Position Papers - October 2016

A review of Catholic affairs

Can the Pope change Catholic teaching on contraception?

Sherif Girgis

Apologist, Catechists, Theologians: Wake up!

Bishop Robert Barron

Number 502 · October 2016 €3 · £2.50 · $4

Film review: Snowden

John Mulderig

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Number 502 · October 2016 Editorial

by Rev. Gavan Jennings

Can the Pope change Catholic teaching on contraception? He won’t. Because he can’t. And hasn’t.

by Sherif Girgis

Benedict the Brave: The Regensburg Address Ten Years Later

by James Day

Christianity without nostalgia

by Thomas Pink

The waning of democracy in Ireland Fr Kevin O’Reilly, OP

Apologist, Catechists, Theologians: Wake up!

by Bishop Robert Barron

Book review: Life’s Journey: A Guide from Conception to Growing Up, Growing Old, and Natural Death

by Rev. John McCloskey

Film review: Snowden

by John Mulderig

Editor: Assistant editors: Subscription manager: Secretary: Design:

2 6 15 22 28 31 36 38

Rev. Gavan Jennings Michael Kirke, Pat Hanratty, Brenda McGann Liam Ó hAlmhain Dick Kearns Víctor Díaz

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Editorial O

ur cover story this month is “Love for the Pope”, referring principally to our article from the American theologian Sherif Girgis clarifying – as if it really needs clarifying – that Pope

Francis is not changing, nor could he change, Church teaching on the immorality of contraception. In the aftermath of a certain amount of confusion regarding Amoris Laetitia there has been much debate about what is going on here. Debate and clarification are fine of course, but unfortunately it is increasingly common to hear or read comments from Catholics which refer to the Pope with diffidence and sometimes, sadly in ways bordering on derogatory. In spreading their own “little faith” in this way, those blogging Catholics are doing something gravely harmful to the Church. Recently Pope Francis himself reminded the Church that “The devil has two very powerful weapons to destroy the Church: divisions and money” (Santa Marta chapel, Sept. 11, 2016).

I thought it might be helpful to recall the teaching and example of St Josemaria Escriva regarding the relationship which holds between the Roman Pontiff and the Catholic faithful. He speaks of the love which Catholics should have for the Pope with crystalline clarity, moved perhaps by the post-conciliar confusion in this regard: he lived through the early years of the post-conciliar crisis and its rebellious rejection of the authority of the papacy, both from the liberal wing as well as from the schismatic Lefebvrist movement.

St Josemaria’s characterises the relationship between the Catholic faithful and their Holy Father as above all a relationship of love, and only secondly one of obedience or submission. Quite often he speaks of a hierarchy of what he terms “the three loves” of a Catholic: firstly God, secondly the Blessed Virgin Mary and thirdly the Pope. For instance in Forge he writes: “Your deepest love, your greatest esteem, your most heartfelt veneration, your most complete obedience and your warmest affection have also to be shown towards the Vicar of Christ on earth, towards the Pope. We Catholics should consider that after God and the most Blessed Virgin, our Mother, the Holy Father comes next in the hierarchy of love and authority” (Forge, 135. Italics mine throughout).

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For him the devotion of the faithful to the Holy Father must be warmhearted and affectionate, not servile or simply obeisant. He asks us to have “real affection” for the Pope: “May the daily consideration of the heavy burden which weighs on the Pope and the bishops move you to venerate and love them with real affection, and to help them with your prayers” (Forge, 136). And indeed such affection characterised his own love for the Holy Father, as observed by the Prelate of Opus Dei, Bishop Javier Echevarría, who lived alongside St Josemaria for many years: His joy when he was actually in the Pope’s presence was immense. I could see that whenever I went with him to an audience with the Pope…. Msgr. Escriva used to ask us to pray very hard for the Pope and love him very much, and show him our affection, because we ought always to see the Pope as the successor of Saint Peter, il dolce Cristo in terra, the “sweet Christ on earth”…. I very soon saw how continually Saint Josemaría renewed the offering of his life for the Pope, in readiness to give his life at any moment, with the grace of God…. He was made deeply happy by whatever made the Pope happy, and he likewise suffered when the Pope was suffering (Echevarría, Javier & Bernal, Salvador, Memoria del Beato Josemaría Escrivá (hereafter MBJE)).

His devotion to the Pope was truly filial and in no way reduced to a servile obedience or submission. He frequently used expressions like “the common Father” or “the house of the common Father” to refer to the Pope or the Apostolic See. St Josemaria recommended that Catholics should accept the Pope’s words with an acceptance which is “religious, humble, internal and effective” (Forge, 133), in other words, acceptance of the Pope’s teaching cannot be restricted to those matters which have been solemnly defined in some way or other. In this of course he was not recommending anything new but echoing Church teaching regarding the “religious assent” due to the Magisterium of the Church. The Second Vatican Council’s Lumen Gentium 25a teaches, for instance, that, “In matters of faith and morals, the bishops speak in the name of Christ and the faithful are to accept their teaching and adhere to it with a religious assent. This religious submission of mind and will must be shown in a special way to the authentic magisterium of the Roman Pontiff, even when he is not speaking ex cathedra”. The same passage of Lumen Gentium points out that the mind and will of the Pope “may be known either from the character of the documents, from his frequent repetition of the same doctrine, or from his manner of speaking.”

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The attitude of the founder of Opus Dei with regard to the Pope was marked by a profound humility, as Bishop Echevarría notes: “… when he was in the presence of the Holy Father he was genuinely moved, and he never tried to hide or to overcome that sensation. And he was also delighted when he got permission for me, as secretary, to go and greet the Pope, the Successor of Peter. He always told me the same thing: ‘Fall on your knees, and make the most of those moments to show your love and veneration, and to increase your prayer for and union with the Pope, the Vicar of Christ.’”

Furthermore he desired that this religious, humble and internal acceptance of the Pope’s teaching would not end there, but that it would bear fruit in action: “Faithfulness to the Pope includes a clear and definite duty: that of knowing his thought, which he tells us in Encyclicals or other documents. We have to do our part to help all Catholics pay attention to the teaching of the Holy Father, and bring their everyday behaviour into line with it.” (Forge 633).

This striking devotion of St Josemaria to the figure of the Roman Pontiff is based on sound theology rather than sentiment. While he was personally acquainted with Pope Pius XII, Pope John XXIII and Pope Paul VI, all of whom held the founder of Opus Dei in very high regard, he always asserted that the faithful should love the Pope, whoever he may be, “with a love that should be always more theological” (Furrow, 353).

The Pope he says, “is the foundation stone of the Church and, throughout the centuries, right to the end of time, he carries out among men that task of sanctifying and governing which Jesus entrusted to Peter” (Forge, 134). He was in no doubt as to the importance of the papacy; without the Pope we lose the Church, and without the Church we lose salvation: “… for where Peter and the Church are, there Christ is; and he is salvation, the only way”. And he quotes some words of Saint Ambrose to this effect: “Where Peter is, there is the Church; and where the Church is, not death, but eternal life reigns.” For where Peter and the Church are, there Christ is; and he is salvation, the only way” (Homily Loyalty to the Church, given on June 4, 1972).

With his deeply theological understanding of the role of the successor of St Peter, St Josemaria was convinced that the greater his union with Christ’s Vicar on earth, the greater would be his union with God. In the words of Bishop Echevarría: He would repeat, with absolute conviction, the words of Psalm 35:10, Apud te est fons vitae et in lumine tuo videbimus lumen! (In you is

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the source of life and in your light we see light). He used this to increase his unity with Christ’s Vicar on earth. He always firmly believed that his union with the Blessed Trinity would grow still closer, the closer he was united in mind and will to the Pope and his intentions (MBJE).

He spoke lovingly of the Church’s prerogatives of unity, holiness and apostolic succession but pointed out that these marks rise or fall on our union with the Roman Pontiff: … the Church is one, with a clear and perfect unity of the whole world and all nations, with that unity of which the principle, root, and indefectible origin is the supreme authority and most excellent primacy of blessed Peter, prince of the Apostles, and his successors in the Roman See. And there is no other Catholic Church, but that one which, built on the one Peter, rises up on the unity of the faith and on charity in one unique body, joined together and compact (Homily Loyalty to the Church, given on June 4, 1972).

Finally, to return to the anxieties regarding the doctrinal orthodoxy of some ambiguous passages in Amoris Laetitia, or casual off-the-cuff remarks made in interviews, such things should not put the least dent in our filial devotion to the Holy Father, nor to in anyway lead us to restrict our adherence to “solemn teaching”. Such an approach is not truly Catholic as St Josemaria so clearly shows, and in the long run is a dangerous posture to adopt. Prayer and trust in God’s providence will lead us to redouble our filial union with the Pope. Returning to the words of St Josemaria: We help to make that apostolic continuity more evident in the eyes of all men by demonstrating with exquisite fidelity our union with the Pope, which is union with Peter. Love for the Roman Pontiff must be in us a delightful passion, for in him we see Christ. If we deal with the Lord in prayer, we will go forward with a clear gaze that will permit us to perceive the action of the Holy Spirit, even in the face of events we do not understand or which produce sighs or sorrow (Ibid).

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Can the Pope change Catholic teaching on contraception?

He won’t. Because he can’t. And hasn’t.

by Sherif Girgis

T

he Catholic Church is a global family, but that hardly spares it the messiness of a household.

One recent source of squabbles has been Pope Francis’s off-thecuff comments on sex and marriage. Last month, for example, he guessed aloud that most Catholic marriages are invalid (while some cohabiting couples might, in some way, be married).

historic (and once universal) Christian condemnation of contraception. Was Francis making exceptions? Might the whole teaching be scrapped? If the pope was wrong, what about papal infallibility?

The exchange also raised broader questions. Which sources of Christian moral teaching are authoritative? Is Christian sexual morality a matter of arbitrary rules laid down by the Bible or the Church, or does it reflect objective moral truth?

That issue has been covered. But an earlier intervention failed to get a similar measure of attention. It came during an inflight press conference, in which the pope’s discussion of contraception and the Zika virus lit a blaze of controversy. The Church has held on to the

These are questions that Pope Francis’s remarks often raise for Catholics. But the answers also matter to Orthodox and

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Evangelical Christians and to others concerned about our culture’s ethic of sex and marriage. Even nonbelievers may benefit from knowing how the Church understands its own teachings on these matters of public import – as an assurance of how firmly committed to them it remains, even in the face of strong cultural pressure.

good. Just as duplicity violates integrity, and adultery marriage, so contraception violates marriage, as I explained in my previous article.

The Church’s teaching against it isn’t just a bylaw for the Catholic community – like the rule about going to confession at least once a year. It states a natural, rational, objective moral principle. The Church can’t repeal those or grant exemptions. Indeed, as we also saw, the Church has firmly taught that it is always immoral for spouses to contracept. So did every Christian body – East and West, Protestant and Catholic – for more than 1900 years.

As Catholics see it, the pope is the vicar of the true, heavenly head of our Catholic family. He deserves our filial affection; family harmony demands it.

This requires openness in all matters, and ready obedience in those defined as essential. But sometimes what promotes the family’s harmony on essentials is critical feedback, and then filial affection demands that, too.

And as I will show below, the Church has always opposed any choice to do something that is wrong in itself, even to avoid harm. The end, in such cases, cannot justify the means.

Morality and Infallibility Rules can be changed when they’re in some way arbitrary.

But moral principles – against adultery and contraception as much as, say, lies or betrayals of trust – aren’t arbitrary at all.

They specify the real demands of loving others, of willing their

But in the Church’s selfunderstanding, the Holy Spirit prevents it from definitively teaching falsehoods on faith or morals. So as a Catholic, I am certain that neither Pope Francis

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nor his successors will commit the Church to a different view; they won’t because they can’t.

And Francis hasn’t.

In his interview Francis alluded to the common belief that Pope Paul VI had approved the use of contraceptives by nuns at risk of being raped. In fact, Paul VI never did. But I think he could have done so without contradicting the Church’s teaching on contraception, and without suggesting that it’s okay to sin if the costs of fidelity are high. Faithful Catholic theologians and bishops’ conferences have long approved using anovulent pills after rape where there is no risk of causing abortion.

His offhand comments mark no such change. As I will also show here, they were expressions of opinion, not exercises of his teaching office. So they don’t implicate papal infallibility, which is about Christ’s promise and the Holy Spirit’s power, not any mortal’s wisdom or mental prowess.

As Catholics see it, the Church teaches infallibly. It does so through its members believing in unison, or through their leaders (the bishops, successors of the Apostles) when speaking with one voice, and only sometimes through the bishops’ leader, the pope.

What the Church has firmly taught, after all, is that it’s immoral to intend to sterilize what would otherwise be a marital act. But no rape can be a marital act. Coerced sex (even between spouses) isn’t even a candidate for expressing marital love, which must be mutual and free. So taking the pill after rape can’t be anti-marital; allowing it is no exception to moral or theological principles.

Could There Be Exceptions?

Even if contracepting is wrong, might it be the thing to do in extreme cases? Can we ever choose one sin as the “lesser” evil, if the harms of avoiding it are bad enough?

In general, the Catholic and natural law traditions have held that acts that violate bedrock

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human goods are always wrong, whatever their benefits. That we must sooner suffer evil than commit it was defended by Socrates centuries before Christ’s birth, and by Paul in Romans decades after His ascension. Reason demands moral absolutes, and faith confirms them. A humane ethic and civilization are impossible without them.

good, and – properly understood – free of exceptions. But doesn’t the Church change its teachings?

Didn’t Francis change this one on a plane flight?

Answering these questions requires some background.

Catholics believe that God’s revelation to humanity reached its fulfillment in the life and ministry of Jesus. It came to an end with the death of the last of the twelve Apostles. All that remains is to develop, clarify, and defend against errors the teaching completed in Christ.

Legitimate references to “lesser evils” in moral theology are about choosing to minimize bad consequences without oneself intending harm to any basic good. To try to get drunkards in a bar fight to use a fist, not a bat; to choose, of two dreadful presidential candidates, the one who will do less damage – these are fine choices of the “lesser evil.” Neither involves violations of any commandment or basic good or form of love.

And for that (and much else), Christ founded the Church. It is His mystical body with many members and Christ Himself as its head. So the Church as a whole – as a single corporate reality, distinct from any particular members – cannot err. It is a supernatural institution whose firm beliefs on faith and morals are guaranteed to be true. Like any corporate body, its beliefs can be gleaned from the consensus of its members or the pronouncements of those empowered to speak for it.

The Church’s Teaching: Continuity and Development So the Church’s teaching against contraception in marriage is constant, based on the human

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Who are those? Only Christ could decide, and Catholics believe He did. He appointed His Apostles and their successors as the Church’s leaders; we call them bishops.

And as the earthly leader of those leaders, He appointed Peter, the Bishop of Rome, and his successors. We call them popes.

Scriptural roots of this vision of authority run deep.

Christ gave Peter the “keys of the Kingdom of heaven.” He said that on Peter, the “rock,” He would build his Church, which He promised to protect against the gates of hell. He gave Peter the mission of “strengthening” his “brethren,” the other Apostles – of unifying the bishops who unify the Christian flock.

He promised Peter personally, and the Apostles as a group, that whatever they bound on earth would enjoy divine guarantee.

He promised them the Holy Spirit to lead them “into all truth.” Whoever listened to them, He said, would be listening to Him. Apostolic teaching, as Paul wrote, comes through men but from God. The

So besides the virtual consensus of all (the sensus fidelium) that X is a truth of Christian faith, the Church’s beliefs can be gleaned from the official teaching of its bishops in unison, or – in the limiting case – that of their leader, the pope. Whenever the pope or all the bishops as one formally propose a principle of faith or morals as binding on all the faithful, it is the Church that speaks through them, and the Spirit that keeps the Church from error. So Christ has promised.

Bishops and popes may be geniuses or ignoramuses, saints or extravagant sinners. They have been all of these things. As private citizens of the Church, so to speak – as disciples – they might be sublime or terribly confused. They might even preach theological errors. Across the ages, some have.

They have received no special knowledge by some secret game of telephone from bishop to bishop across the millennia.

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Even their definitive teachings don’t have the status of Sacred Scripture, which is not only infallible but inspired. Bishops are only men, who must study and pray and discern, praise God for their gains, and seek His mercy for their sins.

What’s special is their office. By His providence, the Holy Spirit sees to it that when the whole body of bishops together, or the pope himself, teaches a point of faith or morals as binding on the whole Church, what they teach is true. Not a brand new truth, but

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a reiteration, clarification, or application of what was revealed in Christ. Not for their glory, but for the Church – for the integrity of its faith in God’s revelation, from Christ’s ascension until His return.

Bishops who remain in communion with Peter can exercise this teaching authority in two ways. They might, though dispersed, agree in explicitly teaching that X is required for Christian faith. Or they might assemble in a single council to define X as a dogma. (Such

councils have given us canonical teachings on the Trinity, Christology, ecclesiology, and more.) Likewise, the pope can definitively teach X by declaring it a requirement of the faith while invoking his Petrine authority.

The Church’s authority is attested from its earliest years.

In the book of Acts, the Apostles settle disputes about revelation by discerning the truth in council. They publish their conclusions as ones that seemed fitting “to the Holy Spirit and to us.” And they transfer their authority by ordination: the laying on of hands.

The pope’s authority, too, is attested from the Church’s earliest decades. Peter’s successors in Rome, at least as early as Clement in A.D. 90, were asked to settle disputes in other regions – and did so, without protest from others – while other bishops were not. As means of communication improved, so did the popes’ ability to exercise authority from a distance, in real time.

And this authority – like every Christian tenet, in every age of the Church – was made explicit and sharpened and clarified over centuries only as challenges to it arose. (As with teachings on Christ and the Trinity, its most solemn affirmation came from a global council of bishops, this one in the nineteenth century. If that seems suspiciously late for an ancient and Biblical teaching, consider that the same council affirmed the equally ancient teaching of St Paul that we can know God’s existence by reason alone. Like every council, this one was responding to current challenges.) And yet a theologian as early as Augustine could declare that whenever Rome spoke, the case was closed; indeed, many early Church Fathers affirmed the special authority of Rome.

History has also witnessed a tight correlation between Christian groups’ unity with Rome and their harmony with each other on faith and morals.

Where groups – for whatever reason, and no matter the distribution of fault – split off from Peter, they split off from

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each other in an endlessly ramifying fractal. Thousands of sects now seek the truth but disagree. They can’t all be right.

Sincerity, prayer, and a Bible simply aren’t enough to preserve the whole of Christian truth.

They weren’t even enough to preserve what some Christians today call the doctrines of “mere Christianity.” The Bible’s table of contents itself didn’t fall from the sky. Why do Christians agree on these twenty-seven New Testament books as God’s inspired Word (despite early debate over, e.g., the Book of Revelation)? For that matter, why do we agree on the natures and divine personhood of Christ? Or on the Trinity? Not because the answers were obvious. Heresies over centuries have challenged the truth on each. Nor are all the teachings we agree on today more important to the spiritual life than those that divide us. Some are, some are not.

Rather, these debates are settled because they were clarified centuries ago by the institution that today still condemns

contraception: the Church in union with Peter. Of course, denominations have also challenged some teachings that were settled before they split off.

But only one thing sets the doctrines of “mere Christianity” apart from all the Catholic teachings that other groups now reject: They had the good fortune to be disputed – and thus formally clarified by the Church – early enough for today’s denominations to have inherited them generally without protest.

To see if the Church has taught something definitively, and hence infallibly, look to what the popes and bishops have taught and under what conditions. I think, as others have argued, that the norm against contraception in marriage has been taught definitively. No one would say that Pope Francis was even attempting to exercise his teaching office in casual remarks on a plane. He offered them as back-of-the-envelope casuistry based on analogies to other teachings as he recalled them.

They’re to be judged by whether they cohere with those teachings

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– as Pope Francis would be the first to insist, having identified as a loyal son of the Church.

The Church’s constancy confirms that when Peter firmly takes the helm, the Spirit steers.

And this makes all the difference. For the Christian, to love Christ is everything. Vows embolden lovers to surrender themselves. Christ’s promise to His bride, the Church, emboldens souls to stake everything on her words, in which they hear the Bridegroom’s voice. That promise has brought me and countless others into the Church and kept untold numbers aboard. It has enabled the cheerful defiance of the Church’s

martyrs and the flamboyant courage of her confessors and saints. And nothing confirms it so dramatically today as the Church’s unswerving witness, against every headwind, to the high moral demands of marital love.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Sherif Girgis is a Yale Law School graduate and a PhD candidate in philosophy at Princeton. This article was originally published on The Public Discourse.

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Benedict the Brave: The Regensburg Address Ten Years Later

by James Day

T

en years ago Pope Benedict XVI took to the dais of the University of Regensburg’s Aula Magna to offer a few “memories and reflections.” The speech, which became widely known simply as Regensburg, has long been dismissed as an infamous gaffe in a generally misunderstood pontificate; it was leveled as incendiary and undiplomatic in solemn rebukes from leaders like Jacques Chirac; it sparked firebombings and effigies; death threats from the Mujahideen Army against the pontiff; and generally did little to enhance Benedict’s reputation.

But how much of Regensburg was actually read, understood, and properly digested, and what was its overall intention?

Contrary to the ensuing censure of the Pope and his speech, the 79-year-old pontiff knew exactly what he was doing. “As I said at the time,” stated Fr. James V. Schall, SJ about its lasting legacy, “this address is one of the world’s most penetrating analysis ever made of intelligence and the consequences of the willful refusal to face its truth.” If really taken to heart, Regensburg at one point may have been the touchstone for a more truthful world – and still might be, a decade later.

The address consists of 4,000 words and 16 paragraphs – one paragraph is for the introduction, three on Islam, and two its conclusion, leaving ten

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paragraphs devoted to the issue of “reason.” Yet, this issue of reason and its relationship to God is rarely the topic of debate or discussion about the address.

That is reserved almost entirely for the short section about Islam, particularly Benedict’s citation of a 14th century Byzantine emperor, Manuel II, a quotation which the Pope himself prefaced as one of “startling brusqueness, a brusqueness that we find unacceptable.” The emperor’s statement – “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached” – is the most cited passage, and the one sometimes leveled against Pope Ratzinger as his own.

The denunciation that followed exposed a great deal about the jittery cultural unease about not only Islam, which continues unresolved to this day, but also the deficiencies of an increasingly atheistic public worldview. “I think the problem is [Benedict] may have still been thinking like a German academic and perhaps

forgot that there were people outside the room who were listening,” Jesuit commentator Fr. Thomas Reese suggested a few days later, summarizing one critique that Joseph Ratzinger the man, as Benedict the pope, could and should only limit his thought to perfunctory papal addresses. That the matter in question – “not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature,” in other words, the opposite of reason, namely violence – was labeled insensitive and provoked scorn is itself more paradoxical than disputable, as Lars Brownworth noted in his 2009 book Lost to the West: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Western Civilization: “Benedict XVI [argued] that violence had no place in faith. Ironically, the speech unleashed a firestorm of controversy in the Middle East, resulting in the destruction of some churches and several deaths.”

Even Benedict sought to moderate tension the Sunday after Regensburg: “I am deeply sorry for the reactions in some

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countries to a few passages of my address at the University of Regensburg, which were considered offensive to the sensibility of Muslims. These in fact were a quotation from a medieval text, which do not in any way express my personal thought.” But should the Pope have apologized for being magnificent? At the time of the Charlie Hebdo massacre in January 2015, Dr Samuel Gregg recalled Regensburg, something not a few thinkers were doing with frequency in light of such attacks: “Many professional interfaith dialoguers don’t like the Regensburg address because it highlighted how much of their discussion was utterly peripheral to the main game,” he said. Now in the ten years since 2006, in the wake of the Arab Spring, expanding terrorist attacks, a media blitzkrieg by Islamic State touting beheadings of Westerners, Coptic Christians and others, global financial chaos, a Europe struggling in its own narrative, a United States enduring an identity crisis, the brilliance and bluntness of Regensburg remains.

It comes down to a matter of the truth: Was the Pope really on to something of such magnitude it was completely overlooked by an unprepared public?

Fr Schall thinks so. In his book on the speech he readily ranks Regensburg with not only John Paul II’s 1979 Poland voyage that set in motion the end of Soviet Communism, but also Cicero’s Pro Archia, Pericles’ Funeral Oration, Plato’s Apology, Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, Henry V on St Crispin’s Day, Lincoln at Gettysburg, Solzhenitsyn at Harvard, Churchill at war.

“Events need not be words,” he writes. “But words can also be events…” And now there’s Benedict at Regensburg: “Academic words are primarily to enlighten us, to take our minds to the heart of what is. This enlightenment is the purpose of Regensburg. It is what has been lacking in our understanding of where we are.”

It also launched a hallmark of memorable, culturally impactful “September speeches” from Benedict, that included, for instance, his challenge to

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Parisian cultural elite in 2008, his bold evocation of St Thomas More in Westminster Hall in 2010, and at the Reichstag in Berlin before Germany’s political leaders in 2011 (all appear in Liberating Logos, edited by Dr Marc Guerra). While all unique to their own time and place, all point back to what was said at Regensburg: “[N]ot to act with reason is contrary to God’s nature.” Dr Guerra himself notes how prescient Benedict detected the “flight from reason” that was surrounding him: Looking back, Pope Benedict’s penetrating diagnosis of the intellectual, moral, and spiritual pathologies that are spawned by our late modern flights from reason – whether these are born out of religious voluntarism or scientific reductionism or cultural perspectivalism or, increasingly, religiously motivated humanitarianism – is, in many ways, more relevant today than it was a mere ten years ago. Truth be told, the Church and the West still have much to learn from the Regensburg Lecture.

Benedict’s aim is not to champion reason alone, but ratio recta – right reason. It’s a direct challenge to the pervading dictatorship of relativism he has long sought to confront and crush. Such tyranny extends down to the very universities meant to explore that reason in multiple subjects of life. It is no accident that Benedict chose a university setting and directed his Address to “representatives of science.” As recent social crises in academia have revealed, the typical foundation for a university as a place of discourse on ranges of ideas is now a shrinking footprint. Doing so inevitably excludes real discussion of God. Not only is the subject of God the central theme of Joseph Ratzinger’s life, but the central theme of the great thinkers and civilizations in history. It was of such import that Regensburg could not ignore exposing the attempt to replace God totally: “A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures.” Is this right reason, the kind of reason now realigning

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public discourse, the public way of life?

Christianity, including among some prominent Catholics, and their evident disinterest in right reason and natural law tells us that Benedict’s warnings were right on the mark.

As Gregg noted a few months ago, reason is being remade not in the image of God, but of a certain perception of how man is to be today: thus, the opposite of reason, in this mentality, is not unreason but faith itself.

Anything having to do with faith is immediately dismissed as contrary to reason – and thus must be eradicated. This is what the Pope confronts at Regensburg and what concerns Gregg: Benedict XVI’s Regensburg lecture was as much about the West’s crisis of faith in reason as it was about the deeper theological problems driving Islamist terrorism. If the West forgets that the Jewish and Christian God is, in fact, not just Love (Caritas) but also Divine Reason (Logos), then it cannot help but collapse into mere sentimental humanitarianism. The present prevalence of feelings-talk and emotivism in much of Western

The Pope at Regensburg, without ingratiating to feelings-talk or emotivism to express his views, and without talking down to his audience in the Aula Magna and beyond, put on display in thirty minutes that the Christian proposal needs both fides and ratio to reach its full potential.

“Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth,” opens Pope Saint John Paul II’s penultimate encyclical Fides et Ratio, a text which bears a heavy Ratzingerian influence, “and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth – in a word, to know himself – so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.”

The proper relationship of faith and reason, therefore, is the Logos. “Logos means both word

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and reason,” Benedict summarizes in the lecture.

Addressing it inevitably leads one into the purview of religion; the Pope knows that unlike the wishes of elitist proponents of statism, it cannot be discounted, and having empathy and knowledge of diverse cultures and traditions where a faith in something greater than themselves is standard – instead of ignorance and contempt – leads to mutual understanding.

Even if it makes one unpopular.

“We seem to be witnessing a clash between two great cultural systems,” he remarked, “the ‘West’ and Islam, with very different forms of power and moral orientation. But what is the West? And who is Islam?”

In his own lecture given in 2007 at James Madison University explicating both Benedict at Regensburg and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 Harvard commencement address, Fr Schall observes Benedict’s grasp of limitation – limits of government and its influences on the human person; limits on human life itself; the Kantian limits of reason alone; and the

limits of sola scriptura, for instance. Determine the degree of limitation on reason and there you will define what you really believe – that is the challenge of Regensburg. It is so challenging we dare not address it, instead choosing to occupy our passions and anger on the branches rather than the root of what is.

It is a challenge that still remains, and its words still await discovery. The ones who seek a better world, who know true diplomacy and dialogue are necessary but recognize truth is the real summit, the ones who will actually pivot the world onto a better course must first sit in quiet and read Regensburg alone, then with each other, and a conversation will start and action follow. But not without risk. Dr Mary Mumbach, professor at Northeast Catholic College and contributor to the collection of essays on Regensburg titled Gained Horizons: Regensburg and the Enlargement of Reason, notes as such:

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Threats of enforcement of political correctness, and in some cases, of terrorist

attacks increasingly place in jeopardy models of faith and reason housed in the sanctuaries dedicated to the cultivation of these spiritual gifts. Increasingly, professors of the life of reason (and/or of faith) labor in the shadow of threats against their livelihood and sometimes against their very lives. Pope Benedict’s witness manifested what cost might be exacted of those who labor in universities as well as in Christian churches.

For those dauntless in following Benedict’s lead, perhaps such charting of a better course indeed will happen within a university, where such discourse was

intended. And maybe it will take place this year, when a bold professor or daring staff member inspired by the courage of Benedict the Brave makes Regensburg required reading either in the classroom or in some clandestine meeting of counterculturals yearning for change, who know that two wings are needed to soar. To see past the layers of distraction created by controversy and to meet Benedict where he wanted to take not only the faithful but all people of goodwill: to new heights of intellect and faith.

This article first appeared in the Catholic World Report.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR James Day has written for Catholic Exchange, Catholic World Report, Crisis, and Orange County Catholic. He is the author of Father Benedict: The Spiritual and Intellectual Legacy of Pope Benedict XVI (November 2016, Sophia Institute Press).

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Christianity without nostalgia

by Thomas Pink

M

y baptismal certificate gives the time and place – as an infant, in the mid-20th century, in a parish of the Church of England, at the hands of the vicar. But how was I to understand this baptism? I could think of it as baptism into the established church of a particular state and nation. Or because it was a baptism into Christ, I could think of it as being into a Church that is universal, and that has no essential connection either to England or to the British state.

What did the fact of being English or being British have to do with my being Christian?

The question had long been in the background. My mother,

though not a Catholic, had been educated at a convent school run

by Catholic nuns, of the Sacred Heart. She never shared their religion, but deeply respected them and their very different allegiance from her own. As a child I had also heard of Bishop Fisher and Sir Thomas More, and of the judicial violence to which they were subjected by the very state of which I was a citizen and subject. This, I could already sense, was an attack on the very idea of Christianity as involving another allegiance than to that state. But it was only later, when I was an older schoolboy, that the question became pressing. It was made pressing through what lay at the heart of the Anglicanism in

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which I was brought up – its mode of worship.

The school chapel was a vast memorial to the military dead of the Great War, with walls of names from that conflict and those that followed flanking as you entered, the sanctuary at the far end dominated by what almost seemed a tomb above the altar, on which stood two mourning angels. Christianity there came to me as a state Anglicanism, mainly Protestant in the reflective spirit of CS Lewis, with hymns and sermons, and the Creed on Sunday. The more devout might frequent the Christian Union, run by a classics master, to find personal conversion through the Bible.

Many of our parents had served in war, and in the chapel war was also given living witness.

The senior chaplain had been a prisoner of the Japanese, and once told us of a real martyr among his captors – a Japanese who, a Christian, was discovered organising communion services for his prisoners and was beheaded.

What was a communion service?

Not the Catholic Mass. That the chaplain made very clear. He once warned me that the doctrine of transubstantiation was quite incredible, and belief in it only encouraged destructive scruples in minister and communicant alike. We were obviously consuming bread and wine, nothing else, in a commemorative meal. To celebrate this the chaplain would wear a plain surplice and a stole, and communion during the week took place in another older, smaller chapel, by cloisters commemorating the Boer Wars, early in the morning.

I attended only seldom, driven into this less usual form of piety by fear of approaching A-levels.

Some of those who taught us were open agnostics. Among the believing Anglicans some, like the classics master and my own housemaster, were evangelicals.

Others adhered to a broad Anglicanism, according to which the call of Christ to benevolence had been corrupted by Christians themselves, and especially by the obsessions of St Paul. Such corruptions were at

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their most damaging regarding sexual teaching, and other less enlightened forms of Christianity – most obviously Roman Catholicism – were still in thrall to these.

them into Someone really present, but not as Someone contained by a particular place or time. This Christianity came from somewhere quite different from the England of my family and school. It came from the Palestine of antiquity through Greece and Rome. And it was universal and not a religion subject to the authority of any state.

Christianity came to me, as it must to anyone, at a particular time and place. But that time and place, an English public school in the 1970s, seemed to present Christianity only to contain it there – as a form of mildly liberal Protestantism combined, in some mutual tension, with evangelical enthusiasm. The school religion was the Christianity of the postVictorian Establishment modified, to a degree, by the cultural loosening of the 1960s.

It was in the library that I discovered John Henry Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, and through Newman the Church Fathers. The Fathers were a revelation to me. Most astonishing of all, they clearly believed in the Mass – in a Eucharistic sacrifice and a change of elements, a change that took elements at a specific time and place, and transformed

As I read him, Newman showed me that the contingency of history could unfold and reveal something eternal, not a mere object of memory, and not the property of a particular nation.

My school religion was not really presenting me with this at all.

The state and cultural establishment in which I had been brought up had tried to contain Christianity by seeking to suppress this very universality, and in particular – and most significantly it seemed to me – by denying the transcendent in the Eucharist.

Much play was made of reasonable compromise and spiritual accommodation towards other Christian traditions – but the real

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willingness to concede was very limited. Once I asked the chaplain, in the still confident heyday of Anglican-Catholic ecumenism, why he constantly expected Catholicism to become more Anglican, and not the reverse. Oh, that was easy to explain, he replied – since (in England) Anglicanism stood between Catholicism and Nonconformity, for reunion to occur both extremes would have to move towards the middle, as would assuredly happen.

that would almost certainly soon change, as they had so often changed before?

When asked why one should be an Anglican, a friend and former pupil of the chaplain’s, a master at another similar school, told me that it was Anglicanism that was practised throughout the ancient cathedrals and parishes of England; and so that was the form of Christianity that was most truly English.

Christianity entered into the world subject to the persecution of a state. How then could its proper form now be determined by just another particular state, and be defended to me on the basis of political and cultural arrangements that were entirely local, deeply contingent, and

In that library I lost my belief in the form of Christianity practised by my family and many of my teachers – as expressive of allegiance to a particular state and of membership of a particular nation. Nothing since has led me to regret this. It only anticipated what was to come: the continued decline of Anglicanism into a doctrinally chaotic sect that now clearly bores and embarrasses the political and cultural elite that once supported it; and the increasing transformation of the British state itself into a real enemy of Christianity.

Christianity is an unconditional allegiance; and it involves membership of a Church which, though she exists in a world of political communities and nations, co-exists with these as contingent realities that are merely passing. Our allegiance as Christians to any of these merely passing realities can only be conditional; and it must be conditional, in particular, on the extent of their respect for

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Christianity and the mission of the Church.

community and a particular cultural identity – these are bound up with one’s natural humanity, as is their profound influence on all that one thinks and does. It often seems hardly possible to detach oneself.

The Anglicanism of my schooldays never expressly denied this, and therein lay much of its genuine value. Why else had the chaplain never forgotten the heroism of that Japanese who had followed Christ rather than the direction of his state?

But then that same Anglicanism wrapped itself up in a passing political and cultural identity, and defended itself in terms only intelligible in the context of that identity.

And that seemed to me absurd.

This sense of absurdity did not on its own make me a Catholic.

For some time, at university, I was an unbeliever in any revealed religion. But it left me with a vivid conviction of the only form in which Christianity is possible. Just as for a Christian attachment to earthly goods must be conditional, so too must attachment to earthly states and cultures.

Humans are deeply social animals. A particular political

But some such detachment is a demand of Christianity. It is part of our detachment from the merely earthly. The detachment is part of the supernatural life that transcends anything we as humans are naturally capable of and which only grace makes possible. Political allegiance and cultural identity can never be allowed to define Christianity or to decide the content of its teaching.

The particular time or place of one’s youth and childhood is always vividly one’s own.

Equally it is irrecoverable, and impossible fully to communicate to others. It is a place to which one can never return, and it cannot provide a common life.

But Christianity provides, through the Church, a common life that is eternal – to which one must arrive through a history, but not to remain in that history.

This common life appeals to

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memory but cannot remain locked up in the vividness of a particular remembered past, not that of an individual, or even of a nation.

There is a religiose form of cultural conservatism that ignores this, and that seeks to defend Christianity as, in effect, a local human tradition. It can take Anglican form, and celebrate a national idyll of prayer book and common law, or it can equally well take a more superficially Catholic form, and celebrate Christianity as the essence of a European culture.

But this is limiting and presumptuous.

The Christian future may have as little to do with Europe as we know it, let alone the fortunes of English parish churches, as the Christian present now has to do with, say, the largely vanished culture of once deeply Christian North Africa.

The Christian life is supernatural. It divinises the human. Cultural conservatism parading as religion does the reverse. In this respect it curiously resembles Christianity in overtly liberal form. Like liberal Christianity, cultural nostalgia reduces to the human what should be divine.

This article first appeared in the September 2 2016 issue of The Catholic Herald.

ABOUT THE
 AUTHOR Thomas Pink is Professor of Philosophy at King’s College, London.

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The waning of democracy in Ireland

by Fr Kevin O’Reilly, OP

S

everal months ago the Irish Times published an interview

by Joseph Humphries with Joseph Mahon (‘Unthinkable: Is philosophy having an existential crisis?’ Irish Times May 24, 2016).

The views expressed in this interview merit some critical attention on account of their implications for the political fabric of Irish society.

Mahon observes that since the 1960s there has been ‘an ongoing battle within philosophy between those who say that you are not really doing philosophy unless you are working on Kant or Hegel, and those who want to steer the discipline towards practical ethics and public-policy issues.’ This battle can be described as one

between ‘pure’ philosophy and ‘applied’ philosophy.

Whether he intends to or not, Mahon nevertheless illustrates very clearly the intimate connection that obtains between what he calls ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ philosophy. In this regard he quotes two sentences, in his estimation ‘arguably, the two most important sentences of the 20th century’, from Simone de Beauvoir: ‘The female is the victim of the species’, and ‘One is not born, but rather becomes a woman.’

These two sentences, he contends, ‘provided the intellectual foundation for all progressive thought and public-policy initiatives relating to reproductive

28

freedom, women’s rights and equality law.’

at the time that it was also ‘a result of political interference in the structures of the Medical Council, arising from the Medical Practitioners Act, 2007.’

Mahon’s musings raise concern in the light of the erosion of basic democratic principles in Ireland over the last decade in particular.

One could cite a number of examples of the way in which the state has extended its control into areas where it has no right to interfere. Here I limit myself to two.

It is of course crucial that all bodies such as the Medical Council be subject to external monitoring.

Political interference is however quite a different matter.

The Medical Practitioners Act 2007 reduced the number of physicians on the Medical Council to 6 (of 25) members. The majority of the members of the council as currently constituted are therefore not medical doctors, though some of them are from other areas of the healthcare profession.

Significantly, six of the twenty-five members are political appointees.

Significantly, the Guide to Professional Conduct and Ethics issued by the Council in 2009 introduced substantial modifications in reproductive health policy. While this departure may have been due in part to other factors, it is difficult not to think that there was some truth in Bishop Kevin Doran’s contention

A second example of worrying interference by the state in matters beyond its proper remit concerns the family. Understood properly, the family ought not to be the object of a justice that redefines and manipulates it according to its own designs. The family, founded on the sexual bi-polarity of male and female, is rather the foundation of justice in society in the sense that justice ought to respect the family as the fundamental source of society which it [justice] regulates.

Rather than torpedoing the natural family in an attempt to engineer new artificial forms of ‘family’, legislation ought to cultivate conditions in which natural families can flourish. It is such conditions, moreover, that

29

arguably contribute best to the well-being of children.

however subtle such manipulation may be?

De Beauvoir’s conception of human nature is dualistic: there is no is no kind of connection between mind and body, and the mind in fact sees itself as being morally free to do whatever it likes with the bodily aspect of our being.

This view is philosophically seriously flawed.

Let me conclude with two ideas.

If society is man writ large, to give free rein to a dualist understanding of human nature is potentially catastrophic since a dualistic understanding of human nature translates into political tyranny. In Plato’s Republic we find a powerful illustration of this point. The twentieth century offered various lessons that would be best not repeated.

Secondly, it is undesirable that philosophers should collude, albeit unconsciously, with the state in its violation of the autonomy proper to society.

The two examples I have offered ought to give pause for thought.

Regardless of one’s personal stance concerning the issues I have touched upon, one must ask oneself: am I happy that the state should in principle have untrammeled freedom to interfere with society and with the private sphere and to manipulate them according to its own designs,

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Firstly, those who wish to support recent political agendas in the sexual and bioethical spheres on the part of the state will realise, of course, that a negative answer to the question above will hinder the advance of these agendas

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Fr Kevin O’Reilly OP, formerly taught at the Milltown Institute, Dublin, and holds doctorates in both philosophy and theology. In the forthcoming academic year he will teach moral theology at the Angelicum University, Rome.

Apologist, Catechists, Theologians: Wake up!

by Bishop Robert Barron

A

fter perusing the latest Pew Study on why young people are leaving the active practice of Christianity, I confess that I just sighed in exasperation. I don’t doubt for a moment the sincerity of those who responded to the survey, but the reasons they offer for abandoning Christianity are just so uncompelling. That is to say, any theologian, apologist, or evangelist worth his salt should be able easily to answer them. And this led me (hence the sigh) to the conclusion that “we have met the enemy and it is us.” For the past fifty years or so, Christian thinkers have largely abandoned the art of apologetics and have failed (here I offer a j’accuse to many in the Catholic universities) to resource the

riches of the Catholic intellectual tradition in order to hold off critics of the faith. I don’t blame the avatars of secularism for actively attempting to debunk Christianity; that’s their job, after all. But I do blame teachers, catechists, evangelists, and academics within the Christian churches for not doing enough to keep our young people engaged. These studies consistently demonstrate that unless we believers seriously pick up our game intellectually, we’re going to keep losing our kids.

Let me look just briefly at some of the chief reasons offered for walking away from Christianity.

Many evidently felt that modern

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science somehow undermines the claims of the faith. One respondent said: “rational thought makes religion go out the window,” and another complained of the “lack of any sort of scientific evidence of a creator.” Well, I’m sure it would come as an enormous surprise to St Paul, St Augustine, St John Chrysostom, St Jerome, St Thomas Aquinas, St Robert Bellarmine, Blessed John Henry Newman, G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, and Joseph Ratzinger – all among the most brilliant people Western culture has produced – that religion and reason are somehow incompatible. And to focus more precisely on the issue of “scientific evidence,” the sciences, ordered by their nature and method to an analysis of empirically verifiable objects and states of affairs within the universe, cannot even in principle address questions regarding God, who is not a being in the world, but rather the reason why the finite realm exists at all. There simply cannot be “scientific” evidence or argument that tells one way or the other in regard to God. Mind

you, this is by no means to imply that there are no rational warrants for belief in God. Philosophers over the centuries, in fact, have articulated dozens of such demonstrations, which have, especially when considered together, enormous probative force. I have found, in my own evangelical work, that the argument from contingency gets quite a bit of traction with those who are wrestling with the issue of God’s existence. What these arguments have lacked, sad to say, are convinced and articulate defenders within the academy and in the ranks of teachers, catechists, and apologists.

One of the young people responded to the survey using the formula made famous by Karl Marx: “religion just seems to be the opiate of the people.”

Marx’s adage, of course, is an adaptation of Ludwig Feuerbach’s observation that religion amounts to a projection of our idealized self-image.

Sigmund Freud, in the early twentieth century, further adapted Feuerbach, arguing that religion is like a waking dream, a

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wish-fulfilling fantasy. This line of thinking has been massively adopted by the so-called “new atheists” of our time. I find it regularly on my internet forums.

What all of this comes down to, ultimately, is a dismissive and patronizing psychologization of religious belief. But it is altogether vulnerable to a tu quoque (you do the same thing) counter-attack. I think it is eminently credible to say that atheism amounts to a wishfulfilling fantasy, precisely in the measure that it allows for complete freedom and selfdetermination: if there is no God, no ultimate moral criterion, I can do and be whatever I want. In a word, the psychologizing cuts just as effectively in the opposite direction. Hence, the two charges more or less cancel one another out – and this should compel us to return to real argument at the objective level.

A third commonly-cited reason for abandoning the Christian churches is that, as one respondent put it, “Christians seem to behave so badly.” God knows that the clergy sex abuse

scandals of the last twenty-five years have lent considerable support to this argument, already bolstered by the usual suspects of the Inquisition, the Crusades, the persecution of Galileo, witch-hunts, etc., etc.

We could, of course, enter into an examination of each of these cases, but for our purposes I am willing to concede the whole argument: yes indeed, over the centuries, lots and lots of Christians have behaved wickedly. But why, one wonders, should this tell against the integrity and rectitude of Christian belief? Many, many Americans have done horrific things, often in the name of America. One thinks of slave owners, the enforcers of Jim Crow laws, the carpet bombers of Dresden and Tokyo, the perpetrators of the My-Lai Massacre, the guards at Abu Ghraib Prison, etc. Do these outrages ipso facto prove that American ideals are less than praiseworthy, or that the American system as such is corrupt? The question answers itself.

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Relatedly, a number of young people said that they left the Christian churches because “religion is the greatest source of conflict in the world.” One hears this charge so often today – especially in the wake of September 11th – that we tend to take it as self-evident, when in point of fact, it is an invention of Enlightenment-era historiography. Voltaire, Diderot, Spinoza, and many others in the 17th and 18th centuries wanted to undermine religion, and they could find no better way to achieve this end than to score Christianity as the source of violence. Through numberless channels this view has seeped into the general consciousness, but it simply does not stand up to serious scrutiny. In their exhaustive survey of the wars of human history (The Encyclopedia of Wars), Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod demonstrate that less than 7% of wars could be credibly blamed on religion, and even the most casual reflection bears this out.

In point of fact, the bloodiest wars in history, those of the twentieth century, which produced over 100 million dead, had practically nothing to do with religion. Indeed, a very persuasive case could be made that ideological secularism and modern nationalism are the sources of greatest bloodshed.

And yet the prejudice, first fostered by the philosophes of the Enlightenment, oddly endures.

An earlier Pew Study showed that for every one person who joins the Catholic Church today, six are leaving, and that many of those who leave are the young.

This most recent survey indicates that intellectual objections figure prominently when these drifters are asked why they abandoned their faith.

My cri de coeur is that teachers, catechists, theologians, apologists, and evangelists might wake up to this crisis and do something about it.

This article first appeared at: www.wordonfire.org.

This article has been reprinted with the kind permission of the editors.

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Examples of reasons why people are unaffiliated Don’t believe • Learning about evolution when I went away to college • Religion is the opiate of the people • Rational thought makes religion go out the window • Lack of any sort of scientific or specific evidence of a creator • I just realized somewhere along the line that I didn’t really believe it • I’m doing a lot of learning studying and kind of making decisions myself rather than listening to someone else Dislike organized religion • I see organized religious groups as more divisive than uniting • I think that more harm has been done in the name of religion than any other area • I no longer believe in organized religion. I don’t attend services anymore. I just believe that religion is very personal conversation with me and my creator • Because I think religion is not a religion anymore. It’s a business ... it’s all about money • The clergy sex abuse scandal • The church’s teachings on homosexuality

Religiously unsure/undecided • I don’t have a particular religion because I am open-minded and I don’t think there is one particular religion that is right or wrong • I feel that there is something out there, but I can’t nail down a religion • Right now I’m kind of leaning towards spirituality, but I’m not too sure. I know I can pray to my God anywhere. I do believe in a higher power, but I don’t need a church to do that Inactive believer • I just basically stopped going to church when I went to college and never picked it back up. I was never super religious.

• I don’t practice any religion and I don’t go church or participate in any rituals of the church • I don’t have the time to go to church

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bishop Robert Barron is an author, speaker, theologian, and founder of Word on Fire, a global media ministry.

Book review: Life’s Journey: A Guide from Conception to Growing Up, Growing Old, and Natural Death

Author: Gerard Verschuuren Angelico Press, 2016 188 pages

by Rev. John McCloskey

T

he author of this important book, Gerard Verschuuren, is a human geneticist with a doctorate in the philosophy of science.

Among his other books are Five Anti-Catholic Myths: Slavery, Crusades, Inquisition, Galileo, Holocaust; Destiny of the Universe: In Pursuit of the Great Unknown; and Darwin’s Philosophical Legacy: The Good and the Not-So-Good. In his latest book, he lives up to the title description by neatly summarizing both the biological and philosophical truths of the different stages of our transit from conception to natural death.

The author’s approach reflects his dual strengths in biology and philosophy. For example,

Verschuuren describes the latest understanding of the development and workings of the brain and then steps back to consider questions such as: “Is the brain a computer?” or “What are addictions if we have free will?”

The format of the book is chronological, with each of the six sections of the book devoted to one phase of life (with titles like “From the Day of Conception,” “Life in the Womb” and “Growing Up”).

In each section, Verschuuren first describes what is going on scientifically (explaining the roles of DNA and chromosomes, sex differentiation and cell development, programmed cell death, clinical death and brain death). He then considers what we

36

might call the implications of what is going on and the greater questions prompted by each stage’s biological hallmarks.

scope of Verschuuren’s conception-to-death exposition in this book, he does dip into the implications of near-death experiences in “The Final Stage” and also entertains the question of “Heaven or Hell?”

Although the author gives his readers much to ponder throughout this book, perhaps the most tantalizing questions arise towards the end, when we reach his presentation of old age and death.

Here, the questions are more cosmic and the stakes much higher: Does death mark the end of the person or not? For after the human body shuts down, the organs stop functioning and decay sets in, we either cease to exist entirely, as the materialists maintain, or, as non-materialist philosophers, theologians, saints and mystics think and believe, we live as disembodied spirits. (Of course, our creedal belief in the resurrection of the dead prepares us for an ultimate reunion with a glorified body at the last day — if we are among those who have died faithful to Our Lord and have entered the heavenly realms after perhaps a period in purgatory.)

All in all, I highly recommend this solid presentation of human biology at each stage of life, accompanied by thoughtprovoking consideration of the great philosophical questions evoked by each stage.

This article first appeared on National Catholic Register, July 2016.

Although an extended discussion of the last things (death, judgment, heaven and hell) is beyond the

37

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rev. C. John McCloskey III is a Catholic priest of the Prelature of Opus Dei and member of the Priestly Society of the Holy Cross. He is the former director of the Catholic Information Center of the Archdiocese of Washington. Website: www.frmccloskey.com.

Director Oliver Stone Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Shailene Woodley, Melissa Leo

Film review: 
 Snowden

USA

by John Mulderig

F

ew figures on the contemporary scene are as controversial as Edward Snowden, the former intelligence officer who, in 2013, revealed to the press the existence of a secret National Security Agency program for the collection of mass data that he considered abusive.

Champion of individual rights against an intrusive government or a traitor to his country?

Opinions about Snowden vary between these two extremes but also probably occupy every square inch of the wide philosophical and political territory dividing them. Riding into this ongoing fray at an enthusiastic gallop comes left-

wing stalwart Oliver Stone. As director and co-writer (with Kieran Fitzgerald) of Snowden (Open Road), Stone serves up an interesting screen biography, but one that eventually proves both excessively one-sided and overlong.

Holed up in a Hong Kong hotel on the eve of his epochal leak, Snowden (Joseph GordonLevitt) recalls the events of his life, beginning with his service in the Army, for the benefit of documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo). Between the extensive flashbacks that follow, he also strategizes with the two principal reporters, Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto) and Ewen MacAskill

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(Tom Wilkinson), working to publish the documents he's stolen.

Drawing on a duo of books, The Snowden Files by Luke Harding and Time of the Octopus by Anatoly Kucherena, Stone initially presents his protagonist as a conscientious man pulled in different directions by his loyalty to the government, his larger sense of duty and his love for his live-in girlfriend, Lindsay Mills (Shailene Woodley). Once Snowden determines his eventual course of action, however, a hero-worshipping tone takes hold to a degree that mars the film’s effectiveness.

Indeed, the swelling music and coinlike profile pose with which we take leave of the title figure would not be out of place in a movie about George Washington or Abraham Lincoln.

If the script is historically accurate, the intelligence community does have some lifeendangering, morally indefensible actions to answer for, as when Snowden becomes involved in a potentially murderous plot to blackmail Middle Eastern banker Marwan al-Kirmani (Bhasker Patel).

But the larger question Snowden raises – how to strike the proper balance between security and privacy – remains a prudential

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judgment about which viewers of faith are free to disagree.

Accordingly, adult moviegoers, some of whom may be put off by the picture's brief but explicit portrayal of sexuality, will have to draw their own conclusions.

Those arrived at, and driven home with a heavy hand, by Stone and his collaborators are all too obvious – to the aesthetic detriment of his project.

The Motion Picture Association of America rating is R – restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.

Reprinted with permission from CNS. www.catholicnews.com.

The film contains a graphic scene of nonmarital sexual activity, images of upper female nudity as well as partial nudity in a strip club, a few uses of profanity and frequent rough and crude language. The Catholic News Service classification is A-III – adults.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR John Mulderig is on the staff of Catholic News Service.

Copyright (c) 2016 Catholic News Service.

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