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BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

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30/01/2013 02:45
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There is a Pope... but US bishops
are not really following Vatican-II
on pushing the Papal Magisterium

By Bevil Bramwell, OMI

Sunday, 27 January 2013

If there is a Pope... Well, there is. What follows from that fact?

First of all, he is not an isolated figurehead or a religious figure who is far away in another country. That would be the Protestant view and the common cultural view in the United States. [Besides, in the hyperlinked global village, the whole world is virtually just a mouse click away, and no one, least of all a major leader, is isolated any more.]

Rather in the Catholic Church, Christ “rules through the Supreme Pontiff and the bishops.”(Vatican II) In the Church, we speak of the mystery where, in reality: “The bonds which bind men to the Church in a visible way are [the] profession of faith, the sacraments, and ecclesiastical government and communion.”

In the same document (Lumen gentium, the Constitution on the Church), the Council was very specific about the relationship between the faithful and those in the government of the Church: “In matters of faith and morals, the bishops speak in the name of Christ and the faithful are to accept their teaching and adhere to it with a religious assent.”

Now, in the United States, we know that this does not happen in the majority of cases. So are any bishops animated enough to teach on this point? Is this even seen as an issue? The answer would certainly explain the hierarchy’s failure to reach people before the election.

Bishops do speak, of course. But why the reticence to explain what their speaking implies? An issue for another time perhaps, because then the Council continues:

This religious submission of mind and will must be shown in a special way to the authentic Magisterium of the Roman Pontiff, even when he is not speaking ex cathedra; that is, it must be shown in such a way that his supreme Magisterium is acknowledged with reverence, the judgments made by him are sincerely adhered to, according to his manifest mind and will.

Remember this the next time someone tries to push something different by invoking Vatican-II. [Indeed! Never let it be said that Vatican-II came short in any way in emphasizing the role of the Supreme Pontiff and the supremacy of his Magisterium, and the necessity for all the faithful, including bishops and priests, to be 'in communion' with him. Every time I read a Vatican II document, this principle appears to be re-stated on every possible occasion. But disobedience to the papal (and therefore, Church) Magisterium has been the arrogant calling card of those who beat their breasts hardest about representing the 'spirit of Vatican II'. That 'spirit' certainly has a notoriously selective memory - what psychologists also call false memories, that imagine teachings Vatican-II never advocated and ignore all the teachings that the spiritists find inconvenient or objectionable, memories as false as their professed 'spirit' which is certainly not holy in any way.]

And point out the specific mention of the Magisterium of the Pope – pace all those who erroneously think that we only offer religious submission to formally infallible teachings. Also, there is nothing in there about American exceptionalism. Political parties superseding what the Pope teaches says is not mentioned once.

Given the need for this relationship of “special reverence,” where in the American Church is the immersion in papal teaching that Vatican II prescribed? Where are those who should be helping the faithful towards religious submission of mind – all the bishops, the clergy, the religious superiors and religious? Am I leading too cloistered a life to see the tens of millions of U.S. Catholics being taught on evenings and weekends in the meaning of the latest encyclical?

Granted we live in a Protestant culture, but why do we have to fall so completely for Protestant parochialism? This widespread bias denies part of the nature of the Catholic Church, and a large part too. Most Americans Catholics live with paltry knowledge of the faith because dioceses have left them with the notion that they know enough just the way they are. What could our wonderful American people possibly learn from Familiaris consortio or Verbum Domini?

The reciprocal relationship of communion between the faithful and the Pope is basic to Catholicism. Unfortunately, we have had at least fifty years of the Church being out of the religious education business once people are confirmed – and of a Church being afraid to ask people what they believe. This smacks of Protestant individualism. Church officials seem to be furthering Unitarianism rather than Catholicism and doing remarkably well, if a bystander might comment.

What is at stake is communion in truth, where the Holy Father is at the center pointing to Christ, the Word, the source of all truth. This communion does not consist of individuals occasionally imagining that they are in union with the Pope, but rather of individuals who actually know what he says in his ordinary Magisterium and then join themselves to the truth (the Word) by their religious assent to what he says.

This union is personal rather than impersonal, close rather than distant, and based on truth rather than imaginings. It relies on everyone knowing what the Pope says in substantial detail. The people in large part will only learn that from their pastors. Since the United States is not under occupation or ravaged by epidemics, dioceses are free and able to do their part in sustaining the communion of the faithful with the Holy Father – or not.

Papal teaching also holds a privileged place because it has a formidable consistency and clarity. One looks in vain for the same level of scholarship and knowledge of the intellectual tradition from other world figures, theologians or writers. [I could mention a few Catholic commentators and good writers who stand out in this regard in the American Church - Father Schall, Archbishop Chaput, Father Barron, much like the Venerable Fulton Sheen before them. Reading them is not just often spiritually exhilarating, but always an education as well because like, Benedict XVI, they have academic knowledge they can and do marshal, casually and unostentatiously, in the service of advancing the faith.]

We have been blessed with Popes who are intellectual and spiritual giants at a time when few bishops and no academics can hold a candle to them. [It always amazes me that the world - even most Catholics, I believe - generally under-estimates the caliber of the Popes that the Church has had in modern times, in the past 200 years, to be more precise, from Blessed Pius IX, Leo XIII, St. Pius X, Benedict XV, and Pius XI to Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I, John Paul II and now Benedict XVI. I limit myself to that time frame because these Popes are of 'recent memory' and there is endless material about them. Most of them fit the conventional 'image' of the intellectual, but even the reassuringly down-to-earth John XXIII and the ever-amiable John Paul I were intellectuals who brought the peasant wisdom in their genes to the considerable academic knowledge they had acquired. George Weigel wrote a great essay in recent years on the awesome qualities of the modern Popes.

Yet what are we to make of the apparent disdain with which supercilious seculars and Catholics (the worst offenders of all) condescend to Benedict XVI, eternally lecturing him as though he were a dull-minded schoolboy who has no mind of his own and must be rapped on the knuckles every so often to remind him he is Pope! Wait a minute, isn't that exactly what Paolo Gabriele thought of Benedict XVI? So this syllogism would conclude by saying that all those supercilious condescending pundits who fancy themselves to be great minds against whom Joseph Ratzinger is a flyweight are no better than a megalomaniac simpleton who deluded himself that he had much more common sense and brains than Benedict XVI. That's right, they aren't.]


In this time of frightening intellectual mediocrity, when more people will listen to a movie star than a Pope – and many Church officials treat this as harmless – the value of truth for human society itself needs to be very clearly explained. Then perhaps papal documents will not stall at the water’s edge.

Bevil Bramwell, priest of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, teaches theology at Catholic Distance University. He holds a Ph.D. from Boston College and works in the area of ecclesiology. His new book, Laity: Beautiful, Good and True - Hans Urs von Balthasar's Theology of the Laity, is now available from Amazon.


I would never be able to imagine the pastoral burdens of being a bishop, but in terms of their teaching function, would it not make sense to set their priorities such that every week, they can be guided first by what the Pope says in his catechesis or Angelus mini-homily or major message during the week, after which they can speak about what they consider to be their local pastoral priority, tying it in if they could to the papal theme for the week? I do not know why in the Internet age, all bishops and parish priests do not do that now. Does it diminish them to follow the lead of the Pope? Should they not be grateful that we have a teaching Pope who can frame the Magisterium in the simple and direct and ever-fresh way that he does, and all they have to do is take off from that - or even use it substantially as is? I cannot think of a better way for the Church to speak as one voice when all its pastors and clergy speak the message of Christ with the words of the Vicar of Christ. Or am I being unrealistic?
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 30/01/2013 03:31]
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