Category Archives: Dialogue

Motives of Credibility

Church, Defending the Faith, Dialogue, Ecumenism, Evangelization, Faith and Reason, Islam, Theology, , , ,

If it is possible to describe a book that has survived for nearly eight centuries as a “hidden gem” then St. Thomas’ other Summa, the Summa Contra Gentiles, qualifies.  As the name suggests, St. Thomas wrote it as a response to the re-emergence of non-Christian philosophy and the rise of Islam.  It is by far his greatest work of apologetics for the Christian faith and in that regard,  it remains a preeminent work and an untapped resource for the Church.  In the first book, he sets out to show both the existence and nature of the Christian God.  In his usual thorough-going manner, he begins by showing how reasonable belief in the Christian God actually is.

Catholics, even down to our own day, are often accused of fideism.  Fideism is the view that religious beliefs are settled only by faith and unsupported by reason.  To be clear, faith deals with claims that transcend human reason.  But they must still be grasped by human reason without doing violence to the human mind and way of thinking.  They cannot be “proven” in the scientific sense, but this does not mean there are no objective reasons why we should believe them to be true.  In an important early question, St. Thomas declares “that to give assent to the truths of Faith is not foolishness even though they are above reason”.

Objective vs Subjective Reasons

St. Thomas uncovers the objective motivations for belief, that is, why someone should believe, and not so much why an individual does believe.  This distinction is rather important because Christianity is often attacked on the basis of subjective motivations for belief.  Whether it is Freud’s father longing or Marx’s opium of the masses, St. Thomas has little interest in uncovering why someone believes (as an aside, you will be hard pressed to find another author, who is as prolific as St. Thomas, that uses personal pronouns less).  Instead he gives four motives for belief in the truth of Christianity.

First, he speaks of the witness of miracles.  Whenever God has spoken those truths that “exceed natural knowledge, He gives visible manifestation to works that surpass the ability of all nature.”  St. Thomas is simply repeating the Johannine principle that miracles should be seen as signs.  Our Lord and the Apostles would preach a message, and to confirm that message came from God, they manifested a physical sign in the form of some miracle.  Public miracles were a regular occurrence in the Early Church because of the need for their strong testimonial power.  In our age, St. Thomas says, miracles are not as necessary and so therefore are not as commonplace.  Nevertheless, “God does not cease to work miracles through His saints for the confirmation of the faith.”  Think of when the Church was an infant in the New World, and how the miracle of Our Lady of Guadalupe resulted in the conversion of 10 million people in less than a decade.  Or think of the Miracle of the Sun and the promise of protection to Portugal.  Or even the Shroud of Turin, the Eucharistic Miracles or the incorruptibility of some of the saints.  All of these defy scientific explanation (and not from a lack of trying) and yet serve as great signs of the truth of the Catholic faith. 

The second motive of credibility as the Catechism calls them (CCC 156) is the mass conversion to Christianity.  In order to be intellectually honest, you must wrestle with the question of how, despite unbelievably humble beginnings, Christianity spread to such epic proportions.  To chalk it up to good fortune is not only too hasty of a dismissal, but also unhistorical for four reasons.  First, it grew “in the midst of the tyranny of persecutions.”  Christianity was illegal for most of its first two and a half centuries.  Why would anyone sign up for it, unless it were true?  Better yet, why would everyone sign up for it?  Conversions came not just from Jews or slaves, but even from the upper classes—“both the simple and most learned, flocked to the Christian faith” St. Thomas says. 

Human nature being what it is, there is a tendency to spurn truths that surpass the human intellect.  That St. Thomas makes a defense of revelation shows just how true this is.  Men are very quick to dismiss those things that they cannot grasp.  Not only that, but Christianity teaches that “the pleasures of the flesh should be curbed” and “the things of the word should be spurned.”  This is, according to St. Thomas, “the greatest of miracles.” 

In an “enlightened” age such as ours, one dominated by the hubris of chronological snobbery, this is most certainly underappreciated.  There was no worldly advantage whatsoever to accepting the truths of the Faith.  Many men and women gave up everything in order to live as Christians.  Perhaps a few would be gullible enough to believe these things, but the Church grew 40% per decade for its first 300 years.  We must take seriously the “democracy of the dead” and not think ourselves wiser than the men upon whose shoulders we stand.

The Miracle of the Church

St. Thomas says that the third motive of credibility is related to the first and the fact the need for miracles in our age has been diminished.  It has been diminished because the greatest miracle (next to the Resurrection) is the Church herself.  One must wrestle with the historical fact of the enduring presence of the Church.  Or, as St. Thomas says, it is not necessary that the miracles “be further repeated, since they appear most clearly in their effect,” namely the presence of the Church.  Lawrence Feingold makes an argument in the form of a dilemma that further illuminates this point.  He says that either the Church spread by miracles, in which case God has confirmed her mission, or it spread without miracles.  Even if the latter is true, it would be no less miraculous to have lasted 2000 years.  Anyone who immerses themselves in Church history and is unafraid to confront the messy human elements, must quickly conclude that the Church as a merely human institution should have failed long ago.  I fear that our own time may, in hindsight, feed this motive of credibility.

The “longevity” argument is often countered by the example of Islam.  St. Thomas, mostly by way of anticipation, shows how it is precisely in lacking the motives of credibility, that Islam is shown to be a false religion.  Muhammad, St. Thomas says “did not bring forth any signs produced in a supernatural way, which alone fittingly gives witness to divine inspiration.”  Secondly, it was spread not by the force of truth, but by the sword.  This is not to whitewash Christian history and say that there weren’t any forced conversions, but that it spread despite being at the wrong end of the sword.  Islam (again even if there are individual Muslims who sincerely choose Islam) has always spread mainly by force which are “signs not lacking even to robbers and tyrants.”  Finally, Muhammad lacks the final motive of credibility, prophecy—”Nor do divine pronouncements on the part of preceding prophets offer him any witness.”

The growth of the Church was prophesied both in the New Testament (c.f. Mt 13, 16) and Old Testament (c.f. Dan 2).  But most striking is the fact that the Old Testament, a collection of books written over the course of hundreds of years, predicted the coming of Christ.  This, if we are to be intellectually honest, cannot be easily dismissed.  His arrival was even predicted within a very specific window of time (c.f. Daniel 9).

In closing, we would be remiss if we did not make an important distinction.  These motives of credibility are reasons why we should believe in Christian revelation.  They clear the way for the infusion of divine Faith, by which we assent to everything God has revealed.  Like all of God’s gifts, there is always give and take.  He gives, but we must take, and we take not by grasping but by removing the impediments we have erected to the reception of the gift.  The motives of credibility help to remove those impediments.

Preparing for Martyrdom

Church, Culture of Life, Dialogue, End Times, Islam, Martyrdom, Mary, Passion of Christ, Saints, , , ,

Very few men have changed the world as much as Francesco di Bernadone did.  While in prayer one day in a run down chapel in Assisi, Italy, he received a Divine mandate to “rebuild my Church.”    After a false start by literally rebuilding the church he was standing in, he set out to reform the crumbling Church.  In the process, St. Francis as he is better known, became one of the most beloved saints for his radical commitment to Christ and His Church.  But the rebuilding of the Portiuncula was not his only “blunder”.  He also thought he could win the martyr’s crown once by visiting the Sultan and trying to get him to convert.  He failed on both accounts, winning the Sultan’s esteem but not his soul.  Francis may have been called to be a great saint, but not a martyr, mainly because he misunderstood martyrdom.

When pressed, most of us would say that martyrdom consists in dying for the faith.  That of course is part of it, but it is not really the primary part.  The primary part is in the literal meaning of the term martyr.  A martyr is a witness.  And not just any witness, but is a certain type of witness that may end in death, but it need not per se.  That is why we refer to Our Lady as Queen of Martyrs and her spiritual son St. John the Evangelist as martyrs even though they did not die by the sword.  They both attest to the fact that death is not the end or the goal, but a means by which the martyr witnesses to Christ.  Otherwise we would not be able to differentiate it with dying for a cause.  As noble as that might be, it is not the same thing as Christian martyrdom.

Martyrs as Witnesses to What?

The key in grasping the distinction is understanding what it is that a martyr is witnessing to.  He is witnessing to the truth of the Resurrection of Christ and his own personal share in it.  His Master too was once put to death, but by His own power He destroyed death’s hold over Him and all those who are in Him.  “O death where is your victory.  O death where is your sting” (1Cor 15:55).  The Christian martyr may fear the pain leading up to death, but has no fear of death itself.  In fact, her eyes are fixed on the prize, so much so that she is willing to undergo any amount of pain to obtain it.

The hagiography of the martyrs is full of stories of incredibly painful deaths that the martyrs suffered at the hands of their persecutors.  But hardly a single story describes the pain, only the joy.  We might be tempted to think it is merely omitted for the sake of the reader.  Tempted, that is, until we realize that the descriptions of their countenance seems to suggest the exact opposite.  They seem to feel nothing.  They don’t sweat while they are being boiled alive (St. Cecilia), their bodies are riddled with arrows and spears while they continue preaching (St. Edmond), they sing Psalms for 15 days in a starvation bunker (St. Maximilian Kolbe) and they joke while being roasted alive (St. Lawrence).  You might think they felt no pain at all based on the descriptions. 

And herein lies the important truth of martyrdom—they most probably didn’t feel pain.  Or at least, if they did, it was way out of proportion to what was actually happening.  And that is because martyrdom is a gift from God so that the merits of witnessing even to the point of death are given to the martyr.  They are witnessing not to their faith in the Resurrection, but to God’s power that was made manifest through the Resurrection.  The martyr is tried so far beyond human capacities that it becomes so blatantly obvious that it is only by the power of God that a human being could endure these things.  The martyr then is both a witness and an instrument.  Martyrdom is not really about the martyr at all but about God.  It is a very public witness to His power over death as shown by how hard it is to actually kill the martyr.  The witnesses to the martyrdom are left without a doubt that something supernatural has happened, even if they later choose to deny it.

Why St. Francis was Wrong…and Right

St. Francis wasn’t wrong in thinking that martyrdom would fulfill his vocation to rebuild the Church.  He was wrong by not seeing it as the means God had chosen for him to do it.  It was a gift that he tried to seize.  But he was absolutely right in his assessment that it would rebuild the Church.  This is why Tertullian uttered his famous dictum that “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.” 

God never gives up on man so that when the world goes deaf, He simply speaks in sign language using martyrs.  Trapped in paganism and hedonism, Rome was transformed by the Christian martyrs who witnessed to the power of their God over death (no other god had that) and no fear of pain and suffering.  Roman soldiers thought they were brave until they watched a young girl march to her death with a smile on her face.  After trying to kill her they knew something Divine was happening.  They saw a way out of the maze of their Godless existence.  And the Church grew at 40% per decade into the middle of the fourth century on the preaching of the martyrs.

Martyrs have been and will remain an integral part of the preaching of the Church.  In some times and places they used only words to preach and in other ages, especially those in which the world grew tone deaf to Divine invitations, the preachers were the martyrs. 

One can’t help but see the parallels between our own decadent society and the decadence of Rome that is leading to widescale deafness.  The public witness of many Catholics is falling upon deaf ears so we should expect that God will raise up a generation of martyrs soon.  Our role is to prepare ourselves and the next generation for this eventuality.  Like in all the previous persecution it will come with little warning and those who have prepared well for it will be able to respond to the gift.  Those who haven’t won’t.  But either way, we should expect that they will be coming soon.

The Philosophical Roots of Protestantism

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Philosophy, it has been said, is the handmaiden of theology.  “It is,” Pope Leo XIII said, “the bulwark of faith and the strong defense of religion” (Leo XIII, Aeterni Patris (AP), 4).  Form the seminal moments of the Church, great theologians like St. Paul and Justin Martyr relied on philosophy to bring the revealed truths down to a level that was intelligible to mankind.  For this reason the Church has always encouraged the study of philosophy, submitting each of the various schools to her wise judgment according to “the excellence of faith, and at the same time consonance with the dignity of human science” (AP, 2).

The Church has long held that Scholasticism, put forth most prominently by St. Thomas Aquinas, is the most useful of all the philosophical schools for understanding and defending the Faith.  While the Church may not have an “official” philosophy, the philosophy of St. Thomas is as close as it comes.  It is his moderate realism that forms the Church’s foundational understanding of the knowledge of God, the Trinity, the Sacraments, the Incarnation, Sanctifying Grace, and much else.

The Problem of Universals

Moderate realism is a school of thought that treats the question of universals.  In our quotidian experience we encounter many individual things—a car, a smartphone, a cat, a neighbor.  Yet in encountering those things we also see that they relate to other things that are like it.  We call it a car, for example, because it belongs to some species of cars that all share some particular nature.  They may have differences such as color and body shape, but we still recognize them as cars.  We do this because we posit there is some universal essence that makes them all cars.  Through the power of abstraction, the mind is able to separate the essence of the thing from the individual instance of it.  One of the perennial problems in philosophy is where exactly this universal essence exists.

A realist, like Plato for example, would say that the universal does exist outside the mind.  It exists in some world of universals (this is the allegory of the cave) and that all the cars, phones, cats and people we see here are mere shadows of that universal.   Many early Christians were affected by Platonic thinking.  It also led to many heresies because of its sharp separation between the material and non-material realms.

Like Platonic realism, Thomistic moderate realism says that the universals do exist outside the mind, but they exist in the things themselves.  In fact these universals give form, that is, they make the individual thing what it is.  The form is one thing, but what makes it individual is its matter.  All of the sensible properties of things are the product of matter limiting form.  With its matter/form distinction the Church is able to develop her entire understanding of the Sacraments, most especially the Eucharist.

There is a third approach to the problem of universals that is mostly a reactionary position to the moderate realism of the Scholastics and this is nominalism.  Nominalists posit that universals do not exist.  These universals or ideas are merely sense impressions that we group together for convenience.  Only individual things exist.  So, rather than examining esoteric questions like how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, these medieval philosophers said there was no such thing as pins and angels.  What practical import could this have?

Nominalism was not just a reaction against realism, but a reaction against reality.  If there are no universals then there is no power of abstraction in man.  If there is no abstracting power then sense knowledge and intellectual knowledge become redundant, both grasping the same object—the individual.  This leads to both the angelism of Descartes and the materialism of Locke.

With nothing to be abstracted, the outside world has nothing to tell us.  The universe is just a collection of individual things with no real relation to each other.  The focus of philosophy, where it still existed, was towards interpreting man’s interior convictions (“I think therefore I am”).  With no natures there is no good or evil in the leading to voluntarism.

Still, even if we grasp some of the unintended consequences, what does this have to do with theology?  Natural theology, that is what can be know about God using human reason alone, ceases to exist as a field of inquiry.  The book of creation is closed leaving faith and Divine revelation as the only means of knowing about God.  Fideism and agnosticism rule the day.  God Himself becomes distant and capricious, no longer being the Logos but instead pure will.

A Famous Nominalist and His Legacy

One can begin to see just how profoundly nominalism has infected modern thought.  Nevertheless, it is instructive to examine just how nominalism escaped the medieval classroom and was smuggled into everyday thinking.  It was through the most famous nominalist, a man who was more famous than the founder William of Ockham, Martin Luther.  It was, as Fr. Louis Bouyer says in his book The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism, through the Reformation that nominalism escaped from the theoretical playground into the pulpit and the public square.

Luther’s early efforts at reform were based on some positive principles that the Church would readily agree with—sola fide and sola gratia for example.  It is when these principles were fertilized by the manure of nominalism that they became revolutionary.

Recall that nominalism posits that there are no real relations between things.  God is completely Other and although He might give us gifts, they cannot really be ours.  Faith, which Catholics believes comes as a gift in Baptism (thus the necessity of Baptism), when seasoned with nominalism becomes something we have on our own.  As long as we believe we are saved then we are saved.  Right belief, according to this view, in order to be truly ours must come from the heart and nothing from the outside (like Baptism) can possibly bestow that upon us.

So too with sola gratia.  Catholics believe that we are saved by grace alone.  Sanctifying grace is infused into our souls making us “partakers of the divine nature” (c.f. 2Peter 1:4) so that we share in Christ’s sonship and truly become children of God (1John 3:2).  Nominalism poisons sanctifying grace making it an impossibility.  Participation in God’s nature is not possible because grace that produces a change in us, while still remaining the Grace of God is non-sensical.   The conclusion is that although salvation is a free gift, it is only insofar as God declares us righteous rather than actually making us so.

Understanding the philosophical roots of Protestantism can help us to bridge the gap with our separated brethren.  We are separated because we are living in different realities.  The Reformation, to be a true reformation should have swept away nominalism.  Instead we are living among its intellectual progeny and need to understand that although we often use the same vocabulary, we mean very different things.  Pointing out the errors of nominalism should be a start to any ecumenical dialogue.

St. Catherine of Siena and the Latest Church Scandal

Church, Dialogue, Divine Mercy, Fasting, Mercy, Saints, Sin, Spiritual Warfare, Suffering, , , ,

For anyone who thought that the clergy sexual abuse scandal was something that was left in the past, the recent revelations regarding former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick have shown that the cancer has metastasized.  Round two promises to be uglier than round one, especially since the former Cardinal’s actions were widely known throughout the American Church and beyond.  The laity could be excused for harboring a feeling of déjà vu, especially given the overall weariness with feeling like sheep without a shepherd.  They might even be excused for looking for looking for ways to take matters into their own hands; might that is until they read the writings of one of the Doctors of the Church.

St. Catherine and the Dialogue on the Clergy

Best known for her ecstatic dictation of a dialogue with God the Father, St. Catherine of Siena lived in an era marked by clerical corruption.  In fact, she was instrumental in reforming the Church by executing some of the very things the Father dictated to her.  There are large sections in her Dialogue in which God tells Catherine what must be done about sinful clergy.  These words, rooted deeply in the Gospel message are particularly relevant for lay people today and merit special attention given the state of the Church today.

The Father begins His dialogue with Catherine reminding her of the great dignity of priests and prelates regardless of their personal sin.  He tells her that “it is impossible to have a greater dignity than theirs” because He has made them “My Christs” (Dialogue, 113).  This dignity attaches to the office and thus cannot be wiped away no matter how often the clergy attempts to deface it through personal sin.  He is well aware that with this dignity comes a great responsibility and that “by sinning they are abusing the souls of their neighbors” and will one day have to answer for it; “Their dignity in being My ministers will no save them from My punishment…they will be punished more severly than all the other because they have received more from My kindness.  Having sinned so miserably they are deserving of greater punishment” (121).  But from the perspective of the laity there is always a certain dignity such that “To Me redounds every assault they make on My ministers.”  He goes on to say that “a person can do no worse violence than to assume the right to punish My ministers” (116).  What the Father is reminding us is that it is the Church’s role to punish the sinful clergy and not the laity (unless appointed by the Church to do so).  This applies even when the Church seems to ignore it or turns a blind eye.  This, as we shall see in a moment, does not mean the laity need to act like sheep led to the slaughter but that they have an active role in bringing about justice.

This role is revealed to Catherine by the Father when He begins “to show her the wretchedness of their [the sinful clergy] lives” (121).  First He describes how the sin is made manifest in their unwillingness to correct others.  The ministers “let My members grow rotten for want of correction…because of fear of losing their rank and position or because they themselves are living in the same or greater sins.”  It is as if they are blind leaders of the blind (117).

The Sins of the Clergy

And what, besides human respect, are these “same or greater sins”?  The Father “reveals these miserable sins of theirs,” the “stench which displeases not only Me…but the devils as well.”  These sins are the sins which are so hateful to Me that for this sin alone five cities (Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboiim and Zoar) were struck down by My divine judgment.  For My divine justice could no longer tolerate it, so despicable to Me is this abominable sin…So you see, dearest daughter, how abominable this sin is to Me in any person. Now imagine how much more hateful it is in those I have called to live celibately” (124).

These words may have been spoken in the 14th Century, but they are as relevant today as they were then.  The parallels to our situation today are uncanny so that through St. Catherine God the Father has left us a blueprint for how the laity ought to respond .  Catherine grasps that these sins are revealed by Providential design.  The Father says, “Sometimes I reveal these miserable sins of theirs to My servants (just as I did to you) so that they may be even more concerned for their salvation and hold them out to Me with greater compassion, praying for them with sorrow for their sins and the insult they are to Me ”(124).  God the Father wants the laity to bring these sinful clerics before Him in merciful prayer so that He might be further glorified in His mercy.  Of this response, many of our contemporaries have already spoken.  But Catherine knows the Father is asking for more from us when she pleads, “O eternal Father, be merciful to Me and to these creatures of yours!  Otherwise take the soul from my body, for I do not think I can stand it anymore. Or give me some respite by showing me where I and  Your other servants can find refuge so that this leprosy will not be able to harm us or deprive us of our bodily and spiritual purity” (124).  She begs the Father how it is that she might escape this leprosy that is infecting the Body.  The Father tells her, “charity will make you put up with your neighbors with true patience by enduring pain, torment, and weariness no matter what their source. In this way you will flee and escape the leprosy” (124). In short, the Father is asking St. Catherine and each one of us not only for prayer, but for penance.  He is calling upon the laity in a very specific way “to fill up in their flesh what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of His body, which is the Church” (Col 1:24).

From within the context of the renewed universal call to holiness, God has providentially arranged for the outward show of sanctity of the Church to depend in a very particular way on the laity.  In an age infected with clericalism this is a most important message.  If the laity are truly to be God’s other “Christs” as well, then they must continue His mission of reparation.  This trial by fire is a clarion call in an ecclesial environment that has shunned penance for generations.  Now the future of the Church depends upon it.  The Holy Spirit may have promised it would not fail, but a renewed laity can make it thrive.  That renewal begins with lives dedicated to penance and reparation.  St. Catherine of Siena, pray for us!

The Truth on Lying

Conscience, Defending the Faith, Dialogue, God's Will, Moralilty, Natural Law, Sin, ,

 

One of my favorite all-time commercials is a Geico ad in which President Lincoln is asked by his wife whether or not the dress she is wearing makes her backside look fat.  As cleverly designed as the commercial is, and as refreshing as “Honest Abe” might be in our current political climate, this short ad is particularly compelling because it forces the viewers to think about the nature of lying.  Drenched in a culture that has shown a particular allergy to truth-telling, we “spin the facts” and color-code our lies, bleaching them of any wrong doing.  As lies increase, trust decreases, turning us all into masters of suspicion. Lies will break down any society, the family included, but there is an ever-greater danger hidden in the weeds of lying—losing a grip on what is real.  Telling a lie over and over, we can easily forget the truth.  As philosopher Hannah Arendt put it, “The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lies will now be accepted as truth…but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world…is being destroyed.”   It is time to tell the truth about lying.

Most of us know a lie when we tell it, but there is a shadow over truth telling that creates a grey area.  That is because we lack a really good definition.  Even the Church has struggled to come up with a good definition.  In the 1994 edition of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the definition of lying was “to speak or act against the truth in order to lead into error someone who has the right to know the truth”(CCC 2483).  When the official Latin text was released 3 years later, the italicized part was left out, rendering lying as “speaking or acting against the truth in order to lead someone into error.”  This is true as far as it goes, but it does not shine enough light to remove the shadow.  This is why St. Augustine’s definition is especially helpful.  He says that lying is deliberately speaking (verbally or non-verbally) contrary to what is on one’s mind.  In other words, there is an opposition between what one speaks and one what thinks in lying.

Loving the Truth

Because most people look at lying as mostly a legal issue, it is first important for us to discuss what makes lying wrong.  Our communicative faculties have as their end the ability to convey our thoughts.  When we lie, that is when we say something that is contrary to what we are thinking, we are abusing that power.  Notice that in this teleological (looking at the purpose of the power) approach circumstances do not matter.  Lying is always wrong.

Seen another way, we can make further sense of the intrinsically evil nature of lies.  Our Lord is pretty harsh in His condemnation of lying; calling those who lie the devil’s offspring “because he is the father of lies” (Jn. 8:44).  There are no such thing as white lies.  A lie is an offense against the truth, the same reality that God, in His Providence, has orchestrated.  That is, all lies, are primarily offenses against God because we are rebelling against the way things are and revolting against His ordering of things.  It is our love for God and with gratitude for His Providential care that we should love the truth so much that we would never lie.

In this case, removing the white does not necessarily remove the grey area until we can answer what constitutes lying.  Recall Augustine’s definition of a lie as the willful communication of an idea that is contrary to what one is thinking.  This definition is preferred because it removes the situation where the speaker is wrong in their thinking from the realm of lying.  If your son did not know he had homework and then told you he didn’t then that would not be lying.  He communicated the truth as he understood it.  Similarly with joking or story telling where the purpose is to convey irony or illustrate a deeper truth.  Many people say “I was just kidding” when they are caught in a lie, so again this is something we all naturally seem to grasp.  Regardless, at a certain point—like when the person asks “are you joking?” –it ceases to be a means of laughter or truth telling and becomes lying

Intuitively we grasp that to forget or joke around is not the same thing as lying.  But it is the so-called hard cases that make it more difficult.  For example, there is the oft-cited situation of the Nazi asking where the Jews are hidden. It was an attempt, although not precise enough, to deal with these hard cases that motivated the authors of the Catechism to include the clause “who has a right to know the truth” in the original definition.  It would seem that the only way out of this Catch-22 would be to lie because it is “the lesser of two evils.”

Living the Truth

It is necessary as this point to make the distinction between deception and lying.  All lies are deception, but not all deception is lying.  There are times when deception might be necessary, especially when the interlocutor plans to use the information in order to commit some evil.  Although our communicative faculties have as their purpose the communication of the truth as we know it, this does not mean that we have an obligation to communicate the truth.  In fact, the obligation may be to remain silent such as when you are keeping a secret.  Likewise the obligation to communicate the truth does not mean it has to be communicated in the clearest fashion.   But because lying is intrinsically evil, that is, it can never be ordered to the good, it can never be a means of deception.

Protecting the truth from those who have no right to the truth is done then not through lying but through what is called Mental Reservation.  A mental reservation is a way of speaking such that the particular meaning of what one is saying is only one possible meaning.  There are two classes of mental reservation—a strict mental reservation involves restricting it in a way that the listener could never guess what you mean.  This would be a form of lying.  A broad mental reservation means that the average listener could figure out one’s meaning, even if it is not very clear.  Blessed John Henry Newman uses the classic example from St. Athanasius’ life when he was fleeing persecution and was asked “Have you seen Athanasius?”  The great enemy of the Arians replied, “Yes, he is close to here.”  Obviously there are a number of ways this could have been interpreted, but it was not a falsehood strictly speaking.  A similar approach could be taken with the example of the Nazis and the Jews but never in a way that would constitute lying.

What if however the soldiers had continued to probe Athanasius, forcing him to answer directly?  Broad mental reservation may be employed for as long as possible but when it fails, one may, out of a love for the truth, simply remain silent and suffer whatever consequences may come from that.  Likewise, many people tell other’s secrets simply because the other person asked and “I wasn’t going to lie.”  One can keep a secret without lying, but it may mean suffering at the hands of the interrogator.  However, before my teen readers see this as a Jedi mind trick and add it to their war-chest to use against their parents, this only applies when the person in question does not have a right to the truth.  When the person has a right to the truth, you have an obligation to give it to them in as clear a manner as possible.  There are some, especially in the Church, that rely on mental reservation to mask heresy.

In the commercial, Honest Abe, wanting to avoid lying, answers that the dress does make Mary Todd look a little fat.  Is this the only possible answer he could have given, or could he have exercised a mental reservation?  I’ll leave that for the readers to answer and debate in the comments section below…

Unleashing the Truth

Defending the Faith, Dialogue

Most regular readers of this blog will readily admit that relativism, that is the absolute truth that there is no absolute truth, is absolutely absurd and unlivable.  So ubiquitous is this false understanding of reality however that there is not a single one of us that remains outside the grasp of its tentacles.  Whether we believe in it or not, it still affects us in ways we might not initially realize.  It is one specific way that I want to address in today’s entry.

Relativism is not only damaging because it fails to recognize universal truth claims.  It is not only damaging because it is unlivable, causing a fracture in our personality between what we believe and how we act.  These are injurious only to those who profess belief in relativism.  It is most damaging because it depreciates truth in everyone’s eyes.  Where relativism reigns, there is a universal indifference towards the truth.

“Wait”, you say, “I am not indifferent to the truth at all.”  Really?  How many times, when confronted with a falsehood, have you just thought “it is not worth it to say anything”?  We might justify it using the Gospel maxim of “not putting pearls before swine” or speak of “picking our battles,” but most of the time we think that ultimately it doesn’t matter.  Perhaps this is more of a self-indictment than anything else, but I would dare to say that it happens more often than we would be willing to admit.

The truth (see what I did there?) is that it does matter and matters immensely.  We are not preserving the pearls of truth nor picking our battles.  There is no danger of losing the pearls of truth because they are not really pearls.  Unlike material goods, spiritual goods like the truth multiply when shared.   What this means is that the truth has a power all its own, even when we don’t share it with great eloquence or fancy arguments.  It has no power when it is kept inside, but once unleashed, it can destroy falsehood.

The Truth and Charity

Note the important distinction between destroying falsehood and beating a person.  This destruction of falsehood is not an excuse to beat your opponent to submission.  What I am suggesting is that we re-capture the distinctively Christian habit of forcefully and charitably attacking untruth.   This is always done with two motives, each equally important—destroy the falsehood and win the person.  The truth will set you free.

This is one of the reasons that GK Chesterton remains one of the best apologists for the Christian faith even today.  He attacked untruth wherever he found it.  He never shied away from debate.  But he was often criticized for how gently he treated his opponents. Unyielding when it came to untruth, he would still speak kindly to and of his opponents.  His goal was to “kill and wound folly” not his opponent.

In fact, at the heart of the Christian message is charity, that is, the habit of loving like God loves.  God loves in truth and with Truth.  For many of us we treat the truth as something that we own rather than as something to be given away.  And because we are possessive of it, we lose our confidence in its power.  It really becomes “my truth.”  As Pope Benedict XVI has said on a number of occasions, “none of us have the truth.  At best, we can say the truth has us.”  You cannot both believe a truth while at the same time not believe in its evidential power, standing all on its own.  With this realization comes the ability to always remain charitable in our untruth slaying.

The Value of Arguing?

The truth is the truth whether I can argue for it or not.  In fact I may not be able to argue it, but still I have an obligation to stamp out the falsehood.  Simply saying “that is not true” is enough, although quite obviously it is much better to be able to say why it isn’t true.  Even still, not being able to argue should never be a reason not to speak out against untruth.  The humiliation of not being able to defend the truth often motivates us to learn how.  Charity is truth, but so is humility.  Trust in the hidden power of the truth.

Most of us are jealous of our own ideas so convincing someone of their falsehood is often difficult.  But do you know who else is listening?  This is something that I came to realize when I took a trip to Mississippi just after Hurricane Katrina to help with cleanup with two guys I knew.  One of them was my college roommate who could never understand why anyone in their right mind was Catholic.  Over the years we had covered pretty much every topic related to the Faith.  A few hours into the trip, he said something (I don’t recall exactly what) about the Blessed Mother that was not true.  I immediately called him on it, even though we had talked about this before.  We spent a couple of hours going back and forth about the Faith.  He was just as unyielding as I was.  The whole time the guy in the back seat was quiet and didn’t say a word.  Two months later he called me and told me that he was entering RCIA and that the eavesdropped conversation was the thing that put him over the top.  My arguments were not to him specifically, I didn’t even know his objections.  Instead he heard the truth and it opened up everything for him.  All this because I was unwilling to leave a falsehood floating around the car.

Perhaps you may not win the person over to the truth, you may stop them from unthinkingly repeating what they are saying.  If what they are saying is untrue, it will crumble under its own weight.  He may not agree with you, but he will think twice before saying it on another occasion.  It will keep the falsehood from spreading.

Unleash the truth!

Dialogue with Islam

Dialogue, Islam

As was mentioned in a previous post, one of the fruits of the Second Vatican Council was a concerted effort on the Church’s part to enter into dialogue with non-Christian religions.  While this always has the aim of evangelizing, it assumes that dialogue is possible.  What I mean by this is that, first, the other group is interested in dialogue and, second, that they are capable of it.  Nowhere are these assumptions challenged more than when it comes to the religion of Islam.  The Church has expended considerable resources on this effort and has had little fruit to show for it.  Could it be that dialogue is simply impossible with Islam?

When his brother Dominicans approached him to ask St. Thomas Aquinas about dialogue with Muslims, he said that they ought to approach them as if they were “natural” men.  What he meant by this is that unlike the Jews, Muslims fully reject Biblical Revelation.  Likewise because of the many contradictions regarding Christian doctrine (most notably the divinity of Christ) found in the Koran, Christians cannot accept theirs.  Therefore, the only approach is through human reason alone.

So even though Islam professes to worship the God of Abraham, the approach is the same as with any other non-Christian religion, through human reason.  What has to be understood however is that Islam rejects the whole notion of human reason.  In the Eleventh Century, there was an intellectual revolution led by perhaps the most influential Muslim next to Mohammed named Al-Ghazali.  As founder of the Ash’arite theology he affirmed that man can only know that which Allah tells him.  This makes entering into dialogue practically impossible.  If man can only know what God tells him, then any search for the truth (the literal meaning of the word dialogue) outside of the definitive revelation of the Koran is fruitless.

In his now infamous Regensburg Lecture, Pope Benedict was addressing this very same issue.  He was calling for an intellectual awakening both in the West and in Islam itself.  The violent response of Islam to Benedict XVI’s lecture showed that there is little room for reasonable discourse about Islam.  But what many Catholics are not aware of is that it actually did result in a gesture toward dialogue when 138 Islamic scholars penned a letter to Pope Benedict called A Common Word between Us and You.  Many within the Church took this as a great sign, but for those who are familiar with the teachings of Islam, it perhaps represents a subterfuge more than a real attempt at peace and understanding between the adherents of the world’s two largest religions.

The Islamic scholars insist that the “basis for this peace and understanding already exists. It is part of the very foundational principles of both faiths: love of the One God, and love of the neighbor. These principles are found over and over again in the sacred texts of Islam and Christianity. The Unity of God, the necessity of love for Him, and the necessity of love of the neighbor is thus the common ground between Islam and Christianity.”  One has to ask whether this is true.

The title of the letter comes from Sura 3:64, “Say: O People of the Scripture! Come to a common word between us and you: that we shall worship none but God, and that we shall ascribe no partner unto Him, and that none of us shall take others for lords beside God. And if they turn away, then say: Bear witness that we are they who have surrendered (unto Him).” The scholars connect this verse with the First and Greatest Commandment given by Jesus—“The words: we shall ascribe no partner unto Him relate to the Unity of God, and the words: worship none but God, relate to being totally devoted to God. Hence they all relate to the First and Greatest Commandment.”Church of Holy Sepulchre and Dome of the Rock

The problem with this is that it attempts to gloss over a very real and potentially insurmountable difference.  No Muslim actually believes that to say “we shall ascribe no partner unto Him” simply refers to the Unity of God in the sense that a Christian would understand the unity of God.  For to “ascribe a partner unto Him” is the unforgivable sin in Islam, namely shirk.  Christians, who believe that Jesus is the Son of God, commit this sin with impunity.  The Koran is very clear as to what Muslims are to do to those who obstinately commit this sin,

“Fight against such of those who have been given the Scripture and believe not in God nor the Last Day, and forbid not that which God has forbidden by His Messenger, and follow not the religion of truth, until they pay the tribute readily, being brought low…and the Christians say: The Messiah is the son of God. That is their saying with their mouths. They imitate the saying of those who disbelieved of old. God (himself) fights against them. How perverse are they! They have taken as lords beside God their rabbis and their monks and the Messiah son of Mary, when they were bidden to worship only One God. None should be worshipped but God alone. Be He glorified from all that they ascribe as partner (to Him)!” (Sura 9:29-31)

A difference this large cannot be a foundation for peace and understanding.  For faithful adherents of Islam, this difference is a foundation for war and dhimmitude (“pay the tribute, being brought low”).  To pretend otherwise is disingenuous at best.

The second commandment as a basis for peace and understanding, namely the love of neighbor also forms a shaky foundation.  After issuing the twofold commandment of love of God and love of neighbor, Jesus is asked by the scholar of the law “who is my neighbor?”.  He goes on to tell him the parable of the Good Samaritan to illustrate that Christianity believes in the brotherhood of all mankind (Luke 10:25-37).  The Christian sees in all men, his neighbor.  For the Muslim who is faithful to the Koran and Hadith, his neighbor is only other Muslims.

One of the five pillars of Islam is Zakat, or almsgiving.  All Muslims are obligated to give alms only to “the poor and the needy, and those who collect them, and those whose hearts are to be reconciled, and to free the captives and the debtors, and for the cause of God, and (for) the wayfarers; a duty imposed by God. God is Knower, Wise” (Sura 9:60).  But these alms can only be given to other Muslims because Allah commands that Muslims “[N]ever be a helper to the unbelievers” (Sura 28:86).  In other words, if the victim was not a Muslim in Jesus’ parable, then Muslims are commanded to pass him by.

It is this foundational truth about Islam that makes dialogue extremely difficult.  Dialogue always assumes an equality between the two parties insofar as their dignity is concerned.  Their ideas may not be equal, but without seeing the other as your equal then honest dialogue can never happen.  Muslims are taught not to see “People of the Book” as their equals.  Only their fellow Muslims can be their equal.  This distinction between believers and unbelievers is made in everything.  It even plays out in Sharia Law with respect to punishments for crimes.  Punishments change based on whether the perpetrator/victim is a Muslim or not because a Muslim is considered to be on a higher level of faith and thus to do him harm is not just breaking some moral code, but also constitutes an act of sacrilege.  The robbers in the parable may even have been faithful Muslims who justified it by saying they were collecting the jizya.

Above I appeared to be overly harsh in response to what appears to be a good will gesture by calling it potentially an act of subterfuge.  This is because Islam is one of the only religions that has a developed doctrine of deception called Taqiyya.  Sura 3:28 commands Islamic adherents to practice deception if it benefits the spread of Islam. Al-Tabari (an early Islamic scholar) explains “If you are under their authority, fearing for yourselves, behave loyally to them with your tongue, while harboring inner animosity for them…”  Because dialogue depends upon both parties being truthful, there can be no movement toward the truth when either party is convinced that they can lie anytime it helps them.  Knowing this, we naturally have to ask whether the scholars are trying to disarm Christians.  Beware of the man offering peace with one hand behind his back.

All of this shows the near impossibility of dialoguing with Muslims.  They can only do so on the basis of the Koran, which is the very text that is in question.  Ultimately in any investigation of the truth, it comes down to “because the Koran says so.”  This was also a point the Benedict XVI stressed as well when he quoted Ibn Hazim “[W]ere it God’s will, we would even practice idolatry.”  The Pope Emeritus was stressing that the Muslim conception of God puts Him  somehow beyond good and evil and that those categories are simply a matter of His capricious will at any given time.

Despite appearing to be a prophet of gloom, I believe there is a path forward in which fruitful dialogue might take place.  Certainly an awareness of what Islam teaches is very important for Catholics.  I am often struck by the level of ignorance of members of the Church.  The reasonable person when confronted with a threatening ideology will learn about it in order to defend themselves against it.  Can you imagine the Church trying to fight Communism without reading Marx and learning how Lenin interpreted him?  Or how about Fascism without reading Nietzsche and seeing how Hitler interpreted him in Mein Kempf?  Regardless of how we divide up Islam into moderate and radical, there is some percentage of Muslims who have become sworn enemies of the Church.  We may choose to fight armed with love and the sword of the Spirit, but not attempt to understand your enemy will not lead to a single conversion.  Perhaps this is why the Church has seen so little fruit in converting Muslims.

Personally I loathe the designation between “moderate Muslims” and “radical Muslims” almost as much “cafeteria Catholics” and “orthodox Catholics.”  In both cases both groups must be prepared to make an explanation for difficult teachings.  The cafeteria Catholic must be prepared to say what the Church teaches about a given issue and why it is wrong or being misinterpreted.  So too the moderate Muslim needs to be prepared to explain the difficult passages in the Koran just as much as the radical Muslim does.  The moderate Muslim needs to be ready to explain why Osama Bin Laden was wrong when he thought “terror in Islam is an obligation” was true based on Sura 9:41 (“Go forth, light armed and heavy armed, and strive hard with your wealth and your lives in the way of Allah! That is best for you if you but knew”).  All too often I have found the Church kowtowing to political correctness by staying away from the controversial issues.  The responses to the letter from those inside the Church were no exception.  I recognize there is a certain amount of decorum necessary, but eventually you have to confront the real differences.  Personally had I received the letter, my first question would have been “how can we have peace and understanding between Christians and Muslims when it appears to the average reader of the Koran that you are commanded to kill me?”  Regardless of whether the person is “moderate” or “radical” the movement toward the truth can never be accomplished without asking these types of uncomfortable questions.

 

 

 

 

On the Meaning of Dialogue

Dialogue, Vatican II

Last week marked the 50th anniversary of the promulgation of a small, but significant document from the Second Vatican Council called Nostra Aetate.  This Declaration on the relationship between the Church and non-Christian religions has been repeatedly hailed as a watershed document marking the Church’s newfound openness to other religions.  It is often summed up in two sentences directly quoted from the document, “[T]he Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions. She regards with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differing in many aspects from the ones she holds and sets forth, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men” (NA, 2).  Like many of the documents of the Council, its overall positive tone has made the Church look more appealing to many.   But this strategy to “accentuate the positive” because it went unchecked, has led to a culture of universalism.  The Church rejecting “nothing that is true and holy in these religions” has really become the belief that the Church “rejects nothing in these religions because they contain things that are true and holy.”  As proof of this, one well known Jesuit author claims that Nostra Aetate has led to an irreversible openness in the Church and to the belief that “Jesus is radiant and alive in whatever paths lead to God, whatever is true, whatever is life giving.”

Like many of the documents of the Council, Nostra Aetate has been caught up by the “Spirit of Vatican II” and has been used to suck the life out of the Church.  When it comes to this particular document however, the Church offered an authoritative interpretation when the Declaration On the Unicity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and the Church or, simply Dominus Iesus, was issued in 2000.  Anyone who attempts to interpret Nostra Aetate (or Unitatis Redintegratio on the Church’s relationship to other Christians for that matter) without putting on the lens of Dominus Iesus will often succumb to the gravity of universalism.

When Dominus Iesus was released there were accusations that it lacked a certain amount of tact and that it set the Church backwards in her relationship with other non-Catholics.  Once the initial waves of indignation settled down it was mostly ignored despite its clarifying purpose.  It is important to note however that this document carries the same Magisterial weight as Nostra Aetate.  Both documents fall under the category of “Declaration” which means they represent a joint statement of the Pope and another religious leader or leaders regarding what ought to be considered a common understanding of some teaching.

According to Cardinal Ratzinger in Dominus Iesus, there are two truths which go hand in hand in our relationship with other religions.  First, the real possibility for salvation exists for all mankind only in Christ.  The second is not that “Jesus is alive and radiant” in other religions, but that the Church is absolutely necessary for the mediation of this salvation.  One may certainly recognize that within these religious traditions there are elements that come from God and even open up the human heart for the way of the Gospel.  But they also contain superstition and other errors that can also be a genuine obstacle to salvation.  Through the different phases of dialogue we may want to emphasize either of those aspects, but ultimately dialogue that never gets to the superstitions and other errors in order to free the followers of the false religion from them is fruitless.

Dominus Iesus

What then is the purpose of this type of document within the corpus of the Council?  It was meant to be part of an overall call to evangelize.  The Church had become closed in on itself in many ways and so the Council hoped to arm the Faithful with a means of encountering those outside the Church—but always with the intention of bringing them back into the Church.  The openness of the Church always has the goal of closing her doors behind the new members that enter.  As Blessed Paul VI said in his Apostolic Exhortation on Evangelization, the Church “exists in order to evangelize, that is to say, in order to preach and teach, to be the channel of the gift of grace, to reconcile sinners with God, and to perpetuate Christ’s sacrifice in the Mass, which is the memorial of His death and glorious resurrection” (Evangelii Nuntiandi, 14).

For those who are familiar with the Latin Mass, it ends with the words Ite Missa Est, which literally means “She is sent.”  The Mass empowers us to be sent out into the world so that we might return with more members.

The optimism of the documents was meant to supply an opening to the Faithful in their encounters.  By rejecting “nothing that is true and holy in these religions” it presents common ground for the evangelizer to begin their presentation of the Gospel and invitation to discipleship.  From the Church’s perspective, dialog is part and parcel of evangelization.  It should always have the goal of conversion.  Today, dialogue has become something like negotiations.  Many think that it should be approached as some sort of zero-sum game in that if the Church would be willing to concede that Jesus’ salvific role is not unique, then Muslims would be willing to admit that He may be the savior of Christians just not the savior of Muslims.  The Council recognized that when there are truths at stake there are no winners and losers.  One side’s loss is a loss for both sides and one side’s gain is a gain for both sides.

If we only practice an openness to other religions and not a strong desire to bring them more fully to Christ, then we have failed.  What they offer is already found in the beauty of the Catholic Church.  Certainly the emphasis that other religions place on certain aspects of the truth may help us to see it more clearly in the Church, but still there is nothing loving about leaving them where they are.

At the close of Dominus Iesus, Cardinal Ratzinger supplied some additional ground rules for dialogue that are well worth repeating.  Beginning with the idea of equality he clarifies that this “refers to the equal personal dignity of the parties in dialogue, not to doctrinal content, nor even less to the position of Jesus Christ — who is God himself made man — in relation to the founders of the other religions.”  He also reminds us that if we are truly guided by charity and respect for individual freedom then the Church will be “primarily committed to proclaiming to all people the truth definitively revealed by the Lord, and to announcing the necessity of conversion to Jesus Christ and of adherence to the Church through Baptism and the other sacraments, in order to participate fully in communion with God, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”  The point is that by treating the mission of evangelizing with some urgency we are most assuredly doing the will of God, who wills that all men be saved. Salvation is found in the truth and those who obey the promptings of the Spirit of truth are on their way toward it—but it remains for the Church who has been entrusted as its guardian to “go out and meet their desire.”