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Contents © 1999
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.

April 1996

"On the Thomas Merton home page on the Internet, one reads that Father Louis much preferred the Rheims-Douay version of the Bible and only reluctantly and out of obedience set it aside for later translations. The Douay is closest to the Latin Vulgate and that is why medievalists prefer it as the English closest to the text found in the authors they study. Suggestions for the rescue of the liturgy often stress the importance of getting the common of the Mass back into Latin, before everything effervesces into ever worse renderings (how apt a word for it). See for example the series of articles by Brian Harrison, O.S. in the Adoremus Bulletin on the so-called Gamber proposal. I am all for that, but I can't resist the thought that the liturgy of the word ought to be in Latin as well. In the old days, the priests read the epistle and gospel in Latin and then, from the pulpit, read them again in English before his homily (or sermon, as it then was called, before the 'vernacular' insisted on the Greek term). That seems to me to be an idea whose time has come."


SHOWDOWN IN WASHINGTON. Looking at the post-Humanae Vitae fallout, Russell Shaw writing for The Catholic World Report, March 1996, focuses on a central character, Germain Grisez: "All this points to an obvious question: What really was the role of Pope Paul VI? Grisez has no doubt that the Pope believed from the start that contraception is wrong. 'What he wasn't sure about was whether the Pill is a contraceptive in the traditional sense,' he explains. Worried about overpopulation in some areas, Paul thought oral contraception might be a solution, and therefore was 'inclined to approve it if possible.'"

"Long before the publication of Humanae Vitae, Grisez had concluded that, just as contraception had triumphed in secular society, so, practically speaking, it also would triumph -- indeed, already was well on its way to triumphing -- among Catholics, regardless of what the Pope finally said."

"The Archdiocese of Washington, D.C. rapidly became a center and focal point for this dissent -- because of the concentration of pro-contraception theologians there, because a substantial number of archdiocesan priests immediately announced that they intended to set aside the teaching of Humanae Vitae in their pastoral practice, and because Cardinal Patrick O'Boyle was a staunch defender of the encyclical."

"Against this background the Washington case came to its inglorious conclusion. The Congregation for the Clergy apparently was instructed to find a pastoral solution. The result was a statement that seemed to say all the right things but gave the game away by requiring restoration of the faculties if the priests merely agreed to insist that Catholics whom they dealt with in the matter of contraception be 'guided by objective moral norms.' One night shortly before its publication Grisez argued with Cardinal O'Boyle until well past midnight, urging him to fly to Rome to remonstrate with the Pope and even threaten resignation if need be. 'I just can't do that with the Pope.' O'Boyle said. Says Grisez, 'That was the sad ending of that episode.'"


GOOD POPES BAD? According to Fr.James V. Schall (Homiletic & Pastoral Review, March 1996), "Why the good popes are hated, I think, has to do with their violation of the first principle of modernity, that nothing is true."

"Take, for example, what the Pope has said in his recent book on Buddhism. For what he said in his simple and direct manner, namely that for Buddhism 'the world is the source of evil and suffering for man,' John Paul was roundly criticized and even threatened while he was in Sri Lanka.

"In his recent encyclical, Evangelium Vitae, furthermore, John Paul II has sought to understand and explain the reasons for the anti-life positions and practices throughout the world. He has clearly reflected on the political and personal reasons presented for justifying any threat to human life, from abortion to euthanasia or genetic engineering. He has examined them and related them to principle, in the light of which he has rendered his judgment about the rightness or wrongness of the various practices."

"What causes the present pope apparently undying hostility and criticism is not his admirable philosophical care and precision, not his addressing a topic of public ethics, but his faithfulness to reason and revelation, his concluding that something is wrong in the direction and principles found in much of modern Western society and in so stating."


WINDOWS OF THE SOUL. Mitchell Kalpakgian in the New Oxford Review (March 1996) points to some of the causes of the indolence afflicting children today: "Those of us who grew up the the 1940s and 1950s recall fondly the impoverished games and spontaneous fun we as children created through the use of our imagination. The word 'bored' was not part of our vocabulary, and organized athletics like Little League did not dominate our lives. With one good bat, an old baseball, and a few gloves to be shared among us, we initiated, organized, and officiated our own games, with no need for adult supervision or arbitration.

"The benefits of a simple childhood -- uncorrupted by the entertainment industry or amusement business -- were a strong imagination, a love of adventure, a spirit of creativity, and the enjoyment of pure fun."

"The modern experience of childhood, however, is often an impoverishment of the spirit and imagination, a drab, joyless world where there is 'nothing to do' or everything is 'boring.' Why? As organized sports compete with spontaneous play, as television viewing inhibits the habit of reading, as daycare institutions replace life in a family, children do not develop a rich inner life or creative spirit."


HEALTH IN MIND AND BODY. In the January 1996 Fidelity, James G. Bruen, Jr. reviews a book by Robert Feeney, "We Americans are obsessed with sports, perhaps more so than with any other topic, with the possible exception of sex.

"Robert Feeney's A Catholic Perspective: Physical Exercise and Sports collects the Church's statements on sports, in particular allocutions of Popes Pius XII and John Paul II, that address the purposes, benefits, and pitfalls of sports."

"And, while that is the book's greatest achievement, Mr. Feeney, who holds a Master of Science Degree in Physical Education, also includes suggestions for exercise programs and spiritual fitness.

"So, when children 'passionately dedicate their whole interest and activity' to sports, training, and attaining championships, the Church does not applaud.

"'...the highest merit should not be attributed to him who has the strongest muscles, but rather to him who shows the most ready ability in keeping them subject to the power of the spirit.'"

"'If morality requires respect for the life of the body, it does not make it an absolute value,' cautions the Catechism of the Catholic Church. 'It rejects a neo-pagan notion that tends to promote the cult of the body, to sacrifice everything for its sake, to idolize physical perfection and success at sports.'"

[Available from: Aquinas Press, 207 Newhall Pl., Leesburg, VA, 22075. $9.75 postpaid.]


MORE CATHOLIC THAN THE POPE. Commenting on Bill Clinton's courting of Catholics for the upcoming elections in Crisis, February 1996, Raymond Arroyo writes, "He came to explain his Bosnia policy to the nation on November 27th... 'A few weeks ago, I was privileged to spend some time with His Holiness Pope John Paul II when he came to America,' the president wistfully recalled.

"There is an organized push these days within the White House to 'reach Catholics symbolically and on the issues,' according to an unnamed White House source. Hillary Clinton has consulted privately with a panel of Catholics to discuss 'themes and issues' that will resonate with Catholic voters."

"During the summer of last year Hillary Clinton helped Mother Teresa open a home in Northwest Washington for children awaiting adoption.... By the time Hillary Clinton retreated to her limo, Catholics had the impression that she and the little saint from Calcutta had come a step closer to resolving their differences.

"A highly placed political adviser to the president says his recent trip to Ireland was primarily designed to 'boost Irish Catholic support in the Midwest.'

"'Each event fills in the mosaic,' says Clinton adviser Jim Castelli. 'And as the mosaic fills in Clinton is looking better and better to Catholics.'"


PICKWICK CATHOLICISM. Odd to see in Crisis is a critique of G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, and C.S. Lewis by James Hitchcock (March 1996): "I must go further and confess to a heresy that among some orthodox Catholics might be regarded as worse than Unitarianism -- I have never felt any strong attraction to the school of English Catholic thought whose leaders were G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc.

"Belloc was in part a historian, but in that role he seems to me like a man with a machine gun -- by spraying shots everywhere he inevitably hit some of his targets, but many of his bullets went astray.

"Belloc's aphorism 'the faith is Europe, and Europe is the faith' is especially rejected in our time, and rightly so. As a judgment about the period 500-1500, it is defensible with numerous qualifications. For the period before and since it is willful blindness. But I have a sense that Belloc did not even care if it was an accurate summation of reality, so long as it served as a comforting conceit.

"Chesterton's image of orthodoxy in its chariot, tenaciously holding tight the reins to forestall catastrophes right and left, has caught the imagination of many people, and it obviously identifies a truth. But there and elsewhere it seems to me Chesterton comes close to identifying truth with the banal, essentially pagan principle in medio stat virtus. Truth and virtue do always reside in the middle, in that purveyors of error can always conceive of yet more extreme positions on either side. But moderation in itself is a virtue only in relation to physical things. Spiritual goods, such as the virtue of charity, should be pursued immoderately.

"It is the Catholic view that heretics seize a truth and enlarge and distort it to the point where it becomes an error, rather as a cancer cell expands and devours healthy cells. Faced with heresy the Church at its best does not merely say, 'Pull the horses a little more to the right' but 'Turn up the lamp, so the circle of light can be expanded and the faithful can see where the heretics have been blind.'

"Chesterton and Belloc's approach to heresy was characteristically a dismissive wave of the hand, the implication that heretics are usually stupid or, more precisely, lacking a sense of balance. But in God's providence even heretics serve his will, mainly by causing the Church to reflect all the more deeply on its own teachings.

"Belloc in particular, but the attitude seems to have extended to [C.S.] Lewis, celebrated drink, especially wine, as itself part of an authentically Christian attitude toward life. The reasons for doing so are obvious enough -- at the Last Supper Jesus made wine sacred, just as at Cana he blessed its ordinary human consumption. But to see the wedding feast as Jesus somehow encouraging hearty good cheer seems to me grotesque; he does not do so anywhere else in the gospels.

"It was typical of Belloc's historical blindness that he seemed to equate teetotalism with Protestantism, as though Martin Luther's problem, for example had not been the opposite.... Belloc also seems not to have understood that the 'Puritan' teetotalers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries themselves had the best possible reasons for condemning drink. Few things in the history of the world have wreaked such havoc on individuals, on families, and on society as the unbridled use of alcohol, as every disinterested observer of British society in the nineteenth century saw very clearly. Although Belloc sneered at teetotalism as a Protestant or even secular obsession, the anti-alcoholic movement was strong in Ireland, where 'temperance' was in fact defined as abstinence by priests whose pastoral experience taught them that many people would not drink in moderation."

Professing his like for the French Existentialist school of Mauriac and Bernanos whom others complain to him to be too depressing, Hitchcock comments, "We are a resurrection people, as modern spiritual teachers never tire of reminding us, to the point where it is no longer appropriate to mourn at funerals and, some would have it, to display crucifixes in our churches. But both dogma and human experience tell us that there can be no resurrection unless there is death first, and in a way that is what I think is lacking in the kind of faith I am here criticizing."


GALILEO, DARWIN, AND THE CHURCH. George Sim Johnston observes in the March 1996 issue of Crisis: "Since Western science owes its existence to the realism of Catholic metaphysics, how did the situation arise where educated people assume that science and Catholic dogma are antagonistic? The answer is simple: Galileo....There are even educated Catholics who wish that the whole sorry episode surrounding that great scientist could be swept under a rug and forgotten.

"This is not, however, the attitude of Pope John Paul II, who has a keen interest in modern science. Shortly after becoming pope, he established a commission to look into the Galileo affair. The commission's report affirmed that Church authorities in the seventeenth century had indeed gravely violated Galileo's rights as a scientist; but it also interestingly supported the anti-Catholic Victorian biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, who examined the Galileo case and reluctantly concluded that 'the Church had the best of it.'

"If the issue had remained purely scientific, Church authorities would have shrugged it off. Galileo's mistake was to push the debate onto theological grounds. Galileo told the Church: Either support the heliocentric model as a fact (even though not proven) or condemn it. He refused the middle ground offered by Cardinal Bellarmine: You are welcome to hold the Copernican model as a hypothesis; you may even assert that it is superior to the old Ptolemaic model; but don't tell us to reinterpret Scripture until you have proof."

Recalling that in his 1986 Wednesday audiences the Pope held evolution to be compatible with creation but not scientifically certain, Johnston says, "[He] got it exactly right. Not only is Darwinism not proved, almost every aspect of it is currently subject to a heated debate among geneticists and paleontologists."

Exposing Darwin's motive of trying to do away with a creator from notebooks published in 1970, Johnston notes the dismay of modern cosmologists who have like motives: "When Einstein formulated the General Theory of Relativity, which deals with gravity and the curvature of space, he was perturbed that his equations showed an expanding universe, which point to its beginning."

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