Although these opinions will not be new to you, they may be novel to my Toronto audience. Imagine my surprise this morning when I discovered they had slipped out from behind the firewall. This is putting my head over the parapet with a vengeance. But I don't think any faithful Catholic can sit on the fence regarding Amoris Laetitia and its toxic fallout, and the more of us who speak out, the better.
(Sorry about the clichés there.)
In case you are curious, I have a family member who married without permission of the Church. She lived outside the Church her entire adult life and then was reconciled to the Church on her deathbed thanks to a visiting priest. Despite her defection, she has eleven Catholic descendants.
You know how we sometimes have to tell our separated brethren that we don't worship the pope? We don't like it when they sings songs at football games about hanging him from the chapel door, but we don't worship him either. Nor do we count living popes among the canonized saints. We do not consider a living pope worthy, for example, of praise and worship music addressed to him.
But it turns out that we have to tell certain Catholics this, too. I present you with, yes, a hymn to Pope Francis. Please listen until at least the refrain.
I haven't laughed so much in days. I will now forsake my sickbed and get ready for tonight's Polish class. H/T Eccles.
Update: I'm laughing at papolatry, by the way, not the pope. I don't think any pope is a laughing matter.
Me on the subject of me in the Scottish Catholic Observer. But perhaps I may be forgiven, for I talk about Ignatian spirituality, recycling, the 100th anniversary of the Fatima apparitions and Robbie Burns' famous poem "To a Louse".
Still confined to bed, I've been spending too much time on Facebook. Today I clicked on a high school pal's posting of this video:
My high school pal thought this had world-changing possibilities. I was disturbed by the sight of two strangers breaking down the volunteers ' identities so that they could replace them with new ones. These new identities are no longer based on family, communities, shared places, shared values or belief in God. They are based quite literally on spit and dodgy science.
It would be nice to believe that DNA tests provide a road map to all the countries your ancestors have hailed from. But this is not how they work. They can only guess and give probabilities, not certainties like "Genetically you are 50% French and 20% Icelandic, Miss Saoirsa O'Reilly."
Even DNA tests looking for health problems---never mind a Cherokee great-grandma--may be wrong. Ancestral search DNA tests are next to useless. Actually, they may be worse than useless, if they cost you a lot of money or an authentic identity based on faith, family, near ancestors, neighbourhood and other aspects of lived experience.
Everybody on earth has been scientifically proven (for now) to have descended from one woman. The current scientific belief is that she was from East Africa. That did not make us all part Zulu. However, it is a nice bolstering of the Christian belief that all human beings have the same "first parents". And perhaps it is a nice reminder that all human beings are human beings, if we needed one.
Occasionally I have been tempted to get a DNA test--and to pay for one of my brothers to get one, too--so as to find out if my mother's mother's mother (etc.) was either a Pict or a Gael, and to discover if my father's father's father (etc.) was a Gael or a Norseman of some sort (Viking or Norman). But unfortunately, that's not how it works and, besides, there are better uses for money.
As a matter of fact, my mother's mother's mother's mother's house is still standing in Edinburgh, and my father's father's father's father took out an ad in the Boston Pilot on August 19, 1854 to look for the brother who followed him from Ireland. Various of my female relations on my father's side have been keen genealogists, so I already know a lot about my ancestry. I also know rather a lot about migration patterns in Scotland, so if I discovered a genetic "cousin" in Poland, for example, I would put the phenomenon down to the 30,000 Scots who settled in Poland between 1400 and 1706 instead of joining the local Polish dance troupe.
The film features a rather offensive Icelandic supremacist, who seems to think he is more valuable than the British scientists, which no doubt he is to Iceland. It also features a proud working-class Englishman who, like the newspapers written for him, doesn't like Germans--presumably because of his ancestors' experience of the First and Second World Wars. (Germans of a certain generation in north-western Germany are not necessarily super-keen on Canadians, I discovered.) The beliefs of the Icelander and Englishman may be irrational, but they are not more irrational than the idea that they are world-citizens because people in other parts of the world may share their ancestral DNA. You mean, Vikings traveled a lot? You mean, Anglo-Saxons are genetically similar to .... wait for it.... Saxons? Holy moly! My worldview is shattered!
Bad science, bad science, bad science, and all with an eye to breaking down identity based on family bonds and lived experience. I have English given names, an Irish maiden name, a Scottish surname, an anglophone Canadian family, mixed ancestry including Revolutionary War Americans, an east-coast Scottish husband, an Eastern European sister-in-law, an Edinburgh-area address, much-loved relatives in theEstrie and a Toronto upbringing. Spitting into a test tube would not change any of that. The story of me would not be in that tube.
Update: I have just thought of unpleasant or at least embarrassing reasons why the DNA of ethnic English and Scots may be shared by a lot of otherwise ethnic French, Germans, Dutch and Italians.
Lazy Christians, parked Christians
Little balls of fur....
Insured Christians, still Christians
Grr! Grr! Grr!
“Lazy Christians, Christians who do not have the will to go forward, Christians who don’t fight to make things change, new things, the things that would do good for everyone, if these things would change. They are lazy, “parked” Christians: they have found in the Church a good place to park. And when I say Christians, I’m talking about laity, priests, bishops… Everyone. But there are parked Christians! For them the Church is a parking place that protects life, and they go forward with all the insurance possible. But these stationary Christians, they make me think of something the grandparents told us as children: beware of still water, that which doesn’t flow, it is the first to go bad.” Pope Francis, 17 January 2017
When I was an undergraduate and learned that all priests weren't singing from the same hymn book, I was introduced to the term "solid". "Solid" described a priest who knew and proclaimed the faith and didn't bend the rules or, rather, warp the truths. This was the kind of priest you could trust with your soul.
I realize that this is not the most popular topic in Catholic circles and that some of us rosary-counters do need to do more regarding the corporal works of mercy, but the object of all our striving is not heaven-on-earth but saving our souls. Every human life that lasts beyond age 7 is a cosmic, all-or-nothing drama: either we will go home to heaven and be happy, or we will find ourselves in hell and suffer eternal misery.
Please don't shoot the messenger. This is good news. The Ancient Greeks didn't believe they had a shot at happiness in the afterlife. They conceived of souls flitting about disconsolately in Hades, deeply envying the poorest of the living. And so it likely was before the Harrowing of Hell. I don't think St. Joseph spent his stretch being grilled by demons, do you?
Anyway, solid priests are not as interested in our earthly happiness (which they still hope for and may fight for) as they are in our eternal happiness. If you are a believing Christian, you don't think 60 years of a great sex life are worth the price tag of unending aeons of misery. You also believe that 60 years of suffering, bravely born, will all be worth it when you see God face-to-face. It's the atheists who think 60 years of a great sex life is all one can hope for. It's the atheists who think a life of suffering is meaningless.
Don't get me wrong. I am not an enemy of happy marriage (au contraire), and I don't think people should be left in their suffering. The Christian Church is quite clear on the importance of the first and the need to alleviate the second. How achieving the goal of eternal happiness and avoiding the fate of eternal grief is to be accomplished on earth can also be found in the deposit of Christian teachings, expounded and protected by the Catholic Church (and to a certain extent the Eastern Orthodox Churches, I think).
Some of these teachings sound very tough, especially now that they no longer shape popular culture. The most obvious ones concern marriage, particularly acts proper to marriage. As popular culture is now so out of step with traditional Christian teachings, these doctrines will shock the stuffing out of Catholics who don't hear about them until it's too late. I was 15 or older before I discovered that the Church forbade the use of artificial contraception. I was so surprised: why then were there so few Catholic families even as big as mine? However, I had divined from a very early age that premarital sex was wrong and shameful, so I accepted the Church's prohibition on artificial birth control cheerfully. I accepted it with the trust of a child until I was old enough to read and understand Humanae Vitae, which was the second Bible of the pro-life movement.
Humanae Vitae is very solid--rigid, even. Having understood its contents from the age of 18 makes it that much easier to refuse the free IVF treatments my British health care providers keep offering. I would love to have a baby--but not at the expense of my soul. The rigidity of Church teaching against IVF gives me a lot of peace. Not only that, it sanctifies my (probably age-related) infertility in a way impossible for women 30 years ago. Thirty years ago, childless women had no right or wrong choice to make. I, however, have the opportunity to refuse IVF, which may add a little something to my "offering it up." The down side, of course, is that other married Catholic women succumb and have IVF babies, and may never regret their sin: how would they, when the end result was their babies?
I used to resent them, but now I feel sorry for them. They have their heart's desire--and now they're stuck in unrepentance. Why didn't their priests explain it to them? Or did they just proceed from the starting point of "An all-loving God wouldn't stop loving me if I helped create a number of embryos in a dish so that I might bring at least one of them to term and thus have the baby I want so much." I am not sure where they would have got this from Scripture or Tradition, mind you. Oh dear.
Sometimes earthly happiness is a bad thing, and sometimes earthly suffering is medicine for the soul. I am quite fascinated by my deformed foot as a vehicle for penance. Who needs a hair shirt who has a bunion? Whenever my foot hurts, I can offer it up!
Anyway, if I went to the wrong kind of priest, I possibly could get "permission" to dabble in IVF. However, my devout Catholic husband would never consent, so that's a mercy too. (Don't forget, we're talking about mortal sin and hell here.) Poor man, what a martyrdom it would be for convert him to have his cradle Catholic wife begging and pleading and cajoling him to participate in objective evil. I am sure he wouldn't cave. However, say I took him to this wrong kind of priest and the priest convinced him through some sigh or clever argument or assurance that there's a wideness to God's mercy that includes joyful and unrepentant IVF, and B.A. submitted... Oh poor chap.
Actually that the above scenario could happen in the Historical House is so ridiculous, there is no point in continuing.
Here's a recent article about hell in the Catholic Herald. It includes verses from Scripture and, appropriately for 2017, Fatima material.
Well, this is a red letter day in the Catholic Blogosphere. American Papist, aka Thomas Peters, has blogged for the first time in 600 days to beg the John Paul generation to protest Amoris Laetitia and its shocking implimention by the Maltese bishops.
It has been 600 days since I last composed a blog post, but this is so important I am breaking my hiatus.
Almost exactly 1600 years ago, in the midst of the Pelagian heresy which threatened to engulf the Church, St. Augustine wrote that when Rome has spoken, the case is closed (paraphrased: “Roma locuta est, causa finita est”).
Today, precisely because the pope has not spoken, the Church is facing a crisis, and the case remains open.
He's begging the priests, religious and theologians under 40 in particular to speak up.
You were formed under the papacies of Saint John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. You went to school for this. You serve as pastors, teachers and counselors. So, speak up!
My dear boy, the people who would speak up against this nonsense are precisely the sort of people who do not graduate or get ordained, except from solidly orthodox teaching institutions. Unless they are tough. I am admit that I am not that tough, and many orthodox students have been much much tougher and braver than I. Still, the glorious thing about having deep-sixed my "career" is that I cannot lose it again. What would I be feeling were I teaching systematic theology at Berkeley right now? Giving up Californian sunshine, and professorial privilege, and all that lovely money would have been a wrench....
Anyway, appealing to those who have positions to lose may not be the best course of action. It might make more sense to appeal to teenagers--especially ones whose lives have been blighted by their parents' divorces. Nobody hates hypocrisy more than teenagers, and teenagers, in my experience, are the people most likely to throw themselves on the ramparts. When I was a teenager, I had friends who chained themselves to operating theatres in you-know-what clinics and were dragged down the stairs by the cops, bumpity, bumpity, bump. (They were also tougher and braver than I.)
Still, you never know. If enough of us freelance professional Catholics start yelling our lungs out, people with a little more worldly stuff to lose will take courage, and if enough of them start yelling, those a little higher up will take courage, too. Although I have to admit that the 13 Cardinals, Archbishop Gądecki, the 45 Theologians and the 4 Cardinals have led the way, the silence or hostility of the rest of bishops plus the other theologians does suggest that this is going to be a down-up movement.
We all know that Cardinals wear red to show their willingness to be martyred. But guess how many Cardinals were martyred during the English Reformation. Guess! Guess! One. He was also the only bishop. (In Scotland, Cardinal Beaton was assassinated, but errr....)
Lots of abbots and priors were killed, dozens of priests, hundreds of lay-folk, but all the other bishops got with the tyrannical program so that Henry VIII could have sex and babies with |Anne Bolyn and feel good about it. So far I have offered up the pain in my sinuses for the doctrinal integrity of the Church, prayed, cried and written an article about the Maltese bishops that I hope is coherent. I'm still sick in bed, after all. Oh, and I have linked to Catholic Papist, so toddle over and think about how you can do your bit.
