Month: May 2018

Does Pope Francis sound like a 1925 agnostic philosopher?

I refer the reader to: Fulton Sheen’s 1925 book, God And Intelligence In Modern Philosophy A Critical Study In The Light Of The Philosophy Of Saint Thomas, p. 166, explaining an agnostic’s position, calling on Aquinas’ De Veritate, “On Truth,” Part I. chap. IV:

There is a double presupposition at the basis of the modern contention that we cannot designate God properly as object, but merely symbolically or metaphorically.

The first is that we do not know reality. Hence God is taken to be a symbol for reality.

“If that’s all it is, the hell with it,” Flannery O’Connor told Mary McCarthy after the latter had observed breezily that the mass was very good symbolism.

The second is that mind is the measure of reality, and hence God is to be measured in terms of the needs of the individual, the needs of the age, of values for our lives and in function of evolution.

God is “measured in terms of the needs of the age, of values for our lives and in function of evolution.” And that’s it, my friend.

Sounds like Francis’ approach as change agent  almost 100 years later.

Not quite, but it gets tricky, He emphasizes the activist and pastoral at times, evincing at least suspicion of the cloistered contemplative in his “Gaudete Et Exsultate” — “26. It is not healthy to love silence while fleeing interaction with others, to want peace and quiet while avoiding activity, to seek prayer while disdaining service” — and for that matter has issued new rules and regulations for them.

Tempted as I am to call it another case of men telling women what to do, I won’t.

He shoots down the doctrinal, sounding like Obama famously telling donors about citizens who “cling to their guns or their religion.”

For Francis it was “Clinging To The Written Word,” his title for a homily he gave in the chapel of the house he lives in on April 11, 2016. In it he begins:

What matters to Jesus is a person’s life, not a framework of laws and words . . .

But people have died for laws and words. What does he have in mind, winging it on a daily basis, making principles up as they go along? Why does he talk that way? Why oppose a person’s life to laws and words? I think a lot of words and tend to take it personally.

Another puzzler, from the same homily, makes sense in a way but turns Scripture on its head:

“It saddens me”, Francis shared, “when I read that passage in the Gospel of Matthew, when Judas repented and went to the priests and said ‘I have sinned’, and wanted to give back the silver pieces”.

They responded to him: “What is that to us? See to it yourself!”. They had “a closed heart in regard to this poor, penitent man who didn’t know what to do”. They told him: “See to it yourself”. Thus Judas “went and hanged himself”.

Too bad. But in the midst of reading the passion story, he sheds a tear for “this poor, penitent man”? Apparently.

For Francis it’s dogma vs. pastoral care. Natl Catholic Reporter’s Josh McElwee explained to National Public Radio — accurately, I’d say — what Francis said in Amoris Laetitia about the role of conscience:

“That’s something that the church talked about 50 years ago, but the last couple of popes did not expand upon.

“And what Pope Francis is saying is that conscience means that people can be hearing something from God, kind of in the depths of their heart, that may even be not quite in accord with what the church teaches generally, as a general norm, but can still be true and can still be discerned to be God’s will in their life.

“So he’s allowing for a little bit of discord between individual cases and the general church teaching.”

Hearing it from God in the depths of one’s heart. Not quite in accord with what the church teaches. A little bit of discord. Rome has spoken, the issue is decided.

Again not quite. With Francis it’s a nudging process: nudge a little here, nudge a little there. Give a homily, issue an exhortation, talk to newsies off the cuff. Before you know it, the real magisterial stuff.

And the beat goes on . . .

Blast from past: Gay priesthood in 1994. Two priests talk about it.

It has seemed appropriate for me to cite this about gay priests in our time of “Who am I to judge?” and the barnstorming Jesuit author of   “Building a Bridge: How the Catholic Church and the LGBT Community can Enter into a Relationship of Respect, Compassion, and Sensitivity.” Fr. James Martin, S.J.

It’s from my 1994 book, Bending the Rules: What American Priests Tell American Catholics, in which I put to 34 veteran pastors ten issues of pastoral concern. One of these was “Gay & lesbian issues: how if at all do they turn up in your ministry? What do you say or do?”

Two of the pastors — both pseudonymously named by me, Fr. Ben Sanders and Fr. Walt Lewis, both ordained in the ’60s, both heading parishes in Midwestern middle-class neighborhoods — produced a memorable give-and-take on the subject, including discussion of the then almost never mentioned gay priesthood:

In an earlier parish where Ben served, “it became difficult to tell who was gay and who wasn’t.  I found it healthy,” he said.  “A lot of the leaders were known as gays and lesbians.  But it wasn’t an issue.  People were proud of that.  You could make it an issue if you tried to exclude them.  But most gays and lesbians are not public about it, so no one knows.”

“I’m a believer in the new numbers” showing only 2% or 3% of the population as homosexual, said Walt — “a lot fewer than we have been led to believe.  In the ordinary parish, only 2% or 3% are gay, so it’s not a big problem.

“In the priesthood, on the other hand, it’s way higher.  There are going to be two priesthoods, and very soon, because of the split between straights and gays.

“We pretend we don’t notice, but there are big differences between the two groups.  Both sides understand this, but no one wants to think it.  It’s going to be a gigantic issue in the church.”

What shape will it take?  Turf-protection, mutual suspicion?

“Already there’s suspicion.  Turf issues haven’t surfaced, because most of it is closeted.  You can’t have turf if you’re closeted.  There will be an expose or outing.  It will be explosive.  Downtown won’t, doesn’t know how to deal with it.  It’s going to blow up in their face.  People have asked them to deal with it, and they haven’t.”

Outing and coming out would involve pastor-parishioner problems too?

“Yes.”

Have you any percentages?

“No.  I am amazed that people can come up with, say 40%.  But my knowledge is limited, partly because gay priests stay away from non-gay priests.  I don’t even know who they are.”

Ben conceded the numbers could be high, as reported from various sources.  “The priesthood makes it acceptable for two men to travel together.  It offers a cover, institutionalizes the male relationship.

“But it’s really a matter of the Catholic obsession with sex.  We have created the problem, and the people who will pay for it are gay.  We have brought this on ourselves.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Walt.  “A certain softness and effeminacy has happened in the church.  I don’t know how it’s connected to homosexuality.  Our diocese has the best leadership we could hope for.  But even he (the bishop) projects a softness.”

“I like him a lot, but it’s people like him who can get ahead in the system,” said Ben.

“That’s a problem, when you have this softness,” said Walt.  “It’s probably in some way connected to homosexuality as a given in the church.  Unless the whole thing is faced, you allow softness to be the real mode the church is known for.

“Once the pastor in this diocese was known as cigar-chomping and whiskey-drinking.  How did that change?  It’s connected somehow to not facing certain things, such as homosexuality.”

How would it have been faced?

“Congress faced it.  (Rep.) Barney Frank (Democrat, Massachusetts) stood up, admitted it, people approved.  In the ’40s and ’50s here, the coverup was for drinking.  It’s not that any more.  It’s this other stuff.”

“It’s a matter of valuing the person as a person,” said Ben.  “We didn’t do that in the ’40s and ’50s.  A priest could be crude and rude.  One told a group of women, ‘If you have a miscarriage, bury it in the back yard.’  How the hell could a guy say this?  I can think of a lot who might have said it.

“Contrary to that, the role of the priest is feminine.  He’s a caretaker, he loves everybody, he blesses all those people you don’t like.  Priests are men performing a feminine role.  We finally got rid of the dress, you know (the cassock).  But we call the church ‘Holy Mother.'”

It’s a  striking, provocative discussion, especially what I have boldfaced.

“Two priesthoods . . . big differences . . . gigantic issue . . . most of it is closeted. . . .  gay priests stay away from non-gay priests. I don’t even know who they are.”

Pope Francis and Fr. Martin notwithstanding, is it much different today, in 2018?

 

God’s Grandeur, a death and resurrection motif

In a poem by GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS SJ, a member of the Society of Jesus, where  “his life as a priest was often a sad and weary one, beset by doubts and depression.”

Thus Adam Kirsch in his 5/11/2009 New Yorker review of Paul Mariani’s biography, Gerard Manley Hopkins.

The poem, “God’s Grandeur”:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
    And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
Later: Add to this about GMH’s life as a Jesuit. In a sense he was a misfit, also from the New Yorker review:
 Long after his death, a fellow Jesuit, speaking to Hopkins’s first biographer, recalled, “I cannot say he was a success either as a teacher or a missioner. He was too whimsical, and . . . he was too delicate a mind for a good deal of the rough work that we have to do in the Society.”
Not hard for me to understand, not at all.

Donald Trump Is the Most Successful First-Year President of All Time

I had to look long and hard via Google to find a mainstream opinion columnist with this point of view –– as of last December anyway. And before Trump’s North Korea initiative, by the way.

On one level, it sounds crazy. The president has spent year one mired in controversy over crazy tweets involving alleged face-lifts of TV stars, horrifically ignorant and ill-advised comments about white nationalists, alleged personal profiting off the presidency, supposed interference in criminal investigations and the connections of multiple members of his campaign and administration team to Russia – and more.

But when it comes to actual policy accomplishments tied to pledges he made on the campaign trail, Trump is actually doing pretty well – whether you like the results or not.

Lest we forget what’s most important, missing the forest because of the trees popping up here, there, everywhere.

(Writer is or has been a GOP consultant, also by the way; but her previous U.S. News contributions do not betray that. Any case, her argument’s what’s important, and to a lesser extent the venue where she apparently has a home.)

via US News

Pope declines to rule on German bishops’ intercommunion proposal

Debate moderator: C,mon, fellows, work this out, OK?

Pope Francis has declined to rule on the validity of a policy approved by the German bishops’ conference, which would allow non-Catholic spouses of Catholics to receive Communion.

The policy was approved by a majority of the German bishops, but a substantial minority objected, and seven German bishops wrote to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) asking for clarification on whether the policy was in line with Church teaching.

At a May 3 meeting at the Vatican, Archbishop Luis Ladaria, the prefect of the CDF, told a delegation of the German hierarchy that the Holy Father wished them to continue discussion of the issue among themselves, hoping for “a possibly unanimous arrangement.”

Hey, it’s a long, long-time settled matter, going back to St. Paul (that far enough for you?) in 1 Corinthians 11.27-29:

27Therefore whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord unworthily will have to answer for the body and blood of the Lord.*

28A person should examine himself,* and so eat the bread and drink the cup.

29For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body, eats and drinks judgment* on himself.

So why is Francis acting as if it’s up for grabs? He’s willing to swing his weight in other matters, why not here? That is, he’s sure about other things, even declaring this or that “magisterial.” Not in this case?

via  Catholic Culture