Rhetoric matters

I love Disputations because he understands the importance of rhetoric in our doctrinal and intellectual formation -- how the specific words we use say so much about who we really are and who we are becoming through those words. It’s also why I give Obama some credit for raising the bar on political rhetoric far more than most other candidates (the fact that he throws the bar away when it comes to life issues is a fatal contradiction). Mark Shea makes a nice reference to Disputations’ rhetorical appreciation:

Too many gripes to answer so I will just focus on a couple. One guy writes:

I guess I find it strange that you and Tom, among others, are so intent on dismissing the concerns of many good Catholics, and, it seems, those of the pope himself.

Tom makes a pretty good reply here:

This manages to pack many of the worst traits of discussions on the Mass into a single sentence. There's overstatement (two posts in two months is "so intent"), victimhood("dismissing the concerns," how boorish), moral posturing ("many good Catholics"), and implied charges of dissent ("dismissing...the pope himself"), all wrapped up in an obstinate inability ("I guess I find it strange") to accept that lack of interest does not imply a judgment against those who are interested.

Just a brilliant fisking of the subtle, corrupting, and self-serving uses of language even among those of us with ostensibly "good intentions" and "right teaching." It really isn't enough to know and crusade for the Truth. The call to "speak the truth in love" is not just some sentimental exhortation, not just an appeal to courtesy or politeness, but a rhetorical insight. Apart from love (which is also an intellectual virtue), our rhetoric can and will consume us and obstruct our participation in the Truth. I am guilty as charged.

Progressives & Orthodoxy

Great piece in the CSM by a Muslim who refuses to accept the "moderate Muslim" label and surrender the "orthodoxy" label to Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Juxtapose that insight next to Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, RFK daughter and former Lt. Gov. of MD who's joined the Catholics-Misrepresenting-Catholicism industry. Heard her on C-Span the other night chanting the banal litanies of "progressive Christianity." If she had half a brain about ancient religions, she'd understand with Ms. Khalid that if you don't confront the primacy of orthodoxy, your hemming and hawing is just boring dinner theater.

Ruthie and the Catholic Five

What a great touring name. Unfortunately, SCOTUS doesn't tour anymore. So what does it mean that all five of the Catholic justices on the Supreme Court upheld a federal law prohibiting a very narrowly defined abortion procedure? The Philadelphia Inquirer and Rosie O'Donnell seem to be of one mind on this one:


We who are proud of the Catholic intellectual tradition would like to give it some credit, but that puts us in a bind, doesn't it? We don't want to say that the Catholic Five voted strictly out of some fideistic (or what most Americans equate with "religious") impulse -- mostly because Catholicism rejects fideism's partitioning of faith and reason. But neither do we want to say that being Catholic had nothing to do with their adjudication of a morally loaded and complex issue.

The Catholic intellect is oriented to the virtues of prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice. Now one doesn't have to be Catholic to exercise these virtues, but we need all the help we can get. So was it just a coincidence that the Catholic Five overturned all those lower courts in conformity with Reason and their church's opposition to abortion? No. But did they decide simply because their "sect" is opposed to abortion? No. Will most Americans (educated or not) be capable of appreciating this distinction? No. Rosie's methane-enhanced thoughts on Catholicism have already been given the imprimatur of mainstream academia.

But I suppose I should stop calling them the Catholic Five. Aww, shucks.

UPDATE: Rick Garnett's got his own fisking of the cartoon.

Worst Massacre?

Now I'm not Native-American or descended from colonizers, but I do think we ought to jiggle our national memory a little harder and try on a little reverent humility before we throw around pronouncements that the Virginia Tech shooting is the greatest massacre in American history.

What is it about us that we need a superlative to give anything innately horrific the time of day? The media response shows how so much of this is just more infotainment.

"Really? A massacre? Hmmm, but does it fit in a Top 5 category? No? Oh, not very original, is it then?"

Why Holy Thursday?

A good friend asked me Tues night how I would summarize to evangelical friends what the all fuss is about in Holy Thursday Mass, or the Celebration of the Institution of the Eucharist. It got me thinking.

What Holy Thursday does (and Good Friday & Easter Vigil do not) is draws us into those precious moments at the deathbed of a beloved spouse. It’s about remembering, not the death itself, but the dying. The Church, together with all the angels and saints of ages past, remembers that last night with her Spouse – the last meal, the foot-washing, the new commandment, the offering of His Body and Blood, the mounting anxiety of the disciples, the words of comfort spoken, the betrayal, the agony in the Garden, the arrest, the trial before the Sanhedrin, the deposition by Pilate and Herod, the torture, the mockery, the abandonment, the denials, the despair. It’s just not enough to read about it from a book, even if it’s the Bible; it’s not enough to just have a little service on Good Friday that summarily assumes what happened the night before. We have to relive that Thursday if we are to understand the Cross.

Christ is the dying spouse and the Church is the surviving spouse at his bedside. She knows he’s about to undergo excruciating pain and imminent death and they’re trying to make the most of those last few moments together, saying what needs to be said, the most important things. Yet the littlest things about that time together become eternally etched in her memory. Even in these moments, the surviving spouse is filled with mixed feelings – anger, fatigue, confusion, skepticism, hopelessness. And though she loves him, she still cheats on him in her despair. She knows she is with him, but not really, and it kills her.

Then the husband gives her a special token to always remember him by. Except this gift is a part of himself and in a mysterious way, it contains everything he stands for, everything about their unbreakable union, everything he is and has done, including his suffering and death. And she realizes afterwards that the whole dying experience and the Gift will save her life, which in turn really is HIS life living on in hers. Somehow, his suffering and death reconnects every loose thread in her life and gives it force and nerve. He not only lives on through the children she bore with him, but by the way she mothers them and the way the family remembers him and acts in his memory, he lives on forever.

The Institution of the Eucharist is all about that priceless gift of himself that the husband gives the wife in his last dying moments with her. It’s not just a material token of a past event, because his dying and his death live on forever.

And I think this is where many Evangelicals part ways – they tend to believe that the dying and death is the bad morbid part that the Resurrection sheds, whereas the Catholic & Orthodox insist that Christ’s death is His triumph, His glory, His crown, and not just a smaller crown next to the big kahuna Resurrection crown. The Cross is the one crown. The Resurrection is a proclamation and an extension of that triumph into eternity. It doesn’t undo, soften, or mitigate the Cross, but intensifies it.

Having no Holy Thursday is like telling the wife to just forget the painful past and move on. But to do that is to forget the Gift. And to forget the Gift is to forget Him.

Children: gift or duty?

The Ochlophobist demonstrates again what the Sarabite has described as an "Orthodox ethos within the Catholic Church," though Ochlo may want to dispute that. All his points on contraception are perfectly consistent with Catholic teachings, yet correct for some of its modern excesses, preoccupations, and inconsistencies. One inconsistency he implicitly highlights is Catholicism's near-exclusive reliance on ethics, rules, and magisterial authority to promote the culture of life.

In exhorting couples to have more children, even just one more than they "wanted" to have, we should not stress duty. Orthodox couples (married in the Orthodox Church) did not make a vow to submit to and die for the other, even if the Church exhorted them to do so. Orthodox couples are not under contract to do anything, including breed. We should call them to do so out of love, out of joy, out of hope. We should remind them of the goodness of oil, wheat, wine, wonder, prayer, and household tables in which they are surrounded by children. We should give them every reason to think of children as blessing and not curse.

Moderns know that contracts kill, even as they use and frequently love them. Moderns, for the most part, also generally intuit that the sophistic metaphysical gymnastics of "natural law" (especially in the sense in which it is used by modern "conservatives") can be contorted to condemn them for almost any sexual act. Certain of the manualists would have us cutting holes in sheets. Augustine proposed one sexual position if one had to have sex (more about that later). Good grief, the last thing a Christian couple needs in the bedroom is another ethic or trite metaphysical parsing of every act which a couple intends for love. No, pastorally we do not need couples to sign on another dotted line and accept the contract of proper Christian family planning. We need Orthodox couples to love, and to love more. This Ochlophobist would be happy with just one more, silly as that may seem.

Catholics love to say that children are unmerited gifts from God, not a right, not ultimately a burden or even a duty, as if we were talking about property rights and contractual obligations. But ontologically, children subsist as gifts, a category that even the secular law recognizes as far less bound by rigid rules. And yet we too often speak of the stricter, more authoritarian ethical teachings and pronouncements and focus on the penalties for violating the Church's pro-life message. This is indeed an inconsistency that the Orthodox ethos avoids. Where the Catholic ethos maintains that duty is a necessary part of a consistent ethic life, the Orthodox ethos insists that duty just scratches the surface. Both are right. The Protestant meanwhile denies the existence of any institutionally-related duties that infringe upon the individual's liberty to decide for him/herself.

The Church will not be marketed

Lion & Cathedral with another gem for all Catholic converts & enthusiasts, on the silly games we play with ourselves over choice of confession:

When Catholic evangelists try to convince people to like Catholicism, they convince them that it is something that exists to be liked. But whether people like doctrines and moral precepts and traditions is irrelevant. They are not marketing tools. They do not exist to be liked, at least not in the sense that something a man chooses for himself is liked. The Church exists to be loved in the way that a mother is loved, and nobody chooses his mother. The Church demands a loyalty that is as inseverable as the bond of maternity; a loyalty that is maintained even when it is unpleasant. The Catholic Church will not triumph by being marketed more effectively; this will not instill in people a conviction that they must honor her because of who she is, whether her qualities are to their liking or not.

Makes you wonder about the wisdom behind efforts like this:

Had someone called central casting in a Hollywood studio and asked for a Catholic look-alike of the magnetic Pentecostal preachers today marching across Latin America, they could not have done much better than Oscar Osorio.

Osorio, an articulate Honduran layman with a wife and four children, is a leader in the Catholic Charismatic movement in Central America. He’s also a star of Channel 48, the Catholic television network in Honduras, where his compelling Bible-based preaching opens each morning’s programming.

Mahony's theology of the Cross

Came across this passing comment from Mahony in an email to his attorneys (part of a file which has been made public obviously). I've been digging more into the LA Archdiocese's legal adventures since it's all related to a paper I'm working on. It was written in 2002 when the media and legal headaches were mounting on His Eminence.

What a Holy Week--filled with Good Fridays, no Easter Sundays!!

If you're looking for deeper causes of the Western Church's degradation, it's all in that exclamation. It's become a popular notion that Good Friday represents bad news and Easter the good news. Hence the platitudes about how we're an "easter people" who prefer "resurrection crucifixes" and sing happy-clappy songs at Mass. But when bishops responsible for catechesis and doctrinal formation of their flocks privately espouse such Christologically heretical notions, we're all in trouble. What's the point if the Paschal Mystery has been rewritten as a Hollywood script -- Cross=crisis; Rez=happy ending?

Glory in the Cross, Mahony! The Cross was your Lord's crowning, His victory over Death, not just the Resurrection! Remember the eternal memory of the saints who cleaved to the Holy Cross! Then maybe you'll spend more time with your confessor and less time doing damage control with your lawyers!

Sometimes legalism is good

Prof. Bainbridge, the current don of Catholic corporate analysis, give us the one-two on Cdl. Mahony's removal in light of the Fr. Caffoe tapes. It's a simple, legalistic reading of canon law, but the shoe fits. Video tape shows the priest with half-naked boys in a state of arousal, yet Mahony was able to stand before his flock and pat himself on the back that "no sexual activity" occured. There is no bishop more contemptible than Cdl. Mahony. His liturgical, doctrinal, and pastroal abuses have been clearly willful, knowing, purposeful, and reckless. He has done one thing right: immigration & Hispanic ministry, but even there, his political egocentrism has tainted his advocacy. Yes, Mahony must go.

Can a Bishop who has lied to his flock on such a key mttner be said to be in compliance with Canon 387? No. Especially given Mahoney's long track record of other misfeasances and malfeasances in connection with the priest sex abuse scandal.

Curiously, there is no express provision in the Canon Law for removal of a diocesan Bishop. Canon 401, § 2, however, states that:

A diocesan Bishop who, because of illness or some other grave reason, has become unsuited for the fulfillment of his office, is earnestly requested to offer his resignation from office.

Mahoney's violation of Canon 387 constitutes the requisite "grave reason" such that he should voluntarily resign. If he fails to do so, the Pope clearly has authority under Canon 403 to appoint a coadjutor bishop who would be vested with the bulk of Mahoney's responsibilities. Alternatively, despite the absence of a clear answer in canon law, most observers believe that the Pope has authority to remove a bishop for sufficiently grave reason. (Certainly, at the bare minimum, the Pope can "lean on" a bishop to do the right thing.)

How infallibility is feeding the dissent

The Curt Jester has a post about yet more folly from Catholic women priesthood dissenters. The conservative commentators are predictably hauling out Ordinatio Sacerdotalis (OS).

They, and according to most polls, the majority of Catholics don't give a crap about OS. There is something totally off about how we conservatives/orthodox are communicating doctrinal truth. The argument by authority approach cannot be our default response. Clergy need to stop hiding behind the "we have not the authority" argument. It's a perfectly true argument, of course, but doesn't go very far by itself.

We have much to learn from the Orthodox East on this. They don't have parallel "womyn" priesthood dissenters worth any mention AND they don't resort to arguments by authority, which they rightly criticize us Catholics for relying too heavily on. The problem is that not even most conservative Catholics have a theological belief in male priesthood; they only believe it because the Pope says so (which is the stereotype of Catholics by the way). This rhetoric of "what part of NO don't you get?" is funny as a joke, but beyond that it's childish, legalistic, and only perpetuates the problem.

Papal authority is meant to protect the Truth, not serve as a substitute for a real confrontation with the Truth. By merely pointing to papal authority, we're diminishing Catholic Truth. It becomes an abstraction, yet another propositional idea up for debate, as all "ideas" are. For the Orthodox (and I see no reason why it can't be so for Catholics as well), male priesthood is an integral part of a densely-packed and tightly-intertwined way of life and liturgy, a unifying communal ethos and aesthetic, not something to be toyed with like a Legos set. There's no room for the impulse to question it, but doctrine and liturgy are never alienable objects of intellectual scrutiny to begin with. But when Catholic Truth gets reduced to papal infallibility, doctrines are no longer lived realities but power discourse. Then you create fertile ground for these idiotic dissenters. The modernism of Catholic conservatives is doing much to feed this absurd cycle of dissent and crackdown and more dissent.

It's about how we clothe doctrine and liturgy. Will we continue to clothe them in the thin threads of the Pope's say-so as an independent source of authority? Or will we follow the wisdom of the East (which if apostolic and patristic is our wisdom as well!) and clothe them in the tougher skins of a full-bodied liturgical culture, as in Old World Catholicism?

The polemics with Protestants really took us off course. Catholics stopped relying on the Liturgy itself as a source of authority and made it derivative of papal authority. That has proved to be disastrous. Conservative idiots will extrapolate that I'm advocating a diminishment or rejection of papal infallibility. I do not, though I suppose a strict, narrow reading of the docs might reveal some friction. I believe in papal infallibility; I just don't think it's the crux of Catholic faith, so we should stop hiding behind it as if it's all we got when it's plainly not.

Sushi Etiquette for Orientalists

Von Balthasar's Whore

Some fuss about von Balthasar's orthodoxy:

And she makes this charge:

In Hans Urs von Balthasar’s 1950’s published work, Castra Meretix [sic], he states the prostitute is the symbol of the Church, ”The figure of the prostitute is so appropriate for the Church…that it…defines the Church of the New Covenant in her most splendid mystery of salvation.”

Well, first, the author has a typo–the term is Casta meretrix (the “chaste whore”) and von Balthasar is hardly original in this. I found this today and it’s a fascinating read. He looks at the image of the Church as a harlot as used in many patristic and medieval sources. They follow the lead of Hosea, of course, who uses the image of a prostitute as a prophetic warning against Israel’s idolatry. And many folks before the Reformation saw the Church in the harlot of Revelation. But they also find types of the Church in Rahab and Tamar in the Old Testament and in Mary Magdalene in the Old Testament–the Church, especially the Gentile Church, is a forgiven harlot; once she followed idols, now she worships Christ. So Beckworth is speaking from ignorance.

This all reminds me of a quip made by a Catholic friend way back as I was just about ready to take the dive into the Tiber: "She may be a Whore, but she's your Mother!"

Getting it

This is what happens when you have a generation of Catholics trained to think that doctrine and tradition is based on a bishop’s say-so. We just don’t get it. You can bet the Orthodox don’t have these numbers. And they don’t have massive catechetical programs. I’m starting to believe that the “poor catechesis” argument we throw around so much is masking a much deeper problem in the very way our priests and bishops understand doctrine and tradition. They don't get it, so we shouldn't hope that the laity will get it.

YONKERS - Polls generally show that 50 percent to 60 percent of Roman Catholics in the United States believe that women should be eligible for the priesthood.

Here's the rest of the article.

No Real Eucharist...

...no real unity. The irony of Bible-believing Protestants conceiving of "church divorces done right" is apparently lost on them.