Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

A very interesting debate recently took place at a meeting of the American Philosophical Association in Chicago. Alvin Plantinga and Daniel Dennet faced off on the question of whether science and theism are compatible. A reporter at the scene has this interesting account of the debate. Here’s his lead-up:

For those of you who do not know, on February 21st, the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association – the main professional body of American philosophers – hosted a kind of debate. I say “kind of debate” because one philosopher gave a paper, the other commented and the first philosopher replied and the floor opened for questions. But in fact the session was a debate.

The debate was between Alvin Plantinga and Daniel Dennett. Plantinga is one of the founders of the Society of Christian Philosophers and one of the fathers of the current desecularization of philosophy. He is widely regarded – even by his critics – as one of the finest epistemologists of the last fifty years and one of the finest philosophers of religion since the Medieval period. Daniel Dennett is one of the New Atheists and is a well-known proponent of atheistic Darwinism and critic of religion. He is widely regarded – even by his critics – as one of the most important early philosophers of mind that opened the field to cognitive science and evolutionary biology. He has contributed enormously to the serious study of the mind and its relationship to the brain. Both philosophers are over sixty and perhaps at the height of their philosophical powers. They have also faced off before but, as far as I know, not in person.

Plantinga was the presenter. The session asked the question of whether science and religion were compatible. Plantinga argues that they are and that in fact the scientific theory taken to be most incompatible with religion – evolutionary theory – is not only compatible with Christian theism (the religious view Plantinga defends) but is incompatible with Christian theism’s most serious opponent in the scientific world – naturalism. Naturalism is the view that physics and the sciences can give a complete description of reality. Plantinga defines it as the view that there is no God or anything like God.

I was at the talk. It was packed with professional philosophers and graduate students in philosophy, most of whom sided with Dennett. I wrote live comments on the debate/session. I prefer to remain anonymous for various reasons, in particular because I am inclined towards Plantinga’s position over Dennett’s and were this to become well-known it could damage or destroy my career in analytic philosophy. This is something I prefer not to put my family through. I almost didn’t publish these comments at all, but as far as I could tell, this would be the only public record of the discussion.

Friends, if you can identify me, I request that you keep my identity secret. I am sharing my thoughts as a service to the philosophical community and all those who have an interest in such debates. But I prefer not to suffer at the hands of my ardently secular colleagues. This is not to say that all secular analytic philosophers are this way; they most certainly are not. But enough of them are that I cannot risk being known publicly.

According to this man-on-the-scene’s report, Dennett’s argument was really not so much an argument as a series of insults. This is not surprising to me. It is standard operating procedure for the current breed of atheists, Dennett included, to insult and ridicule rather than to engage in serious argumentation. The behavior of such atheists makes me wonder if it is not better just to insult them back than to argue with them, though by showing that one has a greater erudition than they. This is what the Eastern Orthodox theologian and former Anglican David Bentley Hart did to the postmodernists in his The Beauty of the Infinite. It would be much easier to engage in this sort of polemic with analytical philosophers because they lack any historical sense about what they’re doing. See this interesting piece by Wayne Hankey on the point. Hankey argues in this piece that the influence of Neoplatonism on contemporary French philosophy is shocking for Anglophone philosophers because the Anglophone tradition is essentially ignorant of the history of philosophy. Therefore, Anglophone thinkers cannot possibly conceive of the idea that Neoplatonism might have anything to teach us today.

Still, one would like to engage in a serious debate with atheists without having it turn into a mutual snark-festival of ad hominem attacks. Even Bertrand Russell did not stoop to that sort of behavior in debating the likes of Frederick Copleston.

A harmful narrative is starting to gain prominence in certain circles in the Church, the circles inhabited by theological liberals. The pontificate of Pope Benedict XVI is being pitted against that of John Paul II, as if the former is undoing all of the progress of the last 40 years that John Paul II enabled. This is nothing new, of course. Everytime during his papacy that John Paul II did anything concrete to stand up for the Tradition, these very circles blamed the action on Cardinal Ratzinger, to whom they gave the moniker ”der Panzerkardinal.” Ratzinger was seen as a controlling, behind the scenes figure, and JP II as a mere puppet on der Panzerkardinal’s strings.

Given that the Holy Father’s pontificate is focused to a large extent on the restoration and reformation of the Sacred Liturgy, it is understandable that he should elicit these reactions. Nothing is more jarring to the sensibilities of theological progressives than the transcendent symbolism of liturgy that the Pope wishes to have more universally emphasized in the Church. Not even JP II’s Theology of the Body was as discomfitting to them, which reaffirmed the Church’s traditional teachings on sexuality while drawing out their metaphysical implications.

The restoration of the sacred to the Sacred Liturgy, which Benedict had long considered of the utmost importance for the contemporary Church, is the surest path to stirring up rancor and animosity among the theological liberals. Any liturgical signifier that points to Christ as the Head of the Church, the One who ultimately constitutes Sacred Liturgy through His Sacrifice on Golgotha,  is an offense to their idolatry of temporality, human passion, and the myth of human progress. Putting a theological liberal in the presence of the sacred is like tossing holy water on a demon. So, with the prospect of having the Sacred Liturgy resacralized, they will throw out charges of anti-Semitism. The more superficial and half-hearted among them will blame the Pope for being unsavvy in the ways of modern media. But underlying it all is a fear and loathing of the sacred.

The narrative which tells of der Panzerkardinal in opposition to the gentle and kindly John Paul II cannot withstand scrutiny. Cardinal Ratzinger was JP II’s most trusted theological adviser. He was kept in charge of the C.D.F. by JP II even though he had long ago wanted to retire from the post. He did not lobby to become Pope. JP II happened to have put him in the perfect position to become pope, but it was not his aspiration. It is not unlikely that John Paul II even foresaw that Cardinal Ratzinger would be his successor. He gladly entrusted, for nearly three decades, the Cardinal with one of the most important positions of pastoral care in the Church.

John Paul II had different pastoral and theological emphases to be sure. But it is a disingenuous exercise in extremis to claim that he and Pope Benedict XVI were intrinsically opposed to one another.

In the myriad crises that the media, as usual, is helping to in some cases fan (economic) and in others foster (ecological, racial, political, etc.) it is not surprising that more end of days prophets have surfaced.  One good thing about this kind of environment is that I have found myself better attuned to consider more carefully the despair of our modern day nihilists.

As I was putting together notes for a lecture tonight, I was reading through JPTG’s theology of the body catecheses once again.   His commenting on a passage from 1 John struck me in a way that I had not considered in the who-knows-how-many-times I had previously read it:

On the one hand, “the world passes away with its concupiscence,” on the other, “the one who does the will of God will remain in eternity” (1Jn 2:17) [Waldstein, 101:7].

The context of his talk is the eschatological hope that one finds in marriage as the primordial sacrament.  However, what struck me is the lack of eschatological hope of so many in our society.  I suspect that the numbers comprising this group are those who are wedded to the passions of the flesh.  Why this is so is suggested in the above passage.

Fixating on the satiation of bodily passions to the neglect of the deeper needs of the soul attenuates, and perhaps completely suppresses, any awareness of that which allows us to transcend the material world.  That is, the spiritual aspect of our existence.  With our focus solely on the corruptible, and steadily corrupting flesh it is no mystery why we would have no long term hope in eternal life.

We see our own flesh, and that of others, decaying before our very eyes.  We have a clear, if subliminal, witness that concupiscence eventually passes away–even if it is our own.   In fact, our experience of concupiscence is that it does not provide a lasting substance on which to build anything.  Once a particular lust is sated, we are left empty.  When we respond in a disordered way to satisfy the urges of the animal aspect of our human nature, we kill again the spiritual life which gives us hope.

I suspect that the world’s hope for the future that rang in the ears of the practical nihilists during BO’s presidential campaign, for a moment at least, resonated with their innermost being.  This explains the explicit messianic adulation that BO received and continues to receive.  His message is one of hope without demands.  This is no hope at all.

This world is passing way as is the concupiscence that keeps it and us from acheiving its greatness.  For those who wed themselves to satisfying their concupiscent desires at the expense of their souls, even the exuberance of  the last election cycle will not be enough to keep them distracted for long.

Our economy has been based upon a rampant consumerism focused too much on an attempt to satisfy concupiscence’s infinite wants at the expense of truth.  The great demand to fill our spiritual void with material goods could not keep up with our incomes so we had to continue to fill the void with goods bought on credit.  It appears that the credit bubble has now burst.  I do not know if we have come to the end of the line with this or not but as any one with eyes can see the crisis we now face is more spiritual than it is economic.

Nevertheless, this world is fading away.  Perhaps now is the most auspicious time to proclaim the new world that this passing world still awaits as it groans in travail, the new creation that will be given to those who do the will of God.

…, or of God? Or am I trying to please men? If I were still pleasing men, I should not be a servant of Christ” (Gal 1:10).

Paul’s letter to the Galatians came to mind recently as I was considering the recent hullabaloo about which the local church in Austria has been screwing itself into the ground.  The bishops there are in open revolt against the Holy Father because he is not as beholden to the sensitivities of the world as they appear to be.  I still cannot fathom how seriously I had misjudged Cardinal Schoenborn.

These are gravely mistaken Austrian bishops who have chosen to take it upon themselves to engage in pressure politics, attempting to use the coercion of public opinion to overturn decisions made by the Holy Father with respect to schism-healing and episcopal appointments.  Of course, impudent reactions to the Holy Father’s guidance of the Church are not limited to the Austrians.

Now, I am certainly not surprised by the reaction of those who habitually fawn after the politically correct crowd.  It is not unusual that their determination as to the right or wrong of any particular action which the Church undertakes is to be judged by the positive or negative reaction of the mass media.  However, in this case, even some commentators less obsessed with “public relations” are criticizing the Holy Father for his lack of public relations savvy.  Here is why I think that the hypersensitivity of these commentators to world reaction is misplaced.

In the case of Bishop Williamson, world reaction betrays a willful ignorance of the Church and the meaning of this move.   These are people who are uninterested in the new progress toward reconciliation.  They have no concern for the gains that have been made in reforming, or at least isolating, Bishop Williamson as one who, for whatever reason, denies the actual horror of the holocaust.

Those who wish to accede to world reaction tacitly put forth the argument that no attempts toward rapprochement should have been made with SSPX, or at least with Bishop Williamson while he continues in his odd beliefs.  In other words, this is essentially saying that such people ought to be excluded from any attempts at reform.  One might observe that the people who condemn the Church for this action are the same who have hailed, or at least been silent about, BO’s intent to engage in dialog with Iran, a country whose President has declared that Israel has no right to exist and who has himself denied the holocaust.  This is very telling.  It strongly suggests that the motivation for this uproar is driven by animus toward the Catholic Church rather than any real concern over what some confused schismatic Catholic priest thinks about the Holocaust.

Since Pius XII, the Church has recognized the need and taken very significant initiatives in terms of rapprochement with our Jewish brothers and sisters.  It is disingenuous for anyone to imply anti-semitism on the part of the Church for the actions she has taken in trying to reconcile SSPX.  Those in the media and in the Church who do so are the same who lambaste the Church for being heavy-handed for any other excommunications.  They presume to tell the Church who should and who should not be in communion with the Church based primarily upon their notions of political correctness.  Frankly, it is none of their business.

The other issue is the nomination of an Austrian priest as an auxiliary bishop for a diocese in Austria.  The uproar here again, I think , has little to do with the priests’ impolitic speculations about the connection between some natural disasters and the unquestionable widespread moral depravity associated with the affected regions.  Certainly, I agree that in the wake of a devastating event with many innocents suffering, especially in our culture in which these statements would in themselves have little chance of being comprehended, it seems that such comments are more likely to exacerbate the suffering of the innocent than it would convict consciences of the guilty.

However, while his speculation was not a theological certainty, neither was it a theological error.  It is possible that God would permit devastation to occur as an opportunity for sinners to awaken themselves from their hedonistic stupor.  Again, it is unlikely that the priest’s statements were the real reason for this reaction.  By all accounts, it is more likely the case that the hierarchy in Austria is more concerned with his willingness to be a public voice of moral truth which will be, for them, an embarrassment.  If not an embarrassment, at least it will cause them difficulties with the largely dissenting clergy and laity.  Certainly, they are also concerned to have a prelate who will not be so “rigid” about truth and Church teaching.

Now, I am not saying that prudence in avoiding unnecessary offense and confusion ought to be set aside.  However, that is not the same as recognizing that we cannot always avoid uproar from an unbelieving world when Christ is proclaimed.  If the suggestion of these critics is that no decision ought to be made until it is vetted by some sort of public relations office, then we may as well simply join the Anglican Communion right now.

St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross would never have made it through such a vetting process.  Neither would have St. Maximilian Kolbe.  Dominus Iesus would never have been able to have been released. All of these caused uproars which could not be avoided.  A cautious vetting process would still have us waiting for an acceptable version of the Catechism of the Catholic Church to be brought forth. Perhaps we ought also to pass all Sacramentary and Lectionary changes/translations through some public relations vetting process?

When people are looking for an opportunity to be offended, there is little chance one is going to be able to proclaim the Gospel and avoid offending people.  With so many others looking for any excuse to attack the Church we perhaps ought to gain certainty that actions that get such an uproar in response were in fact the right ones.

Catholics ought not fall into this politically correct, obsessive mindset to which all too many otherwise solid Catholic commentators seem to have fallen prey.  Regensburg was not a public relations failure; lifting the excommunication on the SSPX was not a public relations failure; the appointment of a solid, if impolitic, Austrian priest as a bishop was not a public relations failure.  The reactions are all unavoidable, if ridiculous, clamorings of a world that cannot bear to hear the truth.  This confused world is abetted by Catholics who share their aversion for truth.

If we make affirmative responses from the world our touchstone for determining what we are to proclaim, then we can no longer be the servants of Christ.

Here’s another reason to boycott CNN…if you needed one (from Fidelis):

CNN Rejects Ad Celebrating Obama’s Life
Ad Was to Air Following State of the Union Address

CHICAGO – CNN has rejected an uplifting and positive ad focusing on the historic inauguration of Barack Obama, submitted for the State of the Union Address on Feb. 24.

CNN claims the ad “suggests a position in favor of the advocacy message, without having permission of the persons involved.”

Burch reacted to CNN’s claims: “This is absurd. Our ad does not suggest that Barack Obama is pro-life. Instead, we make the obvious point that Obama’s mother gave birth to a child that ultimately became the 1st African American President. This is a fact, not an opinion.”

The standard CNN used to reject the ad did not prevent the network from airing a 2005 ad sponsored by the pro-abortion group NARAL that suggested that then Judge John Roberts supported violence against abortion clinics.

 CatholicVote.org, Kathy Christianson of CNN’s Commercial Clearance Department announced that they would not sell a spot to run the Obama ad:

“CNN doesn’t accept advocacy ads that portray personal decisions in a manner that suggests a position in favor of the advocacy message, without having permission of the persons involved. CNN is not accepting this particular advocacy ad because it deals with a highly personal and private matter and does so without the consent of those involved.”

“There is nothing objectionable in this positive, life-affirming advertisement. We never mention the word abortion. We show an ultrasound of a baby. And we congratulate Barack Obama on becoming the first African-American President. And we simply ask people to imagine the potential of each human life,” said Burch.

The ad aired on BET in Chicago on Inauguration Day. It has become an Internet hit with over 1.6 million views since Jan. 20. The ad was in the top 10 ‘most viewed’ category on YouTube on Inauguration Day last month.

The ad reads: “This child’s future is a broken home. He will be abandoned by his father. His single mother will struggle to raise him. Despite the hardships he will endure…this child…will become…the 1st African-American President.” The ad concludes with the tagline, “Life: Imagine the Potential.” The ad is the first of several ads in new campaign launched by CatholicVote.org.

The Obama ad can be viewed at CatholicVote.org, which is a project of the Fidelis Center for Law and Policy.

At RCIA last Tuesday the topic was confession and the 1953 Hitchcock film, “I Confess” was brought up.  Having not seen it, my wife decided to pick up a copy at the library.  While watching it last Sunday night, several thoughts came to mind.

First, as is often said, it occurred to me that there is no way that a movie like this, i.e. one that is  sympathetic to the Catholic faith, could come out of Hollywood today (here is a summary of the plot in case you have not seen it).  Clearly, the failures of some of our priests in the last decade has not escaped Hollywood’s attention.  While they* now have evidence that priests are in fact human, the problem is their false understanding of humanity.  Namely, they believe that the human person is so compelled by his sexual appetite that he has not the capacity to master it.  In fact, they are afflicted with the Freudian myth that suggests that those who attempt to master their sexual urges will ultimately damage themselves.  This distorted understanding man makes a sympathetic treatment of the Catholic faith unlikely.  After all, that is their biggest beef with the Church.

There are many aspects of the 1953 film that will be beyond the reach of today’s Hollywood. Of course, the Hollywood wisdom dictates the need for some sex, or at least sexual tension, in such a film for economic considerations and perhaps also for the sake of a distorted view of artistic merit.  There is the bias against the Catholic faith, especially because she dares to continue to loudly proclaim the reality of sin.  As suggested above, from Hollywood’s perspective the sexual sin she warns against cannot be tolerated. However, even if we could get over these issues, there are other other fundamental problems.

The first thing that comes to mind is the way that the relationship is depicted between the main character Fr. Michael Logan, played by Montgomery Clift, and the leading lady, Ruth Grandfort, played by Anne Baxter.  In the movie, the two had a romantic relationship before he became a priest.  While Ruth continued to love Fr. Logan even after his ordination, there was no time afterward in which Fr. Logan ever doubted or seemed to struggle with his vocation.

Hollywood culture ensures their inability to deem credible anyone who possesses such a strong, supernatural sense of his vocation and the full self-possession of a handsome young man such as Clift plays in the film.  For directors, producers, screenwriters, such self mastery is not something of which they could make sense.  For those coming from a culture in which there is no reason to attempt to fully possess oneself, at least in terms of the sexual urge, the thought that it might be possible for anyone does not even arise.

Another aspect of the film that they would not know how to deal with in a credible manner is the issue of the seal of the confessional.  The idea of sacramental confession has been so caricatured by Hollywood that they lack the intellectual framework necessary to gain an authentic understanding of confession.  They are completely lost as to why there should be such a solemn obligation for silence on the part of the priest.  Perhaps the closest they might come is patient/client privilege, but even this the courts have ultimate jurisdiction over.  Moreover, they have not the capacity for sympathy needed to understand how a priest might be willing to suffer the punishment due to another to protect the confession of the very man to whom the punishment is due.  Completely beyond the pale would be the willingness to suffer this fate for the very man who is trying to frame the priest for the murder.  Rather than see this as heroic virtue they could not but see it rather as misguided folly.

A third element of the plot that would get no sympathy would be Ruth’s husband, Pierre.  Pierre is treated rather ruthlessly by Ruth who is more committed it seems to her still burning love for Fr. Logan than for her marriage commitment and the feelings of her faithful husband (something much more reasonable for Hollywood). Pierre continues to stand by her even when she tells him that she has really never loved him and that she is still in love with Fr. Logan.  Rather than seeing Pierre’s actions as virtuous in exhibiting this spousal fidelity to the marriage and a strong commitment to reconciling, they would rather cast him as a lovelorn sap.

I suppose at root the issues that cause Hollywood’s animus toward the Catholic Church are the same that would make them unable to be sympathetic to those things I mention above.  That is, again, the problem of the human person.  The recognition that there is such a thing as a virtuous character that is achieved through always choosing the right and rejecting the wrong, even the recognition that there is a right and wrong in the realm of sex, are truths that the Hollywood culture has long ago abandoned.  I do not think they are even capable of being open to anything sympathetic to true religion any longer.  But perhaps I am wrong.  I confess, I would be happy if I were.

* – O.k, I admit that I am painting with a rather broad brush.  Nevertheless, I do believe it is a relatively accurate depiction of the predominant Hollywood ethos, if I may use that term here.

I saw an article today reporting that the University Catholic Center at the University of Texas at Austin was starting a “Gay and Lesbian” support group.  This was confirmed on the Center’s website.

Now it is not clear from the report what this support group will entail.  They interview the Paulist priest who will be leading the group, Fr. Ed Koharchik, who provides some interesting statements as reported by UT’s student newspaper, The Daily Texan:

“We want to provide a safe place for young people to talk about this issue – how does it fit in with the Catholic Church teachings?” said the Rev. Ed Koharchik, associate director at the center. “Whether one is gay or straight, it’s morally neutral.”

In recent weeks, the center has promoted the support group, whose purpose is to shed light on the “misconstrued teachings of the church” with respect to non-heterosexual lifestyles, Koharchik said.

“It’s about this group of people and how to stay within the teachings of the church and yet still identify as being of that orientation,” said Michael Jungwirth, a Middle Eastern studies graduate student. “It sounds reasonable.”

Now what he means by “morally neutral” I suppose depends upon what he means by being “gay or straight.”  Unfortunately, using those terms succumbs  to the mistaken notion that same sex attraction has some ontological basis rather than being a disorder that requires healing.  Fr. Koharchik seems to recognize that the terms refer first to a life style.  In other words, they are forms of behavior.

The comments from the student sound promising I suppose.  It is important to stay within the teachings of the Church.  However, I am not all that confident about Fr. Koharchik’s understanding of Church teaching if some of his interviews have been correctly reported.  For example, in an interview with the Daily Texan, published by Politico before the election he is said to have claimed that social issues like immigration and the death penalty were just as important as abortion…Catholics are not single issue voters.  Some additional comments:

Koharchik said he hopes to deter Catholics from breaking off their relationship with God due to their sexual orientation. He said he wants community members to know that sexuality is not tied to an individual’s personhood and that linking the two together could “cut off awareness to goodness.”

Now this is a troubling, deficient anthropology.  If he said this, he really should learn John Paul II’s theology of the body.  In fact, one’s sex is constitutive, in part, of personhood.  One is male or female and cannot be a human person without being so.  Sex difference establishes the structure by which the individual person exercises his personhood.  The claim attributed to Fr. Koharchik introduces a dualism into the person not unrelated to the body-soul dualism of our post-Cartesian Western culture (often mistakenly attributed to Platonism some would argue).  Teaching young people who are confused about their sexual identity because of some pathology that their sexual identity is not part of who they are as persons is not the solution.  In fact, they will recognize that this is false.

Rather, one needs to help them better understand how in fact their intuition that their sex is an integral aspect them as persons, is in fact valid.  The fact that they suffer from an interior conflict between who they are and how they feel is something they do need to understand.  Otherwise, I do not see how they will ever be able to understand why the Church teaches as She does, that they cannot act on certain inclinations.  If they are given to think that this great drive in their lives is something completely unrelated to them as persons and so acting upon it is sinful then this will appear to be an arbitrary, unfair, and impossible demand…something they already, no doubt, feel.

I am further discouraged by the resource that they have chosen as their guide; the problematic, notorious document released by the NCCB a few years back:

Among other pastoral recommendations aimed toward church ministers, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops suggests in its pamphlet, “Always Our Children,” that religious entities “help to establish or promote support groups for parents and family members” of gays and lesbians.

This document had the overall affect of saying “yes you are gay but you ought not to act upon it.”  A ridiculous proposition from any perspective.  I do hope that the following authentically expresses the teachings of the Church

Koharchik’s goal for the support group is to encourage a chaste lifestyle for every person and to encourage members to “live morally good and make proper decisions.

If the way Fr. Koharchik has been represented in the Daily Texan is an accurate portrayal of his thinking, I am concerned that his group will foster more hurt and confusion among those already suffering from such a difficult disorder that attacks the very center of one’s personal identity.  I recognize that it is possible that they are using terminology that they consider pastorally necessary (the fact that they seem to have asked for the Austin Diocese’s support might support this possibility) but it is also possible that they are getting into something that they are not qualified to do.  I would have to ask why they would not draw upon an already existing and successful program like Courage rather than going it alone with an approach that, as the reporting suggests, is in danger of bearing doing more harm than good.

Most of us have heard by now the latest news about Legionaries of Christ founder, Fr. Marcial Maciel.  Last week we had the very sad confirmation of what I suppose most of us had already realized what likely the case since Benedict removed Fr. Maciel’s faculties to act as a priest in public in 2006.  However, for the many Legionaries of Christ and Regnum Christi members who had held out hope that none of the allegations against their founder were true, this last week was a devastating one.

The question in light of the revelation: now what?  I would have to admit that I have found what some have decided to be the correct response, well, disappointing.  Now, I am not talking about the anti-Catholic press, or erstwhile Catholics in the secular press that have abandoned the faith, or even the (not so) Catholic press.  I am talking about faithful Catholics who have decided to lecture the Legionaries about what they should now do.  The advice ranges from internal purging of what they assume to be knowing enablers to dissolution of the order.  I am much troubled by such open letters and blog posts.

There is certainly a need for the Order to reassess what this means for them and to discern what, if anything, these confirmations demand.  However, the Legionaries ought to be able to do that themselves, in obedience to the Holy Father, without outside interference.  They do not need our “piling on” when they are down.

This is a time, it seems to me, to recognize that our brothers and sisters in the Legionaries and Regnum Christi are shocked and suffering and they need us to join with them in solidarity and in prayer.  The Legionaries and Regnum Christi have done enormous good.  They have established important and successful, world-wide media, education, and evangelization apostolates that are helping to transform the world.  It is true that sometimes they have grown faster than they had the organizational maturity to handle perfectly, but everything that they have done has been in fidelity to and for the good of the Church.

So what now?  For those who are Legionaries and Regnum Christi, it should be discernment in obedience to the Holy Father.  For the rest of us, it should be a response of gratitude to God for his having blessed us with this Order and our offering of prayers and support to those who have given themselves to Him through it.  Finally, we must all pray for those who have suffered at the hands of an apparently very confused and deceitful man.

As I was working out this morning I saw that CNN was covering the National Prayer Breakfast, live.  I am not sure that I recall their having done that in the past.  Does anyone know?

Any way, Melissa, our librarian, pointed out to me something interesting in the text of BO’s short talk at this morning’s prayer breakfast:

But no matter what we choose to believe, let us remember that there is no religion whose central tenet is hate. There is no God who condones taking the life of an innocent human being. This much we know.

Now if BO would just learn his basic embryology…

Sandro Magister has an interesting piece up today regarding the public outcry against the Pope for lifting the excommunications against the SSPX. Unlike John Allen, who routinely tries to place blame on Pope Benedict XVI, Magister has a more nuanced take on things. Rather than arguing, as Allen does, that the Pope has justly incurred public outcry against a papal action, Magister places the blame for the current mess on a recalcitrant Curia.

Cardinal Bertone, the Vatican Secretary of State, is particularly inept at his job, according to Magister. But many in the Curia, Magister argues, are either opposed to the Pope’s actions and try to contradict them, or are incapable of understanding his actions.

Magister does make one point, however, that may or may not be a negative critique of the Pope’s decision making. The Holy Father has given up, Magister asserts, on the task of cleaning up the Curia. This may not be a negative critique, because it may just mean that the Holy Father does not see it as his mandate from the Holy Spirit to put his own people into curial positions. On the other hand, as it did for nearly three decades of the JP II papacy, a failure to clean up the Curia causes immense problems for governance of the Church.

Personally, I doubt that many in the Curia believe in or understand properly the hermeneutic of continuity. Certainly, I am sure that the Curia largely represents the attitudes that one finds on a local level in the Church, where one frequently encounters a misguided interpretation of Vatican II. There remains today a mythical hermeneutic of the Council which requires one to believe that a new Church was brought into being in 1965. When one hears that the Pope is trying to bring us back to a pre-Vatican II Church, as one often hears in the midst of the current SSPX situation, one hears a rejection of the Tradition in favor of novelties that have no basis in the organic growth of the Mystical Body of Christ.

To see the Council in continuity with the Tradition is to see it as flowing from the deposit of divine revelation, faithfully guarded by the Church liturgically, scripturally and pedagogically throughout the ages. To see it otherwise is to see the Council as surpassing the very revelation of Christ. A rejection of the hermeneutic of continuity is a rejection of the mandates of Christ. To reject the hermeneutic of continuity is, quite frankly, blasphemous.

Yet, this rejection of the hermeneutic of continuity is omnipresent on local levels, and I am sure that many curial officials are representative in this regard. The uproar against the SSPX from within the Church is ultimately rooted in a twisted desire to see Vatican II as, at last, the first and definitive Pentecost of the Church.

The Pope, more than ever, needs our prayers. May he continue to have the strength to stand up courageously to those in the Church who seek to subvert his plans to restore unity in the Church and to recover the Tradition.

Most of St. Blog’s parish will know Michael as the husband of Amy Welborn and most by now know that he passed away very suddenly yesterday morning.  Michael leaves Amy and a very young family behind.

At times like this, words fail. We at C-L-S offer our prayers and ask for the intercession of our Blessed Mother to allow Amy and her family to experience the embrace of the saints in light as they cope with this most profound tragedy.

Michael Dubruiel, requiescat in pace.

Shawn brought up a series of articles the other day at lunch that I find at once: interesting, confirming 0f my experience, and frightening.  Yesterday, he sent along links to them.  At the Institute we often have discussions about our experiences teaching undergraduates and we generally agree that we see what the article describes.

Thomas F. Bertonneau, a professor of literature at SUNY-Oswego, has written a three part article for the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3).  Bertonneau has taught in a variety of higher education institutions and documents a worrying trend that other instructors of undergraduates have noticed.  I will snip heavily from Bertonneau’s article to allow him to make the points much more eloquently than I can.  He states:

Even in the mid-1980s, student interest in literature was low. I was a teaching assistant and teaching fellow at U.C.L.A.-a first-tier branch of a world-class state university. Except for a few English majors, however, most students saw the course as an obstacle to be hurdled or, better yet, circumvented. Poetry-averse engineering majors and haughty pre-law types volubly asserted the unfairness and inconvenience of having to study Shakespeare or Cervantes. Many read the assigned books desultorily and quite a few disdained to read any of them at all. Obsessively clever, they figured out ways to cheat on the quizzes that I imposed to keep them to the reading schedule. …

In the main, however, students used competent language. They completed their sentences in grammar not too defective, and they deployed vocabulary more or less at an adult level. And in those days one still saw students actually reading books, even if they were not the books assigned in their classes. I recall a moment when it seemed that every frat-boy on campus was lugging around the paperback of The World According to Garp. (I don’t know why.)

Bertonneau is not kidding.  These days the average student does not seem even to purchase the assigned texts, much less read them.  Bertonneau assesses the problem and its effects:

Adults know what propels the descent: proliferating electronic media, video games, an ideologically inspired de-emphasis of rigorous learning at all levels of education, and a pervasive attitude of entitlement that students now absorb into their deficient souls the way babies drink nourishment from a mother’s breast. Flashing lights and three-minute “rap” songs stultify cognitive development. MTV, that bastion of the youth audience, nowadays specializes less in the music video than in the “reality show,” with its endless, formless palaver among “twenty-somethings” confined in a house.

These models of comportment are definitely oral rather than literate. A number of publications over the last decade, such as Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation, have remarked on the phenomenon of a noticeable restriction of cognitive range in college undergraduates. What Bauerlein sees, I see: young people cut off from any elevated sense of who they are, frozen in the “cool” indifference of pop-culture, largely confined to the restrictions of the present moment, and hostile to maturity.

We have seen this on our blog.  A number of years ago Shelray did a post using the image of sculpture of a human-dog chimera to illustrate his point.  This post was eventually facebooked by some one and has become our most active post.  Until we finally cut off comments, we were provided frightening insight into young people’s rejection of reading, their inability to articulate themselves in anything resembling coherent English, and a general substitution of emotivism for rational discourse.  The majority could not figure out that it was only a sculpture.  Shelray soon added a big bold caption to that effect.  It did not help.  However, after posting the “unmissable” caption we did get a few commentors who seemed to relish in their “discovery” of the fact and sought to chastise others who could not make it 1/8th of an inch further down the screen. If you have the stomach for it, you might go and look through some of the comments.

Bertonneau discusses the class he teaches on comparative literature and the grim fruits of the students’ ability to read, think, and articulate.  Here are a few examples:

“Athene helps Telemachus and Odysseus to be reunited and restore order to Troy. This all took place around 450 BC but it was not written down until 800 BC.”

“Beginning with Homer’s ‘The Odyssey’ written down around 800 BC, when infact the events took place in the 4th century. There are many examples of order, tragedy, and some triumph.”

“The Odessy, written down around 800 BC, its events are said to actually take place around 500 BC.”

This ignorance with how to handle  dates in BC, he states, are not isolated cases.  In fact, Bertonneau goes to great lengths in his classes to teach his students how to handles this dating scheme through lectures, a text book showing a graphical timeline, and lectures.  All to no avail.

And my favorite:

A related example is the phrase “the Labronze age,” which one student repeatedly substituted for the actual phrase, “the Bronze Age,” in an essay. This at first baffled me. Then my wife suggested that it referred to a currently famous basketball player, the currency of whose name overwhelmed the student’s visual impression of the historical term in its correct form.

This comes from a final exam.  Bertonneau describes that he provides a “cheat sheet” with 250 or so words and phrases and still the students cannot even look at the sheet and spell words or phrases correctly.  His analysis of the problem:

The answer is that written language, including orthography, makes little or no impression on a large percentage of students because these students are, in fact, operating with oral mental habits rather than literate ones. Many students no longer bother even so much as to press the Spell-check button before printing off a paper. This points, once again, to a failure of the K-12 phase of education to inculcate basic intellectual habits or even basic bourgeois attentiveness in these students. Many a critic has complained that the supervisors of K-12 nationwide have long since deemphasized rigorous literacy training in favor of unstructured oral “expression” and mediated visual demonstration. Not spelling a word correctly when the word is before one’s very eyes is, I would argue, a non-trivial error suggestive of a profound alteration of the mental state away from literacy.

The most interesting insight came when he asked for a comparison of St. Augustine’s Confessions with another protagonist in one of their readings.  Here is what he got:

“Much like Odyssus Augustine, who at one time was reared as a saint in Hippo, is tempted by pretty women as well as by a pear tree. But later he loses his self-control problem and converts into a Christian.”

And Bertonneau’s insightful analysis of this gem:

Although the construction is linguistically inadequate, we should observe that the student-writer has, in fact, hazarded a comparison-and indeed a valid one-which I strove to help students discover as they thought about the separate items of the syllabus as forming a unity. To be candid, the student-writer is only giving me back a remark that I made in a lecture, rather than forming an original judgment. The encounter with Augustine is not, for him, an occasion for thought, but rather for something like mere information retrieval.

Nevertheless, in his or her garbled manner, this writer has gleaned a parallelism assimilating Augustine in the period of late antiquity with Odysseus, protagonist of a poem written in the archaic period of Attic civilization. Sirens, demigoddesses, and husband-hunting princesses all in a sense tempt Odysseus, who, however, mainly contrives to avoid temptation. Homer says that the ability to control his appetites is why Odysseus survived where his crewmates did not. Odysseus sleeps with Circe and then with Calypso under necessity because they are demigoddesses, whom he cannot directly refuse. One may nevertheless suppose that he enjoys his pleasures.

Augustine was also, as the Confessions tell us, susceptible to female attractiveness, and spent a period of inveterate brothel crawling and inexhaustible fornication. But Odysseus seeks to win back the material wealth and chattels that the squatters in his palace would steal from him. In contrast, Augustine, in spiritual revolt against worldliness, rejects power and riches for the sake of his intangible soul. This essential difference the student entirely misses. It is as though the student cannot hold the resemblance and the difference in mind simultaneously.

The phrase, “at one time was reared as a saint in Hippo,” probably stems from my assertion during a lecture that Augustine was revered as a saint within a few short years after his death during the Vandal siege of Hippo. Revered has lapsed into reared. The former is probably an unfamiliar-to the student, an exotic-term whereas the latter still has some currency. The student probably took a high-school course called “Child Rearing.” The sequel is comical, for the student has Augustine being tempted not only by “pretty women” but, casually, also by “a pear tree,” as though one temptation (he has them out of sequence, by the way) was exactly like another.

The real mind-twister follows: “But later he loses his self-control problem and converts into a Christian.” It is worthwhile sorting out what the student, by a generous estimation, wants to say from what he or she actually does say. He or she wants to say, I guess, that, after succumbing to the anomie of many years of indulgence and feeling in consequence radically alienated from himself, Augustine at last found self-control, and found it in the moral dispensation of the Gospel.

Instead we get: “He loses his self-control problem,” an assertion that makes self-control the problem rather than the lack of it and implies that that movement from self-indulgence to self-discipline is somehow accidental and passive rather than deliberative and active. Augustine, in the student’s version of things, doesn’t gain self-control, as one would normally say, but rather he finds himself suddenly free of a burdensome condition (restraint), as if by magic.

The inability to make a straightforward statement along such lines as Augustine rejects self-indulgence and adopts self-control as a mandate of his conversion is much more than a funny instance of incompetence. It is a crippling intellectual deformity that will prevent a student who distantly glimpses a moral problem from adequately seeing or articulating it. The problem will vex and hobble the student whether it is his own or someone else’s. He will lack the very notion of a deliberative resolution. Agonies of error and indecision lie ahead in such a life, but where there is a mass of such lives, the misery of vexation and indecision will afflict everyone, not just the victim of deficient education and default of analysis.

It is not too farfetched to suggest that there is more to the student’s problem than an absence of grammar, vocabulary, and syntax or a life without reading. The hostility to religion that pervades the academic environment and popular culture also hampers him. For to say that self-indulgence is the problem and that Christianity was Augustine’s solution is to go against many years of-undoubtedly half-understood but sufficiently threatening-propaganda from the same crusading people who refuse to let student stores sell Christmas cards or Easter candy, but say nothing about promiscuity in the dorms.

And the results of this, Bertonneau warns, is a coming spiritual savagery:

I see in the resentful incapacity of so many students a not-so-dim “Shape of Things to Come” whose characteristics will be theirs: perceptive obtuseness, expressive coarseness, extreme limitation of language and therefore also of concept, radical unfitness to judge complicated technical or moral problems, complete disconnection from any meaningful past and, to borrow a term from Oswald Spengler, in a condition utterly “historyless.”

Of course, the problem is very clear to educators but it is a problem of family and society and so it must be addressed there first.  Unfortunately, as Bertonneau warns, it is going to be left to these very same people to solve and they will not have the moral resources to see or admit of the root problems of the social decline, as even today we cannot.  Much less will they possess the intellectual resources to implement an effective solution.  Thus, we will get more small, tyrannical laws trying to keep the Vandal’s at the gate all the time increasing the root problem by trying to appease the masses by more and more abetting sexual license and through other death promoting policies.

The only solution is the Gospel and the Catholic Church.  Just as the Church carried civilization through the fall of the Roman Empire and converted the Goths, She will be there to provide a stable structure for moral and spiritual leadership if the West continues on its present trajectory.  The question, however, is where She will exist.  By the time Rome fell, Christianity was legal and widespread.  My only hesitance in saying that She will be everyplace She is needed is that the direction of Western societies seems to make the possibility of Christianity once more an illegal religion not all that remote.

We are losing the ability to think, to understand, to remember, and to intelligently converse with one another.  We are forming attention spans and thought processes that are limited to that which is produced by electronically mediated entertainment.  We may indeed be entering the “Labronze Age.” St. Augustine, pray for us!

For those who are interested, here is some insight  from someone within the White House office for executive branch correspondence about the potential fruitfulness and the best approach for getting your concerns to BO:

1.) President Obama does demand that each correspondence is reviewed and logged, so you will be heard if you take the time to write to him.
2.) Electronic submissions are given the same attention as a hand written letter. In fact, all paper correspondence are converted into electronic form eventually. You can submit an electronic correspondence here:    http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/
3.) If you do write a letter make it short and to the point. Sign your name.
4.) If you want to express emotions, state them, don’t try to convey them in your writing. (“This decision angers me” is better than “You are a jerk”)
5.) Personal statements are better than pre-written postcard that you sign. However, if you only have time to send the postcard, it’s better than nothing.
6.) WRITE, WRITE, WRITE. There is an entire department devoted solely to correspondence, so make sure your opinion is recorded.

Here is my short and to the point letter:

1.  I want to urge you to always remember your responsibility is to serve the common good of all human beings.

2.  One does not require divine revelation to appropriate the embryological fact that the life of a human being begins when the egg is fertilized and a unique DNA comes into existence

3. Those who have employed word games to quibble about which human beings might be denied their rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness include such company as Southern US slave holders, German National Socialists and Soviet Socialists.

4. Does your failure to serve the common good of all by denying the unborn these rights imply your denial of science, your affinity for some aspect of one of the above philosophies, or is it due to some peculiar religious doctrine that you wish to impose upon others?

Peter Steinfels, writing in the NY Times, asks the question about when any bishop in the US will speak out against B16’s lifting of the excommunication against the four SSPX bishops.  Steinfels, is a journalist, the former editor of Commonweal, a Fordham professor, etc, and was instrumental in helping get the Common Ground initiative started.  He would seem to be the kind of self-styled “progressive” that John Allen Jr has attempted to become–that is, thoroughly “progressive” in terms of viewing Catholicism through the lens of the “liberal” US intelligentsia, while trying to maintain an air of fairness to the views of those he considers the “conservative” opposition.

Steinfels begins his weekly column by setting up what he seems to think is justification for seeing some dissent from US Bishops to Benedict’s magnanimous action toward the Lefebvrists.  In other words, he shows that it is possible that B16 could have made an error of judgment and that the Bishops have a certain autonomy in their own right.  Since they are not prevented then, from expressing misgivings by the Church’s constitution, why are they not?

It doesn’t seem to have occurred to Steinfels, I suppose, that it might just be that they appreciate the significance of this gesture much more than he does.  In other words, they recognize that this is no mistake.  It is a mistake only to those who think that Regensburg was a mistake.  Church unity and the salvation of souls is of much more important than the trying to ride the fickle tides of MSM opinion which is always looking for a way to assault the Church.

Steinfels has two beefs.  First, he is concerned about the message that is being sent to the Jews given the response of some.  Second, he is concerned about, because of what SSPX stands for, what this is saying to the rest of the world about the significance of the  Second Vatican Council.  Steinfels writes:

Even Catholics who understand the priority that church leaders always give to healing any formal schism that can perpetuate itself are puzzling over the Vatican’s extraordinary solicitude for this relatively small ultratraditionalist sect.

They wonder whether proponents of liberation theology or women’s ordination need to enlist a few schismatic bishops, who might ordain further bishops, in order to get a similar hearing in Rome.

And of course there are Catholics who dread – and some who hope – that the accommodations made to the Society of St. Pius X augur a larger reversal of the work of Vatican II.

Surely Catholic bishops are aware of the corrosive effect that these kinds of nagging questions can have on the faith of their people. A few such questions have quite likely nagged at some bishops themselves. But so far none of them have chosen to discuss the matter out loud.

This silence would be understandable if the bishops’ only option were to engage in harsh criticism. But they have plenty of respectful, charitable alternatives, from merely acknowledging that the papal action was troubling or perplexing to indicating that they are requesting clarification of Rome’s procedures and the pope’s intentions.

It’s a safe bet that during the last week, private expressions of dismay or bewilderment have been flying from bishop to bishop and from bishops to Rome.

Steinfels here employs the disingenuous technique of the new journalism in which the journalist’s own biases are attributed to the anonymous masses in order to appear to objectively inject the biased tone the writer wants to engender.  It would be more honest if he were attribute the “puzzling,” “wondering” and “dreading” to himself.

I find it singularly remarkable that Steinfels is concerned about the “corrosive effect” that his perceived “reversal” of the work of VII might might have on the faith of Catholics.  He does not seem to be concerned about the “corrosive” effects of the dissent from Church teaching that the pages of the erstwhile Catholic magazine, Commonweal, had on the faith of Catholics while he was its editor.  After all, Catholics are adult and can make up their own minds.  Only when it comes to reversing the work of the Second Vatican Council does this become a threat to these “adult” Catholics.  This brings up the question as to what Steinfels understands to be the “work” of VII–a question I will take up shortly.

Steinfels seems to think that somehow SSPX is getting preferential treatment.  Perhaps he is saying more than he realizes when he says that proponents of liberation theology and women’s ordination need to enlist some schismatic bishops.  Since Steinfels recognizes that the lifting of the excommunication does not completely reconcile the SSPX, is he suggesting that perhaps the other groups he mentions have perhaps excommunicated themselves by their views? I doubt it.  Nevertheless, I am happy to see that he puts them in the same camp–that is, they all belong to a problematic group that needs to conform its views to the Church in some way or another.

Nevertheless, there are clearly differences.  SSPX has a validly (if illicitly) ordained hierarchy which governs approximately 600,000 souls.  They play a significant role in the faith life of many other Catholics who have similar concerns but who still maintain unity with the barque of Peter.  SSPX is especially important within France.

The possibility of dialogue with SSPX, as we have now seen, has been greatly enhanced with the lifting of the excommunications.  Steinfels certainly is sensitive to what he might call the chilling effects of excommunication on the possibilities of dialogue I would imagine. Why he does not seem to see that as applicable in this case is telling.

In fact, this group has now shown an extraordinary, I would say, turn around in their polemics against Rome since the excommunications were announced.  In fact, the apologies by Bishop Williamson and the efforts to silence him on the part of the other bishops can be directly attributed to the lifting of the excommunication.  For the run of the mill dissenters, it is left to their bishops and priests to help them to come to see the truth.  They have not been excommunicated as a group and so there are not the sames structure by which to bring them as a whole back into full communion with the Church.

Steinfels wishes to project his “nagging questions” upon the rest of Catholics in the US.  Perhaps he wishes, rather, to inflame them with the same.  Steinfels and his ilk are all about dialogue with those with whom one disagrees unless this dialogue might be viewed by his milieu as impolitic.  That would seem to be the case here.  If there is a chance to change the hearts and minds of Bishop Williamson and those he might influence, it will come about ultimately through restoring him to full communion with Church teaching.  Even if this conversion cannot happen, bringing  him under the authority of the Church is more likely to provide the opportunity to keep him from propagating his problematic views.  Indeed, just lifting the excommunication seems already to have born fruit in this regard.

I suspect that Steinfels’s problem is primarily that he shares the view of the SSPX, whether he would admit it or not.  That is, that Vatican II marked a rupture with the pre-conciliar Church and if there is a chance at all of bringing SSPX back in, this would upset his premise.  If it is possible to reconcile SSPX, then the Bologna school’s interpretation is all the more clearly reprobate than he might like to believe.  The hope of the Common Ground initiative to raise dissent to respectability and thereby firmly entrenching it in the US Church as a legitimate perspective, will have been further dashed.

Bishops, by and large, realize that the “progressive” agenda is dead.  The only question is what will be the size of the Church that remains after the laity comes to realize that the Church has not and will not change Her teachings.  Who will be the first to ask the question? It will surely not be by any Bishop who has thought about this issue in any theological depth and with any level of objectivity.