Thomas J. Tobin, Bishop of Providence to Congressman Patrick Kennedy

November 11, 2009

Dear Congressman Kennedy

“The fact that I disagree with the hierarchy on some issues does not make me any less of a Catholic.” (Congressman Patrick Kennedy)

Since our recent correspondence has been rather public, I hope you don’t mind if I share a few reflections about your practice of the faith in this public forum. I usually wouldn’t do that – that is speak about someone’s faith in a public setting – but in our well-documented exchange of letters about health care and abortion, it has emerged as an issue. I also share these words publicly with the thought that they might be instructive to other Catholics, including those in prominent positions of leadership.

For the moment I’d like to set aside the discussion of health care reform, as important and relevant as it is, and focus on one statement contained in your letter of October 29, 2009, in which you write, “The fact that I disagree with the hierarchy on some issues does not make me any less of a Catholic.” That sentence certainly caught my attention and deserves a public response, lest it go unchallenged and lead others to believe it’s true. And it raises an important question: What does it mean to be a Catholic?

“The fact that I disagree with the hierarchy on some issues does not make me any less of a Catholic.” Well, in fact, Congressman, in a way it does. Although I wouldn’t choose those particular words, when someone rejects the teachings of the Church, especially on a grave matter, a life-and-death issue like abortion, it certainly does diminish their ecclesial communion, their unity with the Church. This principle is based on the Sacred Scripture and Tradition of the Church and is made more explicit in recent documents.

For example, the “Code of Canon Law” says, “Lay persons are bound by an obligation and possess the right to acquire a knowledge of Christian doctrine adapted to their capacity and condition so that they can live in accord with that doctrine.” (Canon 229, #1)

The “Catechism of the Catholic Church” says this: “Mindful of Christ’s words to his apostles, ‘He who hears you, hears me,’ the faithful receive with docility the teaching and directives that their pastors give them in different forms.” (#87)

Or consider this statement of the Church: “It would be a mistake to confuse the proper autonomy exercised by Catholics in political life with the claim of a principle that prescinds from the moral and social teaching of the Church.” (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, 2002)

There’s lots of canonical and theological verbiage there, Congressman, but what it means is that if you don’t accept the teachings of the Church your communion with the Church is flawed, or in your own words, makes you “less of a Catholic.”

But let’s get down to a more practical question; let’s approach it this way: What does it mean, really, to be a Catholic? After all, being a Catholic has to mean something, right?

Well, in simple terms – and here I refer only to those more visible, structural elements of Church membership – being a Catholic means that you’re part of a faith community that possesses a clearly defined authority and doctrine, obligations and expectations. It means that you believe and accept the teachings of the Church, especially on essential matters of faith and morals; that you belong to a local Catholic community, a parish; that you attend Mass on Sundays and receive the sacraments regularly; that you support the Church, personally, publicly, spiritually and financially.

Congressman, I’m not sure whether or not you fulfill the basic requirements of being a Catholic, so let me ask: Do you accept the teachings of the Church on essential matters of faith and morals, including our stance on abortion? Do you belong to a local Catholic community, a parish? Do you attend Mass on Sundays and receive the sacraments regularly? Do you support the Church, personally, publicly, spiritually and financially?

In your letter you say that you “embrace your faith.” Terrific. But if you don’t fulfill the basic requirements of membership, what is it exactly that makes you a Catholic? Your baptism as an infant? Your family ties? Your cultural heritage?

Your letter also says that your faith “acknowledges the existence of an imperfect humanity.” Absolutely true. But in confronting your rejection of the Church’s teaching, we’re not dealing just with “an imperfect humanity” – as we do when we wrestle with sins such as anger, pride, greed, impurity or dishonesty. We all struggle with those things, and often fail.

Your rejection of the Church’s teaching on abortion falls into a different category – it’s a deliberate and obstinate act of the will; a conscious decision that you’ve re-affirmed on many occasions. Sorry, you can’t chalk it up to an “imperfect humanity.” Your position is unacceptable to the Church and scandalous to many of our members. It absolutely diminishes your communion with the Church.

Congressman Kennedy, I write these words not to embarrass you or to judge the state of your conscience or soul. That’s ultimately between you and God. But your description of your relationship with the Church is now a matter of public record, and it needs to be challenged. I invite you, as your bishop and brother in Christ, to enter into a sincere process of discernment, conversion and repentance. It’s not too late for you to repair your relationship with the Church, redeem your public image, and emerge as an authentic “profile in courage,” especially by defending the sanctity of human life for all people, including unborn children. And if I can ever be of assistance as you travel the road of faith, I would be honored and happy to do so.

Sincerely yours,

Thomas J. Tobin

Bishop of Providence

Leo the Great - Chalcedon (451) and the "New Adam"

The import of today’s feast is the combination of Leo’s Chalcedon and Maximus the Confessor’s Constantinople III in the Christology and consequent anthropology that has everything to do with integral human development in the Third Millennium. That is, the transition from an essentialist metaphysic of seeing the human person as “individual substance of a rational nature” to the dynamic “man, the only earthly being God has willed for itself, finds himself by the sincere gift of himself,” is due to the dynamic understanding of the Jesus Christ, the God-man as a single Being with a single (Personal) Will obeying the Father to death. It is the anthropology of priesthood and work (mediating between self and God for others). The ramifications are immense.

The text of Chalcedon (451):

“Therefore, following the holy fathers, we all teach that with one accord we confess one and the same son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in human nature, truly God and the same with a rational soul and a body truly man, consubstantial with the Father according to divinity, and consubstantial with us, according to human nature, like unto us in all things except sin,; indeed born of the Father before the ages according to divine nature, but in the last days the same born of the virgin Mary, Mother of God according to human nature; for us and for our deliverance, one and the same Christ only begotten Son our Lord, acknowledged in two natures, without mingling, without change, indivisibly, undividedly, the distinction of the natures nowhere removed on account of the union but rather the peculiarity of each nature being kept, and uniting in one person and substance, not divided or separated into two persons, but one and the same son only begotten God Word, Lord Jesus Christ, just as from the beginning the prophets taught about Him and the Lord Jesus Himself taught us, and the creed of our fathers has handed down to us.”

Two hundred thirty years intervene as the Church – not without concomitant political intrigue - tries to untangle the conundrum of how can Christ have a human will that is humanly free, and at the same time be the will of a divine Person who cannot sin. The answer is that sin is not part of true freedom. As Christ is the meaning of man, so also Christ’s freedom as man is the meaning of human freedom. This was the work of Maximus the Confessor who transcended the abstractive imagination – necessary as it is - that tends to “reify” philosophical and theological profundity. This proliferation of philosophoumena is the drawback of objectifying thought. The key consists in realizing that it is not the will as a sort of “substantialized” faculty that wills, but the person. Once philosophers talk about the will as if it were “a subsistent being,” the discourse unintentionally but tragically treats “the will” as if it were an entity in itself.

It is not. It is the tendency of the person toward the good. That realized, it becomes clear that it is the divine Person of the Logos who wills with what we call “the divine Will” and “the human will.” It is the same “I” of the Logos desire in the human mode of human willing. Hence, there is identity in the divine and the human willing which is “Personal,” the one divine Logos willing and obeying the Will of the Father to death on the Cross. This, then, is the anthropology of Redemption.

Ratzinger: “Maximus the Confessor, the great theological interpreter of this second phase of the development of the Christological dogma, illuminates this whole context by reference to Jesus’ prayer on the Mount of Olives, which, as we already saw in Thesis 1, expresses Jesus’ unique relationship to God. Indeed, it is as if we were actually looking in on the inner life of the Word-made-man. It is revealed to us in the sentence which remains the measure and model of all real prayer: ‘Not what I will, but what thou wilt’ (Mk. 14, 36). Jesus’ human will assimilates itself to the will of the Son. In doing this, he receives the Son’s identity, i.e., the complete subordination of the I to the Thou, the self-giving and self-expropriation of the I to the Thou. This is the very essence of him who is pure relation and pure act. Wherever the I give itself to the Thou, there is freedom because this involves the reception of the ‘form of God.’”[1]

This can be made even clearer by the simpler form in which Ratzinger writes it: “The Council of Constantinople has analyzed concretely the problem of the two natures and one person in Christ in view of the problem of the will of Jesus. We are reminded firmly that there exists a specific will of the man Jesus that is not absorbed into the divine will. But this human will follows the divine will and thus becomes a single will with it, not, however, in a forced way but by way of freedom. The metaphysical duplicity of a human will and a divine will is not eliminated, but in the personal sphere, the area of freedom, there is accomplished a fusion of the two, so that this becomes not one single natural will but one personal will. This free union – a mode of union created by love - is a union higher and more intimate than a purely natural union. It corresponds to the highest union which can exist, the union of the Trinity.

“The Council explains this union by a saying of the Lord given in the Gospel of John: ‘I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me’ (John 6, 38). Here the divine Logos is speaking, and speaking of the human will of Jesus in the mode by which he calls his will the will of the Logos. Wit this exegesis of John 6, 38, the Council proves the unity of the subject. In Jesus there are not two ‘I’s’ but only one. The Logos speaks of the will and human thought of Jesus using the ‘I,’ because the human will has become fully one with the will of the Logos, and with it has become pure assent to the will of the Father.”[2]

The Text of Constantinople III (680-681):

“And we proclaim equally two natural volitions or wills in him and two natural principles of action which undergo no division, no change, no partition, no confusion, in accordance with the teaching of the holy fathers. And the two natural wills not in opposition, as the impious heretics said, far from it, but his human will following, and not resisting or struggling, rather in fact subject to his divine and all powerful will. For the will of the flesh had to be moved, and yet to be subjected to the divine will, according to the most wise Athanasius. For just as his flesh is said to be and is flesh of the Word of God, so too the natural will of his flesh is said to and does belong to the Word of God, just as he says himself: I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of the Father who sent me, calling his own will that of his flesh, since his flesh too became his own. For in the same way that his all holy and blameless animate flesh was not destroyed in being made divine but remained in its own limit and category, so his human will as well was not destroyed by being made divine, but rather was preserved, according to the theologian Gregory, who says: "For his willing, when he is considered as saviour, is not in opposition to God, being made divine in its entirety"… Therefore, protecting on all sides the "no confusion" and "no division", we announce the whole in these brief words: Believing our lord Jesus Christ, even after his incarnation, to be one of the holy Trinity and our true God, we say that he has two natures [naturas] shining forth in his one subsistence[subsistentia] in which he demonstrated the miracles and the sufferings throughout his entire providential dwelling here, not in appearance but in truth, the difference of the natures being made known in the same one subsistence in that each nature wills and performs the things that are proper to it in a communion with the other; then in accord with this reasoning we hold that two natural wills and principles of action meet in correspondence for the salvation of the human race.

Constantinople III as Key to Christological-Priestly Anthropology (“Theology of the Cross): Gift of Self

This work of Constantinople III, which views Christ, the divine Person, not as a static substance with two natures (divine and human) as accidental essences in a kind of objectivized theological “erector set,” has been the key to understanding Jesus Christ as the “New Adam” and “Last Man.” It is an understanding that takes its dynamic, the dynamic of person - the "I" found in the the experience of the the divine Person as self-transcendent. It is Trinitarian dynamic translated into a metaphysics of the image. Vatican II’s Gaudium et Spes #22 proclaims that “it is only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of man truly becomes clear. For Adam, the first man, was a type of him who was to come, Christ the Lord, Christ the new Adam, in the very revelation of the mystery of the Father and of his love, fully reveals man to himself and brings to light his most high calling.” Therefore, this dynamic of the relationality of the Son to the Father is lived out through the human will and body to obedient death on the Cross. It is the full and perfect immanentization of the eschaton as the apex and goal of all human history. The supreme point of human history has already been reached, and time is granted for the integral development into that supreme achievement that is Christ.

The Being of Christ as dynamic God-man is the model for all men to actively become “priests of their own existence” (Escriva). That dynamism is personal in the sense that it is the Person who is the Agent of two ontologically distinct wills, and Who wills as one will with both (personally). Ratzinger writes:

“A theology of the incarnation situated too much on the level of essence, may be tempted to be satisfied with the ontological phenomenon: God’s being and man’s have been conjoined. This appears as the real turning-point, and in comparison with it the factual life of Jesus and his death are secondary, as it were the realization of a principle which ultimate adds nothing to the principle itself. But since it is made clear that man’s being is not that of a pure essence, and that he only attains his reality by his activity, it is at once evident that we cannot rest content with a purely essentialist outlook. Man’s being must therefore be examined precisely in its activities. If this is done, the concept of the ‘novus homo’ takes concrete shape in that of the ‘agnus innocens.’ It then becomes apparent that Jesus’ concrete reality is ‘pro me’ (and ‘pro nobis’) and for this very reason is a self-sacrificing existence in the mystery of the cross. This alone shows the wholly personal relationship to Christ, for Christ is not a great super-ego into which the I-monads are organized, but a most individual human being who looks at me personally. His relation to me is not that of a great corporate personality. He enters into a personal. Conversation of love; he has something to say to me alone, which no one else knows (cf. Rev 2. 17). Pascal’s intense piety which made him place in the Lord’s mouth the words: ‘In my agony I thought of you; I shed these drops of blood for you,’ is biblically entirely justified in view of the Pauline ‘pro me.’ Thus Christ no longer appears as a merely general form to which human existences are conformed. His exemplarity means the concrete summons to follow him, and this gives meaning to man’s cross; it calls him to share in the ‘pro me’ of Jesus Christ in a Christian ‘pro invicem’ based on the ‘cum Christo.’”[3]

---

[1] J. Ratzinger, “Behold the Pierced One,” Ignatius (1986) 40-41.

[2] Benedict XVI, “Journey to Easter” Crossroad (1987) 101-102.

[3] J. Ratzinger, Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II Herder and Herder ed. H. Vorgrimler (1966) Vol V, “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World,” “The Church and Man’s Calling – The Dignity of the Human Person,” (1966) 160.

Fall of the Berlin Wall - November 9, 2009

Centesimus Annus

Among the many factors involved in the fall of oppressive regimes, some deserve special mention. Certainly, the decisive factor which gave rise to the changes was the violation of the rights of workers. It cannot be forgotten that the fundamental crisis of systems claiming to express the rule and indeed the dictatorship of the working class began with the great upheavals which took place in Poland in the name of solidarity. It was the throngs of working people which foreswore the ideology which presumed to speak in their name. On the basis of a hard, lived experience of work and of oppression, it was they who recovered and, in a sense, rediscovered the content and principles of the Church's social doctrine.

Also worthy of emphasis is the fact that the fall of this kind of "bloc" or empire was accomplished almost everywhere by means of peaceful protest, using only the weapons of truth and justice. While Marxism held that only by exacerbating social conflicts was it possible to resolve them through violent confrontation, the protests which led to the collapse of Marxism tenaciously insisted on trying every avenue of negotiation, dialogue, and witness to the truth, appealing to the conscience of the adversary and seeking to reawaken in him a sense of shared human dignity.

It seemed that the European order resulting from the Second World War and sanctioned by the Yalta Agreements could only be overturned by another war. Instead, it has been overcome by the non-violent commitment of people who, while always refusing to yield to the force of power, succeeded time after time in finding effective ways of bearing witness to the truth. This disarmed the adversary, since violence always needs to justify itself through deceit, and to appear, however falsely, to be defending a right or responding to a threat posed by others.⁵⁴ Once again I thank God for having sustained people's hearts amid difficult trials, and I pray that this example will prevail in other places and other circumstances. May people learn to fight for justice without violence, renouncing class struggle in their internal disputes, and war in international ones.

24. The second factor in the crisis was certainly the inefficiency of the economic system, which is not to be considered simply as a technical problem, but rather a consequence of the violation of the human rights to private initiative, to ownership of property and to freedom in the economic sector. To this must be added the cultural and national dimension: it is not possible to understand man on the basis of economics alone, nor to define him simply on the basis of class membership. Man is understood in a more complete way when he is situated within the sphere of culture through his language, history, and the position he takes towards the fundamental events of life, such as birth, love, work and death. At the heart of every culture lies the attitude man takes to the greatest mystery: the mystery of God. Different cultures are basically different ways of facing the question of the meaning of personal existence. When this question is eliminated, the culture and moral life of nations are corrupted. For this reason the struggle to defend work was spontaneously linked to the struggle for culture and for national rights.

But the true cause of the new developments was the spiritual void brought about by atheism, which deprived the younger generations of a sense of direction and in many cases led them, in the irrepressible search for personal identity and for the meaning of life, to rediscover the religious roots of their national cultures, and to rediscover the person of Christ himself as the existentially adequate response to the desire in every human heart for goodness, truth and life. This search was supported by the witness of those who, in difficult circumstances and under persecution, remained faithful to God. Marxism had promised to uproot the need for God from the human heart, but the results have shown that it is not possible to succeed in this without throwing the heart into turmoil.

25. The events of 1989 are an example of the success of willingness to negotiate and of the Gospel spirit in the face of an adversary determined not to be bound by moral principles. These events are a warning to those who, in the name of political realism, wish to banish law and morality from the political arena. Undoubtedly, the struggle which led to the changes of 1989 called for clarity, moderation, suffering and sacrifice. In a certain sense, it was a struggle born of prayer, and it would have been unthinkable without immense trust in God, the Lord of history, who carries the human heart in his hands. It is by uniting his own sufferings for the sake of truth and freedom to the sufferings of Christ on the Cross that man is able to accomplish the miracle of peace and is in a position to discern the often narrow path between the cowardice which gives in to evil and the violence which, under the illusion of fighting evil, only makes it worse.

Nevertheless, it cannot be forgotten that the manner in which the individual exercises his freedom is conditioned in innumerable ways. While these certainly have an influence on freedom, they do not determine it; they make the exercise of freedom more difficult or less difficult, but they cannot destroy it. Not only is it wrong from the ethical point of view to disregard human nature, which is made for freedom, but in practice it is impossible to do so. Where society is so organized as to reduce arbitrarily or even suppress the sphere in which freedom is legitimately exercised, the result is that the life of society becomes progressively disorganized and goes into decline.

Moreover, man, who was created for freedom, bears within himself the wound of original sin, which constantly draws him towards evil and puts him in need of redemption. Not only is this doctrine an integral part of Christian revelation; it also has great hermeneutical value insofar as it helps one to understand human reality. Man tends towards good, but he is also capable of evil. He can transcend his immediate interest and still remain bound to it. The social order will be all the more stable, the more it takes this fact into account and does not place in opposition personal interest and the interests of society as a whole, but rather seeks ways to bring them into fruitful harmony. In fact, where self-interest is violently suppressed, it is replaced by a burdensome system of bureaucratic control which dries up the wellsprings of initiative and creativity. When people think they possess the secret of a perfect social organization which makes evil impossible, they also think that they can use any means, including violence and deceit, in order to bring that organization into being. Politics then becomes a "secular religion" which operates under the illusion of creating paradise in this world. But no political society — which possesses its own autonomy and laws⁵⁵ — can ever be confused with the Kingdom of God. The Gospel parable of the weeds among the wheat (cf. Mt 13:24-30; 36-43) teaches that it is for God alone to separate the subjects of the Kingdom from the subjects of the Evil One, and that this judgment will take place at the end of time. By presuming to anticipate judgment here and now, man puts himself in the place of God and sets himself against the patience of God.

(Attempted) MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL

Archbishop Dolan’s Critique of NYT's Selective Outrage

"But if I be asked what sign we may look for to show that the advance of the Faith is at hand I would answer by a word the modern world has forgotten: Persecution. When that shall once more be at work it will be morning"

- Hilaire Belloc Survivals and New Arrivals- (borrowed from Fr. C. John McClosky's e-mail)

Archbishop Timothy Dolan objectively makes a case that simply is not permitted to be made, i.e. that the Catholic Church is invariably singled out for outrage while equal office for allowing Orthodox rabbis to settle these cases ‘internally.’”

Dolan had called for fair-play - on a level playing field - by the New York Times, and that was unconscionable. What is at stake here is the mettle of Archbishop Dolan who is now being measured by the Magisterium of the secularist media. I offer that if he continues to speak truth to power, the next move – which has already been announced – will be to dreg up and vilify him with his historic performance in St. Louis and Milwaukee. Clark Hoyt prepares us – and the archbishop – for what’s coming. Note: “(The New York Times) continues to look into the subject:”

“Dolan himself has been under that microscope. The Times interviewed him months ago about his handling of sexual abuse cases in his previous posts in St. Louis and Milwaukee, and it continues to look into the subject. It is a natural inquiry given that advocates for abuse victims, while giving Dolan credit for transparency in Milwaukee, say he did not go far enough in resolving pedophilia cases there.”

In case you’ve missed the interplay, I offer the evidence for your own perusal:

1) The Archbishop’s article that the Times would not use as an op-ed.

2) That is followed by the article by Maureen Dowd that is criticized in the Archbishop’s blog.

3) That, again, is followed by today’s (November 8, 2009) “The Archbishop’s Blog.”

1) FOUL BALL!

By Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan
Archbishop of New York

October is the month we relish the highpoint of our national pastime, especially when one of our own New York teams is in the World Series!

Sadly, America has another national pastime, this one not pleasant at all: anti-Catholicism.

It is not hyperbole to call prejudice against the Catholic Church a national pastime. Scholars such as Arthur Schlesinger Sr. referred to it as “the deepest bias in the history of the American people,” while John Higham described it as “the most luxuriant, tenacious tradition of paranoiac agitation in American history.” “The anti-Semitism of the left,” is how Paul Viereck reads it, and Professor Philip Jenkins sub-titles his book on the topic “the last acceptable prejudice.”

If you want recent evidence of this unfairness against the Catholic Church, look no further than a few of these following examples of occurrences over the last couple weeks:

• On October 14, in the pages of the New York Times, reporter Paul Vitello exposed the sad extent of child sexual abuse in Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jewish community. According to the article, there were forty cases of such abuse in this tiny community last year alone. Yet the Times did not demand what it has called for incessantly when addressing the same kind of abuse by a tiny minority of priests: release of names of abusers, rollback of statute of limitations, external investigations, release of all records, and total transparency. Instead, an attorney is quoted urging law enforcement officials to recognize “religious sensitivities,” and no criticism was offered of the DA’s office for allowing Orthodox rabbis to settle these cases “internally.” Given the Catholic Church’s own recent horrible experience, I am hardly in any position to criticize our Orthodox Jewish neighbors, and have no wish to do so . . . but I can criticize this kind of “selective outrage.”

Of course, this selective outrage probably should not surprise us at all, as we have seen many other examples of the phenomenon in recent years when it comes to the issue of sexual abuse. To cite but two: In 2004, Professor Carol Shakeshaft documented the wide-spread problem of sexual abuse of minors in our nation’s public schools (the study can be found here). In 2007, the Associated Press issued a series of investigative reports that also showed the numerous examples of sexual abuse by educators against public school students. Both the Shakeshaft study and the AP reports were essentially ignored, as papers such as the New York Times only seem to have priests in their crosshairs.

• On October 16, Laurie Goodstein of the Times offered a front page, above-the-fold story on the sad episode of a Franciscan priest who had fathered a child. Even taking into account that the relationship with the mother was consensual and between two adults, and that the Franciscans have attempted to deal justly with the errant priest’s responsibilities to his son, this action is still sinful, scandalous, and indefensible. However, one still has to wonder why a quarter-century old story of a sin by a priest is now suddenly more pressing and newsworthy than the war in Afghanistan, health care, and starvation–genocide in Sudan. No other cleric from religions other than Catholic ever seems to merit such attention.

• Five days later, October 21, the Times gave its major headline to the decision by the Vatican to welcome Anglicans who had requested union with Rome. Fair enough. Unfair, though, was the article’s observation that the Holy See lured and bid for the Anglicans. Of course, the reality is simply that for years thousands of Anglicans have been asking Rome to be accepted into the Catholic Church with a special sensitivity for their own tradition. As Cardinal Walter Kasper, the Vatican’s chief ecumenist, observed, “We are not fishing in the Anglican pond.” Not enough for the Times; for them, this was another case of the conniving Vatican luring and bidding unsuspecting, good people, greedily capitalizing on the current internal tensions in Anglicanism.

• Finally, the most combustible example of all came Sunday with an intemperate and scurrilous piece by Maureen Dowd on the opinion pages of the Times. In a diatribe that rightly never would have passed muster with the editors had it so criticized an Islamic, Jewish, or African-American religious issue, she digs deep into the nativist handbook to use every anti-Catholic caricature possible, from the Inquisition to the Holocaust, condoms, obsession with sex, pedophile priests, and oppression of women, all the while slashing Pope Benedict XVI for his shoes, his forced conscription -- along with every other German teenage boy -- into the German army, his outreach to former Catholics, and his recent welcome to Anglicans.

True enough, the matter that triggered her spasm -- the current visitation of women religious by Vatican representatives -- is well-worth discussing, and hardly exempt from legitimate questioning. But her prejudice, while maybe appropriate for the Know-Nothing newspaper of the 1850’s, the Menace, has no place in a major publication today.

I do not mean to suggest that anti-catholicism is confined to the pages New York Times. Unfortunately, abundant examples can be found in many different venues. I will not even begin to try and list the many cases of anti-catholicism in the so-called entertainment media, as they are so prevalent they sometimes seem almost routine and obligatory. Elsewhere, last week, Representative Patrick Kennedy made some incredibly inaccurate and uncalled-for remarks concerning the Catholic bishops, as mentioned in this blog on Monday. Also, the New York State Legislature has levied a special payroll tax to help the Metropolitan Transportation Authority fund its deficit. This legislation calls for the public schools to be reimbursed the cost of the tax; Catholic schools, and other private schools, will not receive the reimbursement, costing each of the schools thousands – in some cases tens of thousands – of dollars, money that the parents and schools can hardly afford. (Nor can the archdiocese, which already underwrites the schools by $30 million annually.) Is it not an issue of basic fairness for ALL school-children and their parents to be treated equally?

The Catholic Church is not above criticism. We Catholics do a fair amount of it ourselves. We welcome and expect it. All we ask is that such critique be fair, rational, and accurate, what we would expect for anybody. The suspicion and bias against the Church is a national pastime that should be “rained out” for good.

I guess my own background in American history should caution me not to hold my breath.

Then again, yesterday was the Feast of Saint Jude, the patron saint of impossible causes.

2) The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd

“The Nun’s Story”

Maureen Dowd’s Article of October 24, 2009 - NYT – op ed.

Once, in the first grade, I was late for class. I started crying in the schoolyard, terrified to go in and face the formidable Sister Hiltruda.

Father Montgomery, who looked like a handsome young priest out of a 1930s movie, found me cowering and took my hand, leading me into the classroom.

Sister Hiltruda looked ready to pop, but she couldn’t say a word to me, then or ever. There was no more unassailable patriarchy than the Catholic Church.

Nuns were second-class citizens then and — 40 years after feminism utterly changed America — they still are. The matter of women as priests is closed, a forbidden topic.

In 2004, the cardinal who would become Pope Benedict XVI wrote a Vatican document urging women to be submissive partners, resisting any adversarial roles with men and cultivating “feminine values” like “listening, welcoming, humility, faithfulness, praise and waiting.”

Nuns need to be even more sepia-toned for the über-conservative pope, who was christened “God’s Rottweiler” for his enforcement of orthodoxy. Once a conscripted member of the Hitler Youth, Benedict pardoned a schismatic bishop who claimed that there was no Nazi gas chamber. He also argued on a trip to Africa that distributing condoms could make the AIDS crisis worse.

The Vatican is now conducting two inquisitions into the “quality of life” of American nuns, a dwindling group with an average age of about 70, hoping to herd them back into their old-fashioned habits and convents and curb any speck of modernity or independence.

Nuns who took Vatican II as a mandate for reimagining their mission “started to look uppity to an awful lot of bishops and priests and, of course, the Vatican,” said Kenneth Briggs, the author of “Double Crossed: Uncovering the Catholic Church’s Betrayal of American Nuns.”

The church enabled rampant pedophilia, but nuns who live in apartments and do social work with ailing gays? Sacrilegious! The pope can wear Serengeti sunglasses and expensive red loafers, but shorter hems for nuns? Disgraceful!

“It’s a tragedy because nuns are the jewels of the system,” said Bob Bennett, the Washington lawyer who led the church’s lay inquiry into the pedophilia scandal. “I was of the view that if they had been listened to more, some of this stuff wouldn’t have happened.”

As the Vatican is trying to wall off the “brides of Christ,” Cask of Amontillado style, it is welcoming extreme-right Anglicans into the Catholic Church — the ones who are disgruntled about female priests and openly gay bishops. Il Papa is even willing to bend Rome’s most doggedly held dogma, against married priests — as long as they’re clutching the Anglicans’ Book of Common Prayer.

“Most of the Anglicans who want to move over to the Catholic Church under this deal are people who have scorned women as priests and have scorned gay people,” Briggs said. “The Vatican doesn’t care that these people are motivated by disdain.”

The nuns are pushing back a bit, but it’s hard, since the church has decreed that women can’t be adversarial to men. A nun writing in Commonweal as “Sister X” protests, “American women religious are being bullied.”

She recalls that Bishop Leonard Blair of Toledo, who heads one of the investigations, moved a meeting at the University of Notre Dame off campus to protest a performance of “The Vagina Monologues.” “It is the rare bishop,” Sister X writes, “who has any real understanding of the lives women actually lead.”

The church can be flexible, except with women. Laurie Goodstein, the Times’s religion writer, reported this month on an Illinois woman who had a son with a Franciscan priest. The church agreed to child support but was stingy with money for college and for doctors, once the son got terminal cancer. The priest had never been disciplined and was a pastor in Wisconsin — until he hit the front page. Even then, “Father” Willenborg was suspended only because the woman said that he had pressed her to have an abortion and that he had also had a sexual relationship with a teenager. (Maybe the church shouldn’t be so obdurate on condoms.)

When then-Cardinal Ratzinger was “The Enforcer” in Rome, he investigated and disciplined two American nuns. One, Jeannine Gramick, then of the School Sisters of Notre Dame, founded a ministry to reconcile gays with the church, which regards homosexual desires as “disordered.” The other, Mary Agnes Mansour of the Sisters of Mercy, headed the Michigan Department of Social Services, which, among other things, paid for abortions for poor women.

Marcy Kaptur, a Democratic congresswoman from Toledo and one of Bishop Blair’s flock, got a resolution passed commending nuns for their humble service and sacrifice. “The Vatican’s in another country,” she said. “Maybe people do things differently there. Perhaps the Holy Spirit will intervene.”

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

3) The Public Editor – New York Times

The Archbishop’s Blog

By CLARK HOYT

Published: November 7, 2009, p. 8

LATE last month, Paul Vitello, who covers religion for The Times, wrote a lighthearted feature about a new blogger: Archbishop Timothy Dolan, installed this year to lead the 2.5 million Catholics of the Archdiocese of New York. Little did Vitello know that before the day was out, Dolan would turn his blog on the reporter and his paper, citing news articles and a column by Maureen Dowd as examples of anti-Catholicism.

Skip to next paragraph “It is not hyperbole to call prejudice against the Catholic Church a national pastime,” the archbishop wrote. He said that if you wanted examples of the church being treated unfairly, The Times had supplied four in a couple of weeks. They included Dowd’s “intemperate and scurrilous” column about the treatment of nuns by the church hierarchy and a front-page article about a priest who had fathered a son in a long-term relationship with a parishioner.

Dolan originally submitted his blog post to The Times as an Op-Ed article, and I heard from readers wanting to know why it wasn’t published. David Shipley, the Op-Ed editor, said that his page “has never been the forum for direct responses to articles.” He suggested that the archbishop submit a letter to the editor, but Dolan declined. He told me he knew that a letter to the editor would have to be condensed and he feared that key points would be lost.

The result was the sharp blog attack on The Times from a man who was greeted in the paper six months earlier as warm, flexible and not given to confrontation. Dolan’s criticism touched a nerve with other Catholics with whom I spoke, who feel their faith is under assault in the secular world, and it raised interesting questions about what is fair to report and criticize about the leadership of a religion that is in a unique position of influence: It is both a spiritual home to a quarter of the American population, and a major institution than runs school systems, provides social services and seeks to shape public policy.

Never far from such discussions is the media’s coverage of the church’s pedophilia scandal. One of the examples Dolan cited on his blog was a front-page article in The Times about child sexual abuse in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn. He said it lacked the “outrage” that he said marked coverage of pedophilia in the Catholic Church.

“Why aren’t other people under the same microscope we are?” Dolan asked me. He said child sexual abuse is a broad social problem, yet media coverage seems to focus most on Catholics.

Dolan himself has been under that microscope. The Times interviewed him months ago about his handling of sexual abuse cases in his previous posts in St. Louis and Milwaukee, and it continues to look into the subject. It is a natural inquiry given that advocates for abuse victims, while giving Dolan credit for transparency in Milwaukee, say he did not go far enough in resolving pedophilia cases there.

Times reporters defended the paper’s coverage. Laurie Goodstein, the national religion correspondent, said The Times had reported about sex abuse by clergy of many faiths but that the Catholics’ story was far bigger because there were more priests accused, more people making allegations, more legal wrangling and settlements, and a longer history. And Vitello said of his article about abuse in the Jewish community that his job was to provide information and let readers decide whether to be outraged.

Dolan seemed particularly offended by Dowd’s column, in which she wrote that the Vatican was hoping to herd nuns “back into their old-fashioned habits and convents and curb any speck of modernity or independence.” She said the “über-conservative” Pope Benedict XVI, while a cardinal, had urged women to be submissive partners. She brought up issues like the pope’s conscription into the Hitler Youth, and his statement that condoms could make the AIDS crisis worse.

Dolan wrote that Dowd dug “deep into the nativist handbook to use every anti-Catholic caricature possible.” The subject she raised was legitimate, he said, but her language was more like the prejudice in Know-Nothing papers of the 1850s.

“Far from being anti-Catholic, my column was an expression of one Catholic’s anger and anguish about the moral crisis in her church,” Dowd told me. “It’s not right to call legitimate — and widely shared — complaints about the church hierarchy anti-Catholic, any more than it’s right to call opposition to the policies of a White House anti-American.”

Dolan said he was not trying to stifle dissent. “We welcome criticism of the Catholic Church,” he said. “We need it. What I’m talking about is the ‘how’ of it. Is it measured? Is it temperate?” He said Dowd was serving up “raw red meat.”

Dowd said the issues she raised went to what she sees as the pope’s extreme conservatism and his judgment. “Should I blandly express outrage at the church continuing to treat women as second-class citizens?” she asked. Bland is not what Dowd does. I thought she was well within a columnist’s bounds.

Goodstein, who wrote the article about the priest with a son, said she was vexed by the criticism from Dolan, whom she once described in The Times as a “healer bishop.” Dolan said the affair described in her story was a quarter-century old, and he wondered why it was more newsworthy than subjects like the war in Afghanistan, health care and genocide in Sudan — subjects that The Times, in fact, covers extensively. In a letter to Dolan, Goodstein said he had neglected to mention in his blog that the priest’s son, now 22, was dying from brain cancer and believed the church had failed him, while his father remained a priest.

There is an inherent tension between journalism, which is supposed to be skeptical of authority, and a church that places great emphasis on it. James Martin, a priest and an editor of the Jesuit magazine America, said that, as someone with a foot in each camp, he believes reporters at The Times work hard to get stories right, though he sometimes questions the prominence and frequency of articles about the church’s sex scandal.

Dowd’s column? It was “over the top in mocking the pope,” he said. “Then again, she did that to Bill Clinton.” Martin said he didn’t think most Catholics appreciated reporters’ efforts to be accurate and fair. “On the other hand, I don’t think editors realize how tired Catholics are of seeing the Church portrayed through the lens of sex abuse,” he said.

I think it is hard to pick a handful of examples, as Dolan did, and make a case that The Times has been “anti-Catholic.” Along with unblinking coverage of church controversies, the paper covered his selection as archbishop extensively and for the most part warmly. Goodstein is receiving an award this weekend from the American Academy of Religion for a touching front-page series on priests from abroad serving U.S. parishes.

Could the newspaper sometimes choose a better word in a story or pay more attention to transgressions in other parts of society? Yes. Has it been guilty of anti-Catholicism? I don’t buy it.

Me: I do!

Abortion Restriction Amendment Wins Passage in the U.S. House

By Nicole Gaouette and James Rowley

Nov. 7 (Bloomberg) -- The House voted to restrict the use of federal funds for abortion, limiting access to the procedure for people who use an insurance-purchasing exchange that would be created in pending U.S. health-care legislation.

The 240-194 vote for the amendment included the support of 64 Democrats in addition to Republicans. It came as lawmakers considered a larger bill designed to cover 36 million uninsured Americans and curb rising medical costs.

“I am not writing a new federal abortion policy,” Michigan Representative Bart Stupak, who sponsored the amendment, said in floor debate tonight. The amendment will preserve the “principle of no public funding of abortion and no public funding of insurance policies that pay for abortion.”

Stupak had threatened to join with fellow Democrats to block consideration of his party’s health bill over the issue.

That prompted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to agree to allow the vote to clear the way for debate on the legislation.

Earlier today, Pelosi predicted her chamber would pass the most sweeping U.S. health-care changes in four decades as President Barack Obama urged Congress to “rise to this moment.”

“We will be making history with our vote,” Pelosi told reporters after she and fellow Democrats met with Obama on Capitol Hill. “We will pass health-care reform.”

Another Battle Looms

Still, a later fight over abortion looms as supporters of abortion rights vowed to oppose any final measure that included the restriction. The Senate is struggling to find consensus on its own plan and later would work with the House on a compromise, if both chambers pass their versions.

The 10-year health-care plan’s $1 trillion price tag and its creation of a government-run program to compete with private health insurers represents the biggest changes to health care since the 1965 creation of the Medicare program for the elderly. It would require Americans to get insurance, set up insurance- purchasing exchanges for people who don’t have employer-provided benefits, and provide subsidies to help people obtain coverage.

Stupak and other anti-abortion Democrats voiced concern that lower-income Americans in the proposed health-insurance exchanges could use federal subsidies to pay for abortions.

On the other side, a coalition of 190 lawmakers who favor access to legal abortion say they would oppose any final measure that makes it harder for women to gain access to the procedure.

Threat to Bill

“This is an issue that emerged, with the potential of bringing down the bill,” said Representative Janice Schakowsky, an Illinois Democrat, in an interview. If the additional restrictions make it into the final version of the bill, “many of us couldn’t support it at the end of the day,” she said.

“To say that this amendment is a wolf in sheep’s clothing would be an understatement of a lifetime,” said Colorado Representative Diana DeGette during floor debate. It “will be the greatest restriction of a women’s right to choose” passed by Congress “in our career.”

One Democrat who favors abortion rights, however, Virginia Representative Gerald Connolly, said the Stupak amendment is “not adding new restrictions” and is only “extending existing provisions” to a new government-subsidized program.

“I don’t believe that is an unfair ask for the Pro-Life Caucus,” Connolly told reporters.

The provision -- which would force women who purchase health insurance with a government subsidy to buy a special rider for abortion coverage with their own money -- is no different than the longtime rules for federal government workers, said Connolly, who represents the Virginia suburbs of Washington.

Bigger Picture

The amendment won’t threaten the vote on the overall health-care measure because many Democrats who favor abortion rights will look at the bigger picture, said California Representative Mike Thompson.

“We all recognize it’s one step closer to providing quality, affordable health care” and “we will move on to the next step,” Thompson said.

To contact the reporters on this story: Kristin Jensen in Washington at kjensen@bloomberg.net; Nicole Gaouette in Washington at ngaouette@bloomberg.net

Economic Success: Work as Gift

“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” Albert Einstein (source unknown)

Economic Success: The Object of Work as Artistic Gift

The Good:

It has been a consistent conundrum to ascertain the origin of value. When reality is reduced to quantity, value is reduced to an epiphenomenon of quantified matter, or transmogrified into the rarified “ether” of subjective lucubration. If you think it’s good, it’s good. Or in the parlance of Jane Fonda: “How can you be wrong if you’re so sincere?”

Those are the two sides of the San Andreas Fault (Walker Percy) between matter and thought that has plagued us since Descartes. Karol Wojtyla changed that with his simple phenomenology of the person experiencing himself as good or bad. Wojtyla discovered that the origin of good or bad is the self experiencing itself as either self-transcending or self-seeking. Very simple. Good or bad is not to be discovered outside in the sensibly experienced world (Hume), nor in categories of the mind (Kant), but in the ontological experience of the “I” as acting. This is a very simple brand of self-examination to which they give the name “phenomenology” since Edmund Husserl.

Experience becomes the missing key to find that it is the real ontological self and not things “out there” nor ideas or principles “in here.” As we all sense that an action that we perform is either good or bad, Wojtyla was able to put his finger on the source of that sense. It came from an “experience” of the self itself. He went to work and distinguished what he found to be consciousness and conceptualization as distinct ways of knowing. He didn’t work with an abstractive sensible-abstractive first order epistemology which understands reality as substance and accident. He didn’t deny it, but saw it as “metaphysical terrain” whereby there is an intellect and will as accidents of a substance that is an “’in-itself.” Intellects don’t know, and wills don’t will. It is the Self conscious of its inner experiences who desires.

The major inner experience is self-determination vis a vis an act to be freely performed. Prior to it, there is the experience of potency and act as to the ability to perform the act. Posterior to the act there is the experience of joy or sadness, which results from the actualized state of the being of the “I.” Prior to the act there is freedom to do it or not. It is not a choice between this or that object, but the mastery, or failure of mastery, over the self. If there is no self-mastery, any action is sub-human, and therefore not good as human action. If there is self-mastery, then the action must be in conformity with reality perceived as true. If that occurs, the action is “good.” If the self-mastery is in disconformity with reality it is false and therefore “bad.”

The next question, then, is what is the reality to be conformed to? Joseph Ratzinger may be most helpful here. In his “Truth and Conscience” he presents the “ontological tendency” of the self in imaging the divine Persons as the metaphysical ground of the good and the bad. He says: “(T)here is an inner ontological tendency within man, who is created in the likeness of God, toward the divine. From its origin, man’s being resonates with some things and clashes with others. This anamnesis of the origin, which results from the god-like constitution of our being, is not a conceptually articulated knowing, a store of retrievable contents. It is, so to speak, an inner sense, a capacity to recall, so that t he one whom it addresses, if he is not turned in on himself, hears its echo from within. He sees: That’s it! That is what my nature points to and seeks.”[1] Note that we are dealing with the image of God that is an “ontological tendency” and hence a most realist grounding tendency that becomes consciousness: “That’s it! That is what my nature points to and seeks.” The good. When I determine myself to act in conformity with that tendency, I become good. The “I” then is what I mean by “good.” Good is the ontological “me.”[2]

The theological grounding of this axiology is Christ’s reference to God: “No one is good but only God” (Mk. 10, 18). If this is the grounding origin, then the value “good” can be predicated of man only in so far as he images in the same dynamic mode the prototypical Reality of the Trinity of Relations. As God is prototypical Communio, such must be man. John Paul II wrote in the “Original Unity of Man and Woman:” “If… we want to retrieve also from the account of the Yahwist text the concept of ‘image of God,’ we can deduce that man became the image of God not only through his own humanity, but also through the communion of persons, which man and woman form from the very beginning. The function of the image is that of mirroring the one who is the model, of reproducing its own prototype. Man becomes an image of God not so much in the moment of solitude as in the moment of communion. He is, in fact, ‘from the beginning’ not only an image in which the solitude of one Person, who rules the world, mirrors itself, but also and essentially the image of an inscrutable divine communion of Persons.”[3]

This point is large and scarcely understood today in the light of the faulty eschatology of the second millennium – which we have yet to emerge from - following on the split between Christian East and West and the condemned but sociologically influential formulation of Joachim of Fiore concerning three stages of Salvation history (13^th c.). The split in the year 1054 was the formalization of the individualizing forces in the Church whereby the East – separated from the unifying power of the papacy - became ensnared by the nation states such as Russia, Rumania, Greece, etc. In the West, the absence of the intersubjective dynamic of communio produced an ongoing rationalization and individualization whose end we have not seen. The Parousia has been removed from the “now” of present day history and postponed to coincide with the chronological end of history and the Second Coming. The hope of “development” into “another Christ” as the paradigm of the human person has been replaced by the anticipation of “progress” in science and technology whereby the person called to image God has been replaced by the individual, the unencumbered Self – alone - dominating matter and becoming a self-sufficient god. As alone, man shrinks from everything: death (fear), judgment (guilt), Heaven (achieved pharmacologically in drugs), and Hell (depression).

David Schindler has the chronology of true eschatology right. He remarked: “The crucial points… are whether and in what sense the transformation toward this communion is to begin already now and ‘publicly,’ and not merely in the future and ‘privately;’ and whether this dynamic transformation is to originate from within the core of liberal social order or only by way of addition to it.”[4]

The Computer:

Schindler’s insight consists in seeing technology as a form of anthropology, an anthropology that is mechanistic in nature and that is aided and abetted by an epistemological prejudice that persistently reduces the real to sensibly empirical facts. It must be cautioned that reality is not facts. Facts are mental judgements concerning the real. To consign reality to the data base, small, medium or unimaginably large, is to reduce the real to our way of knowing it, which is to cut it down – Procrustean-like - to our medium of measurement. What else is this but a praxis of force-fed binge of rationalism?

And it creates an anthropology. It is enough to see – at any given moment - half the people on a city street, or in a bus, talking on a cell-phone, working a Blackberry or – child or teenager - mesmerized with the video game. They may be talking or texting with another person, but they are always doing something else at the same time. They are alone. They are in control. They are self-sufficient. They are apprentices – or masters - of the unencumbered Self on the way to becoming like gods. This is an anthropology that is turned back on self. It is an anthropology that does not see.

Schindler points out that “the computer is an arrangement or ordering of space and time and matter and motion for the purpose of realizing a certain kind of knowledge. The ordering is binary and digital. The knowledge sought consists in the gather of discrete bits of information. Knowledge takes the form of acquiring, manipulating, and controlling data. The knowledge proper to a computer is more a matter of power and of ‘summing’ than of ‘seeing.’”[5] And he goes on to point out that “the technological order of the computer is weighted against habits of patient interiority, of contemplativeness, of wonder, of sustained mutual presence, of an embodied being-with, of the wisdom that sees the order to the whole.”[6]

Subordinate the Computer to Art

The computer replaces insight.

Within the theme of Caritas in Veritate, there is the topic of the quality of the product made. I have always been a fan of John Paul II’s “Letter to Artists” where he proclaims that the artifact, as the product of human work, resembles the artist: “In producing a work, artists express themselves to the point where their work becomes a unique disclosure of their own being, of what they are and of how they are what they are. And there are endless examples of this in human history. In shaping a masterpiece, the artist not only summons his work into being, but also in some way reveals his own personality by means of it. For him art offers both a new dimension and an exceptional mode of expression for his spiritual growth. Through his works, the artist speaks to others and communicates with them. The history of art, therefore, is not only a story of works produced but also a story of men and women. Works of art speak of their authors; they enable us to know their inner life, and they reveal the original contribution which artists offer to the history of culture.”[7]

This would come to mean that the goodness of the artist would overflow into the goodness of the artifact as “disclosure of their own being, of what they are and of how they are what they are.” Even more clearly: “(Works of art) enable us to know their (the artist’s inner life.”

Faith as Artistic Act

The knowing that is faith and the concomitant anthropology that is self-gift. In reality they are the same thing. Faith is the ontological obediential act of self gift.

---

[1] J. Ratzinger, “Conscience and Truth” On Conscience, Ignatius (2007) 32.

[2] But note that the whole of creation, including man, was seen by the Creator to be “good.” But after the naming of the animals and actualizing the subjective reality as obeying (and therefore relational) subject, it was revealed that as subject, it was not good for him to be “alone.” As subject, man becomes “good,” only in relation when in fact the first man and woman form a communio as image of the Communio of the Triune God. Cf. “A Theology of the Body”#9, November 14, 1979 DSP (Waldstein) 163.

[3] John Paul II “A Theology of the Body,” Ibid.

[4] David Schindler, “‘Homelessness’ and Market Liberalism” in Wealth, Poverty and Human Destiny ISI Books, (2003) 395.

[5] Ibid 408.

[6]

[7] John Paul II, “Letter to Artists,” #2.

Dear Matthew,

You've got it right. The metaphysics of substance and accident as really distinct arises within an epistemology of sensible perception and abstraction into concepts as "bundles of intellligibility." The notion of being as substance corresponds to that level of sensible and abstract knowing. It is not alse, but merely inadequate as a true metaphysics of the real. It is our way of knowing, not the way things are.

There is another level of experience of reality which is the self in the moral action. This kind of knowing is pre-conceptual. It corresponds to the revelation of the divine Persons as relations and Christology as relational self-gift. It is also available to, as I mention, to direct experience if one has the sensitivity to do the phenomenology involved - as Wojtyla did in his "Subjectivity and the Irreducible in the human person:" Person and Community Lang (1993) 209 -> This latter is a truly real metaphysic since it is immediate experience and not merely mediate through sense perception and conceptual abstraction.

This latter is the key to the future without throwing out the previous abstractive knowing which has been immensely beneficial and will continue to do so in complementarity to the phenomenological. Fr. Connor

Planned Parenthood Director Resigns After Viewing Ultrasound

[Me: This is the way Communism collapsed. The Polish People got up and walked out!!]

Director of Planned Parenthood at 40 Days for Life Birthplace Resigns after Watching Abortion Ultrasound - Planned Parenthood seeks restraining order

By Kathleen Gilbert

BRYAN, Texas, November 2, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The director of the Texas Planned Parenthood abortion mill where the 40 Days for Life campaign began has resigned, saying she experienced a conversion after watching an ultrasound video of a child being killed by abortion.

"I just thought I can't do this anymore, and it was just like a flash that hit me and I thought that's it," said Abby Johnson in an interview with local news network KBTX 3.

Johnson had been affiliated with Bryan's Planned Parenthood facility for eight years, and worked as its director for two. She said she began to feel uncomfortable with Planned Parenthood's business philosophy after the organization, suffering from the economic downturn, told her to try to bring more abortions in the door. "The money wasn't in family planning, the money wasn't in prevention, the money was in abortion and so I had a problem with that," said Johnson.

But the turning point for Johnson was reportedly when she witnessed an actual ultrasound image of an abortion being performed on an unborn child.

"I feel so pure in heart. I don't have this guilt, I don't have this burden on me anymore," said Johnson. "And that's how I know that this conversion was a spiritual conversion."

Johnson resigned on October 6th, near the beginning of Bryan's sixth annual 40 Days for Life campaign, and she has since joined up with the nearby Coalition for Life to begin praying near her old workplace. Coalition for Life is the local group that began 40 Days for Life, the national prayer and fasting campaign that was ongoing at the time of Johnson's resignation.

"This is by far the most amazing thing that has happened to the Coalition for Life throughout its entire history ... we thank God!" wrote Coalition for Life director Shawn Carney, who has been working with Johnson since her resignation, on the group's website.

40 Days for Life national director David Bereit said that Johnson's "amazing conversion demonstrates the importance of a constant, peaceful prayer presence in front of abortion facilities."

"From that first campaign in 2004, we've prayed for Abby - and for all abortion workers - that they would come to see what abortion really is, and that they would leave the deadly business. In this case, those prayers have been answered," said Bereit. "We are so proud of Abby's courage to leave the abortion industry and publicly announce her reasons for leaving."

The story is receiving broad attention after it was posted on the Drudge Report website today.

Planned Parenthood reacted with legal action on Friday by filing for a temporary restraining order, seeking to prevent Johnson and the Coalition for Life from disclosing confidential information. "We regret being forced to turn to the courts to protect the safety and confidentiality of our clients and staff; however, in this instance it is absolutely necessary," said Planned Parenthood in a statement.

A hearing for the restraining order has been set for November 10.

Johnson is one of eight abortion industry workers who left their jobs during the fifth coordinated 40 Days for Life campaign that concluded yesterday in 212 cities. She was the highest-ranking of the eight. Others who quit their clinic jobs included nurses, office staffers and security personnel.

In addition, a Planned Parenthood abortion facility in Kalispell, Montana announced that it will close its doors on November 20, citing a decline in business as the reason for the closure. That clinic was the site of a 40 Days for Life prayer vigil this past spring.

Christopher West: Lust and Eschatology

West’s Context: The Theology of the Body:

West raises the question of whether we can live a divine life on earth. He presents it in the light of the teaching of John Paul II and the Theology of the Body. He says (as posted in toto a few days ago): “Of Which Man Are We Speaking? The pivotal question as I see it is this: What does the grace of redemption offer us in this life with regard to our disordered sexual tendencies? From there, the questions multiply: Is it possible to overcome the pull of lust within us? If not, what are we to do with our disordered desires? If so, to what degree can we be liberated from lust and how can we enter into this grace? Furthermore, what does it actually look like to live a life of ever deepening sexual redemption? (…)

“‘This is what is at stake,’ John Paul II maintained, ‘the reality of Christ’s redemption. Christ has redeemed us! This means he has given us the possibility of realizing the entire truth of our being; he has set our freedom free from the domination of concupiscence’ (Veritatis Splendor 103).” West goes on: “What is the alternative to an effective sexual redemption? If man remains bound by his lusts, is he even capable of loving with a pure heart? Marriage, in this view, comes to be seen and lived as a “legitimate outlet” for indulging our disordered desires and the celibate life comes to be seen and lived as a life of hopeless repression. And we end up ‘holding the form of religion’ while ‘denying the power of it’ (2 Tim 3:5). ‘Ne evacuetur Crux!’ — John Paul II exclaims, ‘Do not empty the Cross of its power!’ (see 1 Cor 1:17). ‘This,’ he said, ‘is the cry of the new evangelization.’ For ‘if the cross of Christ is emptied of its power, man no longer has roots, he no longer has prospects: he is destroyed’ (Orientale Lumen 3).”[1]

Ratzinger's Eschatology and Lust

Consider the same point from the perspective of Joseph Ratzinger’s Eschatology:

The Crucifixion of Jesus Christ is an historical occurrence. The Resurrection of Jesus Christ is eschatological. It is the end and the meaning of history. It is the insertion of the Creator-God immanentized in resurrected Flesh as the eschaton (end) of history. It is the “subsistere” of the Logos as the actio in the “est” of history. It means that the historical action of the Resurrection trumps every metaphysics of sensibly perceived being and all theologies of being and existence. Ratzinger writes: “It thus becomes obvious … that the concept of God is removed from the realm of a mere ουσία. I believe that it was here that the definitive boundary between the biblical and the Greek concept of God became obfuscated, that this obfuscation was the crux of the repeated patristic attempts to combine Greek thought with biblical faith and that from this arose for Christian theology a task that is till far from being accomplished.”[2] And, of course, what he means by this is the completion of first order knowing through sensation and abstraction by the second order of experience of the self in the moral act of self-transcendence, beginning with the act of faith. This relational act, that is the obedience of faith, is the metaphysical translation of the supernatural life of Zoë in a world of ín-itself, substantialist life of Bios and Psuche.

Ratzinger asserts the following: “(T)he Resurrection is an action of God…(N)ow we must extend this statement by saying… the Resurrection is an eschatological action of God. No other word in the language of theology today has assumed such a wide range of meanings as the word ‘eschatological;’ hence we must immediately ask ourselves: What does it mean in this context when we designate the action of God as eschatological? The answer must be given in several stages. The starting point is the fact that Israel awaited the awakening of the dead as the end of history, that is, quite literally as the eschaton, as the final action of God (my underline). Using the stylistic devices of the apocalyptic writers, therefore, the Evangelists, and especially Matthew, described Christ’s Cross and Resurrection as the final hour; they wanted to make it plain that his was not just any resurrection, such as an Elias or some other miracle-worker might have brought about, but a resurrection of a kind never before known, after which death would be no more. That means also, then, that in this awakening the realm of history has been transcended, that he who arose from the dead did not return, as anyone else might have done, to a this-worldly history but stands above it, though by no means without relationship to it.

“Thus the Resurrection cannot be an historical event in the same sense as the Crucifixion is. For that matter, there is no account that depicts it as such, nor is it circumscribed in time otherwise than by the eschatological-symbolical expression ‘the third day.’ On the one hand, it belongs intrinsically to the totality and ultimate greatness of this event that it is ‘eschatological,’ that is, that it transcends history; on the other hand, it belongs just as intrinsically to its inherent importance that it also touches upon history, that is, that this person who was dead is not no longer dead; he – really he himself and as such – is eternally alive in his individuality and uniqueness. Thus, it belongs, at the same time, to this event that it both reaches above history and is founded and anchored in history. Indeed, we could almost say, that the definitive transformation that eschatology underwent by virtue of the Christian belief in the Resurrection is its transposition into history. For late Judaic expectation, eschatology lay at the end of history. To believe in the Resurrection of Jesus means, on the contrary, to believe in the eschaton in history, in the historicity of God’s eschatological action.”[3]

The whole thrust of Benedict’s eschatology is the “Now-Already” of the presence of Jesus Christ in history now. It is also clearly proclaimed by Escriva as the very grounding locution and charism of Opus Dei. Jesus Christ lives! And because He lives, we are able to live a divinized life historically, not without defects and sins. But we can – possumus – live supernatural life, the resurrected life of Christ. We can live an ordinary life of radical self-gift in the middle of the historical world. This is dramatic point Christopher West is making together with John Paul II, Benedict XVI, Romano Guardini, etc. confronting the question: Is it possible to overcome the pull of lust within us? Assumed into the Logos as Jesus of Nazareth, we can.

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[1] Ref. the blog of Christopher West, October 24, 2009.

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[3] J. Ratzinger, “Principles of Catholic Theology,” Ignatius (1987) 184-190.