Monday, June 21, 2010
Thanks to Michael P. for his directing our attention to the June 14 Commonweal editorial entitled “Catholic Unity.” The thrust of the editorial pits the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) against others regarding the March 23 health care law.
The editorial raises two interesting, rhetorical questions. The first is: “What makes the USCCB and its legal and legislative staffs so confident that they alone are competent to understand the new health-care law?”
The second question then follows: “Is there a possibility that the USCCB might be wrong?”
The editors of Commonweal then answer their own questions in the editorial by stating, in essence, that the voice of the Catholic bishops is but one voice in the Church—a major voice but still only one voice; and that the bishops’ conference was wrong in not supporting the health care legislation that became law on March 23. The editorial contains an remarkable presupposition that no one could agree with the position advanced by the bishops; however, this supposition is incorrect. One might add that not everyone who is or claims to be Catholic agrees with the position advanced by the Commonweal editors and those who concur with them.
This makes me wonder: what is the source of unity, and what is the source of this apparent division in which the editors of such a well-known journal (and those who agree with them) pit themselves against those who are called to be the Church’s teachers? What is it that the Church teaches about unity? Whose job is it to unify Catholics? The answers to these questions should be clear to all Catholics.
Thus, we must not forget what the Second Vatican Council said regarding such matters, i.e., the role of bishops, their duty, and their authority: “Bishops... have been made true and authentic teachers of the faith...” (Christus Dominus, N. 2) And, one of the things about teaching that fall within their competence is to address the subject of civil laws (such as the health care legislation) within the understanding of the doctrine of the Church so that the doctrine will be understood by all the faithful. (CD, N. 12) It is the specific duty of bishops to teach the faithful so that they have the capacity to defend and propagate the Church’s doctrine in a world that rejects Her teachings. (CD, N. 13) Moreover, it is the role of the bishops, in communion with the pope, have the responsibility of maintaining the “unity of the flock of Christ.” (Lumen Gentium, N. 22) It is the further responsibility of the bishops “to promote and safeguard the unity of faith and the discipline common to the whole Church.” (LG, N. 23) The faithful are reminded that they are to adhere to their bishops “so that all may be of one mind through unity.” (LG, N. 27) The Commonweal editors may well be free to express their opinions, but this does not mean that they speak with the Church’s teaching authority that is charged with the clear responsibility of promoting the unity of Her members. This authority and responsibility rest elsewhere as the Second Vatican Council demonstrated in the texts I have quoted.
As we prepare to celebrate tomorrow’s feast commemorating the martyrs John Fisher and Thomas More, we might recall another time in which some members of the Church went along with the government’s fiat but others did not. Many of those who did not, such as Fisher and More, suffered greatly. But they remained true to what the Church taught and to which Catholics were called in the exercise of their free will to believe. They understood the unity that is vital to the condition of following Christ in spite of the personal cost.
Saints John Fisher and Thomas More, pray for us!
RJA sj
... as Rick just was: I was reminded of this letter about Meilaender that appears in the current issue of Commonweal:
ABSENT WITHOUT LEAVE
Paul Lauritzen portrays Gilbert Meilaender as a stalwart defender of
human life (“Intellectual Street Fighter,” May 21). But from
what I’ve seen with my own eyes, Meilaender is not too keen on
protecting life from the clutches of militarism. On the subject of the
war in Iraq—one of the foremost assaults on life in our time—Meilaender
was conspicuously absent without leave. In the spirit of Meilaender’s
alleged candor and bluntness, allow me to relate the following incident.
In the fall of 2002, I attended and delivered a paper at a conference
held at Notre Dame’s Center for Ethics and Culture. Naturally, as those
months were a tense prelude to the invasion of Iraq, several of the
panels were devoted to war and peace. (All of them were bellicose, I
might add, especially the ones dominated by Evangelical scholars.) One
of the bigger-ticket panels featured Meilaender, Russell Hittinger, and
an Air Force veteran and scholar whose name I’m glad I can’t remember.
The Air Force vet was clearly hopped up for war. Hittinger mumbled some
forgettable remarks about the United Nations, the tone of which, I do
recall, was not favorable. Meilaender’s talk was unmemorable as well,
but during the Q and A, he revealed himself to be a good deal more
credulous than Lauritzen’s profile would lead you to think.
A student stood up and said, “Look, we all know that governments have
lied in the past. Why should we believe what the Bush administration is
telling us now about weapons of mass destruction?” A nice direct
question for the panel to address, and one that Meilaender should have
been glad to take on. No doubt thinking that the lad was some peacenik,
Meilaender shook his head, chuckled in an avuncular fashion, and
replied, “Oh, I don’t think we have any reason to think that we’re being
lied to.” Here’s a man clearly old enough to remember the Gulf of
Tonkin, My Lai, and Watergate, and what does he do? He counsels
credulity and submission.
I wonder how Meilaender feels now, complicit in his own small way in
the lies, duplicity, and slaughter of that senseless war. Clearly,
Meilaender would rather beat up on stay-at-home dads, or working
mothers, or gays, or some other beleaguered group rather than stand up
to a government engaged in waging a criminal war. So I can’t credit
Lauritzen when he writes that Meilaender “is not interested...in selling
a cheap edition of conscience and authority.”
EUGENE MCCARRAHER
Villanova, Pa.
On a recent plane trip, I read Gilbert Meileander's Neither Beast Nor God (buy it here), which is a succinct examination of the ideas of human and personal "dignity." He writes (among other things):
I doubt whether we can understand dignity well without at least a modest anthropology -- without some notion of what it means to be the sort of creature a human being is. And I, at least, do not think this understanding can possibly be right if we abstract the human beings we seek to understand from their relation to God. Abstracted from that relation, they are simply abstract -- not really what human beings are.
Food for thought!
I just started reading Andrew Cherlin's 2009 book, The Marriage Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family Today. One of the observations he makes is that although we often think of a nation's culture as consistent and unified - a "set of values and expectations that fit togehter to create a coherent whole," it is often the case that culture "contains multiple, inconsisten ways of viewing the same reality, and invididuals choose, sometimes without even realizing it, which view to adopt."
He sees this reflected in the state of marriage in America: Not only do a higher proportion of Americans marry at some point in their lives than in most other Western nations (and marry earlier), but Americans are more likely to breakup and divorce. "American children were more likely to see their parents break up. In fact, children born to married parents in the United States were more likely to experience their parents' breakup than were children born to cohabiting parents in Sweden."
Cherlin suggests this reflects a contradiction in American culture, that our strong culture of marriage and strong culture of individualism "form a contradictory set of models." This contradiction is reflected in the fact that despite that most Americans (76%) agree that marriage is a lifetime relationship that should never be ended except under extreme circumstances," they also believe that individuals who are unhappy in their marriages should easily be able to end them. "What Americans want, in other words, is for everyone else to have a covenant marriage."
Continue
reading
There have been a few posts up, here at MOJ, about the controversial case involving the recent decision by the U.K.'s new Supreme Court in the Jewish Free School case.
Here, in a
Sightings column, Heather Miller Rubens weighs in, and warns that "[t]here are tragic consequences when an essentially secular court of law
attempts to police the boundaries of religious identity and to answer
the question: Who is a Jew?"
Here is an interview by Global Times reporter Li Yanjie with Zhuo Xinping, director of the Institute of Religions at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and Liu Ping, director of the Pushi Institute for Social Sciences, on the state and future of "Sino-Vatican relations". It is interesting to hear how the religious-freedom issues are described, and perceived, by the interviewees. For example:
GT: The Financial Times
recently reported that China has begun to ordain "Vatican-approved"
bishops. How many such bishops have been approved by China? Can you
give us a review of Sino-Vatican relations?
Zhuo: . . . China, as a sovereign state, requires that bishops appointed by the
Vatican should be approved by the government, as has been the case with
other religions in China historically. But the Vatican holds the idea that the ordination of bishops is an issue of freedom of religion. . . .
Here is a worthwhile online series of essays -- about two years old now -- by Steve Waldman of "Beliefnet":
Pope Benedict XI, it is said, admires America’s religious freedom and history. I do too,
especially where we have ended up. But as we focus this week on the
role of Catholics in America, it’s worth remembering just how loathed
Catholics were at the founding of this nation.
Indeed, to an extent rarely acknowledged anti-Catholicism helped fuel the American revolution.
If that sounds harsh, consider the evidence . . .
It seems to me -- and has seemed to me for a while -- that a distressing large number of educated and engaged people have embraced -- either uncritically or insufficiently critically -- inaccurate and often tendentious narratives about historical events, developments, and personalities involving the Church. Whether the question involves the causes and characteristics of the so-called "Dark Ages" or the rise of America's common-school system, it too often seems that an I-would-have-thought-by-now-discredited-or-at-least-problematized "whiggish" bias shapes the telling of the relevant stories and that even Catholics (perhaps in an effort to over-compensate for some other Catholics' "triumphalism") buy and repeat them.
So, I'm reading this summer (among other things) Jonathan Riley-Smith's The Crusades: A History (buy it here), and encourage other Catholics who aspire to an accurate (and therefore instructive) understanding of the past to read it, too. At the very least, the book helps with the task of ministering to the poor souls who sat through Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven (link).
Here, by the way, is a review by the great scholar of late antiquity, Robert Louis Wilken, of two other Crusades-related books:
. . . The recorded past and the remembered past are seldom the same. Nowhere is this more evident than with the Crusades. . . .
[T]he "remembered" history of the Crusades might better be called an
imagined or invented history. Mr. Asbridge, a senior lecturer at Queen
Mary University of London, puts it this way: The Crusades "have come to
have a profound bearing upon our modern world, but almost entirely
through the agency of illusion." Mr. Phillips, a professor of history
at Royal Holloway University of London, says that we have seen only
"shadows of the crusades, not true shapes." . . .
