Last Thanksgiving my brother Matt challenged my mother and I about the Pope's then recent comments in which he told a German journalist doing a book length interview with him that he thought that male prostitutes would be wise to use condoms. This comment was an aside, not a main topic of the interview. Characteristically, when the interview was published the secular press here focused on that one comment, ignored all the stuff about Jesus which to them is inside baseball of sole interest to Catholics, and went nuts over the perceived scandal of a pope recommending condom use.
Matt was interested in getting my mother's take on that the first night we were together. I was sitting there as he asked my mother a string of questions about it and she responded, while I kept attempting to interject a few comments.. I was exhausted (long drive, too many long hot months just suffered down in Florida) and was not in the fittest emotional state. They - unusually - were completely ignoring me, and didn't let me "have the conch" to say anything. I think Matt is tired of me talking about religion (even though it's not that common a topic between us, actually, but when it does come up I tend to hold forth) and just wanted to hear what my mother thought.
I normally would have taken that situation in stride, but under the stress I had a mild melt down, and got really annoyed. Conversation immediately ended, because I got upset. Matt profusely apologized, but in a deadpan way that stuck me in the gut.
I never got to say what I was thinking, and I think Matt already thought he knew what I would have said. I'm pretty sure that he didn't though, really.. I've been thinking quite a lot about it since, and want to have my say, now.
Here's what I think:
The basic problem is that the edifice of Roman Catholic doctrine is in many ways sorely stressed and compromised.
Whether fatally so, remains to be seen. To my mind the problems are significant. The Church's grace is that the stances of everyone else - to include that of scientific secularists - are all philosophically much worse. We must have ontological justification for defending the sacredness of the human person, and the Catholic Church still has by far the best guns in town on that score. So, my own money is all on the Church. We'll see how it all shakes out..
I should start by immediately clarifying that I do not call myself a "Roman" Catholic anymore. Since my conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy (a conversion which I do not completely abjure) I have fully rejected that title, which is one born of the very flawed (to my mind) Gregorian Reform and utterly misguided Protestant Reformation.
I now consider myself simply Catholic, an adherent of the Latin Rite who critically accepts the authority of the pope. I neither renounce my own full freedom of conscience, nor my right to criticize the Catholic tradition or those in authority, but I embrace both that tradition and that authority freely and submit myself to it and them without substantial spiritual reservation. Still, I think that there are major problems with the current ecclesiology advanced by both of the Vatican Councils, and I believe that ultramontagne "papiolotry" has lead to significant distortions in Catholic practice and culture. Rome needs to make her peace with the Orthodox, and that peace must be one of utter fraternal concord, not in the abject surrender of either side to the other. I think the Orthodox have a compelling case that must be heard and in many ways accepted. Nonetheless, I also believe that the Petrine charism exists and subsists in the Roman see.
I'm sure that the dissonance and contradictions that I see, exist in very small part to humiliate me. I accept that now, and am grateful for them.
So, the tradition and those in authority under it are not beyond criticism, but the Church Universal is still my mother and her hierarchy are still - and I pray forever - my lords spiritual. The resolution of the Schism must come, and I pray soon, but it is of course beyond my powers (way way beyond my wisdom and paygrade) to resolve, and so I accept my own impotence and powerlessness in the conflict, and am resolved make my way as humbly I can.
That said, let me lay out the most significant problems with the Catholic position, as I see them:
First major point: Catholicism is in its essence a pre-modern belief system made in many ways practically - that is to say pastorally - obsolete by modernity.
[Aside: Interestingly though, to my febrile little mind at least, there are many powerfully salient and fecund assonances developing between post modern thought and Catholicism and her traditional scholasticism..]
The two main practical interrelated aspects of this obsolescence are in human sexuality and economics.
Traditional Catholic teaching on these issues - against most specifically contraception and usury - are now materially obsolete, in that both contraception and renting money at interest are imperatives to full and uninhibited participation in mainstream contemporary Western life.
It really is only this last century that sexual issues have become problematic for the Church, pastorally. Until the technological advances of the 20th Century (latex and hormonal treatments, as well as safe and effective abortion techniques) the Catholic teaching on sexual reproduction wasn't problematic, because people had no practical alternative. Contraceptive technology was crude and usually unavailable. Furthermore, following the teaching was not usually economically disadvantageous. Having more children meant having more help on the farm, and the mortality rate was high. The relative costs for raising children were much lower (there were no x-boxes, orthodontics, university educations to pay for).. So having many babies was not a big problem, indeed it was often a benefit.
It was the material change, the technological change, the change in the economic system that has created the dissonance.
Both contraception and usury are seen as fundamentally exploitative of the human person from a traditional Catholic perspective. They instrumentalize and objectivize the human being, and turn him into an utilitarian object in which the end or fruit of his work or sexuality is vacated, and alienated (to echo Marx) from himself.
The two things are also fundamentally linked - bourgeois capitalism demands controlled and limited sexual productivity. As stated, a large family is a boon in a agricultural society with short life spans and high maternal and childhood mortality rates. But to live a normal contemporary middle class life, one must limit family size, and the expectation that they do that through abstinence is in most cases impracticable. This obviously sets people up for revolt and failure in terms of the traditional teaching.
Borrowing and lending money at interest (as well as participating in the economic exploitation of others in a myriad of other ways) is also unavoidable. Catholics would have to behave like the Amish to be faithful to traditional teaching againsty usury.
All of which is merely to say that contrary to what many Catholics today think, capitalism is not Catholic. It - as Marx rightly saw - in many ways "tears asunder" traditional economic relationships like the family, and subordinates and even scorns all values except creation of wealth.
A truly Catholic economic system is one where economic activity is utterly focused on the good of the human person, and fundamentally characterized by personal relationships of reciprocal need and obligation. Which is to say in practice something much like the medieval feudal and guild system. It doesn't need to be necessarily monarchical, or even formally aristocratic (though hierarchy and aristocracy of one form or another are a normal feature of any complex human society) and certainly not communist in the sense of outlawing private ownership (that is what a monastic community does, and monasticism must be freely embraced and never forcibly imposed) but its end is not the creation of wealth, but always the good of the human person.
The economy exists to serve man, not man the economy.
So, that's the problem. Technological and economic "advances" have made traditional Catholic practice and belief practically obsolete.
And that problem has been with us for a long, long while, too. The first major flowering of it was with the rise of incipient capitalism in the late Middle Ages. In my Renaissance art history class in college we studied church after church and masterpiece after masterpiece that was commissioned by a rich merchant or banker who had built the masterpiece in question as a sin offering, in propitiation for having committed the sin of usury. The life of Saint Francis and the rise of his and the other mendicant communities is in direct reaction to this.. As in some ways were the heretical Albigensian as well as the Waldensian and other proto- Protestant movements. The actual Reformation - particularly the Calvinist Reformation - on the other hand was fervently capitalist.
In any case, the original position of the Church was against usury - defined as any charging of interest at all. This situation was a major catalyst to the Reformation as I say, as well as the context in which the major Jewish banking families arose.. A situation that in part catalyzed much antisemitism.
By the 18th Century though, the Church had retreated from that strict position, and then completely collapsed on it. Now Rome requires all religious orders to keep their holdings in banks, and runs its own banking system.. One that has produced a few significant financial scandals, by the way.
So, when it comes to money, the old anti-capitalist paradigm mostly has fallen by the way or been actively suppressed..
I'm going to write more about this later, because it is important, and I think needs to be analyzed and discussed.
The magisterium of the Church has in contrast currently firmly staked its ground on maintaining the traditional teachings of the Church regarding sexuality.
This is just as counter cultural, and as doomed to fail as long as current circumstances prevail.
The traditional teaching has been most famously re-stated by Pope Paul VI's papal letter Humanae Vitae. This of course forbids any deliberate intervention in the human reproductive process that is meant to prevent conception. Thus forbidding technological means of contraception such as hormonal treatments like the Pill, or barrier methods like the condom or diaphragm. Fasting (abstention) from sexual activity during periods of fertility, or sex in situations where individuals have been made sterile by circumstances beyond their control, are of course as they have always been still permitted within the bonds of marriage.
Now, that encyclical letter was issued in 1968, right in the midst of the beginning of the Sexual Revolution sparked by the invention of the Pill that prior decade. This is also the era of deepening concern over population growth and resource depletion.
Humanae Vitae was therefore (no surprise) not well received, and along with all the cultural turmoil of they time, and the major changes wrought in world Catholic culture by Vatican II and the subsequent liturgical and other reforms incited by the council, led to massive resistance and revolt.
I don't have any statistics, but I'd bet less than 5% of Catholic couples keep the traditional teaching. This means that the vast majority of couples are - according to traditional Catholic moral thought - in an objective state of serious (mortal) sin.
The hierarchy and priesthood have reacted to this pastoral meltdown by mostly ignoring it. They've also let confession fall into wide disuse, generally only publicly encouraging confession during Lent. I also have never in 30 something years of regular mass attendance heard a sermon against contraception. Nor for that matter against divorce, fornication, premarital sex, pornography, masturbation, homosexuality or any other sexual matter. Those things get very occasionally mentioned in asides (I've heard the word contraception spoken maybe a half dozen times in maybe three sermons, I remember them all clearly), but are are hardly ever to almost never the focus of a normal Sunday homily.
Abortion is of course another thing. That, the only negative exception, gets preached against often. The theology of the human person gets preached as well, but always positively, and in ways that sexuality is explicitly related, but sexual sin is rarely if ever mentioned.
You don't even get asked about it in the confessional - I go every month or two, and I can tell you I rarely get asked any leading questions at all, and never get criticized. Scenes in movies or on television where that happens are not true to my experience.
You do see lots of writing about sexual issues, everywhere in the Catholic press and internet, of course. And the pope and an occasional bishop will broach those topics in their public discourse. But on the parish level there is silence, with maybe only the occasional poster advertising a Natural Family Planning seminar on a bulletin board in the entryway.
All this, in the middle of the sexual revolution, when all hell is breaking loose.
Basically, on the level of moral theology, they've decided to "let those with ears hear" and then not to bring it up all that often and so burden peoples' consciences.
"Jesus said to them: If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now you say: We see. Your sin remains." John 9:41
This all represents the triumph of "Molinism" - the Jesuitical approach to morality. During the Renaissance the Jesuits and their allies began developing a systematic moral casuistry for use in confession and spiritual direction most famously advanced by Molina and Suarez, their hierarchical allies Bellarmine, De Lugo and the rest of the "Company." They were vociferously opposed by the Jansenists, in a battle that has defined Catholic culture since. Vatican II represents the full triumph of the Jesuit position. The predominate post- Vatican II pastoral approach is also pretty much in keeping with the related counsel of St. Alphonsus, that on difficult issues where people are so weak it is often better not to instruct them, so that their ignorance will be a defense at the judgment.
The upshot of all this is that we have a crisis in authority, in that most Catholics (human beings) reject the Church's traditional teaching, and many as an act of conscience. The hierarchy has basically surrendered pastorally, and does not insist on compliance.
Because if they did, they wouldn't have a church left. And like Cardinal Newman cracked, they'd look kinda funny up there all decked out in dresses and funny hats like they are, without us.. Not that they aren't already pretty funny, anyway. All the people in street clothes acting all straight faced and serious just keeps it on the down-low.
So, that's the deal. The thing is that this story is not over, and things could change.
That's a prospect I will discuss further in later posts.
---
No comments:
Post a Comment