Book Notices

"The Devil Knows Latin"

2011-07-10T18:32:00.001-07:00

Don't you just love that quote from Monsignor Ronald Knox? You know, the one made famous by E. Christian Kopff in his delightful book, The Devil Knows Latin: Why America Needs the Classical Tradition(2001):

Ronald Knox, a wise and witty Catholic priest, when asked to perform a baptism in the vernacular, responded with what his biographer Evelyn Waugh described as “uncharacteristic acerbity”: “The baby does not understand English and the Devil knows Latin” (Kopff xv).

The background story, of course, is that a minor exorcism is part of the traditional Catholic baptismal ritual, involving not only holy water, but exorcised salt and holy chrism oil. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, St. Cyril of Jerusalem (ca. AD 313 – 386) gives a detailed description of baptismal exorcism (in Procatechesis 14). Hence Msgr. Knox's statement: "The Devil Knows Latin."

Most of Kopff's message about the joys of Latin and importance of classical education in this book will be greeted by your average American run-of-the-shopping-mall philistines with about as much joy as an invitation to attend the Traditional Latin Mass. But never mind the philistines, what matters is whether the claim is true. I remember reading some biographies of 19th-century and early 20th-century British writers about ten years after I began teaching college, and feeling sorely deprived educationally, even with a doctorate in hand. These guys were studying Greek and Latin and reading Virgil's Aeneid and Plutarch's Lives in the original when they were junior high school age.

It may well be true that we don't need to know Latin or have a classical education to be saints; but it may not only help us stave off the barbarous philistinism of our blithely high-tech yet historically oblivious new dark age, but may even help us along the path to sanctity if it happened to help us discover the abundant legacy of the Church's saints, resources for growth in holiness, and rich spiritual heritage of Mater Ecclesia. I would even argue that a classical education has considerable value in itself as a protoevangelium or praeparatio evangelium. Certainly St. Augustine found it so, who, in his Confessions, attests to the help provided him by the Neo-Platonists in overcoming the obstacles to faith produced by his earlier Manichaeism. Further still, Plato's dialogues provide some of the finest rebuttals of the kind of sophomoric relativism that thrives in the postmodernist environments around most contemporary universities. You can't be a relativist and be open to the Gospel.

The Political Problem of Religious Pluralism

2011-06-23T11:07:00.000-07:00

Christopher Oleson reviews Thaddeus Kozinski, The Political Problem of Religious Pluralism: And Why Philosophers Can't Solve It

To the typical inhabitant of a modern liberal democracy, the title of Thaddeus Kozinski's intriguing new book will probably sound a little puzzling, inasmuch as, within contemporary democractic culture, religious pluralism is not generally understood to be a "political problem." On the contrary, for the democratic soul, religious pluralism seems to be more a positive good, something to be protected and celebrated, rather than "solved" or overcome. One's religious commitments would have to be "extreme" and thus "anti-democratic" to take issue with liberalism's positive affirmation of religious diversity, for it is one of democratic modernity's greatest achievements to have crafted institutional arrangements that allow for the easy co-existence of various religious groups both with one another and with the overarching liberal political order.

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Secular democratic modernity can only claim not to have a religious pluralism problem because it has already implicitly solved this problem by subtly emasculating traditional religious identity

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One of the many insights of Thaddeus Kozinski's valuable contribution to the on-going conversation about the relationship between Faith and politics is to articulate with precision how secular democratic modernity can only claim not to have a religious pluralism problem because it has already implicitly solved this problem by subtly emasculating traditional religious identity and establishing, under the false veil of political neutrality, institutional arrangements charged with theological and metaphysical significance.

Thus, only by becoming enculturated to re-interpret religious belief in such a way that it can have no substantive implications for the social and political order, and correspondingly, by becoming miseducated to not notice the tacit establishment of a quite partisan sense of the good, freedom, and selfhood, do the citizens of secular democracies think that they have a neutral social order that need not view religious pluralism as politically problematic. For those whose religious creed is not merely an emotional accoutrement, this situation is obviously deeply troublesome, for the logic of secular liberalism, as Kozinski makes clear, would force the believer to treat his Faith commitments as merely therapeutic preferences of an autonomous self.

Clarifying this situation and working towards articulating a solution to it which is at once both honest about its principles, coherent in working them out, and politically expressive of the truth and ultimate happiness of man is the task that Kozinski sets himself in his book. He does this by successively engaging the thought of three influential and progressively illuminating political philosophers. John Rawls, Jacques Maritain, and Alasdair MacIntyre. Rawls serves as the quintessential philosophical voice of secular democratic liberalism, Maritain as the exponent of a Catholic hybridization of Thomistic political philosophy and modern democratic ideals, and MacIntyre as the most penetrating philosophical critic of liberal modernity and advocate of a local Thomistic politics of the common good against the bureaucratic nation-state.

Of the three, Kozinski is by far the most sympathetic to MacIntyre. Nevertheless, even his proposal falls short in Kozinski's eyes, for MacIntyre's vision of small communities of virtue does not quite attain to the level of truly political existence, remaining as it does, Kozinski claims, too local in its aspirations. More importantly for Kozinski, MacIntyre's thought problematically remains at the level of mere philosophy. Studiously avoiding the role of theologian, MacIntyre deprives himself of the resources of political theology, and thereby fails to affirm the necessity of a public recognition of divine revelation and Magisterial teaching as the most propitious conditions for a stable and morally healthy political state. As Kozinski's subtitle indicates, philosophy as such can offer little or no light on how to move a community of seriously diverse worldviews to a unified political order of virtue and human happiness. Only the eventual achievement of a confessionally Catholic state, Kozinski concludes, can overcome the limitations of political philosophy in general, and liberal modernity in particular.

Kozinski begins his argument by unpacking the hidden premises of John Rawls' mature work, Political Liberalism. Rawls' primary aim in this book is to articulate how, given the "fact of a reasonable pluralism," citizens with rival "comprehensive views" can equally affirm a unified democratic political order. Paradoxically, Rawls attempts to accomplish this by self-consciously not providing an account of the truth or goodness of his liberal conception of justice. Consequently, he invites each private citizen to affirm and justify it from within their own particular comprehensive view.

One might reasonably ask: what precisely is the "it" that such citizens are being asked to affirm, and where does the recognition of "it" come from? Rawls' answer is the purely political conception of justice implicitly embedded in the public political culture animating contemporary liberal democracies and giving us our sense of what is "free," "equal," and "fair." In other words, there simply is a customary way we democratic liberals politically order our lives that does not, and need not, have any intrinsic theoretical foundation or justification. In this way, Rawls does not defend this conception as "true" and indeed, he does not even think it can be defended as true in some universal, philosophical sense. It is simply the way "we," who inhabit the democracies of the modern west, publicly regard it as good to associate together as a political community. Hence, each citizen can accept and justify "our" liberal sense of justice in whatever way he wants to, so long as he does, in fact, accept it.

This prescinding altogether from the truth of political liberalism is what Kozinski calls Rawls' "postmodern turn." It is a pragmatic attempt to articulate a "politics for the post-enlightened" democratic societies whose political assumptions, Rawls believes, already functionally exist in good working order within the political culture. While these assumptions are not philosophically "true" for Rawls, they are nevertheless "reasonable," at least "for us." Kozinski quotes Richard Rorty's formulation of Rawls' position: "given our history and the traditions embedded in our public life, it is the most reasonable doctrine for us."

In this way Rawls claims to be making room for the comprehensive views of the religiously diverse members of a democracy, and thus not to be imposing anything unreasonable on others. However, this self-image of toleration is thoroughly dispelled by Kozinski, who points out that, for Rawls, the "public political culture" exists as an exclusive and unimpeachable authority beyond which there is no appeal. Accordingly, any comprehensive view that does not correspond to the public political culture, or which regards political cultures as subject to dialectical scrutiny or some higher authority, are ipso facto deemed "unreasonable" and thus unacceptable within a liberal order. Not surprisingly, any traditional Christian "comprehensive view" falls under this category.

Even more objectionable, as Kozinski points out, is the fact that the very idea of the public political culture functioning in this totalizing and exclusivist way is not even a real aspect of our actual political culture, and so, as Kozinski points out, it is "a private belief of Rawls' own comprehensive doctrine, and thus inadmissible, according to Rawls' own criteria, as a public political authority." In other words, Rawls' position, if honestly and consistently viewed, is self-refuting. At the end of the day, Kozinski concludes, Rawls' project involves smuggling controversially foundatinalist and theologically charged principles into the political order under the guise of a purely "reasonable" and "non-theological pragmatism."

It is perhaps worth mentioning here another line of criticism which Kozinski later in the book levels against Maritain, but which perhaps applies even more to Rawls. It involves challenging the very idea that we have a coherent and commonly understood "public political culture" at all. Such an idea entails the existence within our culture of one, conceptually unified and commonly accepted set of political ideas. Yet, one of MacIntyre's most consistent and trenchant criticisms of liberal modernity is that no such thing exists. We may all use the words "freedom," "equality," "rights," "dignity," "law," "responsibility," "justice," but when pushed to be clear about the meaning of such terms, our culture has not common meaning for them.

What contemporary secular democracies actually have is an inconsistent and ultimately incommensurable mélange of fragmentary moral and political concepts derived from diverse and incompatible traditions (e.g., Biblical, Lockean, Puritan, Thomistic, Utilitarian, Marxist, Weberian, Feminist). What we do have in common is what MacIntyre calls a "common moral rhetoric," but this only serves to disguise our deep and interminable disagreements and confusions. If this is, in fact, the case, then Rawls cannot invoke the "public political culture" supposedly operative within modern democracies, as though there were actually such a thing providing us with a common understanding of liberal justice. What we really get from Rawls is not a formulation of our common political culture, but Rawls' own tendentious Ivy League brand of secular democratic socialism.

Far superior in Kozinski's eyes, and yet still inadequate to meet the challenges of authentic political order, is Jacques Maritain's call for a New Christendom that is both democratic and pluralistic. It is superior in that, whereas Rawls sought to craft a political philosophy that supposedly remained agnostic about the human good, Maritain maintained that "exact knowledge of the ends of human life" is essential for a sound understanding of the right order of the state. And since man is ordered to a Good which transcends the political, the political common good must recognize and integrate this truth into its actuality. Thus, for Maritain, political philosophy must become "subalternated" (i.e., dependent for some of its principles) to theology.

Nevertheless, this does not entail a return to the sacral order of Medieval Christendom in Maritain's mind. As Kozinski makes clear, this is because " there is a convergence, for Maritain, of the accepted core of values of today's liberal democracies with the temporal prescriptions of the Gospel." In other words, the democratic notions of human rights, equality, and religious freedom are exactly what the Gospel demands, so there can exist a happy co-existence of a Christian social order with constitutionally pluralistic democratic politics. While a Thomistic political philosophy is thus the de facto justification, and indeed the only coherent grounding, for such a political order, citizens of other religious and philosophical perspectives are free to provide their own understanding of its truth and goodness, no matter how false or incoherent, for Maritain's democratic charter does not prescribe the expression of alternative political self-understandings.

Kozinski argues that this hybridization of Thomistic political philosophy and democratic pluralism is ultimately unsuccessful for a number of reasons, not all of which can be discussed here, but all of which are worth listening to. To begin with, Kozinski claims that Maritain simply misjudged and seriously overestimated the lasting Christian content of modern democratic sensibilities. He mistook the emergent moral sobriety and spiritual openness of devastated, post-war Europe for the settled convictions and habits of Western democracies. In this way he underestimated the past and present countervailing, anti-Christian currents operative in modern culture and politics.

As a result, Maritain was far too sanguine about the desacralization of the modern state and far too unwary about the consequent subjugation of the Church to a purely private (and hence irrelevant) sphere once the secular state came to possess a complete monopoly of temporal power. As a result, Maritain's formulation does not have the resources to recognize the gradual subversion and transposition of operative moral and political priniciples that has taken place within Western democracies during the modern period.

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The consequence of Maritain's vision, Kozinski reasons, is to create a "morally obligatory divorce" between a citizen's religious truth claims and his social and political life

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More problematically, Kozinski asks, "would not active participation in a political order that a priori precludes the political implementation of religiously particularistic political theologies tend to habituate the citizen into privatizing his politically relevant religious truth claims, at least in his political habits, but even in his private thoughts?" The consequence of Maritain's vision, Kozinski reasons, is to create a "morally obligatory divorce" between a citizen's religious truth claims and his social and political life. The consequence will be the unwitting establishment of a liberal political theology, a "democratic faith," Kozinski argues, that is unreconcilable with a fully Catholic understanding of political life. Kozinski sites William Cavanaugh: "Although Maritain wishes to purge rights language of its basis in liberalism and locate its inspiration in the Gospel, it is the Gospel which ends up being supplanted, precisely because it is banished in effect from explicit insertion into public discourse."

While I am sympathetic to Kozinski's concerns and agree that any democratic order that categorically forbids its citizens from advocating and working toward the realization, within political society, of their moral and religious commitments, will harmfully tend to compartmentalize and privatize those beliefs, I wonder whether this criticism of Maritain might not be stating things a bit too categorically. Perhaps it's not, but I wonder if, at least on this specific issue, Kozinski and Maritain are really more divided in cultural and historical judgment rather than in philosophical and theological principle. For the latter to be the case, it would have to be true that Maritain would not want every citizen to embrace the Gospel and then to publicly reason morally and politically from its principles. I am not entirely persuaded that this is true.

The difference, at least as it seems to me, lies in their contrasting assessment of the practical insurmountability of the modern condition of religious pluralism. Maritain thinks that it is not going to be overcome in any foreseeable future, and so he reasons accordingly. Kozinski, on the other hand, envisions and proposes a path to its eventual transcendence. I could be wrong, but were the latter to actually happen within a political community, I doubt that Maritain would have a problem with such a society giving political recognition to its common Catholic Life, especially because such a political recognition would ipso facto recognize the right and duty of every human being to seek the truth about God free from political coercion. If Kozinski himself regards it as imprudent to force a Catholic establishment upon a predominantly non-Catholic society, then perhaps their ositions on this issue are less starkly opposed than might otherwise appear to be the case. This is not to say that there are not other problems with Maritain's position, and it needs to be said that Kozinski's treatment of all this is much fuller and more nuanced than I can here do credit to. I would only caution that Maritain might apply his political principles differently if his cultural and historical assessment were different.

The final thinker Kozinski analyzes is, as we have mentioned, Alasdair MacIntyre. I will not begin to pretend that I can adequately do justice to Kozinski's wide-ranging and provocative treatment of this eminent philosopher. Suffice it to say that Kozinski provides a nice background to the development of MacIntyre's critique of liberal modernity and lays out the principal reasons why MacIntyre regards it as conceptually bankrupt. Kozinski then explains the nature of MacIntyre's understanding of rationality as "tradition constituted." This conception of rational enquiry sees the human intellect as capable of grasping objective truth, but of always doing so only within a particular community characterized by a particular and developing history. There are many profound issues and pertinent questions to be raised about MacIntyre's tradition-constituted rationality, but they cannot be adequately treated here. Suffice it to say that there is much insight in MacIntyre's formulation of the matter, although there are places in his writings where his formulation appears, at least to me, to be in danger of reducing philosophy to dialectic.

As MacIntyre is at pains to show, the fullest and most perfect expression of tradition-constituted rationality is to be found in the tradition of Aristotelian-Thomism, for not only has it been able to continually confront and overcome the questions and problems that have internally arisen within it, but it is also only in light of the principles and explanatory power of this particular tradition that the problems and failures of the philosophical traditions that have subsequently emerged in Western intellectual life are adequately explained and resolved. In other words, in the internal and external dialectical engagements that have characterized the history of the Thomistic tradition, Thomism has shown itself again and again as singularly successful.

Applying this to politics, MacIntyre uses the resources of this tradition to mount a fierce critique of modern liberalism and from it to lay down the outlines of a healthy political philosophy rooted in an authentic understanding of the common good. Such a politics is, for MacIntyre, localist, virtue-based, and rooted in the natural law. Moreover, it can only be truly lived within a community that shares a common tradition of rational enquiry, which is to say, that accepts a common understanding of what is virtuous and what is according to nature. If such communities are to survive under the conditions of the modern nation state, they will always have to maintain an uneasy and merely pragmatic modus vivendi with the large-scale bureaucracies and powerful financial interests that presently exercise a disintegrating monopoly over contemporary nation-states and the market.

While Kozinski is deeply sympathetic to MacIntyre's critique and to the broad contours of his positive proposal, he nevertheless has some very substantive criticisms of his overall project. I will only mention two. First, MacIntyre has "a defective notion of the state" inasmuch as he unreasonably rejects large-scale instantiations of it as legitimate vehicles of political life. His local, tradition-constituted communities are "insufficiently political" because they are, according to Kozinski, simply too small to embody the "law, authority, and citizenship" necessary for real political life in the face of the liberal state. "if MacIntyre's practical model could be adjusted for a larger-scale application, it could acquire a genuinely political character." As it is, "MacIntyre is left with no possible site for overarching political community compatible with the basic condition of modernity -- he offers Aristotelianism without a polis."

This criticism appears to me to be rooted in an ambiguity. Its cogency, it seems to me, depends upon not recognizing a distinction in MacIntyre's writings, which I have always (although perhaps mistakenly) presumed to be operative in them. This distinction is one Aristotle himself makes between the best constitution simply speaking, and the best constitution for a particular people existing within particular circumstances here and now. Thus, there is a difference between what would be the best form of tradition-constituted political community all other things being equal, and what would be the best form of tradition-constituted political community forced to exist under the omnipresent hegemony of secular, emotivist, bureaucratic nation-states. I take "the communities of moral and intellectual virtue" whose formation MacIntyre regards as necessary in this "new Dark Ages" ruled by managerial barbarians to be the latter variety. Given that there is not immediate, realistic prospect of forming truly independent, tradition-constituted and small-scale political communities on the order of the fifth century Athenian polis or the Republic of Venice as it existed from the seventh to the end of the eighteenth century, it is inevitable that MacIntyre's communities will not be able to embody a fully political existence. But of course, one could make the same criticism of Benedictine monasteries during the first Dark Ages. They too were not fully political inasmuch as they existed under intolerable external conditions which prevented the full actualization of political life around them by those of its members striving to keep civilization alive as best they could under such hostile circumstances.

Nevertheless, even if a MacIntyrean tradition-constituted community could come into existence without having to worry about external factors like the surrounding Nanny State or the threat of being swallowed by China, MacIntyre would still affirm that such a community still needs to be small-scale in order to be authentically political. Here MacIntyre is simply being a true Aristotelian, for in Book VII of the Politics Aristotle asks the question of the proper size of a polis' population and geographical boundaries. He writes, "certainly experience shows that it is difficult and perhaps impossible for a polis with too large a population to be well-governed." This is because real political order requires mutual recognition and common deliberation. When a state gets too large it cannot be inhabited by citizens jointly sharing in political life, but only subjects of a distant and relatively anonymous power. I think this, at least in part, is what MacIntyre is getting at in the text quoted by Kozinski: "The second condition for an acceptable political order is its size, 'a relatively small scale society whose relationships are not deformed by compartmentalization'" (166).

It seems to be that the United States had something like this authentically local politics back in the 1830s when Tocqueville visited our shores. Speaking of New England townships, Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America, "In that part of the Union, political life was born in the very heart of the townships; one might almost say that in origin each of them was a little independent nation... In all that concerns themselves alone the townships remain independent bodies, and I do not think one could find a single inhabitant of New England who would recognize the right of the government of the state to control matters of purely municipal interest."

These are truly remarkable words for a twenty-first century American ear. What citizen of New Haven, for example, would now think it preposterous for the state of Connecticut or the federal government to try to regulate his city's internal affairs in significant matters relating to education, public health, standards of public decency, or economic policy? What citizen of Hartford, Concord, or Providence still thinks of their political life and identity as primarily bound up in their township? And who would now regard their town or city as a kind of independent political community whose right to govern its internatl affairs in these matters is both substantive and protected? The answer, of course, is "no one today," and yet Tocqueville could write that, in America, where the instinct for independence was especially pronounced, "every village is a sort of republic accustomed to rule itself."

Further highlighting the political distance separating our modern, centralized nation-state from earlier American political existence is the way in which Tocqueville describes the nature and role of the individual states. Summing up their political status, Tocqueville says succinctly: "In a word, there are twenty0four little sovereign nations who together form the United States." Tocqueville could make this astounding statement because, for our earlier American brothers and sisters, "interest, custom, and feelings are united in concentrating real political life in the state, and not in the Union," for the latter "is in the peculiar position that it only forms one people in relation to certain aims; for all other purposes it is no such thing."It is this kind of political life which I think MacIntyre is calling us to attempt to recover. The fact that we cannot fully do so in any way "compatible with the basic condition of modernity" is not a flaw in MacIntyre's proposal, but a lamentable reality of the unpolitical condition which is modernity. If MacIntyre is offering us "Aristotelianism without a polis," it is not by choice.

The second criticism that I will mention touches on the central thesis of Kozinski's book. It pertains to the inability of philosophy by itself to solve the problem of political order. Kozinski writes, "MacIntyre the philosopher is unable to argue effectively against any anti-Thomistic or anti-Catholic prescription for an ideal political order because such a prescription would inevitably involve theological judgments and commitments... The methodological avoidance of theological judgments and commitments is the primary weakness in MacIntyre's project, for it attenuates the effectiveness of both the vindication of his own theologically based and informed Thomistic tradition, and its dialectical challenge to rival traditions. Any intellectual tradition articulating an ideal political order must necessarily include a judgment as to whether God has communicated His will to man regarding the political order." Accordingly, as MacIntyre himself recognizes, "a purely secular, purely philosophical understanding of the moral life of man is inevitably insufficient." There can be no political wisdom that is not ultimately theological in its scope and political in its aspirations.

Rooted as it is in perennial Catholic teaching on the nature of the political community and its right relation to God, there is a great deal of truth in Kosinzski's conclusion. Surely the most stable, healthy, and politically wise society is one where its people are both publicly and personally united in the true Faith, illumined by Divine Revelation, and able to be sanctified by Sacramental Grace. My only concern here is a potentially misleading sense of philosophy that one might take away from Kozinski's book. As a final reflection, I would only urge a greater caution, or at least more explicit qualification, in how Kozinski formulates the limitations of philosophy. Limitations there certainly are, but a "purely philosophical" understanding of the moral life of man is not a "purely secular" understanding.

It is Saint Thomas' correct understanding that the natural light of the intellect is able to see that the perfection of human nature, and the only thing that can ultimately fulfill human nature's desire for happiness, is to see the essence of God. Accordingly, it is, for Saint Thomas, a prudential dictate of moral philosophy and a precept of the natural law that one should seek to contemplate God as best one can if one is to be as happy as possible and move toward one's end. Indeed, prayer, devotion, and sacrifice are all, for Saint Thomas, dictates of the natural law, for unaided human reason can come to see philosophically that God exists, is the creator and governor of the universe, the giver of all good things, and the ultimate source from whom we derive our being, to whom we owe our obedience, and in whom we find our joy. Because of this, Saint Thomas annexes the virtue of religion under the cardinal virtue of justice. In other words, it is a natural virtue, before it is, like the other virtues, taken up and perfected by grace.

What all of this means is that philosophy, understood properly, is not a secular activity, if "secular" means having no theoretical or practical reference to God as the beginning and end of all things. As Saint Thomas sees it, the deliverances of both the theoretical and practical activity of natural reason, which is to say, the conclusions of metaphysics and moral philosophy, are ultimately theological and religious in nature. Indeed, the very name Aristotle gives to first philosophy is "theology," for the end of the speculative intellect is the contemplation of God. Similarly, the virtue of "religion" is the perfection of reason's moral activity. Saint Thomas argues that religion is the greatest of the moral virtues because it directs all of the other virtues to be done for the sake of adoring, obeying, and giving thanks to God. That these natural activities of the intellect are hindered by our sinful condition and made dramatically easier by the infusion of grace and the light of revelation does not change their being properly philosophical conclusions of the natural intellect. If Saint Thomas is right about all this, and I believe that he is, then I think philosophy might have more to say about the right ordering of a political community than Kozinski's argument seems to allow.

I do not mean to claim that Kozinski is denying philosophy's legitimate role in the dialectical conversation between rival traditions. Indeed, he explicitly criticizes the "Radical Orthodox" theologian, John Milbank, for his fideistic assertion that philosophy can play no role in the adjudication between competing narratives. Kozinski clearly does not think, as Milbank does, that the Christian story can only "out-narrate" the liberal-nihilistic story, as thought it were only a more attractive mythos. Nevertheless, it is sometimes hard to avoid the impression that, for Kozinski, natural reason can accomplish noticeably less than what Saint Thomas, for instance, thought it could. Whether, and in what way, this might be the case remains to be further developed in Kozinski's future contributions to this conversation.

Even with this caveat in mind, Thaddeus Kozinski's book remains a gold mine of rich reflection on the dilemma of articulating a just political order in the condition of secular, pluralistic modernity. As such, it has been a difficult struggle to limit my reactions to this book, for there is so much in it to provoke and challenge one to think more deeply and fruitfully about the issues it treats. There are few thinkers out there astute enough to call into question the regnant assumptions of liberal modernity and open enough to avail themselves of the Church's perennial teaching on these matters. For anyone seeking insight into the deeper philosophical issues of our present political conundrum, The Political Problem of Religious Pluralism: And Why Philosophers Can't Solve It is a worthy book that deserves a careful reading. +

Christopher Oleson is a tutor at Thomas Aquinas College. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the Catholic University of America. He lives with his wife, Rachel, and their six children in Santa Paula, CA. The Political Problem of Religious Pluralism is published by Lexington Books, 2010. Dr. Oleson's review, originally published in Latin Mass: The Journal of Catholic Culture and Tradition Vol. 20, No. 2 (Spring 2011), is reproduced here by kind permission of Latin Mass, 391 E. Virginia Terrace, Santa Paula, CA 93060.

Liturgy and personality

2011-05-08T19:30:00.001-07:00

I remember reading somewhere how Dietrich von Hildebrand, after converting to the Catholic Faith, used to run enthusiastically down the street, coattails flying, to be on time for daily Mass. He loved everything about his newfound religion. As much as anything else, he loved its liturgy.

In fact, he even wrote a book entitled Liturgy and Personality,about the “healing power of formal prayer” -- the power of liturgy to profoundly form and positively shape personality. Far from furnishing us with mere training wheels until we "mature" into more personal and spontaneous prayers "from the heart," formal liturgical prayer is actually the superior form of prayer, according to von Hildebrand. The key is to enter into the prayer of the Church, to make it one's own, to "pray the Mass," as St. Pope Pius X used to say, and to live it.

Formal liturgy -- so staid and “impersonal,” and even “oppressive” in the eyes of so many today -- is actually set forth in its proper meaning as the “source and summit” of our prayer life as Catholics, the place where we encounter our Lord and our God, see where we belong in His Kingdom and, in the process, learn who we are meant to be. In coming to know our God through the Church's liturgy, we come to know ourselves.

An Editor’s note in the latest edition of the book states that "Liturgy and Personality concerns the essence of the liturgy rather than the details of any particular liturgy,” and so urges the reader “to use von Hildebrand’s numerous liturgical examples to discover the gist of his arguments demonstrating the personality-forming power of the Liturgy,” so that these points can then “be related, where appropriate, to comparable elements in today’s Liturgy.”

It is no small point, however, that Liturgy and Personality was first published in 1932 in German: the Mass von Hildebrand loved, and through which he encountered the Lord, was the traditional Latin Mass of the Roman Rite -- the one most Catholics and others today would experience as something prima facie alien, if not alienating, including its "impersonal" Latin and the priest's "back turned to the people." This is the Mass -- this one -- to which he would fly down the street with his open coat billowing behind him!

It's enough to make any sane person wonder, is it not? But then, what is sanity, liturgically speaking? Is it the product of liturgical committees? Remember the joke about the difference between a liturgist and a terrorist? You can negotiate with the terrorist.

First and foremost, von Hildebrand was a Catholic philosopher, and his books on ethics and value-theory are substantial and profound. In the latter half of his life, however, after moving to the United States and after the Second World War, he increasingly turned the attention of his formidable mind to matters of the Church. For him, these were matters of the heart; and he was especially concerned with developments in the Church in the modern post-war world. Many of these developments he found troubling -- modernism, secularism, relativism, dissent, immorality -- and, above all, some of the experiments and innovations he lived to see in the Church's sacred liturgy.

Related:

Dietrich von Hildebrand, "Case for the Latin Mass" (Triumph, October 1966)
__________, Trojan Horse in the City of God: The Catholic Crisis Explained (Sophia Institute Press, 1993)
__________, The New Tower of Babel: Modern Man's Flight from God (Sophia Institute Press, 1994)
__________, The Devastated Vineyard (Roman Catholic Books, 1985)
__________, Charitable Anathema (Roman Catholic Books, 1993)
Alice von Hildebrand, The Soul of a Lion: The Life of Dietrich Von Hildebrand (Ignatius Press, 2000)
__________, The Soul of a Lion: Part 1 (audio file)
__________, The Soul of a Lion: Part 2 (audio file)

Michael Davies: Book Review of Pope Paul's New Mass

2010-11-21T17:28:00.000-08:00

Tridentine Community News (November 21, 2010):

Now that the stream of newsworthy events from the last several weeks is slowing down, we can return to the topic of pioneering Extraordinary Form apologist Michael Davies. [For Part I, see "Michael Davies - Part 1 of 2 - Background," Musings, September 26, 2010]

First published in 1980, Pope Paul's New Mass is part of a trilogy of books, the others being Pope John's Council and Cranmer's Godly Order. Its 663 pages are written in much the same style as, and share some of the content of, other Davies works. It is thus a good starting point for understanding his point of view. “PPNM” was one of the first books to detail the step-by-step liturgical changes that were enacted between 1964-69, the transition period between the Tridentine Mass and the Novus Ordo. It contains chapters describing the evolution of various practices which have been well-documented elsewhere and which will not be rehashed here. More uniquely, PPNM discusses Vatican documents which eliminated the Prayers at the Foot of the Altar, established the abbreviated formula for distributing Holy Communion, the option to receive Communion under Both Kinds, Concelebration, Children’s Masses, and so forth. It is enlightening to realize that the continual stream of liturgical change conditioned the faithful for the most major change yet to come, the imposition of the significantly modified New Rite of Mass in 1969. Approximately 40 documents not frequently discussed nowadays are analyzed, such as 1967’s Tres Abhinc Annos abolishing many of the genuflections and signs of the Cross in the Mass. In some cases, the entire document text is provided in an appendix.

Davies provides ample evidence that intense lobbying and electioneering by a handful of prelates from Germany and France, along with Vatican-designated point man for liturgical reform Archbishop Annibale Bugnini, pushed through these changes and particularly the creation and adoption of the Novus Ordo. This is popular knowledge among those interested in liturgical history, but Davies provides quotes from Bugnini and others proving that was actually the case. Davies also provides numerous quotes from bishops of the era, from the United States and England in particular, who had misgivings about the effect the changes would have on the faith lives of their flocks. The atmosphere was far from one of unanimity.

Davies cites evidence that the reduction, and in some cases the elimination, of language referring to the Holy Mass as a sacrifice was due to a push to make the Mass more palatable to Protestants. He presents a detailed analysis of Eucharistic Prayer II, the Offertory, and other reworded prayers and rubrics as examples of intentionally ambiguous language which can be viewed with acceptance by Protestants as well as Catholics. In conjunction he points out the vocabulary changes (e.g.: “celebrant” to “presider”) and the elimination of “negative” sentences within Scripture passages employed in the readings at Mass.

A chapter is devoted to the General Instruction of the Roman Missal and its follow-on Foreword, the rubrics for and introductory section to the altar missal. There was a surprising amount of dissension over its language, resulting in significant modifications having to be made between the 1969 and 1970 versions. As Davies writes, “What precedent is there in the history of the Church for a sacramental rite needing to have a Foreword written to justify its orthodoxy within one year of its publication?” (p. 306)

The book is filled with memorable snippets such as the following: “The police did not need to be called to Catholic churches each Sunday to hold back the hordes of lapsed Catholics whose faith had been rekindled at the prospect of saying the Confíteor in English.” (p. 92) Nevertheless, PPNM should be judged primarily on the basis of the thought-provoking facts it presents. Regardless of one’s liturgical proclivities, PPNM’s plethora of quotes from Vatican documents, articles, and interviews, amply footnoted, make the reader wonder just what the actual motivations were to impose the changes. Was it true scholarship? This seems unlikely considering all of the changes imposed in such a brief period of time, in an era before electronic communication made collaboration and discussion feasible. Was it a power play to control the liturgy by pushy individuals in an era (the 1960s) where change of all sorts appeared good? Why was making the Mass more appealing to Protestants more important than, for example, appealing to the Orthodox? One is left with the impression that the liturgical changes, and especially their vernacular translations, were rushed through because a door was open that might not be open much longer. Consider how quickly the first English translation of the Ordinary Form appeared in 1969. A mere seven years earlier, Vatican II had not yet even begun. The same thing would be far less likely to happen today, when the Internet would make such a process, and its principal actors and motivations, public knowledge rapidly. Consider that the new English translation of the Ordinary Form has been under the public microscope throughout its entire, over-seven-year process of creation.

There is much to say about the Extraordinary Form that is positive in nature, and our editorial philosophy has been to draw that attractiveness to the fore. Pope Paul’s New Mass admittedly covers some controversial territory with a more negative tone than we like. However, we believe that knowledge of Michael Davies’ significant contributions to the repopularization of the Extraordinary Form, as well as his historical assertions, is an important part of arriving at an intellectually full understanding of the Tridentine Mass as it is celebrated in the world today.

Tridentine Masses This Coming Week

Mon. 11/22 7:00 PM: Low Mass at St. Josaphat (St. Cecilia, Virgin & Martyr)

Tue. 11/23 7:00 PM: Low Mass at Assumption-Windsor (St. Clement I, Pope & Martyr)

[Comments? Please e-mail tridnews@stjosaphatchurch.org. Previous columns are available at www.stjosaphatchurch.org. This edition of Tridentine Community News, with minor editions, is from the St. Josaphat bulletin insert for November 21, 2010. Hat tip to A.B.]

Banished Heart redivivus!

2010-10-02T17:31:00.001-07:00

From a reader who said he tracked down a copy a couple years back when the few remaining were in Australia, notice of this timely reprint:

Banished Heart: Origins of Heteropraxis in the Catholic Church,T&T Clark Studies in Fundamental Liturgy (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, October, 2010).

It's available from Pro Multis for $35.95, but from Amazon for $25.26 and free one-day shipping for the next 17 hours and 16 minutes.

[Hat tip to J.M.]

The New Catholics

2010-08-30T13:21:00.000-07:00

[Note: this review was written around 1990.]

Dan O'Neill, ed., The New Catholics: Contemporary Converts Tell Their Stories,with a Foreword by Walker Percy (Crossroad, 1989, pp. xv + 187; $8.95 paperback). Reviewed by Philip Blosser, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Lenoir-Rhyne College.

At a recent conference at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, a special luncheon was arranged to allow converting Protestant pastors to discuss the problems involved in carrying on their lives as new Roman Catholics. This remarkable phenomenon is just one indication of the apparently growing series of defections to Rome from evangelical and mainstream Protestantism ranks over recent years. Wishing to satisfy my curiosity about the matter, about two years ago I picked up Dan O'Neill's book, The New Catholics, and began reading. Stories such as those told by these converts could easily be multiplied many times over today, yet O'Neill's volume continues to offer a reasonably accurate cross-section of recent converts and remains a good benchmark and starting place for anyone interested in the phenomenon.

O'Neill, who is Pat Boone's son-in-law, begins his Introduction to this book by recalling how the November 7, 1986, issue of Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of America's evangelical Protestants, carried a bold feature headline on its cover: "AMERICA'S CATHOLICS: WHO THEY ARE; WHAT THEY BELIEVE; WHERE THEY ARE GOING; WHY SOME STAY; WHY OTHERS LEAVE." O'Neill comments: "As a Catholic convert from evangelical Protestant ranks, I found this focus on American Catholicism as interesting for what was not said as for what was. There might have been a final subtitle: 'WHY NON-CATHOLICS JOIN.'" This book may be considered a sampling of recent answers to that question.

Who are these converts? They are a new generation of those rediscovering and returning to ancient liturgical churches-- much as Wheaton College Professor Robert Webber describes in Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail: Why Evangelicals Are Attracted to the Liturgical Church(1985), which he wrote shortly after he became an Episcopalian; or as former Campus Crusade for Christ staffer Peter Gilquist describes in Becoming Orthodox: A Journey to the Ancient Christian Faith(1989), shortly after he and some 200 other evangelicals joined the Greek Orthodox-- a move also made recently by Frankie Schaeffer, Jr., the son of Francis A. Schaeffer of L'Abri fame. They are part of a movement, like the Oxford movement of the last century, that is rediscovering what novelist Walker Percy calls in his Foreword "the old-new Jewish-Christian Thing, the one holy Catholic apostolic and Roman Thing." None of these converts may be as notable as Louis Bouyer, Ronald Knox, G.K. Chesterton, or John Henry Newman, who rocked the religious establishment by his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1845. But at a time when evangelical Protestants are making inroads among Catholics, and alienated Catholics are dismissing their religious tradition as an embarrassing dinosaur, it is significant that we find the likes of Malcolm Muggeridge, Walker Percy, Thomas Howard, Sheldon Vanauken, Richard John Neuhaus, William R. Farmer, William Oddie, Scott Hahn, and a multitude of lesser-knowns swimming upstream, against a tide of disaffected Catholics, to embrace the "Roman Obedience."

Why do they convert? There is a theme, running through these accounts, of a search for spiritual identity-- a theme very much like that of Webber's and Gilquist's books. It finds expression, in some cases, as a longing for holistic spirituality, a return to mystery and sacramental reality in the experience of worship; or as a weariness with sectarian differences and a desire to embrace the whole church in all its antiquity and catholicity. Very often, it resolves in a sense of "coming home," as in the selection by Pat Boone's daughter, songwriter Cherry Boone O'Neill, which concludes with a song she composed about her union with Rome, entitled "The Family Reunion"; or as in the story of another convert who envisions his pilgrimage as a "sheep's search for a shepherd," and finds himself at last "safely in the fold of Rome, under the care of the faithful shepherd John Paul II."

In an article entitled "Mistaking Rome for Heaven" (Christianity Today, May 12, 1989), evangelical theologian J.I. Packer contrasts this sense of "coming home" among converts to Catholicism with "what makes Roman Catholics into Protestants, [which] is always convictions about God's revealed truth," and asks: "Is it healthier for a change of church allegiance to be motivated by a feeling of at-home-ness, or by a conviction of truth?" What is striking about the stories of these converts, however, is precisely their repeated accounts of struggle with "convictions of truth." If any concern runs through their stories as a major theme, it is this. Sometimes it surfaces as distress over theological modernism, with its roots in Protestant liberalism, and over hermeneutical and ecclesiastical innovations, such as those leading to the ordination of homosexuals-- or, for that matter, of women. Sometimes it surfaces in concern over the biblical imperatives of care for the poor and homeless, the sanctity of human life and marriage, and the clear-cut stance of Rome against abortion, divorce, and gay/lesbian relationships. But most often it surfaces in a desire to get beyond the sectarian contradictions and disunity in the Body of Christ and recover the authoritative orthodoxy of the ancient and apostolic Church of Rome, with its magisterium and Pope.

While this is not a book of apologetics, it is interesting to follow the snatches of theological reflection by which these converts seek to explain their moves to Rome. One recurring provocation is the distressing observation that Protestantism has spawned hundreds of sects. In his chapter, Dale Vree (editor of The New Oxford Review) cites the Oxford Encyclopedia of World Christianity (1982) as noting more than 28,000 denominations of Christianity. The tone of some writers is not always irenic. One refers to his former denomination as "a small sect that had arisen out of the heated fantasies of nineteenth-century millenarians" and reviles its concept of the Church as "this huddling together of a handful of saints who cling to their list of niggling do's and don'ts while the rest of humanity gropes blindly toward perdition."

One might wish to demur here, and point out the large body of doctrine and experience that evangelical denominations, at least, share in common. But song-writer John Michael Talbot laments, in his chapter, that the things that divide even these denominations, such as the meaning of the sacraments, are not trivial afterthoughts, but differences over the most basic things Jesus commanded us to do: "Do this in remembrance of me . . . Go . . . make disciples of all nations . . . Baptize . . . Teach them to observe all that I commanded you . . ."

This leads, in turn, to another frequent assertion: that the Protestant principles of sola Scriptura and "private interpretation" are simply inadequate. Why? A number of reasons are offered. They are powerless to prevent the multiplication of conflicting and often heretical-- interpretations, apart from an authoritative magisterium (the apostolic teaching authority of Rome). They have no basis in Scripture. Sola Scriptura violates the principle of causality-- that an effect cannot be greater than its cause: if Scripture is authoritative, then how can one deny the authority of the Church, which, gave us the Bible (through its apostles) and determined the Canon (through its early bishops)? Former Gordon College Professor Thomas Howard notes: "All the heresiarchs believed in the inspiration of the Bible, but it took the Church to say, 'This is orthodox' or 'That is heterodox.'"

Such arguments may carry little weight for those who believe that the whole Church went off the rails around the time of Constantine, or, as some 'free church' folks insist, as early as A.D. 95. Conceding this problem, Howard responds: "My difficulty with this line of thought has been settled forever by Saint Augustine's argument against the Donatists: no matter how mucked up the Church is, you can't start anything new." Such a thought simply would not have occurred to those in the early Church: "You couldn't just hive off and start something else." Acknowledging that things did get pretty mucked up, Dan O'Neill points to documented cases among the ancient Roman occupiers of Palestine of converts to Judaism, in order to show how they saw, in the face of a shattered and beaten Jewish society, that salvation was nevertheless of the Jews: "In spite of a history of wicked, faithless kings, temple harlots, arrogant and manipulative priest, and competing religious views . . . they endured circumcision and humiliation among their peers to convert. They recognized in the Law and Prophets that God was speaking through this people." O'Neill's analogy is obvious: If the Jews continued to be the people of God before the birth of Christ despite their human failings, the sins that blight the history of the Roman Catholic Church are not necessarily evidence that she is not what she claims to be or that the Holy Spirit has forsaken her.

Sheldon Vanauken (author of A Severe Mercy),in his own inimitable way, cites three arguments that convinced him "that the Holy Spirit did not leave off His guidance of the Church of Peter in matters of faith." First, not one of the wicked popes of the Avignon 'Captivity' and Great Schism altered doctrine: "In the very year that Henry VIII's obedient Parliament named him head of the English church, Pope Paul III went through the streets of Rome in sackcloth and ashes for the sins of his predecessors-- but not for their errors in doctrine." Second, the timing of the pronouncement of the long-believed-in doctrine of papal infallibility as official dogma, which came just before the unforeseeable inroads of Secularizing Modernism: "Imagine the howls from the likes of Hans Kung if it were defined today! As it is the Catholic faithful . . . know that, if need be, out of the depths of Parnassus the oracle will return into the world: the ex cathedra utterance of the Magisterium. The Church has the bomb." Third, the unforeseeable chain of events leading to the pontificate of John Paul II, the intelligent, powerful defender of the faith, "the white knight of Christendom." Vanauken admits that the Holy Spirit can guide anyone: "But does anyone really see the Holy Spirit, as opposed to the Spirit of the Age, guiding, say, the Episcopal Church-- as a church-- away from all error? Come on!"

Books and reading figure in these accounts as much as one might expect. Anticipating the "clamorous rejoinders" to everything he says, Howard interposes between his own remarks and any agitated protests the following books: John Henry Newman's An Essay On The Development Of Christian Doctrine,Ronald Knox's A Spiritual Aeneid,Louis Bouyer's The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism,Henri de Lubac's Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man,Dom Bede Griffths' The Golden String: An Autobiography,and the Baltimore Catechism:"Demolish them before you demolish me," he writes. One finds also the usual references to writers one expects-- from Thomas Aquinas to Thomas Merton. But there are some surprises, too. A number of contemporary writers, a couple of them anthologized in this volume, figure prominently in a number of accounts, including Vanauken, Howard, and Christopher Derrick, whose father was converted by G.K. Chesterton (himself a convert). Among the most often cited was Chesterton himself. But-- as Walker Percy muses in his Foreword-- "guess who turns up most often? C.S. Lewis!-- who, if he didn't make it all the way, certainly handed along a goodly crew."

There is little here that will clear up the misgivings of evangelical Protestants about Roman dogma concerning Mary, the saints, Purgatory, and the like, and a number of things that may dismay them. Still, there is plenty to warm the heart here, and much to promote sympathy and help to overcome the old crabbed caricatures of "Papists" that prevent Protestants and Catholics from embracing one another as "separated brethren."

Totalitarian lesbiocracy

2010-08-21T17:52:00.000-07:00

Thomas F. Bertonneau, "World Without Men: The Forgotten Novel of Totalitarian Lesbiocracy by Charles Eric Maine" (The Brussels Journal, August 17, 2010):

The blurb on the thirty-five cent Ace paperback likens Charles Eric Maine’s 1958 novel World Without Men to George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Ordinarily – and in consideration of the genre and the lurid cover – one would regard such a comparison skeptically. Nevertheless, while not rising to the artistic level of the Orwell and Huxley masterpieces, World without Men merits being rescued from the large catalogue of 1950s paperback throwaways, not least because of Maine’s vision of an ideological dystopia is based on criticism, not of socialism or communism per se nor of technocracy per se, but rather of feminism. Maine saw in the nascent feminism of his day (the immediate postwar period) a dehumanizing and destructive force, tending towards totalitarianism, which had the potential to deform society in radical, unnatural ways. Maine grasped that feminism – the dogmatic delusion that women are morally and intellectually superior to men – derived its fundamental premises from hatred of, not respect for, the natural order; he grasped also that feminism entailed a fantastic rebellion against sexual dimorphism, which therefore also entailed a total rejection of inherited morality.

* * * * * * *
The crumbling Ace paperback of Maine’s novel from which I quote contains a Publisher’s Postscript. It reads in part as follows: “While the manuscript of WORLD WITHOUT MEN was being prepared for publication, the staff of Ace books were startled to see… a story in the New York Times, for Oct. 16, 1957. This told of the announcement at a meeting of a ‘planned parenthood’ society of advanced work on a ‘synthetic steroid tablet’ to be taken orally to create a limited period of sterility.” According to the Postscript, this story and one other “unexpectedly underline the credibility of Charles Eric Maine’s novel.” About Maine himself, information remains scarce. Charles Eric Maine was the penname of David McIlwain (1921 – 1981), who served in the Royal Air Force in World War Two and became a writer after the war. He seems to have published fourteen novels, most of them, to judge by their titles, in the science fiction genre. (Apart from World Without Men I have read none of them.) An early effort, Spaceways (1953) became a film under the same name the year after its publication.

[Hat tip to F.R.]

The "ineffible weirdness" of deformed liturgy

2010-06-30T21:13:00.000-07:00

I liked Thomas Day's Why Catholics Can't Sing: The Culture of Catholicism and the Triumph of Bad Taste (New York: Crossroad, 1990) when it came out. I knew it would be entertaining, but I had no idea it would be so informative about why Catholic music and liturgy have developed the way they have in contemporary Catholicism. The book was well written, read easily and was obviously targeted at a broad audience; but it was also an education in things I did not then know about the history of the modern Church, like the various strands of Irish, Italian and German influence on liturgy in the American Church.

I recently happened across a sequel by the same author, entitled Where Have You Gone, Michelangelo: The Loss of Soul in Catholic Culture (New York: Crossroad, 1993). Dated, to be sure: that's almost two decades ago. But, to put things in perspective, my favorite college professor used to warn our class not to bother buying any book published within the last 50 years, since, he said, it hadn't yet garnered a sufficient track record to establish itself as a classic worthy of purchase. Hyperbole, of course. But he has a point. And the book looks to be a good read, perhaps a bit more playful, even, if no less serious, than his first.

Here's just a bit from his Preface to give you a taste. "This is one of the most important things to happen to the Catholic church in its entire history. You must experience it!" It sounded urgent, says the author, so he went along "to experience the experience."

The occasion, apparently sometime around the year 1980, was a Mass at a convention of a Catholic organization. Multitudes had descended upon a large cathedral for what was expected to be the sort of post-Vatican II phenomenon that would change the face of the church, if not the world, FOREVER. Multitudes eagerly awaited the experience.

Finally, music indicated that the liturgy had begun, he says, and for the next hour or more, he says he had the uncomfortable feeling that he was attending an illustrated lecture on the meaning of the word "decadent." It was like watching all his loved ones and friends disintegrate in front of him from a loathsome but unnamed disease:

Maybe it was the music: much strumming of guitars; one "contemporary" song sliding, like warm pudding, into another song of similar consistency. According to the printed Order of Service, nearly the entire liturgy would feature the songs of a famous group of "folk" musicians. Sung prayer, in other words, would also double as a demo-session, a little free advertising for the group.

Pain! Oh, the pain of listening to adolescent self-pity and self-importance in song! It would have been bearable if the congregation, caught up in the fervor of the music, had been carried along in its mighty sound, but very few people in the congregation were actually singing.

Looking for a distraction -- anything to take his mind off the group's slouching melodies, he began to look for relief in art, in the building's decorative features, which might be "read" as if they were an architectural prayerbook; which did not work too well, because the cathedral, a mountain of stone piled upon stone, "suggested a combination of a maximum security prison and a Victorian train station," though not utterly without charm. Finding that charm, however, was a little difficult since the building "had recently been subjected to extensive plastic surgery in an effort to make it look more youthful, more postconciliar." During the facelift, "the cathedral had lost some of its gingerbread ornamentation and statues that were too cloying for modern taste, but it had also lost some of its character."

His search for a prayer in architecture was interrupted, abruptly, by an amplified voice.

The presiding priest, holding a microphone now, began the Mass by telling us who he was and who the concelebrants and singers were and who we were and how wonderful it was that we had come. To soften us up even more, he made a little attempt at humor. (nobody even smiled.)

This kind of verbal intrusion, the opening warm-up monologue, is, of course, the modern post-Vatican II method for gathering Catholics together; it is supposed to make everyone feel at home -- but I am positive that the only thing everyone could feel was a rhetorical cattle-prod being shoved into the ribs. The man was forcing us to pay attention to him, and him alone. His warm-up remarks, which warmed up nobody, were really his way of establishing dominance.

A few minutes later there was a homily whose "style" seemed to blend logically with everything else. I shall never forget it.

Drifting from one off-the-top-of-his-head thought to another, the homilist sounded as if he were slipping into a coma. So many sentences ended with a pause and "y'know" that I started to count them. All of this semi-coherent mumbling was supposed to suggest his gift of intimacy and sincerity bestowed upon us, the grateful congregation; yet, at the same time, the intimacy and sincerity were also suggesting that the man had not really prepared his remarks.

It was not easy to discern exactly what the homilist was trying to say with the verbal fragments he was casually dribbling here and there, but a theme gradually emerged and it was this: "them" against "us." Out there in the world were "them," the people who just did not understand the revolution that had changed the Catholic church and the way it should worship after Vatican II. They were powerful, these reactionaries, but they would eventually be swept away. The Spirit was with "us," the authentic Christians of the post-Vatican II era, the only people who possess the true faith in Jesus Christ . . . "y'know."

Right then and there, at that very moment, he says, something forcibly struck him, something clicked ... or snapped:

I still spend a few of my waking hours trying to figure out why anybody with more than three functioning brain cells would put the label of greatness on something that was so embarrassingly shallow, why Catholic parishes by the thousands would try so hard to duplicate that same "atmosphere" of dense and banal immaturity . . . and why I reacted so badly, when I should have just walked out.

. . . I did not go to that cathedral with the idea that I should be reassured by traditional Catholicism expressing its conservatism, its orthodoxy, in traditional rituals. I certainly was not expecting to be uplifted with ceremonies, music, architecture, and preaching that were all glorious beyond description. I did, however, assume that, in a manner that an anthropologist would describe as a universal human phenomenon, I would be part of a collective, common prayer (an activity that comes in many different forms). Instead, I found myself in the middle of something very . . . weird, almost freakish, and it could not be explained away according to the ideologies of conservatism or liberalism. I realize that a High Anglican might find a Cherokee rain dance a trifle weird, just as a Presbyterian might put the same label on a Marionite Catholic liturgy from Lebanon. But the weirdness of that "experience" in a cathedral was something of an altogether different order, and I could not put my finger on it. What was the source of the problem?

The author says that his research for this book was part of his own personal quest to discover what had caused that feeling of being in the presence of "ineffable weirdness: something bizarre, neither fish nor fowl, weak, vaguely diseased." Whatever it was, he writes, "the weirdness had a life of its own and effectively blocked any encounter with theological messages that the ritual was trying to convey."

The author has no illusions about his audience:

Younger readers -- especially Catholics born after, let us say, 1960 -- are hereby forewarned. They may find it difficult to "imagine" whole sections of this book. Older Catholics will read a particular sentence and their minds might be flooded with memories (good and bad) of sights, sounds, and even smells. The younger Catholic will read the same sentence and comprehend only words printed on a page. One reason I wrote this book is to give younger Catholics a different perspective, so they could "imagine" a broader Catholic culture that most of them have never known.

Predestination for Dummies

2010-05-14T15:07:00.000-07:00

Well, it's not quite that, but John Salza's The Mystery of Predestination: According to Scripture, the Church, and St Thomas Aquinas (Saint Benedict Press & Tan Books and Publishers, 2010) is about the clearest introduction you'll find to one of the most impossibly difficult subjects in theology. Here the publisher's summary:

How can an all-loving God choose some people for eternal salvation while permitting others to fall away? Doesn't God offer the same amount of saving grace to everyone? Isn't predestination a Protestant doctrine? In The Mystery of Predestination , author and apologist John Salza, seeks to answer these questions, and others, about that most ineffable and confounding of Christian beliefs: that God chooses to infallibly direct certain people to salvation but not others. Drawing deeply upon Scripture, Sacred Tradition, and the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, Salza says that a proper Catholic understanding of the doctrine of predestination is interconnected with two other central mysteries: the ability of mankind to choose freely to accept or reject God's saving grace, and the inability of mankind to accept God's grace without first being moved by His grace from within. By holding these truths always before us we can see how God may predestine His elect to heaven but never desire that anyone go to hell. We can also achieve a new clarity and depth of insight into a profound Christian truth: God is the primary mover in salvation. It is He who chooses, seeks, and saves us. Meticulously researched and written in a scholarly yet accessible style, The Mystery of Predestination is perfect for the serious Catholic who is confused by Bible verses or Magisterial statements in favor of predestination (and never hears about it in Sunday sermons), or who wants to defend Catholic truth against Calvinist error, and is seeking clear, traditional, and Thomistic answers. Or, indeed, for any thoughtful Christian who wants to come to terms with what the Bible teaches about the fundamental truths of our salvation.

The author is clearly well acquainted with not only the Biblical literature and Catholic theological tradition, but also with the Lutheran and Calvinist Protestant traditions that take issue, at points, with the Catholic position. This little book is a good place to start for anyone interested in the age-old problem and the debates surrounding it.

Japan's lost generation

2010-04-22T19:16:00.001-07:00

The publisher's comments on Michael Zielenziger's 2006 book, Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation(rpt., Vintage, 2007), read:

The world’ s second-wealthiest country, Japan once seemed poised to overtake America. But its failure to recover from the economic collapse of the early 1990s was unprecedented, and today it confronts an array of disturbing social trends. Japan has the highest suicide rate and lowest birthrate of all industrialized countries, and a rising incidence of untreated cases of depression. Equally as troubling are the more than one million young men who shut themselves in their rooms, withdrawing from society, and the growing numbers of “parasite singles,” the name given to single women who refuse to leave home, marry, or bear children.

In Shutting Out the Sun, Michael Zielenziger argues that Japan’s rigid, tradition-steeped society, its aversion to change, and its distrust of individuality and the expression of self are stifling economic revival, political reform, and social evolution. Giving a human face to the country’s malaise, Zielenziger explains how these constraints have driven intelligent, creative young men to become modern-day hermits [the term used by the Japanese is "Hikikomori"]. At the same time, young women, better educated than their mothers and earning high salaries, are rejecting the traditional path to marriage and motherhood, preferring to spend their money on luxury goods and travel.

Reading this is very sad indeed. While Japan -- where I grew up and visited last in 2005 -- still outwardly retains a clear continuity with her past, I have heard from many friends and acquaintances who continue to reside there that the younger generation has, in many respects, lost its way. If earlier generations failed to embrace the Light of Christ (less than 0.1% are practicing Christians of any kind), they at least had the sense of identity that comes from being a unique people with strong national and moral traditions informed by Confucian, Shinto and Buddhist sources. The stalwart moral character and generous spirit of the Japanese people was noted by St. Francis Xavier when he arrived there in 1549, and these traits were very much alive in the Japanese during my childhood. I would insist that they are very much in evidence still. Yet among the younger generation they have been sharply eroded, and nothing has effectively filled the void. Pray for Japan and her people. In the Lord's Providence, I am inclined to think that they are destined still to play a major role in the international community for decades to come.

Related: Phil Rees already reported on the phenomenon of Hikikomori back in 2002 in "Japan: The Missing Million" (BBC, October 20, 2002).

[Hat tip to A.S.]

The Rite of Exorcism

2009-10-20T19:43:00.001-07:00

"As a layperson, the first thing that surprised me about exorcism was that not many priests knew anything about it, especially not American priests."

-- Matt Baglio, Journalist

In the fall of 2005, Matt Baglio, the author of The Rite: The Making of a Modern Exorcist(New York: Doubleday, 2009), was a journalist associated with the Rome bureau of the Associated Press living in Italy when he heard that a Vatican-affiliated university was offering a course entitled "Exorcism and the Prayer of Liberation." He thought it might be a PR stunt. "Did the Church still believe in exorcism?" he asked himself. Not knowing what to expect, he decided to go to the class, viewing it as a rare opportunity: "I thought there was at least an article in it." Little did he know that the envisioned article would turn into a book.

The first day of the course, changed all of his preconceptions about exorcism, largely formed by sensationalist Hollywood depictions. "Not only was the ultramodern classroom an odd setting to see priests, Franciscan friars, and nuns of various orders listening to lectures on the powers of Satan, but, to my surprise, I found the students themselves to be anything but the 'superstitious' or puritanical priests portrayed in popular culture." (p. 235)

One of the most unexpected things about exorcisms as described here is that they aren't typically a one-time deal. More often than not, they resemble a periodic scheduled visit to one's therapist, with the exorcist scheduling their next visit in his appointment book at the conclusion of a session. The vast majority of exorcisms might strike an observer as monotonous affairs. This isn't to say that there aren't occasionally the unexpectedly violent and convulsive confrontations one might expect, but that these are not typically conclusive. A well-known case in Rome reportedly took over 40 years.

Another surprising thing is the disparity in the number of exorcists and workload profiles between various countries. As of the writing of this book, Germany reportedly has no exorcists, the United States 14, and Italy somewhere upwards of 400. "According to the Association of Italian Catholic Psychiatrists and Psychologists, in Italy alone, more than 500,000 people see an exorcist annually." (p. 6)

The author writes:

As a layperson, the first thing that surprised me about exorcism was that not many priests knew anything about it, especially not American priests....

My first behind-the-scenes look at exorcism occurred when I began to interview the various exorcists on their "home turf." Here and there I would catch a glimpse of what existed on the other side -- a group of people hounding Father Tommaso outside the sacristy of the Scala Santa; Father Bamonte wiping a puddle of holy water off a chair so that I could sit down for an interview; sitting in Father Carmine's waiting room while a woman screamed and banged around in his office. Perhaps most surprising was that far from being carried out in some hilltop monastery, many of the exorcisms were performed in churches located right in the heart of Rome. In fact, it was common to be talking to an exorcist while groups of tourists paraded around taking photos of religious iconography. One bizarre aspect of researching this book was this juxtaposition of two worlds -- talking to a victim of demonic possession or hearing an exorcism and then emerging into the bright sunshine and chaotic streets of Rome.

Each exorcist I interviewed was compelling in his own right.... I also found their candor to be refreshing. Many of the books I'd read had ordered everything into neat little boxes, yet here were exorcists with years of experience telling me that there were still things that couldn't be known.

Then there were the victims. Like Father Gary, not only did I find their apparent normalcy surprising, but I also found them credible, even likable people These were not people who struck me a trying to pull a fast one; they were sincere, heartfelt individuals who were struggling with something even they seemed at a loss to understand. Later, when I participated in exorcisms, this impression was only reinforced.

Many people assume that an exorcist is out to prove that people are possessed; however, with each of the Italian exorcists I talked to, I found the opposite to be true. It is also wrong, I think, to assume that the Church is on one side promoting the belief in spirits while the secular world is on the other, trying to debunk such notions. Stroll down to the local New Age bookshop to see the tremendous popularity of angels, "channeling," and "astral travel," not to mention thenumber of "ghost whisperers" and therapists who practice "spirit releasement." (pp. 236-238)

The Italian exorcists interviewed in Baglio's book are at pains to rule out psychological disorders before proceeding with exorcisms. Following suit, Fr. Gary Thomas, the American priest from San Francisco whose training in Rome is the principal subject of Baglio's book, promotes the importance of erring on the side of caution by assembling teams of medical doctors and psychologists or psychiatrists who could fully vet potential "patients" before proceeding to exorcism, and recommends making this a matter of standard national policy once the USCCB can be made to take the issue seriously enough to address it. (pp. 211ff.)

[Hat tip to N.B.]

Related

"The 1999 Rite of Exorcism"
"The 1952 Rite of Exorcism"
"The Reform of the Rite of Exorcism" [30 Days interview with the Vatican exorcist, Father Amorth]
"The New Rite of Exorcism," Latin Mass (Summer 2002).
Curt Jester, "The New Rite of Exorcism" [Only half-joking, blogger Jeff Miller offers this "new rite of exorcism" for the "Spirit of Vatican II"].

A critic of the "Reform of the Reform" from the left

2009-10-20T19:42:00.001-07:00

Our Canadian friend Paul Borealis just called our attention to John F. Baldovin's Reforming the Liturgy: A Response to the Critics(Liturgical Books, 2009), via J. Peter Nixon's review, "Engaging the Opposition" (America, September 14, 2009).

Looking up the book on Amazon, I found an ample review by Alcuin Reid(scroll down), which gives it three stars and begins with this quotation from Mahatma Gandhi: "First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win." While Reid concedes that it is far too early to declare victory, particularly in debate over the production of modern rites, his incisive discussion, highlighting numerous flawed assumptions and arguments in Baldovin's 197-page book, leaves the reader doubting whether there is much if anything to be learned from this book that has not been already stated numerous times before by partisans of the liturgical status quo.

Nixon's review of Baldovin's book in America strikes a balanced tone, but bears the luggage of all the-usual-suspect assumptions found among those drifting among the flotsam and jetsam of the AmChurch mainstream. It refers to the Novus Ordo as if it were an established "rite" (It is not: it is the Roman Rite's "ordinary form," whose unsettled form continues to be debated) and the intended product of the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council (It is not: they did not envision free-standing altars, the removal of Communion rails, Communion in the hand, the ordinary use of Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion, women serving in the sanctuary, etc.), rather than a series of progressively institutionalized innovations stretching over the last four decades; and we're still waiting for the latest changes in the once-again-reformed vernacular translations of the Lectionary.

Nonetheless, if there is anything positive here, it may be the simple fact that the once trendy-lefty radicals who are complacent with the status quo have finally noticed that there is, in fact, an opposition with substantive arguments and attempted engagement.

[Hat tip to Paul Borealis and Alcuin Reid]

Fr. Charles Arminjon on the blessing of trials

2009-10-20T19:40:00.002-07:00

Fr. Charles Arminjon's End of the Present World and the Mysteries of the Future Life (Sophia Institute, 2008), was a life-changer for St. Therese of Lisieux. The book consists of a series of conferences given by Fr. Arminjon at the Cathedral of Chambery (Savoy). I quote from one of the notes:

St. Ambrose held that a life free of trials was a certain sign of divine malediction, and said, "I should not wish to live for a single night under the roof of a man who has never suffered." Another saint said, "Why attach any importance to afflictions? Temporal life is but a transition. A whole lifetime of pain in this world is of no more consequence than an uncomfortable night in a bad hostelry."

[Hat tip to Sir A.S.]

Liturgical books

2009-10-20T19:40:00.001-07:00

Tridentine Community News (September 27, 2009):

We occasionally come across some books that merit mention in this column. They might interest our readers on a liturgical level, as prayer books, or simply because of their uniqueness.

Pontifical

As has previously been announced, Detroit Archbishop Allen Vigneron will be visiting St. Josaphat Church on November 29 to celebrate the Sacrament of Confirmation according to the Extraordinary Form. Have you ever considered where the texts of Extraordinary Form Sacraments may be found?

To our knowledge, there is no book currently in print that contains the Sacrament of Confirmation as administered by a bishop. Reprinted ritual books, such as the 1950s Weller edition of the Rituále Románum, only contain Confirmation as administered by a priest in case of necessity (yes, that was permitted pre-Vatican II).

Leave it to Fr. Borkowski to come up with a solution: He unearthed a 1934 edition of the Pontificále Románum. This book contains not only the Sacrament of Confirmation, but a variety of other Episcopal ceremonies.

Cantus Históriæ Passiónis

During Holy Week, the Passion of Our Lord is chanted by three voices in the sanctuary, traditionally a priest, a deacon, and a third voice who can sustain the lengthy Narrator part. The music for the Passions is lilting and memorable. It is not found in the conventional altar missal. The music is rather contained in a three-book set, known as the Cantus Históriæ Passiónis Dómini Nostri Jesu Christi. The three volumes are named for each of the chanters: Christus (Christ), normally sung by the celebrant; Synagóga (Crowds); and Chronísta (Narrator). Each volume contains notes only for the individual concerned.

Finding the correct edition for the Extraordinary Form is a challenge. The Vatican Press currently sells a 1989 Novus Ordo Latin single volume version of this book, Pássio Dómini Nostri Iesu Christi Liber Cantus, too different to be useful. The web site www.musicasacra.com offers a downloadable Tridentine edition, however it suffers from two problems: 1) It is a single volume edition, which can be confusing to the singers, and 2) It is an edition from before 1955, and thus the excerpts of the Gospel terminate in the wrong places. Hand editing must thus be done to end the Passion at the right point to match the 1962 edition of the missal.

After years of asking booksellers to notify us, borrowing others’ books, and searching on-line, we finally located and purchased an actually-in-force edition: a 1956 version of the three-book set. Publishers out there: There is a market, albeit small, for a reprinting of these books.

Blessed Be God

Are you looking for a comprehensive prayer book, with traditionally-phrased prayers? Back in print is Blessed Be God, a 750 page compendium of numerous devotions, novenas, and the Sacraments. The book is available for $30 from www.pcpbooks.com, or (866) 241-2762.

Daily Roman Missal

It is easy to get spoiled by the various Latin/English hand missals for the Extraordinary Form. They are beautiful aids to prayer.

It is worth reminding our readers that at least one reasonably impressive hand missal exists for the Ordinary Form: the Daily Roman Missal, published by Midwest Theological Forum ($49-99 for various editions, from www.theologicalforum.org, (630) 739-9750). MTF also publishes a lovely Novus Ordo Latin Altar Missal we have previously mentioned.

The Daily Roman Missal includes Latin for the Proper Antiphons (Introit, Responsorial Psalm, Alleluia, Communion) and Ordinary of the Mass. Caveat: The Entrance and Communion Antiphons provided are those for spoken (Low) Masses. At sung Masses, different antiphons are used, taken from the 1974 Graduále Románum. This is a peculiar inconsistency for those of us accustomed to be able to trust the antiphons in our 1962 missals.

A collection of devotional prayers are provided at the back of the current edition. Overall, the book generally resembles the Magníficat subscription paperback missal.

While it is not as comprehensive as most Extraordinary Form hand missals, the Daily Roman Missal is the best such product for the Novus Ordo that we have yet seen, and the only one to include Latin. Note that there have been several revisions of this book, with each successive version improving upon the earlier ones.

With the impending changes to the English translations of the Mass, now may not be the best time to invest in an English hand missal. We do expect MTF to issue an updated edition of this missal when the new translations are released, and at that time, this book will likely be worthy of your investigation.

Nolite timere: Tolle lege, Verbum Domini sit

2009-10-20T19:37:00.001-07:00

This is a project that has long begged to be undertaken, and has been waiting for just the gifts and background brought to it by its author. More than a few of us have long felt the need for the philosophical presuppositions of historical critical approaches to Biblical interpretation to be critically examined -- with a view to the practical end of improving catechesis and preaching, as well as confidence of the laity in Bible reading. This need is particularly acute in the Catholic circles where there is an urgent need for the public and private uses of Scripture over the last half-century to be disabused of the post-Kantian skepticism that is the legacy of Protestant Liberalism, and for those uses of the Bible to be liberated by a well-founded hermeneutic of confident faith. The concerns exhibited by Pope Benedict XVI's writings offer an ideal foil for precisely such a task, and I am delighted to see Professor Scott Hahn undertake it. On the one hand, this will mean that the readership will not be confined to a handfull of postmodern posers from departments of aesthete atheology discussing each other's arcane footnotes about whether Jesus really said what the apostolic writers said He said. On the other hand, nobody should be deceived by the comparative accessibility of Hahn's style or the relative brevity of the book: this is a piece of mature theological reflection seasoned by a career of Biblical teaching and research. I expect a wide readership for this volume; and from the following endorsements, I see I am not alone:

"A compelling manuduction right into the very core of Pope Benedict XVI's theological vision. In this clearly written and cogently argued essay, Hahn makes a convincing and highly pertinent case for what Pope Benedict holds to be the crucial challenge for the Church and theology today--the reunification, and thereby the renewal, of exegesis theologically conceived and theology exegetically grounded. Theologically insightful and surefooted, this book is one of the best and certainly the most timely and urgent among the recent introductions to the theology of Pope Benedict XVI."--Reinhard Huetter, Duke Divinity School

"Hahn here renders an important service in so clearly setting forth the hermeneutical principles, biblical framework, and doctrinal positions of Pope Benedict XVI, arguably the world's most important contemporary theologian. The parallels between the biblical theology of the pope and of evangelicals, together with their respective attempts to interpret Scripture theologically in an age marked by modern biblical criticism, are particularly fascinating."--Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Wheaton College and Graduate School

"As a Protestant biblical scholar, I found Hahn's exposition of Pope Benedict's biblical theology both informative and inspiring. In spite of differences, Protestants need to read this book to understand how deeply we can agree on the primacy of Christ and the Word. Through Hahn, I have a new appreciation for the mind and heart of Pope Benedict."--Tremper Longman III, Westmont College

"The increasingly painful bankruptcy of the historical-critical method in our time has created a vacuum precisely at the point where the living Church requires substantial nurture. Pope Benedict XVI has spoken into this crisis like no one else, and his best expositor, Scott Hahn, has done us a tremendous service by synthesizing Benedict's erudite and prayerful biblical theology into a lively, readable, and intellectually reliable conspectus. This excellent volume will be indispensable for all Christians who seek to be more maturely grounded in Scripture."--David Lyle Jeffrey, Baylor University

Table of Contents:

Ignorance of Scripture Is Ignorance of Christ: The Theological Project of Joseph Ratzinger
The Critique of Criticism: Beginning the Search for a New Theological Synthesis
The Hermeneutic of Faith: Critical and Historical Foundations for a Biblical Theology
The Spiritual Science of Theology: Its Mission and Method in the Life of the Church
Reading God's Testament to Humankind: Biblical Realism, Typology and the Inner Unity of Revelation
The Theology of the Divine Economy: Covenant, Kingdom, and the History of Salvation
The Embrace of Salvation: Mystagogy, and the Transformation of Sacrifice
The Cosmic Liturgy: The Eucharistic Kingdom and the World as Temple
The Authority of Mystery: The Beauty and Necessity of the Theologian's Task

[Hat tip to J.M.]

Loss of faith, loss of filial piety

2009-06-02T17:22:00.001-07:00

"Filial piety" is a rough translation of the Chinese Confucian term xiào (孝) meaning love and respect for one's parents. Though pervasive in the Far East and expressed in a variety of unique cultural conventions, the sentiment is far from alien to the West. "Honor thy father and thy mother" is the single Commandment of the Decalogue that carries a promise with it: "... that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee" (Ex. 20:12).

A son who writes "honest" but unflattering paeans to his parents may expect to gain some momentary notoriety in the world today, but he loses all personal integrity and honor in the bargain.
This is what we learn about Christopher Buckley from his book, Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir (2009), as Joan Frawley Desmond shows us in "Fathers and Sons" (InsideCatholic.com, May 14, 2009):

When the relatives and friends of William F. Buckley and Patricia Taylor Buckley first learned that Christopher Buckley, the satirical novelist, was completing a memoir of the year during which he lost both his parents, there was considerable and well-founded alarm. All three Buckleys had enjoyed famously contentious relations, and, in recent years, Christopher had not only confirmed his agnosticism on matters religious, but went so far as to announce his plan to vote for Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election.

Has Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir confirmed the worst fears of Buckley loyalists? The appearance of a portion of the book in the New York Times Magazine suggests that the scion has provided a juicy deconstruction of a conservative icon. Readers are invited to feast on a series of delicious vignettes that strip away the parents' public charisma and reveal their profound limitations in domestic relations. Mom is a serial liar and self-justifying socialite who never apologizes for routine bad behavior. Dad is a frenetic "great man" and control freak who impatiently abandons his only son on the day of his college graduation.

What more is there to be said? A great deal, actually. Not only does the younger Buckley acknowledge many rich and distinctive moments of parental love and devotion, the narrative reveals something more than the author may have intended: the connection between this ambivalent portrait of his parents and his own waning faith in God. To this reviewer, his critique of the Buckley paterfamilias reads like an attempt to demystify and exorcise the inconvenient Catholic values that shaped the author's upbringing and still plague his conscience.

Read the rest of Desmond's review here.

[Hat tip to J.M.]

Blessed Columba Marmion, Christ in His Mysteries

2009-01-10T16:29:00.001-08:00

In a personal correspondence, Zaccheus Press Editor John O'Leary says: "There are some who think this is Marmion's finest work, including Aidan Nichols (who wrote the Introduction), and Fr. Mark Tierney, the Vice-Postulator (Ret.) for Marmion's Cause for Canonization."

Blessed Columba Marmion, Christ in His Mysteries, translated by Alan Bancroft (Bethesda, MD: Zaccheus Press, 2008) is a sizable book of466 pages. It is not the first book of Marmion's published by Zaccheus Press. Christ, the Life of the Soul was published in December of 2005 (see our post on the book here). In December of the following year, Zaccheus Press published Union with God: Letters of Spiritual Direction by Blessed Columba Marmion (see our post on the book here).

According to Mr. O'Leary, in this book "Marmion is particularly concerned with leading the Catholic faithful toward a deeper understanding and appreciation of the liturgy -- in particular, the many special graces available, if we would but avail ourselves of them, during the course of the liturgical year." In fact, he points out, Marmion's passion for the subject is suggested in a letter he wrote in 1917:

"The good I have been enabled to do to souls -- men, women, children, rich and poor -- by revealing to them the treasures of spiritual life, of light and facility in their relations with God, which are contained in the Liturgy, show me how greatly important it is for every priest, vicar, curate, everyone, to work at making known this well-spring, so sure and so ecclesiastical, of the spiritual life.

Fr. Benedict Groeschel writes in the Foreword:

My advice to the members of this generation is to run to the library for Marmion before you succumb to malnutrition. Read Christ in His Mysteries as soon as possible and you will get some idea of what you have been missing and where to find it.

Again, Aidan Nichols, writing in the Introduction, says:

In Christ in His Mysteries, Marmion’s insight, as simple as it was brilliant, is that practicing Catholics will draw maximum profit from their meditation on the life of Christ if they contemplate its chief happenings through the lens provided by the Church’s liturgical year. In that year those happenings are celebrated in feasts and seasons. The Liturgy is the way the Church as Bride gazes lovingly — and therefore penetratingly — at her Bridegroom, laying out her understanding of His heart: His purposes, the grand design of the Father which He carried out for our sake... Readers of Christ in His Mysteries have opened to them the theological and spiritual treasures of Latin Catholicism at its best.

About the Author

Born in Ireland, Blessed Columba Marmion served for several years as a priest in Dublin before finding a vocation to the monastery. He eventually became the Abbot of Maredsous Abbey, Belgium. One of the foremost spiritual masters of the 20th century, his books were translated into eleven languages and sold some 1.5 million copies.

Firmly rooted in the Bible, the Liturgy, and the writings of the Saints and Doctors of the Church, Marmion explores every aspect of Catholic doctrine, with penetrating insight. His writings are marked both by the remarkable clarity of their exposition, and by their keen psychological insight and sensitivity.

But his greatest contribution to modern spirituality was to restore Jesus Christ to His rightful place at the center of the Christian life — Christ as “the life of the soul” of every Christian: through faith, through the sacraments, and through the liturgy of the Church. Historians note that only a handful of books were universally read by the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council: the Bible, the Catechism of Trent, the 1917 Code, and the writings of Columba Marmion. His doctrine is recognizable in several Vatican II documents.

Many of his admirers believe Marmion will one day not only be canonized, but also declared a Doctor of the Church.

[Hat tip to John O'Leary]

C.S. Lewis and Ronald Knox at Oxford

2009-01-10T16:23:00.000-08:00

"This book had led me deeper into [C.S.] Lewis' own writings than any I've read," writes Walter Hooper, longtime trustee and literary advisor to the estate of C.S. Lewis, in his preface to Fr. Milton T. Walsh's new book, Second Friends: C.S. Lewis and Ronald Knox in Conversation (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2008). Hooper writes:

This—to quote C.S. Lewis—"is the most noble and joyous book I've read these past ten years." It is also one of the most surprising. After immersing myself in the writings of Lewis for half a century I could not, when I first heard Milton Walsh talk about the book, see how C.S. Lewis and Ronald Knox could benefit from being placed together. I am now totally converted.

Carl Olson of Ignatius Insight interviewed Fr. Walsh about his earlier book, Ronald Knox As Apologist: Wit, Laughter and the Popish Creed (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007) last May, and he said this about his second book:

There are many similarities between Knox and C. S. Lewis, and I am currently writing a book comparing their thought. They both came from Evangelical backgrounds; they both combined a love of logic with a romantic view of life. They were both very much at home in the world of Oxford, and wrote in a variety of genres. Knox was about ten years older than Lewis, so they did not know one another in student days. I have found references to each man's writings in the other man's books and letters; they were familiar with one another's work.

When I went to Oxford a couple of years ago I made an interesting discovery. Every afternoon Lewis used to take a walk in the meadow behind Magdalen College, and Knox would take a walk in Christ Church Meadow. I found out they were practically across the street from each other! They had friends in common, and one of them reports that he invited them to lunch one day in 1936. They hit it off very well, and it is enjoyable to speculate what might have happened had Knox not left Oxford a couple of years later. They may have gotten better acquainted, although Lewis' discomfort with "Papists" (excluding such exceptions as Tolkien), and Knox's reticence to go "convert hunting" may have been enough to keep them apart. I like to think they're together now!

Read an excerpt from Ronald Knox As Apologist and the entire interview.

[Acknowledgement: Carl Olson's review posted at Ignatius Insight on June 12, 2008.]

St. Francis, converter of Muslims

2009-01-10T16:21:00.001-08:00

As an update to our earlier post (St. Francis: a Mensch of a Saint, Musings, January 14, 2008) reviewing Frank M. Rega's book, St. Francis of Assisi and the Conversion of the Muslims (TAN, 2007), here is a link to an interview with the author by Michael Baggot, entitled "St. Francis of Assisi: Not a Birkenstock-Clad Hippie But a Converter of Muslims" (LifeSiteNews.com, April 3, 2008).

[Hat tip to blog reader]

Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth

2009-01-10T16:19:00.001-08:00

Jesus of Nazareth, by Pope Benedict XVI, a featured book review by Michael P. Foley

[Christ Pantocrator -- St. Catherine's Monastery, Sinai]

During an interview, Peter Seewald once asked Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger a pointed question: How many ways are there to God? Seewalt, a lapsed Catholic, was perhaps hoping to catch the author of the "infamous" document Dominus Iesus--which reaffirms Jesus Christ as the only source of salvation--in a "gotcha" moment of intolerance and rigidity.

But the Cardinal surprised him. "As many as there are people," he replied. "For even within the same faith each man's way is an entirely personal one."¹ Though Ratzinger also made clear that the only way to God is through Christ, it was his focus on each man's encounter with the Way that discombobulated the jaded journalist. That same disarming blend of the orthodox and the individual is evident in Ratzinger/Benedict XVI's latest book, Jesus of Nazareth, which the author describes not as an "exercise of the Magisterium" but an "expression of [his] personal search 'for the face of the Lord.'"²

The Historical-Critical Method

The Holy Father's salutary distinction between his office and his opinions does not mean that Jesus of Nazareth has little to do with the teachings of the Church. One of the book's central aims is to rectify that form of biblical exegesis known as historical criticism. Begun in the eighteenth century as an
enlightenment attempt to strip revealed religion of its claims to the supernatural and the miraculous, historical criticism now dominates biblical studies both Catholic and Protestant and shows no sign of abating, despite the rise of other schools of interpretation such as literary criticism.

* * * * * * *
Though Ratzinger also made clear that the only way to God is through Christ, it was his focus on each man's encounter with the Way that discombobulated the jaded journalist.

* * * * * * *
As its ideological beginnings make clear, historical criticism is a mixed blessing for Christianity. On the one hand, it was designed to undermine the believer's confidence in the reliability of the sacred text, and consequently it has destroyed not only many a man's orthodox convictions but his entire faith. For contemporary examples of this one need only think of the twaddle advanced by the "Jesus Seminar" or the articles gracing the covers of Time and Newsweek every Easter that deny the Resurrection on the authority of renowned biblical "experts."

On the other hand, it is thanks to the methodology of modern biblical studies that we have made enormous strides in understanding our biblical manuscripts, in our grasp of the original languages, andin our knowledge of Scripture's historical and cultural context. At its best, historical criticism helps exegetes better understand the literal sense of the text.

Benedict makes clear in his preface that he is aware of historical criticism's "indispensable dimension" as well as its significant "limits" (xv, xvi). Undergirding the conflict between historical-critical studies and Christian orthodoxy, however, is a deeper issue: who is the ultimage interpreter of the Bible--the Church, with its rule of faith, or the Academy, with its own canons of judgment? One of the most chilling passages in Jesus of Nazareth is Benedict's reflections on a short story by Vladimir Soloviev in which the Antichrist comes as a renowned Scripture scholar who believes that one should "measure the Bible against the so-called modern worldview" (35):

The Antichrist, with an air of scholarly excellence, tells us that any exegesis that reads the Bible from the perspective of faith in the living God, in order to listen to what God has to say, is fundamentalism; he wants to convince us that only his kind of exegesis, the supposedly pure scientific kind, in which God says nothing and has nothing to say, is able to keep abreast of the times (36).

It is no doubt statements like this that led Cardinal Renato Martino to say that Jesus of Nazareth is not only a book with "salt and pepper" but with "hot peppers."³

* * * * * * *
Most of the controversy generated by Jesus of Nazareth so far has been not over any of Benedict's interpretations of this or that passage but his underlying conviction that the Church is in a beter position to understand its own sacred texts than the Academy.

* * * * * * *
For Benedict, only eyes fortified by Faith, Hope, and Charity can truly see the living mysteries disclosed in the Scriptures.⁴ While historical criticism can be useful, it must be firmly subordinated to the Apostolic Faith (xxiii), and it must remain cognizant of the fact that its own reconstructions of the past are hypothetical and hence tentative (xix). Most of the controversy generated by Jesus of Nazareth so far has been not over any of Benedict's interpretations of this or that passage but his underlying conviction that the Church is in a beter position to understand its own sacred texts than the Academy. That this should come as a surprise or a scandal to anyone indicates the extent of the crisis we are in and why the Pope is wise to address it.

[Saint Jerome from a mural]
On the whole, however, Benedict's own approach is more constructive than critical. His Holiness highlights the auspicious "fact that the inner nature of the [historical-critical] method points beyond itself" (xviii). Just as modern science, when it is understood properly, points to the need for a science or scientia greater than itself, so too does historical criticism implicitly (and perhaps unwittingly) reveal the possibility that every word in the Scriptures "contains more than the author may have been immediately aware of at the time" (xix).

A Master Exegete

Hence, there will always be a need to examine what the Church Fathers called the sensus plenior, the fuller Christological meaning of both Testaments made present through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. To hold this involves no blind appeal to authority or voluntaristic suspension of discernment. On the contrary, Pope Benedict masterfully demonstrates that the most rational and reasonable way to read the Scriptures is with the recognition that the so-called "Jesus of history" is the "Christ of faith" (xxii), that the dichotomy between the two created by many exegetes invariably butchers the very text they purport ot understand and thus undercuts their own claims to competency. Two examples will suffice to illustrate this point.

In his chapter on the Baptism in the Jordan, Benedict takes advantage of the spectacular discovery of the Qumran or "Dead Sea" scrolls in the 1940s, reflecting on the possible connections between the desert Essenes (an ascetical, quasi-monastic Jewish community) and Saint John the Baptist. But while many scholars tend to reduce John's ministry to that of the Essences, Benedict, looking at the same data, more convincingly argues that in light of what we know from Qumran, "the Baptist's appearance on the scene was something completely new; the baptism he enjoined is different fromthe usual religious ablutions" (14). The Essenes had frequent ritual washings to be sure, but these stand in contrast to the unrepeatable act by the Baptist that is "meant to be the concrete enactment of a conversion that gives the whole of life a new direction forever" (ibid.). Like any good Catholic missionary, John was taking preexisting symbols and transforming their use and meaning to betoken a new and divine reality.

Second, in his chapter on the Gospel of Saint John, Benedict reviews the commonplace contention that while the other three Gospels are more or less historical, John's Gospel is a much later product of theological speculation and hence does not reflect the "real" Jesus. Yet as Benedict points out, this conjecture presupposes that theological reflection is a hindrance rather than an aid to knowing who this Man is, and this is absurd: if Christ is who He says He is, the only way to know him is through faith. Ultimately undergirding the "historical Jesus" obsession is a remarkably naive understanding of history as something that can be captured in a series of transcripts. But as John himself points out in his Gospel through his use of the conceept of memory, "remembering" the story of the Christ can only happen through an awakening of the Spirit that makes the data of the past intelligible (231-34). Benedict's careful exploration of the biblical author's self-understanding provides a key to unlocking the text that modern exegetes have been trying in vain to pick.

Genuine Dialogue

It is no coincidence that Jesus of Nazareth is itself an excellent example of how historical criticism, purified of its pretensions to high science and rightly reordered, can bear much fruit. But the book, which covers the earthly ministry of Our Lord from His baptism to His transfiguration (a second volume on the infancy narratives and the Passion is forthcoming), boldly engages a number of other controversies as well. Perhaps the most fascinating example of this is the Pope's response to Rabbi Jacob Neusner, whom Benedict calls a "great Jewish scholar" (69) and a "truly attentive listner" (118). Neusner is the author of the 1994 book A Rabbi Talks With Jesus (reprinted 2000), in which he imagines himself in the crowd listening to Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. As Benedict summarizes:

He listens to Jesus... and he speaks with Jesus himself. He is touched by the greatness and the purity of what is said, and yet at the same time he is troubled by the ultimate incompatibility that he finds at the heart of the Sermon on the Mount.... Again and again he talks with Him. But in the end, he decides not to follow Jesus. He remains--as he himself puts it--withthe 'eternal Israel'" (103-4).

Neusner, a distinguished professor of Judaism at Bard College, was unimpressed with the "Judeo-Christian dialogue [that] served as the medium of a politics of social conciliation" rather than a "religious inquiry into the convictions of the other."⁵ He lamented the post-WWII "conviction that the two religions say the same thing" and the Enlightenment "indifference to the truth-claims of religion."⁶ In other words, he was tired of the very same things that make a traditional Catholic bristle when he hears the words "interreligious dialogue."

Neusner's response was A Rabbi Talks with Jesus, in which he takes with the utmost seriousness and respoect the teachings of Jesus even though he ultimately cannot accept them. Why not? Because "the Torah was and is perfect and beyond improvement,"⁷ whereas Jesus, with His frequent "You have heart it said... But I say unto you" emendations, is clearly going beyond the Torah and hence daring to improve it. Neusner rightly recognizes that with these statements Jesus is claiming to be God, and this astonishing assertion is something to which he cannot assent.

Rabbi Neusner later said of his book that he wanted to explain to Christians why he believed in Judaism, and that this explanation "ought to help Christians identify the critical convictions that bring them to church every Sunday."⁸ It certainly did for one reader. Benedict writes: "More than other interpretations known to me, this respectful and frank dispute between a believing Jew and Jesus, the son of Abraham, has opened my eyes to the greatness of Jesus' words and to the choice that the Gospel places before us" (69).

* * * * * * *
This is interreligious dialogue at its very best, the kind of serious conversation reminiscent of Saint Thomas Aquinas' turn to Rabbi Moses Maimonedes, where respect for the other does not devalue respect for the truth.

* * * * * * *

In what is the longest treatment of any living author in Jesus of Nazareth, the Pope joins "in the rabbi's conversation with Jesus" (70). He argues that Neusner is absolutely right in his analysis of what Jesus is saying, but he contends that this does not constitute a violation of the Torah. On the contrary, drawing from the testimony of the Hebrew Bible the Pope argues that the Torah points beyond itself, beyond the borders of Israel, that God's "one great definitive promise to Israel and the world" was the "gift of universality" which is made possible by the God-man who comes to save both Jew and Gentile (116).

This is interreligious dialogue at its very best, the kind of serious conversation reminiscent of Saint Thomas Aquinas' turn to Rabbi Moses Maimonedes, where respect for the other does not devalue respect for the truth. Neusner himself was amazed that the Pope should honor him in this way. In responding to Jesus of Nazareth, the rabbi wrote, "Someone once called me the most contentious person he had ever known. Now I have met my match. Pope Benedict XVI is another truth-seeker. We are in for interesting times."⁹

Theological Wisdom

To dwell as I have done on the Holy Father's disputations with contemporary issues such as biblical criticism and Judeo-Christian dialogue should not, however, obscure the more fundamental fact that Jesus of Nazareth is first and foremost a treasure of timeless theological wisdom. Benedict is a master reader of Holy Writ, a sleuth of the sacred who artfully connects seeminly disparate scriptural passages or Patristic interpretations to reveal a deep and rich teaching. No matter how well you think you know the Bible, the Pope will surprise you.

* * * * * * *
For Benedict, only eyes fortified by Faith, Hope, and Charity can truly see the living mysteries disclosed in the Scriptures. While historical criticism can be useful, it must be firmly subordinated to the Apostolic Faith, and it must remain cognizant of the fact that its own reconstructions of the past are hypothetical and hence tentative.

* * * * * * *
To mention just two examples: Benedict's explanation of why Jesus deigned to be baptized is not that He wished to rid Himself of His guilt (for He obviously had none) but that He wished to "load the burden of all mankind's guilt upon his shoulders" (18). Like Jonah the prophert, Our Lord inaugurated His public ministry by being thrown into the sea so that others may live. Benedict notes that in Eastern icons depicting Christ's baptism, the river Jordan appears "as a liquid tomb," a Hades into which Christ descends and out of which He rises to be greeted by the Father and the Holy Spirit" (19).

Similarly, Benedict offers a powerful exegesis of the three temptations in the desert by framing this event with a difficult question: Why didn't Jesus turn stone into bread (if not to feed Himself then at least others) or take control of all nations in order to bring peace on earth? Indeed "What did Jesus actually bring, if not world peace, universal prosperity, and a better world?" (44). "The answer," Benedict continues, "is very simple: God. He has brought God. He has brought the God who formerly unveiled his countenance gradually, first to Abraham and then to Moses and the Prophets, and then in the Wisdom literature.... It is this God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the true God, whom he has brought to the nations of the earth" 944).

As this answer suggests, the Pope is never far from the face of the Lord in his exegesis. Everything that Christ says, such as his preaching on the Kingdom of God (ch. 3) or His parables (ch. 7) brings us primarily, not to a doctrine, but to Himself. When Our Lord speaks of the Kingdom of God, for example, He is speaking about His own kingship, Himself. And when He tells the Parable of the Prodigal Son, He is indicating how He Himself is the "concrete realization of the father's" mercy towards the sinner (208).

I mentioned earlier that Peter Seewald was disarmed by Cardinal Ratzinger's answer about the ways of seeking god, and now I should add that that experience reignited his own search for the Lord and his return to the Church. Let us hope that the hot but nourishing peppers in Jesus of Nazareth will have the same effect on those of us whose love of the Lord has grown cool.

Notes

Joseph Ratzinger, Salt of the Earth: The Church at the End of the Millennium: An Interview With Peter Seewald, trans. Adrian J. Walker (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997), 32. [back]

p. xxiii. Cf. Ps. 27:8. [back]

"Cardinal: Pope's Book Goes Against Grain," Zenit.org, 22 July 2007. [back]

Looking at the logical lapses of Rudolf Bultmann, for example, "we see how little protection the highly scientific approach can offer against fundamental mistakes" (220). [back]

Ibid. [back]

Ibid. [back]

Ibid. [back]

Ibid. [back]

Ibid. [back]

[Dr. Michael P. Foley is a professor of Patristics at Baylor University and the author of Why Do Catholics Eat Fish on Friday? The Catholic Origin to Just About Everything (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). The present review of Jesus of Nazareth by Pope Benedict XVI was originally published in Latin Mass: A Journal of Catholic Culture and Tradition (Winter 2008), pp. 34-37, and is reprinted here by permission of Latin Mass Magazine, 391 E. Virginia Terrace, Santa Paula, CA 93060.]

St. Francis -- a Mensch of a Saint

2009-01-10T16:17:00.000-08:00

If you're tired of portraits of St. Francis as little more than a Birkenstock-clad hippie, a Peace Corps social worker, or an effeminate tofu-eating Green Party activist, read this book. Frank M. Rega, St. Francis of Assisi and the Conversion of the Muslims (TAN, 2007) reveals the real St. Francis, who, among other things, was also a brave “knight of Christ” who boldly preached Christianity to the Muslims at the risk of his life. St. Francis accompanied the Crusaders to Egypt on the Fifth Crusade, and boldly walked right into the Muslim camp in a spectacular attempt to preach Christianity to the sultan and his followers. His goal was to convert the Muslims, rather than to simply engage in “dialogue” as such. Yet at the same time, he actually was also a supporter of the armed Crusade. He made such an impact with his preaching, that the sultan rebuffed some of his own religious advisors, the imams, who were insisting that Islamic law required that Francis must be beheaded.

This historic event constitutes the focus of this book, yet this volume also includes a comprehensive biography of the saint. Here's what some others are saying about the book:

"The most important book on St. Francis in English, in recent years." Brother Alexis Bugnolo, Editor, the Franciscan Archive, www.franciscan-archive.org.
"This is a rare and daring approach to the life of St. Francis and one that is so necessary in our world at this time." From the Preface by Father Angelus M. Shaughnessy, O.F.M. Capuchin and EWTN TV Host.

Mr. Rega has been a Third Order (Secular) Franciscan for the past 25 years. His first book, Padre Pio and America, is also published by TAN Books. A Henry Rutgers Scholar and Phi Beta Kappa at Rutgers, Mr. Rega studied at Yale University’s Institute of Human Relations on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. Most recently he was employed by Compuware Corp. as a software engineer on projects for NASA and the Department of Homeland Security.

A 'must read'

2009-01-10T16:15:00.000-08:00

Tracey Rowland, Culture and the Thomist Tradition: After Vatican II (London: Routledge, 2003).

Thomism's influence upon the development of Catholicism is difficult to overestimate - but how secure is its grip on the challenges that face contemporary society? Culture and the Thomist Tradition: After Vatican II rexamines the crisis of Thomism today as thrown into relief by Vatican II, the 21st ecumenical council of the Roman Catholic Church. Following the Church's declarations on culture in the document Gaudium et spes - the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World - it was widely presumed that a mandate had been given for transposing ecclesiastical culture into the idioms of modernity. But, says Tracey Rowland, such an understanding is not only based on a facile reading of the Conciliar documents, but is flawed by Thomism's own failure to demonstrate a workable theology of culture that might guide the Church through such transpositions.

A Thomism that fails to specify the precise role of culture in moral formation is problematic in a multicultural age, where Christians are exposed to a complex matrix of institutions and traditions both theistic and secular. The ambivalence of the Thomist tradition to modernity, and modern conceptions of rationality, also impedes its ability to successfully engage with the arguments of rival traditions. Must a genuinely progressive Thomism learn to accommodate modernity? In opposition to such a stance, and in support of those who have resisted the trend in post-Conciliar liturgy to mimic the modernistic forms of mass culture, Culture and the Thomist Tradition musters a synthesis of the theological critiques of modernity to be found in the works of Alasdair MacIntyre, scholars of the international ‘Communio’ project and the Radical Orthodoxy circle. This synthesis, intended as a postmodern Augustinian Thomism, provides an account of the role of culture, memory and narrative tradition in the formation of intellectual and moral character. Re-evaluating the outcome of Vatican II, and forming the basis of a much-needed Thomist theology of culture, the book argues that the anti-beauty orientation of mass culture acts as a barrier to the theological virtue of hope, and ultimately fosters despair and atheism.

What people are saying about the book:

“The Second Vatican Council was a turning point, a moment of grace; the Catholic Church, ever suspicious of Western society, at last joined the modern world. As observers feared at the time, however, the Council was much too optimistic about the nature of modern Western culture. In this careful and well-documented study, Tracey Rowland analyses its failure to make a radical critique of the problems that have afflicted Catholicism in the post-Conciliar years.” -- Fergus Kerr OP
“Tracey Rowland provides a critical but lucid analysis of the contemporary illusion that it is possible to convert to Christianity a modern culture wrongly thought of as ‘naturally’ Christian. In response, Rowland advocates the development of a Christian culture conscious of its own strong specificity. This book offers valuable insights into how the Christian faith can tackle the cultural challenges it faces today.” -- Serge-Thomas Bonino OP
“This ... is an extremely important book, and no serious student of theology or pastor of souls can afford to ignore it.” -- Laudetur
“This study...deserves a wide readership...[Rowland's] powers of elucidation and clarification of tangled issues are in full stride in this sustained and persuasive argument.” -- David Forest, Nova et Vetera
“For anyone interested in contemporary Thomism or the future of Vatican II's theology, there is much of interest here. ... There is no doubt that anyone interested in current thinking on Vatican II would gain from reading this book. The argument is impressive, challenging, and expressed with clarity and force.” -- Theology
“Tracey Rowland's compelling new book ... [is] impressive in many respects.” -- FCS Quarterly

[Tracey Rowland is Dean of the John Paul II institute for Marriage and the Family, Melbourne, Australia, and part of the international ‘Communio’ school of post-Conciliar Catholic theologians.]

Grootheis, "Franky Schaeffer Escapes from Reason," again

2009-01-10T16:13:00.000-08:00

Some of you may remember the piece we posted "Jaded: Frank Schaeffer 35 years later" (November 3, 2007). Douglas Groothuis, professor of philosophy at Denver Seminary, has just published a fairly scathing review of Frank Schaeffer's new book, Crazy for God, entitled "Franky Plays Schaeffer Card, Again" (The Pearcy Report, December 18, 2007), in which a persistent question is whether the junior Schaeffer has not lost his faith. A few passages in Schaeffer's book encourage such speculation, such as the one on p. 388 in which he questions the existence of God. Again, there are texts such as these:

“We never have any real information about anything important. . . . The most ridiculous thing in the world is a Ph.D. in theology, an oxymoron if one ever existed” (102).

“Perhaps Mom and Dad were right. In an infinite universe, everything must have happened at least once, someplace, sometime. So maybe there is a God who forgives, who loves, who knows. I hope so.” (end of book)

But then again, maybe Groothuis is wrong, and there is a Franky who really does believe, knows and loves God. I hope so.

[Hat tip to E.E.]

Priestblock 25487

2009-01-10T16:11:00.000-08:00

I have just received a review copy of Jean Bernard's Priestblock 25487: A Memoir of Dachau, trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider (Bethesda, MD: Zaccheus Press, 2007) from Zaccheus Press Editor, John H. O'Leary. In an accompanying letter, he notes that the original German edition of the work, published in 2004, was adapted into an award-winning European film called The Ninth Day the same year, but has never before been translated into English.

This is a work of non-fiction, a work of reputed literary merit, which promises to be not only a great read but to offer a tremendous witness to the power of faith. Read some of the consistent five-start Amazon reviews of the film version of the story for confirmation of that.

Here are a number of editorial reviews:

Product Description
In May 1941, Father Jean Bernard was arrested for denouncing the Nazis and deported from his native Luxembourg to Dachau's "Priest Block," a barracks that housed more than 3,000 clergymen of various denominations (the vast majority Roman Catholic priests).
Priestblock 25487 tells the gripping true story of his survival amid inhuman brutality, degradation, and torture.
This important book, originally published in Germany in 1963, was adapted by director Volker Schlöndorff into the film The Ninth Day in 2004.
Introduction by Robert Royal. Preface by Seán Cardinal O'Malley, Archbishop of Boston.
Praise for Priestblock 25487
"Stunning... Casts light into dark and previously neglected corners of the horror that was the Third Reich."
—Richard John Neuhaus, Editor in Chief First Things

"Father Jean Bernard's portrait of survival in a German concentration camp is simple, forceful and vivid and therefore impossible to put down or forget. It ranks with the great 20th Century personal testimonies against totalitarian violence... Priestblock 25487 is a diary of Catholic discipleship under extreme conditions that will deeply move all persons of conscience."
—Charles J. Chaput, Archbishop of Denver

"Gripping! This crisp story of the 3,000-plus Christian clergy at Dachau in 1941 forces me to turn pages quickly, in horror... In its understated power, this brief book is unforgettable."
—Michael Novak, author of Washington's God (with Jana Novak)

"Many hundreds of books have been written and published about German concentration and extermination camps during World War II, including at least two or three dozens written or dictated by their actual survivors.
Of these, Father Jean Bernard's Priestblock 25487 is among the very best, because of the exceptional intelligence and honesty of its author. Dachau, where he was imprisoned, was not the worst of all those camps, and Father Bernard was, surprisingly, released after two years of imprisonment: but perhaps because of these very circumstances his diary is extraordinarily telling, convincing, and graphic.
Every scholar and student of that dreadful chapter of twentieth-century history ought to read—and ponder—its contents."
—John Lukacs, author of The Hitler of History; and Five Days in London: May 1940

"Father Bernard has left readers with a gripping testimony of the brutal treatment the Catholic clergy received at the hands of the Nazis in Dachau. Despite the grim subject matter, the strong Christian faith held by these men is inspiring."
—William A. Donohue, President, Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights

"Deeply moving... The suffering of these priests for the sake of the loving God is one of the modern age's glorious mysteries."
—Father George Rutler, author of A Crisis of Saints

"It is dramatic. It is brutally honest. I loved the book and could not put it down."
—Teresa Tomeo, Ave Maria Radio

"Priestblock 25487 is an important work—a gripping firsthand account of the persecution of anti-Nazi Catholic clergy. I highly recommend this excellent book."
—Sr. Margherita Marchione, author of Yours Is A Precious Witness: Memoirs of Jews and Catholics in Wartime Italy

Journet's theology of the Church

2009-01-10T16:10:00.001-08:00

A reader points out that Charles Cardinal Journet's The Theology of the Church has just been marked down by Ignatius Press (Amazon has marked down its price as well). "This great contemporary theologian has few readers," he writes. "The translation is seamless." His favorite quote thus far:

How will the faithful as a whole elevate themselves to the Christian usage of exterior goods, of marriage, of liberty, if, from their midst, there do not continually arise some Christians who, in order to affirm with a brilliant intensity the primacy of spiritual ends, choose to renounce completely these very goods? Only the love that moves one to renounce all can, in the Church, sustain that love which makes an instrument of all. And as for those who, being primarily engaged in the broader way of the legitimate use of earthly goods, marriage and liberty, find themselves suddenly stopped short in their momentum and rejected by misfortunes as outcasts from life, if they cast a glance on the marvelous examples of renunciation that the Church makes shine forth around them in every epoch, are they not able to comprehend that God, who seemed to want to break them in his power or abandon them to life's trials, in fact is only calling them in his love to a holier and more sublime vocation, of which they themselves would never even have dreamed? (p. 270)

He also points out that a 31-page Journet article on the Mystery of the Eucharist, Le mystère de l'eucharistie (Cardinal Charles Journet) (Paroisse du Christ-Roi, Fribourg), is a veritable summary of Journet's great work on the Mass.

[Hat tip to A.S.]

Major work on Pope's ecclesiology

2009-01-10T16:09:00.001-08:00

As Christopher points out in his post, "New Books by Pope Benedict XVI / Joseph Ratzinger" (Against the Grain, August 21, 2007), Maximilian Heinrich Heim's new book, Joseph Ratzinger - Life in the Church and Living Theology: Fundamentals of Ecclesiology (Ignatius Press, October 2007), at a hefty 500 pages, looks like a major work in Ratzinger scholarship. The publisher's description reads:

This is a major work on the theology of Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, by a highly regarded German theologian, priest and writer. Since his election to the Papacy, Ratzinger's theology, and in particular his ecclesiology (theology of the Church), has been in the limelight of theological and ecumenical discussions.

This important work studies in detail Ratzinger's ecclesiology in the light of Vatican II, against the ongoing debate about what Vatican II really meant to say about the life of the Church, its liturgy, its worship, its doctrine, its pastoral mission, and more. Has his theology of the Church changed since Vatican II, or has it continued to develop consistently? Is the Catholic Church one church among many churches? Is she the object of hope or a historical reality?

Ratzinger the theologian figures centrally in this investigation, not as the former Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, but as a thinker and as a writer.

[Hat tip to C.B.]

Joseph Pearce's Race with the Devil

2009-01-10T16:07:00.000-08:00

Joseph Pearce, author of Literary Converts: Spiritual Inspiration in an Age of Unbelief (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), and many fine biographies of English Catholics (like G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, and J.R.R. Tolkien), as well as others whose relationship to Catholicism were more ambiguous (such as Oscar Wilde and C.S. Lewis), has, as he would be the first to tell us, a ... shall we say ... checkered past. In "Race With the Devil: A Journey from the Hell of Hate to the Well of Mercy" (in Journeys Home column of the The Coming Home Network International's July 2008 Newsletter), Pearce relates his early relationships with anti-Catholic terrorist cells, the Ulster Volunteer Force and Ulster Defense Association, and petrol bomb attacks in which Catholic-owned shops were looted and destroyed in Derry.

I used to read many more of these Journeys Home stories than I have in recent years, perhaps because of the tyranny of the seemingly more urgent, but I've grown to respect Pearce after making his acquaintance through his writing over the past decade, and I was curious about his background. I had read in one of his books that he had been involved on the anti-Catholic side of the Ulster troubles before his conversion, but I hadn't realized how deeply he was involved.

A few excerpts:

"A sound atheist can not be too careful of the books that he reads." So said C.S. Lewis in his autobiographical apologia, Surprised by Joy. These words continue to resonate across the abyss of years that separates me from the abysmal bitterness of my past. What is true of the atheist is as true of the racist. Looking back into the piteous pits of the hell of hatred that consumed my youth, I can see the role that great Christian writers played in lighting my path out of the darkened depths. Eventually, with their light to guide me, I stumbled out into the dazzling brilliance of Christian day.

I think it may have been in the Introduction to Literary Converts (I cannot lay my hands on our copy at the moment and can't be sure), that Pearce offers a lucidly succinct apologia for the direction he chose to go in his research and writing. As I recall, he didn't think straightforward theological apologetics would be his strongest suit, but that the most effective means of engaging the contemporary culture and its hiatus of meaning and purpose would be through the medium of the great artifacts of Catholic literary culture.

But I'm jumping ahead of myself. Pearce writes:

I grew up in a relatively poor neighborhood in London's East End at a time when large-scale immigration was causing major demographic changes.... racial tensions were high .... It was in this highly charged atmosphere that I emerged into angry adolescence.

At the age of fifteen I joined the National Front, a new force in British politics that demanded the compulsory repatriation of all non-white immigrants....

... At the age of sixteen I became editor of Bulldog, the newspaper of the Young National Front, and, three years later, became editor of Nationalism Today, a 'higher brow' ideological journal....

It was, however, in the context of 'the Troubles' in Northern Ireland that my anti-Catholicism would reveal itself in its full ugliness.... I joined the Orange Order, a pseudo-masonic secret society whose sole purpose of existence is to oppose 'popery', i.e. Catholicism.... As a 'Protestant' agnostic I was allowed to join and a friend of mine, an avowed atheist, was also accepted without qualms....

In October 1978, still only seventeen, I flew to Derry in Northern Ireland to assist in the organization of a National Front march. Tensions were high in the city and, towards the end of the day, riots broke out ... I had experienced political violence on the streets in England but nothing on the sheer scale of the anger and violence that I experience in Northern Ireland.

My appetite whetted, I became further embroiled in the politics of Ulster ... During a secret meeting with the army council of the UVF [Ulster Volunteer Force] it was suggested that I use my connections with extremist groups in other parts of the world to open channels for arms smuggling. On another occasion an 'active service unit' of the UVF, i.e. a terrorist cell, offered their 'services' to me, assuring me of their willingness to assassinate any 'targets' that I would like 'taken out' and expressing their eagerness to show me their arsenal of weaponry as a mark of their 'good faith'.

Pearce served two prison sentences, the last a twelve-month sentence, and both his twenty-first and twenty-fifth birthdays behind bars.

During the first of my prison sentences, Auberon Waugh, a well-known writer and son of the great Catholic novelist, Evelyn Waugh, had referred to me as a 'wretched youth'. How right he was! Wretched and wrecked upon the rock of my own hardness of heart.... Even today, when forced to look candidly into the blackness of my past, I am utterly astonished at the truly amazing grace that somehow managed to take root in the desert of my heart.

What was the catalyst for Pearce? With the wisdom of hindsight, he says he perceive that the seeds of his future conversion were planted at the height of his political fanaticism and anti-Catholic prejudices. The seeds were planted, he says, in "the genuine desire to seek a political and economic alternative to the sins of communism and the cynicism of consumerism." He says that during his confrontations on the streets with his Marxist opponents, he was incensed by their suggestion that, as an anti-communist, he was, ipso facto, a "storm-trooper of capitalism." It was this tension and dilemma that forced his intellectual search.

A friend who suggested that he study the distributist ideas of Chesterton informed him that he should buy Chesterton's The Outline of Sanity, but also that he should read the invaluable essay on the subject, entitled "Reflections on a Rotten Apple," which was to be found in a collection of his essays entitled The Well and the Shallows (rpt., Ignatius, 2006). Pearce purchased the two books and read them. "Imagine my surprise, and my consternation, to discover that the book was, for the most part, a defense of the Catholic faith against various modern attacks upon it," says Pearce. "And imagine my confusion when I discovered that I could not fault Chesterton's logic. The wit and wisdom of Chesterton had pulled the rug out from under my smug prejudices against the Catholic Church." It was, however, destined to be a long journey; and Pearce's essay is far too long for me to relate in any real depth. But it's an amazing journey, to be sure. Pearce was received into the Church on the Feast of St. Joseph in 1989.

Pearce is an excellent writer and historical researcher. All of his biographies provide a literary feast in the exploration of that circle of English, mostly Catholic, writers who have had a remarkable influence upon the Anglo-American Catholic intellectual culture of the last century. The retrieval of that Catholic culture is an invaluable resource for us today. Reappropriating that Catholic culture may help prevent us from being so defenseless amidst the value vertigo of our own times, and help to prepare us for the daunting task of rebuilding a comparable Catholic counter-culture in the future.

Recommendation:

Most of Pearce's books are well-worth reading, and many are outstanding. His treatment of Wilde and, more recently, Shakespeare, come to mind. Of all of Pearce's books, however, one that I most frequently recommend is Literary Converts: Spiritual Inspiration in an Age of Unbelief (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000). Here is what the Publisher's description says about it:

Literary Converts is a biographical exploration into the spiritual lives of some of the greatest writers in the English language: Oscar Wilde, Evelyn Waugh, C.S. Lewis, Malcolm Muggeridge, Graham Greene, Edith Sitwell, Siegfried Sassoon, Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers, T.S. Eliot and J.R.R. Tolkien. The role of George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells in intensifying the religious debate despite not being converts themselves is also considered. Many will be intrigued to know more about what inspired their literary heroes; others will find the association of such names with Christian belief surprising or even controversial. Whatever viewpoint we may have, Literary Converts touches on some of the most important questions of the twentieth century, making it a fascinating read.

A reviewer for Publisher's Weekly writes:

This erudite book vividly contrasts the faith that marked the lives of many of Great Britain's more prominent writers of the 20th century with the unbelief that, the author believes, largely marked their times. Many of the book's "converts" began life as Anglicans and then converted to Roman Catholicism, though some, such as C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot, remained with the Church of England. Pearce is at his best when he situates writers within the frameworks of a changing Church and a changing world. For example, he claims that the Catholic Church's move away from the Latin mass hastened the emotional deterioration that directly preceded Evelyn Waugh's death....

Now there's an interesting suggestion: Death by Novus Ordo! Well, technically he died three years and several months before the Novus Ordo was actually promulgated by Paul VI in 1970, but the liturgical innovations were by that time already well under way. Read and enjoy!

Two Books on the Mass Published

2009-01-10T16:06:00.001-08:00

Two major contemporary works on the Mass will be published in August and September:

Charles Journet, The Mass: The Presence of the Sacrifice of the Cross (South Bend IN: St. Augustine's Press, August 15th, 2007), $37.50, 304pp.
Henri de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum: The Eucharist and the Church in the Middle Ages (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, September 1, 2007), $35.00 ($23.10 Amazon discount), 360pp.

[Hat tip to A.S.]

A review: Waugh family

2008-03-10T13:20:00.000-07:00

Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family. By Alexander Waugh. Doubleday. 472 pages. $27.50.

Evelyn Waugh is one of a handful of great modern writers; his Brideshead Revisited is arguably one of the finest novels of the 20th century. Those who love Evelyn's work -- his novels, his essays, his journalism -- may be predisposed, like me, to open Alexander Waugh's Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family with pleasurable anticipation. Alas, this stab at a Waugh family history is enormously disappointing. Alexander Waugh, Evelyn's grandson, can be an engaging writer, yet the defining characteristic of Fathers and Sons is its distinct lack of taste. Titillation quickly loses its shock value and simply becomes repulsive.

Fathers and Sons begins with Dr. Alexander Waugh (1840-1906), aptly nicknamed "The Brute." Dr. Waugh, it seems, brutally beat dogs, women, and children whenever the mood struck him. When Evelyn's children asked their father to draw pictures of The Brute, Evelyn, a deft caricaturist, "drew arresting images of The Brute, smarting nostrils, flaming devil eyes, lascivious mouth, and snapping black-dog teeth."

Of The Brute's five progeny, the oldest, Arthur, labored nearly thirty years for the publishing house of Chapman and Hall, and had modest success as a writer, including a bestselling autobiography called One Man's Road. Arthur is best remembered, though, for establishing a remarkable literary dynasty, fathering the prolific writing duo of Alec and Evelyn, who begat additional Waugh authors. Impressively, works by Waughs have been in continuous print since 1888, and nine of Arthur's descendants have produced 180 books between them, including novels, plays, poems, essays, histories, travelogues, philosophies, and biographies.

But here Fathers and Sons begins going terribly wrong. Alexander has a distracting obsession with speculating on the older Waughs' sexual habits and proclivities. He begins with Arthur, whom he accuses, based on flimsy evidence, of being "highly sexed" and indulging in fetishism with young girls.

Arthur positively fawned over his older son Alec as "Arthur's paternal devotion inflated into something of an obsession." The elder Waugh lived vicariously through Alec, relishing in his son's exploits and suffering his disappointments. Alec excelled at the prep school Sherborne until his -- ahem -- intimacy with a classmate got him expelled. The author spares us no salacious details, spending four pages on the particulars of Alec's habits of self-abuse that would have been better left to the boy and his confessor. Nevertheless, Alec's expulsion devastated Arthur: "All his dreams, high ambitions, soft romantic hopes, were all brutally shattered."

Arthur much less favored Evelyn, perhaps because of his wife's difficult delivery. Evelyn was "a sweet-natured and affectionate child who worshipped his mother." Despite his father's aloofness, Evelyn described his childhood as "blissfully happy."

"I was not rejected or misprized," he told a friend, "But Alec was the firstling and their darling lamb."

Later, the boys' careers appeared to take different paths. Alec had early success as an author, writing a popular reminiscence of his school days called The Loom of Youth. Evelyn became an illustrator, providing graphics for his brother's book. Not until later did Evelyn begin his career as a writer, but he quickly surpassed Alec in terms of literary quality and prominence.

When chronicling Evelyn's wild youth, Alexander relies purely on speculation. Despite saying, "I shall not delve into what he did, or did not do…nor shall I be pokin' m'nose into his intimate friendships," he proceeds to do precisely that, spending the better part of a chapter conjecturing on Evelyn's supposed homosexual attractions to his acquaintances.

Once Alec and Evelyn are married, Alexander still spares us no titillating details of the couples' boudoirs. He tells us, for example, that Alec and his first wife, Barbara, were unable to consummate their marriage, a failure Alexander somehow attributes to the barking family dog who shared their bedroom. Also, Evelyn was drawn to his first wife, also named Evelyn, because of She-Evelyn's supposed resemblance to someone Alexander speculates may have been He-Evelyn's homosexual lover as a young man.

As expected, Evelyn is the book's most intriguing character. While no sane person would argue for his sainthood, he was one of the brightest and wittiest men ever to grace the literary scene. Many of his letters in Fathers and Sons are uproariously funny and are unquestionably the book's high point. He comes across as a lovable curmudgeon rather than The Brute reincarnated. Still, Evelyn was hardly a model father. He could seem by turns selfish, impatient, patronizing, and neglectful. For instance, he sought to avoid attending his son Bron's wedding in 1961, planning instead to go to a society wedding that same day, although his wife eventually prevailed.

But a kinder, gentler Evelyn can be glimpsed between the wisecracks. He rejoiced in Bron's success, which maintained the Waugh family's literary traditions as novelist, journalist, and founder of The Literary Review. Evelyn doted on his daughter Meg, although Alexander hastens to insinuate that their relationship "bordered on the incestuous" because they occasionally traveled together.

Bron comes across as a likable man and an indulgent father, Alexander tells us, not an old crank like his father. In the same breath, Alexander admits he was "seldom if ever disciplined by" Bron, which may be part of the problem here. Alexander frequently overpraises his father, stating, for example, that A.N. Wilson and V.S. Naipaul, among others, believe Bron "to have been greater in stature than his father," Evelyn. Yeah, right.

Finally, we come to Alexander, who is thoroughly modern and most eager to please lowbrow readers. Like many authors today, he lacks humility -- he was cheeky enough to write a biography of God -- and is obsessed with sex talk, naturally assuming everyone is just begging to read a dirty, psychosexual family diary.

The book has generally received rave reviews, most extolling Alexander's "rich, tea-cake prose" -- a family trait. Strangely, not one critic commented on the book's most glaring flaw: its indecorum, so disrespectful of the author's ancestors, akin to desecrating their graves. Perhaps this can be attributed to the Spirit of the Age, but if so, I'll take a Victorian-era biography any day. Regardless of what one thinks of Alexander Waugh's literary talents, the big question is: What motivated him to play Peeping Tom on his forebears?

- James Bemis

[James Bemis is an editorial board member and columnist for California Political Review, and a columnist for Catholic Exchange's The Edge. The present review of Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family by Alexander Waugh, was originally published in the New Oxford Review (February 2008), and is reproduced here by kind permission of New Oxford Review, 1069 Kains Ave., Berkeley, CA 94706.]

Grey Poupon man weaves tale

2007-12-01T11:48:00.001-08:00

I am absolutely, no-holds-barred, flat-out delighted to see this dramatic narrative brought to the printed page. Home-Front Passage: A Southern Sojourn with Monologues (Academy Press, 2007 - ISBN: 978-0615157160) is a first-class piece of highly entertaining autobiographical drama by none other than our own Donegan Smith of Hickory, NC, and recently retired from teaching at Lenoir-Rhyne College.

I first saw this work represented on stage in a one-act play by the author himself, Donegan Smith, a highly-educated and articulate William and Mary grad and a consummate stage actor as well as retired Hollywood actor. Many will remember him as the mustard guy in the Grey Poupon commercials -- the guy in the Rolls Royce wearing the tux. In that connection, he might have simply titled the book, after his own reply to the query "Pardon me, do you have any Grey Poupon?" in the commercial: "But of course!"

I saw "Home-Front Passage" enacted in the Belk Centrum stage on the campus of Lenoir-Rhyne College in Hickory, North Carolina, some ten years ago when the author was teaching acting and drama there and I was a colleague in the philosophy department. Home-Front Passage is a riveting, at times gut-wrenching, drama about a southern boy's right of passage -- a boy caught in the middle of his parents' strained and confusing marriage. From the opening account of his presumed stillbirth on a cold April morning in a tiny four-room house about thirty miles from Raleigh, when his father saw his belly button move and yelled "He's alive, by Christ, my boy's alive!" and had him covered with lard and incubated in the kitchen oven "to save my pre-mature ass" -- to his teenage plea with his father to divorce his mother to save their family, you'll howl with laugher. You'll weep. You'll scream. Get this book! It's a keeper. It's just in time for Christmas. And, if at all possible, see it performed if you get the chance.

Donegan Smith is now retired from professional acting and lives in his home state of North Carolina. He is also retired from college teaching at Lenoir-Rhyne College and from being a drama director. He lives with his wife, Toni -- his favorite actress -- in Hickory, North Carolina, where he continues to teach acting privately.