Fellowship of Catholic Scholars Quarterly 32 Number 3 articles Fall 2009 President’s Letter...... Joseph Koterski, S.J. Terrence Tilley’s Christological Impasses: The Demise of the Doctrine of the Incarnation.....Thomas G. Weinandy, O.F.M., Cap. The Cultural and Ecclesial Situation 1964 to 1967: Paving the Way for Dissent from Church Teaching on Contraception...... William E. May Catholic Feminist Ethics and the Culture of Death ...... Anne Barbeau Gardiner Reflections on Fifty Years of Writing...... James V. Schall, S.J. A Catholic Factor in an Inter-Orthodox Controversy ...... Rev. Msgr. Daniel S. Hamilton

Book Men and Women: Diversity and Mutual Complementarity by Study Seminar, Vatican City...... William E. May American Babylon: Notes of a Christian Exile by Richard John Neuhaus...... D. Q. McInerny A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy by William B. Irvine...... Jude P. Dougherty Christ in His Mysteries: A Benedictine and a Benedict by Blessed Columba Marmion...... Marie P. Loehr

ISSN 1084-3035 The Death of a Pope by Piers Paul Read...... Alfred Hanley Fellowship of Catholic Scholars P.O. Box 495 Notre Dame, IN 46556 (574) 631-5825 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS...... by Jude P. Dougherty www.catholicscholars.org FCS Board J. Brian Benestad, Editor [email protected] Ex Cathedra...... J. Brian Benestad

FCS Quarterly • Fall 2009 1 President’s Letter Going In Their Door by Joseph W. Koterski, S.J.

Fellowship of s the Fellowship convenes for its 2009 conference on Catholic Scholars the theology of Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI, it seems fitting to devote this column to that subject. Scholarship Inspired by the Holy Spirit, To my mind, one of the most intriguing aspects of his in Service to the Church thought is the prominence of ecology in his vision. Do Awe simply have a “green” pope? What is the significance of his empha- sis on environmentalism? Contents The habitual tendency of the news media to pluck statements president’s letter...... 2 supportive of certain ideological lines out of their contexts could ob- scure an unusual but recurrent linkage that Pope Benedict XVI makes Articles between his ecological vision and the natural moral law. Now, if there The Demise of the Doctrine is any theme in recent papal writings that gets shoved into oblivion, it of the Incarnation...... 4 is the reasoning that the Church employs to support her moral teach- Paving the Way for Dissent from Church ings. As John Paul II’s Fides et ratio reiterated, genuine Catholic thought Teaching on Contraception...... 10 necessarily relies on faith and reason as valid and indispensable sources Catholic Feminist Ethics and of knowledge and wisdom. In the realm of moral theology there is no the Culture of Death...... 19 substitute for either revelation or for philosophy. Of special importance Reflections on Fifty Years of Writing...... 25 in the arena of moral thought are personalism and natural law theory. A Catholic Factor in an Dignitas personae (“On the Dignity of the Human Person”), for Inter-Orthodox Controversy...... 31 instance, the 2008 instruction on bioethics, takes up the theme of the relationship between one’s moral stances on various advanced questions Book Reviews of bioethics and one’s grasp of the inviolable dignity of human persons. Men and Women: Diversity and Mutual Like so many papal documents of recent years, including Evangelium Complementarity...... 33 vitae (“The Gospel of Life”), Veritatis splendor (“The Splendor of the American Babylon: Truth”), and Humanae vitae (“On Human Life”), this document rests its Notes of a Christian Exile...... 40 case for the Church’s moral teachings—in this case, opposition to such A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art practices as cloning and embryonic stem-cell research that involves the of Stoic Joy...... 42 destruction of embryos on the grounds—not only on personalism but also on the natural moral law. The category of “personhood” evokes in Christ in His Mysteries: A Benedictine and a Benedict ...... 42 the contemporary mind a sense of the need for reverence and respect, but the establishment of just which beings are persons always requires The Death of a Pope...... 44 an investigation into human nature and thus reference to the natural moral law. COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS...... 47 What is perhaps surprising, however, is the way in which all of Pope Benedict’s statements on ecology inevitably depend on references FCS Board...... 50 to the inestimable dignity of human persons and the natural moral law. Ex Cathedra...... 51 One might not know this from the way in which these statements get selectively quoted. What is the connection that he sees and wants to draw to the world’s attention? Reminder: Membership dues will be I suspect that his strategy here is something akin to the strategy that mailed out the first of the year and are led previous popes to add personalism to their natural law arguments based on a calendar (not academic) year. on moral questions. Even though natural law theory makes a more philosophically solid argument to anyone willing to consider the mat- ter, precisely because it argues on the basis of the metaphysical structure of human beings and not just on something that people are inclined to

2 FCS Quarterly • Fall 2009 recognize at the level of ordinary experience, natural law neither abusing it nor making it an untouchable taboo theory has been in disrepute sociologically ever since the (see, for instance, Caritas in veritate §51). revolt of dissident theologians against the Church’s reit- If the world is coming to see the need for certain eration of opposition to contraception in Humanae vitae. limits on the size of one’s carbon footprint, perhaps it can Revisionist moral theologians conducted a campaign to also come to recognize the need for respecting human make natural law theory sound outdated and tried to life. If climate change and deforestation provide examples shunt it off to the theological repair shop. by which the modern world can see that the natural Wisely, our recent popes in their joint roles as voices moral law is real, then they are suitable for use in mak- of the Magisterium and as moral theologians have taken ing the case for the relevance of the natural moral law to up a number of new approaches to presenting Catholic other aspects of the human condition. It is a case, I think, teaching that give hopeful indications of garnering interest of a wise teacher providing all the premises of the argu- and assent. Personalism seemed at first to be something in ment and letting others see the inescapable cogency of the arsenal of those who dissented from the Magisterium, the conclusions. The moral teachings of the Church are and yet over the past thirty years it has become clear that not arbitrary rules that the Magisterium is imposing but the deepest forms of personalism have actually provided universal truths grounded in human nature that all can new and compelling arguments in favor of the Church’s recognize once they give the matter some consideration. position against contraception. The inseparability of the unitive and procreative meanings of marital intercourse This is, of course, the standard template of all natural law that Pope John Paul II develops in his theology of the reasoning. In numerous speeches as well as in such docu- body as well as in prepapal books like Love and Responsibil- ments as Caritas in veritate Pope Benedict shows us how ity is thoroughly based on personalism, and in fact on a to draw out the proper conclusions about human ecol- form of personalism that is clearly grounded in natural law ogy from environmental ecology in general: thinking. “If there is a lack of respect for the right to life and to a So, when Pope Benedict made “If you want to cul- natural death, if human conception, gestation and birth tivate peace, take care of creation” the theme of his mes- are made artificial, if human embryos are sacrificed to sage for the World Day of Peace, or when he had solar research, the conscience of society ends up losing the panels installed on the top of the Vatican’s audience hall, it concept of human ecology and, along with it, that of is actually a different shade of green than one finds as the environmental ecology. It is contradictory to insist that standard issue for the ecology movement. In insisting on future generations respect the natural environment nature as the Book of Creation, Benedict is clearly claim- when our educational systems and laws do not help ing that only sound religious belief can promote respect them to respect themselves. The book of nature is one for the environment without turning environmentalism and indivisible: it takes in not only the environment but itself into some sort of fetish. Where the methodological also life, sexuality, marriage, the family, social relations: materialism of contemporary science perceives no special in a word, integral human development. ... It would be moral value in nature, and where pantheistic forms of wrong to uphold one set of duties while trampling on ecology risk seeing nature as a kind of divinity (whether the other.” (§51) as a named earth-goddess like Gaia or in some unnamed Statements like this do not merely apply some thin but equally intolerant ideology), Benedict is championing veneer of environmentalism to ecclesial doctrines that re- a view of nature as a gift from the Creator that is always to be employed with reverence for the good of humanity, ally belong in the repair shop. Rather, they display a deeply both those now alive and future generations. Christian insight into the universal character of moral- His argumentative strategy thus looks something ity and to the perennial principles of morality. What the like this. If we agree on the moral need for ecological Church teaches about human life can be articulated not awareness and for responsible use of the environment, only on the basis of revelation about the unique status of we should also agree on the need for absolute respect human persons as the only creatures made in God’s image for every human being, regardless of age or condition but also on the basis of natural law reasoning about the of dependence, precisely because human life is a part of place of human nature within its natural environment, and nature. We should not view nature as the result of mere more specifically by considering implications of ecology chance or evolutionary determinism, but as the outcome and environmentalism beyond the range to which many of divine creation. Cultivating a balanced view about the of their adherents have yet taken them. It is thus a case of natural world means learning to use it responsibility, and going in their door and coming out our own. ✠

FCS Quarterly • Fall 2009 3 Articles Terrence Tilley’s Christological Impasses The Demise of the Doctrine of the Incarnation

Thomas G. Weinandy, O.F.M., Cap. is the result of playing a game to the point that neither Executive Director for the Secretariat of Doctrine side can win.” Within the academy, stalemates “are United States Conference of Catholic Bishops resolved more by attrition than intellection, theories go Washington, DC out of style.” According to Tilley, what resolves various conflicting claims, the stalemate, is not in determining their respective truth or falsity, but rather, depending n June of this year the Catholic Theological So- on the intellectual temper of the time, one or both “go ciety of America met in Halifax for its annual out of style.” It is this “what is in style” or “what is out convention. The theme of its gathering was “Im- of style,” a form of historical relativism, that under- passe…and Beyond.” At the conclusion of the lies many of Tilley’s negative critiques of the Church’s Iconvention Professor Terrence W. Tilley, Chairman of doctrinal Christological tradition—it has gone “out of the Department of Theology at Fordham University, style.” And, it is Tilley’s historical relativism that allows presented his Presidential Address entitled: “Three Im- him then to advance his own positive Christological passes in Christology.” I was present for this address proposals—his “in-style” solutions that will go “beyond” and found it quite troublesome on a couple of levels. the Christological impasses. First, while one would expect a presidential address Tilley’s three Christological impasses concern 1) to a scholarly society to be itself a work of substantial method, 2) salvation, and 3) the person of Christ. Meth- scholarship, this was not the case. Much of its theologi- odology “has to do with the starting point of Christol- cal argumentation was superficial and fallacious. Second, ogy.” “Does one begin with Scripture and tradition while this was an address of the President of a theologi- or does one begin with the current situation?” While cal society that calls itself Catholic, much of the ad- Tilley admits that such a dichotomy may be question- dress’s Christological content and many of its suggested able, he believes it useful since the Congregation for the proposals contain doctrinal ambiguities and even errors. Doctrine of the Faith has criticized Roger Haight, SJ, Rhetorically, Tilley’s address was a tour de force, and Joseph Sobrino, SJ, for not adequately adhering to moving the hearts and minds of many, if not most, of Scripture and to the Christological tradition. Instead, his CTSA listeners, which was not hard to do given they have methodologically founded their respective the content of the talk and the theological and eccle- Christologies on the contemporary situation, what sial sympathies of many in the audience. Undoubtedly, Tilley terms “presentism.” Haight founds his Christol- many who now read the published version will likewise ogy within a post-modern culture and Sobrino within be enthusiastic by its stump rhetoric and pulpit rousing the context of the church of the poor. style (published in Origins, June 25, 2009, Vol. 39/7, pp. Tilley criticizes the CDF and defends Haight and 98-105). However, it is the rhetoric that hides Tilley’s Sobrino. First, Tilley points out that the New Testament superficial scholarship, and thereby camouflages the itself professes a variety of Christologies. John 1 speaks address’s theological ambiguities and doctrinal errors. of “God becoming man,” which the CDF endorses. In this essay, I will examine Tilley’s address in order to “However, [in criticizing Haight] the Congregation for demonstrate the validity of my above observations. In the Doctrine of the Faith seems to neglect another pat- the course of this essay, I will allow Tilley to speak for tern, that ‘God made a human God’s Son,’ as in Romans himself, so as to ensure that the reader will hear him 1:4, Acts 2:22-24, 36 and even John 20:31, among other and not my summary. places. Both patterns are clearly discernable in the New Tilley states at the onset of his address that “[i] Testament but not in the classic dogmas nor in the con- mpasses are serious.” If impasses of consequence, in- gregation’s notification.” Second, Tilley notes that the cluding ecclesial and theological impasses, are not ad- CDF believes that Sobrino has undermined the classic equately resolved, they become stalemates. “A stalemate Christological tradition by holding that the classic doc-

4 FCS Quarterly • Fall 2009 trines capitulated to the culture of the time. In response, nonetheless, laid the groundwork for conclusions that the CDF argues that patristic Christology and the early he wishes to draw as his address progresses. Councils transformed Greek words and concepts so as Second, in keeping with a variety of competing to articulate the truth of the Gospel in their day. In the New Testament Christologies, the specter of relativ- light of CDF’s critique of Haight and Sobrino, Tilley, ism has again raised its head. Having endorsed the in keeping with John Paul II’s insistence that the faith methodology of the Fathers, that is, that they faithfully must be inculturated, asks rhetorically: “Isn’t that what expressed the Gospel within a Greek and Latin culture, Sobrino and others are trying to do today? If it was the Tilley simply and uncritically presumes that this is what right approach to inculturate the Gospel message in the Haight and Sobrino have done or are attempting to fourth and fifth century, why not in the 20th and 21st?” do. They may have rejected as “out of style” the incar- We are now, for Tilley, at a methodological impasse. national model contained within the New Testament “To express the faith in the present we must use terms and endorsed by the early Church, but their respec- appropriate to the present while the Congregation for tive Christologies equally illustrate the New Testament the Doctrine of the Faith demands in effect Christol- principle that multiple Christological interpretations ogy [that]must be represented in the terms used to in- are available, and such interpretations, such as their own, culturate the faith in cultures that exist no longer, terms may now be “in style.” Absent within Tilley’s proposal like hypostasis, physis, prosopon, persona, substantia or mod- is any Christological norm, other than the relative ern transliterations. Adhering to the Greek and Latin cultural and historical zeitgeist, by which one is able to terms of late antiquity runs the real risk of distorting evaluate objectively their Christologies or anyone else’s. the meaning of the faith for people today, yet they are As we will see, this is a consistent problem throughout alleged to be the right terms to use. Impasse!” Tilley’s address. I will take up later the issue of whether Patristic Third, to inculturate the Gospel is the necessary concepts and terminology could actually “distort the Spirit-filled task of the Church in every age and within meaning of the faith for people today.” At present, I every culture. However, there is a difference between will make three comments. First, while many scrip- inculturating the Gospel so as to allow it to be heard ture scholars do emphasize the varieties of Christology and accepted and in so doing Christianizing the culture, contained within the New Testament, these variations, and culturally de-Christianizing the Gospel whereby despite what some scripture scholars maintain, do not the culture transforms the Gospel into something other contradict one another. It is not as if the Prologue of than what it authentically is. Tilley does not address this John’s espousal of an incarnational Christology from serious and delicate issue. Because he does not hold for above contradicts Paul’s and Acts’ profession of an any doctrinal norm that transcends history and culture, adoptionist Christology from below. The whole of the Tilley implicitly holds that the present culture always New Testament professes that Jesus is the eternal Son trumps the content and so controls the expression of of God incarnate and lived an authentic human life of the Gospel as in the cases of Haight and Sobrino. While humble obedience even to death on the cross. Because Tilley lauds the Fathers for inculturating the Gospel in of this the Father raised him up bodily in glory and in their day and insists that Haight and Sobrino are hero- so doing manifested that Jesus is truly the divine Son of ically doing the same today, what the latter are actually God now reigning as man as the risen Lord and Christ. attempting to do is exactly the opposite of what the The resurrection of Jesus is not then, as Tilley would former did. have it, God making a human his divine Son, but rather “The second Christological impasse is how to ac- the confirming demonstration that Jesus is indeed the count for God’s salvific will being effective beyond the eternal divine Son of the Father. Such an interpretation community of the baptized.” Tilley rightly perceives of the various texts was common within the patris- that this impasse is particularly acute with regard to the tic Church and has continued through the centuries Jews and the enduring nature of their covenants. How- down to the present day. In attempting to revive and ever, in the course of his presentation, Tilley does not authorize a form of adoptionism (which the Church offer any new creative insights on how to move beyond condemned as heretical very early on), Tilley has merely these inter-religious impasses other than the need for raised the red-herring that the New Testament itself continual dialogue. Because there is nothing substantial- offers a variety of competing and even conflicting ly new here, I will not discuss this second Christologi- Christologies from which to choose. In so doing he has, cal impasse.

FCS Quarterly • Fall 2009 5 Articles

The third Christological impasse is “an ancient one: address is the most important issue of all: Was what the How could Jesus Christ be both divine and human?” Councils taught in accordance with revelation and so Tilley argues that today theologians regard the Creed of true? In the end, Tilley’s historical narrative is merely a the Council of Chalcedon (451 AD) “as a timely resolu- rhetorical ploy used to subvert and relativize the teach- tion of the historic Christological impasse, but no lon- ing of the Councils. ger take it as a timeless archetype to which all theology More substantially, Tilley states that the Council of must conform…” Actually, Tilley believes that “Chalce- Chalcedon simply restated the Christological problem don’s ‘solution’ was hardly a solution.” Here we find an without offering a satisfactory solution as to how one error and an irony, and ones, as we will see, that re-sur- person could be both God and man. This is exemplified face throughout his talk. The error consists in viewing particularly in attempting to predicate divine and hu- the doctrinal teaching of the Council of Chalcedon as man attributes to Jesus. “The problem of how a person merely a “timely resolution” to an historic issue that has could have both divine and human properties was not long since passed and so no longer “a timeless arche- resolved.” For Tilley, Chalcedon actually exacerbated type.” Rather, the Council of Chalcedon defined the the problem. “The theological effect of the Chalce- ontological nature of the incarnational mystery, that the donian strategy of attributing properties to the two eternal Son of God exists as man, and, as such, Chris- natures rather than to the person of Christ basically left tians, of every age, are bound to assent to the doctrinal the impasse intact.” content of that definition. The irony is that, on the one Two comments are in order here. The first is that hand Tilley argued earlier that the Fathers and Councils Tilley, in the above, reveals that he is simply not ad- provided an adequate expression of the Gospel within equately acquainted with the Creed of the Council of a Greek and Latin culture and insisted that Haight and Chalcedon. Chalcedon did not endorse the notion that Sobrino are admirably attempting to do the same today the divine attributes are to be predicated of the human and yet, on the other hand, he now argues that the Fa- nature and that the human attributes are to be predicated thers and Councils were a complete failure. For Tilley, of the divine nature. Chalcedon did endorse the Alexan- it is not consistency of argumentation that is important drian Christological tradition of Athanasius and Cyril, but rhetorical sound bites. This is further exemplified both of whom stressed that the divine and human at- in what immediately follows. tributes be predicated precisely of one and the same person One of the reasons, according to Tilley, for Chal- of the Son. Because Chalcedon declared that one and cedon’s failure is in the unethical and unscrupulous the same Son existed “in two natures,” that is, as God and ecclesial politics of the time including, quoting G. Hall, as man, it is one and the same person of the Son who the “rigged councils, banished bishops, imprisonments, did not suffer as God and it is one and the same per- ecclesiastical witch hunts and even physical fights.” The son of the Son who did suffer as man. The Second and aftermath of the Council of Chalcedon was no better. In Third Councils of Constantinople (553 AD and 680-681 the midst of political force and imposition, the Church AD) were held not to re-interpret or even to clarify the became splintered into warring theological factions. The teaching of the Council of Chalcedon, but to ensure that “political response to the impasse was to resort to force it be understood precisely in this manner for this was the or divorce—the impasse became a stalemate.” original mind of Chalcedon itself. It is important to ask: What is the purpose of the Secondly, in criticizing Chalcedon for merely re- above highly rhetorical historical narrative? It would stating the impasse of how Jesus can be both God and appear that by detailing all of the political and ecclesial man rather than finding a satisfactory resolution to the shenanigans, some of which, but not all, are no doubt issues, Tilley manifests that he does not understand the true, one is able to contaminate the doctrinal content true nature of the theological enterprise. The task of of the Councils (Nicea [325 AD], Constantinople [381 theology and the defining of doctrine are not to solve AD], Ephesus [431 AD], and Chalcedon [451 AD]) all theological problems but to clarify exactly what the of which took place within such a political corrupt and mysteries of the faith are. Heresy always solves what is ecclesial power-hungry environment. For Tilley, it is considered to be a theological problem and in so doing simply guilt by association. Good doctrine cannot pos- renders the mystery of faith completely comprehensible sibly associate with such reprehensible company and and so depriving it of its very mystery. Arius, a priest because, historically, it did have such nefarious friends, from Alexandria, for example, concluded in 318 AD it cannot possibly be good either. What Tilley does not that there is no possible way for both God to be one

6 FCS Quarterly • Fall 2009 and for the Son to be God. This, for him, was a theo- you can’t shut us up.” Tilley argues that “[g]ood theo- logical problem—an impasse. He resolved the impasse logical ideas live despite official authoritarian repression by denying that the Son was truly God. Granted that because these ideas capture the old creeds in the new this resolution may be easier to comprehend, but it also world, using a new idiom for giving voice to new ways destroyed the Christian mystery that God is one and in which the old faith can live on in a new context.” that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are that While theologians who “stubbornly maintain their one God. The Council of Nicea, which responded to positions” and are not willing to rethink them—“not Arius’s heretical position, did not attempt, as he did, to necessarily to change them”—do not help in advancing solve a theological problem. Rather, the Council clari- the process, “[t]he guardians of orthodoxy who mobilize fied the exact nature of the Christian mystery. The one the legionaries of repression do little to resolve theolog- God is not simply the Father, as Arius maintained; rather ical impasses.” Once more Tilley insists that “we must the one God is the Father begetting the Son and thus stay at the table of dialogue until we can hear the Spirit, the Son possesses the same divine nature as the Father. who gets us through the impasse as the impasse moves The begetting of the Son by the Father is proper to the through and in us. Patience with each other is key.” very nature of the one God. Granted that the Council A few comments are again in order. First, as he of Nicea did not make the mystery of the Trinity com- has done previously, Tilley pleads that the CDF simply prehensible, but it did clarify what exactly the mystery permit theologians today to do what the Fathers did in is. The Council of Chalcedon did the same with regard the past even though he finds that what they did utterly to the Incarnation. It stated clearly that Jesus is one and inadequate, for they created and sanctioned a Christo- the same person of the Son of God who exists in two logical impasse, and, moreover, their political and eccle- natures, both as God and as man, and thus the attributes sial behavior was utterly reprehensible. of each manner of existence can rightly be predicated Second, what Tilley says about the CDF is completely of that same Son. Tilley, it would appear, is into solving inappropriate especially within, what is expected to be, theological problems as a way of overcoming theologi- a scholarly and objective context. Such language hardly cal impasses, rather than clarifying the exact nature of exemplifies respectful table manners nor is it conducive the Christian mysteries and in so doing allowing these to honest and forthright dialogue, the very thing Tilley mysteries to shine with even greater splendor. insists is the proper way to overcome impasses. While Tilley once more faults the CDF for demanding the CDF does indeed criticize and condemn particular that theologians employ Chacedonian concepts and theological opinions, it always does so in a scholarly, language rather than use contemporary concepts—“just respectful and professional manner. what the fathers did.” He sees in such insistence “an- Third, though Tilley rightly speaks of good theo- other instance of a political imposition.” For Tilley, the logical ideas living on and thus speaking the old creed key failed tactic in attempting to overcome impasses “is to a new world, he does not offer any criteria by which stopping the dialogue, often done by silencing theo- to judge whether a theological idea is good and so does logians.” While “notifications and instructions of the in fact capture the old creed for a new world. He is Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith can be and incapable of offering any theological or doctrinal cri- are often helpful theologically and pedagogically,” yet teria, for, in criticizing the workings of the CDF, Tilley “when the congregation resorts to star-chamber tactics clearly reveals, yet again, that he espouses a theological and political sanctions—some direct, some indirect— relativism—that there is no objective standard of ortho- the Congregation of the Faith may recapitulate the doxy, no authentic rule of faith, by which theological vicious politics of the early Church.” Such unseemly opinion can be judged to be true or false, clear or am- tactics only leads to stalemate. The way through an im- biguous. The CDF, then, possesses no doctrinal base for passe and so to avoid a stalemate is “to stay at the table discerning the adequacy of theological opinion other no matter what until we can find a way together around than “star-chamber tactics.” Nor does it posses any the impasse.” Again, for Tilley, “[s]topping the dialogue rightful divine magisterial authority to make doctrinal by silencing theologians does not resolve the impasse. judgments. It simply possesses “human authority” that it You can kill theologians, but you cannot silence them— autocratically exercises with an authoritarian and repres- short of gagging their mouths and tying their hands sive will. This theological relativism becomes eminently behind them. The habitus of their vocation is too strong clear as Tilley moves to the conclusion of his address. to be stopped by human authorities. As I said yesterday, Fourth, Tilley gives the impression that the theolog-

FCS Quarterly • Fall 2009 7 Articles ical academy and the Church’s magisterium are equal is demanding and what the CDF is furthering and partners around the table of dialogue. This is obviously guarding is that the complete faith of the Church is to not the case, but if one holds that the Church no longer be believed, professed and lived, for it is this faith, in possesses divine authority to defend and proclaim the its entirety, that is fully salvific. This doctrinal unity is truth of revelation, one is then able, as Tilley does, to the life-giving source of the Church’s corporate prayer pretend that some dialogical compromise is the only and common life. To endorse and promote erroneous proper way forward within a theological environment conceptions and faulty expressions of this faith—these that professes that all truth is culturally relative. More- actions are the “destructive” ideologies and “idolatrous” over, Tilley gives the impression that the entire Catholic theories that divisively undermine “shared prayer.” theological academy is at an impasse with an intransi- In resolving the impasse over Christological meth- gent and repressive magisterium. He fails to recognize od, Tilley insists that we must “begin where we are.” that not all Catholic theologians agree with his or with We are not above “in heaven” nor are we in the past or the CTSA’s theological and ecclesial agenda, and thus the future. Yet, Tilley admits that “many of us cannot he fails to acknowledge that he does not speak on their but tell a story that begins in heaven: God made the behalf. Many, if not most, of the creative and scholarly Word flesh.” Nonetheless, “[f]or many of us, we can- Catholic theologians today are fully in accord with not but tell a story that begins on earth: God made a the Church’s doctrinal Christological tradition and so human, Mary’s child, God’s Son.” Both, according to would find Tilley’s own positions less than adequate. Tilley, are found in the New Testament. Tilley proceeds Nonetheless, how then does one progress beyond to argue as he has done so often in his presentation. the present Christological impasses? For Tilley, not While Nicea’s homoousios, that the Son is consubstantial only is dialogue essential—the staying at the table— with the Father, may have worked in the fourth cen- but important also is shared ascetic practices, especially tury, it will not work in the present. “The world has “shared prayer.” Thus, “[d]emanding theological con- changed, and those ancient words and concepts can no formity in a time of impasse is a divisive practice.” It longer express the same meaning as they once did. We must be remembered that “[p]ractice, not theory, is the need to experiment with multiple models and concepts heart of Christian life together; to insist on ideological and may wind up with a host of models for communi- identity—one way, one model, one language, especially cating the mystery.” in a time of impasse—is destructive and, as I said yester- So, the methodological impasse is resolved in that day, idolatrous.” some are permitted to tell the old incarnational story, Tilley is correct that shared prayer is important. even though these people are not above “in heaven” However, the depth of shared prayer depends on the where one would seem to need to be, according to unity of faith that both parties share. A group of Catho- Tilley, in order for such a story to make sense. More- lics, who share the same authentic faith of the Church, over, this model employs words that are ancient and are able to participate in a depth of shared prayer, such so no longer express what they once did. Thus, these as the Eucharist, that a mixed group of Catholic and people presently think that they believe what the Fa- Protestants could not possibly achieve. This has further thers taught and the Councils declared, but, in fact, consequences that bear upon Tilley’s argument. they do not because the words that they are employing Tilley is correct that to demand “theological conformi- to express their faith no longer bear the same mean- ty” is a “divisive practice.” For the CDF to demand, for ings that they did when the Fathers and Councils first example, that every theologian conform to the theol- used them. Yet it must be asked: If the meaning of the ogy of Hans Urs von Balthasar would be divisive. How- ancient words no longer bear their original meanings, ever, to demand doctrinal orthodoxy—what has been how would we know this given that the only meaning revealed in scripture and authentically taught within the we now know is their contemporary meaning? Tilley Church’s magisterial tradition through the centuries—is appears to be in a singular enlightened position in that to promote, protect and defend the very mysteries of he must know what these ancient words originally the Catholic faith upon which the unity of the Church, meant in the past, if he is now able to discern that they as the body of Christ, is founded. Neither the Church no longer bear their original meanings in the present nor the CDF in particular is demanding an “ideologi- and so to employ them now would be to misrepresent cal identity” or championing a “theory,” for the Gospel the faith. The point of my critique is simply to manifest is neither an ideology nor a theory. What the Church the incongruity of the entire argument. Tilley never

8 FCS Quarterly • Fall 2009 provides a reason as to why these ancient concepts and and which are not. The acceptance or non-acceptance words have altered their meaning and so are made inef- of a model depends again on the subjective judgment fectual in communicating the faith today other than of the person—“what speaks to me”—what is “in that they originated in a culture other than our own. style.” Tilley, I feel confident, would find no problem But different historical cultures are not self-contained with this. This is what he has been arguing for through- units; rather they form the continuum of history. Cul- out his presentation—in his critique of the traditional tures may vary over the course of history, but they expression of the Incarnation and in his proposal for bring with them into the present the truths (and falsi- the need for “a host” of other “models.” This “host” is ties) they contain—this is what the growth in knowl- necessary in order to accommodate everyone’s personal edge is all about. If Tilley were correct, there would no preference. Of course, there is no longer any objective point is studying Aristotle, Plato, Dante, or Shakespeare, revelational content to be known and believed, nor all of whom lived in cultures other than our own. then is there any unity and communion of faith. The However, any normal intelligent person can learn to Church, as the one body of Christ, becomes so frag- read the Fathers with understanding and can grasp the mented that it ceases to serve any divine purpose. doctrines proclaimed in the ancient creeds—this is the Tilley fails to recognize and to acknowledge that point of catechesis. Because he ultimately holds that the the Trinitarian and Christological doctrines of the early doctrine of the Incarnation, as defined by the ancient councils and creeds, as well as the authoritative doc- councils, is no longer believable, Tilley rhetorically at- trinal teaching of the Church today, are not models in tempts simply again to destabilize its credibility. the sense of approximate expressions of the mysteries. Allowing for a “host of models” is the way, for While these doctrines do not make the mysteries en- Tilley, to resolve the impasse concerning the relation- tirely comprehensible or offer a complete description of ship between the divinity and humanity in Christ. For the mysteries, they do provide a true ontological ac- Tilley the success of these models “begins by realizing count of the mystery, one that can be known and be- that success in accuracy of representation is dependent on suc- lieved. To say that Jesus is the divine Son of the Father cess in the practice of communication, not vice versa.” One existing as man, for example, is to define the ontologi- begins, it would appear according to Tilley, not with ac- cal nature of the mystery of the Incarnation. This is not curacy in conceiving and expressing the mystery of the one model among many other possible models. All else Incarnation with the presumption that such accuracy that is or could be said concerning Jesus must conform will allow one to communicate clearly and unambigu- to the metaphysical truth of this doctrinally defined ously the faith. Rather, one attempts to communicate incarnational mystery. It is the ontological nature of the faith and, if such is achieved, then one knows that the mysteries of faith and their ability to be known and one has expressed it accurately. This is almost a parody articulated, and so be doctrinally defined, that Tilley of modern subjectivism. How can one attempt to com- ultimately denies. municate something if one is not reasonably confident To be fair, Tilley does offer a test. The test cannot that one is communicating it accurately? Moreover, be whether or not a specific model conforms to the an- how can a person who has little or no understanding of cient creeds. “Rather, we shall know relatively adequate the mystery of the Incarnation be the judge of whether models by their practical fruits.” These fruits are work- or not the person who is attempting to communicate ing “for justice within the church and society,” seeking such knowledge has done so accurately? In this situa- “reconciliation in a world desperate for healing” and tion the hearer makes a subjective judgment, founded keeping “at the table of dialogue so as to keep impasse upon no objective criteria, on what he or she would from degenerating into a deadly stalemate.” The fruit like to believe and in so doing validates it. of an adequate model is in feeding the hungry, cloth- The heart of the problem is that, for Tilley, Chris- ing the poor, scattering the proud, etc. Of course, all of tological models, including the ancient “incarnational these fruits were already present when the old “incar- model,” do not conceive and express the ontological national model” was revered, venerated and believed. or metaphysical reality of the mystery of the Incarna- Nonetheless, Tilley has a point: Good doctrine does tion. Models are simply phenomenological approximate bear the fruit of a good moral life. However, his own expressions of the mystery, but since we do not know criteria undercut his whole theological proposal. Those the metaphysical reality of the mystery, we are unable to who argue in a manner similar to Tilley with regard judge which models are closer approximate expressions to what is to be the content of faith also often espouse

FCS Quarterly • Fall 2009 9 Articles

contraception, abortion, fornication, adultery, divorce truth of my original concerns—Tilley’s lack of scholar- and remarriage, masturbation, homosexual activity, ship, his doctrinal ambiguity and error, and his misuse same-sex marriage, euthanasia, embryonic stem cell of rhetoric. I hope that I have equally shown that it is research, etc. Tilley himself states in a footnote: “Laity of the utmost importance that we know who Jesus is, seem to have been disaffected by the bishops’ preaching that is, that we know metaphysically the mystery of the about sexual morality that is increasingly incredible.” Incarnation—Jesus is the eternal Son of the Father ex- While Tilley is not specific, one can presume that he isting as a man; once in humility and now as the glori- would include at least some of the above list. However, ous Lord and risen Christ. the above enumeration is hardly the fruits of a holy life founded upon the truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The thoughts expressed in this article are those of the author While my response to Professor Tilley may be per- alone and do not necessarily reflect any position of the United ceived as extraordinarily negative, and for me it was States Conference of Catholic Bishops regarding the matters not fun to write, I hope that I have demonstrated the discussed herein.

The Cultural and Ecclesial Situation 1964 to 1967: Paving the Way for Dissent from Church Teaching on Contraception

by William E. May publication of Pope Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae in 1968. I Senior Research Fellow, Culture of Life Foundation will use Kelly’s work, focusing on what he has to say Emeritus Michael J. McGivney Professor of Moral Theology, about the situation from 1963 to 1967, while noting Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and some events from 1959 on. I will also note some devel- Family at The Catholic University of America opments in secular culture that Kelly does not com- ment on. will first briefly summarize the cultural situation Kelly pointed out that in 1959 President Dwight in the United States that paved the way for ac- Eisenhower buried a report by William H. Draper, a ceptance of contraception and then offer a much Planned Parenthood activist, calling for government- more substantive account of the ecclesial situation financed and managed-population programs. Eisen- that did so. I hower did more than that; he also banned all govern- ment involvement in family planning for the duration of his term in office (it would end in early 1960) (pp. The Cultural Situation 21-22). Eisenhower’s opposition spurred champions of in the United States contraception to curry the favor of other politicians, including Catholics. Planned Parenthood held a World n his essay of almost 100 pages, “The Bitter Pill Population Emergency Conference in 1960, persuad- the Catholic Community Swallowed,”1 Msgr. ing the National Council of Churches to take a stance George A. Kelly did a splendid job of summariz- favorable to contraception and sterilization. Planned ing the cultural situation in the United States Parenthood also enlisted the support of prominent Iregarding contraception from 1934—when Margaret public figures such as former Secretary of State Chris- Sanger, noted as a pioneer of contraception for eugenic tian Herter (pp. 22-23). Moreover, by 1961 John D. purposes, wrote an article for The American Weekly in Rockefeller III, a firm supporter of government sup- which she proposed an “American Baby Code”—until ported contraceptive programs, used his considerable

10 FCS Quarterly • Fall 2009 wealth to achieve this goal.2 from Church teaching and is still bitterly opposed to In 1962 and following years Planned Parenthood it) clearly showed.3 One of the reasons why these men sought to enlist support of Catholics who seemed sym- and women gladly embraced Catholic teaching on the pathetic to their ideas. Cass Canfield, chairman of the subject was that during the fifties Catholic colleges and editorial board of Harper and Brother Publishers (one universities, and among them a great many operated by of the country’s most prestigious at the time) and a Jesuits, were proud of their Catholic faith and loyal to dedicated supporter of Planned Parenthood, made over- the Magisterium. This was also true of Catholic high tures to some Catholic organizations. But Canfield was schools, at that time most of them being for either boys subtle and did not show all his cards. One major one he or girls, with those for boys under the direction of Jesu- was counting on was a book in the works in 1962 and its, Christian Brothers, Brothers of Mary, Benedictines published in 1963 by John Rock, M.D., called The Time and other religious congregations for men and those for Has Come: A Catholic Doctor’s Proposal to End the Battle girls under the supervision of the Sisters of St. Joseph, Over Birth Control. Alfred A. Knopf and Company pub- various Franciscan communities, Dominicans, Visitation lished the book, endorsed by Herter and others, and the nuns, Loretta nuns, and others. author was praised as a “dedicated Roman Catholic.” 1964 marks a turning point. One great book, Rock’s Catholicism was questionable, to say the least, by Germain Grisez, then professor of philosophy at since he had for thirty years been a dedicated member Georgetown University was published that year to sup- and advocate of Planned Parenthood. In his book Rock port the teaching that contraception is always gravely endorsed abortion as well as contraception (pp. 25-27). immoral. It was called Contraception and the Natural 4 Partially as a result of all this propaganda Lyndon Law. In his book Grisez severely criticized inadequate Johnson, on becoming President of the US after the arguments against contraception rooted in what he assassination of John F. Kennedy, endorsed government called the “conventional natural law theory” based on a sponsored programs of contraception in January, 1965 Suarezian understanding of natural law and developed a (p. 37). This act, coupled with the sexual revolution new argument rooted in St. Thomas’s understanding of associated with the 1960s, the widespread use of con- natural law. But that year also witnessed the publication traception made possible in large part by the anovulant of several books and articles advocating contraception. Pill, and the Supreme Court’s decision in Griswold v. Among the books were Louis Dupré’s Contraception and Connecticut in 1965 (all of which Kelly did not con- Catholics, Dorothy Dunbar Bromley’s The Experience of sider) brought it about that by the middle of the de- Marriage, and two collections of essays that I will exam- cade American secular culture had warmly embraced ine here insofar as I consider them typical of the argu- contraception as a way of life. Griswold v. Connecticut ments given and influential because of the prominence of their authors among intellectually elite Catholics. discovered in the U.S. Constitution a so-called “right to 5 privacy” that led the Court to strike down as uncon- The first, entitled Contraception and Holiness, carried an introduction by retired Jesuit Archbishop Thomas stitutional a Connecticut state law (passed principally Roberts, and included essays by Justus George Lawler, by Protestant legislators in earlier years) forbidding the Rosemary Ruether, Julian Pleasants, and others. William distribution of contraceptives. It was to the same al- Birmingham, who with Joseph Cunneen was co-editor leged “right to privacy” to which the Burger-Blackman of the highly regarded journal Cross Currents, edited Court would appeal in 1973 in its infamous Roe v.Wade another, called What Modern Catholics Believe About Birth decision, invalidating state laws against abortion. Control.6 It included one essay defending the Church’s teaching by Vernon Bourke, professor of philosophy The Ecclesial Situation at St. Louis University, but all other essays in the book championed contraception, and among their authors ntil 1964 no Catholic theologian had ever were Birmingham himself and his wife Mary Louise, said that contraception could possibly be Michael Novak, James Finn, Sally Sullivan, Sidney Cal- morally permissible. Until then, Catholic lahan and others. In addition to the book already noted, theologians unanimously accepted this Dupré, at that time Grisez’s colleague at Georgetown Uteaching of the Church. What is more, so did educated University, wrote an influential pro-contraception essay Catholic laymen and women, as a sociological study in called “Toward a Re-examination of the Catholic Posi- the early 60s by Andrew Greeley (who later dissented tion on Birth Control” for Cross Currents, an essay that I

FCS Quarterly • Fall 2009 11 Articles think merits careful examination. Although Kelly did not refer to Cushing’s remarks, he In 1965 John T. Noonan very influential work, nonetheless showed, in the essay noted earlier, how Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by Catholic Catholic legislators quickly caved in and endorsed laws Theologians and Canonists, was published by the encouraging contraceptive use. prestigious Belknap Press of Harvard University. In his Introduction Noonan wrote as follows: Reasons Advanced Between The propositions constituting a condemnation of contraception are…recurrent. Since the first clear 1964-1967 To Justify mention of contraception by a Christian theologian, Contraception when a harsh third-century moralist [falsely] accused a pope of encouraging it, the articulated judgment will now look more closely at the reasons given has been the same. In the world of the late Empire to support contraception by influential Catholic known to St. Jerome and St. Augustine, in the Os- authors between 1964 and 1967, the year before trogothic Arles of Bishop Caesarius and the Suevian the publication of Humanae Vitae. I will examine Braga of Bishop Martin, in the Paris of St. Albert and Ithe 1964 essays by Rosemary Ruether, Michael Novak, St. Thomas, in the Renaissance Rome of Sixtus V and Louis Dupré because they both they illustrate the and the Renaissance Milan of St. Charles Borromeo, kinds of arguments used to justify contraception and in the Naples of St. Alphonsus Ligouri and the Liège foreshadow the more systematic arguments developed of Charles Billuart, in the Philadelphia of Bishop by the so-called “Majority” of the Papal Commission Kenrick and in the Bombay of Cardinal Gracias, the on Population, the Family, and Natality and the anthro- teachers of the Church have taught without hesita- pological and moral presuppositions underlying those tion or variation that certain acts preventing con- arguments. I will then examine in more depth the ar- ception are gravely sinful. No Catholic theologian guments of the “Majority,” which were written in 1966 has ever taught, “Contraception is a good act.” The and released to the public in 1967. teaching on contraception is clear and apparently fixed forever (p. 6). 1. Rosemary Ruether

But he ended by claiming that new conditions and In her essay, “Birth Control and the Ideals of Mari- the spirit of Vatican II would lead the way to change tal Sexuality,”8 Ruether (1) denies that there is any Church teaching on this point. moral difference between contraception and use of the In addition, in the summer of 1965, before Griswold rhythm method; (2) offers an analysis of the levels of v. Connecticut, Richard Cardinal Cushing, commenting meaning in the marital act; and (3) proposes the “best” on a proposal in the Massachusetts State Legislature way for helping married couples strive for the ideals of to repeal the state’s birth control law banning the use marital union, which includes procreation. contraceptives, gives us an example of one who “is Ruether first attacks what she considers the personally opposed but…” Cushing noted that previ- Church’s inconsistency. The Church condemns all ously Catholic leaders had opposed any effort to alter forms of “artificial” contraception, but it advocates the laws prohibiting contraception. “But my thinking has “rhythm” method. This method, Ruether claims, is changed on that matter,” he reported, “for the simple also contraceptive She thinks it ludicrous to say that reason that I do not see where I have an obligation to an act of intercourse, deliberately chosen during a impose my religious beliefs on people who just do not time when the wife is thought to be infertile, could accept the same faith as I do.” I have added emphasis to possibly be “procreative.” “Hence, sexual acts which show how Cushing reduces the Catholic position to a are calculated to function only during the times of matter of purely sectarian belief—as if it would be im- sterility are sterilizing the act just as much as any other possible for a non-Catholic to support the purpose of means of rendering the act infertile. It is difficult to the Birth Control law. Cushing ended by giving Catho- see why there should be such an absolute moral differ- lic members of the Massachusetts legislature this advice: ence between creating a spatial barrier to procreation “If your constituents want this legislation, vote for it. and creating a temporal barrier to procreation” (p. 74). You represent them. You don’t represent the Catho- In short, couples who practice periodic continence lic Church.”7 Cushing’s message did not go unheard. by using the rhythm method are adopting by choice

12 FCS Quarterly • Fall 2009 a proposal to place a temporal barrier between sperm method of rhythm, which, after all, is just as contracep- and ovum; just as couples who use diaphragms or con- tive and other forms of birth control. doms are placing spatial barriers between them. Why is there a moral difference between the two? Later in Comment her essay Ruether returns to rhythm and attacks it as a most “unnatural” way to solve the problems married Ruether, with other advocates of contraception, sees people face. no moral difference between contraception and use of She then analyzes the sexual act. She says that at fertility awareness or natural family planning as ways of its biological level it has as its purposive goal the gen- regulating conception. This, of course, is nonsense as the eration of a new human being. But as an act of love, it following analysis shows. Ruether and others reason as expresses the interpersonal union between the spouses. follows: Contraception prevents conception. “Rhythm” Ideally, the sexual act should take place when all these (fertility awareness or natural family planning) prevents purposes are realizable. But unfortunately that is not conception. Therefore “rhythm’is contraception. That possible, especially in our fallen world. For one thing, is like arguing: Crows are birds. Eagles are birds. There- one can never be sure when the act will in fact be fore eagles are crows. Obviously the reasoning here is procreative. Moreover, one is able to say “yes” to pro- fallacious. Moreover, no one uses “rhythm” in order to creation only if one is able to say “no,” and in order become pregnant, whereas couples seeking to conceive to say “no” he must have an effective means of birth frequently do so in order to engage in the conjugal act control, to prevent “accidents” from occurring. In at a time when the wife is ovulating. Ruether’s claim addition, “the demands of living in the sexual union that those who practice “rhythm” are placing temporal are real and meaningful demands which impose a far barriers between sperm and ovum is ludicrous. That is more frequent use of the sexual act for its relational simply not what they are “doing,” i.e., choosing to do function than could ever be brought into harmony here and now.9 with procreation itself....the sexual act as a relational Note too that Ruether sharply distinguishes be- act is [moreover] a genuinely purposeful act, and not tween the “biological” level of an act of intercourse and mere play or unleashing of passion. Since this is the its level as “an act of love,” its “relational” or “interper- case, the couple cannot well dispense with the act and sonal” level. This dualistic understanding of human sex- yet continue to live in a sexual relationship without uality (and the human person) will be developed more doing extensive emotional damage to the basic stabil- fully in the Majority papers. Ruether also uses a form ity of their marriage” (p. 79). of consequentialist reasoning, claiming that contracep- From this it follows that couples have no real tion is needed if couples are to avoid serious problems. choice “but to find some method of birth control This is not true, as there are other ways of avoiding the which allows [them] to continue to use the sexual act problems that could arise. for its relational purpose and to do this under as ideal As we will see the “Majority” papers develop in detail emotional circumstances as possible” (p. 80). Ruether much of Ruether’s reasoning. repudiates periodic continence as an unrealistic, inhu- mane option. She thinks periodic abstinence is psycho- 2. Michael Novak logically unbearable as well as ineffective, and it is also (NB. Novak later changed his mind and repudiated dehumanizing (pp. 81, 83, 91). She is not too happy over contraception and embraced Church teaching) barrier methods for aesthetic, not moral, reasons, and concludes that the best way to solve the problem is to Novak’s essay “Toward a Positive Sexual Ethic,”10 has use the oral-steroid pills (p. 83). some interesting features. I will focus on the “argu- In short, Ruether holds that the Church’s position, ment” he mounts to justify the practice of contracep- championed by clerical celibates who simply cannot tion by married couples because of the anthropology appreciate the realities of married life, is dehumanizing and moral theory it presupposes. and unnatural. The biological needs of procreation can Early in the essay he says that marriage and the be satisfied by a relatively few marital acts; the psycho- marital act are ordered to the good of the species, not of logical needs of intercourse for relational, personal rea- individuals (p. 110). He stresses that in recent years people sons demand regular marital intercourse, unhampered have begun to discover the close relationship between by the psychological duress imposed by the ineffective sexuality and personality (p.111), and elaborates on what

FCS Quarterly • Fall 2009 13 Articles he terms the “totality principle.” He sees two levels of good of marriage [the totality principle] anovulants moral imperatives in the sexual act: “the first level is the or contraceptives seem at times to be the lesser of two biological, and its end is the preservation of the species; evils” (p.123). its imperative is ‘do not allow the species to become Moreover, he contends that “if the couple has no extinct.’ The second level is psychological: its end is the control over pregnancy, intercourse may create anxieties harmony and development of the human psyche, intel- that make marital love both a torture and a lie....Un- ligence, will, emotions, and sentiments. Its imperative is less, therefore, one is ready to argue that continence is ‘act toward one another as person to person; do not treat a universal ideal, of itself and without reference to the the other as an object or a means’” (p. 112). natural expressiveness of marital love, one must admit In Novak’s view, today the “biological imperatives that at times and in the total context of a married life of the [natural] law are receding,” while the “psycho- continence can be an evil. For at times either the bio- logical imperatives” are becoming more and more in- logical or else the psychological imperatives of married sistent (p. 112). He then writes: “The crux of this newly love must be violated. In actual experience there simply understood moral imperative...is whether it can be are some situations in which it is imperative ‘not to obeyed without at the same time obeying the biological have children ‘and yet to express one’s love according to imperative” (p. 113). He admits that we must obey the its natural sign” (p. 126). biological imperative, but holds that the moral (psy- chological) imperative is “even more demanding” (p. Comment 114). He wants to get away from a negative criterion, “don’t use contraceptives,” because he deems it “inad- It seems clear from what Novak writes here that he equate” (p. 115), as it surely is. He thinks that Catholics does indeed distinguish sharply between the “biologi- have been conditioned to regard contraception with cal” meaning and the “psychological” or “personal” revulsion (p. 117), that they have overly spiritualized the meaning of the conjugal act and that he regards the marital relationship or reduced the conjugal act merely latter as more imperative and of higher value. This is a to rendering a debt, etc. He recognizes that the sexual clue to his dualism that distinguishes between the “per- impulse must be regulated and ordered. Nonetheless, he son” as experiencing subject and his or her biological believes that the absolute condemnation of contracep- fertility that is in some way under the dominion of the tion is inadequate and the reasons for it weak. personal subject. He also invokes the so-called prin- He says that “the standard Catholic objection to ciple of totality to claim that at times contraception is my argument will be that I am dividing the sexual act necessary to foster the education of children and also between its biological and psychological imperatives. I to avoid some bad consequences for the couple, their will be told that these imperatives form a unity, indeed marriage, and their children. Like Ruether, he adopts a a ‘dynamic’ unity. One cannot do anything to interfere consequentialist kind of moral methodology, justifying with the biological mechanism of the act in order to contraception because it allegedly helps couples avoid exercise only the psychological upper reaches of the serious problems. All these ideas, as we will see, are act. I am also aware that many persons who use con- more ambitiously developed by the “Majority” theolo- traceptives or anovulants do so selfishly. My answer to gians. the second objection would be that neither the use of contraceptives nor the nonuse of contraceptives guaran- 3. Louis Dupré tees the authenticity of the love between the couple.... My answer to the first objection would be that the In the introduction to his essay, “Toward a Re-exam- fundamental issue is how to define the marriage act” (p. ination of the Catholic Position on Birth Control,”11 121). He opines that “sexuality and fertility seem to be Dupré says that he will not present any conclusions. two separate orders” and that the conjugal act receives He nonetheless clearly calls for the acceptance of the its nature from what it “symbolizes, and its morality is contraception of individual acts within marriage when governed by the conformity of its performance to its necessary to achieve the ends of marriage (procreation intention: the outward expression of an inner, perma- and fostering of love) within the whole of marriage. nent bond” (p. 121). Since procreation includes educa- Much that Dupré says is similar to what Ruether and tion and since the exercise of marital sexuality is good Novak say. However he introduces new considerations. for its own sake, he then concludes that “in the total Of these, one of the most important is advanced in Part 1

14 FCS Quarterly • Fall 2009 of his paper. themselves, namely, their procreativity.”He thinks this There Dupré advances the view that the Church’s argument provocative, but not compelling because “for teaching on the intrinsic malice of contraception has two marriage partners who have repeatedly proven not been proposed infallibly, either by solemn defini- their intention of complete surrender in creative acts of tion by council or ex cathedra pronouncements of the love, to exclude occasionally the fertility of their love pope nor by the ordinary and universal exercise of when circumstances prevent them from taking proper the Magisterium (pp. 63-64). In Part 2, on natural end care of new offspring, does not necessarily contradict and natural law, he seems to me to articulate some of the objective meaning of the marital act.” Continuing, Grisez’s arguments against the conventional natural law he says, “it would seem to me that the full meaning of these argument against contraception—that it prevents the occasional acts can be grasped only by connecting them with act of coition from attaining its natural biological end. the totality of all the others….” (p. 81; emphasis added). But in his discussion of human nature he distinguishes between unchangeable aspects of human nature and as- Comment pects subject to somewhat radical change. He questions whether the norm against contraception involves viola- First, I should note that Dupré, writing before Vatican tion of primary natural law precepts or secondary pre- Council II, retained the distinction that had become cepts, which he holds (and claims, falsely, that he has the common between the “primary” and “secondary” ends support of St. Thomas) are not universally binding (pp. of marriage. Second, and more important, he introduces 66-72). He holds that the norm against contraception two new arguments to justify contraception. The first involves violation of a secondary, not primary precept, is his claim that Church teaching against contraception of natural law. has not been infallibly proposed by the Magisterium In Part 3 he asks when artificial interference with of the Church either by solemn definition or through its the functioning of nature (the procreative aspect of ordinary and universal exercise. The second is his assertion marital coition) becomes arbitrary and therefore evil that for St. Thomas secondary precepts of natural law (p. 77). He then asks: “are the two ends of marriage [for do not bind absolutely and universally but only for the him these were (1) the procreation and education of “most part” and admit of exceptions, and that the norm children, and (2) mutual aid of spouses] so independent against contraception is a norm of this kind. as to allow the dilemma that one cannot be abandoned These claims must be challenged. Regarding the without seriously harming basic human values and first, a very substantive argument can be—and has the other cannot be pursued without compromis- been—made that the Church’s teaching on the grave ing equally essential values? We do not think that the immorality of contraception has been proposed infal- two ends must be thus separated.” He then continues libly by the ordinary and universal Magisterium of the as follows: “Since the primary end of marriage is not Church according to the criteria set forth in Lumen simply procreation (as is the ‘natural’ end of the act of Gentium, 25.12 marriage) but the procreation and raising to adulthood Regarding the second, Dupré appeals to a text of of the offspring, it would seem that, at least in those cases St. Thomas in Summa theologiae 1-2, q. 94, a. 5 in which where continence creates a tension between the parents which he says that the natural law in its secondary precepts seriously harms the education of the children, the pursuit of the which are conclusions from its primary precepts, while secondary end itself is essential for the full accomplishment of unchangeable for “for the most part” (non immutatur ut in the primary end (p. 77, emphasis added). pluribus), can be changed “in some particular case” (potest In Part 4 Dupré considers the argument [he refers immutari in aliquo particulari). Dupré, with many dissenting to it as a “psychological” argument] advanced by people theologians/philosophers (e.g., Charles E. Curran, Rich- like the Jesuit Paul Quay, who had argued in 1961, as ard McCormick, Franz Scholz), gravely misinterprets this John Paul II was later on to argue, that contraception is passage. St. Thomas did not say that all specific secondary immoral because it violates the meaning of the conjugal precepts of natural law can be changed in some particular or marital act as an act of spousal “self-giving.” Accord- cases. In fact, he clearly held that many specific secondary ing to this argument against contraception, husbands precepts are absolutely immutable and admit of no exceptions and wives, by contracepting, fail to “give themselves” whatsoever (e.g., the intentional killing of the innocent— unreservedly and thus violate the marital act as a true see Summa theologiae, 2-2, 64, 5).13 Moreover, with respect act of love. They in effect “hold back something of to contraception Aquinas considered this to be a crime

FCS Quarterly • Fall 2009 15 Articles analogous to murder, more serious than fornication.14 The Papal Commission prepared four papers. I think the dualistic view of the human person One, known as the “Minority Report,” defended the (anthropology) and consequentialistic moral reasoning Church’s teaching and argued that it could not be (morality) employed by Dupré is evident since in posi- changed. It also argued that the reasoning used by the tively justifying contraception he offers the same kind authors of the “Majority papers” to justify contracep- of reasoning as that given by Ruether and Novak and tion were not good and would, if true, lead to the rejec- later by the Majority theologians. tion of other firm teachings of the Magisterium. There were three “Majority papers”: (1) the Documentum Syn- 4. Majority Papers theticum or “Rebuttal”—translated in the Hoyt edition used here17 as “The Question Is Not Closed: The Liber- Before taking up the so-called Majority Papers and the als Reply”; this was prepared by Josef Fuchs, S.J., Canon reasoning employed in them to justify contraception, Philippe Delhaye, Raymond Sigmond, O.P.; (2) the I want to say a few things about this commission, the Schema Documenti de Responsabili Paternitate or “Major- thesis of the “majority” and its tremendous impact on ity Report,” translated as “On Responsible Parenthood: Catholics. The story of the Commission and its work The Final Report;” this was prepared by Fuchs, Sig- has been told very sympathetically by the journalist mond, Alfons Auer, S.J., Paul Anciaux, M. Ladourdette, Robert McClory in his book Turning Point. The sub- and Pierre de Locht; and (3) a French text, Indications title of this book, published in 1995,15 is most reveal- pastorales, “Pastoral Approaches.” I have not included this ing: The Inside Story of the Papal Birth Commission and third text here because it adds nothing to the first two. How Humanae Vitae Changed the Life of Patty Crowley With respect to the first two texts I intend to focus and the Future of the Church. In it McClory shows how on the following issues, central to the claim made in Patty Crowley and her husband Patrick, who were the both that married couples can rightly choose, in given president couple of the US Catholic Family Movement circumstances, to practice contraception, namely, (1) and whom Paul VI had appointed to the Commission, man’s dominion over nature; (2) the criteria for deter- persuaded the majority by the massive evidence they mining the moral meaning of human acts; and (3) the provided that showed that a great number of Catholic meaning of marriage and of marital acts as a “totality.” I Couples who practiced “rhythm” nonetheless con- omit discussion of other elements in their presentation, ceived children when they had hoped that conception e.g., their understanding of the competence and extent would not take place, were bitterly angry and whole- of the ecclesial Magisterium in moral questions. In pre- heartedly resented the teaching of the Magisterium. senting the thought of the “majority” of the Commis- Their eloquent plea that the Church accept contracep- sion on these issues I will draw from material in both tion persuaded the majority to argue for its acceptance. the first and the second of the reports identified above. The papers produced by the “majority,” written in 1966, were published in 1967 in France in Le Monde and in 1. Man’s dominion over nature the U.S. in the National Catholic Reporter to put public pressure on Paul VI to accept contraception. When he A key idea in the defense of contraception mounted rejected the arguments of the “majority” in publishing by the “Majority” is that man’s dominion over physical Humanae Vitae, the objection was raised that he simply nature, willed by God, justifies the use of contraceptives ignored their advice (he did not). Patty Crowley and by married couples to prevent pregnancies that would her husband were especially upset and continued their be irresponsible. In “The Question Is Not Closed” they advocacy of contraception and dissent from Church note that, “in the matter at hand,” namely, teaching. Patrick Crowley died in 1974 but Patty lived contraception, there is a certain change in the mind until November 2005 and McClory wrote her obituary of contemporary man. He feels that he is more con- in the December 9, 2005 issue of National Catholic Re- formed to his rational nature, created by God with porter, still a champion of contraception. In his obituary liberty and responsibility, when he uses his skill to McClory praises Patty Crowley as deeply involved in intervene in the biological processes of nature so that the Call to Action group, a group that vehemently re- he can achieve the ends of the institution of matri- pudiates the teaching of the Magisterium on moral and mony in the conditions of actual life, than if he would faith issues.16 abandon himself to chance (p. 69). Now to the papers of the “Majority.”

16 FCS Quarterly • Fall 2009 In “On Responsible Parenthood” they write as biological processes of human generation, etc.), accord- follows: ing to this view, is of itself subpersonal and becomes It is proper to man, created to the image of God, to personal only when “assumed into the human sphere use what is given in physical nature in a way that he and regulated within it.” may develop it to its full significance with a view to the good of the whole person (p. 87). 2. The criteria for determining the moral meaning of human acts According to this idea, the biological fertility of human Here we come to the moral methodology advocated by persons and the biological processes involved in the gen- the “Majority,” i.e., the criteria they propose for distin- eration of human life are physical or biological “givens,” guishing between alternatives of choice that are morally and as such need to be “assumed into the human sphere good and alternatives of choice that are not morally and be regulated within it” (“The Question Is Not good. This theme overlaps with considerations to be Closed,” p. 70). taken up below, on the “totality” of marriage and of The person, according to this idea, is not to be the marital acts, but it is somewhat broader in scope. slave of his biology (moral rightness does not consist in A clue to the moral methodology adopted by the au- conformity to biological or physical laws), to have his thors of “The Question Is Not Closed” is provided in choices determined by the rules and conditions set in the following passage: physiology. To the contrary, the biological givens con- fronting the person are to be controlled and regulated To take his own or another’s life is a sin not because life is under the exclusive dominion of God but by the person’s intelligence and freedom. And this leads because it is contrary to right reason unless there is to the justification of the use of contraceptives. question of a good of a higher order. It is licit to sacrifice With respect to all this, the following passage from a life for the good of the community. It is licit to “On Responsible Parenthood” is quite illuminating: take a life in capital punishment for the sake of the The true opposition is not to be sought between community, and therefore from a motive of charity some material conformity to the physiological pro- for others (p. 69). cesses of nature and some artificial intervention. For it is natural to man to use his skill in order to put under I call this the “Caiaphas” principle. I prescind here human control what is given by physical nature. The from the question of capital punishment and its justifi- opposition is to be sought really between one way of cation. I wish to draw attention to the general norma- acting which is contraceptive and opposed to a pru- tive principle set forth in this passage. It is the follow- dent and generous fruitfulness, and another way which ing: one ought not to do take a human life unless there is is in an ordered relationship to responsible fruitfulness question of a good of a higher order. This provides a built-in and which has a concern for education and all the es- exception clause to a norm such as: one ought not to sential human and Christian values (pp. 90-91). kill innocent human persons. The exception is, unless there is question of a good of a higher order. If such a good This passage is instructive because it distinguishes is present, then it follows that one can rightly kill in- between the use of contraceptives to regulate nature nocent human persons. “It is licit to take another’s life if and what it calls a “way of acting which is contraceptive there is question of a good of a higher order.” And this and opposed to a prudent and generous fruitfulness.” In would be true of every specific moral norm; i.e., every other words, contraception by married persons is mor- specific moral norm (called “concrete moral norms” in ally bad only when motivated by selfish reasons. Oth- “On Responsible Parenthood,” p. 81) is open to excep- erwise, it simply reflects human intelligent control of tion; that is why they “must not be pushed to an ex- “what is given in physical nature.” treme,” i.e., made absolute (ibid.). In evaluating human acts, the authors suggest, one Comment: The principal difficulty with this idea, must take into account the totality of the act in ques- however, is that it presupposes a dualistic understand- tion. They imply that one can make a moral judgment ing of the human person. According to it, the body on an act only when it is seen in its “totality,” i.e., in becomes an instrument of the person. The procreative relationship to the end for the sake of which it is cho- dimension of human sexuality (biological fertility, the sen (cf. p. 72). This leads us to the third theme.

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3. The totality of marriage and of marital acts it in its “totality”; one can judge an act to be morally bad if any element of the act is morally bad—malum ex Here the basic idea underlying the “Majority” reports is quocumque defectu. Thus, if one knows that the object of set forth luminously in the following passage: choice is bad, then one can judge the whole act mor- When man intervenes with the procreative purpose ally bad, even if the end for the sake of which the act is of individual acts by contracepting he does this with chosen is good and if the circumstances in which it is the intention of regulating and not excluding fertility. chosen are good. Then he unites the material finality toward fecundity The authors of the “Majority” Report claim that which exists in intercourse with the formal finality of the object of choice is the whole ensemble of marital the person and renders the entire process human.... acts; the choice is to procreate responsibly within the Conjugal acts which by intention are infertile [here marital covenant. They need to distinguish different the authors are referring to conjugal acts chosen dur- kinds of choices. A couple can choose, in the sense of ing the infertile period of the woman; they see no a commitment, to procreate responsibly within the moral difference between “artificial” and “natural” marital covenant. But this commitment entails further contraception] or which are rendered infertile [by choices, namely, what to do in order to procreate responsibly the use of artificial contraceptives] are ordered to the within the marital covenant. Those who contracept choose expression of the union of love; that love, however, to contracept; one can hardly deny this! Whether the reaches its culmination in fertility responsibly ac- choice to contracept is morally good or morally bad cepted. For that reason other acts of union are in a is another question. But one cannot justify the choice certain sense incomplete and they receive their full to contracept simply because it is the means adopted moral quality with ordination toward the fertile act.... to carry out the commitment to procreate responsibly Infertile conjugal acts constitute a totality with fertile within the marital covenant. One can ask whether this acts and have a single moral specification (p. 72). means is indeed compatible with responsible procre- ation. I hope you see the point. This is a remarkable passage and sums up the basic The authors of “The Question Is Not Closed” argument used to justify contraception; it also illustrates maintain that their standards are really strict and would the moral methodology of the authors. Note that they in no way justify anal/oral sex, asserting that “in these here claim that individual conjugal acts do not have a acts there is preserved neither the dignity of love nor moral specification of their own. If they are contracept- the dignity of the spouses as human persons...” (p. 76). ed marital acts, they are not specified precisely as acts of But this is no explanation at all, since an act accords contraception. Rather, they receive their moral species with human dignity in the morally relevant sense by from the whole ensemble of marital acts, and these, the being reasonable and right in accordance with the truth authors maintain, must be ordained both to love and (cf. Gaudium et spes, n. 14, where it is said that “human to a generous fecundity. Thus, we could say that the dignity itself involves that one glorify God in one’s “single moral specification” of these individual acts is body” by “not allowing it to serve the depraved inclina- “the fostering of love responsibly toward a generous tions of one’s heart” (Also cf. ibid, no. 16). fecundity.” But this is obviously good, not bad; therefore the individual contracepted marital acts ought properly Conclusion to be described not as “contraceptive” acts but as acts of fostering love responsibly toward a generous fecundity. Unfortunately even today many Catholics reject the I believe that this is an accurate rendition of the teaching of the Magisterium on contraception. But, as I central argument. The problem with it, however, is that hope I have shown, contraception, because of the dual- it redescribes the action one chooses to do (namely, to istic anthropology at its heart and the consequentialist/ contracept) in terms of the hoped for consequences of proportionalist moral methodology that it uses, is at the act (namely, the fostering of love responsibly toward the root of the culture or death. Moreover, today social a generous fecundity). While it is true that one cannot scientists such as W. Bradford Wilcox of the University judge an act to be morally good unless one takes it in its of Virginia, and economists are amassing evidence that “totality,” including the end for the sake of which it is supports the teaching of Pope Paul VI in Humanae Vitae. chosen—bonum ex integra causa—it is not true that one Let those who have ears to ear, listen.18 ✠ cannot judge an act to be morally bad unless one takes

18 FCS Quarterly • Fall 2009 ENDNOTES Thomist 52 (1988), 399-408. 10 In What Modern Catholics Think About Birth Control, ed. William Birming- 1 Msgr. George A. Kelly, “The Bitter Pill the Catholic Community Swal- ham (New York: Signet Books, 1964). pp. 109-128. lowed,” in Human Sexuality in Our Time: What the Church Teaches, ed. 11 In Cross Currents 14 (Winter, 1964) 66-73. George A. Kelly (Boston: St. Paul Editions, 1979), pp. 13-101. He also 12 John C. Ford, S.J., and Germain Grisez, “Contraception and the Infal- discusses the ecclesial situation but does so in a quite different way that I libility of the Ordinary Magisterium,” Theological Studies 39.2 (June, 1978) will do. 258-312. 2 I want to point out that in the late 50s and 60s both the Rockefeller and 13 For a superb study of St. Thomas’s teaching on the absolute immutability Ford Foundations were ardent supporters of contraception and Planned of the precepts of the second tablet of the Decalogue, for example, see Parenthood. Kelly does not note this. Patrick Lee, “The Permanence of the Ten Commandments: St. Thomas 3 Andrew Greeley, “Family Planning Among American Catholics,” Chicago as His Modern Commentators,” Theological Studies 42.3 (September 1981) Studies (Spring, 1963). On the basis of these sociological studies Greeley 422-43; see also John Finnis, Moral Absolutes: Tradition, Revision, and Truth concluded that “the success of the Church’s efforts to induce the younger (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1991), generation of Catholic couples to adopt approved methods [contradicts] Chapter 3, where he takes up in depth St. Thomas’s thought and show assertions occasionally made that Catholics are increasingly adopting ap- how utterly false to Aquinas is the interpretation given by authors like pliance [contraceptive] methods,” and that “the more education, the more Dupré. income, the higher the occupational category, the more likely Catholics 14 See Summa contra gentiles, Book 3, chapter 122. There St. Thomas says are to keep the Church’s law and the more likely they are to have or to that if one deliberately impedes procreation (contracepts), one does want larger families.” something akin to homicide. By homicide “a human nature already in 4 Milwaukee, WI. The Bruce Publishing Company. existence is destroyed.” He then says that this type of sin (contraception) 5 New York: Herder & Herder. “appears to take next place, for by it the generation of human nature is 6 New York: Signet Books. precluded.” One can see how badly Dupré has used Aquinas. 7 For Cushing’s talk see Diogenes, “Personally Opposed, but…” Catholic 15 New York: Crossroad. World Report, December, 2003. 16 For McClory’s obituary see: http://ncronline.org/NCR_Online/ 8 In Contraception and Holiness, introduced by Archbishop Thomas Roberts, archives2/2005d/120905/120905o.php, accessed July 17, 2008. S.J. (New York: Herder & Herder, 1964), pp. 72-91. 17 See The Birth-Control Debate: Interim History from the Pages of the National 9 For a thorough discussion of what couples are “doing” when they Catholic Reporter, ed. Robert Hoyt (Kansas City, MO: The National rightly practice periodic continence in order to avoid causing a preg- Catholic Reporter, 1969). nancy when it would not be prudent to cause one, see Germain Grisez, 18 I have summarized the evidence marshaled by Wilcox and others in my Joseph Boyle, John Finnis, and William E. May, “‘ Every Marital Act recent essay, “Humanae Vitae at Forty,” Catholic World Report, July, 2008. Must Be Open to New Life’: Toward a Clearer Understanding,” The

Catholic Feminist Ethics and the Culture of Death: The Case of Sister Margaret Farley by Anne Barbeau Gardiner a “crucial resource for feminist ethics”2 and a “radical Professor Emerita, John Jay College, CU.N.Y. challenge to Catholic ethics.”3 The Church claims that men and women share a human nature that provides n A Just and True Love, a recent collection of es- the ground for objective moral standards. However, Far- says honoring Sister Margaret Farley, Maura Ryan ley denies that there is such a shared nature. She con- asserts that in the last forty years Catholic feminists tends that the “official” moral teaching of the Church is have challenged the traditional sexual ethics of based only on men’s experience, so is not universal. She Ithe Catholic Church by insisting on “the significance asks that the special experiences of women now be the of woman’s experience as a source for interpreting “starting point” for new ethical reflections. moral value.” Their strategy has been to give “priority” Jesuit Brian Linnane agrees with Farley and calls it to woman’s experience, with the “underlying assump- a “scandal” that the Church will not “dialogue” with tion” that this experience is “revelatory of the divine.”1 Catholic feminists on matters like abortion, for besides Sister Margaret Farley has led the way in claiming that being “particularly attentive to the role of experience,” “women’s lived experience—that is, knowledge gained these feminists are correct, he thinks, when they call from living as women—provides a perspective upon the Church’s teachings “experience-laden,” rather than human reality which is itself a source of moral truth.” universal. For Linnane and Farley, Catholic morality By this rule, Farley has turned woman’s experience into is a masculine construct limited to the cultural plane.

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This is why Linnane can praise Farley for creating an or baby. Although she said that both sides had “an un- alternative sexual ethic without the Church’s emphasis conditional claim” on “conscience,” she found “ambi- on “abstinence.”5 guity” only on one side—regarding the nature of the Margaret Farley blazed the trail for many other “fetus.” Then she ended with a wild utopian flourish, Catholic feminists, such as Jean Molesky-Poz, a former advising Catholic pro-lifers to change the “centuries- Franciscan nun who urges women to trust their “ex- laden structures of oppression” that allegedly made periences” rather than the Church and to “begin with abortion necessary.3 the local narrative . . . as a challenge to hegemonic Soon after, in 1982, the Sisters of Mercy sent a power relations parading as universals.”6 Lisa Sowle letter to all Mercy hospitals recommending that tubal Cahill hails Farley as “a leader in the development of ligations be done. Since it violated the Church’s teach- feminist theology” because she was the first to apply ing against sterilization, this directive was opposed the feminist motto, “the personal is political,” to the by Pope John Paul II, who gave the Mercy sisters an Catholic Church and subject the Vatican to a “critique ultimatum and caused them to withdraw the letter. from the perspective of gender equality.”7 According Margaret Farley justified their “capitulation” on the to Cahill, Farley’s emphasis on the “value of freedom” ground that “material cooperation in evil for the sake aligns her with the transcendental Thomists Karl Rah- of a ‘proportionate good’” is morally permissible. Here ner and Bernard Lonergan, who both “challenged she claimed that obeying the Pope was complicity in traditional theologies that either overemphasized the evil and excused her sisters’ obedience only because it captivity of the human person by sin, or made indi- prevented “greater harm, namely the loss of the insti- vidual conscience unduly subordinate to ecclesiasti- tutions that expressed the Mercy ministry.”4 This con- cal authorities and norms.” Cahill contends that, like tempt for papal authority followed from Farley’s basic Rahner, Farley sees freedom as a “primary concept contention that “women’s experience, if taken seri- to define agency,” and like Lonergan, she is interested ously, would alter the very moral norms that are being in the “internal structure of freedom.”8 She has said brought to bear in particular judgments. Women’s ex- that rules cannot be imposed on women by “juridical perience brings into view a dimension of personhood power,” but that women may be invited to give their which the theological tradition has ignored, distorted, “consent.”9 Yet she herself rarely gives her consent and or falsely characterized in its construal of the norma- for years—Charles Curran notes approvingly—has op- tively human.”5 Thus she made so-called women’s ex- posed “papal teachings on contraception, sterilization, perience the ultimate measure of good and evil in the divorce, homosexuality, and direct abortion.”0 Church. I say so-called because though she pretends to She has even criticized such papal encyclicals as speak for all women, Farley speaks for a radical minor- John Paul II’s Familiaris consortio for not giving “due ity of women, and though she uses the word experience, weight” to women’s experience.1 Farley has erected she means an ideology-driven experience. so-called “women’s experience” into a Trojan Horse Another major confrontation occurred soon after full of armed amazons that can penetrate, she hopes, when the Vatican responded to a New York Times ad- the very gates of Rome. vertisement published on October 7, 1984, and paid According to Mary Henold’s recent history of for by Catholics for a Free Choice (CFFC). The ad the movement, a large number of Catholic feminists consisted of a statement (composed in 1983 by Daniel were fellow-travelers of the Culture of Death from the and Marjorie Maguire and Frances Kissling) entitled, early seventies. They were “oddly silent on the abor- “A Diversity of Opinions Regarding Abortion Ex- tion issue” in 1973, when debate raged across the na- ists among Committed Catholics,” and it was signed tion, but Henold discovered from interviews and their by ninety-seven Catholics, including two priests, two correspondence that even then “a majority” favored brothers, and twenty-six nuns from fourteen commu- abortion-rights.2 In 1974, Farley published a subtle nities. Among the signers was Margaret Farley.6 defense of abortion entitled “Liberation, Abortion and She waited until her presidential address to the Responsibility,” in which she placed the Culture of Catholic Theological Society of America in 2000 to Life and the Culture of Death on the same plane as attack the Vatican’s “overwhelming preoccupation” “different experiences of moral obligation” and pre- with abortion and its attempt “to control internal sented the raging controversy as between the rights of debate.”7 In her speech entitled “The Church in the “mothers or fetuses,” never once using the word child Public Forum: Scandal or Prophetic Witness?” she

20 FCS Quarterly • Fall 2009 called the Church’s defense of the Culture of Life “experience” that triggered an impulsive choice. “scandalous” and asked for an end to the Vatican’s A good example of this can be found in the story “opposition to abortion” until the “the credibility gap of two nuns who never regretted signing the CFFC regarding women and the church” had been closed. New York Times ad in 1984. In 1990 they published She also demanded “a reasonable degree of tolerance No Turning Back, in which each defended her pro- for theological diversity.” Despite Farley’s contumacy abortion stand by citing a personal experience as her toward her spiritual superiors, Sister Anne Patrick calls moment of illumination. For Sister Patricia Hussey her “thoroughly Catholic” and echoes her view that it happened in 1969 when a friend told her she had the Vatican must listen to “the wide range of church aborted a child and wasn’t sorry about it. Sister Pat re- members’ experiences before teaching on controver- flected that Millie could not have been “wrong” in her sial issues.”8 This “wide range” of experiences includes choice because she was “a good and tender-hearted having had abortions and practicing lesbianism, but woman,” so at that instant Catholic teaching “began not repenting from these grave sins. It is tragic to to fall apart” before her eyes, and she decided with- contemplate the effect of such an ideology on edu- out further reflection that abortion was not “a case of cated Catholic women. Once caught in its spider web, right and wrong.” Similarly, Sister Barbara Ferraro in they seem unable to break out of it. Take for example 1971 encountered Anna, a mother who had aborted Janet Kalven of Grailville, born in 1913, received her child and been told in confession not to receive into the Church in 1937, and converted to feminism the Eucharist till she repented, but who now wanted in 1969. Kalven writes, “On the sexuality issues— to receive with her son at his First Communion. Bar- contraception, divorce and remarriage, ordination of bara reflected that Anna was “a good woman,” so even women, mandatory priestly celibacy, homosexuality, if the Church was “rigid” on abortion there was “no abortion—both my studies and my experience led easy answer.” On the spur of the moment, she told me to part company with the current teachings of the Anna to go ahead and receive Communion, assuring Church.”9 As a result Kalven, now in her nineties, sees herself, “I could not believe that the God I was com- Christianity as one “myth” among others and clings ing to know would say anything different.” What god desperately to the ideology of an aging feminist mi- was Barbara “coming to know”? It wasn’t the Most nority. Holy Trinity, because she and Pat had been sitting Since the eighties, Farley and her fellow Catho- in feminist circles discussing works like Mary Daly’s lic feminists have defended the Culture of Death by “After the Death of God the Father.”2 The god they claiming that the Church’s teaching is too narrow for were “coming to know” was Margaret Farley’s idol of them. They are entirely mistaken, since the Church’s “woman’s experience,” now their ultimate source of teaching on sexual morality has the breadth of meta- truth. physics and Natural Law, as well as the heights and Soon the personal became the political. In 1982 depths of Revelation itself, whereas their new sexual and 1983 Pat and Barbara testified in the West Virginia morality stands on the narrow base of postmodern legislature against a parental notification bill.3 Then Western feminism. Yet Farley boldly criticizes the in 1984 they sided with Democrat Geraldine Ferraro Church for the “narrow scope” of her “discourse” when she ran for Vice President, because they were on abortion and asks that the debate be widened to pleased that she supported “freedom of choice” as a encompass the “social and relational context,” “the “matter of conscience.” It was to help her campaign ambiguity of fetal status,” and “the complex and inti- that they signed the CFFC New York Times ad printed mate nature of women’s experience of pregnancy.” She on October 7, 1984. Ferraro claimed that her woman’s hopes that by endlessly complicating the issue of abor- “experience” in the district attorney’s office had led tion, a new moral teaching will emerge.0 Following her “to disagree with the official church,” but she still lockstep behind Farley, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend considered herself a Catholic, and she even invited uses terms like broad for the permissive morality of the other Catholics in Congress to a CFFC breakfast feminists and narrow for the Church’s teaching.1 But where she informed them that the “Catholic position when we look at the stories told by Catholic feminists on abortion” was not “monolithic.”4 Like Ferraro, Pat about how they came to promote abortion-rights, we and Barbara were now unabashedly public as Catho- find that their base is truly narrow, not broad. They usu- lics supporting the Culture of Death: they spoke out ally trace their pro-abortion advocacy back to a single for abortion-rights at a NOW rally in Washington,

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D.C., on March 9, 1986, and, after resigning from their the heart of everything I tried to do.” Note that she religious order in 1988, they helped to found West applied her maxim, each soul is precious, so narrowly Virginia Catholics for Choice and West Virginia Cler- that it excluded all babies in the womb. Townsend gy and Laity for Reproductive Rights.5 This is where ends by advising the Vatican to concede that abortion Farley’s idol of woman’s experience led them, straight is a “deeply complicated and difficult issue” on which to the altar of abortion, the altar of Moloch, to whom “good Catholics” can disagree. Otherwise, she warns, ancient Canaanites sacrificed their babies. Catholic women will ignore the Church’s teaching on Here are two more examples of feminists who abortion as they have on contraception. After all, she have made a single narrow experience their reason for adds with palpable contempt, rules made by “celibate” opposing the Church on sexual ethics.. Sister Laurie men who have not known “the joy of sex” and merely Brink, O.P., who teaches biblical studies at Catholic want to protect their “power” are irrelevant to Catho- Theological Union, tells of a girl named Olive who lic women liberated by “sexual revolutions.”9 came to her some years ago in Jamaica to request Many feminists join Townsend in scoffing at celi- money for an abortion. The two of them went to bate men in the Vatican who lack personal experience the principal, who told Olive to come back with of sex. They might as well scoff at the Virgin Mary and her mother. The girl never returned, and ever since our Lord Jesus Christ. For example, Jane Zeni warns then Brink has felt that she let Olive down. And so, that the “limitations” of a Church authority wielded she has committed herself “to a path because of that “exclusively by celibate males” must be taken into ac- experience, for the sake of Olive and every single count when the issue is abortion or some sexual mat- Olive I meet.” Brink’s disaffection from the Church ter on which they lack “subjective experience.”0 She is profound, but she stays in place hoping that Catho- is echoed by Brian Linnane, S.J., who observes that lic teaching will “change.”6 This is an oft-repeated “the traditional Catholic sexual ethic may be deficient pattern—Catholic feminists retain a position within insofar as it has been formulated largely by celibate, the Church from which they have mentally excom- male religious professionals.”1 Susan Secker remarks municated the Magisterium. As Mary Henold points that feminists want the Church to adjust its concept out, when Catholic feminists say they are committed of the “normatively human” because it was “formed to “the church,” they mean “the people (not the struc- by Western, celibate, highly educated and affluent men tures and hierarchy,” because their “understanding” of on the basis of men’s experience.”2 Thus, the ideo- Catholicism is not “contingent on institutional affili- logically-driven experience of a radical minority of ation.”7 Yet they are glad to have the security, prestige, women is supposed to trump the wisdom of the ages. and power that come from having a role in the insti- Catholic feminists are grandiose enough to imagine tution. that their so-called experience is a battering ram that A second example of building on a narrow ex- can knock down the gates of Rome. perience is Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, who tells Another theme that recurs in Catholic feminist of writing a paper in college in 1974 to justify her writing is the claim that abortion is a very “complex” friend’s abortion: “I undertook the project so I would issue. Kerry Kennedy complains that the Church’s have time to think of her, our friendship, and what teaching is too simple: “the public generally only hears our public policy should be.” Before she wrote that the simple answers to complex questions,”3 while paper, she had already decided that her friend was Patricia Hussey and Barbara Ferraro declare that after a “good person” whose “experience” was a matter attending a Women-Church conference in 1983, they of “conscience” and that the Catholic Church was realized that the “ambiguities” surrounding abortion “adamant, unforgiving, un-nuanced” in its perennial are “infinite.”4 Margaret Farley faults the Church for teaching on abortion.8 So the paper was the rational- its failure to take into account the full “complexity of ization of her emotional leap. In1986, Townsend ran experience,”5 and Charles Curran blames the Vatican for Congress on a platform of abortion-rights, and for not sifting in “great detail” the “complex human when her Catholic identity was questioned by pro- reality before coming to an answer to a complex mor- lifers, she retorted that she was indeed a Catholic: al question.” Curran agrees with Farley that the “hier- “Yes, I disagreed with the Church on abortion rights,” archical magisterium” should not grasp at “certitude” but “The idea that each soul was precious, that every in sexual ethics, but rather embrace “self-doubt” as the person was indispensable in the sight of God, stood at basis for “discernment.”6 In short, feminists can parade

22 FCS Quarterly • Fall 2009 as infallible in their pronouncements, but the pope fectiveness of moralism,” of “pinch-faced virtue,” and when he speaks about morality must wrap himself in of “narrowly construed moral systems.”1 She doesn’t complexity, ambiguity, and doubt. explain, however, what “dangers” follow from Catho- Farley has long taught that women’s experience lic morality. Thus Farley repeatedly depicts Church has an “authoritative function in interpreting bibli- teaching as spiteful and narrow, rather than as lofty cal and theological sources.”7 Little wonder that in and universal. In another work, where she defends the chapter 5 of her recent book, Just Love: a Framework use of condoms in Africa because of the AIDS crisis, for Christian Sexual Ethics, where she discusses the four she once again condemns “taboo morality” and the sources of a new framework for sexual ethics—Scrip- “reiteration of long-standing sexual rules” because ture, Tradition, secular disciplines, and contemporary this perpetuates “fear and shame,” prevents “change” experience—she makes experience the most authori- in “traditional beliefs,” and fails to respond to “present tative source of all. First, she dismisses Scripture as experiences.”2 She never considers that present experi- “spare and often confusing” on sexual ethics, and then ences could be tokens of a licentious age. finds Tradition so “confusing,” that its “practices and In Just Love Farley defends masturbation—which beliefs” will now have to “be challenged” and “re- the General Catechism of the Catholic Church calls placed.” She regards her third source—disciplines like “gravely disordered” (#2352)—as the “great good” of biology, sociology, and history—not usable without “self-pleasuring,” and then defends pornography— “discernment,” yet providing access to “reality,” some- which that Catechism calls a “grave offense” (#2354)— thing she never credits Scripture or Tradition with as not necessarily “harmful” when it does not distort doing.8 In discussing her final source “contemporary “gender relations” or eroticize “sexual violence.”3 She experience,” Farley laments that some sexual activity has an entire chapter in her book justifying homo- has been experienced as “evil” or “deviant” only be- sexual activity on the basis of same-sex “experience.” cause it has been constructed that way by religion and Here we see the spreading tentacles of the Culture of society. But today such constructions can be “over- Death: hardly any form of impurity fails to be legiti- turned,” and “experience” can now “assert an author- mized in Farley’s new sexual ethics for Christians. ity that modifies prior norms that would order it.” Today Catholic feminists quietly await the She gives so much “authority” to feminist experience Church’s capitulation. Mary Henold points out that in this section that it alone can serve as the “measure many of them are ensconced in departments of theol- against which the other sources are tested.”9 Indeed, ogy and in parishes in the roles of “pastoral associates, she contends that so-called women’s experience out- pastoral administrators, theologians, liturgists, directors weighs Scripture, Tradition and secular disciplines of religious education, and seminary instructors,” and combined. She might as well call it a new revelation. in these positions they claim to have the “right” to In her seminal essay on Margaret Farley, Susan Secker “define what it means to be Catholic.”4 An example correctly sums up her view in this way: ethical appeals of a feminist defining Catholic for herself could be that violate a woman’s experience cannot be “legiti- seen in Milwaukee in 1991, when Theresa Delgadillo, mately claimed to have authority, even if such appeals a self-declared Latino lesbian feminist, became part are grounded in Scripture or theological tradition.”0 of a “human barricade” in support of abortion-rights In chapter 6 of Just Love, Farley speaks of “mutual- against Operation Rescue. Delgadillo became angry ity” as a norm for her new sexual ethics, but she notes when she saw “a Latino man wielding a banner of that mutuality differs “in kind and degree” in a one- Our Lady of Guadalupe.” Why? Because, she said, “his night stand, a short fling, or a love with commitment. version of Guadalupe was not mine.”5 In other words, Her new ethical approach does not allow her to say she had the right to claim that Our Lady of Guadal- that sex outside of marriage is sinful. She even refuses upe, in her untainted purity, was on the side of active to say that “hooking up,” which she defines as “sex lesbianism and abortion-rights. Well, why not, if a without any relationship,” is gravely immoral. All her Catholic feminist like Sister Margaret Farley, from her warnings are in the opposite direction—against a re- endowed chair at Yale, has taught for decades, and with turn to what she scorns as “sexual taboo morality.” She impunity, that her ideology of “women’s experience” worries that if teenagers are rebuked for hooking up, outweighs Scripture, Tradition, academic disciplines, they might end up with a sense of “shame and guilt.” and plain common sense? ✠ She says we already know the “dangers” and “inef-

FCS Quarterly • Fall 2009 23 Articles

Anne Gardiner delivered this paper to the Uni- 15 Secker “Human Experience,” 587, paraphrasing Farley’s “Moral Imperatives for the Ordination of Women,” in Women and Catholic versity Faculty for Life in June of 2009. It will be Priesthood: An Expanded Vision, edited Anne Marie Gardiner (New York: published in Life and Learning in 2010. Fr. Joseph Paulist Press, 1976), 42. Koterski, the editor of Life and Learning, has given 16 There were 75 more priests, religious and theologians who signed the ad, but who asked for their names to be withheld because they feared the FCSQ permission to include Prof. Gardiner’s to lose their Church-related jobs. Barbara Ferraro and Patricia Hussey, paper in the Fall issue. with Jan O’Reilly, No Turning Back: Two Nuns Battle with the Vatican over Women’s Right to Choose (New York, London: Poseidon Press, 1990), 220. 17 Presidential Address, Proceedings of the Catholic Theological Society of America 55 (June 2000), 87-101. See her note on it in Margaret A. Farley, ENDNOTES Compassionate Respect: A Feminist Approach to Medical Ethics and Other Questions, Madeleva Lecture in Spirituality (New York and Mahwah, 1 “Introduction,” in Maura A. Ryan and Bryan F. Linnane, S. J., A Just and New Jersey: Paulist Press, 2002), 98. 18 True Love: Feminism at the Frontiers of Theological Ethics: Essays in Honor Ibid., 324-25. 19 of Margaret A. Farley (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame “Feminism and Catholicism,” Reconciling, 40. 20 Press, 2009), 2-6. Secker, “Human Experience,” 583, note 16 21 2 Anne E. Patrick, S.N.J.M., “Framework for Love” Toward a Renewed Failing America’s Faithful: How Today’s Churches Are Mixing God with Understanding of Christian Vocation,” in A Just and True Love, 325. Politics and Losing Their Way (New York, Boston: Warner Books. 2007), 3 Susan L Secker, “Human Experience and Women’s Experience: Re- 20, 130,185. 22 sources for Catholic Ethics,” in Dialogue about Catholic Sexual Teaching, No Turning Back, 67-71, 99-100, 98. 23 in Readings in Moral Theology No. 8, edited by Charles I. Curran and Ibid., 206. 24 Richard A. McCormick, S.J. (New York, Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1993), Ibid., 217-18. 25 590. This article first appeared in The Annual, Society of Christian Eth- Ibid., 261, 325. 26 ics, 1991. Kerry Kennedy, Being Catholic Now: [37] Prominent Americans Talk 5 “The Sexual Abuse Scandal in the Catholic Church: Implications for about Change in the Church and the Quest for Meaning (New York: Crown Sexual Ethics,” Just and True Love, 282, 278, Publishers, 2008), 133-34. 27 6 Jan Molesky-Poz, “The Form that Didn’t Fit: Charting New Maps, Catholic and Feminist, 7. 28 Illuminating New Spaces,” Reconciling Catholicism and Feminism? Personal Failing America’s Faithful, 59. 29 Reflections on Tradition and Change, edited by Sally Barr Ebest and Ron Ibid., 145-46, 62. 30 Ebest (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), 21, “Journey from/to Catholicism,” in Reconciling,196-97. 31 23. “The Sexual Abuse Scandal,” Just and True Love, 282. 32 7 “Feminist Theology and Sexual Ethics, Just and True Love, 20-21. Secker, “Human Experience,” 581. 33 8 Cahill states, on p 44 n16, that Farley defends her view of freedom Kerry Kennedy, “Preface,” Being Catholic Now, xxxi. 34 by citing Rahner’s “The Dignity and Freedom of Man,” Theological No Turning Back, 214. “Women-Church groups” is defined on p. 213 Investigations, vol. 2 (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1966), 235-64; and Loner- as “feminist base communities, small circles of women who share their gan’s Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (New York: Philosophical stories and their faith, help each other to live in solidarity, and try to Library, 1958). She cites them in her “Freedom and Desire,” The Papers create rituals.” 35 of the Hnery Luce III Fellows in Theology, vol. 3, ed. Matthew Zyniewicz Secker, “Human Experience,” 583. She is paraphrasing Farley’s “An (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999), 71n1. Ethic for Same-Sex Relations,” in A Challenge to Love: Gay and Lesbian 9 Anne E. Patrick, S.N.J.M., “Framework for Love,” 323. The Leadership Catholics in the Church, edited Robert Nugent (New York: Crossroad, Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), the national organiza- 1986), 99; and Farley, Personal Commitments, 82. 36 tion of elected leaders of women’s communities, had a convention in “John Paul II’s Understanding of the Church,” Just and True Love, 450. 37 New Orleans in September 1985. There Margaret Farley, as the plenary Secker, “Human Experience,” 588. Secker is paraphrasing Farley’s “An speaker, declared that the “‘authority’ to teach is the power to evoke Ethic for Same-Sex Relations,” 97-98. 38 consent,” not “extrinsic imposition, in the form of juridical power.” Margaret A. Farley, Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics 10 Charles E. Curran, “John Paul II’s Understanding of the Church as (New York, London: Continuum, 2007), 182-89. 39 Teacher of the Truth about Humankind,” in Just and True Love, 430. Just Love, 190-96. 40 11 Secker, “Human Experience,” 584. Secker, “Human Experience,” 587-8. She is drawing this from Farley’s 12 Mary J. Henold, Catholic and Feminist: The Surprising History of the “Feminist Consciousness and Scripture,” in Feminist Interpretation of the American Catholic Feminist Movement (Chapel Hill, N. C.: University of Bible, edited Letty M. Russell (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1985), North Carolina Press, 2008), 88, 132, 220-25. 42-43. 41 13Farley’s article appeared originally in Reflection 71 (May 1974), 9-13, Just love, 233-35, 243. 42 and was reprinted in On Moral Medicine: Theological Perspectives in Medi- Compassionate Respect, 12. 43 cal Ethics, edited Stephen Lammers and Allen Verhey (Grand Rapids, Just Love, 235-40. 44 Michigan: Eerdmans, 1987), 434, 435, 437. Catholic and Feminist, 242-3. 45 14 “Framework for Love” Toward a Renewed Understanding of Chris- Theresa Delgadillo, “Race, Sex, and Spirit: Chicana Negotiations of tian Vocation,” in Just and True Love, 316-17, 328. Catholicism,” in Reconciling, 247

24 FCS Quarterly • Fall 2009 Reflections of Fifty Years of Writing

by James V. Schall, S. J. When I re-read this passage preparing for class one Professor, Department of Government, Georgetown University day, I said to myself: “This too is the Catholic Mind Presented at the “Old Docs” Lecture Series at work.” “Intelligere intelligentibus est esse et vivere,” as I Potomac, Maryland, March 3, 2009 wrote someplace (“For intelligent beings, to under- stand is to be and to live”). The Catholic Mind is the mind that is open to everything but what is not true, and even of that, it knows it in the truth of its untruth. I. “Omne ens est verum” (“Every being is true”) remains he Catholic University of America Press the very spirit of mind as such. Augustine was particu- published in November a collection of larly concerned, not with the fables, but with those twenty-two academic essays of mine under philosophers who came closest to what is found in the somewhat provocative title, The Mind Christianity. TThat Is Catholic: Philosophical and Political Essays. The first Benedict XVI, in his “Regensburg Lecture,” re- of these essays appeared in 1957 and the last in 2008. marked that Christianity, from its beginning, was not Such an occasion is an appropriate one for looking so much concerned with the pagan religions as with back over one’s publications to wonder what they were the philosophers. Anyone concerned with the Catholic in fact about. Looking forward from 1957, one hardly Mind must, I think, begin here, with the why of this suspects what will follow. Looking back from 2009, one initial concern with the philosophers, with the reason wonders if it was not all there from the beginning. Not for Paul’s going to Macedonia rather than elsewhere. a few of the things I have written, or better spoken, The eventual link to the rest of the world would pass have appeared in Vital Speeches. through the minds of men, not their religions, or bet- Regularly, I do classes on Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, ter, religions would have to stand the test of mind, real or Aquinas. At some point, after having read together mind. a particularly moving or insightful passage in any of To this list of classical authors, of course, I would these authors, I turn to the class and say: “Isn’t it simply add Scripture, both testaments. And when revelation remarkable that we, in the year of Our Lord, 2009, can is added to reason as such, nothing alien appears, only read something written some twenty-four hundred, or more mind to our mind. Writing, and reading whatever sixteen hundred, or eight hundred years ago, and still is written, consciously quoting it, as Msgr. Sokolowski find it is the best thing we have read?” I know about teach us, bring us to the very “edge” of things, to a things like translations, deconstruction, cultural relativ- place where we ourselves suspect, in our own souls, ism, and diverse interpretations. Still such classic authors that the famous definition of mind that Aristotle gave usually guide us better than anyone else about the us, that power that is capax omnium, that is capable of things that are important, the things that are. all things, is indeed true, even of ourselves. This inner We have been reading the City of God in class. I coherence is the source both of our contentment and came to the following passage in Book Eight (c. 6). In of our abiding restlessness. What is not ourselves is not considering the closeness of Plato to Christianity, Au- to pass unnoticed and un-affirmed. It too is to be con- gustine writes of the Platonist conception of God: “All sciously placed in the order of things, even by ourselves these (finite beings) alike could come into being only who did not create the initial order. through him who simply is. For him existence is not something different from life, as if he could exist with- II. out living; nor is life something other than intelligence, as if he could live without understanding; nor under- ver the years, I have often cited the well- standing something other than happiness, as if he could known passage of Leo Strauss who said understand without being happy. For him, to exist is the that we are lucky if one or two of the same as to live, to understand, to be happy.” Ogreatest minds that ever lived are still

FCS Quarterly • Fall 2009 25 Articles alive while we are alive. We need to add that, even if conversations that we can have while using the writ- they are alive in our time, it will be highly unlikely ten word alone. that we will recognize them as such, even if we come In this matter, I am more a follower of Aquinas, across them. Strauss’s conclusion to this premise was who taught us to state openly, frankly, and, yes, briefly, simply that, if we are going to encounter the minds what we held to be true and why we held it. God is not alive in our time, we have carefully to read them. light, not obscurity. I think this shift of emphasis from When we do this, of course, all time becomes our mystery as yet unexpressed, to truth clearly set forth time. The old refrain of Rudy Vallee is true—“Your in written word and active speech is Christian, though time is my time.” And if we write, our time can be- it has a paradoxical basis in Socrates’ claim that all that come someone else’s time beyond the limited time he knew is what he did not know. Socrates was not, that we are given in this passing world. however, a skeptic. He hated sophists. He was not paid As I think about these things, I am reminded of for what he spoke, yet the young potential philoso- several seminal passages that have made their mark on phers, with some fascination, listened to him. what I do. On reading it again each semester, I repeat Aquinas always made sure, even after he had stated to myself those famous words with which Cicero be- clearly and precisely what is true, that infinitely more gan the third part of his great treatise, De Officiis (“On was left to be said of that which was in fact real and Duties”): “Publius Cornelius Scipio, the first of that beautiful. This abundance in being existed because family to be called Africanus, used to remark that he one source of all finite things was the Creator Him- was never less idle than when he had nothing to do, self, while its other “source” was, as Josef Pieper said, and never less lonely than when he was by himself.” I in the “nothingness” from which all things arose and always have a student stand up in class and read these to which they return when left to themselves alone. penetrating words if for no other reason so that I can Aquinas’s “negative” theology was always at the service hear them again myself. Ultimately, this contemplative of what is. activity is both the source and the end of all practical Over the years, I have kept an up-to-date bibliog- action. raphy of what I have written. In the middle of 2008, Yet, I do not read these lines of Cicero in the this collection of titles of essays, chapters in books, post-Aristotelian sense that man is to withdraw from books, letters to editors, sundry regular columns over a troubled world into his Garden or into himself in the years, book reviews, lectures, and on-line publica- some Epicurean or Stoic sense. Following Augustine’s tions came to one hundred pages. Several years ago, comment, we are most alive when we actually are in with the financial help of some generous friends, I the act of knowing what is. We are most what we are collected copies of all this material. The collection intended to be when we are conversing in our leisure is now housed in the Special Collections Section of about what is true, preferably, as Leon Kass said, in Georgetown University’s Lauinger Library. In the end, his marvelous book, The Hungry Soul: Eating and the all writing is simply “thrown” out there. No author Perfection of Our Nature, while dining together. Truth ever knows whether what he says will be read or by exists primarily in conversation. I believe it was Ci- whom. That itself is something of an adventure, the cero, in his Old Age treatise, who said that the Roman wonder if words have responses. word living together and conversing together was The written form of these preserved materi- better than the corresponding Greek word, “drinking als may in fact become exceptional in years to come. together,” though there is something to be said for the Book and print libraries may become mere deposito- Greeks also, as Socrates showed us. ries. Most of the things that I have written in recent Sometimes bemused friends hint that Schall may years have all been first on line, even when later pub- have contracted what is otherwise known as the sup- lished in print form. One wonders about the future posed “Andrew Greeley Syndrome,” that of never of these on-line materials whose continued existence having an unpublished thought. I deny it, of course. depends on their being kept up-to-date on ever new Sometimes I claim to be a follower of Plato who, technology. There is not only a world of things, and though he wrote an incredible amount of wonderful a world of print, but also a word of ethereal words in things, said in the end that he never wrote down the “blip-form” that constantly are spoken by our kind things that he really held. Words are so fleeting. Plato’s and put on-line every day. dialogues are said to be the closest things to living

26 FCS Quarterly • Fall 2009 spelled out many of these themes. III. In the present book, the following chapter from Re- y approach to The Mind That Is Catholic deeming the Time is included: “The Trinity: God Is Not passes through a citation from Freder- Alone.” This is the greatest reach of the original es- ick Wilhelmsen, a passage cited in the say about what the “totality” of society means. The beginning of my book, At the Limits of chapter entitled, “Aristotle on Friendship,” originally MPolitical Philosophy. The passage reads: “Every profes- in the Classical Bulletin, is the direct link between the sor of philosophy who is worth his salt writes his own issue of friendship in God and man, as it was Aristotle text, a text which is his course, whether he publishes it who worried about God being alone. This Aristotelian or not. The text exists in his notes or in his head. If he “worry” is one of the principal links between reason does not ‘write’ this text down in one way or another, and revelation. he is not a professor because he has nothing personal to From my early teaching experiences at George- say about is subject” (Modern Age, Spring, 1972). So that town, I have noticed that the one topic that never ceas- is what The Mind That Is Catholic is about, namely, what es to fascinate twenty year old students is that of friend- is it that Schall personally has had to say on the subject ship. It certainly fascinated me at the same age. Each matter that has most concerned him. semester, as I read the Ethics again with a new class of a This particular book is a selection of what I call hundred students or so, it never fails to move me to see “academic” essays, as opposed to more informal essays. I the “hush” that comes on a class when students, proba- am not sure there is not more truth in “informal” essays, bly for the first time in their lives, formally consider this though the design of academic essays is also on discern- topic that already drives their young souls to distraction. ing precisely “the truth of the matter.” I must confess But why this issue has been of particular import that my favorite form of writing, which does not mean to me is that it completes an earlier concern that arose that I dislike the others, is the short essay. My books, in political philosophy, namely, the reason why poli- Idylls and Rambles, Schall on Chesterton, The Praise of “Sons tics is the highest of the practical sciences but not the of Bitches,” and Another Sort of Learning, are collections highest science as such, to use Aristotle’s terms. I had of short essays. Yet, more sustained arguments are cer- written my doctoral dissertation at Georgetown in tainly essential to the intellectual enterprise. One of the 1960 under Heinrich Rommen. It was entitled, “Im- Psalms says that we are given “seventy years, eighty if mortality and the Foundations of Political Philosophy,” we are strong.” I suppose that Schall could conclude, on a revised version was published by Louisiana State that basis alone, among “Old Docs,” that he has been University Press under the title Reason, Revelation, “strong.” Ex esse sequitur posse (“From ‘to be’ ‘can be’ and the Foundations of Political Philosophy, in 1987. In follows”). the meantime, I had been ordained and had taught in So it seemed worthwhile to look back on what Rome for a number of years. I have written and “select” several essays that seemed The issue in my mind in the thesis was that of most to state the essence of what I have been seek- the effect of the immortality of the soul, the Socratic ing to say, in one form or another, all my life. I read principle, on our understanding of political things. somewhere that seldom do thinkers have more than Namely, polities and other “societies” were not “be- a few seminal ideas to which they keep coming back ings,” not “substances,” to use Aristotle’s term. I had in all their works. I have, much to my surprise, found published an essay in the Italian journal, Divas Thomas, this view to be true. One does know more when he is in 1980, entitled, “The Reality of Society in St. Thom- older, but he still remembers the intensity and astonish- as.” The point of this essay, as my early mentor, Clif- ment of the first truths he encountered as true. ford Kossel, S. J., had shown, was in the category of In this collection, I included an essay that I had origi- “relation,” not substance. Human beings, not polities, nally published in 1957 in The Thomist, an essay that I were in the category of substance. Hence only human had substantially written in 1955, entitled “The Totality beings were the proper subject of happiness and of of Society: From Justice to Friendship.” On rereading reaching the object that defined it and to which we this early essay, I realized that almost everything I have tended in our every act. thought about since found its seeds in this original es- say. My first book, Redeeming the Time (1968), I think,

FCS Quarterly • Fall 2009 27 Articles

that there was an indirect link between reason and rev- IV. elation that, in my view, bypasses the Straussian prob- y the time I came to do the Louisiana State lem and, at the same time, prevented reason from itself Press book, I had encountered Strauss and claiming a divine power, such that, by itself, it could knew the things of God directly. If it could do this, the Voegelin and the issues of modernity with human reason already would be divine. its relation to the classical authors. In the This meant, as I saw it, that certain truths found in BSpring of 1975, I had written an essay in Modern Age en- revelation, when spelled out, did address themselves to titled “On the Teaching of Ancient and Medieval Politi- reason, when spelled out. As I like to say, faith is direct- cal Theory.” At that time, I was curious about the almost ed to reason and reason seeks answers to what it knows deliberate failure of most political science courses to that it does not know. Thus, when reason is most think- take the Middle Ages and Christianity into account as ing what it can know, that is, if it is true to its vocation central to the very meaning of political philosophy in to be open to all things, it cannot avoid being open to particular. all “answers” to its legitimate questions no matter what I came to realize that there was a reason for this their source. Much modern rationalism, under the guise lack of attention that was not just accidental. Strauss of method, wants to limit reason to what is now called had made his famous distinction between Jerusalem and “scientific” reasoning. This step narrows the meaning Athens in a way that left out Rome. This combination of reason and excludes large portions of reality that of a modernity without a medieval past and a critique the method cannot touch because it limits itself to the of modernity that bypassed what was between ancient measurable in terms of quantity. If God and the soul are thought and modernity was the direct purpose of the not “quantities,” this method cannot deal with them. Louisiana State book. Basically, the issue was whether But now it is clear that philosophy cannot but be revelation itself was addressed to reason in such a way struck that whatever else it is, revelation does have in- that reason could not be itself without considering how telligible answers to certain of philosophy’s own unan- it was addressed. swered questions as asked. It may or may not want to The key to my thinking was provided by Ralph accept them, but it cannot be denied that the “answer” McInerny’s book on the Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. to the question of whether God is lonely, as Aristotle Strauss had implied that reason and revelation stood in- implied, lies in the full meaning of the doctrine of the capable of eliminating each other. One had to be either Trinity, “God is not alone.” That is to say, contained a rabbi or a philosopher. Strauss himself, in Persecution within revelation is a feasible answer to a problem that and the Art of Writing, in a passage that also prophetically, arose in philosophy. Whatever one thinks of it, it is an as we see it now, includes Islam, had noted the centrali- answer to the question as asked. This coherence, I think, ty of doctrine, and hence, philosophy, in precisely Cath- is more than accidental. olic seminary education. Catholicism is founded on the Likewise, in the case of our friends, the object of principle of Aquinas that reason and revelation come friendship is the good of the other qua other. We do from the same source and that they are not and cannot not want them to be otherwise than they are, “gods,” be contradictory to each other. It is not sufficient to say for instance, as Aristotle says. The only real answer to that they cannot refute each other. The issue is whether the issue of the lastingness of friendship as posed in they are addressed to each other. experience is the resurrection of the body, an issue that McInerny, in speaking to this issue, had noted that I will conclude with from another angle. Most of these the texts of revelation, while containing things that, reflections were written before I encountered Msgr. though they were not “against” reason, could not be Sokolowski, about whose insightful book, Christian proved by unaided human reason. The principle teach- Faith & Human Understanding, I have devoted a chapter ings that could not be “proved” by reason were, the in The Mind That Is Catholic. Trinity, the internal life of the Godhead, and the Incar- But, as a long-time reader of Chesterton, I have nation. often been struck, as he was, by the “logic” of her- However, Scripture, for its part, also contained esies. One chapter in the Mind That Is Catholic is called things that could be reached by reason, such as the exis- “Chesterton: The ‘Real’ Heretic.” His heresy was, in tence of God and the validity of a moral life, things also fact, “orthodoxy,” which made him the most counter- found in Scripture. What this coincidence implied was cultural figure in the modern world. Chesterton tells us

28 FCS Quarterly • Fall 2009 that he owes his conversion, not to reading the Chris- ing, scientific ruling of children were already evident, tians authors, whom he avoided, but to reading to the as they were in Chesterton’s 1922 book, Eugenics and heretics. And when he did this, he discoved that they Other Evils and Huxley’s Brave New World. These were contradicted themselves and kept coming back to the proposed as means to make men perfect, by their own fact that their real enemy was, in fact, Christianity as science. such. He concluded that anything that was rejected for All of this was to be the background of Benedict the exact opposite reasons must be pretty close to the XVI’s great Encyclical, Spe Salvi. I bring Benedict up center, to the truth of things. here both because I have now written a good deal Sokolowski’s essay on the Eucharist, in his Christian about him and because he has understood the modern Faith & Human Understanding, traces the valiant efforts mind as itself precisely an eschatological politics, an of philosophers and theologians to deny the real mean- effort to solve the four last things—death, heaven, hell, ing of the Incarnation and in the Eucharist. This strenu- purgatory—by human means. Voegelin had character- ous effort of the human mind to deny, not the truth ized the modern world as an effort to “immanentize of God’s existence, but that of the Incarnation of the the eschaton.” That is, it sought solutions to man’s prob- Son, has been an indirect proof to me of the validity of lems in means other than those of virtue and faith pro- revelation itself as addressed to reason. The Incarnation posed by reason and revelation. and the resurrection of the body, those two “foolish” Behind the modern mind is a driving effort to Christian doctrines, bring us back to the normalcy of make men happy in this world and, therefore, an im- the world in which we carry out our lives. plicit denial of transcendence. David Walsh, in his new What I mean by this normalcy is that we must book, The Modern Philosophical Revolution, has argued take away from politics certain temptations to become that modern philosophy is really at bottom a search a metaphysics itself. I learned this mostly from Charles for being, a search whose dynamism is the rejection of N. R. McCoy, himself one of the great minds in this ideological solutions in this world, a practical thing. field. The reverse side of this issue is that what is at stake In 1976, I wrote an essay in the Scottish Journal of in the study of the relation of reason and revelation is Theology, entitled “Apocalypse as a Secular Enterprise.” the allowing of politics to be politics and not, to recall The Apocalypse, of course, is about the last things and Ronald Knox’s phrase, some “enthusiastic,” some move- how to achieve them. It had been clear to me that ment to solve all the world’s problems by human means. politics had become something more than politics. The The very heart of such a movement is what Strauss reading of Aristotle’s Politics does not presuppose mod- himself called “the modern project,” the self-redemp- ern science to understand what is going on in the pub- tion of man by man. lic order. But to understand modern studies in politics, to understand politics as claims to achieve man’s happiness V. in this world, does require that theology understand what Augustine called superbia. The great crimes do not am something of a late-comer to Plato. The best come from brutal tyrants but from sophisticated think- essay in The Mind That Is Catholic is probably the ers, philosopher-politicians, trying to solve ultimate is- one entitled “The Death of Plato,” which was pub- sues within the confines of this world. Men will be like lished in the American Scholar in 1996. McCoy was, gods, defining good and evil, passing beyond good and Iwith good reason, harsh on Plato. Aristotle’s criticisms evil, to use Nietzsche’s famous phrase. are still normative. It can well be argued that much of The defense of Plato does pass through Augustine. the disorder in the modern world has been spurred on The Republic and the City of God are, in a sense, the by efforts to establish the Kingdom of God on earth same book. In At the Limits of Political Philosophy, as in by our own powers, usually political, scientific, or eco- my earlier Politics of Heaven and Hell, there is a chapter nomic powers. This can be an interpretation of the fifth on “The Death of Socrates and the Death of Christ.” book of the Republic, adapted to our times. Here is the question of why the best man is killed in In 1971, I published a book entitled Human Dignity & the best existing city, and whether it will always be so? Human Numbers. Already at that time, it was clear to Behind these questions, lies the proper location of the me that the “genetic side” of the fifth book of the Re- happiness of man. Is it in this world? The chapter in The public was becoming evident. Cloning, selective breed- Mind That Is Catholic on “Transcendence and Political

FCS Quarterly • Fall 2009 29 Articles

Philosophy” deals with this issue. mercy and justice. God does not have to create the Politics is the public life of mortals while they world, but once He does, the orders of creation within are mortal. It does not seek to make them immortal, it follow their own natures and logic. Man is promised though it knows enough about Socrates last speech to eternal life as his final happiness. Nothing less will do. know that the question of immortality is a legitimate All the efforts to locate this happiness in this world fail. one. Ultimately, the defense of politics involves a clear This is what modern times are about. Indeed, these understanding that man’s ultimate destiny is not in this efforts uncannily produce something ever worse, the world. The purpose of politics is that there might be worst probably being the scientific proposals now more something beyond politics. And this is why the under- and more coming into vogue in which the whole of standing of the individual’s transcendent destiny, death, human corporal nature is being “refashioned.” immortality, and resurrection, are so fundamental. My The “resurrection of the body,” as I have said, seems book, The Order of Things, was designed to put these is- to be one of the “reasons” addressed to human reason sues in place. by revelation. States are not substances. Their “immor- tality” presupposes the passing of the individuals within them. This means they die. The mortals who compose VI. actual polities do die. What has driven modern thinkers to distraction is the effort to refashion man by political, wish to conclude with a remark of Benedict XVI scientific, or economic means so that we would get rid that is pertinent to what I have been arguing. I did of all of his evils without the necessity of his personal a short book on The Regensburg Lecture (2007). It participation. Yet, we know terrible evils do occur that is clear from that book, I think, that what goes on are not punished in this world. They are often, the Iin the modern political mind, including the mind of worst ones, committed by political figures, through laws Islam, is a reflection to our intellectual understanding they enact for our “improvement.” of ourselves. I have long been enamored with the ques- In this context, Benedict makes the following state- tion of Aquinas in the Summa about whether the world ment that “justice” is the best argument for the resur- was made in justice or mercy (I, 21, 4). Of course, it was rection of the body. He tells us that he finds this state- made in mercy, not justice. I have long called justice ment in the Marxist philosopher Theodor Adorno. He “The Most Terrible Virtue” (Markets & Morals, 2004). has just cited the Creed that Christ will come to “judge Justice as such is not, like friendship, interested in the the living and the dead.” Benedict maintains that nei- person in the relation, only that the relation itself be ther the world nor our own lives is complete unless fair. this judgment is pronounced. This goes back to Plato’s The polity was established that justice could be the concern that the world is not made in justice. And the foundation of a common good. As I have often argued, city in speech, though vital, is not sufficient. It is only the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, a Greek if there is an actually resurrection of the body of those doctrine, is not complete. Aristotle himself indicates who did good or evil that ultimate justice can exist in that human happiness includes all of what he is, the the universe. whole, body and soul. Aristotle, if you will, was a tacit Thus, I conclude these reflections on The Mind incarnationalist. There is a chapter in At the Limits of Po- That Is Catholic by saying that this is exactly as we litical Philosophy on the relation of hell to political phi- should expect. If our minds have really taken our ques- losophy. This is an issue that is already present in book tions to their ultimate principle, if we are open to what ten of the Republic, again indicating a curious relation of revelation addresses to reason, we will see that things reason and revelation. It has always seemed to me that if cohere. The problem is not “faith against reason,” or we deny the existence of hell, we trivialize human life. “reason against revelation.” The problem is that they do If there is no accounting for evils or rewards for good cohere. The mystery of evil is not that there is nothing done through our free agency, what difference does it to see, including the relation of all things to their end, make how we live? The defense of hell, in this sense, is but that, as one of the chapters in the book argues, that the defense of human freedom and worth. we can choose not to see. But since we can also choose In his encyclical on hope, Benedict makes a re- to see, we realize that nothing is complete if it does not markable observation which, in my mind, serves to include this freedom with which we are endowed from encourage us to take a second look at the relation of the beginning. ✠

30 FCS Quarterly • Fall 2009 A Catholic Factor in an Inter-Orthodox Controversy

by Rev. Msgr. Daniel S. Hamilton, Ph.D. action as invalid. Thus to this day the OCA does not re- Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church, Lindenhurst, NY ceive invitations to pan-Orthodox consultations called by Constantinople. The Phanar (Constantinople) speaks fter the ninth session (2006, Belgrade) and of fourteen autocephalous churches; Moscow speaks of during the tenth session (2007, Ravenna) fifteen—including, of course, the OCA. of the Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue between the Catho- Alic Church and the Orthodox Churches, the head of the Moscow Patriarchate’s delegation, Bishop Hilarion Canon 28 Alfeyev, raised the sensitive and divisive issue (among onstantinople, in justifying its primacy in some Orthodox) of the authority exercised by the Ecu- the diaspora, relies principally on Canon menical Patriarch of Constantinople within the Ortho- 28 of the general or ecumenical Council 1 dox Communion of Churches. of Chalcedon, held in 451 A.D. (The word Cecumenical signifies the territory of the old Roman Diaspora Empire.) This canon passed at the very end of that Council, with less than half of the original bishops still he controversy centers on an alleged unjusti- in attendance, confirmed the precedence of Constan- fied exercise of a universal or quasi-universal tinople “after Rome”—first granted by the Council jurisdiction by the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople, 381, an earlier ecumenical council - over Orthodox Churches particularly in because that city had become the new imperial capital; Tthe so-called diaspora, that is, in territories outside the and, further—this is important—Chalcedon granted to canonical boundaries of their mother Churches. For the Archbishop of Constantinople the right to ordain example, Orthodox Churches in Western Europe, the the metropolitans of the civil dioceses (large imperial Americas and Eastern Europe, regardless of their ethnic regions) of Thrace, Asia Minor and Pontus and to have origin from a particular church in Eastern Europe or oversight of the churches of the “barbarians” in those the Middle East, would come under the jurisdiction of lands. Constantinople today interprets this canon as Constantinople, which alone would have authority to giving it authority over Orthodox in all lands not part grant them autonomy (self-governance) or autocephaly of the other Eastern patriarchal territories (Alexandria, (complete independence). 2 Antioch and Jerusalem) or of the other autocephalous Other Orthodox local Churches, such as the Rus- local Churches. Some Orthodox local Churches, mainly sian, dispute this and other claims of Constantinople Slavic, dispute this interpretation.5 that turn it into, they maintain, a kind of Eastern pa- Bishop Paschasinus of Lilybaeum, Bishop Lucen- pacy.3 The most critical issue at present concerns the tius of Ascoli and the priest Boniface, legates of the diaspora, especially in the Americas.4 Several Orthodox Bishop of Rome, Pope Leo I (the Great), at Chalce- jurisdictions in the USA-Canada, for example, have don, vigorously opposed passage of Canon 28 by the for decades urged a united synod of Orthodox bishops Council because they had no instructions from Pope to form one Orthodox Church in America. When the Leo and because the canon violated the order of pre- Moscow Patriarchate granted (1970) autocephaly to cedence (Rome, Alexandria, Antioch) set down by the its daughter church—the former Russian Orthodox- Council of Nicaea in 325. But they failed to influence Greek Catholic Metropolia in America—to form the the vote. Subsequently the Council itself, the East- Orthodox Church in America, Constantinople and ern Emperor, Marcian, at Constantinople and Arch- some other local Orthodox Churches rejected this bishop Anatolius of that city wrote letters to Pope

FCS Quarterly • Fall 2009 31 Articles

Leo dutifully and urgently requesting his approval of the Council’s decrees. The Pope did not respond im- Meaning mediately but on March 21, 453 confirmed only the nly the Magisterium can answer the first dogmatic decrees, not the disciplinary ones (includ- question authoritatively. To the second, ing Canon 28). In an earlier letter, May 22, 452, to the a Catholic could hold that this canon, Empress Pulcheria he specifically and categorically though null and void for the Catholic declared null and void (“by the authority Peter, the OChurch, was de facto accepted by the (Eastern) Or- blessed Apostle”) Canon 28 and any other canon that thodox Churches at the time, who simply disregarded 6 derogated from the canons of Nicaea (325). the judgment of Pope Leo I, reasserted the Canon in the Quinisext Synod and, following the separation that began in the 11th century, as Churches no longer Valid? in full communion with the Apostolic See, came to be governed by their own statutes, including Canon 28 of hus Canon 28 never, even subsequently, Chalcedon. They interpret the Canon now according received the approval of the Roman bishop to their own principles, criteria and decision-making which was considered by all - the coun- process; and the Catholic Church will not intrude itself cil itself, the Emperor, and the Archbishop into this process. Tof Constantinople - as necessary for its validity. The Quinisext Synod (692), called by Emperor Justinian II Recently the ecumenical patriarch convened a con- to furnish disciplinary decrees for the 5th and 6th Ecu- ference (Oct.2008) at the Phanar (and has scheduled menical Councils—Constantinople II (553) and III another in the coming months for Cyprus) of heads of (680-81), which had dealt with doctrine and in which the autocephalous churches recognized as such but not only Eastern bishops took part - passed 102 canons, in- any below that rank, thus excluding, for example, the cluding a reassertion of Chalcedon’s Canon 28 (Canon Orthodox Church in America, the two entirely autono- 36). But despite the Emperor’s appeal to Pope Sergius, mous Churches in Estonia (one under Moscow and the the latter and his successors refused to validate the can- other under Constantinople) and the autonomous, self- ons, especially any in conflict with the decisions of the governing Antiochian Archdiocese in the United States. Roman Church. This conference will discuss the issue of the diaspora, Later councils [such as IV Lateran (1215) and and make additional preparations for Orthodoxy’s Great Florence-Ferrara (1439-44)] confirmed in general, the and Holy Council, projected since 1961. Positive results privileges of the Eastern Patriarchs (in 1215 these were from this conference, respecting the diaspora and a Latin Patriarchs) but with no mention of Canon 28. common Orthodox understanding of the Patriarch of One could not reasonably think that they approved in Constantinople’s primacy, will be key factors in insur- their time what Leo I had definitively rejected in 453. ing progress for the dialogue in the Joint International How do these facts affect the inter-Orthodox con- Communion, the next meeting of which is scheduled 7 troversy over the interpretation of Canon 28? This is also for Cyprus in October 2009. ✠ a speculative question, but it should be of interest to Catholic and Orthodox theologians and historians. We ENDNOTES can ask the question: What does the Magisterium of 1. See “Bishop Hilarion Voices his Protest to Cardinal Kasper Against the Catholic Church say about the status of this canon, Procedures at the Orthodox-Catholic Dialogue,” Europaica Bulle- regardless of how its provision regarding the “barbar- tin 106 (Oct.4, 2006) at http://orthodoxeurope.org/page/14/106. ians” is to be interpreted? For the Churches, Eastern or aspx#3, Also Cardinal Kasper’s comment http://zenit.org/article- 1708;?1=english Western, in communion with the Roman See, is the 2. For examples of this controversy over the last several decades, see Hya- canon in force? If not, in what sense or by what crite- cinthe Destiville, Chronique des chrétiens de’l Est depuis la chute du Mur de Ber-lin (1989-2009), III, B, pp.85-91, in Istina,2009, No.1,Janvier-Mars; and ria can it be valid for the Orthodox Churches? Do the Hilarion Alfeyev, Primauté et conciliarité dans la tradition orthodox, Istina, Orthodox authorities just reject the judgment of Pope ibid.,pp.29-36. See also, the comments of Metropolitan Methodios of Leo I in this matter? Apparently so, as Canon 36 of the Boston, in the Orthodox Observer, May-June 2009, Vol.74, No.1249, p.9. 3. See John Meyendorff, “The Council of 381 and the Primacy of Constan- Quinisext Synod would imply. tinople” in Meyendorff, Catholicity and the Church, New York, St. Vladi- mir’s Seminary Press, 1983, Chapter VIII, pp.121-142. Also see note 5.

32 FCS Quarterly • Fall 2009 4. For a candid discussion of Orthodox disunity, especially in North Amer- 6. The relevant portions of these letters are printed in Documents Illustrating ica, by an Orthodox official, see Ajalat, Charles “Regarding Orthodox Papal Authority, A.D. 96-454, ed. By E. Giles, London, SPCK, 1952, pp. Unity,” Part I in The Word, Vol.52, No. 3, March 2008, pp.4-9, and Part II, 517-530. “Orthodox Unity in America,” Vol.52, No.4, April, 2008, pp.4-9. 7. At the October 10-12, 2008 Synaxis or Assembly of the Heads of the 5. Representative, opposed interpretations of Canon 28 are given by Metro- Fourteen Autocephalous Orthodox Churches and an additional fifty politan Philip Saliba of the Antiochian (USA) Christian Self-Governing bishops in Istanbul (Constantinople, the Phanar), Ecumenical Patriarch Archdiocese:”Canon 28 of the 4th Ecumenical Council—Relevant or Bartholomew I who presided at the meeting was at pains to lament Irrelevant Today?”, in The Word, Vol.5. No. 1, Jan.2009, pp.4-9; also in the disputes that had marked the relationship of some of the autocephalous address by Archimandrite Elpidophore Lambryniadis, Les défis lancés a Churches in recent decades and to reject the image of Orthodoxy as a l’orthodoxie en Amerique et le rôle du Partiarcat oecumenique, in Episkepis, federation or confederation of churches rather than a strict unity. He No.698, pp.16-24, but especially pp.22-24. See, also “The Leadership particularly urged the activation of a consultation established in 1993 for of the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Significance of Canon 28 of settling the problem of the relationship of the various daughter churches Chalcedon: A Statement by the Faculty of Holy Cross Greek Orthodox in the diaspora and a moving ahead with plans for the Great and Holy School of Theology,” Brookline, MA, April 30, 2009. (http://holytrinity. Council fist announced fifty years ago. See Orthodox Observer, Nov.2008, onet.net/LinkClick.aspx?link=updates%2FacultyStatementOnLeader Vol.73, No.1244, pp. 1, 4, and Vol. 74, No.1249, p.9. ship.pdf)

Book Reviews

Men and Women: Diversity and Mu- lives” (15-22); Vincent Aucante, “Fa- Part I. The Identity tual Complementarity: Study Seminar therhood” (23-36); Karna Swanson, of Man and Woman: Vatican City, 30-31 January 2004. “The feminist ideologies of today: is it The Present Situation Pontificium Concilium Pro Laicis. possible to speak of a post-feminism?” and Current Trends Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, (37-46); and Manfred Lutz, “Changes 2006, 226 pp. and crises in the relationship between (1) In her thoughtful and thought- man and woman” (47-62). In Part II provoking essay Scaraffia1 points out Reviewed by William E. May, emeritus we find: Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, that in the 1970s for the first time Michael J.McGivney Professor at the Pon- “Activities of the Holy See: Contribu- feminists openly proclaimed the right tifical John Paul II Institute for Studies tions, judgments, prospects” (65-72); to personal self-fulfillment and that on Marriage and Family at The Catholic Marguerite A. Peeters, “Current pro- underlying birth control was only an University of America and Senior Fellow posals and the state of the debate” (73- individual selfish desire. She declares: in Ethics at the Culture of Life Founda- 98). Two are found in Part III: Maria “The linkage between women’s eman- tion. Teresa Garutti Bellenzier, “The identity cipation and the spread of birth con- of women and men according to the trol—the only condition for enabling Introduction teaching of the Church” (101-129); women to liberate themselves from Most Rev. Carlo Caffarra (then Arch- their biological destiny without having his very important and help- bishop of Genoa and now Cardinal to embrace chastity—demonstrates that ful book contains the papers Archbishop of Genoa), “Benchmarks, feminism cannot be considered to be Tgiven at the Seminar noted in problem areas and issues for debate” ( just one more movement among many, the title. After a Preface by Archbishop 131-147). Part IV: Guila Paola di Ni- a mere process of enlarging democracy. Stanislaw Rylko, President of the cola and Attilio Danese, “The horizon Woman’s emancipation presupposes Pontifical Council for the Laity, it is of reciprocity in the family” (151-173); controlling life (which obviously in- divided into 4 parts: I: The Identity of a two-part essay: 1. Maria Eugenia volves controlling death) and therefore Man and Woman (pp. 1-61); II: Dignity, Diaz Pfennich, “Participation and col- forces us to address issues that have Participation, Equality: International laboration in the life of the Church” always been considered as falling into Strategies (pp. 63-98); III: Similarities, (175-180) and 2. Guzman Carriquiry, the realm of religion” (21). Although Differences, and Mutual Relations: The “Participation and collaboration in the having a baby is still considered vital to Church’s Teaching (pp. 99-147); and IV: life of the Church” (181-190); and Fr. civilization, birth control is nonetheless Pastoral Perspectives (pp. 149-204); and Denis Biju-Duval, “The cultural issue: now regarded as the basic condition an Appendix, “Letter to the bishops of proposals for a dialogue” (191-204). for implementing women’s emancipa- the Catholic Church on the Collabora- In this review I summarize the tion and equality with men and an tion of men and women in the Church essays of (1) Scaraffia, (2) Aucante, (3) undisputed achievement of Western and in the World” (pp. 205-226) from Swanson, and (4) Lutz in Part I; (5) culture (21). Today, however, many the Congregation for the Doctrine Archbishop Martin, and (6) Peeters in women are beginning to realize that of the Faith, May 31, 2004 signed by Part II; (7) Garutti Bellenzier and (8) contraceptive birth control is not the Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, President of Archbishop (Cardinal) Caffarra in Part panacea it was proclaimed and are now the Congregation. III, and (9) Father Biju-Duval in Part rediscovering the value of motherhood. Part I contains: Lucetta Scaraffia, IV. They thus contradict “the dogma of “Socio-cultural changes in women’s individual self-fulfillment, of happiness

FCS Quarterly • Fall 2009 33 Book Reviews as the fulfillment of one’s own desires. (iii) Fatherhood and “filiality” de- radical political activism, contraception, Motherhood… teaches us that human velops the idea that “the child does abortion, the right to choose to be a beings are not called merely to achieve not cling to its father as immediately lesbian etc. (38-39). the gratification of personal desires but as it does to its mother…So long as A feminism of Marxist variety, to reach out to what is new, to accept the child is safe within its mother, the championed by Shulamith Firestone the unexpected, and to be repaid in father remains something of an out- and others, more revolutionary in ways that cannot even be imagined,” sider, which does not mean that he demanding changes in the economic and thus the time has come to think must be absent, or that he will remain a area but, like that espoused by NOW, of why the Church condemns birth stranger to his child after birth. For the Friedan, Greer et al., opposes any “pa- control (22). fatherhood which then unites the child triarchal” system and denounces mar- to its father remains intimately linked riage as a form of slavery (39). (2) Aucante’s essay begins by citing to motherhood, while not confusing After describing variants of these Tony Anatrela who declared: “May them…One can…talk of ‘maternal liberal and radical feminisms Swanson 1968 marked the death of the father,” fatherhood,’ that is,, fatherhood inti- takes up post-modern feminism and post- a tendency that has become more mately linked to motherhood” (31). feminism. The first has taken root in complex with the new reproductive Fatherhood is inseparable from a deep academia and understands “masculinity technologies. Indeed “one can well and true love that requires him to wait and femininity to be cultural categories imagine that it will not be long before again, “entering into a state of ascesis (or social constructions) that are sub- the father’s genetic contribution will which we believe to be one of the ject to interrogation and change.” It is no longer be necessary to produce secrets for an understanding of the role based on some modern philosophies children” (25). Aucante’s2 aim is to of the father in the education of his that reject objective realities that it sees examine fatherhood from a phenom- children, [an ascesis]…accepting a re- as pure social constructs always chang- enological perspective with the aim lationship that is not yet complete, and ing because of new social conditions. of identifying the place of the father keeping a reserve which is not possible “This brand of feminism denies that in fatherhood in order to discover except in loving dialogue with mother the concept of the feminine actually whether the father-child relationship is and child” (31-32). exists” (42-43). or is not a natural disposition (25). He (iv) Fatherhood during infancy Swanson thinks that the liberal, considers fatherhood in (i) generation, develops the idea that the father, as radical feminism of the 60s “sold” the (ii) birth, (iii) “filiality,” and (iv) during representing “otherness,” is born into women then and for most of the bal- infancy. Considering (i) he notes two fatherhood by heeding the call of his ance of the 20th century because it gave specific features of fatherhood. First, child, who first calls on his father to them independence, sexual freedom, the roles of mother and father are such initiate what we can call “paternal fa- divorce, access to higher education and that fatherhood is correlative to moth- therhood.” The father must take in his better paying jobs, “self-fulfillment” on erhood in a paradoxical way since only child by listening to him and exercising their own terms. She thinks that wom- the mother can bear the child within a paternal authority that helps his child en “are now reconsidering what they her body whereas fatherhood can only to mature (33-34). bought…they are paying the price in be considered in terms of the relation- Throughout Aucante is heavily in instability in relationships, more work, ship that unites a man and a woman. debt to Gabriel Marcel’s profound and depression, and frustration,” with the Second, the father awaits his child and beautiful reflections on fatherhood, result that “feminism simply no longer looks forward to it. This gives us “a first developed further by Jean-Luc Marion. sells” (43). key to interpreting fatherhood: once We have thus entered the era of conception has occurred , fatherhood (3) Swanson,3 answering the question “post feminism.” There are the “liber- consists of silently expecting and wait- “What Is Feminism?” begins by citing tarian feminists,” exemplified by such ing for the secret of a life that is devel- the New Oxford Dictionary’s definition writers as Danielle Crittenden (What oping” (27-28). of feminism as simply “the advocacy of Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us) and Wendy Birth (ii) places the child in the woman’s rights or the equality of the Shallit (A Return to Modesty) and orga- arms of its father and from the first sexes,” summing its first two waves. The nizations such as the Susan B. Anthony months a deep and intimate bond de- first, initiated by Olympe de Gauge Foundation, who defend marriage and velops between them little by little But in 1791, blossomed in the18thand 19th traditional feminine roles. And finally, “the father must receive the child… centuries with the suffragist move- there are “Catholic feminists,” who find not only in the sense in which a child ment under Mary Wollstonecraft and the teaching of John Paul in Familiaris is always received…but because he has others. This feminism was accepted Consortio inspiring. Among their lead- to take in a being which is alien to him widely in the US and Europe because ers are Mary Ann Glendon and Helen in so many respects.” While the child it responded to their desire to be ac- Alvare (45-46). is always naturally born of its mother, tive and equal participants in society. it remains a child of a father who is The second, launched in the 1960s by (4) Lutz’s 4 insightful essay begins by unknown. Adoption, Aucante holds, is Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Gloria noting that the man-woman relation- similar in that the adoptive father waits Steinem and such organizations as the ship has been expressed in different in anticipation for the adopted child National Organization for Women, was ways in different cultures and is always (29). much more radical, characterized by undergoing change. Nonetheless, “Bio-

34 FCS Quarterly • Fall 2009 logical differences have been the main the century to the “extremist and sim- and reminiscent of Catholic teaching decisive factors in this relationship: plistic variation of the feminist move- on marriage and the family (59). pregnancy, childbirth, breast-feeding ment; in the name of some ‘unisex He ends with an encomium to the and bringing up the children have di- ideology, it not only rejected unilateral great work of Pope John Paul II on rected the attention of women into the power relations, but went so far as to marriage and the family and the man- family, while such features as greater deny even the ‘natural’ role differences, woman relationship. He showed that physical strength have given men the considered to be ‘biologistic’….Any Catholic teaching leads to true happi- role of ‘representative’ of the family talk about sex differences was taboo” ness (60-61). outside it” (47). We now take it for (52-53). granted that women have the right to A major concern of women then Part II: Dignity, vote, full equality in marriage, access to became unwanted pregnancies, leading Participation, Equality: all occupations--but these rights were to a decisive victory of the new femi- International Strategies acquired only recently (47-48). nism by the legalization of abortion, He then emphasizes that Pope John opening the door to other feminist (5) Archbishop Diarmuid Martin5 reviews Paul II acknowledged these rights, demands. The legalization of abortion “Activities of the Holy See: Contribu- especially in his Letter to Women, no. 6. “is at the root of the modern historical tions, judgments, prospects.” He had “What is provocative in John Paul II’s successes of feminism and is in a sense attended the 4th UN World Confer- statements [in that document] is the what constituted, and still constitutes ence on Women (Beijing 1995) and fact that, firstly, he refutes the hack- the founding myth of the new femi- its Conference on Population and neyed charge that the Catholic Church nist movement” (53-54). [Here I differ Development (Cairo 1994). At both is misogynistic and, secondly, he points from Lutz since I think that contra- the focus was on woman’s education out that feminism varies very widely ception is that founding myth and is and empowerment, and he summarizes and is far more complex than might indeed the “gateway” to abortion and their history and impact. These Con- seem at first sight” (49). other feminist “successes.”] ferences advocated an “ethics” strongly Lutz shows that the domination of The tragedy is that the legislation of influenced by feminism, by US policy men over women was the end-product many countries faces “a serious moral under the Democratic pro-abortion in the nineteenth of both the Calvin- dilemma: should the ultimate freedom regime of Clinton ( which repudiated ism of the Pilgrim Fathers and the for women be the freedom to kill in Reagan’s Mexico City policy of 1984 economic system inaugurated by the the mother’s womb?” the idea that a that denied abortion advocates access industrial revolution in Western cul- person exists in the mother’s womb has to the family planning fund), and by a ture. Access to employment was a male been rejected and euphemistic and false secularized Western Europe that repu- prerogative; a woman’s place was in the linguistic conventions “have been found diated its Christian origins (65-67). A home where she was deemed “only” a to downplay the horrific reality of abor- result of this process was reflected in housewife. Women naturally found this tion.” But, Lutz observes. “The real basis language, especially the English lan- situation unjust and rebelled against of all morality is faith in God,” and his guage, now the common language for it. The situation, Lutz shows, was far authority is no longer recognized (55). international exchange, resulting in a different in the Catholic world, which Lutz had earlier (53) pointed out masculinization of female culture so was more agrarian than industrial and that John Paul II had emphasized that that “empowerment” came to mean where roles of men and women were men bear a major responsibility for not the “enhancement” of women not so rigidly separated as both worked abortion’s legalization by shirking their but rather their acquiring “power and in the fields and both were present in responsibilities (see Letter to Women, no. exercising it”(68). the home. Today even some feminists 5). “Gender” became a flexible term recognize that “the Catholic Church Lutz thinks that many women are whose meaning became arbitrary, al- was the only area where women of now beginning to question radical lowing individuals to adapt their sexual every condition could break out of the feminism and the legalization of abor- identity to their own desires. The Holy patriarchal society” (50-51; in note 4, p. tion. Their views on sex and marriage See vigorously rejected this view, 51 Lutz refers as a source H. Schenk’s are beginning to find Catholic teach- circulating a note to UN members Die feministische Herausforderung). He ing on these issues true because of its affirming that there are only 2 gen- then gives examples of important posi- “holistic view of the human person ders, male and female. Similarly, in the tions women religious held, often out- which links the sex drive, personal Western world the term “family” came side the jurisdiction of local bishops, love, and readiness to accept the gift of to identify as licit various forms, reject- and he quotes St. Teresa of Avila who children” (57). ing the notion that the family rooted said one reason she became a nun was Although the current situation is in marriage is the basic form of the to avoid “being dominated by a stupid “depressing,” there are hopeful signs family. During this time various pow- man” (51). for the future. Lutz refers then to Jurg erful non-governmental organizations, The victorious progress of Calvin- Willy’s book Was Hilt Paare Zusam- many of them violently opposed to the ism and the industrial revolution in the men? (What keeps couples together?) Church exerted tremendous influence. 19th century brought about men’s thirst who sums up his years of experience as Thus the International Planned Parent- for more and more power over women family therapist by developing concepts hood Federation received 95 percent in the 20th and led toward the end of that are in many ways compatible with of its funds from governments pushing

FCS Quarterly • Fall 2009 35 Book Reviews contraception and abortion , aided and ily, mother, father, complementarity” God to resume all things in Christ abetted by such groups as Catholics for etc., and these concepts are presented as through the Holy Spirit, or to decide a Free Choice (69-70). Islamic nations, “global moral norms, admitting of no to become part of a diabolical project on the other hand, opposed these trends possible alternatives…to be imposed on designed to take Christ out of society so popular in secularized Western cul- governments. “These terms are above and creation….A Christian reading of ture and formed, as it were, an alliance all processes of cultural change with- the status of women in the world today with the Holy See (70). As a result of out any real substance,” and all this is a reveals…the inequalities and the situ- this conflict between Western culture work of deconstruction, constructing a ations that need to be changed …But and the Islamic/Vatican position, the “pseudo-reality” (77-78). the Church also knows how to discern 1994 Cairo conference did not use the This is illustrated by the new mean- the work of the Holy Spirit within expressions “birth control” or “popula- ing assigned to “gender,” which in the local traditions and does not reject tion explosion,” with the former be- newly reconstructed world separates everything out of hand, as the agents of coming “family planning” and the latter the unchangeable features of men and radical feminism do. For the latter an- “individual reproductive rights.” Even women from socially constructed roles nihilate not only the religious but also “violence” took on a new meaning, constantly changing with trends, per- the human values which the Church, with pro-abortionists calling the infant sonal preferences etc. This particularly in her evangelizing mission, intends to in an unwilling mother’s womb an “ag- affects motherhood reducing theirs and reawaken and enhance.” gressor” against whom she had the right fathers’ roles to ever-changing func- to kill in self-defense (71). tions; it repudiates reproduction and The Archbishop ends by saying: “Our makes male-female roles interchange- Part III: Similarities, challenge is to discern the new concepts able (79-80), viewing monotheistic Differences and Mutual that are being put forward today, and religions as hostile to women and mar- Relations: The Church’s to voice our dissent without eschewing riage as a form of slavery. Teaching debate, while making sure that we are Peeters makes similar observations capable of shedding light on the essen- regarding the way feminism, which is (7) Garutti Bellenzier7 shows how the tials of the issues under debate….[This] either atheistic or deeply indebted to Church’s teaching on the identity of is essential if we are to make the voice atheistic existentialism, equates “equal- women and men has developed. She of the Church heard in a pluralistic and ity” with the quest for giving women considers their identity in God’s plan secularized world” (72). equal “power” with men, and under- for creation, the “traditional interpreta- (6) Peeters’s 6 “Current proposals and the standing “empowerment” not as service tion,” “John Paul II’s catechesis,” and state of the debate” begins by tracing but as giving women control over their “the current teaching.” All these inter- quickly the development of feminism own lives and those of others (82-85). pretations are rooted in the “creation from Margaret Sanger and Simone She (85-97) sketches the main devel- narratives” of chapters 1-3 of Genesis de Beauvoir to the present. At first a opments in the tremendous influence (chs. 1 and 2 different accounts of the Western phenomenon, it quickly be- feminism has exerted over the policies creation of man and woman; chapter 3 came worldwide aided by UN Confer- of the United Nations and its mem- on their “fall”). All the “traditional in- ences, the enlargement of the Euro- ber states—by 2000 one hundred and terpretations” until Augustine also were pean Union, and organizations such ninety-one governments had adopted based on Paul’s interpretation of them. as International Planned Parenthood. the “Millenium Declaration” proposed Discussing the “traditional interpre- Peeters believes that the movement has at a summit meeting at that time. This tation” (103-106). Garutti-Bellenzier already achieved its objectives, even in proposed 8 goals, among them “gen- points out that the second account of Africa. Among those objectives are to der equality and the empowerment of creation (Gen: 2.7, 15-24) influenced deconstruct the structure of the human women,” a goal including contracep- the formation of the theological an- person, making the raison d’etre of life tion/abortion as necessary and promot- thropology in the Church’s teaching. In the “maximum prosperity and quality of ed by numerous UN agencies--whose 1 Cor (11.7-10) Paul “explicitly states life in a culture of tolerance” (73-76). Her power increased greatly during the that man is made in the image and for aim is to “heighten an awareness of the Clinton administration--and by Kofi the glory of God, while the woman breadth and depth of the global feminist Annan as General Secretary of the UN. is made in the image of man, com- revolution, in its most radical aspects,” This goal also put power into the hands ing from him and being created for and to extract from radicalism what of “experts” (e.g. those of the UN’s him.” While some Fathers granted that “can be used for building up a genu- Division for the Advancement of Wom- woman was made in the image of God, inely human and moral international en) enabling them to execute policies they took this to refer to the rational order” (76). extending to women control over their and spiritual soul, ignoring the sexual She points out that as a result of own lives by modern means—contra- –sexual differentiation was limited to feminism, new language was born (em- ception and abortion among them. the bodily sphere (103). Still the domi- bodied in UN documents) in which In her conclusion (97-98) she writes: nant idea was to deny the theomorphic the main concepts are freedom of “This process of worldwide cultural nature of women, whom they also choice, equality, and the empowerment transformation is not yet over. When regarded as obliged to be subservient of women, and absent are terms such as it is, humanity will find itself faced to her husband (cf. Eph 5.22-24; 1 Tim “husband, spouse, love, virginity, fam- with a fundamental choice: to enable 2.11-15). Moreover, the Fathers saw

36 FCS Quarterly • Fall 2009 Eve as the prototype of female moral concept of the image of God.” Because their femininity” and how he appeals weakness and prone to seduction, Adam recognized Eve “as bone of my in Familiaris 24 for an awareness that while Adam was viewed as sinning to bones and flesh of my flesh,” their ho- in marriage there is a mutual “subjec- please her. The Fathers also held man’s mogeneity as persons was emphasized, tion of the spouses out of reverence for superiority over woman in procreation but this included the body and sexual- Christ, and not just that of the wife to as its active agent, affirming that sin ity as integral aspects of their being as the husband” (115-118). was transmitted to offspring through persons. Moreover, the fact that both Our author follows with a section his seed. This patristic tradition was the man and the woman experienced on the presence and roles of women basically that of the Scholastics. Thus shame over their nakedness after the in the Church (118-129). In the early Thomas Aquinas said the only help fall in place of their nakedness without Church there was no problem with woman gives man is to procreate; for shame prior to the fall shows that both, women cooperating with men in many all other needs another man is a bet- the man and the woman, were the ways (hospitality, ministering to the ter helper, although her end, like his, is cause of their fall and alienation from sick, participating in the liturgy and union with God in the beatific vision God and from one another (106-108) spreading the gospel). What is unusual (cf. Summa theologiae, 1, 92,1 and 1, 98, With regard to man’s dominion is that only recently has this been re- 2) ( 104-106). over creation (and woman) and her discovered, “confirming that the Word Garutti Bellenzier notes that this duty to submit to him John Paul II in of God must always be listened to and traditional interpetation was not ex- Mulieris Dignitatem stresses that “both interpreted with the support of the pressed in the explicit declarations of men and women are human beings to ethical and spiritual awareness of any the Magisterium but rather through an equal degree, both are created in given moment in history” (119). Two the practice of the Church as a whole God’s image”…and both are entrusted phenomena in the early Church, in (105-106). She then shows how John with dominion over the earth (Mulieris, particular, are important for woman’s Paul’s Wednesday catecheses on the no. 6.). They are both called to live in identity in the Church: martyrdom and creation narratives in Genesis 1 and a communion of love, mirroring the female monasticism (120-123). 2 (along with ch. 3 and the story of communion of love that is in God, On the question of ministries there man’s fall) (the “theology of the body”) through which the Three Persons love is today a heated debate about the provide a far different interpretation of each other in the mystery of divine life nature of the diaconate exercised by these texts than the “traditional.” even though God is “wholly Other” women in the early Church. However, He stresses the “theological” nature (see Mulieris, nos. 7-8) (109). only recently have some claimed that of the first (chronologically later) ac- She then considers “current teach- women can be validly ordained to the count according to which both man ing,” emphasizing that this teaching, sacramental priesthood; the question and woman were created in the image rooted in Gaudium et spes and John was unthinkable for centuries, in part and likeness of God. He then focuses Paul II, is not an uncritical adjustment because of the “traditional understand- on the second account, which is above to contemporary culture but to “an ing” of woman’s identity previously all subjective (i.e., about subjects or absolute fidelity to Revelation, which described. However, the Magisterium, persons) and psychological. He argues is now more thoroughly understood through documents published by Paul that the solitude of man, a basic an- because the Holy Spirit also reveals VI, John Paul II, and the Congregation thropological problem proceeding from God’s plans through human awareness for the Doctrine of the Faith firmly man’s very nature and the fact that and the events of history. Both man taught that only men can be validly man’s loneliness testifies to his solitude and woman are equally the responsible ordained to the sacramental priesthood, before God, since alone of all material for the fall, and woman is fully man’s offering arguments to show why; the creatures he exists in a personal rela- equal, and both are to be submissive to CDF declared that this teaching was tionship to God himself. “He would one another” (110-111). infallibly proposed by the ordinary emerge from his solitude with the In a section on sexuality and mar- and universal exercise of infallibility by creation of woman.” John Paul II em- riage (112-118) she first uses texts pope and bishops in union with him phasized that “through God’s creative from Gaudium et spes 49, John Paul II’s (123-125). initiative solitary man may emerge from teaching in “theology of the body,” and Garutti Bellenzier ends her long it again in his double unity as male and documents such as the Congregation contribution by calling attention to female…. In this way the meaning of for Education’s Educational Guidance in recent documents (Christifideles laici, man’s original unity, through masculin- Human Love and the Pontifical Council Vatican II’s Decree on the Lay apostolate, ity and femininity, is expressed as an for the Family’s Human Sexuality: Truth etc), showing that in both theory and overcoming of the frontier of solitude and Meaning (112-114) to show how practice women have a necessary role and the discovery of an adequate rela- positively human sexuality is valued to play in participating in the saving tionship to the person and therefore as today as integral to the being of hu- mission of the Church (126-129). an opening and expectation of a com- man persons. She shows how John munion of persons.” It is in this commu- Paul’s teaching in Familiaris consortio (8) Archbishop (now Cardinal) Carlo nion “that man becomes the image of 25-29 relates to the man-woman re- Caffarra’s 8 essay follows (131-147). God.” Thus this second narrative lationship, pointing out his insistence He considers benchmarks, problem could be understood “as a prepara- that “women’s sensitivity for what is areas, and issues for debate. In “bench- tion for understanding the Trinitarian essentially human” is “characteristic of marks” he tries to identify “the main

FCS Quarterly • Fall 2009 37 Book Reviews benchmarks for guidance and criteria planted it. This anthropological disfig- consent “was in lieu of the entire hu- for making judgments within…a very urement makes the woman’s body an man nature” (Summa theologiae, 3,30,1). complex subject area. These can be object to be used and not integral to (139-140). identified by carefully meditating on a person who is to be loved and the Then, citing John Paul II’s Mulieris the history of women within the his- same is true of the man’s body. It also Dignitatem, he says that John Paul has tory of salvation. It is from this history denigrates marriage, deeming cohabita- taught us that the real “symbol of the that we can discover the truth about tion and same-sex unions as equally whole body of the Church, women women—the original truth, the dis- valid or even superior to marriage, and men, is woman” Indeed, he teaches figured truth, the transfigured truth” disparaging motherhood and making that, in the Church, “every human (131). sure that “no unwanted baby ought to being—male and female—is the ‘Bride,’ He thinks that the original truth be born” (135-139). in that he or she accepts the gift of the about women is found principally Citing Gal 4:4: “But when the time love of Christ the Redeemer, and seeks in the second creation account (Gen had fully come, God sent forth his Son, to respond to it with the gift of his or 2.16-25). Caffarra’s reading of the text born of a woman,” Caffarra affirms: her person” (Mulieris Dignitatem, 12 and is similar to that of John Paul II, al- “The original truth about women 25). Caffarra then shows how the gos- though he does not refer to John Paul’s is perfectly fulfilled and transfigured pels demonstrate Christ’s high esteem teaching in text or notes. His point (emphasis added) in Christ. By taking for women. In the eyes of his contem- is that the existence of woman “was flesh, the Word wished to have that poraries Christ “became a promoter of necessary so that the humanity of the unique, fundamental relationship that women’s true dignity and of the vocation human person could attain the fullness every human being has with women, corresponding to this dignity.” Caffarra of being…because only woman could the relationship between the child and then focuses on Jesus’ encounter with make it possible to establish the com- its mother. Each one of us is molded the Samaritan woman; “it was to her munion of persons which would bring by a woman and our humanity comes above all that Jesus revealed his identity man out of his solitude. Woman’s cre- through her. This also applied to the as he had done to no one before, and ation made it possible to establish com- Word: his humanity was molded by she became the first person to proclaim munion between persons.” This truth Mary, because he was procreated by the gospel” (see John 4:18-42). Even can be summed up in two fundamental her in our humanity. She is therefore, more significant was the fact that on statements: “the first is that the woman in every sense, ‘Theotokos,’ the Mother Easter morning Jesus first appeared was a human person equal in dignity to of God.” In fact, Caffarra is convinced to Mary Magdalene who is the real the human person-man. The second is that Mary “alone is capable of mak- symbol of the sinful humanity called that the woman was a different person ing women aware of their femininity to intimacy with the Bridegroom; “it who differed from the man and it is and…is the key totally interpreting it” was in this sinful woman, now called to because of this diversity that the man (139). union with the Lord in glory, that the broke out of his solitude and the com- He prepares the way for giving his most profound truth about woman was munion of persons was formed. …hu- reasons for this conviction as follows. reaffirmed, and this reaffirmation signi- manity was created in two ways, each He summarizes the Patristic and medi- fied humanity….Woman has thus been having equal dignity but differing in eval understanding of the relationship redeemed and transfigured. Redeemed their internal configuration of mascu- between Christ and the Church which from what had disfigured her original linity and femininity.” He then empha- compared this relationship to that truth, transfigured, because He fully sizes the free “gift of self” of the man between Adam and Eve. Their “bodily revealed the very essence of femininity to the woman and of the woman to unity prefigured that unity of two in in Mary his mother” (141-143). This is the man, showing that the biblical text one flesh that defined the salvation the reason why Caffarra is convinced reveals man’s [male and female alike] event: the Church, which is the per- that “Mary alone is capable of mak- vocation is self-giving love. Woman’s fect fulfillment of what was prefigured ing women aware of their femininity mystery is manifested and revealed at the origin of creation: Body and and…is the key totally interpreting it.” through motherhood, cooperating “in Head, Bride and Bridegroom, human- Caffarra then considers problematic a unique way in order to form a new ity made divine, and Christ.” It is no issues. By these he has in mind the dif- human person” (132-135). accident, Caffarra continues, that the ficulties Christian thinking has today The disfigured truth is verified at two Church “is ‘female,’ that ecclesiality is in envisioning woman’s true self-fulfill- levels: the level of “permanent anthro- revealed in the form of femininity… ment. The first issue is methodological. pological” structures and at the level [moreover] our ruin was brought about Christian understanding of woman’s of the historical and institutionalized by cooperation between both Adam true self-fulfillment is not to tailor forms the first disfigurements have and Eve; Christ and Mary cooperate, this understanding to “changed social brought about, particularly damag- albeit in an essentially different way, in conditions,” but rather to judge those ing to female identity. With respect to bringing about our salvation.” Caffarra conditions in light of the truth revealed “permanent anthropological” struc- draws attention to a text of St. Thomas about woman, starting with “the be- tures Caffarra contrasts the authentic Aquinas, who said that when the ginning,” i.e., God’s creation of man, “personalistic” view of the person as a Word became flesh in Mary’s womb male and female, and fully revealed and being in relationship with others and it was like the celebration of marriage transfigured in Christ. The second con- the “individualisic” view that has sup- between humanity and the Word; her cerns the basic anthropological struc-

38 FCS Quarterly • Fall 2009 ture of men, male and female, whose ception, abortion, free sex, same-sex is leading to a return to the Christian bodies are integral to their being as coupling, and the claim that sexual roots of Western culture” (198). In a persons and not, as modern individual- differences are not natural but cultural context of a Church now almost com- ists hold, merely privileged instruments creations is one intellectual component pletely freed of a kind of patriarchy of the “person” who has dominion that the Church was obliged to op- that did not properly grasp the equal over his body and is free to make it pose decisively. But other trends have dignity of women, the influence of a what he wants it to be (143-144). A emerged as well. Some center on the Church that, like Jesus and Paul, highly third problematic, closely linked to the originality and specificity of the female valued women and their unique gifts, second, is woman as mother and the approach to the world, some on the and that values marriage rooted in one who welcomes new human life as difficulty men have in experiencing the free and irrevocable self-giving of a gift from God as opposed to the view themselves as husbands and fathers, man and woman which makes them that motherhood is optional and open and others. When these trends emerge spouses and brings marriage into being, only to the child who is “wanted” here explicitly into the intellectual debates, the Church’s influence and impact on and now to fulfill some desire (144- it is not hard to see how they relate culture will become greater and greater 146). to many of the severe crises culture (198). He concludes with what he calls faces today in education, the break-up In his final pages (199-202) Biju- open issues. The first is to revive the true of couples and families, leading many Duval considers developments in the anthropological structure of the human couples to seek psychological help, etc. psychological sciences and education. person, the second is to recover the (194-195). Regarding the first, he points out that meaning of the human body as integral Biju-Duval next considers “key these sciences have shown that the to this structure, and the third is the dimensions of the pastoral relationship loss of benchmarks for sexual identity significance of procreation (146-147). of the Church to the cultural aspect has increased the psychological suffer- of the [issues noted above].” The first ing of both men and women and that Part IV: Pastoral is the “deconstruction” during the late many men in particular are in a crisis Perspectives 20th century in Western societies lead- of self-identity and many women suffer ing to the claims that sexual identity from the use of contraceptives, abor- (9) Fr. Denis Biju-Duval,9 in offering is purely a social construct constantly tion, etc. There is thus a need to inte- proposals for dialogue on the cultural changing and to the denigration of grate the psychological sciences into a issue, begins by affirming that despite marriage and the family. Since the solid theological and anthropological what the mass media may say, “the emergence of these claims, the Church framework [This, I note, is precisely Church will only have a credible future has had to promote a sound theology the purpose of the Institute for the as a partner in the contemporary cul- of marriage—and of the sacrament of Psychological Sciences in Arlington VA, tural debate when able to discern the Orders--and to elaborate in detail the under the deanship of Gladys Sweeney underlying dynamics [i.e., the aspira- authentic complementarity of man and and sponsored by the Legionaries of tions and values, the sufferings and the woman. This work is unfinished but an Christ] (200). bewilderment creating havoc in the auspicious beginning has been made. With regard to education Biju- world today regarding male and female This crisis “has given the Church an Duval shows that contemporary co-ed- identity and the difference between opportunity to embark on a radical ucation, particularly at the high school them]…and then to join in and be debate regarding the theology of the level, has been disastrous in many ways present” (191). Dialogue is necessary body and to spell out the ethical and for both girls and boys, but in particu- because, as John Paul II observed in spiritual [and anthropological] stakes in lar, boys. He notes that the Church Redemptoris Missio, nos. 52-54, dis- increasing rigorist terms, enabling the has had a rich experience in educating covering what one’s identity is before Church to supercede the materialistic youth and that separate schools for girls God is a slow, gradual, and difficult and dualistic reductive positions [held and boys perform a very positive ser- progress, frequently hampered, but it by many]” (195-197). vice that is helpful to both (201-202). is the Church’s mission to help people A second key dimension is that Concluding, Biju-Duval reiterates understand their authentic identity and globalization and migration are leading in many ways what he said at the be- vocation; she can do so only by bear- to an evolution in the cultural debate. ginning: the Church will be credible in ing witness to this truth in a way that “Western Christian-based societies are the cultural dialogue only if it reflects contemporary men and women can no longer only the places where there what the Christian communities actu- understand. The dialogue can enrich is a caricatured opposition between ally experience. He then notes trends both contemporary culture and the patriarchal clericalism and feminist in recent years showing that this is Church (192). anti-clericalism; we now have to deal the case in some communities, among Biju-Duval points out that a major with an encounter with cultures in them the development of a genuine lay cultural component is the intellectual. which the status and dignity of women spousal spirituality, youth movements This is manifested in debates over the are by no means safeguarded. These and the emergence of more and more man-woman relationship and in many are cultures and religions that admit schools for boys alone and girls alone, ways sets the ethical agenda of many polygyny or female genital mutilation, etc. Much work needs to be done, but societies. Thus the radical feminist and which still keep women subjugated a good start has been made (201-202). movement that ushered in contra- to male dominion. … This situation

FCS Quarterly • Fall 2009 39 Book Reviews

Conclusion American Babylon: Notes of a Chris- book, The Naked Public Square, he tian Exile. Richard John Neuhaus. had written: “On balance and consid- Precisely because the essays in this New York: Basic Books, 2009, 270 ering the alternatives, the influence of volume are so insightful--with many pages, $26.95. the United States is a force for good in providing us with valuable knowledge the world.” (72, emphasis in the origi- of the influence of Calvinism and the Reviewed by D. Q. McInerny, Our Lady nal text) There is no reason to believe industrial revolution on the emergence of Guadalupe Seminary, Denton, Nebraska. he changed his opinion on that matter. of militant feminism in the twentieth His patriotism is of the healthiest kind, century and new trends now making ichard John Neuhaus, who because he views his country from the it more difficult to “sell” the radical died in early January, 2009, broadest possible perspective, sub specie feminist claims to women today--I Rwas a man of many virtues aeternitatis. have offered substantive summaries of and many accomplishments. He was As was the situation with the an- 9 of the 12 essays found in it. All these every bit the public man, and one has cient Israelites in Babylon, so too with essays are of great relevance to the cul- the impression that he was such by today’s Christians: we are in exile. And tural debate of our day on male-female deliberate choice, for though first and yet, also like the ancient Israelites, we identity, and provide sound arguments foremost a man of religion, for his are nonetheless, and in a not unim- in any effort to make Church teaching entire adult life he was dedicated to portant sense, at home. We have here a on male-female complementarity, mar- living out and promoting the proposi- home away from home, as it were, or, riage, and the family credible to people tion that, because religion represents to put it differently, we have a substi- today. the very heart of culture, and because tute and temporary home which is an culture could not be divorced from anticipation of our true and permanent politics, it was the duty of people of one. “So hope is the controlling argu- Endnotes faith to become actively involved ment,” he writes, “and exile in Baby- 1 Scaraffia is Lecturer in contemporary history members of the body politic. A civil lon is the controlling metaphor.” (4) at “La Sapienzia” University in Rome and a society that would separate itself from America is Babylon, then, in the same journalist and writer. the true God, he believed, will soon sense as is every place else on this earth. 2 Vincent Aucante is director of “San Luigi dei enough find itself groveling before He goes on to explain that “the theme Francesi” Cultural Center in Rome and advi- sor to the Embassy of France in Rome. false ones. The name of the organiza- that underlies and weaves together the 3 Karna Swanson is a journalist who helped tion over which he presided for many chapters of this book is that we human establish the website www.mujernueva.org. years, the Institute on Religion and beings were made for community.” (6) dedicated to the investigation of feminism. Public Life, gives clear announcement If Christians are in exile, it is not as in- 4 Manfred Lutz is a psychiatrist and psycho- of the nature of his principal concerns. dividuals, but as a body, an ecclesia. The therapist with a graduate degree in theology, He had an excellent outlet for the very intelligibility of Christian hope author of several books and since 1996 a expression his views in the periodical is to be found in its decidedly other- member of the Pontifical Council for the of which he was the founding editor, worldly orientation, and yet–here we Laity. 5 Archbishop Diarmuid Martin Coadjutor First Things, certainly one of the most have the core of what we might call Archbishop of Dublin, former Secretary of distinguished journals to appear in this Father Neuhaus’s social philosophy– the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, country in recent decades. Born and “other-worldly hope can intensify and Permanent Observer of the Holy See to raised a Lutheran, Richard John Neu- one’s engagement in the responsi- the United Nations Office in Geneva. haus became a convert to Catholicism, bilities for this world.” (14) It is only 6 Marguerite Peeters is a journalist, founder and was subsequently ordained a priest those who have their eyes fixed on the and director of the Institute for International of the Archdiocese of New York. eternal who are able to do full justice Dialogue Dynamics(2II), Brussels, Belgium. American Babylon, Father Neu- to the temporal. It is not that the two, 7 Maria Teresa Garutti Bellenzier is graduate in education and university assistant who haus’s last book, bears the subtitle, the eternal and the temporal, are com- has various local and national responsibilities Notes of a Christian Exile. The volume pletely antithetical to one another; they in Catholic Action and currently heads the may be described as a collection of es- are in fact wonderfully intertwined. By “Progetto Donna” cultural association. says, though it is by no means a dispa- way of emphasizing this point he cites 8 Caffarra is Archbishop (now Cardinal) of Bo- rate one, for all of its eight chapters are the term prolepsis, “an act in which the logna, and was the first President of the Pope nicely woven together by the book’s hoped-for future is already present.” John Paul II Pontifical Institute for Studies twin themes, hope and exile. The title (14) on Marriage and the Family in Rome at the of the book might lead a reader to In the second chapter of the book, Lateran University. 9 Father Biju-Duval is lecturer at the Pontifical expect that he is going to be treated to entitled “Meeting God as an Ameri- Lateran University and dean of the Pontifical something along the lines of a diatribe can,” Father Neuhaus shows that to be, Institute “Redemptor Hominis” at the same against the decadence of contemporary as he is, unabashedly and unapologeti- University. American culture. That is not what he cally devoted to his country, does not would find. Though Father Neuhaus mean that he is uncritical of it. If my is as sensitive as anyone to the severe memory serves me correctly, Ralph shortcomings of the present state Waldo Emerson was once asked why of our society, he is not blind to his he criticized America so, to which he country’s virtues. In his 1984 landmark answered, “Because I love her so.” Both

40 FCS Quarterly • Fall 2009 men had their fingers on the pulse of understanding. “If, however, by progress drama, though each, mysteriously, are their country, but Father Neuhaus was we mean that human beings are free called to play different and apparently by far and away the better diagnosti- agents who are capable of participating permanent roles in it. Mutual respect cian. He was an astute and perspica- in the transcendent purpose that, being between Christians and Jews is a con- cious analyst of the American scene, immanent in history, holds the certain ditio sine qua non, and the dialogue and I think that he deserves to be promise of vindicating all that is true, between the two peoples must be ranked among the keenest students of good, and beautiful, then the answer is ongoing. But, he writes: “We cannot American culture that we have seen certainly yes.” (75) settle into the comfortable interreli- in a long time. In this chapter he gives “Can an Atheist Be a Good Citi- gious politeness of mutual respect for further development to themes he first zen?” is the arresting title of the book’s contradictory positions deemed equally laid out in The Naked Public Square. fourth chapter. It is a bold, straight- true.” (175) Interestingly, in claiming The image borne by that title, he ex- forward question, and he gives it an that, “Christ and his Church do not plains, is intended to convey his deep answer in kind. “In such a nation [as supercede Judaism,” (175) he assumes a concern over “the enforced privatiza- conceived by the likes of Washington, position that many a formidable theo- tion of religion and religiously in- Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, and Lin- logian would regard as very much a formed morality, resulting in the exclu- coln], an atheist can be a citizen, but quaestio disputata. sion of both from the government....” he cannot be a good citizen.” (116) The book’s penultimate chapter is (39) The chief problem we face today We can see the logic of this position, focused on the contemporary politi- in civil society is Erastianism, which in the light of his social philosophy. If, cal scene in the United States. All in is to say, the tendency “in which the as he believes, religion is the heart of all, things do not, in his opinion, go modern state, brooking no competi- culture, and if it is culture that repre- especially well at the moment for the tion from other claims to sovereignty, sents the proper vesture for the public American body politic. Politics is in has attempted to eliminate the ‘bound- square, then the atheist will be, in spite a conflicted state, not only here but ary disputes’ between temporal and of himself, the odd man out, incapable around the globe, and that is explained spiritual authorities.” (35) The naked of being properly integrated into the by the simple fact that “the polis that public square–the venue, as it were, body politic. Conversely, “Those who is the city of man is not a true com- of a polity which has lost touch with adhere to the God of Abraham, Isaac, munity.” (183) He recommends a the transcendent–is, Father Neuhaus Jacob, and Jesus turn out to be the best “disciplined skepticism” (185) towards contends, neither desirable nor possible. citizens.” (117) And they are so “not politics in general; such an attitude, he It is not desirable for obvious reasons. despite the fact that their loyalty to the remarks, is not cynicism, but wisdom. It is not possible because the naked polis is qualified by a higher author- He has pointed and pertinent things public square will not remain naked for ity, but because of it.” (117) On that to say about the controversial field of long. There is no vacuum which cries score one is reminded of something bioethics; he makes a passing reference louder to be filled than that created he wrote in The Naked Public Square: to the purely fictional but endlessly al- by the rejection of the transcendent. “Loyalty to the civitas can be safely luded to entity called “the international Among other things standing by to fill nurtured only if the civitas is not the community”; and he brings telling that vacuum, there is, Father Neuhaus object of highest loyalty.” (75) analysis to bear on the tragic Roe v tellingly observes, the American expe- Father Neuhaus devotes an entire Wade decision of 1973. That decision rience itself, which becomes a substi- chapter, the fifth, to an explication was supposed to have “settled” the issue tute church. And then, relatedly, there is and analysis of the thought of the of abortion, but in fact, as he appositely “democracy’s idolotrous aspirations to philosopher Richard Rorty, a task he notes, “it quickly became the most finality.” (32) The state, as he had ar- found necessary to perform because unsettled question in our public life.” gued in The Naked Public Square, can he regarded the influence of this (198) The final chapter, “Hope and become a de facto religion. man’s thought to be as pervasive as it Hopelessness,” gives special empha- In a chapter devoted to the idea of is deleterious. Rorty has to be dealt sis to one of the main themes of the moral progress, Father Neuhaus, build- with because “contemporaries beyond book. For Father Neuhaus, as indeed it ing upon ideas articulated in Robert numbering, most of whom have never should be for all of us, “to live is to live Nisbet’s History of the Idea of Prog- heard of Richard Rorty, are living their in hope.” (250) As for the alternative, ress, describes how that idea, once the lives in the mode of the liberal ironism one which, it would seem, not a few of darling of Western intellectuals, has he depicted with such rare and chill- our contemporaries have been seduced now been pretty much abandoned by ing candor.” (162) Rorty’s philosophy by, it is simply, and literally, not a vi- them. Are we to give any thought to and Father Neuhaus’s are completely able option. “To believe that we have progress? It all depends on what one at odds with one another. In the fol- no choice,” Father Neuhaus writes, means by the term. The idea of prog- lowing chapter, “Salvation is from the “is to succumb to determinism, and ress which has been unceremoniously Jews,” he surveys the current state of determinism is itself a form of despair.” abandoned by the intellectuals fully affairs apropos of the relation between (217) deserved to be abandoned. But there is Christians and Jews, against the back- American Babylon, Father Neu- another way of understanding progress, ground of the whole sweep of salvation haus’s final book, does signal honor to and we can ask if it is worth com- history. His thesis seems to be that both its author. Its pages bear eloquent wit- mitting ourselves to according to that peoples are involved in a single grand ness to his goodness and wisdom. The

FCS Quarterly • Fall 2009 41 Book Reviews book can serve as a useful guidebook Fascinated by Tom Wolfe’s Epictetus, Spinoza, Descartes, and Pascal drew for the pilgrim soul, for the Christian Irvine set about a systematic study of upon the Stoics. The Stoics were the who knows that he does not have here the 500-year period of Greco-Roman well-loved companions of the Ameri- a lasting city, but who also knows, or at thought that we know as Stoicism. can founders, notably Thomas Jefferson, least should know if he has caught the The result is a splendid little book that John Marshall, and Daniel Webster, not spirit of Father Richard John Neuhaus, could be used to introduce students to to mention John Quincy Adams, who, that so long as he lives in this city he has the Stoics at the upper-division high while on duty abroad, felt ill at ease the weighty duties of a citizen which he school or at the college level. In fact, until his beloved books by Cicero ar- must conscientiously live up to. Irvine must have had that in mind for rived in France. at the end of the book, he provides a With Irvine, one can lament the fact helpful “Stoic Reading Program.” that this period of Western culture— Irvine confesses that his previ- indeed classical learning in general— A Guide to the Good Life; The Ancient ous understanding of Stoicism was has been neglected or displaced in Art of Stoic Joy. Irvine, William B. little more than a kind of dictionary favor of whatever is trendy in the core Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. definition that equated Stoicism with curricula of even our most vener- vii + 314 pp. Cloth, $19.95. indifference in the face of adversity. able institutions of higher learning. In Then by actually reading the Stoics he recommending the pragmatic value Reviewed by Jude P. Dougherty found that, “Rather than being passive of Stoicism, Irvine draws a somewhat The Catholic University of America individuals who were grimly on the enigmatic conclusion; “Practicing Sto- receiving end of the world’s abuse and icism doesn’t take much effort; indeed, n a largely autobiographical “Pref- injustice, the Stoics were fully engaged it takes far less effort than the effort ace” to this work, Irvine, a phi- in life and worked hard to make the one is likely to waste in the absence of Ilosophy professor at a midwestern world a better place.” After review- a philosophy of life.” university, provides an account of how ing the history of Stoicism, Irvine in his fifties he accidentally discovered devotes a large segment of the book for the first time in his academic ca- to “Stoic psychological techniques” reer the Stoics. At no point in his col- for self-mastery, for not only dealing Christ In His Mysteries: A Benedic- lege or university training had anyone with catastrophic events but for facing tine And A Benedict. Blessed Columba lectured about or encouraged him to the trials and tribulations of everyday Marmion read the Stoics. His first encounter life. He follows that with Stoic advice came as a result of reading Tom Wolfe’s on duties, to self and to others, on Reviewed by Marie P. Loehr. novel, A Man in Full, in which the social relations, on “putting up with Marie P. Loehr, an itinerant explicator, fictional character Conrad Hensley, put downs,” and on grief, anger, and writes a monthly column on Scripture and who is unjustly imprisoned, is mistak- the pursuit of fame and the luxurious. doctrinal issues for “Los Pequenos Pepper.” enly sent a book entitled simply The Clearly the book lives up to its title—a Her articles explicating male Orders and Stoics, but whose title page promises, guide to the good life. spousal sacrament have appeared in “The “The complete writings of Epictetus, Among Western philosophies Sto- Way of St. Francis,” “Homiletic and Pastoral Marcus Aurelius, G. Musonius Rufus, icism is easily the most influential Review,” and “The Wanderer.” and Zeno.” As a result of reading the school of thought in spite of its current book, Conrad becomes convinced eclipse. Regarded by many as the lofti- The most efficacious thing, in this as in that with courage he can endure and est and most sublime of philosophies, every matter, the most decisive and trium- overcome the inhuman conditions into it flourished for about 500 years from phant thing, is to look as far as one can and which he has been thrust. Although the time of Zeno of Citium (340-265 habitually, on high. It is to consider God… cast among evil and dangerous men, he B.C.) to the death of the Roman Em- —Marmion, Christ in His Mysteries, p. finds within himself the will and ability peror Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 121-180). 38 to surmount adversity. He discovers in Paul the Apostle is thought to have the teaching of Epictetus a sense of his employed Stoic themes in his letters e have had many theolo- own worth, an awareness that he is not and oral teaching. The Stoic outlook gians of considerable stature just an animal but a being who pos- can be found in Boethius, Ambrose, Win the last half of the twen- sesses within himself a “divine spark.” Tertullian, and many of the early tieth century, and the beginning of the This realization is accompanied by the Church Fathers. During the Middle twenty-first. Fergus Kerr, O.P., presents notion that he is not alone in his strug- Ages, elements of Stoic moral phi- some of the most influential in his gles. There is a higher being –– Zeus losophy were known and used in the survery, Twentieth Century Theologians. –– whose help is sought. With hope formulation of Christian, Jewish, and Some of these, like both Jean Paul II, he seeks the aid of Zeus, not realizing Muslim theories of man and nature and Benedict XVI, are also spiritual that by invoking Zeus he is praying. and of state and society. Thomas Aqui- writers of power and depth. But not all Miraculously, Conrad is liberated from nas is especially indebted to the great- of us are up to either academic theol- jail and subsequently finds a new life, est Stoic of them all, Cicero. In later ogy or mystical spirituality much of looking back on his misfortune as a centuries Francis Bacon, Thomas More, the time. Even if we’re academics, we trial or test of his own mettle. Erasmus, Melanchthon, Montesquieu, have busy schedules that demand atten-

42 FCS Quarterly • Fall 2009 tion, and families or communities who put on his. Does this give it a hint of is a means to strengthen our faith, to engage us. Orthodox flavor, the Eastern mystical reveal Christ’s divinity shining through For those who seek a happy me- tradition and its sometimes repetitive his humanity, to reveal the glory that is dium between the mystical spirituality phrasing and expansiveness? ours when we live in Christ, die in him of Teresa of Avila or John of the Cross No. and rise with him. It is an interior call or even Pierre de Caussade, S.J., vs. the Marmion emphasizes certain themes and beacon for us. For Benedict it is set pablum that too often passes for spiri- in overlapping development, simply in a vivid historical context, its mean- tuality since Vatican II, Blessed Colum- because Christ does so. Each mystery ing is expanded by our knowledge of ba Marmion’s Christ in His Mysteries is develops and illuminates the others in the Judaic background and foundation an excellent choice for reading, medi- slow progression--in historical time, in for it. tation, and spiritual exegesis. Marmion liturgical practice, in personal spiritual It takes place during the Feast of does indeed look up, considers God. growth. In the same way he uses the Tabernacles. It reveals the Word-made- The reality of the Father’s expression in Old Testament to illuminate the New, flesh, who pitches the tent and taber- the Son, and their work in the Spirit, is and the New to explicate the Old. nacle of his flesh among us, and the central to his thought and his pastoral If Marmion is a fine commenta- images of the Tent and tabernacle for concern as abbot and spiritual director. tor and inspiration from the first half the Ark in Sinai develop this context. The most basic theme of this book of the 20th century, Benedict XVI is The cloud from which the Father is the reality that Christ put on our the same for the early part of the 21st speaks and the glory shining forth from humanity, so that we could put on his century. It is worth reading them side within Christ, through his flesh, are the divinity. Marmion stresses throughout by side. Shekinah, the presence of God, who that Christ, who was always in the Marmion is focused on the liturgi- moved over the Tabernacle as pillar “heart’s-embrace of the Father,” wants cal feasts of the Church year as the of cloud by day, pillar of fire by night, to enfold us in his heart’s-embrace, that remembrance of the major mysteries of guiding his people through Sinai to we may be one in him as he and the Christ’s actual life. Thus this book pres- the Promised Land. This is the reality Father are one. ents the major feasts of that life and the that both Marmion and Benedict want Although Marmion was Irish in Church from Advent through Corpus to leave with us. Christ in the Trans- origin, once he discerned his call to Christi. figuration is the true Tabernacle and monastic life, he eventually ended up Benedict approaches the life of Shekinah, guiding his chosen apostles as the abbot of a Benedictine monas- Christ from a somewhat different through the desert of Calvary to the tery in Belgium. His work in writing angle. A considerable theologian and Resurrection and Pentecost. is based on his own practice in prayer, scholar, as well as pope, Benedict A further illumination and enrich- his religious vocation, and his counsels presents a different view of the life of ment in this regard is to read Jean to his monks, and to those who wrote Christ. He is concerned with historical Danielou, S.J.’s explication of the Trans- to him as his work became known in context, doctrinal essence, and a differ- figuration in his seminal work, The Europe and the U.S. ent set of Christ moments--the Ser- Bible and the Liturgy. To read him is to find oneself in mon on the Mount, Cana, and so on. Both Benedict and Danielou are an intense, intimate conversation with Yet his style, similar to Marmion’s in its more likely to cite scholarship contem- this priest who radiates Christ in all his simplicity and lucidity, if more techni- porary to them, Marmion turns to the counsels. His tone is conversational, of- cal in terms of history and doctrine, Fathers and Doctors of the Church to ten lapsing into prayer, much as Teresa presents Christ in his Jesus of Nazareth support his meditations. Where Bene- does in the course of her writing. Thus with equal immediacy and appeal to dict is determined to give us a deeper he draws his reader into prayer as well. the heart as well as the head. and richer doctrinal background, using This is not merely a book for dis- It develops a thought-provoking both Jewish and Christian tradition to cursive reading, straight through. Ar- meditation to read Marmion in con- support his explication, and Danielou ranged according to the life of Christ, junction with Benedict. to develop the symbolical realities that his mysteries are the major feasts and Marmion is concerned with the Christ fulfills in himself, in Scripture liturgies of the Church in the course of spiritual implications of Christ and his and in liturgy, Marmion is entirely the year. Thus the book lends itself to presence among us, his presence in our concerned with the interior life, and reading in order to appreciate a given hearts. Benedict is concerned with this, our personal intimacy with Christ, feast and illuminate its riches at that but his emphasis is more purely doctri- who is so intimate to us in his Person particular festal and ritual moment. nal and theological. He elucidates the and his mysteries. Although Marmion is simple and intellectual implications of Christ’s be- In any case, whoever is seeking an direct in his use of Scripture and his ing and work. Marmion seeks to lead accessible guide to the interior life, and explication of it, we might not grasp its us to open our hearts to Christ, above the richness of Christ—in his Person, depth at first. His style is that of an ear- all. in his mysteries, and in his Eucharistic lier, more leisurely age. It may appear The Benedictine abbot and Bene- presence--Marmion is a sure guide. superficially “pious” in the pejorative dict the pope converge in their portrait Read in conjunction with Benedict, sense. It is not. It is an ongoing medita- of Christ in their discussions of the and Danielou if possible, this is a thor- tion on Christ--his nature, his will, his Transfiguration. oughly enriching way to know God, to putting on our flesh so that we may For Marmion the Transfiguration love him, and to act on that knowledge

FCS Quarterly • Fall 2009 43 Book Reviews and love in service. deftly portrays and probes the conflict self-possession, decides after his acquit- It is appropriate that Marmion’s between an ecclesiology which consid- tal to do a feature story on his work first name, Columba, means “dove,” the ers the Church’s purpose to be essen- with Misericordia in Africa. When icon of the Spirit. tially the alleviation of human suffering she approaches Uriarte about this, she Marmion might well say, as he so and the establishment of social justice immediately comes under his spell and often draws us into his prayer through- in the here and now world of inequal- accepts his offer to come to Africa and out this work: “Most Sacred Heart of ity and travail, by any human means; see first hand what Misericordia, and Jesus, lead us deeper into your heart and a divinely founded Church whose he, are about. From there, the action and your holiness, through your five inherent purpose is to minister Christ’s accelerates and the character interac- wounds, the entrances—and exits—to redemption of fallen eternal souls, by tion intensifies—most gratifyingly for this dovecote where the Spirit nests. supernatural means. The novel is not, the reader. Gradually, it becomes appar- Let us nestle there, under those wings to be sure, a treatise but a moral tale, ent that Uriarte continues his search of truth and love, and take wing from and an excellent one. If a couple of for Sarin, and that he has no compunc- that Presence, to spread the good news useful cliches might here be indulged, tion about manipulating and using of your mysteries to others, in spite of the book is a true page turner, a re- Kate—whose emotional and physical our sins, because of our sins, now and ally good read—but at the same time a affections, and whose judgment as well, forever. Amen.” salient challenge to the Catholic un- he quickly appropriates—to accom- derstanding of the Kingdom of God. plish his goal, the horrific nature of Reference Resources: The story opens with the criminal which remains suspensefully unclear trial of accused terrorist Juan Uriarte in at this point in the narrative. He avers Blessed Columba Marmion, Christ in His London’s Old Baily. Uriarte is a middle to Kate that the effete and soulless old Mysteries, Zacchaeus Press: Bethesda MD, 2008. aged, ex-Jesuit priest, a magnetic and prelates who control the Church to manly, smart and charming veteran of their own benefit perpetrate untold Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth, Doubleday: the El Salvador guerilla wars against suffering by their refusal, for instance, NY, 2007. oppressive injustice waged in the name to allow the use of condoms to retard Jean Danielou, S.J., The Bible and the Liturgy, of a kerygma fused of Marxism and a the global AIDS pandemic while do- University of Notre Dame Press: Notre radically social gospel known as Lib- ing nothing to alleviate its ravaging Dame IN, 1987. eration Theology. Uriarte now works consequences. He projects for Kate the in Africa as a leader in Misericordia vision of a Church free of patriarchal International, a “Catholic” agency tyranny, self interest, and indifference The Death of a Pope. Piers Paul Read, dedicated to the aid and relief of the to the suffering of the human family; San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009, 215 desperately poor suffering from disease, and she embraces ardently that ideal as pp. Cloth/$21.95 oppression, and deprivation in third she accepts utterly his characterization world regions. He is acquitted of the of the institutional Church as inhu- Reviewed by Alfred Hanley charge that he has sought to acquire mane and terminally corrupt. And so recently retired Professor of English and the deadly nerve gas, Sarin, to destroy Kate naively surrenders her very body Department Chair human life on a massive scale because and soul to Uriarte’s noble cause, as St. Charles Borromeo Seminary it could not be proven that he would he has insidiously intended she would, Wynnewood, PA have used the potent poison against even to personal risk. Uriarte’s church, humans had he acquired it. Repudi- however, glibly eschews family values atholic author, Piers Paul ating the trial’s premise that he was and traditional morality, and knows Read—best known for his a Basque separatist-terrorist whose nothing of a personal Savior—of grace, Cdocumentary, Alive: The Story purpose it was to deploy the nerve gas of sacrament, of the mystical, of the of the Andes Survivors, which sold five as a “weapon of mass destruction” in supernatural, of the eternal—but only million copies—has written prolifi- order to force the establishment of an of the temporal, of the “collective,” and cally in various genres including the independent Basque state free of Span- of the militantly expedient; although essay, biography (Alec Guinness), his- ish rule, Juan’s successful if specious he speaks much of “God’s will” for tory, and mostly fiction. His latest and defense is to argue that he had planned the advancement of his social-political fifteenth novel, The Death of a Pope, is to use the toxin in Darfur to scare and utopia. a fast-paced mystery of intrigue and deter Arab-Islamic persecutors of the Every work of fiction is, of course, romance, set against the background Sudanese poor by killing their camels. contrived; but the trick is to make it of the death of Pope John Paul II and (Ironically, the ethnicity of Uriarte is seem authentic, believable This Mr. the election of his successor, Joseph the same as that of the Basque founder Read manages, by and large, to do, cre- Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI. This of the Society of Jesus, St. Ignatius of ating abundantly detailed and credible momentously historical context serves Loyola.) scenarios of British jurisprudence and as more than dramatic backdrop, for An attractive thirty-something espionage, Vatican affairs, and counter- the story deals thematically, pointedly journalist and professed ex-Catholic Church culture; and he convincingly and meaningfully so, with the question covering Uriarte’s trial, Kate Ram- and engagingly depicts various techno- of the Catholic Church’s very function say, taken by what she perceives to be logical and geographical phenomena, and mission. Specifically, the narrative Uriarte’s idealism, courage, and cool for instance, with authoritative knowl-

44 FCS Quarterly • Fall 2009 edge. Aristotle considered a play’s plot oath as an elector/candidate for the metanoia, which is neither adequately as paramount and observed that in the new papacy. demonstrated nor fully justified nar- best dramas of ancient Greece a uni- Monsignor Perez is Cardinal ratively. Compounding the ques- fied and economical action achieved Doornik’s young Secretary, although a tion of Kate’s aptitude as the novel’s a singularly concentrated impact. Al- strict traditionalist, whose orthodoxy heroine is the proposition that she is lowing for the difference between a is most manifest in his rigid adherence less interesting, if far less pernicious, play and a novel, I would suggest that to ecclesiastical form, rule, and accou- than the darkly dynamic Juan Uriarte, there are times when such copious terment, and who is, as is his Cardinal who—unchanging and unregenerate, descriptions of context and process, superior (and paradoxically for similar and therefore no protagonist—is a very as Mr. Read employs with virtuosity, reasons) impelled toward violating the formidable and compelling antagonist somewhat impede the novel’s strong fidelity and trust of his position. and a more powerful presence in the narrative flow, relax its trenchant ten- As any secondary character in any story. sions, and blur its keen focus. But such novel, none of these minor players is Some readers of The Death of a Pope descriptive amplitude characterizes fully drawn; but they all seem more see Uriarte as, if not its protagonist, much of contemporary fiction, let it flat and fabricated than they might be. a positive character understandably be acknowledged, and surely abounds As such, they take on identities a bit driven to dire action, to holy rage, by in such landmark works as Oliver Twist more allegorical than realistic, which, the shameful plight of the downtrod- (which I am presently reading). Might while somewhat incongruent with the den against the perverse indifference such intricate detail serve to gratify the realistic thrust of this fine novel, does of the privileged Church of the “first particular interests of some readers and not essentially compromise either the world”; other readers who may ac- thereby provide a secondary enjoyment story’s narrative or thematic integrity. knowledge his conduct as misguided along the way without necessarily bog- For example, David Kotovski’s sudden- still find Uriarte worthy of admiration. ging down the plot? One man’s mire ly fervent devotion to Kate half way While Mr. Read himself affirms that might be another man’s mead. through the novel, necessary as it might he did not want to create Uriarte as a Other important and interesting be for the advancement of the plot, is pasteboard, one-dimensional character, characters are artfully folded into the inadequately founded and developed a caricatured monster without human narrative: in his few superficial interactions with complexity, and that he did want ob- David Kotovski is a British Security Kate earlier in the story and so seems jectively to represent the evils which Service agent, young but canny and artificial and false when it does emerge outraged Uriarte; neither, I think, did principled, who poses as a journalist so galvanically to motivate his gal- he intend to draw him as an essentially covering Uriarte’s trial, who becomes lant efforts on her behalf. Similarly, Fr. decent figure who might win our acquainted with and then enamored Scott’s mild passivity early in the novel moral or affective sympathies. As Read of Kate, and who then works to save seems not to square credibly with his himself put it: “I certainly want to the ingenuous young lady from the avowed dedication to the Church’s create credible characters and I want to diabolical machinations of Uriarte— Magisterium, although we might en- leave it to the reader to decide which the nature of which he alone, it seems, counter in actual life an ambivalence side they’re on. I don’t think a novel is rightly intuits. of personality as curious. But when a very good novel if they’re [sic] just Fr. Luke Scott, Kate’s Uncle Lolo, Uncle Lolo rather abruptly transforms propaganda for one particular point- is a retired, traditional Catholic priest, toward the novel’s end from an attitude of-view.”2 Read’s objectively balanced positively faithful to the Bishop of of permissive resignation toward his depiction of character, however, does Rome, who loves her as a father, who niece to one of energetic intervention, not imply a moral indifference to their speaks with a kind of respectful re- there is insufficient character construc- actions nor preempt his ideological straint but apparent ineffectuality to tion to make readily believable this disposition toward the good and evil her lost faith. Just as Kotovski, he pur- transition—although, here too, it works he portrays in his fiction, as evidenced sues her to Africa to protect her from thematically. by this comment to his publisher, Igna- Uriarte—and who with Kotovski fig- This issue of character development tius Press : “When I was young I was a ures prominently in the novel’s climax. is more critical with Kate Ramsay. Mr. zealous exponent of Liberation Theol- Cardinal Doornik, Dutch Prefect Read has said, “I’m very fond of my ogy. As I grew older I like to think I for the Congregation for Catholic heroine, Kate, even though she’s fallen grew wiser and came to see how ‘so- Culture (a fabricated Vatican entity), away from the faith and had some cial’ Catholicism, however superficially is a liberal prelate who favors contin- values I wouldn’t share. I’m fond of the appealing in the face of the suffering ued Church dialogue about artificial young heroine.”1 If Kate is the novel’s caused by poverty and injustice, in fact contraception, ordination of women, heroine, its protagonist—and I think falsifies the teaching of the Gospels. homosexual union, papal authority, and she is as the story’s thematic core in- This is particularly true when it con- the like, who thinks the Church needs heres in her, and she is also depicted as dones or even advocates the use of a progressive Pope unlike John Paul II capable of fundamental change—she, violence: as Pope Benedict XVI puts and like himself, who has a skeleton in too, is less convincingly, less roundly it in his encyclical Spe Salvi, ‘Jesus was his closet, and who is thereby coerced drawn and developed than she might not Spartacus, he was not engaged in by Uriarte, whom he uneasily admires, be. This is especially true at the novel’s a fight for political liberation.’ ”3 Like to compromise for a “higher” end his end when she undergoes a kind of Satan in Paradise Lost, Uriarte com-

FCS Quarterly • Fall 2009 45 Book Reviews mands our attention, for he is a forceful Christ mediates His salvation for all of significant for present purposes. For in character of considerable magnitude. humanity, is ultimately of global and a more expressly Catholic novel, while And as with Satan, we might mourn transcendent, not just parochial and the artistic posture need not be at all the corruption by sin of a once lumi- temporal, consequence. Mr. Read in propagandistic, it may—and should— nous soul and his fall from grace; but this excellent novel poignantly raises post an attitude on matters of Faith. we refrain from naming heroic either the question of the Church’s role, Just as the grand old stories, which Milton’s Satan in his refractory delu- masterfully demonstrates its complex are always religious, always enunci- sion that God is an unjust tyrant, or implications, and, I think, forthrightly ate a creed: Virgil extols the divine Uriarte in his perverse delusion that answers it by exposing the moral de- destiny of Augustinian Rome. Dante the Church of Jesus Christ is the ma- pravity, spiritual destitution, and mortal projects the cosmic scheme of God’s lignant cause of man’s ills. We are not barrenness of a monolithic and mili- redemptive plan. Milton justifies the seduced, as were some of the Roman- tant material gospel, while pointing ways of God to man. Hawthorne and tics of old, into confusing rebellious prophetically to the Church’s Divine Dostoyevski testify to the triumph of evil as good. character, mystical domain, and eternal forgiveness and Agape love. And such I read Uriarte as an engagingly destiny . . . all while telling a gripping testament as these and Mr. Read’s complex and plausible but, I must say, story. book give has a more proper and salu- a decidedly detestable character, how- Some leading modern authors who tary claim on the attention of readers, ever actual the terrible conditions he are known as Catholics have shunned Catholic or not, than do the many purports to eliminate. This suggests no the appellation, “Catholic author,” as current novels that scrupulously avoid failure of the novel to frame a believ- has Graham Greene, preferring instead (or distort) representation of religious ably conflicted character; but rather to be regarded as a Catholic who hap- belief while pretending to be religious- it suggests that Uriarte is an apt and pens to write fiction which may hap- ly neutral yet surreptitiously promoting valid representation of an ungodly pen to deal, without bias of course, an irreligious ethos. and possible hypocrisy so possessed of with the Catholic experience. Mr. Mr. Read in The Death of a Pope evil as to distort and debase the holy Read, while avoiding proselytization, advances and unabashedly lights the for nefarious ends. Were this book a does not shy away from being known way for a Catholic fiction that unam- satire—which it could be according to as a Catholic novelist who does write biguously reveals with a master story its ancient usage by Juvenal as an expo- of Catholic ideas and experience—and teller’s skill what supernally matters for sition of the abhorrent without comic from the point of view of a Catholic all the world. May we have more of the intent—Uriarte would work well as a faithful to the Church and its inspired same—from Piers Paul Read and oth- ridiculous grotesque, hideously laugh- magisterial wisdom. ers. able in his twistedness. Novels should be neither homilies Despite what I judge to be its less nor apologetics: the author’s faith, and Endnotes than fully developed characters, The the grace he has received, will become Death of a Pope is none-the-less a re- apparent in his work even if it does not 1 Catholic Spotlight, 25 May 2009, “Transcript of CS#102: Piers Paul Read The Death of a markable and very significant work of have Catholic characters or a Catholic Pope,” available from http://catholicspotlight. fiction. It is written in a bright, urbane, theme. . . . But it is important for the com/293/transcript-of-cs102- piers-paul-read and disciplined style reminiscent of the Catholic writer to demonstrate that he -the-death-of-a-pope/; Internet; accessed 9 consummate prose of the great British is fully human; that he does not flee September 2009. novelists of the early and mid twenti- from evil but confronts it and disarms 2 Ibid. eth century. Evelyn Waugh comes to it in his imagination with the help of 3 Piers Paul Read: The Death of a Pope, un- mind. More importantly, it addresses, or that holy wisdom that comes from dated, “An Interview with Piers Paul Read,” rather dramatizes, a most crucial issue faith in Christ.4 available from http://www.ignatius.com/ death-of-a-pope-book/interview-with-piers- of our time, not just for Catholics but The Death of a Pope, however, does paul-read.htm; Internet; accessed 9 September for humankind. For the nature and have Catholic characters and a Catho- 2009. action of the One, Holy, Catholic, and lic theme, which makes Mr. Read’s 4 Ibid. Apostolic Church, through which Jesus above-stated orientation particularly

46 FCS Quarterly • Fall 2009 Commencement Address

Prepared for delivery The present age is a critical one you will; indeed, it not only beck- at Christendom College, and interesting to live in. The ons but is mandatory if you are to May 16, 2009 civilization characteristic of maintain your identity in the midst Jude P. Dougherty Christendom has not yet disap- of an alien culture. It sometimes Dean Emeritus, School of Philosophy peared, yet another civilization takes uncommon learning to de- The Catholic University of America has begun to take its place. We fend the obvious. In promoting still understand the value of what he called the intellectual life, ou have completed one religious faith. . . . On the other the French Dominican, A. G. Ser- phase of your education hand the shell of Christendom tillanges assured his reader, “You Yand are about to enter an- is broken. The unconquerable don’t have to be a genius to pursue other. The world you are entering mind of the East, the pagan past, a life of the mind; average superior- is not the world I entered at your the industrialist socialist future, ity will do.” A German colleague age. Yours is a far more destabilized confront it with equal authority. cautioned me, “Dougherty, do you world where few of the permanent On the whole life and mind is know what Sertillanges means by things can be taken for granted. saturated with the slow upward ‘average superiority’? That simply Confronted as you are with the filtration of a new spirit . . . that means being French.” intellectual and moral disarray of of an emancipated, atheistic, The interior life is not to be our secularized culture, the mainte- international democracy. confused with introspection or a nance of your personal identity in kind of psychological an alien world may be one of your Santayana was not alone in his migration, an inner exile that John greatest challenges. assessment. Philosophers and theo- Paul II warned his countrymen to Your generation for the first logians as diverse as Nietzsche avoid when they were faced with time in history is experiencing a and Leo XIII addressed the situa- Soviet domination. The interior unity of mankind such that noth- tion. If one is not willing to have life for the Catholic is the life of ing essential can happen anywhere his identity absorbed by a faceless the mind in contact with classical that does not concern all. The Stoic international or multicultural cos- sources of Western culture, but- understanding of the unity of man- mopolitan culture, one has to know tressed by divine revelation and kind, the framework of the polis, who one is. centuries of ecclesial teaching. has been expanded to include the Personal identity is bound in Benedict XVI is the model here. whole of mankind. The growing part to national identity, defined as He opens his recent book on the interdependence among nations has cultural identity. Most of us have apostolic fathers, with a meditation ended the days of absolute national been born in the West, in what on what we know of the teaching sovereignty. Almost imperceptibly, a used to be called “Christendom.” of St. Clement, Bishop of Rome, new attitude has emerged, so much It is not by accident that you are the third successor of St. Peter, after so that a United States of Europe is graduating today from Christen- Linus and Ancletus. But Benedict’s regarded as an imminent possibility. dom College. Over the past four real passion is the Fathers of the As Europeans debate their collec- years you have worked within a Church who followed. He presents tive future, the loss of national sov- curriculum that reflects a distinc- them as a lively bunch of intellec- ereignty looms, with unacknowl- tive culture, one that finds its roots tuals as they grapple with the truths edged consequences. Even more in Jerusalem, Athens, and medieval presented in the “Memories of significant is Europe’s loss of the Paris. Now you are called upon the Apostles,” as the Gospels were spiritual resources which animated to develop your understanding of first called. It is clear that Athens its past. In a memorable passage that tradition and to courageously prepared the way for the intellec- written in the first decade of the defend it where necessary. What- tual reception of the teachings of twentieth century, the Spanish- ever vocation you choose—doctor, Christ. It is with warrant that we born, Harvard University professor, lawyer, or military chief—an intel- say, “Christ came in the fullness of George Santayana expressed it this lectual life still beckons. Call it an time when the intellect of the West way: interior life or a spiritual life, if was prepared to receive the truths

FCS Quarterly • Fall 2009 47 Commencement Address of the Gospel.” The Fathers, Bene- for life. Some you may like better evaluate his education. At the end dict reminds us, were not a homo- than others. Benedict clearly loves of that review, an Italian professor geneous lot. Justin and Clement, Augustine, but he has an affec- came to me with an incredulous who studied in Athens, as did many tion too for the “hot head”Jerome, look and asked, “What is this out- others, will use the tools of philoso- who fled to the desert to avoid comes assessment?” Flustered, all I phy to explicate the new religion the temptations of the city. In the could say at that moment was, “It’s and defend it against the pagans desert he acquired a knowledge of an American invention.” “Absurd,” and the Jews. Tertullian, taking a Greek and Hebrew, and later when came the reply. Absurd or not, I am different tack, will ask, “What does called to Rome as secretary to Pope reminding you that what you carry Athens have to do with Jerusalem?” Damascus, he embarked on a new with you begs to be augmented. St. John Chrysostom, eschew- translation of the biblical texts. The You will not remember what has ing apologetics altogether, favored result we know as the Latin Vulgate, been said here, anymore than I can teaching the faith pure and simple, the official biblical text of the Latin remember a commencement ad- allowing that teaching to convince Church, recognized as such by the dress by President Eisenhower. But whomever it may. I have a grudg- Council of Trent, which even today what you have gained here, prop- ing respect for St. John Chrysos- after recent revisions remains the erly augmented, will sustain you tom even though he did not have official text of the Church. To read through life. much use for philosophy. When he the Fathers with full appreciation is What you will retain is a set sought a convincing proof for the to master the sources upon which of habits, habits developed within existence of God, he found it in they drew. And that takes us back a venerable intellectual tradition, the beauty of the Church itself. The to Athens and Rome. Wherever and, I may note, a tradition that you evidence that he found compelling Catholicism prevails, the classics are share with others not of the Catho- came from the fact that the Church read. It is to be remembered that lic faith. It is a very complex tradi- through its teaching, a teaching that the pagans did not reject Christ; tion, spanning two thousand years reached all levels of society, rich and they simply did not know Christ. of history, 2,300 years if you include poor, learned and not, in the brief Modernity has known Christ, but those grandfathers of the church, period of less than four centuries, has rejected Christ. The first intel- Plato and Aristotle. For that tradi- had transformed not only the lives lectuals to receive the message of tion to become alive, one need only of countless individuals but of na- the Gospels regarded that teaching to enter the Basilica of St. Ambrose tions as well. Given the splendor of as a complement to and expansion in Milan where the past is dramati- the Church, Chrysostom reasoned, of what they already knew. cally asserted. There under the high only God could be its source; As the name of this ceremony altar lie the remains of Ambrose purely human activity could not implies, the past four years have who died in 397, accompanied by account for it. We normally do not prepared you, the graduate, for a the remains of Saints Gervase and think of the Church as evidence for new beginning. What you make Protase, both first-century martyrs. the existence of God, but if we are of it is within your province. Par- That physical proximity is a visible attentive and distinguish between ents should not expect too much reminder of an intellectual inheri- the Church and her sometimes frail too soon. Outcome assessment is tance that dates to the Fathers and personnel, we may come to the not instantaneous, although some to the ancients upon whom they same conclusion as St. John. schools may immediately demand drew. Ambrose, steeped in the Hel- The extant writings of the it of their graduating seniors. Not lenic culture of his day, taught Au- Fathers are of major importance long ago I was an external exam- gustine, and Augustine taught the not only for an understanding of iner, asked to review the work of West. The Fathers of the Church, the faith and the history of the the Rome campus of an American no less than the Greeks and Ro- Church but for an understand- university. The last item on the mans whom they studied, put a ing of Western culture itself. Once check list was something called premium on what we today call a exposed to them, they are likely to “outcomes assessment,” whereby liberal education. From Augustine’s become intellectual companions the graduating senior was asked to De Magistro to Newman’s Idea of

48 FCS Quarterly • Fall 2009 a University, one can find dozens detail and precision. These are not Greece, as an antidote to the ni- of books, some of them Christian universal traits but are rooted in hilism they feared was endanger- and literary classics, that speak to centuries past and depend upon a ing the cultural fabric of Europe. the aims of education. In common historical consciousness, an atten- From antiquity, philosophers have they recognize that the end of life tion to the deeds of ancestors past. recognized that a certain unity of is contemplation, that the road to Even the universal habits of the outlook within the polis is a condi- the Beatific Vision requires a kind mind, philosophy and science, are tion for good government. Nearly of interiority, available even in the subject to the hidden influence of all cultural historians agree that a midst of the crassest temporal pur- race and local milieu. A travel bro- political creed or allegiance to a suits. chure that I recently encountered constitution is not enough. The late The interior life is the life of makes the point. It tells us that the Samuel P. Huntington, addressing the mind in the context of divine Greek island, Santorini was shaped the cultural situation in the United revelation, buttressed by centu- by natural cataclysms, but its vil- States in a book he published ries of ecclesiastical teaching. That lages and landscapes seem chiseled shortly before his death last year, life of the mind is object-directed by the island’s stark light. Out of pointedly asked, “Who are we?” even in the depths of its interior- that light came not only the great He acknowledges that the Anglo- ity. It seeks, as Socrates taught, a statues of ancient Greece and the Protestant culture that gave birth tripartite wisdom, knowledge of long lines of the Parthenon but the to the nation no longer prevails, one’s self, in the light of self, in the precise vocabulary for the ideas that and although he laments the loss of light of nature, and in the light of gave birth to Western philosophy. what he calls “our Protestant soul,” God. It proceeds with confidence Those of you who are fresh from he finds that we remain a religious that there is objective knowledge a logic course may miss a middle people. He looks to the revival about human nature, about the term connecting land, sky, and of that religious spirit as the only material order, and about God. To philosophy and yet may be willing available source of national unity. know who one is, is in some sense to acknowledge that elements such At the beginning of this ad- to differentiate oneself from the as land, water, sky, and prevailing dress I noted that personal identity other. One cannot be a citizen of a winds do have subtle effects on is to some extent linked to na- cosmopolitan multicultural world manners, ideals, and politics. Bavaria tional identity. That remains true, order. Culture, as well as national is not Sicily. but these reflections have led us to identity, is specific. Identity is local. In common with George San- a deeper insight. Given the disinte- As Paul Valéry reminds us, it is the tayana, Husserl and Heidegger saw gration of traditional Western cul- characteristic of a people who have that with the eclipse of Christian- ture, those of you who are steeped inhabited a land over a period of ity, Europe had not only lost its in the faith will find your primary time, who have developed certain identity as Christendom but even identity not as citizens of a cos- collective habits, evident in their its understanding of the sources mopolitan West but as sons and manners, their dress, their religious of its Western culture. All three daughters of a Church whose his- bonds, the feasts they collectively philosophers, each in his own way, tory, out of a sense of piety toward enjoy, the premium they put on called for a renewed study of classi- the inherited, you are obliged to education, and their attention to cal literature, the realism of ancient master. ✠

FCS Quarterly • Fall 2009 49 Officers and Directors

(as of September 2009) Past Presidents ELECTED DIRECTORS

President Prof. William May (2007 – 2010) Sr. Mary Timothy Prokes, Rev. Joseph Koterski, SJ Emeritus Prof. John Paul II FSE Fordham University/ Institute Prof. Christian Brugger Christendom Graduate School Philosophy 620 Michigan Avenue, NE St.John Vianney Seminary 4407 Sano Street Bronx. NY 10458 Washington, DC 20064 1300 South Steele Street Alexandria VA 22312 [email protected] [email protected] Denver CO 80210 [email protected] and [email protected] 703-658-4304 Vice-President Senior Fellow [email protected] 7504 St Philips Ct. Mr. William L. Saunders Culture of Life Foundation H: 9730 Cyprus Point Circle Falls Church VA 22042 Family Research Council 1413 K Street NW #1000 Lone Tree CO 80124 801 G. Street, NW Washington, DC 20005 Prof. Nick Eberstadt Washington DC 20001 Mrs. Helen Hitchcock American Enterprise Institute [email protected] Rev. Earl A. Weis, S.J. 6158 Kingsbury 1150 17th Street NW Loyola University St. Louis, MO 63112 Washington DC 20036 Executive Secretary 6525 N. Sheridan Road helenhhitchcock@sbcglobal. [email protected] Rev. Msgr. Stuart Swetland Chicago, IL 60626-5385 net Mount St. Mary’s University [email protected] (Cheryl 16300 Old Emmitsburg Road Newson) (2009-2012) Emmitsburg, Maryland 21727 Prof. Patrick Lee Franciscan Univ./Philosophy [email protected] Dr. James Hitchcock Steubenville, OH 43952 Prof. Max Bonilla St. Louis University/History Egan Hall Editor of FCS Quarterly [email protected] St. Louis, MO 63103 Franciscan University Prof. J. Brian Benestad [email protected] Steubenville, OH 43952 Univ. of Scranton/Theology Dr. Kenneth Whitehead 809 Ridge Place [email protected] St. Thomas Hall #367 Prof. Ralph McInerny Scranton, PA 18510 Falls Church, VA 22046-3631 Emeritus Dir., Dean Kristin Burns [email protected] [email protected] Maritain Center Christendom Graduate School 714 Hesburgh Library 4407 Sano St. Notre Dame, IN 46556 (2008-2011) Alexandria, VA 22312 [email protected] [email protected] Prof. Stephen Miletic Prof. Gerard V. Bradley Prof. Ann Carson Daly Franciscan Univ./Theology University of Notre Dame Vice President of Steubenville, OH 43952-1763 124 Law School Academic Affairs [email protected] Notre Dame, IN 46556 Belmont Abbey (740) 284-5284 (voice) [email protected] 100 Belmont, Mt. Holly Rd Belmont, NC 28012, Fr. Peter F. Ryan, SJ Dean Bernard Dobranski [email protected] Ave Maria School of Law Mount St. Mary’s Seminary Emmitsburg, MD 21727-7797 Dexter, MI 48130 Prof. Carter Snead [email protected] [email protected] 311 Law School Notre Dame, IN 46556 [email protected]

50 FCS Quarterly • Fall 2009 Ex Cathedra Liberal Education and Ignorance of One’s Mother Tongue

et us think about a remarkable situation in soil for all further educational exertions.”3 many universities. Not a few students are more As we know, Nietzsche got many important things or less illiterate. They don’t really know their wrong, but he was right on target regarding the impor- own mother tongue, even if they can send tance of knowing one’s mother tongue in order to have text messages without looking at their phones, the possibility of receiving a liberal education. He was whileL appearing to be paying attention to what is being also right about the importance of studying Greek and said in class. More specifically, they have difficulty with the Latin to acquire respect for language. Nietzsche’s philoso- structure of sentences and paragraphs and use miserable pher says, “The most salutary thing which the present- diction, especially in papers in which they are trying to day institution of the Gymnasium contains within itself sound educated. One of my liberally educated colleagues, lies in any case in the seriousness with which the Latin a 1963 Holy Cross graduate, retired because he could not and Greek languages are treated through a whole series stand one more year of reading student papers and blue of years: here one learns respect for a regularly fixed books. He was especially upset by the constant misuse of language, for grammar and lexicon. Here one still knows “in which” in their papers. The disappearance of Latin and what an error is ....” Despite this salutary practice of English grammar, the failure to read enough good litera- teaching the classical languages, the good effect is muted ture in high school, and insufficient instruction in writing by two things. Nietzsche’s philosopher explains. “If only throughout primary and secondary school are probably this respect for language did not remain hanging thus in the leading causes of student illiteracy. the air, as a theoretical burden, so to speak, from which Even with good books, professors cannot do much one again immediately unburdens oneself with respect with students who don’t grasp what they are reading, not to one’s mother tongue.”4 In other words, students and because they lack intelligence, but because their language teachers don’t let the discipline of studying and teaching ability is so deficient. Why high schools and universities the classical languages make them more careful and exact don’t do more about this situation is somewhat puzzling. in the study of their mother tongue. They confine the Love of our students requires that we tell them the truth rigorous discipline to the classical languages, as though it about their situation. has nothing to do with the rest of their education. Sec- In preparation for giving a talk on liberal education, ondly, “one contents oneself to know the foreign classical I read through a book to which I was introduced in my languages; one disdains to be proficient in them.”5 college years, On the Future of our Educational Institutions Over the years I have noticed that the very few stu- by Friedrich Nietzsche. This book, written in dialogue dents who have seriously studied Latin in high school form, contains five lectures that Nietzsche delivered at the understand the structure of language and are able to read University of Basel early in 1872. The philosopher in the books with more insight. Unfortunately, Latin is hardly dialogue converses with a former student who has just required anywhere. Even many Jesuit Prep schools, in- retired from a teaching position. He asks the philosopher if cluding prestigious Regis High School in NYC, have there is any hope to reform the Gymnasium, the academic made the study of Latin optional. Many good public secondary institution German students attend before en- schools do make the study of Latin available, but most tering the university. The philosopher begins his response high school students will not realize that the study of the by emphasizing the importance of learning one’s mother classical languages would be good for them. How could tongue. Let us listen to his words: “By nature every human they possible know that! ✠ being speaks and writes now so badly and commonly their German language as is only possible in an age of newspa- Endnotes 1 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Future of Our Educational Institutions (South per German: therefore, the growing up, noble gifted youth Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2004), 44. must be put with force under the glass bell of good taste 2 Nietzsche, 50. and rigorous linguistic discipline.”1 The Gymnasiums, he 3 Nietzsche, 52. 4 Nietzsche, 57. continues, treat German as though it “were only a nec- 5 Nietzsche, 57. essary evil or a dead body.”2 “In sum: the Gymnasium neglects up till now the object that is first of all and most Dr. J. Brian Benestad near, in which true education begins, the mother tongue.” Professor of Theology, University of Scranton, PA Knowledge of one’s mother tongue is “the natural fruitful Editor, Fellowship of Catholic Studies Quarterly

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52 FCS Quarterly • Fall 2009