Category: Are the CTCers Paying Attention?

Jason and the Callers to the Rescue

Published on by D. G. Hart86 Comments

The Pertinacious Papist worries that devout conservative Roman Catholics cannot receive support from Pope Francis. He quotes from a recent John Allen piece on the pope:

… many on the Catholic right can’t help but suspect that the recent preponderance of conservatives who’ve found themselves under the gun isn’t an accident. Some perceive a through-the-looking-glass situation, in which upholding Catholic tradition is now perceived as a greater offense than rejecting it.

How to explain these disciplinary acts?

One possibility is that Francis genuinely wants to hobble the traditionalist constituency, and is using every chance to accomplish it. If so, then Francis doesn’t owe anyone an explanation, because his moves would be having precisely the intended effect.

Another, however, is that the pontiff’s motives aren’t ideological…. The speech Francis delivered at the end of the recent Synod of Bishops would seem to lean in the second direction, as he tried to signal sympathy for both the progressive and traditionalists camps….

If that’s the case, Francis might need to find an occasion to explain in his own voice why he’s going after the people and groups that find themselves in his sights. Otherwise, the risk is that a good chunk of the Church may conclude that if the pope sees them as the enemy, there’s no good reason they shouldn’t see him the same way.

But why worry about a particular pontiff when you have such air-tight ecclesiological theory? Why should reality get in the way?

Gizzards, Pigskins, and Carbs

Published on by D. G. Hart18 Comments

I am not sure why you might feel the need to turn Thanksgiving into another testimonial for Holy Mother Church. Can’t Protestants have anything to themselves? The converts say no.

Taylor Marshall claims:

The first American Thanksgiving was actually celebrated on September 8 (feast of the birth of the Blessed Virgin) in 1565 in St. Augustine, Florida. The Native Americans and Spanish settlers held a feast and the Holy Mass was offered. This was 56 years before the Puritan pilgrims of Massachusetts. Don Pedro Menendez came ashore amid the sounding of trumpets, artillery salutes and the firing of cannons to claim the land for King Philip II and Spain. The ship chaplain Fr. Francisco Lopez de Mendoza Grajales chanted the Te Deum and presented a crucifix that Menendez ceremoniously kissed. Then the 500 soldiers, 200 sailors and 100 families and artisans, along with the Timucuan Indians celebrated the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass in gratitude to God.

Christine Niles acknowledges Thanksgiving’s associations with English Protestants but also points out how marginal those Protestants were:

Queen Elizabeth had little patience for Catholics, but even less for Calvinists, who complained the Church of England remained too papist. In their desire to complete the Reformation and “purify” religion of popish trumperies, the Puritans broke from the Anglican Church, rejected the Book of Common Prayer, and preferred the anti-royalist Geneva Bible to the King James version. They instituted an independent congregationalist ideal that upheld the notion of the common priesthood of all believers, and thus granted an equal say among congregants in the election of the minister (some claim the roots of American democracy lie here). All of this naturally brought down on them the wrath of the Crown, and persecution commenced. A number of Puritans fled England and sought refuge in Holland, where they lived for a dozen years, before deciding to leave for the New World. After meeting another group of Puritans in Southampton, all boarded the Mayflower on September 16, 1620. Sixty-five days later, they sighted Cape Cod. The communal meal we know of as “Thanksgiving” took place in 1621 with about ninety Native Americans, and lasted three days.

And then Ray Cavanaugh argues that Squanto, a convert to Roman Catholicism, made the first Thanksgiving possible:

He bequeathed his possessions to his English friends, all of them Protestant Puritans who, despite their own need for religious freedom, were not especially tolerant of Catholicism. One wonders if these Puritans even knew of their benefactor’s Catholic conversion.

But the guy who wrote the book on the first Thanksgiving, Robert Tracy McKenzie, reminds readers that:

Overwhelmed by God’s gracious intervention, the Pilgrims immediately called for another providential holiday. “We thought it would be great ingratitude,” Winslow explained, if we should “content ourselves with private thanksgiving for that which by private prayer could not be obtained. And therefore another solemn day was set apart and appointed for that end; wherein we returned glory, honor, and praise, with all thankfulness, to our good God.” This occasion, likely held at the end of July, 1623, perfectly matches the Pilgrims’ definition of a thanksgiving holy day. It was a “solemn” observance, as Winslow noted, called to acknowledge a very specific, extraordinary blessing from the Lord. In sum, it was what the Pilgrims themselves would have viewed as their “First Thanksgiving” in America, and we have all but forgotten it.

As we celebrate Thanksgiving today, perhaps we might remember both of these occasions. The Pilgrims’ harvest celebration of 1621 is an important reminder to see God’s gracious hand in the bounty of nature. But the Pilgrims’ holiday of 1623—what they would have called “The First Thanksgiving”—more forthrightly challenges us to look for God’s ongoing, supernatural intervention in our lives.

None of these accounts can dissuade me from my ambivalence about this holiday at this point in this nation’s history. On the one hand, it is the best holiday of the year from the perspective of food, drink, and leisure. On the other hand, the covenant theology that informs a national day of thanksgiving (or fasting) does not fit the conviction that no nation occupies the status that Mosaic Israel did (not to mention fitting a society inhabited by Roman Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, and agnostics). Over at Front Porch Republic I develop this ambivalence.

Does Bryan Need to Talk to John and Francisco?

Published on by D. G. Hart31 Comments

The way the Callers discuss infallibility you’d almost think that apostasy for the visible Roman Catholic Church is impossible. If truth is what the infallible magisterium determines, if a system of truth does not stand over the magisterium to which they need to conform, if Christian truth depends on the determinations of popes and councils of bishops, how could the Roman church ever be wrong?

But another strain of conservative Roman Catholicism doesn’t construe the truth the way Bryan does. John Zmirak, in fact, sounded very different from Bryan, even to the point of echoing Luther:

These men who are fracking the Church to produce the current “earthquake of mercy” are hungry for recognition and legitimacy. They want to be seen as leaders — which is why they dash out in front of every crowd, wherever it’s headed. But legitimacy is precisely what the bishops and even the pope will sacrifice if the Synod ends up approving the radical proposals that are before it.

If the pope permits divorced couples who now live in extramarital relationships to receive Holy Communion without repenting and promising celibacy, he will be sanctioning one of two things: adultery or polygamy. Marriage is, by Christ’s command, indissoluble. That was taught infallibly by the Council of Trent. If the pope denies that doctrine, if he re-shapes one of the seven sacraments so radically, he will be proving something that the Orthodox have been saying since 1870: That he is not infallible on matters of faith and morals.

That might not sound like such an enormous sacrifice; the Church got along quite well without that doctrine right up until Vatican I. But by flouting the Council of Trent, and proving that Vatican I was in fact mistaken, the pope would be doing much more. He would be demonstrating that such Councils themselves lacked divine authority — that they were not like Nicaea or Chalcedon, the early Councils that built up Christian doctrine. Instead Councils such as the Lateran, Trent, and Vaticans I and II, would be merely local Western synods, exactly as the Orthodox have been insisting since 1054. In other words, the pope would be proving that Roman Catholic assertions of papal authority are grossly exaggerated, and that the Eastern Orthodox have the better claim as the heirs of the twelve apostles.

There’s an irony here, since the Orthodox have permitted the quasi-polygamous “Kasper option” for more than 1,000 years. But the Orthodox make no pretense of wielding infallible authority. They accept the early Councils of the Church (which took place well before 1054) and argue among themselves over how to apply them. They could be wrong.

And on marriage, the Orthodox are wrong. But Rome has no such wiggle room. The claims of the papacy are brave, expansive — and empirically falsifiable. If Rome adopts the Orthodox practice of marriage, that will falsify them. The mouse will have died in the maze.

If this happens, it would not prove that Luther or Calvin were right. Instead it would show that papal claims are false, that God has not left the Church with a central authority for the interpretation of doctrine, and that the Orthodox model is the only viable choice for sacramental Christians.

In point of fact, such an outcome would prove Luther and Calvin correct because they made Christ and his word, not the bishops of the church, the standard for proclamation and ministry. The Protestant outlook on biblical authority winds up being so commonsensical.

Francisco Jose Soler Gil piles on with a reminder that popes can be “calamitous”:

When can we say that a Pope is calamitous? Of course, it is not enough for it that the Pontiff support false opinions on this or that issue. Because a Pope, as any other man, will necessarily ignore many matters, and have erroneous convictions on many others. And therefore it could happen that a Pope who is an aficionado on stamp or coin collecting could make grave mistakes regarding the value or date or certain stamps or coins. When rendering his opinion on matters that are not of his competence, a Pope has greater possibilities of erring than of being right. Exactly like you and me, dear reader. Therefore, if a Pope showed some inclination on making public his opinions on the art of pigeon-breeding, ecology, economy, or astronomy, the Catholic expert on such matters would do well in enduring patiently the outlandish blurbs of the Roman pontiff on matters that, naturally, are alien to his Cathedra. The expert will naturally lament the eventual errors, and more generally the lack of prudence that some declarations make evident. But an imprudent and loquacious Pope is not for this reason alone a calamitous Pope.

On the other hand, [a Pope] is, or can thus be, when he, by word and deed, causes damages to the treasure of the faith of the Church, temporarily obscuring aspects of the image of God and of the image of Man that the Church has the duty to defend, transmit, and deepen.

But can there be such a case as this?… Well, in fact it has happened already several times in the history of the Church. When Pope Liberius (4th cent.) – the first non-canonized Pope – gave in to strong Arian pressures, he accepted an ambiguous position regarding this heresy, leaving in the lurch the defenders of the Trinitarian dogma, such as Saint Athanasius; when Pope Anastasius II (5th cent.) flirted with the defenders of the Acacian schism; when Pope John XXII (14th cent.) taught that the vision of the God by the just does not occur before the Last Judgment; when the Popes of the period known as “Great Western Schism” (14th-15th cent.) excommunicated each other; when Pope Leo X (16th cent.) not only intended to pay for his luxuries with the selling of indulgences, but also to theoretically defend his power to do so, etc, etc, a part of the treasure of the faith remained obscured for a more or less lengthy period due to their actions and omissions, therefore creating moments of huge internal tension within the Church. The Popes responsible for these must be properly called “calamitous”.

One thing that is striking about Gil’s advice is how much it sounds like Machen’s counsel to conservative Presbyterians during the 1930s:

(7) Do not follow the instructions of the Pope in that which deviates from the treasure of the Church.

If a Pope would teach doctrines or would try to impose practices that do not correspond to the perennial teaching of the Church, summarized in the catechism, he cannot be supported nor obeyed in his intent. This means, for example, that priests and bishops are under the obligation to insist on traditional doctrine and practice, rooted in the deposit of the faith, even at the cost of exposing themselves to being punished. The lay faithful must likewise insist on teaching traditional doctrine and practices in their area of influence. Under no circumstances, not even out of blind obedience or fear of reprisals, is it acceptable to contribute to the spreading of heterodoxy or heteropraxis.

(8) Do not financially support collaborationist dioceses.

If a Pope would teach doctrines, or would impose practices, that do not correspond to the perennial teaching of the Church, summarized in the catechism, diocesan Pastors should serve as a wall of contention. But history shows that bishops do not always react with sufficient energy when faced with these dangers. Even worse, they at times endorse, for whichever reasons, the efforts of the calamitous pontiff. The lay faithful who lives in a diocese ruled by such a Pastor must therefore remove his financial support to his local church while the inappropriate situation persists. Obviously, this does not apply to aids that are directly destined to charitable ends, but it does apply to all the rest. This also applies to any kind of collaboration with the diocese, whether it be for example some kind of volunteer work or institutional position.

Of course, Bryan could be right and John and Francisco wrong. But he sure seems to be outnumbered.

Methodists and Roman Catholics Together

Published on by D. G. Hart9 Comments

Looks like Jason and the Callers need to rethink their call to Protestants. Their pontiff just declared hostilities between Protestants and Roman Catholics to be sin:

Catholics and Evangelicals should not wait for theologians to reach agreement before praying and working together, Pope Francis recently told a group of Pentecostal Anglican bishops in Rome.

To continue to focus on differences between Christian denominations is “sinning against Christ’s will,” the pontiff said, because “our shared baptism is more important than our differences.”

In the light of Bryan Cross’ comment about the authority of the magisterium, I wonder if he needs to reformat his Call to Communion to conform to Francis’ understanding of Protestants:

The Church does not lose her authority when her claims don’t make sense to us, because otherwise there would no “seeking understanding” to “faith seeking understanding.” Rationalism would be true; the Church would have ‘authority’ only when we agree with what she teaches. Rather, when the Church, exercising her authentic teaching authority, teaches something that does not “make sense” to us, it is we who must trust and seek to grow in our understanding, not the Magisterium that in such cases must instead conform to our understanding.

Still, it sounds like Jerry Walls is making it easier for Methodists to break bread with the Bishop of Rome:

This Sunday (Nov. 2), on what is known as All Souls’ Day, Roman Catholics around the world will be praying for loved ones who have died and for all those who have passed from this life to the next. They will be joined by Jerry Walls.

“I got no problem praying for the dead,” Walls says without hesitation — which is unusual for a United Methodist who attends an Anglican church and teaches Christian philosophy at Houston Baptist University. . . .

Walls is a leading exponent of an effort to convince Protestants — and maybe a few Catholics — that purgatory is a teaching they can, and should, embrace. And he’s having a degree of success, even among some evangelicals, that hasn’t been seen in, well, centuries.

“I would often get negative reactions,” Walls said about his early efforts, starting more than a decade ago, to pitch purgatory to Protestants. “But when I started explaining it, it didn’t cause a lot of shock.”

Now if only Walls could be as generous about limited atonement.

The Protestant Dilemma Writ Catholic

Published on by D. G. Hart89 Comments

Devin Rose thinks he found all the dilemmas that haunt Protestants (and that led him to Rome). But has he along with Jason and the Callers really escaped the thicket of difficulties.

On the one hand, having a written basis for determining church teaching really comes in handy (as opposed to the slippery way that oral tradition or papal whim might operate. According to Gerhard Cardinal Mueller:

Not even an ecumenical council can change the doctrine of the Church, because her Founder, Jesus Christ, entrusted the faithful preservation of his teachings and doctrine to the apostles and their successors. The Gospel of Matthew says: “Go and teach all people everything that I commanded you” (cf. Mt 28:19–20), which is nothing if not a definition of the “deposit of the faith” (depositum fidei) that the Church has received and cannot change. Therefore the doctrine of the Church will never be the sum total of a few theories worked out by a handful of theologians, however ingenious they may be, but rather the profession of our faith in revelation, nothing more and nothing less than the Word of God entrusted to the heart—the interiority—and the lips—the proclamation—of his Church.

We have an elaborate, structured doctrine about marriage, all of it based on the words of Jesus himself, which must be presented in its entirety. We encounter it in the Gospels and in other places in the New Testament, especially in the words of Saint Paul in the First Letter to the Corinthians and in Romans.

On the other hand, the dilemma for all Christians is whether they will submit to religious authority. This includes Roman Catholics and Protestants:

The hallmark Protestant idea of priesthood of all believers allows the individual — whose relationship with God is unmediated — to determine his or her fitness to receive the sacrament. The Catholic Church, meanwhile, retains a few layers of priestly and catechetical scrutiny.

Last week at the synod, Cardinal Andre Vingt-Trois of Paris worried that couples “do not believe that the use of contraceptive methods is a sin and therefore they tend not to speak of them in confession and so they receive Communion untroubled.” Perhaps because married women might think it inappropriate to be questioned about contraception by a cadre of celibate men.

Either way, confessors tend not to press the issue, and no one pulls married couples out of the Communion line. Few believe a solid majority of Catholic women or their husbands will burn in hell for using artificial contraceptives.

In the case of cohabitating couples, there is little the Church can do. Marriage preparation classes acknowledge its sinfulness, but priests and bishops cannot afford to turn away half of what is already a declining number of couples seeking marriage in the Church. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops advises that priests can point couples toward a holier union by “supporting the couple’s plans for the future rather than chastising them for the past.”

Yet even for Catholics whose relationships put them in a perpetual state of mortal sin, individual conscience and church authority are often in fierce tension. In practice, LGBT Catholics often rely on their own consciences in determining whether they will go forward for Communion. In some locales, it is common enough for partnered gays and lesbians to receive Communion that it only makes news when they are turned away.

Meanwhile, Bryan Cross and company have yet to recognize a dilemma that cost a night’s sleep.

Modernism Watch

Published on by D. G. Hart114 Comments

The classic definition of Protestant modernism came from J. Gresham Machen in Christianity and Liberalism. He understood that modernism was an apologetic strategy — a way to save Christianity in the face of modern intellectual and social developments. That strategy involved explaining away certain doctrines as the mere husk of Christianity (deity of Christ, virgin birth, infallibility of Scripture) and properly locating the kernel of Christian teaching (the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, the vicinity of Boston). What modernists did and still do is historicize the faith. Christians believed truth X once upon a time but we now understand how X was the product of a historical moment. The modernist looks beneath the exterior of Christian belief, which is historically situated, and finds the universal truth to which it points.

The classic definition for Roman Catholic modernism came from Pius X (hence the Society of Saint Piux X) who in 1907 wrote:

These rebels profess and repeat, in subtle formulas, monstrous errors on the evolution of dogma, on the return to the pure Gospel—that is, as they say, a Gospel purified of theological explication, Council definitions, and the maxims of the moral life—and on the emancipation of the Church. This they do in their new fashion: they do not engage in revolt, lest they should be ejected, and yet they do not submit either, so that they do not have to abandon their convictions. In their calls for the Church to adapt to modern conditions, in everything they speak and write, preaching a charity without faith, they are very indulgent towards believers, but in reality they are opening up for everyone the path to eternal ruin.

And now traditionalist Roman Catholics fear that the Synod of Bishops who are discussing the nature of marriage, that these church authorities are dabbling in modernism. Even some on the left side of the Roman Catholic spectrum seem to agree (even if taking encouragement from such dabbling) though they prefer the phrase “development of doctrine” to modernism (who wouldn’t?):

Let’s look at this issue of developing doctrine and changing pastoral practice as it relates to the “homosexual agenda” which has +Burke so exercised. For years, for centuries, the Church shared the biases of the ambient culture. Homosexuality was the sin that dare not speak its name and gay people were ostracized and worse. There was little in the Church’s teaching on marriage and the family that was crafted with even a thought to the existence of LGBT people and no obvious congruence between that teaching and the lived experience of gay Catholics. But, what the Church neglected for all those years was a core, foundational doctrine: All human persons are made in the image and likeness of God. This doctrine is, I dare say, even more foundational than the Church’s teaching on marriage, indeed, the Church’s teaching on marriage and all ethical issues is built upon the imago dei, but nobody, until our lifetimes, thought to apply this doctrine to the pastoral care of gays and lesbians.

What changed? First, the experience of HIV/AIDS. In the same way that the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin demonstrated to all the suffering and horror of slavery to people who knew little about it, the AIDS epidemic called forth the most basic Christian, humane sensibility: compassion. . . .

There is an old joke that when the Church announces a change, the document always begins, “As the Church has always taught….” This is usually cited as a way to suggest that the Church is a bit cynical, even hypocritical. But, in fact, this is how change happens in the Church. “The Church has always taught” that all human beings are made in the image and likeness of God, we just forgot to apply that to gays and lesbians for a few centuries. The Church has always taught that Communion is the food of mercy, essential to the on-going conversion of all Christians, not just the divorced and remarried. No one is going to “change doctrine” at this synod, but the synod fathers are trying to retrieve lost insights, recalibrate the way our doctrines are applied in real pastoral praxis, discern new ways to proclaim the Gospel. The synod is evidence that the Church is alive and still attentive to the Holy Spirit, not only to the treatises on canon law. Those who are afraid of this synod – and of this pope – and the ones of little faith.

It’s hard to know how to argue against a view that says “we have always believed this even though it didn’t look like it.” But then arguing against experience as opposed to debating a proposition (yes, I’ve invoked the bogeyman of propositional truth, language speaker than I am) is like making a case against second-hand smoke. And yet, following experience instead of doctrine appears to be precisely what the cardinals are doing in Rome:

Unlike in the past, when bishops or theologians would deduce theology from general, sometimes idealized notions of God or humanity, the prelates at the Synod of Bishops on the family are using inductive reasoning to instead examine theology in the reality of families today, Canadian Archbishop Paul-André Durocher said.

“What’s happening within the synod is we’re seeing a more inductive way of reflecting, starting from the true situation of people and trying to figure out what’s going on here,” said Durocher, who leads the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops.

The prelates, the archbishop said, are “finding that the lived experience of people is also a theological source — what we call a theological source, a place of theological reflection.”

“I think we’re learning to use the Harvard case study method in reflecting theologically on the lives of people,” continued the archbishop, who also heads the archdiocese of Gatineau in Quebec.

“And we’re only, in a sense, starting to learn how to do this as church leaders,” he said. “And this is going to take time for us, to learn to do this and together to come — as we reflect on this — to find what is the way that God is showing.”

When the bishops do eventually figure out how to use the experience of people to construct theology, will Jason and the Callers follow suit? So far the answers from the Callers have been all out of a Pius X framework. They have yet to enter or accommodate the modern world that Vatican II embraced (not to mention missing all the lessons of twentieth-century Protestant history that produced separate communions like the OPC and the PCA).

On the Upside

Published on by D. G. Hart122 Comments

James White takes an I-told-you-so pose in the face of Jason Stellman’s post about how difficult life as a Roman Catholic convert has been. On the one hand, Jason seems to have no sense for how he comes across. First, he was surprised that his Chamber of Commerce posts on behalf of his new religious hometown would strike those in his old Protestant neighborhood as infuriating. Why not simply follow your conscience and shut up about it? Now he also provides his former co-religionists with an excuse for grandstanding. (Hey, wait a minute. Maybe Jason was playing the tempter. Pretty clever.)

On the other hand, White does not refuse the temptation but decides to gloat:

Rome never satisfies. It can’t. All the pomp and circumstance, all the liturgical fanfare, can never truly answer to the true needs of man. Since Rome has abandoned the gospel of grace and replaced it with a synergistic man-centered sacramentalism, she will never be able to offer to men anything but distractions, never true answers, to his real need. . . .

When it comes to Jason Stellman, I know one thing: I warned him, clearly, passionately, without question.

Actually, Mr. White, if you read Jason’s post, how can you say that Roman Catholicism doesn’t satisfy when Jason affirms explicitly that it does? And how can you, Mr. White, make it seem as if adversity for religious convictions is somehow a vindication of sola gratia? After all, didn’t our Lord say:

“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. (Matt 10:34-39)

But there is a silver lining here for Protestants who don’t spiritualize everything and turn a blind eye to human suffering. It is that Jason must have been a heck of a Presbyterian pastor:

. . . I am denied entrance into the church I planted (where my family still attends on Sundays) — I wasn’t even allowed to attend the Christmas Eve service last year and just sit and sing the hymns. To most of my old Calvinistic friends I am simply a traitor to the gospel.

That sounds pretty rough and Jason’s original cheerleading for Rome likely accounts for some of this roughness, though I am only speculating. But that sort of resolve on the part of Jason’s family and former congregation, as painful as it is for him, is likely a tribute to his ability to minister the word and cultivate in both his family and congregants a commitment to what the Bible teaches. Is it any consolation to Jason that he was seemingly a successful Protestant pastor?

Reasons for Conversion

Published on by D. G. Hart23 Comments

In the year 300, by some estimates, Christianity had roughly 6.3 million adherents, a little over ten percent of the Roman Empire’s population. By 350 those numbers shot up to 33.8 million and over 55 percent of the empire’s inhabitants. What might explain such a dramatic rise? The conversion of the emperor to Christianity undoubtedly was a factor. And throughout the early middle ages, one of the major strategies of evangelists or missionaries is to win the monarch as the way to saving the nation.

By the twentieth century, however, reasons for conversion take a dramatically different form. Monarchs are largely ornamental. Societies become secular and pluralistic. And so another set of reasons for considering Christianity emerges. In a review by Stratford Caldecott of a book on the string of English writers who converted to Roman Catholicism over the course of the twentieth century, the author observes how that momentum decreased after Vatican 2:

. . . through the reforms and changes associated with the Second Vatican Council, the Church “began to move way from the Italianate paradigm into which the converts had been received.” In many places, the Church appeared to be seeking an accommodation with modernity that undermined the appeal of conversion. “As Roman Catholics exploited ensuing new opportunities and began to enter the post-war middle class and to assume prestigious social and political positions, their previously homogeneous subculture fragmented. With it crumbled the assumption that being a Roman Catholic automatically made one distinct from, and opposed to, dominant British principles and structures.” Not only did the flood of conversions begin to dry up (from 12,490 per year at the end of the 1950s to about 4,000 per year by the 1970s), but writers such as G. K. Chesterton and even Dr. Dawson came soon to be regarded as marginal even among Catholics—representatives of a subculture that had had its day.

Peter Berger weighs in on the subject of evangelism, in this case Rome’s “New Evangelism” and adds that in a period when religion is less important to social life, the tendency of churches will be to appeal to converts as part of their rejection of secularism:

Highly secularized Western Europe, the Italy of Communione e Liberazione and the Bavaria that was the home of Pope Benedict, Poland under a regime of militant atheism, which Pope John Paul resisted and eventually helped demolish, and Latin America, the locale of John Paul’s address, a continent where the main challenge to the Catholic Church has not come from secularization but from the explosion of Evangelical Protestantism. Despite the big differences between the three cases, what they have in common is the loss of Catholic hegemony. Curiously, conservative Catholics and Evangelical Protestants in the United States have also mobilized against “secularism”, which, in the most religious Western country, is a numerically small sectarian movement seeking to use the federal courts to banish religion from the public sphere. And of course “secularism” is blamed by religious conservatives of all sorts for the post-1960s changes in sexual behavior of which they disapprove.

Also curiously, the Russian Orthodox Church has defined itself as the defender of traditional values against the alleged degeneracy of modern morals. Not only has the Moscow Patriarchate found an ally in this campaign in the Putin administration, but has sought better relations with the Vatican on the same basis. In 2009 Patriarch Kirill of Moscow established warm relations with Benedict XVI.

But Berger thinks that pitting faith against secularism is a false dichotomy and argues for a way to evangelize that is remarkably congenial with 2k because it springs from a recognition that people don’t spend all their days thinking like they do when the assemble on the Lord’s Day:

Pluralism affects the faith of individuals, the character of religious institutions, and the way in which the state relates to religion. Therefore, the theory must span the psychological, institutional and political dimensions of the pluralist phenomenon. The individual lives with a diversity of worldviews and values, between which he must choose. Faith is no longer a matter of fate, but of decisions that may be reversed. It follows that religious certainty is hard to come by. Faith is typically tinged with doubt.

I would say that this situation realizes more fully what “faith” actually is. Preachers frequently counter-pose faith and unbelief, further suggesting that the latter is a terrible sin for which God will punish us in hell. Leave aside that this (Calvinist) God is not one I would want to worship. More relevant for the present argument is that the aforementioned counter-position is misleading: The opposite of faith is not unbelief but knowledge. I know that the skyline of the city I see from my desk is Boston and that this is where I am right now. I don’t need faith to make this affirmation. I do need faith if I affirm that there is the city of God, beyond all the skylines of this world, and that this city is the eternal destination intended by God for his creatures. Christians in particular should not deplore the fact that the pluralist situation points them back to the proposition of the New Testament: “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1).

It follows that religious institutions, even if they don’t like this, become de facto voluntary associations. This creates anxiety, and a nostalgia for certainty. It also provides a market for fundamentalist movements (not all religious), who promise absolute certainty. An important factor in the pluralistic situation is the presence of a secular discourse, which necessarily dominates in a number of modern institutions (notably those based on science and technology, on the market economy, on bureaucracy). This is where secularization theory was not completely wrong; it just exaggerated the hegemony of the secular discourse.

Aside from explaining Jason and the Callers, Berger recognizes (or at least permits the recognition) that faith in Jesus Christ is one thing but not everything. Contrary to w-wists where everything is either for or against Christ (or the French Revolution), 2k understands that faith is one part of a person’s life. It is the most important and it has clear implications for some aspects of natural life (sex, marriage, procreation). But Christianity is not a totalizing with which to one-up Richard Dawkins or Rachel Maddow.

The Queue Is Long

Published on by D. G. Hart18 Comments

I have written several posts here about Jason and the Callers’ apparent ignorance of the regular Roman Catholic world (as opposed to their knowledge of Denzinger). I now understand that the trail of Protestant-turned-Roman-Catholic apologists is as long as the Phillies are behind the Nationals. For instance, Patrick Madrid has made a cottage industry in the publishing world of what Bryan Cross has done with the testimonies at Called To Communion.

But Mark Shea’s recent interview in America reveals how long, how American and how unremarkable to the papacy that line of convert-turned-apologist-and-blogger is:

Other people call me that, but I don’t think of myself as an apologist. Catholic apologetics in our culture is often addressed to Protestant evangelicals, where a lot of people from a Protestant background like Scott Hahn, Jimmy Akin and Steve Ray try to explain to our former friends why we became Catholics. There is a huge wave of American converts who owe a debt to people like Karl Keating who reached out to us in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Francis hasn’t indicated any particular interest in this trend, but neither did John Paul or Benedict. It’s a strongly American Catholic thing. But Catholic Answers has made an impact around the world, as young Catholic lay evangelists from around the world often email me to say they’ve been downloading our stuff and using it in a variety of ways.

As far as I know, no pope, including this one, has ever undertaken to address this particular apologetics subculture. There is no Letter to the Apologists from the pope. Nor do I expect there to be or feel the need for one. I don’t expect Francis to have a particular impact on the apologetics subculture, other than being a shepherd and teacher we take as a model, and I’m O.K. with that. But I think what Pope Francis has done, at least for people like me who try to defend the faith, is give us a new opportunity to defend the pope from Catholics who fear him—and that’s a weird experience for me! I never thought I’d find myself in the ironic position of having to defend the pope from fellow Catholics who loved John Paul and Benedict. Right now, much of the apologetics writing I do is to support Pope Francis when he teaches things the church has always said, but which for some reason we haven’t really grasped until now, and which strike dark fears into the hearts of Catholics who, well, really ought to know better.

What's Good for the Goose. . .

Published on by D. G. Hart6 Comments

If you’re tempted to think Protestantism is bankrupt (inspired by Dwight Longenecker):

1. Remember History – Every Catholic Protestant should read some church history. An excellent, readable summary is Eamon Duffy’s Saints and Sinners which is a history of the papacy. The history of the church reads like the Old Testament. In other words, it is full of saints and sinners, triumphs and tragedies, horror and holiness, weakness and wickedness, strength and sanctity. It’s all there, and that’s why it is authentic and human and divine and real. The church has always been afflicted with persecution from without and corruption from within. That’s because it’s made up of human beings like you and me who are a work in progress. Take a deep breath. It’s not much different now than it always has been. That’s why we had a Reformation.

2. Remember that Catholic means “Universal” – The Catholic Church Protestantism is not a sect. It is not a nationalistic church or an ethnic church. It is not dependent on a particular diocese that has ties to a particular empire. It is not a single minded, mono vision institution. It’s universal. It transcends time. It transcends particular cultures. It transcends particular cultural obsessions. It takes the big view and the wide perspective. This means it includes people who are not like you. They may disagree with you completely. They may be wrong….very wrong, and guess what? You might just be wrong about some stuff too. Get over it.

3. Remember that we’re family – Those people you disagree with? They’re family. You are convinced that the Bible and the magisterium confessions support your views. Guess what, they think the Bible and the magisterium confessions support their views. You think they’re wrong? They think you’re wrong. However, they’re still your brothers and sisters. Brothers and sister fight sometimes. That’s okay, in fact it’s healthy. The Church Protestantism is not some sort of religious Ozzie and Harriet where everything is hunky dory all the time. So you disagree and fight? Big deal. Just make sure you kiss and make up before you turn off the lights. Pray for unity — spiritual not institutional.

4. Don’t Forget the Church’s Teachings – Mother Church is there to teach us. Her teaching corrects us and directs us. The church’s teachings are the bedrock on which our views are founded are summaries of Scripture, the bedrock on which are views are founded. None of us should be Be careful about spouting our own opinions. We should simply put forward the Catholic Christian faith. However–we should also remember that the same teaching that we espouse is viewed from a different perspective by different Catholics Christians. Depending on their personality type, their education and their background they will emphasize different aspects of the church’s their communion’s teachings. They may stress family life, sexual morality and the anti abortion cause. You may stress peace and justice issues, radical discipleship and the preferential option for the poor. That’s okay. Learn to value the other perspective. That’s unfortunate. Learn to understand the spirituality of the church.

5. Allow People to Mess Up – Did a bishop or priest pastor or assembly make a call that displeases you? Take a deep breath. You don’t have to play Savonarola. Maybe he made a mistake and maybe you don’t know how complicated his decision making process was. It’s easy to be an armchair bishop, but if you’re not a priest or bishop you have not a clue how difficult the job is. You don’t have any idea the complexities of relationships, the real life dilemmas, the pastoral decisions and impossible situations that have to be dealt with. Instead of yelling about this priest’s apostasy or that bishop’s “inflexibility” this priest being “too rigid” or that bishop being too lax, why not cut them a break? These guys have a tough job. Why not back off and pray for them a bit more? But always be on the look out for liberalism. History shows that churches often say one thing and mean another.

6. Trust God – God’s in charge. Don’t you have faith? Why all the unhappiness about the church? Could it be that the unhappiness is in you and you’re projecting it outward and blaming others? Why not pray more and realize that God is still in charge. Don’t you see how he works in the world through our human weakness? Surely that’s the whole message of salvation history. God is working his purpose out not through everything being perfect all the time, but through our tragedies and travesties, through our failures and foibles, through our sin and sorrow. This is the beauty of the faith: that he turns the cross of Christ–the worst thing that could happen into the best thing that could happen. He’s doing the same thing with this messy institution we call the church Protestantism. In his mysterious divine providence he’s using the church to accomplish his way in the world. Things will be well. All things will be well. Trust God.

7. Remember John 3:16-17 – At heart the basic message is the only message: “God so love the world that he gave his only Son so that all who believe in him shall have everlasting life. God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved.” Everything else springs from that message, and if we get too caught up in all the other stuff–even if the cause is good and righteous and our views are true and beautiful and good the variety of churches and denominations, but we forget this main message, then everything else we say and do will be skewed, our faith will be off track and our message will be meaningless.

8. Pray More – I mean really pray. Pray that God will bless the means of grace and that pastors will be faithful to God’s word. Not only going through the actions and doing all the right devotions. I mean a heart rending, soul searching, mind bending, life changing, no holds barred, give it all you’ve got kind of prayer. Pray to know Jesus Christ and the power of his sufferings. Pray that you might be totally and utterly his. Pray that you might be made a saint before it is too late. Realize that your souls salvation and your walk with God and your love for Christ and your love for others is the one main thing. Remember that neither the gates of hell nor the acids of modernity will overcome God’s redemptive plan. Focus on that and you’ll find that all those other things you are so worried about fall into line. It’s not that they are not important, its just that they are not the most important.

9. Remember to Take a Deep Breath and Be Thankful – Do you really have to get so worked up about the problems you can do nothing about? Love God. Love your family. Love your friends. Repent of your sins. Worship God. Be happy for once. Yes the world’s in a terrible state. It always has been. Yes, we’re on the brink of disaster. The Titanic has always been about to sink. Yes, the church Protestantism is clattering along like an old jalopy. It has been so from the beginning. Yes, there are failures, disasters, traitors and cowards in the church. Are you sure you’re not one of them? If so, smile and be wrong. There is more grace is accepting that you are wrong than in insisting that you are right. Be thankful and do something beautiful, kind and good. Instead of complaining that the world is a terrible place try in your small way to make it a better place.

10. Be a You Are A Saint – The only great tragedy is not to be a saint. Read the lives of the saints and learn from them. Do not just read about them, but try to emulate them. Take a great risk of faith. Go on the adventure. Work with the poor, give sacrificially and live sacrificially. Life is short and time is wasting. Don’t waste too much of it being miserable and blaming others. Get with God and Go with God and be one of his joyful warriors. Be a saint and everything else will suddenly make sense. Even though [your] conscience accuse [you], that [you] have grossly transgressed all the commandments of God, and kept none of them, and [are] still inclined to all evil; notwithstanding, God, without any merit of [yours], but only of mere grace, grants and imputes to [you], the perfect satisfaction, righteousness and holiness of Christ; even so, as if [you] never had had, nor committed any sin: yea, as if [you] had fully accomplished all that obedience which Christ has accomplished for [you]; inasmuch as [you] embrace such benefit with a believing heart.

Makes me wonder if Father Longenecker would have left the Protestant fold if he had been so charitable with Protestant failings or understood the saving work of Christ.