The Roots of the Conflict

Saint Ambrose

Back in the day Conservative Blog Rorate Caeli often had some postings worth the time to read.  That was before they brought on Richard Cippola and Peter Kwasniewski and Benedict Constable as “contributors” and level of rational analysis and critical thinking nose-dived. I like to read things that make me think and re-think my positions—especially if they contain new information I had not previously considered.  Rare to find that, however, these days on Rorate Cael which is usually as insightful as yesterday’s toast. However, I did see a posting last week entitled “The Condemnation of Action Française and the Birth of Vatican II” and was excited to read it.  The title held some possibility that it might be a significant article, or at least give me some more background on the current ever-widening schism between those of us who embrace the Council and those who reject it.  Unfortunately, I ear-marked it for later and by the time I got back to it, it had been taken down. 

Action Française was a Catholic right-wing political movement in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century France.  It was monarchist and it was deeply anti-Semitic, playing a significant role in the infamous Dreyfus affair. (The family of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre were tied to Action Française.)    The Third French Republic, The French government from the end of the Franco-Prussian War until France’s collapse in the face of Nazi expansion in 1940, was plagued by a lack of social cohesion that polarized French society and Action Française offered an agenda of national unity rooted in France’s historical Catholic culture.  This was opposed—and successfully—by the secularists on the Government’s political left but the rightists were able to offer an effective resistance to the much of the more extreme program of the left, or at least to block some of their proposed anti-clerical legislation. However not all in the Church were willing to sell their Catholicity to Action Française. In 1927 Action Française members were officially denied the sacraments and two years later Pope Pius XI condemned the movement in an effort for rapprochement with the secularist government. The Pope felt that certain right-wing politicians were using the Church for their own political ends rather than acting in good faith.  (The condemnation was lifted by Pius XII at the beginning of the Second World War.) 

The nouvelle théolgie was a movement among theologians—mostly French but also Belgian, Dutch, and Germans—that began about the same time as Action Française fell into disrepute with the Church. The liturgical renewal (some would call it a “revolution”) being born in the Abbeys of Maria Laach, Chevetogne, and Beuron was developing simultaneously as scholars began to study the ancient liturgical texts and better understand the relationship between Patristic theology and pre-13^th century rites. The nouvelle théolgie movement was a reaction against the neo-Thomism promoted by Leo XIII in Aeterni Patris that was so foreign to the ways the Church of the first millennium expressed its faith. Advocates of the nouvelle théolgie looked not to Saint Thomas Aquinas for their theological models but to the older Tradition, to the Fathers of the Church. 

Let me back up for a moment.  From the sub-Apostolic age (approximately 100AD until “The Twelfth-Century Renaissance” the theological foundations of our Catholic faith were set out by a series of bishops and theologians collectively referred to as “The Fathers of the Church.”  The earliest of these is probably Ignatius of Antioch, the final father is Saint Bernard of Claivaux.  The list includes Iranaeus of Lyons, Ambrose, Augustine, John Chrysostom, Gregory the Great, Isidore of Seville, Hilary of Poitiers, Gregory  Nazianzus,  and several dozen other early writers of the Eastern and Western Churches.  These “Fathers” all expressed their teachings in neo-Platonic philosophical terms because in both the Eastern and the Western Christian worlds the dominant way of thinking was neo-Platonism. Neo-Platonism was a “take” on Plato as he was understood and interpreted by Plotinus, a third century philosopher from Greek Egypt.  His philosophy shaped the way people in the Mediterranean world thought and expressed themselves for almost a thousand years.

In the 12^th century, mostly through contact with the world of Arab Philosophy, the West rediscovered Aristotle.  Aristotle had been a disciple of Plato in ancient Athens, but developed his own philosophical methods which depended on logical syllogisms.  Aristotle’s works had been lost in the Western world for centuries but were rediscovered by Arab philosophers in the tenth and eleventh century.  Most prominent among these philosophers was Ibn Sīnā  (or, as we in the West call him, Avicenna).   The cultural exchanges between Islam and the West in the 11^th and 12^th century led to Catholic philosophers becoming very excited about this new way of thinking.  Early Aristotelian thinkers like Peter Abelard were condemned by the Church, but Saint Thomas Aquinas successfully reinterpreted the teachings of the Fathers in this new Aristotelian method and it eventually won the favor of the hierarchy.   Gradually from the thirteenth through the sixteenth century, the Catholic Church abandoned the old neo-Platonic thought and replaced it with Aristotelian, or more commonly called today, Scholastic thought.  In the process, however, Catholic theologians depended less and less on the Fathers of the Church, replacing them with Saint Thomas and his disciples. It proved to be a serious disruption in Catholic intellectual life as the Fathers retreated (or were shoved) off to the sidelines of Catholic thought.

 In the mid-twentieth century advocates of the nouvelle théolgie urged a return to the Fathers as the basis of theological reflection.  An entire generation of theologians: Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Yves Congar, Karl Rahner, Hans Küng, Edward Schillebeeckx, Marie-Dominique Chenu, Louis Bouyer, and Jean Daniélou embraced the new methodology.  Several of them suffered at the hands of the Holy Office (today’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and previously known as the Holy Office of the Roman Inquisition) under the indomitable Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani because of their abandonment of neo-Scholasticism but the new way of thinking was to prevail.  These were the men who shaped the thought of the Second Vatican Council.

A challenge has arisen in as much as the Councils of Trent and Vatican I drew on the neo-Scholastic way of thinking whereas Vatican II is shaped by the Patristic heritage.  The ideas of each sound strange, even heretical, to the other.  The neatly packaged syllogisms of Scholastic Theology are clear and precise but lack the mystical depth of the Patristic Tradition.  The theology of the nouvelle théolgie writers is not nearly as sharply delineated and narrowly defined as the work of the Neo-Scholastics but have the antiquity of Tradition to their defense.  As a result the Church has lost the intellectual cohesion of the pre-Conciliar days.  Some of us can live with that ambiguity; others struggle.  Much of the conflict in the Church today is rooted in this theological diversity. 

The Importance of Humanism to Christianity

Carravaggio's "The
Entombment"--a fruit of
Renaissance humanism  

When Pope Francis announced to the Italian Church at their national synod in Florence this past November that there was a need to bring the idea of humanism to the front again, many of the Katholik Krazies went even more than usually berserk.  To those ignorant of the history of our Christian faith the idea of “humanism” is somehow opposed to authentic Christianity when, in fact, it is an essential component of our Christian faith.  The earliest writer on Christian humanism is no one less than the Apostle Paul himself who in his letters gives us a foundation for a philosophical view on what it means to be truly human.  For Paul we arrive at the fullness of our human nature when we

Have among yourselves the same attitude that is also yours in Christ Jesus, Who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross. (Philippians 2:5-8.)

The key to realizing full human potential is found in kenosis, the emptying of self and self-interest in favor of conforming ourselves to Christ.  In orthodox Christianity, we see Christ to be the ideal human person and to the extent that we conform ourselves to him even as he conforms himself in obedience to the Will of the Father, we reach our potential to be truly human.  This is very counter-intuitive and certainly runs contrary to most of the various humanisms advanced by the philosophers of the ancient world.  Christianity has always taken a remarkably unique approach to the human ideal and the understanding of what makes us human.  Both the various secular humanisms that have emerged since the Enlightenment and the perspectives offered by the other great world religions have some similarities with Christian humanism but also are, at the core, essentially different.  This is because Christianity begins with an understanding of the Godhead that differs not only from the religions of the East but from the other two Abrhamic faiths, Judaism and Islam.  Christianity sees the human person as having the potential to share in the Divine Nature.  The Church Fathers, notably Iranaeus and Athanasius, went to far as to speak of our being sharers in the Divine Nature when we so conform ourselves to Christ that we surrender our own selves to indeed become essentially united to Christ with Christ being the life-principle within us.  “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live but Christ Jesus who lives in me.” (Galatians 2:11).    “God became human so that humans might become God”—a statement which, were it not from the fathers, would seem to be counter to all Christian orthodoxy but which has become a cornerstone of all genuine Christian anthropology or humanism ever since. Beginning with Paul, the authors of the Christian scriptures—both Gospels and Epistles—laid the foundation for a genuine understanding of what it means to be truly human.  The parables of the Good Samaritan, the Pharisee and the Publican, Lazarus and the Rich Man, The King and his two debtors, The man whose barn wasn’t big enough, Lowest Seat at the Banquet, The persistent widow, the Last Judgment and others all give us insights into human nature at its best and at its worst. 

It was Origen, and probably even more, Tertullian, the second/third century theologians who organized much Christian thought into a philosophical system, who gave us the more abstract or philosophical view of human nature—though Origen tended to be a bit over-positivist with his belief that all will eventually be reconciled to God, and Tertullian a big over negative with his objection to the idea that sins committed after baptism cannot be forgiven.  Perhaps for us in the West, the great Christian humanist is Saint Augustine. 

Augustine is, at least for us in the Western Church, the great Christian thinker who takes the Scriptures and the Apostolic Tradition and tries to weave a coherent Christian theology.  His appreciation for human nature is, I think, spot on—in this regard I am much closer to Pope Benedict than to most other Catholic thinkers.  Augustine is often seen as too negative, even sin-obsessed but sin, for Augustine, is not his topic but only the foil against which we can see Grace.  Augustine is the Doctor Gratiae, (the Doctor of Grace).  While Augustine thinks that the human person without grace (should such a creature be even conceivable much less a reality) is pretty much the bottom of the barrel, transformed by Grace the human person mirrors the God in whose image and likeness we are created.  Augustine was an extensive writer who looked not only at the human person in se (I love Latin except for Mass) but in our place in The City of God and in the context of the City of Man.   What I like about Augustine’s humanism is that it is not iced with that overly sweet frosting of a supposed innate human goodness but recognizes the far more bitter-sweet ambivalence of the human heart as it is caught between our natural concupiscence and supernatural Grace. 

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?  The answer is not “The Shadow” but Saint Augustine.  My friend, the late theologian Monika Hellwig, used to rag me about my Augustinian leanings but I just find him to be the most honest and soul-searching of Christian writers.  

Over the Middle Ages a number of Christian authors continued to deal with the subject of a Christian humanism.  The Early and Central Middle Ages was not a great time for intellectual life in the West, though Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Job is highly significant for our topic.  The Renaissance of the 12 century however opened the flood gates of Christian literature and crucial—but conflicting—approaches to Christian humanism were taken by Bernard of Clairvaux and Peter Abelard.  The dispute between Bernard and Abelard also marks the divide between the Fathers and the Scholastics and while Bernard may have won the day it was Abelard who would ultimately win the war.  While Thomas Aquinas and the other Scholastic theologians shied away from embracing Abelard by name or by explicitly affirming his more radical ideas, they embraced his Aristotelian method and did, in fact, come up, as Abelard did, with a much more positivist anthropology than Augustine and most of the Patristic tradition had.  Personally, I think the Scholastics’ positivism regarding the human person have provided the seedbed for the semi-pelagianism that has plagued our Catholic tradition ever since.  But then Monika Hellwig always chided me for my attachment to Saint Augustine. 

Christian humanism exploded in the Renaissance with such figures as Dante Alighieri, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (Pius II), Nicholas of Cusa, Geert Groote, Desiderius Erasmus, Basilios Bessarion,  Baptist of Mantua, John Colet, Thomas More, Giles of Viterbo and many others.  The impact of these thinkers in turn created the magnificent baroque and rococo art with Donatello, Durer, Ghirlandaio, Grunewald, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, El Greco, Tiepolo, Caravaggio and so many more.  Indeed, without humanism the renaissance would not have hatched and the Tridentine Catholicism which so many hail as the apex of Catholic faith and culture would have been—at best—a pallid and ghostly shadow of the energetic and animated revival it was in its day. 

Hopefully Pope Francis’ call for a new humanism can trigger the same energy that was unleashed in the Renaissance.  I will look at Francis’s suggestion in an upcoming post, but I think my next posting will bring you some recent comments by one “FrankieB”—a Katholik Krazie if there every was one and let you see just what we faithful Catholics have to deal with when the self-appointed magisterium gets on our tail.  

Why Are They Afraid of Pope Francis? 8

 

Louise Brown, the world's first "test tube

baby" with her parents and her child.

Pope Francis has instructed the preparatory commission for the 2014 synod on  “The Pastoral Challenges on the Family” to circulate a questionnaire to the world’s bishops—which they are in turn to circulate to the parishes—ascertaining the current practices (not theory) of Catholics on artificial contraception, reception of the Sacraments by the divorced and remarried, couples living together before marriage, and the place of same-sex couples and their families in the life of the Church. 

This questionnaire (which my pastor says he as not yet received as our Archbishop seems tied up with other things right now) has generated a fascinating and contradictory set of responses.  The Neo-trads are waving their hands and saying—“nothing new, nothing new; been done before.  Keep moving, nothing to look at.  Nothing happening here.  Keep moving along….”  The Vatican II types are all enthused saying that “finally we are back on track with the Council—yeah, Francis.”

The neo-trads have a point.  This is not the first time that the Holy See sent out questionnaires to ascertain the sensus fidelium.  Previous synods were often preceded by questionnaires sent to the bishops to help prepare the lineamenta (agenda or working document).  Pope Pius XII wrote the world’s bishops before defining the dogma of the Assumption in 1950.  What is different this time, however, is that the bishops are to pass the questionnaires on to the parishes.  In other words the fidelium are going to get to have some consensus in the consensus fidelium.  Don’t get me wrong—nobody should expect that we are going to have magisterium by democratic vote.  Don’t expect any radical change in Church teaching.  When the dust settles, I don’t expect much to be different, but that isn’t important.  What is important is the process.  Change process will produce—in time—changed product. 

Blessed John Henry Newman pointed out that in the ancient Church there were three requirements for a doctrine to be established. Doctrine took the reflection and study of the theologians; pronouncement of the bishops, and the consensus fidelium.   Consensus fidelium might best be translated as the “harmony of God’s Faithful People.”  It doesn’t mean everyone agrees or that the majority agree—it only means that the People of God, the priests, deacons, and laity (as differentiated from the magisterium: the bishops and from the theologians) have come to hold this doctrine in their collective heart.  

Right now we as a Church are faced with the tremendous moral complexities of living in the twenty-first century.  Scientific, Sociological, Medical, Anthropological, Psychological developments—note, I hesitate to say “advances” because—as a historian I believe the jury is still out on how “good” some of these developments are—have changed the ground rules of possibilities.   At the same, the virtual disappearance of philosophy and theology from our educational systems has left most in our society unable to critically reflect on the moral implications of the choices facing us today.

Case in point.  It is only in the last generation that it has been possible for a child to be conceived in vitro.   Louise Brown, the first child so conceived was born in 1978. The various givers of the Law in Deuteronomy or Leviticus could not have imagined such a thing; nor could Saint Paul—or even Jesus.  Neither Augustine nor Aquinas—or Bellarmine for that matter—could have imagined it.  The understanding of embryology—or even a scientific appreciation of conception—was not in the realm of their intellectual universe.  The “Tradition” doesn’t supply easy answers to this dilemma as it is beyond the minds of those whose writings convey our historic faith.  This is not to say that there are not principles we can find in the scriptures or in the authors that can’t be applied to a solution, but it would be misleading to say that the Tradition supplies a moral resolution without a careful reexamination of precisely what the Tradition was meant to say and a dialogue of that Tradition with the insights of modern science.  So here is the case.  Martin and Susan, devout Catholics who attend Mass every Sunday in their parish—he being an extraordinary minister of the Eucharist and she teaching third-grade CCD—find themselves unable to have children.  They married fairly late, tried Natural Family Planning for two years to conceive, and finally went to a fertility clinic where they were told in vitro was their only hope.  Now despite their being good Catholics, the Church’s problems with in vitro is not on their radar screen.   Sure they heard it in Pre-Cana, but it didn’t register—they never expected to have this problem.  If they attended some adult education program they may have heard it, but even in the best parishes relatively few attend adult ed—especially when it is on reproductive morality.  No, Father doesn’t preach against in vitro from the pulpit any more than he mentions masturbation, oral sex, or contraception from the pulpit.  “Our commission for the pulpit is to preach the Gospel, not teach sex-ed” one priest said to me.  Martin and Susan could have checked the catechism of the Catholic Church—but they never even suspected that something was wrong here.  They wanted a child.  They would love to have several children.  There was nothing selfish in their decision—which is not to say that it was right, but their motives were generous.  “I only heard about it after the course was chosen” said a priest friend of their families.  “I suppose I would have said something if they had asked me beforehand, but frankly I knew their intentions were good and I wasn’t about to take away their happiness when they told me they were expecting.  I think we need to find ways to raise this question in people’s consciences, but I honestly find that most people can’t grasp the problem and just saying that such and such is a sin doesn’t hold water anymore.  You have to be able to explain to people just why it is morally wrong.” 

Pope Francis’ inventory is going to discover that there is a wide breach between theory and practice, but it will also show us that we cannot rely on old answers to new questions.  We need to restore philosophy to the academic curriculum—and not just some vague survey of thought but applied philosophy: ethics.  We need to teach people to think critically and to anchor their thought in intellectual discipline.  Science does not provide the ultimate answers to human existence.  At the same time, moral theology requires a strong dialogue with science—and dialogue implies an equality of parties in the discussion—so that the moral conclusions are consistent with the scientific knowledge to which they are meant to respond.  And in the meantime, we need to remember our task is not to judge but to absolve.   

Foundations of the Anglican Church XXIV: Crying Wolf: The Question of Valid Orders, continued

In the previous post we looked at the issue of the “validity” of sacraments and I mentioned that while claims that the sacramental systems of rival groups within the Church (and without) were invalid stretch all the way back into the third and fourth centuries, the criteria we use today—matter, form, minister, and intention—emerge in the Middle Ages with the switch to scholastic theology from the patristic theology of the first millennium. 
We looked at “matter” and “correct minister” in that earlier posting.  Matter is the material—bread and wine for the Eucharist, water for baptism, etc. necessary for the sacrament.  The correct minister is the person having the authority to administer the sacrament—in some cases a bishop, in others a priest, in the case of baptism and matrimony, a lay person can be the minister of the sacrament.  In this post, we will look at “form” and “intention.”  The “form” are the words used, the formula for administering the sacrament.  The “form” of baptism is “I baptize you in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”   In Penance, or Reconciliation as it is sometimes known, it is “I absolve you in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” 
There can be much variety in form.  In the Eastern Rites, followed by Byzantine Catholics (among others) as well as Orthodox, sacramental formulae are usually in the passive voice: “The Servant of God, N., is baptized in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”  Ever since the days of Saint Thomas Aquinas, the form for the Eucharist has been: This is my Body; This is the Chalice of my Blood…”  But about twenty years ago a question came to the congregation of Rites regarding an ancient Eucharistic Liturgy, the Holy Qurbana of Addai and Mari used in the East Syrian Tradition since apostolic times, in which there are no such “words of Instiution.”  That is to say, the bishop or priest never says: “This is my Body; This is my Blood.”  Faced with an apostolic tradition to the contrary, the Catholic Church backed down about the necessity of having these words for a “valid” Mass.  Moreover, while the Western Church had claimed that the Words of Institution were essential to the Eucharist, the Eastern Church—Catholic and Orthodox, always claimed that the Epiclesis, the Prayer calling down the Holy Spirit, was the actual consecratory prayer.  The various approved Rites of the Church do not all follow the same formulae in administering the sacraments so we need to be clear that there is no one set of words required for a sacrament—any sacrament—to be valid.  There is legitimate variety in sacramental form. 
As for “intention”—this is the trickiest of all criterion.  If a priest says the right words, but does not intend to forgive the penitent, is the penitent forgiven?  If a priest says “This is my Body” but does not himself believe that in the Eucharist the bread becomes the Body of Christ, does the bread remain only bread?   If a priest, in his dotage, goes into a bakery and says: “This is my Body,” does all the bread in the bakery become the Sacrament of the Eucharist?
Here is the real rub that we must consider: if a bishop, in ordaining a priest, intends to ordain him for preaching but not for offering the Eucharistic Sacrifice, is the man validly ordained?   And what, if in addition to not intending to ordain a sacrificing priest, the bishop uses words that do not mention that the priest is being ordained to offer sacrifice—does the “form” prove to be insufficient for validity?  And what if, the bishop himself is not a validly ordained bishop—is then the priest not a validly ordained priest?   Keep these questions in mind as they will become very important points of dispute between the Anglican and Papal parties and continue today to be unresolved points of dispute.
It will take a while for this issue to surface.  When Henry VIII separated the Anglican Church from Communion with the Papacy, he did not change any theology.  Nor did the liturgy—including the rites of Ordination—change in Henry’s day.  The bishops and priests ordained under Henry were validly ordained. No one disputes that.  But after Henry’s death, during the reign of his son, King Edward VI, there were changes in the ritual and changes in the doctrine that raise serious questions about the continuation of sacramental life in the Anglican Communion.