Letters From the Journal of Robert
Moynihan
Janary 1, 2016, Friday -- Pope Begins 2016 with Visit to St. Mary Major
"The Son
of God, made incarnate for our salvation, has given us his Mother, who joins us
on our pilgrimage through this life, so that we may never be left alone,
especially at times of trouble and uncertainty."—Pope Francis, at a 5
p.m. Mass today in Rome (his second Mass of the day), during his
homily, in the basilica St. Mary Major. The Pope was in St. Mary Major to
celebrate the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of the Lord (celebrated on January 1), to venerate an ancient icon of Mary and
the Child Jesus called the Salus Populi Romani(Protection of the
Roman People) which is kept in the basilica, and to open the Holy Door of Mercy
in the chief basilica in Christendom dedicated to Mary
"At the
foot of the Cross, Mary sees her Son offer himself totally, showing us what it
means to love as God loves. At that moment she heard Jesus utter words which
probably reflected what he had learned from her as a child: “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what
they are doing” (Lk 23:24). At that moment, Mary became for all of
us the Mother of forgiveness."—Pope Francis, in the same homily today
"For us, Mary is an icon of how the Church
must offer forgiveness to those who seek it. The Mother of forgiveness teaches
the Church that the forgiveness granted on Golgotha knows no limits. Neither
the law with its quibbles, nor the wisdom of this world with its distinctions,
can hold it back." —Pope
Francis, the same homily
"The Church’s forgiveness must be
every bit as broad as that offered by Jesus on the Cross and by Mary at his
feet. There is no other way."—Pope Francis, in the same homily
==========
Pope Francis began 2016 with a "visit to Mary" -- a
visit to the heart of popular Catholic Marian piety, to an icon of Mary kept in
the oldest basilica in the world dedicated to Mary, St. Mary Major.
It was the 30th
time as Pope that he has visited St. Mary Major, and this icon, since his
election in March, 2013.
At the end of the
Mass, Pope Francis asked even those standing outside of the basilica to repeat
out loud the ancient invocation to Mary: "Mary, Holy Mother of God!"
And during this
Mass, he delivered an important homily.
Celebrating Mass
at 5
p.m. (after
celebrating Mass this morning in St. Peter's Square and giving his Angelus
message and New Year's blessing at noon), Francis gave a
homily which may offer insight into how he will decide some of the great
questions facing him in coming months, including the much-discussed question of
re-admission of divorced and remarried Catholics, after a penitential path, to
the Eucharist.
The Argentine
Pope, seemingly in fidelity to a powerful mystical experience of divine
forgiveness that he himself personally experienced as a youth (as he has
publicly stated) on September 21, 1953, the Feast of St. Mathew, when he was 16
years old, told us today that forgiveness (for those who seek it) knows "no limits."
For this Pope, it is quite clear: "There is no other way."
Is Francis,
with his calling of the two-part Synod on the Family, and with his declaring a
"Jubilee Year of Mercy," indicating
in these words that he wishes to "open the doors" to that
"mercy" and "forgiveness" that would enable all
repentant sinners to return to participate without scandal and without
shame in the full life of the Church, in the life of Christ, including
receiving Holy Communion?
Is that what he was saying in this homily?
One
Concern
The answer is still not clear.
We await the Pope's document, his conclusions after the
two-part Synod, and his own reflection and decision on all that was said.
However, one concern, in our
present cultural circumstances, is this: that a praiseworthy papal desire to
assist individual men and women suffering from the personal, individual wounds
of their own lives (and there are tens of millions of them) not create an
opening on another front which would cause unexpected harm to men and women --
and to the truth of the faith.
This is a concern because
cultural forces inimical to the faith greatly desire to gain a victory in this
particular battle, a battle which is only part of a very broad-based
metaphysical war against the concepts of substantial being, personhood, the
soul, personal fault, sin, guilt, repentance, and holiness of life -- the
concepts which underlie the entire Catholic sacramental system... the concepts
which underlie the entire Catholic faith.
The point is this: even if
Christians all agree on the astounding, joy-causing gift of God's mercy toward
all who seek His forgiveness, we may disagree on how precisely to express that
fact, given our present circumstances and predicament.
What are those
circumstances? What is our predicament?”
I consider the following to
be the deep misgivings of Moynihan concerning the Church offering Pope Francis’ “wishes to ‘open the doors’ to that ‘mercy’
and "forgiveness" that would enable all repentant sinners to
return to participate without scandal and without shame in the full life of the
Church, in the life of Christ, including receiving Holy Communion.”
Moynihan’s “concern” is that forgiving as Christ does will
undermine the metaphysical underpinnings of the whole Christian life.
That is, once you permit the divorced-remarried to Communion, then you
universalize divorce, make it acceptable and breakable on whim without
prejudice to the reality of the Eucharist as the sacramental presence of God
Himself. That is, you have lost “a very
broad-based metaphysical war against the concepts of substantial being,
personhood, the soul, personal fault, sin, guilt, repentance, and holiness of
life -- the concepts which underlie the entire Catholic sacramental system...
the concepts which underlie the entire Catholic faith.”
It seems, in a word, that if the Church
makes sweeping forgiveness according to the dimensions of Christ Himself,
Redeeming Charity will destroy the creating
metaphysic undergirding right and wrong. And the Church dissolves.
In large terms, it seems that you have God the Redeemer
(Mercy) undermining God the Creator (Being), and ultimate the whole thing will
unravel. Let me rehearse it:
It seems to me that we are dealing on the one hand with the
Creator of all being and reality. Part of that reality – and the most important
– is the creation of the human person in the image and likeness of the Person
of the Divine Son. All the rest is “thing.” The received Greek metaphysics that
is not privileged with the revelation of creation has passed on to us a
metaphysic of being as experienced through the external senses. It is a
metaphysic of objects, and the human is also object with the accident of
rationality: hence the received “individual substance of a rational nature.”
For the Greeks, being and nature were indiscriminate since both are what is
objectively (to the senses) “there.”
The notion of “person” took
a big turn in Vatican II when the Church broke from the scholastic philosophic
and theologic lineage and offered a Christological anthropology where the prototype
and meaning of the human person was God Himself in Jesus Christ. Man ceased
being a rational “thing” as substance (in
self and not in other.
In the Greek-Scholastic realist
epistemology, truth is the conformity of thought to reality which is a nature.
More specifically, “in knowledge the intellect and the known reality become
one; the intellect is wholly-that is, in a perfect manner, the known object” “the
soul becomes, so to speak, transformed into the real object.” These are
thomistic quotations I take from Joseph Pieper’s “Reality and the Good.”[1]
Truth as the conformity of the mind with reality takes on an absolute character
because it is created by God and conforms ontologically to His Mind, and we
conform to it and achieve absoluteness of thought by the indirect connection to
the creating Intelligence. The universality of thought is explained by the
abstractive power of the mind seeing into the internal sensible images of
created things rendering them universal concepts.
The absoluteness of our
moral judgments is grounded on this metaphysic and epistemology. In the
scholastic manuals of philosophy and moral theology, the grounding was thus
philosophic and rationalist while being backed by quotes from Scripture. In marriage,
its indissolubility was ontologically grounded on the procreation and education
of children as its primary purpose and solidified by Christ’s words concerning
divorce: “It was not this way from the beginning” (Mt. 19, 8).
It seems to me that the
present drama is playing out in real life The
Legendof the Grand Inquisitor of Dostoevsky’s “Brothers Karamosov.”
The Legend of the
Grand InquisitorIn His infinite mercy He [Christ]came once more among men in that human shape in which He walked among men for thirty-three years fifteen centuries ago. He came down to the 'hot pavements' of the southern town in which on the day before almost a hundred heretics had, ad majorem gloriam Dei, been burnt by the cardinal, the Grand Inquisitor, in a magnificent auto da fe, in the presence of the king, the court, the knights, the cardinals, the most charming ladies of the court, and the whole population of Seville…
The priest, coming to meet the coffin, looks perplexed, and frowns, but the mother of the dead child throws herself at His feet with a wail. 'If it is Thou, raise my child!' she cries, holding out her hands to Him. The procession halts, the coffin is laid on the steps at His feet. He looks with compassion, and His lips once more softly pronounce, 'Maiden, arise!' and the maiden arises. The little girl sits up in the coffin and looks round, smiling with wide-open wondering eyes, holding a bunch of white roses they had put in her hand.
"There are cries, sobs, confusion among the people, and at that moment the cardinal himself, the Grand Inquisitor, passes by the cathedral. He is an old man, almost ninety, tall and erect, with a withered face and sunken eyes, in which there is still a gleam of light. He is not dressed in his gorgeous cardinal's robes, as he was the day before, when he was burning the enemies of the Roman Church- at this moment he is wearing his coarse, old, monk's cassock. At a distance behind him come his gloomy assistants and slaves and the 'holy guard.' He stops at the sight of the crowd and watches it from a distance. He sees everything; he sees them set the coffin down at His feet, sees the child rise up, and his face darkens. He knits his thick grey brows and his eyes gleam with a sinister fire. He holds out his finger and bids the guards take Him. And such is his power, so completely are the people cowed into submission and trembling obedience to him, that the crowd immediately makes way for the guards, and in the midst of deathlike silence they lay hands on Him and lead him away. The crowd instantly bows down to the earth, like one man, before the old Inquisitor. He blesses the people in silence and passes on' The guards lead their prisoner to the close, gloomy vaulted prison- in the ancient palace of the Holy, inquisition and shut him in it. The day passes and is followed by the dark, burning, 'breathless' night of Seville. The air is 'fragrant with laurel and lemon.' In the pitch darkness the iron door of the prison is suddenly opened and the Grand Inquisitor himself comes in with a light in his hand. He is alone; the door is closed at once behind him. He stands in the doorway and for a minute or two gazes into His face. At last he goes up slowly, sets the light on the table and speaks.
"'Is it Thou? Thou?' but receiving no answer, he adds at once. 'Don't answer, be silent. What canst Thou say, indeed? I know too well what Thou wouldst say. And Thou hast no right to add anything to what Thou hadst said of old. Why, then, art Thou come to hinder us? For Thou hast come to hinder us, and Thou knowest that. But dost thou know what will be to-morrow? I know not who Thou art and care not to know whether it is Thou or only a semblance of Him, but to-morrow I shall condemn Thee and burn Thee at the stake as the worst of heretics. And the very people who have to-day kissed Thy feet, to-morrow at the faintest sign from me will rush to heap up the embers of Thy fire. Knowest Thou that? Yes, maybe Thou knowest it,' he added with thoughtful penetration, never for a moment taking his eyes off the Prisoner."
And so it seems, Francis is urging
the Church to be Christ, and therefore forgive and be merciful as Christ. To me
the question is not so much abrogating doctrine, as coming to realize that the
Church has already ushered in a new epistemological horizon in which the Person
of Christ is the meaning of Being (See R. Barron “The Priority of Christ”),
and that meaning is not the intractable “substance” of “thing-in-itself” but
gift as relation, and therefore the meaning of person, grace, marriage, sex,
sacraments… must be recast in that relational metaphysic. The truth of Christ,
sin, heaven, sanctity, etc. is not
mitigated but played out in a new key. And so this issue of divorce,
remarriage, Eucharist is forcing the Church to actually understand what
actually happened in Vatican II, the universal call to sanctity and matrimony,
as well as the whole Christian life.
Apposite to the point: Forgiveness does not undermine the metaphysic of substance, but rather builds the new metaphysic of the person. As Ratzinger insists:
“The root of man’s joy is the harmony he enjoys with himself. He lives in this affirmation. And only one who can accept himself can also accept the thou, can accept the world. The reason why an individual cannot accept the thou, cannot come to terms with him, is that he does not like his own I and, for that reason, cannot accept a thou.
“Something strange happens here. We have seen that the inability to accept one’s I leads to the inability to accept a thou. But how does one go about affirming, assenting to, one’s I? The answer may perhaps be unexpected: We cannot do so by our own efforts alone. Of ourselves, we cannot come to terms with ourselves. Our I becomes acceptable to us only if it has first become acceptable to another I. We can love ourselves only if we have first been loved by someone else. The life a mother gives to her child is not just physical life, she gives total life when she takes the child’s tears and turns them into smiles. It is only when life has been accepted and is perceived as accepted that it becomes acceptable. Man is that strange creature that needs not just physical birth but also appreciation if he is to subsist. This is the root of the phenomenon known as hospitalism. When the initial harmony of our existence has been rejected, when that psycho-physical oneness ahs been ruptured by which the ‘Yes, it is good that you are alive’ sinks, with life itself, deep into the core of the unconscious – then birth itself is interrupted; existence itself is not completely established…. (T)he charism of revolution has been for a long time not just remonstrance against reparable injustices but protestation against existence itself, which has not experienced its acceptance and hence does not know that it is acceptable. If an individual is to accept himself, someone must say to him: ‘It is good that you exist’ – must say it, not with words, but with that act of the entire being that we call love. For it is the way of love to will the other’s existence and, at the same time, to bring that existence forth again. The key to the I lies with the thou; the way to the thou leads through the I.”[2]
The psychiatrist Conrad Baars:
Persons Related to by Affirmation: “can be said to have received the gift of themselves. They feel worthwhile, significant and lovable. They possess themselves as man or woman. They know who they are. They are certain of their identity. They love themselves unselfishly. They are open to all that is good and find joy in the same. They are able to affirm all of creation, and as affirmers of all beings are capable of making others happy and joyful, too. They are largely other-directed. They find joy in being and doing for others. The find joy in their love relationship with their Creator. They can share and give of themselves, be a true friend to others, and feel at ease with persons of both sexes. They are capable of finding happiness in marinate of the freely chosen celibate state of life. They are free from psycho-pathological factors which hamper one’s free will and are therefore sully responsible – morally and legally – for their actions.”[3]
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