“Humanae Vitae may have saved Roman Catholicism, by undercutting one of the most misguided propositions the Church ever promulgated as a central tenet of the faith: the doctrine of papal infallibility.”
So says James Carroll in the July issue of The Atlantic. How did the doctrine arise at Vatican I? The council fathers “were moved to makes this extraordinary proclamation as a kind of compensation for losing the last remaining temporal holdings of the papacy to King Victor Emmanuel II.” In other words, it was a case of sour grapes. Humanae Vitae is only the latest chapter in “the story of an efficient, ever extending spiritual imperialism under the banner of papal infallibility.”
Carroll is writing, ostensibly, a review of James M. O’Toole’s Militant and Triumphant: William Henry O’Connell and the Catholic Church in Boston, 1859-1944(University of Notre Dame Press). The first half of the review has nothing at all to do with the book, and it’s clear Carroll uses the review as an excuse to engage in Catholic bashing. Cardinal O’Connell, he says, was just one more sorry example of the ultramontane impulse, which became to go into decline only with Vatican II. It was at that council, he says, that the Church admitted “that the Holy Spirit acts through the entire people of God, and not just through the hierarchy.”
Just as politicians who move from a prolife to a pro-abortion position are said by the secular media to have “grown,” so Carroll sees the Church “growing.” The key is that “the Church is more than its leaders. The increasing willingness of Catholics to trust their own consciences, even in grave violation of official teaching, represents the long overdue beginning of a new era in the life of the Church.”
There are two things wrong with this. Notice how Carroll talks about “official teaching,” as though this teaching were something the leaders of the Church came to on their own. See how much less force his words would have if he plainly said (and perhaps he does not believe it, which is why he does not say it) that this teaching comes not from the Church, but from Christ.
The second problem is that Carroll evinces little understanding of the role of conscience. Your conscience does not decided for you what is right or wrong. That’s a job for your intellect. Once your intellect makes a decision–once it concludes, for instance, that thievery is wrong–it informs your conscience. Later, when you’re tempted to steal, your conscience goes into action and warns you away from the sin.
But if your intellect never informs your conscience properly–if, for instance, you never learn that thievery is wrong–then you will feel no pangs when driving off in a stolen car.
Yes, you must follow your conscience, even when erroneous, but your first duty is to form your conscience properly. Even then, it won’t be able to decide for you what’s right or wrong. That isn’t its role.
So what’s the real problem? Well, James Carroll is angry at the “institutional Church” because it doesn’t let him do the things he wants to do. He says “there is a sexual lie at the heart of official Church teaching.” But the lie isn’t in the Church–the lie is in the man who shakes his fist at God for not having man a world in man’s own image.
If you live in Southern California, the San Joachin Valley, or New Orleans, you can listen to “St. Joseph Radio Presents” each Saturday. The program, which is now in its fifth year, is aired live on KGER 1390 AM (Long Beach), KBIF 900 AM (Fresno), and WSHO 800 AM (New Orleans) from 3:00 to 4:00 Pacific Time.
Among the regular guests on this talk show are Patrick Madrid and Mark Brumley.
If you don’t live in those areas and would like to have “St. Joseph Radio Presents” aired in your region, please call (714) 744-0336, or write to St. Joseph Catholic Radio, P.O. Box 2983, Orange, CA 92669.
Apologetics and evangelization are for Catholics of all ages–including school children. If they’re to remain in the faith when they get older, youngsters need to learn Catholic doctrines from day one. Among the best teachers of the faith are the Carmelite sisters at St. Rose of Lima School in Cleveland.
We mention them here because they have a peculiar problem and could use your help.
Their school is a century old, and so are–or were–the blackboards. They were made of slate (you don’t find authentic slate blackboards anymore), and over the course of a century they became so warped they were nearly unusable.
To the rescue came a Catholic businessman who volunteered to pay for new blackboards throughout the school–cost: $16,000. So the old blackboards were torn down, but then the businessman’s fortunes collapsed and he couldn’t make the donation. Result: a fine school with no blackboards in its nine classrooms.
So, if you own a blackboard company and wish to donate a few boards, or, more likely, if you’d like to help with a check, large or small, please contact Sister Mary Elizabeth, O.C.D., St. Rose of Lima School, 1418 W. 114th St., Cleveland, OH 44102, (216) 226-4525 or (216) 521-5605.
When the scholars of the Jesus Seminar held their conference in Canada a few months ago, some of them were interviewed by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation at its studio in Ottawa. One of the interviewees was Robert Funk, a New Testament professor who was the chief organizer of the conference. Some of his on-camera comments were revealing.
The interviewer, Marguerite McDonald, asked him how the scholars of the Jesus Seminar decide a scholarly point. “We usually have a ballot of the crucial questions that are raised” in papers presented at the conference. “Voting is a way for us to determine whether there is a scholarly consensus on a particular topic.”
Funk said the scholars “have about forty rules of evidence that we follow” in deciding whether a saying attributed to Jesus was really spoken by him. One of the rules states that “the Jesus tradition was transmitted for two or three decades by word of mouth before anything was written down” (emphasis his).
A grautitous rule, to be sure, and a psychologically wrongheaded one. Keep in mind what the Jesus Seminar scholars need to hold: that the Gospels were written late, were based on faulty memories, and were embellished by overpious Christians. If you grant all that, you must conclude the Gospels are unreliable and tell us nearly nothing which we can label factual.
So why is this gratuitous rule of theirs wrong-headed? Because people don’t work that way. They don’t listen to the marvelous words of the Son of God and put none of them to writing for a generation or so. Think of the way James Boswell reported Samuel Johnson‘s words. He didn’t have a pad of paper with him when Johnson was speaking at his favorite tavern. That would have made the situation too awkward.
Instead, Boswell memorized what Johnson said as the conversation progressed. Later, when he returned to his room, he wrote out the conversation. He did this over many years until, after Johnson’s death, he put all his notes together and produced his famous Life of Johnson.
It takes an odd kind of faith in human nature to believe that no one recorded any of Jesus’ words shortly after he spoke them and while those words were still fresh in the listeners’ minds. Consider the way their followers take down every banal word uttered by modern gurus; we don’t find it at all surprising that they make notes, so why should we be so sure the disciples didn’t do likewise?
When asked to give an example of a saying of Jesus which he definitely didn’t say, Robert Funk said, “The one that we all agreed on right at the outset is the Great Commission found at the end of the Gospel of Matthew, where Jesus allegedly commissions his disciples to go out and convert the world. We’re almost certain that Jesus did not organize an institution; he had no plans for a world mission.”
The kindest thing one can say is that this is sheer prejudice. Just look at the thinking: We know Jesus didn’t establish a Church, and we know he wasn’t interested in everyone becoming a Christian, so he couldn’t have said what Matthew attributes to him.
Funk says that while at the university he learned “that the sorts of things I had learned in my church were not true….It took me several years to get over that rude shock, and I decided to devote my life to helping others get over it similarly.” How very kind of him–and how very kind of the Jesus Seminar scholars to pass along to innocent Christians their doubts, confusions, and fantasies.
In Falls Church, Virginia no mother of young children any longer can claim there’s nothing to keep her intellect occupied. All she has to do is go to Lincoln Park and discuss the Summa Theologiae with other mothers.
Once a month the mothers study the writings of Thomas Aquinas as they watch their children frolick. They call their group Summa, and on any given day from three to eight of them will gather, with a dozen or more children.
Summa began in 1990 when three friends, Mary Meckley, Mary Hasson, and Anne Gribbin began meeting at a church in Alexandria to talk about the Summa. Two of them had graduated from Thoms Aquinas College in California; there they had become acquainted with medieval theology. The advantage of meeting in the park is that many mothers go there with their kids anyway and might as well use the time for intellectual growth.
Each month Meckley distributes photocopies of the pages to be discussed at the next session. During their discussion they ask, “How can I apply this to my life?” Naturally, some of the mothers feel out of their depth at first, but they soon see Aquinas was writing, as he said, for “beginners,” and they have no great problem grasping his thought.
Did you catch the television expose of Robert Tilton and two other televangelists?
One fellow “heals” people on-camera by taking a cane from an infirm woman and telling the healthy man sitting next to her to run up and down the aisle proclaiming his good health. The man does as he’s told, and viewers, because of the camera angle, think the cane had been his and that he was cured instantly. One can only imagine what the poor woman thought.
Another preacher asks for money because his family lost all its possessions when their home burned down. A video shows him touring the rubble of the modest suburban dwelling. He neglects to tell viewers that he has at least one other home, a fine estate in the poshest part of town–spacious grounds, swimming pool, the works.
Then there’s Tilton. He’s the best for laughs. We get his solicitations regularly. A while back he sent a prayer cloth (a small square of polyester) and instructed us to return it to him with a fat check. He promised to pray over the cloth so our prayers would be heard by God. The larger our check, the greater the likelihood that God would gives a positive answer.
It turns out, according to the expose, that the cloths and the accompanying petitionary letters from viewers never cross Tilton’s desk. All the mail is opened by a bank, which deposits the checks in the vault and deposits the prayer cloths and letters in the dumpster.
These televangelists–and others, no doubt–are con artists. They play on the fears and greed of their viewers. You can’t help marveling at their antics, and you’re amazed at how many people follow them. You wonder how folks can be so gullible, and then you realize that the success of these guys is proportionate to the failure of Christianity.
Alas, for their viewers this is Christianity, a fact which suggests that an insufficient effort is being made to get the word out. Who could swallow this swill after tasting the real meat of the gospel? Our best response is teaching the faith.