See “Mr. Potato Head Concelebrates The Holy Mass” below.

Click here to view the video: http://www.fratres.wordpress.com

Alone in the west, without a rival no longer, the church, the new and true Israel after the flesh, could exist in all its fulness, both as the mass of the baptised, and as its clerical branch (deacons, presbyters, and bishops, in communion with the bishop of Rome), and as its royal branch (the kings and the holy roman emperor), and as its prophetic branch (the religious orders pointing to the world beyond), and as its sapiential branch (the doctors of the schools, the lovers of the wisdom of the cross).

All this the social reign of Christ the King, however imperfectly it was realised that this was the social reign of Christ the SERVANT King, and that the actions of all the baptised, of the clergy, of the crowned, of the consecrated, of the learned, were to be moulded after humility. All this was the one world of the respublica christiana, the corpus christianorum: there was no “State” as such exisitng over and against “Church”, rather the distinction between regnum and sacerdotium within the one ecclesia: just as in the Israel after the flesh there was both Solomon and Zadok, but both were part of the one people of God, the true humanity ranged against the beasts from the sea, the leviathans that conterfeit the peaceable kingdom.

How much role the sword played WITHIN this corpus was always a matter for debate, but it was understood that mercy and compassion should be the goal, and how much that corpus could use the sword in defending itself from without was also a matter for debate.

But there was all the difference in the world between the Roman Emperor, whose office preceded “AD”, and right down to the end in the East was understood in a largely non-religious fashion as deriving from his acclamation and not from anything that might be done to him in Hagia Sophia by the Patriarch, and the kings of the West who were exercising an ecclesial, although not clerical office, an office that was entirely the creation of the church. The Investiture Controversy was not, in origin, a dispute about “Church” and “State” as we understand those terms, but a dispute over the relationship and delineation between regnum and sacerdotium WITHIN the Church.

It is only later, perhaps as a consequence of the arrival of the influence of Aristotle displacing the earlier apocalyptic-augustinian understanding of the political, that the former royal branch begins to secularise its own self understanding, seeking its origins not in its calling and crowning by the church, but in the pre-Christian past, and in nature, and we get its ever greater attempts to subordinate the clerical arm to itself, and the invention of the notion of “religion” which allows the intolerant state to become tolerant, once “religion” has to mean little more than “particular ritual behaviour one gets up to in ones spare time”, rather than a whole way of life that takes a social form called Church (which is why “1688″ and all that still left Catholics out in the cold, since we had not yet given up and thrown in the towel: our history in the US is often one long attempt to persuade everyone else that he have now finally done just that).

Now of course killing over doctinal disputes on, say the nature of the Eucharist, is viewed as utter barbarism, while killing in the name of flags, oil, and lines on a map, is of course, virtuous activity on the part of civilised emancipated moderns. The tragedy of the First World War (the mindless slaughter of which can never be justified by anyone, least of all by people who want to moralise endlessly about what those like Lenin and Trotsky felt driven to do to bring it to an end) was that theological consciousness had decayed to such an extent that millions of members of the corpus mysticum felt that it could still exist in a mysterious ethereal fashion hovering above a world of slaughter as members of the corpus gallorum, corpus germanorum, corpus britannicorum etc etc could butcher each other with impunity, all in the name of imperial aggrandisement. The long retreat which the Church made from Anagni onwards culminated in this, as so good and holy a Pope such as Benedict XV could only issue vain appeals for peace to the warring parties, but felt it would be trespassing out of his proper domain to excommunicate everyone involved in the slaughter until it was brought to an end (excommunications he would not have hesitated to resort to in matters of sexual morality, say). The Second International had failed to halt the war, but if the Catholic International had been mobilised, the Third International might never have come into being.

The issue is not so much a tradition of just-war versus pacifism, for this to pose the question in far too abstract and untheological a fashion. Rather, do we work within an apocalyptic-augustinian framework, in which there is the beast and the lamb, or do we work in a thomist-natural law framework, and talk of the natural and the supernatural. Therein lies the real dichotomy.

It’s rather amusing that Cardinal Ratzinger used this very analogy in response to the question of “Q: Is there any such thing as a ‘just war’?” — He started out with the local example of a father’s duty to protect his family, and moves on to the question of a nation’s obligations toward its citizens:

I’d say that we cannot ignore, in the great Christian tradition and in a world marked by sin, any evil aggression that threatens to destroy not only many values, many people, but the image of humanity itself.

But I’d say that we cannot totally exclude the need, the moral need, to suitably defend people and values against unjust aggressors. …

If Matthew Kennel used the analogy, it seems to me he’s in good company. ;-)

As far as ‘modern warfare,’ while I’m sympathetic to Ratzinger’s concern about nuclear arms, the case can be argued that improvements in technology have made it more possible to adhere to the jus in bello criteria of the Catholic just war tradition, insofar as discriminating between attacker and civilian. One can compare the saturation bombings of World War II and even through Vietnam to the geo-targeted weapons today.

Another point: despite our concerns about WMD’s, I think the bulk of ‘modern warfare’ is still fought on a local level. James Turner Johnson appears to challenge this ‘modern warfare is so horrible we should dispense with a notion of ethical criteria applicable to warfare altogether’ line of argument — consider:

The problem with this conception of gross destructiveness as inherent in modern warfare, though, is that it is a contingent judgment being made to do service as a permanent truth. By contrast to the model of the two World Wars, as well as to imagined models of global nuclear holocaust, the actual face of warfare since 1945 has been that of civil wars and regional armed conflicts. Such armed conflict has indeed been bloody, sometimes genocidal, sometimes terroristic, always characterized by violence directed toward noncombatants; yet there has been no “World War III” — or rather, given the ubiquity of this kind of conflict, this is in fact the face of “World War III.” The destructiveness of these recent wars has everything to do with the choices made by those who fight them and nothing to do with any alleged inherent destructiveness of modern weaponry. In other words, the modern-war pacifists get it wrong: their contingent judgment does not describe a permanent truth about warfare in the modern age. The morality of modern war, as of all war, depends on the moral choices of those who fight it. It is not the choice to fight that is inherently wrong, as the “presumption against war” argument has it; it is the choice to fight for immoral reasons and/or by immoral means.

(Just War As It Was and Is, First Things January 2005).

Johnson makes a good point — and an absolute pacifism which chooses to dispense with the ‘just war tradition’ altogether, viewing it as possibly an erroneous teaching in Catholic tradition, is to me a cause for concern.

Not a straw man at all. Br. Matthew was arguing that soldiering is always legitimate, comparing it with nursing:

Why not say they are always legitimate?
Wouldn’t you say nursing is always a legitimate profession?
The proper response would be: “Nursing is always a legitimate profession…”

Matthew K — Are you really asking me to explain the distinction between a parent protecting a child and modern warfare?