Miserando Atque Eligendo: Lowly And Yet Chosen - A Few Brief Reflections On Our New Pope

Tonight, before bed, I proffer a few thoughts on our adorable new Holy Father.  He keeps growing on me, the more I read and pray for and about him.  Details, such as that his first act as pope the morning after the election was to visit Maria Maggiore, which is the great Roman shrine to our Lady, just sing to me.  He arrived by stealth, with ten minutes notice, eschewing the usual papal motorcade. That is simply beautiful.

Note that the title of this post is his episcopal motto.  Again, like almost everything I read about him, I think it is great.

He reminds me of John Paul I - unassuming, exuding gentle kindness, but with a hint of toughness.  Not at all radiating with the charismatic charm of John Paul II, not even the calmer, nebbish charisma of Benedict.. He seems often impassive, expressing little emotion.  Subdued, humble in appearance.  Not the type of fellow you'd tend to notice in a crowd, unlike his two recent predecessors.  

But that common air is perfect.  Very apt in a priest:  "He had no majestic bearing to catch our eye, no beauty to draw us near him.." Exactly.  Just so.  

I think in practical terms his election is explained by two things.  First, Rome is an Italian archdiocese.  It should have an Italian pastor, or at least a pastor who knows them and their language.  And too, the curia is dominated by Italians, and Italian ways.  The curial voting block in the conclave, and those cardinals who would like to see them disciplined in light of the scandals that are festering there, would both want someone who would will relate well to all of that, immediately.  Second, the Church is now no longer mostly European.  We need leadership from the larger world.  A universal pastor from Europe, or worse Italy, would be a parochial choice..

How to solve this paradox?  In Francis we have the perfect resolution.  An Italian, but from outside Italy. Better, one from Latin America, where the strength of the Church now resides.

He has chosen the name Francis, which means of France, or Frank.  Many have commented that it's a homage to Francis of Assisi whose ministry reinvigorated the late medieval Church, and Francis Xavier, the great Jesuit who converted the East. It is of course both of these things.  

But it is also interesting to think how the German Franks, the French, while the "first daughter of the Church" were also simultaneously the great antagonists of Papal supremacy throughout the Middle Ages.. In that great struggle between the Holy Roman Empire and the Papacy over rule of Europe - Guelphs versus Ghibellines - dating back to the moment Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne Emperor on Christmas 800, where the pope surprised the king by refusing to hand the crown to him for him to place it on his own head, the pope himself crowning the Emperor in a symbolic act of supremacy over the secular power.. Through to the moment that Napoleon seized the crown from the hands of Pius VII and crowned himself Emperor in 1804.. 

The term "emperor" of course signifies Emperor of Rome, which is shorthand for the civilized world.  The fact that the Franks, the Germans, had the temerity to claim that title while the historical line of emperors descending from Constantine was still extant in Constantinople, was not exactly appreciated in Byzantium.  Indeed, it is the single most important catalyst creating the Schism we still suffer from today between the Orthodoxy and Catholicism.

This is a major theme I want to continue to treat here on the blog, that I have yet to touch upon at all: the role of political power and ethnic divisions in creating the great schismatic blocks in the Church -Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant.. The struggle over the imperium, the legacy of Rome, is at the heart of that.  

I think the name Francis may in a sense resonate somehow in terms of that struggle - Our new pope may in some way be signaling that that struggle is finally over.  That the papal claim to secular imperium is finally utterly dead. Our Pope Francis reconciles that tension in himself and resolves it.

The pope is now asserting the plenitude of spiritual power.  The reason the Church exists is because people respond to Christ. His humility. God comes to us as a child. Then he offers himself to us, up for us, on the cross. 

This is what love is. This is the form that true power takes. This is our God.

When the Church is humble like this, she conquers the world. When we surrender all pretension to worldly power, and bear the cross with the suffering and poor, we triumph.  

In Christ, like Francis and all the other saints.  Francis of Assisi's example, however, is one of the most radical. Our new Holy Father Francis is calling us to that extremity of love and humility.

Pope Francis has only one lung.   Odd fact, that.  Pope John Paul II always used to use the metaphor of two lungs of the Church in discussing our Orthodox brothers.  That we are one organism, breathing through two lobes.  

Here, we have a pope who as Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires was also bishop of the Eastern Rite in Argentina.  This is unusual, usually the Eastern Rites have their own separate bishop.  

And he has got only one lung.. A single pnuema if you like.  Like I say, odd..  Isn't it?

I'll end this rumination by quoting our Holy Father's first public homily as pope, given at mass on Wednesday, March 13th.  I really thought it was good, so I'll share an excerpt.  The extended homily is pithy - I read it aloud to myself and it took me 2.5 minutes - and profound.  That's the essence of good preaching.  Succinct and powerful.  

I give you about half of it here, what I think the best part:

[W]e can walk as much we want, we can build many things, but if we do not confess Jesus Christ, nothing will avail. We will become a compassionate NGO, but not the Church, the Bride of Christ. When one does not walk, one stalls. When one does not build on solid rock, what happens? What happens is what happens to children on the beach when they make sandcastles: everything collapses, it is without consistency. When one does not profess Jesus Christ – I recall the phrase of Leon Bloy – “Whoever does not pray to God, prays to the devil.” When one does not profess Jesus Christ, one professes the worldliness of the devil.

[...]

The same Peter who confessed Jesus Christ, says, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God. I will follow you, but let us not speak of the Cross. That has nothing to do with it. I’ll follow you on other ways, that do not include the Cross.” When we walk without the Cross, when we build without the Cross, and when we profess Christ without the Cross, we are not disciples of the Lord.  We are worldly.  We may be bishops, priests, cardinals, popes, but not disciples of the Lord.

I would like that all of us, after these days of grace, might have the courage – the courage – to walk in the presence of the Lord, with the Cross of the Lord: to build the Church on the Blood of the Lord, which is shed on the Cross, and to profess the one glory, Christ Crucified. In this way, the Church will go forward. My hope for all of us is that the Holy Spirit, that the prayer of Our Lady, our Mother, might grant us this grace: to walk, to build, to profess Jesus Christ Crucified. So be it.

So (utterly not mote) be it, indeed.  I love this man.  I think we have ourselves a wonderful new pastor.  Thank God.

May God bless and keep our Holy Father.

Now it's midnight.  Sleepytime.  Goodnight, everyone.

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Further Thoughts Forth

Since I just let tear that last post, and the void remains impassive, let me kick it up another notch:

Otto von Hapsburg died at the age of 96, today. July 4th. A distinction he shares with both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. That's amusing.

Why? Because this is the birthday of the Great Masonic Republic, the Whore of the Enlightenment, the anti-thesis of nearly everything that the Hapsburg dynasty represents in historical, theological and political terms. The only thing less "American" in this sense would be the papacy itself.

Now, I never met his highness, who one time pretender to the now extinct throne of the Empire of Austria Hungary, and so also a hypothetical candidate for the post of Holy Roman Emperor if it were still extant. I do have the great honor and pleasure of knowing many of his relatives, personally, though. Indeed, I consider a few of them that I spent some time with to be friends, in that slight but distinct sense that you often develop with people whom you like and share many things in common with.

In common with. Funny. But it's true. I've shared meals and drinks with them, gone to mass and prayed the rosary with them, been to parties and dinners with them, all on a first name basis. Once in a while I would kid one of them, address them as archduke and then tell them with mock sorrow that it was a shame, but that I am a republican and revolutionary..

In a tone of mock sorrow, but not in complete jest. For it's emphatically true: I am a republican and revolutionary.

Because for as much as I like them..

Like them? Yeah. Because they are not at all like the vulgar "noble" house of Monaco, or the tawdry jet- setting Windsors. They're more like the family Von Trapp: very friendly, haute bourgeois in their manner, not at all ostentatious. If you didn't know who they were, you'd never guess.

Still, as much as I like them, I am not about to join the Black Yellow Alliance.

In fact, if we aren't going to bring back the Roman (note, Roman, not Spanish) Inquisition, and support the full triumph of the Gregorian Reform and strive for the fullblown global triumph of the Papal Imperium (see how I've gone Orthodox, and now have come full circle round: accept the authority of the See of Rome all ye schismatics, and repent), then I am with Jefferson, and for the freedoms articulated in the Bill of Rights.

What I'm trying to say is that I am a Guelph and no Ghibelline, then a republican and no monarchist.

Like any of that makes any sense in reality. These last few years I've been thinking about all of this, wondering if I have any politics left anymore.

If it is not time for me to turn inward, for good.


How come? Because in reality, we live in a world where the gnostics have triumphed, in which the nominalists have won full sway. It's all extrapolated numerology and elaborated alchemy, now. The faustians have made their bargain and seized their mess of pottage, in the moment victorious.

Personhood - human dignity - is now held to be synonymous with will and consciousness. The mind is held to be independent of the body, which is to be transcended in the algorithmic triumph of the mind over matter.

The software can be extracted from the hardware, and set loose as a type of "angelic" intelligence to live eternally. The end of the human race, the master stroke of our evolution: transcendence through trans-humanism.

As has always been the case with them, gnostics never tell the truth. They are always hiding their intent, allowing the great mass to wallow, rut and forage, while they seek their transcendence through gnosis.


In terms of this scheme to be a Christian is to be agnostic. For faith is an embrace of powerlessness, a profound humility that recognizes the face of the Lord in that of the retarded, the ignorant, the sinful, the poor. Oneself, and every other human being no matter who they be. It is to renounce any pretension to salvific power over creation, it is to admit our own utter dependance upon and ignorance before God.

For we know nothing about Him that he does not reveal to us Himself. That is to say that all such knowledge is only had by grace.


And grace is not to be had by force, either of intellect or will: It is never coerced but always gratuitously given; like friendship, like love.


Which is to say that a human social order informed by grace would be like a great family in which the weak are borne by the strong.


Not some sort of bizarre hermetic hieratic order in which the masters of numerology lord over everyone else, enslave and force them to do their bidding in return for some contrived unreal abstraction like money.


You know how Orthodox Jews wrap the words of God around their head and right forearm? The will of the One they worship is always before them.


Today, in this culture most of us would put our portfolio and paycheck in the phylacteries if we were to wear tefillin.


That's what you could call a prophecy partially fulfilled. Can I get an amen?


Again, Happy Independence Day Y'all.



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Divers Middle Eastern Video Clips: Paschal Edition

First, this is how certain Syrian Christians celebrate the Resurrection:



This impressive explosion of joy took place in Latakia, اللاذقية, on the coast of Syria (the same region the ruling Alawite Assad family is from, incidentally).


This next clip is from Israeli late night television:

(be forewarned, this bit's pretty offensive)




Lastly, I share this clip of my favorite apparition and stigmatist, Myrna Nazour, from Soufanieh, near Damascus:

(this, the first installment in a 30 something part series, will give you the basic gist of the story)



Myrna of course (of course!) receives the stigmata every year at Easter.


When I was at DLI, one of my teachers, an Orthodox Christian woman from Basra, Iraq, gave me a copy of the icon of Our Lady of Soufanieh, which as that clip notes in the original bleeds oil. The events surrounding this icon and Myrna are known as the "Miracle of Damascus." It's an ecumenical phenomenon.. Myrna is Catholic but her husband is Orthodox, and my impression is that the apparition is hugely popular throughout the Arab world, amongst both Orthodox and Catholics.

The image:

One of my favorite icons, incidentally.

In any case, Our Lady of Soufanieh and Myrna both preach unity amongst the Catholic and Orthodox, and peace with the Muslims. One of main the reasons I dig it.


Anyway, just to let you all know, Syria ain't Kansas. Just a late newsflash from Damascus..



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The Divine Comedy: the Gospel as Parody

Today is Palm Sunday. This is one of those blessed and relatively rare years in which the Eastern (Orthodox) and Western (Catholic) calendars are in harmony. We celebrate Holy Week and Pascha together this year. As the Universal Church always should.

During Lent I've been going almost daily to mass, and reading the psalter.


One of the things that keeps on striking me lately, is how funny the Bible is.

He rides in on an ass. He's making fun of us, of our pretensions.


When the French took Damascus from the Turks in 1920, the commanding General Henri Gouraud rode his charger into the tomb of Saladin in the great Ummayad Mosque, dismounted and planted his boot on the "Sword of Religion's" (that's what Salah al-Din literally means in Arabic) grave and declared, "Réveilles-toi Saladin, nous sommes revenus. Ma présence ici consacre la victoire de la croix sur le croissant!"

Get up Saladin, we've returned. My presence here consecrates the victory of the cross over the crescent!

That's how we like to do it. Charge in on a warhorse, all glory, then crush the enemy's head and spit on his grave. Then consecrate it all in pride and vanity.


We like to put boots up asses, see. That's definitely the American way.

(I love how this video of Toby Keith's immortal poetical expression of that sentiment begins with the image of a puppy wrapped in a flag.. Irony is dead.)


But God rides in barefoot, on an ass. And then goes to the religious and political authorities and allows them to slaughter him. He takes the boot upon himself.


The Gospel - in fact the entire bible - is rife with such inversions as God coming in glory on a donkey.


He's always making the most unexpected entrances, and turning our expectations upside down.


He shows up as a baby, is worshiped by donkeys and gets put in a box for feeding grain to asses (called in English a manger, from the French "to eat.." Taste and see..)

(there's great iconography of the animals in the stable worshiping him..)

Then he goes up on a hillside by the sea of Galilee, and preaches the "Sermon on the Mount," which is where he parodies Moses, and reveals himself to be God. See the sidebar, I've posted the Beatitudes he taught there. These are the Christian answer to the Ten Commandments.


I think they're really funny. Blessed are the poor? Says who?

Jesus, that's who.


And he sat down to teach them. He did not stand in the presence of the Lord as a rabbi does proclaiming scripture in the synagogue, or Moses did coming off the mountain with the written word. He went up and sat.


I've been to the "Mount," it's actually a great grassy hillside right next to Lake Tiberius (also called the Sea of Galilee, but it's not much of a sea at all, actually).. When I stood on it, I laughed. Not at all like majestic solemn old Mount Sinai.

Not exactly what I'd expected. Very gentle. A good joke.


He calmed that sea one night when his disciples were stuck out fishing in the middle of a storm. They were terrified by the storm, then terrified that he'd calmed it. He walks out onto the lake, and calls to them to come to him. Peter (our dearly loved pope) hops out, takes a few steps and sinks.


That my friends, about sums it all up. Very funny.


Stick your finger in me, Thomas. It is finished.


In the Name of the Rose, one of my favorite books, Emberto Eco tells this beautiful story about a Franciscan monk and a novice (played in the uneven late 80's movie version by Sean Connery and Christian Slater) who come to monastery where there's been foul play. The plot revolves around an newly discovered manuscript of Aristotle's ("The Philosopher," as Thomas Aquinas dubs him in the Summa) on laughter. The bad guys are bent on keeping this text from ever seeing the light, because the concept of laughter is so subversive to authority. They eventually kill almost everyone and burn the monastery down along with the book, because they can't handle a joke.

One of the characters (I think it's the arch-badguy, the abbot) makes the observation that in the Gospel Christ never laughs. He cries at the tomb of Lazarus..

(another funny story: "Lord, you're late! He's dead. You were supposed to come when we called you!" Open the tomb. "But he'll be stinky!" You still don't get it. Roll the stone away. They do it. Lazarus comes out dressed like a mummy.
That one had me silently belly laughing to in my pew when it was read at mass a couple weeks ago..)

He gets angry and whips the money changers like curs.

Lots of divine emotion gets expressed.


But no laughter.


Why? Because he's a straight comedian.


"I give them the sign of Jonas," he said.


And this is the thing: the Book of Jonah (like the Book of Job) is a comedy.

Go tell the people to repent, Jonah. "No. Stop bugging me." Jonah runs away, gets on a boat to Finisterra (the name of the end of land where Spain tapers out into the void just beyond Santiago de Compostelle), thinking he can hide from God. There's a storm, like that one on the Sea of Galilee. The sailors are terrified, so when Jonah confesses that God's out to get him, they throw him overboard and so calm the waves. Christ parodies this when he walks out onto the sea himself. Jonah is swallowed by Leviathan. He rests in the gut of a fish (the tomb of the sea) for three days..

(This is an inversion of when the fish leaps out of the Euphrates and Tobias grabs and eats it, then burns its liver to scare away Asmodeus from his beloved.. Or when Christ eats his last meal of grilled fish before he rises into heaven.. See how the symbols and the things signified, how all the referents proliferate? That's what a good comedy is all about..)

He gets spit up onto the beach, resurrected. He then grudgingly decides to obey God, and goes to preach repentance to the people of the great city (Ninevah, or Mosul- the capital of of what is now Southern or Kurdish Iraq, the northern twin of Baghdad, which is on the rivers of Babylon) whom he thinks are disgusting people not worthy of being pardoned. "I don't want to go preach forgiveness to those bastards. I want them to burn like Sodom and Gommorah did.." But he does it now anyway, because he didn't much enjoy being stuck in that fish. He preaches, and they all convert and put on sackcloth and ashes. A great revival. Billy Grahm's wet dream. The End.


It's out of control. And when the meaning dawns on you, you should laugh.


That's why fools who can't take a joke either think that the whole thing is contrived and "just a myth" or else run around saying that it's all "literally" true.

I hate the word literal. It's a nearly useless word that is its own deconstruction.


Our problem is that we need to control everything. We need to pretend we understand. We need to be right. Most of us are running around imposing our narratives on things, telling other people that they're wrong. Faith is parodied as a means of social control, of controlling our own insecurities.

Our tendency is to attempt to turn it all into a recipe for anathematizing and controlling other people..

("The Bible vs. Science," "Creation Science," nursing unhealthy obsessions with Darwin.. The Nazis, the eugenicists, militant atheists and the folks down at the Four Square Bible Church have got it all figured out, see.)

A means of categorizing and reducing or even annihilating the heretical other in all his scandal.


Grinding boots up Muslim asses, for example. Planting boots on their graves.


The irony of militant atheists like Christopher Hitchens or Sam Harris writing book length screeds condemning the many horrific things people have done while proclaiming religious motives and justification, but then themselves advocating massive violence and terror against Muslims is a classical example of this..

An example so idiotic and shameless that it traumatizes my mind.


"The Inquisition means the Catholic Church is evil!"

This, immediately followed by "Muslims are evil, and I support the U.S. government's enhanced interrogation and rendition of terrorists, and Israeli and U.S. coalition violence against them!"


Like I say, no sense of irony. Very stupid.


They cannot see that they are doing much what the Nazis did to the Jews, or what the inquisitors in the violent aftermath of the wars that expelled the Muslims and Jews from Spain, did.

It's not that different. It's coming from the same place: rectitude, ideology as tribalism, annihilation of dissent.

Assassination, terror, and violence as censorship.

The other and his ideas are so threatening we must crush him politically or else kill him. Islam (or Judaism, or Catholicism, or jahaliyah - that's a favorite term among Salafist Muslims, it means pagan ignorance and decadence, all that is not Islam, or whatever) is so dangerous, we must eradicate it.

Shut up. You're wrong. If you don't shut up and do what I tell you, and believe what I tell you to believe, we will kill you.


My earlier posts about the "Left Behind" novels and the Grand Inquisitor are all meant to be driving at this same thesis.


When I put all these things up, I mean it to be read in full context. A context that is to me one of irony, parody and amusement.


Because death and evil are either a joke, or nothing's funny.


For what God does is almost always unexpected, you can't prepare your mind or body for the revelation. You can store up a year's worth of food in your basement, buy guns and ammo, vote Republican and try to keep America pure from whatever you think is evil and threatening, but in the end none of that will matter.

You can prepare your heart and soul, though.

One last joke:

Did you hear the one about that guy that stood up in a Podunk hick town synagogue a couple thousand years ago, pointed at the book of Isaiah and said “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing..”


Cymbal clash. Bada-bump.


Jews. They're pretty damn funny bunch. Always going for the best punchlines.


Blessed Holy Week, everyone. Let's keep one another in our prayers.



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An Open Response to Matt, Concerning the Incoherence of Roman Catholicism as a Belief System

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.



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