Second thoughts on the new Vatican norms...

In a comment on my last post, Crystal called attention to an error I made about the penalties attached to pedophilia by priests and attempted ordinations of women.

I erred in saying that they were the same. As Crystal pointed out, though, they are not--a pedophile may face laicisation, but a woman who attempts to become ordained (or a bishop who attempts to ordain a woman) is excommunicated. There is a quite a disparity here in the severity of the punishment -- what they have in common under the new norms is that they are both now considered "grave crimes," which, as far as I can tell, doesn't mean much more than that they are now subject to the CDF.

I would still argue that, contrary to what many people are saying, the two crimes in question are not being "equated," which was the point of my previous post. But the disparity between the penalties attached to these crimes--which is unchanged under the new norms--is rather perplexing.

As far as the official theology of Rome would have it, excommunication excludes a person from the sacraments, thereby depriving them of the means of salvation -- it is sometimes described as "spiritual capital punishment," an somewhat apt description if you happen to buy into Rome's understanding of things. (Only "somewhat" because it can be reversed.)

Laicisation undoubtedly puts the offending priest in a difficult spot. After all, a priest who has been laicised for pedophilia (or some other sexual crime) is going to have a difficult time supporting himself, at least when he's not in jail. But in the context of Vatican teaching, this has to be seen as a lesser penalty than excommunication.

John L. Allen, Jr. reported a few days ago that

At a Vatican briefing...Maltese Monsignor Charles Scicluna, an official at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, denied that the Vatican equates women's ordination with the sexual abuse of children. An illicit ordination, Scicluna said, is a "sacramental" crime, while abuse is a "moral" crime.

So I guess the real question is, why is a "sacramental" crime punished so much more harshly than a "moral" crime?

Rome has deeply misplaced priorities. So what else is new?

Do the new Vatican norms really equate ordaining a woman with raping a child?

This claim is being made all over the place, but unless I've misunderstood something, I have to disagree.

Before I explain why, left me first clarify that I do not agree with the exclusion of women from the priesthood. I think it's one of the most preposterous policies in a Church with more than its share of preposterous policies. Nor am I defending the inclusion of this penalty against ordaining women in the new norms. From a PR standpoint alone that was a pretty boneheaded move.

But I have to take issue with the claim that ordaining women is being "equated" with pedophilia simply because the penalty is the same in both cases.

Imagine you are the CEO of a company. It might be the policy of the company to automatically fire an employee who, say, steals company property. Firing the employee is really the severest penalty you can hand out. Now, if one employee stole a box of pens, and another employee raped, tortured, and murdered one of his coworkers, both would be fired. But the fact that the penalty is the same in both cases does not mean that both crimes are considered to be of equal gravity. The pen thief satisfied the minimal requirements for the most serious possible penalty. The rapist/torturer/murderer far exceeded the minimal requirements, but a more serious penalty simply was not available.

That, it seems to me, is true in the present situation in the new Vatican norms. The attempted ordination of a woman to the priesthood satisfies, as far as the Vatican is concerned, the minimal requirements for automatic excommunication, the most severe penalty they can hand out. Pedophilia is obviously a far greater crime. But a far greater penalty is not available.

Again, I'm not defending the policy of excommunicating people involved in attempts to ordain women. But to say that it is being equated with pedophilia simply because the penalty is the same in both instances is simply not the case.

Fr. Tom Doyle: "Survival of the Spirit"

I just read a very insightful speech given by Fr. Tom Doyle at a SNAP gathering a couple of years ago. (I first read excerpts from it on Enlightened Catholicism, and as usual Colleen's comments on the address are worth reading as well.)

One thing Fr. Doyle said that struck me as having some importance:

Victim/survivors [of clergy sex abuse] need to explore the substance of some of the official apologies and then come to an emotional as well as cognitive acceptance of the fact that the institution and its office holders will not because they cannot respond in a manner that would reflect full awareness and accepted responsibility. Some victims get "stuck" in an almost endless contentious process trying to get the official Church to realize the enormity of their actions. They need to come to a realization that the Church's narcissistic self-concept of a perfect society renders its leaders incapable of comprehending that the responsibility is rooted in the very core of the institutional Catholic Church. (emphasis in original)

A lot of Catholics are calling for reform, but unfortunately the people who know what needs to be done and the people with the power to actually do it are two completely different groups of people.

Another thing he said:

The victim's anger at the Church and possibly at religion in general needs to be acknowledged and affirmed as a healthy response to the abuse. If it has not been done earlier in the recovery process this might be the appropriate time to examine the radical distinction between organized religion and spiritual security and strength. The toxic belief that God will be displeased if the victim feels anger towards the Church must be dispelled and replaced with a more realistic belief that the organized religious body has actually been a barrier to a secure relationship with the Higher Power. Victims attribute spiritual power to the visible Church because it has been presented as the only pathway to God. Most Catholics are never allowed to progress beyond a level of spiritual and religious development that is early-adolescent at best. The recovery process from clergy sexual abuse offers a unique opportunity for spiritual maturity. (emphasis added)

This is something I've been thinking a lot about lately: the possibility that this scandal might actually encourage spiritual development -- not only in victims of abuse, but among Catholics in general. After all, an individual's disillusionment with external authority can lead them to take greater responsibility for their choices, something far too few Catholics are willing or even able to do under normal circumstances.

At least, the optimist in me imagines that that might happen. The realist in me knows that things are going to have to get a whole lot worse before they get better.

Commonweal Editorial: "Benedict in the Dock"

The editorial of the April 9th issue of Commonweal has been posted on their website, and I think it is well worth reading. Here are some excerpts.

In his last years as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and from the beginning of his papacy, Pope Benedict has demonstrated a real understanding of the nature and scope of the clergy sexual-abuse crisis. He came to that understanding much too slowly, but once he grasped the dimensions and horror of the scandal he acted with diligence and genuine remorse, accelerating the process for removing priests, meeting with victims, and demanding at least some measure of accountability from his fellow bishops.

(He certainly comes across as one of the good guys in the Marcial Maciel debacle, at least in Jason Berry's telling of it -- which everyone should read, by the way.)

Much of the pope’s good work in this regard is now likely to be brushed aside as the history of his own negligence in handling an abusive priest when he was archbishop of Munich thirty years ago comes to light. It should not be surprising that then-Archbishop Ratzinger accepted an offending priest from another diocese, placed him in therapy, and immediately reassigned him to another parish where he abused more children. Burying rather than confronting the problem of abusive priests is what nearly every bishop did at the time.

I've spent a lot of time trying to decide what to think about the various accusations being leveled at the pope. Many of the things being written about him, both in the mainstream media and the blogosphere, have every appearance of being knee-jerk responses that predictably line up with the writer's previous feelings about Benedict: his admirers certain of his innocence, his detractors equally certain of his guilt, even before many of the pertinent facts came out.

Now, I think, enough of the facts are out, and basically I agree with Commonweal's take on the Munich situation:

No sentient person could believe the denials church officials in Munich and the Vatican made on behalf of the pope, saying Benedict played no role in the transfer of the abusive priest. With dreary predictability, documents have surfaced showing that the pope had in fact presided at the meeting where the transfer and reassignment were approved. Even if Benedict paid little attention to such administrative details, as archbishop he was still responsible for putting that priest in a place where he could abuse again. The church should have made this story known to the public years ago. Mistakes can be forgiven; what breeds mistrust and cynicism is the refusal to admit error.

What is most bothersome to me about the Munich situation is not what he did at the time, but the fact that he's not owning up to it now, and has instead let a subordinate take the blame. I'm sure he believed at the time that the priest in question was not a risk to reoffend, and one can imagine him receiving ill-informed "expert" advice to that effect; but if he had just admitted his negligence in this matter, he would be in a very different situation right now.

I wonder, though, how much of the Vatican's response is coming from Benedict and how much is coming from the very corrupt curial officials around him (see the Jason Berry article mentioned above -- I had long ago heard of members of the curia receiving lavish "gifts" and large sums of money from Maciel, but I didn't know it was people like Cardinals Sodano and Dziwisz).

How much freedom does a pope really have? If the pope decided to blow the whistle on the corruption in the curia, what would happen? Why do I have the feeling we'd be seeing a conclave about sixteen days later?

The logic of holding priests to a higher standard

I came across this rather insightful comment by someone named Matt Emerson on a dotCommonweal blog post that I thought was worth sharing here:

The Catholic Church cannot be compared to every other organization that deals with children. No other organization claims that its primary employees act “in the person of Christ.” No other organization, or institution, claims that the truth of all reality (i.e., Christ) “subsists” in that organization or institution. Indeed, as addressed elsewhere, Lumen Gentium states that he who hears the Bishop, hears Christ. What other institution makes such extraordinary claims about its capacity to speak about faith and morals?

The reason why the Church gets special heat for their sins is that it sets itself up for a higher fall. The Pope cannot claim to be the “Vicar of Christ,” and the Church cannot claim that Bishops are the successors of the Apostles, and the Church cannot claim infallibility in its ex cathedra proclamation about faith and morals, and then expect, when the abuse of children occurs under the Church’s watch, to be treated like a local public school district or the Boy Scouts. People look at the behavior of the Church, compare it to its claims of authority, and think the latter are demonstrably false and hypocritical.

The problem, in other words, is not that the Church is especially evil, it’s that it’s essentially the same as everyone else. And if the Church is so wrong on how to treat pedophile priests, why isn’t the Church equally misguided in other decisions about what is “healthy” for the human person? We can make distinctions all we want about the “office” of the Bishop or the “office” of the Holy Father or about “ex cathedra” versus something lesser; and we can blog to the end of time about how the Church, too, is comprised of sinful individuals. But, pastorally, does anyone think those distinctions matter? Is that what the Church has to do to maintain credibility? How many hairs can the Church continue to split?

"Rotten from the top down"

In 1992 an American prelate who had just returned from Rome sat in my office and said bluntly, “The organization to which I belong is rotten from the top down.” He also related a 45-minute visit he had with an American cardinal who was in a long-term intimate relationship with a woman. The cardinal spent 22 minutes (he timed it) bemoaning the fact of the large number of sexually active homosexual priests in his archdiocese. No one has described the clerical structure and current state of affairs better or more clearly than Fr. Brian D’Arcy: “A combination of bad theology, the dysfunctional abuse of power and a warped view of sexuality, have contributed to what the Murphy Report repeatedly refers to as “the systemic failure” to protect the most innocent and the most vulnerable children. I believe that the evil clerical culture which pervades our institution right up to the Vatican bureaucracy itself needs to be dismantled…Part of the human structure of the church is rotten to the core.”

This is from an article by Richard Sipe, whose research and insight into the sexual attitudes and behaviour of Catholic priests are without parallel. The piece is called "The Vatican Connection: Pedophilia and Celibacy." It was apparently posted almost two weeks ago, but it was new to me.

Sipe has effectively refuted the Vatican's insistent claim that mandatory clerical celibacy has anything to do with the pedophilia problem. He describes very clearly and persuasively the system of corruption, which reaches up through the whole hierarchy to the highest levels of the Vatican. It's a must read.

So too is the article by Brian D'Arcy quoted by Sipe, which you can read here.

"...medieval princes prancing about Rome."

Cardinal Franc Rodé is in the news again, for reasons you can read about here.

I quite liked a comment regarding this story that was posted on the America blog, by someone named Christa, so I thought I would quote it in full:

Once again, in the mouths of the medieval "princes," the words, "secular," and "modern" are seen as evil.
The benighted hierarchy, particularly those in the curia, are trying desperately to continue "ruling" the church, but those of us who live in the real "secular" world in this very post-modern age, love the creation that God has given us and love the fact that the world is a holy place to live and work.
We do not need or want to look like the medieval princes prancing about Rome. We do not need or want to be "set apart" for special adulations. We have the intelligence and zeal to carry out the mission of Christ in this God-created, God-redeemed place called Earth. Our minds and hearts have developed to the extent that we take very seriously the message and example of Christ in ministering to his people. Like Christ, the religious and laity together blend in with all of God's people in God's marvelous world. Our faith is in our hearts and translated to our hands. What we profess is seen in what we do for others, not in how we observe the bows and folded hands of rubrics.
This glorious world is also home to our human condition - one that is not perfect or perfectable in this life. Because we are all imperfect, we find in this beautiful world the results of what Pere Teillard called our diminishments - violence, war, hatred, injustice, and all the evil things we do to each other. It is in these arenas where life is hard to the point of being snuffed out that our mission and ministry leads us - not to the hallowed halls of palatial residences or mighty cathedrals.
I believe Christ never wore a cappa magna, tiara, miter, ring, bejeweled crucifix, lace, or silk slippers. I believe he never carried a crosier or was followed by white-gloved little boys who carried his accoutrements like robotic pages. I believe that Christ saw his life and the lives of his followers as giving glory to God through what they DID for each other, not how they wanted to APPEAR to others; through how they lived their lives, not how they observed rituals.
The Good and Holy Pope John XXIII helped Ruah* breathe more freely through the church after the Second Vatican Council. Rode and his ilk still cling to form over substance and so cannot imagine how Ruah is at work today.

* The Hebrew word ruah, if you're not familiar with it, appears frequently in the Hebrew scriptures, and is usually translated "spirit," or "wind."

A quick thought about episcopal authority

I was reading a blog post yesterday (can't remember which, but it might have been this one), and for some reason it made me think of one of Vatican II's more preposterous moments:

[T]he Sacred Council teaches that bishops by divine institution have succeeded to the place of the apostles, as shepherds of the Church, and he who hears them, hears Christ, and he who rejects them, rejects Christ and Him who sent Christ. (Lumen Gentium 20)

What a compelling claim for the bishops to have made about themselves!

This in turn reminded me of something Jesus is alleged to have said:

If I testify about myself, my testimony is not true. (John 5.29)

Cardinal Rodé

Tom Fox of NCR has posted a little "meditation" on some photos of Cardinal Rodé, the curial official overseeing the apostolic investigation of American women religious.

Fox writes,

Looking at these photos, one is reminded of the cultural, ecclesial, and socio-psychological diversity that make up our church. Living, as we do, in the early 21st century, we should recognize we are products of a mix of complex and unprecedented pre-modern, modern, and post-modern influences and temperaments.

He wonders if Rodé, "whose penchant for a traditional, monarchical, European styled, pre-counciliar church, is clearly evident in these photos," is really in a position to make any judgments about the women religious in a cultural setting so far removed from his own.

Fox is not judging Rodé simply on his fashion sense. He quotes a comment made by Rodé to John L. Allen, Jr. claiming that Vatican II "triggered 'the greatest crisis in church history.'" The image of Rodé walking in a procession, with his long train being carried behind him, is also revealing.

Fox provides a link to a site featuring numerous photos of Rodé which simply have to be seen to be believed.

More on the Anglican ordeal...

I’ve dreamt of a reunion of the Catholic and Anglican churches in the past but I always imagined it would be a marrying of the best of both, not a rallying of the worst.

Frank Skinner, "My Church is not a safe haven for bigots"

(Love the title of the article. Wouldn't it be great if it was true...)

* * *

An article today inThe Independent, considers the question of how many Anglican priests will actually make the move:

It is in many people's interests to big this up. There has been talk of as many as a thousand CofE priests leaving, plus thousands more in America and Australia. The 1,000 figure comes from the church's traditionalist Forward in Faith faction (whose critics call it Backward in Bigotry). (emphasis added)

I find that hard to believe. There are fewer than 18,000 priests in the Episcopal Church. Many of the conservatives, I imagine, tend more toward the evangelical wing rather than the Catholic one.

As for the number that will actually "carry out the threat," the article says,

When women priests were first ordained it was said 1,000 priests would quit. In the event only 441 took the financial compensation package on offer, and scores of those have returned from Rome disillusioned since.

Later it says the Vatican "may want a separate Anglican Ordinariate in order to quarantine the newcomers from cradle Catholics. Rome doesn't want the influx of married priests to add legitimacy to the call for married priests among mainstream English Catholics."

I'm not sure how it can fail to do that, actually.

* * *

Here's a bit by John L. Allen, Jr. from NCR:

What's the deal on married priests?

The Vatican announcement on Tuesday clearly ruled in current Anglican ministers who are married and who wish to become Catholic priests, and clearly ruled out married bishops. It's still vague, however, what the situation will be going forward. During the briefing, Levada appeared to suggest that married Anglican seminarians could also be ordained Catholic priests -- but will that be a transitional allowance, or a permanent exception to the discipline of celibacy? In other words, will be the personal ordinariates be like the Eastern churches, able to ordain married priests in perpetuity?

Jesuit Fr. Tom Reese has raised two related questions along these lines:

• Could a married Catholic man join the Anglicans, enter an Anglican seminary and then return to the Catholic Church?
• Could married Catholic men from the traditional dioceses join the Anglican ordinariate and become seminarians and priests?

Obviously, the question becomes what impact such allowances might have on the broader debate over priestly celibacy. Whatever happens, it seems likely that the Vatican will be concerned that the opening to Anglicans not evolve into a massive loophole that ends up eroding the discipline of celibacy on a wider basis.

* * *

A New York Times article made the following observation:

The overture toward the Anglicans speaks to a central theme in Benedict’s papacy: his desire to bring in traditional believers at all costs to help Catholicism become a “creative minority” in increasingly secular Europe.

I think it's funny that he said that. Because, as we all know, conservatives are so creative.

The "creative minority" is what historian Arnold Toynbee called the small number of people in any society who stave off decline by being the ones to find solutions in every age to the big challenges the society faces. They succeed when they are followed by a large enough segment of the population.

In our time -- or in any time, actually -- "traditional believers" are hardly the ones we should be looking to for such solutions. Creativity requires divergent thinking, which is obviously not a conservative strength.

Slightly off-topic, but it needed to be said.

Some thoughts on the Anglican situation...

Some progressive may worry, with Michael Sean Winters, "that some of these newcomers will also be nostalgists, anti-feminists, and anti-gay bigots."

Of course they will, but let's not worry about that. I mean, this is the Roman Catholic Church. A few thousand more of each would be a drop in the bucket compared to what we already have.

* * *

I doubt the numbers will be very substantial. I've seen a couple of articles that pointed out that the Anglican converts will be expected to accept the teachings about divorce, contraception, transubstantiation, and the pope as "God's representative on Earth." For many of us brought up in the Church, these are easily shrugged off as relics of a bygone era, but for prospective converts I imagine they will loom a bit more largely and will likely be stumbling blocks for many.

* * *

This could well hasten the arrival of a married Catholic priesthood, which was already inevitable. As someone who thinks the ordained ministry needs to be reformed far beyond the celibacy issue, I don't know how I feel about that. It will only delay the changes that really need to be made.

* * *

An article in The Times claims, "A 'rush to Rome' would resolve Catholicism's shortage of priests, win back some ancient church buildings annexed at the Reformation and reduce Anglicanism to an anxious, liberal rump."

Actually, it will do none of those things.

With Anglican laypeople coming over along with Anglican priests, the layperson-to-priest ratio is not likely to change much at all, much less "resolve" the problem.

In a comment attached to that story, a Rev. Peter Hawkins wrote,

Most ancient Church property in England is owned by the same officials that owned it at the time of the separation from Rome in 1570 with the excommunication of Elizabeth I. It is owned by Bishops, Deans, Chapters and Incumbents. They cease to hold their office if they become Roman Catholics or any other denomination. Modern Roman Catholic Church Property is owned by Diocesan Trusts. The Church of England in this matter is a series of linked corporations. It is most unlikely that any ancient property could or would be transferred to any Roman Catholic Trust.

Finally, there is good reason to believe that a lot of conservative Anglicans aren't going to see Rome as a solution to their problem. Some of the conservative Anglicans who have already broken away from the Anglican Church of Canada, for example, have already indicated their intention to stick with the Anglican Communion.

I have a feeling we'll look back on this in the future and wonder what all the fuss was about.

"American women religious are being bullied": Sister X

Commonweal has posted an interesting and rather moving article by "Sister X," a nun for over thirty years, reflecting on the Vatican "visitations." She writes anonymously because of the "threat of disciplinary action" that has discouraged all but a few sisters from saying anything publicly about this matter.

She doubts the Vatican is primarily motivated by concern for American nuns. The question they are really interested in, she thinks, is why there aren't more of them.

(I've suggested before that if the Vatican really wants to understand why more women aren't entering religious life, they should ask the women who aren't entering religious life. My guess is they know they wouldn't like the answer.)

Anyway, it's well worth reading. Check it out here.

Outrage over Vatican request to US bishops for funding

The comments on Tom Fox's article yesterday about Cardinal Rodé's request that the US bishops fund the $1.1 million investigation of American women religious have been so vitriolic (and, unusually for an NCR article, largely in agreement with one another) that Fox has written another article just about the comments.

It is rather astonishing that, in the midst of a recession, with churches being closed left and right due to a lack of money, the Vatican expects the US bishops to cough up that much money for something that is already so controversial among American Catholics. Really, how do they think people are going to react to that?

Well, Pope Benedict has said he wants a smaller church.

Colleen Kochivar-Baker has a nice post on this, accompanied by an amusing photo of Cardinal Rodé wearing an outfit that has to be seen to be believed, at her blog Enlightened Catholicism.

A conservative Catholic gets caught in the cafeteria

I wasn't planning on posting anything about the pope's new encyclical until I had a chance to read the entire thing and think about it a little bit.

Nevertheless, I did read George Weigel's already infamous National Review piece, which tried to separate the "clearly Benedictine passages" of the encyclical from the parts reflecting the "conventionally gauchiste and not-very-original thinking" of the Pontifical Council of Justice and Peace.

Weigel alleges that the pope -- who he had previously described as one who "says what he means and means what he says" -- has included naïve Justice and Peace material not because he agrees with it, but because he wants "to maintain the peace within his curial household."

I've read a few responses to Weigel's article, but none as informed or as devastating as one posted on a blog with the somewhat scary-sounding name Evangelical Catholicism, which I first came across at Anamchara.

Here's a nice piece of it:

[C]onsider the implications of what Weigel is saying with respect to Benedict XVI’s character. If Weigel is correct–if the Pope caved in to the Council for Justice and Peace–then we have a serious problem with our ecclesial leadership. What Weigel is telling us is that Pope Benedict XVI incorporated positions that were not his own into his first social encyclical. He didn’t do this in a speech, homily, address, or apostolic letter, but in an encyclical! Weigel is telling us that the Pope was willing to use the authority of a papal encyclical just “to maintain the peace within his curial household,” meanwhile misleading the faithful into believing that the contents of that encyclical are an authentic expression of papal teaching. If this narrative is true, then Weigel is telling us that the character and pastoral discretion of the Pope is up for serious questioning. Weigel is telling us that Benedict XVI really doesn’t mean what he says in the encyclical about the importance of Populorum Progressio, distributive justice, and the logic of gift, which is tantamount to accusing the Pope of being, at best, disingenuous and, at worst, dishonest, to the faithful of the Catholic Church. What is certain is that Weigel has retracted his earlier statements about Benedict XVI’s precision in communication, that the Pope “says what he means and means what he says.” Evidently, Weigel no longer believes this.

It's the best thing I've read online in a while. Check out the whole thing here.

Obama on abortion

Here's something I was not expecting to read today. This is an excerpt from a blog post by John L. Allen, Jr., of NCR:

In the run-up to President Barack Obama’s much-anticipated July 10 meeting with Pope Benedict XVI, an influential cardinal and Vatican adviser has praised Obama’s “humble realism” and compared the president’s approach to abortion to the thinking of St. Thomas Aquinas and early Christian tradition about framing laws in a pluralistic society.

Swiss Cardinal George Cottier, 87, former theologian of the papal household under Pope John Paul II, laid out those views in a cover essay in the current issue of 30 Giorni, perhaps the most widely read journal of Catholic affairs in Italy.

Styled as an analysis of two Obama speeches – his May 17 commencement address at the University of Notre Dame and his June 4 speech to the Islamic world in Cairo – Cottier’s essay was overwhelmingly positive, repeatedly arguing that Obama’s “realism”, as well as his commitment to finding “common ground”, resonate with Christian tradition and the social teaching of the Catholic church.

Seen through American eyes, perhaps the most striking element was Cottier’s analysis of what Obama had to say at Notre Dame. The university’s decision to invite Obama, and to award him an honorary degree, were widely criticized in Catholic circles in the States, given Obama’s positions on abortion, embryonic stem cell research and other life issues. More than 80 bishops publicly objected to the event.

Cottier, however, compared Obama’s Notre Dame address to Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Ecclesiam Suam, in its accent on dialogue and common ground, and to the document Dignitatis Humanae of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) on conducting the search for truth in a pluralistic society. Christians, Cottier wrote, “can be in agreement” with Obama’s “way of framing the search for solutions.”

Such progressive thinking, and from a Cardinal and Vatican advisor! As I write this, no comments have appeared yet on the site. I'm trying to anticipate what the response will be from our usually-quite-predictable brothers and sisters on the right. This is not someone who can be dismissed as a liberal or a dissident.

I strongly recommend reading the whole thing.

Shock: Women religious are not promoting the male-only priesthood!

I've been reading a bit about the Vatican-ordered "Apostolic Visitation" that is being conducted in the U.S., which is (according to the Vatican) meant to "look into the quality of life" of women religious in America.

I had not heard about a second investigation until I read about it on the New York Times website today:

The second investigation of nuns is a doctrinal assessment of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an umbrella organization that claims 1,500 members from about 95 percent of women’s religious orders. This investigation was ordered by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which is headed by an American, Cardinal William Levada.

Cardinal Levada sent a letter to the Leadership Conference saying an investigation was warranted because it appeared that the organization had done little since it was warned eight years ago that it had failed to “promote” the church’s teachings on three issues: the male-only priesthood, homosexuality and the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church as the means to salvation.(emphasis added; source)

I thought that was interesting. Imagine asking women to promote a male-only priesthood...

Pot calling the kettle black...

From the TimesOnline:

The Italian Catholic Church today berated the French government for "presuming" to lecture Pope Benedict XVI on Aids [sic] and condoms, saying that as a former colonial power, France was in no position to "give lessons." [source]

One wonders if the Church leadership's own long history of involvement in colonialism renders it similarly incompetent to "give lessons."

Why the Vatican is wrong about contraception

That the Vatican is dead wrong about contraception is obvious enough to most of us. While the secular media trots out statistics claiming that, contrary to Benedict's assertion, condoms actually do help to prevent the transmission of HIV, I don't think statistics are going to change anyone's mind.

I think it's better to argue with the Vatican on the Vatican's own terms, by calling greater attention to the teaching's fatal flaw: it's actually inconsistent with the acceptance of so-called "natural family planning."

There are people who will insist that there is a moral difference between the two. That there is not, however, has been demonstrated rather decisively in a letter written by Fr. Bernard Lonergan in 1968.

I reproduce here a lengthy explanation of Lonergan's brilliant argument that I posted on this blog several years ago, in two parts:

In September 1968, the Canadian Jesuit philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan wrote a letter to another priest in which he explained why the official church teaching about contraception cannot accurately be said to have been derived from natural law. As he points out in the conclusion of the letter, "when there is no valid reason whatever for a precept, that precept is not of natural law" (9).

His refutation of the argument from natural law is brilliant, but some people have difficulty with some of the philosophical terminology. Below are several passages from the letter. Following each one is an explanation that can be understood, I hope, by those without an academic background in philosophy.

Lonergan begins the letter by noting

"that traditional Catholic doctrine on the sexual act followed rigorously from the position adopted by Aristotle in his De generatione animalium. That position was that the seed of the male was an instrumental cause that changed the matter supplied by the female into a sentient being...The efficient causality of the male was needed to produce the sensitive principle or soul. On that basis it was clear that every act of insemination was of itself procreative and that any positive interference was an act of obstructing the seed in its exercise of its efficient causality." (8)

The important thing to understand here is that Aristotle saw the relationship between insemination and conception as simply one of cause-and-effect. Catholic theolgians shared this view and decided that anything that hinders the cause from achieving its intended effect is unacceptable: if God intends that this cause should have that effect, it is wrong to prevent the effect from taking place.

"Two factors, however, have combined to bring about a notable change in the views of Catholic theologians on this matter. The first, of course, is the fact that the Aristotelian position is erroneous. Insemination and conception are known now to be quite distinct. The act of inseminating is not an act of procreating in the sense that of itself, per se, it leads to conception. The relation of insemination to conception is just statistical and, far more frequently than not, insemination does not lead to conception" (8).

It seems odd that people should not have seen reproduction this way sooner, given that most acts of insemination clearly do not lead to a conception. These should have been seen as distinct events, simply because the latter only occasionally follows the former. At any rate, the recognition that the relationship between insemination and conception is statistical has replaced the view that insemination is procreative in and of itself.

"So there arises the question whether this statistical relationship of insemination to conception is sacrosanct and inviolable. Is it such that no matter what the circumstances, the motives, the needs, any deliberate modification of the statistical relationship must always be prohibited?" (8).

Lonergan is asking if it there are any circumstances in which one can do something to change the statistical probability of conception taking place.

"If one answers affirmatively, he is condemning the rhythm method. If negatively, he permits contraceptives in some cases. Like the diaphragm and the pill, the menstrual chart and the thermometer directly intend to modify the statistical relationship nature places between insemination and conception" (8).

This is, I would argue, the crux of the problem, and the failure to recognise this is one of the main reasons why contraception is still being debated in the church. Supporters of the ban on contraception were deprived of the one reasonable argument they could possibly have made by the allowance of "natural family planning." So they argue unreasonably, applying made-up moral principles and concocting all varieties of fallacious arguments. But that is a subject for another day.

From Part II:

"Besides erroneous Aristotelian biology there has been another factor leading to the change in Catholic theological opinion. It is that sexual intercourse between man and wife both expresses and fosters their mutual love. This is fully acknowledged in Vatican II and also in Humanae vitae. Aristotle treated not marital intercourse but generation as common to all animals. His oversight has been corrected by contemporary phenomenological inquiry." (8)

One thing one notices when reading Aristotle's De generatione animalium is precisely the fact that humans are treated as just another kind of animal. While it is certainly the case that animals generally have sex for no reason other than procreation, it was absurd to suggest that this is the only reason humans should have sex. And yet this attitude shaped Catholic thinking for many centuries. Abandoning the Jewish view that sexual pleasure is itself a gift of God, Catholic theologians adopted the Stoic view that sexual acts that were not specifically aimed at procreation were immoral.

Jerome denied that the church appoved "of any sexual intercourse except for the procreation of children" and asserted that "all sexual intercourse is unclean" (Adversus Jovinianum 1.20). Augustine made the same claim (see De Bono Conjugali, esp. §6). This view was softened somewhat over time, and Aquinas held that sexual acts could be "without sin, provided they be performed in due manner and order, in keeping with the end of human procreation" (ST II-II 153.2).

The notion that sex might have purposes other than sex appears to have first been suggested by Pius XI:

"For in matrimony as well as in the use of the matrimonial rights there are also secondary ends, such as mutual aid, the cultivating of mutual love, and the quieting of concupiscence which husband and wife are not forbidden to consider so long as they are subordinated to the primary end and so long as the intrinsic nature of the act is preserved." (Casti Connubii §59)

With the Second Vatican Council, procreation was no longer the only primary end of the marital act (cf. Gaudium et Spes §48). The encyclical Humanae Vitae by Paul VI reflected this. But there was still a flaw in the reasoning of that encyclical. As Lonergan explains,

"While the Encyclical acknowledges the "unitive sense" of marital intercourse, it claims that inseparable from it there is a "procreative sense." This would be easy enough to understand if one still clung to Aristotle's biology. But on contemporary biology, if insemination may be said to be inseparable from normal intercourse, conception cannot be said to be inseparable from insemination. The discharge of two million spermatozoa into the vagina does not mean or intend two million babies. Most of the time it does not mean or intend any babies at all. The relationship of insemination to conception is not the relation of a per se cause to a per se effect. It is a statistical relationship relating a sufficiently long and random series of inseminations with some conceptions." (9)

A typical married couple will have sex many times, but only a small fraction of these will result in children. On the other hand, it is quite possible that every act could serve as "an expression and sustainer of love" (9). To say that procreation is the primary purpose of marital intercourse, or that the unitive purpose of sex is inseparable from the "procreative sense," makes no sense when one considers that sex only rarely results in conception.

Lonergan's conclusion:

"I have concentrated on what I consider the main issue. Much seems deliberately done to obscure it. The issue is not whether or not people have to have reasons for accepting the Pope's decision. The issue is that, when there is no valid reason whatever for a precept, that precept is not of natural law. Again, re dissent, Vatican II refused to oblige theologians to silence after the Pope determined controverted issues." (9)

Lonergan's point, then, is not that Paul VI was necessarily wrong to condemn contraception, but that he was wrong to claim that the teaching is derived from natural law. Natural law is morality as determined by reason. There is no reasonable argument against contraception, so there is nothing in natural law to support the condemnation of contraception.

Some defenders of the official teaching have acknowledged that the natural law argument is incorrect. Still, they insist that the magisterium could not have erred, so the condemnation will have to stand on some other grounds. Here is a quotation from John Ford (a Jesuit who was involved in drafting Humanae Vitae) and Germain Grisez:

"The Church cannot substantially err in teaching a very serious doctrine of faith or morals through all the centuries -- even through one century -- a doctrine consistently and insistently proposed as one necessarily to be followed in order to attain eternal salvation…If the Church could err as atrociously as this, the authority of the ordinary magisterium in moral matters would be stultified; and the faithful henceforth could have no confidence in moral teaching handed down by the magisterium, especially in sexual questions." ("Contraception and the Infallibility of the Ordinary Magisterium," 302-303)

This exercise in desperation theology falls immediately flat when we consider previous reversals of doctrines that had been taught for centuries: the condemnations of usury and religious freedom, as well as the teaching that slavery was morally licit, to name the most obvious examples. Should we have no confidence in the magisterium because of those?

There was a time, before Humanae Vitae, when the magisterium could have changed its teaching, and relatively little damage would have been done. Contraception would have joined usury, slavery, and religious freedom as something the magisterium used to teach differently about, and people would have been as broken up about it as they are about the earlier changes. Instead, Paul VI and (especially) JPII went the other way, condemning contraception with great vehemence and thereby staking the credibility of the magisterium on this very issue. I know I'm not the only one who thinks that will prove to have been a very grave error.

Works Cited

The Lonergan letter was published in the Lonergan Studies Newsletter, which is available in PDF format here. It's on pages 8-9 of the first issue in the file.

Bringing back childish things

This is from a terrific article posted today on NCR. After detailing some of the numerous steps backward made by the Vatican in recent months, Jamie L. Manson writes,

At the same time, the faithful were given new opportunities to reduce their time in purgatory by days or years. They could even have their purgatorial sentence revoked via the plenary indulgence (assuming, of course, no additional sins are committed). Though they cannot be bought (such practices were outlawed in 1567), indulgences can be earned through charitable contributions and good works (limit one indulgence per sin per day).

Psychologists define "magical thinking" as the belief that one's thoughts, words, or actions can exert more power or influence over events than one actually has.

Lately I'm wondering if some of those in the church’s leadership aren't struggling with a serious case of it. Not only are they assuming power that belongs to God alone, they are using functions like excommunication and indulgences on a people for whom these realities are no longer relevant or real. Indulgences and excommunications only create barriers between people and the understanding they seek, and they drive the church into an ever-deepening irrelevance, especially for younger generations.

I agree that the leaders of the Church are definitely struggling with magical thinking. That they think they can decide that this or that action will reduce one's time in Purgatory by a given length of time is evidence enough of that.

I wish I could agree that "they are using functions like excommunication and indulgences on a people for whom these realities are no longer relevant or real." There are a lot of superstitious Catholics out there who are going to eat this up.

With regard to the use of excommunication (or the penalty of interdict) to exclude people from the sacraments, Manson writes,

Though the church may attempt to magically separate the children of God from the table of God, Eucharist will always rise out of the people. True presence, true Communion becomes real not by the will of church authorities, but through the loving will of God. The power belongs to God and God alone. If our church leaders had their minds and hearts centered in God, rather than on their own power, they would realize that they were truly powerless when it comes to determining who is entitled to be a recipient of God’s presence in this world. They would realize the absurdity of even assuming such a power. God breaks through, regardless of the defenses we construct.

The grace of God cannot be restricted to official channels. (Remember John the Baptist? Or Jesus himself, for that matter? Jewish laymen, both of them.)

You can read the entire article here.

Rethinking Benedict's SSPX decision

I've been thinking about the reaction to Pope Benedict's decision to "rehabilitate" the excommunicated bishops of the SSPX. From people on the progressive wing of the Church, the reaction has been one of almost unanimous indignation.

I wonder, though, if the world would really be better off with SSPX operating independently of the Vatican. It seems to me that bringing them back into the fold might ultimately have the effect of diluting their extremism.

Perhaps we've already started to see this. Antisemitic material on their website, previously ignored by the outside world, became the subject of much discussion. The sudden increase in attention resulted in at least some of it being taken down.

Reversing the excommunications is only a first step to bringing SSPX into the mainstream church. I don't, frankly, think it's going to happen. The Vatican is not going to make the kind of concessions the SSPX types are going to require. The whole attempt will look, on the surface, like a failure. But the antisemitism of the SSPX, once ignored by the outside world, has been revealed for everyone to see.