Requiem Aeternam Dona Ei, Domine

I ordinarily steer away from explicitly political agendas on this blog as too many of my friends among the krazies are caesaropapists who reduce Catholicism to the Tea Party at prayer, but I think there is something worth reflecting on, from a religious point of view, about the legacy of Supreme Court Justice, Antonin Scalia.  So, let’s start—as I usually do—out in left field.  I would like you to punctuate the following sentence. 

“A voice cries in the desert prepare the way of the Lord make straight his paths” 

Christians will almost invariably punctuate it to say: “A Voice cries in the desert: prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths.”  That is how Matthew (3:3); Mark (1:3); Luke (3:4); and John (1:23) interpreted it to speak of John the Baptizer.  The voice cries out in the desert.  But Isaiah, speaking of the return of the Jewish People from their captivity in Babylon (Is 40:3) had actually written “A voice cries: in the desert prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths.”  It is not the crier who is in the desert, but the way of the Lord which we must prepare in the desert between Babylon and Jerusalem to bring the captives home. 

We encounter this issue all the time in scripture: it is called hermeneutics.  How do you interpret the text?  Are you bound to the text’s original meaning or can you, like the Evangelists, put new layers of interpretation on an old text to make that text “live” in your particular day and place?  The Word of God, after all, is a Living Word whose meaning is never exhausted. 

While so-called “evangelicals” often insist on what they term a “biblical literalism” even the sacred authors themselves borrowed quotes from one another and significantly shaded the meaning in so doing to reflect their particular experience of God acting in their time and place.  

Isaiah (7:10-16) writes

Again the LORD spoke to Ahaz:  Ask for a sign from the LORD, your God; let it be deep as Sheol, or high as the sky!  But Ahaz answered, “I will not ask! I will not tempt the LORD!” Then he said: Listen, house of David! Is it not enough that you weary human beings? Must you also weary my God?  Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign; the young woman, pregnant and about to bear a son, shall name him Emmanuel.  Curds and honey^* he will eat so that he may learn to reject evil and choose good; for before the child learns to reject evil and choose good, the land of those two kings whom you dread shall be deserted.

Isaiah was writing of a very specific event.  In the days of Ahaz, king of Judah (735-715 BC), Jerusalem was under siege by the kings of Israel and Aram (Syria) who were trying for force Judah into an alliance with them against the king of Assyria.  This siege was in the first year of Ahaz’s reign (735 BC).  Isaiah was encouraging Ahaz not to join the alliance, which would have, had he entered it, brought destruction to Jerusalem as it did to Israel and Syria when Assyria ultimately defeated them.   Isaiah refers to the fact that the Queen, Abijah, was pregnant and promises Ahaz that by the time the child is old enough for soft foods (curds and honey), the siege will be over.  Some biblical scholars say that the promised son is Hezekiah, successor to Ahaz, and perhaps the most devout and religious king of Judah. (There is a possible problem, however as the dating of Hezekiah’s birth is usually given before the accession of Ahaz to the throne.  We are uncertain of the historical dating, in fact, of Hezekiah’s birth and so this tie of Hezekiah to the prophesied prince remains a possibility.)  The point is, however, that Isaiah has a specific historic event in mind.  It does not involve a virgin (Isaiah uses the word for a young woman, regardless of virginal status)  though it does involve a promised son.  Matthew (1:23) takes this same quote and makes it say:

“Behold, the virgin shall be with child and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel….”

To be fair to Matthew, he was quoting the Septuagint (the Greek version of the Hebrew Scriptures) in which the Hebrew term for a “young woman” (עלמה ) has already be translated into Greek as παρθενος which connotes a young woman who is a virgin. Nevertheless, Matthew takes the Isaiah quote totally out of historical context and applies  it to an entirely new situation.  We can see that ahistorical interpretation of texts is nothing new but that we have long understood that the reader is free—within some less-than-precisely-defined limits—to impose meanings on a text beyond those intended by the original author.  As a historian I like to stay close to the original author’s conscious intent, but I also realize that such expectations are unrealistic.  The text means what we say it means, not only what the original author(s) intended. 

In our Catholic Tradition we have a long history of textual interpretation.  The Fathers of the Church took the biblical texts and wove wonderful theological insights out of  them—insights far beyond what the evangelists and the apostles (not to mention the Hebrew Prophets and authors) ever meant.  The Word is a living Word and while we interpret it according to Tradition we are, and always have been, open to new layers of meaning to emerge.  It is the collective wisdom of the Church—magisterium, theologians, and consensus fidelium in harmony—that determines the validity of these unfolding insights into our ancient faith.  This is what we call the Development of Doctrine. 

I bring this subject up as a comment on the recent death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.  Justice Scalia was probably if not the brightest, then at least the most articulate,  member of the current court. He was a devout Catholic, though not particularly enamored of the teachings of the Second Vatican Council or recent popes regarding the role of the Church in social issues. (His absence from the recent address of Pope Francis to the Joint Session of Congress last October was noted.) His contrariness was not limited to his faith.  Justice Scalia was not a man who much favored the world in which we live.  He carved out a religious niche for himself where he could ignore those current Church practices and teachings with which he disagreed.  His son, the Reverend Paul Scalia, is a priest of the Diocese of Arlington Virginia and, like his father, is a man of exceptional intelligence and charm but also, like his father, has a draw towards certain aspects of the retro-Catholicism of the pre-conciliar years. 

In his role on the Court, Justice Scalia espoused a doctrine often called “originalism” which maintains that the Constitution should be interpreted strictly according to the mind of the men who framed it.  This presents many challenges as the world in which we live raises problems unforeseen by the Founding Fathers and for which the Constitution does not give us adequate guidance. The framers of our Constitution did not believe in such things as racial equality, the rights of women to participate in the political processes, or free public education for all.  Much of our worldview—and basic values as Americans (and even as Christians) is the product of an evolution of ideas over the 240 years since our Republic was founded. 

One of the great strict constructionists of American Constitutional theory was our third president, Thomas Jefferson.  Jefferson bitterly opposed Presidents Washington and Jefferson for actions that he saw as beyond their constitutional warrant.  But then Mr. Jefferson found out when he was President and wanted to buy Louisiana from Napoleon that the Constitution had failed to foresee such an important opportunity.  Hoisted on his own petard, Jefferson went ahead and bought the territory regardless of its constitutionality.  Few people stick to their principles when they become inconvenient.   Strict constructionism, or it variant, “originalism,”may sound like a principle of fidelity but simply does not work.  The Constitution, like the Scriptures, are a living text and while we are bound to interpret it consistently with its history of interpretation (in the case of the scriptures, in the patristic Tradition, in the case of the Constitution with juridical precedence) and we are not free to make things up as we go along, we cannot force a 2016 foot into a 1787 shoe.  Our Founding Fathers were men of their time.  For the greater part they believed that the white race was superior to the other races and deserved to have the law favor their interests.  In writing the Constitution they kept the institution of slavery intact and counted Black slaves as 2/3^rds a “person” for purposes of the census.  Our Founding Fathers did not grant Citizenship to free people of color and the Constitution left voting eligibility to the several States which generally granted it only to white males of property.  Despite Abigail Adam’s plea to her husband to “remember the ladies,” the ladies were legally little better off than free Blacks. 

Other than for free Blacks—and the occasional Jew who was perceived by the Founding Fathers more as a low-Church Christian—there was practically no diversity in the America of our 1787 Constitution.  There were no Mexicans swarming over the yet-to-be-built wall on the border.  Our only contact with Muslims was the USS Enterprise fighting the galleys of Tripoli, and that actually wasn’t for another 14 years yet.   There were some French-speaking Catholics who had found themselves on the wrong side of the Maine Border when the 1783 Treaty of Paris set the boundaries with Canada but they stuck pretty much to themselves and to the backwoods.  They weren’t granted the vote by Massachusetts to which they, at the time, belonged.  There were also German Catholics settling on the Pennsylvania Frontier.  Maryland Catholics were somewhat at the opposite end of the spectrum from the Jews and were perceived as High Church WASPs, very much part of the American establishment.  There certainly were Gays and Lesbians—Pierre L’Enfant, the designer of our nation’s capital for one—but discretion kept their private proclivities out of public discussion.  Back in colonial days we had a rumored cross-dressing Royal Governor of New York, Lord Cornbury, but that sort of thing was decidedly out of fashion by the machismo days of our Revolution. 

All this historical reconstructionism led Mister Justice Scalia to be somewhat primitive himself when it came to issues of race and civil rights.  He was ardently opposed to any sort of affirmative action, not so much color-blind as just blind to the social complexities created by systemic poverty: inadequate and unequal public education, racial profiling, inequitable access to public services, and the other disproportionate burdens placed on the permanent underclass.  He was able himself to break through barriers of immigrant poverty because it was not the sort of systemic barriers that block those, of whatever race, who are disadvantaged by generational privation and this led him to the naïve conclusion that with enough gumption and natural ambition, anyone else could do the same.  It is sad really that he never appreciated his own unique genius that gave him a step-up that people of lesser ability lack.  He came far in life—far further than almost any of us could even dream—but he did so presuming that his extraordinary intelligence and exceptional charm were in fact within the grasp of any and of all.  As intelligent as he was, he fell for the lie of equal opportunity for all.   Humility can be a vice when it blinds us to see that what we have is a gift from beyond ourselves and permits us to think that we are no different than others and we did it on our own. 

I fear that Father Scalia, like so many sons of great fathers, is cut from the same bolt of cloth as was the Justice.  He holds to a lily-white Catholicism of the respectable upper-middle class establishment.  The Church today, like our nation, is far more complex than it was in the days of Jefferson and Madison or the days of Pius X and Pius XII.  Toothpaste does not go back into the tube.  While nothing haunts the soul like plainsong and Mozart thrills the ear attuned to European culture, the Church today pulsates with the rhythms and harmonies of Africa.  Theology today comes not out of the aged faculties of European universities but from the Comunidades Eclesiales de Base in Latin America.  (Even in the Roman universities the professors are increasingly from Asia, Africa, and Latin America.)  Where is the future of the Church?  Where are the vocations: India, Nigeria, Columbia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Kenya… that gives us the answer. 

There is certainly room in American Catholicism for the Ave Verum Corpus and even for Mass VIII.  They have been and they remain part of our cultural heritage.  I hate ugly churches and ugly church art as much as the next dilettante.  I’m even more inclined to write a check for a nun in her habit than one in an ill-fitting skirt and cardigan.   (Sorry, Sisters, I am 100% behind the LCWR but this is just a gut thing, I can’t help myself.)  But at the end of the day, Pius XII is in his tomb and when the Gospel Choir from Holy Apostles comes to sing at our Mass, the church is packed out to the rafters.  At the end of the day Mike and Ray, the married guys down the block, are running the parish team to help out at the shelter next month.  At the end of day, it is Barb carrying the cross and Susie the thurible at 11:00 Mass.  At the end of the day no one in our parish still receives on the tongue.  At the end of the day 30 people come to the traditional Stations of the Cross and 350 come to the youth “living stations.”  At the end of the day, we are more invested in our outreach program in Haiti than we are about putting the tabernacle back in the center of our sanctuary.  We remember when we had 3 priests and they brought communion to the shut-ins every first Friday.   Now we have only one priest but 30 Eucharistic ministers who bring communion to our shut-in’s every Sunday—and some more often.  The neighboring parish has a “youth ministry” with an “adoration hour” and rosary and 15 kids.   Our 95 kids make 450 sandwiches every month and run them into the city for the homeless.   And our kids can tell you about the Gospel of Luke and the Pauline letters and Evangelium Vitae and Laudato Si. 

No, retro-Catholicism and retro-constitutionalism are both no more than museum pieces.  Both in regards to our faith and to our politics there is Tradition that establishes canons for growth and development but they do not remain static.  We occupy an unique place in history and God calls us to be faithful in that time and place, not in some mythic now-past golden age when all was perfect. 

Cry Wolf!

 What danger does the Patient Affordable Health Care Act of 2010 offer to the free exercise of religion guaranteed by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution? 

  First—let’s look at the text. 

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

 

Our concern here is the first two clauses.. There shall be no law respecting an establishing of religion.  There shall be no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion.    
       As I understand it the Catholic Church and its institutions will neither have to provide nor pay for there to be provided to their employees and their dependents, any procedure such as sterilization, abortifacients, or  contraceptives that violate Catholic moral teaching.  On the other hand, their employees and their dependents will be given access to these services at the expense of the insurance companies.  While one might expect that the companies would pass the cost of such services along to those who pay the premiums, in fact the insurance companies want to provide these services as they will lower the cost to the companies since birth-prevention is cheaper than the cost of providing medical care for childbirth and subsequent infant-child care.  (That, at least, is the theory.  I am cynical enough to believe that while the insurance companies may in fact want to provide contraceptive and related services, they will still try to pass the (hidden) cost along in order to maximize their profit. That is the way business works ever since ethics courses became optional in American colleges and universities.)    Does making available to employees of religious institutions services that contradict the religious tenets of the employer-organization without any involvement by or cost to the employer-organization constitute an encroachment on free practice of religion? I think that is a bit of a stretch, but I am not a constitutional lawyer.  Of course neither are the bishops.  Most commentators believe that when this issue comes to the Supreme Court, if the Patient Affordable Care Act of 2010 is still standing despite other lawsuits, that the Court will side with the Church on this issue. They base this estimation on the January 2012 opinion delivered by the Court in the Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School case v EEOC which, though dealing with remarkably different issues has the same principles (or so some think) at stake in terms of a religious body’s right to determine its administrative policies without government interference .     

      I do think we are going to have to determine sound boundaries both to protect religion and protect from religion in a secular society.  I also think there is a campaign in certain segments of our society to restrict the influence and even visibility of religion, but I honestly don’t think that is the Obama administration’s agenda.  And so I have fears that this “Fortnight for Freedom” campaign by the American Bishops is not a legitimate red flag to protect religious freedom but a thinly veiled political assault on the Obama administration to convince Catholics that they should support the Republican ticket in November.   A greater fear of mine than Obamacare being an assault on our religious freedoms is that when the wolf does come no one will take the bishops' cries for help seriously.    

How Many Rights Will the Obama Administration Abrogate?

I have a friend who spent 20 years as a Catholic chaplain in the U.S. military. We were undergrads together, though he was, in fact, a couple of years ahead of me.  Jack is a real looker, the classic “Father What-a-Waste,” and it got him far—which is good because he isn’t the brightest bulb in the chandelier and brains sure weren’t going to do it for him.  He didn’t do well in Philosophy, I remember, because his mind was never very good for abstractions.  Math and Science—no problem and if you needed your car fixed or your VCR programmed—he was your man.  But abstractions—well fortunately we need priests, and as I said in his day he was a looker (and at seventy still looks pretty good for himself), and so he got through seminary with a smile and not much philosophy or theology.

       We went for dinner one evening some years back—I was living in Rome and he was part of the entourage accompanying then-president Bush (“W”) on a foreign trip.  I have no idea how a Catholic chaplain got to come along with a Protestant President, but again good looks and a spotless record go as far in the military as they do in the Church.  Maybe it was to impress some of the Vatican people that the Methodist President brought a priest with him; maybe it was a reward for his hard work.  And maybe it was both.  But we went to dinner, I remember, at a place I like near the Campo dei Fiori and I asked him what advice he would give a soldier who was conflicted because he had been given an immoral order.  Jack didn’t comprehend the question.  It was like I was asking him how much he thought we could get for the green cheese if we ever set up a base on the moon.  “An immoral order?”  he queried.  He paused.  He looked into thin air for about 20 second.  “We don’t do that” he said.  “I mean, it just doesn’t happen.”  Had it been anyone else, I would have thought it was just company loyalty to deny the possibility that evil might exist in the hearts of those wonderful people who had  brought you Abu Ghraib, but I could see he was really puzzled at the concept that someone, somewhere might give an immoral order.  I mean this guy isn’t just ingenuous, he’s actually obtuse.  He’s a true blue believer—Vatican, Pentagon, God, King and Country. If the pope said: next Sunday we’re all going to say mass in the nude, he would marched to the altar bare-assed naked.  And if his commanding officer had told him to drop his drawers when he saluted the President, he would have mooned ol’ “W.”   Fortunately it never came to that.  And fortunately he retired from the military before Secretary of the Army John McHugh put out word through the chief-of chaplain’s office that Catholic Chaplains were not to read at Mass this past Sunday the Pastoral Letter Military Services Archbishop Timothy Broglio had written and ordered to be read at mass condemning the Obama Administration’s forcing Catholic Institutions to provide a type of employee health care that would pay for contraceptives, abortifacients, and sterilization procedures contrary to Catholic morals.  This is a double whammy—an attack on Free Speech as well as Freedom of Religion.  The government (OK, the Department of the Army, so a government department) prevented a letter from an Archbishop to the faithful under his care from being read?  Like what country is this?   McHugh, by the way, is Catholic—but it wouldn’t matter if he were an Episcopalian or even a Buddhist.  This is a clear interference with religious freedom. 

      Now to be fair, this wasn’t President Obama or even “The Administration,” but this flap over religious institutions being required by law to violate their basic moral principles was initiated by the Administration and can be laid directly at the President’s door.  What is the White House thinking these days?  I am sure that they weren’t happy with Archbishop Broglio’s letter to our letter to our men and women in uniform.  The Archbishop made it clear that there is a time for disobedience and the military doesn’t want to encourage that thinking and the government doesn’t want—for good reason—for our troops to be given the example of not only questioning but defying authority.  But our men and women in uniform are here to defend—among other things—our freedom of speech and our freedom from government interference in our religious practices.   

Here is what the Archbishop wrote:  

“the Administration has cast aside the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States” in a way that is “denying Catholics our Nation’s first and most fundamental freedom, that of religious liberty.”

“And, as a result, unless the rule is overturned, we Catholics will be compelled to choose between violating our consciences or dropping health care coverage for our employees (and suffering the penalties for doing so),” he wrote. “We cannot—and will not—comply with this unjust law.”

      And this had to be censored?  Well, fortunately the Secretary of the Navy, Ray Mabus, a Methodist didn’t think so. Secretary of the Air Force, Michael Donley didn’t think so.  No problem with the Marines.  No problem with the Coast Guard.  But I am glad Jack is out of the Army before he did something so wrong as to surrender his rights—and obligations—of free speech and free practice of religion in a system that does not understand that authority has its limits.  

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 II

The Coronation of Napoleon, December 2, 1804

The new American Republic in its 1789 first amendment to the Constitution (ratified in 1791) forbad Congress either to establish (a) religion in law or to prohibit its free exercise.  It was a moderate step away from the time-honored practice of European States that recognized either Catholicism or one or another of the Protestant Churches as the official religion of that particular state.  A more radical approach to altering the relationship of Church and State emerged under the various governments of the French Revolution.  In 1790 the French Government, technically still the monarchy but controlled by revolutionary forces in the National Constituent Assembly, required the clergy to swear an oath of allegiance to the new Constitution.  It also required that pastors and bishops be elected by their respective constituencies.  This did not meet with papal approval, needless to say, and clergy who refused the oath (as many did) were subject to fines, imprisonment, and death.  In 1792 the National Assembly, contrary to Catholic belief, legalized divorce and that civil legalization that contradicted the canon law actually was the initial step in separating civil law from Religious doctrine.  The Government also took the responsibility of registering births, marriages, and deaths from the Church thus making baptism and church-marriage unnecessary for those who chose not to practice Catholicism.   This was just the first step in changing the status of the Church and just weeks later a virulent persecution of the clergy and religious began.  This was followed in the first months of 1793 with a spate of “dechristianization” laws which attempted to remove not only Catholicism but all Christian influence on French culture.  The Gregorian Calendar introduced by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582 (the calendar we use today in America and most of the world) was abolished in favor of a Republican Calendar with ten day weeks—eliminating any Sunday of Christian worship.  Towns with religious names such as Saint-Antoine or Saint Tropez received new names.  The Deistic “Cult of the Supreme Being” was designed to replace Christianity.  It was forbidden to ring church bells or display the cross and of course there were no religious festivals.  Cathedrals and churches were, for the most part, turned over to secular use or left abandoned. Abbeys and convents were most often destroyed and left in ruins.  Despite the high and mighty language of the Revolution about “the rights of man,” there was no religious liberty, neither for the Churches nor for the individual believer.  Slowly, however, after 1795 while public worship was proscribed the private practice of Christian faith—Protestant or Catholic—was, in fact, tolerated although clergy were still often imprisoned or sent to French penal colonies in the Caribbean. Religion was banished from public life but permitted in private.   With the accession of Napoleon in 1799 the religious situation improved as Napoleon, no believer himself, realized he could use an alliance with the Church to consolidate his political and imperial ambitions.  Pius VII was coerced into crowning Napoleon as Emperor of the French at a Pontifical Mass in Notre Dame Cathedral Paris on December 2^nd 1804.  Actually, Napoleon crowned himself—having taken the crown from the Pope’s hands and placed it on his own head before turning and crowning his wife (at the time), Josephine. 

     In the course of their revolution, the French had conquered what is today Belgium and the Netherlands, as well as most of modern Germany.  They also had seized Italy and Spain where they established satellite states under Bonaparte siblings or allies.  Although Sweden was never part of this empire, one of Napoleon’s top generals, Jean- Baptiste Bernadotte was elected King by the Swedish Riksdag (Parliament).  Bernadotte briefly was allied to Napoleonic France but he was no fool and disentangled himself from that alliance when it was clear that Napoleon would not prevail.  Wherever Napoleon held power, however, he established religious liberty giving Catholics, Protestants, and Jews freedom of worship. 

       When Napoleon fell in 1815 the restored European monarchs, including Pope Pius VII, were determined to undo as much as they could of the French Revolutionary influence on European societies.  Religious freedom was among the first things to go.  Outright persecution of religious minorities was difficult to reestablish but limits were put on Catholics and Catholicism in Protestant lands and on Protestants and Protestantism in Catholic countries.  The Catholic Church insisted, for the most part without success, on religious liberty for its adherents in Protestant lands but vehemently opposed Protestant rights in Catholic countries.  The Papal States certainly did not practice religious liberty.  Certain limited freedoms were extended to Jews though they were required to live in the Ghetto until 1882—twelve years after the Kingdom of Italy had taken political control of Rome from the popes.  What liberties Roman Jews had came at the price of various taxes and duties. As difficult as the Jews had it, Protestants had a much more difficult time.  Protestant worship was forbidden in Papal Rome and no Protestant churches could be constructed within the walls of the city.  The Papacy did not approve of religious toleration when it came to “heretics.”  It was only with the fall of Papal Rome and its incorporation into the Kingdom of Italy in 1870 that Protestants acquired the right to worship in Rome and the surrounding area.  As the papacy did not recognize the authority of the Italian monarchy over formerly Papal territory, neither did they accept freedom of religion in the once Papal dominions.   American ex-President Theodore Roosevelt declined an invitation to meet Pius X during a trip to Rome in 1910 because one of the papal conditions on the visit was that the President, an Episcopalian, could not attend a Protestant Church during his visit.  (There were other conditions as well that Roosevelt chose not to meet.) 

     As a result of its intransience on the matter of religious freedom, Rome did not know what to do with the American constitutional policy of Separation of Church and State.  American Catholics, for the most part, accepted the American position without reservation.  Indeed most probably supported it with the enthusiasm with which they embraced life in the American Republic.  Rome chose to ignore the American Constitutional requirement of separation of Church and State as they chose to ignore the reality of republican government.  European prelates found freedom of conscience and republicanism to be too reminiscent of the debacle of the French Revolution.  Yet the Holy See did not want to imperil the health and safety of the Catholic Church which was thriving in the American Republic under the constitutional principle of Separation of Church and State.  It was agreed by Roman officials that American Catholics could live with the Separation of Church and State until such time that Catholics gained the political majority.  At that time they would be bound by Church authority to establish Catholicism as the State Religion in the United States and limit, if not absolutely proscribe, Protestant worship. 

Freedom From Religion and Freedom of Religion

"The Mass of Saint Denis" showing the
King of France at Mass in the Days of
the Alliance of Throne and Altar

We spent a considerable amount of time over the past month looking at the issue of whether or not the United States is “A Christian Nation.”   We demonstrated that there are two distinct traditions in American society.  The Pilgrim/Puritan tradition going back to John Winthrop’s famous “City Set on a Hill” speech to the Massachusetts Bay settlers aboard the Arbella in 1630 recognizes the explicitly Christian foundations and goals set for that colony by its founders. Among the founders of the Republic, most likely Sam Adams, Patrick Henry and Charles Carroll would have agreed.  On the other hand, the American Revolutionary tradition, epitomized by Thomas Jefferson in his Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom and copied into James Madison’s Bill of Rights that became part of the United States Constitution would deny the new Republic to be a Christian nation—or an Islamic, Jewish, Buddhist or any other sort of religious nation.  In addition to Jefferson and Madison, this view would be consistent with the statements of Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, George Washington, and John Hancock.  Moreover, the Maryland Catholic tradition would argue for the religious neutrality of the State.  But this is the issue: religious neutrality.  The Revolutionary tradition does not ban religion from public life as some today would have it, but rather—in the words of Madison’s Bill of Rights, insists that: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”  There are those who want to relegate religion solely to the sphere of private life, confining it to home and church.   That is no more consistent with our republican heritage than would be the recognition in law of the special place of any or all religion in the eyes of the government.  No more must we be a secular nation than should we be a Christian nation.  This requires a careful balance. 

     We must remember that there has been a long tradition of Christianity being the established religion in western societies.   Contrary to popular belief, the Emperor Constantine did not make Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.  He gave the Christian religion legal recognition and freedom from the persecution it has sporadically been subjected to under the Roman Empire for over two centuries and he gave it, and its officials, many special privileges in Roman law. While Christianity was not the official religion of the Empire—under Constantine—the empire was not religiously neutral.  It was the official religion in several places.  King Tiridates III of Armenia had converted to Christianity through the preaching of Saint Gregory the Illuminator in 301 and made Christianity the official religion of is nation.  Abyssinia established Christianity as its official religion about a quarter-century later.  It was only in 380 that the Emperor Theodosius made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.  From that time on an alliance between Throne and Altar was normal in European countries whereby the State enforced the religious doctrines of the Church and the Church preached obedience to the State as a moral obligation.  At the time of the Protestant Reformations of the sixteenth-centuries the various national Churches had to choose their alliance—to the Roman Pontiff or to their respective kings.  Almost invariably the Churches stayed tied to the thrones that supported them.  Where the thrones themselves were content with the papal alliance, such as France, Spain, and the Empire this was no problem.   Where the thrones wanted to disentangle themselves from the Roman alliance, the Churches too became disentangled.  In each case, however, the Throne/Altar ties remained intact.  The Enlightenment challenged this alliance and developed an alternate model of the relationship of Church and State suggesting the States should allow a freedom of conscience whereby government would no longer consider itself responsible for maintaining the theological monopoly of any particular religion.  Most of the Enlightenment thinkers had already abandoned orthodox Christian doctrine, whether Protestant or Catholic, and wanted the freedom from religion more than freedom of religion.  The Churches of Protestant England and Scotland and Sweden found their positions undermined as much as the Catholic Churches of France, Spain, and Portugal but the Protestant nations and their national Churches were more likely to accommodate religious dissent than were the Catholic nations—despite the presence of many freethinkers in the royal governments of France, Spain, Portugal and the Hapsburg empire.  In part this was because Britain, Holland, and the Scandinavian kingdoms had learned to turn a somewhat blind eye to persistent Catholic minorities and had learned to live with a pluralism of belief (and disbelief).  The Catholic countries, on the other hand, were more ardent in pursuing and persecuting religious minorities and strove for religious conformity.  Consequently religious freedom came more easily in the Protestant countries than it did in Catholic countries. 

     The fruit of this in the British colonies in North America was a pretty universal conviction that while a particular Church might be established, the citizenry—as long as it remained orderly—might be allowed a freedom of conscience.  This awareness grew faster in some colonies than others.  Virginia was particularly slow in coming to such freedom,  harassing (persecuting) not only Catholics but Baptists and other non-conformists  almost to the eve of the American Revolution though the issue often appeared to be not doctrinal dissent but failure to pay tithes to the established Anglican clergy.  When the Revolution came, however, Virginia was among the first of the new States to disestablish its official Church and write religious liberty into law.  Maryland, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania supported freedom of conscience from the beginning.  When the new Republic was formed it was taken for granted in each State that citizens would be free to follow their own conscience.  That did not mean that the official churches were always disestablished.  Connecticut did not disestablish the Congregationalist Church until 1818; Massachusetts disestablished it only in 1833.  Anglicanism had been the established religion in Hawaii from 1862 but after the 1893 coup that ended the monarchy—and independence—making Hawaii an American colony the American colonial government, comprised of New England Congregationalists, disestablished it.  Several state constitutions still prohibit atheists from holding public office but a 1961 decision of the United States Supreme Court declared such provisions “unenforceable” as they would constitute a religious test probhiited by Article 6 of the United States Constitution which says in part: The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States. 

OK , So Is Mitt a Christian?

The Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of 

Later Day Saints in Salt Lake City

Is Mitt Romney a Christian?  This question seems to capture the attention of a lot of people right now.  First, let me say that as a Catholic who remembers John Kennedy’s presidential campaign when his Catholic faith was an issue, I support the United State’s Constitution that provides there shall be no religious test for office.  I am interested in a person’s values—very interested—but not their formal religious affiliation.  But that isn’t the point I want to deal with in today’s posting.  I want to look at the question of whether the Mormon faith is a genuine Christian denomination or not.  
     First of all the problem is the word “Christian.”  We use it in very ambiguous ways.  “She is such a Christian” generally means “She is such a good person.”  It particularly refers to people who are kind and generous, as if one had to be a disciple of Jesus to be kind and generous.  I wish all of Jesus’ disciples measured up to this standard.  I know more than a few, and even some who wear those funny black and white “dog collars” around their necks, that would fail the “Christian” litmus test if Christian genuinely meant nice and kind.  In fact, sometimes the more religious a person is the less Christian he or she seems to be.  As one old priest from Poland who is a friend of mine confided to me, his frequent prayer is “From the daily communicant, libera nos, Domine!”    
      A second sense in which one can use the word “Christian”—and this one with some legitimacy—is a person who embraces the ethical teachings of Jesus as outlined in the Gospels.  One may accept Jesus as a great moral teacher without espousing his Divinity or even the uniqueness of the Revelation he imparts to humankind in his teachings as the New Testament records them.  By this standard, Thomas Jefferson and many of our Founding Fathers (and I suppose Mothers) would qualify as Christian as would Quakers, most Unitarians, and many good souls who have no formal religious affiliation with a particular denomination that claims to be “Christian.”  Few of our the founders of our nation were Christians in the stricter use of the term.  Charles Carroll, the only Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence, was one of the few leaders of the new nation who actually was a practicing Christian. 
     A third sense of the word “Christian” would be a person who does have formal membership in a religious group that claims for itself to be a “Christian” Church or denomination.  Now claiming to be Christian doesn’t make a person or collective group of people Christian anymore than claiming that bag you’re selling on a street corner for 25 dollars is a genuine Versace makes that knockoff a genuine Versace.  But there is a social convention by which we generally don’t call each other out in public about such claims.  Nevertheless, while we may be polite and choose not to challenge the authentic Christian beliefs of one another, that doesn’t mean that we accept the authenticity of Christian faith in each other.   A particular point is the issue of valid baptism.  Some groups that claim to be Christian, groups such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, baptize “in the name of Jesus” as opposed to baptizing “in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”  The Catholic Church insists that the Trinitarian formula is necessary for valid baptism according to Matthew 28:19.  (There are scripture passages which would seem to validate baptism in the “Name of the Lord Jesus” (Acts 2:38; 10:48;19:5, but the Catholic Church and most other Christian denominations reject this formula as insufficient based on historical usage and the centrality of the Doctrine of the Trinity to Christian Orthodoxy.)   While we might say that a particular Jehovah’s Witness is “such a fine Christian” in the sense that he or she is a very nice person, or we might even see how their reading the Gospels has endowed them with a set of good Christian values, we would not consider Jehovah Witnesses to be Christian in the sense of belonging to a community of baptized disciples. 
     A fourth sense of the word “Christian,” very close to the last mentioned definition but still different from it, is public affiliation to one of the Churches or religious communities that stands by Christian Faith and Doctrine  as taught by the Apostles and historically defined by the first seven Councils of an undivided Christian Church.  This faith is generally seen as that proclaimed in the three historic creeds: the Apostle’s Creed, the Creed of the Councils of Nicea and Constantinople I, and the Athanasian Creed or Quicumque Vult.  A Christian in this sense accepts the doctrine that there is one God in three Divine Persons, each Person possessing the fullness of the Divine Nature yet being not three Divine Beings but only One.  Such a person, to be a Christian also must accept that Jesus Christ is truly God as is the Father (and the Holy Spirit) and is truly human as are we.  In the one Person of Jesus Christ there are two natures, one Divine and one Human, the natures are joined but not mixed and while each nature is and remains distinct, what can be attributed to each nature can also be said of the other.  All this sounds very complicated but that is because we always try to explain that which transcends our experience and thus is inexplicable.  Sometimes I think we should simply let Mystery be Mystery and not try to unpack Grace.  
      How do Mormons fit into this scheme?  Mormons use the Trinitarian formula for baptism (and until I had done research for this posting, I had thought they baptized in the Name of the Lord Jesus), but most “mainline” Christian theologians and denominations—Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, Presbyterian, and Methodist—have looked at Mormon theology and decided that while Mormons talk about the Trinity they have a very different understanding of the Divine Nature, that is of “God,” than historic Christianity.  In other words, while they use the same words (God, Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) they mean something quite different by those words.  That would mean not only that their faith is substantially different from Christian faith but that their baptism, while using the same words and outward signs (immersion in water), means something very different than as understood by historic Christianity.  For this reason the Catholic Church as well as most other Christian denominations require that Mormons be baptized when joining the Church.  A Presbyterian or a Lutheran, for example, would be “received” into the Catholic Church without repeating baptism.  Baptism in the Catholic theology is an unrepeatable act.  If validly baptized once, you are never baptized again.  But a Mormon becoming a Catholic would have to be baptized as his Mormon “baptism” would be regarded as invalid as the “Father, Son and Holy Spirit” in which he or she had been baptized as a Mormon is not the “Father, Son and Holy Spirit” of our historic Christian faith which is shared by the Orthodox Churches of the East and the majority of Anglican and Protestant Churches (or ecclesial communities) of the West.   Also, because the Mormon understanding of the Divine Nature is, or at least appears to us to be, so radically different than that espoused by historic orthodox Christianity, their understanding of Jesus Christ—in whom the Divine and Human natures are united (though not mixed)—is radically different from that proclaimed historically by the Christian faith.  Thus Catholics would not recognize Mormons doctrinally as Christians. 
      So it all seems to boil down to Are Mormons Christians?  Yes, in the sense that as many (indeed most) Mormons are really fine people many (indeed most) Mormons  are Christians in that broad colloquial sense.  Yes, also, in the sense that most Mormons lead lives shaped by the moral teachings of Jesus.  In this they are as Christian as Thomas Jefferson or Benjamin Franklin or most of our Founding Fathers who thought Jesus was this really wise and ethical teacher.  Actually even more so for while they understand the Divinity of Christ, and indeed divinity, differently than historic Christianity, Mormons do believe that in their sense of being Divine, Jesus fit the bill.  They do not think of him merely as some enlightened human teacher.  But No, from the Catholic understanding of Christian Faith and Sacraments, Mormons are not Christians in the sense of professing authentic Christian doctrine and no they are not Christian in the sense of being in the community of the baptized.  Frankly, when it comes to being President of the United States, I won’t hold anyone to a test of religious beliefs, but the only sense in which I would prefer a Christian over a non-Christian is that second sense—a man or woman whose life and values are shaped by the teachings of Jesus in the Gospel.  When it comes to Christians in public life, I am much more interested in orthopraxis than orthodoxis.   And in that sense, Mitt is the only fellow (or fellowette) currently  in the Republican field that I would vote for.