tag:churchlifejournal.nd.edu,2005:/articlesChurch Life Journal | Articles2024-03-25T06:00:00-04:00tag:churchlifejournal.nd.edu,2005:News/1606852024-03-25T06:00:00-04:002024-03-25T07:48:51-04:00A Very Short Guide to Understanding the Scope, Purpose, and Doctrinal Weight of Papal Documents<p>Elizabeth Huddleston on contexts.</p><p><span class="dropcap">W</span>hen the pope speaks, Catholics tend to listen. Confusion often arises, however, when we do not have the tools to know how to properly listen. Using examples from Pope Francis’s pontificate (and some from other pontificates) we will outline the various types of papal writings in their scope, purpose, and doctrinal weight. One way to approach reading papal documents is to think of them as differing genres. Much like one would not read a newspaper, a poem, and a cookbook the same way, one also should avoid thinking of an apostolic constitution, a brief, and a homily in the same fashion. As you will notice, though, there is a complexity to sorting papal documents due to the inherent overlap in authoritative lens, style, and reasons for publishing the document. Many documents will fit within more than one category, which makes interpreting the document and the nature of its authority all the more difficult.</p>
<ul>
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<a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/bulls.index.html">Papal Bulls</a> represent one of the oldest and most solemn forms of papal documents. Derived from the leaden seal (bulla) traditionally attached to them with silken cords, bulls are reserved for weighty matters such as canonizations, declarations of dogma, establishment of dioceses, or granting of privileges. They possess a formal and authoritative tone, typically beginning with the pope’s name, followed by the phrase “episcopus servus servorum Dei” and closing with “Datum Romae” (given at Rome) followed by the date and the pope’s name. Notable examples include the Bull <a href="https://www.papalencyclicals.net/bon08/b8unam.htm"><em>Unam Sanctam</em></a> by Pope Boniface VIII asserting papal supremacy and the bull <a href="https://encyclopediavirginia.org/primary-documents/inter-caetera-by-pope-alexander-vi-may-4-1493/"><em>Inter Caetera</em></a> by Pope Alexander VI dividing the New World between Spain and Portugal. Pope Francis’s most extensive papal bull to date is <a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/bulls/documents/papa-francesco_bolla_20150411_misericordiae-vultus.html"><em>Misericordiae Vultus</em></a>.</li>
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<a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_constitutions.html">Apostolic Constitutions</a> are solemn papal decrees that establish or modify laws and regulations within the Church. They possess a legislative character and are often used to promulgate or amend the Code of Canon Law or other ecclesiastical statutes. These documents are issued under the pope’s own name and are considered binding doctrinal (or even dogmatic) statements, and they may include provisions for their enforcement. Apostolic Constitutions can be issued as bulls and deal with matters of official doctrine. An example is Pope Francis’s Apostolic Constitution <a href="chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https:/www.vatican.va/content/dam/francesco/pdf/apost_constitutions/documents/papa-francesco_costituzione-ap_20160629_vultum-dei-quaerere_en.pdf"><em>Vultum Dei Quaerere</em></a>, which provides norms for contemplative women religious communities.</li>
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<a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals.index.html">Encyclicals</a> are pastoral letters from the pope to all the bishops of the Catholic Church to be dispersed to all the faithful. These letters form part of the pope’s ordinary teaching authority. They cover a wide range of topics, including matters of faith and morals, social issues, and instructions for the faithful. Encyclicals are characterized by their didactic nature, offering comprehensive teaching and guidance on contemporary issues. While they lack the formal legal status of bulls, they carry significant doctrinal weight and are often considered authoritative sources of Catholic teaching. Notable examples include Pope Leo XIII’s <a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum.html"><em>Rerum Novarum</em></a> on social justice and Pope John Paul II’s <a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_25031995_evangelium-vitae.html"><em>Evangelium Vitae</em></a> on the sanctity of life. Pope Francis’s three encyclicals to date are <a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20130629_enciclica-lumen-fidei.html"><em>Lumen Fidei</em></a>, <a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html"><em>Laudato Si’</em></a>, and <a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20201003_enciclica-fratelli-tutti.html"><em>Fratelli Tutti</em></a>.</li>
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<a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations.index.html">Apostolic Exhortations</a> are documents that encourage and exhort the faithful to undertake specific actions or attitudes in light of particular circumstances. They often follow synods or assemblies of bishops and reflect the pope’s reflections on the discussions and outcomes of such gatherings, though they do not contain dogmatic definitions and are not considered legislative. Apostolic Exhortations combine elements of teaching, encouragement, and pastoral guidance, aiming to foster spiritual renewal and missionary zeal among the faithful. While they lack the legislative force of Apostolic Constitutions, they carry significant moral and pastoral authority. Notable examples include Pope Benedict XVI’s <a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/apost_exhortations/documents/hf_ben-xvi_exh_20100930_verbum-domini.html"><em>Verbum Domini</em></a> (The Word of God) and Pope Francis’s <a href="chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https:/www.vatican.va/content/dam/francesco/pdf/apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20160319_amoris-laetitia_en.pdf"><em>Amoris Laetitia</em></a> (on the family).</li>
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<a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_letters.index.html">Apostolic Letters</a> encompass various types of correspondence issued by the pope. These letters are called apostolic epistles when addressed to specific groups of people. They can range from brief messages to formal decrees, depending on their purpose and audience. Apostolic Letters may address matters of doctrine, discipline, or pastoral concern, and they are often used for administrative purposes within the Church, though they are not considered legislative. While they may lack the solemnity of Bulls or the comprehensive teaching of Encyclicals, Apostolic Letters serve as important instruments of communication and governance in the papal ministry. Examples include Pope Paul VI's <a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/motu_proprio/documents/hf_p-vi_motu-proprio_19680630_credo.html"><em>Solemni Hac Liturgia</em></a> establishing the Feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary and Pope Benedict XVI’s <a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/motu_proprio/documents/hf_ben-xvi_motu-proprio_20111011_porta-fidei.html"><em>Porta Fidei</em></a> announcing the Year of Faith. Pope Francis has issued numerous Apostolic Letters, many of which were declared “Motu Proprio.”</li>
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<a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/motu_proprio.index.html">Motu proprio</a>, “of his own impulse,” or “by his own hand,” are documents that aim to explain already existing doctrine or canon law. Unlike Apostolic Constitutions, these documents do not set out new doctrines, but rather further explain doctrines that are already considered binding on the conscience of Catholics. These documents are issued by the pope personally, expressing his own initiative, decision, or opinion on a particular matter. Motu Proprio can cover a wide range of subjects, including changes to Church law, organizational restructuring, or personal reflections. They often carry significant weight as they directly reflect the pope’s personal judgment and authority. Motu Proprio are typically brief and straightforward, lacking the extensive elaboration found in other types of papal documents. Examples include Pope Benedict XVI's <a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/motu_proprio/documents/hf_ben-xvi_motu-proprio_20070707_summorum-pontificum.html"><em>Summorum Pontificum</em></a>, which relaxed restrictions on the celebration of the Traditional Latin Mass, and Pope Francis's Motu Proprio <a href="https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/en/bollettino/pubblico/2017/09/09/170909a.html"><em>Magnum Principium</em></a>, which shifted authority over liturgical translations to local bishops’ conferences.</li>
<li>Decretal letters are authoritative writings issued by the pope or other high-ranking Church officials, typically in response to specific queries or requests for clarification on matters of canon law or ecclesiastical discipline. Historically, decretals contained papal administrative decisions, and by the Middle Ages were often issued in the form of papal bulls. Today decretals are associated with the extraordinary magisterium of the pope, though they are not considered to be legislative. These letters serve to interpret existing laws, resolve disputes, or provide guidance on legal or procedural issues within the Church. Decretals can be addressed to individuals, such as bishops or religious communities, or to broader audiences, including the entire Church. Today, decretal letters can denote dogmatic definitions, though they are typically used for the proclamation of beatifications and canonizations. While not as formal or solemn as papal bulls, decretal letters nonetheless carry significant authority and are binding on those to whom they are addressed. Examples of decretal letters include Pope Gregory IX's <a href="https://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/decretales"><em>Decretales Gregorii</em></a>, a collection of papal decrees and legal opinions that became a foundational text of canon law. Incorporating decretal letters into the classification of papal documents underscores their importance in shaping the legal and procedural framework of the Church. While they may not always receive the same level of attention as other types of papal documents, decretals play a crucial role in clarifying and interpreting canonical norms, ensuring the orderly governance and administration of the Church’s affairs.</li>
<li>Addresses/allocutions, “allocutions,” were historically used for solemn addresses from the pope to his cardinals. Today, however, these addresses can be less formal and are often published in the <a href="https://www.vatican.va/archive/aas/index_en.htm"><em>Acta Apostolicae Sedis</em></a> and elsewhere. Allocutions are formal speeches or addresses delivered by the pope on various occasions, such as to visiting dignitaries, at gatherings of the College of Cardinals, or during papal audiences. These speeches may cover a wide range of topics, including matters of doctrine, current events, social issues, or reflections on the Church's mission and ministry. While allocutions are not written documents in the traditional sense, they are often transcribed and published for wider dissemination. Allocutions serve as important vehicles for the pope to communicate his thoughts, vision, and guidance to the Church and the world. Allocutions may include <a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/homilies/2024.index.html">homilies</a>, <a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/audiences/2024.index.html">general audiences</a>, <a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2024/february.index.html">speeches</a>, or the weekly <a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/angelus/2024.index.html">Angelus</a>.</li>
<li>Rescripts are documents that typically answer specific petitions put before the Roman Curiae or the pope himself. Signed by the cardinal prefect and the secretary of the relevant congregation, papal rescripts bear the seal of the congregation issuing the document. Rescripts are official responses or decrees issued by the pope or Vatican authorities in reply to petitions or requests submitted to them. These responses may come from bishops, clergy, religious communities, or laypersons seeking clarification, dispensation, or favor in various matters. Rescripts can address a wide range of issues, including dispensations from canonical requirements, permissions for exceptions to Church law, or grants of privileges or favors. They are typically written in a formal style and may include specific conditions or instructions to be followed by the petitioner. Some rescripts are called “instructions,” which are issued by <a href="https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/index.htm">Congregations</a> with the pope’s approval. The purpose of these documents is to explain the proper implementation of the more authoritative documents. An example of this type of document is <a href="https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/ccdds/documents/rc_con_ccdds_doc_20040423_redemptionis-sacramentum_en.html"><em>Redemptionis Sacramentum</em></a><em> </em>(On certain matters to be observed or to be avoided regarding the Most Holy Eucharist), which was authored by the Congregation for Divine Worship and explains the practical implications and instructions for the implementation of Pope John Paul II’s encyclical, <a href="https://www.vatican.va/holy_father/special_features/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_20030417_ecclesia_eucharistia_en.html"><em>Ecclesia de Eucharistia</em></a>. Sometimes rescripts are presented in the form of Declarations. One such example that has received considerable press in recent months is <a href="https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_ddf_doc_20231218_fiducia-supplicans_en.html"><em>Fiducia Supplicans</em></a><em> </em>(On the Pastoral Meaning of Bishops). Though this document was released in response to particular dubia, the scope of the theological reflection was much broader pastorally and theologically than the short answers provided in typical apostolic briefs; therefore, the response was presented in the form of a formal declaration.</li>
<li>Apostolic Briefs, also known as “brevia,” are simple documents that deal with matters of minor importance. The contemporary term brief (brevia) replaced the “litterae,” which were used prior to Pope Martin V (1417–1431). Brevia, also known as papal briefs, are concise papal documents issued for specific administrative or procedural purposes. They may include appointments to ecclesiastical offices, grants of privileges, approvals of statutes or regulations, or responses to particular inquiries or petitions. Brevia are characterized by their brevity and simplicity, conveying the Pope's decision or instruction in a clear and straightforward manner. While less formal than other types of papal documents, brevia play a vital role in the day-to-day functioning of the Church, facilitating the smooth operation of its administrative and juridical processes. Often, apostolic briefs are used to speak to legislative questions (called <em>dubia</em>) that are brought before the Church for further explanation. These speak to very specific questions and thus are quite narrow in their responses. An example of this type of document is the <a href="https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20210222_responsum-dubium-unioni_en.html"><em>Responsum</em></a> published on 15 March 2021 to questions regarding blessings of the unions of same sex persons.</li>
</ul>
<p>Reading and analyzing papal documents takes considerable practice, even for the most seasoned theologian. The nuances between the various types of papal documents are quite important when thinking through the meaning and significance of the particular pronouncement, though the complexity should not be understated. Personally, it felt at times like I was writing in circles when trying to articulate the various types of documents and how they are authoritative. That said, it is not enough to simply think about what the words themselves mean; one has to also think through how the words are being relayed. In other words, it is not just what the pope says, but how he says it that determines how one should explicate the papal teachings.</p>Elizabeth Huddlestontag:churchlifejournal.nd.edu,2005:News/1606462024-03-22T06:00:00-04:002024-03-21T20:55:45-04:00Spiritual Worldliness: A Key Forgotten Bergoglioism<p>Lucas Briola on synodality.</p><p><span class="dropcap">A</span>rchbishop Jorge Bergoglio delivered a speech on 7 March 2013 that would change his life and the life of the Church. That day, this relatively unknown ecclesial commodity—at least to the outside world—spoke for just under four minutes to the cardinals about to elect Pope Benedict XVI’s successor. In remarks that papal biographer Austen Ivereigh once likened to the Gettysburg Address, Bergoglio set out his vision of the Church.<a href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[1]<!--[endif]--></a> His audience found this vision so inspiring that they elected him Pope Francis six days later.</p>
<p>At the speech’s climax, Bergoglio urged the church to be missionary, to go out of itself to the margins. The alternative, he feared, was an “evil” self-referentiality encapsulated by a seeming theological neologism: “spiritual worldliness.”<a href="#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[2]<!--[endif]--></a> For those who knew Bergoglio in Buenos Aires, they would have encountered the phrase regularly. It has since served as a refrain throughout his pontificate. In his speeches, writings, and homilies, Francis has employed the phrase over fifty times. By comparison, Pope Benedict XVI referred to the famous “dictatorship of relativism” less than twenty.<a href="#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[3]<!--[endif]--></a></p>
<p>While that Benedictine term drew the ire and applause of many, Francis’s mantra—despite its prominence—has garnered meager attention. Cindy Wooden and Joshua McElwee’s very helpful “lexicon” for deciphering Francis, for example, does not include a distinct entry on spiritual worldliness, despite the term’s prominence.<a href="#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[4]<!--[endif]--></a> In studies of Francis in general, spiritual worldliness receives scant attention. The omission is unfortunate. Grasping this maxim’s meaning holds a key for understanding and assessing Francis’s complex ecclesiological legacy.</p>
<p>As he confesses in that pre-conclave speech, Francis borrows the phrase from the French Jesuit theological lodestar of the twentieth century: Henri de Lubac. Sarah Shortall’s <em><a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674980105">Soldiers of God in a Secular World</a></em> documents how the political tumult of that century drove much of de Lubac’s theological ministry.<a href="#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[5]<!--[endif]--></a> His theology of nature and grace, for instance, showed that no sphere of life escaped the transformation demanded by grace. So too did this synthesis allow him to reject all tendencies to naturalize the supernatural and immanentize the eschatological. Thus, did de Lubac resist attempts to absorb ecclesial life into partisan politics, from Catholic flirtations with National Socialism before the War to entanglements with Marxism after the War.<a href="#_ftn6" name="_ftnref6" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[6]<!--[endif]--></a></p>
<p>De Lubac’s 1953 ecclesiological masterpiece <em><a href="https://ignatius.com/the-splendor-of-the-church-scp/">The Splendor of the Church</a></em> reflects that commitment. The book does not whitewash ecclesial disfigurement, and de Lubac’s boldness grows in its concluding pages. There, he predicts that if “spiritual worldliness were to invade the Church,” the result would be “something infinitely more disastrous than any worldliness of the purely moral order.”<a href="#_ftn7" name="_ftnref7" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[7]<!--[endif]--></a> It is, for him, the worst evil that can befall the church: worse than simple corruption, general incompetence, and even scandal. Despite its gravity, though, de Lubac never defines the term.</p>
<p>De Lubac takes the idea from a more obscure voice: Anscar Vonier, a German-born Benedictine abbot of Buckfast Abbey. In 1935, Vonier penned <em>The Spirit and the Bride</em>, a work that presented a pneumatological ecclesiology able to redress the overly juridical ecclesiologies that reigned in theological manuals of the day. It is within this context that Vonier defines spiritual worldliness as “the practical relinquishing of other-worldliness,” basing ecclesial standards “not on what is the glory of the Lord, but on what is the profit of man.” This “entirely anthropocentric outlook” pushes the Church to judge its activity on naturalistic, exclusively human criteria, rather than on God.<a href="#_ftn8" name="_ftnref8" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[8]<!--[endif]--></a> To use language from <a href="https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/authors/charles-taylor/">Charles Taylor</a>, it imprisons the Church within “the immanent frame” that characterizes our secular age.<a href="#_ftn9" name="_ftnref9" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[9]<!--[endif]--></a> Put in the Ignatian parlance of Francis, it means living not <em>ad majorem Dei gloriam</em> but <em>ad majorem sui gloriam</em>. Lurking beneath the outward veneer of religiosity and cloaked in spiritual language, this worldliness is silent but deadly. The identification of it was and is prophetic; our current pope makes that clear.</p>
<p>Francis described spiritual worldliness most fully in his 2013 programmatic exhortation, <em>Evangelii Gaudium</em>. He identifies it with a desire for social clout, an obsessive need to manage things, a “concern to be seen” (EG §95). It can surface as a neo-Gnosticism more concerned with subjective self-help than disinterested service, stifling the Cross as a result. It can surface as a neo-Pelagianism more concerned with producible expressions of faith than actual evangelization, stifling the Spirit as a result. Again, these tendencies masquerade as ministerial work, “hid[ing] behind the appearance of piety and even love for the Church” (EG §93). Residue of a Christendom model of the church, they belie the missionary option of which Pope Francis dreams.</p>
<p>Spiritual worldliness especially haunts U.S. Catholicism and its pragmatic tendencies. During his 2015 visit to the States, in an <a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/homilies/2015/documents/papa-francesco_20150924_usa-omelia-vespri-nyc.html">address to clergy at St. Patrick’s Cathedral</a>, Francis observed how spiritual worldliness manifests itself when “standards of efficiency, good management, and outward success which govern the business world” judge pastoral work. While such ideals are not bad <em>per se</em>, too often do they choke pastoral parrhesia. Church management programs are no substitute for ecclesiology. What Karl Rahner once labeled the “tyranny of statistics” can eclipse the theo-centrism that should guide ecclesial decision-making.<a href="#_ftn10" name="_ftnref10" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[10]<!--[endif]--></a> In an assessment-obsessed and results-driven culture, this warning hits close to home.</p>
<p>Indeed, Pope Francis’s diagnosis of spiritual worldliness yields a probing and perhaps even damning self-examen for those who labor in the Church. When he does caution against this danger, typically he directs it toward priests and religious; ecclesial careerism, pretensions of superiority, and narcissism are especially egregious examples he names. Yet spiritual worldliness creeps into all facets of Church life. Bottom lines can dictate parish outreach, marketing demands can dilute the identity of Catholic schools, and self-serving ambition can warp both ecclesial and theological ministry—even if, in each instance, religious “success” seemingly justifies the means. Nowhere has spiritual worldliness done more harm than in the heinous coverups of sexual abuse that aimed to preserve the institution over the truth, reputation over victims.</p>
<p>Selfish convention, rather than the glory of God, sets the standards in all these cases. The self-referentiality of spiritual worldliness—as Bergoglio declared in that decisive pre-conclave speech, “a Church living within herself, of herself, for herself”—suffocates.<a href="#_ftn11" name="_ftnref11" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[11]<!--[endif]--></a> Because its religious pretense eases conscience, it numbs the capacity for conversion. It deforms the Church; it bends it, to use an Augustinian descriptor of sin, <em>incurvatus in se</em>. Or, to use another Augustinian idiom, a <em>libido dominandi</em> cramps the capacity for receptivity toward grace. God becomes an object to control rather than an invitation to, as Avery Dulles once memorably put, “expropriate” oneself into a communion of grace.<a href="#_ftn12" name="_ftnref12" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[12]<!--[endif]--></a> It reduces the Church to just another voluntary association that needs to cater to personal preferences. It produces an exhausted ecclesial fatuousness that borders on a functional apostasy. A spiritually worldly church, Pope Francis <a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2022/may/documents/20220519-collegio-pio-romeno.html">told the community of Pio Romanian College two years ago</a>, is a Church that attempts “to grow without roots,” withering as a result. The pope returns to three roots in particular that can safeguard the Church against spiritual worldliness and so ground authentic growth.</p>
<p>The first root, unsurprisingly, is Christ. A deep Christo-centrism does in fact characterize the thought, words, and ministry of Francis. This allegiance recurs in his denunciations of spiritual worldliness. “The Incarnation,” Francis proposes, reveals “the power of God against the Pelagian ‘power,’ and the weakness of God against the Gnostic ‘power.’”<a href="#_ftn13" name="_ftnref13" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[13]<!--[endif]--></a> At no point is this logic clearer than on the Cross. As he <a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/letters/2023/documents/20230805-lettera-sacerdoti.html">wrote to the priests of Rome last year</a>, “the crucified Jesus” is “the daily antidote to worldliness.” In Christ, the Lion appears as the Slaughtered Lamb (Rev 5:5-6), defeat becomes victory. The Cross, as Saint Paul preached with such gusto, makes “foolish the wisdom of the world” (1 Cor 1:20). If spiritual worldliness reduces the Gospel to merely natural standards, then the Cross inverts those standards. It privileges love over violence and forgiveness over revenge, vulnerability over prestige and surrender over control. If to become cruciform is to become “like the rubbish of the world, the dregs of all things” (1 Cor 4:13), then a Church that follows the crucified Christ is anything but spiritually worldly.</p>
<p>The second root branches from the first: worship. On the Cross, praying the Psalms, Christ praises his Father through the Spirit in a way that destines his risen humanity into the eternal praise that is God’s triune life. In his apostolic letter <a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_letters/documents/20220629-lettera-ap-desiderio-desideravi.html"><em>Desiderio Desideravi</em></a>, Pope Francis once again denounces the dangers of spiritual worldliness, concluding that “the Liturgy is, by its very nature, the most effective antidote against these poisons” (DD §18).<a href="#_ftn14" name="_ftnref14" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[14]<!--[endif]--></a> The letter, written as a theological coda to <a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/motu_proprio/documents/20210716-motu-proprio-traditionis-custodes.html"><em>Traditionis Custodes</em></a>, reminds readers that the liturgy is not a tool for demarcating tribes and constructing religious identities. Rather than bolstering one’s personal preferences, authentic worship points beyond itself. For his part, de Lubac hails Mary, “the perfect worshipper” who lives “<em>Soli Deo gloria,</em>” as the alternative to spiritual worldliness (cf. Lk 1:46-55).<a href="#_ftn15" name="_ftnref15" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[15]<!--[endif]--></a> If a possessive self-referentiality marks spiritual worldliness, then worship demands a eucharistic self-diffusiveness that opens toward a loving encounter with the Other: <em>Laudato si’</em>!</p>
<p>And so the third root branches from the second: the poverty of service. In <a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2019/january/documents/papa-francesco_20190124_panama-vescovi-centroamericani.html">an address to the Central America bishops</a> during the 2019 World Youth Day, Pope Francis hailed Saint Óscar Romero as a counter-witness to spiritual worldliness. The embrace of poverty, which Francis terms “kenotic,” fosters a “noble detachment” from established markers of success. This poverty, moreover, “translates into clear, practical, and visible signs,” warding off a spiritualization of the first two roots. In his own solution to spiritual worldliness, Vonier identifies the Sermon on the Mount as charting those clear, practical, and visible signs. Those who are poor, those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, the peacemaker, says Vonier, are all “types of another world”; the Beatitudes disclose commitments that “would be diametrically opposed to the instincts of a Church that is completely anthropocentric.”<a href="#_ftn16" name="_ftnref16" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[16]<!--[endif]--></a> The call to exercise mercy, arguably <em>the</em> catchphrase for Francis, confronts the indifference that drives our cutthroat economy and technocratic culture.<a href="#_ftn17" name="_ftnref17" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[17]<!--[endif]--></a> In presenting standards that confound typical modes of human thought and action, the Sermon on the Mount commissions a Christ-centered, worshipful, and servant community that throws anthropocentric, worldly standards to the wind.</p>
<p>Perhaps nowhere do Francis’s words about spiritual worldliness matter more than in the ongoing Synod on Synodality. Across the ideological spectrum, there is a persistent temptation to interpret the synod through a spiritually worldly lens. Viewed through those lenses, the synod can appear as an ecclesiastical parlor game. Commentators vie for which side is “winning,” which teachings are to be downplayed or more strongly reasserted, what phrase means what, who deserves what power. “Team theology,” unfortunately, dictates most synodal commentary.<a href="#_ftn18" name="_ftnref18" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[18]<!--[endif]--></a> Angst plagues all sides, betraying an ecclesiological Pelagianism that assumes the church needs either reconstructed or protected. The resultant flattening of the Church to a mere power-structure—all abetted by theological language—typifies spiritual worldliness, as ecclesial questions succumb to the canons of partisan and identity politics. Forgotten, except for perhaps some performative nods, is how synodality can conform believers to Christ, might glorify God, and promote a poor Church of service. Self-referentiality reigns instead.</p>
<p>Francis himself has focused on this temptation in the most recent assembly of the Synod (October 2023). At its beginning, he gave all participants a selection of his writings entitled <em>Santi, non mondani: La grazia di Dio ci salva dalla corruzione interiore</em> (<em>Holy, Not Worldly: God’s Grace Saves Us from Interior Corruption</em>). Amid those proceedings, he offered a <a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2023/october/documents/20231025-intervento-sinodo.html">rare, scathing intervention</a> that lambasted the evils of worldliness. Clericalism, often in the form of an ecclesiasticism, represents one symptom. The deformation of the church to a “supermarket of salvation” represents another.</p>
<p>Francis sounded similar themes in his <a href="https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/en/bollettino/pubblico/2023/10/29/231029a.html">final homily at the assembly’s conclusion</a>. He repeated his warnings against the “idolatry” of a worldliness that, “disguised” as spirituality, “puts ourselves at the center.” This time, however, he proposed a solution, one that is well-rooted in his other remarks on spiritual worldliness. He enjoined the Church first to recover “the amazement of adoration, the wonder of worship,” a joyful recognition that “the way [God] acts is always unpredictable, it transcends our thinking.” Second, he called the Church to orient itself toward the poverty of service, “washing the feet of wounded humanity” and “going out lovingly to encounter the poor.” Summing up his message, he articulated the true aim of the synod: “to adore God and to love our brothers and sisters with his love, that is the great and perennial reform.” Those twin calls find their unity in Christ, the perfect worshipper and the perfect servant—the only firm foundation of ecclesial reform.</p>
<p>The very title of <em>Santi, non mondani</em> captures Pope Francis’s solution to worldliness. As he writes in the <a href="https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2023-10/saints-not-worldly-pope-new-book-hits-stores.html">preface of the work</a>, the “battle” against worldliness “has a name: it is called holiness.” Recall, after all, that Francis is the only pope to have penned a <a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20180319_gaudete-et-exsultate.html">magisterial document on the universal call to holiness</a>. Battles over synodality should be battles over holiness if the synod is to represent something other than a spiritually worldly exercise. In his <a href="https://www.sydneycatholic.org/addresses-and-statements/2023/walking-together-in-communion-participation-and-mission-reflections-on-the-synod-on-synodality/">commentary on the most recent iteration of the synod</a>, Archbishop Anthony Fisher stated this eloquently: “one useful criterion for judging every Synod proposal is: Is it likely, by God’s grace, to generate more apostles and pastors, evangelists and missionaries, religious and teachers, martyrs and mystics, holy men and women, such as our Church and world so sorely need?” Such fruit can only grow through a strong root system of holiness, which figures like Pope Francis, de Lubac, and Vonier have unearthed. If Pope Francis’s diagnosis of spiritual worldliness inspired the start of his pontificate, Pope Francis’s prognosis of holiness must color the twilight of his pontificate.<!-- [if !supportFootnotes]--></p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[1]<!--[endif]--></a> Austen Ivereigh, <em>The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope</em> (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2014), 357.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[2]<!--[endif]--></a> As cited in Paul Vallely, <em>Pope Francis: The Struggle for the Soul of Catholicism</em> (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 151-52.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[3]<!--[endif]--></a> These are the results of a count through the search engine on the Vatican website.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[4]<!--[endif]--></a> There is only one very brief reference to spiritual worldliness in this work; see Joshua J. McElwee and Cindy Wooden, ed., <em>A Pope Francis Lexicon</em> (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2018), 197.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[5]<!--[endif]--></a> Sarah Shortall, <em>Soldiers of God in a Secular World: Catholic Theology and Twentieth-Century French Politics</em> (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021), 100-25, 158-59.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref6" name="_ftn6" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[6]<!--[endif]--></a> De Lubac’s critique of Auguste Comte’s “use” of Catholicism and, relatedly, the Action Française movement is representative of this fear: “The faith that used to be a living adherence to the Mystery of Christ then came to be no more than attachment to a social program, itself twisted and diverted from its purpose. Without any apparent crisis, under a surface that sometimes seemed the reverse of apostasy, that faith has slowly been drained of its substance” (in Henri de Lubac, <em>The Drama of Atheist Humanism</em>, trans. Edith M. Riley and Anne Englund Nash [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995], 266).</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref7" name="_ftn7" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[7]<!--[endif]--></a> Henri de Lubac, <em>The Splendor of the Church</em>, trans. Michael Mason, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999), 378.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref8" name="_ftn8" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[8]<!--[endif]--></a> Anscar Vonier, <em>The Spirit and the Bride</em> (Assumption, IL: Assumption Press, 2013), 118.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref9" name="_ftn9" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[9]<!--[endif]--></a> Charles Taylor, <em>A Secular Age</em> (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 539-93.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref10" name="_ftn10" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[10]<!--[endif]--></a> Karl Rahner, <em>The Church After the Council</em>, trans. D.C. Herron and R. Albrecht (New York: Herder and Herder, 1966), 48.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref11" name="_ftn11" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[11]<!--[endif]--></a> As cited in Vallely, <em>Pope Francis</em>, 152.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref12" name="_ftn12" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[12]<!--[endif]--></a> Avery Dulles, “The Ecclesial Dimension of Faith,” <em>Communio </em>22, no. 3 (1995): 418-32, at 420.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref13" name="_ftn13" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[13]<!--[endif]--></a> This is from an audio recording with Pope Francis made by Massimo Borghesi, as quoted in J. Matthey Ashley, <em>Renewing Theology: Ignatian Spirituality and Karl Rahner, Ignacio Ellacuría, and Pope Francis</em> (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022), 264.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref14" name="_ftn14" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[14]<!--[endif]--></a> As he once preached as Archbishop of Buenos Aires twenty years prior, “May the Eucharist be celebrated with love defend us from all spiritual worldliness” (in Jorge Mario Bergoglio, ”2002 Homily for Corpus Christi,” in <em>In Your Eyes I See My Words: Homilies and Speeches from Buenos Aires</em>, vol. 1, trans. Patrick J. Ryan [New York: Fordham University Press, 2019], 155).</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref15" name="_ftn15" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[15]<!--[endif]--></a> De Lubac, <em>The Splendor of the Church</em>, 376-77.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref16" name="_ftn16" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[16]<!--[endif]--></a> Vonier, <em>The Spirit and the Bride</em>, 119-20.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref17" name="_ftn17" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[17]<!--[endif]--></a> See Matthew T. Eggemeier and Peter Joseph Fritz,<em> Send Lazarus: Catholicism and the Crises of Neoliberalism</em> (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020), 133-208.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref18" name="_ftn18" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[18]<!--[endif]--></a> I take this phrase from Larry Chapp, “The Constantinian Heathenism of the Church: Ratzinger and the Crisis of Our Time,” Catholic World Report (February 4, 2021), <a href="https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2021/02/04/the-constantinian-heathenism-of-the-church-joseph-ratzinger-and-the-crisis-of-our-time/">https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2021/02/04/the-constantinian-heathenism-of-the-church-joseph-ratzinger-and-the-crisis-of-our-time/</a>.</p>
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</div>Lucas Briolatag:churchlifejournal.nd.edu,2005:News/1606432024-03-21T06:00:00-04:002024-03-20T22:57:36-04:00Theron Ware's Damnation and Catholicism, Then and Now<p>Amy Welborn on ideals.</p><p><span class="dropcap">T</span>he novel <em><a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/133/133-h/133-h.htm">The Damnation of Theron Ware</a>, </em>published in 1896, unspools the tale of a young Methodist minister who, thanks to Catholics, science, bohemianism, and good old American pragmatism, loses his faith. Yes, Reverend Theron Ware was vulnerable, no doubt. His pride, limited intellectual, spiritual and social background as well as the bitter, humiliating realities of church life rendered him susceptible to the possibility of damnation— or “illumination” as the novel’s original title slyly suggests; but what a journey it is, a complex trajectory put in motion and shaped by entanglements with a Catholic priest, a Darwinian biologist, an aesthete “new woman,” and the remarkable Sister Soulsby—a blowsy, confident traveling church fundraiser. I learned of the book while perusing the late critic Jonathan Yardley’s list of books worth a “Second Reading.” <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/26/AR2006112601050.html">He said of <em>Theron Ware:</em></a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>Theron Ware’s story will remind today’s reader of the one told three decades later by Dreiser in “An American Tragedy”: a young man married to a woman of his own modest class becomes infatuated with a woman beyond his reach and pays terrible consequences for it. Dreiser’s novel is the more famous, but Frederic’s is the better. It gives us America at a watershed moment in its history, with science advancing and orthodox religion retreating, with the old Anglo oligarchy challenged by new immigrants, with sexuality slowly moving beyond closed doors and shadows, with ambition becoming more rank and unashamed, with early stirrings of what we now know as feminism. More than a century after its publication it remains vivid and pertinent.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I would add that for many of us—and what I’ll be highlighting here—<em>Theron Ware </em>holds interest for what its author relates about the lives of Catholics and his own understanding—as a non-Catholic, but an astute observer—of Catholicism.</p>
<p>That author was Harold Frederic (1856-1898), a journalist whose early life was centered in New York, but who hit his professional stride as the London correspondent for the <em>New York Times. </em>He was only 42 when he died, just two years after the 1896 publication of <em>Theron Ware. </em>Ironically, the author of this sharp-eyed look at the American way of Religion died in the aftermath of a stroke for which his common-law wife (he had a legal wife as well) relied on a Christian Science practitioner for his treatment. It did not work. She and the practitioner were subsequently tried on manslaughter charges for Frederic’s death and acquitted.</p>
<p>As the novel begins, Theron Ware awaits his third pastoral assignment. His hopes are high for what is to come, not only because he is acknowledged as a skilled preacher, but because his last assignment was difficult. Where can one go from here, after all, but up? Theron is mistaken, of course. When he arrives at his disappointing new assignment in Octavius (a stand-in for Utica, Frederic’s hometown), he finds little but challenges. The push-and-pull of local church life is laid out in painful detail, and while the specifics may be particular to this denomination at this time, the general dynamic will be familiar to anyone in any sort of ministry, I think: a dynamic that comes down to the inevitability of ideals crushed by reality. Cruelly.</p>
<p>In this case, Theron is constrained by the restrictive financial position of the church trustees (one of whom never even attends services) and is confronted with theological strains related to Free Methodism. Free Methodists emphasized Pentecostal-type practices and plainness in demeanor and dress. In many parts of the country the Free Methodists had broken off from the main Methodist body, but not in the fictional Octavius, where adherents remained part of the congregation. The Octavius Free Methodists are scandalized by, among other important matters, the flowers in Mrs. Ware’s hat:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“We are a plain sort o’ folks up in these parts,” said Brother Pierce, after a slight further pause. His voice was as dry and rasping as his cough, and its intonations were those of authority. “We walk here,” he went on, eying the minister with a sour regard, “in a meek an’ humble spirit, in the straight an’ narrow way which leadeth unto life. We ain’t gone traipsin’ after strange gods, like some people that call themselves Methodists in other places. We stick by the Discipline an’ the ways of our fathers in Israel. No new-fangled notions can go down here. Your wife’d better take them flowers out of her bunnit afore next Sunday.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So here is Theron Ware, feeling completely unappreciated, certainly locally, but perhaps even cosmically, at odds with important members of his congregation and financially scraping by. He cannot do much about the first two points beyond having his wife strip her <em>bunnit</em>, but perhaps he can bring in some extra income, and what more predictable way for an educated, articulate churchman to make money than to write a book? Not that unreasonable, but less reasonably, Theron decides that the path to publishing success is a book about . . . the patriarch Abraham. The trouble is, he discovers as he sits down to begin, he does not actually know very much about Abraham.</p>
<p>This is a problem to ponder on a walk about town, of course. Perhaps you cannot predict exactly what follows, but familiar with dramatic arcs in general, you might guess the direction in which Theron’s walk will take him: in a state of emotional, mental and spiritual unrest, he is vulnerable. Who would expect, though, that in that vulnerability, he would encounter the Catholics? It is a dreadful scene Theron happens upon: a workman has suffered mortal injuries and is being carried to his home in the Irish area of town. Theron decides, fatefully, to follow.</p>
<p>Not surprisingly, Reverend WASP has never really had much interaction with the Irish, and certainly not with Catholics. His sense of immigrants and Catholics is bigoted and narrow, in his imagination culminating in “a spectral picture of some black-robed tonsured men, with leering satanic masks, making a bonfire of the Bible in the public schools.”</p>
<p>The injured man is carried into his tiny, impoverished home, his family and neighbors awaiting, not a doctor, whose presence would be useless, but for, naturally, the priest. Theron notices a figure who stands apart from this working-class crowd: a tall, well-dressed young woman. She nods at him as if there is nothing unusual about his presence. He is not unwelcome and perhaps even in some mysterious sense, expected. As we soon learn, she is Celia Madden, the daughter of a wealthy local Irish businessman, the parish organist, as well as a devotee of a superficial, but nonetheless seductive pagan bohemianism which will prove, in the end, irresistible to Reverend Theron Ware.</p>
<p>But here, Celia’s function is to manage the situation, and assist the priest in his ministrations. I quote the scene at length for its inherent drama, the picture it paints of Catholicism, and of course, its impact on Theron Ware:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>She moved over to where the woman of the house stood, glum-faced and tearless, and whispered something to her. A confused movement among the crowd followed, and out of it presently resulted a small table, covered with a white cloth, and bearing on it two unlighted candles, a basin of water, and a spoon, which was brought forward and placed in readiness before the closed door. Some of those nearest this cleared space were kneeling now, and murmuring a low buzz of prayer to the click of beads on their rosaries.</p>
<p>The door opened, and Theron saw the priest standing in the doorway with an uplifted hand. He wore now a surplice, with a purple band over his shoulders, and on his pale face there shone a tranquil and tender light.</p>
<p>One of the workmen fetched from the stove a brand, lighted the two candles, and bore the table with its contents into the bedroom. The young woman plucked Theron’s sleeve, and he dumbly followed her into the chamber of death, making one of the group of a dozen, headed by Mrs. MacEvoy and her children, which filled the little room, and overflowed now outward to the street door. He found himself bowing with the others to receive the sprinkled holy water from the priest’s white fingers; kneeling with the others for the prayers; following in impressed silence with the others the strange ceremonial by which the priest traced crosses of holy oil with his thumb upon the eyes, ears, nostrils, lips, hands, and feet of the dying man, wiping off the oil with a piece of cotton-batting each time after he had repeated the invocation to forgiveness for that particular sense. But most of all he was moved by the rich, novel sound of the Latin as the priest rolled it forth in the ASPERGES ME, DOMINE, and MISEREATUR VESTRI OMNIPOTENS DEUS, with its soft Continental vowels and liquid R’s. It seemed to him that he had never really heard Latin before. Then the astonishing young woman with the red hair declaimed the CONFITEOR, vigorously and with a resonant distinctness of enunciation. It was a different Latin, harsher and more sonorous; and while it still dominated the murmured undertone of the other’s prayers, the last moment came.</p>
<p>Theron had stood face to face with death at many other bedsides; no other final scene had stirred him like this. It must have been the girl’s Latin chant, with its clanging reiteration of the great names—BEATUM MICHAELEM ARCHANGELUM, BEATUM JOANNEM BAPTISTAM, SANCTOS APOSTOLOS PETRUM ET PAULUM—invoked with such proud confidence in this squalid little shanty, which so strangely affected him.</p>
<p>He came out with the others at last—the candles and the folded hands over the crucifix left behind—and walked as one in a dream. Even by the time that he had gained the outer doorway, and stood blinking at the bright light and filling his lungs with honest air once more, it had begun to seem incredible to him that he had seen and done all this.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>What a revelation this is to Theron, not just of another corner of life previously unknown, but of a mystery. He has encountered something elemental here, a coming together of heaven and earth, the powers of the cosmos brought down into an impoverished hovel by way of an ancient language. His sense, not only of what is acceptable and normative, but perhaps even of what is real, has developed a crack. Intrigued and curious, on another evening, Theron takes another stroll. His destination this time is the Catholic rectory, the excuse being a hope that the priest might have resources to help him with his Abrahamic <em>magnum opus. </em></p>
<p>It is a telling scene that follows. Frederic was not Catholic, but was friends with one controversial priest, Edward Terry, and familiar with the cases of two others, famed for their progressive social and religious views, Richard Burtsell and Edward McGlynn, the last a supporter of reformer Henry George who was excommunicated by New York’s Archbishop Corrigan from 1887 to 1892.</p>
<p>As he reaches the page, the character of Father Forbes is not a political figure, but his character’s words and actions provide a window into the varied forces working in nineteenth century American Catholicism: new Scriptural scholarship, tensions between clergy and bishops, and the ever-living question of what it meant to be an American and a Catholic. Additionally, the words Frederic puts in his characters’ mouths as they consider the respective natures of Protestantism and Catholicism intriguingly reflect issues at play then, and now.</p>
<p>Let us return to the rectory. Theron is escorted in as Father Forbes and his close local friend, an unbelieving scientist named Dr. Ledsmar, are dining. Lest we assume that Theron’s encounter with the priest will introduce him to the breadth and depth of Catholic historical theology and Scriptural interpretation, we immediately see otherwise. For, as it turns out, Father Forbes is, indeed, deeply aware of theological scholarship—the <em>latest </em>theological scholarship, in fact, which means that he almost immediately disabuses poor Theron of his quaint assumption that Abraham was an actual historical figure. Then, as a devotee of Renan, the priest breaks the crack in Theron’s world wide open when he casually tosses off a reference to “this Christ-myth of ours.” And proceeds to excuse himself, and leaves the room to minister to the parishioners who’ve been waiting patiently for him downstairs.</p>
<p>Theron is confounded. The priest’s views are almost dismissive of the faith his role embodies, the powerful mystery his presence had brought to the dying workman’s home, and what the people he has gone to serve surely assume he believes. He learns that Father Forbes does not even preach at Mass. The doctor patiently explains that there was no reason to, since hardly any in the congregation would be able to comprehend his points, and those that even came close would complain to the bishop about him:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Nobody wants him to preach, and he has reached an age where personal vanity no longer tempts him to do so. What IS wanted of him is that he should be the paternal, ceremonial, authoritative head and centre of his flock, adviser, monitor, overseer, elder brother, friend, patron, seigneur—whatever you like—everything except a bore. They draw the line at that. You see how diametrically opposed this Catholic point of view is to the Protestant.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Which brings Theron to his final observation of this moment: the people waiting for Father Forbes are here either for confession or to take “the pledge”—not to drink, which indicates that they have been drinking to excess, and therefore engaging in sinful behavior. Frederic uses the following conversation between Theron and Dr. Landsmer on this point to elucidate a view of the differences between the religious bodies:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Now, I daresay you have no people at all coming to ‘swear off.’”</p>
<p>The Rev. Mr. Ware shook his head. “No; if a man with us got as bad as all that, he wouldn’t come near the church at all. He’d simply drop out, and there would be an end to it.”</p>
<p>“Quite so,” interjected the doctor. “That is the voluntary system. But these fellows can’t drop out. There’s no bottom to the Catholic Church. Everything that’s in, stays in. If you don’t mind my saying so—of course I view you all impartially from the outside—but it seems logical to me that a church should exist for those who need its help, and not for those who by their own profession are so good already that it is they who help the church. Now, you turn a man out of your church who behaves badly: that must be on the theory that his remaining in would injure the church, and that in turn involves the idea that it is the excellent character of the parishioners which imparts virtue to the church. The Catholics’ conception, you see, is quite the converse. Such virtue as they keep in stock is on tap, so to speak, here in the church itself, and the parishioners come and get some for themselves according to their need for it. Some come every day, some only once a year, some perhaps never between their baptism and their funeral. But they all have a right here, the professional burglar every whit as much as the speckless saint. The only stipulation is that they oughtn’t to come under false pretences: the burglar is in honor bound not to pass himself off to his priest as the saint. But that is merely a moral obligation, established in the burglar’s own interest. It does him no good to come unless he feels that he is playing the rules of the game, and one of these is confession. If he cheats there, he knows that he is cheating nobody but himself, and might much better have stopped away altogether.”</p>
<p>Theron nodded his head comprehendingly. He had a great many views about the Romanish rite of confession which did not at all square with this statement of the case, but this did not seem a specially fit time for bringing them forth. There was indeed a sense of languid repletion in his mind, as if it had been overfed and wanted to lie down for awhile. He contented himself with nodding again, and murmuring reflectively, “Yes, it is all strangely different.”</p>
<p>His tone was an invitation to silence; and the doctor turned his attention to the cigar, studying its ash for a minute with an air of deep meditation, and then solemnly blowing out a slow series of smoke-rings. Theron watched him with an indolent, placid eye, wondering lazily if it was, after all, so very pleasant to smoke.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And here we go, accompanying Theron on his downfall. There’s a great deal to it beyond Catholics, some reflecting social, intellectual and spiritual elements of nineteenth century American life, and others telling us the eternal story of an arrogant naif determinedly seeking the greener pastures for which he is convinced he was made, only to find himself in the ditch to which his pride blinded him.</p>
<p>So yes, there are many reasons to take a look at <em>The Damnation of Theron Ware</em>—it is an entertaining tale that reveals much about the past, human foibles and the uses (and abuses) of religion. But here I highlighted some of the Catholic-specific material, not just because I am always interested in a bit of Catholic history, but because I think it is helpful in understanding contemporary conversations. <em>Todos, todos, todos! </em>The overriding concern of Catholic leadership in the present moment seems to be to correct a supposed view that the Church is an excusive (rigid) institution. Everyone is welcome, we are assured—and we are assured, as well, that this good news is brand new news.</p>
<p>Of course it is not, considering Jesus Christ himself told his disciples to “go out to the whole world” and for a couple of thousand years, they and their successors did just that. If the purpose of the Church is to bring Creation, broken by sin, back to God, reconciled in Christ . . . <em>of course </em>”todos.” Of course. Who doesn’t know that?</p>
<p>But then we are brought into even more conversations about what that means, how and who. Endless conversations about that. A historical relic like <em>The Damnation of Theron Ware </em>gives unique insight into how the <em>todos </em>of Catholicism was understood in the past, even by outsiders: solid, rooted in God’s will not our own, always there, demanding, but also respectful of free will—and, importantly, not dependent on our own personalities or experiences.</p>
<p>Everything’s that’s in, stays in. Is it a hopeful, realistic vision or a cynical one? Does the understanding of Catholicism articulated by Frederic’s characters leave us with an institution that is solid and dependable because it is not dependent on the individual qualities of the minister or the local church community—because it exists beyond our individual foibles and desires—or does it leave us with one that, because of those same qualities, is better able to harbor hypocrisy and in the end, enables complacency?</p>
<p>Is the barely-believing Father Forbes’ ministry a sign of the Church’s strength or its weakness? Or potentially—as is the case with most elements of human life it seems—in fact, both?</p>Amy Welborntag:churchlifejournal.nd.edu,2005:News/1605752024-03-19T06:00:00-04:002024-03-19T10:00:45-04:00St. Gianna Beretta Molla: A Saint for Our Times<p>Abigail Jorgensen on maternal health. </p><p><span class="dropcap">S</span>t. Gianna Beretta Molla is a saint for our times. But, not for the reasons many believe. St. Gianna’s story is often portrayed as follows: she gave up her life so her child could live, thereby setting a heroic example for us of what it means to be a mother, a good mother, a godly mother.</p>
<p>When I first “met” St. Gianna, I was frankly suspicious. As a sociologist, I immerse myself in studying how the examples we use and the stories we tell shape our ideals of what a person should be, what a saint looks like, who qualifies as a good mother. And, as a Catholic doula, one of the most dangerous narratives I see in the Catholic birth world is the idea that perinatal health is what matters most, set up against a backdrop of stories of godly mothers who die for their children.</p>
<p>As a Catholic sociologist doula, who has now learned much more about St. Gianna, I am disheartened by how inaccurate retellings of St. Gianna’s story, and others, can pave the way for us to ignore maternal health. In other words, I worry that emphasizing the sanctifying value of a mother’s death provides an easy excuse to avoid reckoning with the ways in which we undervalue mothers’ lives.</p>
<p>In reality, St. Gianna’s story shows us someone who died to herself every day, someone who practiced that kind of self-giving love and then, when faced with a possibility of heroism, was willing to give the ultimate sacrifice, if needed. However, St. Gianna did not die so that her child might live; and that is crucial for us to understand and remember. Without it, we turn her story into propaganda for maternal death as the most godly and responsible choice; with correct context, we see the ways in which small, everyday choices prepare us for big ones.</p>
<p>St. Gianna Beretta Molla was a physician who lived from 1922 to 1962 in Italy. In her, we see the image of a normal person—a saint who loved to ski and mountain climb, a saint who knitted, who experienced perinatal depression, who reminded her husband to give their son his suppositories, and who wrote about never having time to go to daily Mass and about watching boring reruns on TV.<a href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[1]<!--[endif]--></a></p>
<p>St. Gianna’s first three pregnancies were very difficult. She experienced <em>hyperemesis gravidarum</em> (morning sickness to dangerous levels), long pregnancies (two that lasted 41 weeks and 3 days and one that lasted 43 weeks and 4 days), long labors (around 36 hours), and at least one forceps delivery. After the birth of her three children, she then experienced two miscarriages. At the beginning of her fifth, and most famous, pregnancy, she was 39 years old.</p>
<p>Two months into the pregnancy, Gianna was diagnosed with a uterine fibroma (a tumor which is usually benign, meaning non-cancerous, but can contribute to problems during pregnancy). Two of the typical treatments would result in her unborn baby's death—a surgery removing the contents of her uterus, including both the fibroma and her baby (which would have been illicit under Catholic teaching), and a surgery removing her entire uterus including its contents (which would have been licit under Catholic teaching).</p>
<p>Many retellings of St. Gianna’s story end here, stating that she forwent the treatment entirely and died for her baby. That is inaccurate. St. Gianna chose the third treatment option available to her: a more cautious surgery removing the fibroma but leaving her daughter in utero (which was licit under Catholic teaching).</p>
<p>This surgery was generally successful, and Gianna’s condition returned to expected after it. But she must have worried that there were more problems to come; as this rainbow pregnancy continued, she told her husband and other family members that if, at any point, anyone had to make a choice between her life and that of the baby, they should choose the baby's. Toward the end of her pregnancy, she went through a medical induction of labor, which was unsuccessful, and eventually gave birth through Cesarean surgery to a healthy baby girl, whom she named after herself.</p>
<p>After baby Gianna’s birth, things took a turn for the worse. St. Gianna contracted septic peritonitis, a condition that involves complications of an infection of the lining of her abdomen. This likely was caused by bacteria that entered her body during the C-section, that then spread to her bloodstream. The infection took over her body, making her organs dysfunction, and she died a week after giving birth. St. Gianna was not canonized for dying, nor for dying for her child. She was canonized for her heroism in being willing to die for her child. Her death was unrelated to the life of her child. In other words, she could have been heroic and survived.</p>
<h2>Heroism and Health</h2>
<p>St. Gianna is not a case study of how we should eschew scientific life-prolonging treatment in favor of dying for our children. Consider that she sought treatment for her fibroma, rather than simply allowing it to grow. Consider that she made choices throughout her career as a doctor, fostering the health of her patients and their families. When our takeaway from her story becomes “she’s a saint because she died for her child, and people who die for their children are similarly just meant to be saints,” we ignore her powerful intercession on behalf of maternal health. And that is certainly intercession we need.</p>
<p>Today’s maternal health crisis is truly that: a crisis. Across the world, 223 women die out of every 100,000 who give birth.<a href="#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[2]<!--[endif]--></a> Put another way, in 2020, every two minutes, a woman died because of a condition related to pregnancy and childbirth.<a href="#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[3]<!--[endif]--></a> Since 2016, maternal mortality rates, which were slowly decreasing, have been stalled or increasing worldwide.<a href="#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[4]<!--[endif]--></a> This is particularly notable in the United States, which has the highest maternal mortality rate of all highly-resourced countries at 32.9 deaths for every 100,000 births.<a href="#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[5]<!--[endif]--></a> This rate puts the U.S. in similar ranges as Uzbekistan (30 deaths per 100,000 births) and the Syrian Arab Republic (30 deaths per 100,000 births); compare this to Denmark or Turkmenistan, which has 5 deaths for every 100,000 births.<a href="#_ftn6" name="_ftnref6" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[6]<!--[endif]--></a></p>
<p>The majority of these deaths worldwide occur because of bleeding, infections, and blood pressure complications.<a href="#_ftn7" name="_ftnref7" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[7]<!--[endif]--></a> Sepsis, which caused St. Gianna’s death, is considered to be the primary cause of death in at least 10% of maternal deaths worldwide.<a href="#_ftn8" name="_ftnref8" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[8]<!--[endif]--></a> The prevention of sepsis is so important that professional organizations including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends that everyone who experiences a c-section receive prophylactic antibiotics (preventative antibiotics, usually administered within 60 minutes of starting a c-section).<a href="#_ftn9" name="_ftnref9" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[9]<!--[endif]--></a> Yet, still, some areas do not have the resources needed to administer such antibiotics, and some providers still choose not to prescribe antibiotics in all cases when WHO or ACOG would recommend them.<a href="#_ftn10" name="_ftnref10" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[10]<!--[endif]--></a> Similar struggles face women who will deal with bleeding and blood pressure complications.</p>
<p>Advocating for more and better maternal healthcare is a difficult task. Rather than facing and fighting the dangers our society accepts for pregnant and postpartum women, it can be easier to laud women’s bravery for making impossible choices. Sometimes it feels neat and tidy to be able to put the things someone teaches us about our current lives into a box—such as, “St. Gianna placed her child’s life above her own. I am supposed to do that too if I am in that situation.” The reality of the saints is far more complicated than that. They are often people who chose holiness in many situations and call our attention to the complex realities of injustice in our world today.</p>
<p>Let us not limit our retelling of St. Gianna’s story to the heroic decision of placing her child’s life above her own; let us also be reminded by our societal and global call to better care for mothers during pregnancy and postpartum. Let us echo her compassionate care of her own patients in our care of women during the perinatal period. She is a saint whose untimely and unnecessary death reminds us of the importance of science and high-quality medical care to our survival, and of the commitment we must have to maternal health.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>St. Gianna, patron of those who heroically die so that others can live, pray for us.</p>
<p>St. Gianna, patron of those experiencing hyperemesis gravidarum, long pregnancies, long labors, forceps deliveries, inductions, cesarean births, miscarriage, pregnancy at an advanced maternal age, and perinatal anxiety; those whose children are sick or need regular medications; those who knit; those who dislike watching reruns; those who die to themselves a bit every day; those let down by science and the medical system—pray for us. <!-- [if !supportFootnotes]--></p>
</blockquote>
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<div id="ftn1">
<p><a href="#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[1]<!--[endif]--></a> Gianna Beretta Molla, Love Letters to My Husband (Boston, MA: Pauline Books & Media, 2002); Pietro Molla, Saint Gianna Molla: Wife, Mother, Doctor (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2004).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn2">
<p><a href="#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[2]<!--[endif]--></a> UNICEF Data, “Maternal Mortality Rates and Statistics,” March 14, 2024, https://data.unicef.org/topic/maternal-health/maternal-mortality/.</p>
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<div id="ftn3">
<p><a href="#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[3]<!--[endif]--></a> World Health Organization, “Maternal Mortality,” February 22, 2023, https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/maternal-mortality.</p>
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<div id="ftn4">
<p><a href="#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[4]<!--[endif]--></a> Ibid.</p>
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<div id="ftn5">
<p><a href="#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[5]<!--[endif]--></a> Donna L. Hoyert, “Maternal Mortality Rates in the United States, 2021,” NCHS Health E-Stats, March 16, 2023, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/maternal-mortality/2021/maternal-mortality-rates-2021.htm.</p>
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<div id="ftn6">
<p><a href="#_ftnref6" name="_ftn6" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[6]<!--[endif]--></a> WHO, UNICEF, UNFPA, World Bank Group, and UNDESA/Population Division, “Maternal Mortality Ratio (Modeled Estimate, per 100,000 Live Births)” (Geneva, World Health Organization, 2023), https://data.worldbank.org.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn7">
<p><a href="#_ftnref7" name="_ftn7" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[7]<!--[endif]--></a> World Health Organization, “Maternal Mortality.”</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn8">
<p><a href="#_ftnref8" name="_ftn8" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[8]<!--[endif]--></a> Katherine E. Eddy et al., “Factors Affecting the Use of Antibiotics and Antiseptics to Prevent Maternal Infection at Birth: A Global Mixed-Methods Systematic Review,” PLoS ONE 17, no. 9 (September 1, 2022): e0272982, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0272982.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn9">
<p><a href="#_ftnref9" name="_ftn9" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[9]<!--[endif]--></a> American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, “Use of Prophylactic Antibiotics in Labor and Delivery,” Practice Bulletin, no. #199 (September 2018), https://www.acog.org/clinical/clinical-guidance/practice-bulletin/articles/2018/09/use-of-prophylactic-antibiotics-in-labor-and-delivery.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn10">
<p><a href="#_ftnref10" name="_ftn10" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[10]<!--[endif]--></a> Katherine E. Eddy et al., “Factors Affecting the Use of Antibiotics and Antiseptics to Prevent Maternal Infection at Birth: A Global Mixed-Methods Systematic Review.”</p>
</div>
</div>Abigail Jorgensentag:churchlifejournal.nd.edu,2005:News/1605692024-03-18T06:00:00-04:002024-03-18T10:30:53-04:00Tolkien’s Erotic Lent<p>Chase Padusniak on AB.</p><p>The word “hackneyed” only begins to approach our habit of yoking John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (or better, his <em>The Hobbit</em> and <em>The</em> <em>Lord of the Rings </em>trilogy) to Lent. Both, some have remarked, represent a <a href="https://nicksenger.com/onecatholiclife/the-lord-of-the-rings-and-lent">journey</a>. His Middle Earth (and here the absent middle is Middle English itself) <a href="https://www.christopherfenoglio.com/i-am-frodo-and-other-realizations-in-middle-earth/">mirrors</a> our own yeoman’s sojourn. Traversing immense evil, <a href="https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2021/03/26/lord-rings-20th-anniversary-fellowship-lent-covid-19-240325">good lies</a> at the end of each. As a hobbit (or ascetic of old), get rid of your <a href="https://www.teawithtolkien.com/podcast/2019/3/1/episode-12-lent-like-a-hobbit">shoes</a>! Saussure himself would marvel at the <a href="https://millennialjournal.com/2015/02/17/reading-the-lord-of-the-rings-during-lent/">structural parallels</a>.</p>
<p>I do not mean to demean the impulse. We create the connections because they make sense (and because Tolkien’s books are such lavish, emotionally fraught adventures for our imaginations in a season long pregnant with scampish joy and sullen despondency). In fact, I’d like to double down on this compulsion: what if we took seriously a connection not simply between Tolkien’s books and Lent but also that between his life, his passions, his career, and this Christian season of penitence?</p>
<p>If life is a pilgrimage toward death and Lent is a journey to the Cross and the empty tomb, then <em>peregrinator </em>Tolkien donned sackcloth and sprinkled ashes mostly at the University of Oxford, where he toiled and earned bangers and mash by the sweat of his furrowed brow—that is, teaching and thumbing through medieval manuscripts. Wouldn’t a truly Tolkienian Lent tarry with these fixations of his, the works he never seemed able to put down, indeed, the very stuff of his life?</p>
<p>I propose, then, to take a brief detour through what (in my field, medieval studies) is possibly his most famous and consequential work, the reverberations of which are still with us today. In examining this potentially moribund-seeming bit of philological investigation, we will find Lenten lessons, largely about desire and, above all, its displacement.</p>
<p>This is an erotic fixation, especially in medieval terms. This season demands Christians pick up their crosses and follow Christ. To do so, however, we must first put down what we are carrying now (worries, pains, pretensions) and set our eyes upon Easter morning. As we shall see, the work we set out to do—and Tolkien’s career shows this—is not always the work we end up doing. Christ redefines, displaces, our human, all too human, desires.</p>
<h2>Tolkien’s Love (of) Language</h2>
<p>Tolkien was a philologist. While his most famous scholarly work is certainly “<a href="https://jenniferjsnow.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/11790039-jrr-tolkien-beowulf-the-monsters-and-the-critics.pdf"><em>Beowulf</em>: The Monsters and the Critics,</a>” a lecture committed to something like literary criticism, Ole J.R.R. concentrated much of his professional energy on more minute questions, things like morphology, stemmatics, and dialect reconstruction. To this end, his most important work within his chosen field of medieval studies remains 1929’s “<em>Ancrene Wisse </em>and <em>Hali Meiðhad</em>.”<a href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[1]<!--[endif]--></a></p>
<p>In keeping with this no-nonsense title, Tolkien’s article deals with highly specific lexical issues that would bore most people to tears. He believed he had discovered a dialect of early Middle English, meaning a coherent written standard for a local variant of the language in the period immediately following the Norman Conquest, which otherwise stymied textual production in English (the Normans spoke a version of French that we call “Anglo-Norman”). This dialect existed in two manuscripts from the beginning of the thirteenth century. One he called “A,” the other “B.” Their shared tongue he called (with the creativity of the philologist) “AB language.”</p>
<p>In an age where works had to be copied by hand, changes in spelling to match shifts in pronunciation were common. There was no written standard and dialects varied within only a few miles. Scribes also tended to make mistakes. The labor was repetitive; certain words might be foreign or confusing. Each new scribe copied from a manuscript made by an existing one. Textual transmission was thus one gigantic game of telephone, making it easy enough to go from coherent poem or sermon to half-intelligible mess within only a couple copyists. To find, as Tolkien did, a remarkably consistent set of conventions within a pair of manuscripts was unheard of for this period in England’s history because of war, conquest, and French domination. He found a golden goose (in medievalist terms, anyway):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>At the very least we have here a closeness of relationship between the language and the spelling of two distinct MSS. and hands that is astonishing, if not (as I believe) unique. The two manuscripts are in fact in one language and spelling (AB). And this is found, as far as I am aware, nowhere else. That is, though it may be even a preponderating element in other texts, especially other versions of the same matter, it is not elsewhere found in isolation; nowhere else is it present in so consistent and regular a form, and in all its details of grammar and spelling.<a href="#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[2]<!--[endif]--></a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Lest we think Tolkien abandoned his discovery, he wrote or edited eleven pieces pertaining to the AB group all the way until 1962, only a decade before his death.<a href="#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[3]<!--[endif]--></a> According to Michael D.C. Drout, Tolkien published on this topic more than any other; it forms over a third of all his available scholarly work. The man spent four decades of his life investigating this otherwise little-studied group of texts. What was in them? And why did he care so much?</p>
<h2>Wooing Tolkien</h2>
<p>Two manuscripts initially drew him in. First, MS Corpus Christi College 402, a rendering of <em>Ancrene Wisse</em>, a rule likely written by a cleric for three sisters seeking to become anchoresses, that is, women who lived solitary lives, usually in small cells attached to churches. Next, MS Bodley 34, a collection of saints’ lives and sermons, usually called the “Katherine Group” because one of these hagiographies is that of Saint Katherine. In the 1950s, W. Meredith Thompson would identify poems in British Museum MS Cotton Titus D.xviii that displayed similar characteristics.<a href="#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[4]<!--[endif]--></a> This set (largely of poems) came to be called the “Wooing Group” after both its lead work, <em>Þe Wohunge of Ure Laured</em> (<em>The Wooing of Our Lord</em>)<em> </em>and the texts’ fixation on God’s beckoning the desire of his faithful.</p>
<p>It is this last point that matters the most for our Lenten journey. These texts are rife with exactly the sort of material we might imagine making Tolkien uncomfortable. In keeping with courtly romantic currents popular at the time, Jesus is figured as a handsome, loving knight who will save his (usually) female devotee from a life of carnality in sin by offering her the faithfulness, communion, and ecstasy of truer, higher love.</p>
<p>Before she can turn aside from secular things, these writers (who may be one person) must first apprise her of the dangerous traps ahead. The cleric behind <em>Ancrene Wisse</em>, for instance, hovers over the physical details of a secular dalliance:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Now along comes a man who is weak, but thinks he deserves respect if he has a wide hood and a closed cloak, and wants to look at young anchoresses, and absolutely has to see how the beauty of a woman, whose face is not sunburnt, appeals to him […His temptation,] the pit is her beautiful face, her white neck, her roving eyes, her hand, if she holds it out where [he] can see it.<a href="#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[5]<!--[endif]--></a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Anchoresses (though in other texts from the group perhaps other female religious or simply devout women) must be on guard against vanity too: “Admiring their own white hands is bad for many anchoresses who keep them too beautiful, such as those who have too little to do; they should scrape up the earth every day from the grave in which they will rot.”<a href="#_ftn6" name="_ftnref6" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[6]<!--[endif]--></a> This practice is but one among many intended to deter male suitors. Anchoresses are instructed to rebuke any man who opens their curtain and wishes them a good day and to change the subject immediately if a man uses more complicated (and self-effacing) strategies of seduction.<a href="#_ftn7" name="_ftnref7" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[7]<!--[endif]--></a></p>
<p>This female devotee, however, is not alone. As we see in <em>Þe Wohunge of Ure Laured</em>, the surest way to avoid and defeat such temptation is displacement of desire for a possible lover (even if such desire manifests initially only through a glance or innocent remark) onto a desire for Christ <em>as a lover</em>. Here, then, the author encourages the reader to imagine Jesus in visceral, even sensual, terms:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Before Pilate, how you were stripped, bound fast to the pillar, so that you could in no way flinch from the blows; there you were beaten with knotted whips for my love, so that your lovely body could be all torn and rent; and all your blessed body flowed with one bloody stream […] (Now my heart can break apart, my eyes all overflow with water. Ah! Now is my lover condemned to die! Ah! now they lead him toward Mount Calvary, to the death-place. Ah! See, he bears his cross upon his bare shoulders—and, beloved, would that those blows would fall on me with which they strike you.<a href="#_ftn8" name="_ftnref8" title="">[8]</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Jesus is her lover, a man whose bare shoulders heave like those of a weightlifter, defiant of his enemies. The author dwells on blood, water, and the savagery of this beating, encouraging the reader to stay focused in minute detail on Jesus’s body and the suffering that it endured. Even this depiction of Christ is tame compared to more overt imaginings of him as a knight who saves his lady from danger, a quest often associated in secular courtly literature with sex. The texts in the Katherine Group are hagiographies and therefore, while not as personal, do show the saints as women who suffer broken bodies because of an eroticized love for Jesus. In all cases, these works request that the reader displace her desire for worldly love and reorient it toward Jesus. The authors offer strategies (ascetic and imaginary) to accomplish this goal.</p>
<p>Such physical, sometimes approaching sexual, language is ubiquitous in the AB language texts. No wonder, then, that Tolkien begins his original essay identifying them as a group with a blanket denial of any knowledge of literary-critical interest in them: “My interest in this document is linguistic.”<a href="#_ftn9" name="_ftnref9" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[9]<!--[endif]--></a> His interest might have been, but sometimes our interests have little to do with the results of our actions.</p>
<h2>There and Back Again</h2>
<p>Tolkien sought out and discovered the AB group because of his own interest in historical linguistic preservation, separate from the literary or artistic qualities of these texts. He wanted to isolate and understand the development of a dialect of the English language, denuded of anything erotic (at least in any way related to how that term is typically understood). It is ironic, then, that these texts today have been subject more than perhaps any others within the field of Middle English studies to the critical eyes of gender and queer theorists. It is no accident that I have thus far-cited essays with names like “Romancing the Anchorhold” and “Transvestitism in the Anchorhold.” These hermeneutics are unavoidable in a little corner of scholarship that owes its existence to confluences Tolkien noticed all the way back in 1925.</p>
<p>For his part, Tolkien would no doubt be repulsed by such approaches, as he was by his would-be student and later famed social theorist Stuart Hall’s desire to apply culturally attuned lenses to medieval literary texts in the 1950s.<a href="#_ftn10" name="_ftnref10" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[10]<!--[endif]--></a> But that’s precisely the point: Tolkien’s desire for philological tranquility was displaced just like that of the religious women within the AB group. He, like those present at the crucifixion, knew not what he did. Like Paul, his will to the good turned out to make real what he thought to be bad. His spirit betrayed him, as our desires always betray us. I do not know what I want, and, when I do, my effort toward it enacts something else entirely. Such is life; such is embodiment.</p>
<p>In this way, however, Lent also enters the picture. What we have here is precisely the goal of this most momentous of the Church’s liturgical seasons: the displacement of our typical worldly desires toward an often-slippery love of God. This is the lesson of these texts! When we fast and give alms (as we are called to do during Lent), we discipline the body to reorient the object of our desire. We become the addressees of the AB group, groping in darkness, trying to find our way away from mundane concerns and petty loves toward the <em>summum bonum</em>, if not toward becoming <em>sponsae Christi</em>.</p>
<p>A Tolkienian Lent, then, is one that recommits itself to desiring God, to recognizing the fungibility and fallibility of our merely human wants. Sometimes we recognize the existence of a dialect group among an obscure pair of medieval manuscripts that opens the way for a major current in medieval studies-based gender theory. Sometimes we turn away from the Lord toward secular pursuits—a suitor at the window of our cell, or one of the many distracting vicissitudes of everyday life. We cannot know the outcome of these erotic forces, but we can labor toward their displacement, their recalibration toward God as the object of our love, trusting in Providence that whatever comes will arrive, opening the way for us to greet it (like the Resurrection) with pious joy. In Lent, we march toward this goal, setting the risen Christ before our eyes even as we march through the trials of self-denial, the dark days of Passiontide.</p>
<p>In his article identifying the group, Tolkien off-handedly remarks, “But this, if true, possesses an interest for others than the linguistic analyst.”<a href="#_ftn11" name="_ftnref11" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[11]<!--[endif]--></a> Indeed, his discoveries did—more than he could have imagined.<!-- [if !supportFootnotes]--></p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[1]<!--[endif]--></a> All citations from this article come from Tolkien, J.R.R. “<em>Ancrene Wisse </em>and <em>Hali Meiðhad</em>,” <em>Essays and Studies</em> 14.1 (1929), 104-126. This seminal essay was preceded by related work, especially “The Devil’s Coach-Horses,” for which, see Tolkien, J.R.R. “The Devil’s Coach-Horses,” <em>Review of English Studies</em> 1.3 (1925), 331-336.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[2]<!--[endif]--></a> Tolkien, “<em>Ancrene Wisse </em>and <em>Hali Meiðhad</em>,” 108.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[3]<!--[endif]--></a> See Drout, Michael D.C., “J.R.R. Tolkien’s Medieval Scholarship and Its Significance,” <em>Tolkien Studies </em>4.1 (2007), 113-176, especially 174.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[4]<!--[endif]--></a> <em>Þ</em><em>e Wohunge Of Ure Lauerd. Edited from B.M. MS. Cotton Titus DXVIII together with On Ureisun Of Ure Louerde, On Wel Swuge God Ureisun Of God Almihti, On Lofsong Of Ure Louerde, On Lofsong Of Ure Lefdi, Pe Oreisun Of Seinte Marie from the manuscripts in which they occur</em>, ed. W. Meredith Thomspon, (E.E.T.S., O.S. 241) London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1958.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[5]<!--[endif]--></a> <em>Ancrene Wisse / A Guide for Anchoresses: A Translation</em>, ed. and trans. Bella Millett, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007, 22-23. All text in brackets is mine. Given that that this piece is for a non-medievalist audience, I am opting to use Millett’s translation rather than the original, which can be found here: <a href="https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/publication/hasenfratz-ancrene-wisse">https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/publication/hasenfratz-ancrene-wisse</a>.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref6" name="_ftn6" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[6]<!--[endif]--></a> Ibid., 46.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref7" name="_ftn7" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[7]<!--[endif]--></a> Ibid., 38. See Petříková, Klára, “Romancing the Anchorhold: Romance Motifs in <em>Ancrene Wisse</em>, ‘Guide for Anchoresses,’” <em>Philologica </em>2.1 (2022), 7-20 for a longer consideration of these themes in the text.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref8" name="_ftn8" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[8]<!--[endif]--></a> Quoted in Salih, Sarah, “Transvestitism in the Anchorhold,” <em>The Milieu and Context of the Wooing Group</em>, ed. Susannah Mary Chewning, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009, 148-164, 154-155. The text in brackets is my own. For the original, see ibid.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref9" name="_ftn9" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[9]<!--[endif]--></a> Tolkien, “<em>Ancrene Wisse </em>and <em>Hali Meiðhad</em>,” 104.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref10" name="_ftn10" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[10]<!--[endif]--></a> Hall, Stuart with Bill Schwarz, Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands. Durham: Duke University Press, 156.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref11" name="_ftn11" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[11]<!--[endif]--></a> Tolkien, “<em>Ancrene Wisse </em>and <em>Hali Meiðhad</em>,” 106.</p>
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</div>Chase Padusniaktag:churchlifejournal.nd.edu,2005:News/1605222024-03-15T06:00:00-04:002024-03-14T23:52:52-04:0012 Points—Including 3 Worries, and a Thank-You—on Synodality in the Church<p>John Cavadini on co-responsibility. </p><p><span class="dropcap">T</span>o anticipate the formal expression of gratitude at the conclusion of this essay, I want to say at the outset that I have written this as a response to the invitation tendered by the <em><a href="https://www.uisg.org/en/news/Relazione-di-Sintesi-della-XVI-Assemblea-Generale-Ordinaria-del-Sinodo-dei-Vescovi">Synthesis Report of the First Session of the XVI Ordinary Synod of Bishops</a></em> to offer “theological deepening” of many of the ideas presented therein. This is, essentially, a brief essay in ecclesiology, hopefully relevant to several of the themes presented in the <em>Synthesis Report</em>. These themes are themselves echoes of many of the same themes that characterized much of the preparatory documentation, and I have responded to those in an earlier article.<a href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[1]<!--[endif]--></a></p>
<h2>Twelve Points</h2>
<p><!-- [if !supportLists]-->· <!--[endif]--><em>The first point</em> is a contemplation of the beauty of the Church. The Church is resplendent with beauty. What is this beauty? The first point is what it’s not. We can think of the centuries of witness to the point of heroic virtue which has been exhibited in every century and in every culture in which the Church has laid down her roots. We can, in times of scandal, forget this, but it’s true, and astonishing and beautiful, that there is no culture in which the Church has laid down roots that has not produced martyrs, often in abundance, across all times and places. This is one of the traditional motives of credibility for the Christian faith.</p>
<p>But, beautiful as it is, the sum total of sanctity and of loving witness large and small throughout the last twenty-plus centuries is not the essence of the beauty of the Church. For that would make the Church’s beauty essentially flawed, since all of our virtue, even the most heroic and loving, is flawed. It would also make the Church’s beauty essentially no different, except perhaps in vastly higher degree, from the beauty of any other human organization or social grouping, such as, for example, Amtrack. If Amtrack has any beauty it would be the sum total of on-time trains that functioned perfectly with fantastic food and inexpensive fares, the sum total of its excellent human performance (itself perhaps only an eschatological propect). It’s a one-dimensional beauty.</p>
<p><!-- [if !supportLists]-->· <!--[endif]-->So, <em>second point</em>, positively speaking, what is the beauty of the Church? It is quite simply the beauty of Christ, the Incarnate Word of God, who poured himself out in the most beautiful loving self-gift that there has ever been or could be. <em>Lumen Gentium </em>famously begins: “Christ is the Light of nations and consequently this Sacred Synod gathered together in the Holy Spirit, ardently desires to bring to all humanity that light of Christ which is resplendent on the face of Church” (<em>LG </em>§1).<a href="#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[2]<!--[endif]--></a> The beauty of the Church is a wholly derivative beauty: it comes from Christ; it is he, the Light of Nations, that shines on the face of the Church. And yet the Church does herself really shine with this beautiful light, so that it becomes, in turn, her beauty. Christ the Word of God bent down not only to share our humanity, which he could have taken on in an unfallen state, but, as St. Augustine puts it, he also took on our mortality, becoming our “friend in the fellowship of death” (<em>De trinitate </em>4.17, cf. 4.5) where we had looked for no friend, where we had not expected there could even be a friend!</p>
<p>The fellowship<em> </em>of death remains a fellowship of death, in a way, but it is, now that he has joined us as a free gift of mercy and love, a fellowship in<em> his </em>death and so in his love and so in his life. His love, the love that followed us even to death, <em>is</em> life, as the Resurrection reveals. This fellowship in Christ’s death, in his sacrifice, is the Church.<a href="#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[3]<!--[endif]--></a> The Church shines with the light of Christ because she is a fellowship, a communion, that is constituted by his sacrifice. It is a communion in him, and through him, with each other.</p>
<p><!-- [if !supportLists]-->· <!--[endif]-->Therefore, <em>third point</em>, the Church is, unlike Amtrack, a Mystery. That is why the Church is an article of the Creed and Amtrak is not. With Amtrack, what you see is what you get. The Church is a mystery of the faith because, unlike all other purely human organizations, she did not and does not constitute herself simply by the will of the members to form an association. The People of God does not express the same reality as “We the People.” The Church is a communion in something we did not and could not possibly give ourselves, a communion not in some abstract love or thought of love or sentimental fellow-feeling, but in the Lord’s very concrete love, namely, his Blood. The People of God is a people purchased with the infinitely Precious Blood of Christ (see <em>LG </em>§9, alluding to Acts 20:28 and 1 Cor 11:25). The awesome beauty of the Church is that it is a communion in this very concrete love which we could not have given ourselves but which is the only love so utterly without ulterior or vested interests—unlike all of ours—that it can truly unite us to each other, and in a communion, the communion of saints, that endures unto eternity.</p>
<p>And yet, awesomely, it <em>is</em> a little like Amtrack after all, in that it is here and now, a visible human society in time and space, composed of sinners all. We don’t have to be perfect to be a member. Christ’s blood is poured out not by the thimbleful, for the 12 most perfect human beings that have existed or will exist, but freely, for all. <em>He</em> mixed himself with sinners, without contempt, out of love. But the communion in sin, in Adam, did not drag him into itself. Rather he, the Second Adam, transformed it by giving himself to us so that we sinners are now bound together in the love that defeats sin. This is what the Pauline language of justification by his blood means (see: Rom 5:9). We are his, and, on new terms we couldn’t have given ourselves, namely his terms, we are each other’s.</p>
<p><!-- [if !supportLists]-->· <!--[endif]-->Now the <em>fourth point</em>: the Church is therefore wholly a work of grace, it is not our work. It is first and foremost the work, the creation, the gift of Christ. This work was accomplished on the Cross once for all, but is made present in the sacraments, each in its own way. If the Church is a Mystery it is because she is born primarily of Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross, the sign of this is the blood and water, symbolizing Eucharist and Baptism, sacraments of the Church, that flowed from the side of the crucified Jesus (see <em>LG</em> §3). The Church is therefore a mystery of Christ’s sacrificial love. Since the Eucharist makes present that sacrificial love, the Eucharist “makes the Church” (see the <em>Catechism of the Catholic Church </em>§1396). It is true, of course, that it is Baptism that first incorporates us into the Paschal Mystery and thus into the Church, but Baptism, on its own and strictly speaking, at least in a Catholic ecclesiology, does not ultimately “make” the Church, for it is the first, not the last, of the three sacraments of initiation and as such is by its very nature ordered towards the Eucharist: “In Baptism we have been called to form but one body (Cf. 1 Cor. 12.13). The Eucharist fulfills this call” (<em>CCC</em> §1396). In fact, with <em>Presbyterorum Ordinis </em>§5, all “The other sacraments, and indeed all ecclesiastical ministries and works of the apostolate are bound up with the Eucharist and are directed towards it. For in the most blessed Eucharist is contained the entire spiritual wealth of the Church, namely Christ himself our Pasch and our living bread.” The Church’s countenance shines with the light of Christ because it is resplendent with the light of the Eucharist.</p>
<p><!-- [if !supportLists]-->· <!--[endif]-->Now we are (finally!) ready to talk about co-responsibility, starting with the<em> fifth point</em>: To say that the Eucharistic sacrifice makes the Church is to say that the Church is a work of Christ’s priesthood. The mystery of the Church is therefore a mystery derivative from Christ’s priesthood. His priesthood is mediated to the Church in two ways. One of the most outstanding contributions of <em>Lumen Gentium</em> was to recover front and center one of these two ways, the biblical and patristic idea of the priesthood of the baptized, which configures us to the priesthood of Christ and enables us to make spiritual sacrifices that build up the one Body, for example, in evangelization and in prophetic witness. These sacrifices are consummated in our participation in the Eucharist. The <em>reason </em>Baptism confers the dignity and mission it does is because it confers a share in Christ’s <em>priesthood</em> on all the baptized. This is one of the two mediations of Christ’s priesthood. The second mediation of Christ’s priesthood is another, different sharing in the one Priesthood of Christ. This is Holy Orders, and the difference between the priesthood of the baptized and the ordained priesthood is not simply a matter of degree.</p>
<p>That’s important, because if the difference between these two priesthoods were only a matter of degree, then the ordained priesthood would just have “more” of the baptismal priesthood, and that would mean that the ordained were super-Christians, the super-baptized. The ordained would have a Christian dignity above the baptized, but Baptism confers an equal dignity on all, and the idea that all members of the one Body are co-responsible for the being and mission of the Church comes first and foremost from the idea of this fundamental baptismal dignity (as the <em>Synthesis Report </em>rightly emphasizes). The two priesthoods differ therefore not merely in degree, but “in kind” or “in essence” (<em>essentia</em>): Holy Orders confers the ability to act “in the person of Christ the Head,” and thus to celebrate the Eucharist, making Christ present to his Body as our Head configuring the Church to his sacrifice and thus enabling the priesthood of the Baptized to fulfill its sacrificial role in offering the Eucharist. It also enables the priesthood of the baptized to fulfill its evangelizing role, because this terminates not just in biblical literacy or in mastery of apologetics but in Eucharistic communion. The two priesthoods are thus mutually ordered towards each other (<em>ad invicem … ordinantur</em>) in the being and mission of the Church:</p>
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<p>Though they differ in essence and not merely in degree, the common priesthood of the faithful and the ministerial or hierarchical priesthood are none the less ordered towards each other; each in its own way shares in the one priesthood of Christ. The ministerial priest, by the sacred power that he has, forms and governs the priestly people; in the person of Christ he brings about the Eucharistic sacrifice and offers it to God in the name of all the people. The faithful indeed, by virtue of their royal priesthood, share in the offering of the Eucharist. They exercise that priesthood, too, by the reception of the sacraments, by prayer and thanksgiving, by the witness of a holy life, self-denial and active charity (<em>LG </em>§10).</p>
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<p>With regard to the baptismal priesthood, we read further, in <em>Presbyterorum Ordinis, </em></p>
<blockquote>
<p>The Lord Jesus, <em>whom the Father consecrated and sent into the world</em> (Jn. 10.36) gave his whole mystical body a share in the anointing of the Spirit with which he was anointed (see Mt. 3.16; Lk. 4.18; Acts 4.27; 10.38). In that body all the faithful are made a holy and royal priesthood, they offer spiritual sacrifices to God through Jesus Christ, and they proclaim the mighty deeds of him who has called them out of darkness into his marvelous light (see 1 Pet. 2.5, 9). Therefore, there is no such thing as a member who does not have a share in the mission of the whole body (§2).</p>
</blockquote>
<p><!-- [if !supportLists]-->· <!--[endif]-->This leads to the <em>sixth point</em>, namely, that although the notion of co-responsibility arises out of the fundamental equality and dignity proper to Baptism, a complete account of co-responsibility cannot be developed out of Baptism or fully stated in baptismal terms, just as a complete account of Baptism itself cannot be developed out of Baptism or fully stated in Baptismal terms,<a href="#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[4]<!--[endif]--></a> because Baptism itself is intrinsically ordered toward Eucharistic communion. The <em>communio</em> of the Church is only fully accounted for in Eucharistic terms, and this means in priestly terms. The <em>communio</em> that constitutes the Mystery of the Church is fulfilled in the mutually ordered relationship between the two participations in the one Priesthood of Christ. We read in the <em>Synthesis Report</em> that an invaluable fruit of the synodal process has been, “the heightened awareness of our identity as the faithful People of God” and as “called to differentiated co-responsibility” (§1a), but if this is true, then the language of “co-responsibility” for the being and mission of the Church is incomplete if it does not refer to the way in which these two priesthoods are different in essence and as such are ordered towards each other in the building up of the one Body, and <em>thus </em>generate a co-responsibility. We could say they are co-ordered to the building up of the one Body.</p>
<p><!-- [if !supportLists]-->· <!--[endif]-->This leads to the <em>seventh point</em> which is also the <em>first worry</em>: The <em>Synthesis Report</em> does talk about co-responsibility being exercised across a variety of “charisms, vocations and ministries” (from the Introduction, echoed throughout), but there is no explicit mention of Holy Orders as constitutive of one of these vocations and ministries. And, although the Introduction presents the <em>Sythesis Report</em> as an interpretation of the conciliar literature, there is no mention at all of the baptismal priesthood. Holy Orders itself is not even mentioned in the section on deacons and priests. This lack of precision and clarity gives the impression that the priesthood, here meaning the ordained priesthood, is purely functional, and not rather constitutive (along with the priesthood of the baptized) of the mystery of the Church as born from Christ’s sacrifice. As John Paul II noted, with respect to the ordained priesthood: “the ordained priesthood ought not to be thought of as existing prior to the Church, because it is totally at the service of the Church. Nor should it be considered as posterior to the ecclesial community, as if the Church could be imagined as already established without this priesthood” (<em>Pastores Dabo Vobis</em> §16). The impression that <em>can</em> be given from the <em>Synthesis Report</em> is that “priesthood” seems to demarcate only one among the many ministries, charisms and vocations that have their origin in the baptismal call to mission. It is distinguishable as a function and role but not essentially different in kind.</p>
<p>Without explicit clarification, the Synthesis document seems to teeter, unintentionally, on a Reformed understanding of ministry, where all ministry flows from Baptism, and a correspondingly Reformed ecclesiology which is essentially baptismal and only secondarily Eucharistic. In fact, it can be read, though certainly not intended this way, to verge on an account of the Church that occludes its character as Mystery altogether, in favor of a purely functional account, flatlining the Church as though it were simply a secular organization though with a holy purpose of spreading the Word of God. But, remember, evangelizing is not simply spreading the Word of God, for which one does not need a People of God or a Mystical Body or a Spouse of Christ or a Temple of the Holy Spirit. The terminus of evangelization is the same as that of Baptism, namely, full incorporation into the <em>communio </em>of the One Body and the One People, accomplished Eucharistically. As noted in <em>Presbyterorum Ordinis, </em>“no Christian community is built up which does not grow from and hinge on the celebration of the most holy Eucharist” (<em>PO </em>§6).</p>
<p><!-- [if !supportLists]-->· <!--[endif]-->This leads to the <em>eighth point</em> which is the <em>second worry</em>. This has to do with the idea of “synodality” itself. Inherently it is a beautiful and appealing concept intended to emphasize a leadership style that is attentive and thoroughly consultative, at least, as I read Pope Francis’s <em>Episcopalis communio</em>, and I am appreciative of this emphasis.<em> </em>But in the <em>Synthesis Report</em> it appears more ambiguously. Claiming that synodality “constitutes a true act of further reception” of Vatican II, “implementing what the Council taught about the Church as Mystery and People of God” (Introduction), it is described as “a mode of being Church that integrates communion, mission and participation” (§1g). In other words, “synodality” is an ecclesiology, at least implicitly, a particular theology of the Church, which claims to be a development of <em>Lumen Gentium</em>. What are its basic features? “Baptism,” above all, “is at the root of the principle of synodality” (§7b). Synodality claims to develop a primary feature of the ecclesiology of <em>Lumen Gentium</em>, namely, its recovery of the idea that all of the baptized, in virtue of their baptism, are called to contribute to the mission of the Church. Synodality “values the contribution all the baptized make, according to their respective vocations” (Introduction).</p>
<p>Further, “An invaluable fruit of this [synodal] process is the heightened awareness of our identity as the faithful People of God, within which each is the bearer of a dignity derived from Baptism, and each is called to differentiated co-responsibility for the common mission of evangelization” (§1a, cf. 3c). Synodality values the title “People of God” for the Church, correctly associating this title with the idea that baptism calls all to contribute to the mission of the Church. Nevertheless, as <em>Lumen Gentium </em>and <em>Presbyterorum Ordinis </em>make clear, the Church as People of God cannot be fully described in baptismal terms alone, and certainly not without mention of both of the two priesthoods that, as co-related to each other, are constitutive of the Mystery of the Church as wholly gift, derivative of Christ’s sacrifice as a Church-making sacrifice, made ever-present in the Eucharist. Without further clarification, “synodality” can thus <em>appear</em>, anyway, as describing, at best, a variety of Protestant ecclesiology, and at worst, an organization from which the idea of the Church as Mystery has been severely attenuated. Indeed, the notion of the Church as Mystery is mentioned only once, seemingly as an afterthought, in the Introduction of the <em>Synthesis Report</em>, with no follow-up anywhere in the document.</p>
<p><!-- [if !supportLists]-->· <!--[endif]-->The <em>ninth point</em>: A full account of co-responsibility, and of synodality itself, will therefore not ultimately be derived from Baptism but from the mutual co-relation of the two priesthoods that together constitute the Church, ordered, as they are, towards each other, and co-ordered, one could say, towards the mystery of ecclesial <em>communio</em>.</p>
<p><!-- [if !supportLists]-->· <!--[endif]-->And the <em>tenth point</em>: The theology of co-responsibility, when the two co-related participations in the one priesthood of Christ are taken into account, <em>has the beauty of carving out two distinct, though related, spheres of leadership</em>. There is a leadership associated with the hierarchical priesthood, that of pastoral governance, authoritative teaching, and sanctification, as clearly stated in <em>Lumen Gentium </em>§10. But to me one of the most important features of the theology of co-responsibility is that it indicates that governance, and participation in governance, is not the only form of leadership in the People of God.</p>
<p>We should resist the temptation to conflate leadership too quickly with governance, as we seem to have done before Vatican II and in fact as we still seem to do. If there is no true sphere of leadership, theologically defined, connected to but differing, in a co-responsible way, from governance, then those denied ordination on the basis of innate factors such as sex can legitimately feel aggrieved. Of course, as noted above, because it is an exercise of a priesthood derived from the priestly sacrifice of Christ, it is ordered toward building up the <em>communio</em> of the one Body and so cannot be exercised independently of the hierarchical priesthood, which has the same end in a complementary fashion. Dorothy Day, always ahead of her time, when asked whether Cardinal Spellman contributed to the expenses of the Catholic Worker, used to answer, “No, but he didn’t ask us to undertake this work, either.” She did not need permission to engage in the far-reaching leadership that she did undertake, though, on the other hand, though she was willing to offer pointed responses to his critique of her positions on pacifism, etc., she never disobeyed him.</p>
<p>There are so many examples now of lay-initiated and lay-led projects of evangelization intended to build up, in one way or another, the <em>communio </em>of the one Body. This is not governance. As already noted, not any old project of evangelization is a true exercise of the baptismal priesthood and certainly projects involving imprudent or heterodox teaching are subject to the correction of the bishop—that is part of his co-responsibility. Nevertheless, it is genuine leadership and in many cases this leadership is trend-setting for the Church. As Pius XII famously said, the laity are on the front-lines of the Church’s mission (see <em>CCC </em>§899).</p>
<p><!-- [if !supportLists]-->· <!--[endif]-->The <em>eleventh point</em>, is coincidentally the <em>third worry</em>: To the extent that “synodality” is synonymous with “baptismal,” it will regard all the ministries of the Church as differing, perhaps, in degree, but not differing essentially, in kind. This differing only in degree will include the governance which <em>Lumen Gentium </em>(§10) taught was intrinsic to Holy Orders, especially that conferred on the bishop (see: <em>LG</em> §21, “The fullness of the sacrament of Orders is conferred by episcopal consecration . . . [which] confers, together with the office of sanctifying, the offices also of teaching and ruling,” forcefully and further specified in <em>LG</em> §27). But if “synodality” is synonymous with “baptismal,” then it will seem that governance is essentially a baptismal charism, vocation or ministry. But then co-responsibility for the mission of the Church, coming exclusively from Baptism, can begin to be synonymous with co-responsibility for governance. If co-responsibility and the various charisms and ministries that are to be co-responsible for mission, flow from Baptism, then there is need of a wholesale reform of Church “structures,” and the <em>Synthesis Report</em> seems to call for such:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>All the baptized are co-responsible for mission, each according to his or her vocation, competence and experience. Therefore, all contribute to imagining and discerning steps to reform Christian communities and the Church as a whole, [and] . . . this co-responsibility of all in mission must be the criterion underlying the structuring of Christian communities and the entire local church . . .</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So that “each member is involved in processes and decision-making for the mission of the Church” (§18a-b). Co-responsibility for mission here seems nearly indistinguishable from co-responsibility for governance, and “synodality” seems almost to mean, “co-responsibility for governance.” The laity, it could seem, are truly co-responsible for the being and mission of the Church only to the extent that they are co-responsible for governance, at least in a reformed ecclesiology that flows principally from Baptism. But unless baptismal synodality means the erasure of the intrinsic connection between Holy Orders and governance—and surely the Synod does not intend to reject outright the teaching of <em>Lumen Gentium </em>and <em>Presbyterorum Ordinis</em>—this means that any leadership exercised co-responsibly by the laity will be exercised principally as part of a leadership ministry that is different in kind from their own, a clerical ministry properly speaking, rather than one that is truly their own.</p>
<p>It is true, of course, and good, that lay people can and do participate in structures of governance, even as Chancellors in dioceses or heads of Roman dicasteries, but in these positions they are collaborating in a leadership ministry which is essentially that of the hierarchy, which is not essentially their own. It is also true that all the faithful share in the three <em>munera</em> of the priesthood of Christ, but no lay person, by definition, will ever govern the universal Church, a diocese, or even, strictly speaking, a parish.<a href="#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[5]<!--[endif]--></a> If the governance intrinsic to the fullness of orders is the only form of true leadership in the Church, then leadership and governance seem to be conflated again, just as they were before Vatican II.</p>
<p>But the laity do not need a structure or pastoral plan to validate or mandate the leadership that comes with the exercise of the baptismal priesthood in evangelization. Baptism is itself the mandate. The “synodality” envisioned by this document, in erasing the very language of the baptismal “priesthood,” which establishes a true sphere of leadership proper to the lay faithful imparted by the mystery of Christ’s priesthood present in the Church, could seem then to be just a renewed form of clericalism, where there is never any true leadership that pertains uniquely to the priesthood of the baptized, any true sphere for lay leadership in the Church.</p>
<p><!-- [if !supportLists]-->· <!--[endif]--><em>Finally</em>, the <em>twelfth point</em>, including the <em>thank-you</em>: I offer these comments hoping to contribute to the synodal journey, and especially to episcopal discernment regarding the relatively new phrase, “co-responsibility.” I offer my comments in the spirit of the <em>Synthesis Report</em> itself, which clearly states that it is “not a final document, but an instrument at the service of ongoing discernment.” It is intended to “orientate reflection” regarding points on which “it is necessary to continue deepening our understanding pastorally, theologically, and canonically” (Introduction). The invitation to theological deepening in particular is especially prominent throughout the document. I have taken this invitation seriously and at face value, hoping to offer something where I think, as in any document still in development, enhancements seem needed. It was truly a gesture of the synodality of which the <em>Report </em>speaks to publish a document like this, open-ended and still under construction, and to invite such comment. I admire this commitment to openness and hereby express my thanks to those responsible.<!-- [if !supportFootnotes]--></p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[1]<!--[endif]--></a> In the article from <em>The Thomist</em>, cited above.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[2]<!--[endif]--></a> Translations from the documents of Vatican II are taken, sometimes with adjustment, from <em>Vatican Council II: Constitutions, Decrees, Declarations</em>, edited by Austin Flannery, O.P. (Northport, NY and Dublin: Costello Publishing Co. and Dominican Publications, 1996). The adjustments are sometimes my own, and sometimes, especially for <em>Lumen Gentium,</em> taken from the official English translation at https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19641121_lumen-gentium_en.html</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[3]<!--[endif]--></a> Or perhaps, more precisely, the Church, in Christ, is the sacrament of this fellowship.</p>
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<div id="ftn4">
<p><a href="#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[4]<!--[endif]--></a> This is perhaps implicitly recognized at sec. 3g of the <em>Report.</em></p>
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<div id="ftn5">
<p><a href="#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[5]<!--[endif]--></a> For example, of no layperson will it or could it ever be said that “by the authority and sacred power which they exercise exclusively for the spiritual development of their flock … bishops have a sacred right and duty before the Lord of legislating for and of passing judgment on their subjects, as well as of regulating everything that concerns the good order of divine worship and of the apostolate,” no matter how synodally this authority is exercised (as it should be).</p>
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</div>John Cavadinitag:churchlifejournal.nd.edu,2005:News/1605212024-03-14T06:00:00-04:002024-03-13T22:20:14-04:00The Final Word: Prolegomena to Eschatology<p>Jean-Yves Lacoste on the end.</p><p><span class="dropcap">T</span>he eschatological problem is more recent than the Greek problem of <em>ousia </em>[substance], yet like the problem of <em>ousia</em> it has sparked a “battle between giants,” and for this problem too, it is wise to come to a first conclusion: we do not really know what the final word is; on this subject, we are faced with an aporia. Faced with an aporia, however, we are not left unarmed, either existentially or conceptually. We can reach an understanding about our concepts and the meaning of our existence (that is, for the being that we are, being in the world between birth and death). And to arrive at such an understanding, let us be more precise about the “current” situation of our question.</p>
<p>After the research on eschatology carried out by modern philosophy, and after a new interest for eschatology <a href="https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/hell-purgatory-heaven-in-eschatology-death-and-the-eternal-life/">has animated theology</a>, further precision is necessary: in these scientific and technological times, the <em>eschaton</em> has inevitably become a scientific and technical reality. The question of eschatology, in its classical or modern form, concerned the absolute future of the human being and/or human beings. As I write these lines, human beings have no other absolute future than that of the universe. Understood as the totality of physical realities, and as a totality whose present behavior is known by science and whose future is predictable, the universe has an absolute future, whether science permits us to represent this in the semi-mythical form of the demise of all things or whether it leads us to believe that a new universe will reappear after this demise. And when history, from <em>prôton</em> to <em>eschaton</em>, becomes strictly “universal,” then our own history and, in it, “my” own history, as such subject to philosophical and theological concerns, are, alas, no more than pseudo-questions, because they are nothing more than philosophical and theological questions.</p>
<p>The consequence is clear, even if surprising: the question of eschatology, as we have posed it classically and as we would like to pose it still, is not commensurate with our times. It is not commensurate with the last of all our various forms of metaphysics, that of Nietzsche, since the latter leads to a rejection of all final words in the name of an “eternal return to the same.” And it is not commensurate with the times envisioned by Nietzsche, that of nihilism, where everything has value and nothing has value because everything is no more than valuation. In what contemporary babble calls post-modernity, the question of eschatology is derisory. In what survives of metaphysics in “post-modern” times, the question of eschatology no longer deserves anything more than being “destructed” or “deconstructed.” After the West has finished with eschatology, what can be said that is addressed neither to the “last man,” nor to the “overman,” but simply to the human being that desires to start being himself again? Let us make a few minimal propositions.</p>
<p>1.</p>
<p>The most humble descriptions, those we proposed above, can provide an acceptable <em>organon</em> to all in times of scarcity, or following Nietzsche, in the time of the “desert.” There is no canonical description of temporality that enters into the definition of our being, but any description will confirm the status of elementary phenomena: to have finished with (this or that), being oneself in the mode of becoming and the event, the fragmentary character of our experiences of ourselves within the world, the inchoative character of our events of experience, etc. Nothing in these phenomena allows us to develop and elaborate a thought of history. They are to be inspected naïvely, without having recourse to the “new science” that began its philosophical career with Vico. The becoming that we surely are includes these <em>corsi </em>and <em>ricorsi</em>, this running in circles, so to speak, but on our own level, that is, commensurate with what we are, what each and every one of us is. The intimate consciousness of time, the constitution of a living present, the continuity of the self in the flux of presents, but also the reality of the self as becoming, and of the common experience when, remembering “our” past, we observe also that we ourselves have indeed been, and that we partly are no longer: the phenomenon of history cannot be apprehended if we have not described all these things.</p>
<p>2.</p>
<p>Among all the things that appear to us, one class is of particular interest, those things that have the status of a trace. A trace is always of this or that. It is a trace of this or that which was present, has passed, and has therefore left the trace of its passage. And because a great number of traces are beings which are in principle visible to everyone, and which everyone can apprehend as being, if they have learned to do so, the presence of traces in the world signals on the one hand that the world I live in is a world where we human beings live, and on the other hand that this world has a past—it has been the horizon in which those other than us, prior to us, have made an appearance. Whoever recognizes that a trace, inscribed in a being within the world, appears to him as a trace, knows something about a past that survives partially in the present. He thus recognizes an essential trait of what we have the right to name history. The past precedes us, all of us. From some of its traces, the past “speaks” to us.</p>
<p>3.</p>
<p>And if, across the play of protentions and expectations inscribed in our time, we also observe (how could we not) that we are not in the world exclusively as spectators, but also as agents, then we will admit that there is also a future, for all of us, and that we are to respond to it, partially. It has been rightly argued that the consciousness absorbed by the longing to perpetuate the present, in its “desire for eternity,” only leads to a neglect of action. In the dimensions of universal history, what we can do here and now is generally insignificant. To formulate a concept of history that matches with what we are, however, it is prudent to not appeal to universal history too quickly. Whoever acts in the present takes part in a logic of openness to the future. Speaking of action is not speaking of “fabrication,” even if there are at times products of our actions which will be tomorrow the traces of what we have done today. But before all “machination,” the present lives by being not only that of a consciousness, but also a maker of the future. Even if our contribution to history was on the small scale of our solicitude to a certain neighbor, solicitude exercised today and by virtue of a faithfully kept promise still exercises its lasting force on us tomorrow.</p>
<p>4.</p>
<p>In all its forms, we must add, the promise binds us to our neighbor, also in all his forms, in and through a relation that merits the name <em>covenant</em>. Any covenant can be broken or reversed. Accepting that there is history also demands, banally and from the very first analysis, that in this history we perceive the always possible “undoing” of what we promise to “do.” The promise in any case, despite its banal phenomenality, shelters in the day after day of the world, and its history, something that resembles what others call the “sacred.” Our daily commitments do not explicitly call on heaven and earth as their witness. And yet . . . We promise (this or that), verbally or rather tacitly, to ourselves or to others, without using solemn formulas, but we do commit ourselves to intervene in a micro-history (the only one in which intervention by all of us is possible) and such commitment is not without witness (my conscience is a possible witness, but there are others too). The witness, witnessing tomorrow to a promise kept or a promise broken, has the status of a judge, and justice is always executed solemnly. An alliance or covenant, written or not, never has the status of a scrap of paper. Anyone who wants us to believe this is lying. And in a certain way, he blasphemes, against whatever “sacred” there may be.</p>
<p>5.</p>
<p>The idea of a history in which we would only be spectators is disqualified as soon as it is proposed. The “fact” that we are always in the world while being within history, and always in history as potential manufacturers [<em>facteur</em>] of micro-historical events, leads to the simple conclusion that the historial and the historical belong to the category of the <em>dramatic</em>. A history governed by faceless processes could be mastered as we master any physical reality. A history governed by a benevolent god could be admired with sheer intelligence, as Leibniz does, as the best world to live in—better than other possible worlds. A history woven from covenants and promises, on the other hand, is a history of which we are the manufacturers [<em>facteurs</em>], from the verb δρᾶν, “to do” [faire], and whose dramatic character is due to the always possible and real undoing [<em>défaite</em>] of our doings [<em>faires</em>]. The first words of a phenomenology of history that knows that conscience takes part in history in the guise of a will to action are thus, necessarily, skeptical. History is the totality of micro-historical events. As such, it is the totality of promises made and unmade, of alliances accepted and refused. Events that will relaunch the drama are perpetually possible. Within history, the concept of the end of history, under the heading of a covenant that will not pass and a promise perpetually kept, can only serve to state what history is not.</p>
<p>6.</p>
<p>And thus a spectator who is not impartial, who is not a philosopher of history, will be authorized to speak of a new start [<em>relance</em>], when he calls attention to some event which, he claims, has a meaning few others recognize. These events have taken place in the margins of universal history in the least “interesting” parts of the ancient Middle East. C. S. Lewis, a good observer of religious cultures, was said to be astonished that it was not in Egypt that humanity received promises worthy of faith. Almost everyone wonders why the Greek world was not the sole recipient of a covenant between the fragile human <em>logos</em> and the divine <em>Logos</em>. And we should be astonished when the believer, in this case the Christian, tells us, with a parade of details, that the <em>Logos</em> was made flesh and that it has dwelt among us, and that this event was surprisingly provincial. Kierkegaard, born in a “province” and always writing in the language of his “province” at a distance from a (German) culture that had almost annexed itself to the manifestation of the Spirit, knew something of this, and we must learn it from him. If we say that a new start to history is possible (for the simple reason that it has already taken place) then we need to have faith, not in the splendor of universal history, but in the “sense” of this history that can only be perceived by those who critique it from its margins.</p>
<p>7.</p>
<p>A new beginning which allows for a non-aporetic discourse on the accomplishment of history, perhaps, but on the condition of accepting a ruse of the spirit that Hegel had not foreseen, and an irony (or a humor) on the part of the spectator which allows for a new gaze on the totality of events. This or that has happened in Roman Palestine. This or that was not merely micro-historical, but almost was. Our aptitudes for experience are broad and the transcendental, properly understood, opens us onto what comes “from elsewhere” in such a way that the promises (and duties) inscribed on the face of the other, and the promises (and commandments) that a god would give us, etc. are possibilities that perhaps disturb us but do not disturb philosophy. But a possible that would remain purely possible would only serve as a joy for philosophers or dreamers. And when we say that such a possibility, here that of small events capable of giving meaning to all history and to all histories, has become real, then we must accept that this reality has taken place where we did not really expect it. One easily objects to the “short formulas” which Rahner condensed his transcendental theology, and rightly so, that the concrete intervenes only to verify the <em>a priori</em>. Being interested in a few trivial facts of ancient Palestinian history allows the one who takes his time to perceive the possible that we would not perceive well if it was not first of all a reality that surprises us.</p>
<p>8.</p>
<p>Analytical philosophy owes to I.T. Ramsey a fine plea in favor of those strange experiences that, when experienced, are only intelligible by discerning and by taking part in them, by <em>discernment</em> and <em>commitment</em>. This applies, as well, to our experience of certain histories that are strange primarily because they are marginal. There are realities that rightly interest us because of their splendor or their horror, which appear for whoever has “eyes” to “see”: the glory of classical China and the reign of evil in the Nazi period, to mention only two examples, cannot go unnoticed. To not see them proves a certain blindness, and the one unable to pass judgment on what one he has seen in this case, be it to wonder about it or to speak of its horror, would not be a credible witness. To see that which has every chance of passing unnoticed, on the other hand, demands intelligence, discernment, and finally taking sides. Louis XIV does not go unnoticed in a history (that of France) where he shines more than several suns, <em>nec pluribus impar</em>, but the master word of all times and all history, the <em>logos</em>, was uttered in trivial facts of universal history, and shines with a truly strange light, as “the logos of the cross.”</p>
<p>9. </p>
<p>It is a challenge to think the fulfillment of history through a glimpse of this strange light, and every challenge is addressed to us as beings gifted with intelligence and will. If the still point of history is a cross erected outside the walls of Jerusalem, and everything “turns” around this, and if the absolute history of all things is intelligible only by presupposing the long event of the word which leads to this final word, then the philosophies of history should remain silent and entrust the task of naming the <em>eschaton</em> to the theology of history. A philosophy can be silent because it is a clumsy philosophy; it can also be silent because it knows itself all too well, and knows to some extent that of which it cannot speak. Philosophy and theology are both human, and thus make use of the <em>logo</em>s. Philosophy often ratifies the presence of realities as quotidian as a pipe on the table or a meaningful sentence. Theology is organized around non-quotidian realities: our example, that of the divine<em> logos</em> hidden and manifested in the cross of Jesus, is a paradoxical but excellent one. And we will say of the one who agrees to listen to what the theologian says, and especially the one who listens and recognizes the truth of this discourse, that he “believes.” “To believe,” in a properly theological sense, is first of all to envision and perceive the phenomenality of that which goes unnoticed for the one who knows only how to recognize and perceive the Sun King or pipes placed on a table.</p>
<p>10.</p>
<p>No one perceives except by perceiving this or that, such and such a “fact,” this or that event, etc. And no one thus solely “believes”: the believer gives his approval to words, to events of truth, and to these events as having the force of a promise and a covenant, a promise addressed to all and a covenant offered to all. Our aptitude for experience is an aptitude for <em>this </em>experience, certainly more complex than most, but also as intelligible as most experiences. Promise, covenant, these words are at once of common use and of major importance: in the fabric of everyday life, what they say (and what they do by saying) introduces what we have already cautiously named the “sacred” or, if you will, the “holy.” “Holy,” in fact, because the covenant most worthy of its name and the promise never revoked, are, for the one who believes, the work of the God who alone is holy.</p>
<p>11.</p>
<p>The language we are using and the phenomena to which we are returning show that the question of “beginning anew” is in fact answered by preterition. Heidegger’s final word, almost, is that “everything needs to be said differently,” <em>alles ist ist anders zu sagen</em>. These are words we cannot really endorse. We do not say things in the era of metaphysics as we must say them when metaphysics has exhausted its forces, we do not say things within nihilism as we must say them to leave nihilism behind, etc., but whoever wants to discern the theological meaning of history in a time where its philosophical sense has become opaque knows his right to rely on ancient narratives, on the words used in these narratives, etc. It is good that the theologian does not appeal to philosophies of history that he cannot critique. But it is also good that he knows it: the theology of history does not have to be built again from the bottom up but more modestly we must let it be, as such, at a distance from the philosophical constructions that have lent it this or that stone. When we repeat what has been said, we always say it differently, but this affirmation is true only because it is somewhat vapid. We probably will not speak of covenant, of divine promises and their fulfillment, as another era in theology spoke of them. Our ambition, in any case, is not to propose a “wholly other” entry into the realities and the experiences that deliver the theological meaning of history. Our ambition here is something else: to point out that we already have at our disposal the necessary means to speak about history and its end in the era of nihilism—and that we have them at our disposal because they are older than everything that has led to the hardened forms of metaphysics and to its nihilistic collapse.</p>
<p>12.</p>
<p>When I speak of the <em>eschaton</em>, it is a man who speaks. One will authorize this man, which is no small thing, to know that before its philosophical history, history has had a theological history, and that the latter better allows us to speak of the end of all things. Eschatology, as we know, was destined to be Westernized and to be subject to metaphysical takeover. The phenomena that we have cited and called upon as our witness—the covenant, the promise, and others that we have briefly mentioned, first and foremost hope—can without difficulty be immunized against such takeover. The task to be fulfilled, we are happy to say, can be fulfilled almost easily, because these phenomena entail a common appearance, and because we commonly encounter them outside of any contamination by Western eschatology or metaphysics. And if we speak of divine promises by taking the only “step back” that leads somewhere when we speak of the <em>eschaton</em>, we will not be capable of laying claim <em>ipso facto </em>to a fully organized “eschatology”—we will not pronounce a final word on the <em>eschaton</em>—but we will know at least how to begin speaking of it. Which is no small thing.</p>
<p>13.</p>
<p>Those who bear witness in the world to promises that are not of the world, and speak of a God promising “to make all things new,” believe that some of us here and now will be made “new” in the end. Whoever speaks of history speaks at the same time about beings as a whole and of the totality of events, past, present and to come. We also exist in the mode of the event, and we exist in the mode of unfulfillment that our death lacks the means to accomplish or fulfill. The accomplished reality of our humanity is not at our disposal within the time of the world. The only thing at our disposal is the reality of what we are, what we have been, and what we will be by the strength of our doing and our solicitudes, under the shadow of death. But we are “free” to say that death is our final enemy, and that its defeat has been promised to us . . .</p>
<p>Translated by Stephanie Rumpza and Joeri Schrijvers</p>
<p>EDITORIAL NOTE: This essay is excerpted from <a href="https://wipfandstock.com/9781666709599/god-and-phenomenology/"><em>God and Phenomenology: Thinking with Jean-Yves Lacoste</em></a>, used by permission of <a href="www.wipfandstock.com">Wipf and Stock Publishers</a>, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.</p>Jean-Yves Lacostetag:churchlifejournal.nd.edu,2005:News/1604932024-03-12T06:00:00-04:002024-03-12T00:03:23-04:00A Very Short Introduction to the History of Catholic Debates About the Multiverse and Extraterrestrial Intelligence<p>Paul Thigpen on ancient discussions.</p><p>Are we, on Earth, the lone intelligent inhabitants of this vast universe? The Catholic tradition teaches us that there are other rational creatures, namely angels, who are purely intellectual, non-physical beings. But do we humans share the cosmos with any other <em>embodied</em> intelligent forms of life?</p>
<p>Today, speculation about the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) is livelier than ever in our culture. Yet many who contribute to this intensifying interest in ETI, especially Catholics, fail to realize that the contemporary discussion is only the most recent portion of a debate in Western thought that stretches back at least twenty-six centuries. Fathers and Doctors of the Church, Catholic philosophers and theologians, popes and bishops, friars and priests, scientists and saints have all taken part in the conversation.</p>
<h2>Ancient Greek Cosmology and the Church Fathers</h2>
<p>The conceptual foundations for the Catholic discussion of ETI were laid in the centuries before Christ among Greek philosophers in the sixth, fifth, and fourth centuries BC. The question of intelligent life beyond earth was at that time part of a larger discussion about what came to be known as “the plurality of worlds.” This notion originally referred not so much to multiple heavenly bodies within our universe (such as stars, planets, and their moons) but rather to multiple <em>entire universes, </em>all coexisting independently of one another, each cosmos with its own earth and celestial bodies.</p>
<p>Thinkers in the Greek philosophical tradition known as “atomism” concluded that there is indeed a plurality of such worlds. Plato and Aristotle rejected that idea, but Plato thought the stars were living creatures who had each been given a soul. In this way, we might say that Plato conceived of ETI in the form of living stars who moved across the sky.</p>
<p>We might also note that Aristotle once speculated about inhabitants of the moon, though this idea contradicted his conception of the lunar region as part of the unchanging portion of the cosmos. In addition, followers of the sixth-century Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras believed that the moon is another inhabited world, though not its own cosmos.</p>
<p>Early Christian thinkers were aware of the ancient discussion among pagan philosophers about the plurality of worlds. They continued the conversation, adding their own insights derived from the apostolic tradition of the Church. But they were concerned primarily with speculations about multiple entire universes, presumably inhabited. This possibility they largely rejected, following the Platonist and Aristotelian schools, which had concluded, for various philosophical reasons, that the existence of more than one universe would be somehow less “perfect” than a single cosmos.</p>
<p>The common Greek cosmology placed Earth at the center of the universe, with the sun, moon, and stars revolving around it. The planets (literally, “wanderers”) were simply stars that “wandered” from the path of the other heavenly bodies. This cosmological model thus had no conception of solid or gaseous spheres that could provide a home to living creatures. For this reason, the notion of ETI in the sense of inhabited planets or even moons within our universe received little if any attention from most Christian thinkers until the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when these long-held but pre-Christian notions came into question.</p>
<p>One possible exception to this position is found in a letter written by Pope St. Clement of Rome in the first century. He spoke of “the ocean, impassable to man, and the worlds beyond it,” which are regulated by God’s laws. Origen, a third-century Christian theologian with some plural-world speculations of his own,<sup> </sup>suggested two possible interpretations for Clement’s words. One was that the St. Clement might have been referring to other parts of the Earth that we cannot reach because the ocean prevents such a journey. In this sense, “worlds” would be parallel to the expression used by later, ocean-crossing explorers when they referred to Europe, Asia, and Africa as the “Old World” and the Americas as the “New World.” The second interpretation suggested by Origen was that St. Clement thought “the whole universe of existing things” contained “other worlds”; he “wished the globe of the sun or moon, and of the other bodies called planets, to each be termed ‘worlds.’” If this is the correct interpretation, then here we have what might well be the earliest surviving Christian reference to other worlds within our universe, and even to worlds with inhabitants.</p>
<p>We should also note that Church Fathers such as St. Jerome and St. Augustine, although not speculating about ETI (given the limits of ancient philosophy), did affirm the existence of non-human, non-angelic forms of intelligence. They both cited evidence that at least some of the creatures appearing in pagan mythology (such as satyrs or fauns) might actually exist and live on Earth, and such creatures did not seem to cause them theological difficulty. This observation is increasingly important today, when the public ETI conversation has begun broadening to include other possibilities for non-human intelligence (NHI).</p>
<h2>Medieval Speculations</h2>
<p>Surviving documents from the Early Middle Ages reveal very little speculation focused on the plurality of worlds, though the philosophical and theological debate about it, with its implications for the possible existence of ETI, was apparently continuing. The rediscovery of Aristotle’s work in the West made an unparalleled contribution to the flourishing of philosophy, theology, and science in the High Middle Ages (c. 1000–1300). But that philosopher’s fertile influence on medieval thinkers also brought with it certain limitations. Nowhere are these more evident than in the continuing debate about the plurality of worlds and its implications for the idea of ETI.</p>
<p>Following in the footsteps of Aristotle, the great Scholastic philosopher-theologians of this period—most importantly, St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274)—largely concluded that only one world can exist. Again, the word “world” was taken in the sense of “universe,” not earthlike planets. As we have seen, Aristotle’s geocentric model of the universe led him to conclude that the totality of things in existence has a single circumference and a single center, which is the Earth. So, there could be no possibility of another universe with a different circumference and center.</p>
<p>St. Thomas also drew from Plato’s thought in claiming that a singular universe resulted from a singular divine Craftsman. Because of the oneness of God, he insisted, it was fitting for him to create only one world, mirroring his own perfection. Nevertheless, again following the Greeks, St. Thomas did allow for the possibility that the stars were animated by souls, and were thus living creatures. In this way, he thought that at least one form of extraterrestrial intelligence was possible.</p>
<p>We must emphasize here that the ancient and medieval Christian philosophers who objected to the idea of a “plurality of worlds” were primarily doing so <em>not</em> on the basis of Christian revelation. They were “following the science” on this matter, and the cosmological model of the pre-Christian natural philosophy of the ancient Greeks was the closest thing they had to a science of the cosmos.</p>
<h2>God’s Power Isn’t Limited</h2>
<p>The Scholastic theology of St. Thomas and his scholarly allies came to dominate the universities of Europe. But three years after he died, in 1277, Étienne Tempier, the Bishop of Paris (the city where Thomas had taught), publicly condemned 219 beliefs that were popular at the universities. Étienne considered these beliefs heresies because they seemed to limit the power of God.</p>
<p>One of the condemned notions was that God “cannot make many worlds.” If God is all-powerful, as the Church has always taught, then who could dare claim that it would be beyond his power to make more than one universe? If he created our universe out of nothing, then surely he can create out of nothing just as many other universes as he wishes.</p>
<p>As a result of this public condemnation, many of the theologians of the universities were pressed to reconsider their position on the matter, and the door was open to new speculation about other worlds. Among those who engaged in such speculation, employing significant criticisms of Aristotle’s universe, were the Franciscan philosopher William of Ockham (c. 1280– 1347); the cleric Jean Buridan (c. 1295–1358), rector of the University of Paris; and Nicole Oresme (1325–1382), the Bishop of Paris. Though in the end they all concluded that there is no plurality of worlds (in the sense of multiple entire universes), their critiques helped to identify the weaknesses in the arguments of Aristotle and Aquinas that figured into the continuing conversation in the Renaissance.</p>
<h2>Nicholas of Cusa</h2>
<p>A remarkable thinker of the late Middle Ages was Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464), a German theologian, philosopher, and astronomer. He turned decisively away from the Scholastic tradition of St. Thomas and so many others, drawing more from the thought of Plato than Aristotle. And his astonishingly original conception of the cosmos broke fundamentally with ancient and medieval notions.</p>
<p>Cusa taught that the universe is boundless and has no center, rather than Earth being the immovable center as Aristotle and his Scholastic followers had taught. He also speculated that Earth is just one among innumerable similar planets. All the heavenly bodies, he said, even the sun, moon, and stars, are composed of the same basic elements as the Earth. For these reasons, our position in the universe is neither central nor unique. In these ideas, Cusa anticipated many of the key ideas of modern cosmology.</p>
<p>The Cardinal did not shy away from insisting that the celestial bodies could be inhabited or from speculating about their inhabitants:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Life, as it exists here on earth in the form of men, animals, and plants, is to be found, let us suppose, in a higher form in the solar and stellar regions. Rather than think that so many of the stars and parts of the heavens are uninhabited and that this earth of ours alone is peopled—and that with beings, perhaps, of an inferior type—we will suppose that in every region there are inhabitants, differing in nature by rank and all owing their origin to God, who is the center and circumference of all stellar regions.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In this way, Cusa declared the whole universe to be the stage for an abundance of varied life forms.</p>
<p>We might have expected Cusa’s rather radical break with philosophical tradition to provoke considerable opposition. Yet, his appointment as a cardinal, papal legate, and papal advisor, and his participation in the ecumenical Council of Basel (1431), all suggest that at least within the Catholic Church, he was respected and embraced by authorities at the highest levels.</p>
<h2>ETI Original Sin, Incarnation, Redemption?</h2>
<p>Cusa’s contemporary, the French philosopher and theologian William of Vorilong (aka Guillame de Varouillon, c. 1392–1463), joined the cardinal in pressing the bounds of the ancient conversation. He allowed not just for a plurality of worlds, but an infinity of worlds, noting that the pre-Christian atomist philosopher Democritus had posited such an infinity. Vorilong concluded that if the atheist Democritus had only understood that these worlds “lie hid in the mind of God,” rather than thinking them the result of random interaction of atoms, “he would have understood rightly.”</p>
<p>Contrary to the atomists, however, Vorilong suggested that such worlds could be located <em>within</em> our universe and that they could be inhabited (which he seemed to think probable). Then he moved to boldly go where no theologian had ever gone before. Vorilong raised a pointed question concerning these other-worldly inhabitants: Would their existence be compatible with traditional Christian teaching about original sin, the Incarnation, and redemption in Christ?</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If it be inquired whether men exist on that world, and whether they have sinned as Adam sinned, I answer no, for they would not exist in sin and did not spring from Adam . . . As to the question whether Christ by dying on this earth could redeem the inhabitants of another world, I answer that he is able to do this even if the worlds were infinite, but it would not be fitting for him to go unto another world that he must die again.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Vorilong concluded, then, that since ETI would not be descendants of Adam, they would be without the original sin inherited from him. But even if they somehow had fallen as the human race did, Christ’s incarnation and redemptive sacrifice on Earth could provide them redemption. The Son of God would have the ability to be incarnate on other worlds as well, even an infinite number of times.<sup> </sup>But that scenario of an infinite series of brutal passions and deaths, he insisted, would not be fitting.</p>
<p>If these things are indeed true, we might wonder how we could possibly ever find out about them. Unlike most modern science fiction writers speculating about ETI, Vorilong did not envision visitors from another inhabited world traveling to ours. But he offered another possibility: “By what means are we able to have knowledge of that world? I answer by angelic revelation or by divine means.”<sup> </sup>God could tell us through angels or prophets.</p>
<p>By the end of the fifteenth century, then, we find that the age-old conversation about the plurality of worlds was developing a new focus. Rather than speculations about multiple entire universes, attention was turning toward multiple worlds within our universe. The notion of these other worlds being inhabited by intelligent creatures now came more to the forefront.</p>
<h2>Late Renaissance and Early Modern Developments</h2>
<p>Given the remarkable intellectual ferment in Western culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a number of scientists, philosophers, and theologians entered the ETI arena of debate. Controversy sharpened as clashing scientific models, philosophies, and theologies raised the volume of the conversation, and positions on the central issues, multiplied. What led to such developments?</p>
<p>First, the science of astronomy was making great strides. The “heliocentric” (“sun-centered”) model of the universe, first proposed by the Greek astronomer Aristarchus of Samos in the third century BC was given new life by Nicholas Copernicus (1473–1543), a Polish mathematician, astronomer, and Doctor of Canon Law.<sup> </sup>Copernicus’s most famous work, <em>On the Revolution of the Celestial Orbs, </em>was dedicated to Pope Paul III (1468–1549). In it, the author laid out his arguments with confidence in “the divine providence of the Creator of all things.”</p>
<p>This new model, though forcefully challenged by scientists, philosophers, and theologians alike, came eventually to replace the long-established geocentric model of Aristotle and Ptolemy. It needed important modifications, but it led in the end to a more accurate understanding of our planet’s place in the solar system.<sup> </sup>It also continued to shift the focus of attention in the “plurality of worlds” debate. Rather than speculations about multiple entire universes, new theories emerged about the “worlds” that could be observed in the sky of <em>this</em> universe: the sun, moon, planets, and stars.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, philosophers were challenging more than Aristotle’s model of the cosmos, impelled by a revival of ancient ideas both from Plato and from the atomists. The driving notion behind certain arguments was the “principle of plenitude,” which was drawn ultimately from Plato’s thought<em>.</em> According to this principle, the universe contains all possible forms of existence, so that whatever can be, including multiple inhabited worlds, will be, and it is good that they are.</p>
<p>At the same time, advances in technology, most notably the telescope (invented in 1608), allowed researchers to discover more details about the heavenly bodies that were visible in the sky. Much attention was therefore devoted to comparing the physical characteristics of such bodies to those of Earth. Conclusions about their comparative composition, physical features, and environmental conditions led inevitably to speculation about their possible inhabitants.</p>
<p>Not surprisingly, theologians found themselves pressed to respond to both scientific and philosophical developments, some of which seemed to pose a challenge to traditional Christian beliefs. They were concerned to ensure that theology remained faithful to Sacred Scripture and Tradition. But as the Western Christian tradition was itself shattered by various Protestant movements, theologians of differing convictions debated among themselves about ETI. Catholic and other Christian thinkers proposed a variety of speculations about the subject, but the Catholic Church still took no official position on it (and has not done so to this day).</p>
<p>Catholic figures of those times who were open to the idea of ETI included not only Copernicus, but also such figures as Tomasso Campanella (1568–1639), a Dominican friar, theologian, and philosopher; the philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650); and the poet Alexander Pope (1688–1744). They were joined by a number of prominent Protestant figures.</p>
<h2>The Era of the Extraterrestrial</h2>
<p>By the mid-eighteenth century, the notion of ETI had been promoted by a number of scientists, philosophers, theologians, and poets, including some of the most prominent intellectuals of the day, both Catholic and non-Catholic. In the words of one historian, “the era of the extraterrestrial had begun.”<sup> </sup>These thinkers certainly had their opponents on the issue, but much of public opinion seemed to follow their lead.</p>
<p>One fascinating contribution came from the internationally known Jesuit priest, scientist, philosopher and poet Roger Joseph Boscovich (1711–1787), who taught at the Collegium Romanum and the University of Padua. Boscovich also played a major role in founding the Brera Observatory near Milan.</p>
<p>In his <em>Philosophiae naturalis theoria </em>(1758), he advanced the startling notion (based on a chemical theory about the nature of fire) that “in the sun itself, & in the stars . . . there may exist bodies . . . [that] may grow & live without the slightest injury of any kind to their organic structure.” More remarkable still was his speculation that matter consists of atoms that in addition to interacting gravitationally, as Newton had proposed, were also centers of other forces, both attractive and repulsive, which is indeed our modern understanding. Perhaps such bodies of matter, he proposed, can interpenetrate one another:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There might be a large number of material & sensible [perceptible] universes existing in the same space, separated one from the other in such a way that one was perfectly independent of the other, & the one could never acquire any indication of the existence of the other.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He elaborated:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>What if there are other kinds of things that are different from those about us, or even exactly similar to ours, which have, so to speak, another infinite space, which is distant from this our infinite space by no interval either finite or infinite, but is so foreign to it, situated, so to speak, elsewhere in such a way that it has no communication with this space of ours; & thus will induce no relation of distance.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>These multiple universes could in fact, he goes on to suggest, exist “in a time situated outside the whole of our eternity.”</p>
<p>The breadth of Boscovich’s theory is stunning: God could have created, not just intelligent life on other planets, but entire parallel inhabited universes in parallel eternities. And in a work published after his death, the theorist even considered the possibility of “a sequence of similar universes,” some of which were in size like tiny grains of sand compared to others. His vision in many ways foreshadowed today’s speculations in cosmology and physics, such as theories with extra space dimensions, “hidden sectors” of matter that do not interact (or interact very weakly) with ordinary matter, and “multiverse” scenarios.</p>
<p>The French Catholic philosopher Comte Joseph de Maistre (1754–1821) addressed directly and confidently the issue of Christ’s relationship to extraterrestrials. In his <em>Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg </em>(1821), he criticized certain theologians who reject the notion of ETI “for fear that it disturbs the doctrine of redemption,” who instead insist that “the other planets are mere globes, <em>destitute of life and beauty, </em>which the Almighty has launched into space, apparently like a tennis-player, for his amusement solely.”</p>
<p>By the nineteenth century, and into the early twentieth century, the notion of extraterrestrial intelligence was no longer widely viewed among the well-read in Europe and the United States as an eccentric and perhaps impious speculation. In many ways it had become instead a near-dogma among astronomers, and a common assumption among many theologians as well. St. John Henry Newman (1801–1890), the English Catholic convert theologian, cardinal, and man of letters, complained in his celebrated <em>Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent </em>(1870) that in his day, in religious circles any doubts about the existence of ETI were seen as “blasphemy.”</p>
<h2>Catholic Poets, Priests, and a Blessed</h2>
<p>In this period, Catholic poets such as Aubrey de Vere (1814–1902) and Alice Meynell (1847–1922) wrote lyrically of ETI and their relationship to Christ. Prominent Catholic clergymen who wrote of their conviction that ETI exists were numerous and scattered across the United States, England, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy.</p>
<p>Among the clergy was Père Joseph Félix (1810–1891), a prominent Parisian preacher, who announced in 1863 to thousands of the Catholic faithful in Notre Dame Cathedral that the plurality of worlds was most certainly compatible with Christian beliefs. He told those scientists who saw belief in ETI as a barrier to faith: “Put into the sidereal world [the realm of the distant stars] as many populations as you please . . . Catholic dogma has here a tolerance that will astonish you and ought to satisfy you.”</p>
<p>In Italy, for more than two decades the pluralist position was promoted by the prolific Fr. Angelo Secchi (1818–1878), the director of the Roman College Observatory and one of the founders of astrophysics. In 1856, he noted in a work about the new Observatory:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is with a sweet sentiment that man thinks of these worlds without number, where each star is a sun which, as minister of the divine bounty, distributes life and goodness to the other innumerable beings, blessed by the hand of the Omnipotent.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Another prominent proponent of such ideas was the German priest and seminary professor Joseph Pohle (1852–1922), who joined the founding faculty of the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., in 1889. Though Pohle was known among German and American seminarians primarily for his massive theological textbook, the twelve-volume <em>Textbook of Dogmatics, </em>in Germany he was recognized as a leading proponent of pluralism. His<em> Star Worlds and Their Inhabitants </em>(1884–1885) combined science and history with metaphysics and theology to consider the probability for inhabitants in various celestial bodies, including those of our solar system.</p>
<p>One last Catholic voice of the nineteenth century deserves mention. The celebrated German mystic and stigmatist Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich (1774–1824) allegedly received numerous private revelations throughout her lifetime. These reportedly included visions of planets and other celestial bodies both inhabited and uninhabited, some “awaiting a future population.”</p>
<p>The authenticity of some elements in her writings was eventually questioned because of an editor’s work. Yet we should note that for half a century, a number of eminent Catholic theologians who examined the documents found no reason to doubt that the existence of such creatures was in accord with a traditional Christian view of the universe.</p>
<h2>Liveliest Speculation</h2>
<p>Before 1900, numerous publications about ETI made little effort to distinguish between scientific and religious views. But throughout the twentieth century, fewer explicitly Christian voices were heard to address the matter. As the American astronomer Carl Sagan (1934–1996), himself an agnostic, concluded with regard to the history of ETI speculation, in this field as in others, “science has systematically expropriated areas which are the traditional concern of religion.”</p>
<p>Nevertheless, according to the American astrobiologist Douglas Vakoch, it was at the beginning of the “Age of Space,” in the middle of the twentieth century, that a flurry of brief but provocative Christian theological speculations about ETI appeared in response to the new space exploration. One scientist of the period, the Executive Secretary of the American Rocket Society, observed that “the liveliest speculation” about ETI came from Catholic theologians.</p>
<p>Summing up the thought of a number of these theologians writing between 1955 and 1965, Vakoch observed: “The dominant position of this group was that belief in extraterrestrial beings is consistent with both science and Christian theology. Most of those who took a position on whether such life is probable argued that it is.” Vakoch’s survey of this decade includes references to a number of Catholic theologians (many of them priests): Theodore J. Zubek, John P. Kleinz, Daniel C. Raible, A. Carr, J. D. Conway, James Harford, John J. Lynch, L. C. McHugh, and Angelo Perego.</p>
<p>Among these thinkers, the most common argument for the probable existence of ETI was the glory of God. Creatures in other worlds would glorify God not just by their very existence (reflecting his greatness, love, wisdom, and power) but also by consciously and intentionally acknowledging him as their Creator. Some suggested that certain extraterrestrial races might even glorify God in a better way than we do.</p>
<p>One prominent twentieth-century saint firmly agreed with that idea. The celebrated Italian Capuchin priest and friar St. Pio of Pietrelcino (1887–1968), more commonly known as Padre Pio, once insisted in private conversation that “other beings” exist “who love the Lord . . . The Lord certainly did not limit his glory to this small Earth. On other planets other beings exist who did not sin and fall as we did.”</p>
<p>Pope Saint Paul VI (1897–1978) reportedly found the possibility of extraterrestrials to be reasonable and could see how “the universal Church” would in that case include more than the human race. And when Pope Saint John Paul II (1920–2005) was asked by a child in a public audience, “Holy Father, are there any aliens?” the saint did not respond, “That is contrary to Church teaching,” or “We don’t know.” Instead, he replied simply, “Always remember: They are children of God as we are.” Since that time, the number of Catholic theologians, philosophers, and scientists addressing the subject has multiplied. Among those who consider ETI a possibility or even a probability, and its existence not contrary to the Church’s teaching, we could include Thomas O’Meara, Marie I. George, Peter M. J. Hess, Fr. George Coyne, SJ, Fr. José G. Funes, SJ, Ernan McMullin, Fr. Roch Kereszty, <a href="https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/authors/christopher-baglow/">Christopher T. Baglow</a>,<sup> </sup>and others.</p>
<h2>A Noble and Wondrous Question</h2>
<p>In response to the current renewed interest in Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP, aka UFOs), the recently established Sol Foundation seeks to bring together “experts from academia and government to address the philosophical, policy, and scientific problems” presented by the study of UAP and the closely related topic of extraterrestrial intelligence. To their credit, the organizers of the foundation seek to include religious scholars in their studies. At Sol’s first Symposium in November of 2023, the present writer was invited to address the specific topic of ETI and the Catholic faith. When the video recording of the presentation was posted online, viewers (as expected) posted a wide variety of comments. Many expressed their approval, or at least openness, regarding its thesis: In light of Church teaching and the history of Catholic thought on the subject, we have ample reason to believe that the Church could accommodate the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligent forms of life while remaining faithful to her Tradition.</p>
<p>Even so, one commentator offered a terse criticism: “The Catholic Church once again is playing catch up.” These words reflect a wider sentiment found among many critics of the Faith that the Catholic Church is typically caught off guard by new scientific discoveries that are supposedly contrary to her teachings. As a result, they accuse the Church of revising its doctrine while pretending nothing has changed, as a kind of “constant rearguard action,” as Pope Benedict XVI once described it.</p>
<p>The highly-condensed history of the Catholic ETI conversation presented here demonstrates that in this matter, at least, the Church is by no means “playing catch up.” The Church has never issued a formal statement denying the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence, and the reluctance of most early Catholic thinkers to entertain the matter was not based on theology, but on the mistaken assumptions of a “science” they had inherited from pre-Christian philosophers. Once those philosophical assumptions were challenged, quite a large number of prominent Catholic figures showed themselves capable of imagining the fascinating possibilities of intelligent extraterrestrial life. As we have seen, some of the resulting speculations actually anticipated certain scientific discoveries and theories of the twentieth century.</p>
<p>The Church has left the door wide open for Catholic scientists, as well as Catholic theologians and philosophers, to explore the topic. We should look to St. Albert the Great, the thirteenth-century patron saint of philosophers and scientists, for encouragement in this regard. He insisted: “Since one of the most wondrous and noble questions about Nature is whether there is one world or many, a question that the human mind desires to understand per se, it seems desirable for us to inquire about it.”</p>
<div class="entry-content">
<p>EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is part of a collaboration with the <a href="https://www.catholicscientists.org/">Society of Catholic Scientists</a> (click <a href="https://www.catholicscientists.org/join"><strong>here</strong></a> to read about becoming a member). You can ask questions and join a wider discussion of this essay at the bottom of <a href="https://catholicscientists.org/articles/extraterrestrial-intelligence-and-the-catholic-faith-a-brief-history-of-an-ancient-conversation/">this</a> page where the original version of it is linked, which includes an extensive appendix.</p>
</div>Paul Thigpentag:churchlifejournal.nd.edu,2005:News/1604792024-03-11T05:00:00-04:002024-03-11T12:59:16-04:00Toward a Liturgical Cosmotechnics<p>Jeffrey Bishop on culture and cultus.</p><p><span class="dropcap">T</span>here is a fundamental opposition in Western philosophy between several pairs of ideas that relate to technology. In <a href="https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/what-is-man-that-ai-is-mindful-of-him/">an earlier essay</a> I argued that much of Western thought is defined by these oppositions: <em>techne</em> and <em>episteme</em> (in Plato); natural and artificial beings (in Aristotle); human actor and nature (in Bacon and Descartes). In fact, in the Cartesian rendering, the human is master of, and possesses, nature. Thus, we imagine the human as an entity apart from nature, as the one who can write his or her ethics into the algorithms of our machines.</p>
<p>I pointed out in what I said earlier that the relation of humans and technology is not merely one of a master that manipulates nature with their tools. Just as the use of the hammer allows us to achieve the work we intend, the use of the hammer also makes the arm stronger; and over time, it might even cause the carpenter’s shoulder, a rotator cuff, to tear. All tools have multiple actions, not just those that we intend. The actions reverberate back to us, changing the tool user. Tools even change how we see the world around us. As the old saying goes, “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”</p>
<p>I argued that the same goes for our use of AI. I learned to think because I learned to write. Writing shaped my capacity to reason. Many in the humanities have suggested that we might need to change the way we assess students, because they are using AI to write their papers. But the assessment of students is the least of our problems, and what is at stake is the loss of the development of rational thought. Writing is a technical practice that enables a certain form of reasoning.</p>
<p>Thus, we cannot simply imagine ourselves as masters and possessors of nature through our technics. Our technologies are in part constitutive of the human being. Our way of thinking about technology, in which the human has mastery over technology, is a spiritual problem. In what follows I would like to set out the contours of a different way of thinking about human technicity. In fact, AI is only the latest trend in a certain techno-mytho-religion regnant in Western modernity; it is a religious outlook that Christians ought to find problematic.</p>
<h2>The Contemporary Techno-Mytho-Religion</h2>
<p>Ernst Cassirer, the early twentieth century neo-Kantian philosopher, argued that, rather than the <em>a priori</em> forms of space and time, we should understand the conditions of possibility for human thought to be immanentized symbolic forms. According to Cassirer, there are five symbolic forms including mythology/religion, art, language, history, and science. These symbolic forms are given by a culture, and each form mediates some aspect of the relationship between the subject who encounters an object and the object that the subject encounters. Every culture has each of these symbolical forms, even those cultures, like ours, that deny they have a mythology. Each symbolic form mediates a different aspect of knowledge. Mythology/religion mediates moral knowledge; art mediates aesthetic knowledge; history mediates knowledge of the past; language mediates many different kinds of knowledge about reality; and science mediates factual knowledge of reality.<a href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[1]<!--[endif]--></a></p>
<p>According to Cassirer, mythology is the dominant symbolic form for “primitive” cultures. Mythology anthropomorphizes of the powers of the universe. Thus, Poseidon/Neptune is the power of the sea; Hefestus/Vulcan is the power of the volcano and fire. Greco-Roman mythology represented the forces of the world anthropomorphically through myths. Yet, mythology does not have a moral dimension to it, according to Cassirer. The gods of Greece and Rome are fickle. Poseidon can destroy a human walking by the sea for no reason at all. They lack the moral dimension. Mythology anthropomorphizes what <em>is</em> the case. Power just <em>is</em>; it lacks an <em>ought</em>.</p>
<p>Cassirer goes on to say that religion adds the moral “ought” to mythology. The power of Poseidon can destroy the human for no reason, but it <em>ought not</em> be the case. There is value to the person beyond the mere facts. Mytho-religion is the symbolic form that creates the moral code and moral duty, in Cassirer’s philosophy. Mytho-religion mediates our relationships between God and humankind, between and among humankind, and between humankind and the rest of creation. In other words, Cassirer sees the moral dimension as adding the level of duty to the powers of reality, and the duties are spelled out by the law codes. I will say more about religion later.</p>
<p>Cassirer says that in our day, science is the symbolic form that mediates our understanding of the powers of the world, now thought of as electromagnetism, gravity, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force. Yet, none of us have sense experiences of these forces. Does gravity have a smell? Can you taste electromagnetism? What color are the nuclear forces? Can you touch them or hear them?</p>
<p>Rather, we perceive the effects of the gravitational forces—for example—on bodies, but we do not perceive gravity itself. We can represent the gravitational force mathematically, but we do not experience gravity itself: F<sub>grav</sub> = (G) M1 x M2/r<sup>2</sup>, where F<sub>grav </sub>is the gravitational force, G is the gravitational constant, M1 and M2 are the masses of the two objects in relation to one another, and r is the distance between the center masses of the two objects. The symbolic mediation of this mathematic equation is very different from the symbolic mediation of the anthropomorphized representation of Poseidon as the power of the sea.</p>
<p>Modern science—with its mathematical symbolic forms—represents to the human mind what <em>is</em> the case in the world. Just as ancient Greek mythology used anthropomorphized symbolic forms to represent the powers of the world to the Greek mind, we do so now in the abstract symbols of mathematics. Thus, these symbolic forms are devices of representation, tools of representation that habituate one into seeing the forces of nature in a certain culturally appropriate way. Just as Socrates draws the line in the sand to assist Meno in remembering a truth in the world, our cultural symbolic tools refract the features of reality into something that can be understood by culturally instantiated beings like ourselves.</p>
<p>As we have seen, early modern Western philosophy imagined the human as the master and possessor of nature. The idea is that human knowledge of what <em>is</em> the case in the world would give humans power over the forces of nature. We, the human actors, supply the end toward which those forces could be aimed in modern thought.</p>
<p>With the right tools—technologies—humankind can control and manufacture its own worlds. The human can ride herd over the forces of nature, and through human technics, humans can build the New Jerusalem, Bensalem, the great society, or the posthuman future. Throw into the mix David Hume’s assertion, “never an <em>ought</em> from an <em>is</em>” (where humans supply the <em>oughts</em> after the facts are established) and we find a different mytho-religion at work, call it a techno-mytho-religion. The human—the master and possessor of nature—supplies the <em>ought</em> to the <em>is</em> of reality and through human tools builds the ethic into human-made machines aimed at ushering in a new order.<a href="#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[2]<!--[endif]--></a></p>
<h2>The Sovereignty of Good</h2>
<p>By making the human the measure of all things and the master and possessor of nature, we can see the foundation of the various humanisms that have peppered the various European philosophical empires; at least, this is how I would extend the claims made by Iris Murdoch in her book, <em>The Sovereignty of the Good</em>.</p>
<p>Murdoch points to the problems that arose in the mainstream moral theories of her day, problems that I don’t think we have overcome. Murdoch’s three essays, taken together, claim that modern moral philosophy—whether in its analytic, existentialist, or utilitarian forms—turns our attention to superficial publicly accessible acts found on the surface of human behavior (behaviorism and utilitarianism) or finds its source of decision to be a thin, deflated self that wills to act from nothing substantive (existentialism). With their insistence on truth, the various moral philosophical systems lose sight of the good, for the good is too subtle for the crass work of scientific and philosophical analysis. The good, the true, and the beautiful exist in the world, and the moral life is the life that prepares a self to receive its bearings from outside the humanist self.</p>
<p>Put differently, Murdoch notes that the moral life is the life of work and practice; you might say, one has to engage in a moral technics to do and to know the good. We humans are not the tool-bearing, masters and possessors of nature; rather the humans find themselves in a moral universe, upon which they are dependent and to which they have to accommodate themselves so as to not overstep her bounds. The virtues are the tools by which one comes to be able to see the good of the world, the truth of the world, and the beauty of the world. It is through these intellectual and moral techniques that they participate in molding themselves into its likeness.</p>
<p>Yuk Hui comes to a very similar conclusion in his gem of a book, <em>The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics</em>. Hui explores what the various Western approaches to technology have wrought on the world, and how Asian philosophy—especially Chinese philosophy—has appropriated Western science and technology. He also explores the various attempts of Chinese and Japanese philosophers to overcome Western modern and postmodern philosophy (Modern philosophy inevitably morphs into postmodern philosophy).<a href="#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[3]<!--[endif]--></a></p>
<p>Without a hint of romanticism, Hui turns to what he claims to be a more ancient rendering of Chinese philosophy that places the human in a world that is already moral, the world that is <em>Dao-Qi</em>. The <em>Dao</em> is the governing principle of the universe, the way or the method by which the cosmos is organized. Yet, <em>Dao</em> is already the moral way of reality. <em>Qi</em> is the vessel, or the tool or device through which <em>Dao</em> is mediated. The <em>Dao-Qi</em> pairing appears in one of the most ancient books of Chinese writing, <em>I Ching</em>, and Hui argues that this fundamental metaphysics in Chinese philosophy is a moral metaphysics (not a metaphysics of morals). <em>Dao</em>—what the world <em>is</em>—is already moral. <em>Qi</em> are the technics through which there is a mediation of the <em>ought-is</em> of <em>Dao</em>.<a href="#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[4]<!--[endif]--></a> Chinese ritual practice (<em>Li</em>) are the habits that put one in proper disposition to take up with <em>Dao-Qi</em>. <em>Li</em>—the ritual practice—mediates through a technics, the proper disposition of the human actor.</p>
<p>There is some question among Chinese philosophers as to whether Hui’s reading of Daoist philosophy is historically accurate.<a href="#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[5]<!--[endif]--></a> Yet, Hui nonetheless understands that the Western proclivity to set the human apart from nature is part of the problem; separating the metaphysical from the moral is the problem. The binaries of nature-human, or nature-culture, or is-ought is the fundamental problem at the heart of modern technology, including its appropriation in China, according to Hui.</p>
<p>Cassirer, the neo-Kantian philosopher, comes close to something akin to Hui’s rendering of the Chinese moral metaphysics, but Cassirer’s neo-Kantianism gets in the way. As noted, in Cassirer’s philosophy, the <em>is</em> awaits the human to add the moral duties in a religious idiom. In my estimation, Cassirer’s neo-Kantianism gets in the way of his Judaism. For in the ancient Hebrew mytho-religion the truth of the world is the goodness of the world, no <em>is-ought</em> rupture. “God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. God saw that light was good” (Gen 1:3-4). The duties—the <em>oughts</em>—are not added after the mythology of what <em>is</em>. In the Hebrew cosmogony, the being of creation is inseparable from its goodness. The ancient Hebrew rendering of creation is that it is already good in its coming into being.</p>
<p>The central character in the techno-mytho-religion of the late modern West is the human actor—the master and possessor of nature through technical action. This human actor masters the power of her tools by building into the machines its own morality as if it is just one more mechanical component to be added to the power of the machine.<a href="#_ftn6" name="_ftnref6" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[6]<!--[endif]--></a> If the modern human is to design its morality into things, we must first understand; and to understand things, there is a central act of ritualized violence, for example in the animal sacrifices of the modern biotechnological laboratory.</p>
<p>We do not see the ritualized action in the modern techno-mytho-religion of Western technics. Yet, millions of animals are manufactured for the medical technoscientific enterprise. In the biotechnological world, these animals are sacrificed in service to some notion of a god-like posthuman creature that is invincible to disease and possibly even death (if we are to accept some transhumanist thinkers and biogerontologists). And lest you think I am being hyperbolic, the term used for the killing of these animals is indeed “sacrifice.”</p>
<p>On the contrary, in the Hebrew creation myth, the human, created in the image and likeness of God (and who is thus “very good”) must have practices and rituals that mediate the moral metaphysics (<em>not </em>the metaphysics of morals). The beings of creation are already good in a moral universe, and the human must position itself in relation to these goods. There is no <em>is-ought</em> distinction in Judaism and, likewise, there is no <em>is-ought</em> distinction in the Christian inheritance of the Hebrew mytho-religion.</p>
<h2>Christian Liturgy as the Christian Cosmotechnics</h2>
<p>While Cassirer missed the unity of the true and the good—the unity of the good and the true—in the Hebrew creation myth, Murdoch elevates the practice of the virtues as the propaedeutic for encountering the good and truth of being. Murdoch essentially argues that the good is too subtle for the crass work of scientific and philosophical analysis. She turns to the practice of the virtues as the act of positioning oneself rightly in relation to the goodness of beings and Being. Hui, likewise, sees moral metaphysics—rather than the metaphysics of morals—as central to a cosmotechics that is both local and moral.</p>
<p>Hui points to the importance of these technical practices as well. In Confucian philosophy, <em>Li</em> is the ritualized action that cultivates moral sensibility in the one performing the action.<a href="#_ftn7" name="_ftnref7" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[7]<!--[endif]--></a> Ritualized action is the action that properly situates the actor in relation, not only to other persons, but also to the things with which and upon which the actor acts.<a href="#_ftn8" name="_ftnref8" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[8]<!--[endif]--></a> Ritualized actions properly dispose the actor to a world of significance, including moral significance.</p>
<p>Ronald L. Grimes says that every ritualized action situates the actor in relation to some power relation. For example, ceremony as a form of ritualized action is the celebration of power. Liturgy, however, is the ritualized action that places the actor in subservience of another power, such that the actor waits on power.<a href="#_ftn9" name="_ftnref9" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[9]<!--[endif]--></a></p>
<p>Let’s look at the liturgical action and prayers in the Roman Catholic Mass. In thanksgiving for the gifts, while elevating the gift of bread on the sacred vessel of the paten, the priest says, “Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation, for through your goodness we have received the bread we offer you: fruit of the earth and work of human hands, it will become for us the bread of life.” While elevating the gift of wine in the scared vessel of the chalice, the priest says, “Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation, for through your goodness we have received this wine we offer you: fruit of the vine and work of human hands, it will become our spiritual drink.”</p>
<p>The worshipper awaits the power of the Creator. In each instance, there is something from nature, or better something from creation—the wheat and the grapes; something from culture—the work of human hands; and something to be transformed through the work of God, who gave the gifts to begin with. The supplicant calls upon the Creator to act, as she stands by and awaits God’s action.</p>
<p>However, on closer reflection, we find that wheat and grapes are themselves products of hundreds of years of human cultivation—the technological work of human hands. Wheat and grapes come from God. The traditions of wheat and grape cultivation are gifts from ancestors, combining with the gifts from God. The work of human hands to make them into bread and wine are gifts given by others. They will, through the action of the Holy One, become deeper gifts, the food and drink of spiritual life. From gift to gift to gift; from the goodness of the Other to goodness of God’s creation to goodness of human culture and cultivation.</p>
<p>We are now at the point where we can ask the important question of human technics: do our technics and habits reveal the relationship of the human to creation’s moral metaphysics? Do our habits and practices reveal the place of the human in relation to the whole of creation? Do our habits and practices reveal the human as a part of creation, and as a subordinate actor? Unlike the techno-mytho-religion of modern Western cultures, where the human is imagined as the technological master and possessor of nature, the Christian liturgy reveals the human to be one creature among others, a sub-creator rather than a co-creator.</p>
<p>The human, then, is the creature that by its very nature, requires the mediation of technics for it to properly be what it is. The human is the being that by its nature is cultured. As thinkers like Bernard Stiegler and Yuk Hui have shown us, our technics—tools, techniques, devices—are just materialized features of the ideas that animate cultures and shape the way we take up with reality. It is no wonder then that our word, <em>culture</em>, is etymologically related to the Latin word for worship, <em>cultus</em>.<!-- [if !supportFootnotes]--></p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[1]<!--[endif]--></a> Ernst Cassirer, <em>An Essay on Man</em>, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[2]<!--[endif]--></a> In another publication, I have called the techno-mytho-religion, Transhumanism’s WEIRD Religion. See Jeffrey P. Bishop, “Transhumanism’s WEIRD Religion: On the Ontotheological Morality of the Posthuman,” Philosophy, Theology, and the Sciences 2023; 10(2): 175-198. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1628/ptsc-2023-0020.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[3]<!--[endif]--></a> Yuk Hui, <em>The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics</em>, Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic, 2022.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[4]<!--[endif]--></a> Hui, op.cit, 65-69.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[5]<!--[endif]--></a> See the presentation of Klara Sofija Sanja, “The Relationship between dao and qi in the Yi Jing: Chinese Cosmotechnology,” Presented at the Conference on Yi Jing in Reykajvik, January 4, 2023. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lNQWwYvJbU">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lNQWwYvJbU</a>. Accessed 3/1.2024.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref6" name="_ftn6" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[6]<!--[endif]--></a> See Peter Paul Verbeek, <em>Moralizing Technology: Understanding and Designing the Morality of Things</em>,</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref7" name="_ftn7" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[7]<!--[endif]--></a> Hui, op. cit., 108-110.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref8" name="_ftn8" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[8]<!--[endif]--></a> See Ronald Grimes, <em>Beginnings in Ritual Studies</em>, Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1982, 34-37.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref9" name="_ftn9" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[9]<!--[endif]--></a> Grimes, op. cit., p. 42-44.</p>
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</div>Jeffrey P. Bishoptag:churchlifejournal.nd.edu,2005:News/1603802024-03-08T06:00:00-05:002024-03-08T00:07:40-05:00Lent Is the Time of Conversion<p>Luigi Guissani on the liturgy. </p><p><span class="dropcap">T</span>here comes a time when the Word, the Christian discourse, must be born from our own personal looking at Jesus Christ. It is, in fact, Jesus Christ the Word who is at the center of our Lenten meditation.</p>
<p>If the theme of Advent was that of a global expectation, if the time of Christmas was the announcement of the salvation that has come and begun to manifest itself, the liturgy of Lent is<em> the supreme affirmation of this salvation that has occurred</em> in Jesus Christ—Jesus Christ who is Lord of man, of nature, of the cosmos, of the world, and of its whole history; Jesus Christ in the precise contours of his maturity, in the clear definition of his mission, in his face that is unmistakable, present among all human things. The mature figure of Christ, the new man, is made clear through the power of his newness. A new measure has entered the world, a new proposal has entered life, a measure and a proposal that are so new that the whole of life is played out in accepting this new measure or in sinking under as slaves of the old.</p>
<p>But the measure of the mystery of God is a mature person, a formed personality, who moves as a presence that we cannot flee, through our friendships, our houses, our work environments and interests, who personally confronts each of us. The entirety of faith is here: all of faith is in the face we take on, in the gaze we bring to this Person, in the reaction that we have to his presence . . . The child Jesus has grown up, the light of Epiphany now imposes itself on the streets, a light which responds to, which opposes itself to the expression of human affirmation in politics, in the common mentality, and in power.</p>
<p>Let us ask ourselves if we find ourselves in front of this figure, this reality, this person, if this You is in us, if this You invades our personality, if this You goes to our depths as a direction, as understanding, will, desire, love, if our life is this love. Otherwise, we are standing on the flesh, and “all flesh is like grass, and all its glory like the flower of the field; the grass withers, and the flower wilts; but the word of the Lord remains forever” (1 Pet 1:24-25). This Word is not a discourse—it is a real person, a man, Jesus Christ.</p>
<p>Let us bring out the awareness of this presence from the depth of the fog, from misunderstanding, from all the dissonance. Let us recollect ourselves in front of the One to whom our life is a response, who is the foundation, the meaning of our personal responsibility. We must quickly grasp once again this You whose presence the Gospels of Lent bring to our inner eye, to our imagination, making it easier to recognize the miracle of our life. The miracle of this presence is not given to those who do not recognize him as their own, sufficient to define the very meaning, the very substance of life, to become their very name (1 Pet 2:6-8).</p>
<p>This You and this presence signal a change in our life. Therefore, Lent is the time of conversion. It is no longer a vague expectation, no longer a joy without responsibility because the announcement has just been given, of wonder at its initial manifestation. In front of this mature, strong manifestation—which tells us the scope for which he came (“Before Abraham was, I AM” [ John 8:58])—in front of this mature presence that no longer hides the aims for which he came: to possess our lives—we must respond (Rom 8:2-23).</p>
<p>The first fundamental change that Lent brings, that the renewed awareness of this You should produce in our life, is that our life becomes a life of faith, becomes just—that is, lives by faith. The time of God will enrich the time that passes—the time that becomes the time of faith will enrich our soul and comfort it, will make it always stronger, console it, make it fuller and more capable of joy. “And those he predestined he also called; and those he called he also justified; and those he justified he also glorified” (Rom 8:30).</p>
<p>In short, it is a deep, radical change; it is holiness of life. Lent is the time to change the criterion of value, the time of penitence. All the miracles of Lent were done to change people. The miracle of the fact that Jesus Christ revealed himself in his mature personality, to propose himself and attract our mature personality, aims to invade and transform us in him.</p>
<p>This is the miracle by which others can glorify the Lord, the miracle by which people can understand that God has visited us, visits us: our transformation, our change. A change in us generates a place. The mature Christ, the newness of life that he brings, has created a new place, a new structure. And at the same time this new structure that our change produces becomes the place of the Spirit, becomes the objectivization of the power of the Spirit, as the Lord has done with the Church. “Since you have purified yourselves by obedience to the truth for sincere mutual love, love one another intensely from a pure heart. You have been born anew, not from perishable but from imperishable seed, through the living and abiding word of God” (1 Pet 1:22-23).</p>
<p>God directs us to a new urgency of life: that our change may create a structure, because only this reveals him as true, this creation not from a perishable seed, not from human will, not from the will of our own program, not from the will of our own refuge, not from the will of the one who flees from the earthly situation in which he has been placed to create his own earthly situation. “Not from perishable but from imperishable seed, through the living and abiding word of God”—from being attracted, from having heard this Word, from this mature and strong Person who changes things (as with the Samaritan woman), which changes the man born blind, which changes death into life, which dominates things because “before Abraham was, I AM.” I was there two thousand years ago, I am here now to encounter you, to call you, to sustain you. I want you.</p>
<p>Let us think again about the mature Jesus, the one who claims us, the one of whom the Gospels of Lent speak. Let us think again about the change he brings: first of all a radical faith, from which we are born, and the hope that is a steadfast aspiration, and the charity that creates objective, new structures. This structure which is a miracle to all men, and first of all to us, because the Lord has visited and visits the world through us. And let us remind ourselves that the clearest action of this conversion in charity is obedience in its deepest, widest aspect, an obedience born not from a perishable seed, or for some other reason, but from an imperishable seed. “Behold, I am laying a stone in Zion, a cornerstone, chosen and precious, and whoever believes in it shall not be put to shame” (1 Pet 2:6).</p>
<p>Because the cornerstone without what rests on it—without the connection to him—will remain a stumbling block. For us, Jesus Christ can remain only a stumbling block if he does not become the one in whom all our life is supported. It is the maturity of our person that corresponds, responds, adheres to the maturity of his person. “Although you have not seen him you love him; even though you do not see him now yet believe in him, you rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy, as you attain the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls” (1 Pet 1:8).</p>
<p>The true theme of life has to do with our personhood. Everything begins from and returns there: the maturity of our person is the adhesion that we give to Jesus Christ in Lent. This is the time when the Lord gathers us, saves us through the Word made flesh, who has become one of us. The liturgical year is the story of the Word of God in our life; Lent is the time of the Word of God that walks within the world.</p>
<p>But what other path can we walk with intelligence and freedom of heart if not the path that is clear and certain of its goal? Otherwise, it would be a place of violence. This is, in fact, the position of the person who seeks to bring salvation to the world through study, analysis, her own strength. There is no clear and certain path if the ultimate image of this path is not a gift, a grace. There would only be the violent attempt to impose a goal.</p>
<p>The Christian path is often not clear and intelligent in us and is, instead, somehow unruly and resistant, obscure and almost gloomy, unsatisfied, because our personality is not dominated, invested, determined in its imagination, in its judgment, and in its heart by the “last day,” by the end. <em>Love for the second coming</em>, love for the end of the world, love for the final manifestation—about which Saint Paul speaks in chapter 8 of the Letter to the Romans—has a particular name: <em>hope</em>. Christian hope is the certainty of the final outcome, the certainty in which we live our whole lives as love for a certain future. “The end of all things is at hand. Therefore, be serious and sober in prayer” (1 Pet 4:7).</p>
<p>Prayer is the awareness of reality in its truth, and the truth of reality is Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, in whom all things consist, because “the Father has given everything into his hands and, without him, nothing came into being” (John 3:35; 1:3). Prayer is, therefore, the awareness of the ultimate truth of things, Jesus Christ (“God the tenacious consistency of things”), and the truth of Christ will be manifested at his return, when everything will be fulfilled. “I tell you, brothers, the time is running out. From now on, let those having wives act as not having them, those weeping as not weeping, those rejoicing as not rejoicing, those buying as not owning, those using the world as not using it fully. For the world in its present form is passing away” (1 Cor 7:29-31).</p>
<p>The sense of his coming, of the final manifestation, should become the determining content of our awareness, because at his return we will be fully ourselves: “his return” is the coming to being of “ourselves.” Therefore, the Saints aspired to see him. They longed for death, just like each of us links our good or bad mood to the hope of certain events, because our awareness is dominated by the events to which we aspire, by the imagination of the future we hypothesize.</p>
<p>The sign of how much the desire for his coming dominates in us is our sense of the time that passes quickly, the feeling of the ephemeral, of the provisional. This sense of the brevity of time brings about a cheerful recognition of the true equality of everything: to be married or not is the same thing. All things are equal because the consistency of them is not in the form but in their being a step toward his arrival, toward the Event. The consistency of each thing is in its final manifestation.</p>
<p>This is not a flattening or a monotony, though, because if one is married and the other is not, if one cries and another does not, all of it has to do with the design of the Father. This is the true equality: everything consists in what will come and therefore in the relationship of what exists to this coming.</p>
<p>To the cheerful sense of the brevity of time corresponds, as a corollary, the profound absence of worry, of anxiety. Anxiety and worry derive from the relationship of our own project to what must be done to bring about that project. A characteristic of worry and anxiety is the ease with which we compare ourselves with the other, from which come envy, jealousy, resentment.</p>
<p>During Lent, the first aspect of conversion, the <em>mea culpa</em>, the first gesture of contrition, should be placing ourselves in front of the desire for his final coming. No other attitude, by its nature, breaks out into a cry, into the pure prayer, “Come.” This is so true that the Book of Revelation ends by saying “Come,” and the first prayer of the early Christians is “Come” (Rev 22:17-20).</p>
<p>Moreover, this is the only attitude that makes us abandon everything, because, even though death still brings a sense of fear, it is in this fear that we need to abandon ourselves. We cannot become a total aspiration “for him who comes” if not through love. Therefore, to forget everything is to have everything transformed into desire for him.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I consider that the sufferings of this present time are as nothing compared with the glory to be revealed for us. For creation awaits with eager expectation the revelation of the children of God; for creation was made subject to futility, not of its own accord but because of the one who subjected it, in hope that creation itself would be set free from slavery to corruption and share in the glorious freedom of the children of God (Rom 8:18-21).</p>
</blockquote>
<p>We are dealing with a different anthropology, of a human form radically different, even if it lives in the flesh, than all other men (“insofar as I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God” [Gal 2:20]).</p>
<p>We cannot in fact pronounce the word “liberation” without feeling and trembling before the true value of this word: the desire for the second coming of Christ.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We know that all creation is groaning in labor pains even until now; and not only that, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, we also groan within ourselves as we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in hope we were saved. Now hope that sees for itself is not hope. For who hopes for what one sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait with endurance (Rom 8:22-25).</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This last word summarizes the ethic, the description of human behavior from the point of view of the relationship with reality, time and space, things and people, for men who live this faith in his return and walk<em> spe erecti </em>[upright with hope]. What does it mean that the time is short and yet we are cheerful, what does it mean that all things are equal because their consistence is in his coming, if not that life is governed by patience?</p>
<p>True patience is full of profound cheer and does not get worried: “By your perseverance you will secure your lives” (Luke 21:19). Patience, therefore, is the force of a tension toward his return; as Saint Catherine said, it is born from a cry: “The truth is like the light that is silent when it is time to be silent and, being silent, shouts with the shout of patience.” How does the Bible describe the second coming, the final manifestation of the Lord?</p>
<p>If Lent is the Word of God that walks in the world, then the last day will be that to which the Lenten journey leads: Easter. To know the terminology with which the Bible reveals the ultimate fulfillment of things means to go deeper into perceiving how the Lord—who speaks to us in the history of his Revelation—sees the relationship between our life and that day. To connect the relationship between our journey and that ultimate moment means to live a life dominated by the idea of the end. and living with the end in mind is the most synthetic and recapitulatory aspect of conversion. True contrition, in fact, is completely dominated by that final event.</p>
<p>The biblical terminology speaks of “fulfillment of the promises.” The Hebrew story was the story of the promise, and the life of the Jewish people was the life of a promise. This unique story of the Jewish people was a sign that God had created for all of humanity, because man had been created as a promise, and human history is the story of this promise. For this reason, in the Acts of the Apostles, when Saint Paul makes his speech to the Athenians, he says:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The God who made the world and all that is in it, the Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in sanctuaries made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands because he needs anything. Rather it is he who gives to everyone life and breath and everything. he made from one the whole human race to dwell on the entire surface of the earth, and he fixed the ordered seasons and the boundaries of their regions, so that people might seek God, even perhaps grope for him and find him, though indeed he is not far from any one of us (Acts 17:24-27).</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The movement of the human story, the story of civilization, has one unique aim: to seek God, because only he is the meaning of existence. The fulfillment of the promises made to Abraham is Jesus Christ, and he will reveal that he is the answer to the promises in a complete way, unequivocally, manifestly, at his second coming. In the Letter to the Galatians, Saint Paul says:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“For through faith you are all children of God in Christ Jesus. For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free person, there is not male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s descendant, heirs according to the promise (3:26-29).</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In chapter 15 of the Letter to the Romans (8-12), Saint Paul affirms:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>For I say that Christ became a minister of the circumcised to show God’s truthfulness, to confirm the promises to the patri- archs, but so that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy. As it is written: "Therefore, I will praise you among the Gentiles and sing praises to your name." And again it says: "Rejoice, O Gentiles, with his people." And again: "Praise the Lord, all you Gentiles, and let all the peoples praise him." And again Isaiah says: "The root of Jesse shall come, raised up to rule the Gentiles; in him shall the Gentiles hope."</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Christ, then, is the fulfillment of the promises, and this means that Christ is everything; and not just “in a manner of speaking,” because it is not, first of all, our choice, but the recognition of a reality: “I am the cornerstone” (Psalm 118:22; Matt 21:42). It is a given fact that he is the cornerstone upon which, alone, we can build.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>As God is faithful, our word to you is not “yes” and “no.” For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, who was proclaimed to you by us, Silvanus and Timothy and me, was not “yes” and “no,” but “yes” has been in him. For however many are the promises of God, their Yes is in him; therefore, the Amen from us also goes through him to God for glory. But the one who gives us security with you in Christ and who anointed us is God; he has also put his seal upon us and given the Spirit in our hearts as a first installment (2 Cor 1:18-22).</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Christ is defined as the “yes,” but this “amen” has been spoken, is already present among us.</p>
<p>So, if history is nothing other than the mysterious development of this presence until his final triumph, the sensation that we should have of the human time in which we participate is that of being taken by this fact that, like a rushing torrent, is ovewhelming us and carrying us toward the finish line—it is being within what has already happened, it is time as memory.</p>
<p>Saint Paul, speaking of Christian existence, uses the term <em>redimentes tempus</em>, redeeming the time (Eph 5:16). “To redeem” means to make time true, to make its value come to light in time. All the other terms—to liberate, to make useful, constructive, edifying, positive—are analogous. Saint Paul wrote: “Therefore, the ‘amen’ from us also goes through him to God for glory” (2 Cor 1:20).</p>
<p>In the measure in which we are aware of this definitive and total belonging to Jesus Christ, we have the presentiment of living the end, we anticipate what will happen. The feeling or the awareness that defines the Christian is the expectation of his second coming: this alone transfigures our face. Only if we feel ourselves captivated by the “yes” that Christ is—“For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ” (Gal 3:27)—does the feeling of “Come, Lord” develop itself in us as the dominant feeling of life, and our expression begins to be “amen,” “yes.”</p>
<p>This means that in prosperity or adversity, in the good and the bad, in pain and in joy, one begins to feel that everything is “yes,” that everything is fulfilling itself and <em>non est illis scandalum</em> (Psalm 119:165, Vulgate), there is no longer any scandal. We can have a similar awareness of ourselves only within the fact of Christ, therefore within the communion with all those of whom Christ is made. “But the one who gives us security with you in Christ and who anointed us is God” (2 Cor 1:21)—that is, chosen and consecrated; Jesus is the Christ, the Anointed of God, who has united us with himself, chosen us as part of himself.</p>
<p>But this passage from Saint Paul should say something more to us: “he <em>has also put his seal upon us </em>and given the Spirit in our hearts as a first installment” (2 Cor 1:22). The word seal, in the full awareness of the history of Christian doctrine, signifies a change in our ontology. God is the creator, and when he moves he touches our being. The seal therefore is the outcome of the redemptive and recreative power of God, which transforms our being, and in fact transforms us into his “yes.”</p>
<p>But how does God put his seal upon our hearts? With an event that is recognizable as a gesture in our personal history, with the sacrament. The sacrament is the gesture with which Christ seizes our being and changes it, giving it a different form.</p>
<p>Chapter 3 of the Letter to the Galatians (26-27) says: “For through faith you are all children of God in Christ Jesus. For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ”: you are the beginning of the fulfillment, you are the “yes.” Through the sacrament the “yes” and “amen” which is Christ— the “already present” of the final fulfillment—engages us in our depths. Therefore in the sacrament memory deepens and thus the feeling of his coming becomes ever more powerful and life is transformed. Life in fact is transformed not because we compare our conscience with the moral law but because of these events that happen.</p>
<p>In the sacrament, we are involved in the “already” of Christ, we are involved in the “yes” that is already among us, in the history of this presence that is overwhelming everything, time and space, toward his final manifestation. The sacrament is the gesture with which Christ takes us again and again and brings us always more “within.”</p>
<p>In the last chapter of the Book of Revelation, the word “Come” persists as an aspiration for the beloved and truly marks the physiognomy that should always be ours: but that word is realized in the sacramental gesture, through the infallible awareness of the bride of Christ, the Church.</p>
<p>The sacrament is the gesture with which Christ brings our personality most profoundly into himself. The sacramental life—Penance in particular, which is the second Baptism, and the Eucharist—has as its pale human comparison the example of a person who is distracted and does not recognize the presence of someone he loves, and that beloved person puts a hand on his shoulder saying, “I am here.” It is another world that happens in that moment between those people; it is a new awareness of self, a new consciousness of a relationship with time and with things.</p>
<p>“God has also put his seal upon us and given the Spirit in our hearts as a first installment” (2 Cor 1:22). “He has given the Spirit in our hearts as a first installment” means to have the presentiment of the end, to begin to feel the light of the end. In the sacramental life, more than in any other moment, we have the installment of the Spirit, we begin to understand what is the unity of the world (Rom 8), that all is good, that we are one thing only, that Christ is the Lord.</p>
<p>In the Letter to the Ephesians (6:17), Saint Paul says that the sword of the Spirit is the word of God. We have said that Lent is the Word of God that walks in the world—that is, a sword that cuts (Heb 4:12): the Word of God generates division and conflict. This is the meaning of the word mortification as the law of Christian life. The Word of God is meant to bring life, and yet it cuts and divides: death and resurrection.</p>
<p>The condition of resurrection is death; the condition of life passes through death. In chapter 8 of the Letter to the Romans (verse 2), Saint Paul says: “For the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has freed you from the law of sin and death.” Therefore, there is a contrast, there is an alternative to the Word of God: the law of sin and death.</p>
<p>In chapter 2 of the First Letter to the Corinthians (12-13), Saint Paul says again: “We have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit that is from God, so that we may understand the things freely given us by God. And we speak about them not with words taught by human wisdom, but with words taught by the Spirit, describing spiritual realities in spiritual terms.”</p>
<p>Thus, in the Second Letter to the Corinthians (10:3-4), Saint Paul says: “For, although we are in the flesh [among all the things that we do], we do not battle according to the flesh, for the weapons of our battle are not of flesh but are enormously powerful, capable of destroying fortresses.”</p>
<p>The Word of God is a sword because it fights, and if it fights, it wins, because it destroys fortresses, that is, it destroys even the positions that have been built through centuries and millennia, all the way to original sin, in us. It destroys even the positions that constitute the dominant culture, all of our personal and social habits. The Word of God cannot but be felt as a sword of the Spirit, and the Spirit is the one who creates, the one who redeems, the redemptive power of Christ. The Spirit creates, sanctifies, redeems, builds by seeming to demolish, demolishing in fact our human bones, demolishing our human walls.</p>
<p>What is opposed to the Word of God as the sword of the Spirit? Everything in us that tends not to be converted, not to be of Christ, that seeks to be autonomous. Such illusory autonomy can derive from pride or from infidelity, from a lack of faith, from a lack of the sense of the mystery of Christ. Autonomy as self-love would like to put its own reactions as the measure of its actions and, thus, of its relationships. From this come envy, jealousy, fights, recriminations, dissatisfaction, while the criterion should be the event of Christ and the expectation of his return. </p>
<p>But the true evil root that opposes itself to the sword of the Spirit and does not allow this sword to break us in contrition, the true root is the lack of a sense of the mystery of Christ: history and existence should be valued on the basis of the mystery of Christ and not on the basis of our times and our rhythms—that is, on our demands.</p>
<p>All things are equally fragile: this means that the consistency of all things is a mystery, is his death and resurrection, his second coming. The consistency of things is not in what we make, because the truth of things acts hiddenly, that is, supernaturally. Things are made according to a work that is within, in the depths, in truth.</p>
<p>Autonomy, which derives from infidelity, has a very clear symptom: the gestures of each day, the relationships with people happen outside of the sentiment of the end or the memory of Christ. If our life manages to have some unity, this unity comes from the outside, from the force of will, in a way that is abstract, in the best of cases, moralistic. This effort is exhausting.</p>
<p>Christ accepted from the Father that the redemptive strength he had within him played out slowly and hiddenly through millennia of history, whereas he could have brought it about in a single moment. Christ accepted from the Father that he remain in Palestine, while the people who would have accepted him better were in Tyre and Sidon, in the lands of the pagans; Christ accepted to be crucified in the time fixed by the Father; and so we do not accept the history of Christ if we get scandalized because we do not see in what sense our heavy and opaque concerns have eternal meaning within his coming or within the mystery of his death and resurrection. This is faith: to believe that within what we do there is the mystery of his coming.</p>
<p>If the memory of Christ and the expectation of his coming are in us, and so in everything, the clearness of the transfiguration begins, the presentiment begins, even while remaining opaque and heavy (because it is in this enigma that faith lives). What begins to be felt in the Eucharist begins to be felt in everything that is born from us.</p>
<p>Even if we believe in the second coming of Christ, in the memory of Christ, even if we accept the faith truly, we remain unsatisfied and in a certain inquietude because things are still not like they will be at his coming, things are still not as we would like them to be for our happiness. But Christ came to die—he came, that is, to break through the surface of these things, but he breaks through in a mysterious history.</p>
<p>Things are still heavy and opaque: we cannot expect our peace from the fact that these things change, but from our change we can expect the transfiguration of these things, according to the mysterious design of the Father, in patience. If, at a certain point, our gaze and our heart truly change things, this is a miracle that God does when he wants. In patience the Spirit will not hold back his testimony which is necessary for the faith to be reasonable.</p>
<p>But when one of our actions becomes a miracle—that is, when it is seen as part of the sign of Christ—then we are already detached from it, we see it as small, we no longer are slaves to it, and our happiness does not depend anymore on the outcome itself. Christ died without seeing things change, and thus, each of us is destined to live the same trajectory of Christ and to die as if we have not accomplished anything. If the Father treated the Master like this, he will also treat his disciples like this.</p>
<p>It is normal that the outcome of our actions do not correspond to that aspiration that in a creaturely way we have within, that they do not correspond to the desire for happiness, fullness, satisfaction. It seems like a failure, but it is not; faith makes us understand this and therefore makes us “live together steadfast in Christ and in joy.”</p>
<p>Our faith should become greater, because we should carry the gravity and opacity of things in the certainty that Christ is there and that through these things, just as they are, his second and definitive coming happens (<em>Parousia</em>), his return happens. Things are heavy, but we carry them, because we are made like Christ, the giant who runs the race.</p>
<div class="entry-content">
<p>EDITORIAL NOTE: This essay is adapted from <a href="https://slantbooks.org/books/living-the-liturgy/"><em>Living the Liturgy: A Witness</em></a>, courtesy of <a href="https://slantbooks.org/">Slant Books</a>, All Rights Reserved. </p>
</div>Luigi Giussanitag:churchlifejournal.nd.edu,2005:News/1603662024-03-05T06:00:00-05:002024-03-05T02:56:55-05:00Imagining Heaven: Silence and Evasion<p>Cyril O'Regan on as it is in heaven.</p><p><span class="dropcap">W</span>hen it comes to controversial issues in eschatology Catholic philosophers and theologians routinely do what they tend to do in general, that is, defer, mime, and attempt to thread the needle between speech and silence, saying and unsaying. Their aim is to say as little as possible, not only because of the desire to avoid displaying their genuine bafflement, but also because they feel sheepish about their inability to produce affidavits of their entitlement to speak. It is not nice to be found stuttering and stammering in any circumstance; it is worse again to find oneself so utterly exposed when speaking of the heavenly state that is the suggested purpose of your entire life and supposed to be the object of one’s deepest desire. Far more importantly, it is not only the special classes of theologians and philosophers who leave off.</p>
<p>It is noticeable that in Christian believers in general, and Catholics in particular, that when it comes to “last things” there is a shocking reserve, a reserve that cannot be reduced simply to anxieties about disputed questions concerning the intermediate state, the transitional state of Purgatory, or even the embarrassment of a doctrine of hell and its supposed challenge to the justice and mercy of God. If heaven, as the signified of the eschatological state of the blessed, is not always vigorously questioned—though it sometimes is—there is, nonetheless, a studied vagueness concerning “the better place,” alleviated only by stipulations that we imagine heaven as different in all fundamental respects from this life. Or, alternatively, demanding that its figuration not be so evacuative of the pleasures of this life and our political and social responsibilities. We arrive back at the paralytic beginning: we don’t know what we say, and when we say anything at all, we don’t know what we mean. As Christians we are all bumblers. Philosophers and theologians are just bumblers with the fig leaves of disparate and even contradictory protocols.</p>
<p>In the polite and educated circles in which philosophers and theologians move, beyond the velleities of our stipulations that do little to illuminate heaven and far more to identify who we are or who we want to be, imagining heaven is judged to be in equal parts a sentimental and frivolous activity, tantamount to joining John Lennon and Yoko in dreaming of states of peace and union otherwise than what we experience now. Of course, we are not obliged to abandon the notion of heaven entirely. We can and sometimes do find the energy to support it over the objections of Nietzsche and Marx and the critiques of its use throughout Western Christian history in which the notion of heaven is judged to have functioned as a salve for the suffering here on earth caused by social inequities and economic exploitation and to have drained off the energy needed to fundamentally change the world in which such injustice inheres and thrives.</p>
<p>In any event, Christian thinkers have done enough to show that we can fly in the face of skepticism and the general debility of being modern, even if not necessarily with a good conscience. Yet there are limits: enough is enough, even more than enough. Even if we do not relent regarding the traditional belief in heaven, we put ourselves on notice not to escape into fantastical projections as to what heaven will look like and evade pressing too hard on questions concerning the particular form of our flourishing and happiness in what has to be a radically altered state.</p>
<p>One major question it would be best to avoid is whether the eschatological state of the blessed is primarily immaterial or material, disembodied or embodied. The question is far more risky than it might appear: in answering, on the one hand, we might discover that we are nebulous Platonists all the way down; on the other we might find out that Christian belief in the afterlife bears a close family resemblance to the Valhalla of roistering, jousting, and sword-wielding, even if no blood is drawn. Or perhaps in what might be a third option—though it looks quite like the second—that after the manner of Egyptians we have come to imagine heaven as the good life of endless hunting, eating well, copious sex, and not being eaten by crocodiles.</p>
<p>Of course, how we came to be so tepid and beset, so pale despite our healthy lifestyles, so far from the brazen imaginative world of Dante, is a long story whose telling would involve a <a href="https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/authors/charles-taylor/">Charles Taylor</a>-like monument to chart how religious believers have been shaped (or misshapen) by ideas about the world, about who they are and what they can know, and about the domain of religious beliefs and practices, now come to be regarded as both private and marginal. Even if one could tell this story, which would involve episodes of naturalism, agnosticism, and activism, as well as their overlaps and junctures, it would not be a story fit for an article such as this. Suffice it to say that we late Christian believers find ourselves weighed down by layers of assumptions that minimally function as disincentives to go beyond the bare belief in an afterlife. All too often this empty canvas invites brush strokes that specify otherwise and issue us a permit to paint Dantesque or Breughel-like scenes of punishment of one person’s malodorous gossipy cousin, another’s lying-cheating ex-boyfriend, not forgetting, of course, the too long postponed comeuppance for your ideological enemies whose number grows daily and whose faces constantly shift.</p>
<h2>Breaking the Silence and Ending Evasion</h2>
<p>Given the desert eschatological landscape in modernity, it comes as a welcome surprise to discover just how energetic Christian eschatological discussion has been this past decade and just how prominent a role has been allotted to imagination. Sometimes explicitly stated, sometimes left implicit, the premise is that for belief in heaven to be real and actual it requires Christians to imagine a heaven that is the object of their deepest desires and hopes. One can think of John Thiel’s<em> <a href="https://undpress.nd.edu/9780268042394/icons-of-hope/">Icons<strong> </strong>of Hope</a> </em>(2013) which, on the model of the best intimations in this life of equity and solidarity, imagines heaven as the postmortem manifold of justice and forgiveness; Paul Griffiths’s luminous <em>Decreation</em> (2014) that proceeds by way of what might be called an Augustinian logic of the inversion of the structures of this life, while playfully, but perhaps in a very English fashion, inquiring among other things as to whether animals will share the perfection of life with us; Leonard DeLorenzo’s thoughtful and evocative account in <em><a href="https://undpress.nd.edu/9780268100933/work-of-love/">Work of Love</a> </em>(2017) concerning the communion of the dead with the living and their own communion; and finally Paul Fiddes’ somewhat earlier <em>The Promised End </em>(2000) that landscapes the intimation of heaven unveiled in modern English literature, while leaving in suspense whether these intimations function as prolepses of a felicitous and fully satisfying postmortem state or whether we have to remain agnostic about their fulfillment and remain content with hints and guesses.</p>
<p>I want to draw attention here to an even more recent book that not only grants imagination more than its usual prerogatives when it comes to heaven, but insists on the duties of imagination to think heaven in the face of the loss of loved ones. In the blank space that their going leaves in the world, the ontological wound of their loss, we are obliged in and through the figure of the Cross to think, first the prospect and then the reality of their transition into a radically different mode of existence and relation. Catholic philosopher and poet, Caitlin Smith Gilson, has added to the store of books that provide a thick description of the afterlife running counter to modern philosophical and theological protocols that discourage figuration. <em><a href="https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/heaven-and-the-transcendental-meaning-of-death/">As It Is in Heaven</a> </em>(2022) joyously refuses such restraint.</p>
<p>The book is at once unabashedly traditional and exploratory, unfailingly daring in expression while responsive to the questions regarding the afterlife that are framed with a child’s innocence, and argumentatively tight yet copious in reference. It is also hauntingly personal and existential yet playful in imagining our heavenly state and the gush and lush of our enjoyment of God and each other in a transfigured world that presences the divine and supports our renovation and perfected relations with each other. Grief is the door of entry into the exploration of what we can hope for as the actualization of our belief of the “better state.”</p>
<p>Gilson’s grief for the loss of her fifteen-year-old niece is searing. It leaves her standing out on the razor’s edge between protest and hope, hoping against hope that the emptied space of her vital and full-of-promise niece is not final and that the tear in time of the fabric of relation and communication caused by her passing will yield to healing. If the book has a model—and the philosophical and literary references are so wide and so varied that it could have many and the level of originality such that effectively it might have none—then perhaps the safest bet is C. S. Lewis, and more specifically, <em>A Grief Observed</em> in which the sketches of heaven are generated in and through Lewis’s grief for the loss of his wife, Joy Davidman (H in the book), or maybe better his grief that she has been subtracted from the world which, thereby, has been lessened by it. One can speak in Gilson’s case as in Lewis’s to a passion for a heavenly form of existence appropriate to the dignity of the person lost. One observes in both cases the pressure to speak about what we are not entitled to speak of and to detonate the speech with which we commonly deck our grief and offer as consolation to others: “she has gone to a better place.”</p>
<p>Few texts written in the last few years are as pertinently impertinent as <em>As It Is in Heaven</em>. The commitments to the Catholic philosophical and theological tradition provide the basic architecture. These include the notion of the post-mortem intermediate state, antecedent to resurrection<strong>,</strong> that follows general rather than individual judgment—a position sponsored by Augustine, ratified in Aquinas, and provided exhaustive depiction by Dante in the <em>Paradiso</em>. Without prejudice to the magisterial thinkers of the Catholic tradition, and with due gratitude to Benedict XVI’s defense of the doctrine of the intermediate state in his <a href="https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/hell-purgatory-heaven-in-eschatology-death-and-the-eternal-life/">great book <em>Eschatology</em></a>, Gilson’s focus is exclusively on our final resurrected state.</p>
<p>With regard to the resurrected body, the Catholic tradition provides protocols for our speech inaugurated in Saint Paul and impressively rehearsed in early Christian thinkers from Irenaeus on. Many of these are provisos concerning the inability of our language to stretch beyond the interruption of death and thus our responsibility to underscore differences between the eschatological and pre-eschatological state. Whether essentially or accidentally, Aquinas, who is a central figure for Gilson throughout her work, is an advocate of such epistemic scruple. Essentially, we might say insofar as what he has written is marked by this scruple; accidentally, perhaps in that Aquinas died before he had the opportunity to turn to a systematic treatment of eschatology in the <em>Summa Theologica</em>.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, for Gilson, it is evident that her beloved Aquinas is in need of supplementation. Beleaguered ideologically and imaginatively depleted as we are, we do not have the luxury of his level of scruple. We cannot not speak, and if that implies the risk of saying too much, then the risk must be taken. We can in due course hesitate, draw back, emend, cull, and at a limit repent. Thus, the boldness and the imagistic flood of Gilson’s projections made up of streams native to her poetic imagination, streams of biblical references, and streams of images and symbols borrowed from authors such as C.S. Lewis, Dostoyevsky, Péguy, Rilke, and T. S. Eliot who are her most intimate interlocutors.</p>
<p>Still, it is important to underscore the philosophical rivets. Aquinas is central. Yet the author is not sponsoring a Thomism committed to purity. Her Thomism is open both to conversation with other modalities of philosophy and to being supplemented by discourses that operate fundamentally in the mode of symbol rather than concept. For her, Thomism’s privileged conversation partner on the level of philosophy is phenomenology, but phenomenology understood not to be hostile to metaphysics, as is the case in Husserl and Heidegger. Gilson is not without precedents for linking up Thomism with an ontologically rich phenomenology. In the background there is Edith Stein; in the foreground John Paul II, whose theology of the body peeks through time and again throughout the text.</p>
<h2>Gilson and the Primacy of Resurrection</h2>
<p>Parts 1, “Heaven and the Transcendental Meaning of Death,” and Part 3, “All This and Heaven Too,” are the two pillars of the text insofar as they represent the imagining of heaven as defined in general by the resurrected self in ecstatic relation to God and other selves (Part 1), and, more particularly, by the elevation of the senses to the point of ecstasy (Part 3). As one is first carried along by these discourses on the resurrected body and the extravagance of newly constituted sensory capacities, and then comes to ponder how biblically grounded and conceptually precise the claims are, one finds oneself marveling at a text that is unique precisely because it has no interest in novelty. As she makes the case for the primacy of the resurrected flesh in an authentic Christian eschatology in Part 1, for all her delicate layering and embroidery, recurrence to classical and modern philosophy, as well as her ample literary reference, it seems obvious when one steps back from the lively, even violent, currents of the text that Gilson is making three essential points.</p>
<p>The first is that the fundamental option for the resurrected body over the disembodied soul makes an absolute distinction between Christianity and Platonism. This distinction is insisted on, even as Gilson makes clear that she is far from negative about Platonism and is convinced that in its more existential dimensions it has something important to contribute to Christian eschatology. If Gilson feels secure in advancing the priority of the resurrected body, it is largely because of the centrality of the discussion of Christ’s resurrection in the Gospels and the letters of Paul, as well, of course, as Paul’s insistence on the promise of the resurrected body for those who have had faith in Christ and patterned their life after his.</p>
<p>Though Gilson pulls on numerous threads concerning the eschatological state, she does not talk to the muddle of the contemporary moment in which theology finds itself embarrassed talking about the disembodied soul in an intermediate state, while philosophy finds itself reluctant to talk about resurrection. Since, given the prevailing naturalistic and skeptical ethos in modernity, to affirm that something (anything!) survives death represents its maximum reach. However, we might account for trickledown, in the new social imaginary, even as they attest to the reality of the afterlife, most Christians shy away from depiction. If pressed, most perhaps would confabulate something that bears a closer relationship to the texts of Plato than the New Testament.</p>
<p>A useful experiment: Ask a class of juniors and seniors in Catholic high schools and freshmen in Catholic colleges to figure heaven. If my own experience is anything to go by, you are likely to unearth a society of slightly deranged Platonists, at once carnal and skeptical in their everyday lives and incorrigibly ethereal in their figuring of postmortem blessedness. This leads naturally to my second point concerning Gilson’s laying out of the difference between our original fleshy body and our resurrected body.</p>
<p>Here I will merely lay down Gilson’s basic position, since I intend returning to it when I speak to her elaboration of the exalted state of the senses that are the focus of Part 3 of <em>As It Is in Heaven</em>. Implicitly, Paul’s discussion in 1 Corinthians provides the framework for her views of the relation-difference between the body destined for corruption and the resurrected body. In this sense, she is at one with the entire Catholic tradition that has attempted to parse how the resurrected body bears both a positive and negative relation to our temporal bodily life, positive in that it transforms and perfects it, negative in that flesh in its original state cannot be carried over the hiatus of death which has fundamentally interrupted our identity.</p>
<p>The third point of emphasis in Gilson’s lavish text concerns the primacy of community in heaven, though Gilson makes it clear that she is uninterested in pitting community against the individual person<strong>,</strong> which is not only a tendency in contemporary eschatological discourse that proceeds under the umbrella of political theology—Moltmann and Metz would be two good examples—but also<strong><s> </s></strong>a feature of eschatological discourses that more nearly operate within a traditional frame (even as they stretch it) as, for instance, John Thiel does in <em>Icons of Hope. </em>On this point at least, Gilson proceeds more nearly by the logic of extension than contrast. Here is where her allegiance to phenomenology and especially the centrality of intentionality is most to the fore.</p>
<p>She is persuaded by the critics of Husserl in general, and by Levinas in particular, that consciousness is not only always “consciousness of,” but always intends another that at once dislocates it and is co-constitutive of it. Inspired by the personalism of John Paul II, which unites Aquinas and phenomenology, Gilson elaborates a general anthropology that insists on the community horizon for the formation of selves while also promoting a personalism that underscores the illiminable nature of the person in relation, or, what medieval thought would refer to as their “incommunicable” status. Building on truths discoverable within the pre-eschatological sphere, Gilson insists on the priority of perfected community in the eschatological state. She does so, however, with the caveat that this priority is not absolute. If in the heavenly state individual persons find themselves enhanced, indeed, fully realized, in and through their transparency towards others and towards God, then it is also the case that the community is a community of persons, who are irreplaceable by definition.</p>
<p>Of course, our hope in resurrection and the perfection of community and ourselves as persons is tested in and through the crucible of our loss of a loved one who is herself a matrix of relations, some fully realized and actual, others in the mode of promise. Our hope that death is the door rather than a cliff or abyss is made possible solely through our perception of the passion, death, and resurrection of Christ as a reversal of fortune as elemental as bringing something out of nothing. Conceptual mastery never overtakes our grief: though our grief may moderate, it leaves us unmoored. D. H. Lawrence famously said of our individual and personal death that it can never be a moment in one’s biography: it snips narrative completion.</p>
<p>One might be forgiven for thinking that Gilson has made things easier for herself in <em>As It Is in Heaven </em>by focusing not so much on what death means in the case of our own lives, but the death of those beloveds that leave us reeling, but can, nonetheless, be included in our story. One would be mistaken if one thought that. Grief is searing; the emptiness appalling—the gap . . . a knife. Death’s apparent absoluteness leaves us undone, as unaccommodated as Lear on the heath or desperately trying to discern a breath in the dead body of his youngest and too-lately loved daughter, Cordelia. This is why, though sorely tempted to remove Heidegger from our canons of philosophy and theology, Gilson advises that we might tarry with him a little and be grateful that he has reminded all of us of the reality of death that is the apocalypse towards which we run and which hurtles towards us.</p>
<p>Of course, there is no need to hang the Catholic flag on Heidegger; he is simply reminding us of other reminders in the Christian tradition, certainly, Kierkegaard and Augustine—though there are numerous others. Literature, of course, is a goldmine of such reminders, Dostoevsky as well as C. S. Lewis, O’Neill as well as William Carlos Williams, Camus as well as Charles Péguy, the latter whom Gilson seems to love with a passion similar to that of Hans Urs von Balthasar who makes him a central figure in his articulation of the anatomy of heaven. Gilson suggests that grief is the form of our coming to know the horror of death that we would avoid. One does not come across in <em>As It Is in Heaven</em> the kind of broad conspectus of the modern denial of death that one finds in the sociological work of Philippe Ariès so eloquently deployed in DeLorenzo’s <em>Works of Love</em>. Nonetheless, such a denial is assumed in this wildly speculative and probing text as it is in C. S. Lewis’s <em>A Grief Observed</em>. Grief is the fire that shocks us<strong> </strong>out of our complacency and leaves us suspended over the cliff.</p>
<p>If death is the abyss that grins, the resurrected body is the abyss turned into smile—a smile that acknowledges not only our mortality, but the history and fragility of our flesh which was the scene of our action and passion, our acting and being acted upon. Though there may seem to be plausible exceptions (e.g. the unborn), for Gilson each of us is a history in which our unrepeatable identity is both enacted and discovered; we are both script and improvisation. We bear our damage in our flesh, but bear it gloriously, bear it as a testimony to one who loved us, who bore us up and made us capable of enjoying an excess that otherwise would entirely overwhelm and drown us. Special relations with family and friends are such ineluctable parts of that history that Gilson cannot believe that they are not indemnified, though she is also fully aware that they have to be made straight. Yet, heaven is much more than ratification and repair, it is redeeming loss—the near misses in relations, the relations that would have tingled to the core—and all in all an incalculable expansiveness and intensity in relation that, nonetheless, would not negate special relations and would marry radical newness with recollection.</p>
<p>Such reflections are carried out in part 3, “All This Is Heaven Too” as well as part 1. Especially in part 3. Gilson is positively rhapsodic about the glory of the human resurrected state as the perfected image and likeness of God. Indeed, human beings in their resurrected glory seem essentially to effect something of a disturbance in the common picture of the great chain of being that has angels as the apex of finite creatures. Gilson is unembarrassed about her belief in angels. For her, belief in angels is part and part of the Catholic tradition. Nor is she particularly disturbed by the traditional contrasts between angels and human beings that would have angels higher in the order of being and intellect.</p>
<p>Aquinas’s thought, which serves basically as Gilson’s metaphysical platform throughout the text, endorses a hierarchy that was the common theological sense of both the Western and Eastern Fathers, with Augustine the representative of the former, Pseudo-Dionysius of the latter. For her, however, the incarnation, passion, death, and resurrection of Christ, in an important way, shakes the hierarchy. Not so much, however, by putting human beings at the apex of the ontological pyramid, but by considering human beings as mediators between spirit and flesh. Irenaeus is not mentioned, but he could have been. Maximus the Confessor is not appealed to as an authority for the profound shift towards the valorization of human beings and their enfleshment, as well as the indemnification of the intrinsically dramatic character of human lives, but he remains an available witness. However, steady in the background is C. S. Lewis who understood that for all our stupidity, cravenness, and vulnerability human beings are the glory of God. Human beings are the crux of God’s infinitely costly experiment in love and the granting of finite freedom that bears eternal consequence.</p>
<p>This is nothing of a sly humanism here. What is required is a kind of bifocal vision in which the excellences of angels and human beings before and towards the triune God are offset. If we stick solely to the metaphysical order, then ontologically, epistemically, and doxologically, angels remain superior to human beings. The hierarchy continues to be maintained even in the likes of Augustine, Aquinas and Dante as they suggest a closing of the gap in human beings’ intermediate state in terms of intensity of being, the movement of thinking from discursive thought to the mode of intuition, and the perfection of human beings’ doxological capacity. Gilson can be understood to assume all of the above. Yet this is not her focus. Understandably so, since she is not focused on the intermediate state in the way Aquinas and even Dante are, but rather on our reality in the resurrected state made possible by the incarnation, passion, death, and resurrection of Christ.</p>
<p>If the resurrected state is to be our glory, then, for Gilson, our senses, which are the means both of our belonging and our ecstasy in this life, are unimaginably sharpened even as they are infinitely sublimated. If heaven is the realm of God not only as Truth and Goodness, but, as Gilson suggests, Beauty also, then the sublimed senses are the vehicle for the proper enjoyment of God as excessive. They have been spiritually honed to correspond to God’s superabundant energy, supereminent light, and endless cascading waves of loving. If the senses are sharpened, they are also complicated and made more replete. Gilson is, undoubtedly, influenced by von Balthasar’s suggestion that one inflection of the spiritual grasp and being grasped by beauty is synaesthesia. When Balthasar in <em>Glory of the Lord 1 </em>speaks to this phenomenon in the crossing of senses from seeing to hearing and back again in this life as a kind of foretaste of the eschatological state. In <em>As It Is in Heaven</em>, Gilson speaks also to the crossing of tasting and touch, tasting and seeing, and smell and hearing. In fact, Gilson speaks to all the combinations of pairs of senses, suggesting in addition combinations of three and four, and the ultimate combination of all five senses as the ground and mode of ecstasy towards the triune God and our communion with each other.</p>
<h2>Neither-Nor: Kant and Swedenborg</h2>
<p>In <em>Icons of Hope </em>John Thiel poses the question of whether Kant’s embargo on speaking of the afterlife plays a role in the anemic depiction of heaven in modernity, indeed, even in Roman Catholic thought which, despite its own instructions against speculation, historically has allowed far more to be proposed than is permissible in Kant’s functionalist agnosticism.</p>
<p>Expanding somewhat on what Thiel would license, we might say that the challenge that Kant poses to eschatological thought, perhaps its very possibility, is not simply that he functions at once as a synecdoche for numerous varieties of modern agnosticism regarding a blessed afterlife and in the process provides reputational cover for less lofty species, but also that, whatever the faults of his epistemology, he brings Christians back to the apophatic provisos that mark Christian speech concerning heaven in the great Eastern and Western theologians and which are not entirely suspended in Dante. But does he?</p>
<p>There is a big difference between being enjoined to have discretion in our speech regarding heaven, given the abyss of death, as well as the underdetermined nature of the biblical evidence, and being asked to obey an absolute prohibition against speaking about the afterlife. Readers of <em>The Critique of Pure Reason </em>(1781) are often so preoccupied with the heavy epistemological lifting of the text that they will fail to recall that Kant almost two decades earlier went on a rhetorical rampage against the spiritualist tradition. For him this was first and foremost illustrated by the likes of Johann Kasper Lavater (1741-1801) and Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), both of whom brazenly claimed access in this life to the state of our postmortem existence in heaven.</p>
<p>Swedenborg had to be especially provocative, for unlike Lavater the bulk of his opus is made up of eschatological visions. Kant would have had before him<strong> </strong>texts by Swedenborg such as <em>Heavenly Mysteries </em>(8 vols) (1747-1756), <em>Heaven and Hell </em>(1758), <em>Last Judgment </em>(1758), and <em>New Jerusalem </em>(1758). In<strong> </strong><em>Dreams of a Spirit-Seer </em>(1764) the Kant we come across is unrecognizable, if—as is very likely—for better or worse the <em>First Critique </em>has come to identify him. The 1764 book, written in Kant’s metaphysical period, before the influence of Hume takes hold, is a full-throated invective against the stupidities of postmortem projection, of the wrong-headedness of enthusiasm and its refusal to operate according to philosophical protocols that require restraint. <em>Dreams </em>is outrage, spittle and spill, as it tries to invent a vocabulary of denunciation that would have been ready at hand in England where the lexicon was prodigal: “rubbish,” “piffle,” “hogwash,” “twaddle,” “drivel,” “babble,” “bosh,” “prattle,” “gibberish,” and my personal favorite “flummery.”</p>
<p>An amusing, discombobulated, and magnificently out-of-sorts Kant speaks as if the con-artist<strong> </strong>spiritualists are morally as well as intellectually bankrupt. Of the two targets Swedenborg is especially provocative insofar as the Swedish theosophist provides nothing short of a travelogue of heaven, and<strong>,</strong> in what amounts to brochures<strong>,</strong> points to its more splendid features. These include depicting heaven as a society of the resurrected organized into ascending social ranks, constituting in the end a kind of spiritual aristocracy. Kant was more agitated by Swedenborg’s entitled certainty than his hierarchy, though had he reflected on it that would have outraged him too. Blake, who in his painting and prophetic poems indulged in a copious amount of postmortem projection himself—and some of it of a sexual nature like Swedenborg himself—objected to Swedenborg’s hierarchy, but, arguably, was more put off by the insufferable complacency of Swedenborg’s apocalyptic visions that projected so easily from this life into the next. The projection was so effortless, so devoid of the use of hyperbole and contrast that the earth became the measure of heaven rather than heaven the measure of earth. Thus, the question that we might ask, perhaps even are compelled to pose, is the following: does <em>As It Is in Heaven </em>represent the return of the repressed and Swedenborg’s victory over Kant? In which case, are we not obliged to resist it?</p>
<p>It is true that finally even a careless reader of Gilson’s ebullient text will answer the question in the negative, and come to the sensible conclusion that Gilson no more favors Swedenborg than Kant who in modernity functions as the flaming cherub refusing us entry into paradise. And perhaps for the simple reason that the garrulous “say-everything” of Swedenborg and Kant’s “say nothing” are simply two sides of the self-same modern coin. Or to avail of a less dead image; fantasy projection and linguistic asceticism in modernity share a common root. Fantasy projection is the monster that modern skepticism breeds and which Kant heroically, and ultimately unsuccessfully, tries to contain.</p>
<p>While Gilson seems to operate in a Swedenborgian manner to the degree to which she licenses the use of imagination, a key difference between her and Swedenborg is that her imagining is constrained (maybe even regulated) by the Christian philosophical and theological tradition. She takes risks that perhaps only Christian artists take with respect to heaven. Still, at every turn her iconic extensions from our pre-eschatological to our eschatological state are provided ballast and weight by the Catholic tradition of reflection. In this respect her imaginative eschatological poetics operate after the manner of Dante’s <em>Paradiso</em> as a supplement to what the philosophical and theological traditions have said about eschatological peace, satisfaction, about rest but also dynamism, about individual and communal perfection, about the letting be of thanksgiving and praise, the brilliance and depth of true beauty, and the apocalypse of love hidden from the foundation of the world that is now relentlessly and forever streaming.</p>
<p>Perhaps another key difference—again one for which Dante as well as C. S. Lewis provides a precedent—is that our depiction of heaven represents a point of view from which we come to see not only the value and beauty of the gifts of time and flesh, but also the manifold imperfections of our lives and the damage we have done to others.</p>
<h2>The Specter of Dante</h2>
<p>The above is sufficient to establish that Gilson’s visionary enterprise occurs within the horizon of a Dante-like poetic extension of the philosophical and theological reflections of the Catholic tradition to which she pledges her fealty, rather than within the horizon of Swedenborg, defined by a form of curiosity satisfied only by transcendent objects. I do not mean to suggest that Gilson routinely calls on Dante. In fact, Dante is cited very sparingly in the text. Where then is Dante? If a presence in <em>As It Is in Heaven</em>, then his presence is latent rather than patent. Two points can be made by way of support: first, that C. S. Lewis serves at least as a partial proxy and, second, that Gilson can enjoy the luxury of validating the particular, even idiosyncratic, intimations of heaven in and through experiences recorded in the novels of Dostoyevsky and the poems of Péguy, and Rilke, among others, because she has the assurance from Dante that they can be unified in a single synthetic vision and also that neither singly nor together are they athwart the mainline Christian tradition—or even necessarily at odds with the doctrines of the Catholic tradition.</p>
<p>Still, it would be pushing too hard to say that the largely out of sight Dante is the silent partner in <em>As It Is in Heaven</em>. It would be more accurate, as well as more modest, to say that Dante is something like a specter. This becomes most evident when one allows oneself to feel the angst that fuels <em>As It Is in Heaven </em>and tracks Gilson hunting for hope in the face of absolute loss. Gilson is each one of us; she is the Christian inquirer whose eschatological frame is creaking under the weight of grief and is about to give. It is not so much the doctrines concerning heaven, but the images and hypotheses welling up that link us to our deepest desire and expose our enduring longings.</p>
<p>Without this process of excavation for which Dante provides the paradigm, heaven withers on the vine and the appeal to the better place becomes heaven’s obituary. This is the shadow cast by the modern within the Church, as well as without, which Gilson feels she has to tussle. The battle is not against the Church’s legitimate circumspection, but against the way in which the circumspection can be leveraged against the Church’s positive claims that will reduce belief in heaven to an anxious “perhaps” or diffident “maybe” only periodically alleviated by testimonials from “near-death” experiencers who can offer reassurances for the reality of the afterlife in an empirical language that remains respectable even if the claims are controversial.</p>
<p>Gilson lays forth for us that we need to say more in order to keep belief alive in a world in which we are always being pressured to say less, and risk saying too much in order to say enough.</p>Cyril O'Regantag:churchlifejournal.nd.edu,2005:News/1603372024-03-04T06:00:00-05:002024-03-04T10:30:06-05:00What Difference Does the Trinity Make in Christian Prayer?<p>Margaret Turek on the Christian God.</p><p><span class="dropcap">A</span>s Christians we believe in one God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The doctrine and worship of God in three persons distinguishes Christianity from all other religions as well as every sort of philosophical mysticism. Yet, most of us Christians would be hard-pressed to say something meaningful about the difference it makes to the practice of prayer that the one God is a trinity of persons.</p>
<p><a href="https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/authors/hans-urs-von-balthasar/">Hans Urs von Balthasar</a>, a twentieth-century theologian, can help tremendously here. Balthasar, whose theological work as a whole was imbued with a contemplative spirit, devoted two books to the subject of Christian prayer: the longer <a href="https://ignatius.com/prayer-prayp/"><em>Prayer</em></a> (1955)<a href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[1]<!--[endif]--></a> and the shorter <a href="https://ignatius.com/christian-meditation-cmp/"><em>Christian Meditation</em></a><em> </em>(1984).<a href="#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[2]<!--[endif]--></a> The outstanding merit of these two works lies precisely in Balthasar’s effort to situate the nature and practice of Christian prayer in more explicit and vital connection with the mystery of the Trinity.</p>
<p>In these two books, Balthasar not only examined the distinctive features of Christian prayer, but also explored the more wide-reaching question as to whether the Trinity makes any difference to the human race in its yearning and searching for God. Balthasar tackled the latter issue by inquiring, in the first place, “whether God has spoken to the human race.”<a href="#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[3]<!--[endif]--></a></p>
<p>If God has <em>not</em> spoken to the human race, it is understandable that human beings would take the initiative in forging pathways to God “from below.” Prompted by a natural religious desire, human beings would inevitably devise techniques of meditation by which to ascend to the divine. Not only that, but lacking an awareness of being addressed by God, human beings would be justified in inventing forms of meditation in accordance with a notion of God as the Absolute Silence or as the Wordless Void, that to which we are related as the primordial source from which we come and as the goal of our deepest aspirations, but which cannot relate to us in a personal manner.</p>
<p>Indeed if God has <em>not</em> spoken to the human race, there is good reason to conclude that to be divine is to be detached from interpersonal (dialogical) communication. What this would mean for anyone who strives to arrive at union with the divine is that one can expect a de-personalizing absorption into the impersonal Absolute, or something along the lines of an extinguishing of one’s personal existence rather like the blowing out of a flame. If, on the other hand, God <em>has</em> spoken to<em> </em>the human race, which is the claim of the biblical religions, then both our access to God (via prayer and meditation) and our doctrine of God will be different.</p>
<p>In that case, meditation involves something more than attending to the aspirations and “lights” of our nature. It entails listening to the word of God that comes to us as a “grace,” as a “new” gift to be distinguished from the “first” gift of our creaturely nature. Indeed the word of God that is the focal point of Christian meditation is a gracious word, a word God speaks in <em>freedom</em>. As such, it eludes our manipulation and control and therefore cannot be mastered by any meditative technique. It is a <em>free</em> word addressed to our personal freedom. God’s word calls for an answer; it expects a response.</p>
<p>Hence it is a word that, in issuing from God, establishes creatures in a dialogical relationship with God. This is of decisive importance and should never cease to astound us: the God of the Bible turns toward creatures and expresses himself as an “I” who says “you.” To be sure, since creatures as such are incommensurate with the Creator, God “descends” from the depths of the eternal and absolute to admit creatures into the sphere of his wisdom and love. It is <em>God’s</em> self-surrender to the creature that makes possible and engenders the creature’s answering self-surrender. It is <em>God</em> who discloses and gives himself to us, and in doing so, enables us to give ourselves reciprocally.</p>
<p>Certainly, to acknowledge the primacy of God’s role in meditation is not to regard as simply counterfeit the aspiration of the creature to (somehow) attain to God. God’s primacy in prayer does not render spurious or pointless the longing that propels the human heart to seek after him. There is a God-given purpose to such longing; it is meant to be purified and transformed in the knowledge that (as Balthasar put it) “God alone, in his free and graciously condescending love, can still this yearning. The creature’s yearning cannot be a will to power that would seize possession of God but rather a will to surrender, to let oneself be seized by him.” This yearning is in keeping with God, then, insofar as it takes shape (first) as receptivity to God’s “movement of condescension” and (secondly) as the ensuing determination to imitate God’s handing over of himself in love.<a href="#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[4]<!--[endif]--></a></p>
<p>Now if the God of biblical history initiates a dialogical relationship with creatures and by this manner of communication authentically reveals himself<em>,</em> what does this indicate about God’s inmost being? If God shows himself capable of turning toward human beings as an “I” who says “you,” and thereby expresses the integrity of his eternally perfect and absolute nature (for we realize it is <em>God</em> who acts thus), what in God is the basis for this, the ground of this? Does this not intimate that interpersonal communication is proper to being God? The Christian answer to these questions is elaborated in the doctrine of the Trinity. Balthasar for his part, aiming to shed light on the Trinity as the inner-divine foundation of Christian prayer, developed an understanding of the Christian God as an infinite and eternal exchange of love between the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit.</p>
<p>The Father’s way of being God <em>is</em> a pure initiatory self-communication. Yet this perfect and unlimited self-communication is not one-way, but the eternal generating source of a divine dialogue. For what the Father generates by his self-communication is precisely the equally boundless answer that <em>is</em> the divine Son. Indeed, the eternal dialogue between the Father and the Son is inconceivably perfect such that this changeless exchange yields the Holy Spirit of divine fellowship. The Holy Spirit in God attests to the fact that the personal otherness of the Son vis-à-vis the Father is not annulled or extinguished but maintained and transcended in a perfect communion of love. For on the one hand, the Holy Spirit is the Spirit <em>of the Father</em> and the Spirit <em>of the Son</em>—the Spirit who sustains personal uniqueness and distinction, “the one who is between them.” And on the other hand, the Holy Spirit is “a Someone of his own”: the singular fruit of mutual love, the one in whom the communion of two is complete.<a href="#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[5]<!--[endif]--></a></p>
<p>Since it is entirely good and positive that personal otherness exists in God, we find here valid grounds for venturing an explanation as to how God can (in freedom) address the human person as a beloved “you,” and why the human person need not forfeit his “I” in answering with the total surrender of self. If what constitutes God’s inmost being is the inner-trinitarian conversation, God has no inherent need to converse with us. Nor does God’s tri-personal way of being divine render necessary, as a condition of union with him, the extinguishing or the dissolving of our personal being.</p>
<p>On the contrary, the word of everlasting love that God speaks to us out of an abyssal freedom proceeds from the inner nature of God himself, ultimately from the self-expressing Father. We can receive and respond to God’s word because God the Father, in addressing us, at the same time offers us his grace. This grace renders us connatural with God by virtue of a co-naissance: a being born of God the Father through, with, and in God the Son. Or, what amounts to the same, this grace imparts a participation in the personal existence of the Only-begotten. Hence Christian prayer is always rooted in the “I” of the Son, who unites us with himself through his Incarnation so that we can take part in his dialogue with the Father. The Son by taking on “flesh” for us translates into human terms the very divine Word that he is.</p>
<p>Of ourselves, then, we do not have to devise a proper response to God’s loving address, since the prototype of our response is made visible and audible in the whole existence of the incarnate Word. The Holy Spirit, in turn, enables us to understand and appropriate the Word of God in Christ. By the Spirit we put on the mind of Christ and emit the heartfelt cry “Abba, Father!” Indeed, the Spirit is given to “bridge” the interpersonal communication between God and his adopted children, since the Spirit is the bond of unity (between the paternal address and the filial answer) in God himself.</p>
<p>Insofar as we are aware of the stupendous mystery that undergirds our life of prayer, we can more readily let ourselves be drawn ever nearer to the Father of grace, assured that union with the God of Jesus Christ is not attained at the cost of our dignity as persons. In fact, called to be “sons in the Son,” we are “raised to a dignity beyond compare” (Pastoral Constitution <em>Gaudium et spes</em>, §22).</p>
<p>As Christians, therefore, we ought to be wary of every form of meditation that directs us to leave our personal existence behind in an effort to arrive at union with the wordless abyss, the void in which all distinction is effaced. For after all, as Balthasar remarked</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The Father is not an empty void, not a nirvana, but . . . the Son’s origin, lovingly affirming him. In the Father there is nothing beyond this eternal Yes to the Son, nothing he keeps to himself and does not share with the Son . . . As for the Son, his is the fathomless bliss of being begotten, loved and affirmed [in his personal distinction].<a href="#_ftn6" name="_ftnref6" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[6]<!--[endif]--></a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Seen from the vantage point of the revelation of the Holy Trinity, meditation of whatever brand which proposes a one-way movement from the world towards the Absolute culminating in the “swallowing up” or “blowing out” of every “I” is misconceived—however admirable the motive and noble the aim.<strong> </strong><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]--></p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[1]<!--[endif]--></a> Hans Urs von Balthasar, <em>Prayer, </em>trans. Graham Harrison<em> </em>(San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986).</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[2]<!--[endif]--></a> Balthasar, <em>Christian Meditation,</em> trans. Sister Mary Teresilde Skerry (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989).</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[3]<!--[endif]--></a><em> </em>Ibid., 7.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[4]<!--[endif]--></a> Ibid., 93.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[5]<!--[endif]--></a> Balthasar, “The Unknown Lying Beyond the Word,” in <em>Explorations in Theology, Vol. III: Creator Spirit</em>, trans. Brian McNeil (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993) 107.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref6" name="_ftn6" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[6]<!--[endif]--></a> Balthasar, “The Exalted Lord’s Care for the World,” in <em>You Crown the Year with Your Goodness,</em> trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 124.</p>
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</div>Margaret Turektag:churchlifejournal.nd.edu,2005:News/1603052024-03-01T06:00:00-05:002024-03-01T01:24:08-05:00The Sacrament of the Possible, Or, Why I Became a Catholic<p>Jennifer Newsome Martin on conversion. </p><p><span class="dropcap">L</span>ike Augustine’s <em>Confessions</em>, what is offered here is in a mode of theological memory. <a href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[1]<!--[endif]--></a> It is a recollection, a <em>re</em>-collection, a gathering up and dusting off and laying out vignettes of personal memories side-by-side in a retrospective effort to discern a providential pattern of moments that cumulatively prompted my turn to the Roman Catholic faith at the Easter Vigil of 2005. With St. Augustine too I must ask what is to me the most urgent question: “Lord my God, judge of my conscience, <em>is my memory correct</em>?” (<em>Confessions</em> V.11). This question is pressing because as a genre both retrospective and constructive, any autobiographical writing is prone to misremembering, exaggerating, thematizing, fictionalizing, sentimentalizing, disposed either to selective forgetfulness or romance or both. In the 1874 preface to <em>The Autobiographical Memoir</em>, Newman opines that the genre of</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Memoir, or at least a Life, is more or less the product of the imagination, a <em>conclusion</em> from facts, more or less theoretical and unauthoritative. Besides, for the most part, Lives are padded, or spun out, that they may give an adventitious interest, form a continuous narrative, and complete a volume (<em>Autobiographical Writings</em>, 23).</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Newman took scrupulous care, however, to preserve testaments to his life in such media as grammar school notebooks, scraps of papers salvaged from his boyhood, and the composition and organization of his letters. Letters, he thought, are less susceptible to retrospective fictionalizing: they are confirmed artifacts which don’t lie, or which lie less, perhaps, than the stories we tell about ourselves. Letters, conversely, “are facts” (<em>AW </em>23). And Newman was an archivist of his own facts, “a confirmed hoarder” of “every kind of article that had a personal bearing . . . he treasured these possessions, just because they formed, as it were, an extension of his personality” (<em>AW </em>143).</p>
<p>One especially charming piece of such ephemera Newman kept is what has since been called his “Autobiography in Miniature,” written by Newman in a mix of pencil and ink on the back cover of one of his old school exercise notebooks over the long course of seventy-two years (1812–1884), spanning from age eleven to age eighty-three. Almost an autobiographical prose poem, the document briefly logs significant moments in his life—from a bout of homesickness before his Greek lesson as a young schoolboy to his monumental conversion to Catholicism to his being made an Oratorian priest and a cardinal—with the repetition of the simple phrase: “and now.”</p>
<p>The preservation of this scrap of ephemera, which survived his many bouts of purging his private journals, powerfully elucidates in one material object themes of the quiet drama of Newman’s conversion to holiness and ultimately to the Roman Catholic Church. “<em>And now</em>,” he writes, “in my rooms at Oriel College, a Tutor, a Parish Priest and Fellow, having suffered much, slowly advancing to what is good and holy, and led on by God’s hand blindly, not knowing whither He is taking me” (<em>AW </em>5). In this one artifact there is both a sense of the passage of time as well as a sense of a continuous present.</p>
<p>Each new entry is extended across time and bridges many years, open to whatever future God would have in store for him as he ages from schoolboy to young adult to midlife to old age, but it is also punctuated by the immediacy of the present with the continuous repetition of the phrase “and now.” It, along with Newman’s journals and letters, represents an artifact not only of momentous events in his personal and spiritual life but even more it is an artifact that witnesses to the loving providence of God. As in the mode of Augustine’s <em>Confessions</em>, where the most fundamental confession of the text is not of sin but rather confession in praise of God, Newman suggests that his personal papers provide “the record of God’s great mercies to me, of the wonderful things He has done for my soul” (<em>AW</em> 149).</p>
<p>I have certainly not been as scrupulous with my record keeping as St John Henry Newman was, but I did uncover a thick leather journal from this particularly formative period of life—over a thousand bound pages—begun on May 24, 2000 when I was twenty, Protestant, single, and living in the southern United States, and ended eight years later in June of 2008, when I was Catholic, married, a mother, and working on a PhD in Systematic Theology at the University of Notre Dame. Less impressive than Newman’s seventy-two-year record, I know, but at least it was something. Facts and not conclusions from facts!</p>
<p>And the indisputable facts were there: some testament to my interior life at the time but far more importantly, a testament to the slow work of God’s providence. There is something about the deliberate act of retrospection that can illuminate the patterns of a life, where it comes to be seen that what might have looked at the time only like contingent events of personal history were in fact gifts of grace meted out by a watchful hand. I was surprised at how many details I had forgotten along the way. Without their preservation in writing the providence of God would have been perhaps to me only a theological theorem and not itself an insistent fact. And so comes the title, “The Sacrament of the Possible,” which is in part a little nod to Jean-Pierre de Caussade’s spiritual classic <em>The Sacrament of the Present Moment</em> written in the mid-1700s, a book which is customarily sub-titled <em>Self-Abandonment to Divine Providence</em>.</p>
<p>One unanticipated revelation that met me in these pages was that before I revisited them I would have said as a reliable shorthand that my joining the Catholic Church was a species of the classic intellectual conversion. And in a way I did read my way into Catholicism, with books theological, poetic, literary, historical, and hagiographical. I read all the usual suspects: Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Gerard Manley Hopkins; I read theology with no awareness of or interest in intra-theological Catholic squabbles: I read Jacques Maritain, Etienne Gilson, William Lynch, Edward Schillebeeckx, Karl Rahner, Hans Urs von Balthasar. I recall that Robert Louis Wilken’s little book <em>The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God</em> was especially formative for making the concerns and figures of early Christianity come alive for me when even the concept of tradition itself was an unfamiliar one.</p>
<p>In retrospect, however, and with the sure testament of my own private record, it turned out that I was not in fact fundamentally convinced by scholarly argument, persuasive apologetics, or anyone’s dazzling theological acumen, least of all my own. Without denying the inherent attraction of the Catholic intellectual heritage, it was all much more affective, aesthetic, intuitive, and embodied than I remembered: it was, to reference Paul Claudel’s guardian angel from <em>The Satin Slipper</em>, the experience of the “fish hook of beauty,” that interior sensation in the “depth” of the self, that space “between the heart and the liver, that dull thud, that sharp pull-up, that urgent touch.” It was a love story.</p>
<p>There are entries as early as 2001, four years before my eventual conversion in 2005, which witnessed to a strange, visceral, inexplicable pull of and to the beauty of the liturgy (April 15, 2001 marks, without much context, a longing for “a Catholic Mass”). And once I began attending Mass regularly as a catechumen four years later, I wrote that it is the “liturgy which draws me in, welcomes me, echoes in my head at all hours: ‘<em>In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’</em>; it’s so old, ancient, beautiful, tender, and magnificently unsentimental.”</p>
<p>Rereading entries during the years leading up to my entering into full communion with the Catholic Church was like following a long and golden chain of providential giftedness, being pulled up “further up and further in” by the beauty of God. To put an even finer point on it, I found stuck within the journal’s pages a yellowing index card with some scribbled lines from Plotinus’s <em>Ennead</em> “On Beauty,” a text that describes those who see “true beauties” as “truly enamored,” who see the Beauty and feel “astonishment, and a sweet shock, and longing, and erotic thrill, and a feeling of being overwhelmed with pleasure” (<em>Ennead </em>I, VI, 59). Here again the fundamentally aesthetic character of divine providence emerged: just as the perceiver of beauty in nature or in art must have the eyes to discern patterns or witness with appreciation the delicate interplay of artistic freedom and necessity, so too the perceiver or reader of a life must do the same. It is, as one commentator on Augustine has suggested, to see behind the “seemingly banal experiences” of any given human life and discern the soul as,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A journeying thing, like Israel in the desert, a stranger in a strange land. We all begin as wanderers, estranged from the God of our bliss; but if, through growing docility to the welter of ‘admonitions’ Providence scatters along our way, we come first to believe, then to understand the truth of our situation, we may convert our wandering into pilgrimage, into a return to the heavenly Jerusalem from which we have strayed.<a href="#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title="">[2]</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>This realization of the aesthetic character of providence prompted yet another level of appreciation for its mysterious workings, as both my published scholarship and pedagogical interests have to do with forms of theological aesthetics from Plato to von Balthasar, the latter of which prioritizes the aesthetic categories of beauty within the discipline of theology, including perception, rapture, encounter, and glory, beauty’s theological analogue. My scholarly work is animated at least in part by themes of beauty and desire, and in structures of Christian revelation—God’s personal self-disclosure to human beings—which are fundamentally aesthetic insofar as infinite content is communicated in legible, visible, finite forms, in theophany and transfiguration and word and sacrament. Most of my publications in the last decade or so have focused upon the work of Balthasar and certain of his direct theological and literary interlocutors, people like Dante, whose <em>Paradiso</em> is one of the clearest expressions of the primordial call of the divine beauty of God, of Russian Orthodox Vladimir Solovyov, who was the real-life model for Dostoevsky’s Alyosha<em> </em>in his <em>The Brothers Karamazov</em>, as well as the French Catholic poets Paul Claudel and Charles Péguy, who in some ways helped to shape the sensibilities of <em>ressourcement</em> theology in interwar Catholic France and beyond.</p>
<p>I have already noted a debt to de Caussade’s “abandonment to divine providence;” the other primary category at play in this recollection is that of the <em>possible</em>. Indeed, my conversion had the character not quite of the dramatic introduction of something new or imputed from without but rather something like a gradual <em>attunement </em>(<em>Einstimmung</em>) to possibility (<em>Wahrscheinlichkeit</em>). I experienced becoming a Roman Catholic in a mode of confirmation, recognition, kinship, even something like nostalgia, with a strong sense of coming home to something strangely remembered. The story witnesses to discrete occasions of God’s grace that made an imagined, hoped-for possibility concrete and actual.</p>
<p>Of all the spiritual paths that lay before me, entering into full communion with the Catholic Church was perhaps the least likely one. In a sense it seemed to be utterly <em>im</em>possible—until it didn’t. But the constraints of my upbringing in a large extended family of extremely independent, constitutively temperamental Protestants who were at least unfamiliar with if not somewhat suspicious of the tenets of the Catholic faith contributed to the sense of impossibility of ever becoming a Catholic. This was an outcome that, had someone predicted what was to be, would have been to me utterly beyond belief.</p>
<p>I often say in jest—though it’s not really a joke—that I grew up inside a Flannery O’Connor short story. My earliest childhood memories are set in a tidy little log house in rural North Carolina that my great-grandfather had built in the mid 1800s: originally there was one upstairs room and one downstairs room with a fireplace, with additional rooms built around that heart of that structure up through the 1930s. We eventually moved into a larger house that my father built from the ground up about a quarter of a mile from the historic cabin and lived there on a 40-acre farm nestled within tobacco and soybean fields in what was then an economically fragile town off of Highway 158.</p>
<p>We lived very, very far out in the country, in a community populated not by strangers but by our sprawling extended family of grandmothers and grandfathers, aunts and uncles and cousins. It was not only that we happened to <em>know</em> everyone who lived in our community like might be the case in any other small Southern town; rather, we were related to them all. And we shared a name not only with one another but with the road itself: alongside all the other Newsomes whose homes and farms were dotted along it, we lived at the very end of one John Newsome Road, just gravel for many years but eventually paved by the state of North Carolina. Here enacted—before I had the words for it or knew how much of a fragile gift it really was—was a lived theology of local community, a fidelity to place worthy of Wendell Berry’s or Peter Maurin’s call to holy rootedness.</p>
<p>If anyone had wanted to visit, they would have had to drive from the one stoplight in the one-stoplight town marked with abandoned houses and storefronts, turn left just past Enterprise Baptist Church onto John Newsome Road, then once that ran out, turn right on a dirt road through the woods, past the old tobacco barns and groves of overgrown persimmon trees, past some half-heartedly built treehouses and deer stands, past the wooden outhouse (a relic from the older generations of Newsomes who had come before), past the simple graves of twin great-aunts who had died in the 1930s as infants and were buried there on the property, and finally open out upon a vista with a massive vegetable garden, horse pastures, old barns with chickens and guinea fowl and goats wandering about, a two-story house with a big front porch and a wooden porch swing, and pig pens worthy of Mrs. Turpin’s most searing revelatory visions. It was a microcosm of all the lushness and wildness of nature—Wendell Berry’s “peace of wild things / who do not tax their lives with forethought/of grief,” of thorns, weeds, forests, snakes, unkempt azaleas, a whole undisciplined, verdant tangle of flora and fauna that my family coaxed into compliance enough to cultivate food from the elements of seed, soil, sunshine, water, and time.</p>
<p>This farm and all its unexplored territory—know that 40 acres, to a child, was a universe—was the site of a particularly Southern brand of rural childhood: the rose-colored glasses with which I am very likely re-envisioning the setting recall a peculiar quality of afternoon light, slanting over landscapes of fields peppered with hay bales or corn, ordinary and heartbreakingly beautiful. To a child, at least to <em>me</em> as a child, who possessed a rather galling spiritual precociousness and bookishness which included lugging a giant Bible around to read outdoors—it was not just beautiful; it was <em>enchanted</em>. The world, I thought, even then, was full of signs. My siblings and I basically lived outdoors, especially in the summers: traipsing through the cold water of the creeks to find crawfish under heavy boulders, skipping highly coveted thin, flat rocks at the pond, picking four-leaf clovers by the rabbit pens, standing in the garden with a saltshaker in our pockets eating warm sun-ripened tomatoes straight from the vine.</p>
<p>When my mother wanted us home in the evening she would ring a big, heavy cast iron dinner bell. I remember my father killing the pigs in winter and making fresh sausage at the wooden kitchen table with an old-fashioned grinder clamped to the table. Our water came from a deep well on the property and it was always clear and cold. I belabor all these details not just from an over-active sense of nostalgia (to which I will readily admit), but to note how thoroughly connected we were to the land and to the agricultural rhythms of planting, picking, and preserving: an embodied foretaste, perhaps, of the rhythms of the liturgical seasons, to the constitutive futurity that animates a Christian practice oriented to the eschatological, and to the sacramental sense in which human work and material creation itself—grapes, wine, wheat, bread, oil, water, wood—can indeed be revelatory of God. Moreover, it was a piece of land with a built-in community, with stories, with a history and a tradition, something literally passed down (“<em>traditio</em>”) from one hand and generation to the next like the holy water at Mass from Charles Péguy’s long poem <em>The Portal of the Mystery of Hope</em>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>As at the entrance of the church on Sunday and on the feast days,</p>
<p>When we go to Mass,</p>
<p>Or at the funerals,</p>
<p>We give each other, we pass each other the holy water from hand to hand,</p>
<p>From neighbor to neighbor, one after the other…</p>
<p>So from hand to hand, from finger to finger/From fingertip to fingertip, the eternal generations,</p>
<p>Who are eternally going to Mass,</p>
<p>In the same breasts, in the same hearts up to the death of the world,</p>
<p>Like a relay,</p>
<p>In the same hope, the word of God is passed on (60).</p>
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<p>I came to realize belatedly that this manner of growing up—with the aspirational vision and primal childhood hope that the world and everything in it was teeming with mystery, life, beauty, meaning, and possibility—made my later encounter with the notion of a sacramental worldview more a recognition of something that I already knew, at least at non-verbal, bodily level. What if the world really <em>were</em>, as Hopkins said, “charged with the grandeur of God”? This vision of the created world—wherein I could say with St. Basil of Caesarea that “a single plant, a blade of grass is sufficient to occupy all your intelligence in the contemplation of the skill which produced it”—turned out to be possible and indeed made actual only with the Catholic commitments I would later adopt.</p>
<p>Living in this predominantly Protestant slice of the rural South, however, I never met a Catholic. My childhood was steeped in old time Southern religion, in those kinds of sparse, simple roadside churches, the ones with old-fashioned piano music, nothing on the walls but a wooden rack to display the page numbers for the hymns, King James Bibles, a handful of good country people in the pews. Both my paternal grandfather and my father were ministers in the Christian Churches and Churches of Christ, relatively common in the South and in certain pockets of the Midwest. These congregations are situated in what is sometimes broadly called the “Restoration Movement” or the “Stone Campbell Movement,” which emerged in revivalist efforts in the United States during the nineteenth century to return to the unity of the first century Church as described in the Book of Acts.</p>
<p>The emphasis is placed more on the aural than the visual, upon that which was sung, spoken, heard, preached and proclaimed. That said, there was not any active anti-intellectualist nor fundamentalist strain that I can recall. Our house, at least, was overflowing with books: biblical concordances and commentaries with pull-out colored maps of ancient Jerusalem and Palestine, boxed sets of C.S. Lewis, a complete set of dark green<em> Harvard Classics</em> which lent a dignified, solid air to the living room, though I don’t think I ever got past reading their impressive-sounding spines: <em>Plato, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius</em>; <em>Letters and Treatises of Cicero and Pliny</em>;<em> Pilgrim’s Progress</em>, <em>English Poetry I: Chaucer to Gray</em>.</p>
<p>The perduring gift of growing up in this movement, though it is no longer one with which I identify myself, is a love for and deep familiarity with the Scriptures. My students sometimes think I’m some sort of wizard when I can rattle off long passages of the Scriptural text by heart, but these are the poetic, musical rhythms of biblical speech that I internalized at my parents’ knees and which are permanently imprinted in the most visceral sense of my embodied memory. Claudel’s magnificent little book simply titled <em>J’aime la Bible</em> (<em>I Love the Bible</em>) speaks of the associations of the Scriptures with “the first stirrings of my heart and imagination” (1) and understands the Bible itself as a “vast poem” (14), and “architectural drama” (4), and a “living city” (4). He writes that the,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Holy Scriptures are more than a vehicle, that they alone form a sublime edifice suited not only to worship but to <em>residence</em>, and that the whole world was made for the sole purpose of serving them as support and embellishment…What house can compare with the Scriptures which are the temple of divine thought? And not only in beauty, but in what I call ultimate beauty, the substance of beauty which is meaning (3-4).</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Growing up within this “house” or “city” of the Scriptures made it such that when I began attending Catholic Masses as I was going through RCIA in 2004-2005, I found in an uncanny, bodily, remembered way that I was already at home in the language of the liturgical rites.</p>
<p>What this movement failed to provide, however, was any awareness that there was a long, complex tradition between the first century and my own. St. John Henry Newman once famously remarked that “to be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant.” For my own case at least, this maxim proved itself true. I very distinctly remember, for example, reading St. Ignatius of Antioch’s <em>Letter to the Smyrnaeans</em>, which is dated around 110 AD, just a few short years after the last books of the New Testament were composed. I was staggered by the lines that read, “Let no man do anything connected with the Church without the bishop . . . Wherever the bishop shall appear, there, let the multitude of the people also be; even as wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church.” But that was all to come much later.</p>
<p>Without knowing anything of the ancient tradition of praying with the Psalms, I had began praying them, inscribing them in the pages of the journal I mentioned above. “Thou tellest my wanderings,” I copied out from Psalm 56:8, “put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book?” This and other Psalms were a great consolation to me, giving voice within the pages of sacred Scripture to the full range of human emotion: not just praise and thanksgiving but also lament, fear, anxiety, anger, and sadness.</p>
<p>Around the same time—as a junior in college—I departed for a summer mission to Kiramu, Ethiopia via Amtrak, from rural North Carolina by way of the big city of Indianapolis where our team training was to be held. Incredulously, the training for this decidedly Protestant mission was set not in a conference room of some ubiquitous chain hotel in the Midwest as might be expected but—again providentially—in a Benedictine monastery called Our Lady of Grace Monastery in Beech Grove, IN. I remember marveling at the austere little rooms with their white walls hung with crucifixes and Irish prayers and at the rich statuary populating the Madonna chapel. To me at the time it was all like something out of a movie set, wondrous and foreign but nonetheless compelling in its own way. <em>Could there really be</em>, I remember thinking, <em>such a thing as nuns</em>?</p>
<p>There were. That night we had evening prayer with the Benedictine sisters, and I fell in love with the beauty and formality of it, with both the structure and the dynamism, the dialogical give-and-take of the antiphons, the sound of our voices praying together in common. And here too was the familiar language of the Psalms which had become a veritable spiritual life-raft for me. I was still four years away from finding the idea of becoming a Catholic even a genuinely plausible one, but witnessing this new way of praying by these nuns reawakened my own prayer life at a time when I felt very much in the proverbial dark night of the soul. I am reminded of that line from Dorothy Day’s <em>The Long Loneliness</em>, where the then bohemian atheist Day recounts the shock and surprise of seeing her Catholic roommates praying. “I saw them pray,” Day wrote, “and the public prayer of the church and Blanche’s kneeling down by the table on which was spread out her hats and trimmings did something to me which I could not forget” (<em>The Long Loneliness</em> 107). This witness of the nuns likewise did something to me which I could not forget. It was nothing less than the expansion of my imagination regarding what in fact was and was not possible in terms of spiritual practices and forms of life.</p>
<p>Journal entries for the next few years witness to this enlargement of spiritual imagination. The pages are peppered with quotes from the likes of Julian of Norwich, Basil of Caesarea, Origen, St. Catherine of Siena, Hildegard von Bingen, Georges Bernanos, St. Augustine, Flannery O’Connor, Thomas Merton, the prayers of St. Francis, lines from the <em>Glory Be</em> and the <em>Te Deum </em>and the prayers of the desert fathers. I went to an Ash Wednesday service to receive ashes and was appropriately moved and devastated by the priest’s words, “<em>Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return</em>.” All of this was a revelation, though at the time I thought I loved these works only intellectually, as a curious outsider looking in, as when Dorothy Day read the novels of Huysmans and wrote that “it was these books which made me feel that I too could be at home in the Catholic Church, without becoming a Catholic” (<em>The Long Loneliness</em>, 107).</p>
<p>A few months later I drove out alone to the Trappist Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Conyers, GA, which was founded in 1944 by twenty monks from the Abbey of Gethsemeni near Bardstown, Kentucky, where Merton had lived and prayed. Ancestors of Flannery O’Connor’s peacocks roamed the grounds of the Monastery of the Holy Spirit. It’s a stunning place, made more stunning perhaps by the hazy light of my recollections, but I do remember quite clearly how the grounds hummed with a quiet, insistent life: not just the peacocks fanning out their glorious trains full of eyes like so many apocalyptic angels, but also bees nuzzling clover and bright peonies, birds perched along the steeple of the abbey church, the thrum of cicadas and geese. In my retrospections, coming to understand the ethos of Catholicism and to come to place myself within it was—very much mirroring the formative experiences of my childhood—intimately tied with the sensuality and the beauty of place. As Dostoevsky puts it,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Every blade of grass, every insect, ant, and golden bee . . . bear witness to the mystery of God and continually accomplish it themselves . . . All creation and all creatures, every leaf is striving to the Word, singing glory to God, weeping to Christ, unconsciously accomplishing this by the mystery of their sinless life” (<em>The Brothers Karamazov</em>, 254-5).</p>
</blockquote>
<p>During this initial visit to the monastery, I recall looking at the stained glass rose window in the abbey church and feeling, however tentatively, as if I could be at home within the Catholic tradition (“My heart,” I wrote, “ever since I drove onto the monastery property, has not ceased to beat at almost twice the normal speed . . . There is no part of life that is not holy”). But this realization was something of a slow burn: somehow it took over a year for me to return to the monastery, but when I went back in September of 2004 for a three-day retreat on contemplative prayer, at last my restlessness began to fade.</p>
<p>The abbot, Dom Francis Michael, led the retreat, but the most unforgettable conversation I had was in a session of spiritual counsel with a delightfully spirited monk called Fr. Tom Francis whose eyes, despite his age, glowed with the fire of a kind of eternal youth. We talked at length about Catholic theology and history, the saints, even about Hans Urs von Balthasar’s book on prayer. He confided in me somewhat mirthfully his own contemplative prayer practice of imagining himself riding joyfully and laughing riotously like a young child on the back of Aslan from <em>The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe</em>.</p>
<p>When I got home I called the Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in downtown Atlanta, the first Roman Catholic basilica in Georgia (established in 1880), and began RCIA alongside my husband and his brother. Again, the felt experience of that entire process again was more like a homecoming than not. One journal entry from the time read that it “finally feels like I am putting on my own skin after a long hiatus without being in my proper element.” In March of 2005, three weeks before I was finally to be confirmed as a Catholic, I got the good news that I had been accepted into the Master of Theological Studies at the University of Notre Dame, a place I have called home for nearly twenty years, first as a graduate student, and now (“and now”!) as a faculty member in the Program of Liberal Studies and the Department of Theology.</p>
<p>As I said at the outset, most of my work in academic theology is centered around the thought of Hans Urs von Balthasar, whose project is animated by the coincidence of the beautiful with the good and the true. I became a Catholic, very simply, because I believed Catholicism to be beautiful and good and true.</p>
<p>Balthasar’s metaphysics stipulates furthermore that being itself is full of future, full of possibility; it is “essentially open-ended; even more, it is essentially a beginning, a promise, a <em>hope</em>, an upspringing” (<em>Theo-Logic </em>I, 196). His ecclesiology likewise stipulates that the Catholic Church “in her being has a future . . . The more it is thought about and lived (especially by those whom one calls ‘saints’), the more inexhaustible—and hence the more belonging to the future—does it rise before the eyes of the faithful” (<em>The Glory of the Lord VII</em>, 102). To be a Catholic, then, is to be increasingly intimate to the ever-expanding borders of the possible. The lived practice of the Catholic faith—“from hand to hand, from finger to finger / From fingertip to fingertip, the eternal generations, / Who are eternally going to Mass”—bodies the tradition forward and gathers up with it those who glimpse themselves already in it. I became a Catholic because I could no longer see my own future as something that was not placed within this community and this horizon of possibility from glory to glory, because I could no longer envision a future that was anything but inexhaustible.<!-- [if !supportFootnotes]--></p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[1]<!--[endif]--></a> This essay is an edited, shortened form of the 2022 St John Henry Newman Lecture originally delivered for the Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage at Loyola Chicago.</p>
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<div id="ftn2">
<p><a href="#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[2]<!--[endif]--></a> Robert O’Connell, S.J., <em>Art and the Christian Intelligence in St. Augustine </em>(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 96.</p>
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</div>Jennifer Newsome Martintag:churchlifejournal.nd.edu,2005:News/1602622024-02-29T06:00:00-05:002024-02-28T17:57:03-05:00The Necessity of Interreligious Dialogue Doesn't Negate Our Mission Mandate<p>John Cardinal Onaiyekan on ecumenism. </p><p>I have been asked to offer some reflections on the lessons I have learned from my lifelong experience in Interreligious Dialogue for Peace. I want to stress that for me, interreligious dialogue is not for its own sake but in view of peaceful living together among persons from different religious persuasions. First let me give a brief outline of my interreligious life journey.</p>
<h2>Personal Backround</h2>
<p>From my childhood, I have been bred and raised in an atmosphere of interreligious living together. Although I was born into a very strong Catholic family, we lived at peace with people of other faiths.</p>
<h3>Early Childhood.</h3>
<p>First of all, let me start from the beginning, from when I was born on 29 January 1944. According to the custom of our people, my father gave me a name, which expresses his mood at the gift of a baby son. He gave me the name Olorunfemi, which means “Olorun loves me.” This name, which is common among my people, goes deep into the religious traditions of our people. Olorun is the Yoruba name for God, the Supreme Being, the Almighty Creator, whose worship is the foundation of <a href="https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/the-essence-of-african-traditional-religion/">our traditional religion</a>. I was taken to Church the next day and baptized with the name John. I know that he had in mind John the Baptist, since his two previous children were baptized Joseph and Mary, and my next sibling, a girl, was naturally Elizabeth. I myself later decided on John the Evangelist, the Beloved Apostle, as my patron saint.</p>
<p>But before John, there was Olorunfemi, confirming the deep faith of my father in Olorun, the same God who is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. This attachment to the “God of our Ancestors”, has remained with me all through life. That is how my father put me on my inter-faith life journey.</p>
<p>At the time I was growing up, the <a href="https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/the-essence-of-african-traditional-religion/">African Traditional Religion</a> was still very active in our little community of Kabba. Many members of my family remained attached to our traditional religion. I still remember very well the senior brother to my father, my uncle, who was the head of the traditional religious cult in our little village of Anyongon. He used to visit my father in the bigger town of Kabba every now and again. When he died, his body was brought from Anyongon to Kabba by my father, and given full burial, in line with the traditional religion of our people, as a chief with the dignity of a chief. This was notwithstanding the fact that my father was the head of the Catholics in town. He did not shrink from his duty to facilitate the proper traditional burial of his brother. As a young boy of about 5 years, this made a deep impact on me.</p>
<p>There were other members of my family, both from my father’s and my mother’s side who remained staunch practitioners of our traditional religion. Another example was the senior cousin to my father, Chief Obatimeyin, who led the traditional worshippers in a section of Kabba called Odolu. He was present at my priestly ordination in rapt attention, at the end of which he congratulated me saying, “Yes, you have done well. In our family, this is how we are. Whatever we do, we do it well. Batholomew (namely my father) has done very well.”</p>
<p>On my mother's side, my mother's father was one of the leaders of the traditional worship in the palace area of Kabba. When he died, my mother got caught up in the rituals for his burial to an extent that my father was very angry that they should be involving my mother in their mysterious and mystical practices. But he respected them. Thus, I was taught from the very beginning never to look down on the religion of our ancestors, even though my father constantly warned us not to dabble in their celebrations. That is practical dialogue with the African Traditional Religion on a very personal level.</p>
<p>As for ecumenism, the Christian faith first came to our community of Kabba, first with the preaching of a charismatic preacher called Joseph Babalola. He preached in our town in a very successful crusade. All he demanded was that people should abandon the traditional religion, believe in Jesus Christ, and become Christians. But he did not have any church of his own. Rather, he asked people to go and join any Christian church of their choice. My father decided to join the Catholic Church. Some of his friends and even members of our family joined the Anglican Church, which was the only other Christian denomination in the town at that time. Furthermore, my mother's junior brother decided to become a member of the Christ Apostolic Church, an African charismatic denomination, which was later brought to the town.</p>
<p>What all this meant was that I grew up with my uncles and aunties and their own children who are my cousins, all of us in different Christian denominations and we did not find anything strange about it. We took it in our stride, even though at this time, the ecumenical idea was definitely not yet in vogue in our church. The Irish Catholic missionary did all he could to let us know that it is only the Catholic Church that is the true Church of Christ. All the rest, we were told, were man-made. Protestants are the people who have created for themselves their own fake Christianity. We called them in Yoruba “Aladamo,” meaning those who have created their own doctrines. But despite all this, it did not stop us from having a good relationship with our cousins and uncles who did not follow the Catholic line.</p>
<p>Furthermore, at that time as a child, I still remember one of my uncles who somehow against all odds had become a Muslim. The Islamic faith did not take root in our community. He was one of the few in our community who called himself a Muslim, with the name Suleiman. But he was still a very likable fellow. He visited my father regularly and we children had great respect for him, even though he was a Muslim. Therefore, already at the age of 5,6,7 I had an uncle who was a Muslim, and I did not see him as being somebody who should not be respected for his faith. Thus I grew up from early childhood in a society where the African Traditional Religion, different denominations of the Christian faith and even the Islamic religion were at home.</p>
<h3>School Life Experience</h3>
<p>Later on, I went to a Catholic secondary school where the entire environment was specifically Catholic. It was run by Holy Ghost missionaries for whom the school apostolate was a major form of evangelization. Even though the entire school's daily program was clearly Catholic, with holy mass every morning and other prayers every evening, yet the school was open to children who belonged to other faiths. I still remember very well the very few Muslim students who studied with us. They were expected, and they did comply, to attend Mass every morning, even if they went there to sleep or to read other things. But they were there with us. However, they were not forced to be Christians. In fact, for the Muslims, during Ramadan, provisions were made for them to be able to fast.</p>
<p>I still remember very well my friend, Sabo who had a tenacious compliance with Islamic injunctions, especially during Ramadan. This filled me with great admiration. Here is a young boy who, after just an early heavy breakfast, would neither eat nor drink until sunset. And yet he joined in every aspect of school life, including games and manual labor. I constantly admired him for being so consistent with his faith.</p>
<p>Sabo Ago took it upon himself to slaughter the goats and rams that used to be provided for our meals in the kitchen. He had to do this so that he would not have to eat meat that had not been properly slaughtered. If by any reason he was not available when the cooks needed to slaughter the animals and someone else did, it meant that my friend Sabo Ago would not eat from the common pot on that day because the meat had not been properly slaughtered. Again, this filled me with great admiration for him because it meant he would just make do with whatever he could find to fill his stomach, provided he did not participate in meat that had not been properly slaughtered. That gave me occasion to also have some kind of idea about the beliefs and the practices of the Islamic faith, even though it was from a few young boys in the same school.</p>
<h3>My Journey in Priestly Formation</h3>
<p>My life journey in priestly formation started in 1963 in the major seminary in Ibadan, Nigeria. The theological climate at the time was clearly pre-Vatican II, But the Vatican Council already started in 1963. I was in Ibadan until 1965, and already, echoes of the Vatican Council had begun to trickle in to the curriculum of the seminary formation. However, what reached us most immediately were the liturgical changes that had started, especially as regards sacred Mass in the vernacular and the gradual introduction of African music not only in terms of tones and rhythms but also instruments of music like drums and gongs. This was the first aspect of the Vatican Council that we saw. We had not yet begun to see all that Vatican II brought in as regards interreligious understanding.</p>
<p>However, by summer of 1965, I was sent to Rome to continue my priestly formation at the Collegio Urbano de Propaganda Fide. We landed in Propaganda Fide, with many other young seminarians from all over the mission lands in September of 1965. The Vatican Council ended in December 1965. The documents of the council were promulgated and they were all bestsellers. I therefore started my theology with a lot of reports in the theology class about what had happened in the Vatican Council. Most of our major professors especially of dogma, canon law, and liturgy had been <em>periti </em>or experts in the Vatican Council. And so, I had four years of theological formation in Propaganda Fide, in the immediate aftermath of the Vatican II.</p>
<p>On the one hand, by its very name, Propaganda Fide was an institution to train young candidates from the mission lands to be missionaries back home when they return. We were supposed to get ourselves ready to spread the Catholic faith and to be faithful to the Catholic faith even unto the shedding of our blood. As far as the importance of the Catholic faith is concerned, the formation of the students in Propaganda Fide was precisely to make us zealous preachers of the Gospel.</p>
<p>However, at the same time, the Vatican II had come out with documents like <em>Lumen Gentium</em>, on the Church, <em>Unitatis Redintegratio</em> about ecumenism and. above all, <em>Nostra Aetate</em><strong> </strong>about non-Christian religions. The theological atmosphere was full of debates about how far we were going with regard to ecumenism with fellow Christians who are not Catholics and also opening up to other believers who are not Christians, as we see clearly in the two major documents <em>Lumen Gentium </em>and<em> Nostra Aetate</em>.</p>
<p>The result was that, my formation as a theology seminarian in Rome was quite balanced in terms of being, on the one hand, anxious to go and preach the Gospel to the ends of the earth, but, at the same time, I was made to recognize that other Christians were also Christians and that other believers in God deserved my respect. It was with this mood that I came back home in August 1969 for priestly ordination.</p>
<p>I spent two years at home teaching first in a secondary school and later in the junior seminary. I was eventually sent back to Rome for further studies, first at the Biblical Institute, and later at the Urbaniana University, for a Doctorate in biblical theology. My doctoral thesis was a comparative study of the concept of priesthood in ancient Israel, and in the traditional religion of my people. It is obvious here therefore that I already had a strong interest in interreligious study of the community in which I was to find myself. I therefore came back home with a doctoral degree with emphasis on interreligious dialogue, especially with African Traditional Religion, as well as of a licentiate in Sacred Scripture, which I had begun to learn to read with an open mind.</p>
<h3>Life as a Priest in Nigeria</h3>
<p>After a year teaching in the junior Seminary in my diocese of Lokoja, I was posted to the major seminary in Ibadan to teach scripture as well as act as rector of the seminary. There was also ample opportunity for pastoral work with the local community of Catholics who lived around the Seminary or who patronized the Seminary for their regular Sunday Mass.</p>
<p>My time in the Major Seminary allowed me to put into practice much of what I had learned about ecumenical and interreligious dialogue, especially on the academic level. I was quite involved in discussions with theologians of other Christian denominations especially in the Protestant seminary, the Emmanuel College, which was in the same area as our own major seminary. There was also at that time an association called the Nigerian Association for the Study of Religions, (NASR) where teachers in universities and Seminaries as well as the Islamic Institutions met for annual conferences where we discussed Christianity, Islam, and African Traditional Religion as these relate to the various issues of our nation. That experience opened me up to not only Protestants theologians but also Muslim scholars who also were grappling with the same issues that we were dealing with. We were all seeking ways to bring to bear our theological doctrines with the realities of our society and of our nation. It was an exciting experience.</p>
<h3>Life as a Bishop</h3>
<p>I was appointed a Bishop in July 1982, and ordained in Rome at the St. Peter’s Basilica by Pope St. John Paul II in January 1983. My first appointment was as an Auxiliary in the Diocese of Ilorin, a city tat was particularly important for interfaith and ecumenical relations.</p>
<p>First, in the area of interfaith relations, Ilorin is a strongly Muslim town and the relationship between Christians and Muslims in that town had always been very problematic. The slightest discussion often became violent, especially among the young people of both religions. My six years in Ilorin gave me ample opportunity to step in and try to find ways of getting Christians and Muslims to listen to each other and working towards a non-conflictual relationship. Incidentally, to do this, I needed to pay attention to the ecumenical dimension of our relationship with our Muslim neighbors. That meant therefore that I needed to encourage pastors and leaders of other Christian denominations to meet regularly to try and understand better one another, so that we can have a common and coherent mind when we face Muslims in dialogue. Thus, Ilorin gave me the opportunity for an experience with the Christian Association of Nigeria, of which I was soon elected for some time as the chairman. It was also an opportunity for closer relationship with the Islamic community.</p>
<p>In 1990, I was moved to the Federal Capital of Nigeria, Abuja. There, I was launched into the national level of the relationship between Christians among themselves and between Christians and Muslims. It was from Abuja that I became an important member of the Christian Association of Nigeria. For some time I was President of the Christian Association of Nigeria at the National level. That also brought me in touch with the Islamic leadership of Nigeria under the umbrella of the Nigerian Interreligious Council. It was in this instance that I developed very strong personal relationship with some Muslim leaders, especially with the head of Muslims, the Sultan of Sokoto Sa’ad Abubakar. It was because of this that I was involved in efforts to bring Christians and Muslims groups together within the city of Abuja. Along with the Executive Director of the National Mosque Alhaji Jega, we formed an Inter faith dialogue group for Abuja, which moved on very simple and modest level but opened up the whole idea of Christian and Muslim leaders talking together. There were plenty of things to talk about, because there were various issues that kept arising making the relationship difficult.</p>
<p>On the national level especially during a period when the Nigerian Inter-Religious Council went into a kind of coma, I co-founded an NGO called Inter Faith Initiative For Peace, with the Sultan Abubakar Sa’ad. The initiative still exists.</p>
<p>Finally, towards the end of my tenure as Archbishop of Abuja, I founded an NGO, which went by the name Cardinal Onaiyekan Foundation for Peace. The unit is part and parcel of the interreligious activities of the Archdiocese of Abuja, but for the moment under my chairmanship. The COFP has been very active bringing middle-level religious leaders together on various issues and especially training them in interfaith living together at the grassroot level all across the country. It organizes an annual fellowship program for interfaith peacebuilders, which has extended its influence beyond Nigeria, and admitting candidates from other African countries. The last session had about fifty candidates, including ten from outside Nigeria. This is my life journey and from this life journey, I have learned a lot of lessons.</p>
<h2>LESSONS LEARNED</h2>
<h3>The Reality of the Religious Pluralism</h3>
<p>I have the conviction that religious pluralism is a fact that we can no longer deny whether we like it or not. Not only Nigerians but men and women all over the world have made religious choices as regards how they will worship God and in the different religious organizations that we see around us. There are some that are well-known. Obviously, we talk especially about Christianity and about Islam, the two religions that most affect us in Nigeria and in Africa. But if we go global, we must then think of Hinduism and Buddhism, which also cannot be overlooked.</p>
<p>But the more significant fact is that we need to go beyond simply acknowledging the pluralism of religion. We must go beyond tolerance, and go into respecting the pluralism of religion. It is not always easy for people who are convinced about the truth of their religion to at the same time accept that the pluralism of religion may well be a God-given reality. I have come to the conclusion that pluralism of religion is all within the plan of the Almighty God who is greater than any religion.</p>
<h3>Mission and Dialogue Are Compatible</h3>
<p>In the past, the missionary was thought to be someone who would do everything to make everybody follow his religion. As Catholics and Christians, we have long interpreted the mandate of Jesus: “Go to the whole world and preach the Gospel to all nations” to mean that we must aim at making everybody Christian, in such a way that we find it difficult to have anything positive to say to, or, to have any positive discussion with, anybody who is not ready to be converted.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, this kind of attitude is also what we find among fanatical Muslims who themselves have the idea that the whole world must be converted to Islam. These two religions particularly have a great responsibility in this regard. They have to find a way of holding on to their universal mandate and at the same time recognizing the right of others to have a similar intention. For as long as they do not make room for others, then there will be no room for dialogue. Dialogue must mean that we acknowledge that the other has something valid to say.</p>
<p>Cardinal Arinze used to say that “dialogue means I talk you listen; you talk I listen.” I will listen only if I believe that you really have something worthwhile to tell me. We have to go beyond politely listening to each other and sincerely listening to what the other needs to say. Dialogue does not negate, nor is incompatible, with our mission mandate. We can continue with our mission mandate and at the same time make room to listen to others. In the process, the differences between us are easily explained and understood and, as we shall see later, we will be able to discover the many common grounds that we have.</p>
<p>The Church has a beautiful document on “Proclamation and Dialogue” which deals with this matter. It was a document jointly published by the then Congregation for Interreligious Dialogue and the Congregation for Evangelization of Peoples. These two congregations jointly came out with this document to, on the one hand, affirm the need and the importance of mission and proclamation and at the same time, the necessity of engaging in dialogue.</p>
<h3>Seeking Common Grounds</h3>
<p>Religious pluralism naturally stresses the fact that we have different religions. Unfortunately, we emphasize our differences to the extent that we tend to identify ourselves on the basis of these differences. “I am a Christian because I am not a Muslim,” and vice versa. But in that way, we tend to identify ourselves not by what we are but by what we are not, by how we differ from everyone else!</p>
<p>Therefore, there is a need to make the effort to seek, discover, and celebrate the common grounds that we have among our different religions. If we do not dispose our mind to this, we will only be seeing the differences and will never see where we have common grounds.</p>
<p>Our common grounds are many. There are doctrinal common grounds. One of the most common elements of this common ground is the very belief in the one God. We must insist that the Almighty God has made himself known to the whole of humanity. St Paul says as much in the Epistle to the Romans. The first item in our Christian Creed is “I believe in one God.” If we cannot believe that others have the same God, then it becomes doubtful whether we really believe in one God. If you believe in one God, there <a href="https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/is-the-quranic-god-the-same-god-as-the-biblical-god/">cannot be another God for Muslims</a>, another God for Buddhists, and another one for Hindus.</p>
<p>Even where we have major doctrinal differences, there are still some common elements. Let us take for example, the person of Christ, which is the very great distinguishing item of our faith that distinguishes us from every other religion, especially from Islam. When we look more carefully, especially with Muslims, we see that we share a lot of things in terms of who Jesus is. Obviously, the Islamic idea of Jesus is not the same as the Christian idea of Jesus. But it is not an insignificant matter that the Muslim has great regard for Jesus as a great prophet and respects his mother Mary as a Virgin Mother. We need to gladly celebrate these facts before we begin to quarrel over the things that we cannot reconcile.</p>
<p>Similarly, we have many common moral values. There may be differences in details as regards moral norms and behavior. But as far as basic moral values are concerned, values like honesty, sincerity, and solidarity. We have a lot in common. We need to acknowledge this so that we can work on them in terms of cooperation in practical life.</p>
<p>Similarly, in the general area of worship, if we are ready to respect the way others approach God in prayer, we will discover that we have really a lot in common. An example is the fact that we believe in God who listens to our prayers. There are observances and ways and means of showing our respect for God. There is a belief in sacrifice and fasting. These are aspects of religious worship that we generally hold in common but which we do not often acknowledge. And so, when we seek common grounds, we discover them and we should celebrate them for what they are.</p>
<p>There is also a common ground in terms of the challenges that face us. Nigeria is a good case in point. Whether you are Christian or Muslim, most of our challenges are the same. There are the same problems of conflicts, bad governance, the terrible plague of corruption, the natural problems of disease, and a lack of good health facilities. In these matters, it is not a matter of being Christian or Muslim. It is purely a matter of human needs, and the more we pay attention to this, the more we can understand each other and live and work together. We have common challenges, which are also our common grounds.</p>
<h3>Religion and Peace</h3>
<p>Every religion talks about peace. Christianity believes in Jesus, the Prince of Peace. Islam says that the very word “Islam” means Peace. Therefore, one would expect that religion should bring peace. The ideal still remains that religion is for peace.</p>
<p>However, unfortunately, the reality is that very often, religion has been used for war. Or, shall we say, religion has often been misused and manipulated for war. In our Nigerian context, religion has been very badly manipulated for politics. Our religious differences are being exploited for the selfish interests of people for whom religion is not really a major concern.</p>
<p>This being so, religious leaders have a duty to liberate themselves from these influences that are making it difficult for religion to be itself and to play its proper role in peace. That is why it is important that we emphasize the necessity of interreligious conversation, especially among religious leaders but also among religious communities.</p>
<p>We must also not forget the importance of intra-religious dialogue. Religions like Christianity and Islam have divisions within themselves, which sometimes have caused conflicts that are as virulent as conflict with other religious bodies. The history of Catholic-Protestant wars in early modernity is a terrible lesson for us to keep in mind. Also, within Islam, there has been a long history of conflict, especially between Sunni and Shiite, which is still visible today. Therefore, religions must make peace with themselves. It is only then that religion can be effective in bringing peace to humanity. When religious leaders have a joint position and they come together to mediate, they do so with great efficiency and power. This is especially so where religion is part of the issues that are causing the conflict. Religious leaders must be bold to link hands and get involved in peace building and conflict resolution even when they are not invited. Religion is for peace, and should always be for peace.</p>
<h3>Religious Freedom as a Fundamental Human Right</h3>
<p>To respect the fundamental human right of religious freedom, we must accept the basic equality of every religion, even when it is a small minority. This is not an area where the majority carries the day. Everybody must be allowed to follow God according to his or her conscience.</p>
<p>At the same time, however, there may be a limit to how much one can express one’s religion. This is because your freedom to express your religion must respect the freedom of others. As we usually say, “Your freedom stops where my own begins.” This is often a problem that is not impossible to resolve but which we must recognize.</p>
<p>As far as religious freedom is concerned, there is always the matter of the state. If the state does not uphold the rights of religious freedom, it is difficult for weak minority groups to stand up on their own. The state must therefore be impartial in this matter even when a particular religion may have greater political and economic clout. The state must defend the religious freedom of everyone, irrespective of whether one is in the minority or majority.</p>
<p>Recently, my friend Bryan Grimm has done a lot of work and a lot of moving around the globe espousing the great idea that religious freedom is good for business. He seems to have achieved a great amount of success in convincing both religious leaders as well as business executives that both religion and business have everything to gain by giving room for religious freedom. His project seems to be worth paying very close attention to.</p>
<h3>Religion in our Contemporary Globalized World</h3>
<p>We should remember once again, in our global world people are moving from one part of the world to the other. With ever-improving means of transportation and the revolution in communications technology, it means that we hear and see one another across the whole planet. Therefore, it is no longer possible for any religion to stand aloof or to isolate itself from others. The very fact of globalization means that we must take religious pluralism very seriously.</p>
<p>It is providential and we should thank God that there are many interreligious institutions now in the world. The most well-known to me is the Religious for Peace International, based in New York, which brings together the leadership of most of the major religions in the world, organized according to regions, and National Interreligious Councils. But it is not the only one. There is a group called The Parliament of World Religions and there are other people who are involved in this idea of bringing religious leaders together so that we can build a better world under God.</p>
<p>We cannot forget the great importance of some recent gestures made at a global level. I am thinking especially about the meeting between Pope Francis and the Grand Imman of Al-Azhar Mosque, Sheik Al-Tayeb. The two great religious leaders came out with a powerful common document, with the significant title, “On Human Fraternity.” In the document, they both formally declare that all of us, not just Christians and Muslims, the entire humanity are brothers and sisters. This will make sense only if we admit that there is one Father, whom we call called God by different names.</p>
<p>This document of the pope and the sheik has been endorsed and accepted by many other religious bodies worldwide, both Christian and Muslim groups, as well as other world religions like Buddhism, Hinduism, etc. For me, this is a special grace that God is giving to our world and we pray that we can pay necessary attention to it.</p>
<p>Finally, I want to mention the gradually growing place of religion now in the United Nations and its agencies. For a long time, these bodies have shown some kind of allergy to dealing with religious institutions, either because they believe that religion is bad for society, or because they simply did not find a language to speak with religious organizations.</p>
<p>The allergy perhaps is mutual because the religious body did not show much interest in the UN. In this matter, the Catholic Church from the beginning has been an exception. That is the origin of the Permanent Observers and Representatives of the Holy See in the United Nations and in its agencies. Other religious bodies have now established such contacts with the United Nations. What is more interesting is that recently, the United Nations itself has decided to establish a framework for religions to relate easily with its work. How far this will go, we do not yet know.</p>
<h2>Conclusion</h2>
<p>And with this, I can say I have come to the end of the lessons that I have learned from my long journey of Inter-Religious Dialogue for Peace. The journey is not over yet but I hope it will not be too long since I turn 80 already in January 2024. May the God of Peace grant us harmony in our world, globally and locally. Amen.</p>
<p>EDITORIAL NOTE: A version of this essay was delivered on 29 September 2023 at the World Religions World Church Colloquium with the title, "Lessons from a Life of Interreligious Dialogue for Peace in the World."</p>John Cardinal Onaiyekantag:churchlifejournal.nd.edu,2005:News/1601622024-02-27T05:59:00-05:002024-02-27T09:39:32-05:00A Very Short Introduction to the History of Faith and Science in the Catholic Tradition<p>Stephen Barr on science and religion. </p><p><span class="dropcap">T</span>he Catholic tradition has much to say about the relation of science to the faith. In what follows I will discuss the development of that tradition, starting with its roots in Sacred Scripture and ending with some of the writings of St. John Paul II. A good place to start is with the Book of Genesis. Many people today see that book as an example of primitive mythmaking, which invented false supernatural explanations of things for which we now have true natural explanations, thanks to science. But this is to read Genesis in an anachronistic way. The first chapters of Genesis were an attack on false supernaturalism, not a defense of it.</p>
<p>To take an obvious example, when Genesis said that the sun and moon were lights placed by God in the heavens to light the day and night, it was not proposing an alternative to modern scientific explanations of how the sun and moon formed. It was, rather, opposing the pagan religions of antiquity in which the sun and moon were worshipped as gods. And when Genesis said that man is made in the image of God and is to exercise dominion over created things, it was opposing the pagan idolatry in which human beings worshipped created things or gods made in the image of created things.</p>
<p>In the pagan religions of Egypt, Babylon, Greece and Rome, the world was filled with supernatural forces, and populated by numerous deities—gods and goddess of the oceans and forests, of wind and fire and lightning, of sex and fertility, and so on. But the Old Testament taught that there is only one God, who is not a part of the universe, or located within its space and time or within its phenomena and forces, but a God who is beyond the universe, a God who is indeed the Author of the universe. In this way, biblical religion stripped the physical universe of divinity and supernatural elements and made it into a natural world, no longer the abode of gods, but merely the creation of the one God. Old Testament revelation did not mythologize the physical universe but contributed to demythologizing it.</p>
<p>The very idea of a natural world, therefore, owes much to biblical religion. It also, of course, owes a great deal to the pagan philosophers and scientists of ancient Greece. But whereas biblical religion saw nature in relation to an ultimate source or Author, the Greek thinkers were primarily interested in nature itself, on its own terms, and had no concept of a Creator. So, there was a clash of perspectives that in some ways foreshadowed the arguments of our own day. This can be seen in one of the last books of the Old Testament, the Book of Wisdom, written around 50 BC by a Jewish writer in Alexandria, Egypt. One passage of that book actually discusses the philosopher-scientists of ancient Greece and severely criticizes them for being blind to the Creator. The passage reads as follows:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>For all people who were ignorant of God were foolish by nature, and they were unable from the good things that are seen to know the one who exists, nor did they recognize the artisan while paying heed to his works;</p>
<p>but they supposed that either fire or wind or swift air or the circle of the stars or turbulent water or the lights of heaven were the gods that rule the world.</p>
<p>If through delight in the beauty of these things people assumed them to be gods, let them know how much better than these is their Lord, for the Author of beauty created them.</p>
<p>And if people were amazed at their power and working, let them perceive from them how much more powerful is the one who formed them.</p>
<p>For from the greatness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their Creator.<sup> </sup></p>
<p>Yet these people are little to be blamed, for perhaps they go astray while seeking God and desiring to find him.</p>
<p>For while they live among his works, they keep searching and trust in what they see because the things that are seen are beautiful.</p>
<p>Yet again, not even they are to be excused,</p>
<p>for if they had the power to know so much that they could investigate the world, how did they not more quickly find the Lord of these things? (Wis 13:1-9)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Note the sympathy and even respect that the scriptural author showed toward those pagan scientists because they “kept searching” and their search for truth was perhaps, at least unconsciously, a search for God. But they were unable to see or think beyond Nature, and so made Nature, with its power and beauty, into the highest reality, putting it in the place of God.</p>
<p>The teaching of the Old Testament about the physical universe, then, is that it is neither inhabited by gods nor itself divine, but that it does <em>point </em>to God. As the Book of Wisdom put it “from the greatness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their Creator.” St. Paul famously echoed this in Romans 1:20, where he said that God, although invisible, can be known through the things he has made. This is another very important point that people often misunderstand. In Christian tradition, the primary evidence for the existence of God is not the supernatural, but the natural—for example, the fire, wind, swift air, circle of the stars, and so on, mentioned in the Book of Wisdom.</p>
<p><em>How</em> does the natural world point its Creator? From earliest times, Christian writers emphasized two ways. First, the fact that the world exists at all points to a <em>giver of being</em>, a <em>causa essendi</em>. Second, the fact that the world is orderly, harmonious, and beautiful points to a <em>giver of order</em>. As St. Irenaeus wrote, around 200 AD, “There exists but one God . . . He is the Father, God, the Creator, the Author, the giver of order.” Or as St. Athanasius wrote in the fourth century, with Romans 1:20 clearly in the background, “God, by his own Word, gave to creation such order<strong> </strong>as is found therein, so that though he is by nature invisible, men might be able to know him through his works.” Many early Christian wrote in the same vein.</p>
<p>Not only is the world orderly, but its order is based on law. Scripture itself speaks of God as Lawgiver, not only to the people of Israel and to mankind, but to the cosmos itself. In Jeremiah 33:25, God declares, “When I have no covenant with day and night, and have given no laws to heaven and earth, then too will I reject the descendants of Jacob and of my servant David.”</p>
<p>The very idea that there are laws of physics is rooted in Christian belief. It originated with Descartes and Newton, both of whom saw these laws as having been imposed upon the world of matter by its Creator. Another theme found in many early Christian writings is that God is the “Author” of the world. Indeed, many of the Church Fathers said that God is the Author of two books: the Book of Sacred Scripture and the Book of Nature or book of the universe. For example, St. Augustine wrote, “It is the divine page that you must listen to; it is the book of the universe that you must observe. The pages of Scripture can only be read by those who know how to read and write, while everyone, even the illiterate, can read the book of the universe.”</p>
<p>Now, it obvious that if these two books have the same divine Author they cannot contradict each other. If they <em>seem</em> to disagree, we must be reading one or both of the books incorrectly. St. Augustine warned against interpreting Scripture in a way that contradicts what is known about Nature by reason and experience. He wrote,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Often a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other parts of the world, about the motions and orbits of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, <em>and this knowledge he holds with certainty from reason and experience</em>. Now it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an unbeliever to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics, and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation . . . Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren . . . to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call on Holy Scripture . . . although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The principle that Scripture should not be interpreted in a way that contradicts what is known with certainty by reason became axiomatic to theologians. It was appealed to by Galileo and accepted also by Galileo’s opponents, including Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, who famously wrote in 1615 that</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If there were a real proof that . . . the Sun does not go round the Earth but the Earth round the Sun, then we should have to proceed with great circumspection in explaining passages of Scripture which appear to teach the contrary, and rather admit that we do not understand them than declare an opinion to be false which has proved to be true.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>From the fact that the universe is a book written by God, another conclusion was drawn by theologians, which is that the universe has its own unity and integrity and internal logic, just as a book written by a human author does. Within the plot of a novel, one thing causes another, even though all the things and events in the novel can also be fully attributed to the novelist. In an analogous way, within the plot of the physical universe, one thing causes another, while at the same time all the things and events in the physical universe can be fully attributed to God as the Author of the universe. This is the classic distinction in Catholic theology between the Primary Cause, who is God, and natural “secondary causes” within the created world.</p>
<p>The traditional Catholic understanding is that while God can and in special cases does<strong> </strong>produce effects directly in a miraculous way, he <em>ordinarily</em> acts through natural secondary causes. As the theologian Francisco Suarez, who died about four hundred years ago, put it, “God does not interfere directly with the natural order where secondary causes are sufficient to produce the intended effect.”</p>
<p>This principle was important for the founding of science, for it implied that when we see some strange event or new phenomenon we should look <em>first</em> for natural explanations and not assume a miracle—a point strongly emphasized by medieval theologians, philosophers and scientists, such as Nicolas Oresme and Jean Buridan. Buridan, for example, wrote, “The philosophers explain [such marvels] by appropriate natural causes; but common folk, not knowing of causes, believe these phenomena are produced by a miracle of God, which is usually not true.”</p>
<p>We have seen that many elements of Jewish and Christian belief fit very well with the scientific outlook. The world is the product of divine reason, and therefore made according to principles and laws that can be discovered and understood by reason. And because the Creator is good, the world must be good and worth studying.</p>
<p>It is not surprising, then, that the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries took place within a civilization shaped by Christian belief. And the great figures of that revolution were virtually all devout Christian believers—Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Pascal, Boyle, Steno, Mersenne, Fermat, Grimaldi, Cassini, Newton, Leibniz, and the rest. Most of the great scientists down to the time of Faraday and Maxwell in the mid-nineteenth century continued to be believers.</p>
<p>Now, all of this does not mean that there cannot be tension and even apparent conflicts between science and faith. Of course, there can be and have been. This is not surprising. There have <em>also</em> always been tensions and conflicts <em>within</em> science and <em>within</em> theology. Though truth cannot contradict truth, human progress in understanding truth is often slow and painful. The path of science is often a winding one, where science seems to be going in a certain direction and then suddenly and unexpectedly changes direction.</p>
<p>This is what happened in the Galileo affair. Theologians and the magisterium of the Catholic Church had grown quite comfortable—too comfortable—with the astronomy of the ancient pagan Greeks, Aristotle and Ptolemy, which had been the scientific orthodoxy for fifteen centuries; and theologians were therefore intellectually unprepared to deal with the Scientific Revolution that Copernicus and Galileo started. The Galileo affair was <a href="https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/the-end-of-galileo-affair-galileos-theological-contributions/">enormously complex</a>. However, there is no escaping the fact that Church authorities acted rashly, with disastrous consequences. That tragic affair had one positive result, however, which was that Church authorities in later centuries became much more circumspect in dealing with scientific developments.</p>
<p>For example, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as science uncovered evidence that the Earth is much older than the chronologies in Genesis suggested, the magisterium remained relatively quiet. Similarly, although Darwin published his <em>Origin of Species</em> in 1859, there was no papal pronouncement on evolution until 1950, almost a century later, despite the fact that evolution raised far more profound theological questions than Copernicanism did—questions about the origin and nature of man himself.</p>
<p>In 1893, when Pope Leo XIII felt it necessary to warn against the radical conclusions that some modern biblical scholars were reaching, especially in Germany, he issued the encyclical letter <em>Providentissimus Deus. </em>While the pope was not afraid to confront the biblical scholars, he was very careful with regard to scientists. He wrote, “There can never, indeed, be any real discrepancy between the theologian and the physicist, as long as <em>each</em> confines himself within his own lines, and <em>both</em> are careful, as St. Augustine warns us, ‘not to make rash assertions, or to assert as known what is not known.’”</p>
<p>Note that he says that <em>both</em> the scientist <em>and the theologian</em> must avoid such rashness. We can see here an implicit acknowledgment of the mistakes theologians made in dealing with Galileo. He went on to say,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We must remember, first, that the sacred writers, or to speak more accurately the Holy Spirit who spoke by them, did not intend to teach men these things (that is to say, the essential nature of the things of the visible universe) . . . Hence they did not seek to penetrate the secrets of nature, but rather described and dealt with things in more or less figurative language, or in terms which were commonly used at the time . . .</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The idea that the simplistic descriptions of natural phenomena appearing in many passages of Scripture were an accommodation to the way people thought and spoke at the time the passages were written goes back to mediaeval and early Christian commentators on Scripture, who were well aware that some of those descriptions could not be taken literally.</p>
<p>The caution and patience of the magisterium regarding science in the three centuries after the Galileo affair were wise and necessary. Time was needed for science to travel along its winding path, to give it time to correct its own errors and reach more mature and reliable conclusions. Time was also needed for theologians and philosophers to digest the discoveries of science and reflect upon the many subtle issues they raised.</p>
<p>But at some point, more than mere patience and restraint was required. The magisterium needed to say something of a more positive nature to help the faithful navigate those theological and philosophical issues.</p>
<p>Two important steps were taken in this regard by Pope Pius XII. In 1950, in his encyclical letter <em>Humani Generis,</em> he addressed the evolution of human beings and gave a green light to acceptance of it if that is where the evidence led. But he also drew an important line. While at the physical level human beings may have evolved from non-human ancestors, he said, the human spiritual soul transcends matter and therefore cannot be the product of any merely material process.</p>
<p>Pope Pius XII took another important step. In 1951, in a famous address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, he warmly embraced the recent discoveries in astrophysics, geology, and other fields that pointed to the universe having a beginning several billion years ago. In fact, Fr. George Lemaître, the Catholic priest and theoretical physicist who <a href="https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/faith-and-the-expanding-universe-of-georges-lemaitre/">proposed the Big Bang Theory</a>, was worried that that the pope was embracing it <em>too </em>warmly.</p>
<p>The next notable statement on science by the magisterium was made by the Second Vatican Council, which strongly affirmed the proper autonomy of science in its own sphere. In <em>Gaudium et Spes</em> we read,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Therefore, if methodical investigation within every branch of learning is carried out in a genuinely scientific manner and in accord with moral norms, it never truly conflicts with faith, for earthly matters and the concerns of faith derive from the same God. Indeed, whoever labors to penetrate the secrets of reality with a humble and steady mind, even though he is unaware of the fact, is nevertheless being led by the hand of God, who holds all things in existence, and gives them their identity. Consequently, we cannot but deplore certain habits of mind, which are sometimes found too among Christians, which do not sufficiently attend to the rightful independence of science and which, from the arguments and controversies they spark, lead many minds to conclude that faith and science are mutually opposed.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I think we can all recognize in the last sentence an implicit criticism of the Church officials who condemned Galileo as well as of the fundamentalist Christians who attack evolutionary biology on spurious theological grounds.</p>
<p>I come now finally to the writings and speeches of Pope St. John Paul II, which contain so much of value on the relation of science and faith that I will pick just one point to highlight, though it is a point of surpassing importance.</p>
<p>We saw that Pope Leo XIII in 1893 warned both the theologian and the scientist to stay within “his own lines” (or lanes, as we might say today) and “not to make rash assertions, or to assert as known what is not known.” In the Galileo case one saw theologians swerving across those lines, but today it is often scientists (or science camp followers) who are making rash assertions about what is in fact not known. In particular, this is the case with regard to radically reductive views of human nature and the human person.</p>
<p>While there is no doubt that an enormous amount has been learned and remains to be learned about the nature of human beings through evolutionary biology, genetics, neuroscience, and many other branches of science, it is also true that philosophy and theology have something to say on the subject. As Pope Pius XII emphasized, man is not simply a physical structure or biological organism but is endowed with the spiritual capacities of reason and free will and made in the image of God. In speaking about human nature, then, theology is not crossing the line into territory that belongs exclusively to natural science but is speaking about the very heart of divine revelation. For as Vatican II taught, Christ came not only to reveal God to man but also man to himself. In his Angelus address on Dec 15, 1996, St. John Paul II put it this way:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Yes, Christ is the light because, in his divine identity, he reveals the Father's face. But he is so too because, being a man like us and in solidarity with us in everything except sin, he reveals man to himself. Unfortunately, sin has obscured our capacity to know and follow the light of truth, and indeed, as the Apostle Paul realized, it has exchanged “the truth about God for a lie” (Rom 1:25). By the Incarnation, the Word of God came to bring full light to man. In this regard the Second Vatican Council says that it is “only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of man truly becomes clear” (<em>Gaudium et Spes</em> §22).</p>
</blockquote>
<p>However, in the last half-century, at least, many Christian theologians and philosophers have become so intimidated that they have, as it were, pre-emptively surrendered to reductive claims about man that are, in reality, very long and tenuous extrapolations from what is actually known scientifically.</p>
<p>For example, there has been a tendency for several decades among some theologians to retreat from the traditional Christian teaching that human beings possess a “spiritual soul” distinct from, though not separate from, the body. One can even see this in the first translations of the Mass from Latin into English in 1970, where, for example, “<em>et cum spiritu tuo</em>” was translated not as “and with <em>your spirit</em>” but simply as “and also with you”, and “<em>sanabitur anima mea</em>” was translated not as “<em>my soul</em> will be healed” but as “<em>I</em> will be healed.” Partly, this retreat has been motivated by the idea that the body-soul distinction was imported into Christian thought from Greek metaphysics and is alien to the original biblical conception of man as a unity. And partly it has been motivated by the belief that modern science is moving inevitably toward an ultimate explanation of everything in terms of matter, which would leave no room for an immaterial soul.</p>
<p>I would argue that this is a profound misreading of twentieth-century science. But that it is also a profound misreading of Christian revelation was emphasized by Pope St. John Paul II in a number of his writings and addresses. In a general audience on April 16, 1986, he said the following:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Man created in the image of God is a being at the same time corporeal and spiritual, that is, a being that from one point of view is linked to the material world and from another transcends it. As a spirit, as well as a body, he is a person. This truth about man is the object of our faith, as is the biblical truth about the constitution in the “image and likeness” of God; and it is a truth that has been constantly presented throughout the centuries by the Magisterium of the Church . . .</p>
<p>It is often said that the biblical tradition emphasizes above all the personal unity of man, using the term “body” to designate the whole man. This observation is accurate. But this does not mean that the duality of man is not also present in the biblical tradition, sometimes very clearly. This tradition is reflected in the words of Christ: “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body and cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can kill both soul and body in hell.”</p>
<p>There is no doubt that the doctrine on the unity of the human person and at the same time on the body-spirit duality of man is fully rooted in Sacred Scripture and Tradition.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I think this point is of fundamental importance to faith-science discussions. I have discussed how the physical universe points to God; but just as important is that man himself also points to God, for man is the image of God. It is by reflecting upon man’s spiritual nature, in particular our reason and free will, that we learn something about God, because, as Scripture says, “God is Spirit” (John 4:24). The human spiritual powers of intellect and will are the only realities empirically accessible to us that transcend matter and thus point to the possibility of other realities that transcend the physical world, including God. This is vital in counteracting the materialism that is the basis of so much atheism today.</p>
<p>It is also vital for another reason. As Pope St. John Paul II wrote in a 1996 address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, “[Any theories that] consider the [human] spirit as emerging from the forces of living matter or as a simple epiphenomenon of this matter, are incompatible with the truth about man. They are also incapable of establishing the dignity of the person.”</p>
<p>Having lived under the two dehumanizing ideologies of Nazism and Communism, both based on the denial of the “truth about man” and both destructive of the “dignity of the person,” Pope St. John Paul II saw clearly how much is at stake in some of the discussions among scientists, philosophers, and theologians.</p>
<p>EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is part of a collaboration with the <a href="https://www.catholicscientists.org/">Society of Catholic Scientists</a> (click <a href="https://www.catholicscientists.org/join">here</a> to read about becoming a member). You can find the original version of this article <a href="https://catholicscientists.org/articles/faith-and-science-in-catholic-tradition-from-the-early-church-to-pope-st-john-paul-ii/">here</a> with extensive footnotes.</p>Stephen M. Barrtag:churchlifejournal.nd.edu,2005:News/1601642024-02-26T05:48:00-05:002024-02-26T00:14:00-05:00Toward a Rhetorical Crisis in the Catholic Church<p>Paul Lynch on ecclesial rhetoric.</p><p><span class="dropcap">T</span>o claim that the Church is “in crisis,” at this moment in her history, is to risk being met with <a href="https://www.ncronline.org/news/opinion/confessions-exhausted-catholic">an exhausted shrug</a>. The crises are so relentless that, according to <a href="https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/world/2018-10-11/catholic-churchs-biggest-crisis-reformation">one scholar</a>, only the Protestant Reformation provides the proper scale: the never-ending stories of the sexual abuse of minors and the exposure of shameful coverups; the acrimonious disunity of bishops the world over; the shocking hostility of some of those same bishops toward the pope; and the collapse of identification and interest from the young.</p>
<p>“Crisis” seems not to do justice to these problems. But that has not stopped anyone from using the word. In addition to the abuse crisis, Catholic officials and intellectuals have spoken of a <a href="https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/the-crisis-of-catholic-moral-theology/">theological crisis</a>, a <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/cardinal-sarah-the-crisis-of-the-church-has-entered-a-new-phase/">magisterium crisis</a>, a <a href="https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2021/02/74280/">parish crisis</a>, a <a href="https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2023/04/the-catholic-crisis-over-us">gender crisis</a>, and a <a href="https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2021/11/15/priest-survey-despair-241838">crisis of despair</a> among the clergy. Reasonable people can debate the merits and priorities of these various claims. What seems beyond debate is that the Church is experiencing <a href="https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/the-churchs-share-of-the-burden-for-the-wounds-of-the-sexual-abuse-crisis/https:/churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/the-churchs-share-of-the-burden-for-the-wounds-of-the-sexual-abuse-crisis/">crisis fatigue</a>.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, I want to risk the word one more time to speak about a <em>rhetorical crisis</em>. I hope to be forgiven for this by recalling a more basic meaning of “crisis” as a turning point or moment of decision. Crisis implies not only an emergency, but any crossroads at which a community faces the burden of <em>judgment</em>—of taking a course of action whose outcome is uncertain.</p>
<p>Because the outcomes of such judgments are uncertain, a crisis also requires persuasion, the speech we use when, in the absence of perfect knowledge, we seek cooperation, especially among parties whose perspectives conflict. In such situations, speakers must account not only for the content of their arguments, but also for the time, place, and manner in which those arguments are delivered. Pick the wrong moment or the wrong means, and even the strongest appeal will fail. Rhetoric, then, may be defined as the study of time, place, and manner, or the study of persuasion in all its forms. To call a crisis “rhetorical,” therefore, is not to diminish it, but to take it seriously.</p>
<p>There is as much evidence for the rhetorical crisis as there is for any other of the Church’s crises, despite the absence of the word “rhetoric” in most of the relevant discussions. The <a href="https://www.dappledthings.org/deep-down-things/14556/the-lost-art-of-catholic-preaching">problems</a> of homilies are <a href="https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/pope-francis-and-the-search-for-solutions-to-the-bad-sermon-phenomenon/">well attested</a> and perhaps best captured by the <a href="chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https:/www.synod.va/content/dam/synod/common/phases/continental-stage/dcs/Documento-Tappa-Continentale-EN.pdf">working document</a> from the Continental Stage of the Synod: “poor preaching, including the distance between the content of the sermon, the beauty of faith and the concreteness of life” (§ 93). The Synod itself—a deliberation on how we deliberate—is also evidence of a rhetorical crisis. Pope Francis has even called synodality a “<a href="https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/42963/pope-francis-synodality-is-what-the-lord-expects-of-the-church">style</a>,” (thus invoking the third of the five canons of rhetoric, the others being invention, arrangement, memory, and delivery). There is also the “New Evangelization” (no longer very new), which refers to a collection of efforts aimed at revitalizing the Church’s outreach. The fact that the New Evangelization has continued through three papacies suggests both the permanent nature of the Church’s evangelization mission and a persistent concern about how that mission is being pursued.</p>
<p>That concern is the subject of what follows. Specifically, I track an argument about the 2023 World Youth Day, which took place in Lisbon, Portugal. In the month leading up to the event, its lead organizer, Bishop Américo Aguiar, was widely criticized for appearing to suggest that he did not view World Youth Day as an opportunity for evangelization. What followed was the kind of controversy that has become all too familiar in today’s Church, with one side excoriating the remarks in question and another insisting that they had been taken out of context. Yet surprisingly, despite the familiar contours, this dispute managed to raise a serious question (though one that the disputants themselves struggled to answer): just how intentional should evangelization be? This is a question of rhetoric, and the inability to identify it as such lies at the heart of the Church’s rhetorical crisis.</p>
<h2>What We Talk About When We Talk About Persuasion</h2>
<p>Persuasion lies at the very roots of Christian faith. The New Testament word for faith—<em>pistis—</em>is the same word that Aristotle uses for “proof” in his treatise on rhetoric.<a href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[1]<!--[endif]--></a> To come to faith, then, was to have been persuaded. As John Milbank writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Christianity does not claim that the Good and True are self-evident to merely objective reason, or dialectical argument. On the contrary, it is from the first qualified philosophy by rhetoric in contending that the Good and the True are those things of which we “have a persuasion,” <em>pistis</em>, or “faith.”<a href="#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title="">[2]</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Still, some might balk at calling evangelization “rhetorical.” The reason, argues rhetorician Richard Lanham, is that the West has long suffered from a “bad conscience” about the rhetorical arts.<a href="#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[3]<!--[endif]--></a> Since Plato’s attacks on the Sophists, the western imagination has linked rhetoric with pleasure and play—too frivolous for weighty matters like religion. The bad conscience leads to the persistent feeling that persuasion is wrong, in and of itself. So pervasive is this attitude that it is echoed by Pope Francis, an enormously gifted rhetor.</p>
<p>The pope has warned about a culture in which “image is more important than what is proposed. Plato said it in <em>The Republic</em>, rhetoric—which equates [to] aesthetic—is to politics what cosmetics is to health.”<a href="#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[4]<!--[endif]--></a> Yet just as frequently, Francis has spoken as an anonymous rhetorician, insisting, for example, that the Church does not grow by proselytizing, but by <a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20131124_evangelii-gaudium.html">attraction</a>, or that <a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/angelus/2021/documents/papa-francesco_angelus_20210214.html">the style of God</a> is marked by “closeness, compassion, tenderness,” or that we must restore “<a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20201003_enciclica-fratelli-tutti.html">healthy debates</a>” to our political life rather than giving into “slick marketing techniques.” These are rhetorical considerations, even if the pope does not recognize them as such.</p>
<p>One can see this bad rhetorical conscience on display not only in Francis’s comments, but also in the controversy over the evangelizing goals of World Youth Day. The controversy began with an <a href="https://www.thecatholictelegraph.com/future-portuguese-cardinal-on-wyd-we-dont-want-to-convert-the-young-people-to-christ/92247">interview</a> in which Bishop Aguiar described the kind of atmosphere he was seeking for World Youth Day, an atmosphere marked by interfaith dialogue and understanding, including with those who have no faith at all. He wished “a young person who has no religion to feel welcome and to perhaps not feel strange for thinking in a different way.” While these remarks seem in keeping with Pope Francis’s idea of a culture of encounter, Bishop Aguiar then seemed to take a further step: “We don’t want to convert the young people to Christ or to the Catholic Church or anything like that at all.”</p>
<p>Though the bishop quickly attempted <a href="https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/the-rise-of-bishop-americo-aguiar">to clarify</a> his remarks, it was too late to head off the drearily familiar controversy. One such back-and-forth perfectly displayed the West’s bad conscience about rhetoric. I am speaking of a more or less friendly argument between papal biographer Austen Ivereigh and Minnesota bishop Robert Barron. Though they repeatedly insisted that they disagreed with each other, Ivereigh and Barron struggled to articulate the crux of their dispute. The reason is that neither could recognize that evangelization might have something to do with persuasion.</p>
<p>The dispute began with Barron <a href="https://www.wordonfire.org/articles/barron/world-youth-day-and-converting-everyone-to-christ/">inveighing against</a> Aguiar, complaining that he had surrendered to the cultural consensus that “it finally doesn’t matter what one believes as long as one subscribes to certain ethical principles.” In a world marked by what Barron calls “epistemological indifferentism,” the world might see conversion as nothing more than “arrogant aggression.” But the Church, Barron insists, “thinks that religious truth is available to us and that having it (or not having it) matters immensely.” The Church must boldly proclaim these truths to all, including and especially to those who do not yet share them.</p>
<p>Austen Ivereigh <a href="https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/francis-world-youth-day-lisbon-ivereigh-catholic-vatican-synodality">responded to</a> Barron by arguing that the Bishop had failed to make an important distinction. “What Barron has trouble understanding is that the bid to convert others to the Catholic Church—proselytism—contradicts evangelization, which is firstly about facilitating the encounter with Christ.” Such facilitation requires that we prioritize listening rather than speaking. Ivereigh suggests that we need not worry about converting, for it is ultimately not our job. “It is Christ (the Holy Spirit) who converts, not the power of our persuasion.” “Persuasion” introduces rhetoric to the discussion, but only, as ever, to serve as a foil. Persuasion is tantamount to the proselytism that Ivereigh wants to avoid.</p>
<p>As does Barron. Barron <a href="https://www.wordonfire.org/articles/barron/when-did-conversion-become-a-dirty-word/">acknowledges</a> the same distinction between evangelization and proselytism. Quoting an <em>ad limina </em>visit with Pope Francis, Barron defines proselytism as “an attempt at evangelization that is aggressive, browbeating, condescending, and disrespectful.” Ivereigh’s central mistake, therefore, is to identify proselytism with conversion. Bishop Barron goes on to argue that Ivereigh suffers from his own terminological confusion in failing to distinguish between “evangelization” and “pre-evangelization.” As the term suggests, “pre-evangelization” precedes evangelization; in pre-evangelization, one may have an eye toward conversion as the final aim but does not yet explicitly invite it.</p>
<p>In making this distinction Barron imitates Ivereigh both in introducing more explicitly rhetorical concepts and in using them as foils. “One can indeed prepare the ground for Christ in a thousand different ways: through invitation, conversation, debate, argument, the establishment of friendship, etc.” Conversation, debate, argument—all of these are traditionally associated with rhetoric. But here they are assigned to pre-evangelization, suggesting that Barron agrees that evangelization proper does not include rhetoric.</p>
<p>In a final <a href="https://wherepeteris.com/when-evangelizers-proselytize-ivereigh-responds-to-bishop-barron/">response</a> to Barron, Ivereigh insists that Barron has not fully grasped the distinction Francis makes between proselytism and evangelization. To make his point, he quotes a 2015 homily from Pope Francis: “in the mentality of the Gospel, you do not convince people with arguments, strategies, or tactics. You convince them by simply learning to welcome them.” In the pope’s own words, we once again see a notion of evangelization based explicitly on the rejection of traditional rhetorical moves—arguments, strategies, tactics. Francis repeats this distinction in <a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/audiences/2023/documents/20230111-udienza-generale.html">other remarks</a>, suggesting that the job of evangelization is “to put Jesus in contact with the people, without convincing them but allowing the Lord to do the convincing.” Ivereigh concludes that the pope is trying to teach us that the Gospel witness “can be in tension with, even contradicted by, our attempt to evangelize by means of persuasion, strategies, theological explanations.” Once again, evangelization is defined by the <em>via negativa</em>; whatever we are doing when we are evangelizing, we should not be persuading anyone.</p>
<p>Yet, the striking feature of this dispute is that there is no dispute. Both writers favor evangelization over proselytism, both insist that an encounter with Christ is the aim and means of evangelization, and both cite Pope Francis as an authority for their positions. Most importantly, both reject traditional rhetorical means of persuasion. Yet they cannot finally sustain this rejection. The use of rhetoric, even as an unnamed foil, forces them to define evangelization by its style, which is a rhetorical consideration. If proselytism is “aggressive, browbeating, condescending, and disrespectful,” evangelization must be gentle, inviting, hospitable, and respectful. But if Barron and Ivereigh agree that evangelization is defined by its style, then they also agree that it is defined by its strategy, even if that word is distasteful. Gentler words like “approach” or “manner” might make us more comfortable, speaking of “how” evangelization may proceed. But “how” remains a matter of rhetoric—that is, of suiting a message to time, place, and manner.</p>
<p>The same point can be made regarding Ivereigh’s notion of “facilitation.” Ivereigh writes, “we facilitate . . . the encounter [with the Holy Spirit] whenever we listen respectfully to the heart of another who thinks very differently.” Insofar as respectful listening <em>facilitates </em>this encounter, listening becomes a tactic—a move one makes with some end or aim in mind. Certainly, respectful listening is also an end in itself: it conveys goodwill and kindness to the other, regardless of any other outcomes. But in the context of evangelization, respectful listening is also strategic insofar as it is trying to accomplish something. One can imagine, for example, a situation in which a would-be evangelizer senses that her friend is interested in the Gospel. Yet she also senses that her friend is not quite ready to articulate her interest. So, the evangelizer continues to listen. That choice is a matter of both kindness and design. Only our bad conscience about rhetoric makes us think that they are mutually exclusive.</p>
<p>Emmanuel Levinas offers a useful distinction. Levinas also had a bad conscience about rhetoric, which he saw as an attempt at mastery over the other. Yet he also acknowledged that rhetoric was woven into the very texture of thought. The attempt to name the world always leaves a gap between the word and the thing, a gap that can be bridged only by synecdoche upon synecdoche. Without rhetorical figure and trope, language could not function. At the same time, he also distinguished between the “everyday language” of rhetoric on the one hand and eloquence on the other.</p>
<p>The former might emerge from the encounter with the other, where proximity leavens the “Said” of figure and trope into the “Saying” of particular words appropriate for the particular other. If the Said implies a formality that distances, “[t]he <em>Saying </em>is drawing nigh to one’s neighbor.”<a href="#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[5]<!--[endif]--></a> In this context, “eloquence is excluded under penalty of provoking laughter.”<a href="#_ftn6" name="_ftnref6" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[6]<!--[endif]--></a> But the exclusion of eloquence does not exclude rhetoric in more proximate encounters, though Levinas wishes it were so. Even the transcendence of the other requires “metaphors capable of signifying infinity.”<a href="#_ftn7" name="_ftnref7" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[7]<!--[endif]--></a> Even intimacy requires art.</p>
<p>Pope Francis senses a similar distinction. In the <a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/homilies/2015/documents/papa-francesco_20150712_paraguay-omelia-nu-guazu.html">Paraguay homily</a> Ivereigh cites, Francis distinguishes between two approaches to the Church’s mission. One is marked by “plans and programs.” This approach focuses on “strategies, tactics, maneuvers, techniques, as if we could convert people on the basis of our own arguments.” But that is not how you convince people, Francis insists. “You convince them by simply learning how to welcome them.” When Jesus sends out the twelve, Francis says, He has a purpose in mind. “Jesus does not send them out as men of influence, landlords, officials armed with rules and regulations. Instead, he makes them see that the Christian journey is simply about changing hearts. One’s own heart first of all, and then helping to transform the hearts of others.”</p>
<p>Any fair-minded reader will understand the point he is making. Evangelization is not about step-by-step schemes. It is about a culture of encounter in which would-be evangelizers are as open to persuasion as those they are trying to persuade. But that encounter still has a desired aim, and Jesus recognizes that this aim can be better accomplished with some approaches rather than with others. In this case, Jesus’s style of evangelization is to put the apostles in the position of being welcomed—that is, in a position of vulnerability and dependence rather than the kind of power we might associate with would-be men of influence. (This is an unsurprisingly Levinasian move.) But there is still an influence occasioned by the vulnerability. Evangelization cannot exclude such influence, and it cannot therefore exclude rhetoric. Unless and until we become comfortable talking about rhetoric—about urging, attracting, enticing, influencing—it is hard to see how we will get any better at evangelization.</p>
<h2>Team Clarity and Team Context</h2>
<p>My defense of rhetoric should not suggest that anyone concoct a handy list of tips and tricks for evangelization. If we were to turn to the history of Christian persuasion—particularly representatives such as Paul, Augustine, Erasmus, Newman, among others—we would find sustained and serious reflection on both the art and the ethics of persuasive religious speech. The rhetorical resources of the Catholic Intellectual Tradition mitigate against the superficial.</p>
<p>Those riches are too vast to begin to mine here. As a preliminary step, however, I would suggest that a more self-consciously rhetorical approach to evangelization might at least help us escape from the struggle between the usual partisans of the Francis papacy: Team Clarity and Team Context. Team Clarity includes those who think Francis’s remarks suffer from confusion, and Team Context those who insist that confusion occurs only when the pope’s words are taken out of context. Team Clarity accuses the pope of <a href="https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2013/10/05/pope-francis-the-good-the-baffling-and-the-unclear/">confusing the faithful</a>, though they sometimes blame the media for deliberately misunderstanding Francis. Others found Francis’s policy on the traditional Latin mass <a href="https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2021/12/22/francis-latin-mass-traditionalists-synod-242111https:/www.americamagazine.org/faith/2021/12/22/francis-latin-mass-traditionalists-synod-242111">confusing</a>, especially given Francis’s stated commitment to dialogue. The Synod on Synodality has also been a <a href="https://cruxnow.com/vatican/2023/08/burke-claims-popes-synod-will-foster-confusion-error-and-division">frequent target</a> of the confusion complaint. Others, meanwhile, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/video/opinion-journal-pope-francis-capitalism-confusion/036541B8-6B20-4B69-B38D-FEAEF190A618">have argued</a> that Francis himself is confused about the glories of capitalism.</p>
<p>Team Context, on the other hand, insists that his comments must be understood in context. Writers <a href="https://www.americamagazine.org/content/all-things/cuff-or-his-heart-his-sleeve-putting-francis-context">have noted </a>how frequently a single line has been excised from a much longer interview or personal interaction. (Bishop Aguiar has now also learned this lesson.) Others have focused on <a href="https://wherepeteris.com/pope-francis-and-civil-unions-critical-context/">specific instances</a> in which an off-hand remark might be construed as a major change in Church teaching. Because of this tendency of the news media (and Francis’s critics) to soundbite the pope, the Vatican has sometimes had to <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/vatican-breaks-silence-says-popes-civil-union-comments-were-taken-out-of-context">clarify</a> Francis’s remarks.</p>
<p>Ultimately, I think Team Context has the better argument. Too often, members of Team Clarity have isolated a remark just to read it uncharitably. But there is no sense in trying to adjudicate the clarity-context dispute. The fact is that Team Clarity and Team Context, just like Barron and Ivereigh, are operating from the exact same premise, which is that religious language ought to be judged primarily on how well it conveys meaning. Team Clarity accuses Francis of failing to convey meaning; Team Context counters by saying that Francis is succeeding in conveying meaning if only you look at the totality of what he has said. But both these claims grant the premise that conveying meaning is the point.</p>
<p>Meaning is important, but it is not the only criterion for persuasion—or, I would venture to say, evangelization. For persuasion, time, place, and manner are the key criteria, and if these are ignored, even precision can work against our aims.</p>
<p>The late French intellectual <a href="https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/we-have-never-been-medieval/">Bruno Latour</a> understood this. In <em><a href="http://www.bruno-latour.fr/node/496.html">Rejoicing, Or the Torments of Religious Speech</a>, </em>Latour argues that the basic mistake moderns make about religious discourse is to judge it as a version of scientific discourse—that is, to ask religious discourse to convey information. But that is not what religious speech does. Religious speech seeks not to inform the person who hears it, but rather to transform them. Religious speech is like speech between lovers, who seek not to “convey messages,” but to “change those they address. What they transfer is not an information <em>content</em>, but a new <em>container</em>.”<a href="#_ftn8" name="_ftnref8" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[8]<!--[endif]--></a></p>
<p>Religious discourse should therefore proceed like a lover’s dialogue. If a husband asks his wife, “Do you love me?” he is not seeking some piece of information that might be conveyed, a purpose that could be accomplished by saying, “Yes, but you already know that, I told you so last year.”<a href="#_ftn9" name="_ftnref9" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[9]<!--[endif]--></a> That response is certainly clear, but it is hard to see how it could be persuasive. If the wife wants to answer the question she has actually been asked—will you show me that you love me?—she must find new forms of expression. If she is successful, it will be because she was able to speak both from kindness and by design. That is also what evangelizers must do: to answer the question “do you love me?” and answer it generously, with the style of closeness, compassion, tenderness. There is no manipulation in that.<!-- [if !supportFootnotes]--></p>
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<div id="ftn1">
<p><a href="#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[1]<!--[endif]--></a> James L. Kinneavy <em>Greek Rhetorical Origins of Christian Faith: An Inquiry. (</em>New York: Oxford, 1987).</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><sup><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[2]<!--[endif]--></sup></a> John Milbank, <em>Theology and Social Theory</em>, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 401.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" title=""><sup><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[3]<!--[endif]--></sup></a> Richard A. Lanham, <em>The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance. </em>Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 2004), 5.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" title=""><sup><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[4]<!--[endif]--></sup></a> Jorge Mario Bergoglio and Abraham Skorka, <em>On Heaven and Earth, </em>Translated by Alejandro Bermudez and Howard Goodman (New York: Image, 2013), 141. Francis makes similar remarks in <em>Evangelii Gaudium</em>: “It is dangerous to dwell in the realm of words alone, of images and rhetoric.” In the next section, Francis cites Plato’s <em>Gorgias </em>to lament, “the truth is manipulated, cosmetics take the place of real care of our bodies” (§ 232).</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[5]<!--[endif]--></a> Emmanuel Levinas, “Everday Language and Rhetoric without Eloquence.” <em>Outside the Subject, </em>Translated by Michael B. Smith (Stanford UP, 1994), 142.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref6" name="_ftn6" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[6]<!--[endif]--></a> Ibid., 142.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref7" name="_ftn7" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[7]<!--[endif]--></a> Ibid., 143.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref8" name="_ftn8" title=""><sup><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[8]<!--[endif]--></sup></a> Bruno Latour, <em>Rejoicing</em>, <em>Or the Torments of Religious Speech, </em>Translated by Julie Rose (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 32.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref9" name="_ftn9" title=""><sup><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[9]<!--[endif]--></sup></a> Ibid., 25.</p>
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</div>Paul Lynchtag:churchlifejournal.nd.edu,2005:News/1600612024-02-23T06:00:00-05:002024-02-23T00:21:59-05:00War and Genocide in the Name of God<p>Nicholas Denysenko on Orthodoxy.</p><p><span class="dropcap">M</span>edia coverage of Russia's war on Ukraine tends to conclude that Putin is trying to cement his legacy by forcing Ukraine to serve Russia’s geopolitical and economic interests. <a href="https://wipfandstock.com/9781666748154/the-churchs-unholy-war/">My research</a> on the conflict among Orthodox Christians on the Ukrainian issue shows that many factors contributed to Russian enmity toward Ukrainians and the decision to invade. What follows takes a closer look at the Russian weaponization of Orthodox divisions in Ukraine. Patriarch Kirill’s explanation that the war was being waged to defend Russia from the social threats posed by the West is the first main topic. The rest of the discussion focuses exclusively on Ukraine and how its Orthodox Churches responded to the war. </p>
<h2>A Metaphysical Battle of Good and Evil, Light and Darkness</h2>
<p>Patriarch Kirill endorsed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in sermons delivered from the beginning of the war up until the time of writing. Kirill’s sermons echo the narrative of the Russian Federation by asserting that external forces have assembled to destroy Russia and its civilization. Kirill employs language in his sermons to stir up patriotism—he refers to the need to preserve the unity of the Russian people and to defend the Fatherland. Kirill’s most controversial point is that the war fought on the ground is not only a battle to defend one’s borders, it is also a metaphysical battle of good against evil and darkness versus light.</p>
<h3>Cheesefare Sunday and the Triumph of Orthodoxy: Setting the Tone</h3>
<p>Kirill established his foundations for justifying Russia’s invasion in two sermons delivered in the early period of the war. He delivered his initial remarks on 6 March 2022, Cheesefare Sunday, which customarily begins Lent for Orthodox Christians worldwide. “Cheesefare” refers to the last day believers are allowed to consume dairy products until Pascha (Easter). The primary theme of the day is not bidding farewell to cheese but forgiveness. The Gospel appointed to the Divine Liturgy is Matthew 6:4–14, where Jesus commands his disciples to forgive sins. Every Orthodox and Byzantine Catholic community begins Lent with vespers later on Sunday (evening service). Vespers includes a solemn rite of forgiveness—each participant greets the other people present, one at a time, asks for forgiveness, and bows down before them in a gesture of humility. The theme is to begin the season of Lent with peace.</p>
<p>In his sermon on Cheesefare Sunday, Kirill plunged into the justification for the war by going straight to its most contested space—Donbas. He complained that the real war taking place in Donbas was one of values and accused the Ukrainian state of fighting for false freedoms by defending the civil rights of the LGBTQ community to hold a gay parade. Kirill proceeded to condemn same-sex relationships as sinful on the basis of the Bible and declared that an attempt to argue that this sin does not violate God’s law is the beginning of the end of human civilization. The Russian patriarch’s words were neither random nor haphazard on the eve of the Lenten fast. He emphasized gay parades to illuminate his and the ROC’s [Russian Orthodox Church] opinion on what sin really is.</p>
<p>Kirill then turned his attention to justifying Russia’s attack on Ukraine. He complained that the people of Donbas had suffered for eight years and that the world remained silent in that time. Next, he attempted to connect the suffering of the people of Donbas with Christ’s command to forgive on Cheesefare Sunday. The patriarch stated that forgiveness could not be separated from justice—such a separation would amount to “capitulation and weakness.” He argued that forgiveness had to be on the right side—the side of light, the justice of God, the divine commandments, and the revelation of Christ himself.</p>
<p>Kirill’s justification of the war depends upon the next part of his sermon, where he elaborates that the struggle is not only physical but metaphysical. Those who are fighting on the ground are the defenders of God’s law, the ones who promote holiness and refuse to confuse or mix it with sin. The message is quite simple. Kirill was attempting to establish that the war on the ground was a battle to defend Christian truth. In other words, he has been implying that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a holy war.</p>
<h3>Round 2: The War as a Triumph of Orthodoxy</h3>
<p>Kirill continued to justify the invasion of Ukraine by connecting it to the commemoration of the first Sunday of Lent—the Triumph of Orthodoxy. The Triumph of Orthodoxy remembers the final Orthodox victory over iconoclasm in the year 843. It is a story about bishops, monks, and emperors that fall into apostasy and destroy the holy images and of those that defend the practice of venerating icons. The word “triumph” itself is suggestive—there are winners and losers, those on the right and wrong sides.</p>
<p>Kirill began his sermon by discussing the sacrifices saints made to defend the faith, often suffering torture and humiliation, and, in many cases, death and martyrdom. He suggested that one must be ready to sacrifice everything for the sake of defending the Orthodox faith. After reviewing the violent and sacrilegious acts committed by iconoclasts, Kirill suggested that the world is witnessing another example of state violence against and persecution of the Church, this time in Ukraine. He identified the persecution of the UOC-MP [Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Moscow Patriarchate] in particular, arguing that the persecutors mock UOC-MP believers as from the “Church of the Occupiers” and try to force them to attend another Church, presumably the OCU [Orthodox Church of Ukraine]. The patriarch intensified his polemic when he claimed that the Church has a right to resist state interference in internal Church affairs, and then compared the Ukrainian government with Jewish authorities through a reference to the Gospel of John 19:38 (“for the fear of the Jews”). This declaration came off as thoroughly anti-Semitic, as President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine is Jewish.</p>
<p>Kirill’s sermon ended with an insightful section. He prayed for the unity of the Russian Church in general and for the UOC-MP and Metropolitan Onufry in particular. Kirill then clarified what he means by Russians: all of the people of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. He repeats, the three nations are one people of faith united in one Church. Kirill’s appeal for Church unity revealed his greatest fear—losing the Orthodox Christians that had remained a part of the ROC in Ukraine. The foundational myth of the <a href="https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/will-russian-nationalism-ultimately-strangle-russian-imperialism/">Russkii Mir doctrine</a>—the eternal and fraternal unity of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus—was the basis of his appeal, designed for two audiences: the leaders of the UOC-MP and the upper echelon of the Russian Federation.</p>
<p>Patriarch Kirill’s bestowal of the icon of Our Lady of Augustow to General Zolotov, the head of the Russian National Guard, at the end of the rite of the Triumph of Orthodoxy was probably the most powerful gesture that conveyed the spirit of the justification of the invasion. Our Lady of Augustow was a wonderworking icon that reportedly protected Russian soldiers during World War I. Zolotov expressed confidence that the Mother of God would bring victory to Russia over the “Nazis” in his remarks to the people gathered for the rite of Orthodoxy in Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow. The handing over of this historical icon was an act of weaponizing Christian relics in the name of violence. In other words, by giving the icon to the general, Kirill was suggesting that Mary, too, supports Russia’s war on Ukraine.</p>
<p>In his sermon on Sunday, September 25, 2022, Kirill described the war as an “internecine” conflict and prayed that it would end soon. His claim that God forgives the sins of soldiers who die in the line of duty drew international attention and criticism. The public comment was clearly designed to reassure the Russian public that the invasion of Ukraine was just.</p>
<p>These three sermons delivered by Patriarch Kirill are the primary cornerstones of his position on the war. He depicted Ukraine as the battlefield in which a spiritual war for truth and fidelity to the gospel was being waged. He asserted that the Ukrainian government was using force to impose external values on the people of three nations—Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus—and used historical instances of defending the Orthodox faith as inspiration for defeating a radical state. He continued to justify the invasion seven months after it began by reassuring the ROC’s faithful that the sins of soldiers were forgiven because of their fidelity to their oaths.</p>
<p>Kirill’s comparison of the pressure placed on the UOC-MP with the travails endured by Christians during the iconoclastic crisis is one of the most important themes threaded through the ROC’s metanarrative on the war in Ukraine. Kirill consistently identified the ROC as the victim of external aggression, in this case suffering from the pressures imposed by the Ukrainian government. His argument resembled that of the Russian Federation, that the United States and NATO are threatening Russian security through Ukraine.</p>
<p>The explicit mentioning of the persecution of the UOC-MP is what Kirill used to justify the war. Ironically, in his attempt to claim that others threaten the unity of the Russian Church by opposing the UOC-MP, he dismantled the final ecclesial foundation the ROC had in Ukraine when the UOC-MP took its first step away from the ROC in May 2022.</p>
<p>Patriarch Kirill’s statements validated the Russian aggression in Ukraine that escalated with the beginning of the full-scale invasion in February 2022. The ideas of Europe threatening Russian security, the notion of the unity of three nations in one Church organization, and the mission of Russia defending itself from external threats while simultaneously saving the West existed before the launch of the invasion. Patriarch Kirill’s sermons during the course of the war did not introduce any particularly new ideas or insights into the ROC’s core beliefs. His sermons and public statements confirmed two important realities. First, the leadership of the ROC, along with much of its rank and file, believed the aforementioned narratives on the unity of the people and Russia’s destiny to defend Christianity. Second, the defense of the invasion and the promulgation of the metanarratives demonstrated the loyalty of Kirill and the leadership of the ROC to the Kremlin’s war on Ukraine.</p>
<h2>The OCU and the War: Political Theology and Solidarity with the Ukrainian People</h2>
<p>The OCU’s response to Russia’s invasion has been assertive. They shared a common Ukrainian perspective on Russia’s invasion: the only new thing the war introduced was a major escalation in violence and atrocities. The war did not begin in February 2022—it started in 2014 when Russia invaded Crimea and assisted the separatists in Donbas. The OCU’s messages to the Ukrainian people include expressions of solidarity, harsh condemnation of Russian aggression, appeals for the removal of Patriarch Kirill from his office, and, above all—an urgent plea for unity to the UOC-MP.</p>
<h3>Consistent Care for Ukrainian Armed Forces</h3>
<p>The OCU constructed a political theology during the course of the war, one that is likely a work in progress at the time of this writing. Its appeals and declarations also address practical pastoral matters by answering questions about the kinds of services that can be held in war environments.</p>
<p>In his sermon on Cheesefare Sunday, Metropolitan Epifaniy of the OCU addressed the question of how it would be possible to forgive during the conditions of war. He stated that it is necessary to achieve victory over the aggressor (Russia) and turned to the conditions that had begun to afflict Ukraine as Russian missiles struck, including the feasibility of dietary fasting. Epifaniy blessed the people to modify the dietary fast as they navigated the conditions of the war. He also addressed the traditional Orthodox liturgical services of Lent—the entire season is rather rigorous, with services held in many parishes on most or all days. Epifaniy blessed parish clergy to modify services and laity to confess their sins privately in the event that war would prevent them from observing the customary liturgical rhythm.</p>
<p>Epifaniy consistently threaded the message of victory and peace throughout his sermons. He called upon the people to pray for a military triumph. He developed these themes further in the sermon offered at the rite of forgiveness later in the day on Cheesefare Sunday. He reflected on the meaning of Lent and the Paschal feast and identified the season as both Christ’s suffering and the people’s co-suffering with Christ. Epifaniy described the nature of Christ’s suffering as blameless. Christ did not do anything to provoke the suffering inflicted upon him. He told the people that they, too, were blameless in their suffering, stating that Ukraine had no ill will toward Russia. He described the path of Lent as one of seeking the victory of truth, good, and light. In this manner, he illustrated Christ’s solidarity with the Ukrainian people; they are co-suffering together, and they would be glorified as victors just as Christ was glorified in his resurrection.</p>
<p>On March 7, 2022, the OCU’s holy synod instructed the faithful to observe Lent to the best of their ability, reassuring clergy that abbreviating services for the sake of serving one’s neighbor is faithful to God’s commandment. The synod instructed the people to pray for the armed forces and to do everything necessary to defend their country.</p>
<h3>Defeating a Mighty Opponent</h3>
<p>Metropolitan Epifaniy continued to develop a robust political theology in his sermon on the Triumph of Orthodoxy. He preached on the figures mentioned by the letter to the Hebrews, with special emphasis on Moses, Gideon, and David. He developed the theme of overcoming an enemy who is mightier than any other and instructed people to look to Moses, who defeated Pharaoh and liberated the people from slavery through faith. Gideon’s victory was also improbable—he defeated the Midianites with a mere three hundred. David, of course, slew Goliath, the last examples of three improbable victories over a mighty foe made possible through faith. Epifaniy explicitly connected the extraordinary feats of these prophets, kings, and heroes of the Old Testament, victories achieved only through faith in God, with the Ukrainian response to Russia’s assault on Ukraine.</p>
<p>Epifaniy added a wrinkle to his sermon of liberation theology on the Sunday of Orthodoxy. He announced the necessity of replacing the traditional rite of Orthodoxy—an intense service that celebrated the heroes of the faith while condemning the traitors—with a service of thanksgiving (<em>moleben’</em>) for Ukrainian soldiers and the entire nation for its protection in the face of Russia’s war. Epifaniy asserted that the battle against sin and injustice was the priority, one that warranted a replacement of the traditional rites.</p>
<p>Epifaniy’s sermon on the Sunday of Orthodoxy provides a glimpse into the OCU’s public appeal to the Ukrainian people. The OCU used the occasion of the notion of a triumph of Orthodoxy to express solidarity with a people confronting an ominous opponent. Epifaniy’s references to Moses, Gideon, and David were designed to inspire the Ukrainian people to believe that faith in God can lead to victory. The stakes are not limited to the battle, though. Ultimately, the purpose of defeating the mighty foe is to eradicate the legacy of Russian colonialism in Ukraine.</p>
<h2>An Urgent Appeal: The War and Achieving Orthodox Unity in Ukraine</h2>
<h3>The OCU on the UOC-MP</h3>
<p>Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, complete with missiles and accusations of genocidal atrocities, changed the calculus for the OCU. They used everything at their disposal to place maximal pressure on the UOC-MP and bring them to the negotiating table. At the OCU synodal meeting of March 21, the bishops appealed to the UOC-MP to lay aside all differences for the sake of unity. The bishops proposed that “hierarchs, clergy, monasteries, and religious communities” of the UOC-MP should examine the OCU’s <a href="https://www.oca.org/history-archives/tomos-of-autocephaly">tomos of autocephaly</a> again and “enter into canonical unity with the Orthodox Church of Ukraine.” The proposal included a soft landing for UOC-MP communities taking the step of uniting with the OCU; eparchies of the UOC-MP that make such a decision would remain as they were previously. In other words, UOC-MP structures would not simply be absorbed by the OCU. This line was designed to function as an olive branch for the UOC-MP, a gesture indicating equality were the two Churches to unite.</p>
<p>The OCU issued two statements on the situation of Orthodoxy in Ukraine, with an urgent appeal to unite, aimed for the broad audience of the general public. The Synodal Statement of May 16 began with a complaint— the OCU synod criticized the UOC-MP for continuing its media campaign to discredit the OCU during the war. The OCU accused the UOC-MP of collaboration and declaring that its leaders supported and disseminated the Russkii Mir ideology throughout Ukraine. The synod described the Russkii Mir as “fascist,” claiming that it was one of the foundations justifying Russia’s attack and had led to the Russian occupation, the killing of Ukrainian citizens, and the attempt to completely destroy Ukraine and erase Ukrainian identity.</p>
<p>As a result, the synod was explicit and unforgiving in its condemnation of the UOC-MP and its role as a vessel of the Russkii Mir. In the statement, they mocked the UOC-MP for its obedience to Patriarch Kirill and humiliated them for receiving national awards from Putin. The most scathing part came when the OCU blatantly accused the UOC-MP of collaborating with Russia at a Churchwide level. They first accused the UOC-MP of refusing to adjudicate collaboration “among its own clergy.” They upbraided the UOCMP for claiming that the OCU contributed to Russian aggression against Ukraine because of the tomos of autocephaly. The synod then claimed that the UOC-MP took no action in response to all the problems and potential solutions; they did not, for example, make a public denunciation of ROC propagandists, respond to the invitation to dialogue with the OCU, or take concrete action to separate from the ROC. The synodal statement ended with an urgent appeal to the bishops, clergy, and faithful who remain in the UOC-MP to free themselves from Russian influence and take concrete action for unity.</p>
<p>The tone of the statement shifted from accusatory to conciliatory. The synod promised the UOC-MP that unity is not absorption and conformity to the interior culture of the OCU. Parishes could continue their traditions and elect to pray in Church Slavonic. Unity would not require a shuffle of pastoral assignments. The most important parts of this conciliatory section are the desire to lay aside the differences of the past for the sake of unity and an emphasis on the legitimacy of the tomos of autocephaly. The two Churches disagreed vehemently on the significance of the OCU’s tomos. The OCU was using the war as an opportunity to renew its argument on the legitimacy of the tomos to both the UOC-MP and the Ukrainian people.</p>
<p>As the war dragged on into the summer of 2022, the OCU convened its council of bishops and made a much more detailed and stronger appeal to the UOC-MP. In his speech to the bishops on May 24, 2022, Epifaniy laid out an appeal and plan for unification in the context of war. Arguing that the OCU was actually larger than the UOC-MP on the basis of sociological surveys, Epifaniy stated that four hundred religious communities, one hundred and twenty clergy, and two monasteries had initiated the process of departing from the UOC-MP and uniting with the OCU. The war, the surveys indicating affiliation with the OCU, and the transfer of communities from the UOC-MP to the OCU were all pretexts for finishing the process voluntarily.</p>
<p>Epifaniy prefaced his framework for a unification process by asserting that the OCU does not support aggression aimed at clergy, faithful, and communities of the UOC-MP. The effect of an actualized unification of the UOC-MP and OCU would be the complete removal of Orthodox Ukrainians from Russian influence, a significant contributor to Ukraine’s defeat of Russia. His speech included the use of sharp tools—he did not spare the UOC-MP from harsh criticism. Epifaniy noted that Russia’s war against Ukraine was and remains hybrid; it is not only a military campaign but is also waged through economics, energy, politics, and the informational sphere. He accused Patriarch Kirill of the ROC of blessing the war and allowing the ROC to become part of the Kremlin’s governmental apparatus. He also noted that the ROC was an instrument of Kremlin propaganda.</p>
<p>Epifaniy went on to explain that he had commemorated Kirill during the Divine Liturgies when he presided, but that Kirill’s blessing of the war necessitated his removal from the OCU’s diptychs. Epifaniy mentioned the 1872 declaration of ethnophyletism as a heresy by the synod in Constantinople. He claimed that the Russkii Mir ideology was a variant of this heresy, that Krill was a co-creator and propagandist of the teaching, and that the Orthodox Church should convene a tribunal against Kirill to hold him accountable for his actions. He concluded his review by referring to the Paschal epistle he sent to the heads of the other Orthodox Churches where he called for a Church tribunal, since “one cannot hold the chalice and the pastoral staff in hands covered with blood.”</p>
<p>Keeping in mind the audience—Epifaniy was explaining the situation of the UOC-MP to the bishops of the OCU—he mentioned the possibility that the UOC-MP would convoke a council that would change its statute and distance itself from the ROC. He also noted that they might try to connect the gathering to the one held in Kharkiv in 1992. These words were either prescient or based on good intelligence, as this event did, indeed, take place, just a few days later.</p>
<p>Epifaniy dismissed the possibility of establishing preconditions for a possible union of the Churches. He claimed that Orthodox people and society in general were waiting for the UOC-MP to take “real steps” toward a separation from the ROC. He framed the rest of his appeal with references to past attempts at dialogue, the validity of the EP’s [Ecumenical Patriarchate] decision to receive the clergy of the UAOC [Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church] and UOC-KP [Ukrainian Orthodox Church – Kyiv Patriarchate] without new ordinations, the uncanonical presence of the ROC in Ukraine, and the fact that the UOC-MP missed a chance for the creation of a canonical autocephalous Church in Ukraine by refusing to participate in the 2018 council.</p>
<p>Epifaniy attempted to correlate the EP’s canonical resolution of the Ukrainian situation to the recent reconciliation between the Church of Serbia and the Ochrid Archbishopric in Northern Macedonia. The Churches had been estranged for fifty-five years, and the Serbs not only recognized the legitimacy of the Ochrid Church but also granted it autocephaly. Epifaniy suggested that such a path remained possible for the UOC-MP and OCU regardless of their differences on canonical order in Ukraine.</p>
<h3>OCU—Summary of Positions</h3>
<p>Russia’s invasion of Ukraine did not fundamentally change the OCU’s public identity. As a community consisting of generations of believers who had pursued autocephaly since the late Soviet era, the OCU had a legacy of opposing Russian threats to Ukrainian sovereignty and blatant Russian aggression. Official Church statements and correspondence repeatedly stated that Russia started the war with Ukraine in 2014, so that the events of 2022 were a major escalation of a war that had already been waged for eight years. Throughout that time, the OCU defended Ukrainian culture and literature. The major change occurred in 2018–19, when the external intervention of the EP transformed the OCU’s status from a Church of questionable legitimacy into the autocephalous Church of Ukraine.</p>
<p>Refusals to recognize the OCU notwithstanding, the creation of the OCU, an autocephalous Church recognized by other Orthodox Churches, gave the new Church and its leaders a public platform. The OCU built upon the trust attained by the KP with the people during the Maidan Revolution of Dignity in 2014. Some theologians bristled at the attempt of politicians like Poroshenko to exploit the tomos of autocephaly for their personal gain. In 2018–19, the OCU did not waver from making public appearances with Poroshenko. The ROC and UOC-MP used the OCU’s connection to Poroshenko as a key component of their argument that the OCU was nothing more than a political project.</p>
<p>When the war started, the OCU’s investment in political partnerships and their accompanying narratives proved to be valuable capital in addressing the Ukrainian people. They were able to argue that they had warned about Russian aggression and the ideological dangers of the Russkii Mir for over eight years while the UOC-MP had attempted to maintain neutrality in a strict anti-war position. They were also able to refer to the tomos of autocephaly as a true symbol of separation and independence from the ROC and Russian colonialism. The OCU used their position of solidarity with the Ukrainian people and rejection of Russian colonialism to appeal for Church unity before the Ukrainian populace.</p>
<h2>The UOC-MP in a Liminal or Grey Space</h2>
<p>Russia’s invasion of Ukraine took most of the world by surprise. Perhaps no community was more surprised by the invasion than the UOC-MP. In the days immediately following the attack, bishops, clergy, and entire eparchies responded angrily. The clergy of Volodymyr-Volyn’ demanded that Onufry convoke a council to declare autocephaly. Metropolitan Evlogiy of Sumy—an eparchy close to the Russian border, somewhat remote to proUkrainian sentiments in the Church—condemned the attack and ceased commemorating Kirill during the liturgy.</p>
<p>Officially, the UOC-MP responded clearly but tersely. The UOC-MP issued a brief statement asserting their support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. The leaders declared war to be a sin, described the invasion as a modern episode of Cain and Abel, and included a clear reference to Russia’s attack on Ukraine. The statement included some equivocation. For example, the leaders called upon both Putin and Zelensky to do everything in their power to stop the war, even though Russia was the aggressor.</p>
<p>One week after the attack, on March 4, Onufry made public statements at a special prayer service for peace in Ukraine. Acknowledging the suffering of the Ukrainian people and referring to the rapidly expanding refugee crisis, Onufry appealed directly to Putin to stop the war. Onufry also called on “the Russian side and the Ukrainian side” to meet at the table of negotiation to resolve all issues. This appeal, made just over one week after the attacks began, sustained equivocation—the text mentions that there are always problems among neighboring countries that can be resolved only through dialogue. Onufry ends his appeal by stating that the unity given by God is the only eternal unity, whereas the agreement created by the sword is temporary and limited.</p>
<h3>Cain, Abel, and Repentance</h3>
<p>The UOC-MP’s theological message in the early part of the war was somewhat restrained. Onufry used the Bible story where Cain murders Abel to characterize the war. This was an important step for the UOC-MP—a public acknowledgment that Russia is the aggressor and is murdering innocents.</p>
<p>The second theological message concerned the Lenten season. Onufry encouraged the people to pray and fast and to repent of their sins. He did not explicitly connect the need to repent with responsibility for the war, so the absence of nuancing left that potential interpretation open. The third theological theme was the condemnation of war as a sin. At the highest official level, the UOC-MP maintained consistency with its position since 2014—they remained opposed to all war. The fourth matter related to Church discipline. A number of deaneries, eparchies, and individual clergy within the UOC-MP advocated for separation from the ROC and the establishment of autocephaly. While officials publicly referred to the need for a Churchwide discussion of the issue, they also sent clear signals warning of the potential pitfalls of separatism. The public messaging referred to “canonical” processes, a suggestion that advocacy for separation from the ROC could cause great damage to the Church.</p>
<h3>The Four Hundred—a Public Appeal for a Church Tribunal to Remove Patriarch Kirill</h3>
<p>One can only perform so much damage control in the midst of a crisis. The UOC-MP could not credibly appeal for calm and patience during the course of the war. Clergy were confronting a painful reality on the ground— the complete devastation of people’s lives. Andrii Pinchuk, a priest of the Dnipro Eparchy, composed a long letter to the patriarchs, asking them to convene a Church tribunal to hold Patriarch Kirill accountable for his role in using the Russkii Mir doctrine to justify Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Over four hundred priests affixed their signatures, with many more offering private support because of the threat of reprisal from their bishops. The letter was published by Fordham University’s Public Orthodoxy Forum and disseminated broadly.</p>
<p>This letter represents the opinion of a core group of clergy and faithful within the UOC-MP on the war. The clergy made four specific requests of the leaders of the world’s Orthodox Churches: to condemn Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine, to demand that Russia end the war and return the occupied territories to Ukraine, to evaluate Kirill’s public statements on the war through the lens of Scripture and tradition, and to assess the Russkii Mir doctrine. The last request had a second “lever”—to remove Kirill from office in the event the patriarchs condemned the doctrine.</p>
<p>This open letter is one of the two most important documents of the UOC-MP in the war period (as of this writing). The letter caused a stir among Orthodox because it confirmed internal opposition within the UOC-MP to the ROC. The larger issue was the desire of many clergy and faithful to formally separate from the ROC. The letter clearly stated that refusing to commemorate Kirill during the liturgy was not sufficient. The author declared that it was no longer possible for them to remain “in canonical submission” to the ROC.</p>
<p>If the appeals of the individual eparchies of the UOC-MP to convene a council and declare autocephaly cracked the door open for a separation, the letter opened the door wide. Leaders and observers outside of the UOCMP misunderstood the letter to some degree. It states a desire to depart from the ROC, but it does not mention the OCU at all. The problem was that the appeal to the patriarchs brought the question of the status of the UOC-MP into question. If the UOC-MP was no longer part of the ROC, where did it belong?</p>
<p>The letter caused people throughout the OCU to double down on the urgency for unification. The cohort of people within the UOC-MP who desired separation from the ROC did not, however, respond affirmatively to the appeal for negotiating a new arrangement with the OCU. Pinchuk himself stated that the matter needed to be handled carefully, especially since many rank-and-file members of the UOC-MP had questions about the legitimacy of OCU ordinations because of the canonical sanctions that had been imposed on the UOC-KP and UAOC.</p>
<p>While the letter did not move the UOC-MP’s needle toward the OCU, it did deepen the crack separating the UOC-MP from the ROC. As Kirill continued to justify the war and criticism of Russian aggression remained largely nonexistent, relations between the UOC-MP and the ROC worsened. A handful of important bishops of the UOC-MP maintained their loyalty to Moscow, especially Metropolitan Antony and Metropolitan Pavel. Onufry, however, became estranged from Kirill. Sergei Chapnin reported that they no longer communicated over the phone, and Onufry, bearing the brunt of Ukrainian anger toward Russia for the abject violence unleashed on the people, had to take some kind of concrete action to express solidarity for the people without causing a schism within the UOC-MP.</p>
<h3>The UOC-MP’s Council on May 27, 2022</h3>
<p>The pivotal moment for the leaders of the UOC-MP took place on May 27, 2022, when the Church convened a council to discuss the response to the war and its relationship to the ROC. This gathering is the second important event in the life of the UOC-MP during the war period. In short, the meeting produced unprecedented changes. The Church expressed its disagreement with Patriarch Kirill about the war, removed all references to the ROC from its statute, affirmed its sovereignty and independence, announced the decision to resume making its own chrism, declared the necessity of dialogue with the OCU, and established conditions for the dialogue. The meeting caused an uproar within the Orthodox community, and the language of the documents produced by the meeting created obstacles for interpretation. The bottom line is that the UOC-MP took a cautious step away from the ROC yet essentially moved into a liminal space that is not easily defined. This move gave the UOC-MP freedom to either pursue canonical autocephaly or to return to the bosom of the ROC.</p>
<p>The UOC-MP’s statement was a public signal to both the ROC and the Ukrainian people. The removal of the ROC from the official statute signaled the UOC-MP’s rejection of Kirill’s support for the war. The message presented to the Ukrainian people was much more important, however. The UOC-MP was trying to present itself as a Church standing in solidarity with the Ukrainian people. In this sense, the most important part of the statement concerned the statute of the UOC-MP. The statement argued that the UOC-MP is actually more independent than the OCU, and that the OCU’s tomos remains an obstacle to unification. The message to the ROC, however, was much less clear. On the one hand, the public statement of disagreement with Kirill and the decision to update the statute constituted a decisive step away from the ROC and toward autocephaly. The language of the statement and the media discussion of the event revealed the UOCMP’s caution.</p>
<p>The UOC-MP avoided technical, canonical language in its wording. The event on May 27 was initially called a meeting (<em>зібрання</em>) and not a council (<em>собор</em>), though the official publishing arm of the UOC changed the title of the event to <em>собор </em>shortly afterward. The Church affirmed its independence through two key words—<em>самостійність</em> and <em>незалежність</em>—but the documents avoid the technical canonical term of autocephaly. The document even avoids the word autonomy. The selection of terms demonstrated the desire of the Church to present its case to the broader Ukrainian public without actually taking a concrete step toward voting on or declaring autocephaly.</p>
<p>The other related clue is the decision of the authors to express their disagreement with Kirill. This falls far short of the condemnations issued by the authors and signatories to Pinchuk’s letter. The UOC-MP did not officially sever communion with the ROC nor did it call for a Church tribunal to hold him accountable. Commentators attempted to decipher the meaning of the decision: Was this a step toward some kind of autocephaly, even if it would be hybrid? It is possible that the UOC-MP intended to occupy the liminal space of de facto independence without de jure autocephaly.</p>
<p>The section on dialogue with the OCU had multiple purposes. On the one hand, it was an important step for the UOC-MP to acknowledge that the war had moved the needle to a point where resuming dialogue was necessary for the sake of the Ukrainian people. On the other, the UOC-MP established its positions on the obstacles to unity. It essentially set conditions on the dispute over the language of the tomos and the sacramental validity of the OCU’s ordinations, the most difficult issue of all. The UOC-MP asserted that the OCU’s statute is actually “not autocephalous” and claimed that its status prohibited the kind of freedom necessary for Church activity.</p>
<h3>The UOC-MP’s Future</h3>
<p>The May 27 UOC-MP Council elicited immediate analysis from several corners. Sergei Chapnin noted the divisions within the UOC-MP, with several bishops and key figures opposed to separation from the ROC and especially autocephaly. Chapnin’s observation on internal opposition to autocephaly is astute not only because of certain conservative stakeholders but also because of the breadth of the UOC-MP. The Eparchies of Simferopol and portions of Donetsk and Luhansk remained within the UOC-MP despite Russia’s occupation of these regions. After Russia’s invasion began, the Simferopol Eparchy blessed Russian soldiers taking part in the “special military operation.”</p>
<p>The internal opposition in the UOC-MP to autocephaly and complete separation from the ROC made it impossible to create unanimous consensus on taking a more concrete step one way or another. Immediately after the invasion started, some eparchies and clergy called for a council to vote on autocephaly. Let us consider the implications of the desired outcomes of the pro-Ukrainian and pro-Moscow cohorts of the UOC-MP. If the council had adopted autocephaly, both the ROC itself and its agents in the UOC-MP would have immediately declared it to be illegitimate and schismatic. The ROC would have imposed canonical penalties on bishops and clergy who supported autocephaly. This course of action fits the pattern established by the ROC since 1920—to simply remove pro-autocephalist Ukrainians from the Church by deposing them from holy orders and, on occasion, anathematizing them. If the UOC-MP Council decided to change nothing at all, they would risk angering the masses of clergy and laity desiring some kind of meaningful change. The flow of parishes from the UOC-MP to the OCU would continue with no change at all. The decision to create a new liminal space that removes all dependence on the ROC without declaring canonical autocephaly was an ecclesial version of stopping the bleeding.</p>
<h3>The UOC-MP and the Liminal Space—How Long?</h3>
<p>Stopping the bleeding is a metaphor for avoiding further injury and beginning the healing process. By taking a decisive step away from the ROC, the UOC-MP essentially secured precious time to determine its future. How much time will be needed before the next step should be taken? The bleeding metaphor helps us understand the situation—the UOC-MP needs to heal the source of the bleeding to become whole again. The main source of the Church’s bleeding is its relationship with and dependence upon the ROC.</p>
<p>There are varying opinions on the significance of the UOC-MP’s decisions. Chapnin asserts that the UOC-MP has a few choices. One of them is to essentially remain in this grey space for an indeterminate period of time, just as the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR) remained in isolation from the ROC until the reconciliation of 2007. Vladimir Bureha argues that the UOC-MP’s action in revising the statute is consistent with its earlier history and the relationship it had with Moscow since 1990. The key is the new statute given to the UOC-MP in 1990 that declared its sovereignty and independence, a type of autonomy without the official designation. The primary threads of connection to the ROC are communion with global Orthodoxy through the ROC, the confirmation of the election of the metropolitan of Kyiv by the patriarch of Moscow, and the confirmation of UOC-MP statutory changes by Moscow.</p>
<p>Bureha notes that the UOC-MP has made several key decisions without the confirmation of the ROC since 1990, often without public commentary. He adds that the ROC attempted to assert itself in UOC-MP affairs beginning in 2007, so there certainly has been both attention to and tension with the UOC-MP on just how much independence they have in governing their own affairs. The controversial Kharkiv Council of May 1992 is an example. The UOC-MP changed its statute before setting aside Metropolitan Filaret and electing Metropolitan Volodymyr as its new primate. Bureha notes that the statute change was necessary for the election, and that the ROC never confirmed those 1992 changes. He adds that Patriarch Aleksy II implicitly acknowledged the UOC-MP’s right to govern its own affairs.</p>
<p>Bureha’s argument on relative independence is based on his study of patterns—he mentions several examples where the UOC-MP made changes that were ignored by the governing apparatus of the ROC. There are exceptions to these patterns, and Bureha notes them, so one cannot argue that the evidence demonstrates the complete independence of the UOC-MP.</p>
<p>The point is that the UOC-MP took advantage of their relative independence and acted by removing the texts stating its dependence on the ROC. The removal of such passages from the statute gives the appearance of Church independence—autocephaly—without actually declaring it, hence our grey space. The grey space made it impossible for the ROC to take punitive action. The holy synod of the ROC declared that revisions to the UOC-MP’s statute had to take place in accordance with the correct procedure, including the approval of the patriarch of Moscow. The ROC publicly stated its intent to examine the actual statutory changes, but the text was not officially released at the time of the May 27 gathering. Bureha also noted that the proposed statutory changes were based on a document leaked to the public. The ROC could not publish any official reaction on an unofficial document. Any reaction made to the media by the ROC was nothing more than a personal opinion.</p>
<p>The question of the UOC-MP’s future path remains uncertain. Dialogue with the OCU will require multiple years of meetings to find common ground after decades of enmity. Onufry makes public gestures of true independence; for example, he commemorated the primates of the local Churches at the liturgy he served after May 27, a ritual practice reserved for the primates of autocephalous Churches. Such public gestures may be meaningful for people who want to see evidence of a decisive step away from Moscow. The changes are not, however, the final establishment of an autocephalous Church. Bureha observed that the other Orthodox Churches and the ROC are unlikely to recognize the UOC-MP’s new statute until the war is over. I believe that the UOC-MP will be unable to sustain its current position of “not yet.”</p>
<p>As long as Russia continues its war campaign in Ukraine, pressure will build on the entire Church to make a choice, and some eparchies may leave the UOC-MP en masse, to both the OCU and the ROC, if the UOC-MP refuses to leave the liminal space and make a final decision. The current policies of the Ukrainian government are placing severe duress on the UOC-MP, evidenced by the proposed law outlawing the ROC in Ukraine, the SBU investigations to expose and remove collaborators, and the government’s restrictions on the UOC-MP’s use of the Kyiv Pechers’ka Lavra. Clergy and laity within the UOC-MP continue to request firm verification of the Church’s independence from the ROC in interviews and public appeals. The UOC-MP’s leaders continue to take their time.</p>
<p>A recent interview with Bishop Sylvester—the rector of the Kyiv Theological Academy and Seminary—is revealing. Bishop Sylvester attempted to argue that the UOC-MP is truly independent, making references to the new statute throughout the interview. He dismissed the possibility of declaring autocephaly, stating that such a move is a “path to nowhere.” He claimed that the UOC-MP needs the support of the other local Orthodox Churches before taking concrete steps and promised that this was coming in the near future. Synods and bishops can offer next steps at a future date, but Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is straining the people’s confidence in their Church leaders.</p>
<h3>The Revised Statute and Its Significance</h3>
<p>The revised statute of the UOC-MP has taken on significant meaning in the time that has elapsed since the May 27, 2022, council. UOC-MP spokespeople tend to refer to the statute as granting the UOC-MP greater independence than the OCU, a claim that presumably removes the need for a declaration of autocephaly. Members of this Church body have used public forums to ask Church leaders to verify the new position of the Church in terms of its relationship with the ROC and the rest of global Orthodoxy. Olena Bogdan and Oleksander Tkachenko asked Metropolitan Onufry to deliver the revised statute to the state service for ethnopolitics and freedom of conscience. Last, the fine detail of the statute could potentially clarify the degree of independence the UOC-MP was claiming for itself. The revised statute has always been the primary source for responding to the requests for clarification on the UOC-MP’s status, but the leaders of the Church never made it public. The statute became public when religious scholar Andrii Smyrnov published it on his Facebook page.</p>
<p>The main changes to the statute concern its removal of references to the ROC and the patriarch of Moscow. The administration and governance of the UOC-MP in adherence to the statute would be independent, because there are no clear dependencies on the ROC or participation in its life. The revised statute refers to the hramota of Patriarch Alexy II in 1990 as the authoritative document guaranteeing the independence of the UOCMP. The limits of independence are subject to the interpretation of the <em>hramota</em> and the meaning of the words used to define independence in the statute—namely <em>самостійною</em> and <em>незалежною</em>. The statute uses terms loosely affiliated with the concept of autonomy in Orthodox jurisprudence. Varying interpretations of the statute could become problematic within the UOC-MP and among other Orthodox at any point in time. All Orthodox understand autocephaly as the technical term denoting complete independence, regardless of differences in the minutiae of the statutes of this or that local Orthodox Church. The absence of autocephaly as a canonical term denoting complete independence could permit bishops of the UOC-MP or of other Orthodox Churches to challenge its actual self-governance.</p>
<p>The real change concerns the removal of most of the references to the ROC in the document. On the one hand, the removal was both a gesture of withdrawal and disapproval and also an attempt to dare the ROC into challenging the UOC-MP. On the other hand, the decision to revise a statute by removing references without introducing strong language of self-assertion (autocephaly) was cautious and possibly an internal compromise. It would be easy enough to restore the dependencies in the next iteration of the statute. The UOC-MP’s reluctance to make the revised statute public and the cautious maneuver of simply removing dependencies reveal the Church’s willingness to take only modest steps of separation from the ROC. Government agencies and some members of the clergy and laity have caught on to the UOC-MP’s cautious approach and are calling upon the leaders to take more concrete and permanent steps of separation and independence.</p>
<p>In summary, then, the May 27 council of the UOC-MP was significant because it marked the largest gesture of departure from the ROC. The UOC-MP left the door open for any possibility—either complete autocephaly, a merger with the OCU, or a return to the ROC. The situation can be described only as precarious. It is likely that the outcomes of the war on the ground will push the UOC-MP into making a more permanent change. Until that time arrives, the UOC-MP might be content to remain within the proverbial grey space. The Ukrainian government’s investigation of the UOC-MP is likely to hasten the process of a firmer decision.</p>
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<p>EDITORIAL NOTE: This essay is excerpted from <a href="https://wipfandstock.com/9781666748154/the-churchs-unholy-war/"><em>The Church's Unholy War</em></a>, used by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers, <a href="https://www.wipfandstock.com/">www.wipfandstock.com</a>, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.</p>
</div>Nicholas Denysenkotag:churchlifejournal.nd.edu,2005:News/1600382024-02-22T06:00:00-05:002024-02-21T23:03:32-05:00Blaise Pascal: The Eucharist and the Most Hidden God<p>Xavier Tilliette on Communion. </p><p><span class="dropcap">I</span>f one were to rely solely on the indexes of the Pensées, for example in the Brunschvicg or Lafuma editions, and look for the word “Eucharist,” the findings would be meager and one would miss some of Pascal’s most significant suggestions. His devotion to the Blessed Sacrament is demonstrated during his final sickness and at the moment of his death. During that time of Jansenist austerity, one needed grave reasons in order to receive Communion, and the doctors did not consider him to be in a state to keep the eucharistic fast, nor to be sick enough to receive the Eucharist as Viaticum. Gilberte Périer recounts:</p>
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<p>He very much desired to receive Communion; but the doctors opposed it, saying that he would not be able to keep the fast, unless it was at night, which they did not want to do without necessity. And in order to receive the Viaticum, it would be necessary to be in danger of death, which they did not consider to be the case, so they could not advise it. This resistance angered him, but he was forced to surrender to it.</p>
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<p>His sickness, however, worsens, and Gilberte secretly “prepares the candles” and everything that was necessary for Communion the next morning. During the night the sickness caused violent convulsions and his loved ones feared “that they would see him die without the sacraments after having asked for them so often and with such insistence.” But Pascal recovered calm and lucidity. Thus, the priest of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont, Fr. Beurier, could say, “Behold our Lord, whom I bring to you, behold him whom you have so desired.” “He made an effort, and he stood up only halfway, in order to receive him [the priest] with more respect. Questioned on the principal mysteries of the faith, he responded clearly: ‘Yes, sir, I believe all of it, and with all of my heart.’ He then received the Holy Viaticum and the Extreme Unction while crying. He thanked the priest, who blessed him with the holy ciborium, and he said, ‘May God never abandon me!’” These were his final words. After his thanksgiving, the convulsions resumed and he died twenty-four hours later, August 19, 1662, at one in the morning. He was thirty-nine years old.</p>
<p>Thus Pascal had accomplished in his person that which he wrote about a while before concerning the death of his father, Étienne Pascal, in a long, pious letter to his sister on October 17, 1651: the union of the Eucharist and death. “In sacrifices the principal part is the death of the host . . . the achievement is the death.”</p>
<p>Such an admirable devotion forms a part not only of Pascal’s soul, but also of his thought. This thought is, in a single movement, an original apologetic, a critique of knowledge, and a spiritual meditation or a mysticism. Mystery, for Pascal, is the source of intelligibility, and the eucharistic mystery especially is the most enlightening for the eyes of the heart. It is simultaneously an apotheosis of the hidden God and the touchstone of Catholic truth. The formulations from the important letter to Charlotte de Roannez (October 1656) are well known:</p>
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<p>This strange secrecy, in which God is impenetrably withdrawn from the sight of men, is a great lesson to betake ourselves to solitude far from the sight of men. He remained concealed under the veil of the nature that covers him till the Incarnation; and when it was necessary that he should appear, he concealed himself still the more in covering himself with humanity. He was much more recognizable when he was invisible than when he rendered himself visible. And in fine, when he wished to fulfill the promise that he made to his apostles to remain with men until his final coming, he chose to remain in the strangest and most obscure secret of all, which are the species of the Eucharist. It is this sacrament that St. John calls in the Apocalypse a concealed manna; and I believe that Isaiah saw it in that state, when he said in the spirit of prophecy: Truly thou art a God concealed. This is the last secrecy wherein he can be. The veil of nature that covers God has been penetrated by some of the unbelieving, who, as St. Paul says, have recognized an invisible God through the visible nature. Heretical Christians have recognized him through his humanity and adored Jesus Christ God and man. But to recognize him under the species of bread is peculiar to Catholics alone: none but us are thus enlightened by God . . . the heretics, seeing the perfect appearances of bread in the Eucharist, do not think to see in it another substance. All things cover some mystery; all things are veils that cover God. Christians ought to recognize him in every thing.</p>
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<p>It is a memorable text, which places the Eucharist at the center of the Catholic faith, at the heart of the obscurity where God himself desired to be submerged in order to be more ardently searched for. In a way, he comments on the <em>Adoro te devote, latens Deitas, the hic latet simul et humanitas</em>, and the <em>Jesum quem velatum nunc aspicio</em>. It is an adorable mystery that invites contemplation and not the subtleties of the intellect. Yet, Pascal prepares an “apology” and his first movement is to vigorously attach eucharistic belief to a totally naked faith.</p>
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<p>How I hate these follies of not believing in the Eucharist, etc.! If the Gospel be true, if Jesus Christ be God, what difficulty is there?</p>
<p>Impiety, not to believe in the Eucharist, because it is not seen.</p>
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<p>Nevertheless, he neither ignores nor disregards the theological controversies. And although he did not intervene in the post-Cartesian eucharistic debate, one can perceive a trace of it (which is, in my opinion, irrefutable) in fragment 512, which demands a brief analysis: </p>
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<p>It [the host] is, in peculiar phraseology, wholly the body of Jesus Christ, but it cannot be said to be the whole body of Jesus Christ. The union of two things without change does not enable us to say that one becomes the other; the soul thus being united to the body, the fire to the timber, without change. But change is necessary to make the form of the one become the form of the other; thus the union of the Word to man. </p>
<p>Because my body without my soul would not make the body of a man; therefore my soul united to any matter whatsoever will make my body. It does not distinguish the necessary condition from the sufficient condition; the union is necessary, but not sufficient. The left arm is not the right. Impenetrability is a property of the body.</p>
<p>Identity <em>de numero</em> in regard to the same time requires the identity of matter. Thus if God united my soul to a body in China, the same body, <em>idem numero</em>, would be in China. The same river which runs there is<em> idem numero</em> as that which runs at the same time in China.</p>
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<p>The fragment does not belong to the preparatory bundle of the <em>Pensées</em>. Was it intended for the <em>Provincial Letters</em>? This is doubtful. But, despite the authority of Armogathe, it seems uncontestable that he is thinking of Descartes and specifically the letter to Mesland on February 9, 1645. Léonce Couture, Henri Gouhier, Michel Le Guern, Francis Kaplan all think this. Armogathe’s argument is quite specious, and incidentally he hesitates in his view, but he argues that the fragment goes against the letter. His argument is not topical, for, to state it quickly, having read the contentious points, one can very easily provide the opposite interpretation.</p>
<p>It is not clear whether Pascal knew the name of the author of the letter. He does not provide it. The beginning makes an allusion to the <em>totus Christus</em> of the Council of Trent (Canons 1 and 3; Denz. 1651 and 1653). It expresses Clerselier’s fear and the content of the statement that was crossed out on the original copy. Pascal’s complaint is that the author inclines toward consubstantiation, the association of substances, rather than towards conversion. But, union is not conversion, the soul united to the body does not become the body, the fire does not become the wood. If there is not a prior change of bread into the body the soul is not sufficient. The hypostatic union (where the divine person is the subject, the <em>hypokeimenon</em>, of the man), on the contrary, makes Christ a divine man, whereby all his actions are attributed to the Person (according to the communication of idioms, the <em>perichoresis</em>). However, the example applied to the Eucharist is not <em>ad rem</em>, for there is not a substantial union, but a transubstantiation, a conversion. The eucharistic equivalent to the hypostatic union would be impanation.</p>
<p>The second paragraph does not present difficulties. It is the soul that determines a human body (a Cartesian thesis), but not just any body. The condition of the union of the soul to a corporeal matter is necessary, though it is not sufficient. The bread must have become the body. And the body is not just any body. Today, one would say that it is a structure. Impenetrability (antitype) is a general property of bodies. Moreover, this does not contradict Descartes, who refused the interpenetration of the parts. But he tends to reduce the body to the dimensive quantity of the bread. Yet it is the body of Christ that is in the Eucharist, with his flesh, his limbs, his blood, etc. . . . and this is not an impanated body.</p>
<p>The final paragraph, a rather enigmatic one, treats the numeric or material identity. One would suppose that if one is in Paris, while one’s soul is united to a body in China, this body in exile would be the same identical body, as in the phenomena of bilocation or of duplication of the body. How can we understand the last phrase, which resumes [Descartes’] example of the Loire? It should be understood with an exclamation mark that brings out the irony and the absurdity of the statement. Pascal pushes to its absurd conclusion the fact that the matter of the river (water and the earth of the riverbed), though channeled, is in constant flux. Thus, every river that flows would be the same as any other. But simultaneity does not create identity, the required material identity. Pascal’s example therefore builds on the bond between the <em>hic et nunc</em> of the conservation of the species and transubstantiation, whereas Descartes tended to disjoin them in making the species the median surface. The objection, however, is not very relevant to the extent that the river appears transportable like the integral soul, and because Pascal transposes simultaneously that which coincides locally for Descartes.</p>
<p>It is not that Pascal mocks the explanations, but that he simply does not care about them. He prefers to place the Eucharist back in its natural milieu, which is Catholic doctrine. It is appropriate that it retain its character as a test of faith: “As Jesus Christ remained unknown among men, so His truth remains among common opinions without external difference. Thus the Eucharist among ordinary bread.” It is a lapidary remark with great significance. The exquisite soundness of Pascal’s spiritual theology appears again in fragment 554: “At the Last Supper He gave Himself in communion as about to die; to the disciples at Emmaus as risen from the dead; to the whole Church as ascended into heaven.” And in the laconic fragment 666: “The Eucharist. <em>Comedes panem tuum. Panem nostrum.</em>” The parallel here is striking.</p>
<p>Besides these traces of his meditation, the Eucharist, just as Christ himself, enters in the prophetic and symbolic view of Revelation and is a part of the Pascalian apologetic. The Eucharist, “after the Lord’s Supper” is the “truth after the type,” which does not stop it from remaining a type itself, <em>panis angelorum, panis viatorum</em>. “Christians take even the Eucharist as type of the glory at which they aim.” Indeed, it is peculiar to the sacraments, and to a preeminent degree to the Eucharist, that they be simultaneously truth, reality, as well as figurative: <em>res et sacramentum</em>. This indissoluble duality allows the eucharistic faith to avoid vanishing into symbolism or getting bogged down in a crass material signification. “The subject of the Holy Sacrament” is, with the Incarnation and indulgences, a cornerstone of the Christian and Catholic truth, as seen in the beautiful fragment 862 on heresies (“The source of all heresies is the exclusion of some of these truths”):</p>
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<p>2nd example: On the subject of the Holy Sacrament. We believe that, the substance of the bread being changed, and being consubstantial with that of the body of our Lord, Jesus Christ is therein really present. That is one truth. Another is that this Sacrament is also a type of the cross and of glory, and a commemoration of the two. That is the Catholic faith, which comprehends these two truths which seem opposed. The heresy of to-day, not conceiving that this Sacrament contains at the same time both the presence of Jesus Christ and a type of Him, and that it is a sacrifice and a commemoration of a sacrifice, believes that neither of these truths can be admitted without excluding the other for this reason. They fasten to this point alone, that this Sacrament is emblematic; and in this they are not heretics. They think that we exclude this truth; hence it comes that they raise so many objections to us out of the passages of the Fathers which assert it. Finally, they deny the presence; and in this they are heretics.</p>
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<p>EDITORIAL NOTE: This is an excerpt from <a href="https://www.cuapress.org/9780813235974/the-eucharist-in-modern-philosophy/"><em>The Eucharist in Modern Philosophy</em></a>, translated by <a href="https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/authors/jonathan-martin-ciraulo/">Jonathan Ciraulo</a>. Reprinted with the kind permission of <a href="https://www.cuapress.org/">The Catholic University of America Press</a>. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.</p>
</div>Xavier Tilliettetag:churchlifejournal.nd.edu,2005:News/1600082024-02-20T06:00:00-05:002024-02-19T22:53:07-05:00The Eucharist and Human Dignity<p>Clemens Sedmak on need.</p><p><span class="dropcap">W</span>hen we read the stories of Jesuit priest Alfred Delp, celebrating mass in shackles in Tegel prison in Berlin in the fall of 1944, of Archbishop (later Cardinal) Francis-Xavier Nguyễn Văn Thuận, celebrating the Eucharist in solitary confinement in Vietnam with a drop of wine and a little bit of bread, or of Cardinal Sigitas Tamkevičius from Lithuania celebrating liturgy in secret in a Soviet labor camp—we begin to get a sense of the fundamental and life-giving power of the Eucharist and of some aspects of the relationship between the Eucharist and dignity. Delp, Nguyễn Văn Thuận, and Tamkevičius felt strengthened in their hope, self-respect, and experience of being in community, which are important aspects of human dignity.</p>
<h2>Notes on Dignity</h2>
<p>The Dominican economist Louis-Joseph Lebret developed the idea of “dignity-needs.” Dignity needs (like beauty) allow a person to live a dignified life. Lebret also mentions space—a space to which one can retreat and contemplate.<a href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[1]<!--[endif]--></a> A dignity perspective moves us beyond so called “basic needs” and reminds us of the fact that even food and shelter have dignity-relevant dimensions. Dignity needs reflect important aspects of a dignified life; it is not a bold claim to say that a dignified life allows a person to express deep commitments as long as they do not harm other people. Being able to celebrate the Eucharist and receive communion can be called a dignity need by the standards of many. Being deprived of the Eucharist can be, in a non-trivial sense of the word, torturous.</p>
<p>Let us think of the experience of Jesuit Pedro Arrupe who will accompany us in what follows. Arrupe, General Superior of the Jesuits after the Second Vatican Council and a missionary to Japan since 1938, talked about his hunger for the Eucharist during the 33 days he spent in solitary confinement in Japan in 1941:</p>
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<p>The war broke out in Japan on the feast of the Immaculate Conception, 1941, with the attack of Pearl Harbor. The military police immediately put me in jail, in a cell with an area of four square meters . . . I passed the days and nights in the cold of December entirely alone and without a bed, or table, or anything else but a mat on which to sleep. I was tormented by my uncertainty on why I had been imprisoned . . . But I was above all tortured by not being able to say Mass, at not being able to receive the Eucharist. What loneliness there was!<a href="#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title="">[2]</a></p>
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<p>Being deprived of the Eucharist can be a torturous experience, precisely because deeply rooted dignity-needs are not met. The Eucharist is dignifying because it is a real encounter with God, a sacred celebration of community, a reminder of the real possibility of the human person entering an intimate relationship with God. The Eucharist can become truly identity-giving. This is why Pedro Arrupe could say: “The Eucharist is the center of my life. I cannot imagine a day without the celebration of the Eucharistic Sacrifice.”<a href="#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[3]<!--[endif]--></a> The Eucharist speaks about needs beyond the tangible, beyond the “cash value.” It is a reminder of the truth that the person does not live by bread alone (Matt 4:4). This is clearly a statement about human dignity.</p>
<p>The idea of human dignity, prominently positioned in the preamble and article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is considered “the foundation of all the other principles and content of the Church's social doctrine” (<em><a href="https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/justpeace/documents/rc_pc_justpeace_doc_20060526_compendio-dott-soc_en.html">Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church</a></em> §160). The Universal Declaration of Human Rights left a number of questions open, including the justification of the statement that human beings have inherent dignity and the proper operationalization of dignity—what does it mean to “enact dignity” as a form of life?</p>
<p>The Christian tradition, culminating in the celebration of the Eucharist, can offer responses to these two questions: the justification of human dignity is firmly grounded in the creation story (Gen 1:27) and the theology of the incarnation (Phil 2:6-7) which offers new beautiful and redemptive beginnings to the human family. With regard to the operationalization the gospel has the strong message that encountering the poor and wounded is a privileged way to encounter Christ. When we read in Matthew 25:40, “Just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me,” the passage does not use metaphorical language (“it is as if you had done it to me”), but a plain and direct sentence. Encountering Christ cannot happen if one ignores the poor, those who suffer, those who are disadvantaged, those who are vulnerable, those who are wounded.</p>
<p>It is the same Christ whom we encounter in the Eucharist and whom we encounter in the poor. There is only one Christ, <em>Dominus Iesus</em>. In Arrupe’s words when he reflects on the Eucharist: “There is a relationship with the Gospels. We find in the Gospels a realistic, historical image of Jesus as he lived in Palestine. And in the Eucharist we find Jesus Christ living today among us.”<a href="#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[4]<!--[endif]--></a> It is the same Christ; the same Christ whom we can encounter when we are touched by the lives of the most vulnerable and wounded. And this, in turn, says something about “image and likeness of God.” The kenosis of Christ who “emptied himself” (Phil 2:7) shows us a “poverty of God” that is embraced in a special way by those who are poor. It is crystal clear that the Eucharist <a href="https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/the-eucharist-commits-us-to-the-poor/">commits us to the poor</a>. And this commitment connects the Eucharist to our commitment to a deep practice of human dignity—making the effort and walking the extra mile of respecting a person’s dignity, even under adverse circumstances (e.g. circumstances of vulnerability, scarcity and duress, but also circumstances of moral poverty like violence, injustice, hatred). The Eucharist is a reminder that we are created in the image and likeness of God and that God’s real presence defines who we are and how we ought to live.</p>
<h2>Tales About the Eucharist</h2>
<p>The Eucharist commits us to dignity and to the poor. This commitment to the poor keeps the Eucharist “grounded,” as a celebration in the “here and now.” The above-mentioned statement that the person does not live by bread alone (Matt 4:4) also entails the message: the person does also live by bread.</p>
<p>That is why it will be difficult to claim that one has truly participated in the Eucharist if one does not live the commitment to Matthew 25. There are some hard questions that we have to ask ourselves, such as: “Why is it that in spite of hundreds of thousands of daily and weekly Masses, Christians continue as selfishly as before?”<a href="#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[5]<!--[endif]--></a></p>
<p>There is a temptation to reduce the Eucharist to an isolated island, to a “feel good”-experience, to a spiritual achievement, to a resource of one’s success, to a magic event. These illusions may reflect spiritual worldliness (<em>Evangelii Gaudium</em> §93-94) or a technocratic paradigm (<em>Laudato Si</em> §109-112) with its belief of a good life without deep and ongoing conversion. The Eucharist invites us to see dimensions beyond these misleading mindsets. It thus teaches us important lessons on dignity. When we come to the Eucharist in our liturgy we have gathered, we have acknowledged our sins, we have listened to the Word of God and its meaning, we have we have confessed our faith, we have prayed for the needs of the world. These moments are also tales about human dignity: the human person is part of a community, invited into a self-critical search for identity, open to the transcendent, called to enter commitments, member of the human family, and an example of humanity.</p>
<p>Similarly, when we look at four “Eucharistic moments” (a moment of transformation and disruption, a moment of mystery and sacredness, a moment of reality and presence, a moment of celebration and community) we can draw lessons about human dignity: The idea of new beginnings, freedoms, and the ability to deal with tragedy is part of an understanding of dignity; the connection between mystery and dignity can be established, based on the insight that there is always more to say about dignity. James Hanvey beautifully describes “mystery,” in theological discourse, as “not an intellectual dead end; it is a point of departure. Mystery is the capacity for inexhaustible meaning.”<a href="#_ftn6" name="_ftnref6" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[6]<!--[endif]--></a></p>
<p>Dignity is a term that has this capacity. The idea of living our lives in particular circumstances and an encounter with the real is our human condition; we do not encounter the general, but the particular; we do not encounter humanity, but particular human persons. The commitment to reality is another way of honoring the human condition, thus confirming the dignity of those who enact the <em>conditio humana</em>. The We-dimension of our lives, finally, expressed in the “celebration and community-dimension” of the Eucharist, reflects the reality that we are social beings. “Being a person in the image and likeness of God . . . involves existing in a relationship . . . because God himself, one and triune, is the communion of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (<em>Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church</em> §34).</p>
<p>The We-dimension of our lives is also dignity-relevant, especially with regard to the question of: who is included in the “we”? Mechanisms of exclusion create “the poor” we see described in Matthew 25. The Eucharist is deeply connected to the idea of human dignity because of its message of equality: we are all sinners; we come as sinners to the table of the Lord. There is a deep connection between the Eucharist and Penance (<em>Redemptor Hominis</em> §20). The response “I am a sinner” is a very good response to the question “Who are you?”. Pedro Arrupe led the thirty-second General Congregation of the Jesuits (1974-75) and the document gives a beautiful response to the identity question of the Jesuits: “What is it to be a Jesuit? It is to know that one is a sinner, yet called to be a companion of Jesus” (Decree 2). We are all sinners. This statement can shed some light on our understanding of dignity—we can never exhaust the moral invitation that comes with the dignity as persons created in the image and likeness of God (Matt 5:48: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect”). And we can never get there on our own. We depend on God’s mercy. These two aspects unite all of us as members of the human family. And the idea of “being full members of the human family” and “belonging to the human family” is central for the universal understanding of the inherent dignity of the human person.</p>
<p>The Eucharist, as “the source and summit of the Christian life” (<em>Catechism of the Catholic Church</em> §1324) tells one of the most beautiful stories about human dignity; the Eucharist gives us the message that God considers us worthy to invite us into a celebration where “we already unite ourselves with the heavenly liturgy and anticipate eternal life, when God will be all in all” (<em>Catechism of the Catholic Church</em> §1327). “By celebrating and also partaking of the Eucharist we unite ourselves with Christ on earth and in heaven” (<em>Redemptor Hominis</em> §20). This is a beautiful message and invitation. Sinners being called to a redemptive union. This has been beautifully expressed by Pope Francis: “The Eucharist, although it is the fullness of sacramental life, is not a prize for the perfect but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak” (<em>Evangelii Gaudium</em> §47). Pope Francis quotes Saint Ambrose as well as Saint Cyril of Alexandria in this passage (footnote 51). This may be another way of saying: the Eucharist commits us to the poor, to those who are hungry. Pope Francis’ remark in <em>Evangelii Gaudium</em> is obviously not an invitation to “trivialize” the Eucharist, but rather a warning that the Eucharist should not be instrumentalized for purposes that do not serve the greater glory of God.</p>
<p>This is maybe what the Holy Father expresses in this passage: As much as we want to avoid an entitlement-attitude when it comes to matters of grace, we want to avoid the temptation to turn the Eucharist into an elitist celebration. This could be seen as yet another expression of spiritual worldliness. We want to avoid any possible impression of the kind of self-righteousness that Jesus warns against in Luke 18:10-14. Pope Francis introduces a category to approach an understanding of the Eucharist that is both helpful and precious: the idea of divine tenderness. In his address to participants in the pilgrimage organized by the Sisters Disciples of Jesus in the Eucharist on August 25, 2023, he said:</p>
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<p>Let us not forget that tenderness is one of God’s features: God’s style is closeness, compassion and tenderness. Let us not forget this. To fill with tenderness the wounds and the voids produced by sin in man and society, starting by kneeling before Jesus in the consecrated Host, and remaining there for a long time . . . even when one seems to feel nothing, in silent and trusting abandonment, because—to repeat an expression particularly dear to him—“Magister adest,” “the Teacher is there” (cf. John 11:28).</p>
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<p>If we think of the experience of adoration in front of the blessed sacrament—it is the experience of the tender presence of God. And all can say: “Magister adest.” The message of God’s tenderness, offered to all, is another aspect of the beautiful story the Eucharist tells about the human condition and human dignity—and about a deep and true hunger, a longing for the nourishment that will never make you hunger or thirst again (cf., John 4:4).<a href="#_ftn7" name="_ftnref7" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[7]<!--[endif]--></a></p>
<h2>Hunger, Dignity, and the Experience of the Eucharist</h2>
<p>When we look at the experience of the Eucharist we can, very simply, distinguish two ways of experiencing the Eucharist—the experience of the well-fed and the experience of the hungry. A hungry person will have a different experience of “being invited to the Lord’s table,” of receiving Christ’s body in the bread, or of praying the Our Father with the <a href="https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/a-prayer-for-the-poor/">petition for the daily bread</a>. We pray for our daily bread in the Our Father. Alfred Delp, in his prison meditations, reflected on the Our Father and its petitions and describes the hunger for bread as a real sorrow; he also says that—in order to understand this petition—you have to have experienced hunger, you have to have experienced a piece of bread as a grace from heaven.<a href="#_ftn8" name="_ftnref8" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[8]<!--[endif]--></a> You have to have deep respect of bread and the experience that bread is precious is crucial for the development of this respect. Delp obviously wrote these reflections when he was hoping for bread in prison, where he was not properly fed and where a piece of bread was precious. His experience made it impossible for him to be indifferent to the petitions of the Our Father.</p>
<p>Indifference is indeed a major obstacle to a deep experience of the Eucharist. Archbishop Oscar Romero described in his journal (4 January 1979) how he tried to remember a community of religious sisters about the grave dangers of indifference: “I spoke to them about the presence of Christ in our midst, which he has revealed in diverse forms: in the Church community . . . especially, in the Eucharist; about how many times the Lord's loving presence is answered by indifference . . . atonement is necessary.”<a href="#_ftn9" name="_ftnref9" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[9]<!--[endif]--></a> Indifference is a sign of hardness of the soul, one of the opposites of tenderness; and tenderness cannot happen without vulnerability, probably not without wounds. It could make sense to say that it is more difficult for the well-fed person to break through the hardness of indifference than for the person who is hungry.</p>
<p>A deep way to break through the indifference that comes with comfort is suffering. Suffering speaks a language that can invite us to experience the Eucharist on a deep level. Priests celebrated the Eucharist in the concentration camp Dachau. They had the experience of “Christ coming to us in our Calvary.” The French philosopher Simone Weil offers many insights into the epistemic force of suffering. Consider the book of Job—as an existential wrestling with God it must have been written in intense pain. So, this is how it should be read. Read the book of Job with a migraine. Simone Weil, having suffered from migraines all her life, has insights on a deep and personal level into ways of knowing that comes through suffering. It is knowledge that breaks through the wall of indifference, or through, to use Franz Kafka’s famous words, “the frozen sea within us.”</p>
<p>The deep hunger for the Eucharist is especially intense in moments of suffering, in moments <a href="https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/faith-hope-and-carnage-the-terrible-beauty-of-grief/">where we reach our limits</a>. Let me return to Pedro Arrupe: Four years after his imprisonment, on August 6, 1945 the atomic bomb was dropped over Hiroshima; Arrupe was leading the novitiate of the Jesuits at the outskirts of the city and established a rescue and medical treatment mission. They treated as many people as they could and took them in. Arrupe describes the celebration of the Eucharist:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The explosion took place in August 6. The following day, August 7, at five o’clock in the morning, before beginning to take care of the wounded and bury the dead, I celebrated Mass in the house. In these very moments one feels closer to God, one feels more deeply the value of his aid. Actually, the surroundings did not foster devotion for the celebration of the Mass. The chapel, half destroyed, was overflowing with the wounded, who were lying on the floor very near to one another, suffering terribly, twisted with pain . . . What a terrible scene! A few minutes later the One about whom John the Baptist said “There is one among you whom you do not recognize” (John 1:26) would descend on the altar.<a href="#_ftn10" name="_ftnref10" title="">[10]</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>There is a hunger for the mystery born from suffering. And the mystery can offer, precisely because it is a mystery, a healing response to unspeakable suffering. The person does not live by bread alone. Arrupe describes another experience in the days after the atomic bomb over Hiroshima—he went with companions to the Jesuit priests’ house in the city center; and here is the description of their “way of doing things:” “We finally arrived at our destination and began our first treatments of the Fathers. In spite of the urgency of our work, we had first stopped to celebrated our masses.”<a href="#_ftn11" name="_ftnref11" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[11]<!--[endif]--></a> The person does not live by bread alone and there is a hunger only the Eucharist can respond to. This was also the experience of Archbishop Oscar Romero. On 2 March 1979 he noted in this diary:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In the evening, in the retreat house in El Despertar where Father Octavio and four young men were killed, we celebrated the Eucharist on the fortieth day after the tragic death of our brother . . . The size of the group assembled and their participation was very impressive. When it came time for the Offertory they gave a bouquet of red flowers to the mothers of each of the four young men. They also gave one to Father Octavio's father . . . and this was very moving for the people present.<a href="#_ftn12" name="_ftnref12" title="">[12]</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Again, we see that hunger for the Eucharist born from suffering. Hunger is a deep way to help understand the painful longing the Eucharist is responding to. And hunger for <em>magis </em>[the more[, hunger for the transcendent, hunger for what goes beyond the “Here and Now,” is an important aspect of human dignity. Dignity can be meaningfully connected with the imagination, a sense of the possibility of a different world; human freedom, a constitutive element of dignity, is based on a sense of possibilities, on the ability to imagine different pathways and “worlds.” This is another bridge between the Eucharist and dignity: the Eucharist widens and deepens our imagination, our way of thinking about ourselves, the world, and God’s relationship with us.<a href="#_ftn13" name="_ftnref13" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[13]<!--[endif]--></a> The Eucharist is nothing less than an invitation to experience the real presence of God.<a href="#_ftn14" name="_ftnref14" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[14]<!--[endif]--></a></p>
<p>The imagination is an expression of a longing and also shaped by the experience of hunger that would not want to allow “the way things are” to have the last word. Because of its impact on our longing for the <em>magis</em>, I would like to suggest that the ability to suffer is an important aspect of human dignity. We would not have the discourse on human dignity, had we not the experience of vulnerability and woundedness. The hunger for justice is the result of the experience of injustice. The beatitudes praise this hunger: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled” (Matt 5:6). This hunger cannot be separated from the hunger that draws people to God’s real presence in the Eucharist.</p>
<p>The person does not live by bread alone, but bread is necessary. Pedro Arrupe celebrated the Eucharist in the midst of and a response to suffering, but he did work very hard with his hands and without denying the bitter realities with their demands. After 6 August 1945 he was busy with medical services that he described in no unclear words, far from any spiritualizing of the situation: “To cleanse the wounds it was necessary to puncture and open the blisters . . . his back was completely covered with wounds made by small pieces of glass. With a razor blade I removed more than fifty fragments . . . we had absolutely no anesthetics and some of the children were horribly wounded.”<a href="#_ftn15" name="_ftnref15" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[15]<!--[endif]--></a></p>
<p>Yes, he did find himself in the presence of God: The first sight they caught from the city made them turn to God: “We did the only thing that could be done in the presence of such mass slaughter: we fell on our knees and prayed for guidance, as we were destitute for human help.”<a href="#_ftn16" name="_ftnref16" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[16]<!--[endif]--></a> But after the prayer they went to work including the cremating of dead bodies. You honor dignity by honoring the realities of human life. Arrupe even wrote: “From a missionary perspective, they did challenge us when they said: ‘Do not enter the city because there is a gas in the air that kills for seventy years.’ It is at such times that one feels most a priest, when one knows that in the city there are 50,000 bodies which, unless they are cremated, will cause a terrible plague.”<a href="#_ftn17" name="_ftnref17" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[17]<!--[endif]--></a> Again, to honor the dignity of the human person means honoring the life realities that have been embraced by God through the incarnation.</p>
<h2>Dignity, Real Presence, and Real Hunger</h2>
<p>When we talk about hunger as a necessary aspect of a deep experience of the Eucharist there is a danger to unnecessarily spiritualize the understanding of “hunger” and to use terms like “spiritual hunger” or “hunger for God.” Even though this certainly has its place, we should not underestimate the power and force of physical hunger, hunger for real bread; we should not underestimate the power of the experience of the Eucharist of poor people. The risk of indifference is clearly higher in the case of people living comfortable lives. I need to ask myself as a person with a comfortable life: Where is your hunger? Where is your hunger for bread, for justice, for the bread of life?</p>
<p>The tendency to spiritualize this hunger and disconnect it from actions of solidarity, and experience of suffering can feed into the kind of indifference Archbishop Romero warns against. Pedro Arrupe’s famous “Letter on Poverty”<a href="#_ftn18" name="_ftnref18" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[18]<!--[endif]--></a> reminds the Jesuits of the power of material poverty; it can teach lessons other forms of poverty cannot. The same can be said about “hunger for bread.” There is a way only poverty can help us understand the kenosis of the self-giving Christ; an encounter with Christ in the Eucharist commits to a perspective of the world and the insight that God is present in a special way in the poor.</p>
<p>A deep experience of the Eucharist can come from a place of want where people live their dignity centered around the dignifying force only the Eucharist can bring. Pedro Arrupe experienced the power of the poor in a Eucharist he celebrated in a favela:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A few years ago I was visiting a Jesuit province in Latin America. I was invited, with some timidity, to celebrate a Mass in a suburb, in a “favela,” the poorest in the region as they told me. There were around a hundred thousand people living there in the midst of mud since the town had been built along the side of a depression and became almost completely flooded whenever it rained . . . The Mass was held in a small structure all patched together and open. Since there was no door, cats and dogs came and went without any problem. The Mass began . . . Those people, who seemed to have nothing, were ready to give themselves to share their joy and happiness. When we arrived at the consecration and I raised the Host in the midst of an absolute silence, I perceived the joy of the Lord who remains with His beloved. As Jesus says: “He has sent me to bring the good news to the poor,” “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” Soon after, when I was distributing Communion and was looking at their faces, dry, hard, and tanned by the sun, I noticed that large tears like pearls were running down many of them. They were meeting Jesus, their only consolation. My hands trembled.<a href="#_ftn19" name="_ftnref19" title="">[19]</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>There are lessons on dignity only people living in poverty can bring; there are lessons on the hunger for the Eucharist only those who may not be fed every day, can bring. There are lessons on the love of God only “the poor in spirit” can bring.</p>
<p>Pope Benedict called the Eucharist a “school of charity” (<em>Angelus</em>, 25 May 2008). It is a school where we learn about God’s love for us, and the two great commandments. We may conclude that the ability to love is probably the true center of human dignity; being invited into God’s love is a foundation for the dignity of the human person that is “inherent,” but also an invitation to “go out of oneself” and encounter the world with love. This love is nourished by the experience of God’s life. And the hunger for God’s love and the hunger for the Eucharist coincide. And this hunger is, theologically speaking, an expression of human dignity that no misery can take away.</p>
<p>I want to conclude with a moving experience from Pedro Arrupe. He has described the hunger for the Eucharist and for the real presence of God in an encounter on August 7, 1945:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>One day after the explosion of the atomic bomb, I was passing through streets clogged with masses of ruins of every kind. On the spot where her house had formerly stood, I found a kind of hut supported by some poles and covered with pieces of tin. I went up to it . . . I tried to enter but an unbearable stench repelled me. The young Christian, her name was Nakamura, was lying stretched out on a rough table raised a bit above the ground. Her arms and legs were extended and covered with some burned rags . . . Her burned flesh seemed to be little else but bones and wounds. She had been in this state for fifteen days without being able to take care of herself or clean herself, and she had only eaten a little rice which her father, who was also seriously injured, gave her . . . Appalled by such a terrible sight, I remained without speaking. After a little, Nakamura opened her eyes and when she saw me near, and smiling at her, she looked at me with two tears in her eyes and sought to give me her hand which was only a purulent stump and she said to me with a tone that I shall never forget: “Father, have you brought me Communion?”<a href="#_ftn20" name="_ftnref20" title="">[20]</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>EDITORIAL NOTE: This essay was first delivered as the first lecture in the "The Only Solution is Love: The Eucharist and Catholic Social Teaching" series hosted by Michael Baxter for the <a href="https://mcgrath.nd.edu/">McGrath Institute for Church Life</a>. Here is information about the third and upcoming installment of the series:</p>
<p>The Eucharistic Sacrifice and the Mission to the Poor</p>
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<p><time class="dtstart" datetime="2024-02-28T16:30-05:00"> Wed Feb 28, 2024, 4:30 pm</time> - <time class="dtend" datetime="2024-02-28T17:45-05:00">5:45 pm</time></p>
<p>Eck Visitors Center Auditorium (<a class="placemark-link" target="_blank" href="https://map.nd.edu/#/placemarks/1158/zoom/8/lat/41.696804/lon/-86.239089" rel="noopener">View on map.nd.edu</a>)</p>
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<p>Most Rev. Daniel E. Flores, S.T.D. will offer the third in a six-part lecture series called "The Only Solution is Love: The Eucharist and Catholic Social Teaching." In this third lecture, titled "The Eucharistic Sacrifice and the Mission to the Poor," Bishop Flores will describe the dynamism inherent within the Eucharistic celebration that both names Christ’s mission to the poor, and makes us capable of participating in it. The theme will include addressing “who are the poor?”</p>
<p>Bishop Flores has served as the Bishop of the Diocese of Brownsville since 2009. He studied at the University of Dallas, and Holy Trinity Seminary, completing a BA in Philosophy and a Masters of Divinity.</p>
<p>For more information, <a href="https://mcgrath.nd.edu/conferences/academic-pastoral/the-only-solution-is-love-the-eucharist-and-catholic-social-teaching/">please click here</a>.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[1]<!--[endif]--></a> A. Bossi, Economy and humanism. <em>Estudos avançados</em> 26,75 (2012) 249-266.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[2]<!--[endif]--></a> P. Arrupe, The Eucharist and Youth. In: P. Arrupe. Other Apostolates Today: Selected Letters and Addresses—III. Ed. Jerome Aixala. St. Louis, MI: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1981, 283–307.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[3]<!--[endif]--></a> P. Arrupe, One Jesuit’s Spiritual Journey. Autobiographical Conversations with Jean-Claude Dietsch. Selected Letters and Addresses – V. St. Louis, MI: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1986, 30.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[4]<!--[endif]--></a> Ibd.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[5]<!--[endif]--></a> T. Balasuriya, Eucharist and Human Liberation. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock 2004, 2.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref6" name="_ftn6" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[6]<!--[endif]--></a> J. Hanvey, Dignity, Person, and Imago Trinitatis. In: C. McCrudden, ed., Understanding Human Dignity. Oxford: OUP 2013, 209-228.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref7" name="_ftn7" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[7]<!--[endif]--></a> Cf., S. Torvend, Still Hungry at the Feast. Eucharistic Justice in the Midst of Affliction. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press 2019, 41.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref8" name="_ftn8" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[8]<!--[endif]--></a> A. Delp, Advent of the Heart: Seasonal Sermons and Prison Writings 1941-1944. San</p>
<p>Francisco: Ignatius Press 2006.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref9" name="_ftn9" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[9]<!--[endif]--></a> O. Romero, A Shepherd’s Diary. Transl. I. Hodgson. London: Catholic Fund for Overseas Development (CAFOD) 1963, 121.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref10" name="_ftn10" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[10]<!--[endif]--></a> P. Arrupe, One Jesuit’s Spiritual Journey, 33.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref11" name="_ftn11" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[11]<!--[endif]--></a> P. Arrupe, Essential Writings. Selected with an introduction by K. Burke. 2<sup>nd</sup> printing. Maryknoll / NY: Orbis 2005, 45.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref12" name="_ftn12" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[12]<!--[endif]--></a> O. Romero, A Shepherd’s Diary, 165.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref13" name="_ftn13" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[13]<!--[endif]--></a> Cf., T. Kelly, The Bread of God. Nurturing a Eucharistic Imagination. Liguori, Mo.: Liguori 2001, ix.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref14" name="_ftn14" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[14]<!--[endif]--></a> Cf., J. Ratzinger, Gott ist uns nah. Eucharistie: Mitte des Lebens. Augsburg: St. Ulrich 2001, 75ff.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref15" name="_ftn15" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[15]<!--[endif]--></a> Arrupe, Essential Writings, 43.45.49.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref16" name="_ftn16" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[16]<!--[endif]--></a> Ibd., 41.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref17" name="_ftn17" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[17]<!--[endif]--></a> Ibd., 51.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref18" name="_ftn18" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[18]<!--[endif]--></a> P. Arrupe, Some Reflections on the Practice of Poverty. In: Challenge to Religious Life Today: Selected Letters and Addresses—I, ed. Jerome Aixala. St. Louis: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1979, 95–99.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref19" name="_ftn19" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[19]<!--[endif]--></a> P. Arrupe, Essential Writings, 58-59.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref20" name="_ftn20" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[20]<!--[endif]--></a> P. Arrupe, Other Apostolates Today, 296-297.</p>
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</div>Clemens Sedmaktag:churchlifejournal.nd.edu,2005:News/1600042024-02-19T06:00:00-05:002024-02-19T09:33:42-05:00What Is Man That AI Is Mindful of Him?<p>Jeffrey Bishop on anthropology.</p><p><span class="dropcap">R</span>ecently, my university hosted a salon on Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Knowledge Formation. The panel had two MDs that investigate the uses of AI in medicine, two English literature professors, and one computer scientist that works in AI. To a person each of the five panelists, brought up concerns about the ethics of AI. In each instance, the use of the term “ethics” was very familiar in what was meant about it.</p>
<p>We tend to think that ethics is something added onto technology, as if it is just another component to be added to the machine. We really want our technologies, including AI, to do good things for us, and so the “ethical” questions are always of two sorts : 1) “who” gets to design and thus take advantage of the fruits of AI?, and 2) can we make sure that AI’s fruits are distributed equally among us? Really, what our culture means when it asks the ethics questions of technology is this: who rides herd on these machines, who controls the machines? It is more of a question about the control of technology than anything else.</p>
<p>We truly believe that we can design moralities into our machines.<a href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[1]<!--[endif]--></a> Yet, in this way of configuring “who” gets to design the machines and “who” gets to take advantage of its fruits, this imagined “who” is part of the modern mythology of technoscience that has resulted in the technologies that we think we can ride herd over. What is this human that it can control the technology? What could it possibly mean that morality is designed into AI machines to make them ethical?</p>
<p>The more important question is this: What is the anthropology that informs this idea that the human can control its creations? Or more properly, what is the mythology that would have the human create AI in its own ethical image? Technology is so difficult for us to engage because it is so close to us, for in creating it, it recursively creates us, and sets out for us what it is possible for us to imagine, including what to imagine the ethics of technology is.</p>
<h2>What Is AI, That We Are Mindful of It?: The Western Technological Patrimony</h2>
<p>Plato set us on the epistemological trajectory of our thinking about technology in the West. His distinction between <em>episteme</em> and <em>techne</em>; <em>episteme</em> is true knowledge and <em>techne</em> is mere artifice—the artifice of the sophists. Reason must inform technology lest it become mere artifice taken up by sophistry. So, the idea plays itself out like this: a kind of reason that has not been infected by the sophist’s <em>techne</em> to ought control the tools of reason’s creation.<a href="#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[2]<!--[endif]--></a></p>
<p>Another arm of the West’s thinking about technology can be traced to Aristotle, who claimed that tools have a different kind of being than natural beings. Natural beings have their causes within themselves and tools have their causes outside of their being. Thus, human actors are different from artificial beings at the most fundamental level. The line goes from the human actor using <em>episteme</em> to produce <em>techne</em>/artifice. The tools are under our control; let us use reason to produce and use them.</p>
<p>This vision of the world finds itself at the center of Francis Bacon’s thinking. The human through the new work of science can look at nature, learn from it all that it needs to know, and can deploy that carefully considered knowledge to build the Utopian city, Bensalem. Descartes takes it up a notch: the human actor can become the master and possessor of nature through its on artifice and the creation of devices. Thus, the vision of political and ethical control runs deep in our ways of thinking. The ethics of technology is about controlling, and it can be better controlled if we broaden “who” gets control over it. While the emphasis seems to be on the “who,” the control is the important part. “We” will control “it.” And then if we can just design it from the very beginning making sure that the good things outweigh the bad things and that the good things are distributed to everyone and the bad things are not unduly burdening the least of these, then all will be well.</p>
<p>But then who are we, that we can be mindful of technology? What is the human, that we can be mindful of AI?</p>
<h2>The Chicken or the Egg</h2>
<p>However, on closer inspection, the Western story about technology seems to be the bad kind of myth. It is a shared lie that permits us to delude ourselves. The human is less creator, or master and possessor of his tools, then the tools are constitutive of human identity. Reality is much more complex than these simplistic binaries of <em>episteme</em> and <em>techne</em>, or natural and artificial beings, or the master and her tools.</p>
<p>Spiders—a non-rational animal by our standards—produce their tools, their webs from their own bodies. In fact, spider webs were tools of perception before they were tools of action. The web permitted the spider to extend its already superb vibratory sense. In fact, its exquisite vibratory sense capacities co-evolved with its capacity to produce its natural tool. Only later in its evolutionary development does the web become a trap to capture prey. Birds will use materials found in their locales to design their homes; other species of bird will use rocks to crack open seeds. Tool use is pretty common in the nature, and yet it is disconnected from frontal lobe control.</p>
<p>Moreover, early prehuman hominids are known to have used tools well before the frontal lobe development in the non-humans that would become modern homo sapiens. In fact, the development of the opposable thumb seems to have arrived about the same time as hominid tool use.<a href="#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[3]<!--[endif]--></a> It is entirely possible that the evolutionary development of human reason became possible because of tool use, and not the other way around as it is imagined by Western philosophy. The smaller brain hominid could grasp a stick to beat back its prey, giving it evolutionary advantage over its prey, permitting frontal lobe development.</p>
<p>In fact, other evolutionary developments also contributed to the emergence of modern humans. What will become the voice box moved down lower in the throat, permitting the independent usage of the trachea and the esophagus.<a href="#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[4]<!--[endif]--></a> With its repositioning in relation to the esophagus, the voice box was freed to become a tool for speech, and thus oral symbolic communication—language—became a possibility. You might say that human language is like the spider’s web. With language our attention is drawn to certain aspects of the world, and words permit us to do things in the world around us. Language is, as Heidegger notes, the house of being, a home in which the human can dwell.<a href="#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[5]<!--[endif]--></a></p>
<p>Thus, the hard and fast distinction between nature and technique seems suspect. Words become our tools of mediation between ourselves and the world around us and the world. Like tools that mediate between my intentions and the world I hope to build, words permit us to imagine worlds not yet built, or not yet possible. In fact words shape brains, children need language to progress through stages of cognitive development. So, not only does language permit me to imagine interventions into the world, words themselves make cognitive development possible. Just as the use of a hammer drives the nail into the wood, the use of the hammer reverberates back to its user, making him stronger and more precise with each stroke of the hammer.</p>
<h2>Evolution by Means Other Than Life</h2>
<p>This question of words and their relationship to human powers and human identity is the animating question of the <em><a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1636/1636-h/1636-h.htm">Phaedrus</a></em>. There is a profound truth lurking beneath Socrates’s worries about the technology of writing. At the core of Socrates’s engagement with Phaedrus is the problem that writing—a novel technology—presents to the younger generation Athenian. In learning speech and rhetoric, the student is formed to become a responsible member of the polis.</p>
<p>But if one does not memorize, then memory will become weak. Socrates worries are deeper though. Not only will writing result in the loss of memory now that we don’t have to memorize anything, the tool of writing will also change the modes of rational discourse. Speech-making creates a different kind of memory and a different kind of rationality than writing, and Socrates wonders just what sort of being the Athenian will become. Will writing usher in irrationality? Socrates fears were perhaps overstated, but let’s run with it for a bit.</p>
<p>Walter Ong’s book <em><a href="https://www.routledge.com/Orality-and-Literacy-30th-Anniversary-Edition/Ong/p/book/9780415538381">Orality and Literacy</a></em> plays with the idea that the human animal not only produces techniques of communication like speaking or writing, but that the activity of speaking and writing produces two very different ways of imagining the world.<a href="#_ftn6" name="_ftnref6" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[6]<!--[endif]--></a></p>
<p>For oral cultures, to which we do not have direct access, the poetic techniques of rhyme, meter, and repetition made it possible to create memory aids that can easily be passed from one generation to another. Memory, through recitation, is embedded in the technics epic poems. Memory devices like this make it possible for cultures to be passed from generation to generation. Even the material culture of architecture grows up around the spoken word. Amphitheaters are the centers of culture making and the forum is the center of public engagement; these are places where the technics of speech can be broadcast more easily to the masses. But the technics of speech also shaped not only what, but how the speaker could think. Reason and time were imagined to be a bit more repetitive, not a repetition of the same, but a repetition with a difference. Time is imagined as a spiral, histories are imagined as seasons that will return anew.</p>
<p>With writing a different sort of thinking was made possible, Ong argues. Writing makes possible a different kind of memory aid. One need not do the work of memorizing, but one could be freed to do other things. Prose takes on an ever-more important role. The material culture that grew up around writing was the monastery with its scriptorium. Reason becomes more linear, and history—for the most part—ceases to be cyclical or spiraling. The time-line permits a before and after thinking, a sense of that everything is new, even if it is caused by the past.</p>
<p>The printing press accelerated literary culture. The type-set repeats without difference the words on the page. The word printed on the page yesterday will be the word printed on the page tomorrow. Identical repetition is possible. We can read the truth right there on the surface of the page. With the printing press, the material culture of the monastic scriptoria is no longer necessary. The culture of democratized learning is possible. Everything in the culture must change, including religion, which must be reformed. Where in the previous culture, there were four levels of interpretation of literature—anagogical, allegorical, tropological, and literal—now with the meaning is right there on the surface, the letters on the page—the literal meaning—seemed easily accessible and the most important part of a text, especially the Bible. Even nature, which had also been interpreted according to the four levels, could now be read empirically, on the surface of reality.<a href="#_ftn7" name="_ftnref7" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[7]<!--[endif]--></a></p>
<p>Ong’s point is that, just as my use of a hammer makes me stronger, my use of the cultural technics shapes not only what we think, but how we think. It shapes how we imagine and take up with the world around us. Bernard Stiegler puts it differently. Humans are their technics. We are born into the technics of our age and it shapes what we are and what it is possible for us to become, including what “we” think is ethics. Human life evolves by means other than life. The human animal becomes the animal it is human through its technics.<a href="#_ftn8" name="_ftnref8" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[8]<!--[endif]--></a> The human is that animal that by its nature is cultured, which is to say the human is a product of its technics.</p>
<h2>Off-Loading Moral and Intellectual Habits</h2>
<p>If the technics and tools that we create not only do the work we imagine for it to do, it also shapes our desires and our habits. Technology has been used to off-load the hard work humans had to do, but we eventually become unable to do the off-loaded work. It is a common trope today to hear that millennials don’t have good geographical skills because they have become so dependent upon electronic navigation. The same is true for moral and intellectual habits.</p>
<p>To become a generous person, I must engage in generous activities. If I am in the habit of writing a check every month, and taking it to the homeless shelter, I have to create habits to remind myself to write the check. Then I have to remember to drive a different way to work on the last day of every month to drop the check at the homeless shelter. And then I have to walk into the homeless shelter, and in doing so, I encounter the poor face-to-face. I see that they are just people trying to make it in life.</p>
<p>But modern technology makes it possible that I can set up autopay through my bank allowing me to donate monthly without the creation of habit. I no longer have to remind myself to write the check on the last day of the month. I no longer have the drive by the shelter, or go in to drop the check. I no longer get to encounter the people taking advantage of the shelter. In fact, it changes the way I think of these people. They are not Joe and Betty, they become “the homeless”. While I am giving a check to the homeless shelter, and they are still getting the money, am I truly becoming generous?</p>
<p>Likewise with reasoning: I learned to think when I learned to write. In my attempts to persuade my reader of my thesis, I began to see the rational structure needed to move from my premises to my conclusions. I put the words and the reasoning on the page, and they come back to recursively shape ability to think rationally. Writing habituates me into thinking rationally. I can see the argument, and it recursively shapes me. In writing, I gain an intellectual habit.</p>
<p>In the academy, we have all been focused on AI and its ability to write our students papers. We have mostly worried about how to assess the students now that AI is doing the writing. To my mind, assessment is the least of problems. What will be lost as students increasingly do not write their own papers, are the intellectual habits of reasoning. We may be offloading all of the high stakes and difficult problems to AI, and thus lose our on ability to think critically. We evolve through the mediations of our technology. What is the human? Will AI be mindful of it?</p>
<h2>Toward a Spiritual Anthropology</h2>
<p>I do not mean to sound alarmist. Humans will not cease to be rational because of AI. But human forms of rationality and how we imagine ourselves will change. But the question of AI should force a deeper questioning.</p>
<p>Certainly, the “who” question is an important ethical question; but there is a deeper problem than who gets to control the technology. Modern technics has already created a myth about the human, the “who.” That mythology is that the human has become the master and possessor of nature through its tool-use, and that it can be the master and possessor of its tools. This myth imagines the human to have godlike qualities and to stand in free relation with respect to its technologies.</p>
<p>Yet, the human is already partly a product of its technologies. That means the ethics of technology has to go deeper than the control question, which posits the “who” as a godlike creature that stands apart from and can control AI. It is not just about the <em>control</em> of technology. It is a question about the human. So, the real ethics question is the anthropological question of who we are, and whether there is any depth to our self-conception. But that requires us to realize that the human animal is the animal that by its nature is cultured, which is to say: the human by nature is technical. And it seems that our mythologies of technology including AI occlude us from asking if there is any spiritual depth left to human identity.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[1]<!--[endif]--></a> Peter Paul Verbeek, <em>Moralizing Technology: Understanding and Designing the Morality of Things</em>, University of Chicago Press, 2011.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[2]<!--[endif]--></a> Bernard Stiegler, <em>Technics and Time, vol 1: The Fault of Epimethius</em>, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998; p. 1.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[3]<!--[endif]--></a> Mary W. Marzke, “Tool making, hand morphology, and fossil hominins” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London Biological Science, 2013; 368(1630). DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2012.0414</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[4]<!--[endif]--></a> Lieberman, P. <em>The Biology and Evolution of Language</em>, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[5]<!--[endif]--></a> Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism” in <em>Basic Writings</em>, edited by David Farrell Krell. San Francisco, Harper San Franciso, 1993, p. 217.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref6" name="_ftn6" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[6]<!--[endif]--></a> Walter Ong, <em>Orality and Literacy</em>, New York: Routledge, 2012.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref7" name="_ftn7" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[7]<!--[endif]--></a> See also Catherine Pickstock<em>, After Writing: The Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy</em>. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999.</p>
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<p><a href="#_ftnref8" name="_ftn8" title=""><!-- [if !supportFootnotes]-->[8]<!--[endif]--></a> Stiegler, op. cit. 175-177.</p>
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</div>Jeffrey P. Bishop