Prof. McInerny on Pelosi

All too briefly we were permitted to savor the image of the Speaker of the House poring over the writings of St. Augustine in the watches of the night, looking for things of which the Bishop of Hippo had been unsure. Always mindful of the public, she did not keep her findings to herself. In an impromptu lecture to the press, she opined that she could tap into the putative Augustinian ignorance and go on killing babies and be as good a Catholic as he. Seemingly San Francisco had made her an honorary STD.

And then, mirabile dictu, the chiding voices of bishops were heard. Not one, not two, but half a dozen, perhaps more. Admonishing bishops have become almost as rare as theologians in Congress, but here we had corrective statements remarkable for their pith and point. There is no cover in Catholic doctrine for abortion, any more than there is in natural law.

Where did Nancy Pelosi come by the notion that she could offer alternatives to “official” doctrine and that this was actually the Catholic thing to do? Where would she have acquired the confidence that abortion is a live option, that everyone could just follow his own “conscience,” that moral absolutes are no more? The answer is simple. She is a typical product of Catholic education.

Read the rest.

Is this a model for evangelization?

It's a Jesuit one, of course. You decide

Communion by degree

Everybody knows—OK, almost everybody who reads this blog—that the American bishops lack a unitary policy about giving the Eucharist to Catholics who reject and/or disobey the definitive teaching of the Church. For even better-known reasons, that fact always comes to the fore in a general election. Now that Senator Joe Biden, a Catholic who is as pro-abortion-rights as he is anti-men's-rights, has "ascended to Barack Obama's right hand," the issue has resurfaced. As always, John Allen has instructive things to say. But the recurrence of this familiar issue in the news cycle has prompted me to connect it with another, broader one that tends to interest readers of this blog even more.

Like so many other such issues, the one I have in mind is ecclesiological: just what does being "in communion" with the Catholic Church consist in? What are the necessary and sufficient conditions? How and when are they met? And how, short of juridical excommunication, does a Catholic get herself out of communion with the Church? I once thought that debating such questions was just an arcane theological exercise, the sort that occupies people who don't have to worry about mere temporalities such as earning a living or changing diapers. But in fact it is anything but. The questions that arise here affect us all on the personal, pastoral, and political levels, which are intertwined in many ways. The issue is also very much an apologetical one. Since I can't do everything in one post, I shall focus on the issue mainly from that angle.

One thing that I've consistently observed since Vatican II is that many people, Catholics as much as non-Catholics, have the impression the Church's teaching on membership in the Church is, or rather has become, incoherent. It is widely believed that the Church once taught that you had to be what we'd now call a "card-carrying Catholic" to be saved—and even for those people, the prospects were pretty dicey. Being such a Catholic entailed being "in communion with" the Church of Rome. But having been exposed to Vatican II and ecumenism, many people now believe that the Church no longer teaches that. The general impression seems to be that the Church now teaches that you can squeak into heaven, perhaps by way of purgatory, just by avoiding the grossest and blackest forms of wickedness and being vaguely contrite, in the end, about one's preferred forms of wickedness—or at least about those which one has managed to recognize as such. From this point of view it hardly matters what religion you profess, or even whether you profess any at all.

Of course the above is a caricature I've devised for expository clarity. But it is not a terribly unfair caricature of how many people see these things. It is actually a reasonable summation of what I've been hearing for decades. And how such people see these things is not only wrong but terribly unfair to the Catholic Church, whose teaching on this subject is profound, nuanced, and still developing. Explaining why will help illustrate what being "in communion" with, and thus a member of, the Church actually means—and why that is important.

It is true that the Catholic Church has taught, with her full authority, the doctrine extra ecclesiam nulla salus: "outside the Church, there is no salvation" ('EENS' for short). For people who care about such facts, I don't even need to document that. It is also true that Vatican II did not repeat the words of EENS, at least as a pastoral matter. For what the Council did say, I always urge people to read the documents, especially Lumen Gentium and Unitatis Redintegratio. But for now, here are the three most pertinent statements (emphases added):

Basing itself upon Sacred Scripture and Tradition, [this sacred Council] teaches that the Church, now sojourning on earth as an exile, is necessary for salvation (LG §13).

Even in the beginnings of this one and only Church of God there arose certain rifts,(19) which the Apostle strongly condemned.(20) But in subsequent centuries much more serious dissensions made their appearance and quite large communities came to be separated from full communion with the Catholic Church-for which, often enough, men of both sides were to blame. The children who are born into these Communities and who grow up believing in Christ cannot be accused of the sin involved in the separation, and the Catholic Church embraces upon them as brothers, with respect and affection. For men who believe in Christ and have been truly baptized are in communion with the Catholic Church even though this communion is imperfect (UR §3).

Those also can attain to salvation who through no fault of their own do not know the Gospel of Christ or His Church, yet sincerely seek God and moved by grace strive by their deeds to do His will as it is known to them through the dictates of conscience (LG §16).

The key development of doctrine here is this: those who are, for whatever reason, not culpable for failing to become formally members of the Catholic Church, can still be saved by responding positively to that grace, won by and coming from Christ, which is given to humanity in and through the Church, i.e. the Catholic Church. (The Catechism of the Catholic Church's explanation of EENS helps to make that clear.) The people so described are thus in "imperfect" communion with the Church. Being "in communion with" the Catholic Church thus is, or often can be, a matter of degree—just as the journey of the "pilgrim Church" herself toward eschatological fullness is a matter of degree. And if you are objectively inculpable for that degree's not being full, then you're "in," at least to a degree that can enable your salvation.

That matters a lot for ordinary pastoral practice, evangelization, and missionary activity—for only God can really know who is culpable and who isn't. But the idea of imperfect communion remains very controversial in some quarters, probably because it is so widely misunderstood.

It is often taken to mean that EENS has been, at least from the standpoint of logic, repudiated by the Catholic Magisterium. Of course I have vigorously argued that EENS has not been thus repudiated. My first formal argument to that effect was made in a 2006 post at the now-defunct version of Pontifications, where it evoked a combox running to well over 300 entries, many of which were scholarly. That post is preserved as the first dogma-specific entry in my long essay Development and Negation. The point the naysayers couldn't (or, in some cases, wouldn't) see was itself simple: it is one thing to say that there's no salvation outside the Church; it's another to say what being inside the Church can consist in. The former claim remains the teaching of the Church, now expressed by LG's formulation that she is "necessary for salvation." But the latter claim is that being in the Church, or at least being related to her in a salvific way, is often a matter of degree. That is a real development of insight into the fixed content of the deposit of faith.

What most interests me at the moment, however, is not how non-Catholics can be in some degree of communion with the Church, but how Catholics themselves can fail to in full communion—and why that matters.

The Eucharist is, among many other things, an expression of the intimate unity between God and his people, between Christ and the Church. As such and perforce, it is also an expression of the full unity of faith and graced fellowship among those who share it. So even American Catholics are taught, rightly and in considerable detail, that if they have sinned seriously in this-or-that way, they would be profaning the Eucharist by receiving it. That is because it is held, on the basis of Scripture and Tradition, that those who have abandoned their baptismal vocation by falling into mortal sin are no longer in full communion with the Church, and thus would be lying to the Church, and well as dishonoring the Body and Blood of the Lord, by receiving it into their bodies. Those who receive "unworthily" thus receive "unto their own condemnation" (cf. 1 Cor 11: 23-30). If they are thus and culpably not in full communion with the Church, they can be saved only if they repent. So much used to be taken for granted by Catholics in general, and still is in some quarters. Most Catholics know that, if they have committed sins such as adultery or grand larceny, they need to do something to reconcile with God and the Church.

Now even Catholics who only formally cooperate with grave and intrinsic evils, such as abortion, are committing what is, objectively speaking, serious sin. Hence and in particular, Catholic politicians who support laws giving wide scope to the practice of abortion are doing grave wrong. But it does not necessarily follow that they are guilty of that sin, so that they profane the Eucharist if and when they receive it. That follows only when (a) they are aware of how the teaching of the Church applies in this case, or (b) if they are unaware, they are culpable for being unaware. And the same holds for Catholics in general about any sort of serious sin, especially that of heresy. This is where the problem of pro-abort Catholic pols really arises from.

On a whole host of issues, mainly those having to do with sexuality, marriage, and procreation, many American Catholics do not actually believe the definitive teaching of the Church. And so, of course, they feel no obligation to live by it. The Catholic politicians they help elect are, by and large, no exception. The practical question which thus arises for the Church's pastors, especially the bishops, is whether such people should be presumed culpable for that or not, and thus whether they should be denied the Eucharist or not. In most cases, bishops and priests presume that people are not culpable for their infidelity to Church teaching. They presume either that people are approaching the Eucharist in good conscience or that it is not the role of pastors to judge the consciences of communicants when they march up to receive. And in the case of many ordinary Catholics, that presumption is correct. The depth of ignorance and deception among ordinary Catholics, which reached new lows in the decade or so after Vatican II, remains so great in many instances that such Catholics cannot be presumed culpable when, out of habit and sentiment, they receive the Eucharist. And so, even when such a Catholic is objectively culpable for not being in full communion with the Church, the appearance of full communion on their part is generally kept up.

Nevertheless, that poses a serious obstacle to evangelizing both ignorant Catholics and the culture at large. If, for what seem to be sound pastoral reasons, many Catholics who neither believe nor live by the moral teaching of the Church are receiving the Eucharist with apparent impunity, then how seriously are ordinary Catholics and the world at large to take such teaching? The general impression has become that such teaching is optional: a rather dismal section of the cafeteria line that one is free to bypass and that will, sooner or later, be tossed along with all the other food nobody buys. Thus the policy of keeping up appearances for the sake of pastoral economy has the effect of entrenching, on a wide scale, the very problem that occasioned the policy in the first place. And so, the preaching of the full Gospel has been largely buried under a collective rationalization. That, I am convinced, is the basis of most of the other problems in the American Catholic Church, including the sex-abuse-and-coverup scandal that peaked five years ago. I blame the bishops for the fundamental problem as much as for its most egregious manifestation.

It can be argued that, given the sorry lack of adult catechesis, there is no practical alternative to the present policy of keeping up the appearance of full communion in the case of Catholics who are objectively not in full communion. That's what many bishops do argue, and the argument is cogent. One cannot just pick out, and pick on, the ordinary Catholics who are implicated in this mess. Most of them are not morally responsible for it, nor is it their role to clean it up. But one can and ought to pick out and pick on erring Catholics who have the education to know better and the power to affect a great many lives by their actions. I mean, of course, the Nancy Pelosis and the Joe Bidens. Archbishop Chaput has had some especially trenchant things to say about such people. If they have excuses, they shouldn't be left with them. Too much is at stake.

But there is a still-more fundamental problem here. Having acknowledged and taken into account the reality of imperfect communion for many non-Catholics, Rome must do the same for many Catholics, if only for self-consistency's sake. If she does so, as she has done for decades, she only reinforces the Church's internal problem for the reason I've already stated. If she does not, she becomes pastorally inconsistent: ecumenism will apply only to those who were never formally Catholic, so that we'll end up with a much smaller, if purer, Church. The Pope seems headed, slowly, in the latter direction. How he and his successors will carry on with it remains, however, an open question. In the meantime, the American bishops continue to disagree about how to handle the Pelosis and the Bidens. Maybe that's inevitable.

Either way, they should be more concerned with the formation of ordinary Catholic adults. Almost a decade ago, the USCCB produced a bracing document which points the way. Little has been done to implement it. I'm waiting with my resumé in hand.

Humanae Vitae at 40: the joke's on them

When Pope Paul VI's courageous, landmark encyclical on birth control, Humanae Vitae, came out in late July 1968, I was thirteen years old. Providentially, I had just learned "the facts of life." Yet the reaction of most Catholic adults to said document, including those of my parents' circle, was that the exercise was a cruel joke. "We" had been led to believe that the Pill was OK and was going to be OKed, but we were snookered by that dried-up, out-of-touch old celibate in the Vatican. For reasons I needn't elaborate, the Church has not been the same since. Catholicism still lives, effectively, in a state of internal schism across the board--and the majority are not on the papacy's side. The defining moment was the general reaction to HV, just a few years after Vatican II closed.

Cardinal James Francis Stafford, now head of the Apostolic Penitentiary in Rome and then a parish priest in the Archdiocese of Baltimore, has just offered a hard-eyed, unblinking look at what happened. The story is so compelling that I shall let it speak mostly for itself. I shall say only that he is right to point out that the West, clergy as well as laity, did not want and therefore did not get the right response to the final petition of the Lord's Prayer on this topic. Thus we have paid a steep and wide-ranging price for ignoring, even ridiculing, the constant, irreformable teaching of the Church. We have let, in Paul VI's words, "the smoke of Satan" into the Church, and it is choking us.

Indeed, as Mary Eberstadt points out in the current issue of First Things, that pope's dire predictions about what would happen if the contraceptive mentality became widespread have been so thoroughly borne out that the joke is now on HV's opponents. That includes especially feminists, who complain bitterly about male disrespect for women at a time when women, in the West at least, are ostensibly more privileged than ever before. All one can say is that, when sterile sex is deliberately made the norm, then lust sooner or later wins out over love. We see that everywhere today; it's just Human Nature 101. But the funny thing is they still don't get it. As my first wife was fond of saying, illicit sex "fries the brains." Her mother was a Catholic philosopher from whose paper "Contraception and Chastity" (1972) Eberstadt sees fit to quote at length.

By all means read all three articles I've cited, starting with the last. All is not lost: it's a good sign that even a few Princeton undergraduates, in addition to a growing minority of educated young Catholics, now get it. That would have been inconceivable when I was in college. There is still hope. The hope will be justified by a Church that, perforce, will be smaller but purer.

Baptism with gender-neutral language ruled invalid

So indicates the CDF, which settles it. Amy Welborn has a good post up about it.

Why this and why now? As in the case of women's ordination, Rome is concerned to maintain the gender-symbolic integrity of the sacraments. Jesus did not refer to himself as "the Son," and to God the Father as "Father," just to mollify "the culture." The Jews were and had long been surrounded by cultures with female deities and with priestesses. No, there's a point here that God, unsurprisingly, understands better than we. Today more than ever, people should not be allowed to forget it.

Humanae Vitae for priests

The following mass e-mail to priests from Fr. Thomas Euteneur, President of Human Life International, describes what needs to be done about the problem of contraception in the Church.

We are just five months away from the 40th anniversary of the papal encyclical on birth control, entitled Humanae Vitae, and I am writing to ask your assistance in a project that I hope will impact thousands of men responsible for this marvelous teaching—our priests and seminarians. The project is simple: to send to as many priests and seminarians as possible a new email newsletter that is dedicated to educating them on the teaching of this encyclical. In a moment, I will tell you how you can help me in this project, but first let me explain why this is important.

There are two complaints that I have heard in literally every one of the 50+ countries I have visited. Complaint one is that priests don't preach enough about abortion. That is painfully apparent to all of us. Complaint two is that they are almost totally silent about the issue of birth control as well. Some have described this as a "conspiracy of silence" in the face of one of the most important issues of our day.

Rome, thankfully, has not been silent on either one of these issues. Popes Paul VI, John Paul II and Benedict XVI have been brilliant examples of preaching and teaching on the life issues. The problem comes down to the delivery of these teachings at the grass-roots level! It benefits the "average Catholic" very little if the pope writes a document on an issue of faith or morals only to have priests ignore it in their pastoral care of souls. This has been the de facto situation of our clergy for forty years on the issue of birth control, and it is not too strong to say that the teaching of Christ has been neutered by clerics who contracept its life-giving force!

Don't get me wrong. I am not judging this clerical contraception—I am condemning it! Priests who deprive their people of moral guidance on birth control dig their own graves. "My people perish for lack of knowledge," says the prophet Amos. Yes, and they also perish for the sins of contraception, which has apparently been adopted by the vast majority of Catholics—men, women and physicians—who see no contradiction whatsoever in contraception and the reception of Holy Communion.

HLI has never condemned this lack of clerical responsibility without at the same time offering a positive solution to it. We relentlessly supply bishops, priests, seminarians and religious all over the world with rock-solid information about the life issues, and in doing so, we know that we are helping to form the leaders of the Church Militant to fight the culture of death—and we will never relent in our mission!

In the lead up to the anniversary of Humanae Vitae on July 25th, HLI will publish a special e-newsletter for priests and seminarians dedicated exclusively to teaching them about Humanae Vitae. Here is what the e-newsletter will provide them:

* commentary on the cultural degradation that has been generated by contraception
* homily helps for preaching on birth control
* technical information about the abortifacient dimension of contraception
* resources for promoting natural family planning among your people
* feature-length articles exploring the beauty of Humanae Vitae
* straight-talk regarding priestly dissent on this issue and how it leads to loss of souls,
and finally
* a manifesto for priests to sign to demonstrate that we will never be silent about this issue!

This all sounds like an ambitious plan, I know, but their priestly souls are worth it aren't they?!

Now, here is how you can help us: send us the email addresses of priests and seminarians that you know so that we can invite them to receive this email newsletter. We already have a database of priests and seminarians who will receive this next week, but we want every present and future cleric to enjoy the benefit of this marvelous work.

All we ask is that you hit the REPLY button at the top of this email and send us the email addresses of any priests or seminarians you know. It is not necessary to include their names—just their email addresses. We will invite them to receive our new publication called Humanae Vitae Priests.

Help us take back our Church from the dissenters—it's time to hear the full teaching of our Church from the pulpit again!

The world's (comedy) mission to the church

Once upon a time, it was fun to skewer liberal Christianity. In the 1930's, Reinhold Niebuhr famously observed that liberal Protestantism preached "a God without wrath who brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross." More recently, in one of my favorite lines, somebody whose name I cannot track down said that liberal Christians (among whom we should count Catholic progs) would rather be the world's missionaries to the Church than the Church's missionaries to the world. Witticisms like that were once widely understood, even appreciated, by those with a bit of perspective. They can and should be appreciated by people with a concern for objective truth about matters of universal human concern. You can still find people like that in the interstices of ordinary life as well as in conservative religious settings. A few even read this blog. But that's a blessed minority—even and especially in secular academia. The spiritual devolution of our society has proceeded so far that your typical student, even your typical professor, wouldn't get such witticisms. They're too far gone to appreciate the irony; instead, they provide the comedy themselves. The fun now is to watch them skewer themselves unwittingly. My purpose in this post is to explain both the fact and its importance.

In an "Opinion" column that appeared in last weekend's USA Today, Stephen Prothero, chairman of Boston University's religion department, worries that "religion", meaning traditional religion, "is losing the Millennial Generation." Why? Read on (I've added the boldface emphasis):

For the past two years, I have asked students in my introductory religion courses at Boston University to get together in groups and invent their own religions. They present their religious creations to their classmates, and then everyone votes (with fake money in a makeshift offering plate) for the new religions they like best. This assignment encourages students to reflect on what separates "winners" and "losers" in America's freewheeling spiritual marketplace. It also yields intriguing data regarding what sort of religious beliefs and practices young people love and hate.

The new religious concoctions my students stir up might seem to mirror the diversity of American religion itself. Students tantalize one another with a religion (Dessertism) that preaches the stomach as the way to the soul, another (The Congregation of Wisdom) that honors Jeopardy! phenom Ken Jennings as its patron saint, and yet another (Exetazo) dedicated to sorting out the pluses and minuses of all the other religions so you can find a faith tailored to your own unique personality.

What strikes me most about my students' religions, however, is how similar they are. Almost invariably, they mix fun with faith. (Facebookismianity anyone?) But they do not mix faith with dogma. My students are careful — exceedingly careful — not to tell one another what to believe, or even what to do. Above all, they want to be tolerant and non-judgmental. Most of the religions my students developed were fully compatible with other religions.

They made few demands, either intellectually or morally. Repeatedly, their founders stress that you can join their religion without leaving Catholicism or Judaism or Islam behind.

I doubt that the results of such a classroom assignment would surprise anybody. If they do surprise, they shouldn't. Yet they're worth noting: one might well say that such students are skewering themselves, all the more because they wouldn't recognize the fact. Admittedly, and even granted that they are, their attitude presents traditional religions with a problem. But the surprising thing is that Prothero, a man of the sort from whom one might expect at least a tad of spiritual gravitas, actually thinks the problem is with traditional religions rather than the students.

He makes quite clear his belief that traditional religions are endangering themselves by failing to accommodate such flaccid, frivolous relativism. Thus, if they don't want to lose the Millennial Generation (portentous-sounding, that), their approach had better be more to the tastes of said generation. Now for one thing, such an attitude betrays the sort of blindness that entails a complete loss of the sense of irony. Prothero, of all people, ought to know that the religions which are growing today are precisely those which make the greatest demands on the credence and practice of their adherents. Protestant denominations on the conservative side of the spectrum—especially the more conservative pentecostal churches—are growing at the expense of the mainstream denominations, which latter are precisely those which have made the greatest accommodations to contemporary, secular values. Both Catholicism and Orthodoxy gain more and more adult converts each year, and many of those converts are from liberal Protestant denominations. Orthodox Judaism waxes while more liberal strains of Judaism wane. The Mormon Church, with all its dogmas and "family values," is the fastest-growing church in America. And then there's the growing, global influence of the most traditional strains of Islam. Such facts simply cannot escape the knowledge of any professor of religious studies in a secular institution. But somehow Prothero sees fit to ignore them, at least for purposes of his little propaganda piece. Instead, he implies that the more "traditional" religions, if they want to survive and thrive, had better become more "tolerant" and inclusive. In other words, if they want to reach the young they had better become more like the Episcopal and Unitarian churches, which have been losing members for a long time now. Right.

It gets worse. Prothero not only knows, but clearly evinces that he knows, what the real problem is. He begins his article by citing, if not altogether appreciating, the Niebuhrian witticism with which I began this post. Later on, he quotes a student thus:

One of my students, Carrie-Anne Solana, told me that the religions her colleagues presented in class amounted to nothing more than "organized atheism." "They took normal human impulses," such as eating, drinking, sleeping, having sex and socializing, she said, "and justified them under the title of religion while not offering any form of explanation into why we are here, where we came from or where we go when we die."

Of course Carrie-Anne has it exactly right. She recognizes the basic frivolity and irreligiousness of what her fellow students were proposing. One might think that the task of leaders in more traditional religions would accordingly be to help students get more serious about the basic questions of life and actually "get religion" in response to such concern. But here's Prothero's reaction:

Even so, I can't help but think that priests, rabbis, imams and ministers would do well to engage in interfaith dialogue not only with one another but also with this "spiritual but not religious" generation. One of the biggest challenges to any ancient faith is to adapt to modern circumstances and then, as circumstances change, to adapt again. American religious institutions are, as a rule, doing a poor job of listening to and learning from this millennial generation. Far too often, religious services in the USA are of the adults, by the adults and for the adults. And don't think young people aren't noticing.

Perhaps Prothero hasn't taken note of what happens in megachurch services using praise bands or, for that matter, in your typical Catholic "youth Mass." (If he did take note of such services, he might not be so hard on the "adult" stuff.) But once again, I'm sure he knows all about such facts. He just prefers to ignore what he knows in favor of what he wants—or says he wants.

The disconnect here between reality and prescription is so great as to afford grist for the mill of those of us given to cynical, ironic humor. Like his students, Prothero is skewering himself so effectively that all the comedian needs to do, at least for those close to Prothero's level of education, is present the facts. Which is just as well, since no comedian's talent can come up with as good a parody as that which Prothero and his students unwittingly provide all by themselves. A consequent irony is that the world's missionaries to the church, such as Prothero, end up preaching only to their own choir, thus undermining what they profess to be their main purpose. Worldliness in the guise of spirituality makes otherwise intelligent people stupid. And that should be a great source of comfort for those who keep the flame of genuine divine revelation alive.

The good old days are back...sort of

The blogger "I'd Rather Not Say," a conservative Episcopalian and now a history professor, has offered a superb critique of the new resolution passed by the Episcopal House of Bishops in response to the challenge issued some months ago in Dar es Salaam by their peers. In response to that same resolution, one prominent blogger of views similar to IRNS' has decided to swim the Tiber—a move I was subtly and not-so-subtly urging on IRNS almost thirty-five years ago, when we were roommates at Columbia and the issue for Episcopalians was whether or not to ordain women. And yet, aside from the bad liturgy still characteristic of many Catholic dioceses, I have noticed that what prevents many disaffected Episcopalians from swimming the Tiber is that the Catholic Church just isn't as tough on heretics as she was before Vatican II. So much internal infidelity is permitted de facto that the Barque of Peter seems too leaky to risk leaping aboard. Well, I have good news and bad news for such people.

The good news is that Catholic bishops are still capable of excommunicating people for heresy. This past week, one of them did just that; the good old days are sort of back. Apparently, a half-dozen nuns in Arkansas had got the idea that another nun was, if not the reincarnation of the Virgin Mary, at least the mouthpiece of God. Whatever. I haven't analyzed their beliefs further and am not terribly interested in doing so. The point is that, in an act unprecedented for the Diocese of Little Rock, the bishop excommunicated the nuns who believed such nonsense. I'm delighted to hear that people can still be excommunicated for heresy—if indeed heresy, as opposed to mere lunacy, is really the problem in this case. That should be good news to prospective converts who fear that what the world regards as the bad old days weren't quite as bad as the present. There's not only precedent but hope for disciplining many of those Catholics who will not listen to the Church about matters very much within her purview.

But the bad news is the disproportion between the official reaction to this minor, tightly confined heresy and the persistence of inaction on the far more serious and pervasive heresies which afflict, even define, AmChurch. The way the Church in this country operates today, almost any adult Catholic can disbelieve this or that irreformable doctrine of the Church and not be called on it. For instance, the majority of Catholic couples of childbearing age contracept and are not questioned about it, even in the confessional—if they bother to show up there. They neither believe nor care about the Church's teaching that contraception is "intrinsically evil," which is right there in the CCC and has remained constant, in substance, for as long as there have been records on the subject. But in most cases, their pastors will not take them to task for that. If they themselves believe the relevant teaching at all, the poor fellows are too cowed to make an issue of it. The same goes for many other issues. I've met many Catholics who do not believe this-or-that defined dogma, either because nobody has ever taught it to them or, just as often, because their pastors don't think it really matters what any given parishioner actually believes, so long as they're a decent sort who goes to church and contributes. Most Catholics think similarly. But that is a grave error.

For one thing, it was one factor facilitating the sex-abuse scandal in the clergy. Ever since I was old enough to understand the word 'celibacy', I've learned over and over that most Catholics have absolutely no idea what the spiritual rationale for the celibacy of priests and religous is. Needless to say, few priests bother explaining it to them. To many laity, celibacy is a cruel, unnatural requirement imposed on the Church's lifers for essentially financial and political reasons. My own mother's view of the matter was, I came to learn, quite common: they cannot see how a man with a healthy masculine sexuality, who is not quite ready for Social Security, would willingly embrace celibacy for the love of Christ; conversely, it is thought that if a man does embrace celibacy so as to become a priest or religious, there must be something wrong with him. Is it then any surprise that, for decades, the proportion of men entering the seminary with some-or-other serious psychosexual issue was so disturbingly high? If the general expectation is that psychosexually normal and healthy men shouldn't and won't be priests, then what we'll get are a lot of priests who aren't psychosexually normal and healthy. It only makes sense. And we've seen one of the results.

But that is only a temporary problem; the trends I've been seeing are quite positive. The bigger and longer-term problem is that Catholics are no longer required, de facto, to believe like Catholics. If you're an adult who wants to become a Catholic, you have to go through a process culminating in a profession of faith in all that the Catholic Church "professes and teaches." And rightly so. But if you're a cradle Catholic, confirmed as a child or adolescent, it is presumed that you've already gone through such a process successfully; from that, it is concluded that people don't need an orthodoxy check beyond recitation of the Creed at Sunday Mass. And so the clergy don't, generally speaking, ask adult "cradles" what they believe. But far too often, the presumption is patently false. Most adult cradles were never formed in adult faith; they did and said what they had to so as to get confirmed, and that was it; anything beyond that is, or would be, strictly self-motivated. The result, for the most part, is either that nothing much is done or that what is done is bad. I think the clergy know that—the way one knows that what's likely to turn up if one hoists a boulder in the forest will not be altogether pleasant. And so, with a few worthy exceptions, the boulder is left alone.

Beyond lay ignorance, there's the problem of well-educated priests, nuns, and theologians who quite openly reject Church teaching on key points but are not disciplined for it. Sure, a few are; on occasion, a theologian will lose his mandatum to teach in a Catholic institution. Perhaps many pay a price in less public ways. But excommunications are rare, and open heretics are still allowed to speak and teach heresy freely in Catholic settings. That allows, even encourages, the laity to think that doctrine, not just theology, is a matter of opinion. And—so the thinking goes—since everybody is allowed an opinion, what does it matter what one's opinion is?

As I've implied in the past, I believe this phenomenon to be single worst avoidable problem facing the Church in the Western world today. But again, there is hope. If a bishop can excommunicate a handful of fruitcakes and avoid the pillory, then perhaps the bishops can steel themselves to pick up the much bigger boulder and do something with what they find underneath. They might begin by wiping the dust off their own plan.

Looking for a good synecdoche?

Thanks to Mark Shea, I just read a news story about Alexandra Pelosi, daughter of that
Pelosi. Here are a few tidbits, which only professional Catholics (as distinct from Catholics who are also professionals) would find juicy:

Pelosi was already in an introspective mood, re-examining her own spirituality as she approached parenthood. When she completed the documentary less than two weeks before giving birth, Pelosi says she had a "personal revelation: I have to take my son to church." A baptism is planned. "Because if I don't, he will be called 'unchurched' and (those are the people) most susceptible to some of the more extreme religions later in the life," Pelosi says. "You have to give your children something that they can reject if they want to."

And:

"I was not trying to get into a political debate with the evangelicals about their belief," Pelosi says. "They interpret the Bible the way they want to." But Pelosi was quick to add, "I don't interpret it to say the things that they're saying it says. I don't believe that the Bible says we shall be gay-bashers."

Learning about that divide was a shock to the woman who spent her childhood in progressive Catholic schools. "We were taught just to accept people, that was just a given," Pelosi says. "I don't ever remember being told at Convent of the Sacred Heart that gay was wrong. They never even told us there was anything wrong with abortion. They were just choices.

So there we have it. Alexandra wants her son baptized so that there will be something for him to reject when he's old enough. And she was never taught that "gay" was wrong or even that "abortion" is wrong. They're just "choices." Her mother must be proud.

Alexandra Pelosi affords the perfect living synecdoche of AmChurch. If you didn't grow up Catholic during the last half of the twentieth century, all you have to do to know the nature, and the fruits, of "progressive Catholicism" is listen to her and her story. Are you evangelized by such an example? Of course you're not. If you're impressed all the same, is that because you care passionately about the truth?

This is not a religion anybody would die for. It is a religion destined to die. Its dilution of truth in a soup of relativism and individualism proceeds apace by the generation. For the most part, the Nancy Pelosis produce only the Alexandra Pelosis. Still, I am comforted by the fact that progs, be they lay people or clerics, are not good at reproducing themselves. Alexandra had her first child at 36; he may well end up being her only child. And he will not be evangelized by his parents' example or beliefs. As of now her name is legion, but it will cease to be within her son's lifetime. The Catholics left will be those who, unlike her, know and care about what it means to be Catholic.

More fire and brimstone, please

Over at Pertinacious Papist, Prof. Phil Blosser has posted with permission a New Oxford Review article by Tom Bethell: "Hell and Other Destinations." Some people hate NOR; I like it because its editor, Dale Vree, knows how to offend everybody wittily as well as equally, not because I always agree with it. But the article is definitely worth a read on its own. Here are my reactions.

Among Catholics, disbelief in hell is heresy. That is a problem today, when the swing of the cultural pendulum has made easy universalism more common than the old rigoristic exclusivism. More common, however, is treating the possibility of hell as unimportant. That is the result of faulty understanding, which often arises from faulty emphases in teaching. As a corrective, I also recommend Cardinal Dulles' "The Population of Hell." (That essay used to be easy to access at the First Things website. But they're revamping as I write; and as we all know, progress entails deterioration.)

Many spiritually immature and/or theologically ill-formed people assumed, and still assume, that hell is a fiery place one gets sent to by God for being bad. Those who believe there really is such a hell accordingly believe in a vengeful God. Others, disbelieving such things, believe there is no hell at all. Both groups are wrong; as a result, many from each lose their faith. Fortunately for the former, they recognize the problem with that more often than the latter.

The fire of hell is best conceived as the suffering of those who, by dint of grace sufficient for the salvation of all, have been given eternal life willy-nilly, but on terms they reject. Hell is what one gets when, starting even in this life, one prefers suffering to accepting life on God's terms as revealed in Jesus Christ. That, and only that, is the attitude of the confirmed reprobate. Such people condemn themselves; for them, the love of God is torture because they cannot reciprocate it, and the pain of loss in the hereafter is the resulting impossibility of union with God.

The words of Jesus make unmistakeably clear that becoming such a person is a real possibility one must work to minimize. (I've never understood people who think Jesus preached a nice religion and St. Paul a nasty one. The former talks about hell much more than the latter.) My own spiritual journey verifies the Lord's message. Sometimes I rage at God for being at least complicit in life as it is for me, and for so many others who have it worse than I. Such resentment should of course lessen over time with faithfulness, objectivity, prayer, and all the usual spiritual tools. But unless one is already a saint, fear of hell is often useful and sometimes necessary for the purpose.

For that reason, I have little use for priests who never mention even the possibility of damnation. They're mostly the same ones who see nothing wrong with cafeteria Catholicism, so long as their flock picks the same items they do from the cafeteria. As a result, I can't even eat in cafeterias anymore. That's at least a step away from hell.

Institutional vs. Intentional

Keith Strohm of Intentional Disciples (click the title) has responded to my post "What is our problem?". I am grateful for that because, unlike most of the reactions I've gotten, it actually focuses on the main point of my post. Thus Keith says:

Although he doesn't come right out and say it, perhaps the 'something missing' is intentionality--in formation and discipleship. We've talked a little bit about the reasons why Pentecostal Christianity seems to be the fastest growing section of the Church today, but one of things it does seem to have is an emphasis on encounter and relationship with Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit.

Like Michael, I too don't believe that the Church can survive without its institutional side. Christ embraces the whole of our humanity--"stuff" matters. The reality is that where two or three are gathered in Jesus' name both Christ and politics are in their midst. The question is which will we follow?

I wholeheartedly agree that what's often missing is the "intentionality," and that the basis of the needed intentionality is "an emphasis on encounter and relationship with Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit." That's exactly why, for instance, I've joined Communion and Liberation. There, I find both intentionality and its basis, as one can indeed find them in certain other "ecclesial movements." That is unlike most parishes, which are predicated on providing (a) the sacraments and (b) for want of a better term, pastoral services.

Now both (a) and (b), especially (a), are absolutely necessary. But when there is no community based on experiential encounter with Christ in prayer and in each other, the sacraments and services are experienced primarily as institutional dispensations, and the enterprise starts running more on human than divine energy. The ordinary lay Catholic notices that other institutions provide similar services, most of them more reliably than her local church; she treats the sacraments as goodies you "receive" from the institution, which is located in a building complex at which you pull up and get what you're there for before you pull out, never really forming a community of intentional disciples with your fellow parishioners. The Church thus becomes, experientially speaking, a consumer organization, less exciting if occasionally more necessary than the shopping malls. That is often why people are "bored" by church. Given their experience, who wouldn't be?

Intentionality is not opposed to the Church as institution. The Church has a necessary institutional side that, when healthy, serves as an instrument of intentional discipleship. But intentionality is the opposite of the experience of the Church primarily as institution. That experience is very common and accounts, in large measure, for the fact that many Catholics do not have the necessary encounter with Christ until they leave the Church for this or that Protestant denomination, usually evangelical or pentecostal. And that is why I believe that, in most locales, the Church in this country is missing something she needs that the Pentecostals have. What's missing, in Vatican II's words, "belongs properly" to the Church and can even be found in certain quarters thereof, but is often excluded or driven out by institutionality. Like the original Reformation, the current pentecostal movement is a sign that the true Church needs more of something that human pusillanimity and inertia have too often crowded out.

As the combox on Keith's post indicates, many faithful and informed Catholics don't hear that message because they assume that it's incompatible with affirming the truth of distinctively Catholic doctrine, especially concerning ecclesiology and the sacraments. That assumption is incorrect, and demonstrably so. The demonstrations can be provided by both the working philosophy and the experience of the people who run the Intentional Disciples blog.

More often, however, failure to hear the message results not from such an assumption but from sheer inertia. The combox on the post of mine to which Keith responded is a very good illustration of that.

Most of the discussion has concerned not my main thesis, which is easy to understand, but one of the subsidiary facts I cited to provide evidence for that thesis: the refusal of many bishops to withhold the Eucharist from Catholic politicians who formally cooperate with abortion by supporting a permissive legal regime. The concern of certain people seems to be that I'm being too hard on the bishops by not showing due regard for their canonical prerogatives to be flexible in interpreting and applying the relevant guidelines. Now I readily grant they enjoy such prerogatives, and that in some cases I lack the information necessary for knowing whether they are exercising those prerogatives prudently or not. The problem with the concern being raised, however, is that it is legalistic, and thus institutional in the way I've been criticizing.

Laws and guidelines are not, themselves, legalistic. Legalism is an attitude; laws and guidelines are not attitudes and do not have them. What's legalistic about the attitude in question is that it shows less concern for the prophetic message that needs to be sent in the present situation than for the bishops' right to decide on a less challenging course of action. Even granted there can be cases when a bishop is justified in exercising that right, the net effect of how our bishops generally handle this matter is to give institutional self-preservation more importance than what actually needs to be communicated to Catholic politicians and Catholics generally. Given human nature, the sad fact is that unless there's a concrete ecclesial cost for formally cooperating in grave evil, some Catholics will continue to cooperate it and thus give other Catholics the impression that doing so is compatible with being in full communion with the Church. Institutionality then prevails over intentionality; and a legally permissible course of action that, in some cases, can be justified under the rules thus becomes part of the problem, not part of the solution. This is a very common problem in the Catholic Church, and the concern for legalities on the matter in question is very good evidence thereof. Until legalism becomes far less of a problem in the Church, many Catholics will be able to experience Christ only in non-Catholic churches less concerned with institutional self-preservation and more concerned with transformation through encounter with Christ.

Catholic update, indeed

When I was in parish ministry, I regularly passed out copies of Catholic Update to the RCIA candidates I was charged with instructing. That was because I found the periodical generally sound and topical as well as convenient. But that was a decade ago. It now appears that the editors are more concerned about keeping their stable intact than communicating the Faith.

What has happened to Fr. Kenneth J. Overberg, SJ, is a sad case in point. He is the author of the Advent 2006 issue of CU, as well as of many older ones. For a withering analysis and criticism of the current one, go here and follow the link to the "brilliant fisk." (The author of the latter blog doesn't provide permalinks; too bad, since he's pretty good.) It now seems that another fine Catholic academic has gone over to the other side. That's the real update; be forewarned. And it's symptomatic of something broader that we must name and face.

Although I'm encouraged by the steady stream of adult converts to the Church—in the U.S., the number averages over 150,000 per year—I am brought back to reality by two facts. One is that we face an internal apostasy that started during Vatican II and has hardened since then. The majority of baptized Catholics in this country do not both know and accept those teachings of the Church that would, if followed, require significant and often painful change in their lives. The very idea is outrageous to many of them. The same goes for some converts, many of whom make the move primarily to please a "Catholic" spouse. For the kind of people I'm thinking about, Catholicism is at best a badge of cultural identity—certainly not a means of real, and therefore costly, union with Christ. And the clergy rarely challenge them, in any meaningful way, to change that. The sex-abuse scandal is a symptom of why things got to that point.

That is why Dr. Philip Blosser's prophetic rant must be kept in mind, especially this:

. . . when you invite someone to become a Catholic, you're inviting him not only to board the Ark of Salvation. You're inviting him to come aboard a shipwreck. You're inviting him to join an association at the parish level whose collective acquaintance with Scripture is piecemeal, whose knowledge of Tradition is negligible, whose hymns are embarrassing, whose religious art has become ugly, whose churches look more like U.N. meditation chapels than sanctuaries, whose ethics are slipshod and often dissident, and whose aesthetic and spiritual sensibilities are so far from being sublime that they often look ridiculous.

Granted the worthy exceptions, that is the reality which largely explains the other sobering fact to be considered: at least as many baptized Catholics are leaving by the back door as are entering by the front. A shipwreck just is going to be abandoned by many on the ship, even if and often especially if they themselves had helped to run the ship aground. Many laity who leave can be readily forgiven, since those in charge of their formation communicated no particular reason to for them to stay. The bigger problem is people like Fr. Overberg and Sr. Chittister: clergy and/or religious who are fully Catholic formally, but only partially so materially if at all. They're the natural leaders, and too many have led the sheep astray.

As I used to say at Pontifications, the Vatican's response to that for the past several decades has been essentially demographic: wait for the hopeless older set to die off, while replacing them with a younger set by attracted by such integrity and beauty as can be routed around the corrupt middle management. Perhaps that's not as bad as the alternatives, which are to do nothing or to do a nasty housecleaning. But I am reminded of the orthodox young seminarian who complained to his spiritual director that the place was riddled with heresy: "Don't worry. In a few centuries that too shall pass." That leaves an awful lot of laity to lose in the meantime.

Am I getting it?

Perhaps I do the U.S. bishops an injustice. A few days ago I complained that they'd dropped the ball again on lay dissent from the definitive Church teaching on contraception. There are very good grounds for that complaint. I have found—and I'm by no means the only professional Catholic to have found—that serious-minded non-Catholic and ex-Catholic believers are scandalized by the undisputed fact that most Catholics don't take the teaching seriously and face no penalty whatsoever from their clergy for that attitude. The scandal is not so much the teaching, which is admittedly even more widely rejected outside than within the Church, as what is seen as the institutionalized hypocrisy of the situation. But it looks like the bishops are now trying to address it—sort of.

On the same day they released the document I discussed in my previous post, which is on the criteria for fitness to receive the Eucharist, the USCCB also released another entitled Married Life and the Gift of Love. It is mainly devoted to a sound, even appealing explanation of the teaching's necessary connection with the Church's broader, developed doctrine on sexuality and marriage. The sources used by the document are among the best available, and the document itself would be catechetically quite useful if widely disseminated to and studied by those in parochial ministry—which probably means that won't happen. But it's no coincidence that the bishops released no-compromise documents on sexuality on the same day as the one on fitness to receive the Eucharist. Even though the latter did not say what most needed to be said, the former said enough to let anybody connect the dots if they care enough to bother.

And yet, there remains no incentive for anybody who doesn't do so already. These are the topics on which, if you'll pardon the pun, the rubber hits the road for most American Catholics. Are the bishops ready to drive the bus, not just supply the map? Not just yet. But as the twelve-steppers say: "One good step at a time."