Tag: George Weigel

What Can Change and What Can't

Published on by D. G. Hart22 Comments

Since infallibility has become a frequent topic of recent comments here, a couple of pieces from elsewhere may complicate the infallibility-means-superior meme of Roman Catholic apologists. It turns out that you can find as many opinions about what the church teaches (and here discipline merges with doctrine, a no-no I thought) as Carter has pills.

First, an optimistic piece from George Weigel about Pope Francis as a conservative:

Popes, in other words, are not authoritarian figures, who teach what they will and as they will. The pope is the guardian of an authoritative tradition, of which he is the servant, not the master. Pope Francis knows this as well as anyone, as he has emphasized by repeating that he is a “son of the Church” who believes and teaches what the Church believes and teaches.

Thus the notion that this pontificate is going to change Catholic teaching on the morality of homosexual acts, or on the effects of divorce-and-remarriage on one’s communion with the Church, is a delusion, although the Church can surely develop its pastoral approach to homosexuals and the divorced. As for the environment and the poor, Catholic social doctrine has long taught that we are stewards of creation and that the least of the Lord’s brethren have a moral claim on our solidarity and our charity; the social doctrine leaves open to debate the specific, practical means by which people of good will, and governments, exercise that stewardship, and that solidarity and charity.

And “the role of women in the Church”? No doubt various Church structures would benefit by drawing upon a wider range of talent (irrespective of gender) than the talent-pool from which Church leaders typically emerge. Still, in an interview with La Stampa before Christmas, Pope Francis made it clear that identifying leadership in the Church with ordination is both a form of clericalism and another way of instrumentalizing Catholic women.

So the church is not going to change, but I didn’t see anything about infallibility or the bodily assumption of Mary not changing. Instead, it looks like morality has an aura of infallibility about it. That makes sense since morality comes from God. But if the papacy hasn’t declared the moral law to be infallible, how would we know that morality is unchanging?

And then there is the back-and-forth among Roman Catholics about what the church teaches on Islam:

Consider an online debate that appeared this summer in Catholic Answers Forum about Cardinal Dolan’s visit to a mosque in New York. The debate centered around the Cardinal’s statement “You love God, we love God, and he is the same God”—a statement, in short, which seemed to echo the Catholic Catechism. The most interesting aspect of the month-long thread was that those who argued that Allah is the same God that Christians worship relied almost exclusively on arguments from authority. Here is a sample:

“It is dogma that Catholics and Muslims worship the same God.”

“He [Cardinal Dolan] has the grace of Teaching Authority. Unless you are a bishop, you do not.”

“You are discrediting Vatican II.”

“One either accepts Her teaching authority, or one does not.”

“This is not up for grabs.”

After plowing through dozens of similar propositions, along with numerous citations of the relevant passage in the Catechism, it was difficult for me to avoid the conclusion that forum participants were relying on the argument from authority because it was the only argument they had.

The trouble with the argument from authority in regard to Islam is fourfold. First, the Church has very little to say about Islam. In fact, the brief statements from the Second Vatican Council make no reference to Islam, Muhammad, or the Koran but only refer to “Muslims.” The same is true of paragraph 841 in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which simply repeats the two sentences from Lumen Gentium. The second problem has to do with interpretation. For example, Lumen Gentium states that Muslims “profess to hold the faith of Abraham” but does not assert that they actually do hold the same faith as Abraham. Likewise, Nostra Aetate states that Muslims “revere Him [Jesus] as a prophet,” but does not grapple with the significant differences between the Jesus of the Koran and the Jesus of the Gospels—differences that extend well beyond the fact that the Koran does not acknowledge Jesus as God.

The third problem with the argument from authority as it touches on Islam is that there appears to be some uncertainty about whether Nostra Aetate was meant to be a dogmatic statement. . . .

The fourth problem with the argument from authority is that those who fall back on it often ignore the harsh assessments of Islam offered by earlier Church authorities. For example:

Pope Eugene IV, Council of Basil, 1434: “…there is hope that very many from the abominable sect of Mahomet will be converted to the Catholic Faith.”

Pope Callixtus III, 1455: “I vow to…exalt the true Faith, and to extirpate the diabolical sect of the reprobate and faithless Mahomet in the East.”

Pope Pius II, papal bull, 1459: “…the false prophet Mahomet”

. . . The harsh language of earlier Church authorities can be excused on the grounds that Islam was often at war with Christianity. The more conciliatory language of Vatican II can be better understood if we realize that Islam’s aggression against Christianity seemed entirely a thing of the past at that time. But it can be argued that the irenic statements of Vatican II have helped to create a climate of opinion among Catholics that has left them unprepared for the present state of affairs vis-à-vis Islam. And the present state of affairs seems to herald a resumption of the centuries old Islamic hostility toward Christians.

I don’t know how Jason and the Callers come down on the church’s teaching on Islam, but the more I see, the more it looks like the claims made on behalf of infallibility are overblown given the way that ordinary Roman Catholics can (and have to) splice and dice the works of their bishops. At the very least, we see here more evidence that nothing and everything changed at Vatican II.

In But Not of America (part two)

Published on by D. G. Hart9 Comments

Sometimes politically conservative Roman Catholics can appeal to Americanism to show the flaws of the Democrats. George Weigel has done this:

[Leo XIII] was, in other words, warning against confusions and distortions that are manifestly in play in certain Catholic quarters today, whether or not they were widespread in Catholic circles in late-19th-century America.

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has displayed many of these tendencies throughout her years in the national spotlight. Most recently, the House minority leader said that her Catholic faith “compels” her to “be against discrimination of any kind,” which is why she, as a Catholic, supports so-called “gay marriage.” That the teaching authority of the Church has made unmistakably clear on numerous occasions that there is and can be no such thing as “gay marriage” evidently makes not the slightest difference to Mrs. Pelosi, whose personal judgments are the magisterium she obeys.

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is another whose approach to faith, judgment, and public policy would seem to vindicate Leo XIII’s concerns. Despite the efforts of the archbishop of Kansas City, Kansas, Joseph Naumann, to convince her otherwise, Sebelius, first as governor of the Sunflower State and now as chief health-care official in the Obama administration, has insisted on the most libertine possible abortion policy. She vetoed a bill prohibiting late-term abortions shortly before leaving the governor’s office in Topeka, and she has defended the HHS mandate’s diktat that religious institutions must provide coverage including abortifacient drugs as part of “preventive health services.” That several popes and the entire Catholic hierarchy of the United States have, on numerous occasions, declared such actions beyond the bounds of moral reason — not just the bounds of Catholic doctrine, but the bounds of moral reason itself — makes no discernible difference to Secretary Sebelius. Like Representative Pelosi, she is her own magisterium.

Leo’s concerns about confusions over the natural and supernatural virtues seem prescient when one looks around the U.S. Catholic scene today. E. J. Dionne Jr. regularly praises the Church for its social-service networks (as well he should). But amidst his many attempts to bolster the fading cause of Catholic progressivism, has Dionne ever written about the absolute centrality of the sacraments to Catholic identity and mission, linking the Church’s liturgical life to its work for justice, as the leaders of the mid-20th-century Liturgical Movement always did? I don’t doubt that Dionne believes that the celebration of the Eucharist is a stronger expression of the essence of Catholicism than what any bishop says about the Ryan budget; still, no one would learn that from any of his columns since January. And in this, of course, Dionne maintains his role as chief cheerleader for the Obama administration. For it was President Obama who, at Notre Dame’s 2009 commencement, defined social-service Catholicism of a certain ideological hue as the real Catholicism — a theme to which Obama has returned in recent weeks, reminiscing about the halcyon days of his community organizing in Chicago.

Then there is the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an organization of sisters the Vatican is attempting to reform. That Vatican intervention took place not because many of these sisters supported Obamacare (pace E. J. Dionne), but because their approach to religious life embodies many of the difficulties against which Leo XIII cautioned: conscience understood as personal willfulness and set against ecclesial authority; religious obedience juxtaposed to human maturity; humility discarded for the sake of pride (in this case feminist pride). Many of the LCWR’s leaders seem to agree with Dionne that what really counts in the life of American sisters is their social service, not the vowed witness of poverty, chastity, and obedience in the midst of a culture dominated by the imperial autonomous Self. Leo XIII would have disagreed, and his prediction that any such secularist reduction of consecrated religious life would lead to its implosion has been borne out by the sad fact that the LCWR orders are dying from lack of new members.

Then there is Mario Cuomo, who in 1984 gave a distinctively Americanist speech, in Leo XIII’s sense of the term, at Notre Dame: a speech that paved the way for the national careers of Nancy Pelosi, Kathleen Sebelius, and Joe Biden, and that would have defined the curious Catholicism of the John Kerry administration, had things gone the other way in 2004. Cuomo recently told Maureen Dowd that “if the Church were my religion, I’d have given it up a long time ago. . . . All the terrible things the Church has done. Christ is my religion, the Church is not.” Yet the Church and its teachings, as Leo XIII wrote to Cardinal Gibbons in his ornate style, come to us “from the same Author and Master, ‘the Only Begotten Son, Who is in the bosom of the Father’ [John 1:18].”

Maureen Dowd’s anti-Church rants on the New York Times op-ed page would have brought an embarrassed blush to the face of a great man (and a devoted churchman) like Isaac Hecker. But in this instance, Dowd’s invitation gave Cuomo the opportunity to articulate with precision one facet of the down-market theology that shapes the new Americanism: the theology that sets Jesus (heavily edited down to a few verses from the Sermon on the Mount) against the Church. And when Jesus is juxtaposed to the Church rather them embraced as the Lord of the Church that is His Body in the world, the rest readily follows: Private judgment trumps authoritative Catholic teaching; the Church of social service is severed from, and then trumps, the Church of the sacraments; freedom is purely a matter of following conscience (no matter how ill-formed or erroneous that conscience may be); doctrine is an obstacle to witness; and Kathleen Sebelius, a Catholic cabinet officer who has declared her administration at “war” with the Catholic Church, addresses a commencement ceremony at Georgetown University, a hub of the new Americanism and its distortion of Catholic identity and Catholic social doctrine.

This new form of Catholicism Lite, a not-so-phantom hash of ideas that poses real problems for the integrity of the Church and its evangelical mission, breathes deeply of two winds that have long blown through American Christianity: the ancient Pelagian wind, with its emphasis on the righteousness of our works and how they will win our salvation; and the Congregationalist wind, with its deep suspicion that Catholic authority is incompatible with American democracy. As for the older Americanist controversy, I think the classic historiographers of U.S. Catholicism were largely right: The “Americanism” of which Leo XIII warned in Testem Benevolentiae was far more a phantom concocted by fevered, ancien-régime European minds than a heresy that threatened Catholic faith in the United States. But the problems that Leo flagged are very much with us over a century later. They are at the root of the internal Catholic culture war that has intensified as religious freedom has come under concerted assault, and as the new Americanists, who form a coherent party in a way that Isaac Hecker and his friends never did, have either denied that assault — or abetted it.

And sometimes Roman Catholics can appeal to the popes to challenge politically (and market friendly) conservatives like Weigel. For instance, here’s an excerpt from Weigel’s reaction to Benedict XVI’s encyclical, Caritas in Veritate:

There is also rather more in the encyclical about the redistribution of wealth than about wealth-creation — a sure sign of Justice and Peace default positions at work. And another Justice and Peace favorite – the creation of a “world political authority” to ensure integral human development – is revisited, with no more insight into how such an authority would operate than is typically found in such curial fideism about the inherent superiority of transnational governance. (It is one of the enduring mysteries of the Catholic Church why the Roman Curia places such faith in this fantasy of a “world public authority,” given the Holy See’s experience in battling for life, religious freedom, and elementary decency at the United Nations. But that is how they think at Justice and Peace, where evidence, experience, and the canons of Christian realism sometimes seem of little account.)

If those burrowed into the intellectual and institutional woodwork at the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace imagine Caritas in Veritate as reversing the rout they believe they suffered with Centesimus Annus, and if they further imagine Caritas in Veritate setting Catholic social doctrine on a completely new, Populorum Progressio-defined course (as one Justice and Peace consultor has already said), they are likely to be disappointed. The incoherence of the Justice and Peace sections of the new encyclical is so deep, and the language in some cases so impenetrable, that what the defenders of Populorum Progresio may think to be a new sounding of the trumpet is far more like the warbling of an untuned piccolo.

Perhaps it was criticism’s like this that prompted Weigel’s piece to go the route of the interweb’s lost and found:

Weigel celebrates Centesimus Annus which he claims “jettisoned the idea of a ‘Catholic third way’ that was somehow ‘between’ or ‘beyond’ or ‘above’ capitalism and socialism – a favorite dream of Catholics ranging from G.K.Chesterton to John A. Ryan to Ivan Illich.” Actually, both Centesimus and even more so Caritas in Veritate stress that the “Catholic way” must be prior to the claims of any economic theory, that the disposition for grace and communion must be part of the system, not a mere add-on, that unjust systems produce unjust results, and that a system that produces – at the same time – material wealth and spiritual poverty must be seen as morally and humanly suspect.

Weigel repeats the now common neo-con canard that capitalism is morally wholesome because it is driven not by greed but by human creativity. So, creative like Bernie Madoff or creative like Steve Jobs? Either way, Weigel fails to note that this celebration of wholesome capitalism is not found in the many pages of Caritas in Veritate. . . .

The gravest intellectual problem for Weigel is not his inability to see the validity of the influence of the good monsignori at Justice and Peace, nor that the Catholic social tradition permits several ways of approaching complicated economic and political issues. He claims some passages are “simply incomprehensible” and perhaps they are to him. But, the example he gives is telling. He writes that “the encyclical states that defeating Third World poverty and underdevelopment requires a ‘necessary openness, in a world context, to forms of economic activity marked by quotas of gratuitousness and communion.’ This may mean something interesting; it may mean something naïve or dumb. But, on its face, it is virtually impossible to know what it means.” Gee. I don’t think it is that difficult to understand. It means that the stance of the Christian must be one of openness to the other, especially to the poor, and that we must create shares in the economic sphere for the poor, a share that sees them as a gift from God. We must see our relationship to the poor as one of communion not exploitation. And, does Weigel truly think Pope Benedict would write something “dumb”? Even if you disagree with Pope Benedict, he is never dumb.

Weigel not only misunderstands the relationship a Christian should have to the poor, he misunderstands the relationship a Catholic should have to a papal encyclical. I had thought that it was the Pope and the bishops who had the task of authoritatively interpreting the doctrine of the Church. Silly me. Mr. Weigel, with his gold and red pens, is the official arbiter of what passes as orthodoxy. He labels parts of the new encyclical “incomprehensible,” he charges the curia with “fideism” for advocating the necessity of transnational institutions, and he casts slurs upon Pope Paul VI for Populorum Progressio. Benedict is a “gentle soul” incapable of controlling a text that bears his name and he has been duped into signing on to foolishness.

Weigel is wrong on the merits, but he is also wrong in his stance. This encyclical – all of it – bears the Pope’s signature and the respect due to all statements of the magisterium. Weigel’s arguments have long been tedious and are here tendentious. But, it is not only the intellectual dishonesty of this essay that rankles. Behind his knowing Vaticanology, Weigel betrays a disloyalty to Pope Benedict and to the memory of Pope Paul that surprised even me. I have long recognized a certain myopia and a pronounced hubris in Weigel’s writings but he has outdone himself. He should put his red and gold pens away and read the text in its entirety as an invitation to grow in discipleship. As I commented yesterday, Caritas in Veritate has something to challenge everyone.

These are squabbles you’ll never see mentioned by Jason and the Callers. Sure, dogma has not changed, though the stance that accompanies the dogmatic utterances sure has. But can anyone explain how these disputes, which hardly signify a united church, signify that the dogma of Mary’s bodily assumption even matters?

And They Thought the PCA Was Divided

Published on by D. G. Hart244 Comments

You are not going to find much on the contemporary Roman Catholic Church in Jason and the Callers’ rifling through the early church fathers. Maybe for good reason since Pope Francis has apparently opened the old fault lines of Vatican II within the U.S. hierarchy (at least):

The election of Pope Francis in March heralded a season of surprises for the Catholic church, but perhaps none so unexpected — and unsettling for conservatives — as the re-emergence of the late Chicago Cardinal Joseph Bernardin as a model for the American Catholic future.

While there is no indication that Francis knows the writings of Bernardin, who died in 1996, many say the pope’s remarks repeatedly evoke Bernardin’s signature teachings on the “consistent ethic of life” — the view that church doctrine champions the poor and vulnerable from womb to tomb — and on finding “common ground” to heal divisions in the church.

Ironically, the re-emergence of Bernardin — a man who was admired by a young Chicago organizer named Barack Obama — is exposing the very rifts he sought to bridge, especially among conservatives who thought his broad view of Catholicism was buried with him in Mount Carmel Cemetery outside Chicago.

Francis, for example, repeatedly stresses economic justice and care for the poor as priorities for Catholics, and he warned that the church has become “obsessed” with a few issues, such as abortion, contraception and homosexuality, and needs a “new balance.”

The new pope has also sought to steer the hierarchy away from conservative politics and toward a broad-based view of Catholicism “that is not just top-down but also horizontal” — focused on dialogue in the church and with the wider world.

“Please do not let up, as you fill our cups with hope as well as knowledge.”

“The point that (Bernardin’s) consistent ethic makes is exactly the same point that Pope Francis is making — let’s look at the whole picture and not just focus almost exclusively on three or so issues,” said Archbishop Michael Sheehan of Santa Fe, N.M., who had been close friends with Bernardin since the 1970s.

“I certainly think that if Cardinal Bernardin were alive he would be very pleased with what Pope Francis is saying and doing,” echoed Archbishop Joseph Fiorenza, retired archbishop of Galveston-Houston, whose 1998-2001 term as president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops was seen as one of the last in the mold of Bernardin. . . .

Several other bishops, church officials and observers agreed. But if those assessments are manna to Catholics hungry for a new direction in the church, they are anathema to conservatives who believe Bernardin epitomized everything that was wrong with the U.S. church before Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI pushed the hierarchy to the right.

“The Bernardin Era is over and the Bernardin Machine is no more,” the conservative writer George Weigel wrote in the journal First Things in a 2011 essay that trumpeted the end of a time “in which a liberal consensus dominated both the internal life of the Church and the Church’s address to public policy.”

The fact that Weigel and others would still be driving a stake through the heart of Bernardin’s legacy — as Peter Steinfels put it in a rejoinder in Commonweal magazine — 15 years after his death is a testimony to the stature Bernardin once had, and the angst he can still inspire.

In fact, a generation ago, Bernardin was viewed as the quintessential American churchman — a longtime president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and then its resident wise man, coaxing the hierarchy into approving landmark documents on war and poverty that shaped the public debate on faith in America.

Yet the “John Paul II bishops” who came to power in the 1980s and beyond saw Bernardin’s style and views as too accommodating and too reluctant to mount the barricades on behalf of a more assertive Catholic identity marked by a few hallmark issues rather than a spectrum of teachings.

So just when Jason and the Callers thought they had escaped the unsatisfying clutches of Protestantism, they entered a communion riven by the same kind of divisions that characterized the modernist-fundamentalist controversy. One side wants the church to continue to adapt to the modern world (as Vatican II taught) and the other, like neo-conservatives mugged by the reality of liberal change, wants to put the brakes on adaptation by stressing fundamental markers of Christian identity. Both sides are a long way from early church fathers in which Jason and the Callers have buried their heads.

New Evangelism Indeed

Published on by D. G. Hart56 Comments

Another interview with Pope Francis is circulating the interweb. I don’t imagine Jason and the Callers will be pleased. But I’m sure they will do their best to rescue the pope from error.

A few excerpts (the interviewer’s comments are in bold):

It’s a joke, I tell him. My friends think it is you want to convert me.
He smiles again and replies: “Proselytism is solemn nonsense, it makes no sense. We need to get to know each other, listen to each other and improve our knowledge of the world around us. Sometimes after a meeting I want to arrange another one because new ideas are born and I discover new needs. This is important: to get to know people, listen, expand the circle of ideas. The world is crisscrossed by roads that come closer together and move apart, but the important thing is that they lead towards the Good.”

Your Holiness, is there is a single vision of the Good? And who decides what it is?
“Each of us has a vision of good and of evil. We have to encourage people to move towards what they think is Good.”

Your Holiness, you wrote that in your letter to me. The conscience is autonomous, you said, and everyone must obey his conscience. I think that’s one of the most courageous steps taken by a Pope.
“And I repeat it here. Everyone has his own idea of good and evil and must choose to follow the good and fight evil as he conceives them. That would be enough to make the world a better place.”

Is the Church doing that?
“Yes, that is the purpose of our mission: to identify the material and immaterial needs of the people and try to meet them as we can. Do you know what agape is?”

Yes, I know.
“It is love of others, as our Lord preached. It is not proselytizing, it is love. Love for one’s neighbor, that leavening that serves the common good.”

Love your neighbor as yourself.
“Exactly so.”

Jesus in his preaching said that agape, love for others, is the only way to love God. Correct me if I’m wrong.
“You’re not wrong. The Son of God became incarnate in the souls of men to instill the feeling of brotherhood. All are brothers and all children of God. Abba, as he called the Father. I will show you the way, he said. Follow me and you will find the Father and you will all be his children and he will take delight in you. Agape, the love of each one of us for the other, from the closest to the furthest, is in fact the only way that Jesus has given us to find the way of salvation and of the Beatitudes.” . . .

Do you feel touched by grace?
“No one can know that. Grace is not part of consciousness, it is the amount of light in our souls, not knowledge nor reason. Even you, without knowing it, could be touched by grace.”

Without faith? A non-believer?
“Grace regards the soul.”

I do not believe in the soul.
“You do not believe in it but you have one.”

Your Holiness, you said that you have no intention of trying to convert me and I do not think you would succeed.
“We cannot know that, but I don’t have any such intention.”

And St. Francis?
“He’s great because he is everything. He is a man who wants to do things, wants to build, he founded an order and its rules, he is an itinerant and a missionary, a poet and a prophet, he is mystical. He found evil in himself and rooted it out. He loved nature, animals, the blade of grass on the lawn and the birds flying in the sky. But above all he loved people, children, old people, women. He is the most shining example of that agape we talked about earlier.”

I don’t think this is what George Weigel had in mind for the new evangelization.

Update: once again, Francis has made statements that require folks without the appropriate pay grade to tell us what the pope really meant. Here is Jimmy Akin explaining what the chief explainer was supposed to have explained:

8) So what did Pope Francis mean by his comments on proselytization?

He and Scalfari were joking about converting each other in the interview, and Pope Francis assured Scalfari that he wasn’t going to strong-arm him to convert to Christianity right in the interview.
He said that employing such strong-arm tactics is “solemn nonsense, it makes no sense. We need to get to know each other, listen to each other.”

Later he contrasted proselytization with the way Jesus preached the Gospel, which was based on love.
Finally, he emphasized: “I believe I have already said that our goal is not to proselytize but to listen to needs, desires and disappointments, despair, hope.”

In other words, the Pope believes that evangelization should not involve trying to strong-arm people (proselytization) but that the Gospel should be preached with love and involve a dialogue in which Christians listening to unbelievers and their concerns and help them move toward Christ through a positive demonstration of word and action.

I do not know why St. Patrick sprinkling water on the Irish would be considered strong-arming. In the ex opere operato world of Roman Catholic sacramentalism, baptizing unconverted persons was the surest way to convert them. Baptismal efficacy was one of the reasons why Trent made provisions for non-priests, even Jews and infidels, to perform baptisms on unconverted persons near death. If salvation comes through the waters of baptism, and if the Roman Catholic Church operated according to that logic for almost a millennium, I am not sure why Pope Francis or his interpreters are looking for new ways to evangelize. It looks to this Old Lifer like Vatican II is baaaaack.

Is Infant Baptism (or the Mass) a Life-Style Choice?

Published on by D. G. Hart7 Comments

George Weigel comments on the anniversary of the Edict of Milan (313). I agree with this (though leveling the dangers of coercion to Protestants and Roman Catholics when Inquisitions were a Roman Catholic reality until 1870 is a bit much):

The immediate effects of the Constantinian settlement, both good and ill, were limned with customary wit and literary skill by Evelyn Waugh in the novel Helena. After 313, the tombs of the martyrs were publicly honored; so were the martyr-confessors, often disfigured by torture, who emerged from the Christian underground to kiss each other’s wounds at the first ecumenical council. Before those heroes met at Nicaea in 325, though, grave theological questions had gotten ensnared up in imperial court intrigues and ecclesiastical politics. Later unions of altar and throne led to a general cultural forgetting of Lactantius’ wisdom, as the Church employed the “civil arm” to enforce orthodoxy. Protestantism proved no less vulnerable to the temptation to coercion than Catholicism and Orthodoxy; one might even argue that the seventeenth-century Peace of Westphalia, which ended the European wars of religion by establishing the principle of cuius regio eius religio (the prince’s religion is the people’s religion), reversed the accomplishments of the “Edict of Milan”—and was, in fact, the West’s first modern experiment in the totalitarian coercion of consciences.

But then he shows the addling effects of preoccupation with the political outcomes of faith:

Very few twenty-first-century Christians would welcome a return to state establishments of religion as the accepted norm. So however much the Constantinian settlement led Christianity into what some regard as a lengthy Babylonian captivity to state power, the “Edict of Milan” also affirmed truths that have proven stronger over time than the temptation to use Caesar for God’s work. Today’s challenge is quite different: it’s the temptation to let Caesar, in his various forms, reduce religious conviction to a privacy right of lifestyle choice.

What about when Christ’s followers reduce religious conviction to a privacy right? What Weigel doesn’t see is that the churches are as complicit in privatizing religion as the Obama administration. When Manhattan Declarationists, including Protestants, Roman Catholics, and Orthodox, defend religious freedom in the name of the gospel, when the Gospel Coalition understands its union of Presbyterians, Baptists, and independents as defending the gospel, or when participants at Vatican II recognize Muslims, Jews, and Protestants as on the way to salvation, the particularities of Christianity like baptism and the Lord’s supper fall into irrelevance almost as quickly as it takes to say the Pledge of Allegiance.

Now lest I fall prey to the same error of leveling George Weigel to President Obama’s status, I will grant that the Manhattan Declaration, the Gospel Coalition, and Vatican II mean/meant well. Then again, so does the president. And in both cases the means of grace, word, sacrament, and prayer, that I spend so much time defending (as part of my private responsibilities) make as much difference to the Declarationists, the Allies, and the Cardinals (and their ecumenical observers) as the Seventy-Sixers do to professional sports.

When This World Elbows Its Way Past the World to Come

Published on by D. G. Hart123 Comments

In addition to reading about Turkey, I also brought along materials that have to do explicitly and implicitly with Roman Catholicism. The explicit source is David I. Kertzer’s The Kidnaping of Edgardo Mortara – the case of the Jewish boy abducted in 1858 by the Vatican that led to the 1870 collapse of the Papal States. But I also brought along some back issues of magazines and that includes several issues of First Things.

Last Friday I ran across two remarkably different statements on the relationship between the Christian faith and the world’s affairs. The first, the classic pre-Vatican 2 perspective, ran like this:

. . . this life has not been given to us so that we can use it to enjoy the pleasures of this world, pleasures that alienate us from God, that pervert the heart, that cloud our judgment, that overwhelm our will, pleasures that unfortunately simply produce agitation, rancor, competition, jealousy, affliction, and unhappiness. (Archbishop of Bologna, Christmas letter, 1858)

The second came in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis:

All men of good will . . . believe that there are energies in the free human spirit whereby man may fulfill his destiny on earth, which is to be, not God, but the image of God. All men who believe in God are agreed that He is the Master of history. Man, therefore, manifests himself as the image of God chiefly by his intelligent, confident efforts to master the course of historical events and direct it toward the common good of the peoples of earth. (John Courtney Murray’s response to Pacem in Terris, quoted by George Weigel in First Things, February 2013)

Protestants used to call the difference between these outlooks like these a contrast that separates historic Christian orthodoxy. And those differences invariably attended the church’s embrace of a nation’s mission. I have no idea how conservative Roman Catholics account for such changes in outlook — Americanism used to be the explanation. But speaking about the political order — as if the church has that task — does seem to be the precondition for forgetting that the differences between the citizens of City of God and the City of Man cannot be correlated to life in the earthly city.

Americanism: Protestant and Roman Catholic

Published on by D. G. Hart7 Comments

Scott Clark reposted a piece recently on the ways Protestant conjure with dominant forms of American religiosity. His conclusion ran as follows:

There are conservatives, who embrace the past but must negotiate a modus vivendi with American Religion, and there are liberals who are quite ready to discard the past and go where ever the culture demands so as to try to remain “relevant” and influential. There is a third way to relate to American religion, however, and that is confessionalism, which is neither liberal nor conservative, but it is what the Reformed Churches have always confessed to be the theology, piety, and practice revealed in the Word of God.

The relationship between confessionalism and Americanism also has ramifications for 2k and its reception. Critics of 2k usually equate its proponents with selling out to American notions of the separation of church and state, or worse. These critics would have us return (even though the churches have also come round to church-state separation) to Geneva of 1560, Edinburgh of 1590, or Boston of 1640. But any political theology that embraces the U.S.’s novos ordo seclorum is a capitulation of Christianity to liberal politics.

Curious to observe is a similar dynamic among Roman Catholics. It is sometimes named a debate between Whig and Augustinian Thomists (though the Augustine invoked here ironically sounds more like the Anglican John Milbank than the Bishop of Hippo). The so-called Augustinians are critical of folks like George Weigel, Michael Novak, and the late Richard John Neuhaus for conforming Roman Catholicism to American political and economic conventions. Tracey Rowland outlines the differences in an interview here (almost a decade old):

What I argued in my book “Culture and the Thomist Tradition: After Vatican II” is that there is a division between those who think that the Thomist tradition should accommodate itself to the culture of modernity, particularly the economic dimensions of this culture — the self-described “Whig Thomists” — and those who believe that modernity and its liberal tradition are really toxic to the flourishing of the faith.

Those who take the latter position do not want to supplement the Thomist tradition with doses of Enlightenment values. They are very broadly described as Augustinian Thomists for the want of a better label because, in a manner consistent with St. Augustine’s idea of the two cities, they reject the claim of the liberal tradition to be neutral toward competing perspectives of the good and competing theological claims.

While the Whigs argue that liberalism is the logical outgrowth of the classical-theistic synthesis, the Augustinian Thomists argue that the liberal tradition represents its mutation and heretical reconstruction, and they tend to agree with Samuel Johnson that the devil — not Thomas Aquinas — was the first Whig.

There are thus two different readings of modernity and with that, two different readings of how the Church should engage the contemporary world. While the Whigs want the Church to accommodate the culture of modernity, the Augustinians favor a much more critical stance.

She goes on to draw the contrast this way:

The Whigs want to baptize the current international economic order, while the Augustinians take a more critical approach, arguing that there are economic practices characteristic of this order that cannot be squared with the social teaching of the Church.

Moreover, the Augustinians are more likely to point out that most people do not sit down and develop a worldview for themselves from hours of philosophical and theological reflection. They tacitly pick up values and ideas from the institutions in which they work.

The Augustinians argue that there are aspects of the culture of modernity that act as barriers to the flourishing of Christian practice and belief, and unless the culture is changed, no amount of intellectual gymnastics on the part of the Church’s scholars will be of help to those 1 billion Catholics who have to make a living within the world.

In other words, if one has to be a saint not to be morally compromised by the culture in which one works, then there is something wrong with that culture.

So, the Augustinians are critical of liberalism in the fashion of American political and economic arrangements, and believe that Whigs don’t understand the incompatibility between Roman Catholicism and the kind of modernity that the United States has embodied. The Augustinian complaint is another lament about what America does to religion. (About this debate among Thomists the Callers are generally ignorant.)

But what the Augustinians want to see replace the liberal order is a dicey proposition. The Augustinians, whether they know it or not, are echoing Leo XIII’s condemnation of Americanism as a heresy. Leo’s verdict was far from clear, nor was it free from ultramontanist fear mongers. But the thrust of Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae (1899) was that efforts to accommodate Roman Catholicism to the American way of life were erroneous. This included the efforts of bishops who argued for the legitimacy of the separation of church and state as a viable way for the church to conduct its affairs. Leo still had the Syllabus of Errors (1864) echoing throughout the halls of the Vatican and he was not going to be the pope to give up resisting modern civilization.

An important difference between the Reformed Protestant and Roman Catholic developments is that 2kers do not praise or even baptize the American system the way that Whig Thomists do sometimes. 2k advocates appropriately give 2 cheers for the American political order (and are fairly silent about economics — though Jason Stellman used to sound Occupy-Wall-Streetish). Weigel and company usually give 3 cheers for the U.S. and regard the nation in Lincolnian terms — the “last best hope of earth.” 2kers know that the church through its ministry of the gospel of Jesus Christ is humanity’s last best hope. Which leads me to think that the Augustinians have a point about their Whiggish brethren if the latter confuse the blessings of liberty with the redemption purchased by Christ.