Strange Bedfellows: More Enlightenment Thinkers

I am a great fan of Patrick O’Brien’s Aubrey/Maturin series of novels (The movie Master and Commander being a mash-up of several) and if your read the novels attentively you notice that the real hero of the series is not the somewhat dense and amoral navel commander Jack Aubrey, but his devoutly Catholic surgeon and side-kick and intensely intimate best friend, Stephen Maturin. (At times the relationship seems to be latently—or maybe even discreetly—homosexual.)  Stephen Maturin is not only a brilliant surgeon but also a secret British agent, an ardent republican determined to bring down Napoleon.  Several times in the 21½ novels Maturin expresses his contempt for “that scoundrel Rousseau.”  He is referring to Jean Jacques Rousseau, one of the leading philosophes of the Enlightenment. 

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was not French, but Swiss: a Calvinst from Geneva.  He was, perhaps most famous for his novel Emile (aka On Education).  Moving far from his Calvinist roots (Rousseau would convert to Catholicism c 1728 and then convert back to Calvinism in 1754 though he was by no means a professing Christian, his conversions being more a matter of political and social advantage) Rousseau believed in the inherent goodness of the human individual.  He found the idea of original sin repugnant and believed that the human person in the state of nature is blameless: the bon sauvage, noble savage.  (Sauvage in French, like the original meaning of the English term “savage” does not connote barbarism but simply the human person living wild and free in nature.) He blamed human corruption on the growth of human society that separates the human person from the natural state. He saw society as essential as persons must cooperate in order to survive but he also saw it degenerating into competition from which springs a variety of human evils.  Rousseau, reflecting his Swiss roots, was an ardent believer in republican government and direct democracy—the participation of the largest possible number of citizenry in directly making political decisions. His influence on American thought, especially Jefferson, cannot be missed.  As to religion, while he remained an admirer (even in his Catholic years) of John Calvin for his legislative career in Geneva, he was very post-orthodox in his theology.  He was a Deist though, unlike most Deists who saw God as impersonal and distant, Rousseau had a sort of natural mysticism that made him profoundly aware of and sentimental towards the manifestations of God in nature.  Like other Enlightenment figures he advanced the idea of the freedom of conscience and believed that each person should be free to follow the religious beliefs and practices to which he or she was drawn. 

Voltaire (1694-1778) (born François-Marie Arouet, was educated by the Jesuits at the College Louis le Grand in Paris where he—like so many educated by the Jesuits, lost his Catholic faith.  He adopted the name (nom de plume, nom de guerre) Voltaire in his mid-twenties. It was an anagram of the Latin form of his name Arouet.  He was an exceptionally witty man but as we know from our friends among the Katholik Krazies, not everyone is blessed with a sense of humor and his wit won him the enmity of one of its victims, the Regent, Philippe, the Duke of Orleans.  When you piss of a Regent it never goes well for you, especially under the cherished ancien regime, and Voltaire ended up in the Bastille for eleven months.  His friends—of which he was always to have many—won his release on the promise he would go to exile and he fled to the Netherlands.  There he met a lovely young Huguenot (French Protestant) Catherine Olympe Dunoyer and married her.  He sneaked back into France under somewhat false pretenses—and, as it was against the law for a Catholic (which he still was, at least nominally) to be married to a Protestant, illegally.  He enjoyed the friendship and patronage of Madame de Pompadour, the king’s mistress and this helped him—sometimes—to avoid the various penalties his opinions earned him.

Voltaire went after the Catholic Church and its position of being the established religion in France.  He firmly believed in the separation of Church and State and freedom for the individual to practice the religion of his choice—or no religion.  He was a most prodigious writer of plays, poems, novels, letters and essays as well as scientific and historical works, all of which advanced his very avant-garde ideas.  His brilliance at satire offended many in the establishment and while he had numerous friends outside the court, at court he had more than his share of enemies. 

Voltaire rejected classic Christianity for a vague belief in a creator.  He did have quite a bit of admiration for Hinduism, though how he became familiar with it except through books, I can’t be sure.  Sometimes we develop an admiration for something not so much because we know it or understand it, but because it is contrary to that which society has established for us. 

He was very skeptical of the Bible as he felt that God’s own moral ambiguities—telling various Israelite leaders that they should kill this person or annihilate that nation—only justified violence and oppression.  Yet he was tremendously admiring of nuns, especially those who served the sick and the poor as he saw a deep idealism in them. He saw that Christianity was useful in as that it imposed a certain moral code upon the common and uneducated people but he felt it had no place among those who could think for themselves. He is quoted as having said: “those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”  But perhaps my favorite quote of his is that on his deathbed, when asked by a priest to renounce Satan, he said: “This is no time to make new enemies.”  Humorous to the last.  Hopefully God appreciates the humor; otherwise we are all in deep trouble.

A somewhat less known figure of the Enlightenment was Denis Diderot (1713-1784).  He advocated inoculation against smallpox and he compiled the Encyclopédie which is an anthology of Enlightenment thought.  Unlike most of the philosophes, Diderot was not a Deist but an atheist.  His antagonism against religion may have been due in great part to the death from exhaustion of his much beloved sister, a nun in a very austere convent.  My reason for including Diderot is that he has my favorite quote of all the Enlightenment philosophes: “Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the guts of the last priest.”  I have it hanging in my office right alongside one of my other favorite quotes from a far less distinguished source: si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes. 

Finally, we need to backtrack a bit and deal with the Englishman Sir Issac Newton whom I have somehow overlooked.  Newton (1642-1727), like my buddy Stephen Maturin, was a natural philosopher: i.e. a scientist, and perhaps the most important scientist of all western history.  A great mathematician, it was Newton who established once and for all that the sun, not the earth, is the center of the solar system.  In addition to physics, mathematics, and astronomy, Newton did extensive work in optics.  Given his particular position at Cambridge he was expected to be ordained in the Church of England but he obtained a royal warrant excusing him from Holy Orders.  He never gave a reason but it seems while devout he was not orthodox in as that he did not subscribe to the Doctrine of the Trinity.  Like many in his day He saw God as the Master Mathematician, the Creator of the Universe and Newton attributed the unflinching order of things in the natural realm to the Divine Mind.  

Once Again, Sheldon Cooper Solves the Paradox

Last Saturday evening I caught an episode of Big Bang Theory where Sheldon reaches through a wormhole into a series of parallel universes in an attempt to discern whether there is life there.  It is actually a practical joke he is playing on Howard and Raj who are invading his privacy to satisfy their own curiosity and it plays out quite funny.  I will come back to this point, trust me. 

Then I read an article on the internet Sunday morning giving the reasons that Americans are becoming a secularized nation and rejecting religious beliefs.  I wish that I could have found the article Sunday evening when I sat down to write this blog and if it sounds familiar to any of you readers, please send me the link. 

The article claimed that scientists and philosophers are in a consensus that humankind has outgrown religion.  Science sees the claims of religion not only as improvable but as unfounded in a world where science has unlocked the mysteries of human existence.  Indeed, the author asserts,  religious claims are clearly in conflict with scientific knowledge and thus without credibility.  Philosophers, for their part, range from the materialist atheism of Diderot with an absolute denial of a Deity to the Enlightenment concept of a Deity who sets the clockworks of the universe in motion and then withdraws from its running its course to the Jeffersonian concept that God and Religion have a crucial role to play in the establishment of a moral order for those persons unlike themselves who are not sufficiently intelligent or moral to arrive at a natural understanding of human ethics.

I am probably not doing the article justice—I only had time to read it once before it disappeared in “the Cloud” or wherever things go these days and I don’t mean to dismiss it.  To the contrary I found it a compelling argument despite its troubling thesis.  I wasn’t overly impressed by statistics such as the claim that only 7% of scientists are religious believers; statistics as every historian knows can be cooked to come up with whatever results supports our thesis.  But the article did make me stop and think and I had fully intended to go back to it after Mass and give it a second and third read.  Again, if anyone can help me find the article, I would be interested.   

What interrupted my reading the article, ironically, is that I wanted to go to Mass.  Our parish has a monthly Mass for “Families with Special Needs”—kids with Autism, Downs Syndrome, and other life challenges.  This was the pre-Christmas Mass and the number seemed to have doubled—perhaps about 250 people, about 35 or so who are “Special Needs” and the rest being their family, friends, and parishioners whose ministry is the liturgy and social that follows.  The Mass is pretty lively—it is also somewhat chaotic as the normal conventions of social behavior don’t apply.  One never knows what little bit of theatre will play out but that is precisely why we have this Mass.  Parents can bring their families to Church without worrying if some outburst or other activity will disturb the other worshipers.  We all know the fundamentals of the game at this Mass before we cross the church threshold.

But as I watched that congregation in Church and thought about the academics who are becoming evangelists for the rising secularism of our post-Christian culture, I could only think back to Sheldon and his wormhole into various parallel universes and it hit me how we believers and our non-believing friends live in parallel universes.  The Special Needs faithful and their families would not have any interest in what the Philosophical and Scientific communities supposedly are saying about religion.  They wouldn’t (for the most part) understand it and, more important, it would ring false to their experience.  And the academics (and remember I know those ivory towers well having spent my years in the club) are, for the most part, clueless about what it means to live a life of 24/7 responsibility for someone who faces the sorts of challenges that a parent or family member of a “Special Needs” individual has.  I am not saying that one is right and the other is wrong.  Each system has its own internal cohesion, but the reality coordinates differ in each universe.  I also know from attending these monthly Masses which universe I want to live in—which universe has the reality coordinates that ring most true to my experience and in which universe I might not find sure and fixed answers to speculative questions, but where I do find meaning for life. 

Science and Religion: Dialogue or Divorce?

Physicist Leonard Mlodinow

Yesterday I wrote about how religion and belief are being pushed to the margins of our culture, out of the public square and away from public discourse—except for ridicule.  This aggressive sort of secularism is a threat to cultural pluralism and indeed to our basic freedoms as religion played a major role in the 20^th century in balancing various forms of political and social tyranny whether it was apartheid in South Africa, American sponsored dictatorships in Latin America, Johnson’s “Great Lie” leading us into war in Vietnam, or totalitarianism in Nazi Germany and the Communist bloc.  I am not naïve about—and will do some entries on—how religion has been used in the past to suppress human rights and freedoms as well.  We need a balanced picture, but we must be careful to nuance our histories accurately so that the broad strokes of ideological rhetoric don’t distract us from what remains a very important question for the future of our society regarding the coming place of religion and the rights of religious believers to practice their faith—whatever that might be—without restrictions.
That being said, I was listening to NPR on my way home from church this morning and Krista Tippett hosted physicist Leonard Mlodinow during her program On Being.  Krista brought up the issue of religious belief because, I gather, Mlodinow co-authored a book with Deepak Chopra entitled: War of the World Views: Where Science and Spirituality Meet—And Do Not.  I would have wished for a more profound author to state the case for Spirituality, but Mlodinow’s remarks were interesting.  Unfortunately my route took me through several tunnels where the radio was “in and out,” but one remark that stuck with me was when Mlodinow referred to religion as being “outside science.”  That is a strange way to regard science.  Science is the study of phenomena and religion is a phenomenon.  It is only “outside science” if scientists push it there and then we must ask them why they have chosen to do that.  Granted “God” most likely can never be examined, much less proved, by science.  Nor, for that matter, is “the soul” a likely subject for science.  “God” or “the soul” are experienced by some as phenomenon but whether they have any objective existence in and of themselves is the very question that separates believers from those who do not believe.  There is a line, probably an unbridgeable gap like that referred to in Luke 16:26 between physics and metaphysics.  After all the word “metaphysics” means “beyond physics.”  But the phenomenon of religious belief is something the existence of which is beyond dispute and which can be studied by scientists.  Why do people believe?  Why do they believe what they believe?  Are they conditioned for belief by their biology?  Are they conditioned for belief by their psychological makeup?  What difference, if any, does religious belief cause in the structure and functioning of the brain of the believer?  Does “prayer” alter the neurological makeup of the believer?  Does religious belief and practice cause physiological changes that predispose the believer to certain ethical choices?  I think there is a lot here for scientists in a number of different disciplines to look at—if, of course, they choose.  Or they—or the universities for which they work and which pay them a salary, or the opinion of their peers, or the pressures and biases of the larger society and its limited interests—could lead them to dismiss these questions as “outside science,” if not as subjects that would only interest the eccentric.    Again, I think that our culture is pushing religion to the margins in the hopes that it will become both invisible and impotent for social influence.  That would be sad. 
In 1972 Sir John Templeton, wealthy American/British philanthropist, established an annual prize to be awarded “for progress towards research or discoveries about spiritual realities.” The honorees include some of the best known humanitarians of the last forty years—Mother Teresa of Calcutta, the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Aleksandr Solzhenistyn, the Reverend Doctor Billy Graham, and Dame Cicely Saunders.  Winners have also included a variety of scientists, including eleven physicists.  On the other hand, as another example of a secularist who is unwilling to engage the phenomenon of religious belief, British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins snarkly said that the Templeton Prize “is usually given to a scientist who is prepared to say something nice about religion.”   Of course it would be fascinating for a person like Dawkins who turned from religious belief to non-belief to allow himself to be studied scientifically as well to ascertain the psychological and possibly physiological determinates of his own evolution from his previous religious faith to his current atheism.  But just as psychologists are usually more anxious to look at the idiosyncrasies of their clients rather than their own, scientists too seem to shy away from self-examination.  Too bad.  The inner world of one’s own psyche is far more fascinating than whatever we find outside ourselves and while we must ask the great questions of the universe, unless we know ourselves and how our own biases shape our perception, whatever knowledge we gain of the world beyond our own inner self is highly suspect.  γνῶθι σεαυτόν

 

The Obamazation of Pope Francis IV

Francis’ next shot came when he wrote Eugenio Scalfari the editor of La Republica, an Italian newspaper:
  “You ask me if the God of the Christians forgives those who don’t believe and who don’t seek the faith. I start by saying – and this is the fundamental thing – that God’s mercy has no limits if you go to him with a sincere and contrite heart. The issue for those who do not believe in God is to obey their conscience.
Francis substantially said, that yes, the Mercy of God extends even to those who do not believe in him.  Now un-nuanced, this is theologically problematic as faith has been seen as the sine qua non requirement for salvation every since Paul wrote the letter to the Romans.  Or Galatians.  I can never remember which Epistle comes first. Yet over the course of history this principle has been interpreted in a variety of ways from insisting that one had to be a member of the Catholic Church (Boniface VIII, Unam Sanctam, stating that one must be “subject to the Roman Pontiff” in order to be saved) to some vague acknowledgement of a Supreme Being—a sort of Benjamin Franklin Freemasonry Deism.  Francis seems to take it one step further, however, and say even this minimalistic faith is more than is required. 
I will be the first to admit that Francis is not one to nuance his words—something his predecessors have long been very careful to do (though Benedict XVI, while theologically precise, had a gift for putting his Prada-clad foot in his mouth in geo-politics and John Paul II could soften the harshest language by his Reaganesque acting-school charm.)   But I don’t think it is any accident that Francis is given to a plain-speak that is shattering the glass box in which Catholic thought has long been put on embalmed display.   Francis’ remarks open up dialogue: something of which most Popes—saving John XXIII and Paul VI—of the last century have been terrified.   There is a payoff to this.  In talking with priest friends over the holidays, I am hearing of the numbers of people who came to confess before Christmas and gave credit to Pope Francis for “bringing” them back to the Church.  Perhaps the most touching was the story that one Boston priest told me of a seventy-eight year old Irish woman who had been away from the Church for three years because pastor told her she was in mortal sin for having attended the marriage of her son to  his partner of thirty years.  “He is my son—they are both my sons.  How could I turn my back on them?” she wondered.  “But Pope Francis has let me know that I still have a home in the Church.  I don’t have to choose between my home and boys.”  Of course, for the Pope’s critics he is endangering the salvation of souls by such loose talk, but this is more due to the Jansenism that pervades so many corners of the American Church and which stands ever vigilant against the Mercy of God.  A heart contrite and humbled apparently is not sufficient for these rigorists, but then only those whose hearts are contrite and have been humbled can understand what hope the encounter with Grace brings.  Perhaps this is part of the problem.  We may have a mystic in the chair of Peter. It has been awhile now, at least since Paul VI,  that we have had a Pope who sees the world through those compassionate eyes that view from the Cross.  Philosophers and theologians make their contributions but are generally not the stuff of which mystics are made.    
Francis’ openness to those who understand Truth differently from himself evoked a huge outcry from those who see themselves as the guardians of the patrimony of the faith.  Carol, the woman who blogs The Tenth Crusade (formerly known as Throw the Bums Out In 2013, (thus their url: http://throwthebumsoutin2010.blogspot.com/) wrote”
Pope Francis' letter and outreach to a poor misguided atheist as instructions to obey the diabolical influence of sin upon your intellect.   What a hoot.
This website was founded as an anti-Obama website,(as testified to by a button that reads Gone: 1-20-2013 and which ironically the owner has been unable to remove)  but has morphed into one of the more virulent critics of Pope Francis.  Her sentiments were echoed in The Eponymous Flower (http://eponymousflower.blogspot.com/) which complained that the Pope is too loose in what he says.
The statement may not be so wrong, and really left uncontested, fits. But what does not fit, is the unspoken, but the logical conclusion: There is no need to turn to Christ, it is sufficient that one follows his private conscience. And now you can even invoke a pope. Yes, the Pope says it himself.
The question of the usefulness of this word game of the Pope remains. The danger of a misunderstanding from the outset was on hand. Why, then, was this risk taken, which occurred promptly, as it was used, to the euphoria of La Repubblica, and in whose wake numerous other media? So who has availed themselves of etymological "correctitude"? Whose salvation should this benefit? How much additional confusion has been lent to it without necessity?
Just as criticism was deflected from Francis’ “who am I to judge” statement by the co-incidence of his reining in the Franciscans of the Immaculate and the firestorm that resulted from that, his comments on atheists and salvation was almost immediately overshadowed by his interview with the Jesuit La Civilta Cattolica and reprinted in America.  I have been dealing with the fallout from that interview in my blog postings marked “Why do They Hate Pope Francis,” but it is still noteworthy to remark on the angry response to Francis’ saying:
“We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods. This is not possible. I have not spoken much about these things, and I was reprimanded for that. But when we speak about these issues, we have to talk about them in a context. The teaching of the church, for that matter, is clear and I am a son of the church, but it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time.
The dogmatic and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent. The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently. “The dogmatic and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent. The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently.
This unleashed a firestorm from the Catholic Right.  Judie Brown of the American Life League and Michael Voris of Church Militant TV (formerly Real Catholic TV) were among the first to respond in angry, even rebellious, bewilderment.  Their toxic tocsin was soon take up by the internet locals.  Janet, at Restore DC Catholicism (http://restore-dc-catholicism.blogspot.com/)wrote
While I realize that there might have been some loss of meaning in the translation process, there couldn't have been that much. That said, the proceeds of this interview are most troubling. Many of His Holiness' replies seem to fly in the face of Sacred Tradition and Scripture. Of course Our Lord Himself guarantees that the Pope cannot teach error, presuming that he is speaking solemnly "ex cathedra". By no stretch of the imagination is this "ex cathedra". But there's no way to put a positive spin, a "happy face" if you will, on this.
Janet followed up a few days later with
the "off-the-cuff" interviews he has been giving lately cannot by any stretch of the imagination be called "teaching moments", let alone solemn declarations in which he speaks infallibly. It is quite legitimate for faithful Catholics to question spontaneous remarks and certainly acceptable to discuss the means of delivery of said messages.
Many of us have been questioning the wisdom of the pope's conduct of these interviews for they have often led individuals to believe that he is altering the Church's age-old teachings on faith and morals - particularly the latter in regards to the life issues.
and
Isn't it rather ironic that in his attempt to address the interviewer "where he's at" that the Holy Father loses sight of all the other millions of people and their situations? Does the phrase "can't see the forest for the sake of one tree" have relevance here?
The Batman to Janet’s Robin, Mary Ann Kreitzer at Les Femmes (lesfemmes-thetruth.blogspot.com/) wrote
Several days ago I commented that Pope Francis reminds me of Cardinal Joseph Bernardin. It expressed my befuddlement over what the pope says. It was common for Cardinal Joseph to articulalate (sic) a teaching of the Church in one breath and imply that personal conscience could overrule the teaching in the next .
To which reader Al Hennenbery replied
 Confusion is a tool of the devil. Pray that the warnings of mystics aren't being fulfulled. The Book of Revelation is fearful enough without any false pope.
Les femmes continued it attack on Pope Francis in a later posting:
What is the pope thinking? Can this mish-mash really lead people to and through the narrow gate? (If you haven't read the interview see it here.) Do we want a church where "Each of us has a vision of good and of evil." where "We have to encourage people to move towards what they think is Good." What if what they "think is good" is really evil?
Jesus warned us there would come a time when people would call good evil and evil good. We're there and now the pope seems to have created a situation where liberals can quite comfortably bash those "obsessed" prolifers with their skewed vision of life and marriage. But we don't want to "proselytize" them because "Proselytism is solemn nonsense." Oy vey!
Fr Tom responded by writing:
I pray that Benedict may help him (Pope Francis) to realize how far his outreach has gone beyond the sanctifying paramenters (sic) of true orthodoxy.
So Pope Francis is beyond the parameters of orthodoxy.  He is impulsive.  He confuses evil for good and good for evil.  He’s troubling.  He lacks wisdom. He flies in the face of scripture and tradition.  And he is a false pope.  Funny—these same people would never have tolerated someone criticizing Pope John Paul or Pope Benedict in these same tones.  But this is the problem with these once loyal adherents to the papal teaching: they agree with the Church when the Church agrees with them.   In the final analysis they are no different than those “Cafeteria Catholics” they criticized so vociferously these past thirty years.  I am not saying that they are wrong.  I am not saying that they shouldn’t criticize Pope Francis.  I only hope they remove that beam from their eye before they fault me for questioning some of the statements of Francis’ recent predecessors.  The days of unilateral pronouncements are over.  Les Femmes and Eponymous Flower and Rorate Caeli and Michael Voris and Father Tom and Bishop Tobin have just discovered that while some of us have known it for quite some time now.  “Things change, Kundun.”   And speaking of change, while I have more to do on Pope Francis and the Franciscan kerfuffles, let’s go back to ol’ Henry VIII and the Church of England.    Jolly Hal was closing the monasteries when we left him and we need to get back to that for a few entries if we are ever going to finish that series. 

Atheist Popes and Closet Believers

Have you heard of the dyslexic
pope who believes in Dog?

Bill Maher says that he thinks Pope Francis is an atheist but from his description of atheist, I suspect that Bill Maher is no more an atheist than the pope.  This raises an intriguing question—not whether either the Pope or the comedian is an atheist, but what do people mean by “atheist.”   I have always held to a pretty strict definition of the term.  An atheist is one who denies the existence of a deity—God or any god.  But Mr. Maher points to the Holy Father’s recent statement about salvation for those outside the Church—and even for those who profess to be non-believers.  Maher’s quote, as best as I can retrieve it, is “‘Pope Frank’ said the Lord has redeemed all of us, not just Catholics, even the atheists. And I was like, I’m going to book my flight to heaven right now. “  The question is does Mr. Maher not believe in a Supreme Being or does he not believe in organized religion?  Not believing in organized religion is not sufficient grounds for declaring oneself an atheist.   Many of us are Christians, even Catholics, in spite of the organizational dimension of “the Church,” not because of it.  Note, I say the organizational dimension of the Church, not “the Church.”  I love belonging to a community of people centered around the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  That energizes me and give me some vision for life.  That community to which I belong—and which I find has the most energizing power—happens  to be Catholic.  On the other hand, I am not particularly enamored of belonging to this overly pompous institution fascinated far more by human traditions than by the Evangelical Tradition which draws me and which has been handed down from Christ through his apostles.  Speaking as a historian and not in a theological context, there is a world of difference between “the Church of Jesus Christ” and the institutional bureaucracy that is today’s “face” of Catholicism.  Such things as the College of Cardinals, the Code of Canon Law, the Tridentine Rite, communion on the tongue, galeros and miters, the Knights of Columbus, monsignors, communion rails, canon 915, Bishop Frank Dwayne, male-only altar servers, religious habits,  and birettas are not part of the Jesus-patrimony.  That is not to say that some of them aren’t good things, or even that I don’t like some of those things—but it is not what our faith is about.  Reconciliation, forgiveness of sins, inclusiveness, dignity of each individual, the Kingdom of God, justice, community, service, mercy, almsgiving, change of heart, and prayer are “what we have received from the Lord and handed on to you….”  Many of these things in the patrimony from Christ are somewhat ambiguous and call for our response without giving us concrete norms and that is difficult for people who find great comfort in rules, regulations, and canon laws but the Gospel is the Gospel. 
Frankly, and again as a historian not a theologian, I find that I am called not to believe in the Church (whether as an institution or as a community) but to believe in the Gospel and I see the Church as the community with the mission of spreading that Gospel.  The Church is not worthy my faith.  As a human institution (even if it has foundations in a “divine origin”—i.e. it was founded by Jesus) the Church has proved itself over and over again as unworthy of our faith.  But we as Church have a glorious mission of animating our human family with the message of God’s Kingdom, “on earth as it is in heaven.”  Now that is something I can believe in.  Apparently so does ‘Pope Frank.’  And seemingly so also may Mr. Maher, though he certainly doesn’t see the Catholic Church as an agent in transforming the world and he probably doesn’t see  how these dreams of a “better world” find their greatest potential in the teachings of Jesus.  And without putting words into the papal mouth, I think that what the Holy Father was trying to say is that all who embrace God’s Kingdom will find a place welcome for them in it.  No, Pope Francis is no more an atheist than Mr. Maher is a Christian, but I am not sure he is the atheist he wants to be either. 

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.