Ecology and Autonomy

Yesterday, the Pope spoke of the need to recognize and defend something called the "ecology of man." Significantly, the occasion was the "traditional exchange of Christmas greetings with prelates and members of the Roman Curia." What attracted media attention was, of course, not so much explanation of our duty to be responsible stewards of the rest of the planet; apparently that's taken as platitudinous, which it isn't. The antennae went up for his remarks on gender theory.

Thus:

"It is not outmoded metaphysics," Benedict XVI affirmed, "when Church speaks of the nature of the human being as man and woman, and demands that this order of creation be respected." He said it has more to do with "faith in the Creator and listening to the language of creation, the contempt of which will lead to the self destruction of humanity." The Pope warned against the manipulation that takes place in national and international forums when the term "gender" is altered. "What is often expressed and understood by the term 'gender,' is definitively resolved in the self-emancipation of the human being from creation and the Creator," he warned. "Man wants to create himself, and to decide always and exclusively on his own about what concerns him." The Pontiff said this is man living "against truth, against the creating Spirit." "The rain forests certainly deserve our protection, but man as creature indeed deserves no less," he added.

The immediate expressions of outrage at that were predictable. What's remarkable about them all the same is their unintended irony.

Most people who consider themselves environmentalists are also left-wing politically and, as such, favor "homosexual rights." Like the Pope, they want to protect the natural ecology; but unlike him, they don't seem to think that there is a human ecology, distinct but not separate from the natural, which entails a normative human sexuality. Indeed, there's a strong movement at the UN to "de-criminalize" homosexual activity, which the Obama Administration will doubtless sign onto. Now as a Catholic and a conservative, I too favor the decriminalization of homosexual acts between consenting adults, as well as of prostitution involving consenting adults, because I believe that such laws cannot be enforced fairly. To that extent, I actually disagree with the Pope. But the decriminalization of homosexual acts is only one item, and not the most important one, on the LGBT agenda. As the reaction to Proposition 8's victory in California indicates, that agenda is less interested in privacy, democracy, and due process than in establishing an ever-widening range of sexual deviancy (i.e., what the phrase "Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgender" is really referring to) as equal in moral value to marriage, and in some cases even as marriage. If incoveniences such as the will of the people in a sovereign state get in the way, then recourse to other authorities (the courts, the UN, the Episcopal Church) must be had to eliminate them.

That kind of determination signifies a radical philosophical anthropology, not merely a desire to be free of oppression and hate. The idea is that the freedom of the human person is not so much freedom within the limitations of human nature as freedom to define what human nature is to encompass. Thus if I experience, as a given prior to choice, a desire for genital intercourse with members of the same sex, then respecting my freedom means affirming me when I define my personal identity in those terms. If I experience myself as being of one gender-identity when my overt bodily features would suggest that I'm of the opposite gender-identity, then respecting my freedom means affirming me in my choice to alter my body, surgically and chemically, so as to bring my physical reality more into line with what I take to be my spiritual reality. If all that is so, then the Pope's call for respecting a sexual "ecology of man" on pain of collective self-destruction is a rejection of human freedom at a very basic level, akin to medieval Christendom's physical punishment of those who publicly professed heresy. The Church has outgrown the latter; so why not the former?

The reason is that the latter was a historical distortion of the divine and natural law, whereas the former is a rejection of the very idea of the divine and natural law. Once we claim the right to treat heterosexuality as only an empirical norm, rejecting any suggestion that it is also the moral norm, then we have re-committed the sin of our first parents: aspiring to be as gods, "knowing good and evil" apart from what God has told us. By transgressing the limits God has set for us, we have claimed a moral autonomy that leads only to our spiritual self-destruction. "Original" sin is that state of spiritual destruction which we inherit from our first parents. Carried as far as we've carried that today—e.g., with atomic weaponry, human cloning, and now the idea that marriage need not be between men and women—it could lead to our physical self-destruction too.

Of course the "progressive" response to all this is to insist that religion needs more updating, more "enlightenment," not that humanity needs more humility and self-abnegation before God. But once again, that betrays the assumption that religion as well as morality is a purely human cultural product. The idea that an all-powerful, perfectly holy God might actually have told us that sodomy is an abomination must be "outmoded metaphysics," so that sticking to such an idea is naïve, or a mere defense mechanism, or downright evil. I've heard it all before, and I've heard it many times. But I don't buy it. Like many other human tendencies, homosexuality is objectively disordered at the psychic level—which ought to be evident just by knowing what human genitalia are for. It is incompatible with the ecology of man.

I find it funny that left-wing environmentalists and Gaia-worshippers don't get that. But this Christmas season, when we contemplate God's assuming human nature in the form of an infant, it is perhaps one of the most serious truths we can contemplate.

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.

Remember this when you hear "ACLU"

“From the dawn of the Republic, America’s quest for freedom has been guided by the conviction that the principles governing political and social life are intimately linked to a moral order based on the dominion of God the Creator. The framers of this nation’s founding documents drew upon this conviction when they proclaimed the ‘self-evident truth’ that all men are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights grounded in the laws of nature and of nature’s God. The course of American history demonstrates the difficulties, the struggles, and the great intellectual and moral resolve which were demanded to shape a society that faithfully embodied these noble principles. In that process, which forged the soul of the nation, religious beliefs were a constant inspiration and driving force, as for example in the struggle against slavery and in the civil rights movement."

Pope Benedict XVI, on the White House lawn, April 16, 2008

Peter, Paul, and the Pope's fashion statement

Today is the Solemnity of Sts. Peter and Paul, who were martyred in Rome together. The Church of Rome still "has the bones"--a fact whose providential signifcance is often unappreciated. I do not refer merely to the claim of the popes to have inherited Peter's authority as leader of the Apostles. I also and especially mean the continuity between the Petrine and Pauline charisms in the Church.

Peter, the uneducated fisherman, represents the ordinary believer being faithful to what he knows. That is why the chief function of the papacy is not to innovate but to conserve: conservation takes less learning, if more humility, than innovation. But what the Peters thereby know is too limited just by itself. In Acts, for example, it is clear that Peter needed a good deal of prodding to accept the idea that Gentile converts to Christ did not have to become Jews in any recognizable sense. He was given a vision in the house of Cornelius; more painfully, he needed to be upbraided by Paul for backsliding on table fellowship with the non-kosher. In the end he was brought along, even as his leadership was never questioned in principle.

Paul, on the other hand, was the educated Pharisee. Lacking the advantage of having known Jesus in the flesh, he persecuted the Church zealously at first, and had to have a vision of the Lord to blind him to what he thought he knew before he could open his eyes to Truth. But once in possession of that Truth, he saw its implications with greater range and clarity than his apostolic colleagues. It took the first "council", with Peter presiding even over James at Jerusalem, to vindicate Paul's vision of God's call to the Gentiles. His theology was much more elaborate and thoughtful than Peter's even though the Gospel he preached was the same as Peter's. In due course they could die as brothers at the hands of the Romans, not long after James had been killed by the local Jewish tetrarch.

The story of Peter and Paul is rich fare for meditation. It tells us, among other things, that we need both the conservatives and the visionaries. That's because the faith-once-delivered shows its full integrity and scope in how our understanding of it develops. We must see the unfolding of revelation recorded in Scripture as continuous, just as the authentic development of doctrine and tradition generally since than has been continuous. That is important to recognize in every age of turmoil and growth. It is especially important today.

Most readers of this blog have become familiar with the concept of "the hermeneutic of continuity," and with my advocacy of that theological program. As a theologian, Joseph Ratzinger was one of its primary exponents. He very much remains so as pope. Apparently, the HC has become such a priority with the Vatican that even the Pope's choice of liturgical vestments is touted as a way to reiterate it. Check out this story.

This is another one of those cases when a fashion statement is not just a fashion statement. Actually, it is an anti-fashion statement. The fashion being countered by the papal fashion statement is of course the hermeneutic of discontinuity. As I've often pointed out, the HD is alive and well on both the left and the right in the Church. One can even observe trads and progs, in support of the HD, quoting each other's accounts of Vatican II and its aims--for completely opposite purposes, of course. Each side of the HD has its own reasons for depicting the Council as a sharp break with the Church of the past: the trads criticize the "post-concilar Church" as having thrown off too much of the past; the progs criticize the "post-conciliar Church" as not having thrown off enough of the past.

It's a pleasure to see the Pope's wardrobe saying that both are wrong. And why not? He does sit over the bones.

In case there was any doubt...

I'm still here, and Humanae Vitae isn't about to become a dead letter.

I do not mention those two facts in the same breath because I imagine my staying power to be greater than or equal to HV's. That courageous, landmark encyclical will not only outlive me and my personal opinions; it has already had, and will long continue to have, much greater effect than they. But there are a few people out there who would be almost as happy to see me fall silent as to see HV disappear under the dust. To them especially I say that, as long as I still have breath, I shall continue explaining why neither said document nor its substantive teaching is going to oblige them. I shall certainly not tire of carrying out that unpopular task.

The perduring reason is the fact—noted only by those few theologians who can take the heat for doing so—that the ancient teaching reaffirmed by HV fulfills the very same criteria for infallibility that then-Cardinal Ratzinger said is fulfilled by the teaching that the Church has no authority to confer priestly ordination on women. Of course that is not an defense in the eyes of HV's opponents, who generally reject Ordinatio Sacerdotalis too, along with Ratzinger's laconic observation that the offending doctrine in OS has been "infallibly taught by the ordinary and universal magisterium." And it's true that neither OS nor the CDF responsum that followed are the sort of medium in which popes unilaterally invoke their infallibility; neither, of course, was HV, as was explicitly pointed out by the Vatican spokesman, one Msgr. Lambruschini, who presented it to the media when it was first published in July 1968. But that is hardly dispositive of the question whether HV's teaching is irreformable.

Another way to put that question is: does HV's substantive teaching belong to the binding content of the deposit of faith and morals taught by the Church, with varying degrees of explicitness, from the beginning? Once the question is framed that way, the answer is as obvious as it was in the case of OS, for the Church's rejection of contraception goes back for as far as we have records. One can only reject the obvious conclusion from that by rejecting how Ratzinger applied Vatican II's criteria for infallibility is his responsum about OS—which is what those who reject HV always do. But that doesn't mean HV is going away, any more than it means that OS is going away. The man is, after all, pope, and he has created quite a precedent by how he has invoked what Lumen Gentium §25 says about the infallibility of the ordinary magisterium.

Hence my other reason for thinking HV is going to be a live letter for a long time: what the Pope said a few weeks ago to a conference in Rome about HV. Tipping my hat to Amy Welborn, I quote it at length:

My predecessor of venerated memory, the Servant of God Paul VI, published on July 25, 1968, the encyclical letter Humanae vitae. That document became very quickly a sign of contradiction.

Elaborated in the light of anguished decision, it constitutes a significant act of courage in reaffirming the doctrine and tradition of the Church. That text, so often misunderstood and wrongly interpreted, provoked much discussion if only because it provided the beginnings of a profound dispute that has marked the lives of entire generations.

Forty years since its publication, that teaching not only manifests its truth unchanged but also reveals the farsightedness with which the problem was confronted.

Indeed, it describes conjugal love is described within a global process that is not arrested by a division between body and soul nor rest only on sentiment that is often precarious and fleeting, but assumes the unity of spouses and their total sharing in a reciprocal acceptance of offering themselves to each other with the promise of faithful and exclusive love that is their own free choice.

How can such love be closed to the gift of life? Life is always an invaluable gift. Every time we witness its emergence, we perceive the power of the creative action of God, who trusts in man, and in this way, calls on him to build the future with the strength of hope.

The Magisterium of the Church cannot exempt itself from reflecting in a way that is always new and profound on the fundamental principles regarding matrimony and procreation. But what was true yesterday remains true today.

The truth expressed in Humanae vitae does not change, Rather, precisely in the light of new scientific discoveries, its teaching had been made more actual and urges reflection on its intrinsic value.

The key word to enter consistently into its contents is ‘love’. As I wrote in my first encyclical Deus caritas est, “Man is truly himself when his body and soul are intimately united… It is neither the spirit alone nor the body alone that loves: it is man, the person, a unified creature composed of body and soul, who loves” (No. 5).

Without this unity, a person loses value and one falls into the great danger of considering the body as an object that can be sold and bought (cfr ibid.).

In a culture subjected to the dominance of ‘having’ over ‘being’, human life risks losing its value. If the exercise of sexuality becomes a drug which would subject a partner to one’s own desires and interests, without respecting the wishes and rhythms of the beloved person, then what needs to be defended is not only the true concept of love but, in the first place, human dignity itself.

As believers, we could never permit that the dominance of technology should infect the quality of love and the sacredness of life.

It is not by chance that Jesus, speaking of human love, refers to what God achieved at the start of creation (cfr Mt 19,4-6). His teaching recalls the freely-given act with which the Creator intended to express not only the richness of his love, which openly gives itself to everyone, but also wished to impress a paradigm on which mankind’s behavior should model itself.

In the fecundity of conjugal love, man and woman participate in the Father’s creative act and make evident that at the origin of their married life is a genuine Yes that is pronounced and truly lived in reciprocity, and that is always open to life.

This word of the Lord remains unchanged in its profound truth and cannot be annulled by the different theories which, in the course of the years, have succeeded each other and sometimes contradict each other.

Natural law, which is the basis of recognizing the true equality among men and peoples, deserves to be recognized as the source which can inspire even the relationship between spouses in their responsibility to generate children.

The transmission of life is inscribed in nature, and its laws remain as the unwritten standard to which everyone should refer. Every attempt to ignore this principle will remain sterile itself and has no future.

It is urgent that we rediscover again an alliance which has always been fruitful when it is respected, and which has love and reason in the forefront.

An acute teacher like Willian St. Thierry could write words that we feel to be profoundly valid even for our time: “If reason instructs love, and love enlightens reason, if reason is converted to love, and love allows itself to be confined within the bounds of reason, then together they can result in something great” (Nature and greatness of love, 21,8).

What is this ’something great’ that we may expect? It is the emergence of a responsibility for life which makes fruitful the gift of self that spouses make to each other. It is the fruit of a love that can think and choose in full freedom, without allowing itself to be conditioned disproportionately by the eventual sacrifice it will entail.

From this comes the miracle of life that parents experience for themselves, something extraordinary that is fulfilled in them and through them. No mechanical technique can replace the act of love that two spouses exchange as a sign of the greater mystery which sees them as protagonists and participants in the act of creation.

Unfortunately, one is witnessing more often sad incidents involving adolescents, whose behavior shows an incorrect idea of the mystery of life and of the risky implications of their actions. The emergency in education, which I have often referred to, has a special urgency with regard to the issue of life.

I hope that very special attention may be given to young people above all, so that they may learn the true sense of love and may be prepared through an adequate education in sexuality, without being distracted by ephemeral messages that prevent them from getting to the essence of truth which is in play.

To provide false illusions about love or to deceive them about the genuine responsibilities that they are called on to assume with the exercise of their own sexuality does not do honor to a society that claims to have principles of freedom and democracy.

Freedom should unite itself to truth, and responsibility to strength of dedication to the other to the point of sacrifice. Without these components, the community of men cannot grow, and the risk of enclosing oneself in a circle of asphyxiating selfishness is always lying in ambush.

The teaching expressed in the encyclical Humanae vitae is not easy. Nonetheless, it conforms to the fundamental structure through which life has always been transmitted since the creation of the world, respecting nature and in conformity with its demands.

Respect for human life and the safekeeping of human dignity require us to leave nothing undone so that everyone may participate in the genuine truth of responsible conjugal love, in full adherence to the laws written in the heart of every man.

Wow. How many seminarians, let alone married couples, not only heard about that little talk but have been told it's important?

Of course, the minority of academic theologians who would find B16's defense of HV worth a reasoned rebuttal would probably start by pointing out that it's just the Pope's opinion. No "dogma" is being "defined" here, after all. But that brings me to a larger point I find myself returning to over and over again in my discussions on religion with people from every walk of life.

Most loyal Catholics know that, as Catholics, they are obliged to assent fully to doctrines taught with the Church's full authority. But they are often confused about just what doctrines have in fact been taught with the Church's full authority. Part of that is due to sheer ignorance; but even the more educated have been given the impression by dissenting theologians and priests that nothing short of a dogmatic definition by a pope or ecumenical council requires full (as distinct from provisional) assent from Catholics. That impression is false. It entails logically committing oneself to treating the bulk of the deposit of faith, which has not been so defined, as a mere matter of opinion as opposed to divine revelation. Yet nobody who understands what the relevant concepts involve really believes that the bulk of the deposit of faith (and morals) is only a matter of opinion. So, why does the inconsistency persist in so many minds?

As Ralph McInerny pointed out a decade ago in a little book I recommend to anybody, today we have a crisis of authorities: the Magisterium vs. the guild of academic theologians. The latter authorities generally convey a more popular message than the former, especially on morality, about which the Church has made no dogmatic definitions. And so the theologians are more widely hearkened to about moral questions, and even about dogmatic issues that have direct practical implications, such as the doctrine of the necessity of the Church for salvation. As I have often said before here and elsewhere, authority is the issue.

But of course it is not the most fundamental issue. The most fundamental reasons why the academic guild of theologians often presents itself as an alternate magisterium are spiritual and intellectual pride. The most fundamental reasons why so many Catholics hearken to them is
old-fashioned lust and greed. As even McInerny realizes, only prayer and fasting is going to deal with those.

Time to do my Rosary.

Checking in after the Pope

It's tough to keep blogging while caught in the throes of moving and job-hunting. But as things evolve, I'll get a bit more time to keep up next month. This is my brief reflection on Pope Benedict XVI's visit to the U.S. this past month.

Three things struck me: President Bush's obvious admiration for His Holiness; the prominence of the theme of pederasty in the Pope's talk; and the focus of the MSM on the shortage of priests. Each offers more than meets the eye.

Think and feel what you will about the President. His words to and about the Pope were not only true but sincerely meant—so much so that I permit myself to wonder whether Bush, like Tony Blair, will become Catholic. No doubt others have more informed things to say about that than I do.

It was evident that the Pope decided to confront the pain of the clerical sex scandal head-on rather than skirt it with platitudes. Though insufficient to heal the wounds, that was certainly necessary. I'm delighted he had the courage to see that and act accordingly. Praise be to God.

The priest shortage is news so old as to be almost outdated. Some dioceses, such as Omaha, St. Louis, and Denver, are doing quite well with recruiting and retaining seminarians. Yet others are in a world of trouble. Until the Pope's visit, the Archdiocese of New York was looking at having no entrants into next year's freshman seminary class. The vocations director nows says he's receiving a "tsunami" of inquiries from prospective candidates. Let's hope a few end up actually going to Dunwoodie.

There is no shortage of vocations. There is only, in some quarters, a shortage of willingness to recognize, encourage, and foster them. That the needed encouragement comes from this pope is a sign of the Spirit at work.

The Pope's blow against intolerance

Now that there's been time to reflect, you just gotta love it.

A different kind of hope

Having finished it yesterday, I much enjoyed reading the Pope's new encyclical Spe Salvi. From a personal perspective, it seems to have come at just the right time in my life. Over the next few days, I shall comment on a few points that struck me as characteristically fruitful applications of academic theology to concrete matters of spirituality. But for now, I want to bask with my readers in one of those passing ironies which give cause to hope that some Catholics who are out of step with the Pope on certain vital matters can be brought round.

Joe Cecil of "In Today's News" (a blog whose orientation is better revealed by its URL: liberalcatholicnews.blogspot.com) asks: Is Pope Benedict XVI a Heretic?. Now I've had a few encounters with Joe since I began blogging two-and-a-half years ago. Specifically, we have debated women's ordination and the theology of the body; and many of my posts on other topics are written partly with people like him in mind. He is what I call a "prog": a progressive Catholic, as distinct from a "trad" or traditionalist Catholic. As I use those terms, progs and trads have something theologically significant in common: they both believe that the Church after Vatican II is, in some radical ways, discontinuous with the Church of the past. Both also diverge sharply from Rome on matters dear to their hearts. As I put it last year: "Both sets of malcontents believe that the Second Vatican Council constituted a decisive break with the Church of the past; the main difference is that the trads, decrying the break, want the Council to become a dead letter while the progs, celebrating it as the spirit of Vatican II, are impatient for the Church to complete what they take to be the Council's revolutionary work." So, when a prog like Joe reacts to a papal encyclical by asking whether the pope is a heretic, one can safely expect that he's likely to approve of whichever statement prompted the question—just as one can safely expect that trads raising the same question, which they not infrequently do on this or that topic, are likely to disapprove. In many ways, progs and trads are each other's obverse: heads and tails of the same discontinuant coin. If you see what's on one side of that coin, you can safely predict what's on the other. And that supplies a hermeneut of continuity like me with a sure compass for navigating theological questions which most directly affect Church unity.

The specific issue Joe raises under the heading of his post's title is not hard to sum up. The relevant passage from SS, which he quotes with his added emphasis, is this from §26:

The human being needs unconditional love. He needs the certainty which makes him say: "neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Rom 8:38- 39 ). If this absolute love exists, with its absolute certainty, then — only then — is man "redeemed", whatever should happen to him in his particular circumstances. This is what it means to say: Jesus Christ has "redeemed" us. Through him we have become certain of God, a God who is not a remote "first cause" of the world, because his only-begotten Son has become man and of him everyone can say: "I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me" (Gal 2:20).

Unsurprisingly, Joe professes to like and agree with that. With B16's phrase 'absolute certainty' in mind, Joe then compares that passage with Chapter 13 of the Council of Trent's Decree on Justification, which begins thus:

So also as regards the gift of perseverance, of which it is written, He that shall persevere to the end, he shall be saved:-which gift cannot be derived from any other but Him, who is able to establish him who standeth that he stand perseveringly, and to restore him who falleth: - let no one herein promise himself any thing as certain with an absolute certainty; though all ought to place and repose a most firm hope in God's help.

Joe actually quotes the full chapter, culminating in the dogmatic canon:

If any one saith, that it is necessary for every one, for the obtaining the remission of sins, that he believe for certain, and without any wavering arising from his own infirmity and disposition, that his sins are forgiven him; let him be anathema.

So, when he asks whether the Pope is a heretic, what Joe is asking is whether B16's use of the phrase 'absolute certainty' in the above-quoted passage from SS is logically compatible with Trent's canon. If it isn't, then B16 is indeed a heretic.

Well, of course the two are mutually compatible and of course B16 is not a heretic. In context, the Pope is speaking of God's love for us. If that love is absolute, which it is, then we can be certain it is always on offer, ready to transform us even as it always envelops us. It is our fundament of hope, and that no matter how great our sins. Any Christian who considers herself beyond such redemption is committing the sin of despair. By means of the assent of faith, therefore, we can be absolutely certain that God loves us, even unto what might be considered folly. But God's love can heal and transform us only if we would have it so. Just as healing involves reversing the course of a disease, forgiveness involves free, sincere repentance. That is as it must be. By his wisdom as well as his love, God respects our freedom; yet given that we are sinners even when forgiven, we always retain in this life the freedom to go wrong, and to deceive ourselves about going wrong. That's because we are wounded by the effects of original sin even when freed from it by baptism. In via, we always retain a measure of what Trent calls "infirmity." If so, then as Trent implied, it cannot be a necessary condition for being forgiven that one "believe for certain, without any wavering" that one is forgiven. As B16 implied, we can indeed be absolutely certain that God's forgiveness and love is always on offer, ever pursuing us; at certain times in our lives, it is possible and even salutary to be morally certain that we are being healed by divine forgiveness and love; but given human weakness, such certainty about the fact cannot, itself, be necessary for the fact. Just as regarding oneself as beyond the reach of God's love would be to commit the sin of despair, so professing absolute certainty about one's forgiveness would be to commit the sin of presumption.

Now Joe, I believe, knows all this perfectly well. Or so much of his post would indicate. Why, then, does he ask at the end whether B16's choice of words "cross a line" into heresy? I suggest it's because Joe is confused about the referent of the words. The Pope is saying we can be "absolutely certain" that God loves us. He does not say, and does not believe, that being forgiven requires being certain one is forgiven. For one can never be "absolutely certain" that one has repented and thus done all that is necessary to receive the forgiveness always on offer.

But why would an intelligent, well-informed Catholic like Joe get confused like that? My first thought was that, being of the prog persuasion, Joe doesn't give as much weight to repentance as he should. Over the years, I've known progs who seem to believe that being forgiven does not require repentance, so that being certain God loves us entails, for them, being certain that their sins are forgiven, full stop. But Joe is too smart for that. On reflection, the only explanation for his question that I find plausible is that the hermeneutic of discontinuity just makes it too tempting to find incompatibilities that aren't there. I've seen that sort of thing too often on both ends of the spectrum—especially in the area of ecclesiology—not to suspect its presence here. But there's always hope for a prog capable of wondering aloud whether the pope is a heretic.

Elemental powers

Today during Vespers at Belmont Abbey, one of the readings I heard was from St. Paul's Letter to the Colossians. He asks: "If you died with Christ to the elemental powers of the world, why do you submit to regulations as if you were still living in the world?" (Col 2:20). As the Pope's new encyclical Spe Salvi shows us,
that question remains quite pertinent today.

In context, of course, Paul was upbraiding the Colossian Christians for their tendency to observe pagan rituals as though the original religious myths motivating such things were legitimate. They didn't quite "get" that Christ had liberated them from all that. But if the pagan gods were and are false, then just what were these "elemental powers" to which the baptized had supposedly died with their incorporation into Christ? And I mean the real ones, whatever they were—not the gods of mere imagination, if that's what some of "the gods" were. Given the gravity of the issue, the answer has to be perennial, not just local, and therefore one of contemporary relevance.

One part of the answer is clear enough: fallen angels, or "devils." Jesus talked a lot about those, especially about their chief, who was his chief adversary. It is to such as those that Paul, in the same passage from Colossians, referred when he said of Christ that "despoiling the principalities and the powers, he made a public spectacle of them, leading them away in triumph by [the Cross]" (Col 2:15). That there are such beings is the experience of the saints, of the possessed, and therefore of true exorcists, as well as the irreformable teaching of the Church. But devils are not the whole story; and for good reason, it's not the part the Pope speaks of in SS. Today, the most obvious referent of the term 'elemental powers' is to the blind forces of Nature itself, most specifically to what is now called "evolution." Yet that referent too has its roots in the ancient world of which Paul spoke. The continuity is instructive.

Until a century or two before Christ, little or no distinction had generally been made between unseen personal beings, among whom were devils, and what we would now call "the laws of nature." Skeptical philosophers aside, the masses of people seemed to believe that the seasons unfolded, the stars stayed in their courses, the sun rose and set, and so on, because there were living spirits, "gods," making sure that such things kept happening. That is why the earliest known Western philosopher, Thales, had said: "All things are full of gods." Some of those "gods" were accounted good, others not so good, and some oscillated between the two. So when one paid obeisance to "the gods," one was merely trying to stay on the good side of the unseen personal powers of the universe. There was no hope of escaping their power: the best one could do was limit one's exposure to their caprice, or at least avoid exciting their malice. Such led to a certain fatalism among the ancient pagans, even the Romans. And such fatalism persisted as the skeptical rationalism of the philosophers began to affect the general sensibility. Whether "the gods" literally existed or not, most people saw little or no hope of getting beyond the world, even those who believed there was some sort of afterlife. Their horizons were limited to this world, or to what was taken to be this world. That is why Paul also says to the Ephesians that, before their encounter with Christ, they were "without hope and without God in the world" (Eph 2:12). The Pope puts it thus:

Myth had lost its credibility; the Roman State religion had become fossilized into simple ceremony which was scrupulously carried out, but by then it was merely “political religion”. Philosophical rationalism had confined the gods within the realm of unreality. The Divine was seen in various ways in cosmic forces, but a God to whom one could pray did not exist. Paul illustrates the essential problem of the religion of that time quite accurately when he contrasts life “according to Christ” with life under the dominion of the “elemental spirits of the universe” (Col 2:8).

That's what St. Paul indicated Christ had freed believers from. And so it was. But today in the "developed" world, we live in a public reality that is largely post-Christian, even as in some less developed corners of the world people still live under the spiritual thralldom of an essentially pre-Christian paganism. The philosophy of secular materialism, which can take either agnostic or atheistic forms, is the new fatalism. As such, it is ultimately a counsel of despair. And it is to just that despair that the Christian message addresses itself as much now as it did then, when greed, lust for power, and sexual perversions were as open as they are now. Once again, SS (footnotes omitted):

In this regard a text by Saint Gregory Nazianzen is enlightening. He says that at the very moment when the Magi, guided by the star, adored Christ the new king, astrology came to an end, because the stars were now moving in the orbit determined by Christ. This scene, in fact, overturns the world-view of that time, which in a different way has become fashionable once again today. It is not the elemental spirits of the universe, the laws of matter, which ultimately govern the world and mankind, but a personal God governs the stars, that is, the universe; it is not the laws of matter and of evolution that have the final say, but reason, will, love—a Person. And if we know this Person and he knows us, then truly the inexorable power of material elements no longer has the last word; we are not slaves of the universe and of its laws, we are free. In ancient times, honest enquiring minds were aware of this. Heaven is not empty. Life is not a simple product of laws and the randomness of matter, but within everything and at the same time above everything, there is a personal will, there is a Spirit who in Jesus has revealed himself as Love.

The contrast now is as stark as it was back then. Intellectually the counsel of despair might seem more persuasive, because we know so much more about how the universe in general and life on earth in particular have developed. But existentially, the choice remains exactly the same now as it was when the Church was new: despair, or hope.

Ratzinger, Scripture and the development of doctrine

I love Joseph Ratzinger's mind. It is the mark of a great scholar to hold apparent opposites in tension not only without contradicting himself but also by effectively synthesizing the opposites-in-tension into a bigger whole. That's what he's done in the case of explaining the relationship of the Old with the New Testament.

On the one hand, he is on record as agreeing with St. Augustine—indeed with Tradition and the New Testament itself—that "the New Testament lies hidden in the Old and the Old is unveiled in the New." The OT points objectively to Jesus Christ, who sums up in his Person all the truth contained by the OT. Yet that became clear to people only retrospectively, when Jesus "interpreted" the Scriptures for the disciples after his Resurrection (Luke 24: 25-27) and explained how, despite the hostile resistance of most of the Jewish leadership, they are ultimately about him.

And so, on the other hand, Ratzinger notes:

It is of course possible to read the Old Testament so that it is not directed toward Christ: it does not point unequivocally to Christ. And if Jews cannot see the promises as being fulfilled in him, this is not just ill will on their part, but genuinely because of the obscurity of the texts and the figure of Jesus. Jesus brings a new meaning to these texts--yet it is he who first gives them their proper coherence and significance.

There are perfectly good reasons, then for denying that the Old Testament refers to Christ, and for saying, No, that is not what he said. And there are good reasons for referring it to Him—that is what the dispute between Jews and Christians is all about. But this is not all. A great part of the purely historical and critical exegesis, likewise does not read the Old Testament in the sense of pointing forward: it regards the Christian interpretation of it as being inconsistent with the original meaning, or at rate going far beyond it" (God and the World, pg. 209)

That is why it made sense for the Jews to disagree with the early Christians about how to read what both agreed were "the Scriptures." Of course, for a Christian it would not do to say that the Christian interpretation of the OT is "inconsistent with the original meaning," if by 'the original meaning' one means what God meant to convey through the Scriptures. But if by 'the original meaning' one means what the original human authors intended, and how they were understood by their original audience, then it not only makes sense but is true to say that such "was not what was said." For the most part, the Jews insisted on identifying the latter with the former. But if Christianity is true, then the former goes "far beyond" the latter, perhaps even in some cases saying things that the original human authors would not have accepted.

The classic case of this is how Matthew 1:23 cites Isaiah 7:14 to support the claim that Jesus was born of a virgin. Matthew was relying on the Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, which uses the term parthenos, meaning "virgin," to translate Isaiah's almah, meaning "young woman." Why that translation? After all, not all virgins are young women and not all young women are virgins. Perhaps the "seventy" Jewish scholars in Alexandria who produced the LXX believed that the Messiah would be born of a literal virgin; but then, perhaps not. We really don't know. They may simply have chosen parthenos as a decorous synonym for 'a young woman' with the implication that the Messiah would be her first-born. At any rate, we have no evidence that first-century Jews assumed the Messiah would be born of a literal virgin. There doesn't appear to have been any consensus among Jews about how to construe Isaiah 7:14 on this particular point. Yet Matthew, or at least the early Church that received his Gospel as canonical, seems serenely confident that it prophesied that Jesus the Messiah was born of a literal virgin.

This is but one instance of how the New Testament in general treats the Old Testament. The NT itself has Jesus himself explaining "the Scriptures,"—i.e., the works comprised by the LXX—as referring to him in various ways that either the original authors of the Scriptures or their audiences do not seem to have had in mind. So if Christianity is true, then the material sense of those Scriptures is far broader than what they formally say. The full material sense—what Scripture scholars call the sensus plenior—is formally brought out only in light of later events, reflections, and interpretations.

Now I've always thought that the Church's collective understanding of divine revelation sometimes develops similarly to how divine revelation itself unfolded, at least as recorded in the Bible. Although divine revelation is definitive and complete in Jesus Christ, so that the faith is "once-handed-on" to the "holy ones" (Jude 3) is complete and may not be added to or subtracted from, the Church can and does deepen her collective understanding of the deposit of faith over time. In some cases, that involves insights and formulations that cannot be deduced from earlier ones and would likely not even have been accepted by many Christians who accepted the earlier ones.

What Fr. Al Kimel says on this point deserves extensive quotation:

Place St Athanasius in the mid-second century. Would it not have been the case that many orthodox bishops would have considered his teaching on the homoousion heretical? Did not the Synod of Antioch in 269 condemn the use of the term homoousios to speak of the Son? Rightly does R. P. C. Hanson refer to the fourth century, not as “the story of a defence of orthodoxy, but of a search for orthodoxy, a search conducted by the method of trial and error” (The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God, pp. xix-xx). Clarity was achieved only by struggle, disputation, creative innovation, and dogmatic definition. Hanson even goes so far as to describe the achievement of Athanasius and the Nicene theologians as a change in doctrine: “There is no doubt, however, that the pro-Nicene theologians throughout the controversy were engaged in a process of developing doctrine and consequently introducing what must be called a change in doctrine” (p. 872). The Catholic will want to insist that this doctrinal alteration was only apparent—the Church always knows the truth of the apostolic revelation and cannot and does not propose falsehood in her formal de fide teaching—but he is happy to acknowledge that dogma does indeed develop in the life of the Church.

Or consider the doctrine of the full divinity and personhood of the Holy Spirit. How many of the Ante-Nicene Fathers explicitly believed what came to be ecumenical dogma? In fact, as Dom Gregory Dix observes, very few indeed:

The doctrine of the full Deity of the Holy Ghost offers an even clearer illustration. It was defined in 381 against the teaching of Macedonius that the Holy Ghost is not God as the Father and Son are God, but is in some way subordinate and intermediate between God and creatures. There is nothing in the N.T. which clearly indicates that the Orthodox doctrine is certainly right, or which is irreconcilable with Macedonianism in some form. Even the baptismal formula of Matt. xxviii.19 can scarcely be pressed (as it was pressed then) in such a sense, seeing that baptism “in the Name of the Lord Jesus” only is scriptural, and so late as the ninth century was still an officially accepted alternative. St. Athanasius and St. Basil both raised the question of the Third Person, but their controversy was waged with those who had followed them against the Arians. They appealed, naturally, to scripture and tradition, and it is notorious how defective in substance their appeal is found to be when it is closely examined. It is also remarkable that in the works which they wrote to vindicate this doctrine both carefully avoid even once applying the decisive word “God” to the Holy Ghost, though in this they are but following earlier writers, even professed trinitarians like Novatian, and the N.T. itself. St. Gregory Nazianzen, “the theologian” par excellence for the East, under whose presidency the Oecumenical Council of 381 actually defined the doctrine, is explicit that there were by “few” who accepted it in his day and that Athanasius was the first and almost the only doctor to whom God had vouchsafed light on this subject (Orat 21.32). Elsewhere he is even more devastatingly honest with the admission that while the N.T. plainly revealed the Godhead of the Son it no more than “hinted at” that of the Holy Ghost, which was now being plainly revealed in his own day (Orat 31.26). This is some distance from talk of “most certain warrants of Holy Scripture.” It was neither Scripture nor Tradition which imposed the dogma of 381, defined by the most thinly attended and least unanimous of all the assemblies which rank as General Councils, but the living magisterium of the Church of that age. And upon that basis only it is accepted today. That the full doctrine of the Spirit’s Godhead was then believed in some sense “everywhere” we may hope, though the evidence is not reassuring. That it had “always” been believed by some we may suppose, though the evidence is at least defective. That it had previously been believed “by all” is demonstrably untrue. An enormous catena can be formed of ante-Nicene writers from St. Clement of Rome in the first century onwards who are either Macedonian Subordinationists or who definitely make the Holy Ghost a creature. One would have hard work to find one ante-Nicene writer who consistently teaches the full Constantinopolitan doctrine—apart from the Montanist Tertullian!

The appeal to an alleged consensus of the Fathers, “that which has been believed everywhere, always and by all,” simply fails as an adequate standard in matters of doctrinal controversy; and it does so for the simple reason that it presumes a time when the Church uncontroversially, explicitly, and infallibly taught the propositional fullness of the Catholic faith. But such a golden time has never existed. The Church as Church knows the totality of the deposit of faith; but this knowledge at any given point in history is only partially discursive. Her grasp of the revelation may be described as akin to Michael Polanyi’s conception of tacit knowledge: “We know more than we can tell.” Gerald Jantzen’s summary of A. N. Whitehead is also apposite: “We experience more than we know; and we know more than we can think; and we think more than we can say; and language therefore lags behind the intuitions of immediate experience.” Newman has taught us that the Church lives in history and that her formal teaching will and must develop as new questions are put to her both by the world and by her own theologians, thus requiring her to speak in words that which is deeper than words. “The Church’s teaching lives forward,” explains Richard John Neuhaus, “and no definition, including that of councils, is entirely adequate to the whole of the truth.”

Indeed. It is just such a perspective which Ratzinger brings to the Scriptures themselves. That kind of understanding, both of the unfolding of divine revelation itself and of the subsequent development of doctrine, is distinctively Catholic. It opposes any theological perspective that precludes development beyond a certain point, such as Scripture or the Fathers. It does not negate anything definitive, but requires holding in tension apparent opposites so that new insight into eternal truth may be achieved.

The more I think about that, the more it seems to me an excellent reason to be Catholic.

The Pope's new book

I've seen several complaints in the Catholic blogosphere, most notably here, that the Catholic blogosphere is largely ignoring the Pope's new book Jesus of Nazareth. Well, I can't speak for others, but I for one one have not been ignoring it. I ordered it last month, received it a few weeks ago, and have actually been reading it. I am impressed. It resolves several intellectual puzzles I've had about the question how the "Jesus of history" relates to the "Christ of faith."

When I've finished it over the weekend, I'll have a lot more to say about two sets of issues: the ones that most concern me, and the ones that seem to exercise the critics the most. In the meantime, I look forward to receiving comments on this post that might enrich my next one.

Another item from the plus ça change department

A recent article by Sandro Magister at Chiesa includes the following description of the Curia made by Pope Paul VI, explaining his far-reaching reform of that institution back in 1967: ...a pretentious and sluggish bureaucracy, entirely wrapped in rule and ritual, a breeding ground for ambition and sordid antagonism. Couldn't have said it better myself. Like banks and taxes, the Curia is just one of those necessary evils that Catholics learn to accept for want of a plausible and attractive alternative. But what's the point of bringing that up now?

Magister is disappointed that Pope Benedict XVI, a long-time Curial veteran of decidedly uncurial temperament, has not launched what ecclesiastical politicians and journalists had widely anticipated would be his equally far-reaching reform of the Curia. Never having really expected such a reform, I am not disappointed. A man of Ratzinger's age who does the many things he already does just doesn't have time and energy for the infighting, as bitter as it would be petty, that serious Curial reform would doubtless entail. The result is that the Curia remains pretty much what it's always been, which is pretty much what Paul VI said. This is another one of those intractable embarrassments for the Church like, e.g., the proportion of homosexuals in the celibate priesthood, which is and probably always has been substantially higher than in the general population. But such embarrassments can actually be good for the Church.

In general terms, they remind us that she is not our Church but Christ's. He does her real work; the best we can do is to get our pride, greed, vanity, and lust out of the way long enough to serve as his willing instruments. As Ratzinger observed in his book Called to Communion, the priesthood depends on "self-dispossession;" I would add that that observation holds as much for the priesthood of believers as for the ordained priesthood. Humanity being what it is, that means in practice that Christ will work as much in spite of Christians as because of them. Along with that of its small-scale counterparts in chanceries throughout the world, the nature of the Roman Curia reminds us of precisely that fact.

That reminds me in turn of an argument that helped mightily to preserve me from apostasy in youth. Commenting on the Magister article, Phil Blosser recounts the argument well:

I'm reminded of the words of the 14th century Jewish merchant, Abraham, about the church in Rome to the Archbishop of Paris after returning from a business trip to Rome in Boccaccio's Decameron: "No earthly business that stupid and corrupt could last fourteen weeks. Your Church has lasted fourteen centuries. It must have God behind it."

Phil remarks: Miserere Domine. I note that all prayers imploring mercy from God are merely attempts on our part to dispose ourselves to receive what he is delighted to bestow.

The Pope's audience with Communion & Liberation

Last Saturday the 24th, Pope Benedict held an open audience in St. Peter's Square with scores of thousands of Communion and Liberation members. Along with faithful members from North Carolina, Virginia, and DC, I watched the recording of the satellite feed and simultaneous translation that afternoon at St. Philip Neri Church in Fort Mill, SC. We thank Fr. John Giuliani and the Oratorians for their hospitality and availability.

The camera work was expert; I felt as if I were there right next to the Holy Father; I found myself wanting to reach out, kiss his ring, and talk to him. But this was a significant event for more objective reasons.

What have come to be called "ecclesial movements" in the Church, which are operated primarily by the laity, are often greeted with suspicion by conventional clergy and religious. While criticism is sometimes justified, as with anything human, the present and the previous pope have not exhibited similar reserve. To us in CL, Benedict said:

Communion and Liberation is a communitarian experience of faith, born in the Church not from a will to organize of the hierarchy, but originated from a renewed encounter with Christ and thus, we can say, from an impulse that derives ultimately from the Holy Spirit. Still today, this offers itself as an opportunity to live the Christian faith in a deep and up-to-date way, on one hand with a total fidelity and communion with the Successor of Peter and with the pastors who ensure the government of the Church, and on the other hand with a spontaneity and a freedom that permit new and prophetic apostolic and missionary realizations.

Dear friends, your movement thus inserts itself in that vast flourishing of associations and movements and new ecclesial realities providentially aroused in the Church by the Holy Spirit after the Second Vatican Council. Every gift of the Spirit finds itself in its origin and necessarily at the service of the building up of the Body of Christ, offering a witness of the immense charity of God for the life of all men. The reality of the ecclesial movements is therefore a sign of the fecundity of the Spirit of the Lord, so that the victory of the risen Christ be manifested in the world, and the missionary task entrusted to the whole Church be realized.

In the message to the World Congress of Ecclesial Movements, May 27, 1998, John Paul II repeated, that in the Church there is no contrast or contraposition between the institutional dimension and the charismatic dimension, of which the movements are a meaningful expression, because both are co-essential to the divine constitution of the People of God, and in the Church even the essential institutions are charismatic, and, in any case, the charisms, in one way or another, have to institutionalise themselves in order to have cohesion and continuity.

Note well: there is no "contrast or contraposition between the institutional dimension and the charismatic dimension." This is not a pope who is captive to false dichotomies. That is why he can pursue ecumenical initiatives tirelessly, especially with the Orthodox, while upholding the undiluted truth.

Long live Papa Benedetto, and the charism of Don Giussani!

Benedict's theology of charity

Less than 24 hours before Pope John Paul II died, then-Cardinal Ratzinger gave an address to the Benedictine nuns at Subiaco that would, in effect, lay out an essential element of his papacy: the Church's answer to secularism. Thus, e.g.:

...at this point, in my capacity as believer, I would like to make a proposal to the secularists. At the time of the Enlightenment there was an attempt to understand and define the essential moral norms, saying that they would be valid "etsi Deus non daretur," even in the case that God did not exist. In the opposition of the confessions and in the pending crisis of the image of God, an attempt was made to keep the essential values of morality outside the contradictions and to seek for them an evidence that would render them independent of the many divisions and uncertainties of the different philosophies and confessions. In this way, they wanted to ensure the basis of coexistence and, in general, the foundations of humanity. At that time, it was thought to be possible, as the great deep convictions created by Christianity to a large extent remained. But this is no longer the case.

The search for such a reassuring certainty, which could remain uncontested beyond all differences, failed. Not even the truly grandiose effort of Kant was able to create the necessary shared certainty. Kant had denied that God could be known in the realm of pure reason, but at the same time he had represented God, freedom and immortality as postulates of practical reason, without which, coherently, for him no moral behavior was possible.

Does not today's situation of the world make us think perhaps that he might have been right? I would like to express it in a different way: The attempt, carried to the extreme, to manage human affairs disdaining God completely leads us increasingly to the edge of the abyss, to man's ever greater isolation from reality. We must reverse the axiom of the Enlightenment and say: Even one who does not succeed in finding the way of accepting God, should, nevertheless, seek to live and to direct his life "veluti si Deus daretur," as if God existed. This is the advice Pascal gave to his friends who did not believe. In this way, no one is limited in his freedom, but all our affairs find the support and criterion of which they are in urgent need.

Above all, that of which we are in need at this moment in history are men who, through an enlightened and lived faith, render God credible in this world.

A few months after the Pope's election, I posted a short essay on The Program of Benedict XVI, which was focused on that address. My conclusion was that, for him, the way to restore the Church's credibility today among believers and unbelievers alike is for Catholics to become genuine Catholics again: to form a more intentional community by anchoring life and history in "solid spiritual references." That is one reason why I joined Communion and Liberation, whose members Benedict will be addressing on March 24 both in audience at St. Peter's Square and by live satellite television. Beyond such particulars, however, the most basic among such references is caritas, i.e. divine love.

Hence the Pope's first encyclical proclaimed, with his usual sophistication, that God is love: Deus Est Caritas ('DCE' for short); and now we have the Apostolic Exhortation on the Eucharist, Sacramentum Caritatis ('SC' for short). In this post I want to bring out the key connection between them.

In DCE, after discussing various ways of conceiving the difference and relationship between eros and agape, the Pope explained what was new in the revelation of God that began in the Old-Testament era:

God is the absolute and ultimate source of all being; but this universal principle of creation—the Logos, primordial reason—is at the same time a lover with all the passion of a true love. Eros is thus supremely ennobled, yet at the same time it is so purified as to become one with agape. We can thus see how the reception of the Song of Songs in the canon of sacred Scripture was soon explained by the idea that these love songs ultimately describe God's relation to man and man's relation to God. Thus the Song of Songs became, both in Christian and Jewish literature, a source of mystical knowledge and experience, an expression of the essence of biblical faith: that man can indeed enter into union with God—his primordial aspiration. But this union is no mere fusion, a sinking in the nameless ocean of the Divine; it is a unity which creates love, a unity in which both God and man remain themselves and yet become fully one. As Saint Paul says: “He who is united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him” (1 Cor 6:17).

That becomes fully manifest in the New Testament:

The real novelty of the New Testament lies not so much in new ideas as in the figure of Christ himself, who gives flesh and blood to those concepts—an unprecedented realism. In the Old Testament, the novelty of the Bible did not consist merely in abstract notions but in God's unpredictable and in some sense unprecedented activity. This divine activity now takes on dramatic form when, in Jesus Christ, it is God himself who goes in search of the “stray sheep”, a suffering and lost humanity. When Jesus speaks in his parables of the shepherd who goes after the lost sheep, of the woman who looks for the lost coin, of the father who goes to meet and embrace his prodigal son, these are no mere words: they constitute an explanation of his very being and activity. His death on the Cross is the culmination of that turning of God against himself in which he gives himself in order to raise man up and save him. This is love in its most radical form. By contemplating the pierced side of Christ (cf. 19:37), we can understand the starting-point of this Encyclical Letter: “God is love” (1 Jn 4:8). It is there that this truth can be contemplated. It is from there that our definition of love must begin. In this contemplation the Christian discovers the path along which his life and love must move.

And that is immediately applied to the Eucharist:

13. Jesus gave this act of oblation an enduring presence through his institution of the Eucharist at the Last Supper. He anticipated his death and resurrection by giving his disciples, in the bread and wine, his very self, his body and blood as the new manna (cf. Jn 6:31-33). The ancient world had dimly perceived that man's real food—what truly nourishes him as man—is ultimately the Logos, eternal wisdom: this same Logos now truly becomes food for us—as love. The Eucharist draws us into Jesus' act of self-oblation. More than just statically receiving the incarnate Logos, we enter into the very dynamic of his self-giving. The imagery of marriage between God and Israel is now realized in a way previously inconceivable: it had meant standing in God's presence, but now it becomes union with God through sharing in Jesus' self-gift, sharing in his body and blood. The sacramental “mysticism”, grounded in God's condescension towards us, operates at a radically different level and lifts us to far greater heights than anything that any human mystical elevation could ever accomplish.

Quoting DCE in SC, the Pope now says:

"The Eucharist draws us into Jesus' act of self-oblation. More than just statically receiving the incarnate Logos, we enter into the very dynamic of his self-giving." (21) Jesus "draws us into himself." (22) The substantial conversion of bread and wine into his body and blood introduces within creation the principle of a radical change, a sort of "nuclear fission," to use an image familiar to us today, which penetrates to the heart of all being, a change meant to set off a process which transforms reality, a process leading ultimately to the transfiguration of the entire world, to the point where God will be all in all (cf. 1 Cor 15:28).

This is a very high Eucharistic theology indeed, though it is no novelty. It is simply ignored in a great many Catholic liturgies today, in which the idea of self-oblative love is obscured as people celebrate themselves, if anything at all. The purpose of all the Pope's specifics in SC is to heighten Catholics' awareness of the unfathomable and transformative majesty of the sacrament of divine love. That is the most pertinent sense in which "the Eucharist makes the Church." Only when rooted in that vital center shall we become what would be credible to the world today.

Such is that aspect of the Pope's program which I missed in my first post on the subject. The program begins with liturgy. Thus, SC is not only a summary of and theological reflection on last year's Synod on the Eucharist; it is a prelude to more specific liturgical directives, the first of which will apparently be a "universal indult" for Mass celebrated according to the last iteration of the old Missal, the 1962 edition. Benedict wants the broader program to be based firmly on a liturgical reform of the reform.

He seems to be taking his time about it. But he's almost 80. I pray for many more years.

Turkey and Regensburg: the same pope

An Arab Jesuit explains how and why.

Talking Turkey

Consult The Benedict Blog for links to the best news and commentary on the Pope's trip to Turkey. With that background provided, I offer an imaginary office-hours dialogue at a Catholic university between a student I shall call 'Alethia' and my professorial alter ego.

Alethia: What's this trip all about anyhow, Professor? I hear so many contradictory things about it.

Professor: Well, it was originally supposed to be an ecumenical meeting between the Pope and the Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew, who lives in Istanbul and presides over a dwindling Christian community in what was once Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire that lasted roughly a thousand years, if you count it as an entity distinct from the Western Roman Empire. But as a result of what the Pope said about Islam last September, and of the firestorm it sparked, the largely political question of his relations with the Islamic world now interest the media much more. I've seen very little discussion of what the two men might say to each other by way of working toward the trip's original purpose, which was Christian unity. Too bad.

A: I see. Why did the firestorm break out?

P: By quoting in passing a medieval Byzantine emperor's negative remarks on Islam during a theology lecture, the Pope was understood by most people to be implying that Islam is irrational and violent. His point was a bit subtler than that, but of course few people knew or cared. The reaction in the Muslim world was largely irrational and sometimes violent. There were demonstrations and riots the world over. A Catholic nun was even killed.

A: Doesn't that prove what most people thought was the Pope's point?

P: Um...uh....it's more complicated than that, Alethia. My point is that the media are now a lot more interested in how the Pope and the Muslims, who comprise 99% of Turkey's population, will have got on than in why he really wanted to go there in the first place.

A: You said the trip's original purpose was to work toward Christian unity. Why is that more important in your eyes than the issues with the Muslims?

P: Because the schism between the Orthodox and the Catholic churches is at least a millennium old and is a grave wound to the Body of Christ. Spiritually, that's more significant than what the media prefer to talk about, which is secular politics.

A: And how likely is reunion?

P: As of now, highly unlikely. But there can be progress. It's just that in matters such as this, progress is measured in baby steps. After all, Europeans have long said that the further East you go, the longer the memories and the shorter the tempers.

A: I see. What are the reasons for the continued division?

P: If you cut through all the cultural and historical static—which Christians can readily do with prayer and penance, if they really want to—it comes down to two big issues: the primacy of the pope and the filioque. The Orthodox reject both, at least as understood by the Catholic Church.

A: Could you explain that?

P: I'll start with papal primacy. The Catholic Church has a dogma saying that the Bishop of Rome has "full, supreme, and universal jurisdiction" over all Christians. That means spiritual not temporal jurisdiction. Many Orthodox are willing to let the pope reign as a kind of big-daddy figurehead, and thus have "primacy of honor" among other bishops, but none want him to rule the Church, even indirectly, outside what they're willing to concede are his local jurisdictions. They don't think any bishop should be in charge of the whole Church.

A: Really? No government could run a country that way.

P: It's not as bad as that. They have patriarchs, metropolitans, and synods. When deemed necessary, that all involves some bishops telling others what to do.

A: So they think it's OK for some bishops to tell some others what to do, as long as no single bishop gets to tell all the others what to do?

P: Right. A political-science analogy would be that they want the aristocracy to actually rule and the monarch only to reign.

A: I still don't understand why they think that's how God wants things to be. But as long as we're swimming in these waters, what about the filioque?

P: I'm afraid I don't have time to even begin clarifying the issue. As if you don't have enough reading to do already, a reliable summary of the historical and theological considerations can be found in the 2003 SCOBA statement. But here's the issue in a nutshell.

You know the Creed we say at Sunday Mass. It says, among other things, that the Holy Spirit "proceeds from the Father and the Son." Well, that wasn't part of the Creed that East and West had accepted in common for centuries. Sometime during the Middle Ages, the papacy added the phrase "and the Son" to "proceeds from the Father." The Byzantines thought, and the Orthodox still believe, that that was an unwarranted expansion of the Creed of 381, which had expanded the Nicene Creed of 325, which had expanded the Apostles' Creed of 2nd-century Rome, which was based on the baptismal profession of new members of the Church. I happen to agree that the Roman addition was high-handed and unnecessary, but I also think the theological issue is primarily semantic and can be resolved in principle. A few contemporary Orthodox writers agree with me. But the two churches have been down that road before, and nothing's ultimately come of it.

A: But if the Orthodox accepted the papacy more or less as we do, the filioque problem would go away, wouldn't it?

P: Of course. But one of the reasons they don't accept the papacy as we do is that most of them think the filioque is a heresy defined as dogma by Rome. Ergo, the popes are heretics. And heretics should not lead the Church.

A: Trying to resolve these things seems a bit like a dog chasing its tail.

P: To the Catholic mind it can certainly seem that way. But the Catholic mind and the Orthodox mind are rather different animals.

A: Whatever. It still looks kinda hopeless to me.

P: At the human level it is indeed hopeless. Only divine intervention, perhaps at the behest of the Virgin Mary, can heal the schism. That's why I think the papal Mass at the house in Ephesus, where she lived out her days on earth, is the real centerpiece of the trip. Few people attended, but the reasons for that are security and political concerns.

A: Which brings us back to the Muslims. Isn't the Pope trying to be nice to them?

P: Indeed. That's what really has me worried. Give 'em an inch....

The Pope's visit to Turkey

John Allen, the only regular writer on the staff of the National Catholic Reporter who deprives some of us of the pleasure of calling that peridocal the National Catholic Distorter, reaches his usual high standard in discussing Pope Benedict's upcoming visit to Turkey, the centerpiece of which will be his meeting with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew at Phanar. I must say I was shocked to learn how deep and subtle the persecution of the Orthodox community in Turkey really is. We must pray for our Orthodox brethren there and for ecumenical progress to come out of this visit.

And please God, may Turkey not be let into the EU. Ethnicity and Middle-East borders aside, the problem of religious freedom there is alone enough to break the deal.

Regensburg II: the Pope on faith and reason at Verona

Pope Benedict XVI's address to the 4th Annual Convention of the Catholic Church in Italy, on October 19 and now available online, was rich fare indeed. One theme that stood out for me was one on which I've posted before: what one might call the apologetical significance of mathematics. Thus the Pope:

Mathematics, as such, is a creation of our intelligence: the correspondence between its structures and the real structures of the universe—which is the presupposition of all modern scientific and technological developments, already expressly formulated by Galileo Galilei with the famous affirmation that the book of nature is written in mathematical language—arouses our admiration and raises a big question.

It implies, in fact, that the universe itself is structured in an intelligent manner, such that a profound correspondence exists between our subjective reason and the objective reason in nature. It then becomes inevitable to ask oneself if there might not be a single original intelligence that is the common font of them both.

Thus, precisely the reflection on the development of science brings us towards the creator Logos. The tendency to give irrationality, chance and necessity the primacy is overturned, also to lead our intelligence and our freedom back to it. Upon these bases it again becomes possible to enlarge the area of our rationality, to reopen it to the larger questions of the truth and the good, to link theology, philosophy and science between them in full respect for the methods proper to them and of their reciprocal autonomy, but also in the awareness of the intrinsic unity that holds them together.

This is the task that is before us, a fascinating adventure that is worth our effort, to give a new thrust to the culture of our time and to restore the Christian faith to full citizenship in it.

Such is the vision of the relationship between reason and faith that Benedict defended at Regensburg, where he criticized theological voluntarism as inimical to it. It seems to me that only in Catholicism is the inevitable creative tension implied by that vision maintained. Some of course would see that as a disadvantage; but I don't think it can be disputed that Western culture, which has given so much to the world, depended on it for a long time. That it no longer does means we are living off the spiritual capital of the past.