Pope Francis Condemns the Cult of Greed, Ted Cruz and Paul Ryan Support It
by Brent Budowsky
In recent remarks that were stunning and profound, Pope Francis harshly criticized what he called “the cult of money” and condemned what he called the “dictatorship” of economies that are socially unjust and morally unfair.
These remarks, reported in The Daily Telegraph and highlighted on the Drudge Report (but not in major American media) suggest a papacy with the potential to transform the global economic and financial debate.
Most recent popes, including Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict, raised the same issues that Francis dramatized this week. What makes the Holy Father different today is that he views economic and social injustice as a defining, and possibly THE defining, theme of his papacy.
This is extraordinary, powerful and profound. There are profound differences between the policies of President Obama and Democrats versus the policies proposed by the atheist Ayn Rand and conservative voices such as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Rep. Paul Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Republican leaders in Congress.
Francis suggests there should be far more economic and social justice regarding the wealthy and everyone else within the leading industrial nations, and between the leading industrial nations and poorer nations throughout the world.
There is a debate raging in Washington, across Europe and throughout the world pitting the right, which favors cruel austerity at a time of slow growth and high joblessness, versus progressives and moderates who believe harsh austerity today is economically disastrous and morally repellant.
The pope specifically calls on world leaders to address the great economic and financial injustices, and I agree with him completely. The pope uses words like “cult” and “dictatorship” to describe the champions of financial justice and the conditions their policies create, and I fully agree with him about this, as well.
Francis has also put his money where his mouth is. The Vatican Bank has already announced new openness and reforms at his direction, which should interest opponents of financial reform in America, Britain and elsewhere. Paul Ryan is a fervent disciple of Ayn Rand, who was the atheist champion of the culture of greed.
Ryan famously tried to employ Catholic theology on behalf of his budget austerity against the poor, and was quickly forced to retreat as the absurdity of this view became obvious. Various rightist and Republican voices have championed aspects of the cult of money, including Cruz, Ryan, Rand Paul, Ron Paul, Republican leaders in Congress and Mitt Romney, who famously ridiculed and demeaned much of the nation on video, championing the cult of money to a room of Republican donors whose money he sought.
It is ironic that these profound and important views of the Holy Father have so far received more attention from the Drudge Report than the leading newspapers of America, the network television news, or cable networks with so much airtime to put to work.
The BBC, Al-Jazeera, The Daily Telegraph and other international media have respected and reported the profound thoughts from Francis, which deserve far more attention here, which is why I write these words today.
Let us advance this great discussion to the center of politics and media throughout America and across the world. For those who disagree with my views, or for whatever reason continue to champion the cult of money and greed, I command to their attention the recent comments from Francis and the timeless words of the Sermon on the Mount.
Brent Budowsky is served as Legislative Assistant to U.S. Senator Lloyd Bentsen, responsible for commerce and intelligence matters, including one of the core drafters of the CIA Identities Law. Served as Legislative Director to Congressman Bill Alexander, then Chief Deputy Whip, House of Representatives. Currently a member of the International Advisory Council of the Intelligence Summit. Left government in 1990 for marketing and public affairs business including major corporate entertainment and talent management.
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Jesuit’s book offers rich insights on celibacy
LIVING CELIBACY: HEALTHY PATHWAYS FOR PRIESTS
By Gerdenio Sonny Manuel, SJ
Published by Paulist Press, $14.95
The election of Pope Francis is not likely to reopen the issue of clerical celibacy and its importance to the health of the church and our bishops and priests. The celibacy requirement in the Roman church will be reaffirmed, but with a fresh emphasis on how to make it work better.
Jesuit Fr. Gerdenio “Sonny” Manuel has written an important book for current and next-generation priests facing the challenges of ministerial effectiveness and personal well-being as celibates. His book is a clear sign of how far we have come from the days when newly ordained priests chose for their ordination cards the famous 19th-century prayer of French priest and orator Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire that spoke of priests as otherworldly and heroic men with “a heart of bronze.”
A licensed psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of San Francisco, Manuel’s formula for successfully “living celibacy” is to embrace rather than escape the psychosexual dimensions of a life that forgoes genital sex and an exclusive intimate partnership for the sake of service to the church. He affirms the obvious: that the sacrifices entailed also bring multiple benefits, not the least of which is the freedom to cultivate a wide circle of professional and personal relationships and to travel light, serving whenever and wherever needed without the obligations of marriage and family.
This is not to say that living celibacy is easy, especially as a priest goes through midlife, when the uncertainties of aging and the crisis of realizing one’s limits hit the panic button.
Manuel proposes a lifelong approach to living celibacy in the form of five “healthy pathways for priests.” They are:
- Live close to God and one’s deepest desires;
- Develop relationships and communities of support;
- Ask for love, nurture others, and negotiate separation;
- Cope with stress and recognize destructive patterns of behavior;
- Celebrate the holy.
Behind each of these summary prescriptions are rich stores of clinical data, analysis and case studies from the social sciences, joined to the deep perspectives of Catholic theology and spirituality. Living Celibacy is both informative and inspiring, making it a valuable tool for screening candidates, for those in formation programs and for newly ordained priests. Veteran priests can benefit from the basic principles the author presents. Each chapter ends with reflection questions for personal or group use.
Manuel affirms what Dominican Fr. Don Goergen risked censure to say in his now classic 1975 book The Sexual Celibate — that “friendship is not detrimental but central to celibate living, that celibate persons are also sexual persons, and that celibate life is a profound and rewarding way of living,” as Goergen wrote. Moving beyond a time when “particular friendships” were forbidden and contact between priests and women was discouraged, Manuel assumes that today’s priests can live chastely and effectively in the real world when grounded in community and in the charism given to them to build up the church.
Priests who use their extraordinary freedom to serve others wholeheartedly will bear witness to the mystery of Christ’s love for his church. Priests who seem preoccupied with their own special needs or automatic status will fail to impress anyone, least of all married people in the thick of life’s demands and sacrifices. As one married woman said to this reviewer in a recent conversation, “The biggest challenge for priests is not celibacy but selfishness.” Too much emphasis on the mystique of celibacy can produce a sense of entitlement that is only likely to extend the cycles of repression and compulsion that have so damaged the reputation of the priesthood for all priests.
Some readers may expect to find more discussion of questions about the value of clerical celibacy, the problems associated with clerical culture, issues regarding celibacy and homosexuality or theories that link sexual immaturity to child abuse. Manuel acknowledges these issues but brackets them from the primary focus of the book, which is to support those who choose priestly celibacy.
Manuel begins his book with a question posed by many people to celibates: “How in the world could you do that to yourself?” He ends by affirming the privilege priests have of nurturing the “close irrepressible connection between God and God’s people” that they share and witness to in their own desire and longing for God.
Living Celibacy reminds us all, married, single or celibate, that true love perfects human sexuality when it is lived passionately and chastely for the sake of others in any lifestyle or vocation.
[Pat Marrin is editor of Celebration, the worship resource of the National Catholic Reporter. Contact him at patrickjmarrin@gmail.com.]
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Kenya’s civil society has reached a turning point
There are four numbers particularly linked with the Holy Spirit, who in Christian theology is understood to be the third Person of the Blessed Trinity, co-equal and co-eternal with the Father and the Son. These numbers are three, seven, 12 and 50.
Three because He is the Third Divine Person, Divine Love Personified who unites the Trinity. His three key attributes are Love, Union and Gift. And his great gift, called sanctifying grace, is ultimately a gift of Himself to us. This grace comes with three principal infused virtues, namely faith, hope and charity, called Theological because they have God as their proper object.
Seven because the Holy Spirit gives seven gifts in Christian tradition: wisdom, knowledge, understanding, counsel, fortitude, piety and fear of the Lord. In Catholic theology, his gift of grace is also associated with seven sacraments.
And 12 because the fruits of the Spirit’s indwelling in the soul are 12, and because he is sent as a gift to give life to the Church, which is in turn founded on 12 apostles.
The feast of Pentecost, ‘fifty days after Easter’, which Christians celebrate today, is the great manifestation of the Holy Spirit. It is the day of Jubilee, which like the year of Jubilee is a time of renewal.
Hence the Church sings “Come, Holy Spirit come! And from your celestial home; Shed a ray of light divine!”
And because the Holy Spirit’s main job is to transform us from within, the Church adds, “Bend the stubborn heart and will; Melt the frozen, warm the chill; Guide the steps that go astray.”
This profound latter stanza is relevant to all Christians and people of good will.
Likewise, as Kenyan civil society grapples with an existential crisis, this stanza may help guide their steps to a sure destination.
The elements of the growing crisis of Kenya’s civil society are several. One is a crisis of identity. Are they part of us, or are they foreign agents?
Another is a crisis of alienation. Can they have a prophetic voice, when they reject the outcome of a democratic exercise they claim to believe in?
A third is a crisis of credibility. Can we trust them to walk the talk, or will their partisan political views trump the pursuit of the common good, like when they expressed discontent that Kenyans had chosen peace despite political grievances?
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Pope Francis condemns the cult of greed, Ted Cruz and Paul Ryan support it
In recent remarks that were stunning and profound, Pope Francis harshly criticized what he called “the cult of money” and condemned what he called the “dictatorship” of economies that are socially unjust and morally unfair.
These remarks, reported in The Daily Telegraph and highlighted on the Drudge Report (but not in major American media) suggest a papacy with the potential to transform the global economic and financial debate.
Most recent popes, including Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict, raised the same issues that Francis dramatized this week. What makes the Holy Father different today is that he views economic and social injustice as a defining, and possibly THE defining, theme of is papacy.
This is extraordinary, powerful and profound. There are profound differences between the policies of President Obama and Democrats versus the policies proposed by the atheist Ayn Rand and conservative voices such as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Rep. Paul Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Republican leaders in Congress.
Francis suggests there should be far more economic and social justice regarding the wealthy and everyone else within the leading industrial nations, and between the leading industrial nations and poorer nations throughout the world.
There is a debate raging in Washington, across Europe and throughout the world pitting the right, which favors cruel austerity at a time of slow growth and high joblessness, versus progressives and moderates who believe harsh austerity today is economically disastrous and morally repellant.
The pope specifically calls on world leaders to address the great economic and financial injustices, and I agree with him completely. The pope uses words like “cult” and “dictatorship” to describe the champions of financial justice and the conditions their policies create, and I fully agree with him about this, as well.
Francis has also put his money where his mouth is. The Vatican Bank has already announced new openness and reforms at his direction, which should interest opponents of financial reform in America, Britain and elsewhere. Paul Ryan is a fervent disciple of Ayn Rand, who was the atheist champion of the culture of greed.
Ryan famously tried to employ Catholic theology on behalf of his budget austerity against the poor, and was quickly forced to retreat as the absurdity of this view became obvious. Various rightist and Republican voices have championed aspects of the cult of money, including Cruz, Ryan, Rand Paul, Ron Paul, Republican leaders in Congress and Mitt Romney, who famously ridiculed and demeaned much of the nation on video, championing the cult of money to a room of Republican donors whose money he sought.
It is ironic that these profound and important views of the Holy Father have so far received more attention from the Drudge Report than the leading newspapers of America, the network television news, or cable networks with so much airtime to put to work.
The BBC, Al-Jazeera, The Daily Telegraph and other international media have respected and reported the profound thoughts from Francis, which deserve far more attention here, which is why I write these words today.
Let us advance this great discussion to the center of politics and media throughout America and across the world. For those who disagree with my views, or for whatever reason continue to champion the cult of money and greed, I command to their attention the recent comments from Francis and the timeless words of the Sermon on the Mount.
Abbott budget reply: mind the gap between rhetoric and reality
Abbott budget reply: mind the gap between rhetoric and reality
How far has our understanding of the Coalition’s fiscal policy advanced as a result of Opposition Leader Tony Abbott’s budget reply last night?
Answer: not particularly far, and what detail we got tends to confirm what already seemed to be the case. That is, assuming Abbott is being honest, the Coalition will not run a significantly tighter fiscal policy than Labor. This is despite what Abbott claims is a “budget emergency” of sufficient magnitude that he will reluctantly support Labor’s $30+ billion-worth of tax rises and savings.
If there was a true fiscal emergency, the Coalition would be girding its loins for a serious assault on the budget. However, nearly all of the savings measures announced by Abbott last night (which were additional to Labor’s earlier savings, and most of which were re-announcements) will be directed to funding the $4 billion in carbon price tax cuts and handouts that the Coalition says aren’t necessary.
This is shadow treasurer Joe Hockey, just a few weeks ago:
”Let me be very clear, if there is no carbon tax, there is no need for compensation because if you don’t have a carbon tax, you don’t have injury, and by its very design, the carbon tax is meant to cause injury, it’s meant to change behaviour, and that’s why the government compensates.”
Hockey was exactly right, of course, but his logic has been rejected as politically inconvenient by Abbott. The result: a “budget emergency” so bad you can throw $4 billion at taxpayers for no reason.
That decision inevitably makes the overall savings task for the Coalition more difficult. For example, in 2010, Abbott said in his budget reply that his plan to slash 12,000 public servants would “pay for the Coalition’s direct action on climate change policy, the Green Army and the retention of the current private health insurance rebate”.
But last night, Abbott said the 12,000 cut was among his “specific savings” that would “cover keeping tax thresholds and pension rates without a carbon tax to fund them”.
So opposition climate spokesman Greg Hunt’s risible Soil Magic / Direct Action scheme now has to be funded from other savings (“it will be costed, capped and fully funded from savings,” a Hockey spokesman said). In a perfect world, this will be a prelude to the Coalition abandoning it altogether, since simply sitting and ignoring climate change would be better than blowing billions on winner-picking nonsense.
“The net result … is a credibility gap between the opposition’s apocalyptic fiscal rhetoric and its proposed response to said apocalypse. But it’s a comforting gap.”
The actual new cut identified by Abbott consists of delaying the increase in compulsory super to 12% — at least, unlike former PM John Howard and then-treasurer Peter Costello in 1996, Abbott hasn’t lied about supporting the increase before the election as a prelude to dumping it afterward. This joins the previously announced 12,000 ex-bureaucrats, axing the low-income super contribution and the reduction in our humanitarian intake. Abbott also “confirmed” he would dump the mining tax-funded Family Tax Benefit supplementary allowance (which Hockey actually backed last year), although Abbott was careful not to use the phrase “Family Tax Benefit” when saying he’d dump it, merely referring vaguely to “people on benefits” which of course sounds much more like a war on dole bludgers than class warfare.
This reduction in Australia’s humanitarian intake, which reverses the recommendation of the government’s Houston panel, is both bad policy and morally reprehensible. The Coalition is proposing that one of the world’s richest countries cut its intake of bona fide refugees by over 30%, while at the same time purporting to be serious about discouraging asylum seekers from trying to reach Australia by boat. Seriously reducing the intake of refugees who seek to be resettled in Australia through appropriate, internationally recognised processes sends a strong signal that you maximise your chances of being resettled here by coming by boat.
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Return to Rome – A Review by David J. Engelsma
Return to Rome: Confessions of an Evangelical Catholic
By Francis J. Beckwith
Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2009
144 pages
ISBN: 978 1 58743 247 7 (paperback)
List price $15.00
The blurb on the front cover explains this book: ‘Why the President of the Evangelical Theological Society Left His Post and Returned to the Catholic
Church.’
Francis Beckwith was a prominent theologian in evangelical circles in North America. In 2007, he and his wife joined the Roman Catholic Church. At
the time, he held the prestigious position of president of the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS). The ETS is an organization devoted to the study
and promotion of evangelical theology. Some 4,500 of the most prominent, influential theologians, scholars, professors of theology, and churchmen in
many Protestant churches and seminaries are members of ETS.
Since ‘evangelical’ refers roughly to non-Roman Catholic, Protestant proclamation and defence of the gospel of salvation by grace alone, Beckwith’s
defection to Rome caused no small stir in the ETS, as also more widely in Protestant circles.
The book is Beckwith’s defence of his apostasy. It is, at the same time, encouragement to other evangelicals to follow Beckwith’s lead.
The book by Beckwith is, therefore, not groundbreaking. It is only the most recent of the genre. The earliest, and best known, was John Henry
Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua [English translation: An Apology for His Own Life]: Being a History of His Religious Opinions
(originally published in 1865). Newman’s book was his account of his leaving the Church of England, in the nineteenth century, for Rome. More
recently, the erstwhile Presbyterian Scott Hahn has written Rome, Sweet Home: Our Journey to Catholicism (San Francisco: Ignatius Press,
1993).
Noteworthy Aspects of the Defection
Several aspects of Beckwith’s defence of his abandoning evangelicalism for the Roman Catholic Church are worthy of note. First, none of the various
evangelical churches that Beckwith bounced around in prior to his joining Rome had a strong, solid ecclesiology. None took itself seriously as a
genuine manifestation of the elect body of Jesus Christ, as determined by the infallible marks of the true church listed in Article 29 of the Belgic
Confession. Accordingly, Beckwith felt himself committed to none of them. Whenever it was convenient for him, he would leave a supposedly evangelical
church and join another. In such a church environment, Rome’s claim to be the historic, mother church is irresistible.
For example, one of the churches that Beckwith attended regularly, if he was not a member of it, was a ‘Foursquare Church’ (41). This is the church
founded by the rebel against the prohibition of the apostle that a female not be a preacher, the charlatan and the adulteress Aimee Semple McPherson.
If I were confronted with the choice between the woman-made church of McPherson and the man-made Church of Rome, I would choose Rome, also in view of
the fact that there is no essential difference between the Arminian gospel of the Foursquare Church and the semi-Pelagian theology of Rome.
Second, Beckwith is superstitious. Circumstances in his life speak to him more powerfully regarding church membership than do the truths of Holy
Scripture. Direction from God to join the Roman Catholic Church came in the form of a request from Beckwith’s nephew that Beckwith sponsor the nephew
at the Roman Catholic sacrament of confirmation (19). Beckwith received an important message from God by means of the unusual, accidental switching
of stations on his radio (41). Beckwith was confirmed in his decision to join the Roman Catholic Church by the coincidence that Edith Schaeffer, wife
of the well-known Francis A. Schaeffer, signed his book on the same day that Beckwith was publicly received back into the Roman Church (55, 56).
Assurance of the salvation of Beckwith’s father-in-law, who died outside the Roman Catholic Church, is based on two visions God supposedly gave to
Beckwith’s wife (70, 71).
Rome is the appropriate home of the superstitious.
Third, Beckwith’s admission into the Roman Catholic Church consisted of his involvement in the Roman sacrament of penance. To enter the Church of
Rome, Beckwith had to confess his sins to a priest in the confessional. The climax of the spurious sacrament was Beckwith’s performance of penance.
He performed a work that paid for his sins. Thus, necessarily and appropriately, entrance into the communion of Rome consisted of denying the one
sacrifice of Jesus Christ for sins on the cross.
For Francis J. Beckwith, membership in the Roman Catholic Church took place by way of a public denial of Jesus Christ and his cross.
And the nature of the penance was significant: one public recitation of the Lord’s Prayer and one public recitation of the ‘Hail, Mary.’ ‘The priest
then heard my confession and granted me absolution. I found my way to the main sanctuary, where I did my penance, which consisted of one “Our Father”
and one “Hail Mary”‘ (18).
In the Roman Catholic Church, the grace of pardon is cheap — not free, but cheap. The sinner can purchase this grace, and the purchase price is
ridiculously cheap: rattle off one Lord’s Prayer and one paean to mediatrix Mary.
But the price of forgiveness and of admission to Rome includes adoration of Mary, that is, idolatry. Rome insists on being Rome, even in the case of
the joining by a president of the ETS, who knows full well what the ‘Hail, Mary’ means in Roman Catholic theology and liturgy.
Denying the cross of Jesus Christ as the sole and entire payment of the debt of sin and practicing the idolatry of the worship of and reliance upon
Mary, Francis J. Beckwith is a lost soul. He has plunged himself under the curse of God, and, if he does not repent, will perish forever.
The response of the ETS to the apostasy of its former president did not include any such warning. This lack betrays the weakness of the ETS. An
evangelicalism that cannot condemn the Roman Catholic Church as a false church is not worthy of the name. The evangel is the gospel of Scripture, and
the gospel of Scripture condemns the theology and church that posit another mediator between God and men in addition to Jesus Christ; that judge the
cross of Christ insufficient for redemption; and that attribute salvation to the will and works of the sinner, rather than only to the grace of God,
to say nothing of the rejection of the lordship of the risen Christ over the church by the invention of the papacy.
The Urgent Concern: Justification
If these aspects of Beckwith’s defence of his falling away to Rome catch the attention of every Reformed reader, there is one element of the defence
that ought to be of utmost concern to Reformed and Presbyterian believers today, especially Reformed and Presbyterian officebearers.
This element is Beckwith’s defence of his return to Rome in terms of the doctrine of justification.
Showing a theologian’s awareness of the significance of justification regarding the division between Rome and Protestantism, Beckwith put the
doctrine of justification at the head of the list of issues that had to be resolved in his mind, if he were to join the Roman Catholic Church.
Our questions focused on several theological issues that prevented us from becoming Catholic and seemed insurmountable: the doctrine of
justification, the Real Presence in the Eucharist, the teaching authority of the Church (including apostolic succession and the primacy of the Pope),
and Penance (79).
It is Beckwith’s resolution of the issue of justification that ought to concern Presbyterians and Reformed today. He resolved the issue by adopting
Rome’s doctrine of justification and rejecting the doctrine of the Reformation.
What is significant is Beckwith’s presentation and defence of the Roman Catholic doctrine of justification to his evangelical critics. It is exactly
the explanation of justification that is given by Norman Shepherd and the theology of the Federal Vision in Reformed circles. If one did not know
that the explanation of justification in Return to Rome is that of Romanizing and Romanist Beckwith, he would attribute it to Shepherd, the
men of the Federal Vision, and those who carry water for the Federal Vision.
Justification, Beckwith came to be convinced, is not exclusively legal and forensic. It is also, and chiefly, ‘transformation’ of the sinner into a
holy and good person by his ‘sharing in the divine life of Christ’ (86).
Justification is not the imputation of the righteousness of Christ to the guilty sinner, but the infusing of Christ’s righteousness
into a wicked person so that he becomes increasingly inherently righteous (101, 102).
Justification is not the definitive verdict of God rendering the justified sinner perfectly righteous through faith, but a progressive activity of
God beginning with the infusion of grace at baptism, continuing throughout one’s life, and concluding at the final judgment (101, 102).
In justification, ‘works done in faith by God’s grace contribute to our . . . eventual justification’ (102). Beckwith explains Romans 4:1-8 as
repudiating only ‘the works of the Mosaic law’ for justification (100). Genuinely good works, that is, good works that proceed from true faith, are
taken into account by God when he justifies a sinner.
Justification at the final judgment will take place on the basis of every man’s own good works: ‘Works serve in some way as the basis on which
his [Jesus'] judgment of their eternal fate is made’ (97; the emphasis is Beckwith’s).
Justification is a cooperative effort of God and the sinner. God’s grace enables the sinner to accomplish his own justification, but the sinner must
cooperate with grace by his own free will (112). Such is the reality of this cooperation that it is a possibility that one in whom God has begun the
process of justification may fail to cooperate and, therefore, lose his justification and go lost eternally. In support of this terrifying, God-
dishonouring view of justification, Beckwith appeals to John 15:1-5, Jesus’ teaching of the vine and the branches (95).
And, of course, James 2 is the decisive passage on justification, teaching ‘God’s justification of the Christian’ and teaching that ‘justification is
not by faith alone’ (104, 105).
A Forewarning
In every respect, Beckwith’s doctrine of justification, justifying his journey to Rome, is that of Norman Shepherd and the men of the Federal Vision.
The only difference between Beckwith and the men of the Federal Vision is that Beckwith honestly and openly states, and has acted upon, the
conclusion of his Roman Catholic doctrine of justification: renunciation of the Protestant Reformation and return to Rome.
It does not suit the Federal Vision theologians as yet to declare to their Presbyterian and Reformed audiences that their doctrine of justification,
and their doctrine of a conditional covenant, whence the heretical doctrine of justification springs, imply membership in the Roman Catholic Church.
Shepherd has hinted at the implication of his theology:
Is there any hope for a common understanding between Roman Catholicism and evangelical Protestantism regarding the way of salvation [that
is, especially justification]? May I suggest that there is at least a glimmer of hope if both sides are willing to embrace a covenantal understanding
of the way of salvation [that is, the doctrine of a conditional covenant] (Norman Shepherd, The Call of Grace: How the Covenant Illuminates
Salvation and Evangelism, Phillipsburg, New Jersey: PR, 2000, 59).
The bold declaration of a return to Rome is coming.
In the meanwhile, Francis J. Beckwith, formerly president of the ETS, forewarns the members of Reformed and Presbyterian churches where the doctrine
of justification of the Federal Vision will take them and, if not them themselves, their children and grandchildren: Return to Rome.
Taken with permission from the Protestant Reformed Theological Journal, April 2013.
Will the Catholic Bishops Decide How You Die or Whether You Live? – Truthout – Truth
(Image: Modern hospital and emergency sign via Shutterstock)What happens when religious institutions get to manage public funds, absorb secular hospitals, and put theology above medical science and individual patient conscience? Religious freedom suffers.
In 2010, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, an elderly woman was rushed to a local hospital called St. John. She had suffered a massive stroke and could no longer eat, drink or speak. Mercifully, she was one of the growing percent of Americans who have prepared for such an eventuality by writing an end-of-life directive. Hers said that said she did not want artificial hydration or nutrition if she wasn’t going to recover. Unfortunately, St. John is a facility where the directives of the Catholic bishops take precedence over the directives of individual patients, and one such directive orders hospitals to feed and hydrate end-of-life patients whether they want it or not.
Americans would do well to consider what happens when theology dictates health care.
In the official language of the bishops, St. John is a “Catholic health care ministry,” their term for all Church-affiliated hospitals and clinics. Catholic health care ministries are publicly licensed institutions intended to serve the general public. They are highly subsidized by public dollars. To fund them, the Church uses a variety of public revenue streams including Medicare, Medicaid, county appropriations, federal dollars allocated through the 1946 Hospital Survey and Construction Act, and tax-exempt government bonds. As with any hospital, additional revenues come from insurance payments and investments, with the end result that the Catholic Church contributes less than 5 percent of the funds flowing through their hospitals and clinics. And yet the bishops place theological restrictions on care for all patients and sometimes forbid providers from telling patients that treatment options exist elsewhere.
According to MergerWatch, Catholic control of health dollars and hospital facilities is on the rise across the United States. In Washington State, for example, if all currently proposed mergers go through, almost half of hospital beds will lie in the hands of religious institutions by the end of 2013. Across the US, as Catholic systems such as Peace Health and Catholic Health Initiatives (CHI) quietly absorb secular hospitals, the bishops are fighting in court for the religious equivalent of corporate personhood, claiming that the constitution gives them institutional conscience rights that trump patient choice. Meanwhile, Catholic-owned pharmacies are suing for the right to deny services; and other Catholic-owned business are demanding (and winning) religious exemptions from health insurance obligations.
In an effort to standardize the rules of Catholic institutions and the advice that priests give laypeople, the bishops have created what they call “Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care,” called ERDs for short. When secular and religious institutions merge, the bishops’ directives often restrict services in both. Patients may not realize that a once secular institution named Swedish or Highline is now subject to theology and could impose religious beliefs at odds with those of the patient. Following mergers, changes often are gradual, occurring slowly as staff leave and are replaced with believers, which makes the shift even harder for patients to detect. (Religious hospitals are exempt from non-discriminatory employment practices, somewhat remarkable given that so much of their funding is public.) Hospital administrators may state that they do not interfere in the doctor-patient relationship while at the same time advertising for staff who are “deeply familiar” with the bishops directives.
From a consumer standpoint, one problem with putting religion rather than science in charge of health care is that patients may not know they are being denied the full range of medically appropriate options. They may have no idea when institutional rules prevent doctors and nurses from honoring end-of-life wishes or discussing services that are available in secular settings – services like contraception, abortion, tubal ligation, vasectomy, fertility treatment, or death with dignity. For example, one woman tells of being diagnosed with an ectopic pregnancy at a religious hospital. She was advised that she needed to have her fallopian tube removed. Fortunately, she consulted her smart phone and realized that elsewhere she could simply obtain a medication to end her nonviable pregnancy. The medication is safer and leaves fertility intact, but the Catholic directives treat this as a direct abortion, while the surgery (which damages long term fertility) kills the fetus indirectly and so is acceptable.
Other countries where Catholic theology limits health options offer a dire warning of what might happen here if the Church had an equal hold on the levers of power. In El Salvador, Catholic theology was written into law in 1998, banning all abortions, even those intended to save the mother. As a consequence, a 22-year-old mother named Beatriz, who carries a nonviable fetus, lies in a hospital bed with her kidneys failing, hoping to be granted an exception by El Salvador’s Supreme Court. She has been waiting for over a month. In Catholic Ireland last October, a young dentist, Savita Halappanavar, died after being refused an abortion.
In an ironic twist, the extremity of Catholic directives leads many people to believe that they couldn’t possibly be implemented here. Consider the case of Beatriz. She is the mother of a young child. Her fetus is anencephalic, meaning it has no brain and never will be a person under any circumstance. (Note: Somewhere between 60 and 80 percent of human fertilized eggs self-destruct naturally before a full-term gestation, most before a woman knows she is pregnant, and many because they are defective.) In other words, the Salvadorian anti-abortion law risks the life of a young mother for an incomplete fetus that is a normal failed reproductive product rather than a potential child. For someone who thinks that morality is about well-being, this just sounds crazy. Of course, this could never happen in the United States, right? You may be astounded to learn that a Phoenix nun was excommunicated and her hospital was forcibly disaffiliated from the Catholic Church for allowing an abortion under similarly hopeless circumstances.
In Ireland, after Halappanavar’s unnecessary death, thousands of men and women demanded medical services based on scientific evidence and individual conscience. Halappanavar became the tragic face of an international movement. Even so, given the power of religious institutions and traditions, legal change in Ireland is likely to be minimal. The largely Catholic Irish Medical Association has declined to request abortion rights even in cases of incest, rape and nonviable fetal anomalies. Currently Irish law allows abortion only when a mother’s life is threatened, which is not good enough for a case like Halappanavar’s. A leading obstetrician testified that Halappanavar probably would have survived if she had gotten an abortion during the first three days of her hospital stay. But at that time, there was not a “real and substantial threat to her life.” By the time she met the legal criteria, it was too late.
Patients count on their doctors to know and suggest their best options to protect health and well-being. But as medical options increase, especially at the beginning and end of life, the range of services excluded for theological reasons also increases. Catholic “ethicists” devote millions of dollars to analyzing biomedical technologies in the pipeline and then advocating policy based on theological priorities. They block certain lines of research and prevent affiliated hospitals from participating in clinical studies that require participants to be on contraception, for example a study of a cancer treatment that might cause fetal defects. Procedures opposed by the theologians are likely to be absent altogether from patient-doctor conversations.
Some patient advocates say that mandatory disclosure is part of the solution: Pharmacies that refuse to fill some prescriptions should post the fact that they are not full-service. Church-run abortion diversion centers known as crisis pregnancy centers should post that they are not medical providers. Treatment consent forms should list the scientifically and medically accepted practices that a doctor or hospital refuses to provide so that patients know that these services are available elsewhere. Conversely, providers who sign onto a Patients’ Bill of Rights promising to base care only on medical science and patient conscience could get the equivalent of a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.
But disclosure alone won’t ensure state-of-the-art health care for many Americans, especially those living in small towns or rural settings. Sometimes one clinic or pharmacy serves a wide area, or all nearby services are managed by the same religious institution. In these cases, a woman with a painful and life-threatening ectopic pregnancy might not be able just to get in her car and drive to another clinic. Denial of service hits low-income communities hardest because members often have less flexible time off work and more restricted access to transportation and child care. The right of religious doctors and institutions to deny services obstructs the right of patients to receive timely care that meets normal medical practice standards, which are designed to maximize well-being.
That is because Catholic theology isn’t necessarily about well-being; it is about submitting to the perceived will of God. Sometimes these two align, and sometimes they don’t. To serve God’s will, Catholic theologians attempt to derive moral principles that are about the inherent goodness or evil of certain beliefs and behaviors, regardless of their consequences. In this way of thinking, contraceptives or abortions should not be provided because they are “intrinsically evil,” even when contraception or abortion may save a woman’s life.
To make matters worse, Catholic theology values passive submission to harm when it is believed to serve Catholic practice or faith. Saints are heralded for their commitment to theological principle even in the face of outrageous and foreseeable outcomes, including martyrdom. In fact, Catholic theology sees pain as having positive soul-purifying benefits. This is called redemptive suffering. In the ERDs, it is offered up as an alternative for patients whose unbearable pain leads them to seek death with dignity:
Dying patients who request euthanasia should receive loving care, psychological and spiritual support, and appropriate remedies for pain and other symptoms so that they can live with dignity until the time of natural death…. Patients experiencing suffering that cannot be alleviated should be helped to appreciate the Christian understanding of redemptive suffering.
Former nun Mary Johnson (author of An Unquenchable Thirst) spent 20 years working with Mother Teresa’s organization, the Missionaries of Charity, which has been accused of providing substandard treatment and pain management. She explains the sometimes abysmal conditions in their facilities thus:
Most people today would say that we help the poor by helping them out of poverty. That was never Mother Teresa’s intention. Mother Teresa often told us that as Missionaries of Charity we did not serve the poor to improve their lot, but because we were serving Jesus, who said that whenever service was rendered to one of the least, it was rendered to him. Jesus promised eternal life to those who fed the hungry and clothed the naked.
The point, in other words, is not necessarily to solve the problem but simply to perform service. Ultimately, it isn’t about real world outcomes for the person on the receiving end, but about eternal outcomes for the person on the giving end. The difference is important. And although Johnson doesn’t mention it, the passage she quotes mentions the ill as well as the hungry and naked. The Jesus of the gospel promises eternal life to those who feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit prisoners and care for the ill. When religion and healing are at odds, the way to get to heaven is to offer theologically principled care, even when more compassionate options are available.
This difference in objectives seems like reason enough to separate religion from medicine. Thanks to science, fertility treatment has come a long way from the mandrakes and dove blood prescribed in the Bible. Victims of sexual assault now have options other than being forced to bear rape babies (also the Biblical solution). As we face death, we have alternatives to convincing ourselves that suffering is redemptive. Do we really want theology at the helm of our biggest hospital and clinic systems?
If not, it may be time for ordinary men and women to speak our minds. In Washington State, where the battle over Catholic hospital mergers is heating up, the state constitution specifically prohibits the use of public funds to support religious institutions. Despite that prohibition, one district actually has a line-item in the property tax code to subsidize a Peace Health facility, leaving the local community with no secular alternative. With the Peace Health clinic newly open, the local bishop has already tried to block the now-Catholic system from providing lab work for Planned Parenthood, as was done in the past. Legal challenges may play out in court thanks to a patients’ rights campaign by the ACLU and grassroots groups, but the broader question is this:
When it comes to medical options, whose beliefs count: the bishops’, or the patient’s? Who gets to say whether one woman is forced to incubate a pregnancy gone wrong or another is force-fed at the end of life? Whose version of god gets to dictate how you live and how you die?
John Rupkey: Looking for the work of Satan – Winona Daily News
In her May 4 letter, Marcy Borgschatz wrote of me: “he does not seem to be ashamed of his lifestyle but rather parades it.”
I totally agree. This is what advancing beyond the degrading Roman Catholic theology of homophobia has done for me.
If she would like to offer me something different, I respectfully decline. I’ve already had too many years of shame and hiding inside a closet.
None of the biblical writers ever wrote anything about gay people. They didn’t know gay people existed because gay people were invisible. It has taken until 2013 for us to be able to see just one gay professional athlete. Back then gays were ashamed and scared and hiding inside closets of self-hate, like we have been doing for centuries until the present time.
When the Bible was being written, people didn’t understand that God create some people who fall in love only with members of their own sex. It has been only recently that we have figured this out for ourselves. It is ludicrous to suggest that ancient writers understood this and specifically addressed this issue in the Bible.
They mistakenly thought everybody was created heterosexual, and therefore mistakenly concluded that those who had sex with members of their own gender were heterosexuals acting against their God-given nature.
Marcy also wrote that since the beginning of time God instituted marriage between one man and one woman. I believe anthropologists have not discovered any evidence that suggests this is true.
I hope she isn’t trying to claim that the creation story in the Garden of Eden with the talking snake and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is historical evidence to support her assertion.
If you are looking for the work of Satan in the world today, how about taking a good look at his success in getting some religious people to believe that obvious mythology is history, and then developing a hateful, dehumanizing, homophobic theology partly based on that ignorance.
God is love. Satan promotes beliefs that are degrading, dehumanizing and hateful.
“A Palpable Hopefulness”: A Book Response and a Wish – Patheos
The Lady of the Angels and Her City: A Marian Pilgrimage
by Wendy M. Wright
Liturgical Press, 2013
I can’t think of a better day than May 13, the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima, to bring to your attention Wendy Wright’s new book—and to make a wish for Wendy herself. The publisher’s description sums up well the author’s intent, and why this lavishly illustrated volume is of interest far beyond the widespread boundaries of the largest Catholic diocese in the United States:
The Lady of the Angels and Her City recounts Wendy Wright’s visitations to her hometown’s many Marian churches and shrines. But it is much more than a personal pilgrimage narrative. It offers important glimpses into the history of Los Angeles Catholicism, American Catholic culture, and Mary’s place in Catholic theology and tradition. It peeks into the heroic labors of the religious orders that went on mission there and the waves of immigrants who have arrived on American shores.
Readers who know the geography of Los Angeles Catholicism will surely enjoy Wright’s reflections on familiar places. But there is much here that will fascinate anyone interested in the history of Christianity in America or devotion to Mary by those who love her today.
Disclaimer from the start: This is a book I would have loved to have written, combining as it does two reignited passions, the city that shaped me and to which I have returned, and the devotion to Mary alive again in this revert heart. It’s also a book I wanted badly to rave about. Wendy Wright, professor of theology at Creighton University, contributor to the spirituality journal Weavings, and author of 14 books, has long been one of my favorite spiritual writers. Her seasonal reflections—The Vigil: Keeping Watch in the Season of Christ’s Coming and The Rising: Living the Mysteries of Lent, Easter, and Pentecost—are annual retreats-in-print for me. The photos that enliven every page (most by photographer Dorothy Tuma, who should receive cover credit, I think; others from the archives of the Archdiocese and the religious orders who have served here) make this book the equivalent of a whirlwind visit to the Marian shrines of the world, recreated in L.A.’s global village.
As it is, though (and fully ready to accept that this may be a simple case of envy), I have to downgrade my rating of The Lady of the Angels and Her City to what the old Legion of Decency movie ratings used to call A-IV: Suitable for Adults with Reservations. In other words, it’s complicated.
It’s not Wright’s progressive Catholicism and feminist theology that are problematic. Though this stance might turn away some of my blog neighbors and a good part of the flourishing communion of Marian devotees, Wright comes by it honestly as the unchurched daughter of parents committed to peace and justice, and a 1970s convert to Catholicism formed by the Santa Barbara Franciscans. Don’t dismiss The Lady of the Angels out of hand because of theological or political biases: there are treasures here for everyone.
More difficult for me to overlook are the numerous errors of fact, spelling, and style. This book, Wright says, was six years in the making, but I wish more time had been allotted for a good copy edit. Some errors are historical inaccuracies (Francis heard Christ’s call to repair his church and later established Clare’s convent at San Damiano, not at the Porziuncula), some of local geography (Immaculate Heart of Mary in Hollywood—my childhood parish and school—is north and west of Los Angeles City College, not south and east, and a good long walk from the Cahuenga Branch Library where Wright and I may have crossed paths on a hot summer day, not just nearby). Some are downright embarrassing, such as the misspelling of Cardinal Mahony’s title as Emminence on the title page and in the table of contents, and the misidentifcation of St John’s Seminary personnel Dr Paul Ford (called John Ford in the Acknowledgments) and Rita Faulders (called Rita Flanders in Chapter 8). I will freely admit to being an editing nazi, and I know that things like this won’t be nearly as jarring to readers who don’t know the territory, but a project this significant was worthy of more careful treatment.
The richness of what’s in The Lady of the Angels and Her City far outweighs those quibbles. What disappoints me, though, is what’s not in the book: a sense of any real encounter between Wright and Mary herself. That may be due to the way the book evolved. What began as a personal pilgrimage to places of Marian significance in Wright’s hometown later became an academic sabbatical project, and the two never quite become one. I love the intimacy of the memoir, perhaps because Wright and I grew up only a few years and a few blocks apart, but also because Mary is always revealed most truly in the personal. Too often, though, Wright the theologian and cultural anthropologist steps in to distance herself and the reader from the living reality captured so compellingly in Tuma’s photographs and described so eloquently in Wright’s interviews with believers. This is most apparent when Wright is discussing expressions of Marian devotion with which her experience and theological bent makes her uncomfortable—Mary as Queen and Conquistadora, traditionalist movements such as the Blue Army and the Knights of the Immaculata, the formally proclaimed doctrines of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption. The result is that The Lady of the Angels becomes less a pilgrimage than a series of beautiful postcards from a pilgrimage, full of field notes on the curious customs of the natives.
But pilgrimage is all about encounter: an openness to the person at the heart of the journey, a meeting that inevitably leaves you radically changed in a way that no longer allows for professorial remoteness. Wendy Wright may have had that kind of encounter—she hinted at it during a talk and book signing on Saturday at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels—but it seems not to have been with Mary herself, but with her devotees:
Closer still, with those who look to her as a model of the Christian life or who find her a companion on the journey, sister and friend, I find both inspiration and welcome. Standing among the fingerers of beads, the bearers of flowers, and those who entrust to her their keenest hopes, I find myself, simply, at home. There is something about the way my conversation partners describe their relationship to Mary, no matter what their perspectives on her or on life generally. There is a poignant tenderness, a palpable hopefulness that they communicate. (p. 231)
My wish for Wendy Wright is that she can retake her pilgrimage, seeking this time not knowledge of Mary but relationship with her. It means putting down the prejudices and the baggage. (Not as hard as it seems. Approached in even partial openness, Mary has a way of stripping away those nonessentials, either as tenderly as a mother wiping a child’s smudged face or as dramatically as a guerilla warrior lobbing grenades, depending on what’s needed!) It means not standing by observing the fingerers of beads and the bearers of flowers, but sinking to your knees (no matter how it hurts your joints and your pride) and joining them. And it often means (as I learned to my rueful surprise) starting that pilgrimage with the shrine or the manifestation of Mary that you find most foreign, frightening, or distasteful.
For Wright (as for me, for most of my life) that manifestation is clearly Our Lady of Fatima. Wright and I were both burdened by the politicization of Fatima that took place in the US during the Cold War, especially in John Birch Society-haunted Southern California. In our experience Fatima was bound up with rabid anticommunism, tinged with apocalyptic dread about imminent nuclear warfare and the terrifying Third Secret. That’s the face of Our Lady of Fatima we in the US still know best, whether among Blue Army members or in the communities of Vietnamese immigrants who still honor Our Lady of Fatima as a refuge against the loss of their homeland to communism.
But when I went to Fatima last September as part of a Marian pilgrimage—kicking and screaming, frankly, about starting off in my least favorite Marian site ever—I encountered the real face of the Lady of the Rosary, the Lady of Peace, the Mother of the Portuguese people, who come out every Sunday afternoon to walk her sanctuary like kids going home to mom for Sunday dinner. Not a trace of politics or apocalypse. The sun spinning in the sky as gloriously as it did during the apparitions. The shrine gleaming white, with believers making their way across the Cova da Iria on painful knees but with faces transfigured by joy, radiant with peace. She’s there, the Lady—not just in the iconic statue with its crown bearing a fragment of the bullet removed from Blessed John Paul II after the attempted assassination, or in the simple homes of the shepherd visionaries, or in the thousands carrying candles in nightly procession—but in person. She grabbed me, shook me, turned me upside down, and I will never be an observer again.
That’s why I said today, May 13, was a good day to make this wish for Wendy, and for anyone who reads her fascinating book: Don’t stop there. Go meet Mary. Let her in, let her grab you and shake you. That poignant tenderness, that palpable hopefulness—they’re there for you, in the embrace of the Lady of the Angels.
Pope Francis and lying to save life
Back during World War II, some people lied to save Jewish lives.
More recently, Lila Rose has used undercover tactics to expose Planned Parenthood.
At issue is the question of whether it is ever okay to lie, particularly when you’re trying to save lives.
We live in a violent world, and the issue keeps coming up in human history.
Here is some information you might want to be aware of involving Pope Francis.
On the One Hand
Before we get to the Pope Francis material, we should note that there is a strong view in the history of Catholic thought that says lying of any kind, for any reason, is always wrong.
This view has been endorsed by some of the biggest names in Catholic theology, including St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas.
There have been other views proposed as well, though they have not been the majority view, and it does not appear that the Magisterium has infallibly settled the question.
Indeed, the original edition of the Catechism of the Catholic Church contained a definition of lying that seemed to endorse a proposal made some decades ago that restricted what counts as a lie to telling a falsehood with the intent to deceive a person who had the right to know the truth.
If this was lying in the technical sense, then it would imply that some cases of lying in the broader, everyday sense (telling a falsehood with the intent to deceive, without specifying whether the deceived person has a right to the truth) would not be morally wrong. Some such acts could, potentially, be justified if the person to whom the (broad-sense) lie was told had no right to the truth.
The fact that the original edition of the Catechism included this statement is a notable indicator that the matter has not been infallibly settled, and advocates of the lying-is-always-wrong view should bear in mind that the history of the question is not uniform and does not appear to be infallibly settled.
On the Other Hand
Although the original edition of the Catechism seemed to endorse the restricted view of what counted as lying, they changed it.
Now the relevant passage defines lying this way:
To lie is to speak or act against the truth in order to lead someone into error [CCC 2483].
(Remember the “or act” part. It’s going to be important.)
When the Holy See released the changes to the original edition of the Catechism, they did so without commentary, and so Catholic moral theologians have tried to discern the significance of this change.
Was the Holy See endorsing the historical majority view? Or was it simply not wanting to endorse the restricted view and defaulting to a more general formulation of the kind one would expect in a catechetical text, leaving the technical questions to the experts to hash out over time, under the guidance of the Magisterium?
Whichever was the case, the publication of this new wording would not constitute an infallible determination of the issue any more than the publication of the original wording of the Catechism did.
Indeed, Cardinal Ratzinger was at pains to explain that the treatment of a subject in the Catechism does not change the weight the Magisterium assigns to a particular teaching.
Whatever weight it had before the publication of the Catechism, that is the weight it had afterwards.
However, advocates of the lying-is-sometimes-not-wrong view should bear in mind that the historical majority position and at least the wording in the current edition of the Catechism is against them.
Part of the Problem
Part of the problem here is that we are torn between two powerful intuitions.
On the one hand, we have an intuition–planted in human nature by God himself–that lying is wrong.
That’s a human universal. It appears in every culture. Indeed, cultures could not even form among people who didn’t have the level of mutual trust that the anti-lying ethic is meant to foster.
On the other hand, we also have an intuition that in some cases deceiving another person is not wrong, particularly when that person is an aggressor and the stakes are high.
Thus police officers adopt ruses when trying to catch criminals. Spies do it to serve their nations. Military forces do it to achieve victory on the battlefield.
How precisely these two intuitions–the need to tell the truth and the need to save lives–are to be squared is something too complex to go into here.
I will not be proposing any solutions to this question, and I await further guidance from the Magisterium.
However, I would like to call the reader’s attention to some material that has recently become available in English.
The Actions of Church Officials
It is well-documented that during World War II, various Church officials, including some at the Vatican, and including Pius XII himself, hid or authorized the hiding of Jewish individuals to protect them from the Nazis.
Hiding, though, doesn’t always involve a clear case of lying.
It does deprive the aggressor of knowledge of where their intended victims are, but unless they show up at your door, ask you what you know, and you lie to them, it doesn’t deceive them.
At least it can be argued that it doesn’t.
I’ve read accounts of Church officials doing more than just hiding Jews, things that actually would involve lying or facilitating lying (in the broad, colloquial sense), such as supplying them with false identification papers or false baptismal certificates so that they could pass as Christians.
I’ve never been able to obtain the kind of documentation of those claims that I would want, and so I’ve never brought them to this discussion.
Recently, however, I’ve come across documentation of a much more recent but similar set of circumstances, and they involve our new holy father . . .
Pope Francis
It is well-known that during his lifetime, Pope Francis’s homeland of Argentina has been wracked by problems, including a brutal dictatorship that kidnapped and killed large numbers of its own citizens.
This caused the Argentine people to face situations similar to those in Nazi-controlled territories, and some of them arrived at some of the same solutions in dealing with them.
Recently, a set of interviews with then-Cardinal Bergoglio was published in English as Pope Francis: His Life in His Own Words
It’s a fascinating read, and it contains some passages pertinent to our subject:
[Interviewer:] Apart from hiding people, did you do anything else?
[Cardinal Bergoglio:] I once smuggled a young man out of the country via Foz do Iguaçu in Brazil.
He looked quite a bit like me, carried my identity card, was wearing priest’s clothing, with the clerical collar, and in that way I managed to save his life.
I did what I could for my age and, with the few contacts I had, to plead for people who had been kidnapped.
I got to meet with General Jorge Videla and Admiral Emilio Massera twice.
In one of my attempts to talk to Videla, I managed to find out which military chaplain celebrated the Mass and persuaded him to say he was sick and to send me in his place.
I remember that I celebrated Mass in the residence of the commander in chief of the army, before the whole Videla family, one Saturday afternoon.
Afterward, I asked Videla if I could have a word with him, with the intention of finding out where the arrested priests were being held.
. . .
It is true that Jalics—who was born in Hungary but was an Argentine citizen with an Argentine passport—wrote to me while I was still the provincial superior to ask me to do this for him because he had a justified fear of coming to Argentina and being arrested again.
So I sent the authorities a written request—not mentioning the real reason, but stating that the trip was very expensive—for him to be able to get it seen to at the embassy in Bonn.
I delivered the letter by hand, and the civil servant to whom I gave it asked me what had caused Jalics to leave so suddenly. “He and his friend were accused of being guerrilla fighters, but they had nothing to do with any such thing,” I answered. “Give me the letter, then, and you’ll get the reply in due course,” he said.
What Was the Nature of these Acts?
Cardinal Bergoglio seems in these situations to have used methods that bear a striking similarity to the kind of tactics used to save life in other situations.
Now that this information is available in English, it’s going to be part of the discussion of this question. People of the view that lying (in the colloquial sense) is permissible to save life will bring these passages up, so it’s worth asking the question: Did he lie or was he complicit in lying in order to save life?
In the case of the letter he wrote, perhaps not. He might have phrased himself in such a way that what he did counted as a mental reservation rather than a lie.
What about persuading the other priest to say he was sick? It could be that he was in some way under the weather, but what Cardinal Bergoglio says does not suggest this.
One might try justifying giving the young man his passport and dressing him in priestly clothes on the grounds that these didn’t involve speech acts on Cardinal Bergoglio’s part, but–as we saw in the Catechism’s current definition of lying–lying doesn’t have to involve speech. It can be speaking or acting against the truth in order to lead someone into error–the error, in this case, being believing that the young man was then-Fr. Bergoglio.
What to Make of This?
We should be cautious drawing implications from this.
One might hold that these situations do not, in fact, involve lying or complicity in lying, though that is not obvious from what Cardinal Bergoglio said.
Also, if they did involve lying, people can and do make mistakes. It’s possible that Pope Francis now regrets having done some or all of these, though he does not indicate that in the interview. In fact, he seems pleased of having saved the young man’s life by helping him pose as Fr. Bergoglio.
Furthermore, at the time of the original events and the interview, he was not yet pope and did not have the responsibility and the graces of that office, which might lead him to take a new view of these matters. As Ed Peters has pointed out, we have to be cautious in reading statements made by pontiffs before they are in office and drawing conclusions from them.
Furthermore, nothing the future pope did in these passages was an act of the Magisterium.
These passages are noteworthy, though, inasmuch as they provide a first-person, by-the-man-himself account of the use of these types of tactics to save life by a churchman of some note then and of even more note now.
They provide the kind of account that I haven’t found for similar situations in the World War II period, and now that they’re available in English, they’re bound to come up in future discussions of this subject.
We should be careful, though, not to make too much–or too little–of them.
What Now?
If you like the information I’ve presented here, you should join my Secret Information Club.
If you’re not familiar with it, the Secret Information Club is a free service that I operate by email.
I send out information on a variety of fascinating topics connected with the Catholic faith.
In fact, the very first thing you’ll get if you sign up is information about what Pope Benedict said about the book of Revelation.
He has a lot of interesting things to say!
If you’d like to find out what they are, just sign up at www.SecretInfoClub.com or use this handy sign-up form:
Just email me at jimmy@secretinfoclub.com if you have any difficulty.
In the meantime, what do you think?
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While I agree “austerity measures” would be disasterousand the govt’s plan is sensible to say that “Abbott’s reply is appropriate and sensible” is a bit odd. He plans a stupidly generous paid parental leave scheme paid for by increasing tax on business, he plans a ridiculous “direct action” plan paid for from some unknown source of savings, he will repeal both the carbon mining taxes, make low income earners pay more tax on their super, delay perhaps stop an increase on the super guarantee, cut family tax benefit payments and supposedly plans to reverse means test the private health rebate, family tax benefits as well as reverse the tax increase on high income earning superannuation.
All of this will increase the deficit or result in deeper cuts while at the same time redirecting govt support from the most needy to the least – how is that good fiscal policy?
by Jimmy on May 17, 2013 at 1:26 pm
An aspirational speech.
by klewso on May 17, 2013 at 1:34 pm
Abbott argues that deficits are due to excessive spending, something easily fixable by voting in a Coalition government that would cut spending. This means that revenue is perfectly fine. At the same time, he refers to a “budget emergency” necessitating spending cuts that he would not otherwise make. This means that revenue is not fine at all.
Maybe I need to be a Rhodes Scholar to make sense of how both of these can be simultaneously true.
by Sam on May 17, 2013 at 2:03 pm
” if there is no carbon tax, there is no need for compensation…..Hockey was exactly right, of course”
Yes he is so right, business always pass on cost savings to their customers……
by jennatilz mckrackin on May 17, 2013 at 2:03 pm
This is a country in “emergency” according to Abbott
The truth is that Australian economy is doing well – really well. Growth 13% since 2007. Productivity growth is higher now than it was under Howard. The share market is up about 10% this year. Business investment has never been higher.
One of the lowest unemployment rates in the developed world. Greece etc are around 30%, USA 9%.
Net debt,as a share of GDP is low. Around 10% of GDP. USA, UK are at around 70%, Greece etc are 100% plus.
Abbott is an economic minnow. This was proven when he compared what Cyprus did to peoples savings in the bank to the implementation of a 15% on superannuation earnings
by AussieAchmed on May 17, 2013 at 2:09 pm
Quote from Budget Rely – “The Coalition’s Plan has two objectives: first, to take the budget pressure off Australian households; and second, to strengthen our economy so that, over time, there’s more to go round for everyone.”
First – take away payments to middle class and low paid – take heart people this will take pressure off your household budget.
Take away the $500 contribution to low income workers superannuation. By the time you notice the effect of this Abbott will be retired on his Parliamentary Pension worth thousands each year
Delay introduction of super increase to 12% – this is only expected to cost the average “joe” around $127,000. I mean in terms of how much the minimum wage is – this is chicken feed – surely the low wage earners wont mind working an extra couple of years – Abbott and his billionaire mates will show support and cheer you on from the side lines in mercs or yachts while sitting on some beach resort – now isn’t that comforting??
by AussieAchmed on May 17, 2013 at 2:15 pm
Bernard, just a small point, but don’t you think referring to “Greg Hunt’s risible Soil Magic / Direct Action scheme” in those terms is the sort of linguistic technique whose home is in Andrew Bolt’s columns and, more particularly, in his comments section?
by Keith Thomas on May 17, 2013 at 2:33 pm
Achmed – You forgot cut off the school kids bonus and FTB bonus payments and give the money to the wealthy by rolling back means testing.
by Jimmy on May 17, 2013 at 2:33 pm
What has happened to the really really big issue the opposition have been so concerned about-stopping the boats! Didn’t hear a word about it in the budget reply, so I’m assuming we can all go back to sleeping soundly. The borders are safe! Phew-that was close.
by Griffiths Karen on May 17, 2013 at 2:42 pm
I am pretty sure that Abbott’s speach was exactly what everyone thought it would be – an appeal to the economically and politically naive demographic that he has so cynically exploted before. If they vote him in they really will get the clueless Government they deserve!
It was good to see Swan say what has been glaringly obvious for a year or more – that Abbott’s ‘turn the boats back’ mantra is in complete contradication to his promise not to send refugees to any country that has not signed the UN Refugee Convention.
Exactly where is he going to send the boats back to? Not to Indonesia, not to Sri Lanka, not to Afghanistan or Iran or Burma … I think New Zealand had better watch out as Abbott has put himself in a position where he will have to tow the boats to Auckland harbour and shove them in there!
Same as the massive crippling debt lie when he says that the country has to live within it’s means …’just like families do’ I would kill to owe just 10% of one year of my income – that 10% being made up of my entire mortgage, car loan, credit cards etc etc. Most familes would owe three, four or five times or more of their clear income for one year. If Australia lived economically as Australian families do the country would owe trillions (or some massively huge debt anyway).
Why does the entire media let him get away with this bullsh#t? If I can see the ridiculousness of what Abbott says, why can’t at least some part of the mass media?
by Thorn on May 17, 2013 at 3:36 pm
With Abbott’s plan to repeal the carbon price legislation there is no guarantee that business will reduce prices in line with the full amount they increased them when blaming the carbon price legislation. Abbott is relying on the honesty and integrity of business…oh look there’s another pig flying by….
We will see a whole lot of reasons why the claimed full amount will not be removed. The door for manipulation of the price(s) was opened by state govts not legislating that it must be shown on an electricity bill
by AussieAchmed on May 17, 2013 at 3:59 pm
While I am not against a review of the GST rate I am against GST being put on basic food. It is already applied to processed food. Any attempt to extend it to fresh fruit and vegetables or basics like flour, suger, milk, fish, meat, etc. should be rejected. People need to be encouraged to eat healthy, not be slugged with an extra tax.
Also it will be interesting to see how much rorting of Abbotts paid parental leave scheme will occur when small business realise they can employ their pregnant relatives on high salaries, then let them take paid leave on the cost of the tax payer.
by Andrew ( ) on May 17, 2013 at 4:30 pm
What are we going to expect for the next 4 years. Abbott seems to have no idea – he is as is well know an economic dummy and his speech in rely could have been a much shorter lecture. We know what’s best for you was the approach but we don’t know what your expecataions are. The basis of economics is that of the definition of values and perception of the values of the electorate. In this instance Swan and Gillard have the high ground with the NIDS and Gonski. Abbott has no such vision with the Paid Parental Scheme as his main focus – its sad really – how do we elevate such people into leadership positions?
by tonyfunnywalker on May 17, 2013 at 4:33 pm
Sam, with regards to holding two opposing ideas simultaneously, don’t forget Abbott is a avid catholic and an ex seminarian. Catholic theology, as with most theology, is an exercise in trying to reconcile opposite principles, facts and ideas to fit in with a system spawned by an irrational ‘faith’ I am sure Abbott would have no problem with being able to entertain two opposing ideas at once. Its not disimilar to the quantum state of a particle which can be resolved in two ways when it interacts with another. Abbott’s mind is like that particle and his mind goes around in the ‘quantum’ state and only resolves when he is asked a question. He will then give what he deems the appropriate response. Ditto for the rest of the catholic cabinet. The smug righteous and certainty of the redeemed.
by Paddy Forsayeth on May 17, 2013 at 4:44 pm
Since his policy is still to “turn back the boats” why didn’t he axe the increase in asylum seeker processing that Swan included? According to Tony, they’re not going to make it here anyway. So, why keep the increased costs?? Of course, if he wins, I would be happy to be coincidentally treading water in the neat vicinity of said vessel just so as to hitch a ride to a better country.
by colin skene on May 17, 2013 at 6:17 pm
I think after such a splendid budget reply, that even managed to make WW2 trivial, the PM should kneel at Abbott’s feet and acknowledge his greatness and resign; thus, showing respect to the voice and wisdom of the people, or at least the MSM, Rupert and Gina. After all, it just a nuisance for all and sundry there is a small thing called an election which is needed to make it formal, isn’t it?
by Julia on May 17, 2013 at 6:27 pm
If the polls are to be believed…low income people in droves seem to want to vote for an Abbott and tax cuts for the wealthy. Yep the average Australian; la, la, la, whgat fun for all when the professed Abbott cuts take place.
by Bill Hilliger on May 17, 2013 at 6:58 pm
What a load of codswallop! We haven’t been softened up that much have we? surely not? perhaps yes? MSM/Murdochracy win, Gold ?
by GF50 on May 17, 2013 at 7:03 pm
I wanted to write something about MM’s speech but.. how does one satirise the already risible? Unfortunately sentience seems to be a rare element if the polls hate radio are any indication.
Only the greedy stupid would vote tory, greedy to want what they proffer and stupid to think that they will get it post election.
ESPECIALLY the PPL – that is beyond parody.
by AR on May 17, 2013 at 7:05 pm
Unfortunately Abbott will get a pretty much free ride all the way as the media are all running scared. Now is not the time to be rocking any boats especially at Mr. Murdoch’s MonkeysRUs publications…
by Mark from Melbourne on May 17, 2013 at 7:05 pm
Throwing $4bn at taxpayers for no reason? No reason??
Throwing $4bn at taxpayers to get elected seems plenty of reason to me.
by David Hand on May 17, 2013 at 7:06 pm
Some people say that when Abbott takes money from the low income earners, they in turn will stop subscribing to Foxtel and News Ltd papers as the discresionary spend is curtailed.
by Bill Hilliger on May 17, 2013 at 7:27 pm