Last night I was reading MOJ and enjoyed Prof. Julian Velasco’s comments about the discussion some of us have been having regarding ecclesial issues. While I am in large agreement with many of his fine points, I did not say, imply, or in anyway suggest in any of my postings that would support the statement: “at some point, rejection of Vatican teachings separates one from the Church. Have most American Catholics already done so according to Father Araujo?” I have written to Prof. Velasco to inform him of this misattribution. In reading earlier postings, I noticed that Prof. Steve Shiffrin introduced this point in his posting entitled “What Does It Mean to Be Catholic? I” upon which Prof. Velasco relied. To clarify this confusion, I state for the record that I have not said, implied, or suggested that most American Catholics have rejected “Vatican teachings.” Indeed, people can and do separate themselves from the Church by the actions they take and the views they convey, but I have not quantified this by expressing the view that most American Catholics have separated themselves from the Church. If someone thinks that this is my thinking, then their thinking is mistaken. RJA sj
Friday, September 7, 2007
A point of clarification
Thursday, September 6, 2007
Velasco on the Catholic Question
In
your Mirror of Justice post, “What does it mean to be a Catholic?”,
you ask:
Clearly
, at some point, rejection of Vatican teachings separates one from the Church.
Have most American Catholics already done so according to Father Araujo?
This
is a very interesting question, but not one that is likely to lead to very good
discussion or reliable answers. The psychological cost of answering “yes”
is too great. If one were to answer yes, that would seem to make the
person quite judgmental and self-righteous. Most people do not want to
feel that way, and certainly they do not want to be perceived in that
way. Thus, you cannot expect many “yes” answers.
Accordingly, you cannot have much confidence in your “no” answers,
which might be the product of dishonesty or rationalization/denial.
I
don’t know what the answer is for others; I can only judge myself (and
even that, imperfectly). In doing so, I would ask, first, are the
teachings in question “definitive”, and second, am I “knowingly
and obstinately repudiating” them? I am not a theologian, so I do
not know the answer to the first question. I assume that the Church’s
teachings on the core sex-related issues (divorce, homosexual relations,
masturbation, contraception, abortion, etc.) are, but there are many non-sexual
issues which may not be so clear. So, if I disagree with the Church, I
ask myself whether I am “knowingly” repudiating the Church’s
teachings. Obviously, the answer at this point would be yes. (If I
know it’s definitive, then my repudiation is clearly “knowing”.)
Then I ask whether I am “obstinately” repudiating them. I
answer that question by considering whether I insist that I am right,
regardless of what the Church teaches? If so, then I am probably obstinately
repudiating the Church’s teachings. On the other hand, if I merely do
not understand how the Church is correct, but leave myself open to the possibility
of correction and pray for understanding, then I probably am not obstinately
repudiating the Church. (This process has led me to withhold “final”
judgment when I might otherwise disagree with the Church.)
So
far, so good. The real tough part comes when I know the Church’s clear
position on an issue and cannot agree with it. Although I leave myself
open to the possibility of correction and pray for understanding, I do not, in
good faith, believe the conduct to be wrong. How am I to act? I know
that the Church would say that I should refrain from the conduct in
question. But I may not have the will or strength to do so – especially
given that I do not share the conviction that it is wrong. I think THIS
is the real issue: not whether I agree or disagree, but how I act upon my disagreement.
I am pretty sure that the Church’s answer would be that I must refrain
from receiving communion if I engage in the conduct in question.
I
won’t judge anyone else, because I cannot read their minds and
hearts. But I know myself. I am a sinner. I’m not proud
of it, but I also am not squeemish about admitting an obvious truth. And
when I am sinning, I hope the Church – as teacher – will let me
know. I also hope that theologians (and others) won’t obfuscate the
matter.
I
wouldn’t go so far as to say that I’ve ever “separated myself
from the Church,” because I always attend mass and consider myself to be
a Catholic, however imperfect. But there are times – indeed, long periods
of time – when I cannot, in good faith, receive communion. At least,
not without confession. It would not strike me as implausible that others
might reach the same conclusion from time to time.
But,
as I mentioned in the beginning, asking whether “most American Catholics”
should avoid communion is probably not the best idea.
Regards,
Julian
Velasco
Associate
Professor of Law
University
of Notre Dame
211
Law School
P.O.
Box 780
Notre Dame, IN 46556-0780
The Vatican
I use the imprecise term the "Vatican" teaches instead of the "Church" teaches because I do not believe that teachings of Church leaders are necessarily teachings of the Church. I use the term Vatican as a placeholder for any belief that could count as a teaching of the magisterium. First, as I said in a prior post, "Related to this issue is the
question of what counts as a teaching of the Church. If the Church is the
People of God with the hierarchy playing an important leadership role, what is
the status of hierarchal teachings that are not
accepted by the faithful (recognizing that the question of what counts as
acceptance could be very difficult to ascertain on some issues and easy on
others)? I am unsure. Consider this passage from Lumen Gentium, “The entire body of the faithful, anointed as they are
by the Holy One,(111) cannot err in matters of belief. They manifest this
special property by means of the whole peoples' supernatural discernment in
matters of faith when "from the Bishops down to the last of the lay
faithful" (8*) they show universal agreement in matters of faith and
morals. That discernment in matters of faith is aroused and sustained by the
Spirit of truth. It is exercised under the guidance of the sacred teaching
authority, in faithful and respectful obedience to which the people of God
accepts that which is not just the word of men but truly the word of God.(112).”
Second, as I said in another post, Of course, whatever the degree of
authoritativeness of the objective conscience view, it does not purport to be
an infallible teaching of the Church, and the issue before us is the degree to
which one is required to assent to such teachings. There is a pastoral issue
here that I think is of great importance. Father Sullivan, Magisterium:
Teaching Authority in the Catholic Church 171-72, makes this point
extremely well in my opinion:
“The tendency to obscure the difference between the infallible and the non-infallible exercise of magisterium, by treating papal encyclicals as though they were practically infallible, has, I believe, been largely responsible for the fact that many people, when they learn that encyclicals are not infallible after all, jump to the conclusion that one need pay no attention to them. If people have been led to think of the infallibility of the pope as the basic motive for giving their assent to his teaching, it is not surprising that when this motive is no longer available, their assent will fail as well.”
"The Vatican" dixit?
Prompted by Steve Shiffrin's most recent post, I'm finally going to pose a question that's been on (and off) my mind for more than a season. What do you mean, Steve, when you say "the Vatican teaches" or "the Vatican says" or "the Vatican teaching on?" Also, what do others mean when they use these and similar expressions?
Nothing is signed "the Vatican." What happens if we substitute the real signatories for "the Vatican?" Does this create problems for Steve's (or others') positions on authority, obedicence, etc?
What does it mean to be a Catholic? II
I would like to probe further Eduardo Penalver’s August 31st statement that, “I am Catholic (although perhaps, based on what he says in his post and what he knows of my views, Fr. Araujo disagrees with that statement), and (I'm quite sure Fr. Araujo would disagree with this) I believe I would continue to be Catholic in some sense even if I attempted to completely sever my ties to this Church into which I and my ancestors were born.” I am interested in the sense that Eduardo and I would be Catholic if we joined the United Church of Christ or the Anglicans (the former would deny that they are Catholics; the latter , as I understand it, would maintain that they are Catholics, but not Roman Catholics). I assume Eduardo means something more than the values upon which we were raised would not leave us simply because we changed denominations. Presumably Father Araujo would agree with that. Moreover, I am intrigued by Eduardo’s position that the Protestant Reformation was a conflict within Catholicism. I doubt I would be persuaded by that, but I would like to hear more. I am already inclined to think that God’s saving grace will not depend upon the denomination to which we belong and that the People of God are not confined to Catholic Church members. But I would like to hear a little more from Eduardo – no rush!
What does it mean to be a Catholic? I
I would like to probe a little further Father Araujo’s statement that “I am mindful that there are those who consider themselves members of the Catholic Church but still challenge Peter while at the same time proclaiming their individual fidelity to the Church. . . . Whether anyone elects to bear allegiance to Peter is up to himself or herself. Should this person decide to depart from this loyalty, he or she leaves the Church notwithstanding personal protestations to the contrary.” Although there are distinctions, the statement reminds me of the November 14, 2006 statement of the U.S. Conference on Catholic Bishops, http://www.usccb.org/dpp/Eucharist.pdf, in which it condemned “selective assent to the teachings of the Church” and stated that those who “knowingly and obstinately repudiate her definitive teachings on moral issues” should not receive communion.
Between 1963 and 1974,
for example, the majority position of American Catholics shifted away from that
of the Vatican on issues such as whether sex before marriage was always wrong
(from 74% to 35%), whether divorce after marriage is always wrong (from 52% to
17%), and whether contraception is always wrong (from 56% to 16%). Andrew Greeley,The Catholic Revolution: New Wine, Old Wineskins, and the Second Vatican Council 39 (
Indeed, American
priests, according to Greeley,
also engaged in selective assent to the teachings of the Vatican. The
For example, Richard McCormick argued
that little deference to the Vatican should be paid on issues relating to sexuality and women for a variety of what
struck me as good reasons. Should he and those who thought like him not
participate in the Eucharist?
These are obviously
important issues and I wonder whether the generality of the Conference of
Catholic Bishops general statement was designed to steer clear of them. Clearly , at some point, rejection of Vatican teachings separates one from the Church. Have most American Catholics already done so according to Father Araujo? The Conference of Catholic Bishops? Other MOJ participants?
Jurisprudence: what's the point?
Steven D. Smith has posted his new paper, Jurisprudence: Beyond Extinction?, in which he observes that the classic jurisprudential debate between natural lawyers and positivists:
can come to seem quite pointless. After all, we can all agree - can't we? - that governments exist, that they issue directives and enact rules, that there are methods or criteria by which officials determine what the directives and rules are. And we can likewise agree that some of these directives and rules are just and good, while others are inefficient, unfair, or downright oppressive. So what is the disagreement about? Is it just that some people - the positivists - want to call the wicked rules "law" (albeit "bad law") while the natural lawyers prefer to withhold that honorific designation? Have generations of jurisprudence really been driven by this dispute over labeling?
Given the pointlessness of this debate, Smith then notes that folks who do jurisprudence have drifted off to other disputes that are not "peculiarly within the province of jurisprudence."
Brian Tamanaha comments on the essay:
Smith is right that jurisprudes don't have any special qualifications to opine on issues of morality or sociology or any particular legal subject, but their general perspective on law and their corpus of knowledge can nevertheless be informatively applied to all sorts of particular problems. Indeed, the relevance of jurisprudence is recognized by many scholars of separate fields, who make an effort to familiarize themselves with jurisprudence precisely for this reason.
The Pagan West
Over at First Things, Peter Leithart has a fascinating post wondering whether we need to "re-Paganize" the West as part of our evangelization efforts. Here's an excerpt:
It’s a truism among African theologians that the Church has grown most rapidly where traditional African religions are strongest. According to Ghanaian theologian Kwame Bediako, this is no accident but highlights the “special relationship” that African “primal religions” have with Christianity. Like primal African religion, Christianity displays a strong sense of human finitude and sin, believes in a spiritual world that interacts with the human world, teaches the reality of life after death, and cultivates the sacramental sense that physical objects are carriers of spiritual power. Christianity catches on there because it gives names to the realities they already know and experience.
This special relationship is not unique to twenty-first-century Africa. Many African theologians invoke the patristic notion of a praeparatio evangelii, the belief that pre-Christian religion was designed to prepare the way for the gospel, to justify their approach to African religions. Athens might have been the birthplace of philosophy, but the Athenian citizens opened civic assemblies with sacrifices and Athenian women celebrated the Thesmophoria in honor of Demeter.
Sophisticated as Roman politics and military were, they cleansed the burned Capitolium in A.D. 69 with a suovetaurilia sacrifice to Mars of a pig, ram, and bull; and Trajan’s column shows the emperor offering the same sacrifice to purify the Roman army. Tacitus records that the Germanic tribes outside the empire sacrificed animals and humans, met their gods in sacred groves, and predicted the future with twigs and bird auguries. The Letter to the Hebrews, with its talk of priests and sacrifice, of blood and miasma and purgation, spoke to Greeks and Germans as much as to Jews.
If Christianity is most successful among traditional religions, perhaps the Church has to reinvent primal religion before the West can be restored to Christ. Of course I don’t mean that churches should send their tithes to Wicca International or initiate pulpit exchanges with the Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans. Re-paganizing the West means acting on the premise that, for all our pretense of sophistication, the West has never entirely escaped the impulses and habits of primitive culture, or that, by escaping Christianity, we are reverting to it. Re-paganizing the West means working out the implications of the French sociologist Bruno Latour’s assertion: We have never been modern.
More on Governance and Unity
I would like to thank Eduardo for his patience in following up on his August 31st posting. I just returned from a short business trip to Italy, but I have had some time to reflect on what he said regarding Church governance and unity while I was traveling.
First of all, I would like to identify what I think Eduardo and I hold in common on the points he raised. First of all, these issues that we MOJ members have been discussing dealing with ecclesial governance and unity will likely be debated for some time. While waiting for my plane back to the US at Fiumicino Airport, I had a prolonged discussion with an Episcopalian priest who was returning from a pilgrimage to Rom and Ephesus. We discussed at some length the evolving and growing divide that the Episcopalian Church is presently experiencing. In this discussion, we both acknowledged that this division is deepening and that the debate about it will not disappear any time soon.
I think another position he and I likely share is the fact that each member of the Church is a sinner. Clearly, we are tempted to exercise our free will in ways that we know contravene what God asks of us; moreover, we sometimes take action on these temptations and commit sin. No person is immune from this. Holders of ecclesiastical office, future saints, and we ordinary folk—lay, religious, and clerical—are not immune.
He and I also agree that we disagree or likely disagree on particular issues. But it is not my position within the medium of MOJ to delve into his soul, or he into mine on particular matters. The appropriate forum for this probing is between a person and one’s pastor, confessor, or bishop. Having made this point, I think MOJ is an appropriate medium to present and defend our respective positions in more general terms. And I now take the occasion to do so.
The matters of human sinfulness, reconciliation with God and the neighbor, the forgiveness of sin, and salvation are issues affecting every person (whether he or she acknowledges this or not is another matter) with which ecclesial governance is concerned. Interestingly, the law—both God’s law and, in some contexts, human law—exercises roles regarding these issues. As St. Augustine concluded in one of his sermons, the Church—the Body of Christ, the People of God, and the communion of saints—is the place (he used the image of the sailing ship) where the faithful acknowledge the essence of their being, their unity with one another and God, and the means by which salvation occurs.
Eduardo posits that one can still be a Catholic “in some sense” even if he or she were to completely sever ties with the Church. I assume from what he says that such a person has been baptized but subsequently removes himself or herself from the People of God, etc. through the exercise of free will. However, in accordance with the Dogmatic Constitution of the Church, Lumen Gentium, such a person, while remaining “in the bosom of the Church” in a bodily sense, does not remain in its heart. The same Dogmatic Constitution further indicates that those who refuse to remain in the Church cannot be saved without returning to the heart. Implicit in this is the possibility that one can return through recognition of past error and reconcile with God and the Church established by the Son.
So, “in some sense” Eduardo is on track. But his point is on track only if it takes into account what the Second Council, relying on the Creed, stated regarding membership in the Church: one is fully incorporated into it by accepting
“her entire system and all the means of salvation given to her, and through union with her visible structure are joined to Christ, who rules her through the Supreme Pontiff and the bishops. This joining is effected by the bonds of professed faith, of the sacraments, of ecclesiastical government, and of communion.”
A person may detour from this and still return home up to the last moment of his or her life in this world. But, should he or she consciously remain on this self-chosen diversion, as I think Eduardo suggests, then the membership of such an individual in the Church can legitimately be called into question. RJA sj
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
Fordham Institute on Religion, Law & Lawyer's Work
Good news! The Institute on Religion, Law & Lawyer's Work at Fordham Law School has launched its interesting and helpful website. Check it out.
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