While he doesn’t use the words, I get a strong sense of the idea of space-time from Aquinas, with us being stuck in space-time and God, having created it, being outside and uncontained by it, and therefore essentially mysterious to those of us inside it. And then, whamo, the Incarnation, and God is inside space-time. Very interesting.
Tags: cool bits
Every time the hierarchy takes a stand on anything related to sexuality (e.g., the ban on artificial contraception, the ban on IVF, the attitude towards gays, the issue now manifesting in Wash DC with the withdrawal of adoption services from Catholic Charities), the term “natural law” pops up. Yet the logical relationship between natural law and the particular stand in question is never made clear.
My understanding of natural law is as follows:
It’s natural for existing, living things to flourish and grow and the measure of this growth and flourishing is what we call goodness. So the primary natural law, upon which all other laws must be based, is that good be done (i.e., flourishing occur) and evil avoided.
Natural law is supposed to be founded in our nature and revealed to us by our reason. It should, then, by it’s very nature be *understandable.* Yet it seems that whenever it’s trotted out by the hierarchy as the rationale for a stand, it is the endpoint of the argument, not the beginning. It is garbed in this gnostic, magical aura which we are all just supposed to accept (e.g., revealed, esoteric knowledge necessary for salvation, etc.).
I would love to see some of our more learned friends take apart these alleged natural law claims, since the whole point of natural law is that it is in fact understandable and thereby debatable via reason. The foundation of so many of the hierarchy’s stands about things sexual are intellectually corrupt, it would be a blessed relief to see them lanced once and for all.
The Church has not gotten its stand on sexual matters wrong, the hierarchy has. This is because the hierarchy has not taken account of the ‘sense of the faithful’ (e.g., starting the whole recent mess was Paul VI’s removal of the topic of birth control from the agenda of Vatican II so the bishops – never mind the rest of us – could not weigh in on it). The faithful have steadfastly refused to accept the hierarchy’s point of view.
The hierarchy’s stands about things sexual fail the test of reason not because the arguments don’t hold up but because they aren’t made at all; they are intellectually bogus because they end with natural law rather than begin with it. Also, they fail the test of the fullness of evidence. Look at the footnotes in the latest USCCB letter on marriage — all previous papal documents — like that’s the only reality that needs to be looked at. And look at the difference in the scope of evidence in the Commission on Birth Control’s Majority vs. Minority report. Finally, and most importantly, they fail the test of compassion.
Is natural law another one of those things, like canon law, that progressives blow off because it’s not progressive enough? I was quite surprised to read in Ladislas Orsy’s Receiving the Council that just like the Council failed to create any serious ongoing structures for collegiality, it seems the progressives pretty much blew off the whole domain of canon law. “Opus Dei, on the other hand, fostered the cultivation of this discipline; the University of Navarre became the seedbed for a school of canonists, and from the very moment of the creation of the Committee on the Revision of Canon Law, Opus Dei took an active role in it.” (p. 86)
Tags: intellectual freedom, natural law
Here’s an interesting piece from the Wikipedia article on Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience on the question of the morality of structures of governance. He’s talking about the state here but it relates to the structures by which the Church chooses to govern itself.
Read Church instead of State and it points to an interesting future. (And no, I do not consider current Church governance “an act of God.”
Because government is man-made, not an element of nature or an act of God, Thoreau hoped that its makers could be reasoned with. As governments go, he felt, the U.S. government, with all its faults, was not the worst and even had some admirable qualities. But he felt we could and should insist on better. “The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual.… Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man? There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.”
Tags: structures of governance
Besides its structures of governance, the organizational or corporate culture of the Church obviously makes a huge difference in the way the Church is run.
From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_culture
“Organizational culture is an idea in the field of Organizational studies and management which describes the psychology, attitudes, experiences, beliefs and values (personal and cultural values) of an organization. It has been defined as “the specific collection of values and norms that are shared by people and groups in an organization and that control the way they interact with each other and with stakeholders outside the organization.”
“This definition continues to explain organizational values also known as “beliefs and ideas about what kinds of goals members of an organization should pursue and ideas about the appropriate kinds or standards of behavior organizational members should use to achieve these goals. From organizational values develop organizational norms, guidelines or expectations that prescribe appropriate kinds of behavior by employees in particular situations and control the behavior of organizational members towards one another.”
Tags: structures of governance
In Thoreau’s 1849 essay Civil Disobedience, the driving idea was that one does not necessarily have to physically fight the government, but one must not support it or have it support one (if one is against it). This essay has had a wide influence on many later practitioners of civil disobedience. In the essay, Thoreau explained his reasons for having refused to pay taxes as an act of protest against slavery and against the Mexican-American War.
Quoting from Wikipedia:
Thoreau argues that people should not permit governments to overrule or atrophy their consciences, and that people have a duty to avoid allowing such acquiescence to enable the government to make them the agents of injustice.
Thoreau tells his audience [in relation to slavery and the Mexican-American war] that they cannot blame this problem solely on pro-slavery Southern politicians, but must put the blame on those in, for instance, Massachusetts, “who are more interested in commerce and agriculture than they are in humanity, and are not prepared to do justice to the slave and to Mexico, cost what it may.… There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them.”
He exhorts people not to just wait passively for an opportunity to vote for justice, because voting for justice is as ineffective as wishing for justice; what you need to do is to actually be just. This is not to say that you have an obligation to devote your life to fighting for justice, but you do have an obligation not to commit injustice and not to give injustice your practical support.
Paying taxes is one way in which otherwise well-meaning people collaborate in injustice. People who proclaim that the war in Mexico is wrong and that it is wrong to enforce slavery contradict themselves if they fund both things by paying taxes. Thoreau points out that the same people who applaud soldiers for refusing to fight an unjust war are not themselves willing to refuse to fund the government that started the war.
In a constitutional republic like the United States, people often think that the proper response to an unjust law is to try to use the political process to change the law, but to obey and respect the law until it is changed. But if the law is itself clearly unjust, and the lawmaking process is not designed to quickly obliterate such unjust laws, then Thoreau says the law deserves no respect and it should be broken.
Existentialist Martin Buber wrote, of Civil Disobedience
“I read it with the strong feeling that here was something that concerned me directly.… It was the concrete, the personal element, the “here and now” of this work that won me over. Thoreau did not put forth a general proposition as such; he described and established his attitude in a specific historical-biographic situation. He addressed his reader within the very sphere of this situation common to both of them in such a way that the reader not only discovered why Thoreau acted as he did at that time but also that the reader– assuming him of course to be honest and dispassionate– would have to act in just such a way whenever the proper occasion arose, provided he was seriously engaged in fulfilling his existence as a human person.
The question here is not just about one of the numerous individual cases in the struggle between a truth powerless to act and a power that has become the enemy of truth. It is really a question of the absolutely concrete demonstration of the point at which this struggle at any moment becomes man’s duty as man.…
—”Man’s Duty As Man” (1962)
Some interesting food for thought here for approaching how the faithful might use money and voice to affect positive change.
It’s entirely possible that passion is getting the best of intelligence here, but of late I have been coming to two realizations: the first is the true extent of the damage the current structures of governance are perpetrating on the Church, and the second is the additional damage done by the acquiescence of the faithful to the situation. It’s one thing to be fighting the good fight and failing, and another thing to assume the situation is hopeless and just go about your business. I even sense a bit of self-satisfaction in the post-Vatican II church, like we’re all so cool because we have girl altar boys. None of this is to say that what goes on is bad, it’s not, it’s marvelous. Girl altar boys are marvelous. It only looks bad in comparison to what it could be if certain things were changed. Like the ordination of women priests to go along with those girl altar boys.
The faithful will be the source of change in the church; it will not come from the top. We don’t run the joint yet but we are not powerless: we have money and voice. We just need to get off our butts and figure out how to use our money and our voices appropriately to initiate change for the good.
I think the first step is being realistic about the kind of relationship the faithful often have with the Vatican and the bishops. As the “visited” sisters are finding out, it is not one necessarily based on respectful communication (which you’d hope) but one often based on power and control. If the Vatican was really intent on helping the nuns for example, they could have just talked with them and listened to them. This is not rocket science. Rode was not interested in this; he admits he was concerned about “feminism” and “secular influence.” So rather than a useful conversation the sisters got an exercise of power: a million-dollar visitation, intrusive, secretive, intimidating, the exact opposite of a respectful conversation. In effect, a punch in the nose. How does one respond to a punch in the nose? I think the first thing is to recognize that you have in fact been punched in the nose.
I think in the Church today (incoming generalization) we’ve become benumbed so much through lack of hope for change that we tolerate the intolerable. To haul out a trope from the 60s, I think we need another consciousness-raising so we can act accordingly if we have the opportunity. In our networked world, consciousness of injustice makes a difference. The alternative is being complicit in the downward spiral of the Church.
I also think it important to see questions of collegiality, centralization, sanctions, etc. as questions of power, not theology. Theology (and common sense) point to a much different structure of governance than the one we got. This is why I think the faithful should consider options such as alternative funding structures and acts of “papal” disobedience as a means of forcing change.
The papacy and hierarchy’s very act of demanding that the faithful not talk about certain issues (e.g., women’s ordination) as a prerequisite to being a “good Catholic” is crazy-making; it boggles the mind and demeans the Church.
Imagine going to see your crazy old Uncle Tootie. In order for Uncle Tootie to talk to you, he requires that you wear a hat and hop three times on your left leg before you enter his room. Now you may be fond of Uncle Tootie, and you may remember when he had a few more marbles than he does today, and you may respect him for the work he as done in his life, so you are happy to wear the hat and hop three times on your left leg in order to get in there and pay your respects. But you certainly don’t look to him for any wisdom any more, and you certainly wouldn’t want him running anything.
The more the papacy and hierarchy enforce this policy of certain topics that may not be talked about (e.g., women’s ordination), the more they look like crazy old Uncle Tootie.
That would be cute and funny except for the fact that people are being forced out of their roles in the Church merely for talking about things, as Sister of Charity Louise Lears found out when she forced out of all church ministerial roles and forbidden to receive the sacraments in the archdiocese by Saint Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke. Cutting someone off from the sacraments because they talk about women’s ordination? It’s no wonder people flee the Church.
From Ladislas Orsy: “No one has ever stated more clearly and succinctly the difference between bishops and “doctors” than Aquinas. He discussed it within the framework of the two cathedras: To be promoted to an episcopal cathedra, the qualification required is to be eminent in charity. Ordination then confers eminence in power in relation to the faithful; power that the person did not possess before. To be promoted to a doctoral cathedra, sufficient learning, scientia, is necessary. The position offers an opportunity to use the knowledge and the skill that a person possessed before (cf Quodl. 3.9.c).”
“Comments: Ordination gives no knowledge; no person becomes more learned by it. Competent government, however, especially in our contemporary church, demands a high degree of learning. It follows that ordinarily, unless the bishop has personally sufficient knowledge and skill, he needs the help of the “doctors” to govern well.”
When the hierarchy fixates on obedience, mandatums, visitations and non-transparent, unjust doctrinal scrutiny of said scholars, they stifle the very people who are supposed to be enlightening them.
Upon the passing of Mary Daly, a retired professor at Boston College, Charlotte Allen asks in a January 14, 2010 Wall Street Journal article, where are all the Catholic dissidents, and notes that the Flame of Catholic Dissent is dying out. She notes that Mary Daly, Hans Küng, Edward Schillebeeckx, and Sister Sandra M. Schneiders are all of the Vatican II era and points out the void.
“So where is the second generation of brilliant progressive Catholic theologians? There are plenty of liberal lay Catholics. The church’s ban on artificial birth control is nearly a dead letter, a majority of Catholics say they believe their church should ordain women, and 40% have no moral objections to abortion, according to a 2009 Gallup poll. But dissident Catholicism seems to have lost steam as an intellectual movement, and not only because the issues relating to sex and papal authority that originally sparked Catholic dissidents have not changed in nearly 50 years.”
“The first-generation dissidents were products of a strong and confident traditional Catholic culture against which they rebelled, one whose intellectual standards grounded them in the faith they later came to question. Sister Schneiders, for example, earned four degrees from Catholic institutions, including the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. Yet most Catholics of her generation have not passed on the tenets of their faith to their children—the offspring of the Vatican II generation tend either to be churchless or not to go to church—or, in the case of academics, to their students. It’s hard to rebel when you don’t even know what you are rebelling against.”
Again I have to wonder if the intellectual life of the church has lost its zip not so much from outright repression (which would inspire dissent) but from a growing sense of the irrelevance of the authority of the institution.
In his book Apologia, Cardinal Newman (who had a far tougher time with intellectual freedom in his day than we do in ours) says that he believes in the dogma as taught by the Apostles and interpreted by the Church, and in the universally received traditions of the Church, “which in all times are the clothing and the illustration of the Catholic dogma as already defined,” and other decisions of the Holy See, which come “with a claim to be accepted and obeyed.” Then he says he feels “no temptation at all to break in pieces the great legacy of thought thus committed to us” by the likes of St. Athanasius, St. Augustine, and St. Thomas. Then he says keeping “Infallibility and Reason” in ongoing tension is “necessary for the very life of religion” because it brings them together “for the melting, refining, and moulding, by an incessant, noisy process, of the raw material of human nature.”
This is a description of what I think should be going on but is not going on exactly because of the deadening of our intellectual life.
Besides the issues of obsession with obedience, mandatums, the illogic of “not infallible but irreformable,” and the unjust process of sanctions, two things strike me.
One is that all of the issues that seem to be roiling the Church today (birth control, celibacy, women’s ordination, collegiality) have little to do with “dogma as taught by the Apostles.” They are essentially operational issues. Yet power is exercised by the hierarchy to forbid their discussion (e.g., the nun put under interdict for advocating women’s ordination). The hierarchy seems to want to bring down the full power and weight of the magesterium on these issues, even though they have little to do with essential doctrine. That’s why Ad tuendam fidem (i.e., the creation of a category of doctrine that is not infallible but irreformable is so dangerous, besides being illogical).
Secondly, in the meantime, little relative energy is being put into the articulation of the basic truths of the faith in a way that makes sense in the modern world. We never even get to “the melting, refining, and moulding, by an incessant, noisy process” the truths that might rightly be considered infallible, so “Infallibility and Reason” are not being kept in ongoing tension on topics of consequence because all the focus is on mandating obedience to what are essentially bureaucratic issues.
Also, I wonder if the intellectual life of the church has lost its zip not so much from outright repression but from a growing sense of the irrelevance of the authority of the institution. If that’s the case, then the dialectic Newman suggests of “Infallibility and Reason” isn’t going to work.
What is the state of intellectual freedom in the church? Here’s an example that says it may not be as great as we think.
Remember the debate about teaching creationism in science class in the Kansas public schools? Remember all the Catholic high school principals and presidents of Catholic colleges who hit the media to make perfectly clear that there is no conflict between religious belief and teaching evolution in science class, and that Catholic high schools and colleges have been teaching it in biology classes for at least fifty years?
Yeah, I don’t either.
The Catholic voice was curiously absent, like the dog in the Sherlock Holmes story that didn’t bark in the night. Catholics, of all people, have the rich intellectual tradition that illuminates the border between faith and reason. Yet this controversy went on for months with nary a peep from us. I remember two Catholic voices. One was Cardinal Schonborn, parroting intelligent design philosophy in a New York Times op ed. The other was Father George Coyne, director of the Vatican Observatory, who rebutted Schonborn and said that evolution was not in conflict with faith. (He was subsequently removed from his position as director of the Vatican Observatory.)
It would have been nice to see some Catholic college presidents or high school principals saying, “Duh, we’ve been teaching this stuff for years.” What kept that from happening? Are we all benumbed, put into a stupor? Do we need a good old-fashioned dose of consciousness-raising? Is that actually going on now? Are we reaching a tipping point?
Tags: intellectual freedom
What is sacramental imagination?
From Andrew Greeley:
“Religion… is imagination before it’s anything else. The Catholic imagination is different from the Protestant imagination. You know that: Flannery O’Connor is not John Updike.”
“The central symbol (of religion) is God. One’s “picture” of God is in fact a metaphorical narrative of God’s relationship with the world and the self as part of the world… The Catholic “classics” assume a God who is present in the world, disclosing Himself in and through creation. The world and all its events, objects, and people tend to be somewhat like God. The Protestant classics, on the other hand, assume a God who is radically absent from the world, and who discloses (Himself) only on rare occasions (especially in Jesus Christ and Him crucified). The world and all its events, objects, and people tend to be radically different from God.”
More at: http://www.alyosha.com/si/index.html
And here’s from another article at:
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/episodes/august-5-2009/the-things-of-this-world/3846/
“Theologically, Christianity provides a language—and some doctrinal and historical metaphors or benchmarks—for two such imaginations: the sacramental and the dialectical. The first is broadly linked to Catholic ways of seeing and understanding God and the world, and the second, equally broadly and generally, to a Protestant sensibility.”
“Drawing on the work of Catholic theologian David Tracy, University of Notre Dame theology professor Mary Catherine Hilkert, in her book NAMING GRACE, gives a useful and succinct definition of the two imaginations: “The dialectical imagination stresses the distance between God and humanity, the hiddeness and absence of God, the sinfulness of human beings, the paradox of the cross, the need for grace as redemption and reconciliation…and the not-yet character of the promised reign of God. The sacramental imagination…emphasizes the presence of the God who is self-communicating love, the creation of human beings in the image of God…the mystery of the incarnation.”
I think the thing that’s missing, and the thing that would very much appeal to young people, are rituals that are more rich in what Andrew Greeley (hardly a conservative) calls the sacramental imagination. The Vatican II rediscovery of Scripture was marvelous but I think an unintended consequence was the thought that “Meaning could be conveyed better in word than in gesture, better in print than in procession, better in concept than in image.” (The Four Cultures of the West – John O’Malley, great book.)
As a result, church turned into a didactic exposition of texts rather than an experience of the sacred. In a play, rigorous adherence to the rules of drama, and the audience’s understanding of those rules, lead to the willing suspension of disbelief. I would likewise think that rigorous adherence to the rubrics of liturgy, and the congregation’s understanding of those rubrics, would lead to the creation of belief and to an entering into the liturgy which would allow the individuals in the congregation to let their souls be touched by and enriched by the grace of the goings on. This is exactly the involvement that the constant talking and chumminess of too many liturgies so effectively destroys.
Archbishop Gotfried Danneels has a great article on this and other thoughts on the liturgy in an America Magazine article:
Another good article I found a while back also struck me as capturing what has been lost. The philosopher and liturgist Romano Guardini visited the basilica of Monreale in 1929, and told this story in his “Voyage in Sicily.”
“There are different means of prayerful participation. One is realized by listening, speaking, gesturing. But the other takes place through watching. The first way is a good one, and we northern Europeans know no other. But we have lost something that was still there at Monreale: the capacity for living-in-the-gaze, for resting in the act of seeing, for welcoming the sacred in the form and event, by contemplating them.”
I think the sisters are on to something here. The Church does abuse its own (not that that’s a surprise). The interesting thing is the way they’re articulating it as abuse and responding to it.
From an article in National Catholic Reporter.
“The vast majority of U.S. women religious are not complying with a Vatican request to answer questions in a document of inquiry that is part of a three-year study of the congregations. Leaders of congregations, instead, are leaving questions unanswered or sending in letters or copies of their communities’ constitutions.” …
“Explaining the attitude in her community, St. Joseph Sr. Margaret Gregg said, “I feel the response was a thoughtful, respectful response to a very puzzling situation. The purpose of this investigation is unclear to me, given the level of the questions.” …
“All along, said one woman religious, the challenge has been to respond to the Vatican in a way that breaks a cycle of violence. She said that the women religious communities have attempted to respond by using a language “devoid of the violence” they found in the Vatican questionnaire and within the wider study. She characterized the congregation responses as “creative and affirming,” and part of an effort to set a positive example in “nonviolent resistance.”
“On the one hand we didn’t want to roll over and play dead,” she said. “So the question was, “How do you step outside a violent framework and do something new?’ That was the challenge that emerged.” One congregation, she said, cited a U.S. bishops’ statement concerning domestic abuse in its response letter to Millea. “The point is, there have to be more than two choices: Take the abuse and offer it up, or kill the abuser.”
There are structures and habits in church governance which work to deaden the intellectual life of the church.
The hierarchy is obsessed with obedience. Anyone ordained and anyone holding an office in the church takes a “profession of faith” which includes the following oath: “I adhere with religious submission of will and intellect to the teachings which either the Roman pontiff or the College of Bishops enunciate when they exercise their authentic Magisterium, even if they do not intend to proclaim these teachings by a definitive act.” There are other oaths.
The apostolic constitution Ex Corde Ecclesiae addresses the catholicism of Catholic colleges and universities. It cites Canon 812: “Those who teach theological disciplines in any institutes of higher studies whatsoever must have a mandate from the competent ecclesiastical authority.” In the U.S., “The mandatum is to be granted by the diocesan Bishop of the diocese in which the Catholic university is located.” The college or university is subject to the particular opinion of the bishop who happens to run the diocese in which the college or university finds itself. The history of the pedophilia scandal in the Church shows that a culture of obedience can too easily enable acquiescence to evil.
When it comes to sanctions against theologians, the CDF ignores the lessons of modern jurisprudence: precise definition of an offense; separation of the roles of judge, the prosecutor, and defense; equal access; the presumption of innocence; openness; appeal.
Definitive doctrine, a new category of doctrine created by John Paul II, is not “infallible” but which nevertheless is “irreformable” (i.e., can’t be changed) – a logical inconsistency on the face of it.
Obsession with obedience coupled with continuous extensions of papal-defined “definitive doctrine” (which cannot be changed even though it is not infallible) and the existence of mandatums and sanctions creates an environment which is suppressing the intellectual life of the church. Who can speak out on any issue not a part of the papal party line without potential repercussion? Not any untenured professor of theology under a mandatum, or anyone who has taken the oath of fidelity, which is everyone who has been ordained and anyone who holds an office in the church. They are all subject to sanctions if found to be uttering “erroneous” or “dangerous” doctrine. Even if such sanctions are rarely exercised, they intimidate.
For example, all it takes is “a steady muttering” to get a million dollar investigation going, as evidenced by the ongoing “visitation” of American religious women by the Vatican. “In his Tuesday interview with Vatican Radio, Cardinal Rode said ‘some criticism arrived from United States and an important representative of the U.S. Church warned me about certain irregularities or deficiencies in the lives of American women religious.’ Though Cardinal Rode did not say who the representative was, he also revealed the problems include ‘a certain secularist mentality that has spread among these religious families, perhaps even a certain ‘feminist spirit.’”
(The full story)
Benedict’s latest statement is on British politics, where he claims that legislation introduced by Labour to end discrimination “actually violates natural law” since it stops worshippers remaining true to their beliefs because it makes them admit homosexuals to the priesthood or face prosecution for discriminating against them. Don’t hold your breath waiting for an uprising of Thomists to stand up and argue the point that this attitude is a misreading if not complete distortion of natural law; who wants to get smacked upside the head by the CDF or some bishop’s mandatum?
“Creative thinkers who scrutinize the divine mysteries and give us a language to speak about them must be constantly aware that the church trusts them and protects them. If norms are needed to prevent deviations, norms are even more necessary to secure freedom for creative thinking.” (Orsy, p. 103)
The hierarchy is in a pickle. If they are truly rational about any one of the Church’s contentious issues (e.g., birth control, celibacy, women’s ordination, celibacy, etc.), it will create the expectation that they will be rational about all of them; the whole papal party line either stands inviolate or falls as a whole to the scrutiny of evidence-based reason. Until this scrutiny happens, the Church’s entire intellectual progress, its entire means to have faith seek understanding, will be stymied by the very people who are supposed to be its leaders.
I see issues such as lack of collegiality, mandatums, the injustice of the CDF investigations, mandatory celibacy, the role of women, etc. etc. not as progressive / conservative issues but as moral issues as they affect the ability of the Church to spread its message. These are questions of justice, not political preference. I think it’s important to clarify the nature and extent of the disfunction in the Church not to bash it but to get a handle on fixing it. The Church does abuse its own.
