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Before tackling this short essay by George Weigel, first, let us consider the word BEATITUDE. Its simple dictionary meaning is a 'state of supreme blessedness, utmost bliss, or great joy' and its synonyms are 'blessedness, benediction, grace'. Jesus's Sermon on the Mount is remembered best for the Beatitudes he proclaimed - describing the virtues that men must live in order to be considered ‘blessed’, i.e., in order to find beatitude.
St. Gregory of Nyssa (335-395), brother of St. Basil, friend of St. Gregory Nazianzene, and who, together with them made up the Great Trio of Cappadocian Fathers (even if unlike the other two, he was not declared a Doctor of the Church], described the Beatitudes this way:
"Beatitude is a possession of all things held to be good, from which nothing is absent that a good desire may want. Perhaps the meaning of beatitude may become clearer to us if it is compared with its opposite. Now the opposite of beatitude is misery. Misery means being afflicted unwillingly with painful sufferings."
Beatitude and the ongoing debate over 'Amoris Laetitia'
Too many churchmen seem unaware of this great achievement of post-Vatican II Catholic theology
and so they remain frozen in time, trapped in the hard rules/soft rules debate.
by George Weigel
CATHOLIC WORLD REPORT
July 12, 2017
Asked to name books that gave me the greatest intellectual jolt in recent decades, I’d quickly cite two.
N.T Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God (Fortress Press) accepts every grand-slam bid from the guild of Scriptural deconstructionists and skeptics, calmly replies, “I’ll see you and raise you” – and then takes the game with a flourish, leaving the unbiased reader convinced of, well, the resurrection of the Son of God.
Then there is The Sources of Christian Ethics, by Servais Pinckaers, OP (Catholic University of America Press). If I could put one book into the hands of every (and I mean every) combatant in the post-AL debate, Father Pinckaers’s masterpiece would be it. Why?
Because so much of the controversy over Pope Francis’s post-synodal apostolic exhortation reflects the hard rules/soft rules argument about the Christian moral life that Pinckaers explodes.
The moral life, he insists, is not first and foremost a matter of rules; it’s a matter of beatitude. The Sermon on the Mount is the Magna Carta of Christian ethics. Yes, there are rules, or moral norms, but the Church teaches them in order to lead stumbling humanity toward happiness by helping us grow in the virtues that make for human flourishing.
The recovery of this insight – that beatitude is the goal of the moral life and that the virtues are at the heart of Christian morality – is one of the great achievements of post-Vatican II Catholic theology.
[I don't think any serious Catholic, simple or sophisticated, ever lost sight of that - and we didn’t have to read Pinckaers to know it! It's a matter of semantics, or which horse comes before which cart. As Weigel himself puts it, the Church teaches her moral norms in order to lead man to happiness by growing in virtue. So you can't get to happiness without following the rules. Where is it that those who protest AL's apostate propositions are wrong in talking about rules???]
Too many churchmen seem unaware of it, though, and so they remain frozen in time, trapped in the hard rules/soft rules debate. [Certainly, Weigel cannot include in this criticism the DUBIA cardinals and all the good and competent Catholics who, like them, protest AL for incontrovertible reason – primarily, to object to its rejection of Christian truth. Now, none of the Eight Beatitudes refers to truth-telling but at least two of them, and possibly a third one, could be applied to the holy crusade that the objectors to AL are embarked upon:
”Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after justice: for they shall have their fill. “
“Blessed are the clean of heart: for they shall see God”.
“Blessed are they that suffer persecution for justice's sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”.]
Thus it’s been interesting in recent months to see renewed references to the moral theology of Father Bernhard Häring, C.SS.R. Häring, an anti-Nazi hero during World War II, had a significant influence on the immediate post-Vatican II period; yet, he too seemed strangely imprisoned in a pre-Vatican II mindset. He was something of a rules-centered ethicist before the Council; he remained something of a rules-centered ethicist after the Council. What changed was his approach to the rules: he was a rigorist before the Council and a laxist afterwards. But the rules-centered paradigm was the same.
Which is to say, Father Häring missed the Pinckaers Revolution. And judging from the commentary in the wake of Amoris Laetitia, so did a lot of others, not least among those who think of themselves as the party of Catholic progress.
This is very unfortunate. The Church can and must do a better job of explaining that, behind every “no” the Church says to this, that, or the other human failing or foible, there is a resounding “yes” - a “yes” to beatitude, a “yes” to human flourishing, a “yes” to noble living, a “yes” to a particular virtue. Grasp the “yes,” and each “no” begins to make sense as an invitation to live the virtues that make for a truly fulfilled life.
The Pinckaers approach to the moral life gets us to “yes.” The rules-based approach – in its hard (rigorist) or soft (laxist) form – finds it hard to do that. [NO! First, follow the rules, which can certainly be expressed positively, then you can embark on a life of virtue - in which you will find, even on earth, a foretaste of the beatitude Christ promised. It has been said that all of the Beatitudes have an eschatological meaning, that is, they promise us salvation - not in this world, but in the next – but they also provide “peace of mind in the midst of our trials and tribulations on earth”.]
I might add that there isn’t a shred of empirical evidence to suggest that the lax-rules approach is pastorally successful in bringing the bored, alienated, indifferent, or confused back to a full and sustained practice of the faith, whereas there’s lot of evidence that the living parts of the Church are those that have embraced the Pinckaers approach – which had a decisive influence on John Paul II’s encyclical on the renewal of Catholic moral theology, Veritatis Splendor. But that’s a tale for another time.
I was reminded of the Pinckaers/Häring divide when, a few months back, Cardinal Vincent Nichols of Westminster told a meeting in London that the Church would “persist” in being “awkward” when challenged by the many forms of the sexual revolution. But is that quite the right image? Is the Church being “awkward” (or “obstinate,” another term the cardinal used)?
The 21st-century Church that proclaims certain moral truths in the face of sharp cultural opposition isn’t being different for the sake of being different or mule-headed; and it isn’t being deliberately clumsy. The Church of the New Evangelization [which is certainly not the church of Bergoglio] is saying, “Here’s what we think makes for the happiness you seek. Here are the virtues that make for that happiness, according to millennia of experience. Let’s talk about it.” That’s true pastoral accompaniment.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 14/07/2017 15:17] |