Infallibility at 150

150 years ago today, under the imminent shadow of the Franco-Prussian War (soon to be followed by the Italian conquest of Rome), the First Vatican Council (1869-1870) adopted the Dogmatic Constitution Pastor Aeternus, which famously defined the Infallibility of the Pope, much to the delight of Blessed Pius IX (Pope 1846-1878) and many others, for whom this was, so to speak, the jewel in the maybe much more important crown of papal primacy.

Romanum Pontificem, cum ex Cathedra loquitur, id est, cum omnium Christianorum Pastoris et Doctoris munere fungens, pro suprema sua Apostolica auctoritate doctrinam de fide vel moribus ab universa Ecclesia tenendam definit, per assistentiam divinam, ipsi in beato Petro promissam, ea infallibilitate pollere, qua divinus Redemptor Ecclesiam suam in definienda doctrina de fide vel moribus instructam esse voluit; ideoque eiusmodi Romani Pontificis definitiones ex sese, non autem ex consensu Ecclesiae irreformabiles esse.

That the Roman Pontiff, when he speaks ex Cathedra, that is, when exercising the office of Pastor and Teacher of all Christians, through his supreme Apostolic authority, defines a doctrine of faith or morals to be held by the universal Church, by divine assistance promised to him in blessed Peter, possesses that infallibility, which the divine Redeemer willed his Church in defining doctrine of faith or morals; and therefore such definitions of the Roman Pontiff are irreformable of themselves, and not  from the consent of the Church.

It is commonly claimed that Vatican I resolved the relationship between the Pope and the Bishops basically in favor of the Pope, leaving it to Vatican II (1962-1965) to balance Vatican I with its renewed emphasis on the episcopacy, both on the level of the local Church and also universally through the concept of episcopal collegiality. There is certainly something to be said for that interpretation, as far as it goes. Yet it remains undeniably the case that the Church is today probably about as pope-centered as it is possible to be. To the outside secular world, it often seems that the Pope is the Church. Certainly he is her personification and spokesman, in a way that no one else is and that (at least under ordinary circumstances) it seems can be shared with no one else. Within the Church, the ordinary Catholic may experience the Church most personally and directly at the parish level, but beyond the parish it is again primarily the Pope who represents and speaks for the Church for most Catholics. Most may never make it to Rome. But, for those who do, attending a papal audience or Mass in Saint Peter's or even the Sunday Angelus in the square - even watching such events on TV - is likely to seem way more exciting than anything that happens on the local level. I remember some 25+ years ago, when a local bishop planned a diocesan youth day (inspired by his experience of the recent WYD in Denver) a religious sister warned that he was not the pope and wouldn't have a helicopter to arrive in! Of course she was correct. Having attended several papal events in Rome and elsewhere (including WYD in Cologne), I know well the excitement and enthusiasm that the papal presence inevitably generates.

Some of this is inherent in modernity and the papacy's successful employment of modern media and of celebrity culture. It is also inherent in modern governance which is technologically capable of a degree of centralization and reaching into all aspects of local life, which we typically take for granted now, but which would simply have been impossible in earlier ages. Accordingly it has rightly been emphasized how Infallibility was itself, so to speak, the jewel in the ultimately much more important crown of papal jurisdictional primacy, which was in many ways the great practical accomplishment of the modern papacy in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The Church of the 19th and 20th centuries, internally united and strongly centralized by papal jurisdictional primacy proved powerfully formidable when faced with the threats to her freedom from secular society, especially the rising power of modern national states. But the familiar formula of Vatican I, ex sese, non autem ex consensu Ecclesiae, a direct reference to the infamous Gallican Articles of 1682, was also directed internally - as, for example, Shaun Blanchard has argued, as a response to "the crucial (and in some cases still unresolved) theological and ecclesiological struggles within the Catholic Church itself in the early modern period," prior, that is, to the external threats posed by the French Revolution and what followed. [See "The Twists and Turns That Led to the First Vatican Council," Church Life Journal, https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/the-twists-and-turns-that-led-to-the-first-vatican-council/ ]

In the wake of Vatican II and the internal turmoil that followed within the Church, it can be argued that the ecclesiological concerns of the 18th century seem to have returned from their long hibernation during the ultramontanist winter that followed Vatican I, facilitated for some by an ideologically idealized interpretation of Vatican II ecclesiology.

Yet once again external social realities and political and cultural threats loom large on the horizon as they did in 1870. Inevitably there is only one component of the Church's constitution that can effectively represent the Church to the world, that can effectively make the Church's case to the world, and also (hopefully if perhaps paradoxically) that can bring the world's case to the Church's needful attention in turn. In a certain sense, that seems to be what the present papacy is attempting to accomplish. Certainly Laudato Si' stands as a shining example of the papacy's unique capacity to bring the world's case to the Church's attention. (How successfully is another question, clearly not quite answerable as yet.) 

Whatever one makes of the interesting spectacle of the current ultra-ultramontanism of the Church's "progressive" post-conciliar factions, perhaps it reflects a belated acknowledgment of the reality that there seems no other effective option for being Church in the contemporary world (just as there are increasingly no effective alternatives to centralized bureaucratic governance in the secular world).

And wasn't that more or less what was recognized 150 years ago?

(Photo: Tomb of Blessed Pope Pius IX, Basilica of Saint Lawrence Outside the Walls, 2012)

The Band Plays On

At the height of the AIDS epidemic in 1987, San Francisco Chronicle journalist Randy Shilts published And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic a book that chronicled the early spread of HIV and AIDS, highlighting the governmental indifference and apathy that allowed the epidemic to get worse. (It was made into a TV docudrama in 1993.) 

Since then, the world has experienced severe but relatively localized calamities such as SARS and Ebola. One would think the lessons from those experiences might have been taken to heart by those with political power, those with the ultimate responsibility for public health. I suspect they were in fact taken seriously by some - just not by the political party that would be in power in Washington and many states when the global coronavirus covid-19 pandemic would once again challenge government leaders to actually lead. 

Around the beginning of March, as the approaching pandemic was finally intruding into our consciousness, I mentioned at a meeting that I thought the U.S.should imitate Italy and just shut everything down. I was, of course, roundly mocked for this and was told to calm myself down. Then, within another week, we were in fact largely shut down. It was a harrowing time for many, but by May the pressure was already on to reopen everything, which largely happened in May and June, with consequences we are now experiencing.  We have all seen the graphs that highlight how at one point the U.S. and the E.U. (comparable in population size) were experiencing about the same number of cases but are way apart now, with the U.S. having the most cases in the entire world. What went wrong?

Well, obviously, had we used the lockdown period to augment our testing and tracing capabilities, and had we reopened less precipitously, and had everyone acted sensibly and observed proper precautions like wearing masks and maintaining physical distance, then our situation today might very different. Obviously, there has been a catastrophic failure of political leadership on the part of the president and his political party. In her now famous book about her uncle, Mary Trump noted that he has "never needed to acquire expertise in order to attain or retain power (which partly explains his disdain for the expertise of others)." She also suggests his inadequate response to the pandemic early on was "because of his fear of appearing weak or failing to project the message that everything was 'great,' 'beautiful,' and 'perfect.' The irony is that his failure to face the truth has inevitably led to massive failure anyway. In this case, the lives of potentially hundreds of thousands of people will be lost and the economy of the richest country in history may well be destroyed."

Obviously, leadership matters. To quote Shakespeare: if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the king that led them to it.

If the president had shown even modest leadership and empathy, then others, with greater skill and expertise, might have been empowered to assist him in a common endeavor, and ordinary Americans (or at least most of them) would have done whatever they would have been called upon to do. Instead, however, the failure at the top has allowed free expression to the worst elements of American exceptionalism - deplorable libertarian nonsense and a nonsensical populist denigration of science and expertise - evidenced, for example, in the widespread failure of so many to cooperate with such minimal but essential behaviors as wearing face masks whenever in proximity to others.

Even now, with cases increasing alarmingly all around us, I constantly encounter people without masks, not observing physical distance, etc. 

And the Band Plays On.

"The World's Most Dangerous Man" (the Book)

One doesn't need to read Mary Trump's Too Much and Never Enough:: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man (Simon and Schuster) to know that private wealth is bad and that being rich is what we commonly used to call "a near occasion of sin." To know that, all one needs to do is read scripture and listen to Jesus's words, which repeatedly made that point (a message much of modern Christianity has forgotten or ignored in favor of other subjects on which Jesus had much less to say). Nor need one read her book to wonder whether the present President of the United States may well be what his niece describes. That said, her book helpfully amplifies the picture we already have.

What would otherwise be a biography based on insider family gossip, in the hands of  a niece who is also a qualified clinical psychologist, becomes a psychological portrait of President Trump by a relative who combines her direct firsthand family experience with clinical analysis. Unsurprisingly, when one family member turns against another in this way, there is a inevitably some sad family history in the background and some element of getting back at others in the clan. The author herself acknowledges worrying about this: "I concluded that if  spoke publicly about my uncle,  would be painted as a disgruntled niece looking to cash in or settle a score." Mary is the daughter of Fred Jr. (the President's older brother) who is presented as having been badly broken down by his domineering father, Fred Sr. (the patriarch of the family business, the son of the successful immigrant Trump from Germany who died in the 1918 influenza pandemic). Mary's father famously left the family business to become a pilot, but eventually became an alcoholic and lost this job and his marriage and died at 42. It was Uncle Donald who lived up to his father's brutal expectations and was amply rewarded for it, whereas, when Fred Sr. died, Fred Jr.'s children (the author and her brother, Fred) were excluded from his will. This in turn led to the litigation which led to the supposed non-disclosure agreement, which was the basis for the Trump family's efforts to stop her book. 

Trump's pathologies, if that is what they are, have been on public display for decades. This sad story about horrible rich people, once salacious local entertainment for New Yorkers, has acquired world-historical significance because of the unlikely election of Uncle Donald as president in 2016. It is as if the HBO series Succession's story of how one mean old capitalist damaged all of his children - but most especially the son who most desperately sought to please and succeed him - has come to life off-screen. As someone once said to me about the family drama of another problematic New York politician, Why does anyone bother to write fiction?

I understand what the author is attempting, but personally I would probably have preferred less psychological jargon. Sometimes I felt I was taking a tour of the American Psychiatric Association's DSM-5 finding every diagnostic category that could be applied to the Donald.  At the outset she assures us he meets the "nine criteria" for narcissism. Frankly I find all that clinical diagnostic language almost numbing, whereas the actual story she tells is so raw that the ultimate tragedy of it all almost tells itself. (The psychological approach does, however, add intriguing insights - such as her view that Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un, and Mitch McConnell all "bear more than a passing psychological resemblance to Fred," Donald's father.)

It is a sad, Succession-style story of family dysfunction (facilitated by wealth), which has allegedly left the author's uncle "incapable of growing, learning, or evolving, unable to regulate his emotions, moderate his responses, or take in and synthesize information." We have become more than usually accustomed to political tell-all books by observers of this Administration. Here the President's public presentation mirrors the family story - in Mary's words turning "this country into a macro version of my malignantly dysfunctional family." This book brings us inside the story, and invites us to survey the many cracks in the family portrait. 

The author quotes an article calling her uncle "Frankenstein without a conscience," but then applies that to the President's father, who is in many ways the ultimate villain in the story. - "a high-functioning sociopath" who "seemed to have no emotional needs at all." The damaged son in turn damages the entire nation, his niece argues. "The atmosphere of division my grandfather created in the Trump family is the water in which Donald has always swum, and division continues to benefit him at the expense of everyone else. It's wearing the country down just as it did my father, changing us even when it leaves Donald unaltered. It's weakening our ability to be kind or believe in forgiveness, concepts that have never had any meaning for him."

If Fred, Sr. is the villain, the victim - or, rather, the main victim, inasmuch as everyone is is a victim to some extent - is the author's father, Fred, Jr. ("Freddy"), whose unhappy life story is retold in all its tragic detail, whose father simultaneously told him "that he had to be an unqualified success and that he never could be." Slowly but surely, the second son replace his older brother as the center of their father's world. "Fred accepted Donald's arrogance and bullying - after he actually started to notice them - because he identified with the impulses."

While much of the story of Donald's rise may be familiar, his niece effectively dismantles any mythology of merit, making it very clear how much Donald depended on his father - not just his father's money but his political and other connections. As for minor members of the clan, Mary uses their deference to their father's preference for Donald to illustrate the same sycophancy that establishment Republicans would eventually come to display. 

The sad story of the fight over the will and the medical insurance just highlights what we, of course, already know. "If your only currency is money, that's the only lens through which you determine worth."

The moral of the story? We knew that already. Private wealth is bad, and being rich is what we commonly used to call "a near occasion of sin."

Seeding the Good News in a Bad News World

A sower went out to sow [Matthew 13:1-23]. How many times have we heard this particular parable? One of my teachers used to be fond of citing that familiar opening line to illustrate how we have become so accustomed to hearing certain parables that, when we hear a familiar line like that, we assume we already know what follows and how it is going to end, and so tend to tune out the rest – which, of course, is one of the very things this parable may be warning us against!

Having lived virtually all my life in cities, parables about famers sowing seed sound somewhat exotic to me – and, maybe even somewhat strange. What exactly is the farmer doing? Why does he sow his seed in such a helter-skelter way? Of course, Jesus’ actual hearers – the original audience for this parable - would have understood. Israel’s arid climate and rocky soil are not very farmer-friendly. Finding in advance the pockets of good fertile soil, with the limited technology available to traditional agriculture, would have been be very difficult - and inefficient. Throwing the seed all over the place may mean a lot will be wasted, but it probably guarantees that some will fall on good soil and take root and produce fruit. So what may seem like inefficiency to us turns out to be really quite efficient indeed!

Jesus uses this familiar fact to say something about how God produces fruit in the world, reaching out to us with extravagant generosity, recognizing that maybe not everyone will respond – or, having responded, really persevere. Even so, he reveals himself as widely as possible, in many and various ways. He does that because that is who God is and how God acts – and how he expects his Church to behave in imitation of him. And that is why God’s extravagant generosity invites such an extravagantly faithful response on our part – producing fruit as much as a hundred-fold.

  

We talk a lot in the Church nowadays about evangelization as the essential mission of the Church. Perhaps we talk too much about it, if in fact all we do is talk. We honor and celebrate the great missionaries of the past who travelled to India and Japan like Saint Francis Xavier or from France to Canada like Saints John de Brebeuf and Isaac Jogues or from Spain to California like Saint Junipero Serra in search of pockets of fertile soil in which to plant the Gospel.

But we do have to travel to far off mission lands. One of the most challenging realities about contemporary Catholic life in our own country is that for every new adult member who responds to the invitation to join the Church, some six or more leave. If we Catholics constitute at present a somewhat shrinking 20 percent of the national population, at least another half as many or more Americans describe themselves as “former Catholics.”

Well before the pandemic took over our lives, Sunday Mass attendance was declining dramatically. And, since 2000, Catholic marriage rates are down almost 50%, infant baptisms are down 40% percent, and adult baptisms more than 50%.

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So, wherever we turn, we meet not only those who have never yet heard the Word, but also those who have heard it and forgotten it, and also those for whom the Good News isn’t news at all, or (even worse) those who have heard it in a way which has made it sound more like bad news than good news.

As American Catholics we need to examine our consciences concerning the ways we have allowed the good news to be heard as bad news by so many in our society. Like the farmer in the Gospel, we are commanded to continue to reach out as God does – sharing our story in every possible way, without preconceptions or preconditions, undoing whatever bad news has gotten in the way with the amazingly good news of God’s extravagant generosity.

As the founder of the Paulist Fathers, Servant of God Isaac Hecker, once wrote, in a letter to Orestes Brownson: “If our words have lost their power, it is because there is no power in us to put into them.  The Catholic faith alone is capable of giving to people a true, permanent and burning enthusiasm fraught with the greatest of deeds.  But to enkindle this in others we must be possessed of it first ourselves.”

Homily for the 15th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, July 12, 2020.

The Reason for Notre Dame

I still remember where i was when I heard of the tragic Notre Dame fire on the Monday of Holy Week one year ago. Like many others I applauded President Macron's commitment to rebuild the great cathedral. He created some anxiety, however, with his hint that he favored some sort of "contemporary gesture," something neither the cathedral nor the contemporary world is in any further need of!.

Apparently, his commitment to a quick reconstruction - in time for the 2024 Paris Olympics - may have been decisive in protecting the cathedral from those who want to replace its spire with something more modern. (There have even been proposals suggesting a swimming pool on the cathedral's roof!) According to the announcement made this week, it seems the cathedral's reconstruction will respect its original medieval Gothic design - and Eugène Viollet-le-Duc's 19th-century Gothic spire, which replaced the original medieval one, which had been removed in the previous century.

It is obviously appropriate to build modern buildings in modern styles. If there is a problem with modern architectural styles it is not that they are modern but their style - or lack thereof. However one responds to modern architecture - and there are obviously many different examples of modern architecture from beautiful to bland to ugly -  it is not some modern building that is being reconstructed. Nor is Notre Dame just another example of medieval beauty, of which there would remain many in the world even were Notre Dame not to be rebuilt. More importantly, Notre Dame expresses a medieval cultural and religious sensibility, the loss of which has made modernity more impoverished than most moderns may willingly acknowledge. It is a sensibility which needs to be experienced, in the ways in which such a medieval building is intended to be experienced, in order to fill some of the void that sadly stands at the heart of modern experience.

I don't typically quote Rod Dreher, but what he recently wrote ("Weird Christianity," May 20, 2020) about his first encounter with Chartres Cathedral expresses something of what a church like Notre Dame is meant to do - and still can do even in this cold and soulless age:

"It wasn’t until I stumbled into the Chartres cathedral at age 17, on a tour group, that I was confronted by a form of Christianity that overwhelmed me. Nothing in my life in small-town America in the late 20th century had prepared me for the grandeur of God made manifest in that Gothic cathedral. What kind of Christianity inspires men to build this kind of temple? That was probably the first time in my life that I was truly struck by awe, in the old-fashioned sense. I remember standing there, in the center of the labyrinth, looking all around at the stained-glass windows, the arches, and the vaults, thinking, 'God does exist — and He wants me'.”

That is why it is so important that places like Notre Dame be rebuilt and maintained. That is why the real Notre Dame - not one with a "contemporary gesture" - is so very needed now, as much as it was back in 1345, maybe even more so.