The myth of “interiority”

I read the other day a post on the Lonely Goth’s blog concerning the Khrist Bhaktas or Indian devotees of Christ who are not baptized into the Church. Apparently, according to an article linked to on this site, a great number of people who make pilgrimages to Christian shrines and fills the pews on Sunday are not technically “Christians” as we would call them. They are devotees of Christ who do not seek baptism, since “receiving baptism is perceived as relinquishing one’s entire social and cultural patrimony and becoming assimilated to an alien culture”. Some Catholic priests even encourage this type of devotion to Christ, saying that they are there not to baptize people, but to “preach the Gospel”.

“Syncretic, cowardly compromise”, you might be thinking. The funny thing is, however, that Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, that bête noire of integrist Catholicism, when he was working in the Lord’s vineyard in French-speaking west Africa, almost did the exact same thing with many of the Muslim and animist populations. Realizing that many people due to tribal or marital circumstances (polygamy was common in many places) could not seek baptism, he created a class of “believer”, a sort of perpetual catechumenate, for those not quite ready to take the plunge of becoming an “official Christian”. His aim of course was to convert everybody, but he was realistic about what that really meant in practice. By creating a “third way”, he and other missionaries felt that some people were at least leaving the door partially open to the Church, and that such a committment should at the least be acknowledged by the hierarchy.

Stuff from around the Internet

Found at this site. No real comment.

No offense intended to Father, but really, since when have the “average Catholic laity” been obsessed with the meaning of life questions? And while I don’t really agree with the Spaniard, sometimes I can sympathize with the agnostic soundman’s condescension: “you poor naive Americans”. [Remember, I am just as American as all of you. The only difference is that my ties to the "old country" are much stronger.]

Finally, the article Sharing the Real Mary by David Mills. He seems to be a convert asking some deeper questions regarding the relationship between faith and culture. The comments of others are quite interesting, though they range from pious churchwoman-speak, to more sophisticated comments, to one cradle Catholic who says he has no devotion to the Virgin and finds nothing wrong with this. I found the last type of comment very annoying, and just demonstrative of how “naive” and ahistorical American Catholics outside of certain regions can sometimes be. Maybe they need to spend more time in botanicas…

An Evening with Robert Louis Wilken

AG and I went to a talk at Notre Dame Seminary here in New Orleans given by the noted Christian scholar, Robert Louis Wilken. A former Lutheran pastor and a convert to the Catholic Faith in 1994, Dr. Wilken this night gave a talk entitled, “Reading St. Augustine in the 21st Century”. Dr. Wilken, as many will know, is an expert in early Christian thought, having written and edited such books as Remembering the Christian Past and On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ. He is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Virginia as well as having taught at many notable universities around the world. He is also a New Orleans native, having grown up in the lower Ninth Ward, and gave a biographical prelude to his talk on how good it was to be back in his hometown. There was a good turnout for the event on a rainy Friday night, and the talk itself was followed by a lively and equally interesting Q & A session.

Dr. Wilken decided in his limited time to tackle perhaps the most prolific and influential of ancient writers, St. Augustine of Hippo. Wilken had to start out surveying the vast expanse of Augustine’s thought and writings, not to mention his equally impressive legacy on Western thought. He began with some rather broad yet profound themes that Augustine touched upon in his writings: time, memory, the self, and the soul. In these, what is most important is the “inner life” of man; it is the “most important part of being human”. In Augustine, above any other thinker in antiquity, we have a “turn towards the self”. In no other author then or now can we get a deeper sense of the “inner life” as it journeys towards the truth. For Augustine, reflection and the turn towards the self were a “step on the way back to God”. His task was to explore the infinitely vast universe within, of which the outer universe is but a mere shadow, and there find God.

Archbishop Weakland – the “after-article”

In case you haven’t seen it yet, here is my latest article for Inside Catholic that is a review of Archbishop Rembert Weakland’s autobiography, A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church. As expected, this article has led to a minor “feeding frenzy” over there of “conservative” Catholics venting their ire against the fallen liberal prelate. One criticism of my article is that I did not take seriously enough the sexual dimension of Archbishop Weakland’s downfall, which for many commenters was the main driving force behind his progressive agenda. I wouldn’t want to get into it here, but I will only reiterate what I said in my one comment over there: people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. We have the scandal of Fr. Maciel, who was apparently JPII’s best buddy, and then we have the traditionalists like Fr. Timothy Svea who fell into worse sins and crimes. What about that master of ceremonies of the current Papal court who got picked up by police in the red light district in Rome? I once knew an SSPX priest, Fr. Benedict Vander Putten, who I thought was on fire with the love of God. Turns out he was on fire for the love of underaged girls. Need I go on?

So here too I will steer clear of the “Fox News” culture of accusation and titillation and just argue the issues I set out to discuss in the essay. I think at times that I might have been too hard on the Archbishop, that maybe I have been guilty of the closed-mindedness that I accuse him of. But probing my own reading of the book, I really can’t say that the man has an ounce of real contrition for what he has done. As AG put it to me, the whole book could be summarized as, “yeah, I know I messed up on this one thing… but I am still a good person who did a lot of great things. And I could have done greater things if that darn John Paul II hadn’t persecuted me so much…” I did not get a sense from Weakland that the Church existed as something bigger than the walls of his head. It’s his ideas or the highway; the only reason he is staying Catholic is because he has a strong institutional tie to the Church. It’s all he really knows.

Liturgy anecdotes from the Internet

The first from Bishop Terrence Fulham’s column:

With regard to the feast of St. Joseph the Worker, the monks of St. Peter’s Abbey in Solesmes, France, so long charged with composing Gregorian melodies for new liturgical feasts flat-out refused to do so for the rest of the Pius XII Pontificate so much did they (like myself) despise that feast. It was John XXIII who ordered the music written and they complied, but it has to be the most cacophonous load of rubbish you ever did hear. The monks had the final word, (or should I say notes ?) on that feast. I’m sure the conventual Mass that day was never sung in Solesmes ! I can only remember singing that Mass once in the seminary schola and one of the Alleluia verses is absolutely hideous – completely discordant and unsingable corresponding to no other piece in the Gregorian repertoire of which I am aware and I’m not surprised either !

Surprisingly, by comparison, the Introit for the feast of St. Pius X also introduced in 1955 for its first celebration in 1956 is absolutely beautiful. Even monks can send coded messages and in music !

Enchanted Protestantism – III

Signs, wonders, and the twilight of “doctrinal” Protestantism

People of late have thought me some sort of waivering Catholic who is too friendly with the Protestants. I think half the stuff that I post here would be more than enough to prove that this is a ridiculous. I do have a number of Protestant fans, a couple of whom I know personally. You could even call them, “friends”. They tend to be of the “magisterial Protestant” type, people who take their Luther and Calvin very seriously. I have been told by some that they appreciate my honesty, saying that all of the other Catholics that they encounter are not nearly as honest as I am about what Catholicism is really like. And if Catholicism is merely conceived as a “completion” of a person’s Protestantism, no matter how “Scriptural” they may think it ultimately is, then I think that he is barking up the wrong tree. You can no more get a religion out of a book than you can build a DVD player using the consumer instructional manual. To think as a human being is to think in a context, and not even Muslims treat the Koran the same way that modern Protestants think of the Bible; as some sort of key to an individualistic, bourgeois religion.

Growing up Catholic in the barrio

On my way out of a Latino grocery score in Kenner (I was there to pick up some special cheese for AG’s sister, CG), some middle aged gentleman shoved a newpaper-like brochure in my hand, which I only realized a few seconds and steps later was a Spanish Protestant religious tract. I went to the Salvadoran restaurant next door to order some pupusas as a surprise snack for CG, and so I began to examine the evangelical rag with only mild interest. The front was all about how the Catholic Church preaches a “doctrine of demons” since it “obligates” (?) certain people to be celibate. It also went into the whole idea of works vs. faith, circumscision vs. uncircumscision, and other bizarre ideas formulated in a unique if rather superficial way.

When I got bored with that, I began to look around the small establishment, and noticed that there were two small statues of St. Jude, along with a happy Chinese Buddha (and some other trinkets). At least St. Jude won out in the numbers game. After my pupusas were ready, I was prepared to go out there and give that guy a “piece of my mind”, but he had cleared out by the time I exited the restaurant.

On Romanticist Metanarratives

Found this via the Ochlophobist blog:

Pelikan once called the development of doctrine to be Newman’s “great idea”, and based his entire remarkable history of Christian Doctrine on it. The development of doctrine is a philosophy of history, and Pelikan gave it a practical application. (That Pelikan ultimately rejected the development–implicitly–by embracing Orthodoxy is evidence of its weakness as a grounds for understanding Christian doctrine and faith.) In defense of Newman, the Cardinal often claimed in the essay that the development was simply the fact that no idea is ever first expressed in its fullest form. This seems reasonable enough, but flies in the face of traditional Christian conviction that the Gospel is the fullest form of all doctrine, and that the Church simply defends its deposit through the inspired Creed and councils. It would be truer to say that what develops is the number of occaisions to which doctrine has to be explicitly applied, though no father of the councils would have dared to say he was finding a new doctrine, rather they were always defending that which had always been taught. And from Nicea to iconoclasm, there is plenty of evidence for that fact. New technical language is applied to explain doctrine, but for the orthodox Christian, doctrine itself never develops. Newman’s essay, therefore, attempted to defend orthodoxy against the enlightenment by undermining it; Hegel simply defended incipient-liberal Protestantism against the enlightenment by removing from it all the content of the Gospel. But their methods of engaging it bear a more than cursory similarity.

From a recent Internet discussion

I decided to share part of this with the “general public”:

…I can hardly gel this religion with the rather tame faith of post-Vatican II Catholicism. What the changes of modern Catholicism articulate for me is that the traditional Roman Faith has always been a hodge-podge of official, “clericalized”, theologically correct beliefs and practices, as well as equally important, pagan, “folk” elements. You can try to justify all this stuff with just the Bible, or with the Bible and Patristics, but what you will get is exactly what we inherited in the last half century: a reductionist, bland, modern faith of people obsessed with proof-texting every last belief and practice of the Church; people who in order to see the forest from the trees, begin chopping down a large number of trees they think “get in the way”. Lord, forgive them, for they know not what they do.

I suppose my studies of paganism and Neoplatonism have helped me understand my Faith better. I’m sort of Jack Chick’s evil doppelganger. I realize now that what modern people, even modern Catholics, deem “pagan” is a historically conditioned category. That is just how people have always acted; it is just how people do things. This is quite clear to me in my limited studies of Protestant “folk systems”: even good Protestants of the past read astrology charts, did all sorts of conjuring using the Psalms, and even had the occasional “folk saints” who could be called upon for help (the Kabala-inspired angel magic of the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses comes to mind, a favorite in the deep South, as well as the figure of “High John the Conqueror” amongst African-American Protestants.) When approaching the text of the Bible, we tend to bring to the table our own very sterile and embedded prejudices that the average first century Jew was basically a liturgical Quaker who shared the same cosmology as Richard Dawkins, only with a light sprinkling of “God” on top. This was probably not the case.

Protestants seem to think that Catholics have added on to what the early Church believed; Catholics retort that Protestants have taken away from what the early Church believed. I am sort of starting to think, just from my own religious anthropological investigations, that perhaps no one believes what the early Church believed, and that is perhaps not such a bad thing. The Shepherd of Hermas? Millenarianism? People speaking in tongues and St. Peter making people drop dead just for “lying on their tax returns”? Seven years canonical penance for adultery? And that is just from the paltry documental evidence we know about. Who knows what those first assemblies of believers were really like? Newman quipped that to be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant. I reply that to be deeper in history is to cease to be anything. And pace Newman, to have changed often does not mean that one is perfect. It merely means that one is mortal.

Perhaps I am too subtle or too honest to be on the Internet. I can say, however, that many Catholics take great solace in what I write… So in the end, at least with some of the stuff I write, I am helping a lot of Catholics out. But I do so not by engaging the enemy “on his own terms”… but by trying to argue for Catholicism within the safe confines of its own inner logic. If we were just faithful to who we are, even in our most “pagan” elements and “man-made” traditions, I am convinced that the Gospel will shine forth in all its splendor to the point that we will not have to argue for the Truth: it will be manifest through the Church. I know this because I have seen it myself, and am confident that we don’t need to change one iota of it to make it any more convincing. It has always been my contention that few can “prove” the Truth effectively, but many, even simple people, can SHOW it.

From one of my ex-professors

El Espíritu Santo nos asegura que los obispos no pueden errar cuando imponen su autoridad, pero nada nos asegura cuando la deponen. Quedan siempre en pie las promesas de la indefectibilidad de la Iglesia –las puertas del infierno no prevalecerán–, pero muy empequeñecido quedará el rebaño de Cristo si los pastores siguen adorando al sentir de su grey, cada vez más inspirado por el espíritu nada santo del actual aparato publicitario.

El magisterio conciliar no ha recurrido nunca al ejercicio de la infalibilidad por modo extraordinario, ni puede alcanzar nunca la infalibilidad del magisterio ordinario universal mientras se crea obligado a ejercer su oficio de modo subordinado a una inexistente infalibilidad del sentido de la fe del común de los creyentes.

-La Lámpara Bajo el Celemín, de Alvaro Calderón, págs. 50-1.

The Holy Ghost assures us that the bishops cannot err when they exercise their authority, but nothing assures us of this when they have put it aside. The promises of the indefectibility of the Church always remain – the gates of hell will not prevail- but the flock of Christ will become very small if the shepherds keep adoring the opinions of their flock, everyday more inspired by a non-so-holy spirit of the current publicity apparatus.

The Conciliar magisterium has never had recourse to the exercise of infallibility in its extraordinary mode, nor can it ever achieve the infallibility of the ordinary universal magisterium while it feels itself obligated to exercise its office in a way subordinate to a non-existent infallibility of the sense of common faith of believers.

-Fr. Alvaro Calderon (La Reja, Argentina), in his book, The Light Under a Bushel Basket: Disputed Question Regarding the Magisterium of the Church after Vatican II

(I am trying to get this book, but since it is published by a small publisher in Argentina, it is hard to get, apparently. Any ideas for me?)

While obviously this is only one of the few excerpts I can find from this book, I will speculate to develop what he is trying to say. I think that what he is saying is that “authority” is not an automatic, charismatic mechanism that is simply given in the Church because one holds a particular office: one is obligated to assent to a number of limitations in order to exercise it. In other words, the only bishops who govern well are the bishops who govern wisely, and that means taking into consideration the perrenial doctrines and practices of the Church, and knowing when to discern that certain trends will only lead to destruction.

Thus, bishops (and popes) who follow the zeitgeist, ever reading the signs of the times and ever anxious to adapt the Catholic Faith to the latest fads of the faithful, are the ones who have really put their authority aside. That is my understanding at least. I am very anxious to get my hands on the rest of this book.