Deep Down Things: Essays on Catholic Culture

Deep Down Things

Deep Down Things Essays on Catholic Culture Edited by Joseph A. Cirincione

LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.

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LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200 Lanham, MD 20706 Estover Road Plymouth PL6 7PY United Kingdom Copyright © 2008 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Deep down things : essays on Catholic culture / [edited by] Joseph A. Cirincione. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-2354-6 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-7391-2354-8 (cloth : alk. paper) eISBN-13: 978-0-7391-3008-7 eISBN-10: 0-7391-3008-0 1. Christian life—Catholic authors. I. Cirincione, Joseph A., 1945– BX2350.3.D44 2008 282—dc22 2008018076 Printed in the United States of America

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Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things . . . . (Hopkins 1877, “God’s Grandeur,” 5–10)

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

xi

Joseph. A. Cirincione, Ph.D.

Section One: Catholic Culture and Everyday Life 1

Catholic Initiation or Christian Initiation of Adults?

3

Paul Turner, S.T.D.

2

The Idea of the Parish

13

Michael V. McDevitt

3

For the Laborer Is Worthy of His Hire

31

Gerald L. Miller, Ph.D.

Section Two: Catholic Culture and the Imaginative Life 4

Writing as Sacrament

51

Ron Hansen

5

Catholic Poetry: An Essai in Definition

59

Patricia Cleary Miller

6

Chesterton’s Catholic Imagination

75

Professor John C. Chalberg

7

The Sacramental and Twentieth-Century French Literature M. Kathleen Madigan, Ph.D. vii

93

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Contents

Section Three: Catholic Culture and Postmodern Life 8

John Dryden’s Journey to Rome: Church Authority and Catholic Culture

109

Joseph A. Cirincione, Ph.D.

9

Today’s Ethicist and the Development of Catholic Moral Doctrine

125

Wilfred LaCroix

10

Philosophy and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Culture

143

Curtis L. Hancock, Ph.D.

Section Four: Ultimate Ends 11

Is There a Catholic Culture?

161

Richard J. Janet, Ph.D.

Index

175

About the Contributors

183

Acknowledgments

I

n bringing this collection to print, I owe a great debt to Dr. Richard Janet—director of the Thomas More Center—for entrusting me with the project (which, after all, began as his brainchild). In addition, I owe my appreciation to the Center for financial support, as I do to the RigbyKnickerbocker Development Fund for faculty in the Departments of Psychology and English at Rockhurst University, as well as the Elaine Bourke Lally Fund for Teaching Humanities (also at Rockhurst University). I again note, “Writing as Sacrament” is reprinted by permission of the author, Ron Hansen, and HarperCollins Publishers, with modifications to the original citations and citation format. I also note, all excerpts from poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins—in the Introduction and at the beginning of each section—come from the 1918 edition of Hopkin’s poems. Finally, I thank my wide Jana for her understanding and patience; and I further thank her, Jayna, Matthew, Marissa, and Bridget for keeping in high spirits with their good humor.

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Introduction Joseph A. Cirincione, Ph.D.

BACKGROUND OF THIS COLLECTION

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atholic studies programs have been popping up at Catholic, as well as secular, institutions of higher education in this country. Some programs have taken on agendas that advocate for Catholicism against threats and attacks from various quarters. Other programs favor studying Catholic thought and culture, variously discovering both admirable and less admirable actions, documents, and decisions of the Catholic Church. The Thomas More Center for the Study of Catholic Thought and Culture at Rockhurst University (a Catholic, Jesuit institution in Kansas City, Missouri) adopted the latter course (1) in line with the request of President Edward Kinerk, S.J., that the Thomas More Center find “ways to enrich, and to make more available, appreciation of the Catholic intellectual tradition,” and (2) in light of the University’s commitment to teaching students “how to think. . . . [and how to] appreciate new concepts and expand their understanding of the world, and to listen with respect to different viewpoints and make informed ethical judgments about critical issues.” When the Center proposed bringing Garry Wills to Rockhurst to speak about his then recent book Papal Sin, Structures of Deceit, some people on and off campus questioned whether this was appropriate. But others believed that Catholicism and the Ignatian tradition both seemed to support the Center in sponsoring Wills and other controversial critics, as well as supporters, of Catholic thought and culture. Both Catholicism and the Ignatian tradition find no contradiction between faith and reason, faith xi

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and knowledge of the world. Neither presumes that Catholics should only study Catholic thought and culture that is above reproach; neither presumes that all Catholic thought and culture is above reproach; neither presumes that Catholic thinkers should only praise or agree with Catholic thought and culture. Pope John Paul II—in his encyclical on this topic Fides et Ratio (September 14, 1998)—notes that humans seek “the certitude of truth and the certitude of its absolute value,” but “the natural limitation of reason and the inconstancy of the heart often obscure and distort a person’s search” (27–28). For this reason, no one person or Center or “historical form of philosophy can legitimately claim to embrace the totality of truth, nor to be the complete explanation of the human being, of the world, and of the human being’s relationship with God” (51). That is why, in a Catholic, Jesuit, liberal education, one should hear many voices, including controversial and conflicting voices, in a search for truth. We can even learn, says the Pope, from those thinkers who are in error (54). In this spirit of open inquiry, the essays in this collection grew out of a course offered to Rockhurst University students and members of the Kansas City community. Dr. Richard Janet, director of the Thomas More Center and author of the final summary essay of this collection, developed the course; and he explained the legitimacy and the value of its attempt to highlight common elements of Catholic culture in the Newsletter of the Thomas More Center. What follows is a condensed version of his explanation as applied specifically to the essays that comprise this book. Not content merely to examine the multiple and diverse expressions of Catholicism as they manifest themselves in a pluralistic world, the contributors to this collection have endeavored to discover and analyze the possible roles and influences of common values comprising Catholic culture. For example, one of the bedrock foundations of the Catholic perspective has been recognition that faith and reason do not contradict but might complement each other. That idea inspired the development of a rich and complex Catholic thought and culture. Despite variations and differences among Catholic believers (e.g., due to ethnic influences, historical contexts, economic class, etc.), this collection of essays seeks common elements or ideas that may have spawned the very phenomenon of Catholic faith and continue to shape it. By contrast, the postmodern perspective that prevails in many quarters today would deny any effort to go beyond the expressions of Catholic thought and culture to find the roots of what we call Catholicism itself. The scholarship in this collection, inspired and informed by faith, is as legitimate as the faith-free inquiries of postmodernist thinkers and might even illuminate some areas of human thought and culture that would otherwise pass unnoticed.

Introduction

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OVERVIEW OF THE COLLECTION In the course mentioned above, different faculty members presented classes on elements of Catholic culture that their disciplines allowed them to explore and elucidate. These faculty members have prepared most of the essays in this collection based upon their presentations. Four outside contributors also prepared essays. Some contributors present critiques of Catholic culture or, at least, reflections that do not merely advocate official Catholic positions. But they do so, much as the Center and the University do, with a commitment to getting at truth. The essays that comprise this collection fall into four sections, including a closing summary essay, all of which attempt to highlight components of Catholic culture that have played important roles over the centuries in various places and among various communities. Since this collection took form at a Jesuit institution, it seemed appropriate to employ the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins—that famous nineteenth-century Jesuit poet—for the title of the collection, as well as to introduce the different sections of essays: briefly in the introduction and more fully at the beginning of each section. • The first category (of three essays) explores Catholic Culture and Everyday Life where, according to Hopkins, humans are born to a “blight” that afflicts all of us even as “Christ plays . . . / . . . / To the Father through the features of men’s faces.” Consistent with Hopkins’s views, this section begins with an essay on the initiation of adult converts and continues with a review of life in Catholic parishes, both of which articles highlight a Church blighted with imperfections. Yet both also demonstrate how fallen human communities can reflect Christ in human activity, as does the closing discussion of a living wage in the context of Catholic teachings on social justice. • The second category (of four essays) moves out of the ordinary and everyday to detail Catholic Culture and the Imaginative Life, where Hopkins finds human imagination “sing[ing] sometimes the sweetest, sweetest spells,” while “droop[ing] deadly sometimes . . . ,” waiting ultimately “for [each person’s] bones risen.” The first of the essays, on fiction writing, and the second essay, on composing poetry, view the imaginative life as sacramental, opening life to “the sweetest, sweetest spells.” The two remaining essays review how specific Catholic writers, G. K. Chesterton in England and Georges Bernanos in France, practiced their sacramental craft in ways that not only reflect Catholic culture (singing, drooping, and risen), but help to define it, as well.

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• The third category (of three essays) explores Catholic Culture and Postmodern Life, where Hopkins finds women and men facing “Despair” that can and does “feast” on them and where they pray desperately “To dearest him that lives alas! away.” Two of the essays look at how Catholic culture’s view of Church authority has changed over the years (becoming more narrow or restricted) in reaction to the views of modernism and postmodernism that deny the existence and knowledge of “dearest him.” The other essay reinforces the counter-cultural streak in the rational philosophical bases of Catholicism that give some hope and assurance to despairing humanity. Though modernism and postmodernism encourage humanity to “cry I can no more,” both the Catholic philosophical worldview, i.e., the Western Creed, and Hopkins say, “I can; / Can something.” • One final section provides an essay with a wide-ranging review of major components (ultimate ends) of Catholic culture, pulling together many of the threads spun in the preceding essays. In review, moreover, despite blight, drooping imagination, dark nights, and an absent God, Hopkins finds in that “dearest freshness deep down things” faith that “In a flash” even fallen human nature can be transformed into “immortal diamond.” Section One: Catholic Culture and Everyday Life In his essay—“Catholic Initiation or Christian Initiation of Adults?”— Rev. Paul Turner, a parish priest in Cameron, Missouri, and a well-known writer and speaker on the Catholic sacraments, critically assesses a major ceremonial element of Catholic culture. Believing that full initiation is distinct theologically from the reception of baptized Christians into the Catholic Church, he finds it appropriate that candidates for baptism learn “what is unique about the Catholic Church” (5). But he insists that the initiation of adults must remain primarily “baptism into the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ” (10), that is, a broadly Christian evangelism that proclaims “the most fundamental of beliefs: a belief in a God who lives, and in Jesus Christ, whom God has sent for the purpose of salvation” (5). That said, he has a number of suggestions about how Catholic initiation leaders ought to proceed. Once past initiation, the newly baptized members enter parish life and encounter a much broader array of Catholic cultural elements. Rev. Michael McDevitt, a secular Roman Catholic priest (i.e., a priest without the rule of a religious order in the diocese of Springfield-Cape Girardeau, Missouri), explores “The Idea of the Parish” to get at Catholic culture: he proposes “to substantiate from my pastoral experience what is the identifiable Catholic culture of Roman parishes in the United States”

Introduction

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(13). McDevitt finds so many mobile parishioners seeking out new parishes with every move that he concludes that they must find something commonly satisfying. Moreover, among parishioners, three distinct generations—pre-Vatican II, Vatican II, and post-Vatican II—with all of their conflicts find a good deal commonly satisfying. He identifies the sacraments, liturgy, and rubrics on how to celebrate the sacraments as central to the culture that satisfies mobile parishioners from different generations. He also highlights the place in Catholic culture of the neighborhood church with its parish priest, ecumenism, the gospel of social justice, and tensions between generations. He finds, too, four traditions—regarding death, moral living, penance, and the Eucharist—that overlap some of these earlier elements in comprising Catholic culture at the parish level. And, Father McDevitt notes, all of these elements are central to parishes of Asians, Hispanics, African Americans, etc., as well as to the rural and urban parishes that he has pastored. By contrast with the common cultural elements of initiation, sacraments, liturgy (all of which Catholics knowingly seek and can find even when they travel from an Asian parish on one coast to a Hispanic parish on the other coast or an African American parish in the heartland), the common elements of Catholic social teaching may not be so familiar or so readily embraced. Yet Catholicism does speak not only to the worship lives of the faithful, but also to the conditions of their daily existence—to politics, society, the economy. In his essay, “For the Laborer Is Worthy of His Hire,” Dr. Gerald Miller, professor of Economics at Rockhurst University, traces the notion of a living wage back over a century of Catholicism to Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum. Then, he distinguishes between a minimum wage and a living wage—the latter being “enough to support the wage earner and his or her family in reasonable and frugal comfort” (35) and estimated at nearly $40,000 for a family of four in the United States today. Finally, Dr. Miller sets out a living wage “as a target wage to be reached over time, voluntarily and cooperatively, by both employers and employees, through training and productivity enhancements, as employers—through the virtue of social justice—desire to remunerate longterm, loyal employees more justly” (46). Section Two: Catholic Culture and the Imaginative Life Turning from ordinary daily life, where sacrament and liturgy and generous acts may provide epiphanies and raise wonder, and economic conditions may raise challenges, we find that Catholic artists provide sacramental moments to readers through the life of their imaginations. Ron Hansen (prominent Catholic novelist and professor of English at Santa Clara University) claims, in his essay “Writing as Sacrament,” that

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writing is sacramental when “it provides graced occasions of encounter between humanity and God” (52), when it confidently faces “the great issues of God and faith and right conduct” (52). But, as he admits, there is no necessity “to overtly treat Christian themes” (56); for “The job of fiction writers is to . . . give their readers the feeling that life has great significance, that something is going on here that matters” (57). The imaginative life, in brief, provides moments of incarnated glory amid daily life. And Dr. Patricia Cleary Miller, practicing poet and professor of English at Rockhurst University, says very much the same thing in her chapter “Catholic Poetry: An Essai in Definition.” Miller begins by citing Janet McCann—co-editor with David Craig of Place of Passage: Contemporary Catholic Poetry (2000)—who “In her Introduction . . . states that Catholic poetry’s emphasis on the sacraments is what distinguishes it from other kinds of Christian poetry” (60). According to Miller, Catholic poets, like all poets, begin with the sensuous—“with earth and time”—and move toward the universal where they may “see an intersection between time and eternity” (62–63). Both Hansen and Miller illustrate their reflections on Catholic imagination and writing with their own creations. The next two contributors explore the life of Catholic imagination by looking at creations of classic Catholic authors: the works of G. K. Chesterton and twentieth-century French Catholic writers, particularly Georges Bernanos. John Chalberg’s essay on “Chesterton’s Catholic Imagination” argues that, while Chesterton exercised a “fertile imagination” well before he became a Catholic, “his imaginative powers were enhanced by his belief in and commitment to Catholic orthodoxy—and by his ultimate conversion to Catholicism” (76). A college history instructor at Normandale Community College in Minnesota and performer of a one-man show as G. K. Chesterton, Chalberg demonstrates his claim by showing how Chesterton’s imagination led him to experience joy within the orthodox boundaries of Catholicism. Chesterton believed, argues Chalberg, that the doctrine of original sin generated joy due to the Church’s “promise of the forgiveness of sin” (79)—a major component of Catholic culture. Ultimately, for Chesterton, the imaginative wonder of faith—providing “‘fierce pleasure in things being themselves’” (89)—“sets us free” (91). Chalberg points out how Chesterton imaginatively centered the just society of Catholic culture in “family life” (82) whereby he could also throw into high relief another common element of Catholic culture (as Dr. Gerald Miller’s essay on the living wage implicitly suggested): “that modern capitalism and the modern welfare state actually reinforce one another” (84). Finally, however, Chesterton saw—as do Professor Hansen and Dr. Patricia Miller—that Catholic imagination enables us to appreci-

Introduction

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ate the wonder of ordinary daily life. Or, as Chesterton urged, we ought to “use our imaginative powers to appreciate the things we already have, and make those things live” (90). Dr. M. Kathleen Madigan, professor of Foreign Languages at Rockhurst University, promises in her chapter, “The Sacramental and TwentiethCentury French Literature,” to “focus on a work by . . . Georges Bernanos, in order to show how the quality of the sacramental is part of its essence; then . . . [to] highlight this quality as a distinguishing trait of French Catholic literature by comparing and contrasting it with that of other French twentieth-century works” (93–94). Madigan examines Bernanos’ Dialogues of the Carmelites by calling upon Father Andrew Greeley’s The Catholic Imagination and its association of “Catholic art with the quality of the sacramental, which provides a key to understanding the relationship between Catholicism and the French literary imagination” (95). Madigan compares and contrasts Bernanos’ work to Andre Gide’s The Pastoral Symphony, Sartre’s No Exit, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, and Gilbert Cesbron’s Les Saints vont en Enfer or literally The Saints go into Hell. Her study indicates that Bernanos depicts faith among Carmelite nuns faced by the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution; they accepted death “with hope in life beyond it” (98), whereas Gide provides very little evidence “of the presence of God, or for that matter of hope” (100). The same in many ways is true of Sartre and Beckett, but not Cesbron. What is common to all five works is the “terrible reality” that fills life. For Bernanos and Cesbron there is an essential element of Catholic culture: a “life beyond the misery” (102). And, though politics and religion have undergone and continue to undergo great changes in France, Madigan hopefully suggests that “Traditional signs of grace may become subtler as French literature of the sacramental continues to evolve, but that does not mean that they will be any less pervasive” (104). Section Three: Catholic Culture and Postmodern Life The first of the essays in this group (by Dr. Joseph Cirincione, professor of English at Rockhurst University) may, at first glance, seem out of place in postmodern life given its title, “John Dryden’s Journey to Rome: Church Authority and Catholic Culture.” At first glance, the essay might seem to belong to the previous group of essays on the Catholic imagination. But a closer look at this Restoration poet, dramatist, political and religious propagandist reveals a view of Church authority that continues in John Henry Newman in the nineteenth century and John Neuhaus today—a much broader view than is presently common in Catholic culture and one which Father LaCroix discusses in the very next essay.

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Dryden looked to Church authority as an answer to sectarian factionalism in England, religious strife that in large part fueled a civil war and led to Cromwell’s Commonwealth. The Anglican Church could not, by legitimate authority, function as a final arbiter of the conflicts; “For,” as Dryden asks in his Hind and the Panther, “how can she constrain them to obey / Who has herself cast off the lawfull sway?” (I. 454–55). So, he turned to (i.e., converted to) the Roman Catholic Church where authority, in his view, resided “In Pope and gen’ral councils” (II. 81). For Dryden, as for Newman and Neuhaus, limiting Church authority to some form of Papal authority alone was just too narrow. Yet for many, since the doctrine of Papal infallibility was proclaimed in 1870 (partly to answer the challenge of many so-called modernist threats to the Church), Church authority means Papal authority. Similarly, Fr. Wilfred LaCroix, S.J., professor of Philosophy and a Jesuit priest at Rockhurst University, sees a much narrower role today for moral theologians in the Church, as the Pope and Curia have circumscribed their role—in reaction against the threats of modernism. “Until the end of the nineteenth century, the accepted procedure for Christian moral theologians was to contribute to a developing consensus among those theologians working on a given moral issue,” freely expressing differences of opinion—“even [with] those currently held by the majority” (126; see Newman’s very similar views in Cirincione, 121). But “By the end of the nineteenth century,” under the very same Pope (Pius IX) who precipitated the change from Dryden’s and Newman’s notion of Church authority to the rather different notion of Papal authority, “theologians seldom publicly questioned papal pronouncements on faith and morals, or even pronouncements from the members of the papal Curia” (127). Acknowledging the differences between moral theologians who talked to themselves and ethicists who try “to examine the different positions on an ethical matter and to save as much as possible from the judgments and explanations of all good people” (128); LaCroix nonetheless feels that ethicists can fill some portion of the now defunct role of moral theologians by discovering “that more than one position [regarding particular moral situations] has substantial merit, or that no one position has convincing strength over all others” (133). By contrast with LaCroix’s reservations about Catholicism circling the wagons in the face of modernist and postmodernist thought, Dr. Curtis Hancock, professor of Philosophy at Rockhurst University, argues that it is Catholicism’s responsibility to do just that. In “Philosophy and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Culture,” he laments that “Catholic intellectuals rely significantly on modernist ideas” (143)—specifically, skepticism, naturalism, animalism, and relativism—because these ideas

Introduction

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are destroying Judeo-Christian Western Culture (145–46). In a countercultural attack on the modernist notions that permeate our intellectual culture and insinuate themselves into Catholic culture, Hancock subjects them to a rational critique and offers “an outline and an indication of how modernism can be tested for its reasonableness [and] . . . to show that it is highly problematic” (147). Hancock argues that “Since the Catholic faith has the tradition and the resources to diagnose the errors of modernism, Catholic culture has a clear duty to debate modernist influences in our society” (155). Finally, he looks to philosophy as central to Catholic culture because “It has given Catholic culture the rational resources to defend the Church’s vision of what civilization and culture ought to be” (155). Section Four: Ultimate Ends In a summary article, “Is There a Catholic Culture?”, Dr. Richard Janet, professor of History and director of the Thomas More Center for the Study of Catholic Thought and Culture at Rockhurst University, draws upon the ideas of Christopher Dawson. Janet emphasizes that Christianity and specifically Roman Catholic Christianity played pivotal formative roles in Western culture. Not surprisingly, he sees the search for “Elements of a Catholic Culture” (167) to be quite fruitful. He discovers a number of elements, going back to the “Roots of a Catholic Culture” in “the Incarnation of Christ” (163), as well as perspectives, quite different from those of Protestants. Considering “The Influence of Catholic Culture” (165), Janet looks to “The Catholic [Sacramental] Imagination” (166), variously discussed by essays in both Sections One and Two of this collection. From this sacramental imagination, he finds emerging a number of common cultural elements. First, “Catholic imagination presupposes, the things of earth, humankind included, have been made good by God’s creative act and Incarnation . . . . [and] might transmit God’s grace” (168). Janet also finds other elements common to Catholic culture, including an “emphasis on community” (169); “the concepts of tradition and authority”—discussed by essays in both Sections One and Three—(169); a tendency to countercultural critiques, which the essays in Section Three both discuss and embody; and “a strong appreciation of . . . the occasion of sin, the means of grace, and the possibility of redemption” (171), developed especially by the essays in Sections One and Two. Implicit in all of the essays and most explicit in the works about Catholic imagination in Section Two is “The Catholic cultural perspective [that] opens itself to the drama of every human life and every human community and to the inherent possibility for human goodness and divine grace in an imperfect and sinful world” (172).

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CONCLUSION Coming to terms with Catholic culture may be, for many Catholics, an exercise in self-reflection only, a not invaluable exercise and a worthwhile purpose for this collection to further. But coming to terms with Catholic culture for the essayists and for their readers serves as well to bring us all to a greater appreciation of how “the institutional Church and the popular imagination of creative Catholics have shaped the very nature and direction of Western thought and culture” (Janet 172), an especially worthwhile objective. Consistent with the Mission Statement of the Thomas More Center for the Study of Catholic Thought and Culture, the authors of this collection have aimed “to inspire both Catholics and non-Catholics alike, inside and outside the academic community, to deepen their own knowledge and appreciation of the Christian tradition” generally and Catholic culture particularly. The authors hope to encourage sincere and open dialogue about Catholic culture (in the best tradition of Catholic thought) both to further the inquiry after truth and to enhance fruitful reflection upon Catholic culture and its contributions over time and across cultures.

Section One

CATHOLIC CULTURE AND EVERYDAY LIFE

Áh! ás the heart grows older It will come to such sights colder By and by, nor spare a sigh . . . . It ís the blight man was born for, It is Margaret you mourn for. (Hopkins 1880, “Spring and Fall,” 5–7, 14–15) I say móre: the just man justices; Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces; Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is— Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men’s faces. (Hopkins 1877, “As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame,” 9–14)

1 ✛

Catholic Initiation or Christian Initiation of Adults? Paul Turner, S.T.D.

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hristian initiation should be just that: initiation into the Christian way of life. But in the Catholic Church, the practice of initiation bears the marks of the Catholic culture. Adults may join the Catholic Church either through the baptismal rites of Christian initiation or through the Rite of Reception into the Full Communion of the Catholic Church. If they have never been baptized, adults celebrate the rites of initiation: baptism, confirmation; and first communion—altogether, normally at the Easter Vigil. If they have already been baptized in another Christian community, the Catholic Church will probably recognize their baptism. (There are exceptions; for example, baptism in the name of Jesus and not in the name of the Trinity.) Persons validly baptized cannot be baptized again in the Catholic Church. As members of the Christian faithful, they may be received into the full communion of the Catholic Church in a simple ceremony, followed by confirmation and their first communion. Whereas the baptism of adults in the Catholic Church should take place at the Easter Vigil, the rite of reception may take place at any time of year. When adults are baptized in the Catholic Church, they become Christians. But they also become Catholics. Although the liturgy of the Church stresses that baptism makes one a Christian, the initiating community explicitly works to make the newcomer a cultural Catholic. The two goals are not opposed to each other, but the primary goal of Christian initiation is sometimes obscured by the cultural goal of Catholic initiation. When baptized adults are received into the Catholic Church, Christian initiation does not adequately define what happens to them. The 3

4

Paul Turner, S.T.D.

baptized have already been initiated into another Christian family. And their reception into the Catholic Church has more to do with becoming Catholic than it has to do with being Christian. The influence of a Catholic culture should be more easily seen in the case of the baptized Christian coming for reception, but it is evident even in the case of the formation of the unbaptized.

MOTIVATION AND EVANGELIZATION Many motives inspire people to join the Catholic Church. Once a relationship has been established, Church ministers or volunteers offer catechetical formation and a series of liturgical rites to assist inquirers on their way. According to a recent study, the primary reason why anyone wishes to join the Catholic Church is to unify the religious faith of the family. Not all those wishing to join the Church are married. But of those who are, fully 83 percent have Catholic spouses. The second strongest reason people cite is a spiritual need and hunger related to family, health, death of a loved one, a feeling of emptiness, or an inspiring experience. Third, people may feel lonely or a need for an authentic community (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops [USCCB] 2000, 7). People have found themselves drawn to the Catholic Church through a variety of means: “personal invitation, Catholic spouses and family, sacramental preparation, Catholic schools, inquiry meetings and classes, bulletin notices and announcements, Catholic revivals, parish fairs and socials, newspaper and radio spots, billboards and flyers, mailings, ‘bring a friend’ events, pew cards for visitors, censuses, and home visits” (USCCB 2000, 14). The Catholic Church is notoriously poor at evangelical efforts that other Church communities perform well. Whereas other Churches send their membership door to door to solicit recruits, or telephone homes to announce their presence, Catholics typically wait for people to say they’d like more information about the Church. However, as indicated above, when Catholics do reach out to their neighbor, they yield positive results. Evangelization should be part of every Christian’s life. But the Catholic culture does not evangelize well, perhaps out of some desire to be different from Churches who do, perhaps out of some smugness that the most excellent products should not need marketing in order to be sold. The Catholic culture limits the amount and kind of evangelization that Catholics do.

Catholic Initiation or Christian Initiation of Adults?

5

PRECATECHUMENATE: CATHOLIC APOLOGETICS OR EVANGELIZATION? The unbaptized interested in joining the Catholic Church go through a period of formation called the precatechumenate. Then they establish a formal relationship with the Church through a ritual called the Rite of Acceptance into the Order of Catechumens. Once the Church designates them as catechumens, they are considered members of the household of Christ and enter the period properly called the catechumenate (see throughout International Commission on English in the Liturgy [ICEL] and A Joint Commission of Catholic Bishops’ Conferences and Bishops’ Committee on the Liturgy [BCL] 1988, Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults [RCIA]). Baptized adults seeking to join the Catholic Church cannot enter a precatechumenate properly called because they are already baptized. However, most parishes invite them into a preliminary stage of spiritual reflection and simply blend them into the sessions called the precatechumenate. During the precatechumenate, “faithfully and constantly the living God is proclaimed and Jesus Christ whom he has sent for the salvation of all” (RCIA 1988, 36). According to the rite, the focus of the precatechumenate is quite narrow. It is pure evangelization, bringing the gospel to those who may not yet have heard it. The precatechumenate proclaims the living God and Jesus Christ. It intends to determine if those who are interested in the Church have the most fundamental of beliefs: a belief in a God who lives, and in Jesus Christ, whom God has sent for the purpose of salvation. At first, this purpose of the precatechumenate may seem unnecessary. For those who grew up in a Christian milieu, it might seem ridiculous to inquire whether or not people believe in God or in Jesus. But these foundational points are absolutely critical in baptismal preparation. Faith rests on these pillars. Consequently, the liturgy of the Church directs that the content of the precatechumenate should be evangelical. However, many parish catechumenate programs, aided by published catechetical manuals, stress another goal during the precatechumenate. They use this period to describe what is unique about the Catholic Church, a kind of Catholic apologetics. This is not completely out of line. Inquirers are indeed wondering what makes Catholics different. Why do Catholics pray to Mary? Why are the saints so important? Why can’t priests get married? Why do you stand, sit, and kneel so much at church? Why do Catholics confess their sins to a priest? And so on. Inquirers may not so forthrightly ask questions about the Church’s sexual mores, but they certainly wonder about these matters: Why is sex outside of marriage wrong? Why is homosexuality

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wrong? Why is birth control wrong? Why doesn’t the Church recognize divorce and remarriage more easily? And so on. The precatechumenate should handle the basic questions of faith posed by inquirers. They may set the agenda during this first period of formation. But the liturgy has more basic issues in mind: God and Christ. The period of the precatechumenate is the initial indicator that the community has two goals in initiation: Christian initiation and Catholic initiation.

SYMBOLS OF THE PREBAPTISMAL AND BAPTISMAL RITES A series of rites precedes baptismal initiation. After the Rite of Acceptance into the Order of Catechumens, catechumens may experience word services that include anointing with the oil of catechumens. At the end of their formation they attend the Rite of Election, usually at the cathedral under the presidency of the bishop. The bishop formally calls them to be among God’s elect, those chosen for baptism. During the period of purification and enlightenment, which usually coincides with Lent, they undergo the three scrutiny rites and celebrate the presentations of the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer. They also celebrate preparation rites on Holy Saturday morning. These rites entail an expansive use of symbols. In the Rite of Acceptance, for example, those to become catechumens gather outside the door of the church, a symbol of their crossing over a threshold of faith. They receive a sign of the cross and are invited to reverence a book containing the gospels. Both events signify evangelization: catechumens are becoming acquainted with Christ and his holy Word. In other rites, oil will signify sealing in good catechesis and sealing out evil influences. The names of the catechumens, symbols of their very selves, will be called aloud at the Rite of Election. They will hear the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer, two texts that define the community’s belief and inscribe its central prayer. In the rites of initiation those being baptized will experience the cleansing, destructive, and restorative power of water. They will be anointed and consecrated with perfumed oil. The imposition of hands will signify the calling down of the Holy Spirit. These neophytes will receive special clothing: a white garment, the uniform of the body of Christ. They will hold a lighted candle, a sign of the risen Christ who personally fills their lives of faith. Most gloriously, they will share in the Eucharist, the body and blood of Christ under the forms of bread and wine, symbols of the staff of life, sacrifice, and the joy of sharing a meal. All these symbols help unfold the meaning of the rites they accompany. But they do something else. They announce a foundational spiri-

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tuality of Roman Catholicism. We are a religion of concrete symbols. We use the stuff of the earth: fire, water, oil, bread, wine, threshold, and word. We use natural symbols. The preponderance of these symbols expresses what makes us culturally Catholic, not just Christian. This connection with the earth is one reason why the Church’s liturgy seems Luddite. It eschews slick electronic media. It has accepted sound reinforcement and electric lights, but never to the elimination of live music and candles. Even the pipe organ remains a preferred musical instrument over its electronic cousins because it relies on metal, wood, and air to produce its sound. Baptized candidates for reception into the full communion of the Catholic Church have an optional set of parallel rites in the United States, but they do not explore the full range of symbols listed above. They do celebrate confirmation and communion at the time of their reception. The rites of Christian Initiation, then, are celebrated by means of very Catholic symbols—a panoply of them, all rooted in the natural elements of the created world. In every way, they announce belief in a Creator who constantly intervenes in human life. However, even though all these symbols profess a very Catholic piety, and even though catechetical formation centers for a large part on how Catholics differ from other Christians, the liturgy of the Church is very clear about its goal for the catechumenate: the Christian initiation of adults. One is baptized into the body of Christ. No baptismal formula states, “I baptize you into the Catholic Church in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” Baptism primarily concerns a relationship to Christ and the Church—in the broadest definition of Church. All Christian baptisms accomplish what Catholic baptism does on its fundamental level: it makes someone a Christian. And that is the primary goal of initiation.

FULL COMMUNION Nonetheless, the Catholic Church sees itself as the primary expression of Christianity. American culture, however, disagrees. American culture tends to neutralize the differences among Christian Churches and between Christians and other believers. It is not uncommon to hear even a faithful Catholic say about divergent believers, “Well, we all have the same God.” Or, “We all travel different roads, but we are seeking the same goal.” The Catholic position was reiterated during the jubilee year of 2000 in Dominus Iesus, a document that ironically caused very little jubilation among other Christian denominations. The document, authored by the

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Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, states that the Catholic Church is the continuation of the Church Jesus founded upon Peter. With the expression subsistit in, the Second Vatican Council sought to harmonize two doctrinal statements: on the one hand, that the Church of Christ, despite the divisions which exist among Christians, continues to exist fully only in the Catholic Church, and on the other hand, that “outside of her structure, many elements can be found of sanctification and truth,” that is, in those Churches and ecclesial communities which are not yet in full communion with the Catholic Church. But with respect to these, it needs to be stated that “they derive their efficacy from the very fullness of grace and truth entrusted to the Catholic Church.” (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith 2000, 16)

According to the Congregation, the Church Christ founded exists fully only in the Catholic Church, and imperfectly in other faith communities. Elements of sanctification and truth can be found outside the structure of the Catholic Church, but the fullness of Christ’s Church, the Congregation states, is found only in the Catholic Church. The document made no reference to the ecumenical dialogue that continues between the Catholic Church and many other ecclesial communities. These dialogues had been given much life after the Second Vatican Council issued its Decree on Ecumenism, Unitatis redintegratio. Dominus Iesus said nothing much different from the Decree on Ecumenism, but it took a different tone. The Second Vatican Council’s decree admitted past failures and promoted discussions and prayer leading toward unity. It catapulted Catholics into ecumenical dialogue. Dominus Iesus seems to curtail discussion. It takes a more authoritarian tone, where the Council’s document was more conciliatory. Dominus Iesus admits that inter-religious dialogue presupposes equality, but only in regard to the dignity of human persons, not to doctrinal content. It says the Church must be primarily committed to proclaiming “the truth definitively revealed by the Lord” (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith 2000, 22). Thus, in the opinion of Dominus Iesus, evangelization comes first, dialogue second. The language of Dominus Iesus shed light on the very title of the rite used for receiving baptized Christians into the Catholic Church. The first English translation of this rite called it Reception of Baptized Christians into Full Communion with the Catholic Church (ICEL and BCL 1976). But the final translation changed the title to Reception of Baptized Christians into the Full Communion of the Catholic Church (ICEL and BCL 1988). (Note: the Latin title had not changed. The English title was made more precise.) The change of preposition from with to of revealed a world of theology. Christians baptized in another ecclesial community do not enter communion with the Catholic Church. They enter the communion of the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church does not share sacramental communion

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with other Christians. Those who are in the ecclesial communion of the Catholic Church share sacramental communion. To the theologians of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, when people join the Catholic Church they are not just transferring over, as the occasional politician switches from the Republican to the Democratic party or vice versa. Rather, a healing is happening. One who was outside full communion is received. This thinking fits with the history of the rite of reception. The early Church also faced the dilemma of Christians inside and outside the orthodox Church. Some were baptized by schismatics or heretics of Christianity. Others joined another sect after baptism in orthodox Christianity. Schismatics were reconciled with handlaying by the bishop. Heretics were reconciled with handlaying and an anointing (Turner 1993, 85–92). Although the Catholic Church does not formally label as heretics those who were baptized in other ecclesial communions, the rite of reception uses the historical and liturgical grammar that makes this assumption. For those involved in the ecumenical dialogue, this is not pretty. The rite of reception carries with it a tone of reconciliation. The liturgy and theology of the Catholic Church, therefore, have a different interpretation of the rite of reception than the actual people who undergo it. Officially, the Church sees the rite of reception as a restoration to the unicity of the Catholic Church. But most baptized candidates in the average parish see this as a way to bring a common religion to their marriage and family. Their interest relates to the house church, not to the universal church. The interests of Catholic culture should have free reign in the case of baptized Christians preparing for the rite of reception. The whole process is not a matter of Christianization, which has already happened. It is a matter of becoming Catholic.

A CATHOLIC CULTURE OF INITIATION There is, then, a Catholic culture influencing baptismal initiation and the rite of reception. Even though the rites of initiation for the unbaptized are called rites of Christian initiation, and even though their preparation assumes that inquirers are coming to Christ and only then by implication to the Catholic Church, the preparation for and celebration of initiation are unabashedly Catholic. So are the results. In cases of both the unbaptized and the baptized, joining the Catholic Church aligns a person with all that the culture perceives to be Catholic. New members may get the uniformity they desire for the faith of their household, but they also acquire personal identification with everything that is Catholic.

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The catechumenate is no longer a uniquely Catholic phenomenon. The Catholic Church pioneered its restoration in the wake of the evangelization of nations after the sixteenth century and of the liturgical renewal in the twentieth century. But other Christian Churches are now restoring the catechumenate as well. For example, the United Methodist Church has produced Come to the Waters (1996). And the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America has published Welcome to Christ (1997). Both build on the work begun by the Catholic Church, broadening the catechumenate’s appeal to Christians of other denominations. The liturgy of the Church, echoed now by other Christian Churches, has as its aim the Christian initiation of adults. But the exercise of the catechumenate in the Catholic Church has also become an enculturation into Catholicism.

MANAGING THE CATHOLIC CULTURE If its practitioners perceive Christian initiation as Catholic initiation, they will undo the heart of the rite. Enculturation into Catholicism must take place, but the overall goal should remain broad. It is a goal that all Christian Churches share: baptism into the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Catholic culture means to influence initiation, but it should be managed. Initiation should preserve its Christian center. The symbols of initiation need constant attention. Although the natural symbols will always speak to every human culture, cultural symbols will vary their meaning according to time and place. The rites of initiation call for symbols of affection, like a handshake, embrace, or kiss. They call for accepting a cross and reverencing a book. They call for music. When the Catholic Church adapts these symbols to fit the culture, it affirms the overall work of Christian initiation, while it practices a very Catholic piety: the use of a culture’s signs and symbols to express belief in God’s plan of salvation through Christ. As with any organization, the Catholic Church has developed its own vocabulary. Special terms help the Church express the uniqueness of our organization and beliefs. The vocabulary of the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults, however, is quite obscure. Terms unknown even to many Catholics include catechumen, election, scrutiny, and mystagogy. The acronym RCIA confuses those unfamiliar with it but has remained strangely popular. Such terms lift the catechumenate out of everyday experience and suspend it in a realm that seems detached, unreachable. The retranslation of these terms into more common language might help the efforts of Christian initiation, while allowing the Catholic Church to spread the news by what it does best: connect the quotidian with the divine.

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All Christian spirituality is rooted in community. Especially at the eucharist, the central celebration of faith, Catholics express belief together. In regard to baptism, the entire community of Christians shares the responsibility for the initiation of new members (RCIA 1988, 9). Inquirers will be joining a community of believers, not just a system of beliefs. The catechesis and rites of the catechumenate express this communitarian aspect of Christianity if they emphasize the role of all the people. Catholics, like other Christians, can be lulled into a privatized spirituality. Many find it difficult to think and pray as a community, rather than as individuals. But the catechumenate seeks this approach, formation in the midst of community, an essential ingredient of Christian spirituality, a particular challenge to the cultural Catholic. Catholic spirituality could also be more faithful to its place within the broader Christian perspective. Parish teams working on the precatechumenate should keep the focus of this period on Christ. Many times these sessions leap into the kind of catechesis more properly the venue of the following period of formation, the catechumenate itself. During the period of the catechumenate, the team has ample time to unfold the mysteries of Christ to catechumens. But during the precatechumenate, those interested in the Church ask their questions and the leaders keep refining their spiritual quest. Its goal is Christ. Keeping Christ at the center needs to be the core of all Catholic tradition. Catholic culture can even be perceived in the gifts the newly baptized receive. After an Easter Vigil baptism, the neophyte may receive gifts from friends and family. Many of these are praiseworthy items in and of themselves: missals, rosaries, and lives of the saints, for example. But they reinforce a privatized spirituality that puts the newly baptized in prayerful isolation of the very community he or she has just joined. The best gifts for the newly baptized will help them integrate into the broader Catholic community not just by its devotional symbols but also by its communitarian life and worship. Catholic initiation leaders will express their belief about baptism more clearly if they move the rite of reception out of the Easter Vigil and into another occasion during the year. Although adult baptisms should be celebrated at the Easter Vigil, receptions of baptized Christians may take place any time of year. “It is preferable that the reception into full communion not take place at the Easter Vigil lest there be any confusion of such baptized Christians with the candidates for baptism, possible misunderstanding of or even reflection upon the sacrament of baptism celebrated in another Church or ecclesial community, or any perceived triumphalism in the liturgical welcome into the Catholic eucharistic community” (ICL and BCL “National Statutes for the Catechumenate” 1988, #33). Celebrating these events separately will help nuance the precise nature of baptism, a participation in the death and resurrection of Christ.

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CONCLUSION Adults joining the Catholic Church come unbaptized and baptized. The unbaptized go through a process culminating in rites called Christian initiation. The baptized culminate with reception into full Catholic communion. Catholic culture influences the way Catholics welcome new members—the means of evangelization, the content of catechesis, and most importantly the ritual symbols of initiation. Catholics think their new members are joining the Catholic Church more than joining the Christian Church. They tend to think themselves different from other Christians. Consequently, the specifically Christian thrust of the catechesis and liturgy that prepares for baptism sometimes eludes Catholic leaders. In the end, a member of the Catholic Church is also a Christian. But the making of a Catholic belongs more to Catholic culture. The making of a Christian belongs to initiation.

REFERENCES Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. 2000. Dominus Iesus: On the Unicity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and the Church. Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. 1997. Welcome to Christ. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress. International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL) and A Joint Commission of Catholic Bishops’ Conferences and Bishops’ Committee on the Liturgy (BCL). 1976. Reception of Baptized Christians into Full Communion with the Catholic Church. Washington DC: Publications Office of the USCC. ———. 1988. “National Statutes for the Catechumenate.” In Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA), 363–69. Washington, DC: Publications Office of the USCC. ———. 1988. “Reception of Baptized Christians into the Full Communion of the Catholic Church.” In RCIA, 275–86. Washington DC: Publications Office of the USCC. ———. 1988. Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA). Washington, DC: Publications Office of the USCC. Turner, Paul. 1993. Sources of Confirmation from the Fathers through the Reformers. Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press. United Methodist Church. 1996. Come to the Waters. Nashville: Discipleship Resources. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. 2000. Journey to the Fullness of Life: A Report on the Implementation of the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults in the United States. Washington, DC: Publications Office of the United States Catholic Conference (USCC).

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The Idea of the Parish Michael V. McDevitt

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am a secular Roman Catholic priest assigned by a diocese in the United States of America to pastor a territorial parish. We diocesan priests do not have a rule of a religious congregation or order to follow; therefore, we are secular clergy, not regular, and there seem to have been very few rules for us up until now. American Catholic parishes are responsible for many secular cares and really are not given many blueprints to follow, so we might well ask, “what is the culture of such Catholic parishes?” Mission statements have become very popular these days. Many churches and educational institutions and even businesses have them. My mission here is to substantiate from my pastoral experience what is the identifiable Catholic culture of Roman parishes in the United States.

MY PERSONAL SPIRITUAL JOURNEY Everybody calls me “Father Mike.” I was ordained thirty-six years ago as a priest for the Roman Catholic Church in the United States. When newly ordained, I was an associate pastor at the affluent, strongly German, farming parish of St. Augustine’s in Kelso, Missouri. Later, I was pastor for a year at Our Lady of the Ozarks of Forsyth, Missouri, ministering primarily to retired folks. Then there were eleven years as pastor of a brand new parish in the rapidly expanding city of Springfield, Missouri. At first, a warehouse cathedral, that is, Butler Building, served well for a newly established parish to celebrate Mass. Later, the parishioners and I built our liturgically correct contemporary church of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton. 13

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Next, as the pastor of Sacred Heart in Poplar Bluff, on the Black River in Missouri, I was stationed with a community of faith which is 114 years old. For a substantial number of years, Asian and Filipino medical people have been very active parishioners there because of the presence of multiple medical facilities; the parish has recently been experiencing a surge of Hispanic Catholics. Presently, I am pastor of the one-hundred-year-old St. Agnes Cathedral parish in Springfield, Missouri. The only experience of being a pastor that I haven’t had is being in a cosmopolitan inner city. However, as a seminarian in my last years of theology studies, I worked during the winters and summers for three years at Immaculate Heart of Mary—in the African American project housing area in the west end of Louisville, Kentucky. With this background I have formed my vision of the Catholic culture of a parish.

THE CATHOLIC PARISH PRIESTS OF AMERICA This following little piece of religious prose, The Perfect Priest, was making its rounds several years ago. Results of a computerized survey indicate that the perfect priest preaches exactly 15 minutes. He condemns sin, but never upsets anyone. He works from six until midnight and is always a janitor. He makes $60 a week, wears good clothes, buys good books, drives a good car, and gives about $50 weekly to the poor. He is 51 years old, has been preaching for 50 years. He is wonderfully gentle and handsome. He has a yearning desire to work with teenagers, and spends all his time with senior citizens. The perfect priest smiles all the time with a straight face because he has a sense of humor that keeps him seriously dedicated to his work. He makes 15 calls daily to parish families, shut-ins, and hospitalized—spends all his time evangelizing the unchurched and is always in his office when needed.

Why does this image tickle our funny bones? Because one of the major defining elements of American Catholic parishes is the personality of the parish priest assigned as pastor or associate pastor to a local community. One of the priest/professors of my theological studies put it this way: The specific role of the priest, I would venture to say, is to make the Paschal Mystery come alive in himself, and the People of God, by the ministry of the Word and Sacrament and by what subsidiary means his personal capacities may suggest. To this he is commissioned in fellowship with others and only in fellowship with others is it fully operative. In fellowship with others, with the Bishop, with fellow presbyters, with the People of God. (Polycarp Sherwood, O.S.B., 1970, 9)

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The author of the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes was Qoheleth. The exact meaning of the name Qoheleth is debated. Since the Hebrew word qahal refers to an assembly, Qoheleth probably means someone who calls forth or presides over a meeting. The Greek word used to translate qahal is ekklesia, a citizens’ assembly in ancient Greece. The title Ecclesiastes is really a demarcation that the preacher is the one who calls the community of faith together—a type of a religious barker. In American Catholicism the local priest is an essential part of his parish. In 2002, the tremor caused by the scandal of pedophilia within the American Catholic clergy even witnesses to this relationship of Catholic pastor to his parish. My point here is truer than we care to admit. The impact of a Catholic priest upon a parish does not seem to be found to this degree within the pastoral leadership of other Christian denominations, except perhaps for the major Protestant mega congregations that have recently developed in some of the larger cities of the United States. Our concern in Catholicism is, of course, that the local parish not be in any way a personality cult but, rather, a Christo-centric community!

THE NEIGHBORHOOD CATHOLIC CHURCH There really are no set designs for neighborhood ecclesial communities. But it is with one’s neighboring parishioners—often described as a community of faith under the patronage of some saint—that most people in America experience Roman Catholicism. Many of our Catholic parishes are dedicated to the memory of a particular saint, and along with statues of Mary and Joseph, have elaborate shrines dedicated to patron saints. Indeed, the Little Poor Man of Assisi is a very popular Catholic saint and many American parishes have memorials to him. In fact, in my own diocese, we have just opened a new parish called St. Francis of Assisi, Nixa, Missouri. What is a Roman Catholic parish if it is not unique within our Protestant religious culture of America? Catholics are different. Indeed, Catholics in the United States seem to be extremely creative in detailing religious components that make up a distinctly Roman experience of Christianity. From the multiple institutions of Catholic schooling, to Knights of Columbus anti-abortion memorials, to exquisite stained glass windows and pews with kneelers, to bingos (possibly not as exclusive to Roman Catholicism as they once were) and raffles, to marriage annulment cases, Catholics do it differently from other Christians in the United States. I once was showing a child of another Christian tradition the inside of the local Catholic church building. In offering his youthful gratitude to me, he stated his thanks for my showing him a cathedral! This idealized

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grandeur of Roman Catholic churches (as opposed to most Protestant sanctuaries) is one of the defining elements of our tradition. Many people outside of our tradition enjoy viewing architectural elements of our worship spaces. From the outside looking in, and for those of us inside as Catholics, liturgical environment defines a foundational part of our identity as an ecclesial people. The liturgists warn us that what we construct as our worship edifices will later define worship itself. Catholics love their liturgy and often are critical of how Mass is celebrated. Driven by their faith, generation after generation of Roman Catholics in the United States has sacrificed to build neighborhood church buildings for their parishes. In an effort to take into account adult maturity, current initiation of those joining the Catholic Church ideally respects the story of everyone’s spiritual journey. We allow the consideration of one’s personal experience of grace to dominate our church today. If the Catholic Church has gone through any positive renewal in the last forty years, respect for everyone should stand uppermost as a feature of the Vatican II Church. One does not have to be in the adult world very long to discover that along with personhood comes baggage, and this is true of the spiritual journey. The local church becomes enfleshed by the folks who make up parishes. The following unpublished poem expresses one person’s journey into a parish community, with both the individual and the parish carrying baggage but demonstrating respect: Sanctuary I came to the Church Not so much to find God, As seeking refuge from a world Where love does not exist for some And people have become disposable. I was weary of suspicion’s reign And always armed against hurt. At first, I believed I’d finally found a peaceful place. They welcomed me, smiling lovingly And talking about how God loves us. After a while, I began to see That some of their words were empty; Some of their piety an act And justice was still a crippled thing. Suspicion crashed back into my life And I took up all the armor against hurt That I’d been convinced to lay down. As I headed for the door To leave that place, a knowing came;

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I could not leave, There were no more undiscovered lands. But because I had entered, The door to my heart was permanently Wedged open just a little And God had entered and settled inside. He showed me then That peace cannot be searched out In places or in people. The only place where it can be found Is in tender human hearts, And mine is the only one I can hold accountable for anything. So I went back inside and looked around. I saw that some of the people there Needed me because I believed More than they could.

“Sanctuary” was written by Robby Robinson, a person who came into the church after the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) through the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA). The revised rites of Catholic initiation in the United States were studied in the 1970s and the vernacular, official version of the RCIA for America became effective on July 1, 1988. I helped Robby join the Church when the RCIA process was just starting in the United States. Robby is a laywoman who has been Coordinator of Religious Education in several small parishes in Oklahoma and Missouri.

COMMONALITIES AMONG CATHOLIC PARISHES IN THE UNITED STATES The four traditional marks of Mother Church are that she is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. From the outset we would be defeating our study of the existence of a specific Catholic culture if we were to say that no two Roman parishes are exactly the same. Because of the peculiarities of diocesan affiliations and the particular abilities of individual personnel in local parochial leadership, there are certainly variations. Yet in the Catholic parishes of the United States, there exists a commonality which defines our church. It is interesting to note that in such a mobile society as is the American experience, many Catholics make a positive transition several times in their lives: from one parish to another they find Mother Church over and over again. How does this happen? What is this Catholic subculture? Hidden agendas and expectations of Catholics can be successfully satisfied when members of our church transfer from parish to parish.

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Although individual Catholics and parishes may be different, Ecumenism became a popularly identifiable Roman Catholic term with the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s. Our Protestant Christian sisters and brothers in the United States now allow us to occupy other sacred ground, which they may still be observing from a distance. Indeed, after these forty years of intensive dialogue, common religious respect for the various Christian traditions could be much better. Nonetheless, Catholic parishes in the United States do mimic elements that come from American Protestantism: for example, there are Bible study groups, evangelism (or in Catholic circles evangelization), fellowship halls, gospel music, Pentecostal prayer meetings, finance and building lay administrators similar to church trustees, tithing, committees made up of non-clerics akin to lay deacon boards. There are those in some quarters who question whether the Catholic Church in the United States has moved too close to the Protestant traditions of Christianity. Yet American Roman Catholics remain with open ecclesial arms extended to our separated brethren and will do so until at last the various Protestant denominations may choose to push us away. Indeed, the Decree on Ecumenism, Unitatis redintegratio (Vatican II, promulgated November 21, 1964) officially denotes many efforts of the American Catholic parish of today. But even with the Ecumenism common to American Christianity, we Roman Catholics are different. In America we are pigeonholed as being high church because of our liturgies. We celebrate the ancient tradition of having seven Sacraments that are foundational to our religious identity; indeed, we are identified as a religion by these ceremonies. Catholic subculture in America is not only experienced but it is also legislated. Rubrics are the directions written in red print in liturgical books to give the proper order on how to celebrate the Sacraments. Although some variations are now allowed, contemporary minds may view the Roman Catholic ceremonials as highly controlled, routine, and repetitive. Catholic practitioners of the very traditional interpretation of liturgy, as well as those of the extremely loose application, see our liturgical spectrum as quite wide and even off the charts. But this set of seven Catholic ceremonies remains essential today to Roman religious culture in America. Many parishes have very active liturgical committees in place. The integrity of the Church’s seven Sacraments even takes precedence over ecumenical efforts. The United States occupies a tremendous place of power in the twentyfirst century that is not without its liabilities. The Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the World, Gaudium et Spes (Vatican II, promulgated December 8, 1965) has been a challenge to Catholics everywhere and to American Catholics with their substantial financial resources. Peace and Justice Committees, Social Concerns Groups, St. Vincent de Paul Societies, Parish Kitchens and Food Pantries, and Family Life Commissions are just some

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examples. These real expenditures of parish effort are duplicated time and time again to create a contemporary American Roman Catholic milieu of a Gospel of social justice. In some ways, parishioners see the integrity of their celebration of the Sacraments as directly related to their parish’s being involved in efforts to help others. A distinctive feature of Catholicism is that we look at the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ (Pope Pius XII, Mystici Corporis Christi, June 1943), and belief in God is tethered to our very belief in the Church. St. Paul in his First Letter to the Corinthians (12:14–26) gives us the image of the church as the Body of Christ. In 1992, the Bishop of Springfield-Cape Girardeau in Southern Missouri, John J. Leibrecht, D.D., Ph.D., wrote a pastoral letter, published in our diocesan newspaper, The Mirror (April 3, 1992), entitled “The Parish: A Presence and Work of the Lord.” Bishop Leibrecht divides this pastoral letter on the parish into various subheadings. His themes are that parishes reflect the Risen Christ, they continue Christ’s presence in the world, they continue the Mission of Jesus, and they are communities; indeed, they are Eucharistic communities. Leibrecht goes on to state that parishes are called to prayer and to the missions of evangelizing and teaching. Under the subheading of Parish Structure, Leibrecht says, “Whether the parish be described as the Body of Christ, the people of God, as vine and branches, or as a community of faith, order is necessary” (10). The Bishop concludes that there are essential connections that parishes have with a diocese and the universal Church. In his final remarks, Bishop Leibrecht reflects: The name of my parish is St. Joseph, Sacred Heart, Immaculate Conception. In the final analysis, however, the name of every parish is Jesus Christ . . . . To name a parish St. Joseph, Sacred Heart, Immaculate Conception is a traditional Catholic practice. Such names, in a unique way, simply reflect an individual article of human truth about the encyclopedic God-made-man, Jesus. (11)

The Catholic American parish, as the household of God listening and obeying God, must be a light to the nations, modeling and making a spectacle of herself as the very Bride of Christ. Avery Dulles, S.J., a priest now named a Cardinal of the Church, wrote the Introduction to Vatican II’s conservative Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium (promulgated November 21, 1964), in Abbott’s 1966 book The Documents of Vatican II. In his books Models of the Church (1974) and The Resilient Church (1977), this very same Jesuit Cardinal, Avery Dulles, gave us the idea that there are multiple models by which we can view the Church of Jesus Christ. The pastoral perspective of the Church on the most down to earth level is horizontal, parish-by-mission-parish establishing a subculture throughout the world, though not of the world. Possibly this comprehensive and

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universal aspect of every Catholic parish is what Bishop Leibrecht was referring to when he used the adjective encyclopedic (the widest range of all enlightenment) when referring to the God-made-man, Jesus.

THE REALITIES OF THE PARISH John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801–1890 C.E.) published a monograph in 1873 entitled The Idea of the University in which he ventured the opinion that far and away the majority of education goes on outside the academic classroom setting. With the real world of contemporary universities, his idea of true learning for life at these educational institutions may be questioned. But when it comes to the idea of parish, Roman Catholicism becomes alive and enfleshed. From a pastoral point of view, the parish is a place that provides food for the soul (Eucharist), fresh water for eternal life (Baptism), shelter for the ecclesial flock (a place to worship), and a protection against enemies (prayer and education and formation). The Latin word pastor (now priest, deacon, or lay administrator) is called to be a good shepherd of the parishioners under his or her care. The original Greek paroikia (parish) means dwelling near. But the truth of the matter is that the term parochial may give the impression that nothing else exists outside of one’s local faith community. For instance, some fundamental Protestants go so far as to rebaptize every new member of their local assembly. But we cannot allow the phenomenon of parish life to define believers so narrowly. Parishioners are the local Christian neighbors who are on their journey to eternal life together. There are other church neighborhoods, however, which are doing the same thing. The more successful parishes have a way of working together. A woman who heralded from a large metropolitan parish with multiorganizational structures once sent a letter to me about her transfer to a new location in the world and into a parish much reduced from what she was accustomed to. She narrated that the little parish had the same concerns as the metropolitan parish. For instance, would there be enough money in the small parish’s coffers to respond to the liturgist’s request to change the two Mass candles which were now only nubs, and could the maintenance person also be allowed to purchase wasp spray for the ceiling over the altar? It does not take much to realize that finances and the physical plant are practical concerns, along with the liturgy, that drain much of the efforts and energies of every parish. Stewardship of time, talent, and treasure are more recent additions to the contemporary culture of a Catholic parish. The parish is commonly the first locus of a Catholic’s pattern of financial contributions and acceptance of church fund-raising for the spread of the Gospel. It is often where one is challenged to become a volunteer.

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I am afraid that in the vast universe of issues many times things of little consequence to Salvation History can drive a local community of faith into disarray. Because of the very nature of authority in Roman Christianity, these brush fires usually do not last long because some force makes its authority felt, and that’s that. To a point, Catholic parishes in America may have assimilated various democratic habits. Yet administrative and ordained authorities with personally assumed dominance over a ministry are real elements of the local situation. There is the influence of tradition systemic and realized in every single Roman Catholic parish in the United States, if not the world. (See John Paul II and the piety of Divine Mercy Sunday now celebrated on the last day, a Sunday, of the Octave of Easter.) When some parishioner says “We never did it that way before,” a project can be stopped in mid-air until all the religious and parochial viewpoints are heard, or until some higher authority can be invoked. Interestingly enough, Catholic parochial efforts also include inactive members who have fallen away. Many do return to being active and their influence is felt in many parishes. The Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults is often used as a vehicle for returning Catholics to come back to the Church. Sometimes returning, fallen away Catholics romantically try to recover something they feel that they may have lost long ago; on the other hand, some come back with what they see as valuable elements of their experiences when they were out of the church. The subculture of many Catholic parishes has religiously and even politically conservative and liberal tensions working themselves out on the fringe of local Church life. Some Catholics are getting involved in more traditional practices of former times, and some parishes revel in the fact that they are reestablishing pious ceremonies of antiquity. However, after thirty-six years, I can say that, by way of inclination and disposition, most American Roman Catholics are tolerant of others and moderate to a fault. It takes a lot of effort and real education on an issue to get individual Catholics and, even more, so a parish riled up on matters that count. In the eyes of Catholics, there is no middle ground. Either parishes are very active and successful, or they are dying. Truth be said, there are many parishes that really do just struggle to maintain themselves. Like Martha in the Gospel, the tendency is for the local faith community to commit itself to the heresy of activity, sponsoring events for the sake of keeping parishioners busy. Some of our parishes function like middle-class country clubs, sponsoring golf tournaments and women’s Catholic Bridge tournaments. There are trips to the casinos and volunteer lists for this month’s Vegas night. Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Little League sports, soccer and youth trips to New Orleans, Habitat for Humanity and bowling leagues are on Catholic parish calendars all the time. Frequently, parish dinners are better than local restaurant fare. Scheduled weddings and baptisms seem to be listed

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without comment along with the social events of a parish. Only the more creative parishes are able to officially demark in their weekly bulletins what is more central to discipleship. There ought to be some accounting for the amount of energy that an event can drain from parish resources. Should a parochial funfest involve as much interest as the parish’s celebration of the Triduum? It seems as though many Catholic parishes cannot critique the expenditure of their energies. In many cities and towns in the United States, membership in a local Catholic Church is to be socially alive. American Protestantism is also giving into this same heresy of activity, though both they and we Romans seem to have members of our congregations who are speaking up now as critical prophets. There are at least three distinctive groups in a parish: the pre-Vatican II believers whose sentiments are not dying out as quickly as one might suppose; the Vatican II Generation; and finally the post-Vatican II people who are really struggling. As one can easily see, this Church Council of the 1960s is a defining moment for all levels of church life. Although all sixteen documents touch the American parish to some degree, among the Vatican II decrees, declarations, and constitutions, seven are notable for our purposes: the Constitution on Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Councilium, December 4, 1963; the Decree on the Instruments of Social Communication, Inter Mirifica, December 4, 1963; the Decree on the Bishops’ Pastoral Office in the Church, Christus Dominus, October 28, 1965; the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum, November 18, 1965; the Decree on Apostolate of the Laity, Apostolicam Actuositatem, November 18, 1965; the Declaration on Religious Freedom, Dignitatis Humanae, December 8, 1965; and the Decree on the Ministry and Life of Priests, Presbyterorum Ordinis, December 8, 1965. All of the documents of the 1960s Council changed Catholicism of that time and the way Catholics see themselves today. Since the Vatican II Council, the Catholic Church has been and continues to be touched by the Holy Spirit in ways that seem unprecedented by way of the suddenness of impact. These decrees, declarations, and constitutions caused an implosion of ministries and, at the same time, major dysfunctions for the Church.

CHURCH MOVEMENTS: MARKS OF DYSFUNCTION OR THE SPIRIT? There are a substantial number of folks who question the compatibility of the efforts of post-Vatican II people with the wider Church. George Weigel writes a weekly column, The Catholic Difference, syndicated in fortyplus American newspapers. Most recently, in his book The Courage to Be

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Catholic: Crisis, Reform, and the Future of the Church (Basic Books, 2002), he has defended the romantic attempts of the post-Vatican II people to recapture the faith of former times. Weigel writes that many post-Vatican II people possessively see their Church in a contemporary crisis and want to be more conventionally orthodox than, in his words, the Catholic Lite (7), Vatican II generation. These polemical fundamentalists can be seen, for example, in Mother Angelica and EWTN—Eternal Word Television Network—or the summer youth conferences sponsored by the Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio. In order to be the traditionalists they want to be, these younger Catholics go to Mass daily, study classical elements of the faith and church history, do devotions and read the Bible in their personal effort toward substantive formation. A very small church group, the Neo-Catechumenate Way of new students of faith, founded in 1967, also attempts to enthusiastically revisit the primitive kerygma of Christianity. At Saint Peter’s Square on May 30, 1998, the artist/musician and layman, Kiko Argüello, founder of this group, was one of four speakers to be handpicked by the Pope to speak. Needless to say, with some distrust in the Church of gnostic groups emerging, these very groups themselves distrust the wider Church. Since Vatican II has made its influence felt, parish life, which had a tendency to be inner-directed, is now more outer-directed. In former times, to be visited by the priest for the annual block collection and counted on the parish rolls were very important. Today, by being part of small base communities (a notion from Latin America), or seeking out intentional communities, or exercising specialized ministries, even to creating renewal groups outside of parish boundaries, the faithful are experimenting with new ways of doing things. Lay catechists have taken up a real role in Catholic evangelism. From at least the 1970s, feminism and strong Catholic women leaders have been phenomena within the Church. Even more so in 2008, there is the disappointment with the American Roman Catholic clergy. In our hearts, we know that voices of the faithful or lay Catholic parish leadership forums now have more of an incentive to legitimately represent the Church. There is no going back. Catholics see themselves as a sinful, pilgrim people worthy of redemption. “Where two or three are gathered in My name” (Matthew 18:20), Jesus our Savior is present and the Church exists. Traditionally, Catholics have been faithful in receiving the ministry of their clergy and vowed religious, and feel indebted to them. Far and away the contemporary Church is now made up of laity with their sensus fidelilum (the laity’s perspective) which must be honored. Footnote number 40 in Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium (November 21, 1964) states that the “sense of the faithful” was a favorite theme of John Henry Cardinal Newman.

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Some contemporary commentators ask the question whether Mother Church of the twenty-first century is at the point of critical mass, ready to explode. Universal church scars do leave their mark on local parishes. There is the sinful, scandalous, and criminal behavior of some of our church members from history and at present. But “You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18). Normal parishioners believe these words of Sacred Scripture as much as they believe in their orthodox teaching concerning about Catholics the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. There is something resilient (Avery Dulles, S.J., 1977, The Resilient Church: The Necessity and Limits of Adaptation). There is a religious survival of the fittest of those of us who have our Roman Catholicism properly grounded and live the call to perfection. God calls us to perdure. Although we may not understand how the progress of our beloved faith is presently going to work itself out, “the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail.” We Catholics interpret this promise of Jesus as referring to the Institution of the Roman Catholic Church. What makes Roman Catholic parishioners so strong in their allegiance to the Church? How the following elements fit together is even more mysterious to those of us who are her adherents.

FOUR COMMON CATHOLIC TRADITIONS There are four common traditions or practices or emphases that permeate Catholic parish life: those surrounding death, morality, penance, and Sunday Mass. “Most Catholics do better than other people when it comes to death,” said the non-Catholic owner of a local funeral home. Catholics have official ways of confronting death. I know that the Sacrament of the Sick is among the seven Sacraments of the church, but I recall my first pastor telling me—in 1971 when I was a new priest—that I gave out the Sacrament too casually. In fact, he, as a monsignor of the Church, had only anointed three living people in his fifty years of ministry. So, I remember the old qualification of being in extremo mortis (at the last moment of death). When death visits a Catholic home, the Church is to be called in. The fact that parishioners telephone parish rectories when someone is seriously hurt in a car accident or dying of cancer, tells us that Catholics are taught to ask God’s help when someone is seriously ill and dying. Fourteen Stations of the Cross adorn the sidewalls of many Catholic churches and graphically portray the death journey of Jesus. Catholics teach their very young to memorize the prayer Hail Mary which contains the closing words “pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.”

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Catholic funding maintains legions of church and parish cemeteries as holy ground, second in sanctity only to the acreage where the church edifices stand. Memorial plaques adorn parish churches as remembrances of deceased members of the family. Mass Intentions often are designated for the repose of the souls of our beloved dead. There are the wake services, reception of the body at church, vespers for the deceased, and funeral liturgies celebrated by fellow parishioners, who provide condolence meals afterwards. A successful parish has an updated ministry to the elderly, making sure that aged parishioners are currently anointed. Catholics confront death with crucifixes portraying the corpus of Jesus on an old Roman instrument of death, with pietas of a grieving Mary holding her deceased Son on her lap, with purgatorial societies praying for the dead. In some ways Catholics could be seen as preoccupied with suffering and death. Carmelite spirituality and parish missions often help parishioners to pass through the dark night of the soul. Catholics are taught to accept death and the tragedies of life. Secondly, Catholics know that true discipleship involves morality/ good works. Catholics are taught as children to memorize the Ten Commandments according to the Greek numbering of the Old Testament, the Septuagent. Most Protestants follow the original Hebrew numbering. In recent times well-meaning believers have Ten Commandment placards staked out on their front lawns. Yahweh is the faithful one and we prove ourselves as God’s people by living these ten classical statutes from the Bible. The moral concerns of the Ten Commandments and deference given to sinfulness are treasured in Catholic quarters. The Scriptures tell us that the Lord will never walk away from those who keep these ten precepts. All believers in the Judeo-Christian tradition know this. Catholics actively teach morality and ethics to their children even perhaps to the fault of neglecting to make the Scriptural connections. Sin and the formation of conscience are important themes in Catholic circles. Moral theology is a discipline of study for Mother Church. The proper mores and the failure of personal and societal sin are common Catholic themes. The ethical magisterium of the Church seems to be very public and all pervasive. Supposedly Catholics know what sin and guilt are. Roman Catholics have a tremendous corpus of moral teachings to nourish their commitments to their religion. Morality is, perhaps, even more important in the Catholic parish than reading the Bible from cover to cover. There is not an all-pervasive effort in Roman Catholicism to quote scripture passages to establish a specific ethical challenge to live by. How, in fact, do Catholics read the Bible? Most Catholics are still comfortable having the Bible read to them publicly. As we look at this question, we first have to ask the question how long has adult literacy been universal?

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More or less only in the last century in our own country. Personal Bibles were not even available to the common person until after the Gutenberg Press, six hundred years ago. Therefore, even for recent generations of Catholics, we have had the customary experience of having Bible passages read to us within the official liturgies of the Church. Since Catholic tradition goes back at least 1,900 years, we are very comfortable having the Sacred Scriptures read to us by others. In another sense, the Bible is fully reflected as the living word of God when it is read as a faith community experience. Historically, Catholics in parishes were not encouraged to read the Bible for themselves until the twentieth century. As a third defining Roman Church element, there is a categorical imperative to discipline one’s bad behavior. Catholics do not realize that this maxim has a strong tether to the Bible. Franciscan spirituality within the Church says there is a necessity to do penance for sin. (See Outline of the History and Spirituality of the Franciscan Penitential Movement by Father Raffaele Pazzelli, T.O.R., 1978, 3.) The Latin penitentia is the translation of the Greek word metanoia, both words translating what the great St. Paul meant as conversion. Catholics know how to eat fish on Fridays during Lent, with some parishes having Friday fish dinners all year long; they know that they are to fast an hour before receiving communion and all day on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday; and Catholics know how to offer up prayer and almsgiving as sacrifices. Penance develops selfdiscipline. Discipline is a tremendous help to self-development. In the 1973 educational document of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, To Teach as Jesus Did, a consistent element of Catholic education propounded was the value of the discipline of Christian morality (8; see also 9, 11, 20, 23, 41, 107, 111). Many would agree that the American Catholic Church truly speaks a challenging prophesy in putting together this connection of personal discipline and education. There is the somewhat controversial, but significantly influential, twentieth-century Catholic movement known as Opus Dei. It originated in Spain in 1928. Since the 1980s, Opus Dei is the only personal prelature in the Roman Catholic Church. (A personal prelature is an entity within the Catholic Church that is defined by a group of persons rather than by a geographical area, such as a diocese, headed by their own intact authority structure.) This organization, relatively small in the United States with only 3,000 core members, is a very secretive and conservative Catholic association. Lay members, under the spiritual direction of their handpicked ordained Catholic priests, are to live lives of holiness in the workplace and at home. Opus Dei numeraries and their associates are dedicated to be companion workers to the Pope and to traditional Catholic praxis. Its members are to exercise self-denial in their lives. Having their own Opus

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Dei prayers and customs, their “plan of life” includes daily Mass, the rosary, spiritual reading, and mental prayer. Even if one is hesitant about some Roman Catholic penance practices, all Catholics expect a certain self-discipline among fellow church members. Criticism of ourselves and the fraternal correction of others is part of the Catholic amendment of life. Though basic individual human rights are essential, Catholic culture stops short of free license. Even if we feel we are correct, our Church teaches us that we do not have the right to impose ourselves on others or to manipulate others. Catholics are taught that the individual should sacrifice his/her own wants and desires for the good of others. The Sacrament of Penance celebrates for Catholics what has been elucidated here. Fourth and finally, of all the public rites celebrated by Catholics, the weekly schedule of Masses throughout the year is the apex of parish life. I once wrote to my parishioners the following in the St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Parish Newsletter (July 1984, 1–2): Sunday Mass is at the heart of Catholic life. We are told that one can judge the health of one’s Catholicism by one’s love for the Mass . . . . We don’t delude ourselves in thinking that our parish’s celebration of the liturgy leaves nothing to be desired. Maybe the charm of our Sunday services is the constant weekly struggle to do better with our worship offered to the Lord. So many, including we priests, do put so much of ourselves into these parish celebrations of the Eucharist, that I am sure everyone appreciates the efforts and are inspired. But the Eucharist is more than what we as human beings put into it. We believe that Jesus gave us the memorial of His body and His blood! The Lord Himself initiates and sustains what we do when we come together for the Eucharist. Please consider the following points: A. Liturgy Itself The Symbols and words of Mass are beautiful; but they are empty if we individually and as a community fail to see them within the context of faith. They are only a means whereby we attempt to reach God. As followers of Jesus, this is the way we believe He wants it done. If we rely on how a priest holds his hands or how beautiful it all looks, we will eventually be disappointed. The symbol should lead us on to an awareness of (1) God and His activity in our lives, and (2) our attempts at living the Christian life. The symbols soon wear out if we do not pass beyond them to real prayer. Granted, there are certain adverse limitations on the Mass which a mixed group of all ages raises, and the personal habits of a priest may encourage; but this is a reality, and the way any group of human beings function when the lines of age, talent, and interest are attempted to be bridged.

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Michael V. McDevitt B. The Mystical Body, the Church The people of God, who are themselves Christians, attempt to become the spiritual body of Christ when they come to the Liturgy. Having become one with Our Lord and one another at Communion, they are sent out at the end of Mass to present to the world the image and message of God. We actually become the voices, hands, and hearts of the Christian God in the eyes of our fellow man. If we are understanding, our God is seen as understanding. If we are not, God is seen as harsh. The Catholic people as Church are in a very real way sent out at the end of Mass as the Mystical Body of Christ—actually bringing His love to our world. C. The Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist: As Catholics we must believe that Christ is really and truly present in the sacrament of the Eucharist for, besides Sacred Scripture saying so (Matthew 26:26–28 / Mark 14:22–24 / Luke 22:19–20 / 1 Corinthians 11:23–25 / John 6:51) the terms of the New Covenant are between God the Father and God the Son. Our Mass, besides being a “thanksgiving offering” to the Father through the Son, is also a renewal of this New Covenant. Much Old Testament symbolism of a covenant ceremony is present in the Mass. Christ for our part has to be present to renew the New Testament with God, his Father. The Sunday Eucharist should be what we look forward to all week long and should be the source of our spiritual nourishment for the week ahead. As Catholics we cannot and do not take lightly the Sunday obligation to participate in liturgy. We are now asking everyone who has been more or less casual about this ancient tradition of ours to reconsider their practice and habits.

No matter what the statistics are, Catholic parishes in the United States have to respond to an essential expectation of their parishioners to provide for Mass; hence, the recent influx of international priests into our country. Yet in our less than idealistic world today, with such a radical decrease of vocations in the United States in the last forty years, we now have a ritual for Sunday Celebrations in the Absence of a Priest (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops 1996).

CONCLUSION These four elements distinctly circumscribe so much of what goes on in the Roman Catholic parish: how Catholics seem to be preoccupied with death, live out their faith ethos essentially by practicing morality, do penance for their sins, and understand their Sunday Mass obligation. National Roman parishes of Asians and Hispanic congregations, as well as African American Catholic Churches, may vary somewhat in these practices (Quinceaneras for Hispanic girls turning fifteen years of age rival

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what we Anglos do for our daughters’ weddings); yet they still live out a discipleship with Jesus, identifiable with other Roman Catholic parishes of the United States. Although ecclesial dogma teaches that bishops enjoy the fullness of priesthood and diocesan territories form the local Church, most Catholics identify with their neighborhood faith communities headed by a person exercising the role of pastor—a priest, or a deacon, or a religious sister, or a lay catechist. This pastoral setting of a flock with a caring shepherd is recognized as the ideal of what Church is and what parishes are. If the philosophical discipline of Phenomenology were stringently applied to the subculture of all American Catholic parishes, one would find a distinctively Roman stage for the locus of God’s grace. I will bring my own story to an end here. If it is well written and to the point, that is what I wanted; if it poorly done and mediocre, that is the best I could do. Just as it is harmful to drink wine alone or water alone, whereas mixing wine with water makes a more pleasant drink that increases delight, so a skillfully composed story delights the ears of those who read the work. Let this, then, be the end. (2 Maccabees 15:37–39)

REFERENCES Abbott, Walter M., S.J. 1966. The Documents of Vatican II. New York: Herder and Herder. Coriden, James A. 1996. The Parish in Catholic Tradition: History, Theology, and Canon Law. New York: Paulist Press. Duggan, Robert. 1996. Parish Liturgy: A Handbook for Renewal. Kansas City: Sheed and Ward. Dulles, Avery, S.J. 1966. “Introduction” to Lumen Gentium (Dogmatic Constitution on the Church). In The Documents of Vatican II, edited by Walter M. Abbott, S.J. New York: Herder and Herder, 9–13. ———. 1974. Models of the Church. Garden City, New York: Doubleday. ———. 1977. The Resilient Church: The Necessity and Limits of Adaptation. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Forster, Patricia, and Sweetser, Thomas. 1999. Transforming the Parish: Models for the Future. Franklin, Wisconsin: Sheed and Ward. Froehle, Bryan T., and Gautier, Mary L. 2000. CATHOLICISM USA: A Portrait of the Catholic Church in the United States. Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA), Georgetown University. Mary Knoll, New York: Orbis Books. Gibson, David. 2003. The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful Are Shaping a New American Catholicism. New York: Harper One. Greeley, Andrew. 2004. The Catholic Revolution: New Wine, Old Wineskins, & the Second Vatican Council. Berkeley: University of California Press. International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL) and A Joint Commission of Catholic Bishops’ Conferences and Bishops’ Committee on the Liturgy

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(BCL). 1988. Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA). Washington, DC: Publications Office of the USCC. Keeler, Robert F. Parish! 1997. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company. Leibrecht, John J. April 3, 1992. “The Parish: A Presence and Work of the Lord” (Pastoral Letter from Bishop Leibrecht, Diocese of Springfield-Cape Girardeau, Missouri). In The Mirror (Catholic Newspaper of the Diocese of SpringfieldCape Girardeau): 5–12. McDevitt, Michael V. July 1984. “Dear Parishioners.” Parish Newsletter of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Parish, Springfield, Missouri: 1–2. Newman, John Henry. 1982. The Idea of a University. Ed. Martin J. Svaglic. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. Pazzelli, Raffaele, T.O.R. 1978. Outline of the History and Spirituality of the Franciscan Penitential Movement (The Origins of the Third Order). Rome: Unpublished manuscript. Pope Pius XII. June 1943. Mystici Corporis Christi. Robinson, Robby. 1984. “Sanctuary.” Unpublished poem. Sherwood, Polycarp. 1970. “Alleluia: Papers of Polycarp Sherwood, O.S.B.” Resonance 5.1: 9–12 Steinfels, Peter. 2003. A People Adrift: The Crisis of the Roman Catholic Church in America. New York: Simon & Schuster. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. 1996. Liturgy Documentary Series, Volume 10: Sunday Celebrations in the Absence of a Priest. Washington, DC: Publications Office of the USCCB. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. 1973. To Teach as Jesus Did. Washington, DC: Publications Office of the USCCB, Weigel, George. 2002. The Courage to Be Catholic: Crisis, Reform, and the Future of the Church. New York: Basic Books.

3 ✛

For the Laborer Is Worthy of His Hire Gerald L. Miller, Ph.D.

The harvest is abundant but the laborers are few; so ask the master of the harvest to send out laborers for his harvest. . . . Stay in the same house and eat and drink what is offered to you, for the laborer is worthy of his hire. (Luke 10:4, 7) There is a dictate of natural justice more imperious and more ancient than any bargain between man and man, namely, that wages must be enough to support the wage earner in reasonable and frugal comfort. (Pope Leo XIII 1891, 45) “Working full-time and year-round is, for more and more Americans, not enough.” (Barrington 2000, A2)

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resently there are at least 140 living-wage ordinances that have been enacted across the United States, coupled with numerous additional living-wage campaigns currently in progress. Such legislation involves a great deal of controversy regarding issues of economic and social justice, but is primarily centered on a view that the strict market approach to wage determination results in unacceptably low wages for the working poor. The argument often takes this line of reasoning: if market wage rates are not high enough to lift certain full-time workers out of poverty according to our own governmental poverty thresholds, then legislation establishing a living wage is required. This argument gains further strength in a 31

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weak economy characterized by large layoffs, high unemployment rates, and stagnant wage growth. Underlying such legislative enactments is the mathematics of the current federal minimum wage, recently increased for the first time since 1997 to $5.85 an hour. Full-time work at the minimum wage now equates to $12,168 annually. This is below the latest poverty thresholds for a family of four, a family of three, and even a family of two (see U.S. Census Bureau 2006). Thus, living-wage legislation calls for an hourly amount greater than the national minimum wage. Available evidence suggests that this position is not without foundation. A report by Linda Barrington, of The Conference Board, “shows that an American holding a full-time job in the late 1990s was still as likely to fall below the official poverty line as a similar worker in the 1980s, and more likely to do so than a full-time worker in the 1970s. . . . Working fulltime and year-round is, for more and more Americans, not enough. This is not the outcome one would expect from the longest economic expansion in economic history” (Barrington 2000, A2). Even in the face of such information, the arguments against livingwage enactments are many and varied, emphasizing that the effects on small businesses and specific, especially service-oriented, industries are negative; that the results on local economic development and the recruitment of new business are harmful; that many more low-wage workers are covered by such legislation than full-time, year-round heads of households; that there are already government programs in place, such as the EITC (Earned Income Tax Credit), for such workers; and that there ought not to be any further government interference in the marketplace. The acceptance of such arguments is strong, backed by decades of articles and position papers, and the preponderant weight of the economics profession itself. One of the most fundamental tenets of all of economics is reliance on, and acceptance of, the market solution as being, ceteris paribus, a more optimal position than can be attained by any degree of governmental interference. Supply and demand forces are to be left alone in the determination of equilibrium in the marketplace. Supply and demand will set the appropriate market price, the amount to be bought and sold, and even the wages of workers. Thus, what a person is paid, the hourly wage rate, should be determined by the free play of market forces. Governments, trade unions, and others should desist from interfering with market wage rates. In fact, the essential argument from economists regarding market intervention is that those very people the interference is designed to help will invariably be harmed economically and otherwise as unintended consequences of such non-market action.

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And yet the influence of the economics profession has not been sufficient to silence ongoing calls, usually from religious, social, and labor reformers, joined by politicians, especially those representing poor local districts, for market intervention on the part of the working poor. Part of the explanation for a lack of complete acceptance of the economists’ position lies in the very economic success that the economics profession has helped engineer in the United States. The greatest economic success in American history, the record economic expansion of the 1990s, has, by its tremendous positive impact on incomes and wealth formation, also served to emphasize the increasingly large economic gap between the rich and poor in the United States—a gap that persists. For these religious, social, labor, and political reformers, the great imbalance, and therefore injustice, of the differential, market-dictated rewards at both ends of the wage/earnings distribution, serves as the baseline motive force for change. Evidence of this imbalance abounds: over the past several decades, there has been what Brookings Institute economist Gary Burtless calls a “startling increase” in the gap between wealthier and poorer Americans. . . . Earners in the top quintile make almost 20-fold what earners in the bottom quintile make; that margin has doubled over the past two decades. The top 1% of earners holds about 40% of the country’s wealth, or more than double the percentage of only a quarter century ago. . . . No less an authority than (former) Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has declared that a widening income gap potentially poses “a major threat to our security.” . . . It isn’t asking too much to ask that the rising tide of the world’s most innovative and successful economy lift rowboats as well as yachts. (Hunt 2000, A27)

The imbalance that the market solution has led to between the rich and the poor in the United States has become a constant source of criticism regarding the optimality of the free market outcome. This large and growing gap in income and wealth between the rich and the poor is one major reason that those who find these results of market forces unconscionable, including the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), have begun pushing for “policies that increase the minimum wage so that it becomes a living wage” (USCCB 1999, 10).

HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE LIVING-WAGE CONCEPT According to the original exposition of the living wage principle by Pope Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum (1891), . . . each worker, as head of a household, had a right to a wage sufficient to maintain himself, his wife, and children in reasonable comfort. (Worland 2001, 15)

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But what exactly is a living wage? Although one can find references to such terminology in the past, the widespread use of living-wage terminology is a relatively modern phenomenon. Nevertheless, as a concept it has a long and storied history and, interestingly enough, the idea of a living wage predates the minimum-wage legislation that the living wage is now being resurrected to enhance. Philosophers, theologians, economists, popes, presidents, politicians, social and labor reformers, and others have weighed in on the essential principle, using varied terminology, such as fair pay, just wage, or family wage. The Catholic Church, through what has come to be known as Catholic social teaching, has commented on this issue for over one hundred years (see Miller), and this commentary clearly illustrates continuing issue refinement over time. Statement of the living wage concept begins with Pope Leo XIII, in his classic 1891 papal encyclical, Rerum Novarum (Encyclical on Capital and Labor), which explains that “there is a dictate of natural justice more imperious and more ancient than any bargain between man and man, that wages must be enough to support the wage earner in reasonable and frugal comfort” (45). By 1931, Pope Pius XI wrote, in Quadragesimo Anno (Fortieth Anniversary of Rerum Novarum): “in the first place, the wage paid to the workingman should be sufficient for the support of himself and his family. . . . Social justice demands that reforms be introduced without delay which will guarantee every adult workingman just such a wage” (71). Moreover, as Stephen T. Worland notes, “evidently, for Pius XI, the achievement of wage justice requires compliance with two different principles. The wage rate must, first, allow the firm to stay in business, and second, provide the worker with income sufficient to support himself and his family” (Worland 2001, 15). These writings of the Catholic Church began impacting the world by being reflected in social and political observations and enactments. As Worland points out, “. . . American commentators made the policy inference that the natural right to a living wage provides the justification for minimum wage legislation. In 1906, Father John A. Ryan, the ‘labor priest’ who became the New Deal’s favorite Catholic theologian, took Pope Leo’s principle to mean that ‘as protector of natural rights the state ought to compel employers to pay a living wage’” (Worland 2001, 15). On June 25, 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law the Fair Labor Standards Act, establishing a national minimum wage of $0.25 an hour. By 1944, in his State of the Union address, Roosevelt stated: we have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not freemen.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff

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of which dictatorships are made. In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race, or creed. Among these are the right to a useful and remunerative job (and) . . . the right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation. (n.p.)

In 1963, Pope John XXIII added, in Pacem in Terris (Peace on Earth): “furthermore—and this must be specially emphasized—the worker has a right to wages determined by criterions of justice, and sufficient, therefore, in proportion to available resources, to give the worker and his family a standard of living in keeping with the dignity of the human person” (20). Pope John Paul II, in 1981, in Laborem Exercens (Human Work), tightened and extended the argument, using the term family wage: “just remuneration for the work of an adult who is responsible for a family . . . what is called a family wage—that is, a single salary given to the head of the family for his work, sufficient for the needs of the family without the spouse having to take up gainful employment outside the home.” The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines a just wage as “the legitimate fruit of work. To refuse or withhold it can be a grave injustice. In determining fair pay, both the needs and the contributions of each person must be taken into account. . . . Agreement between the parties is not sufficient to justify morally the amount to be received in wages” (1994, #2434). The idea of a living wage, promulgated by Pope Leo XIII in 1891, has since been developed and refined through the concepts of fair pay, a just wage, and a family wage. All share the baseline definition that such a wage should be enough to support the wage earner and his or her family in reasonable and frugal comfort. This right to earn enough was boldly put forward by FDR, as noted earlier, as a major tenet of a second Bill of Rights.

SPECIFYING THE LIVING WAGE Past Efforts The “living wage” must also be a “sustainable wage.” . . . Strict quid pro quo commutative justice requires that the amount of this wage equate with the value of the worker’s contribution to production. And microeconomic theory indicates that a wage so proportioned to productivity (to the “value of the worker’s marginal product”) would indeed be sustainable. (Worland 2001, 15–16)

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Over the course of its history, the issue of a living wage has been long on discussion and short on specification; that is, an actual dollar amount specification of a realistic living wage has not taken place. Some will object that there have been numerous living-wage specifications made in dollar amounts in recent history; indeed, there are at least 140 of them now. The reality is, however, that these living-wage laws are really just enhanced minimum-wage enactments. Historically, the case for a true living wage, specified in an actual dollar amount, has simply not been made. The words describing a living wage have been stated; the amounts have not. Using the label living wage, but attaching it to an enhanced minimum wage, does not make such a minimum wage a real living wage. Where, for instance, is the supporting argument that these enhanced minimum wages would, say for a family of four, provide a family wage, a “just remuneration for the work of an adult who is responsible for a family . . . what is called a family wage—that is, a single salary given to the head of the family for his work, sufficient for the needs of the family without the spouse having to take up gainful employment outside of the home?” (Pope John Paul II 1981,19). Current Efforts This argument persuaded the Vermont legislature to shelve a living-wage proposal. A legislative study committee found that raising Vermont’s $5.75per-hour minimum wage to a higher living wage of $8.50 would disrupt employment in hotel, restaurant, retail and other industries. A better policy would be a modest wage increase to $6.50 or $7 coupled with various tax, job training, education, health care and other initiatives, the committee recommended in a December [1999] report. (Hirschman 2000, 40)

Current hourly amounts for actually specified living wages range from just above the previous national $5.15-hour-per-hour wage to as high as $13.00 an hour depending on the benefits (such as health insurance) paid by the employer (see Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now [ACORN] for Living Wage Resource Center). But the reasons for specifying the actual wages far exceed attempts to quantify the living wage. The reasons for living-wage enactments across that United States today are many and varied (see Hirschman; Pollin and Luce; and websites of ACORN and Economic Policy Institute for more on issues listed below). Eight selected reasons appear below. • Growing Service Sector Over the past two decades especially, there has been a growing number of working poor employed in the low-skill, low-experience service industry. As a group, these jobs increase rather than decrease

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the ranks of the working poor, for this is often low-pay employment with few or no benefits beyond mandated FICA payments. • Governments Outsourcing Formerly Permanent Public Jobs In the name of efficiency and cost-cutting measures, more and more low-end public jobs at the local, regional, state, and national levels are being outsourced. Cost savings are achieved principally by lowering benefit-payment liabilities for the governmental entities, especially for pension and retirement plans, as well as for health, dental, and life insurance for permanent full-time governmental employees. Ironically, paying the same group of workers a living wage is sometimes required of government contractors receiving contracts from those very same public authorities outsourcing the jobs in the first place. • Comparisons to Economic Development Programs Corporate tax abatement programs, such as Tax Increment Financing (TIF), provide millions of dollars in tax savings and incentives to attract new business and industry, in addition to promoting expansion of existing businesses. Reformers argue that millions of dollars are benefiting corporate development, while little or nothing is being done for workers. Living-wage enactments are sponsored as a way to correct some of this imbalance. • Favorable Economic Circumstances Even though the U.S. economy has ended its historic, record-breaking expansion, the economic pie that all Americans share has grown tremendously since the early 1990s; and it is the case that in such a sustained strong economy, real economic benefits are more and more deeply diffused throughout the entirety of the economy. Though there have indeed been sectors that have suffered economically in this economy, the data clearly show statistically significant improvements for a majority of Americans during the 1990s to present-day. The glaring imbalance between these economic gains and full-time work that earns below poverty-threshold income led some cities and counties to enact living-wage legislation. • Share the Wealth Much as the previous reason, this fifth reason finds that the absolute size and continuing growth in the income/wealth gap between America’s richest and poorest has been and will continue to be important sources of recriminations aimed at the economic system itself. Moreover, all of the concern over this imbalance is not just on the part of social reformers and activists; influential business notables

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have publicly declared this mounting imbalance between the economic haves and have-nots must be addressed, because some see it as potentially destabilizing for the open-market structure of the American economy. As noted earlier, “no less an authority than (former) Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has declared that a widening income gap potentially poses ‘a major threat to our security.’ There are huge social and political prices to be paid by those left behind. . . . One of America’s economic giants touched on the issue of wealth creation and the equitable dispersion of that wealth. ‘Both,’ he noted, ‘are very important.’ That was Bill Gates” (Hunt 2000, A27). As one remedy to this inherently destructive development, living-wage laws can help to reduce the size and some of the psychological sting of this income/wealth gap. Certainly, living-wage enactments will not close the gap. Nevertheless, such wage minimums allow some to extract themselves and their families from at least formal poverty—poverty measured by government threshold amounts—and this carries not only economic, but also social and psychological benefits. • Welfare Reform Welfare reform that is true reform must include the realistic possibility that those weaned from welfare are able to support themselves and their families at an earnings level above poverty. There is little incentive, beyond being forced off of welfare, for able-bodied adults to work full-time if they have little prospect of extracting themselves and their families from poverty. Indeed, there is a tremendous disincentive in such a circumstance. Those involved with welfare reform have not overlooked such a disincentive. Attempting to bring adults off of welfare and into the working, taxpaying economy has provided impetus to the livingwage movement around the country. • Hidden Costs of Low Wages The welfare reform movement has also brought into sharper focus the hidden costs of low-paying employment. Not only are the very lowest paid, full-time, adult workers not able to pull themselves and their families out of poverty; but many are, in fact, also economically dependent on public programs because the family remains mired in poverty. EITC, food stamps, child-care assistance, and federally sponsored hot lunches are just some examples of the ongoing public costs of low-paid employment. A living-wage program not only can help adult, full-time workers reach economic self-sufficiency and pay more taxes, but can also

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significantly reduce some of the hidden public costs of keeping lowpaid workers and their families viable economically. • Activism and Human Rights Groups: Religious, Social, Labor, and Political Activism and human rights advocacy have also been behind many living-wage efforts. There are national and international groups, including the United for a Fair Economy coalition, the Economic Policy Institute, the United Nations (Declaration on Human Rights), and the World Trade Organization; religious organizations, such as the National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice, the Office of Social and International Ministries of the U.S. Jesuit Conference, and the USCCB (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops); and community action groups, such as local chapters of ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), that have committed themselves to organizing efforts to promote living-wage legislation. A commonality among these activists and human rights advocates is concern for the working poor. Although many of the groups are considered by mainstream America to be somewhat left of center with regard to this issue, these organizations have had a powerful effect throughout the land. Certainly many of the present living-wage enactments are based on such group-coalitions, especially at the local level. Despite the many arguments for a living wage, the bases used to specify differing living wage rates throughout the country—that is, the bases for the actual amount of the living wage called for—are much less numerous. Essentially, the bases for the actual amount of the living wage have been those for enhanced minimum-wage legislation. For many, a living wage and the federally mandated minimum wage are inextricably linked. Worland criticizes the NCCB on just this point, noting: “as a matter of fact, linking the right to a living wage with the political push for a higher legal minimum wage, as the USCCB (formerly NCCB) has done, distorts Catholic teaching on wage justice and . . . could be a disastrous guide for public policy” (Worland 2001, 17). According to the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, the original purpose of a minimum wage was to prevent exploitation of workers and provide unskilled and part-time workers with a wage floor. Today the minimum wage has evolved into an antipoverty tool and part of the safety net for primary earners in poor families. Some, like Worland, resist the identification of a living wage with the minimum wage on historical and philosophical grounds. Further uncoupling of these two concepts is mainly due to the fact that the minimum wage is too low

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for any realistic statement of a true living wage. The present minimum wage falls well short of allowing even a small family to live above the poverty line. But focusing on the living wage separately from the minimum wage is quite controversial.

CONTROVERSY REGARDING LIVING WAGE EFFORTS The concept of a “living wage” sounds simple enough. Pay people enough money to support themselves and their families in decent living conditions. Pay them enough so they won’t be poor. But the living-wage controversy is anything but simple. Armed with dueling economic studies, advocates and opponents are battling across the United States to win the heads and hearts of local politicians and voters. A living-wage backlash has bubbled up in other states (besides Vermont), too. Four states—Kansas, Michigan, Arizona, and Louisiana—have considered bills to prohibit local governments from adopting their own minimumwage requirements. . . . (Hirschman 2000, 35, 40)

Living-wage legislation is certainly not without controversy. In fact, such enactments stir up all of the negative attacks, just recently put forward once again, that surround periodic minimum-wage increases at the national level (see Hirschman; Pollin and Luce; and websites of Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now [ACORN] and Economic Policy Institute). Arguments against the living wage include: • Governmental Interference in the Marketplace Clearly the present legislation regarding a living wage in various cities and counties around the United States represents governmental intrusion into the marketplace. Indeed, such enactments often only extend to sectors wherein the local or regional government can exert the power of governmental policy on private vendors through the letting of public contracts. It can hardly be expected that the economics profession will support such market interference, and rightfully so. Governments hardly have a stellar track record of only beneficial outcomes flowing from their incursions into the marketplace, their attempts to control the forces of supply and demand. • More Than Enough Governmental Programs in Place Not only are there already enough governmental welfare and employment assistance programs in existence—there are already too many. America’s poor do not need another government handout program. Numerous government policies have led to the development of a culture of poverty and welfare that many are not able to escape. Moreover, it is a culture of dependence that perpetuates itself

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through succeeding generations raised on these government welfare policies. Government policies have already not worked, and there is an excessive number of them. Such governmental enactments should be pruned back, not increased. • Effects on Small Businesses The negative effects of this type of legislation on businesses in general, especially small businesses, are always brought out in discussions of this type. Ratcheting up of the minimum wage is always fought on the basis of its harmful effects on small businesses, so a much higher living wage would just exacerbate the situation. Small businesses simply cannot afford to pay such increases in wages and will be forced by such enactments to let go of those employees who are the least skilled and, therefore, the least productive. These are the very people, the working poor, whom the legislation is supposedly attempting to help. Thus, a living-wage law will not eventuate into a living wage being paid to the working poor, but will, in fact, lead to no wage being paid at all, as they lose their jobs altogether. Living wage regulations will harm entry-level job seekers, as they force employers, especially small businesses, to reduce their workforce to accommodate the higher, mandated wages. • Destructive Economic Effects on Certain Industries In addition to the negative effects on small businesses noted above, many argue that certain industries will suffer more than other industries through wage-increase legislation, specifically, low-wage service and retail industries, such as fast-food, janitorial, entry-level department store retail sales, and the like. An undue burden will be placed on employers in these industries who will, in turn, be forced to raise the selling price of their services and products accordingly. • Negative Effects on Local Economic Development A city or county with a living-wage law will decrease the attractiveness of that area to potentially new employers and even drive some current businesses out of the vicinity. This will make it more difficult to keep the locale economically viable for all workers. • Inclusion of Non-Heads of Households This issue deals with the composition of the population of working persons to whom living-wage legislation extends. In other words, it would surely not make good economic sense to pay entry-level, single teenagers living at home a living wage. It should not pertain to retirees already receiving substantial pension and Social Security benefits. It is not appropriate legislation for part-time workers.

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The underlying controversy here deals with how such living-wage laws can be written to exclude such groups. Retirees can be full-time workers. Some teens live at home, but some actually are heads of households with children. Such legislation is bound to include persons for whom such enactments are not appropriate and possibly not include members of the working poor who are proper candidates for a living wage.

DEVELOPMENT TOWARD SPECIFICATION OF A LIVING WAGE Just remuneration for the work of an adult who is responsible for a family . . . what is called a family wage—that is, a single salary given to the head of the family for his work, sufficient for the needs of the family without the spouse having to take up gainful employment outside the home. (Pope John Paul II 1981, 19)

In order to begin actually putting a dollar amount to the intended meaning of a living wage, a specific family circumstance needs to be isolated and focused upon to allow necessary comparisons. The usual family structure for this type of analysis is a family of four. It will also be assumed that the wage earner discussed, from this point forward, works full-time, year-round and is paid for 2,080 hours yearly. Given this basis of understanding, we may consider some present dollar amounts of important indices in Table 3.1. These various annual dollar amounts can help move toward an actual dollar-specification of a living wage. To do so, however, requires that a true living wage be clearly defined. A living wage is a family wage, earned by an adult head of household, working full-time and year-round, which allows the family a standard of living in keeping with human dignity and frugal comfort. • It is a wage sufficient to allow one working adult to support the household without the other adult, because of economic necessity, having to secure employment outside of the home. • It is a wage that supports a life that is balanced, with some leisure, and is becoming to a human. • It is a wage that allows parents enough time and resources to raise their children properly. • It is a wage that does not require public assistance to achieve a standard of living in keeping with human dignity and frugal comfort. With this understanding in mind, what would be the dollar amount specified for such a living wage in the United States today? Possibly the

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Table 3.1. Present Dollar Amounts: Toward Specifying a Living Wage Index

Description

Annual Amount

Poverty Threshold, 2006

Family of Four Persons Two Related Children Under 18 1 adult at $5.85 hr.  2,080 hrs. 2 adults at $5.85 hr.  2,080 hrs. 1 adult at $7.25 hr.  2,080 hrs. 2 adults at $7.25 hr.  2,080 hrs. Average Annual Expenditures for FourPerson Consumer Units Average Annual Expenditures for FourPerson Consumer Units Median Income for Four-Person Families

$20,444

Federal Minimum Wage—Current [2007]

Federal Minimum Wage—Projected High [2009] The Family of Four Project 2001 Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey 2005 Administration for Children & Families Estimated 2007

$12,168 $24,336 $15,080 $30,160 $60,927 (estimated to 2007 by author) $62,215

$66,111

most appropriate approach does not begin from the wage-rate side of the issue. When the argument does, it invariably is seen as an enhanced minimum-wage specification and the dollar amount is in constant comparison with the present minimum wage. Hence, compared to the current minimum wage of $5.85 an hour ($12,168 annually), living-wage enactments— for example, above $13.00 per hour (more than $27,000 annually) in some cities in California—seem to be a huge increase, whereas, in actuality, they fall well short of a true living wage for a family of four. If the proponents of a living wage continue to start from the wage-rate side of the issue, they will find themselves in a constant uphill battle with opposing forces and, consequently, struggling mightily to reach their intended goal. Although there will certainly be ongoing research regarding what methodology should be used to determine a realistic living wage for a family of four, some data do exist that can allow a starting point in this determination. Studies of family expenditures like the Consumer Expenditure Survey (2005) of the Bureau of Labor Statistics or The Family of Four Project (2001) of the Heritage Foundation may represent a better method for an initial calculation than a simple comparison to the current minimum wage. In this approach, the calculation begins in a needs-based manner. That is, what are the needs of a family of four to live with some dignity in the United States today?

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Presently, the yearly expenditures in an average four-person family are upwards of $60,000. For purposes of comparison, the median income for four-person families in the United States is around $66,000. These two dollar-amounts yield initial values for comparing current minimum-wage and living-wage laws. Such wage ordinances, even at the high-end— above $13.00 per hour ($27,000 annually)—are clearly far below national averages for expenditures by a family of four. Based on the definition and criteria above, it is difficult to conceive of a true living wage in the United States currently being less than $40,000 per year for a family of four. Indeed, $40,000 annually to live on, for a family of four in the United States today, might not even achieve the level of Pope Leo’s frugal comfort; but such an amount would be much closer to the neighborhood of a true living wage than any present minimum- or living-wage legislation.

THE LIVING WAGE AS A TARGET WAGE At this point in his analysis, Pius XI could have . . . called for passage of a law specifying a legal minimum wage. Instead, he cites the virtue of social justice to explain how the tension between sustainable wage and living wage is to be resolved. . . . . . . According to Pius XI’s exposition of the connection between the virtue of social justice and the natural law, the employer’s responsibility to the human community does not end when he pays the wage that matches value produced by the worker. For if that sustainable wage falls short of the living wage, the virtue of social justice imposes a further moral obligation on the employer. He must make his best efforts to help the worker increase the value of his work so that his productivity earns him a living wage. He is required, for example, to introduce training programs, apprenticeships, educational fringe benefits, i.e., those measures that enhance labor productivity. (Worland 2001, 15–16)

A true living wage is not a minimum wage or even an enhanced minimum wage. This essay is not calling for or specifying a minimum wage of $40,000 annually. A living wage is not an appropriate target wage for teenagers living at home or retirees with liberal pensions, plus Social Security benefits. A living wage is not an appropriate target wage for workers who only work part-time or workers who are not desirous of being in the labor force year-round. A living wage is not an appropriate target wage for most entry-level work. A living wage, as offered here, is not an amount to be legislated at any level—federal, state, or local. This essay does not argue for more livingwage laws.

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As defined above, a living wage is a family wage, earned by an adult head of household working full-time and year-round and, even then, might be based on some consideration of years of service and experience. Even so, clearly few, if any, employers would or could move quickly to a realistic living wage, even for only the appropriate working poor. Thus, the approach taken here is that of considering a living wage as a target wage over time. An example might illuminate this very important point more clearly. An adult with a high school education, working full-time and yearround, is married and has two minor children. The other adult is at home full-time with the children and manages the household. The adult employed outside the home has worked reliably for the same company for over ten years and currently earns $10.00 an hour based on local market conditions. An employer might want to pay an employee like this a true living wage because of seniority, loyalty to the company, quality of work, and because of an employee’s financial inability to meet employee-required contributions to company-subsidized health, dental, or life insurance plans, as well as company-sponsored 401k or retirement programs. The employer knows that getting this worker to a living wage quickly fails any rigorous test of economic logic; but the employer now uses a living wage as a target wage to measure the employee’s actual wages against, and then to develop, in conjunction with the employee, an individualized strategy of training and productivity enhancements to help the employee reach this target wage over time.

CONCLUSION So what is a living wage really? To many, it is just more misguided, utopian nonsense, put forward by activists—religious, social, labor, academic, and political—who have never run a real business or met a payroll. Critics note, ironically and tragically, such efforts would harm the very people, the working poor, whom such activists are supposedly trying to help. Ultimately, the living wage, many believe, will rightly take its place in the dustbin of history alongside other utopian socialist programs that simply do not work. No doubt, views akin to these have been and will continue to be expressed regarding a living wage. Business people, those who would actually have to pay a living wage if it is ever to be viable, have reacted and continue to react disapprovingly overall. As a group, they respond negatively to any proposed increases in the minimum wage. Now, were a true living wage, which is substantially higher than any minimum wage, to

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come along, one could expect the level and tone of the criticism—indeed, derision—to mirror proportionately the increase in the amount. This outcome can be assured if a living wage is legislated, as it has been so far and as the minimum wage has been. Minimum-wage legislation, at any level of government, that attempts to reach a true living wage, will likely be ridiculed and defeated. Business owners, taxpayers, and more conservative politicians alike will fight such a large, across-the-board increase in wage rates. And, according to their take on economic reality, rightfully so. To reach an honest living wage, especially quickly, would be an impossible jump in labor costs to most employers. Further, trying to reach a living wage by way of the legislated minimum wage will fail. And, because terminology like a living wage is being used, falling short of a real living wage will also decrease the chance of appropriate workers getting an actual living wage over time; for employers will use the lower, enhanced minimum-wage amount as the measure to achieve. The process will stop short of attaining a true living wage—far short. For a family of four in the United States today, an initial and very conservative statement of a true living wage is estimated at $40,000 annually. This is to be viewed as a target wage to be reached over time, voluntarily and cooperatively, by both employers and employees, through training and productivity enhancements, as employers—through the virtue of social justice—desire to remunerate long-term, loyal employees more justly. The living wage initially specified here would be somewhat more than $19.00 per hour. Although this would be a substantial increase in wages, even over time, people need to maintain some perspective on a living wage at $19.00 an hour. According to calculations by United for a Fair Economy, if the $5.15 per hour minimum wage had grown in value between 1990 and 2000 at the same rate as the pay of chief executive officers, it would have risen to $28.91 an hour in 2005 dollars or just above $60,000 yearly (United for a Fair Economy 2007). Clearly, all businesses are not in a financial position to move toward this target wage at this time. But companies that reward top management with millions of dollars yearly can afford to tie, over time, the earnings of the lowest paid, long-term, loyal employees to this concept of a living wage. The long tradition of Catholic social teaching and the demands of social justice unequivocally steer efforts toward a living wage for families to allow them to live with human dignity, for the laborer is worthy of his hire.

REFERENCES Administration for Children & Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. March 6, 2006. State Median Income Estimates for Optional Use in Fed-

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eral Fiscal Year 2006 LIHEAP Programs and Mandatory Use in Federal Fiscal Year 2007 LIHEAP Programs. www.acf.dhhs.gov/programs/liheap/guidance/ information_memoranda/im06-05.html (accessed September 18, 2007). Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). Living Wage Resource Center. A Compilation of Living Wage Policies on the Books. www .livingwagecampaign.org (accessed October 11, 2007). Barrington, Linda. June 14, 2000. Does a Rising Tide Lift All Boats? The Conference Board Inc. Quoted in Jacob M. Schlesinger, “Working Full Time Is No Longer Enough,” The Wall Street Journal (June 29, 2000): A2, A12. Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor. Consumer Expenditure Survey, 2005. http://www.bls.gov/cex/ (accessed October 11, 2007). Catechism of the Catholic Church. 1994. New Hope, Kentucky: Urbi et Orbi Communications. Economic Policy Institute. www.epinet.org/content.cfm/issueguides_livingwage _livingwage (accessed October 11, 2007). Heritage Foundation. 2001. The Family of Four Project. http://www.heritage.org/ research/features/familyof4/chapter3/chapter3.cfm (accessed October 11, 2007). Hirschman, Carolyn. July 2000. “Paying Up.” HR Magazine, 35–41. Hunt, Albert R. April 20, 2000. “A Flawed Protest Actually Produces Some Good Results.” The Wall Street Journal, A27. Miller, Gerald L. 2001. “Catholic Social Teaching at the Millennium: The Human Condition in Light of the Gospel.” In Catholicism at the Millennium, edited by Gerald L. Miller and Wilburn T. Stancil, 123–38. Kansas City, Missouri: Rockhurst University Press. Pollin, Robert and Luce, Stephanie. 1998. The Living Wage: Building a Fair Economy. New York: The New Press (CUNY). Pope John XXIII. 1963. Pacem in Terris. www.vatican.va (accessed October 11, 2007). Pope John Paul II. 1981. Laborem Exercens. www.vatican.va (accessed October 11, 2007). Pope Leo XIII. 1891. Rerum Novarum. www.vatican.va (accessed October 11, 2007). Pope Pius XI. 1931. Quadragesimo Anno. www.vatican.va (accessed October 11, 2007). Roosevelt, Franklin D. January 11, 1944. “State of the Union Address.” http://www .presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=16518 (accessed October 11, 2007). Schlesinger, Jacob M. June 29, 2000. “Working Full Time Is No Longer Enough,” The Wall Street Journal, A2, A12. United for a Fair Economy. 2007. CEO Pay Charts. www.faireconomy.org/ research/CEO_Pay_charts.html (accessed October 11, 2007). U.S. Census Bureau. 2006. Poverty Thresholds. www.census.gov/hhes/www/ poverty/threshld/thresh06.html (accessed October 11, 2007). United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. 1999. Faithful Citizenship: Civic Responsibility for a New Millennium. http://www.priestsforlife.org/magisterium/ bishops/faithfulcitizenship99.htm (accessed October 11, 2007). Worland, Stephen T. 2001. “Just Wages.” First Things 110: 14–17.

Section Two

CATHOLIC CULTURE AND THE IMAGINATIVE LIFE

As a dare-gale skylark scanted in a dull cage Man’s mounting spirit in his bone-house, mean house, dwells— ....................................................... Both sing sometímes the sweetest, sweetest spells, Yet both droop deadly sómetimes in their cells Or wring their barriers in bursts of fear or rage. ......................................................... Man’s spirit will be flesh-bound when found at best, But uncumbered: meadow-down is not distressed For a rainbow footing it nor he for his bónes rísen. (Hopkins 1877, “The Caged Skylark,” 1–2, 6–8, 12–14)

4 ✛

Writing as Sacrament Ron Hansen

W

hen Saint Jerome translated the Bible into the Latin Vulgate, he chose the Latin sacramentum, sacrament, for the Greek mysterion, mystery. We understand those words to be quite different, but their difference is an efficient way of getting at my argument that good writing can be a religious act. In the synoptic Gospels mysterion generally referred to the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, and in Saint Paul’s Epistles, to Christ himself as the perfect revelation of God’s will. Tertullian introduced the term sacramentum as we know it when he talked about the rite of Christian initiation, understanding the word to mean a sacred action, object, or means. And Saint Augustine further clarified the term by defining sacraments as “signs pertaining to things divine, or visible forms of an invisible grace” (Betlyon 1985). Eventually more and more events were seen as sacraments until the sixteenth century, when the Protestant Reformation confined the term to baptism and eucharist, the two Gospel sacraments, and the Roman Catholic Council of Trent decreed that signs become sacraments only if they become channels for grace. Twentieth-century theology has used the term in a far more inclusive way, however. The Oxford Companion to the Bible describes sacraments “as occasions of encounter between God and the believer, where the reality of God’s gracious actions needs to be accepted in faith” (Suggit 1993).

“Writing as Sacrament” is reprinted by permission of the author, Ron Hansen, and HarperCollins Publishers, with modifications to the original citations and citation format.

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FICTION WRITING AND MYSTERY Writing, then, can be viewed as a sacrament insofar as it provides graced occasions of encounter between humanity and God. As Flannery O’Connor noted in Mystery and Manners, “the real novelist, the one with an instinct for what he is about, knows that he cannot approach the infinite directly, that he must penetrate the natural human world as it is. The more sacramental his theology, the more encouragement he will get from it to do just that” (“Novelist and Believer” 1969, 163). Even secular interpretations point to the fiction writer’s duty to express the Mystery at the heart of metaphysics. In the famous preface to his novel The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” Joseph Conrad defined a fictional work of art as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect. It is an attempt to find in its forms, in its colours, in its light, in its shadows, in the aspects of matter, and in the facts of life what of each is fundamental, what is enduring and essential—their one illuminating and convincing quality—the very truth of their existence. (1971, 49)

The highest kind of justice to the visible universe often leads to the highest kind of humility about ourselves. Writing about craft in The Art of Fiction, John Gardner held that “the value of great fiction . . . is not just that it entertains us or distracts us from our troubles, not just that it broadens our knowledge of people and places, but also that it helps us to know what we believe, reinforces those qualities that are noblest in us, leads us to feel uneasy about our faults and limitations” (1984, 31). Writers seeking to express a religious vision often help their readers by simply providing, as Gardner puts it, trustworthy but inexpressible models. We ingest metaphors of good, wordlessly learning to behave more like Levin than like Anna (in Anna Karenina), more like the transformed Emma (in Jane Austen’s novel) than like the Emma we first meet in the book. This subtle, for the most part wordless knowledge is the “truth” great fiction seeks out. (1984, 63)

But I have identified in my own experience and that of many other Christian and Jewish writers that there comes a time when we find the need and the confidence to face the great issues of God and faith and right conduct more directly.

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FICTION WRITING AND RELIGIOUS FAITH My first published book was Desperadoes (Hansen 1979), a historical novel about the Dalton gang from their hardscrabble beginnings, through their horse-rustling and outlawry in Oklahoma, to the fatal day in 1892 when all but one of the gang were killed in bank robberies in their hometown of Coffeyville, Kansas. “Crime does not pay” is a biblical theme, as is the book’s focus on honor, loyalty, integrity, selfishness, and reckless ambition—the highest calling Bob Dalton seems to have felt was to be as important as Jesse James. But my own religious experience does not figure greatly in Desperadoes; most people read the book as a highfalutin Western, a boyswill-be-boys adventure full of hijinks and humor and bloodshed. I fell into my second book because of the first. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Hansen 1983) is another historical novel, but is far darker than Desperadoes because I was far more insistent on a Christian perspective on sin and redemption and forgiveness. These were bad guys I was writing about, guys who were sons of preachers but did the wrong thing so blithely and persistently it was like they’d got their instructions all bollixed up. If Jesse James was a false messiah for those Southerners still in civil war with the finance companies and the railroads, then Bob Ford was both his Judas and his Barabbas, a selfimportant quisling who hoped to be famous and who got off scott-free for the killing of his famous friend, but who was hounded out of more than one town afterward until he ended up as a saloonkeeper in Creede, Colorado. There, he himself was killed at the hands of a man who claimed he was evening the score. It’s a form of bad sportsmanship for fiction writers to complain that too few reviewers pick up their subtexts, but in fact I was disappointed that the general reading of the book on Jesse James was pretty much as it was for Desperadoes. Hidden beneath the praise were the questions: Why is this guy writing Westerns? When oh when is he going to give his talent to a subject that matters? In his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T. S. Eliot asserted that great writing required a perpetual surrender of the writer as he or she is in the present in order to pay homage and service to a tradition of literature in the past. “The progress of an artist,” he wrote, “is continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality” (1969, 7). I was following Eliot’s precepts in the wholesale subtraction of my own personality and the submersion of my familial and religious experiences in my retelling of history in my first two novels, and yet I was frustrated that my fiction did not more fully communicate a belief in Jesus as Lord that was so important, indeed central, to my life.

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The English novelist and critic G. K. Chesterton wrote in his conclusion to Heretics: “A [writer] cannot be wise enough to be a great artist without being wise enough to be a philosopher. A [writer] cannot have the energy to produce good art without having the energy to wish to pass beyond it. A small artist is content with art; a great artist is content with nothing except everything” (1986, 198). Everything for me, and for Chesterton, was the mystery of the Holy Being as it was, and is, incarnated in human life. Everything for me, to go even further, was the feeling that Christianity is difficult, but that Christianity is worth it. I finally got around to a fuller expression of that in my third novel. Mariette in Ecstasy (Hansen 1991) concerns a seventeen-year-old woman, Mariette Baptiste, who joins the Convent of Our Lady of Sorrows in upstate New York as a postulant in 1906. Her older sister, Annie, or Mother Celine, is the prioress there and on Christmas Eve, 1906, Mother Celine dies of cancer and is buried. On the next day, Christmas, Mariette is given the stigmata—those wounds in the hands, feet, and side resembling those that Christ suffered on the cross. Whether Mariette is a sexual hysteric full of religious wishful thinking or whether her physical wounds are indeed supernaturally caused is the subject of the novel. I first thought about writing Mariette in Ecstasy after finishing Saint Thérèse of Lisieux’s Story of a Soul. She was the third of her sisters to enter the Carmelite convent of Lisieux where her oldest sister was prioress and, like Mariette, she soon became a favorite there. You may know that Thérèse was just fifteen at the time she entered religious life and she did so little that was outwardly wonderful during her nine years as a nun that when she died of tuberculosis at twenty-four one of the sisters in the convent with her feared there would be nothing to say about Thérèse at the funeral. She did perform the ordinary duties of religious life extraordinarily well, emphasizing simplicity, obedience, and self-forgetfulness over the harsh physical mortifications that were common in France at the time, and she impressed some with her childlike faith in God the Father and with her passionate love of Jesus. She can seem sentimental at times, and there are psychologists who’d diagnose Thérèse as neurotic, but then there are people like me who have a profound respect for her in spite of her perceived excessiveness. When you have a tension like that you’re half the way to having a plot. About then, too, I happened upon Lettres Portugaises, a collection of letters falsely presumed to have been written by Sister Mariana Alcoforado about her frantic love affair with a French courtier in the eighteenth century. At one point she supposedly wrote the Chevalier de C—: “I thank you from the bottom of my heart for the desperation you cause me, and I detest the tranquility in which I lived before I knew you” (Alcoforado 1893, 77–78). I was stunned and excited by that line. Emotions like that, I knew, would

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be at the heart of the novel. I hatched a tale influenced by both those books in which I pretended that the nun I’d modeled on Saint Thérèse of Lisieux would have a kind of love affair with Jesus, with all of a romance’s grand exaltations and disappointments, and its physical manifestation would be Christ’s wounds from the crucifixion. Further reading about religious women and the phenomenon of stigmata acquainted me with Anne Catharine Emmerich, Louise Lateau, Theresa Neumann, and, in particular, Gemma Galgani—all of them stigmatics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some parts of the letters that Mariette writes in the novel are paraphrased from confessions written by Saint Gemma Galgani in 1900 and included in a hard-to-find book called Letters and Ecstasies. Quotidian life in my fictional religious order, the Sisters of the Crucifixion, is based on Thomas Merton’s account of the Cistercian life in The Waters of Siloe. The mass hysteria hinted at in my book was a product of my looking into Aldous Huxley’s fascinating history, The Devils of Loudun. Simple scenes of the sisters at work and recreation were inspired by a book of photographs taken at the Carmelite convent in Lisieux by Thérèse’s sister Céline. The first investigation of Mariette’s stigmata is taken from the medical diagnosis of Padre Pio’s stigmata in the 1920s. Cribbing and stealing from hundreds of sources, I finally allowed my factual sources to be distorted and transmuted by figurative language, forgetfulness, or by the personalities of the fictional characters. I hoped to present in Mariette’s life a faith that gives an intellectual assent to Catholic orthodoxy, but doesn’t forget that the origin of religious feeling is the graced revelation of the Holy Being to us in nature, in the flesh, and in all our faculties. If I may be permitted the immodesty of quoting a review, I was trying to stake claim, as Pico Iyer put it, to “a world as close and equivocal as Emily Dickinson’s, alive with the age-old American concerns of community and wildness, of sexual and spiritual immensities, of transcendence and its discontents” (1993, 496). Saying the unsayable it possibly was—I felt free to try it because I knew the book would get published somewhere, even if it were a small press, and I knew the books I liked best were not those that seemed tailored to contemporary tastes but those that were unfashionable, refractory, insubordinate, that seem the products not of a market analysis but of a writer’s private obsession.

FICTION WRITING AND ARTISTIC FREEDOM But in my rebellion against what Yale law professor Stephen L. Carter has termed “the culture of disbelief” (1993), I did not feel obligated, as

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Catholic fiction writers in the forties and fifties often did, to be conformist, high-minded, and pure, as if I were seeking a nihil obstat from the chancery. As Robert Stone pointed out in “The Reason for Stories,” his essay on moral fiction: It must be emphasized that the moral imperative of fiction provides no excuse for smug moralizing, religiosity, or propaganda. On the contrary, it forbids them. Nor does it require that every writer equip his work with some edifying message advertising progress, brotherhood, and light. It does not require a writer to be a good man, only a good wizard. (1990, 75)

In fact there may be no obligation for a Christian writer or artist to overtly treat Christian themes. Writing about “Catholic Novelists and Their Readers,” Flannery O’Connor affirmed fiction writers whose only objective was being “hotly in pursuit of the real.” She elaborates by noting that St. Thomas Aquinas says that art does not require rectitude of the appetite, that it is wholly concerned with the good of that which is made. He says that a work of art is good in itself, and this is a truth that the modern world has largely forgotten. We are not content to stay within our limitations and make something that is simply a good in and by itself. Now we want to make something that will have some utilitarian value. Yet what is good in itself glorifies God because it reflects God. The artist has his hands full and does his duty if he attends to his art. He can safely leave evangelizing to the evangelists. (1969, 171)

Evangelization for Jesus was generally by means of parables that were often so bewilderingly allusive that his disciples would ask for further explanations of his meaning. Mark has it that, “he did not speak to [the crowds] without a parable, but privately to his own disciples he explained everything” (Mark 4:33–34). Christ’s parables are metaphors that do not contract into simple denotation but broaden continually to take on fresh nuances and connotations. Parables invite the hearer’s interest with familiar settings and situations but finally veer off into the unfamiliar, shattering their homey realism and insisting on further reflection and inquiry. We have the uneasy feeling that we are being interpreted even as we interpret them. Early, pre-Gospel versions seem to have resembled Zen koans in which hearers are left hanging until they find illumination through profound meditation. A kind of koan occurs in the Gospel of Luke when Jesus compares the kingdom of God to “leaven which a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, till it was all leavened” (Luke 13:21). We are challenged, in Jesus’s parables, to figure out how we are like wheat sown in a field, or lost sheep, or mustard seed, or the evil tenants of a householder’s vineyard, and in the hard exercise of interpretation

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we imitate and make present again the graced interaction between the human and the divine. My fourth novel, Atticus (1996), was a retelling of what’s often called the parable of the prodigal son, though it’s the father who’s most truly excessive, having far more love and forgiveness than his son feels he deserves. Without giving away too much of the plot of what is, after all, a mystery, I can offer this: Atticus is the story of a Colorado rancher named Atticus Cody who, when he hears that his wild and wayward son Scott has committed suicide, journeys to a town full of expatriated Americans on the Mexican Caribbean in order to recover the body. While there, Atticus happens upon enough factual oversights and inconsistencies to infer that his son was murdered, and he tries to find out who the murderer is. Mariette in Ecstasy is a parable of a young woman’s quest for God; Atticus is a parable of God’s continuing quest for an intimate relationship with us. Each focuses on seekers, for religion and fiction have in common the unquenchable yearning to achieve the impossible, fathom the unfathomable, hold onto what is fleeting and evanescent and seen, in Saint Paul’s words, “as through a glass, darkly” (1 Corinthians 13:12). CONCLUSION I hesitate to say more for fiction is far better experienced than interpreted. And so it is with sacraments. To fully understand a symbol is to kill it. So the Holy Being continually finds new ways to proclaim itself to us, first and best of all in the symbols of Christ’s life, then in Scripture, and finally in created things, whether they be the glories of nature or art or other human beings. And those symbols will not be objects but actions. As theologian Nathan Mitchell puts it, “Symbols are not things people invent and interpret, but realities that ‘make’ and interpret a people. . . . Symbols are places to live, breathing spaces that help us discover what possibilities life offers” (Mitchell 1993, n.p.). The job of fiction writers is to fashion those symbols and give their readers the feeling that life has great significance, that something is going on here that matters. Writing will be a sacrament when it offers in its own way the formula for happiness of Pierre Tielhard de Chardin. Which is: First, be. Second, love. Finally, worship. We may find it’s possible that if we do just one of those things completely we may have done all three. REFERENCES Alcoforado, Marianna. 1893. The Letters of a Portuguese Nun. Translated by Edgar Prestage. London: David Nutt.

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Betlyon, John W. 1985. “Sacraments.” In Harper’s Bible Dictionary, edited by Paul J. Achtemeier. San Francisco: Harper & Row. Carter, Stephen L. 1993. The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion. New York: BasicBooks. Chesterton, G. K. 1986. Heretics. In The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton, edited by David Dooley, Vol. 1, 37–207. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. Conrad, Joseph. 1971. “Preface, The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’.” In Conrad’s Prefaces to His Works, edited by Edward Garnett, 47–54. New York: Haskell House Publishers Ltd. Eliot, T. S. 1969. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” In Selected Essays, 3–11. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. Gardner, John. 1984. The Art of Fiction. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Hansen, Ron. 1979. Desperadoes. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ———. 1983. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ———. 1991. Mariette in Ecstasy. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. ———. 1996. Atticus. HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. Iyer, Pico. 1993. “Review of Mariette in Ecstasy” by Ron Hansen. Partisan Review LX.3: 493–96. Mitchell, Nathan. 1977. “Symbols Are Actions Not Objects—New Directions for an Old Problem.” Living Worship 13.2: n.p. O’Connor, Flannery. 1969. “Novelist and Believer.” In Mystery and Manners, edited by Sally Fitzgerald and Robert Fitgerald 154–68.. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. ———. “Catholic Novelists and Their Readers.” In Mystery and Manners, 169–90. Stone, Robert. June 1990. “The Reason for Stories.” Harper’s Magazine 276.1657: 71–76. Suggit, John N. 1993. Sacrament. In The Oxford Companion to the Bible, edited by Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Catholic Poetry: An Essai in Definition Patricia Cleary Miller, Ph.D.

“Can one hear oneself close one’s eyes?” (Stilgoe, 1994, ix)

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atholic Poetry: What do these two words mean when paired? Is Catholic Poetry an entity? We might ask further: What do these two words mean when separated? And we might step back into less specific questions: What is religious poetry? Can these two words be separated? The answers to these questions are various. Certainly there are poets who are Catholic and who are closely identified with the Roman Catholic Church: Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II), Thomas Merton, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thérèse of Lisieux. Other Catholic poets are known better without the qualifier: Denise Levertov, Dana Gioia, classicist Robert Fitzgerald, as well as Nobel laureates Seamus Heaney and Gabriela Mistral. And many Christian poets who are not Roman Catholic write religious poetry deeply appreciated by Catholic readers: T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, John Donne, George Herbert. Other poets who write ecstatically are not usually associated with a church: William Wordsworth, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson. These gradations notwithstanding, it is indeed possible to define an entity entitled Catholic Poetry, and to list and study its practitioners. Of course a full study, or even a detailed list, of Catholic poets would far exceed the scope of this essay; the essay will rather work toward a definition of Catholic poetry and religious poetry, before discussing the writer’s own work as an example of both. 59

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What does Catholic poetry look like? It may be characterized by its relation to the seven sacraments of the Church—which mark life’s important passages (baptism, confirmation, marriage, holy orders, sacrament of the sick) as well as the quotidian (communion, confession); and to the liturgy, which marks the seasons (Christmas, Easter) and the lives of the saints. It uses as symbols various objects associated with church rituals. And it is devotional, expressing the prayerful emotions of the poet.

EXAMPLES OF CATHOLIC POETRY Some good current examples of Catholic poetry may be found in David Craig and Janet McCann’s anthology, Place of Passage: Contemporary Catholic Poetry (2000). In her Introduction, McCann states that Catholic poetry’s emphasis on the sacraments is what distinguishes it from other kinds of Christian poetry. She notes that objects associated with the sacraments—baptismal font, chalice—“have their own power,” and that “the little blessed things we tend to keep on our persons . . . rosaries, medals . . . prayer cards, stamped with the names of departed loved ones . . . provide an enhanced sense of life in this world and the continuity from one generation to the next” (20). Organizing their volume around the church year—the great feasts as well as “ordinary time” (with a special section for the poems of Pope John Paul II)—Craig and McCann eschew “direct sermonizing, . . . opting instead for poems that illuminate rather than instruct.” McCann adds, “Some of these poems are expressions of pure joy at the gift of faith. What the poems tend to share is this sense of the sacramental—the belief that there are holy people, places, acts, and things, and God may be approached through them” (20). The editors also include regional, ethnic, social justice, and missionary types of poetry (21–22). Liturgy, sacraments, mementoes and blessed objects, and private devotions form a connection with God, remind the believer of God’s abiding presence—the numinous; they indicate intersections between time and eternity, between the created and the Creator. Trying to express this constant Incarnation, poets search for vocabulary at once concrete and evanescent; they reach for sounds and rhythms beyond their own experience of language. McCann explains that many of the poems they included in the book “are touched with that sense of the imperfect that is our nature, and because they know that they can never be perfect, they dare more” (21). To illustrate these concepts, let us look at several poems from various sources. David Craig’s “Psalm #1,” appearing in his and McCann’s anthology, continues the original Psalm’s description, “Happy the man who fol-

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lows not the counsel of the wicked” (Psalms 1:1), with timeless examples: “He does not linger with scoffers” in bars, but “He sweats all day in Presence, / mumbles among his tools” (2000, 1, 6–7). In contrast, the wicked “sees what he is / as drives, no one behind the wheel” (13–14). His way “is a desolate field and offers / the nothing no one can take” (19–20). The narrator of Dana Gioia’s “The Room Upstairs” recalls a mountain climber to whom years ago he rented his upstairs room. The climber, once badly lacerated in a mountain rescue, suffers “Wounds deep enough to hide your fingers in” (2000, 67). After his death in another climbing accident, the young man appears to the narrator, “’I’m cold. Just hold me. I’m so very cold’” (99). As the man holds the ghost, it slips “silently away / like snow between my fingers . . . .” (105–06). In Gioia’s “The Country Wife,” a woman “makes her way through the dark trees / Down to the lake to be alone” (1996, 1–2). She sees “The night reflected on the lake, / The fire of stars changed into water” (15–16). While making bread, the woman in Denise Levertov’s “The Acolyte” thinks of “the way / the dough rises and has a life of its own” (2001, 15–16), of “the way / the sour smell changes / to fragrance” (18–20; “[S]he wants to make / bread that is more than bread” (29–30). In “The Tide,” Levertov’s speaker asks not only where God is, but also what God wants. She writes, “perhaps God wants / something quite different. / Or nothing, nothing at all” (2000, 6–8). She speaks of one who, dreaming of travel, wakes to discover “you have not left / to begin the journey” (25–26). She concludes that “emptiness / is a cup, and holds / the ocean” (36–38). None of these poems explains itself; indeed, were they to do so they could not be considered good poems. The poets do not say too much; they allow the objects to become symbols in the mind of the reader, to reverberate, and thus to communicate more with each rereading. A good poem takes many risks: going where words cannot go, being misunderstood, being thought autobiographical, taking on a life of its own. Religious poetry faces additional problems: didacticism, parochialism, sappiness. The above poems take the first set of risks, while avoiding the second set. Their audience extends beyond the parochial: it may be catholic as well as Catholic. Similarly, the intensely devotional poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, Therese of Lisieux, John Donne, George Herbert appeal to people in many times and places. Hopkins finds “God’s Grandeur” and “Pied Beauty” everywhere: in crushed oil, the smear of toil, the brinded cow, the dappled trout (1985, “God’s Grandeur” 3, 6; “Pied Beauty” 2–3). Eliot ends his agonized description of the dark night of the soul, “The Waste Land,” with the hopeful “Shantih shantih shantih,” which he explains is “the formal ending to an Upanishad, “The peace which passeth all understanding” (1963, 434, and note to this line). The carefully crafted poems of Thérèse

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use biblical imagery and the vocabulary of intense longing and love. Addressing Jesus as her little brother in “Our Divine Lord to St. Gertrude,” the motherless young nun writes, “Remember Thou that Mary’s holy arms / Thou didst prefer to any royal throne” (1–2). John Donne, seeing angels trumpeting the Last Judgment “At the round earths imagin’d corners,” begs God to “Teach mee how to repent” (1941, “Holy Sonnet VII,” 1, 13). While admonishing “Death be not proud,” he predicts that “death, thou shalt die” (1941, “Holy Sonnet X,” 1, 14). He prays “Batter my heart, three person’d God”; he pleads, “I / Except you’enthrall mee, never shall be free . . .” (1941, “Holy Sonnet XIV,” 1, 13). George Herbert celebrates “Lent,” “The British Church,” “Sunday, Church Music” in language at once specific to his time and meaningful to ours: In “Lent” he prays, “Yet, Lord, instruct us to improve our fast / By starving sin, and taking such repast / As may our faults control. . .” (1964, 43–45).

MORE PATTERNS OF TRANSCENDENCE All these poets typify the many whose orthodoxy shows patterns in the crazy quilt of time and points to the worlds beyond words. Such patterns, such transcendence, may also be found by poets we might call heterodox (not in the sense that their beliefs are heretical, but that they are simply other). William Wordsworth, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, for example, pondered the seasons, their own yearnings, the cycles of death and resurgence, in rhythms variously of railroads and streams and hymns. Wordsworth’s heart “leaps up” at daffodils, rainbows; he accepts sadly, in “While Not a Leaf Seems Faded,” the “bitter change” as summer yields to autumn, which predicts “frost and snow” (1984, 6, 13). Whitman sees the face of Christ in the dying Civil War soldiers (“A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim” [1982, 14–15]). In “A Song for Occupations,” he sings, “In the labor of engines and trades and the labor of fields I find . . . / the eternal meanings” (1982, 2–3). Dickinson dreams of “Rowing in Eden” during “Wild Nights—Wild Nights!” in the thunderstorm, in romance (1960, #249: “Wild Nights—Wild Nights!,” 9, 1). While not specifically sacramental, their work points thoughtfully, often ecstatically, beyond the bonds of earth and time. As we have seen, many poets, of various spiritual persuasions, write in this vein. They begin with earth and time: without the senses, through which comes all knowledge, we cannot get beyond. Poetry starts with images—of sight, sound, taste, smell, touch—and mainly with the first two: with word pictures, with rhythms, with the heartbeat, with the echoes arising from rhyme and alliteration and assonance. It is the par-

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ticularity of the image, presented with carefully crafted details, that leads to the universal. And the universal—that which many individuals, alone in their own countries and time periods, diachronically and synchronically dispersed, recognize as metaphorically accurate for them—may lead them to see an intersection between time and eternity. Images from Eliot’s “Four Quartets” illustrate this point: the circling petals of the rose; the pattern on a Chinese vase; the dance of Shiva—his hands indicating, bestowing, preserving, stopping human life; the country dance that celebrates the change of seasons; and, most significantly, the mysteries of Christmas and Easter (1963, “Little Gidding” V, 46; “Burnt Norton,” V, 6; “Burnt Norton” II, 1–6 , respectively). When else does time stop, does one have the sense of being “out of time,” in rhythm with the turning earth? Staring at the wise old face of an infant, galloping across the summer fields, listening to Beethoven, looking at Monet’s Nympheas, making love—we could go on. The artist—of words or paint or music—waits for these moments, falls into and records them. And through his craft, he floats beyond the self. In this space, nonspace is God; but, paradoxically, God is also in the details observed by the senses. McCann notes, in her Introduction, that some poets believe that “the world’s truths are metaphoric” and that others “find the surface of the world as revealing, not fading against, the face of God” (2000, 21). The important thing for the poet who would so transcend is to wait. Respectfully. Homer and Milton would call it wandering. To Keats it is imagining. To Seamus Heaney it is gazing. As William Stafford told me in a private conversation, art comes in little ways that are so unpredictable that we can’t engineer them (1985). Further, the poem he was writing when he died advises, “Be ready for what God sends” (1993). Robert Frost declares, “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader” (1967, vi). If he respects his craft and trusts his trackless wandering, the poet will find himself somewhere new. And about what will he write? About what he observes. And learns. Donald Hall, recent United States Poet Laureate, whose beloved wife Jane Kenyon died a few years ago, says that all poems are about the loss of love. Another United States Poet Laureate, nonagenarian gardener Stanley Kunitz, blissfully married for many decades, says the only two topics are love and death. Miller Williams says that poets must write about “the writeaboutable.” Art is free; in its variety of opinions and approaches, it is democratic. And even rebellious. Some would argue that this makes it like religion, that great religious leaders—Christ, Buddha, Mohammed—have always broken with the status quo, have always seen the world and man’s relation to God in new ways.

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THE FUNCTION OF CATEGORIES And so how can we hold on for long to a category like Catholic poetry? Or religious poetry? How can poetry not be religious? Indeed, how can any act not be religious? It is interesting to observe people who say they are not religious, to watch how they live. They tend to be reverent. The mountaineer and geologist John Cleary refuses to attend Mass, even on Christmas, but asserts, “I’m just such a traditional Catholic.” Casey Jones, journalist and collector of Native American art, served an inner-city parish as its volunteer groundskeeper for many years. Some say that art is a bridge to God. The traditional Catholic view of the sacraments and symbolic objects and practices is that they serve this function. One might say that bridges can be helpful if you think you need them; but you really don’t need a bridge to God. If you use your senses, if you are alert, any path will take you there. Or, said another way, you are there; a children’s book by Joan Walsh Angland tells of a little girl to whom, when she just sits still, the little woodland creatures come. You don’t even have to pray, just to be. Joyce Dickey, in her last years of living with multiple sclerosis, totally paralyzed, unable to talk or to swallow, still somehow, mysteriously to all observers, had joy in simply being alive. Every day before celebrating Mass, Father Tom Wiederholt used to advise his parishioners, ”Put yourselves in the presence of God.” Realizing that they are already there, he now says, “Be aware that you are in the presence of God.” When he was dying, Jack O’Toole called in his pastor to administer the Last Sacraments, then feinted, “Forget it, Father. I don’t believe in God.” The alert young cleric riposted, “That doesn’t matter, Jack. The only important thing is that God believes in you.” Indeed, we read in Genesis that God walks in the garden in the afternoon. God does not need to be approached. God IS. Immanent, numinous, transcendent, here. We do not have to look for God. But there are ways that we can be aware of His presence: through all things sensual, imaginative, rational. Drums, dancing, chanting; in the quiet Friends Meeting, the Gospel choir, the sedate Anglican service—all carefully planned. All scriptures use words rhythmically, musically to tell their stories, to give their advice. The services, the windows, the color, and chiaroscuro all help the worshipper be aware of the merging of space and time with the timeless. Art and life, time and the timeless, the religious and the secular, God and man: these are not the same; no one would argue that they are. Yet there are seamless connections. Pulling them apart is messy. More interesting for the poet—even as he works methodically, rationally within his craft—to trace their convergences. Listing, tracing, defining Catholic poetry is useful and even fascinating, to a point. But after a while the

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exercise may confine; one wants to ask who is in, who is out, and who are the audiences. Better to leave off the qualifying adjective. Poets get nervous with adjectives, adverbs; they tend to bleed the strong nouns and verbs we depend on. (Still, one must be wary of proscription: Gaston Bachelard calls himself “’a philosopher of adjectives’” [Stilgoe 1994, ix]); Wordsworth and Whitman sometimes revel in adjectives. In his long narrative poem Gunslinger, the poet Ed Dorn had a talking horse who constantly admonished, “Don’t describe” (1995). One must not draw a line around something ineffable and fence it in. It will die. It will not be itself. Poets are advised, “Show, don’t tell.” Actors are told, “Don’t indicate. Just smoke, open the door. Don’t act, just do it.” In this essay I do not want to survey the contemporary scene: I do not want to get corralled. Categories are myriad. The twentieth-anniversary catalogue of New Letters on the Air: Writers on Cassette lists its interviewees first alphabetically and then by prize (Nobel, Pulitzer, Booker, National/American Book, National Book Critics Circle) and by ethnic group and subject matter (Native American, Hispanic, Black, Beat). Other classifications people make include Religious Poetry, Love Poetry, Nature. American, English, French, Chinese, Japanese. Lyric, Narrative, Formal, Traditional, Free. All are useful classifications: national, ethnic, diachronic, synchronic, form, subject matter. Catholic poetry could fit into, could overlap these categories. What distinguishes it bears repeating: it is sacramental; it can be organized liturgically around the seasons and the seven sacraments. It assumes the fall of man, the spiritual journey, the possibility of repentance, the promise of redemption, the presence of God, the contradictory impulses of human nature. Some details of the sacraments and of the spiritual journey may be specific, if not unique, to Catholic poetry; yet much poetry takes the seasons into account (we must constantly ask, “What is the weather like?”); and everyone is also involved in the events the sacraments touch: love and loss, birth and death, coming of age. Catholic poetry may be reverent, devout, righteous, even pious. It can be bad poetry when it is technically dull, overly pious, insular. A web site under Catholic Poetry calls up some sappy sing-song clumsy parochial verse. Catholic poetry is at its best when it uses specifics to transcend boundaries, when it uses language in a fresh way to express universal truths, ultimate mysteries: the human need for unity, for time stopping, for living the fact of the Incarnation.

START WITH A PICTURE My own work begins with a picture. I hesitate to call it a vision—to some readers that would suggest the bizarre: Joan of Arc had visions, but

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twenty-first-century academics should not; Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross talked directly to God, but a thoroughly modern person would not in public admit such activity. I prefer to think in the terms of Bachelard, who wrote that poetry appears in the “isolated image,” in “reverberation” (1994, xv–xvi). Thus, sound and sight and smell, externally stimulated yet appearing in the mind. One stares out a window, daydreams in church or at a concert; one overhears the odd line of conversation, flinches at midnight radios and backfires and shots; one’s house smells like one’s grandmother’s. And then past present future merge; as Bachelard says, “the poetic act has no past” (xv). And Eliot in “Four Quartets” writes, “Time present and time past are both present / perhaps in time future, / And time future contained in time past” (1963, “Burnt Norton” I, 1–3). “Perhaps A Ruined Abbey” is as exact a description as I could craft of an archway I saw in my mind while at Mass. The poem is an attempt to fix the physical details of what the speaker could and could not see, to stay calm amid the frustration of not knowing what she was looking at. (I prefer to call any first-person narrator the speaker and to name the main character the persona in order to step back from the autobiographical.) The you in the poem is probably the beloved, or a person whom I wants to know better, wants to trust but does not yet. You may be God. The poem is in blank verse, thirty-three five-beat lines in two stanzas—sixteen and seventeen lines, in a rhythm that waxes and wanes with the speaker’s level of frustration. In the first stanza she catalogues what she thinks the arch might be; in the second she focuses on what she can know—the weather, the grass. At the end of the poem, when I leans in fatigue against the stone, she finds some comfort in “its cool smooth surface against my cheek.” Like Captain Ernest Shakelton, the apostles on the road to Emmaus, Eliot’s pilgrim in “The Waste Land,” she senses but cannot discern the presence of a person near her. (I did not notice these connections until long after I wrote the poem.) Once the poem was finished, the archway took on a life of its own. I saw it in paintings and photographs. Then, a month after the poem appeared in a journal, I found myself at a place unknown to me, Glastonbury Abbey, legendary burial place of legendary King Arthur, built on a spot where some believe Joseph of Arimathea took the young boy Jesus. There was the ruined abbey of my poem. Perhaps a Ruined Abbey When I think of you I see an archway— mossy, cool, of scratchy granite, ancient Roman gateway to—I cannot tell: perhaps a ruined abbey, Norman cloister where monks still chant; or Gothic Salisbury Cathedral, bombed-out and half-restored. Some

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might build a party palace, restaurants, condos. I do not know: this field that stretches far away and even to the wine-dark sea; a low green plain, a wasteland where something used to be—or never was or will be; a wilderness; a field where sheep could safely graze, where a child could wander; an edge, a precipice down which a child could abruptly tumble, grab a protruding root, hang shrieking unheard above the black and roiling rocks. I do not know; I cannot see beyond the arch; I do not see the building or even the wall from which the arch springs. I do not know if it is a monastery. There are green vines, but no clematis or wisteria. Somehow I know it is Spring. The air is moist; no rain, neither hot nor cold. The path is sandy, damp. The grass on either side is closely cropped. It’s a low Roman arch, just wide enough for two to pass abreast. Perhaps it leads to Italy; but this seems more like England. I can’t tell if you are on the path behind or beside or in front of me. I can’t tell if you are here at all. I feel your presence but I don’t know where you are. I approach the gate, close my eyes, lean against the stone, feel its cool smooth surface against my cheek.

In “Chartres,” “I lose my bearings” in watching clouds moving over the cathedral, in the ecstasy of love and of prayer. The blue of the sky and of the lover’s eyes become one, and because the speaker becomes dizzy while looking at the clouds over the cathedral, she imagines that she is floating with God. My idea for the poem began when I looked up at the sky over the cathedral. The poem ends with this image, but starts with the lover’s touch and the speaker’s reaction to it. The poem is one sentence, eight alexandrines. While the poem fell into this form, I hope that the long lines (six beats, eleven to thirteen syllables), unpunctuated, pull the mind along languidly but deliberately so that, like the speaker, the reader will lose his bearings and will not be able to tell which comes first: blue eyes, blue sky, God. Chartres Sometimes when you touch me somewhere I don’t know where it is so astonishing I arch my back up to meet you smiling above me and throw my head back

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“Priests Pavane in Sheer White Gowns” mixes up sights and sounds and scents in Notre Dame de Paris: the organ trills become a hurricane; the sermon drones into a harangue; lilies, roses, thorns, virgins, mothers all merge into the desperate wife. She becomes disoriented by the heavy incense, loud music, droning sermon, stifling air during Sunday Mass; then all images become cruel—words from the sermon and the scripture readings, the statues of the Virgin and of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, even the flowers. She remembers with horror the begetting of her children. She remembers her husband’s indifference: “You walked along white cliffs / and never called to me.” She remembers her desperation: “I butted my head / into the low moon and hollowed it out.” Finally, in the present, she feels the ground give way: “The green sky rushes past.” At first the speaker controls her observations; she lists images and events methodically. Five of the first six lines are end-stopped. Most of the following twenty-one lines are enjambed, or run-on. Her horror at the disparity between the comfort she seeks (the “surrogates” of stained glass windows and lacy architecture) and the reality she finds (in the sermon’s call to action and the stoical lives of the saints) intensifies through the poem’s twenty-seven lines of irregularly alternating pentameter and hexameter. The last line is impossibly long—sixteen syllables, six irregular feet, culminating in her complete dislocation as she feels herself falling from the cliff where her husband had walked without her. Priests Pavane in Sheer White Gowns The faithful file into Notre Dame de Paris. Priests pavane in sheer white gowns, gold chasubles embroidered green for hope. The incense stings my eyes. The organ trills filigrees of light. Through the hurricane the organ storms a march of triumph. Bodies lean into the typhoon, ballerina arms sway. The incense stings my eyes. The priest’s voice goes on and on: “Hospital for Foundlings, Hospital for Sick Cardinals . . . .” No cures or treatments, just a cold cloth to my head and a knife to my veins. Life for them is too brief for the summer breeze licking my back. They come here for surrogates, for jeweled windows, lace walls, white lilies, incense, chanting. The only word we need is “alleluia,” not Saint Paul and his thorn

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of Satan. The incense stings my eyes. The Virgin holding the Christ Child stands on a stone column banked by lilies—trumpet cup and shaft face opposite ways. Saint Therese cradles her thorny roses. Why did she walk barefoot on frosted floors, eat the tubercular sputum of her dying sister? Why must we all be virgins? That first summer in Paris my white lace gown did no good, and on the fifth night my sobs echoed in the stone courtyard; and four children sprang from your falling asleep on top of me. You walked along white cliffs and never called to me. I butted my head into the low moon and hollowed it out. The green sky rushes past.

In “Praise Him” the speaker is methodical throughout, describing exactly what she sees as she walks up the snowy hill to Saint Joseph’s Trappist Abbey near Boston: the clock tower in the town, the cracked asphalt road, the icy river. Once in the chapel, she feels lost and lonely; distracted by an ugly overhead light, she cannot pray. Then she imagines she hears the voice of God coming from the direction of the light bulb, mockingly wise, admonishing her, basically, to “buck up, Old Girl. And be grateful.” The form is stark, like the landscape and the mood: six stanzas in variations on the Japanese haiku and tanka. All but the third stanza are tercets of five, seven, five syllables; the third is an elongation of this haiku stanza, in five, seven, five, seven, seven syllables. It is my hope that the form reflects both the earnestness of the speaker and a certain sense of levity at that earnestness. Praise Him (At Saint Joseph’s Trappist Abbey) The moon-faced tower behind me scraped the dull sky. I walked up the hill through old snow still white, iced, dusk-gleaming, over swiftsnagged gun-blue river, on cracked macadam, to pale sun sliding behind low stone arches, bell tower, chapel. Ostracized behind visitors wall, old pilgrim lost in a thicket, motherless child, I closed my eyes against the dark. Above me, one electric light and the

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“Last Words” describes a life-sized stone sculpture of Christ on the Cross and a performance of James MacMillan’s piece for choir and orchestra. As the poem progresses, the speaker, who keeps repeating, “I do not feel transported,” disappears and Christ lives—and finally dies—in the sculpture and the music. The poem is in two sections: the first focusing on the sculpture—the sights; the second on the music—the sounds. The form is irregular, following first the eye of the narrator as she describes the shadows on the sculpture and what she wishes she were feeling; then following the rhythm of the choir and orchestra, the motions and grimaces of the conductor, and finally and overwhelmingly, Christ’s words and breathing. Last Words “Seven Last Words from the Cross, for Choir and String Orchestra,” by James MacMillan. Performed by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir and the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra, at Redemptorist Church, 16 February 2002 I. Christ on the Cross is white marble, his crown is a braid of marble. Nailheads sparkle like rubies in his wrists, his chest is pierced, a black stain, a hollow. He is dead, his face is grey. I do not feel transported. Deep violet is the color of his shroud, amethyst are the shadows under his arms, and along his ribs, and behind his legs. He is dead, his face is grey. I do not feel transported. Fra Angelico would have made him smile at me; in Florence the music would have transcended. But here he is dead, his face is grey. I am sitting directly below this large marble statue. Two choirs sing his last words in some language; it may be English; I do not feel transported; my ring is the color of his shroud.

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II. The second choir sings so high we cannot hear it, our ears hurt, our nerves vibrate, Jesus thirsts, he sucks the bitter sponge, he bears his insults but he thirsts the more, he cannot swallow gall, he thirsts the more. The wind blows, it rattles the bones, blows past the bones, blows past and blows against the void, echoes against no echo. Rattles the air. His pulse pounds his temples, his bones pound, he writhes, he cannot break, if he could break he would die now die now die now to pulse to pain to bone pounding he cannot breathe he cannot die. The conductor’s mouth screams— a Grunewald Christ— Father Father. The violins are erinyes. Stop the vibration, the fury the slow pulseless agony— Oh stop the buzz the swarms of bottled flies. He cannot breathe, he cannot die, please bring the sword to pierce his heaving chest— if he cannot get air in, the sword could let all air out. The music drags on without air, the air drifts away away—far it drifts away away, the sound recedes. No sound— No sound— It is finished It is finished. Consummatum est.

CONCLUSION Catholic poems, religious poems, poems, take many forms. It is interesting and useful for the scholar, the teacher, the student to categorize them. Categorization helps us manage time and space. But at the moment of creation, the poet does not usually categorize. The poet, I believe, tries to connect the concrete and the mystery worlds between which he lives much of the time. He wants to slow time down, to hold on to the moment,

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to cry out with Ovid, “slowly slowly may ye run, oh horses of the night” (“lente currite, noctis equi” in “Elegy XIII,” “He Entreats the Dawn to Hasten Not Her Coming”).

REFERENCES Bachelard, Gaston. 1994. Introduction. In The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard. Trans. Maria Jolas, xv–xxxix. Foreword by John R. Stilgoe. Boston: Beacon Press. ———. 1994. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Foreword by John R. Stilgoe. Boston: Beacon Press. Craig, David. 2000. “Psalm #1.” In Place of Passage: Contemporary Catholic Poetry, edited by David Craig and Janet McCann. Ashland, Oregon: Storyline Press. Craig, David, and McCann, Janet, eds. 2000. Place of Passage: Contemporary Catholic Poetry. Ashland, Oregon: Storyline Press. Dickinson, Emily. 1961. “#249: Wild Nights—Wild Nights!” In The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson. Boston: Little, Brown. Donne, John. 1941. “Holy Sonnets VII, X, XIV.” In The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne and the Complete Poetry of William Blake. New York: Modern Library. Dorn, Ed. 1995. Gunslinger. Introduction by Marjorie Perloff. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. Eliot, T. S. 1963. “The Waste Land.” In Collected Poems 1909–1962. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. ———. 1963. “Four Quartets.” In Collected Poems 1909–1962. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. Frost, Robert. 1967. “The Figure a Poem Makes.” In The Complete Poems of Robert Frost, v–viii. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Gioia, Dana. 2000. “The Room Upstairs.” In Place of Passage: Contemporary Catholic Poetry, edited by David Craig and Janet McCann. Ashland, Oregon: Storyline Press. ———. 1996. “The Country Wife.” In Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism, edited by Mark Jarman and David Mason. Brownsville, Oregon: Storyline Press. Herbert, George. 1964. “Lent.” In The Works of George Herbert, edited by F. E. Hutchinson. London: Oxford University Press. Hopkins, Gerard Manley. 1985. “God’s Grandeur.” In Poems and Prose of Gerard Manley Hopkins, edited by W. H. Gardner. London: Putnam. ———. 1985. “Pied Beauty.” In Poems and Prose of Gerard Manley Hopkins, edited by W. H. Gardner. London: Putnam. Jarman, Mark, and Mason, David, eds. 1996. Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism. Brownsville, Oregon: Storyline Press. Levertov, Denise. 2000. “The Tide.” In Place of Passage: Contemporary Catholic Poetry, edited by David Craig and Jean McCann. Ashland, OR: Storyline Press. ———. 2001. “The Acolyte.” In Contemporary American Poetry, 7th ed., edited by A. Poulin Jr. and Michael Waters. New York: Houghton Mifflin.

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Lisieux, Thérèse. “Our Divine Lord to St. Gertrude.” http://www.catholicfirst.com/ thefaith/catholicclassics/sttherese/poemsofsttherese3.cfm. Accessed on January 2, 2008. McCann, Janet. 2000. Introduction. In Place of Passage: Contemporary Catholic Poetry, edited by David Craig and Jean McCann, 19–23. Ashland, Oregon: Storyline Press. Ovid. Elegy XIII, “He Entreats the Dawn to Hasten Not Her Coming.” In The Love Books of Ovid, http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/ovid/lboo/lboo19.htm . Accessed on January 2, 2008. Poulin, A., Jr., and Michael Waters, eds. 2001. Contemporary American Poetry. 7th ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Stafford, William. 1993. www.tomfolio.com/AuthorInfo/authors/williamstafford .asp. Accessed on January 13, 2008. Stilgoe, John R. 1994. Foreword to the 1994 Edition. In The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard. Trans. Maria Jolas, vii–x. Boston: Beacon Press. Whitman, Walt. 1982. “A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim.” In Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, edited by Justin Kaplan. New York: The Library of America. ———. 1982. “A Song for Occupations.” In Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, edited by Justin Kaplan. New York: The Library of America. Wordsworth, William. 1984. “While Not a Leaf Seems Faded.” In William Wordsworth: The Major Works, edited by Stephen Gill, 341. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Chesterton’s Catholic Imagination John C. Chalberg

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hesterton’s Catholic imagination? In this modern world of ours the word Catholic (with a capital c) cannot possibly be an adjective modifying the noun imagination. Such a juxtaposition seems, well, unimaginable. And if those two words are so joined, that joining is consistent with the modern temptation, nay the modern compulsion, to dismiss the notion of a Catholic imagination as an oxymoron or to ridicule it as an impossible flight of imaginative fancy. This is especially the case if the Catholic in question is an orthodox Catholic, which is exactly what Gilbert Keith Chesterton eventually became. After all, what is an orthodox Catholic, if not a dogmatist? And what is a dogmatist, if not someone who either refuses—or is forbidden—to think imaginatively? Was G. K. Chesterton, heaven forbid, a dogmatist? Of course he was. And no less than Chesterton himself would have instantly conceded as much. More than that, he was of the rather dogmatic opinion that everyone was a dogmatist of one sort or another. Not that Chesterton was completely dogmatic on this point. He qualified that dogmatic statement by dividing his dogmatists into two types. There were—and are—dogmatists, such as himself, who freely admitted to being dogmatic. And then there were—and are—dogmatists who deny that that is what they are. Chesterton knew the type even in his day. They preached tolerance and yet practiced the worst sorts of bigotry (usually anti-Catholic bigotry) imaginable. One need exercise only a very small amount of one’s imagination, Catholic or otherwise, to conjure up examples of these modern dogmatists in this ever so modern world of ours.

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Think about that curious word homophobia for a moment. Modern advocates of tolerance use it routinely in reference to those who oppose the gay rights agenda. The centerpiece of that agenda is gay marriage. If our modern world should step ever more deeply into modernity—or postmodernity—by making such a marriage legal, will those who continue to stand in opposition be charged with hate speech if they openly declare that opposition. To ask such a question is to answer it. Chesterton was fortunate enough to live at a time when no one could have imagined a world in which gay marriage would be celebrated and hate speech would be prosecuted. But that did not prevent him from advertising his dogmatism or from spotting dogmatic thinking among his enemies. If anything, his dogmatism helped him to see the dogmatism spouted by those who insisted that they were not dogmatists. So let it be stipulated that G. K. Chesterton was a very dogmatic fellow, whether the subject was Catholic orthodoxy or English politics or modern morals. But permit me to suggest that he was something more than that. Permit me to suggest that he was also a man of great, even rambunctious, imagination. That imagination was no doubt enhanced by his youthful reading of fairy tales. It would later be reflected in his own writing of fiction and in his considerable artistic talent. The young Chesterton, to be sure, was not always filled with a sense of things transcendent. But even then he possessed an active imagination. Certainly it is safe to say that he was a man of imagination long before he became a man of faith. As an artist and a story teller, he could hardly have been anything else. But more to the point—and this is my point—he remained a man of fertile imagination after he became a Catholic. If anything, his imaginative powers were enhanced by his belief in and commitment to Catholic orthodoxy—and by his ultimate conversion to Catholicism. If this stance seems paradoxical, so be it. After all, this will be far from the first time that G. K. Chesterton has been associated with the notion of paradox. It will also be far from the last such association within the confines of this brief essay. But perhaps the ultimate paradox of Chesterton’s intellectual and spiritual lives is that he saw no contradiction between these two lives. In fact, he would finally proclaim that he did not achieve complete mental emancipation until he had become a Catholic. To explore this proclamation, we shall examine Chesterton’s views on the joy of Catholicism, its twin emphases on sin and humility, its moral ideals, the ideal of a just society in light of both capitalism and the welfare state, Christian morality and modern materialism, the imaginative wonder— and power—of faith and, finally, catholic imagination as a springboard to intellectual liberation.

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A FEW HARD FACTS ABOUT CHESTERTON In one sense Chesterton’s formal conversion in 1922 was a very large step indeed. In another, perhaps paradoxical, sense, it was a very small step. But before we leap more daringly into the pits of paradox or head off on flights of imaginative fancy or wander away into the mists of history, let’s nail down a few hard facts. Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born on May 29, 1874. He died on June 14, 1936. In between he wrote more books and essays, poems and novels, than most of us will manage to read in a lifetime. One of those books was titled Orthodoxy. Published in 1908 (and continuously in print since then), it has been called his most Catholic book. But, in point of cold, hard fact, its author was not yet a Catholic. In a formal sense, Chesterton’s conversion did not take place until he was nearly fifty years old. Nonetheless, Orthodoxy offers us a solid piece of evidence that Chesterton was a Catholic thinker well before he decided to take that at once small, and yet very large, step which made him a Catholic communicant. Small? Yes, small, if only because he was already a Catholic in the large sense of that term. And small also because he was already a man of imagination in the small sense of that term. Small step? Small sense? Once again the problem—or perhaps it should be the possibility—of paradox rears its truthful head. Were you, dear reader, expecting ugly head? Sorry to disappoint you. And sorry to confuse you. But in truth Chesterton saw nothing ugly about the notion of paradox—and nothing confusing about it either. If anything, he employed paradoxes as a way of getting at truth. In the same way, he used his imagination as a way of approaching truth. Just as he ultimately found Catholicism to be the Truth.

IMAGINATION, ORTHODOX BOUNDARIES, AND JOY Which brings us back to the small sense of Chesterton’s imagination. It was small in the sense that it was rooted in and consistent with boundaries. Boundaries? To Chesterton boundaries were anything but confining. Certainly they were not impediments to the exercise of his imagination. In truth, and paradoxically so, Chesterton understood that boundaries existed not to hem people in, whether literally or figuratively, but to set people free, mentally free, that is. Now, the adult Chesterton always considered himself to be a free man. As such, he certainly thought of himself as a man who exercised free will. Did his conversion to Catholicism place new limits on this exercise? Not

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in Chesterton’s mind. If anything, he went to great lengths to point out that it was only after he had come to know orthodoxy that he experienced what he called “true mental emancipation” (Orthodoxy 1986, 363). For that matter, it was only after he had come to know orthodoxy that Chesterton thought he had truly begun to experience joy. In that sense, Chesterton, like C. S. Lewis, was “surprised by joy.” And once he experienced that sense of surprise for the first time, Chesterton wanted to repeat this experience again and again. To him, maintaining a sense of joy was critical to maintaining one’s mental health. No doubt the pre-Catholic Chesterton was a joyful fellow. But the Catholic Chesterton was even more joyful. The experience of being received into the Church did not stifle his sense of joy; if anything, it enhanced it. At the same time, Chesterton understood despair. In fact, the young Chesterton experienced deep despair. The Catholic Chesterton transcended that despair. In doing so, he came to understand something else as well. He understood that despair did not stem from being weary of suffering. On the contrary, it stemmed from being “weary of joy.” Once again, here is an imaginative Chesterton turning things upside down and speaking a simple truth at the same time. The automatic assumption of the modern world, whether in Chesterton’s day or our own, is that paganism, whether ancient or modern, is the religion of joy, while Christianity is at all times the religion of sorrow. Not so, concluded Chesterton paradoxically—and truthfully. At the heart of paganism at all times is “pure sorrow,” while at the heart of Christianity is “pure joy” (Orthodoxy 1986, 363). Conventional wisdom has it that Christians are kill-joys. Such wisdom is conventionally expressed by those who raise the specter of the dreaded religious right. This specter constitutes the great bogeyman of modern American life. It is that because it stands athwart the sexual revolution of modern American life. A good ten years ago, when I was in Calgary, Father Ian Boyd of the Chesterton Review told me that such conventional wisdom was on display in an exchange between actor Robert Duvall and a CBC interviewer following the release of The Apostle. According to Father Boyd, Duvall was asked if he was frightened by the power of the religious right in America. His answer may not have frightened his interrogator, but it certainly must have surprised her—and in a way that must have been anything but joyful to her. No, he replied, the power of the pagan left in America was much more frightening to him. Now, Robert Duvall may or may not have read his Chesterton, but he was making a Chestertonian point—and in a most Chestertonian manner. G. K. Chesterton, however, was not simply concerned with the power of paganism. After all, he could imagine something much worse, namely, the utter joylessness of paganism. This is especially true of modern pa-

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ganism with its joyless pursuit of wealth, its joyless pursuit of things, its joyless pursuit of pleasure, especially sexual pleasure, and its joyless pursuit of health. On this last score, Chesterton was bemused by modern man’s belief that the care of one’s body was the way to health. To him the mark of a truly healthy man was carelessness. Seldom was he inclined to exercise his better than three-hundred–pound self. Why? Because he thought that no one should resort to such joyless pursuits simply because one was too fat, or especially because one loved oneself. Only if one was careless enough—and joyful enough—to love other things, things such as horses and high mountains, should one bother to bestir oneself to take exercise. Chesterton was willing to concede that joy could be the “small publicity” of the pagan. But his greater insight was that joy was the “gigantic secret” of the Christian. Once again the obvious question is why? And once again the playful Chesterton, which is to say the imaginative Chesterton (who also happens to be the paradoxical Chesterton), comes into focus: Christians were joyful because they believed in original sin, which belief Chesterton fully and happily came to share. After all, he concluded puckishly, original sin was the “only part of Christian theology that could actually be proved” (Orthodoxy 1986, 217).

JOY, SIN, AND HUMILITY Provable or not, the doctrine of original sin provided fallen man with what a joyful Chesterton thought was the “only cheerful version” of life imaginable (Orthodoxy 1986, 217). There I go again. Cheerful? Because original sin at least offered man hope that a wrong use of the will could be righted. To Chesterton, belief in original sin ought not to produce despair. If anything, such belief led naturally to the conclusion that “our natures were made for beatitude” (Orthodoxy 1986, 217). In a very real sense, then, the good news of the gospel was the good news of original sin, paradoxically speaking, that is. And the good news of Catholicism, to Chesterton, is the promise of the forgiveness of sin. After his 1922 conversion, Chesterton was often asked why he had decided to become a Catholic. His answer, when he chose to give one, was invariably the same: it was the only religion that claimed to rid him of his sins. And once he had converted, he could not imagine being anything else. In this sense there were limits to his Catholic imagination after all! Rivaling Chesterton’s imaginative power was his equally powerful sense of humility. Here I go again. How can humility be powerful? In Chesterton’s case it surely was, as it should be in the life of every

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Christian. After all, if one lives a Christian life, one lives in awe of God and of God’s Church. How then could one be anything other than humble? But, Chesterton was wont to add, being in a state of humility did not mean hanging one’s head in humiliation. Rather, it meant bowing one’s head in humility. In Chesterton’s case, this humility was also grounded in his conviction that pride was the “poison in every other vice” (Pride: The Supreme Evil 1988, 147). In one sense, Chesterton saw nothing wrong with pride, rightly understood. Surely a man could be proud of his wife or his heroes or his Church. But he thought it was something else again to take pride in one’s own accomplishments or virtues. That kind of pride approached the sin of pride. And the prevalence of that sin was sufficient proof to Chesterton that the puritanical prohibitionists of his day were wrong twice over. They mistakenly took pride in their own Puritanism—and in their campaign to force it on others. Puritans were wrong to ban beer and burgundy, because beer and burgundy were gifts from God—and gifts for which we should express thanks, Chesterton liked to add, by “not drinking too much of them” (Orthodoxy 1986, 268). These same prohibitionists were wrong on a second count as well. In their campaign to rid the world of what they considered to be an evil, they revealed that they could not avoid the temptation to commit the sin of pride. Chesterton summarized both wrongs as only Chesterton could. To him, most of the evil in this world did not result from staring mindlessly into the bottom of a beer glass, but from staring longingly into a looking glass. Here again Chesterton turned to his Church to help him maintain a sense of humility, as well as engender a sense of humility in the faithful. Only the Church, he believed, had the strength to take on this task. And it had that strength, because it had been founded on the rock that was a truly humble man. As Chesterton put it, when Christ chose someone upon whom to found His Church, He might have turned to the brilliant Paul or the mystical John. Instead, he turned to a shuffler, a coward, and, yes, even a snob, which is to say he turned to a man. Who better than a humble and humbled Peter to give the Church the strength to carry on the formidable task of combating despair and joylessness and pride in this world? After all, a Church is not just a rock; it is also a chain. And a chain is no stronger than its weakest link (Heretics 1986, 70). According to Chesterton, the individual links of that chain, which is to say individual communicants, were strongest whenever they emerged from the confessional. He understood that modern man had nothing but disdain for those who engaged in the “morbid” practice of confessing their sins to a priest. Here again, Chesterton’s unique genius was to turn the tables on these critics of the Church. To him the truly morbid thing

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was not to confess one’s sins, but rather to conceal them, and perhaps even “let them eat your heart out”—which he deemed to be the “allegedly happy state of mind of many modern people living in highly civilized societies” (“The Fault of the System” January 8, 1908, n.p.). Such a line may strike some as suggestive of a very unChestertonian note of disdain, which, if true, would have left him a very short step away from that poisonous sin of pride. But Chesterton invariably caught himself before he actually committed that sin, even if he did not always stop short of the sins of gluttony and sloth. In any case, his Church was always there to try to stop him. And so was the confessional. In Chesterton’s view, a Catholic who entered the confessional—and who did so with humility—was not doing so out of a sense of morbidity. And when that same Catholic left the confessional he had no reason to feel morbid. How could he when he was standing at the dawn of his own beginning? For, as Chesterton put it, in that brief ritual of confession God had “truly remade him in His own image” (The Autobiography of G. K. Chesterton 1954, 319).

SIN, THE CHURCH, AND MORAL IDEALS Chesterton is justly praised for Orthodoxy, a book that can be found on many a list of the one hundred most influential books of the past century. And his The Everlasting Man, published in 1925, has been credited by no less than C. S. Lewis for convincing him to reject atheism for Christianity. But other books among his post-conversion writings deserve our attention as well, on their merits and because they contribute to our understanding of his Catholic imagination. Such is surely the case with The Thing. “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.” This is one of Chesterton’s most quoted lines (from What’s Wrong with the World [1990, 61]). And while this superb sentence cannot be found in The Thing, it nonetheless expresses a frame of mind that infuses this book. And frame, after all, is always the key word for Chesterton, who was always returning to the importance of having a frame to one’s life, as well as frames or boundaries in one’s life. Only then can one legitimately exercise free will. Only then can one fully put one’s imagination to work. Only then can one imaginatively take risks, not with the certainty of living an error-free life—and surely not with the certainty of living a sin-free life—but always with the certainty that accompanies those Christian ideals, difficult though they may be to live by. This notion is important to keep in mind at all times. Chesterton certainly thought so. And if it was important for him to keep such a notion in mind during his seemingly innocent time, it is even more important during this seemingly less innocent time of scandal within the Church.

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Chesterton has often been portrayed as an innocent at large in a wicked world. Nothing could be further from the truth. He has also been accused of being at least a facile, if not a downright Pollyannaish, optimist. But nothing could be further from the truth. Given our fallen state, and given his belief in that state, it did not take much imagination on his part to appreciate the power, nay the seductiveness, of sin in everyone’s life. In fact, Chesterton was always struck by how much easier it was to commit a sin than to avoid doing so. Whenever he happened upon the story of a particularly awful crime in the London tabloids of his day, Chesterton invariably stopped to ponder not just the awfulness of that crime, but the awful realization that he might have committed it. That sort of imaginative realization may or may not have come naturally to him. But in any case it was consistent with his Catholic theology. As he expressed that theology in the book of essays that he titled The Thing, he contended that sins can be expiated in the Church, because within the Church there is a “test and a principle of expiation.” More than that, and this is especially important to remember today, “Catholic abuses can be reformed, because at least there is a prior admission of a form” (1990, 219). Chesterton was far from oblivious to the obvious, namely, the presence of sin in the world and within the Church. But he insisted on something else, something that ought to have been obvious then—but wasn’t—and something that ought to be obvious today—and isn’t—namely, that the “world will do all that it has ever accused the Church of doing—and do it much worse, and do it without any standards for a return to sanity” (The Thing 1990, 218). In a chapter of The Thing, entitled “The Revolt Against Ideas,” Chesterton confronted head-on the subject of corruption within the Church. There was, for example, corruption within the monasteries of the Middle Ages. Chesterton readily conceded as much. But in a very real sense that concession was a compliment to the monasteries. After all, he noted, “we do not talk of the corruption of the corrupt” (232). For his part, Chesterton was willing to make this alliterative concession: there was such a person as the “avaricious abbot” (233). At the same time, he could not resort to alliteration to condemn the corrupt capitalist of his day. The former could actually be corrupt; the latter could not. The abbot violated his ideals; the capitalist, however, had no ideals to violate. “Mere greed and pride” infected medieval institutions, and “mere greed and pride” are always part and parcel of modern capitalism. The difference is that medieval man was aware of his sinfulness, while modern man is not (233). Chesterton did not deny that many medieval men failed miserably when it came to the daily business of actually living up to their ideals. But he demanded that his enemies—and those of his Church—grant in return

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that many modern men are more miserably, and yes, more disastrously, living without any ideals at all. Which is another way of saying that they are failing to live within a frame or within boundaries. Which is another way of saying that modern men prefer to deny free will than to exercise it. Which, paradoxically speaking, is another way of saying that modern men refuse to live their lives in a truly imaginative fashion.

CAPITALISM, THE WELFARE STATE, AND A JUST SOCIETY One more paradox is in order here: Chesterton’s ability to live within a frame continues to make it so difficult to pigeon-hole him today. It is not that his imagination ultimately took him outside of any frame. Rather, it is that his imaginative thinking cuts across so many of our contemporary boundaries. Catholics who prefer to be pigeon-holed on the left might appreciate Chesterton’s criticisms of modern capitalism and its soulless failings. For that matter, one doesn’t have to search very hard to find an angry Chesterton on this subject. In the essay that concludes What’s Wrong with the World, Chesterton’s anger is immediately apparent: “Not long ago I read that certain doctors and school authorities proposed to deal with the problem of lice in poor districts by sending out an order that all little girls should have their hair cut short.” Why, wondered Chesterton, did it not occur to these same officials to abolish lice instead? Why did it never occur to them that the “problem of lice in the slums is rooted in the wrongness of slums and not in the wrongness of hair?” (1990, 217) What will be next, he wondered further. “Soon they will be twisting necks to assure clean collars, or hacking feet to fit new boots.” Before any of this could happen, Chesterton asked his readers to think for a moment about one little girl, a poor girl with long red hair. And then he asked his readers to think about her father. Having been forced to neglect her hair because of his poverty, that father was forced to see it abolished in the name of hygiene. But in the world of modern capitalism, Chesterton added, that father “doesn’t count.” To be sure, Chesterton wanted him to count. More than that, he thought that that father should count. And even more than that, he thought that that father would count, because the day might come when he would lead a mob for the “most conservative of reasons” (What’s Wrong with the World 1990, 217). A conservative mob? Is this Chesterton at his most crazily paradoxical or his most insightfully paradoxical? In other words, when it comes to hair, is this the Chesterton who leads his readers to pull theirs out? He surely did not see all mobs as conservative. But he did see a place for the legitimacy of mob action, especially if those who joined mobs had legitimate reasons for doing so. And Chesterton certainly thought that

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the father of that little girl qualified. In that sense, a mob could well be a conservative phenomenon. An increasingly angry G. K. Chesterton then proceeded to take his readers through the following sequence: Because of the red hair of an urchin in the slums of London, modern civilization would be set on fire. And perhaps it would happen just like this: “Because a girl should have long hair, she should have clean hair. And because she should have clean hair, she should not have an unclean home. And because she should not have an unclean home, she should have a free and available mother. And because she should have such a mother, she should not have a usurious landlord. And because there should not be such landlords, there should be a redistribution of property. And because there should be a redistribution of property, there shall be a revolution” (What’s Wrong with the World 1990, 218). And when that day came, Chesterton concluded, the “little urchin with the red hair will not have it cut short like a convict’s. Instead, all the kingdoms of the earth shall be hacked about and mutilated to suit her, because hers is the human, nay, the sacred image.” And in the name of preserving that image, concluded Chesterton the Catholic distributist, “there will one day be a just society—and a time when not one hair on her head shall be harmed” (218). It should be noted that Chesterton’s vision of a just society was not only an attack on the modern welfare state, but also an attack on modern capitalism. In fact, it was Chesterton’s great insight, his imaginative insight, his distributist Catholic insight, that modern capitalism and the modern welfare state actually reinforce one another. More than that, the two often work hand-in-hand. Chesterton understood as much long ago. In his essay “The Dreadful Duty of Gudge,” to be found in What’s Wrong with the World, he posited two types: Gudge, the capitalist, and Hudge, the socialist. While each in theory claimed to be devoted to family life, each in fact was destroying family life. Looking toward a day in the not-toodistant future, Chesterton painted a word portrait of Gudge, who sought to “tighten the domestic bonds that do not exist,” and Hudge, who wanted to “loosen the bonds that no longer bind” (212). Did either really want to keep the family at all? Chesterton didn’t think so. After all, if Gudge wanted the family to survive and flourish, if he really wanted it to be strong enough to “resist the savage forces of commerce,” he would work to equalize property. And if Hudge was genuinely pro-family, he would gladly accept the “natural restraints of the family, the distinctions and divisions within the family.” He would not just glumly endure, but enthusiastically advocate the ideal of a “woman being womanly,” which to Chesterton did not mean “soft and yielding,” but “handy, thrifty, rather hard, and very humorous.” More than that,

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Hudge would have to accept the reality of a childish child, which is to say a child who is full of energy, which is to say a child who is as eager to accept authority as he is to eat his vegetables (212–13). In truth, neither Hudge nor Gudge was very interested in preserving family life in England—or anywhere else, for that matter. Chesterton’s “horrible suspicion” was that Hudge and Gudge were in fact in secret partnership against the family, even as each claimed to be advancing the lot of women. Here, Chesterton’s “horrible insight” became one of his most telling insights, namely that Hudge and Gudge were equally determined to evict the woman from the home. Gudge, the capitalist, preferred women workers because they were cheaper; Hudge, the socialist, wanted women to be free to live their own lives. Gudge’s world would be filled with “steady and obedient workers,” which is to say (as Chesterton wrote) a world of “sacking and sweating and bisexual toil, all of which are totally inconsistent with the free family and are bound in the end to destroy it,” leaving a “smiling and prophetic Hudge” to comfort us with his progressive vision that the family is simply an outmoded institution—and one which “we shall soon gloriously outgrow” (214). When it comes to the future of the family, Chesterton has very little to say that should be comforting to modern liberals—or to what passes for much of contemporary conservatism. After all, don’t both parents have to work outside the home today? And given that economic reality, shouldn’t government step in to help them via subsidized day care? Other economic realities dictate corporate policy. Corporations must pay more attention to the bottom line than to any other line, must they not? And they must be able to move employees from city to city like so many pieces on a chess board, must they not? More questions of a similar nature could be posed, but these should suffice to make the point—and to give both liberals and conservatives either pause or an excuse to dismiss Chesterton for thinking thoughts that both have decided ought to have nothing to do with the world that exists today.

MODERN MATERIALISM AND CHRISTIAN MORALITY Is Chesterton really so out of touch with today’s world? Not if we pay attention to his Catholic imagination. To be sure, our allegedly facile optimist, that is, G. K. Chesterton himself, has long been accused of dreaming of a world that didn’t exist at the time that he entered it, didn’t come into being during his heyday as a journalist, doesn’t exist now, won’t exist in the immediate future, and shouldn’t be so much as dreamed about in any foreseeable future. If there was a Chestertonian “golden age,” his critics say, it ended with the dawn of the Renaissance and the Reformation.

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Such charges did not trouble Chesterton when he was alive and writing. Nor should they trouble those who would apply Chestertonian ideas and principles to today’s problems. And the reason for all this collective calm clearly has something to do with the timelessness of Chesterton’s Catholic imagination, the frame of which has always been centered on family life. Here, cultural conservatives can find an ally in Chesterton, even if country club conservatives have to be troubled by, if not openly dismissive of, his adamant opposition to corporate capitalism. If the preservation of traditional family life is at the heart of G. K. Chesterton’s brave old world, as it surely is, then there can be little doubt as to which side is Chesterton’s side in today’s culture wars that swirl around the much beleaguered family. Chesterton, of course, predated not just our culture wars, but World War II and the Cold War as well. However, he did not predate the rise of Bolshevism. In fact, at the time of his death in 1936, it appeared to many in the West that Soviet-style communism was not just on the rise, but would eventually triumph and, more than that, deserved to triumph, given the apparent failure of capitalism. Writing not long before his death, Chesterton detected that the great fear of the day was that the great heresy of Bolshevism would destroy everything in its path. Did he fear Bolshevism? No. Was he among those Western fellow travelers who favored Bolshevism? No again. Well then, he surely must have been at the forefront of those who condemned the great heresy that was Bolshevism. Not really. The object of Chesterton’s worries and wrath in the mid-1930s was less the great heresy of Bolshevism than it was the next great heresy, which he defined as the “practical evil of monopolist materialism.” Neither Bolshevism nor its “step-sister socialism” was a serious threat over the long term, because each was grounded in what Chesterton deemed to be the “thin theory of collectivism” (“The Next Heresy” June 19, 1926, 232). Thin theory? Was this just another Chestertonian venture into alliteration? No. By thin, he simply meant that collectivism ran against the grain of human nature. And if the theory of Bolshevism was not enough to consign it to the dustbin of history, why then the actual practice of Bolshevism would surely accomplish the same end. Or so predicted Chesterton well before there was a Cold War in which the United States acted to contain this great heresy. To Chesterton, the next great heresy (of modern materialism) was far more dangerous, because it was far more seductive, far more consistent with our easily seduced human natures—and far more prevalent in the very bosom of the very country that had taken the lead in containing communism. Moreover, if Chesterton was convinced that the United States in particular and the Christian West in general had little reason to fear that Bolshevism would ever destroy anything in its path, he thought he had

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grave reasons to worry that monopolist materialism would destroy something in its path. That something was Christian morality. In the name of resisting this gathering heresy, Chesterton called upon “those who called themselves conservative” to rally themselves “or soon there will be nothing left to conserve.” More specifically, he called upon those who would “conserve the traditions of my own creed and communion” to recognize that it was capitalism, and not Bolshevism, that was their “actual and active antagonist” (“The Next Heresy” June 19, 1926, 233). Chesterton concluded that those who subscribed to his Catholic “creed and communion” had on occasion been charged with being behind the times. Surprising as it might seem (but shouldn’t), Chesterton readily conceded that the charge had a good deal of merit. More than that, he hoped that it did. Even more than that, he assumed that it did. In the first place, the “human ministers” of the Church were always in the position of dealing with the last heresy, rather than the next one. For example, in the middle of the nineteenth century, a Catholic could be found defending almsgiving against the Malthusian heresy. At the end of the nineteenth century a Catholic could be found defending private property against the Marxian heresy. Where might that leave a Catholic of the twentieth century? Chesterton thought it was high time that members of his “religious tradition” stop worrying about the Bolshevik incarnation of Marxism and start worrying about monopolist materialism and the full head of steam that this next great heresy was already gathering. And those who were the steamiest (pun intended) were not limited to a “few straggling, struggling socialists.” Rather they predominated among the “exultant” rich, or those who had resolved to “enjoy themselves at last” and who were determined that “neither Puritanism nor socialism nor Catholicism shall hold them back” (“The Next Heresy” June 19, 1926, 233). Chesterton, the historian of heresies old and new, could take some comfort from his judgment that “most heresies die faster than they can be killed.” Nonetheless, he was compelled to concede that some heresies did have a longer shelf life than others, especially those heresies that were all too consistent with our fallen state. Chesterton was at best a reluctant futurist, but he did venture to predict that the “practical evil of monopolist materialism” would last much longer and do far more damage than the “brief interlude of Bolshevik materialism” through which his world was then passing (“The Next Heresy” June 19, 1926, 233). Why was our facile optimist so pessimistic on this point? Because the roots of this heresy ran as “deep as nature itself, whose flower is the lust of the flesh and the leer of the eye and the pride of life” (“The Next Heresy” June 19, 1926, 233). Only the most prideful and only the most determined leer could avoid seeing the “signs of the times that are all around.” Were Americans somehow exempt from this? Not according to

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Chesterton, who would actually spend a good deal of time in the United States in 1921 and again in 1930. In fact, Chesterton worried that Americans might be “especially, if unfortunately” susceptible to this “practical evil.” After all, the “madness of tomorrow is not in Moscow, but in Manhattan” (“The Next Heresy” June 19, 1926, 233). In yet another of his post-conversion books, The Well and the Shallows, Chesterton dwelt further on this prophecy in an essay titled “The Surrender upon Sex.” In it, Chesterton launched an attack on the “sham liberality” of the birth control movement, which he sought to redefine as the “birth prevention” movement, because what it really amounted to was “few births and no control” (1990, 367–68). When it came to matters sexual, Chesterton found the modern will “amazingly weak and wavering.” Was the Catholic will just as weak and wavering? He hoped not and prayed not, as he took refuge in his definition of a Catholic as someone who had “plucked up the courage to face the incredible, even conceivable idea that something else may be wiser than he is” (The Well and the Shallows 1990, 369). Chesterton found real wisdom—and a measure of hope—in the Church’s stand against the sexual revolution of his day, as well as the Church’s specific opposition to birth prevention and to divorce. On the latter front, Chesterton found reason to worry that the “marble” was already turning to ice; and the ice, in turn, was melting with great rapidity. Would the Church hold the line against the inevitable argument for divorce, which was that anyone who sought a divorce insisted that his or hers was a special case. To which Chesterton tersely replied, “as if every case were not a special case” (The Well and the Shallows 1990, 370). Because every case was, in its own special way, a special case, Chesterton thought that the Church was right to refuse even the most special of the special cases; for once the world admits the legitimacy of the exception, then that exception is on its way to becoming the rule.

FALLEN HUMANITY AND THE IMAGINATIVE WONDER OF FAITH Before dismissing Chesterton as hopelessly irrelevant or the world as hopelessly lost, let us ponder one more Chesterton insight. As bad as the world was during his lifetime, and as bad as it is today, Gilbert Keith Chesterton always sought to remind us that what we call the world was never going anywhere, at least not in any direction that either the “old optimistic progressives” or the “old pessimistic reactionaries” thought it was going. To Chesterton, the world was never merely getting better or getting worse. Instead, the world of his day and ours was doing what it

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had always done and would continue to do, which is to say it “wobbles” (The Well and the Shallows 1990, 364). The progressive was inclined to think that he inhabited a bad universe, but one that surely could be made better. The reactionary, on the other hand, was convinced that he lived in a bad universe that surely would get worse. And then there was G. K. Chesterton who knew that he lived in a good universe, even if it got much worse instead of better. Life, as Chesterton saw it, was less like a ladder than a seesaw. And not so surprisingly, his Church agreed. On the one hand, Chesterton reminded his readers that the Church never held that “wrongs could not or should not be righted.” But he also pointed out that the Church reminds its adherents that they should not count on the “certainty of comforts becoming more common or cruelties more rare, as if there was an inevitable trend toward a sinless humanity” (The Well and the Shallows 1990, 364). What then should each of us try to do, as the world goes merrily on with its wobbling and the Church goes steadily on reminding its wobblers just what they should be wobbling toward? Let’s begin by asking what we wobblers should not do. Chesterton himself began to answer that question by asking his readers not to hate humanity—or despise humanity—or refuse to help humanity. Fair enough. But it is important to remember that he also asked us not to trust humanity, whether collectively or individually. If you like, he shrugged, be a monarchist, but do not trust a monarchy. If you prefer, he sighed, be a democrat, but do not put your trust in universal manhood suffrage or in any child of man. Better, instead, simply to remember that we are all children of God. To G. K. Chesterton, the only beacon in the night was Faith. And only Faith could help us remember that we are never at the beginning of any endless and expanding dawn—or in the midst of an endless and everdarkening night. Instead, we are always poised at the beginning of an ordinary daily dawn. When Chesterton paused at the end of an ordinary day, he stopped to utter these words on his knees: “Dear God, here lies another day during which I have had eyes, ears, hands, and the great wide world around me. And tomorrow begins another. Why am I allowed two?” (Ward 1943, 62). And when he awakened the next morning to discover that he had been given another miraculous day, he thanked God again for the wonder—and the wonderful ordinariness—of it all. “The world will never starve for want of wonders,” Chesterton repeated endlessly, “but only for want of wonder.” By those wonderful words he did not mean that we must be provided with an endlessly expansive menu of increasingly awesome wonders in order to be fully alive. Instead, it was his way of urging each of us to appreciate the wonder of ordinary daily life, to take a “fierce pleasure in things being themselves,”

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to be excited by the “wetness of water, the fireyness of fire, the steeliness of steel, the unutterable muddiness of mud” (Ward 1943, 108–09). If that is not vintage Chesterton, there is no such animal. If that is not vintage Chesterton, then perhaps this is: “The whole object of real art, of real romance—and, above all, of real religion—is to prevent people from losing the humility and gratitude which are thankful for daylight and daily bread . . . to teach them to feel in the sunlight the song of Apollo and in the bread the epic of the plow” (“The Leopold-Loeb Case” 1990, 411). What is most needed, he believed then and we should believe now, “is intensive imagination.” By that he did not mean imagining the unimaginable. He did not mean imagining the future or imagining some perfect world or perfect time. Rather than turning our imaginations outward, whether into time or space, he thought we should turn “our imaginations inward.” Did he mean unto ourselves? No. Instead, he urged that we use our imaginative powers to appreciate the things that we already have and make those things live. To Chesterton, the idea was not merely to seek “new experiences, which rapidly become old experiences.” Rather, it is “learning how to experience our experiences . . . how to enjoy our enjoyments” (Orthodoxy 1986, 279). And the more ordinary the experience, the greater the enjoyment. Buried in all of this is that wonderful word imagination. Now, when Chesterton asked us to “turn our imaginations inward” he was not asking us to worship the god within us. Of all the “horrible” religions, he wrote in Orthodoxy, the most horrible is the worship of the “god within.” More often than not, the notion that “Jones shall worship the god within means that in the end Jones shall worship Jones” (Orthodoxy 1986, 279). Let that Mr. Jones and everyone else worship the sun and the moon; let him worship cats and crocodiles instead. In sum, encourage Jones to appreciate the great variety of God’s creations, but discourage him from worshipping the one creation above all others that he is sorely tempted to worship, namely himself.

CATHOLIC IMAGINATION AND CATHOLIC FREEDOM In Chesterton’s time and ours, the Church has been criticized for rigidly suppressing all variety in life. Chesterton himself found such criticism to be both mystifying and frustrating. After all, it was his experience that Catholics tended to be highly individualistic types—which is why he thought there would—or should—never be a Catholic party in England or in America. He knew himself and his fellow communicants well enough to know that Catholics have always taken heart from the few transcendent truths on which they did agree, as well as a great deal of

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pleasure in disagreeing on everything else. Which is to say Catholics are free to be dogmatic about those few transcendent truths; and once they have freely accepted those truths, they are free to fight among themselves and with everyone else about everything else. In America Catholics were not compelled to agree that the slave states ought to have won the Civil War or that Andrew Jackson was a savage or that Lincoln was an abject failure or that Wilson was an arrogant schoolmaster. Such opinions were not part of any Catholic order. Quite the contrary, they illustrated Catholic liberty, “which is to say the real liberty of the mind that the modern world no longer possesses” (The Thing 1990, 265). In an essay titled “The New Groove,” Chesterton was struck by this line from a Tennyson poem, Locksley Hall: “Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change” (The Common Man 1950, 102). In this line Tennyson betrayed the “secret,” nay the “crime,” of his own intellectual world and much of the world that came after it. To Chesterton, Tennyson and his fellow moderns had been preoccupied with grooves, and especially with staying in a groove so long as it was a “groove of change.” Why, wondered Chesterton, did the modern mind prefer to think that it was in a groove rather than a rut? Why did the modern form of progress seem to mean traveling ever more quickly along one line and in one direction, leaving no one in a position to indulge the “adventuresome curiosity” to stop—or the even more “adventuresome courage” to go backwards? (109). And what is a Catholic but someone with the courage to think—and live—outside the grooves? Who but a Catholic has the transcendent imagination to believe in miracles and the genuine freedom to live a truly imaginative (which is to say fully adventuresome) daily life? According to Gilbert Keith Chesterton, to ask such questions was to answer them, even in the face of something as daunting and seemingly dogmatic as the Ten Commandments. Chesterton readily conceded that the Ten Commandments might seem to be confining and, yes, dogmatic, especially to modern man. But, as our jolly Englishman was wont to remind us, because there are only ten of them, it must mean that only ten things have been forbidden. This simple realization ought to leave the best and the worst of us plenty of room to exercise the imaginative powers that God has given us. It certainly leaves us more room than modern materialistic philosophies do. To Chesterton, such philosophies amount to nothing more than chains that bind us—or consign us to an inescapable rut; Christianity, on the other hand, constitutes a sword that sets us free, free to live our own daily lives, free to experience the wonders of daily life. As a result, Christian existence is a story that might end up any number of ways, because there is always an element of free will in every

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Christian’s story. Modern man has a terrible time twice over. He has a terrible time with the concept of free will and a terrible time believing that Christians can live free lives, both of which leave modern man in the strange, nay the paradoxical, position of being determined to bring freedom into a Church where it already exists. This is not only wrong-headed, but also potentially quite dangerous. After all, as Chesterton warned us nearly a century ago, “almost every modern proposal to bring freedom into the Church is simply a proposal to bring tyranny into the world” (Orthodoxy 1986, 330). And it requires very little imagination, Catholic or otherwise, to wonder where that story line might be leading us today.

REFERENCES Chesterton, G. K. 1954. The Autobiography of G. K. Chesterton. New York: Sheed and Ward. ———. January 8, 1908. “The Fault of the System,” Daily News, n.p. ———. 1986. Heretics. In The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton, edited by David Dooley, Vol. 1, 37–207. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. ———. 1990. “The Leopold-Loeb Case” (The Illustrated London News, September 20, 1924). In The Collected Works, edited by Lawrence Clipper, Vol. 33, 408–11. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. ———. 1950. “The New Groove.” In The Common Man, 108–17. New York: Sheed and Ward. ———. June 19, 1926. “The Next Heresy,” G.K.’s Weekly, Vol. 3, 232–33. London: The Allied Press, LTD. ———. 1986. Orthodoxy. In The Collected Works, edited by David Dooley, Vol. 1, 209–366. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. ———. 1988. Pride: The Supreme Evil (The Illustrated London News, August 22, 1914). In The Collected Works, edited by Lawrence Clipper, Vol. 30, 146–50. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. ———. 1990. The Thing: Why I Am Catholic. In The Collected Works, edited by George Marlin, Vol. 3 133–335. San Francisco: Ignatius Press,. ———. 1990. The Well and the Shallows. In The Collected Works, edited by George Marlin, Vol. 3, 337–534. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. ———. 1990. What’s Wrong With the World. In The Collected Works, edited by George Marlin, Vol. 4, 33–222. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. Ward, Maisie. 1943. Gilbert Keith Chesterton. New York: Sheed and Ward.

7 ✛

The Sacramental and Twentieth-Century French Literature M. Kathleen Madigan, Ph.D.

THE TRADITION OF CATHOLICISM AND LITERATURE IN FRANCE

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s the “eldest daughter of the Church,” celebrating in 1995 the fifteenhundredth anniversary of the baptism of Clovis, France has strong Catholic roots, and it would be difficult to imagine the development of French literature without the influence of the Roman Catholic Church. In fact, the Church was one of the main sources of the revival of drama beginning in the tenth century, and later, mysteries representing the lives of saints or the Passion of Christ were performed in front of Cathedrals (Maurois 1948, 89). Literary works reflecting Catholic culture throughout the centuries in France abound and many are unimaginable without it; to take just a few examples, the removal of the saints from Christine de Pisan’s Book of the City of Ladies (Le Livre de la Cité des Dames), of the priest from Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, or of the statue of the Virgin Mary from Paul Claudel’s The Satin Slipper (Le Soulier de satin) would change the fabric, structure, and perspective of these stories. The twentieth century was a particularly fruitful one in France for authors writing about Catholic concerns. So numerous are the writers from this period included in studies of literature and Catholicism that it would be impossible to treat them all, but a listing of some names is included in the appendix. And as recently as the 1980s, a large group of such authors were productive enough for David O’Connell to state that “the tradition of Catholic writing is alive and well in France” (1983–1984, 16). In this essay, I will focus on a work by one of these writers, Georges Bernanos, 93

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in order to show how the quality of the sacramental is part of its essence; then I will highlight this quality as a distinguishing trait of French Catholic literature by comparing and contrasting it with that of other French twentieth-century works.

A DISTINGUISHING TRAIT: THE QUALITY OF THE SACRAMENTAL In an interdisciplinary study in which the mutual influence of religion and literature is considered, the question of how to approach literature is an important one if the literature is still to be treated as a work of art. The practice of categorizing literature according to the religion of the author alone may raise a number of methodological problems, for instance, in the case of a change of religious affiliation. Nor can classification of spiritual literature be made through assumptions about the author’s religion based on the professed religion or lack of such of the main characters of the story; drawing conclusions about the author based on fictional characters would be falling into the trap of the biographical fallacy, since one cannot assume that the views of fictional characters or even a narrator represent those of the author (Wellek and Warren 1977, 77). Just as problematic would be an approach based solely on the assent of authors to the title of Catholic writer. Consider that critics have recently debated intensely the question of whether or not Michel Tournier, who claims the title of Christian writer, qualifies (Dunaway 2001, 108). On the other hand, both François Mauriac and Jean Sulivan thought of themselves as Catholics who were also writers, and preferred not to combine the two terms (O’Connell 1983–1984, 9). Understandably, some authors may wish to avoid marginalizing potential readership markets on the one hand, or on the other, exposing their work to commercial exploitation of faith. More intrinsic approaches to the literary work are possible; in his book on the Catholic novel, Gene Kellogg chose works based on content, that is, whether the action in each story depends upon Roman Catholic theology, the history of thought within one of the world’s large Roman Catholic communities, or upon the development of Roman Catholic ideas (1970, 1). This approach certainly has the merit of considering the text itself rather than extrinsic factors alone. But in order to respect the work as literary art, rather than as a mere document, one may also consider literature in terms of its essences, or what have been called “metaphysical qualities” by Roman Ingarden. Examples of these essences are “the tragic,” “the dreadful,” and “the grotesque,” and literary art can provide an imaginative experience (rather than a mere intellectual exercise) through which these

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qualities can be contemplated (Ingarden 1973, 290–93). In his book The Catholic Imagination, Father Andrew Greeley associates Catholic art with the quality of the sacramental, which provides a key to understanding the relationship between Catholicism and the French literary imagination. Greeley states that the Catholic imagination “sees created reality as ‘sacrament,’ that is, a revelation of the presence of God” (2000, 1). Throughout his book, Greeley describes a number of characteristics expressed in Catholic art, such as a concept of sacred place and sacred time, sacred desire, the Mother Love of God, community, hierarchy, and salvation. I would like to consider one work, the Dialogues of the Carmélites by Georges Bernanos, in order to highlight the presence of these traits in French Catholic literature. But first a brief introduction to its author is in order as a way of beginning to place this work into its context.

BIOGRAPHICAL CONTEXT Georges Bernanos (1888–1948) was born in Paris and completed degrees in law and literature at the Sorbonne; he published articles and participated in the activities of the royalist movement of the Action Française. Married in 1917, he had six children; financial difficulties made him decide to leave France with his family, and he later lived in Majorca, Brazil, and Tunisia. Protesting vigorously against all that he considered to be unjust or lacking in integrity, he criticized Franco’s dictatorship (in spite of initial sympathy), France’s armistice with Germany, and the bourgeois complacent attitudes of his own Catholic community. At the same time, because of his belief in the mysterious fusion of human honor and the charity of Christ, he believed that one should never attack or demean human beings in their soul and personhood (Lagarde 1988, 518). The extent of the influence of St. Thérèse of Lisieux (sometimes called the “Little Flower”) on Bernanos has been demonstrated (see Dorschell 1996), particularly in her doctrine of spiritual childhood. The priest in Bernanos’ most famous novel, The Diary of a Country Priest (Journal d’un curé de campagne 1936), in many ways exhibits this spirit in his simplicity and purity, as well as the grace which, as he dies, he sees as everywhere, despite his temptations to despair, the dark spiritual trials which he must undergo in his own prayer life, and his serious illness, interpreted as a sign of the spiritual cancer of the parish which eats away at him (Kellogg 1970, 54). It is through this spirit of childhood that the young priest helps a mother who has lost a son to become reconciled with God and to die in peace. The priest himself dies clutching a rosary and his last words are “Tout est grâce” (“Everything is grace”). A film by Robert Bresson based on this novel was made in 1951, and at the end of the film,

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the cross is used as a backdrop as the priest’s last words are reported. Bernanos’ own story, as well as his fiction, are marked by the cross as a sign of suffering and hope.

THE STORY BEHIND THE DIALOGUES Bernanos wrote many other novels besides The Diary, but I would like to concentrate here on a work which was originally intended to be a film script, The Dialogues of the Carmelites (Les Dialogues des Carmélites), composed in 1948. This work also inspired other creative renderings, such as an opera and television films, and in typical fashion, its characters display conflicting and intense attitudes toward religion. The Dialogues take place during the French Revolution, when sixteen Carmelite nuns of Compiègne were martyred. It is based on Gertrud Von Le Fort’s novella, The Last One at the Scaffold (1931). The influential Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain gave a copy in translation to Father R. L. Bruckberger, who asked Bernanos to write the dialogues for a film version of the story (Gendre 1995, 39). This is but one example of the dynamic exchange between philosophers, writers, and other intellectuals interested in Catholic material not only in French culture, but also on the international scene. Ultimately, the script which Bernanos completed was not used for the film for which it was planned, but rather adapted by Francis Poulenc for the opera which was to become world famous. The Dialogues were suggested to Poulenc who was on his way back from a pilgrimage to Assisi and looking for a subject for a new opera (Gendre 1995, 50). Meanwhile, Emmet Lavery, an American of Irish descent, obtained what he believed to be full rights to the Le Fort story for his own play, which was to set off an international dispute in later years, in which Julien Green was asked to act as arbitrator. Of interest here is the extent to which the story of these Carmelite nuns inspired the imagination of numerous artists working in different media, including in most recent years, screenwriters for television (Gendre 1995, 54). While historical versions of the story of the Carmelites of Compiègne existed and were made available to Bernanos, apparently he relied solely on Le Fort’s story and his own imagination for his work. But let us consider the historical context first in order to appreciate the fictional version. The Historical Context One may question whether certain characteristics of Catholic sensibility, such as those associated with the sacramental, are “pure fiction” or whether the French Catholic culture of the times is accurately portrayed:

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in fact, when the historical versions are examined, one finds very similar, though not always identical traits. Had Bernanos used the historical sources, he could have emphasized the fact that the Carmelites were told of their imminent execution on their community Feast day, July 16th, Our Lady of Carmel; they received the news on that day with joy because of their sense of sacred time and their understanding that this was a sign of blessing on their act of consecration. One of the nuns of this congregation from a century before had experienced a “mystic dream” in which she saw the sixteen Carmelite nuns in their habits in a place like paradise; they were called to “follow the lamb,” with a few set aside (those spared the execution). And this was interpreted as a sign of their heavenly destiny as martyrs at the time of the Revolution (Bush 1995, 65). It was recalled that the nuns did sing hymns of praise to God the afternoon of their execution, and as the Carmelites mounted the scaffold they renewed or took their vows for the first time since vows were suspended in 1789. As each nun approached the scaffold, she kissed the little statue of Virgin and Child held for them by the Prioress, once again expressing the need for the Mother Love of God and affection for the order’s patroness. The scaffold became altar and sacred place as the nuns gave their lives for others, in imitation of Christ; to the original prayer that peace would be restored to France and to the Church was added the specific intention that prisoners be released and the number guillotined lessened (Bush 1995, 71). Bernanos’ Version of the Story of the Carmelites and the Sacramental It is said that Bernanos related in a special way to the fear of the heroine of his story, since he wrote the Dialogues during the last year of his life, while facing his own imminent death due to cancer. The main fictional character of the story, Blanche, is of the noble class and “white as a ghost” in her fear of the rising threat of revolution: she seeks refuge in the convent. The prioress of the convent immediately senses her fear and assumes it, in order to save Blanche’s vocation; she is willing to have the grace of her own courage transferred to Blanche, who dies heroically in the end. This depiction of a prioress who cries about her abandonment while dying in bed stands in stark contrast to the historical version, in which Madame de Croissy died valiantly on the scaffold (Bush 1995, 5). But in Bernanos’ imagined world, the point was to emphasize belief in the Communion of Saints, meaning, here, that one can offer up one’s own life and even one’s dignity to participate in making redemption possible for another. Bernanos thereby exemplifies how a tragedy of fear can be transformed into a drama of holiness (Bonnel 1991, 786). Poulenc likewise emphasized grace over fear (Gendre 1995, 50).

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In this drama, following the evacuation decree (the 1792 expulsion from the monastery), the Carmelite nuns make an act of consecration in which they vow to give their lives as martyrs for the salvation of Carmel and France. They are later arrested and accused of having participated in counter-revolutionary conversations and of having corresponded with fanatics (meaning with their chaplain). The nuns are brought to the Conciergerie prison; and when they receive word that they will be executed, they accept the news joyfully, because they see it as a sign that their wish to give their lives for the peace of France has been accepted by God. Blanche, meanwhile, flees the convent shortly after this act of consecration. Next, the Marquis de la Force, her father, is guillotined along with others of the nobility. Sister Marie of the Incarnation (Soeur Marie de l’Incarnation), who first proposed the act of consecration in this version, leaves to bring Blanche back to Compiègne, hoping at least to save her from a most miserable death; but Blanche fears returning to the imperiled community of nuns. Finally, the nuns are brought from the prison to the Place de la Révolution and, as they approach the guillotine, they sing the hymns Salve Regina and Veni Creator. They continue to sing, but as in the opera, each time a nun mounts the scaffold, the choir is diminished, until just one voice remains. But then suddenly a new voice is heard; it is that of Blanche, who has come to join them. Her face seems free of fear as she approaches the guillotine. Some critics have seen the influence of St. Thérèse here, once again, in Blanche’s humble acceptance of her failings and in her final entrance into Christ’s passion, as well as that of Joan of Arc, in her search for honor (e.g., Heyer 1995, 33; Dorschell 1996, 221). In some ways the adage that grace appears where least expected is fulfilled in this case, as the one considered the “weakest link” in the community sings the final notes of the hymn before accepting martyrdom, finally giving voice to divine strength through God’s response to her in “the unspoken dialogue between the soul and God” (Speaight 1974, 268). Then her voice is silenced too. That silence at the end speaks volumes, because the absence of the singing calls all the more attention to it. Greeley suggests that Catholic sensibility finds “grace in limitation, fragility, mortality,” because it imagines that there is something beyond the “wall of perplexity” (2000, 161). That peace from the Reign of Terror returned to France just ten days after—and some believe in part because of—the sacrifice of the historical Carmelites is only suggested by the final silence. What is emphasized, however, is the grace given Blanche—in spite of her fragility—to overcome her fear and to walk toward her death with hope in life beyond it. Other characteristics ascribed by Greeley to Catholic sensibility in the work are obvious. The convent itself is a sacred place of prayer and the chapel its center, but once in prison, the nuns still find a way to make

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their faith in the presence of God manifest by creating a little altar there too. On an old table, a statue of the little “King of Glory” is placed on a white handkerchief with a half-used candle (Tableau V, Scene XII). The nuns come to kneel in twos or threes before this representation of God’s presence in the form of the child Jesus. As to a sense of sacred time, the fact that Blanche receives the grace to return to the community just as the nuns are approaching the scaffold is viewed as no accident in their eyes and points to providential timing. Sacred desire emerges in the prayer repeated by the nuns, penned by St. Teresa of Avila, “I am Yours and You are mine” and Carmelite spirituality in the tradition of St. John of the Cross is quite sensual, emphasizing the love between God and the beloved; the nuns traditionally thought of themselves as betrothed to Christ. The “Mary Metaphor,” or what Greeley calls the Mother Love of God or a maternal kind of divine care, could not be stronger in a story in which the nuns in their daily life follow a mother superior and go to their death singing the Salve Regina. Community life and a hierarchical structure are what put the nuns at risk in the first place, as the revolutionaries tried to break up their common life and dissolve the vow of obedience; but the nuns continued to prize fidelity to their order and elected superiors. Redemption, meaning salvation for France and for the Carmelites, is of course the whole point of the act of consecration. The revolutionaries thought they were freeing the nuns from their cloister walls and saving them from a terrible fate. But as Claude Gendre has written, “Salvation comes neither from human reason . . . nor from politics . . . nor even from religious heroism. It comes only from the pure grace of God” (1995, 58). The boldest nun of all in Bernanos’ version does not receive her wish to be martyred, as she was not with the community when they were executed. So the crown of the glory of martyrdom comes to the Carmelites, not through choice or willpower but through grace alone. Thus, it is clear that while the historical version itself is moving, the influence of the artistic versions of this story around the world has been at least as powerful. Bush has suggested that the literature and music of some of the century’s greatest artists recounting the story of the Blanche de la Force have been just as effective in conveying the “mystical power of the Carmelites’ oblation” as Rome’s beatification in 1906 (Bush 1995, 8). In the last scene of Poulenc’s opera, the nuns chant the Salve Regina until their voices are silenced one by one by the guillotine; after the last voice is cut off, Blanche arrives, singing the Veni Creator; then her voice is silenced as well. Something palpable clearly transcends the silence of their voices. Both the script and the opera demonstrate how capable the arts are of capturing a quality of life, in this case the sacramental, rendering the invisible perceptible to the senses.

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THE DIALOGUES CONTRASTED WITH OTHER FRENCH TWENTIETH-CENTURY WORKS The Dialogues can be contrasted with the work of another author, Andre Gide; few would think of Gide as representative of the Protestant perspective in France, because in his earliest works he seemed to turn against all constraints of his French Calvinistic background, depicting characters more interested in self-fulfillment than in self-oblation. But his later work, The Pastoral Symphony (La Symphonie Pastorale 1919), surprised others with the seriousness of its content and is recognized for its literary value (Lagarde 1988, 299). This novel is chosen here because it exhibits a different kind of sensibility than that which Greeley describes. In this story, a pastor charitably intends to help a blind girl named Gertrude, but the relationship in which he becomes involved causes his wife, son, and the girl herself great pain. Looking for justification for this relationship in Scripture, he himself blindly ignores polarities such as between good and evil or innocence and guilt (Falk 1967, 50). The end of the story emphasizes the destruction caused by his actions. While the pastor tries to pray at the end, few are the signs perceived of the presence of God, or for that matter of hope. The worldview presented in Jean Paul Sartre’s play No Exit (Huis Clos 1955) may also be contrasted with the Dialogues. The characters enter one by one into what they believe to be hell, but rather than the racks, red-hot pincers, and other instruments of torture which they expect, the three guests are escorted into a drawing-room in Second Empire style. The guests in this room soon discover that there is no hope and one states, “Hell is—other people” (Sartre 1955, 47). Obviously then, there is no hint of the desire to die for the good of others here, as exhibited in the Dialogues, or hope beyond the wall of perplexity, let alone signs of the presence of God. The characters will simply have to “get on with it,” that is, the hell inflicted on each other; for in their view, there is nothing else in the meaning which they have ascribed to their lives and from which there is no exit. In Samuel Beckett’s well-known play Waiting for Godot (En Attendant Godot 1952) the characters wait for a certain Mr. Godot to arrive, whose boy messenger says he will come, but he never does. While waiting, they engage in meaningless gestures, play at conversing with non sequiturs, and generally seem to beg the question of whether life is worth living at all. Any tenuous suggestion of the presence of God perceived, for instance, through a sense of sacred time or place is just as soon snatched away. The quality most steadily captured in this work is that of the absurd, at times comic, at other times agonizing.

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Finally, it may be useful to consider Gilbert Cesbron’s novel Les Saints vont en Enfer (1952), the literal translation of which is The Saints go into Hell, because the political scene it represents is so very different from the Dialogues of Bernanos, yet in a very different context the quality of the sacramental is also found. Here, Cesbron depicts the clerics of the workerpriest movement in France who, after World War II, felt called to reach out to those living terrible lives of poverty, while working in miserable conditions unreached by Church ministry. In this story, Pierre, a young priest, breaks with ministry within the boundaries of his parish church in order to work in a factory and to serve the poor living in that area. A disagreement arises between him and his religious superior about whether it is his duty to pastor all of the souls in the district or just the ones who go to Church. Pierre believes that it is his duty to go where need and the absence of God call. Because of the setting of the purported “absence of God” to which the hero of the novel feels called, that is, to fill a void, one would perhaps not expect to see the signs of Catholic sensibility, which Greeley describes, in this novel. And indeed few signs of it are noticeable in the beginning, as Pierre struggles to turn this neighborhood into a community and to earn some trust. But soon some of these same signs visible in the Dialogues surface, in a different, yet nonetheless moving way. As Pierre earns respect through ministering to others in their physical and spiritual needs, he himself becomes a sign of hope. But other traditional signs are also present in this non-traditional center in which he lives, such as a reproduction of the Holy Face (Christ) and a big image of the Virgin on the wall. Also, a young man with no Church background wanders into the neighborhood church and is so moved by the depictions of Christ in the Stations of the Cross that the seeds of a spiritual conversion are planted; he also senses a special presence at the Eucharist. Meanwhile, Pierre’s ministry is in crisis when on Easter morning he visits a boy in the hospital who had been seriously wounded during a protest by workers in which he was involved. The priest feels responsibility for the boy named Etienne. And so he offers his “life,” understood as all he had tried to accomplish through ministry in this neighborhood, for Etienne’s life. He calls “les autres” (“the others”) into the boy’s room. And who are these “others” whom he invites in? They are first of all Christ; then Christ’s Mother, the one of the pieta; “little Thérèse,” in a cold convent, (meaning St. Thérèse of Lisieux, the Little Flower); Bernadette (of Lourdes); “little Joan” (Joan of Arc), audacious and bold; the elderly Vianney (St. Jean Marie Vianney, the Curé of Ars), with his “transparent skeleton”; and the elderly Vincent (St.Vincent de Paul), his eyes brimming with tears (Cesbron 1952, 237). The author knows that a first name and

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simple description of these saints identifies them in French culture, so well known are they still. In Pierre’s prayer vision, these saints fill the room, they turn toward Christ too, and they wait. Pierre prays that even his dirty (“sale”) feet, hands, and mouth be used, and without knowing too much what he is doing, he extends his hands; the child cries out and Etienne wakes up from his prayer experience. After a moment, he realizes that Etienne is no longer breathing his last, but rather breathing normally like a sleeping child. Later, Etienne slowly gets better and stronger, just as Pierre’s superior announces to him that he will be removed from his current post; Pierre obeys. In the end, he returns to his childhood town to take his place among poor coal miners in the “Kingdom of the Worst” (“le Royaume du Pire”), that is, in the worst possible living conditions. So he has sacrificed the life he had chosen—his calling, in fact—for the life of the boy. That signs of God’s presence are clung to when needed most does not mean that grace does away with suffering or that life is depicted as easy in these stories. On the contrary, the Carmelites are decapitated and Pierre’s life, with the exception of the Easter experience, rarely transcends the terrible reality of not being able to ease the pain of misery for most. The young man whom Pierre had tried to help in his faith eventually despairs. But through his faith, Pierre also experienced the presence of the cloud of witnesses who point to life beyond the misery; belief in the Communion of the Saints seems to transcend political party lines. The community of believers who have gone on to the next life is invoked as naturally as one would call on one’s family on earth, and this presence is viewed as sacred, especially in times of crisis.

RECENT RELIGIOUS TRENDS AND THE FUTURE OF FRENCH CATHOLIC LITERATURE It remains to be seen whether the particular signs of God’s presence evoked thus far will continue to be reflected in French literature, since Catholic culture appears to be changing rapidly in France. In order to understand these changes, a brief overview of some major political events and recent trends in religious practice may be helpful. Bernanos wrote about a time when the links between national and religious identity were first coming under attack, and Cesbron concentrated on a period during the last century when some priests felt that more of those whom they felt called to serve were outside the official Church than were active members within it. This changing political scene has caused such dramatic change in France, that Colin Roberts has written, “the Church . . . has ceased to symbolize the core of modern French culture” (2000, 261). The Church

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and State have been officially separated since 1905, though some would argue that France’s secularism at least guarantees religious existence and expression and therefore links them (Poulat 2000, 19–21). While Vatican II aimed at renewal in the Church, for a splinter group, the experience translated into separation under the leadership of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre (1905–1991); his followers have participated in pre-conciliar practices rather than adhere to the recommendations of the council or submit to the authority of Rome (Roberts 2000, 272). This integrist movement may be understood to some extent as a reaction against the radical changes brought about by the events of the sixties. During the mid-sixties, the bishops of France began to stress social justice over the values of order and tradition (O’Connell 1983–1984, 4). In May of 1968, workers and students in France demonstrated against all institutions seen as repressive, and some included the Roman Catholic Church under that heading. Even before this time, a tendency was developing in France to express religious commitment through political and social activism, as already noted in the work of Gilbert Cesbron (Roberts 2000, 261). Thus, rapid change has been the norm for Catholic culture in twentiethcentury France and controversy no stranger, but reflection of such tension in literary art contributes to its vitality and richness. It is impossible to predict what kind of voice literary artists in France who are Catholic will have in this new century and what kind of religious culture they will reflect in a country where religious practice, at least in traditional ways, is certainly less visible if not diminished. Yet Catholicism is still the religion claimed by the majority of the French (Hilaire 2000, 258); and as anyone who has visited France knows, Catholic holy days continue to be celebrated as holidays, even if these celebrations have become somewhat secularized. In any case, because they are members of a religion which is still culturally dominant in their country, one would hope that in times of religious strife, French Catholic writers would use their gifts as instruments of peace and understanding in the spirit of Bernanos, whose writing ultimately transcended political ideology. France is no stranger to this type of conflict, whether one considers the religious wars of the sixteenth century or the contemporary controversy over whether Muslim girls should be allowed to wear headscarves in public schools. But precisely because of that long experience, lessons can certainly be drawn from the past and applied to the present. Meanwhile, even as the demographics, the political scene, and religious practice continue to change, it is still likely that Catholicism will continue to influence culture and that stories reflecting belief in the presence of God, in one form or another, will be told, with concrete examples of grace discernible in everyday life. Those depicted as representatives of the presence

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of God may now be members of the laity rather than priests and nuns, as in the works of Bernanos and Cesbron: for instance, a contemporary writer like Jacques de Bourbon Busset in his Journal focuses on the union of a couple, whose profound respect and mystical love for each other reflects the Absolute, based on his experience with his wife. His reflections on his relationship with his wife as anchored in Christ’s relationship with the Church exude a sense of the sacred (1985, 96). Traditional signs of grace may become subtler as French literature of the sacramental continues to evolve, but that does not mean that they will be any less pervasive. For instance, the Mother Love of God may be represented more by sacrificial acts than by a traditional statue. But that does not rule out what a statue may continue to represent either. A comprehensive history of the influence of Notre Dame Cathedral on writers without the Marian statue under which the author Paul Claudel experienced his conversion is inconceivable. The “eldest daughter of the Church” will surely continue to change, mature, and face ever-growing challenges to traditions, practices, and ways of expressing faith. But if her dialogue with those unfavorably disposed to religious signs has just begun, it will not be abated quickly, for French culture is imbued with the sacramental. Whatever the future holds, it is clear that the Dialogues are an important contribution to twentieth-century French Catholic writing, and Bernanos’ immense influence as a voice of hope amid the harsh reality of everyday life is undeniable. With that kind of spiritual vocation exemplified again and again, whatever challenges this next century may bring and in whatever form signs of God’s presence are discerned, no doubt Catholic writers of France will continue to grace the world with imaginative revelations of the sacramental in literary art.

APPENDIX A list of twentieth-century authors whose works have been studied in association with Catholicism follows (e.g., in Heppenstall, Keeler, Kellogg, Schwartz); while not meant to be exhaustive, such a list suggests the scope of works which can be considered in this context. The division into “generations” is artificial and used only for the purpose of organization, based on birth dates. These authors write in many genres, such as the novel, drama, poetry, essays, and diary. Precursors: Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly (1808–1889), Léon Bloy (1846–1917), Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907), René Bazin (1853–1932), and Paul Bourget (1852–1935).

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Generation of 1870: Louis Le Cardonnel (1862–1936), Emile Baumann (1868–1941), Paul Claudel (1868–1955), Henry Bordeaux (1870–1963), Charles Péguy (1873–1914), and Henry Ghéon (1875–1944). Generation of 1885: Ernest Psichari (1883–1914), François Mauriac (1885– 1970), Pierre-Jean Jouve (1887–1976), Georges Bernanos (1888–1948), and Julien Green (1900–1998). Generation of 1915: Gilbert Cesbron (1913–1979), Michel Tournier (1924–), Jean Sulivan (1913–1980), Patrice de la Tour du Pin (1911–1975), Jacques de Bourbon Busset (1912–), Pierre Emmanuel (1916–1984), and Michel de Saint Pierre (1916–). Some of the women who could be mentioned in this regard are the precursor St. Thérèse of Lisieux (1873–1897), Raïssa Maritain (1883–1960), Marie Noël (1883–1967), Simone Weil (1909–1943), and Anne Delbée (1946–).

REFERENCES Beckett, Samuel. 1952. En attendant Godot. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. Bernanos, Georges. 1949. Dialogues des Carmélites. Paris: Editions de la Baconnière. Bonnel, Roland G. 1991. “Révolution et sainteté dans les dialogues des Carmélites.” The French Review 64.5: 784–93. Bourbon Busset, Jacques de. 1985. Bien plus qu’aux premiers jours: Journal X. Paris: Gallimard. Bush, William. 1995. “The Historical Parisian Martyrdom: July 17, 1794.” Renascence 48.1: 61–82. ———. 1995. “The Carmelite Martyrs of Compiègne.” Renascence 48.1: 3–9. Cesbron, Gilbert. 1952. Les Saints vont en Enfer. Paris: R. Laffont. Chadwick, Kay, ed. 2000. Catholicism, Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century France. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Diébolt, Evelyne. 2000. “Les femmes catholiques: entre Eglise et société.” In Catholicism, Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century France, 219–243. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Dorschell, Mary Frances Catherine. 1996. Georges Bernanos’ Debt to Thérèse of Lisieux. Lewiston, New York: The Edwin Mellen Press. Dunaway, John M. 2001. “Tournier: Christian Writer? A Response to Susan Petit.” Christianity and Literature 51: 105–108. Falk, Eugene. 1967. Types of Thematic Structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gendre, Claude. Fall 1995. “The Literary Destiny of the Sixteen Carmelite Martyrs of Compiègne and the Role of Emmet Lavery.” Renascence 48.1: 37–60. Gide, André. 1925. La symphonie pastorale. Paris: Gallimard. Greeley, Andrew. 2000. The Catholic Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press. Heppenstall, Rayner. 1969. The Double Image. Port Washington, New York: Kennikal Press.

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Heyer, Astrid. 1995. “The Bernanosian Metamorphosis of Blanche de la Force.” Renascence. 48.1: 25–35. Hilaire, Yves Marie. 2000. “La Sociologie religieuse du catholicisme français au vingtième siècle.” In Catholicism, Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century France, 244–59. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Ingarden, Roman. 1973. The Literary Work of Art. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Keeler, Sister Jerome, O.S.B. 1938. Catholic Literary France. Milwaukee: The Bruce Publishing Company. Kellogg, Gene. 1970. The Vital Tradition: The Catholic Novel and the Period of Convergence. Chicago: Loyola University Press. Lagarde, André, and Michard, Laurent, eds. 1988. XXe Siecle: Collection littéraire. Paris: Bordas. Maurois, André. 1948. The Miracle of France. New York: Harper & Brothers. McManners, John. 1972. Church and State in France, 1870–1914. New York: Harper & Row. O’Connell, David. 1983–1984. “Catholic Writers in France: The Generation of 1915.” Renascence 36.1 & 2: 3–16. Poulat, Émile. 2000. “La laïceté en France au vingtième siècle.” In Catholicism, Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century France, 18–25. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Roberts, Colin. 2000. “Secularisation and the (Re)formulation of French Catholic Identity.” In Catholicism, Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century France, 260–79. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Saint-Yves, Claude. 1955. Le Vrai dialogue des Carmélites. Paris: Michel Potevin. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1955. No Exit and Three Other Plays. New York: Vintage Books. Schwartz, Joseph, ed. Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature 36.1 & 2. Speaight, Robert. 1974. Georges Bernanos: A Study of the Man and the Writer. New York: Liveright. Troyansky, David G., Cismara, Alfred, and Andrews, Norwood, eds. 1991. The French Revolution in Culture and Society. New York: Greenwood Press. Wellek, René, and Warren, Austin. 1977. Theory of Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Section Three

CATHOLIC CULTURE AND POSTMODERN LIFE

Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee; Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can; Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be. But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan, O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee? (Hopkins 1885, “Carrion Comfort,” 1–8) I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day. What hours, O what black hoürs we have spent This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went! And more must, in yet longer light’s delay. With witness I speak this. But where I say Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent To dearest him that lives alas! away. (Hopkins 1885, “I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day,” 1–8)

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hat characterizes Catholic culture? This is an important question to which English literature provides some helpful answers. One poet in particular—who used irony and satire like a fine scalpel to eviscerate those whom he found deviating from his bedrock political and religious values—had a good deal to say about Catholic culture. What he said in the seventeenth century about Catholic culture held true for centuries before and after him, and it remains true for many who value Catholic culture today. Poet Laureate under Charles II, dramatist, father of English literary criticism, successful and respected translator, political and religious polemicist, John Dryden (1631–1700) had a good deal to say about Church authority, a vital constituent of Catholic culture for centuries. By briefly looking at Dryden’s pilgrimage from Protestant to Catholic believer, we shall see this aspect of Catholic culture in high relief. A poet in an age that did not value the confessional verse so common among the later Romantics (“I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!”), Dryden nonetheless was able to express quite powerfully the Catholic culture of Restoration England in his beast fable, The Hind and the Panther (1687). Written in conjunction with his own conversion to Roman Catholicism, The Hind and the Panther not only expresses elements that comprised Dryden’s Catholic culture, but it also contrasted these Catholic elements with elements of the Anglican and dissenting Protestant cultures. Furthermore, four and one-half years earlier Dryden had published Religio Laici (1682), opposing elements of Anglican culture to elements of Catholic culture. Together, these poems show Dryden’s

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intellectual and religious journey to Catholicism, while highlighting the differences between Protestant and Catholic cultures. Reviewing these brilliant poems, unfortunately as unknown to many modern readers as Dryden’s name and reputation are, will shed a good deal of light upon Catholic culture. The essay opens by sketching in the overlapping as well as conflicting religious and political cultures present in Dryden’s England. (In the interests of brevity, the sketch leaves out a good bit of detail that can be found in such works as Prall’s Bloodless Revolution: England, 1688 [1972], Jarrett’s Britain, 1688–1815 [1965], Palmer, Colton, and Kramer’s History of the Modern World [2007], etc.) The essay goes on to look at Dryden’s official position in England before discussing his religious poems, Religio Laici and The Hind and the Panther. It closes by reflecting upon very similar, corroborating views of Church authority from two later Catholic converts—John Henry Cardinal Newman at the end of the ninteenth century and Richard John Neuhaus today.

CHRISTIAN CULTURES AND POLITICS IN DRYDEN’S ENGLAND By the time Dryden was moving in the leading intellectual, literary, political circles of his day—in the 1660s, 1670s, and 1680s—a number of factors weighed upon the Christian cultures (Anglican, Dissenting, Catholic) and political factions. Few in England could forget that the established Church of England went back to Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy (1534), declaring the king “Protector and Only supreme head of the Church and Clergy of England.” (Thomas More and a bevy of women lost their heads in conjunction with it.) If Elizabeth’s long and prosperous reign as queen (1558–1603) had witnessed the growth of Anglican Protestantism in England, as well as the power of Parliament in governance, it had also seen a rise in dissenting Protestant sects who wielded power in Parliament. These facts would spell serious trouble for the Stuarts of Scotland who succeeded to the English throne in 1603. Both James I (1603–1625) and his son Charles I (1625–1649) sought to rule without Parliamentary restrictions on their royal prerogative, and both took a very High Anglican Church view. On both counts, they seemed intent on excluding religious dissenters from a religious and political say in England. Parliament, dissenters, Anglicans, and the Stuarts, however, generally agreed on marginalizing Catholics as potential papist rebels. Charles I so alienated Parliament and its dissenting members that they finally went to war with him in 1642, ultimately beheading him in 1649.

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The Commonwealth and Protectorate, under Cromwell, succeeded the Stuarts. Cromwell proved just as adept as the Stuarts at alienating fellow Protestants and former members of Parliament: Anglicans, Presbyterians, landed gentry, and aristocrats whose lands had been seized during Cromwell’s rule. When, therefore, Cromwell died in 1658 and his son proved inept as his successor, the Stuart line and Charles II were restored to the throne (in 1660); and Parliament once again expected to participate in political decisions. Along with the restoration of the Stuarts, the Anglican Church was reestablished as the Church of England. The Anglicans and landed classes in Parliament (often the same people) acted against the dissenters who were even prevented from holding services. As for the Catholics, they found some sympathy and support from Charles II who had spent a good deal of his time in exile in France, in the Catholic court of Louis XIV. Charles may actually have converted to Catholicism before he returned to England; but, whether he did or not, he sought greater tolerance for dissenters and Catholics through the Declaration of Indulgence in 1672. Parliament resisted by passing the Test Act in 1673, demanding that all members of government demonstrate their Anglican faith in various specified ways. The Test Act forced Charles’s brother and successor, the openly Catholic James, out of office as Lord High Admiral of England. Now, indeed, the Stuarts and Parliament were in conflict, because Parliament feared James as successor to the throne. Parliament feared a Catholic king who might disestablish the Anglican Church and royal supremacy in favor of the Catholic Church and papal supremacy, respectively. Consequently, in the early 1680s, Parliamentary factions comprising various Anglican and dissenting groups tried to exclude James from succeeding to the throne, turning to Charles’s illegitimate son the Duke of Monmouth as their choice of successor. In addition, perhaps as part of the exclusion efforts, rumors about a conspiracy of English Catholics, Jesuits, and the Pope to overthrow English Protestant rule swept England. Though the exclusion efforts failed—James succeeded to the throne in 1685—opposition to Catholics and James persisted. And James only made matters worse through his insistence upon a Jesuit advisor, Edward Petre, at a time when Jesuit readily raised thoughts of revolutionary plots with Louis XIV and the Pope. His appointments of Catholics to important positions in the military, judiciary, and the universities pushed circumstances to the breaking point: James abdicated in 1688, as English leaders invited William of Orange and Mary (James’s daughter) to take over as Protestant king and queen. In 1689, William and Mary agreed to a number of provisos guaranteeing Parliamentary limits on royal prerogative and Protestant succession to the throne.

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Against this backdrop, John Dryden moved from his dissenting roots toward Catholicism. The Drydens and Pickerings, both sides of his family, had been dissenters going back to Henry VIII, but Dryden early on distanced himself from dissenters. Without digressing into precisely when or why he did so, we can say that after 1660 he rarely had any good to say about dissenting sects. He seemed only to see them as he does in Absalom and Achitophel (1681). In Absalom and Achitophel, Dryden defended Charles II and James while attacking the exclusionists generally and dissenters particularly. Dryden’s satiric tone and his general attitude toward the dissenters clearly come across in the following lines: God’s pamper’d people whom, debauch’d with ease, No King could govern, nor no God could please; (Gods they had tri’d of every shape and size That God-smiths could produce, or Priests devise:)[.] (47–50)

(All references are to The Works of John Dryden II [1972] and III [1969], though Dryden’s many italicized words have been printed in regular typeface.) According to Dryden, dissenters opposed all legitimate authority (divine or royal). Their only authority came from within, from the so-called inner light of the Spirit, that is, personal inspiration, an irrational force in Dryden’s view. To Dryden, this “Host of dreaming Saints” seemed “Nothing to Build and all things to Destroy” (529–32).

DRYDEN’S OFFICIAL POSITION The leading literary artist of the Restoration, Dryden befriended royalists and Catholic patrons. Because of both his writing skill and his friends, Dryden was appointed Poet Laureate and Historiographer Royal in 1670. Aside from writing occasional verses, he was also expected to be propagandist for Charles II’s court. For example, he was expected to create a persuasive argument for the Declaration of Indulgence in 1672. A decade later, he would spin a timeless case against mob action in Absalom and Achitophel (1681), specifically, action to exclude James from succession to the throne. Casting Charles II as David/God-the-Father, to the Earl of Shaftesbury’s roles as Achitophel and Satan, as well as the Duke of Monmouth’s Adam and Christ, Dryden created an epic allegory the artistic quality of which far exceeds the demands of political propaganda and the immediate occasion. Taking on many factions in Parliament and the dissenting sects in his poem, Dryden earned a number of powerful enemies. Regardless, he published Religio Laici and The Hind and the Panther in the next few years, earning even more.

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ANGLICAN CULTURE: PRIVATE REASON, PRIVATE JUDGMENT As we explore, first, Dryden’s Anglican culture and, secondly, his Catholic culture, Phillip Harth’s Contexts of Dryden’s Thought (1968) provides a good deal of help in elucidating the occasions of both Religio Laici and The Hind and the Panther. As Harth makes clear, there are actually two occasions which Dryden addresses in the earlier poem: (1) Deism which increasingly concerned all Christian denominations in England (Anglican, Dissenting, and Catholic); and (2) publication of an English translation of Father Simon’s Critical History of the Old Testament which more narrowly concerned Protestant sects. Deism and, therefore, the first half of Religio Laici are beside the point of this essay. The second half of the poem, however, attempts to refute Father Simon’s contentions about scripture on the basis of Protestant Anglicanism. And this is very much to the point. In the interests of arriving at a reliable translation of the Old Testament, Father Simon was applying to scripture the textual techniques that Bentley would soon be applying to classical works and Theobald, in a few decades, would be applying to the surviving texts of Shakespeare’s plays. Without going into great detail on their methods, suffice it to say that all three were searching for corruptions in the transmitted texts and suggesting how the corrupt texts might be corrected or emended (Harth 1968, 177–80). While some might be upset about corruptions in Aesop or Shakespeare, many more were threatened by possible corruptions in sacred scripture. The most threatened, understandably, were Protestants who rested matters of faith wholly upon scripture. The Council of Trent had asserted in 1545 that tradition and scripture were on equal footing in matters of faith; in fact, the Council specifically rejected the Protestant position. If, as Father Simon’s work showed, scripture was corrupt, then the Protestant’s sole prop in matters of faith was less than reliable. Dryden sought to answer Simon as the Anglican divines did in the 1680s, employing some of their works to compose his argument (Harth 1968, 198–200). Dryden ultimately upholds the Anglican position. To do so, he must dispute Catholic tradition and infallibility, as well as acknowledge private reason or private judgment as a significant problem in the Protestant position. Implicit in each of Dryden’s points is the issue of religious authority which, in The Hind and the Panther (1687), will explain his conversion to Catholicism and highlight a vital element of Catholic culture for centuries before and centuries after Dryden. Tradition for the Church was not originally written. Rather, tradition comprised the words regarding matters of belief preserved in the Churches founded by the Apostles. Such words, written down some time after they were spoken, helped in interpreting difficult passages in scripture.

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According to Cardinal Bellarmine, “‘A doctrine is called “not written” . . . not because it has never been written, but because it was not written by a first author [i.e., one of the Evangelists]. Take, for example, the Baptism of infants. Infant Baptism is called a not written apostolic tradition, because it is not found written in any apostolic book, although it is written in the books of nearly all the ancient Fathers’” (qtd. in Harth 1968, 203). Nevertheless, the Anglican divines regularly reduced all tradition to mere oral preservation. Thus, Dryden’s misinterpretation of tradition was characteristic among Anglicans and worked wonderfully to turn Father Simon’s notions of textual corruption against the Church’s arguments for tradition: If Scripture, though deriv’d from heav’nly birth, Has been but carelessly preserv’d on Earth; ......................................... If written words from time are not secur’d How can we think have oral sounds endur’d? (258–71)

Infallibility, like tradition, spoke to some special authority of the Roman Church. While this authority guarantees that the Church cannot lead the faithful into error when it makes pronouncements and interprets scripture on matters of faith, Dryden once again—perhaps intentionally—misinterprets matters. He erroneously considers infallibility to be a form of omniscience, and his error turns out to be a very skillful rhetorical gambit tied to the whole issue of textual corruption: Such an Omniscient Church we wish indeed; ’Twere worth Both Testaments and cast in the Creed: But if this Mother be a Guid so sure, As can all doubts resolve, all truth secure, Then her Infallibility, as well Where Copies are corrupt, or lame, can tell; Restore lost Canon with as little pains, As truly explicate what still remains [.] (282–89)

Problems with the Protestant position emerge, despite Dryden’s attempts to dispute Catholic tradition and infallibility. Whether or not he and his fellow Protestants felt that they had, indeed, refuted Catholic claims to authority on matters of faith, he and his fellow Anglicans acknowledged the problems that existed without such authority. Once Christians were free to consult private conscience and the inner light on matters of faith, as dissenting sects did, the consequences were predicable: The Book thus put in every vulgar hand, Which each presum’d he best cou’d understand,

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The Common Rule was made the common Prey; And at the mercy of the Rabble lay. The tender Page with horney Fists was gaul’d; And he was gifted most that loudest baul’d: The Spirit gave the Doctoral Degree. ......................................... A Thousand daily Sects rise up, and dye; A Thousand more the perish’d Race supply: So all we make of Heavens discover’d Will Is, not to have it, or to use it ill. (400–24)

Dissenters receive the brunt of Dryden’s disdain here because individual conscience—the authority of each person’s inner light—was responsible for the numerous sects fragmenting Protestantism. Dryden will argue that Anglicanism represents the via media because the Anglicans’ private reason differs from the dissenters’ inner light (see Harth 1968, 234ff.), but in his argument lay the seeds of his ultimate conversion to Catholicism. In other words, the Anglican Church could not speak on matters of faith with any authority that commanded obedience. For even as Dryden makes his case for Anglicanism, he is forced to ground his case on the good will of the faithful and not the authority of the Church. What then remains, but, waving each Extreme, The Tides of Ignorance [i.e., the dissenters] and Pride [i.e., the Catholics] to stem: .............................................................. ‘Tis some Relief, that points not clearly known, Without much hazard may be let alone: And, after hearing what our Church can say, If still our Reason runs another way, That private Reason ‘tis more Just to curb, Than by Disputes the publick Peace disturb. For points obscure are of small use to learn: But Common quiet is Mankind’s concern. (427–50)

It may be that well-intentioned individuals concerned about the common quiet will let alone matters of faith that are obscure and will curb their private judgment, but what of those not so well-intentioned? Anglican authority, the via media, rests solely upon the good will of the faithful. Absent such good will, the foundation of Anglican religious authority crumbles. That the Anglican Church could not appeal to any innate authority deserving obedience apparently moved Dryden, by 1687, to seek a Church with just such command. He turned to an infallible Church whose tradition goes back to the apostles with a reliable chain of custody, more reliable than scripture alone.

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CATHOLIC CULTURE AND AUTHORITY In 1687, when Dryden published The Hind and the Panther, setting out the case for the authority of the Catholic Church against the Anglican Church, such an argument was very risky (Winn 1987, 421–24). Not only were James’s headstrong actions antagonizing Protestants of all stripes, but they were also making moderate Catholics uncomfortable with the risks such actions incurred. Dryden’s poem would obviously call attention to himself as a Catholic, incurring even more particular risks. In addition, as a Catholic, Dryden knew that his sons would be excluded from university education. Finally, in Part III of this poem, he criticizes actions of Petre and James, incurring added risks from two of the leading power brokers in his new Catholic culture. Nonetheless, Dryden publicly takes these risks even in a time when many Catholics were publishing their thoughts “surreptitiously” (Harth 1968, 247). As we earlier skipped the first half of Religio Laici as outside the scope of this essay, so we shall skip Part III of The Hind and the Panther. Parts I and II, however, take up the very same issues of Religio Laici in order to deal with them from a Catholic perspective. In a beast fable that characterizes the Catholic Church as a milk-white Hind and the Anglican Church as a spotted (a bit soiled) Panther, Dryden allows the Catholic perspective all the good lines. He does accord the Anglican perspective far more respect (in the choice of the spotted Panther alone), than he does the dissenting Bloody Bear, Quaking Hare, Buffoon Ape, Baptist Boar, or False Reynard. His views on dissenters have not, in short, changed since he published Religio Laici. In any event, as this essay argues throughout, Dryden’s central charge against both dissenters and the Anglican Church is the absence of religious authority, an issue of importance even among Anglican Divines (Harth 1968, 234–42). Understandably drawing his arguments from his newly adopted Catholic culture, Dryden • Likens Protestants to heretics, specifically, the Arians and Socinians; • Shows the need for a guide to unify the faith of the Christian community by guarding against heresy; • Explains tradition in the context of this living guide; • Argues that the Catholic Church alone qualifies as this guide; and • Clarifies the concept of infallibility. In so doing, Dryden draws in high relief the central place of authority in Catholic culture from 1687 back to apostolic times. Evidence suggests that it holds that same place for a good number of believers in Catholic culture today.

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Heresy, according to Dryden’s Catholic perspective, is the logical outcome of private reason. The Hind points specifically to a heresy that Arius had first raised roughly in 300 AD and which Socinus had more recently reiterated at the end of the sixteenth century: they both had denied the divinity of Christ. Although Protestants and Catholics alike repudiated this heresy, Dryden allows the Hind to link it and heresies generally to Protestant reliance upon private judgment and scripture only. Immediately after alluding to both Arius and Socinus in Part I (54–57), the Hind asks the Anglican Panther, “What weight of antient witness can prevail / If private reason hold the publick scale?” (62–3). In Part II, the Hind expands upon these comments by pointing out the problems of relying exclusively upon scripture in matters of faith: . . . but the rule you [the Panther] lay Has led whole flocks, and leads them still astray In weighty points, and full damnation’s way. For did not Arius first, Socinus now, The Son’s eternal god-head disavow, And did not these by Gospel Texts alone Condemn our doctrine, and maintain their own? Have not all hereticks the same pretence To plead the Scriptures in their own defence? (II.147–55)

A guide is necessary to guard against the heresies of private reason. In both passages cited above, Dryden has the Hind quickly indicate that the safeguard against heresy or “erring judgments” is “an unerring Guide!” (I.65). Since scripture, as well as tradition, can be obscure, “For this obscurity could heav’n provide / More prudently than by a living guide, / As doubts arose, the difference to decide?” (II.346–48). We shall discuss the unerring nature of the living guide under infallibility, as the Hind does. At this time, the Hind primarily looks at how a living guide functions to prevent heresy, that is, by employing tradition to interpret scripture. In dealing with the Arian heresy, the Hind asks, How did the Nicene council then decide That strong debate, was it by Scripture try’d? No, sure to those the Rebel would not yield, ....................................... The good old bishops took a simpler way, Each ask’d but what he heard his Father say, Or how he was instructed in his youth, And by traditions force upheld the truth. (II.156–67)

Tradition, as described here, might indeed sound like that easily corrupted oral tradition Dryden had mistaken in Religio Laici for the more

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reliable and more precisely termed “not written” tradition of Catholicism. But the Hind does not stop here; she goes further. She acknowledges that tradition, like scripture, was originally spoken and preserved orally: “Before the Word was written . . . / Our Saviour preach’d his Faith” (II.305–06); “Thus faith was e’re the written word appear’d, / And men believ’d, not what they read, but heard” (II.322–23). But eventually both came to be written: Christ’s life and words found their way into the written gospels, while the apostles and Church Fathers found “preaching by Epistles” necessary (II.335). Because scripture and tradition could both be obscure even on essential matters of faith (“nor if they contain / All needfull doctrines, are those doctrines plain” [II.340–41]), the Hind finds the authority of tradition and scripture linked necessarily to the authority of an “unerring guide.” All three sources of authority help the Christian community to avoid error and help to settle disputes: Thus, with due rev’rence, to th’ Apostles writ, By which my sons are taught, to which, submit; I think, those truths their sacred works contain, The church alone can certainly explain, That following ages, leaning on the past, May rest upon the Primitive at last. ............................................ . . . What th’ Apostles their successours taught, They to the next, from them to us is brought, Th’ undoubted sense which is in scripture sought. From hence the church is arm’d, when errours rise, ............................................ For discord cannot end without a last appeal. Nor can a council national decide But with subordination to her Guide [.] (II.351–71)

The unerring guide is the Catholic Church, the Hind asserts. In the face of the Panther’s rhetorical challenge to “Produce this Vaunted leader to our view” (II.392), the Hind “As once our Saviour own’d his Deity, / Pronounc’d his words—she whom ye seek am I” (II.397–98). In justifying her claim, the Hind first alludes to earlier charges disqualifying the Anglican Church from filling this role: “For how can she constrain them to obey / Who has herself cast off the lawfull sway?” (I.454–55); or, again, “So hardly can Usurpers manage well / Those, whom they first instructed to rebell” (I.517–18). The only authority the Anglican Church has, argues the Hind, is her legal authority as the established Church of England (II.402–39). She lacks the “necessary gifts requir’d in such a guide. / For that which must direct the whole, must be / Bound in one bond of faith

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and unity” (II.450–52). As for herself, the Hind claims that she has the necessary gifts or marks to qualify. She “holds the sceptre and the keys” (II.522), and she manifests the marks set out in the Nicene Creed: She is unified in faith and sanctity (“As one in faith, so one in sanctity” [II.532]), as well as Catholic or universal (“Convey’d to ev’ry clime in ev’ry age” [II.555]); and she bears “Th’ ambitious title of Apostolick” (II.579). As a guide, the Catholic Church is, furthermore, unerring—that is, infallible. Infallibility, as the Hind explains, is not omniscience. Rather, it is a warrant against error. The Pope and councils together provide ongoing guidance to the Christian community when disputes and confusion inevitably beset fallen humanity. And the community is assured that such guidance will not lead them into sin. The Hind admits that there may be some disagreement among Church “Doctours” over just how much authority belongs to the Pope, to the councils, and even the universal “church diffus’d.” In fact, as the editors of Volume III of The Works of John Dryden explain, “Dryden refers to four theories of the locus of infallibility: (1) pope; (2) general councils; (3) lawfull and combin’d pope and general council; (4) pope, general council, and diffus’d church. Rejecting the first two as too narrow and the last as too wide, he accepts the third” (Miner and Dearing 1969, 384): the Pope and councils together, with God’s grace, speak with unerring authority— especially in contrast to private judgment: I then affirm that this unfailing guide In Pope and gen’ral councils must reside; Both lawfull, both combin’d, what one decrees By numerous votes, the other ratifies; On this undoubted sense the church relies. ‘Tis true, some Doctours in a scantier space, I mean in each apart contract the place. Some . . . to greater length extend the line. ............................................................ Thus some contract, and some enlarge the space; In Pope and council who denies the place, Assisted from above with God’s unfailing grace? ............................................................ If any [disputes over scriptural meaning] shou’d in after times appear, New Councils must be call’d, to make the meaning clear [.] ............................................................ But mark how sandy is your own pretence, Who, setting Councils, Pope, and Church aside, Are ev’ry man his own presuming guide. (II.80–107)

Though we have inferred Dryden’s motives or needs in converting to Catholicism based upon the Hind’s various arguments, Dryden never did

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provide such an autobiographical statement. He did, however, explain to a cousin only six months before he died why he could never leave the Church. His explanation parallels very nicely our inferences: “I can neither take the Oaths, nor forsake my Religion, because I know not what Church to go to, if I leave the Catholique; they are all so divided amongst them selves in matters of faith, necessary to Salvation: & yet all assumeing the name of Protestants. May God be pleasd to open your Eyes, as he has opend mine: Truth is but one; & they who have once heard of it, can plead no Excuse, if they do not embrace it” (qtd. in Harth 1968, 244; see also Winn 1987, 414).

CONCLUSION John Dryden understood and depicted the very important place of authority in Catholic culture, vividly contrasting Catholic authority with Protestantism’s private reason in the process. Dryden’s concept of authority, however, might surprise a number of Catholics in the twenty-first century. Since the proclamation of papal infallibility at the Vatican Council of 1870, many Catholics perhaps have understood Church authority and infallibility as restricted to the person of the Pope. This was clearly not so in Dryden’s Catholic culture; as we saw, Dryden explicitly dismissed this narrow sense of infallibility. Nor did this narrow understanding of infallibility obtain in the Catholic culture of those who came after him. Indeed, it is not the understanding of some Catholics even today. For Dryden, infallibility was a matter of Church authority: the Pope and Church councils together oversaw the dual inheritance of scripture and tradition that comprises matters of faith. Two centuries after Dryden, John Henry Cardinal Newman, also a convert to Catholicism, saw Church authority very much as Dryden did. As an Anglican, Newman tried to “‘look out for some Via Media which will preserve us’” (Apologia Pro Vita Sua 1956, 112). But in studying various heresies, specifically, the claim of the Eutychians that Christ had one nature (121–24) and similarly the Arian denial of Christ’s divinity (142–43), Newman concluded that “The truth lay, not with the Via Media, but with what was called “‘the extreme party [i.e., the Roman Catholic Church]’” (143). Specifically, in the fifth-century Eutychian controversy, Newman saw connections to his situation in England. On the one side was the Roman Church proclaiming its position on Christ’s dual nature at the Council of Chalcedon; on the other side were Eutyches and his followers insisting upon Christ’s single nature. In the middle stood the Monophysites. This latter group comprised the via media, a “middle party, many of whom

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came close to orthodoxy . . . in whom Newman saw a parallel to the Anglicans. The parallel, of course, lay not in the doctrines professed but simply in the relation of the parties to each other, the impressive facts being the power of the Pope and the schismatical state of the Monophysites” (Culler 1956, note 5, 121–22). As Dryden, so Newman found that the rock upon which the Anglican via media foundered was “private judgment”—the source of schism and heresy (Apologia 1956, 140). To avoid such fragmentation, Newman eventually saw the need of religious authority to restrict private judgment. Newman, as Dryden, concluded, therefore, that the Roman Catholic Church was a living guide in matters that the Apostles and Church Fathers could not have anticipated. As Newman reasons, it is not surprising that the creator might “interfere in human affairs” by introducing “a power into the world, invested with the prerogative of infallibility in religious matters.” This power would “preserve religion in the world, and . . . restrain that freedom of thought, which of course in itself is one of the greatest of our natural gifts, and to rescue it from its own suicidal excesses” (233). Thus, he concludes that “I am very far more sure that England is in schism, than that the Roman additions to the Primitive Creed may not be developments, arising out of a keen and vivid realizing of the Divine Depositum of Faith” (201). The Church as guide, in Newman’s judgment, was an infallible authority “for smiting hard and throwing back the immense energy of the aggressive, capricious, untrustworthy intellect” (Apologia 1956, 233) or, in terms very similar to Dryden’s, for facing “rebellion as of all possible evils the greatest” (234). Nonetheless, infallible Church authority, in Newman’s view, strove “not to enfeeble the freedom or vigour of human thought in religious speculation, but to resist and control its extravagance” (239). In fact, the infallible Church for Newman and Dryden finds “the Pope in Ecumenical Council” reflecting on the thoughts and disagreements of the Church’s bishops and thinkers (242). The Church is, for this very reason, slow in exercising its authority. It first lets discussion and controversy proceed with great latitude given to private judgment: “in that process of inquiry and deliberation, which end[s] in an infallible enunciation, individual reason [is] paramount” (250). Not surprisingly, Newman was an outspoken opponent of the proclamation of papal infallibility. To demonstrate that Dryden and Newman’s concept of Church authority obtains even today in Catholic culture, we might reflect on yet another—more recent—convert’s notions. Recounting “How I Became the Catholic I Was” in April 2002, Richard John Neuhaus first explains what he found wanting in Protestantism. Neuhaus refers to private reason as the Protestant principle: “And what is called the protestant principle is, as we know from sad experience, so protean, so subject to variation, that

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it results either in the vitiation of doctrine itself or further schism in the defense of doctrinal novelty” (17). As Dryden said, “A Thousand daily Sects rise up, and dye.” By contrast, one of the major attractions of Catholicism for Neuhaus (as for Dryden and Newman) was Church authority. Neuhaus’s words echo Dryden’s, as well as Newman’s, with stunning similarity: . . . if God intended to reveal any definite truths for the benefit of humankind, and if Jesus intended a continuing community of discipleship, then some reliable means would be provided for the preservation and transmission of such truths through the centuries. Catholics believe that God did provide such reliable means by giving the apostles and their successors, the bishops, authority to teach in His name and by promising to be with them forever. The teaching of the apostles and of the apostolic churches, securely grounded in the biblical Word of God, continues to this day. . . . Catholics believe that, under certain carefully prescribed circumstances, the pope and the whole body of bishops are able to teach with infallibility. . . . It means that the Church is indefectible, that we have God’s promise that He will never allow the Church to definitively defect from the truth, to fall into apostasy. (18)

Moreover, says Neuhaus, the Church’s authority—shared by pope and councils—ought to militate against precipitous decisions (as Newman explained) when “judgment is unclear or in heated dispute.” For, as St. Augustine advised, both pope and councils ought, in such situations, to “wait, in firm communion with the Catholic Church and in firm confidence that the Holy Spirit will, as promised, clarify the matter in due course” (19). In brief, John Dryden’s religious poems—over three hundred years ago—reflected quite clearly various conflicting Christian cultures in Restoration England. These poems, for our purposes, also helpfully clarify one major distinction between Catholic and Protestant cultures that obtained then and obtains for many even today: Church authority is the final arbiter in Roman Catholicism. Of course, Church authority for Dryden, like Newman and Neuhaus, comprises the Pope and Church councils, a concept a good deal more encompassing than the concept of papal infallibility that emerged in the late nineteenth century, in large part, to combat the perceived and real threats of modernism.

REFERENCES Culler, Dwight A., ed. 1956. Apologia Pro Vita Sua, by John Henry Newman. Boston: Riverside Press. Dryden, John. 1972. Poems 1681–1684. Vol. II, The Works of John Dryden, edited by H. T. Swedenborg Jr. and Vinton A. Dearing. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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———. 1969. Poems 1685–1692. Vol. III, The Works of John Dryden, edited by Earl Miner and Vinton A. Dearing. Berkeley: University of California Press. Harth, Phillip. 1968. Contexts of Dryden’s Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jarrett, Derek. 1965. Britain, 1688–1815. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Neuhaus, Richard John. April, 2002. “How I Became the Catholic I Was.” First Things, 14–20. Newman, John Henry. 1956. Apologia Pro Vita Sua. Edited by Dwight A. Culler. Boston: The Riverside Press. Palmer, R. Roswell, Colton, Joel, and Kramer, Lloyd. 2007. A History of the Modern World. 10th ed. Boston: McGraw Hill. Prall, Stuart E. 1972. The Bloodless Revolution: England, 1688. Garden City, New York: Anchor Books. Winn, James Anderson. 1987. John Dryden and His World. New Haven: Yale University Press.

9 ✛

Today’s Possible Contribution of the Ethicist in a Catholic University Wilfred LaCroix, S.J.

A HISTORICAL LOOK AT CATHOLIC MORAL THEOLOGY

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elief in the special Incarnation of Jesus came relatively early among his followers (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1994, 466–67). By belief in the Incarnation here, I mean that the Second Person of the Trinity came into Mary’s womb in a special way. But it was also Christian belief that Jesus was not only truly divine, but also truly human just as you or me, except for sin (Hebrews 4:15). So it might be surprising that theologians, from the time of Augustine on, debated the question of exactly when the biologically human embryo in its mother’s womb becomes a living human being of full moral significance. This was true even though Christians early on adopted the Natural Law ethics of the Stoics who were the first to teach the immorality of abortion. The majority position until the nineteenth century (and at least for some theologians continued to be the position into the twentieth century) was that there was “gradual ensoulment” of the fetus. In everyday language, this means that the living being, biologically human from the start, enjoyed only that level of life that was appropriate to its stage of biological development and did not become a baptizable human being for some time after fertilization. On April 5, 1713, the Holy Office, which at the time oversaw the practice of Rites, ruled as follows: “In the case under consideration [the baptism of an aborted fetus], if there is a reasonable foundation for admitting that the fetus is animated by a rational soul, then it may and must be baptized 125

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conditionally. If, however, there is no reasonable foundation, it may by no means be baptized.” (Donceel 1973, 65)

The theological debate was somewhat ended by papal authority rather than by new evidence concerning physical development. About a century before the discovery of DNA, Pope Pius IX left out any qualification of the stage of biological development, in the 1869 apostolic “constitution” Apostolicae sedis, concerning what official Church punishment was imposed for obtaining an abortion. This pronouncement came after advances in medicine made abortion more possible and safer for the woman. It also came amid the nineteenth century’s social and political turmoil in Europe, as the themes of the Enlightenment attracted large numbers to promote freedom for representative government in society and for all mature people in their individual lives. This example from history, often paralleled, offers support for today’s Catholic doing philosophical ethics. It suggests that basic truths of the faith do not, of themselves, settle ethical questions connected with such truths. History shows that the relation of the truths of faith to matters of ethics require not only our experience but also our developing understanding, each of which takes time in history and through history. Gradually our understanding changes in response to the historically new situations and to the growth within the accumulation of experience. It is hard to discover earlier instances in Roman Catholic moral teaching in which matters were settled by papal pronouncement (see Congar, “A Semantic History” 1982, 303–6). From the eleventh century well into the nineteenth century, theologians at universities exercised the ordinary Magisterium of the Church (Mahoney 1987, 118, 156–58). Until the end of the nineteenth century, the accepted procedure for Christian moral theologians was to contribute to a developing consensus among those theologians working on a given moral issue. This procedure included the freedom to express differences to any prevailing positions, even those currently held by the majority. The common way to present such differences was to try to save as much as one could of the positions of those theologians who differed. Such a procedure had the best chance of leading to an eventual consensus. (This save-all-one-can methodology also held for theological reflection in areas besides moral theology, as, for example, Thomas of Aquino’s way of proceeding generally indicates.) Nineteenth-century moral theology manuals, such as those authored by Alphonsus de Liguori and Augustine Lehmkuhl, still consistently used such methodology (Liguori 1828; Lehmkuhl 1888). During these centuries, the moral theologians did not include in the substance of their work any appeal to statements of those in hierarchical authority or those in the Vatican offices. John Noonan writes, “In

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1588 Sixtus V, the most energetic of popes, could do nothing to change the views of the dominant moralists; beginning with the papacy of Leo XIII the moralists, in this area of thought, followed the papal lead” (“An Almost Absolute Value” 1970, 37). Theologians, in their reflections and examinations, employed specific Greek and Roman philosophical categories and terms pertaining to the human person, the family, and society, as well as references to Scriptures and earlier authors. They used these to express, interpret, and evaluate human experience and ideals. One prominent example, as noted already, was the use from Greek philosophy of the theoretical term soul to talk about living things as distinct from non-living things, and to distinguish between the types of souls among the various kinds of living things. It is important to mention that, during this time, few theologians ever talked with ordinary people about these matters. The moral judgment of ordinary people did not enter into the methodology of moral theologians from the medieval times well into the twentieth century. This is, of course, especially true in respect to the moral experiences of women. For example, people who were not married and who were all males developed all moral theology concerning human sexual actions, about what was and what was not sinful. These men usually looked upon the pleasure and companionship involved in human sexual actions as peripheral attractions to endure the hardships of raising the next generations. Consequently, only certain physical positions for sexual activities were considered morally acceptable and all sexual pleasures, including those in intercourse itself, had to be experienced within the attempt to procreate. Elements from this approach remain.

RESTRICTION OF DEBATE ON CATHOLIC MORAL DOCTRINE This way to work out moral positions changed after the onset of the European Enlightenment. By the end of the nineteenth century, theologians seldom publicly questioned papal pronouncements on faith and morals, or even pronouncements from the members of the papal Curia. This practice became institutionally enforced with the Modernism episode at the start of the twentieth century. Since then, monitors within the various offices of the Vatican Curia have systematically reviewed all work of Roman Catholic theologians, including work of Catholic moral theologians. Today, when these monitors find written positions that appear to counter or even to offer qualifications to official papal or curial statements on matters of morals, the theologian-authors have their body of work examined and, eventually, are ordered to retract or even publish corrections to the “misleading or erroneous parts.” At times, the individual theologian

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under examination is required to cease teaching and publishing until the curial offices are satisfied that the theologian is back in agreement. In a recent example, in the spring of 2001, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) condemned “ambiguities and errors” in the work of a Spanish moralist, Redemptorist Father Marciano Vidal (Notification regarding certain writings of Fr. Marciano Vidal, C.Ss.R., 1). The main “ambiguities and errors” specified were in the area of sexual ethics. The Congregation ordered Father Vidal to change his positions on matters such as the following: that the moral use of artificial contraception and sterilization is up to “the responsible discernment of the married couple” (21); that the individual’s “personal condition[s]” (20) must be taken into account regarding the objective and intrinsic evil in masturbation; and that, as it “does not enjoy an adequate biblical foundation,” the official teaching on homosexuality “suffers from significant conditioning and ambiguities”(19). All three areas are also proper subjects for philosophers doing ethical study.

MODERN ETHICISTS AND THEIR METHODOLOGY So what about those doing ethics? We might begin by noting that, in the first fifteen hundred or so years of the Christian experience, no one was doing ethics as we understand the discipline today. Also, today’s ethicist uses a methodology that includes important differences from the methodology accepted for/by the moral theologian from the high Middle Ages until the last part of the nineteenth century. In the past, moral theologians expressed their own positions and examined the positions of other theologians working on a given moral issue in order to promote advances in understanding. Today, following the model of Socrates and Aristotle, the ethicist tries to examine the different positions on an ethical matter and to save as much as possible from the judgments and explanations of all good people. Philosophical ethics has for its data the judgments of people that certain actions are morally right or wrong in various types of situations. The ethicist does not presume to be better at making judgments than most other people. What the ethicist does is to examine these judgments and to try to bring out what is involved in them. Usually, people are not good at explaining why they have the standards they do. People everyday in a great variety of areas make individual decisions about what are morally good and morally bad actions in everyday situations. What seems to be common in the moral judgments of people is the presence of some human values, as well as the call for some to act in certain ways because of such values.

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To do one’s work properly, the ethicist has to give fair examination to all the various explanations on any issue. This means that the ethicist has to develop an acute ability to listen, and to hear correctly what ordinary mature people are saying. Here, we might find a parallel in the ecumenical method of John XXIII. From early in his career in Eastern Europe and Turkey, he approached those Christians disenchanted with Rome, those Christians separated from Rome, and Muslim groups as a person open to learn from them, to save as much of their way of seeing things as he could. Consequently, when later, as pope, he authored encyclicals addressed to “all those of good will,” he had an unprecedented credibility and acceptance. This method is also important in spiritual discernment. One cannot hope to discern movements of the Spirit if one’s disposition is one of hostility to alternatives or predisposition as to outcome. For example, one would not be able to discern the Spirit of Truth acting in non-Christian religions if one started with the conviction that one had the correct position and others had at best flawed elements of the Truth. Somewhat analogously, the ethicist, first of all, must listen openly to the explanations supporting the various positions on a particular moral issue. Next, the ethicist has to determine the merits and the weaknesses in the positions. That is what the expertise in ethics should prepare one to do. During this examination of positions, one should identify the values and axioms people employ as part of their explanations. In our country today, we are able to identify at least seven different sets of such axioms and values in people’s explanations. Each set with its values and axioms or, briefly, with its principles, has its reasonable appeal to something about being human. We usually title these sets ethical theories. People ordinarily do not limit their explanations on different issues to only one of these sets. For example, some appeal to a natural law or, more recently, to a person’s dignity in questions of medical ethics, but these same people will appeal to rational self-interest and utilitarian values in matters of corporate business ethics. This overview of how the ethicist works in the discipline opens a way to talk about the contribution the ethicist, within the proper workings of the discipline and so, indirectly, might make in our day to the official teaching within the Catholic Church. This, of course, has already happened.

ETHICISTS AND THE OFFICIAL TEACHINGS OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH John Noonan early in his career did a study on the moral position of the Christian Churches, prior to the Western Reformation period, on the

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matter of usury. The medieval theologians were generally unanimous in condemning the practice of taking interest on the loan of money. But in the very early stages of capitalism, some theologians argued that the commercial situation in Europe with mercantile capitalism was different enough from that of feudal or ancient times that a reasonable interest on loans of money for business purposes was morally defensible. Over time, a consensus of theologians came to similar positions and so Christian merchants and bankers gained support for what they, in their non-academic consciences, had been seeing as the reasonable thing to do. Noonan reprises this development, as well as others, in a 1993 article, “Development in Moral Doctrine.” In that article, he also noted that, even with much written on the “development of doctrine,” most attention has focused on development in propositions of faith. He has found “no wellknown writer on development who has addressed the kind of changes” in the moral standards he writes about (669). The model Noonan proposes for how Christians could come to substantial changes in their moral standards is similar to common ways ethicists account for the reasonableness of changes in what I call the second level in ethical standards. This is the level of “what counts in specific situations for acting out the pertinent values,” with pertinent values making up the first level of the ethical standard. (This distinction of levels seems to be in Pope John XXIII’s statement: “The substance of the ancient doctrine of the deposit of faith is one thing, and the way in which it is presented is another” [Pope John XXIII 1966, 715]). For example, changes come about in the second level of the decisions of ordinary people as they begin to notice that elements in certain kinds of situations have always been important but had gone unnoticed by most when earlier moral principles developed. (Two examples here would be human slavery and the social subordination of women.) Changes also come about as ordinary people begin to notice that elements in certain kinds of situations are morally important, but that such situations did not even exist when earlier moral principles developed out of such a consensus. (Two examples here would be the uses of contemporary technology to maintain the breathing and metabolism of those in coma or the use of contemporary procedures to achieve in vitro fertilization of the female egg by the male sperm when fertilization in the ordinary manner does not happen.) These second-level moral standards are specific standards expressing the consensus of people trying to act reasonably amid all the specific moral values at stake. For example, with the value “human life” and the attitude “always respect human life,” the consensus-based standard from St. Ambrose on has been that it is morally proper to take physical means to stop an aggressor from unjustly taking the life of another (De Officiis

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ministrorum 1994, I: 36, 179; III: 2, 27). A use of this position appears without citation in Vatican Council II’s Gaudium et Spes (1966, no. 78). Noonan proposed this model (but without the terminology of levels) as a way the Catholic Church could explain to itself a change to support the practice of artificial birth control. While he was never a member of the Pontifical Commission on Birth Control, he was working at the time on the history of changes concerning the prohibition of contraception. So, in the spring of 1965, during the fourth session of the commission, the members called him in for consultation. This fourth session of the Birth Control commission also had thirty-four lay members, including five women. Pat and Patty Crowley, two members of the commission, brought the results of a questionnaire they had circulated among the Christian Family Movement. These results directly and specifically contradicted many of the key assumptions in the current official position on the morality of birth control methods. Even though Noonan and the lay members of the Papal commission contributed to the change in thinking of the majority of the commission, Paul VI chose to stay with the position of Pius XI. Another analysis concerning the birth control matter has only recently become public. Jacques Maritain, a Catholic layman who had a particular combination of intellectual credibility and loyalty to the Church, and the Swiss theologian Abbe Charles Journet had some exchanges concerning moral questions surrounding birth control and Pius XI’s encyclical Casti connubii (1930). At the end of that series of exchanges, Maritain came to the conclusion that, if modern science comes up with something such as a pill that renders a woman sterile for a period of time, it would be moral to use the pill with the intention of avoiding conception (Doering 2001, 18). (This would suggest that Maritain saw such a scientific development as leading to a reasonable change in the second level of an ethical principle.)

CONTRIBUTIONS OF ETHICISTS TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF MORAL POSITIONS As this birth control event is fairly well known, let me here emphasize the first point of my thesis. I suggest that sound development of moral positions might properly be analogous to the sound development of faith positions that have been slowly worked out since the nineteenth-century work of John Henry Newman. I especially refer to his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845) and his essay On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine (1859). In the earlier essay he writes: Unless some special ground of exception can be assigned, it is as evident that Christianity, as a doctrine and worship, will develop in the minds of

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recipients, as that it conforms in other respects, in its external propagation or its political framework, to the general methods by which the course of things is carried forward. Again, if Christianity be a universal religion, suited not simply to one locality or period, but to all times and places, it cannot but vary in its relations and dealings towards the world around it, that is, it will develop. Principles require a very various application according as persons and circumstances vary, and must be thrown into new shapes according to the form of society, which they are to influence. (57–58)

From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, that is, after the Reformation period, it was common to make the distinction between the hierarchy’s active “sense of the faithful” and the laity’s passive “sense of the faithful.” It was Newman who did the historical work to show that the actual historical meanings of “the sense of the faithful” had the laity much more than passive. Although he never went so far as having the laity in the superior active role, he did find them crucial for active approval of positions taught by the hierarchy. Only a few years after Maritain’s private comment above on the possible moral approval of some forms of birth control, Pius XII (in Humani Generis) made a clear affirmation that the Papacy and the Roman Curia were now the embodiment of the Church’s teaching element (Magisterium). He instructed all theologians, including moral theologians, that their approved procedure as theologians was “to indicate how all that is taught by the living Magisterium is to be found in Scripture and divine tradition, whether explicitly or implicitly.” This Papal Magisterium alone is to identify and articulate what is in the deposit of faith since, “this deposit was not entrusted by the divine Redeemer to the individual faithful or even to theologians to be authentically interpreted, but only to the Magisterium of the Church” (1965, no. 3886). So all theologians, including moral theologians, were to use the authoritative pronouncements made by church officials as the framework of the material about which they do intellectual reflection. And, while it is acceptable that they suggest clarifications, they are to avoid anything that would indicate that any of the Magisterium’s pronouncements is wrong. This directive has not always proven to be very easy to carry out. For example, John Noonan noted that Arthur Vermeersch, S.J., later the principal writer of the draft of Casti Connubii, concluded in 1924 that there were no “solid arguments” to establish the immediate infusion of the human (i.e., the immortal rational) soul (“An Almost Absolute Value” 1970, 38). Similarly, Eduardo Hamel noted that some moral theologians speak of the failure of Vatican authorities to give reasonably adequate support for why certain moral positions were to be approved or disapproved. “For example, they affirm as certain the intrinsic malice of all fornication and all sexual activity outside marriage, but at the same time they confess

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the inadequacy of the arguments used to prove it. Speaking of premarital intercourse, Ballerini confessed, “it is certainly forbidden, but we are still looking for convincing arguments to prove it’” (qtd. in Mahoney, 1987, 203). Karl Rahner, S.J., in his analysis of Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae, found it to be “the adopting of a particular attitude” more than “an explanation or a proof” (Rahner 1974, 277). As the Roman Catholic hierarchy, in the last century and a half, has generally adopted the position that Pius XII clearly enunciated in 1950, perhaps the ethicist today, especially the ethicist at a Catholic institution, could contribute positively in ways analogous to how the physical scientists have contributed to dogma in the past. The ethicist would not directly intend this contribution, of course, since such an intention would not be within the discipline. But one could do so indirectly by acting appropriately within one’s discipline. “The faithful, clerical as well as lay, have a just freedom of inquiry, of thought, and of humble and courageous expression in those matters in which they enjoy competence” (Gaudium et Spes 1966, #62). It is the competence of the ethicist to examine the evidence and reasoning and give appropriate weight to all sides of ethical questions important in our time. The ethicist has as material only the following: (1) the various agreements of people trying to do the right thing in morally significant situations and their explanations about these agreements; (2) the moral standards that have emerged from such consensus in the past and the various reasonings in them; and (3) the new information about what are seen to be emerging morally significant situations. Consequently, if there are indications that the development of previous moral standards omitted elements that we now see are important, or if there are indications that previous moral standards were reached prior to the existence of those elements that we now see are important, the ethicist can examine why ordinary good people think the second-level moral standard must change. Using this method, the ethicist may discover that more than one position has substantial merit, or that no one position has convincing strength over all others. Only in this way might the one doing ethics actually be a contributor to the thinking within the Church, again not by making such a contribution one’s primary aim, but by having it as a second effect as one works properly within one’s discipline. Here again history has its lessons. All the major moral changes in the Roman Catholic hierarchical positions in the last two hundred years came after ethicists had set out the reasonableness of humanly experienced moral judgments in the lives of people, which at the time, and often for many years after, differed from the papal and curial positions. The Declaration of Independence of 1776, for example, stated conclusions of moral philosophers concerning human rights and religious

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freedom. The first Amendment in 1791 expressed religious liberty in terms of no state religion and the free exercise of religion. But, in the nineteenth century, Pope Leo XII attacked tolerantism, a term for “religious freedom within a society,” and Pope Gregory XVI condemned “freedom of conscience,” saying that it is an “absurd and erroneous concept, or rather delirium, to assert and support liberty of conscience to anyone whatsoever” (Pope Leo XII 1824, no. 2720; Pope Gregory XVI, 1832, no. 2730). This principle remained into the first half of the twentieth century. In the 1940s and 1950s, John Courtney Murray, S.J., in Theological Studies, carried on an unamicable exchange concerning religious freedom with an opponent writing in American Ecclesiastical Review. This ended with Murray being ordered by his superiors in Rome not to write further on the subject. In 1965, the document on religious freedom, Dignitatis Humanae, in its opening part, affirms the “free exercise of religion.” Murray later commented: In any event, the document is a significant event in the history of the Church. It was, of course, the most controversial document of the whole Council, largely because it raised with sharp emphasis the issue that lay continually below the surface of all the conciliar debates—the issue of the development of doctrine. The notion of development, not the notion of religious freedom, was the real sticking point. . . . The course of the development between the Syllabus of Errors (1864) and Dignitatis Humanae Personae (1965) still remains to be explained by theologians. (Murray 1966, 673)

Underlying this “development” was the Council’s acknowledgment in the document’s opening words that the ethical axioms at its heart pertain to Dignity of Persons (indicating the capacity for reason and selfordering) and not to Natural Law. Three years after Vatican II ended, John Francis Maxwell wrote a long essay on the development within authoritative Catholic statements on human slavery. This development also involves a shift in the moral axioms from those of Natural Law that approved human slavery to those of Dignity of Persons. It also is true that the shift did not come until well after the shift in the minds of lay people in Western culture. It appears that through the centuries, with few exceptions, Catholic popes, bishops, and theologians concurred that human slavery was either according to Natural Law itself or else a penalty for sin. Maxwell traces this tradition from St. Paul and St. Augustine, through St. Thomas, and down to this 1866 Instruction from the Holy Office in reply to some questions by a Vicar Apostolic in Africa. [N]evertheless, slavery itself, considered as such in its essential nature, is not at all contrary to the natural and divine law, and there can be several just

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titles of slavery and these are referred to by approved theologians and commentators of the sacred canons. For the sort of ownership which a slave-owner has over a slave is understood as nothing other than the perpetual right of disposing of the work of a slave for one’s own benefits—services which it is right for one man to provide for another. From this it follows that it is not contrary to the natural and divine law for a slave to be sold, bought, exchanged, or given, provided that in this sale, purchase, exchange or gift, the due conditions are strictly observed which the approved authors likewise describe and explain. (Maxwell 1969–1970, 306)

Other examples include political government, the status of laborers, and capital punishment. From the late 1600s on, ethicists found serious problems when they examined the claims for monarchy as the best form of government for political society. This was a gradual development of what is involved in each person having the freedom to decide for oneself concerning basic choices of action. For example, coming after the growth of capitalism’s mode of production in Western Europe, people claimed basic human rights for each person, including Jews, and the rights of laborers to form unions. They also identified serious problems with capital punishment. That the last execution in the Papal States took place in the 1850s could be explained by the loss of the Papal States in the 1860s, at which time the Pope was divested of temporal powers. In modern times, changes in official Church teachings for each of these areas came well after ethicists worked to set out the strength of such moral judgments made by everyday people. A common aspect in all the above areas of development has been the replacement of axioms ethicists identify as a Natural Law ethics with axioms of what some now name as a Dignity of Person ethics. When the two sets of axioms don’t appear to complement each other, good people seem more often to go with dignity of person axioms. Obviously, a difficulty arises for the ethicist when a Papal or Vatican statement seems to assume that both sets of axioms always complement each other. For example, John Paul II’s address to the participants in the General Assembly of the Pontifical Academy for Life, February 27, 2002. The address, titled “The Humanizing Value of Natural Moral Law,” implies throughout that there never could be incompatibility or dissonance between the axioms basing Natural Law ethics and those basing Dignity of Person ethics. This conflation is done as if there were no intrinsic incompatibility between the two sets of axioms themselves, or incompatibility in application either historically (e.g., slavery) or in the individual instance, where a weighing of all the human values in the particular situation is the task of the individual’s reasoned judgment. Yet simply applying general principles in specific contexts is the step St. Thomas did not take. Rather,

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Thomas cut off the possibility of “deducing down” from Natural Law principles to the daily decisions in people’s lives (Summa Theologiae 1966, I–II: Q. 94, article 4). Instead, for most daily moral decisions, Thomas employed the Virtue ethics and, especially, the ethics of Aristotle. This would often involve the Virtue principle of epikeia, acknowledged by Aristotle, St. Thomas, and modern authors, such as Edouard Hamel, S.J. (Nicomachean Ethics 1985, 1137b; Summa Theologiae 1966, II–II, Q. 120, articles 1 & 2; “The Virtue of Epikeia” 1961, 35–56.)

CONTRIBUTIONS OF ETHICISTS IN NON-AGREEMENTS WITH OFFICIAL CHURCH POSITIONS We might have an analogy from science for how an ethicist today might proceed when there are non-agreements with Papal and Curial positions in the results from one’s investigations. In his 1950 encyclical, Humani Generis, Pius XII gave limited approval to scientific theories of evolution in Biology. He even left open to the biologist the speculation that the human body resulted from a long development from other living matter already in existence. However, because of the doctrine of original sin, he said that no theory of human evolution could be true if it denied that all human beings are descendents of one single set of parents (Enchiridion Symbolorum 1965, no. 3897). What then should the evolutionary biologist do if, in the proper methodology of the various sciences involved in the theories of evolution, the evidences indicate multiple beginnings of today’s human beings? The evolutionary biologist must accept the best evidence of her discipline, even as it counters the papal order. When, in 1992, John Paul II gave an address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, he made a distinction pertinent to the theme of this essay. Based on comments concerning the “Galileo affair” in the seventeenth century and the development in the twentieth-century cosmology by Einstein and others, he praised Galileo’s work and acknowledged that the Vatican theologians erred in condemning Galileo’s interpretation of what he saw. The pope praised Galileo as being a more insightful reader of the sacred books than were the theologians who condemned him. What John Paul did, then, was to say that one trying to learn about things within a specific field of human study has a role, even if not intentionally, in contributing to the growth not only of human understanding but also of the Church’s understanding, even if the human study comes to a position at odds with the Church’s current position. What the pope did not do was acknowledge that the theologians who condemned Galileo in 1633 did so, not on some disciplinary regulation, but on the basis of explicit statements

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of official doctrine from Scriptures and the Fathers. This was also the focus of Bellarmine in his private agreement with Galileo in 1616 (Blackwell 1991, 126–28, 177; Fantoli 1994, 202–03). That such official doctrine has changed has not ever been acknowledged (Hoskin 2004, 13). In his 1992 address, John Paul II made another distinction: “There exist two realms of knowledge, one that has its source in revelation and one that reason can discover by its own power. To the latter belong especially the experimental sciences and philosophy.” It would seem reasonable, then, from such examples, that it is appropriate for one working today in ethical areas concerning, for example, homosexuality, human reproduction, and biomedicine to work within the disciplines of science and ethics properly and not have positions emanating from outside either discipline guide or predispose the result of her work, even if some specific position emanates from the Vatican. Such a procedure may be of special importance today for those ethicists who are Catholic. As noted, those doing moral theology are more restricted now than are ethicists in the examination of the merits of people’s judgments and explanations. Also, as noted earlier, two of the major areas where work of ethicists has later led to developments in moral doctrine of the Church concern people electing their government representatives and people having religious freedom. Both of these areas underwent development after ordinary people moved from making decisions based on general ethical rules to making decisions based on the dignity of the persons in actual situations. Given this history, what is to be expected from an ethicist who is teaching in a Catholic university? It would seem that the ethicist should fairly present all sides of a moral issue even if there exists a hierarchical statement decisively on one side of that issue. To do otherwise would be to act improperly. (I once asked a prominent Catholic philosopher whether he would, in a university ethics class on the morality of contraception, introduce the major objections raised against Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae. The philosopher answered he would not go into the objections to the pope’s encyclical with his university students in his ethics class.) A second way an ethicist could act improperly as an ethicist would be to present all sides of a moral issue but to do so as the truth facing its adversaries, that is, as the truth facing only a brief presentation of positions that are to be refuted. Such a presentation simplifies the matter for students but it also prejudges it for them. I see this as actually more harmful than the first failure, since it not only avoids any possible contribution of ethical analysis to development in Catholic moral positions, but it also indoctrinates students to thinking that all current moral debates have simple solutions and that the current official Church position ends all necessary discussion.

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Ethical study is not a debate. It is especially not a debate against some non-present other. Rather, it is the human effort to get at the best reasonably supported position on moral problems humans are currently facing. This can only be done by giving full respect to all serious positions. To ignore or undervalue the thinking involved in any serious position is to fail as an ethicist. For example, the one who attaches designations such as liberal or conservative to another’s positions puts limits to what that other person evaluates is at issue. In this way, the one attaching the label suggests that the labeled other has nothing substantive to contribute to the matter under discussion. The ancient Chinese had a saying: “the philosopher must be without a label.” Yet perhaps an even worse ethical methodology than the two above would be to ignore or undervalue the judgments of everyday good people who often cannot articulate a very coherent explanation for why they judge something morally good or bad. Let me be clear here on my thesis. I am not focusing on the actual positions on any particular ethical issue. Rather, the focus is on the methodology one uses. It is here that one should distinguish ethics from Catholic apologetics. History in the past four centuries seems to indicate that apparently good developments in the moral teachings of the Catholic Church have quite frequently occurred after philosophers doing ethics worked through these developments. So, could an ethicist at a Catholic and Jesuit school come to see that the best reasonably supported position on some moral problem has to differ from the current official Vatican position? Since what counts as reasonably supported evidence in ethics differs from the processes leading to Vatican positions, such a divergence should not be considered out of place. In fact, one might see it as a failure in ethical examination deliberately to restrain oneself from ever coming to such a position. That would actually fail in two ways. It would fail to be true to the discipline, and it would fail to make what contributions one could significantly make to the Church from one’s discipline. The history of the last two hundred years shows that ethicists being true to their discipline have made such contributions, even though indirectly. One current example returns us to our opening. It is the debate that surrounds using embryonic stem cells in biomedical research. All the pros and cons of such research revolve around the ethical significance appearing at the clock-second the sperm fertilizes the egg. It is true that the fertilized egg has all the chromosomatic potential for human life. But there is evidence that a significant percent of all such fertilized eggs never get implanted in the woman’s endometrium. Instead they are washed out with the next menses. Another significant percentage is miscarried within the first trimester. In addition, for some days during the blastocyst stage

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the cells are inconclusively elements of one or many individuals. Given these data, more than a few scientists, ordinary people, and ethicists are hesitant to say that such eggs immediately upon fertilization have the moral status of an adult human person. And they are hesitant to select what physical stage in development warrants such a moral status. There is still a division among good people over the moral status of a human embryo and so these good people don’t have much hope about reaching any consensus on the ethics of human stem cell research. CONCLUSION Let me end with references to principles for investigation from a theologian and an ethicist, but in reverse order from that at the start. In the Euthyphro, one of the early dialogues of Plato, Socrates and Euthyphro meet at the entrance to the legal court of Athens. Euthyphro is accusing his own father for the murder of a household slave who himself murdered another slave. It seems his father had the slave bound and tossed into a pit. The father forgot about him and the slave died of exposure. Socrates is astonished that Euthyphro is putting his father on trial and asks why it is good to do so. Euthyphro responds that it is good to do it because the gods want people to act that way. The rest of the dialogue has Socrates and Euthyphro examining whether an action is good for humans to do because the gods want people to so act, or whether the gods want people to so act because the action is good for humans to do (1981, 10). For the former, humans must take the goodness of the act on faith that the gods have so ordered; for the latter, humans themselves can understand why the action is good to do. In his Commentary on St. Paul’s Second Epistle to the Corinthians, St. Thomas of Aquino writes: And, likewise, “Where the Lord’s Spirit is, there is liberty” becomes clear because the free individual is the cause of one’s own action, while the slave’s action is explained by the master causing it. So the one who acts on one’s own acts freely, while the one who is moved by another does not act freely. This means that the one who avoids evil actions, not because they are evil, but rather because of the Lord’s commandments, is not free. But the one who avoids evil actions because they are evil, is free. (Opera Omnia 1949, Vol.13, Chapter 3, lectio 3, 312–16)

[This essay was completed and submitted for this volume prior to the publication in 2005 of John T. Noonan Jr.’s book, A Church That Can and Cannot Change. Judge Noonan’s book expands on several specifics herein and is recommended for those who are interested to learn more about these matters.]

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REFERENCES Ambrose, St. 1994. De officiis ministrorum. In A Select Library of Nicene and PostNicene Fathers, 2nd Series, Vol. 10, edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace. Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson Publisher. Aristotle. 1985. Nicomachean Ethics, 1137 a–b. Indianapolis, Indiana, Hackett Publishing Company. Blackwell, Richard J. 1991. Galileo, Bellarmine, and the Bible. Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame Press. Catechism of the Catholic Church. 1994. New Hope, Kentucky: Urbi et Orbi Communications. Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. 2001. Notification regarding certain writings of Fr. Marciano Vidal, C.Ss.R. http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/ congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20010515_vidal_en.html. Accessed January 20, 2008. Congar, Yves. 1982. “A Semantic History of the Term ‘Magisterium’” and “A Brief History of the Forms of the Magisterium and Its Relations with Scholars.” In Readings in Moral Theology No. 3: The Magisterium and Morality, edited by Charles E. Curran and Richard A. McCormick, 297–331. New York: Paulist Press. Denzinger, Henry, and Schonmetzer, Adolf, S.J., eds. 1965. Enchiridion Symbolorum, 33rd ed. Freiburg im Breisgau: Verlag Herder KG. Donceel, Joseph. August 16, 1975. “Why Is Abortion Wrong?” America, 65–67. Doering, Bernard. May 18, 2001. “Silent Dissenter: Jacques Maritain on contraception.” Commonweal, 18–19. Fantoli, Annibale. 1994. Galileo: For Copernicanism and for the Church. Vatican: Vatican Observatory Publications. Gaudium et Spes. 1966. In The Documents of Vatican II, edited by Walter M. Abbott, S.J., 199–308. New York: Herder and Herder. Hamel, Edouard, S.J. January–April 1961. “The Virtue of Epikeia.” Sciences Ecclesiastiques, XIII: 35–56. Hoskin, Michael. March 20, 2004. “The Real Lesson of Galileo.” The Tablet, 258.8529: 13. ———. Sept./Oct., 2002. “The Humanizing Value of Natural Moral Law.” The Pope Speaks, 47.5: 292–95. Lehmkuhl, Augustine. 1888. Theologia Moralis, 5th ed. Friburg, Brisgoviae: Herder. Liguori, Alphonsus de. 1828. Theologia Moralis, 9th ed. amended. Vesustione, Montarsalo. Mahoney, John. 1987. The Making of Moral Theology: A Study of the Roman Catholic Tradition. Oxford: Oxford Clarendon Press. Maxwell, John Francis. 1969–1970. “The Development of Catholic Doctrine Concerning Slavery, Part I and II.” World Justice, XI: 147–92, 291–324. Murray, John Courtney, S.J. 1966. “Religious Freedom.” 672–74, Preface to “Declaration on Religious Freedom,” in The Documents of Vatican II, edited by Walter M. Abbott, S.J., 672–74 and 675–96. New York: Herder and Herder. Newman, John Henry. 1989. Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, 6th edition. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press.

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Noonan, John. 1970. “An Almost Absolute Value in History.” In The Morality of Abortion: Legal and Historical Perspectives, edited by John T. Noonan Jr., 1–59. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ———. 1993. “Development in Moral Doctrine.” Theological Studies 54: 662–77. Plato. 1981. Euthyphro. In Five Dialogues, translated by G. M. A. Grube, 5–22. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. Pope Gregory XVI. 1965. Mirari Vos. In Enchiridion Symbolorum, 33rd ed., edited by Denzinger and Schonmetzer, 549.2730–2732. Freiburg im Breisgau: Verlag Herder KG. Pope Pius XII. 1965. Humani Generis. In Enchiridion Symbolorum, 33rd ed., edited by Denzinger and Schonmetzer, 772–82. Freiburg im Breisgau: Verlag Herder K.G. Pope John XXIII. 1966. “Opening Speech at Vatican II.” In The Documents of Vatican II, edited by Walter M. Abbott, S.J., 710–19. New York: Herder and Herder. Pope John Paul II. November 12, 1992. “Address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Oct. 31, 1992.” Osservatore Romano, No. 44: 1264. Pope Leo XII. 1965. Ubi Primum. In Enchiridion Symbolorum, 33rd ed., edited by Denzinger and Schonmetzer, 547 no. 2720. Freiberg im Breisgau: Verlag Herder K.G. Rahner, Karl, S.J. 1974. “On the Encyclical ‘Humanae Vitae’.” Theological Investigations, XI, 263–87, at 277. London: Darton, Longman & Todd, New York: The Seabury Press. Thomas of Aquino. 1949. Epistolam II Ad Corinthios, Caput Tertio, Lectio III, translated by Wilfred LaCroix, S.J. In Sancti Thomae Aquinatis, Opera Omnia, Tomus, XIII, 314–16. New York: Mosargia. ———. 1966. Summa Theologiae, I–II, q. 94, article 4. Edited by Thomas Gilby, O.P. Volume 28. Cambridge: Blackfriars in conjunction with McGraw-Hill Company, 86–91.

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Philosophy and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Culture Curtis L. Hancock, Ph.D.

D

uring the past few centuries, prominent Catholic intellectuals warned that modernism—a view of knowledge and of the human condition manufactured by influential thinkers during and after “Renaissance times”—was a threat to the survival of Western civilization. Cardinal Newman, Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton, Christopher Dawson, Etienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain, and Pope John Paul II are just a few of the Catholic intellectuals who have worried about the effects of modernism. Convinced that Catholic culture alone has the philosophical resources to expose effectively the errors in modernism, these thinkers have admonished Catholics not to think that modernism can be really congenial with the Christian worldview. They backed up their warnings with countless pages of cogent philosophy and historical analysis to show that modernism is untenable and socially troubling in its consequences. Sadly, their admonition has been often ignored, and, as a result, we live in an age where even Catholic intellectuals rely significantly on modernist ideas. No doubt, those who flirt with modernism have honorable intentions. They surely want to preserve and foster Catholic culture, but their failure to understand the philosophical issues at stake leads them to have their pockets picked while they try not to sell the store. Recently, a book of essays has appeared under the title A Catholic Modernity? The reader suspects that implicit in the theme of such a book is the need to apologize for the Catholic intellectual tradition and to accept that genuine “progress” must surrender, at least in key respects, to the modernist worldview. In fairness, the contributors claim to avoid this concession, desiring “neither a ‘Catholic modernism’. . . nor a ‘modern 143

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Catholicism’” (Heft 1999, 5). But when one reads the volume, one sees that the authors are so mired in modernist assumptions and notions that they presuppose modernism even when they profess to reject it. A case in point is the essay by George Marsden. He tries to persuade others to appreciate the merits of the Judeo-Christian worldview. He uses the word paradigm, a word charged with overtones of modernist skepticism, to make his case. The paradigm Marsden favors, the JudeoChristian worldview, should, he insists, at least be allowed as a peer voice in the public square. But Marsden fails to realize that, if all viewpoints are paradigms, there is no way to persuade others of your position. The only way he can defend his paradigm with any objectivity is by appealing to a standard of truth outside all paradigms. But the language of paradigm follows upon a modernist skepticism that denies that there are standards of truth not reducible to a paradigm. Hence, his arguments collapse under a self-stultifying skepticism, just as much as the arguments of his opponents (Marsden 1999, 90).1 If competing philosophies are so many paradigms, why is Marsden’s paradigm just as good or perhaps superior? Moreover, if everyone has a right to a paradigm, and if the prevailing paradigm despises Christianity, how can Marsden protest? All he can protest is that his prejudice counts as much as somebody else’s prejudice. But if another’s paradigm builds in a prejudice against his prejudice, how can he judge the other unfair or mistaken? The language of paradigm rests upon a modernist skepticism according to which the human mind, not reality, “is the measure of all things.” Truth and goodness are reducible to a consensus among those who have a monopoly of the dominant paradigm. If their paradigm does not favor your view of truth or value, then your view can be dismissed as false and evil, and since there is no standard outside their paradigm (except your own prejudice which is cancelled out by their prejudice or paradigm), then you are helpless to protest rationally. After all, the rational is just another paradigm. The dark side of all of this is that modern intellectual discourse implicitly rests on political power. If that power is congenial with Marsden’s view, then they may let him in the clubhouse, but I would advise him not to count on it. Modernist skepticism is like the elephant sitting in the parlor that people pretend is not there. Such skepticism makes it impossible to reach results concerning value and truth. And yet, the discourse goes on pretending to bear fruit. Once the human mind disconnects from real things in order to test ideas for truth, the intellect becomes its own points on the compass, relying on nothing beyond itself to distinguish intellectual order from confusion; hence, the sad, Orwellian state of affairs that plagues culture today.

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An example is higher education. The confusion is palpable in today’s academy, whether Catholic or secular. Peter Redpath has summed it up in the introduction to his book, Cartesian Nightmare: Skeptical philosophers, atheistic theologians, illiterate professors of English, psychologists who do not believe in the existence of a soul, social scientists who are not scientific, teachers of business courses who have never run a business, chemists who are really physicists, physicists who are really mathematicians, university administrators and teachers of education who lack a basic training in the very subjects which for centuries have constituted the curriculum of a university but who are now directing our institutions of higher learning, these are the inhabitants who not uncommonly reside in that very medium which shapes the development of all of the other contemporary Western cultural institutions. (1997, 3)

Since, as Aristotle rightly observed, the task of education is to order the human intellect and to correct any disorder it may suffer, Professor Redpath’s description of today’s university is a major embarrassment. This embarrassment is sometimes characterized as the result of a “postmodernist malaise” that has spread across Western civilization. But the prefix post fabricates a distinction without a difference. There really is no difference in kind between the modernism of Rousseau, Hume, or Nietzsche and the postmodernism of Heidegger, Rorty, or Derrida. The latter simply works out and makes more explicit the intellectual and social consequences of the modernist worldview. Postmodernism represents the shift from looking upon the human person as noble, specially created, and existing for a purpose to looking upon the human person as hopeless, living without meaning, and caught in a Godless, silent universe. But this skepticism and resulting despair is already present in the assumptions of earlier modernist thinkers, especially in the work of Enlightenment thinkers. While they may give lip service to traditional notions of God, human nature, and morality, their philosophical assumptions, once diagnosed and exposed, tell another story. Postmodernism is the harvest of what modernists have sown. It has taken some time for this crop to ripen and be ready for harvest, because it has taken considerable time for modernists to erode the worldview bequeathed to posterity by the Greeks, Romans, Moslems, Jews, and Christians. Meanwhile, civilization has been living parasitically on the ideals of the Judeo-Christian West, even as modernists have been slowly, but perceptibly, destroying that culture. Modernists have effected this destruction by committing, knowingly or unknowingly, to the modernist worldview. A worldview involves fundamental doctrines concerning knowledge, reality, human nature, the right and the good. Some modernists may be only committed to one or two of these

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claims, perhaps even indifferent to the other claims; then again, some may be committed to all of them. Regardless, modernists collectively profess to have made a cumulative case argument for these beliefs, and over time they have persuaded large segments of academic and popular culture to regard them as axiomatic. Hence, modernism as a cultural force has come to involve this fourfold set of beliefs: (1) Skepticism: there are compelling reasons to doubt whether the human mind can know anything but its own internal states. The human mind does not know the extramental world, things really existing outside the human mind. (2) Naturalism: only matter exists; that is to say, there is nothing supernatural. (3) Animalism: the human person is just another product of chance or randomness in nature, an organic machine, not a special creation. (4) Relativism: there is no objective right or wrong, just the preferences of cultures and individuals. Modernism contrasts with an earlier worldview, one which emerged in the Western world as the Catholic Church assimilated the wisdom of the ancient Greeks and Romans, along with the wisdom of Jews and Moslems, to work out its own account of knowledge, reality, the human person, and morality. This worldview Etienne Gilson calls “the Western Creed,” and it is the philosophical alternative to modernism (1950, 272). By calling it the Western Creed, Gilson intends nothing chauvinistic or exclusionary. On the contrary, he believes that the Western Creed rests on principles and institutions that justify the democratic inclusion of all nations in the human community. In light of his belief, the adjective Western is appropriate because it recognizes the historical experience of the West in developing and fighting for those principles and institutions. In contrast to modernism, these four convictions define the Western Creed: (1) Knowledge: the human intellect under its own powers is able to know something about reality, even the existence of God. (2) Reality: in addition to the natural order, there are supernatural existents, including God and the human soul. (3) Human Nature: the human person is endowed with certain faculties or powers, namely intellect and will, that physics alone cannot explain. Hence, metaphysics, not just physics, is necessary to account for human nature. (4) Morality: human beings are morally accountable. There are objective moral standards according to which both God and human beings may judge the moral quality of human lives and behaviors. Since Western civilization is currently embattled by modernism, it is incumbent on a philosopher sympathetic with the Western Creed to engage the debate between these competing worldviews. If one believes that defending Christian wisdom will protect Western culture, then one surely must assess modernism. This assessment, of course, seldom takes place in today’s academy. I suspect this is because those who control the vehicles of academic culture are themselves so under the influence of modernism that they are reluctant to subject it to criticism. To engage

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such a debate would put their own worldviews in peril. Even those who suspect something is amiss with modernism, and who might incline to criticize it, are often compromised by the disciplinary confusions Professor Redpath spoke of earlier. As a result, they are in no position to produce a fruitful polemic. The moral of this is that the Catholic educator must take what opportunities are available. So, in this essay I would like to show how simple it is to subject modernism to criticism, a criticism which, when shared with students, prepares them to encounter modernist assumptions in their personal and practical lives. This is important because so much of the cultural world they inhabit is shaped by modernism. Once students participate in an examination of modernism, they will be philosophically inoculated against many of its exaggerated and sophistical claims. They will see that, while modernism postures as an unassailable philosophical juggernaut, it is, in fact, a flimsy and implausible alternative to the Christian worldview that it seeks to replace. I can only offer here an outline and an indication of how modernism can be tested for its reasonableness, but these remarks will suffice to show that it is highly problematic. MODERNISM: A SUMMARY ASSESSMENT Skepticism Let me add to my earlier remarks on skepticism. A number of arguments have been repeatedly fired from the skeptic’s blunderbuss. Philosophers have exposed the incoherencies in these arguments over many years, even centuries. Still, the skeptic appears unfazed, continuing to influence modern culture, where epistemological relativism is as prevalent as moral relativism. Everyday one hears bromides like the following: “No one can say what is ‘true’ or ‘false’.” (Somehow, however, this statement is asserted as uncontroversially true.) “‘True’ or ‘false’ is a cultural invention.” (This proposition, of course, is affirmed as a transcultural truth.) “What is ‘true’ or ‘false’ depends on the paradigms one adopts.” (But it would seem that this proposition is meta-paradigmatic.) Conversance with such observations presumably shows that one is fully credentialed to discourse with the modern intelligentsia. Sadly, even ordinary people, traditionally resistant to the distortions of academic culture, parrot these skeptical slogans. Though it may have affected the popular culture, skepticism nonetheless rests on an arbitrary and unconvincing point of view. That influential thinkers have championed it is a puzzlement that may speak more to the fact that skepticism entails consequences appealing to those who control modern cultural discourse than to the fact that skepticism relies on strong

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arguments. Examining arguments persistently put forward by skeptics can readily show skepticism’s inadequate support. Since space is limited, I will discuss one classic skeptical argument, indicating that its weakness is typical of arguments for skepticism generally. In the seventeenth century, this argument gained wide acceptance under the influence of Galileo. While it has been discredited time and again, it stays in circulation generation after generation, something like an annoying urban legend. One often encounters this argument when natural or social scientists attempt to explain the nature of perception. When I was an undergraduate at the University of Oklahoma, I first heard the argument in a zoology class. My instructor, Hughbert Frings, a distinguished teacher and biologist, explained that vision was nothing more than a chemical reaction taking place inside the eye, the sense organ of sight. “The perception of color,” he intoned, “is a chemical reaction modifying the retina.” Since color is an event inside the sense organ, there is no reason, he inferred, to believe that colors really exist outside our perception. Color is an event in our perception; it is not a feature of things existing outside our minds. Presumably, when the poet speaks of the redness of the rose, she is only paying tribute to her own imagination. Before I graduated, I heard many versions of this argument—first, in my science classes; later in psychology and philosophy courses. My temperament makes me naturally skeptical of facile skepticism, so from the beginning, I regarded the argument as incredible. But it seemed that most of my friends and my instructors regarded the argument as irrefutable. I mused to myself that this odd allegiance to the skeptic’s theory must be due to the fact that it sounds “scientific.” A contemporary philosopher, Frank Jackson, has played to that fact in championing the argument: It is a commonplace that there is an apparent clash between the picture Science gives of the world around us and the picture our senses give us. We sense the world is made up of coloured, materially continuous, macroscopic stable objects; Science and, in particular, Physics, tells us that the material world is constituted of clouds of minute, colourless, highly-mobile particles. . . . Science forces us to acknowledge that physical or material things are not coloured. . . . This will enable us to conclude that sense data are all mental, for they are coloured. (1977, 121)

Now, I would be the last to discount the findings of science, spelled with or without an uppercase s. But it seems evident that science does not and, in fact, cannot really support this kind of reasoning. G. K. Chesterton reveals its failure in this clever passage: When a child looks out of the nursery window and sees anything, say the green lawn of the garden, what does he actually know; or does he know

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anything? There are all sorts of nursery games of negative philosophy played round this question. A brilliant Victorian scientist delighted in declaring that the child does not see any grass at all; but only a sort of green mist reflected in a tiny mirror of the human eye. This piece of rationalism has always struck me as almost insanely irrational. If he is not sure of the existence of the grass, which he sees through the glass of the window, how on earth can he be sure of the existence of the retina, which he sees through the glass of a microscope? If sight deceives, why can it not go on deceiving? (1956, 165)

Chesterton has caught the skeptic in a self-refuting position. The scientific theory constructed to explain how knowledge takes place makes the reliability of that theory itself impossible! So, the skeptic’s reasoning relies on science in a way that destroys science. Here we have bad science allied with worse philosophy. As early as the fifth century, when St. Augustine published his book, Against the Academic Skeptics (Contra Akademikos), realist, non-skeptical philosophers (those who are confident that the senses and intellect can know real things) have pointed out that skeptical arguments either suffer this kind of incoherency or are simply unconvincing and arbitrary. The skeptic never has arguments strong enough to convict her adversary. Since skeptics seem to recycle these arguments compulsively, it behooves the Catholic educator to discuss skepticism in the classroom. This will enable students to detect the skeptical propaganda promulgated by today’s intelligentsia. Since skepticism is the hallmark of modernism, to acquaint students with the weaknesses of skepticism, is to give them a powerful advantage in the defense of the Western Creed. Naturalism Like skepticism, naturalism is of ancient vintage, as old as the ancient Greeks. But the Roman philosopher and poet Lucretius gave it definitive expression in his poem On the Nature of Things (De Rerum Natura). This book has been very influential during modern times, as atheists and agnostics have employed it to dismiss the Judeo-Christian worldview. Lucretius’s work has been a handbook for atheists since it ingeniously attempts to show that the universe can be explained without a Creator or without providential design. Since an enlightened mind, Lucretius believed, should prefer a simpler hypothesis, the philosopher may dismiss religious belief as superstitious. In the place of God and divine design, Lucretius substituted the atomism of his predecessors, Leucippus and Democritus. Atomism supposes that bodies ultimately are composed of irreducible microscopic bits of matter. The atomists surmised that, if one were to cut a body into smaller and smaller parts, eventually one would come to ultimate constituents that were uncuttable (atomoi). With this view of nature,

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Lucretius concludes that the universe came about when atoms, originally moving about randomly in vacant space, eventually came together to form larger bodies. Material objects are of two kinds, he asserts, atoms and compounds of atoms. Accordingly, there is no need for anything supernatural: “except for matter and void, no third nature remains within the class of Being” (Lucretius 1977, I, lines 445–46). In other words, reality consists of two things: bodies (atoms and compounds of atoms) and the empty space in which bodies move. There is no reason to believe in a third kind of substance, the non-physical or the supernatural. Lucretius completes his hypothesis by declaring that the motion of bodies in space is eternal. That is to say, atomic motion has occurred throughout an actually infinite past. If so, a Creator has never been necessary. The universe is a brute fact; it is self-explained. In history it is easy to find naturalists who rely on Lucretius’s worldview. The French astronomer Laplace was once asked whether his research had convinced him that God exists. He replied curtly, “I have no need of that hypothesis.” He spoke sincerely, because he knew that, given the scientific knowledge of his day, he could responsibly rely on Lucretius’s hypothesis as an alternative. He could assume that the possibility that the universe had been around forever—thus not requiring a Creator—is as strong as the possibility that God created it. Modern cosmological science, however, has not been kind to Lucretius’s hypothesis. Science in the last half of the twentieth century has established that the universe, rather than being eternal, actually came about with a “Big Bang,” approximately fifteen billion years ago. No less a scientist than Stephen Hawking insists that this is no mere theory, but the consensus among responsible scientists (1996, 20). Not that this fact has discouraged everybody. Carl Sagan begins his television series, Cosmos, with this pronouncement: “The cosmos, the totality of the distribution of matter and radiation in space-time, is all that is or was or ever will be.” Such a dogmatic declaration of atheism is a curiosity given the evidence of modern astronomy, and all the more a curiosity, since Sagan himself was a distinguished astronomer in his own right. One suspects that certain scientists and philosophers—especially some who are self-appointed popularizers of science (which, in their presentations, is often only a thin camouflage for naturalism)—cling to Lucretius’s naturalism because they are reluctant to accept the theistic implications of the Big Bang. And yet, if the atheist denies these theistic implications, he faces a major problem, given that the eternity of the world is now taken off the table. As Anthony Kenny has explained: “A proponent of the Big Bang theory, at least if he is an atheist, must believe that the universe came from nothing and by nothing” (1969, 20). Never short on inventiveness, naturalists have devised theories to skirt this problem. For example,

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in the April, 2002, issue of Discover Magazine, there appears an interview with the astronomer Alan Guth who suggests that the universe came into existence out of nothing without a cause. As the magazine cover announces, “The universe burst into something from absolutely nothing— zero, nada.” Guth reasons that we are faced with two options in light of the Big Bang: either the space-time continuum was created (which means something outside space-time produced it) or the universe just “popped” into existence without a cause. Apparently, Guth—contrary to everything we know about experience and logic—thinks that the latter alternative is preferable. The existential implications of his choice are not lost on him: “I think it undermines the belief that we are here for any cosmic purpose.” But we should not despair: “It does not mean that our lives are meaningless. It means we must give meaning to our lives ourselves” (31). I am relieved, but I still wonder: if there is no God, by what standards can we discover meaning in our lives? Again, we have here a case of bad science compounded by bad philosophy. Suppose, for example, that you suddenly hear a loud bang and you ask others present “What made that bang?” If they reply, “Nothing, it just happened,” you would not be convinced. But if a reasonable person knows that there must be a cause for a little bang, it surely makes sense that there must be a cause for a big bang. (William Lane Craig used this illustration when interviewed by Lee Strobel, The Case for Faith 2000, 76). Philosophers often could benefit from more training in science, but scientists would do well to recognize the limits of their philosophical training. With that recognition, they could spare us the sophistries endemic to naturalist accounts of the universe, such as Guth’s. Still, these sophistries show that Christians have little to fear from naturalists who argue that God is an irrelevancy or that modern science does not support theism. To the naturalist’s challenge, the theist might reply as Chesterton did in Orthodoxy: I felt in my bones . . . that this world did not explain itself. It may be a miracle with a supernatural explanation; it may be a conjuring trick, with a natural explanation. But the explanation of the conjuring trick, if it is to satisfy me, will have to be better than the natural explanations I have heard. (1959, 60–61)

Certainly, the conjuring trick will have to be better than the assertion that “The universe burst into something from absolutely nothing—zero, nada.” Animalism Modernists have used naturalism to redefine human nature and human behavior. This redefinition is implicit often in remarks made by social

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scientists when speaking about the human condition. But it is not just academics and social scientists who “commit sociology,” as George Will puts it. Today these naturalistic attitudes and their effects have trickled down into the popular culture. But more commonly they appear when social scientific elites address troublesome social issues. Here is an example taken from the files of crime and punishment: We the agents of society, must move to end the game of tit-for-tat and blowfor-blow in which the offender has foolishly engaged himself and us. We are not driven, as he is, to wild and impulsive actions. With knowledge comes power, and with power there is no need for the frightened vengeance of the old penology. In its place should go a quiet, dignified, therapeutic program for the rehabilitation of the disorganized one, if possible, the protection of society during the treatment period, and his guided return to useful citizenship, as soon as this can be effected. (Menninger August 1959, 63–64).

Menninger’s attitude about crime and punishment is frequently evident when people are reluctant to hold criminals morally accountable, sometimes arguing that the criminal is actually a victim, whose antisocial behavior results from genetics or environment. If the criminal is a victim, it is uncivilized to punish him. Menninger’s position inclines people to doubt whether evil or vicious character exists. Evildoers—from Charles Manson to Mohammed Atta—suffer from distorted thinking and disturbed psychological states, so much so that an enlightened society should not condemn their behavior, but rather should search for its “root causes.” Evil behavior becomes strictly a psychological or sociological problem, a scientific question, not a moral one. Yet, as one puzzles over Menninger’s words, one begins to catch the scent of inconsistency. In his remarks, he is trying to have it “both ways” regarding crime and punishment. On the one hand, he excuses criminals—people who really do bad things—by calling them “disorganized” personalities; on the other, he condemns ordinary decent citizens—people who want to protect society from criminals—by saying that they suffer a “frightened vengeance” and are invested in “the old penology.” What are these remarks but moral judgments. So, while Menninger would absolve actual criminals, he would judge harshly decent people who want morally to address and remedy crime. It appears that in Menninger’s society, criminals “get a pass,” but people who disagree with him are roundly condemned! Menninger’s remarks betray a controversial, if not patently false, conception of the human person, compounded by moral incoherency. Such views have worked their ill effects in our society, as would-be social engineers, who have dispensed with traditional Judeo-Christian views of responsibility and punishment, fashion a utopia based on their

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social scientific vision of the human condition. This crypto-utopianism is one of the most disturbing features of naturalism, a fact that should not be lost on those wanting to defend the human person as a free, responsible agent.2 Moral Relativism One of the consequences of this naturalist view of the human person and the belief that evil does not exist (except, perhaps, among those on the Christian right) is that people have become reluctant to make moral judgments. One symptom of this is the prevalence of another modernist doctrine, moral relativism, which is rampant in our culture today, especially among the young. What exactly does moral relativism hold? It is the view that there is no right or wrong, only that people think it is so. In other words, there is no objective morality. There are no judgments about right or wrong that reason, relying on experience, can convincingly defend. Instead, right and wrong are just cultural inventions. Our judgments about morality result from cultural conditioning, merely preferences imposed by the geographic and social circumstances of our upbringing. If a person grows up in one place, she acquires certain values. Should she grow up in another, she acquires other values. Since one’s values depend on where one grows up, it is presumptuous and unfair for one individual or group to judge another individual or group. One of the reasons that relativism has cast its spell on culture today is that relativists have been very effective at convincing people that their worldview is necessarily connected with the virtue of tolerance and the cultivation of a multicultural sensibility. That is why relativists will say that one should never pass judgment. “No judgments!” is the catch phrase. (We are not supposed to notice that that utterance is a judgment.) But is this really tolerance or only a pseudo-tolerance? Critics of relativism point out that the meaning of the word tolerance has changed. It has shifted from its classical meaning to a relativistic meaning, a fact Chesterton hit on when he reputedly observed that “today tolerance is the refuge of the person who does not believe anything.” The classical meaning is captured in Voltaire’s famous remark that “I disagree with what you are saying but I will fight to the death for your right to say it.” Today, however, the word tolerance has mutated into “there is no point to disagreement because all views are equally valid.” Disagreement itself has become a sign of intolerance. Volumes can be written about the flimsiness of relativism as a worldview. I will not belabor the point, except to summarize briefly three criticisms that usually awaken the relativist from his dogmatic slumber.

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To begin with, relativism is no true friend of tolerance. In fact, it is the enemy of tolerance, because it excuses intolerance. If there is no way to judge that one culture is really better than another, then the relativist cannot judge that a culture behaves badly if that culture is mired in intolerance. Relativism is as much a rationale for intolerance as it is for tolerance. On the one hand, the relativist wants to promote tolerance as an absolute or universal value. On the other, the relativist cannot promote it, because he does not believe in absolute or universal values. Secondly, relativism, contrary to popular belief, cannot logically cultivate multicultural sensibilities. Mary Midgley in her excellent chapter, “Trying Out One’s New Sword,” shows why relativism cannot, in fact, celebrate cultural diversity (1981, 44). While it is true, she points out, that relativism prohibits someone from condemning another society’s moral beliefs and practices, it obversely prohibits someone from praising another society. If judgments are forbidden, judgments of praise are eliminated as much as judgments of condemnation. But this puts the relativist in an embarrassing position. Rather than inspire inclusiveness and appreciation of other cultures, relativism entails isolationism. If the relativist is consistent, she must do nothing more than take inventory of her own culture, however limited that is. In fact, when one drives relativism to its logical conclusion, it allows each person to declare herself “a culture of one.” In the end, relativism makes culture itself arbitrary, just another invention. Relativism devolves into a radical individualism and moral anarchy, and there is nothing about it in principle to prevent that devolution. This is why relativism invariably crosses the threshold into nihilism. Lastly, relativism makes the idea of progress impossible. This is another embarrassment for the relativist, since he often postures as progressive. But if there are no objective moral standards, there is no way to judge that one set of social circumstances is morally more advanced than another. For example, without the objective value of freedom and dignity, there is no way to judge that Britain and India have progressed beyond their past treatment of women, as the one nation enfranchised women and the other outlawed suttee, the practice of burning a widow alive on her husband’s funeral pyre. Because Britain in 2008, where women can participate in the political process, better approximates the moral standard of freedom and dignity for all, the non-relativist (who believes in the defensibility of such a standard) can argue that Britain really has progressed beyond the sexism it practiced over a century ago. But the relativist can make no such claim with sincerity, because he will not allow that there are really moral standards for a society to approximate. The relativist can claim no more than that societies change; they do not progress. If the relativist asserts that Britain or India has genuinely progressed, then he smuggles in a standard

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or norm of progress and, thus, has given up his position. So, it is only the non-relativist, not the relativist, who can be really progressive. Relativism does not promote tolerance or pluralism or progress. The ability to really justify tolerance and progress eliminates relativism as part of a reasonable worldview. With this understood, universities can send forth educated Christians who can rehabilitate a society crippled by relativism.

CONCLUSION In this brief summary and critique of modernism, I have shown that it is vulnerable to serious objections. I do not pretend to have refuted modernism once and for all. I have merely offered a few indications that it is a troubled and unconvincing worldview. The contemporary Christian should appreciate this fact and not assume that, in order to be a sophisticated, progressive member of enlightened society, she or he must make a bargain with modernism. That bargain should be avoided at all costs, as it would, in my judgment, spell the end of Christian culture as traditionally understood. In my opinion, modernism, because it has largely been unchallenged by capable philosophers in recent times, is rapidly aiding and abetting the production of a new world disorder. Since the Catholic faith has the tradition and the resources to diagnose the errors of modernism, Catholic culture has a clear duty to debate modernist influences in our society. If Catholic culture continues to blithely consort with modernism, it will become a faint remnant of what it once was. The decline of Catholicism signifies a corresponding decay in Western civilization itself. This should come as no surprise, since it has been the Catholic tradition that historically has been the greatest defender and transmitter of the Western Creed. This is why philosophy has also been of central importance in the history of the Catholic Church. It has given Catholic culture the rational resources to defend the Church’s vision of what civilization and culture ought to be. Legend has it that Ernest Hemingway, who suffered many financial bankruptcies during his lifetime, was once asked, “Mr. Hemingway, just how exactly does one become bankrupt?” He replied, laconically: “first slowly; then suddenly.” For centuries, in spite of the gradual incursions of modernism, Western culture retained its vitality as it lived off the capital slowly built up over the centuries by the Western Creed. But I fear that now it has spent its interest and is squandering the principal. If so, our march toward cultural bankruptcy is accelerating. I profess to be a realist, neither a cynic nor a pessimist. If one is sick and visits the doctor, he is simply being prudent. When the doctor says

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that the patient is seriously ill and needs immediate medical help, she is not being a “doom-and-gloomer.” She is discharging her duty as a responsible realist. Because the institutions of Western culture are suffering the ill effects of modernism, they must hope that the “doctor is in.” That physician is philosophy, which, as developed in the Catholic tradition, has the resources to defend the essentials of civilization. Catholic culture needs to rediscover its philosophical wisdom. We do not live in an age of faith anymore. Certainly, God is ultimately in charge, but God also expects us to use our intelligence to cooperate with his grace in history. If the Church is to preserve and advance Christian culture, it can no longer be naïve and indifferent about the influences of ideas on society. Catholic culture needs more competently to train educated minds, so that they can effectively challenge the sophistries of modernist intellectuals. Saint Thomas Aquinas often observed that the intellect is the best friend that faith ever had. It is essential, he said, to keep our intellects strong and rightly ordered; otherwise, we disrupt faith because we cannot defend it anymore in an increasingly secular culture. Faith, then, becomes weakened and marginalized as a cultural force. When that happens, people live increasingly in a faithless society. As Scripture says, “my people perish for lack of vision” (Proverbs 29:18). We need a vigorous philosophy to help us restore our vision. That philosophy must be independent of and a remedy for modernism.

NOTES 1. On page 90, Marsden says the following: “Thomas Kuhn points out that the way people are converted from one paradigm to another is not so much by arguments as by observing the fruitful problem-solving of another community.” But if one believes truth is determined by paradigms, different paradigms may dispute what constitutes “fruitful problem-solving.” So, it does not follow that “fruitful problem-solving” will convert anyone committed to a paradigm unsympathetic with Marsden’s paradigm. If knowledge is determined by something more than a paradigm, well and good, but Marsden, then, should not confuse the issue by talking about paradigms. 2. One of the Orwellian consequences of this naturalist conception of the human condition is the embarrassing failure of naturalists to realize how this conception undermines their proclivity for moral protest. Naturalists often like to assume the high moral ground. “Would that the world were peopled by naturalists,” they often proclaim; “it would be progressive and peaceful, not wicked and violent as is the world fashioned by the Judeo-Christian Ethics.” And at this point, the litany of woes supposedly perpetrated by Christian civilization—from the Spanish Inquisition to the Galileo episode—is paraded before beleaguered Christians. The 100+ million people killed as the direct result of the machinations

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of twentieth-century politicians who explicitly abjured Christianity, such as Stalin (a naturalist) and Hitler (a neo-pagan), are conveniently overlooked in such litanies. The omission is compounded by embarrassment, for the naturalist denies free will and, therefore, cannot assume the high moral ground. If all behaviors are the result of purposeless matter in motion governed by physical laws, it is determinate cause and effect that explains human thought and action, not liberty. If there is no liberty, there is no moral responsibility, and if there is no responsibility there is no morality. Naturalism is determinism and determinism cannot assume the moral ground, whether high or low.

REFERENCES Chesterton, Gilbert Keith. 1956. Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox. New York: Image Books. ———. Orthodoxy. 1959. New York: Image Books. Craig, William Lane. 2000. Interview. In The Case for Faith, edited by Lee Strobel, 57–86. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing House. Guth, Alan. April 2002. Interview. Discover Magazine 23.4: 33–39. Gilson, Etienne. 1950. The Unity of Philosophical Experience. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Hawking, Stephen W., and Penrose, Roger. 1996. The Nature of Space and Time. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Heft, James L. 1999. Introduction. In A Catholic Modernity?, edited by James L. Heft, 3–11. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. Jackson, Frank. 1977. Perception. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Kenny, Anthony. 1969. The Five Ways: St. Thomas Aquinas’ Proofs of God’s Existence. New York: Schocken Books. Lucretius, Caro. 1977. The Nature of Things. Translated and edited by Frank O. Copley, Book One, lines 430–46. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Marsden, George. 1999. “Matteo Ricci and the Prodigal Culture.” In A Catholic Modernity?, edited by James L. Heft, 83–93. New York: Oxford University Press. Menninger, Karl. August 1959. “Verdict Guilty—Now What?” Harper’s Magazine, 209.1311: 63–64. Midgley, Mary. 1981. “Trying Out One’s New Sword.” In Heart and Mind: the Varieties of Moral Experience, 41–51. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Redpath, Peter A. 1997. Introduction. Cartesian Nightmare, 1–6. Amsterdam: Rodopi Press.

Section Four

ULTIMATE ENDS

But vastness blurs and time ‘ beats level. Enough! the Resurrection, A heart’s-clarion! Away grief’s gasping, ‘ joyless days, dejection. Across my foundering deck shone A beacon, an eternal beam. ‘ Flesh fade, and mortal trash Fall to the residuary worm; ‘ world’s wildfire, leave but ash: In a flash, at a trumpet crash, I am all at once what Christ is, ‘ since he was what I am, and This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, ‘ patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, Is immortal diamond. (Hopkins 1888, “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection,” 16–24)

11 ✛

Is There a Catholic Culture? Richard J. Janet, Ph.D.

K

en Follett is a highly successful British author of popular thriller fiction, probably best known in the United States for his 1978 Edgar Award–winning mystery, The Eye of the Needle. Follett surprised many of his readers in the late 1980s by abandoning the thriller genre to write a series of historical novels. The first of these novels, Pillars of the Earth, was published in 1989 and, in almost a thousand pages of careful detail, tells the story of the construction of a twelfth-century English Gothic cathedral. Follett considers it his finest novel and, in his preface to a recent edition, recounts the story of his attraction to the topic and his decade-long effort to complete the work. Like many others who have marveled at the awe-inspiring character of the Gothic cathedrals, Follett wondered what motivated medieval Europeans to devote years of labor and the sacrifice of countless resources to complete these monuments. Pillars of the Earth addresses that question through the fictional lives of Philip of Gwynedd, prior of Knightsbridge Priory and sponsor of the cathedral, and Tom Builder, master mason in charge of the project. What makes Ken Follett’s story so striking is that he is a self-professed atheist. What’s more, I don’t believe in God. I’m not what you’d call a spiritual person. According to my agent, my greatest problem as a writer is that I’m not a tortured soul. The last thing anyone would have expected from me was a book about the building of a church. . . . When I was a boy, all my family belonged to a Puritan religious group called the Plymouth Brethren. For us, a church was a bare room with rows of chairs around a central table. Paintings, statues and all forms of decoration were banned. The sect also discouraged

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members from visiting rival churches. So I grew up pretty much ignorant of Europe’s wealth of gorgeous church architecture. (1999, 1)

Why would a person who professes no belief in a divine power spend years of work and risk his carefully built reputation to tell the story of the construction of a cathedral dedicated to the glory of God? Of course, there were various motivations for the building of medieval cathedrals. Pillars of the Earth contains plenty of the Earthly City—politics, sex, pride, greed, corruption—but there is also an undeniable drive to create a spiritual monument at Knightsbridge Priory. As the story unfolds, the design and construction of the church are carefully described as a labor of faith. Prior Philip and Tom Builder are ambitious and determined men, but they are also essentially spiritual warriors who overcome the numerous challenges presented by the worldly villains in the novel. Follett recognizes in Pillars of the Earth the fundamental role played by religious faith in the realization of one of the great cultural achievements of human civilization. The Christian faith of Philip and Tom not only motivated construction of the cathedral and sustained building efforts during trying times, but gave the Knightsbridge cathedral its distinctive physical shape, form, and atmosphere. What Ken Follett testifies to is the powerful and unquestionable role of faith in shaping human culture.

THE POSSIBILITY OF A CATHOLIC CULTURE Scholars have long acknowledged the power of religion in human history, even when they seek more material explanations for the unfolding of events. The English Marxist historians Christopher Hill and Eric Hobsbawm recognized the influence of religion on the development of modern English society. Hill gave religious faith and ideas due credit for their influence on the seventeenth-century English Revolution. “The tendency of historians recently has been to emphasize its social and political causes, sometimes almost to the exclusion of religion. Yet questions of religion and Church government loomed large for contemporaries, even in spheres which today we should not regard as religious at all” (Hill 1982, 63). Hobsbawm noted the role of religion in ninteenth-century European society, commenting on the “revivals of religion in its most uncompromising, irrationalist, and emotionally compulsive forms,” even as he sought explanations for these phenomena in psychological, economic, and social forces (qtd. in Kaye 1984, 161–62). The very definition of culture—“the complex of arts, institutions and ideas by which any society lives” (Cole 1973, 607)—demands attention

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to the formative influence of religion and religious faith. Human culture encompasses a variety of organizational and institutional, as well as intellectual and spiritual, forms and habits. Christopher Dawson became famous in the first half of the twentieth century for his insistence on the inseparability of religion and culture. Culture, Dawson posited, involved “a common view of life, common standards of behavior and common standards of value, and consequently a culture is a spiritual community which owes its unity to common belief and common ways of thought far more than to any uniformity of physical type” (1948, 48–49). Given the central importance of religious faith on human culture, scholars seek an understanding of the specific influence of various religious beliefs on their surrounding culture. For Western civilization, the pursuit centers on an examination of the role of Christianity and, for several centuries, the almost universal influence of Roman Catholic Christianity. Indeed, the distinctive nature of Christianity led to its dominant influence on the formation of Western culture. “No other religion,” in the view of Thomas Neill, “can have the same view of time and eternity, of culture and salvation, as the Christian religion, for no other religion experienced its God as an historical person” (1952, 8). Drawing on the Hebrew scriptures for its cosmology, Christianity emphasized the special relationship between God and God’s creation, and especially human beings who were made “in the image and likeness of God.” If, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, humans enjoy a relationship with a God in whose image they were created, all of God’s creation—and especially humankind—reveal something of the nature of God. Indeed, humans demonstrate God-like qualities in the process of artistic and cultural creativity, sharing with God “the desire and ability to make things” (Sayers 1978, 114). The relationship between God and humankind also means that human beings can learn of God by analogy to themselves—“We can explain nothing in terms of itself, but only in terms of other things [including God],” in the words of Dorothy Sayers (1978, 115). Christians, then, habitually explain things in reference to other things, that is, they employ metaphors and analogies when discussing the nature of their universe.

ROOTS OF A CATHOLIC CULTURE The fundamental Christian perspective on the world, building on the Judeo-Christian creation stories, hinges on the Incarnation of Christ. “And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us,” John’s gospel poetically recalls. The Incarnation lends a new dignity and worth to humanity and spawns a Christian philosophy of the human person. The classic enunciation of the theology of the Incarnation comes from St. Athanasius

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in De Incarnatione Verbi Dei (The Incarnation of the Word of God), written in 318. In this slim treatise, Athanasius reiterated the Christian belief that God made human beings from nothing and gave them freedom to choose their own fate. Man chose evil (the loss of “original innocence”) in defiance of God’s law and was condemned to a corruptible existence. God, then, became human “to bring the corruptible to incorruption,” entering the world “in a new way” so that divine creation would not wither away. “He became Himself an object for the senses [which had led man astray] so that those who were seeking God in sensible things might apprehend the Father through the works which He, the Word of God, did in the body” (1946, 43). God thereby honored the human condition and sanctified the human body, purposefully choosing to reveal Himself through things in order to save humankind. The result was that life was made good again and imbued with immortality. “In short, such and so many are the Savior’s achievements that follow from His Incarnation, that to try to number them is like gazing at the open sea and trying to count the waves” (Athanasius 1946, 93). As explained by St. Athanasius, the Incarnation contributed to a Christian view of the human person as a being of inherent dignity and worth, made in the image of God and, through Christ’s birth, death, and resurrection, destined for communion with God. Of course, theological attention continued to center on the nature of Christ as God and man. The Council of Chalcedon in 451 reaffirmed the teaching that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine, but the debate has continued among some theologians who wrestle with the subtleties of the Incarnation’s mythic dimensions. However, historically for most Christians the nuances of theological controversy have not influenced their basic attitudes. For centuries, at least in the Catholic tradition, the Incarnation has been taught in the manner of Athanasius; for centuries the imagination of Christians has dwelt on the “Word became flesh”; and for centuries Christians have celebrated the Christmas season as a celebration of the historic fact of the Incarnation. Christians do not employ a uniform method or demonstrate a monolithic perspective in dealing with cultural matters, however. In the pluralistic religious society of the modern West, Christian theology has informed differing (opposing and complementary) attitudes among Christians. The works of David Tracy, popularized by Andrew Greeley, have stressed the differences between Protestant and Catholic cultural perspectives. While Protestants tend toward what Tracy calls a dialectical imagination, stressing the absence of God from the world and “the distance between God and His creation,” Catholics favor an analogical imagination that focuses on the presence of God in the world and “the nearness of God to His creation” (Greeley 2000, 5). “Catholics,” in

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Greeley’s terms, “tend to accentuate the immanence of God, Protestants the transcendence of God” (2000, 5). These differences in cultural perspectives result from the historical development of Protestant Christianity and the reaction of the reformers against the exaggerated sacramentalism of the European peasantry, a sacramentalism that often blurred into superstition and distorted notions regarding personal sanctity and justification. Martin Luther developed a theology of the cross that led to a Protestant emphasis on the Atonement over the Incarnation. Whereas the Protestant reformers emphasized the great gap between God and the human being, the Catholic liturgical calendar celebrated the historicity of God as man. The Christmas season in the Catholic Church, for example, stretches from Christmas Eve to the Baptism of the Lord and focuses attention on the details of the plight of Mary and Joseph, the circumstances of Jesus’ birth, the worship of the shepherds, the visit of the Magi, the circumcision of Jesus, the motherhood of Mary, the fate of the Holy Innocents, the flight of the Holy Family to Egypt, and Jesus’ baptism by John—all real historical events that invite reflection on the mystery of God made man. This Catholic emphasis on the Incarnation contributes to a distinctive cultural perspective. For Catholics, in the words of Henri de Lubac, “the world is the real work of a good God and has a real value. Man’s task is not to liberate himself from time but to liberate himself through time; not to escape from the world but to accept it” (Neill 1952, 11).

THE INFLUENCE OF CATHOLIC CULTURE How has a Catholic cultural perspective, expressed variously among communities of Catholic Christians throughout the world, influenced the shape and nature of human culture, particularly in Western society? The cultural influence of Catholicism has been exerted historically on at least two levels: as both an institution and a cultural sensibility. First, Catholicism has helped shape human society through the direct and indirect influence of the Church on an institutional level. Over the centuries, the Church has demonstrated tremendous powers of inspiration, patronage, and proscription. Architects, painters, sculptors, composers, craftsmen (like Tom Builder in Follett’s Pillars of the Earth), actors, dancers, singers, poets, playwrights, novelists, and scholars have drawn inspiration from the teachings and works of the Church. Some artists have benefited from the direct patronage of the Church, while others have suffered from the censorship of Church authorities. We have only to think of the great monuments of Catholic culture—its churches, museums, libraries, and schools—to appreciate the direct influence of the institutional Church on

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Western society. Some cultural historians stop with this observation. The influence of Catholicism extends well beyond the cultural reach of the institutional Church, however. More difficult to analyze is the second influence of the Catholic faith, as well as Catholic ideas and values, on forging cultural norms, modes of personal expression and, in David Tracy’s usage, popular imagination. Such influence is often exerted privately, in the interior lives of individual Catholics. But interior attitudes, based on a sense of Catholic sacramentalism, naturally affect public behaviors. Human behavior in community often reflects the deeply held interior values of each individual, while also drawing from the social norms and structures which themselves are partly fashioned from commonly held ideas and values. Indeed, Catholic teachings stress the communal nature of the human condition and command active participation in public life. Michael and Kenneth Himes call this “concretized love” and see it as a natural outgrowth of the Incarnation. Maintaining the incarnation in its fullness is the foundation of the sacramental principle: What is true always and everywhere must be expressed sometime somewhere. . . . A consequence of this sacramental principle is the crucial quality of the here and now. . . . Christianity is eminently practical and concrete. It does not exhort to love for the unseen. Rather, it maintains that the unseen can be loved only in the one who is seen. Agape, the prime metaphor for God in the Christian tradition (1 John 4:8, 16), is the effective willing of the good of the other, practical action in order to realize the best possible situation for the other. (Himes and Himes 1993, 130)

“Concretized love” becomes the basis for much of Catholic social teaching, and recent Church emphasis on social justice. Those teachings issue from an internalized appreciation of the sacramental principle, informed by the Incarnation, that is, given public expression in Church precepts.

THE CATHOLIC IMAGINATION Father Andrew Greeley, the prolific American sociologist, popular novelist, and social commentator, has spent much of his career describing and measuring the behavior and attitudes of American Catholics. He has been particularly influenced by the ideas of David Tracy, whose work Greeley has popularized in books like The Catholic Myth, How to Save the Catholic Church, and The Catholic Imagination. Greeley suggests that an essential characteristic of Catholic attitudes and behavior is the underlying sacramental imagination of Catholics (Tracy’s analogical imagination popularized). “Catholics live in an enchanted world,” Greeley writes,

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a world of statues and holy water, stained glass and votive candles, saints and religious medals, rosary beads and holy pictures. But these Catholic paraphernalia are mere hints of a deeper and more pervasive religious sensibility which inclines Catholics to see the Holy lurking in creation. As Catholics, we find our houses and our world haunted by a sense that the objects, events and persons of everyday life are revelations of grace. (Greeley 2000, 1)

Like David Tracy, Greeley recognizes that Catholics tend to express their perceptions of reality through analogy to themselves and other intelligible things. Greeley prefers to refer to this imagination as sacramental, however, for it “sees created reality as a ‘sacrament,’ that is, a revelation of the presence of God” (2000, 1). Greeley’s sociological work tests the hypothesis that there exists a correlation between Catholic behavior and this sacramental imagination. In The Catholic Imagination, he asserts such a correlation between “the great works of art created by Catholics and the imaginations of ordinary Catholics” (2000, 184). Among the examples he provides are the works of Bernini, St. John of the Cross, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Graham Greene, Martin Scorcese, and Mozart. The classic cultural products of these creative geniuses stem from the fundamental Catholic sensibility, the sacramental imagination, that underlies their cultural perceptions. Their visions, echoing the imagination of Catholics throughout the centuries, in turn create a Catholic culture that reinforces the sacramental imagination. Even Greeley’s potboiler fiction, unabashedly popular and sensual, conveys this Catholic cultural perspective. A natural storyteller, Greeley creates worlds where admirable (if flawed) characters, like Blackie Ryan, find redemption and help reaffirm right order in the Earthly City.

ELEMENTS OF A CATHOLIC CULTURE If the sacramental imagination moves Catholics to perceive the universe in a distinct way and has inspired Catholic artists as diverse as Mozart and Hopkins to create masterworks of Western culture, what, if any, common elements typify these products of the Catholic imagination? In some ways, these elements are as varied and complex as the cultures which expressed them, ranging from the basilicas of early Christian Rome through the Gothic cathedrals to the modern steel and glass churches of today. Catholic culture adapts to the historical circumstances of the Catholic community and the cultural geography in which, as a living faith, it is grown and nurtured. The result reflects the rich heritage of the Catholic cultural tradition, a tradition that has grown from a distinctive understanding of the human condition based on an awe-filled appreciation of the beauty, meaning, and mystery of created things.

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Many of the examples alluded to in this collection refer to the Western cultural tradition, where the Catholic Christian element is readily recognizable given the historical influence of the Church. However, the Catholic imagination has adapted itself to various cultural traditions. In the process, Catholic culture has borrowed from, and adapted to, prevailing pre-Christian cultures, as it did in the early Roman Empire. The Church itself has encouraged these adaptations, expressed clearly in the Vatican II Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes), and often referred to as inculturation—defined by Aylward Shorter as “the creative and dynamic relationship between the Christian message and a culture or cultures” (1988, 11; for an overview of the concept of inculturation, see LaCroix, S.J., 2001, 79–94). While these reflections pertain more directly to Western civilization, they recognize the universality of the Catholic imagination. There is nothing inherently Western about the sacramental imagination, although its expression may vary in different cultural circumstances. A Catholic culture, in this sense, remains a broad sensibility that may adapt itself to more specific historical and geographical circumstances. In other words, the media and forms of expression may vary widely, but the fundamental influence of a Catholic sensibility, drawn from the incarnational impulse of Catholic thought and teachings, remains constant. While the Catholic imagination has exerted itself in various ways throughout human history and defies narrow analysis, some common themes emerge in a historical review of Catholic culture. These themes reflect the sacramentalism of the Catholic perspective, born of immersion in the mystery of God’s creation and Incarnation. First and foremost, a Catholic cultural perspective reflects the basic sacramentality, described by Tracy and Greeley, that drives Christian cosmology. If, as the Catholic imagination presupposes, the things of the earth, humankind included, have been made good by God’s creative act and Incarnation; if, in Hopkins’s famous line, “the earth is charged with the grandeur of God,” then things are real and worthy of serious attention. This is true of the Catholic tradition of philosophical realism and of the works of Catholic artists. Physical nature and the products of human invention are all capable of revealing something of the divine nature. God sanctified the universe through the act of creation, and God dignified humanity through Christ’s own birth, death, and resurrection. Hence, the things of the earth might transmit God’s grace (as in the Catholic sacraments). Perhaps nowhere is this made clearer than in the works of the late American Catholic novelist and short-story writer J. F. Powers. In novels like Morte D’Urban and Wheat That Springeth Green, and collections of short stories like Look How the Fish Live, The Prince of Darkness, and The

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Presence of Grace, Powers used mundane things and commonplace human situations to reveal deeper truths. Powers, himself a retiring, almost reclusive personality, spent the majority of his life in his native Minnesota, much of it on the campus of St. John’s University in Collegeville. In his stories, the lives of American Midwesterners become fraught with God’s grace, and even the humdrum existence of a parish rectory teaches readers something about the human condition. Examples include the story of a bishop who spent much of his career preaching about the keystone, the part of an arch that historically held a whole edifice together. To the bishop, the keystone was an obvious symbol of faith; and the metaphor of the keystone became central to his preaching, until he discovered, while building a new cathedral, that modern architects no longer rely on keystones in constructing churches. In another story about rectory life, a pastor goes weeks without learning the name of his new associate, because he is too proud to ask his rival at the diocesan chancery or his housekeeper. The same pastor agonizes over the purchase of furniture for the new associate’s bedroom, particularly the choice between pineapple and cannonball finials on the bedposts. A second major characteristic of Catholic culture is its emphasis on community. In Five Great Catholic Ideas, Father Edward Clark notes that Among the oldest and most consistent teachings of the Fathers of the Church is the notion that we are saved not alone, but as members of a community. By faith and through baptism God calls us into the community of the Church, and it is here, within the fellowship of the saved, that we find our salvation. (1998, 16)

Catholics are baptized into a new personal life but also into the community of the Church and, as such, are obligated to participate in the mission of the Church. The communal aspect of baptism, combined with the prevalent notion of the sanctity of human society and “concretized love,” has led Catholics to prize the values of neighborhood, parish, and Church community. The history of national churches, particularly in predominantly non-Catholic countries like England or immigrant countries like the United States, underscores the Catholic focus on neighborhood and religious community. The nature of American Catholic communities, with their often distinctive social habits and attitudes, is detailed in the scholarship of Robert Orsi, the films of Martin Scorcese, and the novels of James Farrell, among many others. The concepts of tradition and authority also form important touchstones in the cultural expressions of the Catholic imagination. Catholic belief in the objective reality of God and the authentic relationship between the spiritual and material realms, attests to the existence of things higher and

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greater than humankind. If God is revealed through creation and through the unfolding of human history, then the things of this world carry an inherent dignity and majesty and must be respected for what they are and what they have been and not just, in utilitarian fashion, for what they might become. In Catholic teaching, God’s revelation is preserved and transmitted through the Church. Hence, the Church has an important role in teaching and defining Catholic orthodoxy, and in transmitting God’s grace through the sacraments. Non-Catholics, and especially the secular critics of the modern era, have delighted in portraying this respect for tradition and authority as stultifying and destructive of genuine creativity. On the contrary, respect for tradition has inspired some of the most brilliant expressions of human cultural creativity. While some modernist artists struggle to find any meaning in the human condition and in their art, many Catholic-inspired artists link to generations of cultural efforts to express the mystery of creation. St. Augustine, for example, argued that an authentic authority was necessary as a touchstone for critical realism in human thought and culture (Wilken 2003, 170–74). Catholic artists carry on an ongoing conversation with their peers, past and present, as they respond to the sacramental principle in their works. As for authority, some have argued that the most creative epochs in human history have been those guided by a common cultural or spiritual vision. Others have countered that the collapse of overarching worldviews has often inspired more creative cultural approaches. Historically, Church authority, properly understood as a pale reflection of the divine power in certain areas and as a frail attempt at human government in other areas, has patronized, as well as censored, Catholic artists. As Joseph Cirincione analyzes earlier in this work, John Dryden and John Henry Newman represent only two of the many sensitive intellects who have been drawn to Catholicism partly due to its claims of apostolic succession and legitimacy. When the Church is perceived as having overstepped its authority, Catholic artists have been the first to criticize and cajole. In that sense, authority has provided a foil for cultural creativity. As a matter of fact, the historical voices of dissent and innovation—from Aquinas to John Courtney Murray—have often later become norms for Catholic thought and culture. In one form or another, tradition and authority have historically inspired and encouraged, either directly or through the opposition of heroic voices, expressions of the sacramental imagination. Another characteristic of Catholic culture historically has been its counter-culturalism, or willingness to confront the prevailing cultural environment. From the pagan culture of ancient Rome to today’s secular postmodernism, when the dominant non-Catholic or extra-Catholic culture has denied the possibility of the sacred (or defined the sacred in terms of its absolute immanence) and looked to purely material things for

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personal and social fulfillment; or when, conversely, the opposing culture denies the goodness of creation in a retreat into some Gnostic or New Age ideal, Catholic thinkers and artists have maintained the convergence of the spiritual and the material. As we have seen, Catholic culture defines a relationship between the sacred and the profane that dignifies created and objective reality, even while focusing on a more complete personal and communal salvation in Augustine’s Heavenly City. The opposition of these views offers the possibility for cultural tension, as Catholic apologists and artists struggle to refute or reject, respond or adapt to the prevailing non-Catholic culture. Indeed, the tension between secular culture and Catholic values has inspired some of the richest expressions of the Catholic imagination. Finally, the various products of the Catholic imagination reflect a strong appreciation of the drama of human life, and especially the occasion of sin, the means of grace, and the possibility of redemption. The Incarnation invites us to consider the details of Jesus’ human birth; but, since Jesus suffered, died, and was buried as well, Christians throughout history have dwelt, sometimes obsessively, on the reality of sin and suffering. The world is a “vale of tears” and temptation lurks everywhere, God’s benevolent will is manifested in often mysterious ways, the minions of Satan are alive and well, the gift of free will means humans often choose to reject the good, and we have much to feel guilty about. However, the world is also “charged with the grandeur of God,” possibilities of grace abound, often in the most unexpected quarters, and Christ’s death is superceded by his resurrection. St. Augustine, in response to charges that the otherworldly attitude of Christians contributed to the fall of Rome, developed a philosophy of history in The City of God that declared the impermanence and imperfection of the Earthly City. At the same time, Augustine warned against indifference to earthly matters. As for the city of this world, it is neither to last forever nor even to be a city, once the final doom of pain is upon it. Nevertheless, while history lasts, it has a finality of its own; it reaches such happiness by sharing a common good as is possible when there are no goods but the things of time to afford it happiness. . . . it is wrong to deny that the aims of human civilization are good, for this is the highest end that mankind of itself can achieve. For, however lowly the goods of the earth, the aim, such as it is, is peace. (1958, 327)

Because the things of the earth are good, and because human beings are saved through Christ’s resurrection, humankind enjoys the possibility of intrinsic justification; and humans may be sanctified through the drama of every human life, which is filled with examples of divine grace. Good will prevail over evil, however tenuously at times, and sin will succumb to grace and redemption. These themes are repeated over and

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over in Catholic culture, especially in the great works of Catholic literature where often unlikely characters and situations carry God’s grace to a forbidding world. Graham Greene’s whiskey priest in The Power and the Glory, Georges Bernanos’ simple country cure in The Diary of a Country Priest, and the fugitive socialist priest-impostor in Ignacio Silone’s Bread and Wine all transcend the limitations of their own weaknesses and sins to discover something of God’s grace; and they transmit it, sometimes unwittingly, to people in dire need of redemption. The Catholic cultural perspective opens itself to the drama of every human life and every human community and to the inherent possibility for human goodness and divine grace in an otherwise imperfect and sinful world.

CONCLUSION There are, of course, many other themes reflected in the great works of Catholic thought and culture. Some of them are explored by the other essayists in this volume. What unites them all is a positive recognition of a unique Catholic cultural perspective, an outgrowth of Catholic teaching about the goodness of God’s creation and the possibilities for human redemption through the sacrifice of Christ. The world, as Ken Follett and countless others have admitted, is a different place because of the influence of Catholic culture. For better or worse, the institutional Church and the popular imagination of creative Catholics have shaped the very nature and direction of Western thought and culture.

REFERENCES Athanasius, Saint. 1946. The Incarnation of the Word of God, being the treatise of St. Athanasius, De Incarnatione Verbi Dei. Newly translated into English by a religious of C.S.M.V., S. Th., with an introduction by C. S. Lewis. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company. Augustine of Hippo, Saint. 1958. The City of God: Abridged for Modern Readers. New York: Doubleday. Clark, Edward William. 1998. Five Great Catholic Ideas. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company. Cole, Thomas. 1973. “Cultural Development in Antiquity.” Dictionary of the History of Ideas, Volume I. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Dawson, Christopher. 1948. Religion and Culture. London: Sheed and Ward. Follett, Ken. 1999. The Pillars of the Earth. New York: Penguin Books. Greeley, Andrew. 2000. The Catholic Imagination. Los Angeles: University of California Press.

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Hill, Christopher. 1982. The Century of Revolution, 1603–1714. New York: W.W. Norton and Co. Himes, Michael J., and Himes, Kenneth R., O.F.M. 1993. Fullness of Faith: The Public Significance of Theology. New York: Paulist Press. Kaye, Harvey. 1984. The British Marxist Historians: An Introductory Analysis. New York: Polity Press. LaCroix, Wilfred F., S.J. 2001. “Inculturation, Signs of the Times and the Rapidly Changing Culture.” In Catholicism at the Millennium: The Church of Tradition in Transition, edited by Gerald L. Miller and Wilburn T. Stancil, 79–94. Kansas City, Missouri: Rockhurst University Press. Neill, Thomas Patrick. 1952. Religion and Culture. Milwaukee: The Bruce Publishing Company. Sayers, Dorothy. 1978. The Whimsical Christian. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company. Shorter, Aylward. 1988. Toward a Theology of Inculturation. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books. Wilken, Robert Louis. 2003. The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Index

Anglican (Church, Protestantism, service), xviii, 64, 109–22. See also Church of England (established) animalism, xix, 146, 151–53 Aquinas. See St. Thomas Aquinas Aristotle, 128, 136, 145 Arius(-ian[s] heresy), 116–17, 120 atom(-s, -ic, -ism, -ist[s]), 149–50 Atonement, 165 Augustine. See St. Augustine authority. See Church authority

xvii, 93–104; Journal d’un curé de campagne (Diary of a Country Priest), 95–96, 172 Big Bang (Theory), 150–51 body of Christ, 6–7, 19, 27–28. See also Eucharist; Mystical Body of Christ Bolshevik (materialism, -ism), 86–87 boundaries (orthodox), xvi, 77, 81, 83

Bachelard, Gaston, 65–66 baptism(-ized, -izable), xiv, 3–12, 20– 21, 51, 60, 93, 114, 125–26, 165, 169. See also initiation baptismal rites of Christian initiation, 3. See also initiation (of Adult Converts) Beatitude(-ification), 79, 99 Beckett, Samuel, xvii, 100; En Attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot), xvii, 100 Bellarmine, Cardinal, 114, 137 Belloc, Hilaire, 143 Bernanos, Georges, xiii, xvi–xvii, 93– 104, 172; Dialogues of the Carmelites,

capitalism(-ist). See modern capitalism The Carmelites of Compiègne, 93–104 Catechesis(-etical, -ist[s]), 4–7, 11–12, 23, 29 catechumens(-umenate), 5–7, 10–11 Catholic apologetics (apologists), 5, 138, 171 Catholic (Christian) writer(-s, -ing), 94, 103–4 Catholic fiction writer, 56. See also Catholic (Christian) writer; fiction (writer) Catholic initiation, xiv, 3, 6, 10–11, 17. See also initiation Catholic (moral) doctrine (teaching, positions), xiii, 25–27, 39, 125–39, 166, 168, 170, 172. See also Church

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authority; religious authority; papal authority; Vatican authority Catholic orthodoxy. See orthodoxy Catholic poet(-s, -ry, -ems), xvi, 59–60, 64–65, 71 Catholic (sacramental) imagination. See imagination Catholic social teaching, xv, 34, 46, 166. See also social justice; social teaching Cesbron, Gilbert, xvii, 101–4; Les Saints vont en Enfer (The Saints go into Hell) xvii, 101 ceteris paribus. See supply and demand Chesterton, G. K., xiii, xvi–xvii, 54, 75–92, 143, 148–49, 151, 153; The Everlasting Man, 81; Heretics, 54; Orthodoxy, 77, 81, 90, 151; The Thing: Why I am Catholic, 81–82; The Well and the Shallows, 88; What’s Wrong with the World, 81, 83–84 Christian initiation (of adults), 3, 7, 10, 12. See also initiation Christian poet(-s, -ry, -ems), xvi, 59–60 Christmas (Eve), 54, 60, 63–64, 164–65 Church authority, xiv, xvii–xviii, 109–22, 170; of the Church (of Rome, of the Roman Church), xvii, 21, 103, 114–16, 118–21, 169–70; curial statements (positions), 127, 133, 136; infallible(-ility), 113–14, 116–17, 119–22; infallible (Church) authority, 121; Magisterium, 25, 126, 132; official (papal/curial) statements (teachings, positions), 127, 129, 135–37; Roman Catholic hierarchy (hierarchical positions), 133; of tradition, 118; of an unerring guide, 118. See also Catholic (moral) doctrine (teaching, positions); guide: unerring guide (authority); papal authority; religious authority; tradition; Vatican authority Church of England (established), 110–11, 118 Communion. See Eucharist

Communion of Saints, 97, 102 communism, 86 community, xix, 4, 6, 11, 15, 19, 26–27, 55, 87, 95, 99, 101–2, 116, 118–19, 122, 163, 166, 169. See also ecclesial confession(-al). See sacrament: of penance confirmation, 3, 7, 60 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, 8–9, 128 Conrad, Joseph, 52; The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” 52 Council of Chalcedon, 120, 164 Council of Trent, 51, 113 counter-cultural(ism), xiv, xix, 170 Craig, David, xvi, 60; Place of Passage: Contemporary Catholic Poetry, xvi, 60; Psalm #1, 60 Curia (papal), xviii. See also Church authority; papal authority; religious authority; Vatican authority Dawson, Christopher, xix, 143, 163 de Chardin, Pierre Tielhard, 57 Decree on Ecumenism (Unitatis redintegratio). See Vatican II Documents; ecumenism Dickinson, Emily, 55, 59, 62; Wild Nights—Wild Nights!, 62 Dignity of Persons ethical axiom. See ethical theories: human (personal) dignity dissenting Protestant (sects), 109–22 Dogmatic Constitution of the Church (Lumen Gentium). See Vatican II Documents dogmatist(-s, -ic, -ism), 75–76, 91 Dominus Iesus, 7–8 Donne, John, 59, 61–62; Holy Sonnets VII, X, & XIV, 62 Dryden, John, xvii–xviii, 109–22, 170; Absalom and Achitophel, 112; The Hind and the Panther, xviii, 109–10, 112–13, 116; Religio Laici, 109–10, 112–13, 116–17

Index Dulles, S. J., Avery, 19; “Introduction,” Lumen Gentium, 19; Models of the Church, 19; The Resilient Church: The Necessity and Limits of Adaptation, 19. See also Dogmatic Constitution of the Church; Vatican II Documents Earthly City, 162, 167, 171 Easter (Vigil, Octave of), 3, 11, 21, 60, 63, 101–2, 129 ecclesial(-astic, ekklesia), 8–9, 11, 15–16, 18, 20, 29 economic gap (between the rich and poor), 33, 37–38 ecumenism(-ical), xv, 8–9, 18, 129 Eliot, T. S., 53, 59, 61, 63, 66; Four Quartets, 63, 66; Tradition and the Individual Talent, 53; The Waste Land, 61, 66 ethical theories, 129; first level of ethical standard(-s), 130; human (personal) dignity, 42, 46, 129, 134–35; natural law, 44, 125, 129, 134–36; second level of ethical standard(-s), 130–31, 133; virtue ethics, 136 ethics (ethicist[s]), xviii, 125–39 Eucharist(-ic), xv, 6, 11, 19–20, 24, 27– 28, 51, 101; Communion, 7, 26, 28, 60; sacramental communion, 8–9 evangelize(-ing, -ical, -ism, ist[s], ization) xiv, 4–6, 8, 10, 12, 18–19, 23, 56, 114 Fair Labor Standards Act, 34, 39 fair wage. See wages family (life), xvi, 84–86 family wage. See wages FDR. See Roosevelt, Franklin D. fiction (writer[s], writing), xiii, xvi, 51–57, 76 first communion, 3. See also Eucharist Follett, Ken, 161–62, 165, 172; Eye of the Needle, 161; Pillars of the Earth, 161–62, 165

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Fr. Simon, 113–14; Critical History of the Old Testament, 113 free will, 77, 81, 83, 91–92, 157n2, 164, 171 Galileo, 136–37, 148, 156n2 gap (income and wealth between rich and poor). See economic gap (between the rich and poor) Gardner, John, 52; The Art of Fiction, 52 Gide, Andre, xvii, 100; La Symphonie Pastorale (The Pastoral Symphony), xvii, 100 Gilson, Etienne, 143, 146 Gioia, Dana, 59, 61; The Country Wife, 61; The Room Upstairs, 61 gnostic, 23, 149, 171 grace(-d), xvi–xvii, xix, 8, 16, 29, 51–52, 55, 57, 95, 97–99, 102–4, 119, 156, 167–72 Greeley, (Fr. ) Andrew, xvii, 95, 98–101, 164–68; The Catholic Imagination, xvii, 95, 166–67; The Catholic Myth, 166; How to Save the Catholic Church, 166 Green, Julien, 96 Greene, Graham, 167, 172; The Power and the Glory, 172 Greenspan, Alan, 33, 38 guide(-ance), 116–19, 121; living guide, 116–17, 121; unerring guide (authority), 117–19; unfailing guide, 119 Guth, Alan, 151 Harth, Phillip, 113; The Contexts of Dryden’s Thought, 113 Hawking, Stephen, 150 Heaney, Seamus, 59, 63 Heavenly City, 171 Herbert, George, 59, 61–62; The British Church, 62; Church Music, 62; Lent, 62; Sunday, 62 heresy(-etical, -ies, -itic[s]), 9, 62, 87, 116–17, 121

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heresy (of Bolshevism). See Bolshevik (materialism) hierarchical authority (statements), 126, 137. See also Church authority; papal authority; religious authority; Vatican authority hierarchy(-ical), 95, 99, 132–33. See also hierarchical authority (statements) Holy Orders, 60 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, S. J., xiii–xiv, 59, 61, 167–68; God’s Grandeur, 61; Pied Beauty, 61 human nature, xiv, 65, 86, 145–46, 151 humble(-d, -ility, -iliation), 52, 76, 79–81, 90, 98, 133 Huxley, Aldous, 55; The Devils of Loudun, 55 imagination(-s), xiii–xvii, xx, 75–92, 95–96, 148, 166–67, 172; Catholic (analogical) imagination, xvi–xvii, xix, 75–92, 95, 164, 166–69, 171; sacramental imagination, xix, 166–68, 170 immanence, 165, 170 incarnate(-d, -tion, -tional), xvi, xix, 54, 60, 65, 125, 163–66, 168, 171 income gap. See economic gap inculturation, 168 individual conscience (reason). See private conscience (judgment, and reason) Infallibility. See Church authority: infallibility initiation (of Adult Converts), xiii–xv, 3–12, 16; Catholic initiation (of adults), xiv, 3–12, 17; Christian initiation (of adults), xiv, 3–12, 17, 21, 51; Reception of Baptized Christians into the Full Communion of the Catholic Church, xiv, 8; Reception of Baptized Christians into Full Communion with the Catholic Church, 8, 12; Rite of Acceptance (into the Order of Catechumens), 5–6, 11; rites of

(Catholic) initiation, 3–12, 17; rite(s) of Christian initiation (of adults), 3–12, 51; Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults [RCIA]), 5, 10, 17, 21; Rite of Election, 6; Rite of Reception (into the Full Communion of the Catholic Church), 3, 9, 11 inner light (of the Spirit), 112, 114–15. See also private conscience (judgment, reason) Joan of Arc, 65, 98, 101 John of the Cross. See St. John of the Cross joy(-ful, -fully, -less, -lessness), xvi, 6, 60, 76–80, 97–98 just society, xvi, 76, 83–84 just wage. See wages knowledge, reality, human nature, morality (the right and the good), 145–46. See also animalism; naturalism; relativism (epistemological, moral); skepticism Lavery, Emmet, 96 Leibrecht, D. D., John J., 19–20 levels of ethical standards. See ethical theories Levertov, Denise, 59, 61; The Acolyte, 61; The Tide, 61 Lewis, C. S., 78, 81 Lisieux, Thérèse of. See St. Thérèse of Lisieux liturgy(-ical, -ically, -ies, -ist[s]), xv, 3– 7, 9–13, 16, 18, 20, 22, 25–28, 60, 65 living wage. See wage(s) Lucretius, 149–50; On the Nature of Things (De Rerum Natura), 149 Luther, Martin, 165 Magisterium of the Church. See Church authority: Magisterium Maritain, Jacques, 96, 131–32, 143 marriage, (Sacrament of), 5, 6, 9, 15, 60, 132

Index Marxism(-ist, -ian heresy ), 87, 162. See also communism; Bolshevik (materialism) McCann, Janet, xvi, 60; Place of Passage: Contemporary Catholic Poetry, xvi, 60 Menninger, Karl, 152 Merton, Thomas, 55, 59; The Waters of Siloe, 55 Midgley, Mary, 154; Trying Out One’s New Sword, 154 Milton, John, 63 minimum wage. See wage(s) modern capitalism, xvi, 76, 82–87, 130, 135 modernism(-ist[s], -ity), xiv, xviii–xix, 76, 122, 127, 143–56, 170. See also postmodern modern materialism(-istic philosophies), 76, 85–86, 91 Monophysite(-s), 120–21 monopolist materialism, 86–87 moral doctrine. See Catholic (moral) doctrine (teaching, positions); Church authority: official (papal/curial) statements (teachings, positions) moral theology(-ian[s]), xviii, 25, 125–39; de Liguori, Alphonsus, 126; Lehmkuhl, Augustine, 126 morality (right and good), 24–26, 28, 76, 85, 87, 131, 137, 145–46, 153, 157n2 More, Thomas, 110 Mother Love of God, 95, 97, 99, 104 Murray, John Courtney, S. J., 134, 170 mystery(-ies, -ious, -ical), 11, 14, 24, 51–52, 54, 57, 63, 65, 71, 80, 93, 95, 99, 104, 165, 167–68, 170–71 Mystical Body of Christ, 19, 28. See also body of Christ; Eucharist natural law. See ethical theories: natural law naturalism(-ist[s], -istic), xix, 146, 149–53, 156–57n2

179

NCCB (National Conference of Catholic Bishops). See United States (National) Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) Neuhaus, John, xvii–xviii, 110, 121–22 Newman, John Henry, xvii–xviii, 20, 23, 110, 120–22, 131–32, 143, 170; On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine, 131; Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, 131; The Idea of the University, 20 Nicene Council, 117 Nicene Creed, 119 Noonan, John, 126, 129–32, 139; A Church that Can and Cannot Change, 139 not-written doctrine (tradition), 114, 118. See also tradition O’Connor, Flannery, 52, 56; Catholic Novelists and Their Readers, 56; Mystery and Manners, 52 official teachings of the Catholic Church. See Church authority; papal authority; religious authority; Vatican authority one, holy, catholic, and apostolic, 17, 119 original sin, xvi, 79, 136 orthodox (Catholic, Church, -y), xvi, 9, 23–24, 55, 62, 75–78, 121, 170 Ovid, 72; Elegy XIII, He Entreats the Dawn to Hasten Not Her Coming, 72 pagan(-s, -ism, neo-), 78–79, 157n2, 170 papal authority (pronouncement[s], statement[s], position[s]), xviii, 126–27, 133, 135–36; papal infallibility, xviii, 120–22; papal Magisterium, 132; papal supremacy, 111 papal (Vatican, Roman) Curia, xviii, 127, 132; See also Church authority; religious authority; Vatican authority parables, 56–57

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Index

paradigm, 143–56, 156n1. See also worldview paradox(-ical, -ically), 63, 76–79, 83, 92 parish(-es, -ioner[s]), xiii–xv, 4–5, 9, 11, 13–29, 64, 95, 101, 169 parochial(-ism), 13–29, 61, 65 (to) pastor(-s, -al), xiv–xv, 13–29, 64, 100–101, 169 penance(-itential, penetentia). See sacrament: of penance Pio, Padre, 55 Plato, 139; Euthyphro, 139 pope and councils (together), xviii, 119–22 popes: Pope Gregory XVI, 134; Pope John XXIII, 35, 129–30; Pacem in Terris (Peace on Earth), 35; Pope John Paul II (Karol Wojtyla), xii, 21, 35, 59–60, 135–37, 143; Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason), xii; The Humanizing Value of Natural Moral Law, 135; Laborem Exercens (Human Work), 35; Pope Leo XII, 134; Pope Leo XIII, xv, 33–35, 44, 127; Rerum Novarum (Encyclical on Capital and Labor), xv, 33–34; Pope Paul VI, 131, 133, 137; Humanae Vitae, 131, 137; Pope Pius IX, xviii, 126; Apostolicae sedis, 126; Pope Pius XI, 34, 44, 131; Casti connubii, 131–32; Quadragesimo Anno (Fortieth Anniversary of Rerum Novarum), 34; Pope Pius XII, 132–33, 136; Humani Generis, 132, 136; Pope Sixtus V, 127 postmodern(-ism, -ist[s], ity),]), xii, xiv, xvii–xviii, 76, 143–57, 170 post-Vatican II, xv, 22–23 Poulenc, Francis, 96–97, 99 Powers, J. F., 168–69; Look How the Fish Live, 168; Morte D’Urban, 168; The Prince of Darkness, 168; The Presence of Grace, 168–69; Wheat That Springeth Green, 168 precatechumenate(-s), 5–6, 11

pre-Vatican II, xv, 22 pride(-ful, proud), 80, 82, 87, 115, 162 private conscience (judgment, reason), 113–15, 117, 119–21 Prodigal Son, 57 Protestant(-s, -ism), xix, 15–16, 18, 20, 22, 25, 100, 109–22, 164–65. See Reformation Protestant principle. See private conscience (judgment, reason) Protestant Reformation. See Reformation Puritan(-s, -ism, -ical), 80, 87, 161 Rahner, Karl, S. J., 133 redemption, xix, 23, 53, 65, 97, 99, 167, 171–72 Redpath, Peter, 145, 147; Cartesian Nightmare, 145 Reformation, 51, 85, 129, 132 relativism (epistemological, moral), xix, 146–47, 153–55 religious authority, 113, 115–16, 121. See also Church authority; papal authority; Vatican authority religious poet(-s, -ry, -ems), 59, 61, 64–65, 71 resurrection, xiv, 10–11, 164, 168, 171 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 34–35 Ryan, Father John A., 34 sacrament(-s, -al, -alism, -ity), xiii–xvii, xix, 4, 14, 18–19, 24, 51–52, 57, 60, 62, 64–65, 93–104, 165–68, 170; of Baptism, 11; of the Eucharist, 28; of Penance, xv, 24, 26–28, 60, 80–81; of the Sick, 24, 60, 64. See also baptism; Eucharist sacred desire, 95, 99 sacred place, 95, 97, 98, 100 sacred time, 95, 97, 99–100 Sagan, Carl, 150; Cosmos, 150 Salvation. See redemption Salve Regina, 98–99 Sartre, Jean Paul, xvii, 100; Huis Clos (No Exit), xvii, 100

Index schism(-matic[s], -matical), 9, 121–22. See also heresy Scorcese, Martin, 167, 169 Second Vatican Council. See Vatican II Seven Sacraments, 18, 24, 60, 65. See also sacrament Silone, Ignacio, 172; Bread and Wine, 172 Simon, Father. See Fr. Simon sin of pride, 80–81 skeptic(-s, -al, -ism), xix, 143–56 social justice, xiii, xv, 19, 31, 34, 44, 46, 60, 103, 166 social teaching (Catholic). See Catholic social teaching socialist(-ism), 45, 84–87, 172 Socinus(-ians), 116–17 Socrates, 128, 139 Stations of the Cross, 24, 101 St. Ambrose, 130 St. Athanasius, 163–64; De Incarnatione Verbi Dei (The Incarnation of the Word of God), 163–64 St. Augustine, 51, 122, 125, 134, 149, 170–71; Against the Academic Skeptics (Contra Akademikos), 149; The City of God, 171 St. John of the Cross, 66, 99, 167 St. Paul, 19, 26, 51, 57, 68, 80, 134, 139 St. Teresa of Avila, 66, 99 St. Thérèse (of Lisieux, Little Flower), 54–55, 59, 61–62, 68–69, 95, 98, 101; Our Divine Lord to St. Gertrude, 62; Story of a Soul, 54 St. Thomas Aquinas (of Aquino), 56, 126, 134–36, 139, 156, 170; Commentary on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians, 139 stigmata(-atic[s]), 54–55 supply and demand, 32–33, 40 symbols(-olic), 6–7, 10–12, 27–28, 57, 60–61, 64 target wage. See wage Ten Commandments, 25, 91

181

Teresa of Avila. See St. Teresa of Avila Thomas Aquinas (of Aquino). See St. Thomas Aquinas (of Aquino) Tracy, David, 164, 166–68 tradition(-s, -al), xi, xix, 11, 16, 21, 26, 87, 113–18, 120, 132, 155–56, 164, 169–70 transcendence, 55, 62, 165 United States (National) Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), 26, 33, 39; Sunday Celebrations in the Absence of a Priest, 28; To Teach as Jesus Did, 26 Vatican authority(-ies, statements, positions), 132, 135, 137–38. See also Church authority; papal authority; religious authority Vatican II (Council, generation), xv, 8, 16–19, 22–23, 103, 134, 168 Vatican II Documents, 22; Apostolicam Actuositatem (Decree on Apostolate of the Laity), 22; Christus Dominus (Decree on the Bishops’ Pastoral Office in the Church), 22; Dei Verbum (Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation), 22; Dignitatis Humanae (Declaration on Religious Freedom), 22, 134; Gaudium et Spes (Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the World), 18, 131, 168; Inter Mirifica (Decree on the Instruments of Social Communication), 22; Lumen Gentium (Dogmatic Constitution on the Church), 19, 23; Presbyterorum Ordinis (Decree on the Ministry and Life of Priests), 22; Sacrosanctum Councilium (Constitution on Sacred Liturgy), 22; Unitatis redintegratio (Decree on Ecumenism), 8, 18 Veni Creator, 98–99 via media, 115, 120–21 virtue ethics. See ethical theories: virtue ethics

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Von Le Fort, Gertrude, 96; The Last One at the Scaffold, 96 wage(s), 31–46; Fair, 31–46; Family, 31–46; Just, 31–46; Living, xiii, xv–xvi, 31–46; Minimum, xv, 31–46; Target, xv, 44–46 Weigel, George, 22–23; The Catholic Difference, 22; The Courage to be Catholic: Crisis, Reform, and the Future of the Church, 22–23 welfare state, xvi, 76, 83–84 Western Creed, xiv, 146, 149, 155

Whitman, Walt, 59, 62, 65; A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim, 62; A Song for Occupations, 62 Wills, Gary, xi; Papal Sin, Structures of Deceit, xi Wordsworth, William, 59, 62, 65; While Not a Leaf Seems Faded, 62 working poor, 31, 33, 36–37, 39, 41–42, 45 worldview, 100, 143–56, 170. See also paradigm writing of fiction. See fiction

About the Contributors

John C. “Chuck” Chalberg teaches history at Normandale Community College in Bloomington, Minnesota. When not in the classroom, he performs a one-man show as G. K. Chesterton. Joseph A. Cirincione is a professor of English at Rockhurst University and director of the Ignatian Spirituality Center of Kansas City. With a Ph.D. in English from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and an M.B.A. from Rockhurst University, he teaches various literature and writing courses. Dr. Cirincione has presented and published a number of papers on literature and business writing. Curtis L. Hancock, professor of philosophy at Rockhurst University, holds the Joseph M. Freeman Chair of Philosophy. Former president of the American Maritain Association and current president of the Gilson Society for the Advancement of Christian Philosophy, he has authored or co-authored numerous books and articles. He recently authored Recovering a Catholic Philosophy of Elementary Education (Newman House Press). Ron Hansen, educated at Creighton University, the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop, Stanford University, and Santa Clara University, is the Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J., Professor in the Department of English at Santa Clara University. Mariette in Ecstasy, among his seven novels, won a number of awards, and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters recognized his novels and stories with an award in 1990. Professor Hansen has also received a number of honorary doctorates. 183

184

About the Contributors

Richard J. Janet, professor of history and director of the Thomas More Center for the Study of Catholic Thought and Culture at Rockhurst University, earned a Ph.D. in modern European history from the University of Notre Dame. He has published articles and reviews on Victorian English religious history and American Catholicism, and he is working on a book-length history of the Vincentians in the United States. Rev. Wilfred LaCroix, S.J., is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at Rockhurst University. Father LaCroix has published on social justice and international justice. His books include Ethical Principles for Business; War and International Ethics; and Patterns, Values, and Horizons: An Ethic. M. Kathleen Madigan, professor of modern languages at Rockhurst University, has a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a Master’s in Spanish Language and Culture from the University of Salamanca, Spain. She has received grants from various countries to do research in Hamburg and Martinique, as well as to teach at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and work with writers in Senegal. Rev. Michael V. McDevitt, ordained in 1971, currently serves as pastor of St. Agnes Roman Catholic Cathedral in Springfield, Missouri. He has earned a Master’s in the Phenomenology of Religion at Indiana University and a Master’s of Divinity at St. Meinrad School of Theology. Father McDevitt has also taught high school religion, directed various diocesan programs, and served as pastor of numerous parishes. Gerald L. Miller, professor of economics at Rockhurst University, holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in economics from the University of Notre Dame. At Rockhurst, he has been director of the Institute of Social Ethics, the John J. and Laura J. Sullivan Professor in Business Ethics, and the George and Gladys Miller Professor in Business Administration. He has held fellowships at Notre Dame, the University of Chicago, and Rockhurst. Patricia Cleary Miller, professor of English at Rockhurst University, has published non-fiction, as well as two books of poetry, including the award-winning Starting a Swan Dive. A former Bunting Fellow in poetry at Harvard/Radcliffe, she received the Harvard Alumni Association Award and the Hiram Hunn Award. Editor of the Rockhurst Review, Dr. Miller teaches, studies, and writes poetry that transcends the quotidian, that is, ecstatic poetry.

About the Contributors

185

Rev. Paul Turner, pastor of St. Munchin parish in Cameron, Missouri, and its mission, St. Aloysius Church in Maysville, holds a doctorate in sacred theology from Sant’ Anselmo in Rome. His books include The Hallelujah Highway: A History of the Catechumenate, The Catholic Wedding Answer Book, and When Other Christians Become Catholic. He writes “Bulletin Inserts” for Ministry and Liturgy and is a member of the North American Forum on the Catechumenate.