Category: Article

The “Ius Gentium Dei” – Towards contextualizing some current crises in ecclesiology and law

Christian Renaissance Movement

Below is the text of a paper I delivered today at this year’s “Student Theology Conference” at the Angelicum in Rome. It is just the start of the articulation… More work (especially research in older legal commentaries/authors) needs to be done.

I neglected to mention as an example in this talk that the Pope “qua” Bishop of Rome is something which would also arguably fit in my “novel” category of law.

-Eamonn Clark, STL

On September 21 of 687, Pope Conon died after a reign of several weeks – not enough time for rivalries to cool and dissipate. Conon had been a compromise candidate between the Roman clerical faction and the Roman military faction. Paschal, a former contender and now Archpriest at the Lateran Basilica, vied for the throne of St. Peter once again. His supporters, however, were less numerous than those of the Archdeacon, Theodore. After sending a bribe to the Exarch of Ravenna John II Platyn, the Emperor’s main legate in Italy, to have his papacy affirmed by Constantinople, Paschal attempted to take up residence in the Lateran with his supporters – as did Theodore with his. What followed was a nearly three month long armed conflict between the two parties inside the Lateran complex. By mid-December, the Romans had had enough, as had the Exarch. When John II Platyn was arriving in Rome, Paschal sent another bribe, which the Exarch happily took, but then he confirmed a separate candidate who had been acclaimed by politicians, soldiers, clergy, and normal civilians who were gathered on the Palatine Hill. Pope St. Sergius I was elected. Theodore relaxed his grip, and Paschal was eventually thrown into monastic prison on suspicion of witchcraft.

So goes one of several wild stories of the early medieval papacy. Of particular further note is the accession of the infamous Pope Vigilius to the Throne – who not only flirted with Monophysitism and was effectively excommunicated by the Second Council of Constantinople, but also seemingly colluded with the Emperor’s General, Belisarius, to force his predecessor Pope St. Sylverius into exile and took up the papal office while his predecessor was still alive. At least when Sylverius died, all of the Roman clergy began to treat Vigilius as pope…

Such irregularities could no doubt be multiplied – similar skirmishes surrounding the pontificates of Benedict IX immediately come to mind. This raises an important question – where does accession to the papacy fit into the broader world of law? Is it merely a matter of ecclesiastical law? This seems impossible, as there are certain qualities which one must possess to be pope, such as being baptized. Or is it a matter purely of Divine positive law? This too seems untenable, as we clearly have a manmade process today which has produced valid popes for centuries, namely, the conclave process. How do we deal with the fact that the papacy has often been treated much like the Roman imperial throne – where “might makes right” – that is, if you get enough power that is somehow related to the office – like by dominating the Lateran Palace with your army, or by forcing your predecessor into exile – you can somehow enter the office by that very fact? To drive it home, had Paschal the Archpriest successfully crowded out Theodore the Archdeacon, and the Exarch had not arrived, we would almost certainly have had Paschal as Bishop of Rome. This is, in fact, how Benedict IX regained office at least once, with respect to Clement II, seizing the Lateran in November of 1047, and perhaps also previously when expelling Sylvester III in April of 1045. Pope Damasus II ended Benedict’s third papacy when he invaded Rome with his army from Germany and forced Benedict into pious retirement in Grottaferrata.

In this paper I will present a hypothesis that there sits in between Divine positive law and ecclesiastical law a third kind of law which is analogous to the category of law which fills the gap between the natural law and civil law, namely, the “ius gentium,” the law of nations. This kind of law, which I will refer to as the “ius Gentium Dei,” the “law of the People of God,” is relevant not only for solving difficult problems related to papal succession – which topic is not simply historically interesting but increases in pastoral importance in direct proportion to the growing crisis of sedevacantism – but also to topics like rights over the use of liturgies, unjust episcopal depositions, and lay governance… perhaps even doubts about the role or importance of subjective intentionality in the dispensation of the sacraments. All of these are topics on the minds of many. I will argue that collapsing these issues into Divine positive law or ecclesiastical law is a mistake, which is part of why the discussions related to these topics have proven somewhat fruitless. The task, then, is to contextualize these controversies and others like them.

The natural law is man’s participation in the Eternal Law. From the natural law, man devises artifices which provide the structure of distributive justice in civic life – ordinances of reason for the common good promulgated by one with the authoritative care for the community. This is the civil law, which can positively create moral duties, insofar as it squares with the nature of law and has within itself a legitimate presumption of morally preceptive force.

Divine positive law is, one might say, the Church’s participation in Eternal Law, which is preceptive data known through faith. Revealed precepts are given either directly or indirectly – baptize with water, confess your sins, love your enemy, pray the Our Father, and so on – and the practical life of the Church is built around these preceptive pillars. Ecclesiastical law, which essentially tracks the definition of civil law, with the qualification that faith informs the ordinance of reason, must be in accordance with Divine positive law (while also, of course, not violating natural law).

Ecclesiastical law moderates all manner of property and offices which are “possessed,” as does Divine positive law. As already mentioned, the papacy is a good example of these two kinds of law working together. This is unlike natural law, which only indicates a social order based on some kind of common life and the pursuit of truth. Civil law moderates myriad aspects of property ownership, yet we can perceive rather intuitively that it must respect the logic of the ius gentium or else become unjust. One does not acquire possession of a house merely by writing his name on the wall, for example, regardless of whether this is legislated.

Ecclesiastical laws regarding the possession of some spiritual good or authority obviously must accord with Divine positive law, but it seems they must also be in accord with something which “interprets” Divine positive law by extending it to the whole Church as a society, yet without being properly contained therein.

What I am calling the “ius Gentium Dei,” the “law of the People of God,” is the wise application of reason working through faith of the Divine positive law towards the ordering of the whole Church as a perfect society as such. It is, as the ius gentium, as conclusions drawn from premises, rather than particular determinations of higher law (cf. ST I-II q. 95).

Perfect societies, for example, have a visible head, at least habitually. The papacy is important enough that, even were there to be some crisis, such as with Sergius I or Sylverius and Vigilius or other similar cases, the fact will always remain that the Church needs a pope – the need for a successor of St. Peter is indicated by Divine positive law and by lived experience – one need only think of the extended periods during which deadlocked papal elections dragged on for months or even years, such as in the late 1200’s. Yet given that ecclesiastical law, which typically moderates this office, cannot provide for all cases, just as civil law cannot provide for all cases, sometimes appeal must be made to a higher law. Further, given that God, despite being a perfect Legislator, for whatever reason did not actually provide procedural law of any kind for the accession to the papacy, as is evidenced by the vast diversity with which real accession has occurred, no appeal can be made to Divine positive law to settle the matter. The answer lies with the wise application of reason working through faith of the Divine positive law towards the ordering of the whole Church as a perfect society as such, the ius Gentium Dei. We can accept that Sergius I was Roman Pontiff just as much as Vigilius, just as much as Benedict IX three times along with Sylvester III, Gregory VI, and Clement II, and so on. As Fr. Taparelli, grandfather of Catholic social teaching, would likely point out, the fact itself is what makes the society and allows for its contracts, not the other way around. Not to put too fine a point on it, we have a Church of popes, not a Church of the 1983 or 1917 Code of Canon Law.

In his book treating of political economy, the ghostwriter of Rerum Novarum Fr. Liberatore presents the ius gentium as a spectrum, with some items, like the very institution of private property, being closer to the natural law than other items. The papacy and its acquisition seem closer to the Divine positive law than something like rights over the use of particular liturgical customs, which is another item that very much seems not merely part of ecclesiastical law while nonetheless obviously largely subject to ecclesiastical law. The Church can legislate rather arbitrarily a lectionary, a calendar, various kinds of vestments and their colors, the kind, number, position, and use of candles, and so on. We can perceive that, beyond the proper minister and matter and form, there are in fact items which seem so fundamental to the right liturgical order that they are very likely indirectly indicated by Divine positive law; for example, that the readings precede the confection of the Eucharist – the way that Christ’s public teaching preceded His death on the Cross, the way that the prophets preceded the Incarnation, and the way that the Eternal Word of the Father precedes creation through that same Word. However, something like the attempt to introduce extra-Scriptural readings into the Mass would be less offensive but still, I think most would agree, would be illegitimate. The question is, offensive against what? It cannot be Divine positive law, as God gives no direct commandment about readings at Mass – it cannot be only against ecclesiastical law, if that law were actually to be changed. It is instead against the wise application of reason working through faith of the Divine positive law towards the ordering of the whole Church as a perfect society as such, in this case about how that society conducts acts of religion – how God is worshipped by outward, official, public acts of the Church.

No doubt, there is something which lawful authority possesses in the Church that matches the civil reality of eminent domain. One might think of Pope St. Pius V doing away with long-standing local liturgies after Trent, those of almost but not quite 200 years of age. But nobody thinks that the Roman Pontiff could, for example, legitimately (with morally preceptive force) do away with all the liturgies of the Eastern Churches simply at will, or even of a single Church. The Armenian Catholic Church, for example, has an acquired right to use their own liturgical books and rituals, within reason; the ratio for any meaningful intervention in the Armenian liturgy is and can only be what is fair with respect to the ownership of the same liturgy on the part of the entire Armenian Church. The analogy which comes to mind is that of children living under their father’s care in a common house – surely, the father owns the house in the absolute sense and exercises the fullness of authority – immediately, supremely, etc., as to domestic life and the governance of his family – but he cannot arbitrarily and indefinitely forbid the children to use the central rooms of the house, for it is their house too in a real way, albeit in a limited and participatory sense. While the supreme and immediate power of the Roman Pontiff over the whole Church is part of Divine positive law at least indirectly or even directly, the character of ownership over something like the use of particular liturgical customs, especially on the part of the faithful, is not part of Divine positive law. Rather, the articulation of that ownership, along with how it is suspended, modified, or removed, is in large part a matter of the ius Gentium Dei.

I leave aside other possible inhabitants of this category, including those already mentioned – the deposition of bishops, lay governance, and even the character of sacramental intentionality, for lack of time. Rather, I will address the problem which by now should be obvious: Who decides what is contained in the ius Gentium Dei, and, even more importantly, who decides what it demands?

My suggestion is that the answer lies with the whole Church, especially with clergy and the maiores, those who are educated. To reiterate my definition of the ius Gentium Dei, it is the wise application of reason working through faith of the Divine positive law towards the ordering of the whole Church as a perfect society as such. The key is wisdom, the knowledge of the causes of things, in this case knowledge of the causes of the flourishing of the whole Church. This principally belongs to local bishops and most of all to the Roman Pontiff. Yet the head cannot do without the foot. The various roles played by lower clergy and by educated and deputed laity to assist in the governance of the Church are critical, as is the movement of the Holy Spirit among the pious minores, the uneducated, who may by the Gift of counsel know that somehow, something is wrong about a decision about governance without fully or even significantly being able to explain why. When moving all together, problems or conflicts which are over things inside the scope of the ius Gentium Dei are normally figured out less by reasoning or acts of juridic power than by flesh and blood – over time, the solution simply appears because of the fact of the matter at hand. Such was the case with the abnormal papal accessions previously considered – so too it may be the case for various ecclesiological crises in our own day. God wants us to know that we have a pope – other than knowing someone is actually a baptized male, what else do we really need to say other than, “Well, he controls the Lateran and everyone calls him ‘Pope’”? Something similar could be said about lay governance, episcopal depositions, and even sacramental intentionality, if time allowed. The key question is something to the effect of – “Is this paradigm or set of expectations and practices workable for the whole Church with respect to Her good as a perfect society, in line with clearly revealed precepts?” This kind of argument is what needs to be taken up in the apostolate to the sedevacantists – we ought mostly to leave alone particular arguments about the 1917 CIC and the precise definition of “heresy,” let alone any particular historical questions, which, by the way, are seemingly never extended into the murky depths of the First Millennium; as if we really know anything about what men in the 700’s were teaching and preaching before their pontificates. The fact is that “they controlled the Lateran and they were called ‘Pope,’” and this is more or less everything we need to know. This is somewhat of a simplification, but it is not a very large one.

What remains to be said in this brief presentation is to insist that the ius Gentium Dei is not a “trump card” which can or should be “played” by anyone seeking some particular solution in a given conflict. Such an attitude would be the practical equivalent of the speculative error found in illegitimate appeals to the “sensus fidelium.” Just because a decision of a lawful superior seems unfair or ill-considered does not thereby render it invalid or even illicit, even though it may truly be immoral to have legislated on account of his own poor judgment, which because of his office he is specially bound to avoid. If anything, rather than simplifying particular courses of action which smack of disobedience and flippant impiety, this juridic resetting of major ecclesiological crises and questions, and the conflicts which unfortunately accompany them, is an invitation to more serious dialogue and discourse. Children should not simply disobey their father and harshly rebuke him, even when it is really the case that he is unfairly restricting their usage of the house, to return to my analogy – rather, the children must appeal to their father respectfully and plead with him (1 Timothy 5:1). Sometimes, the father lacks wisdom and thinks too much of his rights; however, this is more frequently true of the children who are bound to him in obedience.

In this presentation, which is only a sketch of an at least superficially plausible idea which requires more research and reflection, I have proposed that there is an analogous category of law in the order of revelation to the ius gentium in the order of nature, which category I have called the “ius Gentium Dei,” and I have shown how such a category could help to contextualize several pressing concerns which confront the Church today. Real solutions to these problems may yet be a long way off. However, it is no doubt extremely important both to avoid erroneously claiming one’s rights to be sanctioned directly by God and to avoid erroneously claiming that whatever such rights exist are subject entirely to the whims of the lawful superior. Instead, the via media ought to be more frequently considered, in the form of the ius Gentium Dei – in this case it is not the ”both/and” we are so accustomed to in Catholic theology but rather a rare “neither/nor.”

Ireland – Week 4

Christian Renaissance Movement

Eamonn Clark, STL

Dublin is a city of contradictions.

It’s a place where there are churches and bars on every street. You can see a pious old woman on her way back from mass and a gaggle of girls with the most vulgar tastes in dress standing on the same corner waiting for a bus. You can find rabble-rousers and men of the most refined manners in the same shop. There goes a priest, there goes a trans-rights activist.

It’s a city at war with itself.

In truth, Ireland is a complex country. It’s not complex like America – America (and Americans) are complex because of parts… lots of “things to do.” Ireland (and Irish) are complex because of layers… lots of “things going on in there.” (Yes, yes, it’s an oversimplification. Got it.) The subtle and amiable wit of your average Irish gentleman is counterbalanced by a charming habit of self-deprecation or at least humility. (Irish tend not to brag.)

Even the Irish flag symbolizes a conflict, represented by the layers of the tricolor – the Orange and the Green… Protestants and Catholics. White in the middle as an aspiration of peace.

Ireland is just barely big enough to be really anonymous if you want to be and small enough to be a well-known figure without being some kind of phenom. Though it’s not quite like the Middle East or Iceland, where everyone knows exactly how they are related to everyone else, there’s nevertheless only ever a few degrees of separation between any two people. Major public figures – musicians, politicians, athletes, prelates – they are just kind of part of the family, and part of the story.

Everyone is sort of in it together, in a tangible way. That means all the tensions and wounds of poor old Ireland are shared collectively somehow, too. So is a lot of the unwillingness to talk about it all. This extends from the relatively recent violence (late 1960’s-1998) between North and South during the Troubles, to the ecclesiastical abuse crises (plural) that unfolded on everyone’s watch – and in which therefore basically the whole of Irish society was complicit, in one way or another, to some degree. It’s not polite table conversation. Or polite conversation anywhere else, even on a blog. But the prolonged failure to wrestle with these important collective memories only serves to bury them deeper. What does that do to a soul, of an individual and of a country? Perhaps forms some kind of neurosis?

This theme of repressed pain over the abuse crises in particular was explored and driven home very well by Derek Scally in his recent book “The Best Catholics in the World,” a must-read for anyone interested in the Irish situation. It’s not an entirely balanced take, but it’s an important one.

Dublin, the cultural and political capital of the Republic of Ireland, is something of a symbol of the Irish psyche. There’s some kind of neurosis that is manifesting itself there. No doubt, most Irish would resent that. And that’s kind of the point. In Dublin there are plenty of “normal people,” but there is also a very vocal minority of well-funded and coddled extreme leftists, a large number of ruffians and other kinds of low-culture individuals, and now a significant influx of immigrants (many of them seemingly economic opportunists rather than refugees). Then there is also the undercurrent of the echoes of the strong piety that once animated the city, just barely hanging on, with approximately 1% mass attendance any given Sunday. Now, all that does not represent Ireland. And yet it does, because that’s a major part of what Dublin is, and Dublin is, well, Dublin. So there’s tension between what is most culturally and internationally identifiable about Ireland, and the greater part of the country, or “real Ireland.” All this gives Dublin a uniquely charged energy which is rather hard to describe. And that energy sits on top of the rest of the country, at odds with it.

Layers and contradictions.

These thoughts came to me (in a less-developed form) at the Dublin Rally for Life the other day. It was a good crowd, maybe 8,000-10,000 or so, from all over the country. I already found myself running into people I’ve met during my stay, and that without trying to meet up. It’s not the same as D.C. – smaller, yes, and also lacking the “organizational splendor” that comes with the sort of funding and personnel involved in the March for Life. It’s a much quainter operation. But it has heart.

The constitutional referendum on abortion in Ireland passed by a very slim margin a few years ago (2018). Dubliners would have been the outsized supporters of this. So there were some unfriendly onlookers as we went down one of the main thoroughfares of the city, ending up next to the River Liffey. But there were also people walking by who were openly supportive. A mix. More layers and contradictions to explore.

Like the Troubles or the abuse crises, abortion by this point has touched just about everyone in Ireland somehow. Will the awful reality of 31,000 unborn being killed be yet another deep wound to leave alone for now and later psychologically bury? Or will this tragedy be too much to ignore and suppress, something that runs up too hard against the deeper cultural values which “real Ireland” still possesses deep down? Only time will tell. In the meantime, the Liffey keeps on flowing, and Dublin keeps on changing.

Ireland – Week 3

Christian Renaissance Movement2 Comments

Eamonn Clark, STL

Nobody knows what the round towers were for.

Were they defense towers, or some kind of refuge for monks hiding from Viking raiders? Unlikely, but possible. Were they watchtowers? Belltowers? Astronomy towers? Communication towers? Maybe some of all of this? Who knows. These towers, so distinctive to Ireland, are a mystery.

On my last visit to this island, I had an extended visit to Ardmore, which boasts one of the most well-preserved round towers in the country.

Ardmore is where organized Christianity really began in Ireland. There had already been a small smattering of Christian presence on the island when St. Declan was born, as he was baptized by a priest. But there was no real structure yet, just individual Christians here and there. The bishop Palladius had been sent on a mission by the pope in 431, but no real apostolic efforts seem to have meaningfully penetrated what was then a thick forest covering essentially the entire land.

Declan was educated in Rome and ordained a bishop by the pope, and he returned to Ireland as perhaps its first proper missionary, after meeting with and agreeing to a strategy with none other than St. Patrick, who would follow behind him in some time. (There are four pre-Patrician saints of Munster, each a bishop.) The legend of the return of Declan is its own fascinating tale, nestled in the murky gap between fact and fiction. I’ll save the story for another time, as well as the anecdote about the local bishop in the 1800’s who had a different take on the popular piety associated with “Declan’s Rock” and his comical endeavor to destroy it.

St. Declan’s Rock

The site of Ardmore became homebase for Declan, where a monastery was built according to Patrick’s instructions. Eventually he retreated into the wilderness nearby, where he lived in a small house as a hermit. Ardmore overlooks the sea, where Declan made his famous landing.

The “pattern” at Ardmore involves walking around some of these locations while reciting certain prayers, and, most distinctively, marking the wall near “Declan’s Well” (very likely the same spring he used, next to his house) with crosses by using a small stone. This has been going on for hundreds and hundreds of years.

You can see the engraved crosses in the stone above.

Soon after Declan came Patrick, whose missionary endeavors were more successful and thus more famous. You’ll notice, however, that Patrick concentrated his efforts in the northern part of the island – that’s because Declan had already been quite successful in the south.

St. Declan is now buried in a small tomb adjacent to the monastery which was for centuries the center of perhaps the most powerful ecclesiastical territory in Ireland. Now the monastery is in ruins, and the Diocese of Ardmore has long been swallowed, not even memorialized by a hyphenated name, as so many such dioceses are… it’s just gone.

The ground around it is host, most likely, to approximately 10,000 graves, almost all of them unmarked, and many of them likely quite ancient.

More graves, including St. Declan’s, inside the house-shaped mausoleum.

It’s a mesmerizing place. Haunting, almost.

I find myself increasingly fascinated both with graveyards and with archaeology. There is something so existentially alarming about old things and people, and the markers that indicate them. We stand on top of an entire world that has come and gone, and one day others will stand on top of ours. No doubt, there will be “digital archaeology” in a thousand years… But there will still be a need to dig stuff up and touch it. I’ve been privileged this past year to get my hands on some very interesting texts in various archives around Rome… the thrill of holding a manuscript or book that you know you are the first to handle in 50, 100, 200 or more years, is just really special. And I have a tactile mindset about even my own past – I want to be in this place and that, just to feel connected with my own life, to help make sense of it, and somehow thereby to see what it means. I’ve noticed that not everybody cares about that the way I do. I guess this same sort of impulse is at least part of what attracts me to the older liturgy… It connects me to those who’ve gone before, makes them alive again in some way, helps me to understand where I am from – and where I am to go.

I was at a gathering of priests a few days ago; the men were celebrating various major ordination anniversaries. I sat in on the mass. It was pointed out that there were a few hundred years of priesthood between them all. While contemporaneous, the cumulative experience of priests is nevertheless a bit like Ardmore. How many secrets held under the Seal… dead things, which are hidden underground now – finished, out of sight, out of mind. How many words or encounters which for them were not significant enough to remember, but were so powerful for others that they changed someone’s whole life and even saved their soul. How many repetitive but intentional rituals done, over and over, prayers and signs repeated on and on, to the edification of the faithful who devoutly attend to them. How many unique and always somewhat mysterious ministries – whatever they are, always reaching up towards God in service of His people… like a round tower.

And a saint lies buried within each one.

St. Declan of Ardmore, pray for us.

Ireland – Week 1

Christian Renaissance Movement

Eamonn Clark, STL

So, for reasons I’m not quite yet ready to share on these pages, (though maybe my more perceptive readers can piece things together,) I’ve moved to Ireland for the summer. I’m staying down in the southern countryside for about 3 months. I arrived a week ago.

In this series, I’ll be breaking down my understanding of the situation of the Church in Ireland on these pages every Monday. This week I’ve just been settling in, so I’m passing the first serious post to next week. I’ll share details about events I attend, people I meet, and places I go, all with due discretion. I will not reveal where I am staying until after I’ve left.

Yes, there will be loads of pictures. And cool stories.

Ireland’s situation is very, very unique in the global Church. The overall thesis that I would offer is one I’ve been giving to people already – Ireland is doing better than it sounds, but it is doing worse than it looks. I look forward to unpacking that in the weeks and months to come.

St. Patrick, pray for us.

Image: Alberto Loyo/Getty Images

Jung Goes to Chalcedon: A Christology of Archetypes?

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Below is a talk I gave at the Angelicum’s annual student theology conference last week. Enjoy!

Eamonn Clark, STL

A fallen away Lutheran’s Kantian appropriation of Platonic forms hardly seems like the place to look for shocking insight into Christology, but today I will make the case that it is.

In this paper I will argue that psychologist Carl Jung’s theory of archetypes gives us tools for deepening our understanding of Christ as a Person within the narrative given to us in Sacred Scripture, in particular by examining two archetypes which have been well-treated in mythological and psychological literature: the hero and the trickster. I take all of the classical definitions of the Councils for granted – Jesus Christ is truly God the Son, and fully a man born in Bethlehem. There is much to talk about within the paradigm of Chalcedon and the Alexandrian-Antiochene controversies which occasioned the advent of our cherished credal formulas – but since we do indeed possess revealed data, we have solid ground from which to jump into areas yet unexplored. We can be like Theseus – not running into the labyrinth and becoming lost, food for the minotaur, but not simply staying safe and sound outside either. We can take hold of the cord of tradition and bring it with us to keep ourselves oriented – we can slay the minotaur.

An archetype for Jung is a kind of impression of deeply meaningful symbols upon the collective unconscious – a sort of echo of Averroist anthropology that has somehow taken in data and leaves its mark within us. Jung rejects entirely the “tabula rasa” of St. Thomas and Aristotle. We are born with these ideas already deep within our psyche, and their use in stories or encountering them in our life moves us in particular ways. We expect certain things from certain kinds of characters – a witch-queen is altogether different from a wizard-king, whether they are good or evil. Most people automatically perceive this, even if they can’t articulate it, which is normally the case.

While I am not an Averroist, there is something to be said for the observation that so many peoples across time and space seem to use extremely similar kinds of characters and tropes in their great myths – everything from wise old men to floods to heroes who go on quests.

One might be inclined to dismiss the Jungian thesis outright by saying, “It’s just the way that stories work.” But why is it that we want these kinds of characters and these kinds of stories? We can’t say it’s coincidence. We could try to chalk it up to cultural conditioning, but again, this elides Jung’s main premise: we see these patterns in practically every story-telling culture across time and space, and it is unlikely that all of our common ancestors were telling stories which were sufficiently advanced and powerful to populate our minds with this amount of similar ideas so profoundly. One might also posit that we experience life, and life has its rhythms and structures which our emotions and imagination correspond to in such a way that we are attracted to particular sorts of narratives. This is not wrong, but it still doesn’t get to the heart of the problem, as our emotions and imagination receive the world and process it in a particular way with identifiable patterns which do not explain themselves. We simply return to the same question with different terms: why these kinds of emotional responses, and these imaginative structures? There must be something deeper.

I would suggest the following limited analogy: Christ is to our perception of Him as mathematics is to music. Music has certain rules, which, if violated, create a kind of dissonance which we find jarring; these rules can be laid out in mathematical formulas. The classical liberal arts proceeded from mathematics to music, just as it proceeded from geometry to astronomy and from grammar to rhetoric: the latter studies are of the object of the former studies put into motion, that is, music is mathematics in motion, astronomy is geometry in motion. Christ is the Word, the eternal Logos, the Wisdom of God, through Whom all things are made. Our encounter with Him flows from the “rules” found within Him, the natural law and law of grace finding their origin in Him, the Eternal Law, and thus our encounter with Him is the Logos “in motion,” just like music. However, musical taste is much more deeply informed by culture than is our relationship with Christ – this is where the analogy begins to break down. For example, Westerners intuitively find minor chords “dark,” but this is not the case for others. The rules for our encounter with Christ, where not totally individual, are totally universal, that is to say, a culture does not get to tell us Who Christ is or what He wants, despite shaping the style and circumstances in which we approach Him to some degree; and yet, of course, because charity is a personal friendship with God, its pursuit and activity will also have a dynamic unique to each person.

Because our journey with the Lord is the Word “set in motion,” we can easily see how this puts us into a narrative, a story, which is more literally “words in motion,” so to speak – as from grammar to rhetoric. The fact is that the sacred story of which we are a part has rules. This means that good attempts to reach out to the sacred narrative which imbues the world with its ultimate meaning will track these rules, using particular symbols in the form of characters, tropes, and events. And indeed, we see in the narrative of Sacred Scripture the same threefold operation upon profane myth which grace has on nature: healing, elevating, and perfecting. As a result, it should not be surprising that we are somehow ourselves marked with an intuitive sense of the symbols which fill the great myths, and which even fill normal kinds of good literature. We want to tell certain kinds of stories because we are part of a story whose Divine Author is telling us to do so, whether in our nature somehow, or through the promptings of universal sufficient grace, or some combination of both. Here is not the place to explore how such a theory might respond to the theses of someone like Dupuis, but I simply note that this is a possible way to understand the “logos spermatikos,” the seeds of the Word, among the nations. The conclusion is that our mind is shaped in such a way as to recognize the hints of Christ’s truth, beauty, and goodness as hints – a point I am taking and appropriating from Fr. Pierre Rousselot.

I am concerned here with Christology – the entrance of the Author of the story into the story itself. I will focus exclusively on two great archetypes, which I think give us the beginnings of a psychological Christology: the hero and the trickster. I propose that we can understand Christ as a hylomorphic unity of these two opposing archetypes, with the hero as form and the trickster as matter. I will begin with the trickster archetype.

Claude Levy-Strauss posits that tricksters in mythology are frequently animals which eat carrion, that is, meat which is already dead. They are therefore not hunters, but they are not herbivores – they are something in-between, neither this nor that. We are inclined to be uncomfortable with figures like ravens or coyotes or vultures or snakes (and many snakes do in fact eat carrion) – we’d prefer things that we know do this or that, peaceful plant eaters or vicious hunter-killers. In fact, it is the object which they approach that unsettles us first: the corpse, the dead thing which was living. The trickster is one who cannot be trusted: he is the one who lies, who has petty motives, who will harm others for his own selfish gain, who wants to attain power over us, often by leading us into taking his own unfortunate place, such as by trapping us in a hole while climbing out of it himself. Certainly, this is not how Christ is, but we will return to this description momentarily.

Non-dietary ritual purity laws in Israel related to the state between life and non-life, or death. Thus anytime something seems to be related to crossing the divide between the two “worlds,” it is considered impure – neither this, nor that, something in between, something different. Things which cannot be categorized easily into the world of the living or the world of the “non-living” are to be rendered clearly one thing or the other. If a person becomes impure, such as through contact with a corpse, he or she must go through the symbolic stages of re-entering the world of the living. There is more to be said, but this will have to suffice – I simply point one to the thought that such a lens for studying the Passion and Resurrection could be quite illuminating.

Here are some actions of Christ which correspond to the trickster type: Shapeshifting (the Incarnation as the invisible taking a shape, the Eucharist as the visible becoming hidden in a new shape, the Resurrected Christ’s body changing into a glorified shape); Riddle-telling (parables, rhetorical responses); Gatekeeping (“I am the narrow gate,” etc.); Dwelling on the outskirts and going to the “in-between places,” which Levy-Strauss points out of coyotes, ravens, etc. (Christ does this during much of the public ministry, and especially in Bethany, just before and during Holy Week, the Garden of Gethsemane and the Mount of Olives, Golgotha, all just outside of Jerusalem; in-betweenness is found especially in the Baptismal site, which is in between “life and death”: Israel and the nations, the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea, in the jungle surrounded by desert, and then going down into water which gives and takes life, in the place which is in fact the lowest point on the planet by several hundred meters); Physical evasiveness (“He passed through the crowds,” etc.; tricksters are slippery and quick, like serpents); Touching impure things (i.e. the lepers, the woman with the hemorrhage, the dead girl – “Talitha koum” – just like eating carrion, but it is a spiritual eating); Working through chaos and shadow (in particular the miracles, which are always somehow hidden, whether by the confusion of a crowd as in the multiplications of loaves, or by the weather, as in the walking on the water, or by a wall, such as in the raising of Lazarus, and so on – it is not like jumping off the parapet of the Temple and being protected by the angels, there is room left for both doubt and for a  deeper encounter with the mystery being revealed on account of the need for faith to understand its proper meaning).

All of this symbolizes Christ’s space in our psychological weak spot – the uncanny valley, which is of course maxed out in the Resurrection, as exemplified by the fear which the Apostles experienced when they first saw Him in the Upper Room, thinking they were seeing a ghost. (Luke 24:37) He is the apex, the climax of the story, the way to the happy ending through an unsettling doorway called death. We are unsettled because we do not know what is there – we must ask, “What is it?” “Manna?” We learn in John 6 that Christ is in fact the true Manna, the true “what-is-it,” the real Mystery which provides the bridge between our deathward bios and the zoe of Heaven which shocks our psychology on account of the space whence He comes to us – but this fear is replaced by Paschal joy, when we see that He is not a ghost, or some kind of zombie, but Life itself come to us as a Friend Who will carry us safely across the divide, as our Viaticum.

But Christ is not a trickster, except in a material sense. By this I mean that it is how He works out His program among us, in particular among His contemporaries – our experience is quite different in that we have nice Chalcedonian definitions by which to understand Him. Not so for the Eleven gathered in the Upper Room, and yet in some way they understood Him much more. Christ uses these uncomfortable techniques to shake us out of the comfort of our present modus vivendi and drag us across the divide between bios and zoe – life here, and life in Heaven. He is the way there, and He is the life, zoe.  But He is also the Truth, so that leaves us wondering about the significance of Him qua trickster. In fact, the hero archetype, the formal part, gives us an entirely different lens by which to understand His trickster part. The heroic element inverts the entirety of the meaning of the trickster in Christ: instead of lying to gain power over us out of petty and selfish motives at our expense, He makes Himself weak, giving us power over Him, even to harm Him unto death, and His motive is grave, namely, to help us, especially freeing us by taking on our sorry lot Himself and revealing to us the truth. That’s a complete inversion.

Yet Christ still has and always had power over us. This is because He is God, but, in the narrative sense, He is first and foremost a hero. Heroes are powerful. This is his formal part. Christ qua hero is a theme much more explored than the trickster element, so I will only briefly examine it before returning to a consideration of the question of power.

I pass over Raglan’s 22 points of the heroic “mythotype,” though this is worth its own investigation, and I go instead directly to the “hero’s journey.” This “monomythic” narrative structure has been described by several authors, including most famously Joseph Campbell in The Hero With a Thousand Faces, where it was pioneered, but also by other more recent authors. The hero’s journey essentially consists in a departure from the home, where one is born and raised, to go on a quest of some sort; next, there is some kind of initiation or trial; finally, there is a return home. The quest is always successful – the enemies are thwarted, the magic sword or golden fleece is obtained, or some object which is too powerful is destroyed, like a ring or a sorcerer’s stone. Then the hero returns home triumphant. The parallels with Christ are almost too obvious to point out: it is the entire story of the Incarnation, the Public Ministry, the Cross, the Resurrection, and the Ascension.

It is important for Campbell, at least, that the hero begins in the ordinary world, and is then called to adventure, in a world of mysterious forces and challenges, only to return home to normalcy. Odysseus is a great example. But Christ is very unlike Odysseus – and I speak here just of the “call to adventure” which the Lord receives. His real call to adventure is summed up by St. Paul: “Not deeming equality with God something to be grasped at, He emptied Himself, taking on the form of a slave.” The visible mission of the Son in the Incarnation is the call to adventure. The world of men, unlike the normal hero stories, is not full of mysterious forces, it is full of mundane forces which are perfectly comprehended by the hero and are completely under His control. Then the Lord ascends into Heaven – Nazareth is not really His home.

The journey continues after the call to adventure, with its various stages, which Christ fulfills par excellence, and which for the sake of time I will pass over. The point is that the “hero” is His formal part – He is the one who can rescue us and bring us home with Him safely.

I wish to return to a consideration of power, specifically the power of Christ over our minds as a narrative figure. I note that Christ as a narrative figure has three modes – a mode which is inaccessible to us, another which is partially accessible to us, and another which is totally accessible to us. The first mode is as a flesh-and-blood historical figure during His earthly life and ministry. The second is as a figure who is spoken of by those who had encounters in the first mode, and of course for us this comes especially in the form of the Gospels and Acts. The third is as one with whom we live out our own lives now, and to whom we pray and make sacrifice. In each of these three modes, Christ exercises a unique kind of psychological power.

The first kind of power over humanity is as an uncategorizable figure. In the Public Ministry He was somehow “not this and not that” – again, “manna,” “What is it?” This ambiguity gave Him a power over His interlocutors, both the friendly ones and the unfriendly ones. We are threatened by what is ambiguous, what is “impure,” because we do not know how to treat it… We don’t know what to expect; everything is surprising. This is the trickster element coming to the fore.

The second kind of power is as the Hero which emerges as intellectual and spiritual keystone of human history. The story itself of the Gospels is compelling because it is the story our minds were built to receive and recognize as the “right narrative.” Here we see the hero most on display.

The third kind of power is as the Lord, our God, Who has ascended into Heaven, body and soul, and Who wants now to save us if we let Him. By encountering through prayer and the sacraments the One described in our creeds and in our liturgy, prescinding from the reading of the Scriptures, we get the doctrine of His salvific power. We are utterly helpless before the gaping maw of the abyss which stands beyond death. Only He can help us. To do this, those who are capable of human acts must in fact make the choice to invite Him into their lives. They must walk with Him, in a strange and sometimes very confusing way. He is here, there, everywhere, hiding… He plays a kind of game with us, a game which is ultimately ordered to our salvation if we “play along” and follow the rules. The hero and the trickster reveal themselves here together as a unity most forcefully. He is in hiding, changing shape, touching the impurities of our souls – but he is mighty to save, using that very hiddenness and ambiguity to our advantage and the ultimate advantage of all Creation and God’s own glory.

More research is called for into the Jungian psychological paradigm as a tool to sift through the Scriptures, taking the revealed data as “the story which God wants told,” the narrative which heals, elevates, and perfects pagan narratives – including, of course, the actual historical fulfillment of those stories and their figures. This kind of approach to Scripture is becoming more popular, but this seems to be primarily the case among non-Catholics, and non-theologians; we ought to take our cue from the popularity and power of these kinds of analyses as an opportunity for evangelization, in addition to an opportunity for deepening our own speculative understanding of Christ and our relationship with Him.

Why Women Can’t be Priests

Christian Renaissance Movement3 Comments

Eamonn Clark, STL

I recently had a lengthy exchange with a self-styled “feminist theologian.” We talked about a number of things, but of course we spoke about the perennially misunderstood issue of women’s ordination. Obviously, she was in favor. I was not.

I’ve ordered the famous text on women’s ordination by Fr. Manfred Hauke – as I don’t think this topic is going to be going away for another 20-30 years, and I want to understand it better. I look forward to reading it. In the meantime, here is the argument as I make it, in three parts. The definitive part is the revealed fact of the impossibility of ordaining women to the priesthood. (I will leave aside the question of women deacons, as it is actually slightly more complex; however, I would also argue that it is revealed that the entire sacrament of Holy Orders is reserved for men alone and that many of the arguments against women’s priesthood are operant in the solution to the question of women deacons – it’s just that the argument about the spousal relationship between the priest and the Church does not apply as strongly to the diaconate.) The theoretical part is the underlying theological and anthropological realities which order men toward this office and not women. The practical part is the circumstances of history which teach us about the will of God.

Definition

The universal ordinary magisterium (UOM) delivers us infallible teachings on faith and morals. This is a function of Christ’s promise to the Church, in the apostles, that the Holy Spirit would guide them “into all truth.” (John 16:13) What good is the Church as a teacher if She cannot guarantee that Her consistent and longstanding teaching and use are free from error in faith and morals? Since right belief is necessary for right love (“you can’t love what you don’t know,” etc.), a guarantee that the Church will be preserved from error in teaching is quite important. There are some borderline cases, but when the Church very consistently teaches and/or “uses” something over many centuries, the presumption must be that it is in fact part of UOM teaching and is thus infallible. (This differs from the ordinary magisterium of individual bishops, or of an individual pope, as I have explained elsewhere.) The fact that the Church has for so long and so consistently both taught that women cannot be ordained priests and has in fact not attempted this, since this has only been a practice among tiny groups cut off from mainstream ecclesiastical life and administration, indicates that this is a firm part of the UOM. This was forcefully explained by St. John Paul II in his text Ordinatio Sacerdotalis.

One can even make the argument, as one prominent American canonist does, that St. John Paul II actually used his extraordinary magisterium – the “papal infallibility” sort – when issuing that document, despite any statements to the contrary after the fact. It is an interesting argument, and it is possibly correct. However, we can at least state that it is a clear explanation of the UOM in a definitive way.

Theory

Men hunt, women gather. This is the basic dynamic between men and women from the dawn of civilization. It may mean something for understanding our diverse roles in ecclesiastical life.

In Eden, the man is created first. The woman comes from him, and this is a measure for how the order between men and women ought to be. St. Paul explains this very bluntly in two different sections of 1 Corinthians, with words that make the 21st century westerner bristle from the lack of political correctness. “A man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God; but woman is the glory of man. For man did not come from woman, but woman from man; neither was man created for woman, but woman for man. It is for this reason that a woman ought to have authority over her own head, because of the angels. Nevertheless, in the Lord woman is not independent of man, nor is man independent of woman. For as woman came from man, so also man is born of woman. But everything comes from God.” (1 Corinthians 11:7-12) He continues on in chapter 14: “Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church.” (1 Corinthians 14:34-35)

Almost predicting the present-day near-complete irrelevance of so-called “feminist theology,” Paul says in the conclusion of this section: “But if anyone ignores this, they will themselves be ignored.” (1 Corinthians 14:38)

Likewise, in 1 Timothy, we read: “A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner.” (1 Timothy 2:11-14) Obviously, Paul attributes original sin primarily to Adam (1 Corinthians 15:22), but the fact that it was the woman who was deceived by the Devil leaves the progeny of Eve who are of her sex to be without a claim over official public teaching about God and righteousness (faith and morals). Adam was not deceived – he knew better but was just plain evil in his disobedience and pride.

St. Paul also gives us an order between men and women in the domestic sphere: “Wives be subject to your husbands, as to the Lord. Because the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ is the head of the Church.” (Ephesians 5:22-23a) The corollary, explained immediately, is of course that men must love their wives as Christ loves the Church (which means immense self-denial, even unto laying down one’s life). It’s better seen as the relief of a burden for women, and a challenge for men.

All of this is to say that St. Paul does not believe in “women’s equality” in practical, temporal affairs. Thus, neither does the Church nor Her faithful children. However, temporal affairs are only the means to the end. When Paul says there is “no longer male nor female” in Galatians 3:28, he speaks of the reality that God is not a “respecter of persons.” (Cf. Acts 10:34, Romans 2:11) One’s love of God, and subsequent merit with Him, is completely independent of what station one has in this life. The greatest saint, the holiest human person ever to walk the earth, was a woman – Mary, the Mother of God. She was not complaining about “not being equal,” and now she is Queen of Heaven and Earth.

If women are not permitted to teach in the Church on account of Eve, what is the implication for men? By inversion, we see that Adam’s sin provides the paradigm for the debt which men owe to God. Instead of defending his bride from the serpent (the text of Genesis implies he was standing right next to her when she was deceived), Adam was negligent and subsequently proud by direct disobedience. As part of the curse which Adam is put under, he must toil for his food. Additionally, Adam owes an infinite debt, and all humanity with him, on account of his enormous and special sin. This can only be done by offering something infinitely good back to God. We can certainly offer our own lives, as baptized Christians (the “priesthood of the baptized”), but we are of finite goodness. No number of finite sacrifices equals an infinite sacrifice.

From these points alone we can derive a strong argument for the reservation of the priesthood to men. It is the man’s special burden to make up for what Adam consciously failed to do – to offer himself as a sacrifice for his bride, putting himself between her and the Devil. This is the Mass, where the priest acts in the very person of Christ, offering the perfect sacrifice of Christ Himself on the Cross, by which work (“liturgy” literally means “work”) he procures the spiritual food of the Eucharist for him and his spiritual children. The progeny of Adam who share his sex are responsible for offering the infinite Sacrifice of Christ to atone for their first father’s sin, and for those of himself and the whole Church militant (Earth) and suffering (Purgatory), and to keep Christ’s Bride, the Church, in the souls of Her children, from succumbing to the forces of evil by begging God’s help through succoring Him through the means of this same sacrifice, in addition to offering their very selves in service for the People of God. It is this particular kind of imaging of Christ, precisely as the New Adam, which requires a man, rather than a woman.

There are other theoretical considerations. They are at least twofold: first, that men have a more positive religious inertia than women; second, men are more ordered toward public life than women.

We can notice a few facts, confirmed by empirical study. Women who are pious are generally unable to be pulled downward by their impious husbands, but nor can they pull their impious husbands upward. Women who are impious are generally easily able to pull down weakly pious men. (Thus the Torah’s stronger insistence on men not marrying foreign wives than women not marrying foreign husbands.) On the other hand, impious women are usually easily pulled upward by pious men. This teaches us something about the role of the male in religion: he is by nature meant to lead. It perfects him as a man. Leadership in religion does not correspond to perfecting the woman nearly to the same degree. This is intuitively sensed by children especially, who are far more likely to go to church their whole lives if dad goes than if just mom goes. The example is more psychologically moving, for whatever reason. Therefore, while there are plenty of screw-ups in the priesthood, at least they are male screw-ups. The bad men do less damage than bad women would, and the good men do more good than good women would.

This corresponds with the reality that men are generally more ordered to public life in general. This is for three kinds of reasons: biological, physiological, and psychological. First, the biological. Men do not need to be at home when having a child – the woman does, out of physical necessity. This limits the amount of public engagement that women can have over the course of their life. They cannot make long commitments to delicate, serious, long-term, time-intensive, and physically taxing work that men can. Next, the physiological. Men are bigger, faster, and stronger than women. Once again, men hunt, women gather. The demands of public life at the higher levels are extremely difficult for men to meet well, even though they have the propensity to endure more laborious conditions and be more intimidating to competitors. It is nearly impossible for women, except in special circumstances. This bread-winning gives men a kind of presumptive right to make more decisions about the common welfare of the society in which they live, as they are more effective in managing its affairs, will be called on to do so more often as a result, and are more familiar with what the public sphere is really like. Finally, the psychological. Men are by nature more aggressive and focused than women. They are also more drawn to dealing with problems and tasks related to “things” which they can “fix.” Women excel more with “people problems” which require empathy and high emotional intelligence. The male psychology is therefore much better suited to handling high-pressure situations which call for focus, aggression, and problem-solving ability. (Women, however, can perhaps more easily excel in those public affairs which are purely diplomatic in nature.)

This is not to say that women can’t be good leaders. But it is much harder for them to be effective administrators of public affairs at a high level, especially if they are bearing children. The priesthood is a public office of the Church which intrinsically involves administration, even if the priest is not actually an administrator of anything. (To drive home this point, a priest ordained on his death bed would still be conformed to Christ in view of sanctification and teaching, even if he never actually celebrates the sacraments or teaches anything.) Since the priesthood is a public administrative function in the Church, it is much more fitting that only men occupy the office. While there are some women who would be competent, the point is that the general higher competence of men for public affairs indicates the appropriateness of men alone being able to occupy the office.

Practice

I was informed in my discussion with my feminist friend that actually the reason why there weren’t women priests in the early Church was because of a rigid patriarchal culture in the Roman world, such that it was too difficult to have such women priests in practice. They wouldn’t have been accepted by all those sexist males who wanted to dominate the women because of their evolution-driven urge to do so. But now, she argued, women are socially equal and so should be free to be ordained.

There are two huge problems with this argument from a purely practical point of view, leaving aside the Eurocentrism (or Western-centrism) which animates the thought that women are now socially equal to men, as in most of the world that thought is laughable.

First of all, one must assume that the apostles and their immediate disciples had a serious lack of courage to proclaim the Gospel in its entirety, which would naturally include the right ordering of liturgical worship. Given that these men and women usually knew that the lions likely awaited them in the arena if they were found out by the unfriendly emperor (etc.), this argument is laughable. If one is refusing to worship the local deities, such as in Rome, one becomes an enemy of the state. (The classical pagan pantheons were often seen as being integral to the flourishing of civil society – so appeasing them was important enough to legally enforce the practice of offering sacrifice to them. To refuse to do so was like fomenting insurrection.) One would have to state that St. Peter or St. Andrew, for example, were fine with being martyred for preaching unique salvation in Christ, but it was just a step too far for them to have a woman presiding at the altar. It does not make sense psychologically, and it is even mildly blasphemous.

The second problem is even more fatal. The fact is that presiding at liturgies was one of the only major public functions which women held in the ancient Mediterranean world. Rome, Greece, Persia, Egypt… They all had priestesses in their various cultic paradigms. If Christians had priestesses, this would have been utterly uncontroversial. So the fact that the early local churches did not produce priestesses, as evidenced by the complete absence of any documentation of such a practice, especially the non-existence of a tradition of priestesses enduring after the apostolic age, indicates that it was a conscious choice (or a complete non-choice which merely recognized the right practice and implicitly rejected the wrong practice) that came from something intrinsic to Christianity rather than a decision made from external coercion.

The synthesis of the feminist argument about rigid patriarchy and the early Church: the apostles and their first disciples were so cowardly that they were ready to face martyrdom over preaching Christ, except for allowing for a practice which was totally uncontroversial in the surrounding culture. This is about as good as a reductio ad absurdum can get.

The problem gets even worse when applied to Christ. If it is mildly blasphemous to suggest that the apostle St. Bartholomew was fine being skinned alive but just not for taking the risk of putting women in their God-given place at the altar (despite that being the norm in the pagan world), then it comes close to serious blasphemy to suggest that the Lord was constrained by cultural paradigms in commissioning the first priests in the Upper Room at the Last Supper. If the incarnate Son of God is so beholden to cultural norms of patriarchy that He just can’t find a way around it, then He’s not God. As St. John Paul II explains in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, the Lord acted with total freedom in choosing only men to be conformed to Him as priests. In fact, the more natural choice would have been to choose all the women who were much more faithful to Him. Instead, He consciously chose a bunch of men, most of whom would abandon Him – with one selling Him in an act of betrayal, and the leader of them all denying Him three times within earshot. So clearly the Lord is unconcerned with the “natural choice.” Had He chosen the women, they would have been easily accepted by the ancient world as cultic leaders. True, as teachers it would have been more of a struggle, but as soon they had started healing the blind and raising the dead, people would have listened. God can teach and preach through whomever He wants – through rough, uneducated fishermen, or through women. They were both naturally unfit for the task of conquering the Mediterranean world. And yet conquer it they did.

Conclusion

Women’s ordination is likely to be a peripheral pastoral concern for the next generation, but it seems to be reducing in popularity. This is because those younger women who are attracted to serious Catholic life are not swept up with the cultural revolutionary sentiments of the 1960’s and 70’s. They may even perceive that the idea of “women in the workplace” as it’s been tried over the past 50 years has not been the liberating blessing that women were told it would be. And vanishingly few men are concerned with this perceived “inequality problem.”

The most attractive daughters of Christ are those who fully embrace their femininity – to be happy to love the Lord and their husband (perhaps one and the same) and embrace that most fundamental of virtues, obedience, in a special way. They realize they are off the hook, by and large, for worrying about the affairs of the world and of the Church. They focus on their own sons and daughters, their own neighbors, and their own selves, to make saints. While men must usually hunt in order to realize their full potential as men, normally women need only to gather.

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.

Taparelli: 150 Years Later

Christian Renaissance Movement3 Comments

Eamonn Clark, STL

Yesterday was the 150th anniversary of the death of Fr. Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio, SJ. (I thought it was today, but – apparently not!) My time is short right now but I could not let this moment go by without some brief acknowledgement of this man and his work.

He is the grandfather of Catholic social teaching. He pioneered Catholic theories on mediating associations, the living wage, subsidiarity, “social justice,” and the character of international affairs. He led the charge among the emerging “neo-Thomist” school in Italy, first in Rome, then in Naples where he was exiled, then in Sicily where he was further exiled. He was rehabilitated by Pius IX, who put him as a founding co-editor of the Jesuit journal La Civiltà Cattolica, which is still in print today.

His most famous student, who was in a semi-clandestine after school club at the Roman College devoted to reading St. Thomas, was Giacchino Pecci, the future Pope Leo XIII.

His works remain almost entirely untranslated, except for the French edition of his magnum opus, “Theoretical Wisdom of Natural Right Based on Fact,” which is as difficult to read as it sounds, notwithstanding the old Italian prose. There is some work being done to bring this text into the English language. I can’t wait… it will be really special.

Taparelli was decidedly a 19th century conservative, meaning, he rejected entirely the ideas motivating the French Revolution, which set him in opposition to many of his peers. Further, his close connections with the Italian peninsula’s political elite (including his own brother), coupled with his intellectual eclecticism and bold attempts to re-introduce St. Thomas into seminary formation, made him a lightning rod. So controversial was he that not even Leo XIII cited him in any text, despite the unmistakable influence, an influence that ran even into Pius XI as well. Pius thought that the theologian to read, after St. Thomas, was Taparelli.

For a meaningful introduction to Taparelli, his era, and his work, I recommend Thomas Behr’s recently released book.

We owe quite a bit to this man. I find it inappropriate to pass over this occasion without acknowledging him – and perhaps offering a prayer for his soul, though he is likely in no need.

Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him. May his soul and the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.

Some Thoughts on Papal Resignations – and “BiP”

Christian Renaissance Movement2 Comments

Eamonn Clark, STL

Speculation abounds as to the possibility of a Francis resignation very soon, what with all the things going on – an extraordinary consistory, seemingly frantic reforms, a potentially symbolic trip to L’Aquila, and his unfortunately and obviously declining health – but on the other hand, he is still making plans for various travels in the future, after August. Bizarre.

Given the occasion, I have some thoughts on the idea of papal resignations in general which I thought I’d share.

To begin with, I think it is extremely clear that Benedict XVI validly resigned the papacy, and I believe just as well that Francis was validly elected. I have talked about this on these pages twice, here and here. I also point the reader to Steven O’Reilly’s work on the topic, of Benedict’s resignation in particular, which is extensive. See also Prof. Feser’s work on this.

When one looks at the text of the Declaratio, especially together with the text of Normas Nonnullas, published shortly afterward, it seems to be quite clear that, despite whatever theories Cardinal Ratzinger privately entertained about a “bifurcation” of the papacy before his election (which he apparently did), this is simply not what he intended, given his public words.

I would add too a canonical observation: it seems that categories like “substantial error” and “grave fear/coercion” with respect to papal resignations have a higher bar to clear than with respect the resignation of other offices. The famous “Beal Commentary” on the 1983 CIC talks about substantial error in resignations as being either from cause/motive, or from the essential character of resignation/its effects. So, cause or effect. The example given is a diocesan finance officer who mistakenly thinks he must resign upon the appointment of a new bishop, when he actually does not need to do so. Such a resignation is invalid from its cause. The case with the Benedict XVI bifurcation theory would be an error of effect, supposing, as I do, that the papacy, being the exterior and visible sign of ecclesiastical unity, cannot be split into two offices, one contemplative, one active, or one as “Bishop of Rome” and one as “Vicar of Christ,” despite the fact that St. Peter was simultaneously pope and not the Bishop of Rome… Ever since, they have been linked, a custom which seems to be sanctioned by Divine law, given the obvious facts that 1, St. Peter became Bishop of Rome while he, an apostle, was still alive, thus allowing for revelation to occur publicly, which at least opens the possibility of the existence of a revealed (but not explicitly defined) datum that the ecclesiastical control of Rome is intrinsically linked to the papacy, and 2, the Church has been organized this way in every single case since St. Peter, even when popes have lived outside of Rome (i.e. Viterbo, Gaeta, Avignon), thus suggesting the existence of a Divine law of such an intrinsic link in reality.

So, if Benedict XVI really had this bifurcation thought in mind, despite publicly giving every indication to the contrary, he would indeed seem to have had what would normally be a substantial error that would suffice for the invalidity of resignation. An analogy would be a diocesan bishop saying, “I will resign the ministry of my episcopate over this diocese, but I will still retain the right to ordain licitly, by my own authority, the diocesan clergy of this diocese.” The two go hand in hand, and they cannot be separated. But when one deals with something as important as the papacy, merely ecclesiastical law – viz., the laws regulating the validity of resignations or the loss of office more generally – must be seen in relation to the Divine laws which govern what the papacy is, and they must be seen in the light of the immense importance of the papacy for the health of the universal Church. The “hermeneutic of common sense” is very important… If one pope stops pope-ing, and another guy starts pope-ing, then the strong presumption has to be that the second guy is pope. In the history of the Church, there have been clear cases of false papal claimants, and there have been cases which were less clear, such as in the Western schism… But then there have been cases which, to us with our fancy CIC, would seem clearly to be cases of anti-popes usurping power, such as due to exile or simony (both of which happened with Benedict IX – who then left office for a third time by abdication, dying repentant in a monastery)… Well, here is some common sense: if another guy started pope-ing, and the Church went along with it, then the second guy was pope. It seems God sanctions the common sense hermeneutic when it becomes too difficult to know otherwise who is in fact the Successor of St. Peter. So, even accepting the hypothesis that Benedict XVI was pressured in this way or that, and had a rather significantly erroneous understanding of the papacy which informed his intentions in abdicating, his resignation would not therefore have been necessarily invalid. Anyway, that is my take.

All this stuff brings me to the next point. Popes should not resign. It’s a bad idea. It causes so much confusion, even schism. Benedict said his strength was failing him to such a degree he felt he couldn’t do the job well enough anymore – he had seen what was done by opportunists while John Paul II was dying, and he didn’t want it to happen under him… But somehow, the Church has gotten along just fine for millennia with popes who died in office, likely some who were for a long while in hospice, perhaps popes so decrepit they couldn’t even speak, and probably a handful of popes who even slipped into dementia or suffered from Alzheimer’s. The difference is, in fact, the precedent set by John Paul II especially, and to some extent his immediate predecessors (especially Paul VI). The papacy has not normally been what these men lived it as – traveling here and there, speaking publicly all the time, and being deeply involved in the affairs of the worldwide Church (such as personally appointing every bishop). It does have its advantages, but it also brings large risks with it… If popes were to recede more into the background, with a real and healthy kind of decentralization of power, gathering truly exemplary men to assist them in the curia, then there would be fewer problems with popes staying in office with declining health, whether it’s physical health, mental health, or both.

Anyway, we pray for Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, and for Pope Francis, and his successors.

The Castration of a Sacrament

Christian Renaissance Movement

Eamonn Clark, STL

As subscribers might be picking up on, I have reached a point where I am starting to speak my mind a bit. This is for a few reasons. Thankfully, I am still prudent enough to keep those to myself… for now.

I have noted with interest since the Pan-Amazon synod the tendency of many “influential” figures in the Church to empty the sacrament of Holy Orders of one of its characteristic dimensions, or offices (“munera”)…

When Jesus is visited by the three Wise Men, they bring Him gifts representing His three offices, as Eternal High Priest: myrrh, representing priesthood or sanctification, frankincense, representing prophecy or teaching, and gold, representing kingship or governance.

As Ven. Fulton Sheen points out in one of the most mature of his works, “Those Mysterious Priests,” every priest is a “little Christ.” He participates in the ministry of Christ the Eternal High Priest. These “little Christs” therefore inherit His offices. They too are given gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

Today, some want the gold to be withheld.

We saw this on display in the Pan-Amazon Synod in the suggestions of “reshaping” or “rethinking” the governance of the Amazonian local churches. Laity ought to be able to rule over the ecclesiastical territories and goods, while priests simply move around to preach and administer the sacraments… so goes the suggestion.

This is an attack on the integrity of the sacrament of Holy Orders. It is, in fact, a castration.

Let me put it bluntly. One of the deeper reasons why women cannot be priests is that it is more fitting for men to hold positions of governance. That’s not to say that women can never be good leaders, or should never be in charge of public affairs, etc. – but it is to say that this is a deviation from the norm, and world history bears this out. (I leave aside, perhaps for another time, the Western cultural experiment of women “in the workplace” in the sense proper to the West after the industrial revolution. In my opinion, it has not gone well.) The superiority of men for rule is for numerous reasons – psychological, physiological, sociological, and protological (these latter explaining or verifying the others). This hard truth flies in the face of contemporary Western culture, and yet it is right there in St. Paul’s exegesis of Genesis (1 Corinthians 11 – a complex text, for sure, but there is no getting around certain conclusions), among other places in Scripture. And it accords with the common experience and observation of basically all ages and cultures in world history. Men hunt, women gather – that means something for how society is going to work, let alone flourish. More physical strength and subsequent risk taken, more knowledge of the territory, more freedom when raising a child… it all entails a certain kind of right and fittingness to govern. And this is in fact the pattern even before real civilization began. It continues now, though it is a bit more complex.

The protological truths are where really good spiritual reflections can start. For instance, St. Thomas argues1 that a helper is made for Adam (who came first) primarily with respect to generation – he cannot populate the Earth by himself. Men and women, let it be known, have exponentially different capacities for generation. A man can rather easily have thousands of children in a lifetime and have plenty of time for other things (look at some of the pharaohs); a woman can have a few dozen. That is part of why, as I explored recently, polygamy only ever worked one way in the Bible, on account of the benefit of propagating the human race and propagating the Chosen People in particular. So, this is part of the natural power of Adam, and of males: to propagate the human race. Women are critical assistants in this essential task, but they have a far weaker power of generation. That is just biology.

This biological element of the dynamic between men and women in the context of Eden (along with some other elements which I won’t explore today) is a symbol for what the priesthood is. It is an office whereby spiritual propagation occurs by the personal grace of Christ working through the priest, in the Church, His Bride. Sure, Christ’s grace works instrumentally through any person helping another to be more virtuous, but the instrumentality of the priest is different – it is by his own rational initiative that he exercises his priestly ministry as such, infallibly calling upon God to work in him and through him. Like Joshua made the sun stand still, the priest celebrates the sacraments. “There has never been a day like it before or since, when the LORD listened to the voice of a man, because the LORD was fighting on behalf of Israel.” (Joshua 10:14) Really, it is more like when Christ prays to the Father to have a miracle worked, such as the raising of Lazarus: “So they rolled the stone aside. Then Jesus looked up to heaven and said, ‘Father, thank you for hearing me. You always hear me, but I said it out loud for the sake of all these people standing here, so that they will believe you sent me.‘ Then Jesus shouted, ‘Lazarus, come out!’ And the dead man came out, his hands and feet bound in graveclothes, his face wrapped in a headcloth. Jesus told them, ‘Unwrap him and let him go!'” (John 11: 41-44) This is unlike the charity expressed in a kind word which efficaciously moves a soul to repentance – the causal structure is different. The person who is merely baptized does not “demand” the movement of grace in such an action.

Now, not only is celibacy under attack from those who cannot understand spiritual fatherhood and its ascetic components due either to worldliness, or bad theological education, or sinful lives of their own which they are trying to justify somehow, or outright contempt for the good of the Church, or a combination of these things; the governing function of clergy is being questioned at the highest levels of the Church Militant as well. Often, the same people will put forward both of these two very bad ideas. And, in the extreme cases, they might also propose that women be ordained.

See how it works? See where the root is?

All these things go back (at least in part) to misunderstanding the principle of Adam’s rule over Eve, in relation to Christ’s rule over the Church. Adam is a priest too, a kind of natural priest, the firstborn of material, rational, natural creation – extended later on in Scripture through the so-called “primogeniture” (firstborn) priesthood. Eve is his bride. That spousal dominion, which is “economic” rather than “servile,” we should note, preceded the Fall… it is not a result of sin. Thus, Christ, the New Adam, is a male. Those who participate singularly in His priesthood, who by their office represent His very Person in the administration of grace, truth, and POWER, must be male (and should ideally be celibate, concerned only with spiritual propagation, like Christ).

So we can now see an issue with Cardinal-elect Ghirlanda’s bewildering statement about the new possibility of laity running Roman dicasteries – he argues that it is not a problem, because the “power of governance in the Church does not come from the sacrament of Orders,” but rather from the “canonical mandate,” which, if he didn’t realize it, will always come back to a cleric, whether the parish priest, the local bishop, or the pope. So… the question must be raised… could the pope appoint a lay “vicar for global Church governance” who in practice governs all the world’s bishops, while the pope plays billiards or something? While it is obviously not ideal, is it even possible in theory? It is not so clear. Nor is it clear if the alarming centralization of power in the papacy (pace all the talk about “synodality” and “decentralization”) in the past year or so is entirely legitimate in principle. Understanding what popes are, and what popes are not, which in turn determines their legitimate power and authority, is hopefully going to be a major theological and legal fruit of the period in between Blessed Pope Pius IX and Pope Francis – the period from those who were alive during Vatican I to those who were alive during Vatican II. This age has also seen the end of lay involvement in conclaves (the ius exclusivae) with Pius X – a topic not unrelated to this, but one too complex to broach here, as it opens a very beefy can of worms related to investiture (who chooses/appoints bishops).

As some have already begun to point out, the announcement of – and thankfully, not yet the use of – the “Ghirlandian governance principle” is an attempt at a major revolution in the understanding of Holy Orders and the Church as such, and it seems to run up against the teaching of the Second Vatican Council (in Lumen Gentium specifically), and the Code of Canon Law, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church… While Vatican II is a pastoral and not a dogmatic council, it is also not simply an ideological cafeteria. It is especially annoying when the same people want to appeal to the allegedly unquestionable wisdom and authority of every part of and practical effect of the Second Vatican Council when it suits their agenda, and then jettison things like this because it is not useful to their own ends. (NB: I am not accusing Fr. Ghirlanda of this.)

It turns out that many good clergy resent laity telling them how to govern ecclesiastical affairs on account of those laity being set over those clergy… If we are in fact to follow the teaching of Vatican II, they apparently have got a right sense of their sacramental character. Like Eve is to Adam, laity are critical assistants and cooperators, and they can obviously be great saints, which is the most important thing… but ecclesiastical rule properly belongs to those conformed to Christ in Holy Orders. There could perhaps be individual and extraordinary exceptions in particular cases, but it is not and never can be the norm. To argue otherwise is a castration of the sacrament.

Once again, for my readers in the Second Cycle – this would be a good thesis topic. Distinguishing ecclesiastical governance properly speaking from other kinds of governance (i.e. in religious life) would be a part of such a study.

1 – The biological errors that St. Thomas makes do not destroy the overall argument. Adam didn’t need someone to talk to – he was already talking with God. He needs help making others like himself. Yes, this opens a discussion of why he wants to do this, but the basic point is not therefore fundamentally destroyed.

Who led the reform – Bugnini, or the Holy Spirit?

Christian Renaissance Movement4 Comments

Eamonn Clark, STL

Cardinal-Elect Arthur Roche, Prefect of the Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, has given an interview. It is worth reading, primarily for the following paragraph.

So, all that is taking place is the regulation of the former liturgy of the 1962 Missal by stopping the promotion of that, because it was clear that the Council, the Bishops of the Council, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, were putting forward a new liturgy for the vital life of the Church, for its vitality. And that’s really very important. And to resist that is, is something that is really quite serious, too.

Never mind that the Council didn’t itself reform the liturgy, nor that it was never suggested to create a “new liturgy” but simply have a restoration of sorts. The overall attitude/vision of Roche put forward here is congruent with the speech given by Pope Francis in 2017 to Italian liturgists. Anyone who is interested in what is happening right now in the world of Catholic liturgy absolutely MUST (re)read this speech. It is like an intellectual tell-all. This is the speech where he made one of the oddest statements perhaps ever uttered in public by a Roman pontiff: “After this magisterium, after this long journey, We can affirm with certainty and with magisterial authority that the liturgical reform is irreversible.”

The men leading this charge think that the work of the Consilium ad exsequendam Constitutionem de Sacra Liturgia (or just “the Consilium”), the liturgical committee which was commissioned by the Second Vatican Council to implement the document Sacrosanctum Concilium, was inspired by the Holy Spirit.

The claim of inspiration is not about the document, Sacrosancutm Concilium, which is a huge claim on its own, especially given the “pastoral” as opposed to “doctrinal” character of the Council, as Ratzinger/Benedict XVI pointed out;1 it seems very much to be the work of the Consilium which is being claimed to have inspiration. This sort of claim is without any precedent in the entire liturgical history of the Church, as far as I can tell – do correct me if I am wrong. Nobody claims that their liturgical reforms are “inspired” by the Holy Spirit, and traditionally liturgical developments are seen as being “protected” (a weaker influence of the Holy Spirit) only in special cases, like the commemoration of saints or generally the teaching content of prayers when adopted for a long time in a great number of places. What happens in liturgical reforms throughout the ages is that the general custom of the Church, in Her liturgy, is guided somewhat by the Holy Spirit, overall away from the introduction of error and toward the edification of souls, in the long-term – or something very close to this. Because the liturgy is the public worship of God by the Church, it stands to reason that God would be invested in its development and growth towards a form which more and more adequately reveals and instructs about the mysteries which it contains, including through legitimately diverse forms (i.e., the Eastern liturgies). This process, after the Last Supper, has gradually come to occur typically through minor reforms of bits and pieces of the liturgy, done in tandem with the growth of local liturgical customs. As the centuries have gone on, these changes have become smaller and less frequent.

Suffice it to say, what occurred in the late 1960’s at the Consilium was a bit different. The dishonesty of Archbishop Annibale Bugnini, who spearheaded the work of the Consilium, was sufficient to get him banished to Iran by the same pope who commissioned him in the first place, St. Paul VI.

Knowing the history of these things is no longer optional for anyone who is involved in theology, or in public ecclesiastical life.

There is a nice 3-part series being put out right now which I would encourage readers to watch. The first two episodes are out – PART 1, and PART 2. It is not a perfect production – on several levels – but as an introduction to the the old liturgy, the history of the reform, and what exactly is going on right now, it is helpful. One of the gems comes from the second episode, where the textual changes to the liturgy are shown graphically:

The thought that the Holy Spirit has any direct involvement with major liturgical reforms done by committees, let alone inspires such reforms, which is a category that only properly applies to the original writing of Sacred Scripture, is entirely novel. May I suggest that the ideas of some men about how to change the text and rubrics of one slice of the Church’s liturgy (the Latin/Western slice) are not equivalent with the words of Isaiah, or Genesis, or Matthew. The language we use to talk about these things matters. If Scripture is inspired, and the work of the Consilium is inspired, then how do they differ in authority?

Go read Francis’ speech. Pay attention.

For those readers of mine in higher theological studies – especially if you are looking for a good topic for a dogma STL thesis – start considering what the role of the Holy Spirit is in liturgical reforms. One can make various distinctions, such as inspiration vs. protection vs. providence, etc., which would be relevant. It is the most timely sort of topic, and it is sorely needed. This tension is not going to be swept away by the next pope, one way or the other. It will be here for a while. We may as well settle in, and we would be fools not to arm ourselves with knowledge.

We must also pray and fast for our bishops, including our Holy Father, Pope Francis.

1 – “The Second Vatican Council has not been treated as a part of the entire living Tradition of the Church, but as an end of Tradition, a new start from zero. The truth is that this particular council defined no dogma at all, and deliberately chose to remain on a modest level, as a merely pastoral council; and yet many treat it as though it had made itself into a sort of superdogma which takes away the importance of all the rest.” – Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Benedict XVI), July 13, 1988 (Santiago, Chile)