The response from these gents is always the same: God in His infinite, fathomless, unmeasurable mercy, allows us to do and think whatever we want, and instead of judging each of us guilty of our sins will, in the gaia-mother of all deus ex machinae, say to all, "you know all that sin and judgement stuff in the Bible, Church tradition, yada yada yada -- well, fageddabout it!!! Now come here and give Me a big hug!!!"
This is a horrendous, and I think often deliberate, misinterpretation of "mercy", though anyone who points that out is likely to be browbeaten as a horrible, hate-filled psychological cripple.
Nevertheless, mercy without judgement is pointless. It is sham mercy, sham love, similar in kind to the "love" of negligent parents, who let their kids run wild and "be themselves", and are endlessly bewildered that they grow up to be selfish, cruel, undisciplined, hopelessly confused adults.
Yeah, what Dr. Blosser said.
My Lord, that was one of the most beautiful things I have read before and I have read alot! Thank you Dr. Blosser! I am going to print it off and read it every time a more "enlightened" dissenting priest attemts to belitte my Faith! bravo and thank you!
bridgit
1. I am glad Fr. O'Leary wrote. It led to a stimulating debate. I disagree with him on every single point he tried to make, but it is good to see someone who really believes what he believes write that sort of thing down like that. As I see it, the problem with the whole 'O'Leary approach' to religion is what Andre Frossard made of it: if what you are saying is true, why did the first Christians die for the faith?
2. Chesterton wrote an article entitled "On Household Gods and Goblins" in which he describes the disappointment felt by children who went to see Maeterlinck's play about the Blue Bird: "they were partly dissatisfied with it because it did not end with a Day of Judgment. . . .For children are innocent and love justice; while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy."
Warren
"eisegetical"! That's priceless. Did you coin it yourself?
(No need to confess being a geeky Classicist after that comment, I suppose)
Gee! Well, just now I'm reading an excellent theology book, Ratzinger's Eschatologie, 1977. I note that he says hell and eternal punishment cannot be interpreted away, but then goes on immediately to recall the hope of final redemption for all found in Origen, Gregory of Nyssa and other eminent Fathers as well as the misericordia traditions of the middle ages. He then invokes a mystical descent into hell in John of the Cross and Therese of Lisieux. These grave, modest pages, trembling on the brink of hope, seem quite exemplary to me.
In the early part of the book he distances himself from Martin Werner, whom he praised 11 years earlier, and plays down any discontinuity between Jesus's announcement of the Kingdom and the Church's announcement of the Christ, pointing out that Jesus is the Kingdom in person. I admit that I should reconsider the "step back" model I follow in my essay on "Demystifying the Incarnation" on my blog-site; or at least should stress more that while uncovering the earliest layers is a challenge to stale presentations of tradition, it cannot be a criterion for discounting later understandings, since the Spirit is at work in the community all the time.
Talking asses, axe-heads floating on water, literalistic or fundamentalistic hermeneutics of biblical texts -- you hold up your belief in all this as evidence that you have a genuine sense of the holy and the transcendent and that I have not. What purpose do you serve by presenting Catholicism in this light? All the accusations of intellectual pride and self-deification that you absurdly throw my way could easily boomerang on yourself, it seems. This is Chestertonian bumptiousness, not responsible thinking, and surely not worthy of a Doctor of Philosophy.
If you really want to have your blood boiling, you might take a look at my previous bully pulpit http://forums.nytimes.com/top/op...t&
anchor=1#3796. But do not ask me to stand over everything I said there -- it records my changing moment to moment responses to recent events in Rome.
"It is good to see someone who really believes what he believes write that sort of thing down like that".
I would agree with Warren, if O'Leary was not a priest, of the order of Melchisedech, ordained to offer the Sacrifice of the New Covenant. It is always disheartening to see a cleric say heresy.
Dr.Blosser's text was a perfect "I withstand you to the face" moment. Many priests need such moments, especially in these troubled days.
Pour ceux qui lisent le français, il y a un article excellent contre cette idée d'un enfer vide:
"L'Enfer et l'Ésperance: réponse à Hans Urs von Balthasar", par l'abbé Guy Pagès:
http://www.jesusmarie.com/
elus_g..._balthasar.html
I love you Joe, I don't wish you harm, but that doesn't mean I have to like you. Your comments on the net are like dog poos in Amsterdam, there are plenty and must be avoided. So, could you be more charitable by putting JOE'S OPINION at the beginning of your entries? Thanks.
Now for those of you who are tired of all this rabies theologorum and antitheologorum, please take another look at my new blog for an article on Goethe and Henry James, my two favorite writers (along with Proust). And please remember what Goethe has to say about theology: Es liegt in ihr so viel verborgnes Gift... (There lies in it so much concealed poison; Faust I 1986).
I have taken a look at that French piece on Von Balthasar. Am I to understand that Von Balthasar (favorite theologian of both Paul VI and John Paul II) has joined me in the dog pooch along with Curran, Kung, Rahner and Schillebeeckx (what glorious company Phil Blosser has given me!). But oddly enough the author of the article does not exclude the hope that all will be saved, thus joining John Paul II and even Benedict XVI. I did not read it carefully enough to discover what awful heresy he attributes to Von Balthasar. But I remember that Von B. died two days before he was to be created a Cardinal and that some doctor of theology declared that this was divine punishment for his refusal to recognize that the flames of hell have a physical reality (or so the story was told to me). Has the Church gone mad? I have never thought much about hell, but here are my views:
Hell is the real possibility of final loss, and in a way the guarantee of our full human freedom.
We are entitled to pray for the salvation of all, and as John Paul II says, it can be part of the virtue of hope to hope for this universal salvation.
Fear of final loss is part of the legitimate motivation of leading a good life, but it should ideally not be the dominant motive in a Christian life, for two reasons: the sinner can always turn to Christ who became sin for our sake and who loved us while we were yet sinners; and if the Spirit pours perfect love into our hearts it casts out fear.
Just one last ironic reflection on Phil Blosser's article above. He fails to identify ONE SINGLE POINT on which I can be found in conflict with Catholic orthodoxy! Instead he mentions completely harmless matters, such as that I wrote an article on Luther (which he has not read apparently), or that I consider his own views old-fashioned and inadequate (I did not say "ossified"), or that I am not a biblical fundamentalist. The rest of his sweeping declarations are either wild generalizations or utterly baseless -- such as the central accusation that I consider the Bible a merely human book (I do not, I consider it a divine book, in the sense that the Holy Spirit inspired and worked through its human authors -- but I deny the docetist account of the human authorship that underlies fundamentalism).
No, Von Balthasar was orthodox. Which is why the article rephrases his conclusions, but does not reject them.
Man, you really do have lots of free time!
I just added a piece on Joyce, The Dead, to my burgeoning site. This is a godsend, enabling me to haul many forgotten pieces out of various limbos. I am happy to hear that Von Balthasar was orthodox. Perhaps there is hope for Rahner as well? And dare I put in a word at your august tribunal for that excellent theologian Schillebeeckx? Since he survived three orthodoxy hearings at Rome, he can't be such a terrible modernist as people here seem to think.
"Man, you really do have lots of free time!"
New Catholic | 06.22.05 - 7:43 am |
That's an odd remark from someone who casually throws out smears -- do you not even leave your victims time to defend themselves?
fr Joe feed us yes do not poison us. our catholic constitution will spit out your poison because it is making us sick. like jews of old we wondered in the wilderness for forty years. enough already let us taste milk and honey prepared by Holy Mother Church and die in Her embrace tony g.
A New Ager or a Buddhist could affirm every article in the Nicene Creed, provided its interpretation was "properly nuanced."
I just spent ten minutes composing a message on the theme of Romans 8.1 and it has vanished...
OK, tony, here goes again, in shorter form.
Two experiences mark the Christian -- the LAW which judges and condemns and the GOSPEL which pardons and saves.
God's foreign work is to condemn us, his proper work is to have mercy (according to Luther, who was inspired by a text in Isaiah).
Ratzinger praises John of the Cross and Therese de Lisieux for living the pain of hell. Luther and Melanchthon did so too. It is what they called the terrors of the Law.
This was crushing and depressing for the early Luther until he realized that salvation comes from outside us, from hearing a word of authority, the word of Christ saying THY SINS ARE FORGIVEN which is given weight and substance in the Eucharist FOR THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS.
This location of grace and salvation outside his own subjectivity with its doubts and fears gave Luther a standing in joyful and confident faith, and banished the moroseness and anxiety that had plagued him. This serenity and stability in Christ is the birthright of every Christian, and what spurred Luther most in his apostolate was the desire to free souls from their battle with shadows so that they could turn to Christ and be claimed by his word of forgiveness.
The dialectic of Law and Gospel is the highest art of the Christian. We become trapped in morose supsicion in our dealings with God, so that even in reading the Gospel texts we have ears only for the Law and none for the Gospel. Luther says there is no need to hide from God or from Christ -- to turn to God in Christ is always good -- even if we meet first the condemnation of the Law the sweetness of the Gospel follows close on its heels. Where sin abounds, grace superabounds.
This is the kind of thing Christian theology is about -- which is why I urge you to read Barth Church Dogmatics 2/2 (not 2/1 as I may have said earlier)pp. 1-600, about how Christ takes on all our sin and condemnation to share with us his righteousness and grace.
Coming from a country that has suffered greatly from religious sectarianism I am shocked by the virulent anti-Protestant rhetoric of many here, something that the Church today sternly discourages. Let us not forget that the language of hatred has caused much bloodshed in the past (hatred of gays, btw, has led to actual lynchings in the USA today, just as racial hatred did in the past). Catholic theologians today realize how much we have learned and how much we have yet to learn from the Protestant traditions. Catholics like O. Peach, J. Wicks and many others are now to the fore in Luther scholarship. As to Karl Barth, denounced as a secularist by Dr Blosser, he was saluted as a great theologians by Von Balthasar and has had a deep and wholesome influence on Catholic thought over the last 60 years. Pius XII is said to have acclaimed Barth as the greatest theologians since Aquinas, prompting Barth to remark, "I guess he must be infallible after all!" I second Jerry's remark that 90% of the suspicion and polemic swirling around here comes from FEAR. Why not face your own fears, take them to the Lord in prayer, instead of projecting them on others?
correction O Peach should be Otto Hermann PESCH, OP
This thread reads like a modern day lynching. Cotton Mather's legacy lives on -- right in the heart of the nominal Catholic faithful. Let's resurrect the Scarlet Letter! Sad.
If the truth be told, most of the "chimes" have a great deal to learn from O'Leary and vice versa. A dialogue would be in order.
O'Leary has never once taken to insult anyone. But he is the brunt of indecencies that are rather amazing. And yet, the shallowness of most comments that target him overwhelm any pretense to be otherwise. They are intended to be insulting, pure and simple, and that is a grevious sin.
Is this the age of the straw man? The essay itself that began this thread is a huge straw man. It is a convenient intellectual construct. Clearly, the fissures in the Church cannot be address so simply, or in such language.
And what is this mumbling about sham mercy? Isn't it obvious from this thread what happens when Charity is absent a person's life? As St. Thomas says, none of the virtues can be lived fully without Charity. Absolutely none. Certainly not the moral virtues. But, more importantly for our age, none of the intellectual virtues.
But I'm certain the sport will continue. And yet, there are those that dare criticize the pagan virtues at the same time the Roman circus is alive and well on this thread.
The following comment was posted in the thread having to do with Ratzi Fixing what JPII couldn't. It was in response to Dr. Blosser's important comment about Fear. I thought it might has some relevance here:
Yes, there is a hierarchy of fear. This is rooted, not only in Scripture, but in the analogy of being itself. The ultimate fear is a willful turning away from the source of one's being. This willful turning away from God is the essence of guilt. No problem. ("Ratio culpae consistit in voluntaria aversione a Deo." -- St. Thomas).
You then quote Pieper to say that the popular mind has transformed the ultimate concept of fear into something empty. Yes, that is true. The modern concept of fear is empty. But then so are all concepts today. There are none that are not empty. Nominalism has had its impact on the popular and educated mind alike. So has Protestantism, which at its core is nominalistic and anti-intellectual. It is a mindless voluntarism.
So there stands America, and American Catholicism, and individual Catholics. Right smack in the mix of it all. American culture is nominalistic, anti-intellectual, and voluntaristic. American Catholics partake in this culture from birth. There is no metaphysical tradition in America. No intellectual tradition. American philosophy, whatever it is, is not embued with ontology. And so, it is very difficult for anyone to grasp the hidden significance of these terms. To be sure, everyone has a nominal understanding. They construct propositions using these terms all the time. But, aside from the term itself, they have little else -- little understanding. There are individuals in America who have dedicated their lives to struggling against this weight, but they are few -- very, very few.
And so, the problem is much deeper than J. Pieper describes in your quote.
When terms like Fear, or Mercy, or Truth are used today, it is easy to see from the context they have very little meaning to the user. There is a shell that circumscribes their meaning, and their intrinsic content. Indeed, most individuals are not even aware that there is a notion of intrinsic relations. And so there exists an opaqueness that militates against a person exploring the deeper dimension of concepts.
If you were to take the concepts Fear, Mercy, and Truth and have the readers of your blog write an essay using those three words to explain the painting by Charles Munch -- The Scream -- I think the truth of what I say would make it's appearance.
Yet, many are willing to judge others, and condemn them, choosing sides that have no relevance to Truth, Goodness, Beauty, or Love. On what basis, and for what reason, they never say? One can only wonder what they are talking about, because little is ever made clear. There is a heavy caste of darkness over the entire scene. Read through the above thread.
When Benedict XVI speaks of the dictatorship of relativism it is commonly believed he
Odd, isn't it, how this blog site has become a hotbed of dissident Catholicism ever since the notorious "napalm" thread? Coincidence, I'm sure.
Since everyone else is apparently too charitable to say this to a priest, the psychologically crippled hate monger will volunteer: Fr O'Leary, you are a boorish, browbeating bag of wind. You don't just participate in a thread -- you take it over, and attempt to drown out all other voices. The sheer volume of notes, often irrelevant to the discussion at hand, should make your intentions clear. I believe that you seek to sabotage this web site by driving away all those with whom you disagree.
I think Dr Blosser has been more than patient with dissident blowhards like you and your soul mates Jerry and Lovehandles, but I think it would be proper for him to consider ways of curtailing your spamming of this website.
Note that I have nothing against your participation in the threads here. But "participation" is not what you are about. You are seeking to dominate, to lose other voices in the landslide of your cartoon balloons of dissident propograndizing and egotistical name-dropping. Is it the virtual martyrdom of banishment you seek? That would put Dr Blosser in a difficult position -- banning a Catholic priest from a Catholic blog site -- of course, I'm certain such a thought never crossed your mind.
I understand you are in Japan. How fortuitous. St Francis Xavier brought hundreds of thousands of Japanese souls to the faith. How many souls have you tallied with your spam?
Edvard Munch, Jerry. Charles was the conductor. Sorry for the interruption. Please continue with your filibuster.
It's impossible to compete or keep up with Fr. O'Leary's voluminous verbosity, so I don't even try. I just don't have the time it would take to do so.
Besides, we're not likely to change each other's minds any time soon.
Thanks, Ralph. You are right. I've made this error many times, despite being corrected.
Please don't be nasty. You don't deserve to act that way. I'm certain you intend otherwise, despite your obvious anger. But anger is a sin. And the intrinsic dignity we all possess cannot be express through sin.
"But anger is a sin"
Well, I'm certain Ralph's anger is at least as "Christ-like" as Sr. Chittister's...
"That's an odd remark from someone who casually throws out smears".
Smear? What smear?
I wonder if the merchants knew that Christ was committing a grave sin as He buried His foot into their hindquarters and sent them bouncing down the temple steps. Jerry could have explained it to Him. . . .
Great entry Dr. Blosser. If I were to “move on” beyond traditional Catholicism, it would be back to Nietzsche, not to this watery liberal dreck. If you’re going to apostatize, go all the way!
And the worst thing about Post Mod Squad Catholicism.... It’s boring. ZZZZZZZ....
Tom needs a bottle of Makers Mark!
Jerry is right about metaphysical nominalism and relativism, and about how it can be felt in the very texture of American discourse -- for instance in the FAKE religiosity that Americans demand from their Presidents. I would like to point out that when I talk about "overcoming metaphysics" I mean it in a Heideggerian sense -- metaphysics is TRUE, but inadequate to the phenomenality of being and of Revelation. As to Phil Blosser's point that a subtle hermeneutics could make the Nicene Creed a Buddhist or a New Age text, I suppose that is true, but it does not obviate the necessity of a subtle hermeneutics in bringing a religion formed in the first centuries into the context of understanding of the twenty-first century. Dr Blosser fails to find me guilty of heresy (though New Catholic casually labels me a heretic) but still suspects a certain je ne sais quoi, an atmosphere he finds in may postings. I suggest that this atmosphere may simply be modernity, tolerance and open-mindedness, qualities essential to theology today. Meanwhile a fundamentalist hermeneutic of the Nicene Creed produces grave distortions. For instance it takes "creator of heaven and earth" to confute Evolution. This hermeneutic falls right back into the relativism and nominalism discerned by Jerry above -- it is not an integral and authentic metaphysical apprehension of what the credal utterances are pointing to. It is a sort of blind faith that wants to believe miraculous absurdities -- such as donkeys that actually talk in human language as a matter of historical fact -- rather than stretch mind to the height, length, breadth, depth of the revealed.
but still suspects a certain je ne sais quoi, an atmosphere he finds in may postings. I suggest that this atmosphere may simply be modernity, tolerance and open-mindedness, qualities essential to theology today.
Actually, I've found Dr Blosser to be quite tolerant, open minded, and hip, if not necessarily modern. He disagrees with what you're saying, Father. That doesn't mean he's not listening. I recall an interesting piece he wrote on Father Hans Kung a few months back... I can't find it, but it might be useful here.
Yes, I read that piece on Kung -- an excellent man, whom I met recently in Tokyo promoting his Global Ethic Foundation. You can read his speech on that occasion in the recent issue of Dharma World -- it is the kind of speech that would sit well on the lips of a Pope! Three things I would query (at least) in Phil's article are (1) his underestimation of the importance and value of Kung's works on ecclesiology, especially The Church and The Council and Reunion; though I know that Structures of the Church raised anxieties by its espousal of concililarism, and Infallibility was needlessly provocative and set up a skewed and useless debate; (2) his gratuitous mockery of Karl Barth and his dismissal of Kung's book on him, which was a major ecumenical milestone; (3) his claim that Kung believes Jesus never existed -- which is absurd. I AGREE that Phil Blosser is a tolerant man -- his hospitality to me here is proof of that, and given his deep roots in Japan, which is in some ways the most tolerant of all cultures, I would be surprised if he were truly intolerant.
I am very sorry if this offends, but I have been asking myself why I find this discussion stimulating, as I said earlier. I didn't explain myself then, but I will try again and then ask a question or two. To me, Fr. Joe's ideas are interesting because they touch exactly the same bone that gets tickled when I watch a documentary on snakes or deadly ants, or the Humbolt squid: they are fascinating in exactly the same way.
Questions to Fr. Joe:
a) Give me one really absolute reason why I should believe in Jesus Christ.
b) Give me one serious reason why you are a priest of the Catholic Church.
One day we need to create a theological area of study called "The Fertility of the Holy Spirit Studies." There is no spiritual fertility for liberal catholicism. No matter how much work and articles go into it, there are no children there. The children are in Cologne. The children are in St. Peter's Square. And the children are the future.
Warren
Catholics intellectuals often craft strong moral arguments about a wide range of issues that affect public policy and statecraft. This is to be expected. There is a huge ongoing struggle for the soul of America.
In an earlier post a few weeks back, Dr. Blosser spoke of liberal totalitarianism. I interjected a counter notion of Christian Fascism. My point was not to say such Fascism exists. Rather it was to emphasize that the future of America must transcend all aspects of the current predicament. America's destiny must arise out of a more penetrating articulation of the transcendent notions of Dignity and Freedom as they are rooted in the Person. America's future should not be rooted in some historical past nor in some inadeaquate notion of the present. It should be rooted in transcendent Ideas. Those ideas must be brought down to earth.
Thus, there is a need to engage a war of ideas in America. As for the culture wars, they should be allowed to die. They were ill-conceived from the outset. A culture war is a ping pong match that can only be decided by the intervention of Power. In and of itself, the culture wars are a reflection of the anti-intelllectualism, nominalism, voluntarism I mentioned above -- an intellectual relativism. There is no conceivable foundation in a culture war that could effect any viable resolution of any dispute other than through the use of Power. I challenge anyone to articulate such a basis.
Thus, intellectual relativism poses a grave threat to the long-term survival of America. It encourages factions without engendering even the remotest possibility of reconciliation.
To further the Catholic contribution to America, more emphasis needs be given to cultivating young people who can range far beyond moral disputation. There must be generated among the youth an intellectual nimbleness and a nimbleness of imagination. For example, the logic and metaphysics of Aquinas must be married to the descriptive dynamics of phenomenology. A new language must be created that will inspire a new generation of leaders. Having attended Duquesne, Dr. Blosser will perhaps appreciate where I'm headed with this.
I'm speaking of an ontology of beauty -- a phenomenology that has an a rigorous ontological dimension. I'm not speaking of an aesthetic that allows one to ramble through the forest. This is not to be the Yelllow Submarine. Rather, I'm speaking of a rigor with a face that is compelling even to those who disagree because of where they happen to stand in life's journey. Such an ontology would present itself as an invitation, even to the most intransigent.
At the present, moral arguments alone are the prime weapons used to hold the barricades against the relentless onslaught of relativism. But they can't do the job. For what is really at issue are the intellectual principles which underpin morality, i.e., logic and metaphysics. Few Americans today possess either the knowledge or the skill to write and reflect a
(Continued) The upshot of this long neglect of logic and metaphysics is that Catholic moral philophers are being swept into an ethos of moral pluralism -- not moral relativism, but moral pluralism. Moral pluralism is an arena in which Catholic moral philosophy can be housed on the same shelf along with empiricism and pragmatism or, more simply put, hedonism and utilitarianism. To put it another way, the ethos of moral pluralism is an ethos wherein all that exists is the Many. (Hurrah Heraclitus!) There is no One. (Poor Parmenides!) But, the basic problem still remains the problem of the one and the many. That problem has to be addressed. Contradictions have to be resolved. But moral pluralism has no architectonic structure. It has no intrinsic relations. In short, it adds nothing. The Many reigns supreme. And so, Power alone decides. And that is where the culture wars have brought us today.
Thus the real battleground today is ontology. Only when a fresh and reinvigorated ontology begins to assert itself with a renewed vigor will Catholic moral philosophy (and the Church) acquire the necessary strength to crack moral pluralism. Until that happens, Catholic moral philosophy will be just another view among many, neutered and irrelevant. And its utility will be decided by a Darwinian struggle of the stronger against the weak.
Thus, what Pieper discusses is crucial. But, we must begin at the origins of the problem, namely, the nominalism, voluntarism, and anti-intellectualism which has dominated the West.
One last point. it is on the ground of nominalism, voluntarism, and anti-intelllectualism that rests what JPII calls the structures of sin. Sin is incarnate in every aspect of individuall and institutional life. It is it's very fabric. So, in fairness to all those who participate on this Blog, Fear is very real. It is very, very palpable. Meaningless is everywhere. It suffuses our lives. The lives of our children are at issue. People feel like they are losing not only the soul of America, but their own soul and the soul of their chldren as well. And, if the truth be told, they are quite right in being Fearful. But there is Hope. And Hope lies in addressing the ultimate intellectual crisis that has been slowly saping every vestige of human life since the death of St. Thomas Aquinas, nearly 750 years ago and the rise of nominalism.
Fr. O'Leary writes:
Catholic theologians today realize how much we have learned and how much we have yet to learn from the Protestant traditions.
##
What exactly can we learn from Protestant traditions? Those rooted in the Catholic Church, we already have. Those not rooted in the Catholic Church are heresy and must be avoided.
Hi Fr Joe i dont try to explain my sins away with fancy mental gymnastics no i repent of my sins with much tears and then thank God for his mercy all simple catholics know that by instinct the rest is so much hot air bless me Father for i have sinned antonio
Fr O'Leary and Jerry only seem to get excited when they are
(a) strumming extended riffs on the on the prospects of the ontological sodomy of Aquinas at the hands of Heidegger and the boys -- the grand synthesis of Church and world that secularists have been sweating and heaving over for centuries
(b) redefining "mercy" as permissiveness and indifferentism, tossing "justice" out with the trash, then making a bete noire out of anyone who would question their gushing rhetoric -- this is their brave new charity.
They propose to save the Church from relativism and secularity by immersing Her in it: a grand Hegelian synthesis that will, they tell us, "stretch the mind to the height, length, depth and breadth of the revealled". Jerry generously allows that fear is part of a legitimate response to evil, after all. How empowering, to know that he agrees. He needs to go the extra mile, however, and admit that the plans of he and his friends to drain the Church of the sacred, and replace it with modernist word salad [in the name of battling relativism, no less!!] is a major part of that which to BE feared, despised, and resisted.
There is no grand emergent consciousness on this earth. That idea stumbled out the barroom door with bunko artists like Charles Reich. There is only faith in Christ and His Church.
"ontological sodomy"
Another poetic outburst from Roister. Must be early morning dream recall! Quite frankly, this one calls out for diagrams!
Keep it up, Roister. You're so funny.
My inspiration was your purple paean to America the Beautiful from the other day. The weepy stuff about Leonard Bernstein nearly brought me to tears. "A place for us", indeed.
You have no respect for Leonard Bernstein?
He championed 20th century American composers, most of whom were as sexually confused as he was. He had a way with certain composers, although his technique often amounted to little more than slowing tempos to the speed of molasses running uphill (Mahler). I very much like his recordings of Randall Thompson's 2nd Symphony and William Schuman's 3rd, and as a child I enjoyed his music specials.
On the other hand, as a composer he was overrated. He was basically conceited and self-involved, and had nothing very important to say to the rest of us. West Side Story was corny even in 1960, and the tunes were, well, show tunes -- so what? His "Mass" was downright hilarious -- the self-important artist going for The Big Statement and pratfalling badly.
This was a man who invited murderers, thieves and racists -- collectively known as the Black Panthers -- to his posh Manhattan apartment, listened respectfully to their obscenities, and responded "I dig absolutely", blissfully ignorant of the fatuousness of it all. He married a beautiful woman who bore his children and apparently willingly provided a respectable front for his innumerable homosexual affairs with students and assorted habitues.
Such a man, ultimately, cannot be taken seriously. He may have been a talented vessel for showcasing the genius of others, but at bottom, the cupboard was bare.
Regarding the "Spirit of Vatican II", which is also the name of O'Leary's blog (The O'Leary Factor would have been much better...), there is a great review os a brand new book on the history of this Council, with great comments from the Cardinal Vicar of Rome, Cardinal Ruini, at Sandro Magister's Chiesa:
http://www.chiesa.espressonline....?id=34283&
eng=y
“The interpretation of the council as a rupture and a new beginning is coming to an end. This interpretation is very feeble today, and has no real foothold within the body of the Church. It is time for historiography to produce a new reconstruction of Vatican II which will also be, finally, a true story.”
"Such a man, ultimately, cannot be taken seriously."
But he continues to be, by all the other fools of the world, including his peers -- and even today. A performance of West Side Story has played somewhere in the world, every day of the year, for the last forty years! That counts for something, I would think!
On the other hand, I'm glad you enjoyed his Young People's Concerts. They remain a classic to most people who saw them. You can get the entire collection on DVD at Amazon.
Over all, I think your judgment might be a little harsh. Some things you say are not out of bounds at all -- The Mass is controversial, even today. To be appreciated, it needs to be received in a non-traditional context. Other of your comments are just off-base -- Mahler. And the remarks about show tunes -- well, what can I say. I'm a Jet!
Nonetheless, there it is. Wouldn't it be ironic if in the "other world" you had to live with Leonard for eternity! If such happens, that'd be a real trip. I can see it now -- Roister and Leonard on the same Music and Spirituality Committee! Each atoning for the other's sins. Should that happen, you'd discover God has a real sense of humor, if indeed he does!
To me, a humorous God would be much preferred to a Logical God who kept the railroads running on time! But then, will railroads be necessary? Oh, forget it. Who knows. Who cares.
We'll find out later, I suppose. Good luck.
Looks like New Catholic is going to have to change his/her moniker!
Might I quote Fr. Shannon Collins, who referred to those whose stock in trade is heterodoxy as "spiritual geldings"?
Gee, I am accused on by one of you of being a spiritual gelding and by another of committing ontological sodomy. In Europe and Japan we can discuss philosophical and religious ideas without resorting so compulsively to such anatomical impossibilities. On ontology, my base position is Thomistic, as interpreted by Etienne Gilson particularly -- whose books I heartily recommend, especially The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy and Le Thomisme. God is utterly simple and pure act, ipsum esse subsistens. I am also deeply influenced by the transcendental Thomists who retrieved Thomistic ontology and epistemology via the perspectives and categories of Kant and Hegel, correcting the latter in the process. These Thomists were Jesuits mainly, Marechal, Rahner, Coreth, Metz, Lonergan. I have also been influenced by Heidegger's phenomenological approach to being, which I do not see as denying the truth of metaphysics but as clearing the ground of metaphysics. On this see another great Jesuit, William Richardson, whose book on Heidegger has just been republished by Fordham UP. For the last 23 years I have also been under the sway of Buddhist ontological analysis, especially that of Nagarjuna; see Murti, The Central Philosophy of Buddhism, and the writings of Guy Bugault.
I am very fascinated by Card. Ruini's comments on Vatican II. I have in my study Sarpi's Istoria del Concilio Tridentino and Sforzo Pallacivini's counter-history (in the three volume 19th century French translation). Sarpi is a great stylist -- lucid, packed, pungent, suavely ironic at every turn -- one of the greatest masters of Italian prose, while Pallavicini rather rants and rambles. I have not read Alberigo but I doubt very much if it is fair to label him a Sarpi.
If you want to discuss (but politely please!) the historiography of Vatican II you can reply to the following article on my blogsite
The Vatican are now trying to rewrite the history of Vatican II in such a way as to support their own miniminalist interpretation of it and to extinguish once and for all the Spirit of Vatican II. See the following: http://www.chiesa.espressonline....?id=34283&
eng=y.
Alberigo's history of the Council is compared here to Sarpi's Istoria del Concilio Tridentino, the first history of the Council of Trent, written by an embittered critic of the Vatican (and the target of assassination attempts prompted by the Vatican). In the case of Trent, historical knowledge was hard to come by. Sarpi had access to some of the Council Fathers who were critical of the proceedings. Pallavicini's riposte was based on Vatican documents. But after than there was an embargo on the Tridentine debates, which were published only in the 20th Century. The Bologna proceedings of 1547 first saw the light in 1950 and following years! See Jedin, Kirche des Glaubens, Kirche der Geschichte, vol. II. Meanwhile, the Vatican confiscated the interpretation of Trent and ensured that many of the creative theological impulses of that Council had no future.
In the case of Vatican II, however, there is a collective memory of the atmosphere and promise of the Council. My own first theological writing was a long essay on the forthcoming Council, written in 1962 at the prompting of Br. Gavin in the North Monastery, Christian Brothers School, Cork, full of photos and press cuttings (and unfortunately lost). There was no doubt in anyone's mind throughout the years of the Council and its aftermath that something decisively new had taken place.
But happily, the historical records of Vatican II are open to all. Not only the Council Texts but the full proceedings have been published. The three volume German commentary composed by Ratzinger, Rahner and others fixes clearly how the Council was understood at the time. Just as Sinn Fein is unable to rewrite the murder campaign of the IRA as a patriotic civil rights struggle, thanks to documentation such as the crushing book, Lost Lives, so those who have betrayed Vatican II will not be able to cover over their crime by historical falsification.
Even if Vatican II is destined to remain an anomalous blip on the radar screen of history, it will remain a subversive memory to trouble the sleep of reaction for decades to come.
http://josephsoleary.typepad.com....com/my_weblog/
In Europe and Japan we can discuss philosophical and religious ideas without resorting so compulsively to such anatomical impossibilities.
like it was in Auschwitz and Nanjing?
Franco, we have learned from Auschwitz -- as the architects of Bagram, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib also have. But we appear to have learned rather different lessons. The lesson we have learned is that Auschwitz must never happen again, and to ensure that it never happens again eternal vigilance is required. America has learned, seemingly, only that Europeans can be bad but that Americans are always shining knights of democracy and can do no wrong. This kind of website is not the place where you will find any critique of American wrong-doing but lots of cheap indignation about Nazism. And that, in itself, tells us something. Have the Japanese learned? Not sufficiently. A bit like the Roman Catholic Church conservatives, Japanese conservatives say that the Pacific War was a noble effort to block Western Imperialism, but that there were regrettable excesses (much exaggerated), just as you folk say that the Crusades and Inquisitions were noble efforts to weed out heretics and anti-Roman forces, despite regrettable excesses by a few bad apples.
"so those who have betrayed Vatican II will not be able to cover over their crime by historical falsification."
That's true -- thanks to Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI and their successors that the Holy Spirit may choose for us, the Modernists' crime of historical falsification of the Council's meaning and proper interpretation is failing and will fail.
"America has learned, seemingly, only that Europeans can be bad but that Americans are always shining knights of democracy and can do no wrong."
That may be the way America looks from your vantage point in Japan, but it certainly doesn't look anything like that over here. Your comparision of the abuses at Bagram, Abu Ghraib, and Gitmo to the Holocaust is at least invidious, and definitely absurd and outrageous. Whatever evils we've committed at those prisons are not even in the same class as *the Nazi attempt to systematically eradicate whole nations and classes and groups at a time*. It doesn't reflect well on either your intellect or the state of your soul that you would issue such hateful, bigoted bilge.
"It is time for historiography to produce a new reconstruction of Vatican II which will also be, finally, a true story"
Don't look now, Cardinal Ruini, but "historiography" has produced such a construction. It is "Iota Unum", written by Romano Amerio, a theologican, philosopher, and V2 peritus. The Church has seen fit to studiously ignore it. As always in this age of post V2 relativism, there is truth and there is truth.
Very true, Ralph!
Romano Amerio was the greatest philosopher of the last decades of the 20th century, in my very humble, modest, ang quite ignorant opinion. And in his historiographical adventure, Iota Unum, he set the tone for what the Council really was.
I do believe that in a distant future the Council will be seen as an anomaly, which it certainly was. But in any case, it is past time for the Roman authorities to suppress this demonic false "Conciliar Spirit", which has caused and will still cause the loss of so many millions of souls [oops, I forgot: there is no hell!]
New Catholic,
My point, and Amerio's, is that even the "minimalistic" interpretation is insufficient. The Council was fundamentally flawed, in effect "hijacked" by a gaggle of mostly northern european bishops, and the result was that every dissident Catholic, every liberal priest and heterodox theologian thought he had the green light to turn the Church into a theological Woodstock. I have to agree with Fr O'Leary: there is an attempt to promote a "minimalist" reinterpretation of Vatican II, the gist of which is that the council itself was awesome, the implementation awful. This is Benedict's own interpretation, I think. Amerio's work undercuts it, as does Wiltgen's. Jerry is fond of imagining heavenly confrontations: I would love to be on the same cloud with Benedict and Amerio when they reminisce about old times.
Ralph says,
"I would love to be on the same cloud with Benedict and Amerio."
You will be! Just give it time. As they say down South, everything takes time. And, of course, off to the side, Leonard will be writing a musical description of the conversation. This time with an Ode to Joy, which he couldn't write here! He might even be inspired to write "Heavenly Side Story!"
I only wish I could be there. But I probably have another engagement, if the judgments you make about my comments are correct. Oh well.
Jerry,
Be not afraid. There is always time for repentance and forgiveness. Um, do they have confession in your Church, or does the Pixie of Forgiveness sprinkle magic dust and go "poof"? Just kidding -- all that dust sprinkling would be awful for the environment.
By the way, according to your criterion of what "counts", Andrew Lloyd Webber is probably the greatest composer since the Big Bang.
Oh, sorry, no comparisons of Guantanamo and Nazis allowed! America dictates what the world is entitled to say about America. Ted Rall said that the only moral distinction between Americans and Nazis now is that the Nazis had gas chambers -- oops, Ted Rall is not American. He is UnAmerican. I see that MEDICAL DOCTORS are employed in Guantanamo as torture-aides. Ooops! that should be freedom-aides. It's great to hear the sweet language in which criminals describe their activities. Makes it all sound so innocent, so kinda cute y'know...
So Vatican II was FUNDAMENTALLY FLAWED says Ralph Roister-Doister, AN ANOMALY says New Catholic, teste Amerio et Wiltgen, whoever the heck they are.
These are the guys who have been most vocal in smearing others as "heretics". Let them who think themselves to stand take heed lest they fall.
I looked up this Amerio. He measures Vatican II by the Syllabus of Errors, Pascendi and Humani Generis, and unsurprisingly finds it wanting. "The next step, as the whole of Amerio's book demonstrates, is a complete about face by the papacy. In the opening speech of the Second Vatican Council, Pope John wittingly or unwittingly negated all three syllabuses by declaring that the Church would no longer analyse and refute errors opposed to Catholicism. Instead, it would, in effect, limit itself to an intellectual pacifism, by which Catholics are to hold the faith, but are not to propagate it by controverting the opposed errors. This is essential to the ecumenical enterprise, and to the attempt to put the Church at the service of all men of goodwill, without specifying goodwill toward what. Somehow we are to negate the negation between truth and error, which in context means the difference between Supernaturalism and Naturalism. One is no longer to summon the world to embrace Catholicism; Catholicism is to apply "the medicine of mercy" (Pope John's phrase) and embrace the world, which in context means embracing the Naturalist and anti-traditional culture of modernity." What a bitter irony for Benedict XVI if he discovers that in causing a brain drain of liberal theologians he has handed the Church over to reactionary troglodytes ever ready to declare themselves sedevacantists and to spit on his authority -- since even the orthodoxy of Popes is freely called in question by these people. What a bitter irony...
"A brain drain of liberal theologians"?
Aside from appreciating the unintended humor in this remark, I have to ask, when is this calamitous event supposed to begin? I have to get to Party City and buy festive hats and balloons.
Last I heard, American "Catholic" universities were loaded with tenured liberal theologians who have no intention of going anywhere. They do what they want, protected by the inertia, if not sympathetic support, of bishops, and the ignorant disinterest of alumni.
Just what is setting your teeth a'gnashing, Fr O'Leary? The ignored, reviled work of a dead theologian?
Be not afraid.
Now I understand why you folk persistently swear by the Church of the past -- like Amerio, you no doubt see Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI and Vatican II as a sell-out to Communism. You want to save the Catholic Church from itself, clean up the act of errant Popes and Councils, make the Church over in your own image, in the manner of Fr Malachi Martin. Amerio talks of "the restriction on the Council's liberty to which John XXIII had agreed... the Council would refrain from condemning Communism... the agreement had a powerful, albeit silent, effect on the course of the Council ... Thus the Council, which made statements on capitalism and colonialism, said nothing specific about the greatest evil of the age, Communism. ... The decision to invite Russian Orthodox observers to Vatican Council II was made personally by His Holiness John XXIII with the encouragement of Cardinal Montini, . . . In a book published some time after this, German theologian Fr. Bernard Häring-----who was secretary-coordinator at the Council for the reaction of Gaudium et Spes-----revealed the more profound reason for the 'pigeon-holing' of a petition that many conciliar Fathers signed asking Paul VI and the Council to condemn Communism: "When around two dozen bishops requested a solemn condemnation of Communism," stated Fr. Haring, "Msgr. Glorieux . . . and I were blamed like expiatory goats. I have no reason to deny that I did everything possible to avoid this condemnation, which rang out clearly like a political condemnation. I knew that John XXIII had promised Moscow authorities that the Council would not condemn Communism in order to assure the participation of observers of the Russian Orthodox Church."
Fr. Malachi Martin "relates" that this Vatican-Moscow pact of 1962 was "merely a renewal of an earlier agreement between the Holy See and Moscow" on the occasion of conversations that took place in 1942 in the pontificate of Pius XII. "It was in that year," he writes, "that Vatican Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, who himself later succeeded to the Papacy as Paul VI, talked directly with Joseph Stalin's representative. Those talks were aimed at dimming Pius XIl's constant fulminations against the Soviet dictator and Marxism. Stato himself had been privy to those talks. He had also been privy to the conversations between Montini and the Italian Communist Party leader, Palmiro Togliatti, in 1944. . .
213 Cardinals, Archbishops, and bishops solicited Paul VI to have the Council make such a condemnation. Later, 435 conciliar Fathers repeated the same request. .. neither petition ever came up for debate.
Wonder how many of you would go so far as to say that Vatican II was the work of Satan, with Ratzinger as one of Satan's agents? How would you distance yourselves from the following, for example? http://www.tldm.org/News6/Vatica...VaticanII-
3.htm
Ralph Roister-Doister? New Catholic? Where do you stand? With the Catholic Church or against it?
Our Lady of the Roses, however, stated that Teilhard de Chardin is in hell: "Many of Our clergy have become blinded through their love of worldly pleasure and riches. Many have accepted a soul once high as a priest. Teilhard is in hell! He burns forever for the contamination he spread throughout the world! A man of God has his choice as a human instrument to enter into the kingdom of satan. Man will not defy the laws of God without going unpunished. You are a perverse generation, and you call the hand of punishment down fast upon you." - Our Lady, March 18, 1973 (Read more…)
Ralph,
A lot of things count that we don't necessarily have to like. To me, ALW is not up to Bernstein and Gershwin -- much he composes seems forced. But then, you and I are sitting on our stools screeching about truth. I don't know you, or the range of your impact, but for many people, ALW has brought a measure of inspiration that might be crucial in some way to their spiritual development. The same can be said of Edward Munch (or was it Charles). Munch provides no solutions but, boy, does he sketch the modern predicament. Link him with Guardini's End of the Modern World, for instance, and it's possible to show logically, graphically, and dramatically what today's context is and where it is leading.
Bernstein, or Gershwin, or Weber, or Munch, or Billie Holiday, or James Baldwin, or Tennessee Williams, or even Capote -- or Gilson, or Maritain, or James Collins, or Vernon J. Bourke, or George Klubertanz, or Martin Grabmann, or Eschmann, or de de Raeymaeker, or or Merleau-Ponti -- may not take YOU from T to U, but they have the capacity to take some OTHER person from C to D, if you will. And even those who are at T, or U, or W might benefit from such a fragmented portrait or a more complete, albeit abstract, metaphysical analysis. Picasso, for instance, painted 10,000 images of spiritual alienation. That's not the whole story of man, or man's relation to God, by any means. But if you want to articulate spiritual alienation, Picasso would be a greater inspiration than any formal study of St. Thomas' act of being, or substantial form. When the two perspectives are brought into dialectical relationship, one can more deeply penetrate the concrete truth. The ultimate concrete truth, of course, is Christ.
Every person is on the same journey, but Freedom and the wrestling with Truth determines how it will play out for each. To cut people off at point C -- when they haven't even got to point B -- seems rather pointless to me. But then, I know you will disagree.
But, even if you disagree -- and carefully present arguments for your disagreement -- how can that not be helpful. It is helpful. Like the work of Bernstein, or even Hume, it is helpful. (You see, I keep putting you in good company. That's my generous nature). All 'bad stuff' is necessary alongside the good. It helps to penetrate the significance of what we truly believe. This was the spirit behind JPII's interest in feelings and emotions. He wasn't an aesthetic. He was more. He wasn't captivated by feelings. He was essentially a Thomist. But he knew logic could be enriched by aesthetics. He called for a new anthropology.
Like you, I need all the help I can get. Unless, of course, you are of a different species. Never know about those cave men!
Now, how's that for a mealy mouthed, liberal oozing, ultra modern moral milksop reply! Your voluntarist friend, Neitzche, would just hate me!
"Where do you stand? With the Catholic Church or against it?"
Ask this yourself, O'Leary. And do not worry about me: whatever I do, I'll go to heaven, right?
About the Council, as I had said, it is an anomaly, of course, and that is a negative word, it is a fact admitted by all. It was an anomalous council, convened by anomalous reasons, which issued anomalous documents, with an anomalously optimistic outlook of the world. Its timing was certainly unfortunate; the 1950s were a great time for the Church, outside of China, and those post-war years were so gay (in the old sense of the word); it was easy to believe in the goodness of mankind...
Happy St.John's Day! Cheer up! Liberals are still in control of much of the ecclesiastical apparatus...
"that is NOT a negative word" is what I meant.
Happy to hear that New Catholic does after all accept Vatican II as an authentic Ecumenical Council -- there is a basis for intra-Catholic discussion with him, then. I think, however, that anomalous is a very misleading expression. You could use it of any Council in reality, since they all differ so much from one another. The Council of Nicea was convened by Constantine, a barely converted pagan, still unbaptized. Even at Trent the Holy Roman Emperor had a tremendous role. Basel and Constance -- well, I say nothing of them -- it is an abyssal subject of which I know little.
To call V2 an anomaly and to quote Amerio in the same breath strongly suggest that you agree with him that V2 contradicted the earlier teachings of Pius IX, Pius X, Pius XII and so is of doubtful validity. "a complete about face by the papacy... Pope John wittingly or unwittingly negated all three syllabuses by declaring that the Church would no longer analyse and refute errors opposed to Catholicism. .. Somehow we are to negate the negation between truth and error, which in context means the difference between Supernaturalism and Naturalism. One is no longer to summon the world to embrace Catholicism; Catholicism is to apply "the medicine of mercy" (Pope John's phrase) and embrace the world, which in context means embracing the Naturalist and anti-traditional culture of modernity." If that is what you think of John XXIII, I need not take very seriously your smears against me!
In thinking about the "Gang of the Elect" which prowls this site, the following quote comes to mind: "You either love them or you hate them... there is no in-between." (I'm not going to use Mercy to effect Reconciliation, at Raphs's insistence. Neitzche's criticism of Christianity must be allowed to stand.)
Of course, as most of you must know, this quote was used to give expression to the Playtex Mystique. I sure you'll all remember Playtex Girdles from the 1950's, during those "gay" (used with the exculpatory caveat) days of Happy and Safe Catholicism -- except for China!
After Vatican II, Playtex was replaced by Tupperware! Too bad. Everything was trimmer and simpler in the Fifties. Now everything is culinary -- 'cafeteria Catholics" -- and bloated, fat, and confused.
Where's my iPod? Now, there's the chance for real salvation! Podcasting, anyone! Onward. To a new dimension.
You have obviously misrepresented my views. The 1950s were certainly a healthier age, when talk about same-sex "marriage", for instance, was understood by all as the ludicrousness that it is. And what a gloriously Catholic year the Holy Year of 1950 was! The definition of the Assumption, the condemnation of the Teilhardists in Humani Generis... But the optimism of those post-war years (I had forgotten Hungary, too -- apologies to the Magyars) in the West was deceitful.
There were many evil minds at work in the Council, but most Council fathers were just bishops who could only think, based on their own happy, full, obedient churches, that the future could only be brighter...
---
There is nothing left to say. I still waiting for the post-Conciliar John of the Cross, though.
En aquel amor inmenso
que de los dos procedía
palabras de gran regalo
el Padre al Hijo dezía
de tan profundo deleite
que nadie las entendía
sólo el Hijo lo gozaba
que es a quien pertenecía.
Pero aquello que se entiende
desta manera dezía:
—Nada me contenta, Hijo,
fuera de tu compañía.
Y si algo me contenta
en ti mismo lo quería
el que a ti más se parece
a mi más satisfazía.
Y el quen nada te semeja
en mí nada hallaría
en ti solo me he agradado
¡o vida de vida mía!.
Eres lumbre de mi lumbre
eres mi sabiduría
figura de mi substancia
en quien bien me complazía.
Al que a ti te amare Hijo
a mí mismo le daría
y el amor que yo te tengo
ésse mismo en él pondría
en razón de aver amado
a quien yo tanto quería.
(St.John of the Cross - Old Castillian orthography)
"I AM still wating" -- sorry for the typo.
Keep that tar a'bubblin', Fr O'Leary, you're in your element now. It's all very well to waggle on about your intimate knowledge of Buddhist ontology, or Heidegger's phenomenology of navel lint, but nothing gets the blood surging like a good ol' bear baiting. And by golly, O'Leary, you're good at it!
First you make a big show of having to "look up" this obscure fellow Amerio, and omigawd, you're just horrified at what you find!! You don't call him a sedevacantist, because he wasn't one, but you do associate him with sedevacantists, quite a feat for some one who doesn't know anything about him.
Oh, and Wiltgen, you don't know anything about him either. He headed the V2 communications center -- writing out press releases summarizing the council's daily accomplishments. His book is entitled "The Rhine Flows Into the Tiber" -- he's merely a hack journalist-priest, not a buddhist-existentialist-dandy, so I suppose it's not surprising you don't know about him.
Then you scour the internet for fever swamp material, so that you can lump your opponents into one big gooey ball. Gee Fr O'Leary, those rabid drooling propagandists at Fox News couldn't have done it better!
But even though you may not know Amerio, I suspect Benedict does, and is in the process of applying aspects of his critique, a process I'm sure you find frightening. How far he will go I do not know. He seems committed to "saving the appearances", even while "reforming the reforms". God speed him in his efforts and keep his work from being derailed by servants like Fr O'Leary.
As far as "where I stand": I am a Roman Catholic. I've been going to Mass every Sunday virtually all my life, aside from a fling with secularism during my 20's, now repented. I go to a Novus Ordo service because my bishop is one of those progressive fellers that beams as his pastors turn over Catholic churches to Gay Man Choruses and Unitarian-Universalist choirs for gala song fests, but grants indults about as willingly as he passes kidney stones. I grit my teeth at the congregationalist claptrap that characterizes the liturgy, but I accept it, because there is no other choice.
I must agree with Ralph once more and must also say that it is so embarassing that these liberal Catholic intellectuals do not know the great orthodox names. How can they not know about Romano Amerio??? If he had written treaties of theological stupidity, like Dupuis, or had reveled in nothingness, as Sartre, they would certainly know him...
"Oh, sorry, no comparisons of Guantanamo and Nazis allowed! . . ."
There's no justification for what you said. Criticism and disapprobation of our human rights abuses are one thing, but it's a violation of human reasons, not to mention unspeakably offensive and demeaning to the memory of the victims of the Holocaust to group Gitmo with Auschwitz. You should just get it over with and apologise. Or do you care more about scoring cheap rhetorical points against your political opponents?
Not that some of the more intemperate rhetoric of Ralph and New Catholic is all that likely to put you in the mood for an apology. Sheesh, guys, can you tone it down just a tad?
"You have obviously misrepresented my views."
No, I don't believe I have. I've made your views into a caricature like you've done to every other view. Your views ARE a caricature of Catholicism. They lack philosophical dimension. They are "cut and paste."
Like Luther says: Every man is a priest and a prophet." Of course, the main deduction from this is that no priest or prophet is willing to accept the views of any other priest and prophet. And so, you adopt a crusty irascible cantankerous view of Christianity, just like Luther. And to settle scores, you would bring out the modern day analogate to the German Princes to guarantee order! Ergo, Christian Fascism.
"Thou setter up and plucker down of kings." -- Shakespeare.
Sorry, Polycarp, if my remarks seem "intemperate" to you. You are probably right to think them so. However, Fr O'Leary has taken over virtually every thread on this web site with dozens of cartoon balloons of self-congratulatory heterodoxy. If I am being provocative, which I am, I was not the first to do so.
Think for a moment. Why would a flamingly liberal theologian in Japan drop himself on this particular blog site with all the grace and delicacy of Bobo the Blue Whale? To engage in spirited debate? Is that what he has done? It seems to me -- just one man's opinion here -- that he has buried this site in his comments, with the intention not of engaging other points of view, but of overwhelming them.
I've said before: I would welcome -- not that this is my blog site -- anyone who presents a point of view vigorously, but within the common rules of engagement on these sites. I think Dr Blosser has been extraordinarily forebearing toward Fr O'Leary, but I think Fr O'Leary has not been so toward Dr Blosser, much less the rest of us. I am a mere ant in the kitchen, trying to avoid that big heterodox foot descending upon me.
But I apologize to whoever may find my way of doing that offensive.
"You should just get it over with and apologise. Or do you care more about scoring cheap rhetorical points against your political opponents?"
Your entire criticism is cheap. This is sheer obfuscation. You sound like Karl Rove. Sheer idiocy. Nothing more than a deliberate strategy of confusion. And just above you were talking about Catholicism! Here's one mouthful. And here's another. No logical connection? What's with you?
This "Gang of the Elect" is a hotbed of fundamentalist Protestanism that has somehow wormed it way into the Church.
"if my remarks seem "intemperate""
If would be helpful if you would address ideas rather than motives, persons, and the like. There is no monolithic agreement about ideas in the Church. Anyone who thinks that is so distant from the center that it doesn't matter in the larger scheme whether they exist or not. And don't give me this dreary talk about Dogma. This is not about Dogma, nor has it ever been. What is in question is the questionable.
I've yet to see an idea addressed on this site in a serious fashion. They have been presented. But they are overlooked, and conveniently so. To address ideas is difficult. It is not about ants crawling around the floor, or cave men trying to protect the cubs.
Much has been said here that would be stimulating to mature intellectuals. But I'm afraid it's the Playtex thing. The Girdle people just don't like the Tupperware people. They never did. To become one, you had to throw away the other.
Nonetheless, one is compelled to wonder: is it only Tupperware people that are trying to explore new dimensions? Perhaps. All I hear from the Girdle people is the sympathetic cry of echo. But in that echo, the only thing left is voice. Everything of substance has faded away.
Thanks for calling me a fascist, Jerry. And member of a "gang". And that I "lack philosophical dimension". And that I am "caricatural". And that I "adopt a crusty irascible cantankerous view of Christianity".
I have never been so viciously personally attacked in my life -- and by someone who does not even know who I am... Thank you very much. It is always nice to know the character of the people who are running much of the ecclesiastical institutions.
Jerry,
For crying out loud, let go of this tupperware-girdle analogy, please! It makes your remarks about Andrew Lloyd Webber seem sober and reasonable by comparison! Saaay, you didn't get it from one of Andrew's wonderful songs, did you?
Aside from wondering why you hang around, the level of discourse on this blog site being so dismal, I have to question why you girdles -- or are you the tupperware freshness containers? -- are so inebriated with "trying to explore new dimensions"? That's fine if we're talking about music or movies or bridge, I suppose, but that's not the subject we cro-magnons bash over each other's heads here. Lust for the new is not a desirable trait in a Catholic, in my view, for it indicates dissatisfaction with the old, and the old was instituted by Christ, not by Martin Heidegger.
I am now going to shut up for the weekend. As I said, this is not my blog site, and I trust I've made my point, however scurrilous and boneheaded some of you may believe it to be. Besides, I've got to go feed the pet wolverine.
Truth and mercy.
"Fr O'Leary has taken over virtually every thread on this web site"
The obvious suggestion is that if you can't keep up with the men, don't try to act like one. Try instead to learn from them.
This should not be a matter of pride or comfort. Good Lord, when someone has spent an entire life reflecting on something, try to understand what they have learned. You don't have to agree with them. But you are obliged to respect them and try to respond proportionately.
If your spiritual life is so precarious that you can't listen and benefit, something is terribly wrong.
There is no need to challenge everyone. Life is not a ping pong match. Sadly, for too many, that is what it has become. This is simply ridiculous. It has no benefit.
But, if you want it that way, join in as best as you can! I can assure you the game is not over.
And calling others "Christian Fascists"? What sport is that, Jerry?
I cannot deny I was deeply hurt by your, yes, disproportionate comment. All I can do is wish you a happy St.John's Day and a fine weekend. I'll come back to visit Dr.Blosser's blog when there are cooler and calmer waters, "sicut cervus desiderat".
Ralph,
You say: "It makes your remarks about Andrew Lloyd Webber seem sober and reasonable by comparison!"
Hmmmm! I wonder. Are you saying my comments about ALW are slowly gaining strength?
Have a nice weekend. Be kind to the wolverines. They're the future. We're old porridge.
Truth, Beauty, Goodness.
Jerry
New Catholic,
You said: "I cannot deny I was deeply hurt by your, yes, disproportionate comment."
Sorry about that. But, you are wrong. They were not disproportionate. Quite the opposite. Nor was the intention to hurt. They were to inform.
Like it or not, Protestants and Catholics alike were engaged in the horrors that swept Germany last century. People don't like to hear such comparisons today, but they had better get used to it. To think that something similar could not happen here in America is just plain silly. Poisonous ideas creep into the fiber of a nation without individuals even knowing they themselves have become willing agents for its destructive force. The world is not a church.
Who would have thought that Duns Scotus' articulation of "quiddity" 750 years ago would have developed a life of its own -- running through Ockham and beyond? Who would have thought that that simple idea was the seed which dealt the dealth knell of ontology and the intellectual architecture of God, nature, and man. Who would have thought that this corruption of St. Thomas would be developed for two hundred years and then serve as the straw man for Martin Luther. But it did. Who would have thought that John Locke's notion of toleration would help to transform ethics and politics into a form of conventionalism? Who is aware that there is a strong influence of Neitzche in American politics? How many are aware of where this kind of voluntarism leads? Few even know where it led in the past? But where is it taking this country today? I'm not sure. But I don't like what I see.
As one Jewish friend told me, "I can hear the Jack Boots off in the distance!"
I don't know whether what she says is true or not. But people are beginning to hear those sounds. They may be wrong. They may be right. But vigilence is demanded in any case.
For me, I believe we are in grave danger in this country -- from every corner. The liberal/conservative sop dance just doesn't cut it anymore. It is a dance that is consumed by Power and Wealth. Neither side is worth much. They offer no redeeming view of the future. Neither are predicated on a solid basis. A new vision is needed, a vision rooted in the very principles to which everyone on this website is committed. And I mean everyone.
I believe there is a very subtle transmutation taking place in this country that runs much deeper than all the commotion that characterizes, economics, politics and religion. Amidst this metamorphosis, Americans are totally distracted. The Press has become worthless. National leaders are celebrities -- so they think. Too many are self-righteous. Simply put, the checks and balances in America are failing -- every one of them. Democracy in America is loosing its intrinsic foundation. It is succumbing to the "revolt of the masses." Reread that volume. It might mean more today than when it was written -- written for Europe.
In t
(Continued) In this regard, Fascism might be a good notion to explore once again. Fascism is not necesarily about race. It is as much a mechanism as anything. It can be about any ideology. And the sectarian notions that have infected American politics are little more than ideological expressions. Sectarianism is not an effective antidote to Liberalism. Both are equally unsatisfactory. Neither have a sound philosophical basis. Both are reductionist. Both are dangerous, each in their own way. Both will lead to catastrophe.
So your feelings may be hurt. But beyond your feelings lies a very serious struggle underway for hearts and minds -- a struggle that will shape the dynamics of America and the world. The seeds are already sown. The contradictions are already present.
My question is this: shall intelligent Catholics quibble about small things, or shall they use their intelligence and their intellectual heritage to reconcile contradictions in ways that will insure a decent future for their children and even beyond. Shall we just watch and shout about inanities. Or shall we become serious and truly engaged? Shall we take our intellectual gaze and put it to work on the ground? Or shall we simple aspire to some transcendent aim. For St. Thomas, the course was clear: thought and action, infused with grace, constitutes the total commitment of man. As Maritain would say, we should strive to become the integral person.
I think, once focused, we would all agree. In America, the time is coming that we get serious.
"Your entire criticism is cheap. This is sheer obfuscation. You sound like Karl Rove. Sheer idiocy. Nothing more than a deliberate strategy of confusion."
Listen here, "Jerry," you have no business spewing your insults and slanders at me or anyone else. You also do yourself no favors by your defense of the outrageous comparison of America's human rights abuses to the Holocaust. By your vile behavior here, you demonstrate that you have nothing worthwhile to contribute.
Go level your false accusations and self-righteous huffpuffery at someone else. I haven't the time for it, nor will I ever.
"Sorry, Polycarp, if my remarks seem 'intemperate' to you. You are probably right to think them so."
Some of your remarks are, not all. I can understand your frustration with Fr. O'Leary. He's obviously a very intelligent and amazingly skilled typist with far too much time on his hands. This "Jerry" guy is also pretty verbose. There's no way I could ever bear up under the tidal waves of words they are able to produce, so, apart from occasional comments, I just have to watch them play their games here. I suppose they'll eventually get bored with their new toy and go play somewhere else.
"But I apologize to whoever may find my way of doing that offensive."
I dunno. I guess my only point is that we just need to remember not to return evil for evil, blow for blow. Not that I'm particularly good at following my own advice . . .
St. Polycarp,
You said: "You also do yourself no favors by your defense of the outrageous comparison of America's human rights abuses to the Holocaust."
Show me where I said this. The truth is that I never made such a comparison. No where. Never. Ever. It is in your mind, not my words.
What I did say was that the kind of horrors that happened in Europe could indeed happen here if we're not careful. Now, how could any thoughtful person disagree with that statement. In fact, I would love to know the logical grounds on which this statement could be proven false? Provide them to me.
Let me reiterate: no mention was made to any human rights abuses coming out of the Iraqi war. That is a topic I have not mentioned. In fact, my statement was not predicated on any empirical comparison. It was a logical statement. And it was intended as a warning.
As for me spewing insults and slander, you're missing something very important. Running from the beginning of this thread are some of the most malicious statements I ever seen directed at a Catholic priest. That priest is Fr. O'Leary. Up towards the front of this thread I said the following:
"O'Leary has never once taken to insult anyone. But he is the brunt of indecencies that are rather amazing. And yet, the shallowness of most comments that target him overwhelm any pretense to be otherwise. They are intended to be insulting, pure and simple, and that is a grevious sin."
Why would you wait until entry #97 to mention "insults and slander" when it's began with entry #1. Where were you when the slander began. Where was your criticism at #1. If you really find it a troublesome matter, how come it only bothers you now? There are reasons for this long delay. Come on. Be real.
"Show me where I said this. The truth is that I never made such a comparison. No where. Never. Ever. It is in your mind, not my words."
Nice try. Fr. O'Leary made the comparison. I criticised him for it. You slandered me for criticising him for it, which constitutes a defense of his comparison. I did not say you made the comparison. No where. Never. Ever. It is in your mind, not my words.
"O'Leary has never once taken to insult anyone. But he is the brunt of indecencies that are rather amazing."
You apparently haven't been reading all of his comments at this weblog -- not that I blame you, as I've already given up trying to read everything he posts here.
The reason I didn't mention insults and slander until just a while ago is because you hadn't slandered and insulted me until then. You've apparently slandered and insulted some other folks here too, but I decided to let them respond.
I have registered my objection to the tone of some, perhaps many, of the criticisms of Fr. O'Leary. But I certainly understand why faithful Catholics would object to many of his statements, and why they would get offended. Priests swear oaths to believe and teach the Catholic faith, and Fr. O'Leary obviously questions or rejects certain elements of the faith. It's a grievous sorrow whenever someone's faith makes shipwreck -- and it's all the worse when it is a priest who has gone astray.
As for why I haven't complained about slander and insult from the beginning of this thread, I haven't read but a few of the comments posted in this thread. When I scan through what is supposed to be a discussion of the Catholic faith and find nutty stuff about girdles and tupperware along with angry or impolite posts and ripostes, I figure there's not much point hopping into the fray. Also, as I've mentioned before, I really don't have the time I'd need to devote to discussions and debates here. When a commentbox fills with over 90 posts in three days, most of them coming in while I'm otherwise occupied, I simply won't be able to keep up with the to-and-fro here.
Another smear, Polycarp: "Fr. O'Leary obviously questions or rejects certain elements of the faith. It's a grievous sorrow whenever someone's faith makes shipwreck -- and it's all the worse when it is a priest who has gone astray."
My comparison of US activities with Nazism bore on the following points: the treatment of Iraqis as untermenschen, massacring them in 1991 and 2003 without the faintest compunction; the use of medical doctors to assist in torture in American camps in which the detainees have been offered no process of justice; and there are many other valid points of comparison. Why just the other day an AMERICAN colleague astonished a group of us at a gathering by saying "why do other countries not intervene to save America from our new Nazism the way they did in the case of Germany?" Sorry if you cannot bear to have such likenesses pointed out. For the men tortured to death in Bagram and for the hundreds of thousands massacred by the US in Iraq, and for the children made eyeless or armless in clusterbombs, the difference between Americans and Nazis might be quite hard to see. Of course you don't worry about that. Iraqis are mere untermenschen, right? Oh, you are liberating them? Yea? For oil?
Polycarp, if you have not the time to read carefully what is posted here, I suggest you should check at least to see that what is actually posted verifies the false accusations made by others before you jump on the bandwagon. Your urge to spew libel reflects poorly on the maturity of your judgment.
Btw, Polycarp, your first posting on this site was a blanket agreement with what Dr Blosser said. But I pointed out that his posting is really just a heap of bs that contains outrageous accusations about my theology -- such as that I regard the Bible as a merely human book and much else. Now instead of apologizing for your slavish following of a totally inaccurate piece that you took as Gospel you throw a hissy fit about a side-issue in the context of this debate (even if a much more important issue in real life -- I mean the US abuse of the Iraqi people -- read Drewermann, Reden gegen den Krieg, 1991, in which a German points out the Nazi path you and your countrymen are taking -- read, weep, learn).
Jerry is right that Polycarp's initial response above had nothing about my alleged slanders -- he only started talking like that when I challenged New Catholic for his smears against me. Here are a few more of the fatuous comments to which Polycarp blindly subscribes: "The New Consciousness divinizes Fr. O'Leary's own consciousness -- at least for Fr. O'Leary. There is no magisterium to which he is subject but his own consciousness, his own conscience, his own instantiation of Hegelian "Absolute Spirit," or what have you. The Vatican has no REAL authority, except that which someone like Fr. O'Leary confers upon it by his altogether accidental and sporadic agreement." That, of course, is what nonrevisionist Catholics call "cafeteria Catholicism." I am also accused, implicitly of "selling" a view of morality as a subjective creation rather than something objective; as making the human subject, not God, the ultimate law-giver; as reducing guilt to subjective guilt feelings; as having lostr all sense of a transcendent object of worship; as tending to Pantheism; as worshipping not God but our own (collective) psyche, in collective self-apotheosis; as denying that God never makes any demands on us that we do not make of ourselves, because He is us. There is NOTHING in anything I have ever written that comes within a tinker's curse of justifying these absurd allegations. But carried away be his hero-worship of Chesterton, Dr Blosser has also been infected by the propensity of Chesterton to wild, bumptious generalizations. Chesterton, however, usually refrained from assaulting individuals in this way (though he may have done so in his early book, "Heretics") because he was too intelligent and too much of a gentleman to do so. And he didn't need to because he was serenely confident in his faith. Oddly, Dr Blosser also mischaracterizes my criticisms of his own position, putting in quote marks utterances I never made and attributing to me a scorn of medieval scholasticism that I never expressed here or elsewhere. I did say that many scholastic categories are now obsolete, but that is only to be expected after 700 years.
Polycarp, Hans Kung in his recent speech on a GLOBAL ETHIC here in Tokyo pointed to one concrete sin against that Ethic today -- the US war in Iraq. He stressed especially the US LIES. I do not recollect him mentioning GOEBBELS, but had he done so that would have been a very illuminating comparison between what is going on in the US today and what was going on in Germany then. I heard an American philosopher lecture at a conference in Nice in 2003 on the late Dominique Janicaud who talked of Heidegger's Nazi involvements -- the philosopher pointed out that a similar shadow lies over American philosophy today in its incapacity to stand up against the Neoconservatives who have caused so much death and destruction. His speech was called "L'ombre de notre pensee" in imitation of Janicaud's title L'ombre de cette pensee".
I am rather embarrassed by Dr Blosser's outpourings but I would be more embarrassed if I were the author of them. They could even be construed as a criminal libel.
On June 14, Senate Minority Whip Richard J. Durbin compared the military's interrogation techniques at the prison camp at U.S. Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to that of the Nazis and other murderous regimes.
Yet CBS did not broadcast a single story on the Illinois Democrat's comments. "Today" and "Good Morning America" and those networks' nightly news programs didn't air anything about it until the senator apologized after a week of complaints by Republicans, the Anti-Defamation League and veterans groups.
"What the networks did was zero, zero, zero, zero on Durbin, and as soon as Rove shows up, boom," said Tim Graham, director of media analysis at the conservative Media Research Center. "To say that one deserves zero coverage and the other huge coverage is just bizarre."
Steve Lovelady, managing editor of the Columbia Journalism Review Daily, said he's "not sure if the network morning shows even qualify as journalism these days," describing them as "yuk-fests with periodic headline updates tossed into the mix almost as an afterthought."
St. Polycarp says:
"But I certainly understand why faithful Catholics would object to many of his [Fr. O'Leary] statements, and why they would get offended"
Would you now.
And those who object to Fr. O'Leary are the "faithful Catholics?" On what basis do you accrue to yourself the qualities to make judgments about "faithful Catholics"? Or about Fr. O'Leary? Do you really know that much about what it means to be a "faithful Catholic?" Or are you and others simply absorbed in some strange kind of fundamentalist piety? An explanation is in order.
Pretense to intellectual discipline is dangerous, especially when one is called upon to say something in the public forum-- as is now the case. One liners are not enough. Get to the heart of the matter if indeed you have the ability you claim.
And going futher, what is it about Fr. O'Leary's statements that go contrary to Catholic teaching? You and others here have dissected nothing. Is that a sign that you are unable to make distinctions? Distinctions are, after all, the stuff of one's faith. It is necessarily consistent with the analogy of being. Of course, if some vague notion of what it means to be one of the faithul is all that matters, then you have boughten nothing but a blind witness, or contingent belief, or convention of some sort, or whatever. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with piety. But it doesn't necessarily give one the abilaity to make the kind of statements that are being made on this site.
Do you have any philosophical background? This is not meant to be rhetorical. It is a serious question.
It troubles me that Catholics who pretend otherwise seem to know very little about their faith or about philosophy. But that does not deter them from presenting scribble and slander on the internet -- with all the mighty claims to veracity.
This has peaked my interest. Is the trend that is present here simply another threat which the Church will have to face in the future? I'm afraid it is. And frankly, it's very, very depressing.
May I propose a new way of evaluating comments posted here? They should not be weighed by volume, but by accuracy. I have tried several times to get Father O'Leary to answer simple questions, not because I wish to be inquisitorial but so that I can establish something as true or false. Others have written more or less temporately on a wide range of subjects.
Still, the question ought to be, by analogy, "Was Senator McCarthy RIGHT?", not "Is Senator McCarthy being tolerant.
If we have to resort to what someone at the USCCB referred to as reading beyond the literal meaning of the text in order to find our obviously contradictory rationale, let us (all, myself included) have the humility to recognize how far we are straying from the truth.
Incidentally, the question to which he responded this way was "Can women's feet be washed on Holy Thursday". He replied that the text says "chosen men [males]", but that the text didn't forbid women and therefore the allowing of it would be reading beyond.....
"And those who object to Fr. O'Leary are the 'faithful Catholics?'"
Yes, obviously. Faithful Catholics listen to the Magisterium, which teaches that women cannot be ordained. Fr' O'Leary, however, has advocated at this weblog the ordination of women. You do the math.
"On what basis do you accrue to yourself the qualities to make judgments about 'faithful Catholics'?"
On what basis do you accrue to yourself the qualities to make judgments about 'faithful Catholics'? After all, you and Joe have written off me and Dr. Blosser and other Catholics here as pseudo-Catholic fundamentalist Protestants.
"An explanation is in order."
I don't owe you or anyone else an explanation, nor do I need to burnish credentials for your satisfaction. Nor do I believe, as you apparently do, that the only Catholics who are qualified to spot and criticise error are the tiny handful who happen to have a "philosophical background." Not that it would really make any difference to you -- Dr. Blosser has such a background, and that doesn't impress you, so why would it impress you if any other faithful Catholics here had that background? So I will decline your request that I wave credentials, which I may or may not have, in your face.
As for your claim that no one here has dissected Joe's false assertions, you obviously haven't read everything that Joe has posted here or that others have posted in reply to him. You've come into this rather late in the game.
I see that Joe has gone completely off the deep end. He is now accusing me of personally attacking the Iraqis and treating them lik untermenschen, and that I am taking a Nazi path.
Like I said here before: What color is the sky in your world, Joe?
By the way, Jerry, would calling someone a Nazi constitute "tak[ing] to insult anyone"?
St. Polycarp:
"Faithful Catholics listen to the Magisterium"
Yes, before and after every change made by he Magisterium. Have you noticed there are no women priests? Have you noticed O'Leary has not created a substitute Church with women priests. Have you noticed a dialogue has well been underway for some time now. And have you noticed it is healthy for both sides. The truth will get more light shed on it, even if it is true that only men should be priests -- which an old dude like me happens to believe.
St. Polycarp:
"I don't owe you or anyone else an explanation, nor do I need to burnish credentials for your satisfaction."
Of course you don't. No one ever said you did.
But your credentials should radiate through what you do and say. And even if you don't intend to do so -- even if you don't intend to present your credentials at the court -- they will appear to others loud and clear nonetheless.
The human act comes from somewhere. Elementary metaphysics, old chap! And what metaphysical principles attest to that truth? Simple ones. The principle of causality, the principle of identity, the principle of contradiction, and the principle of sufficient reason! A lot of principles involved. Even many more than this.
This is how to interpret my remark.
St. Polycarp:
"Dr. Blosser has such a background, and that doesn't impress you...."
Here you go again! Have you taken the time to read the exchange between Dr. Blosser and myself. It might interest you to know what he said:
"Jerry: Well put. Not only do I agree, I especially like the notes on nominalism and the distinction between moral and intellectual relativism. Thank you.
pb | 06.22.05 - 2:35 pm | #"
St. Polycarp:
"As for your claim that no one here has dissected Joe's false assertions, you obviously haven't read everything that Joe has posted here or that others have posted in reply to him. You've come into this rather late in the game."
You seem to have two possessions -- "carelessness" and "poor recollection"!
Shakespeare comes to mind: "How long hath this possession held the man?"
My visits and comments on this site predate O'Leary. Actually, my first comment was around the time Benedict XVI was elected -- the napalm reference, with which I had to take exception.
The first O'Leary appearance came on June 17 in the "Can Papa Ratzi fix what John Paul couldn't?" piece that Dr. Blosser posted. O'Leary made a comment about using condemnatory language. The very next post was yours -- "Dr. Blosser is a Christian"
It was then I made some remarks directed to you. To be exact, it was post #3.
So you can see, I never came to the ballpark late in the game. I was there for the opening ball.
I don't know your credentials, but I think we can deduce you're not a lawyer!
St. Polycarp:
"By the way, Jerry, would calling someone a Nazi constitute "tak[ing] to insult anyone"?
Who said such a thing? Where did it happen? I need something concrete.
Contrary to the thrust of your question, there are some individuals who would smile at the thought of being called a Nazi. Even today. Their shirt buttons would simply pop!
In reading posts above, and elsewhere, I find slight evidence of a facility to use language in its analogical dimensions. Propositions seem to be clumped in equivocal or univocal categories. Perhaps that explains the communications challenges. It would certainly present a serious deficiency in understanding the teachings of the Magisterium -- and politics.
Univocal thinking is heavily steeped in our age. It is an outgrowth of nominalism and intellectual relevatism.
"The first O'Leary appearance came on June 17 in the 'Can Papa Ratzi fix what John Paul couldn't?' piece that Dr. Blosser posted. O'Leary made a comment about using condemnatory language. The very next post was yours -- 'Dr. Blosser is a Christian'"
Like I said, you've come into this late in the game -- Fr. O'Leary began posting here before then. There's a comment from him dated May 11 in the commentbox of "Protecting the Lavender Mafia?" -- its the first comment there too, when he claimed that priestly celibacy is one of the main causes of homosexuals getting themselves ordained priests.
You seem to have two possessions: carelessness, and poor recollection. Plus, you're apt to make freaky, disturbing analogies about girdles and tupperware.
"It was then I made some remarks directed to you. To be exact, it was post #3."
Yeah, I remember that. Like Fr. O'Leary's comment, it didn't seem to be particularly relevant or edifying, though it was extremely wordy and turgid, so I ignored it, and pretty much the rest of the comments in that commentbox.
"I don't know your credentials, but I think we can deduce you're not a lawyer!"
Thank you. That's one of the nicest things anybody has ever said about me.
St. Polycarp:
"Thank you. That's one of the nicest things anybody has ever said about me."
As Edith Stein would say, God has infinite ways of tricking a person into receiving and reflecting grace! I'll give God credit for this one. See how humble I am! And yet, I have no regrets being God's unwitting assistant. It was fun.
"it didn't seem to be particularly relevant." That hurts. Actually, some did think it was relelvant. Perhaps you missed the relevance (just a nudging thought). God doesn't dispense grace for everything, you know. Hint: had somethiing to do with logic and language -- analogical, univocal, equivocal.
"Protecting the Lavender Mafia?" -- Yea, I missed that one. Although, without knowing what it's about, Pope Soprano does have a nice Rossini ring to it, don't you think. Or, would you prefer the grand entrance of the Purple Elephants?
"freaky, disturbing analogies about girdles and tupperware." I could have said "uptight" and "cut and paste" instead. Sorry you didn't like the analogous terms. Did you like the analogy? I suppose you perfer "cafeteria catholic" and "faithful Catholic" instead? That analogy would be the same as mine except I'd substitute the terms "cut and paste" for the term "faithful". That'd refine it a bit.
"extremely wordy and turgid" Now this throws me off. Others say I'm "too succinct and precise." Elaborate more. What's a man to do? Ever read Maritain? And you're picking on me?
I guess I'll have to seek out Tom Cruise on this one. Vitamins and exercise. You might try it yourself. Keeps the blood cool he says. Perhaps the Magisterium? Any interest there, I wonder.
This has become a waste of time. When a thread reaches the he said/she said stage, it is time to check out. I don't know why Dr Blosser gives carte blanche to a dissident priest in Japan and his sycophant, but it's his web site and his business, so I'm simply going to bail.
But before I do, a parting shot:
Dr Blosser has several blogs. The others are specialized and scholarly. This one is less so, both in choice of topic and tone of commentary -- totally unsuited to the monumental scholarship of Fr O'Leary -- were scholarly discourse the object of his efforts. If the dissident priest was so anxious to engage Blosser in a scholarly exchange on theological and philosophical matters, I would think he would do so in a forum where he was less likely to be interrupted by rubbernecking "boys" like myself, who according to Jerry's smarmily avuncular council, should be silent and should gaze in rapt slackjawed awe at the geyser of wisdom and knowledge that is Joseph O'Leary [perhaps we should save our catcalls and disrespect for Benedict's encyclicals]. But Fr Joe went for the Fox Channel of Blosser blog sites, and promptly saturation-bombed it with dissident bon mots, smirky praise for the dissident Kung, and obscure philosophical references that would immediately exclude from the conversation all those who work for an honest living. Let's stop kidding ourselves: his purpose was to disrupt.
Has any reader of this blog come to believe it is now a three-way monologue? Father O'Leary and Jerry do all kinds of talking but no listening. St. Polycarp does seem to be paying attention, but can't get much of a word in edgewise.
Polycarp: draws on Protestant fundamentalist authors to attack mainstream Catholic exegesis. I claim no originality in my views of Scripture, being unqualified to do so; if I deviate in any way from mainsteam Catholic exegesis, tell me so and I will reconsider.
Garton-Zavesky claims I do not answer his questions -- he should reread the posts I sent after each of his question sessions and he will see that the answers are clearly contained in them.
Roister claims that the "intellectual" character of my posts was meant to disrupt the "Fox Channel" character of discourse here, better suited to "rubbernecks". Talk about putting yourself down! I was quite unaware of Dr Blosser's other weblogs, and I shall certainly transfer my allegiance to them if the quality of debate is in fact higher there.
"he claimed that priestly celibacy is one of the main causes of homosexuals getting themselves ordained priests."
Here is a distortion -- I would rather say that heterosexuals have been discouraged from "getting themselves ordained priests" (an expression which shows Polycarp's poor understanding of the priestly vocation).
HERE IS WHAT I WROTE IN RESPONSE TO THE ZANY "LAVENDER MAFIA" PIECE. CONTRARY TO WHAT POLYCARP SAYS, THIS WAS NOT MY FIRST POSTING HERE:
I find it odd that this author makes no reference to a major causal factor in the gaying of the priesthood -- namely, the expectation that priests be unmarried.
81% of the cases of sexual abuse of minors involve boys, not girls. But that does NOT mean that homosexuality is the problem. It's a question of simple logic. Supposing that the priesthood was 100% heterosexual, but still celibate. Then all the scandals involving minors would involve female minors. Would that mean that heterosexuality was the problem?
Oops, apologies Polycarp, you did not say it was my first post, just the first post in that box.
My Lord, that was one of the most beautiful things I have read before and I have read alot! Thank you Dr. Blosser! I am going to print it off and read it every time a more "enlightened" dissenting priest attemts to belitte my Faith! bravo and thank you!
bridgit
Bridgit Goett | 06.21.05 - 10:36 pm | # SEE HOW SLANDER SPREADS! PHIL BLOSSER, LOOK WHAT YOU HAVE TO ANSWER FOR...
LETTER SENT TO DR BLOSSER
Dear Phil,
I have been looking again at your piece on me on the web, and I am sorry to have to ask you to remove it, or at least to rewrite it leaving out all reference to me.
Your piece contains a considerable number of false statements about me, in a public place, and with my name and photograph attached. These statements are quite liable to damage my professional reputation and my livelihood. They have all the elements of a criminal libel.
One of your respondents has said she is copying the article and distributing it to friends, who will have no way of checking the veracity of your careless allegations.
In fact, I should advise you that your swashbuckling ad hominem style is just the sort of thing that leads people into legal difficulties, as your patron J. H. Newman discovered to his cost on one occasion.
So, with no hard feelings, but as a matter of self-respect, I must insist that you remove this offensive article from public view.
I would also request that on removing the site you make some kind of apology, as is customary in these cases.
Yours sincerely,
Joe
Now, I had to interrupt my weekend for this.
After 6 days and 130 comments, you accuse Prof. Blosser of "criminal libel"? That is a serious charge, and it always demands that the accused published something false (or that he should have known by all means available to him to be false) regarding the accuser.
Can you enlighten us and tell us what are the falsities in his text?
I believe it is more probable that he has a legal case against you, for all the disorder and personal distress (to him) you have caused in what used to be a lively, but peaceful, blog.
In the first paragraph of his text, Prof. Blosser says you had transformed his blog into a "bully pulpit". It is very sad that the degree of bullying has come to this: a "legal" threat...
False? That I regard the bible as a merely human book, that I regard morality as lacking an objective basis, that I am Pantheist -- need more? I am not threatening anyone, merely asking that a tract which far exceeds the bounds of fair comment be removed from public view. Naturally it has been instructive, and monitory, to see the kind of reactions the tract has elicited from its gullible readers. But enough is enough. Dr Blosser should now remove this composition, or at least leave my name out of it; it is unworthy of him and of his site.
Another accusation of Dr Blosser is that I deny all real authority to the magisterium of the Catholic Church -- this despite my repeated insistence that such is not the case in numerous postings. Dr Blosser seems to have difficulty hearing what others are saying as he blithely paints them with the brush of his own overheated fantasies.
However, New Catholic is right in one thing -- I should have asked for the posting to be removed immediately. I thought its absurdity would expose itself, as it does to any unbiased reader. But what prompted me to view the matter more seriously is the realization that at least one poster here is copying and distributing Dr Blosser's rant as if it were Gospel. Hate-campaigns against Catholic theologians are rife in the Church today, and I wish to deprive this one of its fodder. Fair enough?
Here is an article that lays the truth bare --- Phil Blosser is a -- gasp! --- RELATIVIST!
http://dialoginternational.typep...ional/religion/
Or better, this: http://www.washingtonpost.com/
wp...5052601538.html
Yup, folks. BLOSSERISM is RELATIVISM. No wonder he plays fast and loose with the truth in his offensive article above.
Dionne has identified the two planks of Blosserian Relativism, namely ADHOMINISM and SELECTIVISM. To which can be added the sedulous cultivation of blind spots, or what in older days we used to call OBSCURANTISM or OBFUSCATIONISM or OBSTRUCTIONISM or OSTRICHISM.
Blosser Principles of Relativistic Logic:
ANYTHING THAT SOUNDS LIBERAL MUST BE CONDEMNED -- e.g. critical study of Scripture, the theory of Evolution, understanding of gays, advancement of women. One can judge by the liberal aura of the view that it is to be condemned. Truth does not come into it.
ANYONE GUILTY OF ANY LIBERAL VIEW IS GUILTY OF ALL -- e.g. one who espouses the liberalism of the majority of Catholic exegetes must equally be an amoral libertine, a pantheist, an atheist, a secular humanist, etc. etc. Therefore every kind of accusation is permitted. Truth does not come into it.
TRUTH AND FALSEHOOD ARE ULTIMATELY BASED ON WHAT GIVES SATISFACTION TO THE INSTINCTS OF THE REACTIONARY SUBJECT -- in this case to Phil Blosser.
Dear Fr. O'Leary,
I have been looking again at your comments on the web, and I am sorry to have to ask you to refrain from saying those things again on Dr. Blosser's blog, or if you must at least post them on your own blog.
Your piece contains a considerable number of false statements about CATHOLIC TEACHINGS, in a public place, and on behalf of the CHURCH'S name with AGENDAS attached. These statements are quite liable to damage on the CHURCH'S reputation and HER livelihood. Your comments have all the elements of a FARCE.
One of the respondents has said she is copying the article and distributing it to friends, who will have no way of checking the veracity of allegations UNLESS they visit this blog and see all your silly comments.
In fact, I should advise you that your CHILDISH LEGAL THREAT is just the sort of thing that ruin one's reputation, as Dr. Blosser blog's patron J. H. Newman discovered to his cost on one occasion, sued by an APOSTATE IMMORAL PRIEST.
So, with no hard feelings, but as a matter of self-respect, I must insist that Dr. Blosser should keep your offensive postings in public view since you have made an ASS of yourself.
I would also request that on removing your future nasty un-Catholic comments from this site you should also repent and make some kind of apology to the Lord and to us other readers offended by you, as is customary in these cases.
Yours sincerely,
Franco -- explain your allegations if you can. Give ONE example of a false statement about Catholic teachings. I have given six of so examples of false statements in Philip's piece. You have all my letters here to draw on. The lady misled by Philip will NOT have an occasion to verify his allegations because my posts will have been deleted (most already are). Franco, TRUTH and FALSEHOOD are objective and serious matters, not to be played with frivolously to give satisfaction to some young-fogey priest-baiting agenda. If you have no respect for TRUTH, no concern with fact, logic, objectivity, you cannot expect to be taken very seriously.
Bah, on looking above at your "dog poos in Amsterdam post" it is obvious that you are just a joker.
"Polycarp: draws on Protestant fundamentalist authors to attack mainstream Catholic exegesis."
Exegesis performed by Catholics is not the same thing as Catholic exegesis.
Also, Fr. Brian Harrison, Fr. John McCarthy, and Fr. William Most are Catholics, not Protestant fundamentalists. I have on occasion had recourse (not at this weblog, however) to such Protestant authors as Dr. Walter Kaiser and Dr. Gleason Archer when I thought their scholarship holds up, but then I'm hardly the only Catholic who cites or refers to so-called "fundamentalist" scholars. Truth is truth no matter the religion of the man utters it, just as error is error no matter the religion of the man who utters it.
I don't see Dr. Blosser removing this weblog entry to which Fr. O'Leary objects. There doesn't seem to be anything libelous about the criticisms he expressed. And the piece obviously isn't just about Fr. O'Leary, and nothing he said can't back backed up or explained by referring to the context of Fr. O'Leary previous postings here.
but Joe, you're a priest.
"There doesn't seem to be anything libelous about the criticisms he expressed. And the piece obviously isn't just about Fr. O'Leary," PRECISELY, he is using me as a whipping boy to verify his independently-formed identikit of the New Consciousness. In fact I AGREE with his account of the New Consciousness, but I DENY that I am an example of it!
"and nothing he said can't be backed up or explained by referring to the context of Fr. O'Leary previous postings here." I see, not the CONTENT but the CONTEXT. I say that I follow Rahner and Dei Verbum on the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture, and he says I believe Scripture is merely a human composition. But what I say does not count because of the mysterious CONTEXT! Remarkable sophistication of fundamentalist hermeneutics. What people do not seem to get is that I am an old-fashioned believer in truth and falsehood, not an effete postmodernist poseur. For instance, does Phil Blosser really believe that as a matter of historical fact Balaam's donkey spoke human words? I doubt it very much. I suspect he is playing to the gallery, to his followers who expect that kind of thing of him. When I talked about truth or falsehood in connection with the resurrection narratives he dismissed me as a Fundamentalist. He has studied exegesis himself and has no problem in reality with accepting Markan priority or the Two Document Hypothesis in regard to the Synoptic Problem. But his posture here would not lead one to believe that.
but Joe, you're a priest.
Franco | 06.26.05 - 10:23 am | #
meaning I am supposed to bear with bs with an appeasing smile, "for sufferance is the badge of all our tribe" -- take it then that I am seeking to educate you, in pastoral outreach, Franco, in the SACREDNESS OF TRUTH, truth that rarely -- never -- flatters our egos. If you feel a rush of ego-satisfaction in composting a diatribe, suspect that Truth is not in it.
composting -- I meant composing -- Freudian!
Why is Philip so inconsistent and erratic? Because he is defending a position that is intellectual feeble, so he has to complement rational argument with sweeping ad hominem generalization and various fey evasive sleights. Usually such chronically defective argumentation is not a sign of lack of talent but of a weak and shoddy case.
Maybe Polycarp did not name Protestant sources, but his entire defense of the historicity of Daniel seems to come from them. Not that I, of course, would mind that. For Polycarp's respect for Catholic authorities, consider the following: "'The vaticinium ex eventu character of Daniel's predictions of the Greek empire is upheld by the vast majority of exegetes, Catholic and Protestant, today.' Yeah, it was probably an opinion of Pope John Paul II's too, and may be an opinion of Pope Benedict XVI. But, as Pope Benedict himself once said, truth is not determined by majority vote. Jesus believed Daniel was an authentic prophet, and I tend to put more stock in His opinions than those of us mortals." If I said that, he'd pounce on me!
"nothing he said can't back backed up or EXPLAINED by referring to the CONTEXT of Fr. O'Leary previous postings here." opines Polycarp. Even if this were so, do you think the untutored reader of Philip's rant, who has no access to the EXPLANATION, will imagine that an explanation is needed? It is as if I posted a message that "X is a drunkard" and then EXPLAINED that in some other documents the CONTEXT of my remark was that X was drunk on lofty ideas or on beautiful music.
By the way, in Mark 13.14 Jesus refers to the "abomination of desolation" (bdelugma tes heremoseos) but not to Daniel. Daniel is added in Matthew's rewriting of Mark's narrative (Mt 24.15) -- and phrases like Mt's "to rhethen dia Daniel tou prophetou" fit Matthaean style well, whereas they seem unlike Jesus's own style insofar as this can be glimpsed through the prisms of Mark and the Q source. Lk 21.20 drops the phrase altogether, probably because it would make little sense to his Gentile audience. (Am I talking "Greek" to Polycarp, who clings so desperately to a fundamentalistic literalism that is not countenanced by contemporary exegesis of by the Pontifical Biblical Commission?)
I'm sorry if I offended you Fr. O'Leary, I apologize. the letter above was meant to be a sarcastic parody of your letter but I really meant what I said above. Even the name Franco was chosen just to tease you. With that aside, I'm here in the first place to read Dr. BLOSSER'S blog, not yours. I know where to find yours. I also enjoy other's comments (other than yours) but the thing is, that I really really don't like it when you took over other's blog with overwhelmingly long posts of your truth. It is impolite and rude, now I'm not gonna click 'your comments' any longer. I'm afraid of you, you reminds me of those bullies at school for their superior physical power but in your case it's your superior mental power. You may be smart, speak many languages, read many great literatures, but you're a bully. You subdue anyone on your path with force. I had a very bad experience with bullies and strangely I have the same feeling towards you.
Again, I apologize if I offended you with my words, I'm trully sorry, but from now on I will try to avoid you on the net and off. I will mention you in my prayer, bless me Father.
Come, Franco, that won't wash. It was you who compared me to dog poo etc. Acting the meek lamb now is a bit of an Uriah Heep stunt.
I note that the abomination of desolation is mentioned in MARK but that in MATTHEW the reference to the prophet Daniel is added (in Matthaean style -- not very like Jesus's style as we glimpse it via Mark and Q) and that LUKE omits the reference altogether as unintelligible to his Gentile audience. (Sorry to be so telegraphic, but you get the picture, Polycarp).
Blosser on O'Leary: "The New Consciousness divinizes Fr. O'Leary's own consciousness -- at least for Fr. O'Leary. There is no magisterium to which he is subject but his own consciousness... The Vatican has no REAL authority, except that which someone like Fr. O'Leary confers upon it by his altogether accidental and sporadic agreement... Ancient Paganism had a clear perception of an objective moral order... The New Consciousness is relativistic, subjectivistic, pragmatic. It places human beings above the law... It collapses objective guilt (since there is no such thing, in its view) into subjective guilt feelings... Ancient Paganism retained a clear sense of the supernatural otherness of its object of worship. The New Consciousness has essentially lost all sense of the actual supernatural and, with it, a transcendent object of worship... It verges... towards variant forms of Pantheism, in which a "sacralization of psychology" enables people to talk about God while really meaning their own (collective) psyche... God never makes any demands on us that we do not make of ourselves in this New Religion. By definition He cannot, because He is us." EVERY SINGLE WORD OF THIS, as applied to me, IS A GRATUITOUS LIE!
Imitating our parodist above, I could rewrite Blosser's piece ever so amusingly as follows: "a reactionary who has enough time on his hands to run several blogs. I am amazed at the quantity of time his 'teaching career' permits him to spend pouring fourth avalanches of opinion, ideology, theory, and general rightist spleen. I suppose he believes he's helping to enlighten those of us stuck in the "outdated ruts" of a "decadent" and "secularist" "modernist" rational common sense. Perhaps his motives cannot be faulted. Still, the sheer quantity of time and energy he spends pursuing his agenda is amazing, to say the least. The clearest litmus test to distinguish the two views is their attitudes toward the Bible. The Neocons reduce it to a magical book dictated by the Spirit, who makes the human author a ventriloquist's dummy. This docetist view of Scripture they naturally calls "Catholic orthodoxy." They are the brave new Crusaders, the bold and daring ones who turn the clock back to a golden age of pre-modern certitudes, which they freely eisegete into the text, claiming vague memories of patristic allegory as the antidote to all modern Catholic scholarship. Their Bible is whittled down to something on a manipulable human scale -- like a wax nose to be bent this way or that -- to suit their whim and the limits of their neocon outlook. Theirs is the Bible of Bush or other up to date ideologues, lacking the scope and breadth of the Scripture the church's scholarship and worship has unveiled. They are the elite ones, the proud and few, who have reached sufficient maturity and erudition to realize that, just as they discovered the world's need of their neocon democratic wars, so they know the deep meaning of Scripture by the refusal of critical study and consideration of qualified opinion."
Fr. O'Leary says: "Am I talking "Greek" to Polycarp"
It's much worse than that. The entire Polycarp creation is a mask that covers a vast "waste land" of sickening sanctimony, of a pietistic penance, a making show of religion without the spirit of it.
This is what happens to a person's soul when they take upon themselves the study of religion without adequate spiritual preparation and guidance. Gilson warned our class of this danger when we began the study of philosophy. And he was right. For some people, the study of philosophy became overwhelming. It destroyed their sense of proportion. Even these many years later, some have not recovered.
Should it turn out that Polycarp were an undergraduate at a small fundamentalist christian college hidden somewhere along the backwaters of hilly America, it would come as no surprise. There is a smallness to him that is inescapable in his "credentials". It's a pity. It's not the way a young person should begin their journey.
As for Franco, well, what can anyone say about Franco. He writes from an excess of outward holiness, but he reveals the sickening sanctimonious smile of the pietistic penitent. Characters such as his are the subject of novels. They are never taken seriously. Too bad. That is their deepest desire -- to be appreciated. But they will never be appreciated. They will always try to get attention in the wrong way at the wrong time. But they keep trying because they are engaged in a constant search for love.
If I were Dr. Blosser, I would remove this post for a variety of reasons. Fr. O'Leary has expressed some. But there is another reason that would be more compelling.
Frankly, were I Dr. Blosser I wouldn't want to be associated with the creepy comments of my admirers. I would find it all very icky. The "chimes", as I called them earlier, would cause me a profound sense of shame. At first, I may do as Dr. Blosser has obviously done: try to laugh it off. "Look at that liberal, getting his just due." But at a deeper level a time would come when conscience began to shout louder than humor. At that point, I might get a sickening sense that something has gone terribly wrong. Then I would ask from a brighter conscience: what have I unleashed in the name of Orthodoxy! Yes, I would see myself reflected in the acts of my admirers. And that would be horrifying! And then I would truly Fear. "Ratio culpae consistit in voluntaria aversione a Deo."
I notice that Phil Blosser puts the Resurrection on the same level as Balaam's ass and axeheads floating on water. He states that I do not believe in the Resurrection. In reality, I do believe in the Resurrection as testified by the apostolic witness and as verified in the experience of the early Church. Blosser's litmus of orthodoxy on this is "was it an event you could have seen if you were there?" -- this is a topic that is a matter of the INTERPRETATION of the doctrine, and on which I am content to follow the melior et sanior pars of contemporary Catholic exegetes and theologians. The resurrection is an ESCHATOLOGICAL event and I suggest that whatever could be SEEN would not be that event as such -- even if the corpse of Jesus could be SEEN changing into his spiritual body or even if the ANGEL could be SEEN opening the grave (as in Mt; in the other Gospels the women see no such thing). There are historical events that attest the resurrection -- the appearances to Peter, then to the 12, to the 500, to James, to all the apostles, to Paul; the general pneumatic experiences of the infant church, and whatever else may lie behind the resurrection narratives of the four Gospels. But to say that the resurrection itself is an ordinary historical event is felt by very many contemporary theologians to be unsatisfactory. The bumptiousness, flippancy and complacency with which Blosser invokes this central Christian reality to score schoolboyish debating points is a sign of incurable frivolity.
Jerry spluttered: "It's much worse than that. The entire Polycarp creation is a mask that covers a vast 'waste land' of sickening sanctimony, of a pietistic penance, a making show of religion without the spirit of it.
"This is what happens to a person's soul when they take upon themselves the study of religion without adequate spiritual preparation and guidance. Gilson warned our class of this danger when we began the study of philosophy. And he was right. For some people, the study of philosophy became overwhelming. It destroyed their sense of proportion. Even these many years later, some have not recovered.
"Should it turn out that Polycarp were an undergraduate at a small fundamentalist christian college hidden somewhere along the backwaters of hilly America, it would come as no surprise. There is a smallness to him that is inescapable in his 'credentials'. It's a pity. It's not the way a young person should begin their journey."
Wow. Just wow. Well, I think we can say without any doubt that Jerry has neither the spiritual gift of discerning of spirits nor the gift of reading souls. His arrant speculation is so far off the mark it just isn't even funny.
But at least with his hatefilled verdict on my character and spirituality in the near total absence of evidence, Jerry has definitively exposed himself for the arrogant self-righteous bigot he is.
Polycarp, you have given just as much basis for such spiritual radiography as I have given for the radiography you and Phil practice on my soul. You obviously don't lie to get the treatment you mete out so freely. And surely it is true that your dancing on pins over outrageously strained biblical interpretation and your acting like an always infallible Pope about every conclusion you come to, treating all who disagree with you as heretics, is petty? Even when you make huge concessions, as when you conceded to me that Numbers 31 cannot be historical, you still remain pompous in your claims to infallibility. By the way, you never answered the real problem with Numbers 31 which is this: how can you allegorize or find an edifying meaning in a text in which God commands the rape of virgins and the murder of children? And there are many others, such as I Samuel 15. The herem, or war of extermination, may have been less often practiced by ancient Israel (we hope) in reality than in the pages of Scripture, but it was just as essential to their polity as jihad to Islam or the Crusades to the medieval Church. As with Blosser on the resurrection narratives your entire precarious performance depends on pretending not to see the problems which you see very well (problems that are well known to first years students in theology). When you scream in rage (yes you do) at those of us who try to give honest answers to the problems while maintaining the substance of our Christian faith (drawing on the wisdom of the Church in our quest for a credible interpretation) you reveal in reality the shallowness of your own theology and the panic-stricken nature of your narrow and unreal world-view.
A VAST WASTE LAND OF SICKENING SANCTIMONY...
"Frankly, were I Dr. Blosser I wouldn't want to be associated with the creepy comments of my admirers. I would find it all very icky. The "chimes", as I called them earlier, would cause me a profound sense of shame. At first, I may do as Dr. Blosser has obviously done: try to laugh it off. "Look at that liberal, getting his just due." But at a deeper level a time would come when conscience began to shout louder than humor. At that point, I might get a sickening sense that something has gone terribly wrong. Then I would ask from a brighter conscience: what have I unleashed in the name of Orthodoxy! Yes, I would see myself reflected in the acts of my admirers. And that would be horrifying! "
Yes, Phil writes in witty style, a la Waugh or Belloc, what his admirers develop in a style that is a horrible reflection of what lies at the basis of Phil's distorted outlook. The really frightening thing is that he himself finds nothing noisome in the thought or language of New Catholic (whose guffaws about the noble Joan Chittister he speaks so warmly of), Polycarp (whose biblical literalism he backs despite knowing better as a student of exegesis), Roister, Chris G-Z, Warren etc. -- no enemies on the right -- seemingly flattered by his own reflection in their mirror. Nothing is easier, Phil, than to raise up a rabble. There is an old novel by the Catholic novelist Paul Bourget called "Le Disciple" -- testimony to a generation who felt betrayed by their teachers. I am always TERRIFIED when I have influence, for fear it might be an evil influence. Phil does not seem to have any such brakes of conscience, and that is perhaps the most disturbing thing at all. That puts him is the demagogic class of a GEORGE BUSH -- and we know to what George Bush has led his gullible disciples, don't we. On that point the chickens seem to be coming home to roost. HELL HATH NO FURY LIKE A NATION CONNED!
You still haven't told me what color the sky is in your world, Father. In my world the sky is usually blue, though at sunrise and sunset it turns rosy and orange and red, and at night it turns the darkest violet and black.
Oh, and it turns grey when its overcast. Actually one time during particularly horrendous weather the sky turned bilious green.
The sky over America is the color of ashes.
Oh, Polycarp. What a fool.
You exhibit the slimiest traits. Your attacks on Fr. O'Leary are creepy. There's no getting around it. Simply creepy. As creey as the mucous patches found in the mouth of a syphilitic. Odious. Loathsome. Vile, even. Yikes. And you say I've missed the mark about you! It just wishful thinking on you part.
Blather and sanctimony are your stock and trade. They are your masks of deceit. Little pup, nothing gets worse. Absolutely nothing.
How anyone would associate with your smallness tests all logic. Reciprocity is the only reason
But a head of steam is building! Members of professional associations are beginning to notice. Shock is the intial reaction thus far. The question arises: how could a member of the Academy give countenance to such behavior? We'll see what happens.
Polycarp says:
"Wow. Just wow. Well, I think we can say without any doubt that Jerry has neither the spiritual gift of discerning of spirits nor the gift of reading souls. His arrant speculation is so far off the mark it just isn't even funny."
For all I know, you might be a biblical scholar. You might even prowl the nights in dirty old book stores.
But your behavior exihibits what I've described above. And it's creepy.
"For all I know, you might be a biblical scholar. You might even prowl the nights in dirty old book stores."
Exactly. You admit you've got next to nothing to go on, but choose to think the absolute worst of me. Where I come from, that sort of thing doesn't speak well of a person.
I don't know who the heck you are any more than you know who I am. But I will say that I think that with comments like, "As creepy as the mucous patches found in the mouth of a syphilitic," your mask is off. Should any of your recent remarks hre see the light of day, I think you'd be advised to think of your own reputation in the Academy, if you have any, rather than Dr. Blosser's.
By the way, the ad hominem is the stock-in-trade of those who have no valid arguments to advance.
I'm still shaking my head here. It's almost incredible that we've come to this pass. Clearly there is between us a great gulf fixed, one that apparently prevents accurate, let alone respectful and charitable, communication. There is literally nothing else to be said here -- the atmosphere is just too poisonous -- so I'm signing off from this commentbox, permanently.
"Exactly. You admit you've got next to nothing to go on, but choose to think the absolute worst of me. Where I come from, that sort of thing doesn't speak well of a person."
Quite the contrary. There's much to go on. Distinctions, Polycarp, distinctions. Who you are is not in question. How you have behave is. There's too much to go on.
Your behavior is evident throughout this thread. It's creepy. Nothing has changed there. It's reeks like rotten mucous.
As for professional associations. The attention has been called. it will not focus on me. Nor will it focus on you, little cartoon figure that you are.
In a (probably) vain attempt to steer this back on track, I pose some questions to Fr. O'Leary. If he would prefer to answer them off list, I will be happy to accept them that way and, with his permission, report back on what I discovered.
Father O'Leary: I have no power of authority over you. As a Knight of Columbus I respect the office to which you have been raised by God's calling. Therefore,
1) Do you accept the Church's constant understanding of Sacred Scripture and Divine Tradition? (I'm not looking for some declaration of modern exegesis, just a simple "yes" or "no".
2) Do you accept that, since he is the Pope, Benedict XVI is the yardstick by which the Catholicity of others is measured?
3) Do you accept that Dr. Blosser, St. Polycarp, Ralph Roister-Doister and I can not square anything you have said with what the Church has always taught? Do you further accept that we have good cause?
4) Do you realize that all the theologians you mention constantly (Schillebeckxx et al) form an intellectual cadre whose fundamental tenants, if implemented, would destroy the Church?
5) Could you take an oath against Modernism with sincerity?
6) What is your opinion on Liturgiam Authenticam? Should there be a new translation of the Mass in line with its principles?
On a more personal note, out of sincere interest:
1) What is your ministry in Japan?
2) Do you encourage or discourage adoration of the Blessed Sacrament?
3) When did you first realize you were called to be a priest? Have you ever doubted that?
Chris Garton-Zavesky
inconnu1@hotmail.com
1) Do you accept the Church's constant understanding of Sacred Scripture and Divine Tradition? (I'm not looking for some declaration of modern exegesis, just a simple "yes" or "no". YES
2) Do you accept that, since he is the Pope, Benedict XVI is the yardstick by which the Catholicity of others is measured? A not THE yardstick YES.
3) Do you accept that Dr. Blosser, St. Polycarp, Ralph Roister-Doister and I can not square anything you have said with what the Church has always taught? YES
Do you further accept that we have good cause? NO -- It is a matter of blocked theological understanding.
4) Do you realize that all the theologians you mention constantly (Schillebeckxx et al) form an intellectual cadre whose fundamental tenants, if implemented, would destroy the Church? NO, they are the architects of VATICAN II.
5) Could you take an oath against Modernism with sincerity? AN oath, YES, but not THE ANTI-MODERNIST OATH (whose history and interpretation would be a very complex topic)
6) What is your opinion on Liturgiam Authenticam? I HAVE NOT READ IT. I HAVE SEEN MOSTLY NEGATIVE COMMENTS ON IT IN THE TABLET. Should there be a new translation of the Mass in line with its principles? THE NEW TRANSLATION I SAW IN THE TABLET WAS A DISIMPROVEMENT LINGUISTICALLY AND THEOLOGICALLY. BUT A NEW TRANSLATION IS INDEED NEEDED. THE PRESENT LITURGY IS ANAEMIC LINGUISTICALLY AND THEOLOGICALLY.
On a more personal note, out of sincere interest:
1) What is your ministry in Japan?
PRIMARY: TEACHING, EDITING THEOLOGICAL JOURNAL, WRITING; SECONDARY: CONVENT CHAPLAIN AND WEEKEND CELEBRANT OF EUCHARIST.
2) Do you encourage or discourage adoration of the Blessed Sacrament?
VERY MUCH ENCOURAGE HOLY HOURS ETC.
3) When did you first realize you were called to be a priest? AGED 13. Have you ever doubted that? NO.
1) Do you accept the Church's constant understanding of Sacred Scripture and Divine Tradition? (I'm not looking for some declaration of modern exegesis, just a simple "yes" or "no".
2) Do you accept that, since he is the Pope, Benedict XVI is the yardstick by which the Catholicity of others is measured?
3) Do you accept that Dr. Blosser, St. Polycarp, Ralph Roister-Doister and I can not square anything you have said with what the Church has always taught? Do you further accept that we have good cause?
4) Do you realize that all the theologians you mention constantly (Schillebeckxx et al) form an intellectual cadre whose fundamental tenants, if implemented, would destroy the Church?
5) Could you take an oath against Modernism with sincerity?
6) What is your opinion on Liturgiam Authenticam? Should there be a new translation of the Mass in line with its principles?
On a more personal note, out of sincere1) Do you accept the Church's constant understanding of Sacred Scripture and Divine Tradition? (I'm not looking for some declaration of modern exegesis, just a simple "yes" or "no".
2) Do you accept that,
" It's almost incredible that we've come to this pass ..... so I'm signing off from this commentbox, permanently."
Frankly, it doesn't matter whether you come or go. From the beginning, you've left behind a creepy trail of venom that has done damage to Fr. O'Leary in ways beyond your ability to comprehend. Those wounds won't go away easily, if ever.
And now, you have the impudence to think this is all about you and your puny feelings. That is simply disgusting. It's worse than that! Your behavior has been deliberately malicious towards Fr. O'Leary from the outset. Get thee gone, whoever you are, and good riddance!
You're such a hateful, bitter man, Jerry. There's absolutely nothing Christian or holy about you and your conduct in this "discussion." I'll pray for you. It's all I can do. Farewell.
I understand but don't share Jerry's anger. As a literalist or -- I think it is fair to say -- fundamentalist, Polycarp regards my non-literal understanding of many parts of Scripture as simply heretical. His position needs to be shored up with a modicum of sarcasm, but he does try to tone it down. He did not attack me strongly until I started repeating what Americans have said about the Nazi character of what Americans are doing in the Middle East.
I think many of Phil's postings could be construed as libelous -- as when he says that Kung believes Jesus never existed or when he lambastes Richard P. McBrien or Boston College. He seems to have little sense that he is accountable to truth and fairness in his broadsides.
I think with great admiration of Edward Schillebeeckx -- the victim of smears from the Catholic right for the long duration of his career. Three times he was summoned to Rome -- Rahner went with him once, and returned to his teaching in a state of depression saying that "nothing has changed in the Vatican". Though Jean Galot libelously denounced as Schillebeeckx as a 'heretic' on Vatican Radio, in none of his three hearings was Schillebeeckx convicted of unorthodoxy. His views on the Eucharist, Ministry and Christology (including the Resurrection) may ruffle some Roman feathers, but they are not uncatholic. But I know of one case in which a theologian was condemned by Rome solely on the basis of a report on his writings by an unknown person from the Gregorian University. There was no due process of any kind. The same theologian's books were later translated into Polish with Nihil Obstat adn Imprimatur. So it looks as if the Blosser style of judgment, with attendant skulduggery, has taken root in Rome under Ratzinger. Let's hope the new head of the CDF, with his background in American traditions of democracy and due process, will clean up that show.
My baby weblog has been neglected due to my postings here. Have a look at the latest offering, though: THE STRESS OF TIME. Stop fretting about dill and cummin and just enjoy!
THANK GOD there are some American doctors and psychiatrists ready to protest against the HORROR of using doctors and psychiatrists, Nazi-style, in the torture and abuse of illegally held prisoners. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/2...n/
l27gitmo.html
While Phil Blosser strains out gnats about rubrics and the like, has he EVER posted a critique of human rights abuses being perpetrated by his country?
Joe,
I think your denial of knowledge of Blosser's other websites is pure swill. You have obviously had him in your sites for a long time.
You are a priest. You do not conduct yourself like one. Rather, you conduct yourself like a venomous, intellectually petty, overbearing pedagogue. How many converts do you think you've made with this stunt of yours? Do you care? Is the conception of religious conversion even operative in your ecumenical Candyland?
You said you would immediately transfer your hissy-fit cartoon balloons to one of Dr Blosser's other websites, uh, now that you knew they existed. Then you wrote a couple dozen more. If you are truly interested in serious philosophical debate with Dr Blosser, I invite you once again to transfer yourself to one of his other more appropriate sites and have at it. I'll only speak for myself, though I suspect others will agree: I am disgusted with your domineering arrogance masquerading as priestly holiness. I'm tired of your references to apostates, pagans, and atheists as containing the seed of true Catholicism. I'm tired of YOU.
My bet is that you're not about to go anywhere. Your behavior here has never been about intellect or spirited debate, and those regulars who deplore my "intemperate" remarks are, I think, being naive in assuming that it is. It's about sheer envy and malicious cat-scratching. It's about being the biggest intellectual bull goose in the barnyard. It's the egotistical professor's version of smackdown. You want Blosser's head. Good luck getting it.
I patiently sat out the saturation-bombing with Lovehandles, another semi-focused intellectual blowhard. No sooner does his ardor peter out than Joe the dissident priest shows up to carry the torch forward. I have been accused of a number of psychological dysfunctions -- perhaps paranoia was included, I can't recall -- but gee whiz, it is strange that you guys keep showing up.
Finally, Joe, your letter to Dr Blosser is a real knee slapper. I'd love to see what happens to you in court, when you are facing real people, not wispy academic sycophants, and cannot rely on your arrogance and pedantic sneering to carry you through.
Stunning article in RECHERCHES DE SCIENCE RELIGIEUSE, an issue devoted to the IDEA OF A COUNCIL. Alberto Melloni analyzes the ecclesiological defects of the last pontificate -- quoting Phil Blosser on the Kasper-Ratzinger quarrel -- and augurs that a new council is on the way. This is an amazingly timely issue of RSR, which may be the first trumpet blast in a new epoch in church history.
Jerry,
I visit Dr Blosser's blogsites on occasion, just as I visit Amy Welborn's, Dom Bettinelli's, and several others. I came to my beliefs long before I came to these sites. I am not part of Blosser's robotic neo-conservative strike force. I don't know the man, don't correspond with him, don't audit his courses, don't babysit his kids. All of which makes your indictment of Dr Blosser's "conscience" so mewlingly pathetic that I can only goggle at what a fool your blind hug-me-please liberalism has made you.
I have been drawn into the latest brouhaha simply because I am sick and tired of clicking into dozens upon dozens of notes by lovehandles and then by the dissident priest -- pompous, semi-focused notes whose main purpose is to disrupt things and chase people away. This is a kind of intellectual gangsterism, and I'm surprised that the exquisitely sensitive moral tuning fork of a fine fellow like yourself is so strangely insensitive to it.
And Jerry, this Webber infatuation of yours has to end. Webber stinks because Broadway stinks. It's kind of a great big Sunset Boulevard where rubberneckers can pay big money and watch odd creatures preen themselves and wallow in their illusions. Come to think of it, Broadway is sort of a musical analogue of most college faculties today.
I am reading at last Alberigo's History of Vatican II. The first sentence is this lovely bombshell: "Trembling a little with emotion but at the same time humbly resolute in my purpose, I announce to you a double celebration which I propose to undertake: a diocosan synod for the City and a general Council for the universal Church" (John XXIII, Jan 25, 1959). Btw, The Rhine Flows into the Tiber is a wacky book I looked at when it came out almost 40 years ago. The movements of the Spirit and the Church are not measured by such fearful, biased books.
I apologize that I have had so little time to read most of these comments, let alone comment upon them. I am in the week of final exams in three summer courses I am teaching that conclude the end of June. Next month, I will have only two courses to contend with, so perhaps a bit more time, though I do face a publisher's deadline for an encyclopedia article.
Of the little I have managed to catch up on in this comment box, I am surprised at the direction things have taken. I recognize in myself, as well as in these comments, the difficulty we sometimes have in sorting out personalities from issues. I know I try my best to attack only ideas I disagree with, not persons, even when this favor isn't always returned.
I see that Fr. O'Leary has taken the liberty of posting a letter to me that he sent me under separate cover by email. He asks me to delete the post to which these comments are attached and to offer him a public apology for "criminal libel." Let me respond, then, by also posting my reply here along with his, which I emailed him this morning, before I had read any of these comments:
"Fr. Joe,
"I re-read the piece. I agree that it's style is informal. I agree that it has statements that would appear incriminating. But "criminal libel"? Remove it from the web and apologize for it? Nothing doing. I assume you stand behind your own avelanche of comments you've appended to these posts for the last couple of months. Well there's plenty in those comments that is far more incriminating than anything I've said. I've only offered general summaries of your views. Unless you can show me that I've made any statements that impute to you views you do not hold, I don't see a need to change a thing. If you'd rather, however, I will be happy to re-write the piece substantiating every assertion with a quotation from one of your own comments.
"C'mon, we both believe in the free-exchange of ideas and opinions, do we not? And we believe, I hope, in standing behind what we've said, do we not? Otherwise what happens to free and open debate? If you'd like, I could ask the readers of the blog if they think I've maligned you in any way, and if they agree that I have, I could agree to offer an apology. But apologize now -- for what? C'mon, I think it's patently clear to my readers that I respect you and your scholarly mind, even if I disagree with many of your opinions. As long as you're confident that none of your views at any point contradict Catholic teaching, as you've made very clear you believe, then why should you fear anything?
"Bless you, Father,
Phil"
Fr. O'Leary:
Thank you for answering my questions as simply as you could manage. I wish to encourage you to elaborate on those topics to which you added caveats. Which oath, for example, against modernism, would you take? If the Pope is only one yardstick among many, which other yardsticks would you propose, and does Catholic tradition support you?
In regard to LA and the translation of the Mass, the one draft I have seen is a marked improvement over the ICEL translation precisely because it says what the Latin says. Can it be improved?? Probably. "Pro Multis" should read "for many", for example. Still, whether you or I like it, LA is the law of the liturgical landscape.
Could you elaborate what you mean by "blocked theological understanding?" I'm fairly widely read, although obviously not as well read as many erudite folks who post here and elsewhere. What theological works would you suggest that I read?
About Vatican II and the folks I mentioned, you are quite right to observe that they are the architects of the plan, but Pope Paul Vi was the engineer, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. His Holiness had to intervene repeatedly precisely to ensure the Catholic content of the documents.
Chris
Ralph,
Call it whatever. Grace will eventually trick you too!
What captured my attention these past few days was the abuse and smearing of a Catholic priest, not necessarily Fr. O'Leary. Fr. O'Leary and I don't know each other. Neither do we know how the other thinks. I haven't read his articles. He hasn't read mine. But there was ill-will directed towards a priest and that is wrong. Period. It's just that simple. It goes no further than that.
I have no disrespect of your beliefs about the Catholic Church. I don't even know what they are. Whatever they are, I'm certain they represent your sincere attempt to bring order to your life, and to submit yourself before God. That's all I know, and even that is ripe with conjecture.
You have claims for your views others don't. That's to be expected. That's easily handled. Easily.
Disagreement is a moment in the dialectic of enrichment. It calls upon the parties to find reasons to effect reconciliation. Finding reaons presupposes understanding. Thus dialogue is mutually beneficial. Reconciliation is the outcome. It's more than Lovehandles!
Even your views on Bernstein could stimulate a deeper understanding if pursued from principle -- although that may require an aspirin or two, or a few shots of Makers Mark. Most probably it would require both. And with that behind us, we could move on to Barbara Streisand and the way we were.
The Church has always handled differences. It's good at it. In so doing, it recognizes that talking takes time. So, there's room for your thoughts -- and those of Polycarp and New Catholic -- and for Fr. O'Leary's thoughts, too. One doesn't have to agree. But to be authentic in dialogue, one needs to have reasons for agreement AND disagreement, reasons that flow from principle. This is the Catholic way.
St. Thomas gave undeviating respect to Aristotle, The Philosopher, although a careful reading of his writings reveal a profound disagreement with Aristotle's interpretation of reality. He accorded the same respect to Augustine. Von Balthazar treated Karl Barth with now legendary respect. Both benefited as a result. That benefit has been passed on to others. Maritain's youthfui but intemperate remarks about his former mentor Bergson weighed heavily on him. It was a burden he never entirely escaped.
Like the greatest thinkers, our meager role should be to meet each other at the level of discourse. Our very presence should be an invitation to others, and a signal that they are safe before us. Such interaction is a gift of one to another.
The distasteful and blind assaults on a Catholic priest is thus out of order. It is unacceptable.
Dr. Blosser's post was unsavory and obnoxious. It was needlessly abusive. It was as distasteful as his napalm reference in an earlier post. Both submissions lacked proportionality. Their intention may have been playful. Perhaps. He claims so. But his i
(Continued -- I forgot to save)
To me, the tone against Fr. O'Leary was offensive, whether it was intended to be or not. Perhaps this is a case of perception. But if it is, I have never perceived such abuses against a priest. I guess I was brought up on Bing Crosby and Going My Way. I'm come to expect it with politicians, but not priests. I said all this early on. No one took note. The vicious assaults simply continued. And they continue even now.
The very fact that Fr. O'Leary doesn't share my anger is a tribute to his decency. Just as well, my anger is not directed against a person, or what they believe. My remarks are directed against the malicious way Fr. O'Leary has been abused.
That is the issue for me. Nothing else.
Fine Jerry, that is the issue with you. The other day you indicated that Fr O'Leary was a fount of knowledge whose notes we should all read in hushed rapture, but now you're saying that it is the perceived disrespect of a priest that is the issue with you. What will the issue with you be tomorrow?
That said, I must say that I too have had regrets over some of what I said to Fr O'Leary this morning. I should have been more respectful, merely on the basis of his being a priest. And on that basis, I apologize to Fr O'Leary -- I'm sorry I let my irritation with his actions on this blog reach such an indiscriminate level.
But let's not pretend that that's the end of it. He is also a person, and based on what I've seen in his behavior on this blog site, not a very attractive one. The adjectives I used -- domineering, arrogant, etc -- are suitable to describe what he's done here, and what he continues to do. You call his blitzkrieg an invitation to "dialogue"? In my view it is intellectual bullying of the first order. The fact that he is a very learned man does not make it less so.
Perhaps your view of the matter is colored by the fact that you fervently agree with practically everything he has written here.
"Perhaps your view of the matter is colored by the fact that you fervently agree with practically everything he has written here."
Doubtful. If true, its accidental. If not true, its accidental. I have my own purpose. You characterize it as Lovehandles -- I'm not even fat -- but its not. I may cue you in at some point. But we haven't even settled our score over Bernstein yet. No use stumbling over our feet.
Actually, what I said is true. Only one thing peaked my interest. If you read everything I said on this and the Ratzi thread -- go ahead, it will reduce your penance! -- I think you'll discover it reads that way. I would be very surprised if it didn't.
To me, the content of Fr. O'Leary's remarks are secondary to the treatment he was receiving. I don't think I could explain his throughts -- I asked him for some reading materials which he graciously provided -- so its highly unlikely we would agree. And if we do, then great. You can take me on directly.
My work probably doesn't fit within the range of this website. I tried to interject a few ideas to see if they would sprout, but they fell dead born from the press. But they should fit.
To put it in JPII terms, my work is designed to address the "structures of sin" that lie at the heart of our culture and institutions, and that contribute to a wide range of behavior dysfunctions -- substance abuse, youth violence, gangs, homelessness, risky sexual behavior. So, in general, you can see I'm working on a short term national prevention strategy! (A joke!)
But its not time for a sneak preview.
By the way, I can't tell you how many foreign visitors have come up to me over the past 20 years and said: "I wanna be in America!"
Effective public diplomacy, ole chap! Effective public diplomacy.
Phil Blosser does not seem to approve of ANY living theologian except Ratzinger. This puts him in a very odd position when he takes up the cudgels for his foreshortened notions of orthodoxy. His theology is patched together out of Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, and other culture-war polemicists like Schall, Schaffer et al. True he invokes the names of Newman and Aquinas, but has not shown much knowledge of them.
PHIL BLOSSER REPLIES:
I agree that it has statements that would appear incriminating. But "criminal libel"? Remove it from the web and apologize for it? Nothing doing. HMM? You even ADMIT that it appears incriminating! Note that "criminal libel" does not imply malicious intent. In law, as I very vaguely recall, there are three justifications against the charge of libel: (a) justification -- the truth of the contents; (b) privilege -- parliamentary privilege or privilege due to some professional relation to the person libeled; (c) that the libel was not actually published or could not actually damage the offended. An Irish newspaper had to pay thousands of pounds to a Bishop merely for stating that he was opposed to ecumenism. But no doubt the USA has much slacker ideas of libel -- it would appear so.
"I assume you stand behind your own avelanche [avalanche] of comments you've appended to these posts for the last couple of months. Well there's plenty in those comments that is far more incriminating than anything I've said. YOU ARE AT ENTIRE LIBERTY TO DELETE THEM! YOU ARE THE PUBLISHER, NOT I! I've only offered general summaries of your views. Unless you can show me that I've made any statements that impute to you views you do not hold, I don't see a need to change a thing. If you'd rather, however, I will be happy to re-write the piece substantiating every assertion with a quotation from one of your own comments. IF YOU DO THE LATTER THE READER WILL SEE FOR HIMSELF THE PRINCIPLES OF YOUR BIASED INTERPRETATIONS. PLEASE DO SO.
"C'mon, we both believe in the free-exchange of ideas and opinions, do we not? AS A SUPPORTER OF THE HISTORICAL INQUISITION, AND A REGULAR SMEARER OF LIBERAL THEOLOGIANS LIKE R MCBRIEN, DO YOU REALLY? And we believe, I hope, in standing behind what we've said, do we not? NO, OF COURSE WE SHOULD NOT STAND OVER WHAT WE SAID WHEN IT IS RUDE OR WRONG. Otherwise what happens to free and open debate? If you'd like, I could ask the readers of the blog if they think I've maligned you in any way, and if they agree that I have, I could agree to offer an apology. But apologize now -- for what? C'mon, I think it's patently clear to my readers that I respect you and your scholarly mind, even if I disagree with many of your opinions. THAT IS NOT THE ISSUE AT ALL. As long as you're confident that none of your views at any point contradict Catholic teaching, as you've made very clear you believe, then why should you fear anything? I DO NOT FEAR, I JUST DEMAND THAT SINCE I AM AN ORTHODOX CATHOLIC AN ENTIRE PIECE PREDICATED ON THE OPPOSITE ASSUMPTION AND INTENDED TO BOLSTER IT, WITHOUT A SHADOW OF JUSTIFICATION, SHOULD NOT BE CIRCULATED. You have immolated your own reputation on the flames of your self-indulgent opiniatedness, but I think you should have some tenderness before casting that of others on the pyre as well.
Of course if you claim to back up your allegations with quotes from me, they should not be misleadingly selective or truncated. You say for example that I consider the Bible a merely human book. You should point out that in postings prior to your essay I stated my adherence to the divine inspiration of Scripture, notably as interpreted by Karl Rahner -- in a well-known essay of unimpeached orthodoxy. You say I do not believe in the Resurrection -- again I would ask you to distinguish between the historicity of the resurrection narratives in the four gospels and the original resurrection witness, as we have it directly from Paul in I Cor 15 -- and to point out that my belief in the resurrection is obvious from my adherence, heart and soul, to the latter. You might also mention that the vast majority of Catholic exegetes agree with me on the historicity of the resurection narratives and that I at no point sought to strike a position different from theirs, etc. etc. But I doubt if you really understand these distinctions.
Father O'Leary:
What does the term "orthodox Catholic" mean to you? It is as plain as the nose on my face (I'm not Jewish, but people tell me I look as if I am) that you and I use the terms differently. Since I wish sincerely to understand your posts, this term seems key. You fervently believe that you are an orthodox Catholic. What does such a description entail, and how would, say, Dr. Blosser, fail it.
By the way -- Fr. McBrien is a nuisance all over American television every time the press are searching for a DISSENTING view. He relished being the "nuancer", if you like. I don't know anything about his international presence, but certainly at home, the only point of pulling his bridle out of the stable is to diminish the authority of any statement made by any Catholic authority.
Chris
What does the term 'orthodox Catholic' mean to you?
Chris:
That's pretty much the salient question for all thinking Catholics today. Hence it is worth asking not only Fr. O'Leary but everybody across the spectrum. Indeed, it is but the specification, periodically revived in Church history, of the broader question constituting the basic controversy of creation itself: Who is the authority?
In illo tempore, Lucifer's pride led him to answer that question wrongly, thus leading to his rebellion and downfall. In his envy, rage, and self-deluded hope, he caused our first parents to fall too. That inaugurated the problem to which the solution is the incarnation, life, death, resurrection, ascension, and return of God the Son. We await only that return to bring all to glorious fruition. In the meantime, however, the presence of Christ in the world is focused in the Eucharist, his actual body and blood, and extended outward through those who gather round to celebrate it: the Bride of Christ, the Church, which as his bride is one body with him. The visible authority in that Church, to whom the invisible divine authority has been delegated, is the college of bishops in union with their head, the pope. They have such authority not just to govern but to teach. To be an "orthodox" Catholic is just to submit to that authority by trusting implicitly whatever it teaches definitively and irreformably. That is the only acceptable answer, in both theory and practice, to the question: "Who is the authority?"
The scandal of ambiguity in the answers of Christians to that question manifests itself both in the divisions of Christendom and in how the conflict of today's ideology of personal autonomy (non serviam) with the countervailing, salvific truth plays out between and among Catholics themselves. One stark illustration of that among American Catholics is the opposed philosophical views of Justices Kennedy and Scalia in the Court's Lawrence decision striking down state anti-sodomy laws. Another is the difference between a Fr. Richard McBrien and a Cardinal Avery Dulles. Catholics in general, as distinct from the new pope, no longer speak with one voice to the world but with a cacophony of essentially old disputes that have already been resolved in principle. Many either don't care or don't listen because they have answered the specific question wrongly even if they profess the right answer to the general one. Thus they unwittingly follow the primal lead of the Enemy. The only solution is to make clear what is at stake so that more people will be motivated to do the opposite.
Mr Chris G-Z asks what I mean by blocked theological understanding -- I mean unawareness of the science or art of HERMENEUTICS, essential to responsible theology at every level.
What are the other yardsticks of Catholic faith beside the Pope? This is dealt with in Fundamental Theology (theological prologemena), see for example Michael Schmaus, Dogmatik I, 1960. Scripture, tradition, the universal magisterium, the Councils, conscience and reason are among the yardsticks to be respected. Schmaus insists that the Church is the Interpreter not the Mistress of Scripture.
What anti-Modernism oath would I swear? Pascendi contains a long list of alleged Modernist errors -- essentially I subscribe to none of them. But as Ratzinger points out in his 1966 book on The Problem of History of Dogma, it is the drift and intention of the encyclical that counts, not some of its weaker individual points, which may wrongly dismiss quite valid points associated with the Modernists (e.g. their rejection of the idea that dogmas fall ahistorically from heaven).
Orthodoxy is much more than merely subscribing to irreformable dogmas -- by that standard I take it we are all orthodox here. The interpretation of those dogmas may testify in greater or lesser degree to a mature sense of the fulness of Catholic and Christian truth. In making orthodoxy seem a strait-jacket and in making it seem to entail rejection of basic modern rationality one may betray a thin and shrill idea of what orthodoxy is which ultimately serves to bring orthodoxy into disrepute. While it is not precisely a heresy to equate orthodoxy with biblical fundamentalism, it is nonetheless a very damaging way of presenting orthodoxy. Again it is very important to bear in mind the Vatican II teaching on the hierarchy of truths. The specifications on papal infallibility in the final paragraph of Pastor Aeternus, for example, are little more than a difficult modern footnote to the vision of papal authority agreed on by the undivided church of the first millennium; in practice their effect has been negative, to remind Catholics that Papal teachings usually are not infallible and irreformable (except when they are transmitting the basic truths of the Creeds). Again the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption are more declarations of devotion than of dogma; their dogmatic content serves primarily to inculcate devotional attitudes; they should not be held up as dogmas to be bound on all as essential to salvation (in contrast to those of the Nicene Creed, for example.) Also orthodoxy should ideally be rooted in a wide and deep grasp of the organic growth of doctrine over the ages and it should not present Roman Catholicism as an anti-ecumenical sect or as cut off from other Christian communities and other religions. Another mark of healthy Catholic orthodoxy is a deep respect for the Jewish people and their faith, from which our own derives.
Michael Liccione is to be welcomed here as he has the courage to post under his own name. His website which I have been looking at contains a great wealth of interesting articles. Of course there is much to argue with as well, but that must be for another day.
Fr. O'Leary:
Thanks for the compliment. I return it by noting my appreciation of your thoughts on what orthodoxy entails; I agree with much of it. But at some point, it must be possible for the ordinary believer to be orthodox without being able to ascertain the precise degree of authority of ecclesiastical teaching documents. One doesn't need to parse such things like a Jesuit in order to give due assent to the teaching authority of the Church.
That is why I did not use the terms 'dogma' and 'infallible'. We both know that there is much more to the Catholic Faith than what has been formally defined with anathemas; adherence to the whole of the faith delivered once-for-all to the saints remains necessary for orthodoxy. Hence what is taught definitively and irreformably by the ordinary magisterium of the Church, typically in conjunction with the sensus fidelium and as pertaining to the deposit of faith AND morals, is also essential. "Picking and choosing" among teachings satisfying that description is the pre-Nicene, and thus the most traditional, definition of heresy (hairesis; "choice"). If that were not the case, then dogmas would have no prior subject matter to define.
Controversy, of course, arises when it is not clear to the Church as a whole that a given teaching satisfies the description 'definitive and irreformable'. On many points there is no controversy or is no longer any; the interesting cases are those which do occasion dissent in a given era. Yet even in some such cases, it is crystal clear that the past judges the present. For example, the existence and nature of Satan, as described in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, has been definitively and irreformably taught by the ordinary magisterium. It belongs to the deposit of faith, so that it is at least materially heretical to deny the existence of Satan as taught. That many educated Catholics nowadays, including many clerics, do not believe in the existence of Satan as taught is simply irrelevant to the teaching's objective confessional status. Catholics who disbelieve in Satan's existence are materially heretical—though personal culpability for that is another matter altogether, and in the case of laity at least, we should typically decline to assess culpability.
With the relevant principle established, the question then becomes how to apply it to the harder cases. For reasons I'm writing for publication about, those seem nowadays to be "the pelvic issues" of sex, gender, and procreation. That the Zeitgeist hates the teachings of the Church on those issues (especially on those rare occasions when the rationale for said teaching is actually understood) is, to my mind, itself fairly good evidence that they are true. But of course it is not sufficient evidence. For that, we also must look to the history and clarity of Church teaching on whatever issue is in question. That of contraception seems a good example.
Activ
Active interruption of the generative process, whatever the technology or lack thereof, has been condemned by the Church as intrinsically evil for as long as the written record goes back. Hence, in Humanae Vitae, Paul VI was simply reaffirming the traditional ban in face of questions that had been occasioned by new contraceptive technology and the so-called "population explosion." That he also developed therein the Church's teaching about sex and marriage generally, so as to supply the needed conceptual and pastoral context, was a terrific illustration of authentic development of doctrine in keeping with Tradition. Accordingly, that HV's teaching was rejected by many laity and clerics at the time it was issued, that it indeed occasioned some formal apostasy, and that is now pretty much ignored by the majority of married Catholics, is no argument against its definitive and irreformable status. Both the CCC itself, and JP2's public remarks about HV during his own papacy, make that as evident as anything so controversial can get. The globality of dissent on this issue says more about the culture than the doctrine itself, and what it says is negative in just the ways that Paul VI prophesied.
That is not to deny that some controversial teachings are not so clearly binding. The teaching about artificial procreation, for example—which is basically that it's another intrinsic evil—has not had enough time to sink in with Catholics because the issue itself, for obvious reasons, is so new. So I can't blame most Catholics, especially infertile couples, for not "receiving" the teaching. But with science and technology evolving as quickly as they now are in these areas, what is at stake spiritually will not remain unclear for very long. Eventually people will have to take sides, and they had better take sides with the Church.
I would generalize that statement in all sorts of ways, many of which have nothing to do with morals but everything to with the love of the Bride for the Bridegroom.
Best,
Mike
Humanae Vitae has not been officially presented as an infallible and irreformable teaching. Ratzinger somewhere said that if the Church were not to accept a papal teaching, even one declared infallible, than that teaching would not be binding. The teaching of Boniface VIII in Unam Sanctam might be a concrete instance of such non-reception. Humanae Vitae may be another. There is no basis to speak of apostasy here.
The CDF under Ratzinger declared that the Church's inability to ordain women as priests is infallible teaching. As far as I know, not one has taken this declaration seriously. Another case of non-reception that robs the teaching of binding power. This doctrine of the necessity of reception is very liberal, yet it appears to be part of Catholic thought. Yes -- irreformable doctrines are true ex sese and not from the subsequent consent of the Church, as my compatriot Cardinal Cullen had Vatican I add to its definition of infallibility (this was once known as "the feather in Ireland's cap"). Yet is that consent were not forthcoming, the doctrines would not come into effect -- that, at least, is the position Ratzinger appears to uphold.
As to the "existence and nature of Satan", it is not clear that the Church has defined anything on it in response to querying of traditional representations. The Catechism of the Catholic Church is not a document carrying the authority of a Papal or Conciliar ex cathedra pronouncement. Paul VI insisted on the personal reality of Satan, but it is not a topic on which Catholic authorities touch very much; in contrast to Protestant and even Anglican preachers. The nature of Satan is quite obscure in any case, once we think beyond the framework that early Christianity inherited from Persian sources (the serpent of Genesis and the adversary who strolls in God's presence in Job are not connected with this. I check Ratzinger's Eschatologie, and note that in his discussion of Hell he makes no mention of devils or fallen angels. Biblical eschatology is often thought of as a battle between Christ and demonic powers, but this seems to be absent from Ratzinger's 1977 book -- though I would need to check more carefully. Of course Ratzinger is a modern theologian and realizes how much the biblical language of angels and demons is time-bound and in need of a demythologizing interpretation -- with no prejudice to the spiritual realities that such language conveys. As always, it is the spirit that gives life, the time-bound letter goes rancid if we clutch at it unspiritually.
You're making two moves that I framed my previous post to forestall: assimilating definitive and irreformable teaching to formally defined teaching, so that whatever doesn't count as the latter cannot count as the former; and making "reception" a constitutive rather than only a heuristic mark of definitive and irreformable teaching. And you're missing the forest for the trees in doing so.
Since there's little point in battling over individual trees when the forest is at stake, I'll just note one example in passing as evidence of the narrowness of your perspective. You write: "The CDF under Ratzinger declared that the Church's inability to ordain women as priests is infallible teaching. As far as I know, not [sic] one has taken this declaration seriously." That reminds me of nothing so much as literary critic Pauline Kael's remark that she couldn't understand how Nixon had won re-election in 1972 because "I don't know a single person who voted for him." But just as I know lots of people who voted for Nixon, I know lots of educated Catholics who took the CDF responsum quite seriously indeed—starting with myself. The Catholics I know who didn't take it seriously are those who believe that only those teachings which are solemnly defined by the extraordinary magisterium amount to anything more than theological opinions. Since people who think that way did not and do not take Ordinatio Sacerdotalis as anything more than a Polish pope's theological opinion, they certainly did not and do not take the CDF responsum on it as anything weightier than Professor Ratzinger's opinion, excusable only by the need to placate his boss but all the less credible for that very reason. The problem with that sort of attitude is quite general and is by no means limited to women's ordination, or indeed to any other particular controversial issue.
What that attitude entails, in principle if not always in practice, is a complete license to disbelieve any doctrine that is not
labelled "infallible" or that one is not formally anathematized for disbelieving. Aside from its manifest incompatibility with the constant teaching of the magisterium, as most recently expressed in Dei Verbum 8 ff. and Lumen Gentium 22-25—which latter speaks of the infallibility of the ordinary magisterium but probably wouldn't weigh with you anyway, since there no anathemas there—that attitude makes a mockery of the very notion of dogma itself. Dogmas taken collectively no more begin to exhaust the content of the deposit of faith than they begin to exhaust the mysteries they speak of when taken severally. That is because the function of a dogma is to give a permanent and normative linguistic expression to something already and traditionally believed by the Church to belong to the deposit of faith. But if dogma were the only or even the primary means of identifying what belongs to that deposit and what thus has a decisive claim on o
a decisive claim on our assent, then there would be no prior faith for dogma to define and the very content of that faith would be contingent on its formulation in dogma. But that is absurd. Hence from both the historical and the propositional viewpoints, the primary content of the faith taught by the Church and assented to in baptism has to exist and elicit religious assent prior to dogmatization. That's the content I call "definitive and
irreformable" without using the words "dogma" or "infallible" which have their place but which ordinarily trigger exactly the distorting reaction you've displayed anyhow. Even after dogmatization, there's always plenty of the old faith left (formally) undefined but still (materially) definitive. But you guys leave the Church no option save "the nuclear option" of dogmatization to get you to believe whatever it is you don't feel inclined to believe. That's just not in keeping with either the noetic structure or the lived reality of Catholic faith.
Your appeal to "reception" in Ratzinger is beside the point. I've read enough of him to conclude that, for him, some degree of reception by the faithful is necessary as one of the heuristic marks of definitive and irreformable doctrine, but no degree is necessary as a constitutive mark thereof. In other words, there has to be some measure of reception if we are to be able to tell that a doctrine is definitive and irreformable, but such reception is not what makes the doctrine definitive and irreformable. The only question is just how much reception is heuristically necessary. Well, not much, really. Consider 341, when the Council of Rimini, to the acclamation of most of the faithful as well as most of the bishops, delivered itself of an Arian confession of faith. St. Athanasius lamented that "the world awoke to find itself Arian." And that was after Nicaea I. It took decades of struggle, sometimes violent, indeed centuries of it in the West, to get the bulk of the baptized to "receive" the orthodox teaching. All it takes sometimes is a hardy little band of faithful folk. We are in such an era again.
Yes, in addition to doctrine defined de fide there is a vast realm of doctrine to be received with the obsequium of which Vatican II speaks -- but precisely here also is where there is a margin of play for legitimate questioning. It was St Jerome, not St Athanasius, who observed after the Rimini debacle that "the whole world awoke and found itself Arian". I agree that reception is not constitutive of the authority of defined dogma -- the very point made by the ex sese clause; but its absence is indeed heuristic, it helps us to find (Gk heurein) that a valid dogmatic act has not occurred. When I said no one takes seriously the CDF's claims that the impossibility of ordaining women is infallible, I was referring not to the alleged impossibility as such but precisely to the infallibility claimed for it. Even the Vatican has not repeated this claim. Now that Ratzinger is Pope he could formally define the impossibility of ordaining women as infallible. I wonder how that would be received?
It was the tight definition of infallibility in 1870 that opened up the perceived gap between infallible teaching and the ordinary non-infallible teaching of the magisterium. To say that the latter is irreformable would be tantamount to saying that it is infallible; I do not see how this can be argued.
Some imagined that the definition of Papal infallibility would make Councils (to determine the mind of the Church, consensually) unnecessary. Yet Pius XI and Pius XII planned Councils. Pius XI is said to have desisted because "there are no theologians in the Church" and Pius XII because of the expense of a Council in postwar Europe.
Today the Church can resolve its pastoral crisis and polarization only by a Council. But it will take a long time to prepare!
Yes, the reception of Nicea took a long time; just as the non-reception of Unam Sanctam did. And yes, at Nicea the truth of the dogma was resident in the Conciliar utterance and was not constituted by its later reception. What all of this shows is the very limited value of appeal to infallible instances. We magnify the first four councils because their dogmas were universally received, apart from the monophysites and nestorians still flourishing today. Other Councils have been less well received, notably Basel and Constance (though I admit I know little about this). Appeal to the broader infallibility of the universal magisterium is not in practice terrible helpful when controversies arise, as the Arian example clearly shows. Many fourth century people could claim that the universal magisterium along with the consensus of pre-Nicene Fathers, supported Arianism rather than the homoousios of Nicea. Papal infallibility was supposed to make it possible for the Pope to determine truth infallibly when there was a fluctuatio in the minds of the faithful -- to resolve a controversy in other words. Yet is the two most plausible candidates for papally infallible statements, the dogmas of 1854 and 1950, there was no such fluctuatio. The Pope consulted the bishops in preparation for the 1950 definition and found no resistance. When there was a fluctuatio, as in the case of contraception, the Pope did not dare invoke infallibility. People like Grisez argue, I think, that the universal magisterium ensures the infallibility of Humanae Vitae, but if you read the Episcopal Conferences's interpretations of Humanae Vitae, notably that of the Canadian Bishops, you will see that many bishops saw the encyclical as little more than a recommendation of the Pope to be received or rejected as the faithful saw fit. The fluctuatio about womens' ordination has also not been resolved by the claim of infallibility (oddly put forward by the CDF rather than the Pope) or by the ban on further discussion of it.
I agree that dogmatization is of secondary significance in the transmission of Christian truth. It is largely a negative and protective matter, a fence around the Revelation to ensure that it is not plundered in false interpretations. Nicea and Chalcedon point back to John 1.14, The Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us, and do not add anything to its substance.
A band of hardy folk who "receive" the doctrine of Humanae Vitae or on womens' ordination as prophetic and labor for its wider reception are perfectly within their rights, but they cannot be certain that their doctrine is that which will ultimately prevail -- since papal doctrine put forward with equal force in the past did not in the end prevail. So here we have to live with a margin of openness and uncertainty, a most salutary thing
The synod of Rimini and Seleucia was not in 341 but in 379; the Arian text deplored by Jerome was composed at Seleucia, where the emperor had kept the eastern bishops separated from their western counterparts in Rimini.
Slight correction: Ursacius and Valens, those very active Arians, brought the document of Seleucia to Rimini and made the bishops there accept it, so that "the whole world awoke and found itself Arian". But Arianism was already, as Dick Cheney would put it, in its final throes -- the Council of Constantinople came only 2 years later, with the formulation of the Niceo-Constantinopolitan Creed that we still use today.
Ooops, I am dreaming -- it was 359 not 379! Of course the Church could not lurch from night to day in two years.
Irreformable, infallible, etc. are words that seem of little use when the issue is the transmission of the substance of Christian truth. Largeness of vision is a better and surer guarantee of orthodoxy -- a virtue which sickens when it cannot link the transmitted message to the contemporary world in its length and breadth -- as John XXIII realized in summoning the Council. Some said that "theology ended in the fourth century and it ended badly" -- becoming an endless wrangle about authorities rather than a joyful exploration of the riches of revealed truth. Of course I don't agree, but there is some truth in the witticism.
Because the deep pastoral crisis of Catholicism today concerns not petty topics like contraception or womens' ordination or gay marriage but the Gesamtbild, the big picture, the vision thing, and because the unmanned bishops, the dozing curial bureaucracy, and the zealous New Movements are patently incapable of providing what is needed, it is clear that nothing less than a Council will do the trick. But has the Church at present the theological resources to hold a Council? Perhaps we will be reaching out to the other Christian communities -- this time not in condescension but in need -- so that the next Council will be a truly Ecumenical one -- the first act of UNITED CHRISTENDOM in a thousand years! If the world unites in globalization why can the Church of Christ not at last unite in the Spirit?
"Scripture, tradition, the universal magisterium, the Councils, conscience and reason" -- these are the yardsticks you accept. By definition, since Truth is One, Scripture, Tradition, the Magisterium, the Councils and Reason can't disagree with each other in substance. That only leaves one's conscience to measure a different standard. Cardinal Pell is quite correct to observe that the liberty of conscience notion has been badly overplayed in the last forty years. A rightly formed conscience will agree with Scripture, Tradition, the Magisterium, the Councils and Reason, however, which leaves you with ONE effective yardstick, not the 6 you want to accept as different from the Holy Father.
Christ didn't say "Your names are Peter, James, John,.... and on these rocks I will continually establish your church." He said, "Tu es Petrus et super hanc petram aedificabo ecclesiam meam".
All of which brings me by direct route to Philip Blosser's posting which started this conflagration. He says in essence that the only authority you will accept is that of Father Joe O'Leary himself. I would say that he stands vindicated on this point. Since the only one of the yardsticks which can honestly lead you in a direction other than Christ's is your own conscience, this must, by itself, be the justification for your unwillingness to accept Catholic doctrine, whole and entire.
Chris
Chris, none other than Joseph Ratzinger has insisted, more emphatically than almost any other theologian, that for the Christian the authority of conscience is supreme over any other, even than that of the Pope. He specifically refers to fascism as the result when freedom of conscience is trampled on. As for the rest of your letter, you are floundering badly -- never did I deny the objective authority of any other other instances. To which I should add the lex orandi of the Church. I fear that your hermeneutics are as defective as those of Phil Blosser. I must say that the only correspondent I have met here who shows any sense of theological nuance is Mr Liccione above. His distinction between heuristic and constitutive, for example, is streets ahead of any of the bluster and gesticulations that the rest of you come up with. Why do you not do some study before you sound off?
One thought troubles me.
Why is it that Christianity has always been so quarrelsome? Even one of the earliest Christian documents, Galatians, plunges us into a world of bitter wrangling. This has roots in the violence of the Old Testament.
I have not indulged much in theological wrangling during my years in Japan, devoting the best of my energies to studying Buddhism instead. And the contrast between the Buddhist Scriptures and philosophies and the eternal wrangling of theologians surely puts the latter to shame.
The honor of Christianity in this regard, oddly enough, is saved by the scholastics and especially by Aquinas. He is a theologian who never raised his voice in anger and never indulged in sarcasm -- a miracle!
The Fathers were steeped in Greek rhetoric, and unfortunately took a special delight in the polemical forms of rhetoric instead of the irenical ones. Ad hominem attacks became the norm in the prefaces to their anti-heretical treatises, and they soon began hitting below the belt.
Buddhism never had need of such low tactics, because of its serene rationality. Aquinas is the greatest Christian Buddhist, in that sense!
Anger is the sign of immaturity in a theologian. Reading the early Newman you find that he is full of anger, often spluttering with indignation (against Luther and Calvin, casually dubbed heretics, against Hampden, against Catholic Emancipation, etc.). His writings after the age of 50 or so breathe a serener spirit.
This is post no. 172. Is this a record?
Is it vacation time in Japan or something? Are you a parish priest?--if you are, who's running your parish?
I wish I had the free time you have!
I'm sure Fr. O'Leary's studies into Buddhism and its various scriptures are immensely more extensive and in depth than my brief studies, but it seems to me that he is painting an unrealistic, romantic picture of Buddhism. I'm pretty sure that Buddhism is just as marked by in-house fighting, controversy, schism, and outright violence and political maneuvering as any other religious endeavor you might care to name.
I'm sure Fr. O'Leary's studies into Buddhism and its various scriptures are immensely more extensive and in depth than my brief studies, but it seems to me that he is painting an unrealistic, romantic picture of Buddhism. I'm pretty sure that Buddhism is just as marked by in-house fighting, controversy, schism, and outright violence and political maneuvering as any other religious endeavor you might care to name.
"Marked" no doubt, but "just as marked", no. Offhand I cannot think of a single person who was put to death for failure to subscribe to an orthodox Buddhist belief, or being threatened with torture. Buddhism is about as peaceful as medieval scholasticism -- with its sects and controversies, to be sure, but without the rhetoric of hatred that so many religionists went in for, including ones I admire, such as Gregory of Nyssa, John Chrysostom, Luther (of whom Thomas Mann said that he was "a great hater, prepared heart and soul for bloodletting"!). Buddhism never felt threatened the way Calvinism did when faced with Servetus (you are familiar with the story of his judicial murder) or the way the Vatican did when faced with Bruno, Sarpi, Galileo and other early moderns.
There are of course many controversies in Buddhism. Shinran and Honen were resented by the conservatives in medieval Japan, and Nichiren introduced a principle of fanaticism. The two branches of Shinran's New Pure Land school face each other in massive temples across the main street in Kyoto, two rival Vaticans. But the twenty or so classical denominations of Buddhism in Japan agree to differ quite peacefully. When Buddhists have been violent it is due to involvement in secular politics -- the warrior monks of Mt Hiei, the Zen support for wartime fascism (heavily emphasized in the writings of Brian Victoria), the "Buddhism Betrayed?" scenario in Sri Lanka of recent years. One reason for the serenity of Buddhism is its discouragement of the passion of anger and of attachment to views. Buddhism is the most self-critical of all religions, because it was born as a critical turn within an already ancient and complex religious tradition. Every other religion can benefit from trying the medicine of Buddhism.
Fr O'Leary paints a romantic picture of every religion but his own. For that he has an attitude of teasing antagonism, and a reductive method, the end goal of which seems to be complete irrelevance. Perhaps once he has finished the deconstruction of Christianity, he will start on Buddhism.
The Buddhists will welcome you with open arms. The reason no one ever came to blows over Buddhist tenants is that they do not claim to be objectively true or necessary for salvation.
There's no need to tar Dr. Blosser with the brush you use on me. Apologies, Phil, for having you painted in my corner.
Evidently I'm not up to the task of defending the Church in a forum such as this.
Be assured of my prayers, Fr. O'Leary.
Over the pope as the expression of the binding claim of ecclesiastical authority there still stands one's own conscience, which must be obeyed before all else, if necessary even against the requirement of ecclesiasitcal authority.
This emphasis on the individual, whose conscience confronts him or her with a supreme and ultimate tribunal, and one which in the last resort is beyond the claim of external social groups, even of the official Church, also establishes a principle of opposition to increasing totalitarianism.
My last post is a quote from you know who.
Yes, we know who. But you misconstrue his meaning, in precisely the same manner as the priest many years ago who said to a bunch of engaged couples: The teaching of Humanae Vitae is that Contraception is objectively a sin, BUT WE DON'T LIVE IN AN OBJECTIVE WORLD.
I can convey exactly the same meaning as His Holiness, and do so, when I say to my students: If His HOliness comes to me, in my classroom, and demands that I desecrate the tabernacle in the chapel, my answer must be a firm one: NO, Your Holiness, I will not.
I asked Dr Blosser to remove his libelous article and he said "no way!" Only a few days before writing his libel he wrote me a letter saying that he and I were closer than he had at first thought. I notice that he also posts a libel about Starbucks, though it is refuted in two of the responses it received. This is reckless folly.
Ratzinger's views on conscience have nothing to do with pantheism and self-deification, any more than Newman's had ("I drink to conscience first, then to the Pope"). Newman's enemies spoke of him much as Blosser speaks of liberal theologians today. Newman along with the German bishops in 1875 was the most influential minimizer of the import of Vatican I and did much to resolve the anger that Council had generated in society and the divisions (including a schism that still continues) which it caused in the Church. One of the most repulsive hijackings of Newman by the Catholic right is a volume of his sermons re-edited under the title NEWMAN AGAINST THE LIBERALS, which Dr Blosser highly recommends. When Newman attacks theological liberalism he means what we would not call Modernism. Theologically, Newman was quite a liberal, so much so that Vatican II is sometimes called "Newman's Council".
Blosser has a lot in common with Ottaviani who submitted a document to the Council's preparatory commission in which "the Scriptures are never cited... Pascendi, Lamentabili, and the anti-modernist oath are cited eight times and Humani generis seven times. Among the errors opposed are: laicism, mistaken notions of Christ's satisfaction, minimalism in Mariology and errors on her virginity, denials that the Catholic Church is the one true Church, new theories about the salvation of infants who die without baptism, denials of the difference between the universal and hierarchical priesthood, emphases on the Church's sins, and neglect of the doctrine of Hell" (Alberigo, History of Vatican II, vol. 1, p. 238-9). Many members of the commission criticized the document "for its negative character, inflation of the authority of encyclicals, neglect of the varying doctrinal authority of its statements, and attempt to close many legitimately disputed questions".
Garton-Zavesky pounced on my mention of the word CONSCIENCE and now claims I misconstrue the Pope's meaning -- quite gratuitously! He can find my thoughts on this subject on my website, the very first articles (go to June 2005), josephsoleary.typepad.com/My_Weblog. On objective morality and the role of conscience I FULLY agree with the official teaching of Paul VI, as expressed for instance in his letter to Cardinal O'Boyle of Washington. I am absolutely amazed at Mr G.-Z.'s method of lashing out at theologians in general. His unctuous expressions of respect for the clergy in his first postings, in which he told us how he stood up when they enter the room, seem to mask a deep anticlericalism. I am forced to ask myself why two American academics, he and Phil Blosser, would lash out so wildly, why they feel so threatened, why they do not have the patience to respect the criteria of evidence and logic that they would demand their students to respect.
I would remind Garton-Zavesky that I am not a moral theologian and that the debate here has not been about conscience particularly. The piece I refer him to on my website is an extremely rare incursion into moral theology. I showed it to a Professor of Moral Theology who has taught for 25 years at an American Catholic university, and he could find nothing to correct in it. If Mr Garton-Zavesky is capable of finding theological errors which my learned counsel could not I will congratuate him on his brilliance and I will instantly correct those errors.
OVER THE POPE AS THE BINDING EXPRESSION OF ECCLESIASTICAL AUTHORITY THERE STILL STANDS ONE'S OWN CONSCIENCE.
Mr G.-Z. claims that this means "if the Pope commanded me to desecrate the blessed sacrament I would have to refuse in conscience".
Kindly read the above proposition again and note the phrase AS THE BINDING EXPRESSION OF ECCLESIASTICAL AUTHORITY.
Here is a wonderful quote from De Lubac on the other members of the subcommission of the preparatory Theological Commission before Vatican II:
"They know their craft, but little else. You sense in them a certain indifference to Scripture, the Fathers, the Eastern Church; a lack of interest in and uneasiness with regard to contemporary doctrines and intellectual currents contrary to Catholic faith. They are, it seems, too certain of their own superiority; their practice of judging does not incline them to work. It is the milieu of the Holy Office. Observations, studies, suggestions from theologians, or even bishops, from elsewhere (except those of some friends or spokesmen) scarcely retain their attention. The result it a little academic system, ultra-intellectualistic but without much intellectual quality. The Gospel is folded into this system, which is the constant a priori."
Sounds familiar?
above quote is from Alberigo, 245-6
Fr. O'Leary:
Again, I'd rather discuss the general principles here before getting into specific cases, which will in due course become the focus again.
Evidently you acknowledge a tertium quid between dogma and theologoumenon: an ordinary magisterium calling for obsequium from the faithful. What I'd like to know is whether, in keeping with Lumen Gentium 25, you acknowledge any zone of infallibility for the college of bishops and/or the pope in teaching what calls for obsequium. If so, what criteria do you recognize as severally necessary and jointly sufficient for recognizing it? If not, why not?
I do not understand the expression "any zone of infallibility in teaching what calls for obsequium". My understanding is that some church teaching is regarded as infallible (whether on the basis of the authority of Scripture, Councils, the universal magisterium or the pope speaking ex cathedra) and other teaching as authoritative and as demanding obsequium although not infallible and therefore irreformable.
Lumen Gentium 25, in the biblical spirit of Vatican II, begins by locating authority in a wider context: "Among the more important duties of bishops that of PREACHING THE GOSPEL has pride of place". The Catholic right stresses dogma, infallibility, irreformability ad nauseam but tends to slight the richer, deeper context of PREACHING THE GOSPEL. A good theologian should give 95% of his concern to HEARING THE WORD OF GOD and only 5% to respecting the teaching of the church magisterium -- the latter is only the servant and interpreter of Scripture, nothing more (its first service being to discern the Canon). LG continues a little further on: "bishops who teach in communion with the Roman Pontiff are to be revered by all as witnesses of divine and Catholic truth". Who denies it?
Is the great complaint of bishops today not that the Vatican has frustrated and thwarted their duty of witnessing, so that even at the Roman Synods their episcopal voice is silenced (with a papal summary replacing what they said)?
The faithful are "obliged to submit to their bishops' decision.. in matters of faith and morals, and to adhere to it with a ready and respectful allegiance of mind. This loyal submission of hte will and intellect must be given, in a special way, to the authentic teaching authority of the Roman Pontiff, even when he does not speak ex cathedra" -- this is the obsequium I mentioned above. Again who denies this?
Only at this point does LG take up the thorny topic of infallibility; here one might consult the commentaries to know what alternatives were considered and rejected in the formulation here retained.
Bishops "proclaim infallibly the doctrine of Christ on the following conditions: ... when ... they are in agreement that a particular teaching is to be held definitively and absolutely; ... when, assembled in general council, etc.
Note that the infallibility of the Church is mentioned in connection with the bishops first, not the Pope. The infallibility of the universal magisterium has been invoked by those who wish to see Humanae Vitae as infallible -- but there is a great problem with this, namely, that if such were the case Paul VI would not need to have decided on the issue at all. It might be said that subsequent reception of Humanae Vitae revealed unanimity of the universal magisterium; but as we know the Episcopal Conferences gave widely conflicting and often extremely liberal "interpretations" of the Encyclical.
LG 25 continues as follows:
"This infallibility with which the divine Redeemer wished to endow his Church... is coextensive with the deposit of revelation... The Roman Pontiff, head of the college of Bishops [note this primus inter pares touch, putting the Pope within the episcopal context; cf. the German Bishops of 1875 insisting that Vatican I did not absorb episcopal jurisdiction in papal -- as Pius IX agreed], enjoys this infallibility in virtue of his office when ... he proclaims in an abolute decision a doctrine pertaining to faith or morals. For that reason his decisions are rightly said to be irreformable by their very nature.... and do not admit of appeal to any other tribunal". Note here that infallibility and irreformability are coextensive; I still cannot see how a teaching can be one without being the other.
The above teaching is clear and simple and there is not need to dance on pins about it. In practice there are two problems that I see: how do identify which teachings exactly are taught INFALLIBLY by (a) the universal magisterium; (b) the Pope. Many in Rome on the eve of Vatican II considered that the impossiblity of unbaptised children going to heaven was de fide (limbo was the universal doctrine of the bishops). Now it appears that his diagnosis was incorrect. So infallibility is a nice meta-dogma, but in practice is often quite impractical to use positively, and has more often functioned to signal that contested teaching are in fact non-infallible.
Jacques Maritain said:
"As a Catholic and by my Catholic Faith, I am bound in conscience to no human, theological, or philosophical opinion, however well founded it may be, and still less to any judgments on contingent or worldly matters, or to any temporal power. Nor am I bound to any particular form of culture or civilization, and still less of race or blood. I am bound uniquely to what is universality itself and superuniversality: to the Divine, to the words and precepts of Him who said, I am the Truth, I who speak to you. That in brief is how the Catholic outlook appears to me. Catholic theology teaches that it is upon our love, as Saint John of the Cross says, that we shall be judged; in other words, that salvation and eternal life depend on charity. It teaches that charity presupposes faith and has its root in faith, in other words, in truth divinely revealed. It teaches that explicit faith in Christ, illuminating the human mind regarding the inmost secrets of divind truth and life, is not only the requisite means for souls to attain the highest degree of conformity with God and divine union, and a prerequisite for peoples to achieve a firm position of general morality and perfectly human civilization, but that that faith is also the response of reverence justly due to Gods gift, inclining His glory toward us."
Seems like he is saying something important here about being an orthodox Catholic! Have at it.
Where did you find that, Jerry?
Fr. O'Leary:
Your emphasis on the ecclesiastical authority part doesn't help your case. It strengthens the case of the late Archbishop Lefebvre -- since he was being compelled by legitimate ecclesiastical authority to do what his Catholic conscience told him he could not do. I don't hold to everything the archbishop said or did, nor do I declare him a saint. Nevertheless, he has a much stronger claim to Ratzinger's statement than, say, the womens' ordination cabbal. Their consciences are going away from the Church by refusing to accept WHAT THE CHURCH HAS ALWAYS TAUGHT.
(I've got to figure out how to use italics on here, so I don't look like I'm shouting).
Chris,
How do you address Maritain's statement quoted above?
Chris,
How do you address this quote of Ratzinger which I borrowed from Fr. O'Leary's website:
"Over the pope as the expression of the binding claim of ecclesiastical authority there still stands one's own conscience, which must be obeyed before all else, if necessary even against the requirement of ecclesiastical authority."
This sounds very similar to the Maritain quote above, it seems to me. Over ecclesiastical authority stands Conscience. Pretty direct, I'd say.
I'm sorry, Santiago. I missed your post.
The Maritain quote is from an essay he wrote entitled "Who Is My Neighbour? which appeared in Ransoming the Time (1941).
Toward the end of this essay he says:
"While remaining within the faith, the friendship of charity helps us to recognize whatever beliefs other than our own include of truth and of dignity, of human and divine values. It makes us respect them, urges us on ever to seek in them everything that is stamped with the mark of man's original greatness and of the prevenient care and generosity of God. It helps us to come to a mutual understanding of one another. It is not supra dogmatic; it is supra subjective. It does not make us go beyond our faith, but beyond ourselves. In other words, it helps us to purify our faith of the shell of egotism and subjectivity in which we instinctively tend to enclose it. And it also inevitably carries with it a sort of heart-rending -- attached, as is the heart, at once to the truth we love and to the neighbor who is ignorant of that truth.
",,, I distrust any friendship between believers of all denominations which is not accompanied, as it were, by a kind of compunction or soul's sorrow -- which would be easy and comfortable."
"...I also distrust a friendship between believers of the same denomination which is, as it were, easy and comfortable, because in that case charity would be reserved to their fellow worshippers, there would be a universalism which would limit love to brothers in the same faith, a proselytism which would love another man only in order to convert him and only in so far as he is capable of conversion, a Christianity which would be the Christianity of good people as against bad people, and which would confuse the order of charity with what a great spiritual writer of the seventeenth century called a police-force order."
And there it is. Jacques Maritain. This is how I remember it. Charity!
If Lefebvre compromised with his conscience in order to stay on good terms with the Church I disapprove. Conscience may indeed force a man or woman to leave the Church, but conscience should never be forced -- that is the essence of Dignitatis Humanae. The Church should not put people in a situation where they are forced out of the Church by following their conscience unless the matter concerns the very essence of faith. Paul VI was very conscious of this in issuing Humanae Vitae, for example.
Thanks for the citation, Jerry.
Hi there, you may be interested in an old essay I just put on my website. It deals with the issue that is really troubling some of you -- how to handle Modern Historical Consciousness (or what Dr Blosser might call the New Consciousness?).
I have also added a piece written in November 2003 on the Iraq War -- it errs rather on the side of optimism, but stands up well otherwise I think. josephsoleary.typepad.com/My_Weblog
I don't see a contradiction between this and solid adherence to the constant teaching of the Magisterium of the Church. The Catholic Faith, as taught by the magisterium is not a "school of thought" or an "opinion", but is the Truth taught by Christ.
Remember that Liturgiam Authenticam requires that translation be not inspired by political agendas etc., and firmly mandates translation in what enemies call "exclusive" language. Explanation: what the enemies call "Exclusive" language is normal, right and proper, true, worthy of expressing the teaching of the Church and firmly routed in right thinking. "Inclusive" language is muddle-headed mush.
I'll see if I can find and read Maritain in the original French.
Chris says:
"I don't see a contradiction between this and solid adherence to the constant teaching of the Magisterium of the Church."
Your statement is a logical truism. And as self-evident as it may appear, individuals don't live in a purely logical world. They live in a world of contingency. Thus, you have really ignored the entire thrust of Maritain's statement. Which means you've missed his point altogether.
I'm afraid French won't help. It is not nuance that needs clarifying. It is the essential point that begs for understanding.
Jerry:
No, I don't think I have ignored it. Maritain is not the Magisterium, nor is he "part" of it unless the Holy Father accepts his teaching as valid. He observes that he is not bound by any opinion -- but that he is bound to Christ -- WHO binds him to the Church and it all follows logically from there. You're trying to introduce into Maritain's thought (as represented here, at any rate) something which isn't there.
You are trying to give theology some kind of mathematical precision. That will never happen. Read Maritain's Degrees of Knowledge.
For Maritain, Conscience stands above all else. Just as a person grows in Truth, so they will grow in Love. As this happens, Conscience will grow, too. And the Person will move towards a more perfect unity with Christ.
You place so much emphasis upon the Magisterium that you forget why it exists in the first place. It is to contribute to all these things happening. The Magisterium is not akin to a school mom lording over unruly kids, threatening them with a dunce cap. Heavens! That is more like Cotton Mather.
The purpose of the magisterium, as the name implies, is to TEACH the flock so that we can know the truth, hold fast to it, and thereby attain Heaven.
I agree. But too often the Teaching is so far removed from where a person finds themselves on their journey to God that the Teaching becomes more a discouragement than a help. This is not acceptable.
This very present danger constitutes a challenge for the Magisterium. I don't know how to resolve these contradictions, but they do exist. The Maritain comment that I posted earlier has to do in part with this kind of thing. The inability of the Magisterium to conduct a meaningful dialogue with large segments of its flock is really a huge problem all around, especially in this mindless swirl we call post-modern society.
This challenge is not one where the burden rests entirely on the person. The Magisterium must also reach out to its flock in meaningful ways. Truth has to be made meaningful without doing violence to itself. The difficulty is enormous.
It is at this point where charity plays a central role. We must engage the life of one another. We must become agents of grace not judgment. We are called to reconcile, not alienate. How to do that is at issue.
Perhaps I'm unable to make myself clear on this matter. Let me try it another way. How do we relate to one another as sinners, but in the spirit of charity? How do we do that? Maybe that's a way of putting the issue. Maybe not.
Jerry:
Bad grammar leads to bad logic, which is what you demonstrate here. To wit: "a person finds themselves on their journey" -- lovers of thought can't conscience such nonsense. "They" is a plural pronoun. A person finds himself. Occasionally a person finds herself. Outside of schizophrenia, no person finds THEMself anywhere.
If someone says "that teaching is too hard", the Church has an obligation to say "so it is, but true none the less."
The Magisterium doesn't "conduct a meaningful dialogue"- because except in loony-tune schools where relativism is king the teacher doesn't give curricular control to the student. The inmates (the sick people) don't run the asylum (or the hospital).
The truth of the Gospel isn't a blunt instrument with which to hit people, but failure to accept it has consequences, which consequences we have an obligation to show to the uninformed and unconverted.
Watered down truth doesn't help anyone either. "Because of your just punishments" just doesn't cut it as a formulation in the act of contrition -- no one in a self-justifying society fears God's justice. Consider by contrast the "loss of Heaven and the pains of Hell", which affirms the reality of both ends, and doesn't blame God for anything.
Chris
Bad grammar has been the tool of great literatue. Just a reminder. My words are not great literature. Another reminder.
But I accept your red pencil mark, as I'm sure it was extended in an act of Charity. Thank you.
A dialogue is still necessary, whether you think so or not. It's a requirement of Charity.
If the hierarchy of he Church wants to act like the bankrollers of Truth, raking in only the solid souls then so be it. They steered a course to the Reformation and the Inquisition. So, it won't be the first time they have led everyone astray.
But being so aloof, they are violating their obligations to Charity, as Maritain would say. Charity is the highest obligation, after all. Without Charity, nothing else can be fully lived. It's as simple as that, Chris.
When a person is dying of thirst, it does no good to tell them they need water!
It's not simply a matter of Truth or watered down truth. It a matter of communicating the Truth so that a person can become Good and radiate Beauty. This is why von Balthazar's work is so pregnant with promise for the future of the Church.
All four are necessary -- Being, Truth, the Good, and Beauty. Beauty is the ultimate synthesis. It's presence is fully expressed in Christ. Being, Truth, Goodness, radiates through Beauty.
But the hierarchy is stuck in the first phase of this Transcendental Enterprise and they exhibit little facility thus far to finish the job. It's a deplorable state of affairs.
Frankly, they need help -- and so the Age of the Laity! But the Laity needs help. And so the Age of Finger Pointing -- which brings us back to Blosser's original post .
Truth spoken to a man dying of thirst is still true and not, merely because it is true, uncharitable.
If you write to me to tell me that my sleeping with a male companion is a mortal sin 1) because I'm male; and 2) because I'm married to someone else, you are by that fact commiting an act of charity. You are trying to save my soul. If I recognize that you speak the truth, I will need help acting on that realization, and will be grateful to you for bluntly pointing out my error. If I acknowledge it slowly, I may go to someone else for help, but I still get help. If I deny the gravity of the situation, you have done your job, and I will burn in Hell.
Oh, I forgot. Hell might be empty.
God Himself gives us an example. Father Richards likes to observe that "some of His disciples left Him" is written in John 6:66. He wouldn't compromise the truth or tone down the "rhetoric".
Here, however is where what you're calling charity has a legitimate place.
Knowingly voting for John Kerry is a mortal sin because he supports abortion. Therefore, if you voted for him, I must assume you are in a state of mortal sin. So I tell you this. I advise you to go to confession to get "right" with God. See, God forgives any sin for which we are sincerely sorry.
G-Z, Knowingly voting for George Bush is also a mortal sin, by your reasoning, since Bush supports abortion.
Jerry was too humble in accepting your correction of his grammar. Some grammarians accept the form now common in oral usage, "a person must ask themself" since "him or herself" is too cumbersome. But I do not know if grammarians would accept your own construction, "lovers of thought can't conscience such nonsense". Last I heard, conscience was a noun, not a verb. Jerry's viewpoint here is the same as Paul VI's in regard to the teaching of Humanae Vitae. But when a teaching despite the most humane, charitable and evangelical presentation continues to be rejected by the vast majority of catholics over thirty-seven years, it is time to call that teaching itself in question. The Vatican have painted themselves into a corner on this one (note elegant use of collective noun here) as Cardinal Franz Koenig stated. Now they are stonewalling. The same is probably true of their teaching on gay sex.
Charlie Curran, Hans Kung, Edward Schillebeeckx, Karl Rahner, and Joseph O'Leary,
After all that is the biggest compliment I have ever received! Not that I deserve it -- the other four are outstanding servants of the Church as theologians and as priests. It is a sad reflection on Phil Blosser that he thinks it appropriate to list those four illustrious names in tones of derision. He has much to learn from all four, much to learn about the nature of true Catholicism. Having met all four in real life, I will vouch also for their graciousness as human beings. Never would they post such shoddy pieces as the Leland Peterson drivel or the posting at the head of this thread. No, not even Hans Kung in his most sweeping polemic would descend to such vulgarity.
Some grammarians now accept ...
Did you know, Father O'Leary, that some honest Americans used to accept that slavery was a good thing. They were mistaken. Slavery of the 19th century, inter alia, involved the abuse of the human person, which is usually sinful?
In this country there were laws my wife calls "NINA" laws: No Irish Need Apply". Some theologians and social scientists countenanced them. So what.
On the other hand, ONE bishop in England refused the Act of Supremacy. He paid with his life, and is now known to the world as St. John Fisher.
Right, even in language usage, is not determined by majority vote.
All of the foregoing aside, however, there isn't anything whatsoever wrong with "himself".
"When a person is dying of thirst, it does no good to tell them they need water!"
It does if they've been deluded into thinking that water is a deadly poison. In such circumstances -- such as we find Western civilisation today -- you have to tell them they need water, AND explain to them that water isn't bad for them, but is the only thing that can save them.
The people I'm referring to already know water is a good. But Truth, by itself, is not enough. One has to get Truth in the Bones -- i.e., makes it concrete. This is where everyone does poorly. Of course, there are those who deny this truth applies to them. But they are simply wrong -- despite the relaxed look on their faces.
I suppose one can draw an analogy to smokers. Smokers smoke today because they smoked yesterday. They know smoking is not good, but they smoke. And, probably, they will continue to smoke until they take their last breath. The thirty-five year public health campaign to reduce the incidence of smoking in the US has had rather dismal results! But everyone knows the truth about smoking. Any smoker who dies of cancer is not surprised they got cancer.
The two thousand year spiritual campaign has had even more dismal results. But, I suppose, we're making progress! Talking takes time. And unlike the public health campaign, the spiritual campaign has that spiritual additive called mercy.
By the way, what's the deal with the post counts here at Dr. Blosser's blog? The counts seem to go up for a while, then they start to drop -- the more you post, the lower the number gets, until it reaches zero and starts all over again. Or else it goes up for a while, then drops, then goes back up. Just the other day there were over a 150 comments in this box, but now we're down to 82.
And now we're back to 80 posts . . . .
Now we're down to 75 . . . .
Weird.
42 comments now. And yet clinking on this commentbox's link almost crashes my computer. Wow.
31 and falling.
Jordan -- it now read two (2). This must be a counter of the number of souls Father O'Leary believes to be in Hell. Those souls are John Paul II's and Pius Xi.
Chris
Chris,
Now there is only 1. And you're the only person I don't see here in Heaven.
I knew you'd prove me wrong about that Heaven and Hell thingy!
Keep the Faith, though. I'll see what I can do. I don't give up that easily.
I'm sorry. I haven't the faintest idea what your comments are intended to communicate. Maybe I don't read sarcasm well anymore? Maybe I'm too tired for an ad hominem attack? Why did Jerry reply to a comment I made specifically about Fr. O'Leary? Are you two clones of each other? Are you two addresses for the same person. {The slightly frightening conclusion would have to be that Fr. O'Leary has even more time than most of us believed.}
Chris
Chris, are you a clone of Polycarp and New Catholic? Are you one of them, or both?
Chris,
Yes, even this little post is confusing, isn't it.
Perhaps you should spend a little more time reading the books and authors you criticize!
By the way. How is your study of conscience going?
One thing we can see is proven by these interminable running squabbles involving Fr. O'Leary and (to a lesser extent) Jerry: the biblical proverb is true indeed, that in a multitude of words there wants not sin.
Jerry:
I asked my question because I addressed a question to Father O'Leary, but you answered it. It was a legitmate question, therefore, to ask why you had answered it. I genuinely have no idea what your answer meant.
There is no need to tar Polycarp and New Catholic with the brush you have chosen for me. If you must resort to ad hominem attacks, don't besmirch others' good names.
Jerry- I would read these authors, but I have my soul to save. As my mind, as you have pointed out, is easil swayed, I wouldn't want the sound of heresy to poison my soul, which doesn't need any help charting its break-neck path to hell. In God's mercy I trust.
This will be my last posting on this comment stream.
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