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11/20/2016

Hold The Instant Canonizations

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I have a pretty full day today and will not be able to make a full post. However, tomorrow (Tuesday) will be our first reflection of the new Church Year as well is our introduction to the Gospel of Matthew, the Scripture of choice for the A Cycle. Our primary resource for Tuesdays will be the commentary on St. Matthew by R.T. France; the link is on the home page.

​My cousin from out Idaho way posted a very interesting piece from ​the blogsite of Monsignor Charles Pope, "Community in Mission." The entry is "
Funeral Foibles: Problems in the Celebration of Catholic Funerals." As November is traditionally a month dedicated to intensive prayers for the dead, I thought this might be an interesting and perhaps controversial piece for reflection and discussion. I have to admit that many of Monsignor's concerns have been mine for years, including my time in the active ministry.

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11/15/2016

How Vatican II Crept Into My Seminary

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Last Monday I described the content of Bernard Haring’s 1954 The Law of Christ, the “before and after” moment of moral theology. What happened next was the not-so-gradual impact of European thinking upon Catholicism in the United States. I entered the seminary in 1962, and I was living away from home for the first time, so I was somewhat preoccupied with being a homesick high school freshman. In our dormitory building was a bulletin board controlled by one person, the “prefect of discipline,” a very stern priest whose assignment, to put it mildly, was to “keep the herd obedient with a cattle prod.” I don’t think he was aware of The Law of Christ. One day a typed message went up on the board that a solemn Mass of the Holy Ghost would be offered for the success of the Ecumenical Council. I had very little idea of what this was all about.
 
Occasionally I regret that I lived the Council years isolated from parish life, because now I would have liked to observe how local parishes learned about the Council. My window was a conservative boarding school seminary, and the faculty was, of course, trained in old school spirituality and religious outlook. In my junior year (1964-65) a young priest was assigned to the faculty, a friar who was then in his doctoral studies, I believe. (The rector of the seminary, I found out later, resented the fact that this priest had permission from the order to attend class in New York City on Wednesdays.) His name was
Regis Duffy, O.F.M., and he taught music, which on my report cards was listed as a grade in “chant,” and he directed the choir. I liked him, as he was friendly to the students, a rare commodity then. However, he kindly told me I wasn’t cut out for the choir. Years later in Washington, when I cantored and played my twelve-string guitar at his Masses, I never let him forget that.
 
Regis, by his choice of musical selections, introduced us to the first wave of liturgical changes, such as “antiphonal” singing of the Psalms in the vernacular for popular participation, and to such new
Church composers as Joseph Gelineau.  His preaching opened us to the changes in approach to moral thinking. Regis was the Sunday homilist on the day of the Selma civil rights march led by Martin Luther King (recaptured in the recent film “Selma”) and he talked about our need to stand in solidarity with Negroes in their struggle for justice. Regis would go on to become one of the most celebrated liturgists of the later twentieth century.
 
In my senior high school year, our religion course was based upon the advances in Scripture study, essentially the same methodology I use today in the Tuesday blog entry on the Sunday Gospels. At the time, though, the shift from a purely historical to a theological understanding of the Gospel was somewhat over my head and my grade in religion suffered. (How does someone get 68 in religion—in a seminary, no less?) But discussion about other changes in the church was filtering into our seminary. Although Vatican II was just ending, there was anticipation that there would be changes in religious habits, and our school paper ran a question and answer post about our reactions to that. I was a strong advocate for changes to the religious habits of sisters, long before the Council. I felt it was unfair that sisters should be so encumbered with cloth and starch from head to foot, when by contrast priests and friars could change out of their habits into comfortable clothes for sports and off hours. My aunts at home, however, scoffed at sisters who experimented with new habits. “They just want to show off their legs!”
 
Seminaries, and certainly ours, were notable for strictness and austerity. Somewhere around the end of the Council, the rector allowed an afternoon snack of bread and jelly. Not the Second Coming of Christ, to be sure, but a major change in a highly structured world that signaled to us that whatever Vatican II meant, it was introducing a more relaxed church experience. A greater change was introduced in my junior year (1965) when we were permitted to go home on Easter Sunday for a week, and in 1967 we could go home for Thanksgiving weekend as well.
 
The academic year 1967-68, my college sophomore year at the same seminary, saw a turnover in our faculty with the infusion of a half-dozen newly ordained friars who were deeply immersed in the post-Vatican II era of theology. I certainly enjoyed the change of atmosphere, but I found myself worried about moral theology. My seminary professors had adopted the Haring outlook, and several of my cousins were getting married and wrestling with the birth control controversy. Birth control—use of the pill—was hotly debated in 1967 (
Humanae Vitae was not issued till 1968) and truth be told, on matters of morals I tended to be a “manualist.” My reasoning was the domino theory: if one moral law can change, then the whole teaching system of the Church would collapse. Some Cardinals feel this way today about Pope Francis’ suggestion of new pastoral options for the divorced and remarried.
 
Just before I went home for Thanksgiving in 1967, I sat down with my theology teacher and laid out my fears. He had discussed Haring and the new moral methodologies in class. He gave me two hours of his time to explain from Biblical, historical, and pastoral sources how some teachings were being approached in a new light, and he explained the principal of “fundamental option.” I trusted him and I never worried about it again. In fact, when our science fair came around in the spring of 1968, with the help of the town pharmacist, I created an exhibit of the chemical process of the pill then in use. As our science fair was open to the public, more than a few couples stopped by to talk, and I put them in touch with the young friar faculty members. Not everyone was happy with my exhibit, but I didn’t get tossed from the seminary. And I had a close-up view of the revolution started by
The Love of Christ.

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11/7/2016

The Law of Christ

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I have talked a great deal over the last few Monday posts about Father Bernard Haring and his impact upon the science of moral theology in the Roman Catholic tradition. So much so that it seemed only fair to zoom in on his 1954 work that changed our thinking about sin and penitential practice, The Law of Christ. The first English translations appeared in the United States in the early 1960’s, but the essence and principles of LC were integrated immediately into European university curriculums, and thus absorbed by the many American priests and religious obtaining doctorates overseas. By the time I entered college in 1966 Haring’s thought was a staple of my textbooks and lectures. Angelo Roncalli, the future John XXIII, read LC prior to his election in 1958 and would bring Haring into the writing of several Vatican II schemas, including Optotam Totius on seminary training and more famously Gaudium et Spes on the Church’s place in the world.
 
What was different about
The Law of Christ? For starters, it was not a manual.  James Keenan’s A History of Catholic Moral Theology in the Twentieth Century devotes considerable attention to Haring’s forerunners, moralists who were breaking away from the catalogue method of discussing sin toward some form of incorporation of the imitation of Christ, or who used the Ten Commandments as an organizational framework (as the Catechism of the Catholic Church continues to do.) Keenan gives credit to Haring for two breakthroughs. First, Haring summarized the discontent of many moralists with the legal or casuist approach to morality. Second, Haring approached moral theology in the context of the full theological enterprise of Catholic academics: foundational principles, Christian anthropology, Scripture, Liturgy, and history.
 

The Law of Christ begins with a history of the discipline and established in a foundational sense what the “tools” of the moralists are: responsibility, fellowship, and the imitatio Christi. (Keenan, p.91) The introduction of responsibility takes him naturally to a discussion of Christian anthropology, i.e., what is the identity and capacity of a human, and a baptized human? His answer is the call to follow Christ; this is what we have been created to do. Haring emphasizes the unity of the body and soul: behavior is motivated by affect for God in his visible reality, Jesus. {“Phillip, he who sees me sees him who sent me.”)
 
Haring goes on to define the human as one who lives in community and in history. This was certainly true of Jesus, who came “not to be served but to serve,” and who played out the Redemptive drama in a real time (“for our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate”). The Christian likewise serves the community of his time and place. Haring is certainly assisted here by the renewed Catholic Scripture study of time which had rediscovered the idea of God working through history in the narrative of the Israelite people and continuing, through the Pentecost event, to play out in the assembly of the followers of Jesus.  Haring writes that the human history is marked by sin but always called to restoration. The “way home” in his thought is the sacraments, and his expansion of the role of liturgy in moral theology is a marked departure from the manualist tradition’s emphasis upon juridical confession. An aside: my students are always surprised when I tell them the penitential rite of the Mass does forgive sin.  
 
Another of Haring’s strengths is his understanding of the emerging Catholic philosophical and theological thinking taking place around him, in the works of Karl Rahner, Bernard Lonergan, and many others who would ultimately serve as periti or advisors at Vatican II. From his theological peers Haring developed at considerable length his concept of human freedom. Remember that the prevalent mood of Post-War Europe was one of pessimism, and that the philosophy of the time was notably existentialist​—the influence of Kierkegaard and Sartre, for example. Catholic thinkers addressing this new environment had to take account that human thought was built around a basic freedom of choice, a freedom so deep that Catholic theologians looked to both Biblical and psychological referents to describe it.
 
By the time I reached graduate studies the term for Christian freedom was “fundamental option,” or the most basic choice for or against the invitation of God to embrace the life of his Son. As it turned out, my graduate comprehensive examinations—spread out over several days—included my three-hour elucidation of this term, which mercifully will not be repeated here. Haring believed that the ability to arrive at and articulate one’s fundamental option—the heart of one’s faith and, by extension, moral decision making—rested upon one’s knowledge of God, the development of one’s conscience, and the realization through action of our call to responsibility. Sixty years of subsequent scholarship and experience have naturally adapted and in some cases reassessed the notions of Christian freedom, but the enduring legacy is a turn from sole consideration of sinful acts to the attitude and faith of the human believer.
 
Parts three and four of The Law of Christ turn to practical considerations of embracing and living the Law of Christ—specifically, of course, identifying what it might look like in the everyday world. The drawback of any law system is the inability of the lawgiver to envision every possible circumstance; hence the importance of the Supreme Court of the United States, for example. Haring never dismissed the ultimate authority of the teaching Church, but he and moralists to follow would be more inclined to respect the human conscience as competent to judge individual moral circumstances, based on the three principles enumerated in the preceding paragraph.
 
Part five of LC is devoted to the process of conversion with discussion of contrition, confession, penance, satisfaction and atonement. The sixth part focuses on life after conversion in pursuit of the perfection of the virtues. This final part corresponds to the fourth quadrant of today’s Catechism. In summary, Keenan writes that “Notably different from his predecessors, Haring privileges human freedom as foundational to moral goodness. For Haring, freedom is the possibility of responding to God’s call to do God’s will. But that freedom is itself a gift. As God calls, God provides. Sin is the refusal to accept the gift and the call; it is therefore the defeat of freedom and the entrance into slavery.” (p. 92)
 
Haring’s work would open a great many doors to the pastoral dimensions of morality in the Vatican II era and beyond. It would also come under considerable scrutiny when the idea of freedom of conscience encountered its first true crucible, the formal teaching of Pope Paul VI in 1968 against the use of artificial birth control. But that is a story for a later day.
  

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  • HOME
  • MORALITY
  • SCRIPTURE
  • PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
  • CHURCH HISTORY
  • BOOKS
  • LITURGY
  • ON MY MIND
  • The Boys of Aroma Hill-Callicoon
  • ABOUT THE BREWMASTER
  • CATHOLIC NOVELISTS and the BOOKS THEY WRITE
  • VATICAN II DECREE ON LITURGY STUDY