Sunday Snippets - A Catholic Carnival (13 July 2014)

Salvete omnes commilitiones Christi! Welcome to another “Sunday Snippets – A Catholic Carnival”.  Sunday Snippets is a weekly convocation of Catholic bloggers in which we share our posts from the past week.  The main site is at This That and the Other Thing [here], hosted by the ever gracious RAnn.

Without God's Grace, all our efforts are fruitless

      It was a slow week at Principium et Finis, where lingering commitments from the academic year and various other complications left less time for bloggery.  Nonetheless, we did manage to squeeze out a few things: something old, something new, something . . . well, a couple other things too.

     It seems to be the case that every week I disclaim any intentional “theme” for the week, and yet there seems to be one.  Why should this week be any exception?  The theme here is the same one expressed by St. Paul when he said:

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. (Romans 12:2)

And:

. . .it is no longer I who live. But Christ who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (Galatians 2:20)

It sounds simple enough to turn from self and conform ourselves to Christ, but putting it into practice is very difficult for most of us.  That’s what many of our Christian friends outside the Catholic (and Orthodox) orbit don’t understand: the purpose of all the “stuff”, sacraments, liturgical prayer, magisterial teaching, even Scripture itself, is that they are all material means to help us turn from our natural proclivity to make “man" (which is to say, ourselves) "the measure of all things”, and instead aim at living our lives according to God’s standard.  That was our common thread this past week.

Monday – The best Sacred Music brings us out of ourselves and our ordinary lives and lifts us up toward Heaven; this piece by the Pride of Venice, Antonio Vivaldi, is a sterling example: “Cum Sancto Spiritu From Gloria By Vivaldi” [here]

Wednesday -  Psalm 127 reminds us (and I, for one, need a lot of reminding) that all of our efforts are fruitless without God’s Grace: “Psalm 127: A Gift and Blessing From the Lord” [here]

Thursday – This week I started re-running my series on the Liturgy of the Hours as a prayer for laypeople. In private prayer we often find ourselves asking God to listen to our concerns; the LOH requires that we Listen to the voice of The Lord: “Sanctify Your Day: The Liturgy of the Hours (Throwback Thursday Edition)” [here]

Friday – While conscience is inside the heart and mind of each of us individually, its purpose is not to conform the Moral Law to our preferences (as many people would have us believe), but to conform our preferences to the Moral Law, as the Angelic Doctor explains with his usual clarity: “Does St. Thomas Give Assent To Dissent?” [here]

Finally, the question of the week was whether we had any stories about nuns.  I do not have any specific stories today, but I do have many memories from my time spent in several Catholic schools in the sixties and seventies.  I have always been bemused by the old stereotype of the mean, knuckle-cracking nun, because the nuns I knew, although not without human failings, were on the whole loving, nurturing women who worked hard to help the children under their care.  I recall them with nothing but fondness and gratitude.

Does St.Thomas Give Assent To Dissent?

     St. Thomas Aquinas, greatest of Catholic theologians, has been the target of a sort of “hostile takeover.” Certain people are invoking his authority in order to justify ignoring Catholic moral doctrine, claiming that, according to St. Thomas, it’s wrong not to follow your conscience, even if it’s in error; therefore, if their conscience tells them to use contraceptives, or support pro- abortion politicians, or vote in favor of redefining marriage they would actually be sinning if they obeyed the Church!  Don’t blame them: Thomas Aquinas made them do it.  What else could they do?

     On the one hand, St. Thomas does actually say what the dissenters claim he says, but on the other, he actually means the opposite of what they say he means.  Here is the relevant passage from his Summa Theologiae  [ST hereafter: italics mine here and below]:

. . .  conscience is nothing else than the application of knowledge to some action. Now knowledge is in the reason. Therefore when the will is at variance with erring reason, it is against conscience. But every such will is evil; for it is written (Romans 14:23): "All that is not of faith"--i.e. all that is against conscience--"is sin." 

Therefore the will is evil when it is at variance with erring reason.  ST IiaIae  

Yes, it is “evil” to disobey even an erroneous conscience, but conscience does not mean “feelings” or “opinions” (the common misrepresentation); rather, it is “the application of knowledge to some action”.  To St. Thomas (and to the Church) it is the process of applying moral principles to one’s particular situation, or “knowledge applied to an individual case”, as he describes it in another section (ST I, 79, 13).  Since conscience is the reasoning process by which we determine whether a course of action is good or evil, going against conscience means deliberately choosing what we believe to be evil, even if we do not actually accomplish evil:  

But when erring reason proposes something as being commanded by God, then to scorn the dictate of reason is to scorn the commandment of God.  ST IiaIae   

When we violate our conscience, then, quite apart from the actual harm we might or might not be doing (objective sin), we are intentionally rejecting what we believe to be God’s will (subjective sin): that’s why it’s "evil" to violate our conscience. This act of defiance is a sin in itself, quite apart from the sinfulness (or not) of the particular act we are contemplating.      

The story doesn’t end there, of course; St. Thomas was well aware that someone might try to use his argument to justify sin. He goes on to explain that, even though we must obey an erroneous conscience, we may be morally culpable (i.e., guilty of sin) for having an erroneous conscience.  He says: 

If then reason or conscience err with an error that is voluntary, either directly, or through negligence, so that one errs about what one ought to know; then such an error of reason or conscience does not excuse the will, that abides by that erring reason or conscience, from being evil. But if the error arise from ignorance of some circumstance, and without any negligence, so that it cause the act to be involuntary, then that error of reason or conscience excuses the will, that abides by that erring reason, from being evil. ST IiaIae  

Recall that conscience is moral principles (what he calls “knowledge” or “Divine Law”) applied to particular circumstances.   For an adult Christian “what one ought to know” are the moral principles contained in Church teaching, although it is quite possible to be mistaken or misinformed, through no fault of one’s own (invincible ignorance), about the circumstances to which one is applying the principles. Therefore, invincible ignorance excuses us from subjective guilt, but failure to form our conscience properly does not.   Just to be sure his point is clear, St. Thomas illustrates with the following examples:    

For instance, if erring reason tell a man that he should go to another man's wife, the will that abides by that erring reason is evil; since this error arises from ignorance of the Divine Law, which he is bound to know. But if a man's reason, errs in mistaking another for his wife, and if he wish to give her her right [i.e., sexual intercourse] when she asks for it, his will is excused from being evil: because this error arises from ignorance of a circumstance , which ignorance excuses, and causes the act to be involuntary. ST IiaIae

Notice the phrase “bound to know”: whether or not adultery is wrong is not a matter of conscience, its wrongness is an unalterable reality that we are “bound” to acknowledge.

St. Thomas did NOT make her do it

       The champions of conscience (or perhaps more properly “conscience”) over and against Catholic moral doctrine almost without exception invoke St. Thomas (when they invoke him) to justify their rejection of the Church’s teaching on one of the currently fashionable sexual issues, such as contraception, gay marriage, extra-marital sex, etc., practices that have been explicitly and unambiguously condemned in scripture and in the teaching of the Church under the sixth commandment’s prohibition of adultery.  If we look at the whole passage, however, and not just the one sentence that seems to excuse dissent, we see that St. Thomas is saying explicitly that you cannot invoke conscience against these teachings. Using adultery as his example, he demonstrates that the role of conscience is not to determine basic rules of right and wrong, but to guide our own actions according to the rules we have received from God through his Church.

      It would be helpful at this point to recall that sin involves a lot more than just the will of the sinner. The Church teaches that there must be three conditions for a sin to be a mortal sin: grave matter, full knowledge, and full consent or, more prosaically, "it's bad, you know darn well it's bad, but you go ahead and do it anyway".  St. Thomas is here considering only the second part of the formulation, that is, whether or not you know darn well it's bad.   Even if, through no fault of your own (a significant "if", as we saw above) you don't know it's bad, and so are not guilty of choosing bad, it's still bad.  And it's bad because bad consequences, for you and/or society at large, are likely to follow.  That's why it's a sin, after all. Consider St. Thomas's example of the unwitting adulterer.  He is not guilty of subjective sin, because he is not aware of what he is doing.  The act is nevertheless an objective sin, which could lead to all manner of destructive consequences: fathering a child out of wedlock (with all the attendant problems), or receiving a disease which might in turn infect his innocent wife; the other woman might receive an infection from him, and, depending on her awareness of the situation, might feel exploited or betrayed by him.  If the adultery becomes known, as is likely, it will damage the man's relationship with his wife and children; if not, he may feel the need to cover up his deed and commit the further sin of lying in order protect his family . . .  And on and on.  

   In other words, a sin is a sin is a sin, and whatever we may think, it's still a sin.  As Catholics, we have ample means of knowing the Moral Law, and therefore have no excuse for disobeying it.  St. Thomas writes nothing that justifies committing acts which the Church teaches to be morally wrong.

(The above is a revised and condensed version of an earlier series of five posts titled "Thomas Aquinas Said What?")

Sanctify Your Day: The Liturgy of the Hours (LOH 1 - Throwback Thursday Edition)

     There was a time in my life when I was immersed in secularism.  I began to recover in my late twenties, a process given a sudden and decisive boost by a powerful conversion experience in my thirtieth year, as I have related in other posts [here, here].  That was the start of an amazing adventure.  In the first flush of rediscovered faith I experienced an unexpected  joy in prayer, and many problems that had seemed insurmountable before were now, surprisingly, manageable. 

We can't all pray like monks . . .

      I have heard this honeymoon period after a conversion, or reversion, referred to as the “Pink Cloud” phase.  The Catholic tradition wisely tells us that conversion is a process and the pink cloud, like the infatuation at the beginning of a relationship, sooner or later (sooner, usually) dissipates, leaving the long and often hard road that is the only way to true love. 

     So it was for me.  Eight years down the road my wife and I had moved to another state (twice) and had several small children.  Life was good, but my spiritual life was stuck.  I needed something more, but I didn’t know what.  It happened that we were visiting in the state where that first profound reversion experience had taken place, and as I was driving past the church where I had been moved so profoundly years before the bells began to chime (literally).  The clock on the dashboard said 6 o’clock.  “Vespers”, I thought to myself, and then it struck me: I could pray the Divine Office.  In fact, it almost seemed as though I was being told I should pray the Divine Office.

     I was excited about the possibility, but had no idea how to go about it.  I had a very vague understanding of the Divine Office: I knew that it was a series of formal prayers said at certain times every day, and I knew the names of some of those prayer times (Matins, Lauds, Vespers), but that was it.  As soon as our car ride was over I looked up “Divine Office” in the encyclopedia (my mother-in-law did not have internet access) and started piecing it together.  I learned that the Divine Office (now called the Liturgy of the Hours) goes back to the very earliest days of the Church, and is built around the praying of the Psalms and certain Canticles (poems or songs) from other parts of the Bible.  The Magnificat, for instance, which is the prayer Mary says when she meets her cousin Elizabeth (Luke 1:46-55), is always part of Vespers (i.e., Evening Prayer).

     I did not at first feel ready to pray the actual Liturgy of the Hours (I didn’t even know where to find the prayers), so at first I just made a point of praying some time close to the canonical hours.  Soon, however, I started to find resources online, and eventually bought a fairly inexpensive prayer book.  The Divine Office changed everything: not only did I have a much fuller prayer life, but I found that it really did “sanctify time”, as they say.  I felt closer to Christ and his Church, and I became much more familiar with Sacred Scripture in the process.  I also found that some ingrained patterns of sin which 

. . . family life can be busy

had withstood my earlier experience became more tractable.  It was, in fact, another conversion.

     I do need to point out that I have never been able to pray like a monk: I have a wife and children and need to work extra jobs to keep them all clothed and fed.   Priests and religious, and certain lay people under vows, are required to pray the Divine Office in a certain way; the rest of us can adapt it to our situation.  I am planning a series of posts discussing various aspects of the Liturgy of the Hours, including how busy lay people can incorporate the Divine Office into their regular prayer life, available resources, the history of the Divine office, and my reflections on some of the particular hours.

     In the meanwhile, I encourage you to click on the logo below and visit divineoffice.org, one of the best online resources available.

Psalm 127: A Gift and Blessing From the Lord

     One of the many benefits of praying the Liturgy of the Hours is that we become very familiar with the Psalms, which comprise the core of the Liturgy.  These ancient hymns of the Jewish Temple address many different aspects of our relationship with God: some are songs of  praise, others speak of our fears, or of God’s mercy, or thank him for his protection from our enemies.

     One Psalm that has always resonated with me is Psalm 127 (I also discuss it more briefly in my post on Daytime Prayer, here, and it provides the title for a recent post on poverty, here).  It is fairly short (four stanzas), but beautifully reminds us of our dependence on God and his providential care.  The psalm opens with the image of house construction: “If the Lord does not build the house, in vain do its builders labor”.  The psalmist then presents a series of images illustrating how useless our efforts are without God’s help:

If the Lord does not watch over the city, in vain does the watchman keep vigil. 

In vain is your earlier rising, your going later to rest, you who toil for the bread you eat, when he pours gifts on his beloved while they slumber. 

What an eloquent reminder that it is only through Grace that our efforts bear fruit!

     The focus shifts in the last half of Psalm 127:instead of building a house, here we are building our “house”, that is, our family, again only through the Grace of God: “Truly sons are a gift from the Lord, a blessing, the fruit of the womb”.  Here, too, God is the real author; and our children are Providence in tangible form: both gift and blessing, which is to say their source is God, and that’s a good thing. And not just good in some spiritual sense: 

Indeed the sons of youth are like arrows in the hand of a warrior. 

O the happiness of the man who has filled his quiver with these arrows! He will have no cause for shame when he disputes with his foes in the gateways.

You can’t ask for images more down-to-earth than these: are sons a like weapons, they’ll back us up when we face our enemies, and all through the generosity of the Lord.

     It will come as no surprise that the idea of our progeny as gift and blessing is not as common as it once was.  Thirty-five years ago, in his introduction to Pope John Paul I’s Illustrissimi, John Cardinal Wright wrote:

     The present almost pathological lack of joy shows up in every vocation and in every area of life.  There already exist among us people who rejoice as little in the coming of children as once used to do only some of our neo-pagan neighbors.  Among descendents of people who, only yesterday, of the coming of a baby as a “blessed event,” maternity  is no longer thought joyful. 

That train has gone much further down the track since 1979, so that now even the President of the United States can speak of a young women being “punished with a baby”. 

     We need to speak out, of course, against this anti-child attitude, the anti-family ethos and what Pope John Paul II called the Culture of Death.  I regularly do so in this space.  But we also need to remember, as Cardinal Wright points out, that our message is at root a message of Joy. Our children, and children in general (sadly, not all who wish it have their quivers filled in this way) are “a gift from the Lord, a blessing, the fruit of the womb”.  We need to say it often, and live it publicly, and always gives thanks to God for building up our house. 

Cum Sancto Spiritu from Gloria by Vivaldi

The most beautiful music in the world was composed to praise and glorify God.  Here's yet another example, by Antonio Vivaldi.

Sunday Snippets - A Catholic Carnival (6 July 2014)

Thursday July 3rd was the Feast of Thomas the Apostle

     Welcome once again to “Sunday Snippets – A Catholic Carnival”, a weekly gathering of Catholic bloggers who come together every Lord’s Day to share their posts from the previous week.  Well, we don’t literally gather, we cyberly gather at This That and the Other Thing where RAnn figuratively presides over our e-convocation [Main Event here], but you get the idea. This is the first Sunday in some time that is not also a solemnity, by the way – but that’s all right, every Sunday is a little Easter, a commemoration of Christ’s Resurrection.  Alleluia!          

     There was not an underlying theme this past week at Principium et Finis, but we did look at the matter/spirit, body/soul connection from a couple of different angles, both in reference to the relationship between temporal authority and the Church. There seems to be a bit of a trend among some Catholics toward adopting a sort of permanent adversarial stance toward their country.  It seems to me that an appropriate, and in fact commendable Patriotism balances the love of one’s fellow citizens and the history and traditions of one’s country with the recognition of the sovereignty of God.  This is a good thing. I suspect that in some quarters there is not a clear enough distinction being made between Patriotism and its evil cousin, the idolatry known as Nationalism, which puts the nation or the state in the place reserved for God.

     Wednesday, for instance, I took issue with a writer whom I admire, David Warren, because in an otherwise well-done article he engages in a sort of historical Docetism by denying the significance of the material context, that is the culture of Greece and Rome, in which the Church took shape during the first few centuries of its existence.  Friday, Independence Day here in the United States, I discussed the formal declaration of that independence, a document which points to a unique republic in which “sovereignty belonged to the people, [but] the true Sovereign was God himself”.  Because of the Declaration of Independence, Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address* famously described his country as “a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”.  While the United States has often fallen short of its ideals, the Declaration has always served as a standard by which it measures, and sometimes corrects itself, and as an inspiration to aim higher (it has also been an inspiration to countless others around the world).  It also reminds us that all earthly authority is ultimately subject to the authority of God, a truth we ignore at our peril.

     This past week at Principium et Finis: 
   

Another glorious contribution form the Boy Wonder of Salzburg: “Mozart: Gloria from his Coronation Mass in C Major” [here]  

The preliminary document for this fall's synod on the family suggests maybe the Pope doesn't want to jettison Church teaching after all . . . “Good News: The Pope Is Catholic” [here]

We can't fight the rise of secularism by holding up an image of Western Culture that denies its human sources: "How Do We Counter the Culture of Narcissism?" [here]

Sure, atheists can be good people - if they want to.  Or not.  Whatever.  “Why Be Moral? (Throwback Thursday Edition)” [here]

A July 4th reflection on the Declaration of Independence: “Appealing To The Supreme Judge Of The World” [here]  

*Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, July 1-3, marked the 151st anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, the greatest and most destructive battle ever on North American soil.

Pickett's Charge, Gettysburg, July 3rd 1863

"Appealing To The Supreme Judge Of The World"

     A defiant group of Englishmen and Scots-Irish who were tired of getting pushed around made a formal announcement 238 years ago today that they had had enough, that they were declaring independence from Great Britain and her grasping monarch, George III (to my British friends out there, by the way, no hard feelings – I think we’ve smoothed things over since, especially in the war begun a hundred years ago this summer, and even more so the in one that followed a few decades after). Here’s how that document, the Declaration of Independence, begins:

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

“The laws of nature and nature’s God”.  Here’s an extraordinary thing: they were going above the head of the king, as it were, and appealing to God for justice.  Likewise in the next paragraph:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

     So, governments exist only by God’s leave, and their purpose is to protect the people’s God-given rights.  The end result of this idea can only be a republic, and a republic was formally codified eleven years later in the U.S. Constitution, but this was to be a republic different from those that had gone before: while technically the sovereignty belonged to the people, the true Sovereign was God himself. And yet it was not a theocracy: the protection of individual freedoms demanded that the citizens individually be governed by God’s law in pursuit of their individual interest.  That is what John Adams meant when he said (I won’t quote directly this time; if you’re familiar with this blog you’ve seen the quote) that the U.S. Constitution was fit only for a moral and religious people.  In the absence of religious faith (particularly Christian faith), citizens without a sure moral compass make a people incapable of self-government.

     We can see how true this is simply by looking around us.  There have been several periods in American history referred to as the Great Awakenings, dramatic revivals of religious faith.  In the past half century we seem (both in the U.S. and other Western nations) to be going through a Big Sleep, a dramatic decline in religious belief.  At the same time we see an equally precipitous decline in morals, a rapid disintegration of the family, and a growing and ever more coercive state eager to step in and make more of our decisions for us.  It’s worth pointing out that our growing weakness as a culture is also a major factor in the growing boldness of jihadists and others eager to complete our downfall.  People unwilling or unable to govern themselves are incapable of directing the government of the state; the end result can only be tyranny.

     The Declaration ends with a final invocation to the sovereignty of God.  The document concludes:

           

We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare, that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states . . . And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.

I submit that unless we are equally willing to submit to the “Supreme Judge of the world”, and ready to pledge our “lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor”, we will find ourselves under the weight of a despotism heavier than anything George III could have imagined. 

Why Be Moral? (Throwback Thursday Edition)

(This is an updated version of a post originally published on February 24th of this year)

     I heard an atheist calling in to a Catholic radio show one morning with the following point:  atheists are quite as capable as Christians are of leading moral lives, and it is quite possible for an atheist to be a “good person”, and many in fact are.  The hosts of the show answered the caller respectfully (as always) and thoughtfully: that we Catholics are called to love everybody, that we respect the dignity of every human being, and that we don't assume that anyone is a "bad person" simply because they're an atheist. They missed (atypically, let me hasten to add) a crucial point, however, the crucial point: no serious Catholic I know of is arguing that atheists cannot be moral; rather, that without the authority of God morality is purely subjective, a personal choice on the part of the atheist.  There is no objective reason why he should not be immoral, since there is no objective standard of right and wrong.
     It is true that non-Christians, including atheists, can embrace natural law, as I discussed in an earlier post [here].  Not only that, but, as the radio hosts pointed out, St. Paul tells us:

For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified.  When Gentiles who have not the law do by nature what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness and their conflicting thoughts accuse or perhaps excuse them . . . (Romans 2:13-15) 

     The problem is that in our fallen state we have other influences, other “spirits” as St. Ignatius of Loyola would put it, who are urging us in other directions.  That is one reason why we need Divine Revelation.  As I argue in another place [full article here], the less Christian our society becomes, the stronger those other voices will become, and the less likely the atheistic or indifferent are to heed the law written on their hearts:

Our civilization has been shaped by Christianity for almost two thousand years.  Christian beliefs, attitudes and moral convictions (commonly referred to as the Judeo-Christian worldview) are woven into all of our customs and institutions.  It is true that we have never realized the Christian ideal; one could say that we haven’t even come close.  Nevertheless, anyone raised in the West over the last two millenia has been formed, to a large degree, by that Christocentric worldview, whether they consciously embrace it or not.  More than one commentator has remarked that even the “new atheists” such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have not jettisoned principles such as the dignity of the human person (not a universal value by any stretch) or a Judeo-Christian concept of justice — they employ these very ideas, in fact, as weapons against Christianity.  This is confirmed by my personal experience: most self-proclaimed atheists with whom I am personally acquainted still adhere to a mostly Christian ethical code (even though they can’t give an authoritative reason why), with the usual exceptions involving sexual morality — which doesn’t do much to distinguish them from most professed Christians.

Without its source and foundation of Christian belief, however, the worldview itself will quickly wither . . .

     That, I think, is the counter to the atheist’s challenge: it’s not that an atheist can’t be moral, but rather, without God, why should he?

How Do We Counter the Culture of Narcissism?

     There’s an interesting piece at The Catholic Thing [here] by David Warren called “The Counter-Culture”. I find myself agreeing with his conclusion, but not with everything he says along the way.  Warren takes issue with those Catholics who disparage Western Civilization, and insists that the Church is the author of that civilization, however much it might owe to previous societies (just how much is included in that “however much” is the rub; more on that in a moment), as well as secularists who tout an oddly non-Christian interpretation of it.  He concludes that championing that culture, and particularly its Christian dimension, is the only way to counter the rapidly decaying culture of secularism that has grown up around us in recent decades.

     So far, so good.  Problems arise, however, when Warren attempts to counter secularists who would draw a direct line from Greco-Roman times that, somehow, skips over the heavily Christian period from about 300 A.D. to 1968.  Warren commits the mirror-image error of dismissing the critical importance of Greece and Rome:

The conceit of the modern “gliberal” (glib plus liberal), since Humanism began exiting the Church, is that our Civ was founded in ancient pagan Greece. There are fragments of that built into the whole, but only because Holy Mother Church preserved and adapted them, to her own purposes.

Likewise the old pagan Roman conception of open roads and tranquil freedom, under the law to the far horizon – Christendom was inspired by that. But it could equally have been inspired by the Chinese, or any other vast, ordered realm. It was Holy Church, and the minds she applied to worldly government, which transformed that model, introducing such principles as subsidiarity to make what was, in effect, a vast and extremely fertile theocracy.

Vergil and Dante in Hell

Again, I am in complete agreement with his main point, which is that our civilization is not simply an updated version of Greco-Roman antiquity, but something completely new, about which the most important and essential fact is the intervention of Christ in history and the Church he left behind.  The problem here is that Warren would have us believe that Christ erased history, that there is no (or little) organic connection between the civilization of the Roman Empire and the Christian civilization that succeeded it.  This is simply bad historiography. Certainly everyone from the Franks and Visigoths crashing across the frontiers, not intending to destroy so much as to grab their own share of Romanitas, to medieval monks busily copying Vergil’s Aeneid and Horace’s Odes in their scriptoria, to the great Catholic poet Dante, whose guide through Hell and Purgatory in his magnum opus the Commedia is none other than that same Vergil, to Thomas Aquinas and his successors imbibing and baptizing the thought of the Greek philosopher Aristotle, to the colonial American who needed to know Latin and Greek to enter Harvard College – none of them doubted that they were heirs to the great pre-Christian civilizations of the West. The Church grew and formed for its first few centuries within the Roman Empire, and the templates, at least, of all her major institutions were formed before Alaric swept into Rome. God could certainly have established his Church in China or in some other culture, but it would have been a very different Church, and would have authored a very different culture.

     That’s the strictly historical perspective, but I think Warren is missing something else, something about our understanding of how God intervenes in our world.  The Church that could have developed out of any “vast, ordered realm” is an abstraction, but both revelation and our experience is that we don’t have a God who deals in abstractions; He is a God of particulars.  He chose a particular people to whom he first revealed himself in order that he might incarnate himself among them in the person of the God-Man Jesus of Nazareth; he carefully chose and prepared Mary as the human mother of Jesus; he likewise chose and prepared particular individuals such as Peter and Paul to carry forward the mission of Jesus. Does it make any sense at all that he would then leave his Church, the Mystical Body of Christ on Earth, to the random inspiration of whatever vast, ordered realm happened to be at hand?  I argue that God would be as careful in this choice as in the others.

      One might ask, why does it matter?  It matters, first of all, because the truth is important, and we can’t counter the untruths of some with distortions of our own.  Second, Warren is absolutely correct that the Church is the primary creator of Western Culture, and that what is has created far transcends anything that might have developed from Greco-Roman culture in its absence, which is to say the absence of Christ.  Jesus says, “Behold, I make all things new” (Revelation 21:5). For all its flaws, the civilization that was nurtured by his Church is new in human history, and uniquely bears his stamp.  It’s our best resource in the culture war that is raging in this world, which is at its root a spiritual battle, but one which is fought out in the material world: it can’t be fought with abstractions.  I can’t say it better than Warren does himself in his own conclusion:

To the “culture of narcissism” by which we are surrounded, in a Western world that has denied Christ, we must oppose a counter-culture.  And we must oppose on every level: in our literature, our music, our art, our architecture, even our science.  Whether or not it is our intention, we cannot plausibly be Catholic Christian without becoming civilized again.

Good News: The Pope Is Catholic

     The Synod on the Family scheduled to convene in Rome this coming October is generating a lot of interest, much more so than such events  generally do outside of official circles.  In the wider Catholic world there are three main groups that are paying close attention.  The first is the  “progressives” who believe that Pope Francis is really one of them, and are convinced that the synod will liberalize Church practice and, who knows, maybe even doctrine in the area of sexuality and marriage (there has been a lot of loose talk about lifting the restriction on divorced and remarried Catholics receiving communion, for instance).  The second group is composed of those of a more traditional bent who are nonetheless afraid that the first group is right both in its assessment of the current pontiff and in its expectations for the synod.  Finally there are those orthodox Catholics who trust that the Pope is himself orthodox (despite some poorly thought-out comments in interviews with the popular press), and expect that the synod will do little harm, and might, possibly, do something toward improving the Church’s poor performance in communicating its teaching on marriage, family, and sexuality over the last few decades.

     Last Thursday the Vatican released an Instrumentum Laboris, a document setting out the agenda for the synod, called The Pastoral Challenges of the Family in the Context of Evangelization (a good commentary on the document from Lifesitenews is here, the official text here). This document will please the last of the three groups listed above, reassure the second, and cause anxiety for the first.  Drawing on the results of a world-wide survey of Catholics, the document reaches two very interesting conclusions.  First: “The People of God’s knowledge of conciliar and post-conciliar documents on the Magisterium of the family seems to be rather wanting” and that their teachings “do not seem to have taken a foothold in the faithful’s mentality.” In fact, “many Christians, for various reasons, are found to be unaware of the very existence of this teaching.”  Second, the instrumentum notes that many respondents found the clergy in many cases “are not sufficiently familiar with the documentation on marriage and the family”, that “the clergy sometimes feel so unsuited and ill- prepared to treat issues regarding sexuality, fertility and procreation that they often choose to remain silent.”  Not only that “Some responses also voice a certain dissatisfaction with some members of the clergy who appear indifferent to some moral teachings.”

     There’s nothing terribly earth-shattering here; most of us have probably made many of these same observations (I myself did just last week in my post on St. John Fisher, here).  There are two reasons, however, to find this document encouraging.  First, it suggests that the planned focus of the upcoming synod is not to water down Church teaching, as many liberalizers hope, but to improve the effectiveness Church’s teaching; the final result may well come out differently, but this is a hopeful sign.  Also, it appears that the Pope who is overseeing the process is, in fact, Catholic (who would have guessed?), a Catholic who believes in the Church’s doctrine on marriage and sexuality, and is serious about teaching it.

     One could easily miss this last point if all you read about Pope Francis is the popular press.  There are some more knowledgeable commentators (such as the inimitable Fr. Z) who have been claiming the Pope for the Church all along, and now even some some of the players on the other side are coming to the same realization; consider, for instance, this recent story from the left-wing Salon: “Pope Francis’ new clothes: Why his progressive image is white smoke and mirrors – Don’t buy his populist rhetoric.  The new pope is every bit the sexist homophobe as his predecessors.” He must be doing something right.