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Mary and the Midwife

Thu, 08 Dec 2022 06:00:00 -0500

The dogma of the Immaculate Conception holds that Mary was preserved from original sin from the moment of her conception “by a singular grace and privilege of almighty God, and in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, Savior of the human race.” This was solemnly proclaimed as a dogma by Pope Pius IX in 1854, after consultation with theologians and the bishops of the world. By the middle of the nineteenth century, there had been a liturgical feast celebrating the Immaculate Conception since the Middle Ages, several popes had articulated and defended the doctrine, and it had become widely accepted in the Church. At the time of its proclamation, the doctrine obviously met the standard of catholicity (being held by the whole Church)—one of the marks of revealed truth. But it’s less clear that it meets the standard of apostolicity (being part of the deposit of faith handed down from before the death of the last apostle). And non-Catholic Christians often object to the dogma on that ground.

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Vocation in the Second Half of Your Life

Thu, 08 Sep 2022 06:00:00 -0400

When I was a college chaplain, the weekend in late August when parents dropped off their children for the schoolyear always presented an interesting pastoral opportunity. While gathered on campus for Mass, these parents formed a select congregation: All were at the same stage in life, a point of transition from being parents of children to being parents of adults. They were on the precipice of a spiritual crisis—and a vocational crisis—that nobody talks about and which they did not see coming.

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What Mercy Is

Sun, 01 Mar 2015 00:00:00 -0500

Mercy: The Essence of the Gospel and the Key to Christian Life
by walter kasper
paulist, 288 pages, $29.95

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Taming the Vindictive Passions

Sun, 01 Feb 2004 00:00:00 -0500

Getting Even: Forgiveness and Its Limits.
by Jeffrie G. Murphy.
Oxford University Press. 152 pp. $21.

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The Tribunal of Mercy

Sat, 01 Mar 2003 00:00:00 -0500

It is surprising, given the events of the last year, to imagine that some members of the Roman Catholic clergy actively seek to be ordained a bishop, and even regard their path towards this office as an ecclesiastical “career.” St. Augustine regarded his ordination as a grave danger to his salvation, because he knew he would have to answer to God for the souls of all those in his diocese. Pope Gregory the Great, worrying about the ease with which the sins of a bishop are magnified into scandal, argued that “no one does more harm to the Church than he who, having the title or rank of holiness, acts evilly.” The widespread criticism of the bishops’ handling of sexual abuse by Catholic priests ought to bring home to everyone the tremendous burden that comes with the office of bishop.

Let us examine the criticisms leveled against the bishops. Bishops are supposed to govern with mercy, as Christ did. So we shall (charitably) assume that, in giving former abusers chance after chance to clean up their lives and be faithful to their vocations, the bishops acted out of mercy”and not from negligence, or from indifference to the abuses and the abused, or from fear of public scandal. If we make this assumption, we can still say that they seem to have acted with a naiveté that is scandalous in people with such broad responsibilities, because in their mercy they took too few precautions that the abusers would not strike again with other victims.

After the story broke and public opinion wondered why these criminals were treated so leniently, the bishops then made the equal and opposite mistake: having been burned by being too merciful, they turned around and zealously applied the strictest justice, in the form of “zero tolerance” policies. But, as Richard John Neuhaus has argued at length, that response seems neither Christian nor, in many cases, just. Yet, if the bishops turn around again and behave mercifully toward their priests, it isn’t clear how this will help the situation that brought on all the criticism in the first place.

Part of the difficulty here comes from a conceptual confusion, the common view that justice and mercy are opposed to each other. This view assumes that mercy is the Christian virtue, justice the secular one; mercy the virtue that tailors policies to the individual, justice the impersonal universal law; mercy is leniency, justice strictness. This view is frequently found among some of the greatest religious minds. Reinhold Niebuhr, who held this view, found it in Karl Barth, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and, before that, Augustine’s City of God . Luther’s distinction between law and gospel seems to express this view, as does the vision of the twentieth“century Polish mystic St. Faustina Kowalska, which portrays a wrathful God the Father holding back from the application of terrible justice only because He sees man through the wounds of His Son. Even Richard Rorty, who is not a great religious mind, thinks that the success of liberal democracies lies in the creative tensions between “the agents of love” and “the agents of justice,” explained more or less in this way.

Yet this sharp opposition deserves to be called into question. Any mother knows that treating all her children alike is unjust”the twelve“year“old girl needs to be treated one way, the three“year“old boy another, and the seventeen“year“old young man in yet another way. The twelve“year“old who earns perfect grades in school might be rewarded by staying up late to watch Olympic gymnastics, while the seventeen“year“old might regard watching gymnastics as more like torture. It is ridiculous to expect the three“year“old to be as responsible as his teenage older brother, for example; if both punch their best friends, the one should be sent to the corner while the other might be grounded for an extended period. It would be silly to argue that since both have committed the same act, they should be punished similarly, that to punish the toddler lightly is somehow to frustrate justice. We don’t expect children to control their anger as well as adults, and so it would be monstrous to hold the toddler to the moral standard of an adult, by bringing him up on charges of battery, say. In this case, to reward and punish each child individually, the hallmark of mercy in the view I’m criticizing, is clearly to act with justice as well.

To treat people as other than they are is inherently unjust. Since people are persons, it follows that to treat them impersonally is likewise unjust. Yet human laws are applied without regard to the personal history of each person subject to them. So it would seem that every human law is unjust.

This conclusion obviously requires qualification, since baldly stated it seems crazy”the very word “just” is derived from a Latin word for law, after all. But the idea that every human law is imperfect, and therefore unjust to some extent, does indeed make sense, because we can imagine a perfectly just judge who administers perfect justice”who assesses a person’s talents, motives, opportunities, weaknesses, ideals, history, and everything else about him, and then judges all his actions against the standard of what he is able to do. The perfect judge would have to apply an infinitely complex law, so that each person under the law would be held to a standard that is individually tailored to his situation: “Anyone who was born on May 23 at 2:53 p.m. at 1128 Main St. and whose first sight was of a quite pretty nurse named Amy whose hands were slightly cold . . . ” and so on, telling the exact story of your life in literally every detail, “ . . . any such person ought to have been able to control his temper upon discovering that the morning newspaper was wet from the rain, but could not be expected to remember to buy a card for his sister’s sixteenth birthday.”

Such a perfect judge would also have to be omniscient, for he would have to know an infinitely complex law and know the infinitely many ways people can fall short of that law. He would have to know men’s hearts, evaluating them in the mysterious intimacy of their free choices, and he could not be repulsed by what he found there. And finally, he would have to care enough about the law and the people to administer such a law perfectly.

But such an omniscient and conscientious judge would still not administer perfect justice unless the laws he administered were also perfectly just. So the perfect judge would have to be the perfect lawgiver, whose laws are not only infinitely complex but also ordered toward a perfectly just society. And he would have to be the perfect executive, since his laws would have to be effective in bringing about this just society.

If the goal of this judge, lawgiver, and king were to have a perfectly ordered society, then he could not be satisfied with perfect laws that nobody actually follows, or that people once were able to follow but are now observed more in the breach. His laws would have to be dynamic, so that they constantly adjust to reflect what a person could be expected to achieve at this moment, and his sentences would have to be therapeutic, so that when a person fails to uphold his personal law he is rehabilitated and even strengthened because of his punishment. If the laws were dynamic but the punishments not therapeutic, if every time someone broke the law it was adjusted downward to accommodate the downward pull of vice, it would clearly result in general disorder and not a just society. Alternatively, if the sentences were therapeutic but the laws not dynamic, if every punishment improved a person but the laws never reflected this, then the law would cease to be related to the person, and would again become unjust. Either the laws would be too strict”for instance, putting the three“year“old in jail for striking a playmate”or inadequate to restore order”telling the teenager who beat up a classmate to sit in the corner for twenty minutes.

It should be obvious that only God could create and administer this perfect justice. It might be the “God of the philosophers” rather than “the God of revelation,” since we’ve only spoken in general terms about divine attributes, as philosophers do. In any case, the point stands that if such a perfectly just God exists, then all human laws are imperfectly just, which is to say that they are all unjust, to a greater or lesser degree.

It should also be clear that this perfect justice is no different than mercy. Each law is tailored to the individual person, so that what he is expected to do is always within his reach. If he meets one set of expectations he is presented with new demands, so that he travels up an inclined plane until he is at all times living up to his full potential. If he fails to meet one set of expectations, he is given another chance to conform to a new set, and to continue, step by step, to become all that he can be. There is no distinction here between strictness and leniency, the impersonal and the personal. God’s justice is completely personal, and therefore is neither strict nor lenient.

In the apostolic exhortation Reconciliatio et Paenitentia , Pope John Paul II reflects on the nature of the sacrament of Penance:

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An Almost Christian Fantasy

Tue, 01 May 2001 00:00:00 -0400

The Golden Compass
by Philip Pullman
Knopf, 326 pages, $26

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Evangelicals in the Church of Mary

Fri, 01 Dec 2000 00:00:00 -0500

The Protestants were out at the pro-life ball,” my Catholic friend told me, with some agitation. “They gave us all evangelical tracts.” He was talking about a fundraising ball in Manhattan for a variety of pro-life groups. Although of the two young professional women who cochaired the event one was Roman Catholic and one evangelical Protestant, given the religious demographics of New York, most of the over three hundred people in attendance were Catholics, giving the impression that this was a “Catholic” event. That’s why my friend was irritated at receiving an evangelical “tract” in a package handed out at the affair. When I reminded him that evangelicals are pro“life, too, and that distributing tracts is one way in which some people are accustomed to spreading the gospel of Christ, he upbraided me for not being more concerned. Aren’t they spreading error? Isn’t Protestantism heretical?

Earlier that same day I had received a call from a friend who works for a major evangelical parachurch organization. He wanted my advice on the best way for his organization to set up activities at a Catholic university with which I am somewhat familiar. We spoke for some time about the particular questions involved, but did not broach the larger question of whether I as a Catholic should help Protestants evangelize at a Catholic university in the first place.

That question did occur to me, but I decided that he had a right to pursue his ministry, and the handful of evangelicals at Catholic universities have a right to be ministered to. Although his organization is not interested in “sheep stealing,” I could certainly foresee that some students who were baptized Catholic might decide to convert to evangelical Protestantism. I think such conversions could, at least in some instances, turn out to be a good thing. And I think John Paul II might agree with me.

Let me explain. All Christians agree that salvation involves a commitment to follow the call of Christ, a commitment that is renewed daily. Many Catholics and evangelicals fall short of this, of course, and in characteristic ways. Catholics tend to find comfort and security in their membership in the Church, as they should; they weave the sacraments and the liturgical seasons into the warp and woof of their lives, as they should; their faith becomes routine, as in regular, and appropriately so. But it can also become routine, as in routinized. Some seem to presume that not being excommunicated or in a state of mortal sin is the totality of the Christian life, as if the whole purpose of being Catholic were to avoid being thrown out of the Church. Cradle Catholics have the decision to follow Christ in the Catholic Church made for them by others while they are infants. Often, and I speak from experience, they do not later make that commitment their own and affirm it daily, as many of those who join the Church as adults do. We might call the resulting vice of merely routinized Christian living spiritual sloth .

Evangelicals, if I may be permitted, have almost the opposite spiritual vice. They tend to have had such a strong experience in their adult conversions that they make that experience the touchstone of their interior lives from then on. The experience has many aspects, but two in particular: the decision to accept and imitate Christ, on the one hand, and the emotions that accompany and confirm that decision, on the other. It seems that most evangelicals believe, and they are undoubtedly right in most cases, that the emotional part of conversion—the quickening of the heart, the ecstatic rush—is the felt experience of the action of the Holy Spirit.

The Christian spiritual tradition calls these the “consolations” that God sometimes sends us as a foretaste of the delights of heaven. Some evangelicals, apparently, find them so delightful that seeking consolations comes to constitute the center of their spiritual lives. This desire for heavenly delights in this life can lead us to identify the action of the Holy Spirit with powerful but merely human emotions (always a danger with a style of worship, whether Catholic or Protestant, that relies on generating spiritual enthusiasm). Looking for consolations can lead us to question the Holy Spirit when, because of psychological difficulties or other ways in which God may be testing our faith, consolations are lacking in our prayer and worship. An attachment to and hunger for emotional experiences that repeat the ecstatic moment of conversion”—an attachment and hunger distinctive among evangelical Protestants—we might call spiritual gluttony .

It would be too easy to say that evangelicals and Catholics ought to get together because their characteristic spiritual vices complement each other. As a Catholic, I think that all Christians should accept Jesus as Lord and should each day make a conscious commitment to imitate Christ in their lives, tapping into the resources of truth and grace he entrusted to the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church headed by Christ, shepherded by Peter and his successors up to and including John Paul II. Catholics ought to be filled with the energy and zeal that their evangelical brethren so often show. We must always be haunted by the words of Revelation regarding the fate of the lukewarm in the Church, whom the Lord says he will “vomit out” because they are neither hot nor cold (Revelation 3:16).

Likewise, I think evangelicals ought to accept the authoritative voice of the successors of Peter and the apostles not as an oppressive imposition but as Christ’s gift and as an aid in evangelization. After all, Jesus asked Peter to take responsibility for feeding Christ’s sheep. If at times Peter’s successors have seemed less interested in feeding the sheep than in fleecing them, it should still be acknowledged that Jesus wanted the sheep to be fed by Peter, and he wanted the sheep to want Peter to feed them. Since both the pastor and his flock are guided by the Good Shepherd who is Jesus, the leading and the being led are both in obedience to Christ.

Catholics are sometimes prone to a partisan understanding of the Church’s relation to non-Catholics. A person can become so caught up in defending the institution that he sees other committed Christians primarily as threats, rather than as brethren in Christ. This is decidedly not the ecumenical vision of the Second Vatican Council, which declares of non-Catholic Christians that “by his gifts and graces, the sanctifying power of the Holy Spirit is also active in them” ( Lumen Gentium 15). But it is common nonetheless.

The instinct to protect one’s turf can too easily translate into a defensive attitude towards other Christians, a temptation of which John Paul II is acutely aware. In December 1987, at the beginning of a year that the Pope dedicated for special reflection on the importance of the Virgin Mary, Ecumenical Patriarch Dimitrios I of Constantinople visited the Holy See. The Pope took advantage of his annual address to the curia to link the two events, the Marian year and the visit, in a speech still talked about thirteen years later.

Borrowing a metaphor from Hans Urs von Balthasar, the Pope spoke of two dimensions or “profiles,” or, one might even go so far as to say, two Churches within the one Church that is the Body of Christ: the Church of Mary and the Church of Peter. The Church of Peter or the “Petrine profile” refers to the exercise of the authority of jurisdiction and office”the official concern of the bishops”while the Church of Mary or “Marian profile” consists of those who with Mary say “Yes” to God’s call.

The Marian dimension is “supreme and preeminent,” said the Pope, “richer in personal and communitarian implications” than the Petrine dimension. Pressing this image, the Pope insisted that the Petrine profile be thought of as in service to the Marian profile, that the chief purpose of office in the Roman Catholic Church is not to protect God’s interests or those of the Church’s institutions, but to minister to—that is, to aid and serve—all those who with the Mother of God respond faithfully and lovingly to the person of Jesus.

The “pilgrimage aspect of the Church,” said the Pope, is prefigured in Mary, who accepted Jesus before he had founded his Church. It is when the Church looks to Mary’s example as a pilgrim, the Pope believes, that its ecumenical possibilities are most manifest. It is also part of Catholic doctrine that all those who believe and are baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit participate in the Body of Christ, whether or not they are in full communion with the Body of Christ as it subsists in the Catholic Church. Which means that all Christians, including Protestants, make up the Church of Mary, and ought to be served and supported by the Church of Peter.

While this way of putting it might make some evangelicals uncomfortable, others have already started using the resources this Pope has made accessible and attractive to the world. It is obvious that Charles Colson and Billy Graham pay more attention to the writings of the Holy Father and take them to heart more readily than do some dissenting Catholic priests and theologians. Pat Robertson for a time was sending copies of the Catechism of the Catholic Church as a gift to friends, while some Catholics view the Catechism as oppressive and authoritarian. It could even be argued that Campus Crusade and Prison Fellowship have done more to advance the Church of Mary than entire theology departments of some Catholic universities. These evangelical leaders recognize that Catholics and evangelicals share the same gospel, the same deposit of faith, and especially in recent decades, the same evangelical and apostolic imperative. Robert P. George refers to this reality as the “pan“orthodox alliance” (see “What Can We Reasonably Hope For?”, January 2000). The Pope seems to think that the papacy—being the “servant of the servants of God” in the words of Gregory the Great—can be viewed as ministry in service to this alliance.

Although the imagery is his own, the Pope is surely following the Second Vatican Council’s teaching that the hierarchy is in the service of all believers. The constitution Lumen Gentium , in which the Council expressed the Church’s self-understanding, looks outward to others from its opening line, “Christ is the light of the nations.” The Council describes the Church as the People of Israel chosen by God, reconstituted in Christ, and sent out to the world, preaching the gospel in word and deed. Catholics and Protestants who have not read Lumen Gentium often do not realize how seriously it engages those important parts of the Christian tradition so vigorously asserted by the sixteenth-century Reformers, and therefore fail to realize how little support it supplies for the instinct to protect one’s own turf, to be obsessed with “sheep stealing,” or to define the Body of Christ polemically so as to exclude other Christians from the “gifts and graces [and] sanctifying power” that the Holy Spirit gives them.

While many evangelical churches are filled with former Catholics, these former Catholics will be the first to admit that as Catholics they were (for the most part) either nonpracticing or practicing but lukewarm. While they were sacramentally and juridically Catholic by their baptism, they did not live the baptismal grace that was theirs. If that latent grace is revivified, Catholics should rejoice, even if it happens outside full communion with the Catholic Church. Many of these former Catholics left the Church of Peter but are not lost to the Church of Mary, the dimension of the Church which Christ intends the Church of Peter to serve.

Although Catholics are rightly disappointed when people feel they have to leave the Catholic Church to find a living faith in Jesus, we should not be angry with them. We must rather ask about the stumbling blocks that other Catholics had placed in their spiritual path. Lumen Gentium speaks quite starkly of those who fail to live according to the grace they receive: “Even though incorporated into the Church, one who does not persevere in charity is not saved . He remains indeed in the bosom of the Church, but ‘in body’ not ‘in heart’” (no. 14, emphasis added). Catholics should give thanks if charity returns to their hearts, even if it is through the evangelism of non“Catholics.

So when I encourage my evangelical brethren to extend their ministries among Catholics, I hope to be adding to the number of people who say “Yes” to God. I do hope they say it also to Christ’s Body the Church in all the dimensions Christ intended for his Church; but, above all, I hope that they say it. Many evangelicals are good Christians, many Catholics are bad Christians, and if some bad Christians become better Christians through the influence of evangelical Protestants, Deo gratias . If I pray that there be more workers for the harvest, I shouldn’t mind when they show up, even if they are not exactly what I expected. And, as the animosities between Catholics and evangelicals subside, as Catholics and Protestants come to realize that they are already in communion, however imperfectly, I am confident that many Christians who live in the Marian dimension of the Church will continue to discover the fulness that the Holy Spirit bestows in the ministry of Peter, who is called by the Good Shepherd to feed all the sheep.

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Sex and the Married Missileer

Tue, 01 Feb 2000 00:00:00 -0500

At Minot Air Force base in Minot, North Dakota, a wife kisses her husband goodbye, knowing that he will be spending the night alone in close quarters with a fit, talented, professional woman officer. He will dress next to her, sleep where she slept, smell how she smells. Although their job can sometimes be tense, for the most part it is boring, and so they talk. Over several days each week, month after month, they’ve built up a relationship that it would be fair to call friendly. He is a devoted husband, yet he is a man, and weak as all men are weak. So as his wife kisses him goodbye, she worries, not that his hands will wander, but that his heart might, just a little bit. She wants to trust him, but it can be hard, and she fears she’s growing jealous, against her will, of that colleague of her husband. She knows she is supposed to think of her as just another officer in the armed forces, but when she looks she sees, and fears her husband sees, another woman.

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Separation Anxiety

Fri, 01 Oct 1999 00:00:00 -0400

The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity.
By Leon J. Podles.
Spence. 350 pp. $27.95

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“Saving” the Poor

Sat, 01 May 1999 00:00:00 -0400

The poor will always be with us. Yet, pace Cain, we have an obligation to look after our brothers. As we well know, poverty today is too often accompanied by social pathologies, deep corrupting vices, and a smoldering despair that Great Society welfare services do little to alleviate, and perhaps much to exacerbate. The welfare state provides money, food, shelter, education, medicine, even job training––the pathologies still remain. Even where a new breed of mayors and police chiefs seems to be getting crime under control, one gets the sense that in our poorest neighborhoods expensive policing is merely an external restraint on a culture that deep down respects the lawless and contemns the law. Reducing urban poverty involves changing that culture, and, most urgently, changing the hardened young men whose confidence and ill-gotten wealth make them objects of admiration and emulation. Changing the culture, then, means changing hearts as much as providing services, a task for which our welfare bureaucracies are, shall we say, poorly equipped.

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