Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

Well, it looks like we will be moving back to San Antonio after having been away for almost the entire decade.  The sad end to this apostolate has opened the door to a promising new apostolate in San Antonio.  A new school called the Mexican American Catholic College will begin offering courses in the fall.  I will be serving as their academic dean.  I have been meaning for some years to recover my long dormant Spanish (I pray that it is dormant and not lost) and this new position with this bi-lingual school makes that a pressing requirement.

In the waning weeks of our school of theology here in Champaign, I have had the opportunity to more clearly appreciate the gift that this apostolate was.  The time spent with students and staff, I do not take so much for granted any longer.  One such experience was my panel participation last Tuesday night in which our FOCUS missionaries hosted a campus wide  “Stump the Catholic” panel discussion.

Students from across the U of I campus were invited to bring their questions and boy did they.  One enterprising atheist student posted on reddit, soliciting questions in order to “demolish” us. Most of the questions from the floor were the old fare that one would expect to hear.  Some students clearly were taken aback that there were such solid answers to questions of which they had assumed that all serious Catholics must be ignorant.  Not all, however, allowed themselves to experience this ephiphany.  In reading about B16’s address this morning to the Pontifical Biblical Commission I am reminded of important insights that help to explain why with some questions, for example those which deal with Scripture, it is notoriously difficult to satisfy some people.

CNA reports that the Holy Father discussed the issues of contemporary biblical interpretation and reminded his audience that authentic interpretation of Scripture can only take place with the Church.  This is a very important point that needs to be understood.  Benedict goes into the justification in the article and so I will not repeat that.

However, let me offer that a proper anthropology can illustrate why this is so.  Such an assertion as Benedict’s is, of course, very offensive for those who subscribe to the notion that critical approaches to biblical exegesis are the only appropriate tools for “enlightened” minds.  These people who place themselves outside of the Church’s tradition take such a claim as one smacking of intellectual suppression.  It seems to me that this very mindset is the problem keeping them from considering the legitimacy of the Pope’s statement.

I would say that Benedict’s assertion is a corollary to St. Augustine’s sage insight articulated in the dictum: “I believe that I might understand.”  Belief is in fact a prerequisite to understanding the divine mysteries.  But belief is often misunderstood.  I recall the exchange of open letters between the late Carl Sagan and a priest from the Christophers (whose name I do not recall) a number of years back about Sagan’s unbelief.  It came down to the fact that Sagan was fearful of believing because he felt that belief surrendered the intellect and made him vulnerable to exploitation.

The US culture does in fact promote this type of thinkingthrough a still strong but fading fideistic current.  However, trust, belief, and faith are eminently human.  The less of them we possess, the more we surrender our capacities to fulfill ourselves has human beings.  We can see that we need trust just to live.  There is no place one can go in which he does not have to in some way, rely on another.  A quick (and adequately reflective)  audit of daily life will verify the level of interdependence we have on one another as well as the unreflective trust we immediately place in others upon whom we depend.  Moreover, we cannot have a relationship unless we trust.  The depth of a relationship is dictated by the level of trust between the two parties comprising the relationship.  We cannot fulfill ourselves as human persons without these deep, trusting, giving relationships with others.

We are in fact, created to trust.  Trust and belief do not require one to suspend his reason.  Far from it.  In fact, in order to mature in faith it demands active engagement of the intellect.  However, it begins with trust.

Trust is the first step in belief, in faith.  To be skeptical, is an anti-human disposition.  Now skepticism is not the same as prudential caution.  If the consequences are grave for misplaced trust and/or the probability high that one’s trust might be abused in less than grave situations, caution is very reasonable.  However, skepticism (as I am defining it anyway) is an act of the will against trust before even opening one’s mind to consideration of the rationale for the acceptance of a proposition.  In other words, one has prejudged; he has made made up his mind without fairly considering the evidence.  This is termed unjust prejudice and it is why prejudice is wrong.  Skepticism, as distinct from prudential caution, is simply prejudice or bigotry. To be truly human one must first trust; man is one who believes.

This is an initial step in recognizing why understanding Scripture requires one to be in communion with the Church but of course there are a few more to go. Once we trust (with prudential caution) we then are open to hearing, understanding, and considering a proposition .  This proposition is one in which we are asked to believe.  It is not a rare event mind you, to take on trust the propositions of others.  It is something we do countless times throughout the day. Those who tabulate such things claim that over 90% of what we “know” we have accepted in trust from others without verifying it for ourselves. If the proposition is reasonable and the proposer is credible and competent then it is eminently reasonable to begin the process of trusting the proposition.  Of course, various persons are going to have a variety of questions to be answered before determining any such proposition is reasonable.

At this point, one is open to the final stage in Christian faith and that is to accepting the gift, the theological virtue of faith which elevates and perfects the natural trust and belief of the hearer.  This theological virtue is that which deepens and broadens the understanding of the proposition in addition to being able to hold the conviction with unshakable certainty.  It is this experience of faith and of God’s love which gives one deeper and more profound insights into the propositions which convey the mystery of faith.

This experience of faith and love is nothing more than the experience of communion with God which human beings acheive through union with Christ.  Union with Christ is by definition, communion in His Church the fullness of which is the Catholic Church. The anthropology of trust makes understandable why one must be in the heart of the Church to understand its profound mysteries and why this communion does not entail suppression of one’s intellect.

B16’s statement has deep Trinitarian, Christological, ecclesiological and anthropological implications.  One of which suggests that those who uncritically accept the philosphical baggage that comes with the history of higher criticism will never be able to understand the authentic meaning of Scripture.  Criticism is a very useful tool but to assume that one must adopt skepticism toward divine revelation or toward the Church in order to perform the various methods of biblical criticism is to disqualify oneself from being a Catholic biblical scholar and to remove the liklihood that one will come to an authentic exegetical result.

It means that athiests and other methodological skeptics will never be convinced through intellectual argument alone.  They must first experience conversion, a softening of the heart.  It is the reason that our young atheist mentioned above subsequently claimed victory and why many in the Catholic bibilical academy will unfortunately go to their graves rejecting many Church teachings and steadfastly rejecting the use of any exegetical tools other than criticism.  We must pray for a change of heart for those who are thus instransigent so that they may be set free in order to more effectively use their heads.

I started this post last week and was close to being finished but lost it all when I went to save it.  I am just now having a chance to return to it so you have had a week’s reprieve…but no longer…

A number of months ago, I read through Dinesh D’Souza’a What’s So Great About Christianity.  This was D’Souza’s response to the aggressive atheists’ attack on religion of recent years.  I congratulate him for taking on such an important task.  I also have to say that I am impressed at the breadth of material that a “policy wonk” was able to sift through and to apply.  In many respects, he did a masterful job in assimilating and articulating a variety of significant issues and arguments

Regrettably, that is not uniformly the case.  In fact, in reading some of his arguments one gets the sense that he is at least as influenced by Protestant thought than by the Catholic intellectual tradition even though he is Catholic.  For example, D’Souza cites St. Thomas Aquinas the same number of times as he does Martin Luther and few would argue that when it comes to natural theology, a good part of the purpose of his book, there is absolutely no comparison between the two.  In the end, I suspect that it is a lack of adequate familiarity with Catholic thought that gives this book the appearance of a potpourri of arguments rather than a coherent, systematized response to fundamental errors in atheism.

In what I consider to be a fatal flaw for this book, D”Souza invokes Immanuel Kant as a modern philosopher who provides what the author believes to be an unassailable defense against the atheists’ materialist reduction of reality.  D’Souza summarizes his thinking on Kant in this article he wrote for the Christian Science Monitor just before his book was released:

Kant erected a sturdy intellectual bulwark against atheism that hasn’t been breached since. His defense doesn’t draw on sacred texts or any other sources of authority to which people of faith might naturally and rightfully turn when confronted with atheist arguments. Instead, it relies on the only framework that today’s atheist proselytizers say is valid: reason. The Fallacy of the Enlightenment is the glib assumption that there is only one limit to what human beings can know – reality itself. This view says we can find out more and more until eventually there is nothing more to discover. It holds that human reason and science can, in principle, unmask the whole of reality.

In his 1781 “Critique of Pure Reason,” Kant showed that this premise is false. In fact, he argued, there is a much greater limit to what human beings can know. Kant showed that human knowledge is constrained not merely by the unlimited magnitude of reality but also by a limited sensory apparatus of perception.

Consider a tape recorder. It captures only one mode of reality, namely sound. Thus all aspects of reality that cannot be captured in sound are beyond its reach. The same, Kant would argue, is true of human beings. The only way we apprehend empirical reality is through our five senses. But why should we believe, Kant asked, that this five-mode instrument is sufficient? What makes us think that there is no reality that lies beyond sensory perception?

What appeals to D’Souza about Kant is that the latter seems to provide a rational solution to the reductive, materialist assumption of atheists.  Kant appears to provide a sound basis for showing the atheist that he is assuming too much when he declares his ability to rule out the existence of anything but the material world.  It seems to me that this is a novel reading of Kant.  I am not an expert on Kant, but I do not think that Kant employed his thinking against atheists’ materialist reductionism.  Nevertheless, even if the implications of Kant’s thinking do provide this consequence, the costs that come with accepting Kant are simply too high.  We can begin to see the implications of Kant’s thinking by reading more of what D’Souza has to say about him:

Moreover, the reality we apprehend is not reality in itself. It is merely our experience or “take” on it. Kant’s startling claim is that we have no basis for assuming that a material perception of reality ever resembles reality itself. I can tell if my daughter’s drawing of her teacher looks like the teacher by placing the portrait alongside the person. With my eyes, I compare the copy with the original. Kant points out, however, that comparing our experience of reality to reality itself is impossible. We have representations only, never the originals. So we have no basis for presuming that the two are even comparable. When we equate experience and reality, we are making an unjustified leap.

It is essential to recognize that Kant isn’t diminishing the importance of experience. It is entirely rational for us to use science and reason to discover the operating principles of the world of experience. This world, however, is not the only one there is. Kant contended that while science and reason apply to the world of sensory phenomena, of things as they are experienced by us, science and reason cannot penetrate what Kant termed the noumena – things as they are in themselves.

Some critics have understood Kant to be denying the existence of external reality or of arguing that all of reality is “in the mind.” Kant emphatically rejects this. He insists that the noumenon obviously exists because it is what gives rise to phenomena. In other words, our experience is an experience of something. Perhaps the best way to understand this is to see Kant as positing two kinds of reality: the material reality that we experience and reality itself. To many, the implication of Kant’s argument is that reality as a whole is, in principle, inaccessible to human perception and human reason.

And herein lies the rub.  It matters not whether Kant tries to take experience seriously or not.  It matters not whether he denies the existence of external reality or not.  The consequences of his thinking end with the same result.

Kant is very similar to Descartes but with even more deliterious consequence.  Descartes was attempting to overcome the epistemological skepticism of his day when he began the modern inward turn with his cogito ergo sum.  In doing so, he accepted in principle ( at least hypothetically) the fatal error that one might be distrustful of all that he knows through experience. Descartes tried to rebuild, with mathematical precision, a solid philosophy that did away with all skepticism.  Unfortunately, attempting to create a philosophy which uses as its foundation and starting point, one’s self-awareness as the only sure point of knowledge, is impossible.  It did not take very long for his entire system to be deconstructed.  David Hume accepted Descartes implicit epistemological skepticism and took it to its logical dead end.

Unfortunately, Immaneul Kant accepted Hume’s fundamental epistemological skepticism but not his methodological skepticism about the empirical world.  Thus, Kant, like Descartes, attempted to build a philosophy that explained how one could function in the empirical world while denying the ability to know anything beyond.  It did not take long for Kant’s system to be likewise dismantled, though his thinking about religion and God were problematic in and of themselves.

Kant indeed draws an insuperable barrier between the world of experience, the phenomenal world, and reality itself, the noumenal world.  D’Souza does not address Kant’s own explicit implications of this lack of access to the noumenal world.

For Kant, St. Thomas Aquinas’ “Five Ways,” his proofs for the existence of God, are invalid.  In fact, for Kant there is no possibility for any speculative knowledge about God or any reality beyond phenomenal experience.  The human intellect just has not capacity in this regard and so it is doomed to failure.  Thus, D’Souza is being intellectually inconsistent by citing Kant’s noumenal/phenomenal dichotomy and St. Thomas’ natural theology in the same work.

So does Kant believe in God?  He does, but Kant’s belief is not one of faith nor is it a product of speculative induction.  It is a curious deduction that is based, apparently, solely upon pragmatic necessity.  He starts with the premise that we must be moral and for a variety of reasons concludes that we must believe in God if we are to live a moral life.  The implications of this are clear.  Kant’s position leaves us with the functional demand to believe in God without the intellectual frame work to make such belief reasonable.  We can see from this the metaphysical basis for atheism: faith is simply morality, faith is unreasonable, faith is fideistic, etc. In fact, most acknowledge Kant as the father of German Idealism and many have recognized German Idealism as a significant progenitor of modern atheism.

It is ironic that D’Souza would select a modern thinker who is arguably a significant contributor to the development of modern atheism as a defense against it.  Even more, that he would use the precise epistemologically skeptical theory that promoted its development.  Fr. Jonathan Robinson of the Oratory, in his book The Mass and Modernity, argues that Kant reduces religion to morality and the implications of such are destructive to Catholicism.  Kant rules out the use of pure reason and eliminates our access to God.  He rejects supernatural divine revelation and our ability to speculatively reason about God or any reality beyond our experience.  He rejects Church structure, Sacraments, prayer, etc. as anything more than a time conditioned, concrete manifestation of the human attempt to establish a moral structure for life.

Moreover, it is ironic that D’Souza would tear asunder that one point of common reference between atheists and the Catholic intellectual tradition, that is our reason and its ability to know the created (for Catholics anyway) world as it is.  Chesterton pointed out that these points of agreement are instrumental in establishing dialogue and debate in order to change minds and hearts.  This is one truth that we cannot afford to throw away.  The Catholic intellectual tradition provides a much greater wealth of resources to refute the materialist reduction of atheism without the penalty we must pay to saddle up with Kant.  If we are looking for a compelling argument that can ultimately unmask the atheists’ naivete about the limits of their thinking, well I will only say that Kant can’t do it.

I was at the gym this morning and, as usual, was exposed to the latest bloviation from the mainstream media.  This morning, Kerry Kennedy was on some morning show offering her explorations into her Catholic faith that she is promoting through a new book, Being Catholic Now: Prominent Americans Talk About Change in the Church and the Quest for Meaning.

Kennedy is one of Robert F. Kennedy’s youngest children.  She describes her motivation to write the book:

So, what happened is that I was feeling conflicted because my Catholicism is so deeply important to me — it was my sense of connection to the almighty, to humanity, to my heritage, my upbringing. And my Catholicism informed my view of the world, and the work that I do every day on social justice issues. And yet, so often when I went to church, I was confronted with words and symbols that were anathema to my values. …So I thought it was time to take some time and reflect more deeply on these issues.

I suppose that this is a good thing.  One should feel a sense of consternation when the values one holds are in conflict with the faith one professes.  Now Kennedy is a lawyer, so we might assume a lawyer who is going to investigate some conflict of positions would begin by looking at the reasoning behind the positions in which she is in conflict.  That is not apparently what Kennedy chooses to do.

Her modus operandi is to ask 37 different prominent Catholic Americans for their views on Catholicism.  She wanted a broad spectrum of views from people of have thought seriously about some issue…any issue.  She did not think it important that they have thought seriously about what it means to be Catholic.  Some of her choices of “Catholics” are quite curious.  While there are a couple who might make sense, Cardinal McCarrick and Tom Monghan, others are bizzarre.  She interviews such authorities on what it means to be Catholic like: Bill Maher, Dan Akroyd, Susan Sarandon, Andrew Sullivan, and Nancy Pelosi.  Bill Maher, are you kidding.  Exactly what will you learn from this obscence, anti-Catholic ignoramus?  For some reason, I do not think that if I wanted to know about a topic, say superstring theory, that I would ask someone who has thought a lot about Keynesian economics but hasn’t a clue about superstring theory.  I dunno., maybe that’s just me.

The problem, it seems to me, is that instead of considering the source of the Church’s teaching and the source of her values, Kennedy instead seems to assume her values to be foundational and instead an open investigation into Church teaching and an honest self-assessment, she turns her focus on trying to legitimize her desire to remain Catholic while rejecting those teachings which conflict with her “values.”  With such an agenda, where else would one turn than to some of the notable leaders of dissent:

So, as Robert Drinan in this book pointed out, the pope apologized for 92 things that the Catholic church had done wrong, and he (Drinan) said, ‘These are fallible people and I expect them to do fallible things in the future as well.’ And so I think that that is a source of comfort for me, to view it sort of in that way, that we’re all fallible, and we’ll all make mistakes, but that this is an important institution to be part of.

This is the old, tired canard of dissenters.  The Church has erred on this or that issue in the past, and usually they make no distinctions among the issues that throw out, thus they are wrong (and I am right) in my dissent against this or that issue (which usually has to deal with sexual restraint).  These dissenters generally conflate matters of prudential judgment, sinfulness of some members of the hierachy (she makes much hay over the “pedophile” scandal), changes in disciplinary practice, and authentic development of doctrine all to suggest that the Church is not infallible (not asking how much more fallible she might be than the Institution). And that is what Kennedy does here:

I was trying to resolve that issue, of how do people who disagree with what the institutional church is saying to them look themselves in the mirror and say, ‘I am a Catholic.’ And what I found is that absolutely everybody disagrees with the church. The cardinals disagree with the church, and the nuns and the priests, and even Tom Monaghan disagrees with the church, so everybody has a disagreement, which is interesting to me. It’s just not a monolith at all. It’s an enormous organism with a lot of moving parts and people with strong opinions and I think that that’s good.

Tom Monaghan’s admitting that he would not again send his children to Catholic schools because they have become destructive to the faith of young people is not the same as Fr. Drinan arguing that abortion “rights” is an issue that Catholics can legitimately support. Kennedy certainly does not demonstrate that she possesses a mature understanding of her faith.  In fact, she does not manifest even the capacity for making critical distinctions that is supposed to be the art of a lawyer.  In terms of her  understanding of the faith, here is what I take to be her summary:

I also think that Catholicism is inherently about contradiction. So much of the New Testament is about Christ arguing with the Pharisees and with the scribes and with the Jewish leaders of the day, and as Pope Benedict said, it’s a quest for the truth. And so if you’re going to have a quest for the truth, you’re going to have a lot of questioning of authority. And we’re taught to have obedience to authority, but we’re also taught to revere saints, so many of whom were burnt at the stake or martyred because they questioned authority. And then we are told that Christ has died but Christ is coming again. And when Catholics say I don’t understand this, how can this really be transformed into the blood of Christ, is this really the body of Christ that we are eating now, they are told, ‘That’s the mystery,’ and ‘Go in peace,’ and that’s sort of it. And so I think that, in a way, I think it’s good, because it prepares us to deal with so many other parts of life, where there are conflicting emotions. At the moment of greatest love, there is greatest fear, and at the moment of enormous repression, there is resistance, and therefore a chance at revolutionary change. And so I think our lives are full of contradictions.

So since the Catholic Church is about contradiction she “feels” that she can be at peace with holding to the faith which is “anathema” to many of her personal  values.  For example, the Church is a strong promoter of social justice around the world she argues, except for the parish she went to in Northern Virginia which preached on ending a woman’s right to abortion.  Nor did it permit girl altar servers, an even more disturbing anachronism it seems.  But not to worry, now she is in a great parish in Armonk, New York where the priest is always putting a picture of haloed Gandhi on the altar. She seems to equate Christian mystery with contradiction reflecting a rather immature (and erroneous) understanding of this important doctrine.

Implied is that for Kennedy, the most relevant contradiction is the fact that the Church requires obedience to authority (at least she knows that) but on the other hand, everyone knows that Jesus was a rebel (of course, Matthew 23:2-3 was a distortion of the pure Gospel message inserted by some later, ecclesio-centric redactor). So she will be an obedient rebel?  I suppose she will be obedient to her personal “values” and rebellious against Church authority because it will not canonize her personal values.  The scary thing is that this lady says she is teaching CCD.

So the Church prepares us for the contradictions of life by being, not a contradiction with the world, but a contradiction with reason.  This sense that faith is opposed to reason, the radical individualism, and the anti-authority rebellion are emblematic of Enlightenment rationalism and are all manifested in Kennedy’s assertions.  But she is not even a rationalist.  Rather, she is parasitic on Enlightenment premises for some of her argumentation but proves to be, as will be seen, thoroughly post-modern.  This justifies (in her mind I suppose) her self-contradictions in arguing that her “Catholicism inform[s] my view of the world, and the work that I do every day on social justice issues” but at the same time it does not inform her moral world view in terms of same sex attraction disorder, abortion, contraception and the like.

One might ask why she would still want to be a member of the Church with which she has so much disagreement.  Well, it is for an immature understanding of a seriously correct reason.  The Catholic Church provides her “sense of connection to the almighty, to humanity, to my heritage, my upbringing.” It does provide this because the Church is man’s entry into communion with God.  Unfortunately, Kennedy’s dualistic ecclesiology feeds her individualistic worldview.  For her, the institutional Church “is separate and apart from my sense of connection to the Almighty, when I pray.” She believes that she can separate the “institutional” Church from her “Catholicism.”

Perhaps someone should recommend to her De Lubac’s Splendor of the Church, or Balthasar’s The Office of Peter and the Structure of the Church as counter proposals to her defective understanding of the Church.  In these works, these 20th century thinkers show how the Church is an organic whole comprising the Totus Christus, the Whole Christ.  One cannot have the unity with the Father the Church effects while rejecting the hierarchical structure that the Lord Jesus established to tend His sheep. Or as St. Cyprian says, “one cannot have God as Father who will not have the Church as his Mother.” One cannot fully embrace the Father if one rejects the fullness of the Truth, which is His Son–and this includes the Son’s Mystical Body–the Church.  The fragmented thinking of our time might make a fragmented view of the Church seem plausible but it is worldview that has deleterious consequences for one’s soul.

Kennedy presents a confused sort of argument which allows her to maintain her connection with her childhood memories by remaining Catholic and still embracing her Enlightenment formed, personal “values.”  She hopes that her book will be a comfort for other confused Catholics who are searching for a rationalization, or more correctly mutual emotional support, for their dissent:

I hope that they’ll feel like they’re not alone…I hope that people will feel that there are a lot of others out there who are grappling with the same issues: Should I raise my children Catholic? What does that mean? Am I a good Catholic? What does it mean to be a good Catholic today? If I’m not following the way I was taught as a child, or that my parents approached the religion, does that mean that I’m somehow missing something, or that I’m bad? And I hope also that others might feel a sense that the essence, the goodness of Catholicism, of that relationship with God, of that sense of love, can be embraced without embracing the parts of the institutional church which are anathema to your values, to one’s values.

Kennedy chooses an apt term for her position.  Her desire that people considering dissent are able to “feel” a solidarity with other dissenters is more truthful than asserting that any honest, thinking person could embrace such drivel. She is in fact, proposing that the ground of action must be one’s arbitrarily chosen “values” rather than a quest for truth and justice.  When faced with a contradiction of values, Kennedy chooses to side with Nietzsche and Sarte.  Unfortunately, with these two rebels as her priest-mediators, she is risking abandoning the “connection with the Almighty” she claims to desire; regardless of what her affective senses tell her.

“Among thousands of people, there are not a hundred who will arrive at their salvation, and I am not even certain of that number, so much perversity is there among the young and so much negligence among the old.” - St John Chrysostom

Fr. Kimel of pontifications did an interesting piece on questions surrounding how many souls will be saved and how many will be damned.

I have omitted one important fact: as decent as most people I know may be, I have to admit that every person I know is also selfish, even the nicest ones. My experience, in other words, confirms a fundamental teaching of the Catholic Church—the doctrine of original sin.

… Every human being is born into a world dominated by Satan and corrupted by death and sin. And in a mysterious way which I at least cannot explain, these three elements—spiritual alienation from God, oppression by Satan, and deformation by a sinful world—coincide….

A couple of years ago, I came across a piece called, Cry of A Lost Soul , which is a powerful record of events that led a young woman to ultimately lose her soul. The sobering document has been previously printed with imprimatur, and describes the vision of a young, single catholic woman after learning of her friend from work who had recently died as a result of an automobile accident. Right from the beginning of the ghoulish narrative, it was evident how many times I took on the nature of the damned.

When I was jealous of others, wanting them to share in a misery of failure.

“I should like to see you to come to this state where I must remain forever.”

When I did things for others based not in the spirit of charity, but with self centered motivations – doing it out of obligation or out of fear of rejection by saying no.

“Our wills are hardened in evil – in what you call evil. Even when we do something ‘good’, as I do now, opening your eyes about hell, it is not because of a good intention”.

When life seemed so unfair, and I found solace in a state of self-pity and anger.

“We look appalled at our ruined life, hating and suffering. Do you hear? We here drink hatred like water.”

When deep down inside, I secretly took delight in the misfortunes of others of whom I was either jealous of or held in disdain.

“I hate the devil too. And yet I am pleased about him, because he tries to ruin all of you; In truth every time they drag down here to hell a human soul their own torture is increased. But what does one not do for hatred?”

We never know when our time will end, but be assured that God is a the perfect judge.

“Deep down I was rebelling against God. You did not understand it; you thought me still a Catholic. I wanted, in fact, to be called one; The lost Catholics suffer more than those of other religions, because they, mostly, received and despised more graces and more light. He who knew more suffers more cruelly than he who knew less. He who sinned out of malice suffers more keenly than he who sinned out of weakness. But nobody suffers more than he deserves.”

For he even has mercy on those whose souls are eternally destined for hell.

“God was merciful to us by not allowing our wicked wills to exhaust themselves on earth, as we should have been prepared to do. This would have increased our faults and our pains. He caused us to die before our time, as in my case, or had other mitigating circumstances intervene. Now He shows Himself merciful towards us by not compelling a closer approach than that afforded in this remote inferno.”

Humbling.

“Enter by the narrow gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and many there are who enter that way. How narrow the gate and close the way that leads to life! And few there are who find it.” (Matt. 7:13, 14)

Sincere apology by author/perplexed prophet of a website predicting a 2007 Rapture -

THE ONLY THING I CAN THINK OF IS THAT I RELEASED THE DREAM AT THE WRONG TIME AND GOT THE BOOK PUBLISHED TOO EARLY. MAYBE THE DREAM HAD SOME KIND OF SYMBOLIC MEANING INSTEAD OF A LITERAL MEANING THAT I HAVE NOT BEEN ABLE TO FIGURE OUT YET. I STILL DO NOT KNOW WHAT I HAVE DONE WRONG AND WHY THE PROPHECY FAILED. I PROMISE ALL OF YOU THAT I DID NOT INTENTIONALLY MEAN TO HURT OR MISLEAD ANYBODY. I PROMISE I DID NOT MAKE UP THE DREAM. I KNOW MANY OF YOU ARE VERY DISAPPOINTED, BUT I ASSURE YOU NO ONE IS AS DISAPPOINTED AS I AM. PLEASE FORGIVE ME IF I HAVE SHAKENED ANYONE’S FAITH WITH THIS PROPHECY.

Fullness of Truth, just another reason to be eternally thankful that we’re Catholic !!

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

Historian Sergio Luzzatto’s latest book The Other Christ: Padre Pio and 19th Century Italy has deduced that Padre Pio faked his stigmata through pouring carbolic acid on his hands. A secret Vatican document found by Luzzatto revealed how a pharmacist remembered a young Padre Pio buying four grams of carbolic acid in 1919. The testimony was originally presented to the Vatican by the Archbishop of Manfredonia, Pasquale Gagliardi, as proof that Padre Pio caused his own stigmata with acid.

What I suspect is conveniently omitted from Luzatto’s novel is a fair disclosure on the truth surrounding Archbishop Gagliardi’s “veritable satanic war” waged against Padre Pio. For what ever reason, the Archbishop was bent on sabotaging St. Pio’s ministry through baseless accusations of sexual and monetary improprieties and soliciting falsified letters which were then forwarded to the Vatican. When in truth, it was the archbishop himself who was the center of controversy which included public accusations of sexual molestation, unchastity and faulty accounting errors, in addition to his diocese being infected with continued and habitual pederasty as well as acts of cleric sodomy. The Vatican eventually removed him from his diocese.

Saint Pio never retaliated nor ever criticized Archbishop Gagliardi and immediately said Mass for him after his death. It is said that the angriest he was ever seen about the archbishop’s attacks was against one of his own supporters who had verbally attacked Gagliardi – another fact that will most likely never come to light in Luzzatto’s book which has the stench of anti-catholicism which far exceeds that of carbolic acid.

As quoted by the Living Church Foundation:

Regarding his move to the Roman Catholic Church, Bishop Steenson said, “I believe that the Lord now calls me in this direction. It amazes me, after all of these years, what a radical journey of faith this must necessarily be. To some it seems foolish; to others disloyal; to others an abandonment.”

Bishop Steenson will be the third bishop to convert to the Catholic faith in 2007. Bishop Dan Herzog of Albany converted shortly after his retirement and retired Bishop Clarence C. Pope returned to the Church in August.

I got an e-mail the other day, forwarding a link to an article from an on-line North Carolinian newspaper. It was a commentary on the CDF’s recent ecclesiological clarification that we posted on back in early/mid July. I found the article interesting for the simple fact that it contains, in one convenient place, almost every logical fallacy and erroneous form of thought that I have seen hurled at the Church for this document–and all of this in just over 800 words.

The author, Lauren R. Stanley, is a former Catholic who is now ordained in the Episcopalian ecclesial communion. As a literary device, she repeatedly uses a southern phrase of disagreement/disbelief:

Well, spit. I guess I’m not a real Christian after all. I thought I was. Truly. I’ve devoted my life – my body and my soul – to being a Christian, to trying to live as one. But apparently, I’m not. At least, not as far as Pope Benedict XVI is concerned. The Vatican, under his leadership, recently announced that the Roman Catholic Church is the only true Church, and that those of us who worship in other “churches” aren’t worshipping in real churches after all.

The “real Christian” assertion is a non-sequitur. The Catholic Church explicitly teaches that everyone who is validly baptized is a Christian (see CCC 1271). The claim of not being a real Christian then is Stanley’s interpolation and not that of the Church. Now if Stanley wants to argue that the Church is wrong about this and assert that everyone must be in a “real church” to be a “real Christian” then she must make the case for her assertion. Otherwise, to claim that Pope Benedict or the Catholic Church is asserting something that he/She is not is, at the very least negligent but more probably, disingenuous.

But of course, in distorting the meaning of the document, which is euphemistically called “spin” but more honestly called a lie, she is in good company with a majority of the reporting on this. This type of behavior seems to be reminiscent of that which one sees from rebellious teenagers who are not yet able to argue logically and so they emote by accusation. But of course, this is not all she had to say. Stanley goes on:

The Vatican even had the audacity to proclaim that while Orthodox churches could be considered “churches” in some ways, they aren’t really because they suffer from a “wound” that comes from not recognizing the primacy of the papacy.

Stanley accuses the Catholic Church of “audacity” for daring to have an understanding of Christianity and of the Catholic Church at variance with her own. In accusing the Church of arrogance what she does is to conflate a subjective attitude with a truth claim and in so doing, she falls into the trap of relativism by assuming that either there is no absolute truth or assuming at least that no one can have access to it.

The fact is though, that a truth claim is either true or false. If it is false then one simply need to demonstrate its falsity. However, what she does here is to assume its falsity, a priori, and then goes on to make an assessment of the subjective state of all of those involved with making this proclamation. In other words, she has looked into all of their souls and summarily found them all guilty of having an arrogant attitude. Quite a feat, huh?

The interesting thing about falling into relativism is that you automatically become self-contradictory–and that is what happens here. In assuming that the Catholic Church is wrong about the nature of the Church, and that she is right, without even making an argument for her position, she is becoming dogmatic in the pejorative sense of the term. Dogmatism is never tolerant and so it is not surprising to find that neither is Rev. Stanley.

She assumes that her ecclesiology is the correct one and seems to have no tolerance for those who would disagree with her. If tolerance is openness to hearing and discussing others’ views without personal condemnation, then Rev. Stanley must be characterized as being intolerant.

She is also self-contradictory in assuming that her position is right and the Catholic teaching is wrong. Later she will imply that anything that a Christian wants to call a church is one by definition in giving the advice to her readers to continue to go to the church of their choice. One might ask by what authority does she claim to know infallibly (or at least with sufficient confidence so as to authoritatively teach others) what God has taught and what He has not. Here she is making the logical fallacy of special pleading. She asserts that the Catholic Church does not have authority to teach on Christ’s behalf (she says later of B16: “You don’t get to decide these things!”– presumably this is because He didn’t give anyone this authority?) but then she immediately assumes this authority for herself in order to condemn the Church for assuming this authority for itself–an authority that apparently does not exist except momentarily when she needs to make use of it. Did you follow that? But the good Rev. is not done with Catholics yet. She will return to the old canards of caricature and ad hominem:

I must admit, there is a part of me that says, “Oh, ignore him. Benedict is the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, but he’s not my spiritual leader.” This is the part of me that recognizes that Benedict is the former cardinal, Joseph Ratzinger, who always has been a strict interpreter of the Roman Church’s stances. That this is the man who in 2000 wrote the document Dominus Iesus, in which these current views were promulgated. That this is the man who was feared by some in the Roman Church for his unwavering conviction that he was right, the rest of the world was wrong, and that was that.

This is a gross misrepresentation of the facts. As an Episcopal clergyman who has chosen to speak out about the Catholic Church she has some obligation to understand the Catholic Church and what it teaches if she is going to criticize it. Her reference to “the current views” of the Church assumes that the Church sometime had taught something else, but this is exactly the purpose of the document–to affirm the continuity of the teaching about the Catholic Church as the fullness of the one Church that Christ founded.

Further, she ought to know that Magisterial teaching is not a matter of the individual opinions of those comprising the Magisterium weighed against others. But I forgot, the Catholic Church has no right to Her own ecclesiology. The Church must submit to Stanley’s ecclesiology or be dismissed as arrogant. If I were the type to posit the attitude of another, I might say that she is arrogant. After ranting a bit, she gets in one more of the favorite canards of vague thinkers, before returning to her apparently favorite approach–caricatured distortions:

And then there is the part of me, the one that after my initial reactions is gaining ascendancy, which is bemused and asks, “Is this really the way to proclaim the Gospel? Is this how we work to proclaim the love of Christ? Are we really called, as beloved children of God, to be this exclusionary? Did Jesus really tell me to say, ‘My faith is better than your faith!’?”

Here she throws in the old stand by of modern religiosity: namely, that any faith that makes demands on its adherents is by definition, exclusionary. There is much that could be said about this: for example, this is not a document meant for initial proclamation of the gospel but a clarification of a truth for Catholics who may have been confused by theological discussions of this issue. Regardless, her implication is that any truths of faith that could in any way be taken in a negative way by those who are not part of that faith must be expunged. This fits very well with a relativist mindset but as I said, relativism is inherently self-contradictory.

One might ask her, isn’t proclaiming the love of Christ exclusionary in itself? Why proclaim it at all? Is it necessary or just a heart warming thing to do? If necessary, then doesn’t this mean that those who have not accepted Him are excluded from the Church until accepting His truth? If proclaiming the gospel is just something nice to let people know about it, then why proclaim it at all and risk offending some who do not want to hear it? There is no justification for proclaiming the gospel if Christianity is not by definition exclusionary–it excludes those who have not heard or do not want to accede to the truth it proclaims. Well, perhaps she had a sense that this was an implication of her thinking because she immediately goes back to caricatures in her last sentence and in the next paragraph:

And in part, I realize that every time someone comes along – be it the pope or one of my neighbors – proclaiming that he or she alone knows the mind of Christ, and the rest of us are damned, I cringe. Because that sort of exclusionary theology ensures that many, many people – people who are starved for spiritual nourishment – are going to turn their backs on churches and church politics and say, “No way. I refuse to be involved in any church that tells me I’m not good enough.” Which basically is what Benedict is saying: Those of us who are not, or who no longer are, Roman Catholics, quite simply are not good enough.

I suppose that I need not point out that the Pope does not proclaim that he alone knows the mind of Christ. He does not say that everyone who is not Catholic, or even Christian, is damned. He did not say that non-Catholics are not good enough. I suppose it is appropriate for the good Rev. Stanley to end her longer rant with her favorite tactic of impersonating an emoting teenager. After all, if one is not prepared to dialog with authentic tolerance, without caricaturing or condemning the other because one disagrees then I suppose all that is left to do is–well, spit!

The Church will survive the sex abuse scandal. Not abandoning Jesus based on the actions of Judas pretty much sums up the actions of most faithful Catholics who are Catholic because they believe it to be the one true Church established by Christ. One’s Faith in the Catholic Church has never been, nor will ever be dependent on individuals within the Church. Fortunately, unlike the Church, organizations such as the Voice of the Faithful which attempt to exploit weaknesses within the Church (i.e. the sex abuse scandal) to further their own scandalous agenda eventually sink into oblivion. In this case, the VOTF is fading fast with dwindling donations and a leadership crisis of their own.

Hear why Fr. Philip N. Powell is sick of love: (If you prefer to listen, there’s also an audio link).

Love is always true. Never a lie. Love is always the glory of God. Never the glorification of man. Love always carries us to goodness. Never to evil. Love always binds us in obedience. Love never frees us to be disobedient. Love always heals, always cleans, sometimes hurts, sometimes casts out. Love never winks at sin, shrugs at injustice, or ignores the poor. Love always looks to Christ, his church, and his Mother.

For those of us who prefer syrup with our love don’t often like to hear, “when necessary, love will kick your butt, take your name, and call your mama!”

 Thanks Father.

Jimmy Akin wrote on confronting evil this morning which I found helpful in deaing with the disgust and anger from what I saw in the above picture and others like it. I usually try to remember my own sinfulness when I feel the need to judge other’s intentions, but in this case, I wasn’t very successful. Where much is given, much is expected; and I have been blessed so far beyond what I ever deserved, but I can’t help but wonder what has happened to these people that made them turn their hearts to stone. I think this would be a great opportunity for me to recall the saying - hate the sin, but love the sinner.

So, in comes Jimmy’s article on evil and how we should address it:

First, evil is a real. Some people commit horrible evil against other people, and we have to remember that.

God has promised that he will deal with such people. No matter what evil someone like this does, God will not let them get away with it. God will right all of the wrongs that have been done, he will heal those who have been hurt, he will make it up to the innocent who have suffered, and he will hold the evildoer to account for his deeds.

…we must also pray for (their) souls, because (they) need to repent and seek God’s mercy. God’s mercy is something we all need, and Jesus loved all of us enough that he took our sins upon himself so that we might be saved.

…God will make sure that justice is done and that mercy will be shown to those who seek it. So let us all seek God in prayer and trust him to help us in this horrible situation.

May God have mercy on us all.

H/T to Kris for the disturbing photos.

In preparing for a lecture this afternoon, I was reading through Familiaris consortio again and for some reason paragraph 8 struck me as so pressingly important right now. Perhaps it was my recent conversations with Monica over the “Ashley Treatment.” It says:

The whole Church is obliged to a deep reflection and commitment, so that the new culture now emerging may be evangelized in depth, true values acknowledged, the rights of men and women defended, and justice promoted in the very structures of society. In this way the “new humanism” will not distract people from their relationship with God, but will lead them to it more fully.

Science and its technical applications offer new and immense possibilities in the construction of such a humanism. Still, as a consequence of political choices that decide the direction of research and its applications, science is often used against its original purpose, which is the advancement of the human person.

It becomes necessary, therefore, on the part of all, to recover an awareness of the primacy of moral values, which are the values of the human person as such. The great task that has to be faced today for the renewal of society is that of recapturing the ultimate meaning of life and its fundamental values. Only an awareness of the primacy of these values enables man to use the immense possibilities given him by science in such a way as to bring about the true advancement of the human person in his or her whole truth, in his or her freedom and dignity. Science is called to ally itself with wisdom.

And here is the kicker!:

The following words of the Second Vatican Council can therefore be applied to the problems of the family: “Our era needs such wisdom more than bygone ages if the discoveries made by man are to be further humanized. For the future of the world stands in peril unless wiser people are forthcoming (Gaudium et spes, 15).

The paragraph ends with a call to education of moral conscience:

The education of the moral conscience, which makes every human being capable of judging and of discerning the proper ways to achieve self-realization according to his or her original truth, thus becomes a pressing requirement that cannot be renounced.

Modern culture must be led to a more profoundly restored covenant with divine Wisdom. Every man is given a share of such Wisdom through the creating action of God. And it is only in faithfulness to this covenant that the families of today will be in a position to influence positively the building of a more just and fraternal world.

The fact that “ethicists” can justify the “Ashley Treatment” is the logical consequence of that perversion of thought which began with Descartes and now seems to be reaching its postmodern, nihilistic finality. Nature no longer has any meaning but that to which we give it. If we can manipulate it to our desires then let’s do it. Since we get to define nature as we please, we have carte blanche “moral” authority to run roughshod over the weakest who have no voice of their own. We now kill the unborn and harvest their corpses, and we further maim the disabled and justify ourselves in emotional appeals to the good that these misguided actions will bring.

I pray that we do indeed have wiser women and men forthcoming!

I have been reading a lot lately works by the Eastern Orthodox lay theologian and poet Philip Sherrard (1922-1995), who, in several books (see The Rape of Man and Nature and Human Image: World Image), issued a radical theological critique of modern scientism. Sherrard was a masterful “deconstructor” of the heretical theological and misguided metaphysical presuppositions that underlay modern science. Influenced in part by the philosophy of René Guénon and his followers – disciples of the so-called Sophia Perennis – Sherrard was able to show that modern materialism, naturalism or scientism has its roots in the distorted image of the human self that was inculcated by bad theology in the modern period. As Sherrard poignantly notes throughout his writings, it is always the case that our human “self-image” generates our “world-image.” This is true of all civilizations and cultures, and our modern techno-scientific society is no exception (despite the silly pretensions of Enlightenment-influenced rationalists to the contrary). However, according to Sherrard, there is one big difference between traditional and modern societies in this regard: the self-image exemplified by modern society – formed by a faith-desire to see the world as nothing more than a mathematical grid – rejects the traditional idea that physical nature and the human subject have an essential connection to one another.

Sherrard argues convincingly that it is modern blindness to the essential connection of the human self to physical nature that is responsible for the environmental dilemmas of our age. For Sherrard, the modern environmental crisis is, in sum, the result of bad metaphysics. Viewing the world as nothing more than a mechanism susceptible to mathematical analysis and as detached from any participation in spiritual reality, modern humanity has, according to Sherrard, sought to “rape nature” for the sake of dominance and control. Moreover, in Sherrard’s opinion, it is little use to turn to scientists to seek a way out of this situation. Sherrard thinks that the blindness of many scientists to the metaphysical crisis of the modern age is total and complete:

Modern science has emerged because, knowingly or unknowingly, scientists themselves have accepted and continue to work within a certain framework of metaphysical or philosophical principles that constitute a reality in their own right and quite apart from the phenomenon to which they have given birth. This is to say that modern science, far from being merely a pragmatic, materialist or empirical discipline independent of metaphysics – and it is this which many scientists would want us to believe – in fact presupposes and implements in its every aspect, theoretical and practical, a metaphysical or philosophical view of things that is anything but neutral, self-evident, self-proven or a matter of common sense. It is this view that determines the whole character of modern science as well as the character of the society which is fashioned in its image.

Few contemporary scientists appear to be aware of this. Scientists are specialists, and within the confines of their specialties they are no doubt capable of producing theories and effects consistent with the premises they have adopted. But scientific knowledge itself has no depth and no complexity: it represents the lowest common denominator of the most average kind of mentality. Its authors have never even grasped the crucial distinction between wisdom and speculative hypothesis based on experiment. Hence once they venture outside the confines of their specialties and try to justify their theories and effects in terms of value or to assess their metaphysical or human significance, they produce only nonsense, because the premises which they take as their standards are not comprehensive enough to allow them to do anything else.

Indeed, judged by the normal standards of metaphysical or philosophical discourse, scientists – but for the rarest exceptions – display a total lack of competence in this realm: the thought in this respect of such a highly esteemed scientist as Albert Einstein, for instance, is bewildering in its naiveté (The Rape of Man and Nature, 11).

Sherrard, in typically modern, Eastern Orthodox fashion, lays the blame for our distorted, modern self-image too much at the feet of the acceptance by Western Christianity of Aristotelian philosophy. He calls for a return to a more Neo-Platonically influenced theology, such as was found in the great tradition of the Eastern Church Fathers. We here at C-L-S would not want to countenance all aspects of Sherrard’s analysis of things, least of all his bias against Aristotle. Nevertheless, it is to be noted that some of the best modern Thomists have likewise called for recognition of the more overtly Neo-Platonic themes in Thomas himself, such as the participation of all things in God, or of a greater appreciation for intuition in the realm of knowledge.

At any rate, I find Sherrard’s “eco-conscious” critique of scientism – though extreme at times – quite a refreshing departure from much contemporary Christian discourse about modernity and science. Too often in the last half-century, too many of the great ecclesiastical figures of the Church have evinced a dangerous ambiguity toward the metaphysical distortions of modern thought and culture…

Actor Peter Boyle, who died on Tuesday the 12th, was brought up Catholic and spent three years as a member of the Christian Brothers religious order. He described his time in the monastery as, “living in the Middle Ages.” In his own words, “I felt the call for awhile; then I felt the normal pull of the world and the flesh.” After dropping his vocation, he rejected the teachings of the Catholic faith. One thing is for sure, he now knows the truth of the Church. He was a well known, active member of Planned Parenthood’s celebrity Board of Advocates. Planned Parenthood has not yet released a statement regarding Boyle’s death.

Source

Celebrity Watch – Public figures that support Planned Parenthood’s agenda

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.

Cardinal George delivered a homily on Sunday at the Catholic Theological Union, which pretty much sums up why we, as Americans, are not trusted in many parts of the world (believe it or not, it was actually long BEFORE the Iraq war).

“The world distrusts us NOT because we are rich and free. Many of us are not rich and some of us aren’t especially free. They distrust us because we are deaf and blind, because too often we don’t understand and make no effort to understand,” he said.

“We have this cultural proclivity that says, ‘We know what is best and if we truly want to do something, whether in church or in society, no one has the right to tell us no.’ That cultural proclivity, which defines us in many ways, has to be surrendered, or we will never be part of God’s kingdom.”

How can you trust someone who is directed by the will of their own feelings, emotions and desires which, more times than not, is a manifestation of disordered pride. Trust is eternal when based on Truth.

It seems that I can’t even get away from the inane commentators on this issue in the peacefulness of noon Mass. Unfortunately at the Newman Center on the U of I campus the Prayer of the Faithful is often opened up to the congregation.

We have a well known dingbat who often uses this opportunity to sew discord by espousing his strange and combative political views. Today, immediately after the celebrant had prayed for the soul of the sister killed in the Sudan, this person asks for the same thing but tacks on “because of the Pope’s assault on Islam.” His asking me to join him in sin by unfairly calumnizing our Holy Father, the very antithesis of what we were supposed to be doing at Mass, was too much. I debated with myself for quite a while over whether I was in the correct spiritual condition to go to Communion.

I went over to Amy’s blog to see what the blogosphere has been saying today and I was sad to see that blogger’s whose opinions I normally respect were suggesting that B16 blundered by including a quote that was not even fundamental to his point. While I respect these guys, I have a much higher estimation of Benedict’s intellectual prowess and after studying his address, I find that his choice of quotes to be quite instrumental to his point.

Surely he did not expect the insane response we are seeing…how could he, he is not insane. However, I have been very encouraged to hear (thanks mostly to Fr. Stephanos’ work) some very insightful responses to the furor:

From Feminist, Muslim commentator Irshad Manji:

As a faithful Muslim, I do not believe the pope should have apologized. I’ve read what’s been described as his inflammatory speech. Actually, he called for dialogue with the Muslim world. To ignore that larger context and to focus on a mere few words of the speech is like reducing the Koran, Islam’s holy book, to its most bloodthirsty passages. We Muslims hate it when people do that. The hypocrisy of doing this to the pope stinks to high heaven.

Yet some Muslims have gone further. In the West Bank, churches have been firebombed. During a big protest in London, placards proclaimed “Islam will take Rome.” In Somalia, a Catholic nun was murdered shortly after a Muslim cleric urged violence against the Vatican.

Coincidence? I think not.

And thinking is what the Quran encourages. It asks Muslims to reflect far more than to retaliate. Even if someone mocks your religion, the Koran says, walk away. Later, engage in dialogue. Wasn’t that the pope’s point?

We Muslims should remember that God told the Prophet Muhammad to “read.” My advice to fellow Muslims: Read the pope’s speech — in its entirety — and you’ll see that his message of reason, reconciliation, and conversation would make him a better Muslim than most of us.

From a leading Italian Muslim (translated by Fr. Stephanos):

It is desolating and preoccupying to see Muslims who have given life to a unified international front to attack the Pope and demand public apologies. From Bin Laden to the Muslim Brotherhood, from Pakistan to Turkey, from Al Jazeera to Al Arabiya, there has risen anew the widespread and universal alliance that first emerged on the occasion of the events surrounding the cartoons about Mohammed.

It testifies, in an unequivocal manner, that the root of the evil is a blind ideology of imperious hatred among Muslims, one that violates the faith and darkens the mind. Why is it that Muslims, especially the so-called moderates, never stand up with similar and as much enthusiasm against the true and perpetual profaners of Islam, the Islamic terrorists who massacre Muslims themselves in the name of the same God, the Islamic extremists who legitimize the destruction of Israel and inculcate faith in the so-called Islamic “martyrdom”, while in the meantime they feel themselves dutybound to promote a sort of Islamic “holy war” against the head of the Catholic Church who legitimately expresses his evaluations concerning Islam, with respect but with just as much clarity about the diversity that naturally exists between the two religions? …

[snip]

The ideology of hatred is an ancestral reality that exists in the heart of Islam from its very beginnings, because of the refusal to recognize and respect the plurality of the physiological religious communities, and given the subjectivity of the relationship between the believer and God, and the absence of a single spiritual reference point that embodies the absoluteness of the dogmas of faith. …

And finally, Fr. Stephanos provided a link to perhaps the best analysis of B16’s speech I have seen by Justin Raimondo. Though I do not agree with everything this atheist/pacifist thinker says in his analysis, I think that his general understanding of what B16 was trying to accomplish is superb (again, thanks to Fr. Stephanos for pointing us to this):

[snip]

Out of a complicated and thoroughly delightful narrative on the relationship between faith and reason – intended to illustrate his point that Catholicism is the only authentic alternative to the “primitive” irrationalism of Protestant and Islamic mystics, on the one hand, and godless rationalism on the other – the fanatics (egged on by the media) have latched on to a few paragraphs, which are citations and not even the words of this pope. What is fascinating is his point that the long-term trend within Christian circles, Catholic as well as Protestant, has amounted to a process of “de-Hellenization,” i.e., an attempt to divorce Christianity from what the “reformers” regard as alien accretions of the Hellenistic period. Yet the gospels were written in Greek, notes Benedict, and he goes on to explain, in so many words, how the Christian concept of the logos – in the beginning, writes Saint John, was the Logos – assumes a rational, benevolent God.

[snip]

It doesn’t matter to the pope’s critics – not all of them Muslims, by any means – that this is a citation, and, taken in context, clearly doesn’t reflect the pope’s personal views. And it surely doesn’t matter that Manuel was speaking from the bitterest of experiences: that he personally lived through and witnessed the Turkish invasion of the medieval Balkans, where many thousands were faced with the choice recently offered to those two Fox News employees by their captors in occupied Palestine – convert or die.

The pope’s accusers could care less that Benedict is here concerned chiefly with rescuing the Hellenistic spirit of theology as philosophical inquiry from the assault of various fundamentalists, both Christian and Muslim. To the Catholics, both Greek and Roman, not to act in accordance with reason is alien to God’s nature. To the devout Muslim, however – and, the pope would doubtless aver, to Protestant sects as well – God is utterly transcendent. To buttress this point, Benedict cites the leaders of the Reformation as well as “the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God’s will, we would even have to practice idolatry.”

This nightmare universe ruled over by a malevolent God, where reason is overthrown, is a Bizarro World, where good is evil, godliness is mass murder, and anything is permitted. All wars, in such a world, are “just” wars.

[snip]

The current controversy is being compared to the tasteless caricatures of Muhammad that appeared in many European newspapers, but the reality is quite different, almost the complete opposite: the cartoons were a deliberate provocation, whereas the pope’s comments were not intended to give offense. Indeed, in its defense of reason and dialogue as the alternative to violence, the pope’s lecture was and is a valuable contribution to the cause of peace.

That extremists of every stripe – including Western secularists, who hate the Catholic Church – are rejecting the Vatican’s explanations and condemning the pope’s remarks as “insensitive” is hardly surprising. These people disdain the restraints imposed on their actions by the logos, or the rule of reason, and prefer to believe that their ideological and religious views transcend the need for rational or moral justification. As long as the Vatican stands against this worrying modern trend, it opposes the War Party of every nation. Apologize? This pope has had to face a veritable storm of demands for apologies from the beginning of his tenure, but has yet to have any cause for contrition.

At the end of his Regensburg talk, B16 makes an invitation to reasoned dialogue with modernity and presumably with Islam:

“Not to act reasonably (with logos) is contrary to the nature of God,” said Manuel II, according to his Christian understanding of God, in response to his Persian interlocutor. It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures.

It seems to me that the response to his invitation has been heard from those who make the headlines (both in the newsroom and in the streets).  It is a resounding affirmation that reason is beyond the pale of those holding the most threatening positions as far as cultural stability is concerned.  I can only hope that the sane and rational voices that seem open to the Holy Father’s invitation (such as the few that I have posted above) are still around to dialogue after the cataclysmic clash that some radical agitators in Islam are hanker’in for and the mass media seems eager to foment.

This has been an extremely busy week so I have not been plugged into much that has been happening; nor has there been much time to blog. However, it has been hard to miss the almost incomprehensible uproar over Pope Benedict XVI’s Regensburg allocution.

Amy is doing a nice summary of world reaction and some of St. Blog’s Parish commentary on said reaction to Regensburg. Most of the latter recognize that B16 was using a book that he had been recently reading as a point of departure for his discussion about the intellectual path that has led to the separation of faith and reason and subsequently to the relativism of Western thought.

They also point out that the book quotations were simply the point of departure for his discussion not its focus and most rightly show that the reaction is, both by some in Islam and by much of the popular press, ridiculous. In other words, the Pope quotes from an old debate and he is recklessly insensitive to Islam. Madonna directly attacks the most solemn event in Christianity and she is simply artistically expressing herself using the moral absolute of free speech (an absolute that seems only to apply to those things which the media agrees). Infuriating, but not surprising.

So what else is there to add? Not much I suppose to this issue but to perhaps ask: I wonder if the Franciscans will also mount a public campaign of outrage for B16’s having diss’ed Duns Scotus and his succumbing to and propagating into Christian thought, William of Ockham’s Nominalist voluntarism.

I haven’t read but are the present day communities descended from the Lutheran and Calvinist traditions also up in arms over the part B16 shows they played in the devolution of Western thought? Kantian philosophers are no doubt standing side by side with the disaffected Muslims and burning the Pope in effigy. Surely, Harnackian historicists are plotting their violent response as we speak. As Hierothee said already in an earlier post, the response is an unintended testament to the truth of what the Holy Father has been saying about a mistaken view of God and its relationship to violence in the name of religion.

However, if the article were to be read closely for what the Pope did say rather than reading it in an attempt to impose upon his words that which inflames Islamic passions, I think that one will find a brilliant, in its concision, history of the devolution of popular Western thought and how we have arrived at a widespread relativism. I also found a few other points that I thought were interesting:

Today we know that the Greek translation of the Old Testament produced at Alexandria — the Septuagint — is more than a simple (and in that sense perhaps less than satisfactory) translation of the Hebrew text: It is an independent textual witness and a distinct and important step in the history of Revelation, one which brought about this encounter in a way that was decisive for the birth and spread of Christianity. A profound encounter of faith and reason is taking place here, an encounter between genuine enlightenment and religion. From the very heart of Christian faith and, at the same time, the heart of Greek thought now joined to faith, Manuel II was able to say: Not to act “with logos” is contrary to God’s nature.

Now there are several ways to take this statement I suppose. His focus is certainly on the integration of Greek metaphysics with divine revelation but his reference to the Septuagint as “more than a simple translation” but “an independent textual witness” and “a distinct and important step in the history of Revelation” could be taken to mean something I think is new.

What I mean by new is that if one understands the last phrase, “a distinct and important step in the history of Revelation,” to mean that the Septuagint translation was part of the (final) redaction process of the Old Testament, then it could be seen as a movement away from the general understanding of Hebrew as the definitive language of the Old Testament. I have not found any Magisterial assertions which would contradict such a movement by the way.

I recognize that it is possible in this passage that he is simply referring to the fact that the Septuagint is the oldest textual witness to the Old Testament and is an important corrective tool for fixing textual corruptions in the Masoretic text but the last phrase seems to me to go beyond this. Any way, this reflection is not Magisterial so it doesn’t carry any weight, but it is still interesting.

Another very interesting text is his explication of the relationship between reason and faith as it relates to love and logos in the divine essence:

God does not become more divine when we push him away from us in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism; rather, the truly divine God is the God who has revealed himself as logos and, as logos, has acted and continues to act lovingly on our behalf. Certainly, love “transcends” knowledge and is thereby capable of perceiving more than thought alone (cf. Ephesians 3:19); nonetheless it continues to be love of the God who is logos. Consequently, Christian worship is “logic latreía” — worship in harmony with the eternal Word and with our reason (cf. Romans 12:1).

Here Benedict shows the problem of annihilating the analogia entis (the analogy of being) in a mistaken attempt to protect God’s transcendence, in this case, ends in voluntarism. Here he shows how reason and faith must be integrated. In fact, B16 seems to suggest that faith and love can be considered convertible (i.e. faith is love and love is faith) to some degree. Both require trust followed by a personal response of self gift. Furthermore, faith ought to reflect something of the divine and so it seems reasonable to see faith as a human manifestation of the intra-Trinitarian total self gift (i.e. the Processions) which is convertible with love.

In any case, B16 shows here that the relationship between human reason and faith, because it reflects (via the anologia entis) the divine relationship between Logos and Love, is one that results in the Christian worship of God through the use of human reason (which itself is a participation in the divine Logos). In other words, truly human worship must engage the reason but it also transcends reason by means of love.

Here is perhaps a bold proposal that certainly will not sit well with many secular academics:

We will succeed in doing so only if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizons. In this sense theology rightly belongs in the university and within the wide-ranging dialogue of sciences, not merely as a historical discipline and one of the human sciences, but precisely as theology, as inquiry into the rationality of faith.

Here B16 points to the illogical limitation that Western thought places on knowledge, to that knowledge which is empirically based. Often, Western thinkers today do not realize that modern science is parasitic on philosophical truths. Benedict’s bold statement about theology belonging in the university arises from his commitment to reason’s analogical participation in the divine Logos and so reason’s capacity to investigate divine revelation with the tools of reason and arrive at valid insights that open minds can accept for its rational clarity.

Benedict calls on the Western academy to get some backbone and stop rejecting those questions as unintelligible simply because one cannot apply to them the only tools with which they feel comfortable (i.e. empirical methods).

The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby. The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur — this is the program with which a theology grounded in biblical faith enters into the debates of our time.

I agree with Hierothee. Benedict’s allocution is a masterful exposition of one of the biggest problems of our times, a defective understanding of knowledge. This enables a relativist morality and so an inability to acknowledge and deal with the social ills that are dragging Western culture in the direction of the ancient civilizations that imploded from moral corruption. I suspect that this is the great harm to which Benedict refers. As did Hierothee, I urge you to read Benedict’s address if you haven’t already.

True to its nature, the western press has, in the last couple of days, stupidly and dangerously mischaracterized the Holy Father. They have, with a crudeness that surpasses credulity, tried to portray Benedict’s brilliant, recent lecture at Regensburg, to a group of scientists, as an attack on Islam. Clearly, the speech surpasses the intellectual ken of the typical journalist. It is one of the clearest, pithiest, most forceful expositions of the path that led to the separation of faith and reason in the West that I have ever read. For those who have not read it, here it is.

That the pope’s erudite lecture should have led to this headline is maddening. That the New York Times should be calling for him to apologize is infuriating.

That the “Muslim street” is burning him in effigy is confirmation of the words of Emperor Manuel II that Benedict had quoted in the lecture.

My outrage at this situation is directed largely at the western media, who incited this whole mess. Western journalists continue to fan the flames. The unconscious voluntarism and subtle nihilism that informs western journalists (who are, of course, a reflection of us all) demonstrates itself in this case to be even more destructive than the conscious voluntarism and violent nihilism of the ‘Muslim street.’ But more on that later…