The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft
interred with their bones. So let it be with Caesar.
-Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
I cannot praise Garret FitzGerald. The 1980s economic recession hit my family and others. Many friends had to emigrate as national debt and unemployment doubled during his term. Charles Haughey's harsh policies addressed the morass over the next half-decade.
My school-fellows rejoiced as Dr FitzGerald took power in 1982. Their confidence collapsed for many reasons. Until his campaign of secularisation, Catholic schoolboys with Catholic sensibilities did not fear the Old Belvederean. Dr FitzGerald promised constitutional protection for the unborn child, but he supported Peter Sutherland's limp-wristed wording, rejected by the Dáil in favour of Fianna Fáil's proposal, which the electorate adopted. In 1985, the Family Planning (Amendment) Act was narrowly passed, despite electoral disapproval. In 1986, Dr FitzGerald's divorce proposals were thrown out by a two-to-one majority. The Catholic hierarchy played a minimal role in the defeat.
Dr FitzGerald took a robust line against the Provisionals, but his 1984 New Ireland Forum Report presentation led to Margaret Thatcher's "Out...out...out". Nevertheless, the two signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985. This is Dr FitzGerald's genuinely lasting achievement, but it did not get through without some controversy: the Unionist McGimpsey brothers (both Irish citizens) unsuccessfully brought the agreement before the Irish courts. The Supreme Court took a different view of the Single European Act, which the ardent Europhile Dr FitzGerald had tried to fast-track. This had to go before the people.
Garret FitzGerald had become leader of Liam Cosgrave's Fine Gael, then a Christian Democratic party, in 1977. He supported Declan Costello's liberal Just Society document which was based on papal encyclicals. The new leader worked to transform Fine Gael. He denied cabinet positions to experienced conservatives such as Richie Ryan, Richard Burke and Tom O'Donnell. But he went further: former Labour party leader Michael O'Leary was imposed on Dublin South-West in November 1982 in order to unseat the Catholic-minded TD Larry McMahon. At the time, Deputy McMahon's teenage daughter was dying of leukaemia (the girl survived due to a bone marrow transplant while heaven was stormed on her behalf).
Other like-minded party stalwarts, such as Liam Cosgrave Junior, Alice Glenn and Joseph Doyle received similar treatment. Could the 1985 Family Planning Act have squeaked through without this display of ruthlessness? I cannot help wondering to what extent Dr FitzGerald was influenced by the views of his friend and theological advisor, Rev. Professor Enda McDonagh.
Did Dr FitzGerald have a sense of humour? Well, there is reason to believe that one of his first steps as Taoiseach was to ensure the axing of the satirical television show Hall's Pictorial Weekly. Such an act is not what one would normally associate with greatness.
Peadar Laighléis
The Editor adds:
In that connection, the priest-author Fr J.
Anthony Gaughan in his book At the Coalface
recalls how Dr FitzGerald, when opening a new
St John of God centre, urged the Catholic clergy
to preach less about sexual morality and more
about the obligation to pay income tax. In a letter to the Irish Timesof June 22, 1979, Fr Gaughan
retorted:
May I suggest to those who intend to oblige Dr FitzGerald that one of the first points worth considering on this topic is the fact that of all sections of the community Dr FitzGerald and his colleagues alone enjoy a large part of their income tax-free. The injustice and anti-democratic character of this is compounded by the fact that they actually make this law to suit themselves.
Interestingly, Dr FitzGerald chose to reply to Fr Gaughan not in the Irish Times but in a four-page personal letter, intimating that such comments could undermine our tender democracy, mainly by causing the Irish people to lose trust in politicians. In any case, he maintained, the politicians were not responsible for the advantages they enjoyed in relation to income tax! Fr Gaughan was amazed at the concern that "my little peck" had caused.
Of course, de mortuis nihil nisi bonum, but the eulogies paid by the media to Dr FitzGerald were surely more than a little over the top. And there was a puzzling tribute from Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin, who told the Irish Times that the former Taoiseach had brought his Christian faith and Christian practice into political life, and he wished we had more politicians like him.
Stramentaria commented that anyone would think Dr FitzGerald had been a member of Opus Dei.
It was a bit of surprise to read about the sacking of Bishop William Morris of Toowoomba Diocese, Queensland, Australia. I've never heard of the man or his diocese, but could think of plenty of other episcopal folk who merit a one-way ticket to retirement.
Bishop Morris--"call me Bill, mate"--was obviously a progressive-liberal who endeared himself to the media and commentariat for his ongoing contempt of Church teaching and law. So, it was not surprising that his enforced departure in April was the occasion of anger, tears and downright abuse of the man deemed responsible--BXVI.
Much of it was orchestrated by Bishop "Bill" himself, the religious orders, nuns and a bevy of suspended priests. Instead of departing quietly to a life of prayer and penance, the bishop issued a seven-page defence of his record, in which he attacked the Pope, Archbishop Chaput, the Vatican's visitor, and "a small group of Catholics" who complained about his wayward rule. Rome, he shouted, had denied him natural justice, refused to show him the evidence, and judged him guilty in violation of due process. Presenting himself as a victim of arbitrary papal power, he claimed that his sole offence in 2006 was suggesting that accepting women and married men for the priesthood (as well as recognising Anglican, Lutheran and United Church orders) would solve the problem of shortage of priests. The bishop lamented the shortage of priests in his diocese, but said little about the fact that for most of the 70,000 Catholics in his diocese, the last vocation is a distant memory. However, as TV documentaries like to say, "But wait. There is more!" The Catholic News Agency discovered a Vatican document that revealed a picture of a bishop who persisted in gross disobedience, prevarication and defiance. As one of his priests commented, "you can't keep on telling Rome to get stuffed." Which is exactly what the man did from day one of his elevation to the episcopate in 1992.
It soon emerged that Rome had been trying for no less than 13 years to persuade the bishop to correct his doctrinal and liturgical errors, including the abuse of the Rite 3--"general absolution"--of the Sacrament of Reconciliation. The result of these patient efforts? Nil.
The bishop was asked to resign twice in 2007 but refused. Again, twice in 2008 with the same result, and in 2009 he rejected a personal request of the Pope. The CNS document showed that the Pope and his aides spent an inordinate amount of time on Bishop Morris.
In his departing letter, Bishop Morris complained that "Rome controls bishops by fear..." Hardly true, if his scandalous display of calculated insouciance is any indication. Shouldn't he have some fear? Certainly, for his own immortal soul, after 17 years of undermining of the faith of so many Australian Catholics.
David Manly
LAST FRIDAY, the feast of Our Lady of Fatima, a very important document issued from the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei, with the approval of the Holy Father. This was the long-awaited instruction on the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum, and it rejoices in the wonderful title Universae Ecclesiae.
There had been many fears expressed before it appeared that this instruction would somehow restrict the provisions of the Motu Proprio, but this is not in fact the case. True, there are a few points which one might wish more strongly made, but in general this is an excellent document which reinforces the Motu Proprio, and will certainly help to achieve its proper implementation.
I said the title was wonderful, and now let me tell you why. Universae Ecclesiaemeans "for the universal Church". They are the first two words of the original Latin document. And let me make an important point here: it is clear that the English translation you will read is rather deficient, and gives the impression that the document is weaker than it actually is. In any case, those two words, Universae Ecclesiae, are the first words of the first sentence, which states: "The Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum has made the riches of the Roman Liturgy more accessible for the universal Church."
Precious treasure for all
It is often said that the traditional Latin Mass is only for old people, or nostalgic folk, or for the odd or esoteric. But no; now we know it is universae Ecclesiae--for the universal Church. It is very clear that the Holy Father wishes the ancient liturgy to be known throughout the Church, and by all faithful. The document speaks here of the riches of the Roman Liturgy--divitiae--as inherent in the ancient liturgy. Later on it speaks of the more ancient use as "a precious treasure to be preserved"; and in that place it says that the Pope desires to bestow that precious treasure on all the faithful. On all the faithful, mind. Universae Ecclesiae!
That is the first general point of the new document. The second is this, and is closely related: the Pope issued the Motu Proprio for the good of the faithful, and it is to be interpreted in favour of the faithful; not in favour of the bishops! As a result, attempts on the part of the hierarchy to restrict its application are quite against the mind of the Holy Father.
Universae Ecclesiae is quite clear on this, and provides for remedies against recalcitrant hierarchs. If a group of the faithful from a parish, or coming together from several parishes, desires the old Mass, it must be provided for them. In practice I know this will be difficult, but at least now the principle is very clear, and that was not the case a few years ago: there has been real progress, thank God.
Reconciling past and present
The third and final general point of the new document is that the Motu Proprio aimed at promoting reconciliation in the bosom of the Church: in sinu Ecclesiae. Not at the fringes of the Church, and not just with a few dissident groups. The reconciliation in view is far deeper and wider. It is a reconciliation between two different interpretations of the Second Vatican Council: between those who think the Church somehow ended at that Council, and those who think it somehow began there!
By reviving the ancient liturgy, and desiring it for the universal Church, the Holy Father wishes the whole Church to recognise, and I quote: "What was sacred for prior generations remains sacred and great for us as well, and cannot be suddenly prohibited altogether or even judged harmful."
If a Catholic rejects the older form of the Mass out of hand, he is in fact rejecting the tradition of the Church, and, to that extent, the Church itself. On the other hand, acceptance of the older form will help to put the newer liturgy in its proper context; and so there will come about that reconciliation of past and present, which the Holy Father so desires.
So much for the general principles of the new document. Now I wish to comment on two particular points.
Firstly, and this is of prime importance, the document makes clear that liturgical laws enacted since 1962 do not apply to the older liturgy. Hence, for example, the permission to receive communion on the hand simply does not apply here, and so at the Old Mass you must receive on the tongue. Likewise with all the other modifications bearing on the celebration of the liturgy itself, such as female altar servers. Everything must be as it was in 1962.
Training of clerics
The second thing I wish to comment on is what the document says about the training of clerics. I wish to comment on this especially as today is vocations Sunday. This is a point which may seem weak to you when you read it, especially in the translation.
Bishops are earnestly (enixe) requested to give clerics in training the opportunity to learn to say the Old Mass, and this especially (potissimum) in the case of seminaries. "Earnestly requested" is not the sort of language we should have liked, and is open to being earnestly ignored! However, forced prayer is no devotion; and too strict an imposition could easily lead to unhelpful resentment. At least the wish of the Holy Father is made clear; and faithful bishops, and good seminaries, will respond.
What about our seminaries here in Ireland, and Rome? As far as I know, none of them offers any instruction in the older liturgy, and the instruction in Latin is very poor indeed. However, we are still awaiting the report of the recent visitation, and its implementation. As we pray today for vocations, our prayer can have this particular focus: that our seminaries might soon be places where men could freely express their love for the older liturgy, and their desire to celebrate it; and where it would be taught and fostered. Our seminaries, and all seminaries, throughout the Church, for the good of the universal Church: Universae Ecclesiae!
The Cloak of Malice
The Church cannot approve of that liberty which begets a contempt of the most sacred laws of God, and casts off the obedience due to lawful authority; for this is not liberty so much as license, and is most correctly styled by St Augustine the "liberty of self-ruin", and by the Apostle St Peter the "cloak of malice".
----Pope Leo XIII, Immortale Dei (1885)
ON Tuesday March 15, 1586 in the court of York, Judge George Clinch pronounced this appalling sentence over Mrs Margaret Clitherow, aged 33, a butcher's wife pregnant with her fourth child:
You must return from whence you came, and there, in the lowest part of the prison, be stripped naked, laid down, your back on the ground, and as much weight laid upon you as you are able to bear, and so to continue for three days without meat or drink, and on the third day to be pressed to death, your hands and feet tied to posts, and a sharp stone under your back.
Her crime was sheltering Catholic priests, "traitors and seducers of the Queen's subjects". The unusual and horrible penalty was imposed because Margaret refused to plead either guilty or not guilty--for reasons which will be explained later.
In March this year, in honour of St Margaret Clitherow, a Catholic High Mass in the old Latin rite was celebrated in York Minster for the first time since the Reformation--complete with beautiful vestments, ceremonial and incense. It was a Votive Mass of a Holy Woman Martyr Not a Virgin. More than 700 Catholics packed the Cathedral, and the Anglican Dean of York, Very Rev. Keith Jones, who had given permission for the Mass, sat in the choir.
Wealthy husband
Many of the details of the life of this exceptionally courageous woman, including her last painful days of imprisonment were written down by her spiritual director Father John Mush.
Margaret Clitherow, née Middleton was born during the last years of the reign of Mary Tudor. She grew up to be attractive and very lively. Her father, a candle-maker died when she was 14, and four years later her mother arranged for her to marry John Clitherow, whom we would now describe as a meat wholesaler. He became one of the wealthiest men in the city.
When Queen Elizabeth I came to the throne and imposed a Protestant state church, most English people were Catholic, but the majority of these had got used to changes in religion and were prepared to conform outwardly by attending the new service which replaced the Mass in their parish church. They were waiting for happier times, expecting it would all blow over and the Catholic faith would be restored before long. Such people were known as "church papists"-- as opposed to the "popish recusants" who refused to attend the Protestant service and had to pay crippling fines. By the time the church papists realised the changes were there to stay, it was too late, and they had got so used to conforming that few had the courage to suffer for their faith.
At first, Margaret joined her husband John in worshipping at their parish church, but after three years she was reconciled with the Catholic Church. John must have been a very understanding husband: throughout their marriage he paid her fines and even allowed her to bring up the children as Catholics.
Margaret proved to be a loving wife and mother, though she was disturbed by John's protestations of faith in the Queen's religion. She once stated: "Know you, I love him next to God in this world...If I have offended my husband in any way, save for my conscience, I ask of God and him forgiveness." Her husband reciprocated her love. He said that he could wish for no better wife, "except only two faults, and these were, she fasted too much and would not go with him to church."
Fearless and outspoken
The Clitherows had three children: Henry, Anne, and William who was born when she was in prison for failing to attend services at the parish church. Margaret broke the law still further by hiring a Catholic tutor for the two younger children, and she secretly sent her oldest son to be educated in the Catholic college at Douai in France. She never lived to see the day when her two sons were ordained as priests and her daughter entered religious life.
Her home became one of the most important hiding places for fugitive priests in all of England. The Clitherow house was equipped with a secret cupboard where the vestments, the wine and the altar breads were kept. It also had a "priest's hole" where a fugitive cleric could hide. Margaret, meanwhile, was becoming a fearless and very outspoken Catholic.
On March 10, 1586, John Clitherow was summoned to explain the absence of his son Henry abroad. As a well-respected member of the Protestant community, he was furious and refused to give any information.
Margaret knew the authorities would search their home, but she was confident they would find nothing that would incriminate her or her husband. Mass had been said that morning and the priest had escaped. When the searchers burst open the schoolroom door, they found nothing but a group of children studying their lessons. The Clitherow children were not easily intimidated, but the searchers noticed that an older boy, from Flanders, was obviously extremely scared. When they stripped him and threatened him with a flogging, he told them everything he knew.
He even showed them where the Mass was said and where the vestments and altar breads were kept. The authorities ransacked the house, carrying off all the incriminating evidence. The two Clitherow children were taken to Protestant families and Margaret was never allowed to see them again. She was taken to prison.
Refused to plead
Early in the evening of Monday, March 14, Margaret Clitherow was brought before the judges at Common Hall in the city of York. Her indictment was read and she was asked how she pleaded. In answer she said, "I know of no offence whereof I should confess myself guilty. Having made no offence, I need no trial."
Early the next day she was taken back to the Common Hall. Judge Clinch reminded her that under the law of Queen Elizabeth, when an accused person refused to make a plea and stand trial before a jury, the accused would be sentenced to what was called peine forte et dure.The person was laid naked on the stone floor of an underground cell with a door laid over him and on the door heavy stones were piled. Further weights were piled upon him until he was pressed to death.
One might well wonder why Margaret refused to make a plea and avoid such a frightful punishment. It was because she did not want her young children to be forced to give evidence against her, when they would either have had to lie under oath or have been partially responsible for their mother's conviction and subsequent death. It was an ordeal from which she was determined to spare them. As she told a neighbour, she knew she would be executed anyway.
Finally the judge passed sentence that she should be crushed to death as a punishment for having "harboured and maintained Jesuits and seminary priests, traitors to the Queen's majesty and her laws".
Ten days were allowed to pass between her sentencing and execution. On the day of her execution, she was calm and forgiving. When asked to pray for the Queen, she asked God to turn Her Majesty to the Catholic faith. They placed the board upon her and the hired executioners placed the huge stones on it. Within a quarter of an hour she was dead. The sheriffs left the body under the door from nine in the morning until three in the afternoon. They then buried her body in some waste ground, where they hoped it would never be found.
Her death took place on March 25, 1586 on Good Friday.
Another particularly shameful aspect of Margaret's execution was the fact that she was pregnant at the time. The Jesuit poet Fr Gerard Manly Hopkins concluded his poem "Margaret Clitherow" with the lines:
Within her womb the child was quick.
Small matter of that then! Let him smother
And wreck in ruins of his mother.
You might think this kind of brutal execution could have occurred in most European countries in the sixteenth century. Curiously, it could not have happened in Spain, infamous in Protestant culture as the home of the Inquisition. In Calder—n's play El Alcalde de Zalamea, written at about that time, two suspects are to be questioned under torture after an army officer is killed. One is a soldier, the other what would now be described as his "partner"--a high-spirited camp follower known to the troops as La Chispa ("Sparky"). She tells the authorities they can't do that to her, and when asked why not, she replies confidently estoy pre–ada--"I'm pregnant."
In 1970, Pope Paul VI canonised Margaret Clitherow under the title of "The Pearl of York". (Margarita is Latin for a pearl.) Her reputed home, 36 The Shambles is on one of the most beautiful streets in her native city. It has become a martyr's shrine and each year thousands of pilgrims come to pay her homage.
Respectful silence
The Mass in honour of St Margaret Clitherow was a most significant event in the early 21st century history of both the Catholic and the Anglican Churches. The massive choir of York Minster was packed, and over 150 people had to be accommodated in the nave, with extra seating brought in. The music was provided by a local choir, the Rudgate Singers, who specialise in the Latin Mass. They sang the Mass for Five Voices of William Byrd, a near contemporary of Margaret Clitherow.
Afterwards there was a procession from the Minster through the city streets to her shrine in The Shambles. The sight of so many Catholic pilgrims publicly processing and praying the Rosary drew the attention of Saturday afternoon shoppers, and a respectful silence fell as the procession passed.
The procession finished at the Catholic Church of the English Martyrs, where a relic of St Margaret Clitherow was venerated. This was followed by Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, conferred by Fr Michael Brown, Northern Chaplain of the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales which had organised the event.
The Minster Mass was a triumph for the LMSEW. As its General Manager Mike Lord commented:
Something special happened in York on Saturday. Hundreds of Catholics gathered in the historic centre of northern Christianity to honour one of England's bravest women in a quite extraordinary way. Indeed, some people travelled from as far away as London, Oxford and Dublin.
This Mass in the ancient Roman Rite demonstrates quite clearly the suppressed level of interest in the Latin Mass, particularly amongst the young. I'm afraid many English and Welsh bishops are still very grudging in helping to organise celebrations of the Latin Mass, but our huge congregation today shows that hundreds of people want to stand alongside Pope Benedict in his efforts to restore beauty and dignity to Catholic worship and to restore Christianity in its ancient European heartland.
He expressed the Society's grateful thanks to the Dean and Chapter of York Minster.
It is possibly not without significance that the Latin Mass Society had originally hoped to celebrate the Mass in the nearby Catholic Parish Church of St Wilfrid, but it was "not available". Clearly, St Wilfrid's loss was York Minster's gain.
The LMS is already planning an even bigger celebration in honour of St Margaret Clitherow next year.
Much of the biographical material I have gathered about St Margaret Clitherow comes from an article by Daniel F. McSheffery in the April 1994 issue of the American Homiletic and Pastoral Review.
POPE BENEDICT, in Part Two of his Jesus of Nazareth has a great section on the Resurrection. He asks: what kind of reality is the Resurrection? For the New Testament writers, it's clearly both a physical reality and something that completely goes beyond the physical. Pope Benedict sees it as something like an extraordinary evolutionary leap.
It's not at all like the various raisings from the dead that Jesus performed during his life, to the daughter of Jairus, to the widow of Nain's son, to Lazarus. Their bodies came back to life, and they continued to live a normal life, then they died. But the body of Jesus is first of all very much within space and time, where he continually appears to his disciples, speaks to them and eats with them--as St Luke says, he's definitely not a ghost but of flesh and bones.
Still, he passes through closed doors, suddenly appears and disappears, and has gone beyond death in a definite way. Does this mean, as some think, that the Resurrection of Jesus is impossible? Isn't this against the known laws of science? The Pope asks this question, but himself asks another one: could it be that there are realities that go beyond what can be known by the natural sciences? Couldn't God, who created the world, not also create another dimension by which even matter could in some sense participate in God's own life? Because that's what the Resurrection is: Jesus in his humanity now fully participates in the life of God, while still appearing on this earth.
The empty tomb
Yes, that's such an advance that the apostles, the early Christians, the women and St Paul who all had the privilege of experiencing Jesus' Resurrection, were all aware of something intensely real, happening in the here and now, yet profoundly beyond anything they had ever imagined.
Pope Benedict asks about the evidence for the Resurrection. What about the empty tomb? Well, Mary Magdalene herself thinks it was possible that someone took the body away. So that wouldn't of itself be enough. But if there had been a corrupting body there, no one would have believed in the Resurrection. So the empty tomb is a necessary but not sufficient component for belief in the Resurrection.
He goes through the two different kinds of accounts: ones that are carefully structured to remain faithful to the belief of the earliest Christians, and the more lively accounts of the personal meetings with the Risen Jesus. The confessional ones are very carefully formulated, expressing the first Christians and the earliest Church. All the confessional ones are from men, because Jewish tradition only accepted male witnesses, so they can be seen as coming up to those legal standards.
Privileged group
But because it was women rather than men who surrounded Jesus with love during his passion (apart from the beloved disciple), most of the narrations are by women, as if they were the privileged group for these personal appearances. For the Pope, the confessional expressions of belief in the resurrection are rooted in the personal experiences; each approach is nourished by the other.
To take a few examples of the confessional appearances, we have St Paul's very careful listing of the witnesses, beginning with Peter and the Twelve. This brings out the connection between the Resurrection and the Church--it's not only an individual matter but has everything to do with the continuation of the Risen Jesus in time through the sacraments and teaching of the Church.
And St Paul mentions Peter first to confirm his own role as the rock of the Church's faith, which St John will also do with the triple question of the Risen Jesus to him, do you love me? And the special commission to Peter, to feed my sheep. After Peter, there's the Twelve, the Apostles who live today in the College of Bishops united around Peter's successor.
One of the strongest evidences for the fact of the Resurrection is that nothing else could explain the power of the apostles' witness just after this--before the Resurrection they were dispirited and depressed. None of them had understood when he'd prophesied his coming Resurrection.
Only a huge event bursting into their experience could have led them to become the centre of this huge new spiritual Big Bang that was greater than the original physical one, because it created in space and time the presence of God's unlimited love, lifting up our bodiliness and our humanity directly to make us, as St Peter writes, "sharers of the divine nature".
He quotes St Jude Thaddeus' question at the Last Supper: "Lord, how is it that you will manifest yourself to us, and not to the world?" Why only to Abraham, to the Jewish people, to Christians, and not to all? Why indeed did you not show them with irresistible power that you're the living one, the Lord of life and death? Why did you reveal yourself only to a small flock of disciples, whose testimony we must now rely on?
Pope Benedict answers: "It is part of the mystery of God that he acts so gently, that he only gradually builds up his history within the great history of humankind; that he becomes man and so can be overlooked by his contemporaries and by the decisive forces within history...that he continues to knock gently at the doors of our hearts and only slowly opens our eyes if we open our doors to him."
And yet--is not this the truly divine way? Not to overwhelm with external power, but to give freedom, to offer and to touch our hearts to love. He finishes by inviting us to open ourselves to the evidences of his presence, because if we do so we too will know he's truly alive. "With Thomas, let's place our hand in Jesus pierced side and confess, My Lord and my God!"
Beati qui persecutionem patiuntur propter iustitiam
quoniam ipsorum est regnum caelorum
--Matthew 5: 10
DIE WEISSE ROSE (The White Rose), a novel banned in Germany in 1938, might have been forgotten if Munich University students engaged in resistance to the Third Reich had not adopted its name.
The White Rose circulated six anti-Nazi leaflets between June 1942 and February 1943, which called on the German people to withhold support from Hitler's government. Five students and a professor were guillotined and others, some still in secondary school, received punitive sentences. A chemistry student created a similar group in Hamburg University, which led to seven further executions and more prison sentences.
One sees how insidious Hitler's regime was, from its opponents' fate. Sophie Scholl, now a modern German icon, was a pretty and talented woman who was executed at the age of 21. Sophie came to Munich to study biology and philosophy. Her brother Hans, a non-commissioned officer in the Wehmacht, was studying medicine.
The Scholls were a devout Lutheran family in Ulm. Their mother, Magdalena Müller, spent a decade as a Lutheran nun before marrying Robert Scholl whom she met while tending the wounded during the First World War. Though Herr Scholl opposed Nazism, all his children joined the Hitler Jugend or its female equivalent the Bund deutscher Mädel. Hans was an HJ leader, but was later discharged for opposing the regime. His three sisters and brother gradually did the same.
Hans met like-minded student-soldiers in Munich University's medical faculty: Willi Graf, Alexander Schmorell and Christoph Probst. Willi, a devout Catholic Saarlander, refused to join the HJ and participated in the Catholic Grauer Orden instead, earning an arrest for his trouble. Christoph, a Luftwaffe medic, was brought up as a religious humanist by his father. Alex was born in Russia to a German father and Russian mother. His maternal grandfather was an Orthodox priest. His mother died when he was two and the family fled Russia after his father re-married. Alex grew up in Munich speaking Russian at home and was brought up as an Orthodox. These four were collaborating when Sophie joined them.
Promotion denied
The White Rose were cultured young people whose Munich life revolved around theatre, concert hall and art gallery as well as lectures, and they read extensively outside their own studies. Most were medical students, but all attended Kurt Huber's philosophy lectures. Professor Dr Huber was a popular lecturer whose dry wit was the talk of the university. When referring to Spinoza, he sarcastically apologised for poisoning young minds with non-Aryan thought. The Nazi establishment noticed, and denied Dr Huber a deserved promotion. The group studied the works of St Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas and other (mainly Catholic) theologians, and frequented the houses of Munich's Catholic intellectuals. This had a marked influence on Christoph.
Sophie had her own struggle to get to university. She trained as a kindergarten teacher and then did six months' compulsory service in the Labour Corps. She found comfort in St Augustine's Confessions. She realised the wrong of the exclusion of the Jews from civil life and the removal of mentally handicapped children from orphanages where she worked. Though she was not Catholic, the sermons of Clemens von Galen, Bishop of Münster, against euthanasia impressed her.
Hans was gratified by Sophie's moral support, but worked to keep her out of any dangerous action. Sophie received a copy of the first White Rose flyer at lectures and brought it home to Hans. She found a volume of Schiller on his desk with a passage quoted in the leaflet marked--and thus realised that he was the author of the pamphlet. Hans reluctantly included Sophie in the group, at her insistence.
Unlikely soldiers
In the summer of 1942, the White Rose activity lapsed as Hans was obliged to go to Russia as a medical assistant, along with Willi and Alex. The three were unlikely soldiers in any army, let alone the Wehrmacht, and it is incredible what they got away with. For Alex, Russia was a homecoming. He considered himself both German and Russian. When he was conscripted, he broke down when required to swear the oath to Hitler. The attending officer let it go: he was not released from military service, but he never took the oath. Alex announced he could shoot neither Russian nor German.
The Russian peasants were suspicious of this German soldier addressing them in perfect Russian, but they quickly accepted Alex and his friends. The three, with other comrades, spent much time out of bounds talking to Russians, singing and dancing with them by night, attending Orthodox liturgies. Willi befriended a young Russian woman named Sina, who assisted in the field hospital. He witnessed Nazi atrocities in Poland and avoided serious consequences for himself only through exemplary medical service. Sina gave him an insight into the hatred Russians had developed towards Germany. Dostoyevsky was a favourite author and the men at the front re-read Crime and Punishment and other works in Russian.
Back in Germany, Sophie was obliged to spend the summer working in a munitions factory. While there, she befriended some Russian women engaged in forced labour. Aside from her brother and friends, her fiancé, Fritz Hartnagel was serving as an army captain in Russia. Her younger brother Werner would later die there.
The men were transformed by their Russian experience and returned with a new urgency. Hans met Falk Harnack who was also on the Eastern front. Falk's brother was executed for involvement in Die Rote Kapelle (the Red Orchestra), Germany's first serious resistance group. Their uncle, the theologian Adolf Harnack was a colleague of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Falk promised to link the White Rose to the Communists in a broad-based resistance movement developing in the army against Hitler. This led to conflict with Professor Huber whose opposition to Nazism was based on conservative patriotism. Dr Huber could see that the Russian Front had changed them.
In addition, Hans, Willi and Alex began painting anti-Nazi slogans on walls in Munich. Efforts were made to produce and distribute more leaflets, which had a sharper focus than the earlier ones.
Following the fifth leaflet's publication in January 1943, an incident occurred in the Deutschemuseum auditorium. The Gauleiter of Bavaria, Paul Giesler addressed the students and academics for the university's 470th anniversary. The Gauleiter accused female students of studying in order to dodge wartime duties (physical labour) and said the least they could do was present the Führer with a child annually. (Marriage was unmentioned). He said he could lend his own adjutants to girls not pretty enough to find lovers, promising this would be a "glorious experience".
The women students rose to walk out. Storm troopers tried to arrest them, but were attacked by male students, many of whom wore Wehrmacht or Luftwaffe uniforms. The students marched down Ludwigstrasse in the Third Reich's first-ever student protest.
Stalingrad defeat
News of the riot reached the White Rose, who had boycotted the talk. They saw it as the first flush of success. But another story captured their attention. Field-Marshal von Paulus and the Sixth Army surrendered at Stalingrad. Sophie's fiancé was lucky to leave on the last plane out. Professor Huber composed the sixth leaflet, referring to the Munich student revolt and the Stalingrad defeat, which he put down to dilettantish leadership.
The draft caused friction between Dr Huber and the students as Dr Huber wished the leaflet to support the Wehrmacht, but the others wanted to cut this line out. The leaflet was printed and circulated. The Scholls went to the university on February 18 to distribute leaflets at key points in the building. They still had flyers, so they brought them to the top storey and pushed them down. Within seconds, students emerged from lecture halls, which seemed to allow the Scholls vanish in the crowd. However, the conscientious janitor, Jakob Schmid, recognised and arrested them.
The Gestapo were summoned and an empty suitcase seemed suspicious. Hans was carrying Christoph's draft for the seventh leaflet which he attempted to eat, but it was recovered. Their story was that Sophie was bringing the suitcase to Ulm to pick up clean laundry and an unknown student had handed Hans the letter he tried to destroy. They said Herr Schmid was mistaken.
Incriminating evidence
The Scholls were interrogated for five hours and the Gestapo were prepared to let them go, but a search of their flat uncovered more evidence: a letter from Christoph whose handwriting matched the draft; copious amounts of stamps and stationery--and Hans' service Luger, which he had no authorisation to keep at home. Christoph was arrested and Gestapo investigators put together a picture of the White Rose. Willi was detained but Alex evaded arrest long enough to make his way to Innsbruck with forged Croatian papers. He attempted to escape to Switzerland, but failed and made his way back to Munich, where he was identified. Collaborators were also arrested.
Hans insisted he acted alone; that Sophie had no serious part in it and that Christoph wrote the draft in depression following Stalingrad and his wife's ongoing childbirth fever after the recent birth of their third child.
Sophie was offered an exculpatory statement to sign. She refused and accepted complete responsibility. The Scholls and Christoph were tried on February 22 before the President of the People's Court, Dr Roland Freisler who flew especially from Berlin. After a judicial travesty, Freisler sentenced all three to death, following which there was commotion as Robert Scholl arrived and attempted to speak in his children's defence.
Final cigarette
The three were removed to death cells, where they had two hours. The Lutheran chaplain attended the Scholls, and Probst requested a Catholic priest. He was baptised, made his First Communion and received the Last Sacraments. After seeing their family, all three were reunited with the connivance of prison staff for a final cigarette prior to beheading. Fritz Hartnagel was in hospital and never saw Sophie again, but he married her sister Elisabeth after the war.
The second White Rose trial took place on April 18. The accused saw some Russian women scrubbing the graffito Scholl lebt!(Scholl lives!) from the wall of the People's Court under SA supervision. Kurt Huber was stripped of doctorate, professorship and citizenship. He was sentenced to death with Willi and Alex. Dr Huber and Alex were guillotined on July 13--Dr Huber raced to finish a book on Leibniz in prison. Willi was kept alive as the Gestapo wanted information on the Grauer Orden. Willi told them nothing and was beheaded on October 12. Other members of the White Rose received sentences ranging from 10 years to six months.
Clara Huber was denied a widow's pension and other students organised a collection--generating Hamburg's White Rose. Dr Huber combined musicology and psychology among his interests and collaborated in folk music collection with the composer Carl Orff. (Orff thought he was already in too much trouble to help.)
Religious convictions
The White Rose has been claimed by many ideological factions, so contextualisation is necessary. The opposition to National Socialism was rooted in the members' Third Reich experiences. It came from deep religious convictions: they were, religiously, eclectic--from each of the three branches of Christianity, with some closet Jews and even a Buddhist and a theosophist. However, Bishop von Galen's sermons and other Catholic writings were their main inspiration. Hans moved closer to Catholicism over time and considered conversion in his last days. Alex's Russian Orthodoxy is treated as affectation by commentators, but his friends are unanimous that he was serious about it and the Russian Church Abroad list him as one of the new Russian Martyrs. He may be canonised in time-- icons are already available.
The group may be a model for ecumenical action, but no member compromised their own faith in the process. They opposed a system that encouraged secularism and syncretism, which denied the dignity of all human life and attacked the mentally handicapped, Jews, Slavs and other groups deemed inferior. They were prepared to work in common cause with Communists, but they were not Communist. They were liberal in outlook and disposition, but not in ideology.
Nor did they hate Germany: their principal motivation was love of Germany and the Germans and shame for German misdeeds. Soon Germans who were totally remote from the Reich would pay very dearly for the National Socialists' actions. The White Rose merits constant re-examination and re-evaluation, especially by those who seek to assert universal Christian values against a liberal secularism in denial about its own parallels with Nazism.
THE man said to me the other day something that set me thinking. "There's something wrong with the Church, but I can't put my finger on what it is." Since the Church is essentially a mystery, within the mystery of God's love, I could understand that man's lack of precision in defining the problem. Yet I believe that he, and his kind, form a vital part of the solution to the problem. For he is one of the Lord's scholars, a man who has heard the Lord say, "Learn of me, for I am gentle and humble of heart." Yes, and that man has passed the test with flying colours.
He is one of Ireland's hidden holy ones. He is a working-class man now retired. It pleases him that he can "visit Jesus" more often. But I assure him that, "Jesus is with you all the while, John." I realise that his daily visits to the Church, as he puts it, "get me out of the house." But while that may be true, it is also a humble camouflage for his reason for going to the Church. It is his bond with Jesus, for he has told me so, and the Church is Jesus' home among the rest. John is happy to sit with Jesus and have a chat.
There are many such people around this country, unsung heroes of the Church. The theologians and their theories; the authorities of the Church and their pronouncements, may make the headlines. But it is people like John, who don't just talk about Jesus, but who knowhim personally, and love him, that are keeping the Church graced most really in our time.
The print of the nails
Those good people know Jesus because they are constantly walking with him, and his Mother Mary, through the joyful, luminous, sorrowful, and glorious mysteries of his life. They get very close to Jesus as they walk with him through the horrors of his dreadful Passion. Go to any Church and you will find such people adoring and praising Jesus in the Adoration Chapels. So that when they come to the celebration of holy Mass, they know in their hearts that it is the sacrifice of Jesus, which they have held lovingly in imagination in the Rosary, and while making the Stations of the Cross.
There is much talk of the crisis in the Church, and all sorts of intellectual attempts are being made to get to grips with it. New structures are proposed as the best approach to a solution. Could it be that the value of the free action of God's powerful grace prayerfully invoked has been overlooked? How can we know which route to a solution to the crisis is best to follow?
Perhaps we can find help from something the Blessed Cardinal Newman wrote in his Historical Sketches vol. 2, on St Martin of Tours. I think that Newman could have had the likes of my friend John in mind when he wrote these words, for what he says of the age of St Martin applies very well to our own today. The Blessed Cardinal says this:
The application of this vision to Martin's age is obvious; I suppose it means in this day, that Christ comes in pride of intellect, or reputation for philosophy. These are the glittering robes in which Satan is now arraying. Many spirits are abroad, more are issuing from the pit; the credentials which they display are the precious gifts of mind, beauty, richness, depth, originality. Christians, look hard at them with Martin in silence, and ask them for the print of the nails.
THOMAS BERRY died on June 1, 2009, at age 94. A Passionist priest and self-styled "geologian", he was described by Newsweek in 1989 as "the most provocative figure among the new breed of eco-theologians".
Among the tributes he received after his demise, we find these three: Fr. Diarmuid O'Murchu lauded him as "the single greatest disciple of Teilhard de Chardin" and a "great prophetic figure of our time". Holy Cross Brother Dave Andrews of Food and Water Watch, a non-governmental organisation, declared that Berry gave him a "new view of history, culture and religion". And Fr. Seán McDonagh praised him as not only "the most important and insightful Catholic commentator on environmental issues during the second half of the 20th century", but as one who has set "the agenda for every human being for the 21st century".
Born in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1914, Thomas Berry joined the Passionists in 1934 and was ordained in 1942. He directed the graduate program in History of Religions at Fordham from 1966 to 1979, the American Teilhard Association from 1975 to 1987, and New York's Riverdale Centre for Religious Research from 1970 to 1995. He was also mentor to the "green sisters".
From Vermont's "Green Mountain Monastery and Father Thomas Berry Sanctuary", Sister Gail Worcelo informs us that he chose to be "returned to a beautiful meadow on our land" in a burial on June 8, 2009. Under his guidance, Worcelo, a Passionist nun, started this monastery to seek "the refounding of religious life in light of new understandings of the universe story and the evolution of Christ Consciousness".
'Supreme subversive science'
Upon examining three of Thomas Berry's books, The Dream of the Earth (1988), The Great Work: Our Way into the Future (1999), and Evening Thoughts: Reflecting on Earth as Sacred Community (2006), one finds that, for Berry, ecology is "the supreme subversive science" that has the power to undermine Western culture, the culture he blames for today's ecological crisis.
Mere environmentalism, he asserts, will not solve our problems, so he proposes that ecology become the "foundation of all courses, all programs, all professions". Not only must the West change its institutions--legal, political, commercial, industrial, educational, religious--from top to bottom, it must "create a new language, even a new sense of what it is to be human", and find a "completely new sense of reality and of value".
Fr Berry admits that what he proposes will revolutionise Western culture--in law, it will become a crime to act as if "natural beings" are only "material realities"; in agriculture, a large part of the population will have to engage in subsistence farming, with each bioregion forced to be self-sustaining; in religion, the natural world will become the "primary scripture"; and in morals, "bio centrism"--placing the interests of human beings on the same level as, or even below, those of rivers, trees, and animals in a given bioregion--will replace the "natural-law vision of the medieval world".
He's aware that, at first, biocentrism will be hard to take, because we humans will need to learn that the Earth (always with a capital E) is "primary" and we are only "derivative". We will have to see ourselves as nothing more than a "species among species" and to take the Earth as an "extrahuman referent" for our decisions. According to Berry, there is a "pathology" embedded deep in Western culture, dating from when Judeo-Christianity linked up with Greek humanism, in which religion and the humanities have been guilty of putting human beings above the natural world. Even Western science has treated "the human as Olympian ruler of the planet". But this view of human nature as "a superior mode of being" is passé, for now our species has become "the affliction of the world, its demonic presence".
One might ask why Western traditions should be blamed for the ecological crisis when they were cast aside by modern science three centuries ago. Fr Berry's reply is that our traditions are guilty because they defined civilisation as "a vast effort at liberating the human from the limitations of nature". They broke the "primary law" of the universe by failing to teach us that we are a mere "subsystem of the Earth system", and by allowing us to become "a predator draining the life of its host".
Berry thinks we have long overvalued the human species because of our fascination with patriarchy, which he calls the "basic pathology" of the West, as well as the social, political, moral, and religious problem underlying our governments, corporations, and churches. At the same time, he celebrates the "wisdom" of feminists, whose "greatest support", he says, comes from the ecological movement.
More than feminism, Fr Berry celebrates Deep Ecology--possibly the most misanthropic movement in history. In his first book as a "geologian", The Dream of the Earth, Berry spells out one of the chief principles of Deep Ecology--that human beings must substantially decrease so that other species may flourish. Deep Ecology teaches that the human species has been a great burden on the Earth since the Neolithic Age. Berry echoes this point when he laments that "human disturbance of the natural world was begun in a serious way" ten thousand years ago with Neolithic agriculture, and that, ever since, humans have "impinged with progressive destructiveness on the patterns of the natural world".
Keeping numbers down
At one point he even complains that in late Palaeolithic times there was "a significant deleterious human impact on some of the larger animal species". One may wonder how far down in numbers the human species is supposed to fall so that other "lifeforms" might flourish.
Furthermore, Berry echoes Deep Ecology when he says that once the Earth has been divided into bio regions, human numbers will have to be kept in balance with those of other species: "Both in terms of species and in terms of numbers, a certain balance must be maintained." He doesn't say who will compel us to keep our numbers down, but he hints that if we over-multiply we will be left to starve because there is no such global task as "feeding the world".
Deep Ecology also applauds wildness in human beings. Berry adopts this principle too, as when he says, somewhat disturbingly, "Something in the wild depths of the human soul finds its fulfilment in the experience of nature's violent moments", and "The natural world demands a response that rises from the wild unconscious depths of the soul." To unleash the "wild depths" is quite contrary to what the Lamb of God came to accomplish.
In the preface to The Dream of the Earth, his collaborator Brian Swimme remarks that, because Berry stands in the "ancient tradition of the shamanic personality", one may expect a certain "disorientation" when reading his work. To call a Catholic priest "shamanic" seems preposterous--until we realise that Fr Berry himself lavished praise on the role of the shaman and welcomed its restoration in our day. He defined a shaman as one who "journeys into the far regions of the cosmic mystery and brings back the vision and the power needed by the human community". This role, he explained, would become very important when the Earth comes to be mapped out into bioregions, for then the need would arise for a "sensitivity akin to that of the shamanic personality", a sensitivity to "numinous powers" within the Earth that could result in new revelations. In the Christian tradition, this kind of "sensitivity" to powers below ground has a Faustian overtone.
Giordano Bruno
Thomas Berry calls himself a follower of Giordano Bruno, a priest executed for materialist pantheism in 1600. He also praises the "earlier wisdom" found in "alchemy, astrology, the pagan nature rituals, and the hermetic teachings". Here too he echoes Deep Ecology and its neo-pagan rituals.
While Berry admits that the "religious-humanist traditions" of Western society reject such "wisdom", he insists that we have to embrace it to pass beyond "rational processes" and participate in the "dream of the Earth". Why, you might ask, would we want to pass beyond "rational processes"? Make sure you are sitting down for the answer:
To obtain the power to guide evolution. Yes, he really said that! Until now, he claims, we have been "unknowingly carried through the evolutionary process", but in the future we could "in some sense guide and energise the process ourselves". But to shape evolution we'd have to take upon ourselves "the will of the more comprehensive self" by an "acknowledged union with the deeper structures of reality", even a "union with the Earth, with the universe itself". By taking on this larger "self", we'd gain the power to determine evolution by acts of will: "If we will the future effectively it will be because the guidance and the powers of the Earth have been communicated to us, not because we have determined the future of the Earth simply with some rational faculty."
Talk about a delusion of grandeur! Berry makes the Astronomer in Samuel Johnson's Rasselas look humble--he merely thought he could make the sun rise and set. For Berry, guiding evolution in the whole universe is within reach once we agree to pass beyond "rational processes". It seems never to have occurred to Berry, or to his devotees in the Sierra Club (which published Dream of the Earth) or among the green sisters, that the so-called powers of the Earth might be deceitful demons lying in wait for our immortal souls.
It's astonishing that a Catholic priest could believe such claptrap as that by "invocation" we can persuade the "dynamic forces" in the "sea of energy" around us to give us unheard-of cosmic powers. For a Christian, never mind a Catholic priest, such an "invocation" would be idolatrous. Of course, Fr Berry was already a pantheist in 1988 when he published his Dream. Strange that his bishop and the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith didn't publicly warn the flock of his apostasy. He went on for another twenty years, seducing lambs into his materialist pantheism.
In 1999, in The Great Work, Berry speaks of the Earth as our creator, upholder, guide, and our "ultimate destiny". The Earth, he says, "brings us into being", "sustains us in life", and gives us "guidance" and "powers" for the asking. During all those ages in which humans were developing music, dance, and religious ritual, they were only giving expression to "Earth itself in its vast range of creativity". It was in us that the planet was coming into a "mode of reflexive consciousness". Moreover, at the end of our lives, the Earth that "brought us into being draws us back into itself to enter the deepest of all mysteries".
Patriarchal pathology
Perhaps this is why Berry was "returned to a beautiful meadow" in Vermont, rather than buried among the Passionists. And yet Berry contradicts himself: He says that when the Earth made human beings, it not only "created a supreme danger to all other components of the Earth community", it also made itself "capable of self-destruction" through "human agency".
So now it is a question of whether the Earth can survive the "intelligence" it "brought forth". Well, if human beings are only a planetary "subsystem" and are created, sustained, and guided by the Earth, how come our thoughts and actions are beyond the Earth's control? Berry tries to palm off this contradiction by saying that the Earth took the "ultimate daring venture" when it confided "its destiny to human decision" and gave us "the power of life and death over its basic life systems".
Confided its destiny? This sounds as if man is set apart from the rest of creation as Genesis and Psalm 8 teach. Yet Fr Berry keeps insisting elsewhere that to set us apart is a Western patriarchal pathology.
For Fr Berry, it is not just the Earth, but the universe itself that is divine. He calls the universe "selfemergent, self-sustaining, and self-fulfilling", the only "self-referent mode of being", our "primary source of existence", and our "ultimate destiny". He urges us to identify with evolution as our personal story in order to attain "the quintessence of human fulfilment" and become "sacred" ourselves by participating in the "primary sacred reality". To add a kind of Eucharistic aura to his pantheism, Berry calls the universe "an intimate presence" where everything is "intimately present to everything else", and where human beings play a special role as the "communion" of the universe "become conscious of itself".
In addition, the universe was wholly present in the "primordial atomic particles", which already contained "the destinies of all that has followed, even the spiritual shaping of the human". He assures us that these first atoms contained "the total mystery and meaning of the universe, as well as the entire range of creativity that will ever exist". In these passages he transfers to the universe attributes that Catholics ascribe to our saviour Jesus Christ in the Eucharist-- e.g., that He is whole in the whole, and whole in every part. But there's another contradiction here: How can the universe be the all-in-all if, as Berry admits, it had a beginning?
Reality and value
But Fr Berry doesn't stop there. He attributes to the universe qualities and powers that belong to God. For example, he claims that the universe planned from the start to make human beings: "The entire universe has been involved in shaping our individual mental as well as our physical being from that first awesome moment when the universe emerged." It has guided us "safely through the turbulent centuries", and will help us if we "inquire concerning the basic issues of reality and value" and learn from it "the deep mysteries of our existence".
Since our human intelligence "emerged" from the universe, he adds, it is "ordered toward the universe" as its fulfilment. Here, among other vagaries, we find him confusing the impersonal, implacable universe with a loving and providential God.
Berry also makes the startling claim that "many scientists" agree with him that the universe had a spirit-dimension from the start: "That some form of intelligent reflection on itself was implicit in the universe from the beginning is now granted by many scientists." He provides no footnote with the names of those scientists. He adds that other scientists have not yet "appreciated" the "psychic dimension" of the universe and refuse to recognise that the "primordial particles" of the universe were "already radiant with intelligibility and with unfathomable mystery".
The key role of the human species, he says, is to "activate" the intelligence of the universe and allow it to celebrate itself in our "self-awareness". One might well ask why a divine and intelligent universe would need a creature like man to activate its intelligence. It seems illogical. Of course, a "shaman" is not bound by the laws of logic.
It might seem odd that Fr Berry, who claimed at the end of his life to be in good standing with the Passionist order, should excoriate Christianity for its emphasis on the redemption, but hey, these are unusual times. At the opening of Evening Thoughts, published in 2006, Berry has this dedication: "To my monastery community, which has guided, educated, and supported me through these many years." This could well be true--the Passionists have offered no disclaimer, and the Passionist retreat house I visited three years ago in Massachusetts was selling his Evening Thoughts in its gift shop.
And yet, in this very book, Fr Berry accuses Christianity of being the "ultimate basis of our ecological difficulties" and insists that those who defend our religion against this accusation are not convincing. They fail to acknowledge "those dark or limited aspects of Christianity that made our Western society liable to act so harshly toward the natural world".
One such "dark" aspect is that Christianity's sense of the divine is based on "verbal sources"--i.e., the Scriptures, which draw us away from nature as "our primary revelation".
A second dark aspect is that Christianity sees the divine as "transcendent to the natural world", instead of a "pervasive divine presence" within the universe.
A third dark aspect is belief in original sin, which doesn't fit with "the emergent story of the universe such as we now understand it". Berry denounces the "excessive emphasis" on redemption in Western religious traditions. He complains that "the creed itself is overbalanced in favour of redemption" and he urges Christians to rephrase our doctrines in biocentric terms: "Even the incarnation and redemption as these are presented within the Christian tradition must be considered as primarily for the good of the universe even though these have a certain immediate reference to the human."
Contempt for Bible
Fr Berry is also upset by our Christian belief in "an eternal destiny beyond that of other members of the created world." Our desire for a home that is not of this world is, he declares, "alienating" us from the "only context in which human life has any satisfying meaning." Yes, he calls this world our only context. So much for St Augustine's City of God. It is because of our "salvation orientation" that we Christians have been bad for ecology--our attention, he says, has been directed too much toward "moral conduct, social injustice, pietistic practices, and interior meditation experiences", when it should have been focused on the "survival of this world".
Fr Berry shows a not-so-subtle contempt for the Bible when he says that the West is focused on "the existence of a monotheistic personal male deity, creator of the universe clearly distinct from himself, a deity communicating his directions for the human community to a small pastoral tribe in the Palestinian region of the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea".
Note that he does not put a capital letter on deity or creator, nor does he use the name God. This is hardly a slip, for when he mentions our Lord Jesus Christ in his eco-theological writings, he typically places Him in lists that include Confucius, Buddha, Moses, Darius, Plato, and Mohammed, all of whom are supposedly "archetypal" personalities "instrumental" in maintaining "the energy level" of their cultures. Could an atheist speak of our Redeemer with more disdain?
They are Legion
The disciples of Thomas Berry span the globe. We find them in his "sanctuary" at the eco-monastery in Vermont, where Sr Worcelo wants "to contribute to the unfolding of an Integral Christianity by bringing the Catholic religious tradition into its cosmological/planetary phase". We also find them in Ireland, where the Columban Ecological Institute in County Meath holds an "Earth Ritual" in his honour; and in Comox Valley, Canada, where a Unitarian gathering contemplates "the Shamanic Mission of Thomas Berry". Meanwhile Matthew Fox, who calls him "Meister", implements Berry's "agenda" by affirming "the sacramental character of the Universe" in "Techno Cosmic Masses".
It's sad that all of Thomas Berry's erudition should have come to this. Unlike Samuel Johnson's Astronomer in Rasselas, he never learned humility.
Anne Barbeau Gardiner is Professor Emerita of English at John Jay College of the City University of New York. She has published on Dryden, Milton, and Swift, as well as on Catholics of the seventeenth century. With acknowledgements and thanks to the New Oxford Review.
CONSIDER the immensity of the Catholic Church apparatus as it reached the fateful year 1960. From the 1500s to the 1800s, church property across Europe and America had been consistently pruned, repossessed, taken over with or without form of law, with or without episcopal and papal consent.
The Protestant revolt, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the nineteenth-century conflicts of church and state, had been nothing but stages in one long and immense story of plunder and looting, sometimes for the good of the state, often for less deserving causes. And yet the Church had come into the twentieth century not only stronger, but possibly richer than she had ever been.
Survive and conquer
In countries like Britain and the Netherlands, where it had been barely tolerated and almost invisible in 1800, in 1900--let alone 1960--it was a power. In Italy, France, Spain, Mexico, the state had taken over her properties again and again; and yet every episode of looting was followed by a new wave of foundations, endowments, building. Already in 1840, Macaulay was drawing attention to the essential failure of all attempts to break the Church; not with any pleasure, because he disliked it. But even by then, it was clear that the long plunder of the Church had been a total political failure.
The power of the Church not just to survive but to conquer had come from below. It had been the result of millions of parish communities, as often as not made up of poor and ignorant immigrants, to build and endow their own churches, their own schools, their hospitals and missions. While the Italian state was busy confiscating the estates built up by saints three or ten centuries before--at the same time, barely noticed by the authorities, living saints such as St John Bosco and Mother Cabrini and Bishop Scalabrini and my own ancestor Clelia Barbieri were establishing new communities, new ministries, and, inevitably, new endowments.
The Church, in fact, was catching the tremendous wave of Western growth that changed the face of the world between 1800 and 1950, spreading the European race across the face of two continents and multiplying its numbers from six to tenfold even in Europe. The first thing we think of, of course, in terms of growth, was the famous Victorian family-- father, mother and 10 or 20 children. But the importance of those families lies not just in sheer numbers, but in the fact that, from the end of the Napoleonic wars on, health and life duration were constantly growing. Europeans had long had large families; but until 1820 or even later, it was in the expectation that many of the children, even in the most rich and comfortable families, would die young. From the 1820s on, that began to be less and less the case.
Without an equally enormous set of opportunities, of course, this growth would have resulted in nothing but what Malthus had forecast--a growing competition for scarce resources, resulting in mass death. But as it happens, the nineteenth century was a period of unbelievably increasing opportunities. Several continents were suddenly opened to exploitation and settlement, while at home the swift advance of technology produced a stream of new economic opportunities, from workers in the new plants to journalists in the suddenly popular press to nurses in the new hospitals. A family could have any amount of children without any great fear that any of them would risk starving; if nothing else, any child who did not find an opportunity at home could be sent to try his luck in America or Australia.
A prestigious career
In this world of multiplying opportunities and enormous unleashed energies, the Church too had a nearly infinite array of posts. It was far from merely restoring the holes left by various waves of state and private plunder; vast arrays of new tasks awaited. Every new village in the new colonies would require a church and a school; and at home there were all sorts of new ministries--hospitals, the vast Catholic press, the new phenomenon of Catholic universities, schools in general, political parties, banks, co-operative societies, even trades unions. Any family one of whose children showed any kind of piety or interest in sacred matters had every reason to encourage him or her to follow a vocation; the vast growth that surrounded them on every side was itself enough to impress on everyone the prestige and merit of a Church career.
The Church of 1960, the enormous apparatus spread over five continents and dominant even in countries where it had been illegal almost within living memory, was the result of this long wave. But the long wave had exhausted itself; and at the same time it had began to show all the flaws that are inevitable even in the holiest enterprise this side of the veil. The practical and building spirit that had quietly dominated church enterprise over 150 years, allowing great figures such as Newman and Chesterton and their likes to draw attention while, away from the limelight, the umpteenth parish church, private hospital or local bank was being set up, was giving way to a silent unhappiness, a sense of being behind the world at large, of being provincial and secondary.
Consciously or not, the Church in its growth had adopted the attitudes and to some extent the goals of the world, and of course had not managed to beat the world on its own ground. The Church had grown, but not grown far enough to outrace its enemy the world. The Church could build a great and impressive university at Notre Dame, but it would never be as great and impressive as Harvard; the Church could build magnificent hospitals, but the state or state-directed national health services could build many, many more, just as good.
Beneath the cassock and the habit, religious felt, more and more, the cultural and ethical draw of the world. The colossal endeavour put forth in the last two centuries to survive the greedy attentions of the world at large had turned into an increasing insertion in that same world--but in a perceivedly backward and provincial position. In a sense, it was worse than in the days of Pius VII and Pius IX; when the powers of the state and the people were openly turned against the Church, the Church had something to fight, to endure, to work towards; now the world had more or less accepted it on its own terms, as a minor figure in its landscape, even a bit of a sentimental indulgence.
The history of modern culture was taught--and never mind how many major figures, from Chesterton to Bernanos, from Stravinsky to Johnny Cash, were Christians--as though Christianity did not exist, and I have met many children of the sixties who literally have no notion whatever what the Church is, teaches or does. No wonder that every lie about her, from Hochhuth to Dan Brown, sells so well.
The explosion of self-indulgence in the sixties, from which the collapse of the religious orders and the crisis in vocations are often said to proceed, comes from this underlying crisis, which is a crisis of vocation in a much deeper way. The Church has survived, triumphantly survived, one of the most severe series of attacks ever witnessed. Though her position is still here and there--most notably in China--under threat, the issue is no longer in doubt. But in surviving, it has adopted too much of the world's way of looking at things. Too many churchmen felt not like successful priests or nuns, but like second-rate schoolteachers, office managers, or journalists.
A great lie of our time
Another reason for the crisis is that the dynamic resource of population growth that had powered the growth in the number of Church and Church-related institutions was also clearly running out. The Victorian family of 10 or 20 children was no longer the norm and never would be again. And here we have to deal with one of the great lies of our time. Women do not have children because they don't know how to avoid it; they don't have children out of ignorance. Women, or rather families--with the mother, of course, as a driving force--have children because they see it as a practical thing to do.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth century, they had children because many of them would die, and they wanted at least a few to live; in the nineteenth, increasingly, because many children could get gainful employment and enrich the family, including looking after the older generation. In the twentieth century, these reasons progressively ceased to matter. Unprecedented understanding of hygiene made sure tion for scarce resources, resulting in mass death. But as it happens, the nineteenth century was a period of unbelievably increasing opportunities. Several continents were suddenly opened to exploitation and settlement, while at home the swift advance of technology produced a stream of new economic opportunities, from workers in the new plants to journalists in the suddenly popular press to nurses in the new hospitals. A family could have any amount of children without any great fear that any of them would risk starving; if nothing else, any child who did not find an opportunity at home could be sent to try his luck in America or Australia.
A prestigious career
In this world of multiplying opportunities and enormous unleashed energies, the Church too had a nearly infinite array of posts. It was far from merely restoring the holes left by various waves of state and private plunder; vast arrays of new tasks awaited. Every new village in the new colonies would require a church and a school; and at home there were all sorts of new ministries--hospitals, the vast Catholic press, the new phenomenon of Catholic universities, schools in general, political parties, banks, co-operative societies, even trades unions. Any family one of whose children showed any kind of piety or interest in sacred matters had every reason to encourage him or her to follow a vocation; the vast growth that surrounded them on every side was itself enough to impress on everyone the prestige and merit of a Church career.
The Church of 1960, the enormous apparatus spread over five continents and dominant even in countries where it had been illegal almost within living memory, was the result of this long wave. But the long wave had exhausted itself; and at the same time it had began to show all the flaws that are inevitable even in the holiest enterprise this side of the veil. The practical and building spirit that had quietly dominated church enterprise over 150 years, allowing great figures such as Newman and Chesterton and their likes to draw attention while, away from the limelight, the umpteenth parish church, private hospital or local bank was being set up, was giving way to a silent unhappiness, a sense of being behind the world at large, of being provincial and secondary.
Consciously or not, the Church in its growth had adopted the attitudes and to some extent the goals of the world, and of course had not managed to beat the world on its own ground. The Church had grown, but not grown far enough to outrace its enemy the world. The Church could build a great and impressive university at Notre Dame, but it would never be as great and impressive as Harvard; the Church could build magnificent hospitals, but the state or state-directed national health services could build many, many more, just as good.
Beneath the cassock and the habit, religious felt, more and more, the cultural and ethical draw of the world. The colossal endeavour put forth in the last two centuries to survive the greedy attentions of the world at large had turned into an increasing insertion in that same world--but in a perceivedly backward and provincial position. In a sense, it was worse than in the days of Pius VII and Pius IX; when the powers of the state and the people were openly turned against the Church, the Church had something to fight, to endure, to work towards; now the world had more or less accepted it on its own terms, as a minor figure in its landscape, even a bit of a sentimental indulgence.
The history of modern culture was taught--and never mind how many major figures, from Chesterton to Bernanos, from Stravinsky to Johnny Cash, were Christians--as though Christianity did not exist, and I have met many children of the sixties who literally have no notion whatever what the Church is, teaches or does. No wonder that every lie about her, from Hochhuth to Dan Brown, sells so well.
The explosion of self-indulgence in the sixties, from which the collapse of the religious orders and the crisis in vocations are often said to proceed, comes from this underlying crisis, which is a crisis of vocation in a much deeper way. The Church has survived, triumphantly survived, one of the most severe series of attacks ever witnessed. Though her position is still here and there--most notably in China--under threat, the issue is no longer in doubt. But in surviving, it has adopted too much of the world's way of looking at things. Too many churchmen felt not like successful priests or nuns, but like second-rate schoolteachers, office managers, or journalists.
A great lie of our time
Another reason for the crisis is that the dynamic resource of population growth that had powered the growth in the number of Church and Church-related institutions was also clearly running out. The Victorian family of 10 or 20 children was no longer the norm and never would be again. And here we have to deal with one of the great lies of our time. Women do not have children because they don't know how to avoid it; they don't have children out of ignorance. Women, or rather families--with the mother, of course, as a driving force--have children because they see it as a practical thing to do.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth century, they had children because many of them would die, and they wanted at least a few to live; in the nineteenth, increasingly, because many children could get gainful employment and enrich the family, including looking after the older generation. In the twentieth century, these reasons progressively ceased to matter. Unprecedented understanding of hygiene made sure that nearly every child survived to become an adult; unexploited resources diminished in number and importance, so that the threat of unemployment became increasingly a feature of the landscape even of the richest countries.
In this situation, women would have been certain to have fewer children, whether or not contraception and abortion had been available. Far from being so pathetically ignorant as to find themselves pregnant without knowing why or how to stop it, women at all times have had their ways to control the issue. In Greek myth, no less, fear of female refusal to comply with the demand for babies is frequently found under the symbolic disguise of tales about women toasting the seed grain before it was sowed, thus making the land infertile.
A racist assumption
However, the demand for legalised contraception and abortion has always been presented under this guise--as a battle against ignorance. Third World women, it was said, bring children into the world by the dozen and then watch them starve to death because there is not enough food to feed them. (Of course, all the great African famines are really the result of war, but let's not say that too loudly--it might spoil the picture.) This racist assumption--the poor ignorant blacks need us enlightened whites to look after their own best interests--gained hold across the West, not only because of its flattering racism, but above all because it had a real correspondence with what was seen as direct, local experience.
In the year of the Lord 1960 the whole West was peopled by a generation who had seen their parents in the case of Catholics, their grandparents in the case of agnostics and Protestants, bring up families of 10 or 20 children, and who instinctively knew that they would never in their lives consider any such effort or sacrifice. They could not but regard their parents or grandparents with a kind of affectionate contempt; people who had lived in so much more restricted a world, a world of ignorance and poverty. Emotionally, it was very easy to connect the large families of the European near past and the African present with the ignorance and backwardness of the past.
Ultimately, the racist assumption that a Kenyan woman with ten children was too stupid to know the difference depended on an unspoken assumption that one's own mother or grandmother--so backward, so set in her ways, so closely associated with a provincial past--was equally stupid and ignorant. To those who were 20 in 1960, it never occurred that their parents, in their own day and in their own way, had been just as much rational, far-sighted and up-to-date as they were--only that conditions were different and made different requirements.
It was on the spur of this propaganda that the world-wards drift of so many priests and laymen was brutally broken. No wonder that it took years of thought and agonised debate before the unhappy Paul VI could bring himself to lay down the gauntlet of Humanae Vitae--not on the matter of abortion, but on the far more insidious and less attractive one of contraception.
It was all too clear to anyone that the world had changed. Nobody could seriously imagine a Church whose average family had a dozen children; if nothing else, the idea of further crowding an already choked Western Europe was enough to make anyone's head spin. Population growth was dreaded, not altogether without reason: everyone could see the natural and artistic heritage of the richest countries being squeezed and concreted over.
Families were shrinking, and at the time that seemed an almost unmitigated good. The only issue (nobody then publicly imagined that the Church would have tolerated abortion) was whether the Church was disposed to slacken the ban on artificial means of contraception.
Well. We know what happened. Surrounded by every kind of suggestion and hidden menace, flattered and pushed in one direction and one only, the Pope nevertheless steeled himself to do his duty; and the earth shook, and the heavens opened. From one day to the next, Catholics who had been cradling themselves in the unbroken if tepid acceptance of the modern world found that world drawn up against them in a ferocious, unbroken phalanx, backed by mountains of dollars and the wrath of all the mass media. Most of them, especially the more "prominent"--those on whom the worldly media had poured more attention in the recent past--broke and went over to the enemy. To live by the values of the world, to accept its views and its reprehensions, had become such a second nature to them that when the time came to show to whom they were loyal, they showed it.
Dynamic monasticism
It is this generation that is now dying out, and it is the religious institutions that harboured them that are shrinking. That consummation was forecast, though for the wrong reasons, more than half a century ago; people have been talking about a crisis of vocations for two or three generations. What had to happen was a real reorientation of the Church and its institutions, in a more purely religious direction, away from purely worldly success. And it is happening: all across the Church, there are religious orders whose numbers and influence are growing--and they are, without exception, reformed versions of the traditional forms of monastic life and charisma. There is even a swiftlygrowing order of blue-dressed nuns!
Monasticism will not die so long as there is a Catholic Church. It is connaturate to it. Think of the Carthusians, the silent monks, so strangely and impressively brought to the public attention by the movie Into Great Silence. Can you conceive of anything that suggests more strongly the high Middle Ages, the "age of faith" as it is sometimes called? The Carthusians are indeed a product of the twelfth century, but another ultra-rigorist order, the Trappists come from the Age of Reason, and, of all countries, from France, from the strange and heartfelt vocation of a French nobleman.
That's right: when the whole of Christendom, and France in particular, had been falling in love with rationalism for its own sake, France, the cultural centre of Europe, produced an order that declined to argue; as France and the world were growing intoxicated with the most brilliant, if not necessarily most sound, style of talk ever devised, from the aristocratic heart of that culture came men who made an offer to the Church and to God, not of their talk, but of their silence. And unlike most other orders, the Trappists (and the Carthusians) have never lacked for novices.
With acknowledgments to Fabio Paolo Barbieri, whom we have tried to contact, without success. More of his work may be found by Googling his name.
MORE THAN 700 years ago, Pope Gregory IX ruled that beer cannot be used for baptism instead of water:
Since as we have learned from your report, it sometimes happens because of the scarcity of water, that infants of your lands are baptised in beer or mead, we reply to you in the tenor of those present that, since according to evangelical doctrine it is necessary to be reborn of water and the Holy Spirit (John 3:5) they are not to be considered rightly baptised who are baptised in beer. ...for the sake of those poor children, I thank Christ our Lord that He gave us the Church to stand for truth (1 Timothy 3:15), and the rock of St Peter (Matthew 16:18) to confirm our faith (Luke 22:32)...even in the small things.
--From the letter Sicut erat of Pope Gregory IX (in office 1227-1241) to Archbishop Sigurd of Nidaros, Norway, July 8, 1241, in Denzinger 447.
My one-person parallel magisterium hereby dissents from the above-quoted teaching, for the following reasons:
First, the Pope's prohibition against baptising with beer was not an infallible exercise of the extraordinary magisterium. Therefore, I can follow my conscience and use beer for baptism.
Second, the Pope assumed antiquated Platonist essentialism and Aristotelian physicalism to differentiate beer from water. But modern science shows that beer is at least 90% water, and experts don't agree on what minimum proportion of water is required for water to remain water. So the "actual" distinction between beer and water is, in "truth", nothing but an arbitrary logocentric convention imposed by the hegemonic elite that controls the dominant semantic discourse. Therefore, to be liberated from socially constructed "reality", we should use beer as baptismal water.
Third, many of today's Christians drink beer like it was water, making these liquids phenomenologically equivalent. Therefore, the institutional Church should follow the sensus fidelium and baptise with beer.
Fourth, the Pope was an Italian who probably drank wine as the Apostles advised (1 Timothy 5:23). What does he know of my life and my needs as a beer-lover, that he presumes to judge my desire to use liturgical beer?
No moral authority
Fifth, the Popes have no business keeping beer out of baptism, when they can't even keep sexual abuse scandals out of the priesthood. The Pope's apologies, his decrees to police the ranks of the clergy, his tighter standards for ordination, his championing of prayer and ascetic self-discipline for priests, his punishment of prominent Church leaders, his admission of non-clergy to high positions; his visitations/investigations and other measures to make the clergy accountable--these are not enough. The Pope still hasn't done real reform like letting us choose whether we want to be baptised with beer or stout, or to have our Mass celebrated by our bartender: in short, he hasn't overhauled Catholic dogma from its outdated God-centredness to modern me-principle. Until the Church has done enough, it has no moral authority to judge my use of baptismal beer.
Sixth, the population explosion, which objective science has informed us is actually happening, has increased demand for fresh water. Also, beer has alcohol whose disinfectant properties can help fight modern pandemics. So it's more humane, considerate, and compassionate to use beer in baptism. By not doing it, the Popes are to blame for drought and disease.
Seventh, the Pope is keeping people away from the Church, with his pre-conciliar idea that the Church must stand for principle amid the secular world. But applying meaningful and love-centred post-conciliar and post-modern ecumenical theology (theologia invertebrata stercotaurana misinterpretativaque egocentrica atque vacua) if we baptised with beer, billions would sign up to convert overnight. Therefore we must drop the purity-fetish on baptismal water and baptise with beer.
Innovatory inculturation
Eighth, the Bible was written by pastoral people whose use of water in baptism was specific to their culture. But we should follow the innovating spirit of the last ecumenical council, whose most progressive interpreters have brought such renewal to the Church. So, rather than perpetuate an outdated tradition, we should subject it to a functional critique and modernise the liturgy by baptising with beer.
Ninth, the Biblical writers--all males--required water for baptism to exclude wymyn power; for herstory shows that wymyn dominated the pre-Christian orgiastic cults that used intoxicating substances in initiation rites. Also, the very existence of the prohibition against baptismal beer, which is herstorically directed toward males, shows the male-orientedness of Church policy. To protect wymyn's dignity and fight the patriarchy, we should baptise converts and catechumyn with beer.
Tenth, using water for baptism shows the effeminate slave morality that, according to Nietzsche, is perpetuated by Christianity. Everybody knows masterful men would prefer baptism with strong beer.
Eleventh, the Pope's ruling cited the Gospel of John. But modern biblical scholars, who have doctorates in textual and form criticism and therefore know better than all the ancient witnesses (including Irenaeus, the student of the John's pupil Polycarp), question that Gospel's authorship by John the Apostle. So we can't be sure if the historical John's record really said "water" and not "beer". Therefore the Pope's ruling is uncertain, and we can baptise with beer.
Twelfth, the Pope based his non-diachronic ruling on the idea that baptismal regeneration with "water and the Holy Spirit" is the Christian rite of initiation. But this disregards the dialectical relationships of the apostles and their communities within the Nazarene Movement. In this case, the Johannine alliance's choice of water-baptism (supported by the deuteroPauline coalition) is obviously contradicted by the preference for river-water-baptism--and therefore water-and-suspended-river-particulates baptism--of the united federation of Petrine-Jacobean churches and the common extra-Marcan source of the Mattheo-Lucan armada. Clearly, the Pope wrongly interprets the Bible as a unitary whole in light of apostolic tradition, on the simplistic basis that the same God who inspired the Biblical writers now lives in the Church. While modern experts are still reconstructing the Biblical books with their personal deconstructive paradigms, we may ignore the Pope and use beer-baptism as a rite of initiation.
Thirteenth, the Pope and bishops who codified the Biblical books deliberately excluded the secret gnosis of Heinekenses of Henessios, whose alternative Christianity was less narrow-minded on liturgical beer. The Catholics triumphed only because they connived with Constantine to set the councils in the morning when the Heinekensians were still sleeping off their hangovers (as revealed to me by my spirit guide Colt, the 45th Ascended Master).
Fourteenth, it's the interiority of my faith that counts, not the physical matter and form of the sacraments. So if I truly believe, then it's perfectly okay if I get baptised with beer.
Fifteenth, Christianity isn't about religion with its dogmas and do's and don'ts, but about relationship; and I'd feel happier with God if I was baptised with beer.
Lastly, under the principle of totality, we should look at the whole Christian life and not at particular wrong acts. In my case, using beer for baptism would deepen my Christian life, for then I'd renew my baptism every day.
Catholics for Baptismal Choice
Therefore, on exegetical, historical-critical, theological, pastoral, missiological, ecclesiological, epidemiological, linguistic, scientific, phenomenological, anthropological, gender-egalitarian, epistemological, and faith-based grounds, I dissent from the Pope's ruling against baptism with beer. I have also established Catholics for Baptismal Choice (CBC), a non-profit, tax-haven people's organization, to pressurise the hierarchy into relaxing its rigorist stance against baptismal beer.
Our manifesto Baptism of Human's Desiring: A Theo-Historical Semeiosis of the Waters of Life in Scriptural Text and Context has been published in Chamelium, the journal for cutting-edge theology, and will appear in abridged form in the progressive publications The Suppository, The Rut, Dissent and Death and Superficialities. Unfortunately it was rejected by Sensus Communis, the conservative journal.
With special thanks to our corporate sponsors, on whose support we completely rely. We also thank our grassroots partners who have fed us much-needed lines:
Americans for Dividing Principle from Power, Profitable Non-Godparenthood Federation, Voice of the Expanding Agenda and the Narcolepsy Foundation.
We are also grateful to Fr Flann O'Fudge Ph.D. for the inspiration we gained from his Theology of Accommodation: a New Faith for a New Audience (Mendacitas Press, 1985) and Dissent for Showmanship: Reshaping Christianity to Ingratiate Oneself with the World(Trimmer Publications, 1991). Both works testify to the intellectual courage of a remarkable man.
Sluts Expressing Themselves
One of the few television programmes I nearly always watch is BBC2's Newsnight. It is always informative and frequently entertaining, particularly when the formidable Jeremy Paxman is in charge.
However, my blood ran a little cold when a hoyden with matted hair and ethnic raiment, described as a writer, was brought on to explain why she and others were taking part in a demonstration to, as she put it, "reclaim the word 'slut'". They were going to dress as provocatively as possible in order to "express their femininity".
Why does this worry me? Because the sole object, as far as I can see, is to make men drool with lust, and yet to have them severely punished for sexual harassment if they take any steps, however tentative, towards fulfilling their desires. That surely shows great hatred and contempt for the entire male sex.
The culture of our day, when soft porn is on display almost everywhere, sends out the most confusing signals to young men. No wonder many of them get so angry and frustrated. There was a great deal of sense in that old admonition to exercise custody of the eyes. I don't know where this repellent woman got the idea that the word "slut" was ever complimentary. As someone said in Shakespeare's As You Like It: "Truly, and to cast away honesty upon a foul slut were to put good meat into an unclean dish."
*************************
Winking at the Pixies?
I wonder how the talks between the Vatican and the Society of St Pius X are going. I imagine the participants are churning over the same old ground: the Pixies insisting that "conciliar Rome" must repent of all its neo-Modernist errors; Rome replying that the decrees of Vatican II are not for turning. I don't think even Guttur Profundum really knows what's going on (if he does he's not telling me).
As an innocent ignoramus in such matters, it does seem to me that the two sides are really not that far apart. They must certainly be closer than the participants in the farcical old ARCIC dialogues between Rome and the Anglicans, where there was no real common ground on, for instance, the Eucharist, but a lot of pretence that it was all just a question of words. Perhaps by contrast the SSPX controversy (I refuse to call it a "schism"--as the Holy Father doesn't) really is amenable to some sort of formula, if only one could be found. Could the Pixies not be told that if they would be willing to sign up to all of Vatican II, interpreted in accordance with the Tradition of the Church--or the hermeneutic of continuity if you prefer--they would immediately be restored to full Catholic unity?
I rather like Fr Hunwicke's take on it all, although I'm afraid it may make some of our valued contributors, and many of our readers, rather cross:
If I had any influence with either the Roman dicasteries, or the SSPX, which I don't, I would advise both sides to stop taking this whole business so painfully seriously; to give each other a broad wink across the negotiating table; to drink deep together in whatever beverages the dicasteries keep in their cellars; and to sign up to some cheerful little semantic fudge which would enable the Holy See to get on with the urgent and joyful task of erecting SSPX Ordinariates all over the world. Droves of them. Ordinariates is the Future. Fresh Expressions of Church.
Hear, hear! Or as the Americans say: "Way to go!" Think how the Mods would loathe it...
There's only one remaining problem, really. Pixies aren't in the habit of winking.
*************************
Peace Be Upon Us All
I see that the series of Lenten talks on "Understanding Islam", given by a team of Moslem speakers (see our last issue) was such a success that the lovely Catholic parish of Dalkey arranged a visit to the mosque in Clonskeagh, in conjunction with Rev. Ginnie Kennerley of the neighbouring Church of Ireland parish. It was originally announced that this was to take place on April 24th--Easter Sunday--but this, I am relieved to learn, was a mistake. I suppose it might be a trifle over-optimistic to hope that there will be a reciprocal visit to Sunday Mass in the Church of the Assumption by a group of inquirers from the Clonskeagh mosque. Moslems think they have nothing whatever of value to learn from Christians.
As it happens, I recently came across an article from The Spectator of December 1989, on a Moslem mission to Catholic infidels in Galway. It was by Jane Kelly, whom I mentioned in these columns a couple of issues ago. They have plans for us, to be sure:
Over another glass of mineral water they expounded on the changes the Irish will willingly undergo. Ahmed said: "Even the strongest cultures must evolve. The Irish will not find giving up drink hard when they are told its evils. One thousand years ago the Arabs used to drink, but when Islam came they gave it up."
Eating habits will have to alter; the days of ham and black pudding are numbered. Ahmed, who was studying for membership of the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin, said: "It has been proven that the pig is the only homosexual animal. As this perversion is most prevalent in pork-eating nations, it is obvious that it gets into your genes through the meat."
Irish music would have to "adapt". A Mr Hanif envisaged a time when Irish families, gathered around the peat fire, would enjoy renditions of favourites like "When Islamic Eyes Are Smiling", "Does Your Mother Come from Mecca?", "How Are Things in Naqb Ashtar?" and "Seven Sober Nights".
Miss Kelly suggested that Shane McGowan of The Pogues would no doubt go the way of Moslem convert Cat Stevens, peace be upon him, and take to wearing a bag on his head. If Allah was truly merciful, she added, he might be forced to adopt a faceconcealing veil.
No, don't laugh. It was funny in the 1980s, but it's just a bit too close for comfort now.
*************************
Curse of the Sacred Microphone
A true funeral horror story. I hear that in one diocese, the bishop has quite rightly ordered that his priests must strictly observe the directive from Rome that there are to be no eulogies during the obsequies.
The night before the funeral of one local worthy, a stranger telephoned a certain PP, told him he was a doctor colleague of the deceased, and would like to say a few suitable words during the Requiem Mass. The priest told him he was sorry, but that was strictly out of order. There would be some bidding prayers and that was all.
At the offertory, relatives lined up, as is the custom, and were handed slips of paper on which were written previously approved prayers. Among them was this doctor, a set, determined expression on his face. When it came to his turn, he brushed aside the paper, and produced a speech from his pocket, which he then proceeded to deliver. There was nothing the priest could do, short of making an ugly scene and thus distressing the relatives.
It occurs to me that this is one of the curses of the Sacred Microphone, now an essential liturgical prop in virtually every Irish church. Without it, this doctor would have been stymied. When I was young, most priests were well able to make themselves heard in every church with reasonable acoustics. (It was almost a strain on the eardrums to hear a Redemptorist missioner getting into his stride.) I'm not very keen on those embarrassing bidding prayers, either.
It was damn bad manners of that doctor. How would he feel if a priest walked into his surgery and demanded to recite a decade of the rosary for a patient?
*************************
Harmless Old Buffers
Guttur Profundum tells me that Rome is not pleased with the antics of the "Association of Catholic Priests", and has made its views known to the Irish hierarchy.
The bishops feel that that the ACP does not represent the vast majority of priests in this country, and that its membership consists of a few dozen arrested adolescents, pining for the halcyon days of the 1960s and 70s, when they could sport flared jeans and sideburns, and to be young was very heaven.
Whatever about their influence with the secular media, which always guarantees them sympathetic coverage, these old boys are now approaching their dotage, and are not attracting new recruits. They need monitoring, but most of them are fairly harmless.
*************************
The Wisdom of Age
Philip Hewitson, an elderly man from Norwich in England was going up to bed when his wife told him that he'd left the light on in the garden shed, which she could see from the bedroom window. Philip opened the back door to go and turn off the light but saw that there were people in the shed stealing things.
He phoned the police, who asked: "Is someone in your house?"
He said: "No, but some people are breaking into my garden shed and stealing from me." Then the police replied: "All patrols are busy. You should lock your doors and an officer will be along when one is available."
Philip said: "Okay." He hung up the phone and counted to 30. Then he phoned the police again.
"Hello, I just called you a few seconds ago because there were people stealing things from my shed. Well, you don't have to worry about them now because I just shot them." And he hung up.
Within five minutes, six police cars, a SWAT team, a helicopter, two fire engines, a paramedic, and an ambulance showed up at the Hewitsons' residence, and caught the burglars red-handed.
One of the policemen said to Philip: "I thought you said that you'd shot them"
Philip said: "I thought you said there was nobody available."
*************************
Warmists Getting Windy
A few years ago the Warmists were worried that sheep were passing so much wind that they were making a significant contribution to greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and thus helping to damage the ozone layer. I speculated in these columns about what West Cork hill farmers might be expected to do about it. Then a bit more recently the Warmists decided the real danger was from flatulence in cattle, and the only solution was for us all to give up beef and reduce the number of herds.
Now they think an even more significant factor is flatulence in humans.
Must we all stop eating baked beans and force the Heinz corporation into liquidation?
*************************
The Joys of Liberation
A character in Evelyn Waugh's Scott-King's Modern Europe says: "I am a Croat, born under the Hapsburg Empire. That was a true League of Nations. As a young man I studied in Zagreb, Budapest, Prague, Vienna--one was free, one moved where on would; one was a citizen of Europe. Then we were liberated and put under the Serbs. Now we are liberated again and put under the Russians. And always more police, more prisons, more hanging..."
*************************
The Joys of Sex Education
I wouldn't have believed this if it hadn't been confirmed by a 10-year-old whose word I trust. Two props for sex education classes in Irish schools nowadays are:
A carrot.
A pineapple ring.
The Morning After Pill
A Eagarth—ir,
This letter is one of the hardest that I have written,
because the profession to which I have belonged for
half a century has evolved in all the wrong directions.
Way back in the late 50s and 60s, when it was not linked to either UCD or Trinity, there was a strong Catholic tradition (though it recognised other faiths without prejudice). One of our lecturers, Miss Alice Esmonde truly lived a Catholic, Christian life. She wrote a Catholic Truth Society booklet, The Stations of the Cross which in my view is fit to stand alongside Caryll Houselander's Reed of God.
Then came the beginning of the downward slide when the College affiliated first with UCD and then with TCD. As so often happens, moral cowardice begins with non-associated issues. There were only two, but we members should have read the signs. In 2003-4, after the smoking ban became law, Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) pressurised the Council of the Pharmaceutical Society of Ireland into instructing pharmacists that it would be unethical for them to sell herbal cigarettes, as these were more injurious to health than tobacco. For generations, these herbal products were the only means available to help people overcome their dependency, and at no time was there any reference to their being dangerous.
Of course, ASH had its own agenda. In America, many people had been awarded vast sums of money in compensation for wrongful arrests and convictions for smoking herbal cigarettes in tobacco-prohibited areas. So the organisation was successful in having these products banned. I wrote to the Society complaining of the insult perpetrated on individual pharmacists past and present, by the inference that they did not have the competency to provide these products. My letter was ignored, hence my writing to you.
Last year, a lone doctor started a panic by demanding that paracetamol and codeine tablets be hidden from public view in the shop dispensary. Again another insult, inferring that pharmacists are irresponsible.
So the latest craven reaction comes as no surprise; but it does create a moral dilemma for any pharmacist who opposes the Morning After Pill. To me, for a pharmacist to tell someone to go where the pill can be got, is the same as that pharmacist supplying it. The only course open is to be courteous, but to refuse to give any directions as to where it can be obtained.
I feel that my life in the profession has been worthless because now I am expected to drown my conscience and submit to majority viewpoint dictatorship (political correctness). T.S. Eliot's Family Reunion sums it up: "In a world of fugitives, the person going in the opposite direction will appear to be running away."
Edited by Nick Lowry, and James. R. Lothian, and published by Brandsma Books Ltd., 14, Villarea Park, Dun Laoghaire, Co. Dublin. (Tel: 01 280 3540). Cost of yearly subscription in Ireland (six issues), EUR19.80.