In October 4 Vatican ceremony, Pope Francis blesses pachamama statue (LifesiteNews)
The statues of the fertility idol that vandals had removed from a Catholic parish in Rome and tossed into the Tiber have been recovered, said Pope Francis. Excerpt from his remarks:
“Good afternoon, I would like to say a word about the pachamama statues that were removed from the Church at Traspontina, which were there without idolatrous intentions and were thrown into the Tiber.
“First of all, this happened in Rome and, as bishop of the diocese, I ask pardon of the people who were offended by this act.”
So the Pope now affirms that these statues were meant to represent the Incan fertility goddess. Useful to know. He went on to say that they might be displayed at the final mass of the Amazon Synod on Sunday.
There you have it.
On EWTN last night, Cardinal Gerhard Müller, who was, until dismissed by Francis, the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — that is, the top doctrinal body of the Catholic Church — called the statues “idols,” and said that bringing them into the church was a crime against the law of God. Watch this short clip:
Understand what is happening here: the cardinal who until fairly recently was the top doctrinal official in the Catholic Church is indirectly accusing the Pope of allowing idolatry, and breaking the divine law. If those “pachamama statues” — to use Francis’s own words — turn up at the closing mass of the Synod in St. Peter’s Basilica, it will be seen by many as a profanation of the temple, as an “abomination of desolation,” to use the term of the prophet Daniel, and Jesus of Nazareth.
Many Biblical scholars say that Christ’s warning about the abomination of desolation in the Temple was a prophetic reference to the Roman army attacking Jerusalem and profaning the Temple. This happened in the year 70 AD; the Romans initially intended to capture the Second Temple and turn it into a sanctuary of Emperor worship, but they ended up burning it down. In any event, that was the end of Jewish temple worship.
But some scholars believe that Jesus made a double prophecy, and that just before the Apocalypse, there will be another abomination of desolation in the temple. I am Orthodox, not Catholic; I don’t know if reputable scholars in the Orthodox tradition believe that this was a double prophecy, and if so, what it portends for the Last Days. But if I were a Catholic, and I saw those idols at the final synod mass in St. Peter’s on Sunday, my blood would run cold.
Whatever you think of prophecy, the fact that a senior cardinal — the former head of the CDF! — has called what Pope Francis has blessed a crime against the divine law is a staggering. Last night, I had an exchange on Twitter with a couple of Catholics, including CNA’s excellent editor J.D. Flynn, who wondered why I write in such a crisis mode about events in the Christian world. My answer is: look around you! The crisis is real.
Let me repeat it in a slightly different framing: In the last 24 hours, the Catholic world has seen the Pope call these Amazonian statues by the Mother Earth goddess name — Pachamama — lament their theft from a church, celebrate their recovery, and suggest that they might be present at mass at St. Peter’s Basilica on Sunday. It has also seen the former doctrinal chief of the Catholic Church denounce these statues as “idols,” and call the placing of them inside a Catholic Church as a violation of divine law. If that doesn’t tell you that the Catholic Church is in a severe crisis at its very summit, what will it take?
675 Before Christ’s second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the “mystery of iniquity” in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh.
LifeSite: You used extraordinarily strong words. You spoke of “apostasy inside the Church”. Could you explain what you meant by that?
Eijk: I quoted number 675 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Because there are cardinals who plead for the blessing of homosexual relationships, I referred to this paragraph of the Catechism as a warning. It states that shortly before Apocalypse, voices will rise within the Church itself, and even among the highest authorities of the Church who will express divergent opinions in relation to Catholic doctrine. I did this as a warning: let us be careful not to find ourselves in this situation. I must say that, to my surprise, Cardinal Müller took up this idea: on February 9 of this year, he published a statement on the fundamental elements of the Catholic faith, in which he also referred to number 675 (2). It is also remarkable that my interview and the full quotation were also taken up by Bishop Gänswein during the presentation of a book by Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option.
All this has reached many people and many have also started to think about it. In this way, I hope to get more and more people in the Church to open their mouths and create clarity, because many Catholics – but you know this as well as I do – are really confused.
To keep silent about these and the other truths of the Faith and to teach people accordingly is the greatest deception against which the Catechism vigorously warns. It represents the last trial of the Church and leads man to a religious delusion, “the price of their apostasy” (CCC 675) it is the fraud of Antichrist. “He will deceive those who are lost by all means of injustice, for they have closed themselves to the love of the truth by which they should be saved” (2 Thess: 2-10)
CWR: There has been quite a bit of discussion about your references to apostasy and “the fraud of the Antichrist” (§ 5). Were you suggesting that we may be living through the “last trial of the Church”? And what sort of apostasy, specifically, did you have in mind?
Cardinal Müller: The Antichrist is a figure embodying opposition to Christ. He does not simply appear at the end of history, but emerges in every age as the one who tempts us into the pit and the one who destroys God’s house. Jesus has asked whether he will still find faith when he returns. And sometimes in Church history, it seems as though faith does run out in the Church. In the struggle against ultra-powerful Arianism, which was sustained by public opinion and political power, Saint Athanasius often seems outmaneuvered. Back then, Arianism was modern and Catholicism premodern in the eyes of those whose faith lay in forward progress. As Saint Jerome puts it with a groan, the world awoke and found that it had become Arian. This is the hour of Saint Peter. Jesus told him that Satan has longed to sift the disciples and the whole Church like wheat. Then followed Jesus’ word of tremendous force and relevance, even in this present time of suffering in the Church: “But I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail; and when you have turned again, strengthen your brethren” (Lk 22:32).
Bp. Azcona confirms ‘Pachamama’ is a pagan goddess
You are not signed in as a Premium user; we rely on Premium users to support our news reporting. Sign in or Sign up today!
VATICAN (ChurchMilitant.com) – An Amazonian bishop is denouncing the “demonic sacrileges” taking place in Rome, confirming that the controversial fertility figure dubbed “Pachamama” is indeed a pagan goddess.
Bishop José Luis Azcona, Emeritus Bishop of Marajó in the Amazon region, is condemning the pagan rites surrounding the idol as “demonic sacrileges that produce scandal.”
“In those rituals there is the devil, there is magic. Our Lady is not the Pachamama, she is the Virgin of Nazareth,” the Spanish-born prelate thundered in a 45-minute sermon given Oct. 16 in the Basilica of Our Lady of Nazareth, Belem, in the Amazonian state of Para, Brazil.In those rituals there is the devil, there is magic.Tweet
Bishop Azcona, who in August called the synod’s Instrumentum Laboris (working document) a “document of straw,” referred to REPAM’s pre-synodal meeting in Brazil last June during which several “indigenous rituals with invocations and prayers in which some bishops also participated” took place.
Synod fathers carry “Pachamama”
REPAM is a Catholic network that advocates on behalf of Amazonians and is headed by Cdl. Claudio Hummes, relator general of the Amazon Synod, and a proponent of ordaining women deacons and making exemptions to clerical celibacy.
“These are fundamental issues and here in the Amazon we know the meaning of Macumba orCondomblè,” said Bp. Azcona, lashing out at the Vatican ceremony. “They are magical rites and curses, coming from northeastern Brazil and the state of Bahia, which are frequent here.”
Delivering his homily in Portuguese, Bp. Azcona affirmed that “these celebrations depend on the spirits that are evoked and it is evident that this is witchcraft, from which the letter of St. Paul to the Galatians warns us, in chapter 5, verse 29, when he denounces the sin of idolatry that is incompatible with the Gospel and with mission.”
The bishop likened the idols “venerated in the Vatican” to the Anatolian mother goddess Cybele and to the Hellenic goddess Astarte: “Both express the fertility of women.”
Pagan offering to Pachamama
“The invocation of the statuettes in front of which even some religious have bowed in the Vatican (and I will not mention the religious order to which they belong) is the invocation of the mythical power of Mother Earth, to which they are asking blessings upon humanity or offering gestures of gratitude,” he insisted. “These are scandalous demonic sacrileges, especially for the little ones who can’t discern.”
“Mother earth should not be worshiped because everything, even the earth, is under the dominion of Jesus Christ,” he said. “It is not possible that there are spirits with a power equal to or greater than that of Our Lord or that of the Virgin Mary.”
In a homily punctuated by applause from a packed congregation, the prelate declaimed:
Pachamama is not and never will be the Virgin Mary. To say that statue represents the Virgin is a lie. She is not the Lady of the Amazon because the only Lady of the Amazon is Mary of Nazareth. Let’s not make syncretistic mixes. All this is impossible: the Mother of God is the Queen of Heaven and earth.
In a subtle reference to Pope Francis, Azcona called for the discernment of the Holy Spirit to distinguish what comes from the devil or from the human mind, noting that the Holy Father talked a great deal about discernment.
The Amazonian bishop’s sermon will be seen as a rebuke to liberal Western Catholic media who have attacked the traditional Catholic opposition to the idols as “shameful racist and sexist.”
Investiture of Bp. Moisés Atisha of Arica, Chile, where bishops tookpart in an indigenous ritual invoking the spirits of the Aymara Indians
Last month, Bp. Azcona criticized the Instrumentum Laboris for promoting neo-Pelagian heresy and said that it had completely ignored the real issues of the Amazonian region: Pentecostalism and pedophilia.
Calling child abuse a “dramatic, piercing problem, of which the document does not speak” and “which reaches impressive levels,” the bishop spoke of how this victimization constituted “an essential part of theabandoned and destroyed face of Jesus in the Amazon.”
In Pará alone in one year there were 25,000 reports of crimes of pedophilia, while experts said that for every case of child sex abuse reported there are four others unreported, Bp. Azcona observed.
“Where is the pastoral sensitivity on the part of those responsible for the Instrumentum Laboris so obvious and so firmly expressed by the Holy Father Pope Francis?” he asked.
“The Amazon, at least the Brazilian Amazon, is no longer Catholic,” because it “has a Pentecostal majority,” the bishop noting that “in some regions of Amazonia the Pentecostal majority reaches 80%.”Cdl. Gianfranco Ravasi participating in “Pachamama” ritual
Returning to the theme of the demonic, he lamented that “nowhere in the Instrumentum Laboris is there talk of the presence of demons or their influence, of their wickedness in people, peoples and cultures, as well as the victory of Christ, His liberation and destruction of the power of the Malignant,” cautioning that the Amazon Synod ran the risk of fomenting schism.
Meanwhile, Brazilian sources have told Church Militant that the syncretism exposed at the synod is only the tip of the iceberg and such pagan practices have deeply penetrated Catholicism under the guise of inculturation.
This is one reason why Catholics are leaving the Church and joining Pentecostal and evangelical groups, they said.The syncretism exposed at the synod is only the tip of the iceberg.Tweet
At the investiture of Moisés Atisha, bishop of Arica, Chile, the bishops participated in an indigenous ritual invoking the spirits of the pagan Aymara Indians.
In a YouTube video, Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, biblical scholar who directed the Italian Catholic Bible project and former president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, can be seen participating in a pagan Pachamama ritual in San Marcos Sierras, Argentina.
Tom Stoppard remarked in one of his plays (Jumpers) that at a certain point, the moralist—the one who takes moral truths seriously—is likely to sound like “a crank haranguing the bus queue with the demented certitude of one possessed of privileged information.” Bill Barr delivered a speech on religious freedom at the law school at Notre Dame. Anyone who was tutored in American history and law, anyone whose education had encompassed a reading of the classics in political philosophy, would have recognized a speech drawing deeply on some of the best things said and done in the tradition running back to Athens as well as Jerusalem.
But none of that seemed to be noticed by some of the critics who quickly railed against Barr and his speech. They offered caricatures of denigration quite out of scale, unmeasured—and unmeasured precisely as they were untethered from anything that could confirm the pretensions of the critics to a lofty perch of learning.
The Mythology of Liberalism: Jeffrey Toobin’s Fake History
And so Jeffery Toobin, writing in the New Yorker, vouchsafed at once that William Barr had given “the worst speech by an Attorney General of the United States in modern history…[h]istorically illiterate, morally obtuse, and willfully misleading.” And where was that historical illiteracy shown at once to clinch the case? “In a potted history of the founding of the Republic,” according to Toobin, “Barr said, ‘In the Framers’ view, free government was only suitable and sustainable for a religious people—a people who recognized that there was a transcendent moral order.’”
“Not so,” said Toobin. “The Framers believed,” he said, “that free government was suitable for believers and nonbelievers alike. As Justice Hugo Black put it in 1961, ‘Neither a State nor the Federal Government can constitutionally force a person to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion. Neither can constitutionally pass laws or impose requirements which aid all religions as against nonbelievers, and neither can aid those religions based on a belief in the existence of God as against those religions founded on different beliefs.’”
Anyone with pretensions to scholarship in law or American history would have recognized at once that the lines Toobin attributes to Barr were the lines of John Adams. The tutored writer would have recognized them at once even if Barr himself had not been citing Adams as the source of that commentary.
And in the understanding of a “transcendent moral order” behind the law, Adams was clearly not alone; he was expressing the understanding shared widely among the ablest political men of that generation. James Wilson made the same point when he argued, contrary to Blackstone, that the American law could indeed contain a “principle of revolution,” because the American law began with the recognition of an unjust law—that a measure passed with all of the trappings of legal procedure could nevertheless be wanting in the very substance of justice.
Which is to say, America began with a recognition of a body of natural law, principles of moral judgment that were there before the positive law; and they would be there as a source of measuring the validity, or the moral justification, for those laws. Clearly, Alexander Hamilton touched the same understanding when he argued, contra Hobbes, that all morality cannot be merely conventional. Hobbes had neglected, he wrote, the presence of that “superintending principle,” the author of the moral law, along with the other laws of nature. It was that “deity,” he said who “has constituted an eternal and immutable law, which is, indispensably, obligatory upon all mankind, prior to any human institution whatever.”
But for Toobin, the avowals and the serious writing of Adams, Wilson, and Hamilton somehow do not count in revealing the true understanding of the Founders and the regime they had brought forth.
The truth of that regime was to be found, rather, in Hugo Black, FDR’s first appointment to the Supreme Court, a man bitterly hostile to the Catholic Church, and a former member of the Ku Klux Klan. It was Black who managed to place our jurisprudence of the Establishment clause in a strikingly different cast in 1947, in the famous Eversoncase. And there, Black showed the sleight of hand of a practiced illusionist. As he sought to sum up the tradition of the American law, he noted that “neither a State nor the federal government can set up a church.” True enough. But then he moved across the line into doctrines radically new: “No tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities at institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion.”
That declaration began the move that would acquire more and more momentum, to drive religion out of the public square altogether.
It was one thing to say that the government may not impose religions by force of law, intervene in disputes on doctrine, or make appointments to ecclesial bodies, naming bishops and other prelates. But that was quite another from saying that the government may not recognize the salutary place of religion as a moral force for our people. Or that it may not take decisive steps to favor religion over irreligion.
Thomas Jefferson, when he was President, would attend Christian services taking place in the Capitol itself, in the hall of the House of Representatives. And he would ask Congress to provide aid to the Kaskaskia Indians in order to support their Catholic priest. What Toobin offers as his authoritative account of the history of the American law and the jurisprudence of religion is but a fable, a retelling and falsification of history, to suit the current worldview of the Left. It bears on the historical record with the same accuracy as Mel Brooks’s History of the World, Part I.
Religious Tolerance is Founded on True Religion & Natural Law
Toobin is done one better, in that department, by Michael Sean Winters in The National Catholic Reporter, who pronounces Barr, from his lectern, as “ridiculously stupid.” He offers as a rival thesis that religious freedom was not widely respected and protected, and he takes as a key point that “the Bill of Rights was not applied to the states until the adoption of the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, and, in the case of religious liberty, the relevant clauses of the First Amendment were not applied to state and local government until the 1947 Supreme Court decision in Everson v.Board of Education of the Township of Ewing.”
Winters tees up his point to expose Barr’s constitutional ignorance, and then tellingly gets it wrong. If he had studied the cases on law, he would have known that the 14th amendment was extended to “incorporate” the free exercise of religion, not in 1947, but in 1940, with Cantwell v. Connecticut. It is more than revealing that Winters would not only make a mistake on an elementary point, but that he would identify the new, grand protection of religion with the case crafted by Hugo Black—the case that was aimed to put the respect for religion in our law in the course of ultimate extinction.
Winters did raise an enduringly apt question, though, about the tendency, even among the defenders of religion, to provide only a “utilitarian” account of the good of religion. We think of George Washington’s famous line: “Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice?” And yet, if Winters had read Barr’s speech with any care, he would have seen the hand of a writer who had evidently been touched by the classics in political philosophy.
There was something notably Platonic in Barr’s remark that it is just “another form of tyranny—where the individual is enslaved by his appetites.” Plato offered to us that the man with self-control had a constitutional ruler in himself. He would forego to himself the right to do wrongful things, and in that forbearance he would become a stronger, not a weaker man. For he could concentrate his powers now on the things rightful for him to do.
What was engaged here for William Barr, as it was for the Founders, was the enduring difference between freedom and license. Engaged in any occasion of freedom was the question of whether that freedom would be directed to ends that were rightful or wrongful. Barr saw the Judeo-Christian teaching as bearing moral lessons that were quite convergent with the teachings of natural law, and the natural law could be known across the religious division, by Catholics and Baptists, and even atheists.
It took no revelation on the part of Barr to know that a country grounded in the Judeo-Christian ethic would offer tolerance and respect even for those of novel and exotic religions, as long as they accorded with the moral system that could command the respect of all because it could be understood by all. It delivered no news to Barr to point out, as Winters did, that the Mormons and other religions have been repressed at different times in this country—as when Jews were barred from voting or holding office in Rhode Island. But it seemed to run beyond Winters’s wit that none of that could efface the truth of those principles Barr was stating anew. Nor could it dislodge the dominant record of religious freedom that those principles managed to sustain.
It was not a “utilitarian” view of religion that Barr was putting forth when he recalled James Madison, writing to explain the Remonstrance against religious assessments in Virginia. By religion, Madison said, he meant “a duty towards the Creator,” and a “duty…precedent both in order of time and degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society.” Clearly, religion marked foremost for Madison the moral law that emanated from God, the moral order that was antecedent to all positive laws.
The teaching, then, was that the life of this republic began with people who had cultivated already a willingness to respect a law that ran beyond their own will and their appetites. Surely, there could be no deeper teaching about the salutary force of religion at the Founding—and even more urgently in our own day.
The Crisis is as Real as Our Moral Passions
But it was precisely that sense of urgency, sounded by Barr, that elicited the most mocking derision from his critics. “I think we all recognize,” he wrote, “that over the past 50 years religion has been under increasing attack”—that there has been a “comprehensive effort to drive it from the public square.”
It is 25 years since Fr. Richard Neuhaus sounded the alarm with his book The Naked Public Square, for the Establishment Clause was being revved up ever more to stamp religion as illegitimate in the schools or in almost any other public setting. One would hardly think there was any serious controversy on that point, and yet Barr’s critics treat it as a fantasy of Barr’s own making, along with his observation that the “militant secularists today do not have a live and let live spirit—they are not content to leave religious people alone to practice their faith. Instead, they seem to take a delight in compelling people to violate their conscience.”
Is that point really under serious doubt by anyone who has been paying attention of late?
Even the libertarians who favor same-sex marriage have pointed out that there is no need to prosecute bakers or florists who decline to engage their arts in celebrating that form of marriage. For there are many other bakers and florists more than willing to have the business. What delivers the surprise to the libertarians is that the activists are driven by nothing less than the “logic of morals” itself—that what is rightful should be pursued and promoted, and what is wrongful should be avoided or even punished. The gay activists are powerfully driven to insist on the moral rightness of their position. Those who would deny it are clearly stamped as wrongdoers who should be condemned and punished.
There should be no surprise in any quarter on this point. Lincoln noted the same logic at work in the crisis of his time, with the defenders of slavery: “Holding, as they do, that slavery is morally right, and socially elevating, they cannot cease to demand a full national recognition of it, as a legal right, and a social blessing. Nor can we justifiably withhold this, on any ground save our conviction that slavery is wrong.” And similarly, in our own day, the matter turns solely on our judgment on the rightness or wrongness of same-sex marriage.
For Barr’s critics to express incredulity on this point, belying their own moral convictions, is to offer either self-blindness or a partisan refusal to acknowledge any truth at odds with one’s political needs at the moment.
Mark Rienzi, that gifted lawyer and professor, aptly observed that if the government truly had a “compelling interest” in diffusing contraceptives through the country, the Little Sisters of the Poor would hardly stand out as a vehicle of prime value. An Obama Administration that sought to impose that obligation on the Little Sisters was obviously not driven by public needs. It was animated rather by the moral passion to impose this new measure of justice on the Church that has offered the main, enduring refusal to endorse this new moral order of things.
But in the same way, Jeffrey Toobin sees no moral shadings here: The refusal of tradesmen to become complicit in a same-sex marriage is something he treats as simply a matter of rank “discrimination.” Is he really unaware that serious people for generations have not thought homosexual marriage plausible, let alone morally defensible and urgent? Is he unaware that even the leading liberals in this country professed their opposition to that novelty right up the edge of the Supreme Court installing that form of marriage in our laws?
And yet, Toobin treats the opponents of same-sex marriage, abortion, and transgenderism as not merely malicious but as too backward to grasp what should be morally obvious. In a life spent studying law and given over to punditry, can he really be so distant from the vast traditions of thought and searching arguments on the part of minds far better than his own? Or has brute, unvarnished ideology just come into play once again to erase any sense of nuance or moral argument?
We’ve recently lost our dear friend, Michael Uhlmann, wise in counsel, gifted in teaching, and one of his enduring lessons for us is “Uhlmann’s Law,” which reduces to this: There may be no need to expend your wit in pondering theories ever more clever to explain arguments as unaccountable as they are implausible when stupidity alone—simple, old-fashioned, unalloyed stupidity—may be quite enough.
The Right Needs to Heed Barr’s Message
But it would be odd—and it would belie the artistry of Bill Barr—if we failed to note that he was delivering his speech at a law school, and a University, that was no longer prepared to receive, with a sympathetic understanding, the appeal he was making. Barr was making the case anew for the law that stood before the positive law, but he was willing to give it, in public, its proper name. That “transcendent moral order which flows from God’s eternal law” is “the natural law.” And it is “impressed upon, and reflected in, all created things.”
Twenty-seven years ago, when Bill Barr was Attorney General, I heard him deliver a speech of the same tenor and substance, in a Catholic meeting, and his talk was published later as “The Moral Culture: the Best Possible Life” (Providence, 1992). That may be quite enough to show that the principles and the lines of argument do not spring from any speech writer, but from his own serious reflections, cultivated over many years.
But there is no small irony in the fact that in conservative circles, the fashion long settled has been to mock and dismiss the natural law as a set of hazy principles hovering in the sky, with little practical bearing on our law. The Federalist Society has become the principal engine for scouting and shaping candidates for judgeships in a conservative administration. I have been a member and loyal supporter of that Society since its beginning. But it’s also true that the main current of opinion in that venerable organization is one that echoes the dubiety about natural law that was expressed by my own dear friends, Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia. And that sense of things is well reflected among the young conservatives who have found a congenial home in that rare family that has become the law school of Notre Dame.
Hence the challenge for Bill Barr. He has been enduring in making the case for the natural law, but now he finds the need to make that case ever more within the circles of his most committed friends. Bill Barr understood that his speech was part of his mission of recovering truths long fading from the public understanding. He knows that there has been a falling away from those truths even in the circles of conservatives.
He knows that the task he had set for himself long ago has become now ever harder.
Hadley Arkes is Founder and Director of The James Wilson Institute on Natural Rights and the American Founding. He was the main advocate, and architect, of the bill that became known as the Born-Alive Infants’ Protection Act. Among other books, he is the author of Natural Rights and the Right to Choose (2002), and Constitutional Illusions and Anchoring Truths: The Touchstone of the Natural Law (2010), both with Cambridge University Press. A longtime member of the faculty at Amherst College, and The Edward Ney Professor of Jurisprudence, since 2016 he has assumed emeritus status.
Posted inUncategorized|Comments Off on ATTORNEY GENERAL Bill Barr GIVES A MEMORABLE SPEECH
It is Sheer Madness if Cd. Muller doesn’t Convene a Imperfect Council to Remove Francis as a Heretic against the First Commandment
Today, LifeSiteNews reported that Francis confirmed that the idols that were prostrated before and worshipped in front of Francis in the Vatican gardens were images of the pagan goddess Pachamama:
“Pope Francis has… confirm[ed] suspicions that the [“Vatican ‘Pachamama'”] statues were idols.”
Moreover, the news outlet quotes Francis himself declaring the “pachamama” idols were recovered and will scandalously and sacrilegiously be “displayed… at the closing Mass of the Synod”:
“I would like to say a word about the pachamama statues that were removed from the Church at Traspontina, which were there without idolatrous intentions… the Carabinieri… commander said, ‘the display of the [idol] statues [will be] at the closing Mass of the Synod’… This is good news, thank you.” (LifeSiteNews, “Full transcript of the Pope’s comments on pagan ‘Pachamama’ statues” and “Pope calls statues ‘Pachamama’ and apologizes for their removeal from church,” October 25, 2019)
The LifeSiteNews article, also, revealed that former head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith Cardinal Gerhard Muller on EWTN said:
“[A]ccording to the Law of God Himself – the First Commandment – idolism [idolatry] is a grave sin… to bring the idols into the Church was a grave sin, a crime against the Divine Law.”
It appears beyond doubt that Francis is a manifest heretic in terms of the First Commandment.
Cardinal Muller said Francis actions are “a crime against Divine Law.”
Even supposeding that Francis’s actions had no “idolatrous intentions” which can only be judged by a imperfect council, “the very “bring[ing] [of] the idols into the Church” and now saying that he will commit the scandalous sacrilege of “display[ing]… the [Sachamama idol] statues at the closing Mass of the Synod” is “a crime against” the First Commandment.
There is no doubt that Francis is as Doctor of the Church St. Francis de Sales says is “explicitly a heretic” in terms of the First Commandment who must by the “Church… [be] declar[ed]… deprived of his Apostlic See”:
“The Pope… when he is explicitly a heretic… the Church must either deprive him or as some say declare him deprived of his Apostlic See.” (The Catholic Controversy by St. Francis de Sales, Pages 305-306)
It is now sheer madness if Cardinal Muller and other faithful Catholic cardinals do not convene an imperfect council to “declare” Francis “deprived of his Apostlic See” and to investigate the validity of the Francis conclave and the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI which Bishop Rene Gracida has called for.
Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Church.
It is Sheer Madness if Cd. Muller doesn’t Convene a Imperfect Council to Remove Francis as a Heretic against the First Commandment
Today, LifeSiteNews reported that Francis confirmed that the idols that were prostrated before and worshipped in front of Francis in the Vatican gardens were images of the pagan goddess Pachamama:
“Pope Francis has… confirm[ed] suspicions that the [“Vatican ‘Pachamama'”] statues were idols.”
Moreover, the news outlet quotes Francis himself declaring the “pachamama” idols were recovered and will scandalously and sacrilegiously be “displayed… at the closing Mass of the Synod”:
“I would like to say a word about the pachamama statues that were removed from the Church at Traspontina, which were there without idolatrous intentions… the Carabinieri… commander said, ‘the display of the [idol] statues [will be] at the closing Mass of the Synod’… This is good news, thank you.” (LifeSiteNews, “Full transcript of the Pope’s comments on pagan ‘Pachamama’ statues” and “Pope calls statues ‘Pachamama’ and apologizes for their removeal from church,” October 25, 2019)
The LifeSiteNews article, also, revealed that former head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith Cardinal Gerhard Muller on EWTN said:
“[A]ccording to the Law of God Himself – the First Commandment – idolism [idolatry] is a grave sin… to bring the idols into the Church was a grave sin, a crime against the Divine Law.”
It appears beyond doubt that Francis is a manifest heretic in terms of the First Commandment.
Cardinal Muller said Francis actions are “a crime against Divine Law.”
Even supposeding that Francis’s actions had no “idolatrous intentions” which can only be judged by a imperfect council, “the very “bring[ing] [of] the idols into the Church” and now saying that he will commit the scandalous sacrilege of “display[ing]… the [Sachamama idol] statues at the closing Mass of the Synod” is “a crime against” the First Commandment.
There is no doubt that Francis is as Doctor of the Church St. Francis de Sales says is “explicitly a heretic” in terms of the First Commandment who must by the “Church… [be] declar[ed]… deprived of his Apostlic See”:
“The Pope… when he is explicitly a heretic… the Church must either deprive him or as some say declare him deprived of his Apostlic See.” (The Catholic Controversy by St. Francis de Sales, Pages 305-306)
It is now sheer madness if Cardinal Muller and other faithful Catholic cardinals do not convene an imperfect council to “declare” Francis “deprived of his Apostlic See” and to investigate the validity of the Francis conclave and the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI which Bishop Rene Gracida has called for.
Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Church.
Andrea Tornielli is an intelligent man. He ran a rather good column series on Church matters at La Stampa, the main newspaper in Turin, for many years before he accepted a job in 2018 as editorial director in the Vatican’s Dicastery of Communications. He was offered that position, as was only to be expected, because he had become a fervent supporter of Pope Francis and had the journalistic skills to help out a communications office that was troubled, not least when Greg Burke, an American, and Paloma Garcia Ovejero, a Spaniard – director and vice-director of the Holy See Press Office – abruptly resigned after Tornielli’s appointment.
He and other public faces of the Vatican have had a tough assignment in recent weeks. Whether or not the figurines in the garden were Pachamama, and whatever you may make of the two men who took similar statuettes from the Carmelite church in Traspontina and threw them in the Tiber, none of this was exactly the best way for the Vatican to have made the case for the otherwise quite necessary inculturation of the Gospel in the Amazon region.
Anyone with an ounce of PR sense could have told whoever was responsible for the initial “tree-planting ceremony” that the “optics” – as we now say in the age of the non-stop media barrage – were very bad. And if anyone were to look at substance, it’s a slam-dunk mistake to allow such images to appear: It’s the job of the Church to bring Christ to the nations, not the gods of the nations to the Vatican.
We don’t know if anyone with such a minimal journalistic sense had an opportunity to speak to the relevant actors. Despite widespread suspicions by traditional Catholics that various plots are underway, much of what happens in the Vatican – especially this Vatican – is the result of disorder as much as of conscious decision and planning.
We do know that various spokesmen have had to result to pathetic dodges the past weeks. No one is willing to say what the figurines represented because, as I will not stop repeating, there are only two possible explanations:
the figurines are regarded in the Vatican as trivial, like children playing with dolls, and the veneration the indigenous representatives showed toward them didn’t mean much of anything to our pope and bishops, despite all the talk of preserving indigenous “spiritualities.” This would absolve the pope from participating in an idolatrous pagan ritual, but at the cost of his giving the impression of taking indigenous ways seriously;
or, the figurines are regarded in the Vatican as sacred. Indeed, some news outlets – the ever-entertaining National Catholic Reporter, America, and others who support Pope Francis uncritically – have described the casting of the images in the Tiber as a “desecration,” which can only happen if there’s something sacred to desecrate. This leads to an inconvenient truth, however, namely that a serious pagan ritual, involving pagan gods and goddesses, was permitted on the Vatican grounds.
There is no third here. And this is the logical problem into which the synod fell early because organizers didn’t think it was necessary to look, really, into “indigenous” elements that were being admitted.
So what does a spokesman do, besides trying to blur the issue so that a few news cycles will pass and the whole thing just slips away?
I’m sorry to have to say that he therefore lies – either intentionally or out of a sense that he needs to put up something plausible in defense – or if not that, grasps at straws by misrepresenting even so great a figure as St. John Henry Newman.
Someone clearly sent Tornielli a passage from Newman’s Apologia, which refers to the ways that the Church historically adapted pagan symbols to Christian purposes. That’s fine, so far as it goes, and no more than he truth. But the passage in question doesnot say – Newman was a serious Christian and not a spin-doctor – that the Church thought the pagan elements should be honored and the “spiritualities” behind them were thus to be “preserved.”
And besides, it was not a matter of pagan gods and goddesses being so absorbed, but peripheral symbols being repurposed. To put this in concrete terms, if only the native boat, paddles, fishing nets, and similar items had been present in the Vatican and nearby churches, who would have been disturbed?
But as you edge closer to real beliefs about real gods and goddesses, either the alarm goes off, or you’ve accepted that a sentimental affirmation of the Other, so common in democratic politics these days, has replaced the dire warnings from the earliest and most authoritative Jewish Scriptures about “strange gods.”
[Professor Eduardo Echeverria explains all this in theological terms in the separate column appended to this one below.]
In that light, the bishops who assembled in the Catacombs of Domitilla last week, to reswear to the preserving of Amazon spiritualities – a gesture liberation theologians made in the 1960s during Vatican II – is breathtaking in its disconnect from Catholicity – and in its self-righteous belief in its Christian liberality.
I have no doubt that there’s much worth preserving in indigenous ways that would not involve idolatry or the sacrifice of clear thought. But even granting that, one thing seems crystal clear to me: that some of the most influential figures in the Amazon Synod are not in a very good position to lecture the world about inculturation, least of all how it should now be carried out.
Robert Royal is Editor-in-Chief of The Catholic Thing
Pope Francis and Andrea Tornielli (Photo: L’Osservatore Romano)
“Spoils from Egypt”
Eduardo Echeverria
As Robert Royal has outlined above, Andrea Tornielli, the editorial director of the Vatican Dicastery for Communication, has defended the legitimacy of using, in several ceremonies in Rome, the Amazonian wooden statues depicting a young pregnant woman as “an image of motherhood and the sacredness of life, a traditional symbol for indigenous peoples representing the bond with ‘mother earth’.”
Tornielli ignores the confusion that has followed. Does she represent the Virgin Mary or “Our Lady of the Amazon”? Fr. Giacomo Costa, a communications official for the Amazon synod, already ruled that out. Is she a religious symbol of the goddess Pachamama, or Mother Earth? Nobody at the Amazon synod seems to know.
Suppose we grant Tornielli the point he seems to be making, namely, that this image represents the “goods” of motherhood, life’s sacredness, and a bond with the earth. Can we treat these as “neutral goods” abstracted from the understanding of the indigenous peoples: an image of fertility and life expressive of a pagan and nature-centered religiosity? Once we reinsert these alleged “goods” – life, fertility, and mother earth – into the context of their religious worldview, it is clear that they are not conformable to the fullness of God’s truth in Jesus Christ.
Tornielli suggests that we can treat these alleged “goods” apart from their religious worldview. He even enlists St. John Henry Newman’s reflections in An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, Chapter VIII §2.6, suggesting that Newman legitimizes “the adoption of pagan elements by the Church.”
Newman wrote:
The use of temples, and these dedicated to particular saints, and ornamented on occasions with branches of trees, incense, lamps and candles; votive offerings on recovery from illness; holy water, asylums; holy days and seasons, use of calendars, processions, blessings on the fields, sacerdotal vestments, the tonsure, the ring in marriage, turning to the east, images at a later date, perhaps the ecclesiastical chant, and the Kyrie Eleison, are all of pagan origin, and sanctified by their adoption into the church. (emphasis added)
Yes, Newman does say this, but Tornielli leaves unexplained not only Newman’s understanding of the sanctification of these alleged “goods,” but also the entire context of this chapter where Newman discusses the “assimilative power of Dogmatic Truth.” Thus, Tornielli fails to make his point.
The “spoils from Egypt” trope is the context of Newman’s reflections regarding the sanctification of these assimilated goods. Newman’s main point – and it is a point lost upon this synod and, yes, on Tornielli – is this: the traditional spoils from Egypt trope insists that the “goods” from other cultures once assimilated must be purified, transmuted, fulfilling and perfecting them by the fullness of God’s truth in Jesus Christ. “[T]he grace in the Gospel. . . changes the quality of doctrines, opinions, usages, actions. . .when incorporated with it, and makes them right and acceptable to its Divine Author, whereas before they were either infected with evil, or at best but shadows of the truth.” (VIII.§2.5)
Newman is not alone in making use of the “spoils from Egypt” trope. St. Augustine explains this in On Christian Doctrine, Bk 2.XL.60:
Like the treasures of the ancient Egyptians, who possessed not only idols and heavy burdens, which the people of Israel hated and shunned, but also vessels and ornaments of silver and gold, and clothes, which on leaving Egypt the people of Israel, in order to make better use of them, surreptitiously claimed for themselves. [Exod 3:21-2, 12: 36-6] – similarly all the branches of pagan learning contains not only false and superstitious fantasies and burdensome studies that involve unnecessary effort, which each one of us must loathe and avoid as under Christ’s guidance we abandon the company of pagans, but also studies for liberated minds which are more appropriate to the service of the truth. . . .These treasures – like the silver and gold, which they did not create but dug, as it were from the mines of providence, which is everywhere – which were used wickedly and harmfully in the service of demons must be removed by Christians. . .and applied to their true function, that of preaching the gospel.
The general principle behind St. Augustine’s reflections is that we may discover truth and goodness in pagan religions and philosophical systems, but we must consider that the interpretation of these truths and goods is often such that they distort and misinterpret them from the perspective of their religions and systems.
Thus, these truths and goods need to be broken open and freed from their perspective in the direction of Christ by a “clarifying transposition,” which involves cleansing these fragments, polishing them “until that radiance shines forth which shows that [they are] fragment[s] of the total glorification of God.” (Hans Urs von Balthasar)
This, too, is the view of Vatican II. No wonder Ad Gentes §9 takes the Church’s missionary activity to involve a “purg[ing] of evil associations [of] every element of truth and grace which is found among peoples.” Or that Lumen Gentium, §16-17 speak of “deceptions by the Evil One” at work in a man’s resistance to God’s prevenient grace as well as that the gospel “snatches them [non-Christians] from the slavery of error and of idols” and the “confusion of the devil.”
Indeed, Ad Gentes §9 speaks of the fragments of truth and grace to be found among the nations that the gospel “frees from all taint of evil and restores [the truth] to Christ its maker, who overthrows the devil’s domain and wards off the manifold malice of vice.”
The Catholic Church is deeply committed to the “all-embracing authority of Christ” (cf. Matt 28:18) over all forms of creaturely truth because in Christ are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. (cf. Col 2: 2-3) Hence, Christians cannot rest until they have taken every thought and practice that has been raised against the knowledge of God into the service of the Lordship of Christ. (2 Cor 10:5)
Eduardo J. Echeverria is Professor of Philosophy and Systematic Theology at Sacred Heart Major Seminary, Detroit.
Posted inUncategorized|Comments Off on The bishops who assembled in the Catacombs of Domitilla last week, to reswear to the preserving of Amazon spiritualities – a gesture liberation theologians made in the 1960s during Vatican II – is breathtaking in its disconnect from Catholicity – and in its self-righteous belief in its Christian liberality.
The Conclusions of the Synod For the Amazon Were Already In the Pope’s Mind Five Years Ago
*
On the brink of the vote on the final document of the synod for the Amazon, the questions about what will be the key innovations entrusted to the decision of the pope have a predetermined answer.
In fact, both the conception of this synod and its aims – the ordination of married priests and new ministries for women – were already “in a nutshell” at the April 4 2014 audience between Pope Francis and the emigrant Austrian bishop in Brazil Erwin Kräutler.
We now know the details of the unfolding of that audience, thanks to a book that Kräutler himself published on the occasion of this synod.
To understand how the history and the outcomes of the synod for the Amazon were already written back then, it is enough to peruse the pages of this book, as Maike Hickson has done for “LifeSite News” of October 22, in the review reproduced below.
*
Amazon Synod’s architect reveals how Pope Francis could “open a door” to women’s ordination
by Maike Hickson
Erwin Kräutler, the bishop emeritus of the Diocese of Xingu, Brazil, […] published a new book dedicated to the Amazon Synod and its outcome. The title of the book is “Renewal Now. Impulses from the Amazon for the Reform of the Church.”
In his new publication, Bishop Kräutler repeats his call for married priests and for female deacons, as well as for female priests. It is in this context that he speaks about the large role that women already play in the Church in his own region in Brazil. When claiming that women have too little say in the Catholic Church, he states:
“Often I refer to the fact that at our end, at the Xingu, things go very differently, that women lead the Liturgies of the Word and that they, in doing so, also give a homily. But this experience in Brazil and perhaps also somewhere else is at the most a tender flash of light, but it is far from being a proof for the sunrise that we have been awaiting for so long.”
He is “convinced that the same dignity of the woman with regard to the admission to the ordained offices will come.”
“And I hope,” the bishop continues, “that the Amazon Synod will be breaking open new paths for it, or at least making some steps in the right direction.”
*
Kräutler recalls his April 4, 2014 meeting with Pope Francis which was to be a crucial event in the history of the current Pan-Amazon Synod, and he shows how all of his points which he had brought up in discussion with Pope Francis have now been included in the Amazon Synod.
When speaking about his private audience with Pope Francis, the Austrian bishop first recalled that it was actually his own theological adviser, Father Paulo Suess, who shortly before the audience had told Pope Francis about the lack of priests in the Amazon. It was then that the Pope said “that he expected the bishops to give him concrete and courageous proposals.” And, with a laugh, Pope Francis then asked Kräutler whether or not he remembers that he himself had already used the same word – “Corajudos” [which Kräutler translates with the words “courageous, bold”] – when speaking at the World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro on July 27, 2013.
The Austrian bishop also related how he presented three points to the Pope: “the situation [and rights] of the indigenous people in the Amazon”; “the Amazon and ecology”; and “the parishes without the Eucharist,” i.e., the lack of priests. It was here, concerning the third point, that the Pope asked Kräutler whether he has a specific proposal to make. After Kräutler had simply said that there needs to be a way so that his parishes are not excluded from the Eucharist, the Pope referred to “a bishop in Mexico; it is Bishop Samuel Ruizof San Cristobal de las Casas, who is now deceased” and whom Kräutler knew. Ruiz had ordained hundreds of indigenous permanent deacons who were married and who were only leading their own parishes. This practice had been stopped by the Vatican in 2001.
Pope Francis then asked Kräutler as to why these deacons could not also celebrate the Holy Eucharist, and the bishop answered: “because they are married.” It was here that Pope Francis himself brought up the ideas of Bishop Fritz Lobinger, who envisions a “Team of Elders” who lead a parish and are ordained and thus are able to celebrate Mass. These “Elders” could be married – and male or female, as well, according to Lobinger’s ideas.
It is significant that Pope Francis brought up the ideas of a man who explicitly wished the ordination of women to the priesthood. But also significant is that he had already discussed Lobinger’s ideas back in 2014, while in 2019, he stated in an in-flight press conference that “I’m not saying that it should be done, because I have not reflected, I have not prayed sufficiently about it.”
*
One could perhaps say that this Amazon Synod is Kräutler’s Synod.
States Kräutler: “For our indigenous people in Brazil, it is absolutely wonderful that Pope Francis has picked up on all the intentions that I was able to present to him at my private [2014] audience in Rome.”
But Kräutler also has some demeaning words to say about the “Romans” in the pre-synodal council which prepared the Amazon Synod and which had eighteen members, many of them from Latin America, some of them from the Roman Curia. It was a group of Latin American experts who had prepared a draft for the “Lineamenta” (preparatory document) of the Amazon Synod, but their ideas were met with some resistance. While describing how the pre-synodal team worked through the draft in April of 2018, Bishop Kräutler stated: “Sometimes, there were differences of opinion, especially with the ‘Romans’.”
The Austrian bishop later returned to this same theme when describing the May 2019 meeting of the pre-synodal council, which was then to discuss the draft of the synod’s “Instrumentum Laboris” (working document).
“The discussions were not always easy,” the Austrian prelate wrote. “Sometimes, we felt an ice-cold headwind.” He went on to explain his words: “The problem is always the same: opinions which are based upon a year-long pastoral experience and upon direct contact with the People of God, clash with cold norms, canons, and paragraphs, represented by members of the Roman Curia who know Latin America only from the perspective of a tourist and who most probably never have worked directly in the field of pastoral care of a parish.”
Kräutler insisted that his own group “fought bravely” and were thus able to finalize the synod’s working document. But then he was even more satisfied when, on November 14-15, 2018, there took place a meeting of the pre-synodal council along with the presidents of all regional conferences of the Brazilian Amazon in Manaus. Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri, the head of the Secretariat of the Synod of Bishops, had also come from Rome. “This meeting,” Kräutler explained, “has given me more hope that there could be some movement, after all, with regard to the matter of the parishes without the Eucharist, and to the conditions for the admission to ordained offices.”
“Because, suddenly,” he continued, “bishops who had not said much about this topic until then suddenly raised their voices. As was to be expected, Cardinal Baldisseri had brought up some objections and referred to statements of different popes. But then two bishops – Dom Edson of São Gabriel da Cachoeira (Amazon) and Dom Filipe of Miracema do Norte (Tocantins) – answered and withstood, just as Peter did it with Paul in Antioch, ‘to the face’ (Gal 2:11) of His Eminence.”
Dom Filipe, according to the Austrian bishop, had prepared himself and written down a text and “declared right away: ‘today’s conditions for the admission to ordained offices have to be revised!’”
For this prelate, “tradition” has a bad taste. He proposed to get rid of “the ballast that has been accumulated over the centuries, which we in our Church carry with much suffering and which some in the right corner fanatically defend as ‘tradition.’”
He confidently proposes now to remove at the Amazon synod everything that is “superfluous.”
*
In this sense, Bishop Kräutler reveals in his new book that, during the pre-synodal council meetings, “in the presence of the Pope, I insisted upon including the ordination of female deacons in the final document [of the Amazon Synod].” However, Cardinal Baldisseri insisted that it would be “better to let the ‘people’ in the Amazon first answer the questions that we present to them, instead of pre-empting them.”
For Kräutler, the female diaconate is a must of the Amazon Synod, since, “realistically, we will essentially not advance with regard to the female priesthood. I feel sorry for Pope Francis, because Pope John Paul II had unmistakably stated that the Church has no authority to ordain women to the priesthood.” Now, Pope Francis “stands under this verdict,” the prelate added, “as to what concerns the female priesthood.” But he himself still thinks that this very verdict is “not a dogma.”
As to the question of remaining loyal to Revelation, Bishop Kräutler has his own ideas. This question “really does not mean that all rites and regulations of the Early Church are still for us binding in the meaning of those times.” Here, he explicitly rejects St. Paul’s admonition that “women should be silent at assemblies” of the parish (1 Cor 14:33-34). “Would this rule still be valid,” he argued, “how would the situation be in the parishes of the Amazon and in other regions which are led by women in two-thirds of the cases?” This bishop even claims that this passage of St. Paul has been introduced only later, thus questioning its very authenticity.
The Austrian prelate furthermore suggested that there have been many teachings, for example of the 19th century, that the Church in the 20th century abandoned, for example the Church’s stance with regard to democracy (Pope St. Pius X), to religious liberty (“Dignitatis Humanae”), and also to other novelties introduced in the Second Vatican Council “that would have been regarded as being heretical at the time of the First Council.”
*
In his own boldness, Bishop Kräutler also confirmed the “fears of conservative circles” in the Catholic Church – explicitly some writings of Sandro Magister and of Giuseppe Nardi Katholisches.info), namely that the “workshop Amazon” is meant to attack the Sacrament of Holy Orders. “What is being presented here as a great fear,” Kräutler writes, “I regard with an attitude of hope. The Amazon Synod can be the cause of an epochal step in the Universal Church.”
Here, he finalizes his own hopes with regard to what Pope Francis will likely do: First, he hopes that the Pope will listen to the Synod participants. “When we present our intentions in a decisive manner, he could, similar to the Synod on Marriage, open a door in saying: ‘You bishops now have the possibility to do what you consider to be necessary.’” It would then be “up to the regional bishops’ conferences to say ‘yes, the situation with us is such that we shall make use of the possibility as given to us by the Pope to ordain ‘viri probati’ and female deacons.”
Here, Bishop Kräutler draws a link to Pope Francis’ post-synodal exhortation “Amoris Laetitia,” in which he permitted that regional bishops’ conferences – such as the German Bishops’ Conference – allow some divorced and remarried couples to receive Holy Communion, in spite of their living objectively in the state of adultery.
In light of the fact that Bishop Kräutler was so successful in getting Pope Francis to organize a synod according to his three points as he presented them to the Pope in 2014, we may well expect to read such a conclusion and proposal as just described here by the bishop in the final report of the Amazon Synod, as well as in the subsequent post-synodal exhortation of Pope Francis that will surely not be long delayed.
Posted inUncategorized|Comments Off on AS THE AMAZON SYNOD DRAWS TO A CLOSE WE AWAIT THE DROPPING OF THE OTHER SHOE, WHICH FRANCIS THE MERCIFUL PROBABLY HAD IN MIND IF NOT IN HAND BEFORE THE SYNOD EVEN BEGAN
Editor’s note: in this fascinating interview with Crisis Magazine, the acclaimed novelist Walker Percy discusses the vocations crisis, abortion, Vatican II, popes, and (of course) literature. The interview originally appeared in the July 1989 print edition of Crisis. It has been edited for brevity.
CRISIS: There is tremendous intellectual opposition in the Church to Pope John Paul II. What do you make of that?
PERCY: The poor man. I think he’s getting a bum rap. On TV, they usually say: This pope is a nice man, but he’s a Pole and just by nature reactionary. Yet if you look at his encyclicals, he’s quite liberal politically. He’s almost as critical of free-wheeling capitalism as he is of Marxism. He certainly doesn’t come across as a “conservative” in the usual sense. What his critics mean, although they won’t admit it, is that he is an orthodox Catholic, that he’s bound and determined to maintain the magisterium.
I was talking to a priest the other day who said he was leaving the Church. Why, I asked? Because nothing had changed, he said. Changed how? Well, the bishops should be more independent, the magisterium is too strong, it should be up to the bishops to determine the nature of the Eucharist, and so forth. I said, If you do that, what you’ve got is another Episcopal Church—just another church on the street: a Roman Episcopal Church, next to the Protestant Episcopal Church, and so on.
A couple of years ago you were asked what you thought of Cardinal Ratzinger. You said you didn’t know his work that well, but the right sort of people hated him, so he couldn’t be all bad.
[laughter] I guess I’ll go with that.
What do you think of the Catholic press?
I think it’s all over the place. It’s extremely pluralistic, which is good, and some of it I like, such as Crisis, which I like considerably better than the National Catholic Reporter.
Your writings embody a critique of many of the philosophies of people who now praise you extravagantly. What do you think of this paradox?
Who praised me extravagantly?
Well, when your last book came out, it was surprising to see your face splashed across the front page of the Washington Post “Style” section and the front page of the New York Times Book Review. All of these publications which ought, philosophically, to dislike you, seem to like you, while the mainstream Christian press, which ought to like you, has begun to complain that you don’t care enough about women, the poor, and so on.
Well, that may be a good place to be—misunderstood both by one’s fellow Catholics and by the secular press. For instance, I remember The Moviegoer was well received, and for the wrong reasons, I think. The Catholic novelist has to be very careful. He has to be under-handed, deceitful, and damn careful how he uses the words of religion, which have all fallen into disuse and almost become obscenities, thanks to people like Jimmy Swaggart.
I remember that The Moviegoer was well received and reviewed favorably by the New York Times and other papers. One reviewer said that the reason he or she liked it so much was that at the end of the novel Binx Bolling says something like, “When the word God is mentioned, a curtain comes down in my head; I can’t think about it. What I really believe is that a kick in the ass, in the right place, is the only thing a man can do.” That was read by non-believers to mean, a kick in the ass to the Church, you see, instead of to the nonbelievers. That may be my fault.
On the other hand, if the subject of religion comes up in a novel, or any hint of any kind of conversion or revelation, it’s disapproved of. The secular reviewers say: the author did a good job, his characters are well-drawn, and the plot moves along, but his religion shows. It’s a game you can’t win. What you do is, you tell the story. As Flannery O’Connor said, the worst thing the novelist can do is be edifying. She kept most specific references to the Church out of her work, yet God knows she was as powerful Catholic as I ever knew.
If Miss O’Connor popped out of the grave today, what would surprise her most about the Church?
I think probably the disunity, the near-sundering of the American Church. I think she would be horrified, and probably most of all by the nuns, by what happened to the Georgia nuns, to the Louisiana nuns, and I guess to most of the others. They completely fell apart. They were seduced, not by feminism—which the pope approves of, in the sense of the right of women not to be discriminated against—but by radical feminism. Many of the nuns I know were completely seduced by it, to the point of rebelling against any sort of discipline. They began to mix up the magisterium with macho masculinism, as if the Pope were Hemingway. I think that would horrify O’Connor more than anything else.
Speaking of Flannery O’Connor, how did you happen to use as the leitmotif of The Thanatos Syndrome a passage from one of her essays: Tenderness leads to the gas chamber.
Did she say that?
It’s at the end of her introduction to A Memoir of Mary Ann.
I’m amazed. I would happily admit that I did that consciously because I’d love to give her the credit.
Could you explain what “tenderness leads to the gas chamber” means?
I don’t know what exactly Flannery said, but I was thinking of the Nazis and of my experience of the Germans, whom I liked very much. I was in Germany in 1934, the year after Hitler came into power. The Germans seemed to me extremely likable people, extremely sentimental people; they had tremendous tenderness in their conversations. After all, the romantic Gefuehl, openness to feeling, comes from the Germans. God knows they did great things with it: the great German composers from the nineteenth century, for instance. The apposition of German feeling, German tenderness, and the gas chambers struck me as a great mystery at the time. Yet is it a paradox? If Gefuehlor tenderness is all you have, it can lead anywhere. The opposite of tenderness is not cruelty.
That passage from O’Connor about the gas chambers is, in a way, the most political thing she ever wrote. It begins: “In the absence of faith, we govern by tenderness” (emphasis added). Similarly, it seems that your last novel is, in one sense, the most political work you’ve written: the subject matter is Tom More foiling a plot against the public weal. Then there’s your recent, unsuccessful effort to publish a letter in The New York Times warning about the danger of taking innocent life by abortion, euthanasia, etc.
The Times was offended. Nothing offends the American liberal more than being compared to the German liberals of the Weimar Republic. There’s a book—not by Nazis, in fact long before the Nazis—advocating abortion and the elimination of life “without value.” It was written by German doctors of the Weimar Republic, which was probably the most liberal democracy in Europe. Not only did large-scale abortions start in the Weimar Republic, not under the Nazis, but euthanasia did, too, as did the elimination of the malformed and “unfit.” All these practices were justified in a book by two liberal Weimar physicians: The Defense of the Destruction of Life Without Value. The whole notion is very reasonable without the Christian ethic—no, it’s got to be more than the Christian ethic, it’s got to be an article of faith. We talk about the sacredness of life as if it’s a democratic swear-word, but unless you really mean it, what’s more reasonable than doing what the Weimar scientists did? Why bother with people whose “quality of life” is inferior?
Why are abortion rights so central a feature in the ideological canon of groups who are usually committed to what we would call compassion or tenderness?
That’s a very good question. If I had anything to say to the liberals, in the usual sense of that word, it is that I agree with them on almost everything: their political and social causes, and the ACLU, God knows, the right to freedom of speech, to help the homeless, the poor, the minorities, God knows the blacks, the third world—their hearts are in the right place. It’s actually a mystery, a bafflement to me, how they cannot see the paradox of being in favor of these good things and yet not batting an eyelash when it comes to destroying unborn life.
They also pride themselves on being scientific, yet the scientific consensus is, in the matter of Roe v. Wade, how wrong Blackmun was when he said there’s no scientific agreement about when human life begins. That’s absolutely untrue, scientifically. It was a stupid statement, and I’ve heard indirectly that he knew better. To get back to the liberals, I feel a great sorrow that this tremendous energy that goes into all the other causes with which I agree is not going into the protection of life.
Would the disregard of the spiritual have something to do with that? Many criticized the character Father Smith in your last book because he keeps leaving the world and going up into the fire tower to wrestle with his God. Spiritual life, it seems, is unimportant; only good works matter.
Absolutely. That’s the Christian scandal: the emphasis on individual human life. Absent that, what’s wrong with improving the quality of life? What’s wrong with getting rid of people who get in the way? What’s wrong with putting old, miserable people out of their misery? What’s wrong with getting rid of badly handicapped, suffering children. Once you’re on that slippery slope, where does it end? It ends in the gas chamber. If the consensus is that the Jews are bad for the polity, what’s wrong with getting rid of Jews? How do you make the argument that we shouldn’t get rid of Jews, or gypsies, or Catholics, or “anti-social blacks”?
What now provides the subject matter of literature? It used to be regional experience—what was distinctive about my small town or this big city. If everyone has the same narrow body of experience, what becomes the great topic for a writer?
Well, I can speak for myself. I’m not interested in the South except as a backdrop, a setting. To over-simplify vastly, I work on a couple of premises. One is that twentieth-century man is deranged, literally deranged. In this society, which is post-Christian, post-modern—the era doesn’t have a name yet—there is no coherent theory of man, as I say in my Jefferson lecture. The only theory of man in the air is what comes from the popular media, which is a kind of a pop scientific idea which I say is fundamentally Cartesian and incoherent.
Tocqueville—an amazing fellow—said it 150 years ago: All the Americans I know are Cartesians without having read a word of Descartes. He meant that an educated American believes that everything can be explained “scientifically,” can be reduced to the cause and effect of electrons, neurons, and so forth. But at the same time, each person exempts his own mind from this, as do scientists. I see this endemic Cartesianism, and my criticism is that it leaves us without a coherent theory of man. Consequently, modern man is deranged.
In these books you seemed to have solved a problem that Tocqueville and Flannery O’Connor both worried about, namely, What will writers have to write about as modern life becomes ever more prosaic, safe, and comfortable? It seems that a safe and comfortable existence can produce more than enough turmoil in a soul to provide a writer with drama.
Yes, Will Barrett in The Last Gentleman had it made, did everything, accomplished everything, then had a mid-life crisis and started falling down in the sand traps on the golf course. This fits in well with a recent discovery called the “Florida Syndrome.” A psychiatrist in St. Petersburg studied a lot of people, good people, who did the right American thing: worked hard for 30 years, saved their money, retired, and went to live in this American Eden in Florida (or Southern California or Phoenix). They feel entitled, and are entitled, to be rewarded for a life of toil, usually pretty dreary. After 30 years they go to Florida, and a very large percentage, according to this doctor, get depressed, get disoriented, feel terrible, so bad that a lot of them move back to their little house in Dubuque. I was pleased to hear that. [laughter]
I like one thing that Einstein said—I couldn’t understand much else that he said. Somebody asked him, How did it happen that you got into nuclear physics, this extraordinarily theoretical work? He said, I did it to escape the dreariness of ordinary life in this world. He said, I mean dreary. He was living an ordinary middle-class, German, Jewish life. From what I observe, even with the huge consumption in this country, an awful lot of people are very unhappy, find life very dreary, and move a lot—all the time. I know a couple— both of them over 70—who move from one condominium to another, looking for a different golf course. [laughter]
You mentioned the absence among people of a shared view of life. The conventional view seems to be: Who needs that? Everyone should come up with his own philosophy. Why bother with an overarching, teleological point of view? What’s wrong with this commonplace privatization of “values”?
Well, I can’t do better than quote Mother Teresa. She said about abortion: “If a mother can kill her unborn child, I can kill you, and you can kill me.” The privatization of values could lead to that, couldn’t it?
You once said you converted because of “Christianity’s rather insolent claim to be true.” What can the Church do to reap converts?
Well, that’s the answer. The only chance the Church has of ever making converts, or even getting vocations within her own people, is to remain true to herself. God knows, it’s hard. The Holy Father is trying to cleave to these very unpopular teachings on monogamy, abortion, contraception, and all the others. The poor man is having the hardest time in the world. He’s going squarely against the entire zeitgeist of the modern world. But if he doesn’t do it… well, what’s happened with so many religious orders? They’ve become so “liberal,” so unrecognizable as religious orders, that they’re not getting any people coming in. Why bother? Vocations are down dramatically. Why not? They were not down when I became a Catholic; we had a flourishing Benedictine community right in the little town where I lived. The nuns have disappeared, folded. They’ve gone in all kinds of different directions, every kind of feminism.
Vatican II, of course, was the opening of the Church to the modern world. The idea was precisely to make Catholicism more relevant, to attract more converts. Was Vatican II in any sense a mistake, or at least imprudent tactically?
I don’t think so. I think the Church will weather that. There was nothing unorthodox about Vatican II; it is no abridgment of dogma or doctrine. I think a lot of people use Vatican II as an excuse to chuck the whole thing, to throw out the baby with the bathwater. They talk about Vatican II, but what they really want to do is get rid of the Magisterium, get rid of the Eucharist, and you know what Flannery O’Connor said about that: “If it’s only a symbol, the hell with it.”
Didn’t you once tell an interviewer who asked about the “heroic role” of the writer: “Hell, I can’t think of any writer who was heroic, except maybe Flannery O’Connor”?
That’s true for me. Writers are a pretty sorry lot, to tell you the truth, a bad lot altogether.
Your work often makes one think of Chesterton: both of you make so much use of paradox and comedy. Why do authors with Christian concerns use paradox and comedy?
Kierkegaard said that the comic is of the same essence as the religious. Even though they appear to be bipolar, one springs from the other. Only a true believer can see how funny it all is. It just seems so natural to me, maybe I can’t even analyze it.
To get back to your question about the Catholic media, if I had one wish for Catholic journalism, it would be to have something like the Jews have in Commentary. It doesn’t matter whether you agree or disagree with Commentary; if you want to find out about current Jewish thought, Commentary comes to mind right away. It’s extremely well done. I wish there was a journal like it for Catholics. Maybe Crisis can do something like that.
Walker Percy, Obl.S.B. (1916 – 1990) was a Southern author from Covington, Louisiana whose interests included philosophy and semiotics. Percy is known for his philosophical novels set in and around New Orleans, Louisiana, the first of which, The Moviegoer, won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. He devoted his literary life to the exploration of “the dislocation of man in the modern age.” His work displays a unique combination of existential questioning, Southern sensibility, and deep Catholic faith.
RELIGION & LIBERTY, Acton Institute’s International Journal of Religion, Economics and Culture
There is no ‘Catholic case for Communism’ Rev. Ben Johnson
The Jesuit-run America magazine recently published an apolo- gy for Communism that would have been embarrassing in Gor- bachev-era Pravda. “The Catholic Case for Communism” (by Dean Dettloff, July 23, 2019) minimizes Marxism’s intensely an- ti-Christian views, ignores its oppression and economic decimation of its citizens, distorts the bulk of Catholic social teach- ing on socialism, and seemingly ends with a call to revolution.
Dettloff, who is America’s Toronto cor- respondent, claims to own Marxism’s “real and tragic mistakes,” yet he downplays these to the point of farce. He admits, without elaboration, that “Communism in its socio-political expression has at times caused great human and ecological suffer- ing.” That seems a rather anodyne way to describe decades of imperialism, censor- ship, and torture; the Gulag archipelago, reeducation camps designed to eradi- cate the victim’s entire personality, and the systematic industrial slaughter of 100 million people (and still counting in North Korea, China, and Cuba).
In this America essay, the plight of Communism’s victims is reduced to the level of “ecological suffering.”
Similarly, Dettloff obfuscates about Communism’s hatred of religion in general and Christianity in particular. He will allow only that Marxist-Leninists “were com- mitted Enlightenment thinkers, atheists who sometimes assumed religion would
fade away in the bright light of scientific reason, and at other times advocated pro- pagandizing against it.”
Had Communists restricted them- selves to propaganda, they would have failed before taking power, rather than 70 years afterward. The Bolsheviks mur- dered 2,691 Russian Orthodox priests, 1,962 monks, and 3,447 nuns in 1922 alone. Dettloff obliquely admits Com- munists persecuted religious people “at different moments in history.” In reali-ty, Communist persecution of the Church was near-universal. The same cycle un- wound in Spain, Hungary, Albania, North Korea, and Xi Jinping’s China. Its boot has fallen on the necks of such luminaries as Cardinal Mindszenty, Blessed Fr. Jerzy Popiełuszko, and an obscure Polish priest named Karol Wojtyla.
Before taking Christian lives, the Communists took their property. Le- nin wrote secretly in 1922 that the Po- litburo must use the Bolshevik-inspired famine as cover to “confiscate all church property with all the ruthless energy we can still muster.” He understood, better than Christians, that without property the Church has no earthly self-defense. Wealth gives its holder agency – which is to say, liberty.
Dettloff attempts to reassure his readers that Communists will only despoil “the rich,” not common people. Abolish- ing private property does not mean the Red Guard will confiscate “the kinds of
things an artisan or farmer might own” but only “the kind of private property that most of us do not have”: business- es, capital goods, etc. This assumes that universal human rights depend on one’s class. It overlooks Communism’s history of sacking Church property, the only opu- lence most peasants ever saw – property that was truly preserved in common for scores of generations.
More importantly, it again ignores the bloody pages of Communist histo- ry. Stalin sent soldiers door-to-door to confiscate all food, utensils – even pets – before starving six million Ukrainians to death in the Holodomor. Had Dettloff been writing 100 years ago, he may have been deemed gullible. But with a century of history to draw on, it is hard for Dettl- off – a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute for Christian Studies – to plead ignorance.
Yet in his telling, “Catholics and com- munists have found natural reasons to offer one another a sign of peace.” Det- tloff cites as proof the fact that numerous Communist organizations (all of which he helpfully links for America’s readers) allow Christian fellow travelers to work toward Marxist ends, that “Christians have been passionately represented in commu- nist and socialist movements around the world,”andthatsomeMarxistleaderswere former seminarians. (Was Josef Stalin less murderous because he was once an Or- thodox seminarian, or Khrushchev because he memorized virtually all four Gospels?)
03 SPRING 2019 ACTON.ORG
Photo: Bolivian President Evo Morales presents Pope Francis with a hammer-and-sickle “Crucifix” (Photo credit: Associated Press)
This is rather like the seductress who estranges a man from his family, then boasts about her connection to his ex- wife. Marxism lured Catholics away from the Christian faith into a false religion of materialism.
The Roman Catholic Church’s un- broken teaching condemns all forms of Marxism and Communism. Pope Pius XI wrote in Quadragesimo Anno that “no one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist.”
“See to it, Venerable Brethren, that the Faithful do not allow themselves to be deceived!” he wrote. “Communism is intrinsically wrong, and no one who would save Christian civilization may collaborate with it in any undertaking whatsoever.”
Nonetheless, Dettloff argues that Catholics should promote Marxism (and, implicitly, that they should ignore the Magisterium), because “Communism has provided one of the few sustainable oppositions to capitalism,” which is – he asseverates – “an economic system based on avarice, exploitation, and hu- man suffering.”
“Sustainable” may not accurately describe an economic system that col- lapsed in an ash heap after seven decades of bread lines and mass starvation. The economic implosion of every Marxist ex- periment in human history seems to have passed him by. So does its concentra- tion of all wealth into the hands of state functionaries, its endless class warfare,
its history of assigning jobs irrespective of individual choice, and its requirement that all curry the good favor of the polit- ical class for a (marginally) better chance at survival.
Presumably, Marxist apologists will argue that these socio-political expres- sions were “not real socialism.” Yet col- lectivists believed the regimes were so- cialist at the time. It would appear that one can only tell a government is not practicing “real” socialism after it fails, the same way that Puritans could only tell a woman was innocent of witchcraft after she began drowning.
The free market brings people from diverse ethnic and socioeconomic back- grounds together in harmonious relation- ships. It requires people to serve others by providing goods or services their neigh- bors want to buy. Capitalism indisputably generates more wealth and better living conditions for the poor than those living under socialism. And it leaves the worker the fruits of his or her labor and, with it, choice and dignity.
The America piece ends with a call to overthrow this system of free exchange and replace it with the greatest system of oppression ever devised – and contains a possible incitement to violence. Dettl- off’s article-length press release began by quoting Dorothy Day’s observation, “It is when the Communists are good that they are dangerous.” She warned, in the pages of America magazine, that
humanitarian-sounding Marxists lead Catholics astray, persecute the Church, and even kill protesters on either side of the debate. Dettloff concludes by saying, “It is when the communists are danger- ous that they are good” – an apparent call to revolution in the pages of America. This is fitting since it was Karl Marx, not Lenin, who wrote that “there is only one way in which the murderous death ag- onies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated,and that way is revolutionary terror.” The fact that this violates Catholic doctrine also seems to have eluded America.
Dettloff is counting on the historical ignorance of his readers, and he likely counts right. Communist atrocities are not taught in public schools or universi- ties. That class time is reserved for the evils of national socialism and the depre- dations of America’s founders.
But Dettloff also assumes ignorance of Catholic teaching, with which America’s editors should be conversant. The pub- lication of an article extolling the most murderous, anti-Christian ideology of the twentieth century provides scant ev- idence that they are, or that it animates their editorial decisions.
Rev. Ben Johnson is managing editor of Religion & Liberty and senior editor of the Acton Institute’s transatlantic website. R&L
Posted inUncategorized|Comments Off on The Jesuits, periodical, AMERICA, not only promotes the LGBT agenda but also mirrors the favorable view of Francis the Merciful on Communism
Viva Bishop Gracida for Proclaiming: “Pachamama Drowned, As it Should be”
– Updated Bishop October 22
Rene Gracida alone among all the Catholic bishops of the entire world is defending God’s greatest commandment:
“You shall have no other gods before me.”
After the heroes who are called “Cristeros” extracted the sacrilegious pagan idols of Pachamama from the Santa Maria in Traspontina church in the Vatican and plummeted the idols into the Tiber River only one bishop in the entire world defended them.
Bishop Gracida proclaimed on his website:
“Pachamama drowned, as it should be.”
I can only proclaim and shout with my fist raised in salute:
Viva Cristo Rey!
Viva Los Cristeros!
Viva #IamCristeros!
Viva La Virgen de Guadalupe!
Viva San Jose!
Viva Obispo Gracida!
Viva Cristo Rey!
I raised my fist in salute with and to Los Cristeros, Bishop Gracida, all faithful Catholics and with the Catholic Resistance in solidarity, support, strength, defiance and resistance against those who dare go against Cristo Rey – Christ the King!
Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Church. Shout again with the raised fist in salute: Viva Cristo Rey! Viva Cristo Rey! Viva Cristo Rey!
It seems impossible to imagine the bishop in charge of Hawai’i via the Diocese of Honolulu making the kinds of waves he would make were he to stand up and be counted on this.
I have put together talking points and will be meeting with him on November first. It is a crucial meeting for me as I have to know how to get him to talk and not talk myself. Here is the list with material taken out that would make this message too long.
‘Talking Points Modesty may seem to evade your eyes during the interview. Thank you.
1. Effects on the Church if Francis himself does not specifically refute Scalfari’s claim that he doesn’t believe in the divinity of Christ. [One wordless way he has told us this several times already.]
2. Effects on the Church of placing women above men, or in a position of equality.
3. Effects on the Church of a this world orientation. Any positive points. Not for Our Lord’s purposes. For the devil’s yes. Destructive effect on the soul.
+ Sheep have scattered. Without a superabundance of determination for which they are utterly ill equipped to suddenly receive as if a miracle – things don’t work that way – they are irredeemably lost to the heights they could have attained in sanctity, and perhaps, to eternal life altogether based on the behavior of some I have met. [am a convert]
4. Effects on the Church of removing contemplation from its Contemplative Orders, or reducing time spent in prayer by non-contemplative ones, changing dress and reducing privacy by substituting responsibility for this-world concerns, either mentally, or bodily, and to whatever degree deviates from the historic norms.
5. Effects on the Church: Level of discretion as a bishop expected going forward regarding 4. in the Honolulu Diocese. [I care.]
5. Effects on the Church: Effects on the USCCB of this point in Church history.
He will be going to the mainland for the important meeting at which the president is to be elected (I think) in November. I was fortunate to get an appointment with him. 9:44 PM
Good for you Nandarani, God be with you. Everyone needs to figure out for themselves exactly how they will resist and/or defend Jesus Christ and our Catholic faith. You have done something here, and it is a wonderful thing. And I am happy, very happy, to be a Cristero now! Viva Cristo Rey! When one is suffering, it is far harder to suffer in silence, far more healthy and exhilarating to fight back. We have taken it, Catholic friends, and now, it’s on.2:42 PM
4. “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” 5 “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.”
Regarding the dragon goddess idol dunkers, according to the Jorge Magisterium:
1. God made the pachamama baptizers this way. Not only do they not sin by their thievery, racism and sacrilege, these were acts of virtue, and they were God’s will for these men.
2. Who are you all to judge the dunkers?
3. There is no hell for these wetters. 4. Everyone is going to heaevn forever-including the dunkers, wetters, baptizers, and drowners, those who defy the spirit of dialogue, those who steal sacred objects, those who film them doing these things, those who are religiously intolerant, racists, those with vexatious attitudes, those who refuse to rebuild the church, those who refuse to renew the church, those wh escalate these acts, and all those pure and holy amazonians in the Amazon region who kill children they don’t like, don’t want, who are twins, or who are challenged in any way eg by burying them alive as they cry and whimper.
The Jorge Magisterium demands that anyone in any of the categories in the list above be joyfully and fruitfully integrated into the daily life of the church community. See further discussions:
In my last column (“Steps from God to the Religion of the Self”) I recalled Saint John Paul II’s warning about the “subjectivizing” of “conscience”: “[T]he inescapable claims of truth disappear, yielding their place to a criterion of sincerity, authenticity and ‘being at peace with oneself.’”
In that way, “conscience” is subtly but decisively turned: instead of being directed to a set of objective moral truths and the Author of the moral law, this “conscience” comes to mean the “truths” that a person is willing to settle on as his own.
One of the sharpest echoes of this understanding in our law can be found in Justice Antonin Scalia’s warning about a state of affairs in which “each conscience is [treated] as a law unto itself.” That was one of the culminating lines in the famous case of Employment Services v. Smith (1990); it has sparked the most spirited (and unwarranted) criticism of Scalia’s opinion, even among his most devoted friends.
The case involved federal and State laws barring the use of “controlled substances.” The statutes were meant to deal with drug use, a concern once shared across the political spectrum. In this instance, two men working in a center for drug counseling in Oregon were fired for using peyote. They were denied unemployment compensation because, it was held, they were fired for good cause, for they had violated the law.
But the peyote was used under a Native American religious ritual, and so the question was raised as to whether there ought to be an accommodation here of religion, giving the religious a bit more slack from the rules that were applied without controversy to other people, not affected by a sense of religious obligations.
Scalia put the accent on laws of “general applicability.” There was wide support in the country for those laws on drugs, and no one suggested that those laws had been passed for the purpose of harassing or punishing the religious. Nor was there any instance here of the government presuming to judge the rituals or doctrines that were more or less central to any religion – and more or less deserving of an exemption from the laws.
As Scalia understood, it was quite beyond the rightful competence of judges to pronounce on such questions. But the Justice ran through a long list of cases, from the grand to the prosaic, that refused to admit a religious ground of exemption from laws thought to be thoroughly defensible, for the religious along with everyone else.
And so, they covered laws on:
— health and safety, including “child neglect,”
— the paying of taxes, including social security,
— compulsory vaccination,
— the regulation of drugs,
— regulating traffic,
— minimum wages,
— child labor,
— environmental protection,
— military service.
*
As Scalia noted, in a pointed twist, it was “precisely because we value and protect that religious divergence, [that] we cannot afford the luxury of deeming presumptively invalid, as applied to the religious objector, every regulation of conduct that does not protect an interest of the highest order.”
Justice O’Connor, concurring but troubled, acknowledged that religious conduct cannot be “automatically immune from all government regulation simply because it is motivated by. . .sincere beliefs.” Nevertheless, she appealed to an understanding that she thought had been established in earlier cases: namely, that the government should be required “to justify any substantial burden on religiously motivated conduct by a compelling state interest and by means narrowly tailored to achieve that interest.”
That formula would be taken up and passed just three years later as part of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), and it has been used widely now in our cases. That Act was taken as a reproach to Scalia in the Smith case. And yet that kind of legislative response was not at all at odds with his understanding.
Legislatures may work out accommodations with the religious, on terms that turn out to be defensible or indefensible, and Scalia far preferred to see the matter resolved in that way. That was far better than having judges invoke a “constitutional right” with a sweeping exemption from all manner of laws for any “beliefs” that are claimed to be “religious.”
As it turned out, Justice O’Connor had been willing to join Scalia’s decision in Smith precisely because she saw no “serious dispute that Oregon has a compelling interest in prohibiting the possession of peyote by its citizens.” In other words, she accorded with Scalia while quite missing his deeper point – a mistake that would now be carried over to the judges applying RFRA.
In a country highly divided on the matter of drugs, a consensus had been formed, knitting together majorities willing to act on this issue of drugs – and that was the clearest measure of what people in Oregon and the country thought to be an interest “compelling” enough to enact into law.
Clarence Thomas once raised the question of why the people of Michigan had a “compelling interest” in taxing themselves to sustain an elite law school in which around 70 percent of the graduates will leave the State – and why that interest, in turn, should be taken to justify racial preferences in admissions. The people of Michigan could have just as plausibly decided to use the same funds to support medical care for the aged or to give themselves a reduction in taxes.
Either way, it was the people of Michigan who could decide which interest was more “compelling.” It was not within the tool kit of Justice O’Connor or any federal judge to pronounce on that question.
As Scalia understood, only a deep principle of law should override that judgment. Absent that, matters should not hinge on what an unelected judge regarded, in any case, as a policy “important” enough to elicit her respect.
And so, the secret that hasn’t quite broken through: Scalia had it right in Smith, and still has it right, even with the Religious Freedom Restoration Act on the books.
*Image: Justices O’Connor and Scalia in 1992 (Photo: Laura Patterson/CQ Roll Call/Getty Images)
Posted inUncategorized|Comments Off on ONE OF THE MYSTERIES OF LIFE WHICH HAS BRIEFLY OCCUPIED MY MIND FROM TIME TO TIME IS WHY THE GOOD SO OFTEN DIE YOUNG, OR AT LEAST BEFORE WHAT WE WOULD CONSIDER RIPE OLD AGE. OF COURSE AT 96 I AM AWARE THAT THAT THOUGHT DOES NOT REFLECT FAVORABLY ON ME. BUT, STILL THE THOUGHT PASSES THROUGH MY MIND WHEN I THINK OF JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA FOR WHOM I HAD/HAVE THE HIGHEST REGARD!!!
ABYSSUS ABYSSUM INVOCAT / DEEP CALLS TO DEEP 
You must be logged in to post a comment.