Sentire Cum Ecclesia

According to this report in The Sunday Age this morning ( http://the.age.com.au/victoria/sperm-drought-drives-call-to-lift-imports-20110219-1b0f3.html) there is a shortage of “sperm donors” in Australia. I hadn’t noticed, but I have the solution.

1. Get married.
2. Donate sperm to your wife in love in the good ol’ fashioned way.
3. Have baby.

A new puppy. His name is Tom Tom. He is a “moodle”, ie. a maltese/toy poodle cross.

I’ve been meaning to blog on this all week, but things have been a little busy at the office and at home. But it’s Saturday morning, and the rains have gone, and the sun is shining (and it’s bloody humid) and I am now outside with my pipe and my coffee and my computer and its TIME TO BLOG!

Readers of this ‘ere blog will know that Brian Coyne and I have had a long running discussion about the group he calls the “85%” of people who are baptised Catholic and who have ceased to participate in the life of the Church. To put it absurdly and reductionistically simply, Brian claims the solution is that the Church should scrap those aspects of its teaching which conflict with the modern mores, and I claim the solution is better evangelisation and catechisation.

Into that mix comes this article by John Allen Jnr: “In America’s religious marketplace, the real Catholic problem is new sales”. The Catholica Forum has picked it up, but as yet there isn’t much discussion there.

It should be noted (as Sherry does on the Siena Institute blog, that

the topic here is the retention of religious identity, not how often people who still regard themselves as Catholic actually attend Mass. Around the Catholic blogosphere, we tend to conflate the two issues but the Pew study addresses both separately and John Allen is focusing on the first issue of religious identity in this interview.

So the article does not address all of the issues that are relevant to Brian’s “85%”. Also we need to remember that Allen’s article is about the US, and it the figures there do not necessarily translate into figures for Australia where the religious culture is a little different, but I do think that one aspect is probably true: a great proportion of members of Evangelical and Pentecostal churches in Australia were baptised as Catholics, and hence make up at least a significant proportion of Brian’s “85%”.

That being said, it also needs to be said that, as the Pew Forum chaps in the interview point out, the figures for the States are rather confusing and do not lend themselves either to neatly “proving” the liberal or conservative Catholic point of view on the matter.

Still, the point that Allen focuses upon and which seems to fit here in Australia too, is that the Catholic Church is not as active as the Protestant Churches in the area of attracting new members from outside the Church. I don’t have the figures in front of me, but I reckon it is probably true to say that about 2-3% of Catholics here too are converts to the Church. RCIA has been relatively successful in this regard.

The real question is how to get more people into RCIA in the first place, and then how to make the catechetical impact of the RCIA program – and of our day to day catechisation in our families, schools and parishes – more effective in retaining those whom we evangelise. Allan’s interlocutors say:

But one of the points of the report is that to understand the dynamics of American religion, you have to see retention and recruitment together. It’s the churn, the ratio of leaving to joining, which matters. It’s the recruitment side that sets Catholics apart. Four people leave Catholicism for every one who joins, and there’s no other religious group where you see a similar ratio. Baptists, for example, also have more people leaving than joining, but their ratio of 2-1 is twice of what we see for Catholics.

The conclusion is simple. “Recruitment” = evangelisation. “Retention” = catechisation. Brian may well be right, there are probably a lot of non-practicing Catholics who do not participate in the life of the Church because of its doctrinal and moral demands. But the evidence of the Pew Forum study shows that quite aside from this issue – and the merits or otherwise of a program of “reform” that would soften those demands (note that the Pew Forum guys say that the high figure of ex-Catholics in the Evangelican and Pentecostal churches would indicate that these ex-Catholics are looking for a church which is MORE rather than less conservative) – improved efforts at evangelisation and catechisation are required if we are to improve our recruitment and retention statistics for the future of the Church.

Most of the writing on Egypt is concerned with what is going to happen next in Egypt from a political point of view, but who can say what will happen next in Egypt from a relgious point of view? Of course the two are inextricably intertwined. Here is a sampling of stuff I have come across on the matter in recent days.

ABC Radio National

The Spirit of Things

Egypt and Islam

Egyptian-born Muslim feminist and New York-based reporter, Mona Eltahawy is an advocate of the Egyptian revolution and believes it will deliver freedom and democracy. Professor Tariq Ramadan, the grandson of the Egyptian founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, is a proponent of a new Islam that is modern but conservative. They have different views but both are the new Muslim voices calling for change.

The Philosophers Zone

Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood and Sayyid Qutb

The Society of the Muslim Brothers, otherwise known as the Muslim Brotherhood, has been banned in Egypt for many years. Nevertheless, after the recent upheavals, the Brotherhood was among the opposition groups invited to talk with Vice President Omar Suleiman. So today on The Philosopher’s Zone we’re exploring the life and times of the Egyptian thinker, Sayyid Qutb, the Brotherhood’s great theorist. Qutb spent many years in jail during the ’50s and’60s, but before his execution by the Egyptian government, he was the Brotherhood’s leading intellectual. And he really disliked the American suburban obsession with lawns.

Late Night Live

Egypt and women’s rights

Egyptian women have played a central role in the revolution which led to President Mubarak’s departure. What will change in Egypt mean for half its population — women? Can women’s rights be preserved and extended in the future?

Reuters Faith World Blog

Analysis: U.S. eyes Egypt Islamists as extremist fears fester

(Reuters) – U.S. officials are concerned that Islamic extremists may try to exploit Egypt’s upheaval but are not yet convinced that the Muslim Brotherhood, the country’s most influential Islamist opposition group, is necessarily a threat. The toppling of President Hosni Mubarak on Friday marked the beginning of a new, uncertain era in Egypt that promises to empower Islamist movements like the Muslim Brotherhood, long viewed with deep suspicion in the West.

Egypt opposition needs time, or Islamists will win – party

The Muslim Brotherhood will be the only group in Egypt ready for a parliamentary election unless others are given a year or more to recover from years of oppression, said a former Brotherhood politician seeking to found his own party.Abou Elela Mady broke away from the Brotherhood in the 1990s. He tried four times to get approval for his Wasat Party (Center Party) under President Hosni Mubarak’s rule, but curbs on political life prevented him doing so.

Guestview: Misrepresenting Egypt – the Mubarak myth of “secular” vs “Islamic”

By Elizabeth Shakman Hurd

The term ‘secular’ and its conceptual affiliates are doing a lot of work in misrepresenting the uprising in Egypt. ‘Secular’ politics has been taken to mean ‘good’ politics (limited democratization, stability, and support for the peace treaty with Israel), and ‘Islamic’ politics is being translated as ‘bad’ politics (the myriad dangers allegedly posed by the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies). Accounts of the current situation in Egypt are handicapped by an inability to read politics in Egypt and Muslim-majority societies outside of this overly simplistic and politically distorting lens.

Egypt and Pakistan; something borrowed, something new

Comparisons with Pakistan tend to make you somewhat sceptical about the chances of Egypt’s uprising turning out well. Yet there is something quite new coming out of Egypt that has the potential to be transformative across the Muslim world. And that is the rejection of all forms of old authority, including, significantly, religious authority. “The revolution was not just directed against the autocratic, repressive and corrupt Egyptian regime, which relied on an alliance of money, power and corruption. It was also directed against the official religious establishment and its discourse that supports this regime, either directly or indirectly.” Hossam Tammam writes in Egyptian paper Al Masry Al Youm.

[NEW UPDATE 16th Feb: Today it got worse rather than better. The Herald Sun seems unaware that Fr Bob has asked for a “retraction”.

UPDATE 15th Feb: I have just seen on Cathnews in the comments to their report on this article the following comment:

On Twitter, Fr Bob said he was misquoted and seeks retraction.
That being so, be good if CathNews retracted also for repeating it. This is what he said on Twitter feed, @FatherBob: ‘Spread the word,comrades. I will not do gay weddings.I cannot do gay weddings.The H/S headliner is wrong.Get retraction 4 me.’

I welcome his retraction (or correction, if indeed the HS misquoted him), and hope that he will be able to make this a little more public than just on “Twitter”. It shows the danger of any priest speaking his mind to the press on such delicate matters.]

Dear Fr Bob,

This is just a short letter to let you know that your latest foray into the public square (“Gay marriage lobbyists welcome Fr Bob McGuire’s pledge”) is, at the very best, a great muddying of the waters around the issue of the Church’s stance with regard to the pastoral care of homosexually attracted persons. I fear that the real effect will be to cause great confusion among Catholics and non-Catholics in general. The truth is that your statement of intention in the matter of civil unions – if carried out – will have the effect of leading those whom you purport to care for deeper into mortal sin with your blessing.

You know as well as anyone (or you should) that the Catholic Church makes a distinction between homosexual orientation and homosexual acts.

The Catechism reminds us (§2357) that

tradition has always declared that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered”. They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.

I fear that your public statement is actually a statement (whether you intended this or not) which condones homosexual acts. You are a priest of the Catholic Church. You should take to heart that the Church teaches that under NO circumstance are such acts to “be approved”. If a priest blesses a same sex union, even if it does not take place within a Catholic church building, that priest is acting in the name of the Church to do something that the Church has expressly prohibited. It isn’t a matter of where the blessing takes place, but that you, as a priest, would be the one doing it.

Your desire to give pastoral care to homosexually attracted persons is admirable. This is what all Catholics are cared to do with compassion and love. Again, the Catechism teaches us (§ 2358) that people in this situation:

must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. These persons are called to fulfill God’s will in their lives and, if they are Christians, to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord’s Cross the difficulties they may encounter from their condition.

Nevertheless (Catechism § 2359):

Homosexual persons are called to chastity. By the virtues of self-mastery that teach them inner freedom, at times by the support of disinterested friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace, they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection.

When a homosexual person seeks to enter a publically recognised form of “union” with another person of the same sex, it is testimony to the fact that they do not intend to live chastely with the kind of “self-mastery” to which the Christian gospel calls them. If you bless a couple who have the intention of living in a homosexual union which is sexually acted out, you are blessing an action which is “intrinsically disordered” and which, when done intentionally and with full knowledge of the gravity of their sin, is a mortal sin. Not to put too fine a point on it, you are confirming them in sin.

Such a “blessing” can never be an authentic part of Christian pastoral care for the sinner. You, as a priest, have the duty to call sinners to repentance, and to give them God’s absolution when they repent and seek to amend their lives accordingly.

Please give deep consideration to the damage you are doing to individual consciences by your words in this matter. I implore you, having considered the unwiseness of your statement, to retract your public statement in an equally public manner. I ask this for the sake of the Church, for the sake of the people in your care, for your own sake, and above all for the sake of Jesus Christ, of whom you are a called and ordained servant.

In deepest charity,

David Schütz.

That claim seems to be the latest tactic to be adopted by the Secularist Army in the fight over the fundamental human right to religious freedom, if yesterday’s Sunday Age was anything to go by.

First there was the opinion piece posing as a news item by Melissa Fyfe, “Religious groups to regain bias rights”. I can hardly recall having ever read such a biased piece of news reporting – even for The Sunday Age, this piece set a new low point in journalistic standards.

Then came the full one and half page (and The Sunday Age has BIG pages) diatribe by David Marr “Faiths rule on sex from bathroom to bedroom”. If the first piece was one of the most biased pieces of journalism I have ever seen, this must be the most self-indulgent. For his own personal reasons, David Marr thinks that his right to express his own sexual preferences in public are greater than the right of religious persons to live out their fundamental spiritual convictions in public.

The only reason a piece like Marr’s could even be taken serious today is because we live in an age in which many people really do think – or have been told to think – that the right to freedom of sexual expression is more fundamental than the right to freedom of religious belief. The irony of the whole thing is that the Secularists are accusing Christians of being the ones who are obsessed with sex, when the boot is clearly on the other foot.

[Nb. In the poll at the bottom of the David Marr article on the internet, the question asked is:

Should religious-based organisations who receive taxpayer funding be allowed to sack people, or refuse to hire them, because of their sexuality?

Thus far the results are Yes 25% No 75% Total votes: 1685.

You still have time to vote, if you don’t mind being forced to express yourself as a bigot just so as to protect your fundamental human right to religious freedom!]

From one point of view though, the Secularists have already conceded an important point. They have conceded – for the time being and however much it galls them – that religious groups have the right to demand a certain sexual mores of at least one category within their employment, namely official religious leaders such as priests and rabbis. What they are attempting to do, however, is to tell us when and in what circumstances our religious beliefs are important or not. That is the real issue here. These oh-so-tolerant determinators of public opinion want to seize the power to be our religious teachers, and to tell us when our demand for morality is reasonable or not.

Just to pick a Scriptural injunction to Christian morality out of the hat, lets take a look at 1 Timothy 1:9-11:

9 This means understanding that the law is laid down not for the innocent but for the lawless and disobedient, for the godless and sinful, for the unholy and profane, for those who kill their father or mother, for murderers, 10 fornicators, sodomites, slave traders, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to the sound teaching 11 that conforms to the glorious gospel of the blessed God, which he entrusted to me.

One suspects that David Marr would have no problem with a Christian organisation sacking someone who was a murderer, guilty of patricide or matricide, or a slave trader. Even non-religious companies will sack someone for being a liar or a perjurer. It is clear too why St Paul said that those who do these things are “godless and sinful” – because they are “contrary to the sound teaching that conforms to the glorious gospel of the blessed of God”.

But of all these things, David Marr and Co. want to tell us we should exchange this “sound teaching” for a new one, one that no longer sees the practice of “fornication” or “sodomy” as “contrary to the sound teaching” we have received.

I submit that it isn’t the Church that’s obsessed with sex.

David Marr and Melissa Fyfe and their ilk could learn a bit from the UN Declaration of Human Rights, Article 18:

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

Following the string of natural disasters affecting Australia at the moment (the floods all across Eastern Australia, Cyclone Yasi in Queensland, fires in Western Australia) and the 2nd anniversary of our Black Saturday (Feb 7, 2009) fires, there has been some reflection in the print and online media in recent days about the vexed and perennial question of Theodicy. If this is a new word to you, here is how Wikipedia defines and explains the term:

Theodicy (from Greek theos – “god” + dike – “justice”) is a theological or philosophical study which attempts to justify* God’s (largely in the Monotheistic/Abrahamic sense) intrinsic (or foundational) nature of omni-benevolence (all loving), omniscience (all knowing) and omnipotence (all powerful), despite the existence of evil which would otherwise stand to refute God’s existence.

[* “justify” is probably too loaded a word for this definition; theodicy is not only about the “justification” of God’s justice, but also about the discussion of the problem as a whole – whatever one’s conclusions.]

As an example, you might want to listen to this discussion on ABC Radio National’s Sunday Night program. As a fairly standard but well expressed response, you might to read this piece by a local (Queenslander come South) ACU theologian Joel Hodge. Joel’s piece is, as I said, fairly standard. There is nothing particularly new there. C.S. Lewis dealt with the same problem and gave much the same answer in The Problem of Pain.

Well, don’t expect me to give you the answer here, but I do want to make a short reflection, and give an indication of how I approach the whole matter of “Theodicy”, especially in relation to natural disasters.

A few bits of background reading/listening might be in order. First I would suggest listening to a rather good Radio National Encounter program (you can listen or read the transcript here) with Tim Flannery and Paul Collins. I do not endorse the thinking of either speaker entirely – especially Flannery’s almost religious sense of “Gaia” and Collin’s use of Thomas Berry’s notion of the “geologian”, but I do see their thinking pairing up a little with mine on this subject. Another (perhaps surprising) source I would point you too is Anne Rice’s (pre-Catholic period) novel “Memnoch the Devil” (see here for the plot).

Rice does a particularly sterling job in the novel of portraying theodicy as the chief reason for Lucifer’s fall from heaven. The Devil (in her novel) is fascinated with the beauty of God’s creative work. He is entranced by the beauty and delicacy of a flower, and praises God’s handiwork. But then the flower dies and decays (a masterstroke of Rice’s approach is that she does not see death and decay as something which entered God’s creation with the sin of Adam, but something that God worked into his creation from the very beginning – ie. it was intentional). This infuriates Lucifer. How could God create such a flawed thing? And more than that – because obviously the cycle of death and life are foundational to the creation she describes – why could God not simply have created a world in which everything endures for ever in static perfection? He becomes angry with God, and rebels, and falls from grace.

There is a connection here then with Flannery’s idea of a “commonwealth of virtue”:

Tim Flannery: I was trying to find an expression for what Gaia actually represents, and it’s clearly, our earth is clearly not as competent at regulating its temperature or its chemistry as a living organism is. It’s somewhat below that, and yet is perhaps arguably more competent than individual eco-systems, simply because it’s the sum of all eco-systems averaged if you want, around the planet. And we need a new term for it, so I think the Commonwealth of Virtue was the best way that I could explain the result of these accumulated win-sins that give us stability.

Bill Bunbury: How do you define virtue in this context? Because it’s often seen simply as a human concept of human behaviour. Does virtue enter the ecological domain in this way?

Tim Flannery: Well it does in a sense. Perhaps I was using the word rather idiosyncratically, but to me, the virtue is that it has created a system that allows all to exist. Without that virtue we simply would not be here. As I say, in a world where only the fittest survive, no-one survives. And just to explain that, imagine a football league where only the fittest survived, only the winning team survived each year. You wouldn’t have football any more. And the same is true for eco-systems, winner-take-all approaches to life just don’t work.

What he means by “the virtue is that it has created a system that allows all to exist” is, I take it, that the entire system – death and decay on the one hand and life and harmony on the other – is precisely integral to the perfection and beauty that we all discern in God’s creation.

The interviewer, Bill Bunbury, says at one point in the Encounter program:

We look at nature, we see beauty in it, and we have to reconcile that with what Tennyson describes and what Dawkins describes and in a sense, what Darwin recognises. There is that tension for humans, isn’t it, to look at nature and see it as beneficent, because after all, it provides us with what we eat and what we love and what we paint or photograph of celebrate in song or poetry or painting.

The Medieval theologians in particular marvelled at how beautiful and harmonious the world was, and saw in this the finger of God. Yet they, perhaps even more than us, were perfectly aware of the suffering that exists in creation as well.
The question then, as I see it, is this: Are you a glass half empty type of person or are you a glass half full type? Do you, like Memnoch the Devil, focus on the one minute part of creation that is suffering, and, because of this, see all creation as soured and flawed; or do you, like the Scholastics, see the suffering that is inherent in our created existence, and yet nevertheless see how the whole is beautiful?

Personally, I marvel at the fact of (as the Monty Python boys put it) “how amazingly unlikely is [my] birth.” In the whole immensity of the cosmos, here is a planet of molten rock hurtling around its violently burning star, on which there is a thin layer of solid (but constantly moving) earth surrounded by another thin layer of stable (but equally violent at times) atmosphere. And between these two layers, we exist, we live, and we thrive. To me that is nothing short of a miracle.

It seems to me that there is a “commonwealth of virtue” not only in creation, but also in human society, as the Sunday Night program pointed out. In that program, the speakers told how the predominant reaction of those caught in the floods and cyclones was not “Why did God let this happen to me?” but rather “I have been overwhelmed by the help and generosity of others.” Where there is suffering, there is also great virtue. Just as a dying flower provides compost and nutrients for the next plant that will grow on that spot, just as the lamb that is eaten allows the lion to live and care for her lion cubs, so, as it says in the Scriptures, “God works all things together for good to those who love him.”

Here is something I read in Peter Kreeft recently:

If God is all-powerful and all-loving, then “in everything God works for good with those who love him”. Even in persecution, torture, and death! For although “for thy sake we are being killed all the day long”, yet “in all these things we are more than conquerors.” Why? Because these tortures, like everything, serve the one single end of the single-minded and single-hearted God who wills only our good. He practices what he preaches: purity and simplicity of heart, 100% love.

Now that is, of course, an expression of faith. But it is the kind of faith that in Rice’s novel, the Devil lacked. God could have created a world without suffering, without change, with what we would call “full perfection”, but would it have been so? With all its capriciousness, is this not (possibly) the most perfect of all worlds if we had the eyes of God to see it? In other words, is our idea of a perfect world really that “perfect”?

Of course, for me this raises questions of our hopes for the “world to come”, in which there will be no more suffering at all. I don’t know how God intends to do that, and I am willing to be entirely surprised! But I think one way in which it is possible is that the New Creation will be entirely “in God” himself, in a way that the present cosmos is not. Unless you are a thorough-going pantheist, we have to recognise that this world is not “wholly in God”. In a sense (as explained by Hodge in his piece) this is necessary for the time being. One day, when God will become “all in all” as St Paul’s says, things will be different. But VERY different. It will not be like this world at all. Then the problem of theodicy will no longer trouble us.

On Euthanasia anyway. See here.

Secretary Clarifies Pope’s Organ Donor Status

ROME, FEB. 7, 2011 (Zenit.org).- Benedict XVI’s private secretary has clarified rumors about the Pope’s organ donor card, saying that after election to the See of Peter, it automatically became invalid.

Monsignor Georg Gänswein made this clarification in a Feb. 5 letter to a German doctor who was using the Pope as an example in order to promote organ donation.

“It is correct that the Pope has got an organ donor card,” Monsignor Gänswein wrote. “But contrary to some claims made in public, the organ donor card from the 1970s became invalid ipso facto when Cardinal Ratzinger was elected leader of the Catholic Church.”

Archbishop Zygmunt Zimowski, president of the Pontifical Council for Health Care Ministry, explained to La Repubblica that the Pope’s body belongs to the whole Church, and its preservation is understandable in view of possible future veneration.

Saint Benedict the XVIth perhaps? Well, even if not, I for one will be queuing up to pray at his tomb one day. Just as a thought experiment though, imagine being the recipient of the papal heart… Or, as an even more bizarre thought experiment, imagine if you received a heart transplant and then the person who donated it was elevated to SAINTHOOD! Too weird.

I encourage you to go here to sign an online petition to our Federal Parliament supporting the current legal definition of marriage in Australia. They have almost 5000 signatures at the time of this posting – their target is 5 times that. The Petition (and website) is run by the Australian Christian Lobby.