Laypeople are not merely the clergy's collaborators, but rather share in the responsibility of the Church's ministry, says Benedict XVI.
The Pope called on the laity to become more aware of their role when he inaugurated Tuesday an ecclesial conference for the Diocese of Rome on "Church Membership and Pastoral Co-responsibility." The conference is under way through Friday.
"There should be a renewed becoming aware of our being Church and of the pastoral co-responsibility that, in the name of Christ, all of us are called to carry out," the Holy Father said. This co-responsibility should advance "respect for vocations and for the functions of consecrated persons and laypeople," he added.
The Pontiff acknowledged that this requires a "change of mentality," especially regarding laypeople, shifting from "considering themselves collaborators of the clergy to recognizing themselves truly as 'co-responsible' for the being and action of the Church, favoring the consolidation of a mature and committed laity."
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My Comment: Let it be inserted here that as Church, the laity have mission to the world. The entire Church is denominated "secular," but the laity is "characterized" as secular because they their transformation into Christ, their sharing in the priesthood of Christ, takes place precisely in their fulfillment of ordinary secular work and family life. This, indeed, demands a "change of mentality." The clericalization of the laity must be overcome.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The Bishop of Rome suggested that "there is still a tendency to unilaterally identify the Church with the hierarchy, forgetting the common responsibility, the common mission" of all the baptized.
"Up to what point is the pastoral responsibility of everyone, especially the laity, recognized and encouraged," he asked.
Referring to laypeople committed in the service of the Church, the Pope said there should not be "a lessening of the awareness that they are 'Church,' because Christ, the eternal Word of the Father, convokes them and makes them his People."
Benedict XVI thus asked priests to transmit to laypeople a "sense of belonging to the parish community" and the importance of unity. He further encouraged that laypeople draw close to sacred Scripture, through means such as lectio divina, and carry out missionary activity, in first place through living out charity.
The Holy Father contended that preparations for the Jubilee Year 2000 in Rome helped "the ecclesial community to enhance awareness that the command to evangelize is not just for a few, but for all the baptized."
That's how the Church has lived for generations, he added, while "so many baptized" have "dedicated their lives to educating young generations in the faith, to care for the sick and to help the poor."
"This mission is entrusted to us today, in different situations, in a city in which many baptized have lost the way of the Church and those who are not Christians do not know the beauty of our faith," the Pope stated.
On the other hand, he cautioned against a tendency to see the People of God from a "purely sociological" point of view "with an almost exclusively horizontal perspective that excludes the vertical reference to God."
The Pontiff looked at the distinction between "People of God" and "Body of Christ," affirming that both concepts "are complementary and together form the New Testament concept of the Church."
He explained: "While 'People of God' expresses the continuity of the history of the Church, 'Body of Christ' expresses the universality inaugurated on the cross and with the resurrection of the Lord."
"In Christ, we become really the People of God," which, he affirmed, means everyone, "from the Pope to the last child."
"The Church, therefore, is not the result of a sum of individuals, but a unity among those who are nourished by the Word of God and the Bread of Life," the Pontiff noted.
And the Church "grows and develops," he affirmed. "The future of Christianity and the Church of Rome is also the commitment and the testimony of each one of us."
Layfaithful and Ministers are Equally Priests [as “Other Christs”] yet Irreducibly Different [as Bridegroom (male) and Bride (female)]
The equality of laity and ministerial priests is grounded in their sacramental sharing in the one priesthood of Christ. The priesthood of Christ is presented in St. Paul’s Hebrews 9-11. It consists in the divine “I” of the Logos mastering “His” human will of Jesus of Nazareth, and by the medium of it making the gift of Himself to the Father. Since the human person is made in the image and likeness of the Logos, he/she is capable of that same self-mastery and the same self-gift. Hence, it could be expressed in terms of being “priests of their own existence” in that they are able to be mediators between themselves as subjects – “I’s” - and God. If priesthood means mediation, then priesthood is part and parcel of the ontological topology of the human person.
This, of course, means that anthropology is fundamentally Christological and a radical departure from the received Aristotelian anthropology of “individual substance of a rational nature.” This is a huge novelty which is not a break with tradition but, let’s say, complementary to it. What it does is introduce the “deeper” subjective dimension of the human person as more real. It discloses that there is an ontological reality to subjectivity as subjectivity that was hitherto considered to be “thought” and the locus of subjectivism as relativism. John Paul II affirms as much when he states: “In a special way, the person constitutes a privileged locus for the encounter with being, and hence with metaphysical enquiry” (Fides et Ratio #83). Let me supplement that with this other remark of Wojtyla: “I am convinced that the line of demarcation between the subjectivistic (idealistic) and objectivistic (realistic) views in anthropology and ethics must break down and is in fact breaking down on the basis of the experience of the human being. This experience automatically frees us from pure consciousness as the subject conceived and assumed a priori and leads us to the full concrete existence of the human being, to the reality of the conscious subject.”
Thanks to the growth like this in philosophic sensitivity, there has been the disclosure of the self as ontological reality, in fact, the supreme ontological reality – the “privileged locus” - that has hitherto been hidden by and in consciousness, but which has been disclosed “phenomenologically” in the free activity of self-determination which has never been named specifically as epistemological “experience” although we have forever been experiencing it. Wojtyla has done the heavy lifting here in “The Acting Person” disclosing the “experience” of the “I” in the act of self-determination as opposed to the case when something merely “happens” within the subject. He says: “When I act the ego is the cause that dynamizes the subject. It is the attitude of the ego that is then dominant, whereas subjectiveness seems to be indicating something opposite – it shows the ego as if it were subjacent in the fact of its own dynamization. Such is the case when something happens within the ego. Efficacy and subjectiveness seem to split the field of human experiences into two mutually irreducible factors. Experiences are associated with structures. The structure of ‘man-acts’ and the structure of ‘something-happens-in-man’ seem to divide the human being as if they were two separate levels.” This achievement of identifying the self as the grounding ontological reality is fundamental in being able to appreciate that both laity and priest are equally priests insofar as equally Christs by their sacramental incorporation into Him. The essential difference, like that between male and female is the orientation, “direction,” or “attitude” of the self-giving. But that’s what has to be developed below.
Lumen Gentium #10 reads: “Though they differ essentially and not only in degree, the common priesthood of the faithful and the ministerial or hierarchical priesthood are none the less ordered one to another, each in its own proper way shares in the one priesthood of Christ.” Using precise terminology, the Church is saying that the ministerial priest and the layfaithful of the common priesthood are equal as identical in their sharing in the one priesthood of Jesus Christ. Their identity and relation to each other – as equal but different – is analogical to the identity and relation of male and female. Consider “Dominus Iesus:” “Jesus Christ continues his presence and his work of salvation in the Church and by means of the Church (cf. Col 1:24-27), which is his body (cf. 1 Cor 12:12-13, 27; Col 1:18). And thus, just as the head and members of a living body, though not identical, are inseparable, so too Christ and the Church can neither be confused nor separated, and constitute a single “whole Christ”. This same inseparability is also expressed in the New Testament by the analogy of the Church as the Bride of Christ (cf. 2 Cor 11:2; Eph 5:25-29; Rev 21:2,9)(Lumen Gentium #6).
Because of the ontological nature of the sacraments as real sources of identity with Christ, laity and ministers are one (“unum”) as Christ, yet essentially different. They are to be understood as the identity and essential difference that obtains between male and female. Jesus Christ is Bridegroom; the Church is Bride. Their enfleshment in the Eucharist makes them One Whole Christ. This can only be understood if the being of laity and minister are understood as constitutively relational. The laity as Bride-female is equal to Bridegroom, but oriented in an essentially different way as relation. The one is total self-gift as donation; the other is total self-gift as reception. The giftedness of the Bride is to the world; the giftedness of the Bridegroom is to the Bride.
Let’s consider the ministerial priest. The orientation or direction of the relation of the ministerial priest is to be totally in the service of the layfaithful to activate their priesthood. They celebrate Mass, preach the revealed Word and administer the sacraments, above all, Penance. John Paul II put it best when he said: “This Marian profile is also – even perhaps more so – fundamental and characteristic for the Church as is the apostolic and Petrine profile to which it is profoundly united… The Marian dimension of the Church is antecedent to that of the Petrine, without being in any way divided from it or being less complementary. Mary Immaculate precedes all others, including obviously Peter himself and the Apostles. This is so… because their triple function has not other purpose except to form the Church in line with the ideal of sanctity already programmed and prefigured in Mary.”
Using common parlance, laymen and priests form the communio of the Church – the Body of the One Christ - by the mutual gift of self. Priesthood means “mediation” and it takes place by mediating between self and God in the service of others. Laymen do it on the occasion and exercise of their professional, secular work in the world. Priests do it by acting in the Person of Christ serving the layman. The direction of the relationality is different, and therefore irreducible. Yet they are both total self-gift and relational, and therefore priests of Christ.
In the parlance of St. Josemaria Escriva, the founder of Opus Dei, everybody must live out the “priestly soul,” which is the “lay mentality.” The priestly soul is the self-mastery that comes from subduing the self as one subdues the earth in order to take it as private property. The prototype of the priestly soul is the Divine Person of the Logos subduing and mastering the human will of the man (not person), Jesus of Nazareth, thus making that human will His own. You own the earth that you subdue. That act of self-mastery is the supreme act of freedom that differentiates the human person from a merely cosmic stimulus-response organism working out of sheer necessity. That freedom is what St. Josemaria understood to be the “lay mentality,” i.e. the freedom with which each one decides about himself in all that pertains to what is open to opinion. What is not open to opinion is the Revelation of Jesus Christ and the morality consequent to it.
This anecdote of Malcolm Muggeridge could help us:
“… Some forty years ago, shortly before the outbreak of the 1939-45 war, the person whom I have most loved in this world, my wife Kitty, was desperately ill, and, as I was informed by the doctor attending her, had only an outside chance of surviving. The medical details are unimportant; probably today, with the great advances that have taken place in curative medicine, her state would not be so serious. But as the situation presented itself then, she was hovering between life and death, though, needless to say, there was no voice, as there might well be nowadays, to suggest that it might be better to let her go.
“The doctor explained that an emergency operation was essential, and, in honesty, felt bound to tell me that it would be something of a gamble. Her blood, it appeared, was so thin as a result of a long spell of jaundice that before he operated a blood-transfusion was desperately needed – this was before the days of plasma. As he said this, an incredible happiness amounting to ecstasy surged up inside me. If I could be the donor! My blood group was established, and found to suitable; the necessary gear was brought in, very primitive by contemporary standards – just a glass tube one end of which was inserted in her arm and the other end in mine, with a pump in the middle drawing out my blood and sending it into her. I would watch the flow, shouting out absurdly to the doctor: `Don’t stint yourself, take all you want!’ and noting delightedly the immediate effect in bringing back life into her face that before had seemed grey and lifeless. It was the turning point; from that moment she began to mend.
At no point in our long relationship has there been a more ecstatic moment than when I thus saw my life-blood pouring into hers to revivify it. We were at one, blood to blood, as no other kind of union could make us. To give life – this was what love was for; to give it in all circumstances and eventualities; whether God creating the universe, or a male and female creating another human being…” or Malcolm Muggeridge giving lots of his blood to his wife.
Priestly Total Self-Gift Means to “Taste God”
Benedict XVI remarked: God “failed” in Adam and therefore started the human race over again in Himself. God “failed” in the parable of the Banquet where the first guests invited failed to come. Benedict XVI asks why did this happen, and what is one to do? – because this is precisely the situation we are in today in the Church. He responds:
“St Gregory the Great in his explanation of this text sought to delve into it further and wondered: how can a man say "no" to the greatest thing that exists; that he has no time for what is most important; that he can lock himself into his own existence?
And he answers: in reality, they have never had an experience of God; they have never acquired a "taste" for God; they have never experienced how delightful it is to be "touched" by God! They lack this "contact" -- and with it, the "taste for God". And only if we, so to speak, taste him, only then can we come to the banquet.
St Gregory cites the Psalm from which today's Communion Antiphon is taken: Taste, try it and see; taste and then you will see and be enlightened! Our task is to help people so they can taste the flavor for God anew.
In another homily, St Gregory the Great deepened further the same question and asked himself: how can it be that man does not even want to "taste" God?
And he responds: when man is entirely caught up in his own world, with material things, with what he can do, with all that is feasible and brings him success, with all that he can produce or understand by himself, then his capacity to perceive God weakens, the organ sensitive to God deteriorates, it becomes unable to perceive and sense, it no longer perceives the Divine, because the corresponding inner organ has withered, it has stopped developing.
When he overuses all the other organs, the empirical ones, it can happen that it is precisely the sense of God that suffers, that this organ dies, and man, as St Gregory says, no longer perceives God's gaze, to be looked at by him, the fact that his precious gaze touches me!
I maintain that St Gregory the Great has described exactly the situation of our time -- in fact, his was an age very similar to ours. And the question still arises: what should we do?
I hold that the first thing to do is what the Lord tells us today in the First Reading, and which St Paul cries to us in God's Name: "Your attitude must be Christ's -- 'Touto phroneite en hymin ho kai en Christo Iesou'".
Learn to think as Christ thought, learn to think with him! And this thinking is not only the thinking of the mind, but also a thinking of the heart.
We learn Jesus Christ's sentiments when we learn to think with him and thus, when we learn to think also of his failure, of his passage through failure and of the growth of his love in failure.
If we enter into these sentiments of his, if we begin to practice thinking like him and with him, then joy for God is awakened within us, confident that he is the strongest; yes, we can say that love for him is reawakened within us. We feel how beautiful it is that he is there and that we can know him -- that we know him in the face of Jesus Christ who suffered for us.
I think this is the first thing: that we ourselves enter into vital contact with God -- with the Lord Jesus, the living God; that in us the organ directed to God be strengthened; that we bear within us a perception of his "exquisiteness".
This also gives life to our work, but we also run a risk: one can do much, many things in the ecclesiastical field, all for God ..., and yet remain totally taken up with oneself, without encountering God. Work replaces faith, but then one becomes empty within.
I therefore believe that we must make an effort above all to listen to the Lord in prayer, in deep interior participation in the sacraments, in learning the sentiments of God in the faces and the suffering of others, in order to be infected by his joy, his zeal and his love, and to look at the world with him and starting from him.
If we can succeed in doing this, even in the midst of the many "noes", we will once again find people waiting for him who may perhaps often be odd -- the parable clearly says so -- but who are nevertheless called to enter his hall.
Once again, in other words: it is a matter of the centrality of God, and not just any god but the God with the Face of Jesus Christ. Today, this is crucial.
There are so many problems one could list that must be solved, but none of them can be solved unless God is put at the centre, if God does not become once again visible to the world, if he does not become the determining factor in our lives and also enters the world in a decisive way through us.”
To “taste God” is to experience God in yourself. This is possible because the metaphysical anthropology of the human person is the image of the divine Persons. The only person I can experience in the use of my freedom in the act of self-determination is myself. If I master myself to give myself in prayer as Jesus Christ is prayer to the Father (being a pure relation to the Father which reveals itself when incarnate as prayer), I can experience within myself – in some way – what Christ experiences in Himself as a divine Person. The more gift I make of myself, the more gift I experience; the more gift I experience, the greater the actual consciousness I have of what it means to be the Son of God; the greater that consciousness, the more able I will be to be able to say: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Mt. 16, 16).
Help the Friday Fax track and expose this new population conspiracy…
May 27, 2009
Dear Reader of the Friday Fax,
A cabal of the world’s richest men and women just met in New York City. The meeting included multi-billionaires David Rockefeller, Bill Gates, Ted Turner, George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, and Warren Buffet.
The purpose of the meeting was to coordinate their charitable giving. That sounds wonderful doesn’t it? Until you hear what they agreed on.
They agreed that the world’s number one problem is that there are too many poor people. That’s nice, too. There are too many poor people. And what is their solution?
GET RID OF THE POOR PEOPLE.
These fabulously wealthy people with their grand houses, private jets, yachts and lavish lifestyles decided to pool their massive resources and declare war on the world’s poor by spending billions of dollars on population control!
This group met a few days ago in New York and call themselves, get this, The Good Club!
This is a veritable rogues gallery of anti-life and anti-family plutocrats. Ted Turner is a long time supporter of forcing poor countries to support abortion and population control.David Rockefeller is one of the founders of the modern population control movement and through his Rockefeller Foundation has paid billions for it.
And these guys are not just for population control;
They are also anti-Christian!
The Rockefeller Foundation is one of the big funders of the anti-Catholic anti-life groups that calls itself Catholics for Choice. Ted Turner gave a speech at the UN several years ago in which he attacked his childhood Christianity and was given a standing ovation for doing so!
There is a massive resurgence of population control activity.
Just a few weeks ago, we reported in our Friday Fax that the UN just issued a new report calling for increased spending to reduce the fertility rate (that is UN-speak for population control) in the developing world!
I will put aside the question of whether these guys have gotten the news that the big population problem in the world today is not rapidly growing populations but rather the “graying of the population” precisely because of UN style population control programs.
I bring this to your attention because as there is renewed spending on these issues and that the UN is back into the population control business so much that there is a profound need for the continuing health of C-FAM’s Friday Fax…
Reading Bob Herbert’s “Our Crumbling Foundation” in the NYT, May 26, 2009 A 19, one is tempted to think back to the last posting here of David Goldman’s “Depression and Demographics” where he pins the long term, and really, only solution to the financial health of the country on the birth rate. Anything besides living babies who will grow into autonomous producers of wealth is considered “bookkeeping and ultimately trivial.”
Today, Bob Herbert wrings his hands and does not know what to say about the solution:
“America has become self-destructively shortsighted in recent decades. That has kept us from acknowledging the awful long-term consequences of the tidal wave of joblessness that has swept over the nation since the start of the recession in December 2007. And it is keeping us from understanding how important the maintenance and development of the infrastructure is to the nation’s long-term social and economic prospects.
“It is not just about roads and bridges, although they are important. It’s also about schools, and the electrical grid, and environmental and technological innovation. It ‘s about establishing a world-class industrial and economic platform for a nation that is speeding toward second-class status on a range of important fronts.
“It’s about whether we’re serious about remaining a great nation. We don’t act like it. Here’s a staggering statistic: According to the Education Trust, the U.S. is the only industrialized country in which young people are less likely than their parents to graduate from high school
“We can’t put our people to work. We can’t educate the young. We can’t keep the infrastructure in good repair. It’s hard to believe that this nation could be so dysfunctional at the end of the first decade of the 21st century. It’s tragic.”
It’s important to keep in mind that this is the same newspaper with editorial and op-ed that has espoused 1) contraception fearing that we would be standing on each other’s shoulders eating seaweed, and 2) abortion that has done in 49,551,703 babies.
Attempting to make a point and sustain the critique, I offer a piece from the previous posting of David Goldman on this blog:
“The declining demographics of the traditional American family raise a dismal possibility: Perhaps the world is poorer now because the present generation did not bother to rear a new generation. All else is bookkeeping and ultimately trivial. This unwelcome and unprecedented change underlies the present global economic crisis. We are grayer, and less fecund, and as a result we are poorer, and will get poorer still —no utter what economic policies we put in place.
“The collapse of home prices and the knock-on effects on the banking system stem from the shrinking count of families that require houses. It is no accident that the housing market —the economic sector most sensitive to demographics— was the epicenter of the economic crisis. In fact, demographers have been predicting a housing crash for years due to the demographics of diminishing demand. Wall Street and Washington merely succeeded in prolonging the housing bubble for a few additional years. The adverse demographics arising from cultural decay, though, portend far graver consequences for the funding of health and retirement systems.
“Conservatives have indulged in self-congratulation over the quarter-century run of growth that began in 1984 with the Reagan administration’s tax reforms. A prosperity that fails to rear a new generation in sufficient number is hollow, as we have learned to our detriment during the past year. Compared to Japan and most European countries, which face demographic catastrophe, America’s position seems relatively strong, but that strength is only postponing the reckoning by keeping the world’s capital flowing into the U.S. mortgage market right up until the crash at the end of 2007.
“As long as conservative leaders delivered economic growth, family issues were relegated to Sunday rhetoric. Of course, conservative thinkers never actually proposed to measure the movement’s success solely in units of gross domestic product, or square feet per home, or cubic displacement of the average automobile engine. But delivering consumer goods was what conservatives seemed to do well, and they rode the momentum of the Reagan boom.
“Until now. Our children are our wealth. Too few of them are seated around America’s common table, and it is their absence that makes us poor. Not only the absolute count of children, to be sure, but also the shrinking proportion of children raised with the moral material advantages of two-parent families diminishes our prospects. The capital markets have reduced the value of homeowners’ equity by $8 trillion and of stocks by $7 trillion. Households with a provider aged 45 to 54 have lost half their net worth between 2004 and 2009, according to Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. There are ways to ameliorate the financial crisis, but none of them will replace the lives that should have been part of America and now are missed.”
This suggests that nothing economic policy can do will entirely reverse the great wave of wealth destruction.”[1]
Welcome news is the upholding of Proposition 8 in California that bans same sex marriage.The loss of perception concerning the meaning of human sexuality and the communio of the sexes as imaging the Divine Persons in holy matrimony was foreseen as an outgrowth of contraception. That originating evil is still with us, and still not clearly understood in its treacherous undermining of the human person.
Three generations of economists immersed themselves in study of the Great Depression, determined to prevent a recurrence of the awful events of the 1930s. And as our current financial crisis began to unfold in 2008, policymakers did everything that those economists prescribed. Following John Maynard Keynes, President Bush and President Obama each offered a fiscal stimulus. The Federal Reserve maintained confidence in the financial system, increased the money supply, and lowered interest rates. The major industrial nations worked together, rather than at cross purposes as they had in the early 1930s.
In other words, the government tried to do everything right, but everything continues to go wrong. We labored hard and traveled long to avoid a new depression, but one seems to have found us, nonetheless.
So is this something outside the lesson book of the Great Depression? Most officials and economists argue that, until home prices stabilize, necrosis will continue to spread through the assets of the financial system and consumers will continue to restrict spending. The sources of the present crisis reach into the capillary system of the economy: the most basic decisions and requirements of American households. All the apparatus of financial engineering is helpless beside the simple issue of household decisions about shelter. We are in the most democratic of economic crises, and it stems directly from the character of our people.
Part of the problem in seeing this may be that we are transfixed by the dense technicalities of credit flow, the new varieties of toxic assets, and the endless iterations of financial restructuring. Sometimes it helps to look at the world with a kind of simplicity. Think of it this way: Credit markets derive from the cycle of human life. Young people need to borrow capital to start families and businesses; old people need to earn income on the capital they have saved. We invest our retirement savings in the formation of new households. All the armamentarium of modern capital markets boils down to investing in a new generation so that they will provide for us when we are old.
To understand the bleeding in the housing market, then, we need to examine the population of prospective homebuyers whose millions of individual decisions determine whether the economy will recover. Families with children are the fulcrum of the housing market. Because single-parent families tend to be poor, the buying power is concentrated in two-parent families with children.
N
ow, consider this fact: America’s population has risen from 200 million to 300 million since 1970, while the total number of two-parent families with children is the same today as it was when Richard Nixon took office, at 25 million. In 1973, the United States had 36 million housing units with three or more bedrooms, not many more than the number of two-parent families with children —which means that the supply of family homes was roughly in line with the number of families. By 2005, the number of housing units with three or more bedrooms had doubled to 72 million, though America had the same number of two-parent families with children.
The number of two-parent families with children, the kind of household that requires and can afford a large home, has remained essentially stagnant since 1963, according to the Census Bureau. Between 1963 and 2005, to be sure, the total number of what the Census Bureau categorizes as families grew from 47 million to 77 million. But most of the increase is due to families without children, including what are sometimes rather strangely called “one-person families.”
I
n place of traditional two-parent families with children, America has seen enormous growth in one-parent families and childless families. The number of one-parent families with children has tripled. Dependent children formed half the U.S. population in 1960, and they add up to only 30 percent today. The dependent elderly doubled as a proportion the population, from 15 percent in 1960 to 30 percent today.
If capital markets derive from the cycle of human life, what happens if the cycle goes wrong? Investors may be unreasonably panicked about the future, and governments can allay this panic by guaranteeing bank deposits, increasing incentives to invest, and so forth. But something different is in play when investors are reasonably panicked. What if there really is something wrong with our future —if the next generation fails to appear in sufficient numbers? The answer is that we get poorer.
The declining demographics of the traditional American family raise a dismal possibility: Perhaps the world is poorer now because the present generation did not bother to rear a new generation. All else is bookkeeping and ultimately trivial. This unwelcome and unprecedented change underlies the present global economic crisis. We are grayer, and less fecund, and as a result we are poorer, and will get poorer still —no utter what economic policies we put in place.
We could put this another way: America’s housing market collapsed because conservatives lost the culture wars even back while they were prevailing in electoral politics. During the past half century America has changed from a nation in which most households had two parents with young children. We are now a melange of alternative arrangements in which the nuclear family is merely a niche phenomenon. By 2025, single-person households may outnumber families with children.
The collapse of home prices and the knock-on effects on the banking system stem from the shrinking count of families that require houses. It is no accident that the housing market —the economic sector most sensitive to demographics— was the epicenter of the economic crisis. In fact, demographers have been predicting a housing crash for years due to the demographics of diminishing demand. Wall Street and Washington merely succeeded in prolonging the housing bubble for a few additional years. The adverse demographics arising from cultural decay, though, portend far graver consequences for the funding of health and retirement systems.
Conservatives have indulged in self-congratulation over the quarter-century run of growth that began in 1984 with the Reagan administration’s tax reforms. A prosperity that fails to rear a new generation in sufficient number is hollow, as we have learned to our detriment during the past year. Compared to Japan and most European countries, which face demographic catastrophe, America’s position seems relatively strong, but that strength is only postponing the reckoning by keeping the world’s capital flowing into the U.S. mortgage market right up until the crash at the end of 2007.
As long as conservative leaders delivered economic growth, family issues were relegated to Sunday rhetoric. Of course, conservative thinkers never actually proposed to measure the movement’s success solely in units of gross domestic product, or square feet per home, or cubic displacement of the average automobile engine. But delivering consumer goods was what conservatives seemed to do well, and they rode the momentum of the Reagan boom.
Until now. Our children are our wealth. Too few of them are seated around America’s common table, and it is their absence that makes us poor. Not only the absolute count of children, to be sure, but also the shrinking proportion of children raised with the moral material advantages of two-parent families diminishes our prospects. The capital markets have reduced the value of homeowners’ equity by $8 trillion and of stocks by $7 trillion. Households with a provider aged 45 to 54 have lost half their net worth between 2004 and 2009, according to Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. There are ways to ameliorate the financial crisis, but none of them will replace the lives that should have been part of America and now are missed.
This suggests that nothing economic policy can do will entirely reverse the great wave of wealth destruction. President Obama made hope the watchword of his campaign, but there is less for which to hope, largely because of the economic impact of the lifestyle choices favored by the same young people who were so enthusiastic for Obama. The Reagan reforms created new markets and financing techniques and put enormous amounts of leverage at the disposal of businesses and households. The 1980s saw the creation of a mortgage-backed securities market that turned the American home into a ready source of capital, the emergence of a high-yield bond market that allowed new companies to issue debt, and the expansion of private equity. These financing techniques contributed mightily to the great expansion of 1984-2008, and they were the same instruments that would wreak ruin on the financial system. During the 1980s the baby boomers were in their twenties and thirties, when families are supposed to take on debt; twenty years later, the baby boomers were in their fifties and sixties, when families are supposed to save for retirement. The elixir of youth turned toxic for the aging.
Unless we restore the traditional family to a central position in American life, we cannot expect to return to the kind of wealth accumulation that characterized the 1980s and 1990s. Theoretically; we might recruit immigrants to replace the children we did not rear, or we might invest capital overseas with the children of other countries. From the standpoint of economic policy, neither of those possibilities can be dismissed. But the contributions of immigration or capital export will be marginal at best compared to the central issue of whether the demographics of America reverts health.
Life is sacred for its own sake. It is not an instrument to provide us with fatter IRAs or better real-estate values. But it is fair to point out that wealth depends ultimately on the natural order of human life.
Failing to rear a new generation in sufficient numbers to replace the present one violates that order, and it has consequences for wealth, among many other things. Americans who rejected the mild yoke of family responsibility in pursuit of atavistic enjoyment will find at last that this is not to be theirs, either.
It will be painful for conservatives to admit that things were not well with America under the Republican watch, at least not at the family level. From 1954 to 1970, for example, half or more of households contained two parents and one or more children under the age of eighteen. In fact as well as in popular culture, the two-parent nuclear family formed the normative American household. By 1981, when Ronald Reagan took office, two-parent households had fallen to just over two-fifths of the total. Today, less than a third of American households constitute a two-parent nuclear family with children.
Housing prices are collapsing in part because single-person households are replacing families with children. The Virginia Tech economist Arthur C. Nelson has noted that households with children would fall from half to a quarter of all households by 2025. The demand of Americans will then be urban apartments for empty nesters. Demand for large-lot single family homes, Nelson calculated, will slump from 56 million today to 34 million in 2025 —a reduction of 40 percent. There never will be a housing price recovery in many parts of the country. Huge tracts will become uninhabited except by vandals and rodents.
All of these trends were evident for years, and duly noted by housing economists. Why did it take until 2007 for home prices to collapse? If America were a closed economy, the housing market would have crashed years ago. The paradox is that the rest of the industrial world, and much of the developing world, are aging faster than the United States.
I
n the industrial world, there are more than 400 million people in their peak savings years, 40 to 64 years of age, and the number is growing. There are fewer than 350 million young earners in the 19-to-40-year bracket, and their number is shrinking. If savers in Japan can’t find enough young people to lend to, they will lend to the young people of other countries. Japan’s median age will rise above 60 by mid-century, and Europe’s will rise to the mid-50s.
America is slightly better off. Countries with aging and shrinking populations must export and invest the proceeds. Japan’s households have hoarded $14 trillion in savings, which they will spend on geriatric care provided by Indonesian and Filipino nurses, as the country’s population falls to just 90 million in 2050 from 127 million today.
The graying of the industrial world creates an inexhaustible supply of savings and demand for assets in which to invest them —which is to say, for young people able to borrow and pay loans with interest. The tragedy is that most of the world’s young people live in countries without capital markets, enforcement of property rights, or reliable governments. Japanese investors will not buy mortgages from Africa or Latin America, or even China. A rich Chinese won’t lend money to a poor Chinese unless, of course, the poor Chinese first moves to the United States.
Until recently, that left the United States the main destination for the aging savers of the industrial world. America became the magnet for savings accumulated by aging Europeans and Japanese. To this must be added the rainy-day savings of the Chinese government, whose desire to accumulate large amounts of foreign-exchange reserves is more than justified in retrospect by the present crisis.
America has roughly 120 million adults in the 19-to-14 age bracket, the prime borrowing years. That is not a large number against the 420 million prospective savers in the aging developed world as a whole. There simply aren’t enough young Americans to absorb the savings of the rest of the world. In demographic terms, America is only the leper with the most fingers.
The rest of the world lent the United States vast sums, rising to almost $1 trillion in 2007. As the rest of he world thrust its savings on the United States, interest rates fell and home prices rose. To feed the inexhaustible demand for American assets, Wall Street connived with the ratings agencies to turn the sow’s ear of subprime mortgages into silk purses, in the form of supposedly default-proof securities with high credit ratings. Americans thought themselves charmed and came to expect indefinitely continuing rates of 10 percent annual appreciation of home prices (and correspondingly higher returns to homeowners with a great deal of leverage).
The baby boomers evidently concluded that one day they all would sell their houses to each other at exorbitant prices and retire on the proceeds. The national household savings rate fell to zero by 2007, as Americans came to believe that capital gains on residential real estate would substitute for savings.
A
fter a $15 trillion reduction in asset values, Americans are now saving as much as they can. Of course, if everyone saves and no one spends, the economy shuts down, which is precisely what is happening. The trouble is not that aging baby boomers need to save. The problem is that the families with children who need to spend never were formed in sufficient numbers to sustain growth.
In emphasizing the demographics, I do not mean to give Wall Street a free pass for prolonging the bubble. Without financial engineering, the crisis would have come sooner and in a milder form. But we would have been just as poor in consequence. The origin of the crisis is demographic, and its solution can only be demographic.
America needs to find productive young people to whom to lend. The world abounds in young people, of course, but not young people who can productively use capital and are thus good credit risks. The trouble is to locate young people who are reared to the skill sets, work ethic, and social values required for a modern economy.
In theory, it is possible to match American capital to the requirements of young people in venues capable of great productivity growth. East Asia, for example, has almost 500 million people in the 19-to-40-year-old bracket, 50 percent more than that of the entire industrial world. The prospect of raising the productivity of Chinese, Indians, and other Asians opens up an entirely different horizon for the American economy. In theory, the opportunities for investment in Asia are limitless, but political trust, capital markets, regulatory institutions, and other preconditions for such investment have been inadequate. For aging Americans to trust their savings to young Asians, a generation’s worth of institutional reforms would be required.
It is also possible to improve America’s demographic profile through immigration, as Reuven Brenner of McGill University has proposed. Some years ago Cardinal Baffi of Bologna suggested that Europe seek Catholic immigrants from Latin America. In a small way, something like this is happening. Europe’s alternative is to accept more immigrants from the Middle East and Africa, with the attendant risks of cultural hollowing out and eventual Islamicization. America’s problem is more difficult, for what America requires are highly skilled immigrants.
Even so, efforts to export capital and import workers will at best mitigate America’s economic problems in a small way. We are going to be poorer for a generation and perhaps longer. We will drive smaller cars and live in smaller homes, vacation in cabins by the lake rather than at Disney World, and send our children to public universities rather than private liberal-arts colleges. The baby boomers on average will work five or ten years longer before retiring on less income than they had planned, and young people will work for less money at duller jobs than they had hoped.
I
n traditional societies, each extended family relied on its own children to care for its own elderly. The resources the community devoted to the destitute —gleaning the fields after harvest, for example — were quite limited. Modern society does not require every family to fund its retirement by rearing children; we may, contribute to a pension fund and draw on the labor of the children of others. But if everyone were to retire on the same day, the pension fund would go bankrupt instantly, and we all would starve.
The distribution of rewards and penalties is manifestly unfair. The current crisis is particularly unfair to those who brought up children and contributed monthly to their pension fund, only to watch the value of their savings evaporate in the crisis. Tax and social-insurance policy should reflect the effort and cost of rearing children and require those who avoid such effort and cost to pay their fair share.
Numerous proposals for family-friendly tax policy are in circulation, including recent suggestions by Ramesh Ponnuru, Ross Douthat, and Reihan Salam. The core of a family-oriented economic program might include the following measures:
• Cut taxes on families. The personal exemption introduced with the Second World War’s Victory Tax was $624, reflecting the cost of “food and a little more.” In today’s dollars that would be about $7,600, while the current personal exemption stands at only $3,650. The personal exemption should be raised to $8,000 simply to restore the real value of the deduction, and the full personal exemption should apply to children.
• Shift part of the burden of social insurance to the childless. For most taxpayers, social-insurance deductions are almost as great a burden as income tax. Families that bring up children contribute to the future tax base; families that do not get a free ride. The base rate for social security and Medicare deductions should rise, with a significant exemption for families with children, so that a disproportionate share of the burden falls on the childless.
• Make child-related expenses tax deductible. Tuition and health care are the key expenses here with which parents need help.
• Change the immigration laws. The United States needs highly skilled, productive individuals in their prime years for earning and family formation.
We delude ourselves when we imagine that a few hundred dollars of tax incentives will persuade individuals to form families or keep them together. A generation of Americans has grownup with the belief that the traditional family is merely one lifestyle choice among many.
But it is among the young that such a conservative message could reverberate the loudest. The young know that the promise of sexual freedom has brought them nothing but emptiness and anomie. They suffer more than anyone from the breakup of families. They know that abortion has wrought psychic damage that never can be repaired. And, they see that their own future was compromised by the poor choices of their parents.
It was always morally wrong for conservatives to attempt to segregate the emotionally charged issues of public morals from the conservative growth agenda. We know now that it was also incompetent from a purely economic point of view. Without life, there is no wealth; without families, there is no economic future. The value of future income streams traded in capital markets will fall in accordance with our impoverished demography. We cannot pursue the acquisition of wealth and the provision of upward mobility except through the reconquest of the American polity on behalf of the American family.
T
he conservative movement today seems weaker than at any time since Lyndon Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater. There are no free-marketeers in the foxholes, and it is hard to find an economics of any stripe who does not believe that the government must provide some kind of economic stimulus and rescue the financial system.
But the present crisis also might present the conservative movement with the greatest opportunity it has had since Ronald Reagan took office. The Obama administration will certainly face backlash when its promise to fix the economy through the antiquated tools of Keynesian stimulus comes to nothing. And as a result, American voters may be more disposed to consider fundamental problems than they have been for several generations. The message that our children are our wealth, and that families are its custodian, might resonate all the more strongly for the manifest failure of the alternatives.
DAVID P. GOLDMAN is associate editor of FIRST THINGS.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Response to my post on Fatima by Les Leicester
Here’s a most interesting post found at The Truth Will Make You Free, a blog by Father Robert A. Connor, Chaplain at Southmont, a center of Opus Dei in South Orange, New Jersey. The conclusion or highlight of the post I have quoted below;
The Point of it all: Will the engendering of Christ again in all those who achieve the heart of Our Lady bring about the new culture and civilization that we are awaiting for the development of this third millennium of Jesus Christ? That is, will each of us become “alter Christus” in the ordinary life of work and family life such that the absolute truth of the human person (imaging the prototype, Jesus Christ) become the ordering principle of freedom.
The content of that truth of the person:
- “the person of the worker is the principle, subject and purpose of work.
- “the priority of work over capital and the fact that material goods are meant for all.”
- “a sense of solidarity involving not only rights to be defended but also the duties to be performed.:
- “participation aimed at promoting the national and international common good and not just defending individual or corporate interests.”
- “assimilate the methods of confrontation and of frank and vigorous dialogue.”
Result:
- “the political authorities will become more capable of acting with respect for the legitimate freedoms of individuals, families and subsidiary groups.”
- “ they will thus create the conditions necessary for man to be able to achieve his authentic and integral welfare, including his spiritual goal.”
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Leicester Response:
Here is my reply (too long for a com-box),
Forgive my cynicism Father, but I don’t follow the last step in the transition to the new social order. As the die-hard Marxists claim about the Soviet Union that true communism was never achieved, I would suggest that the capitalist west has been a bastardized form of free enterprise among men. The ethos of the founders of America was lost sometime after it was codified in the Declaration and the Constitution. The question of whether it was achievable is the same question that must be asked of every “system”, including those pre-existing the Enlightenment, although it is only since that the question of a “system” was even on the radar for the average man.
Rather than say that the American experiment has been tried and found wanting, I don’t think it has been truly tried. Nor could it, because it is in the nature of concupiscent man to discover any means to make a system unfair, for the benefit of a few. Monarchies of the past, to their credit, did not pretend that it was otherwise although there were wise and benevolent kings on occasion who saw the commoner as their responsibility, their charge. Egalitarian and individualist ideologies believe it is possible to establish a system that, through one mechanism or another, can maintain the equality of every individual, however equality is defined. The one common feature of them all is their failure. That failure is rooted in the nature of men.
And that is where I cannot practically follow the step from the teaching of the Church as you have described it, and which is not debatable; to the world governed by that code or ethic, however it is described or called.
In microcosm, we see the civilization of love in the Acts of the Apostles, chapter 2, verse 44 and following. They basically eliminated private property and followed the ethic that Karl Marx invoked; from each according to his ability to each according to his need. What held this together? The common overriding personal faith of each in the Lord Jesus Christ. (I would also suggest that it may have been in part the Apostles’ expectation of the immanent return of Jesus Christ. It was later that the possibility became apparent that Jesus might not return in their life-time and I believe that was at the root of the situation St. Paul was dealing with in his second letter to the Thessalonians where he says in chapter 3, verse 10;
“In fact, when we were with you, we instructed you that if anyone was unwilling to work, neither should that one eat.”)
So where is this civilization now? We can actually find it in the monastic orders, and other Christian organizations throughout Church history. But again, what does it depend upon? The common overriding personal faith of each in the Lord Jesus Christ. And, even so, the concupiscence of one and all makes such a life difficult by times and requiring a “rule.”
We see this occurring also in the natural order (natural law) in the family. Once again, this group is bound together by a bond of love and when infused with grace is that much stronger. And even so, one of its features is the hierarchy of authority, which, when undermined, destroys the unity. We have seen this loss of unity at work among the Protestants as well for the same reason.
If this new civilization is to replace the old orders and ideologies of communism and capitalism presumably we are talking about the world beyond the family and the monastery. Are we expecting the entire world to have the common overriding faith in Jesus Christ? Great expectations indeed. Is this the goal of the gospel? Absolutely. But even Christ himself pointed out that the way is narrow and few that are that find it. Are we looking at a parallel to what is known as Dominion theology and resides mainly within a small group of Presbyterians? In that ideology there is only a presumption of a majority of believers, such that they dominate not only the culture but the political sphere.
My cynicism resides in the knowledge that mankind is free, whether or not we wish to acknowledge that in law (the point of Dignitatis Humanae) and political order, and his faith in Jesus Christ or lack thereof is his choice. Thus, unless a very large majority of society are believers, this civilization cannot be achieved without coercion, which of course, would be antithetical to its very essence. Even in a society that had a pre-existing Christian order, the influence of that order on the human heart was not necessarily convincing. As I’ve quoted many times in the past, Pope Benedict (the Cardinal Ratzinger) in Introduction to Christianity makes this statement;
“And when today as believers in our age we hear it said, a little enviously perhaps, that in the Middle Ages everyone without exception in our lands was a believer, it is a good thing to cast a glance behind the scenes, as we can today, thanks to historical research. This will tell us that even in those days there was the great mass of nominal believers and a relatively small number of people who had really entered into the inner movement of belief. It will show us that for many belief was only a ready-made mode of life, by which for them the exciting adventure really signified by the word credo was at least as much concealed as disclosed.”
A ready-made mode of life. Is that then what we wish to re-create in the new civilization of love?
- “the political authorities will become more capable of acting with respect for the legitimate freedoms of individuals, families and subsidiary groups.”
- “ they will thus create the conditions necessary for man to be able to achieve his authentic and integral welfare, including his spiritual goal.”
****
They will? How so? What will motivate them? You see, we cannot escape that fundamental pre-requisite of the individual’s faith, and we know having spent time in the confessional, even that is no guarantee of consistent proper behavior one to another. How much less among those with only the veneer of faith or no faith at all?
But suppose this were achievable even among those whose spiritual path is not ours, but who have recognized the philosophical wisdom of such an order. Even if the goal is the same, is there no argument over the structure? Is not every economic and political system devised for the ultimate good of mankind? Did the communists set out with the express purpose of killing and enslaving millions, denying their rights and quenching their spirits? No, they were trying to bring mankind to a higher way of life. Does free enterprise as a system not set out to maximize man’s potential by freeing him to work to his own capacity and/or desire and live free, thereby creating a better society for all mankind?
I would suggest that the only criterion for judging a “system” or ideology is how it deals, in practical terms, with man’s concupiscence, and builds in checks and balances based on that foreknowledge. I would also suggest that the closest to achieving that end was the American system. The goal was not capitalism. The goal was freedom. In fact, per se, there was no economic system at the founding of the United States. Economics was simply what men do, when they are free to do so. Trade is what happens between men who work and produce and are allowed to keep what they create. In a nation where freedom of trade is not the norm, the trade still happens, but it often stays underground.
To speak of “creating the conditions necessary” is already to pre-suppose that man is in need of governance. If men were able to live as men in perfect charity, they would have no need of governance. But since we know and have pre-supposed that is not the case, we have to ask the question, who governs the governors?
This was supposed to be the genius of the AmericanConstitutionalRepublic. It was first and foremost a system of governance with the starting point the natural law, the recognition that man’s free will pre-exists the state, coming from the higher source, the Creator. The system was not primarily an economic system. Economics was done beginning at the family level, wherein the primary assumption of free men was to ensure the security of that primary (Catholic) social construction and that through local government the subsidiary support and accountability was to be achieved in the first instance. For larger concerns, the state governments were to act autonomously, with accountability, in support of their own people, again employing that principle of subsidiarity. Finally, for only those concerns that affected all of the people of all of the states, the federal government was to tie it all together in support of the security and commerce of the states. It was to be the weakest form of government, again in the principle of subsidiarity, with clearly delineated powers beyond which it could not go. Therefore, in principle, the Catholic social doctrine was constructed in the founding documents of the United States of America, beginning with the highest good, the free man interacting with his Creator, his immediate family, his immediate neighbors and moving down from there (not up) in subsidiarity to the federal government.
How that structure was turned upside down in 200+ years is a study in concupiscence. I would even add that Capitalism, as an economic system, was only possible because of that reversal of order of subsidiarity. It, like its Communist nemesis, needs centralized power to enable its concentrations of wealth. Free enterprise among free men is not equivalent to Capitalism and the first can exist without the second.
The conditions of that initial American system were the ideal for the realizing of man’s true nature and the nobility of his work. Those conditions have already existed and have been lost. It seems to me that any Catholic who would wish to realize the circumstances wherein Catholic social doctrine can flourish, should work for the return in America to the founding.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Comment: I think the practical step from the doctrine of the person as “finding self by the sincere gift of self” (GS #24) is the actual achievement of personal holiness in the execution of work.
This has not taken place for a number of reasons that extend beyond the presence of concupiscence in historical persons:
1) Clericalism: the Church has been a prisoner of clericalism from the Constantine emancipation of 313. Weigel quotes Professor Stefan Swiezawski that Vatican II marked “‘the end of the Constantinian epoch’ in which the Church was a power alongside other political powers,”[1] and the key to the political unity of the empire. Pace the distinction of Pope Gelasius I (492-496) between the two powers claiming the independence of the Church, the one society with two power extended – in Church doctrine – down to Leo XIII where the American separation of Church and State impacted doctrinally with final clarification in Dignitatis Humanae. John Courtney Murray’s “Contemporary Orientations of Catholic Thought on Church and State in the Light of History” (Theological Studies vol. X, June 1949, no.2) is very enlightening here. Murray sees Leo XIII understanding that “In the medieval universe of discourse the root of the matter was not the unity of the human person, citizen and Christian, but rather the unity of the social body which was both Church and state, the respublica Christiana, whose unity required the subordination of regnum to sacerdotium… The medieval starting point was the Church, and it set the doctrine of the two powers in characteristic social perspectives… [Hence] the confessional stated with its ‘Union of Throne and Altar’… However, the Leonine starting point is not the Church nor are its perspectives social. Its starting point is the dualism within the human person, who is both child of God, member of the Church, and also member of the human community, citizen of a state…” (underline mine).[2]
Therefore, I agree with you that “in principle, the Catholic social doctrine was constructed in the founding documents of the United States of America beginning with the highest good, the free man interacting with his Creator, his immediate family, his immediate neighbors and moving down from there (not up) in subsidiarity to the federal government.” David Walsh is huge here in his “Beyond Ideology” where he looks for the truth of the future world order to be grounded in an experience of Christ, no matter how unconscious or preconscious.
You use the word “systems” several times whose “one common feature … is their failure. That failure is rooted in the nature of men.” I take “system” to be identical to “structure,” and it brings me to the “Instruction on Christian Freedom and Liberation” over Ratzinger’s name (1986). “#75: [The Church] considers that the first thing to be done is to appeal to the spiritual and moral capacities of the individual and to the permanent need for inner conversion, if one is to achieve the economic and social changes that will truly be at the service of man.
“The priority given to structures and technical organization over the person and the requirements of his dignity is the expression of a materialistic anthropology and is contrary to the construction of a just social order.
“On the other hand, the recognized priority of freedom and of conversion of heart in no way eliminates the need for unjust structures to be changed….
“It remains true… that structures established for people’s good are of themselves incapable of securing and guaranteeing that good. The corruption which in certain countries affects the leaders and the state bureaucracy, and which destroys all honest social life, is a proof of this. Moral integrity is a necessary condition for the health of society. It is therefore necessary to work simultaneously for the conversion of hearts and for the improvement of structures.”
2) Positivism: The failure to “cross the threshold of hope” to the mysterious reality of the Being of the human person. (Neo-scholastic theology has not done it, and the philosophy that is apologetic defense against modernity.[3] )That is, the progressive positivism of the intelligence which has dried up the transcendental sense, in a word, the experience of the ontological self going out of self. Hence, we have been constructing and depending on rationalist ideologies that now, at the end of the 2nd and beginning of the 3d millennia, have dried up. We are waiting for the appearance of the sons of God to appear.
Cynicism still reigns: therefore, what to do?
I believe that all are called to holiness. So do you. I also believe that some are called to live holiness to a heroic degree now. Ratzinger’s whole mind about Christianity is the eschatological dimension. The Kingdom God is here now in the world. It is the Person of Christ and all who actually are making the constant conversion to self-gift in ordinary work in the world becoming “other Christs.” Being “other Christs” they are the presence of the Kingdom of God in the world “at the summit of all human activities.” They are achieving this in the exercise of secular work. It is not to take place in the monastic order only, but in the street where the Sacrifice of the Mass must be lived.
Christ is the meaning of man. Therefore, sanctity is for all. There is a most personal vocation extended to all. And there are concentric circles that affect each other in an ever widening cascade. There must be a few, of whom the majority are laity with a few priests serving them, with the vocation to radical self-giftedness which they “irradiate” (as yeast in the dough) in identity with Christ as worker. It is “irradiation,” not penetration (which would presuppose that sanctity originates outside the secular world). These few must reach the nerve centers of the society, particularly in affecting public opinion, i.e. the media.
In a word, it is the apostolate of St. Paul at the Areopagus: “So Paul, standing in the middle of the Areopagus, said: ‘Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed alone, and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription: “To an unknown god.” What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you’” (Acts 17, 22-23).The Acts of the Apostles read: “All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new” (Acts 17, 21). This is the nature of the media. But, today, there is clearly a control of the lights and the microphone. That control is not Paul, nor the Christian experiencing Christ with a mind formed on the Magisterium who is a professionally first class journalist or news commentator. It would be most useful to reread John Paul II’s “Mission of the Redeemer” #37, c) on the “modern equivalents of the Areopagus.”
Still cynicism. There is a work of the Spirit going on right now. There is a new springtime of the Gospel occurring. Consider Ratzinger’s entire work on “Eschatology” (CUA 1988), “What It Means to Be a Christian” Ignatius (2006) (his 1965 homilies on the Kingdom of God as the Person of Christ), his “Dogma and Preaching” on Advent: John the Baptist’s fulminating about the signs that should accompany the presence of God in history, and then the failure of any visible signs, his question to Christ, “Are you he who is to come or shall we look for another?” and finally the conversion necessary to understand that Love is, indeed, present. Christ answers: “Go and tell John what it is that you have seen and heard: the blind see, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have good news preached to them. And blessed is he who is not scandalized in me” (Lk. 7, 22-23).
This doesn’t mean that we’re doing what it takes. We are not. I would say that it’s happening despite us. But it would help if we understood what was up and undertook the real steps to the radical conversion to be Christ Himself in the secular world with attention to getting into the media at all levels and growing a public consciousness (and therefore culture) of the dignity of the human person. Without being a Rahnerian, there is doubtlessly an anonymous Christian life lived by many when there is an integral human culture effected by a few working at the nerve centers of society.
[1] George Weigel, “Witness to Hope,” Cliffside Books (1999) 296.
[2] John Courtney Murray, “Contemporary Orientations of Catholic Thought on Church and State in the Light of History” Theological Studiesvol. X, June 1949, no.2, 220-221.
[3]Ratzinger: "(H)ere is the problem: Ought we to accept modernity in full, or in part? Is there a real contribution? Can this modern way of thinking be a contribution, or offer a contribution, or not? And if there is a contribution from the modern, critical way of thinking, in line with the Enlightenment, how can it be reconciled with the great institutions and the great gifts of the faith?
"Or ought we, in the name of the faith, to reject modernity? You see? There always seems to be this dilemma: either we must reject the whole of the tradition, all the exegesis of the Fathers... or we must reject modernity."
He answers: "And it seems to me that this was the true intention of the Second Vatican Council, to go beyond an unfruitful and overly narrow apologetic to a true synthesis with the positive elements of modernity, but at the same time, let us say, to transform modernity, to heal it of its illnesses, by means of the light and strength of the faith" (From "Let God's Light Shine Forth" Robert Moynihan - Doubleday (2005) 34-35. I offer the book of David Walsh, “The Modern Philosophical Revolution” Cambridge (2008)and the scholarship therein on “German Idealism” as an answer going in the right direction.
This suggests that nothing economic policy can do will entirely reverse the great wave of wealth destruction. President Obama made hope the watchword of his campaign, but there is less for which to hope, largely because of the economic impact of the lifestyle choices favored by the same young people who were so enthusiastic for Obama. The Reagan reforms created new markets and financing techniques and put enormous amounts of leverage at the disposal of businesses and households. The 1980s saw the creation of a mortgage-backed securities market that turned the American home into a ready source of capital, the emergence of a high-yield bond market that allowed new companies to issue debt, and the expansion of private equity. These financing techniques contributed mightily to the great expansion of 1984-2008, and they were the same instruments that would wreak ruin on the financial system. During the 1980s the baby boomers were in their twenties and thirties, when families are supposed to take on debt; twenty years later, the baby boomers were in their fifties and sixties, when families are supposed to save for retirement. The elixir of youth turned toxic for the aging.