Tag: Synod 2014

Don't Stop, Believin'

Published on by D. G. Hart908 Comments

I wonder if Jason and the Callers were aware of statistics like these when they aligned with a communion they thought to be the arbiter of Christian truth:

One-third of divorced and remarried Catholics who have not had their first marriage annulled receive Communion, even if they have not sought the permission of their priest.

Catholics in Britain and Ireland in such circumstances were almost twice as likely to receive Communion without having sought permission as US Catholics (29 per cent vs 17 per cent). . . .

Practising Catholics said the chief threats to marriage and family life were: artificial contraception; gay marriage and adoption; pressure caused by long working hours, money worries and unemployment; and the proliferation of pornography.

Almost three-quarters of practising Catholics welcomed the presence of lay people at the Synod, with one-quarter saying they wished more had been invited to attend and to be involved in decision-making.

Twenty per cent of Mass-going women and 15 per cent of Mass-going men said they sometimes felt the Church was too focused on the family to the point where they sometimes felt alienated.

Eighty-nine per cent of practising Catholics said a child ideally needed a mother and a father, while 11 per cent said a parent’s gender was less important than his or her commitment to the child.

About half of respondents said there was a danger the synod would be dominated by Western concerns rather than those affecting Catholics in the developing world.

Some 83 per cent of practising Catholics said they regularly pray with their children, or did when they were younger, and 78 per cent said they often talk to them about faith, or did when they were younger.

Of the clergy who took part, more than a third said the ban on artificial contraception could be ignored in good conscience and that cohabitation could be an acceptable stage en route to marriage.

To put this data which is skewed toward people who read The Tablet and use its website, consider the results of a Pew survey from last year:

How do U.S. Catholics view same-sex marriage?

As of 2012, about half of U.S. Catholics support same-sex marriage. This level of support has increased over the past decade, rising from 40% in favor in 2001.

How do U.S. Catholics view abortion?

Half of U.S. Catholics overall (51%) say that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while 44% say it should be illegal in all or most cases. Among white Catholics, 54% say abortion should be legal in all or most cases. By contrast, among Hispanic Catholics, 53% say abortion should be illegal in all or most cases. In the general public, 54% say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while 39% say it should be illegal in all or most cases.

How do U.S. Catholics view contraception?

Just 15% of U.S. Catholics say that using contraceptives is morally wrong. Greater percentages say contraception is either morally acceptable (41%) or not a moral issue (36%). Catholics who attend Mass at least once a week are more evenly split. About three-in-ten say using contraceptives is morally wrong (27%). Similar percentages say it is morally acceptable (33%) or not a moral issue (30%).

Maybe if you are comparing yourself to the Protestant mainline, or to the Church of England, you take some encouragement from these numbers. But if you’re the Yankees or Steelers of the ecclesiastical world and rooting for a winner is what you signed up for when you crossed the Tiber, what happens when your ecclesiastical players keep coming up short in the fantasy church league?

For this reason, as much attention as people have given to the gathering of bishops in Rome over the last two weeks, not enough has been directed at how a church with so much authority, universal jurisdiction, apostolic succession, and charism — so many trophies — has been so ineffective in shepherding its flock.

I for one cannot understand how Roman Catholicism’s defenders (whether liberal or conservative) can continue to claim superiority. For instance, from the left, Michael Sean Winters consoles himself that Rome is not the Episcopal Church (which is sort of like the Phillies’ fans saying their team is not the Cubs):

A friend forwarded me a tweet from, of all people, Mia Farrow. It read: “Disappointed Catholics – imagine no Cardinals, Popes or bankers. All welcome, gay marriage, women and married priests – the Episcopal church.” Now, I do not mean to suggest that Ms. Farrow speaks for informed Episcopalianism. But, the obvious rejoinder is “No apostolic succession, no Real Presence, no ministry of unity in the Petrine office – some deal. And hurry, before they close up shop and turn off the lights.” And, the fact is that you know and I know Catholics who think as Ms. Farrow does. Their agenda has trumped everything and that is the problem. Ideology gets in the way of the unity of faith to which Pope Francis is calling us. It is this prior commitment to a desired outcome, ideologically defined, that keeps the Holy Spirit from our counsels and charity from our discussions. In short, ideology can frustrate genuine progress.

So apostolic succession is the rejoinder to those for whom it doesn’t matter (remember “pray, pay and obey”?), or even to bishops who don’t invoke their episcopal power? Again to use the Phillies’ analogy, so the Phillies were awful this year but darn, weren’t they good in 2008 — you know, once a world champion always a world champion. Tell that to the Red Sox. But if you want to keep insisting that the Phillies invented baseball, okay, but I’m not sure what kind of conversations about baseball are really possible if you’re going to take that line even though your bishops conceded fifty years ago that other teams helped contribute to baseball.

Then from the right we have the example of David Mills who compares (admirably I should say because I’d much rather interact with a conservative Roman Catholic who tells me I am wrong) Roman Catholicism to the best house in the neighborhood:

In the preface to Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis described the Church as a house with various rooms occupied by different traditions, including Catholicism. It’s not that good an image, even from his point of view, but it does give us one way of understanding our relation to our Protestant friends. Lewis would not have accepted this reimagining of his metaphor, but Catholics, who know that the Church isn’t merely one denomination among others, will know that the Catholic Church is the house, and the rooms are occupied by the various rites within the Church. To enter the house, one must be a member of the family. Friends may set up homes in the yard. They are within the pale, the relation the Church calls “real but imperfect communion.”

The Church will share as much as she can with her separated brethren. The family living in the house and the friends living in the yard may spend a lot of time together, and greatly enjoy each other’s company, but at the end of the day they each go back to their own homes. Some living in the yard resent never being let into the house, even for a family meal. It seems unkind and irrational. They’re happy to have Catholics in their homes and cannot understand why Catholics will not let them in theirs.

The homes they set up in the yard will keep them relatively warm and dry, if they build well, as some do, though not all. Life in the yard is much better than life on the street. Yet, however pleasant the families’ lives in the yard, they would be much happier and healthier and more productive if they got to live in the house itself. They are not homeless, which is a good thing, but they’re not really at home either.

. . . Outside it they do not experience the blessings only found on the inside. The positive reason is that it is a wonderful house. It is a great place to live. It is the best place to live. The kitchen is stocked with food, and the living room filled with comfortable furniture. The bathrooms have hot showers and working toilets, and the bedrooms are good. It is cool in the summer and warm in the winter. It has interesting architectural features and curious nooks and crannies. It is full of art, books, and music. It is where your family lives.

The Church is where the faith is found in its fullness, its plenitude, its abundance. I know this from my own experience of being outside the Church and then being on the inside. For over twenty years I was an Episcopalian of the sort called Anglo-Catholic, an active one who volunteered in various conservative organizations and taught at the Episcopal Church’s most conservative seminary. I lived in a rather nice house in the yard, one that from the outside looked very much like the Catholic house: much smaller, of course, but more tastefully designed and aesthetically pleasing, and sitting closer to the Catholic house than many of the others. But in the yard nevertheless, as conveyed by the joke, which even Episcopalians would make, that their religious body was “Catholic lite.”

But isn’t this house, as the recent synod and polls suggest, a little drafty, in need of a new roof, with a septic system in disrepair, and an owner who doesn’t want to do any work on repairing the house because he think he owns the whole neighborhood (maybe like the one the Addams Family occupied)? When will this beautiful house get the maintenance it needs? Or when will the residents of the house actually listen to what the real estate agents are saying (some of whom teach classes in the house’s universities) that the house no longer matters since it’s more fun to hang out with the homeless?

And then comes the offhand comment about the synod that you just can’t believe someone said, in this case another fellow whom I admire, Peter Lawler:

Someone was wondering whether it was my “Pope Francis” moment in which I was subtly repudiating Catholic teaching on the purposes of sex and marriage. Well, I don’t think our pope is actually doing that, although I will say he’s filled the air with mixed messages. But maybe he’s right in some way such that, although the truth doesn’t change, recent developments might suggest that the gift of talking about it lovingly and effectively is in short supply. I certainly don’t claim to have that gift.

I don’t like to have to make this connection, but Roman Catholic marriage practices that led the bishops to Rome to think about what to do occurred on the watch of one of the church’s most beloved popes, John Paul II. Not only was he revered by many (maybe not the progressives), but he also offered one of the most philosophically rich accounts of sex, the body, and marriage that Roman Catholics have ever seen. And for all this you get a group of followers who are indistinguishable from the rest of their American mainline Protestant neighbors on gay marriage?

I know that since all priests still have to take the anti-modernist oath, lots of Roman Catholics think that modernism can’t happen there. But here they need to remember that Protestant modernism arose among Presbyterians at the same time that ministers subscribed the Westminster Standards.

I get it. Roman Catholic modernism doesn’t smell (and we haven’t even begun to talk about Richard McBrien).

Imagine if Protestants Had Received Such a Hearing

Published on by D. G. Hart71 Comments

A report from the early days of the Synod in Rome:

The first days of discussions at the global meeting of Catholic bishops have focused partly on how to change “harsh language” used by the church in discussing family life and on acknowledging that people grow in faith slowly, according to Vatican observers of the meeting.

One theme said to be included in 70 speeches made by prelates over the past two days is how the prelates label people with words that “are not necessarily words that invite people to draw closer to the church.”

Briefing reporters Tuesday on the event, known as a Synod of Bishops, Basilian Fr. Thomas Rosica said one or more synod members specifically referred to three terms commonly used by the church:

“Living in sin”: a reference to couples who live together before marriage;
“Intrinsically disordered”: a reference to gay people; and
“Contraceptive mentality”: a reference made by some prelates to refer to a society that does not respect life.

“To label people … does not help in bringing people to Christ,” said Rosica, summarizing the synod member. “There was a great desire that our language has to change in order to meet the very difficult situations.”

Imagine just how much Trent’s “let him be anathema” harshed Ursinus’ buzz.

Modernism Watch

Published on by D. G. Hart114 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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