Catholic Metanarrative

Thursday, April 29, 2010

Article: John Paul II and “Taking the Discipline”

FATHER ROBERT BARRON

Perhaps you were startled to learn recently that Pope John Paul II regularly practiced the form of mortification called “taking the discipline,” that is to say, striking his body with a whip.

Apparently he hung the disciplinary belt in his closet, along with his vestments, and never failed to take it with him, even when he went on vacation. He also, we learned, sometimes slept on the hardwood floor of his bedroom as an ascetic practice, purposely messing his sheets and blanket in the morning so as not to draw attention to what he had done.

I realize that activities such as these can strike many contemporary people as bizarre, perhaps even as the fruit of psychological disorders, complexes, and repressions. Though the author who reported these things did so in order to convince us of John Paul's sanctity, some today might, because of them, actually think less of the late Pope. I thought that these revelations might be a good occasion to reflect more deeply on the typically Lenten practices of mortification and asceticism.

I would first observe that "taking the discipline" was hardly something unique to John Paul. Many of the great masters of the spiritual tradition over the centuries both practiced it and recommended it, and it was a staple of the asceticism of most of the mainstream religious orders up until the time of Vatican II. A second observation is that taking the discipline should never be confused with a wanton display of masochism: the instrument in question was usually a rope with a few small knots tied in it, and the actual physical pain involved was usually minimal. Da Vinci Code fantasies about vicious self-flagellation should be set aside.

But what precisely is the point of this unusual practice? First, it is a means of imitating Christ by participating in his suffering. The goal of the spiritual quest is to allow Jesus to live his life in us fully. St. Paul said, "it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me." This means that we must strive to conform ourselves to Jesus' humility, his compassion, his joyful prayer, his identification with sinners, his teaching, his manner of thinking and feeling, and his vicarious suffering. By taking upon himself unmerited suffering, Jesus atoned for the sins of the world.

We can enter, however imperfectly, into this dynamic by accepting – for our own sins or those of others – some physical or psychological discomfort. Thus St. Dominic recommended that one pray with one's arms stretched out for a long period in the attitude of the crucified Lord, St. Benedict urged his monks to fast frequently, and St. Antony endured myriad hardships in the solitude of his desert hermitage. Again, this isn't masochism but spiritual participation, an attempt, as Paul put it, "to make up in our own bodies what is still lacking in the suffering of Christ." A corollary to this principle is what Charles Williams called "co-inherence," the idea that we are all, at the deepest metaphysical level, connected to one another. Because we are so inextricably bound together, we can bear each other's burdens, one person, as it were, offering his suffering on behalf of someone else.

A second spiritual reason for John Paul's practice is the legitimate disciplining of the body. As I have often argued, Catholics are not dualists or puritans. We don't think that the flesh is, in itself, sinful or problematic. However, we know that the desires of the body have become, through the fall, disordered. We experience the fact that they are no longer consistently subordinated to reason and that they can consequently appear in exaggerated form or assert themselves disproportionately.

Merton said that we fast, from time to time, from food and drink and sex precisely so as to allow the deeper spiritual hungers to surface and be satisfied.

Thomas Merton commented that the needs of the body – for food, drink, sleep, and sex – are like insistent children that pester us and demand to have their way. Just as children have to be disciplined lest they come to dominate the household, so the desires of the flesh have to be curtailed, limited, lest they come to monopolize all of one's energies. Merton said that we fast, from time to time, from food and drink and sex precisely so as to allow the deeper spiritual hungers to surface and be satisfied. Now the use of the discipline is an extreme and very pointed instance of this practice. It is a vivid reminder to oneself that the pleasure of the body is not one's determining and ultimate good.

I realize that some readers might still be balking at this point, wondering whether this particular discipline still seems rather over the top. But stop and consider for a moment the activities that go on every day in the typical work-out center. People labor away on stationary bikes, stair-masters, eliptical machines, and treadmills; they sweat their way through pull-ups, push-ups, dead-lifts, and kettle-bell routines. In all sorts of ways, they discipline their bodies so as to overcome the natural tendency toward laziness and self-indulgence. More to it, these same people most likely deny themselves all sorts of pleasurable foods, resisting powerful cravings. And all of this punishment is in service of a healthier body. Why can't certain forms of corporal discipline be in service of the far more important health of the mind and spirit?



ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Father Robert Barron, "John Paul II and 'Taking the Discipline'." Our Sunday Visitor (March 15, 2010).

Reprinted with permission of Father Robert Barron.

THE AUTHOR

Fr. Robert Barron was ordained a priest for the Archdiocese of Chicago in 1986. He has a Masters degree in Philosophy from the Catholic University of America and a Doctorate in Sacred Theology from the Institute Catholique de Paris. He is currently professor of systematic theology at the University of St. Mary of the Lake, Mundelein Seminary. Fr. Barron is the author of, And Now I See: A Theology of Transformation, Thomas Aquinas: Spiritual Master, Heaven in Stone and Glass: Experiencing the Spirituality of the Great Cathedrals, Eucharist (Catholic Spirituality for Adults), Priority of Christ, The: Toward a Postliberal Catholicism, and Word on File: Proclaiming the Power of Christ. He also gives frequent talks, retreats and workshops on issues of theology and spirituality.

Father Barron uses his YouTube channel to reach out to people and bring valuable lessons of faith alive by pointing out things that can be learned by watching popular characters of movies and television shows.

Copyright © 2010 Father Robert Barron

Article: An Open Letter to Hans Küng

GEORGE WEIGEL

Permit me to suggest that you owe Pope Benedict XVI a public apology, for what, objectively speaking, is a calumny that I pray was informed in part by ignorance (if culpable ignorance).

Dr. Küng:

A decade and a half ago, a former colleague of yours among the younger progressive theologians at Vatican II told me of a friendly warning he had given you at the beginning of the Council's second session. As this distinguished biblical scholar and proponent of Christian-Jewish reconciliation remembered those heady days, you had taken to driving around Rome in a fire-engine red Mercedes convertible, which your friend presumed had been one fruit of the commercial success of your book, The Council: Reform and Reunion.

This automotive display struck your colleague as imprudent and unnecessarily self-advertising, given that some of your more adventurous opinions, and your talent for what would later be called the sound-bite, were already raising eyebrows and hackles in the Roman Curia. So, as the story was told me, your friend called you aside one day and said, using a French term you both understood, "Hans, you are becoming too evident."

As the man who single-handedly invented a new global personality-type – the dissident theologian as international media star – you were not, I take it, overly distressed by your friend's warning. In 1963, you were already determined to cut a singular path for yourself, and you were media-savvy enough to know that a world press obsessed with the man-bites-dog story of the dissenting priest-theologian would give you a megaphone for your views. You were, I take it, unhappy with the late John Paul II for trying to dismantle that story-line by removing your ecclesiastical mandate to teach as a professor of Catholic theology; your subsequent, snarling put-down of Karol Wojtyla's alleged intellectual inferiority in one volume of your memoirs ranked, until recently, as the low-point of a polemical career in which you have become most evident as a man who can concede little intelligence, decency, or good will in his opponents.

I say "until recently," however, because your April 16 open letter to the world's bishops, which I first read in the Irish Times, set new standards for that distinctive form of hatred known as odium theologicum and for mean-spirited condemnation of an old friend who had, on his rise to the papacy, been generous to you while encouraging aspects of your current work.


Before we get to your assault on the integrity of Pope Benedict XVI, however, permit me to observe that your article makes it painfully clear that you have not been paying much attention to the matters on which you pronounce with an air of infallible self-assurance that would bring a blush to the cheek of Pius IX.

You seem blithely indifferent to the doctrinal chaos besetting much of European and North American Protestantism, which has created circumstances in which theologically serious ecumenical dialogue has become gravely imperiled.

You take the most rabid of the Pius XII-baiters at face value, evidently unaware that the weight of recent scholarship is shifting the debate in favor of Pius' courage in defense of European Jewry (whatever one may think of his exercise of prudence).

That the Concilium project became ever more implausible over time – and that a younger generation of theologians, especially in North America, gravitated toward the Communio orbit – could not have been a happy experience for you.

You misrepresent the effects of Benedict XVI's 2006 Regensburg Lecture, which you dismiss as having "caricatured" Islam. In fact, the Regensburg Lecture refocused the Catholic-Islamic dialogue on the two issues that complex conversation urgently needs to engage – religious freedom as a fundamental human right that can be known by reason, and the separation of religious and political authority in the twenty-first century state.

You display no comprehension of what actually prevents HIV/AIDS in Africa, and you cling to the tattered myth of "overpopulation" at a moment when fertility rates are dropping around the globe and Europe is entering a demographic winter of its own conscious creation.

You seem oblivious to the scientific evidence underwriting the Church's defense of the moral status of the human embryo, while falsely charging that the Catholic Church opposes stem-cell research.

Why do you not know these things? You are an obviously intelligent man; you once did groundbreaking work in ecumenical theology. What has happened to you?


What has happened, I suggest, is that you have lost the argument over the meaning and the proper hermeneutics of Vatican II. That explains why you relentlessly pursue your fifty-year quest for a liberal Protestant Catholicism, at precisely the moment when the liberal Protestant project is collapsing from its inherent theological incoherence. And that is why you have now engaged in a vicious smear of another former Vatican II colleague, Joseph Ratzinger. Before addressing that smear, permit me to continue briefly on the hermeneutics of the Council.

While you are not the most theologically accomplished exponent of what Benedict XVI called the "hermeneutics of rupture" in his Christmas 2005 address to the Roman Curia, you are, without doubt, the most internationally visible member of that aging group which continues to argue that the period 1962–1965 marked a decisive trapgate in the history of the Catholic Church: the moment of a new beginning, in which Tradition would be dethroned from its accustomed place as a primary source of theological reflection, to be replaced by a Christianity that increasingly let "the world" set the Church's agenda (as a motto of the World Council of Churches then put it).

The struggle between this interpretation of the Council, and that advanced by Council fathers like Ratzinger and Henri de Lubac, split the post-conciliar Catholic theological world into warring factions with contending journals: Concilium for you and your progressive colleagues, Communio for those you continue to call "reactionaries." That the Concilium project became ever more implausible over time – and that a younger generation of theologians, especially in North America, gravitated toward the Communio orbit – could not have been a happy experience for you. And that the Communio project should have decisively shaped the deliberations of the 1985 Extraordinary Synod of Bishops, called by John Paul II to celebrate Vatican II's achievements and assess its full implementation on the twentieth anniversary of its conclusion, must have been another blow.

Yet I venture to guess that the iron really entered your soul when, on December 22, 2005, the newly elected Pope Benedict XVI – the man whose appointment to the theological faculty at Tübingen you had once helped arrange – addressed the Roman Curia and suggested that the argument was over: and that the conciliar "hermeneutics of reform," which presumed continuity with the Great Tradition of the Church, had won the day over "the hermeneutics of discontinuity and rupture."


Perhaps, while you and Benedict XVI were drinking beer at Castel Gandolfo in the summer of 2005, you somehow imagined that Ratzinger had changed his mind on this central question. He obviously had not. Why you ever imagined he might accept your view of what an "ongoing renewal of the Church" would involve is, frankly, puzzling. Nor does your analysis of the contemporary Catholic situation become any more plausible when one reads, further along in your latest op-ed broadside, that recent popes have been "autocrats" against the bishops; again, one wonders whether you have been paying sufficient attention. For it seems self-evidently clear that Paul VI, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI have been painfully reluctant – some would say, unfortunately reluctant – to discipline bishops who have shown themselves incompetent or malfeasant and have lost the capacity to teach and lead because of that: a situation many of us hope will change, and change soon, in light of recent controversies.

In a sense, of course, none of your familiar complaints about post-conciliar Catholic life is new. It does, however, seem ever more counterintuitive for someone who truly cares about the future of the Catholic Church as a witness to God's truth for the world's salvation to press the line you persistently urge upon us: that a credible Catholicism will tread the same path trod in recent decades by various Protestant communities which, wittingly or not, have followed one or another version of your counsel to adopt a hermeneutics of rupture with the Great Tradition of Christianity. Still, that is the single-minded stance you have taken since one of your colleagues worried about your becoming too evident; and as that stance has kept you evident, at least on the op-ed pages of newspapers who share your reading of Catholic tradition, I expect it's too much to expect you to change, or even modify, your views, even if every bit of empirical evidence at hand suggests that the path you propose is the path to oblivion for the churches.

What can be expected, though, is that you comport yourself with a minimum of integrity and elementary decency in the controversies in which you engage. I understand odium theologicum as well as anyone, but I must, in all candor, tell you that you crossed a line that should not have been crossed in your recent article, when you wrote the following:

There is no denying the fact that the worldwide system of covering up sexual crimes committed by clerics was engineered by the Roman Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Cardinal Ratzinger (1981-2005).

That, sir, is not true. I refuse to believe that you knew this to be false and wrote it anyway, for that would mean you had willfully condemned yourself as a liar. But on the assumption that you did not know this sentence to be a tissue of falsehoods, then you are so manifestly ignorant of how competencies over abuse cases were assigned in the Roman Curia prior to Ratzinger's seizing control of the process and bringing it under CDF's competence in 2001, then you have forfeited any claim to be taken seriously on this, or indeed any other matter involving the Roman Curia and the central governance of the Catholic Church.

For it seems self-evidently clear that Paul VI, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI have been painfully reluctant – some would say, unfortunately reluctant – to discipline bishops who have shown themselves incompetent or malfeasant and have lost the capacity to teach and lead because of that: a situation many of us hope will change, and change soon, in light of recent controversies.

As you perhaps do not know, I have been a vigorous, and I hope responsible, critic of the way abuse cases were (mis)handled by individual bishops and by the authorities in the Curia prior to the late 1990s, when then-Cardinal Ratzinger began to fight for a major change in the handling of these cases. (If you are interested, I refer you to my 2002 book, The Courage To Be Catholic: Crisis, Reform, and the Future of the Church.)

I therefore speak with some assurance of the ground on which I stand when I say that your description of Ratzinger's role as quoted above is not only ludicrous to anyone familiar with the relevant history, but is belied by the experience of American bishops who consistently found Ratzinger thoughtful, helpful, deeply concerned about the corruption of the priesthood by a small minority of abusers, and distressed by the incompetence or malfeasance of bishops who took the promises of psychotherapy far more seriously than they ought, or lacked the moral courage to confront what had to be confronted.

I recognize that authors do not write the sometimes awful subheads that are put on op-ed pieces. Nonetheless, you authored a piece of vitriol – itself utterly unbecoming a priest, an intellectual, or a gentleman – that permitted the editors of the Irish Times to slug your article: "Pope Benedict has made worse just about everything that is wrong with the Catholic Church and is directly responsible for engineering the global cover-up of child rape perpetrated by priests, according to this open letter to all Catholic bishops." That grotesque falsification of the truth perhaps demonstrates where odium theologicum can lead a man. But it is nonetheless shameful.

Permit me to suggest that you owe Pope Benedict XVI a public apology, for what, objectively speaking, is a calumny that I pray was informed in part by ignorance (if culpable ignorance). I assure you that I am committed to a thoroughgoing reform of the Roman Curia and the episcopate, projects I described at some length in God's Choice: Pope Benedict XVI and the Future of the Catholic Church, a copy of which, in German, I shall be happy to send you. But there is no path to true reform in the Church that does not run through the steep and narrow valley of the truth. The truth was butchered in your article in the Irish Times. And that means that you have set back the cause of reform.


With the assurance of my prayers,

George Weigel


ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

George Weigel. "An Open Letter to Hans Küng." On The Square (April 21, 2010).

This article is reprinted with permission from First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life and the author, George Weigel.

First Things is published by The Institute on Religion and Public Life, an interreligious, nonpartisan research and education institute whose purpose is to advance a religiously informed public philosophy for the ordering of society.

To subscribe to First Things call 1-877-905-9920 or go here.

THE AUTHOR

George Weigel, a Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is a Roman Catholic theologian and one of America's leading commentators on issues of religion and public life. Weigel is the author or editor of Against the Grain: Christianity and Democracy, War and Peace, Faith, Reason, and the War Against Jihadism: A Call to Action, God's Choice: Pope Benedict XVI and the Future of the Catholic Church, The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God, Letters to a Young Catholic: The Art of Mentoring, The Courage to Be Catholic: Crisis, Reform, and the Future of the Church, and The Truth of Catholicism: Ten Controversies Explored.

George Weigel's major study of the life, thought, and action of Pope John Paul II, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II (Harper Collins, 1999) was published to international acclaim in 1999, and translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Portuguese, Slovak, Czech, Slovenian, Russian, and German. The 2001 documentary film based on the book won numerous prizes. George Weigel is a consultant on Vatican affairs for NBC News, and his weekly column, "The Catholic Difference," is syndicated to more than fifty newspapers around the United States.

Copyright © 2010 First Things

Article: A nice guy finishes first

COLLEEN CARROLL CAMPBELL

They say it's just a game. But the 74th Masters golf tournament was something more — a tale, you could say, of two marriages.

It began as the umpteenth episode in the tiresome Tiger Woods sex scandal. Five months after the golfer's compulsive infidelities came to light, with a seemingly endless parade of mistresses continuing to surface, some 5 million viewers tuned in to ESPN to watch Woods take his first tee shot. The attraction was more schadenfreude than sporting interest: Would Woods' aggrieved wife make a surprise appearance on the course? Would he choke at the start of his much-hyped return to the majors? And if he did well, would anyone cheer?

In the end, Woods made a respectable fourth-place showing, the crowds politely applauded and the talented-but-petulant champ resumed his old habits of blaming Jesus Christ for failed shots and snapping at reporters who questioned his on-the-course cursing. His humdrum comeback concluded with the world's most famous cad speeding off in the back of an SUV, sullen and alone.

The contrast between that ending and the jubilant one enjoyed by Masters winner Phil Mickelson could not have been starker. A serial philanderer may have attracted the pre-tournament press, but it was a family man who stole the show.

The back-story of Mickelson's victory made it particularly sweet. In the past year, both his mother and wife have been battling breast cancer. Caring for his wife of 13 years took its toll on his golf game, forcing the 39-year-old father of three to take a hiatus from the PGA tour to shepherd her through chemotherapy. After grimly schlepping to recent tournaments alone, Mickelson was delighted when his entire family accompanied him to the Masters.

The week was not easy: His wife was too weak to come to the course. He spent the wee hours of Sunday morning caring for his 10-year-old daughter, who broke her wrist while roller-skating and needed an emergency X-ray and splint.

Yet it all seemed worthwhile Sunday afternoon when Mickelson looked up just before sinking the final putt to see his smiling wife, Amy Mickelson, who had dragged herself out of bed to celebrate at his side. After the two shared a tearful embrace, Mickelson hugged each of his children and dedicated his win to his family, praising his "incredible wife" who "has been an inspiration for me."

As the poignant scene unfolded, Mickelson's victory looked like a win for marriage, family and the everyday perseverance that gets short shrift in our scandal-fixated popular culture. For a moment there on Magnolia Lane, it seemed as if fans were cheering every devoted husband and father in America. We were celebrating every ordinary guy who volunteers for the 2 a.m. feeding instead of rolling over and falling back asleep, who works a job he does not love to support his family or scales back the work he loves to spend more time at home, who resists the temptation to numb himself to his family's needs by escaping into booze or bimbos or an Internet fantasy life.

Yet it all seemed worthwhile Sunday afternoon when Mickelson looked up just before sinking the final putt to see his smiling wife, Amy Mickelson, who had dragged herself out of bed to celebrate at his side.

That guy doesn't get a lot of credit these days. We don't see much of him in our movies, and when he shows up in sitcoms, it's usually as the butt of jokes. Compared to stars like Woods, whose vices even seem larger than life, the ordinary, faithful husband and father looks a little small, at least onscreen.

In real life, he looks like Mickelson: a winner showered with love by a family that admires him as a man, not only as a golfer. I don't know much about Mickelson's home life; his marriage probably has endured its share of rough patches. But I suspect his wife and children can be found standing with him on the bad days as well as the good, because they know he does the same for them.

That's the hidden reward that accompanies the hidden sacrifices millions of husbands and fathers make every day. Mickelson's victory nudged us to look away from the sordid Woods spectacle and focus on something worth watching for a change: a nice guy getting some well-deserved respect.

It felt so good, maybe we should do it more often.




ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Colleen Carroll Campbell. "A nice guy finishes first." St. Louis Post-Dispatch (April 15, 2010).

Reprinted with permission of the author, Colleen Carroll Campbell.

THE AUTHOR

Colleen Carroll Campbell is an author, television and radio host and St. Louis-based fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. She is the author of The New Faithful: Why Young Adults Are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy. Colleen Carroll Campbell writes for a wide variety of national publications, speaks to audiences across America, and hosts her own television show, "Faith & Culture," on EWTN, the world's largest religious media network. Her website is here.

Copyright © 2010 Colleen Carroll Campbell

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Wednesday Liturgy: Candles at the Gospel Reading

ROME, APRIL 27, 2010 (Zenit.org).- Answered by Legionary of Christ Father Edward McNamara, professor of liturgy at the Regina Apostolorum university.


Q: During Easter season at the reading of the Gospel at Mass on Sundays, are the ministers dispensed from carrying lit candles to the ambo if there is an Easter candle? -- F.A., Rio de Mouro, Portugal

A: In principle, there is no such "dispensation" except during the Easter Vigil itself, because on this night the Easter candle itself suffices to honor the risen Lord in his Gospel.

The fact that the liturgical books specify that on this night Gospel candles are not used implies that they should be used on all other solemn occasions. At the same time, we recall that these candles, like incense, are recommended but not obligatory elements of the celebration of Mass and may be omitted.

During the rest of Eastertide the Easter candle and those that accompany the Gospel have different symbolic values.

The Easter candle represents the risen Christ and, while it is often placed near the ambo, this is not the only possibility. The other possibilities are at the center of the sanctuary or next to the altar. Because of this, the Easter candle is not necessarily or primarily associated with the Gospel.

The candles that accompany the Gospel are a means of honoring and emphasizing the particular centrality of the Gospel in salvation history and as the high point of the Liturgy of the Word.

As the Second Vatican Council's dogmatic constitution Dei Verbum points out, these liturgical honors also establish a certain parallel with the honors attributed to the Blessed Sacrament, which is also accompanied by lighted torches and incense. This serves to underline the particular real presence of Christ in the liturgical proclamation of the Word, though without detriment to the unique nature of the substantial real presence of the Eucharist.

Wednesday Liturgy: Follow-up: Baptismal Font Near the Altar

ROME, APRIL 27, 2010 (Zenit.org).- Answered by Legionary of Christ Father Edward McNamara, professor of liturgy at the Regina Apostolorum university.


Related to the questions on the baptismal fonts (see April 13), a Minnesota reader had asked: "In my parish we have a large baptismal font (sufficient to perform immersion baptisms) in a baptistry which is at the main entrance to the sanctuary. We also have a different set of doors where about half of the congregation exits the sanctuary. My question is: Can you have separate holy water fonts at the exit doors of the church or does that conflict with the theology of having only one font because there is only one baptism and we can only have one baptismal font?"

The question implies that in this parish the baptismal font doubles as a holy water stoup. This procedure is not ideal, since they are normally two distinct elements in church architecture.

In fact, except for Eastertide, the rite of baptism foresees the blessing of the baptismal holy water. It follows that, if the baptismal font habitually contains water, as occasionally occurs in new fonts, it is not necessarily blessed holy water as usually understood.

The tradition of placing holy water stoups at the entrance of the church probably originated with the custom of early Christians of washing their hands before entering the basilica in a fountain opportunely located in the atrium and called a cantharus or phiala. The custom was not just for practical purposes, as can be seen in St. John Chrysostom's admonition to those who "enter church washing their hands but not their hearts" (Homily LXXI on St. John).

When in time the atrium of most churches was reduced to a porch or narthex, the cantharus gave way to smaller stoups placed just inside the entrance of the church.

This change also led to the disappearance of any practical usage of water, leaving only the religious meaning as a symbol of baptism and purification. Although the practice already existed in some places, it was Pope Leo IV (847-855) who ordered priests to bless and sprinkle the people with holy water every Sunday before Mass. In some places this was done by the priest as the people entered the church. The present custom of crossing oneself is apparently of later origin.

There are relatively few extant examples of stoups from before the 11th century, although there are some probable examples going back several centuries earlier. There are no universally established rules regarding the size, shape and design of stoups, and many forms are found.

The diocesan norms issued for Milan by St. Charles Borromeo (1538-1584) greatly influenced subsequent usages. He wrote: "The vessel intended for holy water shall be of marble or of solid stone, neither porous nor with cracks. It shall rest upon a handsomely wrought column and shall not be placed outside of the church but within it and, insofar as possible, to the right of those who enter. There shall be one at the door by which the men enter and one at the women's door. They shall not be fastened to the wall but removed from it as far as convenient. A column or a base will support them and it must represent nothing profane."

In conclusion, the baptismal font is distinct from the holy water stoup, and there can be additional stoups at secondary church entrances so that the faithful can make use of this venerable sacramental.

Thursday, April 22, 2010

Article: What Use Is Literature?

MYRON MAGNET

Aristotle perhaps didn’t go far enough when he said that tragedy was more philosophic than history, concentrating as it does on what might be rather than merely on what had been.

He might have gone on to say that tragedy – or, more broadly, literature – is more philosophic even than philosophy. It is a form of knowledge that draws on all our ways of knowing, rather than on ratiocination alone. And it is a more intense form of knowledge, since, unlike philosophy, it isn't constantly taking its own pulse, or checking its instruments, anxiously asking itself how it can know this or that. As Dickens would say, it just goes and knows it.

Two or three decades ago, the belief that literature was a repository of knowledge – and important knowledge – was usual enough for critics to take it for granted. At the very least, everybody understood that literature was a storehouse of documentary knowledge. We could learn about how others lived – the Greeks, the men of the Middle Ages, our own contemporaries: how they judged one another, what they considered good manners, how they fell in love, what their family life was like, how they structured their society, when they dined, how they grew up and took their place in the world of adults.


But that was only the beginning. Literature also teaches us more about psychology than the psychologists can. The inner life – and its relation to the outer appearance, from which it is often (and proverbially) very different – is literature's special subject. It is a particularly complex subject, with its interweaving of motives and impulses, as appetites grapple with ideals, as consciousness both registers and distorts external reality, as natural promptings intersect with social ambitions, and the universal in our nature takes on the fashion and the garb of a particular age.

Here literature's weakness – that, unlike philosophy, it is unsystematic – becomes its great strength. It mobilizes all our faculties of knowledge at once: not just our ability to analyze the outer world but our introspection and intuition as well. We can understand what is going on in the hearts of others because we know what stirs our own hearts, and what could stir them. When a writer imagines his characters' inner drama, his description rings true to us because we have felt similar impulses or imagined analogous situations, and, further, can identify sympathetically with something beyond our ken. We grasp intuitively the complex internal mix: the simultaneous interplay of feelings, thoughts, beliefs, and hopes, of conscious and subliminal impulses – as pity combines with social anxiety, say, or with eros or vanity or sudden insight to impel a character to behave as he behaves. Literature is the great school of motivation: it teaches us how, out of the complex welter of impulses churning within us, we make the choices that define us and seal our fate.

And it dramatizes for us the consequences of those choices. Do they lead to happiness or misery, decency or not – and for whom? What do the high-handedness of Menelaus and the anger of Achilles produce? What dire offence from am'rous causes springs? What results from the choices of Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina? What happens to the soul of a man who kills a "useless" old pawnbroker – or, at the urging of his wife, the king of Scotland?


The inner life – and its relation to the outer appearance, from which it is often (and proverbially) very different – is literature's special subject.

These choices have ramifications not just for individuals but often for the whole social order. So it is on many levels that literature asks: How should we live? What is the right life for man? And to ask such questions, it must ask the further question: What is human nature, and what guideposts and constraints does it set for the kind of life we can choose? How do we realize to the full the potentialities for excellence and happiness that nature implants in us? Therefore, to add to its rich complexity, even while literature is exercising all our ways of knowing at once, it often is also taking two simultaneous perspectives, the personal and the social – and examining (at least implicitly) the ways in which the two realms intersect with and affect each other. As in music, many different voices interweave to create one larger harmony, transcending the sum of its parts.

Literature is a conversation across the ages about our experience and our nature, a conversation in which, while there isn't unanimity, there is a surprising breadth of agreement. Literature amounts, in these matters, to the accumulated wisdom of the race, the sum of our reflections on our own existence. It begins with observation, with reporting, rendering the facts of our inner and outer reality with acuity sharpened by imagination. At its greatest, it goes on to show how these facts have coherence and, finally, meaning. As it dramatizes what actually happens to concrete individuals trying to shape their lives at the confluence of so many imperatives, it presents us with concrete and particular manifestations of universal truths. For as the greatest authors know, the universal has to be embodied in the particular – where, as it is enmeshed in the complexity and contradictoriness of real experience, it loses the clarity and lucidity that only abstractions can possess.


Well, you may object, if this is what literature's insights amount to, then it is a realm of opinion, not knowledge. And just such doubts have been eating away at the confidence of literary critics, with growing force, over the last quarter century. In the face of science, with its spectacular practical achievements and its unequivocal experimental truths, what claim had literature – admittedly fiction – to a kind of truth? Wasn't it just fantasy, interesting perhaps, but ultimately ephemeral and useless? And if anyone wanted to know about the world that literature supposedly elucidated, we had the "human sciences" – studies like sociology and psychology and anthropology – that brought the rigor and authority of science (as its practitioners claimed, at least) to what literature handled in so amateur a fashion.

But we should take the claims of the human sciences, even sometimes of the harder sciences, with a certain skepticism. Too many "studies" and "reports," with tables of data in small print appended, have purported to reveal truths about welfare or policing or sex education but in fact have revealed nothing but the initial prejudices of the "investigators." For me, the epiphany came when I interviewed the nation's leading climatologists for a magazine article on acid rain (about which I knew nothing) and discovered mostly ideology, not knowledge – among scientists. When I also learned some years ago that academic paleontologists at that time couldn't hope to get tenure if they questioned the theory that a giant meteor explosion had caused the extinction of the dinosaurs – thus providing a model of what a so-called nuclear winter would produce – my own skepticism took on a certain wryness.

The social scientists have a mantra: "The plural of anecdote is not data." I think they are mistaken. An accumulation of accurate stories about how the human world works, stories that provide an account wrapped in an interpretation, adds up to knowledge, better knowledge than we can get elsewhere. Data are meaningless until we can articulate a story that makes sense out of them, and literature makes sense out of the data of human experience.


Literature is a conversation across the ages about our experience and our nature, a conversation in which, while there isn't unanimity, there is a surprising breadth of agreement.

Can anyone think that there is more understanding to be gained about the human heart from Freud than from Shakespeare – that the studies of Dora or the Wolf Man approach anywhere near to the profundity of understanding embodied in Macbeth or Lear, with their unflinching elucidation of man's (and woman's) capacity for evil? Can anyone think that the studies of Margaret Mead or Alfred Kinsey tell us anything nearly as true as Ovid or Turgenev? Does the sociobiology of E. O. Wilson or Richard Dawkins tell us any more than we learn from Homer or Virgil?

An exquisite little poem of Tennyson's, called "1865-66," sums up this point infinitely better than I could do:

I stood on a tower in the wet,
And New Year and Old Year met,
And winds were roaring and blowing;
And I said, "O years, that meet in tears,
Have ye aught that is worth the knowing?
Science enough and exploring,
Wanderers coming and going,
Matter enough for deploring,
But aught that is worth the knowing?"
Seas at my feet were flowing,
Waves on the shingle pouring,
Old Year roaring and blowing,
And New Year blowing and roaring.

What's wanted is wisdom: the ability to see into the heart of things. This is the kind of knowledge that Plato describes so poetically in that most literary of all philosophical passages, the allegory of the cave: the knowledge that sees through the world of appearances to the Truth, of which the appearances are but an emanation – a knowledge that requires a lifetime of reason and study to attain but that comes finally in a flash of intuition, because the Truth is in us, in an inner nature we can glimpse by introspection and intuition, as well as in the world. And this is the knowledge – a knowledge, one might say, that resides in our souls as well as in our minds – that great literature embodies.

It is a knowledge that has its practical uses, too, no less than scientific knowledge; for if it doesn't build computers or space shuttles, it builds civilizations. It defines what it means to be human, dramatizing the values and ideals, the web of culture, that differentiate us from the beasts.


Consider four very brief examples. Start with Sophocles, since Oedipus Rex really does stand at the beginning of our tradition. Here is a work in which the author stacks the deck just as much as you can possibly stack it. A man commits two terrible crimes – universally terrible, not just bad by the standards of this or that society. But he didn't know that he was committing them; he didn't know that the man he killed was his father or that the queen he married was his mother. Not knowing what he was doing, he certainly didn't intend to commit these crimes. Furthermore, he was fated to do those terrible things, as oracles plainly stated at his birth. So with every kind of extenuating circumstance surrounding his actions, was he responsible?

Sophocles answers a resounding Yes. What it means to be human, he shows us, is that you take responsibility for your actions. In a world of uncertainty and chance, where so much is out of our control, this is the only way we can assert that we are moral creatures with free will, whose doings have meaning, rather than being just part of the mere flux and confusion of brute creation. This is a hard doctrine, but one that has undiminished resonance for us in our own era, whose search for extenuation and victimization diminishes rather than ennobles all it touches. And it is this acceptance of responsibility that makes Oedipus truly a tragic hero, with equal emphasis on both those words.

What's wanted is wisdom: the ability to see into the heart of things.

Now flash forward two millennia to a dramatic world that seems as though it belongs on another planet, the world of Mozart's magical comic opera Così fan tutte – "They All Do It." Its libretto, written by Lorenzo da Ponte, who also wrote the libretti for Don Giovanni and The Marriage of Figaro before ending up in New York as Columbia's first professor of Italian, tells the wonderfully silly story of a bet two handsome young men make with their cynical older friend. Your two girlfriends, the older man says, whom you claim to be paragons of faithfulness, will not stay true to you if put to the test. Pretend to be called off to war, then come back disguised as noble Albanians, woo each other's girls, and you'll see.

Well, you know the result. But when the boys pretend to go off to war, the girls sing such a piercingly sweet lament of loss and farewell (for we are in a realm of literature-plus) that you know their love is real, even though they later fall for the supposed Albanians and so prove – temporarily – unfaithful. And the opera's point is that, yes, from one point of view, one good-looking boy is much like another; still, from another point of view, the person we choose is unique and special and the only one for us. We are creatures of animal instinct; but as we marshal that indiscriminate instinct into an act of discriminating and binding choice, we transform the natural into the human and create a new realm of feeling and meaning in the process.


Così gets performed somewhere every year, and Jane Austen's Emma, published a quarter century later, is just as perennial: Gwyneth Paltrow stars in the recent movie version of it, and Alicia Silverstone played the same character in the adaptation Clueless. No wonder this story has lasted: its title character is adorable – irresistible despite her invincible self-satisfaction and self-delusion, perhaps excusable in one so very young and pretty and, as it happens, upscale. The story's key event is an act of bad manners: Emma insults a family friend, Miss Bates, and wounds her feelings. True, Miss Bates is the kind of boring old maid whose endless chatter about trivialities makes you cringe when you see her coming, but she is a harmless and kindly person. True, too, Emma's rudeness doesn't approach what you can now hear on TV or on the streets every hour of the day; it is only a sarcastic crack about Miss Bates's talkiness.

But the man Emma loves calls her on the carpet for her behavior: she's at the top of the social heap in her little town, he says, and if she treats Miss Bates with contempt, others will follow suit, causing injury to a poor and dependent but good-hearted person. Manners are not trivial, a matter of which fork to use; they are a department of morals, part of the code – that web of culture, again – by which we succeed in living in harmony with one another. Manners are another key part of the humanizing project, through which we convert eating into dining, sex into romance and courtship, and our everyday interactions into occasions for cooperation rather than conflict.

Today, of course, many would object that all this is fake and stilted, and that we should just be natural and sincere and not trouble ourselves with the courtesies and conventionalities. So let me end with an early novel of Dickens's, Martin Chuzzlewit, which has something to say about just this question. You want to know what people are like when they are natural and dispense with the courtesies? Fine, Dickens says; let's go out to the American frontier (which he actually visited in 1842). The natural landscape, far from being like the Garden of Eden, is a disease-carrying swamp; the inhabitants, who call themselves Nature's Noblemen, are coarse, deceitful, and violent. All of them carry guns and knives – and, among other proclivities, they have no problem with enslaving other people.

Literature is the great school of motivation: it teaches us how, out of the complex welter of impulses churning within us, we make the choices that define us and seal our fate.

If you want something better, says this great novelist of the modern city, let's go back to London, an alternative realm to nature, a man-made place where you hear horses neighing and stamping not in fields but in underground stables, where you see oranges not on trees but in crates carried through the streets at unseasonable times of the year, where flowers bloom in pots on high-up windowsills, where the smoke from the chimneys creates its own, quite unnatural atmosphere. But this is an environment that is wonderful for people. It's like a hothouse, in whose controlled climate people can develop their selfhood to the full. For it is precisely in this artificial, man-made realm – a social realm in which people make up stories and tell them to one another; make up selves and present them to one another; make up the ceremonies that consecrate their doings – that mankind remakes itself into something that fulfills all the potentialities of our nature that nature alone can't make bloom.


One final point. The era that confidently viewed literature in the way that I have described has of course been over for some years now. A newly emergent critical orthodoxy has taken a wrecking bar to literature. Critics no longer see the literary enterprise as reliably trying to show us the truth of our condition and the possibilities it offers but instead trying to hoodwink us into tolerating political and social oppression that we would instantly reject, could we but free our minds from the myths and mystifications with which authors, mere apologists of the established and the powerful, have beguiled us. The critic's job now is not to dive down to the heart of the truth the author had grasped and explain to a new generation of readers how it applies to lived experience; he is to unmask the author's imposture, to reveal how the author, unconscious himself of his actual motives and blind to the reality he purports to illuminate, really is a kind of lackey, devoid of the critic's keen ability to see that the social relations, conventions, and beliefs that the author celebrates as humanizing and civilizing man in reality do exactly the opposite, constraining and diminishing him. To these critics, the truth of literature has become its falsehood; the author, however great, is merely the gullible propagandist of one or another tyranny.

For all that, the literate public has kept on reading literature, whose great works will still be there to instruct and inspire mankind long after the works of that angry, arrogant, and obtuse generation of critics have turned to dust.



ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Myron Magnet. "What Use Is Literature?" City Journal (Summer, 2003).

Reprinted with permission of City Journal.

City Journal is published by the Manhattan Institute, a think tank whose mission is to develop and disseminate new ideas that foster greater economic choice and individual responsibility.

THE AUTHOR

Myron Magnet is the author of The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties' Legacy to the Underclass. He is City Journal's editor-at-large and was its editor from 1994 through 2006. He is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal.

Copyright © 2010 City Journal

Article: Ad Multos Annos

ROBERT ROYAL

Today is the fifth anniversary of Joseph Ratzinger’s election as successor to St. Peter.

It was a happy day in 2005 and it's sad that this year's celebration comes amid much controversy. But our press, with all its sophistication and technology, is not really equipped to detect holiness or even simple goodness. And wouldn't much know what to do with them. So let's put aside for one day the stories of abuse – and the stories about the fairness or unfairness of the stories – to look at some of the more lasting things that this intelligent and gentle soul has done, before and after becoming Benedict XVI.

There are quite a few of them. He seems to have been destined to become a world-class theologian. But not in the merely cerebral sense. He was born in 1927, entre les deux guerres, "between the two wars" that radically shook Europe's confidence in its own culture. Though he admires Thomas Aquinas for reconciling faith and reason, he did not adopt the then popular neo-scholasticism (as a contemporary from his native Bavaria put it in the local dialect, "scholasticism wasn't his beer"). Ratzinger latched on to an Augustinianism that he saw as better suited to our moment: "ultimately it is not enough for a man that God is supposed to have said this or that to us, or that we can imagine this or that about him. Only if he had done something and is something for us, then what we need has come about upon which we can base our life."

This God who moves first to meet us lay behind his – and Karol Wojtyla's – initial enthusiasm for Vatican II. But He also came in a specific historical form. When reforms started to turn into revolutions, Ratzinger's was one of the most brilliant exponents of the truth that the authentically new is always in living continuity with the tradition. Paul VI appointed him archbishop of Munich and Freising in 1977, and John Paul II made him prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) only four years later.

Cardinal Ratzinger was often described as "God's Rottweiler" or der Panzercardinal. The media picked up these slurs from dissident Catholics. Though he was responsible for doctrinal orthodoxy at CDF, there has perhaps never been an occupant of the post less of a Grand Inquisitor.

When John Allen did his critical book on Ratzinger (which he later regretted), he discovered that Ratzinger's students, even those who deeply disagreed with his views, described him as the best prepared, most accessible, and well intentioned of professors. That has been a constant character trait. Even when lines had to be drawn at the CDF on Liberation Theology or other innovations, he never entirely closed off dialogue (after his election, he invited Hans Küng to Rome, who returned the kindness with multiple criticisms in the press). Indeed, he's opened real dialogue with leading European secularist thinkers like Jürgen Habermas. The ex-Panzer Cardinal had the American press eating out of his hand during his 2008 visit because of his obvious sincerity and gentleness. No one was more surprised than the press itself – though it has a short memory.

He continued an enormous intellectual output in the midst of all this other activity. If you want a good sense of the man and his thought, pick up Salt of the Earth or God and the World, the two books of interviews he did with the German journalist Peter Seewald – which brought Seewald himself back to Catholicism. They're easy to read and very rich. On every page, you encounter an active, searching mind, firm in faith, but aware that faithfulness means a constant, renewed determination to face the challenges of life and to seek deeper understanding through them.

Here's a passage taken almost at random:

If we become steel hard, impenetrable, that would mean a loss of humanity and sensibility in dealing with other people. [The Roman philosopher] Seneca the stoic said: Sympathy is abhorrent. If, on the other hand, we look at Christ, he is all sympathy, and that makes him precious to us. Being sympathetic, being vulnerable, is part of being a Christian. One must learn to accept injuries, to live with wounds, and in the end to find therein a deeper healing.

Some Rottweiler

Pressed by Seewald on his own vocation, which Ratzinger once called "a real meeting" with God, he dismissed any mystical event, but explained, "Perhaps one might describe it as something that gets right past your guard and burns its way into your inmost being."

Of course, this is not to be read in the sappy modern way of thinking that sympathy abolishes distinctions and truth. Still less does it mean accepting individualistic forms of do-it-yourself spirituality. Ratzinger identified the loss of the communal dimension – which is perhaps part of the general loss of faith in institutions since the two World Wars – as a distortion of Christianity. We don't just sit down with the Bible and draw a teaching out of it. That just makes Christianity another philosophy. Religion, he notes, has not disappeared, even in Europe: "religions are springing up all over the place."

The problem is that these are ultimately systems of self-help that we manufacture with no real roots. They could have existed without the sacred history of Israel and the Church – which is to say if God had never bothered about us. This is the deep source of the "dictatorship of relativism" he spoke of just before his election. Of the central role of the Church, he has said: "If her faith collapsed and she were to declare herself, so to speak, spiritually bankrupt and say, We have been mistaken, then a fracture would run through the whole of history and of mankind, the implications of which would be quite unimaginable."

Pressed by Seewald on his own vocation, which Ratzinger once called "a real meeting" with God, he dismissed any mystical event, but explained, "Perhaps one might describe it as something that gets right past your guard and burns its way into your inmost being."

Thank God it did, and thank God for Joseph Ratzinger, our Holy Father now these five hard years. Ad multos annos.





ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Robert Royal. "Ad Multos Annos." The Catholic Thing (April 19, 2010).

Reprinted with permission from The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@thecatholicthing.org.

The Catholic thing – the concrete historical reality of Catholicism – is the richest cultural tradition in the world. That is the deep background to The Catholic Thing which bring you an original column every day that provides fresh and penetrating insight into the current situation along with other commentary, news, analysis, and – yes – even humor. Our writers include some of the most seasoned and insightful Catholic minds in America: Michael Novak, Ralph McInerny, Hadley Arkes, Michael Uhlmann, Mary Eberstadt, Austin Ruse, George Marlin, William Saunders, and many others.

THE AUTHOR

Robert Royal is editor-in-chief of The Catholic Thing, and president of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C. Among his books are The Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century: A Comprehensive Global History, Dante Alighieri: Divine Comedy, Divine Spirituality, The Pope's Army: 500 Years of the Papal Swiss Guard, 1492 and All That: Political Manipulations of History, The Virgin and the Dynamo: The Use and Abuse of Religion in Environmental Debates, and most recently, The God That Did Not Fail: How Religion Built and Sustains the West. Robert Royal is on the advisory board of the Catholic Education Resource Center.

Copyright © 2010 The Catholic Thing