Category: Are the CTCers Paying Attention?

Called to Discombobulation

Published on by D. G. Hart227 Comments

I wonder if Stellman needs some coaching from Mark Shea:

It was around here that I entered the Church (1987) and fairly quickly surveyed what I took to be the lay of the land. The Church, I gathered, was divided between the loopy left and what Peter Kreeft called “non-revisionist Catholics”, aka “faithful conservative Catholics” who accepted the whole of the Church’s teaching, including the inconvenient and difficult Pelvic Bits, and tried to live that out. Having endured numerous nutball Seattle liturgies (“in the Name of the Creator and the Redeemer and the Sanctifier, may God our Father/Mother bless you”) with edited scripture readings sanitized for my protection and commentary such as “This passage is a crock” from the Seattle priestly caste, as well as instructions to just feel free to blow off the Church’s more inconvenient teaching, I came into the Church ready to stick it out defiantly against the lefty Seattle fiefdom with its sneering contempt for orthodoxy and its naked disdain for the Holy Father (my DRE loved to mock the Polish accent for the benefit of the RCIA class and tell the newbies what a buffoon the pope was for upholding the Church’s teaching. It made my blood boil. Only silly ultramontanes believed all that junk JPII said, I was assured.)

So I entered the Church in 1987 and set out to seriously live by the profession “I believe all that the holy, Catholic Church, believes, teaches, and proclaims is revealed by God.” Found a great parish in Seattle (Blessed Sacrament) full of wonderful Dominicans who taught me that the key to happiness as a Catholic was what Sherry Weddell has come to term”intentional discipleship”. That means not merely getting the sacramental card punched once a week, nor figuring out strategies for doing as I pleased while checking off a minimum daily adult requirement checklist on bare minimum cooperation with the Holy Spirit when he doesn’t get in my way, but making a serious stab at asking “What do you want me to do today, Jesus?” In this, I assumed that the great secret underground of Faithful Conservative Catholics was my allies and that the mission was to infiltrate, undermine, and destroy from within the regime of liberal dissent I’d seen up close and personal here in Seattle. Seemed reasonable.

Consequently, I took the formulation of the Five Non-Negotiables (abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem call research, human cloning, and gay “marriage”) as common sense as, I have no doubt, did whoever formulated them. I can’t remember when I first ran across them (sometime in the 90s I think) and I have no idea who came up with them, but they seemed (and seem) to me to have a certain prima facie common sense to them: Here are five big issues that, at the very least, Catholics should agree on. The “at the very least” was always, for me, the key phrase. It never occurred to me that Catholics would insist that these are the only things Catholics should care about, much less that Catholics should seize on these things to attack other aspects of the Church’s teaching. That was, I assumed, what the Liberals did with their hyperfocus on protesting the Trident base over at Bangor while turning a blind eye to Seattle’s abortion mills. So I happily embraced the five non-negotiables as as a sort of quick and dirty summary of bare minimum adherence to the Church’s fundamental teachings about the dignity of human life, and the family. It didn’t and shouldn’t exhaust our understanding for the Church’s social teaching. But it sketched out the floor of that teaching, below which we cannot go. If you wanted a much fuller teaching, there was the Seamless Garment, which always impressed me as a fine, nuanced, balanced, and sane approach to articulating the whole of the Church’s consistent ethic of life. Indeed, back in the day, I once wrote a piece for the National Catholic Register, sketching out the sanity of the Seamless Garment and more or less naively assumed all Catholics agreed with this obvious, catechism-based, common sense.

At least conservatives in the PCUSA used to claim that their communion before 1967 had not changed its doctrine. An entire Christian tradition, from Augustine of Hippo to Zoe of Rome, boiled down to five moral claims?

I still wait for the Callers to acknowledge the discrepancy between their Call and their Communion. The former may have a certain logic, but the latter has all the marks of the Protestant mainline circa 1970. Here’s a piece of advice to Jason and the Callers — the Call needs to address the conservative Presbyterian opposition to modernism. How those converts got around the modernist trends in Roman Catholicism since Vatican 2 has to owe to the Callers’ divorce of history from truth.

In the Same Boat?

Published on by D. G. Hart415 Comments

Do Jason and the Callers concede what George Weigel admits, namely, that despite all the authority that they boast for their communion it turns out they have no episcopal oversight unless they are ordained. In comments about the media’s coverage of the sex abuse scandal, Weigel says:

Another fact that was missed is that reducing a man, an abuser, to the lay state persistently and, if you will permit me, mindlessly dubbed “defrocking,” a word which has absolutely no meaning in any known Catholic vocabulary, is often worse for both the Church and society. It’s worse for the Church because the Church has no way to control the man who has been laicized or reduced to the lay state, and it’s worse for society because that man cut loose from any possibility of institutional control by the institution in which he had spent some considerable part of his life might, therefore, pose a future risk because of what we know to be a high rate of recidivism in some of these cases.

How is this any different from a Protestant denomination or congregation except that Protestant apologists don’t go around boasting about the authority of their pastors and bishops?

In the same setting, Weigel raised yet another question about the gap between Jason and the Callers theory and Roman Catholic practice — in this case, whether the charism of apostolic succession can make up for ineptitude:

The second point that I would make is that if you are interested in doing real reporting among serious Catholics throughout the world, I think you will find something quite striking, and that is while there remains enormous, strong, emotional, and affective and personal support for priests, there are real questions about the competence of bishops throughout the Church.

No matter where I go in the world Church, North America, Europe, Latin America, the single biggest complaint I hear from engaged and intelligent Catholics is about the competence of the local bishop. Some of that is unfair, but a lot of it isn’t, and it speaks to a serious problem that the abuse crisis has brought to the fore.

Let me put that problem in historical terms. In the early 19th Century when the first Catholic bishops were being appointed in the then nascent United States of America, Pope Pius VII had a free right of appointment in perhaps 50 of the then some 600 dioceses in the world. The rest were controlled by governments, by cathedral chapters or other ecclesiastical organizations, but the Church did not have — the Church as embodied by its leadership in Rome — simply did not have control over the most crucial appointments in its ordained leadership.

One of the great untold stories of the success of Vatican diplomacy over the past 200 years has been to change that situation such that now with what is it, more than 5,000 bishops in the world —

. . . Five thousand and twelve bishops in the world, and with the sole exceptions of Vietnam and China, the Church has essentially a free right of appointment. So the Church has gathered back to itself after what some of us would consider this period of Babylonian captivity to state power in the appointment of bishops. It has regained the capacity to order its own house according to its own criteria.

And, in fact, this has been imbedded in the new code of cannon law, which says that no rights of appointment are to be given in the future to state authorities.

However, if you were going to claim the right to appoint, then you must also in my view own the right to dismiss, and this is perhaps the single biggest management problem in the Catholic Church today, is that we do not have a mechanism in place for dealing with instances of manifest incompetence or worse in the exercise of the local Episcopal office, and that problem in turn explains a large amount, I think, of the dissatisfaction of not marginal Catholics, but serious Catholics, regular Church-going Catholics, major donor Catholics, with local bishops, with the quality of the Episcopate throughout the world Church.

So here is another huge problem that has got to be addressed presumably in the next pontificate. How does the Church get the quality of leadership that the people of the Church deserve, and how does the Church deal with the problem of, frankly, failed appointments? When we get it wrong, how do we deal with this?

This has got to be addressed. I addressed it actually a bit in The Courage to be Catholic, and it’s perhaps a shining example of how little influence I have over things that none of this has had the slightest dent that I can tell on the way things are done.

But it’s a big, big problem, and it’s perhaps in the abuse crisis, if one is thinking about this over the long term, it’s the biggest problem that has come to the surface that will have real effect on the life of the Church and the life of the people of the Church for the next 50 to 100 years.

Do Jason and the Callers listen to other voices in their own communion — “we do not have a mechanism in place for dealing with instances of manifest incompetence or worse in the exercise of the local Episcopal office, and that problem in turn explains a large amount, I think, of the dissatisfaction of not marginal Catholics, but serious Catholics, regular Church-going Catholics, major donor Catholics, with local bishops, with the quality of the Episcopate throughout the world Church.”

They keep telling us they have a mechanism in place and regular Roman Catholics like Weigel say the mechanism doesn’t exist.

The fine print of Jason and the Callers’ call is that they raise the stakes of conversion. If you convert to mother church, they argue, you get so much more than a possibly subjectivized relationship with Jesus. But what happens if you don’t get all that? What happens if the church isn’t all that your theory says it is? What happens if the church isn’t the mechanism you say it is? Doesn’t that make conversion to Jesus in a setting where the church tells you that having Jesus is all you need — not worrying about whether the church’s claims for itself are audaciously true — a call that is much more compelling?

Called to Answer

Published on by D. G. Hart61 Comments

Jason and the Callers don’t include the fine print in their call. We know. But I can’t imagine even the Callers have enough time to fill out all the surveys the bishops (and others) are sending.

Here’s one in preparation for the next Synod on the family:

The Socio-Cultural Context (ns. 5 – 8)

1. What initiatives are taking place and what are those planned in relation to the challenges these cultural changes pose to the family (cf. ns. 6 – 7): which initiatives are geared to reawaken an awareness of God’s presence in family life; to teaching and establishing sound interpersonal relationships; to fostering social and economic policies useful to the family; to alleviating difficulties associated with attention given to children, the elderly and family members who are ill; and to addressing more specific cultural factors present in the local Church?

2. What analytical tools are currently being used in these times of anthropological and cultural changes; what are the more significant positive or negative results? (cf. n. 5)

3. Beyond proclaiming God’s Word and pointing out extreme situations, how does the Church choose to be present “as Church” and to draw near families in extreme situations? (cf. n. 8). How does the Church seek to prevent these situations? What can be done to support and strengthen families of believers and those faithful to the bonds of marriage?

4. How does the Church respond, in her pastoral activity, to the diffusion of cultural relativism in secularized society and to the consequent rejection, on the part of many, of the model of family formed by a man and woman united in the marriage and open to life?

The Importance of Affectivity in Life (ns. 9 – 10)

5. How do Christian families bear witness, for succeeding generations, to the development and growth of a life of sentiment? (cf. ns. 9 – 10). In this regard, how might the formation of ordained ministers be improved? What qualified persons are urgently needed in this pastoral activity?

Pastoral Challenges (n. 11)

6. To what extent and by what means is the ordinary pastoral care of families addressed to those on the periphery? (cf. n. 11). What are the operational guidelines available to foster and appreciate the “desire to form a family” planted by the Creator in the heart of every person, especially among young people, including those in family situations which do not correspond to the Christian vision? How do they respond to the Church’s efforts in her mission to them? How prevalent is natural marriage among the non-baptized, also in relation to the desire to form a family among the young?

Part II
Looking at Christ: The Gospel of the Family . . .

7. A fixed gaze on Christ opens up new possibilities. “Indeed, every time we return to the source of the Christian experience, new paths and undreamed of possibilities open up” (n. 12). How is the teaching from Sacred Scripture utilized in pastoral activity on behalf of families. To what extent does “fixing our gaze on Christ” nourish a pastoral care of the family which is courageous and faithful?

8. What marriage and family values can be seen to be realized in the life of young people and married couples? What form do they take? Are there values which can be highlighted? (cf. n. 13) What sinful aspects are to be avoided and overcome?

9. What human pedagogy needs to be taken into account — in keeping with divine pedagogy — so as better to understand what is required in the Church’s pastoral activity in light of the maturation of a couple’s life together which would lead to marriage in the future? (cf. n. 13)

10. What is being done to demonstrate the greatness and beauty of the gift of indissolubility so as to prompt a desire to live it and strengthen it more and more? (cf. n. 14)

11. How can people be helped to understand that a relationship with God can assist couples in overcoming the inherent weaknesses in marital relations? (cf. n. 14) How do people bear witness to the fact that divine blessings accompany every true marriage? How do people manifest that the grace of the Sacrament sustains married couples throughout their life together?

That is only the first eleven of FORTY-SIX!!!! sets of questions.

And then we have a survey on Pope Francis:

1. My view of Pope Francis is:
Favorable
Mostly Favorable
Mostly Unfavorable
Unfavorable
2. Since Pope Francis was elected, I am more interested in the Catholic faith.
Agree
Disagree
Comments

3. Since Pope Francis was elected, I have attended Mass more often.
Agree
Disagree
Comments

4. Pope Francis represents a major change in the direction of the church.
Agree
Disagree
Comments

5. By now, I expected that Pope Francis would have made more concrete changes in the church.
Agree
Disagree
Comments

6. The widespread media coverage of Pope Francis has been:
A big help in reforming the image of the Catholic Church.
Irrelevant to the life of the church.
Harmful because the media often misrepresents what Francis says.
Other
Other

7. The comments Pope Francis has made on controversial topics often distort church teaching.
Agree
Disagree
Other
Other

8. The area where I would most like to see more action from Pope Francis is:
Holding bishops accountable for not dealing properly with abusers in their dioceses.
Creating more leadership roles for women in the church.
Reforming the Curia.
Cleaning up the Vatican Bank.
Stopping the Vatican investigation of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious.
Enforcing better global standards for dealing with priest sexual abuse.
Other
Other

9. I think Pope Francis’ frequent off-the-cuff interviews and informal approach have:
Made the papacy much more appealing to the average Catholic.
Robbed the papacy of much of its grandeur.
Not made much difference to how the pope is viewed.
Other
Other

10. I have found myself paying closer attention to Catholic news since Pope Francis was elected.
Agree
Disagree
Comments

11. I have been inspired by Pope Francis’ humble and simple lifestyle.
Agree
Disagree
Comments

12. Laypeople are getting more of a role and voice in the church under Pope Francis.
Agree
Disagree
Comments

13. I believe that Francis will make major reforms in the Vatican during his papacy.
Agree
Disagree
Comments

14. Pope Francis doesn’t speak enough about abortion.
Agree
Disagree
Don’t have an opinion
Comments

15. I find Pope Francis’ comments on homosexuality and same-sex relationships troubling.
Agree
Disagree
Comments

16. I think Pope Francis is causing too much division within the church.
Agree
Disagree
Comments

17. The best pope in the last 50 years has been:
Francis
Benedict XVI
John Paul II
John Paul I
Paul VI
Comments

18. The most memorable thing Francis has done so far in his papacy is…

19. One thing about Pope Francis that has been a disappointment to me is…

20. If I could meet Pope Francis, I’d tell him…

21. If I had to grade Francis as pope so far, I’d give him a _____, because…

22. The quality that I like most about Pope Francis is…

23. The biggest surprise from Pope Francis has been…

24. One area in which Pope Francis is challenging me to become a better Catholic is…

25. My greatest hope for the remainder of Pope Francis’ papacy is…

Did ever a hierarchical church look more Babdist?

Audacious indeed.

How Times Have Changed

Published on by D. G. Hart126 Comments

As Robbie George explains it, from one THE-ROCK star:

I grew up in West Virginia as a Catholic in a Protestant culture, the kind we would today describe as evangelical. We Catholics had the pope — but he was a distant and, to be blunt, foreign figure. Our Protestant neighbors had Billy Graham, the friend of presidents, business magnates and celebrities, who through the magic of television was a frequent, familiar guest in the homes of ordinary people; and he was as American as apple pie.

We didn’t admit it in those days, but we Appalachian Catholics — like, I suspect, many of our coreligionists throughout the land — envied those Protestants. We figured that Billy Graham made being a Protestant in America something like what it was to be a Catholic in Italy. And while we weren’t quite sure it wasn’t a little bit disloyal to watch, listen to and even like and admire a Protestant preacher, watch and listen many of us did — sometimes against the warnings of our parish priests or the nuns who taught us in parochial schools.

It was hard not to watch and listen to Graham. He was mesmerizing: movie star looks; a strong, compelling voice; a charmingly soft Southern accent; stage presence. His message was as simple as it was powerful: Our lives on earth are short. Soon enough each of us will die. Do you want to go to heaven? Then you must give your life to Christ. You must accept him as your Lord and Savior and enter into a personal relationship with him. He is even now lovingly extending his hand to you. Will you not take it? Quoting Scripture, he would say, “ ‘Now is the accepted time; today is the day of salvation.’ This is the hour of decision.”

Then would come the altar call: As Graham’s superb musical team played and sang the moving old hymn “Just as I Am,” the acclaimed evangelist would invite — encourage — those attending his “crusades,” or listening to his “Hour of Decision” program, first on radio, then television, to stand up and give their lives to Christ. Watching from home, even we Catholics felt the impulse to get out of our seats, though we believed that we already belonged to Christ sacramentally, through baptism.

To another:

I suspect that Graham’s only real competitor for the title of most influential Christian evangelist of the 20th century is Pope John Paul II. And the comparison is apt. A John Paul II event, whether in Paris, New York, Los Angeles or Manila, resembled nothing so much as one of Graham’s crusades — a vast crowd in an allegedly postreligious age, and often in an allegedly post-Christian city, drawn to a larger-than-life figure preaching a demanding message of repentance and reform, but doing it with the accent on God’s mercy and the liberating joy of the Christian life.

Wacker reports that Graham and John Paul II met three times, and that Graham’s admiration for John Paul was “manifest.” Did the pope reciprocate that admiration? At one of their meetings, he grasped the Protestant preacher by the thumb — yes, the thumb — and said, “We are brothers.” John Paul II was not a glad-hander or a flatterer. He didn’t say what he didn’t mean. In Graham he clearly saw a fellow Christian, a fellow evangelist and, no doubt, a fellow pioneer in the effort to heal the divisions that had fractured Christianity. Graham, who earlier in his life had been suspicious of Catholics, took great satisfaction in the pope’s regard for him.

All of which confirms my hunch: without a celebrity pope, Roman Catholicism would not have picked up the Protestant following that it has. The irony of course is that after Vatican 2 Protestants didn’t need to convert. Even the pope recognized Protestants as saved.

Missing Logic

Published on by D. G. Hart40 Comments

A couple of items that all apologists might want to chew over, especially the homers we know as Jason and the Callers.

First, notice the absence of logic in Russ Saltzman’s tu quoque-like decision to become a Roman Catholic:

While certainly Neuhaus was – crap, still is – a tremendous influence on me, Dianne’s announcement set me to examining my Lutheran life, and in some ways it’s not as Lutheran as it once was. I write regularly for a Catholic magazine. Everybody senior on the staff at First Things is Catholic. I know as many priests as I do pastors, people I hang out with on email and the like, and I point out not a few of those priests were once Lutheran pastors. Not to slight you or anyone you know, it has just happened in my life that my intellectual and best theological compatriots these days are largely Roman Catholic.

What I have always sought – since seminary on – is to be in a church that finally gives expression to the catholicity of the Augsburg Confession. There is no Lutheran expression doing that. Most of my 17 years as editor of Forum Letter was spent, so it seems, showing Lutherans how far we have fallen from the practice of parish life described in our own confession.

There are evangelically catholic centers of Lutheran congregational life, and some that are deeply so, And there are evangelically catholic-minded pastors seeking parish renewal by Creed, Catechism, Confession, and praise God for it. The Church must continually struggle “against forces that always strike the Church and gospel: the fashions and fads of Gnosticisms ancient and new . . . the devaluation of the sacraments through neglect, the socially accommodating spirit of Church Growth excitements, and the gross appetite of a politicized bureaucracy.” (Forum Letter 19:9, September 1990). It may be, I’ll find out, the best field for the contestation in that struggle is with Rome.

5) By the time I reasoned all that out, Step 5 was, like, why the hell not?

Yet, this is not for ease nor is it out of mere unhappiness with the state of Lutheranism. It rises from true conviction that has grown in strength since Richard’s death, that the essence – more like fullness – of the Church of Christ is in found communion with churches in communion with the bishop of Rome. It is not safe to deny one’s conscience or renege on conviction.

Notice especially the lack of urgency as in what must I be do to be saved? You can be saved in the ELCA or the RCC. But in which do you receive a fuller bang for your assent? (If all my friends are Detroit Tigers’ fans, do I abandon the Phillies? These days, hell yes of course.)

And then comes word of the importance of the imagination, as opposed to logic, in the appeal of Roman Catholicism:

The literary shortcomings of Catholics in this era, he suggests, were due to an often combative and excessively didactic posture, which obscured human and artistic engagement with religious questions. “Religious function,” Ryan suggests, following Marcel Gauchet’s analysis in The Disenchantment of the World, needed to leave behind its role as a heavy-handed instrument of conversion and be “metabolized,” or drawn into an “aesthetic repertoire” infused with “Catholic ways of knowing and habits of being,” before Catholic authors could have a serious impact on American literature.

Orestes Brownson and Fr. Isaac Hecker, for example, both saw the potential of Catholic literature as a tool for combating anti-Catholic prejudice and educating the rapidly growing population of American Catholics. They imagined enormous possibilities for evangelization in the burgeoning printing industry, calling for a Catholic literature that would provide an education in the doctrines of Catholicism while instilling moral values, hoping to counter the influence of the wildly popular sentimental novels and scurrilous romances of the era.

While neither Brownson nor Hecker was successful in reaching a large audience, the novels of Jedidiah Huntington and Anna Hanson Dorsey, and the devotional writings of Cardinal James Gibbons, did become somewhat popular, even on par with the sentimental-didactic fiction of their Protestant contemporaries. Ryan points out that all three of these authors can attribute their relative success in part to their willingness to integrate into their fiction the literary themes and conventions to which readers of such fiction were accustomed.

So maybe the website should be called, “Imagine Communion.”

Folded or Dirty

Published on by D. G. Hart180 Comments

It’s still laundry that most of us don’t get to see. It’s a little old at this point, but the exchange between Ross Douthat and James Martin, editor at large of America magazine, displayed an honesty that conversations between conservatives and liberals in American Protestantism never revealed. It also exposed us outsiders to a range of views that Jason and the Callers keep under wraps (whether out of duplicity or ignorance is anyone’s guess. Here are a few highlights:

Douthat admits that papal supremacy won’t fix what ails Roman Catholicism (contrary to Jason and the Callers):

. . . to the extent that some conservatives ultimately find themselves in sincere disagreement with statements this pope makes, or experience sincere disappointment with some of his appointments, that experience might help cure them of the unhealthy papolatry that sometimes built up under John Paul II, and help them recognize the truth of a point that more liberal Catholics have often raised—that the Vatican is not the church entire, and that many worthwhile experiments in Catholic history have been undertaken without a stamp of approval (quite the reverse, indeed) from the hierarchy.

But with all of this said, on some of the issues we’re debating right now, I think there’s also an important asymmetry between the position of progressive Catholics and conservative Catholics vis-à-vis a pope who might seem at times to be on the “other team.” By this I mean that for Catholics who desire some kind change in church teaching around sex and marriage and the family, by definition the continuity and integrity of the current teaching isn’t essential to their understanding of what the church is, why it’s worth belonging to, and so on. As much as they may have been disappointed under the last two pontificates, that is, their fundamental reasons for being Catholic were not shaken by what John Paul or Benedict taught or said on divorce or same-sex marriage or other issue, because they had already decided that what any specific pope says about sex or marriage can be taken as provisional, subject to the future revision by the Holy Spirit.

Martin identifies the bottom line for Roman Catholic progressives (would Jason and the Callers agree?):

I can surely understand the frustration of some who feel that what they view as essential is up for grabs. Seeing something that you deem essential being held up for debate would be disturbing indeed. But, for me, the essentials are contained, first, in in the Gospels and, second, in the Nicene Creed. So no pope—no Christian—could say, “There is no need to love your enemy, to forgive, or to care for the poor.” Nor could any Christian say, “Jesus Christ did not rise from the dead.” After the Gospels and the Creed, I look to the whole rest of our church tradition, through the lens of the hierarchy of truths, understanding what has a greater level of authority over us.

That’s a brief answer to a big question, but as for the essentials, I would—and I’m not being metaphorical here—die for them.

One more — Douthat identifies the state of U.S. Roman Catholicism (and makes me wonder whether Jason and the Callers are calling to this communion):

These are all clearly persistent temptations for the church—a version of the commercial temptation helped bring on the Protestant Reformation, after all—and much of what we think of today as liberal Catholicism was forged in reaction to their pre-Vatican II manifestations. The ritualistic spirit of Eat meat on Friday, go straight to hell, do not pass go, the God-as-accountant image inherent in say these seventeen different prayers to thirteen different saints and receive in return exactly 4,544 days off Purgatory, the culture of shame and silence around sexuality, the punitive visions of hell immortalized by James Joyce, the pomp and circumstance embraced by princes of the church…these are stereotypes, of course, of a richer and more complicated reality, but they are grounded in real aspects of the pre-1960s church, which were in need of correction and reform.

But as someone who came of age long, long after the battles of Vatican II, I simply don’t recognize the Catholic culture that many liberal Catholics seem to believe they’re warring against or seeking to undo or overthrow. The “traditionalist” church, the church of lace and legalisms if you will, that the current pontiff is particularly quick to critique, is simply not part of most American Catholics’ everyday experience. It may exist in some parishes and precincts, or among certain bishops or cardinals. But the dominant experience of Catholic life, Catholic liturgy, Catholic preaching, has nothing in common with the stereotype of a Pharisee lecturing people about their (mostly sexual) sins.

What it has more in common with, and I speak from experience, is certain forms of Mainline Protestantism and megachurch evangelicalism: Notwithstanding what still emanates from the Vatican, we’ve become a church of long communion and short confession lines (and you’re more likely to find me in the first than the second), of Jesus-affirms-you sermons and songs, of marriage preparation retreats (like mine) where most of the couples are cohabitating and nobody particularly cares, and of widespread popular attitudes toward the divine and toward church teaching that mostly resemble H. Richard Niebuhr’s vision of a God without wrath, men without sin, and a Kingdom without judgment.

Would that we would ever hear this kind of frankness from Jason and the Callers (and the entire team of apologetical salesmen).

The Call Goes Only So Far

Published on by D. G. Hart74 Comments

To communion but not to education:

The ascendant liberalism at modern Catholic colleges is a problem that has perplexed parents with traditional Catholic beliefs for decades now. Bishop Sheen went so far as to recommend that Catholic parents steer their children toward state and private colleges rather than Catholic institutions, contending it would be better to have their faith ignored at a secular college than actively undermined by liberal Catholic professors at a Catholic college.

Not everyone agrees with Sheen. I can remember an exchange on this topic in Triumph magazine back in the 1970s. I can’t recall who it was who disagreed with Sheen’s position, but his point was that even a Catholic college with a theology and philosophy department dominated by liberation theologians was a better choice than a secular college. The writer in question contended that the odds were good that a student would be able to find at least a few professors loyal to the Church at liberal Catholic colleges to help them grow in their faith, something not likely at secular colleges. Beyond that, he felt that spending four years in a Catholic atmosphere of available daily Masses, and the trappings of stained-glass windows and statues of the saints would have a favorable influence on the spiritual life of young people of college age.

My own view? I went back on forth on the question, but I did send my daughter in the 1990s to a Jesuit college that I knew was far more liberal than the Jesuit college I attended in the 1960s. She learned little about Thomas Aquinas and Jacques Maritain while in attendance, but I did not regret my decision. I am convinced that the Catholic cultural environment in which she was immersed was a healthy influence on her spiritual growth.
I was recently surprised to discover that there are professors at Catholic colleges these days who ponder this very issue, who worry about what it will mean if the Catholic identity of their institutions is lost.

Why don’t Jason and the Callers ever talk about Boston College?

Building Bridges or Revoking the Call

Published on by D. G. Hart123 Comments

Rick Warren thinks he is trying to find common ground between Roman Catholics and Protestants. He doesn’t realize he just cut off Jason and the Callers at the knees:

Warren, whose Purpose Driven Life and Purpose Driven Church books have sold millions of copies around the world, recorded a video interview for the Catholic News Service in which he said: “We have far more in common than what divides us.”

He continued: “When you talk about Pentecostals, charismatics, evangelicals, fundamentalists, Catholics, Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians … Well they would all say we believe in the trinity, we believe in the Bible, we believe in the resurrection, we believe salvation is through Jesus Christ. These are the big issues.

“Sometimes Protestants think that Catholics worship Mary like she’s another god. But that’s not exactly Catholic doctrine.”

He also referred to the Roman Catholic practice of prayer to the saints, which Protestants reject, saying: “When you understand what they mean by what they’re saying, there’s a whole lot more commonality.

“Now there’s still real differences, no doubt about that. But the most important thing is if you love Jesus, we’re on the same team.”

He said that Church unity would realistically be “not a structural unity but a unity of mission. And so, when it comes to the family we are co-workers in the field on this for the protection of what we call the sanctity of life, the sanctity of sex, and the sanctity of marriage. So there’s a great commonality and there’s no division on any of those three.”

I wonder why Rick Warren is on Pope Francis’ A-list but not Bryan Cross. Audacious?

Do You See What I See?

Published on by D. G. Hart115 Comments

Haven’t heard the carol yet, but I’m sure it’s coming.

This post from Guy Noir at the Pertinacious Papist brought the Christmas carol to mind and it concerns our peaceful interlocutor, Bryan Cross, and why he doesn’t see what others do.

First Guy quotes a critic of Called to Communion but does not link to his source (and yes, I had hoped it was — all about — me):

I think the point is that Bryan Cross and the whole Called to Communion project is almost entirely out of step with modern Roman Catholicism post-V2. … It’s why you don’t see very many cradle RCs calling us to communion. They understand that the Vatican now sees us as true Christians, having in practice renounced the anathemas of Trent even while still nominally claiming them. The religion that Bryan and CtC promote is very heady and not at all in touch with the average RC in the pew. …[T]he church basically renounced its earlier doctrines and practices at V2… Bryan et al don’t see it at all, which is why we get 10,000 word tomes trying to make the square peg of Tridentine Romanism fit the round hole of post-V2 RCism. The blindness of CtC is seen in their refusal to admit that if Francis and any nineteenth century pope sat down together, neither one of them would recognize each other as a true RC.

Then Guy comments, I think in support of both the critic and of Bryan Cross (though I may be mistaken):

I really don’t know. Does proposing something that seems simply beyond the pale — just because it seems beyond the pale — make a suggestion out of the question? If a nagging suspicion or claim won’t go away, is the best policy simply to ignore it? If Francis to so many Catholics sounds unCatholic, isn’t that a reason to address to underlying issues, versus continuing to exist in a faith-anestithizing environment where we just pretend it ain’t so? And while I am at it, since when is a Pope who talks like Universalism is an option and Being Good is good enough, a pope than evangelicals think sounds evangelical?! B. B. Warfield and Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange, please call you offices, stat!

In which case, it looks like Bryan doesn’t see, contrary to what his paradigms tell him, either what the state of affairs is in the contemporary church or who his allies are in the contemporary church. One thing I do know — it would be worth the price of admission (a cheap bottle of Irish whiskey?) to be around the Callers when they read Crux and National Catholic Reporter.

Where Do You Get Your Inspiration?

Published on by D. G. Hart3 Comments

I don’t think Dwight Longenecker meant to imply this, and maybe the pitch for contributions to his parish hampered his thinking, but when he suggests that the shortage of priests stems from bad liturgical architecture, I was hardly persuaded:

As I travel around the country and see archive photographs of our Catholic churches it is clear that it happened virtually everywhere. Marble altarpieces were ripped out, statues taken down and relegated to basements, votive candle racks removed, beautiful flooring covered with carpet, wall paintings white washed and tabernacles moved to the side….the list goes on and on, and when the liturgical experimentation was finished, the religious orders invaded by pop psychiatrists, the colleges and universities taken over by modernism and the sacred music transformed into mediocre folk and light rock groups the new Protestant revolution was complete.

I always try to be broad minded and fair, but when you see the brutal, cheap and ostentatious churches that were built the crime of erecting these warehouses with tacky Catholic stuff inside is only surmounted by the iconoclastic crimes perpetrated on the existing buildings and artwork.

I do not know the details of the Josephinum wreck-ovation, but if the place was in need of work was it impossible to restore the artwork, modernize the facilities and do so with taste, balance and a sense of continuity? It seems not, and this process was repeated time and again by naive and ignorant modernist ideologues.

What has been the result? Has the experimentation filled the seminaries, sparked a wave of new vocations to the religious life, filled the churches with new life and brought Catholicism alive for the modern age?

I think we all know the answer.

(Yet more evidence of change among Roman Catholics that Jason and the Callers need to consider when spouting their call. I know, I know. No doctrine has changed. Everything is fine. Woot!)

I read Fr. Longenecker’s post on the very day when I finished reading excerpts from Jim Elliot’s journal, a piece of writing that first drove me batty and then drew me in. He was, for those who did not grow up in the hot house of northern Dispensational Protestant fundamentalism, one of those five missionaries who was in early 1956 slain by natives in the jungle of Ecuador. His wife, Betty Elliot, was responsible for publishing his often TMI journals and he along with the other victims emerged as martyrs for the cause of evangelism.

Elliot lived his life like a spiritual moth hovering around the flame of the almighty God –one day on cloud nine from some insight to emerge from his Quiet Time, the next he was in the depths of despair for thinking less than spiritual or holy thoughts. Only later in the journal does he become human and talk about his love for Betty in ways too intimate for women and children, and also vindicate Paul’s instruction (1 Cor 7) about the distractions that come to ministers when they take on marriage and family. Even so, the journal comes across as remarkably genuine and given a reader’s awareness of the tragedy that is coming, it makes for downright compelling reading. I wasn’t prepared to be as moved by the book as I was.

And one thing Elliot’s book proves, is that Christians (Protestant or Roman Catholic) don’t need well appointed altars to be inspired for full-time Christian service. Here’s one sample (those adverse to experimental Calvinism be advised):

JANUARY 29 [1948] Genesis 35 Lord, I would recenter my spiritual life as Jacob does in this portion. Instead of Beth-el, he centers his experience on El Beth-el — not the house of God but the God of that house. Often I feel compassion for Thy Church, because it is visible and can be physically apprehended, but I would not have that be my concern any longer. Lord, I want to be centering my interest on Thee, the God of God’s house. Be then revealed to me that my desires might be fixed on the primary thing. Christ, the Son of sorrow (v. 18) has now become the Son of His right hand. Praise God, the Savior is exalted in heaven and there given His deserved place. “As in heaven, so in earth.” Even so, come, Lord Jesus! [18]

Surely, Fr. Longenecker, a graduate of Bob Jones University, knows better.