Phoenix-based Flawless Intentions Ministry (no, we don’t understand the origin of the name either) has issued a leaflet that says, quoting Catholicism and Fundamentalism: “Karl Keating makes the hugely erroneous assertion that, ‘Whatever else might be said, it is certain that the early Church took John 6 literally and the accounts of the Last Supper literally. There is no record in the early centuries of any Christian doubting the Catholic interpretation. There exists no document in which the literal interpretation is opposed and the metaphorical accepted.’”
Mark Speena, who is Flawless Intentions Ministry, lists eleven quotations from early Christian writers. He claims that Keating is wrong and that these writers demonstrate that the Eucharist was understood metaphorically, not literally. Hmmm.
Speena says The Didache “simply refers to the Lord’s Supper as ‘spiritual food and drink.’” Yes, it does refer to it that way, but is such a phrase inconsistent with a literal understanding of John 6? Hardly, since transubstantiation itself is necessarily spiritual, without being any the less real.
Theophilus of Antioch is quoted as writing, “For though yourself prudent, you endure fools gladly. Otherwise you would not have been moved by senseless men to yield yourself to empty words and to give credit to the prevalent rumor wherewith godless lips falsely accuse us, who are worshipers of God and are called Christians, . . . that we eat human flesh.”
What Theophilus was writing about was the pagan claim that Christians were cannibals because they claimed to eat their God. Well, Christians did claim that (because they understood John 6 literally), but the pagans, not knowing that the Presence of Christ in the Eucharist is sacramental but not corporeal in the normal physical sense, thought that Christians were eating flesh indistinguishable from the flesh hanging from their own bones. Ironically, the pagan charge of cannibalism tends to prove, rather than disprove, the Catholic understanding of John 6.
The remaining nine quotations in his leaflet are similar. They need to be tweaked and taken out of context if they’re to seem to support a strictly metaphorical view of the Eucharist. We have no reason to doubt Speena’s intentions—nor have we reason to doubt that his conclusions are flawed.
Kevin Binfield, who teaches at Gardner-Webb University in North Carolina, and Carol Winkelmann, who teaches at Xavier University in Ohio, issued a “call for papers,” inviting “proposals or complete papers for a collection of essays treating subversive or revisionist teaching in conservative—especially religious—classrooms, institutions, or communities.” Among the suggested topics: “teaching offensive or challenging texts” (students shouldn’t be allowed to read things we don’t agree with); “teaching canonical texts using subversive approaches—feminist, post-colonial, queer, animal rights, Marxist” (forget what the required books say—force your own interpretation into the students); “identifying types/modes of conservative resistance” (don’t let orthodox students intimidate you); “coping with administrative scrutiny” (how to work against your institution without getting fired); “administrative/student complicity” (make it harder to get fired by getting a few others on your side); “using religious scriptures to subvert religious fundamentalism” (which is to say, religious belief in general).
We can hardly wait for the book.
Come Home to Rome, the newsletter of G.R.A.C.E. Ministries, a Catholic organization based in St. Petersburg, Florida, included a short quiz in its March newsletter. In one of the questions readers were asked to define “relics.” The choices: “(a) a name given by certain dissenters to the aging members of the Roman Curia; (b) a condiment usually associated with mustard and used on hotdogs; (c) a word for those items of saints which can be venerated.”
If you don’t know the answer to that question, you’d better not try the next, which asks for a definition of “pantheism.” The choices: “(a) a belief system which gave rise to the Black Panther movement; (b) the worship of cooking implements, believed to have begun with the invention of Teflon; (c) any form of the false philosophy that maintains that all things are divine or [that] identifies God with the universe.”
Game for one more? What is “transubstantiation”? The choices: “(a) the belief that a human being can grow gills if he hangs out at the beach long enough; (b) the scientific explanation of time travel, i.e., how a cyborg can come from the future to alter the past; (c) the word officially adopted by the Council of Trent to express the total transformation of the whole substance of the bread and wine into the Body, Blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus Christ in the sacrament of the Eucharist.”
If you answered “c” to each of these questions, you’re right, except you receive only partial credit for the last question because answer “c” isn’t entirely right. The term “transubstantiation” was adopted not by the Council of Trent, but by the Lateran Council of 1215.
Most Americans, according to a poll commissioned by U.S. News & World Report, think their friends are going to hell. While 87 percent of those polled said they expect to end up in heaven, only 18 percent thought that their friends would join them there—which demonstrates again that your mother was right when she nagged you not to hang around with the wrong crowd.
The senior class at Seton School, a private Catholic institution in Manassas, Virginia, issued a manifesto saying that “We Are Church” isn’t—the Church, that is. “We intended to invite a representative of We Are Church to our class to see all these signatures and explain politely that there most certainly are plenty of real Catholics left in this part of the world. We will then send the signatures to the Holy Father.” Query: Where are the teenagers who are supporting We Are Church as avidly as these teenagers are opposing it? Answer: Nowhere (partly because they were contracepted into non-existence, partly because most of those who weren’t just aren’t interested in We Are Church’s program).
A World Wide Web site gives “Guidelines on Excommunication.” You might think, from such a title, that this could be a look at what canon law says about excommunication. Wrong. It is a guide about how to get excommunicated so you won’t any longer be considered a Christian, especially a Catholic. The site is hosted by self-described atheists, who complain that “the Roman Catholic Church apparently does not excommunicate its members easily. They say that the reason for this is to leave the way open for reconciliation.”
But the real motive is deeper, say the atheists. “By never giving up a member, the Church is able to claim millions as members who do not accept its doctrines, who never attend, who never contribute money or time and who are, in fact, opposed to what it stands for. . . . If you do not wish to contribute to the power of the Roman Catholic Church, you may want to get yourself excommunicated. Think of the publicity that there would be in only five or ten percent of the world’s billion or so Catholics decided to leave the Church permanently.” (Say, maybe these guys are onto something! If the right five or ten percent left, a lot of internal problems would be resolved. . . .)
Why should a nominal Catholic seek to be excommunicated? Well, “the Roman Catholic Church is misogynist,” as proved by the fact that Catholics helped to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment. Besides “the Church has fostered wife abuse by promoting cultures where any marriage, no matter how bad, was better for a woman than living alone.” (Translation: The Church thinks divorce is bad.)
Another reason to get excommunicated is that “the Roman Catholic Church is homophobic. In fact, it’s worse than that; the proper description of its position is ‘pro-natalist.’” Oh, no! Not that!
Lastly, as we all know and as Paul Blanshard repeatedly and tiringly wrote forty years ago, “the Roman Catholic Church is antidemocratic, authoritarian, and intolerant.” For instance, the Church “actively supported the fascist Spanish dictator Franco against the democratic republic.” Well, yes, the Church did prefer Franco, for all his faults, to his Loyalist opposition, in part because the Loyalists murdered thousands of priests and religious, desecrated churches, profaned the Blessed Sacrament, and did what they could to wipe out Christianity.
The Web site complains that “the Church is patronizing to atheists. They can easily recognize another superstition, but, being unfamiliar with rationality, they have difficulty accepting the decision to renounce all mumbo jumbo.” Ah, there’s “rationality” for you: reducing something as grand, as historically important, as influential, as intellectually deep as the Catholic faith to “mumbo jumbo.”
When stripped of its rhetoric, modern atheism is seen as non-rational, even though it wraps itself in the flag of reason. Hilaire Belloc was right when he noted that history’s best thinkers—whether on abstruse subjects such as philosophy or on concrete subjects such as history and medicine—have been believers, not atheists. Atheism clogs the mind and inhibits rationality. As Frank Sheed noted in Theology and Sanity, as we would wonder about the mental stability of a physician who disbelieved in microbes, so we should wonder about the mental stability of those who reject out of hand the larger part of reality, the supernatural. Theirs is not a rational position. It is mumbo jumbo.
We like the Internet. This new technology has permitted not just a greater dissemination of the truths of the faith, but also has permitted thousands of people to become active in talking about the faith. Many Catholics find themselves forced to explain and defend their beliefs, and that’s good. In the long run it means that they go back and do their homework, and it means that some of them will find joy in apologetics work and will engage in it offline too.
But the Internet has drawbacks. It has given kooks and bigots public exposure that they never would have had otherwise. Fortunately, most kooks and bigots are so kooky and bigoted that their online presence doesn’t do much harm (and few people ever find out about their Web sites), but some of them are fairly sophisticated. One outfit—now happily off the Web, it seems—distributed a long essay titled “Roman Catholicism: Is It a Cult?” No need to recycle the argument here, except to say that it was based on the Fundamentalist idea that the Catholic Church promotes “a false or inadequate basis of salvation,” “a false basis of authority,” and such supposedly anti-biblical things as penance and indulgences. In other words, Catholicism is not Fundamentalism, and therefore it is a cult. Neat and tidy.
Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, president of the Pontifical Council for the Family, on February 12 issued a directive for confessors regarding contraception. The directive reiterates that the use of contraceptives is always materially sinful. This sin is “an evil and a disorder.” “The objective evil of contraception . . . introduces a pernicious habit into the conjugal life of the couple. It is therefore necessary to strive in the most suitable way to free the moral conscience from those errors which contradict the nature of conjugal life as a total gift.”
Cardinal Lopez Trujillo counsels confessors against being either rigorist or lax: “Frequent relapse into sins of contraception does not in itself constitute a motive for denying absolution; absolution cannot be imparted, however, in the absence of sufficient repentance or of the resolution not to fall again into sin.”
Probably there are few confessors who think that falling into the same sin repeatedly necessarily means the penitent isn’t really sorry for his sin and thus is undeserving of absolution. There are other sins that some penitents are habituated to, and confessors know that a penitent can be authentically sorry even though the likelihood is that he quickly will fall into the same sin again. On the other hand—and surely this is more important today—confessors are told not to give absolution to those who do not show real repentance for the sin of contraception.
Much of the directive gives advice about how to form consciences on the issue of contraception. Today most Catholics think contraception is not a sin; if they go to confession at all, many who practice contraception don’t mention it as one of their sins. These people need to understand the inherent sinfulness of contraception, says Cardinal Lopez Trujillo, and “the confessor must try to bring such penitents ever closer to accepting God’s plan in their own lives.” This is to be accomplished through prayer by the penitents and through admonition and exhortation by the priests.
The Book of Mormon, which seems to have more than its share of anachronisms. Here are two:
“And I beheld his sword, and I drew it forth from the sheath thereof; and the hilt thereof was of pure gold, and the workmanship thereof was exceedingly fine, and I saw that the blade thereof was made of the most precious steel” (1 Nephi 4:9, supposedly referring to events around 600 B.C.). Steel was invented by the Chinese after the time of Christ.
“And it came to pass that after they had bound me insomuch that I could not move, the compass, which had been prepared of the Lord, did cease to work” (1 Nephi 18:12). Compasses were invented in the twelfth century A.D.
What better place to evangelize than Rome itself? So says Jesus Cares Ministries of Dallas. The Evangelical group has been distributing flyers asking people to come to Rome this summer and “help reach 125,000 people with the Word of God.” The Rome Tevere Expo will be held along the Tiber River from June 22 through July 30. In 1996 “more than 214,000 scriptural booklets reached the multitudes.” This year the organizers want to distribute even more. Now if we could just figure out how to get 214,000 copies of Pillar of Fire, Pillar of Truth into Italian and into Rome. . . .