In which Abp. Chaput takes on some errors of the Spadaro-Figueroa tandem presenting themselves as theoreticians for the 'geo-theo-political' objectives of Bergoglianism…
A word about useful tools
By Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap.
July 18, 2017
History is full of great quotations that people never said. One of the best lines comes from Vladimir Lenin. He described Russian progressives, social democrats, and other fellow travelers as “useful idiots” – naïve allies in revolution whom the Bolsheviks promptly crushed when they took power.
Or so the legend goes. In fact, there’s no evidence Lenin actually spoke those words, at least in public. But no one seems to care. It’s a compelling line, and in its own way, entirely true. The naïve and imprudent can very easily end up as useful tools in a larger conflict; or to frame it more generously, as useful innocents. The result is usually the same. They’re discarded.
History is also full of unfortunate comments that really were said – as found, for example, in a recent Rome-based journal article that many have already rightly criticized. The article in question,
La Civiltà Cattolicas ’ “Evangelical Fundamentalism and Catholic Integralism in the USA: A Surprising Ecumenism,” is
an exercise in dumbing down and inadequately presenting the nature of Catholic/evangelical cooperation on religious freedom and other key issues.
Catholics and other Christians who see themselves as progressive tend to be wary of the religious liberty debate. Some distrust it as a smokescreen for conservative politics. Some see it as a distraction from other urgent issues. Some are made uneasy by the cooperation of many Catholics and evangelicals, as well as Mormons and many Orthodox, to push back against abortion on demand, to defend marriage and the family, and to resist LGBT efforts to weaken religious freedom protections through coercive SOGI (sexual orientation/gender identity) “anti-discrimination” laws.
But working for religious freedom has never precluded service to the poor. The opposite is true. In America, the liberty of religious communities has always been a seedbed of social action and ministry to those in need.
The divide between Catholic and other faith communities has often run deep. Only real and present danger could draw them together. The cooperation of Catholics and evangelicals was quite rare when I was a young priest. Their current mutual aid, the ecumenism that seems to so worry
La Civilta Cattolica, is a function of shared concerns and principles, not ambition for political power
.
As an evangelical friend once said,
the whole idea of Baptist faith cuts against the integration of Church and state. Foreign observers who want to criticize the United States and its religious landscape – and yes, there’s always plenty to criticize — should note that fact. It’s rather basic.
Dismissing today’s attacks on religious liberty as a “narrative of fear” — as the La Civiltà Cattolica authors curiously describe it — might have made some sense 25 years ago. Now it sounds willfully ignorant. It also ignores the fact that America’s culture wars weren’t wanted, and weren’t started, by people faithful to constant Christian belief.
So it’s an especially odd kind of surprise when believers are attacked by their co-religionists merely for fighting for what their Churches have always held to be true. [Surely, the archbishop cannot still claim surprise after more than four years when the supposed Vicar of Christ on earth has been leading the charge himself!]
Earlier this month, one of the main architects and financiers of today’s LGBT activism said publicly what should have been obvious all along:
The goal of at least some gay activism is not simply to assure equality for the same-sex attracted, but to “punish the wicked” – in other words, to punish those who oppose the LGBT cultural agenda.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out whom that might include.
Today’s conflicts over sexual freedom and identity involve an almost perfect inversion of what we once meant by right and wrong.
Catholics are called to treat all persons with charity and justice. That includes those who hate what we believe. It demands a conversion of heart. It demands patience, courage and humility. We need to shed any self-righteousness. But charity and justice can’t be severed from truth. For Christians, Scripture is the Word of God, the revelation of God’s truth – and there’s no way to soften or detour around the substance of Romans 1:18-32, or any of the other biblical calls to sexual integrity and virtuous conduct.
Trying to do so demeans what Christians have always claimed to believe. It reduces us to useful tools of those who would smother the faith that so many other Christians have suffered, and are now suffering, to fully witness.
This is why groups that fight for religious liberty in our courts, legislatures, and in the public square – distinguished groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom and Becket (formerly the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty) – are heroes, not “haters.”
And if their efforts draw Catholics, evangelicals and other people of good will together in common cause, we should thank God for the unity it brings.
***
The Archbishop encourages readers to learn more about, and to support with their prayers and resources, the Alliance Defending Freedom at www.adflegal.org, and Becket at www.becketlaw.org.
I don't know if Fr. Schall will address this issue soon or at all, but meanwhile, another prominent Jesuit communicator has taken on his colleague at La Civilta Cattolica for something he denoucnes as 'not even risng to the level of mediocrity'...
Article by pope’s confidantes adds little
to understanding Trump’s America
[nor the state of Christianity in the USA today]
By Father Raymond J. de Souza, SJ
CRUX
July 15, 2017
If Jesuit Father Antonio Spadaro was not the editor of La Civiltà Cattolica
[I'll refer to it as LCC from hereon] his recent attack on the “ecumenism of hate” he diagnoses in the United States never would have been published in that [once] venerable journal.
Indeed, had such a commentary on the theological roots of contemporary American politics been submitted to the Jesuit magazine
America, the authors would have been invited to give it a major re-write, or better, to choose another topic altogether on which they had some expertise.
[This is the famous 'peer review' process in which editors of serious (not bias-compromised) scientific journals (LCC, which has to be predominantly theological in content, is a scientific journal in that context), require their contributors to be as correct as they can in their facts, to cite reliable and verifiable sources for the facts they refer to, and to present objective data and reasonably founded conclusions drawn therefrom in order to come forward with any new hypothesis, discovery or claim as something more solid than just the writer's personal opinion. If the article has to be rewritten many times until it meets the criteria, then so be it, but it will not be published unless and until it does. I was always impressed that Joseph Ratzinger never fails to refer to theology as a science, because that is how he sees it, and why he is religiously rigorous in his own theological methodology and writing, and in considering the theology of others.]
Wrong on Protestant history, ignorant of contemporary Catholic life, tendentious in its analysis, patronizing in tone and damning with faint praise the very policies of the Holy Father it seeks to defend, it is hard to understand what ambitions were had for a piece that does not even rise to the level of mediocrity. [WOW! Fr. De Souza rises to proverbial Jesuit eloquence to denounce the output of a fellow Jesuit who truly shames the order's legendary scholastic and academic tradition with this balderdash, as no one has been brazen enough to call it!]
Pope Francis deserves much better from those he has entrusted to interpret his thought.
[Well, he handpicked them, after all, and, let us remember once more, "A man is known by the company he keeps".]
Authored with Marcelo Figueroa, a Protestant pastor personally chosen by Pope Francis last year to be the editor-in-chief of the new Argentinean edition of the Vatican newspaper
L’Osservatore Romano, the article argues that what they consider the hate-filled politics of the Trump administration has its roots in an unholy alliance between “Evangelical Fundamentalism” and “Catholic Integralism.”
These “new crusaders” - George W. Bush, went down this path too, they argue, and, to a lesser degree Ronald Reagan before him - are little different in their theological inspiration from the “jihadists” they oppose. The theological inspiration of the current American administration has, they submit, quite a bit in common with the religious thinking of Osama bin Laden.
[Father Z has a post today in which he observes how Spadaro and Figueroa actually avoid imputing anything negative to Ronald Reagan - even if it was he who famously called the USSR an 'evil empire' and unhesitatingly saw the Cold War as a battle between good and evil, so how much more 'Manichaean' can you be? - because unlike George W Bush and Trump who are perceived to be particularly unpopular Presidents, Reagan has such enormous popularity ratings that to attack him in the same breath as Bush and Trump would be like Bergoglio stepping on a deadly third rail!]
Spadaro and Figueroa argue that Evangelical fundamentalism subjects politics to a biblical literalism which rejects dialogue and peace in favor of bringing about salvation through apocalyptic wars. Such theology has opposed “the black civil rights movement, the hippy movement, communism, feminist movements,” inter alia, “and now in our day there are the migrants and the Muslims.” Catholic “integralists” are their allies in this exclusionary and violent approach to politics, hence the emerging “ecumenism of hate.”
Experts in American Protestant history will, soon enough, expose the many errors made by Spadaro and Figueroa, who assemble a mishmash of fundamentalism, the “prosperity gospel,” “Christian reconstructionism,” Norman Vincent Peale, and Rousas John Rushdoony, in presenting their account of American Evangelicalism’s [alleged]
history of hate.
Permit one bit of history [i.e.,historical ignorance] to suffice:
“The term ‘evangelical fundamentalist’ can today be assimilated to the ‘evangelical right’ or ‘theoconservatism’ and has its origins in the years 1910-1915. In that period a South Californian millionaire, Lyman Stewart, published the 12-volume work The Fundamentals. The author wanted to respond to the threat of modernist ideas of the time. He summarized the thought of authors whose doctrinal support he appreciated. He exemplified the moral, social, collective and individual aspects of the evangelical faith. His admirers include many politicians and even two recent presidents: Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.”
Spadaro and Figueroa appear to think that
The Fundamentals is the work of a single “author.” In fact, it consists of some 90 essays by more than five dozen authors, including most of the major Protestant denominations. But that’s a relative quibble compared to the charge they make, patronizingly, that American Evangelical theology, suffering from an incapacity for proper biblical exegesis, is thus hell-bent on precipitating Armageddon. But perhaps it is better that Pastor Figueroa’s fellow Protestants in the United States enter into a fraternal dialogue with him about their “jihadist” theology.
[I have yet to come across any Protestant critique of this major intellectual embarrassment that passes for a scholarly essay!]
On the Catholic side, Spadaro and Figueroa are alarmed, as they write in this key paragraph:
“Some who profess themselves to be Catholic express themselves in ways that until recently were unknown in their tradition and using tones much closer to Evangelicals. They are defined as value voters as far as attracting electoral mass support is concerned. There is a well-defined world of ecumenical convergence between sectors that are paradoxically competitors when it comes to confessional belonging. This meeting over shared objectives happens around such themes as abortion, same-sex marriage, religious education in schools and other matters generally considered moral or tied to values.
Both Evangelical and Catholic Integralists condemn traditional ecumenism and yet promote an ecumenism of conflict that unites them in the nostalgic dream of a theocratic type of state. However, the most dangerous prospect for this strange ecumenism is attributable to its xenophobic and Islamophobic vision that wants walls and purifying deportations. The word ‘ecumenism’ transforms into a paradox, into an ‘ecumenism of hate.’ Intolerance is a celestial mark of purism. Reductionism is the exegetical methodology. Ultraliteralism is its hermeneutical key.”
All that would certainly be alarming. But is it happening? Who are “those who profess to be Catholic” who “dream of a theocratic type of state”? What journals expound their thoughts? In what faculties do they teach? What books have they written? What movements does their thought animate? NONE OF THAT EXISTS.
[Except in the overwrought imagination which they share with their lord and master!]
But there is Michael Voris and his Church Militant site. After their superficial survey of a century of American Protestant thought, Spadaro and Figueroa offer only this on the Catholic side:
“There is a shocking rhetoric used, for example, by the writers of Church Militant, a successful US-based digital platform that is openly in favor of a political ultraconservatism and uses Christian symbols to impose itself. This abuse is called “authentic Christianity.” And to show its own preferences, it has created a close analogy between Donald Trump and Emperor Constantine, and between Hilary Clinton and Diocletian. The American elections in this perspective were seen as a ‘spiritual war’.”
Perhaps Michael Voris is successful, but
only a vast ignorance of the American Catholic scene would consider Church Militant to be influential, let alone representative. Voris has been forbidden to use the name “Catholic” in his ventures, and just last week was asked to leave the Convocation of Catholic Leaders in Orlando, American Catholicism’s largest such recent gathering. Did Spadaro consult his Jesuit colleagues at America, or Figueroa his American colleagues at L’Osservatore Romano, about the relative importance of Voris on the American “theological” scene, as it were?
Selecting such a singular and extreme example fatally undercuts the argument that Spadaro and Figueroa are advancing, and evidences
a willingness to think ill of the character of American Catholic discourse. We might then ask how this is supposed to serve the ministry of Pope Francis.
Surely Spadaro and Figueroa know that they are widely considered papal confidants and authentic interpreters of his thought. That is why attention is duly paid to what they write, edit and tweet. A piece that patronizes Evangelicals and mischaracterizes Catholics would seem to retard the very ecumenism that the Holy Father seeks to advance. Surely this is not the vision that Pope Francis has of Christian theology in the United States?
[Is that a rhetorical question, wishful thinking, or both?]
Spadaro and Figueroa, having outlined the “ecumenism of hate,” note that there is “an enormous difference between these concepts and the ecumenism employed by Pope Francis.” Well, yes. One expects that the Holy Father has a rather different approach than spreading hate. But that is a rather low bar.
Spadaro and Figueroa have a slightly different aim in bringing Pope Francis into this odd piece. In ramping up the threat of the
integralist ecumenism of hate, the authors amplify the supposed danger of being contaminated by them. If condemning “jihadism” for example, might ally you with “crusaders,” perhaps it is better to say nothing at all, or simply insist upon “dialogue,” without specifying its substance. But Pope Francis has not done that, as witness his recent speech to a Muslim audience in Cairo.
Spadaro and Figueroa appear to favor a more neutral approach, and attribute it to the Holy See:
[“And this is why the diplomacy of the Holy See wants to establish direct and fluid relations with the superpowers, without entering into pre-constituted networks of alliances and influence. In this sphere, the pope does not want to say who is right or who is wrong for he knows that at the root of conflicts there is always a fight for power. So, there is no need to imagine a taking of sides for moral reasons, much worse for spiritual ones.”
La Civiltà Cattolica derives much of its prestige from the fact that its pages are reviewed by the Vatican Secretariat of State before publication.
Do the Holy See’s top diplomats agree with the characterization of their work as not “saying who is right or who is wrong” because all are fighting over power?
Spadaro and Figueroa’s theological assessment of the “ecumenism of hate” does not bear scrutiny. Their charges will dissipate quickly enough for lack of substantive argument. But the claim that the Holy See refrains from distinguishing between right and wrong in a world of tyrants and their victims needs a correction soon. It would have been opportune for the Secretariat of State to have done so before publication.
[Perhaps since Spadaro and Figueroa appear to be in a much more privileged position close to the papal ear, mind and heart than anyone at the Secretariat of State – Spadaro especially in his persona as unofficial spokesman for the pope – the middle-level managers at SecState who are supposedly in charge of 'vetting' LCC before publication, have simply stopped doing so, because who are they, after all, to demand that a papal pet like Spadaro should meet 'peer review' standards?]
Funny that Fr. Longenecker should home in on two now all-too-familiar and tedious communications tactics by the Bergoglians led by their lord and master – setting up strawmen (actual 'people', or categories of people, anyway, as we all know someone likes to do, as well as strawman arguments) every chance they get, and using them as scapegoats for everything they find wrong in the Church and in the world.
Spadaro, straw men and scapegoats
by Fr. Dwight Longenecker
From his PATHEOS blog
July 17, 2017
Fr De Souza has brilliantly analyzed for CRUX the article at La Civilta Cattolica that everyone is talking about. His juicy observation about the article is that “It does not rise to the level of mediocrity”.
Having read the article I actually agreed with some of the observations about Evangelical Fundamentalism.
The problem is that the authors are commenting on something they don’t know about from personal experience. It’s all theory from a few books they’ve read and perhaps a few conversations with fellow intellectuals in some coffee shop in Europe.
The American Evangelical scene is far more complex and crazy than these guys understand.
[That is not to say that they do not have good people at all who are not 'crazy'!] Their snide comment, for instance about Evangelical fundamentalists being mostly “white men from the deep South”, is a racist bigoted comment on the level of Obama’s famous and fatuous wisecrack about country folk who “cling to their religion and guns” or Mrs Clinton’s “basket of deplorables”.
When will these people learn that not all conservatives are Wal-Mart shoppers with a gun rack in their pick-up?
[And what is wrong, Fr Dwight, with a Wal-Mart shopper who carries a gun in his pickup??? As long he does so to protect himself and his family and not to hunt others to kill them!]
But the main problem is that in the second half Spadaro and Figueroa attempt to throw Catholic conservatives into the same pick-up truck as the “stupid Evangelicals”.
[Oh, dear – he makes it worse by extending the faulty synecdoche (i.e, where a part is taken to represent the whole)!]
- They come up with a name “Catholic Integralists” - this shadowy group who want to create a “theocracy” and go to war with the Muslims etc. etc. As others have pointed out, such American Catholics only exist in the imagination of Spadaro and Figueroa.
- They come up with Michael Voris and his Church Militant group. Sure, but Michael and his devotees are a tiny minority in the Catholic Church of the USA. Do we really need the editor of a major Vatican paper to put Voris in his place? I think not.
Spadaro’s attack on American “Catholic Integralists” is an attack on a straw man. It's a scarecrow and like all scarecrows the article doesn’t have a brain.
But there is a reason for Spadaro to create this straw man. He wants to create a scarecrow that seems scary. By creating this imaginary creature “the American Catholic Integralist” he has given a label to all the Catholic conservatives he wishes to demonize.
This follows the usual routine of conflict: 1. Generalize about your enemy. 2. Imagine they are organized 3.Create a name for this shadowy group 4. Demonize them 5. Marginalize them 6. Exclude them 7.Get rid of them. 8. Feel good about it. In other words, use a scarecrow to create a scapegoat.
The article is a classic example of the progressivists' passive-aggressive tactics. Their talk is all about sweetness and light and tolerance and being nice, but while they smile they stab and while they kiss they twist the knife.
The fact that Spadaro and Figueroa blather on about “Pope Francis is building a world without fences and borders – which calls for dialogue and not for war and conflict” makes this blatant attempt at stereotyping and scapegoating all the more ironic.
[Not ironic at all, if one consider's Bergoglio's daily example of demonizing everyone who does not think as he does - in which case Bergoglio bears the brunt of the irony.]
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 23/07/2017 04:25]