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Saturday, November 08, 2008

Catholics Responding to the Election: Final Thoughts




Since I had the good fortune of finding myself in Chicago- the home of the new US President Elect- on election day this week, I decided to dodge the crowds and get lost for a bit in the quiet, peaceful environ of the Shedd Aquarium, which I have always loved. (After a weekend at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, it always seems wise to me to steal away and consider the animals anyway). There is something so magical about looking into the wild, exotic, weightless world of the fragile and dangerous creatures that live in a separate universe -within- our- universe; and this particular visit did not disappoint. There were new seahorses intertwining their little tales affectionately, and soft, elegant jellyfish shimmering in and out of gentle currents, and massive sharks and a playful otters. Best of all were the new weedy water dragons, which you can see in the pictures- I could hardly tear myself away from these particular figments of God's gorgeous imagination.

After a little while I noticed that, on this relatively quiet day in one of the nation's best aquariums, I was accompanied at a distance by a group of young European priests who were also taking in the beauty and the quiet of the water world on an election day. Their presence and obvious enjoyment of the creatures made me think of a chapter from C. S. Lewis' The Problem of Pain, where he considers a brief theology of the animals, and with it, a theology of mediation and priesthood as well.

Lewis thinks that humanity entire has a priestly and redemptive role in the creation- or, at least, might have had one: "It may have been one of man's functions to restore peace to the animal world, and if he had not joined the enemy he might have succeeded in doing so to an extent now hardly imaginable." This is a view, incidentally, taken up and developed at length by T. F. Torrance who holds firmly to the link between human and creaturely corruption and who postulates that it is "man's task to save the natural order through remedial and integrative activity, bringing back order where there is disorder and restoring peace where there is disharmony." Lewis insists that we consider the animals not in isolation, but in relation to humanity, since it is through humanity that they relate to God; thus the wildness and obedience of the creation will continue in beautiful balance in the obedience of the animals to man, since man is the priest of creation. As Lewis puts it, "the old picture of the beasts fawning and sporting before Adam may not be wholly symbolical; for man was made to be the priest, and even in one sense, the Christ of the animals- the mediator through whom they apprehend as much of the of the Divine splendor as their natures will allow." (Lewis, PP 66)

(In this regard, I have a habit of responding in a certain way to my little dog's reproachful look when I go out to Mass: I remind her that I am going for both of us, because the creation groans to be re-united to its Creator, and I am a member of the only species that can receive our Maker into itself, so off I go, on behalf of wind patterns and seagulls and trees and spoiled dachsunds)

... on the whole, this little vignette at the Aquarium recalled for me the enormity of what we are doing on this planet, in our discreet lives which will come and go, in our little realms of responsibilities and routines, in our grand political system that is off to a new start. These all come together in our hopes for an eternity of joyous worship of the One who began it all in the first place.

Just as Christ gave Himself to God for our sakes, we do what we do on behalf of creatures great and small. And we have a lot of work to do.

Note: my bishop's request for prayer for the president elect is available here

posted by MM at 9:11 AM

Thursday, November 06, 2008

Catholics Responding to the Election: Political Theology 101


Bl. John Henry Newman
on
The Papacy and the Preservation of Civilization

Bl. John Henry Newman has some excellent things to say on point in his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk of 1900. This piece is essentially Newman's explication of a political theology based on a Catholic historical construal, and an explanation of the Christian's civic duties in light of his primary duties to Christ and Christ's Vicar.

Newman invokes a basic argument in defense of the papacy: ecclesial government by the monarchial papacy is simply most efficient, aesthetically proper, and benevolent. This has been the classical proposal for human government from the beginning.

Newman also invokes a striking passage from Dean Milman's Latin Christianity to insist that themonarchial papacy was the only means by which Christ's Church could constitute itself as Christ's autonomous society in the earth, and then resist being hijacked by transient medieval states. Consequently, Newman urges that papacy provided the only means by which Western Europe developed into the civilization that we know and love. In fact, Newman here refers to the Roman pontiff as "the Father of European civilization."

Read on:

"The Papacy was the only power which lay not entirely and absolutely prostrate before the disasters of the times—a power which had an inherent strength, and might resume its majesty. It was this power which was most imperatively required to preserve all which was to survive out of the crumbling wreck of Roman civilization. To Western Christianity was absolutely necessary a centre, standing alone, strong in traditionary reverence, and in acknowledged claims to supremacy. Even the perfect organization of the Christian hierarchy might in all human probability have fallen to pieces in perpetual conflict: it might have degenerated into a half-secular feudal caste, with hereditary benefices more and more entirely subservient to the civil authority, a priesthood of each nation or each tribe, gradually sinking to the intellectual or religious level of the nation or tribe.

On the rise of a power both controlling and conservative hung, humanly speaking, the life and death of Christianity—of Christianity as a permanent, aggressive, expansive, and, to a certain extent, uniform system. There must be a counter-balance to barbaric force, to the unavoidable anarchy of Teutonism, with its tribal, or at the utmost national independence, forming a host of small, conflicting, antagonistic kingdoms. All Europe would have been what England was under the Octarchy, what Germany was when her emperors were weak; and even her emperors she owed to Rome, to the Church, to Christianity.

Providence might have otherwise ordained; but it is impossible for man to imagine by what other organizing or consolidating force the commonwealth of the Western nations could have grown up to a discordant, indeed, and conflicting league, but still a league, with that unity and conformity of manners, usages, laws, religion, which have made their rivalries, oppugnancies, and even their long ceaseless wars, on the whole to issue in the noblest, highest, most intellectual form of civilization known to man ... It is impossible to conceive what had been the confusion, the lawlessness, the chaotic state of the middle ages, without the medieval Papacy...The right to warn and punish powerful men, to excommunicate kings, to preach aloud truth and justice to the inhabitants of the earth, to denounce immoral doctrines, to strike at rebellion in the garb of heresy, were the very weapons by which Europe was brought into a civilized condition."

posted by MM at 7:48 AM

Friday, November 07, 2008

Catholics Responding to the Election: Political Theology 101



The Church and the City

"The Church is not merely a society, men associated with God, but the divine Societas itself, the life of the Godhead reaching out to humanity and taking up humanity into itself." - Yves Congar, Divided Christendom

One of my professors used to say that the proper use of prepositions is one of the most critical aspects of orthodoxy. He was so right.

A Protestant friend took me to an event recently that turned out to be a networking event for local evangelical churches- mega churches, house churches, disjointed zealots all, etc. The purpose? To build momentum towards the formation of a kind of Protestant Evangalical/Pentecostal "diocese" which would oversee and organize the work of otherwise isolated churches in my hometown under one key "bishop" figure who would organize the ministers within his cure. They call themselves "The Church of the City." The goals of this initiative are greater efficiency and force through structural unity, something that the evangelical world has only enjoyed through the semblance of unity afforded by a regrettably disheveled aesthetic held unfortunately in common (no offense, Michael W. Smith). I am all for this structural unity, of course; history has proven that the top-down episcopacy of the early church is simply the best expression of Christ's servant-lordship in the heavenly Kingdom which is the Church. But, as I so often do at such gatherings, I was squirming through the whole thing...

I was troubled. The language which these good people use to communicate their laudable vision reflects the sordid, deprived ecclesiology that bankrupts the Bride of Christ in our idolatrous American culture. A Church of the City? What is this "of?"

I am a Classics person. I read Latin and Greek a lot, and in that kind of verbal algebra you have to figure out exactly what the "of" is doing in a sentence. It may sometimes be a locative genitive, expressing place. It may be a genitive of agent, expressing the means by which a result is accomplished; or it may be a partititve force, expressing a thing in terms of its distinction from its genus. But almost always, "of" denotes posesssion. Do you get that? The city's church?

The Church is Christ's. The church is not a function of local culture, nor should it ever be conditioned by political need or social proclivities. The Church is not a base for American politics nor a recreation facility for Christian families. In addressing the needs of the world, the Church is to respond only to Christ. Alone among the other glories of the fallen creation, the Church is "of" Christ. It is only in this way that the Church can fulfill her vocation to be for the world in sacrifical love, service, and instruction in spirit and in truth. Thus we may say that the Church is for the city, because the Church is Christ's loving gift to the needy world for its healing and benefit. The Church is in the city certainly. The Church's people may come from the City, in entering the City of God demarked by the Church's jurisdiction, as they go in and out and find pasture. But in no way may the Church remain the Church of Jesus Christ and simultaneously be the Church of the City.

Let me say this carefully. The Apostles and Mary left that upper room and immediately fell into the Spirit's will of gathering a community to celebrate the memory of the Lord. They sang His praises among the excellent civic structures of Roman life for centuries, and in posing serious risks to the proper organization of society (they had another Lord to whom they gave their money and their virgins, for instance), many, many of them died because they refused to be "of" the city. Thus when Constantine provided the Church with its state-sanctioned status, Augustine responded with the Church's definitive warning against confusing the Kingdom of the Crucified, who fed the poor and died that all might live, with the Kingdom of the Emperor, which would inevitably exploit the poor and kill persons to defend its own interests: in Augustine's City of God and City of Man, we are told once and for all that though the two "kingdoms" may exist among each other, they are forever seperated, if only because one will perish and the other will enter into the eternal embrace of God. For centuries onward, the Church was able to flourish in its own development as the polis of God among the nations, from time to time getting it right, and at other times failing utterly; but in general, the Church undersood that she was a Kingdom separate and consecrate, with corroborating structures evident in the papal "monarchy," the centralized government at Rome, and the common law of the vox fides. This happy understanding (among other blessings) was neatly shattered by the Protestant Revolt, particularly where Luther's belligerance propelled hordes of formerly good Kingdom citizens into the far country of anarchy.

But despite Luther's democratizing impulses, it ontologically remains that the Church is no democracy formed by human will, for human expediency. The Church is an eternally nuptial "Body" called into being by the will of God. She has a king. Thus it was that the splintered factions of the Church in the wake of the Protestant Revolt sought a superstructure, as appropriate for a Kingdom. But now there was none available to them. The only organizing principle that came to mind to these anxious Reformers was... you got it... the nation and its substructures. So the Reformers turned for organization to the feudal princes about whom Jesus had always hinted... "little flock, they will resist you." And now we have the laudible aim of inter-denominational unity organized under the auspices of the local secular polity... not the Church universal, as manifested in her particular local communities in particular townships, but rather, "The Church of the City."

The Church and the State, properly understood as parallel and eternally separate worlds, so often become merged in the Protestant mind. What we have is the rhetoric that I heard at my luncheon as we sang the praises of a "God-birthed USA"... "the nation as THE instrument of God's renewal among The Other Nations..." "the city as a light." In this rubric, the unity of the church becomes desirable, not in reflection of Trinitarian desire, but merely as a means for national socio-political progress; and, incidentally, the hallmark of such a church's success is the great benefit of its members' election to political offices.

The problem? These ideas defy Scripture. In the history of the universe, if we speak indeed of Scripture and not our political ambitions, God has "chosen" only one nation as His instrument, and that nation is ancient Israel. Those who would draw a false analogy between the US of A and the Israel of God are completely unjustified, and I think a little rebellious, because the New Testament is clear: it is the Church that constitutes the new Israel. And like Israel, the Church is a pilgrim nation, a universal and timeless creature, properly rejected by that world who cannot ever comprehend her in her lovely, waiting adoration of One alone, as she serves the least of these and the enemy in ways that the state never could. She is the universal creature, really separated and distinguished only by spatial instantiations of the everlasting whole. Let us have the Church in the city, for the city, from the city. But please, never the Church of.

posted by MM at 8:24 AM

Wednesday, November 05, 2008

Catholics Responding to the Election: Political Theology 101



John Paul II
on
The Role of the Church in Politics

"...It is precisely about (these conflicts), in the very pointed terms in which they then appeared, that the Pope does not hesitate to speak. In the face of conflicts which set man against man, almost as if they were "wolves," conflicts between the extremes of mere physical survival on the one side and opulence on the other, the (pastor) does not hesitate to intervene by virtue of his "apostolic office," that is, on the basis of the mission received from Jesus Christ himself to "feed his lambs and tend his sheep" (cf. Jn 21:15-17), and to "bind and loose" on earth for the Kingdom of Heaven (cf. Mt 16:19).

In this way, Pope Leo XIII, in the footsteps of his Predecessors, created a lasting paradigm for the Church. The Church, in fact, has something to say about specific human situations, both individual and communal, national and international. She formulates a genuine doctrine for these situations, a corpus which enables her to analyze social realities, to make judgments about them and to indicate directions to be taken for the just resolution of the problems involved.

In Pope Leo XIII's time such a concept of the Church's right and duty was far from being commonly admitted. Indeed, a two-fold approach prevailed: one directed to this world and this life, to which faith ought to remain extraneous; the other directed towards a purely other-worldly salvation, which neither enlightens nor directs existence on earth. The Pope's approach in publishing Rerum Novarum gave the Church "citizenship status" as it were, amid the changing realities of public life, and this standing would be more fully confirmed later on.

In effect, to teach and to spread her social doctrine pertains to the Church's evangelizing mission and is an essential part of the Christian message, since this doctrine points out the direct consequences of that message in the life of society and situates daily work and struggles for justice in the context of bearing witness to Christ the Saviour....This doctrine is likewise a source of unity and peace in dealing with the conflicts which inevitably arise in social and economic life. Thus it is possible to meet these new situations without degrading the human person's transcendent dignity, either in oneself or in one's adversaries, and to direct those situations towards just solutions...The new evangelization which the modern world urgently needs and which I have emphasized many times, must include among its essential elements a proclamation of the Church's social doctrine... Now, as then, we need to repeat that there can be no genuine solution of the "social question" apart from the Gospel, and that the new things can find in the Gospel the context for their correct understanding and the proper moral perspective for judgment on them."

- Pope John Paul II, Centesimus Annus

posted by MM at 8:24 AM