RCC-EOC reunification proposals

Read Mike Liccione's here. Ad Orientem comments here:

But the bottom line is this… If Vatican I is not heresy, we Orthodox have no business doing anything other than kneeling in front of the Pope and kissing his ring. And the Pope has no need or legitimate reason for not exercising his universal jurisdiction throughout The Church. If God gave him the authority it was not done with a view to only using it in the West. And if Vatican I is heresy, then Orthodoxy must never ever under any circumstances compromise with it. Whatever failings I have (and they are legion) I am not a relativist. Any attempted compromise in a matter of Truth is a recipe for disaster. It is the foundation for another Florence. As Owen the Ochlophobist once observed in one of his more memorable quotes (I paraphrase) 'In order for communion between Rome and Orthodoxy to be restored, one or the other must cease to exist.' Either Rome is right or we are.

Those are not comfortable words. But there it is.

Oh, East, have a heart. Rome's still struggling to shake off the burden of its barbarian infiltration. And where were you during the era of Byzantine glory? You basically left Rome, the seat of Sts. Peter and Paul's martyrdoms, to shrivel into an outpost in the Gothic sticks. Why didn't the emperor convene a council to stop the Western slide towards theological Gomorrah? Of course, it's not that simple, but Rome is more frequently seen as perpetrator than victim, when, as we now know from criminal sociology, the two types are usually flip sides of each other.

"Are there closets in heaven?"

More Catholic Babel over sexuality in the Church of Minneapolis-St. Paul.

I'm becoming more convinced that Pat Buchanan is right: we are an "infantile nation," which makes AmChurch an infantile religion. Look, it's all quite simple in a way and really doesn't demand all the adolescent blood, sweat, and tears that people are pouring into the sexuality wars. Here it goes: we are far, far more than our sexuality. That's pretty much it.

Yes, sexuality is a critical aspect of our human nature. But it's extraordinarily complex (and therein lies its simplicity). It cannot be reduced to biology/genetics on the one hand, or individual choice on the other, nor is it just social/cultural conditioning. Why can't it be a multivariate thing or a "mystery," as is everything else that's truly human? I really don't see how this is a controvertible point at least from a Catholic POV.

Sexuality is but one dimension of our individuality. It is NOT identical with the self, personhood, or one's identity. Therefore there is no such thing as a "homosexual" or a "heterosexual," ontologically speaking. Humans have the capacity to reduce themselves to one dimension of their appetites, as in the case of over/undereating, but few would accept that individuals are reducible to their eating habits and inclinations. I may be a bulimic, but that's just one part of who I am, and not a very good part at that. It's not just eating, we do it with our political ideologies, ethnicities, families, anything appetitive.

Eros is poorly understood in American culture. Rather than seeing the erotic in all dimensions of our humanity, we've fragmented, demonized, reified, ontologized, and fetishized it. As Catholics, we should have no problem admitting that the erotic underlies all intimate human relationships, including those between family members, friends of the same sex, even between ourselves and Christ. Eros does not mean sexual, coital, or erogenous, though they all are clearly dimensions of it. Eros is also expressed through our food, our music and arts, through our liturgies and prayers. It's a good thing in and of itself. We'd save ourselves a lot of trouble if we created a culture that celebrated a healthy sense of eros in which we can admit same-sex attraction without automatically fearing the onset of sex, with all its naughtiness and eroticism. Same-sex attraction needs a culture that isn't afraid of it and thus can properly guide, mold, and sanctify it. We don't live in that culture unfortunately. When bishops and priests play right into this "Dignity" game, they're capitulating to this radically eros-phobic culture's terms. They're no longer true shepherds but wolves in sheep's clothing.

There's nothing in the sexual teachings of the Church that exempts heterosexual behavior from the judgments laid upon homosexual behavior. If I have any complaint with the Church's predominant magisterial and pastoral approach to homosexuality, it's in the way its communicators have made homosexuality out to be a special case, something ontologically different from heterosexuality. In so doing it buys into the world's definitions of what eros is. But sin has corrupted eros in human sexuality, all of it, which therefore needs redemption and deification. To obsess over sexual orientation (or the silly issue of which gender in general really turns your erogenous zones on) is a myopia that's causing so much of this distracting and foolish sturm und drang we call sexual politics.

Church teachers on sexuality need to tie together more explicitly how pornography, sex addiction, adultery, masturbation, fornication, pederasty, pedo/ephebophilia, sodomy, etc. are all of a piece in the mind of the Church; they're all distortions and perversions of human eros. Whether heterosexuals are committing them or homosexuals are committing them is really a secondary issue, if one at all. In this sense, "homoes" aren't all that different from "heteroes."

Things get really messy when gays demand that the Church not just accept them as sinners like all the rest of us, but their hypersexualized anthropology (sexuality-is-identity). And the Church rightly rejects this anthropological doctrine, which derives mostly from the same victimization culture that demands America view blacks as ontologically victimized blacks first and foremost. This anthropology is just as, if not more, dehumanizing as homosexual acts themselves. The evilness of homosexual acts derives from this demonic anthropology. So I refuse to look at my self-proclaimed gay, straight, bi, or whatever friend as a sexual orientation. Sexual orientation doesn't even have the same ontological density that race/ethnicity does because it is far less determined by genetics than skin color, and the Church doesn't even grant skin color ontological status.

The Church ultimately calls us to one sexual orientation: spouse-sexuality, not heterosexuality per se. I'm not supposed to be attracted to every member of the opposite sex. Rather my sexuality must be oriented, expressed, trained, and sanctified towards my spouse exclusively, whether that be a wife, husband, parish, diocese, Christ, apostolate, or mission. But being a "spousesexual" is not normlessly determined by individual will and desire, nor is it primarily a "pelvic" matter. Like everything else it must conform to natural and divine law. Hence, the otherness of human gender is implicated and requires that spouses be Other to each other. Homosexual unions cannot be spouses in any Christian sense because they deny the otherness of gender, which is carved no less into our very DNA and our theological origins as male and female. If the Logos did not think human gender mattered, it would have assumed hermaphroditic flesh or angelic androgyny.

In conclusion, is homosexuality disordered? Yes, no less than heterosexuality in the modern world is, but differently nonetheless. We go off the rails once we start differentiating sexual heresies quantitatively, rather than theologically. Too many Catholics think the Church teaches homosexuality to be more sinful than heterosexuality, as if sin operated on a scale of one to ten. The Catholic gay agenda is warped for its anthropological heresy. The hyper/pan/heterosexed culture we live in is warped for its denial of eros and ascesis. Are there "closets in heaven?" Of course not, but heaven is redeemed, deified eros. Only the most grotesquely childish, infantile religion would suggest heaven is a place where we get to freely express our sexual deviancies like finger paint.

Catholics who have same-sex orientation definitely have a difficult cross to bear, one I dare not suppose comprehension, but so do porn addicts and pedophiles (calm down, stop being defensive; of course they're not morally equivalent, for what it's worth). Sexual orientation is no more and no less under the jurisdiction of individual will. Therefore, to speak of SSA simply as a matter of choice on the one hand or determinism of any kind on the other is ridiculous. Redemption is never just about individual choice or will. It is a participation in the divine energies of Christ. It is a battle in which holy ascesis and virtue determine victory and defeat. But any Catholicism that plays to the gay agenda is a clear path to disaster and theological suicide.

An Orthodox balm for Europe

...and for Western Christianity, particularly Catholicism. From Christian Science Monitor:

With the exception of Greece, this sad legacy has made Western Europeans notoriously slow to accept countries with large Orthodox populations into pan-European institutions. In the current expansion eastward, however, it is inevitable that the values and mores of European institutions and alliances will be shaped more and more by the traditionalist views of Orthodox Christian believers and less and less by the modern, secularized Protestant assumptions of Western European democracies. Orthodox believers already far outnumber Protestants across Europe, and by some estimates they may eventually even surpass Roman Catholics. If 21st-century Europe ever develops a religious complexion, it will be predominantly Eastern Orthodox.

Amin, amin.

More liberal high dudgeon

Michael Perry needs a break:

Give me a break!

In response to Kenneth Slattery, C.M. (here), who is no doubt a good man, those of who who believe that contraceptive intercourse is *not* immoral are at least--at least!--as warranted in calling those who believe that contraceptive intercourse is immoral "invincibly ignorant" as Kenneth Slattery is in calling us invincibly ignorant. My God, why can't we just accept that there is room for reasonable disagreement here?

Who's the one having difficulty accepting that there is room for reasonable disagreement here?

Taiwanese appointed to Pontifical Academy of Sciences

One of the few international arenas where Taiwanese can still function relatively free from the meddling of the Mainlanders. It might not be much from a secular perspective, but for Taiwanese-American Catholics (all ten of us), it's proud moment.

Vatican City (AsiaNews) – Benedict XVI appointed two new members of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. They are Klaus von Klitzing, professor of physics at the Max-Planck-Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgard (Germany), and Yuan-Tseh Lee, professor of chemistry and president of the Academia Sinica in Taipei.

Yuan Tseh Lee was born on November 19, 1936, in Hsinchu, Taiwan, and earned a B.Sc. in 1959 from the National Taiwan University. After a M.Sc. from the National Tsing Hua University, he moved to the United States where he got a Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1965. As a post-doctoral student he began experiments on reactive scattering in ionic-molecular reaction.

In 1968 he became assistant professor at the University of Chicago, which in a few years became an important centre for the study of crossed molecular beams.

In 1974, he returned to Berkeley as professor of chemistry. Here he pursued his research into various primary photochemical processes and the spectroscopy of ionic and molecular clusters.

In 1994 he retired as professor and principal investigator at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, UC-Berkeley, and was appointed president of Taiwan’s Academia Sinica

In 2006 he became President Emeritus and Distinguished Research Fellow.

Professor Lee was also awarded many international prizes, including the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1986.

After Asceticism & Bankruptcy

There's something wonderfully apt and ironic about dioceses filing for "bankruptcy." Bishops appeal to the mercy of the State, requesting absolution and salvation, by putting on the sackcloth of Chapter 11 of the Gospel According to Civil Bankruptcy. Woe's me, I am financially (but not morally or spiritually) bankrupt! Grant me mercy from the onslaught of judgment creditors, o thou great bankruptcy judge! It's divine comedy.

Has anyone in the American Church read the Linacre Institute's study, After Asceticism, on the deeper disciplinary and formation issues that conditioned the pedophile priest scandal? It doesn't seem like it, from Bishop Brom of San Diego's latest diocesan appeal, which asks priests to "donate" a month's salary and extends a "personal invitation" to the laity to contribute generously to a fund for "compassionate outreach to our brothers and sisters who have suffered sexual abuse within the family of the Church." Did earlier Christians ever "donate" anything to the Church? We used to use the language of alms, tithes, indulgences, penance; today it's tax-deductible donations and invitations.

More Oprah-esque therapeutic-bureaucratic claptrap that has come to be the hallmark of USCCB lingo. Total absence of language from the Catholic tradition. Zero ascesis. Why should anyone "donate" a dime to a hierarchy that looks to public relations science and the legal system for solutions rather than its own 2000-yr old traditions which it either callously ignores or contemptuously spurns. Where's the pentitential and sacramental framework for all this? Where's the soul-searching for the root spiritual causes of the scandal? I only hear about bankruptcy proceedings (legal), zero-tolerance policies (bureaucratic), compassion and forgiveness (therapeutic).

The "spirit of Vatican II" which suffeuses Bishop Brom's letter demonstrates how little the Catholic hierarchy has learned from the scandal. Too much of our clergy are functional atheists who slurp and swig language as if it were a smoothie, when it's not. Truth-language emanates out of the logos of God, and without a recognition of this dimension of episcopal authority, their statements have the roar of papers nervously shuffling.

Exegeting SCOTUS

David B. Hart, "The Pornography Culture," The New Atlantis, shows us how the theologian-cultural critic can relativize and contextualize constitutional jurisprudence without looking like a Con law dilettante:

We have, as a society, long accepted the legal fiction that we are incapable of even that minimal prudential wisdom necessary to distinguish speech or art worthy of protection from the most debased products of the imagination, and so have become content to rely upon the abstract promise of free speech as our only sure defense against the lure of authoritarianism. And perhaps, at this juncture in cultural history, this lack of judgment is no longer really a fiction.
.....
This is why I profess so little interest in the question of the constitutionality of COPA [Child Online Protection Act]; the more interesting question, it seems to me, concerns what sort of society we have succeeded in creating if the conclusions we draw from the fundamental principles of our republic oblige us to defend pornographers’ access to a medium as pervasive, porous, complex, and malleable as the Internet against laws intended to protect children.

Ad Orientem - not just a liturgical rubric

From Daniel Greeson's blog, The Way of a Pilgrim

“Orthodoxy is summoned to witness. Now more than ever the Christian West stands before divergent prospects, a living question addressed also to the Orthodox world… The ‘old polemical theology’ has long ago lost its inner connection with any reality. Such theology was an academic discipline, and was always elaborated according to the same western ‘textbooks.’ A historiosophical exegesis of the western religious tragedy must become the new ‘polemical theology.’ But this tragedy must be reendured and relived, precisely as one’s own, and its potential catharsis must be demonstrated in the fullness of the experience of the Church and patristic tradition. In this newly sought Orthodox synthesis, the centuries-old experience of the Catholic West must be studied and diagnosed by Orthodox theology with greater care and sympathy than has been the case up to now… The Orthodox theologian must also offer his own testimony to this world — a testimony arising from the inner memory of the Church — and resolve the question with his historical findings.” - Georges Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology II, pp. 302-304

We've all witnessed how easy it is these days for "conservative" and "liberal" Catholics to be more attached to their secular ideological bedpartners than to Catholicism. It's telling that the term "Catholicism" is becoming ever more difficult to utter without any modifiers. Even among "traditionalist" Catholics, the tendency to read Catholicism with all the polemical imbalance of a hyper-Tridentine mindset/aesthetic continues to distort our ancient faith as much as it defends against the invasive heresies du jour.

But let us admit that the travesty of the Episcopal Church USA is just a canary in the coal mine that is Western Christianity (whose mother is the Church of Rome), that the liturgical and spiritual chaos arising in the aftermath of Vatican II shares a common pathology with the nihilistic mockeries of Christianity in modern aesthetics and rationality. Amidst the confusion of what is truly Catholic (not just in terms of propositional faith and morals but phronema), I'm becoming more convinced that Orthodoxy's the only thing left that can help us find our way back to the Church of the Martyrdom of Sts. Peter and Paul - truly Western, truly Apostolic.

So "ad orientem" is not just a sound rubric for our Masses, but consistent with the lex orandi, lex credendi principle, it signifies the only future and hope for contemporary Catholic theology. The familiar Catholic megaphone needs to also be a satellite dish pointed east, tuned to the long-lost voices of the Fathers (besides selective bits of Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas). Along with Fr. Florovsky's commendation of Orthodoxy's witness, it remains up to Catholics to figure out how to reconcile our doctrinal and liturgical "developments" since the Carolingian era (pace Newman) with the mind of the Apostolic Churches. It's the only way V2's aggiornamento and novus habitus mentis can be interpreted without dissolving into the nothingness of the modern world.

Liberals love to talk about "active participation" of the laity; listening to the Eastern Churches would be a new, constructive start, especially seeing how stalled discourse between left and right currently stands. It's the only ecumenism that matters today.

Classic Neuhaus

From his column in the latest First Things issue

I see Garry Wills has a new book out, What Jesus Meant. It purports to explain what Jesus meant to say and no doubt would have said had he the advantage of being Garry Wills.

And this on the ECUSA priestess who has publicly embraced her inner Muslim:

In any case, the lady in Seattle said it all. Of her simultaneous adherence to Christianity and Islam she commented: “It wasn’t about intellect. All I know is the calling of my heart to Islam was very much something about my identity and who I am supposed to be.” It wasn’t about intellect. This is a journal of ideas and it is beyond our competence to comment on a person who says she has no idea what she is doing.

Liturgical Lace or Lingerie?

The MP seems to have created a bull market for lace these days. But the reform of the reform will not be complete until we eliminate the liturgical lingerie that bedecks our supposedly male clergy. I really cannot comprehend how the Triddies drool over all the negligees and peignoir that pass for vestments, and yet expect to combat the gaying of our clergy. Lace should only be permitted as a trim no wider than a couple of inches. And if it must be wider than that, it absolutely CANNOT be sheer, which is what really gives our clergy that Baroque-transvestite look. It's particularly perverted when we force our little altar boys to dress up in those girly outfits. Makes you wonder about the role of lace in the ephebo/pedophile cases.

Exhibit A: this obscenity to the right here even has the little dainty satin bow and a plunging neckline for our viewing pleasure. Get yours at Victoria's Sacristy.

Scripture & CLT

Prof. Rob Vischer has been hanging with the evangelicals and wonders aloud why Catholic Legal Theory does so little to incorporate Scripture. I wonder in response, why should it? CLT is not a theological discipline but a rarefied hybrid field that works off the distillation of Catholic teaching and practice. To expect Scripture to provide direct guidance or insight into specific aspects of secular law is to demand too much and too little of it -- too much in that Scripture is not primarily a rulebook or answer key to legal/political problems; too little in that Scripture is diminished when it's mined for anything but liturgical formation.

Along with all the apostolic churches, Catholicism requires that Scripture be read and interpreted liturgically. Only out of the Liturgy, that is, prayer of one mind with the Tradition, can the Bible be understood properly. Moral and legal insights can only be gleaned from Scripture through Liturgy. It makes sense that evangelicals, in mostly ignoring this critical principle, would misuse Scripture by presuming it has some direct, practical "application" to the law, which just opens the door to all sorts of ideological invasions and proof-texting flights of fancy.

Tridentine Vernacular

Ad Orientem has posted an excerpt from Fr. Stanley Harakas on the confusion in both Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches over the ancient liturgical tongues.

But there is a rub in all this for the Orthodox. Though we use many different languages in our worship, Greek, Slavonic, Arabic, Romanian and other traditional languages, for many Orthodox these function just like Latin does for the Roman Catholics. It is the language, precisely because it is not understood, because it is exotic, and because of the lack of understanding, that carries for many people the sense of the holy, and not what actually is said and done in worship! Language becomes a barrier to true worship, that is, worship that invites the Orthodox Christian to say with St. Paul "I will pray with the spirit and I will pray with the mind also."

I still have yet to hear a traditionalist Catholic explain why V2 couldn't have simply vernacularized the Tridentine Mass. It eludes me how a Tridentine Mass in Douay-Rheims English could possibly be inferior in any way to the stripped-down Pauline Mass. I would disagree with Harakas's suggestion that the old, non-vernacular liturgical tongue possesses no spiritual value for the synaxis, but I would agree that too many traditionalists in the apostolic churches make a fetish out of the ancient languages. The real issue is whether the language we use in our liturgy connects and binds us to the fullness of the Faith in unity, and Latin achieves this probably better than all the rest, but the rationale gets flipped on its head when defense of Latin becomes its own proxy for doctrinal orthodoxy.

Of shorts and men

Todd Aglialoro's piece in Crisis on "The New Catholic Manliness" has been met with many head nods from all about St. Blogs. So why are Catholic men so consistently and abundantly wearing shorts to Mass? Nothing represents the suburbanization heresy, and its invariable devolution into consumerist effeminacy, more than men in shorts at Mass. Today at the noon choir Mass at the Shrine, by my sampling at least 1/3 of the men decided that their Sunday best included showing off their legs. Of course, the declension rule for intergenerational Mass dress thereby gives their sons license to dress like slobs. Some fifty-something chump had it in him to ascend the altar steps and present the offertory gifts in those ubiquitous khaki shorts and white sneakers for our viewing pleasure. I wanted to take the offering basket-on-a-stick to his bare backthighs.

But wait, how superficial of me. Jesus doesn't care about how we dress but how we love our neighbor.... But that's not really the issue, is it? The issue is what kind of man would willingly be caught dead sporting preppie shorts in a sanctuary of the Catholic Church.

That we need our bishops to formally prohibit what is patently offensive dress at Mass is yet another sign of the impotence of our post-V2 catechesis against the culture of adolescence in the Western church. What, do we need another motu proprio?

Who has title to the Apostolic Tradition?

The Whappsters have some clippings of Sacrosanctum Concilium and this one deserves inclusion in the sacramentary in some form.

For it was from the side of Christ as He slept the sleep of death upon the cross that there came forth "the wondrous sacrament of the whole Church" (13).

Why is the rhetoric of our canons often so much more prayerful and theologically rich than our V2 prayers (or their translations) themselves? This is another point the Orthodox remind us of and actually practice: prayer first, official rulings second. Official doctrinal statements may reinforce and guide prayer, but the treasures of our apostolic faith should be stored in the prayers themselves; doctrinal pronouncements are merely the Church's ecclesiastical (legal) instruments that protect title in those treasures.

Speaking of title, all that the motu proprio does essentially is quiet title after an adverse possession. Modernist bishops in the Church had roped off everything predating V2, telling us no one is allowed to come onto that parcel of land without their permission. Well, that didn't stop the SSPX, who went ahead to trespass and occupy it hostilely, openly and notoriously, actually, exclusively, and continuously. Nor did it stop their less seditious cousins who followed the rules but argued all along that they had been unjustly ousted and that the bishops had wrongfully appropriated exclusive title to themselves for land that belonged to all the faithful.

So I like the descriptions of Summorum Ponticum as a "liberalizing" act because it 1) restores some worth to the term "liberal," after its many decades of corrosion and perversion by Liberals and 2) truly does give our Apostolic inheritance back to the laity, which raises the analogy of testamentary challenges, subject for another day perhaps. In the meantime, we can enjoy the recognition by our court of highest earthly appeal that apostolicity in liturgy remains one of the notes of the Catholic Church. The Church Militant retains a life tenancy in that tradition, which means the doctrine of waste must be applied to determine its duties to the grantor (Christ) and remainderman (the Church Triumphant)...or something like that. Back to bar review.