00 12/08/2017 03:59

Who is really guilty of an infelicitous 'ecumenism of hate' as Spadaro-Figueroa put it? Classic failure on the part of Bergoglians to see the massive beam obstructing their mind's eye while spotting the faintest mote in other's eyes!

EWTN and the Register part
of 'the ecumenism of hate'?

Politics is what motivates these intemperate accusations

by Father Raymond J. de Souza, SJ

August 11, 2017

Is the work of the National Catholic Register, and its parent apostolate, EWTN, advancing an “ecumenism of hate” in which “Catholic integralists” and “evangelical fundamentalists” seek to subordinate the Gospel to a right-wing political agenda?

That’s the remarkable charge made by some thinkers close to Pope Francis and their most enthusiastic supporters. Such people, in Christian charity, should be ignored; and, if the quality of their analysis alone were the only relevant criterion, its manifest mediocrity would mandate just that. But when such figures are such prominent interpreters of the current pontificate, they cannot be ignored.

Last month, Jesuit Father Antonio Spadaro, confidant of the Holy Father, and Marcelo Figueroa, a Protestant pastor personally chosen by Pope Francis to be the editor-in-chief of the new Argentinean edition of the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, authored an essay arguing that what they consider to be the hate-filled politics of the Trump administration has its roots in an unholy alliance between “Evangelical Fundamentalism” and “Catholic Integralism.”

The essay appeared in La Civiltà Cattolica, the Jesuit journal published in Rome that warrants attention because its pages are reviewed in advance by the Vatican’s Secretariat of State. Father Spadaro is the journal’s editor.

The essay has produced a great number of critical responses, including from R.R. Reno of First Things, writing in these pages. I had my say twice at Crux, both on substance and style. Other commentators also weighed in, including George Weigel and Robert Royal.

Those responses have argued that the analysis provided by Father Spadaro and Pastor Figueroa is not an accurate reading of America’s religious history over the past century. The essay was particularly weak in selecting as the Catholic example of this “ecumenism of hate” the website “Church Militant,” which by any account represents a tiny minority in the United States.

Father Spadaro and Figueroa, having made an outrageous claim using an incendiary and inaccurate example, were then supported by liberal American commentators claiming that the “ecumenism of hate” problem had actually infected this newspaper.

Michael Sean Winters, writing at the National Catholic Reporter, began with Church Militant and ended up with us:

That kind of militaristic, and profane, language is not uncommon at right-wing Catholic websites, all of which feed into the mainstream through less outrageous, but decidedly conservative, media outlets like EWTN and the National Catholic Register.

EWTN is a kind of gateway drug for conservative Catholics: You may start by watching Raymond Arroyo interview Sebastian Gorka for the umpteenth time or reading Father de Souza explain how Trump’s speech in Poland was “faith-filled” and go no further, just as some people smoke weed and that is enough. But for others, EWTN or the Register lead you into the snake pit of truly whacky conservative Catholic media

.
Writing at Crux, another commentator, Steven Krueger — president of Catholic Democrats, a partisan organization that grew out of the “Catholics for Obama” project in the 2008 and 2012 elections — claimed that the unholy alliance began under the auspices of the late Father Richard John Neuhaus and the late Charles Colson:

There’s an evangelical/Catholic alliance that has evolved over time and was first codified in 1994 with the signing of “Evangelicals and Catholics Together.” In 2004, The New York Times reported that “Catholic and evangelical leaders who forged relationships in the anti-abortion movement … are now working side by side in campaigns on other culture-war issues, and for Republican candidates.”


George Weigel responded to the nonsense that Evangelicals and Catholics Together, one of the most serious theological dialogues on the ecumenical front anywhere, was somehow a partisan political initiative.

What is to be made of such intemperate accusations, portraying the late Father Neuhaus or Mother Angelica as providers of a “gateway drug” that intoxicates conservative Catholics with hate-filled attitudes and lamentable politics?

It is politics. [I think, more appropriately, ideology, which really underlies most politics across the spectrum.]

Father Spadaro, Figueroa, Winters, Krueger and others are preoccupied with politics. The very term “integralism” in the original essay is used to characterize an approach to religion and politics that sees, historically, the state subject to the control of the church, or at least in active cooperation with it. The claim now made is that new Catholic “integralists” in the United States have made their faith subordinate to Republican Party politics.

One can understand why Catholics of a left-leaning political bent would be frustrated. For several generations, the intersection of religion and politics in America has been around a set of issues — the right to life, marriage and family and religious liberty — that have aligned religious voters with more conservative politics.

A key priority of Pope Francis has been to highlight issues that would shift religious voters toward the political left — increased immigration, climate change and redistributive economics.

That project should bring Spadaro et al confidence, but, instead, we see a lashing out and a flailing about in the face of supposedly shady enemies engaged in nefarious coalitions.


It brings to mind the unhinged nature of the late atheist Christopher Hitchens, who devoted his considerable intelligence to spewing forth vicious attacks on Mother Teresa. While the substance of the attacks was easily dismissed, it was the fever of the attacker that remained notable.

And one might simply ask: Whose fault is it that religious voters find liberal political options so unwelcoming?

There is a long tradition, not only in the United States, of what has been called the “social gospel,” the application of Christian principles to politics in a progressive vein. It has a venerable history and could claim the abolition of slavery, the anti-poverty programs of the welfare state, the civil-rights movement and universal health care as part of that history.

How did liberal politics move — above all, with its embrace of abortion — toward the place where an American president sought to force the Little Sisters of the Poor to provide contraceptives in their health plans? Is that not an example, for Catholics who prefer liberal politics, of precisely the subordination of faith to politics that Father Spadaro and Figueroa lament?

The Spadaro/Figueroa essay and its aftermath is most curious. At precisely the moment when those on the Catholic left have the enthusiastic encouragement of the Holy Father, there is a desperate name-calling of those with whom they disagree.

When they should be confident in the persuasiveness of their arguments, they have resorted instead to (falsely) discrediting others. Indeed, as they analyze the dark motivations of others, one might ask why they are so insecure.
[Why indeed! They ought to be manifesting the smug confidence and triumphalism that goes with hubris.]

I thought I had posted this second reaction from George Weigel to the Bergoglio attack dogs Spadaro and Figueroa... Turns out I never got to transfer it from the WORD document where I try to do all the preliminary work before posting.

Ecumenism, influence-envy,
and the real Manichaean division

The honest engagement of differences in service to evangelical vigor
is not advanced by the systematic misrepresentation of others’ views,
by the puerile bullying of bishops, or by indulging in spasms of influence-envy.

By George Weigel

August 9, 2017

Defending the indefensible is never pretty. Or so we’re reminded by recent attempts from the portside of the Catholic commentariat to defend the madcap analysis of America’s alleged “ecumenism of hate” that appeared last month in the Italian Catholic journal, La Civiltà Cattolica(edited by the Jesuits of Rome and published after vetting by the Secretariat of State of the Holy See).

The more sober-minded defenders admit that the article, jointly authored by Fr. Anthony Spadaro, SJ, and Pastor Marcelo Figueroa, contains errors of fact and tendentious interpretations of recent history – but then go on to suggest that it raises important questions. How, though, are serious questions raised, much less clarified or answered, by falsifications of both history and contemporary reality?

Other defenders of the Spadaro/Figueroa article, less chastened by the self-evident fact that the article would receive a thumping “F” in a freshman religious studies course at any reputable college, have taken the occasion of the article to scrape their various boils and indulge in the very Manichean division of the ecclesial world into children of light and children of darkness that the article condemns.

One of these boils involves a project I helped launch and in which I’ve been engaged for over two decades: the study group known as “Evangelicals and Catholics Together.”

A post Spadaro-Figueroa editorial in the National Catholic Reporter charged that
- ECT, as it’s widely known, is a prominent example of “Catholic complicity in the politicization of faith;”
- the participants in the original ECT statement, from which the study group takes its name, were on the “outer conservative edges” of their communities “before the landscape fades to irrational extremes;” and t
- the original statement “ill-served” Catholics, evangelical Protestants, the cause of the Gospel, and the health of American public life.

Moreover, the NCR grimly warns “bishops and those who staff their offices” against conceding to “the visions of ideologues in think-tanks and institutes with an absolutist and narrow agenda.” For in doing so (by, presumably, embracing the ECT agenda) these bishops and staff “have squandered their standing and credibility in the wider culture.”


Oh, dear. Where to begin?

ECT is an ongoing project, which has now produced nine joint statements, with a tenth, an explanation of Christianity to its contemporary cultured despisers, coming soon.
- Five of the first nine — on justification, Scripture, the communion of saints, the universal call to holiness, and the Blessed Virgin Mary — were entirely theological in character and had nothing to do with political controversies.
- Those that touched on contested issues – the statements on the sanctity of life, on religious freedom, and on marriage—set the discussion of public policy in an explicitly biblical and theological context (as, indeed, did the initial ECT statement the Reporter editorial deplores).

The five theological statements measure up well against similar documents from other ecumenical dialogues of the past half-century; an honest Catholic liberal, Notre Dame’s Lawrence Cunningham, recommended all the ECT statements for “the pertinence of their concerns and the sophistication of their theological argument.”

From the very outset of our joint work, ECT participants have made it clear that we speak from and to our various Churches and ecclesial communities, not for them. We have also scrupulously described our differences, with a concern for expressing the “other’s” views accurately.

But don’t just take my word for it. Get the book that collects the first nine ECT documents and explains both the genesis of the project and of each statement: Evangelicals and Catholics Together at Twenty: Vital Statements on Contested Issues, edited by Timothy George and Thomas G. Guarino (Brazos Press). Read it. Then compare what you read with the NCRep editorial.

In his June address to the U.S. bishops, Archbishop Christoph Pierre, the apostolic nuncio to the United States, appealed for a Church that listens more, “even to those with whom we disagree,” because the honest engagement of differences helps us all “propose the…Gospel in a more persuasive, life-changing way.” True enough.

The honest engagement of differences in service to evangelical vigor is not advanced, however, by the systematic misrepresentation of others’ views, by the puerile bullying of bishops, or by indulging in spasms of influence-envy.

Moreover, the Nuncio’s welcome appeal to become a Church of missionary disciples — Pope Francis’s “Church permanently in mission” [What does he mean by 'mission' though, since he – and his fellow progressivists and ecumenicalists, appear to have replaced Christ's mandate to "Go forth and baptize all nations in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit" with inter-religious dialog, i.e., "Go forth and talk to each other but take care not to profess the Catholic faith, much less insist on it as the one true way to salvation!"]— will only be answered if we see today’s challenging, but evangelically exciting, situation clearly; and such clarity of vision requires something other than lenses ground in the 1970s.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 12/08/2017 04:22]