From Pontifications: “The Church does not know more than the Apostles knew”

I have a question—OK, maybe a Socratic question. How can John Henry Newman, the 19th-century Anglican convert to Catholicism who virtually invented the idea of "development of doctrine," assure his correspondent that the Church knows no more than the Apostles knew? After all, both the Orthodox and fundamentalist Protestants would agree that the Church knows no more than the Apostles knew, but for that very reason deny that there is any such thing as legitimate development of doctrine.

Perhaps another way to frame the question is: how can "development" of doctrine not be "addition" of doctrine to the faith once delivered to the saints? I know the chorus that says it cannot fail to be addition, and thus illegitimate; but I'm interested in seeing somebody actually engage Newman (and Vatican II) on this question instead of dismissing development out of hand.

To paraphrase the Pontificator: "Some Christians don't believe in development of doctrine. They just practice it."

A Single Commandment Can Save

From Orthodox priest Steven Freeman, at Pontifications. Click the title and comment here.

The schism that balances

From one point of view, one might say it just gets weirder and weirder. Now living in DC, reunited with the Korean wife chosen for him years ago by the Rev. Sung Myung Moon of the Unification Church, Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo, 76, has launched a schism in the Catholic Church by illicitly ordaining four men as bishops. They too are married, and the aim of Milingo's acts appears to be to agitate for a married priesthood in the predominant "Latin Church" of the universal Catholic Church. Of course the Vatican excommunicated him within 48 hours. So now we have another schism on our hands—the last one being the "traditionalist" schism launched by the late Archbishop Marcel Lefevbre in the late 1980s by his ordination of two bishops for his Society of St. Pius X, which persists despite earnest talks seeking reconciliation.

The question I have about this Milingo thing is why so few Catholics seem to care. The ordinations, though illicit, are pretty clearly valid, which means Milingo has created a new church that is out of communion with Rome. That should be big news, but it's caused hardly a blip: I spent last weekend in intense contact with committed Catholics, but not one seemed to find the event worth discussing. In my puzzlement, I've just read the Catholic journalist I always turn to on extraordinary occasions, John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter. His column—part news, part speculation—is as interesting as always, but it doesn't really clear things up for me. Perhaps Catholics don't particularly care because they're too cynical to imagine that a schism over married priests and bishops will really change anything.

I care but I'm not perturbed. On the one hand, we have a twenty-year-old trad schism maintained by celibate bishops who find the Vatican too liberal, and in fact consider themselves more Catholic than the Pope. On the other, we have a new schism led by an elderly and demonstrably rather unstable bishop, whose PR line seems to be the "need" to bring back the 150,000 or so Catholic priests who have left the ministry to marry. But what's really propelling Milingo's defiance is, by his own account, the Vatican's "lack of appreciation" for his "deep spiritual gifts." Well, if those gifts are genuine, he is squandering them with this act of disobedience and schism. His misplaced and misspent pride, if nothing else, will keep this schism from growing because it's not rich enough soil for anything big and long-term. But the situation gives me the pleasure of knowing that we now have a prog schism balancing the trad one. All the sweeter for being led by a flake.

Going overboard

Fr. Martin Fox is one of those special parish priests who actually welcomes honest, detailed feedback about his homilies. That's why he posts them online, where he gets that feedback; and I expect he gets the same from a few brave, flesh-and-blood parishioners. Since I generally like his stuff, I've told him I shall join the feedback chorus.

I especially liked the closing lines from last Sunday's homily:

Most of us get intense about something. About that special someone we love; about sports, or our careers, about music, hobbies, or politics. And that’s fine. But what excuse can we have for not feeling strongly about the rights of every person, rich or poor, American or foreign, young or old, able-bodied or disabled, born or unborn? Because when someone has fallen out, or been pushed out, and they’re about to go under…That’s when you and I need to go overboard.

That's being countercultural in a way people can understand and swallow. Read it all by clicking this entry's title.

From Pontifications: Ratzinger on Peter

Click this entry's title for a very rich passage on the origins of the papacy from the theologian who is now pope. The link takes you to an entry at Pontifications. As promised, this blog now hosts all comments on posts at that blog. So if you wish to comment, open the combox here.

Why I'm joining Communion and Liberation

The short explanation is: I feel like I'm coming home after years in the wilderness.

This weekend I attended a conference held in at the Rock Hill Oratory in South Carolina by the Catholic ecclesial movement" Communion and Liberation, based in Italy but spreading worldwide. Leaders and members from Florida to New York converged for organizational planning and inspirational talks given mostly by the movement's American spiritual director, Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete of the Archdiocese of Washington. (Google him; you'll unearth quite a feast of articles.) The theme was "the risk of education," which is also the title of a book by the movement's founder, Fr. Luigi Giussani, who died last year. The picture at left is of the cover of the movements journal, which is sometimes inspiring but also needs a native-English-speaking copy editor.

Everybody I met there was not only an orthodox Catholic—which only takes one so far—but a genuine human being. Love radiated from nearly all of them, including Alabacete himself as he duly displayed what I'd heard is his ready, often sardonic wit. A good proportion of the attendees were highly educated; a few of the professors gave talks. But nobody was stuffy or tried to hide their struggles and weaknesses. The people I met are saints-in-the-making who'd be the last to think of themselves as candidates for canonization. Indeed, my impressions confirmed what Albacete is often quoted as saying: CL is "Opus Dei for bad people."

That's exactly why I'm so comfortable among them. Most other "orthodox" Catholic groups, settings, and organizations now have little use for me, a twice-divorced father of three who, six years ago, had what was once called a "nervous breakdown" and spent almost the whole next year, including three months as an inpatient, getting full-spectrum treatment for depression (and I mean they threw everything at me). Even though, save for that year, I've been working full-time at quite ordinary jobs to pay child support, it's been nearly a decade since I've had what could be considered a suitable job for somebody with my background, interests, and abilities. By this time last year, I had concluded that my professional life as a servant of the Church was over. Though in good health and good shape for a man my age, I felt treated as a has-been by the Church as well as by the world—which didn't seem far from the reality. One thing that's changed that conclusion is the feedback I've since been getting online, here and at Pontifications; the other, perhaps even more important, is the enthusiasm with which CL people have been affirming me as an individual and inviting me into their informal but rapidly growing employment network. I felt as though Jesus was telling me it's OK not to be OK, and that things will be OK.

Two other things also enthused me: CL's gender dynamics and its—well, its Italianness. While most of the intellectual heft comes from the men, most of the drive and organizational savvy comes from the women, who constitute the majority of "responsibles" leading local cells around the country. There were lots of married couples too, whose strengths nicely complemented each other. And even though there were more straight-up Americans than Italians, there were many native Italians now living in the U.S. and, as one might expect, the overall spirituality of CL seems distinctively modern Italian. The whole thing is like a big extended family in which all is shared, and the bad taken with the good as a matter of course.

Count me in. And have a peek yourself. The website linked above will direct you to the nearest reps.

Pontifications: an end and a beginning

Al Kimel, blogmeister of Pontifications where I am a co-writer, has decided to close down the combox as he prepares for ordination as a Roman Catholic priest. I have expressed my view of that move in a post over there today. Let me express my thanks to him once again. The Catholic priesthood will gain strength from his presence therein.

Starting next week, and as Al's subsequent posting permits, I will be hosting comments on his posts right here at Sacramentum Vitae. While he may offer comment himself from time to time, the burdens of moderating debate will devolve to yours truly. I hope that many of those who enjoyed and learned from Pontifications will continue doing so here.

The Feast of St. Michael and the Archangels

For obvious and not-so-obvious reasons, today's date is a specially important one to me. It seems to have been St. Michael the Archangel's feastday from the earliest Christian centuries in Rome. Although the Catholic Church has combined the feast with those of the archangels Gabriel and Raphael, thus honoring the "Big Three" mentioned in the Bible, even now the Anglicans call today's feast "Michaelmas."The name itself signifies. The original Hebrew meant "he who is like God;" in Christian traditon, that description morphed into a question: "Who is like God?" which in turn was held to be Michael's battle cry as he and his host ejected Satan and his host from heaven for a mass rebellion motivated by Satan's claim to God's throne. Thus Jesus said: "I saw Satan fall from heaven like lightning" (Luke 10:18). Now I know there are plenty of biblical scholars who explain that away, in context, as nothing but Jesus' approbation of the work of "the seventy-two" in rolling back evil. It was that, to be sure; but frankly, I don't buy the reductionistic 'nothing but' and have never been able to.

With Tradition, I believe that Jesus was also describing what he witnessed in illo tempore, as God the Son, before his incarnation as a man. His copious talk of and conflict with Satan in the Gospels strongly suggest that the two go way, way back: further back than we can possibly imagine. God appears to have given Michael the place of honor once held by Lucifer, now Satan. As such, Michael is commander-in-chief of the angelic hosts and champion of the Church Militant on earth.

Many other roles, revealed in apparitions and miracles, have also been attributed to him. Google him, read about him, and learn. This saint is incalculably important, as are angels generally in the "economy" of salvation.Some people are put off by the fact that he and the other archangels are called 'saint'. After all, Rome hasn't vetted and canonized any such being! That betrays a misunderstanding of the word. The lower-case 'saint' comes indirectly from the NT Greek hagios, meaning 'holy one'; the Latin for that is sanctus, the root of the Old French and Norman saint. Any "holy one" is a saint, even if the pope doesn't know it and say it. All the good angels are saints; they dwell in God's presence and do his bidding. Indeed, the very term 'angel' comes from the Greek for 'messenger'; in the Bible, that role is the most common one attributed to angels for the benefit of human beings. I am devoted to St. Michael as protector, guide, and hopefully as healer.

The wisdom that soothes is the wisdom that hurts

The Bible readings from today's (Roman) Catholic Mass got me onto one of those meditative jags that I make bold to ascribe to the Holy Spirit. I name him as the source because the core thought typifies God's ironic, paradoxical sense of humor: the wisdom that soothes is the wisdom that hurts. One cannot but see the Cross in that.

Take the first reading: Wisdom 2: 12, 17-20. Whatever the human author's conscious intent may have been, the Spirit is clearly speaking through this text of Jesus Christ and the motives of those who brought him to his earthly end—as does the "responsorial" psalm that follows. That is important for today because it describes what Jesus underwent to save us even today. And the way the passage expresses the thinking of the "wicked" reminds us of something equally important for today: why Muslims reject the proposition that Jesus really died on the Cross at all, never mind that he did so in order to save us from our sins. There is no Redemption in Islam because, like the wicked spoken of in today's selection from Wisdom, Muhammad and his followers assume that "if the just one be the son of God, God will defend him and deliver him from the hand of his foes." Of course God did save Jesus from his foes by raising him from the dead, but that's not what "the wicked" of the reading and Muslims as a group have in mind. They assume that God would never let a "prophet" or any, similarly august "just one" suffer the extreme humiliation of the Cross. Even the Apostles shared that assumption until after the fact. What the "wicked," the Muslims, and the Apostles before the Resurrection have in mind is natural human thought: the same that some of the Crucifixion's spectators had in mind when, as recounted in Matthew's Passion, they taunted Jesus thus:

"You who would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, save yourself, if you are the Son of God, (and) come down from the cross!" Likewise the chief priests with the scribes and elders mocked him and said, "He saved others; he cannot save himself. So he is the king of Israel! Let him come down from the cross now, and we will believe in him."

Of course Muslims are no more if no less "wicked" than any other group—including, unfortunately, Christians. But Islam's rejection of the Cross indicates a profound difference between Islam and Christianity, and what makes Islam different in this respect is the wisdom of the world, not of God.

By contrast, says a verse from today's second reading, "the wisdom from above is first of all pure, then peaceable, gentle, compliant, full of mercy and good fruits, without inconstancy or insincerity" (James 3:17). Such wisdom comes from the Holy Spirit dwelling in us. Since it is based only on love not fear, it does not exert power in self-defense, does not compel, and arises from no ulterior motive. It lets itself be nailed to crosses small and big. The person who receives and cultivates such wisdom is a sacrificial offering for others. He feels the weight of it but, for the most part, does not make us feel it too, as somebody with a martyr complex would. (We all know such people.) For the most part, such wisdom manifests itself as the quoted verse says. It is "first of all pure," by which is meant what Kierkegaard meant when he asserted that "purity of heart is to will one thing." The one thing the wise person wills is fellowship with and conformity to the primoridal Wisdom, the Logos, Jesus Christ.

As today's Gospel indicates, that comes at almost unimaginable cost. Being an offering for others sooner or later carries the ultimate price. The wisdom that soothes others is the wisdom that hurts us. Given what fallen humanity is like, that could hardly be otherwise. It's the truth behind the saying "No good deed goes unpunished." Whatever form it may take, the "punishment" is part of the deed—indeed the consummation of the deed: "It is finished." That happens in mostly small ways, and we will each die well to the extent we are faithful in those small ways. Indeed, as a total emptying of self for God and others, the punishment cannot remain punishment. It is redemptive, and thus a prelude to that glory of which Jesus' resurrection was the prime instance and cause. And that's why worries about status and power are so silly; why "[i]f anyone wishes to be first, he shall be the last of all and the servant of all." That is only possible if we receive, identify with, and emulate the "little child" in ourselves and others, symbolized by the child whom Jesus took in his arms with the words: "Whoever receives one child such as this in my name, receives me; and whoever receives me, receives not me but the One who sent me.” The wisdom from above may not consist in such littleness, but it cannot only be received in such littleness. For only in such littleness can we escape the "wisdom" of the world and be filled by the Spirit with that of the Logos himself.

A way to orient ourselves that way in daily life is to ask ourselves: are we after control or the Cross? Fr. Martin Fox explains it well.

The Feast of St. (Padre) Pio

I can't let this day end without marking the feast of one of the Church's most extraordinary saints, Padre Pio of Pietrelcina. To my substantial post on last year's feast, I add my request that he be the spiritual father of those whom I love, especially my children. It's just one of the ways to compensate for my inadequacies.

Why the Pope chose to say what he did

Thanks to The Ochlophobist for the best explanation I've heard. Here's a sample:

1. The Pope gave this speech to European secularists knowing full well that Islamic extremists (that is, a sizable portion of Muslims in both Europe and the Middle East) would react to the speech in an uncivil manner. Their uncivil reaction would highlight to those European secularists who heard the speech or read it that the secular European world and the Catholic intellectual world share something in common that is not shared with them by the Islamic world in general - civility and a cultured intellectual reserve. By highlighting this the Pope suggests in a subtle manner that this shared civility may just have something to do with a common intellectual heritage - the synthesis of Christian and hellenic thought which is found in the intellectual patrimony of Europe.

2. If "1" is true then we might view the Pope's speech as a brilliant rhetorical devise used to attempt to reestablish a common intellectual bond between the European university (or European intellectuals in general) and the Catholic Church in the midst of a Europe which is increasingly being Islamicized. This is a very subtle way for the Pope to remind Europeans that even as secularists they have more in common with Catholic Christianity than they do with Islam. This may seem an obvious point, but in today's Europe it is not - many secularists instinctually feel some resonance with Islam due to their shared hatred of Christianity. Thus if one can present Christianity as a reasoned, intellectually reserved and cultured form of thought which is quintessentially European at the exact moment that the Muslims in the midst are waving their "death to the infidels" signs then one has just effectively changed the former "us vs. them" to a new alliance of "us vs. them." I believe that this is exactly what Pope Benedict intended with this speech.

Read it all.

Why the Pope's main point is irrefutable

Yesterday I promised a post "analyzing" Pope Benedict XVI's Regensburg speech that set the Umma off once again. Herein I shall keep that promise. But first I note that, also yesterday, a friend of mine e-mailed the recent photo at the left. I hope that many of you get the black humor. If you do, you know that the main point of the Pope's remarks is irrefutable.

For those who don't, I point out that the man whose death is being called for by the devout Muslim holding the sign, namely the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus, has been dead for nearly 600 years. (To be charitable, I'm willing to allow that the demonstrator wants to emulate how one ninth-century pope treated his dead predecessor: he had the body disinterred, tried before a mock court, convicted, mutilated, and dumped into the Tiber. Plays to the gallery pretty well.) It was the Pope's citation of a remark made by Emperor Manuel which occasioned the latest paroxysm across the Umma, in which of course have been heard not a few threats on the Pope's life. Such threats are now understood to be a matter of course when somebody offends Muslims. We've learned the ground rule for dialogue: "Islam has been a religion of peace since 622; say otherwise and at least one of us will feel obliged to kill you." But it is well nonetheless that the Pope cannot unsay what he said. His choice to quote the Emperor was doubtless very carefully weighed to make a point that desperately needed to be made but also required plausible deniability from such a globally important figure. Many otherwise sympathetic people have taken the Pope to task for that. But they forget the significance of the fact that the very uproar he caused proved his point. Which is what?

Like everything the Pope says to or among academics, of which he was a star, the point is not immediately obvious. Perhaps the best way to unearth it is to consider how Benedict praised his old university.

[It] was also very proud of its two theological faculties. It was clear that, by inquiring about the reasonableness of faith, they too carried out a work which is necessarily part of the "whole" of the universitas scientiarum, even if not everyone could share the faith which theologians seek to correlate with reason as a whole. This profound sense of coherence within the universe of reason was not troubled, even when it was once reported that a colleague had said there was something odd about our university: it had two faculties devoted to something that did not exist: God. That even in the face of such radical scepticism it is still necessary and reasonable to raise the question of God through the use of reason, and to do so in the context of the tradition of the Christian faith: this, within the university as a whole, was accepted without question.

Such a vision of faith and reason is not only quintessentially Western but universally valid. Whether or not we believe we have a true answer to "the question of God," theology is a reasonable discipline, fit for a university, because the questions theology considers are reasonable ones meriting the most assiduous inquiry. But within both religious and secular culture, there has long been a certain theological tendency undermining the role of reason in the life of faith and in society as a whole.

To philosophers, the most familiar label for that tendency is voluntarism. In theology, voluntarism in its strong form is the notion that divine sovereignty is so absolute that God is not bound by anything at all—not even his by own goodness, and not even by reason itself. God wills what he wills what he wills: if he wills that good be evil and evil good, then it is so; if he wills that contradictions be true, then they are true. In Catholicism, certain late-medieval thinkers such as William of Ockham and Nicholas of Cusa were strong voluntarists, as have been not a few Protestant thinkers since. All that is old hat to philosophers and theologians, and the Pope alluded to it right after his discussion of the Emperor's words. But the striking thing about the lecture is the connection drawn between Muslim and Christian voluntarism, and how each relates to the problems of today.

Here's what the Pope said about the Muslim part of it (I have added the emphasis):

In the seventh conversation-controversy, edited by Professor Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the jihad (holy war). The emperor must have known that Sura 2, 256 reads: "There is no compulsion in religion". It is one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur’an, concerning holy war. Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the "Book" and the "infidels", he turns to his interlocutor somewhat brusquely with the central question on the relationship between religion and violence in general, in these words: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached".

The emperor goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. "God is not pleased by blood, and not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats... To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death...". The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature.

[Khoury] observes: "For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality. Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God’s will, we would even have to practise idolatry."

Well then: if, as remains common Muslim theology, God is "not bound even by his own word," then there can be no problem about religious violence or contradictions in the Qu'ran. In one sura we read that there's "no compulsion" in religion; in others, we read about all the conditions under which killing "infidels" is justified. This is why Muslims say with a straight face that Islam is a religion of peace and a religion of jihad, violent if need be, against infidels. This is why, though the majority of Muslims are not warlike, they have only weak arguments against those who are warlike. According to them, the Qu'ran is the literal words of God; if God is not bound by his own word, then of course he is not even bound by the logic of his words. But we are bound by his words; so if his words are illogical, then we are bound to be illogical.

That's quite pertinent to current events, and quite bad enough in itself. But such unreason is not the only sort of unreason that voluntarism has caused. The West is guilty too, albeit in a very different way.

I shall cut to the chase since you can read the lecture for yourself. The Pope's chief complaint is how the West, starting with medieval voluntarism, has ended relegating religion and ethics to the realm of the subjective, which may be interesting and even inspiring but cannot contain objective, rationally knowable truths. The Muslim way of divorcing faith and morality from reason leads to intolerance and violence; the Western way of doing so, which expresses itself as relativism and subjectivism, leads to cultural decadence. It is just such decadence that Muslims most dislike. And it's all the worse because it makes the bulk of contemporary Westerners unable to understand the Muslim challenge and react accordingly.

The only way to deal with that challenge is to restore a vision of reality in which religion and morality form part of a unitary vision of truth along with the science of which we are rightly proud. Such is what the Catholic Church continues to uphold—at least among those of her children, like the Pope, who think about such things and are able to appreciate their importance. In such a vision, God is bound by his own goodness and wisdom, which are dimly expressed in our virtues, our logic, and our science. To borrow a phrase from the American Declaration of Independence, science helps us understand "the laws of nature"; religion and natural morality help us to understand "nature's God." Together, they all form a unitary vision of truth. And it's one that excludes violence aimed at enforcing religious tenets.

It took Christians quite a long time to learn that. Most Muslims have not yet learned it. That is the main point of the Pope's lecture. It ought to be obvious. Too bad it isn't.

Are we cowards or men?

Reaction in the Western media to latest Muslim paroxysm of rage—a collective tantrum provoked by a wonderful lecture of the Pope's that I shall analyze in my next post—has got me asking myself a question that ought to trouble thoughtful people: do men any longer outnumber cowards in the West?

It is by my own experience that I know the difference between the two. There have been times in my life when I behaved in manly fashion, and times when I behaved like a coward. The biggest failures in my life have been caused by my own cowardice, and I'm still not sure whether I'll die a coward or a man. While I'm doing my best to meet the challenges of my life, and they are not trivial, I cannot take for granted that I won't flunk the next big test out of cowardice. (I'm sure it won't be about principle, of course; I'm too pig-headed for that to be a test worth giving me. My tests have all had to do with loving those hard to love, starting with myself; and I'm sure my next one will too.) But whatever the occasion of the test will be, I've been around too long to presume that much on the grace of God, let alone myself. That is why I don't at all like what I'm seeing in the so-called free world's reaction to Muslim bullying.

Consider the contents of a must-read article from the online magazine The Brussels Journal: The Church – Part of the Problem or Part of the Solution? Its sorry account of Western dhimmitude is all the more depressing given how the forces in our society that should be stiffening our spiritual backbone against jihad are those most given to weakening it: the churches. Were it not for my fear of playing armchair psychoanalyst, I'd say they have a collective death wish. The spiritual torpor and ingrained, cultural self-hatred so evident in so many of our clergy seems to me to be causing a desire to surrender to an enemy with far greater spiritual vigor. That is cowardice. I can understand that in agnostics and hedonists, but not in men of God. Yet there it is—the only explanation I can find for the fact that we are apparently expected to walk on eggshells around and about Muslims, so as not to provoke "understandable" reactions that wouldn't be tolerated for a New York minute from others under far greater provocation.

Don't believe me? Well, living where I do and reading what I read, I can hardly go a day without seeing or hearing my religion insulted. But if I burned a car in response, I'd do hard time; if I called for the death of the village atheist, I'd have a restraining order slapped on me; if I and my Catholic friends demonstrated with signs like the ones the Muslims have been carrying lately, we'd be dismissed and marginalized as kooks—if we were lucky. I can understand Muslims upholding such a double standard; but from Westerners it is absolutely intolerable, all the more because it's upheld in the name of "tolerance." If one cannot see what's intellectually wrong with moral relativism, just behold the cowardice it causes and encourages. Nobody likes the sight of cowardice, including those guilty of it.

Perhaps that's why they're blind to it. If 9/11 wasn't enough to remove their blinders, I shudder to think what would be.

The Pope and the Muslims: give me the T-shirt

Here we go again. This time, the Pope gives a sound, sober, and elegant academic lecture at a university where he once taught, in which he cites in passing a derogatory statement about Islam made by a medieval Byzantine emperor. The purpose of the citation was to illustrate one side of a contrast Benedict wished to describe, one that is found not just in Islam but in the West too. And if you read the lecture, to which I've linked, it is clear that he was focusing much more on the West's internal problem. But because the quoted statement was a negative one about Islam, the Muslims are angry again. Demonstrations have been held all over the world; effigies have been burned and car windows smashed; outraged clerics have called for an apology. We saw this movie less than a year ago over something far less subtle and intellectual: a cartoon in a Danish newspaper. So what else is new? And I ask: so what?

For the past few generations, Muslims have been getting angrier all the time. Some Muslims, especially young and unemployed ones in their home countries, are angry that they do not enjoy the freedoms and privileges of the West. Others, immigrants in Western countries, enjoy such privileges while hating what makes them possible. Most Muslims believe that they shouldn't be willing to live with the fact that the rest of the world isn't Muslim. And a small but very well-known minority of Muslims regularly targets and kills innocent people, including Muslims, as part of the jihad or struggle against what they consider the enemies of Islam. In such a context, it doesn't matter to most Muslims what the Pope actually meant. It doesn't matter that he has called for, and practiced, mutual respect and interreligious dialogue. It doesn't even matter that his view of Islam is much more balanced than that of Manuel II Paleologus, the angry, almost despairing leader of an ever-shrinking Byzantine state which he knew was doomed to extinction by Muslim armies. No, all that matters is that the Pope quoted something negative about Islam. Anybody who even cites something negative about Islam must be, if not an outright enemy of Islam, than terribly disrepectful of Islam. Such, apparently, is the Muslim rule for interreligious dialogue. They may and do say what they like about Christians and Jews, but the latter may not say or even cite anything negative about Islam. Such is the double standard of angry people.

Frankly, my dears, I don't give a damn. The choices left us by the Muslim attitude are silence or dhimmitude, and neither is acceptable. The Pope had every right to say what he did. Presumably to calm the waters, he has issued a ritual expression of "regret"; he has to, if only for political purposes. But don't let that fool you. The Pope knows that what I'm saying is true, and he's not going to deny what he actually said, because it too was true. We should not hesitate to say so.

Over at Pontifications, one commenter has envisioned a T-shirt. On the front: “Islam: a religion of peace since A.D. 622″ and on the back, “Say otherwise and we’ll blow you up.” The thing should be said and the T-shirt made. I'd buy it. Of course, only those who want to live should feel free to wear it.

Five years ago today...

What happened to America five years ago today was an atrocity far worse than the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor sixty years earlier. The latter took about as many lives as 9/11, but its target was military not civilian. It was a conventional act of war against soldiers, not one of mad terrorism against innocents. It lacerated my soul in another way too. At a party in 1975, I danced to the disco sound of "Burn, Baby, Burn!" at Windows on the World, at the top of one of the towers. All I could think of on 9/11 was penance.

While both Pearl Harbor and 9/11 roused this country from a certain slumber, there is another key difference: Pearl Harbor was an attempt to break our naval power; 9/11 was an attempt to break our will. The former did not long succeed; indeed, one might say that it roused and stifferened our will to prevail. In the short run, 9/11 failed too. But about the long run I am not so sanguine.

Americans and Westerners generally do not, as a whole, seem yet to understand what all the conflict within and about the Middle East has in common. This is not a war about "terrorism," which is only the most obvious weapon wielded by our true enemy. Whether one looks at Iraq, Southern Lebanon, Palestine, Afghanistan, or any place where Islamist terrorism has spilled blood, the enemy is the same: radical Islamic jihadism, whether of the Sunni (Wahhabi) or the Shi'ite variety best represented by Hezbollah and sustained by Iran in Iraq too. The aim of all jihadists is the same: the destruction of Israel and ultimately of the West, making way for the worldwide rule of Islam. While it is quite true, for example, that Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda had no working connection, the trends throughout the Middle East and Southern Asia, both before and since Saddam, are toward increasing convergence of jihadist groups. Saddam paid off the families of Palestinian suicide bombers of Israelis and tolerated Iraq's homegrown jihadist group, Ansar al-Sunna. The hydra-headed monster had been, and has since been getting, more cohesive for quite some time. One might argue that the overthrow of Saddam and the subsequent Iraqi insurgency has only accelerated that process; but if it has, that is not such a bad thing. It helps prevent people from sleeping too long.

Wherever there is Islamist terrorism, one finds jihadists from many different countries joining together. We're seeing only the earliest stages of what will, in due course, evolve into a true "clash of civilizations." Secular tools and outlooks will not avail us. The West will lose if it does not, in Benedict XVI's words, recover its "spiritual roots."

The Birth of the Blessed Virgin Mary

I thought I should take note of this day for two reasons. First, it is the anniversary of the ordination of one of my oldest friends. Congratulations to him as he continues his ministry in difficult circumstances. Second, it's a good occasion to mention one of my favorite themes: the most salient area of theology today is ecclesiology.

Of course we have no idea on what date Mary was actually born, and I shall not detain you by speculating on why September 8 was chosen to celebrate this feast. It appears to have been first celebrated liturgically in sixth-century Palestine after the Council of Ephesus acclaiming her as Theotokos or "God-bearer." Since the sources for Mary's origins are apocryphal, Rome was slow to put the feast on the universal calendar; that didn't happen, apparently, until the 8th century, after all the christological councils of the first millennium had done their work. Yet even though the basic outlines of orthodox christology were settled by then, the question of the nature of the Church as Mystical Body of Christ had not been. And while there has been some development, the question still isn't really settled. Most of the theological disputes today, at least in my observation, either stem from or lead to that theme. And so I shall say something about it here. Taking his cues from St Andrew of Crete, A. Valentini has noted:

In the case of all the Saints, the Church commemorates their birthday on the day of their return to the Lord. However, in the cases of St. John the Baptizer and the Blessed Virgin, it also celebrates the day of their earthly birth. This is a singular fact already emphasized in ancient times, for example, by Paschasius Radbertus (d. about 859).

The reason for this fact is not found primarily in the greatness or the privileges of the persons involved but in the singular mission that was theirs in the History of Salvation. In this light, the birth of the Blessed Virgin is considered to be - like that of John the Baptizer - in direct relationship with the coming of the Savior of the world. Thus, the birth and existence of Mary—similar to and even more than those of the Baptizer—take on a significance that transcends her own person. It is explained solely in the context of the History of Salvation, connected with the People of God of the Old Covenant and the New. Mary's birth lies at the confluence of the two Testaments, bringing to an end the stage of expectation and the promises and inaugurating the new times of grace and salvation in Jesus Christ.

Mary, the Daughter of Zion and ideal personification of Israel, is the last and most worthy representative of the People of the Old Covenant but at the same time she is "the hope and the dawn of the whole world." With her, the elevated Daughter of Zion, after a long expectation of the promises, the times are fulfilled and a new economy is established (LG 55).

The birth of Mary is ordained in particular toward her mission as Mother of the Savior. Her existence is indissolubly connected with that of Christ: it partakes of a unique plan of predestination and grace. God's mysterious plan regarding the incarnation of the Word embraces also the Virgin who is His Mother. In this way, the Birth of Mary is inserted at the very heart of the History of Salvation (emphasis added).

Valentini cites Vatican II's Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, which was concerned to present Mary above all as "Mother of the Church." Within the Church, Mary represents the feminine principle in which we all share as members of the Mystical Body of Christ, i.e. the Church. The Church is one body with Christ because she is the Bride whom he, the Bridegroom, has married. Thus Mary is Spouse of the Holy Spirit as well as Mother of the Son. As her divine Son's most perfect human disciple, filled to overflowing with the Holy Spirit who conceived the Son in her, she leads to the Son by the power of the Spirit all those who seek her care and protection. As personification of the Church, she helps to make the Church as collectivity what she is individually: the receiver and bearer of God in the world. Such is the "Marian charism" of all believers.

At the other pole of the Church we have the clerical hierarchy, with the college of bishops as collective head and the pope as head of them. The hierarchy represents the masculine principle of headship and self-immolation that is fully found only in the life, death, resurrection, and divine person of God the Son Incarnate: Our Lord Jesus Christ. As sinners, they fulfill their role quite imperfectly even as Mary fulfills hers perfectly. They and their role exist for the sake of all of us, whom the human person Mary represents. Such is the balance of the Church. The representation of headship, through which Jesus Christ exercises his headship, is done by sinful men; the representation of submission and sanctification, which Jesus also uses for his purpose, is done by a sinless woman.

We need to meditate more on such truths today. I could go on, but I don't have time and for now this is enough food for thought. I offer it to you, my readers, and to God for further development.

Not dead yet

Apologies to my vast readership once again for my month-long absence. I've moved to another city and have been working long hours as a wage slave to pay for that. Which reminds me that today is Labor Day.

Though fraught with struggle and violence, the labor movement's origins in the 19th century were on the whole laudable. It had been historically inevitable that the Industrial Revolution would cause massive exploitation of cheap labor, and it was morally imperative that such exploitation be mitigated. Communism was not the answer; and as an alternative, the American labor movement once had considerable success that we still benefit from today. But labor is now in eclipse: the forces of international competition, especially the influence of cheap Asian labor, have put many employers in a very strong position once again. If they don't move production to where labor is cheapest, they cannot price their products competitively and in due course go out of business. So, many jobs are exported overseas, and the pay for many of the remaining ones is forced downward. Such is globalization, which nothing can stop despite the pain and the reactionary longings for an easier past. What is to be done?

Right now, not much can be done save at the margins. More and more Americans lack access to adequate health care because they cannot afford it on their own and their employers cannot, for the reasons stated above, afford to provide them with insurance. Indeed, the very concept of employer-based health insurance is slowly but steadily becoming unworkable for all but the highest-paid workers, those in the most profitable industries, and government workers. We desperately need a system of tax-financed basic health care, with anything elective left to the current system and with rationing of services for those past Social-Security retirement age. But that would only be nibbling at the margins, and the force of prejudice against anything smacking of "socialism" is so strong that Americans don't seem ready even for that.

In any case, the real new labor revolution needs to be over the very nature of work itself. Even unionized and other well-paid workers tend to view their jobs less as intrinsically valuable than as the suffering one must undergo to obtain money for survival and pleasure. That is how I view my current job, and I have lots of company all over the world. Actually, my position is better than that of many, because at one time I actually did earn my living doing something I love and am young enough to regain that opportunity if I work smart enough in my spare time. But countless people don't have such opportunities. The only solution is to embrace the vision of human dignity best embodied in the social teaching of the Catholic Church.

To those willing to acquaint themselves with that, I recommend John Paul II's encyclical Laborem Exercens and the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church.

Transfiguration

I hate to admit it, but there's something of the normal American in me. The admission is due because I first started caring about the Feast of the Transfiguration, which is today, when I learned that the atomic-bombing of Hiroshima also occurred on the 6th of August (1945).

The flash of that bomb was the closest thing to the Uncreated Light that man had ever produced. Not surprisingly, it was for destructive purposes: killing scores of thousands of innocent people with the aim of terrorizing Japan into unconditional surrender. Whatever Americans may have thought of that then and now, the Catholic Church cannot but condemn the mass targeting of civilians in warfare—regardless of the weapon used. And Vatican II did so (Gaudium et spes §80). Yet the ghoulish juxtaposition of such evil with the good celebrated in today's feast provide much to ponder in wonder.

My own meditation is that the real power at the heart of reality is God's to bestow according to his gracious will, not man's to grasp at for his limited, selfish purposes. The creative force of the universe is also the transforming light of love. But as we delve ever deeper into the mysteries of the physical cosmos, we become capable of once-inconceivable violence. The potential for that is now so great that we can readily imagine the human race annihilating itself by unleashing it. So of course more and more nations yearn to acquire nuclear weapons, whose only rational use is to deter others from using them. But even though we have thousands of deliverable warheads affording "multi-layered redundancy," we will not reduce our force by a single one.

Such is one of Satan's ways of mocking the Transfiguration, the prototype of that deification to which we are all called. Let us live in the light so as to reduce such mockery to silence.

The "real" person inside?

The latest flap surrounding Mel Gibson perfectly illustrates some contemporary confusions about moral psychology. Truth can be served by pointing them out, thus encouraging humility—the sort of humility Gibson's obviously sincere public confession has shown.

Citing the old proverb in vino veritas, Gibson's old enemies and not a few of his erstwhile supporters take his drunken tirade as irrefutable evidence that he is, at heart, an anti-Semitic boor. Nonsense. If the proverb were true without qualification, then the best way for police to obtain confessions and judges to secure reliable testimony from witnesses would be to get the subjects drunk. But it isn't, and there's no argument against fact. So let's drop the all-too-easy illusion. What Gibson's anti-Semitic remarks show is that he has such ugliness inside him, along with other kinds of ugliness that he has manifested, such as alcoholism—a demon with which many otherwise good people have struggled. We all have ugliness inside us; some less than others, to be sure; but I know of nobody past the age of reason who has none at all. Indeed, saints are the most likely to see themselves as sinners and such unflinching, genuine humility is one reason they are saints. We cannot say who the "real" Mel Gibson is just because alcohol loosened his inhibitions on expressing his inner ugliness.

He was of course totally wrong to let himself get that drunk, and then drive in that state, to start with. But one could with at least as much justice—if not more—say that the "real" Mel Gibson is the one who repented of his rotten behavior and issued his well-publicized expression of regret. That's a choice he made while sober, after all; one is more likely to choose rationally and well when one is sober because reason and free will, our non-animal capacities, are more likely to operate without intoxicants. And such choices are more characteristically personal than much of the ugliness that people carry round inside them.

I'm struck by the fact that people have been quick to take the nasty side as the "really" real and the admirable as phony, a pose to be "seen through" and debunked. Given that Mel Gibson came out of Hollywood, it's just assumed that his confession is a publicity stunt pulled off for the sake of damage control. With some Hollywood types, that level of cynicism is probably justified. But I cannot think of the producer and director of The Passion of the Christ, who is also a loving father of eight, in that way. The man has too much good inside him. That he also has much bad inside him is only human. But I supose being human is unacceptable for those "right-wingers."

I'm sure somebody has written to explain that. Any references?

The real and the fake hierarchy of truths

Since Vatican II, a lot of Catholic theologians who wish to jettison, marginalize, or render optional certain unpopular or hard-to-believe doctrines are wont, for that purpose, to cite the Council's statement about the "hierarchy of truths." Thus:

...in ecumenical dialogue, Catholic theologians standing fast by the teaching of the Church and investigating the divine mysteries with the separated brethren must proceed with love for the truth, with charity, and with humility. When comparing doctrines with one another, they should remember that in Catholic doctrine there exists a "hierarchy" of truths, since they vary in their relation to the fundamental Christian faith. Thus the way will be opened by which through fraternal rivalry all will be stirred to a deeper understanding and a clearer presentation of the unfathomable riches of Christ. (Unitatis Redintegratio §11)

The point of citing the hierarchy of truths in that context was to remind Catholics engaged in "ecumenical dialogue" not to dwell so much on certain distinctively Catholic doctrines "lower down" in the hierarchy, such as the Marian ones, as to obscure awareness of our unity with some non-Catholic Christians about some of the ones "higher up," such as the Trinity, the Hypostatic Union, and man's call to a share in the divine life. But some theologians, and not a few people who read them, interpret the Council's statement to mean that the lower-down doctrines are dispensable, inasmuch as they are matters of opinion not touching the "core" of faith, not articles of an organically whole faith. That view is incorrect.

Here's what Fr. Gus DiNoia, O.P., former chief editor of The Thomist and currently Undersecretary for the Vatican's Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, has to say about this issue:

A lot of modern theology has been seduced by the criterion of reasonability, or as somebody might say, critical reasonability. The result is that you have to pare down articles of faith, rather than taking the entirety of the revelation in all of its complexity, richness, challenged difficulty. You pare it down so that you have a core that you can "live with." This is deadly, because now the faith has to pass the bar of human reason, whereas for classical theology it was just the opposite. Human reason had to pass the bar of faith.

From this way of thinking has emerged one of the most insidious abuses of "the hierarchy of doctrines." The hierarchy of doctrines is treated as a way of ranking doctrines by their authority and as Avery Dulles has pointed out in an article we published in The Thomist. This of course was not what the Second Vatican Council meant by the hierarchy of doctrines. What the hierarchy of doctrines refers to is that all of the doctrines, which, you might say, seem not to be central, are not, therefore, dispensable, but only understandable with respect to a core.

Let me give you a very good example. We are all bodies with parts, fingers, toes, ears, livers, brains, hearts, now if I said to you, what is your most important part, most people would say either the brain or the heart. If I asked you what is your most least important part, you might say, your pinky. But the fact that you are able to identify important parts of your body with respect to less important ones, does not mean that you are prepared to part with any of the parts of your body. You are not prepared to part with pinkies, because they are not hearts.

Although this sounds funny, sometimes it's these kinds of examples that are the only ones that make sense to people. The hierarchy of doctrines is more correctly understood with an organic metaphor, because what the hierarchy of doctrine means is that doctrine like the perpetual virginity of Mary or sexual morality don't make sense apart from the core. It doesn't mean some beliefs are less important and therefore dispensable, it means that they don't work apart from the core and in this case, the core is the Trinity; The Father, Christ, and the Holy Spirit.

Quite so. While a given doctrine further from the "core" might not be as important as one closer thereto, it's sort of like one's pinky: it belongs to one's organism; one wouldn't want to treat it as dispensable; yet it only makes sense in terms of the whole and draws its life from more basic parts of the body.

Indeed, the hierarchy of faith is structured by the analogy of faith, by which the coherence of each part not only depends on but reflects the core and all the others. When people don't quite see the point of the "lesser" doctrines, such as those on sexual morality or the virginity of Mary, it's because they don't understand how the greater ones manifest themselves in the concrete and the particular. They are not immersed enough in the faith to grasp the analogy of faith, and thus are prey to the "insidious" error that Fr. DiNoia diagnoses and warns us about. That is especially true of many Catholics, who thus become legalistic, always looking to rank teachings of the Church by their precise "degree of authority" so that they can determine which they can get away with disbelieving.

While some teachings are hardly irreformable, such as those representing the exercise of prudential judgment about some morally significant aspects of contemporary life, the legalism I'm describing almost always extends to other teachings which indeed are irreformable. The cure is proper awareness of what holds the hierarchy of truths together. Such awareness can come about only if one is animated by a sincere desire to be grasped by the virtue and the content of faith, as distinct from developing religious opinions for oneself.

A good start for those so disposed would be the book whose cover is imaged at the beginning of this post. Just click it.