Category: Roman Catholicism

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.)

2K Subsidiarity?

Published on by D. G. Hart44 Comments

What’s good for society is not so much for the church.

Subsidiarity rejects all forms of tyranny. It makes hierarchy more a matter of enabling those in the middle and bottom to carry on their lives than giving those at the top the power to plan out what is wanted and see to its achievement. It rejects the conception of social justice most common today, which emphasizes equality and universality and thus a comprehensive system of supervision and control. Instead, it stands for the Catholic and classical conception of social justice, a state of affairs in which each part of the social order receives its due so it can carry out its proper function.

More generally, it rejects present-day liberalism, the attempt to turn the social order into a technically rational contrivance for maximum equal satisfaction of individual preferences. It opposes it not only in its leftist or progressive form, which emphasizes expertise and equality, and prefers to act through neutral bureaucracies and international authorities, but also in its rightist or conservative form, which emphasizes energy and efficiency, and prefers global markets and the exercise of national power. So it is ill at ease with both the politically-correct welfare state and such aspects of present-day capitalism as outsourcing, big box stores, the penetration of commercial relations into all aspects of life, and the bottom line as the final standard for business decisions.

It nonetheless accepts certain tendencies often identified as conservative or liberal. It generally favors family values, distributed powers, federalism, local control, and freedom of enterprise and association, all of which now count as conservative causes. It also favors causes that count as liberal, such as grassroots democracy, limitations on big business as well as big government, and certain kinds of unionism. It favors neighborliness and an active civil society, which everyone says he likes, and maintenance of borders and limits on globalization, which our major parties along with the whole of our ruling class now reject.

The life of the Church provides a concrete example of why subsidiarity makes sense and how it works. The point of the formal structure of the Church, her hierarchy, sacraments, disciplines, and subordinate bodies, is to help the faithful become what God intended them to be. That purpose can’t be legislated, administered, or forced on anyone, but it can be aided, and that is the point of what the Church does as an organized community. As the saying goes, salus animarum suprema lex (“the salvation of souls is the supreme law”).

To that end, the aspects of the life of the Church that normally matter most—parish life, the availability of the sacraments, and the religious life of the believer and his network of family and friends—are necessarily local.

I do not understand why papal supremacy and the centralization of church power in Rome fits neatly with such a subsidiarist outlook. The Reformation questioned the centralization of European church life. Protestants are inherently subsidiarist while Roman Catholics have to hedge.

If the Poor Become Middle Class, Are They Still Blessed?

Published on by D. G. Hart10 Comments

Capitalism breeds attachment to material goods. I get it. It may even tempt — make that, cause — its users to measure happiness and the good life by worldly standards. But is socialism any different? If capitalism breeds haves, does pointing out what the have-nots don’t have really challenge materialist notions of wealth, standard of living, property, or means of production?

The Social Gospel has always struck me as just as materialist as high capitalism, though it is much more sanctimonious about it since for every Russell Conwell ten ministers publicly identify with the poor even while depending on market mechanisms for their wages. In other words, applying a materialist reading of the beatitudes — either pro-free markets or pro-redistribution — misses the point. A capitalist might say that free markets lift all boats and will take the poor off poverty rolls and put them in the suburbs with a mortgage and car loan payments. A socialist might say that the elimination of private property and free markets will distribute wealth to all citizens so that everyone has a home and a car. But what about when the home owner or sharer dies? What kind of home does he have then? Neither the capitalist or leftist reading of the Beatitudes addresses the matter of spiritual poverty, or the understanding that this world’s goods are inconsequential for the world to come, when the spiritually poor, whether financially rich or destitute, will inherit the kingdom of God (if they trust in Christ)?

These questions follow from Andrew Sullivan’s rebuke to Rush Limbaugh. Conservative talk radio’s supreme host is worthy of all sorts of criticism. But I don’t think Sullivan’s complaint hits the mark:

But the Pope is not making an empirical observation. In so far as he is, he agrees with you. What he’s saying is that this passion for material things is not what makes us good or happy. That’s all. And that’s a lot for Limbaugh to chew on. And if the mania for more and more materialist thrills distracts us from, say, the plight of a working American facing bankruptcy because of cancer, or the child of an illegal immigrant with no secure home, then it is a deeply immoral distraction. There’s something almost poignant in Limbaugh’s inability even to understand that material goods are not self-evidently the purpose of life and are usually (and in Jesus’ stern teachings always) paths away from God and our own good and our own happiness. Something poignant because it reveals a profound ignorance of one of the West’s deepest cultural inheritances in Christianity.

If Sullivan had wanted to show his spiritual understanding of Christianity, he might have re-written this line: “… if the mania for more and more materialist thrills distracts us from, say, the plight of a working American facing bankruptcy because of cancer the wages of sin and death, or the child of an illegal immigrant with no secure home without the assurance of God’s forgiveness through the cross of Christ, then it is a deeply immoral distraction.”

As it is, paychecks and housing appear to rank high in Sullivan’s understanding of Christianity. That makes him anti-materialist and separates him from Rush Limbaugh how?

Whose Paradigm, Which Market?

Published on by D. G. Hart49 Comments

Bryan Cross is apparently pleased with Time magazine’s choice of Pope Francis as Person of 2013. His approval raises a question about whether his repeated appeal to paradigm is selective. When Protestants fail to assent to his arguments about Roman Catholic teaching, Bryan says we are not using the correct paradigm. Now when Time magazine’s editors select a pope as man of the year, does Bryan raise any question about their paradigm? Last I checked, Time was not a Roman Catholic publication (and Kenneth Woodward hasn’t worked for Newsweek for some time).

One additional curiosity surrounding this story. If you click on the video that accompanies Time‘s story (at the link above), you will see an advertisement for Kia’s new luxury sedan, the K900. So much for the magazine paying any attention to Francis’ warnings about capitalism. His annual personhood will not obstruct the global economy.

If So Many Mediators, Why Only One Pope?

Published on by D. G. Hart26 Comments

Here is part of Charles Pope’s (real name) response to a Protestant who insists that the Bible teaches that Christians have only one mediator, Jesus Christ:

Rather we speak of a subordinate mediation when we seek the prayers of the saints, or of one another. For indeed we could have no communion with them or each other if it be not for Jesus Christ, who as the head of the Body the Church, unites all his members and facilitates our communion with each other.

You seem to speak of there being one mediator in an absolute sense, excluding any other possible interaction or any subordinate mediation. But Consider, that if there is only one mediator in the absolute sense you say, then you ought never again to ask ANYONE to pray for you. Neither should you attend any church, read any book, listen to any sermon or even read the Bible (since the Bible mediates Jesus words to you).

Now, a “mediator” is someone or something that acts as a kind of go-between, as something which acts to facilitate our relationship with Jesus. And though Jesus mediates our relationship to the Father, he also asked Apostles, preachers and teachers to mediate, to facilitate his relationship with us.

Thus Jesus sent apostles out to draw others to him. And St. Paul says, How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? And how can anyone preach unless they are sent? As it is written: “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!” Consequently, faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word about Christ. (Rom 10:14-15, 17) And thus Jesus has his relationship with us mediated through his Word, and through the apostles and others who announce that Word and draw us to him.

But since you say there is absolutely only ONE mediator, and no subordinate or deputed mediators, there is therefore no need to ask ANYONE or ANYTHING to mediate. So burn your Bible, stop asking anyone to pray for you, seek no advice, NO ONE can mediate a single thing to you Gerry. No one can do this because there is, as you say in an unqualified sense, absolutely only ONE mediator. ONE!

Aside from the squishy word play (Framelike) which takes one sense of interacting with other believers (including a very porous idea of speaking to dead saints) and using that to justify prayers to dead, I wonder if Pope would be that expansive in explaining papal supremacy. In other words, why be so particular with the authority of one particular bishop and not equally particular about the work of Christ? Inquiring minds and all that.

Does the Vatican Have a Bureau of Spin Control?

Published on by D. G. Hart13 Comments

John Allen thinks Rome might need one.

First, there’s a growing tendency in the Catholic blogosphere to grouse that Francis is becoming more myth than man, that a cluster of urban legends are growing up that threaten to turn the pope into what one Italian blogger recently called “a cartoon strip for kids.” The danger, as some of these commentators see it, is that important aspects of the pope’s character and message, such as his repeated warnings about the devil and the “spirits of this world,” are being obscured.

Of course, there’s always a risk of selective emphasis and myth-making when the media decides to turn someone into a celebrity, but I would put the situation this way: Isn’t it better that people are paying attention than not?

Surely deciding what to do with a massive global megaphone is a better problem than wondering how to get that megaphone in the first place.

Second, we’re probably in for a long run of pope storylines that are going to burst on the world like a spring thunderstorm, and some of them, like his alleged nocturnal outings, are likely to be bunk, rooted in misunderstandings or in breathless leaps to premature conclusions. The old rule of caveat emptor, therefore, will be more critical than ever.

Actually, this dynamic may offer a new lease on life to Catholic journalists everywhere, some of whom are feeling a bit disoriented at the way the general-interest media has sort of ripped the pope story away from them. Insiders no longer may have a monopoly on the beat, but they may be able to rebrand as the go-to destination for rumor control.

Third, there’s a sense in which the media ferment amounts to a virtual application of Francis’ memorable line from Evangelii Gaudium: “I prefer a church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security.”

By injecting himself so thoroughly into the 21st-century media culture, Francis runs the risk of seeing his image distorted, obscured and occasionally caricatured. From his point of view, however, that’s preferable to staying out of the fray — because the fray, after all, is where real people live.

I can see many a celebrity Protestant pastor thinking the very thing. Access is better than not access. But fame turns to fad. The grass withers. Shepherds are not celebrities.

Tribalists All

Published on by D. G. Hart31 Comments

While six middle-aged men continue to receive their comeuppance for challenging the soundness of rap and hip-hop, the imbroglio over whether Mark Driscoll plagiarized Peter Jones continues. (I don’t know why people are not debating whether Driscoll should even be writing books.) Miles Mullin writes a gloomy assessment of evangelicalism thanks to the structural problems that the Driscoll affair reveals:

Because of the personality-driven leadership inherent in contemporary evangelicalism, the tribalism it nurtures, and the reality that most of American evangelicalism subsists in some variation of the free church tradition, the final outcome of this story is clear. There is no authority that can adjudicate this matter other than the authority upon which both Driscoll and Mefferd have built their ministries: evangelical popular opinion. . . . Thus, regardless of whether or not Mark Driscoll truly plagiarized in A Call to Resurgence(and other books) or whether Janet Mefferd lied about Driscoll hanging up, their tribes will defend them to the end.

This is the troubling reality of the personality-based leadership that encompasses much of American evangelicalism. Often, charisma and dynamic communication skills trump character and integrity as popular appeal wins the day. And for those of us who wish it were otherwise, there is no court of appeal with the authority to hear our case.

I am not sure about the distinction between charisma and dynamic communication on the one side and character and integrity on the other. In the world of mass media no one has the kind of personal knowledge that allows us to tell whether a figure has any more character and integrity than he does charisma and rhetorical skills. Someone who actually holds an office of authority could function as an umpire in such a dispute. And said office-holder would have authority no matter what his gifts or integrity (unless of course he broke the rules that pertained to his office). In other words, an ecclesiastical officer could decide this matter (as well as an officer of the court) if Driscoll were part of a church overseen by officers who assented to church authority.

Now I can see where some might think this takes me, right in the direction of Jason and the Callers’ boy-have-we-got-a-solution-for-you appeal to papal supremacy. And that is exactly where I’d like to go since it seems to (all about) me that without temporal authority the pope’s spiritual office has descended to the levels of charisma, rhetorical skills, integrity, and character. Before Vatican 2 the papacy could claim greater authority and generally commanded it. But since the 1950s with the greater prosperity of Roman Catholics in the U.S. and greater academic accomplishments by Roman Catholic scholars, even papal supremacy does not command the conformity that it once did when the people prayed, paid, and obeyed. For instance, the Vatican’s power to police Roman Catholic universities has arguably never been weaker (despite Ex Corde Ecclesiae).

Here is one recent story where Roman Catholic professors are appealing to Pope Francis’ off the cuff remarks to challenge their administrations:

Pope Francis surprised many last month following the publication of his first full-length interview, in which he offered a less doctrinaire stance on issues such as homosexuality and abortion than any of his predecessors.

“I am no one to judge,” he said in response a question about gay people, echoing previous comments he’d made to media on the topic this summer and signaling to some that the Vatican was becoming more moderate. Somewhat similarly, the pope said that the church has grown “obsessed” with doctrine — at the expense of larger spiritual matters.

“We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods,” he said. “I have not spoken much about these things, and I was reprimanded for that.”

But within days of the publication of the Vatican-approved interview, which appeared in the U.S. in the Jesuit magazine America, several American Roman Catholic institutions took a harder line on those exact issues.

The apparent disconnect led some faculty members at Santa Clara and Loyola Marymount Universities, which recently dropped coverage for elective abortions from their standard health insurance plans, and Providence College, which banned a gay marriage advocate from speaking on campus, to wonder whether their administrations had gotten the message.

Meanwhile, the theologians whom John Paul II tried to make more accountable through Ex Corde Ecclesiae are raising questions of their own:

An international group of prominent Catholic theologians have called the church’s teachings on marriage and sexuality “incomprehensible” and are asking bishops around the world to take seriously the expertise of lay people in their preparations for a global meeting of the prelates at the Vatican next year.

Church teaching on issues like contraception and same-sex marriage, the theologians write, are based on “abstract notions of natural law and [are] outdated, or at the very least scientifically uninformed” and “are for the most part incomprehensible to the majority of the faithful.”

Addressing next year’s meeting of church leaders, known as a Synod of Bishops, they say that previous such meetings involved “only carefully hand-picked members of the laity.”

Those meetings, they write, “offered no critical voice and ignored abundant evidence that the teaching of the church on marriage and sexuality was not serving the needs of the faithful.”

Of course, an apologist could say that this changes nothing. The pope is still in charge. Which of course is true in a sense. But his being-in-chargedness is not exactly evident in large sectors of the church, any more than Protestants have some way to adjudicate the Driscoll affair. And if we recall how popular Francis is compared to Benedict XVI, the categories of charisma and character turn out to be as crucial for a pope’s clout in the modern church as it is for celebrity pastors among Protestants.

Which is just one way of saying that in the modern world where churches are “merely” spiritual institutions, without backup from the state — the real power in contemporary affairs, Roman Catholics and Protestants are both shooting blanks. (Eastern Orthodox may be different when you can have titles like this one — His All Holiness, Bartholomew I, Archbishop of Constantinople, New Rome, and Ecumenical Patriarch.) And that may explain why so many popes, now regarded as being products of time and place, the ones who oversaw Inquisitions, abducted Jewish boys, and condemned all aspects of modern social life, had a point. If they were going to retain their power, it needed to be powerfully palpable and visible.

What Mechanism Fixes This?

Published on by D. G. Hart53 Comments

Ross Douthat describes a world that is hard to square with The Call:

There are many Catholics, as I’ve pointed out before, who dissent from church teaching on various issues in a “soft” way that doesn’t really shape their relationship to the church — and this population may be pretty content with a change in tone and emphasis (and press coverage!) that doesn’t otherwise lead to dramatic shifts. (This is roughly what John Allen has in mind when he describes Francis as potentially “a pope for the Catholic middle.”) Then, in an overlapping category, there are self-defined “liberal Catholics” for whom economic concerns are much more crucial to their self-definition than either moral or theological debates, and who are likely to be similarly content with a papacy that seems to be foregrounding and validating their issues even if it’s also reaffirming traditional doctrine on sex, marriage and the family.

Then at the opposite extreme there are liberal Catholics (and many lapsed and semi-lapsed Catholics) whose vision is more comprehensively hostile to the church as it has existed and exists, and whose temporary happiness with Pope Francis is likely to dissipate in the absence of the kind of sweeping, Protestantizing change that more orthodox believers consider not only undesirable but impossible. Where this category overlaps with the various secular and non-Catholic voices who have embraced the “Good Pope Francis” narrative, you can see the potential for an eventual large-scale backlash, of the kind that Joshua Keating hints at in a piece for Slate today, which ends up dismissing Francis’s grasp for a religious middle as all salesmanship and no substance, and the new pope himself as just another Vatican reactionary.

Then, finally, you have Catholics who are morally/culturally/theologically liberal but also realistic about the ways in which Catholicism can and cannot change — by which mean I mean that they want to see their church address and adapt to certain post-sexual revolution realities, but don’t expect or desire a revolution that suddenly makes every church-versus-culture conflict on these issues disappear.

If Jason and the Callers have an answer, I’d like to know.

A World Without Winners and Losers

Published on by D. G. Hart9 Comments

We saw Philomena last week and I was relieved that the movie did not go overboard in targeting Irish nuns as the tyrants they were (as I’ve heard) before Rome adopted the post-Vatican 2 pose of embracing rather than scolding the modern world. I have heard about nuns from all sorts of cradle — now former — Roman Catholics who experienced a highly charged encounter with Christianity where the stakes for sin and disobedience could be devastating. Philomena illustrates this well in the instance of a girl, reared by nuns in a convent, who has an illegitimate child and who needs — as the nuns explain — to atone for her sin. This atonement means having the child taken away for adoption and then suffering the sorrow of lost contact with the much wanted and much loved child for the rest of her life. It may be my fundie past, but I kept wondering why the nuns did not present this unwed mother with the forgiveness of sins that comes through Christ’s atonement. “Oh, that’s right. They are Roman Catholic and don’t believe in forgiveness of sins the way that Protestants do.” Maybe that’s a simplistic conclusion. Maybe Rome was far more nuanced than that. But when you do believe the Eucharist is a re-presentation of Christ’s sacrifice, and that it can be said for the dead, as opposed to the Protestant/author-to-Hebrews view that Christ’s sacrifice was once for all and that it atoned for all believers’ sins, the nuns response to unwed adolescent girls makes sense. Not to mention that the film’s depiction makes sense of the former Roman Catholic baby boomers’ understanding that for the church Christianity was all about law and guilt, with little relief to be found except through penance and the Mass.

But the popular understanding of Christianity among Roman Catholics today is not so restrictive or disciplinary. Like the efforts of bishops at Vatican 2 to show a much less judgmental manner, many of the writers at various Roman Catholic websites (minus JATC) present a Christian religion that is so tolerant that it becomes universalistic and humanitarian. Michael Sean Winters, for instance, had this to say in further reflections on Evangelii Guadium:

As predicted, much of the criticism leveled at the pope the past couple of days has painted him as naïve about economic matters. I am not one of those the pope calls on the phone, but I think we all have enough of a sense of the man to know that he would plead guilty to the charge that he is not an economist. Indeed, the fact that this criticism is laid at his feet shows just how far down the slippery slope his critics are. How dare the pope not understand our economic science! How dare he ignore our charts, our data, out statistics! How naïve to suggest that our economic laws should conform to his religious vision! That is precisely his point: As a Christian, we cannot accept an economic system that results in such injustice, in which the few winners get richer and richer and the millions of losers get poorer and poorer. Such a system is unworthy of a Christian understanding of justice.

Francis, however, is after something deeper here too. Yes, injustice should set off alarm bells. But, what is wrong with modern capitalism is not just that the few winners are doing so well and the many losers are doing so poorly. It is that, in the Christian view of the world, no human being is a “loser.” A system that is predicated on there being winners and losers is wrong-headed not just when the differences between the two are extreme, as they are today. It is wrong-headed period. Humans, experienced through the culture of encounter the Gospel invites, are always winners: “To believe that the Son of God as­sumed our human flesh means that each human person has been taken up into the very heart of God” Pope Francis writes. (#178) Shame on those who treat their fellow man as if he has not been taken up into the very heart of God.

Esau, the Canaanites, the Pharisees, Herod, the Judaizers were not “losers”? Has Winters not read the Baltimore Catechism (for starters)?

183. What are the rewards or punishments appointed for men after the particular judgment?
The rewards or punishments appointed for men after the particular judgment are heaven, purgatory, or hell.

184. Who are punished in purgatory?
Those are punished for a time in purgatory who die in the state of grace but are guilty of venial sin, or have not fully satisfied for the temporal punishment due to their sins.

The fire will assay the quality of everyone’s work; if his work abides which he has built thereon, he will receive reward; if his work burns he will lose his reward, but himself will be saved, yet so as through fire. (I Corinthians 3:13-15)

185. Who are punished in hell?
Those are punished in hell who die in mortal sin; they are deprived of the vision of God and suffer dreadful torments, especially that of fire, for all eternity.

The he will say to those on his left hand, “Depart from me, accursed ones, into the everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels.” (Matthew 25:41)

Now maybe Winters was not trying to make an eschatological point. Maybe he only meant that in this world everyone is a “winner” because of God’s providence (as opposed to redemption). Or that everyone should be a “winner.” But if Pope Francis does teach that everyone is taken up into the heart of God, then, boy, were most of the priests and nuns prior to Vatican 2 serving up some big bowls of spiritual and doctrinal wrong. As Roman Catholics used to know, not everyone was equal morally. Not everyone was equal sacramentally. The winners were the saints, the losers where the heretics and schismatics. Those in the middle had to serve time in purgatory. They all knew that being on the wrong side of the church was far worse than being on the down side of the poverty line. Poverty goes away. Even purgatory yields to heaven. But hell is forever.

But Winters is such an economic and sacramental egalitarian that he can’t resist taking a shot at Calvinism:

It is not politic in the world of ecumenical dialogue to make the point, but I shall make it anyway. The world the modern, financialized economy has created bears a creepy resemblance to the soteriological vision of Calvin, does it not? The elect, predestined few flourish while the massa damnata burn in hell. And, there is nothing anyone can do about it. In Calvin’s views on salvation, it is predestination that leaves us helpless. In today’s world, it is the “economic laws” that leave us helpless and, as Pope Francis indicates, invite a “culture of indifference.” The pope is reminding us that we cannot be indifferent precisely because we are Christians called to evangelize.

Has Winters not seen the headquarters of the OPC? Does he really mean to suggest that Calvinist churches have the kind of wealth, art, and architecture that Vatican City does (as if all that display was made possible by games of bingo)? And is Winters really unfamiliar with the Aquinas’ teaching about predestination?

Maybe he is. But it could simply be that in order to square his economic egalitarianism with Christianity, Winters needs to dumb down the gospel and eternal life so that they conform to expectations about a just and equitable economy:

Who cares if Pope Francis knows his economics? He knows that at the heart of the Gospel is good news for the poor. He did not need to consult a team of economists to write Evangelii Gaudium: His focus group consisted of only four people, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

In point of fact, the poor in the gospels included not just those on poverty rolls but also the pretty well off — tax collectors, centurions, and other sinners. And their blessedness was not going to come with middle-class income. It was going to come from the house that Jesus was going to prepare.

This doesn’t mean that Pope Francis or Winters are wrong to be alarmed by income inequality. It does mean they both have some work to do to explain why economic justice is synonymous with the gospel. It also means, contra Winters, that Pope Francis should know that economics is different from theology, wealth from salvation, poverty from damnation. But if you make that sort of 2k distinction, then the pope may need to stick to his own sphere of spiritual authority and theological truth. If not, then all the people who consult the book of nature and figure out the “science” of economics have some right to criticize papal economics. This is not Christendom, after all.

Obsessive Confession Disorder

Published on by D. G. Hart453 Comments

Jason Stellman may think I am obsessed with Jason and the Callers, but every time he root root roots for the Vatican team, he winds up jeering at his former teammates. So when he tries to vindicate Roman Catholic ecclesiology, he dissects the Confession of Faith:

Consider first the realm of ecclesiology (which is related to Christology most obviously because the Church is the Body of Christ). In Protestantism, there is no single visible church, there is no single visible entity that can serve as an analogue to the physical body of Jesus of Nazareth. While the people of Galilee and Judaea could have pointed their fingers and said, “That is Jesus Christ, right over there sitting under that tree, see him? No, not that guy, the one to his left. Yeah, him.” Protestants today cannot point to anything and say, “This is the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church right here. No, not that one, this one.” In Protestantism, the church becomes more or less visible depending on the circumstances, fading in and out, as it were, of one’s field of vision:

This catholic Church has been sometimes more, sometimes less visible. And particular Churches, which are members thereof, are more or less pure, according as the doctrine of the Gospel is taught and embraced, ordinances administered, and public worship performed more or less purely in them (WCF xxv.4).

But why dismiss Protestants when he could simply exalt and magnify his own magisterium (which has all that supremacy and infallibility)? Here is what Jason’s Catechism has to say about visiblity:

779 The Church is both visible and spiritual, a hierarchical society and the Mystical Body of Christ. She is one, yet formed of two components, human and divine. That is her mystery, which only faith can accept.

This might appear to vindicate Jason’s point about Protestantism lacking a single visible church. But then Vatican 2 raises its traditionalist-defying head. And what we find is that the singularity of Rome pre-Vatican 2 is subdued, thus leaving Jason to quote the Confession of Faith against HIS OWN understanding of the church:

Moreover, some and even very many of the significant elements and endowments which together go to build up and give life to the Church itself, can exist outside the visible boundaries of the Catholic Church: the written word of God; the life of grace; faith, hope and charity, with the other interior gifts of the Holy Spirit, and visible elements too. All of these, which come from Christ and lead back to Christ, belong by right to the one Church of Christ.

The brethren divided from us also use many liturgical actions of the Christian religion. These most certainly can truly engender a life of grace in ways that vary according to the condition of each Church or Community. These liturgical actions must be regarded as capable of giving access to the community of salvation.

It follows that the separated Churches and Communities as such, though we believe them to be deficient in some respects, have been by no means deprived of significance and importance in the mystery of salvation. For the Spirit of Christ has not refrained from using them as means of salvation which derive their efficacy from the very fullness of grace and truth entrusted to the Church.

Nevertheless, our separated brethren, whether considered as individuals or as Communities and Churches, are not blessed with that unity which Jesus Christ wished to bestow on all those who through Him were born again into one body, and with Him quickened to newness of life – that unity which the Holy Scriptures and the ancient Tradition of the Church proclaim. For it is only through Christ’s Catholic Church, which is “the all-embracing means of salvation,” that they can benefit fully from the means of salvation. We believe that Our Lord entrusted all the blessings of the New Covenant to the apostolic college alone, of which Peter is the head, in order to establish the one Body of Christ on earth to which all should be fully incorporated who belong in any way to the people of God. This people of God, though still in its members liable to sin, is ever growing in Christ during its pilgrimage on earth, and is guided by God’s gentle wisdom, according to His hidden designs, until it shall happily arrive at the fullness of eternal glory in the heavenly Jerusalem. (Decree on Ecumenism)

For the bishops at Vatican 2, the issue was not visibility but unity.

And if Jason spent as much time looking through the teaching resources of his magisterium and less combing Protestant teaching to which he objects, he might also find a rebuke to his own dealings with Protestants:

The way and method in which the Catholic faith is expressed should never become an obstacle to dialogue with our brethren. It is, of course, essential that the doctrine should be clearly presented in its entirety. Nothing is so foreign to the spirit of ecumenism as a false irenicism, in which the purity of Catholic doctrine suffers loss and its genuine and certain meaning is clouded.

At the same time, the Catholic faith must be explained more profoundly and precisely, in such a way and in such terms as our separated brethren can also really understand.

Moreover, in ecumenical dialogue, Catholic theologians standing fast by the teaching of the Church and investigating the divine mysteries with the separated brethren must proceed with love for the truth, with charity, and with humility. When comparing doctrines with one another, they should remember that in Catholic doctrine there exists a “hierarchy” of truths, since they vary in their relation to the fundamental Christian faith. Thus the way will be opened by which through fraternal rivalry all will be stirred to a deeper understanding and a clearer presentation of the unfathomable riches of Christ. (Decree on Ecumenism)

So again, why doesn’t Jason get on board with the kinder gentler version of Roman Catholicism that has only been around for as long as he has been alive? OCD?