The Brits Debate Celibacy

Last night on the BBC they conducted a debate over the issue of celibacy in the Church.  The following extract is from a new blog written by Tina Beattie, the Director of the Digby Stuart Research Center For Catholic Studies.  The extract records Tina's personal contributions to the debate as a member of the side advocating for a change in the celibacy doctrine.  Tina brings up a couple of points I had never given much consideration, but in retrospect think need to be seriously considered.

"I pointed out that we already have married priests in the Roman Catholic Church thanks to the influx of Anglicans. The bishop (Malcolm McMahon) tried to defend that on the basis of exceptions, but having referred to celibacy in ontological terms, that wasn't a very persuasive defence. And I did wonder, if there can be ontological exceptions for Anglicans, why not for women? It's all very unsatisfactory, and seems unfair to faithful Roman Catholic celibate priests who long to marry but are forbidden to do so.


I agreed to take part in this debate because of the word 'compulsory'. I think celibacy is a gift and a vocation with huge advantages for the Church. It enables men and women to work in situations of extreme hardship and danger - which is why the Catholic Church is usually still there when all other NGOs and aid agencies have fled. It also gives a potent witness to an alternative way of life, in an age when so many in society simply take it for granted that abundant high-performance sexual activity is as essential to our human well-being as eating and drinking. But when celibacy and priesthood are forced into the same vocation, and when the institutional Church is governed by an exclusively male celibate hierarchy, we should not be surprised that the Church is every bit as obsessed with sex as secular society is. (Opposite sides of the same sexually obsessive coin--this does not imply one is right and one is wrong. Both are out of a balance and ignore the concept of love in sexual relationships.)

However, like Frank Skinner, in the end I'd rather see celibate women priests than married priests. The Church would need to be much more radically transformed in its attitudes to women for priests' wives to be anything other than glorified housekeepers, and with present teachings on contraception presbyteries would soon be overflowing with babies. Married priests might simply prop up the status quo with all its patriarchal and misogynistic tendencies. Maybe what we need is a much wider understanding of different models of priesthood and different models of celibacy, without an essential link between the two.

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I had not actually considered just how the birth control issue might play out in rectories with a married priesthood.  It's easy to imagine how a married couple might have to spend a bit of energy defending the sacramentality of their marriage if children didn't appear on a regular basis.  Not a mission I particularly would want to engage in as part of priestly ministry.  I wonder if married deacons experience much of this kind of scrutiny?

I strongly agree with Dr. Beattie's final thought that celibacy and the priesthood have to be freed of the linkage between the two.  I would state this a little more broadly and say that sexuality and the priesthood have to be freed of such linkage.  I don't mean to suggest that candidates for the priesthood needn't have a mature understanding of sexual expression.  I see it more in the sense that candidates for the priesthood should be mature across the board with sexuality one aspect of that maturity, and spiritual maturity being the primary criterion--irrespective of gender.  Spiritual maturity implies the inclusion of sexual maturity as one can't be truly spiritually mature if one operates out of an immature mentality towards sex.

The sex abuse crisis certainly points out how one can attain religious leadership while being essentially immature in a whole host of areas--sexuality only one of such areas.  In my own life the people who have had the most impact on my spiritual development have all had one thing in common, and it's not celibacy or chastity or heterosexual orientation.  It's compassion and empathy, or to put it differently, they have demonstrated and engaged in the 'art' of relationship.  This doesn't mean that they were great enablers of immorality and sin, but that they created an accepting environment in which dysfunctional areas of living could be explored and healed.  The emphasis was not on changing behavior, but in healing the underlying reasons for the behavior. Once healing occurs, behavior has to change.

I can remember back in my younger days when a priest I hugely respected said that celibacy and chastity are not bad ideas at all, but the way they were taught and implemented were just crap. He said no one seems to wonder if Jesus had other reasons for practicing celibacy other than purity laws.  He thought Jesus chose celibacy because Jesus realized one doesn't have a sexual relationship in a vacuum of two people. No relationship has consequences for just two people.  If Jesus and Mary Magdalene, for instance, had had a sexual relationship the effects on the Apostles would most likely have been explosive.  In this priest's mind Jesus made a deliberate choice to practice a celibate life precisely so that the consequences of such a singular relationship would not effect His teaching mission or undercut the necessary relationship with His disciples.  Jesus couldn't afford the jealousy such a relationship might engender in others.  Peter comes to mind.

Had Jesus begun his teaching career at fifty nine instead of twenty nine, things might have been a little different.  The fires of passion being banked to some extent, family responsibilities over and done with, and most men not particularly interested in the old wife of an old rabbi.  For whatever reason, Jesus opted for a different path.  This has never meant the Church had to opt for the same path.  Most young men, Apostles included, are not chemically built for celibacy, nor are they usually relationally mature enough to make celibacy a healthy kind of relational choice.  In the end celibacy is not so much a sexual choice, as it is a relational choice.  It's a choice that's best served in maturity not youth. 

I personally believe that celibacy/chastity should not be available as a consecrated vow until later in life for any religious state.  If they are not integrated parts of the personality there will be problems.  Mature integration is not usually accomplished through youthful denial. Recognizing that might be a good place to start this conversation.

John Paul II Was Haunted By A 'Catolic' Dream

I came across a fascinating tale of a dream of JPII's on the website Catholic Concern for Animals by JR Hyland.  The dream was about a homeless mother cat and her kittens.  The story was originally related in one of the two hundred some interviews JPII granted author Anton Gronowicz for his biographical book on John Paul entitled "God's Broker".  The interviews took place shortly after JPII's election to the papacy and the book was published in 1984.  It's a pretty straightforward dream, loaded with lessons for JPII and perhaps lessons for us as well--and some of those lessons might be about about JPII......

"The dream took place in 1969 the night before the Pope, known then as Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, was to visit New York City for the first time. It was late summer and he had been touring Canada. He spoke of the beauty of its fields and forests and how he had wished for more time to walk in woods vibrant with color and with his "ears filled with the songs and voices of animals."

In the midst of this discussion of Canada, the Pope abruptly changed the subject and said: "The night before my departure from Canada to New York, which I had never seen, I had a strange dream." But his dream was not of beautiful forests, warm with the summer sun. It was of a crowded city, frigid with the cold of a northern winter. And although he had never been there, his dream captured the way Manhattan looks and feels, after a major snow storm.

"It was a terribly severe winter in New York, the city was completely covered with snow. Inhabitants were well-off and warmly dressed, and walking slowly along roads because cars, due to mountains of snow, could not be operated. I was happy that I could walk on top of the snow on avenues of white.

"All my physical effort was spent on walking. To this day, pictures of huge apartment houses on both sides of the avenue are instilled in my mind, and the doormen quickly closing and opening entrance doors as though trying to prevent humanity and warmth from escaping.

"On top of the snow, I noticed a brown cat emerge from a side street and walk on the snow. I looked closer, and to my surprise, saw that this big cat was being followed by six small brown-and- white kittens, all of them following the big brown cat in a perfect line. The mother cat looked back from time to time to see if her babies were there, but her main concern was to reach the entrance door. I presumed she was trying to find warmth for herself and her children, but as soon as she reached the door, a man in a well-pressed uniform, jumped at her with a broom and chased them away. I followed this procession and prepared to deliver a speech to the doorman. I opened my mouth and tried to complain, 'Where is your proverbial American generosity? Where is your American good heart and fair play? Let them in. Let them in!!

"I tried to speak, but the words would not come out. Maybe I was afraid of the doorman with the broom. I started searching my cassock pockets for a piece of bread, found some crumbs and put them on my palms, calling: 'Kitty, kitty, kitty.' But the words would not come from my supposedly intelligent mouth. Instead, the wind blew the crumbs from my palm and I said, 'what can I do? I can't speak to the cats. I can't speak to the doorman. But there are many hungry birds. They might pick up the crumbs.'

"Again, I walked after the cats, now with a pain in my chest, feeling tremendous cold. On the left I saw a church building and thought, 'There we will find help.' I heard singing and again, the idea occurred to me that it must be a Catholic church. The music grew louder, as though trying to convince God that they were praying to Him.

The mother cat jumped in front of me and climbed the stairs, followed by her kittens. I raised my head and saw a tall Jesuit priest chasing the cats off the steps. But as I was about to shout at the Jesuit 'I am a cardinal!' and give an order to accept the cats, the mother cat and her offspring ran behind the church, because from there came the appetizing aroma of food. Probably there was a kitchen there. But a second Jesuit appeared at the kitchen door and scared the cats away. They returned to the avenue and started walking north.

"They walked on the same side of the avenue as the Jesuit church and I followed. Then they reached an imposing red brick church. An Anglican bishop appeared and said to the cats, 'My dear animal children, please go immediately to the animal shelter. There is food for you there. We Anglican clergy donate lots of money to the animal shelter, every year, at Christmas time.'

"The mother cat and her kittens didn't even meow. They knew the authoritative voice of the Anglican bishop. They walked uptown and gradually the luxurious buildings disappeared, together with the doormen, and we saw drab dilapidated apartments.

"As they walked and the buildings grew shabbier and dirty, a door was opened, not by a doorman but by an old wrinkled woman in a cotton dress. [She saw the cats] and shouted 'Oh, little mother,' and when she opened her mouth I saw she had few teeth. She gently ushered the mother cat and kittens inside, who jumped happily about because the warmth of the house embraced them."

The narrative ended as the cats found a safe haven with the woman who had little enough, herself. When the Pope concluded his dream the author to whom he related it did not make any comment on what had been said. But he did write that "I had never seen such a sad expression on the face of this man." Considering that this was the same man who had related the horrors of his young manhood, under Nazi occupation, the author's remark shows the deep impact this dream had on the Pope.

If the Pontiff offered a commentary on his dream, Anton Gronowicz does not share it with the reader. But we are told that John Paul began to recite the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi."

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There are a number of schools of thought as to what dreams are and what the symbolism represents.  What I find fascinating about this dream of John Paul's is that it maintains a continuity in time and place.  It could very well be a real story, and not a dream.  This aspect may be the reason that it seems to have so effected JPII so strongly. Dreams like this are hard to dismiss, precisely because they follow our normal waking experience of reality.

There are some aspects of this dream that I found very fascinating, such as the portrayal of the Jesuit priests, the Anglican Vicar, and JPII's own inability to either feed the cats himself or open his mouth to use his influence as a Cardinal to change anything for the better.  The dream doesn't paint a very flattering picture of the clergy as effective servants for the least amongst us--no better than an apartment doorman.  The dream ends with the least of humanity giving hospitality to the least amongst us.  It's easy for me to see where JPII's face displayed great sadness.  His own dream portrayed the clerical caste, of which he was a high ranking member, as either indifferent, compartmentalized in their charity, or in his case, impotent to effect change. 

The most obvious interpretation might be JPII"s dream is a kind of modern version of the Nativity story.  There is no room at any inn for this mother and her kittens until they find a 'toothless hag' who willingly takes them in because she recognizes a 'little mother' and the stray family all live happily in the warmth of her home.

A wrinkled toothless hag is hardly the first picture for Mother Church that would come to many people's minds, but it did to JPII's mind.  Of course, real Christian love has nothing to do with outward appearance, and everything to do with inward warmth.  I can't help but wonder if JPII ever understood the core meaning of his dream and what it might have portended for his papacy.  I think he probably did get the gist of the dream but as he himself experienced in the dream,  he couldn't act on or articulate this particular understanding about the Christian Church.  As he experiences in the dream:  "But the words would not come from my supposedly intelligent mouth."

When An Event Admission Ticket Is Not An Event Admission Ticket

Thought I'd do my small part to help organizers defray the cost of Benedict's visit by advertising some sample souvenirs.  For a thoughtful review of these and others, try this link

Seriously, there are times I don't know whether to laugh or cry--because there are times when Church leaders, in giving the appearance of adhering to Church doctrine, appear very manipulative, more like con artists than spiritual leaders.  This tendency has been amply demonstrated by our clerical higher ups in the abuse crisis, but now Archbishop Vincent Nichols has given us another demonstration of double speak.  His task was to prove that setting an admission price for papal events in Britain did not violate simony statutes, especially setting a flat fee for admittance to Papal Masses.  From RTE Ireland:

Those wanting to see Pope Benedict XVI during his visit to Britain this week have been asked to make a 'financial contribution' to attend masses to help make up a shortfall in funding.

When they go to the events, they will also be urged to buy t-shirts, baseball caps and tea cups commemorating the visit, as the Catholic Church's marketing arm swings into action.

The Church is asking for £25 (€30) per head to attend the open-air mass in Birmingham on September 19, the final day of the visit. (This is about $39 US.)

The contribution is slightly lower for the mass in Glasgow on Thursday, at £20, and entry to the prayer vigil in London on Saturday is £5.

All the prices include transport to the venues and a 'pilgrim pack' -- a bag containing a CD and a booklet about the visit.

While asking for payment to attend a papal mass is believed to be unprecedented, the Catholic Church has denied it amounts to an entrance fee.

'Those contributions only cover the costs of the transport and the security provisions,' said Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols, the head of the Catholic Church in England.

'It includes their travel so it's not as if it is a payment to go to mass.' (I suppose that technically one could pay for a ticket whose end destination is a papal mass, and not go to the mass.  There for selling 'travel packages' explicitly to papal masses is not technically simony, even though it gives a very definite appearance of violating the spirit of the doctrine.)
The funding of the first ever state visit by a pope to Britain is expected to cost around £20m and has attracted controversy as taxpayers are footing £10 to £12m of the bill.

That leaves a £10m shortfall for the Catholic Churches in England, Scotland and Wales to pick up, of which £6m has already been raised through a public appeal for funds.

The 'financial contributions' to attend the masses will make up the rest.

More than three quarters of Britons are against meeting even half the cost of the visit, according to a poll by public theology think tank Theos this month.

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Irish laity are not snapping up their allotment of travel packages.  Of 2500 'financial contributions' slated for the Irish for Pope Benedict's mass in Bellahouston Park, Glasgow, 2000 remain.  Where as 300,000 attended JPII"s mass at this venue in 1982, organizers estimate 80,000 for Benedict.  Perhaps Benedict will see this upturn in apathy as proof that his desire for a leaner church is well on it's way.  That would probably be easier for him to accept than the alternatives, that he is not JPII, that the abuse crisis really has had a profound effect on Catholic participation, and that Benedict's Catholic world view is rapidly losing ground in the advancement of secular notions of individual human rights--especially in the democratic anglo world, but also in Latin American countries.

One could wonder if thirty plus years of the restorationist agenda has been particularly good for the People of God.  It doesn't seem to have been to good for the People of God as defined by Vatican II theology.  With the beatification of Cardinal Newman as the centerpiece of this trip, there has been a great deal of writing about Newman and his influence on the Church.  To be honest, I don't actually recognize much of the Cardinal Newman of Vatican II in the analysis of Cardinal Newman coming from Benedict and the Vatican.  I would have to agree with John Cornwell's take, that the theologian whose writing was so much a part of Vatican II thinking would have to be 'restored' as much as Vatican II itself.

One of the more interesting things I learned in reading Cornwell's article is the reason for the extensive decomposition of Newman's body: 

"On a wet October day in 2008, an assortment of priests and grave-diggers arrived at the cemetery in Rednal, armed with shovels and a mechanical digger. They planned to transfer Newman’s remains to a tomb back at his church in Birmingham. Nothing was found except the brass name-plate and a few bits of rotten wood. A solution to the mystery was discovered in the archives of the Birmingham Post. A journalist at the burial reported that, on Newman’s orders, the grave was filled with compost to hasten decomposition."

It does seem that Newman was not interested in the Church finding and restoring his physical remains.  Perhaps on some level he knew that there was nothing he could do about his ideas, so he asserted his only control about those ideas through his burial--side by side with his beloved companion with no relics left to be manipulated for the 'sainthood industry'. Newman's final message seems to be about the supremacy of the love in his life, and this was not to be overshadowed by the veneration or manipulation of his ideas or his physical body.  Truly a message from the grave, but probably not one we will hear from Pope Benedict. 

In the meantime Vatican organizers are most likely concerned with other messages.  After all there are all those 'financial contributions' and 'travel arrangements' yet to be sold.  

A Clerical Call For More Catholic Babies To Save European Culture From Islamic Babies

Seriously, this is an actual game.  Doesn't appear to be one I personally would want to play.  I've done my diaper duty.

Catholic priest urges European Christians to fight off Islam by having babies
BY Meena Hartenstein  NY DAILY NEWS - Wednesday, September 8th 2010

A prominent Catholic priest wants European Christians to fight off Islam with a unique weapon: babies.

Father Piero Gheddo, an Italian missionary priest, said Wednesday he believes a declining birth rate among Europeans combined with a rising tide of Muslim immigrants could mean that Islam will soon dominate Europe.

"Certainly from a demographic point of view, as it is clear to everyone that Italians are decreasing by 120,000 or 130,000 persons a year because of abortion and broken families; while among the more than 200,000 legal immigrants a year in Italy, more than half are Muslims and Muslim families, which have a much higher level of growth," he said, according to Rome's Catholic news service Zenit News Agency.

Gheddo's solution? Christians need to start having more children. (Except for him and his fellow clergy.)

"The fact is that, as a people, we are becoming ever more pagan and the religious vacuum is inevitably filled by other proposals and religious forces," he said. "If we consider ourselves a Christian country, we should return to the practice of Christian life, which would also solve the problem of empty cradles." (I love his use of 'we'.  The truth is a large number of Italians would not consider themselves part of his 'we'.

Father Gheddo is a well-respected member of the Vatican's Pontificial Institute for Foreign Missionaires.

His comments were made in response to Libyan chief of state Moammar Khadafy, who said this week that Europe should convert to Islam.

Khadafy, on an official visit to Italy, laced his speech with controversial remarks, such as, "Tomorrow Europe might no longer be European, and even black, as there are millions who want to come in."

"We don't know if Europe will remain an advanced and united continent or if it will be destroyed, as happened with the barbarian invasions," Khadafy added, before handing out free copies of the Koran.

Incensed that Muslims could one day outnumber Christians in Europe, Gheddo vowed to bring more attention to the issue. (Could be European Muslims will be secularized long before Islam is able to take over the Continent. A likely fact Khadafy ignores as well.)

The media hasn't "seriously taken into consideration how to respond to this challenge of Islam," he said, "which sooner or later will conquer the majority in Europe."

Gheddo intends to change that.  (Easy for him to say as he can be all talk and no walk.)

"The challenge must be taken seriously," he said.

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It's hard to take this particular challenge seriously when it's being issued by a man who can't be part of his desired solution.  At least not officially, that is. It's exactly the same situation Catholic lay reformers are in when it comes to the priesthood.  We can talk all we want, but by definition will not be a deciding part of any solutions.  It's a frustrating place to be.

I couldn't help but notice that Fr. Gheddo places the blame for the demographic problems he sees in Italy on abortion and broken families.  I suspect economic factors,  birth control, and the reluctance of Italian males to enter into marriage has more to do with his perceived state of affairs.  I see very little reason that the same kinds of factors won't impact Islamic immigrants.  Secularizing tendencies, like higher levels of education for women, effect all religious denominations.  Even the most reactionary.  Perhaps most fundamentally the most reactionary.

Fr Gheddo, whether he intends to admit this or not, is making the case that Islam has more power over it's adherents than Catholicism.  I wonder how true that will be when adherents of Islam find themselves in truly open secular societies.  Even truly theocratic states like Iran are finding it harder and harder to keep secular ideas from 'infecting' their people and changing their cultures.  Especially in the younger generations who have taken like ducks to water to the global revolution in communication technologies.  Especially younger women.

I truly wonder if Fr. Gheddo's real concern is not Islamic immigration but the changing status of women in western culture.  One of the real changes is that women are making decisions about children on the ability to raise them, not just have them.  Children are no longer seen as 'random' gifts from God, but a serious personal responsibility.  One that calls for serious consideration about all kinds of factors which impact families and family size.  Women in the west have been empowered to have the primary voice in how many children they will have and when they will have those children.  Motherhood and parenting is no longer a random crap shoot at the behest of male sexual need.  Parental complementarity, as opposed to gender complementarity, is a much broader concept in which parental roles and responsibilities are shared across the board. It's incomprehensible to me that Islam will prove any better at stopping this trend than Christianity has, because the truth is this trend towards the empowerment of women actually frees and empowers men in as many ways as it does women---that is if men are willing to see it and willing to value their daughters as much as sons.

There were two other articles I read this morning that are worth  pointing out.  The first is on Michael Bayly's Wild Reed.  It deals with the incredible man/boy subculture with in the Taliban in Afghanistan.  This is a culture which stones homosexuals by religious law.  The rationale used by men who engage in man/boy sexual partnerships is that it's not homosexuality because they are not in love with their boys.  I guess that makes this religiously sanctioned sexual exploitation of young boys. And it's based in pathological levels of misogyny.

The other article is on Bilgrimage and deals with Focus On The Family's keynote convention speaker, Newt Gingrich.  Perhaps Newt's talk will explain his concepts about how repeated practice makes monogamous traditional heterosexual marriage better--at least for traditional powerful men like himself.

Benedict Advocates Repentance And Conversion--Not Structural Change

Pope Benedict has a great idea here except for a few problems.  Pedophiles don't repent and their bishop enablers have exempted themselves from any accountability, which more or less negates any notion of complete repentance or any kind of conversion. This is even more egregious in cases in which bishops themselves are abusers. Benedict completely ignores the idea that real repentance might mandate structural change.  The following is from the Sydney Herald. 

Pope Benedict XVI says repentance is more effective than structural change within the Church to counter sexual abuse by priests.


Using an indirect historical analogy, the pope on Wednesday recalled the words of XII century Saint Hildegard, according to whom "a true renewal of the ecclesiastic community is the result less of structural changes than of a sincere spirit of repentance and an active path towards conversion."

Saint Hildergard at the time was fighting the criticism by German sects "proposing a radical reform of the Church in order to fight abuses by clergy," Benedict told 7,000 pilgrims at his weekly general audience.

The pontiff said Hildergard's was "a message that we should never forget."

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Maybe Hildergard's is a message that needs some modification since eight hundred years later the Church is still dealing with the same abusive problems.  Sometimes good old fashioned structural changes can facilitate true repentance.  Often times these structural changes also reduce one's ability to abuse with impunity or disabuse one of the notion they are not accountable to anyone other than themselves.  Come to think of it, isn't Benedict the same Pope who is demanding structural changes for the Legionaries and suggested Maciel restructure himself into a monastery?

Actually, I'm not sure structural changes would actually accomplish much if they weren't accompanied by a completely different mindset.  As it stands now the Church is in love with the idea of the victim/abuser dynamic.  It's pervasive in much of it's theology and spirituality.  It leads to the kind of mentality that blames victims for being complicit in their own victimization, or tells them to offer up their suffering for the good of their abuser, or demands they forgive their unrepentant abuser for the good of their own soul.  There's a bit of truth in the last statement, but it's a long road for any victim to reach that point of forgiveness.  The larger truth is forgiveness of this sort is too often seen by the abuser as a free pass and short circuits true repentance and conversion.  This is sometimes called receiving cheap grace.  Real grace is not cheap.  I am not personally predisposed to offering Benedict much cheap grace.

This victim/abuser dynamic can also be described by the terms prey/predator. The operative emotional consequence for people exposed to this dynamic is fear.  The Church has a long traditional history of evoking fear in it's adherents.  Victimizing and preying on catechized lay fear has also proven to be very lucrative. This is why I'm quite sure Benedict is not going to advocate change in the cultural structure.  We'll just have to trust an intrinsically predatory hierarchical structure will change it's stripes and repent and convert. He wants us to believe this clerical lion will lay down with it's lay lambs.  Right. 

What Does The Future Hold?

Homer Simpson is not a representative of the next stage of human evolution.


The Progressive Catholic Voice has a new post about a trip to interview Hans Kung taken by organizers of the American Catholic Conference.  ACC is organizing a national meeting of reform minded Catholics to be held in Detroit in June of 2011.  The following short excerpt gives Dr. Kung's view of the future of Catholicism.

In a relaxed atmosphere, Dr. Küng expressed his views about the future of the Church. As he sees it, the institution we know will die soon, to be replaced by communities following the gospel of Jesus, with informal liturgies and a sacramentality related to life in community. He is very devoted to developing relationships between Christianity and non-Christian religions, the attempt to discover a global ethical commonality, and ultimately, a global understanding of God. What he sees emerging is a spirituality related to the human condition and stages of life, to replace institutionalized rigidity.

Dr. Kung is describing a vastly different Catholicism from the one currently in place.  I find his take on the future to be the highest probability for Catholics in many global locations if only because the priest shortage leaves very little alternative.  His idea of communities with informal liturgies was successfully demonstrated in Brazil in the idea of Base Communities, and then as successfully suppressed by the Vatican under JPII. I imagine that of all the headaches the Vatican curia currently faces, the rise of successful community based Evangelical communities in South America may be higher on the list than the Vatican is willing to express. At the rate Evangelicals are eating into the Catholic population, Catholicism could be a minority religion in less than fifty years.  It seems to me this is a very heavy price for maintaining the doctrine of our current sacramental priesthood.

Dr Kung also mentions the importance of developing a global understanding of God with a global ethical commonality.  This idea will have just as profound an impact on traditional notions of Catholicism as the idea of locally based sacramental communities. This influence can already be seen in theological trends coming from India and the Orient with their different understandings of spirituality and emphasis on both/and thinking.  It can also be seen in the American continents with the influence of Indigenous understandings of cosmology, liturgical and sacramental practices, and shamanism.  The push for these global understandings are not coming from the top down, but from the bottom up.  As such they are a direct threat to any hierarchical religious structure based in static dogmatism.

There is also another idea contained in the above trends which is not always explicitly mentioned but is definitely implied.  This is the idea that we are on the brink of another leap in human consciousness and human capability.  A leap perhaps as important as the one evidenced in the evolution of self awareness and the concomitant ability to think in context of past and future which allowed for a different relationship with time and material reality.  It could very well be that this evolution in consciousness is the reason homo sapiens is the sole representative species of humanity.  The next step, according to some future thinkers, is homo transcendent. 

The advent of homo transcendent is not just an idea being tossed around in spiritual circles, it's also being tossed around by scientists studying human consciousness, theoretical physics, and neurophysiology.  Rather than scoffing at the tales of Mayan shamans or a Padre Pio they are asking serious questions about the neural mechanisms which might be involved.  They may not yet have definitive answers, but there is a growing amount of research which indicates mystical experiences are directly related to unique patterns of neural activity.  Something is happening in the brains of some people and it's recordable.  Oh yea and in some cases that something produces changes in material reality and/or accesses unique information.

This brings up all kinds of other questions.  Some of them having to do with the kinds of information accessed and the kinds of manifested events.  For instance Padre Pio had very different experiences in the mystical realm than an Indigenous shaman even though both manifest similar abilities. It seems that we can only understand the mystical realms via the world view we have entrained in our brains.  Padre Pio had a stated and confirmed desire to become a 'perfect victim soul' and his experience confirmed this understanding, complete with physical demonic attacks.  An Indigenous shaman has a very different world view and would see these kind of attacks as a product of unexamined fears drawing this reality to the dreamer.  This is why the shamanic tradition has a training process that takes decades.  One of the main thrusts of the training is to clean up and protect the ego from disintegrating through the fear generated by mind bending alternate realities.  In a sense one point of the extensive training is to foster a kind of super sanity. 

Padre Pio, in the monastic tradition experienced a similar kind of notion, except in his case it was not evolving a form of super sanity, but super sanctity.  In the difference between those two words, sanity and sanctity, lies the potential for a great deal of tussle over the spiritual future of Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular.  More to come.

The Weary Traveler Is Finally All Rested

I hope everyone is having a restful labor day.  I for one can certainly use a restful labor day.  Last week was enough labor for me to last at least the next month.  But in the end, I am safely moved and have my latest abode pretty well shaped up.  Even the three cats have settled in,  having survived two days of continuous driving courtesy of loopy pills from a kindly vet.  I thank God for kindly vets.  I also thank God for the US Postal Service.  I was shocked that all twelve boxes I shipped parcel post arrived before I did, and even though the boxes showed some wear and tear, the contents did not.  All in all it was a busy but successful week.

I've spent the past two days catching up on all the things I missed in the Catholic world, and there is quite a bit I could write about, but I will save those thoughts for later.  For now I want to relate two personal stories.  The first happened the day before I left for Montana when I was packing up the last of my boxes to ship.  The youngest of my cats bopped through the bedroom window to share her latest catch with me.  It turned out to be a humming bird.  This was the second such gift she had managed to catch.  The first she had brought three months previously and it did not survive the giving.  At the time I had this sinking feeling because humming birds represent joy in many Native cultures.  It did turn out that next three months were not full of joy for yours truly.  So being brought another apparently dead humming bird, right before I am to embark on another stage in my life, did not inspire a lot of confidence.

I managed to retrieve the humming bird which lay comatose in my hand and proceeded to take it to the front of the house with the intent to bury it.  Along the way I get the distinct message that maybe I shouldn't be so quick to bury it.  So I do a little intentional energy work and as I'm doing so the beak begins to open and close with the rhythm of my hands.  I straighten out it's feathers and place it gently on the ground where it cheeps once and then zooms off, apparently none the worse for wear.  In my head I hear the comment "Joy resurrected."  It seemed to be a very good omen. Not to my cat though.

The next day as I began my drive back to Montana I did my standard meditation for a safe journey.  In this meditation I visualize a cone of protective energy around my vehicle.  This time I hear: "That's pretty selfish".
I'm seriously stopped in my tracks. What?, I ask.  The response comes back that I could, if I wasn't being so selfish, extend the cone of protection out to about a fifty mile radius and include everyone sharing the road with me.  I'm like, I can do that?  The answer came back "No, but we can through you.  We can use you and your vehicle as the center point and extend the cone out to more or less that radius."  Since I didn't have any particularly good reason to deny the request I agreed.  My version of a protective cone includes no accidents and no breakdowns.  In the two days and over twelve hundred miles, I saw no accidents and no breakdowns, and I thought a lot about this particular interaction.

While I was driving through Denver I was hyper alert for accidents or breakdowns because statistics would indicate it was this time on the road where I would see accidents or breakdowns.  I saw none and blew through Denver without even having to slow down.  So I'm thinking to myself if this whole thing is actually true it would be quite a gift for a lot of unsuspecting drivers.  At which point the same voice says: "Imagine what this 'trick' of ours would be worth to an auto insurance company?  They might pay good money to make sure people with this kind of connection were always on the road in high traffic areas---that's just a practical observation."

Again I found my own musings brought to a halt by this observation.  I can't say that I would ever have conceived of the effects this kind of thing would have on insurance companies.  But it wasn't this practical application that contained the real lesson of this exercise.  It was the spiritual.  It was brought to my attention that this gift was extended to everyone who shared the road with me.  Given the roads I was driving encompassed one of the major drug routes it meant the gift was extended to criminals, drug runners, abusers, drunks, druggies, the generally irresponsible, Protestants, Natives, Jews, Moslems, true Catholics, lapsed Catholics, and all and sundry without exception.  Without exception. Just as Jesus fed the multitudes without exception or extended healing to all without exception, these kinds of gifts were meant to be given without exception--or merit or judgment.  Just given. Period.

I am not intending to state that this scenario was actually in effect.  One of my personal maxims is that one can not extrapolate from a data of point of one. All I know is that on this one trip I saw no accidents and no breakdowns and had a really fascinating mile eating mental conversation with some interesting ramifications.

Tomorrow I want to address some aspects of Catholic mysticism and some statements from Catholic mystics which do not necessarily fall into the usual categories of doom and destruction and hell and damnation.  In researching some recent visionaries I came across this quote from Padre Pio as recorded by his fellow Capuchins: 

Question: Padre, some claim that there are creatures of God on other planets, too.


Answer: "What else? Do you think they don’t exist and that God’s omnipotence is limited to this small planet Earth? What else? Do you think there are no other beings who love the Lord?"

Question: Padre, I think the Earth is nothing compared to other planets and stars.

Answer: "Exactly! Yes, and we Earthlings are nothing, too. The Lord certainly did not limit His glory to this small Earth. On other planets other beings exist who did not sin and fall as we did." (Maybe they didn't have quite the same free choice dynamic we do.)


 
One wonders if in Pio's 'travels' he didn't make some serious connections with other intelligent beings, or if he came to a different conclusion about the nature of angels and other 'supernatural' beings.
 
 
 








   

Reconciling Faith With Reason Is Not The Same As Reconciling Faith With Science

Archbishop Martin of Dublin gave a speech in Italy to the members of the Communion and Liberation movement.  The speech dealt with Cardinal Newman's time as rector of Ireland's first Catholic University. Most of the commentary has dealt with Archbishop Martin's comments on the state of Catholicism in Ireland and it's apparent dearth of theological maturity.  However, I had a different reaction to this speech.  This link will take you to a full translation, but the following short extract really hit home to me:

"In the Catholic university Gazette of 9 February 1855, Newman quotes from an earlier speech: "One of the greatest disasters of modern times is the separation between religion and science, and the perfection of knowledge is a combination of both ... which makes men not only educated but good Christians."

Directly after this quote, Martin shifts Newman's point entirely:

The question of relationship between faith and reason was particularly delicate at that time — maybe less in Ireland than the rest of the United Kingdom and continental Europe — with the increase of the sceptical attitude toward religion. Newman wanted to show his contemporaries that faith and reason do not conflict, but also that “reason could not be the sole arbiter of all truth”.

This substitution of Archbishop Martin's is done all the time by Catholic teachers.  Newman was referencing faith and science, not faith and reason.  There is a huge huge difference between the two concepts.  In Newman's time, as with our own, there are major conflicts between traditional faith and scientific understandings, gaps which reason is hard pressed to reconcile.  Equating reason with science is a nice trick, one which the teaching authority attempts to do with regularity.  Reason is an intellectual tool both science and theology use to arrive at truth.  The difference is science uses reason to rule out false assumptions, theology all too often uses reason to justify false assumptions.  Where as there may not be an inherent conflict between faith and reason, depending on one's starting assumptions, there can be a huge conflict between faith and science.

At no point in his entire speech does Archbishop Martin refer to Newman's original point about reconciling faith and science.  It's faith and reason which must be reconciled, which in too many cases means ignoring scientific evidence which contradicts underlying unexamined faith assumptions.  Some tenants of Natural Law morality come to mind.

I am personally very frustrated by the dearth of theologians who are delving into the latest scientific advancements, especially in quantum theory and human consciousness.  I don't understand how an honest person trying to reconcile faith and science can ignore whole fields of science which describe an incredible reality of enormous potential.  Maybe it's too frightening, but to continue to ignore these kinds of scientific advances is to admit traditional Christian understanding can not be reconciled with scientific reasoning.  I happen to think that's not true, but reconciling the two will take the courage to read the Gospels with fresh eyes, minus the accretions of centuries of false assumptions as to how the universe really works.


Short personal note.  I should be back up and posting regularly by the end of the week.  I sincerely want to thank the people who have donated to the support of this blog.  It's been both affirming and humbling, giving me a real boost when I needed one.

Gender Complimentarity Or Gender Confusion?

I had a tough time visualising JPII as the major player in this role, even though he truly believed this was a good metaphor for the relationship of the Church with Jesus.  Notice I haven't mentioned cappa magna.

Latley there has been lots of discussion of JPII's Theology of the Body.  Enough that I went back and tried to muddle my way through the original Wednesday talks this signature writing of JPII is taken from.  I have to admit I just couldn't get through it.  I don't know if it's a function of translation or what, but JPII seems to have engaged in an unbelievable amount of convoluted and dense thinking.  In the end I couldn't help think most of it was covering the fact he was essentially making the same points over and over again.

What struck me most forcefully about this exercise is that JPII seemed to expend a lot of verbiage justifying traditional marriage as a legitimate metaphor for the Church as the bride of Christ.  Quite frankly I have never ever bought that metaphor.  Maybe it's because I'm a mother and a woman and don't see how males quite fit the bridal/mother image, and since clerical males are the most important representatives of the Church, they carry the burden of this representation.  That's quite a yoke.  Actually I was tempted to write another word that rhymes with yoke.

But, if we give credence to this image of the bridal role of the Church, then I guess it could be a fair assumption to take the image even further and state that the polarization evident with in the Church is equivalent to divorce.  An ugly divorce in which abuse and exploitation plays a critical role and the children of this divorce have to decide which parent they will support or whether they will break off from both parents.
Trouble with this divorce is the so called 'brides' are the only party being heard from and they are dictating to the children what daddy wants of them.  It seems the Catholic family can only stay in tact if the 'brides' get their way.  This is quite the role reversal--not traditional at all.  I suppose this is why I get so confused with all the babble about orientation and gender roles. Is the pope a father or the most important representation of the bride?

The bottom line for me with the Theology of the Body is whether an opus based on the second creation story in Genesis is even credible, since Genesis itself is not credible as a literal creation description.  Seems to me that JPII read back into it a great deal of subsequent abstract theology which incidentally ignored a great deal of historical development which didn't fit his noble concept's of complementarity--things like women being considered a class of property for most of the last two millenia.  And as to his understanding of female sexual response, well, let's just say women are equipped to enjoy sex in ways that don't involve male reproductive deposits.  A fact JPII seemed to ignore for one reason or another.

It seems I will be able to keep posting sporadically, but it will be sporadic for the next couple of weeks. I will make a serious effort to do so if only because the comment section gets way too long.  Speaking of which, there are some serious issues being debated and I hope that continues.  It's such a pleasure to read debate over issues and understandings without the salient features of the kind of debates that happen on other sites.

"The Exodus Begins, Come Let Us Go"

 

This photo from the Cleveland Plains Dealer, of the new St Peter's parish, may be worth far more than a thousand words for the Archdiocese of Cleveland and the halls of Rome.

 
The new break away community of St. Peter's in Cleveland is perhaps a more threatening situation for hierarchical authority than St Stanislaus Kostka in St. Louis.  In this case a parish community and it's priest has more or less said 'take your church building and shove it', we'll keep our living church.  This is both a simple but very radical understanding.  Once a person has gotten past the unexamined mental connection of church building equals valid parish, and makes the connection that a congregation is in fact centered in it's people,  one is free to begin questioning a whole boat load of other unexamined connections and assumptions.  A person begins to see that there really is a hierarchy of spiritual understandings that the Institutional Church has done it's best to commingle and subsume to clerical authority and tangible signs of power--like church buildings which they control and can close with impunity.
 
St Peter's represents a very possible future for Catholicism.  More and more Catholics who cherish their sacramental, communal, and spiritual life are going to decide that those aspects of their faith are more important than obeying hierarchical decisions.  It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that the Vatican's failure to put lay sacramental access above mandatory clerical celibacy and the all male priesthood is one of the root causes of parish closures and consolidations.  This position is in fact insulting to the faith of the laity.  There will be more and more parishes like St Peter's who go their own way, and for those whose priests won't follow, these groups will find other sources of priesthood.
 
These parishes will undoubtedly manifest different styles of worship and doctrinal conformity.  Some will be traditionalist in the extreme and some far less so.  They will however share the Living Jesus in all His manifest forms.  It could even be the somewhere down the line there will be a truce called between the various factions of Catholic understanding because all sides will share the same freedom to express their unique understandings.  One thing both sides already share, even if one side seems loathe to admit it, is listening to Rome doesn't imply one will go directly to hell for not obeying Rome. There is a big difference.
 
Most Catholics when pushed to articulate why they are Catholic or why they care about being Catholic, don't wax eloquently on about the triumphant infallible papacy.  Rome does that.  What lay Catholics can wax eloquently about is the spiritual connection they have with Catholicism.  That's true for both trads and progressives.  That they have differences of opinion in how that spiritual connection is fed should not be surprising because that has been a very traditional aspect of Christianity from the get go.  For instance it's hard to imagine the Johanine community which produced the Gospel of John would have derived a great deal of spiritual insight from many of the early Gentile Jesus followers who produced Luke.  These two Gospels, reflecting two different early groups of Jesus followers, speak to two different levels of spiritual understanding.  Just as the whole conflict between the Jerusalem Jewish view and Paul's trans Jewish view was another example of not every follower of Jesus being on the same page. And yet the Church flourished, somehow managing to encompass and finally validate all these diverse spiritual views to some extent or another.  If only the modern Institution could somehow take this lesson from it's Apostolic origins.
 
It won't though, because two thousand years later the emphasis is not on spiritual growth, but economic and secular power.  Uniformity and inculcating obedience to central authority are far more important now than they could ever have been to groups of Jesus followers who essentially had nothing of this sort and didn't care if they did. Just like Jesus taught.
 
The 'exodus' from the controlling tentacles of the Institutional form of Catholicism will escalate as more and more people give themselves permission to exit.  All the Burkian threats will go unheard because they are not about authentic Catholic spirituality.  They are about inauthentic institutional control and Catholics of all persuasions are beginning to develop eyes to see and ears to hear.
 
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Personal update about this blog.  I have pretty much come to the end of my financial ability to sustain Enlightened Catholicism.  In the coming weeks I will be relocating back to Montana and won't have the resources to keep the Internet connection which makes this blog possible.  I am hopeful that given a few months to generate some actual income I will return. EC and the community which shares their thoughts mean too much to me to end in any permanent sense.  Until then, keep the real faith burning.