Roman Documents

Just got around to reading the letter of Pope Benedict concerning the lifting of the excommunications. It's part explanation, part apology, part teaching, part exhortation--and entirely amazing. Most papal letters are very formal, floating serenely in a plane of abstraction. This one grapples with real issues and measures out genuine passion. It reads like something out of the correspondence of St. Basil or St. Gregory Theologian. Truly a patristic text, a letter from a father in a time of crisis. This is not the letter of an authoritarian, but of one who "teaches with authority." Eis polla eti, despota!

Some more hidden jewels of Spe Salvi.

1. "Asceticism and Involuntary Sin"

I have argued that the notion of "involuntary sin" is a key to understanding the Eastern Christian moral vision. It is a vision in which moral decisions and asceticism are absolutely intertwined. Now I'm not sure I can actually claim that the Pope agrees with me (!) but I can definitely quote something from him that is entirely consonant with this vision:

The vessel, that is your heart, must first be enlarged and then cleansed, freed from the vinegar and its taste. This requires hard work and is painful, but in this way alone do we become suited to that for which we are destined....To pray is not to step outside history and withdraw to our own private corner of happiness. When we pray properly we undergo a process of inner purification which opens us up to God and thus to our fellow human beings as well. In prayer we must learn what we can truly ask of God—what is worthy of God. We must learn that we cannot pray against others. We must learn that we cannot ask for the superficial and comfortable things that we desire at this moment—that meagre, misplaced hope that leads us away from God. We must learn to purify our desires and our hopes. We must free ourselves from the hidden lies with which we deceive ourselves. God sees through them, and when we come before God, we too are forced to recognize them. “But who can discern his errors? Clear me from hidden faults” prays the Psalmist (Ps 19:12 [18:13]). Failure to recognize my guilt, the illusion of my innocence, does not justify me and does not save me, because I am culpable for the numbness of my conscience and my incapacity to recognize the evil in me for what it is. If God does not exist, perhaps I have to seek refuge in these lies, because there is no one who can forgive me; no one who is the true criterion. Yet my encounter with God awakens my conscience in such a way that it no longer aims at self-justification, and is no longer a mere reflection of me and those of my contemporaries who shape my thinking, but it becomes a capacity for listening to the Good itself. (Para. 33).

2. Purgatory and the East

I was astonished to see the Pope suggest (in para. 44) an exegesis of the parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man in which Dives languishes in "an intermediate state between death and resurrection, a state in which the final sentence is yet to be pronounced." This offers a view of the afterlife entirely in continuity with what I understand to be the Orthodox belief.

What follows (para. 45) is a discussion of the idea of purgation in which he seems to propose viewing the Eastern and Western positions as historically contingent developments of a single basic understanding. The whole paragraph is worth quoting:

45. This early Jewish idea of an intermediate state includes the view that these souls are not simply in a sort of temporary custody but, as the parable of the rich man illustrates, are already being punished or are experiencing a provisional form of bliss. There is also the idea that this state can involve purification and healing which mature the soul for communion with God. The early Church took up these concepts, and in the Western Church they gradually developed into the doctrine of Purgatory. We do not need to examine here the complex historical paths of this development; it is enough to ask what it actually means. With death, our life-choice becomes definitive—our life stands before the judge. Our choice, which in the course of an entire life takes on a certain shape, can have a variety of forms. There can be people who have totally destroyed their desire for truth and readiness to love, people for whom everything has become a lie, people who have lived for hatred and have suppressed all love within themselves. This is a terrifying thought, but alarming profiles of this type can be seen in certain figures of our own history. In such people all would be beyond remedy and the destruction of good would be irrevocable: this is what we mean by the word Hell. On the other hand there can be people who are utterly pure, completely permeated by God, and thus fully open to their neighbours—people for whom communion with God even now gives direction to their entire being and whose journey towards God only brings to fulfilment what they already are.

Note that the Holy Father describes the doctrine of purgatory as belonging not to the "Catholic Church" but to the "Western Church." I must remember this next time a trad. RC tells me I have to "believe in Purgatory" to be a Catholic! Purgation doesn't need its own eschatological territory, and the whole apparatus of the Western approach, with its fires and indulgences and temporal computations of relative purgatorial sentences is not "Catholic" but "Western."

Looking forward to reading it of course. John Allen noted the release on the Feast of St. Andrew was not coincidental. There's hope in that alone!

Couldn't help noticing this remark:

Benedict wanted this encyclical to appear in the Christmas season, since Christmas is the great feast of the Incarnation, traditionally understood as the principal symbol of Christian hope. On Saturday, the church enters the period of Advent, pointing towards Christmas.

So he can meet his deadlines! I'm glad someone can!! :-{

Here's a classic conundrum in east-west relations.

Many easterners would agree that contemporary western liturgical music is, as Stiffy Byng might put it, a "gawd-'elp-us." They would agree with Monsignor Valentín Miserachs Grau, director of the Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music:

How far we are from the true spirit of sacred music, that is, of true liturgical music....How can we stand it that such a wave of inconsistent, arrogant and ridiculous profanities have so easily gained a stamp of approval in our celebrations?

Jolly good. Oh, but look at the default solution: centralized control. At least that is how the conservative news service, Zenit, reports it:

Perhaps a pontifical office with authority over sacred music would correct the abuses that have occurred in this area, suggested a Vatican official.

Spiritual problem, authoritarian solution. All this points to an issue bigger than music. As Bertie might say (I'm in a Wodehouse state of mind), rem acu bloomin' tetigisti...

Christina's recent comment reminded me that the post referring to the brief remarks by John de Fiesole on the Disputations blog has disappeared in our little journey to this new URL.

I'm not sure that the author is quite correct in saying that the CDF document "hoses" the Catholics for being out of communion with the Orthodox in quite the same way it "hoses" the Orthodox for refusing to accept communion with the Pope. The actual paragraph is this:

A very well-written and impassioned reflection by an intelligent and sensitive Orthodox priest on the CDF document. (It is certainly a more reasoned response than the slightly hysterical one ascribed to Romanian Patriarch Teoctist!) Ecumenism is not an overly popular enterprise within Orthodoxy today, and it would be a tragedy if (as I suspect it does) Father George's discouragement is widespread among those few people who have invested much of their energy resources into dialogue between Catholics and Orthodox.

My only comment is that we must all understand that the Vatican operates like any bureaucracy. Underneath the apparent unity lies a variety of agendas fighting for ascendancy. In the pontificate of John Paul II we certainly saw one of these groups succeed in the publication of those remarkable documents Orientale Lumen and Ut Unum Sint. But that same pontificate also saw the publication of Dominus Iesus of which this most recent document is just an aftershock. One document, especially from a dicastery rather than the pope's own pen, does not a revolution make. If the new document is indeed as "error" as Father George puts it, then the very essence of ecumenical work lies in exposing the error to the light of theological and pastoral reason.

Zenit News has published a very interesting interview with one of my favorite Russian Orthodox Bishops, HILARION of Vienna. Vladyka Hilarion is always a good read. This interview is on the recent Vatican document of the nature of the Church that Father Nicholas mentioned yesterday in his blogging.

There is one point that His Grace makes that I really want to lift up. He understands how it is that the Roman Church can view the Orthodox as "lacking something" by being out of communion with the Pope. But he wants Rome to understand that the Orthodox view it as lacking something being out of communion with them.

Now I don't suppose Rome would have much trouble admitting that, insofar as it is partly responsible for the schism, that there is indeed some kind of defect on its part in its relationship with Orthodoxy. But here's the big question: what kind of "defect."

Continue reading "Defective Churches"