A Contemporary Reflection on the Becket Controversy, continued

Statue of Becket in

Canterbury Cathedral

The first generations of Christians did not have a comfortable relationship with the culture in which they lived.  They were persecuted and despised by the government.  They certainly were in no position to write the laws by which the empire was governed, nor did those laws reflect their values and beliefs.  Nevertheless they were admonished by their scriptures to be good and obedient citizens.  The author of First Peter (most probably not Peter himself and probably written during the persecution of the Church under the Emperor Domitian) instructed his readers:

Submit yourselves for the Lord’s sake to every human institution, whether to a king as the one in authority, or to governors as sent by him for the punishment of evildoers and the praise of those who do right.  For such is the will of God that by doing right you may silence the ignorance of foolish men.  [Act] as free men, and do not use your freedom as a covering for evil, but [use it] as bondslaves of God. Honor all men; love the brotherhood, fear God, honor the king.

Called to responsible citizenship in the Empire and obedient to its laws, Christians were guided in their moral choices by a superior law—the Law of Christ and his Gospel.  In a culture that saw no problem with adultery, fornication, homosexuality, pederasty, and any number of other sexual variations they strove to honor marriage and family life by their own committed example.  In a society that knew and used abortifacient drugs and various forms of contraception they recognized that the killing of the unborn was evil and did not practice it.  Nor did they endorse contraception.  (at the time, their understanding of contraception saw it as a form of destroying human life as they believed that the entirety of the human person was contained in the male semen and to block the semen from the womb, where they thought the seed matured into a fetus, was to cause the death of that human person.)  They lived in a society where unwanted children were left exposed to die. They, of course, did not practice infanticide.  They lived in a world where the head of the household had life and death power over not only his slaves but his children—yet they did not take lives.  There were other “liberties” granted under law in which they did not engage. Nor did they did serve in the military or undertake duties in which they might have to take a human life.  They did not go to the theatre.  In a culture that was fairly “wide open” they lived life by the narrow path that Jesus had prescribed. 

In 312 things changed drastically for the Christian population.  The newly victorious Emperor, Constantine, not only legalized their religion but gave them a religious preeminence over the other cults common in that society.  Constantine did not close the pagan temples or the theatres with their gladiator shows and sometimes somewhat pornographic entertainments.  Christians still refrained from going to the theatres or worshipping at the temples.  Eventually Christians became not only the established religion but for all practical purposes the sole religion of the Empire.  In the fifth century the temples and theatres were closed.  Laws were written to proscribe sexual practices that were contrary to the Judeo-Christian revelation.  Those laws were not always enforced but the mentality gradually shifted that the State should base its legal system on the religious moral code.   This was not only a Christian moral principle.  With the rise of Islam in the seventh century, Islamic states also determined their civil and criminal law according to the revelation proper to their religion.  In Christian Europe, Judaism and Christianity more or less shared a moral code, especially in regard to sexuality, marriage, and family life.  The one difference that comes to mind was the permission in Judaism for divorce and the law codes of the developing European societies did not attempt to restrict that privilege among the Jewish community.  In fact, a blind eye was often turned towards divorce and concubinage and sometimes homosexuality in the Christian community as well.  In fact, while laws governing moral behavior were often “on the books” they were just as often not enforced.  Nevertheless the standard remained that the law should reflect Christian moral principles. 
With the Protestant Reformations of the sixteenth century cracks appeared in the relationship of Church and Law.  Some Protestant States began to look differently on some issues, most notably divorce, than Catholic tradition.  (Ironically, at least at first, England was not one of those States.)  In fact, among some of the radical reformers such as the Anabaptists of Münster, traditional marriage gave way to a sexual libertarianism.  Of course, even here, the laws permitting this were written in accord with the religious doctrines governing the state. 
More to the core of the issue, the religious diversity created by the Reformations of the sixteenth (and seventeenth) century were responsible for the creation of a secular mentality.   The conflicting religious claims of the various Churches and sects led the philosophes of the Enlightenment to look for a morality grounded not in religious doctrine but in human reason.  This was the outlook of the majority of the founders of our Republic—Jefferson, Franklin, Washington, Madison and others.  Even Catholic thinkers at the time did not disagree as Catholic doctrine, always more positivist than Lutheran and Calvinist, held that the moral Truth of revelation was attainable through human reason—the so-called Natural Law.      
While the Catholic Church in America supported the idea that Church and State should be separate, Rome did not.  And even though Catholic thinkers said that Natural Law was apparent by reason as well as by revelation, the Church insisted that the State should draft its laws to preserve and protect the Church and its teaching.  In countries where the Catholic Church was established by law or accorded a special constitutional place—Italy, Ireland, Spain, among others—divorce was illegal, contraception unavailable, abortion a criminal offense. 
This relationship of Church and State became shaky in the twentieth century and after Dignitatis Humanae of Vatican II assured that the sovereignty of each conscience should be respected cracks appeared in those legal systems that had formally incorporated Catholic teaching in the legal codes. 
This brings us to our current dilemma.  There are many in the Catholic community, including many Catholic bishops, who want the laws that govern our society to be written to incorporate Catholic moral principles.  Yet it is clear to many others of us that the laws in democratic society must reflect not the teachings of one specific religious group but the moral consensus of the entire society.  This does not mean that we have to abdicate our moral principles in favor of a least-common-denominator morality much less yield to an amoral social code.  We have every right to persuade others in our society that our moral principles have a validity that transcend our doctrinal stance.  The key word here is persuade.  We have no right to impose our moral code but we have every right to offer persuasive evidence to help our fellow citizens to form their own moral conscience without our imposing our beliefs on them.
A particular urgency in this matter concerns our need to protect the unborn.  Every day hundreds of unborn children are deprived of the lives for which they were created.  It is tempting to try to force a unilateral solution to this tragedy by attempting to use politics to impose laws that protect the unborn.  The problem is that a significant number of our fellow citizens either do not accept the premise that the unborn are human lives or they prefer to close their eyes and ignore the moral quandary of conflicting interests between the unborn and the women who carry them.
I remember reading Cider House Rules by John Irving.  I probably read it twenty years ago.  It is an exceptionally well-written novel.  Inj the context of the story between the director of an orphanage, Dr. Wilbur Larch and his young protégé, Homer Wells, Irving manages to give clear and unbiased statement to both sides of the abortion issue.  While the pro-life case is well presented, it does lose out in the story to the pro-choice argument. This is not surprising as Irving had been commissioned to write a novel to win the audience to the pro-choice view.  Indeed he is to be commended in stating the pro-life views as fairly as he did.  At the time I read the book, I could not but help think that it was tragic that American Catholics had not employed a novelist of Irving’s stature to make the emotional and intellectual appeal to win public opinion to the cause of the unborn.  But this is the failed strategy.  We have tried to force laws on people rather than win their intellects and their hearts to our cause.  Jesus never gave his Church a commission to change laws.  The Apostles never undertook a political agenda in the Roman Empire.  Our commission is to preach a Gospel that changes hearts.  We will, no doubt, make enemies if we change hearts for the good but not nearly as many enemies as we are making now by trying to force a political solution that does not have the support of the vast majority of the population. Moreover, while we will make some foes if we are successful in evangelizing with a Gospel of Life we will have the moral high ground and be faithful to our mission.  Our attempts to coerce rather than to convert are not only doomed to failure; they betray the mission we have been given as a Church.      

Memories Are Made of This--Refashioning Vatican II

October 11^th this year marks the 50^th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council and one of the behind-the-scenes struggles for the direction of the Catholic Church concerns just what that Council taught in its various decrees, declarations, and constitutions.  One would think that the Council’s teachings would be quite clear.  I mean, it is all there in black and white (though in Latin) in the official documents, but one thing historians know and the rest of the world must learn is that a document is not enough—the real “trick” is in the interpretation of the document.  I don’t mean the translation—though that too is a matter of interpretation as despite the best efforts of Liturgiam Authenticam to fool you to the contrary, there is no such thing as a literal interpretation, at least a faithful literal interpretation—but I mean the interpretation of what the documents mean.  We all know what a document says (or actually reads as documents don’t talk) but what does it mean?  We have the same issue in the United States when it comes to interpreting our Constitution.  There are strict constructionists like Mr. Justice Scalia for whom it is a static set of words and ideas and who insist it be interpreted in a narrow historical context for the exact meaning of its author(s), and you have the broad constructionists, generally liberals, who treat it like a living organism whose meaning has evolved over the years as it is applied to situations never foreseen by its 18^th century proponents.  So too the Documents of Vatican II:   must they be understood as to the intentions of the authors and the Council Fathers who approved them or are they able to be mined for new meanings that develop as the Church grows and develops.  Certainly this much is true: the Church of 2012 would be beyond the wildest imaginations of the Pope (John XXIII) and Bishops who marched into Saint Peter’s Basilica 50 years ago.  Where are the legions of veiled nuns?  What are lay people doing bringing Holy Communion to the sick?  What language is this we are hearing at Mass?  Why are these Africans dancing around the altar?  Look at all these black and brown and yellow bishops!  Lots of changes—some good, some not so good.   The once dormant Church of Latin America is alive and thriving—raised from the dead!   The Church of Europe is sinking fast. Who’da thunk it?
So how do we interpret the Council decrees?  When it comes to the US Constitution, the conservatives want a “strict construction.”  When it comes to the Decrees of Vatican II, it is the liberals who are arguing to stay with the original intent of the Council Fathers.  It is the liberals in the Church who believe that the Council has been stolen from them by an attempt to reinterpret the decrees in a way very different from how they were originally understood.  Before the current school year opened, Cardinal Wuerl wrote a letter to the seminarians of his Archdiocese  calling on them to study hard and, as the 50^th anniversary of the Council approached, to study the Conciliar documents closely so as to defend them against those who would interpret them with a “hermeneutic of discontinuity.”   This, in a nutshell,  is the argument over the Council—are the Conciliar decrees “continuous” with the teaching of the pre-conciliar Church or do they represent a sharp break in our Catholic heritage?
It is the conservatives—led by people in Rome, including Pope Benedict—who want to alter the history of the Council by reshaping the teaching of the Council according to a “hermeneutic of continuity.”  A great part of this is from the Holy Father’s ardent desire to reconcile the Traditionalist movement begun by the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.  Most Catholics think that the fight with the traditionalists is over the “New Mass” but the liturgical reforms of Paul VI are only the tip of the iceberg.  I have long felt that the only people who really understand the Second Vatican Council are those who reject it.   I am not endorsing a rejection of the Council—far from it.  I think the Council has saved the Church for the future.  But the Council saved the Church by taking radical means.  There was at Vatican II, for example, a complete reversal of Catholic teaching regarding ecumenism.  Catholics had been forbidden to engage in any ecumenical activity prior to the Council—discussion groups, collaborative projects, mission work—and never, never, never were we to pray with Protestants (who were heretics) or even the Orthodox (who were only schismatics, but separated none the less from the “True Church”).  Ecumenism had been explicitly condemned by Pius XI in his 1928 encyclical Mortalium Animos.   
Another discontinuity is that the Council itself was a bit of backtracking on the infallibility of the Pope.  Vatican I with its decree Pastor Aeternus declaring Papal Infallibility had made the idea of a Council superfluous.  All authority resided in the Pope.  There would never again be a need to gather the bishops to share the teaching office of Peter.  To not only gather them in a Council but to permit them to openly discuss Catholic doctrine and discipline was nothing less than a reconsideration of Papal authority as defined at Vatican I. 
Dignitatis Humanae, the Decree on Religious Liberty totally reversed Catholic Doctrine that taught that freedom of worship should be limited to the Catholic Church and that ‘error has no rights’ meaning that non-Catholic worship should be proscribed by civil law.  Dei Verbum, the Constitution on Divine Revelation not only permitted but encouraged the very sort of biblical studies that Pius X had condemned in his battle against modernism.   
Recently the Vatican announced that The Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences is interested in collecting the journals, diaries, and private notes of the Council Fathers (participants) at Vatican II for the archives so that future scholars could better study the Council.  Hopefully this project will be a failure and the various dioceses and religious orders will preserve the relevant documents.  There would be no more effective way of advancing the lie of the “hermeneutic of continuity” than to isolate from scholars, historians, and theologians the relevant documents that show what the bishops were thinking at the time of the Council.  To reinterpret the Council in the “hermeneutic of continuity” is to rob the Council of charismatic character with which the Holy Spirit endowed it and to reduce it to a tool of those who want to turn back the clock and undo the work of Grace.

A Liberal With A Troubled Conscience

Auschwitz: citizens cannot claim the

defense that they didn't know what

is going on around them

I know that I appear to be leftwards leaning in my views, but I must admit that I find myself wrestling with the issue of for whom to vote for President next month.  One of my regular readers sent me the following link to an essay by Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic outlining why he won’t vote for Obama. 

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/09/why-i-refuse-to-vote-for-barack-obama/262861/

Mr. Friedersdorf, a conservative leaning journalist who has moral issues with the Republican Party,  advocates in this article voting for Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate for President, admitting that Johnson won’t win but proposing him as a candidate who represents a more moral choice than either Governor Romney or President Obama.   I am no Libertarian and I don’t expect to vote for Governor Johnson but the article does capture some of my moral dilemma about voting for Mr. Obama.  Four years ago I saw Mr. Obama as better representing my Catholic weltanschauung.  (Just so you don’t have to look that up, it means something like but not precisely “worldview.”  Perhaps one could say “my philosophy” but that doesn’t quite capture it either. )  As a Catholic I struggle with the “every-man-for-himself” (gender biased language preserved intentionally) philosophy of the Republican Party and articulated so wonderfully (in every sense of that word) by Vice-Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin.  (Poor Paul Ryan is just so turgid after Sarah’s histrionic enthusiasm.)  (I guess it is also ironic that it was Governor Palin who articulated the “every man for himself” thinking of the Party.)  Pardon me, I am using far too many parentheses and derailing my train of thought. 

In any event, I believed—and still do—that the Democratic Party better represents our Catholic understanding of the inter-dependence of members of our society.  I believe that we are our brothers’ (and sister’s) keepers and that we have responsibility towards one another both on a personal and collective level.  In line with Dignitatis Humanae I also believe that Freedom of Conscience is a God-given right and that there should be a firewall between religious doctrines of any and all religious bodies and the civil law.  (Gosh, maybe I am a libertarian!  No, it is just a coincidence in this particular point.)   I believe that people of any, all, or no religion should bring their religious and philosophically inspired values to the public forum but that laws ultimately be based on consensus rather than specific doctrine so that the freedom of conscience of minorities not be compromised.  I also find that the Democratic Party better captures and respects our Catholic understanding of the rights of labor and better favors human rights in accord with Catholic teaching especially in matters of immigration.  Also—and admittedly this does not apply to either 2008 candidate Obama or 2012 President Obama—what opposition there is (and we need far more) to the Death Penalty and to the proliference of handguns and semi-automatic weapons  in our society comes from the Democratic side of the aisle.  As pointed out in a previous posting, I profoundly disagree with the Democratic Party on the question of abortion “rights.”             
But I am troubled about more being wrong in the Obama administration than the question of protecting the lives of the yet-to-be-born.  Mr. Friedersdorf’s article raises issues for me—particularly about the effects of how our wars are being fought—that trouble me.  I am currently reading (for the second time) The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.  There can be no doubt that from 1936 through 1945 the average German-in-the-streets knew that things were going on that were fundamentally immoral.  They may not have known the details but evil on that scale cannot be totally hid from public consciousness.  They knew in 1933 that it was wrong to deprive people of positions in public service and education and the professions because of their ethnic identity.  They saw by 1938 that their government was not protecting certain citizens and their properties from mob violence.    They noticed by 1940 that neighbors were disappearing.  And certainly large numbers of them—people who saw cattle-trains crammed with Jews, who signed contracts for Zyklon B,  or designed crematoria ovens designed to dispose of thousands of bodies a day, or lived in villages from which you could see the smoke and smell the burning corpses—knew that beneath the alles in ordnung of the Reich with its on-times trains and famous Gemütlichkeit something very evil was going on.  And the change I wanted four years ago was because in the America of Cheney-Rumsfeld I knew there were things going on that were fundamentally immoral.  I may not have known specifics but I saw the potential for evil in aspects of the “Patriot Act.”  I knew that Sadaam’s “weapons of mass destruction” was no more than an invented lie to justify a war that would give the fat-cats tied to the administration a chance to enrich themselves.  I knew that Cheney was a chicken-hawk who had avoided serving in the military during Viet Nam but who was anxious to send a new generation of Americans to kill and be killed and I knew that he was only one of many in the Bush administration with those yellow feathers.    (I also have never served in the Military but I was opposed to sending Americans to Vietnam in its day and Iraq  in ours.  Chicken I may be, hawk I am not.)  I knew that there were innumerable civil rights violations of American citizens and aliens (legal and illegal alike) in the Bush era.  And I wanted change.  What troubles me about Mr. Friederdorf’s article is that while I do believe that we have taken steps towards a more moral society under the current administration, I know that there are still things fundamentally wrong, fundamentally evil, going on in our name.  I don’t think there is an easy answer on how a Christian might vote this year.  As for how a Catholic might vote, Bishops like John Myers and Bill Lori are quick to do the moral analysis for us and save us the trouble of thinking.  God bless ‘em. 

Freedom From Religion and Freedom of Religion IV

Anti-Catholic cartoon by American polotical

cartoonist Thomas Nast (1840-1902) illustrating

fear of Catholic Takeover of the United States

Well, as we have pointed out in our last entries, the Catholic Church was opposed not only to the Separation of Church and State as outlined in the United States Constitution but opposed to the idea of religious liberty or “freedom of conscience” itself.  This put the Church square in conflict with the American constitutional tradition which Americans, including Catholic Americans, for the most part overwhelmingly embraced.  Conflict of ideologies was inevitable and finally came to a head in 1954 when the Holy See silenced Jesuit Father John Courtney Murray for his views on the subject.  In a surprising reversal of the Magisterium, however, the Magisterium itself abandoned its long-held tenet and in the 1965 Conciliar Decree Dignitatis Humanae subscribed to the principle that each person should be free to follow the directives of his or her own conscience in matters of religious belief and be granted in civil law the freedom of worship according to individual conscience.  

    Until the notoriety of the Murray silencing, most American Catholics were unaware of the conflict between the United States Constitution and Catholic Magisterial teaching.  American Protestants, however, knew it. Anti-Catholicism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was primarily linked to anti-immigrant sentiment.  If you look at the right hand column where it is marked “Labels” you will see thirteen postings on “anti-Catholicism.”  One of the reasons that so many Americans feared the growth of the Catholic Church in the American Republic is that they saw that Catholicism posed a danger to American liberties.  We ridicule the idea that Catholics, if they attained a political majority, would take away Freedom of Religion in the United States—but remember, that is precisely what the papacy expected them to do.  I doubt it ever would have come to that.  I think Americans of whatever religious faith make a clear distinction in their public and political life between one’s religious convictions and the commitment we have to the freedoms outlined in the Bill of Rights.  While we might vote our faith, and while our electoral choices should—like all decisions in our lives—reflect the values our Christian and Catholic faith has given us, I think the civic values of the American Constitutional tradition are a firewall against religious extremism. 

     Now although Catholic doctrine has changed to embrace freedom of conscience, this question does have relevance today.  Just as Catholics can expect neither their faith nor the canon law of their Church to determine the laws of the Nation or of any State, County, or local jurisdiction, we must also insist that no other creed or religious law find its way into public legislation.  There must be no more room for Sharia than there is for Canon Law or the Mosaic Law in public life.  Individuals are free, indeed should be encouraged, to follow religious precepts in their individual lives and within the framework of their particular religious community,  but the anti-establishment clause of the first amendment protects us from having any one religious philosophy imposed on the American people.    

      Sharia law might be the obvious threat today but there are Catholics who still want to see Catholicism established as the official religion of the United States.  I used to think they were all crazies like Solange Hertz, a Leesburg Virginia doyenne with more bats in her belfry than Hogwarts at Halloween but then a couple of years ago along came Michael Voris from Real Catholic TV suggesting that what we need now is a Catholic Monarchy to replace our Republican Government.  Fortunately Voris has no support from the Church for his bizarre ideas and little influence among everyday Catholics but he is articulate and, adjusting for the observation that his reality coordinates are off kilter, within his own world of factoids he invariably has a well thought out and philosophically consistent patter.   Indeed he is not alone in his parallel universe.  There is a considerable faction among the neo-traditionalists who reject the Second Vatican Council whose fundamental opposition to the Catholic Church is not about the liturgy but about the Conciliar Decrees, especially Dignitatis Humanae and its assertion of Freedom of Conscience.  In the end, the ascendancy of Catholic Law over the larger society would be as fatal a blow to the Human Dignity with which our Creator has endowed us as would be Sharia law.  We may be more familiar with Catholic theology and law than Sharia Law, and Catholic hegemony might require less adjustment on our part, but are we willing to yield to any outside force the sovereignty of our conscience, the consciences of which God has made us each a steward and for which God will hold us accountable?

     Religion cannot be banned from public life—nor should it be. We are guaranteed the free exercise of religion.   There is no effective way in a democracy to keep religion out of public life because religious citizens will (hopefully) have their political philosophies shaped by their religious faith.  Even non-believers have their attitudes and values shaped by their non-belief.  Religion (or lack thereof) will all come to the lawmakers’ table but it must only come to the table through the agency of the individual citizens and never through the direct influence of religious institutions over government.   And if the Churches (and Synagogues and Mosques and various Atheistic Associations) are performing their role in raising the consciousness of their individual members, making convincing arguments for the political consequences of their beliefs, those beliefs will be reflected in the democratic process.   But the attempt to coerce believers into voting blocs sorted by religion undermines the constitutional processes.  I expect my pastor to tell me that abortion is wrong.  I expect my pastor to tell me that same-sex marriage is not consistent with our Christian understanding of matrimony.  I expect my pastor to tell me that we have a responsibility to provide for the needy and vulnerable among us.  I expect my pastor to pass on the Church’s teaching regarding immigration and the death penalty as well as contraception and divorce. I hope my pastor will have the coglioni to tell me to vote my conscience (not my religion [collective] but  my conscience [individual]) and not my wallet.  And I hope I will have the intelligence to know the difference and the integrity to be truthful as to which is which. 

Freedom from Religion and Freedom of Religion III

The Tomb of Pope Leo XIII in the
Basilica of Saint John Lateran

The United States, including its Catholic citizens, was very committed to the principle of the Separation of Church and State.  The papacy was very committed to the idea that the Catholic Faith should be established by law in every nation and that other religions—and especially heretical “cults” (aka Protestants) should be proscribed.  Two trains running down tracks ultimately destined to collide.  

     The collision was to be a long time in coming however.  In a world without modern communications the American Republic was no more than a vague idea to the Papal Court.  Until the final decades of the nineteenth century, basically until people began to accustom themselves to the transatlantic cable, the American Church in its day to day operations was all but independent from Rome.  John Carroll had deliberately held communications with the Holy See to a minimum and his successors in the American episcopacy followed suite.  It was pointless to involve Rome in local decisions—before steamships for a letter to go to Rome, be considered by a congregation, and come back was at least a six month process and could easily take twice that long.  Whatever decision was needed was long past its time before the Holy See could respond.  And frankly, European bishops were no more inclined to surrender decision making to the Roman Curia were jealous of their own authority in their own dioceses.  That only began to change with the collapse of the Papal States in 1870 when the popes needed to consolidate their religious authority to compensate the diminution of prestige at the loss of the Papal States.  It was after Vatican I—and the fall of Rome to the Italian Monarchy that same year—that Rome really began to take note of the American Church and it was startled to see how “American” (i.e. non-Roman) it was.  This came to a bit of a head with Leo XIII’s 1895 Encyclical Latter, Longinqua Oceani, in which the pope declared  that the Church “ would bring forth more abundant fruits if, in addition to liberty, she enjoyed the favor of the laws and the patronage of the public authority.”  Such favor and patronage, of course, is in direct contradiction to the United States Constitution which declares in its first amendment that “Congress shall make no law regarding the establishment of religion…”   Leo further admonished the American Church that while it might have to live with the idea of separation of Church and State at least until a Catholic majority could correct the situation, it “would be very erroneous to draw the conclusion that in America is to be sought the type of the most desirable status of the Church, or that it would be universally lawful or expedient for State and Church to be, as in America, dissevered and divorced.”  In other words, the American situation of the separation of Church and State is not an ideal but an anomaly.

     It could have been worse.  Leo was, unlike his predecessors, not opposed to Republics per se.  To the rage of conservatives he encouraged French Catholics to give their support to the Third Republic which replaced the Second Empire after France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War.  Conservative Catholics in France wanted to restore the Bourbon monarchy and while Leo wold have preferred that, he conceded that the Republic was acceptable.  Catholicism had always seen monarchy as the ideal, the thought being that civil government should be along the lines of Divine Government and so just as God governs the world, a monarch should govern the people.  Forget this Vox Dei Vox Populi idea—it is dangerous to Church and State alike. (Vox Dei Vox Populi is Latin for The Voice of God [is found in] the voice of the people.  You can see why Popes who consider themselves the Vox Dei don’t like that idea.) 

     Fortunately it took a long time to bring this pot to a boil, but to a boil it was to come.  An American Jesuit, John Courtney Murray, was teaching at the Catholic University in Washington DC.  The experience of Christians of various faiths cooperating against the Third Reich in the years before and during World War II convinced Father Murray that the traditional anti-ecumenical policies of Catholicism and the resultant Catholic isolationism was an obsolete and a dangerous policy in a world haunted by totalitarianism.  He further came to believe that, despite the admonition of Leo XIII in Longinqua Oceani,  religious freedom as outlined in the First Amendment to the American Constitution was an ideal that should be embraced in the twentieth century.  In these ideas he was far ahead of his time—too far ahead of his time for many of his fellow Catholics who saw the ethnic and religious ghettos into which the Catholics of the early twentieth century had retreated as essential to preserve the faith.  Teaching with Father Murray at Catholic University was Monsignor Joseph Clifford Fenton, one of the most arrogant and acrimonious junior grade prelates the Church has known in its long history of arrogant and acrimonious prelates.  Monsignor Fenton was editor of the American Ecclesiastical Review.  Fenton despised Religious.  Fenton despised anyone who he considered beneath him and his monsignoral dignity him which more or less included the human race as a collective.  He was probably also a bit jealous of Murray and his popularity.  Fenton reported Murray to the appropriate Roman dicasteries and the redoubtable Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani, head of the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office, who silenced Murray and prohibited him from speaking or writing on the topic of Church/State relations.  These were the final years of the papacy of Pius XII who that year had suffered from a hiatal hernia requiring surgery and whose health went into a steady decline during which more and more of the papal prerogatives were assumed by curial officials such as Ottaviani.  Pius’s successor, John XXIII convoked an Ecumenical Council with the express purpose of opening the Catholic Church up to the ecumenical movement which had long been prohibited it by Popes such as Pius XI whose encyclical Mortalium Animos condemned ecumenism as undermining Catholic doctrinal hegemony.  Ottaviani insured that Fenton would be on the various commissions that were preparing the Conciliar agenda and it was planned by Ottaviani that no serious doctrinal shift, especially as regards ecumenism or freedom of conscience would be submitted to the bishops.  When the bishops assembled in the autumn of 1962 for the first session of the Council, however, they would not accept the conservative agenda, however and demanded that the schemata for the council prepared by Fenton and others be abandoned and a new agenda drawn up.  It was at this point that Francis Spellman, the Cardinal Archbishop of New York, rescued John Courtney Murray from the obscurity to which Fenton’s accusations had reduced him and brought him to the Council as Spellman’s personal theologian.  Here Murray had his revenge on his reactionary foes as the Council in its decree on Religious Freedom, Dignitatis Humanae, enshrined the basic principles of freedom of conscience and the very doctrine that Leo XIII had said should not be spread from America to the rest of the world became a universally recognized principle in Catholic teaching.  Eternal Rest to Joseph Fenton, Alfredo Ottaviani, and Leo XIII.  One of those three, despite his fear of freedom of conscience, is probably a saint.  It wouldn’t be Fenton or Ottaviani.  

More Notes on Maryland Catholicism

The rebuilt Catholic "Chapel" on the site of
Saint Mary's City in Maryland

I mentioned yesterday that the traditional American Catholicism that is rooted in the Catholic experience of the Maryland colony is more like the post-conciliar Catholicism of today while our memories of the Church before Vatican II reflect the faith and practice of the immigrants that flooded the United States from 1840 until World War I.  I had a number of emails asking me to clarify.  “Surely,” one asked, “the Mass in colonical Maryland was in Latin, was it not?”   Another wrote: “In the picture of the Church in Saint Mary’s City that you posted on the web page, there was an altar rail and the altar seems to face the wall.”  So what do I mean when I maintain  that colonial and early United States Catholicism had  more in common with the Catholicism that we practice today than with the Church that those of us who grew up before Vatican II remember?  
      In the first place.  Yes, the Mass was celebrated in Latin in 1632 when The Ark and The Dove brought the first Catholic settlers.  And the Mass was in Latin in 1776 when Charles Carroll went up to Philadelphia to sign the Declaration of Independence.  Father John Carroll who was to be our first bishop and other priests discussed Mass in English, but had no permission from Rome to implement their plan.  Without such permission, however, they did (on their own authority) put the Marriage Rite, the Baptism Rite, and parts of the funeral rite (though not the Requiem Mass) in English.  Some of the prayers for Confession were also put into English though not the formula of absolution.  And yes, the altars in the churches invariably faced the rear wall of the church as they did everywhere else except for some of the churches in Rome, most notably the papal basilicas, where they have always faced the people.  So what do I mean in comparing the recusant Catholicism of colonial Maryland with our Vatican II Catholicism today?
      Well there are several points.  Before we get to liturgical issues, I would like to look at ecumenism.  Two and a half centuries ago the Catholic Church was mortally opposed to what today we call ecumenism.  To put this in context we must remember that first of all the Catholic Church was opposed to democracy and taught that monarchy was the form of government most consistent with the law of God because it reflects the Divine Order of the Universe.  God has not established that his laws are determined by the consent of the governed and nations too should be ruled by monarchs who shape laws by decree so that the earthly realm will most resemble the heavenly realm.  (Believe it or not, there are still crackpots in the Church who agree with this.  Michael Voris of “Real Catholic TV” advocated this some time back on his internet-based television network.  The internet also has various blogs and webpages on the subject of Catholicism and Monarchy, and the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre was not only a maintainer of the Traditional Pre-Conciliar Liturgy but politically an ardent Monarchist.      
      The Catholic Church not only supported Monarchy as the ideal form of government (thought it “tolerated” democratic republics such as the New United States) but also maintained as a matter of doctrine that although every political society was morally bound to permit the Catholic Church freedom of worship and unhindered participation in public life, that when Catholics became the political majority in a country they had to establish the Catholic Church as the official religion of the State and to put limitations on the practice of non-Catholic “cults” whether Christian or otherwise.   Furthermore the State was obligated to shape its laws according to Catholic morals and doctrines.  Divorce, for example, should not be legal, nor contraception in a Catholic State. The American principle of Separation of Church and State and its corollary of Freedom of Worship was something that could be tolerated until Catholics became the political majority in the United States.  As late as the mid 1950’s the Vatican silenced an American theologian, a Jesuit (who else?) at Catholic University in Washington DC and forbad him (his name, by the way, was John Courtney Murray) to teach, speak, or publish on the issue of Separation of Church and State.  At the Second Vatican Council, the Council did a 180 degree about-face with the decree Dignitatis Humanae asserting that every person was to be given the freedom of conscience in matters of religion.  Similarly until Vatican II, the Holy See had repeatedly condemned the Ecumenical Movement, most notably in the 1928 Encyclical of Pius XI, Mortalium Animos. 
      Interreligious cooperation of sort was prohibited and Catholics were not so much allowed as to say the Lord’s Prayer with Protestants.  As for cooperation with Jews—or Muslims—well, it was not even in the realm of possibility. 
But the American tradition was very different.   Catholics in the former English colonies knew what religious persecution was.  Even in Maryland—founded to be a refuge for Catholics from persecution in England, Catholics had been denied voting or public office since the beginning of the eighteenth century.  American Catholics universally supported the Revolution in hopes of attaining full rights as citizens.  Charles Carroll, the most politically prominent (and the wealthiest) of American Catholics spoke of the “rights of conscience,” to be among the “common rights of nature” granted not by government but inherent in human freedom and dignity.   Carroll’s cousin, Father John Carroll who was to become the first Catholic Bishop in the new nation, ardently supported the cause of Independence and, according to the website of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, defended the American principle of religious toleration despite its variance from traditional Catholic doctrine.  Moreover, Carroll was cordial and collaborative with the clergy of other denominations, respected by all and respecting all.  It was not uncommon in colonial and newly independent America for Protestant and Catholic clergy to cover the pastoral needs of each other’s widely scattered flocks.  Funerals in particular were handled by whatever clergy were available.  Father Gabriel Richard, a French émigré priest serving in Michigan territory before the War of 1812 even served for a time as the pastor of a Protestant congregation in addition to the pastoral work in his own parish.  Catholics and Protestants generally lived together not only peacefully but in mutual respect and cooperation.  Episcopalian George and Martha Washington were friends with such Catholic families as the Lees (the Maryland Lees, not the Virginia Lees—though themselves related, the Maryland Lees had become Catholic at some point) and the Digges.  As I mentioned in an earlier post (January 2, 2012), Washington supposedly gave the first contribution to the building of Saint Mary’s Catholic Church in Alexandria Virginia through the agency of his friend Col John Fitzgerald.  It was a world of civility and good relations that cut across religious lines two centuries before John XXIII saw Protestants not as heretics but as “separated brethren.” 

Is Vatican II in Danger?-- III a closer look behind the scenes

Yesterday we spoke of how the ecumenical and inter-faith agenda of Vatican II has fared in the years since the Council. It might be important to clarify our terms. “Ecumenical” refers to relationships among Christian groups. “Inter-faith” refers to relationships among religious groups that do not share faith in Christ, or relationships between Christians and non-Christian religions. Thus Catholic-Presbyterian dialogues over worship, for example, would be Ecumenical. Catholic-Buddhist or Catholic-Jewish (or Muslim , Hindu etc.) dialogues or collaborative charities, or other efforts would be “Inter-faith.” We obviously have much more in common with other groups that profess faith in Jesus Christ as Son of God and Savior than we do with groups that may recognize him as a Prophet (Islam) or a Holy Man (Hinduism) or who see him as simply a historical or mythological figure. There is therefore a sort of hierarchy of relationships. We have more in common with Jews, for example, than other non-Christian religions as we see that we share with them the Revelation of the Law and the Prophets given to the People of Israel. We share with Jews—and Muslims—the Abrahamic faith in the One God which gives us a closer tie with Islam than with the non-Abrahamic faiths. But while we do not share the faith in the One God revealed to Abraham with Buddhists or Hindus or others there is much truth in the wide spectrum of Asian religions—and indeed many of the indigenous religions of the world and at Vatican II the Catholic Church explicitly acknowledges this truth and affirms that we Catholics do not reject any element of this truth. The Council Fathers declared
The Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions. She regards with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differing in many aspects from the ones she holds and sets forth, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men. (NA para2)
This statement is a bone of contention for many who reject—in whole or in part—the Second Vatican Council. In fact there are three decrees of the Council which are extremely contentious—and I am not counting the decree on the Liturgy among them. That is an entirely separate issue and not nearly as divisive—though it has been divisive enough—as the three I will mention. They are the Decree on Ecumenism (Unitatis Reintegratio), the Decree on Non-Christian Religions (Nostra Aetate), and the Decree on Religious Liberty (Dignitatis Humanae). Opponents of the Council claim that these decrees represent a total reversal of the Church’s doctrine from before Council. And they are correct. The second Vatican Council did a 180 degree about-face on what the Catholic Church had taught on Ecumenism, Non-Christian Religions, and Religious Liberty. Some of the opponents of the Council have gone so far as to claim that this reversal, as a rejection of previously defined magisterial teaching, is heresy and therefore the “popes” who have supported it (John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I, John Paul II, and now Benedict XVI) are—as heretics—barred from the papal office and that the Chair of Peter is and has been since the Council began—empty. They are called “sede-vacantists” which comes from the Latin for “empty chair” (sede vacante). They reject all and everything about the Second Vatican Council.
A slightly less extremist position are the followers of the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. While they are known mostly for their rejection of the new Liturgy, the Archbishop’s major complaint about the Council was the same complaint of the sede-vacantists, namely that the those three conciliar documents represent a repudiation of doctrines taught by the Popes and Councils and held by the faithful before the Second Vatican Council. Particularly troubling to Archbishop Lefebvre was the Document on Religious Liberty. Lefebvre came from a family whose political (and religious) ties were to a faction in French politics that are dedicated to restoring the Monarchy and reversing the French Revolution. Ever since the nineteenth century there has been a small but dedicated ultra-Catholic faction in France that seeks to establish the ancien regime with its alliance of Throne and Altar. Americans are generally not aware of this but the Catholic Church taught—up until the Second Vatican Council—that the Union of (the Catholic) Church and State was the political ideal and that Catholics had a duty towards political action that would establish the Catholic Church as the official State Religion—with restrictions on and even prohibition of other religious groups—in whatever nation they lived. This doctrine was generally overlooked in the United States as it was on conflict with our Constitution but there are some extreme right-wing Catholics—mostly in the Sede Vacantist group—who do still teach it today. Solange Hertz would be one; Atila Sinke Guimarães is another. This school not only represents a renunciation of the Second Vatican Council, but of Western culture since the Enlightenment with its positive values (I for one do not think all the values of the Enlightenment are positive) of equality of persons under law, freedom of conscience, republican government and other elements that provided the founders of our nation with the foundational principles of the American Revolution and Constitution. We will touch on this topic in future blogs when we treat some of the reasons for Anti-Catholicism in American history. Those voices who, especially in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, claimed that Catholics could not be good Americans actually knew Church teaching better than most American Catholics who did not see a conflict between their Church and their loyalty to the United States—but all that is for the future.
While the Holy See does not take the Sede-Vacantists seriously—and for the most part they, like Mrs. Hertz and her friends—are people who have constructed a bit of psychotic bubble, a universe of alternative realities, both Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI have made serious overtures to the Lefebvrist camp. Indeed Pope Benedict has lifted the excommunication and received them back into the Church without clearing up the Lefebvrist dissent from the Council. This is problematic for a variety of reasons. First it legitimizes dissent from official Church teaching. Secondly it may require revisiting the Council and its decrees to try to find ways to accommodate the Lefebvrists. This may explain one of the reasons for a reinterpretation—usually claimed to be an “authentic interpretation” of the Conciliar Documents. If this is so it will open yet more issues for while the Lefebvrists are willing to tolerate the existence of the “new liturgy” as long as they don’t have to use it, they are quite firm on rejecting the doctrinal changes that have permitted Ecumenical and Inter-faith relationships to develop on any official level.
When one recalls the heady enthusiasm of the Coinciliar years, Ecumenism has been for the most part hugely disappointing. I don’t think that any of us expected that Inter-religious dialogue would progress beyond the point of mutual respect and collaboration in projects that better the lives of people both locally and around the globe. It still has the promise to do that and in the process we have learned about some common ground that has been mutually beneficial. This has not been without controversy, however, particularly in the area of the influence of Buddhist and Hindu meditation techniques. But we had great hopes for Ecumenism during and after the Council. Forty years ago many of us thought that by this time we would have come to the point of, if not corporate reunion, at least sacramental sharing. There are reasons why this has not happened and not all the blame goes on the Catholic side. As I had written previously, the decision by most Protestant and Anglican Churches in the favor of the ordination of women has been a huge stumbling block . Underneath the surface is also a very different theology of human sexuality, manifest not only in divergent views of homosexuality but in the role of sex in marriage. There is also a different anthropology that gives a different level of urgency to the abortion issue as well as questions of embryonic stem-cells, in-vitro fertilization, genetic engineering and other topics very pertinent to today’s world. But our mistake, I believe, in not making greater progress while there was still much consensus on these other issues, was that we did not talk frankly and openly about our different ecclesiologies and theologies of the Sacrament of Orders. We avoided the tough questions where feelings are sensitive. Now we have several more tough and sensitive questions and it will be all the more difficult to resolve them. Far from backing off from Ecumenical dialogues we need to sit down, indeed chain ourselves to the table, and examine all the neuralgic points in full detail, ready on both sides (or all sides) to listen and open to being convinced (note, I said open, not predetermined). We still need the polite gestures and cordial ceremonial gatherings but we also need “to talk turkey.” Reconciliation will never come about without honest, truthful, frank, conversation, indeed argument. Somewhere here I have passed from history-in-the-making to theological turf where I have sworn not to go, so better to end this here. Next installment of Vatican II—in Danger? will be on the liturgy but probably not for a few days. I want to cover the issues of the nuns on the battlefields of the Civil War first.

The image today is a Buddhist monk with some Catholic Sisters at the beatification of Mother Teresa of Calcutta in 2003