Plan B

Précis:

1) Practical doubt, or doubt as to the lawfulness of an action is, according to the teaching of moral theology, incompatible with right action; since to act with a doubtful conscience is obviously to act in disregard of the moral law. To act with a doubtful conscience is therefore, sinful

; and the doubt must be removed before any action can be justified.

John Kippley remarked: “If you are doubtful about the morality of some action, you shouldn't act, but instead you should get advice and clarify your conscience. The wisdom of the axiom "you should not act on a doubtful conscience" is easily seen in the common example about the hunter who hears a lot of noise in the bushes but isn't certain if it's an animal or a fellow hunter. That happened to me the only time I ever went deer hunting-after struggling up a steep, brushy knoll on all fours I raised my head and looked into my friend's rifle barrel! Fortunately, he clarified his doubtful knowledge by waiting.”

2) The evidence to date supports the contention that use of “Emergency Contraceptive” does not always inhibit ovulation even if used in the preovulatory phase, and that it may unfavorably alter the endometrial lining regardless of when in the cycle it is used, with the effect persisting for days. In other words, the contraceptive effect is ambiguous and the abortifacient effect is probable. Hence, in such a state of practical doubt, the logic of the immorality of administering this drug is compelling.

Bishop Lori’s Blog: September 29, 2007

“Plan B, an issue previously discussed in this blog (“Sad State of the Constitution State”, April 24th—see “Archive”) is back in the news. Many of you posted comments about those media reports, so I’d like to offer a number of clarifications and some additional perspective.

"Last spring, the Connecticut Bishops worked hard to defeat the so-called “Plan B” legislation. It’s not that the Church opposes administering Plan B to victims of rape; these women have suffered a gravely unjust assault. Last year, nearly 75 rape victims were treated in the four Connecticut Catholic hospitals; no one was denied Plan B as the result of the Catholic hospital protocols which required both a pregnancy test and an ovulation test prior to the administration of that drug.

"What’s really at issue here is how much testing is appropriate to ensure that Plan B does not induce the chemical abortion of a fertilized ovum. There is uncertainty about how Plan B works. Its effect is to prevent fertilization of the ovum. Some believe, however, that in rare instances Plan B can render the lining of the uterus inhospitable to the fertilized ovum which must implant in it in order to survive and grow; many other experts dispute this. For their part, the Bishops of Connecticut felt it was best not only to administer the standard FDA-approved pregnancy test, but also an ovulation test. However, this course of action was only a prudential judgment, not a matter of settled Church teaching and practice. Other bishops and moral theologians hold that a pregnancy test alone suffices. Indeed, the Church does not teach that it is intrinsically evil to administer Plan B without first giving an ovulation test or that those who do so are committing an abortion.

"Unfortunately, Connecticut Legislature decided last spring to settle the question of whether both tests are necessary, instead of letting the Church do so in her own way. The Governor signed into law a measure that forbids health care professionals from using the results of an ovulation test in treating a rape victim. We bishops, as well as health care professionals, continue to believe this law is seriously flawed and should be changed. You should also know that we carefully explored with very competent experts the possibility of challenging the law. Unfortunately, such a challenge would most likely not succeed. Failure of the hospitals to comply would put them and their staffs at risk.

"In the course of this discussion, every possible option was discussed at length with medical-moral experts faithful to the Church’s teaching, with legal experts especially in the area of constitutional law, and with hospital personnel. “Reluctant compliance” emerged as the only viable option. In permitting Catholic hospitals to comply with this law, neither our teaching nor our principles have changed. We have only altered the prudential judgment we previously made; this was done for the good of our Catholic hospitals and those they serve.

"At the same time, we remain open to new developments in medical science which hopefully will bring greater clarity to this matter. Above all, we continue to pray for the healing of those who are victims of sexual assault.”

NCBC Statement in Response to the United States Food and Drug Administration'sApproval of Over the Counter Sale of "Plan B"September 1, 2006

The approval of the over the counter sale of "Plan B," sometimes known as the "Morning After Pill," represents a tragic betrayal of women. The non-prescription availability of this drug which has significant potential for serious side effects raises the question, "Why do women deserve less governmental protections than others?" The total dosage of levonorgestrel (the active ingredient in "Plan B") taken over twelve hours is six times the daily dosage found in a number of oral contraceptives which are sold by prescription only. All one needs to do is note the potential side effects of such a drug to realize that the health of women is not the driving force for this FDA approval. Women taking this drug without medical oversight may be subjected to serious side effects such as future ectopic pregnancies. Women deserve better.Supposedly there will be monitoring in place to assure that only teenagers eighteen years of age or older will have over the counter access to this drug. Parents' accounts of the difficulty of limiting their children's access to cigarettes and alcohol demonstrate how difficult it will be to enforce such provisions. Parents also deserve better.There are many euphemisms used to describe the manner of action of levonorgestrel, from the "Morning After Pill" to "Emergency Contraception." Both terms misrepresent the facts. Contraceptives are to prevent conception. Science tells us that conception occurs upon the union of a mother's egg and a father's sperm. Such a union can occur within minutes of intercourse. There is only a very small window of opportunity for the "Morning After Pill" to act as a contraceptive by the suppression of ovulation - if it is taken just prior to the time a woman ovulates. Otherwise, the "Morning After Pill" has great potential of being an abortifacient by making the womb inhospitable to the new human being engendered by his or her parents. The most vulnerable of human life becomes disposable.Each of us as a member of this society has the right to expect from our government better protections of human life and dignity. What does the approval of the over the counter sale of this drug say about us as a society? Is the most intimate act between a man and a woman, the natural outcome of which frequently is the creation of a new and unique human being, nothing more than a biological exercise with no responsibilities attached to it? What about the human being brought about through such an act? Does that human person have no rights once engendered by the act of his or her parents?The National Catholic Bioethics Center receives the news of the FDA approval of non-prescription distribution of "Plan B" with great regret. We all become vulnerable when compromises are made in the processes which have been established by our government to ensure drug safety; by our government which has been charged with protecting its members, especially the most vulnerable. John M. Haas is the publisher of The National Catholic Bioethics Center's publications, and Edward J. Furton is the Editor in Chief. Center's website: www.ncbcenter.org, or by calling the Center at 215.877.2660.

Spirit & Life® "The words I spoke to you are spirit and life." (Jn 6:63)Human Life International e-NewsletterVolume 01, Number 87 October 05, 2007
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Plan A: Keep "Plan B" Out of Catholic Hospitals

On September 28th the Connecticut bishops issued an unfortunate statement allowing the Plan B abortion-causing drug to be used in cases of rape in Catholic hospitals. I have written respectfully and urgently to the Connecticut Catholic Conference (CCC) and to each bishop individually to ask them to withdraw this potentially precedent-setting statement, and I pray that they do so. I am extremely concerned that this statement will begin to have a domino effect on other Catholic hospitals and healthcare institutions, and I write to you today to ask your ongoing partnership in this concern.

First, let me be clear about our obligations as Catholics. While our bishops operate in union with the Vicar of Christ, no individual bishop or conference of bishops, however wise or holy, has the charism of infallibility. Our respect for our bishops is sometimes exercised in presenting them with the clear facts that their advisors may have missed. It is an expression of our filial cooperation in their ministry. In this case, we have no option but to humbly ask them to reverse their decision due to some extremely egregious errors contained in the statement.
Errors of factError number 1: "The administration of Plan B pills in this instance cannot be judged to be the commission of an abortion because of such doubt about how Plan B pills and similar drugs work."

The truth is that there is absolutely no doubt about how the Plan B pills work. Just ask the manufacturer, Barr Pharmaceuticals, whose product insert states: "This product works mainly by preventing ovulation (egg release). It may also prevent fertilization of a released egg (joining of sperm and egg) or attachment of a fertilized egg to the uterus (implantation)." (My italics.) It's that third item that makes Plan B an abortion-causing drug. The same can be said for every chemical contraceptive.

Error number 2: "...the teaching authority of the Church has not definitively resolved this matter...." Here, regretfully, Catholics are led to believe that Rome has not unambiguously addressed the issue of Plan B (a.k.a., the "morning after pill") already.
The truth of this matter is evident by a simple recourse to a statement of the Pontifical Academy for Life on the Vatican's website. The Academy stated in a document issued in October of 2001 that "from the ethical standpoint the same absolute unlawfulness of abortifacient procedures also applies to distributing, prescribing and taking the morning-after pill. All who, whether sharing the intention or not, directly co-operate with this procedure, are also morally responsible for it." The Vatican did not need to invent any new teaching on the Plan B pills because these pills fall into the category of abortifacient contraception, pure and simple. The consistent teaching of our Church on abortion applies here.

Errors of judgment: There were other errors in judgment in the bishops' statement that confuse the issue from a moral point of view. The bishops state that "to administer Plan B pills without an ovulation test is not an intrinsically evil act." This type of language just confuses the issue. It would indeed be a seriously irresponsible act to administer a killing drug not knowing whether or not ovulation has occurred and a new life is present. It would be like a hunter shooting at something moving in a forest if he were not really sure that what he saw was an animal or a human being. To use the language of "intrinsically evil" would make us think - legalistically - that it would be okay to take an action if it were only possibly evil. Hair-splitting language like this does not give us guidance when our moral obligation is to err on the side of life whenever there is a doubt. Furthermore, Dr. Chris Kahlenborn has shown that Plan B only works to halt ovulation half the time. Thus fertilization may occur even after the pill is administered, and a chemical abortion would result.

The core of the matter.What we are faced with here is the long arm of the culture of death reaching into our Catholic institutions and coercing us to comply with its totalitarian dictates. The Connecticut state legislature, with the complicity of the governor, passed a law that forbad the use of ovulation tests in cases of rape - why? This unwarranted government intrusion into a purely medical decision was totally unnecessary and would not likely have affected any other institutions than Catholic ones. It is, in my opinion, a law that was drafted deliberately to coerce Catholic hospitals to comply with the contraceptive dictates of the abortion providers. Remember this same state was the origin of the 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut Supreme Court case which legalized contraception! It is no wonder that Connecticut is reaping the rotten fruit of the seeds that it sowed over forty years ago.

The bishops were forced into a "reluctant compliance" with this law, according to Bishop Lori of Bridgeport, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. Acts of blatant coercion of Catholic consciences are already far advanced and will only continue unless the Church is willing to stand up and rebuke the arrogance of these coercive measures and carve out strict realms of conscience which are unreachable by activist courts and corrupt politicians. That will require Church leaders to be willing to fight ferocious battles against the dictators of relativism in order to assert our rights of conscience and faith. All Catholics, but especially our leaders, will have to be clear-headed and uncompromising in the face of the temptations to put our Catholic institutions in league with the liars and manipulators of the culture of death.

I envision a day in which Catholic leaders may have to resign from lucrative positions in business and shut down Catholic healthcare institutions rather than cooperate in the arrogant and coercive programs of the culture of death. Actually, I think that day has already arrived.
What we can doOur greatest weapon in this battle against the culture of death is prayer. I ask you to pray for the bishops, above all, who are usually the target of attack by the culture of death and are often surrounded by compromisers. We need their strong moral leadership unfettered by lawyers and "ethicists" who prevent them from taking up arms in the culture wars. We are at a point in our Church's history where bishops and priests are being called to martyrdom for the sake of the Faith, and only prayer will give them that courage to embrace their vocations to the last drop of blood.

Secondly, we all need to make a firm decision to never be silent in the face of any form of chemical killing. Abortifacient contraception is a back-door plague which enters into lives, institutions and societies in the guise of the birth control "savior," but it is just one more way to kill, and with greater frequency at that.

Finally, stay tuned for more battles in more states with more Catholic healthcare institutions. One phone call I had with the legislative advisor of the Connecticut Catholic Conference gave me the impression that the domino effect is already happening in other episcopal conferences, and that concerns me deeply. The vigilance of many great pro-life forces, coupled with prayer and massive protests from people of conscience will undoubtedly give our Church leaders the courage to imitate the Good Shepherd, who laid down His life for His sheep.

Rev. Thomas J. Euteneuer,President, Human Life International

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Scientific Evaluation:

Polycarp.org: Dr. Christ Kahlenborn

The Annals of Pharmacotherapy: Vol. 36, No. 3, pp. 465–470.
Postfertilization Effect of Hormonal Emergency Contraception
Chris Kahlenborn, 1 Joseph B Stanford, 2 and Walter L Larimore3

OBJECTIVE: To assess the possibility of a postfertilization effect in regard to the most common types of hormonal emergency contraception (EC) used in the US and to explore the ethical impact of this possibility.

DATA SOURCES AND STUDY SELECTION: A MEDLINE search (1966–November 2001) was done to identify all pertinent English-language journal articles. A review of reference sections of the major review articles was performed to identify additional articles. Search terms included emergency contraception, postcoital contraception, postfertilization effect, Yuzpe regimen, levonorgestrel, mechanism of action, Plan B.

DATA SYNTHESIS: The 2 most common types of hormonal EC used in the US are the Yuzpe regimen (high-dose ethinyl estradiol with high-dose levonorgestrel) and Plan B (high-dose levonorgestrel alone). Although both methods sometimes stop ovulation, they may also act by reducing the probability of implantation, due to their adverse effect on the endometrium (a postfertilization effect). The available evidence for a postfertilization effect is moderately strong, whether hormonal EC is used in the preovulatory, ovulatory, or postovulatory phase of the menstrual cycle.

CONCLUSIONS: Based on the present theoretical and empirical evidence, both the Yuzpe regimen and Plan B likely act at times by causing a postfertilization effect, regardless of when in the menstrual cycle they are used. These findings have potential implications in such areas as informed consent, emergency department protocols, and conscience clauses.
KEY WORDS: contraception, levonorgestrel, postfertilization effect.
Ann Pharmacother 2002;36:465–470.

Emergency contraception (EC) consists of hormones or mechanical devices used within 72 hours of sexual intercourse with the intent of preventing pregnancy. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, women used high-dose estrogens such as diethylstilbestrol as EC.1 This treatment was replaced in 1974 by combination high-dose oral contraceptives (OCs) (e.g., ethinyl estradiol/levonorgestrel) used within a 12-hour interval (i.e., the Yuzpe regimen) and, in later years, by Plan B, which consists of 2 levonorgestrel tablets.2 The intrauterine device, danazol (danocrine), and mifepristone have also been studied and promoted as EC, but the Yuzpe regimen remains the most prevalent form of EC in the US and Europe.3

The question as to whether hormonal EC sometimes acts after fertilization to prevent implantation, called a postfertilization effect (i.e., early abortion), is important and could have far-reaching implications given the differing attitudes in regard to its use and related issues such as informed consent, emergency department rape protocols, and conscience clauses. Postfertilization effect refers to any effect that reduces the survival rate of the zygote/embryo after fertilization, usually prior to clinical recognition of pregnancy. We use the term early abortion synonymously with postfertilization effect. We recognize that some physicians,4 geneticists, and ethicists have arbitrarily defined human life as beginning after implantation, thereby eschewing the possibility of an early abortion prior to implantation. However, we recognize the traditional definition of pregnancy: “the gestational process, comprising the growth and development within a woman of a new individual from conception through embryonic and fetal period to birth,” where conception is defined as “the beginning of pregnancy, usually taken to be the instant that a spermatozoon enters an ovum and forms a viable zygote.”5

In a previous review6 of the mechanism of action of OCs, we concluded that they act at times via a postfertilization effect, that is, after fertilization and prior to the clinical recognition of pregnancy. However, the Yuzpe regimen and Plan B have a different dose and time course for use, which may result in different actions on the reproductive system. This article reviews data on the use of the Yuzpe regimen and Plan B with regard to their mechanisms of action and any potential ethical implications of those mechanisms.

Mechanisms of Action

The Physicians' Desk Reference7 states: “ECPs (Emergency Contraceptive Pills) act primarily by inhibiting ovulation. They may act by altering tubal transport of the sperm and/or ova and/or altering the endometrium (thereby inhibiting implantation).” The Medical Letter2 ,8 stated in regard to hormonal EC: “Some studies have shown alteration in the endometrium, suggesting that they could also interfere with implantation of the fertilized egg, but other studies have found no such effects.” Therefore, the critical ethical questions are: Does use of the Yuzpe regimen or Plan B have a postfertilization effect; that is, does hormonal EC use at times cause an early abortion by altering the receptive properties of the endometrium? Can such an effect occur when EC is used in the preovulatory phase of the cycle, or does the postfertilization effect occur only when it is used in the ovulatory or postovulatory phase?

EFFECTS ON OVULATION

It is often asserted that hormonal EC use consistently stops ovulation. In an early study with oral contraceptives, Carr et al.9 found that a woman's estradiol, progesterone, luteinizing hormone (LH), and follicle-stimulating hormone concentrations decreased significantly once she started using OCs. Because an LH surge is presumed necessary for ovulation, this result has been cited by many as evidence that hormonal contraceptive use completely inhibits ovulation. However, the findings of the Carr et al. article cannot be extrapolated to today's Yuzpe regimen or Plan B for several reasons. First, although the article was written in 1979, when the doses of estrogen in OCs were higher than the doses in today's OCs, using high-dose hormones in mid-cycle is far different from using them for 21 days in a 28-day cycle. Second, the findings were based on the results of only 4 ovulating women. Therefore, data from that study cannot be used to establish that use of today's OCs or hormonal EC consistently suppresses ovulation.
Further data from hormonal assays confirm that EC use does not consistently stop ovulation. One study10 of the Yuzpe regimen that examined serum hormonal markers of ovulation noted that an LH peak concentration occurred within 4 days after the treatment in 5 of 9 women, with a subsequent increase of progesterone, suggesting that ovulation had occurred. A more recent trial11 using urine hormonal markers found an LH peak concentration within 1 day of treatment with the Yuzpe regimen in 2 of 8 women, with a subsequent confirmatory increase of progesterone.

EFFECTS OF HORMONAL EC IN THE PREOVULATORY PHASE

Table 1 12–20 notes the major studies that have analyzed hormonal EC use. The estimated efficacy rates range from 56.9% to 90.9%, with the largest trial12 showing a 56.9% efficacy rate. The efficacy rate is the percent of reduction in the pregnancy rate of women who used hormonal EC compared with the estimated rate of women who did not. These rates are calculated from secondary data sources and have not been established via a randomized, controlled, prospective study (Appendix I3 ,20–28 ). This study,12 by the World Health Organization, found that in a group of about 400 women, 6 who used the Yuzpe regimen in the preovulatory phase became pregnant (10 were expected to become pregnant if no EC was used). In addition, 2 women who used Plan B in the preovulatory phase became pregnant (11 were expected). The preovulatory period is the time of the menstrual cycle that occurs more than 3 days prior to the expected day of ovulation. The expected day of ovulation in this study was estimated as the 14th day prior to the onset of the next menstrual cycle. Although this is an imprecise definition with the potential for significant misclassification, it is the best definition available for these studies. In addition, Glasier17 presented 2 cases of women who became pregnant after using the Yuzpe regimen while their progesterone concentrations were <1.5 href="http://www.polycarp.org/postfertilization_polycarp_1.htm#i1060-0280-036-03-0465-b12#i1060-0280-036-03-0465-b12">12 ,17 have shown that hormonal EC use, even in the preovulatory phase, does not consistently prevent pregnancy and, by definition, allows ovulation in those cases. Some have speculated29 that if ovulation is not inhibited, other mechanisms, such as a change in the viscosity of cervical mucus and/or an alteration in the tubal transport of sperm, ovum, or embryo, may come into play. However, there are no clinical data to address these theoretical mechanisms. In contrast, there are clinical data directly relevant to the potential effects of hormonal EC use on implantation.

EFFECTS ON IMPLANTATION [= Abortion]

OCs are known to adversely affect the implantation process,6 which has implications for the Yuzpe regimen and Plan B because they are composed of the same (or similar) hormones contained in today's OCs. OCs affect integrins, a group of adhesion molecules that have been implicated as playing an important role in the area of fertilization and implantation. Somkuti et al.30 noted: “These alterations in epithelial and stromal integrin expression suggest that impaired uterine receptivity is one mechanism whereby OCs exert their contraceptive action.” In addition, prostaglandins are critical for implantation, but OC use lowers uterine prostaglandin concentrations.31 ,32 Finally, it is well known that OC use decreases the thickness of the endometrium as verified by magnetic resonance imaging scans,33 ,34 and a thinner endometrium makes implantation more difficult.35–39 Because hormonal EC consists of hormones contained within OCs, it is possible that the use of hormonal EC has some of the same effects on the endometrium as does the use of OCs. A number of studies support this hypothesis, noting changes in endometrial histology,1 ,40 or uterine hormone receptor levels41 that persist for days after women used the Yuzpe regimen. All of these findings imply that use of the Yuzpe regimen unfavorably alters the endometrium.

In addition to the theoretical evidence that EC use adversely affects implantation, Hertzen and Van Look12 found that both use of the Yuzpe regimen and Plan B reduced the expected number of pregnancies when they were used in the ovulatory phase (17–13 d prior to the next menstrual cycle) and postovulatory phase (13 d prior to the expected menstrual cycle), as well as in the preovulatory phase (as discussed earlier). In the groups that used the Yuzpe regimen in the ovulatory phase, 17 pregnancies occurred (54 were expected if EC was not used), whereas 7 occurred in the postovulatory phase (11 were expected). In the group that used Plan B, 7 pregnancies occurred (53 were expected) in the ovulatory phase, whereas 2 occurred in the postovulatory phase (10 were expected). These data are highly consistent with the hypothesis that hormonal EC has a postfertilization effect on the endometrium. In the case of the use of hormonal EC in the ovulatory phase, it is still possible that other mechanisms might come into play (i.e., a change in the viscosity of cervical mucus and/or an alteration in the tubal transport of either the sperm, ovum, or embryo). However, we could find no data to support these theories.

Increased Risk of Ectopic Pregnancy?

One result of a postfertilization effect of hormonal EC use might be an increased proportion of recognized pregnancies that are ectopic. If the actions of hormonal EC on the fallopian tube and endometrium were such as to have no postfertilization effects, then the reduction in the rate of intrauterine pregnancies (IUPs) in women taking agents used in EC should be proportional to the reduction in the rate of extrauterine pregnancies (EPs) in women using hormonal EC. However, if the effect of hormonal ECs is to increase the EP/IUP ratio, this would indicate that one or more postfertilization effects are operating.6

The current proportion of clinical pregnancies that are ectopic is a little less than 2%.42 In the only study that we are aware of regarding hormonal EC and ectopic pregnancy, Kubba and Guillebaud43 noted that in 715 women who used the Yuzpe regimen, 17 pregnancies occurred, including 1 ectopic pregnancy (i.e., a 5.9% rate of ectopic pregnancy), supporting the possibility of one or more postfertilization effects. However, the confirmation of a postfertilization effect would take a much larger series of hormonal EC pregnancies to determine whether the proportion of ectopic pregnancies is indeed higher than in those not having used EC.

Relative Contribution of Postfertilization Effect Return to Top
As noted earlier, 2 small studies10 ,11 have suggested that when EC is used before ovulation, ovulation may be inhibited in 55–75% of the cases. Under the highly optimistic assumption that hormonal EC use prevents ovulation in 87.5% of women treated, Trussell and Raymond44 estimated that a mechanism “other than preventing ovulation accounts for 13–38% of the estimated effectiveness of the Yuzpe regimen.” This range is higher than 12.5% because hormonal EC is often used during or after ovulation when, by definition, mechanisms other than prevention of ovulation are in effect. The most likely candidate for the mechanism “other than preventing ovulation” is a postfertilization effect (by effects on the endometrium).

Summary and Implications

The evidence to date supports the contention that use of EC does not always inhibit ovulation even if used in the preovulatory phase, and that it may unfavorably alter the endometrial lining regardless of when in the cycle it is used, with the effect persisting for days. The reduced rates of observable pregnancy compared with the expected rates in women who use hormonal EC in the preovulatory, ovulatory, or postovulatory phase are consistent with a postfertilization effect, which may occur when hormonal EC is used in any of these menstrual phases.
This interpretation of the cited literature has important ramifications, given the polarizing opinions about EC use.45 For example, many state laws contain conscience clauses in which medical personnel (e.g., physicians, pharmacists, nurses, physician assistants, nurse practitioners) cannot be forced to participate in, or refer for, any surgical or drug-induced abortions. Therefore, evidence in favor of a postfertilization effect may have legal implications for healthcare providers who either prescribe or have objections to prescribing these agents.
Emergency department protocols could also be impacted by evidence of a postfertilization effect. For example, emergency departments of Catholic hospitals usually allow either no use of hormonal EC in their rape protocols or limited use (i.e., preovulatory use of hormonal EC).45 Catholic hospitals that do allow hormonal EC use prior to ovulation may wish to reassess their policies given the findings that EC use does not consistently stop ovulation and has the potential of causing a postfertilization effect even when used prior to ovulation. Most large secular hospitals have fewer limitations on the use of hormonal EC as part of their rape protocols. Nevertheless, evidence of a postfertilization effect from use of hormonal EC is important to physicians who must make a moral decision about prescribing or referring for a drug that can cause an early abortion.

There are potential limitations in our conclusions. Because no controlled trials have been done with women using EC, our conclusions are based on the existing data of case series with historical controls. However, these are the best available data for hormonal EC use. In addition, we have assumed, based on our discussions with physicians and laypeople across the country, that a significant number of physicians and patients would be concerned about a possible postfertilization effect. Although some evidence does exist to support our assumption,45 ,46 further research is needed. Nevertheless, the principle of informed consent would state that it is important to inform women who may use hormonal EC about this possible effect so that they can choose based on the best available data.

Regardless of the personal beliefs of the physician or provider about the mechanism of hormonal EC use, it is important that patients have information relevant to their own beliefs and value systems. It has been suggested to us by some that postfertilization loss attributed to hormonal EC use would not need to be included in informed consent until it is either definitely proven to exist or proven to be a common event. However, rare but important events are an essential part of other informed-consent discussions in medicine, primarily when the rare possibility would be judged by the patient to be important. For example, anesthesia-related deaths are rare for elective surgery; nevertheless, it is considered appropriate and legally necessary to discuss this rare possibility with patients before such surgery because the possibility of death is so important. Therefore, for women to whom the induced death of a zygote/embryo is important, failure to discuss the possibility of this loss, even if the possibility is judged to be remote, would be a failure of informed consent. Furthermore, based on the data reviewed in this article, it seems that a postfertilization effect is probably more common than is recognized by most physicians or patients. This is particularly true because in the studies done to date, women have been more likely to request treatment after intercourse that occurred near the time of ovulation than after intercourse that occurred earlier in the cycle.44

Some have suggested to us that an overemphasis of possible postfertilization effects might make women choose not to use EC and therefore increase the incidence of unplanned pregnancies. Both of these views fail to acknowledge the value of a woman's right to make decisions based on informed consent. During informed-consent discussions, overemphasis of any single possible risk may not result in appropriate informed consent; however, failing to mention a possible risk would be a failure of adequate informed consent. Therefore, discussion of a potential postfertilization risk should occur and should be kept within the perspective of the available medical evidence.

Proper informed consent requires patient and physician comprehension of information, the disclosure of that information, and the sharing of interpretations. If a postfertilization mechanism of hormonal EC use violates the morals of any woman, the failure of the physician or care provider to disclose that information would effectively eliminate the likelihood that the woman's consent was truly informed.

Finally, there is in our view a potential for negative psychological impact on women who value human life from conception onward, and have not been given informed consent about hormonal EC use, and later learn of the potential postfertilization effects. Their responses could include disappointment, guilt, sadness, anger, rage, depression, or a sense of having been violated by the provider. To assume that all patients will not care about a postfertilization effect is not supported by the literature.45 ,47–49

References

1. Yuzpe AA, Thurlow HJ, Ramzy I, Leyshon JI. Post coital contraception — a pilot study. J Reprod Med 1974;13:53–8. [PubMed Citation]2. Plan B: a progestin only contraceptive. Med Lett 2000;42:10 3. LaValleur J. Emergency contraception. Obstet Gynecol Clin North Am 2000;27:817–39. [PubMed Citation]4. Hughes EC, ed. Committee on terminology, American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Obstetric–gynecological terminology Philadelphia: FA Davis. 1972 5. Mosby's medical, nursing, & allied health dictionary. 6th ed. Philadelphia: Mosby. 2002 6. Larimore WL, Stanford J. Postfertilization effects of oral contraceptives and their relationship to informed consent. Arch Fam Med 2000;9:126–33. [PubMed Citation]7. Physicians' desk reference. 54th ed. Montvale, NJ: Medical Economics. 2000:1335 8. An emergency contraceptive kit. Med Lett 1998;40:102–3. 9. Carr BR, Parker CR, Madden JM, MacDonald PA, Porter JC. Plasma levels of adrenocorticotropin and cortisol in women receiving oral contraceptive steroid treatment. J Clin Endocrinol Metab 1979;49:346–9. [PubMed Citation]10. Ling WY, Robichaud A, Zayid I, Wrixon W, MacLeod SC. Mode of action of dl-norgestrel and ethinylestradiol combination in postcoital contraception. Fertil Steril 1979;32:297–302. [PubMed Citation]11. Swahn LM, Westlund P, Johannisson E, Bygdeman M. Effect of post-coital contraceptive methods on the endometrium and the menstrual cycle. Acta Obstet Gynecol Scand 1996;75:738–44. [PubMed Citation]12. Hertzen H, Van Look PFA. Randomised controlled trial of levonorgestrel versus the Yuzpe regimen of combined oral contraceptives for emergency contraception. Lancet 1998;352:428–33. [PubMed Citation]13. Webb AMC, Russell J, Elstein M. Comparison of Yuzpe regimen, danazol, and mifepristone (RU 486) in oral postcoital contraception. BMJ 1992;305:927–31. 14. Zuliani G, Colombo UF, Molla R. Hormonal postcoital contraception with an ethinylestradiol–norgestrel combination and two danazol regimens. Eur J Obstet Gynecol Reprod Biol 1990;37:253–60. [PubMed Citation]15. Yuzpe AA, Smith RP, Rademaker AW. A multicenter clinical investigation employing ethinyl estradiol combined with dl-norgestrel as a postcoital contraceptive agent. Fertil Steril 1982;37:508–13. [PubMed Citation]16. Ho PC, Kwan MSW. A prospective randomized comparison of levonorgestrel with the Yuzpe regimen in post-coital contraception. Hum Reprod 1993;8:389–92. [PubMed Citation]17. Glasier A, Thong KJ, Dewar M, Mackie M, Baird DT. Mifepristone (RU-486) compared with high-dose estrogen and progestogen for emergency postcoital contraception. N Engl J Med 1992;327:1041–4. [PubMed Citation]18. Van Santen MR, Haspels AA. A comparison of high-dose estrogens versus low-dose ethinylestradiol and norgestrel combination in postcoital interception: a study in 493 women. Fertil Steril 1985;43:206–13. [PubMed Citation]19. Percival-Smith RK, Abercrombie B. Postcoital contraception with dl-norgestrel/ethinyl estradiol combination: six years experience in a student medical clinic. Contraception 1987;36:287–93. [PubMed Citation]20. Trussell J, Rodriguez G, Ellertson C. Updated estimates of the effectiveness of the Yuzpe regimen of emergency contraception. Contraception 1999;59:147–51. [PubMed Citation]21. Glasier A. Emergency contraception. Br Med Bull 2000;56:729–38. [PubMed Citation]22. Dixon GW, Schlesselman JJ, Ory HW, Blye RP. Ethinyl estradiol and conjugated estrogens as postcoital contraceptives. JAMA 1980;244:1336–9. [PubMed Citation]23. Schwartz D, Mayaux MJ, Martin-Boyce A, Czyglik F, David G. Donor insemination: conception rate according to cycle day in a series of 821 cycles with a single insemination. Fertil Steril 1979;31:226–9. [PubMed Citation]24. Barrett JC, Marshall J. The risk of conception on different days of the menstrual cycle. Popul Stud 1969;23:455–61. 25. Wilcox AJ, Weinberg CR, Baird DD. Timing of sexual intercourse in relation to ovulation. Effects on probability of conception, survival of the pregnancy, and sex of baby. N Engl J Med 1995;333:1517–21. [PubMed Citation]26. Hacker NF, Moore JG, Essentials of obstetrics and gynecology. 3rd ed. Philadelphia: WB Saunders. 1998 27. Diamond EF. Ovral in rape protocols. Ethics Medics 1996;2110:2 28. Wilcox AJ, Dunson D, Baird DD. The timing of the “fertile window” in the menstrual cycle: day specific estimates from a prospective study. BMJ 2000;321:1259–62. 29. Glasier A. Emergency postcoital contraception. N Engl J Med 1997;337:1058–64. [PubMed Citation]30. Somkuti SG, Sun J, Yowell C, Fritz M, Lessey B. The effect of oral contraceptive pills on markers of endometrial receptivity. Fertil Steril 1996;65:484–8. [PubMed Citation]31. Dawood YM, Ibuprofen and dysmenorrhea. Am J Med 1984;771 A.:87–94. 32. Bieglmayer C, Hofer G, Kainz C, Reinthaller A, Kopp B, Janisch H. Concentration of various arachidonic acid metabolites in menstrual fluid are associated with menstrual pain and are influenced by hormonal contraceptives. Gynecol Endocrin 1995;9:307–12. [PubMed Citation]33. Brown HK, Stoll BS, Nicosia SV, Fiorica JV, Hambley PS, Clarke LP. Uterine junctional zone: correlation between histiologic findings and MR imaging. Radiology 1991;179:409–13. [PubMed Citation]34. Demas BE, Hricak H, Jaffe RB. Uterine MR imaging: effects of hormonal stimulation. Radiology 1986;159:123–6. [PubMed Citation]35. Abdalla HI, Brooks AA, Johnson MR, Kirkland A, Thomas A, Studd JW. Endometrial thickness: a predictor of implantation in ovum recipients?. Hum Reprod 1994;9:363–5. [PubMed Citation]36. Dickey RP, Olar TT, Taylor SN, Curole DN, Matulich EM. Relationship of endometrial thickness and pattern to fecundity in ovulation induction cycles: effect of clomiphene citrate alone and with human menopausal gonadotropin. Fertil Steril 1993;59:756–60. [PubMed Citation]37. Gonen Y, Casper RF, Jacobson W, Blankier J. Endometrial thickness and growth during ovarian stimulation: a possible predictor of implantation in in-vitro fertilization. Fertil Steril 1989;52:446–50. [PubMed Citation]38. Schwartz LB, Chiu AS, Courtney M, Krey L, Schmidt-Sarosi C. The embryo versus endometrium controversy revisited as it relates to predicting pregnancy outcome in in-vitro fertilization — embryo transfer cycles. Hum Reprod 1997;12:45–50. [PubMed Citation]39. Shoham Z, Carlo C, Patel A, Conway GS, Jacobs HS. Is it possible to run a succesful ovulation induction program based solely on ultrasound monitoring: the importance of endometrial measurements. Fertil Steril 1991;56:836–41. [PubMed Citation]40. Ling WY, Wrixon W, Zayid I, Acorn T, Popat R, Wilson E. Mode of action of dl-norgestrel and ethinylestradiol combination in postcoital contraception. II. Effect of postovulatory administration on ovarian function and endometrium. Fertil Steril 1983;39:292–7. [PubMed Citation]41. Kubba AA, White JO, Guillebaud J, Elder MG. The biochemistry of human endometrium after two regimens of postcoital contraception: a dl-norgestrel/ethinylestradiol combination or danazol. Fertil Steril 1986;45:512–6. [PubMed Citation]42. Aboud A. A five-year review of ectopic pregnancy. Clin Exp Obstet Gynecol 1997;24:127–9. [PubMed Citation]43. Kubba AA, Guillebaud J. Case of ectopic pregnancy after postcoital contraception with ethinyloestradiol–levonorgestrel. Br Med J 1983;287:1343–4. [PubMed Citation]44. Trussell J, Raymond EG. Statistical evidence about the mechanism of action of the Yuzpe regimen of emergency contraception. Obstet Gynecol 1999;93:872–6. [PubMed Citation]45. Golden NH, Seigel WM, Fisher M, Schneider M, Quijano E, Suss A. Emergency contraception: pediatricians' knowledge, attitudes and opinions. Pediatrics 2001;107:287–92. [PubMed Citation]46. Spinnato JA. Mechanism of action of intrauterine contraceptive devices and its relation to informed consent. Am J Obstet Gynecol 1997;176:503–6. [PubMed Citation]47. Wilkinson J, Ethical problems at the beginning of life. In: Wilkinson J, ed. Christian ethics in health care: a source book for Christian doctors, nurses and other health care professionals Edinburgh, Scotland: Handsel Press. 1988:176–208. 48. Ryder RE. Natural family planning: effective birth control supported by the Catholic Church. BMJ 1993;307:723–6. 49. Tonti-Filippini N, The pill: abortifacient or contraceptive: a literature review. Linacre Quarterly 1995 Feb.:5–28.

APPENDIX

Appendix I. Critique of EC Efficacy

The measure of efficacy is critical to an analysis of a possible postfertilization effect. For example, if hormonal EC use had a 0% efficacy rate, the question of a postfertilization effect would be irrelevant. Hormonal EC use received Food and Drug Administration approval without evidence of a randomized, controlled, prospective study regarding its effectiveness.3 ,21 Rather, effectiveness was estimated based on the studies we have reviewed in this article. We noted the efficacy rates based on the raw data versus Trussell et al.'s20 calculated estimates for each of the 8 trials presented in Table 1 . Trussell et al. used the latter estimates to calculate an overall efficacy rate of 74.1%, while the raw data yield a figure of 65.7%.

In these studies, the pregnancy rates of the cohort were compared with pregnancy rates estimated from historical controls. Specifically, the control pregnancy rates were based on the procedure developed in the Dixon Study,22 which estimated the expected rate of pregnancy in women from a single act of intercourse on a particular day of the menstrual cycle. Dixon based the probability of pregnancy per specific day on 2 major studies: Schwartz et al. (1979)23 and Barrett and Marshall (1969).24 In subsequent analyses, Trussell et al. dropped the Schwartz study, which was based on artificial insemination, and added another historical control group from a cohort of women trying to achieve pregnancy in North Carolina in the early 1980s.25 In doing this, Trussell et al. were in fact not comparing contemporaneous cohorts and controls. This major design problem may render the conclusions of the studies uncertain for 2 reasons:

1. In the 1960s, the rate of infertility was lower than in later years. For example, “infertility increased 177% among married women aged 20 to 24 years between 1965 and 1982.”26 Therefore, the rate of infertility would be expected to be lower for the Barrett controls than for the study cohorts (women using EC). In addition, Wilcox et al.25 noted that “women were excluded if they had a serious chronic illness or if they or their partners had a history of fertility problems.” None of the case studies reported specifically screening for infertility. It is therefore probable that both of the historical control studies had a lower rate of infertility than the case studies. If this is true, then studies of EC use that employ historical controls for comparison may overestimate the effectiveness of EC use in preventing or ending a pregnancy.

2. Selecting controls from women who were not seeking to use EC to avoid pregnancy may lead to differences that could affect the results. For example, some controls came from the Barrett and Marshall study,24 which examined 241 couples who were using a natural family planning method based on basal body temperature. Some of these women were trying to conceive, as were the women enrolled in the Wilcox et al. trial.25 None was known to be under the stress of a rape or other high-stress situation. However, the cohort in the 8 trials cited by Trussell were trying to prevent or end their pregnancy and were probably under more emotional stress than the controls who desired pregnancy. If 2 groups of women are examined, one that desires pregnancy and the other that does not and is under stress, the fertility rates in each group may vary markedly because it is possible that under extreme stress, the secretion of ovulatory hormones from the pituitary gland could be inhibited. For example, Diamond27 noted a prospective study in Minnesota of 4000 women who had been raped and none had become pregnant. This may reflect an endogenous hormonal change whereby the women's bodies inhibited ovulation during or shortly after the time of the sexual assault.

3. All of the EC studies are based on a fixed timing of ovulation relative to cycle length (e.g., 14 d before the next menstrual cycle). However, the length of the luteal phase varies significantly, both between women, and to a lesser extent, within the same woman, even for women of regular cycles.28 Therefore, the assignment of conception probabilities based on day relative to ovulation is imprecise.
We believe for the above-noted reasons that the estimates of efficacy rates for hormonal EC use are highly tentative and require further analysis.

1Chris Kahlenborn MD, Department of Internal Medicine, Altoona Hospital, Altoona, PA; Department of Internal Medicine, Bon Secour Hospital, Altoona, E-mail: kahlen@alt3.com
2Joseph B Stanford MD MSPH, Assistant Professor, Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT
3Walter L Larimore MD, Associate Clinical Professor, Community and Family Medicine, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL; Vice-President, Medical Outreach, Focus on the Family, Colorado Springs, CO.
Reprints available from The Annals of Pharmacotherapy

Press Commentary:

Bishops Conferences Admit to Approving Abortifacient Drugs for Rape at Catholic Hospitals
Catholic Medical Association Opposes Measure - Calls for Vatican clarification

By John-Henry Westen

HARTFORD, May 2, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The Catholic Medical Association, the largest professional organization of Catholic physicians in the U.S. is resolutely opposed to the use of the abortifacient morning after pill (also known as 'emergency contraception' or its generic name Plan B) in Catholic Hospitals because of its potential to cause abortions. Nevertheless, the Catholic Bishops of both Connecticut and Wisconsin and other states have publicly admitted that their Catholic hospitals are distributing such pills to rape victims. In testimony before the Wisconsin Senate Committee last week, the Wisconsin Catholic Conference noted that Catholic hospitals were in fact already administering the morning after pill with the use of pregnancy tests. Kim Wadas, Associate Director for Health Care at the Conference, told the committee, "Catholic hospitals in Wisconsin can and do treat victims with emergency contraception." (see the full testimony here: http://www.wisconsin.nasccd.org/bins/wisconsin/content/pages... <http://www.wisconsin.nasccd.org/bins/wisconsin/content/pages/Advocacy/Testimony/sb129tst-EC%20treatment.pdf?_resolutionfile=ftppath> ) In a joint April 25 letter signed by the Bishops of Connecticut, Archbishop of Harford Henry Mansell, and Bishop of Bridgeport William Lori, the prelates state: "It is important to repeat that Connecticut's Catholic hospitals do provide emergency contraception." Later in the letter they add, "We would not object to passage of a statute that would require all hospitals to adopt protocols requiring the distribution of Plan B to sexual assault victims when medically appropriate." (see the letter at the Connecticut Catholic Conference website - Copy and paste the following link into your browser) connecticut.nasccd.org/bins/connecticut/content/documents/Bishop's%20Letter%20on%20Plan%20B.pdf ) LifeSiteNews.com has learned that some Catholic hospitals in Massachusetts, Colorado, New York, California, Washington also offer so-called 'emergency contraception' to some rape victims. The bishops of these dioceses believe they are allowing the use of emergency contraception only in cases where "appropriate testing" has determined that the woman is not pregnant and thus the pill, in halting ovulation may prevent a pregnancy occurring as a result of the rape. The science however does not definitively back up their hopes. Medical evidence, accepted by the largest association of Catholic doctors in the United States, demonstrates that the pregnancy tests used cannot accurately detect a pregnancy at fertilization but only after implantation which takes more than a week after the new life is formed. A more stringent protocol known as the ovulation method used in some Catholic hospitals, seeks to determine if the patient has ovulated and if the test indicates she has not, the pills can be given. However, medical evidence demonstrates considerable doubt that even these tests can detect a potential fertilization in time to prevent an abortion caused by administration of the pill. (for a detailed look at this aspect of the medical evidence see here: http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2007_docs/UScatholichospitalsand... <http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2007_docs/UScatholichospitalsandrapetreatment.pdf>) Even if such tests could accurately determine that ovulation has not yet occurred another difficulty exists. A study by Dr. Chris Kahlenborn in 2003 found that the pill only works to halt ovulation half the time. Thus fertilization may occur even after the pill is administered, and an abortion would result since in addition to stopping ovulation the pills act to weaken the lining of the uterus making implantation unsustainable. See Dr. Kahlenborn's study here: <http://www.polycarp.org/postfertilization_polycarp_1.htm>

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LifeSiteNews.com

Dr. Kathleen Raviele, the President-Elect of the Catholic Medical Association, told LifeSiteNews.com that the science is complex and "Bishops can't be expected to understand all of the medical nuances of this." She says however that the situation as it stands requires reassessment. "In everything we err on the side of life," she said and thus the administration of the morning after pill in Catholic hospitals is "not justified." At its Annual Meeting in 2003, the Catholic Medical Association passed a resolution correcting theologians who have erroneously suggested that it would be legitimate for Catholic hospitals to provide "emergency contraception" to rape victims. The Catholic doctors said that the term 'emergency contraception' is "a misnomer as it does not consistently prevent fertilization". The resolution concludes that the drug, "has the potential to prevent implantation whether given in the pre-ovulatory, ovulatory, or post-ovulatory phase, that it cannot be ethically employed by a Catholic physician or administered in a Catholic Hospital in cases of rape". Raviele added that the most common morning after pill currently in use, Plan B, has many negative side effects such as nausea and dizziness, and the medical literature is pointing to use of the abortion drug RU-486 as a replacement. "The next emergency contraceptive on the horizon is going to be a low dose of RU-486 since it has no side effects," she warned. Dr. Kahlenborn, who, with two other physicians, did the study on the effect of the morning after pill told LifeSiteNews.com, no one knows for sure how the morning after pill works. Acting in an area of life and death in uncertainty, suggests Dr. Kahlenborn, is reckless. "The bishops who approve this are approving potential abortions," he said. "You have the Catholic doctors telling you this and even Protestant doctors," said Kahlenborn speaking of the Catholic Medical Association and the two Protestant and Mormon physicians who co-authored the study on the morning after pill. "Who are the bishops listening to?," he asked rhetorically. The Catholic Health Association is an association led by theologians which advises the bishops on such matters and it approves of the limited use of the morning after pill in Catholic hospitals for rape victims. Dr. Kahlenborn wondered about reliance on theologians for opinion on medical science rather than on medical doctors. "Basically saying your theologians are smarter than all the doctors out there," he said. Given the complexities involved, Dr. Kahlenborn suggested that a new Vatican intervention would be required to clear up the situation. "The only way I really think its going to change is if the Vatican does something," he concluded. To politely request that the Pontifical Academy for Life clarify the situation write: pav@acdlife.va See related LifeSiteNews.com coverage: US Catholic Bishops in Wisconsin and Connecticut Drop Opposition to Abortion-Causing Emergency Contraception

St. Luke and Benedict XVI

Joseph Ratzinger - Benedict XVI exclaims in the foreword to “Jesus of Nazareth:” “I trust the Gospels” The reason he trusts them is due to the unique affirmation of Luke that Jesus is the true prophet announced by Moses in Deuteronomy: “And the Lord said to me, ‘This was well said. I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their kinsmen, and will put my words into his mouth; he shall tell them all that I command him’” (Deuteronomy 18, 18).

Moses spoke to God face to face, but he did not “see” God face to face. “You shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen” (Ex. 33, 23). But in the case of Jesus, things are different. The prologue of St. John’s Gospel reads: “No one has ever seen God; it is the only Son, who is nearest to the Father’s heart, who has made him known” (Jn. 1, 18).” The pope goes on: “What was true of Moses only in fragmentary form has now been fully realized in the person of Jesus: He lives before the face of God, not just as a friend, but as a Son; he lives in the most intimate unity with the Father.

“We have to start here if we are truly to understand the figure of Jesus as it is presented to us in the New Testament; all that we are told about his words, deeds, sufferings, and glory is anchored here. This is the central point, and if we leave it out of account, we fail to grasp what the figure of Jesus is really all about, so that it becomes self-contradictory and, in the end, unintelligible. The question that every reader of the New Testament must ask – where Jesus’ teaching came from, how his appearance in history is to be explained – can really be answered only from this perspective. The reaction of his hearers was clear: This teaching does not come from any school. It is radically different from what can be learned in schools. It is not the kind of explanation or interpretation that is taught there. It is different; it is interpretation ‘with authority.’”

The point that Benedict made in Brazil last May 13th is apposite: “Only God knows God.” And therefore, only God sees God in the face. The telling scriptural quote is Matt 11, 27: “No one knows the Son except the Father; nor does anyone know the Father except the Son, and him to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.”

Jesus Christ Reduced Positivistically

The exegesis of the last two centuries has been dominated by the philosophy of Immanuel Kant that spawned the philosophy of empirical positivism. Ratzinger remarked in 1988: “One can not that in the history-of-religions school, the model of evolution was applied to the analysis of biblical texts. This was an effort to bring the methods and models of the natural sciences to bear on the study of history. Bultmann laid hold of this notion in a more general way and thus attributed to the so-called scientific worldview a kind of dogmatic character. Thus, for example, for him the non historicity of the miracle stories was no question whatever anymore. The only thing one needed to do yet was to explain how these miracle stories came about. On one hand the introduction of the scientific worldview was indeterminate and not well thought out. ON the other hand, it offered an absolute rule for distinguishing between what could have been and what had to be explained only by development. To this category belonged everything which is not met with in common daily experience. There could only have been what now is. For everything else, therefore, historical processes are invented, whose reconstruction became the particular challenge of exegesis.

Kantian Background

Ratzinger continues: “But I think we must go yet a step further in order to appreciate the fundamental decision of the system which generated these particular categories for judgment. The real philosophic presupposition of the whole system seems to me to lie in the philosophic turning point proposed by Immanuel Kant. According to him, the voice of being-in-itself cannot be heard by human beings. Man can hear it only indirectly in the postulates of practical reason which have remained as it were the small opening through which he can make contact with the real, that is, his eternal destiny. For the rest, as far as the content of his intellectual life is concerned, he must limit himself to the realm of the categories. Thence comes the restriction to the positive, to the empirical, to the ‘exact’ science, which by definition excludes the appearance of what is ‘wholly other,’ or the one who is wholly other, or a new initiative from another plane.

“In theological terms, this means that revelation must recede into the pure formality of the eschatological stance, which corresponds to the Kantian split. As far as everything else is concerned, it all needs to be ‘explained.’ What might otherwise seem like a direct proclamation of the divine, can only myth, whose laws of development can be discovered. It is with this basic conviction that Bultmann, with the majority of modern exegetes, read the Bible. He is certain that it cannot be the way it is depicted in the Bible, and he looks for methods to prove the way it really had to be. To that extent there lies in modern exegesis a reduction of history into philosophy, a revision of history by means of philosophy.”

Luke Reads Christ’s Words and Actions From Within the Experience of Prayer. So Must Exegesis.

Ratzinger – Benedict XVI trusts the Gospels because it is uniquely Luke who shows that the very Person of Jesus reveals Himself to be the relational action of prayer. Therefore, everything Jesus did or said cannot be reduced to the cultural, psychological, geographical, historical, hormonal (if you will)… Luke reports that the very Person of Jesus is the action of prayer. He is reporting that when the “I” of the Logos takes on flesh, the relationality of His Being assumes the human will of Jesus of Nazareth and He freely wills to be Who He is, Word spoken and speaking to the Father: Abba. This is irreducible to cosmic conceptual categories.

Ratzinger offers the three principal lucan sites: Lk. 6, 12, Lk. 9, 18 and Lk. 9, 28, the most important, perhaps, being Lk. 9, 18: “And it came to pass as he was praying in private, that his disciples also were with him, and he asked them, saying, ‘Who do the crowds say that I am?’ And they answered and said, “john the Baptist; and others, Elias; and others, that one of the ancient prophets has risen again.’
“And he said to them, ‘But who do you say that I am/’ Simon Peter answered and said, ‘The Christ of God.’”

Ratzinger comments: “Peter had grasped and expressed the most fundamental reality of the person of Jesus as a result of having seen him praying, in fellowship with the Father. According to Luke, we see who Jesus is if we see him at prayer. The Christian confession of faith comes from participating in the prayer of Jesus, from being drawn into his prayer and being privileged to behold it; it interprets the experience of Jesus’ prayer, and its interpretation of Jesus is correct because it springs from a sharing in what is most personal and intimate to him.
“Thus we have arrived at both the very basis and the abiding precondition of the Christian confession of faith: only by entering into Jesus’ solitude, only by participating in what is most personal to him, his communication with the Father, can one see what this most personal reality is; only thus can one penetrate to his identity. This is the only way to understand him and to grasp what ‘following Jesus’ means. The Christian confession is not a neutral proposition; it is prayer, only yielding its meaning within prayer. The person who has beheld Jesus’ intimacy with his Father and has come to understand him from within is called to be a ‘rock’ of the Church. The Chruch arises out of participation in the prayer of Jesus.”

As Guardini said it: “The person of Jesus is unprecedented and therefore measurable by no already existing norm. Christian recognition consists of realizing that all things really began with Jesus Christ; that he is his own norm – and therefore ours – for he is Truth.”

“Christ’s effect upon the world can be compared with nothing in history save its own creation: ‘In the beginning God created heaven and earth.’ What take s place in Christ is of the same order as the original act of creation, though on a still higher level. For the beginning of the new creation is as far superior to the love which created the stars, plants, animals and men. That is what the words mean: ‘I’ have come to cast fire upon the earth, and what will I but that it be kindled?’ (Lk. 12, 49). It is the fire of new becoming; not only ‘truth’ or ‘love,’ but the incandescence of new creation.

“How earnest these words are is clear from those that follow: ‘But I have a baptism to be baptized with; and how distressed I am until it is accomplished!’ ‘Baptism’ is the mystery of creative depths: grave and womb in one. Christ must pass through them because human hardness of heart does not allow him to take the other road. Down, down through terrible destruction he descends, to the nadir of divine creation whence saved existence can climb back into being.”

[1] Joseph Ratzinger – Benedict XVI, “Jesus of Nazareth,” Doubleday (2007) 6.
[1] Ibid.
[1] “Biblical Interpretation in Crisis: On the Question of the Foundations and Approaches of Exegesis Today,” January 27th 1988 at St. Peter’s Church in New York, N.Y.
[1] Ibid.
[1] J. Ratzinger, “Behold the Pierced One,” Ignatius (1986) 19.
[1] Romano Guardini, “The Lord,” Regnery (1954) 306-307.
[1] Ibid

Suggested Foreword to Kent Gilges' "The Gift of LIfe"

This book is not so much about Elizabeth Nyanga Gilges who in 1994 at the age of eight months was diagnosed with a rare brain tumor that permitted her neither to hear, speak or talk. She died on March 11, 2004 at the age of 10 after having introduced her father and mother into a learning process of self giving whose content was the process itself. Hence, the book.

To read it is to experience the truth of St. Exupery’s renowned secret dictum: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” [1]

What is striking here is to find oneself caught up in emotion such that makes reading in public become all but impossible. I have used several passages in preaching retreats to various assemblages of both men and women, and I invariably find myself unable to continue because of the emotional charge that builds within me. Before Kent wrote the book, I became privy to a short blurb he had written for “The Family Gazette” that caught my eye. He said there: “At times, I have sensed in other people the belief that it would be better for Liz and me if Elie were to die soon. They feel she is a hardship, that it would make our lives easier, or more steady if she were gone, that it would strengthen our marriage by giving us more time together, less stress.

“I think these people are fools. I was right when I was a boy. Suffering is a gift…. Elie is the greatest gift we have ever been given. She makes our lives far richer, more contemplative, and full of joy than they ever would have been without her. She is a beloved – even essential --- addition to our home and will be as long as she is with us. Elie has given us an awareness of suffering’s noble beauty.”


Later, I became privy to the eulogy he had prepared in anticipation of Elie’s death. The interior emotion of the father invaded me as he recounted: “I have spoken this eulogy in cars, in the woods, in a boat. I have spoken it mainly when I was alone, out loud with tears streaming down my face. But I have also prepared it in my head at a party or as I sat with a crowd of friends at dinner, my thoughts drifting far beyond the conversation until I have had to stop my train of thought because I knew that within moments I would choke up and start crying and nobody would have any idea why.” He goes on to mention – for me – the profound point that this child was held for her entire life time. She was affirmed tactilly by a certain number of persons, and he names them one by one, commenting: “It amazes me that so many people have touched her, held her, rocked her. So much family. Dozens of the most caring nurses we could hope for. Many priests have held her and all have prayed for her continuously since her illness. She has been comforted and loved by more people in her few short years than many of us in a lifetime. And being held, being touched, has been her way of touching others in turn. We touched her physically. She touches us spiritually.” He then recounts their names, individually, one by one.

And then, the final commendation:

“I cannot point to many things that I have done which were wholly good, but caring for Elie is one. She was a burden, yes, but she was also a gift. And it is my great hope that if I ever make it to heaven and stand before God, I will be greeted there by a little girl with blond hair and a sweet smile who welcomes me and introduces me to God. And God will laugh and say, ‘Don’t worry. It wasn’t ever really as close a call as you thought. Anyone who cared for Elie got a free pass.’

“Goodbye my beautiful gift. God’s speed.”

At the actual moment of her death, Kent Gilges says: “Is Elie resting in peace? I guess I hope not. I hope that for the first time, a little girl who was never able to walk finally has the use of her legs and is running through fields filled with the yellow and blue flowers that adorned her pale brow as she lay in her coffin.”

It is difficult not to dig deeply in what is going on in the book and in the reader with the heart of a child. We are dealing with a knowing that is in the heart and the emotions. In an apparent contradiction to scientific objectivity that held up to crossing the threshold into quantum physics but that now is in shambles, the supreme objectivity – or realism – is achieved only by the deployment of the entire self in encounter with another self - even if that self is a severely handicapped little girl. Kent Gilges is a child peering into the persona of his beautiful daughter, and, resonating with her, tells us who she is by telling us who he is. It would be fitting to dedicate this book to the reader who may be a “Leon Werth when he was a little boy” just as Saint-Exupery dedicating “The Little Prince.”

One of the most stunning parts of the book is the chapter “A Day in the Life Of” that does the above in the bathtub: “I slept in late this morning. I’m only three and a half so I don’t know how to tell time, but the sun was already coming through the window and shining on my face when I finally woke up. The sun is one of my favorite things; I can’t see it, but I can feel warmth on my face…

“Tonight, Cheryl didn’t make me do exercises. Instead, mommy took me in the bath with her. I love the bath. Mommy and I get in together, and it is always very hot…. Mommy let me stretch out and float. My hands bob at the surface and mommy only has to hold up my head. She says I’m so fat that I float.

“You might wonder what I think about when I’m floating in the bathtub with my eyes closed. That’s the best part of the story. I think about God. I try to imagine what it will be like when God holds me. You see, since my eyes don’t work like everyone else’s, I see different things than most kids. Mommy and daddy think that when I tilt my head back and look at the ceiling, it has something to do with my brain not working. It doesn’t though. Up high above us, I see angels dancing. Sometimes they come down close and talk to me and sometimes they are very far away, but they always seem to be dancing. And when they talk to me, they tell me that God is waiting for a little while yet to see me, and that I have a very good reason for being here. They say that when I visit God, I will sit on His lap and talk to Him for a long time, and when I fall asleep, He’s going to give me to the angels to hold while I wait for mommy and daddy.

“I like to think about that in the bathtub because I think being held by God is a lot like being held by daddy, except better.”

* * * * * * * * * * *

But, who is this daddy who is inside this little girl’s head and heart? A father who has suffered and is terribly vulnerable to love and be loved. Louis Evely wrote:

“Do you know what it is to be a Father?
“To be a Father is precisely to suffer; to become a father is to become vulnerable. As long as one is young, one is hard, selfish, protected. No doubt, one has terrible blues, emotions, melancholies, but one holds one’s own pretty well, one withdraws easily, one suffers only for oneself. Our compassion for others is gratuitous, generous, superfluous.
“But when one becomes a father, or a mother, one suddenly sees oneself as vulnerable, in the most sensitive part of one’s being; one is completely powerless to defend oneself, one is no longer free, one is tied up. To become a father is to experience an infinite dependency on an infinitely small, frail, being, dependent on us and therefore omnipotent over our heart. Oh, we really depend on people who depend on us! The strong person who loves a weak person has put his happiness at his mercy. He depends on him henceforth. He is without any defense against him. To love a person is inevitably to depend on him, to give him power over us. God loved us freely; God have us power over him. God wanted to have need of us. The passion is the revelation of our terrible power over God. He surrendered himself to us, we had him at our disposal, we did with him what we wanted. On a plaque in Normandy one can read this cruel sentence: ‘It is always the one who loves the least who is the strongest.’ It is always he who is least in love who gets his way with the other, who keeps a cool head and stays in control of the situation. God, in regard to us, will always be the weakest, for he loves. God can be denied, forgotten; he cannot deny us, forget us. We can be without God. God cannot be without men.[2] We can stop being sons; he cannot stop being a Father. ‘Man in revolt against God is like the bird in the storm which dashes itself against the cliff. But God, in his mercy, became flesh so that the violence of the impact might be endured by him and not by us.’ Thus, God will always be the weakest against us for he loves us. We are of Jacob’s race, we are the true Israel, he who fought against the angel all night and who deserved his name: ‘mighty against God.’”[3]

Prior to his election as pope, and while taking part in the Second Vatican Council, Cardinal Karol Wojtyla wrote his last dramatic work, “Reflections on fatherhood,” that sums up this work:

“And in the end You could put aside our world. You may let it crumble around us and, above all else, in us. And then it will transpire that YOU remain whole only in the SON, and He in You – whole with Him in YOUR LOVE, Father and Bridegroom

“And everything else will then turn out to be unimportant and inessential, except for this: father, child, and love.

“And then, looking at the simplest things, all of us will say: could we not have learned this long ago? Has this not always been embedded at the bottom of everything that is?” [1964] [4]


[1] Antoine de Saint-Exupery, “The Little Prince” Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (1943) XXI, 70-71.
[2] This refers to God’s Erotic Love that is one with His Agape. See Benedict XVI’s “Deus Caritas Est,” #9-11. God’s Love not only gives Self but desires (spousally) to receive free love from created human persons.
[3] Louis Evely, “Suffering” op. cit.
[4] Karol Wojtyla, “Reflections on Fatherhood,” The Collected Plays and Writings on Theater University of California Press (1987) 368.

Giving Thanks (on the occasion of the 28th Sunday C)

Giving thanks is endemic to personhood. In fact we could even say that the notion of person is derived from Christian revelation of engendering the Son from the Father and the return of thanksgiving to Him. Since Person, as revealed and at its Trinitarian core, is never self-constituting nor self-reliant, the act of giving thanks pertains to the very constitution of the person.

According to Joseph Ratzinger, the Greek notion of substance as the metaphysical rendering of “this God who had been understood as pure Being or pure thought, circling round for ever closed in upon itself without reaching over to man and his little world; this God of the philosophers, whose pure eternity and unchangeability had excluded any relation with the changeable and transitory,”[1] is not helpful in accounting for the reality of the ontologically one God as a Trinity of Persons nor for Christ as Divine Person of two autonomous yet “compenetrating”[2] natures. As he says elsewhere, “What may be a questionable idea in the context of physics was asserted by theology in the fourth and fifth century about the persons in God, namely, that they are nothing but the act of relativity toward each other. In God, person is the pure relativity of being turned toward the other; it does not lie on the level of substance – the substance is one – but on the level of dialogical reality, of relativity toward the other… Relation is here recognized as a third specific fundamental category between substance and accident, the two great categorical form of thought in Antiquity. Again we encounter the Christian newness of the personalistic idea in all its sharpness and clarity. The contribution offered by faith to human thought becomes especially clear and palpable here. It was faith that gave birth to this idea of pure act, of pure relativity, which does not lie on the level of substance and does not touch or divined substance; and it was faith that thereby brought the personal phenomenon into view.”[3]

It should be noted here that Ratzinger sees this epistemological development that must take place in order to craft a metaphysics that will anchor relation as the prius in human thought as “a task that is still far from being accomplished.”[4] This is precisely what he envisages as his principal task as Pope succeeding John Paul II and Vatican II: to move consciousness from a metaphysic of substance to a metaphysic of relation. And to that end, he published as his key-note statement: Deus Caritas Est. That is, God is an Actio that is Agape, the open Self-Transcendence that is a triple Self-Gift. “It thus becomes obvious … that the concept of God is removed from the realm of a mere ousia.”[5]

Of course, the Fathers of the Church (Athanasius, in point) did not remove the Greek “substance,” ousia, from the account of the Being of God, but put it into a mysterious tension so that two of the divine Persons Who are irreducibly different as Father and Son (“The Father is greater than I,” [Jn. 14, 29]) are equal as Being but not the same Person.

At a much later date, Hegel notoriously remarked: “In my view, which can be justified only by the exposition of the system itself, everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject [Das Wahre nicht als Substanz, sondern eben so sehr als Subjekt]”[6] An important commentator of Hegel, Nathan Rotenstreich, said: “If we take into account the religious background of Hegel’s thought, something else attracts our notice. At an early stage in Christian thought, subject acquired the meaning of person. In the history of Christian speculation about the Trinity, the notion of Person (Persona) arose as a kind of corrective to the notions of substance and the substantive unity of God. The notion of substance lacked personal character and could be viewed merely as essence, being or ousia.” [7]

Ingratitude Undermines Personhood

Not to be thankful is to arrogate the received being and goodness of self to self-achievement and self sufficiency. If personhood is to be in relation, and in the case of the Son of God, His very To Be as divine Person, equal in Being to the Father, then the very identity of the Son is to give glory to the Father in unending gratitude and glorification.

As images of God in the Son, the folkloric is telling with regard to the ontological constitution of the human person precisely because of its unreflective spontaneity. Lewis Hyde writes the following:

“Tribal peoples usually distinguish between gifts and capital. Commonly they have a law that repeats the sensibility implicit in the idea of an Indian gift. ‘One man’s gift,’ they say ‘must not be another man’s capital.’ Wendy James, a British social anthropologist, tells us that among the Uduk in northeast Africa, ‘any wealth transferred from one subclan to another, whether animals, grain or money, is in the nature of a gift, and should be consumed, and not invested for growth. If such transferred wealth is added to the subclan’s capital [cattle in this case] and kept for growth and investment, the subclan is regarded as being in an immoral relation of debt to the donors of the original gift.’ If a pair of goats received as a gift from another subclan is kept to breed or to buy cattle, ‘there will be general complaint that the so-and so’s are getting rich at someone else’s expense, behaving immorally by hoarding and investing gifts, and therefore eo being in a state of severe debt. It will be expected that they will soon suffer storm damage…’

“The goats in this example move from one clan to another… And what happens then? If the object is a gift, it keeps moving, which in this case means that the man who received the goats throws a big party and everyone gets fed. The goats needn’t be given back, but they surely can’t be set aside to produce milk or more goats. And a new note has been added: the feeling that if a gift is not treated as such, if one form of property is converted into another, something horrible will happen. In folk tales the person who tries to hold on to a gift usually dies; in this anecdote the risk is ‘storm damage.’ What happens in fact to most tribal groups is worse than storm damage. Where someone manages to commercialize a tribe’s gift relationships the social fabric of the group is invariably destroyed.”[8]

Notice that the notion of "capital" is the existential and economic equivalent of "substance" that really is the subject that must be relational as gift. Notice how this speaks of the Christian anthropology at the basis of a true and healthy economic: that no one can keep anything for self. Private property is really the derivation of the achievement of self possession and self-identity, which results from the subduing of the earth - and which in reality is the self. Just as the self musts be given away, "capital" must always be available to the other as "labor." John Paul II remarked: "Isolating these means [of production] as a separate property in order to set it up in the form of 'capital' in opposition to 'labor' - and even to practice exploitation of labor - is contrary to the very nature of these means and their possession. They cannot be possessed against labor, they cannot even be possessed for possession's sake, because the only legitimate title to their possession -whether in the form of private ownership or in the form of public or collective ownership - is that they shoulde serve labor, and thus, by serving labor, that they should make possible the achievement of the first principle of this order, namely, the universal destination of goods and the right to common use of them" (Labor Exercens 14).

[1] J. Ratzinger, “Introduction to Christianity,” Ignatius (1990) 99.
[2] J. Ratzinger, “Journey Towards Easter” Crossroad (1987) 88-90; “Behold the Pierced One,” Ignatius (1986) 37-42; 92.
[3] J. Ratzinger, “The Notion of Person in Theology,” Communio 17 (Fall 1990) 444-445.
[4] J. Ratzinger, “Salvation and History” in “Section 2: Faith and History” in Principles of Catholic Theology” Ignatius (1987) 185.
[5] Ibid 185.
[6] Hegel, “Phenomenology of Spirit,” Preface.
[7] Nathan Rotenstreich, “From Substance to Subject,” Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague (1974) 2.
[8] Lewis Hyde, “The Gift,” Vintage Books (1983) 4-5.

Lepanto of the Third Millennium

At the first Lepanto (1571), the intervention of the Virgin was considered the principal cause of the victory of the Christian forces against the Islamic attack against the then Christian culture of the West known as Christendom. In the most summary fashion, we can say that the actual surviving model of Church and State after the first millennium, pace the doctrine of Pope Gelasius (492) who taught that Church and State are two distinct societies, was one single political-religious society with miter and crown, the Res Publica Christiana. What was saved at Lepanto was Christian culture instantiated in this single religio-political society. As a result one could say that the war and the victory were extrinsic since the Christian West was suffering a progressive anemia in both its spiritual and secular expression, and what was saved was being devoured from within. There was a progressive split of faith from life that has deposited us in a secularism in which God is absent. This, unhealed, was what was saved in the first Lepanto.

A Second Lepanto

At this beginning of the third millennium, a second Lepanto challenges us to establish a world culture that will be based on the truth and dignity of the human person. This can have no other source than God Himself who took our human nature, assuming it in to His Divine Person as His own and lived out His relation to the Father by obeying to death with His human will. This world culture – crafted on the human nature of Christ – will have the double dynamic of solidarity and subsidiarity whereby it will be universal without being homogenized. It will conform to the Christological anthropology described in Gaudium et spes #24 that “man, the only earthly being that God has loved for itself, finds himself by the sincere gift of himself.” The solidarity of self-gift derives from and returns to enhance the subsidiarity of the subsistent and autonomous subject.

The Kingdom of God

The truth and dignity of the human person is Christ Himself. As God-man, Jesus is both Jesus of Nazareth and Jesus the Christ. He is the revelation both of who God is and who man is. “In reality 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” (Gaudium et spes #22).

Christ is both in time and out of time. He is both now and at the end of the world. The fullness of His presence will not only be at the end of time, but took place 2000 years ago, and is happening at this moment. Ratzinger clarifies the meaning of “parousia” by referring to its translation as “Advent:” “‘Advent does not… mean ‘expectation,’ as some may think. It is a translation of the Greek word parousia which means ‘presence’ or, more accurately, ‘arrival,’ i.e., the beginning of a presence. In antiquity the word was a technical term for the presence of a king or ruler and also of the god being worshipped, who bestows his parousia on his devotees for a time. ‘Advent,’ then, means a presence begun, the presence being that of God.

“Advent reminds us, therefore, of two things: first, that God’s presence in the world has already begun, that he is present though in a hidden manner; second, that his presence has only begun and is not yet full and complete, that it is in a state of development, of becoming and progressing toward its full form. His presence has already begun, and we, the faithful, are the ones through whom he wishes to be present in the world.”[1]

This “presence” of God in history and space is Jesus Christ, and it is the meaning of the Kingdom of God. John Paul II, in Redemptoris Missio #18 says: “The kingdom of God is not a concept, a doctrine, or a program subject to free interpretation. It is before all else a person with the face and name of Jesus of Nazareth, the image of the invisible God.”

Notice the implications of the above. If the Kingdom of God is a Person who is both the transcendent creating, eternal God as well as this man Jesus of Nazareth who looks me in the eye, shakes my hand, introduces me to His mother and father and shows me where he works, eats and sleeps, then the Kingdom of God is present here in this world whenever and wherever He is.

The Mission of Opus Dei: To Instantiate the Kingdom of God in Time and Space

Add to this the locution that Josemaria Escriva received on August 7, 1931 and solidified two months later in October of the same year. He heard: "a voice, as always, perfect, clear: et ego, si exaltatus fuero a terra, omnia traham ad meipsum! (Jn. 12, 32). And the precise concept: it is not in the sense in which Scripture says it that I say it to you. I say it to you in the sense that you place me at the summit of all human activities; that in all the places of the word, there may be Christians with a personal and most free dedication, that they be other Christs" (underline mine).The meaning is clear: if the Kingdom of God is the Person of Jesus of Nazareth (this historical figure who lived 2,000 years ago), who is Jesus the Christ (and therefore God, and therefore lives now), and if the entire thrust of the Christian revelation and sacramental system is the identification of each baptized, confirmed and communicated person such that he/she becomes Christ Himself by the becoming capable of making the total gift of self, then wherever one of these persons is, Christ is, and the Kingdom is.

Now, add to this, that the human person who actually did this was the Blessed Virgin Mary who - full of Grace (God's love affirming her and making her capable of making the gift saying "Yes" - "Fiat" - is inviting us through the Church and today's feast of the "Holy Rosary" and the historical precedent of the First Lepanto to pray with her such that we can do what she did: engender the God-man in us by making a like gift of ourselves.

Add further, that tomorrow, October 8th, is the 7th anniversary of the consecration of the third millennium to the heart of Mary by John Paul II which echoes that other consecration made on March 25, 1984 which presaged - and many believe, caused - the collapse of Communism in 1989. Notice that in the year 2,000, John Paul II had the original statue of the Virgin of Fatima brought to Rome, exactly as he did in 1984. He had asked the entire Church to make the consecration of the world (including Russia) with him. On this occasion, he had about 1, 500 bishops in Rome in St. Peter’s Square celebrating their special Jubilee, who made the “Act of Entrustment” to Mary with him. He, and they, prayed to the Mother of Christ to protect the Church and the world at the beginning of the Third Millennium.

In retrospect, Opus Dei appears as the affirmation of Jesus of Nazareth. Every believer holds that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, i.e. that Jesus is God. What has been blurred in the praxis for centuries is the Jesus Who is God, is also Jesus Who is man; that He was, will be, and is at this moment in the world and Lord of history; and that wherever there is a baptised Christian (or not) who makes the gift of self, there is the Kingdom of God - but hidden.




[1] J. Ratzinger, Dogma and Preaching, Franciscan Herald Press (1985) 71-72.

October 2, 2007 Opus Dei and Benedict XVI

October 2, 2007

In the mind of BenedictXVI, the great crisis facing the third millennium is the challenge of discovering the metaphysical absolute in the historical contingent. His answer is the historical individual, Jesus of Nazareth being the divine Person, Jesus Christ.

A window that looks in on the workings of this answer is Benedict’s theology of the kingdom of God. John Paul II, with Ratzinger at his side, wrote in Redemptoris Missio #18: “Christ not only proclaimed the kingdom, but in him the kingdom itself became present and was fulfilled. This happened not only through his words and his deeds: ‘Above all…. The kingdom is made manifest in the very person of Christ, Son of God and Son of Man, who came “to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mk. 10, 45). The kingdom of God is not a concept, a doctrine, or a program subject to free interpretation, but it is before all else a person with the face and name of Jesus of Nazareth, the image of the invisible God.”

In his new “Jesus of Nazareth” [note that the book is not entitled “Jesus Christ” as divine transcendent Absolute but as the contingent historical individual “Jesus of Nazareth”], Benedict insists that “When Jesus speaks of the Kingdom of God, he is quite simply proclaiming God, and proclaiming him to be the living God, who is able to act concretely in the world and in history and is even now so acting. He is telling us: ‘God exists’ and “God is really God,’ which means that he holds in his hands the threads of the world. In this sense, Jesus’ message is very simply and thoroughly God-centered. The new and totally specific thing about his message is that he is telling us: God is acting now – this is the hour when God is showing himself in history as its Lord, as the living God, in a way that goes beyond anything seen before. ‘Kingdom of God’ is therefore an inadequate translation. It would be better to speak of God’s being-Lord, of his lordship.”

The logic is inexorable. If the Person of Jesus of Nazareth is the Kingdom of God, and He is God Himself as “Son” of the Father to Whom He is uniquely able to say “Abba,” and yet, at the same time, He is this individual man (not human person) Jesus of Nazareth as an individual cipher in time and place, and if He has given authorization to His disciples – human historical persons in time and space - also to say “Abba” because of their ontological identification with Him through the Baptism and Eucharist, then wherever they are, Jesus the Son of the living God is, and there is the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God is the Person of Christ, and wherever there is “another Christ.”

This is the verbal founding of Opus Dei. St. Josemaria Escriva recalls August 7, 1931: “At that moment of elevating the Sacred Host, without losing paper recollection, without being distracted… there came to my mind, with extraordinary force and clarity, the phrase of Scripture ‘et si exaltatus fuero a terra, omnia traham ad me ipsum’ [And I, if I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all things to myself] (Jn. 12, 32). Ordinarily, in the face of the supernatural, I am afraid. Afterward comes the ne timeas [do not be afraid], it is I. And I understood that it would be the men and women of God who would lift the Cross with the doctrines of Christ over the pinnacle of all human activity. And I saw our Lord triumph, drawing to himself all things.”

John Coverdale recounts: “Reflecting years later on this experience, Escriva said that he understood our Lord to be saying those words to him ‘not in the sense in which the Scripture says them. I say it to you in the sense that you are to raise me up in all human activities, in the sense that all over the world there should be Christians with a personal and very free dedication, who will be other Christs.’”

One month later “on October 16, 1931, he experienced an even more intense and prolonged sense of being a son of God. Once again, this period of sublime prayer (which he later described as the most elevated prayer God ever gave him) occurred not in church but on the street.” He was in a street car. “Suddenly, in the midst of that bitterness that was so great, these words: “you are my son, you are Christ. And I only knew how to repeat: Abba, Pater! Abba, Pater! Abba!, Abba!, Abba! Now I see it with a new light, as a new discovery: as one sees, when the years pass, the hand of the Lord, of the divine Wisdom, of the All Powerful One. Lord, you have made me understand that to have the Cross is to find happiness, joy. And the reason – I see it with more clarity than ever – is this: to have the Cross is to be identified with Christ, it is to be Christ and, therefore, to be a son of God.”

Keep in mind the studied observation of Joachim Jeremias: “When we turn to Jesus’ preaching, the answer must be: Yes, here there is something quite new, absolutely new – the word abba. From the prayer in Gethsemane, Mark 14, 36, we learn that Jesus addressed God with this word, and this point is confirmed not only by Rom. 8, 15 and Gal. 4, 6, but also by the striking oscillation of the forms for the vocative ‘O father’ in the Greek text of the gospels, an oscillation which is to be explained only through the fact that the Aramaic term abba lies behind all such passages. With the help of my assistants I have examined the prayer literature of ancient Judaism – a large, rich literature, all too little explored. The result of this examination was that in no place in this immense literature is this invocation of God as abba to be found. How is this to be explained? The church fathers Chrysostom, Theodore of Mopsuestia, and Theodoret of Cyrus who originated from Antioch (where the populace spoke the West Syrian dialect of Aramaic) and who probably had Aramaic-speaking nurses, testify unanimously that abba was the address of the small child to his father. And the Talmud confirms this when it says: ‘When a child experiences the taste of wheat [i.e. when it is weaned], it learns to say abba and imam [‘dear father’ and ‘dear mother’].” Abba and imam are thus originally the first sounds which the child stammers. In Jesus’ days they were no longer restricted to children’s talk; they were also used by grown-up sons and daughters to address their parents. Yet their humble origin was not forgotten. Abba was an everyday word, a homely family-word. No Jew would have dared to address God in this manner. Jesus did it always, in all his prayers which are handed down to us, with one single exception, the cry from the cross: ‘

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ (Mark 15, 34; Matt. 27, 46); here the term of address for God was prescribed by the fact that Jesus was quoting Ps. 22, 1. Jesus thus spoke with God as a child speaks with his father, simply, intimately, securely. But his invocation of God as abba is not to be understood merely psychologically, as a step toward growing apprehension of God. Rather we learn from Matt. 11, 27 that Jesus himself viewed this form of address for God as the heart of that revelation which had been granted him by the Father. IN this term abba the ultimate mystery of his mission and his authority is expressed. He, to whom the Father had granted full knowledge of God, has the messianic prerogative of addressing him with the familiar address of a son. This term abba is an ipsissima vox of Jesus and contains in nuce his message and his claim to have been sent from the Father.”

That St. Josemaria Escriva was overcome in a profusion of spilling it forth on the street was the confirmation of what he saw on October 2, 1928 and heard on August 7 and October 16, 1931: that he was, son of God and another Christ and, on the trolley and in the street, the instantiation of the Kingdom of God insofar as he was “Christ Passing By.”

Notice in the founding of Opus Dei the this-worldly intensification of the Kingdom of God in history here and now. Historically, there has not been a lack of affirmation concerning the supernatural character of the Kingdom of God. But what has been lacking is that this supernatural Kingdom will come not only in parousia as an eschatological end term at the end of the completion of history, but must take place now. The goal is not to take place as an objective structure or “thing” as a politicized “Christendom,” but as the instantiation of a Person, the Person of Jesus of Nazareth who is the Son of the living God into Whom each one of us is grafted as branch to vine. The Kingdom becomes a reality with each person staying in his/her place in the world and converting again and again into self gift in the exercise of work and family life, and thus become “another Christ.” This is the apostolic burden of Opus Dei and its secular “character.” And this is the burden of the first volume of Ratzinger-Benedict’s “Jesus of Nazareth.”

The Drama of Third Millennial Theology (Reworked)

Theology Today and Benedict XVI: Overcoming the Dualism Between Faith and Life.

Preface

His initial unrest: When Joseph Ratzinger began his intellectual career in the fall of 1953 – and now throughout his entire life – there was one overriding concern to which he wanted to contribute something: the relation of salvation-history to metaphysics. He found that Christian faith “directs man not simply to the Eternal but to the God who acts in time and history. Here questions of quite diverse character and of different orders arose. How can that which has taken place historically become present? How can the unique and unrepeatable have a universal significance? But then, on the other hand: has not the ‘Hellenization’ of Christianity, which attempted to overcome the scandal of the particular by a blending of faith and metaphysics, led to a development in a false direction? Has it not created a static style of thought which cannot do justice to the dynamism of the biblical style?

“These questions had a strong influence on me, and I wanted to make a contribution toward answering them” [underline mine] (J. Ratzinger "The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure," Franciscan Herald Press [1989] xi).

His response: “All Christian theology…must be first and foremost a theology of Resurrection. It must be a theology of Resurrection before it is a theology of the justification of the sinner; it must be a theology of Resurrection before it is a theology of the metaphysical Sonship of God. It can be a theology of the Cross but only as and within the framework of a theology of Resurrection. Its first and primordial statement is the good tidings that the power of death, the one constant of history, has, in a single instance, been broken by the power of God and that history has thus been imbued with an entirely new hope. In other words, the core of the gospel consists in the good tidings of the Resurrection and, consequently, in the good tidings of God’s action, which precedes all human doing…

“(I)f it is true that… as faith in an actio Dei is antecedent to all other declarations of faith, then the primacy of history over metaphysics, over all theologies of being and existence, becomes immediately obvious. It thus becomes obvious also that the concept of God is removed from the realm of a mere οΰσία. I believe 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 still far from being accomplished. Decisive for the Greek concept of God was the belief in God as a pure and changeless being of whom, consequently, no action could be predicated; his utter changelessness meant that he was completely self-contained and referred wholly to himself without any relationship to what was changeable. For the biblical God, on the other hand, it is precisely relationship and action that are the essential marks; creation and revelation are the two basic statements about him, and when revelation is fulfilled in the Resurrection, it is thus confirmed once again that he is not just one who is timeless but also one who is above time, whose existence is known to us only through his action.

“The prae [the "priority"] of God’s action: this means not just the preeminence of history over metaphysics but also the rejection of a purely existential version of the gospel message – quite simply because [on that existential reading] the gospel message [would] mean the primacy of the ‘in itself’ over the ‘for me’ … To seek another independent reality behind it [the text of the gospel] would be foolish objectivism. God acted: this was said before anything was said about man, about his sin, about his search for a gracious God.
“Thus the prae of God’s action means, ultimately that actio is antecedent to Verbum, reality to the tidings of it. In other words, the level of reality of the revelation-event is deeper than that of the proclamation-event, which seeks to interpret God’s action in human language. Precisely this is the origin of the sacramental principle, the reason why the word of God, which is also action, must be received by man in words and signs” ( J. Ratzinger, “Principles of Catholic Theology,” Ignatius [1987] 184-186).

Ratzinger says this most simply in his autobiography concerning his habilitation thesis: “revelation is always a concept denoting an act. The word refers to the act in which God shows himself, not to the objectified result of this act. And because this is so, the receiving subject is always also a part of the concept of ‘revelation.’ Where there is no one to receive ‘revelation’,’ no re-vel-ation has occurred, because no veil has been removed. By definition, revelation requires a someone who apprehends it….(R)evelation precedes Scripture and becomes deposited in Scripture but is not simply identical with it. This is turn means that revelation is always something greater than what is merely written down. And this again means that there can be no such thing as pure sola scriptura (‘by Scripture alone’), because an essential element of Scripture is the Church as understanding subject, and with this the fundamental sense of tradition is already given" (J. Ratzinger "Milestones..." Ignatius [1997] 108-109).

The above needs explanation. The Resurrection is the act of revelation. It encloses the self-gift of obedience to death on the Cross that brings it about. Self-gift especially to death where it is total and complete is co-extensive with life. Eternal Life. Christ rises physically with His body, soul, human will and intellect, because He, as divine “I” (Logos), has willed obedience to physical death with His human will, and so communicated the Trinitarian relation of the “I” to His entire humanity. This act of resurrection is the act of revelation of the absolute that is the “I” of the divine Person in the contingency of history. The act of faith of the believer is a mimic of the act of obedience to death by the God-man.

The Resurrection reveals to us what our ontological self has been yearning for and tending toward always and everywhere. When confronted with the Resurrection, our inner conscience, “if it is not turned in on itself, hears its echo from within.” The believer sees: “That’s it! That is what my nature points to and seeks.” The Resurrection reveals us to ourselves. It reveals the the deepest yearning in us that is us: the longing to live forever and to love. I recall a bumper sticker that read: "If love isn't forever, what is forever for?" It reveals the ontological profile of the human person as the meaning of history: the absolute in the relative singular individual.

Being, then, means relation, as going out of self, and finding self in the going out. A whole new metaphysic comes into view. Its marquis announcement is: “man, the only earthly being God has willed for itself, finds itself by the sincere gift of self” (Gaudium et Spes #24). History is not just a succession of facts. It is a metaphysic of personhood as a work in progress. Ratzinger is doing here what he advertised in “Introduction to Christianity:” “Therein lies concealed a revolution in man’s view of the world: the undivided sway of thinking in terms of substance is ended; relation is discovered as an equally valid primordial mode of reality. It becomes possible to surmount what we call today ‘objectifying thought;’ a new plane of being comes into view. It is probably true to say that t he tasks imposed on philosophy as a result of these facts is far from being complete – so much does modern thought depend on the possibilities thus disclosed.”

The ontological “shape” of substance now comes into view. In the realism of the existential profile disclosed by phenomenology, instead of being the static in-itselfness that is the underlying support - substrate - of the accidents (hupokeimenon), it is now rather the existential “I” that has become itself by the relational sincere gift of self. The paradigmatic reality of substance-now-become-subject is the divine Person as “act of begetting, of giving oneself, of streaming forth. It is identical with the act of giving. Only as this act is it person, and therefore it is not the giver but the act of giving, ‘wave’ not ‘corpuscle’… In this idea of relativity in word and love, independent of the concept of substance and not to be classified among the ‘accidents,’ Christian thought discovered the kernel of the concept of person, which describes something other and infinitely more than the mere idea of the ‘individual.’”

In a word, what has until now in traditional metaphysics been taken to be the Greek “substance,” is taken now to be the ontological “I” that is preceded by the love that is the revelation of the Resurrection, and that is perfected by the going out of self that is the response to that revelation. It is in this act that the inchoate “I” comes into the ontological fullness of Being by its self-transcendence as gift.

Ratzinger ties together Resurrection and metaphysics (i.e. Faith and Reason, showing how one cannot be without the other): Resurrection is the action (Revelation) of the Divine "I" that makes the gift of self to the receiving "I" of the believer who is activated by the divine Love and affirmatrion, and then, self-activating as returned self-gift that is "faith." Cor ad cor loquitur. It is an ontological "I AM" speaking to an ontological "I am." Greek "substance" is an abstraction of this ontological dialogue of subjectivities. Ratzinger remarked: “All salvation history is gathered here, as it were, in the one point of this ultimate Passover that thus includes and interprets salvation history, just as it is itself interpreted and illumined by salvation history. For it is evident now that this whole history is likewise an exodus history: a history that begins with the call to Abraham to go out from his country – and this attains its deepest significance in the Passover of Jesus Christ: in the agape eis telos [“loved to the end”], in the radical love that became a total exodus from himself, a going-out-from-himself toward the other even to the radical delivery of himself to death so that it can be explained in the words: ‘I am going away and shall return’ (Jn. 14, 28) – by going, I come. The ‘living opening through the curtain,’ as the epistle to the Hebrews explains the Lord’s going-away on the Cross (Heb. 10, 20), reveals itself in this way as the true exodus that is meant by all the exoduses of history. Thus we see how the theology of Resurrection gathers all salvation history within itself and concentrates it on its existence-oriented meaning so that, in a very literal sense, it becomes a theology of existence, a theology of ex-sistere, of that exodus by which the human indivudal goes out from himself and through which alone he can find himself. In this movement of ex-sistere, faith and love are ultimately united – the deepest significance of each is that Exi, that call to transcend and sacrifice the I that is the basic law of the history of God’s covenant with man and, ipso facto, the truly basic law of all human existence.”

Ratzinger concludes his piece on “Faith and History:” “God’s action is, precisely in the objectivity of its ‘in-itself-ness,’ not a hopeless objectivity, but the true formula of human existence, which has its ‘in-itself-ness’ outside itself and can find its true center only in ex-sistere, in going-out-from itself. It is also no empty past but that ‘perfect tense’ that is therefore man’s true ‘present tense’ because it is always antecedent to it, always at the same time its promise and its future. Thus is implies, of necessity, that ‘is’ that faith soon formulated explicitly: Jesus is Christ, God is man. Hence man’s future means being one with God and so being one with mankind, which will be a single, final man in the manifold unity that the whole greatness of the Easter reality. God ‘is’ man…”

This act precedes all our actions since it is the full response to the “ontological tendency” that is our inchoate personhood as images of the divine Persons. We yearn for the action of this revelation (the gift of self to death on the Cross which becomes Resurrection), which becomes our very selves resurrected when we make the response of self-gift to it. The act of obedience that is called “faith” to the revelation that is Resurrection, tends toward martyrdom as it denouement. In that act, the believer experiences becoming “another Christ.” This experience of the self as gift to death is the Christian experience, which is the experience of the Absolute in time. This is the Ratzinger contribution. And it is enormous. It discloses what the human mind has constantly been searching for and which has continually ended in aporias that are strings of dualism.

In a word, one finds Being as absolute in the historical act of self-gift in the here and now. It demands this new metaphysic, the metaphysic of relation which has already been formulated in Christological anthropology of Gaudium Spes #24: "Man… finds self… only in the sincere gift of self.” Man finds himself to be another Christ only by the overcoming of the self, taking possession of the self and governing the self to serve to death.

Corpus:

Background: The Ancient Regime ended in the 20th century – probably in the spring of 1968. Two world wars preceded by Enlightenment rationalism provoking antagonistic dualisms of supernatural/natural, grace/nature, faith/reason, Church/state, priest/layman, and now even male/female - along with the radical secularisms of militant Marxism and its equally noxious counterpart “the secular city”- have left us with the conundrum that presents, in the words of Josef Ratzinger, the following challenge: “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 reconciled with the great intuitions 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, relegate it to the library as historically unsustainable, or we must reject modernity.”

Benedict XVI has his heroes: “Augustine, as you know, was a man who, on the one hand, had studied in great depth the great philosophies, the profane literature of the ancient world.
“On the one hand, he was also very critical of the pagan authors, even with regard to Plato, to Virgil, those great authors whom he loved so much.
“He criticized them, and with a penetrating sense, purified them.
“This was his way of using the great pre-Christian culture: purify it, heal it, and in this way, also, healing it, he gave true greatness to this culture. Because in this way, it entered into the fact of the incarnation, no? And became part of the Word’s incarnation.
“But only by means of the difficult process of purification, of transformation, of conversion.
“I would say the word ‘conversion’ is the key word, one of the key words, of St. Augustine, and our culture also has a need for conversion. Without conversion one does not arrive at the Lord. This is true of the individual, and this is true of the culture as well…”

The Root


At root, the challenge is of a metaphysical nature, determined by Christology which, in turn, controls anthropology. The question is the resolution of the conundrum of whether reality is ultimate “being” as static(in-self) or kinetic (for-other). Fergus Kerr, referring to Ratzinger’s “Introduction to Christianity,” remarks: “What Ratzinger is doing… without saying so, is denying that we have to accept the idea that it takes Greek metaphysics to enable us to speak of God as ‘being.’” This has been the standing intellectual question that surfaced in Greek philosophical literature in the 6th century in the personages of Parmenides and Heraclitus. It is the grounding and hounding question of Josef Ratzinger in his theological forays since the beginning of his life as a scholar. He remarked in the foreword to the American edition of “The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure:”

“When I began the preparatory work for this study in the fall of 1953, one of the questions which stood in the foreground of concern within the German-speaking, Catholic theological circles was the question of the relation of salvation–history to metaphysics. This was a problem which arose above all from contacts with Protestant theology which, since the time of Luther, has tended to see in metaphysical thought a departure from the specific claim of the Christian faith which directs man not simply to the Eternal but to the God who acts in time and history. Here questions of quite diverse character and of different orders arose. How can that which has taken place historically become present? How can the unique and unrepeatable have a universal significance? But then, on the other hand: Has not the ‘Hellenization’ of Christianity, which attempted to overcome the scandal of the particular by a blending of faith and metaphysics, led to a development in a false direction? Has it not created a static style of thought which cannot do justice to the dynamism of the biblical style?”

“These questions had a strong influence on me, and I wanted to make a contribution toward answering them. In the light of the accepted tradition of German theology, it was self-evident to me that this could not be done in an a priori way. Rather, it could take place only in dialogue with that very theological tradition which was being called into question. Only on the basis of this type of study could any systematic formulation take place. I have attempted to give a tentative sketch of such a formulation in my book Introduction to Christianity which appeared in 1968. Since I had devoted my first study to Augustine and thus had become somewhat familiar with the world of the Fathers, it seemed natural now to approach the Middle Ages.”

Ratzinger concludes: “The results were surprising enough. It became apparent… that the discussion which Bonaventure understood with Joachim of Fiore… led to a change in the concept of eschatology which remains operative even today.” By that is meant that Christ is not only the fulfillment of history at the end of the world, but is situated as the meaning and center of history now. The star that has illuminated the intellectual journey of Joseph Ratzinger has led him to a double experience and two tiered knowledge of Jesus Christ as center of history now and final meaning of history at the end of time. A re-creation has already taken place that is hidden and will become apparent at the end. Ratzinger says: “Here it is given a new tone which significantly comes entirely from Bonaventure’s own world of thought and can apparently be traced to no outside influence. ‘That is why the coming of the Son of God marks the fullness of time: not because time ends with His coming, but because the hidden prophecies of all ages have been fulfilled. Had Christ come at the beginning of time, He would have come too soon; and had His coming been delayed until the very end, He would have come too late. It belonged to Him as the true Savior to provide a time of healing right between the time of sickness and the time of judgment; as the true Mediator, to come midway, some of His elect preceding and others following Him.’ Almost imperceptibly something new is created here out of the old Scholastic concepts that had served to clarify the plenitudo temporum. This is found in the statement that the ‘fullness of time’ is simultaneously the ‘center of time.’ Even the concept of Mediator, which in itself has an entirely different meaning, is employed here to provide a basis for this sense of mediating salvation, but in the sense of standing in the center of time.”

On the same point, Ratzinger again: “Bonaventure does not accept the notion of an age of the Holy Spirit which destroyed the central position of Christ in the Joachimite [Joachim of Flora] view. Certainly the two final ordines are orders of the Spirit; and the Spirit certainly achieves a particular power in the final age; but this age, as such, is an age of Christ. It remains the septima aetas of the New Testament Christ-time which endures up to the end… If it is justified to say that for Joachim [of Flora], Christ is merely one point of division among others, it is no less justified to say that for Bonaventure, Christ is the ‘axis of world history,’ the center of time.”

Take note that this is precisely the thesis that is at work in the work-in-progress, “Jesus of Nazareth.” The individual facticity of the historical individual, Jesus of Nazareth, who lived, died and rose two thousand years ago is the Absolute, Eternal Deity of the divine Person Who is Jesus Christ, the Son of God. This divine Person is historically present in the Eucharist and in each of the baptized who by conversion has become “alter Christus.” This conversion of the human person into “another Christ” is the meaning of the “Kingdom of God” as “at hand” (Mk. 1, 15), “already come upon you” (Mt. 12, 28), “within you” (Lk. 17, 21) and to be sought “here” or “there.” The living God who is Lord of the world is present in the world at this moment, not merely at the end moment.

The great crisis that Benedict sees is the absence of God in the present world because there is the absence of the experience of God. God is treated at best as a conclusion to a thought process, which in a positivistic age can be dismissed with ease. In the recent book, “Jesus of Nazareth,” he says: “We can put it even more simply: When Jesus speaks of the Kingdom of God, he is quite simply proclaiming God, and proclaiming him to be the living God, who is able to act concretely in the world and in history and is even now so acting. He is telling us: ‘God exists’ and ‘God is really God,’ which means that he holds in his hands the threads of the world. In this sense, Jesus’ message is very simple and thoroughly God-centered. The new and totally specific thing about his message is that he is telling us: God is acting now – this is the hour when God is showing himself in history as its Lord, as the living God, in a way that goes beyond anything seen before. ‘Kingdom of God’ is therefore an inadequate translation. It would be better to speak of God’s being-Lord, of his lordship.”

This same concern for the presence of God as “reason” in the present confrontation of Islam and Christianity is evidenced in Benedict’s Regensburg speech. Revelation is “reasonable:” “Modifying the first verse of the Book of Genesis, John began the prologue of his Gospel with the words: ‘In the beginning was the 'logos.’” Benedict went on to say: “God acts with logos. Logos means both reason and word -- a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason. John thus spoke the final word on the biblical concept of God, and in this word all the often toilsome and tortuous threads of biblical faith find their culmination and synthesis. In the beginning was the logos, and the logos is God, says the Evangelist. The encounter between the biblical message and Greek thought did not happen by chance.” He concluded the point: “Within the Old Testament, the process which started at the burning bush came to new maturity at the time of the Exile [@ Babylon in the presence of Greek philosophy], when the God of Israel, an Israel now deprived of its land and worship, was proclaimed as the God of heaven and earth and described in a simple formula which echoes the words uttered at the burning bush: “I Am.” This “I Am” is not cosmic facticity as an individual substance of Greek, but the triple relationality of the divine Person forming the One Communio that is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. God reveals “Himself” to be the God of relation to Israel, not a self-sufficient in-itselfness.

The question that burns deep within Josef Ratzinger-Benedict XVI is the possibility of formulating a metaphysic that can embrace both Absolute Truth and Absolute Good within the historical contingent individual. In a word, a metaphysic that can account for the cosmically experiential event of Jesus of Nazareth as Jesus the Christ, Son of the living God.

Confronting the fact that traditionally there has not been such a metaphysic, the question arises: can there be one? Benedict’s response is to send us into the tension of “I and the Father are one” (Jn. 10, 30) and “The Father is greater than I” (Jn. 14, 28) that can only mean that the divine Person cannot be what has been understood by Greek philosophical “substance” as “standing-in-self” but pure relation. Hence, each divine Person must be the unique and irreducible act of relating as engendering, glorifying and mutual self-giving, and as such, a subsistent Subject. There are three Subjects that are so intrinsically related that None can be without the Other, thus forming the one Communio that is God Who proclaims: “I AM.”

The Divine Person Who is the Son-Logos has assumed the concrete humanity Jesus of Nazareth. Ratzinger preached to John Paul II: “The Council of Constantinople has analysed 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 tow, 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 tint he Gospel of John: ‘I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of the Father who sent me’ (Jn. 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. With this exegesis of John 6, 38, the Council proves the unity of the subject: in Jesus there are not two ‘I,’ but only one. The Logos speaks of the will and human thought of Jesus using the ‘I;’ this has become his ‘I,’ has been assumed into his ‘I,’ because the human will has become fully one with the will of the Logos, and with it has be come pure assent to the will of the Father.”

Since the human will is the will of the divine “I” of the Logos Who is pure relation to the Father, the Logos lives out His very “To Be” as obedience to the Father to physical death. The divine “I” of the Logos, then, experiences humanly –through the exercise of His human will – what it means to be Son as man. It is the divine “I” that does the human exercising. And since there is a human intelligence accompanying the will and the conscious component of the human experience of the divine Person, the divine Person of the Logos Who is Son of the Father, utters “Abba.”

This Aramaic word, “Abba,” reveals the relationality of the Being of the Son as pure relation to the Father. It is an utterance that is unique in all of Jewish Old Testament literature, even Jewish prayer. Joachim Jeremias reported: “With the help of my assistants I have examined the prayer literature of ancient Judaism – a large, rich literature, all too little explored. The result of this examination was that in no place in this immense literature is this invocation of God as abba to be found. How is this to be explained? The church fathers Chrysostom, Theodore of Mopsuestia, and Theodoret of Cyrus who originate from Antioch (where the populace spoke the West Syrian dialect of Aramaic) and who probably had Aramaic-speaking nurses, testify unanimously that abba was the address of the small child to his father. And the Talmud confirms this when it says: ‘When a child experiences the taste of wheat [i.e. when it is weaned], it learns to say abba and imam [‘dear father’ and ‘dear mother’]. Abba and imam are thus originally the first sounds which the child stammers….”

The large thesis of Joachim Jeremias is contained in the text preceding the immediately above: “When we turn to Jesus’ preaching the answer must be: Yes, here there is something quite new, absolutely new – the word abba. From the prayer in Gethsemane, Mark 14, 36, we learn that Jesus addressed God with this word, and this point is confirmed not only by Rom. 8, 15 and Gal. 4, 6, but also by the striking oscillation of the forms for the vocative ‘O father’ in the Greek text of the gospels, an oscillation which is to be explained only through the fact that the Aramaic term abba les behind all such passages.”

The crucial point is that this human utterance, Abba, discloses the όμοοϋσιος (homoousios) of the “I” of the Logos with the Father and with us. Jesus Christ as both God and man is the revelation of not only who God is, but also who man is. Gaudium et spes #22 says: “In reality it is only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of man truly becomes clear…. 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.” Hence, the act of self mastery which the divine Person exercises over His human will must be the prototype of self mastery that the human person must exercise of his will. And because of the sacramental insertion into the Person of Christ by baptism and confirmation, the human person is enabled (capax) to make the radical relation of self-gift that is faith and so become “another Christ.”


Revelation and Faith as Relational Acts

Ratzinger enlarges this thesis on the kind of being we have in the God-man. We are seeing here that the “is” of Jesus is not just a fact of being in-itself. “Facticity” is a judgment of the intellect abstracting from the level of sense experience. What we are working on here is not sense experience alone of an historical fact. Doubtless it is historical fact, but at the same time more than historical fact as the experience of the supra-historical Person of the Word.

Revelation: Ratzinger forthrightly distinguishes between Sacred Scripture and Revelation. He asserts that “revelation precedes Scripture and becomes deposited in Scripture but is not simply identical with it. This in turn means that revelation is always something greater than what is merely written down. And this again means that there can be no such thing as pure sola scriptura (‘by Scripture alone’), because an essential element of Scripture is the Church as understanding subject, and with this the fundamental sense of tradition is already given.” This “something greater” is the very Person of Christ as revelation of the Father. Revelation is a Person, not a word; or better, revelation is a Word (Logos) as Person.

Ratzinger recounts “About thirty years ago [in the 1950’s), when I was trying to write a study on the ways that revelation was understood in thirteenth-century theology, I stumbled upon the unexpected fact that in that period it had not occurred to any one to characterize the Bible as ‘revelation.’ Nor was the term ‘source’ applied to it. This is not to say that the Bible was held in less esteem then than it is today. Quite the contrary: the respect for it was much more unconditional, and it was clear that theology, by right, can and should be nothing other than the interpretation of Scripture. But their concept of the harmony between what is written and what is lived out was different from contemporary notions. Therefore the term ‘revelation’ was applied only, on the one hand, to that ineffable act which can never be adequately expressed in human words, in which God makes himself known to his creature, and, on the other hand, to that act of reception in which this gracious condescension [Zuwendung] of God dawns upon man and becomes revelation. Everything that can be grasped in words, and thus Scripture, too, is then testimony to that revelation but is not revelation itself. And only revelation itself is also a ‘source’ in the strict sense, the source by which Scripture is nourished. If it becomes disengaged from this living connection to God’s condescension within the ‘We’ of the faithful, then it is uprooted from the ground in which it lives and becomes merely ‘the letter,’ merely ‘the flesh.’”

The operative words in the above paragraph are “act” and “act.” The “act” of God’s gift of Himself in the Person of Christ must be responded to by the “act” of reception that is faith. In his autobiography, Ratzinger said: “’revelation is always a concept denoting an act. The word refers to the act in which God shows himself, not to the objectified result of this act [Sacred Scripture]. And because this is so, the receiving subject is always also a part of the concept of ‘revelation.’ Where there is no one to perceive ‘revelation,’ no re-vel-ation has occurred, because no veil has been removed. By definition, revelation requires a someone who apprehends it.”

Faith: Antecedent to the revelation/faith relationship as relational act to relational act, is the experiential condition of the human person as seeking after truth. Man is a pilgrim of the Absolute and cannot stop the interior quest to find truth and good. He cannot live without it. Man has an ontological tendency toward God. This was a question that had been shut down in the 15th and 16th centuries by Cardinal Cajetan(1468-1534) who, according to Cardinal Antonio Piolanti, “’separates’ the two orders, natural and supernatural, in a way that completely differentiates him from St. Thomas.” Henri de Lubac asserts that “It is in fact quite clear that in denying the created intellect any natural desire to see God – whereas St. Thomas said and repeated: Omnis intellectus naturaliter desiderat divinae substantiae visionem – Cajetan was in no sense, ‘clarifying’ or ‘developing’ Thomist teaching on the matter; far from ‘pushing it to its ultimate conclusion,’ or bringing it to its goal, as has been suggested in a praiseworthy attempt to achieve harmony, he was profoundly altering its whole meaning.”
Speaking on the topic of conscience and truth, Joseph Ratzinger introduced “the first so-called ontological level of the phenomenon conscience consist in the fact that something like an original memory of the good and true (both are identical) has been implanted in us, that there 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 godlike 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 the one whom it addressed, 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.”
This does not give us faith, however, but morality. Ratzinger then remarks: “The anamnesis [the “remembering” as ontological image of the divine Persons that is conscience] instilled in our being needs, one might say, assistance from without so that it can become aware of itself. But this ‘from without’ is not something set in opposition to anamnesis but ordered to it. It has maieutic function, imposes nothing foreign, but brings to fruition what is proper to anamnesis, namely, its interior openness to the truth.”


Such an experiences can be mimicked in the believer by the very nature of the act of faith as trust of another. The act of faith takes place on a second level beyond sense experience in the beholder or believer, a personal level that mimics the act of self-transcendence that is “revelation.” This act of the beholder, mimicking revelation, is called “faith.” Hence, we are seeing that the being of the Person of Christ is pure relation to the Father and, as incarnate, has assumed a human will and intellect into the dynamics of His Personal Being whereby He is able to utter an historical “Abba.”

What Ratzinger wants to affirm is “primacy of history over metaphysics, over all theologies of being and existence.” Better stated, he wants to achieve a revolution in the meaning of “being” that will come from the Person of Christ, and therefore the human person, in terms of history. He states that “It thus becomes obvious… that the concept of God is removed from the realm of ousia.” Aristotle wrote: “The term ‘substance’ [ousia] is spoken of, if not in more, still in four main senses: for the essence [to ti en einai] is thought to be the substance of an individual [ousia dokei einai ekastou], and the universal [to katholou], and the genus [to genos], and fourthly the underlying subject [to hupokeimenon].” Ken Schmitz remarks that “Among the Latins, the term substantia came to be used for all three of the above senses, although its very etymology seems to have drawn it towards the notion of ‘substrate.’ Philosophical Latin generally followed this rendering: and, as the more formal structure of Aristotelian metaphysics gave way from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, the term came more and more, without ever wholly losing its other meanings, to bear the passive meaning of: that which underlies the accidents of the composite as their support.”




Ratzinger underlines the importance of such a paradigm shift: “I believe it was here that the definitive boundary between the biblical and the Greek concepts 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 still far from being accomplished.”

[Note that Ratzinger is not separating theism or Christianity from metaphysics, but only from the hegemony of Greek metaphysics. Recall his remarks on the notion of person in the Trinity as relation. “Relation,” he says, “is here recognized as a third specific fundamental category between substance and accident, the two great categorical form of thought in Antiquity. Again we encounter the Christian newness of the personalistic idea in all its sharpness and clarity. The contribution offered by faith to human thought becomes especially clear and palpable here It was faith that gave birth to this idea of pure act, of pure relativity, which does not lie on the level of substance and does not touch or divide substance; and it was faith that thereby brought the personal phenomenon into view.” After suggesting the divine Persons as pure act of relation, he commented: “Therein lies concealed a revolution in man’s view of the world: the undivided sway of thinking in terms of substance is ended; relation is discovered as an equally valid primordial mode of reality. It becomes possible to surmount what we call today ‘objectifying thought;’ a new plane of being comes into view It is probably true to say that the task imposed on philosophy as a result of these facts is far from being completed – so much does modern thought depend on the possibilities thus disclosed, but for which it would be inconceivable.” ]

What is that task? To glimpse the self of the believer as the normative center of metaphysical experience and the meaning of being. It is precisely here that that he learned from Bonaventure following Augustine and Gregory of Nyssa that faith “is not a system of semi-knowledge, but an existential decision – it is life in terms of the future that God grants us, even beyond the frontier of death. This is the attitude and orientation that gives life its weights and measures, its ordinances, and its very freedom. Certainly a life lived by faith resembles more an expedition up a mountain than a quiet evening spent reading in front of the fire…” Again: “Let us repeat: at its core faith is not a system of knowledge, but trust. Christian faith is: ‘the discovery of a You, who supports me and, despite all the inadequacies and final frustration of human encounter, gives me a promise of indestructible love, which not only longs for, but grants, eternity. Christian faith lives not merely by giving objective meaning, but by the fact that his meaning knows me and loves me, so that I can entrust myself to it with the attitude of a child, who knows that all his problems are safe with the You who is his mother. And so, in the end, faith, trust, and love are one, and all the specific details embraced by faith are but concretizations of the all-supporting movement of the ‘I believe in you’ – of the discovery of God in the face of the man Jesus of Nazareth.’”

Ratzinger sees this experience of “being” as relation or self-translation in the very act of faith itself as anthropological act. He calls it “the fundamental act of Christian existence.” He says, “In the act of faith the essential structure of Christianity is expressed, its answer to the question how in the art of being human one can reach the goal. There are other answers. Not all religions are ‘faith.’ Buddhism in its classic form, for example, does not aim at this act of self-transcendence, of encounter with the totally other – with God, who addresses me and invites me to love. Characteristic of Buddhism is rather a kind of radical internalization: an act of climbing not out of oneself but into oneself, an act that is meant to lead to liberation from the yoke of individuality, from the burden of being a person, and to a return into the common identity of all being that, in comparison with our experience of existence, can be described as not-being, as nothing, in order to express its total otherness.” Note that if Christ is the revelation of what it means to be man, to be human, and if Christ is the gift of self – the supreme act of relation that is obedience to death - , then the experience of Christ will be a mimicking act of self-transcendence in the believer whereby he/she will experience being “another Christ” and become conscious of this identity. He/she will be able to say: “I live; no, not I, Christ lives in me” (Gal. 2, 20). Christian faith, then, will be “the art of being human,” as Ratzinger began his address on “The New Evangelization:” “To evangelize means: to show this path -- to teach the art of living. At the beginning of his public life Jesus says: I have come to evangelize the poor (Luke 4:18); this means: I have the response to your fundamental question; I will show you the path of life, the path toward happiness -- rather: I am that path” (underline mine).
Notice also that this is exactly the way Benedict began “Jesus of Nazareth:” The uniqueness of Moses as prophet was “neither all the miraculous deeds he is reported to have done nor his many works and sufferings along the say from the ‘house of bondage in Egypt’ through the desert to threshold of the Promised Land. The most important thing is that he spoke with God as with a friend.” He had a personal experience of God, even though he was permitted to see God only in the back, and not face to face. However, there was to come after him a prophet who would speak with God face to face, and this because He was the Son of the living God the Father. He is όμοοϋσιος, God from very God. And therefore, He knows the Father as no other could possibly know Him: “No one knows the Son except the Father; nor does anyone know the Father except the Son and him to whom the Son chooses to reveal him” (Mt. 11, 27).
This experiential character is now the meaning of revelation and faith. The totality of revelation is the very Person of Christ as the Son of the living God as total self-gift on the Cross; and faith is the act of the subject who has made a like self-gift, and therefore experiences in self what it means to experience being “another Christ” and becoming conscious of same.

From Substance to Subject


The terminus a quo of the paradigm shift in theology and philosophy is the Greek notion of substance. Insofar as it is an ontology that nullifies history as the locus of salvation, Ratzinger is impatient with it. Quotes……….
He delineates levels of experience… At the existential, he finds, rather than substance, subject. And if we add the metaphysical phenomenology of Wojtyla, we can speak of the subject “I” as the real meaning of substance….