Papabile? Luis Antonio Tagle on Sacrificing to Idols
I just recently read, over at John Allen’s All Things Catholic, about Manilla’s new archbishop. He sounded intriguing, so I did a little looking and found his highly acclaimed address to the World Eucharistic Congress in Quebec. It’s just under an hour if you watch all six parts on Youtube, but I’ll share my favorite segment here:
Not only does Bishop Tagle get the commonly botched doctrine of Eucharistic Sacrifice exactly right (not that I’m too surprised, he is a member of the International Theological Commission!), but he puts it in a context that makes clear what the early Christians were responding to when they decided to use sacrificial language to describe Jesus’ death. And he does so in a way that helps Christians of today see what it calls us to. Eucharistic Sacrifice isn’t merely a private affair.
Humans are sacrificing animals. We will sacrifice to whatever we worship. We “Gotta Serve Somebody.” A coherent doctrine of Eucharistic Sacrifice makes this clear. It is a vaccine against idol worship.
And, on top of being a top notch theologian and preacher, this good bishop seems remarkably balanced and humble. It’s heartening to hear about shepherds like this. May the Lord send us many more!
Brett Salkeld is a doctoral student in theology at Regis College in Toronto. He is a father of three (so far) and husband of one.
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Outstanding! I sure pope he’s papabile. He’s up there with Peter Turkson and Diarmuid Martin on my list of great future hopes for the Church!
Is there something I don’t know about the incumbent? :)
He’s in his 80s?
He’s just a kid! (Though is a victim of “socialized medicine.”)
All quite impressive rhetoric, but when he starts denouncing Catholics like Weigel who were some of the most egregious bolsters of the “national security” idolatry he mentions, then I will think he is actually serious. Right now it is just talk, and talk is cheap. This is especially important for the Catholic world because they have sadly saddled the world with some of the worst reactionaries around. They owe the world to clean up their own mess. And Weigel is just a part of that stinking pile.
Peter Paul:
It would give great satisfaction to hear a solid denunciation of George Weigel from someone in high office, but I don’t think that would serve any good purpose. George is a writer of excellent prose and a fine human being with mostly wretched ideas about the morality of national security and the nature of economic justice. Denouncing George personally would be a sure way to ensure Bishop Tagle or anyone else becomes non-papabile. Furthermore, I’m sure George bathes as regularly as any other American — it’s his priorities that stink. Better to follow long-standing Christian tradition, and love the sinner, denounce the sin.
Frank,
Well here is where I differ from you strongly. A person who holds such views cannot be a good person. To have been one of the most evident supporters of a non-sensical war where many innocents were killed show a dark heart. (I am not a pacifist; a clearly justified war would have been another matter!) Though one cannot peer into the soul of another, I actually doubt a person like that believes much of anything. He reminds me of quite a few very cynical types I met in the Church. He is awash in some sort of bizarre nihilistic dream, where crafting tony-sounding Catholic phrases takes the place of reality lived by most people, and are taken as aesthetic gold by comrades alone. Only in the modern Catholic Church, believe me. That it is a virtual transvaluation of values is almost not the worst part. It is an aesthetic transvaluation, known as an artistic flush, down the drain.
Frank,
And a post scriptum. As we used to say in the seminary “distinguo”. One can easily distinguish between many good conservatives who were taken in by rhetoric and false information and therefore supported that war, and people like Weigel. It is quite another thing to have been part of the cabal of intellectual machinators who created the conceptual disinformation knowingly and used religion cleverly to thwart any reasoned weight against the aggressive instincts. It is those who cynically gave themselves over to fanatical creation of aggressive fantasy — which is all Weigel’s books were about on the subject — that is utterly sub-moral. And that he did it flouting the wishes of the very Pope he had hagiographied is just a grim coincidence worthy of Mephistopheles himself.
Every time the audience applauded, the Mennonite in me and the Catholic in me high-fived each other. I love it when that happens.
I thought it was interesting how the Canadian crowd responded to the comments about the god of National Security. I don’t know that he would’ve received the same response in the US.
Thank you Frank M. It is not said often enough to love the sinner but denounce the sin.
Even if that sinner has 10,000 sins instead of two or three or is mired in the mud of sin, I believe Jesus would have us love the sinner even though we don’t love his sins.
What did Jesus say about the speck in the sinner’s eye whwn we have a beam in our own? And about how many times to forgive? Even if his sins makes him the least of all, did not Jesus say whatever you do to the least you do to Him? We certainly can and are obligated to point out the sins to another with humility, but we are to do so motivated by love and not self interest.
Bruce,
Let me respond to that if I may, since it seems obliquely related to my comment. I am a universalist: I believe all will be saved. So in that sense I really do take the gospel koan to heart– God’s rain falls on the just and the unjust. But the view you are expressing, is a very Catholic one, and one which developed rather slowly and came to flower in the Counter-Reformation. No offense to your personal view, but it is a view of forgiveness that was created as an expedient for the corruptions in the Church. I don’t think the historical record indicates that it has worn very well. And some of the current scandals show the weird and perverse ends that it can be turned to. We are not God, so we must make limiting moral distinctions to protect ourselves and those we hold dear. My view is that this allows us to turn away from making the ultimate distinction, and see God as all merciful. But in this world bad people are bad people. It is possible for a few to change, but not usually. And the character we were discussing, is certainly bad.
You’ve judged Weigel, PPF. Not just his acts, but his heart. How would you judge yourself? How do you think you’ll be judged? How should you be judged? Is it possible that your universalism was “created as an expedient” for your own corruptions?
Peter,
Thank you for your response to my comment. The idea to love the sinner but to hate the sin is a restatement of what jesus said to love your enemies and to do good to those who persecute you. Implied in this is is that we do not love what our enemies do to us; if we did, they would not be our enemies!
My views as expressed above are based on my understanding of the Gospels from sources which predate the Counter-Reformation by many centuries, namely the writings themselves, other New Testament writings and the teachings of the desert fathers.
Is forgiveness expedient? Regarding recent scandals, the enemy of the abused is the abuser. But the enemy of the abuser is the abused who come forward. Have these abused been loved by the institution when they have been treated so badly at wanting justice? Forgiveness is not the problem. It needs to be applied by all sides at times, but has not been. Each one of us are called to practice it, in my view. We have not seen a lot of it.
As a universalist, you “believe all will be saved.” Does this not also include all the “bad people”? If so, is an all merciful God somehow involved? If not, how are all saved?
Bruce,
First let’s do the nice part. Of course that includes all the bad people. We are all already saved. The Kenosis of God, which Christ’s life represents par excellence, is already accomplished. To put it in old terminology of Nicholas of Cusa, the Coincidentia Oppositorum never ends, except when it finally shall. We are all just tiny BUT important parts of this.
Second, I follow the view of John Meier, my former professor and, if I may say, my friend (we had lunch a few times). Namely, that a lot of what Jesus engaged in was “riddle speech”. And here is my further interpretation of that (not necessarily Meier’s): Riddles pertain to a realm that is beyond the contents of the riddle. When Jesus said forgive 70 X 70 he was alluding to the announcement of the the vast salvation of all humankind. He was saying– get beyond the state where you believe and fantasize about others suffering, get beyond the Schadenfreude, to mix historlcal referents bit. He was NOT saying–be a rube and a fool. Which is what a lot of misprisions about proximate human forgiveness makes people. And in fact the Roman Catholic Church has never in its own governance with outsiders operated by anything but canny, non-foolish terms as I am suggesting.
Lastly,
I think you have to look at the whole culture of the early Church to understand this matter, Let me put it this way: If you can delve into their very vigorous and ritualized public declarations of sins, and mystagogic treatment of PUBLIC forgiveness as ritual prerequisite and not come way with a different take on this I would be surprised. The very modern Counter-Reformation sense of a sort of prima facie forgiveness as a dogmatic sop, to convince and mollify individuals, is really a quite recent thing. Add to this the fact that Weigel has never repented of his great evil and I think the case is closed.
Peter, I do not think that the Gospels are all that complicated. True, the institutional church has not always lived up to the Gospels. But did we have no teachings on forgiveness prior to the Counter-Reformation? (See Roots of Christian Mysticism by Olivier Clement, New City Press, Hyde Park, NY for what the desert fathers had to say.)
When Jesus said to forgive 70 x 70 times, this was in reply to a question by Peter on how many times to forgive. The Church has, I believe, been consistent through the ages that this meant “without limit”. What does this have to do with being a rube or a fool? To forgive in this manner is to imitate God Him (Her) Self!
In no way does forgiveness mean that we overlook evil. But if one believes that “all are saved” then apparently there is a separation between the person and the evil he/she has done. I believe that we do not forgive the evil which has been done. We forgive the person who has committed that evil. The person is accountable ultimately to God and God’s mercy.
I, like you, am not a fan of Mr. Weigel. However, he personally is not his writings and he does not deserve to be condemned for expressing his views, no matter how erroneous. His writings, though, are certainly subject to scutiny and his views (and mine, and yours, etc.)should be challenged when appropriate.
Thank you for your comments.
Bruce,
I understand your point, and can feel that it comes from a good place. I am not here to question the virtue you have developed in life to look past the moral dross of others. We all hope to be treated with such charity, myself included. But I think you are making some sort of moral category mistake here. The sort of evil I am defining for Mr. Weigel is not like sort that might come if I were jealous of your success as a friend and sought to cut you down. This is a sort of day-to-day evil that we can relate to, and it takes real virtue in others to look past it. What Mr. Weigel was engaged in was of an entirely different order. It speaks prima facie to a vast talent at deception and prevarication. To forgive such evil would involve identifying what the evil is that is to be forgiven. In this case it is per se even unknowable because this character was so wound in with the cabal of psi-ops propagators from the outset. My point is NOT that there are some things that are utterly unforgiveable; though as a practical matter for individuals there often are, and I do not think that is always a moral failing, but self-protection. What Weigel was about is something more petty and yet vast. Petty in the sense that I do not see him as very high-up on any political food chain. But vast in the sense that he clearly had gotten the word that his deceptive propaganda efforts would be highly appreciated by those he was eager to curry favor with. That is the real world, and ignorant men will sell their souls for the tiniest scrap of prestige. Somehow in this discussion the more important point got lost. Namely, that the Catholic Church owes the world to clean up the mess it created by spawning a whole generation of reactionary intellectuals, detached from history itself. This history will be written later, by people with more objectivity than those living today. But I believe it all started with the ouster of Charlie Curran and the jettisoning of real academic accountability by the Church therewith.
On this very point it is crucial to look at the Pope’s recent comments to the Bundestag the other day. That should definitely be discussed in a post here. He seems to be making a big turn away from the reactionary element in the Roman Church, in detaching himself — in his homeland no less –from the notion of a correlation between Natural Law and political realities.
Mark,
I hope to be judged by God with His vast mercy evident everywhere in creation. As to fellow human beings I expect to be judged by what I do. I am not personally terribly judgmental. I am pretty easy-going about all sorts of things, and have generally a live-and-let-live attitude. But, silly me, I draw the line at encouraging the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people for no conceivable reason, for a judgement as to the heart. Call me crazy!
The Catholic view on these things is just meshugenah.
Also, since Weigel is the biographer of the Pope, handpicked, I hope one further argument will be allowed here. I would like to post my review from the online bookseller’s site of the former Pope’s very fine book The Acting Person, as it touches on the very issue we are discussing here. And compared to most of my reviews on that site, which are pretty silly, this one was a moment of more serious reflection for me:
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The Acting Person: A Contribution to Phenomenological Anthropology (Analecta Husserliana)
by Karol Wojtyla
Fine Philosophy, But Poor Theology, August 7, 2011
This review is from: The Acting Person: A Contribution to Phenomenological Anthropology (Analecta Husserliana) (Hardcover)
Having spent quite a lot of time when I was in college reading through back issues of the Analecta Husserliana for light reading, I can say without reservation that the articles that comprise The Acting Person were some of the finest works in those journals. They make very clear that Wojtija was a world-class intellectual, quite unlike the German Cardinal who succeeded him as Pope. In fact, one can say that in the hothouse world of Husserlian studies, Wojtija made a great contribution to understanding. Namely that human identity, when conceived of phenomenologically, must be intrinsically involved with act, and that such does not violate a rigorous notion of essence. In this Wojtija seemed to follow, without ever I believe precisely delimiting the influence, Doninican philosophers of phenomenology who emphasized a return to the Brentano-based toots of phenomenology in Intentionality, conceived of qua process of consciousness. This tendency was to reach its zenith in Dominicans such as Ambrose McNicholl, who dwelled especially on Brentano, and delimited an ambit for a moral consideration of these philosophical notions, unsurprising in followers of Aquinas. Though without, of course, the Schelerian existential notions Wojtija brought to it.
Well, It worked very well as Husserlian philosophy, but when transfered to the realm of theology it encountered a problem which was never resolved, and only exacerbated. And, in turn, it has bequeathed large problems for the Roman Catholic Church, given the massive influence of Wojtija. For the notion of identity as act, and closely related to moral action per se, may indeed be one very original way of solving the almost disembodied idealism latent in Husserlianism, which flowered in the Cartesian Meditations. But that is because from the strictly philosophical perspective identity- as- act would have to include those actions that are harmful or less virtuous. From the strict point of view, this would create a sort of continuum of actions from dark to light, if I may interpolate that image, that make up the acting person. Yet, please note, when transfered to the theological realm this rather rigorous analysis encounters a moment of great quicksand-like temptation endemic to that transfer itself. Namely, very radical notion of Christian forgiveness, which may be justly said to be sui generis in world thinking, either philosophical or religious. I am not saying that Christians should question this doctrine per se. Only that, more precisely, when the notion of identity-as-act encounters the notion of radical forgiveness, a disjunct or discontinuity unexpectedly results, in the mixture. For if we are truly going to try hone in on identity, then that very strong focus demands that we never fail to incorporate the whole continuum that makes up the identity. However, because of the Christian notion of radical forgiveness, the odd temptation to conflate identity with the (strictly) philosophically one-sided notion of the “forgiven self” appears. I do not think there is anything intrinsic tho the Christian notion of forgiveness that necessitates the willful turning -away from commonsensical notions of considering the totality of the self. Only that the latent idealism in the Husserlian-inclined view is, I believe, very deeply tempted in the direction of such conflation.
This is how one can explain how Wojtija’s view, which was philosophically brilliant, resulted in a very idealized notion of the self and the body (!), when it was used for theological considerations. That is, it was morally idealized in way that flouted any kind of commonsense wisdom about the totality of human nature and sexuality. It has lead an entire generation of Catholics to base their lives on the hyper-idealized ambitions of one very smart man, who ultimately sought refuge from his own intellectual prowess. And that refuge was in an almost infantalized and regressive thoelogy, ironically made possible by some of the most sophisticated (Jewish) Husserlian philosophy. The extent of the problem can be see in the fact that even sharp Husserlians like Robert Sokolowski are also tempted into a similar idealism when doing theology, but from somewhat different Husserlian emphases. It is a cautionary tale, ultimately, about some of the dangers and excesses of the philosophical approach to life. The most obvious lesson would seem to be is that when a philosophically -inspired theology produces a world-view so at odds with commonsense, it should as a matter of method be held to some increased scrutiny on that basis alone. For the worst part of this particular tale is that the very idealism attendant here has helped fuel the bizarre amoral libertinism of some corrupt clergy, who see in the notion of radical forgiveness, conceived of as total identity, a crypto-psychological and de facto, if not de jure certainly, license to do whatever they want, and then hide it. No doubt this Burkean “unexpected consequence” of Wojtija’s ideas would have horrified him. But intellectual history tells us, strangely, that it can bizarrely be traced back to him. When we twin that license with his own hyper-scrupulousness and attraction to regressive spiritualities (physical mortification) we see a circle of idealism close ranks in a way that diminishes any real healthy insight.”