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This post is a rejoinder to a speech given by the current pope in 1989, posted at Enlightened Catholicism. (Read it, please, if you can.)
With all due respect to an elderly bishop and theologian, to me his musings on the dynamics of the psyche, his diagnosis of modern man's psychopathology, and his proposal of a cure via philosophical evangelization - all presented in abstract language void of any concrete basis in Scripture or the Fathers - leave the reader awash in a sea of airy abstractions, punctuated by fanciful conceptual leaps.
Driven by the same pet peeves we see today - an agenda with no discernible resemblance to the Gospel - the pope is clearly on a mission laid out 23 long years ago. And to this clinical psychologist, the speech reads as little more than abstract drivel - missing a human touch - but tinged, I hate to say this, with something akin to nuttiness. As Shakespeare might have opined: "Sound and Fury. Signifying nothing."
Sorry to assign reading, but I beg you, if you haven't already done so, to go and read the speech. As I want to be fair and allow you to form your own opinion, despite my opening remarks. But folks... I am aghast!
Here are some initial parts of the speech (all I could bear to closely analyze), which set the scene for my remarks below (but feel free to skip over 1-19, a tedious necessity, to ensure a careful analysis):
It is exceedingly difficult for this reader and would-be respondent to even make sense of the abstractions and illogical leaps which I have detailed above. And that's before he even gets to points 1, 2, and 3. Nevertheless, it would appear from the paragraph I've just flagged that the pope views faith as unquestioning acceptance of abstract philosophical principles. In contrast to a relationship with the indwelling Trinity. In contrast to the Gospel. And the Good News - to me - is twisted into Bad News. A dark vision. Simply to be believed. Or not. (As he makes clear.)
Somewhere along the line this man has entered an alternate universe. Unmoored from the Gospel, so far as I can see. Taking for "faith" a sort of abstract, philosophical compendium, placed into a blender, poured out as pablum to be swallowed whole, it would appear. Making of the faithful puppets on Vatican strings. For I see nothing of this in the words or actions of Jesus or the hammered-out doctrines of the Creed or the close spiritual/scriptural reasoning of the Fathers, or the concept of faith as a relationship.
Only in point #1 does he cite actual publications. Not for what they contain, but for what's missing: The "doctrine of creation" he asserts has disappeared from the theological radar screen. (Restoring this doctrine, apparently, is the basis from which our pablum conscience is to be formed?) Next come abstract leaps of "logic" yielding this sentence: "In a time when we are experiencing the agonizing of creation against man’s work and when the question of the limits and standards of creation upon our activity has become the central problem of our ethical responsibility, this fact must appear quite strange." Strange, indeed, is that sentence. Nevertheless, it gives a flavor for how he mistakes the signs of the times, while revealing a strange tendency to empathize with creation, but not with actual persons. Followed by a lament that we, as he views it, are unable to read a spiritual message in nature (he calls it the "material world") and he mourns an imagined "demise of metaphysics" which somehow "relates" to a perceived lack of teaching on creation.
I must admit, if this man were in my office, at this point I'd be wondering about hospitalization.
Now, I could go on... quoting and trying to parse the abstractions he seems most comfortable dealing with, the abstract assumptions and generalizations and so on, all of which seem so far afield from Jesus or the Old Testament for that matter. So far from the blessed wonder of concrete, nitty-gritty reality throughout the Bible. Instead, Benedict seems hung up on yearning for an alternate universe. Of abstractions. I can imagine Euclidian Geometry would really please him. Those neat proofs. No sex. Triangles and Squares being their different "genders" so to speak, each with their different "roles" so neatly laid out, nothing amiss. No need for freedom or rights.
With all due respect for this man's age and years of study and prayer, he seems unable to reach out and touch someone. As Jesus did. So I simply can't see how his reasoning is likely to reach those of us he clearly views as degenerates. Indeed, his thinking, to me, sounds Calvinistic - as if we were utterly depraved.
Let's take a moment to consider: Where is the Lord of Love? Where is the Good Shepherd? Are we not the People of God? Have we not been baptized into a Royal Priesthood?
Instead (in point #2) we get: "The decline of the doctrine on creation includes the decline of metaphysics, man’s imprisonment in the empirical." Yes, it actually appears that he wants everyone to leave the everyday (as Rahner lovingly describes the world) and join him in his beloved abstractions. Greek metaphysical abstractions instead of grassroots imagery, so vivid in Hebrew scriptures (mountains leaping like rams) and the Gospels (Jesus feeding the multitudes) . Instead of faith as a relationship ("Come to me all you who labor and are burdened...")
Dear God! Please, send someone who is a true theologian, to help me here! A true theologian as the Fathers viewed it. Someone whose years of prayer have so melted into humility that the Living Presence of God flows through him or her. Someone to whom God has granted insight and wisdom and an ability to reach out and touch someone. With Divine Love and Compassion and Mercy as Jesus demonstrates so movingly.
It's hard for me to comprehend, from this speech, that the pope is actually a theologian. And heaven knows he is no psychologist - but has deigned to "diagnose" European "man's" current psychic state ("the deep desperation of mankind today") and, without citing either scripture or the Fathers, he deigns to propose a solution to his personal diagnosis - as if we all had been infected by a common brain disease and he alone knows the treatment to alleviate the symptoms he believes we ALL manifest! (Is this the source of the famous "many" change?) And why foist the treatment on the US/sisters, when he's diagnosed "European man" - oh, well...
It's clear Benedict has his betes noires. You could make a list. Easily. From just this speech. The various vendettas going on today ~ laid out 23 years ago. What is not clear, however, is how in the heck he imagines reaching anyone with this agenda?
Forgive me, Father, but this is abstract drivel. Sound and fury. Signifying nothing.
Makes you yearn for a blade of grass. A flower. Give me Psalm 1 any day. The blessed Realities of Scripture: Creation. God's calls. God's visitations. The Psalms. The Prophets. The Gospels.
Maranatha! Come, Lord Jesus!
With all due respect to an elderly bishop and theologian, to me his musings on the dynamics of the psyche, his diagnosis of modern man's psychopathology, and his proposal of a cure via philosophical evangelization - all presented in abstract language void of any concrete basis in Scripture or the Fathers - leave the reader awash in a sea of airy abstractions, punctuated by fanciful conceptual leaps.
Driven by the same pet peeves we see today - an agenda with no discernible resemblance to the Gospel - the pope is clearly on a mission laid out 23 long years ago. And to this clinical psychologist, the speech reads as little more than abstract drivel - missing a human touch - but tinged, I hate to say this, with something akin to nuttiness. As Shakespeare might have opined: "Sound and Fury. Signifying nothing."
Sorry to assign reading, but I beg you, if you haven't already done so, to go and read the speech. As I want to be fair and allow you to form your own opinion, despite my opening remarks. But folks... I am aghast!
Here are some initial parts of the speech (all I could bear to closely analyze), which set the scene for my remarks below (but feel free to skip over 1-19, a tedious necessity, to ensure a careful analysis):
- General Pet Peeve: People in the pews are questioning papal authority. He calls the laity's concerns "difficulties with the faith" = "a litany of objections to the practice and teaching of the Church" (However, you will notice below that the difficulties have nothing to do with basics defined in the creed!)
- Specific Burrs under pope's saddle: "principal elements of this litany" = pelvic/gender issues (birth control, same-sex attraction) and "sacramental order" (divorce/remarriage & admission to Eucharist, women's ordination) - in other words, our "faith" somehow stands (or falls) on these crucial (Gospel?) gender/sex/marital issues!
- Bottom Line Pet Peeve: People should not think for themselves, since "individual conscience"or "freedom" (of "conscience") = bad, bad, bad ... (This in spite of Vatican II pronouncements to the contrary, not to speak of our God-given free will.)
- Concluding Diagnosis: "They [laity's concerns - #2 above] spring from one and the same vision of humanity within which there operates a particular notion of human freedom."[#3 above] (How right he is, except most people do not view this as a pathology. Here we enter different worlds.)
- Stop and Notice: Nothing about the Gospel. No scripture. No Patristics. (Pet Peeves of a pope.)
- Broad generalization: "modern man would find it difficult to relate to the Church’s traditional sexual morality" = lumping everything together as if people are endorsing prostitution, child abuse, bestiality, polygamy, adultery, promiscuity, etc. (Sexuality and Authority = the Gospel?)
- Broad assumption: "the Church’s traditional sexual morality" is being critiqued "no matter how meaningful [it] may have been under past historical conditions." (No history cited and history might offer a very different view here... Plus, how dare we question?)
- Reformulated Diagnosis: "we are no longer prepared to subordinate [our conscience] to some external authority" = let your fingers do the walking and we'll do the talking. (There's that dreaded God-given freedom.)
- Prescribed Treatment = We will think for you! (Conscience as a sort of robotic method issued from on high = Rome.)
- Stop and Notice: The proposed robotic method has nothing to do with the Gospel.
- Reformulated Diagnosis: "aura of morality" [our choices] = "surrender of moral integrity, the simplifications of a lax conscience." (Laity's failure to bow to Rome's sexual fixations has led us to a point of total depravity across the board.)
- Prescribed Treatment = "conscience understood as that knowledge which derives from a higher form of knowing." (Conscience trickles down from on high: We will think for you!)
- Broad strange assumption: One's relationship to one's body "changes" if we think for ourselves, if we don't follow these norms from on high "as the ultimate arbiter of one’s obligation." (Termed an "assumption" as this appears to be an important part of his "argument" - but no evidence or reasoning is mustered to support the claim.)
- Strange logic: Body now being discussed as if it were an appendage - instead of us! (Is he delicately referring to the male sexual organ?? Or perhaps due to "robotic" view of how people should or do make choices?)
- Strange logic: "No longer does man expect to receive a message from his bodiliness as to who he is and what he should do..." (You got me, folks! Where this comes from ... I cannot fathom.)
- Stop and Notice: Nothing about the Gospel! No scripture at all. No Patristics. (In this supposed anthropology or psychology which bears no resemblance to Jesus!)
- Reformulated Diagnosis (phrased in strange logic): So perverse [my word] have we become, apparently, that "the body no longer expresses being at all, on the contrary, it has become a piece of property." (Dualism. At best!)
- Strange logic and assumptive leap: "this way of thinking first became an actual possibility through the fundamental separation—not a theoretical but a practical and constantly practiced separation—of sexuality and procreation." (Translation: Birth control has deranged humanity.)
- Strange logic leading to Weird Bottom-line Diagnosis and Plan to Assess for Treatment:
It would be interesting to follow in detail this revolutionary vision about man which has appeared behind our rather haphazardly concocted litany of objections to the Church’s teaching. Without a doubt this will be one of the principal challenges for anthropological reflection in coming years. This reflection will have to sort out meticulously where quite meaningful corrections to traditional notions appear and where there begins a truly fundamental opposition to faith’s vision of man, an opposition that admits no possibility of compromise but places squarely before us the alternative of believing or not.
It is exceedingly difficult for this reader and would-be respondent to even make sense of the abstractions and illogical leaps which I have detailed above. And that's before he even gets to points 1, 2, and 3. Nevertheless, it would appear from the paragraph I've just flagged that the pope views faith as unquestioning acceptance of abstract philosophical principles. In contrast to a relationship with the indwelling Trinity. In contrast to the Gospel. And the Good News - to me - is twisted into Bad News. A dark vision. Simply to be believed. Or not. (As he makes clear.)
Somewhere along the line this man has entered an alternate universe. Unmoored from the Gospel, so far as I can see. Taking for "faith" a sort of abstract, philosophical compendium, placed into a blender, poured out as pablum to be swallowed whole, it would appear. Making of the faithful puppets on Vatican strings. For I see nothing of this in the words or actions of Jesus or the hammered-out doctrines of the Creed or the close spiritual/scriptural reasoning of the Fathers, or the concept of faith as a relationship.
Only in point #1 does he cite actual publications. Not for what they contain, but for what's missing: The "doctrine of creation" he asserts has disappeared from the theological radar screen. (Restoring this doctrine, apparently, is the basis from which our pablum conscience is to be formed?) Next come abstract leaps of "logic" yielding this sentence: "In a time when we are experiencing the agonizing of creation against man’s work and when the question of the limits and standards of creation upon our activity has become the central problem of our ethical responsibility, this fact must appear quite strange." Strange, indeed, is that sentence. Nevertheless, it gives a flavor for how he mistakes the signs of the times, while revealing a strange tendency to empathize with creation, but not with actual persons. Followed by a lament that we, as he views it, are unable to read a spiritual message in nature (he calls it the "material world") and he mourns an imagined "demise of metaphysics" which somehow "relates" to a perceived lack of teaching on creation.
I must admit, if this man were in my office, at this point I'd be wondering about hospitalization.
Now, I could go on... quoting and trying to parse the abstractions he seems most comfortable dealing with, the abstract assumptions and generalizations and so on, all of which seem so far afield from Jesus or the Old Testament for that matter. So far from the blessed wonder of concrete, nitty-gritty reality throughout the Bible. Instead, Benedict seems hung up on yearning for an alternate universe. Of abstractions. I can imagine Euclidian Geometry would really please him. Those neat proofs. No sex. Triangles and Squares being their different "genders" so to speak, each with their different "roles" so neatly laid out, nothing amiss. No need for freedom or rights.
With all due respect for this man's age and years of study and prayer, he seems unable to reach out and touch someone. As Jesus did. So I simply can't see how his reasoning is likely to reach those of us he clearly views as degenerates. Indeed, his thinking, to me, sounds Calvinistic - as if we were utterly depraved.
Let's take a moment to consider: Where is the Lord of Love? Where is the Good Shepherd? Are we not the People of God? Have we not been baptized into a Royal Priesthood?
Instead (in point #2) we get: "The decline of the doctrine on creation includes the decline of metaphysics, man’s imprisonment in the empirical." Yes, it actually appears that he wants everyone to leave the everyday (as Rahner lovingly describes the world) and join him in his beloved abstractions. Greek metaphysical abstractions instead of grassroots imagery, so vivid in Hebrew scriptures (mountains leaping like rams) and the Gospels (Jesus feeding the multitudes) . Instead of faith as a relationship ("Come to me all you who labor and are burdened...")
Dear God! Please, send someone who is a true theologian, to help me here! A true theologian as the Fathers viewed it. Someone whose years of prayer have so melted into humility that the Living Presence of God flows through him or her. Someone to whom God has granted insight and wisdom and an ability to reach out and touch someone. With Divine Love and Compassion and Mercy as Jesus demonstrates so movingly.
It's hard for me to comprehend, from this speech, that the pope is actually a theologian. And heaven knows he is no psychologist - but has deigned to "diagnose" European "man's" current psychic state ("the deep desperation of mankind today") and, without citing either scripture or the Fathers, he deigns to propose a solution to his personal diagnosis - as if we all had been infected by a common brain disease and he alone knows the treatment to alleviate the symptoms he believes we ALL manifest! (Is this the source of the famous "many" change?) And why foist the treatment on the US/sisters, when he's diagnosed "European man" - oh, well...
It's clear Benedict has his betes noires. You could make a list. Easily. From just this speech. The various vendettas going on today ~ laid out 23 years ago. What is not clear, however, is how in the heck he imagines reaching anyone with this agenda?
Forgive me, Father, but this is abstract drivel. Sound and fury. Signifying nothing.
Makes you yearn for a blade of grass. A flower. Give me Psalm 1 any day. The blessed Realities of Scripture: Creation. God's calls. God's visitations. The Psalms. The Prophets. The Gospels.
Maranatha! Come, Lord Jesus!
