THE CHURCH MILITANT - BELEAGUERED BY BERGOGLIANISM

It is with great joy and relief that one now hears from Fr. Schall himself, who last week, had been reported to be in precarious condition following major surgery. He will be marking
his 91st birthday on January 20. As always, my favorite Jesuit has sublime thoughts and sublime prose.


Schall at 91 —
an interim report
by James V. Schall, S.J.

January 12, 2019

Note: Many people have inquired about Fr. Schall’s health over the past few weeks. We did not much comment on it here because the situation seemed unclear and we also wanted to respect the good padre’s privacy. But Lo! Here he is, back, to explain his situation (and, as usual, much more) himself. – Robert Royal

Let me first acknowledge the many prayers and greetings that have been sent to me by so many people. I am deeply touched and grateful. Though I expected to be in the great beyond by now, Schall is not calling the shots. The colon operation was successful and the patient lives, though not so comfortably as before.

This was the fourth major operation that I have had during my four-score years and ten – and counting. The overwhelming issue that one poses to himself in sickness and accident is not “Why me, Lord?” Rather it is the silence of God about us. We each exist for a purpose, probably for many purposes. The very concept of a final judgment includes seeing what such purposes might be in the context of the whole of reality.

We are created, as Ignatius of Loyola said, to praise, reverence, and serve God and by this means to save our own souls. We either achieve this purpose or not, such is the power God bestowed in our being. We are conscious of our sins, so no clear path to glory seems open to us, apart from some power to forgive, something we do not give ourselves.

Somehow, I have found the so-called “Jesus Prayer,’ to be most helpful – “Jesus, Son of the Eternal Father, have mercy on me, a sinner.” One’s life is often filled with prayers for others, and rightly so. But in the lonely hours when you cannot sleep or get comfortable or figure out what it is all about, you realize that you too are now the locus of the reality that is you.

We are each of us created to participate in the eternal life of the Triune Godhead. At times, the connection between this life and the next seems very close. But we are not given the clarity of seeing the complete connection. Our minds still prod us to know what all of this experience is about.

At another level, I have what I might call the “orthodoxy” problem. Is the center holding? I have been long convinced of that insight of Chesterton’s about the abidingness of Rome in the essential narrative of faith and reason. It was this deposit of faith and reason abiding over time that would stand down the ages.

Now we seem to have a Church whose center waffles. We are not being persecuted, at least not overtly. The problems in the Church seem to be of its own making. We are more than perplexed. Concern about eternal things seems to be a side issue to a this-worldly Messiah that claims to be able to make us at home in this world.

We want to say that nothing basic is really going on. Yet too much evidence appears that some huge disconnect it taking place in our midst. That clear line of thought from Aristotle to Aquinas to Benedict seems frayed.

Orthodoxy meant a confidence that what was handed down was not itself changing or becoming obscure. It also meant that reason would meet what was revealed to us as compatible with what we could learn by ourselves. The truths of God made reason more itself, when thought out.

Strictly speaking, if what is revealed and what is understood are no longer coherent to each other, then that central promise on which we rely for stability of doctrine and practice cannot be maintained.

Belloc’s “How odd of God to choose the Jews” becomes “How odd of God to let such concerns go on in our midst.” We are reminded often that, “My ways are not your ways.” There is some comfort in this assurance.

I have frequently remarked during the era of John Paul II and Benedict that Catholicism has never been intellectually stronger or culturally weaker. That sharp edge of intellect seems dimmed to me. The God of faith and reason still seems untouched in its integrity.

But the world is not converted. It calls us with loud voices to come, be human, and forget the Man on the Cross who was sent into your midst, lo those many years ago.

It turns out that Christ was serious about our knowing and observing the commandments. Socrates was correct. It is never right to do wrong. There are deeds that are intrinsically evil. To insist that they are good is to undermine our souls. We now see daily that no sin is forgotten, even as it may be forgiven.

God created the world with a plan in mind. We are included in it, each of us. Prayer, for me, has always depended on dogma. To pray is also to seek the truth of what is. Only the truth can make us free. We pray for so many others. We also pray for the Church that it remain the bridge between this world and the next.


Also, from THE CATHOLIC THING, a review of the book Maureen Mullarkey cited in her critique of Pope Francis's Christmas Day message on 'fraternity'.


'The Idol of Our Age'
by Robert Royal

January 14, 2019


In times like these, when so much is deeply unsettled in both the Church and the world, there are few reliable guides to our predicament. But one has just appeared: Daniel Mahoney’s brief but powerful book: The Idol of Our Age: How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity.

A few decades back, American evangelicals used to denounce secular humanism, rightly – but without knowing what it was other than a denial of religion. During the same period, St. John Paul II, tried to recover an authentic Christian humanism, i.e., a rich “anthropology” in which the human person is only rightly understood in relation to God.

A Christian humanism is necessary because unless we properly value life in this world, religion can become distorted, a kind of Puritanism that denies our nature as creatures with bodies, minds, and spirits.

A Christian humanism is necessary, however, because without God, we close in on ourselves. The sciences discover truths about our world, but cannot say anything about why we’re here, what our lives mean, or where we go after death.

In the vacuum left by exclusion of religion and moral truths, we make idols of human desires – repeat the original wrong turn in the Garden of Eden – and think we are gods, as we see only too clearly in our post-Christian culture.

Mahoney provides a wise and wide-ranging account of how we got here, starting with Auguste Comte who, in the decades after the French Revolution, formally developed a “religion of humanity.”

Similar currents cropped up in America, Western Europe, and Russia; Mahoney deftly relates how Orestes Brownson, Aurel Kolnai (a little know but brilliant Hungarian), and Alexander Solzhenitsyn responded to proliferating branches of “humanitarianism.”

As the great political philosopher Pierre Manent says in a foreword to this book, humanitarianism is the “ruling opinion” in developed Western societies now, it “commands and forbids, inspires and intimidates.”

Humanitarianism is a demanding idol that serves a dual purpose. Initially, it filled the gap left by the abandonment of religion. Though atheism deprived people, individually, of a future life, they could at least see working for “humanity” as something that transcends any single person.

These ersatz religions inevitably go awry, however, because they cannot really fill the spiritual gulf, and therefore have led, historically, to ever more radical – and tyrannical – movements like Marxism, progressivism, and the current “identity” fads.

In recent times, humanitarianism has taken an additional turn. It’s now a stick with which to beat various particularisms: attachments to nations, specific religions, families, communities. Such attachments are now often portrayed as a kind of sectarianism that offends against “humanity” as a whole.

Then again, much depends on where you stand in the progressive “arc of history.” Non-Western and anti-Western groups are allowed their particular “identities.” Muslims, African and Latin American migrants, homosexuals, etc. are useful in undermining the traditional markers of identity – religion, family, and nation – in favor of “humanity.”

Mahoney relates all this to Pope Francis in a particularly trenchant chapter, which is remarkable both for the strength of his critique and his fairness to the often-overlooked traditional sides of the pope. He counsels us to take the pope’s written arguments seriously (not his “remarkably undisciplined off-the-cuff remarks”) as matter demanding careful reflection and appraisal.

The main problem, says Mahoney, has been that “His admirers, and sometimes the pope himself, confuse Christian charity with secular humanitarianism.”
- Largely because of that emphasis, the pope, though he has expressed opposition to things like abortion and gay “marriage,” also gives the impression that “mercy” means not pushing too hard against them in public.
- He’s done the same for the divorced and remarried within the Church.

By contrast, he’s been relentless in opposing war and capital punishment, which Church teaching has always classified as sometimes moral necessities.

But “Divine mercy is not humanitarian compassion. It is not a substitute for repentance and the firm, if humane, exercise of the rule of law.” By his blurring of such distinctions, Francis has left the Church “divided and vulnerable to an unthinking political correctness.”

And such confusions lead to others. The pope’s writings on the environment, for example, rightly remind us of the drive towards the Promethean “mastery” of nature that has marred Western science and technology – something quite different than the “dominion” over the Creation in Genesis. Laudato si, therefore, can be partly read as a sort of conservative green stance rooted in a deep Christian spirituality.

But the Vatican’s incautious alliance with radical environmentalists has led to “mistaken emphases.”
- For instance, the pope often condemns business for greed, rarely commends it for creating wealth and helping out the very poor in whose name he speaks. (To my knowledge, he’s never recognized that globalization – for all its problems – has raised hundreds of millions out of sheer destitution.)
- He seems to pay little attention to the fact that modern “humanitarian” regimes – i.e., the Soviet Union, China, Cuba – that claimed to represent “the people” have been among the most murderous, oppressive, environmentally disastrous systems in human history, while evil “capitalist” nations have steadily cleaned up their environments.

Francis vehemently denounces Western leaders for refusing to open borders to migrants. But he’s indulgent towards Venezuela and China, the Castros, Bolivia’s Evo Morales. The Yale historian Carlos Eire, who was born in Cuba, has argued that the pope shows a kind of “preferential option for the oppressors.”

And he also seems to have greater trust in international technocrats and a “world authority” over nations – i.e., smaller groups, more responsive to concrete human conditions.

The Christian tradition has always emphasized moderation, prudence, realism in human affairs.
- In a fallen world, the attempt to create heaven on earth by fallen creatures, is a recipe for various hells, as recent history shows beyond doubt.
- And that’s true even when the humanitarianism comes to us dressed in equality, tolerance, acceptance.
- True Christian charity is a hard school that includes those ideals, but also the sterner virtues that prevent our all-too-human efforts from becoming idolatrous – and demonic.