The scolding pope

The Roman Catholic Church is in turmoil.

I do not think it is too much of an exaggeration to make this claim. At the closing Mass of the recent Synod on the Family, Pope Francis is widely reported as having “scolded” the assembled congregation. This congregation was not Joe and Suzy from St. Dismal’s-by-the-Sea. No, the assembled worshipers were all the global leaders and glitterati, the power men, of the very church of which the pope is leader.

[By the way, this pope is a scolder. Just Google “pope scolds” and you will be stunned at the number of hits and variety of targets of his derision. I am reminded of the adoring mom watching the military parade pass by and scolding, “All those soldiers are out of step except my Bobby.”]

Without getting into the substance of the matter under dispute [namely, the rights of divorced and gay Catholics to receive Communion and the underlying broader ideologies on both sides] the pope made a fundamentally radical [if that phrase is not totally fatuous] observation.

He told his listeners [remember who they were] not to get too wedded to doctrine, to loosen up in the interests of “reaching” people who otherwise have been cast out, as it were, to make the church an oasis for them not a desert.

This seems unexceptional and almost unremarkable, except when you note the response of some African bishops, of whom one said that the focus on Eurocentric and Western sexual issues was shallow when he was dealing with parishioners who had lost children to Boku Haram.

In short, the focus on the poor, the outcast, the marginalized which have, rightly, been Pope Francis’s main concern, seem myopic when plunged into the sex-frame of current Western society’s norm.

That on the one hand, represented by the African bishops.

The other hand, represented, say, by Cardinal Burke and his allies, believes that the Synod was urging him and others to alter, fiddle with, or simply ignore official doctrine, which is similar to a president of the USA, having sworn to “uphold and defend the Constitution,” deliberately behaving beyond or in contradiction of its norms. Such a path is chaos and anarchy.

A comment on this.

Just as there is a path to change the American Constitution [which makes deliberate flouting of it rebellious and criminal] so too there is a way of altering church doctrine.

Offering willful disobedience or disregard as a way forward is mockery of the essential notion of doctrine itself. Such a path leads to the fractured factionalization which modern Protestantism has become.

Somehow the pope needs to be able to square a circle, to persuade that bringing in the up-till-now rejected ones can be accomplished by bringing them in to the church itself. I believe a revisit to the heart of the teaching on sex must be undertaken.

Is it credible, let alone compatible with this papal focus, to go on asserting that original sin is transmitted through sexual intercourse, as taught by St. Augustine? Is this a necessary let alone vaguely honest exegesis of the Adam and Eve story? I think it is woefully mistaken. Has this erroneous notion not totally colored the entire body of the Catholic doctrines on sex?

The church once and for all must get rid of the teaching that sin is the ultimate STD.

This issue must be dealt with first and once done the doors which Pope Francis seeks to swing open will be found to have fallen down.

Musing on nuttiness

The Roman Catholic synod on family life opens in the Vatican today and even as this is announced, it is being described as “contentious” and “divided.”

Before it has even opened! Amazing.

But, the pope has asked participants (some 270 clerics from all over the worlds) to remember that this is not a time for personal opinions. Oh no, it is a time and opportunity to listen to and then speak for  …. wait for it .… you got it  …. God.

Disputatious is the last thing God would be. Right?

Why can’t we all just get along. Where was that said? Leviticus somewhere?

But, lest you think this is nutty, check this out.

Remember Warren Jeffs? He was and still is the leader of the FLDS, a fundamentalist sect of Mormonism believing in polygamy and marriage for underage girls to adult men. Or rather, to a select few adult men, himself most often. Jeffs is serving time for child molestation.

He has now instructed his followers that only certain men [yes …. selected by him and he has designated “seed bearers”] are to be allowed to have sex with any woman and that as they do do the woman’s husband is to sit and hold her hand. This is called “ritualistic procreation.”

This is utterly bizzaro stuff, of course, but it is not the nuttiest aspect of the story. Read this:

Although day-to-day leadership of the church is run mostly by Jeff’s brother, Lyle Jeffs, Warren Jeffs actively directs church matters from prison

From prison? That is a state institution, right? Bound to uphold the law, right? To incarcerate, isolate, possibly even punish, convicted criminals, right?

And this nut-job is still allowed to run his church, direct and instruct the continuation of sexual behaviors, from behind bars?

Nuttiness all around.

 

PS

I was wondering if someone would remind me of St. Paul’s “Prison Epistles” or Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison. Those documents, of course, must be judged on the merit of their content. Ah. Content. There ya’ go. 

Papal interview

For those of you who may not know, Kim Davis is a Kentucky county clerk who grabbed her fifteen minutes of fame by not complying with recent federal law, as promulgated in a Supreme Court decision, which requires her to issue marriage licenses to all couples, regardless of their “gender dynamic.” A fundamentalist Christian, she personally opposes same-sex marriages and felt the law was an assault on her religious freedom.

Interestingly, but in essence irrelevant to the substance of her case or the case against her, she has a checkered marital past, having been married four times and given birth to twins out of wedlock. All of this behavior is alleged to have taken place prior to her conversion to her particular brand of Christianity.

I mention all this only to highlight that it is hard to know what to make of reports that she met the pope in private during his recent visit to the USA.

Why would he agree to do this and why would she want such an audience? [The Vatican has remained silent. That in itself is odd. Silent? Why?]

Let’s assume it did not happen. Then what?

Who has an interest in inventing and spreading the story?

Kim Davis, obviously. But, why would an evangelical Christian have any interest in meeting the pope? The meeting was not a celebrity interview, according to the reports. There was prayer and the pope gave her rosaries.

BTW, why would he give her more than one? Her parents are Catholic. Really? Is that the way papal gifts work?

“Excuse me, Holy Father, I need a couple of extra for my cousins.”

I don’t think so.

Let’s  assume it did happen, then what? How did it get arranged? Who called whom? I do not know the papal cell number, do you? Whose number is more easily discovered? I assume the Pope didn’t make the call. Who did? And why?

Initially I thought this was a lie and that its falsehood was the most curious thing about it.

If it is not a lie, there is far, far more curiosity.  

PS

Since I posted earlier today this just in: read here. My goodness. The Vatican has lost its collective mind.

Bizarre if not dangerous

Two quick observations to start the week.

First, Pope Francis is about to embark on his visit to the United Sates. Coverage has already been extensive and will only increase as everything gets going. A whiff of controversy has surrounded his time here.

The first hint of a bad smell came with the announcement of a guest list to meet him at the White House.

It includes a number of folks representative of, how shall I put it, the out-of –the-ordinary American, let alone Catholic: a transvestite, a nun in open rebellion, various alternative sexuality folks, and the like.

President Obama would not be trying to make a statement would he? One which might embarrass the Pope? Or, the Catholics in the USA? Surely not. Church and State are separated after all.

Comments have swirled around the matter of politics and faith and both Trump and Carson have caused, unintentional, stirs. Faith and politics should not be mixed. I have heard the media say so and they, after all, are the arbiters of what is politically correct. And yet, the list of guests stinks.

Second, Dr. Nathalie Cabrol. She is a scientist, heading up SETI’s search for alien life. You can read the report about her work here.

The gist of the piece is that she is searching for alien life in the universe by listening for a certain type of radio signal. But, so far, she has heard nothing.

And, wait for it, because she has heard nothing, she concludes aliens are out there. We are just not listening hard enough.

She even goes on to state, as a fact, that aliens will inevitably be more sophisticated than us and finding it hard to communicate with our “teenage” civilization. Maybe. But, maybe not. Maybe we are the most advanced civilization in the universe. Maybe. It’s possible in a universe of almost infinite possibility. Who knows? Nobody!

John Grunsfeld, a former astronaut, put it this way: “If there is life out there, intelligent life, they’ll know we’re here.”

So, we cannot hear them and so conclude they must be there; and being there we know that they hear us. They are sort of like the NSA of the universe, listening unseen to our every sound.

I wonder if they (the aliens, I mean) dress as oddly as the Pope.

Public opinion and power

There are two unrelated stories today which are connected, or I want to connect, in what might be an instructive way.

First, this about  the trials of Amanda Knox and I mean by that “trials” in both senses.

The Italian Court of Cassation, the supreme criminal court in what has come to appear their odd legal system, has ruled that Knox and her co-defendant, her then Italian boyfriend, are innocent. This finding is based on many grounds.

Of more interest than the finally ruling, is the clarity with which the court spoke on how the prosecution conducted its case as it meandered through the legal system over a period of just a little less than a decade. Note some of the language:

glaring errors  …  a hit-and-miss hunt for a scapegoat to satisfy public opinion  …  stunning weakness  …  investigative bouts of amnesia

Concluding:

Avid media attention and the nationalities of the people involved led to a spasmodic search for one or more guilty parties to offer up to international public opinion, which certainly did not aid the search for the truth.

Public opinion, more, misguided and uniformed public opinion, distorts justice and the truth. If it can do this what can it not do?

Then there is this report of a conservative ‘revolt’ in the Vatican.

Of course, when the conservative Pope Benedict was in power there were rumors of liberal, or even radical, revolts in his Vatican. And indeed there was; Francis, a polar opposite, was elected after all.

The subtle and significant difference is that Pope Francis is “popular” and this is what happens; “public opinion” plays a role now as it did not during Benedict’s time.

A good thing?

These two articles make a connection worth noting. (It just so happens that it is an Italian Connection!)

Faulty towers

The pope caused a minor kerfuffle recently with his pronouncements on climate change/global warming. I have mentioned this before and want in this post to focus on one voice in this ensuing kerfuffle, that of Cardinal Pell, a well-known opponent of Pope Francis or at least of his views and also an outspoken climate change skeptic. In criticizing Pope Francis in this instance, however, Pell made an interesting argument.

You can read about it in this brief article.

Note the two odd premises Pell enunciates:

The church has got no mandate from the Lord to pronounce on scientific matters. We believe in the autonomy of science.

The first is what I call the piece of pizza fallacy.

Imagine a pepperoni pizza. Cut into eight slices, let us say, the fallacy suggests that one piece and one piece alone can and ought to be isolated as and for a totally different topping, chocolate chips say. This make little culinary or cuisine sense, clearly, and yet is applied to many things other than pizza. Religion in life for example. Religion is all chocolate chips whereas the muck and madness of life is pepperoni. No pastor (shepherd) in his or her right mind would encourage this attitude. Life and faith get mixed together. Cutting religion off from this muck is madness itself. And vice versa.

Pell seems to think the chocolate chips of scientific matters are an independent pizza. They are not. He knows this very well, as his views on abortion testify. What is abortion but applied science and Pell wants the Lord’s mandate to be loud and clear. Would the cardinal prohibit priest’s praying with a patient before open heart surgery? Nonsense. As with all fallacies, they demand prejudicial bias to make any sense and once the sense is unpacked they are revealed for what they are: nonsense.

The second is the autonomy illusion.

My suspicion is that science would welcome this assertion. After all, did this not prompt the naïve Manhattan project leaders. Let’s show how big and bad a bomb can be so that the generals and presidents will never use it. How did that work out? Not so well. Never does, Science is no more autonomous than any other aspect of the human adventure. Pell probably is trying to say something about objectivity and evidence, but even radical empiricality is questionable these days as a thorough analysis of any real state of affairs. Interconnectedness is the flavor of the day or, should I say, the era.

One may agree with Cardinal Pell’s unease with Pope Francis tendency to meddle, but slipping back into selective piety is no way to engage the debate.

Symbols gone daft

I have been moving. Ugh. Even when everything in a move goes routinely the experience is disrupting. Ours was anything but routine. I will not bore you with the details. Life is returning to normal, despite still living in “cardboard city,” and I have a chance to write another post.

It’s funny how life keeps on going on. It’s like when returning home after going on a lengthy vacation and listening to some familiar local radio station. The hosts are all the same, chatting away about this and that, as though you’d never missed a thing. I feel like that re-emerging from the preoccupying demands of the move. Life has continued.

Odd how symbols mean things.

The Confederate battle flag has been the focus of some attention.

This has happened before, but this time round during this summer of racial tensions, discontent, and animosities, the flag became a spark-plug of rage, dissatisfaction, and anxiety so much so that the South Carolina legislature has passed a law making it illegal to fly it from public buildings in the palmetto state. I heard one critic of flying the flag state that it had “caused division and hate.”

Serious charge, that is. By all means, therefore, remove the cause. The flag has been banned. We can expect, therefore that the division and hate will lessen and/or disappear.

Really?

The president of Bolivia gave the pope a crucifix representing Christ nailed to a hammer and sickle.

You can read about it here.

The most disturbing sentence in this article, by the way, is this:

The hammer and sickle, for those of you born after the end of the Cold War, is meant to symbolize “uniting labor and peasants” and was the ultimate Communist symbol and a part of the Soviet Union’s flag.

Good grief! The workers of the world unite symbol of Communism has to be explained to a generation that has no clue what it represents. And, going back to the battle flag of the Confederacy, what does the hammer and sickle represent?

Not just the workers’ paradise of Lenin, or even popular coffee-house socialism a la Bernie Sanders, but the gulags of Stalin and twenty million corpses!

So, on the one hand we are asked to be thrilled that the old symbol of slavery and oppression has been banned in the USA, while on the other rock-star Pope Francis receives a hammer and sickle crucifix.

We live in puzzling times.

Watch out

(Check out the “My New Book” page at the top for the latest news.)

The last couple of days have seen reports of the pending comments by Pope Francis on climate change.

Climate change is, to say the least, a controversial topic.

It is made so not by anything inherent to it, although in the northern USA the cool summer has combined with two particularly brutal winters to spur the prevalence of anecdotage, the announcement of the personally trivial as the universally authoritative.  No, the issue with climate change is science. Scientific opinion is not unanimous and the data we, the public, are given from both sides seems equally convincing. It is a puzzle.

This puzzle in turn leads many to see the issue as something calling for political solution. That alas, seems to be what is happening. The environmentalist wings of various political parties argue for climate control measures, while those measures are viewed by their political opponents as ideologically motivated and opportunistic attempts to limit “big business.”

Clarity is far from imminent.

Into this drama steps the pope.

Set aside the matter of which side he is going to support. That is not my concern in this post.

My concern is the nature of the kerfuffle his opining about it at all has caused. See this piece from the UK’s The Guardian, a leftward leaning newspaper. Two paragraphs in particular are worth noting:

“The pope ought to stay with his job, and we’ll stay with ours,” James Inhofe, the granddaddy of climate change deniers in the US Congress and chairman of the Senate environment and public works committee, said last week, after picking up an award at a climate sceptics’ conference.

Rick Santorum, a devout Catholic and a long-shot contender for the Republican nomination, told a Philadelphia radio station: “The church has gotten it wrong a few times on science, and I think we probably are better off leaving science to the scientists and focusing on what we’re good at, which is theology and morality.”

The point to focus on is the assertion that the pope’s and by implication the church’s “job” is to comment on matters not of the common good, particularly not science, but rather of “theology and morality.”

Forget morality, for the moment. It’s theology that is my focus.

If theology has nothing to say about the common good, including but not restricted to science, it really has very little to say; of interest and relevance, that is. The theos of which such a narrow theology would speak becomes a circus clown, a domestic pet, a cosmetic curiosity.

Frankly, I very much anticipate disagreeing with what Pope Francis will be saying about climate change, but his saying cannot be anything but a good thing. His God is not tame, clownish, nor a cosmetic curiosity.

His theos may well make politicians nervous. That can only be a good thing.

Medievalism

You might have read about it or even seen it. Pope Francis has performed a miracle, what some are referring to as a “half-miracle. The former is a theological concept with some authenticity from antiquity; the latter? Not so much. If you missed the video here is a link.

The blood of this particular saint, kept in a glass vial, has liquefied in the presence of former popes some nine times over the centuries.

When teaching about the miracles of Jesus, I always try and point out that miracles and parables are cousins. Each works with two realms, on the one hand the realm of the mundane, the familiar, and the everyday (farmers working, women baking, lost sheep, sibling rivals, and the like) and, on the other, the realm of the eternal, the unfamiliar, and the divine (the kingdom of God.) Parables using words seek to draw our attention from the former to the latter, while miracles using actions seek to pierce the latter with the former. If one seems to slip away from interpretation it is a useful tool to try and interpret it as belonging to the other cousin category. This technique often helps understanding. The key point is that each has a purpose beyond its mere utterance, in the case of a parable, or its mere performance, in the case of a miracle. In the absence of such a purpose all we are left with is theotainment, religious wisdom and power as fun, even, I am driven to say as is the case with much liturgical theotainment these days, as manipulative fun.

Now it is not too far-fetched to claim that the miracle the other day was a sign (as the fourth Gospel calls miracles, by the way) or, in other words, power with a purpose. The pope was visiting what is described in the CNN video I linked as the “epicenter” of crime in Italy. His liquefying the blood of a saint could be seen as a declaration about blood: The criminals shed it, I liquefy it, and the Church has it, the Blood of Eternal Life for you.

But this suggests staging does it not? Which brings us back to manipulation and theotainment, even if well-intentioned. Manipulation and theotainment are, of course, the two essential ingredients in the devil’s last temptation to Jesus: “Go ahead, jump down from the top of the temple tower and float to the ground, dazzle them, show them, wow them, win them.”

I have heard ISIS criticized for “medievalism” in their outlook and methods.  The Middle Ages were indeed characterized by much barbaric behavior, if that is what is in the mind of those who attribute medievalism to ISIS, but they were also the age of superstition and dazzling shows, of tangible displays of power both political and ecclesiastical, designed to sway and control the masses.

There was a whiff of medievalism in Naples the other day.

Free speech limits

Pope Francis has, once again, caused a minor kerfuffle.

I am not referring to renewed remarks he made regarding man-made global warming. I suspect his knowledge of planetary climate change is utterly dependent, as is mine, on the experts he chooses to be advised by and it cannot surprise anyone that the voices commanding his attention in this regard (short of God’s, of course) are on the leftward side of the debate. How else could he summon for governmental restrictions of free-market economic activities?

No, I am referring to the comments he made yesterday about free speech, following on the Charlie Hebdo debacle. You can read about it here.

Voices have been raised on the right, as you would expect, lamenting this papal “attack” on free speech, especially in the context of his being perceived to be in league with Islamic leadership. Where, I heard it asked, was the papal voice when the Crucifix was immersed in urine and deemed to be a ‘work of art?” The implication is clear; papal involvement now in this specific context is pro-Muslim and, perhaps, anti-Semitic, given the delicatessen victims.

I would urge caution here.

Pope Francis, it seems to me, is supporting the religious witness in his advocacy of secular limits in the attacks on faith, on any faith. Nowhere does he suggest governmentally imposed limitation on free speech. His remarks resound to my ear very much like the considered comments by Corey Saylor, the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ Department to Monitor and Combat Islamophobia, made in a BBC interview yesterday. The suggestion is not for legal but moral limits on free speech.

I think the knee-jerk outrage at the papal comments  is based in part on the complete absence from the critics’ intellectual armory of the notion of moral limitation which prompts them to fail to hear what was being said. For them “limits” must mean legal, governmentally imposed, limits. The notion of an internally held, personal, cohesive moral conviction escapes them.

If I am right and indeed this is what Pope Francis is speaking of, then the misunderstanding by those who criticize him is not only sad, it is frightening; for Catholics and all Christians, for Muslims, Jews, and people of any and all faiths.