Author Archives: chalcedon451

Pharisees & Popes

25 Sunday Feb 2018

Posted by in Catholic Tradition, Faith, Pope

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Bolivian President Evo Morales (L) exchanges gifts with Pope Francis during a meeting at Quemado presidential palace in La Paz on July 8, 2015. Pope Francis, the first Latin American pontiff, arrived in Bolivia on the second leg of a three-nation tour of the continent’s poorest countries, where he has been acclaimed by huge crowds. AFP PHOTO/JUAN CARLOS USNAYO

“Three months ago, in a country, in a city, a mother wanted to baptize her newly born son, but she was married civilly to a divorced man. The priest said, ‘Yes, yes. Baptize the baby. But your husband is divorced, so he cannot be present at the ceremony.’ This is happening today. The Pharisees, or Doctors of the Law, are not people of the past, even today there are many of them. That is why we shepherds need prayers.”

Thus Pope Francis at Santa Marta last October.

As presented in the Gospels, the Pharisees were men who cared so much for the letter of the Law that the Spirit of it passed them by; one feels they were the spiritual predecessors of modern Health & Safety experts. Jesus was clear about the importance of not binding the people with extra burdens. Any priest who acted in the manner described by the Pope, should have recognised that his actions were not going to contribute to family stability, or even, perhaps, to the bringing of the cild to baptism. It is hard to know quite what the priest thought he was achieving.

In such circumstances, the ‘rigorism’ condemned by the Pope, seems to stand rightly condemned.

But then when, as last February, the Pope takes the line that rigorism includes priests who tell divorced people that they can remarry, he seems, to many of us, the ignore what the Lord Jesus says in Mark 10:1-12. To accuse any priest who upholds that teaching as a ‘Pharisee’ seems to take the word to that point of uselessness occupied by a word like ‘fascist;’ anyone of whom one disapproves, falls automatically into that category. It is a word for the polemicist, not the apologist.

No Catholic can cavalierly dismiss the insistence on dogma as pharisaism. The Laws of the Church derive from the teachings of Jesus. Yes, and of course, how easy it would have been to have been able to do as the original Pharisees could, and allow divorce on certain grounds; but Jesus was clear on this. We can, as many churches have, choose to caveat His words, and effectively allow divorce; but try as we might, we cannot pretend we are abiding by His words.

All of this is by way of prelude to Fr Thomas Weinandy’s thought-provoking article in In the National Catholic Register. A member of the Vatican’s International Theological Commission, Fr Weinandy spoke on the theme of the four marks of the Church: “One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic.” All of these were, he said, at risk, not least from the confusion created by the Holy See itself.

This is a theme we have considered here recently. There is certainly a place of robust discussion and deep questioning, and even for the sort of contrarianism which can make a seminar or lecture go with a swing, but it seems an unlikely role for the holder of the See of St Peter, not least in an age of instant communication. An septuagenarian who, by his own admission, does not read social media, may, perhaps, have an imperfect understanding of how his words are received by millions who do not spend their time in theological controversy. Fr Weinandy has a better understanding, and that gives him cause for concern.

In spite of all the controversy following Vatican II, there was never any doubt over where Blessed Paul VI, St John Paul II and Benedict XVI stood regarding the Church’s “doctrine, morals, and liturgical practice.” But, Fr Weinandy

“Such is not the case, in many significant ways, within the present pontificate of Pope Francis,” Father Weinandy continued. Praising the Pope for his personal holiness and his concern for the young and the marginalised, he goes on to observe:

that “at times” the Holy Father appears to identify himself “not as the promoter of unity but as the agent of division,” and that his desire to — in the Pope’s own words — “make a mess” in the belief that a greater unifying good will emerge, is a cause for great concern.

By doing nothing to calm the doctrinal division and moral discord within the Church caused by some of his own ambiguity, the Pope, Fr Weinandy suggests, may have transgressed has transgressed the foundational mark of the Church – “her oneness.”

It seems hard to counter Fr Weinandy’s thesis. Does that mark him out as a ‘rigorist’? Are there not, as suggested in the opening paragraphs, times when rigor is necessary? I would suggest that Fr Weinandy’s interesting lecture is read by all with a concern for these things. I would further suggest that attempts to write him off as a Pharisee miss the point. Dogma is dogma. doctrine is doctrine, and if one does not like them, then there are plenty of alternative ecclesial communities which will accommodate those of that point of view.

Education, what is it good for?

19 Monday Feb 2018

Posted by in Church/State, Education, Faith

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One characteristic of modern, advanced countries, is that they realise that education is essential. We forget how recently this, now commonplace statement, was not the case. In the UK it was not until 1870 that there was primary and secondary schooling for all, and as late as the turn of the nineteenth/twentieth centuries, there were only half a dozen universities in the UK, and most of them dated from the Middle Ages. It was not until 1944 that the UK Government really turned its attention to secondary education. Before then, the main provider of education was the Church.

The Church, of course had a vested interest in the subject, and as, until relatively recent times, it provided the State with many of those who ran its institutions, the State was willing to support its efforts. For all the ill-informed criticisms directed at the medieval Church, there can be no doubt that it was, in effect, the Noah’s ark of classical learning.

By the mid-twentieth century, it was accepted that modern States needed a highly educated work-force. In the UK, with its clear hierarchy of class, that tended to mean that anything utilitarian, was under-valued. When the British State expanded Higher Education in the 1960s, it did so by establishing universities which, despite the hyperbole about them being ‘new’, tended to imitate the established universities. It was left to the Polytechnics to deal with the more utilitarian end of the education market, but even there, the British class system exerted its pull, and as they expanded, many of them looked to imitate the traditional providers of Higher Education.

As usual in the UK, there was much pragmatism but little discussion of first principles. The Blessed John Henry Newman had clear ideas about what a university should be for. It should be a community of scholars, and the older ones should prepare the younger ones to be people able to realise the gifts they had been given by God. His faith in Divine Providence convinced him, in a religious version of market economics, that if Universities did that, then men (and in his day women were barred from Higher Education) would find the place where they could fulfil their destiny. He understood, as all good educators do, that it was the whole person, and not just the intellect, which needed to be brought out (‘e duco’ – leading out, the Latin root of the word).

That is why education, cut off from its religious roots, is in perpetual danger. The State is always myopic. Politicians, wedded to short-termism (usually the date of the next election) will seek to make it fulfil whatever short-term need they can think of. But they need, as the Church has always done, to take account of the sort of society they want to live in. Music and the arts do not happen by accident, and a good society will want them and value them; it will also be willing to pay for them, and allow rich men and women to support them too.

Education is for life, not just for a few years in our youth. If we grasp that it is about helping each of us be the person God meant us to be, then we are at less risk from the fads and fallacies of the age.

Higher Education and the Philistine

18 Sunday Feb 2018

Posted by in Education, Faith, Newman

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pexels-photo-356086.jpegThe UK Secretary of State for Education, Damian Hinds, wishes to see a new ‘value for money’ test applied to universities, which, he says, will see cuts to the fees charged to students doing Arts and Social Sciences subjects.

Mr Hinds, who got a First in Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford, seems to think in terms of the first and third of those subjects. Mr Corbyn is offering to abolish fees, so politically the Tories need to do something to appeal to the young. One might expect a man with an Oxford First to realise that offering something for nothing is always going to trump offering something from which you have to pay; especially with anyone economically illiterate enough to believe the Labour leader. Economically, he seems to think it an easy matter to put a value on a degree. Does it lead you to a good job?

Mr Hinds was educated at a Catholic Grammar School. One presumes he did not come across the Blessed John Henry Newman’s Idea of a University there, or, indeed, elsewhere. But that he went through a Catholic education and should have come out with such a utilitarian view of the purpose of higher education is a disappointment. Managing to study Philosophy at Oxford and still having a purely instrumentalist view of higher education ought to be surprising.

But one does not need to be a philosopher to question whether Arts and Humanities subjects are of lesser value than more vocational ones. That well-known leftist Think Tank (that is joke by the way), The World Economic Forum, has articulated the qualities it thinks desirable in national leaders. Not one of the qualities, which are needed among more than just the ‘leaders’, is discipline specific. All of them require what the Minister himself seems to lack, which is the ability to take the skills one learns at university, skills such as critical thinking and empathetic understanding, and apply them to the task in hand. One hopes Mr Hinds will remember some of those skills before it is too later.

At the moment the UK’s universities stand second only to those of America as an international success story. In the last five years they have faced a revolution in the context within which they work. From a situation where they had to deal with a Government-imposed cap on the number of students they could take, and low fees, they were pushed into a free market where they could take as many students as they could get, and charge up to £9k a year (now £9.25K) to each of those students. The market worked as the market tends to. Many students went where they thought they could get the best value for that money. They based that judgment of ‘value’ on many things, but not money alone. Universities adapted with speed and agility to the new situation. But now, just as they are coming to terms with it, HMG seem determined to change the rules of the game – again.

If Mr Hinds’ views are economically reductionist, they are also regressive. Children from backgrounds where there is enough social capital to realise the value of Arts and Social Science subjects, will continue to do them, but at a reduced price; children from other backgrounds will be deterred. So, within a generation, Arts and Humanities and Social Science subjects will be the the preserve of a social elite at a few “top” universities. Let’s return to the 1930s, it was so much better then.

But above all, Hinds expresses a deeply philistine view of education. Wilde defined a philistine as one who knew the cost of everything and the value of nothing. Value and ‘values’ as not the same thing. What value a society of educated people able to think and make informed decisions about political and economic issues? But let’s not worry, seems to be the argument, ‘value for money’ can be defined in narrow utilitarian terms.

If, as Mr Hinds claims, he wants to continue widening access to Higher Education – a line I support, let us widen it for all subjects, not just the ones a current generation think economically useful, especially when the yardstick used is the wrong one. That a Conservative Catholic should be so confused about the value of higher education is deeply depressing.

Of your charity

17 Saturday Feb 2018

Posted by in Church/State, Faith, Lent

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ANC

One of the things those of us with any disposable income try to do, is to give it to good causes. About once a year I review who receives what I give. There are some obvious stalwarts: my old College, which is not one of Oxford’s richest, and gave me so much, that I want to give something back to each new generation; and then a series of charities. Some of these are secular charities, but the majority are religious ones. It was, therefore, sobering, to put it mildly, to see the news about Oxfam. As my friend Neo has written elsewhere there is a very considerable iceberg underneath this tip.

That aid agency staff commit abuses seems further proof of the axiom that bad people will find a way of working with vulnerable people. We see it in every Church. This leads those with an agenda to criticise my own Church, or someone else’s church; for believers in original sin, that seems a culpably blind attitude. Some of the things described in Neo’s piece are heart-breaking. For the Director of Oxfam to say ‘it isn’t as though we murdered babies’, shows, alas, that he still fails to grasp the scale of the outrage. His detailed excuses as to why they behaved as they did once they knew the details of the scandal, shows a concern with preserving the institution at all costs. As an expert on disaster management, he should have consulted an expert in media relations on when not to bring a mechanical digger to a hole-making party.

Charities have become big business, but unlike other businesses which pay their CEOs a fortune, this business does not make anything or sell anything, it raises funds and then tries to spend them in the best way possible. It is a business that relies on reputation. The Charity sector is not coming well out of this, or indeed, other investigations, such as phone fund-raising. There is something deeply disturbing about the pattern of behaviour being revealed. I stopped one long-term donation because a phone fund-raiser aggressively tried to make me increase the amount I had given. He seemed oblivious to my argument that I gave to a number of charities and had worked out what I could afford to give to each; the result was he managed to lose his charity a regular amount, plus a legacy. Of course, he did not work with the charity, he was a professional fund-raiser paid by results. I hope he was not on a bonus.

In all this sorry story, it is good to recall some charities do work no one else would. The Aid to the Church in Need charity is one. The work it has done with the victims of ISIS/Daesh is exemplary. In places no one else goes, ANC goes. It is helping thousands of Christian who feel abandoned by the UN charities working in Jordan. £3.6 million has just been given to Iraqi Christians to help rebuild houses in the Nineveh Plain. This is something no one else would do. NGOs tend to take a relentlessly politically correct line, which in places like Jordan means that Christians are at the bottom of the list. A quarter of Iraq’s Christian have now returned to their homes. This is real charity. It is not about trying to help make the refugee camps more permanent, but about making them unnecessary. So far, £28million has been given to Christians in Iraq.

But ANC is in the Sudan, Russia, Syria, and raising the alarm wherever Christians are persecuted. At Lent we are encouraged to give of our charity. I have made my decision, and hope that, despite the scandal engulfing the ‘charity sector’, charities like ANC will continue to be supported.

Relatively speaking

16 Friday Feb 2018

Posted by in Blogging, Faith, Pope

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New pope greets crowds in Vatican City

Catholicism poses a fundamental challenge to the contemporary belief that everything is relative (except, of course, the truth that there is no such thing as truth). Truth is the person of Christ, and what flows from that belief. It is precisely for this reason that there is concern when any occupant of the See of St Peter seems not to be giving a clear statement of Catholic belief; if the trumpet gives an uncertain sound … and all that. As an academic I am always happy to stir up thinking by questioning the assumptions my students have about their subject, but what is appropriate in one arena is not in another. I happen to believe that the University where I work is a force for good in the world, and even if I had doubts about some of the things it does (I don’t), I would not raise the issue in public. It remains a mystery to me why Pope Francis cannot follow that simple rule.

One lesson he, and the rest of us, can learn from the postmodernists is that it is not the authorial voice which is authoritative; it is what is heard, as much as what was meant by the author, which counts. If people keep getting a certain impression about what the Pope is saying, that does not mean they are right, but it does mean that those who advise him might point out that greater clarity would be useful.

Of course, there will always be those whose perspective is such that they will misread what is said. One of the things which has concerned me from the start of this Papacy is that from the moment Francis stepped out onto the balcony, there were those who were criticising him. They might want to tell us that everything that has happened since justifies their doubts, even as those who oppose them would tell us that such a reaction os simple self-confirmation bias. From there we descend into the world of ‘fake news’. As with President Trump, those who have no time for him will read everything he does and says as confirmation that they are right. Those on the Right who take the view that such a reaction simply proves the Left will never give Trump a break, might, if they are critical of Pope Francis, like to ponder the irony that in the eyes of the Pope’s supporters, they are doing what liberals do to Trump. As so it goes on.

In all of this, what of the faithful? As with much of our political discourse, it may be a sobering reminder that most people do not follow what obsesses parts of the blogosphere.

The Pope is infallible only in certain matters and on certain issues. If the impression has gained ground over the last thirty years that almost everything the Pope says is to be taken as Gospel, then that certainly would not be the fault of those who spent so much time criticising St Pope John Paul II. The irony of those people now shifting their position to the one they used to criticise is not lost on some of us; nor is the irony of their opponents changing places with them.

Contrary to what is sometimes implied, the Catholic Church has always had a lively intellectual life. How could it be otherwise in a living Church? In a world with 24/7 media this allows more of us access to that process, but we should remember that just as we would object to anyone impugning our good faith in taking up a position, so others will object if we do the same. Tone influences what is heard. From His Holiness down, all who engage in such discussions would do well to remember that.

An absence of lives

15 Thursday Feb 2018

Posted by in Abortion, Faith

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We, as a society, are, rightly, concerned with ‘rights.’ There are those who might argue we are too obsessed with them, perhaps at the expense of emphasising that they ought to come with duties. ‘Human rights’ are something we would all wish to be seen to be supporting, even those, such as myself, who would argue that the phrase can be misleading.

How so? If it is taken to mean that the mere fact of being human confers certain inalienable rights upon us, then that would, historically, be incorrect. Mankind has not generally acted, or legislated, as though the simple fact of being human gave one certain rights. In so far as legal systems are outgrowths of what a society wishes to valorise, they have tended to protect property, class, caste and privileges, rather than supposed inherent rights. But, in the modern era, at least in the West, this has changed. All sorts of ‘rights’ are now legally protected. Life, it would seem, is recognised as being of intrinsic value. The idea of arguing, as men and women did in the past in the West, that human beings could own each other as commodities, is, rightly, seen as abhorrent. So much so that it has taken too much time for us to recognise the phenomenon of modern slavery.

It is, for many of us, a sign of civilisation at work that special attention has been paid to women, who, at all times and in all places, have tended to find themselves at a disadvantage to men in various ways. Whilst one might ague about some of the ways in which these rights have been gained, and even asserted, it is all small beer concerned with the gains. Any society which uses the talents of only half its members properly, suffers for it.

All of which makes it so odd that the greatest discrimination against the female sex has the ardent support of so many women. If I were to say that 50,000 women a year were prevented from having a better life by legislation, I daresay there would be an outcry; and I daresay I’d be part of it. So far, solidarity holds. But if I go on to say, as I am doing, that 50,000 female lives a year are lost in India, then there would, rightly, be a huge outpouring of wrath; until I mentioned that that is the figure of female lives ended by abortion in that country. At that point the solidarity ends.

There are generally two sorts of reaction. The first is to deny that the foetus is a life at all; it is not ‘a woman’, it is a potential woman. How like Aristotle’s argument for slavery, which held that slaves, although like humans, were not fully human, they lacked certain characteristics enjoyed by those he thought fully human. Throughout human history, acts of cruelty towards groups of people have often been justified by arguments which effectively dehumanised them. Perhaps somewhere, the residual respect for human life demands that before it is exterminated on any scale, one has first to argue that what is being destroyed is not human in the way you and I are. And, of course, the arguments in favour of abortion are all, as President Reagan noticed, advanced by those who are alive.

The second reaction is to assert the rights of the mother. The mother it is asserted, has a right to decide what to do with her own body. For the sake of this argument, the mother’s body has four hands, hour feet, two heads and two hearts. Again, we avoid any recognition that there is a separate human being involved in the argument. In the name of the rights of the woman, there are, a 2014 report argued, 200 million fewer women in the world than there would have been without abortion.

Under UK law, gender selective abortion is illegal; yet it happens. The idea that all feminists passed by on the other side here is not the case; some leading feminists did, indeed, protest at ‘gendercide‘. It ought to trouble all of us that so many female lives are lost; indeed, that so many lives are prevented from coming into being.

The Catholic Church teaches that abortion is wrong:

Since the first century the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion. This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable. Direct abortion, that is to say, abortion willed either as an end or a means, is gravely contrary to the moral law (CCC2271)

All human life is sacred. We are all made in God’s image. The destruction of one of God’s children is a sin which cries to Heaven. The destruction of tens of millions is the same sin on a larger scale. That it is condoned by large numbers of people in our society gives pause for thought about what we have become as a society. What is it we place value upon? Human rights, or the right of ourselves to do what we like within a liberal and permissive interpretation of the law?

Here, as elsewhere, the Church refuses to take an instrumentalist view of our job as stewards of God’s earth. None of which is to claim any quick or easy answers, but it to pose the question about the real commitment of our society to ‘human rights.’

Into Lent

14 Wednesday Feb 2018

Posted by in Faith, Lent

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We are told that immediately after his baptism, Jesus was driven out into the wilderness by the Holy Spirit. We do not often ponder how odd this phrasing is. Here, at the start of the mission, we see the Spirit leading Jesus into the wilderness; and as anyone who has been there will tell you, beyond the Jordan it really is a wilderness; by day the sun scorches and the scorpions threaten, and by night the cold freezes the body, and the howls of wild animals the blood. It was there that Jesus was tested.

The wilderness is a rite of passage, a test, throughout the Old Testament; it is there that those chosen by God are tested: Abraham is commanded to go into the wild places to sacrifice Isaac; the children of Israel are led through the wilderness by Moses for forty years; it is in the wilderness of Sinai that God gives Moses the tablets of the Law after he has fasted and prayed for 40 days; Elijah is is also led into the wilderness and sustained there by God for 40 days. Jesus follows this pattern.

By contrast Adam, was placed in the Garden of Eden. His life was set beside still waters, and all that he wanted, even a companion, was provided by the will of a beneficent God. But that was not enough for Adam and Eve. Having all they could wanted, they found, as we, their descendants do, a new want. They wanted to be as wise as God. They could bear nothing less than equality with God. Satan appealed to pride and self-will in setting before them the idea that God wanted to keep them in subjection and that if they would but reach out their hands, they could soon be like God, equal with Him. Adam and Eve succumbed to this, despite the felicity of their surroundings. Now we see the second Adam, Christ, undergo the second temptation of man in a wilderness symbolic of that in which mankind had lived since the fall. Paul tells us: ‘For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ all shall be made alive.’ Here we shall see the Tempter defeated, where once he was victorious.

Satan’s methods are the ones which worked for him of old; they work on us now. He tempts us to take a course of action which, in itself, seems harmless enough – in the case of Jesus, that he should feed himself by turning stones into bread. But that would have been to place our will before that of God. Hence  Jesus replies that we live not just by bread, but by the word of God. We, of course, knowing that Jesus is that Word, see a deeper meaning than the Devil could; if we allow ourselves to be guided by the things of this world, we too shall fail to see that the ‘Light which lighteth the world’ has come into it.

That Jesus was tempted reminds us of His true humanity. He triumphs not by the assertion of his own will, real though that is. He does so by renouncing his will and doing that of His Father in Heaven. Luke tells us that he was filled with the Spirit, and he relies upon the strength that gives Him; unlike Adam, he does not think that the exercise of his will is the way to respond to the promptings of the Devil. Paul tells us that Jesus came to overthrow the Evil One who holds us captive:

 Inasmuch then as the children have partaken of flesh and blood, He Himself likewise shared in the same, that through death He might destroy him who had the power of death, that is, the devil

Jesus rejects the Devil’s offers of glory and power and embraces, instead, the will of the Father – and the path that will lead Him to the agony of Gethsemene and the sufferings of Golgotha. He who was without sin, He who resisted the Tempter, was ‘made sin’ for us so that through his sacrifice we might be made righteous. It is through Jesus that we are saved. His obedience does that which our own efforts never could do – they make us right with God. As all fell in Adam, so, if we embrace Him, will all rise in Jesus.

So, as we go through this Lenten season, may we so conform our will to His, that we may take His obedience to the will of the Father as our example. May we, through the Spirit, be delivered from temptation. As He rises, may we rise with Him, and in Him, and through Him.

Stewardship

13 Tuesday Feb 2018

Posted by in Catholic Tradition, Church/State, Faith

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One of the many unfortunate results of the Church getting caught up in the culture wars is the politicisation of our stewardship of the earth. Because ‘Green causes’ have become identified with the political left, those who self-identify as not being on that side in the the culture wars, tend to trash the ‘Green agenda.’ Now it may well be that most mainstream scientists are wrong on these issues, and a minority of dissidents are correct, it would not be the first time that has happened. But is an important point being missed in the retreat to pre-prepared trenches?

What does it say about out attitude as Christians if we regard ourselves as owners of the earth? The Bible is clear that our relationship to God’s creation is that of steward; Jesus is equally clear about how God regards stewards who see their position as that of owners. What does that mean in practice?

We might take it as a matter of regret if a species becomes extinct, but is there not a wider, Christian perspective? God’s overflowing creativity has populated a world to delight us, and unless we think He has no purpose in creating, we might want to take on board the idea that each aspect of creation tells us something about God and His Creation; every time we lose an aspect of that, we lose something God has given us.

What does it say about us as a community of Christians that we take an instrumentalist view of the environment? Probably much the same thing as it says when we take the same view of education. It says, in effect, that we have adopted a materialist view of life. We see no objective beyond getting rich and being comfortable. Is that, in any way, what Jesus is telling us about what God created us for?  He came that we should have life, and have it more abundantly. That is not a proclamation of the prosperity Gospel. It is not a call to forget stewardship.

But have we the wisdom to think deeply about this? Or are we simply going to retreat to the Culture War trenches? In Laudato Si, the Pope asks us to think about the purpose of life, and what it means to say we are made in the image of God? An exploitative relationship with the environment, like one with labour, is one which runs counter to the Christian belief that we are stewards of this earth, and that every life has a unique value.

In education we are moving, and may even have moved, close to a position in which the idea that knowledge is worth having for its own sake is regarded as anathema; we are told that university degrees need to be ‘useful,’ where ‘use’ is tied to monetary gain. In the UK, a degree which leads to a poorly-paid but socially useful job, is rated as less useful than one which delivers a good salary. So, women who choose to stay at home and raise children are regarded with less favour than those who take the decision to remain childless and devote themselves to their job. Women are encouraged to follow men and define their value in relation to their job. And we complain that family matters less. How can it not in a society which puts a value solely on what is economically useful?

Benedict XVI wrote about our need to recapture a sense of reason. He challenged it to rise to the ‘Socratic task of inquiring into the good life.’ Human beings, separated from God are, he reminded us, ‘reduced to a single dimension’. ‘Were God to lose his centrality man would lose his rightful place, he would no longer fit into creation, into relations with others. ‘ That, Pope Francis suggests in Laudato Si, is precisely what modern society in the West has reduced us to. We need, he suggests, quoting St Augustine, to rediscover a reverence for the beauty of God’s creation:

St Augustine, who spent much of his life seeking the Truth and was grasped by the Truth, wrote a very beautiful and famous passage in which he said: “Question the beauty of the earth, question the beauty of the sea, question the beauty of the air distending and diffusing itself, question the beauty of the sky… question all these realities. All respond: ‘See, we are beautiful’. Their beauty is a profession [confessio]. These beauties are subject to change. Who made them if not the Beautiful One [Pulcher] who is not subject to change?” (Sermo 241, 2: pl 38, 1134).

Pope Benedict called  for us to recover

and enable people today to recover — our capacity for contemplating creation, its beauty and its structure. The world is not a shapeless mass of magma, but the better we know it and the better we discover its marvellous mechanisms the more clearly we can see a plan, we see that there is a creative intelligence. 

Neither are our fellow men simply means of production and consumption. We need to recapture what it means to be made in God’s image.

As the Catechism of the Catholic Church says:

with his openness to truth and beauty, his sense of moral goodness, his freedom and the voice of his conscience, with his longings for the infinite and for happiness, man questions himself about God’s existence” (n. 33).

Unless our culture can recapture these aspects of life, then we remain condemned to an essentially reductionist and profoundly unChristian way of life.

Retreat to the trenches of the culture war if you must, but such an approach to Laudato Si misses the continuity with Pope Benedict – and St Augustine.

Religious illiteracy

12 Monday Feb 2018

Posted by in Anglicanism, Anti Catholic, Catholic Tradition, Education, Faith

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Of all the defects of modern government, one of the least commented upon is the religious illiteracy of our leaders. It is more than a generation since I was asked, by a student at one of the UK’s top thirty universities whether “Anglicanism was the same as Catholicism?” – and the situation has not improved. Why does it matter? Because, at least here in the UK, decisions which effect Church schools are being taken by people whose minds are so filled with contemporary preoccupations that they have no background against which to operate when taking decisions.

A Government which claims to be Conservative is determined to make all schools teach children from age 4 and up, “age-appropriate” content, that includes information about same-sex marriage and transgenderism.  And, in case anyone should suppose that I am being biased in attributing the Government’s motives to a desire to be ‘up to date’ and ‘on trend,’ let me quote the former Minister, Justine Greening:

it is important that the church, in a way, keeps up and is part of a modern country. We have allowed same-sex marriage, that’s a massive step forward for the better. And for me, I think people do want to see our major faiths keep up with modern attitudes.

Let us pause there and deconstruct what is an Orwellian sentence.

‘Our major faiths’ will, whether they want it or not, be kept ‘up to date’ with ‘modern attitudes’ by the Government because she thinks people want it. Which ‘people’ are these?

One presumes they are not the more than fifty percent of the population who, in the recent British Elections Survey, thought that ‘gender equality’ had ‘gone far enough’. As The New Statesman commented:

It is also worth reconsidering, in the light of this data, the anger and resentment expressed in focus groups and on doorsteps about such prevalent socially conservative views being painted as bigoted, extreme or niche, when they are in fact held by majorities of British adults.

Mrs Greening was speaking for the ‘people’ she knows, the holders of liberal social attitudes which many, perhaps most, of the population do not hold. She has learnt nothing from Trump, or the Brexit fiasco, about the gap between Metropolitan social liberalism and a still prevalent social conservatism. That, of course, does not stop her, and others, claiming to be talking in the name of ‘the people’.

Dame Louise Casey, another senior government adviser, has singled out Catholics in particular. It is “not OK for Catholic schools to be homophobic and anti-gay marriage,” she testified in the House of Commons. “I have a problem with the expression of religious conservatism because I think often it can be anti-equalities.” Well, many, perhaps most ordinary people, have a problem with her social liberalism because they think it anti-democratic, and see it as running counter to common-sense; it is unclear why an unelected adviser’s views should take precedence, especially when they are, themselves, redolent of an ancient anti-Catholic bigotry.

Dame Louise, naturally, offers no evidence that Catholic schools are homophobic. If homophobia exists in them, it is not from Catholic but societal sources. The teaching of the Church on care of and respect for homosexuals is clear. As for being ‘anti-gay marriage,’ perhaps Dame Louise is ignorant of the Catholic, and traditional, definition of ‘marriage’?

This socially liberal agenda, an artefact of a minority of the electorate, is to be foisted upon the rest of us for precisely what reason? It is certainly not because people voted for it. The current, admittedly useless, Government, committed itself in its manifesto to lifting the cap on Church schools not being able to have more than 50% of their pupils from a faith background; it has not fulfilled that pledge.

Ministers and their apparatchiks have no understanding of the religious basis on which our schools proceed, or indeed, of religion at all. Catholic, Anglican, Jewish and Muslim Schools are all being presented with an agenda here to which they cannot, in good conscience, sign up. It is an agenda which is not supported by most people, but it will be imposed upon us for our own good. The ties that bind government and people continue to loosen.

That is sad enough. What is sadder is that it being done by people who have no idea of the harm they are wreaking, and no conception of the value systems which have underpinned the civilization they are so busy undermining. Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.

As Lent approaches

11 Sunday Feb 2018

Posted by in Bible, Catholic Tradition, Faith, Lent

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Lent is a chance to reassess where we are; a time of penance.

If press of business at work was the primary reason to refrain from blogging, there was a secondary one. It seemed impossible to blog and remain spiritually calm. The invasion of modern culture wars into the realm of religion was inevitable, but becomes wearing to one who finds it difficult to define himself in those terms.

At the heart of my own faith is the encounter with Christ in the Eucharist. That is the Christ who I encounter in the Holy Scriptures, who tells us that we will eat of His body and drink of His blood, and that He is the Way, the Truth and the Light. Were that not the case then there would be a disconnect between reason and experience, and my own Christianity rests on those two pillars- reason and experience. But these two are mediated through the Church and its traditions. I do not understand these things solely by the light of my own reason, although I constantly test them against it; I am part of a living tradition. I am but one of a great cloud of witnesses.

The spoken Word matters to me a great deal. Without Scripture I would be lost. But to interpret it by the sole light of my own reason would also be to risk becoming lost. Christ became man so that I, like other sinners, might receive life, and life eternal. My experience tells me that the Christ of Scripture is the one I encounter at the Eucharist; the Church reinforces that and provides me with a sacramental understanding of what, and who, I have received; it is a memorial of His saving Passion; but it is Him too not simply a memorial. I know this through what I feel; but I find reinforcement and validation for what I feel in the tradition and teaching of the Church.

Modern critical theorists of Scripture made the attempt to make it conform to their own limited, non-sacramental understanding of the world; ruling out miracles on the a priori ground that they could not exist. That was to insert one’s own understanding in place of that of the Church, which has always had the humility to accept what the Scripture it received described; it does not attempt to know better than the eye-witnesses. One’s unaided understanding might lead one astray. Had the Lord Jesus wished us to get our teaching about Him from a book alone, then undoubtedly He could have written that book. Instead He inspired His followers to write and collect what was written, providing, through the Church He founded, an infallible interpreter in cases of doubt.

In all of that, there is for me, only one culture war – that of the World against that of the Church. Of the mystery of the existence of many churches, I have no opinion. I have met better men and women than myself in many other Churches, and I leave any verdict on their ultimate fate where it belongs, with the Only Just Judge. I observe, with no further comment, that there are Anglicans and Orthodox with whom I have more in common than some Catholics I know. We share the characteristic of trying to balance faith, reason and tradition, and of not trying to give priority to whatsoever might be novel, whilst, at the same time, not turning our face against the fact that Spirit is at work in the Church

As I prepare for Lent, I am drawn back to this place and to the fellowship it provides.