Tuesday, July 16, 2019

Nothing can defeat a people...

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"When men revolve to cooperate with the grace of God, the marvels of history are worked: the conversion of the Roman Empire; the formation of the Middle Ages; the reconquest of Spain, starting from Covadonga; all events that result from the great resurrections of soul of which all peoples are also capable. These resurrections are invincible, because nothing can defeat a people that is virtuous and truly loves God."
 217 best images about C - Controrivoluzione on Pinterest ...

-- Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, Revolution and Counter-Revolution (Spring Grove, PA: The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property, 1993), p. 104.


By way of contrast...


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ca. July 15, 2019

In conclusion:



[p. 115]

Monday, July 15, 2019

Conservative cowardice...

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“Through 1789, 1917, and 1945 the ‘substance of inner life,’ as Salazar put it, evaporated, although after each date some, always fewer, old forms still survived, creating the impression that the loss had been tolerable. Thus after each turning point, the domain of what the counter-revolutionaries considered as _essential_ diminished, while increasingly more had to be jettisoned as _inessential_. This was not a philosophical choice, but a political one, enforced by necessity. Counter-revolutionaries know that a civilization decays in proportion as it consents to jettison more and more of its substance, which it then calls a no longer useful ballast, or ‘inessential.’ But from the point of view of Western civilization it is hard to tell which of the two losses is greater, more ‘essential’: the communization of Eastern Europe or the elimination of Latin from curriculum and liturgy.”

-- Thomas Molnar, The Counter-Revolution (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1969), p. 158.

An American Caesar...

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“The post-1945 counter-revolutionary generation, while retaining through family piety and comradely loyalty a certain monarchist coloration, was nevertheless ready to accept other channels to the sacred than the person of the king. … Thus emerges a new type of counterrevolutionary ‘hero,’ the embodiment neither of the ideal restored monarch of the nineteenth century, nor of the twentieth-century ‘strong man.’ … 
If a portrait were to be drawn of him, it would show a figure born or educated in a counter-revolutionary milieu, or otherwise understood to have counter-revolutionary convictions. Public opinion classifies him as a counter-revolutionary, and, accordingly, he has partisans and opponents, a definite political profile. This impression becomes the more firm as his style of life and style of thought, things deeper than intellectual judgments, automatically divide people into his friends and his foes, sympathizers or adversaries. Yet, a considerable ambiguity prevails around him since the style and content of his thought are often in disharmony: until power is firmly in his hand, he does not disclose where the real weight is. In the period prepatory to power, this ambiguity grants the counter-revolutionary ‘hero’ a great freedom of action: only in the decisive moment does he show his hand: he accepts the leadership counter-revolutionaries offer him, but his policies will follow the revolutionary pattern, and will, in the last analysis, favor the revolutionary cause. Thus his success follows from his timing, and indeed he dominates the time factor precisely in that neither his natural partisans nor his natural adversaries are able in advance to calculate and evaluate his moves; while they are confused, the ‘hero’ gains time, the most important element for his complicated maneuvers.

The phenomenon is so universal – although rare – that it would be an error to find it on the counter-revolutionary side only. What the communists call ‘Bonapartism’ is its revolutionary version. …

The period since 1789 has known, however, more such phenomena on the counter-revolutionary side. It would not be entirely inappropriate to the phenomenon ‘Caesarism,’ over against the revolutionary phenomenon of ‘Bonapartism.’ Julius Caesar, member of the class of optimates, brilliant aristocrat, sensuous, luxury-loving, even effeminate in his youth, became the leader of the populaires by a political choice, the result of acute views about the situation of Rome. Caesar’s views were … consciously and masterfully chosen, to be sure, as the best means to promote his own career, but also as the Realpolitik of the moment.

The contemporary counter-revolutionary ‘hero’ resembles Caesar in that he too belongs to the ‘optimates,’ and he too decides, after a careful analysis of the situation, that he needs a popular base. This situation has two facets: one, as it appears to the counter-revolutionary hero himself, the other as it appears to the counter-revolutionaries accepting him as their spokesman and leader. Briefly put, the counter-revolutionary hero, although his personal tastes and style are shaped by counter-revolutionary convictions and values, reaches the conclusion that in the post-1945 world power is in the hands of the communications media, acknowledged representatives of the populaires. His policies, over against his deeper preferences, will aim at acceptance by these media so that his natural opponents might be neutralized in the course of carrying out his plans.

- Thomas Molnar, The Counter-Revolution (1969), pp. 154-157.

This passage in particular seems prophetic of Trump.

The interesting lapse in foresight comes near the end of the passages cited, where Molnar says the 'hero' will need to appease the revolutionary media in order to succeed.

Yet, Trump follows the pattern Molnar limns by admitting, by his actions, how important the media are for accessing and influencing public opinion, even if the gatekeepers of those media are themselves hostile. As estranged as he may be towards "the mainstream media," he could not have succeeded, paradoxically, without their hostility. It is in this sense that Trump "relies on" Twitter and combative interview tactics so much: he literally needed the media to give him constant exposure even if it was negative. That being said, Trump's master stroke was recognizing that the media were so deeply "bolshevized" (as Molnar would put it) that he had to make its figureheads into enemies just to get their unwitting broadcast support.

The media of persuasion cry out in pain...

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“The counter-revolutionary restoration has regularly failed, not because of some intrinsic weakness in the counter-revolutionary position and philosophy, but because counter-revolutionaries were largely unable to make full use of modern methods, organization, slogans, political parties, and the press. The process of ‘image making’ was abandoned to the revolutionary media, so that counter-revolutionaries have regularly appeared in unfavorable light, if they were indeed known at all. …

“In the arena of politics, the counter-revolution must usually wait for events to persuade people and voters to rally to its cause; it seems unable to persuade them in periods of calm and normalcy to join, and this to a very large extent because counter-revolutionaries make no serious effort in this direction, but leave the field to the revolutionary media of persuasion. … The reputation of counter-revolutionary spokesmen suffers doubly: first, because in the period before the crisis they draw antagonism from revolutionary media as ‘prophets of doom’ [B]; when the crisis is on, a new label is used, that of impotence to redress things [T]. At any rate, they will be known, before and after, as ‘men of crisis,’ emerging only in exceptional circumstances, filling an interregnum as ‘providential men,’ ‘men on a white horse,’ ‘dictators.’” ...


"The year 1945 represents both a defeat and a victory for the counter-revolution, although, while the defeat seemed to be complete, the victory was, to say the least, ambiguous. Contrary to tendentious insinuations, the counter-revolutionary's defeat is not identical with that of the bourgeoisie, of fascism, of the corporate state, or of Hitler's 'New European order.' One of the points this book seeks to emphasize is that the counter-revolutionary is not a radical rightist, and that only a century and a half's frustrations have led him into despair and panic; his anti-democratic stance is one with his loyalty to the monarchic principle, so that it was natural for him to make the following reasoning: in proportion as democracy and the parties weaken the nation and undermine its spirit, one must search for a monarch or for a temporary substitute, who will abolish the parties, limit the sphere of democracy, and restore national unity. Writers as different as Renan, Bernanos, and Simone Weil were exasperated by the party system, and were calling for an elite to redeem national existence. They are only three, chosen at random, among the deepest consciences of Europe, expressing the same conviction and the same hope.

"If this central counter-revolutionary program had had a chance of incorporation in the political destiny of the Western world, extreme solutions would have had no appeal for the counter-revolutionary. However, it is a further part of this book's thesis that the reason for the counter-revolutionaries' frustration was an early development of revolutionary monopoly over the communications media, hence over intellectual fashion. This had begun before the French Revolution, but after 1917 the equilibrium was definitively broken: the revolutionary monopoly had, henceforth, a hard core, an irreducible point of crystallization in Marxism as an ultimate overwhelming reference for the otherwise vague utopianism of the Left. The struggle between Revolution and counter-revolution became inevitably intensified: To break the revolutionary monopoly that now signalled not only the threat of cultural decline (pointed out by men like E. Faguet, Ortega, Spengler), but the imminent danger of bolshevization, radical measures were seen as indispensable palliatives."

- Thomas Molnar, The Counter-Revolution (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1969), pp. 118-120, 144-145.

Also highly recommended is this 2004 IntellectualConservative.com review of Molnar's scandalously ignored book.

Wednesday, February 20, 2019

On ecumenical dialogue with the "Eastern Orthodox"...

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The Eastern Orthodox Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, Part 5

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"Unfortunately, it has not yet become axiomatic to accept the Byzantine tradition as a consistent harbinger of the Latin tradition, one lagging centuries behind Byzantine theology of the Immaculate Conception."

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-- Fr. Christiaan Kappes, The Immaculate Conception (2014), p. 15.

The Eastern Orthodox Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, Part 4

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"In negotiations with the Greeks in Constantinople, emperor John VIII [d. 1448] had to choose between two rival Councils for corporate reunion with the West. The Conciliarists at Basel wished to slight Pope Eugenius IV and receive the Greek contingent there. However, the Orthodox tradition was too conscious of the traditional presence of the Pope of Rome at an Ecumenical Council. As such, it was [sic!] beyond their ecclesiology to seriously consider convoking a Council that intentionally excluded the virtual presence of the Pope."


-- Fr. Christiaan Kappes, The Immaculate Conception (2014), p. 14.

The Eastern Orthodox Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, Part 3

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"[T]he early patristic tradition of the [Blessed Virgin Mary] harmoniously couple her appellation of 'prepurified' and 'immaculate' to such a degree that there is no known Father of the Church, Ecumenical Council, Liturgy or ecclesiastical author, who was at variance with the BVM's absolute holiness and perfection when considered under this quasi-title."
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-- Fr. Christiaan Kappes, The Immaculate Conception (2014), p. 14.

On feminizing the world...

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"C. S. Lewis asserts the feminine character of the Christian worshiper as consequent upon the transcendent masculinity of the God who is worshiped, a notion also echoed by H. U. von Balthasar, as in the last century by Matthias Scheeben. For Lewis, see That Hideous Strength (New York: Macmillan, 1965) 316: 'What is above and beyond all things is so masculine that we are all feminine in relation to it.' ... This quite common and quite unreflective reservation of the reality of masculinity to the Creator, over against a relatively feminized creation, implies a reversion to a cosmological dualism radically incompatible both with Catholic sacramental realism and with the doctrine of the Good Creation which underlies that realism."

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-- Donald Keefe, Covenantal Theology, p. 310, n. 172

The only acceptable and viable economic theory...

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The only acceptable and viable economic theory is one that roots all conventional economic factors in the stability and fecundity of the pious nuclear family.

No photo description available.

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Tuesday, February 19, 2019

Eucharistic worship or bust...

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"Only in [Eucharistic] worship do we enter into our free solidarity with the second Adam."
A Beginner's Guide to Adoration - LifeTeen.com for ... 

-- Keefe, CT, p. 365, n. 50

Notate bene...

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Keefe, unlike many Jesuits of his day, is not trying to "update" or "reform" or "reinterpret" Catholicism, but is, rather, trying to convince fellow theologians to stop explaining the Faith through the ventriloquist dolls of non-Christian metaphysics and presuppositions.

Worship is sacramental or it is not Christian worship...

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"There is nothing in the New Testament understanding of our imaging of God which could justify the monadism we find in the notion of the imago Dei as the contemplative imaging of a monadic absolute, the Deus Unus. This notion of the imaging of God by man ... [is r]adically nonhistorical and Middle Platonic in its origins, [and] is saved for theological purposes only by the recognition, in Origen as in those who follow him, that the human imaging of God is fulfilled only in worship, although since Origen the worship has been conceived largely as contemplative, not as sacramental and historical."

Counterlight's Peculiars: Saints and Others

-- Keefe, CT, v. 1, p. 356, n. 13

In non-Keefian terms, this passage demolishes the notion of someone being "spiritual but not religious," because literally every-thing in the world is rooted in the Eucharist; and because the Eucharist, in turn, is irreducibly sacramental (i.e., historical), everything in the Catholic life is irreducibly sacramental. This is why we must not trifle with liturgical worship but must see it as one of the primary ways that we "image" God.

Keefe was not a "traditionalist" but he does at times countersignal the cosmological flabbiness of what Vatican II officially taught, and gives no quarter to the immanentist excesses to which that Council's contested claims exploited.

Suffice to say that the obscurity, if not outright ignominy, of Keefe's genius is itself yet another argument against what post-Conciliar Catholicism has become. 

Our Christocentric dependence upon revelation...

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"The historical Image who is Christ reveals in his imaging his eternal source in the Father as the Father's Word, the Father's Son, eternally generated by the Father and co-eternal with the Father, One God with the Father and the Spirit. To insist upon the fact and the necessity of the revelation of the Image is not to put the truth or the freedom of the revelation of the Trinity in doubt, but only to stress our dependence upon that revelation."

Growing up with the Bible and other sources for insight ...

-- CT, v. 1, p. 365, n. 41.

Saturday, February 9, 2019

What is said of the Church...

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"Following Paul in Ephesians 5, the patristic tradition has understood what is said of [Mary] to be said of the Church. The degree of this identification is disputed, particularly in the context of the 'co-redemptrix' title, whose legitimacy was debated in the 1940s and 1950s, and resisted as if implying a species of synergism.... The relegation of Mariology to ecclesiology at Vatican II did nothing to settle the issue.... Much of the criticism ... of the thoroughgoing communication of idioms between Mary and the Church, bears finally upon this emphasis of a Mariology then [ca. the 1960s] perceived to be old-fashioned and now perceived also to be an affront to the ecumenism taught at Vatican II. Nonetheless the Marian piety associated with the ascription of a redemptive role to the Theotokos had and has a better base than has the criticism made of it, and is far more deeply grounded in the analogy of faith than it has been given credit for by either side of the debate."


— Donald Keefe, Covenantal Theology (1991), p. 304, n. 140.

Wait, what?

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"[T]he _Summa Theologiae_ does not treat of the Christ's marital relation to the Church".

— Donald Keefe, Covenantal Theology, p. 303, n. 129.

Hail to "one and the same" Son...

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"Mary is not the Christotokos in Nestorius' sense of the term ... but is rather the Theotokos, the mother of the one Son who is at once her Son and the Son of the Father. She is the mother of Christ the man, not of his human nature: to require, with Nestorius ... anthropotokos in addition to Theotokos, as its necessary corrective, or to prefer Christotokos, is inevitably to deny the unity of Christ. Theotokos is properly said of Mary only because of the historical unity of her Son; she is the mother of a human Son, a human Person, not a human nature—which does not at all imply a 'two Sons' doctrine, for it is as Son that Christ is 'one and the same,' the eternal Son of the eternal Father, and the historical son of Mary, in the unity of one Person who is not 'two sons' but one."

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-- Donald Keefe, Covenantal Theology (1991), p. 295, n. 92.

The pre-Anselmian Ontological Argument for God's existence...

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"[A] millennium earlier [than St. Anselm] Seneca had designated the pantheist Stoic divinity also as that than which nihil majus cogitari potest".

— Donald Keefe, Covenantal Theology (1991), p. 289, n. 72.

This is the first time I'd ever heard about this!

I made a thing...

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This happened to my SCOTUS one time...

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Sinlessly on a cruciform tree...

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The First Adam 
consumed 
sinfully 
from the tree of the knowledge of good 
and of evil, 
while the Second Adam
was consumed
sinlessly
on the cruciform tree,
to impart knowledge
of the victory of good
over evil
to Old Adam's heirs,
whose heirs are we all.


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"Where the reality of the sin originans is rejected, the reality of an original moral agent for the fall is immediately abandoned, and with this, the moral character of the fall. At this point, the fall itself becomes a metaphor for the materiality of the created order. ... It is curious that attempts to avoid the supposed 'pessimism' of Paul, and of Augustine's reliance upon Paul, so regularly conclude in the definitive pessimism of metaphysical dualism, in which the root of evil is not sin but our material dispersion in space and time."

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— Donald Keefe, Covenantal Theology (1991), p. 287, n. 59.

For reference (c/o Fr. John Hardon, SJ): 
Five qualities are generally attributed to Adam's transgression. It is seriously culpable, personal with Adam, technically original originating (originale originans), implied total aversion from God, and conversion or turning to creatures. ... It is sin as something habitual and not actual, natural and not personal, involving a moral state of soul and state of culpability, implying both the reatus culpae and the macula peccati, and properly described as original originated (originale originatum) as distinct from the personal sin of Adam.

Say what you will...

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The recent SOTU was reason enough, among many other reasons, why NeverTrump cuckservatives should eat shit and die (in Minecraft, that is.)

Immigrant Catholicism and affronts to modernity...

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"[C]urrent revisionist theology is concerned with the 'retrieval' rather than the exploration of the doctrinal tradition, with political therapy rather than redemption [cf. Bergoglio], and the eschatology in view is invariably monist, a ritual flight from the hazards of the historical order to the immobilist security of the ideal. Uniformly, the sexual symbolism expressed in sacramental marriage is discovered to be radically incompatible with this ancient fear of historical responsibility, and the symbolism which marriage underwrites is everywhere under attack by those who recognize in it the fundamental barrier to a renewed gnosticism—whose dévots [irony alert!] proclaim the demise of that 'immigrant Catholicism' characterized by its commitment to such affronts to modernity as the reservation of priestly orders to me, clerical celibacy, virginity outside of marriage and life-long fidelity within it, as well as by a clear eye for the distinction between the criminal homicide which is abortion and the lawful homicide which vindicates the symbols of public order by the execution of salient offense against the public decencies."

— Donald Keefe, Covenantal Theology, p. 276, n. 21.

The Future of Traditional Catholics and the Rise of New-Class Catholicism...

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"The intense involvement of the American episcopacy in a broad range of political questions, and their relative unconcern for the sacramental worship which is the actuality of Catholicism and their prime responsibility, speaks volumes for the routine acceptance of an ever more politicized orthopraxis as the substance of what amounts to New-Class Catholicism. The utopian [i.e., ahistorical, cosmological] quality of this aberration is manifest in the paradoxical willingness of the bishops to submit even the moral abomination of abortion to political judgment, and yet at the same time to transform highly controversial political decisions upon domestic and foreign policy into touchstones of Catholic orthodoxy and morality. A putatively national episcopal policy which could reject as impractical the quest for a constitutional amendment barring abortion as slavery ... in favor of an amendment which would leave such matters to the political processes of the individual states has lost its bearings, for at the same time the American bishops are strangely unwilling to leave economic and foreign policy decisions to such popular decisions."

click:

— Donald Keefe, S.J., Covenantal Theology, vol. 1, p. 112.

Theological modernity delenda est...

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"Schillebeeckx ... proceeded in his later work ... to a notion of the relation of the Church to the Eucharist in which the faith of the Church is the cause of the Eucharistic presence: this of course rules out the notion of the Eucharist as the representation of the One Sacrifice, and thus the need of ordination to offer that Sacrifice. ... Schillebeeckx can then only conclude, given his a priori relativization of tradition, that the Tridentine doctrine of the Sacrifice of the Mass must go. Here he is at one with the whole of the cosmological and dehistoricizing agenda of theological modernity, which must finally converge upon the negation of this Event, for it celebrates the good news of the falsehood of that historical pessimism."

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— Fr. Donald Keefe, Covenantal Theology (1991), p. 108.

A sentimentalized version of the priesthood...

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"Archbishop Thomas J. Murphy ..., chairman [ca. 1989] of the U. S. Catholic Conference Committee on Priestly Life and Ministry and advisor to the Committee on Priestly Formation [endorsed, ca. 1982, a National Catholic Vocation Council Booklet that presented] the contemporary priestly ideal as that of 'the enabler and the leader, as a poet and storyteller, as a builder of community and as a person who concelebrates the gifts and ministries of all the people.' ... One is reminded ... of Aldous Huxley's celebrated relegation, in Brave New World, of the bishop of the future to the role of 'community arch-songster.' The declining number of vocations [ca. 1991] to this sentimentalized version of the priesthood—all that is left when dissent is given its head—is hardly surprising; still less is it much to be regretted, for a vocation actually meeting that description cannot serve the Church."

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— Fr. Donald Keefe, Covenantal Theology (1991), p. 99.

"Ecumenism is our strength... compromise is victory... war is peace..."

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"The willingness—indeed the eagerness—of Catholics to accept [the] exclusion of the fundamental affirmations of their faith from public life in order that they may enter the 'main stream' is the foremost scandal of Catholicism in this past half century: in this, they literally trade a mess of pottage for the human birthright."

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- Fr. Donald Keefe, Covenantal Theology (1991), p. 97.

Yo, dawg, I heard you liked Blind Watchmakers, so...

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"The universe, [according to Richard Dawkins], mindlessly following its mechanical laws, has succeeded in crafting these astonishing [biological] structures by repeated trial and error. What Dawkins does not seem to appreciate is that his Blind Watchmaker is something even more remarkable than Paley's watches. Paley finds a "watch," and asks how such a thing could have come to be there by chance. Dawkins finds an immense automated factory that blindly constructs watches, and feels that he has completely answered Paley's point. But that is absurd. How can a factory that makes watches be less in need of explanation than the watches themselves? Paley, if still alive, would be entitled to ask Dawkins how his Blind Watchmaker came to be there. Perhaps Dawkins would answer that it was produced by a Blind "Blind Watchmaker" Maker."


— Stephen M. Barr, _Modern Physics and Ancient Faith_ (Notre Dame, IN: NDU Press, 2003), p. 111.

Saturday, January 26, 2019

Reasonable men... and women...

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"If there is no conviction [or practice] so alien to the mind of the Church as to place its partisans outside the Church, then membership in the same Church has ceased to have any meaning. Reasonable men may disagree as to what counts as an error grave enough to earn an anathema, but this is not the same as denying the possibility of ortho- and hetero- doxy in principle."

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— Fr. Paul Mankowski, SJ, National Jesuit News, December 1991 (as cited in the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars, Volume 15, Number 3 [June 1992], p. 9).

Touching the basis of all reality.. and finding infinite love...

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"We must not objectivize God’s presence, God’s giving of himself to us in the eucharist, as just another of the many ways of being present to us. The eucharist is the centre of all other presences of God toward us. In the eucharist, we touch the basis of all reality, the Holy Trinity; here are concentrated the uncreated, personalized, loving energies of God as loving community. God’s fullness of love moves toward us in order to transform us into his loving children.”


— George A. Maloney, SJ, Be Filled with the Fullness of God (Hyde Park, New York: St. Paul’s, 1993), p. 120.

"Eucharistic Controversies" by James Hitchcock

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[As with my recent post of Fr. Meconi's essay, "A Christian View of History," this short essay by Prof. Hitchcock was not only a large factor in drawing me into Fr. Keefe's work, but has also found itself virtually consigned to the "memory hole." So, in order that his essay is more readily available than by scouring the Wayback Machine, I post it here for posterity.]

EUCHARISTIC CONTROVERSIES

by James Hitchcock

One of the great ironies of Catholic history is the frequency with which the Eucharist, the very act of Christian unity, has been the focus of contention and faction.

In this as in so many other things the Catholic Church, more than any other religion except Eastern Orthodoxy, regards correct belief as crucial to authentic faith. Modern sentimental liberalism urges that everyone be admitted to the Eucharist, almost indiscriminately, since participating in the Eucharistic act will itself overcome differences and forge unity.

But, while the Church does not of course require everyone to be a dogmatic theologian, it has always insisted that, to the degree each person is able, he must understand Catholic practice in orthodox ways. Thus an indiscriminately "inclusive" Eucharistic community would be a kind of lie.

One of the fiercest Eucharistic controversies came during the "Dark Ages," when the level of speculation in the West was generally low but when for the first time the Church had to face directly the claim that, when Jesus said "This is my Body," he was not speaking literally. Those tenth-century disputes ended by firmly enthroning Eucharistic realism in the Church, so that at every point the Church has taken great pains to defend that realism, as well as ancillary doctrines such as the sacramental power of the priesthood transcending the personal worthiness of the priest himself.

The Reformation of course divided Christianity a dozen ways on this matter, of which the Protestant-Catholic split was only one instance. Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli aborted a possible theological alliance by failing to agree on the meaning of "This is my body," and there developed a spectrum of Protestant beliefs ranging all the way to the Quaker refusal to celebrate the Eucharist at all, as a merely "carnal" understanding of God.

One of the saddest features of post-Vatican II Catholicism is the way in which the Eucharist, once the great transcendent act in which the most socially diverse Catholics could submerge their identities, has now itself become a focus of contention and division. There is now the "Tridentine Mass," the "Novus Ordo Latin Mass," the ordinary vernacular Mass, the "folk Mass," and those celebrations with numerous varieties of improvisation by celebrants and worshippers. In this as in other matters, there is no longer one faith, and what various groups understand the Eucharist to be is fundamentally in conflict one with another. Beyond all statistics of numerical decline, beyond all disputes over morality or the role of women, this Eucharistic division is the single most important indicator of the unhealthy state of post-conciliar Catholicism.

Traditional Eucharistic piety, and much of traditional theology as well, has been criticized as narrow, static, and legalistic, all of which was true in some respects. At its worst the old Eucharistic understanding was preoccupied with obedient conformity and rubrical correctness, able to find Christ solely in the act of priestly consecration and its aftermath. It is this narrowness which reformers had been trying to remedy ever since the beginning of the liturgical movement in the nineteenth century.

But, as with so many other post-conciliar developments, "reform" has proceeded not by broadening and deepening authentic understanding but by truncating it through a shallow and restricted rationalism.

Polls show that two thirds of Catholics do not believe that Jesus is bodily present in the Eucharist, a figure which probably represents not so much conscious dissent as mere ignorance. What has replaced orthodox understanding is a rational reductionism into which all but confirmed atheists might enter - Jesus is present in the Eucharistic community through the individuals who comprise it, whose unity is itself his presence. The bread and wine symbolize this unity.

An authentic Catholic understanding, which has always been available to those who sought it, does understand that Jesus is indeed present in the Eucharist in multiple ways, among which is his presence within all baptized believers, a presence which is especially powerful when those believers gather for Eucharistic worship. He is also present in the words of Scripture, which are not to be read merely as lessons to be learned but as living words able to penetrate the soul of the hearer and transform it. He is, above all, uniquely and entirely present in an immensely heightened and intense way in the Eucharistic elements themselves.

The relationship of these various modes of presence to one another is itself part of the inexhaustible mystery of the Eucharist.

The Eucharist is indeed, as reformers insist, an action rather than a static reality. It is the action of God within the worshipping [sic] community, making Christ wholly present in real and profound ways. Thus the kind of Eucharistic piety which saw Jesus as the "prisoner of the tabernacle," or which thought of him as absent from the assembly prior to the consecration at each Mass, was indeed misguided.

The classical liturgical movement, as it existed until the time of the Council, as well as the work of various modern theologians, sought to retrieve the widest and deepest possible understanding of the Eucharist, an understanding far more demanding in terms of informed faith than the old piety required. Instead, however, liberal Catholicism has mainly issued forth in such things as the theory of "transignification," which are shallow, rationalistic, and merely subjective.

But the post-conciliar period has also brought forth a neglected classic of Eucharistic theology — Father Donald J. Keefe's Covenantal Theology: the Eucharistic Ordering of History — which is as rich and profound a work on the subject as the twentieth century has produced. Only a rash individual would claim to understand all of it, but it provides the basis for a genuine reconstruction of Eucharistic understanding.

James Hitchcock is professor of history at Saint Louis University.

"A Christian View of History" by David Meconi, S.J.

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[This essay, along with a brief essay by Prof. James Hitchcock, more or less launched my entry into the work of Fr. Keefe, but it has slipped through my clutches a few times over the years, so I want to make sure it's readily available somewhere else than a dusty corner of the Wayback Machine.]

A Christian View of History

by David Meconi, S.J.

“In Christianity time has a fundamental importance.”1 At the dawn of the new millennium, our Philosopher Pope wants to teach the world that time is not inimical to human union with the Divine but is rather the arena in which creation’s encounter with God takes place. The Christian faith is neither a mere remembrance of the past nor is it merely the waiting of things to come. In two recent writings, the Holy Father reemphasizes this distinct Christian understanding of history: that time neither sweeps us further away from God’s revelation in Christ nor does it simply bring us to some future glory, but is the conduit in which the Eternal is fully available and definitively present to us now. John Paul II’s 1994 Apostolic Exhortation, Tertio Millennio Adveniente, is a beautifully constructed meditation on the nature of history and the significance of time while his 1998 encyclical, Fides et Ratio, argues that absolute truth is not some lost or unattainable reality but “is immersed in time and history” (no. 11) and as such, is presently available to those who seek rightly. Both monumental writings draw on the Christian understanding of time as part of the good creation and a means through which God reveals Himself.

Paganism, Protestantism, and Postmodernism all share a mistrust of the Church’s historical optimism. Instead of seeing history as the medium of salvation, these schools of thought maintain that the Divine, the Absolute, is outside of the here and now. To have a distinctly Christian understanding of history, however, is to confess that the Divine is fully present in and accessible to those in space and time. Professing otherwise is to fall into an historical pessimism, taking one of three forms. First, as the pre- or extra-Judeo-Christian pagans believed, time is a pernicious current taking humanity further and further from some Golden Age. In this worldview, divine works were accomplished in a “time before time.” Groping to return to that time unmarked by successive days, religion became the way man could “tie back” (re-ligio) to that eternal present.

The Protestant understanding of history sees time as salvific only in recollecting what God has done and hoping for what He will again do. God is of course active in history but His real presence is something of the past, when Christ walked the earth, as well as something of the future, His Second Coming. Since the “here and now” is void of His tangible and explicit presence, time has no salvific significance in and of itself. The believer is thus forced to “get out” of history through his inner-life of faith. Because God is no longer really objectively present in history, His presence is now determined by human memory and anticipation. Without the Eucharistic mediation of the Church, Protestantism is forced to deny that the fullness of God’s Self is able to be encountered in the present moment and hence denies history’s ability to mediate the Divine.

The third option is of course that there is no Absolute, no Ultimate Reality, and time is able to offer only that which is relative, finite, and passing. This is the Postmodern understanding of history: because we are caught up in endless and inexplicable relationships and webs of networks, the truth always remains something “out there” and is never able to penetrate our own perspectives and positions. In history there can be no immanent truth, beauty, or goodness. In fact, in history we find nothing—no guiding standards, no valid traditions, no objective reality.

By way of explaining the historical pessimism underlying each of these three positions, the following essay will explain what John Paul II means when he holds up time as a fundamental Christian category. The question to be answered here is whether or not God reveals Himself definitively in created time, in history. Is time a medium of redemption or a hindrance to it? Can one encounter the Absolute fully in the here and now? If the answer is yes, how; if no, what then is history’s relationship to the Divine? Jesuit theologian Donald J. Keefe has seen this relationship between Christ and history more clearly than most and has consequently spent most of his academic energy reminding the rest of us that, “There is no other free, intelligible order in history than the one which is grounded in the free unity of the Eucharistic One Flesh, and none has ever been proposed.”2 In the following essay it will therefore be shown that only in the Eucharistic worship of the Church is the Divine essentially and fully present in time while all other creeds share a related distrust toward the historical.

The second section of Tertio Millennio Adveniente begins by contrasting the Christian sense of time with the pre-Christian or pagan understanding. For the Christian, time is created by God and as such—like all of God’s good creation—time is purposeful and a sacramental through which the Divine is seen. John Paul writes, “Time is indeed fulfilled by the very fact that God, in the Incarnation, came down into human history. Eternity entered into time: what ‘fulfillment’ could be greater than this? What other ‘fulfillment’ would be possible? Some have thought in terms of certain mysterious cosmic cycles in which the history of the universe, and of mankind in particular, would constantly repeat itself . . . . Some have considered various forms of reincarnation: depending on one’s previous life, one would receive a new life in either a higher or lower form, until full purification is attained” (no. 9).

The Holy Father knows that apart from God’s covenant fulfilled in the “fullness of time” (cf. Gal 4:4), pre-Christian civilizations could not see how time was good and meaningful. Rather, to find meaning in this world, the pagan myth acted as the safeguard against history’s devouring those caught up in the present day. Because the pagan gods cannot be met in history, the pre- or extra-Judeo-Christian world used myths reenacted in ritual to regain that Golden Age in which the gods walked the earth. These divine events, figures, and sayings which happened in ‘that time before time’ are again made real through the re-telling of the story. The myth offers meaning and protection in a world devoid of significance: since time moves man further and further away from his true home, he clings to the stories and ceremonies which unite him to the heavenly. As Oedipus, the legendary king of Thebes, proclaimed shortly before his death: “Only the gods can never age, the gods can never die. All else in the world almighty Time obliterates, crushes all to nothing . . .” Myth, as in the telling of the Oedipus trilogy, saves the present by injecting the Immutable into an otherwise transient moment.

Greek Orphics depicted their god of time, Chronos, as a vicious monster and the ancient Latins lived by the adage, Tempus edax rerum (Time destroys all things.) Because the non-Christian trembled in the face of the future, he held up the retelling of myth and reenactment of various rites as his only link to the permanent. The eminent scholar in world religions, Mircea Eliade, calls this the pagan’s attempt to escape his “profane duration” by commemorating some pristine past. For those without the proper understanding of God in the world, in history, time must be transcended and even reversed through religious festivals. As Eliade writes, myths reenacted in rituals, “suspend the flow of time, of duration, and project the celebrant into a mythical time, in illo tempore . . . all rituals imitate a divine archetype and that their continual reactualization takes place in one and the same atemporal mythical instant.”3 For example, upon the return of a warrior from battle, stories of the hero—Marduk in the Mesopotamian Gilgamesh Epic or Zeus’ battle against the Titans—would be told to provide meaning and significance, the presence of the gods, to the deeds just wrought. Upon the death of a child, a pious Greek mother would recall Demeter’s perennial loss of Persephone; and every year the citizens of Rome retold the legend of Romulus and Remus so as to recover the sacred origins of their city. For without the individuals’ recalling of these myths, the significance of the present could not convey the Permanent, the Divine, and risks being irretrievably lost to the pernicious current of time.

Pagan texts were read and rites were performed to flee the present and commemorate what the gods had once done. Within this pessimism, however, Christ’s Church was born. “Not by way of cleverly concocted myths” (2 Pet 1:16) did the first Christians teach. Rather, in stark contrast to the pagan attempt to revive a lost time in which Divinity could be found, the Apostles insisted on announcing—literally, to make now (nunc)—the Good News. Whereas the pagan myths and rituals strove to recover an age gone by, the Christian liturgy made available the definitive and real presence of God. As Cambridge University’s Catherine Pickstock writes, “although the Gospel is written down in a book, its proclamation is continuous with the sacrifice it narrates. Its enunciation ‘makes now’ a total sacrifice which is not a prior, closed-off event, but enters the interstices of our present, in contrast to the non-sacrificial silence of the unspoken text.”4

The Scriptures and the Sacrifice of the Mass together are the means Christ gave to His Church in order to give His whole self uninterruptedly to those in history. By continuing His Incarnation through His Body and Blood in the Holy Eucharist and by continuing His teaching through the Scriptures as transmitted and thus interpreted by His living Church, Christ ensured His essential and absolute Presence to those in time.5 The Lord did not condemn us solely to remembering or anticipating Him—sola fide. Nevertheless, the second understanding of time in need of examination is that in which Christ’s actual presence from the here and now has been removed, thus rendering His presence merely spiritual and intangible.

By removing Christ’s Body and Blood from the center of all worship, the Reformers unknowingly and unintentionally removed God from history. The Calvinist maxim finitum capax non infiniti, (the finite cannot mediate the Infinite), annuls the created order’s mediation of the Divine. In rejecting the Eucharist as the historical continuation of Christ’s Incarnation, Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and many others took the God-made-flesh out of time and space, out of the world in which we live. Like any other incarnate individual, once Christ’s flesh is removed from the here and now, His presence becomes one of mere spirit: a presence of memory and anticipation but no longer a Presence which we can touch, kneel in front of and adore. Christ’s Real Presence is confined to the Heavens, to the eternal where time cannot reach. But without Christ’s body essentially present in the here and now, how His presence in this world is different than, say, that of the Holy Spirit’s becomes difficult to explain.

Consider, for example, Article XXXVIII of the Thirty-Nine Articles of Anglicanism: “The Body of Christ is given, received, and eaten in the Supper only in a heavenly and spiritual sense. Moreover the medium by which the Body of Christ is received and eaten in the Supper is faith.”6 Without the Church’s sacramental mediation, the true object of Protestant worship is removed from history. Christ’s individuality, His ‘scandal of particularity’—which St. Irenaeus knew scandalized the Gnostics who considered Christ’s flesh a phantom or a mere symbol—is no longer an objective presence in this world. It is now the faith of the believer that establishes Christ’s presence in the world. Unlike the time He walked Jerusalem, Christ’s presence no longer elicits faith but is a presence now determined by the individual believer, sola fide. The Eucharistic Lord who summons and causes an individual’s faith is now reduced to a presence determined by the individual believer because history does not mediate God’s true and objective presence.

Cardinal Ratzinger traces this inversion back to Luther’s denial of history’s mediation of Christ’s true presence. Luther, Ratzinger writes, “considered this heavenly-earthly, Christian-secular history no longer as salvation-bringing and Christian but as anti-Christian, and who sought Christianity, not in it [i.e., history], but against it . . .” Rejection of Christ’s objective presence in history, then, forces the individual to “bring” Christ into history via his own act of faith. Ratzinger can maintain that “Luther’s appearance signaled the collapse of the prevailing historical consciousness,” because with the Reformers came an understanding of Jesus Christ unmediated by His Bridal Church, a spiritual “presence” of the Incarnate God, and an inability to encounter God’s final and definitive work in history.7

The most formidable Protestant theologian of this century, Rudolf Bultmann (d. 1976), encouraged each Christian to “demythologize” the Scriptures so as to rid them of any historical particularity. Believers must now understand Christ’s to be an entirely other-worldly presence. Since history is unable to mediate the Kingdom of God, the Christian should see that, “In his faith he is already above time and history. For although the advent of Christ is an historical event that happened ‘once’ in the past, it is at the same time, an eternal event that occurs again and again in the soul of any Christian in whose soul Christ is born, suffers, dies and is raised up to eternal life. In his faith the Christian is a contemporary of Christ, and time and the world of history are overcome. The advent of Christ is an event in the realm of eternity which is incommensurable with historical time.”8 Firmly rejecting Christ’s Incarnation as eucharistically continued throughout history, the Protestant mind no longer understands His Real Presence to be available to those in time but, rather, to be an other-worldly, unhistorical, cure for time.

Postmodernism holds the similar belief that for those in time, there can be no final truth, no definitive meaning. The term Postmodern was popularized at the turn of this century to describe the discontentment with the modern project which promised to quell human dissatisfaction through progress and technology. After these failed promises of the Renaissance and Enlightenment (i.e., Modernity), Postmodernism realized that we have all we want but we are still restless, anxious, and unsatisfied. Postmodern thinkers have accordingly turned away from any allegiance to what has gone before. Theirs is a position marked by a fatigue with history and there can be little doubt that their rejection of tradition has affected all areas of human living: one only needs to think of twelve-tone or atonalism in music (e.g., John Cage), stream of consciousness and free verse in literature and poetry (e.g., Samuel Beckett), and Dadaism and anti-representationalism in art (e.g., Andy Warhol). Abandonment of structure and tradition has likewise influenced architecture, film, television, and flourishes in every imaginable academic discipline.

The Postmodernist quickly points out that history has proven that there are no permanent foundations underlying human existence and any appeal to reality or truth is nothing more than a camouflaged resort to power. In denying the possibility of objective truth, a series of nineteenth and twentieth-century thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Michel Foucault (1926-1984), and Jacques Derrida (b. 1930) maintain the impossibility of encountering the other. The human person is shut up in his own perspective, his own mind; all is relation, there is no real meaning in the world, only dubious viewpoints, perspectives, and personal opinions. One postmodern critic, David Lehman, summed it up this way, “There are no truths, only a radical relativism; there are no longer any standpoints that can a priori be considered privileged, no structure that functions validly as a model for other structures, no postulate of ontological hierarchy that serve as an organizing principle in the manner in which a deity can be said to engender man and the world.”

What began as a reaction against modernity ends in the rejection of the created realm’s ability to encounter the Divine. Why? Like Heraclitus’ river, Postmoderns see time as that which sweeps away all permanence and ability to grasp the other. In this Postmodern world, people can no longer subscribe to a final, definitive Principle which explains the way things are; there is no true self, no external world and no God to whom all is related. Jacques Derrida argues that such Logocentrism, the attempt to relate all meaning to God—the “transcendental signifier”—as the foundation of truth, is “an attempt which can only ever fail, an attempt to trace the sense of being to the logos, to discourse or reason . . .”9 The postmodern understanding of history disallows any stable referents, any fixed natures, and certainly any possibility of Incarnate Truth breaking into created time. Or as D.H. Lawrence once wrote, “individuality, our identity, is nothing more than an accidental cohesion in the flux of time.”10 Time sweeps all away: all selves, all reality, all truth.

Against this pessimism, the Holy Father insists that, “History therefore becomes the arena where we see what God does for humanity . . . In the Incarnation of the Son of God we see forged the enduring and definitive synthesis which the human mind of itself could not even have imagined: the Eternal enters time, the Whole lies hidden in the part, God takes on a human face” (Fides et Ratio, no. 12). Final truth not only exists but is discernible here and now. The human knower is not condemned to grope for unattainable answers, is not doomed to a world of relativism and doubt, but lives in a world where the Absolute Principle of reality can be encountered.

Note how John Paul’s understanding of meaning and truth is rooted in his understanding of history. Because the Church’s authority is grounded in the historical, Eucharistic Lord, she can teach with a final and definitive voice. In today’s postmodern world, however, the Church’s authority is seen, not as a historical extension of the authority Christ gives to His Apostles but, as nothing more than the fulfillment of Nietzsche’s promise that the world’s weak would search for power out of their “vindictive cunning of impotence.” For it is an all too common opinion today that the Pope has a self-appointed monopoly on ecclesial power and that he could change the Church’s teaching against, say, abortion, the male priesthood, artificial contraception, etc. . . . if he only had the will to do so. A world unable to see history as a medium of the Absolute begins to think that every truth is relative and is eventually lulled into understanding every “truth” as nothing more than an expression of individual strength. However, the Catholic understanding of history and its subsequent teaching of the truth of the Ultimate’s Presence in the world stands as a bright beacon to the rejection of history and subsequent nihilism of Postmodernism. As the Holy Father concludes, although many today believe “the time of certainties is irrevocably past, and the human being must now learn to live in a horizon of total absence of meaning, where everything is provisional and ephemeral,” the Church offers the world true hope and meaning (Fides et Ratio, no. 91). Christ’s self-appropriation of all history to Himself is alone what saves us from this postmodern pessimism, this current “crisis of meaning” (ibid., no. 81).

These reflections have helped us see how Paganism, Protestantism, and Postmodernism all share a denial of the historical order’s ability to mediate the Absolute, the Divine. For the pagan the created order was viewed as a destructive river which took him further and further away from a “time before time” in which harmony and unity prevailed. To recapture this Golden Age, the pagan recalled the perfect personages and deeds which injected permanence and meaning into the present. Denying the capacity to meet God-made-flesh today, Protestantism has haphazardly removed Him from history. Apart from the ecclesial event of the Eucharist, God’s Incarnation is absent from time and His presence becomes one of spirit, determined by the individual believer. Postmodernism likewise sees truth and meaning determined not by the individual’s assent to external reality but by personal perspective and determination. The quest for truth and worship is abandoned as illusory and meaningless.

Apart from these three forms of historical pessimism, stands the sacramental mediation of the Church. In contrast to the understanding of time as antagonistic to our encounter with the Divine, the Church teaches that each passing day does not take us further and further away from God but, rather, stands as a perpetual invitation to enter more fully into His closeness. The Church’s message has always stood in hopeful opposition to such despair of the historical. “Within the dimension of time the world was created; within it the history of salvation unfolds…every year, every day and every moment are embraced by his Incarnation and Resurrection, and thus become part of the ‘fullness of time’” (Tertio Millennio Adveniente, no. 10). Time does not diminish Christ’s Presence in the world because as God-made-flesh, Jesus Christ promised to be with us until the end of the age (Mat. 28:20) and it is this same Incarnate God continuously present in the sacramental worship of the Church.

Eucharistic worship is thus not one peripheral liturgy among others but is rather the life-giving event which imparts ultimate meaning into our otherwise transient days. Christ is the Lord of history, the Lord of all places and times equally and fully and it is only in the Church’s life, where the Divine essence is fully available, that the present becomes salvific. Apart from Christ’s Eucharistic presence and His accessibility through the Church’s worship, the only alternative remaining is a fatalistic understanding of time and history. He has however entrusted Himself to His Body on earth (e.g., Acts 9:4-5), and the Church’s historical mediation of Creator to creation offers the only option to those alien creeds insistent on the inaccessibility of the Divine.

End Notes

1 Tertio Millennio Adveniente, no. 10. For all papal writings I will simply include the title and paragraph number in the body of this essay.

2 Donald J. Keefe, “Eucharistic Affirmations,” The Catholic World Report (June, 1999), p. 52. See also Fr. Keefe’s Covenantal Theology: The Eucharistic Order of History (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1996).

3 Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return (New York: Bollingen Foundation and Pantheon Books, 1954), p. 76.

4 Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 218.

5 See the Second Vatican Council’s Dei Verbum, no. 9, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 74-141 for more on the transmission of divine revelation.

6 As cited in James T. O’Connor, The Hidden Manna (Ignatius Press, 1988), p. 150.

7 Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology: Building Stones for a Fundamental Theology (Ignatius Press, 1987), p. 157.

8 Rudolf Bultmann, History and Eschatology (New York: Harper and Row 1957), p. 153.

9 Raoul Mortley, French Philosophers in Conversation: Levinas, Schneider, Serres, Irigaray, Le Doeuff, Derrida (New York: Routledge Press, 1991), p. 104.

10 As quoted in Martin Henry, “God in Postmodernity,” The Irish Theological Quarterly, vol. 63 (1998), p. 8, n. 17. For more on Catholicism and Postmodernism, see American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly (Spring, 1999) which dedicates five excellent essays to understanding the Church’s response to postmodern claims.

Friday, January 25, 2019

God bless Fr. Donald Keefe, SJ...

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"[O]ur objective reality as human is covenantal, and as historical is Eucharistic; this reality is the single interest and single subject matter of Catholic theology, because it is the ground of existence in Christ. The Eucharist is the center of objective existence because it is the constituting Event of the historically free world, of the Good Creation . . . There is no other dignity than this, our participation in the One Flesh of the One Sacrifice by which in Christ we have access to the Father.”
The last I had heard of Fr. Keefe (via John Kelleher?), many years ago, was that he was working on a final supplement to Covenantal Theology. In the interim — I just discovered tonight —, he has left this vale of tears. I can only offer my humble prayers for his departed soul, as well as hope that any unfinished works of his may come to light in due time.

R.I.P.

Fundamentalists have more fun...

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"This Schlagwort [viz., 'fundamentalism'], once descriptive of a naive Biblical literalism, has become the favored device and the current glib-speak for exiling from the realm of civilized discourse those Christians, Catholic and Protestant, who prefer the magisterial authority of their traditions to the clerical and academic consensus that would subordinate the Gospel to the higher truth of modernity. ... [For example,] Martin Marty argues [ca. 1987] that insofar as persons of religious conviction do not sell out to an amalgamated 'pluralistic' public religiosity, the end they have in view can only be a theocratic intolerance....  
"The fundamentalist label is now used in quasi-Catholic circles to include whatever theological position refuses to drift before the winds of change emanating from the editorial offices of such journals of conventional opinion as Commonweal, America and the U.S. Catholic Conference 'news service,' the weekly Origins...."

-- Fr. Donald J. Keefe, S.J., Covenantal Theology: The Eucharistic Order of History, rev. ed., with an Appendix (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, [1991] 1996), p. 66. 

Monday, January 21, 2019

Fr. Rutler's Weekly Column - 20 January 2019

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Fr. Rutler's Weekly Column
January 20, 2019

   The nineteenth-century churchman John Henry Newman has shaped many of my views and how to apply them. With the credit of a second miracle to his intercession, it is likely that he will be canonized in short order.
   Our culture as a whole is conflicted about the course of events and moral failing in dealing with them, and this is glaringly so in the Church, which is made by God to be a beacon and ballast for all people. Newman reminds us in one of his letters (Vol. XXV, p. 204) not to be surprised by this, as it fits the predictable strategy of the Anti-Christ: “Where you have power, you will have the abuse of power—and the more absolute, the stronger, the more sacred the power, the greater and more certain will be its abuse.”

Where you had Pius X, you will have Francis I...

   For Catholics, present problems are weightier than at any time since the sixteenth century, with its political and theological upheavals. Even the assurance of a stable and centrifugal reference in Rome itself is being tested. It is helpful to recall what Newman said in another of his letters (Vol. XXVII, p. 256): “In the times of Arianism the great men of the Church thought things too bad to last. So did Pope Gregory at the end of the 7th century, St. Romuald in the 11th, afterwards St. Vincent Ferrer, and I think Savonarola—and so on to our time.”

Gee, if only we had a pope who also thought things were bad...

   It would be falsely pious to sweep the scandals of our day under the rug. And it is stunningly evident that, in cases of moral abuse, bureaucratic attempts to buy silence have been a very bad investment.

Is this where Rutler names names? No... I didn't think so....

   In the Historical Sketches, Newman refers to “the endemic perennial fidget which possesses us about giving scandal; facts are omitted in great histories, or glosses are put upon memorable acts, because they are thought not edifying, whereas of all scandals such omissions, such glosses, are the greatest." 

Cf. my above gloss...

   Present experience attests to what Newman wrote in his book Via Media: “The whole course of Christianity from the first . . . is but one series of troubles and disorders. Every century is like every other, and to those who live in it seems worse than all times before it. The Church is ever ailing . . . Religion seems ever expiring, schisms dominant, the light of truth dim, its adherents scattered. The cause of Christ is ever in its last agony." 
   Scandal is “an attitude or behavior which leads another to do evil” and it “takes on a particular gravity by reason of the authority of those who cause it or the weakness of those who are scandalized” (Catechism of the Catholic Church #2284-2285). Our Lord, who faulted the scribes and Pharisees for giving scandal, is the author and head of the Church, and the good news is that, despite the vicissitudes and dissembling of the Church’s mortal members, His Good News is not “fake news.”

Never mind that the same Catechism is on record asserting that Christ Himself 

"scandalized the Pharisees by eating with tax collectors and sinners as familiarly as with themselves. Against those among them 'who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and despised others', Jesus affirmed: 'I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.' He went further by proclaiming before the Pharisees that, since sin is universal, those who pretend not to need salvation are blind to themselves. Jesus gave scandal above all when he identified his merciful conduct toward sinners with God's own attitude toward them" (cf. CCC 588-589).

Stay tuned for more animadversions...

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