Sentire Cum Ecclesia

Okay, so Papa Benny and I are not exactly on a first name basis with one another, but I discover today that I am (or at least once was) on a first name basis with one leader of a globally significant Christian body.

Back when I was a student at Luther Seminary, my wife and I lived next to the Rev. Matthew Harrison and his wife. He plays the banjo badly (or at least did then) but doesn’t seem to have stopped them from electing him as the President of the Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church. My congratulations to Matt, and best wishes for his ministry as President of that venerable body of Lutherans. HT to Pastor Mark.

Why didn’t you tell us, Tony? Yes, Beyond the Pews is Tony’s very own blogsite where he even has some funny stuff. (Don’t get confused by the fact that Tony calls himself Faz over there, OK? That’s what the rest of the blogging world knows him as. It’s just here at this table we get to call him Tony.)

Anyway, Tony/Faz has done me the great honour of putting my blog on his (very short) blog roll, so it would be churlish of me not to add Beyond the Pews to mine.

Has anyone seen a Church answering this description?

1. “last feudal institution in the Western world”
2. “a mediaeval bastion of secrecy and privilege”
3. “cannot survive in the modern world”
4. where “the people’s role is to ”pray, pay and obey””
5. No “short-term future”
6. which is “losing all its educated women because they felt so oppressed”

Sounds awful. I don’t know what church this is describing, but it’s not the one I belong to!

(Background to this story: http://www.johngarratt.com.au/cozzens.php)

Yesterday, I found a book online by American Catholic ecumenical theologian Jeffrey Gros called “The Ecumenical Christian Dialogues and the Catechism of the Catholic Church”. It looks good and I have ordered a copy. Gros sets out to offer

selections from ecumenical dialogues formally sponsored by the Catholic Church arranged according to the order of the Cathechism of the Catholic Church; readers can learn what the Catholic Church believes and what other Christian churches believe on the same topic gathered together.

Isnt’ that a neat idea? I hope the project lives up to my expectations.

This leads me to another thought. In the combox on the previous post, Tony asked “what is ‘prevailing secular ideology’?” that the Holy Father refers to? It is true that we don’t have a collection of secular doctrines neatly arranged as a sort of “Secular Catechism” – but wouldn’t it be helpful if we did?

I was led to thinking about this when listening to an episode of ABC Radio National’s Encounter on then new secular ethics classes in NSW schools as an alternative to the religion classes. In this episode, Fr Gerald Gleeson (Professor of Philosophy at the Catholic Institute of Sydney) says:

Well secular ethics is part of a project of modernity. Philosophers think of modernity beginning about 400 years ago and it really begins with the attempt to rebuild the foundations of human knowledge and truth, but to build them on a human foundation. Now to some extent, what they were doing was understandable, they were reacting against the wars of religion, against misbehaviour of all sorts of people, and so the modern philosophers said, ‘Look, let’s start again. Let’s work out for ourselves what’s true and false, good and bad and so on’. And to some extent, this is an experiment, and Immanuel Kant actually describes his work as an experiment. Let’s see if we can make some progress if we say that everything has to be relative to the human understanding. [there is a connection here with Tracey Rowland’s recent article in the Tablet]

Now for a number of centuries, this modern project worked because it was still trading on a lot of inherited Christian ethics. But the difficulty for secular ethics is that when you try to develop your ethical foundations on purely human terms, on what human reasoning can establish for itself, you end up with a very minimal framework. And so I suppose the sort of minimal framework that many people would have these days is that first of all they’d emphasise autonomy, individual personal freedom, people should be free to do what they like. Second rule: that they shouldn’t do harm to other people. They should try and do good and they should act fairly. Now these four principles if you like, have become the mantra of many approaches to secular ethics.

From this, we could put together a little “secular catechism” on principles of ethics that would include sections on:

1) Individual Autonomy
2) “Do no harm”
3) Try to do “Good”
4) Act Fairly

I think Fr Gleeson’s analysis is fairly accurate on these points. However, he then goes on to say (again, quite correctly):

The difficulty is that they don’t bring enough content with them. Because immediately you say, ‘Well what is to harm another person?’ and as soon as you ask that question, the debate all begins, because to have an understanding of what’s truly harmful to a person, you need to have some understanding of, well, what’s good for a person?

I’m not expecting an edition of “The Catechism of Secular Ideology” out soon, but wouldn’t it be useful for our dialogue with secularism if we had access to such a compendium?

As a side note, Encounter follows this episode up with another one on Progressive Religion and Ethics. This is all about the same subject that Rachel Kohn addressed on the Spirit of Things recently. Here again, David Rutlege asks Fred Plummer:

David Rutledge: A question often asked of Progressive Christians is: if you privilege good works over confessional beliefs in the Incarnation, the Resurrection and so on, what are you left with that’s distinctively Christian, and that you can’t get from Buddhism or Reform Judaism, or a course in secular ethics?

Fred Plumer: …for me, being a Christian means I have spent forty years of my life studying a particular man, and trying to sort out what it was he was teaching, and trying to live that, and having discoveries about who I am and what I am, and what the world is and what the universe is, as a result of that.

And that led me back to thinking, is it not one thing to study a man and try to follow his teachings, and another thing to actually be in a relationship with that man and try to follow him himself as a person? And that leads us back to Papa Ratzinger’s opening paragraph of his first encyclical (again, what Tracey was talking about in her article):

We have come to believe in God’s love: in these words the Christian can express the fundamental decision of his life. Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.

Just some thoughts.

Here is the full announcement from VIS with my emphases and [my comments]:

RELIGIOUS FREEDOM, THE PATH TO PEACE

VATICAN CITY, 13 JUL 2010 (VIS) – “Religious freedom, the path to peace” is the theme chosen by Pope Benedict XVI for the celebration of the 2011 World Day of Peace.

“The World Day of Peace”, reads a communique on the subject released today, “will therefore be dedicated to the theme of religious freedom. It is well known that in many parts of the world there are various forms of restriction or denial of religious freedom, from discrimination and marginalisation based on religion, to acts of violence against religious minorities”. [note that denial of religious freedom begins with “discrimination and marginalisation” on the basis of religious identity.]

“Religious freedom is authentically realised when it is experienced as the coherent search for truth and for the truth about man. [one of these truths is that the religious impulse belongs to man’s nature] This approach to religious freedom offers us a fundamental criterion for discerning the phenomenon of religion and its expressions. It necessarily rejects the ‘religiosity’ of fundamentalism, and the manipulation of truth and of the truth about man. Since such distortions are opposed to the dignity of man and to the search for truth, they cannot be considered as religious freedom”.

The communique recalls words Benedict XVI’s pronounced before the United Nations General Assembly in 2008: “Human rights, of course, must include the right to religious freedom, understood as the expression of a dimension that is at once individual and communitarian [ie. we are not just talking about private or individual freedom of expression of religious identity] – a vision that brings out the unity of the person while clearly distinguishing between the dimension of the citizen and that of the believer”.

The text continues: “Today there are many areas of the world in which forms of restrictions and limitations to religious freedom persist, both where communities of believers are a minority, and where communities of believers are not a minority, and where more sophisticated forms of discrimination and marginalisation exist, on the cultural level and in the spheres of public, civil and political activity. ‘It is inconceivable’, as Benedict XVI remarked, ‘that believers should have to suppress a part of themselves – their faith – in order to be active citizens. It should never be necessary to deny God in order to enjoy one’s rights. The rights associated with religion are all the more in need of protection if they are considered to clash with a prevailing secular ideology or with majority religious positions of an exclusive nature‘”. [That is a very good point: the exercise of religious positions “of an exclusive nature” can have the effect of limiting the right to freedom of religion.]

The communique concludes by highlighting how “man cannot be fragmented, and separated from what he believes, because that in which he believes has an impact on his life and on his person. ‘Refusal to recognise the contribution to society that is rooted in the religious dimension and in the quest for the Absolute – by its nature, expressing communion between persons – would effectively privilege an individualistic approach, and would fragment the unity of the person’. It is for this reason that: ‘Religious Freedom is the Path to Peace'”.

The interesting thing to note is that highlighting the right to freedom of religion cuts two ways:

1) The Pope is defending the right of Catholics to this freedom
2) This right of religious freedom extends to ALL religious people, whatever their creed.

This right does not extend, however, to “the ‘religiosity’ of fundamentalism, and the manipulation of truth and of the truth about man”. It is on this basis that the Holy Father identifies the two greatest threats to religious freedom today:

1) a prevailing secular ideology
2) majority religious positions of an exclusive nature

That ought to be enough to keep us going in the combox for a while… :-)

When I was talking to Fr Mitch, he mentioned this upcoming film “Die Päpstin”. It’s from the same people (Constantin Films) who gave us “the Hitler Rant”. Seems that they have given up doing historical films in favour of fairy tales. I don’t know how our David Wenham got involved. I didn’t even know he knew German. Wait for it in a dubbed version in a cinema near you!

This is unexepected: NCR staff writer, Michael Sean Winters, has written in praise of a recent article in The Tablet (“Ratzinger the Romantic“) by our one and only Professor Tracey Rowland.

Does anyone read Winters’ stuff regularly? What’s his general take on things?

Interestingly, there a commentator on his post writes that while they “would be thrilled with the pope portrayed there, brilliant without sacrificing compassion”, that is not (apparently) the pope they know from their own experience. This raises an interesting question: are we currently in some kind of virtual “papal schism”, where one group of Catholics admires and loves one pope while another group hates and deplores another quite different – yet indeed the very same – pope?

In a recent com box discussion to this post, Peregrinus usefully did an overview for us of the ways in which Catholic ecclesiastical statements have used the word “crimen” – a technical term usually translated simply as “crime” in English.

He gave us this list:

So, to sum up, “crime” can refer to
– something forbidden by civil law (the “civil sense”)
– something forbidden by canon law (the “canonical sense”)
– something gravely wrong (the “moral sense”)

And of course these senses can overlap.

Note also that not necessarily everything forbidden by canon law is a “crime”. I’ll spare you a detailed analysis of the Code of Canon Law; suffice it to say that the “crime” and “criminal” occur surprising rarely, and with no very clear meaning.

Well, the word is appearing a little more commonly these days, and at least some of the acts to which the word is applied has been recently clarified in this curial document: “Norms concerning the most serious crimes”. There are a couple of follow up documents, including this one from Cardinal Levada “A brief introduction to the modifications made in the Normae de gravioribus delictis, reserved to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith”, and this one from the press officer, Fr Lombardi “The significance of the publication of the new “Norms concerning the most serious crimes”” (nb. The Catholic Culture website has usefully collected all the official documents relating to this on one page here. (Nb. In fact, the word most commonly used in the document itself is not “crime” but “delict” – although this has been lost in the resulting media storm.)

Today Barney Zwartz has published an article in The Age criticising the Holy See for what he calls “spectacular incompetence”:

With its usual unerring instinct, the Vatican has turned a sound deed – tightening up procedures against abusive priests – into a public relations disaster by unnecessarily linking unrelated concerns.

As one Catholic told me, ”they excommunicate women before they excommunicate abusers”. …

This is further unwanted confirmation of how out of touch the hierarchy is, as it engages in that peculiar Vatican dance: one step forward, two to the side, then five steps backwards.

He is referring, of course, to the widely publicised media story that the Vatican has “declared” (as if they just invented this idea) the ordination of women to be “a crime”. This has sparked a lot of discussion – even over the staff lunch table the other day – which shows that the particular nuances that Perry listed above are not at all appreciated by the wider audience.

This is just another illustration of the point I was making in my Dialogue and Proclamation post the other day: that in this age of electronic communication, anything said in a particular context to a particular audience for a particular purpose will inevitably be misunderstood when it inevitably finds its way into the universal media.

One can argue, against Barney, that he hasn’t helped his readers to understand the context and meaning of the new Vatican norms and the particular language that these norms use. For him, the new norms were all about “abusive priests” and thus all the other issues addressed by the new norms are “unrelated concerns”. These other “concerns” may be unrelated in his mind, but are NOT unrelated in so far as the Church’s canon law goes. The document on the new norms is a document of canon law, not a newspaper column or a public relations announcement. The Church’s canon law addresses many issues that to Barney might seem “unrelated” but which – in canon law – are not.

The new norms are a revision of a document issued in 2001, and as such cover a lot of things other than Barney’s (or the media’s in general) particular and immediate concerns. The document is specifically intended to clarify which “delicts” (which is in fact the word used in the Latin title for the document – Normae de Gravioribus Delictis – not “crimen”) are to be “reserved to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith”. That was the specific intent of the document, and hence the various “delicts” that it lists are NOT “unrelated”.

What is, of course, causing all the fuss is that that one of these “delicts” concerns what the document calls “the attempted sacred ordination of a woman”. It is important to note that the document does not actually use the word “crime” in this context, but rather it is called “a grave delict”. I am no lawyer, let alone a canon lawyer, yet that source of all knowledge called Wikipedia describes a “delict” as “an intentional or negligent act which gives rise to a legal obligation between parties”. That would seem to be the case in this context: the one who commits any of these acts either intentionally or negligantly has breached Canon Law and thus has a “legal obligation” to answer for their actions before the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Thus, “the attempted sacred ordination of a woman” by a Catholic bishop would be regarded as a situation for which said bishop would need to answer to the Congregation. That is what the document says, and that is all that the document says in this regard. Nor is this something new, although it has been introduced in this revision of the 2001 document. As the outline of the exact changes to the 2001 document makes clear, this was established as a “delict” already in 2007:

13. The attempted ordination of a woman has also been introduced as a delict in the new text, as established by the decree of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on 19 December 2007 (art. 5);

The document is certainly not issuing a new broadside against those ecclesial communities who do ordain women as ministers in their churches. Since they are separated from the Catholic Church they therefore do not come under the norms of her Code of Canon Law.

Nevertheless, all this has been lost in the media debate. It is par for the course. The Holy See cannot be accused of incompetance simply because a public legal document has been taken out of its context and criticised by those who have not bothered to seek out the original source of a media story.

For those of you in Melbourne who would like to join us, we are starting a new course on “Reading Paul: Romans” tonight at Mary Glowrey House at 6:30pm. $15 a night, the course will run through to the end of the year. Full details here.

On the front page of his blog “Culturewatch”, you will find a link to this article by the esteemed Bill Muehlenberg (for whom I have every respect): “Concerns about Halal foods”. In it – without a link and without directly naming me (perhaps he is trying to spare me embarrassment?) – you will find a reference to something I wrote on this blog not so long ago in reference to the “urban myth” about Cadbury’s Chocolate being “food offered to idols” (HT to Matthias):

But sadly even many Christians are quite confused about all this. Consider what one Catholic blogger (who happens to be fully involved in the interfaith movement) had to say about all this:

“There are many Christians who wish to say that the God Muslims seek and intend to worship is ‘not the same’ as our God. It is true that some of attributes Muslim’s ascribe to the Deity are different from the attributes we ascribe to Him, but then, the attributes of God in Jewish theology is different from the attributes of God in Christian theology too, and no-one is suggesting that they worship ‘an idol’.”

Sadly he is wrong in everything he says here. Allah is not Yahweh. The God of Islam is not the God of the Bible.

Before entering more deeply into Bill’s critique of my position, let me first say that I am not involved in something called “the interfaith movement”. There IS such a thing as an “interfaith movement” to which events such as the Parliament of the World’s Religions belongs, and “The Interfaith Movement” to which groups such as the Interfaith Seminary in New York belongs. What I am “fully involved in” is something called Catholic interrelgious dialogue, which is a whole different kettle of fish, though very often confused with “the” or “an” “interfaith movement”. But more of that some other time…

The first section of Bill’s article is uncontentious. He simply and correctly states what Halal food is and what the situation is in Australia.

Then in the next section headed “General Concerns” he grabs the stick at the wrong end by stating:

So what is the concern then about Halal foods in Australia (and the West)? A general concern which all Australians may well have is how this fits into the bigger picture of Islam in Australia. A major worry is that this is just another part of the process of setting up a parallel Islamic state within Australia, leading to the eventual full implementation of sharia law. Everyone concerned about the free and democratic West and how it is being undermined by various covert and overt Islamic pressures should be worried about this.

This really is too much. It is like the old English attitude that allegiance to the Pope obliged Catholics to act as a “fifth column” in Protestant England. It is simply making a mountain out of a mole hill. There are obvious tensions between Muslims allegiance to the Umma and their allegiance as citizens to the local State authorities – but these are no different from the tensions that exist between a Catholic trying to faithfully live out the law of their faith in a land whose law does not always comply with Catholic beliefs (we have a situation like that here in Victoria with our abortion laws – Bill would heartedly agree on this point, I think). But to suggest that the labelling of Halal foods for Australian Muslims is part of a “process of setting up a parallel Islamic state within Australia” is as ridiculous as suggesting that Catholic faithfulness to the teaching of the Catholic Magisterium is an attempt to set up a parallel Papal State in Australia. This is not helpful to the discussion AT ALL.

Not serving Haram food to Muslims is as much a mark of respect as not serving un-Kosher food to Jews. It is a mark of hospitality. Okay, you can raise legitimate questions of reciprocity (“why here in Australian when not there in Saudi Arabia”), but that is a different issue. Just because we are not treated hospitably elsewhere and by others is no reason for not showing hospitality here to our own citizens! Rather, we set an example, and maintain a benchmark, by which and from which we can raise these legitimate concerns with other nations that are not so hospitable to our beliefs and practices.

Also, Bill raises the following question:

Another concern is that companies pay these certification boards. So who gets the money? Where are these funds going to? Is it possible that some of it is finding its way into the hands of jihadist groups? These seem to be legitimate questions to ask.

It may be a legitimate question, but don’t assume the answer before you know it. I know some of the people directly involved in the business of Halal certification, and they aren’t Jihadists, nor are they getting rich on this. As Perry pointed out in the comments on my post on the matter, this is just a matter of the market – which will pay to make its products more acceptable to a wider public. In other words, why this attitude of suspicion without evidence?

Bill then goes on to specifically “Christian concerns”:

But more specifically, Christian concerns have to do with how Halal meats are ritually slaughtered. In this process (which can only be carried out by a Muslim), the Muslim prays to Allah while facing Mecca. Arguments can be made about how humane the process is, and groups like the RSPCA claim it is less humane than traditional slaughter methods. But what about this ritual, and the prayers to a false God?

Leaving aside the RSPCA’s concerns (and I remember well my father slaughtering sheep myself as a youngster – not something I could do myself – in ways that are not unlike the way in which Muslims slaughter their meat – minus the prayer to Allah), the hinge of this issue is that of whether or not Allah is a “false god”.

And that is where the rubber hits the road. Here the Catholic Church begs to differ from Mr Muehlenberg. We don’t regard Allah as “a false god”. No Middle Eastern Catholic regards the God of their Muslim neighbours as “a false god”. We would say that they worship the God of Abraham in a way that is not according to the Truth, and we would also say that they have beliefs about the God of Abraham which are not the same as our Christian beliefs about this God, but that doesn’t make Allah “an idol” or even “a false god”.

The rest of Bill’s argument hinges entirely on his assertion that Allah IS a “false god/idol”. He says that I am guilty (and hence the Catholic Church is guilty) of “simple heresy”, comparable to that of the Marcionites (a strange comparison, because it would seem to me that there is more of the Marcionite in Bill’s position than in mine).

Bill ends by saying:

It seems to me there are two main worries here. One is the ever encroaching inroads made by Islam in the West, along with the gradual diminutions of our freedoms. The other is the sloppy and unbiblical thinking found in so many people calling themselves Christians. Between the two of them the Islamist agenda is nicely being pushed along, while the West is slowly unravelling.

Well, it seems to me that what is driviing Bill is a fear of Islam (I don’t think fear is a good basis for the development of future relations between Christians and Muslims, though I grant there is good reason to fear – as Christians, however, we excercise that love which “casts out fear”) on the one hand, and on the other, exactly the same “sloppy and unbiblical thinking” which he ascribes to me.

For instance, we need to be clear of what we mean by “false god” and “idol”. In the account of the Golden Calf episode in Exodus, for instance, we have not so much a case of “false god” as an “idol” or “graven image” of the true God (the Israelites said to themselves that “This is your God, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!” Ex. 32:4). Still a sin, but the sin of false worship (“idolatry”) rather than the sin of worshipping a “false god”. Second we need to know what the Muslim is actually doing when he prays the prayer to Allah during the slaughter process. He is NOT offering a sacrifice to Allah, but rather acknowledging Allah (God) as the Lord and Creator of this creature which he is slaughtering. It is a kind of “anticipated” grace before meals. I have yet to meet a Muslim who was not prepared to eat a meal over which we have prayed Christian grace! (Or a Jew for that matter!).

Clear thinking, clear biblical thinking, and generous charity in the place of suspicious fear are what lay behind my original comments, and I am sticking to them.