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When compromise trumps apostolic tradition

Tuesday, 07 September 2010 17:04

Pope Benedict XVI’s pastoral visit to Great Britain next month will unfold along a pilgrim’s path metaphorically strewn with landmines. Headline-grabbing new atheists like Richard Dawkins, along with their allies in the international plaintiff’s bar, may try to have the pontiff arrested as an enabler of child abuse. More subtly, but just as falsely, homosexual activists and their allies will portray John Henry Newman, whom the Pope will beatify, as the patron saint of gay liberation. No challenge facing Benedict in Britain, however, will be greater than the challenge of re-framing the Anglican-Catholic ecumenical dialogue, which is on the verge of de facto extinction.

The death of that once-promising dialogue would have been unimaginable 40 years ago. Then, in the aftermath of Vatican II, it seemed possible that Canterbury and Rome might be reconciled, with full ecclesiastical communion restored. That great hope began to run aground in the mid-1980s, when the Church of England faced the question of whether it could call women to holy orders (a practice already under way in other member communities of the worldwide Anglican Communion). As I discovered when researching the biography of Pope John Paul II, a theological Rubicon seems to have been crossed in a 1984-86 exchange of letters among Dr. Robert Runcie, the Anglican primate, Cardinal Johannes Willebrands, the president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, and the pope.

John Paul and Willebrands made quite clear to Runcie that the bright hope of ecclesial reconciliation would be severely damaged were the Church of England to engage in a practice that the Catholic Church (and the Orthodox churches) believed was unauthorized by apostolic tradition, and in fact contradicted that tradition. While admirably candid, Dr. Runcie’s attempt to explain why the Church of England believed it could proceed to the ordination of women demonstrated that Anglicanism and Catholicism were living in two distinct universes of discourse, one theological, the other sociological. For Runcie advanced no theological arguments as to why apostolic tradition could be understood to authorize the innovation he and many of his Anglican colleagues proposed; rather, he cited the expanding roles of women in society as the crucial issue. Sociological trends, Runcie’s letter implied, trumped apostolic tradition—which was not, of course, something the Catholic Church could accept.

The same issue recently re-emerged in the Church of England’s debate over the ordination of women as bishops. Dr. Rowan Williams, the current Anglican primate, and his colleague in York, Dr. John Sentamu, proposed a compromise in which the Church of England would ordain women to its episcopate, but parishes unable to accept this innovation would be allowed to invite a male bishop to preside over those rituals for which a bishop’s presence is required. This compromise was rejected by the General Synod of the Church of England, leading the London Telegraph to deplore editorially the loss of the Anglican “tradition of compromise that has preserved the Church for more than 400 years.”

The Telegraph’s sense of what has “preserved the Church for more than 400 years” is misplaced, I fear. Elements of sanctity, intelligence, and beauty have been nurtured in the Anglican Communion for more than four centuries by the work of the Holy Spirit, who distributes gifts freely, and not only within the confines of the Catholic Church. Thus there have been great Anglican theologians and noble Anglican martyrs in the Anglican Communion, which has also given the world a splendid patrimony of liturgical music and a powerful example of the majesty of the English language as a vehicle of worship. None of this has had much, if anything, to do with a “tradition of compromise.”

The sad truth of the matter is that the “tradition of compromise” is what is destroying the Anglican Communion. For that “tradition” has come to mean that the apostolic tradition of the Church—the essential constitution bequeathed to the Church by Christ, which can be discerned in the Scriptures and which was articulated in the creeds—has ceased to have any normative claim within Anglicanism.

Thus an ecclesiological rule-of-thumb: when anything goes, the first thing to go is apostolic tradition.

George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

What was achieved in Harris v. McRae

Columns - The Catholic Difference

Tuesday, 07 September 2010 17:04

On June 30, 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in Harris v. McRae and upheld the constitutionality of the Hyde Amendment, which had prohibited federal funding for Medicaid abortions since 1976. Three decades later, Harris v. McRae remains the pro-life movement’s most important legal victory since Roe v. Wade created a “right to abortion” in 1973. That victory is now jeopardized by Obamacare, and by the insouciance of some Catholics about the extension of the Hyde Amendment to future federal health-care legislation.

On this 30th anniversary, therefore, it’s important to remember just what was achieved in Harris v. McRae.

First, writing for the Court majority, Justice Potter Stewart made clear that, whatever putative “right to abortion” may be found within the interstices of the Constitution, such a “right” does not imply that the federal government can compel American taxpayers to pay for the deaths of innocents. As Justice Stewart put it, “Regardless of whether the freedom of a woman to choose to terminate her pregnancy for health reasons lies at the core or the periphery of the due process liberty recognized in [Roe v. Wade], it simply does not follow that a woman’s freedom of choice carries with it a constitutional entitlement to the financial resources to avail herself of the full range of protected choices.” In plain language: any putative “right to abortion” does not carry with it the power to make me pay for abortions.

Second, the majority in the Court’s 5-4 decision accepted the Solicitor General’s argument that the Hyde Amendment is, as my friend Edward Grant has written, “rationally related to the interest we all must have in preserving nascent human life and encouraging childbirth.” In other words: pregnancy is not a disease, the choice to terminate a pregnancy is fraught with public implications, and the state has an interest in supporting the begetting and safe delivery of its future citizens.

Third, the Court rejected the plaintiff’s claims that the Hyde Amendment’s prohibition on federal funding of abortion involved an imposition of Catholic doctrine in violation of the First Amendment’s ban on religious “establishment.” In plain language: the abortion debate is not “sectarian,” but engages fundamental issues of justice in which everyone has a stake.

The heroes of this victory should also be remembered at its 30th anniversary: Congressman Henry J. Hyde; Professor Victor Rosenblum of Northwestern University, Dennis Horan, Patrick Trueman, Thomas Marzen, and other members of the legal team at the Americans United for Life Legal Defense Fund; James Buckley and Jesse Helms, who, with Congressman Hyde, entered the case as intervening-defendants. Some of the young lawyers who worked with the defense team in Harris v. McRae have continued to make names for themselves as national pro-life leaders: Carl Anderson, now Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus; Robert Destro, now of the Catholic University of America’s law school; and Paige Comstock Cunningham, a longtime board member of Americans United for Life. All honor to them.

Their achievement, however, is not secure. The Hyde Amendment, although deemed constitutional, still had to be re-enacted in every Congress, every year following Harris v. McRae—a fact of legislative history that raises the most serious questions about the Obama administration’s claim that the Hyde Amendment is such “settled law” that it need not be replicated in the various legislative iterations of Obamacare. The administration’s “deal” with certain Democratic congressmen to include a Hyde Amendment-type ban on abortion funding through a presidential executive order is the thinnest of barriers—some would say, a non-existent barrier—against claims that abortion is a “necessary” form of health care that requires taxpayer funding. That some Catholic members of Congress and some Catholic health-care advocates have fallen for this sleight-of-hand reflects either grave misunderstanding of the law or bad faith.

The Hyde Amendment is a continual bone in the throat of abortion advocates, who once followed Henry Hyde to Mass in their efforts to “prove” that his amendment was the product of Catholic hocus-pocus. They won’t down tools in this fight. Neither should the defenders of Harris v. McRae.

(Full disclosure: George Weigel is a member of the board of directors of Americans United for Life.)

George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

Church and media, from within and without

Columns - The Catholic Difference

Tuesday, 07 September 2010 17:04

That Pope Benedict XVI is Catholicism’s most effective spokesman and navigator through the rocks and shoals of Scandal Time II was demonstrated yet again in May, during a flying papal press conference en route to Portugal. Discussing the enduring meaning of the “message of Fatima,” the pope said the following:

“As for the new things we can find in this message today, there is also the fact that attacks on the pope and the church come not only from without, but the sufferings of the church come precisely from within the church, from sin existing within the church. This, too, is something we have always known, but today we are seeing it in a really terrifying way: that the greatest persecution of the church comes not from her enemies without but arises from sin within the church, and thus the church has a deep need to relearn penance, to accept purification, to learn forgiveness on the one hand, but also the need for justice.”

Beautiful, profound, unexceptionable: yet this lesson in theology and piety was interpreted by virtually the entire press corps as a papal blessing on the way Scandal Time II had been covered since March—and an implicit criticism of those who had suggested that recent reporting and commentary on priestly sexual abuse and episcopal misgovernance had been, at times, shoddy and agenda-driven (the agenda being the disempowerment of both pope and church). There is nothing in the pope’s actual words, however, that supports that little bit of auto-absolution by the brethren of the fourth estate.

Thus “…attacks on the pope and the church come not only from without”: what can that mean other than that there have, in fact, been attacks from the church “from without”?

That “the greatest persecution of the church comes not from her enemies without but arises from sin within the church” is certainly true (and has been said repeatedly by both John Paul II and Benedict XVI). But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t persecutors “from without.” Measured against the Evil One and the damage he can cause, those outsiders may be pretty small beer; but they’re persecutors nonetheless.

The pope was entirely right to remind everyone of what he called, in his Good Friday meditations in 2005, the “filth” in the church: infidelity is the cause of Scandal Time II, as it was the cause of the Long Lent of 2002. Dealing with that infidelity, as the Holy Father continued, requires “conversion, prayer, penance and the theological virtues” [of faith, hope, and love]. Here are the essentials in the church’s response to evil, which “attacks from within and without.”

These are ancient truths. Recognizing their contemporary salience does not, however, require us to stand mute on the occasions when the press manifestly gets it wrong. Charity does require us to acknowledge that, in most cases — not all, but most — getting-it-wrong is the result of ignorance rather than malice. Still, one significant difference between 2002 and 2010 has been that the malice of some newspapers and magazines has been clear to anyone with a critical eye.

That unhappy fact underscores the necessity of reforming the Holy See’s communications operation, which has retreated from the advances made under John Paul II’s longtime spokesman, the Spanish layman Joaquin Navarro-Valls. As John Paul and Navarro-Valls demonstrated, the pope-press spokesman relationship works well when the spokesman is well-established in the confidence and confidences of the pontiff, and has ready access to the man he’s interpreting to the world. Building such a relationship with a spokesman may require a pope to alter his habitual patterns of work, but the effort seems worth it, judging by the results.

The ingrained media defensiveness of the Roman Curia must also change: the attitude, entrenched over centuries, that the best story is no story. No, the best story is a good story that presents facts accurately and does so in such a way that the essentials of the church’s evangelical message get communicated. That takes work, but again, the effort is worth it.

George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

Singing the ‘World Cup Soccer blues’

Columns - The Catholic Difference

Tuesday, 07 September 2010 17:04

Although I played a bit of the “beautiful game” in high school and college, and rooted for the Baltimore Bays when professional soccer was trying to get started in the U.S. with rosters composed of aging Europeans and not-quite-ready-for-prime-time players from Latin American and the Caribbean, I can’t say that I share the passionate interest of, oh, 80 percent of humanity in the current World Cup goings-on.

Perhaps it has something to do with some recent history.

I watched the 1994 World Cup final in Cracow’s un-air-conditioned Hotel Royal, recovering from a 104-degree fever caused by an attack of food poisoning that struck me on a bus trip to the shrine of the Black Madonna in Czestochowa—not the place to suffer a violent attack of gastric distress, I assure you. The TV in my hotel room was a 6-inch diameter black and white job, which reduced the Los Angeles Coliseum to the size of a large soup plate. Nor was my frame of mind improved by the game itself, a 0-0 (or “Nil-Nil,” in soccer-speak) tie between Brazil and Italy, ultimately won by the Brazilians who prevailed in penalty kicks, 3-2: a practice that struck me, then and now, as akin to settling the seventh game of the World Series by playing home run derby.

The 1998 World Cup was held in France and saw the host country record its first Cup win. That made President Jacques Chirac happy, and as a general proposition, whatever made Jacques happy made George unhappy.

On the first day of World Cup 2002, I happened to be in Lisbon, preparing to address a lunch meeting of what was described to me as “75 percent of the Portuguese GNP.” The United States played Portugal that morning and the Portuguese capital adjourned all business in order to watch the match, which it was assumed Portugal would win handily. Somehow, though, the U.S. prevailed, 3-2, which did not put my lunch audience in the most receptive of moods. I fear I did not improve the situation by apologizing for the game’s outcome, on the grounds that “You obviously care about this a lot more than we do…”

Then there was World Cup 2006, the final game of which is remembered primarily for the French star, Zinedine Zidane, getting himself ejected in overtime for head-butting an Italian adversary. Again, neither of the finalists managed to score a goal, so once again, the soccer equivalent of home run derby settled things in favor of the Italians.

I’ll be teaching in Cracow when the World Cup is in its win-or-go-home elimination round this year, and my students from central and eastern Europe will be intensely following every game—even the Nil-Nil games which, I will be told, are exercises in beauty that one must learn to appreciate. I’m sorry but I’ve tried, and it doesn’t work.

I am perfectly prepared to argue that people who complain that “nothing happens in baseball” simply don’t know what they’re watching, for something is happening in baseball, the most situational of our sports, every second. But I’m not prepared to concede that I’m “missing something” in a sport in which there are more histrionics than in small-town Italian opera, scoring is about as frequent as Commonweal editorials praising the Roman Curia, and the premier global event is settled by home-run derby (or, if you prefer, a field-goal kicking contest).

As for the beautiful game’s athleticism, I readily concede that these guys are in fantastic shape and do some amazing things. But will a month of World Cup highlights produce any more incidents of beautiful athleticism than two weeks of “Web Gems” on ESPN’s “SportsCenter” during the baseball season? I very much doubt it.

Out of solidarity with my students, I’ll watch the World Cup final, praying that it isn’t settled by a penalty-kick shootout. And I’ll be grateful that, for a few weeks, the usually-empty phrase “international community” actually means something. But I wish it would happen through a sport that acknowledges a simple, biblical truth: God gave us opposable thumbs for a reason.

George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

Deep Catholicism, the alternative to Catholic Lite

Columns - The Catholic Difference

Tuesday, 07 September 2010 17:04

Eight years ago, during the Long Lent of 2002, I started using the phrase “Catholic Lite” to denote a cast of mind that, in my judgment, had contributed mightily to the crisis of fidelity that was at the root of clerical sexual abuse and episcopal misgovernance. Within that mindset, one of the fundamental questions shaping ecclesial life had become, “How little can I believe and do while still remaining a Catholic?” Then as now, the question struck me as not only mistaken, but ultimately boring. But it didn’t come from nowhere, and understanding its origins was, and is, important.

In the late 1960s, the emergence of Catholic Lite was a reaction to some of the weaknesses of pre-Vatican II catechesis, and especially the kind of teaching that failed to distinguish between those parts of the Baltimore Catechism that stood at the core of Christian conviction and those that were on the periphery. This dumbing-down tendency in catechetics received intellectual reinforcement from efforts by scholars like Karl Rahner, an influential figure at the Council, to create what the German theologian called “brief creedal statements” (three examples of which may be found at the end of Rahner’s Foundations of Christian Faith). Rahner likely meant to provide short, compelling summaries of the Creed from which the serious work of explaining Christianity to unbelievers could begin; what too many learned from efforts like his was Catholic Lite.

Catholic Lite was also informed by interpretations of the Council which held that Vatican II marked a decisive break-point with the past, and that the boundaries of faith and morals were now sufficiently elastic as to accommodate virtually any construal of what it meant to believe, pray and live as a Catholic. This notion of a “council of rupture” was rejected by the 1985 Extraordinary Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, which counterposed a “council of continuity and reform.” But traces of the mentality of rupture remained.

Catholic Lite also had a certain pastoral appeal. During the Long Lent of 2002, and again during 2010’s Scandal Time II, I’ve been approached by concerned Catholics who begin a conversation by saying, “I’m a bad Catholic, but….” To which I invariably, and truthfully, reply, “We’re all bad Catholics .” — before going on to make the point that holding the bar of expectation high, even knowing that we’ll fail, is the path to genuine spiritual and moral growth. Yet it’s also understandable that, in a society dominated by the culture of the therapeutic, some pastors would imagine it more, well, pastoral to prescribe Catholic Lite rather than challenging parishioners to live Catholicism-in-full: understandable, but short-sighted and, in the final analysis, a disservice to Christians baptized for spiritual and moral grandeur.

What’s the alternative to Catholic Lite? I found one answer in a new book by Father Aidan Nichols, O.P., one of the intellectual adornments of Anglophone Catholicism, who teaches at Cambridge University in England. In Criticizing the Critics: Catholic Apologias for Today (Family Publications), Father Nichols responds to the challenges posed (according to the book’s table of contents) by “modernists, neo-gnostics, academic biblical exegetes, feminists, liberal Protestants, progressive Catholics, the erotically absorbed, and critics of Christendom” in a series of trenchant essays. Toward the end, he gives us a luminous description of the Catholicism-in-full that we need. That kind of Catholicism is not sectarian, nor does it attempt to re-create the Catholic 1950s, “which … showed its Achilles’ heel by the manner in which its adherents subsequently fell way.” Rather, what we should seek is:

“…a deep Catholicism [that] is not simply sure of its dogmatic basis and at home in its corporate memory, though these are essential. It is also profoundly rooted in the Scriptures, the Fathers, the great doctors and spiritual teachers, and receptive to whatever is lovely in the human world of any and every time and place, which the Word draws to himself by assuming human nature into union with his own divine person.”

George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.