The Mystery Horn—Articles

Truth and Consequences

2009-04-08T19:44:00.000-07:00

David Warren

One of my living heroes, the American journalist and economist Thomas Sowell, wrote a column a couple of days ago consisting of "random thoughts" -- aphoristic remarks about things as they now are. His points ran from the generality of:

"Perhaps the scariest aspect of our times is how many people think in talking points, rather than in terms of real world consequences."

To the specificity of:

"Barack Obama seems determined to repeat every disastrous mistake of the 1930s, at home and abroad. He has already repeated Herbert Hoover's policy of raising taxes on high income earners, FDR's policy of trying to micro-manage the economy, and Neville Chamberlain's policy of seeking dialogues with hostile nations while downplaying the dangers they represent."

Sowell is superb when apothegmatic. The value in such assertions as these -- made free of the encumbering apparatus of careful qualification on which he usually depends -- is that they light a dark landscape with lightning. They are the pure electric charge of insight.

I love Sowell, because he can "do" desolation without wandering into despair. Reciprocally, he can do hope -- the real thing, not the rhetorical posture. A black man, from a fatherless home, raised by an aunt whom he thought was his mother, in rural then urban conditions that would excuse any man for failure, he saw through his circumstances. He dragged himself up, through a machine shop, through the Marines, eventually to great eminence in the academic world, at a time before he could trade on his race. And he continued rising, with the help of honest friends, and by ignoring vilifications.

He is the opposite of the current U.S. president, who, despite a semi-fatherless start, lucked out at every stage, and has consistently traded on race. Which is not to say I'm against luck, per se, nor against exploiting one's natural advantages. I am instead calling attention to what can be done without luck and advantages. Obama's youthful memoirs are well-written and captivating, but narcissistic; I would recommend The Autobiography of Malcolm X for better insights into American black experience. And I would recommend Sowell's A Personal Odyssey for something that defeats both, by refusing to politicize the personal.

We learn by suffering; Sowell knows that, and has learned. We advance by finding advantages in what at first sight are only limitations and oppressions; by turning the tables on fate. This is an individual, not a collective operation; it begins with that refusal to make an excuse. In moments Sowell reminds me almost of Solzhenitsyn, turning a Siberian prison camp into an elite finishing school of hard knocks, and graduating from it, magna cum laude.

When I read a man's works, I do not look only at his arguments, but when I can know, at how he has lived them. One is not converted by arguments alone, one is converted by personal example, and by spiritual qualities that go beyond the purely rational. Note that construction: the spiritual requires more than the rational, not less. We do not, or rather should not, take instructions on how to live from people who do not live by them.

Now, Professor Sowell is only one of many living heroes, and I mention him today because he is so often casually vilified, demonized, derided and condescended to by "progressive" people, including many fellow blacks, as if he were an Uncle Tom, when he is no such thing.

Clarence Thomas, the U.S. Supreme Court justice who is another of my living heroes, recalled throwing a book by Sowell in the trash, in his young radical days. In Justice Thomas's memoir, My Grandfather's Son, a parallel story is told of wrestling with, then finally breaking through, the political myths that have provided the greatest obstacle to the genuine liberation of "African America."

Another hero, though a man I did not at first appreciate, is the late Martin Luther King Jr. Read him and one finds that he is no mere politician, selling illusions to advance a career, or to promote any party agenda. His unambiguously Christian apprehension of the world is visible to all who are prepared to take seriously what he has to say, for instance against moral failure, against broken families, against the evil of abortion, against radicalism and violence. The black man must stand, not as a black, but as a man. King is accepted today as a hero, across all political classes, yet his message is often reduced to that of a "community organizer." Yet he was, in reality, the opposite of that.

In this Holy Week, facing towards Good Friday, we should remember what lies deeper than politics: Truth. "Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you." Yet what goes deeper than politics, applies also to politics. It is to stand on truths for which you won't be thanked, to stand alone if you must, full of the hope that in the end, truth wins

Papal Authority in Von Balthasar’s Ecclesiology

2008-12-18T17:01:00.000-08:00

Fr. Raymond Cleaveland

The members of the Church can and must create an environment in which the Pope can exercise his authority and be loved for it.

It can neither be said that love disappears in office (or that office co-opts love for itself), nor that office and love stand in opposition like two adequately separable structural elements—Hans Urs von Balthasar.

Hans Urs von Balthasar’s 1974 study in Petrine authority, The Office of Peter and the Structure of the Church, masterfully lays out a novel ecclesial vision of authority. Yet the English translation of the title seems to miss the point. The original German title captures Balthasar’s reasons for writing much more poignantly: Der Antiromische Affekt—“The Anti-Roman Attitude.” Though Balthasar was a rising star when it was published, he looked like David casting pebbles at the post-conciliar Goliaths the likes of Küng, Rahner and Schillebeeckx. The ex-periti had reason to gloat, for they had emerged from the Council vindicated in their ideas, successful in their theological publications, and spurred-on by the epoch of confusion, which immediately followed. And while guarding his personal friendships, Balthasar challenged the theologians of his day with his own voluminous publications, confronting their “anti-Roman feeling” and ressentiment, which, in his own words, “blinded them to the objective” of theological reflection. [1] He did so by reexamining the points of departure for ecclesiological reflection, and from his brow came a new genre of ecclesiology—one based on the concept of discipleship—which became the platform for his reflections on authority in general, and Petrine authority in particular.

Let me say at the outset that this is not an attempt to “pigeon-hole” one man as “conservative” and others as “liberals,” nor to portray Balthasar as some kind of “Defensor Fidei” during tumultuous times, for any sort of label applied to a man of his theological breadth and profundity would be necessarily reductive. Rather, this essay will treat Balthasar’s unique ecclesial vision (which has always been characterized by a strong Sensus Ecclesiae) of the intimate connection between discipleship and authority. It will be done in four parts, following the natural sequence of Balthasar’s own profound reflection on Peter and his role in the Church: 1) the essence of discipleship and the “paradox of the following”; 2) the “Form of Christ” in the disciple and in Peter in particular; 3) authority in the communio of the Church; and 4) the specific role of the Petrine Office in Balthasar’s mind—that of guarding unity.

Some background

What is the origin of authority in the Church? Is there not a variety of charisms, of which authority is but one? And what role, if any, should the Sovereign Pontiff have in the post-conciliar Church? These and other questions resonated in seminary halls and universities during the late 60s and most of the 70s. Yet Balthasar had resolved most of them in his own heart as early as 1961, a year before the Council was even convened, when he wrote that authority in the Church came about precisely because the Church’s institutional factor is, by its own nature, inseparable from the New Testament idea of discipleship. [2] Yet the continual and seemingly insurmountable debate of the day pitted the theologians’ call for freedom of reflection [3] against Paul VI’s repeated pleas for obedience (who, by the way, was a very non-authoritarian pope, compared to some of his predecessors). This disdain for Paul VI became particularly acute in the wake of Humanae Vitae, and this perhaps was Balthasar’s ultimate reason for publishing Der Antiromische Affekt in the face of so many contrary voices. In his 1971 article, “The Pope Today,” his indictment is forceful and poignant.

...[T]he loud-mouthed, Christian, mostly clerical rogues who take such pleasure in attacking Rome can study their own physiognomies in the satirical pictures of Bosch and Breughel…They have all the laughs on their side. But Peter must have seemed fairly laughable too when he was crucified upside down; it was simply a good joke…therefore, blessed the office—whether it’s the Pope or the bishops or simple priests who stand firm, or anyone else who feels responsible when people start saying ‘the Church should do this and that’—which offers itself to fulfill this function, to be the seat of the illness. There is no honor to be won in this role, but if the crowd is to have its fun, a face is needed which one can slap in order to try one’s own strength: the oscillation of the needle tells one infallibly how strong one is. And that too is a form of infallibility. [4]

Whether or not Balthasar’s face had been figuratively “slapped” was beside the point. He saw it happening to Paul VI and others and used his preferred weapon, the pen, to reaffirm that Peter and his office of unity must not merely be tolerated, but valued, recognized and loved. Among the vast ecclesiological contribution of Balthasar, this last aspect is truly a gem, and it is ultimately the vindication of his own thought over those of his academic contemporaries. In the words of Cardinal Ratzinger, pronounced at Balthasar’s funeral Mass in 1988, just two days after the Consistory in which he was to receive the Red Hat, “what the Pope intended to express by this mark of distinction, and of honor [i.e., the cardinalate], remains valid: no longer only private individuals but the Church itself, in its official responsibility, tells us that he is right in what he teaches of the Faith…” [5]

Discipleship

Balthasar begins his reflections by contrasting authority in the Old and New Testaments. In the Old Covenant mindset, authority was quite reduced. There is some notion, for example, of Mosaic or Davidic leadership, but it was largely overshadowed by the Jews’ concept of the people’s fidelity to Yahweh. Although the Prophets, for example, were “lone rangers” in their quest for repentance, every Jew knew that his sort in life and that of the people depended on his own fidelity to the Deuteronomic Law. When Yahweh punished his People, or chastised to the umpteenth generation, it was usually because of their infidelity (murmuring in the desert, consorting with the daughters of Moab, marrying Midianite women, etc). Yet for Balthasar, the Incarnation of the Son of God radically changed the equation. No longer was it the Transcendental Yahweh appearing to Moses in a burning bush or on a mountaintop; the Incarnation was God himself who became Immanuel, handing his New Law over to us as one man gives a gift to another. This radical change from the Old Covenant requires, for Balthasar, a different model of government for the New People of God. Note that the personal nature of the divine-human relationship does not change. “It is true that the Twelve chosen by the Lord form the new, spiritual Israel. But the significant factor is that they are not themselves tribes but individuals and that the new people of God is built on the foundation of individuals who follow the unique individual Christ.” [6] Thus, it is the individual who is called to follow Christ, and the establishment of institutional organs and authoritative structures in the Church as a necessary part of this new form of personal fidelity to Yahweh called “discipleship.”

This results in what Balthasar calls the Paradox of the Following, noting that Christ’s relationship with his disciples was atypical of his contemporaries. The Rabbis of the day imparted knowledge and truth; Christ himself was knowledge and truth, calling his disciples not just to “learn from him” in the externals, but to unite themselves to him in all that is internal—”apart from me you can do nothing” (Matt. 11:29; John 15:5). Hence the paradox, for the disciple is not a mere pupil in the academic sense; he must, as St. Paul says, “induire Christum”—”put on Christ” (Gal. 3:27). Here Balthasar introduces the concept of the Form of Christ, which he sees as the disciple’s transformation into Christ (Gal. 4:9) via this internal discipleship. As he notes in Office of the Church,

The act of surrender in faith under the impulse of grace is therefore answered by God with investiture with the “form of Christ”, which will be formed in the Christian (Gal. 4:19) so that he, in turn, may become a “form” for others (1 Thess.1:7). This form, as common to all Christians, is the soil from which springs authority in the Church, the “pattern for the flock” (1 Pet. 5:3) which is a form specially established by Christ. [7]

It is clear that this concept of “transformation in Christ” represents a stumbling block for Protestants, who, invoking Luther’s notion of total depravity, would insist on its impossibility. Yet in Balthasar’s mind, the Catholic finds precisely in this internal regeneration of the disciple’s soul not only the essence of one’s personal Christian life, but also the source for our Church’s authority and office. “The Christian, the apostle, is steeped in this form of Christ and made a new creature; and in him, therefore, only one form can come into being, one that is the product of love and the ministerial office indissolubly conjoined.” [8] Let us continue to explore and understand this notion in the person of Peter.

The Forma Christi in Peter

The apostles, like all Christians, were not exempt from this “Paradox of the Following.” Like no others ever have, they truly followed him, across the plains of Galilee, through the foothills of Judea, and even up to Jerusalem, where he was crucified and died. Although the Eleven ran from the cross, all of the apostles eventually did follow the Master “usque ad mortem,” and in Peter’s particular case, “mortem autem crucis.” Even before their own passions and martyrdoms, they participated in the Passion and martyrdom of the Lord. Peter’s case was particularly bitter, for his three-fold denial of the Master brought him face-to-face with his own sinfulness. Yet, for Balthasar, this is not a merely accidental occurrence; it was a deliberate part of God’s plan that the future leaders of the Church should taste failure and humiliation as Jesus did. Peter’s denial of the Lord was essential to forming Christ in him.

...[T]he decisive factors in their training are the Cross and the absolute failure of Judas, Peter, and the rest who fled (even John slept and left the Lord alone). For what happened here was no fiction…but a real, fruitful humiliation, which alone brought to successful conclusion the attempts to “leave all” and so made them capable of receiving authority. [9]

This was a crucial element in Peter’s preparation for the Power of the Keys. Humiliation and the cross are essential to the acquisition, or better said, reception, of that particular forma Christi which carries with it the charism of governing the flock. As Balthasar continues, “it is necessary as an essential element in the instilling of the form as foreordained for the way of life of those in the ministry. Once again: the form is not the ministry itself. It is the unity made up of the man as he is (a failure) and the commission given by divine grace from above.” [10] Lest we think all this untimely, let us recall that Balthasar witnessed in his own day a somewhat cruel repetition of this, as he noted in a 1971 newspaper article:

And if today Paul VI is, in the eyes of the world, as a result of so many mistakes which today are inevitable as a consequence of the absurd overloading of the papal office, a deeply humiliated man, then I can only breathe a sigh of relief…[f]or this makes him to me far more credible than the pontificating cardinals, whose democratic ecclesiastical politics earn them the plaudits of the masses (headed by the theologians). [11]

Peter was not the only one who experienced this humiliation. Indeed, the other apostles felt it too. Perhaps the most outstanding New Testament example is that of St. Paul, humiliated in Athens, attacked by brigands, imprisoned and finally, put to death on the Via Ostia. But these splinters of the Cross that the Apostle was made to feel formed his own style of leadership. His experience of failure, like Peter’s, made him particularly apt to govern in charity and humility the communities he had founded. While his letters don’t have many traces of Paul’s meekness, it is clear that he usually did not throw his weight around, making “demands as an apostle of Christ” (1 Thess. 2:6). While Paul reproved and rebuked when necessary, he preferred to teach from his own experience, knowing that verba docent, sed exemplum trahet. “Once again we see how Paul, so far from presuming on his official position to admonish the community for its manner of life, does just the opposite. He refers to his manner of life in order to shake them out of the certainties, of being “already filled, already become rich,” already reigning (1 Cor 4:8).” [12] Again, Balthasar hammers his point home, referring to Paul’s use of his own apostolic authority:

It is not by his office that the apostle represents Christ for the community but as one humiliated in Christ, made a “spectacle to the world, to angels and to men” (v. 20). To be a person sent, one must have died and have been crucified to the world, and this must be apparent in the office….If he does this, then and only then, is the office discharged in a Christian way and has the same theological and apologetic force for both Christians and non-Christians as the Christian’s witness with his life, which, indeed, is a witness only as a dying with Christ in to the new God-given form. [13]

Yet humility did not come easily to these men. Paul, in his characteristically brash tone, refers to himself as a “better apostle” than the others (see 2 Cor 11:23). Peter promised that he would never abandon the Lord, and promptly did so at the first sign of the cross (Lk 22:33). Unbeknownst to him, it was precisely in learning humility in the school of failure that he rendered himself fit to “confirm his brethren” in the faith (Lk 22: 32).

Balthasar sees three significant moments in Peter’s life which helped him to understand and accept his role of primacy. First, Peter lives in openness to the wisdom of the Father. It was he, at Caesarea Philippi who responded, “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God!” (Mt 16:18). And it was he again who refused to leave at the scandal of the Eucharist: “Lord, to whom shall we go?” In doing so, he seems to answer for the entire college of the Twelve. [14] Peter, though proud, was not the one vying for positions in heaven, as were the Sons of Thunder.

Instead there are true signs of a genuine humility. He has to accept many hard things said to him by Jesus. From here to his being the first of the line of popes in the community of ‘fellow presbyters’ (1 Pet 5:1) is not a long distance. [15]

Second, Peter’s crucifixion, his being “taken where he did not want to go,” conformed him in a real way to his crucified Savior. Yet Peter, and so many of his successors (though not all, unfortunately), did not desire such an exalted office. Many, like Angelo Roncalli, dreaded and shunned it, only uttering their “accipiam” reluctantly. Balthasar calls it a “chasm,” across which only God’s grace can carry us, perhaps recalling those words spoken to St. Paul: sufficit tibi gratia mea (2 Cor. 12:9). “The chasm of demanding too much which yawns between the man and his mandate, between the sinner and denier and his mission to feed the flock properly in the manner of the Good Shepherd, is bridged by the grace of the Lord.” [16] Finally, we see Peter embrace his office. The Acts of the Apostles are riddled with examples of Peter’s primacy in the Apostolic College. He exercises his authority first in Jerusalem, in urbe, and then, taken where he did not want to go, in the capital of the Empire, where he leads the Church in orbe.

The Church as Communio

Yet the early Church was more than just Peter and Paul. It was a complex fabric, a weaving-together of the lives of many. According to Jesuit theologian John McDade, Balthasar identifies a series of key players who each offered their own charisms to the fledgling Church. These charisms go beyond the usual three or four mentioned by St. Paul—apostles, prophets, teachers, etc. They include, but are not limited to: Our Lady, model par excellence of the disciple of the Lord; Peter, who holds the office of pastor; Paul, the missionary; the Twelve, forming the Apostolic College; John the Baptist, last prophet of the Old Testament and first martyr of the New; John, the disciple of love; and James, keeper of tradition and the law. [17] From this wider group of players, Balthasar picks out those whom he calls the “Apostolic Foursome”: Peter, Paul, John and James. According to McDade, “each principle in the Foursome represents a clearly defined mission within the Church, necessarily involved with each other.” [18] Though very diverse in their personalities, and often engaging in debate (Peter and Paul, for instance), Balthasar’s ecclesiological view considers that they were essentially ‘in communion’ with one another; hence the vision of the Church as a communio, where collegiality and primacy are not in conflict with one another. In fact, Balthasar notes that John reinforces Peter’s authority as much as Matthew, highlighting his primacy at the beginning of his Gospel (John 1:42) and concluding it with the most eloquent example of Christ confirming Peter’s authority in love. Chapters 20 and 21 of John are, he says, a subtly composed symbolic doctrine of the church (John 20:1-10; 21:1-25), in which the mandate to “office” (Peter) and the mandate to “love” (John) are so intertwined with each other that the “greater love” which is demanded of Peter (John 21:15) passes from John to him, but John…remains standing (uniting office and love together) beside Peter according to the sovereign will of the Lord of the Church. [19]

In the ecclesiology of communio, authority is shared by all of the Twelve. All were, using a later term, episkopoi—all had been given the power to “bind and loose” (Matt. 18:18; John 20:23), and all had to use that power in humility and love.

The Office of Unity

If the above is true, namely that apostolic authority was shared, and that each apostle or disciple brought his own specific gifts of the Spirit to the communio, what then is the specificity of the Petrine ministry? What was the primary function of Peter and his successors? In order to better understand Balthasar’s answer, let us recall that the Church is and always has been known as casta meretrix—the chaste whore. While avoiding knee-jerk conclusions such as Martin Luther’s repeated references to her as the “Whore of Babylon,” let us recall that casta meretrix was actually a fond title accorded to her by the Fathers of the Church. Picking up on the biblical theme of adultery as symbolic of the infidelity of the Chosen People to God’s Covenant (see David and Bathsheba, the Song of Solomon, Hosea, Rahab), the notion of the casta meretrix recognizes the inherent sinfulness of the people, while equally acknowledging the sanctity of the Church, immaculate Bride of Christ, and one ark of Salvation. The Council Fathers echoed this dichotomy of sin and sanctity in Lumen Gentium: “the Church, embracing in its bosom sinners, at the same time holy and always in need of being purified, always follows the way of penance and renewal.” [20] Perhaps Origen, though, best captured the idea of casta meretrix when he said, referring to the celebrated prostitute whom the Fathers saw as a typus Ecclesiae, “outside Rahab’s house, the Church, there is no salvation.”

Within Rahab’s house, there is but one who is the Immaculate Conception. The rest of us are capable of denying the Lord like Peter, seeking positions, like James and John, or even doubting, like Thomas. These and other sins tear at the fabric of the communio. Thus, the role of Petrine ministry in Balthasar’s mind becomes clearer. He sees it as the safeguard of unity within the Body of Christ. “The papacy has always—from the Petrine texts of the New Testament on—had to exercise the function of unity in the church and, indeed, of visible unity in the visible church which, considered realistically, is made up of sinners—egoists and separatists.” [21] Since the function of preserving unity is real and necessary, Balthasar draws three specific conclusions about it in his article, The Petrine Office in the Church.

First, it is not merely an honorary office, where Peter is primus inter pares. In order to carry out his mission, Peter and his successors must have real governing power. Two, the Petrine ministry is a particular charism given to the popes. It is part of the communio, but not merely an extension of the fraternal charity already existing in it. When the chips are down, dogma, doctrine, and beliefs count. That is the stuff of which heresy and schism are made. St. Augustine’s famous “ama, et fac quod vis” doesn’t apply to the obstinate preaching of heretical or schismatic doctrines because that, in Balthasar’s mind, would be a contradiction of love. No one doubts that the exercise of this aspect of Petrine ministry can be painful, perhaps more so for the one who exercises it than for the one who receives it. In supporting the John Paul II’s 1979 removal of Hans Küng’s license to teach Catholic Theology, Balthasar wrote:

John Paul II is safeguarding nothing less than the fundamental substance of Catholic faith…No one can deny that this was urgent after years of dogmatic, moral and liturgical permissiveness … Perhaps it is inevitable that the Pope should give the impression of Hercules cleaning out the Augean stables. [22]

Third, the Petrine ministry is not merely a “transitory function” which might be abolished one day or used only on a case-to-case basis. Instead, says Balthasar, “this function of the preservation of unity is a constitutive function of the Church and is exercisable only under the condition that its bearer is given the powers that belong to him in the limits of his office.” 23 Then comes a Balthasarian phrase that many a contemporary theologian would do well to meditate upon: “This presupposes from the other members of the church (bishops, priests, laity) a docility and reverence toward this pneumatic office.” [24]

Thus we encounter a truly genial aspect of Balthasar’s ecclesiology of communio. He rejects the imperial or medieval vision of the Church as a “pyramid,” with the Papacy at its peak. In the words of McDade, quoting The Office of Peter, “such an image distorts the relation of the Papacy to the rest of the Church because the Pope is not ‘above’ the Church in any serious sense, nor is the Church ‘under’ him (‘…but it shall not be so with you.’ Luke 22:26). Only Jesus stands above the Church as its Lord.” [25] Thus, in a somewhat radical upheaval of classic ecclesiology, Balthasar tears down the pyramid, places the Papacy within the larger unity of the Church. Primacy is given to holiness in the disciple’s life, more than the office that he or she holds. The Blessed Virgin becomes the model of the disciple, an idea that the Council Fathers picked-up on in calling her the true Typus Ecclesiae, Model of the Church. [26] McDade notes that, “for Von Balthasar, the radiant heart of the Church is lay, faithful and holy, characterized by contemplative receptivity in relation to God, and symbolized by the femininity and virginal maternity of Mary: as she is, so is the church.” [27] John Paul II, who reportedly said that Von Balthasar was his favorite theologian, referenced this notion of the ‘primacy of sanctity’ when he wrote the May 22, 1994 Apostolic Letter, Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, on the subject of the ordination of women.

Moreover, it is to the holiness of the faithful that the hierarchical structure of the Church is totally ordered. For this reason, the Declaration Inter Insigniores recalls: “the only better gift, which can and must be desired, is love (cf. 1 Cor 12 and 13). The greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven are not the ministers but the saints. [28]

Perhaps John Paul II’s numerous beatifications and canonizations (more than any Pope in history) are a part of a larger message for the faithful which harks back to Chapter 5 of Lumen Gentium: it is sanctity of life that counts in God’s eyes, not whether one is called to be apostle or prophet or teacher—or lay person for that matter. Strains of this also echo in Balthasar’s writings. Yet the Pope notes that the question of the ordination of women was, in some places, still considered “open to debate.”

Wherefore, in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church’s divine constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren (cf. Luke 22:32) I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful. [29]

Needless to say, Ordinatio Sacerdotalis was not received well in all circles. Some rejected it outright. Others quickly retorted that the ordination of deacons wasn’t explicitly mentioned therein. Here, too, we disciples of the 21 st Century can learn a lesson in humility from Von Balthasar. During the years of his canonical exile, when he could not receive incardination, Father Balthasar undoubtedly suffered. He could direct Adrienne von Speyer spiritually, but he could not hear her confession. In many ways and forms, members of the communio are hurt by other members. Sometimes, the exercise of the Petrine office, always in view of the good of the body as a whole, can bring suffering to some. At one point, the writings of Henri de Lubac were censured by the Holy Office, and during that period, wrote his beautiful Meditation sur l’Eglise. In all these sufferings, Balthasar notes that it is important to recognize the hand of God working through the imperfect instruments.

And since the office of Peter is borne by fallible human beings, it needs everyone’s watchful but loving cooperation so that the exercise of this office may be characterized by the degree of ‘in-fallibility’ that belongs to it. More precisely, this means that a pope can exercise his office fruitfully for all only if he is recognized and loved in a truly ecclesial way, even in the midst of paraklesis or dispute. [30]

This echoes Von Balthasar’s above-mentioned thought that the members of the Church can and must create an environment in which the Pope can exercise his authority and be loved for it. This undoubtedly requires certain humility, but then again, humility is the stuff that saints are made of. In his classic lecture, “Why I am a Catholic,” Balthasar points to the lives of the saints as ideal disciples of the Lord, disciples who lived within the communio, exercising their own charisms with a magnanimous Sensus Ecclesiae.

And [the saints] are humble, that is to say, that the mediocrity of the Church does not deter them from joining themselves to it once and for all, for they know well enough that without the Church they would not find their way to God…They do not fight the mediocrity [of Christ’s Church] in a spirit of contestation, but by spurring on those who have quality, by inspiring them, by igniting them. They suffer at the hands of the Church, but they do not become embittered, nor do they stand sulkily aside. They do not set up their own conventicle alongside the Church, but they throw their fire into its very center. [31]

Balthasar once wrote that if the Church as a whole had been only a holy, loving church, there would never have been need for the Petrine office of unity. Yet in the next sentence, almost as if he remembered that the Church is casta meretrix, Balthasar notes that the object of Peter’s authority is to “hold fast the congruence between this one faith and the unity of love.” [32]

References

[1] Hans Urs Von Balthasar, “The Petrine Office in the Church”, in The Von Balthasar Reader, ed. Kehl and Löser, trans. Robert Daly (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 274.

[2] Hans Urs Von Balthasar, “Office in the Church”,Spouse of the Word, vol. 2, trans. Littledale (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1991), 82.

[3] As one example of this, see Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations, vol. 2. (Darton, Longman & Todd, 1963) in in A Rahner Reader, ed. Gerald A. McCool, (New York: Crossroad, 1975) 300. “There must be room in theology for research, for different schools and directions of thought, for experiments and progress…Side by side with the official function which is transmitted in a judicial manner, there is and must be the charismatic and the prophetic in the Church which must…in all patience and humility, be given sufficient room for growth, even though its bearers are sometimes rather ‘inconvenient.’”

[4] Hans Urs Von Balthasar, “The Pope Today”, Elucidations, trans. John Riches, (London: SPCK, 1975), 103-04.

[5] Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, “Homily at the funeral liturgy of Hans Urs von Balthasar,” cited in Hans Urs von Balthasar: His Life and Work, ed. David L. Schindler, (Ignatius, San Francisco, 1991), 295.

[6] Hans Urs Von Balthasar, “Office in the Church”, 86.

[7] Hans Urs Von Balthasar, “Office in the Church”, 81.

[8] Ibid, 118-9.

[9] Hans Urs Von Balthasar, “Office in the Church”, 114.

[10] Hans Urs Von Balthasar, “Office in the Church”,114-5.

[11] Hans Urs Von Balthasar, “Why do I still remain in the Church?”, Elucidations, trans. John Riches, (London: SPCK, 1975), 210.

[12] Hans Urs Von Balthasar, “Office in the Church”, 117.

[13 Hans Urs Von Balthasar, “Office in the Church”,117.

[14 Hans Urs Von Balthasar, “Peter-First Bearer of the Office of Unity”, in The Von Balthasar Reader, ed. Kehl and Löser, trans. Robert Daly (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 221.

[15 Hans Urs Von Balthasar, “Peter-First Bearer of the Office of Unity”, 221.

[16] Hans Urs Von Balthasar, “Peter-First Bearer of the Office of Unity”, 222-3.

[17] John McDade, SJ, Von Balthasar and the Office of Peter in the Church, unpublished paper available from: http://www.heythrop.ac.uk/faculty/acad/mcdadej/Balthasar and the Office of Peter.doc Internet; accessed 17 November, 2004.

[18] McDade, 3.

[19] Hans Urs Von Balthasar, “Peter-First Bearer of the Office of Unity”, 211.

[20Lumen Gentium, 8

[21] Hans Urs Von Balthasar, “The Petrine Office in the Church”, in The Von Balthasar Reader, ed. Kehl and Löser, trans. Robert Daly (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 274.

[22] Hans Urs von Balthasar, cited in John Allen, “Debating Karl Rahner and Hans Urs Von Balthasar,” National Catholic Reporter, Nov 28, 2003.

[23] Hans Urs Von Balthasar, “The Petrine Office in the Church”, 274.

[24] Hans Urs Von Balthasar, “The Petrine Office in the Church”, 274.

[25] John McDade, SJ, 3.

[26] Lumen Gentium, 63, 68.

[27] John McDade, SJ, 3.

[28] Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, 3.

[29] Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, 4.

[30] Hans Urs Von Balthasar, The Office of Peter and the Structure of the Church, trans. Andree Emery, (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1986), 315.

[31] Hans Urs Von Balthasar, “Why do I still remain in the Church?”, Elucidations, trans. John Riches, (London: SPCK, 1975), 214.

[32] Hans Urs Von Balthasar, “The Petrine Office in the Church”, 275.

Liberalism: Sin, Iniquity, Abomination

2008-12-05T07:41:00.000-08:00

By Rev. Fr. Horacio Bojorge, S. J.

This essay by Rev. Fr. Horacio Bojorge has been published in Spanish by Ediciones del Alcázar, Buenos Aires, under the title El Liberalismo es la Iniquidad—La Rebelión Contra el Padre (Liberalism is 'the' Iniquity-The Rebellion Against the Father.)

Many authors have exposed the failures and flaws of Liberalism, its historical and philosophical precedents, and consequences. In this exposition we shall analyze the concept of liberalism as sin. This is what liberalism really represents: a systematic rebellion against Divine Paternity. In the classic sense of the word, Liberalism is an abomination.

Liberalism is not simply a sin but 'the' sin. Therefore, when we call it "a sin", we could misunderstand it as just another sin among many. In reality, liberalism is the sin par excellence, root, base and pinnacle of all sin. By introducing this brief precision I believe I have interpreted correctly the ultimate intention of Fr. Felix Sardá i Salvany, who titled his work Liberalism is Sin [1]

The thesis

When I say that Liberalism is 'the' sin, the quintessential sin; I intent to advance one step closer to the comprehension of the type of sin we are dealing with, and the reason why Liberalism must be defined in that unique way.

My thesis could be summarized as follows: Liberalism is 'the' sin, because Liberalism is intrinsically evil. It is the sin against the Holy Spirit, the rejection of the Son, and the rebellion against the Father.

We need to understand the importance and depth of this affirmation. Liberalism is the direct sin against Christ and the Father. Consequently, it is a sin against the Holy Spirit. We shall see later that this is the sin that is called "the iniquity" in the New Testament, the sin of the Devil. The book of wisdom says that by envy—by ακηδία [1] of the Devil—death entered the world and those who belong to them, experience that death when they rebel against God, [2] and just like the Devil they aspire to place themselves in the place of God. They are also in accordance with the Devil in his negative to serve God. This is the sum of all evil, the supreme iniquity. Its complete manifestation is reserved for the Time of the End. This is what Saint Paul calls "The Mystery of Iniquity" (Mysterium Iniquitatis.) [3]

Liberalism is exposed as a manifestation of the mystery of iniquity, denounced by Saint Paul as a force acting incipiently in a covert manner already in apostolic times.

We will return to this topic and examine it in more detail. However, it is convenient to define in advance the concept of iniquity. According to the New Testament, iniquity consists in rejecting Jesus Christ and the revelation of God the Father, as agents of man's life and salvation. Iniquity is the opposition to the Holy Spirit by an impure spirit. It is therefore a direct sin against the Holy Spirit.

This rejection can be explicit or implicit. Explicit like that of Judaism and others who deny the validity of the Christian revelation in history. Implicit, like that of the practical atheists, or those who are indifferent, or those who do not oppose the truth but simply consider truth implicit, and relegate it to the bin of unnecessary, or inconvenient things that are hard to explain.

A recent example

Let me propose an example to show which types of silence, omission, or forgetfulness I am referring to.

His Holiness Benedict XVI introduced a small modification in the text of the Theme of the Fifth Conference of the Episcopate in Latin America and the Caribbean. The title of the theme that was presented to him was: "Disciples and missionaries of Jesus Christ, so that our peoples may have life".

The Pope added two words: 'in Him', changing it to "Disciples and missionaries of Jesus Christ, so that our peoples may have life 'in Him'".

With this smallest addition of two words ('in Him') the Pope called our attention to something fundamentally essential. If that something would have remained implicit, it could have covered a dire ambiguity in the comprehension of the expression "may have life".

To have life 'in Him' means to have the fullness of life as sons. The life announced by Jesus Christ. The goal of the disciple's mission remains defined explicitly by its objective: "so that they may have life 'in Him'".

This inspired addition, introduced by the Vicar of Christ, prevented the whole theme of the Conference, (and even the Conference itself) from being infected by that kind of Gramscian reductionism, that limits the life of man to a purely material existence. That immanentist reduction that has its roots in Rationalism, Naturalism, and Liberalism, finding its final form in Marxist Materialism.

I would be satisfied if, at the end of my exposition, I had been able to explain the nature of the sin of Liberalism, helping to comprehend better the nature of the danger avoided by the Pope, when he reminded us that the goal of our missionary work is to aid the peoples to have life in Christ through the message of God the Father. That life is the fullness of life that we can only have 'in Him'. Such life consists of entering in communion with the Father, and his Son Jesus Christ, by means of the Holy Spirit.

Notice how, at the bottom of that vague imprecision in the original phrase—at the root of that casual omission—lay something that could have been wrongly construed as an essential part of the Gospel. That ambiguity left just enough room for a surreptitious infection of the message with the Liberal concept that separates human life from its life in God. In that Naturalist vision, the ultimate horizon in the life of man is merely the quality of life.

That silence could have been particularly damaging if its origin would have been a forgetting of the essential. It would have been demonic if its origin would have been a conscious aversion towards the essential.

Félix Sardá i Salvany: Liberalism is sin

Before going any further it is necessary to define, as a fundamental point of reference, the diagnostic given to us by Fr. Félix Sardá i Salvany in his work "Liberalism is Sin". There Fr. Sardá writes:

Liberalism, whether in the doctrinal or practical order, is a sin. In the doctrinal order, it is heresy, and consequently a mortal sin against faith. In the practical order, it is a sin against the commandments of God and of the Church, for it virtually transgresses all commandments. To be more precise: in the doctrinal order, Liberalism strikes at the very foundations of faith; it is heresy radical and universal, because within it all heresies are comprehended. In the practical order it is a radical and universal infraction of the divine law, since it sanctions and authorizes all infractions of that law.

Liberalism is a heresy in the doctrinal order because heresy is the formal and obstinate denial of all Christian dogmas in general. It repudiates dogma altogether and substitutes opinion, whether that opinion be doctrinal or the negation of doctrine. Consequently, it denies every doctrine in particular. If we were to examine in detail all the doctrines or dogmas which, within the range of Liberalism, have been denied, we would find every Christian dogma in one way or another rejected—from the dogma of the Incarnation to that of Infallibility.

Nonetheless Liberalism is in itself dogmatic; and it is in the declaration of its own fundamental dogma, the absolute independence of the individual and the social reason, that it denies all Christian dogmas in general. Catholic dogma is the authoritative declaration of revealed truth—or a truth consequent upon Revelation—by its infallibly constituted exponent [the Pope]. This logically implies the obedient acceptance of the dogma on the part of the individual and of society. Liberalism refuses to acknowledge this rational obedience and denies the authority. It asserts the sovereignty of the individual and social reason and enthrones Rationalism in the seat of authority. It knows no dogma except the dogma of self-assertion. Hence it is heresy, fundamental and radical, the rebellion of the human intellect against God.

It follows, therefore, that Liberalism denies the absolute jurisdiction of Jesus Christ, who is God, over individuals and over society, and by consequence, repudiates the jurisdiction which God has delegated to the visible head of the Church over each and all of the faithful, whatever their condition or rank in life. Moreover, it denies the necessity of divine Revelation and the obligation of everyone to accept that Revelation under pain of eternal perdition. It denies the formal motive of faith, viz., the authority of God revealing, and admits only as much of revealed doctrine as it chooses or comprehends within its own narrow capacity. It denies the infallible magistracy of the Church and of the Pope, and consequently all the doctrines defined and taught by this divine authority. In short, it sets itself up as the measure and rule of faith and thus really shuts out Revelation altogether. It denies everything which it itself does not proclaim. It negates everything which it itself does not affirm. But not being able to affirm any truth beyond its own reach, it denies the possibility of any truth which it does not comprehend. The revelation of truth above human reason it therefore debars at the outset. The divinity of Jesus Christ is beyond its horoscope. The Church is outside its comprehension. The submission of human reason to the Word of Christ or its divinely constituted exponent [the Catholic Church, especially the Pope] is to it intolerable. It is, therefore, the radical and universal denial of all divine truth and Christian dogma, the primal type of all heresy, and the supreme rebellion against the authority of God and His Church. As with Lucifer, its maxim is, "I will not serve." Such is the general negation uttered by Liberalism. From this radical denial of revealed truth in general naturally follows the denial of particular dogmas, in whole or in part (as circumstances present them in opposition to its rationalistic judgment). Thus, for instance, it denies the validity of faith by Baptism, when it admits or supposes the equality of any or all religious cults; it denies the sanctity of marriage when it sanctions so-called civil marriages; it denies the infallibility of the Roman Pontiff, when it refuses to accept as laws his official commands and teachings and subjects them to the scrutiny of its own intellect—not to assure itself of their authenticity, as is legitimate, but to sit in defiant judgment upon their contents.

When we come to the practical order, Liberalism is radical immorality. Morality requires a standard and a guide for rational action; it postulates a hierarchy of ends, and therefore of order, within whose series there is a subordination of means to the attainment of an ultimate purpose. It therefore requires a principle or fundamental rule of all action, by which the subject of moral acts, the rational creature, determines his course and guides himself to the attainment of his end. In the moral order, the Eternal Reason alone can be that principle or fundamental rule of action, and this Eternal Reason is God. In the moral order, the created reason, with power to determine its course, must guide itself by the light of the Uncreated Reason, Who is the beginning and end of all things. The law, therefore, imposed by the Eternal Reason upon the creature must be the principle or rule of morality. Hence, obedience and submission in the moral order is an absolute requisite of morality. But Liberalism has proclaimed the absurd principle of the absolute sovereignty of human reason; it denies any reason beyond itself and asserts its independence in the order of knowledge, and hence in the order of action or morality. Here we have morality without law, without order, freedom to do what one pleases, or what comes to the same thing, morality which is not morality, for morality implies the idea not only of direction, but also essentially demands that of restraint and limitation under the control of law. Liberalism in the order of action is license, recognizing no principle or rule beyond itself.

We may then say of Liberalism: in the order of ideas it is absolute error; in the order of facts it is absolute disorder. It is, therefore, in both cases a very grievous and deadly sin, for sin is rebellion against God in thought or in deed, the enthronement of the creature in the place of the Creator. [4]

The road to follow

Fr. Sardá i Salvany tells the truth. There is more, though a lot is implicit in the precise diagnostic of the Spanish apologist. Firstly we see that Liberalism is 'the sin' in a specific sense: it is 'the iniquity' identified in the New Testament as the setting in place of the supreme anti-Christian, anti-God evil. The seed of that iniquity lies hidden in history waiting to sprout a virulent manifestation. This is also an eschatological sign, because it is the cause of the final dissolution of mankind an the preamble to the reign of the Antichrist.

As we shall see, Saint John defines 'that sin' as η ανομία (ē anomía 'the iniquity'). This sin is particular and unique, this η ανομία (indifferent negligence that makes no difference between good and evil) always appears in the New Testament as a characteristic of the Antichrist and the End of Times, the Final Judgment, or the παρουσία (parousia) of Our Lord Jesus Christ. From the beginning of the Church it is applied to the rejection of Jesus Christ and God the Father, whom the Son comes to reveal. Saint John affirms that in his First Letter:

"... many antichrists have come; therefore we know that it is the last hour [...] This is the antichrist, he who denies the Father and the Son. No one who denies the Son has the Father. He who confesses the Son has the Father also." [5]

That denial or rejection was experienced by Jesus Christ Himself during his life. He defined it as a "blasphemy against the Holy Spirit". [6] The same rejection was experienced by all the apostolic ecclesial communities, because it is present and operates within them. Saint John and also Saint Paul interpreted its nature in the light of the words of Jesus. They announced its recrudescence in the End of Times.

One example of evil language

As a sample of the language of the modern iniquity, please read what was said by David Friedrich Strauss, Pastor and Theologian, self-appointed arbiter of what we should consider an acceptable Christ:

As long as Christianity is considered like something given to Mankind from outside itself; Christ as something who came from Heaven; His Church like an institution for the forgiveness of sins by means of His blood; Christianity will be understood in a Jewish way and the Religion of the Spirit will continue to be fleshly. Christianity will only be understood when we recognize in it a Mankind made more aware of itself than it has ever been aware so far: that Jesus is only that Man in Whom that profound conscience was manifested for the first time like a force determinant of His whole life and His whole being; and that sin can be erased only by access to this new conscience. [7]

The rebellion against the Father

The aforementioned words of Saint John, teach us that lastly, 'the sin', the worse evil, is the rejection of God the Father, the rebellion against a God-Father. That rejection and rebellion are manifested in the rejection of the Son (sent by the Father,) and of those disciples sent by the Son. The Son is rejected because the Father is also rejected. The Father is rejected by those seeking to avoid being subject to Him by filial obedience.

We must remember that the rejection of both obedience and subjection to God's government of human affairs has long established biblical roots. Remember the people of Israel who wanted to be freed from the lead of Moses [8]. Later, the Israelites asked Samuel to give them a King, like the kings of the neighboring nations.
God interpreted that request as an intent of secularization of political life, a form of early liberalism: "They have not rejected you, they have rejected Me, so that I don't rule over them." [9] Certainly, the Israelite monarchy would come to be the history of the infidelities of the chosen people to their Covenant with God, with the kings they have asked for, acting as leaders of the apostasy.
In the New Testament we find the Parable of the Murderous Vineyard Workers. They kill the son to take possession of their master's vineyard for themselves.
Let us recall the words of Jesus: "He who receives you, receives me, and he who receives me, receives the One who sent me." [10] Also, inversely: "He who rejects you, rejects me; and he who rejects me, rejects the Father who sent me." [11]
The rejection of God found in the Old Testament continues manifesting itself, as reported in the New Testament, in the form of a rejection of God the Father.

Heresies of Liberal origin

Within the Christian world—including the Catholic world—there were produced certain forms of religious liberalism. This religious Liberalism, criticized by John Henry Cardinal Newman, produced deviations and heretic theologies containing the rejection of God the Father that we observe and suffer even today.

One of them was the so-called Deism. Deism accepts God as a Creator, a Supreme Architect. But, once the house has been constructed, God leaves it in the hands of its inhabitants. He does not keep any relation with them, leaving them without the possibility of communion or closeness. Deism was a Naturalist, Rationalist rejection of the Christian revelation. It believed in a Creator God with whom there is no possible communion or communication.

Cardinal Pie cleverly diagnosed that, rejecting the communion with a God that invites us to commune, "is nothing but the fear of vertigo produced by the wondrous heights that God calls us to climb." [12] That fear to the sublime union, will later invade all dimensions of human life, giving origin to Liberal individualism, the master-slave dialectic substituting Christian brotherhood, class warfare, and finally, the dictatorship of the envious that will impose the hatred of the best [13] and the tyranny of Equalitarianism in the name of Democracy.

From Jesus 'without Father' to Jesus 'against the Father'

A further consequence of religious Liberalism has been the Reductionist vision of Christ, in the style of the one proposed by David Friedrich Strauss we read earlier. This Jesuanism presents a historical Jesus separated from the Christ of the faith, with no reference ever being made to the Father as the final goal of the Gospel's message.

In the theological-pastoral discourse emerging from that proposition, the Father is relegated to a silent, implicit role. The Father is only explained when someone demands an explanation.

The Dominican Father Le Guillou has said about that contemporary Jesuanism:

"This places [...] Christ, not with the Father, but in lieu of the Father. In that way we see the vague design of a kind of Christicism, or Jesuanism (generally leaving the name of the Father silent) that tries to pass for real Christianity." [14]

Saint Paul teaches us: "But how are men to call upon him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without a preacher?" [15] That which is not preached is not believed. That is the horrific consequence of leaving the Father in an implicit role, falling outside the conscience of both preacher and faithful.
This fact has been pointed out by Monsignor Josef Cordes in his work: The Eclipse of the Father, in these words:

"When one asks the great contemporary theologians of both confessions (Protestant and Catholic) about the Father of Jesus Christ, one acquires a surprising perspective: the researchers think more frequently and more markedly about 'God' that in the "Eternal Father'. If one calculates the statistical average of how many times the word 'Father' is used in the Father-Son relationship, the word is sadly relegated." [16]

This is the result of the liberal contagion that has affected the common sense of culture and overflows to the faithful, affecting them and the preachers as well. Once could say, extending the words of Saint Paul: How will they preach if they don't believe?

The Jesuanism, or pastoral criticism, is frequently proposed by the Protestant sects and ecclesial communities. Protestants preachers heard in tents and radio programs come to mind. Their message is the announcement of Christ as the personal savior, without a reference to the Father, nor the entering in communion with Him as the point of completion of the salvation they announce.

That same illness has been extended among, and penetrates into the common sense of Catholics, priests and theologians included. I refer you to your own experience in hearing the preachers in our own temples.

Something caught my attention in the final message of the Conference of Aparecida—please note that I am not referring to the magnificent Final Document of the Conference, but to the Final Message, a sort of draft of the Final Document written by the Ad Hoc Commission—In this Final Message, different from the later, final document, the Father ends up relegated to an implicit role in the whole opening part, the doctrinal-kerygmatic speaking of Jesus (10 times,) or Lord Jesus (1 time,) or Jesus Christ (4 times.) In the message the Father is mentioned three times. He is never mentioned in the first part, where Jesus Christ is presented, but later after passing over the doctrinal-kerygmatic moment, in the parenthetical context of the fourth and fifth sections. In this manner Jesus Christ is presented predominantly as Jesus, without an explicit reference to His Father.

The contrast with the original discourse of Benedict XVI is remarkable. There, Benedict XVI reiterates explicitly, that the Father is the goal of the evangelizing process to which the Conference of Aparecida is calling. [17] That is reflected in the Final Document.

This phenomenon I have been describing so far—the growing detachment of Jesus from the Father in pastoral preaching—is emphasized until it reaches a form of paroxysm in the diffusion of Freudian psychoanalysis.

Father Ignatius Anderggen has written:

Freudian psychoanalysis, as a method and technique, is intrinsically in solidarity with its fundamental intent of reaching a full awareness of the rebellion of man against God the Father, the rebellion rooted in the unconscious structure of those vices and passions of man that have not been restored by grace. This intention of Freud, and also of Nietzsche, consists in their conscious opposition against God and their pretension of taking God's place." [18]

From the rebellion against God the Father to a society without fathers

Monsignor Paul Josef Cordes comments:

"Freud—who knew that the father in the flesh is the analogy of the Celestial Father—had to get rid of the former first, to eliminate the later ". [19]

That is why, by means of the psychoanalysis, he attacks the Father in the soul of the patient being analyzed.

Fr. Le Guillou, in the same work quoted before, points to the fact that the abolition of God the Father, is a basic element in what Monsignor Paul Josef Cordes has called the Eclipse of the Father in our culture; a progressive disappearance of the paternal figure and of the culture of paternity; the effective destruction of the paternal male.

The religious rebellion against God the Father in liberal civilization brought about sociological and cultural consequences. There has been a continual extermination of the paternal man, an also of the filial man, the spousal man and the fraternal man. The abandoning of the fathers to the geriatric nursing home by the present generation, is the consequence of the previous abandonment of God the Father, relegated to Heaven, just as if Heaven was a geriatric home. That generation did not lived with God anymore. They only visited Him from time to time or during visit hours... or never.

The Italian psychotherapist and sociologist Claudio Risè, in his book Il Padre l'Assente Inaccettabile (The Father, Unacceptable Absent), dedicates an entire chapter to describe how Western Civilization is "distancing itself from the Father". Claudio Risè establishes a parallel between the secularization process, initiated during the French Revolution (the fruit of seeds planted by the German Reformation) and the decadence and disappearance of the paternal figure and of the right of the family man in the West. [20]

On Earth as it is in Heaven

The disappearance of the paternal figure in our society is nothing strange. Mircea Eliade has demonstrated in his studies in History of Religion, that man builds his civilization and culture imitating his gods:

"In reenacting Sacred History, imitating the behavior of the divine, man takes his place and continues united to the gods in what is real and significant." [21]

"The modern-irreligious man assumes a new existential situation. He sees himself as the only subject and agent of history, rejecting all calls to transcendence [...] he does not accept any model of mankind outside of the human condition as found in the diverse historical situations. That man is self-built but he does not reach the completion of the task beyond the point of de-sacralizing himself and the world. He sees the sacred as an obstacle for his freedom. He will not be truly free until he has killed the last god." [22]

The religious rebelliousness of Liberalism against God the Father ends therefore, with the dissolution, not only of the paternal culture, but of all culture. That is the result of the untying of forces of destruction in the human heart, forces that accelerate and precipitate the apocalyptic threats upon that part of mankind living apart from God.

Mircea Eliade affirms:

"In the Judeo-Christian perspective one could say that the no-religion is equal to a new fall of man [...] After the first fall, religiousness fell to the level of the torn conscience. After the second fall, it has fallen even further down, to the underworld of the unconscious: it has been forgotten."

The non-religious man is a disconnected man

Now we can understand better the relationship between the sin that is 'the iniquity' and all the other sins that emanate from it. When men revolt against Heaven, they revolt against each other on earth.

God came seeking to rescue man, fallen by original sin. When fallen man refuses to take the hand that God extends to lift him up, he falls to even more unforgivable depths.

In the light of the prophecy of Malachi—the last words of the Old Testament—our theme acquires apocalyptic tones. This prophecy closes the Old Testament announcing the coming of Elijah. The New Testament connects that return of Elijah with the advent of John the Baptist, precursor of Christ:

"Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and terrible day of the LORD comes. And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the land with a curse." [23]

In our world, the irreligious and the anti-religious men, all have religious ancestors. Along with their rebellion against God the Father, there is a rebellion against their own fathers. The heart of the sons has turned against the fathers and the heart of the fathers has turned against the sons.

Christ has reconciled all things with His blood on the Cross—including fathers and sons, sons and fathers—that is what happened in the Catholic culture. After the arrival of Christ, if men insist again in rejecting Christ and the Father, just as Liberalism does, the result is that men are planted against God the Father, and also against each other.

If there is no possibility of a new reconciliation, then, the only expectation left, is that of a land smitten by the curse. A curse that men could have avoided but they consciously refused to avoid. This curse, they chose freely, misusing their freedom to reject goodness and accept evil.

Kant's liberation from religious moral—An example of rebelliousness

I have quoted so far, a number of contemporary authors who have studied the illnesses of our culture. All of them coincide in affirming that the origin of those ailments can be traced back to the German Reformation, the French Revolution, the ideology of Illuminism and the Soviet Revolution.

That path shown, shows clearly that the irreligious emancipation of morals leads inevitably to the dissolution of the social bonds among men. Plain history debunks the myth of the secularization of morals and the emancipation of all divine and religious moorings, proposed by the Kantian utopia.

Let us see if the Liberal manifest of Kant was on target:

"So far as morality is based upon the conception of man as a free agent who, just because he is free, binds himself through his reason to unconditioned laws, it stands in need neither of the idea of another Being over him, for him to apprehend his duty, nor of an incentive other than the law itself, for him to do his duty. At least it is man's own fault if he is subject to such a need; and if he is, this need can be relieved through nothing outside himself: for whatever does not originate in himself and his own freedom in no way compensates for the deficiency of his morality. Hence for its own sake morality does not need religion at all (whether objectively, as regards willing, or subjectively, as regards ability [to act]); by virtue of pure practical reason it is self-sufficient." [25]

You have just read the manifest of iniquity. The voice of that sin from which all other sin derives; the religious impiety that is the origin of all impiety perpetrated among men: "You will be like God, knowing good and evil." [26]

The central proposition of Liberalism is: "Do free men need the Christian revelation to live morally? Does he need to be subject to a God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit? No, thanks. Does he need to be saved from something by God? Not at all! Man can fend for himself!"

The many-horned beast that said grandiose things

Kant's manifesto has been proved fallacious by history, however it continues to be taken seriously even more now than ever before. The image of the Beast, described by the prophet Daniel, comes to my imagination. This is the last Beast that emerges from the depths of the sea.

We know that the bottom of the sea, in the biblical imagery, is the place of residence of all the evil forces, the enemies of God. The last Beast emerges from the sea. Unlike the previous ones, this is a talking Beast. It says grandiose things. Horns multiply protruding from its head. [27] The bombastic things it proclaims are the lies of Satan, the original liar and the father of lies. The horns are the multiple political powers born of Satan's lies.

The Christian interpreters of the Apocalypse have seen in this Beast and its horns, the figures of the political powers and the ideologies that support them: Naturalism, Rationalism, Free-thinking, Liberalism, Socialism, Communism, Marxism, Progressivism, Modernism, Post-Modernism, etc.

The Beast represents the sum of all iniquity, the rejection of Christ and the rebellion against God the Father. That Beast speaks saying grandiose things. It opposes the Word of God, the Word made Man with its eloquence, its propaganda, the erroneous discourse of its ideology, and the manifestos of its lawlessness (Greek ανομíα, anomía).

As the previous beasts are fearsome due to their menacing maws and terrible paws, this Beast impresses with its misguiding eloquence. It displays a convincing sophistry, opposed to the Word of God. When we arrive to the Apocalypse of John this will become a deafening croaking of frogs.

We are reminded of this beast, representing Satan himself, by the words of Our Lord:

"Do not fear those who kill the body [the lion, the bear and the leopard seen by Daniel] but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body [the fourth beast that says grandiose things, the father of lies and all his servants, the prince of this world and all the kingdoms belonging to him] in hell." [28]

Sin is 'the' iniquity

Liberalism is the historic manifestation of the spirit of the Antichrist. From the beginning of history, he hides the seed of his final reign. The "Mystery of Iniquity" [29] prophesized by Saint Paul in 2 Thessalonians 2, 7 that breaks into the world at the end of times. But, before going into the Pauline mystery of iniquity, let us deal with the ανομíα, the lawlessness. Let us analyze its essence as it is expounded in the Holy Scriptures. We begin with the First Letter of John. In this case the Revised Standard Version Catholic, renders ανομíα as lawlessness.

Saint John affirms in his First Letter: "Sin is lawlessness." [ανομíαanomía, iniquity]. [30] We can take profit from listening and keeping in mind the context of this apostolic affirmation:

See what love the Father has given us, [31] that we should be called children of God; and so we are. [32] The reason why the world does not know us [33] is that it did not know Him. [34] Beloved, we are God's children now; it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when He appears we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. And every one who thus hopes in Him [Jesus] purifies [35] himself as He is pure. [36] Every one who commits sin [ten hamartían] is guilty of lawlessness; sin is lawlessness [ten anomían, iniquity]. [37] You know that He appeared to take away sins, [38] and in Him there is no sin. No one who abides in Him sins; [39] no one who sins [40] has either seen Him or known Him. Little children, let no one deceive [41] you [planáto]. He who does right is righteous, as he is righteous. He who commits sin is of the devil; for the devil has sinned from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil. No one born of God commits sin; for God's nature abides in him, and he cannot sin because he is born of God. By this it may be seen who are the children of God, and who are the children of the devil: whoever does not do right is not of God, nor he who does not love his brother. (1 John 3, 1-10 RSV Catholic)

This passage is full of meaning. In it, John opposes to the sons of God to the sons of the Devil. Two generations, meaning two progenies or human races. His letter teaches us how to discern one from the other.

This discernment is necessary and difficult for two reasons. Firstly because the manifestation of the sons of God has not yet occurred. Secondly, because the generation of the original serpent is a race of snakes. They are the sons of the Devil, the descendants of he who was a liar from the beginning. They lie with their thought, word and deed! They are consummated hypocrites, able to pass for sons of God. Even more, they take upon themselves to declare that they are the real sons of God and accuse and condemn the true sons. Their lies are like the deafening croak of the swamp frogs. They are the clamor of the swamp.

The lawlessness or iniquity

At this point we need to go in further in the interpretation and specific sense of the 'ανομία' (pr. AH-NOH-MEE-AH, iniquity, lawlessness) in the text of Holy Scripture. Comprehending the nature of 'ανομία' as it is revealed in Scripture, will allow us to understand what is the 'sin of the world' that Jesus came to take away. That will allow us to understand also why Liberalism is 'the iniquity' (ανομία,) whether in its more radical, rabidly open anticlericalism, or in those other secondary forms, where the radical edge has been mitigated. These are basically hypocritical forms, moderated only in appearance.
The etymology of the Greek word ανομία (from ánomos, no-law) means literally lack of law, negation of the law, without law. What the Vulgate translated as 'iniquity' (iniquitatis,) is basically lack of law, negation of the law. In the case of Liberalism, ανομία is, in all truth, an adequate adjective because Liberalism seeks to free itself of all laws exterior to the individual, making the will of the individual its own law. That is what we have heard from Kant in his manifesto for the liberation of all morals.

Due to this moral relativism, Liberalism has allowed certain errors to reemerge in our time. For example, the "situation moral," known in moral theology. This is effectively, moral pragmatism.

John Paul II had to fight against the modern moral relativism engendered by Liberalism. In his encyclical Veritatis Splendor, he defended the objectivity of Natural Law against moral relativism and subjectivism. We have read before how Kant affirms that man does not need God telling him what is good and what is bad, because man has the science of good and evil. What else can we add to that?
Benedict XVI continues to combat the wave of moral relativism invading classrooms and parliaments. Relativism is one of the bêtes noires of the contemporary world.

The moral academicians within the Catholic realm are not completely free from its influence.

It is precisely because of that ανομία, that iniquity, that we can say that Liberalism is 'the sin'. That lawlessness is an effort to adroitly shake off the subjection to all laws, especially God's law. Lawlessness negates all limits to the self determination of the individual and society. [41b]

If we see it from the perspective of the thought of Mircea Eliade, we could say that ανομία is the voiding of the divine example in the configuration of human life.
When Saint John makes the affirmation: "Sin is lawlessness [iniquity]", his affirmation has a specific meaning. Without denying the usual meaning of the Greek word ανομία—opposition to the law—he presents it predicating specifically in the sense of denying Jesus, He who has "not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it." (Matthew 5:13-20). Considering the Christian perspective, it is obvious that he who rejects the one who is Himself the fulfilling of the law, wholly rejects the law. He who ignores, does not acknowledge, or takes no heed of Him who perfectly fulfills the law, commits the ultimate act of lawlessness, the most extreme of iniquities. He perpetrates the deepest of iniquities, the most radical and perverse sin, carrying the most baneful and deadly consequences for himself, and mankind.

The ανομία according to John is the rejection of Jesus Christ, the Revealer, the obedient Son—who lives by and fulfills—the will of the Father. Jesus Christ the Son, the fullness of the law fully revealed by his behavior as a perfect Son doing the Father's will: "For this is the will of my Father, that every one who sees the Son and believes in him should have eternal life [...]" (John 6, 40). Those who do not recognize the will of the Father and commit the ανομία, rebel against the will of the Father, thus excluding themselves from eternal life by refusing to live as sons in filial justice.

Finally, for Saint John, the sin is: the ανομία, the iniquity or lawlessness. It is to willfully refuse to believe in Christ. It is the negation of the Son and the Father, the rejection of the only way to enter into a communion of life with them.

To refuse to believe is to deny to enter and participate in the family covenant offered to humans by the Divine. This is apostasy (αποστασία), the abandonment of the ancestral communion. The iniquity is fundamentally, apostasy. This apostasy is often made visible when the rejection of the ecclesial communion is made manifest in public by those who depart from their brothers, after having judged, accused and condemned them. This rejection of the ecclesial brotherhood shows clearly that the apostate loves the world more than the Father. He loves his own passions and the world much more than having God as Father.

Eschatology and ανομία

The word ανομία is used in the New Testament in a context predominantly eschatological, relative to the Final Judgment, the parousía (παρουσια), and the future of the Church at the End of Times. It does not have a predominant moral sense, but rather religious, relative to the salvation of condemnation of men.
In the Sermon of the Mountain, we hear Jesus say that He will be the judge of that future judgment:

"On that day many will say to me, `Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?' And then will I declare to them, 'I never knew you; depart from me, [42] you evildoers.' [η ανομία]." [43]

The iniquity condemned by Jesus, has been perpetrated in history by means of invoking His name to produce—by means of that invocation—prodigious signs, prophecies and expulsion of demons, thus appearing to give credit to those who are only Christian in appearance. What does this mean?

Jesus warns us in His instructions about the future:

For many will come in my name, saying, `I am the Christ,' and they will lead many astray [...] For false Christs and false prophets will arise and show great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect. Lo, I have told you beforehand. [44]

These are the impostors that will appear before the Judge saying, "Lord, Lord, we have performed many miracles in your name". Jesus will reject them on the grounds of them having been evildoers, workers of lawlessness.

They appear in history invoking the name of Jesus, but hypocritically doing their own will and not the will of the Father. They announce the messianic salvation and try to put it to work. Let us reflect for a moment in the so called "theologies of liberation" that were introduced in the name of a "liberator Christ" while proposing class warfare. They did not promote the freedom of the sons of God announced by Jesus Christ, the need to become sons of God and the loving subjection of ones own life to the will of the Father. Those and other pseudo-Messiahs, make human will the norm of interpretation of the words of Jesus Christ, while adroitly manipulating the Christ's image.

Iniquity and Scandal

Going further in our reading of these passages of Sacred Scripture we can learn more about what is the ανομία. Pointing to the End of Times, in the parable of the wheat and the weeds, Jesus says:

So just as the tares are gathered up and burned with fire, so shall it be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send forth His angels, and they will gather out of His kingdom all stumbling blocks, and those [evildoers] who commit lawlessness, and will throw them into the furnace of fire; in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. [45]

We can make a few useful observations here:

1. Here 'the evildoers' are presented—let us emphasize this—as being internal to the Kingdom: '[the angels] will gather out of His kingdom...'. This is something that happens inside the kingdom, it also happens in the name of Jesus, with knowledge of His teaching, invoking His teaching, twisting the meaning of His teaching as they find it convenient—but—not doing what Jesus teaches. They listen to His words—and perhaps they may teach His words in His name—but they don't practice them.

2. Those 'workers of lawlessness', those evildoers operate in a scandalous manner, being like stumbling blocks causing the fall of those who have faith. We have to notice here the technical application and the salvific sense of the word scandal, which we use more frequently in a moral sense (as in "scandalous sins.") Jesus uses this word in the sense of making the disciples stumble in their following of Jesus, who is the road to the Father. What is the relationship between iniquity and scandal? Scandal, used here in parallel with iniquity, supposes in this context, that the evildoers— by the mere device of being evil—induce many believers into iniquity.

Iniquity is contagious and damaging to the believers' faith. Even more when it is more than an isolated practice, when it has been turned into an environment, a civilization, a culture, a contagion penetrating in the hearts of the believers as an invisible cultural colonization, altering their common sense, their outlook on life and the world. Thus they also become hypocritical Christians, underground evildoers who have heard the words of Christ in the beginning and they ended up not practicing them, or perhaps practicing a modified version of Christ's teaching, which is equally bad. They are victims, more or less guilty of the evildoers' reinterpreting of the doctrine of Jesus to undermine it.

Is it not true that we can apply in full, this definition of iniquity to a pretended Christian teaching that would limit itself to teach values, while avoiding to look at the practical exercise of theological and cardinal virtues? Today we see how easily Jesus Christ is substituted by values, and not even virtues at that! The substitution of the faithful and explicit Gospel for a sort of 'Gospel light and stretch'. This is a chilling procedure, bringing to mind the exchange of Christ for thirty silver coins—a monetary value. The substitution of the Gospel message for the mere proclamation of values, even if those values are the values of the Gospel: is it not a form of treason? Certainly this definition can be applied to the program of hetero-interpretation of the believer's language proposed by Antonio Gramsci, a program that has been a stumbling block for so many believers.

Liberal Catholics

The parable of the weeds can help us to focus on the phenomenon of religious Liberalism.

It is quite obvious that Liberalism has been a stumbling block for many—even more so its religious version—It has been an obstacle and a scandal for many Christians. It has lead many to confusion. It has been the cause why many Catholics have gone astray, including clergy and bishops who have wandered into the ways of liberal Catholicism. This has happened mainly to those Christians more inclined to listen to the flattery of the world and more fearful of its condemnations and persecutions.

Fr. Félix Sardá i Salvany observes how the liberal iniquity becomes a cause for scandal, once installed in the minds of priests or bishops. That is a stumbling block causing the believers to accept the Liberal opinions. To those faithful who are taken aback by the fact that something like that may even happen, Fr. Salvany says:

"Yes, friendly reader, yes. There can be, unfortunately, ministers of the Church who are Liberal, some of those in that sect are fierce, and others gentle, and there are some that are just resented. This happens just in the same way among the laymen. The ministers of God are not exempt from paying tribute to human frailties [...] This should not come as a shock to no one, considering that there has been hardly any heresy in the Church of God that has not been propagated or exalted by some cleric."[46]

These words of Jesus apply very well to those men of the Church who have fallen prey to the Liberal contagion:

" So you also outwardly appear righteous to men, but within you are full of hypocrisy and iniquity (ανομία)." [47]

What turns the ανομία into grave iniquity is precisely the act of becoming an obstacle for men who are in their filial way to reach the Father:

"But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because you shut the kingdom of heaven against men; for you neither enter yourselves, nor allow those who would enter to go in." (Matthew 23, 13).

The Kingdom of the Heavens is nothing more than the way to attain communion, as sons, with the Father. Therefore, hypocrisy is ανομία, the iniquity that causes one to separate from the faith in Christ, loosing the opportunity to reach the communion of the human and the Divine. Thus iniquity (ανομία) is scandal because it makes us stumble and fall while we are following Christ in our way to the Father.
Jesus calls those who are championing the opposition to Him in every time, the sons of Satan, a brood of vipers, a perverse generation:

" You serpents, you brood of vipers, how are you to escape being sentenced to hell?" [48]

Here we find again, the same opposition that we saw earlier in the text of the First Letter of John. The sons of God, who are pure as the Lamb, counter to the sons of Satan who oppose the Son, the workers of lawlessness, the evildoers who practice the iniquity (ανομία) which is 'the' sin.

The Iniquity According to Saint Paul

The teaching of Saint Paul about the iniquity extends the doctrine emanating from the texts of Saint Matthew and Saint John. The most significant passage containing this teaching is this:

Now concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our assembling to meet him, we beg you, brethren, not to be quickly shaken in mind or excited, either by spirit or by word, or by letter purporting to be from us, to the effect that the day of the Lord has come. Let no one deceive you in any way; for that day will not come, unless the rebellion comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of perdition, who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God. Do you not remember that when I was still with you I told you this? And you know what is restraining him now so that he may be revealed in his time. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only he who now restrains it will do so until he is out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed, and the Lord Jesus will slay him with the breath of his mouth and destroy him by his appearing and his coming. The coming of the lawless one by the activity of Satan will be with all power and with pretended signs and wonders, and with all wicked deception for those who are to perish, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. Therefore God sends upon them a strong delusion, to make them believe what is false, so that all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness. But we are bound to give thanks to God always for you, brethren beloved by the Lord, because God chose you from the beginning to be saved, through sanctification by the Spirit and belief in the truth. [49]

The Mystery of Iniquity

We enter now fully into eschatological predictions, into the fullness of apocalyptic doctrine. That is why we are going to link Liberalism with that eschatological lawlessness which—invoking the Christian mysteries—it is against them and yet able to parasitize them, working prodigies in Christ's name. These are marvels of efficacy that the wicked use to propel themselves, augment their prestige, and hypocritically mislead the elect.

The Fraud and Falsehood of Modernity

Romano Guardini has described well the Christian perplexity standing before the Modern Age, showing features common to both the age and the mystery of iniquity in this manner:

"The [Christian] memories of the Modern Age rebellion against God were too deeply impressed, leading to an excessive suspicion of modernity and its way of placing all spheres of cultural activity in contradiction with the faith. We must add to that, the occurrence of what we have called the fraud [the hypocrisy] of the Modern Age, that falsehood consisting in the denial of one part of the Christian doctrine and order of life, while at the same time reclaiming for modernity the fatherhood of the cultural results of Christian doctrine and order. This caused the Christian feeling of insecurity relation to the Modern Age: everywhere one could find ideas and values of obvious Christian heritage, being presented falsely as belonging to the common patrimony. Elements of the Christian heritage everywhere were being turned against their own originator. [50]

This is a fact that deserves further reflection. I prefer to ruminate on it in the light of the observations of Mircea Eliade. Let us reflect on the situation of the Christian man in a Liberal medium, where there is also religious Liberalism. What is going to happen to that Christian when he is forced to live in a world that he cannot configure according to his divine archetypes, nay, this world is imposed to him, constructed by others according to the disordered configurations of the irreligious man?

Would this Christian be tempted to reconcile the irreconcilable, the configuration of the irreligious world with the religious archetypes of his faith? Wouldn't that put him in a state of confusion? Would he end up splitting in two, with his religious faith on one side, and the Liberal secular sense on the other? This is something to think about. At this stage we finally arrive to the thought of Father Leonardo Castellani.

The teachings of Fr. Leonardo Castellani

Fr. Leonardo Castellani has disserted deeply and abundantly about the mystery of iniquity in the eschatological context of the Antichrist, and about Liberalism as an apocalyptic phenomenon related to the mystery of iniquity.

I bring up here some passages of Fr. Castellani that are useful to revise and confirm what we have been analyzing.

"The Mystery of Iniquity is the hating of God and the idolizing adoration of Man." [51]

There is evidently an implicit mention of Liberalism in this quote. Liberalism can be also defined properly as "a negation of God and divinization of Man." Now Fr. Castellani comments on other apocalyptic characters connected with this mystery:

"The two beasts are [the first:] the political powers and [the second] man's religious instinct turned against God and controlled by the Pseudo-Christ and the Pseudo-Prophet. [...]

"The Great Harlot is religion, de-constructed and placed in the hands of the temporal powers."

"The adoration of man and the hating of God have always existed [...] that [phenomenon] has a tendency to coalesce in the body politic and crush the saints. That was the power that condemned Socrates, persecuted the prophets, crucified Jesus, and later multiplied the martyrs. That power, incarnated in a man of satanic greatness, a plebeian and perverse genius, perhaps [not unlike Our Lord] of the Jewish race, superhuman intellect, absolutely evil, will destroy the Church when the obstacles impeding him are removed, Satan will lend him his power and accumulated fury." [52]

Fr. Castellani foresees that this tide of iniquity will mortally affect Catholicism:

"The temporal structure of the Church—at least a sizeable part of it—will be captured by the Antichrist, fornicating with the kings of the earth, as it has already happened in history. At that point the abomination causing desolation will enter the Holy Place." [53]

In other passages of his commentaries on the Apocalypse, Fr. Castellani links Liberalism with one of the three frogs of Saint John's Revelation. Those three frogs appear in the scene after the pouring of the sixth "cup of the ire of God" that the seven angels pour over the earth. [54]

Let us keep in mind that the frogs (Hebrew, tsefardim) are God's second plague sent to punish Pharaoh [55] Even when here they appear to be only three frogs, one could think that they gather the kings of the earth, to lead an invasion of frogs. In the story of Exodus, the frogs fill the whole country getting into homes, furnaces and everywhere.

These three frogs come out of:
1. the mouth of the Serpent
2. the mouth of the first Beast
3. the mouth of the False Prophet (identified by some with the second Beast)

These three frogs "are demonic spirits, performing signs, who go abroad to the kings of the whole world, to assemble them for battle on the great day of God the Almighty." [56]

Fr. Castellani observes:

"[the frogs] have challenged the interpreters; the Fathers of the Church, and almost all have seen in them heresies the latest and newest of them. These are Liberalism, Communism and [...] Modernism". [57]

The same interpretation is put by Fr. Castellani in the mouth of his literary character, Don Benjamin Benavides:

"The three frogs are Liberalism, Communism and Modernism, three noisy, jumpy, swampy, stuttering heresies [...] they come out of the sixth plague [...] they are three unclean spirits [opposed to the Holy Ghost] capable to execute prodigies to congregate the kings of the earth to the last battle against God." [58]

"The text does not say 'three demons', neither is in agreement with the fact that two of the spirits come out of the mouths of men. The text says 'unclean spirits'. Those words, in any language, designate a movement, an ideology, a theology [...] they resemble frogs; slimy, lascivious, occult, swampy, noisy and boring animals, incessantly repeating their monotonous croak:

"Croak, croak, croak, the frogs sing
From the bottom of the river,
Democracy, croak, croak, croak,
Social Justice, croak, croak, croak
Humanity, croak, croak, croak,
The diabolic trio sings unceasingly."

"This political heresy, now diffused throughout the world, does not yet have a name. When it gets a name, it will not be his own, that is what Newman called "Religious Liberalism." He saw in it—just like I do—an omen of the Antichrist." That is what Pius X called 'modernism' and Hillaire Belloc called 'aloguism' [and 'anthropolatry']. That is the old religious Naturalism that goes back to Rousseau and the Encyclopedists and, if you will, has his roots in Baius (Michel Bay) [...] that is, deep inside, the idolatry of Man and Mankind, the worse possible error, attributed by Saint Paul to the [lawlessness, the iniquity, the chaos] the ánomos (ανομoσ)."

"I have written much about it, I will condense my thought here. This is a subtle falsification of Christianity, intent on emptying Christianity of its supernatural meaning, leaving the empty hull, which is filled again promptly by 'the spirit that loves the unclean wasted spaces' with he ancient call 'you shall be like Gods.'"

"Josef Pieper justly observed that the slogan of Liberalism, the dictum: 'Religion is a private thing and is not a concern of the State' implies make a God out of the State, putting it above a private God. This is the idolatry of the State, as old as the world itself, or at least, as old as the Roman Caesars, now proclaimed openly by Hegel: the worshiping of the Nation, man's creation, 'higher that practical intellect,' in the words of Saint Thomas Aquinas; who also adds, referring to the ancient cult of the Caesars: if man ceases to worship God he falls into the worshiping of the State—his nation, his race, his Science, his aesthetics, his power to wage war, his Freedom, his Constitution, and also Goddess Reason. Those last three deities were adored by the French Revolution; although the incense ascended towards Robespierre, who stood in the background, behind the prostitutes adorned with priestly silk and gold. [59]

Don Benjamin Benavides offers more information about the three frogs:

"Liberalism, struggling with his son Communism, is the frog-like spirit that came out of the mouth of the Beast, the other came out of the Dragon's mouth [...] Modernism will ally itself to both [...] Modernism is the common ground of these two opposing heresies. One day—we can see it coming—the Pseudo-prophet will fuse them together." [60]

"Modernism cannot be defined briefly, [...] That heresy is nothing more than the explicit, pedantic center of an omnipresent spirit permeating today's world. His origin in history was the 'Philosophism' of the 18th century. Fr. Manuel Lacunza [60b] with a very keen eye, saw the heresy of the Antichrist, the last heresy, the more radical and perfect of them all. Ever since those days, it has taken diverse appearances, but deep inside it has been always the same. It keeps repeating the same old song " Croak, croak, croak, the frogs sing, from the bottom of the river" [...] Anyone can figure out what a frog is saying because it's more noise than word. It is a magical noise, it is hypnotic, demonic, full of signs and prodigies... It attracts, subdues, hypnotizes, enhebriates, exhilarates [...] in its own way, in a wholesale manner.

"The 'croak-croak' of Liberalism is 'freedom, freedom, freedom;' the croak-croak of Communism is 'social justice.' The croak-croak of Modernism and the mother of them all is "Paradise on Earth", "Man is God" [...] and Democracy is the chorus of the three frogs singing together: political democracy, social democracy, and religious democracy.

[...] These are the last three heresies because one cannot go any further in the falsification of Christianity. These are the false messiahs predicted by Our Savior. Inside them beats the heart of "the Abomination causing Desolation" consisting in the worshipping of man instead of God, under the pretension of holding to the Christian ways, while keeping the exterior structure of the Church." [61]

After this consideration of the writings of Fr. Castellani, we can conclude that Liberalism is not only 'the' sin, it is also the 'unclean, impure spirit' that opposes the Holy Spirit proceeding from the Father through the Son.
Fr. Castellani ended his conference about the "Essence of Liberalism" taking a phrase from a letter by Juan Manuel de Rosas [62] a quote presented as his "Argentine definition of a free man."

"A truly free man is he, who exempt from unfounded fears and unnecessary desires, in any country, finding himself in any given condition, is still subject to the mandates of God, the dictates of his conscience and of sane reason..."

In the same conference, Castellani encourages his young audience telling them:

"Neither you, nor I can defeat the Liberals with one hit. There is though, a way to defeat them in the end: "Giving witness" in the manner of the great Catholics that have confronted it intellectually. [63]

Conclusion

I have strived to show how Liberalism is 'the' sin, the supreme iniquity, the sin against the Holy Spirit. This is essentially the rebellion against the Father, the shout of "I shall not serve". Consistant with not obeying, not wanting to be His sons, not wanting to recognize God as Father, not wanting to recognize any right over one's life, not wanting to receive one's being from the Father. That is wanting to be one's own beginning and end, to be one's own god.

Confronted with this terrible blasphemy of our times, in the words of Fr. Castellani, we have nothing to oppose but our own witness of wanting to be sons of the Father, striving to live like sons and to know God as Our Father. That is why I invite you to pray this Prayer to the Father, saying with me:

Father, beget us in this hour and in every hour, in this day and every day. We want to receive our being from You always and in every instant here on earth, and in heaven, eternally so that we can glorify You like You deserve. Give us our being, our sight, our thinking, our understanding, our wanting to do Your will, our remembering your charity from where we come and to where we go. Our joy and peace, our happiness: we worship You, we praise You, we bless You. We have no happiness outside of You. To give You glory is the blessing of Your sons. Do not let us fall into the temptation of this generation of indifference where You have placed us. They are saddened by our joy. Deliver us from the evil one. Do not let his sadness prevail over the joy of Your sons, so that nothing will obscure Your glory and the glory You gave to your Son, Jesus Christ. Amen.

References

[1] ακηδία, pron. ah-ceh-dee-ah; meaning negligence, indifference, for the wicked are indifferent, make no distinction between good and evil. Latin acidĭa, derived from the same Greek word.

[2] Wisdom 2, 24.

[3] 2 Thessalonians 2,7.

[4] Félix Sardá i Salvany, El liberalismo es pecado, (Liberalism is Sin), Ediciones Cruz y Fierro, Buenos Aires, 1977. Colección Clásicos Contrarrevolucionarios 2. Cited from the Spanish edition in c. 3, pp. 32-34.

[5] 1 John 2, 18-23.

[6] Mark 3, 29.

[7] David Friedrich Strauss, Das Leben Jesu, für das deutsche Volk bearbeitet (The Life of Jesus for German Working People), Leipzig 1864, p. 18.

[8] Exodus 32, 1: When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered themselves together to Aaron, and said to him, "Up, make us gods, who shall go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him."

[9] 1 Samuel 8, 7; Cfr. Luke 19, 14 `We do not want this man to reign over us.'

[10] Matthew 10, 40.

[11] Luke 10, 16.

[12] Alfredo Sáenz, El Cardenal Pie. Lucidez y Coraje al Servicio de la Verdad. (Cardenal Pie. Lucidity and Courage in the Service of Truth). Editorial Gladius, Buenos Aires. 2nd. Ed. 2007, p. 276.

[13] See the study by Helmut Schoeck, La Envidia. Una Teoría de la Sociedad (Envy. A Theory of Society). Ed. Club de Lectores, Buenos Aires 1969.

[14] M. J. Le Guillou, O.P. El Misterio del Padre. Fe de los Apóstoles (The Mystery of the Father. Faith of the Apostles). Gnosis Actuales. Editorial Encuentro, Madrid 1998, p. 196.

[15] Romans 10, 14.

[16] Mons. Paul Josef Cordes, El Eclipse del Padre (The Eclipse of the Father), Editorial Palabra, Madrid 2003, 1967, cited in p. 167.

[17] In the discourse of Benedict XVI the reference of Jesus Christ to the Father is very clear. Jesus has come to reveal the Father. The discourse expresses clearly this relation of Jesus to the Father in three main passages.

1-By pointing at what must be done by the Conference of Aparecida with the situation faced by the Latin American Continent at this point. "A new situation is being analyzed here in Aparecida. Facing these crossroads, the, the faithful expect of this new Conference, a renewal and revitalization of their faith in Christ, our only Teacher and Savior, who has revealed to us the unique experience of the Father's infinite love for mankind."

2-By pointing at Jesus as the one who reveals God: "For the Christian the nucleus of the response is simple" Only God knows God, only His Son, Who is God, is from God, true God can know Him. "He who is 'in the bossom of the Father', has revealed Him."

3-By pointing at the charism and the mission of those religious and consecrated people: "remind your brothers and sisters that the Kingdom of God has arrived already; that justice and truth are possible if we are open to the loving presence of God our Father, of Christ our Brother and Lord, and the Holy Spirit our Consoler."

[18] Fr. Ignatius Andereggen: Santo Tomás de Aquino- Psicólogo (St. Thomas Aquinas-Psychologist). Sapientia, 205 (1999) 59-68. R. Fr. Andereggen refers these affirmations by Sigmund Freud to: Totem y Tabú (Totem and Taboo), Buenos Aires 1993, 155-156.

[19] Mons. Paul Josef Cordes, El Eclipse del Padre (The Eclipse of the Father), Editorial Palabra, Madrid 2003, 1967, p. 179.

[20] Claudio Risè, Il Padre, l'Assente Inaccettabile, (The Father, the Unacceptable Absent) San Paolo, 2003, 7th Ed. pp. 49-70.

[21] Mircea Eliade, Lo Sagrado y lo profano, (The Sacred and the Profane) Ed. Guadarrama, Madrid 1967, p. 196.

[22] Mircea Eliade, op.cit. p. 197.

[23] Mircea Eliade, op.cit. p. 207.

[24] Malachi 4, 5-6; Matthew 17, 10-13; Luke 1, 17.

[25] Immanuel Kant, Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft, Beginning of the Prologue to the 1st Edition, 1793.

"Die Moral, so fern sie auf dem Begriffe des Menschen als eines freien, eben darum aber auch sich selbst durch seine Vernunft an unbedingte Gesetze bindenden Wesens gegründet ist, bedarf weder der Idee eines andern Wesens über ihm, um seine Pflicht zu erkennen, noch einer andern Triebfeder als des Gesetzes selbst, um sie zu beobachten. [...] Sie bedarf also zum Behuf ihrer selbst (sowohl objectiv, was das Wollen, als subjectiv, was das Können betrifft) keinesweges der Religion, sondern Vermöge der reinen praktischen Vernunft ist sie sich selbst genug." En: Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft. Vorrede zur ersten Auflage.; Kant's gesammelte Schriften, Hsgben. von der Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften Band VI, Seite 1.

[26] Genesis 3, 5.

[27] Daniel 7, 7-8.

[28] Matthew 10, 28.

[29] In this section I make use of the study by Fr. Ignace de la Potterie S.J. El Pecado es la Iniquidad (Sin is the Iniquity), from the volume containing several of his works: La Vida según el Espíritu, (Life According to the Spirit,) Ed. Sígueme, Salamanca 1967, pp. 69-86), from the French original: La Vie selon l'Esprit, Ed. Du Cerf, Paris 1965.

[30] 1 Juan 3, 4.

[31] Dédoken, given, delivered.

[32] Esmén, we are. The continuous present in Greek means literally: "we are being'.

[33] Ginôskei hemás, "That is why the world did not know Him [ignored Him]".

[34] Egnô autón, Egnô is at the root origin of the English word for "ignorance" which implies "not to know" both in the intransitive and the transitive.

[35] Agnízei, purify.

[36] Agnós, pure; from where the Latin word agnus (lamb) derives.

[37] Pás ho poiôn tên hamartían kai tén anomían poiéi, kai hê amartía estin he anomía.

[38] Tas hamartías.

[39] Hamartánei, a present word, here given a continuing sense.

[40] Pas ho amartanôn, "all sinners," participle.

[41] Planato, to deceive, to misguide, to deviate. "The misguiding, planê is one of the characteristics of the forces of darkness in the eschatological dualism light-darkness. In the darkness we stray off the road, with light we can see it. Remember that even in Matthew the notions of iniquity and perdition (straying off the road of salvation) are shown together in the warnings about the false prophets." Fr. Ignace de la Potterie S.J. La Vida según el Espíritu, (Life According to the Spirit,) Ed. Sígueme, Salamanca 1967 p. 81.

[41b] This part of Fr. Bojorge's work brings to mind the rebellion of the nations against the Father and His Messiah, prophesized in Psalm 2. That rebellion precedes the triumph of the Kingdom of God on earth. [Editor's note.]

[42] Psalm 6,8-9: "Depart from me, all you workers of evil; for the LORD has heard the sound of my weeping. The LORD has heard my supplication; the LORD accepts my prayer." This eschatological interpretation is shown in reference to the lawlessness made manifest in the Passion of Our Lord. The same will be manifested the time the Antichrist is revealed.

[43] Ergazoménoi ten anomían; Matthew 7, 22-23.

[44] Matthew 24, 5, 23-25.

[45] Tous poiountas tēn anomian; Matthew 13, 40-42:
ωσπερ ουν συλλεγεται τα ζιζανια και πυρι κατακαιεται ουτως εσται εν τη συντελεια του αιωνος τουτου. αποστελει ο υιος του ανθρωπου τους αγγελους αυτου και συλλεξουσιν εκ της βασιλειας αυτου παντα τα σκανδαλα και τους ποιουντας την ανομιαν. και βαλουσιν αυτους εις την καμινον του πυρος εκει εσται ο κλαυθμος και ο βρυγμος των οδοντων.
Transliterated: ōsper oun sullegetai ta zizania kai puri katakaietai outōs estai en tē sunteleia tou aiōnos toutou. apostelei o uios tou anthrōpou tous angelous autou kai sullexousin ek tēs basileias autou panta ta skandala kai tous poiountas tēn anomian. kai balousin autous eis tēn kaminon tou puros ekei estai o klauthmos kai o brugmos tōn odontōn.

[46] Félix Sardá i Salvany, El Liberalismo es Pecado (Liberalism is Sin) p. 129.

[47] Matthew 23, 28.

[48] Matthew 23, 33.

[49] 2 Thessalonians, 2, 1-13.

[50] Romano Guardini, El Ocaso de la Edad Moderna, (The End of the Modern Age) Ed. Guadarrama Madrid, 1958, p. 143.

[51] "El Misterio de la iniquidad es el odio a Dios y la adoración idolátrica del Hombre." Quoted from Cristo: ¿Vuelve o no vuelve? (Chist: Will He Return or Not?) Fr. Leonardo Castellani. Ed. Vórtice, Bs. As. 2004; pp. 26.

[52] "Las dos Bestias son [la primera:] el poder político y [la segunda] el instinto religioso del hombre vueltos contra Dios y dominados por el Pseudo-Cristo y el Pseudo-profeta. [...]

"La Gran Ramera es la religión descompuesta y entregada a los poderes temporales".

"La adoración del hombre con el odio a Dios ha existido siempre [...] él tiende a corporizarse en cuerpo político y aplastar a los santos. él fue quien condenó a Sócrates, persiguió a los profetas, crucificó a Jesús, y después multiplicó los mártires; y él será quien destruya la Iglesia, cuando, retirado el Obstáculo que lo retiene se encarne en un hombre de satánica grandeza, plebeyo genial y perverso, quizás de raza judía, de intelecto sobrehumano, de maldad absoluta, a quien Satán prestará su poder y su acumulada furia". Fr. Leonardo Castellani, Cristo: ¿Vuelve o no vuelve? (Chist: Will He Return or Not?) pp. 26-27.

[53] "la estructura temporal de la Iglesia existente será presa del Anticristo, fornicará con los reyes de la tierra—al menos una parte ostensible de ella, como pasó ya en la historia—y la abominación de la desolación entrará en el lugar santo." Fr. Leonardo Castellani, Cristo: ¿Vuelve o no vuelve? (Chist: Will He Return or Not?) p. 27.

[54] Revelation 16, 12 ss.

[55] Exodus 8, 1-4: Then the LORD said to Moses, "Go in to Pharaoh and say to him, `Thus says the LORD, "Let my people go, that they may serve me. But if you refuse to let them go, behold, I will plague all your country with frogs; the Nile shall swarm with frogs which shall come up into your house, and into your bedchamber and on your bed, and into the houses of your servants and of your people, and into your ovens and your kneading bowls; the frogs shall come up on you and on your people and on all your servants." And the LORD said to Moses, "Say to Aaron, `Stretch out your hand with your rod over the rivers, over the canals, and over the pools, and cause frogs to come upon the land of Egypt!'" So Aaron stretched out his hand over the waters of Egypt; and the frogs came up and covered the land of Egypt.

ובכה ובעמך ובכל עבדיך יעלו הצפרדעים׃ (Exodus 8, 4. Hebrew Bible)

και επι σε και επι τους θεραποντας σου και επι τον λαον σου αναβησονται οι βατραχοι (Exodus 8, 4. Septuagint)

[56] Revelation 16, 14.

[57] "han hecho sudar el quilo y romperse el mate (la cabeza) a los intérpretes; los santos Padres, casi todos, han visto en ellas 'herejías', las últimas y 'novísimas'. Son el liberalismo, el comunismo y el [...] modernismo". Fr. Leonardo Castellani, El Apokalypsis, (The Apocalipse) Ediciones Jus, Buenos Aires 1963, p. 228

[58] "Las tres ranas son el liberalismo, el comunismo y el modernismo, tres herejías vocingleras, saltarinas, pantanosas y tartamudas [...] surgen de la plaga sexta y según dice el profeta son tres espíritus impuros [opuestos al Espíritu Santo] y capaces de hacer prodigios para congregar a los [ocho] reyes de toda la tierra a la última batalla contra Dios."

"El texto no dice 'tres demonios' ni tampoco es congruente con el salir dos de ellos de boca de dos hombres: el texto dice 'espíritus' [impuros] palabra que, en todas las lenguas designa también un movimiento, una ideología, una teología. [...] se parecen a ranas, animal viscoso y lascivo, oculto y fangoso, vocinglero y aburridor, que repite sin cesar su croar monótono:

"Cuá, cuá, cuá, cantaba la rana
Cuá, cuá, cuá, debajo del río
La democracia, cuá, cuá,
Justicia social, cuá, cuá,
Y la Humanidad, cuá, cuá,
Canta el diabólico trío".

"Esta herejía política difusa hoy en todo el mundo, que aún no tiene nombre y cuando lo tenga no será el propio suyo, que Newman en el siglo pasado llamó 'liberalismo religioso' (y por cierto vio en ella, como yo ahora, presagios del Anticristo); que San Pío X llamó 'modernismo' y Belloc 'aloguismo', es el viejo naturalismo religioso que remonta a Rousseau y los Enciclopedistas; y en su raíz, si se quiere, al presbítero belga Baius (Michel Bay) ...; la cual es, en su fondo, la idolatría del Hombre y de la Humanidad, el peor error posible, atribuido por San Pablo al ánomos.
Fr. Leonardo Castellani, Los Papeles de Benjamín Benavides, (The Papers of Benjamin Benavides.) Ediciones Dictio, Buenos Aires 3rd Edition, 1978, p. 43.

[59] "Mucho he escrito sobre ella, me resumiré aquí. Consiste en una adulteración sutil del cristianismo, al cual vacía de su contenido sobrenatural dejando la huera corteza, la cual rellena de inmediato 'el espíritu que ama los sitios sucios y los lugares vacantes' con el antiguo 'Seréis como dioses'.

"Josef Pieper observó con justeza que el dicho 'la Religión es cosa privada y al Estado no le interesa', lema del liberalismo, comporta nombrar Dios al Estado, poniéndolo por encima del Dios...; privado. Es la estatolatría, tan vieja como el mundo, o por lo menos, como los Césares romanos, proclamada ahora abiertamente por Hegel: la adoración de la 'Nación', creación del hombre, 'la más alta obra del intelecto práctico' dice Santo Tomás; el cual añade, refiriéndose al antiguo culto de los Césares, que si el hombre deja de adorar a Dios, cae a adorar al Estado—a su nación, a su raza, a su Ciencia, a su Estética, a su poder bélico, a la Libertad, a la Constitución—y a la Diosa Razón; a cuyas tres últimas deidades tributó culto la Revolución Francesa; aunque era Robespierre, en el fondo, que estaba allí detrás de las prostitutas enjaezadas de seda y oro sacerdotales, a quien subía el humo del incienso". Fr. Leonardo Castellani, El Apokalypsis, (The Apocalipse) Ediciones Jus, Buenos Aires 1963, pp. 228-230

[60] "El liberalismo, en pugna con su hijo el comunismo, son el espíritu batracio que salió de la boca de la Bestia, y el otro que salió de la boca del Dragón [...] El modernismo coaligará a los dos [...] el modernismo es el fondo común de las dos herejías contrarias, que algún día—que ya vemos venir—las englobará por obra del Pseudoprofeta". Fr. Leonardo Castellani, Los Papeles de Benjamín Benavides, (The Papers of Benjamin Benavides.) Ediciones Dictio, Buenos Aires 3rd Edition, 1978, p. 45.

[61] "[El modernismo] no se puede definir brevemente. [...] Esa herejía no es más que el núcleo explícito y pedantesco de un impalpable y omnipresente espíritu que permea el mundo de hoy. Su origen histórico fue el filosofismo del siglo XVIII, en el cual, con certero ojo, el Padre Lacunza vio la herejía del Anticristo, la última herejía, la más radical y perfecta de todas. Desde entonces acá ha revestido diversas formas, pero el fondo es el mismo, dice siempre lo mismo: 'Cuá, cuá, cantaba la rana, cuá, cuá, debajo del río" [...] ¡Cualquiera interpreta lo que dice una rana!—rió Don Benya—es más un ruido que una palabra. Pero es un ruido mágico, arrebatador, demoníaco, lleno de signos y prodigios...; Atrae, aduerme, entontece, emborracha, exalta [...] pero así, aproximadamente y a bulto.

"El cuá, cuá, del liberalismo es 'libertad, libertad, libertad'; el cuá, cuá, del comunismo es: 'justicia social', el cuá, cuá, del modernismo, de donde nacieron los otros y los reunirá un día, podríamos asignarle éste: 'Paraíso en la tierra'; 'Dios es el Hombre'; 'el hombre es Dios'" [...] "y la Democracia es el coro de las tres ranas juntas: democracia política, democracia social, y democracia religiosa".

[...] "Estas son las tres últimas herejías, porque no se puede ir más allá en materia de falsificación del cristianismo. Son literalmente los pseudo-cristos que predijo el Salvador. En el fondo de ellos late la 'abominación de la desolación'; [que consiste] en la adoración del hombre en lugar de Dios, y eso bajo formas cristianas y aún manteniendo tal vez el armazón exterior de la Iglesia".

Fr. Leonardo Castellani, Los Papeles de Benjamín Benavides, (The Papers of Benjamin Benavides.) Ediciones Dictio, Buenos Aires 3rd Edition, 1978, p. 46-47.

[62] "El hombre verdaderamente 'libre' es aquél que, exento de temores infundados y deseos innecesarios, en cualquier país y cualquier condición en que se halle, está 'sujeto' a los mandatos de Dios, al dictado de su conciencia y a los dictámenes de la sana razón...". Leonardo Castellani, La Esencia del Liberalismo, (The Essence of Liberalism) Ediciones Nuevo Orden, Buenos Aires 1964, 2nd edition, c. Carta a Josefina Gómez.

[63] "Neither you or I can defeat Echeverría, Ingenieros or Repetto (*) in one fell swoop (I cannot even read them myself) but we can serve Truth, and furthermore if God choses us we can give witness to the Truth; that is the great battle cry of Christianity that made fall the walls of pagan Jericho. All the religion of Christ is contained in these two words presented by Christ to the Apostles: give witness. [...] In Spain, during the century dominated by Liberalism, there were always men, from Donoso Cortés to Ramiro de Maetzu, that made Truth, that is, gave witness; and Spain [in time] triumphed over Liberalism. That is the true Great Mission of Buenos Aires: not precisely to exteriorize religiosity, nor to make religious propaganda, or [rather] religious boredom, repeating the same commonplace religious platitudes that have bored people to death; but to make Truth. How do you make Truth? By making Life, that is the rough material [of Truth]. How do you make Life? God has given us a little bit, we cannot increase it or diminish it, but we can spend it well.
(*) Argentine Liberal writers of the 19th and early 20th centuries: Esteban Echeverría, José Ingenieros and Nicolás Repetto.

Ni yo ni ustedes podemos vencer de golpe a Echeverría, a Ingenieros y a Repetto (yo ni siquiera puedo leerlos) pero podemos servir a la verdad, e incluso si Dios nos elige podemos dar testimonio a la Verdad; lo cual es el gran grito del Cristianismo, el que hizo caer las murallas de la pagana Jericó. Toda la religión de Cristo se encierra en estas dos palabras que Cristo impuso a sus Apóstoles : dar testimonio. [...] En España durante un siglo que duró el dominio del liberalismo nunca faltaron hombres, desde Donoso Cortés hasta Ramiro de Maeztu, que hicieron Verdad, o sea, dieron testimonio; y España venció al liberalismo. Esta es la verdadera Gran Misión de Buenos Aires: no precisamente hacer exterioridad religiosa, ni propaganda religiosa, ni aburrimiento religioso, repitiendo lugares comunes religiosos de los cuales la gente está aburrida; sino hacer Verdad. ¿Cómo se hace Verdad? Solamente con Vida, esa es la materia prima. ¿Cómo se hace Vida? Dios nos ha dado un cachito, no podemos aumentarlo ni disminuirlo, podemos biengastarlo.

Taken from La Esencia del Liberalismo, (The Essence of Liberalism) by Fr. Leonardo Castellani, Ediciones Nuevo Orden, Buenos Aires 1964, 2nd edition.

The Gift

2008-10-25T07:07:00.000-07:00

Fr. Ray Ryland

“You're a married priest? I didn't know we had married priests. I think the Church should let all her priests marry.”

Words like these have greeted me frequently since my ordination to the priesthood in 1983, with dispensation from the rule of celibacy. I always assure those who favor optional celibacy that both my wife and I strongly support the Church's discipline of priestly celibacy. While I'm deeply grateful that the Church has made an exception for certain former Protestant clergy like me, the exception is clearly a compromise. The priesthood and marriage are both full-time vocations. The fact is, no one can do complete justice to both simultaneously.

The objection usually persists. “But surely a married man is better qualified to teach people about marriage than is a celibate priest.” Again, I disagree (politely, of course). The purpose of marriage preparation is not to teach couples what the priest has experienced. Catholic couples need and have the right to be instructed in the Church's revealed truth about the meaning of human sexuality and holy matrimony. If both a married and a celibate priest are reasonably mature, and if each teaches in harmony with the Church, the married priest has no essential advantage over the celibate priest in giving marriage instruction.

Then comes the final argument. “Yes, that may be, but if priests could marry, it would solve our priest shortage.” I reply that this is an assumption with no evidence to support it. If the rule of celibacy is keeping men out of the priesthood, how do we account for the dioceses in this country that have an abundance of priests? As Pope Paul VI said 40 years ago, the decline in priestly vocations is due to lack of faith on the part of our people. The dissent that has been rampant in recent decades has created widespread confusion about the Church's teaching, especially with regard to the priesthood.

An Ancient Discipline

Unquestionably, sentiment in favor of optional celibacy for priests is growing, even among faithful Catholics. But there are two fundamental errors underlying this opinion, one historical, the other theological.

First, the historical error: People commonly believe that the Church mandated celibacy for her priests beginning in the fourth century or the twelfth century or somewhere in between. The fact is, priestly celibacy is an apostolic institution. [1]

The connection of celibacy with priesthood was first revealed in Christ. We see that in its perfect embodiment, priesthood involves remaining free from all claims of marriage and parenthood. That freedom enabled God's Son to be completely available for the working of the Father's perfect will through Him (Cf. John 4,34).

When He called His successors, the apostles, “they left everything and followed him” (Luke 5,11). Later, Peter reminded Jesus, “We have left everything and followed you.” Then he asked, with typical candor, “What then will we have?” (Matthew 19:27). Jesus replied, “There is no one who has left house or wife or brothers or parents or children, for the sake of the kingdom of God, who will not get back very much more in this age, and in the age to come” (Luke 19,29, emphasis added). Recall also that when Jesus taught the indissolubility of marriage, He also highly commended celibacy (Matthew 19,12). And Paul himself strongly endorsed celibacy for more effective service to the Lord.

The disciplinary canons of the Council of Elvira in 305 are the Church's earliest record regarding priestly celibacy. The council gave no explanation of its rulings, which were ancient and presumably well-known. Canon 33 forbade all married bishops, priests, and deacons from having sexual relations with their wives and begetting children. The council reminded the married clergy that they were bound by a vow of perpetual continence. Penalty for breaking that vow was deposition from the ministry. Commenting on this council, Pope Pius XI said that these canons, the “first written traces” of the “Law of Ecclesiastical Celibacy,” “presuppose a still earlier unwritten practice. ” [2]

The Council of Arles, nine years later, upheld both the obligation of continence for married clergy and the penalty for nonconformity. The Council of Nicaea in 325 took for granted priestly celibacy for unmarried and married clergy. Canon 3 stated, “This great synod absolutely forbids a bishop, presbyter, deacon or any of the clergy to keep a woman who has been brought in to live with him, with the exception of course of his mother or sister or aunt, or of any person who is above suspicion. ” [3] On the basis of the fourth- and fifth-century evidence, Rev. Christian Cochini, S.J., holds that the phrase “any person who is above suspicion” includes wives of clergy who with their spouses had taken vows of continence before their husbands were ordained. [4]

Near the end of the fourth century, a Spanish bishop wrote to the pope, asking for help in dealing with married clergy who were having conjugal relations with their wives and having children. In 385 Pope Siricius reminded all married clergy (in Spain and presumably everywhere) that their vows of perpetual continence were “indissoluble.” [5] The next year, the pope issued a decretal repeating his prior ruling. He insisted he was not giving new rulings but was rather recalling the clergy to rules long established in the Church.

Some of the married clergy tried to defend their continuing conjugal life, but there was no tradition of optional celibacy to which they could appeal. They pointed rather to 1 Timothy 3,2, Titus 1,6, and 1 Timothy 3,12, which specified that bishops, priests, and deacons must have been “married only once” (must be unius uxoris vir , “husband of one wife”). In response, Pope Siricius declared that “married only once” does not mean that after their ordination married clergy could continue conjugal relations with their wives. The true meaning is this: A man faithful to one wife could be expected to be mature enough to live the perpetual continence required of him and his wife after his ordination.

This is the original magisterial exegesis of these passages. Further, Pope Siricius's teaching finds clear echoes in the writings of the Fathers of this era: Ambrose, Epiphanius of Salamis, and Ambrosiaster. [6]

Another passage used to buttress the apostolic case for optional celibacy is 1Corinthians 9,5. Referring to his prerogatives as an apostle, Paul asks (seemingly rhetorically), “Do we not have the right to be accompanied by a believing wife, as do the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas?” The Greek behind “believing wife” in this translation is “a sister wife” or “a sister as wife.” The words together do not mean “wife” in the ordinary sense. In the early centuries the term “sister” (as in 1 Corinthians 9,5) was used to designate a wife of a clergyman who with her had vowed perpetual continence before his ordination. Their relation was that of brother and sister.

(Momentarily to depart from our chronology, we should glance at the Directory on the Ministry and Life of Priests , issued in 1994 by the Congregation for the Clergy. Section 59 affirms Pope Siricius's exegesis of the passages in Timothy and Titus. It also cites several early councils that required continence for married as well as for unmarried clergy. Then come these words: “The Church, from apostolic times , has wished to conserve the gift of perpetual continence of the clergy and choose the candidates for Holy Orders from among the celibate faithful” [emphasis added]. “The celibate faithful” clearly in early centuries would include married men who with their wives had vowed to observe perpetual continence after the men were ordained.)

Back to the fourth century: The Council of Carthage in 390, involving the whole African hierarchy, restated the rule of perpetual continence for all married clergy. They declared they were simply restating the Church's unbroken tradition. In explaining their decree, the presiding bishop, Genethlius, urged that “what the apostles taught and what antiquity itself observed , let us also endeavor to keep” [7] (emphasis added).

The decretal Dominus Inter was issued in the early fifth century by a Roman synod, led most likely by Pope Innocent I. Responding to questions raised by bishops from Gaul, Canon 16 repeats the Church's rule of perpetual continence for married clergy. [8] We find the same teaching by pontiffs who succeeded Innocent I—Leo the Great and Gregory the Great, for example, as well as Sts. Jerome, Augustine, and Ambrose. So did the Council of Tours (461), the Council of Gerona (517), and the Council of Auvergne (535). Further, the requirement of perpetual continence for married clergy appears in the penitential books of the Celtic churches.

Confusing History

In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Gregorian reform dealt with violations of the norm of clerical celibacy. The Second Lateran Council (1139) was part of this movement. From this fact, Catholics and non-Catholics alike have wrongly concluded that this council originated clerical celibacy. Like all its predecessors that dealt with the matter, the Lateran Council sought to enforce the apostolic ban on conjugal life for the clergy.

Apologists for the Eastern Orthodox practice of mixed celibacy (married priests and deacons, celibate bishops) ignore these councils' declaration that they were only upholding an apostolic tradition.

In more recent times, the predecessor of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued an instruction in 1858 that stated: “Whoever ponders diligently the true tradition of celibacy and clerical continence will indeed find that, from the first centuries of the Catholic Church, if not by a general and explicit law, at least by behavior and custom, it was firmly established that not only bishops and priests, but [all] clergy in Holy Orders were to preserve inviolate virginity or perpetual continence.” [9]

That priestly celibacy is an apostolic tradition “is shown clearly and convincingly” by the work of Stickler, Cochini, Heid, and others. This is the verdict of then–Cardinal Ratzinger. [10]

Optional Celibacy?

The Eastern Orthodox discipline of optional celibacy (optional for priests and deacons, required for bishops), was first formulated in 692. Prior to that time, all the Eastern Churches followed the apostolic tradition of mandatory continence for both married and unmarried clergy.

But the Council of Trullo in 692 radically changed the discipline of celibacy. One of its canons did retain the prohibition of bishops, priests, and deacons marrying after ordination. It also partly preserved the apostolic tradition in requiring perpetual continence of married men who were installed in the episcopate. But it decreed that married men ordained to the diaconate and priesthood could continue their conjugal life after ordination. The council herein both explicitly and polemically rejected the clerical discipline of Rome, which is to say, the apostolic tradition.

To justify this departure, Trullo quoted the earlier canons of the Council of Carthage. That council, as we have seen, had restated the rule of perpetual continence for all married clergy by appealing to what it called the apostolic tradition. Its records were widely available. Trullo changed the wording of the Carthaginian canons so that they mandated only temporary continence for married clergy only on days when they served at the altar. (This is effectively the Old Testament law for levitical priests who served in the Temple.)

Despite this radical alteration of the Carthage council's ruling, the Council of Trullo blithely assured all who would listen that by their decrees they were only “preserving the ancient rule and apostolic perfection and order.” [11] The Catholic Church, of course, has never recognized the Council of Trullo.

In her magisterial statements, the Catholic Church has often spoken of the Eastern practice regarding celibacy. The Church always uses guarded language, not wanting to widen the breach between the Orthodox Churches and the Catholic Church. But she has never said—never even implied—that the Eastern practice stands on par with her own discipline regarding celibacy. Typical of her attitude is the language of Pope Pius XII in his 1935 encyclical on the Catholic priesthood quoted earlier. After extolling the glories of priestly celibacy, he said he was not criticizing the Oriental discipline. “What we have said has been meant solely to exalt in the Lord something we consider one of the purest glories of the Catholic priesthood , something which seems to us to correspond better to the desires of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and his purposes in regard to priestly souls” (Section 47, emphases added).

A Unique ‘Discipline'

I earlier noted that the advocacy of optional celibacy for priests reflects two basic errors. One is historical—a failure to recognize that priestly celibacy is an apostolic tradition. The other error lies in the ambiguity of the word “discipline” to characterize the Church's rule of celibacy. True, the requirement of priestly celibacy is not part of the deposit of Faith. In a sense it is part of the Church's discipline. But it is quite unlike all her other disciplines. Take the Church's rules about fasting before receiving the Eucharist; about allowing meat on Friday if one otherwise fulfills the obligation of penance; about being allowed to register in a parish when one lives outside the parish bounds. These have been changed with no theological consequences.

Theoretically, if he so chose, the pope could set aside the rule of priestly celibacy overnight. But if he did, it would have a profound, negative effect on the Church's understanding of herself and of the priesthood.

Here we follow Benedict XVI's teaching. The Church is both human and divine, a duality of structure (organization) and the presence and power of the Holy Spirit. That which gives the Church her permanency of structure is itself a sacrament—the sacrament of orders. This means that the Church's structure is continuously created by God's unfailing action through the sacrament. The Church as an institution cannot herself choose those who will serve in the hierarchy. The call to holy orders comes from God, and the Church can only recognize that call. Thus our Lord commanded us, “Pray the Lord of the harvest to send workers into his harvest” (Matthew 9,37).

So the priestly ministry has a “strictly charismatic character,” in the words of Benedict XVI. The Church emphasizes that fact by “linking ... priesthood with virginity, which clearly can be understood only as a personal charism, never simply as an official qualification.” Any attempt to separate priesthood from celibacy (“the demand for their uncoupling”) would in effect deny the charismatic nature of priesthood. It would reduce it to an office completely under the control of the institution. Thus the Church in effect would be regarded as a purely human institution. [12]

The Gift

The priesthood is a continuous gift to the Church. She is only a steward, not the giver, of that gift. But as recent magisterial statements have reminded us, celibacy itself is also a gift.

In his encyclical I Will Give You Shepherds (1992), Pope John Paul II repeatedly characterizes clerical celibacy as such. He calls it “a priceless gift,” “a precious gift,” a “gift of God for the Church.” It is a gift to be cherished. And because it is God's gift, the Church as an institution has no right to set it aside—to send it back to God, so to speak.

The Synod of Bishops in 1990 issued what is perhaps the ultimate statement of modern times on the Church's commitment to priestly celibacy. “The synod would like to see celibacy presented and explained in the fullness of its biblical, theological and spiritual richness, as a precious gift given by God to his Church and as a sign of the kingdom which is not of this world—a sign of God's love for this world and of the undivided love of the priest for God and for God's people , with the result that celibacy is seen as a positive enrichment of the priesthood” (emphases added).

Further, the Church is totally committed to maintaining priestly celibacy. “The synod does not wish to leave any doubts in the mind of anyone regarding the Church's firm will to maintain the law that demands perpetual and freely chosen celibacy for present and future candidates for priestly ordination in the Latin rite” (Proposition 11).

While advocates of a married priesthood will likely continue their efforts, they have neither history nor the contemporary Church on their side.

References

[1] For more detail, see Ray Ryland, A Brief History of Clerical Celibacy. Peter Stravinskas, ed., Priestly Celibacy: Its Scriptural, Historical, Spiritual, and Psychological Roots (Mt. Pocono: Newman House Press, 2001), pp. 27-44.
[2] Ad Catholici Sacerdotii , 43 (1935).
[3] Norman P. Tanner, S.J., ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils , Vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1990), p. 7.
[4] Christian Cochini, S.J., Apostolic Origins of Priestly Celibacy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), pp. 185-195.
[5] Ibid. , p. 9.
[6] Ibid. , footnote 18, p. 12.
[7] Ibid. , p. 5.
[8] Ibid. , p. 15.
[9] Quoted by Roman Cholij, Celibacy, Married Clergy, and the Oriental Code. Eastern Churches Journal , Vol. 3, No. 3 (Autumn, 1996), p. 112.
[10] Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, The Theological Locus of Ecclesial Movements. Communio (Fall 1998), footnote 2, p. 483.
[11] Quoted by Roman Cholij, Clerical Celibacy in East and West (Herefordshire: Fowler Wright Books, 1988), p. 115.
[12] Ratzinger, op. cit., p. 483.
Rev. Ray Ryland is a contributing editor of This Rock magazine, boardmember and chaplain of The Coming Home Network.

Simon, Do You Love Me?

2008-10-13T12:59:00.000-07:00

Fr. Luigi Giussani

In Chapter 21 of St John's Gospel we find the fascinating documentation of the historical birth of the new ethics. The particular story that is documented there is the keystone of the Christian conception of man, of his morality and of his relationship with God, with life and with the world.

The disciples are on their way back at dawn after a bad night on the lake, in which they had caught nothing. As they approach the shore they see on the beach a figure in the process of preparing a fire. They would see later that on the fire were fish collected for them, for their early morning hunger. All at once John says to Peter, "But that's the Lord!". Then all their eyes open and Peter dives into the water just as he is and reaches the shore first, followed by the others. They sit in a circle, in silence; no-one speaks because they all know it is the Lord. Laying there eating they exchange a word or two amongst themselves, but they are all afraid at the exceptional presence of Jesus, the risen Jesus, who had already appeared to them several times.

Simon, whose many errors had made more humble than the rest, was lying amongst the others before the food the Master had prepared. He looks to see who is next to him and, amazed and trembling, he sees that it is Jesus. He turns his glance away from him and sits there, full of embarrassment. But Jesus speaks to him. Peter thinks in his heart, "My God, my God, what a telling-off I deserve! Now he's going to ask me why I betrayed him. The betrayal had been his last big mistake, but the whole of his life, even the familiarity with the Master, had been troubled by his impetuous character, by his instinctive impulsiveness and unguarded forwardness. He saw the whole of himself in the light of his defects. That betrayal had emphasised clearly the rest of his mistakes, how little he was worth, how weak he was, so weak it was pitiable. "Simon" who knows how he trembled as that word entered his ear and touched his heart , "Simon" and here he would have made as if to look towards Jesus "do you love me?" Who would ever have expected that question? Who would have expected that word?

Peter was a man forty or fifty years old, with wife and children, and yet so much a child before the mystery of that companion he had met by chance! Imagine how he would have felt pierced by that look that knew every part of him. "You will be called Kepha" [1] His difficult character was identified by that word, "rock", and the last thing on his mind was to imagine what the mystery of God, and the mystery of that Man Son of God was going to do with that rock, was going to make of that rock. From their first meeting He occupied his whole soul, his whole heart. It was with that presence in his heart, with the continuous memory of Him that he looked at his wife, his children, his work-mates, his friends, and strangers, individuals and crowds, that he thought and that he went to sleep. That Man had become for him a great immense revelation that was still to be clarified.

"Simon, do you love me?" "Yes, Lord, I love You". How could he say such a thing after all he had done? That "yes" was the affirmation of his recognition of a supreme excellence, an undeniable excellence, of a sympathy that overrode all the others. Everything was there inscribed in that look of theirs, consistency and inconsistency seemed finally to be relegated to second place, behind that faithfulness that felt like flesh of his flesh, behind that form of life that the encounter had molded.

There was, in fact, no reproof. Only the same question repeated, "Simon, do you love me?" Not unsure of himself, but fearful and trembling, he answered once more, "Yes, I love You". But the third time, the third time that Jesus asked him, he had to ask Jesus himself for confirmation, "Yes, Lord, You know that I love You. All my human preference, all the preference of my heart is for You. You are the extreme preference in life, the supreme excellence of things. I don't know how, I don't know how to say it, or how it can be, but despite everything I have done, despite all I might do again, I love you".

This "yes" is the birth of morality, the first breath of morality in the dry desert of instinct and of pure reactivity. Morality sinks its roots into Peter's "yes", and this "yes" can take root in the man's earth only through a dominating Presence, that is accepted, embraced and served with all the energy in one's heart, that only in this way can become a child again. Without the Presence there is no moral action, there is no morality.

But why is Peter's "yes" to Jesus the birth of morality? Don't the criteria of consistency and inconsistency come first?

Peter had got just about everything wrong, and yet he lived a supreme sympathy for Jesus. He understood that everything in him tended to Christ, that everything was embraced in those eyes, that face, that heart. The sins of the past could not constitute an objection, and not even all the inconsistency he could imagine for himself in the future. Christ was the source, the place of his hope. Even had what he had done and what he would possibly do been thrown at him as an objection, Christ was still, through all the fog of those objections, the light of his hope. He valued Him above everything else, from the first moment he had felt those eyes fixed on him, had felt that look. He loved him for that.

"Yes, Lord, You know that You are the object of my supreme sympathy, of my highest esteem". This is how morality is born. Yet the expression is very generic, "Yes, I love You"; but it is as generic as it is generative of the pursuit of a new kind of life. "Whoever has this hope in Him purifies himself as he is pure". [2] Our hope is in Christ, in that Presence that, however distracted and forgetful we are, we cannot take away at least not completely from the earth of our heart for all the tradition through which he has reached right up to us. It is in Him that I hope, before counting my mistakes and my virtues. Numeric quantities have no place here. In the relationship with Him numbers don't count, measured or measurable weight has no place, and all the possible evil that I may bring about in the future, even this doesn't count, it cannot usurp the first place before Christ's eyes that is held by Peter's "yes" repeated by me. Then a sigh comes from the depths of our being, like a breath that rises from the breast and elates the whole person and makes it act, it makes it long to act more justly; from the depths of the heart springs the flower of the desire for justice, for true, authentic love, for the capacity for gratuitouness. Just as our every move does not start off as an analysis of what our eyes see, but the embrace of what the heart is waiting for, so perfection is not the keeping of laws, but attachment to a Presence.

Only the man who lives this hope in Christ goes on for the whole of his life in this ascesis, in this striving for good. Even when he is clearly contradictory, he wants the good. This always wins, in the sense that it is the last word on him, on his own day, on what he does, on what he has done, on what he will do. Whoever lives this hope in Christ goes on in ascesis. Morality is a continuous tension towards perfection which is born from an event in which the relationship with the divine, with Mystery, is marked.

The ultimate reason for the "yes"

What is the true reason for the "yes" said to Christ by Peter? Why does the "yes" said to Jesus have more value than listing all one's mistakes and all the possible future mistakes that one's weakness implies? Why is this "yes" more decisive and greater that all the moral responsibility translated into detail, into concrete practice? The answer to these questions reveals the ultimate essence of the Father's Envoy. Christ is the "Envoy", the one sent by the Father, he is the One who reveals the Father to men and to the world. "This is the true life: that they know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent". [3] The most important thing is "that they know You", that they love You, because this You is the meaning of life.
"Yes, I love You", Peter said. The reason for this "yes" consisted in the fact that he had glimpsed in those eyes that fixed on him that first time, and then had fixed on him so many times during the following days and years, that he was God, that he was Yahweh, the true Yahweh: mercy. [4] In Jesus is revealed the relationship with God as love and therefore as mercy. Mercy is the attitude of the Mystery towards any kind of weakness, mistake or forgetfulness on man's part: before any crime committed by man, God loves him.

This was what Simon felt, and this is where his "Yes, I love You" is born.
The meaning of the world and of history is the mercy of Christ, Son of the Father, sent by the Father to die for us. In the play by Milosz, the Abbot, to whom Miguel Mañara would go every day to lament of his past sins, seems one day to lose his patience and says, "Enough of all this womanish lamentation! All this never existed". What's this "never existed"? Miguel had murdered, raped, and committed all kinds of injustice"All this never existed. Only He is" [5] he, Jesus, turns to us, he makes himself an "encounter" for us, asking us only one thing, not "What have you done?" but , "Do you love me?".

Loving him above all things does not mean therefore that I have not sinned, or that I will not sin tomorrow. How strange! It takes an infinite patience to be this mercy, an infinite power from which in this earth, in the time and space we are given to live in, whether the years be few or many we receive, we draw happiness. Because a man with the awareness of how small he is, is happy at the announcement of this mercy: Jesus is mercy. He is sent by the Father to make us know that the essence of God has mercy as its supreme characteristic for man. "You have bent down over our wounds and have healed us", says one of the prefaces of the Ambrosian Rite, "Giving us a medicine stronger that our wounds, a mercy greater than our fault. So even sin, in virtue of your invincible love, serves to raise us up to divine life". [6]

Peace, the possibility of peace arises from this happiness. In all our misfortunes, in all our evils, in all our inconsistencies, in all our weakness, in that mortal weakness that is man, we can really breathe and long for peace, generate peace and respect for the other.

Respecting the other means looking at him with our eyes on another Presence "The Christians", says the Letter to Diognetus of the 2nd century, "treat each other with a respect that is inconceivable to others". [7] The word "respect" (Latin respectus, from re-spicio) has the same root as aspicio (to look at), and the re- means keeping your eyes turned towards something, like someone who while his is walking keeps his eyes fixed on an object. "Respect" means "looking at a person while keeping another person in view". It is like looking at a child when his mother is nearby. A teacher doesn't treat a child as she normally does if the mother is present. She is more attentive, at least if she has a minimum of sensitivity (maybe it's no longer the case today). Without respect for what you are using, for what is there for me to use, for what I take hold of because I want to use it, there is no adequate relationship with anything. Respect, though, cannot come from the fact that what I have before me is useful: if this is my viewpoint I dominate it. No, respect looks beyond what I use. In this way work acquires nobility, becomes light-hearted, in the midst of all the worries with which we get out of bed. The renewal of this awareness is morning prayer. A man who looks at his wife while perceiving and acknowledging an Other, Jesus, within and beyond the figure of his wife can have respect and veneration for her, can value her freedom, which is relationship with the infinite, relationship with Jesus.

The beginning of morality is an act of love

Simon's "yes" to Jesus cannot be considered as the expression of a feeling, but is the beginning of a moral road that either opens with this "yes" or doesn't open at all. The beginning of a human morality is not the analysis of phenomena that fill the existence of the "I", nor the analysis of human behaviour in view of a common good; this could produce an abstract secular morality, but not a human morality.
St Thomas notes, "man's life consists in the affection that is its main support and in which it finds its greatest satisfaction". [8] The beginning of a new human morality is an act of love. This is why a presence is required, the presence of someone that strikes our person, who gathers all our powers and draws them towards a good that we don't know and yet long for and are waiting for: that good is the Mystery.

The dialogue between Jesus and Peter ends in an odd way. Peter, who is on the point of following Jesus, is concerned about the youngest among them, John, who was like a son to him. "Seeing him, he said to Jesus, 'What about him, Lord?' Jesus replied, "Don't worry about him, just follow me'". [9] That "yes" is addressed to a Presence that says, "Follow me, give up your life". "Jesu, tibi vivo, Jesu tibi morior, Jesu sive vivo sive morior, tuus sum". [10] Whether you live or die you are mine. You belong to me. I have made you. I am your destiny. I am your meaning and the meaning of the world.

It is the "I" that is the protagonist of morality, the whole "I"; and the person has as its law a word that we all think we know and of which, after a long time, if we have a small shred of fidelity to what is original in us, we begin to glimpse the meaning: love. The person has love as its law. "God, Being, is love", St John writes. [11]

Love is a judgment moved by a Presence linked with destiny. It is a judgement, like when you say, "That's Mont Blanc", or "this is a great friend of mine". Love is a judgement moved by a Presence linked with my destiny, which I discover, I glimpse, I sense to be linked with my destiny. When John and Andrew saw him for the first time and heard him say "Come home with me. Come and see", and they stayed all those hours listening to him talking, they didn't understand, but they sensed that that person was linked with their destiny. They had heard all those who spoke in public, heard their opinions and those of all the parties, but only that Man was linked with their destiny.

Christian morality is the revolution on earth, because it is not a list of laws, but a love for being. One can go wrong a thousand times and will always be forgiven, he will always be taken back again and will set off once more on his journey, if his heart takes up again this "yes". What is important in that "Yes, Lord, I love You" is a tension of the whole of one's person, determined by the awareness that Christ is God and by the love for this Man who has come for me. This determines my whole awareness, and I can go wrong a thousand times a day, to the point of being ashamed to lift up my head, but no-one can take away this certainty from me. I only pray the Lord, I pray the Spirit to change me, to make me an imitator of Christ, that my presence become more like that of Christ.

Morality is love, love for Being who has become man, an event in history, that reaches me through that mysterious company that historically is called Church or Mystical Body of Christ or People of God. I love him within this company. They can accuse me of a hundred thousand wrongs, they can put me on trial, the judge can send me to prison without even questioning me, with patent injustice, without considering whether or not I am guilty, but they cannot take away from me this attachment that keeps on making me vibrate with the desire for the good, that is to say to adhere to him. Because the good is not "the good", but to adhere to Him, to follow that face, his Presence, to carry that presence everywhere, to say it to everyone, so that this Presence may dominate the world the end of the world will be the moment when this Presence becomes evident for everyone.

This is the new morality: it is a love, not rules to be followed. And evil is offending the object of this love or forgetting it. You can quite well say, analysing humbly all the highways and byways of a man's life, "This is right and this is wrong", listing in order all the errors into which a man may fall. This would be to write a book of morals. But morality is in me, who love Him who made me and is here. If it were not so then I could use morality exclusively for asserting my advantage; in any case it would destroy all hope. You need to read Pasolini or Pavese to understand this; but no, it enough to remember Judas.

The permanence of the new morality

If the beginning of the new morality is an act of love, of adhering, and this requires a Presence of someone who strikes us and gathers all our powers as Jesus did with Simon , it becomes fundamental to answer the question: how does this event go on being present in our existence? The answer to this question establishes the possibility of the new morality in the present, here and now, otherwise for us it would begin in an intellectualistic, abstract, theoretical way. This answer lies in that Christian term that belongs to the experience of what is present, without which we would not be able to know whether our experience is concrete or fantasy: the term is "memory". In the memory the event that we experience in all its richness becomes immersed in the flow of time and space, becomes part of a history.

The first condition for the new morality is making memory of that Presence that surpasses the terms of human knowing, that is to say acknowledging here and now the Presence that cannot be reduced to any human hypothesis.

This Presence is a reality that is before us and through the power of His Spirit, is in us. This Presence is permanent in our life and is so powerful that it makes possible, through our adhering to it, the coming about of a new creation in us. So a person can rise again after imperfection and error, at the end of every action that is always disproportional and always imperfect, with a step that is more just, because His gift continues, like a cool spring, and no limitation of ours can put a stop to it.

The permanence of this Presence is grace, pure event, and we do not persevere in adhering to it in the here and now. We acknowledge it and adhere to it. Just like the encounter, the wonder, its continuity, the impetus of adherence is grace: and this grace becomes ours because we accept it. Accepting this absolute novelty, that happens over and over again, a thousand times a day, is the supreme aspect of freedom.

Just as for John and Andrew, for Simon, for Zacchaeus, the beginning of the change in us is a grace, a gift. We have had an encounter whose aim was to change us and perfect us. We adhered to this Presence that corresponds to our expectations in an exceptional way, with a persistence, as in the case of Zacchaeus who was no longer defined by the imperfections he was prey to, because that Presence was there to pierce like a cool stream all the filth of the forest of his humanity. [12]

The wonder of the encounter, the wonder that continues, the adherence to that Presence that goes on imply the embrace of and the unity with all those whom that Presence puts near us. The Presence has made itself the object of our gaze so that through us, with our defects, and the sorrow for those defects, and the strange energy that comes from it, it may be more known and loved.

Co-authored with Stefano Alberto and Javier Prades

Notes

[1]Cf John 1, 42.

[2]1 John 3, 3.

[3]John 17, 3.

[4]A passage of St Ambrose can shed light on this. In his comment on the Creation, speaking of the seventh day, when God rested, he says, "I thank the Lord our God that created a work so marvellous in which to find rest. He created the heavens, and I don't read that he rested; he created the earth, and I don't read that he rested; he created the sun, the moon, the stars, and I don't read that he rested even then; but I read that he created man and at this point he rested, having a being whose sins he could forgive" (Sant'Ambrose, Hexameron, IX, 76, in Opera omnia di Sant'Ambrogio, vol. 1, Biblioteca Ambrosiana-Città Nuova Editrice, Milano-Roma 1979, p. 419).

[5]Cf. O. Milosz, Miguel Mañara, Jaca Book, Milano 1998, pp. 48-63.

[6]Preface of XVI Sunday &laqno;per annum", in Messale Ambrosiano Festivo, Marietti-Jaca Book, Torino-Milano 1976, p. 653.

[7]Letter to Diognetus, PG 2, 1167-1186.

[8]Cf. St Thomas, Summa Theologiae, II, IIae, q. 179, art. 1.

[9]Cf. John 21, 20-22.

[10] "Jesu tibi vivo", mediaeval Hymn, in Canti, Coop. Edit. Nuovo Mondo, Milano 1995, p. 34.

[11] 1 John 4, 8.

[12] Cf. Lk 19:1-10.

The Dynamics of Discipleship

2008-09-04T13:06:00.000-07:00

Fr. James Farfaglia

In contrast to other situations, Jesus encounters people that are eager to listen to him. The multitude is so numerous, that he decides to take one of the fishing boats and use it as his pulpit: "Getting into one of the boats, which was Simon's, he asked him to put out a little from the land. And he sat down and taught the people from the boat" (Luke: 5: 3).

Lake Gennesaret, also called the Sea of Galilee and the Lake of Tiberias, is situated 680 feet below sea level and flanked by hills on its west side. This geographical situation allowed Jesus to use the lake as an amphitheatre, projecting his voice to the crowds, consisting of common every day people, not the Pharisees and Sadducees, who are eager to listen to him. In this Sunday's gospel narrative we encounter humble people, people who are seeking the truth and are opening themselves to God. They are the kind of people that we must be at all times.

The people that came to listen to Jesus were simple and poor. They were thirsting for something new, transcendent and real. They were unsatisfied with the heavy legalistic burdens placed on their shoulders by the Pharisees and the political oppression brought on by Roman rule. They were seeking a happiness that only God could give them.

However, most people today are skeptical and apathetic. They look at most religious and political leaders and find very few who live authentic and convincing lives. Only someone real will be able to challenge indifference and inertia. People wallow in apathy because there is a lack of proposals and principles that fascinate the human psyche.

When the human person encounters mystery; when the human person experiences the transcendent; when the human person finds the treasure and the pearl of great price, only then will the human person be able to escape from apathy and skepticism, and find joy and peace.

Mystery, transcendence, the treasure, and the pearl of great price all were revealed in the person of Jesus to the crowd. In Christ, ideas that were abstract in the Old Testament seemed real, tangible, and possible to live. This is why the people were so eager to listen.

Today, Jesus is visible through his Church. Today’s challenge is that all those who are part of this Church must make Jesus visible to contemporary man. This is why Pope John Paul the Great said that "man is the way for the Church" (Redemptoris Hominis, 14.3).

If the presence of Jesus in the Church is clouded over by corrupted bureaucratic forms of governance that impede communion and evangelization, then the Church will not be convincing for modern man who already is so immersed in boredom and cynicism. If Christians are not living the gospel and have been overcome by a spirit of negativity, personal ambition and dishonesty then how can the Church be salt and light?

Presentations and programs do not move people. Only something tangible and real can awaken in people a sense of astonishment. As we consider this Sunday’s gospel narrative we see that "the crowd was pressing in on Jesus" precisely because they intuitively knew something new, something unique, something totally different was happening. God was walking the earth.

The challenge for every Christian of the modern world is to make Jesus present to others by the authentic witness of a life lived with conviction.

Peter was among the first disciples of the Lord. As his journey begins, he already knows who the Lord is. He calls him the Master. He loves the Lord and trusts him. Why would an expert fisherman listen to a carpenter about fishing? Peter is able to go beyond human thought and human sight. The vision of faith allows him to see Jesus as he really is: the Master. "Master, we toiled all night and took nothing! But at your word I will let down the nets" (Luke 5: 5). Knowledge leads to love, and Peter’s love is made manifest in surrender. Surrender did not take away from his personal freedom. Freedom can only be found in the truth.

Today, as we journey through the third millennium of human history, we are confronted with conflicts and upheavals that at first may frighten us, but in reality are part of a profound cultural and spiritual transformation that is in dynamic process.

A serious life of prayer is very important for the times that we live in. Pope John Paul the Great directed our gaze toward a new springtime in the life of the Church. However, spring means that snow, ice and mud are still on the ground. Flowers and leaves are just beginning to bud.

The Catholic Church in America may soon become smaller and more faithful. The America of yesterday may soon become something different. All of the traditional structures of support that have made our lives comfortable and easy are presently engulfed in confusion, but transformation is slowly taking place. Without daily contemplative prayer and daily Mass, or at least a prolonged visit before the Blessed Sacrament, you may be overpowered by anxiety and fear. You may implode without a personal relationship with God.

A contemporary spiritual writer describes the qualities of this new relationship with God when he writes, "This adventure of faith will consist in burning bridges, setting aside all rules of common sense and all probabilities and, like Abraham, disregarding arguments, explanations, and proofs, untying ourselves from all rational positions and, bound hand and foot, making the great leap into the abyss of the dark night, surrendering ourselves to the totally Other-God Alone-in pure and dark faith.
The contemplative of the future will need to enter the unfathomable regions of the mystery of God-without guides, without supports, without light. God will be experienced as the Other Limit; God’s distance and proximity will be meditated upon simultaneously; and as a result, there will be a feeling of dizziness which is a mixture of fascination, fright, annihilation, and dread.
The contemplative will have to run the risk of being submerged in this bottomless ocean where dangerous challenges are hidden. These, the contemplative cannot shun, but must face and accept them in their burning insistency.
Those who return from this adventure will be figures sculpted by purity, strength, and fire. Transformed by the ecstatic closeness of God, above them will appear the living and illuminating image of the Son. They will become the transparent witnesses of God." (Ignacio Larrañaga, O.F.M. Cap., "Sensing Your Hidden Presence: Toward Intimacy with God", p. 12.)

"But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus' knees, saying, 'Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord'" (Luke 5: 8). The astonishing result of their renewed effort to fish amazed Peter and those who were with him. Like Peter, we need to recognize our own sinful condition and the need for divine assistance.

Autonomy rooted in pride does not allow the Lord Jesus to enter into our lives. Autonomy is not the same as freedom. In our journey towards eternal life the exercise of human freedom is essential. However, again, let us remember that freedom and autonomy are not one and the same.

John Paul the Great brilliantly reminded us over and over, especially in his encyclicals Veritatis Splendor and Evangelium Vitae that freedom and truth must stay together. Freedom without truth only leads to anarchy.

The virtue of humility permits us to recognize who we really are and helps to bring us to a deep and personal relationship with the Lord. Humility allows us to be dependent upon God. Dependence does not take away from personal freedom. Dependence means that we can cry out Abba, Father! Only through practicing this humility, will prayer and the sacraments become an integral and convincing way of life.

Following the Lord Jesus will always be an exciting adventure, but frequently we may struggle and even fail. Thus Peter had fished all night, only to be discouraged by the results. However, when the Lord ordered him to try again he responded, "But at your word I will let down the nets." Here is the continual reminder that we must never give up but always begin again.

Inevitably this loving discipleship leads to increased apostolic activity. Love cannot be bottled up and contained. The transformation that takes place within us by grace transforms us into living members of the Church. Disciple and apostle are the same. "Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching men" (Luke 5: 10).

A Conversation on Information

2008-09-01T16:07:00.000-07:00

Patrick Coppock

An Interview with Umberto Eco, February, 1995

A chain-smoking and jovial Umberto Eco receives me in his crowded, untidy but cheerful little office at the Institute for Communication Studies at the University of Bologna. A bay-window opens out onto a tiny balcony overlooking the garden ofthe villa where the institute has its offices and library. The walls of the office are covered with rows of well-filled bookshelves; a sofa along one wall is full of piles of papers, books and articles, a modest writing desk hidden under even more books and papers. In one corner of the room is an IBM 486 clone with Windows, a new article or book obviously in progress on the screen. Eco offers me a chair in front of his desk.

In advance I had given him a list of some possible issues we might discuss so he would have some idea of what was on my mind: Computer technology, the Internet community and processes of cultural change. I begin by asking:

"Professor Eco, you're a man of letters, a writer, philosopher, a historian. On the desk beside you is a computer. Is modern computer technology actually functional for you as an author and literary researcher?"

Eco glances over at the computer, smiles, then nods thoughtfully:

Yes, but sometimes the computer can also give paralysing results. I will give you an example: I was invited by Jerusalem University to a symposium whose theme was the image of Jerusalem and the temple as an image through the centuries. I did not know what to do on this particular topic. Then I said to myself, well OK, I have worked with stuff from the beginning of the Middle Ages; my dissertation was on Thomas Aquinas. He points to the rows of well-filled bookshelves on my left...Here I have all the works of Thomas Aquinas with a reasonably good index, and I looked there to see how many times he quoted Jerusalem and tried to say what use he made of the image of Jerusalem. Now, if I only had these books - well, that index is a reasonable index which focuses only on the larger, more intensive treatments of the word 'Jerusalem' - I would have found say 10 or 15 tokens of 'Jerusalem' which I would have been able to examine. Unfortunately I now have the Aquinas hypertext...

He glances again at the computer in the corner... and there I found, that there were - well I don't remember the exact number - but there were round 11,000 or so tokens... "Oh my God!" Well at that point I quit!

"Yes, that's far too much material at one time, obviously."

Working with 11,000 references is just impossible. That's far too many.

"So the system you use doesn't 'filter' well enough in other words?"

I cannot manage to scan as many as 11,000 tokens. Now, if I had only my old traditional limitations then I would probably have done something more or less reasonable on that particular topic.

"That's because the human person who is searching does it in a kind of sensible, intuitive way, whereas the computer just does it in a very mechanical way and just picks out every single example?"

My theory is that there is no difference between the Sunday New York Times and the Pravda of the old days. The Sunday New York Times that can have 600 or 700 pages altogether really just contains old news fit to print. But one week is not enough to read a number of the Sunday New York Times. So therefore, the fact that the news items are there is irrelevant, or immaterial, because you cannot retrieve them. So what then is the difference between the Pravda, which didn't give any news, and the New York Times which gives too much? Once upon a time, if I needed a bibliography on Norway and semiotics, I went to a library and probably found four items. I took notes and found other bibliographical references. Now with the Internet I can have 10,000 items. At this point I become paralyzed. I simply have to choose another topic.

"So information overload and this extreme, non-intuitive selection of information is the main problem?

Yes, we have an excessive retrieveability of information. It is neither ironical nor paradoxical, I think, what has happened with Xerox copies.

Eco picks up a pile of papers from the desk in front of him and waves them.

Once I used to go to the library and take notes. I would work a lot, but at the end of my work I had, say, 30 files on a certain subject. Now, when I go into the library - this has happened frequently to me in American libraries - I find a lot of things that I xerox and xerox and xerox in order to have them. When I come home with them all, and I never read them. I never read them at all!

"No, same here: you never seem to have the time, do you? Once you know that it is there, you feel reassured, and so you don't read it."

Exactly...

"Xeroxing then can paralyse your reading activity? That's another risk?"

Sure...That's another risk which is sometimes very real.

"Yes, well then, what do you think about the idea of these personal information filters. This idea that you can kind of make a personal profile, and the system will search Internet on the basis of this?"

This is what I call the art of decimation...

"Decimation?"

Decimation. You kill only one person out of ten...

He gestures towards the well-filled bookshelves again.

The number of books that only concern my specific domain, not to speak of the other ones that I receive weekly certainly, exaggeratedly, overwhelms my reading...

"Your capability, capacity?"

...my capability, my time. If you have a certain experience you are able to... well, you can make a very random decimation. On this or that subject for instance, there may be no more than ten possible new ideas. It is rare that that is the case.

"And the working hypotheses you make are based on these?"

So .. if I read only one out of ten books, probably there will be an idea in there I can find, and if it is not there, then it will be in the next group of ten books that I pick up. But this is a very random thing.

"But it is also very much based on your past experience, obviously?"

Oh, sure, it is random, but based upon past experience.

He reaches for a book from his desk and begins to thumb through it.

OK, now I am able to open this at the first page, to look at the summary, to see the bibliography and to understand if the fellow is reliable or not; if there is something new there or not. And since I have long experience, my decimation is oriented. I sense it is better that I read this, and not that etcetera.

"So you are able in a way to recognise newness, or innovation?"

In a way, in a way. I can commit mistakes of course, but if I make a mistake today, I probably won't do that tomorrow. Possibly I may choose to disregard some book or other and that may be a mistake, but the next week I will come across yet another book, and so on. But a student of 20 years old, or even of 30 does not have this kind of filtering ability. We have to invent a practice, a theory. A practice or training in decimation.

"Well now, how do we do that?"

Eco leans forward eagerly in his chair.

Well, it still has to be invented. There must be some rules. There are some very elementary rules such as: control the dates of the bibliography for instance. If you are working on a certain subject you may find many references from 1993 and 1994. But in relation to other subjects finding only references from 1993 and 1994 might be negative, you ought to be finding some older dates.

"Exactly."

So if you read a book on Kant and you have only a bibliography from the nineteen-nineties then this is suspect. The author is working from secondary sources. If you are reading a book on hypertext and you find an old bibliography then this is suspect, because every day there is something new about this particular field. So there may be some first, elementary rules you can use in order to isolate certain things immediately. If you are reading an American book on a certain subject and you find only an English or American bibliography, then it is suspect. The author should have a larger...

"... overview?"

... yes, overview. But if it is a book on analytical philosophy and there is only an English bibliography, it is

probably unnecessary to also have a Polish bibliography, even though there is a great school of logicians and analytical philosophers in Poland. So it all depends on the subject matter; on the state of the art. It should be absolutely urgent for us to invent rules for decimation; probably flexible rules, that change from domain to domain. Otherwise the future will be worse than the present, and we can reach a level at which over-information and censure will identify each other.

"OK?"

You see, you can cancel by abundance. You can cancel by subtraction, and you can cancel by increase or addition.

"By addition, yes. But you know, this business of knowing what is relevant... I mean - and this is something that I am quite concerned about - the quality of the stuff you get via the Net. You know, in Cyberspace, or whatever you want to call it; the Information Superhighway... It's my opinion - I don't know what you think - but certainly at the moment there are only a very limited number of people who have sufficient access, sufficient capabilities, to be able to put stuff out there. And that's a problem as well in itself. Because the people who choose to put information out there, those people choose the content of reading for the rest, do they not?"

Eco is silent for a moment.

Yes, I saw you had many questions in the papers you gave me the other day about all this new technology. I feel obliged to make a formal statement here: I am enormously interested in what is happening. I am trying to establish all possible services on Internet here at my institute, and to push young people to work in this direction. I think it is enormously important for the future, even for politics. I want to introduce into our curriculum for communication studies some special seminars in this area. Personally, I do not use those technologies. For a very simple reason. At my age, first, let us also say, at my level of 'visibility', my problem is to avoid the message.

"Yes..?"

Otherwise I will be destroyed by the number of messages. My problem is not to answer the telephone; my problem is to destroy the fax;the unrequested fax as soon as it arrives. Even if, or rather, when in the near future, I finally get an e-mail account, my problem will be how not to receive anything. Because if there is something that has to reach me at any cost, it will. There will be some way by which I will be informed.

There are few persons in the world that can reach me and tell me: look you should pay attention to this or that. Now, this is a personal problem of mine.

"Because of your position?"

Yes, even corresponding to, let's say, my ideology. Once, when I was younger, I said that after 50 a critic or a scholar mustn't be concerned any longer with avant-garde movements, but to write only about Elizabethan poets.

"...writing about the past?"

Yes, now why? Because novelty is coming so quickly these days that only a younger person is able to swallow and digest it, while an older person is slower in doing that. Why? An older person has a lot of experience, knows a lot of things and can very well work on more established problems than the young people who do not know enough to do that.

"Well, no, they don't have enough insight of course..."

This is a general rule; it's not by chance that my last scholarly book was on the search for a perfect language and not on the last trends in informatics and semantics. Because younger people are very fresh and able to see what happens in these domains. I personally have more experience and am better able to work out from classical material. In a way I think I have followed this principle. Obviously, I keep my eyes open; I am still very curious about all this. Really though, I don't try at any cost to try to understand and write about post-rap music. I am more able to make a good analysis of the Beatles, if not, of Johann Sebastian Bach. And that's what happens with all those new technologies. It is the same as what happens to a sportsman. You are a football player until the age of thirty. After 30 you become a coach.

"Yes, exactly. But the coach of course has the responsibility of keeping himself oriented about what is going on...?

Oh yes, keeping informed, but he is not obliged to try to kick the ball every morning.

"And also there's this idea of being a facilitator, rather than a user in a conventional way: one sees the possibilities that are available, and makes them available for the other people and just says OK...?

Yes, but it is younger people who must make the new analyses. They are more flexible and they are more

independent of past experience. They do not risk repeating the same schemes; interpretative schemes. So why should I make analyses of programmes when they are able to do it better?

"Professor Eco, you are an academic; you're a scholar. You also write popular books. You are writing, very successfully, for two entirely different audiences. Do you experience any difficulty withstanding tabloidisation of your work, where the tabloid media and the TV conform to certain genres and norms which may be uncharacteristic of scholarly work?"

The problem is triple. There is not a single problem, there are three problems. First, a statement: I write academic stuff. I write in the newspapers - call it tabloid or popular journalism. I write my novels that by a mysterious chance have a mass success, but which I personally consider academic novels; and they are not easy novels. They are not love stories or things like that. So, there are three different problems.

Secondly, the problem can be considered from the point of view of the producer and the point of view of the receiver. As a producer I do not feel I have a split personality. All my life, the fact of studying something helped me to write more popular articles in order to explain the phenomena of the mass-media. The fact of being obliged to do this made me make weekly reflections - I would say irresponsible reflections - cooked-and-eaten or wash-and-wear reflections on what happened day by day helped me to collect experiences; to be attentive to what happened, and then to use the same material in a more organic and more profound, or more articulated and more critical way in my academic books.

So, for me, it was a sort of mutual help: the academic activity helped me to have instruments to understand the actualities; the continual attention to day by day events helped me to have material for reflection for my academic work. The story of the novel is another one, but equally I don't feel a split here either in my personality. I feel that what I do on the left side helps what I am doing on the right side.

Different is the point of view of reception. Here there is another problem: the fact that you are transformed into an icon. They are asking you something that you do not want to give...

"Transformed into an icon: you mean in the sense of becoming an oracle?"

Yes, an oracle. One is asked all the time, "What do you think about...?".

Now, why should I think anything about that? This happens not only to me. At this moment in time, Italian journalism is such that every scholar every day receives a phone call asking things like: "What do you think about the marriage of princess so-and-so?", or even incredibly stupid questions like "what do you think about the death of Greta Garbo?". Now why should you ask me about this? You answer either with a triviality like, "Well yes, she was a great actress, and I was very shocked by that," or, if you want to be very original: "oh, I am very happy that that lousy whore is dead - I hated her..." Obviously your answer cannot be anything other than some kind of formality. So it is not only a personal experience of mine, but of everybody. So you receive continuous pressure to do everything. That's why I told you that I don't receive messages, I don't read faxes and I don't answer the phone.

"So you don't follow electronic forums, or take part in online news group discussions or other activities of the Internet community?"

Not until now. But that is another problem, it is not due to the pressure at all. I will do it in the course of the next few months. But only in order to make a sort of survey, starting to put together some ideas. Maybe there can be something I might want to start with;I think there is an old book collector's network that I think can be useful because you can ask other people things like: "I found an old edition from 1643; I am not sure if there is a previous edition". OK, I will use it.

Eco nods seriously. I think that is one of the most exciting things about the Internet is that you can look upon it as a "community". I notice you mentioned in that paper you gave me from the San Marino conference that you were a bit unsure about whether we could really create this Global Village or community. Well now I do have some reservations -- but I certainly have had some positive experiences. If you find the right community like for instance the PEIRCE-L discussion list that I am a member of: I find this very good, because you have some kind of quality control there since people that "go there" only do so because they are specially interested -- Now just to develop this point a bit: you were talking about this business of being an icon etc. and Michael Crichton ...

Well, in the last year I have published three books. I was obliged to read tons and tons of dissertations and

papers from my students. So of course I did not have time at this moment to play with Internet. In the next six months probably, when I have finished a lot of things, I will do it. OK. It's only a practical problem. Apropos the icon thing: the only way is to try and resist this iconisation - you answer no, no, no. But the problem has reached uncontrollable dimensions in the mass-media kingdom, because now it is not only your statements that makes a scoop, but it is your silence too.

"OK, I see, yes?"

I always quote one particular episode, because it is typical; but there are tens of thousands of such episodes. One day, as usual, finishing my class at 7 p.m., together with my assistants and students we went to a bar for a chat until 8 p.m. and then I went home, with some of them following me and chatting. We crossed Piazza Verdi in Bologna, in which we have the Opera House. What I didn't know was that this particular evening there was an important première. Well, I didn't know about that, of course I don't know everything.He smiles.Well, we crossed the square and I went home to do something, or to watch television, or to fuck - I don't know what. The day after, the headline in the newspaper was: "Umberto Eco did not attend that première! "Which is not a piece of news at all, because I usually do not attend these things. So, it was not a piece of news, but probably they had nothing better to talk about, so my absence became a...

"A sign?"

...yes, a sign. Well, at this point you cannot do anything but to try and disregard those kinds of accidents.

"To return to Michael Crichton - I think I wrote this in those questions in those papers I gave you - was talking of this idea of the mediasaurus, the big publishing houses. Do you think the media giants are at risk because people will be able to go directly to the sources of information? I mean, do you think that will reduce the pressure on the kind of icon figure, the expert, or do you think that whole thing is a myth, a total myth?"

My first reaction was: OK, finally we have an acephalous system. Acephalous: without a head.

"Without a head, headless. Yes, I liked that rhizome idea of yours."

A kind of a modern Quillian network, a sort of neural net...

"An organic system...?"

Yes, without archetypes, and without - well, you know all that - and this will probably change enormously the filtering of information. Now, on second thoughts, I have two problems: How much can this system remain acephalous? The overloading of the network at some point will impose some filtering and discipline, and at this point we don't know what will happen. The Internet is the greatest possibility of abolishing any or every Great Brother...

"Big Brother...?"

Big Brother. But it can in a second step open up the possibility for some Big Brothers to occupy the main lines and the main network. At this point, I do not know. Secondly: if it remains acephalous, then the abundance of information will be such that either you have reached such a level of maturity that you are able to be your own filter, or you will desperately need a filter...

"Some professional filter?"

...some professional filter. So once again you will ask somebody...an information consultant...to be your gatekeeper!

Take the example of a book shop. In the thirties a book shop was a small place in which every week there

were one or two new books. If you went there often you knew pretty well how to isolate the interesting new items and so on. Now, a book shop like the FNAC in Paris, or the Feltrinelli here in Bologna, is an Internet in itself: you have everything. Now - an this concerns not only the young student, but also myself - if I don't read the cultural pages of the newspapers to know what is happening, then I am lost. There's this excess of information. Once again it makes you need a gatekeeper...

"A filter."

...a filter. So this filtration function of certain centres of orientation will remain. Take another example: once upon a time there was the upper class who had the great tailors that were telling men, and ladies too, how to dress properly. The lower class could only buy ready-made, off the hook stuff, so it was very easy to distinguish them from one another. Then improved distribution made it very easy for everybody to begin composing his or her own dress, we have personalised denims, blue jeans etc.

"Composing personal styles, yes."

And in principle the wife of Mr. Agnelli Rockefeller and the young maid from Puerto Rica can go to the same store - for instance Bloomingdales - buy the same elements and concoct their own style. Now, has this eliminated, in the language of fashions, the class-difference? No. The rich lady has some rules for composition...

"A code?"

Yes, a code. And the young Puerto-Rican has not. Maybe they can buy the same blue jeans. In the end the composition will still underline the difference. Where does the difference lie? In the great filtering of opinion leaders like Armani or Krizia: they tell how to compose, and the informed, cultivated person uses them as advisors, while the uncultivated person invents styles by him- or herself. So, once again, you have a sort of total Internet of fashions - up to a certain level: Timberland for both. Everybody can buy a pair of Timberlands. Blue jeans for both, but one has a small, private network of advisors.

"Advisors, yes. So what you are basically saying then is that culture will pervade, even though..."

Culture or UNculture. Because the filters also can be negative filters. But there will be filters in any case. At most there will be an exaggeration, an overabundance of negative filters. One of the TV talk-show directors, or anchor-men here in Italy at the moment -Funari - is providing a model for behaviour for a lot of lower-class young people. It is a filter: a negative filter, but it is there.

"We have this dream and the vision of the Internet as something which is very open, and is going to create a society without a centre, or is going to take part in the development of societies without centres;a general global democratisation: you don't really think that that is possible?"

Eco leans forward in his chair:

Yes, but once again we are back at the problem of decimation. A student of mine who is a devotee of the

Internet, and he is interested also, not only, but also in Peirce, he discovered a Peircean network. So he sent messages, he got answers. He started to argue with somebody. And he said to me: "Oh last night after my last message I got an answer from a fellow - let's call him Smith - which seems to me stupid and strange. So I said: "No,Smith is one of the greatest scholars on Peirce. Probably you don't know him because he has published very little. He is a modest person who works hard at this university, but he is a great, great mind." So he was ready to disregard Smith's message, probably because he did not like the first ten lines, or possibly because Smith was wrong on this particular point. I don't know. While he ought to have taken him very seriously, but he couldn't know that. Smith was just one among the hundreds that were discussing Peirce at this moment on the Net. Once again: which are the criteria by which you are able to select a Smith? They cannot come from Internet.

"The criteria cannot come from Internet?"

No. You have to find something, for instance in the journal Versus, in which someone says that the opinions of Smith are very important. So, once again, if you don't have a filter, you are unable on the basis of a single message to understand that Smith has to be taken seriously. That's the risk.

"But on the other hand, if you are a participant in one of these virtual communities - Let's call them communities – like these discussion groups and if you have got a kind of critical sense yourself, and if you know a bit about the field...?"

Certainly, and you can discover that Brown, who is absolutely unknown is in any case so smart that it is worthwhile to keep in touch with this person. Well, OK, there are also these positive aspects. OK, OK. But there is still a risk that if there are at anyone time one hundred persons discussing Peirce, your discovery of Brown, as well as your disregarding of Smith will be purely random.

"You think so?"

You cannot read one hundred messages in one night and look at them critically to decide that Brown is the best. Brown is the one you met. So if you don't have a background code, at least as a first filter, the fact of knowing that Smith is famous should not stop you from reading Brown. OK, this happens every day: you open a journal. There is an article by somebody there you don't know. You start reading and say OK, that's good. I have made interesting discoveries in my own life by reading articles by unknown scholars, and I discovered that they were great. And maybe I discovered later that they were famous: it was only due to my own ignorance that I did not know their name. So it is always possible to make random discoveries, but a filter is in some way important.

"Well, again, it's this community thing...?

There can also be internal filters. You can look at one hundred messages on Peirce and see that each of them is quoting Smith. At a certain point you feel that Smith probably has a certain... importance, or something to say, considering that everybody is quoting him. But OK, it is once again this art of filtering and choosing that becomes a very complex art.

"But it has to do with two things, doesn't it? A sense of community: a specialised community, people with common values and specific goals. And it has to do with a sense of trust: that the people in that "space" are talking sense, and that there will be mechanisms operating there which will get rid of extraneous stuff. I think that is one of the most fascinating things, but also one of the most difficult things is: just how do you find the right community? On UseNet, alone, there are over 3000 News groups ..."

Listen, I am not saying that Internet is, or will be a negative experience. I am saying on the contrary that it is a great chance. Once we have asserted this, I am trying to isolate the possible traps; the possible negative aspects. I am trying to focus on the critical aspects of a positive experience. I think it is also my role as a critic of media to do that. I believe that once completely developed and implemented, Virtual Reality will be enormously important for a lot of scientific experiences, but I have also to remark that if Virtual Reality becomes only entertainment for solitary persons, it can become a new kind of technological masturbation. So we have to consider both.

"Yes, yes. I think that is a very real problem, but again this is a question of solitude versus community, isn't it?"

The problem of solitude is enormous...

Eco pauses for a moment, and leans back in his chair.

It is a community but it is only a virtual community. Now, it is true that great artists spend their lives living in remote villages and writing letters all over the world and they establish these kinds of virtual communities.

"Kant did that as well - he was a great letter writer...?"

Yes, there was Kant. But I think of a great poet like Leopardi. He was sick, a hunchback. Repressed. Lived in a village. Went once or twice to Rome. I don't remember how often, though he traveled a little more. He was well known, and in touch with all the intelligentsia of his time. OK, it's always possible. But for every Leopardi, you have a lot of other people that are living in isolation, with elaborate forms of mental illness. One great problem of our time is the decrease, or absolute lack, of face-to-face communities.

I always like to tell the story of Bosco - San Giovanni Bosco. This Salesian priest in the middle of the 19th century who got the idea that was a whole new generation of young people who were working from a very young age in factories, and so were dispersed and separated from the family. He invented the oratorium, which was a community, to which those who worked could go to play and discuss. And for those who couldn't work, he established typographies, activities in which they could take part. So, he was matching the problem of despair and isolation in the industrial society with the possibility of people meeting each other, and obviously also having a religious purpose. It was a great social invention.

What I reproach today; with both Catholics, as well as former Communists or Progressives, is that they lacked the new don Bosco. There was no new San Giovanni Bosco of our age able to invent a new possibility of establishing communities. And so you have young disaffected males with guns killing people in Central Park. You have all the problems of young people...

"The pathologies, yes..."

Also of mature and aged persons who feel isolated. Was, is, television a way to overcome this solitude? No, it was a way to increase it. With your can of beer you sit down on the couch...Television was not the solution.Obviously for certain people - I had an old aunt who was obliged to live all the day at home, and was unable to walk, and for her the television was a gift of heaven. For her, it was really the only possibility to be in some way in touch with the world. But for a normal person it is not. Can the new virtual communities like we have on Internet do the same job? Certainly! They give to a person living in the Mid-West the possibility to contact others from there. Is that a substitute for face-to-face contact and community? No, it isn't! So the real social function of, let's say, Internet, should be to be a starting point for establishing contacts, and then to establish local...

"Places to meet face-to-face..."

Yes, local communities. When Internet really becomes a way of implementing - through virtual communities - face-to-face communities, then that will be an important social change. I was talking with Professor Prodi [note:Romano Prodi is professor of economics at the University of Bologna, and prospective prime- ministerial candidate for a coalition of centre-left moderates in the next Italian general election] and I told him that the only possibility that you have to make a real campaign, is to realise in every city a group, a club, a circle. One of the real forces in the inventions of Berlusconi was not only to use television for political propaganda. He, having a big industrial organisation, established clubs everywhere. This was people that were proud to wear the badge and to identify themselves as belonging to a particular group. I saw them in the village where I have my country house. It was artificial. It was all set up in two months, so it wasn't enough to establish a really profound sense of belonging to a community. But it was an idea.So I told Prodi that he should do the same. And one way to do that is to use Internet. Because through Internet you can reach, say, two persons in every city, giving them materials, documents. People will be encouraged to xerox all these materials and to establish local groups, networks. So it is a sort of collaboration between virtual and...

"Real communities?..."

...and real communities. If we succeed in doing that then Internet will be an enormous element or factor of social change. If it remains only virtual it could lead some people to pure onanistic solitude. In this sense, most of the hackers are sick persons, because they sit passive. They play and intrude into the computers of the banks or the Pentagon, because it is the only way to feel alive.

"You have just released a new hypertext encyclopaedia. In an article you published recently in the local paper in Bologna, La Republicca, you write that this work will contain more information than the Encyclopaedia Britannica. There you also wrote that the main advantage of your Encyclomedia is its non-linear retrieval and cross-referencing system. I always wonder about the effectiveness of hypertext systems in general, because someone has to make the links. So even though you call it non-linear retrieval, or whatever, it is all decided by somebody in advance?"

Well, first of all: if you are able tomorrow to invent a hypertext in which every idea and every word, every

adjective, every article can be linked with everything. OK, at this point it is obvious that even there, there is a filter which establishes the links. In this sense it will be very difficult to make a philosophical hypertext, because you will have to decide if you will link the notion of passion in Descartes with the notion of passion in Aristotle, which are two different notions...

"Yes, completely different."

For Aristotle it is simply a cognitive event, and for Descartes, and for the 17th century passion has to do with feeling, sentiment etcetera. But in the case of our Encyclomedia, which was based on historical data, you have a certain guarantee. The name of a city is linked to other cities. The name of a given person links with persons which had connections with them. And you also can establish unforeseen links...

"The users can make their own links?"

Yes, because you have, let's say, so-called books and files. There's for instance a book on Descartes, and obviously in the book on Descartes you will certainly mention, let's say Pascal, or Gallileo. There are some immediate links, because Gallileo and Pascal are highlighted, and so you can immediately identify the possibility of there being links there. There is no pre-established link between Descartes and Caravaggio. Why? Because they had nothing in common except he fact that they lived in the same century. But I wanted to solve, or to answer this question: "Was it possible that Descartes met Caravaggio?" Descartes travelled pretty much. So, I have a function that allows me to ask about Descartes AND/OR Caravaggio, and I found I had the possibility of detecting that that meeting was impossible, because Caravaggio died when Descartes was 14. So, I established my own links.

"OK, I see. You are able to check that kind of thing then. I saw a CD-ROM recently published by Multimedia World that was quite interesting. It was a kind of CD-ROM hypertext version of the magazine. But it also had - you know the World Wide Web - where you make a server and you put pages on it and create links to other places from these pages?"

Eco nods.

"Well they had put a World Wide Web page on the CD-ROM, so that you could not only look at what was on the CD-ROM - the kind of enclosed world of that - but you also had access out onto the World Wide Web. And of course, once you can get onto World Wide Web, then you can go anywhere..."

I don't know about the present state of the Net. I guess I am able to have on my screen every article published by every newspaper in Rwanda and Burundi, or at least, if that is not the case now, then it will be possible...

"...at some time, yes, I'm sure."

Tomorrow. At this point, OK, there will be other negative aspects. You will get too much about Rwanda-Burundi...

"Yes, and it is time to go through it all that's the problem...?"

And I don't know if the best article is in the Boston Globe, or the Los Angeles Times. I have no time to read it all. That is the problem that we are facing. It exists.

"But again, you can't get away from this idea of trust and community. Because, obviously, if you want to find out things, then normally, in everyday life, you go to people that you trust, who you think have a fairly good overview, and you ask them, "Well listen, there's too much here, can't you give me a pointer."

Yes, that is a possibility. But you know one of the first great events on the early nets was the story of George Lakoff, who wrote this beautiful article on the Gulf War. He understood that it was too late to have it published before the war. He didn't know anything at the time about the Net, but he gave the article to a friend who had "connections". The day after, people were xeroxing this article in Bologna, in Amsterdam, in Sidney, all over the world! The article propagated because of a network, but more than that. It was because the opinion of a man called George Lakoff was...

"...worth reading, yes exactly!"

But then you have this other problem that publishing happens very quickly. You can publish instantly on the Net. And with speed, follows brevity. I have noticed that newer generations of computer users are learning tocommunicate in very abbreviated codes. I discovered recently a new formula they use...

Eco takes out a notebook from the desk, and begins to write.

...which in Italian sounds very obscene: CUL8R, "See you later". Yes, you can write a love-letter in this way with the same intensity of heart...

"This is a kind of phenomenon of virtual communities, because it is so instantaneous a form of communication, and we also see a merging of oral and written language in a lot of these discussion groups. There's very much a merging of these kinds of things. Do you think this will have an effect on publishing per se; on the literary norms, on literacy?"

In the longer term I think so, yes, probably.

Eco continues writing.

You know that under the Mona Lisa of Duchamp there is this acronym -pseudo acronym, which read

"L.H.O.D.O.Q." - in French this is elle à chaud au cul. Obviously this was made by Duchamp in his Dadaist period, it remained a shibboleth for the happy few, but I think CUL8R can also become a form.

"So you expect written norms to change?"

Why not? Once I have discovered it, and once I have told it to some friends, I will use it in my letters. Why not? This can also change the epistolary style of many people. But to me this is a minor problem, because there are a lot of technological innovations that have changed things. For example in 16th century books they tried to develop the first rights of protection. They called it: privilège du roi. It was one page saying that the king has decided that nobody could use what was in the book without permission. Today we have this:

Eco scribbles a sign on the paper, and shows it to me.

"Yes, copyright ©, sure."

Now today, that is enough. OK, we have observed that it was useless to have a page of privilège du roi when we have this one which means exactly the same thing. So it is not something absolutely new. Every new technology introduces new idioms...

"Or even norms?"

...norms that at the beginning can terrorise the old academic who says things like: "Oh our language is being corrupted!" They become...

"Accepted and functional in a new way...?"

... and independent. In the sixties all the letters I got from the States ended with "love", which had lost its erotic, sexual connotations. I could write, you know, "love", why not?

"Peace and love?"

Yes. Once you have accepted the new custom it becomes normalised. Now I see it has disappeared. The first time I received it from a friend I said: "Oh, did he become homosexual?" No, he did not of course.

"In your article from that seminar at San Marino on the future of the book, you mentioned Rube Goldberg."

Well, I mentioned Rube Goldberg because somebody there mentioned him, so it was not an idea of mine but taking up the suggestion of somebody else.

"But you said a Rube Goldberg model seems to you the only metaphysical template for our electronic future, and that sounds rather interesting. Metaphysical template, is that some kind of...?"

As far as I remember he quoted Goldberg as a masterpiece of bricolage. Taking it in isolation in my paper without reference to the previous token it is rather ununderstandable. No, what I want to stress, and what is perhaps important for a kind of magazine like this is that there is one kind of discussion item I consider absolutely irrelevant, and one other kind of item I consider mischievous. The irrelevant one is the discussion on whether the CD-ROM will abolish the book. Now, that's stupid, that's silly.

"This was tied in with this idea of ceci tuera cela - "this will kill that?""

Yes. Because as I have repeatedly said, on a camel in the desert you can bring a book not a computer.

"Well, today you can bring a computer."

Sure, today you can, but it is always easier when you are lying down in a tent with a book, you can do this and that.

Eco takes a newspaper from his desk. He leans back in his chair, draping the open paper over his face.

You don't need a plug, and you don't need an everlasting battery either. Second, because there are kinds of reading experiences that can only be done with a book. I don't think it's possible to read Homer on the computer. But books split into two categories: books to be read, and books to be consulted. All books made to be consulted can be substituted by the CD-ROM. The future writing desk of tomorrow should absolutely be made up of two computers. A small clone for writing, and the 486, the great high memory computer to store dictionaries and encyclopaedias and books that you need to consult. You can't do it all with a single computer. If you are writing you cannot stop all the time to open the database, to look for the dictionary. Every operation requires a lot of movements and time. Two computers, and all those shelves...

He points demonstratively at all the bookshelves lining the walls: ...could disappear.

"All the reference works?"

All the reference works, yes. It's less costly. I have calculated the price of a wall space, considering the price of floor space -not in the centre of Milan, not even at the periphery - the price of these shelves in humble materials, not in precious wood. I discovered that every stupid book that I receive costs me $100.

"In space?"

In space.

"Not to mention the environmental aspect of course - the forests etc.

Yes, also the forests... I receive an average of 10 free books per day. It is costing me much too much. At the moment I have an apartment of 500 square metres, and I cannot go on moving my home every five years in order to store all the books I get. If I could eliminate all the encyclopaedias and dictionaries etcetera, then that would be fine. And if it would be an advantage for me, then it would be an enormous advantage for a person living in a small flat. So all the reference books can be eliminated. All the rest must remain.The function of the computerized reference book would be one of encouraging me to find paper books, and to use them as paper books, that's all. I am very optimistic on this point. I don't believe that you will buy the new diskette of new poems, if not for reasons of information, because you need to have them quickly. The book, even with the worst paper in the world, lasts longer than magnetic support systems, at least up until now. The second problem is this utopia of the hypertext, and I explained in my San Marino article the confusion between hyper-systems and hypertext. Hyper-systems are a great innovation. My CD-ROM is a hyper-system. But regarding hypertext: I don't need magnetic support to recompose Ulysses just as I want. I do it with a book.Ido nothing but that when I read Joyce: changing and moving and going back. So the idea of a hypertext that I can use to recompose 10 different novels is stupid; as stupid as Dungeons and Dragons or this kind of stuff. It can be a game.

Once a man called Saporta invented in France, at the end of the fifties, a movable book. The idea was already present in Mallarmé. The idea of the movable book was a sort of great metaphor for the infinity of reading. If you want, it was a metaphor for deconstruction. OK. Saporta, on the contrary, made a book in which you could mix...

"You mean you could put things into it?"

...mix up the pages, and the story would change.

"A kind of loose-leaf book?"

Yes. OK. If you suspect that even in a CD-ROM the links are pre-established by the author, well, even

Saporta pre-established the possibilities of the story.

"It's all a limited universe, yes."

Is it not better to read Shakespeare and then to daydream, dreaming of Hamlet marrying Juliet, and so the hypertext as a text can only be a game. The hyper-system, that is the future. The hypertext can have educational purposes: try to mix up things, to find new possibilities. OK, but it is not a revolution in literature or in poetry.

"You don't think so?"

No, I don't think so. When you have had what we had the paper books, and with Joyce or Mallarmé, you don't need the hypertext in order to have an open-ended reading of literature.

"You mentioned Dungeons and Dragons. These multi-user virtual spaces where people can engage simultaneously in dialogue by writing. They can create rooms, they can assume character roles, they can interact with each other in ways that physical space cannot allow. A colleague of mine, Finn Bostad, told me that some of his students spend many hours in this environment. For some, it is like enacting a novel at the same time as you are writing it."

OK, it's a nice game.

"Do you think this might lead to new forms of literature?"

I have been using a fantastic hypertext for the last 30 years. It is called Scrabble. Isn't it true that with Scrabble you can compose every possible cross link, every combination of sentences. It's a nice game, it can have educational purposes. Sometimes my wife who is German learned part of her English lexicon by playing Scrabble. Sometimes we play Scrabble in English, or in French. OK, but if you are a poet you have your mental Scrabble. You don't need the board to do it. It is the same I think for all those kinds of games. They can be very nice to play. So, I repeat: they can be used for training people in inventing and composing, but they have nothing to do, according to me, with the future of literature.

But maybe I am a dinosaur: I am still living very well by selling old-fashioned books, and probably I'll die before the landscape has changed completely. So I remain open to possible developments of all these perspectives.

At the present state of the art, if I had to bet all the money I have in my pocket, I would bet more on hyper-systems more than on hypertext. That's a personal bet.

"Have you looked at any of these hyper-books, like those of Jay Bolter and Michael Joyce? They have made some of these things which are just basically a hypertext system, where you can go in, and there's a lot of text which you can explore by means of different links."

Yes, I have read about them... I have not tried them, and I know that my position can be the same as of

Cremonini, who was a great professor of logic, metaphysics and astronomy at the time of Gallileo. When they brought to him Gallileo's binocular, he said "I do not want to look inside it, because it could mix up my ideas." So the poor Cremonini remained as the symbol of academic bigot that refuses to try a new experience. Then, when you read a serious book on Cremonini, first you discover that Cremonini was a great mind of this time, even though he was not an innovator like Gallileo, and that it isn't true that he refused to look into the binocular. He just said: "At the present state of technology, those lenses are very rudimentary, so I don't think that they can really help me to see something more. It was an objection to the present primitive state of the art. So what I am making now is probably a statement that we are still at a primitive state of the art. I have not been interested up to now to try virtual reality. Because until it is possible to make love to Marilyn Monroe; until the moment that her clothes start floating away - well, then at that moment I will try! But as long as it is just a sketch of Marilyn Monroe, and I can have the real sensation elsewhere, then the state of the art is so primitive that I prefer to wait, that's all! If you offer me this possibility soon, or better still, if you offer me this possibility when I am 80, I will be enthusiastic about the innovation, and I will become a fanatic supporter!

"Well, I think I tend to agree with you there. There's still this very basic problem which is one of quality. The quality of the experience is still very limited, and it is the technology that limits it...?"

It doesn't matter though; I say go with it! But that's why I say that at this point I have the impression that it is most interesting for educational and training purposes, rather than for providing real new aesthetic experiences. Even though my friend Nanni Balestrini, one of the poets and novelists, of the new avant-garde of the sixties made a poem with the computer - mixing it up.

"A kind of art form - computer art?"

Yes, something like milliard de poeme of Queneau. So those experiences already exist. I have the first edition of Chinosura Lucensis by a 17th century monk who invented a sort of Lullian multiple wheel, by means of which he was able to compose several million poems for the Virgin. It's an old idea, an old utopia. And sometimes this provided real help for invention. So there is nothing wrong with it, but probably the final effect should be an object that I can move with my mind and not with my fingers, otherwise I will lose something.

"Exactly. So this brings us back again to the kind of question of the interface and how do you interact with it? It's a problem I think with computers today that they offer another type of experience. Take writing for example. You write with a pen, you move your hand in a certain way, have a certain kind of feedback all the time while you are writing. On a computer you are doing it all by means of keys."

As a writer I have discovered there are certain kinds of things for which I still need the pen, there are certain things for which I need the computer, certain things for which I need a felt-tipped pen. And the kind of instrument I am using is influencing my writing enormously.

"The material substance that you operate with".

Yes, when I come to think about it, this kind of action...

Eco picks up his notepad and scribbles on it, ...is very important. And this is so new that people have not really understood those differences. I don't know...

"We have these new pen-based systems now?"

You have seen my Foucault's Pendulum. In one of the first files, Bellbo says how spiritual it is to invent. So, there was a Metropolitan legend that said that my novels have been written at the computer, and they don't consider that The Name of the Rose was published in 1980, and that the first really good word-processors started to come in 1982-83. So it could not have been computer-written.

"So it was written on a typewriter, or...?"

Type-written or hand-written. But for the Pendulum, since the Pendulum speaks about the computer, the silly journalists argue that, well, "Your book was concocted by the computer." And they still believe that you put some words there, and zzzaapp: the machine gives you the book. One of them said: "Well, it is clear that this is computer-written, except one chapter. That one where the boy plays the trumpet in the cemetery (the final chapter). It's clear that that one is hand-written." It was the only chapter of my book that I wrote immediately, and without correction at the computer! All the others were hand-written!

"Put together, yes?"

Put together in multiple ways. Why? Because I had in mind this final chapter right from the beginning. And I thought about it for eight years so intensely that when I arrived at this point - I remember very well, it was in my apartment in Bologna at 6 o'clock - it was like playing the piano, like a jazz-musician: I put it all down very easily with the computer, following my mind and only making the corrections underway. It was totally written at the computer...it was just because there was more inspiration, so to speak.

People have still these kinds of mythological visions about the machine. And then there is a purposefully faked production of mythology. Those who ask you the most naive questions about the computer; just seeing it as some kind of mysterious machine that invents for you, are journalists who are using them every day. So they know that it is not true. But when the ask questions, they try to make them the ones that the most naive reader would make. So there is a kind of play of bad faith, mauvaise fois. So the journalist, who knows exactly that it is not the computer which invents for him or her, is the one who co-operates in the spreading of the Metropolitan legend, the false rumour about the extraordinary intelligence of the computer.

"I was thinking about that book that you published just recently: Six walks in the Fictional Woods. It was rather nice the last essay you had there. The final bit where you were taken into this kind of planetarium..."

Ah, yes, the planetarium.

"...where you experienced the moment of your birth. Yes, now that's a kind of virtual reality experience, isn't it?"

Yes, certainly, and it really was computer prepared, because only the computer could remake the sky of that evening.

"But it really was a profound experience you thought, for yourself?"

Yes, for me, it was really touching, perhaps a little narcissistic.

"And perhaps especially since it was a sort of expression of love, as well, on the part of the people, in that they had gone to all the trouble?"

Yes, it was an expression of love on their part, but there was also an atmosphere, because my wife, who was with me - and it was not her night - but she was equally impressed and touched by the magic of the experience. So for me, it could have been narcissism, but for her it was really the emotion, of having the impression of something that happened 60 years ago.

"A kind of being in the past?"

Yes, it was really beautiful.

"So it is in fact possible to do a simulation which is so real that it has a profound effect upon the person, by means of technology?"

Certainly, you can enjoy Beethoven on a compact disc better than with the 78 disc...and sometimes better than in a small theater with a "medium rare" orchestra. So I am absolutely... Well, I am a recorder player, and now the Japanese production of plastic recorders has reached such a level of sophistication that - then you can of course still have a top recorder of superior quality costing $5,000, made by a top craftsman - but if you compare a good plastic recorder and a normal, old wooden one, the plastic ones keep their sound quality; and they don't suffer from temperature and humidity. And though perhaps not for a soloist, but certainly for a group or orchestra they can work very well. No objections.

The Secular War on the Supernatural

2008-09-01T16:01:00.000-07:00

Dr. Alice Von Hildebrand
Originally published at The Christian Post

The supernatural is a partaking in God’s very life. There is not one single religion that can compete with Christianity, a religion allowing us to become God-like by participation in His life.

In 1965 my husband, Dietrich von Hildebrand and I had a private audience with Pope Paul VI, in which my husband "shot from the hip" as usual, saying "Your Holiness, you realise that the Church is going through the worst crisis in history, worse than the Protestant Reformation" (which I usually refer to as the Protestant Deformation). The Pope seemed to be surprised and my husband continued: "What has taken place is that people have lost sight of the supernatural."
Partaking in God’s life

The supernatural is the greatest gift that God has given us. We are humble, modest creatures. The human male was made from the dust of the earth, a very un-aristocratic origin; the human female did a little bit better and was taken from the body of a human person. (This is one of the big triumphs that women have, one of the advantages that they have over men!) The supernatural is a partaking in God’s very life. There is not one single religion that can compete with Christianity, a religion allowing us to become God-like by participation in His life.

The supernatural is something that could never have been invented by the most inventive human person. The supernatural is a new song, a new music coming from above that never entered man’s head. In some way you can prove the Divinity of Christ by saying no human being would ever have invented a God who chose to take the form of a slave, to suffer and to die, to re-open for us the gates of Heaven, Humanly speaking, it is sheer madness.

It was the supernatural which converted Edith Stein, who studied under Husserl with my husband. She was an atheist who one very fine day read the autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila. She started at seven in the evening and the next morning at seven o’clock she said "I’m going to become a Roman Catholic" and she became a Roman Catholic saint (St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross).

Co-operating with Christ

It was his discovery of the supernatural which drew my husband into the Church; a new reality, something infinitely more beautiful, the supernatural was infinitely above what he had experienced before. Following his conversion from atheism to Catholicism, until his death, it was his very particular mission to fight for the reality of the supernatural, which he saw as being eroded more and more. An erosion so systematic that it has led today to an absolute rebellion, when modern men say to God "We do not want it, we can do without it; human nature can perfect itself by itself, we do not need any help."

The supernatural life was lost by sin and this loss was so irreparable that God alone could give it back to us, it was impossible, by human effort, to re-conquer this Divine life that had been given to us. And this is, of course, once again, the amazing message of Christianity, that God became man, to be humiliated, to be rejected and ridiculed and to die the most agonising death to re-open for us the gates of Heaven.

We have the possibility of re-living, re-conquering the supernatural life through the message of Christ, through the Church and the sacraments, but God asks for our co-operation. St. Augustine said "He Who made you without you, will not sanctify you or save you without your help". And Christ tells us very explicitly "If you want to become my disciples, carry your cross and follow me."
Fear of humiliation

To have supernatural life might be very appealing; to carry one’s cross is much less appealing. There are lots of people willing to follow Christ to Mount Tabor, there are very few people willing to follow Him to Calvary. Yet Calvary is a step that we have to go through in order to reach Eternal Life.

When Christ first gave this message, some people were so overwhelmed that they become Christians and it is said explicitly in the Acts of the Apostles "When they were mocked and whipped and tortured, they rejoiced because it was a privilege for them to suffer with Christ". That was the beginning of Christianity and why that period was such a glorious time was because people were so conscious of the gift of the supernatural that they despised all human advantages, security, money, honour. They embraced suffering with joy because Christ had suffered and died for us.

Unfortunately, people discovered that to suffer is unpleasant and in order to enter Heaven we not only have to accept suffering, but humiliation. After all, Christ was humiliated to the greatest possible extent. We have to accept humiliation, but if there is anything that we dread, it is humiliation. We fear suffering, but probably we fear humiliation more than that.

Fear of the truth

So the Church became recognised in the fourth century and grew until that great period called The Middle Ages. Even through the Middle Ages the Church did not produce people who were all saints, but there were plenty of saints and there are two things about the Middle Ages that I would like to emphasise.

The first was that they knew that the greatest achievement a human being could aspire to was holiness, to be re-born, to become a new creature. And the second thing that they knew was that when they sinned, they were sinners. Well today, the peculiarity of modern man is that he sins but denies that sins exist. There is a rather striking difference between the two. As long as you know that you are a sinner, there is hope, but the very day that you no longer know it and feel perfectly comfortable sinning and justifying your own sin, things are getting to be a bit dangerous.

Even though the supernatural is the greatest gift that man could possibly have received, for some reason there is something in man’s fallen nature that does not like the message of the supernatural at all.

For example, in the Gospel of St. Mark (Chapter 5) in the country of the Gerasenes, Christ sent the legion of unclean spirits out of the man possessed into a great herd of swine; and the herd, numbering about two thousand, rushed down the steep bank into the sea, and were drowned in the sea.

The terrified swineherds fled, rushing into the town, spreading the news throughout the countryside. Jesus was begged to depart from the neighbourhood. Why did they want Jesus to go? They had lost a lot. 2000 swine cost a lot of money. However, a much deeper explanation, suggested by Kierkegaard, is a valid one. The Gerasenes could not stand the confrontation between themselves and Christ’s holiness. In other words they were afraid of the truth, and I claim that most men, if not all men, are afraid of the truth. Why? Because the moment I know it, I know that I have to change. I know that I have to die to myself and be re-born.
Fear of conversion

Christianity has done something which is totally revolutionary. Christ did not say "I have the truth", he said "I am the truth", Moses did not say so, Buddha did not say so, Mohammed did not say so. Christ alone claims that He is The Truth, capital T. Now, the very moment that you are confronted with the Truth, and you suddenly discover all the lies that are in us, there are two possibilities. Either you kneel down and adore and recognise Christ to be God, or you run away and say "depart from us, we can do without you".

Once again let us turn to the New Testament. When Christ is about to be condemned, and He says "I have come to give testimony to the truth", what does Pilate say? "What is the truth?" And runs off. He doesn’t wait for an answer, which Christ could have given him. He is not interested. He just raises a rhetorical question "What is the truth?" and takes off.

Or take Felix, the Roman Governor. When St. Paul was waiting to be sent to Rome, the Governor Felix came to see him almost daily because he enjoyed Paul’s brilliance and scholarship. These visits continued for a while, until one very fine day St. Paul had the unfortunate idea of mentioning chastity. The moment he spoke the word "chastity", Felix got up, left and never came back. Can you guess why? I believe you can find the answer by yourself.

So the amazing thing we are going to discover is that theoretically all our universities accept in some way the pursuit of truth, but in fact when it comes to accepting a concrete truth that challenges me to change my life, we say "depart from us, we don’t want you."

Fear of guilt

I happen to be a Benedictine Oblate, According to the Rule of St. Benedict, a sign that you have a Benedictine vocation is to love humiliation. Why? Because Christ was humiliated. We die to our fallen nature and we are reborn in Christ. In other words, holiness. The very moment that you realise that this is going to cost suffering and the cross, you’re going to say to yourself "There might be ways of escaping". Apart from suffering and humiliation, which we dread, all of us, there’s something that we fear desperately and modern man believes that he has succeeded in eliminating this feeling, that is, guilt.

How many of my students when I was giving a course on ethics would raise their hand furiously and say "of course you’re trying to give us a bad conscience, but I’m not responsible for what I did, it’s my education or my genes or the society in which I live, but I’m not responsible. I’m guiltless". Basically many psychiatrists are going to talk you out of a feeling of guilt and say "you’re not guilty, you’re just as good as anyone else". The gospel of the New Age is love yourself, like yourself, you are fine, you are O.K. and I am O.K. and everybody’s O.K. and then we have a very happy world.

Now suppose that deep down in my soul I refuse to live up to the demands made by the Church, and the Church does make demands upon us, the Church challenges us to die to ourselves and to become new creatures. The Church invites us to receive the sacraments in a state of grace and if we fail to do so, to go to confession and to recognise our guilt and then the tremendous gift of absolution. "Go in peace, your sins are forgiven." Not to have guilt without the possibility of believing in absolution is dreadful.

Unholy steps to catastrophe

Now suppose that I realise that the Church is making these demands upon me and I don’t want to listen to them, what do I do? I’m going to use unholy cleverness. Cleverness is not intelligence. Intelligence, according to Plato, is the capacity to distinguish between truth and error. Cleverness is the capacity to use your mind in such a fashion that you always manage to fend for yourself or to defend your position.

Go to the United States and you’re going to see how clever lawyers can be. When they defend a cause which is absolutely defenceless, they win because they are clever, because they can distort things, because they can create such confusion that in the end you don’t know the difference between black and white and true and false.

Now, I have found out from a long period of teaching at the City University, secular and to a large extent atheistic, that some of my least gifted students were very clever at defending themselves. We don’t want to live up to the demands of the Church, but we’re going to use our cleverness to escape from these demands. After a series of steps, the final step is going to lead us to the catastrophe that we are experiencing today, when there is an open war on the supernatural.

The first step is simply to pay lip service to the teaching of the Church. You recite the Credo and you know your Catechism, but there’s no relationship whatever between what you say and your life. You are a Sunday Catholic, you go to church, you bow and the rest of it and on Monday you live as a pagan, very comfortably. That’s step number one.

The second step is worse. Once you are just giving lip service to the Church, you’re going to go a little bit further and water down the teaching of the Church. What does it mean to "water down"? Let me quote Kierkegaard who has a superb formulation. He said: "Christ changed water into wine. Modern theologians do a lot better than that, they change wine into water". Instead of seeing the Church as founded by Christ, instead of understanding that Peter has the keys; where Peter is, there is the Church, that he has this extraordinary position of re-presenting Christ, however unworthy he might be as an individual, he says "Well, you know, sociology has taught us that the Church is basically a human institution, flawed and weak, not to be taken that seriously." You water it down.

Or, the third step goes a little bit further and this applies particularly to contraception. You go to confession and you say to the priest "I’m practising contraception". The priest says to you "You know, I grant you the teaching of the Church presents an ideal, but the Church is a mother and knows that we are very weak and we cannot live up to that ideal. No one can, we are weak human beings, we’re imperfect. So, keep in mind the Church puts the clock one hour ahead of time; so even if you don’t quite make it according to your watch, keep in mind that you still have one hour and you still will make it. So therefore you can practise contraception, but nevertheless you can go to heaven because the Church does not expect perfection, it just shows a sort of ideal which is good to strive towards, but if you can’t do it the Church will understand."

Once again, to quote Kierkegaard, who detected the war of the supernatural within the Protestant Church in the nineteenth century and fought relentlessly against it, the next step is more subtle and more devastating and this is something which is very widespread today and it leads to the catastrophe which we are going to examine.

Secularizing the supernatural

The next step is to praise the supernatural very highly, but for purely secular reasons, not because it is supernatural, not because it comes from above, not because it is this holy jewel that fecundates our soul, but ... let me give you a series of examples that I heard in articles, or books, or at conferences.

The Holy Virgin praised to the skies because of her vitality, physical strength and resistance. Just imagine, she becomes pregnant and then immediately she leaves Nazareth and walks all the way to Judea, no buses, no cars, no roads, no airplanes, mostly on foot, or donkey. Look at her strength.

And then, we read in the Gospel, when Christ was being crucified she stood at the foot of the cross, not collapsed, she did not become hysterical. She stood for hours. What vitality, what physical resistance and strength. Not a word about her spiritual and supernatural attitude, not a word about the fact that she was carrying the Son of God in her womb and that obviously she was carried by Angels, she was held by God, because she was totally receptive to his message.

At Hunter University, the Bible was praised for its literary beauty, but there was not one acknowledgment that it is the Word of God. It was recognised that the Bible was not Homer, not Dante, but nevertheless worth reading.

People rave about St. Francis, he was so jolly, he was fun, but that he sang out of love for God, not a word of it. Voltaire, one of the worst enemies of the Church, declared that there was only one saint to his taste, St. Vincent de Paul, because he was doing social work! Don Bosco is praised because he was a great educator.

On American TV Mother Teresa was praised because she started from scratch and built up a rather impressive religious organisation with great efficiency. That her efficiency was based on holiness, that she prayed five hours on her knees every day, that she relied totally on God and was carried by faith, not a word of that.

Pope John Paul II was praised by a priest for delivering the Christian message in 54 languages and covering great mileage during his Pontificate.

The next most vicious and dangerous step is to place nature above the supernatural.

The moment my husband entered the Church, he fell in love with the Church and that love lasted as long as he lived. He saw the Church as a living bride of Christ. He saw the Church with supernatural eyes. He knew full well that there were bad popes and mediocre prelates, but his vision of the Church never changed from the first day to the last.

At the University of Munich, he was warned not to mention religion, but to call it metaphysics. He was told off for giving precedence to his students who were priests when entering or leaving a room.

The conclusion that I’m drawing is man’s fallen nature is tricky and he’s doing everything to try to undermine the message of the supernatural so that we can live as we please.

The great divide

I’m going to make a suggestion. If you read articles, you’ll read that traditional Catholics are opposed to liberal Catholics, or you’re going to be told that traditional Catholics are too far right. Maybe the best Bishop we have in the United States, Bishop Bruskewitz of Nebraska, who is to my mind a very great man and a blessing for us, was accused and turned upon. He was to receive an Honorary Doctorate, and was turned upon because he was too far right and when he heard this he had a beautiful answer (and I thought he was quoting my husband): "Neither right nor left; higher and deeper."

Now let us abolish the terms "conservative" or "liberal", the terms "left" and "right" which are secularistic. I suggest that we say from now on "those who have kept the sense of the supernatural and those who have lost it". That is the great divide, that is the essence.

Do you look at the Church and her teaching, whether dogmatic or moral, with a supernatural eye, or do you look at it with secular lenses? That is the divide. Left and right confuses the issue. Let us re-discover the greatness and the beauty of the supernatural and I claim that it is so difficult in the polluted world in which we live, that if we don’t pray for it every single day, we are going to be infected. It is the air that you breathe, the newspaper that you read, the television show that you see, time and again you will see this is a fight and attack on the supernatural.
Understanding a celibate clergy

Now today, after we have gone through these various steps, the supernatural has been eroded, particularly from the time of the Renaissance and from the time of the Protestant Deformation. It has been so weakened that today people lay down the mask and there is an open rebellion against the teaching of the Church. The Resurrection of Christ is denied, whether Christ actually founded the Church is challenged, the authority of Peter is rejected, the presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist is no longer believed in by the majority of Catholics, who get no Catholic education, or get a Catholic education which is a scandal and which must make the angels in Heaven cry; the celibacy of priests is rejected and the ordination of women advocated.

Feminism is one of the greatest threats to the Church. I have spent the last ten years fighting feminism in all its forms in the United States.

Now let me say one word about the celibacy of priests.

I claim that if you lose sight of the supernatural, you will never understand why there should be a celibate clergy. You’ve already chosen the secularistic norm and then say "Well, after all, Freud has convinced us that to have a sexual life is good and healthy and good for your nerves and if you don’t have that sort of thing then obviously you’re going to be crippled and you’re going to be repressed and you’re going to have all sorts of psychological problems. So why shouldn’t priests get married? And on top of it, there are so very few priests today and if you want to attract more vocations, let us abolish celibacy."

If you look at it from a supernatural point of view and you understand the extraordinary dignity granted to priests, the overwhelming gift which given to them, supernaturally, to become another Christ, to be able to change bread and wine into His Holy Body and Blood, to be able to say to someone "your sins are forgiven" and they are forgiven, this calls for a total self-donation.

I heard a very famous Catholic prelate, very high up who would say "I truly do not know why celibacy is required of priests". The sexual sphere is something very mysterious and very profound. So to speak, it is man’s secret, a great mystery which is confided to us and which is meant to be shared only in marriage as an expression of the total self-donation to another person. If there is something that the priest is called upon, it is to give himself completely and totally to God and this implies precisely the sealing of the sexual sphere because it symbolises that particular dimension of donation. This is what happens in marriage. The husband gives himself to the wife and vice versa. It’s not just a biological act, it is a profound psychological donation to another person.

Innumerable priests do their very best to make you forget they are priests, by dressing like lay people or cracking coarse jokes like lay people and then feel somehow they are in with the spirit of the times.

Woman’s religious mission

But let me turn to the question of feminism which has been one of my great concerns. Feminism started as a sort of revolt against sometimes very unfair and unjust treatment of women and one of my delights at City University, day after day, was how stupid my colleagues considered me. For a long time I was the only woman in the Department. And they used to say "A woman, how can you teach philosophy?" It’s very tragic, but what can you do? There is a history of male accomplishments.

If you read the Gospel, women play a very secondary role. Even the Holy Virgin is mentioned very rarely and speaks very little. The very moment that you put on supernatural lenses you are going to come to the strange conclusion that it is a privilege to be a woman. It is a privilege precisely because, to be in the background, from a secularistic point of view, to be humiliated, which often happens, is a tremendous supernatural advantage.

This is something St. Teresa understood so profoundly. It is not true that to be humiliated is to be inferior. It is not true that to be subject to one’s husband is to be inferior. If you read the Gospel of St. Luke when Christ was found in the Temple in Jerusalem and then went back to Nazareth with Mary and Joseph, it is said "He was subject to them".

Would you like to be in the situation of St. Joseph or in the situation of Mary? St. Joseph had original sin and was a creature. Mary had no original sin and was a creature. And the Child Jesus was God. And Who was subject to whom? God was subject to these creatures. It’s not a comfortable position to give orders to someone who is Divine. Therefore to be subject does not mean to be inferior, but it means simply the supernatural outlook that to accept humiliation is to come very close to God, because that is our way to Paradise. It’s a blessing. But I claim that women have a particularly religious mission.

Why a religious mission?

Because women, by their very nature are more receptive than men. You see this in the mystery of the sexual sphere. The woman is receptive, which doesn’t mean passive. That was one of the dreadful confusions made by Aristotle, that he identified passivity and receptivity and then declared the male superior to the female, which is a pagan nonsense.

The woman has a great advantage over the human male, she is receptive and religiously speaking, receptivity is a crucial virtue. The Holy Virgin taught us that when she said at the Annunciation "Be it done to me according to Thy Word". She wasn’t doing, she said "be it done". In other words she was receptive and her receptivity enabled the Holy Spirit to fecundate her and at that very moment the Son of God was made incarnate in her womb.

St. Teresa of Avila and St. Peter Alcantara say that many more women than men receive extraordinary mystical graces, and if you study the history of mysticism you will be amazed how many more women than men were mystics. Why? They are more receptive and you see, towards God we are all females. A saint becomes a male saint because he learned to be receptive to God’s grace. "Give it to me, O Lord, I cannot do it by myself".

The mystery of femininity

The woman is in a very particular way the guardian of purity and in the world in which we live, the world of sexual perversions and disaster, maybe it can be said this is because women have failed in their mission to stand for purity.

And why do I say she stands for purity and for virginity?

There’s something very interesting. If you look at the liturgy there are special Masses for popes, for apostles, martyrs, non-martyrs, confessors, non-confessors and when you turn to women, you have only two categories, virgin/non-virgin, martyr/non-martyr. This is something extremely interesting. There is no Mass for celibates, none, but there is a Mass for virgins.

This indicates very plainly that there is something extraordinarily great and mysterious about femininity. And why do I say it is so great and so mysterious? Because you all know that every little girl that is born, is born with a seal, so to speak, protecting the mystery of her femininity, which is the womb. There is a seal and if you understand, a seal always indicates something which is sacred. The seal, which doesn’t exist in the male body, is profoundly symbolic and says this belongs to God in a special way. This is a sphere which is so beautiful and so profound that it cannot be touched upon, except with God’s permission, in a Catholic marriage.

When a girl or young woman is permitted to give the keys of this mysterious domain, this closed garden, to her husband-to-be, she says: "Up until now I have kept this garden virginal, now God has given me the keys and is allowing me to give them to you and I know that you will penetrate into it, with trembling reverence and gratitude". The moment that a woman is embraced by her husband and a few hours afterwards she conceives, in this very moment, something absolutely amazing happens which once again illuminates the greatness of femininity. Neither husband nor wife can create a human soul. God alone can.

Of course there is the male seed and there is the female egg. These are material realities that God has put into the bodies and when they are united, an amazing thing happens. God creates a new human soul, totally new, which never existed before. Where? In the mystery of the female body. This is where the soul is conceived. It has nothing to do with the husband. The husband is out of the game at this point and the very moment that God creates a soul he implies that there is a special contact between God and the female body, so to speak, touching it in creating it. Once again, what an extraordinary privilege.

Sacred veiling

And this is why the female body should be veiled because everything which is sacred calls for veiling. When Moses came down form Mount Sinai, he veiled his face. Why did he veil his face? Because he had spoken to God and at that very moment there was a sacredness that called for veiling.

Now the stupid feminists after Vatican II suddenly "discovered" that when women go to Church veiled, it is a sign of their inferiority. The man takes off his hat and the woman puts on a veil. My goodness, how they have lost the sense of the supernatural. Veiling indicates sacredness and it is a special privilege of the woman that she enters church veiled.

You see the Church recognises things so profoundly that in some way you can say she has always recognised the special dignity granted to women. You cannot be a Christian and not recognise the privilege that it is to be a woman, because the most perfect of all creatures, the only creature born without original sin, is a woman and therefore once again you understand the extraordinary privilege of being one and having this image of the Holy Virgin, who was both Virgin and Mother and the two go beautifully together.

Virginity and maternity

It’s not so that if you remain a virgin you are going to have no children. The women who have most children are virgins. Mother Teresa of Calcutta had millions of children. You know in the best of cases women can have 18 or 20. Today they no longer do that, but it used to be the case. But if you are a virgin and you give yourself completely and totally, you become a mother to millions of people, begging for your help and begging for love because basically, what is maternity? Maternity is so holy, because it is to accept to suffer that someone may be born and therefore there is a beautiful parallel between maternity and the sacrifice of the Cross.

Christ accepted to die that we may be re-born to Eternal Life. In some way you can see this charism of women. Either virginity which can be combined with maternity or maternity without virginity are so sublime and are so beautiful that these two charisms are incompatible with the priesthood. They just don’t go together. The moment that you realise you have a maternal vocation, the moment that you realise you are called to virginity, it excludes the priesthood. They don’t go together. You cannot have all the charisms and what a blessing that men have the priesthood, because otherwise they could develop complexes of inferiority which would be a catastrophe because they don’t like it. As a matter of fact I think they would be very disturbed suddenly to realise the greatness of femininity.

Mother Teresa of Calcutta said "A woman cannot become a priest. There was only one creature on earth who could say with truth ‘This is My Body, This is My Blood’, the Holy Virgin and she was not chosen to be a priest." Therefore let us accept and realise to be a priest as St. Paul says quite explicitly, God chooses who is going to be a priest and he happens to have chosen the male sex. However, some stupid women would like to sell the privilege of their femininity, the mystery of their femininity, the sacredness of their femininity, their maternal vocation, to become priests and to steal it from men who have received it from God Himself. The Church has always honoured women in an extraordinary way.
Overcoming the evil of feminism

If you study pagan art, you will see that the pagans glorified the male genitals. The male organ was considered to be the symbol of strength and power. If you go to Pompeii or to Athens, to pagan countries, the male organ was always the one that was honored.

When the Church took over, she waged war on this pagan cult. She eliminated it, she fought against it. Sometimes you find remnants in pagan cultures, but the very moment the Church came it was officially eliminated and what did she do? She replaced it by a prayer, prayed by millions of people, day after day, century after century, which makes an explicit reference to the female organ par excellence, the womb: "Blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus". That is the place that the Church gives to women in the Church.

Therefore let us realize the tremendous greatness of the mission women have received and make them realize that they have to wake up to the greatness of this mission, to fight for it and to overcome the catastrophe and evil of feminism.

I have not chosen to be a woman, but the more I meditate on the Christian message, I am grateful I am one.

Is the Reformation Over?

2008-09-01T15:56:00.000-07:00

Geoffrey Wainwright
Originally published by First Things

An Evangelical Assessment of Contemporary Roman Catholicism

The character of this friendly book by Mark A. Noll and Carolyn Nystrom is best captured by its subtitle: “An Evangelical Assessment of Contemporary Roman Catholicism.” The book offers—from an evangelical perspective—an historical account of the shift that has occurred over the last fifty years toward a more mutually sympathetic attitude between some Protestant evangelicals and some Roman Catholics. The book’s geographical center of gravity lies in North America, and particularly in the United States.

For this reader at least, the literary and rhetorical difficulty for such a book consists in locating within a single frame of discourse the respective partners in the changing relationship, and this difficulty itself points to the theological and ecclesiological problem that the authors rightly sense underlies their title question: “Is the Reformation Over?” On the one hand, the Roman Catholic partners in the recent rapprochement always know that they belong to an ecclesial body that understands itself to be one, and in which the sole Church of Jesus Christ “subsists.” On the other hand, self-identified evangelicals are linked among themselves by a set of elective affinities, while belonging to a potpourri of Protestant denominations that display only a limited and variable concern about their own existence in institutional separation from one another, let alone from the Roman Catholic Church.

The recent shift in attitudes between some evangelicals and some Catholics naturally involves a reexamination of the doctrinal topics on which basic and continuing agreement between classical Protestantism and Roman Catholicism has sometimes been obscured—as well as a reexamination of those topics that were divisive in the sixteenth century and have remained controversial ever since. The shift also reflects some broader social and political developments. Finally, one cannot explain the change in attitudes without referring to the sometimes unacknowledged achievements of the ecumenical movement that began with the twentieth century and to which many self-styled evangelicals and the Roman Catholic Church itself were latecomers. Noll and Nystrom weave their substantive doctrinal discussion together with some of these contextual factors.

They begin impressionistically with some symptoms of popular change: the growing acceptability among Catholics of the iconic Baptist evangelist Billy Graham, the adoption by Catholics of the Alpha courses initiated at Holy Trinity Brompton, the inclusion of hymns by Protestant authors in Catholic hymnals, the welcome afforded by many evangelicals to the witness and writings of Pope John Paul II, a favorable review by the star evangelical intellectual J.I. Packer of a book titled The Born-Again Catholic (1983), and so on.

Mutual polemics between Catholics and Protestants in general go back to the sixteenth century. Dating at least from the declaration of the Evangelical Alliance at New York in 1873 that “the most formidable foe of living Christianity among us is . . . the nominally Christian Church of Rome,” the particular “historic standoff” between evangelicals and Catholics lasted, as our authors show, in virtually unmitigated form until the late 1950s. The “rapid about-face” began in the early 1960s under the impulse of the Second Vatican Council and “its willingness to address non-Catholic Christians as ‘brothers,’ to acknowledge that blame lay on both sides for the ecclesiastical ruptures of the Reformation, to stress the unique role of Christ as mediator between God and humanity, and to urge ordinary lay Catholics to live lives of practical Christian holiness.” Especially important in the United States was the accommodation between the religious claims of the Catholic Church and the American passion for civil liberties, an accommodation symbolized by the election of the Catholic John F. Kennedy as President in 1960 and by the Vatican II declaration on religious liberty, which owed much to the American Jesuit John Courtney Murray.

Noll and Nystrom next survey the international bilateral dialogues on matters of doctrine that followed in the wake of Vatican II between the Roman Catholic Church, on the one hand, and the various “world confessional families” or “Christian world communions,” on the other. They note the theological agreements registered by the diverse bilateral commissions and the remaining differences and problems acknowledged by them. Curiously, Noll and Nystrom do not stop to ask why the Catholic Church launched precisely this pattern of multiple bilateral dialogues, nor why the various Protestant bodies so readily entered into these dialogues. Significantly—and this may point to an ecclesiological blind spot on their part—Noll and Nystrom fail to remark that the reports of such dialogues have not so far been adopted into the official teaching of either the Catholic Church or of the participating Protestant denominations. The exception is the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification signed by the Roman Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation on October 31, 1999. The authors recognize the substantive importance of this text but not the ecclesiological significance of its official adoption.

Even more strangely, Noll and Nystrom ignore the doctrinal work done in multilateral dialogue through the World Council of Churches, and particularly its Commission on Faith and Order. The classic Protestant bodies were the chief initiators of such multilateral ecumenism from its modern beginnings, and since 1968 twelve of the Commission’s official members have been Roman Catholic. Several of these theologians contributed significantly to the 1982 Lima text on Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry, to which the official response of the Catholic Church was very positive. Ignoring the convergences registered and acknowledged in the Lima text, Noll and Nystrom seem to assume that historic differences in sacramentology between Catholics and Protestants—and indeed among the latter (including evangelicals)—remain basically unchanged. Their lack of attention to Commission on Faith and Order proves a liability when the authors come to their more systematic discussion of such questions as Scripture and Tradition, and (crucially) the doctrine of the Church.

After their survey of the bilateral dialogues, Noll and Nystrom examine the universal Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992; English 1994). “Evangelical or confessional Protestants who pick up the Catechism will,” they say, “find themselves in for a treat.” The “depth of scholarship, worn quite lightly” is appreciated, as well as the “strikingly pastoral tone.” The Catechism’s substance is approved at many points, and “in the areas where Protestants and Catholics are likely to disagree (for example, the sacraments, pope, Mary, purgatory), it expresses official Catholic teaching clearly,” so that Protestant readers may at least “come away with a better understanding of why Catholics think as they do on such subjects.”

Next up is the informal American phenomenon of Evangelicals and Catholics Together, which was sparked in the 1990s by the perceived need for a common witness on current social issues (“cobelligerence”). Later, the group also considered more fundamental theological matters, such as the doctrine of salvation and the ecclesiological questions implied in different understandings of the relation between Scripture and Tradition and of “the communion of saints.”

The following chapter describes some individual reactions to apparent Catholic-evangelical rapprochement, which range from antagonism through criticism and partnership to conversion in one direction or the other. The authors disarmingly look for lessons that can be drawn by evangelicals from the reasons given by former evangelicals who have gone “home to Rome”: a richer worship, a greater depth in history, a religious certainty, an identifiably united Church, a firm teaching authority. In turn, evangelicals have some justified criticisms to address to historic and contemporary Catholicism. Mutual admonition is the order of the day.

In the last two chapters, the authors make their concluding assessment: first in social and political terms by analyzing the positions of evangelicals and Catholics with regard to main themes in American history; second in more biblical and theological terms as they seek to answer the question they set themselves in their title. They take pride in the contribution of Protestantism to liberal democracy.

No mention is made of the heresy of “Americanism” that was condemned as a form of modernism by Pope Leo XIII at the very end of the nineteenth century. Noll and Nystrom seem less perturbed than they might be by the ways in which the individualism endemic to Protestantism may have contributed to the contemporary “dictatorship of relativism” castigated by Joseph Ratzinger on the eve of his election as Pope Benedict XVI.

Biblically and theologically, the authors welcome some convergence between the parties on the doctrine of salvation but rightly recognize the doctrine of the Church as “the crux of Catholic-evangelical disagreement.” Although they cite the Baptist theologian Timothy George in a way that shows his awareness of the ground-breaking work of the World Conference on Faith and Order at Montreal in 1963 on “Scripture, Tradition, and traditions,” Noll and Nystrom make no systematic use of his insights; they also neglect to note the phraseology of Pope John Paul II when he called for further study on “the relationship between Sacred Scripture as the highest authority in matters of faith and Sacred Tradition as indispensable to the interpretation of the Word of God” (Ut Unum Sint, 79)—a formulation that I think may hold the best promise of resolving the question since the sixteenth century. Nor do the authors pick up on the same pope’s astonishing invitation of the leaders of other churches and their theologians to a “patient and fraternal dialogue” to help find ways in which the pastoral and doctrinal ministry of Peter might be differently exercised in the service of universal Christian unity—a move that opened the prospect of a “reformed papacy” such as Luther, at least, was willing to contemplate.

Disappointingly, our authors seem to acquiesce in the false opposition often drawn between the Lausanne Covenant of Evangelicals in 1974 and the Catholic Catechism of 1992: “For Catholics, the Church constitutes believers; for evangelicals, believers constitute the Church. For Catholics, individual believers are a function of the Church; for evangelicals, the Church is a function of individual believers.” Most serious of all, our authors share the regular inability of evangelicals to grapple with the necessary tangibility of ecclesial unity. This tangibility was given its classic description by the Commission on Faith and Order, approved by the New Delhi Assembly of the World Council of Churches in 1961, and recently taken up again in the Princeton Proposal for Christian Unity, In One Body through the Cross (2003). The unity that is both God’s gift and our task is being made visible as all in each place who are baptized into Jesus Christ and confess him as Lord and Savior are brought by the Holy Spirit into one fully committed fellowship, holding the one apostolic faith, preaching the one Gospel, breaking the one bread, joining in common prayer, and having a corporate life reaching out in witness and service to all and who at the same time are united with the whole Christian fellowship in all places and all ages in such wise that ministry and members are accepted by all, and that all can act and speak together as occasion requires for the tasks to which God calls his people.

The vision of Noll and Nystrom does not rise above “cooperation” between Catholics and evangelicals; it is innocent of the category of “degrees of communion” introduced by the Vatican II decree on ecumenism that opened the way to a dynamic growth towards the full “reintegration of unity” in the one Body.

Instead, they seem to acquiesce in the continuance, at least on this side of the city of God, of evangelical Protestantism and Roman Catholicism as two “linguistic systems,” which are at once partially compatible and incommensurable.

References

Geoffrey Wainwright holds the Cushman Chair of Christian Theology at Duke University.

Is the Reformation Over? An Evangelical Assessment of Contemporary Roman Catholicism-By Mark A. Noll and Carolyn Nystrom, Baker Academic. 272 pp. $24.99.

Moscow's Assault on the Vatican

2008-09-01T15:52:00.000-07:00

Ion Mihai Pacepa
Published originally by National Review

The KGB made corrupting the Church a priority.

The Soviet Union was never comfortable living in the same world with the Vatican. The most recent disclosures document that the Kremlin was prepared to go to any lengths to counter the Catholic Church’s strong anti-Communism.

In March 2006 an Italian parliamentary commission concluded “beyond any reasonable doubt that the leaders of the Soviet Union took the initiative to eliminate the pope Karol Wojtyla,” in retaliation for his support to the dissident Solidarity movement in Poland. In January 2007, when documents disclosed that the newly appointed archbishop of Warsaw, Stanislaw Wielgus, had collaborated with Poland’s Communist-era political police, he admitted the accusation and resigned. The following day the rector of Krakow’s Wawel Cathedral, the burial site of Polish kings and queens, resigned for the same reason. Then it was learned that Michal Jagosz, a member of the Vatican’s tribunal considering sainthood for the late Pope John Paul II, has been accused of being a former Communist secret police agent; according to the Polish media, he had been recruited in 1984 before leaving Poland for an assignment to the Vatican. Currently, a book is about to be published that will identify 39 other priests whose names have been found in Krakow secret police files, some of whom are now bishops. Moreover, this seems to be just scratching the surface. A special commission will soon start investigating the past of all religious servants during the Communist era, as thousands more Catholic priests throughout that country are believed to have collaborated with the secret police. And this is just Poland — the archives of the KGB and those of the political police in the rest of the former Soviet bloc have yet to be opened on the subject of operations against the Vatican.

In my other life, when I was at the center of Moscow’s foreign-intelligence wars, I myself was caught up in a deliberate Kremlin effort to smear the Vatican, by portraying Pope Pius XII as a coldhearted Nazi sympathizer. Ultimately, the operation did not cause any lasting damage, but it left a residual bad taste that is hard to rinse away. The story has never before been told.

Battling the Church

In February 1960, Nikita Khrushchev approved a super-secret plan for destroying the Vatican’s moral authority in Western Europe. The idea was the brainchild of KGB chairman Aleksandr Shelepin and Aleksey Kirichenko, the Soviet Politburo member responsible for international policies. Up until that time, the KGB had fought its “mortal enemy” in Eastern Europe, where the Holy See had been crudely attacked as a cesspool of espionage in the pay of American imperialism, and its representatives had been summarily jailed as spies. Now Moscow wanted the Vatican discredited by its own priests, on its home territory, as a bastion of Nazism.

Eugenio Pacelli, by then Pope Pius XII, was selected as the KGB’s main target, its incarnation of evil, because he had departed this world in 1958. “Dead men cannot defend themselves” was the KGB’s latest slogan. Moscow had just gotten a black eye for framing and imprisoning a living Vatican prelate, József Cardinal Mindszenty, the primate of Hungary, in 1948. During the 1956 Hungarian Revolution he had escaped from jail and found asylum in the U.S. Embassy in Budapest, where he began writing his memoirs. As the details of how he had been framed became known to Western journalists, he was widely seen as a saintly hero and martyr.

Because Pius XII had served as the papal nuncio in Munich and Berlin when the Nazis were beginning their bid for power, the KGB wanted to depict him as an anti-Semite who had encouraged Hitler’s Holocaust. The hitch was that the operation was not to give the least hint of Soviet bloc involvement. The whole dirty job had to be carried out by Western hands, using evidence from the Vatican itself. That would correct another mistake made in the case of Mindszenty, who had been framed with counterfeit Soviet and Hungarian documents. (On February 6, 1949, just days before Mindszenty’s trial ended, Hanna Sulner, the Hungarian handwriting expert who had fabricated the “evidence” used to frame the cardinal, escaped to Vienna and displayed microfilms of the “documents” on which the show trial was founded. Hanna demonstrated, in an excruciatingly detailed testimony, that all were forged documents, “some ostensibly in the cardinal’s hand, others bearing his supposed signature,” produced by her.)

To avoid another Mindszenty catastrophe, the KGB needed some original Vatican documents, even ones only remotely connected with Pius XII, which its dezinformatsiya experts could slightly modify and project in the “proper light” to prove the Pope’s “true colors.” The difficulty was that the KGB had no access to the Vatican archives, and that was where my DIE, the Romanian foreign intelligence service, came in. The new chief of the Soviet foreign intelligence service, General Aleksandr Sakharovsky, had created the DIE in 1949 and had until recently been our chief Soviet adviser; he knew that the DIE was in an excellent position to contact the Vatican and obtain approval to search its archives. In 1959, when I had been assigned to West Germany in the cover position as deputy chief of the Romanian Mission, I had conducted a “spy swap” under which two DIE officers (Colonel Gheorghe Horobet and Major Nicolae Ciuciulin), who had been caught red-handed in West Germany, had been exchanged for Roman Catholic bishop Augustin Pacha, who had been jailed by the KGB on a spurious charge of espionage and was finally returned to the Vatican via West Germany.

Infiltrating the Vatican

“Seat-12” was the code name given to this operation against Pius XII, and I became its Romanian point man. To facilitate my job, Sakharovsky had authorized me to (falsely) inform the Vatican that Romania was ready to restore its broken relations with the Holy See, in exchange for access to its archives and a one-billion-dollar, interest-free loan for 25 years. (Romania’s relations with the Vatican had been severed in 1951, when Moscow accused the Vatican’s nunciatura in Romania of being an undercover CIA front and closed its offices. The nunciatura buildings in Bucharest had been turned over to the DIE, and now housed a foreign language school.) The access to the Papal archives, I was to tell the Vatican, was needed in order to find historical roots that would help the Romanian government publicly justify its change of heart toward the Holy See. The billion (no, that is not a typographical error), I was told, had been introduced into the game to make Romania’s alleged turnabout more plausible. “If there’s one thing those monks understand, it’s money,” Sakharovsky remarked.

My earlier involvement in the exchange of Bishop Pacha for the two DIE officers did indeed open doors for me. A month after receiving the KGB’s instructions, I had my first contact with a Vatican representative. For secrecy reasons that meeting — and most of the ones that followed — took place at a hotel in Geneva, Switzerland. There I was introduced to an “influential member of the diplomatic corps” who, I was told, had begun his career working in the Vatican archives. His name was Agostino Casaroli, and I would soon learn that he was truly influential. On the spot this monsignor gave me access to the Vatican archives, and soon three young DIE undercover officers posing as Romanian priests were digging around in the papal archives. Casaroli also agreed “in principle” to Bucharest’s demand for the interest free loan, but he said the Vatican wished to place certain conditions on it. (Up until 1978, when I left Romania for good, I was still negotiating for that loan, which had gone down to $200 million.)

During 1960-62, the DIE succeeded in pilfering hundreds of documents connected in any way with Pope Pius XII out of the Vatican Archives and the Apostolic Library. Everything was immediately sent to the KGB via special courier. In actual fact, no incriminating material against the pontiff ever turned up in all those secretly photographed documents. Mostly they were copies of personal letters and transcripts of meetings and speeches, all couched in the routine kind of diplomatic language one would expect to find. Nevertheless, the KGB kept asking for more documents. And we sent more.

The KGB produces a play

In 1963, General Ivan Agayants, the famous chief of the KGB’s disinformation department, landed in Bucharest to thank us for our help. He told us that “Seat-12” had materialized into a powerful play attacking Pope Pius XII, entitled The Deputy, an oblique reference to the pope as Christ’s representative on earth. Agayants took credit for the outline of the play, and he told us that it had voluminous appendices of background documents put together by his experts with help from the documents we had purloined from the Vatican. Agayants also told us that The Deputy’s producer, Erwin Piscator, was a devoted Communist who had a longstanding relationship with Moscow. In 1929 he had founded the Proletarian Theater in Berlin, then sought political asylum in the Soviet Union when Hitler came to power, and a few years later had “emigrated” to the United States. In 1962 Piscator had returned to West Berlin to produce The Deputy.

Throughout my years in Romania, I always took my KGB bosses with a grain of salt, because they used to juggle the facts around so as to make Soviet intelligence the mother and father of everything. But I had reason to believe Agayants’s self-serving claim. He was a living legend in the field of desinformatsiya. In 1943, as the rezident in Iran, Agayants launched the disinformation report that Hitler had set up a special team to kidnap President Franklin Roosevelt from the American Embassy in Tehran during the Allied Summit to be held there. As a result, Roosevelt agreed to be headquartered in a villa within the “safety” of the Soviet Embassy compound, which was guarded by a large military unit. All the Soviet personnel assigned to that villa were undercover intelligence officers who spoke English, but, with few exceptions, they kept that a secret so as to be able to eavesdrop. Even given the limited technical capabilities of that day, Agayants was able to provide Stalin with hourly monitoring reports on the American and British guests. That helped Stalin obtain Roosevelt’s tacit agreement to let him retain the Baltic countries and the rest of the territories occupied by the Soviet Union in 1939-40. Agayants was also credited with having induced Roosevelt to use the familiar “Uncle Joe” for Stalin at that summit. According to what Sakharovsky told us, Stalin was more elated over that than he was even over his territorial gains. “The cripple’s mine!” he reportedly exulted.

Just a year before The Deputy was launched, Agayants had pulled off another masterful coup. He fabricated out of whole cloth a manuscript designed to persuade the West that, deep down, the Kremlin thought highly of the Jews; this was published in Western Europe, to great popular success, as a book entitled Notes for a Journal. The manuscript was attributed to Maxim Litvinov, né Meir Walach, the former Soviet commissar for foreign affairs, who had been fired in 1939 when Stalin purged his diplomatic apparatus of Jews in preparation for signing his “non-aggression” pact with Hitler. (The Stalin-Hitler Non-Aggression Pact was signed on August 23, 1939, in Moscow. It had a secret Protocol that partitioned Poland between the two signatories and gave the Soviets a free hand in Estonia, Latvia, Finland, Bessarabia, and Northern Bukovina.) This Agayants book was so flawlessly counterfeited that Britain’s most prominent historian on Soviet Russia, Edward Hallet Carr, was totally convinced of its authenticity and in fact wrote an introduction for it. (Carr had authored a ten-volume History of Soviet Russia.)

The Deputy saw the light in 1963 as the work of an unknown West German named Rolf Hochhuth, under the title Der Stellvertreter. Ein christliches Trauerspiel (The Deputy, a Christian Tragedy). Its central thesis was that Pius XII had supported Hitler and encouraged him to go ahead with the Jewish Holocaust. It immediately ignited a huge controversy around Pius XII, who was depicted as a cold, heartless man more concerned about Vatican properties than about the fate of Hitler’s victims. The original text presents an eight-hour play, backed by some 40 to 80 pages (depending on the edition) of what Hochhuth called “historical documentation.” In a newspaper article published in Germany in 1963, Hochhuth defends his portrayal of Pius XII, saying: “The facts are there — forty crowded pages of documentation in the appendix to my play.” In a radio interview given in New York in 1964, when The Deputy opened there, Hochhuth said, “I considered it necessary to add to the play a historical appendix, fifty to eighty pages (depending on the size of the print).” In the original edition, the appendix is entitled “Historische Streiflichter” (historical sidelights). The Deputy has been translated into some 20 languages, drastically cut and with the appendix usually omitted.

Before writing The Deputy, Hochhuth, who did not have a high school diploma (Abitur), was working in various inconspicuous capacities for the Bertelsmann publishing house. In interviews he claimed that in 1959 he took a leave of absence from his job and went to Rome, where he spent three months talking to people and then writing the first draft of the play, and where he posed “a series of questions” to one bishop whose name he refused to reveal. Hardly likely! At about that same time I used to visit the Vatican fairly regularly as an accredited messenger from a head of state, and I was never able to get any talkative bishop off into a corner with me — and it was not for lack of trying. The DIE illegal officers we infiltrated into the Vatican also encountered almost insurmountable difficulties in penetrating the Vatican secret archives, even though they had airtight cover as priests.

During my old days in the DIE, when I would ask my personnel chief, General Nicolae Ceausescu (the dictator’s brother), to give me a rundown of the file on some subordinate, he would always ask me, “For promotion or demotion?” During its first ten years of life, the Deputy leaned toward the Pope’s demotion. It generated a flurry of books and articles, some accusing and some defending the pontiff. Some went so far as to lay the blame for the Auschwitz atrocities on the pope’s shoulders, some meticulously tore Hochhuth’s arguments to shreds, but all contributed to the huge attention this rather stilted play received in its day. Today, many people who have never heard of The Deputy are sincerely convinced that Pius XII was a cold and evil man who hated the Jews and helped Hitler do away with them. As KGB chairman Yury Andropov, the unparalleled master of Soviet deception, used to tell me, people are more ready to believe smut than holiness.

Falsehoods undermined

Toward the mid 1970s, The Deputy started running out of steam. In 1974 Andropov conceded to us that, had we known then what we know today, we would never have gone after Pope Pius XII. What now made the difference was newly released information showing that Hitler, far from being friendly with Pius XII, had in fact been plotting against him.

Just a few days before Andropov’s admission, the former supreme commander of the German SS (Schutzstaffel) squadron in Italy during World War II, General Friedrich Otto Wolff, had been released from jail and confessed that in 1943 Hitler had ordered him to abduct Pope Pius XII from the Vatican. That order had been so hush-hush that it never turned up after the war in any Nazi archive. Nor had it come out at any of the many debriefings of Gestapo and SS officers conducted by the victorious Allies. In his confession Wolff claimed that he had replied to Hitler that his order would take six weeks to carry out. Hitler, who blamed the pope for the overthrow of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, wanted it done immediately. Eventually Wolff persuaded Hitler that there would be a great negative response if the plan were implemented, and the Führer dropped it.

It was also during 1974 that Cardinal Mindszenty published his book Memoirs, which describes in agonizing detail how he was framed in Communist Hungary. On the evidence of fabricated documents, he was charged with “treason, misuse of foreign currency, and conspiracy,” offenses “all punishable by death or life imprisonment.” He also describes how his falsified “confession” then took on a life of its own. “It seemed to me that anyone should at once have recognized this document as a crude forgery, since it is the product of a bungling, uncultivated mind,” the cardinal writes. “But when I subsequently went through foreign books, newspapers, and magazines that dealt with my case and commented on my ‘confession,’ I realized that the public must have concluded that the ‘confession’ had actually been composed by me, although in a semiconscious state and under the influence of brainwashing… [T]hat the police would have published a document they had themselves manufactured seemed altogether too brazen to be believed.” Furthermore, Hanna Sulner, the Hungarian handwriting expert used to frame the cardinal, who had escaped to Vienna, confirmed that she had forged Mindszenty’s “confession.”

A few years later, Pope John Paul II started the process of sanctifying Pius XII, and witnesses from all over the world have compellingly proved that Pius XII was an enemy, not a friend, of Hitler. Israel Zoller, the chief rabbi of Rome between 1943-44, when Hitler took over that city, devoted an entire chapter of his memoirs to praising the leadership of Pius XII. “The Holy Father sent by hand a letter to the bishops instructing them to lift the enclosure from convents and monasteries, so that they could become refuges for the Jews. I know of one convent where the Sisters slept in the basement, giving up their beds to Jewish refugees.” On July 25, 1944, Zoller was received by Pope Pius XII. Notes taken by Vatican secretary of state Giovanni Battista Montini (who would become Pope Paul VI) show that Rabbi Zoller thanked the Holy Father for all he had done to save the Jewish community of Rome — and his thanks were transmitted over the radio. On February 13, 1945, Rabbi Zoller was baptized by Rome’s auxiliary bishop Luigi Traglia in the Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli. In gratitude to Pius XII, Zoller took the Christian name of Eugenio (the pope’s name). A year later Zoller’s wife and daughter were also baptized.

David G. Dalin, in The Myth of Hitler’s Pope: How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews From the Nazis, published a few months ago, has compiled further overwhelming proof of Eugenio Pacelli’s friendship for the Jews beginning long before he became pope. At the start of World War II, Pope Pius XII’s first encyclical was so anti-Hitler that the Royal Air Force and the French air force dropped 88,000 copies of it over Germany.

Over the past 16 years, the freedom of religion has been restored in Russia, and a new generation has been struggling to develop a new national identity. We can only hope that President Vladimir Putin will see fit to open the KGB archives and set forth on the table, for all to see, how the Communists maligned one of the most important popes of the last century.

References

Lt. General Ion Mihai Pacepa is the highest-ranking intelligence officer ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc. His book Red Horizons has been republished in 27 countries.

The Solzhenitsyn Interview

2008-09-01T15:14:00.000-07:00

Joseph Pearce
Extracted from St. Austin Review

In the course of his research for Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile Joseph Pearce traveled to Moscow to interview the Nobel Prize winning author. Arguably one of the most significant writers of the twentieth century, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, according to Joseph Pearce, has too often been stereotyped as a prophet of doom, a pessimist, someone out of touch with reality, and irrelevant. Pearce sets out to challenge this typical media typecasting: Solzhenitsyn as "paradox personified: the pessimistic optimist." He shows how Solzhenitsyn's Christian faith brought him to the truth that shines so clearly in all his writing: that "creeping knowledge that human history may be little more than a long defeat in a land of exile. Yet such a defeat, however long, is rooted in time: temporal and therefore temporary.".

Pearce: In your work as a whole would you say that the spiritual or the philosophical dimension is more important than the political?

Solzhenitsyn: Yes certainly. First would be the literary side, then the spiritual and philosophical. The political side is required principally because of the necessity of the current Russian position.

Pearce: Do you feel that many of the problems in the modern world are due to an inadequate grasp of spiritual and philosophical truth by the population as a whole?

Solzhenitsyn: This is certainly true. Man has set for himself the goal of conquering the world but in the processes loses his soul. That which is called humanism, but what would be more correctly called irreligious anthropocentrism, cannot yield answers to the most essential questions of our life. We have arrived at an intellectual chaos.

Pearce: In Russia In the Abyss you say that "our frenzied government is stabbing to death the future of Russia". Why did you chose to use such strong and provocative language?

Solzhenitsyn: We are exiting from communism in a most unfortunate and awkward way. It would have been difficult to design a path out of communism worse than the one that has been followed. Our government declared that it is conducting some kind of great reforms. In reality, no real reforms were begun and no one at any point has declared a coherent programme. The name of "reform" simply covers what is latently a process of the theft of the national heritage.

Pearce: You have also written that "Russia has entered a blind alley and has nowhere to go". What did you mean by this?

Solzhenitsyn: The central government possesses no plan of finding the way out of this blind alley. They have been pursuing a course of simply trying to stay in power by whichever means are possible. Across the country, Russians, whether political or otherwise, have some kind of ideas about how to save the country, about how to find the way out. There are a lot of clear thinkers everywhere. They may suggest some project, some plan for the future. I know this because a significant portion of these get mailed directly to me. These people hope that I will be able to say something and move it upwards, but in these circumstances I cannot do this.

Pearce: Do you believe that the West is in the same blind alley and also has nowhere to go?

Solzhenitsyn: Over the last twelve years I have stopped viewing Russia as something very distinct from the West. Today when we say the West we are already referring to the West and to Russia. We could use the word "modernity" if we exclude Africa, and the Islamic world, and partially China. With the exception of those areas we should not use the words "the West" but the word "modernity". The modern world. And yes, then I would say that there are ills that are characteristic, that have plagued the West for a long time and now Russia has quickly adopted them also.

Pearce: You are often accused of "doom and gloom". How would you respond?

Solzhenitsyn: This is a consequence of the fact that people don't read, they just glance through. Let me give you an example: The Gulag Archipelago. There are horrific stories in that book but throughout, through it all, there is a spirit of catharsis. In Russia In the Abyss, I have not painted the dark reality in rose-tinted shades but I do include a clear way, a search for something brighter, some way out, most importantly in the spiritual sense because I cannot suggest political ways out, that is the task of politicians, so it is simply that those who accuse me of this do not know how to read.

Pearce: A British journalist recently stated that you believe that Russia has overthrown the evils of communism only to replace them with the evils of capitalism, is that a fair statement of your position and, if so, what do you feel are the worst evils of capitalism?

Solzhenitsyn: In different places over the years I have had to prove that socialism, which to many western thinkers is a sort of kingdom of justice, was in fact full of coercion, of bureaucratic greed and corruption and avarice, and consistent within itself that socialism cannot be implemented without the aid of coercion. Communist propaganda would sometimes include statements such as "we include almost all the commandments of the Gospel in our ideology". The difference is that the Gospel asks all this to be achieved through love, through self-limitation, but socialism only uses coercion. This is one point. Untouched by the breath of God, unrestricted by human conscience, both capitalism and socialism are repulsive.

Pearce: Does the fact that modernity makes a virtue out of selfishness constitute one of the keys to its enduring success? Joseph Pearce and Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn: That's very correct. It does make a virtue out of selfishness and Protestantism made a major contribution to this.

Pearce: Why Protestantism?

Solzhenitsyn: Of course, one cannot declare that only my faith is correct and all other faiths are not. Of course God is endlessly multi-dimensional so every religion that exists on earth represents some face, some side of God. One must not have any negative attitude to any religion but nonetheless the depth of understanding God and the depth of applying God's commandments is different in different religions. In this sense we have to admit that Protestantism has brought everything down only to faith. Calvinism says that nothing depends on man, that faith is already predetermined. Also in its sharp protest against Catholicism, Protestantism rushed to discard together with ritual all the mysterious, the mythical and mystical aspects of the Faith. In that sense it has impoverished religion.

Pearce: Is the only hope a return to religion?

Solzhenitsyn: Not a return to religion but an elevation toward religion. The thing is that religion itself cannot but be dynamic which is why "return" is an incorrect term. A return to the forms of religion which perhaps existed a couple of centuries ago is absolutely impossible. On the contrary, in order to combat modern materialistic mores, as religion must, to fight nihilism and egotism, religion must also develop, must be flexible in its forms, and it must have a correlation with the cultural forms of the epoch. Religion always remains higher than everyday life. In order to make the elevation towards religion easier for people, religion must be able to alter its forms in relation to the consciousness of modern man.

Pearce: Related to this, there are two points of view amongst members of the Catholic Church about the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. One side says that it was good because it modernised the Church, the other side saw it as a surrender to the modern values with which the Church was essentially at war. What are your own views?

Solzhenitsyn: This question stands also now before the Russian Orthodox Church. It also has two currents within it. The one which is hierarchically dominated does not want to develop at all whereas the reformers seek change. For instance, a question peculiar to the Russian Orthodox Church is should we continue to use Old Church Slavonic or should we start to introduce more of the contemporary Russian language into the service. I understand the fears of both those in the Orthodox and in the Catholic Church, the wariness, the hesitation and the fear that this is lowering the Church to the modern condition, the modern surroundings. I understand this fear but alas I also fear that if religion does not allow itself to change it will be impossible to return the world to religion because the world is incapable on its own of rising as high as the old demands of religion. Religion needs to come to meet it somewhat.

Pearce: Does this pessimism, for want of a better word, apply to society's prospects of rediscovering, or rising to, religion?

Solzhenitsyn: I would have to say that the road is very difficult and the hope is very small but it is not excluded. History has in different questions laid out some tremendous turnabouts and curves.

Pearce: In that case do you see the likelihood that religion will continue much as it is at the moment as being practised only by a minority?

Solzhenitsyn: Yes I do. But that doesn't mean that believers should let their hands drop or that they should give up. I am deeply convinced that God is present both in the lives of every person and also in the lives of entire nations.

Pearce: What is the present position of Christianity in Russia?

Solzhenitsyn: After the permission was freely given for people to practise their faith the number of Christianity's adherents has grown. Many under an atheistic press, a vice grip, had forgotten their faith so there is now something of a return to Christianity yet simultaneously there is a decay of values which accompanies the rise of consumer society. It is a simultaneous process.

Pearce: Do you feel that the future of Russia is bound up with Christianity and, if so, is it bound up with the future of the Russian Orthodox Church?

Solzhenitsyn: The Orthodox Church is the central current of Christianity in this country. I would say that the Christian parts of Russia will not abandon this path but I would hesitate to predict to what extent this would influence the development of events for the whole country. For the entire future of Russia, I would say that the situation is in a balance and it is unclear which way this balance will go. As this is true for the whole of Russia, and all the issues to do with Russia, it is also unclear to what degree the development of Christianity will be intertwined in Russia and will influence the way the whole country goes. We cannot predict that now.

Pearce: If Christianity is the will of God and at the same time is destined to perform a minor role in the future of humanity, is this the will of God or is it the result of human free will turning to evil, which God permits?
Solzhenitsyn: It is a result of the free will of man and one must not detach that from the predictions of the end of the world in the Gospels. In the Scriptures let us note that which predicts the future always talks of the road toward the anti-Christ and not the triumph of God's will.

Pearce: In retrospect, what were the most important and defining moments in your life?

Solzhenitsyn: I will try to answer. Firstly, army and the front because I lived without a father. My father died before I was born and so I had lacked upbringing by men. In the army I went away from that. That's first. Second would be the arrest because it allowed me to understand Soviet reality in its entirety and not merely the one-sided view I had of it previous to the arrest.

Pearce: How would you like to be remembered to posterity?

Solzhenitsyn: That's a complex question. I would hope that all that has been said about me, slandered about me, in the course of decades, would, like mud, dry up and fall off. It is amazing how much gibberish has been talked about me, more so in the west than in the USSR. In the USSR it was all one-directional propaganda, and (laughs) everyone knew that it was just Communist propaganda.

Notes

Joseph Pearce. An Interview with Alexander Solzhenitsyn, St. Austin Review 2 no. 2 (February, 2003).
This article reprinted with permission from St. Austin Review. From England's Catholic publisher, The Saint Austin Press, the Saint Austin Review (StAR) is a magazine which brings together scholars, journalists, poets and spiritual leaders from around the English-speaking world. People such as Joseph Pearce, James Schall SJ, Robert Asch, Benedict Groeschel CFR, Janet Smith, Patrick Riley, and many more. Each month 12 pages of this 44-page magazine are devoted to a particular cultural or spiritual theme.

It is Wonderful For Us To Be Here!

2008-09-01T10:59:00.000-07:00

Mauro Giuseppe Lepori
Extracted from the book Simone Chiamato Pietro

In the footsteps of a man pursuing God

For six days Simon stood a bit apart: he remained in the group and listened to Jesus but did not dare to talk to Him, ask Him questions or come up with the usual comments. And yet he could clearly see that the attitude of the Teacher towards him had not changed. Jesus did not hold a grudge against anyone, not even against the Pharisees with whom he often argued. The anger of Jesus was not the kind of outburst common among men. Peter realized that the Lord's anger was always the expression of profound suffering. Every time the Teacher turned severe or was coarse with them, they quickly understood that in such occasions Jesus did not have any other way of expressing how much he loved them.

Truly the Teacher appeared to treat Peter more abruptly than he treated the others. In the beginning Simon suffered because he was under the impression that Jesus did not find him very likable, but later he acknowledged that the fault was in his own character. It was he who provoked Jesus' reaction. In every occasion Peter ended up upset with himself: "Why do you always have to make your remarks, speak your mind, answer when no one has asked you, or when the matter does not concern you?" Nevertheless, every time, Peter was the first to ask for forgiveness, make up for his mistakes and his uncontrollable outbursts.

In time however, Peter realized that his understanding was too superficial because he could see that Jesus never reacted instinctively at other's actions. His patience was infinite. Peter understood that in Jesus everything was love and desire for His neighbor's good. Then, he thought, he had to ask himself what greater good Jesus desired for him when He treated him so harshly.

After feeling anguished and wounded at first, Peter started to reflect on Jesus' recent reaction. Never had the Teacher been so harsh and offensive with him or with any other person: "Stand behind me, Satan!" He had given him the title of His own worst enemy, the one against whom Jesus struggled. How many times had Peter been present with the others at the disputes between the Teacher and the demons that possessed so many a hapless one! It was horrible to hear them scream and howl once they were caught. Then Simon remained troubled, with a feeling of fright that caused him nightmare after nightmare. He could find peace only by getting close to Jesus or at least thinking of Him.

But now, it was him whom Jesus had called Satan! All because Peter rebelled at the thought that the Lord could suffer and die terribly. Peter wondered if there was any connection with Jesus' prediction defining him as the "rock" of His Church and the destiny that He had announced for Himself. Simon would have never ever accepted any appointments or honors if it were at the cost of the suffering and death of his Teacher and friend. Never! Jesus should have understood that! And then after all, what was that Church and Kingdom that Jesus was talking about?

Peter became silent. The Lord's violent reaction suggested to him that the connection between the mission entrusted to him and the suffering death of Jesus was necessary and indissoluble, and therefore he could not go any deeper in that friendship without embracing the Teacher's dark destiny. Simon wondered if the day when he had responded to the Lord's call with infinite joy had even lead to this. He recalled the euphoric happiness of his first steps following Jesus. Back then, everything was so serene and simple. It is true that there were plenty of difficulties to bear, but everything was immersed in and covered by the sweet experience of the Rabbi's friendship and love. Now, instead, the difficulty was not something external or aside of the relationship with Him: it was inside of that relationship. That represented an unbearable wound for Peter, because for him no possibility of consolation existed outside of the Lord's friendship. If it was true that he had turned into something like Satan; lost, accursed, and far from God, then this friendship, the only one that had given him the certainty of salvation, was shattered.

Peter now began to wait. He really did not know anything for sure; he knew it was impossible to grasp the situation intuitively. That had to be something that surpassed all those conjectures burning in his mind like a mortal fever. Thus, a sense of relief came over him. Six days later, Jesus suddenly called him along with James and John to depart for a secret place that the other nine apostles should not know. They left the populated areas and began to climb the side of a hill. They walked for several hours in a silence that the three disciples dared not to break, not even to ask one another where they were going. Peter walked with an aura of serenity in his heart. He told himself that, whatever was about to happen this time between the Teacher and him, was what had freed him from the delirious thoughts that obsessed him for six days and six nights.

Jesus was pensive, engrossed in prayer. He preceded them climbing the mountain on a rocky trail with a regular pace that appeared to be carefully kept not to disturb the depth of His thoughts.

Once He arrived at the top of the mountain Jesus began to pray. His gestures and expressions were those the disciples caught Him often using, even though He loved to go a distance from them to pray to the Father. This time however Jesus did not try to distance Himself from the other three. Thus they felt increasingly uncomfortable to be so near of Jesus' prayer, as if they were obliged to contemplate a secret that, once unveiled, would later weigh on their consciences.

The people envied their intimacy with the great Rabbi who attracted crowds and performed miracles. That intimacy, the disciples felt, increased always in depth and surpassed the weak forces of their intelligence and of their hearts. Since He had began talking about the hour of suffering and His approaching death, Jesus had become for the disciples like the burning bush of Moses: they were attracted to it but the more they approached it, the more they felt wounded by their own lack of dignity.

These feelings even changed the relationship among the Twelve. The distance that seemed to grow between their own wretchedness and the mystery of the Lord, made them agree in a desire for reciprocal compassion, a desire that none of them could satisfy. Peter felt always closer to the youngest son of Zebedee, John. Jesus also loved this disciple more than the others, but such preference did not disturb him at all because he intuitively knew that it could be destined to any of them, and John had at least the merit of receiving it with simplicity. Therefore Peter looked more for the company of John than that of the others. They did not talk much but John seemed to radiate the effects of a particular relationship with the Teacher that was communicated mysteriously to all of those who were near to him.

On the mountain the three men felt impelled to gather close to each other, insofar as between them and Jesus a strong sense of distance was growing deeper. His return was imminent. Was He sad? Was He happy? It was as if suffering and joy came mysteriously to coincide in the Lord, as a more and more intense glow blinded their terrified eyes. Vigil and sleep, light and night, the brightness of the sun and the darkness of dense clouds, silence and deafening sound, all of these melted before their gaze fixed on the look of Jesus: It was the same familiar face, but now they found it strange.

Jesus was alone and silent yet two prophets were talking with Him. The disciples did not hear anything of what they were saying but they guessed they were talking about that which Jesus had been announcing for some time and which they did not want to hear about. And the glorious light that now blinded them seemed to be coming forth from that darkness, just like the golden dawn rises from the night.

Peter now finds himself as happy as he has ever been and he understands that even joy like light, has its source in the dark mysteries that those three were talking about. Peter surmised that he was participating in Jesus' joy, and that there was no room for the sadness of the past few days. How he felt as his own, for himself, the joy of Jesus! It was more his own than his sadness had ever been. This joy descended upon him, it came inside him, it was coming down from the sublime vision upon the misery that he knew to be his, and a misery that Jesus loved more than one could possibly endure. He felt so loved as he was, without deserving it, that it turned to be completely natural to speak to Jesus in the midst of that light, like if he had been in the middle of any commonplace event. He felt he could say almost anything his own nature and—why not?—his own absent-mindedness, dictated. Like a child, he just spoke what was in his heart: "Teacher, it is wonderful for us to be here! So let us make three shelters one for You, one for Moses, and one for Elijah." (Luke 9, 33).

But the darkness that fell suddenly on them blocked those words on his lips, and his heart lost immediately the childlike innocent serenity which he believed he had regained shortly before. He almost said to himself "No Simon, you are not innocent!" Another voice more potent immersed him into total silence: "This is my Son the Beloved: listen to Him!" (Mark 9, 7).

The voice sounded like the outbreak of thunder, as if voice and word never had neither origin nor end. Although at that precise moment everything was returned to normal around them, on the face of Jesus remained imprinted a sense of eternity, at the same time terrifying and sweet. Jesus came near and said calmly "Let us descend, let us keep silent!".

Translated by Carlos Caso-Rosendi

To buy the book visit ItacaLibri

Viva Cristo Rey!

2008-09-01T10:55:00.000-07:00

Fr. James Farfaglia

Induite armaturam Dei, ut possitis stare adversus insidias Diaboli. Quia non est nobis colluctatio adversus sanguinem et carnem sed adversus principatus, adversus potestates, adversus mundi rectores tenebrarum harum, adversus spiritalia nequitiae in caelestibus.
—Epistula Sancti Pauli Apostoli ad Ephesios VI, 11-12.

I have always been inspired by the example of Blessed Miguel Pro of Mexico who as a priest of the Society of Jesus, lived during a very trying time for the Mexican people. The Catholic Church was terribly persecuted. A popular uprising of Catholic laymen called the Cristeros rose to the occasion to free the Church from oppression. Blessed Miguel Pro died as a martyr, executed on the firing squad by federal soldiers on November 23, 1927 .

As he stood, waiting for the shots that would end his earthly life and begin a new life in the kingdom of heaven, he forgave his executioners, and spreading out his arms in the form of a cross he cried out ¡Viva Cristo Rey! Long live Christ the King!

This is the kind of zeal and conviction that the kingdom needs from all of us. No true reforms will take place in the Church; no renewal will take place in our nation until Jesus Christ reigns in everyone's heart. ¡Viva Cristo Rey! Long live Christ the King!

The Kingdom of God is the central teaching of Jesus throughout the Gospels. The word kingdom appears more than any other word throughout the four Gospels. Jesus begins his public ministry by preaching the kingdom. "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel (Mark 1:14 ).

By summarizing all of the teachings of the New Testament on the kingdom we can clearly see that the kingdom is a three dimensional reality: the life of grace within every individual who does the will of God, the Church here on earth, and eternal life in heaven.

The kingdom first establishes itself in our hearts through the sacrament of Baptism, thus allowing us to participate in God's inner life. We are elevated and transformed through sanctifying grace. This supernatural life of grace comes to fulfillment in the eternal life of heaven.

Referring to the Vatican II document Lumen Gentium, the Catechism of the Catholic Church explains that the Church is the kingdom of Christ already present in mystery. It is the mission of the Church to proclaim and establish the kingdom of Christ . This mission takes place between the first coming and the second coming of Christ. The Church will become perfected in the glory of heaven once the Second Coming takes place. Meanwhile, the Church journeys here on earth through persecutions and consolations. She is in exile from the Lord and waits with joyful hope for the full coming of the kingdom.

Jesus makes it very clear that there are two kingdoms. The two kingdoms are constantly in battle with each other. Jesus is the king of one kingdom, and Satan is the king of the other kingdom. The battle takes place in our hearts, and it displays itself with great drama in the world. To ensure that Jesus is always the king of our hearts requires great commitment, sacrifice, conviction, hard work and a lot of prayer.

We must never be surprised that the spiritual life is a battle. A battle between the two kingdoms will always take place in our heart until the day the Lord calls us to the kingdom of heaven. If you struggle, you will conquer. If you conquer, you will be given the crown of victory.

To maintain the state of sanctifying grace in our souls, and to cultivate our spiritual life so that grace increases are the essential elements to the Christian way of life. However, this is not an easy enterprise.

Due to the effects of original sin, there are four areas that cause the greatest personal struggle. If we focus our attention to these obstacles to sanctifying grace, we live with immense interior freedom and intimacy with God. The four areas that I am referring to are lust, gluttony avarice, and sloth.

I have already spoken in detail about the virtue of chastity. Since we live in a society consumed in sexual sins, we must be vigilant and never give in to the corruption of our times. Prayer, the sacraments, and filial devotion to Mary are indispensable tools to preserve the life of grace. Let us remember to avoid the near occasions of sin. In Fatima , Our Blessed Mother warned humanity that sexual sins cause more people to go to hell than any other offenses.

Gluttony is another battle for most Americans. We allow ourselves to be controlled by food. Gluttony is defined as an inordinate love for the pleasures of food. This common vice makes our soul the slave of our body and causes us to act like an animal. We can acquire the virtue of temperance by eating proper foods and controlling the amounts of food that we consume. It is disgraceful the amount of food that people pile onto their plates.

Avarice is another common problem for most Americans. The inordinate love for money and material possessions is a real problem in today’s society. This vice can be uprooted from our souls by living within our means, keeping within a strict yearly budget, avoiding unnecessary credit card debt, and by practicing the Biblical principle of tithing. The sin of avarice is rooted in a deep mistrust in God who provides all that we need for our daily existence.

Along with the traditional means that I mentioned that are necessary for the preservation of the virtue of chastity, uprooting the sins of gluttony and avarice are very useful in the cultivation of purity. If we can control our eating and spending habits, we can then have a greater ability to control our sexual desires.

Sloth is another terrible vice that controls many people. Sloth proceeds from an inordinate attachment to sensual pleasure and it causes us to avoid suffering and effort. In the spiritual life, sloth presents the greatest obstacle to spiritual progress. If we do not exert ourselves with a strong will and firm character, we are putting our own eternal salvation in jeopardy. There is no room for laziness and complacency in the kingdom of Christ !

My dear friends, the spiritual life will always be a continual battle, but if we really love Jesus and his kingdom, we will always be able to proclaim the inspirational words spoken by St. Paul , one of the greatest members of the kingdom: “I have fought the good fight to the end; I have run the race to the finish; I have kept the faith” (2 Timothy 4: 8)

History is filled with the details of many famous battles. One of these confrontations took place at the Alamo . On March 5, 1836 , Colonel William Travis assembled his men in the plaza of the Alamo and told them that there was no hope that they would receive any help.

He drew a line on the ground with a sword to be crossed by all who were committed to stay and fight. Everyone crossed the line except for one man by the name of Moses Rose, who escaped over one of the walls surrounding the Alamo .

Today, more than ever, the kingdom of Christ needs convinced Catholics who will fight heroically for their King. The kingdom of Christ on earth has always been known as the Church militant, not a Church of cowards.

The conflict between good and evil reached its culmination during the passion of Christ the King. Betrayal, disloyalty, fear, and hatred came to overshadow the fidelity of a few disciples and the Lord’s loving Mother.

The Cross is an essential component for membership in the kingdom of Christ . Those who belong to the kingdom of Satan do not want a king who tells them that they have to suffer. They want Jesus to come down from the cross.

Continual conflict and the carrying of the cross mean that each member of Christ’s kingdom will have to be courageous.

The Good Paternalism

2008-09-01T10:40:00.000-07:00

George Will
Originally published by TownHall.com

The American Indian Public Charter School serves 200 inner-city students in sixth through eighth grade. The focus of AIPCS is excellent student attendance (99%), which helps to ensure the academic needs of American Indian students and other interested in attending our school. We will provide them with an education to enhance their academic skills in reading, writing, spelling, mathematics, science, social science, business, and humanities in order to compete and be productive members in a capitalistic society. This will be a collaborative effort between school, family, and community—Mission statement of the American Indian Public Charter School.

Seated at a solitary desk in the hall outside a classroom, the slender 13-year-old boy with a smile like a sunrise earnestly does remedial algebra, assisted by a paid tutor. She, too, is 13. Both wear the uniform—white polo shirt, khaki slacks—of a school that has not yet admitted the boy. It will, because he refuses to go away.

The son of Indian immigrants from Mexico, the boy decided he is going to be a doctor, heard about the American Indian Public Charter School here and started showing up. Ben Chavis, AIPCS' benevolent dictator, told the boy that although he was doing well at school, he was not up to the rigors of AIPCS, which is decorated with photographs of the many students it has sent to the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth. So the boy asked, what must I do?

Telling young people what they must do is what Chavis does. With close- cropped hair and a short beard flecked with gray, he looks somewhat like Lenin, but is less democratic. A Lumbee Indian from North Carolina, he ran track, earned a Ph.D. from the University of Arizona, got rich in real estate ("I wanted to buy back America and lease it to the whites") and decided to fix the world, beginning with AIPCS.

Founded in 1996, it swiftly became a multiculturalists' playground where much was tolerated and little was learned. Chavis arrived in 2000 to reverse that condition. Charter schools are not unionized, so he could trim the dead wood, which included all but one staff member.

David Whitman, in his book "Sweating the Small Stuff: Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism," reports that in Chicago, from 2003 through 2006, just three of every 1,000 teachers received an "unsatisfactory" rating in annual evaluations; in 87 "failing schools"—with below average and declining test scores—69 had no teachers rated unsatisfactory; in all of Chicago, just nine teachers received more than one unsatisfactory rating and none of them was dismissed. Chavis' teachers come from places such as Harvard, Dartmouth, Oberlin, Columbia, Berkeley, Brown and Wesleyan.

AIPCS is one of six highly prescriptive schools Whitman studied, where "noncognitive skills"—responsible behaviors such as self-discipline and cooperativeness—are part of the cultural capital the curriculum delivers. Many inner-city schools feature a monotonous chaos of disruption. AIPCS—Oakland's highest performing middle school -- stresses obligation, not self-expression. Chavis, now "administrator emeritus," is adamant: "Everyone says we should 'preserve our culture.' There is a lot of our culture we should wipe out."

A visitor to an AIPCS classroom notices that the children do not notice visitors. Students are taught to sit properly—no slumping—and keep their eyes on the teacher. No makeup, no jewelry, no electronic devices. AIPCS' 200 pupils take just 20 minutes for lunch and are with the same teacher in the same classroom all day. Rotating would consume at least 10 minutes, seven times a day. Seventy minutes a day in AIPCS' extra-long 196-day school year would be a lot of lost instruction. The school does not close for Columbus Day, Martin Luther King Day or Cesar Chavez Day.

Every student takes four pre-AP (advanced placement) classes. There are three weeks of summer math instruction, three hours of homework a night. Seventh-graders take the SAT. College is assumed.
Ben Chavis

Paternalism is the restriction of freedom for the good of the person restricted. AIPCS acts in loco parentis because Chavis, who is cool toward parental involvement, wants an enveloping school culture that combats the culture of poverty and the streets.

He and other practitioners of the new paternalism—once upon a time, schooling was understood as democracy's permissible, indeed obligatory, paternalism—are proving that cultural pessimists are mistaken: We know how to close the achievement gap that often separates minorities from whites before kindergarten and widens through high school. A growing cohort of people possess the pedagogic skills to make "no excuses" schools flourish.

Unfortunately, powerful factions fiercely oppose the flourishing. Among them are education schools with their romantic progressivism—teachers should be mere "enablers" of group learning; self-esteem is a prerequisite for accomplishment, not a consequence thereof. Other opponents are the teachers' unions and their handmaiden, the Democratic Party. Today's liberals favor paternalism—you cannot eat trans fats; you must buy health insurance—for everyone except children. Odd.

The Gratingest Generation

2008-09-01T07:21:00.000-07:00

Thomas Sowell
Published originally by The Conservative Voice

If our era could have its own coat of arms, it would be a yak against a background of mush. This must be the golden age of endless and pointless talk.

Every sports events seems to be preceded by all kinds of talk -- whether by athletes repeating cliches that we have heard a thousand times, announcers making pseudo-profound sociological observations, or fans rambling on incoherently.

Then after the contest come the childish celebrations, the second-guessing and still more cliches.

Even when the action is going on at grand slam tennis matches, there are interviews with celebrities who happen to be in the stands, while the play on the court is ignored by both, even though it is shown on the screen.

Theatrical hype on the part of both the interviewer and the celebrity are common.

Does it ever occur to media chatterboxes that people watch tennis because they want to see tennis, not hear about some celebrity's latest movie or TV series?

If those who lived during World War II were "the greatest generation," this must be the gratingest generation.

It's not just the constant meaningless chatter that grates. There is the incessant self-dramatization.

Everybody knows about Manny Ramirez's hair styling. But there have been many other sluggers over the years, whose haircuts were never noticed. Does anyone remember Ted Williams' haircut or the haircuts of Mickey Mantle or Hank Aaron?

All those people are remembered for what they did, not how they looked.

Boxers and wrestlers must be the worst. Outlandish get-ups and behaving like badly raised brats have become the norm.

When you see old films of Joe Louis or Rocky Marciano, you see adults acting like adults-- indeed, like gentlemen.

There was none of this making faces at an opponent before the fight or loudly boasting afterwards, much less taunting during the contest. In other words, you didn't have to act like a lout in order to be a boxer.

When Joe DiMaggio hit a ball that was caught up against the 415-foot sign in Yankee Stadium by a Dodger outfielder, at a crucial point during the 1947 World Series, DiMaggio briefly kicked the dirt in frustration while running the bases.

That was as close to an emotional outburst that DiMaggio ever came. That picture has been shown innumerable times, precisely because it was so exceptional for DiMaggio to go even that far.

Like so much that went wrong in American society, the new style of loutish self-dramatization began in the 1960s. When Muhammad Ali became heavyweight champion in 1964, it marked the end of the era when boxers simply did their job, collected their money and went home, usually after a few brief words.

Over the years, football players began carrying on with elaborate celebrations after every touchdown. Baseball teams developed pre-game rituals and post-game celebrations.

While this trend of self-dramatization is most visible in sports, it extends well beyond athletes.

Parents give their children off-the-wall names. "Mary" has long since lost its place as the perennially most popular name for girls.

There is a high turnover in what names are hot and which ones are not. Apparently everybody has to try to outdo everybody else, even when it comes to naming children.

Here, as in sports, superficial attention-getters have replaced achievements that speak for themselves. Indeed, the whole notion of achievement is downplayed, if not swept under the rug.

People who have achieved success are often referred to as "privileged," especially by the intelligentsia. Achievements used to be a source of inspiration for others but have been turned into a source of grievance for those without comparable achievements.

There have always been superficial dandies but they have not always been admired or regarded as models. Our society is worse off because they are.

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