prayer ...
"It's Your face, O Lord, that I seek; hide not your face, O Lord".
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
Sunday, July 09, 2006
Sunday, January 02, 2005
ZENIT - The World Seen From Rome
Code: ZE041212420
Date: 2004-12-24
Politics Without God?
George Weigel on Europe's Malaise
ROME, DEC. 24, 2004 (Zenit.org).- Here are excerpts from an address given by George Weigel at the Gregorian University this month. Weigel is a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.
* * *
Politics Without God? Reflections on Europe and America
By George Weigel
At the far western end of the axis that traverses Paris from the Louvre down the Champs Elysées and through the Arc de Triomphe is the Great Arch of La Défense. Designed by a sternly modernist Danish architect, the Great Arch is a colossal open cube: almost 40 stories tall, faced in glass and 2.47 acres of white Carrara marble. Its rooftop terrace offers an unparalleled view of the French capital, past the Tuilleries to the Ile de la Cité, Sante Chapelle, and Notre-Dame.
The arch's three-story high roof also houses the International Foundation for Human Rights. For President François Mitterrand planned the Great Arch as a human rights monument, something suitably gigantic to mark the bicentenary of the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Thus, in one guidebook, the Great Arch was dubbed "Fraternity Arch." That same guidebook, like every other one I consulted, emphasized that the entire Cathedral of Notre-Dame would fit comfortably inside the Great Arch.
All of which raised some questions, as I walked along that terrace in 1997. Which culture would better protect human rights and secure the moral foundations of democracy? The culture that built this rational, geometrically precise, but essentially featureless cube? Or the culture that produced the gargoyles and flying buttresses, the asymmetries and holy "unsameness" of Notre-Dame and the other great Gothic cathedrals of Europe?
Those questions have come back to me, if in different forms, as I've tried to understand Europe in recent years. How, for example, should one understand the fierce argument in Europe over whether a new constitutional treaty for the European Union should include a reference to the Christian sources of European civilization? Why did so many European intellectuals and political leaders deem any reference to the Christian sources of contemporary Europe civilization a threat to human rights and democracy?
Was there some connection between this internal European debate over Europe's constitution-making and the portrait in the European press of Americans (and especially an American president) as religious fanatics intent on shooting up the world? Was there a further connection between this debate and the fate of Rocco Buttiglione's candidacy for the post of Commissioner of Justice on the European Commission?
Understanding these phenomena requires something more than a conventional political analysis. Nor can political answers explain the reasons behind perhaps the most urgent issue confronting Europe today -- the fact that Western Europe is committing demographic suicide, its far-below-replacement-level birthrates creating enormous pressures on the European welfare state and a demographic vacuum into which Islamic immigrants are flowing in increasing numbers, often becoming radicalized in the process.
My proposal is that Europe is experiencing a crisis of cultural and civilizational morale whose roots are also taking hold in some parts quarters of American society and culture. Understanding and addressing this crisis means confronting the question posed sharply, if unintentionally, by those guidebooks that boast about the alleged superiority of the Great Arch to Notre-Dame: the question of the cube and the cathedral, and their relationship to both the meaning of freedom and the future of democracy.
To suggest that Europe is living through a "crisis of civilizational morale" is a very broad description. Let me raised some specific issues that point toward that conclusion -- and to the necessity of a cultural, indeed theological, analysis of Europe's situation today.
-- Why, in the aftermath of 1989, did Europeans fail to condemn communism as a moral and political monstrosity? Why was the only politically acceptable judgment on communism the rather banal observation that it "didn't work"?
-- Why, as historian John Keegan puts it, do Europeans often espouse "a philosophy of international action that actually rejected action and took refuge in the belief that all conflicts of interest were to be settled by consultation, conciliation, and the intervention of international agencies"?
-- What accounts for disturbing currents of irrationality in contemporary European politics? Why did one of every five Germans (and one-third of those under 30) believe that the United States was responsible for 9/11, while some 300,000 French men and women made a best seller out of "L'Effroyable Imposture" [The Appalling Fraud], in which the author, Thierry Meyssan, argued that the twin towers of the World Trade Center were destroyed by the U.S. military, using remote-controlled airliners?
-- Why did the voters of Spain give a de facto victory to appeasement in their March 2004 elections, held days after Al-Qaeda operatives killed hundreds and wounded thousands by bombing a Madrid train station?
-- Why is Europe retreating from democracy and binding itself ever tighter in the cords of bureaucracy? Why do European states find it virtually impossible to make hard domestic political decisions -- as on the length of the workweek or the funding of pensions? Why is Europe on the way to what French political philosopher Pierre Manent calls "depoliticization?" Why does Manent have "the impression today that the greatest ambition of Europeans is to become the inspectors of American prisons"?
-- Why are so many European public intellectuals "Christophobic," as international legal scholar J.H.H. Weiler (himself an observant Jew) puts it? Why is European high culture so contemptuous of both religious and secular tradition, as French philosopher Rémi Brague has pointed out?
-- Why do certain parts of Europe exhibit a curious, even bizarre, approach to death? Why did so many of the French prefer to continue their summer vacations during the European heat wave of 2003, leaving their parents unburied and warehoused in refrigerated lockers? Why is death increasingly anonymous in Germany, with no death notice in the newspapers, no church funeral ceremony, no secular memorial service -- "as though," as Richard John Neuhaus observed, "the deceased did not exist"?
-- Above all, why is Europe committing demographic suicide, systematically depopulating itself in what British historian Niall Ferguson calls the greatest "sustained reduction in European population since the Black Death of the 14th century"?
-- Why do 18 European countries report "negative natural increase" (i.e., more deaths than births)?
-- Why does no Western European country have a replacement-level birthrate?
-- Why is Germany likely to lose the equivalent of the population of the former East Germany in the first half of the 21st century?
-- Why will Spain's population decline from 40 million to 31 million by 2050?
-- Why will 42% of Italians be over 60 by 2050 -- at which point, on present trends, almost 60% of the Italian people will have no brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, or uncles?
-- What is happening when an entire continent, wealthier and healthier than ever before, declines to create the human future in the most elemental sense, by creating a next generation? ?
Probing to the deeper roots of Europe's crisis of civilizational morale is important for understanding Europe today and for discerning whatever promising paths of European renewal there may be. Getting at the roots of "Europe's problem" is also important for understanding a set of problems Americans may face in the not-too-distant future. And that means that both Europeans and Americans must learn to think in new ways about the dynamics of history.
During 13 years of research and teaching in east central Europe, I've been impressed by what might be called the Slavic view of history. You can find it in a great thinker who lived in the borderland between Orthodoxy and Catholicism, Vladimir Soloviev, who challenged the fashionable nihilism and materialism of the late 19th century.
You can find it in 19th-century Polish novelists, poets and playwrights, who, breaking with the Jacobin conviction that "revolution" meant a complete rupture with the past, insisted that genuine "revolution" meant the recovery of lost spiritual and moral values. You can find it in such intellectual leaders of the anti-communist resistance in east central Europe as Karol Wojtyla, Václav Havel and Václav Benda, who all argued that "living in the truth" could change what seemed unchangeable in history.
The common thread among these disparate thinkers is the conviction that the deepest currents of "history" are spiritual and cultural, rather than political and economic. "History" is not simply the byproduct of the contest for power in the world -- although power plays an important role in history. And "history" is certainly not the exhaust fumes produced by the means of production, as the Marxists taught.
Rather, "history" is driven by culture -- by what men and women honor, cherish, and worship; by what societies deem to be true and good and noble; by the expressions they give to those convictions in language, literature and the arts; by what individuals and societies are willing to stake their lives on.
Poland is one embodiment of this way of thinking, which Poles believe has been vindicated empirically by their own modern history. For 123 years, from 1795 to 1918, the Polish state was erased from Europe. Yet during that century and a quarter the Polish nation survived with such vigor that it could give birth to a new Polish state in 1918. And despite the fact that the revived Polish state was then beset for 50 years by the plagues of Nazism and communism, the Polish nation proved strong enough to give a new birth of freedom to east central Europe in the Revolution of 1989.
How did this happen? Poland survived -- better, Poland prevailed -- because of culture: a culture formed by a distinctive language, by a unique literature, and by an intense Catholic faith (which, an its noblest and deepest expressions, was ecumenical and tolerant, not xenophobic, as so many stereotypes have it). Poles know in their bones that culture is what drives history over the long haul.
This "Slavic view of history" is really a classically Christian way of thinking about history, whose roots can be traced back at least as far as St. Augustine and "The City of God." Yet, it is the Slavs who have been, in our time, the most powerful exponents of this "culture-first" understanding of the dynamics of the world's story. ?
World War I, the Great War, was the product of a crisis of civilizational morality, a failure of moral reason in a culture that had given the world the very concept of "moral reason." That crisis of moral reason led to a crisis of civilizational morale that is much with us today.
This latter crisis has only become visible since the end of the Cold War. Its effects were first masked by the illusory peace between World War I and World War II; then by the rise of totalitarianism and the Great Depression; then by World War II itself; and then by the Cold War. It was only after 1991, when the 77-year-long political-military crisis that began in 1914 had ended, that the long-term effects of Europe's "rage of self-mutilation" could come to the surface of history and be seen for what they were -- and for what they are.
The damage done to the fabric of European culture and civilization in the Great War could only been seen clearly when the Great War's political effects had been cleared from the board in 1991. Recognizing that damage for what it is brings into sharper focus the contemporary European cultural and political situation and its lessons for the United States.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's insight into the meaning of the Great War reinforces the intuition that we should look to the realm of culture for a deeper explanation of the currents of history. So let us take a first step in reading history the old-fashioned way -- St. Augustine's way -- through lenses ground by the tools of theology. And that brings us to another Christian analyst of modern European history.
Henri de Lubac was one of 20th-century Catholicism's most distinguished theologians. Like other Europeans who had witnessed the Continent's travail during the first four and a half decades of the century, Father de Lubac was haunted by the question, "What happened?" Or, perhaps more to the point, "Why had what happened, happened?"
Father de Lubac was fascinated by the history of ideas, which he knew to be fraught with "real world" consequences. Thus, during the early 1940s, he turned his attention to some of the most influential intellectual figures in pre-20th century European culture. The result was a book, "The Drama of Atheistic Humanism" ["Le Drame de l'humanisme athée"], which argued that the civilizational crisis in which Europe found itself during World War II was the product of a deliberate rejection of the God of the Bible in the name of authentic human liberation.
This, de Lubac suggested, was a great reversal. In the classical world, the gods, or Fate, played games with men and women, often with lethal consequences. In the face of these experiences, the revelation of the God of the Bible -- the self-disclosure in history of the one God who was neither a willful tyrant (to be avoided) nor a carnivorous predator (to be appeased) nor a remote abstraction (to be safely ignored) -- was perceived as a great liberation. Human beings were neither the playthings of the gods nor the passive victims of Fate. Because they could have access to the one true God through prayer and worship, those who believed in the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Jesus could bend history in a humane direction. History was thus an arena of responsibility and purpose.
Yet what biblical man had perceived as liberation, the proponents of atheistic humanism perceived as bondage. Human freedom could not co-exist with the God of Jews and Christians. Human greatness required rejecting the biblical God, according to atheistic humanism.
This, Father de Lubac argued, was something new. This was not the atheism of skeptical individuals. This was atheistic humanism -- atheism with a developed ideology and a program for remaking the world. As a historian of ideas, de Lubac knew that bad ideas can have lethal consequences. At the heart of the darkness inside the great mid-20th century tyrannies [of] communism, fascism, Nazism, Father de Lubac discerned the lethal effects of the marriage between modern technology and the ideas borne by atheistic humanism.
He summed up the results of this misbegotten union in these terms: "It is not true, as is sometimes said, that man cannot organize the world without God. What is true is that, without God, he can only organize it against man." That is what the tyrannies of the mid-20th century had proven -- ultramundane humanism is inevitably inhuman humanism. And inhuman humanism cannot neither sustain nor defend the democratic project. It can only undermine it or attack it. ?
The argument over acknowledging any Christian contribution to the democratic civilization of the 21st century may have clarified the understandings of "democracy" and "human rights" that shape contemporary European high culture and the political elite in the Brussels-Paris-Berlin axis, but it also raised serious questions about Europe's capacity to defend its democracy, morally and philosophically.
If democratic institutions and procedures are the expressions of a distinctive way of life based on specific moral commitments, then democratic citizenship must be more than a matter of following the procedures and abiding by the laws and regulations agreed upon by the institutions A democratic citizen is someone who can give an account of his or her commitment to human rights, to the rule of law and equality before the law, to decision-making by the majority and protection of the rights of minorities. Democratic citizenship means being able to tell why one affirms "the universal values of the inviolable and inalienable rights of the human person, democracy, equality, freedom and the rule of law," to cite the preamble to the European constitution. Who can give such an account?
Here is one of the richest ironies involved in the question of the cube and the cathedral. The original charge against Christians in the Roman empire was that they were "atheists": people who were "a-theos," people who had abandoned the gods of Rome and who were thus a threat to public life and public order. To be a-theos was to stand outside and over-against the political community.
The "Christophobia" of contemporary European high culture turns this indictment inside out and upside down: Christianity cannot be acknowledged as a source of European democracy because the only public space safe for pluralism, tolerance, civility, and democracy is a public space that is thoroughly a-theos.
It is all very strange. For the truth of the matter is that European Christians can likely give a more compelling account of their commitment to democratic values than their fellow Europeans who are a-theos -- who believe that "neutrality toward worldviews" must characterize democratic Europe. A postmodern or neo-Kantian "neutrality toward worldviews" cannot be truly tolerant; it can only be indifferent.
Absent convictions, there is no tolerance; there is only indifference. Absent some compelling notion of the truth that requires us to be tolerant of those who have a different understanding of the truth, there is only skepticism and relativism. And skepticism and relativism are very weak foundations on which to build and sustain a pluralistic democracy, for neither skepticism nor relativism, by their own logic, can "give an account" of why we should be tolerant and civil.
In contrast to this thin account of tolerance -- we should be tolerant because it works better -- there is the argument for tolerance given by Pope John Paul II in his 1989 encyclical letter on Christian mission, "Redemptoris Missio" [The Mission of the Redeemer]. There the Pope taught that "The Church proposes; she imposes nothing." The Catholic Church respects the "other" as an "other" who is also a seeker of truth and goodness; the Church only asks that the believer and the "other" enter into a dialogue that leads to mutual enrichment rather than to a deeper skepticism about the possibility of grasping the truth of things.
The Catholic Church believes it to be the will of God that Christians be tolerant of those who have a different view of God's will, or no view of God's will. Thus Catholics (and other Christians who share this conviction) can "give an account" of their defense of the "other's" freedom, even if the "other," skeptical and relativist, finds it hard to "give an account" of the freedom of the Christian. That the Church did not always behave according to these convictions is obvious from history.
The point today is that the Church recognizes, publicly, that acts of coercion undertaken in its name were offenses against its own true doctrine. That is why, on March 12, 2000, Pope John Paul II led a "Day of Pardon" at St. Peter's Basilica. This was not an exercise in Catholic political correctness, nor was this pandering to approved victim groups. This was confession: an acknowledgment of sin and a plea for divine mercy that recommitted the Church to live the truth it professed about the freedom of the human person.
A community capable of such acts -- the community of the cathedral, if you will -- is a community capable of learning from the past, capable of a reformed life. A community capable of such acts of public repentance is a community that can give a compelling account of its commitments to freedom.
Can others? Can those who are a-theos -- can the people of the cube -- grapple with the dark passages on European history caused by radically secularist understandings of the human person, human community, and human destiny: the Reign of Terror, Nazism, and communism?
These concerns are not, let me repeat, the products of American Euro-phobia, nor are they the result of the sharp division between much of Europe and the United States over the Iraq War. Indeed, there is nothing very original in my reading of Europe's current condition: You can find the same points of concern in John Paul II's 2003 apostolic exhortation, "Ecclesia in Europa." There, the Pope suggests that, within Europe itself, there is an intuition that a "Europe" of political, legal and economic structures alone is insufficient. Like John Paul II, thoughtful Europeans are asking whether a "Europe" that represents the continentwide triumph of bureaucratic regulation is all that might be hoped for.
The debate over the "invocatio Dei" in the new European constitution was also the present and the future, not just the past. Those who insisted that there be no overt recognition that Christianity played a decisive role in the formation of European civilization did not do so in the name of "tolerance," despite their claims to the contrary. They did so because they are committed to the proposition that there can be politics-without-God: that a Europe free, tolerant, civil, and pluralistic can only be built as a public space from which the God of the Bible has been excluded.
That this position is shared by more than a few American political, judicial, intellectual, and cultural leaders is obvious, and suggests that what has been unfolding in Europe in recent decades -- indeed, over the past two centuries -- could well be replicated in the United States (as it is already being replicated in Canada). To repeat, that is why "Europe's problem" is, from an American point of view, "our" problem, too.
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Code: ZE041212420
Date: 2004-12-24
Politics Without God?
George Weigel on Europe's Malaise
ROME, DEC. 24, 2004 (Zenit.org).- Here are excerpts from an address given by George Weigel at the Gregorian University this month. Weigel is a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.
* * *
Politics Without God? Reflections on Europe and America
By George Weigel
At the far western end of the axis that traverses Paris from the Louvre down the Champs Elysées and through the Arc de Triomphe is the Great Arch of La Défense. Designed by a sternly modernist Danish architect, the Great Arch is a colossal open cube: almost 40 stories tall, faced in glass and 2.47 acres of white Carrara marble. Its rooftop terrace offers an unparalleled view of the French capital, past the Tuilleries to the Ile de la Cité, Sante Chapelle, and Notre-Dame.
The arch's three-story high roof also houses the International Foundation for Human Rights. For President François Mitterrand planned the Great Arch as a human rights monument, something suitably gigantic to mark the bicentenary of the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Thus, in one guidebook, the Great Arch was dubbed "Fraternity Arch." That same guidebook, like every other one I consulted, emphasized that the entire Cathedral of Notre-Dame would fit comfortably inside the Great Arch.
All of which raised some questions, as I walked along that terrace in 1997. Which culture would better protect human rights and secure the moral foundations of democracy? The culture that built this rational, geometrically precise, but essentially featureless cube? Or the culture that produced the gargoyles and flying buttresses, the asymmetries and holy "unsameness" of Notre-Dame and the other great Gothic cathedrals of Europe?
Those questions have come back to me, if in different forms, as I've tried to understand Europe in recent years. How, for example, should one understand the fierce argument in Europe over whether a new constitutional treaty for the European Union should include a reference to the Christian sources of European civilization? Why did so many European intellectuals and political leaders deem any reference to the Christian sources of contemporary Europe civilization a threat to human rights and democracy?
Was there some connection between this internal European debate over Europe's constitution-making and the portrait in the European press of Americans (and especially an American president) as religious fanatics intent on shooting up the world? Was there a further connection between this debate and the fate of Rocco Buttiglione's candidacy for the post of Commissioner of Justice on the European Commission?
Understanding these phenomena requires something more than a conventional political analysis. Nor can political answers explain the reasons behind perhaps the most urgent issue confronting Europe today -- the fact that Western Europe is committing demographic suicide, its far-below-replacement-level birthrates creating enormous pressures on the European welfare state and a demographic vacuum into which Islamic immigrants are flowing in increasing numbers, often becoming radicalized in the process.
My proposal is that Europe is experiencing a crisis of cultural and civilizational morale whose roots are also taking hold in some parts quarters of American society and culture. Understanding and addressing this crisis means confronting the question posed sharply, if unintentionally, by those guidebooks that boast about the alleged superiority of the Great Arch to Notre-Dame: the question of the cube and the cathedral, and their relationship to both the meaning of freedom and the future of democracy.
To suggest that Europe is living through a "crisis of civilizational morale" is a very broad description. Let me raised some specific issues that point toward that conclusion -- and to the necessity of a cultural, indeed theological, analysis of Europe's situation today.
-- Why, in the aftermath of 1989, did Europeans fail to condemn communism as a moral and political monstrosity? Why was the only politically acceptable judgment on communism the rather banal observation that it "didn't work"?
-- Why, as historian John Keegan puts it, do Europeans often espouse "a philosophy of international action that actually rejected action and took refuge in the belief that all conflicts of interest were to be settled by consultation, conciliation, and the intervention of international agencies"?
-- What accounts for disturbing currents of irrationality in contemporary European politics? Why did one of every five Germans (and one-third of those under 30) believe that the United States was responsible for 9/11, while some 300,000 French men and women made a best seller out of "L'Effroyable Imposture" [The Appalling Fraud], in which the author, Thierry Meyssan, argued that the twin towers of the World Trade Center were destroyed by the U.S. military, using remote-controlled airliners?
-- Why did the voters of Spain give a de facto victory to appeasement in their March 2004 elections, held days after Al-Qaeda operatives killed hundreds and wounded thousands by bombing a Madrid train station?
-- Why is Europe retreating from democracy and binding itself ever tighter in the cords of bureaucracy? Why do European states find it virtually impossible to make hard domestic political decisions -- as on the length of the workweek or the funding of pensions? Why is Europe on the way to what French political philosopher Pierre Manent calls "depoliticization?" Why does Manent have "the impression today that the greatest ambition of Europeans is to become the inspectors of American prisons"?
-- Why are so many European public intellectuals "Christophobic," as international legal scholar J.H.H. Weiler (himself an observant Jew) puts it? Why is European high culture so contemptuous of both religious and secular tradition, as French philosopher Rémi Brague has pointed out?
-- Why do certain parts of Europe exhibit a curious, even bizarre, approach to death? Why did so many of the French prefer to continue their summer vacations during the European heat wave of 2003, leaving their parents unburied and warehoused in refrigerated lockers? Why is death increasingly anonymous in Germany, with no death notice in the newspapers, no church funeral ceremony, no secular memorial service -- "as though," as Richard John Neuhaus observed, "the deceased did not exist"?
-- Above all, why is Europe committing demographic suicide, systematically depopulating itself in what British historian Niall Ferguson calls the greatest "sustained reduction in European population since the Black Death of the 14th century"?
-- Why do 18 European countries report "negative natural increase" (i.e., more deaths than births)?
-- Why does no Western European country have a replacement-level birthrate?
-- Why is Germany likely to lose the equivalent of the population of the former East Germany in the first half of the 21st century?
-- Why will Spain's population decline from 40 million to 31 million by 2050?
-- Why will 42% of Italians be over 60 by 2050 -- at which point, on present trends, almost 60% of the Italian people will have no brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, or uncles?
-- What is happening when an entire continent, wealthier and healthier than ever before, declines to create the human future in the most elemental sense, by creating a next generation? ?
Probing to the deeper roots of Europe's crisis of civilizational morale is important for understanding Europe today and for discerning whatever promising paths of European renewal there may be. Getting at the roots of "Europe's problem" is also important for understanding a set of problems Americans may face in the not-too-distant future. And that means that both Europeans and Americans must learn to think in new ways about the dynamics of history.
During 13 years of research and teaching in east central Europe, I've been impressed by what might be called the Slavic view of history. You can find it in a great thinker who lived in the borderland between Orthodoxy and Catholicism, Vladimir Soloviev, who challenged the fashionable nihilism and materialism of the late 19th century.
You can find it in 19th-century Polish novelists, poets and playwrights, who, breaking with the Jacobin conviction that "revolution" meant a complete rupture with the past, insisted that genuine "revolution" meant the recovery of lost spiritual and moral values. You can find it in such intellectual leaders of the anti-communist resistance in east central Europe as Karol Wojtyla, Václav Havel and Václav Benda, who all argued that "living in the truth" could change what seemed unchangeable in history.
The common thread among these disparate thinkers is the conviction that the deepest currents of "history" are spiritual and cultural, rather than political and economic. "History" is not simply the byproduct of the contest for power in the world -- although power plays an important role in history. And "history" is certainly not the exhaust fumes produced by the means of production, as the Marxists taught.
Rather, "history" is driven by culture -- by what men and women honor, cherish, and worship; by what societies deem to be true and good and noble; by the expressions they give to those convictions in language, literature and the arts; by what individuals and societies are willing to stake their lives on.
Poland is one embodiment of this way of thinking, which Poles believe has been vindicated empirically by their own modern history. For 123 years, from 1795 to 1918, the Polish state was erased from Europe. Yet during that century and a quarter the Polish nation survived with such vigor that it could give birth to a new Polish state in 1918. And despite the fact that the revived Polish state was then beset for 50 years by the plagues of Nazism and communism, the Polish nation proved strong enough to give a new birth of freedom to east central Europe in the Revolution of 1989.
How did this happen? Poland survived -- better, Poland prevailed -- because of culture: a culture formed by a distinctive language, by a unique literature, and by an intense Catholic faith (which, an its noblest and deepest expressions, was ecumenical and tolerant, not xenophobic, as so many stereotypes have it). Poles know in their bones that culture is what drives history over the long haul.
This "Slavic view of history" is really a classically Christian way of thinking about history, whose roots can be traced back at least as far as St. Augustine and "The City of God." Yet, it is the Slavs who have been, in our time, the most powerful exponents of this "culture-first" understanding of the dynamics of the world's story. ?
World War I, the Great War, was the product of a crisis of civilizational morality, a failure of moral reason in a culture that had given the world the very concept of "moral reason." That crisis of moral reason led to a crisis of civilizational morale that is much with us today.
This latter crisis has only become visible since the end of the Cold War. Its effects were first masked by the illusory peace between World War I and World War II; then by the rise of totalitarianism and the Great Depression; then by World War II itself; and then by the Cold War. It was only after 1991, when the 77-year-long political-military crisis that began in 1914 had ended, that the long-term effects of Europe's "rage of self-mutilation" could come to the surface of history and be seen for what they were -- and for what they are.
The damage done to the fabric of European culture and civilization in the Great War could only been seen clearly when the Great War's political effects had been cleared from the board in 1991. Recognizing that damage for what it is brings into sharper focus the contemporary European cultural and political situation and its lessons for the United States.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's insight into the meaning of the Great War reinforces the intuition that we should look to the realm of culture for a deeper explanation of the currents of history. So let us take a first step in reading history the old-fashioned way -- St. Augustine's way -- through lenses ground by the tools of theology. And that brings us to another Christian analyst of modern European history.
Henri de Lubac was one of 20th-century Catholicism's most distinguished theologians. Like other Europeans who had witnessed the Continent's travail during the first four and a half decades of the century, Father de Lubac was haunted by the question, "What happened?" Or, perhaps more to the point, "Why had what happened, happened?"
Father de Lubac was fascinated by the history of ideas, which he knew to be fraught with "real world" consequences. Thus, during the early 1940s, he turned his attention to some of the most influential intellectual figures in pre-20th century European culture. The result was a book, "The Drama of Atheistic Humanism" ["Le Drame de l'humanisme athée"], which argued that the civilizational crisis in which Europe found itself during World War II was the product of a deliberate rejection of the God of the Bible in the name of authentic human liberation.
This, de Lubac suggested, was a great reversal. In the classical world, the gods, or Fate, played games with men and women, often with lethal consequences. In the face of these experiences, the revelation of the God of the Bible -- the self-disclosure in history of the one God who was neither a willful tyrant (to be avoided) nor a carnivorous predator (to be appeased) nor a remote abstraction (to be safely ignored) -- was perceived as a great liberation. Human beings were neither the playthings of the gods nor the passive victims of Fate. Because they could have access to the one true God through prayer and worship, those who believed in the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Jesus could bend history in a humane direction. History was thus an arena of responsibility and purpose.
Yet what biblical man had perceived as liberation, the proponents of atheistic humanism perceived as bondage. Human freedom could not co-exist with the God of Jews and Christians. Human greatness required rejecting the biblical God, according to atheistic humanism.
This, Father de Lubac argued, was something new. This was not the atheism of skeptical individuals. This was atheistic humanism -- atheism with a developed ideology and a program for remaking the world. As a historian of ideas, de Lubac knew that bad ideas can have lethal consequences. At the heart of the darkness inside the great mid-20th century tyrannies [of] communism, fascism, Nazism, Father de Lubac discerned the lethal effects of the marriage between modern technology and the ideas borne by atheistic humanism.
He summed up the results of this misbegotten union in these terms: "It is not true, as is sometimes said, that man cannot organize the world without God. What is true is that, without God, he can only organize it against man." That is what the tyrannies of the mid-20th century had proven -- ultramundane humanism is inevitably inhuman humanism. And inhuman humanism cannot neither sustain nor defend the democratic project. It can only undermine it or attack it. ?
The argument over acknowledging any Christian contribution to the democratic civilization of the 21st century may have clarified the understandings of "democracy" and "human rights" that shape contemporary European high culture and the political elite in the Brussels-Paris-Berlin axis, but it also raised serious questions about Europe's capacity to defend its democracy, morally and philosophically.
If democratic institutions and procedures are the expressions of a distinctive way of life based on specific moral commitments, then democratic citizenship must be more than a matter of following the procedures and abiding by the laws and regulations agreed upon by the institutions A democratic citizen is someone who can give an account of his or her commitment to human rights, to the rule of law and equality before the law, to decision-making by the majority and protection of the rights of minorities. Democratic citizenship means being able to tell why one affirms "the universal values of the inviolable and inalienable rights of the human person, democracy, equality, freedom and the rule of law," to cite the preamble to the European constitution. Who can give such an account?
Here is one of the richest ironies involved in the question of the cube and the cathedral. The original charge against Christians in the Roman empire was that they were "atheists": people who were "a-theos," people who had abandoned the gods of Rome and who were thus a threat to public life and public order. To be a-theos was to stand outside and over-against the political community.
The "Christophobia" of contemporary European high culture turns this indictment inside out and upside down: Christianity cannot be acknowledged as a source of European democracy because the only public space safe for pluralism, tolerance, civility, and democracy is a public space that is thoroughly a-theos.
It is all very strange. For the truth of the matter is that European Christians can likely give a more compelling account of their commitment to democratic values than their fellow Europeans who are a-theos -- who believe that "neutrality toward worldviews" must characterize democratic Europe. A postmodern or neo-Kantian "neutrality toward worldviews" cannot be truly tolerant; it can only be indifferent.
Absent convictions, there is no tolerance; there is only indifference. Absent some compelling notion of the truth that requires us to be tolerant of those who have a different understanding of the truth, there is only skepticism and relativism. And skepticism and relativism are very weak foundations on which to build and sustain a pluralistic democracy, for neither skepticism nor relativism, by their own logic, can "give an account" of why we should be tolerant and civil.
In contrast to this thin account of tolerance -- we should be tolerant because it works better -- there is the argument for tolerance given by Pope John Paul II in his 1989 encyclical letter on Christian mission, "Redemptoris Missio" [The Mission of the Redeemer]. There the Pope taught that "The Church proposes; she imposes nothing." The Catholic Church respects the "other" as an "other" who is also a seeker of truth and goodness; the Church only asks that the believer and the "other" enter into a dialogue that leads to mutual enrichment rather than to a deeper skepticism about the possibility of grasping the truth of things.
The Catholic Church believes it to be the will of God that Christians be tolerant of those who have a different view of God's will, or no view of God's will. Thus Catholics (and other Christians who share this conviction) can "give an account" of their defense of the "other's" freedom, even if the "other," skeptical and relativist, finds it hard to "give an account" of the freedom of the Christian. That the Church did not always behave according to these convictions is obvious from history.
The point today is that the Church recognizes, publicly, that acts of coercion undertaken in its name were offenses against its own true doctrine. That is why, on March 12, 2000, Pope John Paul II led a "Day of Pardon" at St. Peter's Basilica. This was not an exercise in Catholic political correctness, nor was this pandering to approved victim groups. This was confession: an acknowledgment of sin and a plea for divine mercy that recommitted the Church to live the truth it professed about the freedom of the human person.
A community capable of such acts -- the community of the cathedral, if you will -- is a community capable of learning from the past, capable of a reformed life. A community capable of such acts of public repentance is a community that can give a compelling account of its commitments to freedom.
Can others? Can those who are a-theos -- can the people of the cube -- grapple with the dark passages on European history caused by radically secularist understandings of the human person, human community, and human destiny: the Reign of Terror, Nazism, and communism?
These concerns are not, let me repeat, the products of American Euro-phobia, nor are they the result of the sharp division between much of Europe and the United States over the Iraq War. Indeed, there is nothing very original in my reading of Europe's current condition: You can find the same points of concern in John Paul II's 2003 apostolic exhortation, "Ecclesia in Europa." There, the Pope suggests that, within Europe itself, there is an intuition that a "Europe" of political, legal and economic structures alone is insufficient. Like John Paul II, thoughtful Europeans are asking whether a "Europe" that represents the continentwide triumph of bureaucratic regulation is all that might be hoped for.
The debate over the "invocatio Dei" in the new European constitution was also the present and the future, not just the past. Those who insisted that there be no overt recognition that Christianity played a decisive role in the formation of European civilization did not do so in the name of "tolerance," despite their claims to the contrary. They did so because they are committed to the proposition that there can be politics-without-God: that a Europe free, tolerant, civil, and pluralistic can only be built as a public space from which the God of the Bible has been excluded.
That this position is shared by more than a few American political, judicial, intellectual, and cultural leaders is obvious, and suggests that what has been unfolding in Europe in recent decades -- indeed, over the past two centuries -- could well be replicated in the United States (as it is already being replicated in Canada). To repeat, that is why "Europe's problem" is, from an American point of view, "our" problem, too.
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Saturday, January 01, 2005
Thursday, December 16, 2004
An atheist was taking a walk through the woods.
What majestic trees!
What powerful rivers!
What beautiful animals!" he said to himself.
As he was walking alongside the river he heard a rustling in the bushes
behind him. He turned to look. He saw a 7 foot grizzly charge towards him.
He ran as fast as he could up the path. He looked over his shoulder and saw
that the bear was closing in on him. He looked over his shoulder again, and
the bear was even closer.
He tripped and fell on the ground. He rolled over to pick himself up but saw
the bear right on top of him, reaching for him with his left paw and raising
his right paw to strike him.
At that instant the Atheist cried out: "Oh my God!..."
Time stopped.
The bear froze.
The forest was silent.
As a bright light shone upon the man, a voice came out of the sky:
"You deny my existence for all of these years, teach others I don't exist,
and even credit creation to a cosmic accident.
Do you expect me to help you out of this predicament?
Am I to count you as a believer?"
The atheist looked directly into the light, "It would be hypocritical of me
to suddenly ask You to treat me as a Christian now, but perhaps could you
make the BEAR a Christian?"
"Very well," said the voice.
The light went out.
The sounds of the forest resumed.
And then the bear dropped his right paw, brought both paws together and
bowed his head and spoke:
"Lord, bless this food, which I am about to receive from thy bounty through
Christ our Lord Amen."
What majestic trees!
What powerful rivers!
What beautiful animals!" he said to himself.
As he was walking alongside the river he heard a rustling in the bushes
behind him. He turned to look. He saw a 7 foot grizzly charge towards him.
He ran as fast as he could up the path. He looked over his shoulder and saw
that the bear was closing in on him. He looked over his shoulder again, and
the bear was even closer.
He tripped and fell on the ground. He rolled over to pick himself up but saw
the bear right on top of him, reaching for him with his left paw and raising
his right paw to strike him.
At that instant the Atheist cried out: "Oh my God!..."
Time stopped.
The bear froze.
The forest was silent.
As a bright light shone upon the man, a voice came out of the sky:
"You deny my existence for all of these years, teach others I don't exist,
and even credit creation to a cosmic accident.
Do you expect me to help you out of this predicament?
Am I to count you as a believer?"
The atheist looked directly into the light, "It would be hypocritical of me
to suddenly ask You to treat me as a Christian now, but perhaps could you
make the BEAR a Christian?"
"Very well," said the voice.
The light went out.
The sounds of the forest resumed.
And then the bear dropped his right paw, brought both paws together and
bowed his head and spoke:
"Lord, bless this food, which I am about to receive from thy bounty through
Christ our Lord Amen."
35 CATHOLIC MISSIONARIES KILLED IN 2003
VATICAN CITY, MARCH 22, 2004 (Zenit.org).- Last year saw the lives of 35 Catholic missionaries -- bishops, priests, religious and lay people -- ended violently.
So says the news agency Fides of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples which published the names of the dead, on the occasion of the Day of Prayer and Fasting in Memory of Martyred Missionaries, to be observed on Wednesday.
In 2003 the greatest number of victims was recorded in Africa, particularly in Sudan and Uganda, where rebels continue to combat the established government, and in war-torn Congo. Notable in Burundi was the killing of Archbishop Michael Courtney, apostolic nuncio.
The list of missionaries killed, updated only in Italian, is published by Fides at
VATICAN CITY, MARCH 22, 2004 (Zenit.org).- Last year saw the lives of 35 Catholic missionaries -- bishops, priests, religious and lay people -- ended violently.
So says the news agency Fides of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples which published the names of the dead, on the occasion of the Day of Prayer and Fasting in Memory of Martyred Missionaries, to be observed on Wednesday.
In 2003 the greatest number of victims was recorded in Africa, particularly in Sudan and Uganda, where rebels continue to combat the established government, and in war-torn Congo. Notable in Burundi was the killing of Archbishop Michael Courtney, apostolic nuncio.
The list of missionaries killed, updated only in Italian, is published by Fides at
1954 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF RABBI WHO CONVERTED IS PUBLISHED
Israel Zoller Reported a "Peaceful Conscience"
ROME, FEB. 16, 2004 (Zenit.org).- The autobiography of Israel Zoller, a wartime rabbi of Rome who converted to Christianity in 1945, has just been published in Italy -- a half-century after it was written.
In "Before the Dawn" ("Prima dell'Alba," St. Paul Publishers), Zoller says that at his baptism he took the name Eugene, in honor of the wartime help his community received from Pope Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli).
Zoller led the Jewish community in Rome from 1938 to July 1944. On Aug. 15 of that year, he revealed to Father Paolo Dezza, then rector of the Gregorian University and eventually a cardinal, his intention to become a Catholic.
The former rabbi was baptized, together with his wife -- who added "Mary" to her given name Emma -- on Feb. 13, 1945, in the chapel of St. Mary of the Angels Church. The author wrote the book in 1954. He died in 1956.
Israel Zoller was of Polish origin. His mother belonged to a family of rabbinical tradition, which could trace its origins back four centuries. Israel studied at the University of Vienna and later at the University of Florence, where he received a licentiate in philosophy, while at the same time studying at the Rabbinical College.
In 1920, Zoller became chief rabbi of Trieste. Thirteen years later he was granted Italian citizenship. Because of the Fascist laws, he had to Italianize his surname from Zoller to Zolli.
Eventually he became professor of arts and Jewish literature at the University of Padua, but was forced to leave the field of teaching because of the racial laws of Benito Mussolini's government. He was appointed chief rabbi of Rome in 1938.
In his book, Zolli recounts how after the arrival of the Nazis in Rome he dedicated himself to hiding Jews and saving their lives, thanks to the collaboration of Vatican institutions, and in particular, that of Pius XII.
According to the book, Ugo Foa, president of the Jewish community at the time, did not share the rabbi's fears, and believed that Zolli's warnings about the Nazis were alarmist.
To those who accused him of being a traitor for having been baptized, Zolli answered: "I haven't denied anything; I have a peaceful conscience. Is not the God of Jesus Christ, of Paul, the same God as that of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob? Paul was a convert. Did he, by any chance, abandon the God of Israel? Did he cease to love Israel? Just to think something like this is absurd."
ZE04021608
Original
Israel Zoller Reported a "Peaceful Conscience"
ROME, FEB. 16, 2004 (Zenit.org).- The autobiography of Israel Zoller, a wartime rabbi of Rome who converted to Christianity in 1945, has just been published in Italy -- a half-century after it was written.
In "Before the Dawn" ("Prima dell'Alba," St. Paul Publishers), Zoller says that at his baptism he took the name Eugene, in honor of the wartime help his community received from Pope Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli).
Zoller led the Jewish community in Rome from 1938 to July 1944. On Aug. 15 of that year, he revealed to Father Paolo Dezza, then rector of the Gregorian University and eventually a cardinal, his intention to become a Catholic.
The former rabbi was baptized, together with his wife -- who added "Mary" to her given name Emma -- on Feb. 13, 1945, in the chapel of St. Mary of the Angels Church. The author wrote the book in 1954. He died in 1956.
Israel Zoller was of Polish origin. His mother belonged to a family of rabbinical tradition, which could trace its origins back four centuries. Israel studied at the University of Vienna and later at the University of Florence, where he received a licentiate in philosophy, while at the same time studying at the Rabbinical College.
In 1920, Zoller became chief rabbi of Trieste. Thirteen years later he was granted Italian citizenship. Because of the Fascist laws, he had to Italianize his surname from Zoller to Zolli.
Eventually he became professor of arts and Jewish literature at the University of Padua, but was forced to leave the field of teaching because of the racial laws of Benito Mussolini's government. He was appointed chief rabbi of Rome in 1938.
In his book, Zolli recounts how after the arrival of the Nazis in Rome he dedicated himself to hiding Jews and saving their lives, thanks to the collaboration of Vatican institutions, and in particular, that of Pius XII.
According to the book, Ugo Foa, president of the Jewish community at the time, did not share the rabbi's fears, and believed that Zolli's warnings about the Nazis were alarmist.
To those who accused him of being a traitor for having been baptized, Zolli answered: "I haven't denied anything; I have a peaceful conscience. Is not the God of Jesus Christ, of Paul, the same God as that of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob? Paul was a convert. Did he, by any chance, abandon the God of Israel? Did he cease to love Israel? Just to think something like this is absurd."
ZE04021608
Original
Saturday, June 26, 2004
Jennifer Ferrara former Lutheran minister apologist for the all-male Catholic priesthood
FORMER LUTHERAN PASTOR DEBUNKS WOMEN'S ORDINATION (PART 1)
Jennifer Ferrara Was Won Over by the Pope's Theology of the Body
SPRING CITY, Pennsylvania, JUNE 21, 2004 (Zenit.org).- When she was younger, Jennifer Ferrara never would have foreseen the day when she became a sort of apologist for the all-male Catholic priesthood.
But that's what the former Lutheran minister who converted to Catholicism has become.
Ferrara, who became Catholic in 1998, recently told her conversion story in "The Catholic Mystique: Fourteen Women Find Fulfillment in the Catholic Church" (Our Sunday Visitor), which she co-edited with Patricia Sodano Ireland, another former Lutheran pastor.
Ferrara shared with ZENIT how her search for theological justification of women's ordination in Lutheran seminary eventually changed her mind about the priesthood and opened her heart to the Catholic Church.
Part 2 of this interview will appear Tuesday.
Q: How did you as a former Lutheran pastor come to realize that women should not and cannot be ordained as priests?
Ferrara: When I entered seminary, I was a garden-variety feminist who believed men and women were basically the same. I thought it patently obvious that women should be ordained.
I really gave the issue little thought, but to the extent that I did, it was a matter of equal rights. I also was not particularly orthodox in my beliefs. I had studied religion in college; I did not lose my faith in the process but adopted a mishmash of heretical ideas.
While in the seminary, I gradually became theologically orthodox, which was -- considering the environment of mainline Protestant seminaries -- a minor miracle. Slowly, it began to dawn on me that women's ordination was a new development that needed theological justification. I did not come up with a full-blown defense until years later when I was a parish pastor.
By that time, I thought of myself as an "evangelical catholic." Evangelical catholics view Lutheranism as a reform movement within and for the one Church of Christ. Therefore, Lutherans have a responsibility to work toward reconciliation with Rome.
The fact that I was a Lutheran pastor put me in an awkward position, theologically speaking. I was an impediment to that reconciliation for which I longed. This forced me to take a hard look at the issue of women's ordination.
Q: What did Luther himself think of the idea of women priests?
Ferrara: Though Martin Luther did not believe in women's ordination, I found support for it in his writings.
In his "Lectures on Genesis," he argues that God did not intend for men and women to have different roles. Differentiation between the sexes is a result of the fall of our first parents. As a form of punishment, women have been subjected to men and, therefore, have been deprived of the ability to administer to affairs outside the home, including those of the Church.
Luther believed that male headship was a matter of natural law. As a Lutheran pastor, I disagreed. The acceptance of equality between the sexes throughout the Western world demonstrated otherwise.
According to Luther, societal arrangements should be preserved within the Church, lest we give scandal to the Gospel. I thought restricting ordination to men had become a modern-day scandal. Ordaining women seemed like the best way to serve our Lord in this time and place.
When I started to think about becoming Roman Catholic, I disagreed with the Church's teachings on women's ordination. I actually thought about writing an article outlining what I presumed to be the theological deficiencies with the Catholic position, which in retrospect seems like sheer hubris.
In order to prepare for it, I read John Paul II's theology of the body. There I encountered a vision of creation that challenged all my feminist notions about men and women.
Q: How so?
Ferrara: According to John Paul, men and women were not created essentially the same. Masculinity and femininity are not just attributes; rather, the function of sex is a constituent part of the person. Men and woman both express the human but do so in different and complementary ways. Believe it or not, this was a radically new idea to me.
The differences between men and women lie in the way they express love for one another. Men have the more active role in the relationship: The husband is the one who loves while the wife is the one who is loved and, in return, gives love. True authority is exercised through service. As John Paul II says, "To reign is to serve."
However, men and women serve in particularly masculine and feminine ways. At the heart of this diversity in roles is the difference between motherhood and fatherhood.
No matter what men and women do, they bring paternal or maternal characteristics to their vocation. This is just as true of those who have chosen the religious life as it is of those who become biological parents.
This means the Roman Catholic priest is not simply a father figure: He is a spiritual father. To state what has ceased to be obvious in a society governed by the principle of androgyny: Mothers and fathers are not interchangeable. Women are not men and, therefore, cannot be priests any more than they can be fathers in the physical sense. If women can step into the role of priest, then it is no longer one of fatherhood.
To understand all of this required me to give up my functional view of the ministry. In most Protestant denominations, the pastor serves a role within the priesthood of all believers. He or she preaches the Word and administers the sacraments.
In the Catholic Church, the priest acts "in persona Christi." Christ is the bridegroom; the Church is his bride. This nuptial mystery is proclaimed throughout the Old and New Testaments.
According to the Catholic understanding of the priesthood, the priest represents Christ himself, the author of the covenant, the bridegroom and head of the Church. This is especially true in the case of the Eucharist, when Christ is exercising his ministry of salvation.
One must utterly disregard the importance of the nuptial mystery for the economy of salvation in order to make an argument for women's ordination.
If the Church were to ordain women, the entire understanding of the importance of the feminine and masculine in the working out of our salvation would be lost. Much is at stake here. Once I really saw that, it was relatively easy for me to give up my ordination and embrace the Church's position.
[Tuesday: The role of women in the Church]
ZE04062121
www.zenit.org/english/visualizza.phtml?sid=55677
Part II
FORMER LUTHERAN PASTOR DEFENDS ALL-MALE PRIESTHOOD (PART 2)
Jennifer Ferrara on Proper Roles in the Church
SPRING CITY, Pennsylvania, JUNE 22, 2004 (Zenit.org).- Women can find innumerable opportunities for service in the Church if only they embrace their proper role, says a former Lutheran minister who now extols the all-male Catholic priesthood.
Jennifer Ferrara, who became Catholic in 1998, recently told her conversion story in "The Catholic Mystique: Fourteen Women Find Fulfillment in the Catholic Church" (Our Sunday Visitor). She co-edited it with Patricia Sodano Ireland, another former Lutheran pastor.
Ferrara shared with ZENIT how women will find fulfillment in the Church if they understand that only Catholicism recognizes the importance of the feminine in society and in salvation. Part 1 of this interview appeared Monday.
Q: What role is left for women in the Church if they cannot be priests?
Ferrara: It is not a matter of a role "being left for women" but of women embracing their proper role. There has always been plenty for women to do in the Catholic Church.
Remember, the ordination of women in Protestant communities is a recent development. Before then, women had almost no role to play in those denominations. Protestant churches are starkly masculine.
As a Lutheran, I had no female models of holiness to turn to for comfort and guidance. Though many Protestant denominations ordain women, they do not recognize the importance of the feminine -- mother Church embodied in Mary -- in God's plan for salvation.
I do not see why many Catholics discount the importance of the women religious in the life of the Church as if they were second-class citizens. They are our spiritual mothers.
Protestants have never recognized such a role for women. Moreover, there are also all sorts of lay apostolates, orders and associations women can join.
Q: Your conversion from a Lutheran minister to being a Catholic also meant giving up your former ministerial role, yet some women in the Church argue they feel excluded because they cannot become priests. What would you say to them?
Ferrara: I would begin by saying I understand their anger and frustration.
At first, I was bitter about the prospect of giving up my ordination in order to join the Church. However, I would also tell them my life as a Roman Catholic laywoman, wife and mother has taken on a new sense of definition.
For the first time, I am trying to listen to what the Church has to say about who I am rather than expecting the Church to conform to what I think she should be.
In general, modern people chafe against revealed authority because they expect the outer life of institutions to be rendered serviceable to the psychological inner life of individuals. Therefore, if women want to be priests and claim to feel pain because they are not priests, it automatically follows that they should be priests.
Yet women who insist they have a call to the priesthood and use their pain as evidence of an authentic interior call from God are, in fact, using the protean politics of pain and not Catholic theology to explain their experiences.
If they truly wish to empty themselves and renounce their own will for the sake of God and Church, they will find innumerable opportunities for service.
Q: How do you explain John Paul II's claim that men and women were not created as identical beings to those who think men and women are the same, interchangeable?
Ferrara: I have found that those who are determined to embrace the principle of androgyny are not open to hearing about the Pope's teachings.
However, the average person knows instinctively that men and women are not the same. This is especially true of those who have children. They see mothers and fathers, boys and girls, are inherently different.
John Paul II's teachings explain reality. That is where I begin. If you can get people to acknowledge the simple premise that men and women -- though equal in dignity and importance -- are different, you can begin to talk about what this means for the roles they play.
Q: What can be done to combat the movement for women's ordination?
Ferrara: Those of us who oppose women's ordination cannot allow ourselves to be put on the defensive. We do not have to apologize for our stance. The best way to combat the movement for women's ordination is to present the Church's teachings in a positive light.
We do not raise the status of women by convincing them that they need to be men. Though women can and should be allowed to do most of the jobs traditionally filled by men -- bringing to them a feminine sensibility -- they cannot and never will be biological and spiritual fathers.
Those who insist otherwise effectively deny that which is noble and holy about being wives and mothers -- biological and spiritual -- in the plan by which God intends to redeem his creation.
The Catholic Church is one the few institutions, maybe the only one, left in the world that recognizes the importance of the feminine not only for the proper working of society but for our salvation. We need to be willing to say just that.
ZE04062223
www.zenit.org/english/visualizza.phtml?sid=55735
FORMER LUTHERAN PASTOR DEBUNKS WOMEN'S ORDINATION (PART 1)
Jennifer Ferrara Was Won Over by the Pope's Theology of the Body
SPRING CITY, Pennsylvania, JUNE 21, 2004 (Zenit.org).- When she was younger, Jennifer Ferrara never would have foreseen the day when she became a sort of apologist for the all-male Catholic priesthood.
But that's what the former Lutheran minister who converted to Catholicism has become.
Ferrara, who became Catholic in 1998, recently told her conversion story in "The Catholic Mystique: Fourteen Women Find Fulfillment in the Catholic Church" (Our Sunday Visitor), which she co-edited with Patricia Sodano Ireland, another former Lutheran pastor.
Ferrara shared with ZENIT how her search for theological justification of women's ordination in Lutheran seminary eventually changed her mind about the priesthood and opened her heart to the Catholic Church.
Part 2 of this interview will appear Tuesday.
Q: How did you as a former Lutheran pastor come to realize that women should not and cannot be ordained as priests?
Ferrara: When I entered seminary, I was a garden-variety feminist who believed men and women were basically the same. I thought it patently obvious that women should be ordained.
I really gave the issue little thought, but to the extent that I did, it was a matter of equal rights. I also was not particularly orthodox in my beliefs. I had studied religion in college; I did not lose my faith in the process but adopted a mishmash of heretical ideas.
While in the seminary, I gradually became theologically orthodox, which was -- considering the environment of mainline Protestant seminaries -- a minor miracle. Slowly, it began to dawn on me that women's ordination was a new development that needed theological justification. I did not come up with a full-blown defense until years later when I was a parish pastor.
By that time, I thought of myself as an "evangelical catholic." Evangelical catholics view Lutheranism as a reform movement within and for the one Church of Christ. Therefore, Lutherans have a responsibility to work toward reconciliation with Rome.
The fact that I was a Lutheran pastor put me in an awkward position, theologically speaking. I was an impediment to that reconciliation for which I longed. This forced me to take a hard look at the issue of women's ordination.
Q: What did Luther himself think of the idea of women priests?
Ferrara: Though Martin Luther did not believe in women's ordination, I found support for it in his writings.
In his "Lectures on Genesis," he argues that God did not intend for men and women to have different roles. Differentiation between the sexes is a result of the fall of our first parents. As a form of punishment, women have been subjected to men and, therefore, have been deprived of the ability to administer to affairs outside the home, including those of the Church.
Luther believed that male headship was a matter of natural law. As a Lutheran pastor, I disagreed. The acceptance of equality between the sexes throughout the Western world demonstrated otherwise.
According to Luther, societal arrangements should be preserved within the Church, lest we give scandal to the Gospel. I thought restricting ordination to men had become a modern-day scandal. Ordaining women seemed like the best way to serve our Lord in this time and place.
When I started to think about becoming Roman Catholic, I disagreed with the Church's teachings on women's ordination. I actually thought about writing an article outlining what I presumed to be the theological deficiencies with the Catholic position, which in retrospect seems like sheer hubris.
In order to prepare for it, I read John Paul II's theology of the body. There I encountered a vision of creation that challenged all my feminist notions about men and women.
Q: How so?
Ferrara: According to John Paul, men and women were not created essentially the same. Masculinity and femininity are not just attributes; rather, the function of sex is a constituent part of the person. Men and woman both express the human but do so in different and complementary ways. Believe it or not, this was a radically new idea to me.
The differences between men and women lie in the way they express love for one another. Men have the more active role in the relationship: The husband is the one who loves while the wife is the one who is loved and, in return, gives love. True authority is exercised through service. As John Paul II says, "To reign is to serve."
However, men and women serve in particularly masculine and feminine ways. At the heart of this diversity in roles is the difference between motherhood and fatherhood.
No matter what men and women do, they bring paternal or maternal characteristics to their vocation. This is just as true of those who have chosen the religious life as it is of those who become biological parents.
This means the Roman Catholic priest is not simply a father figure: He is a spiritual father. To state what has ceased to be obvious in a society governed by the principle of androgyny: Mothers and fathers are not interchangeable. Women are not men and, therefore, cannot be priests any more than they can be fathers in the physical sense. If women can step into the role of priest, then it is no longer one of fatherhood.
To understand all of this required me to give up my functional view of the ministry. In most Protestant denominations, the pastor serves a role within the priesthood of all believers. He or she preaches the Word and administers the sacraments.
In the Catholic Church, the priest acts "in persona Christi." Christ is the bridegroom; the Church is his bride. This nuptial mystery is proclaimed throughout the Old and New Testaments.
According to the Catholic understanding of the priesthood, the priest represents Christ himself, the author of the covenant, the bridegroom and head of the Church. This is especially true in the case of the Eucharist, when Christ is exercising his ministry of salvation.
One must utterly disregard the importance of the nuptial mystery for the economy of salvation in order to make an argument for women's ordination.
If the Church were to ordain women, the entire understanding of the importance of the feminine and masculine in the working out of our salvation would be lost. Much is at stake here. Once I really saw that, it was relatively easy for me to give up my ordination and embrace the Church's position.
[Tuesday: The role of women in the Church]
ZE04062121
www.zenit.org/english/visualizza.phtml?sid=55677
Part II
FORMER LUTHERAN PASTOR DEFENDS ALL-MALE PRIESTHOOD (PART 2)
Jennifer Ferrara on Proper Roles in the Church
SPRING CITY, Pennsylvania, JUNE 22, 2004 (Zenit.org).- Women can find innumerable opportunities for service in the Church if only they embrace their proper role, says a former Lutheran minister who now extols the all-male Catholic priesthood.
Jennifer Ferrara, who became Catholic in 1998, recently told her conversion story in "The Catholic Mystique: Fourteen Women Find Fulfillment in the Catholic Church" (Our Sunday Visitor). She co-edited it with Patricia Sodano Ireland, another former Lutheran pastor.
Ferrara shared with ZENIT how women will find fulfillment in the Church if they understand that only Catholicism recognizes the importance of the feminine in society and in salvation. Part 1 of this interview appeared Monday.
Q: What role is left for women in the Church if they cannot be priests?
Ferrara: It is not a matter of a role "being left for women" but of women embracing their proper role. There has always been plenty for women to do in the Catholic Church.
Remember, the ordination of women in Protestant communities is a recent development. Before then, women had almost no role to play in those denominations. Protestant churches are starkly masculine.
As a Lutheran, I had no female models of holiness to turn to for comfort and guidance. Though many Protestant denominations ordain women, they do not recognize the importance of the feminine -- mother Church embodied in Mary -- in God's plan for salvation.
I do not see why many Catholics discount the importance of the women religious in the life of the Church as if they were second-class citizens. They are our spiritual mothers.
Protestants have never recognized such a role for women. Moreover, there are also all sorts of lay apostolates, orders and associations women can join.
Q: Your conversion from a Lutheran minister to being a Catholic also meant giving up your former ministerial role, yet some women in the Church argue they feel excluded because they cannot become priests. What would you say to them?
Ferrara: I would begin by saying I understand their anger and frustration.
At first, I was bitter about the prospect of giving up my ordination in order to join the Church. However, I would also tell them my life as a Roman Catholic laywoman, wife and mother has taken on a new sense of definition.
For the first time, I am trying to listen to what the Church has to say about who I am rather than expecting the Church to conform to what I think she should be.
In general, modern people chafe against revealed authority because they expect the outer life of institutions to be rendered serviceable to the psychological inner life of individuals. Therefore, if women want to be priests and claim to feel pain because they are not priests, it automatically follows that they should be priests.
Yet women who insist they have a call to the priesthood and use their pain as evidence of an authentic interior call from God are, in fact, using the protean politics of pain and not Catholic theology to explain their experiences.
If they truly wish to empty themselves and renounce their own will for the sake of God and Church, they will find innumerable opportunities for service.
Q: How do you explain John Paul II's claim that men and women were not created as identical beings to those who think men and women are the same, interchangeable?
Ferrara: I have found that those who are determined to embrace the principle of androgyny are not open to hearing about the Pope's teachings.
However, the average person knows instinctively that men and women are not the same. This is especially true of those who have children. They see mothers and fathers, boys and girls, are inherently different.
John Paul II's teachings explain reality. That is where I begin. If you can get people to acknowledge the simple premise that men and women -- though equal in dignity and importance -- are different, you can begin to talk about what this means for the roles they play.
Q: What can be done to combat the movement for women's ordination?
Ferrara: Those of us who oppose women's ordination cannot allow ourselves to be put on the defensive. We do not have to apologize for our stance. The best way to combat the movement for women's ordination is to present the Church's teachings in a positive light.
We do not raise the status of women by convincing them that they need to be men. Though women can and should be allowed to do most of the jobs traditionally filled by men -- bringing to them a feminine sensibility -- they cannot and never will be biological and spiritual fathers.
Those who insist otherwise effectively deny that which is noble and holy about being wives and mothers -- biological and spiritual -- in the plan by which God intends to redeem his creation.
The Catholic Church is one the few institutions, maybe the only one, left in the world that recognizes the importance of the feminine not only for the proper working of society but for our salvation. We need to be willing to say just that.
ZE04062223
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Saturday, June 19, 2004
Terrorism of the minorities
Cardinal Roberto Tucci noted that "in present-day Western democracy a certain tendency is being verified of the dictatorship of minorities."
"It is thought that, in order to respect this minority, the majority must be offended, and I don't think this is democracy," he added.
"We must explain what we believe in, that we have a religious conception which is different from theirs in many aspects, and that we have the right to be respected, just as we respect their religious conceptions," Cardinal Tucci concluded.
ZE03110210
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Cardinal Roberto Tucci noted that "in present-day Western democracy a certain tendency is being verified of the dictatorship of minorities."
"It is thought that, in order to respect this minority, the majority must be offended, and I don't think this is democracy," he added.
"We must explain what we believe in, that we have a religious conception which is different from theirs in many aspects, and that we have the right to be respected, just as we respect their religious conceptions," Cardinal Tucci concluded.
ZE03110210
See www.zenit.org
Friday, June 18, 2004
"L'Eglise catholique dans la France d'aujourd'hui",
par le prof. Rémond
CITE DU VATICAN, Mercredi 5 novembre 2003 (ZENIT.org) - L'Eglise catholique dans la France d'aujourd'hui a fait l'objet de cet exposé du Professeur René Rémond ce matin, devant l'assemblée des év?ques de France, sous le titre: "D'un si?cle ? l'autre : relations avec l'Etat, présence dans la société". Le texte est diffusé par le portail de la conférence des év?ques (http://www.cef.fr).
La connaissance des origines pour comprendre
"Toute analyse des rapports entre le fait religieux et la société comme toute réflexion sur le concept de la la?cité rel?ve, ? cause de la multiplicité de ses implications, d'une pluralité d'approches, juridique, sociologique et politique, mais aussi philosophique, théologique et historique, cette derni?re n'étant pas la moins éclairante. Seule en effet la connaissance des origines et des antécédents permet de comprendre la pérennité de certaines attitudes d'esprit, la persistance de tels jugements, voire l'archa?sme de certaines positions. La démarche historienne présente aussi l'avantage de dévoiler l'ampleur des changements qui ont affecté tant l'idée de la la?cité que sa pratique et elle en propose des explications.
Changements d'appréciation
"Sans ce regard sur la longue durée comment comprendrait-on par exemple que l'Église de France puisse aujourd'hui dire qu'elle s'accommode d'une loi, celle de séparation des Églises et de l'État, dans laquelle elle voyait lors de son adoption une initiative visant ? sa destruction et qui a fait alors l'objet de deux encycliques pontificales qui en condamnaient absolument et l'inspiration et les dispositions ? Autre exemple de ces changements d'appréciation : la permutation des positions entre catholiques et protestants. Si les premiers ne demandent plus l'abrogation de ladite loi, les Réformés, qui avaient alors applaudi ? une initiative qui achevait de les émanciper de l'hégémonie de l'Église dominante, se plaignent aujourd'hui de certaines limitations qu'elle impose ? leurs activités et souhaitent qu'y soient apportées des modifications.
En un si?cle tout ou presque a changé
"C'est qu'en un si?cle tout ou presque a changé ; la composition du paysage religieux, le syst?me de concepts et de valeurs dans lequel s'enracine l'idée de la?cité, la pratique administrative, sans parler de l'évolution des esprits y compris chez les catholiques. De ces changements, le jugement sur la la?cité doit tenir compte. En conséquence, si l'on conçoit bien que pour éviter de rouvrir des controverses heureusement apaisées on puisse souhaiter ne pas remettre en question le texte de 1905, on ne doit pas pour autant en faire une lecture fondamentaliste et s'attacher religieusement ? son interprétation premi?re : on doit témoigner du m?me attachement ? l'ensemble des dispositions qui en un si?cle sont venues progressivement orienter l'application, parfois infléchir l'orientation et proposer des solutions inédites aux questions nouvelles.
La loi de Séparation, aujourd'hui texte de conciliation
"C'est cette évolution qui explique que la loi de Séparation puisse aujourd'hui ?tre tenue pour un texte de conciliation et interprétée comme ayant contribué ? la concorde. Ce n'était pas tout ? fait la lecture qu'en ont faite sur le moment les contemporains, d'un côté comme de l'autre. Par quel processus singulier a-t-on pu passer d'une interprétation ? l'autre ? C'est toute l'histoire de l'évolution de la la?cité comme idée et comme pratique et que, en 1905, les catholiques ne pouvaient évidemment pressentir. Sur le moment ils trouvaient dans le texte comme dans le contexte plus d'une raison d'y voir le point d'orgue du conflit qui opposait la République ? l'Église. Au reste dans la majorité qui vota la séparation, plus d'un, convaincu que l'Église ne maintenait son influence sur la société que grâce au soutien de la puissance publique, escomptait de la rupture définitive des liens qui les unissaient son dépérissement et ? terme sa disparition.
Contexte
"Interprétant le texte ? la lumi?re du contexte, les contemporains y voient naturellement le dernier maillon de la longue chaîne de textes qui traduisaient dans la législation la volonté persévérante de soustraire ? la tutelle de l'Église l'État et l'enseignement, la société civile et ses institutions, les comportements collectifs et les conduites individuelles. Cette derni?re initiative paraissait bien donner le coup de grâce ? tout espoir de fonder des relations apaisées entre le catholicisme et la société moderne.
Une agression de plus?
"Les catholiques trouvent aussi dans les circonstances des raisons de voir dans ce texte une agression de plus. La loi met unilatéralement fin ? un régime qui avait nagu?re été instauré par une négociation bilatérale entre la République française et le Saint-Si?ge. La nouvelle loi n'a pas fait l'objet de pourparlers avec le Vatican, la France ayant m?me rompu les relations diplomatiques. Comment les catholiques n'y auraient-ils pas vu une résurgence du gallicanisme ? Circonstance aggravante aux yeux d'un peuple de fid?les pour qui la foi chrétienne et l'attachement ? l'Église s'identifient depuis pr?s d'un si?cle ? une obéissance inconditionnelle au Souverain Pontife.
La référence ? une autre rupture
"On déchiffre toujours le présent ? la lumi?re du passé. Cette nouvelle rupture est lue en France comme ? Rome par référence ? une autre rupture : la malheureuse expérience de la Constitution civile du clergé de 1790 qui a provoqué la fracture de la conscience nationale et dissocié le catholicisme de la société moderne. Ce précédent a projeté son ombre sur les débats de 1905. Rome a craint un nouveau schisme. La formule des associations cultuelles telle qu'elle était définie par le texte de loi rappelait par trop le précédent de l'Église constitutionnelle.
La procédure des inventaires
"Ajoutons que la procédure des inventaires, qui se justifiait par la nécessité de procéder ? une évaluation des biens avant leur transfert des fabriques d'hier aux cultuelles de demain, décrétée sans consultation, exécutée avec brutalité, a frappé les imaginations et associé au principe de la séparation une connotation de violence de l'appareil d'État. De surcroît Pie X ayant fait défense de se pr?ter ? l'application d'une loi réputée mauvaise et injuste, et la transmission des biens n'ayant pu de ce fait s'opérer conformément ? la loi, la séparation s'est trouvée associée ? une spoliation qui n'était pas dans l'esprit des législateurs mais dans laquelle les fid?les virent une conséquence logique. Dans ces conditions il n'y a pas lieu de s'étonner que les autorités religieuses et les fid?les aient porté sur la loi et sur le régime de séparation, ainsi que sur l'idée de la?cité ? laquelle ils attribuaient avec raison l'inspiration, un jugement enti?rement négatif".
? Cef.fr
ZF03110513
Voire www.zenit.org
par le prof. Rémond
CITE DU VATICAN, Mercredi 5 novembre 2003 (ZENIT.org) - L'Eglise catholique dans la France d'aujourd'hui a fait l'objet de cet exposé du Professeur René Rémond ce matin, devant l'assemblée des év?ques de France, sous le titre: "D'un si?cle ? l'autre : relations avec l'Etat, présence dans la société". Le texte est diffusé par le portail de la conférence des év?ques (http://www.cef.fr).
La connaissance des origines pour comprendre
"Toute analyse des rapports entre le fait religieux et la société comme toute réflexion sur le concept de la la?cité rel?ve, ? cause de la multiplicité de ses implications, d'une pluralité d'approches, juridique, sociologique et politique, mais aussi philosophique, théologique et historique, cette derni?re n'étant pas la moins éclairante. Seule en effet la connaissance des origines et des antécédents permet de comprendre la pérennité de certaines attitudes d'esprit, la persistance de tels jugements, voire l'archa?sme de certaines positions. La démarche historienne présente aussi l'avantage de dévoiler l'ampleur des changements qui ont affecté tant l'idée de la la?cité que sa pratique et elle en propose des explications.
Changements d'appréciation
"Sans ce regard sur la longue durée comment comprendrait-on par exemple que l'Église de France puisse aujourd'hui dire qu'elle s'accommode d'une loi, celle de séparation des Églises et de l'État, dans laquelle elle voyait lors de son adoption une initiative visant ? sa destruction et qui a fait alors l'objet de deux encycliques pontificales qui en condamnaient absolument et l'inspiration et les dispositions ? Autre exemple de ces changements d'appréciation : la permutation des positions entre catholiques et protestants. Si les premiers ne demandent plus l'abrogation de ladite loi, les Réformés, qui avaient alors applaudi ? une initiative qui achevait de les émanciper de l'hégémonie de l'Église dominante, se plaignent aujourd'hui de certaines limitations qu'elle impose ? leurs activités et souhaitent qu'y soient apportées des modifications.
En un si?cle tout ou presque a changé
"C'est qu'en un si?cle tout ou presque a changé ; la composition du paysage religieux, le syst?me de concepts et de valeurs dans lequel s'enracine l'idée de la?cité, la pratique administrative, sans parler de l'évolution des esprits y compris chez les catholiques. De ces changements, le jugement sur la la?cité doit tenir compte. En conséquence, si l'on conçoit bien que pour éviter de rouvrir des controverses heureusement apaisées on puisse souhaiter ne pas remettre en question le texte de 1905, on ne doit pas pour autant en faire une lecture fondamentaliste et s'attacher religieusement ? son interprétation premi?re : on doit témoigner du m?me attachement ? l'ensemble des dispositions qui en un si?cle sont venues progressivement orienter l'application, parfois infléchir l'orientation et proposer des solutions inédites aux questions nouvelles.
La loi de Séparation, aujourd'hui texte de conciliation
"C'est cette évolution qui explique que la loi de Séparation puisse aujourd'hui ?tre tenue pour un texte de conciliation et interprétée comme ayant contribué ? la concorde. Ce n'était pas tout ? fait la lecture qu'en ont faite sur le moment les contemporains, d'un côté comme de l'autre. Par quel processus singulier a-t-on pu passer d'une interprétation ? l'autre ? C'est toute l'histoire de l'évolution de la la?cité comme idée et comme pratique et que, en 1905, les catholiques ne pouvaient évidemment pressentir. Sur le moment ils trouvaient dans le texte comme dans le contexte plus d'une raison d'y voir le point d'orgue du conflit qui opposait la République ? l'Église. Au reste dans la majorité qui vota la séparation, plus d'un, convaincu que l'Église ne maintenait son influence sur la société que grâce au soutien de la puissance publique, escomptait de la rupture définitive des liens qui les unissaient son dépérissement et ? terme sa disparition.
Contexte
"Interprétant le texte ? la lumi?re du contexte, les contemporains y voient naturellement le dernier maillon de la longue chaîne de textes qui traduisaient dans la législation la volonté persévérante de soustraire ? la tutelle de l'Église l'État et l'enseignement, la société civile et ses institutions, les comportements collectifs et les conduites individuelles. Cette derni?re initiative paraissait bien donner le coup de grâce ? tout espoir de fonder des relations apaisées entre le catholicisme et la société moderne.
Une agression de plus?
"Les catholiques trouvent aussi dans les circonstances des raisons de voir dans ce texte une agression de plus. La loi met unilatéralement fin ? un régime qui avait nagu?re été instauré par une négociation bilatérale entre la République française et le Saint-Si?ge. La nouvelle loi n'a pas fait l'objet de pourparlers avec le Vatican, la France ayant m?me rompu les relations diplomatiques. Comment les catholiques n'y auraient-ils pas vu une résurgence du gallicanisme ? Circonstance aggravante aux yeux d'un peuple de fid?les pour qui la foi chrétienne et l'attachement ? l'Église s'identifient depuis pr?s d'un si?cle ? une obéissance inconditionnelle au Souverain Pontife.
La référence ? une autre rupture
"On déchiffre toujours le présent ? la lumi?re du passé. Cette nouvelle rupture est lue en France comme ? Rome par référence ? une autre rupture : la malheureuse expérience de la Constitution civile du clergé de 1790 qui a provoqué la fracture de la conscience nationale et dissocié le catholicisme de la société moderne. Ce précédent a projeté son ombre sur les débats de 1905. Rome a craint un nouveau schisme. La formule des associations cultuelles telle qu'elle était définie par le texte de loi rappelait par trop le précédent de l'Église constitutionnelle.
La procédure des inventaires
"Ajoutons que la procédure des inventaires, qui se justifiait par la nécessité de procéder ? une évaluation des biens avant leur transfert des fabriques d'hier aux cultuelles de demain, décrétée sans consultation, exécutée avec brutalité, a frappé les imaginations et associé au principe de la séparation une connotation de violence de l'appareil d'État. De surcroît Pie X ayant fait défense de se pr?ter ? l'application d'une loi réputée mauvaise et injuste, et la transmission des biens n'ayant pu de ce fait s'opérer conformément ? la loi, la séparation s'est trouvée associée ? une spoliation qui n'était pas dans l'esprit des législateurs mais dans laquelle les fid?les virent une conséquence logique. Dans ces conditions il n'y a pas lieu de s'étonner que les autorités religieuses et les fid?les aient porté sur la loi et sur le régime de séparation, ainsi que sur l'idée de la?cité ? laquelle ils attribuaient avec raison l'inspiration, un jugement enti?rement négatif".
? Cef.fr
ZF03110513
Voire www.zenit.org
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