Catholic Metanarrative

Friday, May 28, 2010

Excerpt: Consequences for Christian Involvement in Politics

Editor's note: In a way of celebrating the five years we've been online, Catholic Metanarrative presents an excerpt of a lecture prepared by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Politische Vision und Praxis der Politik), which was delivered in Trent, Italy on September 2002. (The lecture can be read in full in the book "Values in a Time of Upheaval" published by Ignatius Press and Crossroad Publishing.)

I find it nice to refresh ourselves with the principles of how we can contribute to society, as many of the governments all around the world have experienced a change in its composition -- or have been threatened by anarchy and activism. Although the excerpt is just a small portion of the entire lecture, it does provide some points for us to ponder.

*~*~*

What consequences may we infer from this for the connection between political vision and political praxis today? One might no doubt write an immensely long monograph on this topic, but I do not feel that that is my task. I would like to offer two theses, indicating as briefly as possible how the consequences of what I have written might be translated into action today.

1. Politics is the realm of reason -- not of a merely technological, calculating reason, but of moral reason, since the goal of the state, and hence the ultimate goal of all politics, has a moral nature, namely, peace and justice. This means that moral reason (or, perhaps better, the rational insight into what serves justice and peace, i.e., what is moral) must be activated ever anew and defended against anything that might lend obscurity and thus paralyze the capacity for moral insight. One-sided interests form alliances with power and generate myths in various forms that present themselves as the true path to the moral dimension in politics. But in reality, these are blind spots of those who exercise power -- and they make other people blind too.

In the twentieth century, we experienced the formation of two great myths with terrible consequences: racism, with its lying promise of salvation, propagated by National Socialism, and the divinization of revolution against the background of dialectical historical evolutionism. In both case, the primal moral insights of man into good and evil were dismissed. We were told that whatever served the superiority of the race, or anything that served to bring about the future world, was "good," even if the previous insights of mankind would have call it "bad."

After the disappearance of the great ideologies from the world stage, today's political myths are less clearly defined. But even now there exists mythical forms of genuine values that appear credible precisely because their starting point is these values. They are dangerous because they offer a one-sided version of these values in a way that can only be termed mythical. I would say that in people's general consciousness today, there are three dominant values that are presented in a mythical one-sidedness that puts moral reason at risk. There three are progress, science and freedom.

2. We are continually obliged to undertake new demythologizing in order that reason may truly come into its own. Yet here again is another myth that must be unmasked, one that confronts us with the ultimately decisive question of rational politics. In many cases, perhaps in virtually all cases, a majority decision is the "most rational" way to achieve common solutions. But the majority cannot be an ultimate principle, since there are values that no majority is entitled to annul. It can never be right to kill innocent persons, and no power can make this legitimate. Here too, what is ultimately at stake is the defense of reason. Reason -- that is, moral reason -- is above the majority. But how is it possible to discern these ultimate values that are the basis of all "rational" and morally correct politics and are therefor binding on every person, irrespective of how majorities may shift and change? What are these values?

Constitutional theory in classical antiquity, in the Middle Ages, and even in the conflicts of the modern period, has appealed to the natural law that can be known by "right reason" (ratio recta). Today, however, this "right reason" seems to have ceased delivering answers to our questions, and natural law is considered, no longer as accessible to the insight of all persons, but rather as a specifically Catholic doctrine. This signifies a crisis of political reason, which is a crisis of politics as such. It seems that all that exists today is partisan reason, no longer a reason common to all men, at least as far as the great fundamental structures of values are concerned. All who bear responsibility for peace and justice in the world -- and in the last analysis, that means all of us -- have the urgent task of working to overcome this state of affairs. This endeavor is by no means hopeless, since reason itself will always make its voice heard against the abuse of power and one-sided partisanship.

In my debate with the philosopher Arcais de Flores, we touched precisely on this point: the limitations of the principle of consensus. The philosopher could not deny that there exist values that even the majority must simply accept. But what are these values? Confronted with this problem, the moderator of the debate, Gad Lerner, asked, "Why not take the Ten Commandments as a criterion?" It is perfectly correct to point out that the Decalogue is not the private property of Christians or Jews: it is a sublime expression of moral reason, and as such it finds echoes in the wisdom of the other great cultures. To take the Ten Commandments as our criterion might be a tremendous help in healing reason so that "right reason" may once again get to work.

This also makes clear what faith can contribute to correct politics. Faith does not make reason superfluous, but it can contribute evidence of essential values. Through the experiment of a life of faith, these values acquire a credibility that also illuminates and heals reason. In the last century (as in every century), it was in fact the testimony of the martyrs that limited the excesses of power, thus making a decisive contribution to what we might call the convalescence of reason.

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Wednesday Liturgy: The "Adoro Te Devote"

ROME, MAY 25, 2010 (Zenit.org).- Answered by Legionary of Christ Father Edward McNamara, professor of liturgy at the Regina Apostolorum university.


Q: Can you confirm me that there is a new version of Adore Te Devote (published by the Vatican already some years ago)? Is this version compulsory? -- R.M., Antwerp, Belgium

A: Effectively there are two variants of this beautiful hymn. Most of the variations occur in the first two verses. The substitution of the words "posset omni scélere" for "quit ab omni scélere" in the second-to-last verse and "cupio" for "sitio" in the closing one are practically the only other changes.

This hymn is usually attributed to St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) even though the earliest extant manuscript hails from about 50 years after his death. References to Aquinas' hymn in the writings of his Franciscan contemporary Jacopone da Todi (1228-1306, author of the Stabat Mater) tend to confirm its authenticity.

In spite of its saintly authorship the hymn never entered into the official liturgy and was only saved from obscurity when Pope St. Pius V included it among the prayers of thanksgiving after communion in his missal of 1570. Paul VI incorporated it into the Roman ritual, using a critical text established by the liturgist Dom André Wilmart.

The variations in the first verse are:

"Adóro te devóte, latens Déitas, quae sub his figúris vere látitas: tibi
se cor meum totum súbicit, quia te contémplans totum déficit."

"Adóro devóte latens véritas / Te quae sub his formis vere látitas "

And the second verse:

"Visus, tactus, gustus in te fállitur, sed audítu solo tuto créditur.
Credo quidquid dixit Dei Fílius; nil hoc verbo veritátis vérius."

"Visus, tactus, gustus in te fállitur, sed solus audítus tute créditur.
Credo quidquid dixit Dei Fílius; nihil Veritátis verbo vérius."

Taking into account the rules of poetic meter, it would appear that the second version is probably closer to the original, although the other version has been consecrated by centuries of use.

There are more than 16 known English translations, sometimes of one, sometimes of the other version. One translation of the common version goes:

"O Godhead hid, devoutly I adore Thee,
Who truly art within the forms before me;
To Thee my heart I bow with bended knee,
As failing quite in contemplating Thee.

"Sight, touch, and taste in Thee are each deceived;
The ear alone most safely is believed:
I believe all the Son of God has spoken,
Than Truth's own word there is no truer token."

On the other hand, the rendering by great Jesuit poet Gerald Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) is partly based on the other variant. Likewise, it so closely imitates the original meter as to allow it to be sung to traditional chants.

"Humbly I adore thee, Verity unseen, Who thy glory hidest 'neath these shadows mean; Lo, to thee surrendered, my whole heart is bowed, Tranced as it beholds thee, shrined within the cloud.

"Taste, and touch, and vision, to discern thee fail; Faith, that comes by hearing, pierces through the veil. I believe whate'er the Son of God hath told; What the truth hath spoken, that for truth I hold."

Debate regarding the text is usually between those who prefer "latens veritas" to "latens Deitas." There are good arguments for both choices. Thus, Father George Rutler defends "latens veritas" saying:

"The 'Adoro te' does not speak of the 'hidden God' but of the 'hidden truth' that is God. After Plato in his cave approached divinity "'neath these shadows mean,' and Moses better approached the Living Presence 'shrined within the cloud,' the eucharistic Church discerns the Lord himself really present, by an activity of faith upon reason. Saint Thomas sings the intricate economy of substance and accident at the heart of the 'sacrament of sacraments.'"

On the other hand, in a series of beautiful meditations on the text of this hymn (ZENIT 2004), Capuchin Father Raniero Cantalamessa, preacher to the Papal Household, made the following argument:

"There is another reason that impels us to keep to the traditional text. This, like other venerated Latin liturgical hymns of the past, belongs to the community of the faithful that have sung it for centuries, have made it their own and almost re-created it, no less than to the author who composed it, often, however, remaining anonymous. The popular text is no less valuable than the critical text and it is with it, in fact, that the hymn continues to be known and sung in the whole Church.

"In every stanza of the Adoro Te Devote there is a theological affirmation and an invocation which is the prayerful response of the soul to the mystery. The theological truth recalled in the first stanza refers to the manner of the presence of Christ in the Eucharistic species. The Latin expression 'vere latitas' is charged with meaning, it means: he is hidden, but he really is (where the accent is on 'vere,' only the reality of the presence) and it also means: he truly is, but hidden (where the accent is on 'latitas,' on the sacramental character of this presence)."

It is hard to decide which view is correct. Even Wilmart's critical text is not accepted by all scholars. Both alternatives, however, as Father Rutler and Father Cantalamessa show, offer sublime praise to the Blessed Sacrament.

Is there an obligatory version? The "Adoro devote" probably has more weight in official texts, although the recently published Compendium Eucharisticum presents the traditional "Adoro te devote" form.

I would therefore conclude that either variant may be legitimately used according to local custom.

Wednesday Liturgy: Follow-up: Blue Liturgical Vestments

ROME, MAY 25, 2010 (Zenit.org).- Answered by Legionary of Christ Father Edward McNamara, professor of liturgy at the Regina Apostolorum university.


Related to the question about blue vestments (see May 11), a reader from Ghana had asked: "Is it important or necessary that the color of the statues of the Virgin Mary and the saints in the church follow the liturgical colors? For instance, during Lent would you put violet around the Virgin Mary instead of white, or green during ordinary time? In these same periods or liturgical times, should the altar be changed to white on Thursdays for adoration or not?"

There is no law regulating the vesting of images of sacred images and hence no requirement to do so according to the liturgical seasons. However, where such a custom exists it is good to maintain it.

For example, the costume of the famous statue of the Infant of Prague venerated in the Czech capital's church of Our Lady of Victory is frequently changed according to the feasts and seasons. There are many other shrines to Mary and the saints that have similar customs. These changes need not coincide with the liturgical seasons and may follow their own traditions.

It is still a widespread custom to place an antependium hanging down in front of the altar and varying in color according to the season or feast. While not obligatory, it is congruous to remove or change it to white for adoration, especially if the antependium is of a penitential hue.

A correspondent from the Philippines asked for details about the "Spanish privilege" of using blue vestments on the feast of the Immaculate Conception. This privilege was granted to Spain, its colonies, and Latin America by a decree of the Sacred Congregation of Rites on Feb. 12, 1864. Since the Philippines was still a Spanish colony at that time, I believe they continue to enjoy the privilege.

This privilege would not apply to Belgium, from whence came one of our previous column's questions. All remaining ties that Belgium had to Spain ceased with the Peace of Utrecht in 1715.

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Wednesday Liturgy: Kneeling Through the Doxology

ROME, MAY 18, 2010 (Zenit.org).- Answered by Legionary of Christ Father Edward McNamara, professor of liturgy at the Regina Apostolorum university.


Q: I wonder why in the United States the rule is to keep kneeling for the final Amen of the doxology, while in other countries the rule is to stand. In some places, people even elevate the hands, as in the Old Testament, while acclaiming the Amen. That Amen is accompanied by a sign of elevation-offering, which implies a movement of the whole community toward God. Kneeling at that moment seems to contradict the original meaning of the great Amen. What is important is not the rule in itself, but the meaning of the liturgical gesture in the whole context of the celebration. -- J.D., Poteet, Texas

A: The U.S. version of the General Instruction of the Roman Missal (GIRM) says in No. 43: "In the dioceses of the United States of America, they should kneel beginning after the singing or recitation of the Sanctus until after the Amen of the Eucharistic Prayer [...]." In the original Latin and other languages, the norm states that the people kneel during the consecration from the epiclesis to the "Mysterium fidei." It adds, however, that the custom of remaining kneeling for the entire Eucharistic Prayer may be praiseworthily maintained in places where it is prevalent.

Therefore, the two alternatives are a question of local tradition and custom. The Holy See approved the U.S. bishops' adaptation of the general rule because it was already a well-established practice in the country.

Although our reader makes an interesting point regarding the sign of elevating-offering, I believe that asking the people to rise up before the Amen would actually interrupt the prayer's natural flow. While gestures are important, the faithful's essential participation at this moment is in joining in the great Amen that concludes the canon. With this Amen the people in a way make all of the prayers and intercessions proclaimed by the priest their own and, through the priest, unite themselves to Christ's eternal sacrifice.

For this reason, the priest and deacon should hold the paten and chalice aloft until the Amen is fully concluded. As is mentioned in GIRM, No. 180: "At the final doxology of the Eucharistic Prayer, the deacon stands next to the priest, holding the chalice elevated while the priest elevates the paten with the host, until the people have responded with the acclamation, Amen."

Related to this is a recent 2009 official response to a doubt published in Notitiae, the organ of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments. The doubt asked if it was licit at a concelebration for several priests to raise sundry chalices during the doxology.

The Vatican congregation responded negatively and specifically reprobated the practice. The congregation stressed that only one paten and chalice should be raised at this moment. The congregation explained that it was not so much a gesture carried out to show the host and chalice to the people but rather to ritually express the words said by the priest in the final doxology.

Wednesday Liturgy: Follow-up: Bishop as a Concelebrant

ROME, MAY 18, 2010 (Zenit.org).- Answered by Legionary of Christ Father Edward McNamara, professor of liturgy at the Regina Apostolorum university.


A Canadian canonist sent me the following clarifying note: "In response to your 4 May 2010 column, 'Bishop as Concelebrant,' I would like to offer the following clarification. The responses to proposed doubts (Responsa ad dubia proposita) published in Notitiae are not authentic interpretations of the law. Authentic interpretations are treated in c. 16 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law. What distinguishes an authentic interpretation of law from, say, a private reply is the following: (1) laws are authentically interpreted by the legislator or the one to whom the same legislator has entrusted the power of authentically interpreting; (2) an authentic interpretation has the same force as the law itself; (3) authentic interpretations put forth in the form of law must be promulgated. The legislator has not, as far as I am aware, entrusted the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments with the power to authentically interpret laws. This is reserved to the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts (Pastor bonus, arts. 154-155). What is published in Notitiae is effectively an interpretation in the form of an administrative act in a particular matter. Names and particulars have been removed before publication. Consequently, it does not possess the force of law and it binds only those for whom and affects the matters for which it was given (c. 16, §3). Responses to proposed doubts should not be dismissed on account of this distinction. In publishing them in Notitiae, the CDWDS is revealing the praxis Curiae (cf. c. 19) and suggesting that the response has a more general interest and application. It is not, however, an authentic interpretation of the law."

I am very grateful to our reader for this note. As I have mentioned on other occasions, I am not a trained canonist and so can easily err with regard to the technical meanings of words.

At the same time, I am inclined to doubt that the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments has no authority to interpret liturgical law. My reasoning is the following:

-- Canon 2 specifically states: "For the most part the Code does not define the rites which must be observed in celebrating liturgical actions. Therefore, liturgical laws in force until now retain their force unless one of them is contrary to the canons of the Code." This canon affirms the existence of a true body of law that falls outside the aegis of the Code. This law is at the same time narrower in scope and more extensive in volume than the Code of Canon Law. This law is still found in multiple sources and has not been formally codified.

-- It would seem strange that such a vast body of law has no official interpretative authority. The Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts does not appear to be the appropriate body. Although it has made several authentic interpretations regarding liturgical matters, all of them refer exclusively to the Code. It has so far never issued an interpretation regarding liturgical matters not found in the Code.

-- Since the Congregation for Divine Worship officially issues almost all liturgical law, it is the most likely official organism for its interpretation. It would be something of an anomaly that it could not interpret its own laws.

-- When this congregation interprets liturgical law it does so in several ways. Sometimes it publishes private replies without any name, and this is certainly an example of the administrative act and the praxis curiae mentioned above by our reader. On the other hand, when it issues a "Response to a doubt," it adopts a technical Latin language format similar to that used by the Council for Legislative Texts when this body issues authentic interpretations. At the very least it has the appearance of the legislator's will to issue a definitive interpretation of a doubtful point of liturgical law.

For these reasons, although perhaps the expression "authentic interpretation" is not correct, I do believe that the Congregation for Divine Worship has the authority to interpret those liturgical laws not found in the Code of Canon Law.

Thursday, May 13, 2010

Article: Building better things, living better lives

FATHER RAYMOND J. DE SOUZA

My path to the priesthood went through the study of economics, so the past week I've spent at the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences is about as pleasant a task as I could imagine.

For many, the Vatican gardens would be ruined by several days of papers on economics, but I recognized it as a blessing. The dismal science it is not!

The academy is made up of a few dozen world-class social scientists, including two Nobel laureates in economics, both of them non-Catholic. I have spent my entire adult life on the university campus, but as an observer at these annual meetings, I get a taste of what university life should be but rarely is. Here we have the exploration of a problem of general interest by scholars who can speak out of their specialty to a general audience of intelligent people. The university norm is that scholars avoid general audiences and problems of general interest in favour of specializations so obscure that even their colleagues have trouble following their research.

The topics here change from year to year – development, security, education, peace and security. This year the topic was the economic crisis, with a special focus on philosophical and moral dimensions.

Economics has a philosophical dimension, and because it deals with human action, its roots are in moral philosophy. Economics often forgets this and pretends to be like engineering or physics, but human sciences remain human and social sciences remain social – the person matters, and the person lives with others.

A dominant theme of the deliberations was that too much of the economy had become "financialized." Too much energy was spent not on building better things or providing better services, but rather on financial instruments that were, as their name suggests, derivative of the real economy. In this derived – and contrived – world the normal rules of prudence, transparency and integrity were flaunted. When reality intruded, the result was catastrophic.

That's not left-wing rabble rousing. The chairman of Ferrari and the governor of the Italian central bank were among those who worried about the consequences of greed, the problems of moral hazard and the need for strong governance over financial instruments – which after all, are necessary for investment and trade.

There was a deeper concern too about "financialization" of common life beyond strictly economic concerns. Some relationships should obviously not be treated only in terms of commercial exchanges, like husbands and wives, or parents and children. But what about doctors and patients, or even banks and their clients? Is something not lost when those relationships are reduced only to their financial dimension?

Or consider the corporation. The profit it makes is an indication of its efficient use of resources in the provision of goods and services desired by others. It is also an association of people working co-operatively on a common project for the common good. What happens to a corporation then when it is considered not an association of free creative persons but a commodity to be bought and sold? When its profit is seen not as an indication of a well-functioning association but solely as a financial asset to be realized? Is that not only a human loss, but an economic one as well, undermining the foundations of economic stability?

Life makes room for gifts. Can economics?

If philosophical questions are not the usual metier of economists, theological ones are more challenging still. In his encyclical last year, Pope Benedict XVI argued that the logic of the gift had to find a place in economic life. That's not easy to do. The social phenomenon which is the object of economics is the exchange – we observe free exchanges, and then make conclusions about preferences, incentives, goals and even happiness. Without exchanges it is hard to imagine what economists would study.

Gifts are not exchanges. Indeed, a gift that becomes an exchange might be said to have been financialized into something else. In acquiring a commercial value it ceased to be a gift. Yet the gift is an essential part of being human – we experience it before we learn about exchanges. Life makes room for gifts. Can economics?

A useful distinction is often drawn between a market economy and a market society. The latter is the consequence of the financialization of everything. And if financialization weakens the economy, it wreaks havoc in society. Yet is it possible to have the former without the latter?

Academies are for asking such questions; universities should be too.



ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Father Raymond J. de Souza, "Building better things, living better lives." National Post, (Canada) May 6, 2010.

Reprinted with permission of the National Post and Fr. de Souza.

THE AUTHOR

Father Raymond J. de Souza is chaplain to Newman House, the Roman Catholic mission at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario. Father de Souza's web site is here. Father de Souza is on the advisory board of the Catholic Education Resource Center.

Copyright © 2010 National Post

Article: To know and follow the Lord

FATHER GEORGE RUTLER

In St. Paul, and in all the saints, is sensed the personality of Christ whom some adored and some scorned, but no one ever found manipulative, and not even His enemies found Him depressing.

A psychopath is often confused with a sociopath, but the latter is not mentally ill in a medical sense. Sociopaths, being more subtle and even charming, may do more harm to others than someone who is certifiably insane. Sociopaths are so absorbed in themselves that they lack any moral conscience, and blame others for their own failures while taking credit for the accomplishments of others. Sociopaths are manipulative and intimidating, skilled at bullying others while playing on their affections. They will use others for their own ends, either through flattery or humiliation, and lie without any sense of guilt, becoming vindictive when exposed. Sociopaths can be attractive, until you experience them.

The sociopath is the photographic negative of Christ in whom we can see the Father. In the sociopath, we catch a glimpse of the Prince of Lies. The sociopath makes sorrow a contagion, while Christ spreads joy (cf. John 15:11) by giving Himself to us as "grace," which enables us to love. The sociopath cannot love because he is frozen within himself. The youthful Saul of Tarsus may have been a budding sociopath, destructive in his self-regard, but the Risen Christ changed all that. Sixty percent of the occurrences of the word "joy" in the New Testament are from St. Paul, who did not know its meaning before his conversion. In Greek, joy and grace sound much the same, for hara is nurtured and perfected by haris. St. Paul says (2 Cor. 2:3 ff) that "my joy is the joy of you all," and he urges us to save others from becoming "swallowed up with overmuch sorrow." That word "overmuch" is the craft of the King James translation and needs no updating in our conflicted world. In St. Paul, and in all the saints, is sensed the personality of Christ whom some adored and some scorned, but no one ever found manipulative, and not even His enemies found Him depressing.

By following Our Lord as He walks into the cauldron of the earthly Jerusalem, with its rampant pathologies, the Church also walks toward the heavenly Jerusalem, where all is joy because all are looking at God instead of themselves.

"Be glad and rejoice for ever and ever for what I am creating, because I now create Jerusalem 'Joy' and her people 'Gladness.' I shall rejoice over Jerusalem and exult in my people. No more will the sound of weeping or the sound of cries be heard in her; in her, no more will be found the infant living a few days only, or the old man not living to the end of his days. To die at the age of a hundred will be dying young; not to live to be a hundred will be the sign of a curse. They will build houses and inhabit them, plant vineyards and eat their fruit" (Isaiah 65:18-21).



ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Father George William Rutler. "To know and follow the Lord." Weekly Column for March 21, 2010.

Reprinted with permission of Father George W. Rutler.

THE AUTHOR

Father Rutler received priestly ordination in 1981. Born in 1945 and reared in the Episcopal tradition, Father Rutler was an Episcopal priest for nine years. He was received into the Catholic Church in 1979 and was sent to the North American College in Rome for seminary studies. Father Rutler graduated from Dartmouth, where he was a Rufus Choate Scholar, and took advanced degrees at the Johns Hopkins University and the General Theological Seminary. He holds several degrees from the Gregorian and Angelicum Universities in Rome, including the Pontifical Doctorate in Sacred Theology, and studied at the Institut Catholique in Paris. In England, in 1988, the University of Oxford awarded him the degree Master of Studies. From 1987 to 1989 he was regular preacher to the students, faculty, and townspeople of Oxford. Cardinal Egan appointed him Pastor of the Church of Our Saviour, effective September 17, 2001.

Since 1988 his weekly television program has been broadcast worldwide on EWTN. Father Rutler has published 16 books, including: Coincidentally: Unserious Reflections on Trivial Connections, A Crisis of Saints: Essays on People and Principles, Brightest and Best, Saint John Vianney: The Cure D'Ars Today, Crisis in Culture, and Adam Danced: The Cross and the Seven Deadly Sins.

Copyright © 2010 Father George W. Rutler

Article: The High Cost of Ignoring Beauty

ROGER SCRUTON

People need beauty. In so many areas of modern life – in pop music, in television and cinema, in language and literature – beauty is being displaced by raucous and attention-grabbing clichés.

In Britain, the state, in the form either of local or central government, will tell you whether you can or cannot build on land that you own. And if it permits you to build, it will stipulate not only the purposes for which you may use the building, but also how it should look, and what materials should be used to construct it. Americans are used to building regulations that enforce utilitarian standards: insulation, smoke alarms, electrical safety, the size and situation of bathrooms, and so on. But they are not used to being told what aesthetic principles to follow, or what the neighborhood requires of materials and architectural details. I suspect that many Americans would regard such stipulations as a radical violation of property rights, and further evidence of the state's illegitimate expansion.

This American attitude has something healthy about it, but it tends to go with two quite erroneous assumptions about beauty and the aesthetic. The first assumption is that beauty is an entirely subjective matter, about which there can be no reasoned argument and concerning which it is futile to search for a consensus. The second assumption, congenial to those who adopt the first, is that beauty doesn't matter, that it is a value without economic reality, which cannot be allowed to place any independent constraint on the workings of the market.

Here is the democratic culture at work – on its way to mutual destruction.

The first assumption, that beauty is subjective, owes much of its appeal to the fact that it is functional in a democratic culture. By making this assumption you avoid giving offense to the one whose taste differs from yours. He likes garden gnomes, illuminated Christmas displays, Bing Crosby singing "White Christmas," and a thousand other things that send shudders down the educated spine. But that's his taste, and he is entitled to it. Leave him to enjoy it and he will leave you to get on with listening to Beethoven quartets, collecting antiques, and designing your house in the style of Palladio. But sometimes the assumption becomes dysfunctional. Each year his illuminated Christmas display increases in size, gets more bright and obtrusive, and lasts longer. Eventually his house has an all-year round Christmas tree, with Santa protruding from the chimney and brightly shining reindeer on the lawn. To be honest, the sight is insufferable, and entirely spoils the view from your window. You retaliate by playing Wagner late at night, only to receive blasts of Bing Crosby in the early hours. Here is the democratic culture at work – on its way to mutual destruction.

This kind of thing has been felt strongly in Europe, and it is one of the reasons for the reaction against McDonalds. While everyone has a right to advertise his wares, the advertisement must not spoil the place on which it shines. And American advertisements seem invariably designed to do just that. Maybe they don't have that effect in America: after all, it is hard to see how the average American main street can be spoiled by an illuminated sign or by anything else. But the main streets of European cities are the result of meticulous aesthetic decisions over centuries. Do we really want the double yellow arches competing with the arches of St. Mark's?

Even if Americans feel entitled to build as they wish, they don't feel entitled to behave as they wish towards their neighbors. In America's culture, manners are of supreme importance.


That question might prompt us to revise the assumption that beauty is subjective. Aesthetic judgements may look subjective when you are wandering in the aesthetic desert of Waco or Las Vegas. In the old cities of Europe, however, you discover what happens when people are guided by a shared tradition which not only makes aesthetic judgement central, but also lays down standards that govern what everybody does. And in Venice or Prague, in Bath, Oxford, or Lisbon, you come to see that there is all the difference in the world between aesthetic judgement treated as an expression of individual taste, and aesthetic judgement treated in the opposite way, as the expression of a community. Maybe we see beauty as subjective only because we have given the wrong place to aesthetic judgement in our lives – seeing it as a way of affirming ourselves, instead of a way of denying ourselves.

Maybe we see beauty as subjective only because we have given the wrong place to aesthetic judgement in our lives – seeing it as a way of affirming ourselves, instead of a way of denying ourselves.

There is a parallel here with manners. Even if Americans feel entitled to build as they wish, they don't feel entitled to behave as they wish towards their neighbors. On the contrary, in America's culture manners are of supreme importance, and recognized as the ultimate guarantee of peaceful coexistence. Americans greet their neighbors, speak politely, are always smiling. If someone bumps into them in the street they apologize; they cannot take leave of anyone, not even a stranger, without wishing him a wonderful day. And courtesy is the ruling principle of all business dealings. In short, American manners exist so that people will fit in, not stand out. They are ways in which individuality is suppressed, and a lingua franca of conformist gestures adopted in its stead. And this has a function, namely to protect the private from the public, to ensure that each person is secure within his space, and that the public realm is minimally threatening.

When it comes to beauty, our view of its status is radically affected by whether we see it as a form of self-expression, or as a form of self-denial. If we see it in this second way, then the assumption that it is merely subjective begins to fall away. Instead beauty begins to take on another character, as one of the instruments in our consensus-building strategies, one of the values through which we construct and belong to a shared and mutually consoling world. In short, it is part of building a home.

No greater aesthetic catastrophe has struck our cities – European just as much as American – than the modernist idea that a building should stand out from its surroundings.

We can see this clearly if we look at the rituals and customs of family life. Consider what happens when you lay the table for a meal. This is not just a utilitarian event. If you treat it as such, the ritual will disintegrate, and the family members will end up grabbing individual portions to eat on their own. The table is laid according to precise rules of symmetry, choosing the right cutlery, the right plates, the right jugs and glasses. Everything is meticulously controlled by aesthetic norms, and those norms convey some of the meaning of family life. The pattern on a willow-pattern plate, for example, has been fixed over centuries, and speaks of tranquillity, of gentleness and of things that remain forever the same. Very many ordinary objects on the table have been, as it were, polished by domestic affection. Their edges have been rubbed off, and they speak in subdued, unpretentious tones of belonging. Serving the food is ritualized too, and you witness in the family meal the continuity of manners and aesthetic values. You witness another continuity too, between aesthetic values and the emotion that the Romans knew as piety – the recognition that the world is in other than human hands. Hence the gods are present at mealtimes, and Christians precede their eating with a grace, inviting God to sit down among them before they sit down themselves.


That example tells us a lot about aesthetic judgement and the pursuit of beauty. In particular, it shows the centrality of beauty to home-building, and therefore to establishing a shared environment. When the motive of sharing arises, we look for norms and conventions that we can all accept. We leave behind our private appetites and subjective preferences, in order to achieve a consensus that will provide a public background to what we are and what we do. In such circumstances aesthetic disagreements are not comfortable disagreements like disagreements over taste in food (which are not so much disagreements as differences). When it comes to the built environment we should not be surprised that aesthetic disagreements are the subjects of fierce litigation and legislative enforcement – even here in America, where each person is sovereign in his land.

Jacobs's ideas have shared the fate of every prophecy in recorded history, which is to be ignored until it is too late to act on them.

No greater aesthetic catastrophe has struck our cities – European just as much as American – than the modernist idea that a building should stand out from its surroundings, to become a declaration of its own originality. As much as the home, cities depend upon good manners; and good manners require the modest accommodation to neighbors rather than the arrogant assertion of apartness.

We can reject the assumption that beauty is merely subjective without embracing the view that it is objective. The distinction between subjective and objective is neither clear nor exhaustive. I prefer to say that judgements of beauty express rational preferences, about matters in which the agreement of others is both sought and valued. They are not so very different, in those respects, from moral judgements, and often concern similar themes – as when we criticize works of art for their obscenity, cruelty, or sentimentality. Just how far we can go down the path of rational discussion depends upon what we think of the second assumption, namely, that beauty doesn't matter.

This returns me to the case of my neighbor's house, with its kitsch decorations and ghastly illuminated tableaus. These things matter to him; and they matter to me. My desire to get rid of them is as great as his desire to retain them – maybe even greater, given that my taste, unlike his, is deeply rooted in a desire to fit in with my surroundings. So here is one proof that beauty matters – and also that the attempt to coordinate our tastes is vital to sharing our home, our town, and our community.

In that case, however, there has to be a place for aesthetic judgement in the planning and building of cities. In a celebrated work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, Jane Jacobs argued that cities should develop spontaneously and organically, so as to enshrine in their contours the unintended results of the consensual transactions between their residents. Only then will they facilitate the peaceful evolution of urban life. A true city is built by its residents, in that every aspect of it reflects something that results from what uncountably many residents have wanted, rather than something that a few self-appointed experts have planned. And that is the aspect of old Rome, Siena, or Istanbul that most appeals to the modern traveller. Some urbanists interpret Jacobs's argument as showing that aesthetic values can be left to look after themselves; others, on the contrary, have insisted that her examples really derive their force from the aesthetic values that she smuggles in as side-constraints.

Tradition in architecture conveys the kind of practical knowledge that is required by neighborliness.

We should certainly recognize that the old cities whose organic complexity Jacobs admired show the mark of planning: not comprehensive planning, certainly, but the insertion, into the fabric of the city, of localized forms of symmetry and order, like the Piazza Navona in Rome, or the Suleimaniye mosque and its precincts in Istanbul. And those are projects entirely motivated and controlled by aesthetic values. The principal concern of the architects was to fit in to an existing urban fabric, to achieve local symmetry within the context of a historically given settlement. No greater aesthetic catastrophe has struck our cities – European just as much as American – than the modernist idea that a building should stand out from its surroundings, to become a declaration of its own originality. As much as the home, cities depend upon good manners; and good manners require the modest accommodation to neighbors rather than the arrogant assertion of apartness. The architects who win the big commissions today – Frank Gehry, Richard Rogers, Daniel Libeskind, Norman Foster – are people who design buildings like the Centre Beaubourg in Paris or the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, which stand apart from their surroundings, islands of Ego in a sea of Us. Foster has lighted in his travels upon the lovely 18th-century city of Lisbon and taken offence at its level architecture, which never rises above the height of an aristocratic palace, and concentrates all attention on the place where human life occurs, which is the street. He is therefore campaigning to build a large glass tower above the city, so as to provide a centre of attention in a place whose beauty arises precisely from the fact that attention is not centred but dispersed.

Jane Jacobs's target was not stylistic rudeness, however, but functionalism, according to which buildings are dictated by their purposes, so as to remain wedded to those purposes forever. Since there is, in human life, no such thing as "forever," the result is buildings that stand derelict after 20 years, and indeed whole cities that are abandoned as wasteland when the local industry dies. This effect is exacerbated in America by absurd zoning laws that banish industry to one part of town, offices to another part, and shopping to another, leaving the residential areas deserted in the daytime, and without the principal hubs of social communication. A city governed by zoning laws dies at the first economic shock – and we have seen this effect from Buffalo to Tampa, as areas of the city first lose their function, then become vandalized, and finally provide the sordid background to scenes of violence and decay. By clearing the city center of residents, American zoning laws leave it unguarded, prey to every kind of nomadism, and occupied by buildings that can never adapt to social and economic change. The law of ethology, which tells us that maladaptation is the prelude to extinction, applies also to the American city.

Architecture is not like poetry, music, or painting – an art that belongs in the world of leisure and luxury. It survives regardless of its aesthetic merit, and is only rarely the expression of creative genius.

Furthermore, functionalist building styles, which appropriate whole blocks, or thrust jagged corners in the way of pedestrians, prevent the emergence of the principal public space, which is the street. Streets, with doors that open onto them from houses that smile at them, are the arteries and veins, the lungs and digestive tracts of the city – the channels through which all communication flows. A street in which people live, work, and worship renews itself as life renews itself; it has eyes to watch over it, and shared forms of life to fill it. Nothing is more important than defending the street against expressways and throughways, against block development, and against zoning provisions that forbid genuine settlement.


Jacobs's ideas have shared the fate of every prophecy in recorded history, which is to be ignored until it is too late to act on them. Her message has been taken up and refined in recent years by James Howard Kunstler who, in The Geography of Nowhere, describes the aesthetic and moral disaster of American urbanization, as the zoning laws drive people constantly further from their places of work and recreation, leaving the abandoned wreckage of fleeting businesses in their wake. Kunstler has gone on to argue (in The Long Emergency) that suburbanization, which is the only consensual solution to the disaster, is unsustainable, and that America is preparing an extended emergency for itself when the oil runs out.

The failure of modernism, in my view, lies not in the fact that it has produced no great or beautiful buildings – the Chapel at Ronchamp, and the houses of Frank Lloyd Wright abundantly prove the opposite.

Whether or not you go along with Kunstler's doom scenario, the question that Jacobs has bequeathed to us remains. How do we get out of the mess? If the problem is planning, how can we plan to avoid it? And is there no distinction between a good plan and a bad plan? Wasn't Venice planned, after all, and Ephesus, and Bath, and a thousand other triumphs of urbanization? Perhaps the wisest response to Jacobs's argument therefore is to point to the distinction between plans and side-constraints. Although a free economy is needed if we are to solve the problem of economic coordination, freedom must be contained, and it is contained by law. Legal side-constraints ensure that cheats will not prosper. Likewise with the city: there must be planning, but it should be envisaged negatively, as a system of side-constraints, rather than positively, as a way of "taking charge" of what happens and where.


And here, it seems to me, is where beauty matters and how. Over time, people establish styles, patterns, and vocabularies which perform, in the building of cities, the same function as good manners between neighbors. A "neighbor," according to the Anglo-Saxon etymology, is one who "builds nearby." The buildings that go up in our neighborhood matter to us in just the way that our neighbors matter. They demand our attention, and shape our lives. They can overwhelm us or soothe us; they can be an alien presence or a home. And the function of aesthetic values in the practice of architecture is to ensure that the primary requirement of every building is served – namely, that it should be a fitting member of a community of neighbors. Buildings need to fit in, to stand appropriately side by side; they are subject to the rule of good manners just as much as people are. This is the real reason for the importance of tradition in architecture – that it conveys the kind of practical knowledge that is required by neighborliness.

Architecture is not like poetry, music, or painting – an art that belongs in the world of leisure and luxury. It survives regardless of its aesthetic merit, and is only rarely the expression of creative genius. There are great works of architecture and often, like the churches of Mansart or Borromini, they are the work of a single person. But most works of architecture are not great and should not aspire to be so, any more than ordinary people should lay claim to the privileges of genius when conversing with their neighbors. What matters in architecture is the emergence of a learnable vernacular style – a common language that enables buildings to stand side by side without offending each other.

The glass and steel-frame blocks, built without facades and indifferent to alignment with their neighbors are an ecological disaster.

The American towns were built using standard parts derived from the 3,000-year-old tradition which we know as classicism. The old pattern books (such as those published by Asher Benjamin in Boston in 1797 and 1806, and which are responsible for the once agreeable nature of the New England towns, Boston included) offered precedents to builders, forms which had pleased and harmonized, and which could be relied upon not to spoil or degrade the streets in which they were placed. That is what we see in the streets of European towns: not the imposition of some overall proportion or outline, but the organic growth of a street from the repetition of matching details. The failure of modernism, in my view, lies not in the fact that it has produced no great or beautiful buildings – the Chapel at Ronchamp, and the houses of Frank Lloyd Wright abundantly prove the opposite. It lies in the absence of any reliable patterns or types, which can be used in awkward or novel situations so as to spontaneously harmonize with the existing urban decor, and so as to retain the essence of the street as a common home. The degradation of our cities is the result of a "modernist vernacular," whose principal device is the stack of horizontal layers, with jutting and obtrusive corners, built without consideration for the street, without a coherent facade, and without intelligible relation to its neighbors. In other words, the degradation that we witness, and which is the real cause of the flight to the suburbs, results from the absence of aesthetic side-constraints.

When there are no such side-constraints, the costs should not be reckoned merely in terms of the uncomfortable and homeless feelings of the people who must work in the resulting wasteland. The costs are both environmental and economic. The glass and steel-frame blocks, built without facades and indifferent to alignment with their neighbours, are an ecological disaster. Traditional architecture concentrates on the generality of form, on details that embody the tacit knowledge of how to live with a building and adapt to it. Hence traditional architecture in turn adapts to us. It fits to our uses, and shelters whatever we do. Hence it survives – in the way that Georgetown and Old Town Alexandria have survived, though hampered, alas, by zoning laws. Modernist architecture cannot change its use, and architects assume that their buildings will have a life span of 20 years. Building with that thought in mind you are not building a settlement, still less a neighborhood. You are constructing an extremely expensive and ecologically destructive tent. The environmental impact of its demolition is enormous, and the energy that goes into building it must be spent again on demolishing it and yet again on replacing it.

But there is another cost, too, and it is one that we witness in individual lives as well as in the community. This is the aesthetic cost. People need beauty. They need the sense of being at home in their world, and being in communication with other souls. In so many areas of modern life – in pop music, in television and cinema, in language and literature – beauty is being displaced by raucous and attention-grabbing clichés.

In this respect it is worth also recalling that great human discovery, the window. The windows of traditional pattern-book houses form agreeable, humanizing details; they are the eyes of the house. In hot weather they can be opened to let in the breezes, and ensure a circulation of air. In cold weather they can be closed. They are adorned with simple mouldings and crowned with architrave and keystone that emphasize their proportions. They are integrated into the implicit order of the façade, so that it is easy to find the matching door or attic window which will look right beside them. In all this we see an accumulation of practical knowledge which issues from the aesthetic side-constraints in something like the way that deals and market transactions issue from good manners.

The windows of modern downtown buildings are not eyes; they do not humanize the façade; they suggest no form or pattern that could be repeated, and lay no constraints on what can and cannot be placed beside, above, and beneath them. They cannot be opened in hot weather, and they forbid the circulation of air from outside the building. The building therefore depends on a year-round consumption of energy, in the winter to heat it, in the summer to cool it, and the stale air that circulates inside captures and perpetuates the diseases of the inmates – producing that well-known "sick building syndrome," which is responsible for many lost days of work in modern cities. The result is not just an aesthetic disaster, it is an ecological disaster too. And it exemplifies an important feature of the modern world, which is the hard work that is being constantly expended on losing knowledge. The modernist vernacular, which conceives buildings as curtains of tinted glass raised on invisible scaffolds of concrete and steel, represents both an unusual advance for ignorance and a giant ecological threat. And architects and their theorists devoted an immense amount of intellectual labor to achieving this result.

I have concentrated on architecture since it provides such a clear illustration of the social, environmental, and economic costs of ignoring beauty. But there is another cost, too, and it is one that we witness in individual lives as well as in the community. This is the aesthetic cost. People need beauty. They need the sense of being at home in their world, and being in communication with other souls. In so many areas of modern life – in pop music, in television and cinema, in language and literature – beauty is being displaced by raucous and attention-grabbing clichés. We are being torn out of ourselves by the loud and insolent gestures of people who want to seize our attention but to give nothing in return for it. Although this is not the place to argue the point it should perhaps be said that this loss of beauty, and contempt for the pursuit of it, is one step on the way to a new form of human life, in which taking replaces giving, and vague lusts replace real loves.




"Why Beauty Matters" by Roger Scruton - BBC Two (part 1 of 6)

part two
part three
part four
part five
part six


ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Roger Scruton. "The High Cost of Ignoring Beauty." The American (December 19, 2009).

The American is a magazine of ideas published by the American Enterprise Institute. Reprinted with permission of the author, Roger Scruton.

THE AUTHOR

Roger Scruton is an adjunct scholar of the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC, a new position he took up in July 2009. Prior to that he was a research professor for the Institute for the Psychological Sciences. He is also a fellow of Blackfriars Hall in Oxford. He is a writer, philosopher and public commentator who has specialised in aesthetics with particular attention to music and architecture. He engages in contemporary political and cultural debates as a powerful conservative thinker and polemicist. He has written widely in the press on political and cultural issues. He has held visiting posts at Princeton, Stanford, Louvain, Guelph (Ontario), Witwatersrand (S. Africa), Waterloo (Ontario), Oslo, Bordeaux, and Cambridge, England. Mr. Scruton has published more than 30 books including, Beauty, Understanding Music: Philosophy and Interpretation, I Drink therefore I am, Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged, The Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Political Thought, News from Somewhere: On Settling, An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture, An Intelligent Person's Guide to Philosophy, Sexual Desire, The Aesthetics of Music, The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat, Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, A Political Philosphy, and most recently Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life. Roger Scruton is a member of the advisory board of the Catholic Education Resource Center.

Copyright © 2010 Roger Scruton


Article: Recognizing the True Church

FATHER JOHN A. HARDON, S.J.

There are two basic positions in the medley of world religions outside the Catholic Church.

One group of religious bodies professes lineal descent from the society that Jesus Christ established during His stay on earth. These are all the churches of Christendom separated from the unity of Rome. Another and larger group has either no historical dependence on the teaching of Christ, or, as in Mohammedanism, the relation is negligible. And these are the countless Oriental and African cults whose origin is generally pre-Christian and in some cases, like the primitive religion of China, has a traceable ancestry from third millennium B.C.

Any reasonable Catholic will ask himself what right he has to claim that his Church, alone of all the religious systems in the world, has the fullness of divine revelation and the guarantee of absolute truth. How does he know?

His method of proving that Catholicism is true will be determined by the purpose he has in view. If he intends to show that the Catholic Church today is the organization that Christ founded, he will examine what qualities the Savior wanted His Church to have, and if no other Christian body has them, then only Catholicism is the veritable Church of Christ. Since the time of Bellarmine (1542-1621) who wrote against the Reformers, four visible properties have been used to identify authentic Christianity from its pseudo counterpart. Christ made His Church one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. Consequently whatever Christian body answers to that description may legitimately call Jesus Christ her founder. An objective analysis of Roman Catholicism shows that only she satisfies the conditions and therefore she alone was founded by Christ and is animated by His divine Spirit.

But if a Catholic approaches the question on a global scale, and wants to prove that no other religion outside of his own is true, whether Christian or otherwise, he will not be immediately concerned with comparing the original Church of Christ with Catholicism. He will look for a broader and more inclusive principle of discrimination by which any religious system can be tested and its divine authorization verified. Such a principle is the norm of miracles, which even the unlettered primitive should recognize. It says simply that when God communicates a revelation (as claimed in some form by every organized religion), He will confirm the mysteries He reveals and make them rationally acceptable by working miracles in favor of the truths that he wants believed. Or put negatively He will not work miracles in support of a pretended revelation because, as Master of miraculous phenomena, He would be actively cooperating in a lie.

When Vatican Council in the last century set about defining the nature of the Catholic faith, it chose the latter method of proving the Church's divine authority by way of miracles, in preference to the former from the four qualities, on the assumption that the method chosen really includes the one transmitted. [1] After declaring that without faith it is impossible to please God, the Council explained how, "in order to enable us to fulfill our obligations of embracing the true faith and steadfastly persevering in it, God established the Church through His only-begotten Son and endowed her with unmistakable marks of her foundation, so that she could be recognized by all as the guardian and teacher of the revealed word." What are these unmistakable marks? They are "all the many marvelous proofs that God has provided to make the credibility of the Christian faith evident, (which) point to the Catholic Church alone." Specifically "the Church herself is a great, a perpetual motive of credibility and an irrefutable proof of her own divine mission" by reason of five classes of miracles that God has been working in and through her to the present day. There is the Church's "remarkable propagation, her exalted sanctity, her inexhaustible fruitfulness in all that is good, her catholic unity and her unshakeable stability." [2]


Phenomenal Propagation of Catholic Christianity

It would be naïve to invoke the miraculous assistance of God to explain a mere numerical increase in the Church's membership since the first mass conversion on Pentecost Sunday. There is a purely natural sense in which every religious institution multiplies its members, and even purely civil bodies like states or anti-religious movements like Communism can have a remarkable growth in numbers with the passage of time. In order to be supernatural, the development should be more than numerically considered; it must be in a society that loses none of its organic unity no matter how rapid or wide the extension; the increase must be in the face of great obstacles, violent opposition and contrary to the normal laws of social expansion; and above all, it must occur in spite of a natural repugnance to join or remain in an organization that places the heaviest demands on human generosity in voluntary submission and self-control. Moreover, to be genuinely miraculous, the propagation should be truly universal and extend to all Classes of people, in every nation and period of history.

First Three Centuries of the Christian Era. The diffusion of Christianity from the death of Christ to the Edict of Constantine (313 A.D.) was so remarkable that it became one of the strongest arguments of the second and third century apologists. In his dialogue with Trypho the Jew, St. Justin points to the fulfillment of the prophecy of Malachy as a confirmation of the Christian religion. "Your nation," he says, speaking of the Jews, "does not even now extend from the rising of the sun to the going down thereof, for there are nations among which none of your race has ever lived. But there is not one single race of men – whether barbarians, or Greeks, or persons called by any other name, nomads, or vagabonds, or herdsmen dwelling in tents – among whom prayers and thanksgivings are not offered to the Father and Creator of the universe in the name of the Crucified Jesus." [3] Justin's dialogue is dated about 155 A.D.

Towards the end of the second century, Tertullian adds further details on the number and variety of converts to Christianity. Addressing himself to the pagans, he tells them, "We are but of yesterday, yet we have filled every place among you: cities, islands, fortresses, towns, marketplaces, camp, tribes, town councils, the palace, the senate, the forum. We have left nothing to you but the temples of your gods…Unarmed, we could have overcome you. For if such a multitude of men as we are had broken loose from you and had gone into some remote corner of the earth, you would have had to look around for people to rule. There would have been more enemies than citizens left to you." [4] Even allowing for rhetorical exaggeration, this testimony is substantially accurate and corroborated by contemporary pagan writers. Thus Pliny the Younger as Proconsul of Bithynia wrote in the early second century to the Emperor Trajan for instructions on how to apply the laws of the empire in ferreting out the Christians. "This contagious superstition," he complained, "is not confined to the cities alone, but has spread through the villages and the rural districts." Then more hopefully, "It seems possible, however, to check and cure it. Certainly at least the temples, which had been almost deserted, begin now to be frequented." He therefore suggests leniency, since "it is easy to imagine what multitudes may be reclaimed from this error, if a door be left open for repentance." [5]

Pliny's letter to Trajan gives only a hint of the barbaric persecution waged against Christians precisely because their continued expansion was hostile to the state religion of paganism and therefore construed as a threat to the empire itself. Thus according to ancient records Diocletian and Maximian issued edicts for the suppression of Christianity, "when they saw almost all men deserting the worship of the gods and attaching themselves to the Christian people." [6] And before them, reaching back to the first generation after Christ, "when Nero noticed that not only at Rome but everywhere a large multitude were daily falling away from idolatry and coming over to the new religion, he vowed to destroy the heavenly temple and as the first persecutor of the saints of God crucified Peter and executed Paul." [7] Nor was the hostility limited to government circles, but private individuals shared in the common distrust and hatred of what Tacitus called "the enemies of the human race," and others "a confederacy to be detested and rooted out." [8]

Consistent with these sentiments, the Christians were first despised and ridiculed, then deprived of their civil and political rights, and when this failed to subdue them, were imprisoned and put to death. "Various forms of mockery were added to enhance their dying agonies. Covered with the skins of wild beasts, they were doomed to die by the mangling of dogs, or by being nailed to crosses, or to be set on fire and burned after twilight by way of nightly illumination." [9] Yet their only crime, as Tertullian protested, was the Christian name; which to the pagans meant "sacrilege and treason"; sacrilege for not worshiping the Roman pantheon and treason because the religion of the gods was identified with the prosperity of the state.

The diffusion of Christianity from the death of Christ to the Edict of Constantine (313 A.D.) was so remarkable that it became one of the strongest arguments of the second and third century apologists.

In spite of all this oppression, however, the Church grew in numbers and influence until by the fourth century it quite literally dominated the Roman world. The evidence is so convincing that historians who cannot be suspected of favorable bias report that, "about the year 300 the human race of the Mediterranean belonged without exception to this Church, in so far as religion, morals and higher attainments of these nations were of any consequence." [10]

Corresponding attempts to explain the remarkable diffusion on purely natural grounds have been fruitless. The most notorious effort was by Edward Gibbon, a lapsed Catholic, who attributed the Church's expansion to purely natural causes, notably the zeal of its missionaries, its doctrine of rewards and punishments, reputed miracles, purity of morals and heroic charity of the early Christians, and the Church's strict discipline and organization. To which we subsume and ask: was it only a natural power that produced this extraordinary zeal, motivated such exalted virtue and maintained the strong discipline that proximately and ostensibly accounted for the Church's development in spite of every opposition against it? [11] If nothing more than nature was in operation, and nature is repetitive, the origins of Christianity should have been duplicated many times over. But no other religious movement in history, making such demands on concupiscence and human pride, has even approximated the Christian phenomenon.

Growth of the Church in Modern Times. Comparable to the development of the early Church is the propagation of the Catholic religion in our own day. Perhaps it is less spectacular in the absence of a startling comparison between nothing at the beginning and a large body after a short time. But the growth is no less phenomenal when studied in the full context of contemporary history. The Church's demands for self-sacrifice are no less today than during patristic times. If anything they are more exacting where Catholics live on such intimate terms with people who do not share their convictions of faith and moral attitudes. To live in a world that may not be openly hostile, but whose institutions and philosophy of life go counter to the most radical instincts of Catholicism, and remain faithful to Catholic ideals; to further live these ideals so faithfully that those on the outside are attracted to share them, often at great cost; and to dedicate time, money, and effort, even oneself for a lifetime, in order to give others what are believed to be the treasures of the faith – this can safely be compared with the obstacles that pre-Nicene Christianity overcame to reach the diffusion that we call miraculous.

Moreover, we have a norm of comparison between Catholicism and other religious bodies that is quite as valid as the contrast between the Church at Pentecost and the Church when the Edict of Milan was published. What other religious group can show the steady organic growth of the Catholic Church, say, in the past one hundred years? In absolute numbers, the world increase was about 200 million to make a present total approaching half a billion members. Mere quantity, however, is not so important. Other religions have also grown in membership, even though not so extensively. But none of them can be legitimately compared with Roman Catholicism. The religions of the East are not juridical societies with a unified authority and consequently should not properly be called churches except in the widest analogous sense. Some, like Buddhism whose founder did not teach a personal deity, are scarcely theistic; others, like Mohammedanism, are so tied in with the political power as hardly to be distinguished from the national state. Greek Orthodoxy has become the unwitting tool of atheistic Communism; after a generation of iron control by the Marxist government, its Patriarch blandly declared that "everything in the world takes place in its good time and according to God's will, as in this case the State, built on a democratic basis, has allowed the rebirth of the Church in its high dignity. This was brought about by the will of God, and our Church was given full ecclesiastical freedom, protected in this by the laws of the State." [12] The mélange of Protestantism is so lacking in juridical authority and disunited on basic doctrinal issues that its numerical increment cannot be regarded as a growth in membership, except within the sectarian limits of each denomination.

Catholicism, on the other hand, has not only increased by family accretion, which itself requires higher than natural motives to resist the practice of contraception; it continues adding by adult conversions an average of one million persons every year. Even a minority of heretical apostasies is evidence to the Church's continued growth as being more than human achievement. "For heretics are made," says Augustine, "from the ranks of those who even if they were in the Church would go astray notwithstanding. Since they are outside the Church, they are of very great service, not by teaching the truth, of which they are ignorant, but by exciting the carnally-minded Catholics to seek the truth, and the spiritually-minded to disclose it." [13] This providence, we may believe, includes such major defections as the Protestant Revolt, whose break with the Church temporarily depleted her ranks but whose opposition, often in good faith, has served as a powerful stimulus for Catholic zeal and evangelization.


Exalted Sanctity and Miracles

Personal sanctity is an elusive concept. The title of "saint" has been applied indiscriminately to such varied individuals as Savonarola, John Wesley and Mahatma Gandhi. It is found in Scripture as a generic name for all the believers. And most technically, in the Catholic Church only those are called "saints" who have been duly canonized by papal authority.

In the present setting, however, as evidence of divine approval, exalted sanctity means the faithful practice of the moral virtues over a long period of time, under severe trial and temptation, and to a degree that clearly exceeds the native capacity of the human will. All the virtues are comprehended, but especially charity, fortitude and temperance. Moreover the testimony in favor of these virtues must be convincing. Pious sentiments are not enough; there must have been deeds, tried in the crucible of suffering and testified by unimpeachable witnesses.

Historical Evidence of Holiness. In the first five centuries of the Christian era, saints were "canonized" by popular acclaim after a person's death following a life of great holiness. All the ancient Fathers of the Church like Ambrose and Chrysostom, virgins like Melania and Eustochium, and missionaries like St. Patrick belong to this category. Their moral heroism was too obvious to be lost on the most prejudiced observer and is proved by authentic records that are still extant. Athanasius' Life of Anthony (251-356 A.D.) for example, has come down to us in several versions, including Syriac and Armenian, all dating from the fourth century and drawing on first-hand knowledge of the Father of Monasticism.

Did he show abnegation of his will by internal mortification? Did he control his anger and the movements of concupiscence, and curb an effusive temperament? Was he always meek and patient in suffering whatever persecutions came his way? Did he ever show himself disturbed on such occasions?

From the sixth to the twelfth centuries, the bishops reserved to themselves the sole right of examining the virtues of people who died with a reputation for sanctity; and finally in 1170 Pope Alexander III universally prescribed that the final verdict on sainthood must come from the Holy See. Present legislation on how to determine heroic virtue is summarized in the Code of Canon Law, covering 142 canons, and going into the minutest detail of judicial scrutiny. The method has been substantially the same for nine hundred years. There is first a gathering of all the documents relative to the person's whole life; letters received and sent, writings of every sort including spiritual notes and diary and testimonials from eye-witnesses. This mass of material is submitted to Rome, where the Congregation of Rites under the Pope decides if further investigation is permissible. If so, there begins a tedious (years long) informative process in all the places where the candidate for sainthood lived and was known personally. Witnesses are examined and asked to testify under oath on all they know from childhood to death about the person's virtues and failings. In the single canonical process for St. Francis Xavier a total of 202 witnesses was interrogated in India alone, giving sworn testimony that runs to five hundred pages of printed text. [14] On completion of the informative process the cause for beatification is formally introduced and from then on the critical examination or apostolic process begins. A committee of five judges in the diocese spends at least two years going over the data to decide whether there is good evidence of moral heroicity. If the conclusion is affirmative, a report is sent to Rome to each of three committees acting independently; if two of the three favor heroicity they offer their conclusions to the Pope who, in session with a fourth committee decides for or against declaring the investigandus as Venerable, which means that he or she had practiced virtue to a heroic degree.

The following is a sample questionnaire to be answered by the Roman judges on the virtues of temperance practiced by the person under examination. "Did he show abnegation of his will by internal mortification? Did he control his anger and the movements of concupiscence, and curb an effusive temperament? Was he always meek and patient in suffering whatever persecutions came his way? Did he ever show himself disturbed on such occasions? Was he abstemious as regards food and drink? Did he faithfully observe the fasts prescribed by the Church (and the Rules of his Institute)? What was he in the habit of eating and when? Was he temperate in the use of sleep? Did he sleep on the ground, or if in bed, was it hard and uncomfortable? Was he sparing in the matter of clothing? Did he like to have his room (or cell) very simple, and avoid bodily conveniences? Did he control his flesh (even) with extraordinary fasts and penances? Did he subdue the other bodily senses and never allow them illicit pleasures? Did he prefer to be silent and alone, and was he grave and modest in his walk? And finally did he appear moderate in his speech and actions?" [15] With all its detail, however, the foregoing is only one of more than ten similar questionnaires on all the major virtues, including poverty, chastity and obedience in the case of religious.

Miracles as the Fruit of Sanctity. No matter how convincing the evidence of heroic virtue in a Servant of God, the Church will not proceed to his beatification until physical miracles, scientifically proved, had been wrought through the person's intercession. [16] Two, three, or four miracles are required, depending on the kind of testimony that was used in the canonical process, i.e., whether eye or ear-witnesses, or mere documents. One prescription from Canon Law illustrates the care exercised in testing miraculous phenomena. "In order to prove the miracles, two experts are to be hired expressly for this purpose when the case first opens; and if they agree that phenomenon is not miraculous, it must be discarded forthwith. (Moreover) since it often happens that in discussing miracles there is question of passing judgment on a cure, the experts must be outstanding in the field of medicine or surgery. In fact, if at all possible, they should be chosen from among specialists in the diagnosis and treatment of the disease which is supposed to have been miraculously cured." [17] Centuries may intervene before the requisite miracles take place. They are indispensable. However, once beatified, more miracles are needed, two or three depending on the type of beatification. And again, two or more hundred years may elapse without fully attested miracles. Until they occur, clearly through the intercession of the prospective saint, he is not canonized. The number of people raised to the honors of the altar varies with different periods of the Church's history. Pope Pius XI beatified 406 men and women, and canonized 40.

But miracles in canonical processes are not the only kind that God works through the merits of His saints, in attestation of the Church's sanctity. Equally numerous and better known are the phenomena which occur at famous shrines like Lourdes and St. Anne de Beaupre. At Lourdes, annual average since 1858 is 78 cures declared at the time of occurrence as naturally inexplicable. Of these 4 have been further subjected to rigorous testing over a period of several years after the reported miracle and found absolutely beyond the powers of nature. [18] Among the unbiased witnesses of what happens at Lourdes in the late Alexis Carrel, Nobel Prize winner in 1912 for work on vascular ligature and grafting blood vessels and other organs. The experience of watching one of his patients suddenly cured of tubercular peritonitis while praying at the shrine prompted this commentary on the power of prayer at Lourdes. "In surroundings where men pray, there are frequent reports of cures being obtained in response to supplications addressed to God and His saints. The Medical Bureau at Lourdes has rendered a great service to science in demonstrating the reality of such cures. Sick people have been healed almost instantly of such afflictions as lupus of the face, cancer, kidney infections, ulcers, pulmonary and peritoneal tuberculosis, and tuberculosis of the bone. The phenomenon nearly always occurs in the same way. First great pain, then the feeling of being cured. In a few seconds, or at most a couple of hours, the symptoms disappear and lesions are automatically repaired. The miracle is characterized by an extreme acceleration of the normal processes of healing. Never has such acceleration been observed among surgeons and physiologists in the course of their clinical experience." [19] Carrel's experience at Lourdes, when publicized, first cost him a temporary loss of prestige in the medical profession and later contributed to his conversion from agnosticism.

What is most significant about miracles since apostolic times is their close integration with sanctity under the aegis of Catholic Christianity. Reported miraculous occurrences outside the Church's atmosphere are not impossible, but even then would be found to confirm what is objectively true and in accordance with Catholic teaching. However, the evidence for non-Catholic miracles, when reported, has not been scientifically conclusive – barring always those phenomena which indeed surpass the powers of nature but are clearly demoniac productions.


Inexhaustible Fruitfulness in Benefiting Mankind

It would easy to draw up a list of benefits that Catholics and others have drawn from the Church's treasury over the centuries: her conquest of Roman paganism and raising the status of women; her preservation of the wisdom of antiquity, in Plato, Aristotle and Cicero, that would have been lost except for the patient toil of the monasteries; her bold defense of the rights of man and his dignity against unjust oppressors; her shining example of courage against the vandal hordes, the Moslem terror and currently the inhumanity of atheistic Communism. Underlying these and similar benefits, however, is a more radical contribution that cuts across the history of all nations, going back to the origins of the Hebrew people and finding its full expression in the rise and dissemination of Christianity.

The glory of the Catholic Church is that she has remained faithful to the trust committed to her, by safeguarding the content and meaning of the Judaeo-Christian revelation and as a consequence keeping alive the fountain-head of all peace and happiness in the world. . .

Although this contribution is scarcely appreciated by most people, it involves the transmission from God to the human race of those fundamental religious truths on which the whole structure of private and public morality depends. It is true that absolutely speaking, our reason by its natural powers can arrive at a correct knowledge of the one personal God whose providence governs the world, and also of the natural law which the Creator has written in the hearts of men. But for most people the obstacles to this knowledge are insurmountable. Concupiscence and lack of time, mental limitation and the pressure of daily needs prevent the average persons from acquiring any more than the barest minimum about the moral law and its necessary, so that religious and moral truths which by their nature are not beyond the capacity of the mind, might be known by everyone with absolute conviction, with ease, and without any admixture of error.

If the Catholic Church had done nothing else than transmitted to mankind this revelation from God and preserved it from deterioration, she would justify her claim to being the greatest benefactor of the human race.

Revelation Identified by the Catholic Church. Before the time of Christ, God communicated His revelation to chosen prophets like Abraham and Moses, and protected its integrity by a special providence over the Jewish people. In the first century of the Christian era, He extended and amplified this communication in the person of Jesus of Nazareth and His followers, up to the death of John the Apostle, about the year 100 A.D. Within the ambit of the Judaeo-Christian revelation, therefore, was contained all that men would ever need to understand the moral law and be faithful to its observance in future generations. But human nature is blind and prone to error in the very act of recognizing the revealed word of God, as evidenced by the strange vagaries among the ancient Jews on such basic truths as the immortality of the soul, and by the plethora of gospels and apocalypses, histories, acts and epistles, all claiming to be inspired, that arose in competition to the authentic writings of the New Testament. With every new heresy, there appeared another gospel. Thus the Gospel of the Egyptians was created by the Gnostics who rejected matrimony; the Ebionities wrote the Gospel of the Twelve Apostles as an attack on the birth and genealogy of the Savior; the Gospel of St. Peter was a Docetist fabrication which made Pilate a hero and questioned the reality of Christ's bodily death and resurrection.

Due to the Church's vigilance, however, these apocrypha were duly recognized as spurious and exposed in scores of writings that have come down to us from the early patristic age. "The Church has only four Gospels," wrote Origen, "the heretics have many, among which there is one according to the Egyptians and another by the Twelve Apostles. Basildes (a Gnostic) has also dared to write a Gospel and attached his name to it. I know of another Gospel by Thomas, one according to Mathias and several others. But of all the evangelical writings we accept only what the Church has approved, namely, the four Gospels." [20]

Church as Custodian of the Revealed Word. After identifying the true revelation and transmitting it to the people, the Church had the further task of preserving it from corruption at the hands of pious meddlers or unscrupulous persons who will falsify the word of God. An outstanding example of this type of vigilance was the condemnation of the Protestant Reformers by the Council of Trent. Breaking with fifteen centuries of Christian tradition, they excised seven books of the Old Testament, along with part of five others, and dropped from one to nine books of the New Testament, including the Apocalypse and the Epistle of St. James. Luther's test for the validity of any book in the Bible was the conformity of its teaching with what he a priori laid down as the essential element of Christianity; Calvin's was even more elastic, claiming that the Holy Spirit individually teaches every man to distinguish the word of God from its spurious counterfeit. [21] One result of this tampering with the biblical canon was a new concept of the moral law which postulated a divine responsibility for all our actions, whether good or bad, and reduced human liberty to a mere name, or made it a creation of the devil who deceives us into thinking we are free agents on the road to salvation.

Natural Benefits Derived from Divine Revelation. Incalculable blessings follow as a logical consequence to the revelation of religious truth, even in the natural order. Cut off from the moorings of revealed truth, there is no limit to which the human mind cannot go into denying the very foundations of the moral order. "Science," according to a recent Soviet publication, "sets out from the proposition that there is nothing in the universe except matter and its motion, that the universe is one and material. Religion on the contrary sets out from the position that alongside the material world there is also the non-material, spiritual, supernatural world which is prior to and determines the material world." Consequently there must be "a conscious intervention in the process of destroying religion by waging a special war against it." [22] This attitude is not confined to militant communism but in greater or less degree is the mental aberration of all who have lost their faith in the revealed word of God.

Comparable to the knowledge of a personal deity is the admission of man's responsibility for his own actions, which is written on every page of the Scriptures and which those who reject the Bible may vaguely recognize as a handy postulate but scarcely acknowledge as absolutely true. "The real grounds for supposing free will," says William James, "is pragmatic." [23] It has no guarantee in objective reality.

On the level of social morality, how many of those who are ignorant of Christian revelation or who knowing it follow their own interpretation, still believe that marriage is permanent contract which binds one man and one woman until death, and that any liberties outside the marital union are adultery? The same with contraception and pre-marital relations. "The Presbyterian Church," writes one spokesman for that body, "does not legislate for its people on personal moral issues. Nothing in the Church's teaching, however, can be construed as forbidding an intelligent, conservative, and unselfish employment of birth control. The commandment of God to our first parents, 'Be fruitful and multiply,' was given at a time when the world was underpopulated. Presbyterians do not believe this precept is relevant today." [24]

The glory of the Catholic Church is that she has remained faithful to the trust committed to her, by safeguarding the content and meaning of the Judaeo-Christian revelation and as a consequence keeping alive the fountain-head of all peace and happiness in the world – which is the knowledge of the one true God and of man's duties to himself, to his neighbor and his Creator.


The Catholic Unity of Roman Catholicism

What appears to be the earliest use of the title "Catholic Church" is found in the authentic record which commemorated the martyrdom of St. Polycarp (156 A.D.) and was dedicated "to all the communities of the Holy and Catholic Church, residing in every place." [25] In the third century, Cyprian appealed to the Church's unity as the mark of her divinity. "God is one and Christ is one, and one is His Church, and the faith is one, and one His people joined together by the bond of concord into a solid unity of body." [26] By the fourth century this unbroken concord of her members, spread throughout the world, was crystallized in the article of the Nicene Creed which to this day is part of the Eucharistic liturgy, "I believe in the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church." [27]

As defined by the Vatican Council catholic unity comprehends two evidences of the Church's miraculous origin and conservation: her unity of membership, where every rank and type of personality is joined together in common obedience to the Sovereign Pontiff; and her universality, which extends to all nations and regions of the world, in every age since apostolic times.

As defined by the Vatican Council catholic unity comprehends two evidences of the Church's miraculous origin and conservation: her unity of membership, where every rank and type of personality is joined together in common obedience to the Sovereign Pontiff; and her universality, which extends to all nations and regions of the world, in every age since apostolic times.

In order to appreciate the transcendent character of this catholic unity we should reflect on the inherent difficulty that even a small group of men finds to agree on almost anything which their reason does not convince them is objectively true. The difficulty increases in proportion to the sacrifices that agreement may demand and rises to a practical impossibility where the concord must prevail over a long period of time.

If this is valid in the ordinary affairs of life, it is eminently true in the sphere of religion, where the natural instinct is to rebel against any imposition by human authority and reject any person or society, no matter how exalted, that would stand between the individual and God. Hence the provision for autonomy in all religions outside of Judaism in the Old Law and of Catholicism in the New, to preserve a liberty of action that is independent of any earthly agency claiming to speak with the authority of God.

Catholic Unity in Faith and Doctrine. Since apostolic times, the first care of the Church has been to preserve inviolate the deposit of faith which Christ had committed her. St. Paul rebuked the Galatians for deserting the teaching of the Master, telling them that "even if an angel from heaven should preach a gospel to you other than that which we have preached to you, let him be anathema." [28] Throughout the subsequent history of the Church, the primary concern was always to safeguard the unity of faith against the encroachment of heretics who would divide the seamless garment of Christ. Within a century of the Edict of Milan, four general councils were convened to clarify and define certain doctrines that were controverted, with never a thought of compromise and often at the cost of heavy losses among the clergy and laity who refused to accept the Church's interpretation. One after another, the recalcitrants were condemned as heretics: the Arians for denying the divinity of Christ, the Pelagians for rejecting the necessity of grace, the Albigenses for reviving Manichean dualism, the Protestants for teaching that man is absolutely corrupt and incapable of any good, the Jansenists for holding that grace is irresistible, and modern Rationalists for making reason the sole arbiter in matters of faith.

As a result of this constant vigilance and the demand for submission of her members to the Roman Pontiff, the Church's solidarity is acknowledged even by those who are alien to her principles. "The unity of the Roman Church," Reinhold Niebuhr told the World Council at Evanston, "is indeed impressive, and in some respects enviable, in comparison with our unhappy divisions." [29] But Catholic unity is more than enviable because it is more than natural, as the least study of other religious systems will show. Whatever agreement they have is social rather than theological, and beneath the surface of a common name is a medley of beliefs on the most fundamental issues that cannot, except by an abuse of language, be called unity of faith and doctrine.

Disunity Outside of Roman Catholicism. In the western world, the most familiar disunity is among the Protestant denominations, where 200 million Christians are divided into more than a thousand sects, and these in turn into further autonomous denominations. Sectarian apologists claim that the essence of Protestantism is "the freedom of the Christian man," and its appeal is to "those who are willing to assume the responsibilities of liberty as well as enjoy its privileges." Consequently they openly encourage dogmatic individualism. Unlike the "false freedom" in the Catholic Church, "which consists in liberty to believe and do what the infallible authority of the Church says is true and right," Protestants are free to accept or reject, as the Spirit moves them, even what their own denomination proposes as the official doctrine. [30]

The fruit of this denial is a rampant sectarianism of which thoughtful Protestants are deeply ashamed and which the current ecumenical movement is trying to control if not eradicate. Divisions among pagans and infidels, they admit, are expected and understandable. "But for those who are called Christ's people to be at enmity with one another, to withdraw from one another, to have no intimate, brotherly dealing with one another, is a scandal. It is a scandal even to the unbelieving and half-believing world around us." [31] Protestants are divided on every issue of faith and morals, and every level of religious practice. Not even the nature of God is exempt from the discord, for though most churches subscribe to the formula, "I believe in God the Father Almighty," some, like the Christian Scientists (who call themselves Protestant) profess an open pantheism, summarized in Mrs. Baker Eddy's maxim that, "All is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation, for God is All in All." [32] They are further divided on the person of Christ, from the extreme of accepting the Nicene Creed that Christ is consubstantial with the Father to making the Incarnation a mere symbol of God's love for mankind. The Scriptures are still believed to be inspired and inerrant by certain denominations, like the strict Baptists and conservative Lutherans. But for most Protestants, Bible authoritarian is dead. "During the past century and a half, it has crumbled under the impact of biblical and philosophical criticism." [33]

In place of the bible, human reason and personal experience have become the ultimate norms of faith, or, as among the Quakers, the Inner Light, which is variously described as the Indwelling Spirit, or the Voice of God, speaking to the soul without the encumbrance of any book or institution. Some Protestants baptize in infancy, others only after adult profession of faith, and some do not require baptism for salvation, and much less for church membership. Most Protestants have some semblance of the Eucharist which they call the Lord's Supper, but they differ infinitely in describing what Holy Communion means. For some it is the physical body of Christ, for others His body in spirit, and for most only a symbol or sign of His redemptive love. But the acme of discord is their confusion about the very essence of Christianity, whether Christ ever founded a Church or only started a movement, and if there is a Church what are its qualities and can it be identified. Perhaps the most candid statement at the World Council of Churches in 1954 was the admission by one of its ranking leaders that while verbally "we proclaim that in some profound sense the Church is one, we are divided and stultified over defining that unity. That, of course, is a glimpse of the obvious. If we were agreed on the nature of the Church's one-ness, our struggle between each other would be over." [34] Yet they will not have unity at the price of submitting to an ultimate authority. "Only a church with a high command" like Roman Catholicism can achieve unanimity. "Protestantism has no such dictator." and therefore "has no united voice. It does not want it on those terms" [35] – which is both an explanation of Protestant discord and a proof that the unity of Catholicism is divine. Human nature is too radically autonomous to be submissively united on such a cosmic scale, except through the special intervention of God.


The Church's Invincible Stability

There is a close relation between unity and stability, but they are not the same thing. While unity refers to the Church's members, who agree among themselves under a common visible head, stability describes the Church's perdurance in keeping the same doctrine, worship and juridical structure, substantially unchanged over the centuries in spite of opposition, persecution and the native inconstancy of her members.

Stability and unity are related as cause and effect, since without a stable body of principles and organization, the concord of her members would never be guaranteed and the very possibility of change would provoke disunity, at least between those who feared innovation and those who did not.

Constancy of Apostolic Doctrine. Hostile critics of the Church accuse her of having "promulgated many new doctrines," since "the Pope boasts that all rights exist in the shrine of his heart, and whatever he decides and commands within his church is spirit and right, even though it is above and contrary to Scripture." [36] The fact is that of all religious systems in the history of the world, only Catholicism has remained faithful to the principles of her Founder, and those who charge her with the contrary are only hiding their own instability behind the accusation.

The history of the Catholic Church is the history of her conflict with elements within or outside her body that sought to rob her of the deposit of truth that was built upon the Apostles. All the general councils were convoked to withstand this threat of innovation, and heretics were proscribed for disagreeing with the Church's original doctrine. In ancient times, at the Council of Constantinople, the Nestorians were condemned because they contradicted "the tradition in the Church of God from the beginning." [37] The Semi-Pelagians, who claimed that the power of believing "inheres in us naturally and not by a gift of grace," were condemned as "adversaries of the apostolic teaching." [38] And currently, in the Oath against Modernism, a Catholic is required to say, "I entirely reject the heretical misrepresentation that dogmas evolve and change from one meaning to another different from the one which the Church held previously." [39] Even the doctrines which are most controverted by her enemies, the Church has derived from the original sources of faith. Thus in proclaiming the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, Pope Pius XII could accurately say that "the truth of this dogma is based on Sacred Scripture. It is sanctioned by the worship of the Church from the most ancient times and is completely in accord with all other revealed truths." [40]

But the worst enemies of the Church were those nurtured in her own household.

In contrast with this sedulous care to preserve the apostolic tradition, other Christian bodies have all departed in greater or less measure from the revelation found in the Scriptures and universally professed by the nascent Church. The Trinity of Persons in one God, the union of divine and human natures in Christ, the bodily presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the perpetual virginity of the Mother of God, the existence of hell as eternal punishment, the Sacrifice of the Mass, the remission of sins at baptism, the prohibition of divorce with remarriage – are only partial evidence of how deeply and widely the churches separated from Rome have broken with the faith which the Apostles preached and for which thousands of martyrs in the early Church had sacrificed their lives.

However, Catholic stability of doctrine is not only unique among the bodies of Christendom. It is also unparalleled outside of organized Christianity. Added to the motley collection of sects among the oriental religion is their constantly shifting position on the most elementary principles of morality and doctrine. Hinduism is a fair example. With no ecclesiastical organization to unify its 300 million adherents, split into several thousand casts, we should expect a wide deviation of beliefs between such extremes as the Brahman philosophers and the illiterate "untouchables" or Sudras. But Hinduism is more than divided; it is by nature changeable due to the very concept of the deity. According to its most prominent exponent, "Hindu thought believes in the evolution of our knowledge of God. We have to vary continually our notions of God until we pass beyond all notions into the very heart of the reality itself. Hinduism does not distinguish ideas of God as true or false, adopting one particular idea as the standard for the whole human race. It accepts the obvious fact that mankind seeks its goal of God at various levels and in various directions, and feels sympathy with every stage of the search. The same God expresses itself at one stage as power, at another as personality, at a third as all-comprehensive spirit, just as the same forces which put forth the green leaves also cause the crimson flowers to grow. We do not say that the crimson flowers are all the truth and the green leaves are all false. The bewildering polytheism of the masses and the uncompromising monotheism of the classes are for the Hindu the expression of one and the same force at different levels." [41] Every man therefore is encouraged to form his own notion of the deity, on the assumption that none of the ideas is objectively true, destined to be changed as different circumstances arise.

Stability of Catholic Worship and Government. Parallel with the Church's constancy of doctrine is the unbroken tradition of her religious practice and juridical structure. While adapting herself in accidentals to the needs of her members at various times, her stability in worship and government is a scandal to those who either have no Christian heritage of their own, or who believe that development in other areas calls for a similar change in the forms of religion.

In the field of worship, the Sacrifice of the Mass is a classic instance of unchanging constancy. Liturgical ceremonies have been added and subtracted, but the substance remains the same. The text of the words of Consecration goes back to the Synoptic Gospels, repeated by St. Paul and confirmed by the most ancient writers. Likewise in the sacrament of baptism, the same continuity of practice – using water with the invocation of the Trinity. Even the method in which the water is now used, by ablution, is sanctioned by apostolic custom, dating from the first century and instructing the presbyter to "pour water on the head three times in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit." [42] Extreme Unction, fasting and abstinence, Sunday observance, prayers for the dead, veneration of the saints and, in fact, all the substantials of Catholic piety can be traced – often in the smallest detail – to practice of the early Church.

Underlying the Church's constancy in everything else is the stability of her government that for nineteen centuries has literally withstood the gates of hell and that even her adversaries are forced to admire. Concretely this means of the institutions in history, none has a longer and more contradicted tenure than the papacy. In the previous chapter we have seen something of its origins, which gradually developed with the Church's expansion but from the very beginning was a monarchy that vindicated its right to judge the consciences of men because it was founded by the Son of God.

Militating against the papacy has been every form of human malice and pride. Up to the Edict of Milan, twenty-six of the first thirty-three popes were martyred. With the Church's deliverance from pagan oppression arose an equally dangerous political control by the State, which the popes resisted under bribery, threats and physical violence. Champions of papal liberty like Gregory I and VII, Innocent II and Boniface VIII, stand as symbols of resistance to encroachment by the civil power.

But the worst enemies of the Church were those nurtured in her own household. Although the popes, as a class, have been men of high integrity, there were tragic exceptions. John III (955-964) was elected Bishop of Rome at the age of eighteen and in less than a decade proved so unworthy that a synod, ordered by the emperor, tried and deposed him on charges of sacrilege, simony, perjury, murder and incest. Benedict IX (1032-1048) was driven out of Rome because of his wicked life. To most people, Alexander VI (1492-1503) epitomized the degradation of the papacy, when the Vicar of Christ condoned the public crimes of his illegitimate children and bartered the highest offices in the Church for political gain.

The forty years of the Great Western Schism (1378-1417) typify the virulence of passion that would have destroyed any other institution. Though validly elected, Urban VI gave cause for complaint by his arbitrary conduct in trying to reform the French segment of the College of Cardinals. They proceeded to choose one of their own number, Clement VII, as anti-pope, and until the Council of Constance settled the dispute by electing Martin V, there were three lines of rival claimants to the papacy: the Roman started by Urban VI, the French under Clement VII, and the Pisan, begun by Alexander V. Theologians, canonists and even saints were divided in their allegiance, St. Catherine of Siena recognizing Urban VI and St. Vincent Ferrer acknowledging Clement VII. True, the Great Schism was not schismatic in the ordinary sense of the term because no question of faith was involved and all parties upheld the supremacy of the Holy See. The problem was: which of the two or three claimants is the legitimate pope? That the issue should have been solved at all is remarkable, considering what happens in civil governments under less trying circumstances. But that in spite of this trial, the papacy grew in strength and vitality has baffled secular historians, even when they admire the phenomenon. "What human institution could have withstood the ordeal?" asks de Maistre. A bitter enemy of the popes, Gregorovius, declares that the Schism "raised the papacy from decadence to a new eminence, and showed the world once again how the mystical faith of the people endows the pontiffs with power that can rise to glory even when apparently dead." [43]

One of the curiosities of religious psychology is the intransigence of sincere non-Catholics when faced with the Church's continuity. Forced to admit the evidence, they cannot see the cause. Few Protestants have written more eloquently on the stability of Catholicism than Lord Macaulay. "There is not, and there never was, on this earth," he wrote, "a work of human policy so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church. No other institution is left standing which carries the mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian ampitheatre., The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday, when compared with the line of .the Supreme Pontiffs. That line we can trace back in an unbroken series, from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the nineteenth century, to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth; and far beyond the time of Pepin the august dynasty extends, till it is lost in the twilight of fable." Republics and kingdoms have risen and fallen. Yet "the Papacy remains, not in decay, not a mere antique; but full of life and youthful vigor." After this eulogy, we are not prepared for the conclusion. "It is impossible to deny that the polity of the Church of Rome is the very masterpiece of human wisdom. In truth, nothing but such a polity could, against such assaults, have borne up such doctrines. The stronger our conviction that reason and Scripture were decidedly on the side of Protestantism, the greater is the reluctant admiration with which we regard that system of tactics against which reason and Scripture were arrayed in vain." [44]

Macaulay's attitude is less surprising in the light of what the Vatican Council teaches on the credibility of the Catholic Church. "Like a standard lifted up for the nations, she calls to herself those who do not yet believe, to be recognized by all as the guardian and teacher of the revealed word." The objective evidence is not enough. Unless "the most merciful Lord stirs up and helps those who are wandering astray, to come to knowledge of the truth," [45] they may admire the Church's doctrine and liturgy, and praise her constancy in every storm, without realizing that these phenomena are signs of miraculous approval and a mark of the presence of God.


Endnotes:

  1. From the published proceedings of the Council we know that the original draft of the statement on recognizing the true Church gave the historical method, from the properties of unity, holiness, catholicity and apostolicity. But this schema was completely modified, leaving only the passage "unmistakable marks," and substituting for the four notes the present method by way of miracles. Acta Concilii Vaticani (Collectio Lacensis) VII, 511-512 (for the original draft), and 161 (for the point at which the via miraculorum was introduced.
  2. Denzinger, 1793-1794.
  3. St. Justin, "Dialogus cum Tryphono Judaeo," cap. 117, MPG 6, 747.
  4. Tertullian, "Apologeticus" (written about 197 A.D.), cap. 37, MPL 1, 462.
  5. C. Plinius Secundus Minor, "Epistula ad Trajanum" (generally dated 111-113 A.D.), num. 96, Bibliotheca Scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum, Leipzig, 1933, p. 363.
  6. Eusebius, "Historia Ecclesiastica," Lib. IX, cap. 9, MPG 20, 1491.
  7. Firmus Lactantius, "De Mortibus Persecutorum," MPL 7, 196-7.
  8. Tacitus, Annales (written under Trajan, 98-117 A.D.), Lib. XV, cap. 44. Minutius Felix, Octavius, X.
  9. Tacitus, loc. cit.
  10. Adolph Harnack, The Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries, London, 1905, vol. II, p. 143.
  11. Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. I, chap. 15.
  12. Alexei, Patriarch of All Russia, "Statement to the delegation of the National Council of Churches, U.S.A.," American Churchmen Visit the Soviet Union, New York, 1956, p. 13.
  13. St. Augustine, "De Vern Religione," cap. 8, num. 15, MPL 34, 129.
  14. Monumenta Xaveriana, Madrid, 1912, pp. 134-642.
  15. Codex Pro Postulatoribus Causarum Beatificationis et Canonizationis, Rom, 1929, p. 15.
  16. Though normally one or two miracles are required for the beatification of martyrs, the pope may dispense from this obligation. However there is no dispensation from miracles for canonizing a beatus, whether he was martyred or not.
  17. Canon 2118, parag. 1-2.
  18. "Lista de las Curaciones on Lourdes Reconocidas por la Iglesia como Milagrosas," Ecclesia, Madrid, Feb. 8, 1958, pp. 146-148.
  19. Alexis Carrel, La Priere, Paris, 1944, pp. 26-27.
  20. Origen, "Homilia in Lucam," MPG 13, 1803.
  21. By the eighteenth century most Protestant divines had reinstated the books of the New Testament that were dropped by Luther and Calvin. But to this day the Protestant Bible has a mutilated Old Testament canon, on the theory that the Catholic Scriptures include writings acceptable to the Jews of the Diaspura but not to the Jews in Palestine. However, this theory is the later rationalization of an act of rebellion against the Church's authority to determine the content of revelation.
  22. Atheist Education in School, Government Directive to teachers, Sovietskaja Pedagogica, Moscow, 1955, num 5, pp. 10-11.
  23. William James, Pragmatism, New Yori, 1907, p. 118.
  24. John Sutherland Bonnell, "What Is a Presbyterian?" A Guide to the Religions of America, New York, 1955, p. 107.
  25. "Martyrium S. Polycarpi" (Inscriptio), MPG 5, 1029.
  26. St. Cyprian, "De Unitate Ecclesiae," MPL 4, 534.
  27. The present Nicene Creed was partly composed at the Council of Nicea, but its present form, including the article on the Church, dates from the Council of Constantinople in 381. A.D.
  28. Galatians 1:8.
  29. Reinhold Niebuhr, "Our Dependence Is on God," Christian Century, Sept. 1, 1954, p. 1035.
  30. Winfred E. Garrison, A Protestant Manifesto, New York, 1952, pp. 193-194.
  31. Angus Dun, Prospecting for a United Church, New York, 1948, p. 12.
  32. Mrs. Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Boston 1934, p. 468.
  33. Albert C. Knudson, "Cardinal Principles of Protestantism," Protestantism: A Symposium, Nashville, 1945, p. 132.
  34. Oliver Tomkins (Vice-Chairman of the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches), Address at the Evanston Assembly, Aug. 17, 1954, Num. IV, 5-E, p. 1.
  35. Garrison, op. cit., p. 190.
  36. Smalcald Articles, Part III, Art. VIII, 4. Drafted by Luther in 1537 for a proposed General Council, they offer a perfect contrast between Catholic doctrine and the principles of the Reformation.
  37. Denzinger, 221.
  38. Denzinger, 178.
  39. Denzinger, 2145.
  40. Denzinger, 3032.
  41. S. Radhakrishnan, The Hindu View of Life, London, 1949, pp. 31-32.
  42. "Didache (seu) Doctrine Duodecim Apostolorum," Patres Apostolici, Paderborn, 1905, vol. I, p. 16.
  43. Ferdinand Gregorofius, Storia della Citta di Roma nel Medio Evo, Citta di Castello, 1943, vol. XIII, p. 249.
  44. T. Babingon Macaulay, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, New York, 1861, vol. III, pp. 303-304, 327.
  45. Denzinger, 1793-1794.



ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Father John A. Hardon. "Recognizing the True Church." chapter IV from Christ to Catholicism (Inter Mirifica, 2003.

Reprinted with permission from Inter Mirifica.

THE AUTHOR

Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J. (1914-2000) was a tireless apostle of the Catholic faith. The author of over twenty-five books including Spiritual Life in the Modern World, Catholic Prayer Book, The Catholic Catechism, Modern Catholic Dictionary, Pocket Catholic Dictionary, Pocket Catholic Catechism, Q & A Catholic Catechism, Treasury of Catholic Wisdom, Catholic Lifetime Reading Plan and many other Catholic books and hundreds of articles, Father Hardon was a close associate and advisor of Pope Paul VI, Pope John Paul II, and Mother Teresa and the Missionaries of Charity. Order Father Hardon's home study courses here.

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