It took several years after our conversion and baptism to recognize and fully appreciate how much they differed from conservative Catholics (within whose camp we've found our home) and while it really isn't a matter of progressive vs conservative, but being congruent with traditional Church teaching rather than not and conservatives tend to be the former, progressives the latter.
Once realizing the difference and understanding their perspective, the attempt to ally Peter with Occupy Wall Street isn’t a surprise.
George Weigel, one of the Church’s most important theologians—his books are at Amazon’s author page—writes about them on the Ethics & Public Policy Center.
An excerpt.
“It's been a bad three and a half decades for self-styled "progressive" Catholics.
“First, there was John Paul II, whom many in that camp habitually labeled a charismatic reactionary. Yet the Polish pope was a hero all over the world during an epic pontificate that bent history's arc in a more humane direction, and did so without the aid of liberation theology. John Paul's funeral Mass on April 8, 2005, became, in the apt phrase of NBC anchor Brian Williams, "the human event of a generation," a moniker unlikely to be attached to the obsequies of, say, Hans Küng, John Paul's most embittered progressive critic.
“Then came the election of the progressives' bête noire, Joseph Ratzinger, as Pope Benedict XVI: a horror that a prominent progressive, Notre Dame's Fr. Richard McBrien, declared electorally impossible a mere 24 hours before it happened. Catholic progressives hunkered down for what they hoped would be a brief Ratzingerian interregnum. But Benedict XVI has proven an energetic pope whose pontificate has been in dynamic continuity with that of his predecessor, an astute analyst of the cultural crisis of the West, and a man determined to strengthen Catholic identity as the sine qua non of Catholic reform.
“Thus the Wojtyla-Ratzinger years have put paid to the notion, beloved of Catholic progressives, that Catholicism began anew -ex nihilo, as it were - at the Second Vatican Council. Committed to the hoary "liberal/conservative" hermeneutic of the Council's history, Catholic progressives hold that Vatican II represented a dramatic rupture with the past. The great teaching pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, however, have proposed a far more plausible interpretation of the Council as one in dynamic continuity with the great tradition of Christian orthodoxy. That interpretation, in turn, is shaping an entire new generation of Catholic intellectuals who are far more interested in exploring the complex riches of that tradition than in deconstructing it. Unlike the aging progressives, who have shown themselves rather infertile intellectually and who survive in large part because of that most conservative of institutions, the tenure system, many younger Catholic scholars are fully committed to putting theology at the service of the "New Evangelization" for which John Paul II and Benedict XVI have insistently called.
“In the United States, the progressives have also been steadily losing their grip at the national, diocesan, and local-parish levels. Various lay-renewal movements have become vital and self-consciously orthodox factors in Catholic life, and a new generation of priests and bishops, many of whom look explicitly to John Paul II as their model of ecclesiastical leadership, have come to the fore. For the past half-decade or more, the Catholic bishops of the United States, following the pope's lead, have increasingly stressed the importance of Catholic identity, by which they understand fidelity to Catholic teaching, in confronting an increasingly hostile cultural and legal/political environment. That problem has been considerably exacerbated by the Obama administration, which many Catholic progressives welcomed with loud hosannas, and for whose regulatory assault on Catholic health-care and social-service agencies progressives have provided cover, often by implausible appeals to Catholic social doctrine.
“Throughout this fairly rapid decline, progressive Catholicism's distinctive cultural marker has been its skepticism about the teaching authority of the Church: whether that teaching authority was formally and authoritatively addressing the ethics of human love, the suitability of women for Holy Orders, the uniqueness of Christ as universal savior, or the intrinsic evils of abortion and euthanasia. Thus it was another sign of the increasing incoherence of progressive Catholicism when several of its American paladins mounted a raucous defense of a "Note" - a kind of Vatican white paper - on international financial reform issued by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace (PCJP) on October 24. It was an extraordinary exercise: The progressives depicted Benedict XVI as a senior chaplain to Occupy Wall Street, described the Note in such overwrought terms that the gullible might have thought this white paper shared in the charism of papal infallibility, and darkly suggested that those who disagreed with the Note's prescriptions were cafeteria Catholics, picking and choosing their doctrines to fit preexisting political tastes.
“The irony of men such as the former editor of America, Fr. Thomas Reese, S.J., Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne Jr., and National Catholic Reporter blogger Michael Sean Winters promoting a notion of papal teaching authority more expansive than any imagined by the most wild-eyed traditionalist will not be lost on cognoscenti of ecclesiastical intrigue. This new notion of PCJP infallibility does, however, raise interesting questions - about the nature and modalities of Catholic teaching authority, about the organization of the Holy See, and about the state of Catholic progressivism in America.
“Given the continuing confusion caused by Father Reese's assertion that the Note positioned Benedict XVI "to the left of Nancy Pelosi" (which reverberated throughout the media echo chamber), it's important to pin down just what the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace is, and what authority its statements bear.
“The Pontifical Council (with whose president, Cardinal Peter Turkson, I had an entirely cordial 90-minute conversation last year) was established after Vatican II as part of the "New Curia," a set of agencies intended to give organizational expression to some of Vatican II's pastoral concerns: the promotion of social doctrine, the family, the lay mission in the world, and so forth. Unlike the older Congregations of the Roman Curia, which exercise an authority of jurisdiction (over bishops, clergy, religious life, Catholic worship, etc.), and unlike the Tribunals of the Curia, which make binding legal decisions, the "Pontifical Councils" of the New Curia were intended to be in-house think-tanks. Bureaucracy being what it is, however, they quickly morphed into something else: paper factories issuing all sorts of statements on all sorts of issues. As I wrote in God's Choice: Pope Benedict XVI and the Future of the Catholic Church, there was concern during the 2005 conclave over the large amount of paper being generated by the New Curia: paper that was inevitably, if inaccurately, interpreted publicly as being the settled understanding of the Catholic Church and its highest teaching authority on X, Y, and Z.”
Showing posts with label History. Show all posts
Showing posts with label History. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Follow Up, Criminal Justice Collapse Book
Yesterday, I wrote about the book reviewed by the Wall Street Journal, “The Collapse of the American Criminal Justice System”, and after reading the table of contents at Amazon, I decided to not buy the book, which decision was validated by this excellent article about the book from the Crime & Consequences blog.
An excerpt.
“Prof. Doug Berman put up an entry today on Sentencing Law and Policy about the last book published by the late Harvard Law Prof. William Stuntz. The book is titled, "The Collapse of American Criminal Justice." Its thesis, not too surprisingly given the title, is that our criminal justice system has fallen into utter failure….
“The whole thing -- all of it -- is preposterous. Over the time this alleged disaster is supposed to have happened (roughly the last 20 years), the crime rate has fallen off a cliff. The property crime rate is down by 43%; the violent crime rate by 47%, and the murder rate by slightly more than 50%. The raw figures are here, and you can do the math yourself. If you look at the numbers, you'll see that the murder rate is lower now than it has been at any time in almost 50 years.
“Perhaps the most stunning figure, however, is this: The number of serious crimes annually 20 years ago was 14,872,900. The number last year was 10,329,135. That is a drop of 4,543,765. Four and a half million fewer crime victims….
“I will readily concede that the system looks "broken" to two categories of observers: (1) academics who never saw a criminal for whom an excuse could not be manufactured, and who thus lament their incarceration; and (2) the criminals themselves, now thankfully keeping each other company rather than the rest of us.”
An excerpt.
“Prof. Doug Berman put up an entry today on Sentencing Law and Policy about the last book published by the late Harvard Law Prof. William Stuntz. The book is titled, "The Collapse of American Criminal Justice." Its thesis, not too surprisingly given the title, is that our criminal justice system has fallen into utter failure….
“The whole thing -- all of it -- is preposterous. Over the time this alleged disaster is supposed to have happened (roughly the last 20 years), the crime rate has fallen off a cliff. The property crime rate is down by 43%; the violent crime rate by 47%, and the murder rate by slightly more than 50%. The raw figures are here, and you can do the math yourself. If you look at the numbers, you'll see that the murder rate is lower now than it has been at any time in almost 50 years.
“Perhaps the most stunning figure, however, is this: The number of serious crimes annually 20 years ago was 14,872,900. The number last year was 10,329,135. That is a drop of 4,543,765. Four and a half million fewer crime victims….
“I will readily concede that the system looks "broken" to two categories of observers: (1) academics who never saw a criminal for whom an excuse could not be manufactured, and who thus lament their incarceration; and (2) the criminals themselves, now thankfully keeping each other company rather than the rest of us.”
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Criminal Justice, Keeping Informed
Every few months I buy a new book on criminal justice containing the newest research to help keep me informed, and this one looked interesting after reading the review from the Wall Street Journal.
I went to Amazon and after reading the table of contents, decided against buying it, primarily because I have already obtained a 2011 book, Crime and Public Policy, which is an edited text book with several essays covering a broad array of criminal justice subjects, and secondly because Stuntz's book looked a little too focused on one area and one opinion, and wouldn't necessarily add that much to my library.
However, I did purchase, The Better Angels of Our Nature, which looks to be an extraordinary research project on violence, and about which I will let you know once I get a chance to peruse it.
Here is an excerpt from the Wall Street Journal review.
“How has the American criminal-justice system become one of the most punitive in the world without providing a corresponding level of public safety? In "The Collapse of American Criminal Justice," William J. Stuntz—a revered Harvard law professor who died of colon cancer earlier this year at the age of 52—offers a provocative big-picture answer.
“Perhaps aware that "collapse" in the book's title requires justification, Mr. Stuntz begins by reviewing some statistics. As he shows, in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s, amid the largest crime wave in American history, the U.S. prison population declined. Imprisonment rates plummeted to some of the lowest ever seen in the modern Western world. High-crime neighborhoods, as Mr. Stuntz puts it, were "abandoned to their fate."
“The backlash to this crime wave was equally striking. Since the mid-1970s, America has punished crime more and more severely. New York's imprisonment rate, for example, has sextupled. In a span of a little more than 30 years, "America first embraced punishment levels lower than Sweden's, then built a justice system more punitive than Russia's."
“Mr. Stuntz readily acknowledges what many legal scholars do not: America's current lock-'em-up philosophy has dramatically helped to reduce urban crime. Since 1991, violent-crime rates have declined roughly a third nationwide and as much as two-thirds in a few cities (New York among them). Even so, Mr. Stuntz counts these declines as a pyrrhic victory, given that violence per capita in the U.S. today remains significantly higher than in 1950. And he is unwilling simply to assign all the credit for recent crime drops to increased punishment. He wonders, for example, why crime rates began falling only around 1991—two decades after prison populations started steeply rising.
“To unravel such complexities, Mr. Stuntz tries to place America's contemporary criminal-justice problems in their historical legal context. He first looks at the 14th Amendment's effort in 1868 to ensure that newly freed slaves received "the equal protection of the laws"—a promise that fell apart a few years later when the Supreme Court eviscerated the equal-protection guarantee and left generations of Southern blacks to be victimized by Klan violence. Mr. Stuntz argues that narrow equal-protection jurisprudence helps to explain why, nearly a century later, Chief Justice Earl Warren began spinning constitutional restrictions from the 14th Amendment's other important provision, the Due Process Clause.”
I went to Amazon and after reading the table of contents, decided against buying it, primarily because I have already obtained a 2011 book, Crime and Public Policy, which is an edited text book with several essays covering a broad array of criminal justice subjects, and secondly because Stuntz's book looked a little too focused on one area and one opinion, and wouldn't necessarily add that much to my library.
However, I did purchase, The Better Angels of Our Nature, which looks to be an extraordinary research project on violence, and about which I will let you know once I get a chance to peruse it.
Here is an excerpt from the Wall Street Journal review.
“How has the American criminal-justice system become one of the most punitive in the world without providing a corresponding level of public safety? In "The Collapse of American Criminal Justice," William J. Stuntz—a revered Harvard law professor who died of colon cancer earlier this year at the age of 52—offers a provocative big-picture answer.
“Perhaps aware that "collapse" in the book's title requires justification, Mr. Stuntz begins by reviewing some statistics. As he shows, in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s, amid the largest crime wave in American history, the U.S. prison population declined. Imprisonment rates plummeted to some of the lowest ever seen in the modern Western world. High-crime neighborhoods, as Mr. Stuntz puts it, were "abandoned to their fate."
“The backlash to this crime wave was equally striking. Since the mid-1970s, America has punished crime more and more severely. New York's imprisonment rate, for example, has sextupled. In a span of a little more than 30 years, "America first embraced punishment levels lower than Sweden's, then built a justice system more punitive than Russia's."
“Mr. Stuntz readily acknowledges what many legal scholars do not: America's current lock-'em-up philosophy has dramatically helped to reduce urban crime. Since 1991, violent-crime rates have declined roughly a third nationwide and as much as two-thirds in a few cities (New York among them). Even so, Mr. Stuntz counts these declines as a pyrrhic victory, given that violence per capita in the U.S. today remains significantly higher than in 1950. And he is unwilling simply to assign all the credit for recent crime drops to increased punishment. He wonders, for example, why crime rates began falling only around 1991—two decades after prison populations started steeply rising.
“To unravel such complexities, Mr. Stuntz tries to place America's contemporary criminal-justice problems in their historical legal context. He first looks at the 14th Amendment's effort in 1868 to ensure that newly freed slaves received "the equal protection of the laws"—a promise that fell apart a few years later when the Supreme Court eviscerated the equal-protection guarantee and left generations of Southern blacks to be victimized by Klan violence. Mr. Stuntz argues that narrow equal-protection jurisprudence helps to explain why, nearly a century later, Chief Justice Earl Warren began spinning constitutional restrictions from the 14th Amendment's other important provision, the Due Process Clause.”
Thursday, October 20, 2011
Medieval Prison
In perusing the book, The Medieval Prison: A Social History, I came across the following:
“Largely as a response to their persecution under the Romans, early Christian apologists developed a basic imaginary of the prison. Martyrological narratives set in and around Roman jails introduced literary “sweet inversion” of despair into hope, of physical suffering into spiritual empowerment, and of secular coercion into divine grace. In this way, theodicy helped disseminate incarceration as a leitmotif of Christian spirituality, first among ascetics and later in monastic circles. As we shall see, self-imposed incarceration became a common metaphor for the angelic life and soon assumed purgatorial qualities...
“The Martyrological literature conveying the experiences of Christian confessors presents the prison as a place of personal trial and eschatological triumph, and incarceration as a process of spiritual growth, potentially culminating in revelation. Thus, rather than precipitating apostasy, the harsh conditions of the Roman jail accelerated religious perfection: a classic “sweet inversion.” In the emphatic words that Prudentius (348-405?) attributed to Fructuosus, the martyred bishop of Tarragona (d. 259),
"Prison to the Christian faithful is the path to glory,
Prison propels to the heavens’ summit,
Prison unites God with the blessed."
“As a new locus of holiness, the prison attracted substantial attention from early Christians, whether laymen or clergy…
“In the words of Tertullian (140-230): “The prison serves the Christian as the desert served the prophet…Even if the body is confined, even if the flesh is detained, everything is open to the spirit.”
“By comparing the prison with the desert, Tertullian linked Christian asceticism with the formative experiences of the Israelites and Christ’s spiritual training….The metaphor subsequently found its way into monastic spirituality, which spawned a distinct new strand of carceral language. Thus, according to the Desert Mother Syncletica (d. ca. 400),
"In the world, if we commit an offence, even an involuntary one, we are thrown into prison; let us likewise cast ourselves into prison because of our sins, so that voluntary remembrance may anticipate the punishment that is to come.”
Geltner, G. (2008). The medieval prison: A social history. Princeton: Princeton University Press. (pp. 83-85)
“Largely as a response to their persecution under the Romans, early Christian apologists developed a basic imaginary of the prison. Martyrological narratives set in and around Roman jails introduced literary “sweet inversion” of despair into hope, of physical suffering into spiritual empowerment, and of secular coercion into divine grace. In this way, theodicy helped disseminate incarceration as a leitmotif of Christian spirituality, first among ascetics and later in monastic circles. As we shall see, self-imposed incarceration became a common metaphor for the angelic life and soon assumed purgatorial qualities...
“The Martyrological literature conveying the experiences of Christian confessors presents the prison as a place of personal trial and eschatological triumph, and incarceration as a process of spiritual growth, potentially culminating in revelation. Thus, rather than precipitating apostasy, the harsh conditions of the Roman jail accelerated religious perfection: a classic “sweet inversion.” In the emphatic words that Prudentius (348-405?) attributed to Fructuosus, the martyred bishop of Tarragona (d. 259),
"Prison to the Christian faithful is the path to glory,
Prison propels to the heavens’ summit,
Prison unites God with the blessed."
“As a new locus of holiness, the prison attracted substantial attention from early Christians, whether laymen or clergy…
“In the words of Tertullian (140-230): “The prison serves the Christian as the desert served the prophet…Even if the body is confined, even if the flesh is detained, everything is open to the spirit.”
“By comparing the prison with the desert, Tertullian linked Christian asceticism with the formative experiences of the Israelites and Christ’s spiritual training….The metaphor subsequently found its way into monastic spirituality, which spawned a distinct new strand of carceral language. Thus, according to the Desert Mother Syncletica (d. ca. 400),
"In the world, if we commit an offence, even an involuntary one, we are thrown into prison; let us likewise cast ourselves into prison because of our sins, so that voluntary remembrance may anticipate the punishment that is to come.”
Geltner, G. (2008). The medieval prison: A social history. Princeton: Princeton University Press. (pp. 83-85)
Monday, October 17, 2011
The 15 Decade Rosary
The rosary—as it has been for centuries—is at the center of the private devotions buttressing liturgical practice, and in this Month of the Rosary, it is timely to summarize reflections on it, and the larger truth it expresses, devotion to Christ through Mary.
I have turned to many resources in this study over the past few years since I began praying the rosary on a regular basis, and lately I have found much that resonates with my private devotions in the works of St. Louis Grignion de Montfort, and his marvelous books, The Secret of the Rosary, and True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary (I would recommend you seek out the older editions in hardback) are crucial guides.
One aspect that leapt out in my study is that the five decade rosary I have been using is not the fullest expression of the rosary of tradition, as the Catholic Encyclopedia explains:
"The Rosary", says the Roman Breviary, "is a certain form of prayer wherein we say fifteen decades or tens of Hail Marys with an Our Father between each ten, while at each of these fifteen decades we recall successively in pious meditation one of the mysteries of our Redemption."
The birth of the rosary as a feast day of the Church is powerfully connected to Catholic martiality by one of the great martial popes, Saint Pius V, who called forth the knights and armed men of Europe to fight in a decisive battle, noted by the Catholic Encyclopedia.
“On the day of the Battle of Lepanto, 7 Oct., 1571, he was working with the cardinals, when, suddenly, interrupting his work opening the window and looking at the sky, he cried out, "A truce to business; our great task at present is to thank God for the victory which He has just given the Christian army". He burst into tears when he heard of the victory, which dealt the Turkish power a blow from which it never recovered. In memory of this triumph he instituted for the first Sunday of October the feast of the Rosary.”
Saint Pope Pius V wrote in the Papal Bull of 1569 Consueverunt Romani—two years before the battle of Lepanto.
“And so Dominic looked to that simple way of praying and beseeching God, accessible to all and wholly pious, which is called the Rosary, or Psalter of the Blessed Virgin Mary, in which the same most Blessed Virgin is venerated by the angelic greeting repeated one hundred and fifty times, that is, according to the number of the Davidic Psalter, and by the Lord's Prayer with each decade. Interposed with these prayers are certain meditations showing forth the entire life of Our Lord Jesus Christ, thus completing the method of prayer devised by the by the Fathers of the Holy Roman Church.”
This aspect: “showing forth the entire life of Our Lord Jesus Christ” at each praying of the fifteen decades is very powerful, and is not enjoyed by praying only five, which results in a somewhat disjointed approach I had never noticed before praying the full fifteen.
Enjoy this Month of the Rosary and pray a fifteen decade rosary, which are hard to find but I found one at, where else, 15 Decade Rosaries, a wonderful apostolate.
I have turned to many resources in this study over the past few years since I began praying the rosary on a regular basis, and lately I have found much that resonates with my private devotions in the works of St. Louis Grignion de Montfort, and his marvelous books, The Secret of the Rosary, and True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary (I would recommend you seek out the older editions in hardback) are crucial guides.
One aspect that leapt out in my study is that the five decade rosary I have been using is not the fullest expression of the rosary of tradition, as the Catholic Encyclopedia explains:
"The Rosary", says the Roman Breviary, "is a certain form of prayer wherein we say fifteen decades or tens of Hail Marys with an Our Father between each ten, while at each of these fifteen decades we recall successively in pious meditation one of the mysteries of our Redemption."
The birth of the rosary as a feast day of the Church is powerfully connected to Catholic martiality by one of the great martial popes, Saint Pius V, who called forth the knights and armed men of Europe to fight in a decisive battle, noted by the Catholic Encyclopedia.
“On the day of the Battle of Lepanto, 7 Oct., 1571, he was working with the cardinals, when, suddenly, interrupting his work opening the window and looking at the sky, he cried out, "A truce to business; our great task at present is to thank God for the victory which He has just given the Christian army". He burst into tears when he heard of the victory, which dealt the Turkish power a blow from which it never recovered. In memory of this triumph he instituted for the first Sunday of October the feast of the Rosary.”
Saint Pope Pius V wrote in the Papal Bull of 1569 Consueverunt Romani—two years before the battle of Lepanto.
“And so Dominic looked to that simple way of praying and beseeching God, accessible to all and wholly pious, which is called the Rosary, or Psalter of the Blessed Virgin Mary, in which the same most Blessed Virgin is venerated by the angelic greeting repeated one hundred and fifty times, that is, according to the number of the Davidic Psalter, and by the Lord's Prayer with each decade. Interposed with these prayers are certain meditations showing forth the entire life of Our Lord Jesus Christ, thus completing the method of prayer devised by the by the Fathers of the Holy Roman Church.”
This aspect: “showing forth the entire life of Our Lord Jesus Christ” at each praying of the fifteen decades is very powerful, and is not enjoyed by praying only five, which results in a somewhat disjointed approach I had never noticed before praying the full fifteen.
Enjoy this Month of the Rosary and pray a fifteen decade rosary, which are hard to find but I found one at, where else, 15 Decade Rosaries, a wonderful apostolate.
Thursday, October 13, 2011
Regensburg and Remembering
It was one of the most powerful talks in relation to the war on terror—which many consider World War IV—given by an international leader and it was delivered by the Holy Father.
This article from the Ethics and Public Policy Center looks at what has happened since.
An excerpt.
“In the flood of commentary surrounding the tenth anniversary of 9/11, I found but one reference to a related anniversary of considerable importance: the fifth anniversary of Pope Benedict XVI's Regensburg Lecture. That lecture, given the day after the fifth anniversary of 9/11 at the pope's old university in Germany, identified the two key challenges to 21st century Islam, if that faith of over a billion people is going to live within today's world in something other than a condition of war. On the fifth anniversary of Regensburg, therefore, it's worth reviewing what the Pope proposed, not least because the 9/11 anniversary commentary assiduously avoided the question that the Holy Father courageously confronted: the question of what-must-change in Islam in the future, to prevent an ongoing global war of Islam-against-the-rest.
“Benedict XVI made two proposals at Regensburg.
“Islam, he suggested, must find a way to affirm religious freedom as a fundamental human right that can be known by reason and that includes the right to change one's religion—and it must find this "way" from within its own religious, legal, philosophical, and theological resources. The question is not one of surrender to certain secularist conceptions of public life, any more than it was when Catholicism confronted political modernity and found a solution in the Second Vatican Council's Declaration on Religious Freedom. The solution has to come from within, in what Christian theology would call a "development of doctrine."
“Secondly, Islam must find a way—again, from within its own religious and intellectual resources—to affirm a distinction between religious and political authority in a just state. This need not and indeed cannot mean a radical "wall of separation" between the two, based on some (mis)conceptions of the American constitutional order. It might mean something like what the Catholic Church did during the late 20th century, when Catholic scholars reached back into the fifth century and rediscovered a traditional distinction between priestly and imperial authority: a tradition whose deepest roots go back to the Lord's own distinction between what is owed to Caesar and what is owed to God [Matthew 15.21].
“Despite there being largely ignored during the 9/11 anniversary, these do seem to be the two key issues. An Islam that affirms religious freedom, including conversion from one faith to another, and that buttresses that affirmation through its own religious self-understanding and the arts of reason, is an Islam with which "the rest" can live at ease, and in enriching ways. An Islam in which religious and political authority are distinct, if related, is an Islam in which a genuinely civil society can begin to take root—and a robust civil society is one barrier against the corrupt authoritarianism that has bedeviled Islamic countries for centuries. A robust civil society in which there is room for religious freedom and multiple political perspectives is also essential to realizing the promise of today's "Arab Spring"—which could give birth to a hot summer and a bitter winter if its chief accomplishment is to effect a change from secular political authoritarianism to religiously-warranted political authoritarianism.”
This article from the Ethics and Public Policy Center looks at what has happened since.
An excerpt.
“In the flood of commentary surrounding the tenth anniversary of 9/11, I found but one reference to a related anniversary of considerable importance: the fifth anniversary of Pope Benedict XVI's Regensburg Lecture. That lecture, given the day after the fifth anniversary of 9/11 at the pope's old university in Germany, identified the two key challenges to 21st century Islam, if that faith of over a billion people is going to live within today's world in something other than a condition of war. On the fifth anniversary of Regensburg, therefore, it's worth reviewing what the Pope proposed, not least because the 9/11 anniversary commentary assiduously avoided the question that the Holy Father courageously confronted: the question of what-must-change in Islam in the future, to prevent an ongoing global war of Islam-against-the-rest.
“Benedict XVI made two proposals at Regensburg.
“Islam, he suggested, must find a way to affirm religious freedom as a fundamental human right that can be known by reason and that includes the right to change one's religion—and it must find this "way" from within its own religious, legal, philosophical, and theological resources. The question is not one of surrender to certain secularist conceptions of public life, any more than it was when Catholicism confronted political modernity and found a solution in the Second Vatican Council's Declaration on Religious Freedom. The solution has to come from within, in what Christian theology would call a "development of doctrine."
“Secondly, Islam must find a way—again, from within its own religious and intellectual resources—to affirm a distinction between religious and political authority in a just state. This need not and indeed cannot mean a radical "wall of separation" between the two, based on some (mis)conceptions of the American constitutional order. It might mean something like what the Catholic Church did during the late 20th century, when Catholic scholars reached back into the fifth century and rediscovered a traditional distinction between priestly and imperial authority: a tradition whose deepest roots go back to the Lord's own distinction between what is owed to Caesar and what is owed to God [Matthew 15.21].
“Despite there being largely ignored during the 9/11 anniversary, these do seem to be the two key issues. An Islam that affirms religious freedom, including conversion from one faith to another, and that buttresses that affirmation through its own religious self-understanding and the arts of reason, is an Islam with which "the rest" can live at ease, and in enriching ways. An Islam in which religious and political authority are distinct, if related, is an Islam in which a genuinely civil society can begin to take root—and a robust civil society is one barrier against the corrupt authoritarianism that has bedeviled Islamic countries for centuries. A robust civil society in which there is room for religious freedom and multiple political perspectives is also essential to realizing the promise of today's "Arab Spring"—which could give birth to a hot summer and a bitter winter if its chief accomplishment is to effect a change from secular political authoritarianism to religiously-warranted political authoritarianism.”
Thursday, October 6, 2011
Catholic Social Teaching
The marvelous book, Church State and Society: An Introduction to Catholic Social Doctrine, gets a wonderful review from Ignatius Insight, and while it is a book I have only begun to delve into, I have learned enough that it has joined the social teaching canon of my apostolate The Lampstand Foundation.
An excerpt from the Ignatius review.
"The concept of justice as order in the soul of the individual needs to be rediscovered today." — Benestad, 144.
"Nowadays, service to others is often presented as the distinguishing characteristic of a Catholic university; but without linking that service to the prior task of seeking truth and achieving some order in one's soul through prayer, a sacramental life, acceptance of the Catholic creeds, and the practice of Christian morality. It seems naïve to me, and even Pelagian, to think that Christ-like service can be informed and embrace without a foundation in Christian doctrine and a basis in learning." — Benestad, 284.
“I.
“We have been waiting for this remarkable book for a long time, one that knows not just episcopal and papal thought but the whole history of theology, political philosophy, and philosophy at large. This book has roots not only in the Greeks and Romans, but also in Scripture and the great theologians of the Church. And it is aware of the pitfalls of language and ideas that often steer Christian thinkers into the heady, dangerous realms of ideology. Dr. Brian Benestad knows his Locke and Hobbes, his Marx, and the more modern liberal relativist theories associated with Rawls and other American writers.
“Benestad, at the University of Scranton, is the best qualified and able of American scholars to write an overall understanding of Catholic Social Thought, which has tended to become a rather narrow and isolated body of knowledge. Benestad's mentor, whom he often cites and whose collected essays he edited, was the late Father Ernest Fortin, A.A. Fortin, along with Heinrich Rommen, Jacques Maritain, Yves Simon, John Courtney Murray, and Charles N. R. McCoy, was certainly the most critical and acute mind in the intellectual circles of his time. Fortin covered the whole gamut of thought from Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, to the Fathers of the Church, Aquinas, Aquinas, Dante, and into the modern world. Fortin was familiar with Strauss and Bloom and their critiques of modernity.
“This book is more than the "introduction" of its sub-title. It is nothing less than a critical, philosophical reflection on the whole tradition of what is loosely called "social thought or doctrine." It knows its way through the relation of reason and revelation. Its range includes economics, environmentalism, universities, political institutions, war, life and family questions, subsidiarity, and culture. Metaphysics is always just below the surface.
“Benestad, to be sure, unlike Plato, Aristotle, and the current pope, does not have much to say about music. But he makes remarkable use of classic literature and novels to illustrate virtues and vices. He is obviously a broadly learned man in the tradition of liberal education. This overlook of social thought is doubly necessary as many of the basic words and notions that are found in modern thought and in political usage are anything but neutral or friendly to what Catholicism is and what it holds.
“II.
“Thus, a major effort of Benestad is to clarify what is meant by "justice," "rights," "social justice," "values," and "dignity," the language that even the popes and bishops have, sometimes incautiously, chosen to use to explain Catholic positions in the public order. Each of these words has an ancient or recent history that is anything but self-evident. Different philosophies make each concept in effect equivocal, not meaning at all what other users mean.
“Each concept or word needs to be carefully distinguished. We need to see that what Hobbes meant by "rights" was not what Aristotle meant by justice. Among these words and phrases, perhaps none is more necessary to rethink than that of "social justice," a very modern phrase from the late nineteenth century that cannot, in spite of heroic efforts to do so, easily be reconciled with classic political thought or Christian terms. The phrase is inspired largely by modern liberal thought that presupposes human autonomy with no relation to natural or divine law.
“Benestad does a remarkably fine job in tracing the roots and implications of this phrase and how it might be properly used so that it does not bear its ideological baggage from Locke or Rousseau. A major reason that Catholic thought has not had the impact that it should is because words like justice, values, rights, and dignity come from Hobbes, Locke, Nietzsche, Weber, and Kant. They do not mean what it looks like they mean from a tradition of Aquinas or Aristotle. Benestad, to his credit, is well aware both that these words are the meat of modern discourse and the source of considerable confusion. The book is a constant effort to relate rights to duty, dignity to being, values to objective norms, and justice to virtue.
"Indeed, it might well be said that the major effort of Benestad is to show how no concept of justice as some sort of rearrangement of society can stand by itself apart from the classical emphasis on the need of individual virtue. We cannot have a "just" society if we do not have "just" people who know that justice is not a subjective "right" or "want" but something that is objectively "due."
“Aristotle's political philosophy had been well aware that regimes reflect the virtue of the people that composed it. He knew we cannot have a good regime and un-virtuous citizens. Modern thought has largely rejected this to claim that vice and disorder can be cured simply by change of regime. It doesn't and cannot happen that way, even though some regimes are better than others.
“Benestad is completely familiar with what is known as modern Catholic social thought from the work of Leo XIII on. He knows of Pius XI and Pius XIII, John XXIII, and Paul VI. He is aware that in John Paul II and Benedict we have something in the Church that has perhaps never existed before: two popes, one following the other, both working together, who are themselves first class scholars and (particularly in the case of John Paul II) charismatic leaders of world historic significance. The world has done its best to refuse to acknowledge their genius and the truth of their lives and teachings. In this sense, our intellectual problems are initially moral ones.
“Benestad is well aware of the extra-ordinary genius of the present pope. His appendix is devoted to Caritas in veritate, the pope's third "social" encyclical. At one level, it is amusing to realize that the Catholic Church has been headed since Leo XIII at the end of the nineteenth century by men of superior intellect, but more recently by men the equals of any minds or their own or any other time. How little this intellectual foundation of the Church is appreciated within the Church and culture is a judgment on the quality of the lived faith and ongoing intelligence of our time.
“The book contains four parts with twelve chapters. The first part concerns "the human person, the political community, and the common good." Part two covers "civil society and the common good, three mediating societies (family, Church, and universities). Part three brings us to private property and the universal destination of goods. Finally, part four is on the international community and justice. It is in this latter section that Benestad deals sanely with war and international institutions.
“One thing that particularly struck me about this book is that Benestad always makes his own judgment on the issues that he presents. The reader always knows where he stands on the issues, and why. He is quite critical of many of the politicized American episcopal initiatives in the social order, none more so than that of Cardinal Bernadin's confused "seamless garment" doctrine. Often such documents bear ideological traits that never should be there.”
An excerpt from the Ignatius review.
"The concept of justice as order in the soul of the individual needs to be rediscovered today." — Benestad, 144.
"Nowadays, service to others is often presented as the distinguishing characteristic of a Catholic university; but without linking that service to the prior task of seeking truth and achieving some order in one's soul through prayer, a sacramental life, acceptance of the Catholic creeds, and the practice of Christian morality. It seems naïve to me, and even Pelagian, to think that Christ-like service can be informed and embrace without a foundation in Christian doctrine and a basis in learning." — Benestad, 284.
“I.
“We have been waiting for this remarkable book for a long time, one that knows not just episcopal and papal thought but the whole history of theology, political philosophy, and philosophy at large. This book has roots not only in the Greeks and Romans, but also in Scripture and the great theologians of the Church. And it is aware of the pitfalls of language and ideas that often steer Christian thinkers into the heady, dangerous realms of ideology. Dr. Brian Benestad knows his Locke and Hobbes, his Marx, and the more modern liberal relativist theories associated with Rawls and other American writers.
“Benestad, at the University of Scranton, is the best qualified and able of American scholars to write an overall understanding of Catholic Social Thought, which has tended to become a rather narrow and isolated body of knowledge. Benestad's mentor, whom he often cites and whose collected essays he edited, was the late Father Ernest Fortin, A.A. Fortin, along with Heinrich Rommen, Jacques Maritain, Yves Simon, John Courtney Murray, and Charles N. R. McCoy, was certainly the most critical and acute mind in the intellectual circles of his time. Fortin covered the whole gamut of thought from Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, to the Fathers of the Church, Aquinas, Aquinas, Dante, and into the modern world. Fortin was familiar with Strauss and Bloom and their critiques of modernity.
“This book is more than the "introduction" of its sub-title. It is nothing less than a critical, philosophical reflection on the whole tradition of what is loosely called "social thought or doctrine." It knows its way through the relation of reason and revelation. Its range includes economics, environmentalism, universities, political institutions, war, life and family questions, subsidiarity, and culture. Metaphysics is always just below the surface.
“Benestad, to be sure, unlike Plato, Aristotle, and the current pope, does not have much to say about music. But he makes remarkable use of classic literature and novels to illustrate virtues and vices. He is obviously a broadly learned man in the tradition of liberal education. This overlook of social thought is doubly necessary as many of the basic words and notions that are found in modern thought and in political usage are anything but neutral or friendly to what Catholicism is and what it holds.
“II.
“Thus, a major effort of Benestad is to clarify what is meant by "justice," "rights," "social justice," "values," and "dignity," the language that even the popes and bishops have, sometimes incautiously, chosen to use to explain Catholic positions in the public order. Each of these words has an ancient or recent history that is anything but self-evident. Different philosophies make each concept in effect equivocal, not meaning at all what other users mean.
“Each concept or word needs to be carefully distinguished. We need to see that what Hobbes meant by "rights" was not what Aristotle meant by justice. Among these words and phrases, perhaps none is more necessary to rethink than that of "social justice," a very modern phrase from the late nineteenth century that cannot, in spite of heroic efforts to do so, easily be reconciled with classic political thought or Christian terms. The phrase is inspired largely by modern liberal thought that presupposes human autonomy with no relation to natural or divine law.
“Benestad does a remarkably fine job in tracing the roots and implications of this phrase and how it might be properly used so that it does not bear its ideological baggage from Locke or Rousseau. A major reason that Catholic thought has not had the impact that it should is because words like justice, values, rights, and dignity come from Hobbes, Locke, Nietzsche, Weber, and Kant. They do not mean what it looks like they mean from a tradition of Aquinas or Aristotle. Benestad, to his credit, is well aware both that these words are the meat of modern discourse and the source of considerable confusion. The book is a constant effort to relate rights to duty, dignity to being, values to objective norms, and justice to virtue.
"Indeed, it might well be said that the major effort of Benestad is to show how no concept of justice as some sort of rearrangement of society can stand by itself apart from the classical emphasis on the need of individual virtue. We cannot have a "just" society if we do not have "just" people who know that justice is not a subjective "right" or "want" but something that is objectively "due."
“Aristotle's political philosophy had been well aware that regimes reflect the virtue of the people that composed it. He knew we cannot have a good regime and un-virtuous citizens. Modern thought has largely rejected this to claim that vice and disorder can be cured simply by change of regime. It doesn't and cannot happen that way, even though some regimes are better than others.
“Benestad is completely familiar with what is known as modern Catholic social thought from the work of Leo XIII on. He knows of Pius XI and Pius XIII, John XXIII, and Paul VI. He is aware that in John Paul II and Benedict we have something in the Church that has perhaps never existed before: two popes, one following the other, both working together, who are themselves first class scholars and (particularly in the case of John Paul II) charismatic leaders of world historic significance. The world has done its best to refuse to acknowledge their genius and the truth of their lives and teachings. In this sense, our intellectual problems are initially moral ones.
“Benestad is well aware of the extra-ordinary genius of the present pope. His appendix is devoted to Caritas in veritate, the pope's third "social" encyclical. At one level, it is amusing to realize that the Catholic Church has been headed since Leo XIII at the end of the nineteenth century by men of superior intellect, but more recently by men the equals of any minds or their own or any other time. How little this intellectual foundation of the Church is appreciated within the Church and culture is a judgment on the quality of the lived faith and ongoing intelligence of our time.
“The book contains four parts with twelve chapters. The first part concerns "the human person, the political community, and the common good." Part two covers "civil society and the common good, three mediating societies (family, Church, and universities). Part three brings us to private property and the universal destination of goods. Finally, part four is on the international community and justice. It is in this latter section that Benestad deals sanely with war and international institutions.
“One thing that particularly struck me about this book is that Benestad always makes his own judgment on the issues that he presents. The reader always knows where he stands on the issues, and why. He is quite critical of many of the politicized American episcopal initiatives in the social order, none more so than that of Cardinal Bernadin's confused "seamless garment" doctrine. Often such documents bear ideological traits that never should be there.”
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
Capital Punishment Support II
Following up on yesterday’s post, this comment from Dr. Feser’s article is really superb.
The comment:
“CS Lewis often pointed out the Christianity was added to and a completion of natural law and good paganism.
“Therefore much of The Good, most, was taken for granted as being obvious, spontaneous, inborn.
“The anciently conceived Good was a unity of virtue, truth a beauty.
“So modern 'thinkers' arrive on the scene having rejected the vast submerged iceberg of the natural and the spontaneous, and having isolated virtue (ethics) from the true and the beautiful, and they tackle an issue like the death penalty by considering it on the assumption that all previous generations were evil fools and a few minutes of sensible consideration should be able to supersede them.
“And so we discover that the death penalty is evil, and all of humanity before a few decades ago, and ninety something percent of humanity now, is evil...
“Wow!
“I look around at the world of careerists, expedience merchants and intellectual pygmies who make these amazing moral discoveries such as the evilness of the death penalty, these pundits and pub debaters who claim to have superseded the justice of the ages (the great philosophers, the Saints and martyrs)- and am simply stunned at the mismatch.
“It really is bizarre that the most self-indulgent and hedonistic generations to inhabit the planet should regard themselves as *moral* experts and exemplars - of all things!”
The comment:
“CS Lewis often pointed out the Christianity was added to and a completion of natural law and good paganism.
“Therefore much of The Good, most, was taken for granted as being obvious, spontaneous, inborn.
“The anciently conceived Good was a unity of virtue, truth a beauty.
“So modern 'thinkers' arrive on the scene having rejected the vast submerged iceberg of the natural and the spontaneous, and having isolated virtue (ethics) from the true and the beautiful, and they tackle an issue like the death penalty by considering it on the assumption that all previous generations were evil fools and a few minutes of sensible consideration should be able to supersede them.
“And so we discover that the death penalty is evil, and all of humanity before a few decades ago, and ninety something percent of humanity now, is evil...
“Wow!
“I look around at the world of careerists, expedience merchants and intellectual pygmies who make these amazing moral discoveries such as the evilness of the death penalty, these pundits and pub debaters who claim to have superseded the justice of the ages (the great philosophers, the Saints and martyrs)- and am simply stunned at the mismatch.
“It really is bizarre that the most self-indulgent and hedonistic generations to inhabit the planet should regard themselves as *moral* experts and exemplars - of all things!”
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Peter in Germany
In a timely follow-up to yesterday’s post, this article by George Weigel about the Pope’s visit to Germany—reminding Germans of their religious heritage—is superb.
An excerpt.
“Americans exhausted by adolescent chants of "Pass this bill!" and the rest of the rhetorical detritus of the 2012 pre-campaign might go to the Vatican web site, click on Pope Benedict XVI, and spend a half-hour reading through the texts of the Holy Father's recent visit to his German homeland. It's amazing how refreshing it can be to listen to an intelligent and compassionate adult after weeks slogging through the slough of sound-bites crafted from focus-group hissy fits.
“For, despite the fact that a lot of the mainstream media long ago decided that Benedict XVI was a non-story (save for when he was being accused, ludicrously, of responsibility for the sexual abuse of the young), the 84-year-old pope has, in six years, established himself as perhaps the world's premier adult, at least among major international figures. He tells the truth to the roiled worlds of Islam about the imperative of finding Islamic warrants for religious freedom and the separation of religious and political power in a just state. He tells the truth to the United Nations about the irreducible moral core of world politics and economics. He tells the truth to Great Britain about the necessity of nurturing the human ecology that makes democracy possible (and does so in the place where Thomas More was condemned).
“And he does all of this without hectoring and without scolding. Rather, this elderly Bavarian, who is indisputably one of the most learned men on the planet, draws upon a deep and broad knowledge of the taproots of Western civilization, which he deploys rhetorically through the skills of a master-teacher in order to invite others into a deeper apprehension of the truth.
“It's not snap, crackle, and pop; it's something far more nourishing. And it draws. Benedict XVI drew somewhere between 1.5 million young people to Madrid in August for World Youth Day, a massive event that got precious little media attention, especially when compared to the slavish coverage of a few thousand young hellions trashing the streets of Britain earlier in the month. And he drew large and receptive crowds in his native Germany this past week, despite the carping of such disgruntled former colleagues as Prof. Hans Küng, who told Der Spiegel that Benedict was responsible for the "Putinization of the Catholic Church", which was rather thick, coming as it did from the Aaron Burr of the Catholic revolution that never was.
“But I digress.
“IN THE BUNDESTAG
“In his September 22 address to the Bundestag, Benedict spoke some home truths to his countrymen who, like many of their European Union compatriots, have forgotten a great deal about the cultural foundations of the West - foundations that are essential in supporting the political edifice of human rights and the rule of law. Contemporary Europe imagines that it can sustain its democratic politics with resources drawn from the continental Enlightenment and its intellectual heirs; Benedict XVI takes a longer and deeper view. And in a setting that inevitably conjures up memories of the vile anti-Semitism that led to the Shoah of European Jewry, Joseph Ratzinger boldly reached back into the Hebrew Bible to teach a lesson to politicians about their vocation: “In the First Books of Kings, it is recounted that God invited the young King Solomon, on his accession to the throne, to make a request. What will the young ruler ask for at this important moment? Success - wealth - long life - destruction of his enemies? He chooses none of these things. Instead he asks for a listening heart so that he may...discern between good and evil. (cf. 1 Kings 3.9). Through this story, the Bible wants to tell us what should ultimately matter for a politician. His fundamental criterion and the motivation for his work...must not be success, and certainly not material gain. Politics must be a striving for justice....Naturally a politician will seek success, without which he would have no opportunity for effective political action at all. Yet success [must be] subordinated to the criterion of justice, to the will to do what is right, and to the understanding of what is right...‘Without justice, what else is the State but a great band of robbers?,' as Saint Augustine once said...”
“And from that patristic vantage point in 5th-century North Africa, Benedict did not hesitate to connect the dots to the bloody 20th-century drama in which he and so many of his audience were caught up: "We Germans know from our own experience that these words are no empty specter. We have seen how power became divorced from right, how power opposed right and crushed it, so that the State became an instrument for destroying right - a highly organized band of robbers, capable of threatening the whole world and driving it to the edge of the abyss."
An excerpt.
“Americans exhausted by adolescent chants of "Pass this bill!" and the rest of the rhetorical detritus of the 2012 pre-campaign might go to the Vatican web site, click on Pope Benedict XVI, and spend a half-hour reading through the texts of the Holy Father's recent visit to his German homeland. It's amazing how refreshing it can be to listen to an intelligent and compassionate adult after weeks slogging through the slough of sound-bites crafted from focus-group hissy fits.
“For, despite the fact that a lot of the mainstream media long ago decided that Benedict XVI was a non-story (save for when he was being accused, ludicrously, of responsibility for the sexual abuse of the young), the 84-year-old pope has, in six years, established himself as perhaps the world's premier adult, at least among major international figures. He tells the truth to the roiled worlds of Islam about the imperative of finding Islamic warrants for religious freedom and the separation of religious and political power in a just state. He tells the truth to the United Nations about the irreducible moral core of world politics and economics. He tells the truth to Great Britain about the necessity of nurturing the human ecology that makes democracy possible (and does so in the place where Thomas More was condemned).
“And he does all of this without hectoring and without scolding. Rather, this elderly Bavarian, who is indisputably one of the most learned men on the planet, draws upon a deep and broad knowledge of the taproots of Western civilization, which he deploys rhetorically through the skills of a master-teacher in order to invite others into a deeper apprehension of the truth.
“It's not snap, crackle, and pop; it's something far more nourishing. And it draws. Benedict XVI drew somewhere between 1.5 million young people to Madrid in August for World Youth Day, a massive event that got precious little media attention, especially when compared to the slavish coverage of a few thousand young hellions trashing the streets of Britain earlier in the month. And he drew large and receptive crowds in his native Germany this past week, despite the carping of such disgruntled former colleagues as Prof. Hans Küng, who told Der Spiegel that Benedict was responsible for the "Putinization of the Catholic Church", which was rather thick, coming as it did from the Aaron Burr of the Catholic revolution that never was.
“But I digress.
“IN THE BUNDESTAG
“In his September 22 address to the Bundestag, Benedict spoke some home truths to his countrymen who, like many of their European Union compatriots, have forgotten a great deal about the cultural foundations of the West - foundations that are essential in supporting the political edifice of human rights and the rule of law. Contemporary Europe imagines that it can sustain its democratic politics with resources drawn from the continental Enlightenment and its intellectual heirs; Benedict XVI takes a longer and deeper view. And in a setting that inevitably conjures up memories of the vile anti-Semitism that led to the Shoah of European Jewry, Joseph Ratzinger boldly reached back into the Hebrew Bible to teach a lesson to politicians about their vocation: “In the First Books of Kings, it is recounted that God invited the young King Solomon, on his accession to the throne, to make a request. What will the young ruler ask for at this important moment? Success - wealth - long life - destruction of his enemies? He chooses none of these things. Instead he asks for a listening heart so that he may...discern between good and evil. (cf. 1 Kings 3.9). Through this story, the Bible wants to tell us what should ultimately matter for a politician. His fundamental criterion and the motivation for his work...must not be success, and certainly not material gain. Politics must be a striving for justice....Naturally a politician will seek success, without which he would have no opportunity for effective political action at all. Yet success [must be] subordinated to the criterion of justice, to the will to do what is right, and to the understanding of what is right...‘Without justice, what else is the State but a great band of robbers?,' as Saint Augustine once said...”
“And from that patristic vantage point in 5th-century North Africa, Benedict did not hesitate to connect the dots to the bloody 20th-century drama in which he and so many of his audience were caught up: "We Germans know from our own experience that these words are no empty specter. We have seen how power became divorced from right, how power opposed right and crushed it, so that the State became an instrument for destroying right - a highly organized band of robbers, capable of threatening the whole world and driving it to the edge of the abyss."
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
We Hold These Truths
It is one of the most remarkable books from an American Catholic theologian—We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition, by John Courtney Murray, S. J. (1960)—ever written, and I was reminded of that in the new issue of The Catholic Social Science Review, the journal of the Society of Catholic Social Scientists, where, in introducing a symposium on Murray’s book, Kenneth L. Grasso (2011) wrote:
“…I would suggest that the task of understanding and critically engaging its far ranging, complex, and subtle argument remains among the most important pieces of unfinished business facing American Catholic thought.” (Getting Murray Right, in The Catholic Social Science Review: Volume XVI, (p. 85)
And, in rereading Murray, I came across this:
“Perhaps one day the noble many-storied mansion of democracy will be dismantled, leveled to the dimensions of a flat majoritarianism, which is no mansion but a barn, perhaps even a tool shed in which the weapons of tyranny may be forged. Perhaps there will one day be wide dissent even from the political principles which emerge from natural law, as well as dissent from the constellation of ideas that have historically undergirded these principles—the idea that government has a moral basis; that the universal moral law is the foundation of society; that the legal order of society—that is, the state—is subject to judgment by a law that is not statistical but inherent in the nature of man; that the eternal reason of God is the ultimate origin of all law; that this nation in all its aspects—as a society, a state, an ordered and free relationship between governors and governed—is under God. The possibility that widespread dissent from these principles should develop is not foreclosed. If that evil day should come, the results would introduce one more paradox into history. The Catholic community would still be speaking in the ethical and political idiom familiar to them as it was familiar to their fathers, both the Fathers of the Church and the Fathers of the American Republic. The guardianship of the original American consensus, based on the Western heritage, would have passed to the Catholic community, within which the heritage was elaborated long before America was. And it would be for others, not Catholics, to ask themselves whether they still shared the consensus which first fashioned the American people into a body politic and determined the structure of its fundamental law." (1960) Sheed and Ward, New York. (pp. 42-43)
This hearkens back to the first post of this blog in 2007 commenting on a book written 47 years after Murrays’.
“…I would suggest that the task of understanding and critically engaging its far ranging, complex, and subtle argument remains among the most important pieces of unfinished business facing American Catholic thought.” (Getting Murray Right, in The Catholic Social Science Review: Volume XVI, (p. 85)
And, in rereading Murray, I came across this:
“Perhaps one day the noble many-storied mansion of democracy will be dismantled, leveled to the dimensions of a flat majoritarianism, which is no mansion but a barn, perhaps even a tool shed in which the weapons of tyranny may be forged. Perhaps there will one day be wide dissent even from the political principles which emerge from natural law, as well as dissent from the constellation of ideas that have historically undergirded these principles—the idea that government has a moral basis; that the universal moral law is the foundation of society; that the legal order of society—that is, the state—is subject to judgment by a law that is not statistical but inherent in the nature of man; that the eternal reason of God is the ultimate origin of all law; that this nation in all its aspects—as a society, a state, an ordered and free relationship between governors and governed—is under God. The possibility that widespread dissent from these principles should develop is not foreclosed. If that evil day should come, the results would introduce one more paradox into history. The Catholic community would still be speaking in the ethical and political idiom familiar to them as it was familiar to their fathers, both the Fathers of the Church and the Fathers of the American Republic. The guardianship of the original American consensus, based on the Western heritage, would have passed to the Catholic community, within which the heritage was elaborated long before America was. And it would be for others, not Catholics, to ask themselves whether they still shared the consensus which first fashioned the American people into a body politic and determined the structure of its fundamental law." (1960) Sheed and Ward, New York. (pp. 42-43)
This hearkens back to the first post of this blog in 2007 commenting on a book written 47 years after Murrays’.
Friday, September 23, 2011
Priest’s Model
St. John Vianney was one of the greatest priests of the Church, and this article from The Catholic Thing reminds us why.
The collected sermons of this saint are available and a must read, as fresh and potent today as when they were preached.
An excerpt from The Catholic Thing article.
“Saint John Vianney (1786-1859) was the curé of the parish of Ars in France and, because of his simple but great gifts as a pastor, was made the Patron of Priests and Parish Priests. I try to read his biography each year and am regularly struck by some of the features of his daily life.
“The reason for my fascination is that he was a pastor before the wholesale professionalization of the clergy. So he spent more time in his parish church than anywhere else. But he was not a desk jockey, although there were certainly some among the pastors of his circle.
“The church building back then had not yet become a place of limited use. Rather it was like the courtyard of God, much after the fashion of the vision in Isaiah: “In the year King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a high and lofty throne, with the train of his garment filling the temple.” (Isaiah 6:1) There were people crowding in to pray at all hours of the day or night. They were coming for grace and truth. The good pastor was right there in the middle of that crowd.
“Here is the eyewitness account of Monsieur La Croix in the church: “What mighty influence did he exercise over his hearers! . . . The multitude was crowded around him; at his feet, on the steps of the altar, on the pavement of the choir, were pressed together persons of every age, sex, and condition . . . all absorbed in breathless attention.” And all to hear a priest giving instruction in catechetics – and doing it daily.
“He was in the church from midnight on to deal with the crowds. The remarkable thing is that the whole day passed in the church, and divided among prayer, instruction, and the sacraments. Of course, the sacrament that occupied the most time was Confession. Observers noted that he spent about sixteen hours a day in confession. This was of course before confession was obliterated by psychologizing and theories about the impossibilities of really sinning.
“When did you last hear a homily on sin? It was the reason for Christ’s death and yet it is an almost unknown category in people’s thought, even Christians. Yet people become less human because of sin. We are watching the whole possibility of humanity trickle away into the sand.”
The collected sermons of this saint are available and a must read, as fresh and potent today as when they were preached.
An excerpt from The Catholic Thing article.
“Saint John Vianney (1786-1859) was the curé of the parish of Ars in France and, because of his simple but great gifts as a pastor, was made the Patron of Priests and Parish Priests. I try to read his biography each year and am regularly struck by some of the features of his daily life.
“The reason for my fascination is that he was a pastor before the wholesale professionalization of the clergy. So he spent more time in his parish church than anywhere else. But he was not a desk jockey, although there were certainly some among the pastors of his circle.
“The church building back then had not yet become a place of limited use. Rather it was like the courtyard of God, much after the fashion of the vision in Isaiah: “In the year King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a high and lofty throne, with the train of his garment filling the temple.” (Isaiah 6:1) There were people crowding in to pray at all hours of the day or night. They were coming for grace and truth. The good pastor was right there in the middle of that crowd.
“Here is the eyewitness account of Monsieur La Croix in the church: “What mighty influence did he exercise over his hearers! . . . The multitude was crowded around him; at his feet, on the steps of the altar, on the pavement of the choir, were pressed together persons of every age, sex, and condition . . . all absorbed in breathless attention.” And all to hear a priest giving instruction in catechetics – and doing it daily.
“He was in the church from midnight on to deal with the crowds. The remarkable thing is that the whole day passed in the church, and divided among prayer, instruction, and the sacraments. Of course, the sacrament that occupied the most time was Confession. Observers noted that he spent about sixteen hours a day in confession. This was of course before confession was obliterated by psychologizing and theories about the impossibilities of really sinning.
“When did you last hear a homily on sin? It was the reason for Christ’s death and yet it is an almost unknown category in people’s thought, even Christians. Yet people become less human because of sin. We are watching the whole possibility of humanity trickle away into the sand.”
Monday, September 19, 2011
Converts & Cradle Catholics
As a convert, I have found the point of this article from the Wall Street Journal—that converts are more evangelical than cradles—to be true, somewhat.
For a convert, the discovery of the teachings of Catholicism is a profound revelation of truth found at last, after years of the wandering search through the mundane and often ridiculous varieties of religious experience in the world; while the cradle Catholic often takes it for granted, especially true for those cradle Catholics who no longer study the teachings of the Church.
An excerpt.
“Do converts to the faith make better evangelists than "cradle Catholics"? Pope Benedict XVI seems to think so. Christians since childhood should "ask forgiveness," the pope told a group of his former theological students recently, "because we bring so little of the light of [Christ's] face to others, and emanate so feebly the certainty that he is, he is present and he is the great and complete reality that we are all awaiting."
“But are Catholics "by birth"—or any believers raised in a religious tradition—indeed less-convincing witnesses, or less motivated, than are converts? Do they have a greater responsibility to live up to the tenets of the faith since they have known Christ from their earliest years? And are they a bigger disappointment to the Mother Church—and the world—when they come up short?
“Benedict himself would certainly qualify as a "cradle Catholic." Joseph Ratzinger was born at home, early on the morning of Holy Saturday in April 1927, into the all-encompassing Catholic culture of small-town Bavaria. Within a few hours of his birth, the infant's mother bundled him up and trudged through an early spring snow to have him baptized at the village parish—the first step on a long but in some ways commonplace life of faith, at least in that day and age.
"I am a perfectly ordinary Christian," he once said of himself, with characteristic modesty. Yet it's hard to argue that Joseph Ratzinger, now the pope, has been anything less than enthusiastic in preaching the gospel. He entered the seminary while still an adolescent and rose from priest to cardinal to pope.
“But is that enough? Over the past 2,000 years, two narratives have competed in the Christian imagination: the ideal of the child raised in a Christian home, growing steadily in faith and virtue, and that of the repentant soul whose clamorous conversion leads heaven to rejoice more than over 99 of the righteous.”
For a convert, the discovery of the teachings of Catholicism is a profound revelation of truth found at last, after years of the wandering search through the mundane and often ridiculous varieties of religious experience in the world; while the cradle Catholic often takes it for granted, especially true for those cradle Catholics who no longer study the teachings of the Church.
An excerpt.
“Do converts to the faith make better evangelists than "cradle Catholics"? Pope Benedict XVI seems to think so. Christians since childhood should "ask forgiveness," the pope told a group of his former theological students recently, "because we bring so little of the light of [Christ's] face to others, and emanate so feebly the certainty that he is, he is present and he is the great and complete reality that we are all awaiting."
“But are Catholics "by birth"—or any believers raised in a religious tradition—indeed less-convincing witnesses, or less motivated, than are converts? Do they have a greater responsibility to live up to the tenets of the faith since they have known Christ from their earliest years? And are they a bigger disappointment to the Mother Church—and the world—when they come up short?
“Benedict himself would certainly qualify as a "cradle Catholic." Joseph Ratzinger was born at home, early on the morning of Holy Saturday in April 1927, into the all-encompassing Catholic culture of small-town Bavaria. Within a few hours of his birth, the infant's mother bundled him up and trudged through an early spring snow to have him baptized at the village parish—the first step on a long but in some ways commonplace life of faith, at least in that day and age.
"I am a perfectly ordinary Christian," he once said of himself, with characteristic modesty. Yet it's hard to argue that Joseph Ratzinger, now the pope, has been anything less than enthusiastic in preaching the gospel. He entered the seminary while still an adolescent and rose from priest to cardinal to pope.
“But is that enough? Over the past 2,000 years, two narratives have competed in the Christian imagination: the ideal of the child raised in a Christian home, growing steadily in faith and virtue, and that of the repentant soul whose clamorous conversion leads heaven to rejoice more than over 99 of the righteous.”
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
Sexual Abuse & Becoming Catholic
An excellent story from the National Catholic Register by a convert coming into the Church in 2005 when the scandal was raging—reminiscent of our experience as converts in 2004—and why she still became Catholic.
A must read!
An excerpt.
“When people hear that my husband and I began exploring Catholicism in 2005, one of the first questions they often ask is, “What about the sexual abuse scandals? Didn’t that scare you away from the Church?”
“They’re usually surprised when I report that the answer is no; in fact, the scandals and the negative media coverage actually increased my faith in the Church. Here’s why:
“Getting the Facts Straight
“One of the first things I did was to look into the numbers behind the sexual abuse cases. Was I heading into an institution that was filled with sexual predators, as the media would have me believe? I was shocked to find that, by even the most anti-Catholic organizations’ estimates, only about 2 percent of Catholic priests had even been accused of sexual misconduct. And certainly the cover-ups by members of the hierarchy were deplorable, but my research led me to see that that was common in all organizations, not just the Church. To list just one of the many examples, in Washington there were 159 coaches accused of sexual misconduct with minors over a 10-year period. Ninety-eight of them continued to coach or teach. And how did the school hierarchies respond? To quote this article: “When faced with complaints against coaches, school officials often failed to investigate them and sometimes ignored a law requiring them to report suspected abuse to police. Many times, they disregarded a state law requiring them to report misconduct to the state education office. Even after getting caught, many men were allowed to continue coaching because school administrators promised to keep their disciplinary records secret if the coaches simply left. Some districts paid tens of thousands of dollars to get coaches to leave. Other districts hired coaches they knew had records of sexual misconduct.”
“In another example, Carol Shakeshaft and Audrey Cohan looked at 225 cases of abuse by educators in New York City. Shakeshaft reported: “All of the accused admitted sexual abuse of a student, but none of the abusers was reported to the authorities, and only 1 percent lost their license to teach. Only 35 percent suffered negative consequences of any kind, and 39 percent chose to leave their school district, most with positive recommendations. Some were even given an early retirement package.”
“I could go on, but you get the idea. After investigating the issue, I found that, sadly, there is nothing different going on in the Catholic Church than in any organization where men are in contact with children, and that it’s an unfortunate fact of human nature—and not something unique within the Church—that people in hierarchy tend to look the other way when it comes to bad conduct by the people who report to them.”
A must read!
An excerpt.
“When people hear that my husband and I began exploring Catholicism in 2005, one of the first questions they often ask is, “What about the sexual abuse scandals? Didn’t that scare you away from the Church?”
“They’re usually surprised when I report that the answer is no; in fact, the scandals and the negative media coverage actually increased my faith in the Church. Here’s why:
“Getting the Facts Straight
“One of the first things I did was to look into the numbers behind the sexual abuse cases. Was I heading into an institution that was filled with sexual predators, as the media would have me believe? I was shocked to find that, by even the most anti-Catholic organizations’ estimates, only about 2 percent of Catholic priests had even been accused of sexual misconduct. And certainly the cover-ups by members of the hierarchy were deplorable, but my research led me to see that that was common in all organizations, not just the Church. To list just one of the many examples, in Washington there were 159 coaches accused of sexual misconduct with minors over a 10-year period. Ninety-eight of them continued to coach or teach. And how did the school hierarchies respond? To quote this article: “When faced with complaints against coaches, school officials often failed to investigate them and sometimes ignored a law requiring them to report suspected abuse to police. Many times, they disregarded a state law requiring them to report misconduct to the state education office. Even after getting caught, many men were allowed to continue coaching because school administrators promised to keep their disciplinary records secret if the coaches simply left. Some districts paid tens of thousands of dollars to get coaches to leave. Other districts hired coaches they knew had records of sexual misconduct.”
“In another example, Carol Shakeshaft and Audrey Cohan looked at 225 cases of abuse by educators in New York City. Shakeshaft reported: “All of the accused admitted sexual abuse of a student, but none of the abusers was reported to the authorities, and only 1 percent lost their license to teach. Only 35 percent suffered negative consequences of any kind, and 39 percent chose to leave their school district, most with positive recommendations. Some were even given an early retirement package.”
“I could go on, but you get the idea. After investigating the issue, I found that, sadly, there is nothing different going on in the Catholic Church than in any organization where men are in contact with children, and that it’s an unfortunate fact of human nature—and not something unique within the Church—that people in hierarchy tend to look the other way when it comes to bad conduct by the people who report to them.”
Monday, September 12, 2011
Vatican II
It is fashionable among many in the Church to lay the blame for the current sexual scandals in the Catholic Church at the feet of Vatican II.
This article from The Catholic Thing leans in that direction.
A deep reading of the history of the Church will reveal that the world’s evil has exerted a strong influence over the faithful since the beginning, and the Church always has to battle the world for their souls.
A reading of the 11th century Book of Gomorrah by St. Peter Damian about the scourge of sexual abuse in the Church at that time, reveals that, and a two part review of it noting the current connections, is available online: Part 1 and Part 2.
An excerpt from The Catholic Thing article.
“When he was cardinal of Krakow and the diocese faced a problem, Karol Wojtyla used to ask those working with him: “What is the truth of faith that sheds light on this problem?” He was head of a large diocese and yet he could work from the mind of the Church. In contrast, there are the memorable words of Cardinal Cushing (1895-1970), archbishop of Boston, to Catholic political leaders: “If your constituents want this legislation, vote for it.”
“A blank check for Catholic politicians – and by extension for every other Catholic – to go with what society believes rather than what the Church believes. And Cardinal Cushing was not the only one. Archbishop Wojtyła, on the other hand, made his starting point the teaching of the Church. His stance had a consistency – one of the reasons for his journey to sainthood – that needs to be recovered in the United States….
“The damage of uncritically going along with societal thinking is vast and almost unimaginable, given how many decades it has continued, largely unopposed, in America. At the very least, such thinking has deeply fragmented the Church, so that while we have one group working very hard to think with the mind of the Church, we have another confused and misled because this cardinal, or that senator, or a bishop or a priest is giving away the farm.
“And finally, there is a group working to make sure that the Church only teaches what is approved by secular culture – although why we would need yet another organization to promote that culture is beyond me. The great scandal of the fractures of the Church in the twentieth century has gone mostly unanswered and unchallenged, and no heads have rolled.
“Thinking with the mind of the Church would, for example, have nipped many of the sex scandals in the bud. Clergy who did things like that could not possibly continue in ministry. It is entirely irrelevant if the personnel director does not “understand” the culprit’s behavior. The actions are violations of the moral law and the Church can act on those grounds. It does not have to wait for psychological studies.
“But of course this would take unshakeable faith in the Church, and that faith was a casualty of a wrong reading of Vatican II. Having faith in the Church would have saved two billion dollars in payouts to victims, which could have been used to help the poor – whose patrimony it is.”
This article from The Catholic Thing leans in that direction.
A deep reading of the history of the Church will reveal that the world’s evil has exerted a strong influence over the faithful since the beginning, and the Church always has to battle the world for their souls.
A reading of the 11th century Book of Gomorrah by St. Peter Damian about the scourge of sexual abuse in the Church at that time, reveals that, and a two part review of it noting the current connections, is available online: Part 1 and Part 2.
An excerpt from The Catholic Thing article.
“When he was cardinal of Krakow and the diocese faced a problem, Karol Wojtyla used to ask those working with him: “What is the truth of faith that sheds light on this problem?” He was head of a large diocese and yet he could work from the mind of the Church. In contrast, there are the memorable words of Cardinal Cushing (1895-1970), archbishop of Boston, to Catholic political leaders: “If your constituents want this legislation, vote for it.”
“A blank check for Catholic politicians – and by extension for every other Catholic – to go with what society believes rather than what the Church believes. And Cardinal Cushing was not the only one. Archbishop Wojtyła, on the other hand, made his starting point the teaching of the Church. His stance had a consistency – one of the reasons for his journey to sainthood – that needs to be recovered in the United States….
“The damage of uncritically going along with societal thinking is vast and almost unimaginable, given how many decades it has continued, largely unopposed, in America. At the very least, such thinking has deeply fragmented the Church, so that while we have one group working very hard to think with the mind of the Church, we have another confused and misled because this cardinal, or that senator, or a bishop or a priest is giving away the farm.
“And finally, there is a group working to make sure that the Church only teaches what is approved by secular culture – although why we would need yet another organization to promote that culture is beyond me. The great scandal of the fractures of the Church in the twentieth century has gone mostly unanswered and unchallenged, and no heads have rolled.
“Thinking with the mind of the Church would, for example, have nipped many of the sex scandals in the bud. Clergy who did things like that could not possibly continue in ministry. It is entirely irrelevant if the personnel director does not “understand” the culprit’s behavior. The actions are violations of the moral law and the Church can act on those grounds. It does not have to wait for psychological studies.
“But of course this would take unshakeable faith in the Church, and that faith was a casualty of a wrong reading of Vatican II. Having faith in the Church would have saved two billion dollars in payouts to victims, which could have been used to help the poor – whose patrimony it is.”
Thursday, September 8, 2011
American Bishops & American Catholicism
A bracing call from Catholic Culture to U.S. Bishops to remember their failure in protecting the Church from dissident theologians within the Church in the past, and not allow the failure to continue into the future.
An excerpt.
“Fr. Thomas Weinandy caught my eye last week when he complained of a “crisis” in Catholic theology characterized by a rejection of Catholic faith and morals. Fr. Weinandy is the chief staff aide to the US bishops’ committee on doctrine. What are we to say about this crisis?
“The first and most important thing to say is that the crisis is of the bishops’ own making. I do not claim that the profound secularization of culture which has eroded Catholic theology on every side is primarily the fault of the bishops, but it is certainly their fault—including the fault of Rome herself—that a pitched battle was not waged in the 1960’s to keep Catholic universities and colleges from succumbing to this secular spirit. For the institutions of Catholic higher education are in fact the collective seat of theological studies, and what Fr. Weinandy rightly calls “a radical divide over the central tenets of the Catholic faith and the Church’s fundamental moral tradition” would far better have been nipped in the bud than allowed, for now nearly fifty years, to grow from strength to strength.
“Given the long percolation of Modernism in Catholic theological circles from the late 19th century and the rapid secularization of Western culture in the 1960’s, this battle would have been long and hard. But it is difficult to imagine that it would not now be over, instead of just beginning on far less favorable terrain. The key to victory would have been to make sure that heretics were clearly and forcefully declared to be where they belonged—that is, outside rather than within the Church, so that they could attack Catholic faith and morals only from secular institutions. You may recall that this was finally done with one premier dissenter, Hans Küng, who is no longer permitted to teach theology at any Catholic institution, with the result that nobody any longer cares what he thinks.”
An excerpt.
“Fr. Thomas Weinandy caught my eye last week when he complained of a “crisis” in Catholic theology characterized by a rejection of Catholic faith and morals. Fr. Weinandy is the chief staff aide to the US bishops’ committee on doctrine. What are we to say about this crisis?
“The first and most important thing to say is that the crisis is of the bishops’ own making. I do not claim that the profound secularization of culture which has eroded Catholic theology on every side is primarily the fault of the bishops, but it is certainly their fault—including the fault of Rome herself—that a pitched battle was not waged in the 1960’s to keep Catholic universities and colleges from succumbing to this secular spirit. For the institutions of Catholic higher education are in fact the collective seat of theological studies, and what Fr. Weinandy rightly calls “a radical divide over the central tenets of the Catholic faith and the Church’s fundamental moral tradition” would far better have been nipped in the bud than allowed, for now nearly fifty years, to grow from strength to strength.
“Given the long percolation of Modernism in Catholic theological circles from the late 19th century and the rapid secularization of Western culture in the 1960’s, this battle would have been long and hard. But it is difficult to imagine that it would not now be over, instead of just beginning on far less favorable terrain. The key to victory would have been to make sure that heretics were clearly and forcefully declared to be where they belonged—that is, outside rather than within the Church, so that they could attack Catholic faith and morals only from secular institutions. You may recall that this was finally done with one premier dissenter, Hans Küng, who is no longer permitted to teach theology at any Catholic institution, with the result that nobody any longer cares what he thinks.”
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
The Church Triumphant
A very nice reflection reminding us of our history, from The American Catholic blog.
An excerpt.
“One of the swear words common since Vatican II in the Catholic Church is triumphalism. We are to avoid it at all costs, and it is a bad, bad thing. In a small way this makes sense. The Church is both a divine and a human institution. As a divine institution the Church is always victorious and triumphant as result of the Triumph of the Cross, and proceeds serenely through time and eternity. As a human institution the Church consists of we sinful individuals here on Earth, and meets with victories and defeats as she seeks to spread the message of Christ, often on very stony fields indeed. To view the Church here on Earth through rose colored glasses and to assume that simply because the ultimate victory will be claimed by the Church against the Gates of Hell that all is well within the Church is to mistake the Church Triumphant for the Church Militant.
“However, in the place of triumphalism too many Catholics have embraced defeatism, either by assuming that the mission of the Church to all of humanity is hopeless or, much worse, thinking that spreading the Gospel isn’t important because everyone is saved anyway, and the religion they follow is unimportant. Hand in hand with this is the thrusting firmly down the memory hole of most of Church history, teaching and practice before Vatican II. The “fruits” of two generations of Catholics ignorant of the teachings and history of the Catholic Church are plain and dismaying.
“We Catholics have a grand history and we should learn it and teach it to our children. We should teach to them the victories and the defeats of the Church here on Earth, and also teach them that whenever they have reason to thank God, to remember the Te Deum.”
An excerpt.
“One of the swear words common since Vatican II in the Catholic Church is triumphalism. We are to avoid it at all costs, and it is a bad, bad thing. In a small way this makes sense. The Church is both a divine and a human institution. As a divine institution the Church is always victorious and triumphant as result of the Triumph of the Cross, and proceeds serenely through time and eternity. As a human institution the Church consists of we sinful individuals here on Earth, and meets with victories and defeats as she seeks to spread the message of Christ, often on very stony fields indeed. To view the Church here on Earth through rose colored glasses and to assume that simply because the ultimate victory will be claimed by the Church against the Gates of Hell that all is well within the Church is to mistake the Church Triumphant for the Church Militant.
“However, in the place of triumphalism too many Catholics have embraced defeatism, either by assuming that the mission of the Church to all of humanity is hopeless or, much worse, thinking that spreading the Gospel isn’t important because everyone is saved anyway, and the religion they follow is unimportant. Hand in hand with this is the thrusting firmly down the memory hole of most of Church history, teaching and practice before Vatican II. The “fruits” of two generations of Catholics ignorant of the teachings and history of the Catholic Church are plain and dismaying.
“We Catholics have a grand history and we should learn it and teach it to our children. We should teach to them the victories and the defeats of the Church here on Earth, and also teach them that whenever they have reason to thank God, to remember the Te Deum.”
Friday, September 2, 2011
Church Sinners & History
I am rereading the amazing book about the Church by H. W. Crocker III, Triumph: The Power and the Glory of the Catholic Church, one of two books Lampstand exhorts those engaged in prison ministry to get to those prisoners they are working with, and am once again enthralled with the great sacredness and dismayed with the great sinfulness, permeating the souls of those in Catholic leadership over the centuries, and the steadfastness of the quiet faithful attending mass, performing penance, creating and sustaining the Catholic world.
But through it all, through all of the worldly accommodations, the personal papal failures, the mistaken strategies, the satanic attacks and surrenders to evil, the folly and fear; yet the thunderous promise of Christ stands: “And I say to thee: That thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” (Matthew 16:18)
But through it all, through all of the worldly accommodations, the personal papal failures, the mistaken strategies, the satanic attacks and surrenders to evil, the folly and fear; yet the thunderous promise of Christ stands: “And I say to thee: That thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” (Matthew 16:18)
Thursday, August 25, 2011
World Youth Day II
Sandro Magister on Chiesa writes movingly of the just concluded event, which will encourage great hope among the faithful for the continued power of the Catholic Church as a sign of contradiction in the world.
An excerpt.
“ROME, August 24, 2011 – After every one of his voyages outside of Italy, Benedict XVI loves to provide a snapshot of it at the following Wednesday general audience…
“To simple outside observation, these worldwide gatherings also demonstrate distinctive characteristics, which were especially visible in Madrid.
“The first is silence. A prolonged, very intense silence that breaks out at key moments, in a throng of young people that had been exploding with celebration just a moment before.
“The Via Crucis is one of these moments. Another, even more striking, is that of the adoration of the sacred host during the nighttime vigil. A third is that of communion during the concluding Mass.
“Silent adoration of the sacred host is an innovation introduced into the World Youth Days by Benedict XVI. The pope kneels down, and with him hundreds of thousands of young people kneel down on the bare ground. All of them kneeling not to the pope, but to that "our daily bread" who is Jesus.
“The violent stormy downpour in Madrid that preceded Eucharistic adoration made the silence even more striking. And the same thing happened the following morning, at the Mass. The unexpected cancellation of the distribution of communion – for unexplained reasons of security – did not produce disorder and distraction in the endless expanse of young people, but on the contrary a silence of surprising composure and intensity, a mass "spiritual communion" with no known precedent.
“A second distinctive characteristic of this last World Youth Day is the very low average age of the participants, 22.
“This means that many of them were taking part in it for the first time. Their pope is Benedict XV, not John Paul II, whom they knew only as children. They are part of a generation of young and very young people highly exposed to a secularized culture. But at the same time, they are the signal that the questions about God and ultimate destinies are alive and present in this generation as well. And what motivates these young people is precisely these questions, to which a pope like Benedict XVI offers answers that are simple, yet powerfully demanding and attractive.
“The veterans of the World Youth Days were there, in Madrid. But above all among the tens of thousands of volunteers who assisted with the organization. Or among the numerous priests and religious who accompanied the young people, whose vocations germinated during previous World Youth Days. It has been clearly shown that these gatherings are an incubator for the future leadership of Catholic communities around the world.
“A third distinctive characteristic is the projection of these young people "ad extra." They don't have any interest in the battles within the Church to bring it into step with the times. They are light years away from the "cahier de doléances" of some of their older brothers: for married priests, for women priests, for communion for the divorced and remarried, for the popular election of bishops, for democracy in the Church, etcetera etcetera.
“For them, all of this is irrelevant. It is enough for them to be Catholics as Pope Benedict shows and explains to them. Without diversions, without concessions. If we were saved at a high price – the blood of Christ – we must reach just as high in giving our lives as true Christians.
“It is not the internal reorganization of the Church, but passion for the evangelization of the world that motivates these young people.”
An excerpt.
“ROME, August 24, 2011 – After every one of his voyages outside of Italy, Benedict XVI loves to provide a snapshot of it at the following Wednesday general audience…
“To simple outside observation, these worldwide gatherings also demonstrate distinctive characteristics, which were especially visible in Madrid.
“The first is silence. A prolonged, very intense silence that breaks out at key moments, in a throng of young people that had been exploding with celebration just a moment before.
“The Via Crucis is one of these moments. Another, even more striking, is that of the adoration of the sacred host during the nighttime vigil. A third is that of communion during the concluding Mass.
“Silent adoration of the sacred host is an innovation introduced into the World Youth Days by Benedict XVI. The pope kneels down, and with him hundreds of thousands of young people kneel down on the bare ground. All of them kneeling not to the pope, but to that "our daily bread" who is Jesus.
“The violent stormy downpour in Madrid that preceded Eucharistic adoration made the silence even more striking. And the same thing happened the following morning, at the Mass. The unexpected cancellation of the distribution of communion – for unexplained reasons of security – did not produce disorder and distraction in the endless expanse of young people, but on the contrary a silence of surprising composure and intensity, a mass "spiritual communion" with no known precedent.
“A second distinctive characteristic of this last World Youth Day is the very low average age of the participants, 22.
“This means that many of them were taking part in it for the first time. Their pope is Benedict XV, not John Paul II, whom they knew only as children. They are part of a generation of young and very young people highly exposed to a secularized culture. But at the same time, they are the signal that the questions about God and ultimate destinies are alive and present in this generation as well. And what motivates these young people is precisely these questions, to which a pope like Benedict XVI offers answers that are simple, yet powerfully demanding and attractive.
“The veterans of the World Youth Days were there, in Madrid. But above all among the tens of thousands of volunteers who assisted with the organization. Or among the numerous priests and religious who accompanied the young people, whose vocations germinated during previous World Youth Days. It has been clearly shown that these gatherings are an incubator for the future leadership of Catholic communities around the world.
“A third distinctive characteristic is the projection of these young people "ad extra." They don't have any interest in the battles within the Church to bring it into step with the times. They are light years away from the "cahier de doléances" of some of their older brothers: for married priests, for women priests, for communion for the divorced and remarried, for the popular election of bishops, for democracy in the Church, etcetera etcetera.
“For them, all of this is irrelevant. It is enough for them to be Catholics as Pope Benedict shows and explains to them. Without diversions, without concessions. If we were saved at a high price – the blood of Christ – we must reach just as high in giving our lives as true Christians.
“It is not the internal reorganization of the Church, but passion for the evangelization of the world that motivates these young people.”
Monday, August 22, 2011
Doctor of the Church
This eminent title elevates the particularly wise and learned saint above other saints and helps Catholics in their study of Church doctrine/dogma—providing a lamp shedding light for our faith journey—doctrine/dogma being defined by the Catechism's Glossary as:
“Doctrine/Dogma: The revealed teachings of Christ which are proclaimed by the fullest extent of the exercise of the authority of the Church’s Magisterium. The faithful are obliged to believe the truths or dogmas contained in divine Revelation and defined by the Magisterium.”
And within the Catechism it says:
“The dogmas of the faith
88 The Church's Magisterium exercises the authority it holds from Christ to the fullest extent when it defines dogmas, that is, when it proposes, in a form obliging the Christian people to an irrevocable adherence of faith, truths contained in divine Revelation or also when it proposes, in a definitive way, truths having a necessary connection with these.
89 There is an organic connection between our spiritual life and the dogmas. Dogmas are lights along the path of faith; they illuminate it and make it secure. Conversely, if our life is upright, our intellect and heart will be open to welcome the light shed by the dogmas of faith.
90 The mutual connections between dogmas, and their coherence, can be found in the whole of the Revelation of the mystery of Christ. "In Catholic doctrine there exists an order or hierarchy of truths, since they vary in their relation to the foundation of the Christian faith."
This article from Chiesa reports on a recent awarding of the title to a saint and examines the title historically.
An excerpt.
“VATICAN CITY, August 21, 2011 – Saint John of Avila (1499-1569) will be the 34th doctor proclaimed by the Catholic Church, the first under the pontificate of Benedict XVI.
“The pope made the announcement at the end of the Mass celebrated on the morning of Saturday, August 20, in the cathedral of Madrid, with the seminarians who had gone there for World Youth Day.
“So the title of doctor of the Church has once again been assigned to a man, after being granted consecutively to the first three women in history to bear it: Paul VI invested Saint Teresa of Avila and Saint Catherine of Siena with it in 1970; John Paul II gave it to Saint Thérèse of Lisieux in 1997.
“Currently, the practices regarding new doctors of the Church are being examined jointly by the congregation for the causes of saints and the congregation for the doctrine of the faith.
“There is not much official information available on the subject. Some of it was provided by the Jesuit Giandomenico Mucci in the article "The title of doctor of the Church" published in the last issue of 1997 of "La Civiltà Cattolica."
“In it, Mucci, building on theses formulated by the Franciscan Umberto Betti (made a cardinal by Benedict XVI in 2007, and deceased two years later), spoke out in favor of granting the title of doctor to martyrs as well, but not to popes.
"Because the title of doctor of the Church," he wrote, "is based specifically on the 'eminens doctrina,' it cannot be concealed under any gift of sanctity possessed by the candidate for the title of doctor. So even a martyr in whom the Church recognizes the 'eminens doctrina' (Ignatius, Irenaeus, Cyprian) can be elevated to the doctorate, despite the different historical practice."
“However, "it seems problematic," Mucci then added, "to grant the title of doctor of the universal Church to a saint who was a Roman pontiff. In fact, the documents of his magisterium are authoritative not because of the 'eminens doctrina' possessed as a personal gift of grace, but by virtue of the office that constituted him supreme pastor and doctor of all the faithful."
“In the same article, Mucci listed the saints and blesseds on the waiting list for the title of doctor.
“Six of them are women: Saint Veronica Giuliani, Saint Hildegard of Bingen, Saint Gertrude of Helfta, Saint Bridget of Sweden, Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, Blessed Julian of Norwich.
“And twelve are men: in addition to Saint John of Avila, Saint Gregory of Narek, Saint John Bosco, Saints Cyril and Methodius, Saint Lorenzo Giustiniani, Saint Antonino of Florence, Saint Thomas of Villanova, Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Saint Vincent de Paul, Saint Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort, Saint Bernardino of Siena.”
“Doctrine/Dogma: The revealed teachings of Christ which are proclaimed by the fullest extent of the exercise of the authority of the Church’s Magisterium. The faithful are obliged to believe the truths or dogmas contained in divine Revelation and defined by the Magisterium.”
And within the Catechism it says:
“The dogmas of the faith
88 The Church's Magisterium exercises the authority it holds from Christ to the fullest extent when it defines dogmas, that is, when it proposes, in a form obliging the Christian people to an irrevocable adherence of faith, truths contained in divine Revelation or also when it proposes, in a definitive way, truths having a necessary connection with these.
89 There is an organic connection between our spiritual life and the dogmas. Dogmas are lights along the path of faith; they illuminate it and make it secure. Conversely, if our life is upright, our intellect and heart will be open to welcome the light shed by the dogmas of faith.
90 The mutual connections between dogmas, and their coherence, can be found in the whole of the Revelation of the mystery of Christ. "In Catholic doctrine there exists an order or hierarchy of truths, since they vary in their relation to the foundation of the Christian faith."
This article from Chiesa reports on a recent awarding of the title to a saint and examines the title historically.
An excerpt.
“VATICAN CITY, August 21, 2011 – Saint John of Avila (1499-1569) will be the 34th doctor proclaimed by the Catholic Church, the first under the pontificate of Benedict XVI.
“The pope made the announcement at the end of the Mass celebrated on the morning of Saturday, August 20, in the cathedral of Madrid, with the seminarians who had gone there for World Youth Day.
“So the title of doctor of the Church has once again been assigned to a man, after being granted consecutively to the first three women in history to bear it: Paul VI invested Saint Teresa of Avila and Saint Catherine of Siena with it in 1970; John Paul II gave it to Saint Thérèse of Lisieux in 1997.
“Currently, the practices regarding new doctors of the Church are being examined jointly by the congregation for the causes of saints and the congregation for the doctrine of the faith.
“There is not much official information available on the subject. Some of it was provided by the Jesuit Giandomenico Mucci in the article "The title of doctor of the Church" published in the last issue of 1997 of "La Civiltà Cattolica."
“In it, Mucci, building on theses formulated by the Franciscan Umberto Betti (made a cardinal by Benedict XVI in 2007, and deceased two years later), spoke out in favor of granting the title of doctor to martyrs as well, but not to popes.
"Because the title of doctor of the Church," he wrote, "is based specifically on the 'eminens doctrina,' it cannot be concealed under any gift of sanctity possessed by the candidate for the title of doctor. So even a martyr in whom the Church recognizes the 'eminens doctrina' (Ignatius, Irenaeus, Cyprian) can be elevated to the doctorate, despite the different historical practice."
“However, "it seems problematic," Mucci then added, "to grant the title of doctor of the universal Church to a saint who was a Roman pontiff. In fact, the documents of his magisterium are authoritative not because of the 'eminens doctrina' possessed as a personal gift of grace, but by virtue of the office that constituted him supreme pastor and doctor of all the faithful."
“In the same article, Mucci listed the saints and blesseds on the waiting list for the title of doctor.
“Six of them are women: Saint Veronica Giuliani, Saint Hildegard of Bingen, Saint Gertrude of Helfta, Saint Bridget of Sweden, Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, Blessed Julian of Norwich.
“And twelve are men: in addition to Saint John of Avila, Saint Gregory of Narek, Saint John Bosco, Saints Cyril and Methodius, Saint Lorenzo Giustiniani, Saint Antonino of Florence, Saint Thomas of Villanova, Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Saint Vincent de Paul, Saint Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort, Saint Bernardino of Siena.”
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
The Liturgy & Sexual Abuse
A very interesting article from the Catholic News Agency speculating about the possible connection.
We know that much of modern life has been a search for constancy and authenticity; especially since the cultural ferment of the 1960's.
For Catholics, it is found in the Latin Mass.
An excerpt.
“As debate surrounding the recently published John Jay Report (Causes and Context of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests in the United States, 1950-2010) continues, more and more Catholics are coming to the unavoidable conclusion (contrary to “official findings”) that the overwhelming majority of abuse cases were directly related to homosexuality.
“One may further deduce that the historical spike in such incidents also likely coincided with an increase in the relative number of homosexual men in the priesthood - a proposition too unsavory (not to mention too politically incorrect) for many to acknowledge.
“Those who are willing to look at the situation with eyes opened wide are left to ponder, not just the aforementioned abuse crisis, but also the broader implications of homosexuality in the priesthood.
“I would submit that the impact of homosexual priests has perhaps been brought to bear in a particularly profound way in the liturgical life of the Church, and I would ask the reader to keep in mind as we proceed the warning issued by St. Paul, “Know you not that a little leaven corrupteth the whole lump?” (1 Cor. 5:6)
“Let’s begin by considering that the priest who celebrates Holy Mass does so in persona Christi – in the person of Christ – such that he “does nothing of his own power” when he carries out his liturgical duties; rather, it is the Lord Himself who is present and active in offering the Holy Sacrifice (cf St. John Chrysostom – Homily on the Holy Pentecost).
“Jesus Christ, the Eternal High Priest, is uniquely present and made visible to the faithful in the person of the ordained minister at Holy Mass (cf Sacrosanctum Concilium - 7) – a reality that compels the celebrating priest to personally surrender to Christ after the example of St. John the Baptist who said, “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30).
“The cleric who suffers with homosexuality, however, will necessarily find this liturgical submission-of-self a most challenging proposition.
“Psychiatrist Dr. Richard Fitzgibbons, a consultant to the Vatican Congregation for Clergy and a leading expert with more than 35 years of clinical experience treating priests and others who suffer with Same Sex Attraction (SSA), said in a recent interview with regard to homosexuality in the priesthood, “Narcissism – a personality disorder in which an insatiable need for admiration often leads to attention-seeking behavior – is prevalent among men who struggle with homosexuality. This conflict results in a need to draw attention to his own personality in the liturgy rather than to surrender his personal identity in favor of Christ.”…
“According to Dr. Fitzgibbons, “The insecurity inherent to SSA could also predispose the homosexual cleric to seek the approval of the laity by treating the liturgy as performance or by otherwise calling attention to himself. Furthermore, the underlying anger and disdain for authority that is also endemic to homosexuality could lead to rebelliousness and a determination to ‘do his own thing’ with the liturgy.”…
“Prior to Vatican II, Holy Mass was commonly celebrated in Latin in the ad oreintem posture in which both priest and people faced east, even if only a “liturgical east.” As such, the personality (and underlying emotional health) of the priest was of little consequence in the celebration, and so “losing himself” in order to make room for Christ in the liturgy was far more easily accomplished by the priest than it is today.
“In the Novus Ordo, however, the priest most commonly offers Holy Mass in the vernacular versus populum (facing the people) wherein his personality (and at times his emotional health) is unavoidably on display. Aware of the impact that his liturgical persona can have on the experience of the assembled faithful, the priest often feels tremendous pressure to draw upon his personal resources to “perform” his duties in a compelling way. Even in the best of circumstances, it is quite natural for the priest to feel moved to so meet the expectant eyes and ears of the faithful such as they are ever cast upon him in the newly configured rite.”
We know that much of modern life has been a search for constancy and authenticity; especially since the cultural ferment of the 1960's.
For Catholics, it is found in the Latin Mass.
An excerpt.
“As debate surrounding the recently published John Jay Report (Causes and Context of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests in the United States, 1950-2010) continues, more and more Catholics are coming to the unavoidable conclusion (contrary to “official findings”) that the overwhelming majority of abuse cases were directly related to homosexuality.
“One may further deduce that the historical spike in such incidents also likely coincided with an increase in the relative number of homosexual men in the priesthood - a proposition too unsavory (not to mention too politically incorrect) for many to acknowledge.
“Those who are willing to look at the situation with eyes opened wide are left to ponder, not just the aforementioned abuse crisis, but also the broader implications of homosexuality in the priesthood.
“I would submit that the impact of homosexual priests has perhaps been brought to bear in a particularly profound way in the liturgical life of the Church, and I would ask the reader to keep in mind as we proceed the warning issued by St. Paul, “Know you not that a little leaven corrupteth the whole lump?” (1 Cor. 5:6)
“Let’s begin by considering that the priest who celebrates Holy Mass does so in persona Christi – in the person of Christ – such that he “does nothing of his own power” when he carries out his liturgical duties; rather, it is the Lord Himself who is present and active in offering the Holy Sacrifice (cf St. John Chrysostom – Homily on the Holy Pentecost).
“Jesus Christ, the Eternal High Priest, is uniquely present and made visible to the faithful in the person of the ordained minister at Holy Mass (cf Sacrosanctum Concilium - 7) – a reality that compels the celebrating priest to personally surrender to Christ after the example of St. John the Baptist who said, “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30).
“The cleric who suffers with homosexuality, however, will necessarily find this liturgical submission-of-self a most challenging proposition.
“Psychiatrist Dr. Richard Fitzgibbons, a consultant to the Vatican Congregation for Clergy and a leading expert with more than 35 years of clinical experience treating priests and others who suffer with Same Sex Attraction (SSA), said in a recent interview with regard to homosexuality in the priesthood, “Narcissism – a personality disorder in which an insatiable need for admiration often leads to attention-seeking behavior – is prevalent among men who struggle with homosexuality. This conflict results in a need to draw attention to his own personality in the liturgy rather than to surrender his personal identity in favor of Christ.”…
“According to Dr. Fitzgibbons, “The insecurity inherent to SSA could also predispose the homosexual cleric to seek the approval of the laity by treating the liturgy as performance or by otherwise calling attention to himself. Furthermore, the underlying anger and disdain for authority that is also endemic to homosexuality could lead to rebelliousness and a determination to ‘do his own thing’ with the liturgy.”…
“Prior to Vatican II, Holy Mass was commonly celebrated in Latin in the ad oreintem posture in which both priest and people faced east, even if only a “liturgical east.” As such, the personality (and underlying emotional health) of the priest was of little consequence in the celebration, and so “losing himself” in order to make room for Christ in the liturgy was far more easily accomplished by the priest than it is today.
“In the Novus Ordo, however, the priest most commonly offers Holy Mass in the vernacular versus populum (facing the people) wherein his personality (and at times his emotional health) is unavoidably on display. Aware of the impact that his liturgical persona can have on the experience of the assembled faithful, the priest often feels tremendous pressure to draw upon his personal resources to “perform” his duties in a compelling way. Even in the best of circumstances, it is quite natural for the priest to feel moved to so meet the expectant eyes and ears of the faithful such as they are ever cast upon him in the newly configured rite.”
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