Monday, February 11, 2013
Fr. Barron on Pope Benedict XVI
Fr. Robert Barron appeared on MSNBC today to comment on the abdication of Pope Benedict XVI. (His appearance begins around 3:10). He fields questions and offers some interesting comments of possible successors.
While a Papacy Concludes, the Discipleship Continues…
In light of our Holy Father’s announcement today that he will step down from the Chair of Peter at the end of this month, we need to take stock of several points that will help to put his announcement and its impact in a proper context.
First of all, several other popes, although not recent ones, have resigned their office as many news sources are reminding us today, albeit for different reasons. But no one whom I have read in this regard has discussed the plan of Pius XII who, with credible evidence that Hitler had a plan to kidnap him and hold him hostage, had arranged for his resignation if Hitler’s plan had been carried out during the Second World War. As Pope Pius noted to his closest aids, if Hitler carried out his plan, he would have had not Pius XII but Eugenio Pacelli; thus, the person in Hitler’s custody would not be the pope but a priest who was also a cardinal. It was evident that if Hitler’s plan moved forward and succeeded, the Church and the world in relatively modern times would have had to deal with the resignation of a pope. Even though Hitler’s plan was not implemented, what becomes clear is that Pius XII’s plan and Benedict XVI’s actions are similar in that the decisions both of these pontiffs made were not done lightly or out of a desire to do other things after a long life of service. They were done for the good of Christ and His Church.
Second, Pope Benedict exercised a leadership that many in the secular world do not understand. Robby has pointed out one example of this in his commentary on the remarks made by Nicholas Kristof. Another example also comes from today’s The New York Times online article by Rachel Donadio, which has since been changed, but which earlier made an allegation about his ultra-conservatism. What followed has been retained, i.e., his papacy was overshadowed by clerical abuse. Ms. Donadio called the wrong man a conservative. The case can be objectively made that Pope Benedict was an ardent advocate for the Church’s teachings because he understood not only the “what” about them but the “why” as well. I do not think Ms. Donadio, her paper, or many who consider themselves progressives will ever understand that Benedict was far more concerned about everyone that many of the strongest advocates who advance theories about human rights, which are lacking because they are based on the concept of the isolated individual who has claims to whatever he or she wants without attending responsibilities. Benedict knew the perils of this kind of thinking and the falsehoods to which it leads; moreover, he understood, lived, and preached the way for the progress of all peoples, not just some.
Third, the fact that Pope Benedict will be stepping down from the papacy does not mean that his Christian leadership will conclude, for he remains a disciple who will continue to serve as a powerful example for others. In the future, his discipleship will likely focus on two major activities. The first will be to continue his scholarly work with which the papacy interfered. The second is that he will likely spend time in his monastic habitat to pray in preparation for meeting his and our Creator. For those of us who also share health concerns associated with either old age or disease or both, his prayerful preparation for meeting God will, for many of us, be and remain a vital exercise of discipleship that needs to be adopted by anyone who claims to follow Christ.
RJA sj
Reflections of a young Catholic convert
“Pope John Paul II remained in office so that he might show us how to suffer and how to die. Pope Benedict XVI is leaving the Papal Office so that he might show us how to live in humble honesty.”
http://www.piercedhands.com/im-glad-pope-benedict-is-resigning/
Pope Benedict's Confidence
I find myself in awe of the amount of confidence and certainty of having correctly heard the call of God that Pope Benedict XVI must possess in order to take the step he took, this shattering of 600 years of precedence. My only personal encounter with Pope Benedict came when he presided over Mass at a conference I attended at the Vatican, a few weeks before he was elected Pope. The sermon was a reminder that those of us attending the conference could do all the reasoning & philosophizing & theologizing we wanted, but at the end of the day, the most important thing we could do was this -- attend Mass and encounter the truth of Christ in our prayer and the Eucharist. Perhaps a prescient piece of advice for himself?
I also find myself thinking about this description of Pope Benedict's personal confidence, from a John Allen column back in 2006:
My thesis is this: After 18 months of Benedict's papacy, one defining characteristic is what we might call his "Chestertonian assurance," a tranquility in the face of diverse currents of thought, as well as the respect that one deeply cultured soul naturally feels for another.By the way, I am not comparing Benedict and Chesterton on a personal level. Chesterton was irascible and curmudgeonly; Benedict, on the other hand, is unfailingly gracious, polite, and kind. As a personality type, he's closer to Emily Post. Yet Benedict breathes the same air of Christian enlightenment as Chesterton. His approach to modernity is neither the craven assimilation that Jacques Maritain described as "kneeling before the world," nor the defensiveness of a "Taliban Catholicism" that knows only how to excoriate and condemn.
Facing disagreement and differing cultural visions, Benedict is not afraid -- and because he's not afraid, he's not defensive, and he's not in a hurry.
Such a spirit is largely alien to our fractured and hair-trigger era, and so Benedict has been something of a paradox- this avatar of Catholic traditionalism espousing a positive message, willing to engage in reasoned reflection with people who don't think like him. For 18 months, people have been speculating about when the "real pope" will emerge from beneath this serene, gracious façade. Ladies and gentleman, I suggest to you tonight that the façade is the real pope.
Pope Benedict's resignation
Like many others, I'm sure, I find I am still "processing" the news about the Pope's resignation. I don't have any insta-punditry to offer, other than to say "thank you!" to the Holy Father, and to the Holy Spirit, for the gift of his leadership, thought, and service. I know that, here at MOJ, we've often discussed the Catholic-Legal-Theory implications of his encyclicals and writings, and I hope that the entire MOJ crew will consider posting additional reflections. Certainly, for me, the Pope's exploration of the idea of "healthy secularity" has been hugely influential.
I recall, a few years back, early in Pope Benedict's papacy, a very interesting conference at Villanova, at which participants were invited to reflect on his work, its themes, and its direction. I contributed a short essay called "Church, State, and the Practice of Love," which is available here. Here's the abstract:
In his firstencyclical letter, Deus caritas est, Pope Benedict XVI describes the Church as a
community of love. In this letter, he explores the organized practice love by
and through the Church, and the relationship between this practice, on the one
hand, and the Church's commitment to the just ordering of the State and society,
on the other. God is love, he writes. This paper considers the implications of
this fact for the inescapably complicated nexus of church-state relations in our
constitutional order.
The specific goal for this paper is to draw from
Deus caritas est some insight into what is a fundamental and - at present - the
most pressing challenge in church-state law, namely, the preservation of the
Church's moral and legal right to govern herself in accord with her own norms
and in response to her own calling. It asks, what does the new Pope's work and
thinking, about the future and present state of the Church and her organized
practice of love, suggest about the appropriate content and vulnerable state of
the rights and independence of religious groups - and of the freedom of the
Church?
The oracle speaks
Well, in case there was any doubt, we now have an ex cathedra announcement from the hierarchy of the New York Times:
"At some point, the church will accept contraception and female and non-celibate priests. Could it be in the next papacy?" -- Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times
Although I ought to be used to it by now, I still find the parochialism of liberal secular elites stunning. Their small-minded preoccupation with sex and gender is, in its way, amusing. A pope abdicates for the first time in centuries, and what immediately pops into the mind of Nicholas Kristof and his ilk? Contraception, women's ordination, and celibacy. Oy vey.
Also amusing is his uncritical--indeed unthinking--embrace of Hegelian-Marxian certainty about the trajectory of history. "At some point, the church will [embrace the ideology of the New York Times editorial board]. It just will, you see. History is open to no other possibilities. It's a done deal. Already determined. Kristof was no doubt prevented only by the character limit on Twitter from saying "the correlation of forces . . . . "
Announcement of Pope Benedict's Retirement
As reported this morning, Pope Benedict has indicated his intent to retire from the papacy at the end of this month.
The full statement from Pope Benedict XVI:
Dear Brothers,
I have convoked you to this Consistory, not only for the three canonizations, but also to communicate to you a decision of great importance for the life of the Church.After having repeatedly examined my conscience before God, I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry.
I am well aware that this ministry, due to its essential spiritual nature, must be carried out not only with words and deeds, but no less with prayer and suffering.
However, in today’s world, subject to so many rapid changes and shaken by questions of deep relevance for the life of faith, in order to govern the bark of Saint Peter and proclaim the Gospel, both strength of mind and body are necessary, strength which in the last few months, has deteriorated in me to the extent that I have had to recognize my incapacity to adequately fulfil the ministry entrusted to me.
For this reason, and well aware of the seriousness of this act, with full freedom I declare that I renounce the ministry of Bishop of Rome, Successor of Saint Peter, entrusted to me by the Cardinals on 19 April 2005, in such a way, that as from 28 February 2013, at 20:00 hours, the See of Rome, the See of Saint Peter, will be vacant and a Conclave to elect the new Supreme Pontiff will have to be convoked by those whose competence it is.
Dear Brothers, I thank you most sincerely for all the love and work with which you have supported me in my ministry and I ask pardon for all my defects.
And now, let us entrust the Holy Church to the care of Our Supreme Pastor, Our Lord Jesus Christ, and implore his holy Mother Mary, so that she may assist the Cardinal Fathers with her maternal solicitude, in electing a new Supreme Pontiff. With regard to myself, I wish to also devotedly serve the Holy Church of God in the future through a life dedicated to prayer.
From the Vatican, 10 February 2013
BENEDICTUS PP XVI
Sunday, February 10, 2013
Jay Williams
Not quite down the middle of the CST fairway, but this, I thought, was a very moving story about the talented, resilient, and gutsy Duke University point guard, Jay Williams. I may be a homer, but the story does a nice job of describing the power of institutions to support people in times of personal weakness and need.
Saturday, February 9, 2013
Fetishizing Drones
National Review, the flagship journal of the conservative movement, has published an editorial that is broadly sympathetic to the Justice Department's "white paper" laying out the Obama administration's legal argument for the targeted killings of individuals (including U.S. citizens) aligned with terrorists, without judicial recourse. But the editors make a damning point of criticism despite their sympathy for the administration's legal claims:
"To be fair, it is true that the Obama administration fetishizes drones and over-relies on them in its prosecution of the War on Terror. This is due in no small measure to its own undermining of the Bush-era institutions and procedures built up to deal with captured enemy combatants. In its distaste for these institutions and procedures, the current administration has increasingly relied on death from above — collateral damage and intelligence collection be damned — as the more palatable alternative."
Catholics and others who believe that not all is fair in love and war (or at least not in war) should have been speaking out against Obama's overuse of drones long ago. The basic facts were known well before we learned about the "white paper." Too many liberals were more interested in protecting their man than in speaking truth to his power; too many conservatives were cheering him on when it came to targeted killing by predator drones. For anyone paying attention, the thirteenth chime of the clock should have been heard before the election when Obama campaign adviser and former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, responding to a question about the death of Abulrahman al-Awlaki, the 16 year old son of al-Qaeda propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki, in a drone strike two weeks after his father was slain in a presidentially ordered targeted killing, said that the boy "should have had a more responsible father." I myself raised concerns about the President's increased use of drones in a comment here at Mirror of Justice last summer. I am taking the liberty of re-posting it:
June 18, 2012
President Obama's Predator Drones
Since assuming office (and receiving his Nobel Peace Prize) in 2009, President Obama has massively increased the use of unmanned predator drones in what used to be known as the war against terror. According to Chris Kirk, writing in Slate, Obama has authorized five times the number of drone attacks authorized by President Bush. Liberals, who would be screaming bloody murder if it were Bush, have gone strangely (well, not so strangely) quiet about this, while conservatives are cheering on a president whose other policies they abhor.
The use of drones is not, in my opinion, inherently immoral in otherwise justifiable military operations; but the risks of death and other grave harms to noncombatants are substantial and certainly complicate the picture for any policy maker who is serious about the moral requirements for the justified use of military force. Having a valid military target is in itself not a sufficient justification for the use of weapons such as predator drones. Sometimes considerations of justice to noncombatants forbid their use, even if that means that grave risks must be endured by our own forces in the prosecution of a war.
The wholesale and indiscriminate use of drones cannot be justified, and should be criticized. This is something that Catholic intellectuals across the spectrum ought, it seems to me, to agree about. If we don't speak, who will?
On the lethal side effects of the Obama drone strategy, see this article by Clive Smith:
Legal Scholarship, Objective Truth, and the Future of Legal Education
I am most grateful to Mike Moreland, John Breen, and Greg Sisk for raising and addressing challenging issues that pertain to the content of legal scholarship these days that consciously addresses the neuralgic issues from a perspective that is Catholic or aligned with views consistent with Catholic social thought. If publications in the law reviews and journals, which are considered the most prestigious, offer a one-sided view of the neuralgic issues, can we infer anything from the content of legal education that law students are receiving in this age of great and grave challenges to legal education?
Many years ago, another professor took strong issue with what I had to say in one of my earliest articles that addressed abortion. In that essay, I attempted to portray a sincere and serious dialogue between conversing partners about Roe v. Wade. In short, by use of this device, I thought I could present in an objective manner this critical issue, i.e., abortion.
Within a short time, I noticed that another professor, who was aggressively pro-abortion, took to task what I had to say in one of her footnotes in a published essay in a journal many would consider prestigious to this day. In today’s nomenclature, her essay would fall within the category of: reproductive rights and freedom. I did not mind her taking me on, but I did mind her using ad hominem methods in her critique which did not address in the least the substance of my arguments that undergirded my position which she was critiquing. In essence, the substance of her critique was that I did not agree with her position. The scholarly and practical reasons of for her critique that might have been proffered and explained were conspicuous by their absence. When I suggested to the editors of the law journal which published her essay and which is considered one of the more prestigious in the American legal academy as I have mentioned, they rejected my request to offer a reply. In short, it seemed that there was nothing more to say on the matter even though there was.
I know that there are law journals and reviews which will publish manuscripts that offer a pro-life or pro-traditional marriage perspective, just to mention two of the principal neuralgic issues of the day, but these periodicals, which I hasten to add provide a great service, are not considered “prestigious” because the law schools that sponsor them do not fall within the upper echelons of the U.S. News and World Report law school evaluations or similar surveys. But I wonder aloud whether these surveys do an effective job of evaluating with objectivity the nature of legal education today and what it is supposed to be about. The fact that a journal and its law school were once prestigious does not mean that this status will last forever. Moreover, as most law school faculties are pondering the future of legal education in this bleak period where the future of many law schools is a subject of question, shouldn’t the focus of their discussions concern the nature of legal education? It may be that the emphasis of these discussions is not on substance of legal education itself but on how to market a particular brand of legal education.
For those interested in Catholic legal theory and the education that is its natural companion, I suggest that this is a time of opportunity for those schools which are sincerely interested in their Catholic identity to consider the possibility that to be great institutions of legal education does not necessitate mimicry of institutions that were the prestigious institutions of the past.
The recent postings of Greg, John, and Mike demonstrate that if something is missing from legal scholarship and legal advocacy on the neuralgic issues of the day, there is likely something also missing from the education which these authors and practitioners have received. If nature abhors a vacuum, the time may well be now for those interested in Catholic legal theory and who teach at institutions which in some fashion rely on the moniker Catholic to ask the pressing question: what is missing from what we have to offer current and future students (without worrying about whether the “prestigious” institutions are doing the same). If some of us are willing to ask and respond to this question, we may not only be benefiting the institutions for which we labor but we could also be aiding our students—both existing and future, the profession, and the institution of the rule of law.
RJA sj
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