Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

A brand new Web site through the Vatican Congregation for the Clergy provides open access to Biblical verses with exegesis from doctors of the Church AND cross reference liturgical texts with commentaries from Church Fathers. The site offers six categories in nine languages in addition to the option of downloading the site’s content. The nine translations of the Bible, including Hebrew and Greek, can be read side-by-side, as can the Eastern and Latin Codes of Canon Law. A down-loadable version allows us to connect Sacred Scripture to the complete works of many Doctors of the Church, Councils, Encyclicals, teachings of the Popes, Catechisms, as well as commentaries from secular literature, etc…

Might want to bookmark this one. Fair warning if you plan to down-load a version onto your hard drive, it’s excruciatingly slow.

Update: E-mail support for documents and articles of interest for Bishops and Priests.

Zenit

That rascal B16 is at it again. Always agitating those secularists. Imagine the nerve of his claiming this for Christianity. You wouldn’t think that he might be saying this because he actually believes it do you?  What if it is true?  Would it still be arrogant to proclaim it, or would it be a moral imperative?

It doesn’t matter. I suspect that if the popular press picks up on this CNA article title of today’s Wednesday audience they will be incensed and attempt to ensure that everyone else is as well.

National Catholic Reporter’s vastly overestimated man on the scene, John Allen, Jr., has a new post up extolling the “heroic” talk that Daniel Finn recently gave to the CTSA, decrying its ghetto-ization into an enclave of liberal theology:

For Allen, Finn’s address was an important battle cry denouncing the polarization in Catholic discourse that has strewn apart the Catholic community in the United States. We have forgotten how to talk to each other, in Allen’s opinion. We no longer carry on conversations as adults and open up ourselves to different points of view. Liberals talk to liberals, conservatives to conservatives, traditionalists to traditionalists, etc. We have become a Church of self-enclosed islands, of ideologues, with no one lending a sympathetic ear to one’s ideological “other.”

Now, there is no doubt that Finn’s address was of some importance. After all, it is heartening to think that heretics might indeed be willing to open themselves up to the living voice of the Magisterium. But here is precisely the problem with Allen’s theologically naïve perspective: heresy is not a legitimate voice of diversity in the Church of God. Allen’s plaintive cry for dialogue suffers from the same fundamental problem that one finds with Cardinal Bernardin’s wretched “Common Ground Initiative”: heresy requires anathematization, not a sympathetic ear, not a pat on the back, not a “we’re all just taking shelter under the One, Big Canopy of the Church.”

There is absolutely no reason to listen to and carry out a dialogue with proponents of womyn priests, or gay marriage, or with those many CTSA biblical scholars who deny the Resurrection as a physical as well as symbolic reality. Indeed, to “dialogue” with such Cretins is to approve implicitly their heretical perspectives as legitimate theological positions. Irenaeus did not “dialogue” with the Gnostikoi, he renounced them vigorously. Athanasius did not sit down and have a beer and a pleasant talk on the divinity of Christ with the Arians, he violently rejected their heresy. Saint Maximus the Confessor pleaded vehemently and unwaveringly with the monoenergists/monothelites to renounce outright their heretical denials of Christ’s humanity, at the cost of his tongue and his life.

And, in fact, the heretics in the Church today are much less theologically subtle than the ancient Gnostikoi, Arians, monothelites (pick your ancient heresy, its proponents were inevitably more intellectually subtle than the cult of CTSA “theologians”). Indeed, if dialogue with heretics were a worthy pursuit, these ancient pseudo-theologians would be much more worthy partners in the conversation than those we have to deal with today.

No, we don’t need more dialogue. We need to call a spade a spade and a heretic a heretic.

If you have been reading this blog for any length of time, you might be asking yourself what the heck is this guy doing writing about Catholic, or for that matter any, literary matters. This would be an excellent observation. I don’t intend to write about the literary arts per se, rather, on a particular concern associated with the. Some time ago I posted on a book by a Catholic novelist on the issue of chastity.

It was a good book but I had some misgivings about some of the content (actually a quite small part). However, it was very much in line of what you might read from Walker Percy or Flannery O’Connor. There was the use of obscene language and some mild sexual scenes. So what’s my problem?

There are three issues here as I see them. First, there is the issue of purity. Second, we have the matter of material participation in evil. Finally, we have the issue of scandal. I will take them one at a time.

Flannery O’Connor had some misgivings about her style and how it corresponded to her faith but after consulting with her spiritual director, he told her that she did not have the obligation to write for a 15 year old girl. True enough; I suppose that we are guilty here at C-L-S of assuming this as well. However, there ought to be more said about this. While we do not have the obligation to limit everything we write or say to audiences that are not sufficiently mature to deal with certain topics this is not the same as saying we do not have the obligation to attend to the concern of avoiding putting others into the near occasion of sin. We are our brothers’ keepers and must help to guard others’ purity. This is not the same as puritanism.

O.k., so what is the difference between purity and puritanism? Purity is a single minded commitment of the will to be in accord with God and therefore to look upon other human beings in the way that God created them. In other words, purity recognizes that each human person is made in the image of God and created for their own sakes. The person is made body and soul and purity recognizes, therefore, the beauty and goodness of the body and its important role in manifesting the person. It also recognizes the importance and goodness, nay holiness, of marital sexual intercourse. Purity recognizes that the only proper attitude toward a person is love. Others cannot be treated as a means but must always be looked upon as ends in themselves. Thus, no one can be reduced to their physical (or any other) attributes. They cannot be looked upon as a means to pleasure.

Purity also recognizes that we are in a fallen state and that it is a constant struggle to avoid the reduction of the other to a means to an end. This is very often sexual or emotional pleasure, but not always. And so purity recognizes that there are certain things that can lead one to see and treat others as objects. As an example, men are very visual and can be, in varying degrees, visually superficial. Thus, those wishing to be pure must avoid such occasions that would subject them to impure thoughts. While these are often visual, as I will discuss below, words can be powerful occasions for returning one to problematic visual experiences. Women wishing to guard men’s purity will not subject reveal their bodies in such a way as to make themselves the occasion of temptations against purity.

Puritanism, on the other hand, sees the body and even marital sexual intercourse as dirty, as something of a necessary evil. So while the response of someone motivated by puritanism and one motivated by an authentic concern for purity may sometimes externally appear to be the same, it will not be such in all cases because of their different motivations. For example, while respecting purity, the naked human body may be portrayed in art if it is done in such a way as to reveal the whole human person rather than to evoke an erotic response. Puritanism would never allow this to be done.

So now that we have these terms defined, we need to look at what we are doing in literature with words and word images. Words are symbols and have symbolic value. They point to a reality beyond themselves. I suppose that our post-Cartesian mindset has led us to view symbols in a disembodied, even arbitrary manner. A rose by any other name…

There is some truth to the claim of arbitrariness to the assigning of names to things, but this is not universally true. Nor does this fact negate the mediation of the thing symbolized, in a very real way, through its symbol. Symbols are more than just arbitrary signs of something else. We recognize this in our human experience. For example, the way a person’s name can mediate their presence to us in such a way that we actually experience in a certain manner, their presence.

Another example might be the way we react when someone says something kind or hateful to us. Even if we know what they are thinking, the experience of hearing or reading the words gives us the sense that the words have an ontology of their own. We are cut to the quick with hateful words or uplifted in an almost transcendent way with words of affirmation. There is a weightiness to the spoken and written word that goes beyond simple affective or psychological response.

Thus, words and word images can and do mediate to us the object or experience they symbolize, in way that cannot be reduced to the cognitive. That is why words are so powerful and must be used with much care. This brings us to the second issue: material participation in evil.

We must always avoid evil, but there are times when as an unintended side effect of a good act with a good intention, we find that the good done results in bad consequences. Sometimes we find that accepting the unintended consequences is justified by the greater proportion of good that will come from the good act and good intention. The Catholic tradition refers to this as the principle of double effect. Just war teaching relies upon this principle. In the case of using words or word images that might evoke impure responses in others but the intention is to explain circumstances and/or actually counter the effects of such events and words the use of them may be justified. However, we must first recognize that they are evils.

If we look at obscenities, we can see that they usually have to do with the bathroom or the bedroom. Most others tend to reduce the human person to something less than human. Most all have the same goal. They take what is holy or sacred (an act or a human person) and try to reduce it to the profane. Even if they are not always intended in this way by those who use them, that is their etymology. Thus, the use of them is at least a material participation in evil. Formal participation would be actually intending, to some degree, to convey the evil sentiment. Material participation can sometimes be licit and necessary. Formal participation in evil can never be justified.

Therefore, one must recognize the gravity of choosing to use obscene words or word images. It seems to me that literary merit in and of itself cannot be the only consideration. Rather, the gravity of material participation in evil dictates that one must ensure the use of obscene words or word images is an absolute necessity with no other effective way to bring about the good. Furthermore, one can never employ obscenities with the intent that the reader will experience a lurid response and furthermore, the writer must use all his skill to ensure that this is avoided. This would be formal participation and no good result can ever justify it.

The final issue is scandal. There are two aspects to this issue. The first is that which we have been discussing all along. Christian scandal is not what is often meant colloquially by the use of the term, mainly shocking sensibilities. Rather, the Christian meaning can be found in its Greek etymological origin, scandalon, which means a stone upon which one stumbles. In other words, in this context one is guilty of scandal when he causes others to sin or he makes it at least a near temptation. Today, so many have been exposed to pornography that this becomes a dicey issue. It does not take much for some (many?) to be led back to these images impressed forever in their memories. This ought to be taken into consideration, at least in deciding how to craft the use of one’s literary material.

However, something else ought to be considered as well. We are conditioned by our culture with the idea of “adult” humor, content, etc. into a mistaken notion about adult abilities. Now, while it is true that adults do have a greater maturity and therefore, capacity and obligation to master themselves and their responses to exposure to impure, or suggestively so, experiences, we too often naively assume that these exposures have no effect on us. All have varying degrees of self-mastery, but no one can be so confident in themselves that they would unthinkingly expose themselves to impurity. In fact, I would submit that exposure to impurity has a tremendous, cumulative, and perhaps almost imperceptible effect on our thinking and willful responses to temptations against purity. Being an “adult” does not give anyone license to expose himself to impurity with the presumption that their are no negative consequences for so doing. In fact, just the opposite is true. As an adult, one has the obligation to recognize and avoid all temptations against purity.

The other aspect of scandal is that by use of obscenity one can lead his readers to assume that obscene words or word images are “no big deal.” I think that this does happen when, for example, someone reads Walker Percy, knowing that he was a very faithful Catholic and sees his use of obscenities, the reader comes to think that there is nothing wrong with or at least no caution necessary with their use.

This is why you do not see the use of such words here and that we edit out or delete any such use as seems appropriate. Thoughts?

I came across an article on The American Daily called Catholics, Witches and New Age , where the author used the example of a couple of catholic parishes and some orders of nuns co-sponsoring a conference called Earth Spirit Rising - Return to Earth Wisdom as an example to why only solo-scriptura Christians have the confidence of divine revelation avoid this type of infiltrations in their faiths.

It is shameful that areas within Christendom are opening up their gatherings to that which is contrary to God’s Word, especially so when lead by so-called spiritual leaders such as nuns, priests and pastors. Divine judgment in condemnation will settle upon such persons for leading others astray.

Satan has always attempted in every generation to do everything demonically possible to keep persons from discovering the eternal truths in Scripture. Those aware of this must continue to lift up the Bible as the sole divine revelation — complete in itself with no need to detour into alternative means of communicating with the divine.

Those caught up in New Age teachings must be prayed for earnestly by genuine Christian believers. “Other practices such as the enneagram and labyrinths have gained widespread use in Catholic retreat centers.

I agree with his first paragraph, but the mentality of which he professes is actually what has led to a theology of personal preference and this often gives way to relativism.

With all good intentions - some of whom I have a close personal relationship have recently expressed their concerns of an alien paganism in Roswell NM, to which I travel no more than necessary; while others shudder at the thought of their previous celebrations of Easter and Christmas. While they believe they are guided by Scripture and the Holy Spirit as their source of Divine Revelation, in reality they are blindly accepting the traditions and authority of obscure preachers and authors. God love ‘em.

Since Shelray’s post on Richard Sipe and my post on Fr. Doyle’s, Mr. Sipe’s compadre, e-mail in regard to the post, the issue of orthodoxy and charity seem to have become a point of discussion. Now I do not want to appear to be defensive. I will admit that I am sometimes guilty of reacting combatively or emotionally; perhaps more often than I even realize. Shelray’s more recent post was a good reminder to me to be more attentive to my motivations. Nevertheless, there seems to be a confusion about the meaning of charity and an unstated presupposition that those who defend the Magisterium somehow, almost universally, trade charity for truth.

Let us make our distinctions today. What is charity? Charity at root is agape. It is God’s love which means that it is total Self-gift for the sake of the good of the Other. In close connection with this, it is a theological virtue. The term theological denotes the fact that it is a gift of grace. The term virtue means that it is something that is acquired by habit. Thus, it is something that develops and grows by a gift of grace with which the recipient cooperates. This cooperation begins with the human emulation of Trinitarian agape. Man practices charity by an act of the will in which he wills the good of the other for his own sake. He does this concretely through a total gift of himself to God and in various ways, to others for the sake of God and His love. But one cannot give what he does not possess. Thus, authentic charity requires self-mastery which comes about by a virtuous life. That is, a life lived in accord with the cardinal virtues and of course, aided by grace.

O.k. What does this mean for the way we act. Can charity be determined from outward actions? Not infallibly. Jesus’ overturning, in anger, of the money changers’ tables was by definition, an act of charity but it was not from their perspective, a very nice act. Jesus had in mind their own good and the good of others though. That is not to say that we all have license to run around overturning the tables of those needing fraternal correction. After all, we are not Jesus and we do not have the same insight into people’s souls. Nevertheless, a prudent and temperate (two of the cardinal virtues) person can discern that at times that direct confrontation is necessary. However, pragmatically we must admit that it is more often the case that changing hearts begins with relationships of trust than with acts of direct confrontation. That is why I say a prudent and temperate person.

What this does mean is that while one can often intuit care and concern of another from his actions, charity is not equivalent to appearing to be nice. In fact, many times the opposite is the case. One can be nice to someone to whom he ought to be offering charitable correction because he fears conflict, fears rejection, wants to be affirming, or any number of reasons that take priority over a real concern for the person and the welfare of his entire personhood.

So is it the case that most orthodox people care more for the truth than for charity? Cardinal Ratzinger pointed out that one cannot be separated from the other. One cannot have authentic truth without charity. Nor can one have real charity without the truth. The lack of one, diminishes and often destroys the other. Truth is not simply cognitive content but it is an encounter, in some degree, with Truth Himself. Charity is not simply an emotion or a sweet disposition. It is communion with the Trinitarian Communio, in Jesus Christ. If orthodox people present cognitively true propositions out of hateful motivations they cannot communicate the Person of Christ and when doing so will not be successful in transferring the cognitive proposition to the other. When others reject the truth because they do want to be charitable they destroy charity and rather propagate sin and dysfunction.

Truth and Charity have their fullest expression in the Catholic Church. The Church is the People of God, which means a hierarchical structure with authority given to the Pope, bishops and priests, along with the lay faithful. To pose hierarchical authority against communion and love or to undermine the hierarchical authority and trust puts one in opposition to this ecclesiological truth. To try to claim governing authority for the laity is to reject the revealed truth of the Church. To cast aspersions and caricature every faithful bishop and the hierarchy itself as power hungry, secretive, and self interested and to claim celibacy (which is much more than “just a discipline”) is at the root cause of the sex abuse crisis is not simply a distortion of the facts, it is a cause of scandal. Scandal means to cause any little one to sin, to fall away from the Catholic Church and Her spiritual leadership and especially Her Sacraments. This is tantamount to denying them the healing grace they need, and ultimately putting at grave risk, their eternal salvation.

This is what the acts of those such as A. W. Richard Sipe and Fr. Thomas P. Doyle have the effects of doing. Any one who reads Fr. Doyle’s articles (here are a few more for example: here and here) , his merciless attack of the “institutional Church,” and his support for the anti-Catholic organization Voice of the Faithful or Richard Sipe’s Freudian distortions of the meaning of the human person will have little trouble in agreeing that I have described their actions accurately, even if they do not agree with the conclusions. I hopefully have been successful in avoiding intuiting their motivations/intentions. I certainly have not judged, God forbid, the states of their souls. In good conscience, I believe that this post is done with charity.

I have no illusions that this post is going to remedy any problems by its argument. Perhaps it can provide some food for thought and some clarification of the issues. Regardless of how these gentlemen got to the point at which they now stand, they clearly believe that they are in the right. It will take the Holy Spirit to convince them otherwise. I will pray for them and I hope that you will too.

One of Wikipedia’s prominent editors known as Essjay (aka Ryan Jordan), a self-described tenured professor of theology at a private university in the eastern United States, turned out to be a 24 year-old community college dropout. The controversy began when The New Yorker magazine did a profile on Jordan, and when pressed by the reporter, he revealed he was “24 and holds no advanced degrees, and that he was never taught.” As ironic as it may sound, I’m of the belief that Ryan Jordan’s source and method of teaching the Catholic faith via Father’s John Trigilio and Kenneth Brighenti, “Catholicism for Dummies“, is actually less scandalous than what is being taught by some of the enlightened theologians currently teaching in our Catholic universities. More information on this scandal can be read at Wikipedia Watch.

As written in the Florida Catholic:

Timothy George, dean of Beeson Divinity School at Samford University, a Baptist college in Birmingham, Ala., wrote recently that “it is time for evangelicals to recover a fully biblical appreciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary and her role in the history of salvation, and to do so precisely as evangelicals.” George’s comments appeared in the December 2003 issue of Christianity Today and in a 2004 collection of essays by various theologians, “Mary: Mother of God”. We may not be able to recite the rosary or kneel down before statues of Mary, but we need not throw her overboard,”.

John Alden Williams, professor emeritus in the humanities of religion at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, is a Catholic historian who has studied Islamic civilization and religion. He and fellow William and Mary professor James A. Bill published “Roman Catholics and Shi’i Muslims” in 2002. It notes that two sections of the Quran, the sacred book of Islam, are devoted to Mary, known there as Maryam. She is recognized as the purified woman chosen to be the mother of the promised Messiah. Islam considers Jesus an important prophet, but not the incarnation of God.

Williams explained in a phone interview that, like Catholics, Shiite Muslims, who are a minority compared to the vastly more numerous Sunni Muslims, believe in intercessory prayer through saints and other holy people. That includes Mary, who is highly revered as a mediatrix between humans and God, or Allah. Sufis, another Islamic sect, also believe in intercession.

Shelray mentioned a while ago about the World Series of Catholic Theologians that Michael and Katerina over at Evangelical Catholicism have put together. Well, they are now down to the semi-finals. I am happy to see that for the most part the voters have distinguished between Catholic theologians who have had the biggest impact on authentic Catholic theology and those Catholic theologians who have had the biggest affect distorting authentic theology (except for the fact that a Liberation theologian has survived to the semi’s).

For some reason, there seemed to be some mild controversy over the fact Fr. Raymond Brown was beat out by Fr. Aidan Nichols. I don’t share the concern. Fr. Nichols is an excellent theologian who I would suggest, has done much for the English speaking world in explicating and developing Balthasar’s thought. In my view, Fr. Brown was a scriptural exegete who limited himself to higher criticism and because of this, at his own peril and ours, sometimes ventured into theological speculation. He seemed to suggest by his work that historical criticism was the only valid approach to biblical exegesis and so he was forever having to defend his work because his conclusions seemed to regularly contradict Church teaching. In his replies he would often say that Scripture does not say something but he believed it because the Church teaches it…a response that often led to further confusion…but I digress…

Any way, go over and vote.

It seems to me quite clear that those people who take a “progressive” stance on issues pertaining to the faith come down, invariably, on the side of things that would lead to the destruction of souls and even to the Church. A case in point is found in a recent article by Sandro Magister.

Magister describes in this article the issues at stake in a forthcoming conference at Verona regarding future pastoral strategies in the Italian Church. Two sides will be well-represented at this conference, according to Magister. On the one side are the faithful who are in line with the pastoral strategy of the last two pontificates. This side recommends a strong, clear message of faith to a world that increasingly lives in opposition to the pronouncements of Christ. On the other side, are those theologians who recommend that the Church open itself to the world in a mission of dialogue, that it listen before it speaks, and that it provide a “prophetic” witness rather than a triumphalistic proclamation of truth.

Aside from the vaguely contradictory notion of providing a “prophetic” witness to a world that one considers one’s teacher, a concrete pastoral recommendation has arisen among these progressives that is quite puzzling indeed. For, it seems, the theological progressives in Italy recommend a rigorist position on infant baptism. That is, they recommend denying baptism to those children whose parents and godparents are considered to be absent of faith. In fact, the denial of baptism in these circumstances has become a widespread practice in the Italian Church. The reasoning behind the practice is stated well by a progressive Catholic layman, Giorgio Campanini:

It seems beyond doubt that we are facing a clear disequilibrium in the administering of the sacraments. An emblematic case is that of the sacrament of baptism, the celebration of which seems to have given much greater emphasis to traditional, ritual, and sometimes almost magical components rather than to the presentation of the faith. To what extent is baptism, as administered today, truly a proclamation, a summons to faith? What has become of the godparents, the hypothetical ‘guarantors’ of the baptized child’s faith, in a widely secularized society like that of today? It must be asked whether the current praxis – that of not denying baptism to anyone, believer or non-believer – is really the most ecclesiastically correct one, and whether baptism can continue to be granted in the future without the catechesis of the parents, relatives, and godparents.

Magister analyzes well the problems inherent in this practice – which Cardinal Camillo Ruini, for many years the leading figure of the Italian bishops’ conference, has described as “pastorally destructive.” Magister points out that the same theological progressives who promote “openness” to the world are, in regard to this practice, theologically rigorist. I would add that it is clear that these “progressive rigorists” have taken on a rather Puritanical notion of Catholic sacraments. They would deny access to the grace of baptism for children whose parents or godparents “lack faith.” Could a more ruinous pastoral strategy be in place?

This brings me to the question that I raise in the title to this post. Whose bidding are these “progressive rigorists” doing? Christ’s or Antichrist’s?

The recent, almost unbelievable, tragedy in Pennsylvania has been copiously covered in the news media. Unfortunately, it is becoming an all too common occurrence. One of the telling things in the coverage is the way that the press seems almost unable to understand the Amish response of forgiveness. The very day that the young girls were killed the community sent representatives to the family of the killer to offer condolences for their loss and assurance of the Amish families’ forgiveness. Half of those at this man’s funeral were from the Amish community.

This does not seem “to compute” to those covering the story. Perhaps this is not surprising since statistics suggest that most of those in the news media, who would be covering the story, are non-believers. However, I wonder how strange it might seem to some of us Christians? Forgiveness, even in the most difficult of circumstances, is a Christian obligation. To deny someone else forgiveness is to deny it to oneself as the Amish have rightly said. This Amish community is presenting an heroic Christian witness and they are making it clear that it is their Christian faith that allows them to overcome more common but less “human” inclinations. This witness raises the perennial question that causes so many to reject belief in a loving God–the existence of evil and suffering.

One of the oft quoted responses from the Amish community is that they make sense of this because they understand it to be God’s will. Even some Christians rebel against this idea because if God wills it, it would seem that God is willing evil. Now, since Amish belief is influenced by Reformed theology it is almost certain that they do not make a distinction between God’s positive will and His permissive will. Thus, it is unlikely that they would be able to address this concern for those who are not willing to accept what is certainly a contradiction between faith and reason. In fact, because of this lack of distinction and for other reasons, a movement began at the beginning of the 20th century with philosopher Alfred North Whitehead called process philosophy. Whitehead and his students began a new theistic system of thought in an attempts to address the problem of suffering with a good God and they did so by rejecting God’s immutability. Whitehead incorporated Darwinian evolutionary theory into his theory about God and envisioned Him, rather than as Immutable Eternal Act, as a process that is conditioned and changed by creation. God is in the process of becoming God.

Some Catholic theologians, especially among the Jesuits (no surprise I suppose) have adopted process thought. Following Whitehead, they reject Church teaching on God’s immutability by claiming this is not a biblical view but the distortion of the biblical God by the incorporation of Greek philosophy into early Christianity. This is, of course, a facile dismissal of Christian tradition that leads most process theologians, in the end, to dismissing the Trinity or at least an orthodox understanding of the Trinity. Recently, some Evangelicals have begun to catch onto some aspects of process thought under the moniker, “openness theology.” Openness theology, among other things, attempts to “excuse” God from association with evil by denying Him omniscience, omnipotence, or some other necessary attribute of divine immutability. Very popular these days is wanting God to suffer in His divinity (for more on this and a good response to process thinking see Fr. Thomas Weinandy’s article) in order to bring Him closer to us.

John Paul the Great warned, in Fides et ratio, of the dangers of rejecting a sound metaphysics (and it is clear he had Thomist metaphysics in mind) in trying to do theology because one is then obligated to create his own on the fly. Philosophy done ad hoc is never self-consistent and so it devolves into incoherence. This is exactly the problem with the philosophies that deny God’s immutability. The problem with denying God immutability, omniscience, or omnipotence is that these are necessary attributes of God. God cannot be God if He changes, if He does not know everything, or does not have complete authority over His creation. Why? Perhaps the truth of creatio ex nihilo, God’s creation out of nothing, can make it clear.

The Greek philosophers recognized that nothing comes from nothing. Anything that is contingent (that is, non-necessary existence) cannot exist without some necessary Source of existence. In fact, anything that can change must have a higher principle of existence that is responsible for giving to the object its capacity to change and that which it can change into. Therefore, if God can change, He must change into something He is not. Where does the “something” come from if it does already exist as part of God? It cannot come from Him or He would already posses it. A god who changes is not necessary being and therefore, He cannot create ex nihilo. In other words, he is not God.

Ironically, contrary to the originators’ intentions, the implications of a changing, suffering god are not the source of comfort or encouragement. If God can change, then there is no guarantee that he will ever overcome evil or even want to. He could change his mind about salvation and leave us all to go to hell as we deserve. He could change his mind about creation, annihilate it, and start over. He would not be Love but the Absolute Will of Islam and Christian voluntarism (which B16 recently criticized). With this type of god, we have no assurance of anything; certainly not salvation and eternal happiness. Our existence could quickly come to an end, we could spend enternity in hell regardless of our faith or good works, or we could spend eternity suffering in heaven if a suffering god turns out to be what it is that our mutable god turns into.

Evil and suffering are difficult to understand, especially when we experience them. This is not surprising since the correct understanding of evil (moral and natural) and suffering are as the privation of some good that ought to be there but is not. Again, this is a logical necessity because concrete existence can only come from God; only He can create out of nothing. God can only create good. Furthermore, God must keep whatever He creates in existence as a continuing act so there is no possibility that a concrete, positive “thing” could be evil in its being because it would require that God cooperate with evil (at least by keeping evil in existence if not creating it). This is another irony of those who reject God’s omniscience or omnipotence because they think that this requires God to cooperate with evil. Logic dictates exactly the opposite. Thus it is to be expected that while we can understand the existence of evil and suffering in the abstract as a necessity of the abuse of free will, when faced with a concrete experience of it we can never understand it. Evil is a privation of the good and, therefore, has no logos, no ratio, no meaning. It is an existential state, not an ontological reality that can be made sense of.

The wisdom of the Cross, as St. Paul teaches (see 1 Cor 17-31), is not a worldly wisdom. Rather, it is the grace of Christ rushing in to replace the good that has been removed through the evil of sin. That is why Paul says that with the Cross of Christ, where sin increased grace abounded all the more (see Rom 5:20). Grace heals the effects of evil because grace restores the communion with the divine nature, lost through sin, that all creation requires for its integrity (cf. 2 Pt 1:4).

This is the wisdom and brilliance of the Cross; God’s power is His Love; it is Himself. The total self gift of Christ in obedience on the Cross has undone the first sin of Adam. Sin and evil now become the catalysts for their own eventual destruction. God does not use evil as though it were some tool. He permits evil so that all have the free will to give themselves totally to Him or reject Him. But He only allows the sin and death that greater good can come from it. Christ calls all Christians to take up our crosses and to cooperate with Him in restoring to the world the harmony that sin destroys.

This is the witness of the Pennsylvania Amish community this last week. Instead of becoming cooperators with evil by wishing harm and vengeance on another of God’s creatures and thereby emptying the Cross of its power, they are showing that Christians must be cooperators with the Cross of Christ by rejoicing in their sufferings for sake of the building up of the Church (see Col 1:24). They show that we must return hate with love and show how Christ conquers the world.

Article by Catholic New Service:

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — An Italian exorcist said demonic influence is strong in today’s world, affecting individuals and sometimes entire societies. While it is very rare for a person to be possessed by a demon, history reveals some likely examples — including Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, said Pauline Father Gabriele Amorth.

Father Amorth, who works as an exorcist in the Diocese of Rome, made the comments in an interview with Vatican Radio Aug. 27. Father Amorth said every culture in history has shown an awareness of the existence of evil spirits.

With the Bible, he said, these spirits were identified as rebellious angels who “tempt man to evil out of hatred for God.” “The devil can possess not only individuals but also entire groups and populations.

For example, I am convinced that the Nazis were all possessed by the devil,” he said. “If one thinks of what was committed by people like Stalin or Hitler, certainly they were possessed by the devil. This is seen in their actions, in their behavior and in the horrors they committed,” he said. “Therefore, society also needs to be defended against the devil,” he said.

Father Amorth said he thought one reason why the devil’s influence was high today is that Christian faith has weakened, replaced in many cases by superstition and an interest in the occult, which he said “open the way to demonic influences.”

He said the church teaches that the devil is a pure spirit; he is not seen, but his effects can be seen, he said. Exorcism, he said, is a prayer made in the name of the church to liberate people stricken by the devil or by his evil influences.

Father Amorth gained notoriety in 2000 when he revealed that Pope John Paul II had performed an impromptu exorcism on a young woman who flew into an apparent rage at the end of a general audience at the Vatican. In 1999, the Vatican issued a revised Rite of Exorcism, cautioning that cases of actual possession by devils were probably very rare.

The church also has emphasized that before an exorcism is performed, it is important to make certain one is dealing with the devil and not a psychological or other illness.

Our friends from when we lived in the DC area were here visiting this weekend. We had a very nice time. The weather was nice and so we decided to go to Springfield for the day on Saturday. As we drove past one church on the way into town, it had a sign out front that said, “If God seems far away, who moved?” One of our friends brought the sign to our attention and it occurred to me that the answer to the question necessitated a sound philosophical foundation. I mentioned that without a proper understanding of God and immutability then one could easily answer this question wrongly. She replied that one of her teachers (she is taking classes at a Catholic theology school in the DC area) told her class that he thought that the worst thing that happened to Christianity was its distortion by Greek philosophy. We did not pursue this issue very far but it did not surprise me. This claim is popular among a host of folks within and outside of Christianity.

This theory that Christianity was corrupted by Greek thought was popularized by Liberal Protestant historian, Adolph von Harnack, in his late 19th century History of Dogma. He claimed that the Early Church Fathers uncritically incorporated Platonist conceptions of God in contradiction to biblical depictions of divinity. This idea was taken up by some such as famed philosopher and progenitor of process philosophy, Alfred North Whitehead and student Charles Hartshorne, to reject God’s immutability. A few years after the last volume of Harnack’s three volume tome appeared, A.M. Fairbain declared that “theology has no falser idea than the impassibility of God” [The Place of Christ in Modern Theology (NY: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1893], 483). Since that time it has become widespread in Protestant circles to declare that God can suffer. This has been taken up by many Catholics as well. Now one can say that God suffered, but this requires distinctions.

Jesus Christ certainly really and truly suffered in His Passion and death. Jesus is God and so using what theologians call the communication of idioms we can say that God suffered. However, one cannot say God suffers or changes in any way in His divinity. If one claims that God can change in His divinity one implicitly denies God’s divinity. I will try to avoid a detailed discussion, so here is a quick and dirty summary. God is Being itself. All that exists owes its existence to God. God’s being is perfection itself. If God could change, even from one “emotional” state to another, there would have to be some higher principle than God that would provide the “room” for Him to “move” from one state to another. Thus, that which we call God would not be.

Now there are many people who complain that if God does not react to us and our sin, if He does not suffer when people suffer then He is just a lump and not the God that they want to have. This of course, is a false understanding of divine immutability. Immutability does not mean static. We are so stuck in time that we cannot comprehend eternal existence. However, the mistake those make who think this way, is that they do not recognize that God is the source of time. Change, as we understand it, is very closely associated with time. God is not limited by time; He does not need not change to be eternally active. St. Thomas referred to God as actus purus, Pure Act. He is one, eternal act. Thus, those things that we experience in time that are by their nature associated with change, such as emotions, if they are perfections then they have their origin in divine perfection. However, God is simple perfection and so that which we know as emotions is one way that we can participate in this simple divine perfection. But in God it always was, always is, and always will be. God does not experience emotions as we understand them. However, there is nothing that we experience as suffering in God because suffering is not a perfection.

God cannot suffer in His divinity. This is for the simple reason that suffering is a privation of being. It is non-being. Our experience of suffering comes from a lack of some good. Like evil and sin, there is some privation of good that gives rise to suffering. While some innocently fall into the error of a suffering God due to a faulty metaphysics, often as a misguided way of excusing God for the existence of evil in the world. However, some actually want a suffering/ changing God for other reasons. Many desire a changing God who can learn and evolve with His creation. Thus, He can learn from His “mistakes.” In the Old Testament, God may have outlawed certain things but they no longer need be considered so ’cause God has evolved. If these prohibitions continued into the New Testament, well that is not the last word either. If God suffers when we suffer, then He will find a way to allow us to do things that used to be considered wrong if we can devise an argument for why the prohibition causes us suffering.

Some implications of a suffering, changing God: If He can change, then we have no certainty of His promise of salvation in Christ. If He can change in any way, nothing keeps Him from changing His promise. In fact, even if He did not change His “mind,” there would be no guarantee that He could effect His plan of salvation. He would be subject to the ebb and flow of this higher principle that provided room for His changing. If we think about it for a moment, we do not want a god who can suffer with us; we want a God who can save us. In fact, this is the only philosophically consistent way to understand God. God does not suffer, He does not change; He cannot and will not change. He loves us unchangeably. That is the comfort of truly knowing our God.

If you are interested in a very good summary of the arguments for a suffering God and a solid refutation of them, you ought to take a look at a great book by Fr. Thomas Weinandy called Does God Suffer? Fr. Weinandy is a Capuchin friar who is now the Executive Director of the Secretariat for Doctrine and Pastoral Practices, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB).

Fr. Servais Pinckaers, O.P., in his book Morality: The Catholic View, describes two views of freedom. Fr. Pinckaers is a Belgian Dominican and has been described as one of the leading moral theologians in the Thomistic renewal of moral theology after the Second Vatican Council.

Fr. Pinckaers describes these two freedoms as: Freedom for Excellence and Freedom of Indifference. Freedom for Excellence has been the classical view of freedom since the advent of Western philosophy. It presupposes that man is naturally moral and so he has the capacity to act with excellence whenever he wishes. This freedom indicates that free will arises from the faculties of reason and will and from a natural longing for truth, goodness, and happiness. It is given to us in germ and develops through education and practice of the virtues until it flourishes in maturity. It unites one’s actions into an ordered whole that nourishes human flourishing with its end being authentic human happiness.

Freedom for Excellence was embraced and Christianized at the very early stages of the Church because it conformed so well with revealed truth. In fact, Christian teaching greatly strengthened this view. The Fall from grace and dis-integration of our reason, will, and affectivies (i.e. appetites and emotions) explained why we often experience conflicts in choosing the ultimate good, and confirmed the universal experience that when the lesser good (most often sensible goods) is too often chosen at the expense of the greater good (i.e. the moral good) momentary pleasure eventually gives way to problematic experiences, such as the deficiencies in self control, addictions, physical and psycho-emotional pathologies, and a general moral decline. Christian teaching of our renewed access to sanctifying grace in and through Christ, and our need to cooperate with this grace helps to explain the great capacities of the Saints to exercise tremendous self-control, to demonstrate consistently heroic moral lives, and the ability to experience joy in even the most difficult of physical and emotional circumstances.

But in the 14th century, there came a divorce between happiness and the moral life. William of Ockham, a Franciscan theologian, introduced his Ockhamist Nominalism that was to have a devastating effect on thought, religion, and society. We are still experiencing these deleterious effects today. Ockham set out to rescue God’s omnipotence from what he mistakenly saw as threats posed by St. Thomas’ integration of Aristotelian metaphysics into Christian theology. In the process he tore asunder the metaphysical structures of realism. He denied the reality of universals, arguing that God did not need what St. Thomas called the divine ideas in which all created entities participated. Instead, he said that God knew everything in their particulars, undermining the idea of nature, including human nature. He went further and advocated a voluntarist view of creation as totally arising from the divine will, such that God could actually command man to hate Him and then this would be moral.

Ockham also reversed the traditional relationship between freedom and nature. He now said that freedom precedes nature. Thus free will precedes reason and will on the level of action and so it is the first faculty of the human person. He defines freedom as the power to choose indifferently between two contraries. Because free will is first, one can choose between being happy and not being happy. There is no natural inclination to happiness, it is a matter of indifferent choice of the free will. Nature is no longer the source of freedom or happiness, it is choice. This is the freedom of indifference.

There is no longer a natural bond between the freedom of God and the freedom of the human person. We are now reduced to obligation imposed by the law. The law becomes juridicized and seen as arbitrary. Because happiness is divorced from nature, happiness is redefined and understood to have to be often sacrificed to obligation. Obedience to the law is emphasized and moral action as a response of love with a goal of happiness is pushed out of view. This Nominalist thinking gave rise to a morality of obligation. This view was accepted by the Protestant Reformers and institutionalized by philosophers like Immanuel Kant and his ethics of duty and so forms the predominant view that has influenced the modern West.

However, the logical consequences of Nominalism eventually took root and the primacy of the will, together with the denial of nature and the rebellion against authority gave rise to modernism and now post-modernism. The ethics of obligation has been rejected, happiness has been replaced with sensual pleasure, and the only moral absolute is the primacy of choice. When choice is king and there is no nature to guide one’s actions in the way of right and wrong, as a society we have come to be able to justify killing our unborn, glorifying sexual and alimentary hedonism, redefining human nature so as to accommodate as many number of disorders, that we now euphemize as sexual orientations and genders, as current societal limits will tolerate.

For Christian traditions that were founded on Nominalist metaphysics, man is totally corrupt and there is no possibility of a freedom for excellence. For nihilistic, post-modernism there is nothing to perfect except social structures dedicated the cult of choice. Unfortunately, many Catholics fall into both of these camps. To this Pinckaers responds that the need is great to rediscover and renew the understanding of the freedom for excellence to which the Holy Spirit constantly beckons us and offers us the grace to pursue and achieve. Excellence is what the human heart was created for and it is the only true path to human happiness because its end is Christ.

I’m not sure if you caught it in Zenit a couple of weeks back, but they ran a two part series (part 1 & part 2) discussing a new English, critical edition of John Paul the Great’s Theology of the Body catecheses just released by the Daughters of St. Paul. Some of the changes:

One of the biggest changes according to the translator, Michael Waldstein, was the discovery of the primary texts in Polish (previously it was thought that Italian was the original language) which provided a never before seen outline of the structure. Each portion had its own explanatory headings that did not make it into the Italian translation. Waldstein included these headings in the new translation which he says makes the entire work much more intelligible.

Another change will be the standardization of terminology. The English had been translated week to week by a different translator at the L’Osservatore Romano by whomever was on duty at the English desk that week. Waldstein gives an example of a fundamental technical phrase that in Italian (significato sposale del corpo, or spousal meaning of the body) that occurs 117 times in the Italian but is translated 8 different ways in the English.

Other additions include:

A foreword by Cardinal Schönborn, Archbishop of Vienna

A preface by Christopher West.

The catecheses of Song of Songs and Tobit: a comparison between the delivered text and the longer original pre-Papal text.

A comprehensive index of words and phrases.

A scriptural index.

A reference table for other versions of the papal texts.

My Italian is not that great so I admit that I have appropriated it primarily through the English translation. As such, I have ordered a copy of the new translation and plan to read through it again to see if my reading is altered any by the new translation.

If you would like to get a copy, try here: Theology of the Body

The Jesuits have perennial difficulties with the moral error called Proportionalism. Australian Jesuit Fr. Frank Brennan is no exception. Fr. Brennan is infamous for trying to suggest such things as abortion are not morally equivalent to murder and that not all abortion is wrong. Now a reader has sent along a link to a story in which this confused priest gives a gem of a quote. He says that

an attitude of moral purity towards experimentation with embryos “will do nothing to command the respect or assent of lawmakers wanting to know the appropriate legal limits to impose.”

One might ask what exactly is the problem with moral purity? From the context, it appears that Fr. Brennan faults moral purity for not being politically expedient. I suppose one can admit guilt in this regard (oh by the way, did I mention he is also a lawyer?). He has further sage (worldly) wisdom to offer:

“Some church leaders are convinced that even the deliberate creation of excess embryos so as to assist an infertile couple with IVF is morally wrong,” Fr Brennan said. “But even they would need to admit that the conscience of the nation is not with them on that.” He asserted that everybody knows couples who have undergone IVF “with a desire and deep respect for human life.”

O.k., so there are some Church leaders who are convinced that the deliberate creation of excess embryos for IVF is morally wrong. Well, I suppose that is true; though if one wanted to inform rather than deceive, he would say that the Church authoritatively teaches that the creation of any human embryo outside the marital act is always morally wrong. Any Church leader in union with the Church must be convinced of this.

How about another problem with the statement? I agree that one must realize that the conscience of the nation (in this case Australia) is not well formed in this regard. This affects the manner in which one approaches the issue. The same is true in the U.S. However, the truth of the matter is not established by the consensus which is what Fr. Brennan seems to be saying.

Fr. Brennan gives away his proportionalism when he suggests that since everyone knows good life-respecting couples who have undergone IVF (I guess Australia must be a very small place?) means that it must be o.k. After all, for proportionalists there are no absolute moral norms. Rather, intention can change what could be a morally evil act into a morally good one. For proportionalists, the act is not a moral one until intentions and outcomes are determined. For normal people, a morally evil act is always morally evil regardless of intention or outcome.

Fr. Brennan wants a more “nuanced” approach to Catholic morality. He complains:

…if the Catholic view “will not permit even the creation of embryos in these circumstances”, then the moral purity of the view will fail to command the respect or assent of lawmakers seeking “the appropriate legal limits to impose on citizens of all faiths and none.” “There are many issues in our lives today which are so complex that they do not permit of simplistic assertions by church leaders insufficiently engaged with people’s experiences,” he said.

You see, personal experience is the first measure of moral uprightness. He appears to have a distorted Lonerganian, values morality (dis)integrated into his proportionalism. I would guess by his gray hair and his not so Roman collar that he is from an era of the Catholic Church that is, frankly, an embarrasment to most. When I think of the 70’s era “main stream” moral theology, I immediately think back to the fashions that (hopefully) we all still find embarrasing. With the tired moral theories that Fr. Brennan still espouses, I see him very much at home with long sideburns, a pea green polyester leisure suit, white platform Patten leather shoes, and flashing a peace sign. Boy, I am glad most of us have matured beyond those days.

But I am a worm, hardly human, scorned by everyone, despised by the people. All who see me mock me; they curl their lips and jeer; they shake their heads at me: “You relied on the LORD–let him deliver you; if he loves you, let him rescue you.” Yet you drew me forth from the womb, made me safe at my mother’s breast. Upon you I was thrust from the womb; since birth you are my God. Do not stay far from me, for trouble is near, and there is no one to help. Source

I am not sure if many of you have noticed it over on our blog roll, but Justin over at Ressourcement has teamed up with our own Hierothee to bring you the Louis Bouyer Website.

They are just getting started but they have already provided a few first ever English translations for parts of Fr. Bouyer’s works. Bouyer was an influential thinker in the nouvelle théologie movement and the more of him that I read the more I see affinities of his thought with John Paul the Great, especially in their Trinitarian cosmology.  Of course, Hierothee can tell you much more… Go take a look and tell them how much you like it: Louis Bouyer

If this looks familiar to some, I thought I would reprise and update an important idea.

The prevailing Nominalism in society today goes well beyond the presupposition that there is nothing but an arbitrary relationship between words and their referents. We have been culturally conditioned to assume that there is nothing but superficial, and certainly not an ontological, relationship between the symbol and its referent.

Some Catholics have succumbed to Nominalism when it comes to the Sacraments. For them, the sacramental symbols are just material reminders of something spiritual (for other confused souls they function purely on the psychological level). This Nominalism was rare prior to Ockham.

However, Sacraments are Real symbols par excellence. They are what they symbolize and they convey the grace they represent. This is the case with the priest in Holy Orders, where he is a “symbol” of Christ, the Bridegroom.

Those who dissent from the Church’s dogmatic teaching that only men can be priests suffer from at least two problems in this regard. First, they err in their rejection of the idea that symbols have real ontological relationship to their referents; this is particularly true of the Sacraments. Second, they are wrong in refusing to accept that sex differences have ontological significance for the person. In other words, these sex differences are in part, constitutive of the human person.

From now to eternity, we are and will be either a female or male person. We cannot change our sex without annihilating ourselves as persons (”transgender” surgery is simply surface mutilation of the body; it cannot change the sex of the person). In fact, the relationship between sex and symbol is cosmological.

Sex is a form of relation; it establishes the structure by which we relate to others. What we see as sex differences in creatures is ultimately a biological (and spiritual) manifestation of the manner in which God relates to His creation and the way other aspects of creation relate to one another and to God. Peter Kreeft has a masterful article on sexual symbolism which much more clearly explains this profound truth. In fact, I would recommend reading Kreeft’s article before reading John Paul the Great’s theology of the body catecheses because in it Kreeft summarizes much of what JP the Great presupposes in his anthropology.

So how about the answer to the question? You probably can figure out by now that it is yes and no. No, if you are thinking of corporal copulation. However, there will be sex differences in heaven. Our masculinity and femininity remain with us forever as part of who we are.

Now even though there will be no bodily copulation, if one recognizes that sexual intercourse is intended not only as a way to reproduce the species but as a foretaste of the universal intersubjective unity we will have with God and every other person in heaven, then I suppose that one might consider that there will be the fulfillment of what sex prefigures in heaven. This heavenly, intersubjective unity is so far beyond the intimacy of marital sexual union that I suppose using the phrase “sex in heaven” could mislead and distort one’s understanding of the unimaginable joys which God has prepared for those who love Him.

Lent is coming up next week and so priests, religious, catechists, just about everyone is busily searching the internet for ideas for Lenten reflections. Msgr. was one of those and was kind enough to share with me the fruits of his search for Lenten reflections on reconciliation.

Well, thanks to the IHM Sisters (if I were to guess I would put my money on the bet that they are having trouble with vocations right now) we find that even after 2000 years we still have not managed to squeeze pantheism out of the thinking of some who call themselves Catholic. Here is a little snippet from their Lenten reflection on reconciliation:

As we are experiencing the impact of the universe story, we feel that something is missing in a sense of reconciliation that excludes the beloved community of life that is other than human. Recently, the members of the Earth Charter Committee decided to place a representative symbol of this community in their prayer corners.

“Universe story”, “Earth Charter Committee”, “community other than human”? This is not sounding good. My hair is starting to bristle already. If I were Shelray, apoplexy would already be setting in (but I have a little calmer disposition).

It is amazing how the presence of a giraffe, a turtle or a frog next to a candle or icon helps bring a deeper consciousness to our prayer.

Yea, but I am not exactly sure what it would be a deeper consciousness of (I tend to let my prepositions dangle when I fight off nausea). I am thinking here maybe the zoo or the cow pond. I don’t recall St. Paul admonishing any Christians to go to the local pound looking for reconciliation.

God is in us and in all. If we are polluting or wasting water, if we help destroy needed habitats by our demands for particular products, if we carelessly dispose of recyclable materials, our relationship to the earth community needs healing. Reconciliation lies in the recognition of the way things really are. Genuine reconciliation is based on the truths that God is in us and in all, working in all. We are bonded to and interdependent with all that is. When we live, respecting these truths, we are reconciled.

Ohhhh, those unpaid bills of the Church. It is true that there is a real connection of man with creation. We are stewards of God’s creation and we must manage and respect it as coming from God. However, it is rank heresy to imply some sort of consciousness to it (which is what I take from non-human community…I hope I am wrong).

Furthermore, the “God is in us and in all” comment seems to reflect a serious lack of appreciation here between God’s immanent presence which is the halmark of pantheism, and Christian truth in which God is transcendent in His nature but omnipresent in His power and in His offer of a close relationship to man.

I am sure the IHM Sisters are very nice and sincere religious. I just wish that they would stay within the bounds of Christianity in their theology (or at least be a little more careful about what they put on the internet).