Mirror of Justice

Obama: A Vatican II President?

That's what Notre Dame theologian Fr. Richard McBrien seems to suggest, here.  I wonder whether the MOJ bloggers who are "evangelical" Catholics (you know who you are!) will agree ...

"Evangelical" bloggers?  "Vatican II bloggers?  Hmm ...

Another Reader's Response on Homosexuality and Christian Faith

Another MOJ reader offered this comment to Greg's reply to my response to his original post on the ELCA's recent decision to allow parishes to allow noncelibate homosexualis in committed relationships to the pulpit:

"Sisk asks: And what Christian group of any significance size and venerability has accepted a revision of traditional church teaching on sexual morality, thereby setting aside the complementarity of male and female as a guiding principle for sexual relationships, while still maintaining orthodox beliefs on the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ, on His Church, and on the Scriptures?

"The answer to this is easy: All of them except one. To my knowledge, every single Christian Church other than the Catholic Church is accepting of the use of birth-control between married couples. And there is a very strong argument to be made that in accepting such a use of birth-control these churches have accepted "a revision of traditional church teaching on sexual morality" that is no less radical than the revision entailed by condoning homosexual sexual acts and partnerships....

"Surely Sisk would agree that many of these birth-control-accepting churches retain recognizably orthodox beliefs on the incarnation, death and resurrection of Christ, etc..."

Background from a Reader with Experience on the Lay Governance Issue

Here's some interesting background on this issue from a reader (who incidently has an interesting post on the geographical distribution of the 7 deadly sins at his blog):

I have had some experience as a lay brother in a clerical religious order, and can perhaps provide some insight into the dynamics of lay leadership and priestly leadership.

 

First, the fact that a lay brother is being cassated as a major superior of a clerical congregation (Maryknoll is, at root, an association of priests) has nothing to do with the broader governing authority of the laity. It simply means that, in a society whose mission is clerical the governing authority should be held by a cleric. Now, in other congregations and orders, such as monasteries in the Benedictine tradition, or the various Franciscan orders, the mission of the order is not clerical and ordination is not (theoretically) the norm; so a non-ordained members have and continue to be made superiors and major superiors. Further, there are no requirements for lay associations, such as the Legion of Mary, to have clerics involved in governance. For organs of the Church whose mission is essentially lay in character, the governing authority is appropriately held by (and sometimes restricted to) the laity.

 

Now, perhaps the Maryknoll Missioners should re-write their foundational documents to reflect the changes in their membership and sense of mission; but unless they do so, they remain essentially a clerical congregation, and appropriately require major superiors to be clerics.

 

I would note that this also extends to the office of Pastor in a parish. The purpose of the parish is essentially a clerical one: to unite the faithful in the sacramental presence of Christ. So an ordained person is rightly required as the highest authority in the parish. But, in this country, we have tended to associate the parish (or the diocese) with the whole of the Church. There are many acts of the Church, works of charity and service and education and so on, which are not properly the acts of a parish. These are, appropriately, led by lay persons or non-ordained religious.

 

Moreover, the entire governance of the secular sphere is the appropriate realm of the laity. To this end, ordained clerics are forbidden to hold secular political office.

 

In short, the question is not one of a "restrictive view of the role of lay persons," but one of the nature of the governance required by a given organization.

I'm not sure that this explanation of the governance documents answers some of the larger questions Susan and I have about Church attitudes toward the role of the laity, but it does help explain this particular situation.

Obama at Notre Dame, redux

The cover of the new issue of America magazine says "Notre Dame revisited."  The issue includes essays by my own bishop -- and the bishop in whose diocese the University of Notre Dame is located -- John D'arcy, and also the archbishop emeritus of San Francisco, John R. Quinn. 

It would be unfortunate if readers of America took these pieces as "pro" and "con", or "point" and "counter-point."  It seems to me that they are, in fact, addressing different questions.  Archbishop Quinn seemed to treat as closely related what, in my view, are two very different sets of questions:  (1) Questions about the nature of a Catholic university and the relationship of such a university to the Church, specifically, the teaching office of the local bishop; and (2) questions about the actions that a bishop should take, in order to bear faithful witness to the Church's teachings, especially on the sanctity of life, with respect to political leaders and candidates who advance unjust policies.  He wrote:

The dilemma that confronts us today is whether the church’s vision is best realized on the issue of abortion by focusing our witness on the clear moral teaching about abortion and public law, or whether it is preferable or obligatory to add to that teaching role the additional role of directly sanctioning public officials through sustained, personally focused criticism, the denial of honors or even excommunication.

This dilemma has troubled us for many years now, but it has been crystallized in the controversy over the decision of the University of Notre Dame to award an honorary degree in May of this year to the president of the United States. This is the first time in the history of this conference that a large number of bishops of the United States have publicly condemned honoring a sitting president, and this condemnation has further ramifications due to the fact that this president is the first African-American to hold that high office.

I worry, again, that Archbishop Quinn is slipping too easily from the "should bishops condemn political leaders directly, deny communion to Catholic politicians, etc.?" debate to the "what does it mean to be a Catholic university?" debate.  Bishop D'arcy's essay is not about the importance of condemning pro-abortion-rights politicians (I am confident that he would agree with much of what Archbishop Quinn writes about, e.g., the need for bishops to avoid the appearance of partisanship, etc.).  Instead, he asks:

What is the relationship of the Catholic university to the local bishop? No relationship? Someone who occasionally offers Mass on campus? Someone who sits on the platform at graduation? Or is the bishop the teacher in the diocese, responsible for souls, including the souls of students—in this case, the students at Notre Dame? Does the responsibility of the bishop to teach, to govern and to sanctify end at the gate of the university? In the spirit of Ex Corde Ecclesiae, which places the primary responsibility on the institution, I am proposing these questions for the university. . . .

As bishops, we must be teachers and pastors. In that spirit, I would respectfully put these questions to the Catholic universities in the diocese I serve and to other Catholic universities.

Do you consider it a responsibility in your public statements, in your life as a university and in your actions, including your public awards, to give witness to the Catholic faith in all its fullness?

What is your relationship to the church and, specifically, to the local bishop and his pastoral authority as defined by the Second Vatican Council?

Finally, a more fundamental question: Where will the great Catholic universities search for a guiding light in the years ahead? Will it be the Land O’Lakes Statement or Ex Corde Ecclesiae? The first comes from a frantic time, with finances as the driving force. Its understanding of freedom is defensive, absolutist and narrow. It never mentions Christ and barely mentions the truth. The second text, Ex Corde Ecclesiae, speaks constantly of truth and the pursuit of truth. It speaks of freedom in the broader, Catholic philosophical and theological tradition, as linked to the common good, to the rights of others and always subject to truth. Unlike Land O’Lakes, it is communal, reflective of the developments since Vatican II, and it speaks with a language enlightened by the Holy Spirit.

On these three questions, I respectfully submit, rests the future of Catholic higher education in this country and so much else.

Like I said, I am confident that Bishop D'arcy agrees with Archbishop Quinn regarding the importance of "cordiality."  (It would be very unfortunate if the juxtaposition of the two essays led any America readers to imagine that Bishop D'arcy has been anything but cordial.)  I wonder, though, what Archbishop Quinn thinks are the answers to Bishop D'arcy's questions?

"The Church and the University"

The August 31 edition of America has Bishop D'Arcy's "pastoral reflection on the controversy at Notre Dame."  Read it here.

More On the Leadership Role of Laity

 A reader had these comments on the lay leadership discussion:

Like yourself, and Prof. Stabile, I'm puzzled by the lack of support for lay leadership of religious institutes that have established lay membership.  I find it particularly puzzling in light of the attention paid in recent pontificates to how the laity can lead lives of heroic virtue (see Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati, St. Joseph Moscati, St. Gianna Beretta Molla).  Presumably if you can do that, you can lead.  So I put the question to a seminarian friend of mine, who attributed it to, at least in part, the formation of those presently in leadership roles.    He noted that this is likely to change (I think JPII's reflections on the laity will help), and pointed to the increasing use of laity (both men and women) as chancellors of dioceses as evidence that the shift was already occurring.

Sin (or, the little black book)

Metallica's "Black Album" was very cool.  So, I am confident, is my friend Gary Anderson's (Theology, Notre Dame) new (and very black) book, "Sin." 

What is sin? Is it simply wrongdoing? Why do its effects linger over time? In this sensitive, imaginative, and original work, Gary Anderson shows how changing conceptions of sin and forgiveness lay at the very heart of the biblical tradition. Spanning nearly two thousand years, the book brilliantly demonstrates how sin, once conceived of as a physical burden, becomes, over time, eclipsed by economic metaphors. Transformed from a weight that an individual carried, sin becomes a debt that must be repaid in order to be redeemed in God’s eyes.

 

Anderson shows how this ancient Jewish revolution in thought shaped the way the Christian church understood the death and resurrection of Jesus and eventually led to the development of various penitential disciplines, deeds of charity, and even papal indulgences. In so doing it reveals how these changing notions of sin provided a spur for the Protestant Reformation.

 

Broad in scope while still exceptionally attentive to detail, this ambitious and profound book unveils one of the most seismic shifts that occurred in religious belief and practice, deepening our understanding of one of the most fundamental aspects of human experience.

As Nigel Tufnel might have put it, "[i]t's like, how much more black could this be? and the answer is none. None more black."

More on Homosexuality and Christian Faith

One reader offers these reactions to Greg's reply to my response to his original post on the ELCA's recent decision to allow parishes to allow noncelibate homosexualis in committed relationships to the pulpit:

"I greatly appreciated your comment in response to Greg's original post entitled "The ECLA, the Episcopal Church, and the Integration of Church Teaching on Sexual Morality with Christian Doctrine." I think that you are entirely correct that questioning one issue does not destroy the entire structure of the Catholic Church's teachings. John T. Noonan in his book "The Church that Can and Cannot Change" discusses issues on which the Church has changed its position over time because of people within the Chuch questioning them.

"I see that Greg has responded to your post demanding empirical evidence for your views. In particular, he asked two questions: "Has it not been true that the minority of political societies in the world that have recognized same-sex unions (something that, as a political matter, I myself am tempted to support in some manner) are also characterized by a persisting or increasing libertinism on matters of sexual behavior? Has orthodox Christian faith increased in any such country (or has the opposite occurred)? "

"The first question confuses correlation with causation as there has been a general decline in actual church attendance in most Western developed nations since WWII (although polls in the US show that those claiming to attend church regularly have been relatively stable from 1939 to today - about 40%) while attitudes about sex became more liberal during the same period. It would be difficult for him to prove that one caused the other or that other factors did not play a significantly stronger role in causing the decline in church attendance. The second question seems a bit of a catch-22 because Greg would probably exclude as "orthodox" any Christian faith that condone same-sex unions.

"For what it is worth, a survey earlier this year reported that the number of people who regularly attended church in Britain, one of the few nations that permis homosexuals to marry, increased in 2008 from 21% to 26%. In addition, homosexuals in the United States who profess to be Christian (about 70% which is pretty high given the extent to which Christian Churches have traditionally demonized homosexuals) tend to be more active in the churches to which they belong than their straight brethen according to a survey by George Barna, an evangelica pollster.  As for "orthodox" teachings of the Catholic Church keeping people in the pews in Europe, this doesn't seem to be the case in Italy where a recent survey revealed that chuch attendance was far lower than previously thought and much closer to that of Britain." 

More on the Integration of Teaching on Sexual Morality and the Foundations of Orthodox Christian Faith

Susan Stabile responds to my earlier posting and argues that it indeed is possible for a religious organization or denomination to “pluck” the thread of traditional church teaching on the morality of same-sex sexual conduct without unraveling the rest of the garment of Christian doctrine.  I do hope that she’s right.  Because some mainline denominations in the United States are moving in that direction, and even recognizing that this represents a small minority of Christians in this country much less the world, I genuinely do hope that they will be able to fuse together a modern progressive view of sexuality with a traditional orthodox faith in Christ.

But I wonder where is the empirical basis for Susan’s optimism?  Has it not been true that the minority of political societies in the world that have recognized same-sex unions (something that, as a political matter, I myself am tempted to support in some manner) are also characterized by a persisting or increasing libertinism on matters of sexual behavior?  Has orthodox Christian faith increased in any such country (or has the opposite occurred)?  And what Christian group of any significance size and venerability has accepted a revision of traditional church teaching on sexual morality, thereby setting aside the complementarity of male and female as a guiding principle for sexual relationships, while still maintaining orthodox beliefs on the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ, on His Church, and on the Scriptures?  I don’t mean to be “snarky” here, but truly wonder whether such beliefs can be held side-by-side over time and with a critical mass of the faithful.

In response to my earlier post, Susan understandably resists what she reads as my “implying that one can’t question one issue without risking everything falling to pieces risks cutting off useful questioning and discussing of issues.”  But is this just “one issue”? Or does logic and experience indicate that there is something about this particular issue that presents a breaking-point?

Could it be that, in contrast with most other matters, traditional Christian teaching on sexual morality is so well-developed, so ontologically grounded in the traditional Christian understanding of what it means to be human and to be man and woman, and so anchored in Scripture that it cannot easily – or perhaps at all – be separated from the rest of the Deposit of Faith?  Yes, we’ve all seen the valiant efforts of some to reconstruct that tradition, to invent a new theology of the human body, or to explain away those scriptural passages.  But, if we are honest with ourselves, don’t such efforts always prove to be a little too clever, at least if presented as consistent with tradition rather than as a new reconstruction (and thus one that departs from orthodox theology)?

So here’s my question:  might it be that an assault on that dimension of the magisterial authority addressing sexual relationships is so revolutionary as to place the magisterial authority itself and generally at risk, so as to lead to an inevitable post-modern retreat from tradition and in the direction of further elevating individual experience and self-sovereignty above teaching, tradition, and Scripture?  (To be sure, some on and off this list might welcome such a diminution of magisterial authority and a movement away from orthodoxy and tradition.  But then they would simply be proving the point, that traditional Christian beliefs on the essence of the faith are difficult to reconcile with present-day liberal sexual mores.)

In sum, might the surgery necessary to excise moral teaching on sexual relationships from the rest of the body of Christian tradition prove to be so radical that the patient cannot survive?

Greg Sisk

"Judge Upholds Law Requiring Doctors to Tell Women Abortion Ends Life"

According to the Catholic Spirit (Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis):

A federal judge in South Dakota ruled Aug. 20 that a 2005 South Dakota law requiring doctors to inform patients that abortion kills a human being is constitutional.

U.S. District Judge Karen Schreier handed down the decision in a lawsuit filed against the state by Planned Parenthood Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota.

Schreier said that although doctors must use the term "human being," it can be used in a "biological sense" and not an "ideological" one. The law specifies that a woman must be told that abortion "will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being."

In the same ruling she overturned a requirement in the law that women be informed that abortion can spur suicidal thoughts, increasing the risk of suicide. She termed such disclosures "untruthful and misleading."