Religion

On the face of it, these pro-homosexualists who don’t like “prejudice” have a point: Mixed message, and Two speeches, two days apart. If it’s true, as the Pope supposedly said, that we should all strive to “overcome preconceived ideas and prejudices, tear down barriers and eliminate contrasts that divide … so as to build together a world of justice and peace,” then it’s not clear why we should accept sexual distinctions rather than struggle against them, with gays heroically leading the way. To be more specific, here’s the way people today understand such statements:

Does anyone know what “reconciliation” means in church-speak? Dr. Schori, the Episcopal Presiding Bishop, uses it quite a lot, and calls it the mission of her church, but you never see a clear definition.

The freeing of the Old Mass seems to be drawing closer.

Hegel points out somewhere that at one time men started the day by praying or reading the Bible, while in his day they started it by reading a newspaper. Today I suppose they mostly turn on the TV or radio or go online. Whatever the specifics, Hegel’s general point is an important one. When you start a day or anything that matters the point is always to get in touch with where things stand, and how you do that depends on what you think your setting is and what you think is real.

God is the ens realissimum, the Most Real Being. You could turn that around, and say that whatever you think is most real is what you think is God. How men deal with that issue changes from time to time. The classic Christian view is reflected in the Treaty of Paris (1763), ending the Seven Years War, which begins “In the Name of the Most Holy and Undivided Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.” In contrast, the beginnings of the Declaration of Independence (“When in the course of human events”) and the U.S. Constitution (“We the people”) suggest that by the time they were written history and therefore human activity had become the basic reality. (At least that was so at the highest and most formal level of thought. In slightly more local and day-to-day settings, for example the drafting of state constitutions, men continued to appeal to God.)

Still, in spite of the gloom and doom of the last posting, life goes on, and no cloud but has a silver lining. For example, a big benefit of the recent scandals in the Catholic Church and growing anti-religious trends in Western life is that they’ve squashed a lot of the happy talk the Church has been stuck with for the past 40 years and forced the bishops to try to figure out what it is they’re supposed to stand for and why.

In France, criticism of a private fund-raising effort now seems to constitute a violation of the separation of Church and state: Catholic Clergy Attack French Telethon Over Stem Cell Aid.

The country’s Muscular Dystrophy Association runs an annual telethon to raise money for medical research, part of which is spent on research on embryonic stem cells. Some clerics said the telethon shouldn’t be supported for that reason. It seems that the most extreme statement was made by a member of the commission for bioethics and human life in one diocese, who posted a statement on the diocesan web site that said “It is no longer possible to participate in the telethon … Christians cannot cooperate with evil.” The statement has been removed, and the consensus among bishops is that the effort should still be supported,

A Good Source tells me that everyone at the Vatican is in a tizzy over the rumored document liberalizing availability of the Tridentine (traditional Latin) mass. Everyone think’s it’s a big deal, but no one (except I suppose the Pope) has any idea what’s going to happen or when.

So much for inside gossip. In the rest of the world hardly anyone has any idea why any of this should matter. Here are some points that may help guide the perplexed:

• The Mass is central to Catholicism. It’s the most important single thing the hierarchical Church does, because it’s the center of unity—spiritual, social, historical and physical—between Heaven and earth and among Catholics. Raphael’s Disputa might give you some idea of the place it holds. It’s a bit like the position sex holds in marriage, only more so.

I remember the beauty of Anglican worship when I first encountered it, and I used to attend an Episcopalian church, so like others I’ve been watching with horrified fascination the continuing devolution of the Episcopal Church. So here are some comments on Dr. Katharine Jefferts Schori’s investiture sermon as presiding bishop of what is now TEC (“The Episcopal Church”):

• From the sermon and other statements it appears that putting aside poetic language Dr. Schori’s religion is a matter of working together to eliminate social divisions and gross material evils like poverty and disease. Today, it seems, that means signing on to the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. So far as I can tell there’s nothing else there. Creeds and so on from her standpoint are just distractions in comparison with “mission”, which means development goals.

Oriens, the journal of the Ecclesia Dei Society of Australia, has a good website with a good selection of articles, reviews, and other materials connected to the restoration of the traditional Latin Mass and its bearing on the situation in the Church generally. Among the articles I particularly noticed The Papa Luigi syndrome and Think Catholic, Act Locally.

The fundamental question of political legitimacy is the nature and purpose of authority, and thus the nature of man, the world, moral obligation, and the human good—in other words, which religion is correct. Liberalism cannot get by without answering that question, but it answers it indirectly, by claiming moral ignorance. We do not know what the good is, it tells us, so we should treat all desires the same. The satisfaction of all desires thus becomes the unquestionable good.

What does it mean that something as idiotic as the Da Vinci Code has had a strong effect on how people answer pollsters’ questions about Christianity and Catholicism? (No, I haven’t read the book or seen the movie, and yes, I feel entitled to dismiss them as idiotic anyway.)

Some possibilities:

To think and act we have to trust things that go beyond what we can perceive or demonstrate. Our knowledge cannot be a mere summary of the evidence but must rest on something further—at a minimum, on a belief that future evidence will validate it. It is a system of coherent belief, and like any other cannot exist without tradition and thus faith. In the end, there are no skeptics. None of us can abandon faith without abandoning thought and life.

Reason and experience depend on an everyday kind of faith. We need that faith to tell us that our memories can be relied on, that the experience of others is like our own, even that things exist independently of us and our thoughts. Reason is not self-sustaining. It cannot demonstrate the conditions of its functioning: the validity of first principles, the coherence of memory, the trustworthiness of perception, or the reliability of the linguistic and cultural setting it needs to operate. To trust reason we must trust those things, and to trust experience we must trust both our perceptions and the thoughts that enable us to sort them out and come to grips with them. We understand tradition, the accumulated thought and experience of our people, much more by accepting it than by weighing and judging it from outside. We treat it as something that comes to us with an authority that goes beyond anything we can fully explain. Our confidence is based on faith that it is not random or arbitrary but revelatory, that through it the bits, pieces and glimmerings that are immediately available to us have grown into attitudes, practices, beliefs and symbols that show how things are and make truths available to us we could not attain directly.

I’d been out of internet contact for 10 days or so and hadn’t seen the cartoons that supposedly gave rise to all the delayed Muslim outrage. When I did I was startled by how mild they were. A few of them seemed likely to offend: one that made the Islamic crescent look like horns on Mohammed’s head, and a couple that depicted the prophet as violent and oppressive.