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!
Thursday, September 6, 2007
What does it mean to be a Catholic? II
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.
Time for the unpopular -- and, for a change, a little joy
The Sept. 10 issue of America magazine includes a courageous cover story by Wilson Miscamble, CSC, titled "The Faculty 'Problem': How Can Catholic Identity Be Preserved?" Miscamble is professor of history at Notre Dame, and what he has published in "The National Catholic Weekly" is a lawyer's brief arguing that Notre Dame has lost -- or is about to lose -- its claim to be a meaningfully "Catholic" university and calling for the action that is necessary to stop what is in fact not an inevitable loss of identity. Miscamble also draws the lessons for places that haven't been as blessed with fidelity as Notre Dame has been: Notre Dame, and other historically Catholic universities, can choose to remain, or to become again, Catholic, but it's a choice, a choice that would involve a lot of hard and frequently unpopular work. When a member of the sponsoring religious order publicly questions whether Notre Dame, of all places, is going to end up Catholic and does so, as Miscamble has, in measured but strong terms, it's at last time to pay attention. As one friend put it to me: "Miscamble shows exactly how the store gets sold."
Miscamble makes the case that the right faculty hiring is absolutely essential to creating and maintaing a school's Catholic identity. He also argues that, in the present circumstances of departments and units that are indifferent or even hostile to mission, presidents and provosts and boards of trustees must sit up straight, put down their coffee cups, slide the honorific paper weights to one side of the well-varnished desk, and do something, even something unpopular: "It must be understood . . . that this is not a matter that can be massaged by minor measures. The temptation for administrators is to hope that a little adjustment here and a bit of tinkering there might improve the situation without stirring faculty opposition. Settling for minor measures in the present circumstances, however, indicates a complicity in the secularization process. A major change in the hiring process is required, and the need for it must be approved at the level of the board of trustees and implemented with courageous leadership, whatever faculty resistance it generates."
The opposition to Catholic universities' actually being (or becoming again) Catholic comes in many forms and from many quarters -- and, to be sure, there's no Platonic form of the Catholic university. Many of us in "Catholic" law schools are familiar with the internal opposition that is pure, old-fashioned anti-Catholic bigotry, the more subtle but monstrously crude opposition that supposes that Catholics can't be smart (and that people who haven't gone to the short list of schools, which of course includes no Catholic places, aren't good enough), and the contented, supine opposition that says "I go to Mass on Sundays, say the creed, support my parish, and the rest, but my faith -- and yours -- has nothing to do with providing professional education." Some of us are also blessed to be familiar with deans and colleagues (not all of them Catholics!) who take the work of building inclusive Catholic places of higher education to heart. But, if Miscamble is right, those of us in the classrooms and in the departments need help from above.
The observation that what presidents, provosts, and boards must do will be unpleasant because unpopular should not be allowed to obscure the end goal, and one dimension of it in particular. Catholic Christians living or working together in inclusive communities can be expected to be people of joy, the joy that attends believing in and sharing the Good News. Mary Ann Glendon exemplifies this when, in answer to the question "Why are you still a Catholic?", she replied (in print): "I love being Catholic!" The work of building Catholic universities depends for its success on people who, loving their faith and Church and their God, can show by their joy and generosity that the work is attractive, even compelling. Catholic institutions don't get built without self-sacrifice on the part of the builders.
Abortion In The Philippines
New York Times
September 5, 2007
The 50-year-old grandmother has lost count of the number of pregnancies she has terminated in this largely Roman Catholic country where abortion is illegal and strictly taboo, but where about half a million women end their pregnancies every year.
The backstreet abortions performed by healers like Minda may become more common as a United States government aid program plans to stop distributing contraceptives in the Philippines in 2008. This will leave birth control up to the government which under the influence of Catholic bishops advocates unreliable natural birth control methods rather than the pill and condoms.
[To read the rest, click here.]
Mother Teresa
New York Times
September 5, 2007
Editorial
A Saint of Darkness
To the extent people ever tried to project themselves into the mind of Mother Teresa, they might have pictured a Gothic vault washed in dazzling beams of saintly conviction. How startling to discover that it was a dark and dispirited place, littered with doubts.
A new book of her letters, “Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light,” published by Doubleday, show her struggling for decades against disbelief. “If I ever become a saint,” she wrote in one letter, “I will surely be one of ‘darkness.’ ” And in another: “If there be no God — there can be no soul. If there is no soul then Jesus — You also are not true. Heaven, what emptiness.”
That may rattle some believers, but it is a welcome reminder that saints, too, are only human, and that stories of dauntless piety tend to be false. The letters — which Mother Teresa wanted destroyed — may help chip away at the lacquer of myth that has been adhering to her since well before her death in 1997.
They reveal, too, a cannily willful nun, who tested the limits of her vow of strict obedience in her campaign to win permission to leave her order, the Loreto Sisters, to found the Missionaries of Charity, with the radical goal of going outside convent walls to live among the poor of Calcutta’s slums. “Please let me go,” she wrote in one of many insistent letters to her archbishop. “If the work be all human, it will die with me, if it be all His it will live for ages to come. Souls are being lost in the meantime.”
When the archbishop relented, the rest became history, until the revelation of the pain that haunted her down the decades.
“I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe,” wrote Flannery O’Connor, the Roman Catholic author whose stories traverse the landscape of 20th-century unbelief. “What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not to believe.”
O’Connor suffered from isolation and debilitating illness, Mother Teresa from decades of spiritual emptiness. But — and here is the exemplary part, inspiring even by the standards of a secular age — they both shut up about it and got on with their work. Mother Teresa, sick with longing for a sense of the divine, kept faith with the sick of Calcutta. And now, dead for 10 years, she is poised to reach those who can at last recognize, in her, something of their own doubting, conflicted selves.
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
The Tablet
September 1, 2007
Outlook from the Outback
Stephen Crittenden
A
devastating critique of the Catholic Church in Australia recently
published by one of the country's most respected bishops has ignited
debate about its future and pushed the progressive majority of the
Church back to prominence after years in the shadows
Like the rural horizons of Australia after the worst drought in 100 years, the Australian Church is tinder dry, and a retired auxiliary Bishop of Sydney, Geoffrey Robinson, may have lit the match. His new book, Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church: reclaiming the spirit of Jesus (John Garrett Publishing, Melbourne), accuses the leadership of the Catholic Church of treating the clerical sexual crisis as something to be "managed" in the hope that it will go away and never be referred to again. He says that until it confronts the root causes of this crisis, the Church will continue to be crippled.
One of the most intelligent and capable of the Australian bishops, Geoffrey Robinson, 70, is a former lecturer in canon law and was seen by many as the logical successor to Cardinal Ted Clancy as Archbishop of Sydney. Erudite, shy, rather unsmiling, and certainly no wishy-washy liberal, he is esteemed by Australian Catholics for his integrity in coordinating the Church's national response to the abuse crisis in the late 1990s. I interviewed him for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation at that time, and his bleak and careworn demeanour left a deep impression.
Thanks to this book, we now know that he was struggling both with his own sexual abuse as a boy and his mounting frustration at Rome's silence and lack of support in relation to the crisis: "I eventually came to the point where I felt that, with the thoughts that were running through my head, I could no longer be a bishop of a Church about which I had such profound reservations."
[To read the rest, click here.]
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