Excellent post. What drivel! This fellow is mightily offended that the incessant naval-gazing of "educated baby boomers" were bypassed by JPII in favor of eternal truths. He is offended that all of these decades of deconstruction have not resulted in the complete Protestant-ation and Modernization of the Catholic Church.
And his description of "uncharitable" neoCaths is...shall we say...uncharitable. Majorly.
Well, I'm offended too! He didn't include me in his wrath! 
You and every other Catholic blogger I love to read. Thanks again for the kind words.
Cool down before blogging and committing mistakes like "BushHilter" and "Benedict XIV"... 
Whether your fury is a holy one I doubt....
I've corrected the mistakes. Thanks for being a second set of eyes.
Rebecca's your better half? Small world. I'm predicting a blogstorm for the good father, and I'll be doing a "circus" of sorts. Nice commentary.
Phil Blosser has never as far as I know explained how his understanding of the resurrection differs from mine. However, he comes a little closer to concreteness in his latest. He says that I 're-interpret it, by classifying it an "eschatological" event, which means that it's relegated to the non-empirical, non-factual, non-historical realm of the noumenal "Christ of Faith." This leaves (me) free to deny that the Resurrection ever happened to the "Jesus of History.'
I do not think that this is exactly what I am saying. I say that the resurrection is the inbreaking of the eschaton into history, an objective and real event, attested by the "appearing" of Christ to the Apostles and his presence as a life-giving Spirit to the early Church and to the Church ever since. It is empirical in a sense, just as the outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost is.
This inbreaking of the eschaton means that the final glorification promised to all Christians is already enjoyed by Christ in his human nature, the first-fruits. Later doctrine teaches that it is already enjoyed by Mary as well. This eschatological reality is called the resurrection of the body. What is sown a physical body is raised a spiriual body.
Phil Blosser thinks that Paul in I Cor 15 would agree with him that the resurrection is an empirical event; historical in the sense of something that an objective nonbelieving historian would have been able to register if he had been present. But it cannot have been so obvious. Matthew says that some of those who saw the risen Jesus doubted of the reality of what they saw (the scene, set on a symbolic Matthean mountain is no doubt a theological construction). Luke has a very solid risen Jesus who eats. But this too is a theological construction directed against docetists who reduced the resurrection to a ghost story -- correcting perhaps the misleading impression that might be left by talk of the risen Christ walking through closed doors (as in John 20). Paul does not speak of touching the solid body of the risen one; his account of the resurrection is as spiritual or pneumatic as that of Paul Tillich. The empty tomb, if it is a historical reality, would certainly be an empirical event in the most normal sense of "empirical". But the empty tomb is at most a sign of the resurrection. The resurrection itself is a reality of a different order.
Phil Blosser creates a heavy dualism between eschatology and history, but in reality the resurrection and exaltation of Jesus will simply not fit into the category of historical events in the positivistic sense. It is a historical-eschatological event that is irreducible to the signs and isolated experiences that attest it.
The narrations of the closing chapters of the four Gospels give many indications of how they are to be read -- not as a straightforward record but as traces of an overwhelming event that could not be captured in ordinary empirical terms.
Resurrexit tertia die secundum Scri
Resurrexit tertia die secundum Scripturas -- to embrace this truth of faith is not made easier by fundamentalist insistence on taking the gospel texts as literal records. Phil Blosser's version of the resurrection has caused many Christians to lose their faith, and many more hang on to it only in a constant debilitating battle against doubt. The Pauline vision of the resurrection is in contrast warranted by the sense of Christ present in his Church, eschatologically victorious over the present evil age. It is not an agonized hole in corner affair but the integral horizon of Christian historical existence.
It seems that Fr, O'Leary is dumping this text into blogs that have linked his neocath post. I refer readers who are interested to Phil Blosser's blog: http://pblosser.blogspot.com/
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I hardly think Blosser is a 'fundamentalist' and am indeed aware of how a 'back to basics' methodology can to violence to any text, including the Bible. I think Blosser and most thinking Christians would agree that the resurrection narrative is the very last places one should read in a mythological sense. Other texts in the Bible can be enagaged with more latitude.
I read about this post before reading it here, and then I read O Leary's post itself.
He really, REALLY is not saying half the things you say he's saying. And the reality is he's spot on when he talks about these people - their anachronism, their itchy trigger fingers. For example, he writes...
"The Neocaths are ill at ease with modernity. They feel they have seen through the myths of secular humanism, and the liberal culture of democratic discussion which they see as relativistic. They bewail confusion and uncertainty and call for a firm voice of authority to put an end to it."
How is that in any way inaccurate? Or this...
"The Neocaths tend to sexual puritanism. Appalled by the consequences of the sexual revolution, AIDS, abortion, cohabitation, adultery, divorce, pornography, they retreat to the strictest Catholic doctrine as an ark of refuge. They are very vocal advocates and practitioners of a strictly-interpreted concept of sexual fidelity, with a strong emphasis on procreative sexuality."
He's right about their position, and he's not even saying he disagrees with it.
He didn't say that JP2 WAS manipulating the crowd, just that there was a criticism.
He didn't say that JP2 was Mao, just comparing a deliberate communications technique. It's a valid point.
"They distrust a list of Vatican II generation writers such as Rahner, Schillebeeckx, Raymond Brown, Richard P. McBrien, whom they often hastily denounce as modernists"
This is inaccurate? Don't think so.
So O Leary is ridiculous, when he's entirely accurate about detailing a sociall trend?
Way to kill the messenger.
Now, I happen to be very fond of NeoCaths, not because of their totalitarian agenda and anti-intellectualism, of course - but because at least they read books.
Jordan, I didn't intend to say that O'Leary has his facts wrong. As I pointed out, he is very well read and obviously no dummy. I object to the spin he puts on his reportage. One of his smart tricks is make him hard to pin down. Reminds me of reading Derrida at times.
"They feel they have seen through the myths of secular humanism." It is no stretch to say that a Christian should not feel a pull to conform to the times - not matter if those times are 200 AD or 2000 AD.
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