Category: Are the CTCers Paying Attention?

Stories You Did Not See at Called to Communion

Published on by D. G. Hart68 Comments

John Allen keeps it real for Jason and the Callers with the top five under reported stories of 2013. Here are three of the five:

2. Scalfari and the perils of projection

So far, Pope Francis has had four extended sessions with the press, and while all have been fascinating, none was more of a blockbuster than the text published by veteran Italian journalist and nonbeliever Eugenio Scalfari on Oct. 1. Among other things, the choice by Francis to sit down with one of Italy’s most prominent secular intellectuals was seen as further confirmation of his commitment to outreach and dialogue.

Memorable lines from the Scalfari piece included the pope criticizing a “Vatican-centric” worldview, the assertion that some clergy suffer from “the leprosy of a royal court,” and the mother of all sound bites, “God is not a Catholic.” It also featured Francis describing a moment before he accepted the papacy when he thought about refusing and exited the Sistine Chapel to pray in a small room off the balcony overlooking St. Peter’s Square.

4. The church’s Italian problem

It’s possible that the influence and reputation of the Italian bishops reached a new low in 2013.

One sign came in national elections in February, when both the Vatican and the Italian church wrapped technocratic Prime Minister Mario Monti in a warm, loving embrace, yet Monti barely drew 10 percent of the vote and finished in an embarrassing fourth place. While Monti had political handicaps of his own, it’s striking how little difference the bishops’ support meant.

Here’s another: The headline of a recent national poll about which institutions Italians trust was that the church has gained 10 points since the election of Francis. However, that bump brought its trust level up to just 54.2 percent, meaning fully half of the country remains skeptical. (For the record, the church finished well behind Italy’s forces of order.)

Say “church” to most Italians and they think “bishops,” so in effect, the survey was a referendum on the hierarchy.

5. Allam and heartburn for ideologues

The highest-profile Catholic convert during the Benedict years was Magdi Cristiano Allam, an Egyptian-born politician and essayist who rose to fame in Italy as a fierce critic of radical Islam. Allam was personally received into the church by Benedict XVI during the 2008 Easter vigil Mass, but announced in late March that he considered his allegiance “expired” because of a “softer” line on Islam under Francis.

Allam published an essay adding four additional reasons for his defection: what he called the built-in “relativism” of Catholicism, its inherent tendency to “globalism” (instead of defending Western culture and values), its “do-gooder” streak, and its imposition of unrealistic teachings on sex and money.

Aside from the debatable fourth point, Allam was basically right on the first three.

Meanwhile, Pope Francis shows no reluctance to continue to make news:

“You should be real witnesses of a world doing and acting differently,” the pope told some 120 leaders of male religious orders during a closed-door Nov. 29 meeting at the Vatican, according a new account of the event released Friday by the Italian Jesuit magazine La Civilta Cattolica.

“But in life it is difficult for everything to be clear, precise, outlined neatly,” the pope continued. “Life is complicated; it consists of grace and sin.”

“He who does not sin is not human,” said the pope. “We all make mistakes and we need to recognize our weaknesses. A religious who recognizes himself as weak and a sinner does not negate the witness that he is called to give, rather he reinforces it, and this is good for everyone.”

The Limits of Logic and the Benefits of Geography

Published on by D. G. Hart60 Comments

Jason Stellman continues his brief for Roman Catholic superiority with the twist of posting at his own blog and, making his membership in Jason and the Callers complete, at at Called to Communion. Apparently, Bryan Cross and Sean Patrick will now edit comments on Jason’s posts so that Jason can do more televised interviews. The funny thing about this arrangement is that posting at CTC has not united Bryan’s logic with Jason’s style. In fact, if Jason’s first post is any indication, Bryan’s scholasticism has taken a back seat to Stellman’s intuition. But the oxymoronic ecumenical (call to communion) polemics (we’re better than Protestants) abide.

It turns out — surprise — that Roman Catholicism makes better sense of the incarnation than Protestantism. The simple logic is that since Christ assumed and maintains a physical body that could and can be seen, an ecclesiology that features visibility beats one that invokes invisibility. But the logic of Jason’s argument is almost as confusing as his understanding of geography.

If there is a connection between Christology and Ecclesiology (Umm, hellooo ? The Church is the Body of which Christ is the Head, so I’d label this connection as “uncontroversial”), then the idea that the eternal Son assumed human nature and took on a real, flesh-and-blood body just like ours, is more consistent in a visible-church paradigm than in an invisible-church paradigm. The physical body of Christ was visible; you could point him out in a crowd or identify him with a kiss as Judas did for the Roman soldiers.

The key word here is was. Jesus’ body is no longer on earth and cannot be seen. And by sending his Spirit to be with the church after he left planet earth, Jesus could very well have been teaching that the nature of the church, its bonds of fellowship and its worship, is going to be spiritual, not visible (like Old Testament devotion was with the altar, sacrifice and priests — sound familiar?). In fact, Jesus tells the woman at the well that the new pattern of worship emerging is one where place matters less than spirit and truth. And then Jason has the problem of being so insensitive to believers whose relatives have died and no longer have bodies. Are they visible? Are they excluded from the church because they don’t have bodies? Or is it the case that an ecclesiology that so features physicality is shallow compared to one that recognizes a fellowship among those saints who are both seen and unseen. (Hint: if God the Father is spirit and cannot be seen, fellowship with the unseen is important. Duh!)

Not to be tripped up by such theological or logical subtleties, Jason stumbles on to give two big thumbs up to the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist.

Is Christ present at the Table or not? Like with the question “Is the church visible or not,” the answer here is, “It depends.” If the worshiper is a worthy receiver, then yes, he indeed feeds spiritually and truly upon the body and blood of Christ. But if the worshiper is unworthy and faithless, then what he is eating and drinking is not Christ’s body and blood, but simply ordinary bread and wine. This also smacks of Docetism, as if Jesus of Nazareth could have been truly present with Zaccheus, partially present with Nicodemus, and completely absent with Judas, even though they were all standing right in front of him in the flesh.

First, Jason gets the Protestant position wrong. The unworthy receiver eats and drinks judgment. The last time I had ordinary bread and wine, I was not sinning overtly or deserving judgment. But that inaccuracy notwithstanding, second, the idea that Christ is present in the Lord’s Supper to everyone equally, just like he was to the people with whom Christ lived, walked and talked, commits some sort of Christological error — can’t remember which one — because the nature of a body is being limited in time and space, and if Jesus is not here then he can’t be here in the same way that he was here to Zaccheus. And since Jason doesn’t mention the Spirit, the person of the Trinity that helps Protestants understand Christ’s real presence in an omnipresent way, his bad logic suffers again from poor theology.

Jason’s last point exhibits a Romophilia that makes chopped liver out of the churches of Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, and Constantinople.

Moreover, the Catholic paradigm makes much better sense of the Incarnation by its gospel demonstrating the need for the ongoing and continual humanity of Christ. If salvation consists largely (almost exclusively to hear some Protestants tell it) in the forensic imputation of the active and passive obedience of Christ by which the sinner is legally justified in the divine court, then the need for Jesus’ humanity can be said to have expired after the ascension. But if, as the Catholic Church maintains (echoing the fathers), salvation consists primarily in the deifying participation of humanity in the divine nature, which happens by means of Christ’s glorified humanity and risen flesh, then what happened at the Incarnation was a much bigger deal than some Protestants realize.

The deifying participation of humanity in the divine nature is what the Eastern Churches call theosis. In fact, Jason’s entire post may vindicate his personal decision to leave Presbyterianism but his boosterism apparently blinded him to the substantial difficulties he raised for his own ecclesiology from Eastern Orthodox challenges. After all, Jesus never made it to Rome to found a church — if we take the physicality of the incarnation seriously. He did though found a church in Jerusalem. If Jason wanted to talk about the Jerusalem Catholic Church he might have a point. But since he wants to root, root, root for his new home church, he needs help from Bryan to make his argument coherent.

Meanwhile, Jason may want to pay more attention to what’s going on in his visible church than tilting at Protestant windmills:

I think it is obvious that Wuerl belongs to the more traditional, pilgrim model and always has. In the 1970s and early 1980s, the prophet model was invoked mostly by liberal theologians to justify their positions. In the 1990s and first decade of the 21st century, it was conservatives who claimed the prophetic mantle for themselves. Both groups forgot that in the Hebrew Scriptures, the prophets were reluctant to accept the mantle. Both groups forgot that the dominant Catholic mode of leadership has almost always been the pilgrim model, and when the prophet model dominated, ruin came: Savonarola, Saint- Cloud, Pio Nono. The Church is not at Her best when Her leaders are busy hurling epithets or indulging what Pope Francis has called a “self-absorbed promethean neopelagianism.” Wuerl strikes me as one of those bishops who does not over-inflate his own significance. Yes, he takes his job seriously and expects his collaborators to do so as well. But, like Pope Francis, he leaves room for the Spirit to do its work. Let us have more bishops like this in the coming year. The first test will, of course, be Chicago. No need for extensive previstas from the nuncio on this nomination as all of the candidates will be well known. The rumors of any particular names have dried up, which usually means those who are being consulted are shifting from speculation to decision. I have no idea who it will be but I will venture one prediction: Some jaws will drop. . . .

The divisions within the Church are not going away, but they are likely to change in the coming year. I predicted early on that you would begin to see cleavage within the Catholic Left between those who are thrilled by the Holy Father’s focus on the poor, and for whom that focus is enough, and those who argue for changes where no change is likely to be forthcoming, the ordination of women, same-sex marriage, etc. And, on the Catholic Right, you will see a similar cleavage between those who will allow themselves to be challenged by Pope Francis and those who will shift towards a rejectionist position, either completely gutting the pope’s words of their obvious meaning and import as Morlino did in the article mentioned above or, for the more extreme members, moving towards schismatic groups. The Left, when it gets disaffected, just walks away. The Right causes trouble. In 2014, many bishops will face the prospect of clear, unambiguous dissent on the Right and it will be curious to see how they respond.

Synod of Bishops?

Published on by D. G. Hart20 Comments

Roman Catholic websites keep talking about the upcoming Synod of Bishops, a body about which I had not heard much (after all, Jason and the Callers never point to this Synod as a slam dunk of Roman Catholicism’s superiority). So I wonder what kind of standing it has in the church and how much lay Roman Catholics actually know about it. It appears to be a kind of board of trustees that has an advisory role with the pope — one of the institutional manifestations of a collegial ecclesiology if Wikipedia is to be believed. But it is clearly a body in subjection to the Bishop of Rome:

It is for the Pope to

convoke the Synod of the Bishops

ratify the election of participants in the assembly

determine the topic of discussion, if possible at least six months before the assembly

distribute the material for discussion to those who should participate

to set the agenda

to preside either personally or through delegates over the assembly.

In addition, the Pope may appoint further participants in any assembly of the Synod of Bishops, in number up to 15% of those who participate either ex officio (the heads of Eastern Catholic Churches and the cardinals at the helm of departments of the Roman Curia) or because elected by episcopal conferences or the Union of Superiors General.

The Synod appears to have met formally 13 times since its institution in 1967, with a period during the 1990s when it convened in a “special” capacity. (The upcoming Synod will be the 14th meeting.)

After the 13th Synod in 2012, Pope Benedict issued an apostolic exhortation devoted to the theology of the Word of God (Verbum Domini). One paragraph caught my eye:

The Synod Fathers greatly stressed the importance of promoting a suitable knowledge of the Bible among those engaged in the area of culture, also in secularized contexts and among non-believers. Sacred Scripture contains anthropological and philosophical values that have had a positive influence on humanity as a whole. A sense of the Bible as a great code for cultures needs to be fully recovered.

Since the Telegraph recently ran a story about upcoming Hollywood productions on biblical narratives, I wonder if the Synod of Bishops deserves much more attention and credit than it has received:

Phil Cooke, a film-maker and media consultant to Christian organisations, said Hollywood’s epiphany had financial, not spiritual, origins. “What’s happened is they’ve understood it’s very good business to take Christians seriously, and this is a real serious market,” he said.

“For years Hollywood bent over backwards to reach special interest groups, be it feminists or environmentalists. It has finally realised that there are 91  million evangelical Christians in America.”
For their part, studio executives have taken something of a leap of faith that films in which religious figures save the world will bring big box office receipts.

That faith is based in no small part on the success of The Bible, a television mini-series shown on the History channel earlier this year, which averaged 11.4 million viewers and became America’s most watched cable show of 2013.

“It made the Bible cool to talk about again,” said Mr Cooke. “The separation of church and state in America is so strong that people had become afraid to talk about God, at work or at school. Suddenly, these Bible stories were water cooler conversation again.”

I’m still waiting for HBO to do a series on David. Talk about political intrigue, sexual scandal, and family foibles. It could rival The Sopranos.

Liberalism Rampant

Published on by D. G. Hart514 Comments

While the man in the hat (not the funny one the pope wears), Bryan Cross, and I debate the extent and significance of liberalism within the Roman Catholic Church, the pile of links that warrant a perception that Rome is far from conservative — so why would a conservative Protestant go there, mainline Protestant may be another matter — mounts.

First, a word from the archbishop of Denver, Samuel Aquila, on how good the good news is (beware, this may be Nadia Bolz-Weber territory):

To Christians, I encourage you to remember, as Pope Francis reminded us in the aforementioned interview, that “Christmas is joy, religious joy, God’s joy, an inner joy of light and peace.” We must be witnesses of such joy, and we must contemplate the great mystery of God, who came to dwell among us.

“With Christ,” he writes in “Evangelii Gaudium” (The Joy of the Gospel), “joy is constantly born anew.”

The Pope used the word joy in his letter more than 50 times, underlining the absolute centrality of joy in the life of a Christian. He invites Christians to “a renewed personal encounter with Jesus to Christ.” He urges us to listen intently to God’s voice in our hearts, and to experience the “quiet joy of his love.”

To non-Christians, I urge you to take another look at Christmas. Look at it again with fresh eyes. Look at what we celebrate: let the eyes of your souls go past the presents, the trees, the fat Santa and red-nosed Rudolph, and stop at the center of the manger. Listen to the everlasting message of love and peace, and you will know what Christmas is all about, the God who loves you eternally even if you do not wish to receive that love. It’s a message that benefits us all.

Then a couple of responses to Francis’ apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, that suggest conservative Presbyterians have room for concern. First an SSPXer’s letter to Pope Francis:

Evangelization thus takes on a salvific importance – it has a supernatural end, and this has always been understood by Catholics throughout the ages. The purpose of evangelization is primarily to save souls.

However, in Evangelii Gaudium, the impetus for Christian evangelization of other cultures for the purpose of eternal salvation is explained in terms of a “dialogue”, and the supernatural end (eternal life in heaven with God) seems replaced by a natural one. You write, “Interreligious dialogue is a necessary condition for peace in the world, and so it is a duty for Christian” (EG, 250). The obligation for Christians to evangelize is “peace in the world”, not the salvation of souls. This seems to substitute a worldly, naturalistic cause for evangelization for the more traditional supernatural one. Indeed, the two greatest issues Catholic evangelization has to respond to are said to be inclusion of the poor and world peace. (cf. 186, 217) It seems Your Holiness is suggesting that it is purely worldly concerns that the Gospel is here to address, not the salvation of men’s souls or the false religions that keep them from that salvation.

Then a brief retort from Peter Leithart, possibly a little payback to Stellman:

In the midst of many wonderful things in Francis I’s exhortation, there are some missteps. One of these comes towards the end in his pastoral advice concerning Islam. I don’t object to his exhortations to Christians to treat Muslims with dignity and love. He’s undoubtedly right that “Many [Muslims] also have a deep conviction that their life, in its entirety, is from God and for God. They also acknowledge the need to respond to God with an ethical commitment and with mercy towards those most in need.” Whether their lives are in fact for God, I have no doubt of their conviction that this is the case.

But the basis for his exhortation is mistaken, and seriously so.

Quoting Vatican II’s Lumen Gentium, he says that “we must never forget that they ‘profess to hold the faith of Abraham, and together with us they adore the one, merciful God, who will judge humanity on the last day.’” He adds, “The sacred writings of Islam have retained some Christian teachings; Jesus and Mary receive profound veneration and it is admirable to see how Muslims both young and old, men and women, make time for daily prayer and faithfully take part in religious services.”

On both counts, Francis’s statements are at odds with the New Testament.

Next, in an ironic twist, while the Jesuits who edit America have found the era of Pope Francis to be one where — how convenient! — the labels of conservative and liberal no longer apply, the Roman Catholics who oversee the Catholic Theological Society of America received a report about the need to make room for conservatives within the organization and at its annual and regional meetings.

First America on America (thanks to our charismatic correspondent):

Third, America understands the church as the body of Christ, not as the body politic. Liberal, conservative, moderate are words that describe factions in a polis, not members of a communion. It stands to reason, moreover, that America’s fundamental commitment precludes certain self-conceptions. Since the word of God is incoherent when it is separated from the church and its living teaching office, America could never envision itself as “the Loyal Opposition.” Nor do we understand the phrase “people of God” as a theological justification for setting one part of the body of Christ against another. The people of God are not a proletariat engaged in some perpetual conflict with a clerical bourgeoisie. It is obvious to us, moreover, that a preoccupation with episcopal action, whether it bears an ultramontane or a Marxist character, is nevertheless a form of clericalism. None of this is to say that America cannot bring a critical eye to ecclesiastical events; this is, in fact, our very purpose.

. . . Fifth, America’s fundamental commitment means that we view ideology as largely inimical to Christian discipleship. Revelation is humanity’s true story. Ideologies, which are alternative metanarratives, invariably involve an “other,” a conceptual scapegoat, some oppressor who must be overthrown by the oppressed. Only the Gospel’s radical call to peace and reconciliation justifies a radical politics. Catholic social teaching is not the Republican Party plus economic justice, nor is it the Democratic Party minus abortion rights. Yet neither is it some amalgamation of the two. Catholic social teaching is far more radical than our secular politics precisely because it is inspired by the Gospel, which is itself a radical call to discipleship, one that is subversive of every creaturely notion of power. There is more to Christian political witness than the tired, quadrennial debate about which presidential candidate represents the lesser of two evils.

Sixth, our fundamental commitment means that we are not beholden to any political party or any special interest. “America will aim,” wrote Father Wynne, “at becoming a representative exponent of Catholic thought and activity without bias or plea for special interest.” Admittedly, we do harbor one bias: a preferential option for the poor and vulnerable. “The poor,” however, “are not ‘special parties’ and they usually have no ‘special parties’ to speak for them,” wrote Father Davis in 1959. America believes that the work of social justice is a constitutive element of Christian discipleship. We also share with the Society of Jesus the conviction that “the faith that does justice is, inseparably, the faith that engages other traditions in dialogue, and the faith that evangelizes culture.”

Then the place of conservative theologians in CTSA:

A.Many CTSA sessions, both plenary and concurrent, include jokes and snide remarks about, or disrespectful references to, bishops, the Vatican, the magisterium, etc. These predictably elicit derisive laughter from a part of the audience.

B.Many CTSA members employ demeaning references. For example, the phrase“thinking Catholics” is sometimes used to mean liberals. The phrase “people whowould take us backwards” is sometimes used to mean conservatives.

C.Resolutions are a significant problem because an individual member can bring to the floor of the business meeting a divisive issue that not only consumes important time and energy but exacerbates the ideological differences that exist among theologians, typically leaving conservatives feeling not only marginalized but unwelcome. (CTSA members who have trouble understanding this as a problem might ask how they would feel if they were part of a professional society that passed resolutions criticizing a theologian they hold in high regard or endorsing views they reject.)

D.In recent decades, conservative theologians have only rarely been invited to be plenary speakers and respondents.

E.In CTSA elections, there is a general unwillingness of many members to vote for a conservative theologian. Scholarly credentials seem often outweighed by voters’partisan commitments.

F.Some conservative theologians have experienced the feeling that a number of other members “wish I wouldn’t come back” to the CTSA.

G.In sum, the self-conception of many members that the CTSA is open to all Catholic theologians is faulty and self-deceptive. As one of our members put it,the CTSA is a group of liberal theologians and “this permeates virtually everything.” Because the CTSA does not aspire to be a partisan group, both attitudes and practices will have to shift if the CTSA is to become the place where all perspectives within Catholic theology in North America are welcome.

And if outsiders believed the problem was only with academics and clergy exposed to higher criticism and inclusive theology, poll numbers on the church in the U.S. reveal matters that might keep Jason and the Callers away from claims of superiority:

American Catholics support same-sex marriage 60 – 31 percent, compared to the 56 – 36 percent support among all U.S. adults.

More devout Catholics, who attend religious services about once a week, support same- sex marriage 53 – 40 percent, while less observant Catholics support it 65 – 26 percent.

Catholic women support same-sex marriage 72 – 22 percent, while Catholic men support it 49 – 40 percent. Support ranges from 46 – 37 percent among Catholics over 65 years old to 64 – 27 percent among Catholics 18 to 49 years old.

Catholics like their new Pope: 36 percent have a “very favorable” opinion of him and 53 percent have a “favorable” opinion, with 4 percent “unfavorable.”

“American Catholics liked what they heard when Pope Francis said the Church should stop talking so much about issues like gay marriage, abortion and contraception,” said Maurice Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.

“Maybe they were just waiting for a Jesuit. Overwhelmingly, across the demographic board, Catholics – men and women, regular or not-so-regular church-goers, young and old – have a favorable opinion of Pope Francis.”

American Catholics support 60 – 30 percent the ordination of women priests. Those who attend religious services about once a week support women priests 52 – 38 percent, compared to 66 – 25 percent among those who attend services less frequently.

There is almost no gender gap.

Support for women priests grows with age, from 57 – 32 percent among Catholics 18 to 49 years old to 68 – 28 percent among those over 65 years old.

Catholic opinion on abortion is similar of the opinions of all American adults:
16 percent of Catholics say abortion should be legal in all cases, compared to 19 percent of all Americans;
36 percent of Catholics say abortion should be legal in most cases, compared to 34 percent of all Americans;
21 percent of Catholics say abortion should be illegal in most cases, compared to 23 percent of all Americans;
21 percent of Catholics say abortion should be illegal in all cases, compared to 16 percent of all Americans.

Finally, to round this out, some priests (even former Protestant ones) believe the church needs to recover the language of hell in its evangelistic efforts:

The most insidious cancer in the Christian church today is universalism and semi-universalism combined with indifferentism. Indifferentism is the lie that it doesn’t really matter what church or religion you belong to. Universalism is the lie that everyone will be saved because God is so merciful he will not send anyone to hell. Semi-universalism is the commonly held lie that there may be a hell, but there probably won’t be very many people there. All of these beliefs are clearly contrary to the plain words of Scripture.

Ralph writes clearly and concisely with abundant quotes from Scripture and the documents of the Church. He tells us what the New Evangelization is, answers the question “Why Bother?”, discusses the laity’s role, the necessity of the Holy Spirit’s power. He then goes on to outline the simple message of salvation: human beings are sinners separated from God from sin and they need salvation or they will go to hell.

Sorry folks. That’s the message, and the message is clear from Scripture and the unanimous teachings of the church from antiquity to the present day. Ralph goes on to advise how to share this message with joy and compassion–avoiding the “bull in a china shop” approach and avoiding any sense of being judgmental and un loving. There is no room for the Westboro Baptist approach, but plenty of room for a joyful, honest and firm proclamation of the faith.

Yikes!

When You Have 'Splainin' To Do and Don't Know It

Published on by D. G. Hart30 Comments

The Big Kahuna is not necessarily the movie to see on Christmas Day. The options for the Harts are to re-watch Family Man (which is a very clever retread of It’s A Wonderful Life set in contemporary New Joisey) or Metropolitan, both with Christmas themes. (Unfortunately, the copies that we own of each are in VHS, which means having to find the old video cassette player — chore one — and then reckon with the existing shelves and wires — chore two on steroids.) If neither of these is available for free at Amazon Prime, we may trot out My Architect, a wonderful documentary about the Philadelphia architect, Louis Kahn, made by his illegitimate son, Nathaniel. What does My Architect have to do with Christmas? Not much, except that at holidays we turn nostalgic and Philadelphia’s presence in the movie reminds the Harts of our life there. (At the risk of going stream of consciousness, a recent viewing of Stories We Tell, by Sarah Polley, another poignant documentary about fathers and mother, reminded the Harts of My Architect and put us in the mood.)

Speaking of nostalgia during the holiday season, an outing to Ann Arbor yesterday allowed us to see a double-feature (for the price of two admissions, mind you) of Nebraska and Saving Mr. Banks. Nebraska has its charms, as do most of Alexander Payne‘s movies (among them Sideways, About Schmidt, and Descendants). But Saving Mr. Banks stole the show. I for one cannot get enough of Emma Thompson. But the portrayal of a proper Londoner (via Australia) having to reckon with Hollywood was priceless. It was in several respects the flipside of My Week with Marilyn, a movie about Marilyn Monroe’s starring in a Sir Laurence Olivier production, filmed at Pinewood Studios, The Prince and the Showgirl. (Seeing Kenneth Branagh play Olivier is wonderful.) Watching the clash between English formality and American casualness in both these movies is priceless.

This is a long-winded way of making available to Oldlifers — and especially Roman Catholic critics of Oldlife errors — a clip from The Big Kahuna that is arguably the best scene from a movie that gets evangelicalism right and portrays it surprisingly sympathetically. (For those pressed for time, the really poignant lines come around minute 2:50 and run for a minute or so.) And what the movie gets right is a born-again innocence that exalts in its own righteousness without noticing the log protruding from an outlook that overlooks the fundamental tension of the Christian life — being both saint-and-sinner. The scene also exposes the sort of self-righteousness that we often see in Protestants who convert to Roman Catholicism — an exaltation of the “true” church while ignoring all the warts that make Rome less than appealing and the claims of converts less than believable. Modesty is incumbent on all Christians. But for those with a church whose past is as tainted as Rome’s is (give Protestants time, we only have 500 years experience), such modesty is not simply becoming but necessary. The way Phil looks at Bob in this clip is the way I often feel when reading Jason and the Callers.

What does any of this have to do with Christmas? Nothing, really. No problem, though, it’s a secular holiday and I am grateful for the time off to watch movies.

If I Were Bishop

Published on by D. G. Hart10 Comments

Bill Evans has some thoughts he thinks appropriate for the Advent Season:

From what antecedents does POEC [Paleo-orthodox ecclesial Calvinism] draw? POEC finds much to appreciate in the seminal work of John Calvin, but it is a critical and contextual reading of Calvin. This is no simplistic effort to pit “Calvin against the later Calvinists” (as some have recently alleged). Rather, it recognizes that the Reformed tradition has always been diverse and that realism in the trajectory of Calvin has always had its exponents. We also find much to ponder in critical appropriations (as opposed to mere parroting or repristinating) of Jonathan Edwards in the eighteenth century, John W. Nevin of Mercersburg, James Henley Thornwell and John B. Adger of Columbia, and W. G. T. Shedd in the nineteenth, and Geerhardus Vos, Thomas F. Torrance of Scotland, and Richard B. Gaffin, Jr. in the twentieth.

Since none of the figures mentioned, with the exception possibly of Torrance, would have countenanced Advent (not sure where Gaffin stands), Evans’ construction of a Protestant tradition looks fairly arbitrary.

Of course, Evans is not alone in this. Peter Leithart is similarly episcopal in his theological creativity. Meanwhile, Jason and the Callers concoct a Roman Catholic tradition that defies what their own bishops tolerate or enforce.

The fix for Christians who want to be ecclesial is not to abstract ecclesial Christianity (whether Roman Catholic or Protestant) from an actual church. It is, instead, to identify with the communion to which you belong. If you want your own communion to be more ecclesial, seek its ecclesial health on its own terms. (Serve as an officer, shovel the sidewalks, prepare traybakes for pot luck suppers, call attention to your communion’s own ecclesiology.)

For Calvinists, this should also include remembering basic Reformed Protestant objections to church calendars:

The Time Necessary for Worship. Although religion is not bound to time, yet it cannot be cultivated and exercised without a proper distribution and arrangement of time. Every Church, therefore, chooses for itself a certain time for public prayers, and for the preaching of the Gospel, and for the celebration of the sacraments; and no one is permitted to overthrow this appointment of the Church at his own pleasure. For unless some due time and leisure is given for the outward exercise of religion, without doubt men would be drawn away from it by their own affairs.

The Lord’s Day. Hence we see that in the ancient churches there were not only certain set hours in the week appointed for meetings, but that also the Lord’s Day itself, ever since the apostles’ time, was set aside for them and for a holy rest, a practice now rightly preserved by our Churches for the sake of worship and love.

Superstition. In this connection we do not yield to the Jewish observance and to superstitions. For we do not believe that one day is any holier than another, or think that rest in itself is acceptable to God. Moreover, we celebrate the Lord’s Day and not the Sabbath as a free observance.

The Festivals of Christ and the Saints. Moreover, if in Christian liberty the churches religiously celebrate the memory of the Lord’s nativity, circumcision, passion, resurrection, and of his ascension into heaven, and the sending of the Holy Spirit upon his disciples, we approve of it highly. But we do not approve of feasts instituted for men and for saints. Holy days have to do with the first Table of the Law and belong to God alone. Finally, holy days which have been instituted for the saints and which we have abolished, have much that is absurd and useless, and are not to be tolerated. In the meantime, we confess that the remembrance of saints, at a suitable time and place, is to be profitably commended to the people in sermons, and the holy examples of the saints set forth to be imitated by all. (Second Helvetic Confession, 24)

Seasons farewells.

More Two Kingdom Vibes from the Vatican

Published on by D. G. Hart6 Comments

John Allen shows why the papal office involves a lot more than the spirituality of the church. That’s why the magisterium needs help from lay folks whose proficiency depends more on temporal than eternal goods:

Whenever we get around to cataloging the principal ironies of the Pope Francis era, right at the top of the list will have to be this: The pontiff who famously longs for a “poor church for the poor” and who rails against “trickle-down” economics is also the pope who’s created a boom market for “God’s consultants.”

Before the Francis reform is finished, there might not be a systems analyst, management expert or financial guru left on earth who doesn’t have a contract in Rome. This pope may have his issues with capitalism, but these days, he can’t even walk across Vatican grounds without bumping into a whole regiment of its foot soldiers.

In brief, three points are especially striking about this rise of God’s consultants:

They represent a clear break with the Vatican’s traditional ambivalence about relying on secular expertise, on the grounds that secular values are inevitably part of the package.

They also represent a clear step towards the “de-Italianization” of the Vatican, rupturing its traditional reliance on Italian financiers for its business advice.

Then again, Pope Francis may be thinking that lay consultants have what clerics need:

In what amounts to his first “State of the Union” speech, Pope Francis warned Dec. 21 that without a spirit of service the Vatican risks becoming no more than a “heavy bureaucratic customs house,” and insisted that its personnel shouldn’t constantly be “inspecting and questioning.”

The pope did not roll out a specific reform plan, but laid out the basic values he believes curial personnel must have: professionalism and a dedication to service.

Francis also issued another strong call to resist gossip, calling on curia personnel to become “conscientious objectors” to the “unwritten law” of the Vatican, which is a temptation to gossip that’s “harmful to people, our work and our surroundings.”

Francis made the comments in the pope’s annual year-end speech to the Roman Curia. The first such speech of a papacy often offers a broad vision of where the new pope wants the Vatican, and, by extension, the broader church, to move. . . .

The heart of the speech was the call for professionalism and service.

“When professionalism is lacking, there is a slow drift downwards towards mediocrity,” the pope said.

“Dossiers become full of trite and lifeless information, and incapable of opening up lofty perspectives. Then too, when the attitude is no longer one of service to the particular churches and their bishops, the structure of the Curia turns into a ponderous, bureaucratic customs house, constantly inspecting and questioning, hindering the working of the Holy Spirit and the growth of God’s people.”

It’s only a century removed, but the Rotarians when they began were all about service and professionalism.

Called to Communion with a Twist

Published on by D. G. Hart297 Comments

It is almost twenty years old, but this article gives another reason why Jason and the Callers may have bitten off more than that for which they bargained. This piece (thanks to one evangelical convert to Rome who notices aspects of church life that JATC don’t) places contemporary Roman Catholic biblical scholarship in historical perspective and shows the triumph of Protestant approaches to Scripture for the folks with whom JATC now commune:

A half-century ago, during the darkest days of World War II, on the feast of St. Jerome (Sept. 30, 1943), Pope Pius XII issued his encyclical on “The Most Opportune Way to Promote Biblical Studies,” Divino Afflante Spiritu (literally, “Inspired by the Divine Spirit”), in commemoration of the encyclical Pope Leo XIII had issued on Nov. 18, 1893, Providentissimus Deus (“The God of All Providence”), which itself represented a cautious opening to historical criticism of the Bible. Pius’s encyclical, often called the Magna Carta of Catholic biblical scholarship, offered the first official rays of light after the long, dark winter of anti-modernism.

Modern biblical studies emerged in the late-17th and 18th centuries as the old order crumbled amid religious wars and divisions of the period. Enlightened reason was seen as a liberation from the biblical dogmas that fostered hatred and division. The rise of natural science in the 19th centu­ry further undermined the biblical view of the world, and the discovery of biblical manuscripts and records of other ancient civilizations chal­lenged traditional notions of biblical inspiration and revelation.

Protestant theology, especially in Germany in 19th century, is a his­tory of response to the challenge of Enlightenment rationalism and the new historiography. Names such as Friedrich D. Schleiermacher, David Friedrich Strauss, Ferdinand Christian Baur and Johannes Weiss, to name but a few, are still part of an unofficial “canon” for any course in the history of biblical scholarship. Yet the “battle for the Bible” caused deep divisions within Protestantism. Its contemporary legacy is the spread of fundamentalism that continues to divide major denominations like the Southern Baptist Convention.

Throughout the tumultuous years of the 19th century there were ten­tative attempts by Catholics (like the members of the Catholic Tubingen school) to incorporate emerging biblical scholarship and to dialogue with its proponents. Yet official Catholic theology and teaching remained suspicious and defensive.

That was then, then Vatican II happened:

The immediate history of post-Vatican II Catholic biblical scholarship, in concert with other theological disciplines, presents a dazzling kaleidoscope. One immediate effect was the commitment to biblical and theological studies by a great number of people. More and more talented lay people, especially women scholars, entered the field. . . . Protestants became leading members of the Catholic Biblical Association. The biblical renewal became the soul of bilateral ecumenical dialogues, as groups turned to the scriptural roots of disputed issues only to find that a historical-critical reading of the Scriptures challenged positions once thought to be set in concrete. Redaction criticism helped to uncover the theological creativity and literary achievement of the Evangelists and dis­closed a multicolored pluralism in the New Testament itself. Fresh translations from the original languages such as the Bible of Jerusalem and the New American Bible were produced, and Catholics participated in the production of commentaries no longer divided along confessional lines. Creative theological movements such as feminist and liberation theology wrestled criti­cally with the biblical texts as a source of their insights. Literally thousands of religious and lay people flocked to summer institutes and workshops sustained by joyful discovery of the manner in which the Bible touched their lives. The church was being transformed “from below” as individuals and groups defined their lives and faith in dialogue with the Bible.

The irony is that JATC went from communing with one sort of Protestant to communing with another sort.

Wow indeed.

Papal Social Gospel

Published on by D. G. Hart7 Comments

That is the conclusion that has settled after some time of absorbing Evangelii Gaudium, namely, that Pope Francis may not be a liberationist, a liberal, or a Vatican II rebel, but he is doing something different from his predecessors. (As if it were everyone but the magisterium’s job to read the tea leaves of papal pronouncements.) And it — the consensus on Pope Francis — does involve the economy (stupid).

First, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry comes straight out with criticisms of Francis’ understanding of economics, but then applauds the church’s capacity to create synergy between the permanent things of the gospel and the passing circumstances of this world:

. . . it’s simply not true that if we in the West stopped wasting food kids in Africa would have it. It wasn’t true when my parents told me so** to make me clean my plate, and it’s still not true. And pretending it is is, well, infantile. And not in a Matthew 18 way. And we can “rescue” this Francis comment by elevating it to the theological level, by saying that by wasting food we are, in a powerful sense, being ungrateful towards God’s good creation and being selfish. And that perhaps if we rid ourselves of this ungratefulness we will be made holier by grace and better able to follow Jesus’ command to feed the hungry. And I believe this is true! But that’s not what Francis is saying or, at the very least, it’s not only what he’s saying.

Second, it shows that so much can be accomplished at the level of social doctrine without getting into econo-philosophical debates about “free markets” and “trickle-down economics.” You don’t need to reform or reinterpret or innovate Catholic social doctrine to say that corruption of government officials is scandalous.

Third, because if there is any institution in the world that should put this issue front and center, it’s the Catholic Church. First because, as I’ve said, it’s already well within the bounds of Tradition and flows naturally from the Gospel.

In the Bible I read, Jesus says things about food and hunger that make me think correlating the gospel’s spiritual and eschatological categories with physical hunger and food is not the best interpretation (but I am only a Protestant with an opinion):

Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you. For on him God the Father has set his seal.” 28 Then they said to him, “What must we do, to be doing the works of God?” 29 Jesus answered them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” 30 So they said to him, s“Then what sign do you do, that we may see and believe you? What work do you perform? 31 Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’” 32 Jesus then said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. 33 For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” . . . 35 Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst. (John 6)

But apparently, as John Allen reports, Pope Francis is more on Gobry’s side than mine:

. . . Francis had already given himself a major birthday present 24 hours before by shaking up the membership of the Congregation for Bishops in order to lay the groundwork for a new generation of “Francis bishops.”

In the United States, attention was understandably focused on the nomination of Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, D.C., and the effective removal of Cardinal Raymond Burke, president of the Apostolic Signatura, the Vatican’s supreme court. Putting in the moderate Wuerl and taking the strongly conservative Burke off couldn’t help but seem a signal of the kind of bishop Francis intends to elevate in the United States.

As pope, however, Francis is responsible not just for the 6 percent of the world’s Catholic population that lives in the United States, but the whole shooting match, 1.2 billion faithful all over the planet.

In that regard, it’s worth looking at the other appointments Francis made Monday to the Congregation for Bishops — 30 in all, including 12 new members and confirmations for 18 prelates who already sat on the body.

For the sake of analysis, two assumptions need to be stipulated:

The 12 new members best reflect Francis’ personal touch, given that most of the 18 confirmations were for Vatican personnel whose jobs generally entitle them to a seat at the table;

The kind of man Francis picks for the Congregation for Bishops is, in effect, a proxy for the kind of bishops he wants this panel to identify.

If those postulates are correct, we can draw some early conclusions about what a “Francis bishop” looks like — ideological moderates with the broad support of their fellow bishops and a real commitment to the social Gospel.

(Allen goes on to comment on the Pope’s specific choices for bishop.)

Arguably the most sobering assessment comes from James Schall, a figure well regarded (and rightly so) by conservative Roman Catholics. Schall is as cautious as he is careful:

. . . if I am asked what is the overall impression left by this Exhortation, I have to say that it is very much “this-worldly” oriented. It points horizontally, not vertically. The inner life of the Godhead is not much spoken of. When the Father is mentioned, it is always in the context of the love of the neighbor whom God loves in Christ. Unlike Benedict in Spe Salvi, there is little attention given to “eternal life.” When Francis mentions the “kingdom of God,” he does not, as one would expect, cite Augustine. He mentions actual cities and is rather surprised by them. When Augustine talked of “the City of God,” he said that it began among us, but could not be achieved in this world. No existing city would ever be this Kingdom. Augustine, with good reason, was leery of the ambitions of the cities of this world.

Of course, this emphasis on actual cities is Aristotelian. We are social and political animals. What concerns Francis, if I might put it that way, is the second great commandment. He obviously does not deny the first, the love of God. But Francis’ attention is given to God’s love as it exists among us. But he thinks not enough response is given to it. He wants to improve the world by emphasizing the joy of Christianity that we can experience in our lives and worship. The love of neighbor is an active thing. This pope believes in action. He talks of contemplation at times, but with overtones of Ignatius of Loyola’s simul in actione contemplativus; we behold God’s action in the doing of what needs to be done.

Pope Bergoglio is much more oriented to modernity, to modern culture, than the previous two popes. He cites John XXIII, and sometimes Paul VI, though he certainly cites John Paul II and Benedict—and de Lubac, Guardini, Newman, Bernanos, and the various documents of episcopal conferences. He is open to modern science. He is aware of skepticism, relativism, and atheism, but he has a certain sympathy for their adherents.

So what do I think the Pope is doing with his strong emphasis on missionary activities? He lightly touches the difficulty of political obstacles in most nations of the world to allow for much real missionary work. He mentions the basic right of religious freedom and its lack in many nations. He does not name many names. So his missionary activity first begins at home. The “joy” of the Gospel is designed to be a beacon of light in the world. It can only be seen if believers themselves see it.

Modernity is, briefly, the position that no truth is found in things or in ourselves. We are free because we are liberated from all religion or philosophy that would limit our freedom, individual or corporate. Religion of any kind is an enemy to this liberty. Once this freedom is established, man can go forward, as Benedict pointed out, to create a world in his own image. Man is not made in any image of God. He makes himself in his own image. Once free of any transcendent claim, man is free to create a truly “human” world that has no outside demands of a god or nature. Science and politics with this background will be able to make man into what he ought to be.

What Pope Francis seems to be doing in this Exhortation is, as it were, to present an alternative to modernity within modernity. This alternative is itself inner-worldly. That is, the emphasis is on the effects of Christianity as it truly ought to be lived in the here and now.

Whether Schall is comfortable with this shift is another matter since he mentions that “another legitimate version” of the Christian life — an alternative to Francis’ — is to be “hated precisely because [Christians] do live as Christ asked them to live.”

Schall offers another check upon Francis’ apparently optimistic embrace of modernity:

. . . at bottom, what this Exhortation seems to be is, indeed, an answer to classical modernity that, when spelled out, does everything modernity hopes for, only better and more securely because it is rooted in the real nature of man and is open to the gifts that have come to us in revelation. The Pope’s impatience has its charm. It also has its dangers. After all, most men who have ever lived on this planet have lived in very imperfect circumstances. The Church was for them too. Few lived in really fully developed economic and political orders with scientific and technological support that enabled man the leisure and time to create a civilization. Paul VI called it a “civilization of love,” and Pope Francis would probably call it the same.

So it looks like Francis is increasingly showing himself to be in line with a Vatican II spirit that was eager to embrace the modern world and extend Roman Catholicism out of the ghetto, parish, and parochial school to the wider world of suburbia, universities, and middle-class life. Which raises the question if the pope is identifying more with middle-class life and the kind of social structures that created it than he is with the poor. That was surely the case with the Protestant Social Gospelers, a group from to which Jason and the Callers should have paid more attention.

A Genie Out of the Bottle

Published on by D. G. Hart218 Comments

What Jason and the Callers don’t understand about history, historical consciousness, or what happened at Vatican 2, they could well learn from Mark Massa, a Jesuit and Dean of the School of Ministry and Theology at Boston College. Particularly instructive is this excerpt from the conclusion to his book, The American Catholic Revolution:

. . . there are at least three lessons to be learned from the Catholic sixties in the United States. . . . First, it seems highly unlikely that historical consciousness — the awareness that everything, including the Church, changes as history unfolds — can ever be effectively explained away again. True, some whom the secular press term traditionalists have been attempting that very thing since shortly after the Second Vatican Council closed. Those on the extreme end of these efforts view Vatican II as an anticouncil; that is, they see that even of 1962-65 as not being a real council of the Church at all, but rather an event abetted by the Forces of Darkness against the Fortress Church of Pius IX and Pius X. This group has always constituted an interesting but numerically insignificant group of Catholics.

More numerous — and more influential, at least in Europe — are those Catholics who even in the 1960s and certainly in the contemporary Church wish to claim Vatican II for the side of continuity and ahistorical Catholic truth: no “Rupture” did — or could — emerge from the implementation of the reforms of the council because the Church cannot change. But more to the point, they argue, is the fat that the council fathers implementing the reformed intended no such rupture with previous councils or Church practice. The efforts of this group — some in key hierarchical positions of authority — to ignore the genie let out of the bottle, or at least to act as though that genie offered nothing new and important, have found powerful spokespersons in the highest levels of Church government. But their arguments ignore the perspicacious law of unintended consequences, a law provable to the extent that it provides intellectual clarity on what in fact happened in the Catholic sixties. Mainstream Catholics in the United States, after the sixties, have come to understand their own revered brand of Christianity as having undergone historical development and change. The law of unintended consequences goes a long way in explaining why that perception has triumphed so broadly in the American Catholic community. Whatever the strengths of the arguments offered by the group attempt to claim Vatican II for the side of continuity, their failure to take into account the clear results of that law undercuts the important aspects of their position. Whatever the intentions of the bishop passing the conciliar decrees, the resulting documents sponsored a revolution that took on a life of its own, just as all events in history have a tendency to do. . . .

Second, the widespread acceptance of the seemingly self-evident truth that things change will make it increasingly difficult to propound or defend Church teaching and practice by appealing to timeless, static categories of propositional truth. This applies most particularly to the intellectual tradition of scholastic natural law, which the Catholic tradition has relied on for presenting its most important teachings since the thirteenth century. The fractious nonrecption of Paul VI’s encyclical on birth control, if nothing else, illustrates this with startling clarity. Whatever the truth of Paul VI’s teaching, the massive noncompliance accorded his encyclical shows that the great majority of American Catholics did not form their consciences along the lines of such moral reasoning, and have not since. There are of course many possible reasons for this lack of compliance on the part of the vast majority of practicing Catholics on an issue that the hierarchical Church has termed “serious matter.” Some of those reasons may indeed involve personal ignorance, sinful willfulness, or just plain selfishness. But an important reason for that noncompliance, what I would label as the main reason, is that the classical unchanging world it presupposes no longer makes sense to the vast majority of the faithful in the United States. What Bernard Lonergan so elegantly called the “transition from a classicist world view to historical mindedness” in fact describes the intellectual revolution that mainstream Catholics underwent during the sixties.

Whatever the strengths of that older classicist worldview — and it served the Catholic Church extraordinarily well for centuries — it can no longer provide plausible explanations for Church teaching . . . . The older intellectual categories of scholastic natural law, first enunciated so brilliantly by St. Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, appear unable to accomplish that now. Perhaps the intellectual justification offered in its place to explain Catholic teaching will represent the most important long-term fruit of the intellectual revolution sponsored by historical consciousness in Catholic Christianity. Time will tell.

The third lesson that Massa draws is that the labels conservative and liberal no longer make sense of Roman Catholicism:

What the historical consciousness allows us to see is that none of these figures [Bernard Lonergan, Avery Dulles, the Catonsville Nine] can be appropriately understood by the application of political labels. What they had in common as central players in the socioreligious drama I’ve termed the Catholic sixties was a deep appreciation of how the religious tradition to which they all belonged had undergone historical evolution and change. That appreciation was as Catholic as it was modern, in the sense that Pius X so feared. At its core was the radical recognition that what faithful Christians did and believed in the mid-twentieth century was not always a faithful replication of what the early Christian and the medieval builders of the great cathedrals had done and believed. Sometimes this recognition was good news; sometimes it was a cause for reform. . . But at its root was an appreciation of disruption, discontinuity, and evolution as part of the very fiber of the Catholic tradition. Change was not foreign to the Catholic tradition: it defined it.

This is why the bumper sticker line, “This is the church Jesus founded,” can no longer be uttered with a straight face. (And for those who want to claim with a straight face that Rome is the church Christ founded, they need to consider that Massa’s book came out five years after Benedict XVI outlined the hermeneutic of continuity by which the magisterium was going to read the history of Vatican II. Apparently, Massa, an official at a prominent Roman Catholic university, did not get that memorandum.)