A Sound of Sheer Silence

So, the conservative journal First Things published a piece by Dominican friar Romanus Cessario, defending the Mortara affair .  For those not familiar, Edgardo Mortara was a Jewish boy living at the tail end of the Papal States period who was secretly baptised by a nurse in a Catholic hospital.  Having done so, Papal law required that he be raised Catholic, and so he was forcibly taken from his parents and raised more or less directly by the Pope at the time, Pius IX.  This has generally been seen as one of the more monstrous black marks on the Roman Catholic Church in its long history of anti-Semitism, and so the Hot Take of defending the Pope's action were bound to be controversial.  Ross Douthat, no liberal Catholic he, gave a strong negative reaction to the piece , as did others. In particular, Douthat makes the case that the article is clarifying as to the nature of the traditionalist Catholic stance--i.e. still anti-Semitic.  I think Douthat is right, ...

As they say, sometimes you go to the mountain, and sometimes the mount comes to you.   Witness Sunday's column by Ross Douthat on his bete noir , Pope Francis.  Douthat evidently is working on a book on how Pope Francis is destroying Catholicism  and maybe Western civilization as well, so perhaps this column is some sort of trial balloon for that project.  I love this column, because it is a perfect encapsulation of many of the sources of dishonesty that I want to talk about in this series, all in a nice package. There are several things I want to hit on in Douthat's column (probably requiring a couple of posts), but I want to start in this post with the question that I am sure New York Times readers who don't follow the ins and outs of Catholic politics are asking themselves---what is Ross's deal?  Why is he so mad at Pope Francis?  Here is my theory--Douthat is singularly focused on Pope Francis because Pope Francis has exposed that conservative Cathol...

There is no such thing as a discrete issue.  We like to believe that we are perfect scientists in the way we approach problems, slicing off every complication and condition in order to get down to the pure, uncontaminated, "objective" analysis of something.  All of that is self-delusion.  Everything exists in a context, and that context informs the way you look at any issue. It's very hard to parse out why we react the way we do to something, why we believe what we believe about something.  Sometimes it is the thing we think it is, sometimes it is the circumstances in which the thing is situated, and often it is both. For the last two months or so, I have been almost exclusively attending an Episcopal Church.  The parish is decent distance away from where I live, out in the suburbs, which is why it took me a while to find it.  If some nefarious group of Episcopalian conspirators were to design a parish for the purpose of maximizing the chances of getting ...

1.   I mentioned before  that one of the biggest changes in my outlook in the last 10 years or so has been a move from a singular focus on what is in my head to a broader perspective.  One of the concrete ways that this has manifested itself is in decision-making.  In my 20s and early 30s, in situations small and large, I fell into a predictable pattern.  Some situation would crop up, and I would get a feeling about it.  Call it intuition, call it a hunch, call it Someone trying to tell me something, but I would get a strong sense that one particular choice in front of me was a bad one and that I shouldn't do it. But then I would interrogate that feeling--why did I believe that?  What evidence did I have to support this supposition?  It was almost as if I felt I had to justify my decision to some public review board, and if I couldn't martial enough evidence to support my feeling, then I could not in good conscience take it to the board.  B...

Last week marked the 50th anniversary of the release of the Second Vatican Council document Nostra Aetate ("In Our Time").  I have not counted words, but I believe  Nostra Aetate  is the shortest of the Vatican II documents, clocking in at only five paragraphs.  Nevertheless, there is an argument to be made that  Nostra Aetate  is the most consequential of all of the Vatican II documents, and is undoubtedly the most revolutionary. Special attention should be paid to Paragraph 4 of  Nostra Aetate .  The document as a whole is about the relationship between the Catholic Church and non-Christian religions, and Paragraph 4 deals with Judaism. In it, it makes three major claims.  First, while acknowledging that Catholics believe Jesus to represent the true fulfillment of the Abrahamic and Mosaic covenants, it rejects the notion this transition from the old to the new covenant leaves continued practitioners of the old divorced from God's love a...

Yesterday I wrote a post suggesting that Catholics should channel Nick Saban and embrace The Process .  Clearly, Michael Brendan Dougherty is not college football fan . I guess I have two major take-aways from this piece.  One, I simply cannot fathom why people like Dougherty (and, to a less extent, Ross Douthat ) think that so much is at stake with the so-called Kasper proposal specifically and the Synod discussions generally.  Prior to the coming of Pope Francis, the Catholic Church's position was that marriages are indissoluble in theory, but in practice in most dioceses in the world one could get out from under a failed marriage to remarry through the annulment process.  After Pope Francis's canon law reforms a few weeks ago, the position of the Church is that marriages are indissoluble in theory, but in practice in most dioceses in the world one could get out from underneath a failed marriage to remarry through the ( now faster and more "user friendly" ) annu...

Dr. Natalia Imperatori-Lee [ postscript: Dr. Imperatori-Lee was elected to the board of the Catholic Theological Society of America.  Congrats, Professor! ] said something in her panel discussion with Andrew Sullivan and Fr. Jim Martin that has been stuck in my head and won't let go--in a Church that believes in the Incarnation and the Sacraments, there can be no distinction between style and substance, because style is a kind of substance.  It matters how things look and how they come across, because in how they look and how they come across, they communicate truths every bit as real as any explicit doctrinal formulation. Consider an example. These two photos were taken at the Sacra Liturgia conference last week in New York City.  The guy seated on the throne with the long red cape (a cappa magna , or "big cape") in the top photo is Cardinal Burke; the guy in the middle of the bottom photo in the red gloves is Archbishop Cordileone (indeed, the Sa...

I've talked before about Ross Douthat's recent comments about the Synod on the Family.  Recently, he and James Martin, S.J., had what I thought was a very thoughtful and interesting exchange that was reproduced in America  Magazine (hat tip to Fr. Justin for sending it my way).  It is very much worth reading.  A couple of things struck me in reading this exchange--threads running through the conversation that are unspoken, but informing what is being said. The first involves the idea that the Catholic Church holds marriage to be inviolable.  Certainly, that is the official position--marriage is for life and cannot be dissolved--and the need to protect that principle is at the heart of Douthat's objections to the Synod.  On the other hand, everyone understands that there is a way for one to "get out from underneath" a first marriage and enter into a second one with the full blessing of the Church, and that way is an annulment.  Now, I understand th...

Beginning with the papacy of St. Pius X, Catholic thought was dominated by two core ideas.  The first idea was a rejection of "Modernism," a catch-all term that referred to the "modern" ideas that had come into prominence in the 19th and early 20th Century--democracy, Communism, industrial capitalism, the nation-state, modern scientific developments, etc.  All of this, in Pope Pius X's view, was bad and must be rejected by Catholics in toto .  The other big idea was that of the Scholastic manual--essentially a compendium of Catholic theology and thought that purported to provide comprehensive answers to all of the questions you might want to ask.  Not surprisingly, this era in Catholicism presented a vision of Church that was almost entirely static and unchanging. After World War II, a group of French and German Catholic thinkers came on the scene and were grouped under the heading of " Nouvelle Theologie " or New Theology.  These thinkers believed t...

For those who are not familiar with Hans Kung, here is a quick background.  Way back at the time of the Second Vatican Council (1958-1964), Kung, a Swiss priest, was a prominent member of the group of young theologians that was trying to move the Council fathers toward a more expansive and modern interpretation of the teachings of the Catholic Church.  Among even this group, Kung was the youngest and (arguably) the most brilliant, matched only by an obscure Bavarian priest by the name of Josef Ratzinger--the future Pope Benedict XVI.  These Young Turks basically got their way, and their fingerprints are all over the documents of Vatican II. In the aftermath of the Council, the Young Turks eventually split down the middle over what to do next.  One party, lead in many ways by Ratzinger/Benedict, pulled back from some of the outcomes of the Council and called for some measure of retrenchment.  The other side, led by Kung, called for going farther....

Remember how I said that Jesuits like to lob intellectual grenades into the mix to see what happens?  Pope Francis just pulled the pin .  I will probably have a couple of posts about this amazing interview, but I have a couple of immediate reactions.  First, particularly if one reads the entire interview, you see the Jesuit-ness of Pope Francis come right to the forefront.  He has a long discussion of how Ignatian spirituality (the ideas of St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits) influences his way of leading and thinking.  So, the take away for me is that he is more or less like all of the Jesuits I've met.  Second, I will be fascinated to see the reaction from the right-wing Catholic blogosphere and conservative Catholic media (EWTN et al. ).  The meme that "Francis is speaking off the cuff and is not serious," seems to be unsupportable by even those in the deepest of denial (Update: or perhaps not ).  It...

I have no musical training.  My friend Father Justin once said I have a "good natural instrument," but I think he was just trying to be nice.  Nevertheless, I make a point to sing all of the songs in Church--active participation in the Liturgy and all that.  So, I feel qualified to pass judgment on the music that is the staple of most Catholic Masses.  And the judgment is simple--it's mostly terrible. I am certainly not the first person to complain about the music, but this is my blog so I will vent.  The music is terrible for two reasons.  First, much of it is bizarrely hard to sing.  Take for example the "old" standard "On Eagle's Wings."  Now, I have a soft spot in my heart for this song, but it is very tough for men to sing, since so much of it is in the high registers.  Don't believe me?  Listen to this rendition, focusing on the ends of the verses. Now, these guys are exactly Andrea Bocelli, but there are giving it t...

A theme of Pope Benedict's speeches and writings is the idea of the "Hermaneutic of Continuity" with regards to Vatican II.  In other words, the proper starting point for understanding the documents of Vatican II is that they reflect a continuation of what came before, and are consistent with what came before, even if the presentation is different.  Much can be said about this concept, but I think even Pope Benedict would agree that the following passage from the Vatican II document Nostra Aetate ("In Our Time") is a profound departure from what came before it: Nevertheless, God holds the Jews most dear for the sake of their Fathers; He does not repent of the gifts He makes or of the calls He issues-such is the witness of the Apostle. In company with the Prophets and the same Apostle, the Church awaits that day, known to God alone, on which all peoples will address the Lord in a single voice and "serve him shoulder to shoulder" (Soph. 3:9).... True...

People of my generation (as in + or - 15 years) are unique in the history of Catholicism, in that we have no experience of the Latin Mass as the central point of contact with the Catholic faith.  My only contact with the Latin Mass is through the stories of my parents, whose opinions on it are mixed, to say the least.  My father more or less takes the position that the loss of the Latin Mass took everything that was special about Catholicism and flushed it away, while my mother more or less would say "good riddance."