I’ve been busy with a lot of other things recently and important things have happened. People have asked me to comment. I’ll ramble a little.
First, tonight I was drawn over to that fever-swamp that is the Fishwrap (aka National fill in an adjective other than “Catholic” Reporter) for an opinion piece about Charlie Kirk. What flipped the writers fin was Card. Dolan remark that Charlie was like a modern day St. Paul. The writer also slams Bp. Barron. One wonders how much of St. Paul’s writings any Fishwrap writer agrees with, but let that pass. The writer hums a little about how wrong it was that Charlie was killed – probably with an eye and a half on people being fired in various places (although I don’t think he has to worry about the Fishwrap). Then he gets out what another Fishwrap writer likes to use: venom. Samples…
Any reflection on the legacy of Kirk cannot gloss over the pain and suffering that Kirk inflicted on innumerable people through his harsh, divisive and combative rhetoric. We have published some of those perspectives in the National Catholic Reporter in recent days, but in any conversations about Kirk’s legacy, we cannot ignore his racism, sexism and xenophobia.
Gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.
Since Kirk was killed, I’ve reviewed quite a few of his videos. “harsh, divisive and combative rhetoric” “Harsh”? I saw no evidence of that. “Divisive”? Sure… he disagreed…. BUT… you aren’t allowed to disagree in the Rawlsian Fishtank. “Combative”? It was a debating moment with the phrase “prove me wrong” not “let’s braid each other’s hair”. “Rhetoric”? That’s a buzz word. However, rhetoric is
the art of effective or writing or speaking especially in the public square so as to move, delight and persuade your audience. He was in an outdoor place taking on all comers and moving, delighting and persuading. He also, paralyzed, irritated and hardened others, but, hey. You can’t win them all.
But you can win a lot of them, and he did.
Charlie Kirk, an autodidact who didn’t go to college, went into the public square – colleges and universities – and debated, especially young people, inviting those who disagreed with him to the front of the line. Results varied in the face-to-face moments: some youngsters with seriously scrambled minds (probably through little fault – but not all – of their own) stomped or slouched away firing a last obscenity, others had a light bulb moment. The effect on the bystanders listening to these exchanges and seeing the videos was strong. So, the secular left and progressivists in the Church became increasingly frightened by Charlie Kirk because he was both effective and he stole their spotlight.
One of the things that impressed me about Kirk’s style was his patience, often cheerful, with truly stupid questions and arguments.
Back to the Fishwrap, the writer casts doubts on Kirk’s interest in the Catholic Church. First, he says that Charlie didn’t like Francis. Wow. That’s persuasive. He pointed out that Kirk – a Protestant – as recently as 8 months ago had a problem with the papacy. Wow. There’s news. Conversions can gestate too, Fishwraper. Some sincere conversions happen pretty fast and they are no less real because of the timeline.
In any event, the Fishwrap writer was triggered by Card. Dolan’s remark and Bp. Barron’s words and probably, fundamentally, by Charlie’s success.
What about Pope Leo’s interview with Crux.
I’ll preface this: I don’t think Popes should give interviews.
Also, I am wary of imposing my preferences so that they become expectations so that they become demands so that they become ultimatums.
In what I saw, I had the impression that he was uncomfortable.
Leo mentioned that the homosexual thing, women deacons, and the “Tridentine” Mass are “hot button” issues. Leo has a finely honed political sense. A “hot button” issue is a controversial or emotionally charged topic that provokes strong, immediate reactions from people.
The topic of deaconettes is not interesting because it simply won’t happen. Leo said of it, okay we can talk about it, but: “I at the moment don’t have an intention of changing the teaching of the Church on the topic.”
First, I don’t think he thinks he can change it, and he knows it. Also, “at the moment” doesn’t mean that he is going to change his mind. Consider Greek heos. I’ll expand on that, below.
Leo addressed a couple of points which have made people run around with their hair on fire. Hot-button issues.
I would like to have heard something clearer from him about the homosexuality question. I believe it was a mistake to use the alphabet-soup label which only gives those on that side an chance to instrumentalize him.
Of course Francis was all over this, wasn’t he? And personnel was/is policy. What did Leo say? Among, other things he said,
“we have to change attitudes before we even think about changing what the Church says about any given question.”
Okaaaay… if we want, we might say Leo means that we have to change attitudes to a more favorable position about homosexuality so that we can change doctrine. But that’s not what he said. It is also possible that, in speaking off the cuff and also being a little uncomfortable, he meant we have to change attitudes which reflect, for example, the rampant mania about sex today which causes so much harm.
People want the church doctrine to change, want attitudes to change. I think we have to change attitudes before we even think about changing what the Church says about any given question. I find it highly unlikely, certainly in the near future, that the church’s doctrine in terms of what the church teaches about sexuality, what the Church teaches about marriage, [will change].
Saying “in the near future” doesn’t mean that thinks it can be changed in the distant future.
English… it’s hard. Example: in Matthew 1:25 we read that Joseph “knew [Mary] not until she had borne a son; and he called his name Jesus.” For Protestants and the unsubtle, “until” means that after she had her Son, they had relations. “Until” is Greek heos used also like Matthew 13:33, Jesus says, “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven which a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, until it was all leavened.” The use of heos does not mean that the leaven was later taken out of the flour.
And he co-opted Francis.
A person’s identity, for some people, is all about sexual identity, and for many people in other parts of the world, that’s not a primary issue in terms of how we should deal with one another. I confess, that’s on the back of my mind, because, as we’ve seen at the synod, any issue dealing with the LGBTQ questions is highly polarizing within the Church. For now, because of what I’ve already tried to demonstrate and live out in terms of my understanding of being pope at this time in history, I’m trying not to continue to polarize or promote polarization in the church.
What I’m trying to say is what Francis said very clearly when he would say, ‘todos, todos, todos’. Everyone’s invited in, but I don’t invite a person in because they are or are not of any specific identity.
He goes on to defend true marriage. He contradicts what is going on in Germany about the dreadful Fiducia disaster.
Families need to be supported, what they call the traditional family. The family is father, mother, and children. I think that the role of the family in society, which has at times suffered in recent decades, once again has to be recognized, strengthened. I just wonder out loud if the question about polarization and how people treat one another doesn’t also come from situations where people did not grow up in the context of a family where we learn – that’s the first place you learn how to love one another, how to live with one another, how to tolerate one another, and how to form the bonds of communion. That’s the family. If we take away that basic building block it becomes very difficult to learn that in other ways.
I think Leo is going to kill off documents like Fiducia in this way. It will become a non-document. Would I prefer that he issue a letter making it null and void? Sure. That runs the risk of giving it more energy and exciting certain people to push back. And, it must be admitted, they both organize well and they probably have preternatural help to drive them, given that certain activities can grant access to the enemy of the soul.
About Leo and the Traditional Latin Mass.
I wrote elsewhere that Leo not infrequently spoke about polarization. My experience is the lion’s share of polarization is inflicted by those who are set against traditional sacred worship. That results in responses to the inflictions. The majority of people who desire the TLM want to be left in peace to live their Catholic lives in a way that is entirely legitimate. That’s not what the enemies of the TLM want. They want to force people to do something. They can’t leave them alone.
Leo said:
Obviously, between the Tridentine Mass and the Vatican II Mass, the Mass of Paul VI, I’m not sure where that’s going to go. It’s obviously very complicated.
What was said here? There is a tacit acknowledgement here that there is not a one unique expression of the Roman Rite, and that one is older and the outgrowth of a Council and that one is a recent result of… well… Paul VI perhaps even more than Vatican II. What the Council mandated and what we got are pretty different. However, perhaps more telling is the identification of an implicit conflict of the Councils.
Under Benedict, who used a juridical solution, side-stepped the theological. This need not be a conflict of Vatican II against Trent. The enemies of tradition gathered by Francis held that Trent was superseded by Vatican II. Vatican II was a new Pentecost. Every aspect of the Church’s cult, code and creed must be rethought, reinterpreted, retooled, revised in the light of Vatican II. Moreover, only a few people are really qualified to know what Vatican II really said. There are those who say that the real importance of Vatican II is not the black words on white pages, the texts, but the subtext and metatext of the Council. Jesuit lib historian John W. O’Malley in his book What Happened at Vatican II argued that – in nutshell, the real content of the Council was not the black on white of the documents but rather the marked change in tone. It’s subtext. It is in this change of tone or attitude that we find the real message of the Council, so strong that it forces reinterpretation of everything that went before. In short, justification for rupture.
I would add also the metatext of the Council, what people commented on it. A well-organized para-conciliar ideology took hold of the reporting on and interpretation of the Council while the Council was going on, even on a day to day basis. It superimposed on the concrete discussions and documents. I can’t go into the role of IDOC at length. Suffice to say that well organized progressivists/modernists issued reports and summaries on the days work in different language. Since the press was hungry for information, they exercised a huge influence over how the Council would be received in the larger world, ecclesial and secular. Participants included people like Hans Küng, Edward Schillebeeckx, Yves Congar, Bernard Häring, names associated with theology pushing renewal in liturgy, ecclesiology, ecumenism, etc. IDOC leaked drafts of sensitive documents from commissions. IDOC continued after the Council. It is probably that an IDOC functionary leaked the documents from the papal commission on birth control to the Fishwrap.
Back to it.
NB: In two paragraphs, as divided in print, Leo used the word “polarization” three times. In the first part of the interview, he used “polarization” 5 times. In the rest of the parts as well.
Polarization is a key concern for him. It seems to me that he thinks if he moves quickly or moves strongly in one “direction” or another, he will contributed to the polarization. I think this also recognizes that Francis massively polarized the Church in many spheres. He has a huge mess… bunch of messes…. to clean up. How do you do that?
Leo said:
Again, we’ve become polarized, so that instead of being able to say, well, if we celebrate the Vatican II liturgy in a proper way, do you really find that much difference between this experience and that experience?
This could be a signal that he wants to have the Novus Ordo celebrated in keeping with the Church’s liturgical tradition and with abuses of creativity of whims. Isn’t that what Summorum Pontificum attempted? Apart from the issue of “mutual enrichment”, for DECADES I’ve been saying, put them side-by-side, Novus Ordo celebrated well next to the Vetus Ordo. Let people decide. Why should one be afraid of that.
A point:
I do know that part of that issue, unfortunately, has become – again, part of a process of polarization – people have used the liturgy as an excuse for advancing other topics. It’s become a political tool, and that’s very unfortunate.
I think this is perhaps an issue for some people in France. But it isn’t everywhere and for everyone.
Going on, Leo, in contrast to Francis, said, and I commented on this elsewhere (my emphases):
I have not had the chance to really sit down with a group of people who are advocating for the Tridentine rite. There’s an opportunity coming up soon, and I’m sure there will be occasions for that. But that is an issue that I think also, maybe with synodality, we have to sit down and talk about. It’s become the kind of issue that’s so polarized that people aren’t willing to listen to one another, oftentimes. I’ve heard bishops talk to me, they’ve talked to me about that, where they say, ‘we invited them to this and that and they just won’t even hear it’. They don’t even want to talk about it. That’s a problem in itself. It means we’re into ideology now, we’re no longer into the experience of church communion. That’s one of the issues on the agenda.
First, he says he hasn’t talked with people who want the TLM, but there will be not one opportunity, but “occasions”. Plural.
Second, “synodality”. I suspect that that “walking together” word doesn’t mean what it did for Francis. Were there to be a significant (not insultingly token) and prudent representation of people who desire to have the TLM, then we shall see. I suspect we will have to wait.
Third, “so polarized that people aren’t willing to listen to one another, oftentimes”. Which side was more unwilling to listen? Now we will see if Leo is willing to listen. The only bit of evidence we have at the moment is that he has restored that the Summorum Pontificum Pilgrimage have a Pontifical Mass in St. Peter’s.
Fourth, “bishops …say, ‘we invited them to this and that and they just won’t even hear it’. They don’t even want to talk about it.” Elsewhere, I wonder if these bishops were willing to accept invitations from the TLM communities.
Fifth, “It means we’re into ideology now, we’re no longer into the experience of church communion. That’s one of the issues on the agenda.” That means that he has this as an action item. It is “on the agenda”.
Bottom line, I don’t think we should make Leo say something that he didn’t say. I’ll try to avoid that, too.
Lastly, eventually, simply talking and talking and talking, especially about important moral issues, the hot button issues must be dealt with with crystal clarity. Dialogue and “walking together” which only goes in a circle must resolve.
In the Inferno, Dante with Virgil pass the gate that says “Abandon all hope you who enter here” and, before they even reach the Charon and the banks of the river leading to true Hell, they behold the vestibule of Hell, a plain filled with the a vast multitude of the tepid and indecisive, pointlessly chasing in a circle a whirling banner with no emblem.
