John Allen, of the National Catholic Reporter no less, has convinced me that Pope Benedict is consciously placing his papacy under the mantle of the Virgin, just as his predecessor did. Actions speak even louder than words. I doubt the Pope knows something that Tradition doesn't; but he sure knows something a lot of his theologian colleagues don't.

See this page for a good account of the feast. Meanwhile, I suspect Rome is catholicizing Mr. Allen, in spite of who signs his paycheck.

The Immaculate Conception: trying to be erenic

Several friends have called my attention to a pair of posts over at Eirenikon: one called "On Original Sin and the Immaculate Conception," the other "More on the Immaculate Conception in Eastern Orthodoxy." Well, they have my attention.

I like Eirenikon: its Orthodox "editor," to whom I shall refer as "EE" in deference to his wish for anonymity, openly states that his blog's purpose is "Orthodox-Catholic reconciliation." That makes EE almost as quixotic as I and certainly braver, considering the reaction he sometimes gets from his co-religionists. At any rate, the long combox to the first of the two aforementioned posts, a combox that took me nearly an hour to read, tends to confirm that impression. EE's support came from "the West" not "the East"—unsurprising given that the post consisted of a quotation from a Jesuit theologian. Of course that should be balanced by the quotation of which the second post mostly consists; from a Greek-Catholic scholar, it impressively presents evidence for old, established Eastern-Christian belief in the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception ('DIC' for short). EE invited refutation of said scholar's point, but did not really get one.

Of course the naysayers had already said their nays in the combox to the earlier post. In response to them, I offer again two old posts of mine: Freedom, evolution, and original sin, and Our "solitary boast". The best point of that might be to take some of the pressure off EE.

For the culture-war tactical manual

On this Feast of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, I just thought it appropriate to post this vignette from the pro-life front.

To dogmatize, or not to dogmatize

During May, the month of Mary, in which I intermittently return to the Rosary, I once again pondered addressing the question whether the papacy should define as dogma the doctrine that Mary is the "Mediatrix of all Graces" (MMAG). There's even an ongoing movement asking Rome to issue such a definition of the "fifth Marian dogma." Every May some Catholics in the blogosphere and other spheres renew that debate, one which is viewed with, at best, bemused tolerance by non-Catholic Christians. For those reasons and others I had thought better of returning to the topic myself. But now I see it addressed by a thoughtful Catholic calling himself "John Cassian" (JC), who has included in his post a reference to a post of mine that I should have thought was unrelated. Bringing out the relationship is of general interest.

Let me say at outset both the sense in which I believe MMAG to be true and why I am adamantly opposed to defining it as dogma. I believe it to be true because I believe it logically follows from doctrines which the Church has already taught irreformably. First, Mary is the Mother of God and Mother of the Church. She is Mother of God because she is the Mother of Jesus Christ, who is a divine person, namely God the Son; she is Mother of the Church (as Vatican II affirmed in Lumen Gentium Chapter VIII) primarily because the Church is the Mystical Body of her divine Son and secondarily because her loving intercession, precisely as Mother, continues on behalf of all God's people. Now all grace comes ultimately from God, inasmuch as grace in the primary sense of the term is God himself graciously communicating his life to us so that we become "partakers of the divine nature." And the Church is necessary for our reception of such grace, inasmuch as the divine life God offers to all humanity is extended in and through the Church, even when it manifests itself outside the visible boundaries of the Church. As Mother of both God and the Church, therefore, Mary is the "medium" in which divine grace, embodied by the person and won by the merits of Jesus Christ, is given to all humanity. Thus she is "mediatrix of all graces." In that sense, I believe, MMAG is true.

Nonetheless I am opposed to defining MMAG as dogma because I believe such a move would do more harm than good. On the one hand, that minority of Christians, mostly Catholics, who would understand and accept MMAG don't need such a definition in order to bolster their faith. On the other, if there were such a definition, it would be so widely misunderstood and rejected that ecumenical prospects across the board would be darkened. Far from settling any controversy troubling the Church, it would create controversy where none exists and none need exist. MMAG is an essentially mystical doctrine it might someday be opportune to define, by way of addressing those impulses and intimations which explain why some people seek "the sacred feminine." But I just can't see how that time would be now.

That was pretty much my own view of the MMAG movement before reading JC's post. He opposes defining MMAG as dogma not because he thinks the doctrine false—he finds it true in a certain sense, though not quite the one I've expounded—but because he believes such a definition would only encourage what he sees as a baleful tendency across the spectrum of Catholic thought. He calls that tendency "Catechism Catholicism," which indeed infects certain quarters, though I don't disapprove of it for the reasons JC does. In his own words (emphasis added):

I think [snip] that this phenomena of "Catechism Catholicism" is part of the ongoing story of the Church's struggle to fully understand the implications of Vatican I. Regarding Vatican I, it seems clear that a strong papal primacy is part of the dogmatic patrimony of the Church...but there is a strong argument to be made that the pronouncement came at a time when Catholic culture worldwide was in the initial stages of its collapse, due to the rise of secularism/modernism, etc......the strong formulation of papal primacy allowed the average Catholic, whose grasp of liturgy and tradition was becoming more tenuous, to begin formulating the Faith in more strictly hierarchical/monarchical terms. This led to the ecclesial mess we have today, where the average orthodox Catholic formulates their ecclesiology, not primarily with reference to Scripture, liturgy, tradition, but to "canon X of CCC", or "papal document y." This is the "pope=CEO of the Church" model of ecclesiology, and one sees it in both liberal and conservative factions...conservatives, when they say things like "I wish the pope would just fire Cdl Mahony," and in liberals when they say, "I wish the pope would hurry up and ordain women,gays,dogs, etc"

In some ways, even the cultural mess that followed Vatican II can be seen as part of the outgrowth of the development of "Catechism Catholicism." I think many of the Vatican II promulgations can be seen as an attempt to undo the mess caused by the misappropriation of Vat I teaching. Hence all the emphasis on the collegiality of bishops, and the function of the laity, and the returning of the liturgy to the people and their cultures, etc......all of which is well and good, except that the laity and bishops were in full-blown cultural collapse at the time. I don't think I need to elaborate on the many unfortunate results that came from the conjunction of V2 teaching with modern Western culture of the late 20th century...

I can see what JC is struggling to articulate here, but what he means becomes clearer when he discusses Fr. Joseph O'Leary's interaction with me in the combox to my May 3 post "Development and Negation: the struggle continues." You can read that for yourself; here's what JC says:

It highlights quite nicely what I am trying to get across - namely, that misuse of the Petrine privilege can have the unintended effect of weakening the Church's authority. In the post, a conservative Catholic [he means yours truly —ML] argues with a fairly standard paint-by-numbers liberal theologian [Fr. O'Leary] over the subject of Church teaching.

The interesting thing is that the crux of the liberal theologian's argument for rejection of many critical Church teachings, such as Humanae Vitae (HV), is that they were not infallibly proclaimed, and thus subject to "development," by which he means "negation. And in a strict technical sense, he's correct - HV was not infallibly proclaimed.

It's an interesting exchange, because it shows how the misuse of dogmatic authority can contribute to all sorts of unforeseen problems. I think it would have been unfathomable to theologians 200+ years ago to make the argument that "well, it's not infallible, so we can believe what we want." Thus, one dogma (infallibility) is played off of another (contraception), because there is a mindset, rampant in both conservative and liberal circles, that the only important dogmas are ones defined from the extraordinary magisterium. The movement for the fifth Marian dogma only reinforces this unfortunate trend, in my opinion, since it seems to reinforce, this time from a "conservative" standpoint, the idea that that "it only really matters if the Pope says its true!"

I'm afraid I must agree with JC here. He's taught me something: defining MMAG right now, or indeed any new dogma, would probably have the paradoxical effect of making doctrines not so defined seem optional. I suspect that's why John Paul the Great, in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis and Evangelium Vitae §57 ff., only invoked his authority to confirm what has been infallibly and thus irreformably taught by the ordinary and universal magisterium. That's why I'm so enthusiastic about what the progs call "creeping infallibilism," a label which is their way of complaining that Rome has been reminding us of how infallibility actually does extend beyond the extraordinary magisterium.

I think JC would like my Humanae Vitae post of last Thursday.

Our "solitary boast"

Fr. Edward Oakes, SJ, closes his recent, provocative little article on the Immaculate Conception ('IC' for short) with this stanza from Wordsworth's "The Virgin":

Mother! whose virgin bosom was uncrossed
With the least shade of thought to sin allied;
Woman! above all women glorified,
Our tainted nature’s solitary boast.

Every Catholic-in-formation should memorize that text. If the suggestion itself would seem catechetically unsound to some people in charge of such things, I don't care. Oakes explains why one shouldn't care.

For one thing, IC could and should be appreciated by Protestants. Explicating a passage from Pius IX's bull defining the doctrine, Oakes points out:

Mary is the perfect example of sola gratia at work. Everything she later did and was given came from this first grace of predestination, won for her purely and entirely by the merits of Christ, not her own; and even those “merits” she “earned” came from the graces given her aboriginally, in view of her predestined status as the chosen Mother of the Savior. As Pius IX clearly asserts, by a venerable exegetical tradition dating from patristic times, she was predestined to be sinless when God spoke thus to the Serpent in the Garden of Eden after our first parents’ first sin: “I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your seed and her seed. He shall bruise your dead, and you shall bruise his heel” (Genesis 3:15).

I find that persuasive partly because it is so beautiful an instance of the analogia fidei. But that could be set aside as mere opinion—which is why, as a Catholic, I find the authority of the Magisterium sufficient of itself to call for assent to the doctrine of the IC (henceforth 'DIC' for short'). But those for whom no such factors, either severally or collectively, suffice to guarantee truth have objected to DIC. Here I want to consider two which, albeit from different Christian traditions, ultimately converge.

One is usually heard from Protestants, though by no means only from Protestants: DIC is nowhere to be found in Scripture or the confessions of the early Church. From that point of view, DIC can only appear a theological speculation, fueled historically by an (actually or potentially) idolatrous veneration of a strictly human person whom we have no basis in divine revelation for believing to be special beyond her obvious, privileged status as the one who bore Our Savior into the world. That objection does not raise any special difficulty about predestination, a Pauline doctrine that many Protestants profess in some-or-other strong sense. But the other objection I want to consider centers on what is taken to be the concept of predestination that DIC entails.

I have heard it said, mostly by some Orthodox but also by a few non-Orthodox, that the kind of predestination which Mary is presented by Pius IX as enjoying is incompatible with human freedom, so that she cannot be said to have freely consented to anything of salvific significance. If sound, that objection would show Catholic doctrine to be internally inconsistent. For the Catholic Church professes that Mary freely consented to the Incarnation; indeed, the substance of the Church's confession on this point itself entails that Mary's free consent was, in Oakes' words, "the great fulcrum-shift in the drama of salvation." And yet, it is said, the sort of predestination entailed by DIC made that consent inevitable before the fact, and therefore unfree.

The first, mostly Protestant objection is just a special case of the more general divergence between Protestantism and the two older Christian traditions about the role of Tradition in conveying special divine revelation to us. If Scripture is not merely a normative rule of faith and materially sufficient to convey such revelation, but is rather the only such rule and thus formally sufficient—i.e., if sola scriptura is true in a sense strong enough to exclude both Catholic and Orthodox accounts of Tradition—then the objection in question is decisive. One cannot simply deduce DIC, as a matter of mere logic, from Scripture or the confessions of the early Church; indeed, not even the Church says otherwise. But the if-clause is the salient premise, not the consequent; and for both intellectual and experiential reasons, I have never found that premise remotely persuasive. As I've explained elsewhere, the arguments for it cannot help reducing Christianity to subjective opinion rather than the proximate object of faith as a divine gift. And since the objection does not concern DIC in particular more than a host of other doctrines, I shall leave it aside for the moment.

The other objection, from human freedom, is more potent. What actually lends force to it is the causal circle that Oakes presents as a key basis for meditation and development of doctrine. Thus:

...Mary could not be kept free from sin except by the merits of Christ won on the cross; but of course Christ could not have entered history to save us by dying on the cross except by the free consent of Mary, whose free assent to the angel was a truly graced assent vouchsafed by the future death of her Son.

Now I agree with Oakes about the "dizzying implications" of that circle. Taking his cue from Ratzinger and von Balthasar, he notes that the circle must be affirmed and can be usefully explained, as von Balthasar did in the third volume of his Theo-Drama. But acknowledging and meditating on it does not answer the objection; it remains merely assumed that Mary's consent was both predestined and free. How can the objection be answered?

I propose seeing Mary's freedom as a sharing in Christ's, and thus as a key aspect in which she instanced how all the baptized are called to become "partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4). As St. Maximus the Confessor showed, the human will of Jesus Christ was free even though he could not have sinned; if so, then in general, the exercise of human freedom need not entail the possibility of choosing in a manner contrary to God's positive will. Christ's human will freely chose to suffer and die—even though that, along with the Incarnation itself, had been eternally, unalterably, and in that sense necessarily decreed by the Trinity, and therefore by the person of the Son, who is solely and identically the person who is and acts as Jesus Christ. The retroactive causality of the Passion on Mary, in the form of making her kecharitomene beginning with the IC, was simply the way she was similarly decreed to enjoy a pre-eminent capacity to have and exercise the kind of freedom her Son did in undergoing the Passion. The grace with which she was filled at the IC was not, then, an overriding of her human freedom, but was rather a necessary condition for exercising the kind of freedom her Son was to exercise as a man and which made her own possible. That's the kind of freedom she was to exercise by consenting to the Incarnation.

Oakes presents the causal circle assumed here as, historically, the basis for that authentic development of doctrine which we now call the IC. Many conservative Protestants object to such "developments" on the ground that they go beyond Scripture and, merely by that fact, add to the deposit of faith what is not there. Many Orthodox object that, even if such "developments" are acceptable as theological opinions, dogmatizing them imposes more of a confessional burden than the common deposit warrants. But such objections do not address the substance of the Catholic Church's ongoing meditation on the Virgin; they merely question her authority to draw forth from the deposit of faith the treasures she claims to find there. It seems to me that the beauty radiating through the DIC is itself a reason to question the questioners.

An ecumenical symposium about...the Blessed Virgin

One of the things I love about First Things is that Fr. Neuhaus and his staff show just how it is possible to actually have an ecumenical discussion of a topic such as the Blessed Virgin. This week, they're posting a series of five "preliminary papers" on the topic under the aegis of the "Evangelicals and Catholics Together" project.

On Monday, Edward T. Oakes, SJ led off with a characteristically provocative post about the Immaculate Conception, arguing that that event is the primary instance of salvation sola gratia. On Tuesday, J.I. Packer offered a solid exegesis of Luke on Jesus' early life, with a focus on Mary. Today, T.M. Moore, head of "a spiritual fellowship in the Celtic tradition," complains that "the liturgical formulas of the Celts" go too far in moving from "adoration" to "supplication" of Mary. The irony alone is worth the read. Cornelius Plantinga and Matthew Levering will round off the week.

On Friday I will post on the Oakes piece. My hunch is that the controversy over that one is as predictable as the content of the rest.