Reading Old Books (Continuing)

As I have noted in older blog posts, found here, https://catholiceye.wordpress.com//?s=reading+old+books&search=Go the reading of old books is very rewarding, and I’ve recently been reading the works of Orestes Brownson, who wrote in the 19^th Century, and came across this wonderful excerpt.

“The objection to the Catholic Church just now most insisted upon in our country is, that she is hostile to our form of government…..

“I must, however, premise that I am always humbled in my own opinion, when I am called upon to reply to an objection of this sort. It is humiliating in the extreme to be forced to defend the spiritual against objections drawn from the temporal, or religion against objections drawn from politics. Religion, if any thing, is for man the supreme law, and must take precedence of every thing else; and the very idea of a church, is that of an institution founded by Almighty God, for the purpose of introducing and sustaining the supremacy of his law in the government of human affairs. If religion and politics are opposed, politics, not religion, must give way. No man, I care not who he is, whether a Catholic or a Protestant, a pagan or a Mahometan, if he has any conception of religion at all, denies, or can deny, that he should place his religion first, and that all else in his life should be subordinated to it. He who denies that his religion should govern his politics, as well as all his actions, virtually denies morality, denies the divine law, and asserts political atheism. To subject religion to politics, or to object to a religion because incompatible with this or that political theory, is, in principle, to deny the sovereignty of God himself, and to fall below the most degrading form of gentilism.” (p. 39)

Michael P. Federici. (2019). From the July 1856 essay: The Church and the Republic; Or the Church Necessary to the Republic, and the Republic compatible with the Church, (pp.37-62) inThe Catholic Writings of Orestes Brownson. University of Notre Dame Press: Notre Dame, Indiana.

Loving the Church

I read an excellent article today by Fr. John Saward, in the Catholic Herald Magazine expressing so well what I have been trying to explain for years but never reaching the eloquence and insight of Fr. Saward.

Here is an excerpt, unfortunately its not online.

I have emboldened what I think to be the key idea, in the final paragraph.

Excerpt.

“We can still love the Church.

“We must love the Church.

“Those who truly love the Lord Jesus will not fail to love the Mystical Body of which He is the Head, the Bride for whom He offered Himself up on the Cross. It would be ingratitude to Him if we refused His gift of the Church as Mother and Teacher. We are members of the Church, yet she is greater than we are, and is eminently worthy of our trust. The One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church will never let us down. She is “the house of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth.” (I Timothy 3:15)

“But surely, when we remember the sexual crimes of some of the clergy, we cannot love the Church. How is she to be trusted when so many of her bishops, even when not guilty of perversion themselves, have practiced deception and covered up the evils of others? Surely we cannot love a Church led by bad shepherds.

“But no, we can and must love the Church. The wickedness of which we have heard so much in this last year is the work of churchmen, not of the Church herself. The visible, hierarchical Catholic Church remains immaculate in the beauty of holiness, and in the splendour of truth. She is holy because of Christ, her divine Head, and by the working of the Holy Spirit, who fills her with His grace, gifts and fruits.

“Despite our own sins, and those of our pastors, the Church is holy in the sacred doctrine of her faith, and in her Sacraments, which impart the grace of Christ for the sanctification of our souls. She is holy in the saints in heaven, and above all in the Immaculate Mother of God, the Queen of All Saints. She is holy in the poor souls in purgatory, for whom the remains of sin are being burnt away. She is holy in the humble Catholics on earth who love Jesus and Mary, trust in God and not in themselves, who strive to keep the commandments, avoid the occasions of sin, pray without ceasing, and fight courageously against the world, the flesh and the Devil. When we say in the Apostle’s Creed that we believe in the Holy Catholic Church, we are not deceiving ourselves.

“The Church’s integrity is undiminished even when one of her prelates departs from her faith and presents his own strange opinions as if they were orthodoxy. Think of those who fell into Arianism, of Nestorius in the See of Constantinople, or of Thomas Cramer, Archbishop of Canterbury. The faith once delivered to the saints (Jude 3) remains invulnerable despite the depredations of the heretics. This or that cleric may lose his faith, and make himself a slave of the world, but the Church our Mother remains divinely free; she is a virgin, and keeps the faith pure and intact. Even when a pope falls into heresy, as Honorius I and John XXII apparently did, Peter’s voice still resounds with all its original clarity in the teaching of his orthodox predecessors, and indeed in all those bishops, priests and lay people who hold and foster the Catholic and Apostolic faith. Sacred Tradition is immortal by the gift of the risen Christ.” (p. 36)

Fr. John Saward. (2019). Love in a time of crisis. Catholic Herald. August 2, 2019.

American Church’s History with Slavery

It is not a pretty picture, as this article from the New York Times explains.

The Church, though built upon the foundation of God, has, in her human led incarnation, done many terrible things, though even these things cannot destroy her, for as Christ promised, She is an invincible spiritual reality.

An excerpt.

“Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School, one of the oldest Roman Catholic girls’ schools in the nation, has long celebrated the vision and generosity of its founders: a determined band of Catholic nuns who championed free education for the poor in the early 1800s.

The sisters, who established an elite academy in Washington, D.C., also ran “a Saturday school, free to any young girl who wished to learn — including slaves, at a time when public schools were almost nonexistent and teaching slaves to read was illegal,” according to an official history posted for several years on the school’s website.

“But when a newly hired school archivist and historian started digging in the convent’s records a few years ago, she found no evidence that the nuns had taught enslaved children to read or write. Instead, she found records that documented a darker side of the order’s history.

“The Georgetown Visitation sisters owned at least 107 enslaved men, women and children, the records show. And they sold dozens of those people to pay debts and to help finance the expansion of their school and the construction of a new chapel.

“Nothing else to do than to dispose of the family of Negroes,’’ Mother Agnes Brent, the convent’s superior, wrote in 1821 as she approved the sale of a couple and their two young children. The enslaved woman was just days away from giving birth to her third child.

“Nuns disposing of black families? I have been poring over 19th-century church records for several years now and such casual cruelty from leaders of the faith still takes my breath away. I am a black journalist and a black Catholic. Yet I grew up knowing nothing about the nuns who bought and sold human beings.

“For generations, enslaved people have been largely left out of the origin story traditionally told about the Catholic Church. My reporting on Georgetown University, which profited from the sale of more than 200 slaves, has helped to draw attention in recent years to universities and their ties to slavery. But slavery also helped to fuel the growth of many contemporary institutions, including some churches and religious organizations.

“Historians say that nearly all of the orders of Catholic sisters established by the late 1820s owned slaves. Today, many Catholic sisters are outspoken champions of social justice and some are grappling with this painful history even as lawmakers in Congress and presidential candidates debate whether reparations should be paid to the descendants of enslaved people.

Retrieved August 2, 2019 from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/02/opinion/sunday/nuns-slavery.html?

 

Good Bishops Do Exist

And here is one of them as reported by Chris Ferrara, which includes one of the all time great descriptions of the modern bishop, which I’ve put in bold.

An excerpt.

“One of the few bishops who even approaches what one could call a staunch and militant Catholic orthodoxy today is Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas. Needless to say, he was not made a bishop by Francis but rather by Pope Benedict XVI in 2012.

“In an interview with LifeSiteNews, Bishop Strickland addressed the “controversy” surrounding a tweet in which he merely observed the obvious about the current state of the Church’s human element after more than fifty years of delusional “renewal” in the name of Vatican II:

“The deposit of faith has not been guarded, instead it has been fragmented & corrupted especially in the areas of marriage, family & sexuality. I pray that bishops & all Catholics will return anew to this font of revealed truth & pray for cleansing & renewal in God’s life & grace.”

“Note well: Bishop Strickland prays that bishops will return to an adherence to Church teaching (the “font of revealed truth”) and defend her doctrine on marriage, family and sexuality.

“Strickland is clearly not one of the bloated Hogarthian figures who occupy so many episcopal sees, where there is neither a bad meal to be eaten nor a discouraging word to be heard, and the Skies of Renewal are not cloudy all day. Strickland is thus quite willing to say the hard things that need to be said, such as: “Our society is unraveling, especially with regard to marriage, family and sexual morality. This is all the more tragic because God has revealed the truth that we need to flourish in this world and share eternal life with Him after we depart this world.”

“Departing this world! Eternal life! Not exactly the uppermost items on contemporary episcopal agendas — or, for that matter, on the agenda of Benedict’s successor. As for the current Pope, while Strickland may be too politic to be quite that obvious, it is self-evident that it is largely on account of Francis that Church teaching has been “fragmented & corrupted… in the areas of marriage, family & sexuality.” It would be no exaggeration to say that this fragmentation, in the name of Francis’ newfangled “synodal church,” is the very program of his pontificate.

“For it is none other than Francis who, alone among all the Popes in Church history, has authorized Holy Communion for public adulterers who claim to have “remarried” after an illicit civil divorce, thereby casting aside even the teaching of John Paul II and Benedict XVI to the contrary. And it is Francis who has declared that contraception can be justified as the “lesser of two evils” when used to prevent the transmission of disease — the notion that one may legitimately choose to do one evil to avoid another being the death of all morality. Nor can we forget that it was Pope Francis who insisted that the sham “Synod on the Family” include an interim report declaring that “homosexual unions” provide “precious support for the life of the partners” even after the bishops at the Synod had voted to reject it.

“Strickland finds himself in a situation so degenerated that it now requires him manfully to affirm the most basic tenets of the natural law in the face of the hostility of his own fellow bishops in the USCCB. For example: “It’s part of our deposit of faith that we believe homosexual activity is immoral.”

Retrieved July 26, 2019 from https://fatima.org/news-views/fatima-perspectives-1321/

 

Return to the Desert for the Church

A wonderful article from the Remnant Newspaper.

An excerpt.

Traditionalists talk a lot about finding ways to return the Church – and consequently the world – to the state of Christendom in the Age of Faith. We all have dreams of recreating the glories and certainties of medieval Christendom, and some monastics – Norcia, Le Barroux, Clear Creek, the Benedictines of Mary, the Carmelite monks of Cody, Wyoming – are even going so far as to bring these dreams to reality in stone and mortar. But much as we all love pointed arches and Gregorian Chant, is it possible that these dreams are leaving out a big piece of the puzzle? At least, in terms of rebuilding larger Catholic civilisation, are we perhaps forgetting that the fruits of Christian culture presuppose a social, political and cultural context that made such physical manifestations possible?

Are we modern men making medieval palaces to live in? It’s natural for us to want a return of the greatness of Christendom of the 13^th century. But do we deserve it in our current condition? How did we get to the stage of Scholasticism and flying buttresses?

I don’t mean to say we shouldn’t build great physical structures where we can, or that money shouldn’t be spent on beautiful things; far from it. But maybe we should pull the camera back a little. Where did these great cultural, social and philosophical treasures come from? How did we get Chartres and Notre Dame cathedrals? From what culture did Gregorian Chant derive? It took 182 years to build Notre Dame. What was the cultural condition of Christendom in 1163 that allowed the decision to be made to allocate such incredible resources in the first place? Are we in a situation now that is in any way comparable to that of the 11^th or 12^th century? The answer is obvious.

But then we have to ask, if we do want to return our entire civilisation to that level, if we want to see a revival of the great age of Faith, how did they get there? Where should we start? What historical Christian period most closely matches our own, an age of great achievement, strength and confidence, or an age of weakness and persecution? The answer is perhaps not going to be much to anyone’s liking. The revival of Christendom can only be achieved the same way it was created in the first place.

Where did Christendom really come from? The “propositum monasticum”

In a conversation by email this weekend, a well known Traditionalist monastic told me that whatever might come of these recent efforts to build neo-gothic monasteries, in our fierce longing for the age of Christianity’s greatness we could be putting the Gothic cart before the desert monastic horse. He said we are in such a state of degradation we must go past even the roots of Christendom to the very seeds.

What did they have in 1163 that we don’t? Christendom was not built from nothing in the 12^th century. It was a development from foundations laid centuries before in the ages of persecution and monastic heroism. Maybe it is not to Chartres and Notre Dame we should look, but to the Thebaid. With our eyes full of the romantic glamour of the High Middle Ages we may have forgotten that the deserts of Egypt in the 4th century were peopled with thousands of monks and nuns. These were Christians who had fled the consolations and protections of the world – including an abruptly legalised religion suddenly elevated to a State Church – to strive for a heavenly way of living.

When, a few centuries later, a revival of persecution pushed these men and women out of their desert monastic cities they came providentially to spread that heavenly way of life into the rest of the Christian world of late antiquity. It was this, much more than the chaotic imperial politics of the early papacy^[1], that brought the living water to a European people thirsting desperately for Christ.

The foundation of that monastic principle is the personal dedication to union with Christ above all other things, an idea that would later be called the “propositum monasticum” – the radical, singular and irrevocable choice of a life dedicated wholly to Christ. Their idea was revolutionary for the ancient world, it must have looked to the pagan mind like a kind of mania, a godly madness that nothing could overcome.

A semi-converted Emperor may have decided to simply replace classical paganism with Christianity as the official state religion, but the two religious ideas are at root incompatible. Paganism never had anything to say to the individual about the moral life or salvation; Christianity had much to say to the state, but only gained that power through its prior claims on individual souls.

This inversion of the nature of religion was so radical, so completely unprecedented in all of known human history that it re-made the whole world. Christ does not want the cold, official worship of the state. He speaks only to the human soul, to woo her, to “allure her… and lead her into the wilderness and speak tenderly to her,” and to convince her to give up her idols. No pagan god in any Classical myth ever spoke to humanity thus.

Christendom was built not by the popes or emperors but on a prior foundation of the individual commitment of each Catholic in the age of persecution amid a pagan society, the determination to turn away from the world and toward Christ at any cost.

The intense mystical love of the dedicated Christian for the person of Christ made the terrors of the arena, wild beasts, grilles and all tortures, and all worldly temptations, as nothing. It was this high romance of the individual soul with the beloved that overcame and transformed the cruelties and barbarism of Classical paganism, not the Edict of Milan. Anyone who wants to know how truly useless for building Christian civilisation the papacy can be must read the story of Marozia, the Theophylacti and the Pornocracy of the 10th century.

If the Novusordoist structures won’t have us because we are Traditionalists, why do we want them?

My friend adds the rather pertinent observation that if the classical monastic life refuses you entry, it “shows that it is not making itself available to souls who want to answer the universal invitation of Our Lord given to all to follow him in poverty, chastity and obedience.”

It may seem an odd comment until you start investigating closely the condition even of the better-known “conservative” contemporary monastic communities. In one celebrated house of contemplative nuns, famed for their “traditional” flavour of liturgy and vita communis, a candidate who shows a preference for the “extraordinary form” of Mass or Divine Office will be assigned a particular sister whose job it is to correct that candidate’s erring ideas. Close inspection of “conservative” religious life is what taught me the difference, and that this is often where the most virulent hostility against Tradition can be found.

“The essential is not the classical dream” of monasticism, “although it can be found there,” my friend said. What is essential is “seeking His face,” the “fuga mundi and saving souls (all the while surviving this desert world).”

In our time the Church’s leadership has locked the gates of the monastic life: “The hierarchy, ever seeking to control and domesticate whatever moves in the Church by their giving or refusing recognition, has all but left the Church without consecrated souls at all, and very few prophets for all the documents that have been written since 1965.”

My friend, however, moves past this saying simply that if we lament that there are no monasteries to join – none that would have us because of our refusal to give up certain aspects of the ancient Catholic Faith in favour of a supposed “New Paradigm” – we might not need them, strictly speaking. The life of devotion, of consecration to Christ, does not require marbled halls; it requires only the will to live it.

Following the example of the earliest recorded monastics, we remember that “the monastic life is adaptable, just like infants’ stem cells that adapt to all the needs of the body.” Where a young would-be saint of the 13^th century had the luxury of simply joining the monastery down the road, a Christian of the 4^th century had to be a pioneer; but the result was the same.

“If living the vows we flee the world, seek His face and seek to save souls by prayer or by labour, what more is needed to be truly a monk or a nun?”

Any person with the desire for sanctity could be as good a monk or a nun “as any who entered as 18 year old and made it to the golden jubilee! Because it is a matter of answering the universal call of Our Lord.”

My friend continues with a DIY proposal: “In Egypt and Syria and everywhere else monasteries were nothing like the great Abbeys of Mont St. Michel, Kelso and Cluny. Our monastic stem-cell can build abbeys but just as well can find us a life like the eremitical lauras of St. Romuald or as itinerants like the Little Sisters of Jesus of Blessed Charles de Foucauld did in Chinese Junks and gypsy caravans.

“We’ve had 2000 years of all kinds of social structures to protect the propositum: look to the East and to the West. You name it we’ve had it. Caves; recluses; abbeys; priories; lauras; hermitages, huts, pillars, open-roofed enclosures. St. Simon Stock had an oak tree, Mother Potter had a hospice, and pious women lived together in houses in private vows or none. There has been no shortage of structures.”

“From the propositum we move to social structures. But the propositum is first. Then social structure. Any social structures that will protect and nurture the propositum, make it flower, is valid.” And this means that in the absence of support from the hierarchy or existing structures we enjoy a divine freedom to re-create whatever old forms that will serve us now, in our rather straightened circumstances.

The propositum for all Christians

And this observation can easily be extended past the worries about vocational prospects for the religious life to the rest of the Church’s structures, locked in the deadly tar pit of the Novusordoist New Paradigm.

At its very core, with all external things stripped away, the life of the Christian, in any state of life, “is a matter of making the propositum, making that act of holy resolve, of self-consecration of your life and entire being to Our Lord. Nobody can stop you. No order has control of it. No bishop. No Pope. Jesus gave every person the power and right to do it. It was the way of the early consecrated virgin martyrs, and they truly shine in every Canon of the Mass and are there remembered every day, hundreds of times a day all over the world.”

“If you have made a propositum all you need is a social structure to keep your consecration.” The requirement is only the consecration – the dedication of self, of family, of work, of prayer, of all of life’s goals, difficulties, struggles and sufferings.

And this is how Christendom was built: the radical choice of total dedication, consecration, to Christ for life is the prior requirement for any hope of restoration.

The time of the desert has returned. We have ground old Christendom to the dust. The physical structures might still stand for now (and we all saw in April how easily and quickly they can be gone) but the social, cultural, spiritual structures that created them are already completely gone, razed to the ground by 450 years of rampant hatred for Christ and His holy Church. If we are to start rebuilding, we have no choice now but to look to the earliest centuries and the Catholics who started with nothing. Nothing but Christ who is all in all.

What did Catholics do under pagan (…and Arian and Nestorian…) persecution? It’s true they hid in the catacombs, but perhaps more importantly to history, they went to the deserts either literally in space or interiorly at home. They gave their lives – and their deaths – completely to God. They devoted their every waking moment to Christ, to seeking His will and His Face, until it became a matter of indifference to them if they were persecuted, if they were arrested and tortured, if they lost their property or were exiled.

It was out of this voluntary embrace of spiritual poverty, indifference to the world and its fury, that Christendom grew to the extraordinary heights of the 12^th and 13^th centuries. When Catholics had nothing, when there was no Christendom, no human law protecting them, no monasteries, no universities, nothing earthly to call their own, no glorious medieval past to look to, they turned to Christ Himself as all their wealth.

Retrieved July 12, 2019 from https://www.remnantnewspaper.com/web/index.php/articles/item/4530-the-monastic-propositum-and-the-way-through-the-desert-putting-the-horse-before-the-cart

Infiltration of the Church

This is my third post on this book by Taylor Marshall, and the latest one is here, https://catholiceye.wordpress.com/2019/06/18/infiltration-of-the-church/ ; and due to the reviews have gone up and down on whether to read the book, but finally got hold of it and am about a third of the way through and it is excellent.

It is a coherent, logical layout of the facts about the Church—none of which are new to me nor the multitude that have been agonizing over our Church for so long—but by pulling everything past and recent together serves a great purpose for those who may not have had the stomach or the time to keep up with all of the degradation stuff over the past couple decades.

I highly recommend it and you can get your copy here, https://www.amazon.com/Infiltration-Plot-Destroy-Church-Within/dp/1622828461/ref=sr_

 

 

The Paralyzed Church?

This article from Catholic World Report makes a case others note also; the Church does seem paralyzed right now, as it has many times in the past, but the promise of Christ prevails.

An excerpt.

The Church is paralyzed today. Last November’s meeting of the USCCB, the recent papal motu proprio (which I discussed here), and now this month’s USCCB meeting have all demonstrated an exhaustion of episcopal imagination, which cannot conceive of ways forward through the abuse crisis except by mindless repetition of the very structures and processes which have, in many ways, given rise to the crisis.

We are caught in precisely the scenario Freud described in his 1914 essay “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through”. The patient who neurotically and destructively continues to enact certain patterns of thought and action is repeating what he cannot remember clearly: some trauma is buried in his psyche, and it is evident only by and in his repetitive actions, which are a disguised form of remembering. A psychoanalysis helps him work through that trauma, ending the cycles of repetition by allowing him to remember the original event, helping to free the patient to move forward.

We are caught in the repetition of those deeply destructive structures and processes, and have turned one crisis into three: sex abuse is also (as Christopher Altieri has put it with unmatched clarity) an abuse of power and, as we are now learning out of West Virginia, money also. Today the Church is paralyzed and cannot find solutions for this tripartite crisis, and the risk we run here is that of descending into what Freud called the “death drive.”

It seems to me the paralysis is of a pattern well known to the mariners and mythologists of Greek antiquity, who gave us the celebrated images of ships in the very narrow Strait of Messina being caught between Charybdis and Scylla. These were reputed sea monsters dwelling on either side of the strait and almost invariably capturing and capsizing those who sailed too close to one side to avoid the peril of the other. The Church today appears to be paralyzed by fear of the Charybdis of the papacy, on the one hand, and a Scylla called “lay involvement” on the other. We need to think carefully about these fears in order to see they are groundless. Like all neurotic fears, the images of them that lurk in our minds are far more fantastic and fearsome than the reality.

In my new book Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power (Angelico Press, 2019), I discuss these fears at length and how they have led us to be paralyzed—and how we can move beyond the paralysis.

Several people recently have asked me to give examples of what I mean. Let me give two such examples here briefly, while encouraging people to read the book for the details.

Let’s first consider the papacy. It has changed enormously over the centuries. For the last 150 years the Church has essayed a particularly hazardous model of maximal centralization, which as we now realize is not only profoundly unhelpful, but also without serious historical or theological justification, or ecumenical appeal. It has done so largely as a reaction to an unconscious traumatic pseudo-memory of the French revolution and Napoleonic ravages in response to which, it was claimed by many nineteenth-century Catholics, a “sovereign” pontiff was needed who would be untouchable by secular powers—or any other powers, including brother bishops.

That model is still operative today, because the “memory” still suggests that if we do not have a sovereign pontiff operating a very centralized system, then any day now a new Napoleon could arise to sack an entire episcopate. As Adam Phillips likes to say, “memories always have a certain future in mind.” “Memories” of long-dead tyrants in utterly singular and unrepeatable circumstances were used to justify a future in which no pope could ever again be at the mercy of a secular ruler. This has given us a system today premised upon near-absolute powers of “sovereign pontiff”.

American bishops in the nineteenth century happily went along with Pope Pius IX inserting himself more and more into their affairs and muscling them aside from their own responsibilities. We saw this again just last week in American bishops dithering about whether an abusive retired bishop can be in any way “restricted” or disciplined by his successor. The reluctance here to entertain such timid proposals comes from the fear that in advancing any such prospects, the bishops are treading on papal “sovereignty,” as, we are told, it is only the pope who can discipline a bishop.

Certainly in the current system that seems to be the case de iure. But de facto there is no discipline in a system that includes more than 5000 bishops in the world today. The prospect of one man supervising all of them is on its face problematic, if not impossible, and as we have seen with Theodore McCarrick (inter alia), not only was there no discipline, he continued to get promoted.

Retrieved June 21, 2019 from https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2019/06/21/the-paralyzed-church/

Capital Punishment is Part of the Magisterium

Another reminder of this, from the Canon Law Blog.

Earlier today Cdl. Dolan of New York tweeted: “With the clear and cogent clarification of the successor of St. Peter, there now exists no loophole to morally justify capital punishment.”

The supposedly clear and cogent clarification that Dolan has in mind must be Pope Francis’ 2018 modification of the Catechism of the Catholic Church to assert that the death penalty is “inadmissible”. But, while it is likely that Francis meant what Dolan said, the pope did not quite claim what the cardinal clearly did. Francis (or his handlers) left just enough wiggle room (by using “inadmissible”, an ambiguous term in magisterial-moral discourse) to avoid flatly declaring the DP “immoral” and setting off thereby a magisterial firestorm such as has not been seen for some centuries.

Dolan, in contrast, tweeting in terms well-known to tradition, plainly stated that the DP is immoral, thus going beyond what Francis was willing to say. That’s a problem. Indeed, it’s two problems.

1. Numerous serious studies argue (convincingly, in my view) that the liceity of the DP in certain cases is taught by the Church’s infallible magisterium (specifically, as “secondary object” thereof); at the very least, such studies make a prima facie case for the liceity of the death penalty under the infallible magisterium. Therefore, Church leaders contradicting that position must, simply must, deal with the possibility that infallibility is in play here, and, at a minimum, they should refrain from unnuanced declarations that might, in the end, be shown as “opposed to the doctrine of the Catholic Church” per Canon 750 § 2. See also Canon 1371 n. 1.

But the stakes might be higher still.

2. Many of the sources invoked for the liceity of the DP as a secondary object of infallibility (Scripture, Patristics, etc.) are those commonly associated with infallible assertions of primary objects of infallibility, that is, with matters of revelation. Now, while contradicting infallible assertions regarding secondary objects is, as stated above, to make one opposed to the doctrine of the Church, contradicting primary objects of the Church’s infallible magisterium is a specific element of heresy per Canons 750 § 1 and 751. See also Canon 1364. Obviously, this characterization risks even greater harm to the Church.

Retrieved June 20, 2019 from https://canonlawblog.wordpress.com/2019/06/17/a-comment-on-a-cardinals-tweet-re-capital-punishment/

Infiltration of the Church

The most balanced review yet of the recent book discussing the infiltration of the Church by Satanic/Humanistic inspired ideas, from Crisis Magazine.

An excerpt.

Has the Catholic Church been infiltrated by anti-Catholic forces intent on its destruction?  That’s the thesis of Taylor Marshall’s new book, Infiltration:  The Plot to Destroy the Church from Within.

The book has already generated a lot of controversy, with one critic accusing the author of “McCarthyism” and “wild assertions.” Marshall’s main assertion is that the Church has been infiltrated by Masons, Modernists, and communists who aim to change the Church’s mission “from something supernatural to something secular.”

Marshall uses the word “infiltration” in two senses: an infiltration of personnel and an infiltration of ideas, and it’s not always clear what sense he’s using. But in the main, he’s writing about the infiltration of ideas.

Indeed the primary document he refers to—The Permanent Instruction of the Alta Vendita—is less about the placement of agents than about the gradual introduction of a new climate of thought. The author of The Permanent Instruction admitted that it might take more than a century before the process produced “a pope according to our own heart.”

Was there an actual penetration of the Church by agents of communism and/or Freemasonry? Marshall does name some names, and he does offer evidence, but although his evidence is not always conclusive, it is suggestive. Earlier popes were certainly worried about the influence of Masons and Modernists. Pope Leo XIII published four encyclicals against Freemasonry, and Pope Pius X was convinced that Modernists had infiltrated the clergy and the seminaries.

Communist Infiltration
Marshall also cites the testimony of Bella Dodd, a former communist agent, who told a House Committee that “in the 1930s we put eleven hundred men into the priesthood in order to destroy the Church from within.” Similar testimony was offered to the committee by Manning Johnson, another former agent; however, no other corroborating evidence of their testimony has been produced.

Still, the possibility of physical infiltration should not be dismissed out of hand. It’s the kind of thing that Soviet communists were capable of doing and had actually done. There is abundant evidence, for example, that communists did successfully infiltrate the Russian Orthodox Church. And, according to ex- communists such as Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley, as well as later researchers such as Stanton Evans and Diana West, the Roosevelt administration had been thoroughly penetrated by communist agents.

We also know that Soviet communists waged a highly successful campaign to smear Pope Pius XII as “Hitler’s Pope.” In addition, smear campaigns were launched to discredit several other high-ranking anti-communist prelates such as Archbishop Wojtyla. Moreover, as historian Paul Kengor asserts, the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II was ordered by the GRU (Soviet military intelligence).

During the Cold War, Soviet communists viewed the Catholic Church as one of their greatest enemies, so the motive to undermine the Church existed; and, as exemplified by the infiltration of the Russian Orthodox Church, so did the capability.

Not every conspiracy is a theory. Real conspiracies—some with devastating results—are a part of history. Sometimes, Comrade X really does instruct agent Y to infiltrate organization Z. On the other hand, it’s important to understand that not every disaster is the result of a conspiracy.

Some ideas are very seductive and they can spread widely without the help of organized conspirators. The conspiratorial movements that Marshall identifies—Freemasonry, Modernism, liberalism, and communism—all share many ideas in common. In essence, they are all forms of humanism—the idea that mankind can effect some kind of secular salvation by the proper manipulation of the social environment.

These ideas are often couched in terms that are very appealing to Christians—“peace,” “love,” “brotherhood,” “compassion,” “the dignity of man,” and the like. In many respects, these movements are counterfeits of Christianity; they have an emotional appeal for many precisely because they echo parts of the Christian message.

The Human Potential Movement
In the 1960s and ’70s, the “gospel” of humanistic psychology swept through the Church with amazing speed. Almost overnight, the tenets of pop psychology were substituted for Catholic doctrine. Religious studies texts for high school students frequently cited popular psychologists such as Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow, and the cultivation of self-esteem in students became a top priority for Catholic teachers. Instead of moral precepts, students were introduced to faddish strategies such as “values clarification” and “moral reasoning.” Meanwhile, goals such as self-acceptance and self-esteem came to be seen as more important that the achievement of sanctity. And, since Human Potential Psychology had no room for the concept of sin, countless Catholics suddenly discovered that they were “OK” as they were, with the result that the practice of Confession nearly disappeared.

Many of these striking transformations in the Church are still with us today, but there is little evidence that they were the result of any deliberate conspiracy. Carl Rogers was certainly the most important figure in the Human Potential Movement. It was he who made the case that “growth psychology” could be applied to every area of life. Yet, there is no evidence that I’m aware of which would link Rogers to Masons or communists or any other conspiratorial group. Because Rogers did his graduate work at Columbia University he was almost certainly exposed to the ideas of John Dewey, the author of the “Humanist Manifesto,” but, then, so was my mother and so were about half of the other teachers in America. The fact is, Rogers was rather apolitical, and was quite uncomfortable with the idea that he was looked upon as the founder of a movement. It’s difficult to see him as part of any conspiracy, yet the infiltration of the Church by the theories of Human Potential Psychology arguably did more harm to Catholicism than Freemasons or communists ever did.

Retrieved June19, 2019 from https://www.crisismagazine.com/2019/infiltration-real-or-imagined

 

Magisterial Teaching, Slavery & Women Priests

The Church uses the narrative of the unchangeable nature of magisterial teaching to deny women the priesthood, but magisterial teaching has been changed often, notably concerning slavery, which these excellent articles (Part I & Part II so far) from Women in Theology note.

Part I

I tell my students that the Catholic church used to think about slavery the same way most of us think about incarceration today: it’s good as long as long as the person deserves it.

Put another way, earlier magisterial judgments about slavery were not an all or nothing affair. Just as we today believe it is wrong to imprison an innocent person, so magisterial authorities thought it was wrong to enslave an individual without just cause.

But, just as our collective outrage at unjust incarceration does not automatically indicate support for prison abolition, so magisterial condemnations of certain instances of enslavement did not evidence opposition to slavery itself.

For most of the church’s history, the magisterium asked not whether slavery itself was wrong, but when and under what circumstances it was right.

Augustine, for example, thought that slavery was a just punishment for original sin. Original sin brought slavery into the world because it brought disobedience in too. Enslaved people earned their fate due to their disobedience.

But while we would blame slavery on the sinfulness of slave masters, Augustine blamed it to the sins of enslaved people themselves.

For Augustine, slavery was theological in another sense. He argued that, although Jewish people had descended from the free woman Sarah “in the flesh,” they were still slaves due to their spiritual attachment to the Old Testament.

And, even though they lacked a servile attachment to the Old Testament, Augustine’s pagan Arab contemporaries were slaves too (136-137). As the descendants of Abraham’s enslaved concubine Hagar, they had inherited their servile status through not the spirit, but the flesh.

Christians of course were free in both senses.

What about Aquinas? Modern interpreters often point to his belief that slavery was unnatural as evidence that Aquinas somehow opposed slavery.

But this misinterprets his work. As used in reference to slavery, the term “unnatural” did not operate as a category of moral condemnation. He deemed slavery unnatural only in the sense that it was not a part of God’s original plan for creation. Retrieved June 9, 2019 from https://womenintheology.org/2019/06/09/catholic-teaching-changes-slavery-part-i/

Part II

Magisterial authorities would continue to endorse real world practices of slavery throughout the medieval era.

In this vein, magisterial authorities recognized four legitimate reasons-then called “titles”-for which one person could enslave another:

1. As punishment for a capital crime.
2. As a result of capture on the battlefield while fighting an unjust war.
3. As repayment for debt.
4. Through purchase from a slave trader who acquired the slave legitimately.
5. In the case of the centuries’ long battle between Christian and Muslim kingdoms for control of the Iberian peninsula: for being a foreign Muslim.

These titles may seem random and arbitrary to us, but each followed the logic of slavery.

Enemy soldiers and capital convicts alike both deserved death but were mercifully allowed to live. Since they lived because of their masters, they therefore lived for them. Put another way, a master owned a slave’s life because a slave owed him her life.

What about the Muslims? More than simply generic religious bigotry positioned them as especially enslaveable. Purportedly descended from apostate Christians, they were engaged in theological rebellion simply by existing. They were theologically what enemy soldiers and capital convicts were sociopolitically.

Informed by this traditional Catholic teaching about slavery, in the fifteenth century, Pope Alexander VI gave all of Africa to Portugal and America to Spain with the explicit command to enslave all those who didn’t bow down to Iberian authority.

Retrieved June 9, 2019 from https://womenintheology.org/2019/06/09/catholic-teaching-changes-slavery-part-ii/