Tag: Italy

Terry Mattingly is Tightening My Jaws

Published on by D. G. Hart2 Comments

Mr. Mattingly’s point, as someone with journalistic credibility, is to point out how journalists get religion stories wrong. I get it. Reporters make mistakes. Worse, they have bias. But what if Mr. Mattingly gets journalists wrong?

Case in point. He pits the New York Times’ and Boston Globe’s (via Crux) coverage of Pope Francis’ refusal to meet with the chief Italian bishop as an indication of the pope’s refusal to identify publicly with a pro-family, anti-gay marriage parade sponsored by the Italian episcopate. Here is a crucial passage from the Crux:

Pope Francis abruptly canceled a meeting last Wednesday with Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco of Genoa, the president of the Italian bishops’ conference and a vocal proponent of Family Day. Many took that as a snub, suggesting that Francis wants to keep his distance from the fight.

Two days later, however, Francis reversed course and stepped directly into the debate.

In an annual speech to a Vatican court, Francis issued a blunt warning that “there can be no confusion between the family willed by God and any other type of union,” which was taken by Italians as a criticism of the Cirinnà bill and, at least indirectly, an endorsement of Family Day.

Mattingly thinks this shows that the Times’ report — which indicated a papal slap down of pro-family Italians — was wrong.

Why isn’t the papal speech on Aug. 22 – the one stating “there can be no confusion between the family willed by God and every other type of union” – relevant to the Times report that was published on Aug. 24?

Hello.

Saying something to the Vatican court is not meeting with the head Italian bishop. Nor is it an endorsement of the pro-family rally. Even Roman Catholic theologians know this:

[Pope Francis] has not directly endorsed the upcoming Family Day; he has not appealed to Italian politicians or to Italian Catholics; and he has emphasized repeatedly that this is something in the hands of the Catholic laity. His speech to the Rota Romana last week was clear in drawing a distinction between Catholic marriage and other unions, but it was a speech in no way similar to those given by John Paul II and Benedict XVI. It was a strong defense of traditional Catholic marriage, but made no references to Italian politics or “non-negotiable values.”

It’s clear that the Vatican has a strong preference for a same-sex union law over one for gay marriage; further, it views the section of the bill that would legalize gestational surrogacy as alarming and rushed through by the government of Matteo Renzi, a Catholic whose strongest suit is surprising allies and enemies alike with the rapidity of his actions. Francis has remained largely disengaged from the politics of the bill, and his main effort seems to be protecting the authority of the pope from any attempt to manipulate it—especially when that attempt comes from Italian bishops. Interestingly, an audience scheduled with Cardinal Bagnasco was canceled the day before it was supposed to take place, on January 20.

We do not know yet what kind of popular support Family Day 2016 will have, but it is clear that Pope Francis has reset the role of the papacy not only in Italian domestic politics, but also in Italian ecclesiastical politics.

Sure, the theologian in question, Massimo Faggioli, is sympathetic to the Times except when Ross Douthat is the author. Still, its not as if Mattingly’s take on matters Roman Catholic is such an obvious one.

Competing Paradigms and Church Politics

Published on by D. G. Hart15 Comments

First, a paradigm that Bryan Cross has not considered — the Italian one:

Anyone who knows the inner reality of Catholic life is well aware that at the retail level, there’s always a sort of negotiation that goes on between what the rules say and what actually happens. It’s not about hypocrisy or disobedience, but adapting universal norms to the infinite complexity of real-life human situations.

I was once at a talk given by a senior Vatican official when a questioner said he had a sin he wasn’t ready to confess but still felt drawn to receive Communion, even though the rules say he shouldn’t.

“The law of the church is clear,” the official responded. “You have to go to confession first.” Then the official said, “But now let me talk to you person to person. As a priest, I can’t substitute my conscience for yours. I can’t tell you to go or not to go. You have to make that choice in conscience, always bearing in mind that it must be a well-formed conscience.”

That’s the Italian view of law, which permeates the psychology of the church — law is an aspiration, not an absolute, which must be adapted to individual circumstances.

Second, the people’s paradigm in contrast to their bishop’s or the pope’s:

Medjugorje: On Monday, a commission created under Benedict XVI and presided over by Italy’s powerful Cardinal Camillo Ruini submitted the results of a four-year inquest into the alleged apparitions and revelations of the Virgin Mary at Medjugorje in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It will be up to Francis to decide what to do, though some felt he tipped his hand in mid-November during a homily in his morning Mass in which he said that Mary “is not a postmaster sending messages every day.” In the Jan. 23 edition of Corriere della Sera, famed Vatican writer Vittorio Messori said it’ll be a painful decision whichever way it goes: If Francs rules the apparitions are false, millions of faithful who flock to Medjugorje will feel deceived and betrayed; if he says they’re authentic, it would be “devastating” for canon law, which leaves to the local bishop the right to judge such phenomena in his diocese, and two bishops in a row have said no. For that reason, Messori predicted the ruling will be that “for now” there’s no proof these events are supernatural rather than the more definitive, “there’s proof they’re not supernatural.”

Last, the transparency paradigm (which isn’t necessarily the one to use with the “millions of faithful” when it comes to apparitions):

This week, Scarano faced another arrest warrant on charges of money laundering, as prosecutors charged he paid around 60 people in cash to write checks to him for roughly 10,000 euro, then used those checks to create a false paper trail to cover as much as $10 million stashed in various accounts, including the Vatican bank. . . .

Faced with the clamor these two storylines are generating, the Vatican response so far has been a deafening silence.

Not so long ago, one could have counted on somebody loudly questioning whether civil investigators were overstepping their boundaries by intruding on the Vatican’s sovereign autonomy. One recalls, for instance, that when former Naples Cardinal Michele Giordano learned his phone had been wiretapped as part of an investigation of a real estate scam orchestrated by his brother in the late 1990s, the cardinal testily snapped, “I could have been talking to the pope!”

It’s also easy to imagine that someone might have implied, if not stated outright, that these investigations are part of a political, media, and judicial campaign to drag the church through the mud, that the charges themselves are false or exaggerated, or that the Vatican’s role in the story is so negligible as to make even mentioning it gratuitous.

This time around, however, Vatican officials seem content to allow the criminal probes to play out without protest or perceptions of interference.

While Francis has not put out a formal gag order, people who otherwise might have been inclined to pop off seem to have gotten the memo: If transparency and accountability are the new watchwords, then doing or saying anything that smacks of obstruction of justice is probably not a good career move.

Nation, Race, Church

Published on by D. G. Hart43 Comments

What is my primary identity? I am a white man or less crudely, a person of European descent. I am also a citizen of the U.S. And then, rounding out personal identities, I am a member of the communion known as the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

But if I check my wallet, the only ID card I find comes from the State of Michigan – a driver’s license (the photo on which identifies me as a white guy with receding hair). When I travel I have a passport issued by the United States (and a similarly dopey photo of a follicly challenged white man). So far, no ecclesiastical body has taken me up on my observation of the need for church passports. That way, we could when on the road, show that our papers are in order and that our membership is in good standing. We could also receive a stamp to verify to the home church authorities that we were present for church and if we partook of the Lord’s Supper.

So far, I am unaware of any documents that would certify my racial or ethnic identity. I know some fancy cats and dogs have breeding papers. The last time humans may have thought about such documentation, the effects were not pleasant. So let’s not go there.

These were some of the thoughts I had after listening to a story on NPR about Italian opposition to Cecile Kyenge, recently appointed as the first black cabinet minister within the Italian government. If Americans think that racism is bad on this side of the Atlantic, I wonder what they would do with Italians referring to Kyenge as a monkey and throwing bananas her way when speaking in public. Granted, it would not be fair to tarnish all Italians with the accusation of racism since the Northern League Party has been responsible for the ugly opposition to Kyenge, a party that accounts for 18 of Italy’s 315 Senators. Then again, can anyone imagine any political candidate winning an election in the U.S. if he were associated with this kind of racism?

So far, so nation and race. We have citizens of Italy who are of European descent (duh!) opposing an African-Italian politician. What about Christianity and church membership. Italy (another duh) is a nation whose citizens have long and deep ties to the Roman Catholic Church. Of course, the Vatican was a major speed bump to Italy’s emergence as an independent nation, and tensions between Italian nationalism and Roman Catholicism existed down to World War II. Still, it is not inconceivable to think of Italians as having some awareness and affection for the Roman Catholic church. And that might lead us to think that Christians, like Roman Catholics, would not react in such a hostile way to politicians like Kyenge. After all, this is a church that puts “universal” in its very name. No matter how bad Christian practice is in Europe, being Catholic, you would think, would lift you out of the particularities of race and nation to identify at least with other Christians if not other humans in a universal way. But apparently Roman Catholicism has not had that affect on Italians just as evangelicalism has not lifted Protestants in the United States, despite all that mystical union with the body of Christ business, above identifying the United States with God’s redemptive purposes.

The Vatican has in the past spoken out against Italy’s racism, so it is not as if the Roman curia are unaware of the problem. Even so, this news does remind us of the older associations between Roman Catholicism and a European conservatism that opposed egalitarianism, individualism, and democracy. (Say what you will about the problems of those political sensibilities, they have been largely responsible for countering racial views that elevate one group above others.) I mention this Roman Catholic illiberalism if only because of a fascinating book by Peter D’Agostino about Roman Catholics in the United States and Italy and how the former sided with a Vatican that was opposed to the kind of political structures on which Americans usually prided themselves. (The book is just the start of D’Agostino’s fascination for me.) I have not finished the book, but here is an indication of the argument he makes:

Students of religion in the United States have ignored Fascist Italy. Studies of the interwar years rarely mention the Italy-Vatican rapprochement of the 1920s or the Lateran Pacts of 1929. Historians John McGreevy and Philip Gleason have analyzed mid-twentieth-century American liberal critiques of Catholicism as an antidemocratic, authoritarian culture with affinities to “fascism” or “totalitarianism.” In their work, “fascism (not Fascism) is a generic term for authoritarianism, and the “rise of fascism” happened in the 1930s, as if Fascist Italy did not exist in the 1920s. They tend to conflate informed anti-Fascists struggling for a democratic Italy with the bigotry of Paul Blanshard. . . . Ultimately, they sidestep the issue liberals raised: the substantial links between the American Church and Fascist Italy for two decades. . . .

On occasion American Catholics did criticize Fascism. It does not follow, however, that “what appeared to Italian exiles and American liberals to be a monolithic pro-Mussolini Catholic chorus were in reality the voices of individual churchmen.” This claim ignores hierarchical structures of power and community vigilance that belie the notion that the Church was a group of atomized individuals free to articulate broadly divergent views on matters relating to the Roman Question. Attention to the timing and content of American Catholic criticism of Fascism during the Italy-Vatican rapprochemement of the 1920s reveals the collaboration of a transnational church. When the Vatican praised Fascism for outlawing Masonry, American Catholics voiced similar praise. When the Vatican protested Fascist interference in the moral development of Italian youth, so did American Catholics. When the Vatican instigated the dissolution of the Partito Popolare Italiano (PPI), American Catholics agreed it was a wise policy. When the Vatican withheld commentary on the beating, imprisonment, or murder of an anti-Fascist, American Catholics also remained silent. (159-160)

So sometimes church membership does transcend nation (American Roman Catholics following Rome), and sometimes it does not (Italians today).

My point is not to find more skeletons in Rome’s closet. I do think this is another piece of Roman Catholic history that Jason and the Callers have airbrushed from their philosophical accounts of the papacy. But the fascinating point, I think, is the degree to which Christianity actually affects a person’s politics and identity. Does church membership define someone more than race and nation? Sure, we know what the ideal is. But can Christians actually escape the constraints of history like to whom and where you are born?

Italy or Infallibility

Published on by D. G. Hart16 Comments

The claims to papal infallibility to which John Henry Newman objected came at precisely the time when Pius IX was on the hot seat with Italian republicans and Europe’s ruling class.

The military defeats suffered by Pius IX, far from leading him to make peace with the new regime, prompted him to go newly on the attack. In 1862, his allocution, Maxima quidem laetitia, reaffirmed that the Pope could not be free to do his spiritual duty without temporal power, and on December 8, 1864, he issued one of the most famous – and controversial – encyclicals of modern times, Quanta cura, with its accompanying Syllabus of Errors.

The idea of preparing an inventory of the errors of modern times had long been championed by the Jesuits of Civilita Cattolica. A team of Vatican experts drew up the list, and the Pope’s encyclical and the Syllabus were sent out together to all bishops with a cover letter sent from Cardinal Antonelli. The Cardinal explained: “The Pope has already in Encyclicals and Allocutions condemned the principal errors of this most unhappy age . . . . Therefore the Pope wished a Syllabus of these Errors to be drawn up for the use of all Catholic bishops that they may have before their eyes the pernicious doctrines that he has proscribed.”

For the Pope’s enemies, the Syllabus simply confirmed their belief that the pontifical state – if not the papacy itself – was a glaring anachronism in the nineteenth century. Among the pernicious doctrines the Pope condemned were that people should be free to profess whatever religion they thought best; that even those not in the Catholic Church could aspire to eternal salvation; that Catholics could disagree with the need for the Pope to have temporal power; that there should be a separation of Church and state; and “that the Pope could and should reconcile himself to and agree with progress, liberalism, and modern civilization.”

Even many loyal Catholics – perhaps most – were shocked by the Syllabus, in which the Pope seemed to condemn progress and modern civilization. For the anticlerical forces, the Syllabus was “manna from heaven,” in the words of Roger Aubert, Pius IX’s biographer. One Piedmontese newspaper, noting that the Pope had condemned modern science, delightfully (if maliciously) asked whether he now planned to ban trains, telegraph, steam engines, and gaslights from his – albeit recently reduced – lands. (David Kertzer, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, 257-58)

(Parenthetically, Protestants were and continue to be a mixed bag when it comes to progress and modern science. And that may be too charitable, since postmillenialism too readily morphed into paeans to modernity as the outworking of God’s special purposes. At the same time, Protestants who read Wendell Berry and figure out how to bemoan the dislocating effects of modernity often turn to Roman Catholicism as the Christian answer to the woes of progressive civilization. These folks find the Syllabus of Errors congenial if not prophetic. Too bad that every pope since Vatican 2 has refused to agree with Pius IX. These post-Vatican 2 popes have wanted the church to engage the modern world and update the Roman Catholic faith. Which makes me wonder why the Protestants who convert to Rome as a conservative response to modernity don’t join forces with the SSPXers who are truly opposed to modernity and to the contemporary Vatican’s indifference to if not outright rejection of Pius IX’s Syllabus.)

Kertzer also points out that Pius IX not only doubled down on his divine status in troubled times, but also continued to oversee the Roman Inquisition’s abduction of Jewish children.

In 1864, another episode involving a Jewish boy demonstrated anew the Vatican’s intention to hold out against the forces of secularization. The case involved 9-year-old Giuseppe Coen, who lived in Rome’s ghetto. One day Guiseppe failed to return home from his job at a nearby cobbler’s shop. His parents soon discovered that he had been taken to the House of the Catechumens, forced there, they said, by the Catholic cobbler. For the Jews and the enemies of Church temporal power, this had all the makings of Mortara redux.

At the beginning of August, when protests about the new case began to appear in the liberal press the church-allied Giormale di Roma painted its own picture of what had happened. Giuseppe Coen, a Jewish boy of the Rome ghetto, had long nourished the wish to become a Christian, along with the fear that he would be severely punished if his parents heard of it. “For fifteen days he begged his employer to take him to the House of the Catechumens.” Finally, on July 25, taking advantage of the visit by a relative of the cobbler who happened to have a priest with him, Guiseppe’s pleas were answered. They took him to the Catechumens, whether the boy convinced the Rector of his fervent desire to become a Christian.

The Coens had wasted no time in seeking French aid, for in the wake of the Mortara case, they had no illusions of getting their son released simply by petitioning the Church. Three days after the child’s disappearance, the French ambassador went to see Cardinal Antonelli on their behalf, and he returned to the Vatican the following morning to renew his angry protests.

The French liberal press quickly took the case up, demanding to know why French soldiers were standing by while Jewish children were being stolen from their parents. On August 13, the papal nuncio in Paris wrote to Cardinal Antonelli to report on his recent unpleasant meeting with the French minister of foreign affairs, Drouyn de Lhuys. The Minister railed against the holding of the boy, calling it an action contrary to the laws of nature, “carried out and sanctioned by the Holy See under the eyes of the French troops.” The nuncio reported, “I responded that France’s protection of the pope’s temporal power did not give it the right to involve it in measure and actions that regarded the Pontiff’s spiritual jurisdiction.” (258-59)

Echoes of Unam Sanctam were still reverberating in the Vatican, apparently. The papacy did not have the temporal power strong enough to make its spiritual power stick. The papal states were no match for Austria or France. But even if the papacy depended on the French and Austrians for protection, its officials could not recognize that the papacy was not temporally or spiritually independent. If Pius IX regarded his temporal power as essential to his spiritual authority, and yet he was not strong enough to defend his Legations, then the Church was not truly free. But this did not prevent the Vatican from regarding the stronger political powers as beholden to the pope. Apparently, the Vatican’s spiritual power not only depended on the integrity of the Papal States (temporal power), but also on the civil muscle of Roman Catholic emperors and kings. All power, civil and ecclesiastical, flowed from the Eternal City.