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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34500 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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In some non-US news German Catholic has decided to vote against official Catholic doctrine, by supporting the blessing of same-gender relationships. Unlike MLK who advocated a stricter reading of the Bible, present schismatics seem to argue in favour of a "living constitution Bible".

If they hope to bring back believers by adopting left-alligned attitudes, they are probably mistaken. This is because if one looks towards the US, a country with sufficient religous pluralism to make comparisons between various sects of Christianity, one can observe that future only holds failure for such a plan.

More progressive Christian groups, apparently called "mainline" in American discourse, are declining significantly faster then conservative ("evangelical") ones.

I assume that such statistics are known to Catholic leadership, be it in Vatican or Bonn, so it stands to reason it probably isn't maximization of mass attendance that is the motivation. Sincere belief in correctness of their cause is.

If Vaticans persecution of rightist deviations, and German acceptance of leftist ones, hastens the decline of belief in G-d, it would be in-line the usual stance of the Church that Truth (as it interprets it: gay couples deserve to be blessed, bishops need permission to Mass in Latin) is important than popularity.

Better there be A Couple, but Committed, than Common, but Cafeteria.

It's German Catholicism. It's long being plagued by being ultra-liberal, and ironically I think this was one of the worst effects of the deal with Bismarck after the Kulturkampf. Getting a share of public spoils by the church tax does tie any church to the state, and as states become liberal and secular, they drag the churches along with them.

German Catholicism is rich, fat, and contented, and doesn't want to rock the boat over the social order. Much easier to ignore the old guy in white in Rome and keep your paymasters happy.

As a catechumen, I’ve seen plenty of people talking about this in online Catholic spaces, but this has yet to come up in real life.

Maybe this is just the fervor of a convert speaking, but it seems to me we have a lot of work to do educating the laity (and apparently the German bishops) on doctrines of the faith. Last night YouTube recommended a video to me from Bishop Barron where he shared a poll that 70% of Catholics do not believe in the real presence of the Eucharist.

This is perhaps the greatest distinction between the Catholic Church and nearly all of Protestantism.

Is it? Theological ignorance is a massive problem in American Protestant churches as well - remember that Ligonier poll? That found 73% of evangelicals affirming the statement "Jesus is the first and greatest being created by God", which is as classically heretical as you can get. 43% of evangelicals affirmed "Jesus was a great teacher but he was not God". 57% of evangelicals agreed with "Everyone sins a little,, but most people are good by nature". 65% of evangelicals affirmed that "Everyone is born innocent in the eyes of God". These are all obvious heresies.

There are even some obvious contradictions: 97% agree that "There is one true God in three persons: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit", and then 60% agree that "The Holy Spirit is a force but is not a personal being". Not only is that false, they just said that the Spirit is a person!

Likewise I am sure that a majority of Catholics deny the Real Presence, or think that the Immaculate Conception is about Jesus, or some other basic misunderstanding of doctrine.

Catechesis is a massive problem in Christian churches in the West right now.

On the Ligonier poll, it is striking that there is a very high degree of conformity on culture war issues (e.g. 92% agree that abortion is a sin), but extreme levels of confusing on even basic questions of doctrine. It suggests to me that churches have become very good at lining people up into political tribes, but are failing at their more basic, essential duty of teaching the gospel.

I was saying the Real Presence was perhaps the greatest distinction, not theological ignorance.

Agreed that not knowing what your religion actually promotes is very common.

but are failing at their more basic, essential duty of teaching the gospel.

TBF, that's only if you think teaching the gospel is the point, rather than sorting people into culture war tribes.

Are you sure that partitioning people along culture war fault lines is the primary function of churches? The culture wars breaking out over religious lines is a pretty recent (~50 years) development.

I'm pretty sure religion is a more basic fault line for culture wars than race is, and going back further. It's not that religion produces culture war, just that it's a battlefield for it.

Historically, this is nothing exceptional. How many medieval illiterate village peasants (or barely literate town laborers) would answer this questionnaire correctly?

It depends on the era of 'medieval', and way more than you think. Medieval community life was heavily influenced by the sacred calendar -- feast days and fast days, holy processions and festivals, based on events from the life of Christ and lives of the saints. Likewise, while illiteracy was common, medieval churches were decorated with stained glass, icons, statues, and other artistic representations of key elements of the faith. Finally, while catechesis (religious education) was a recurring issue within the medieval church, the Carolingian Renaissance (at the tail end of the Early Medieval period) and the rise of mendicant orders (Franciscans and Dominicans during the High Medieval age) represent serious efforts by the church to improve religious education of priests as a means of improving the religious instruction of the laity.

At the very apex of Age of Faith, at the time when Saint Thomas wrote his Summa, how common peasant devotion and worship looked like?

It looked like this.

Yes. Veneration of dead dog as a saint. Absolute and unspeakable horror for anyone who ever skimmed Theology 101, SOP for average Christian peasant of the day.

This is what actual based trad popular religion of our ancestors looked like, and it had nothing in common with dreams of online trad bros.

The church was not amused.

The custom was regarded as harmful and superstitious by the church, which made efforts to eradicate it.

How successful it was?

the last known visit by someone to Saint Guinefort Wood to effect a cure for a sick child occurring around the 1940s.

Yea, only full fledged modernity of radio, cinema, TV, urbanization and medicine that actually works, managed to uproot age old superstitions.

If it it 'standard operating procedure' for 'average Christian peasants', can you show me another example of a dog saint? Or do I need to point you to the many many irrationalities of our modern secular world before you'll agree that the plural of anecdote is not data, and that you can't generalize from a single example that was notorious even in its own day?

This dog anecdote was just an illustration of peasant relationship to the divine and supernatural, untouched by any theological thought.

Yes, it is an anecdote, because we do not have any research or opinion polls from medieval villages.

We don't, but we have second best, classic anthropologic survey work of extremely trad Italian village (with very unPC name), as close we could in 20th century get to the medieval world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moral_Basis_of_a_Backward_Society

The Moral Basis of a Backward Society is a book by Edward C. Banfield, an American political scientist who visited Montegrano, Italy (Montegrano is the fictitious name used by Banfield to protect the original town of Chiaromonte, in the Southern Italian region of Basilicata) in 1955. He observed a self-interested, family-centric society, which sacrificed the public good for the sake of nepotism and the immediate family. As an American, Banfield was witnessing what was to become infamous as the Southern Italian Mafias and a self-centered clan-system promoting the well-being of their inner group at the expense of the other ones. Banfield postulated that the backwardness of such a society could be explained "largely but not entirely" by "the inability of the villagers to act together for their common good or, indeed, for any end transcending the immediate, material interest of the nuclear family."

So, after 1500 years of Christianity, how pious and devoted were the Montegranesi?

The Montegranesi get little religious instruction. A peasant grandmother tells her grandchildren the stories of miracles and sacred things which she heard from her grandmother. At six a child learns his catechism, a meagre list of questions and answers which is likely to be forgotten soon after the priest has given a simple test.

In school an hour a week is devoted to religion. In later life the individual, if he goes to church--and many do not--hears simple sermons: the priest says, for example, that to be a good Catholic one must love God, obey the laws of the church, and do right. On saints days speakers sometimes come from Naples and Potenza to tell about the saint whose holiday it is.

This is the extent of the ordinary person's religious training.

Those few who could read the Bible are not discouraged from doing so but they are not encouraged either. A few peasant women have prayer books or the gospels, but most homes contain no religious literature.

Every peasant has his children baptized but (according to a Montegrano priest) most of them--especially the men--do not take seriously the idea of life after death. They believe there may be some kind of an after-world but that, whatever its nature, it will be the same for all. The hope of heaven and the fear of hell do not move them.

For the typical peasant, God (or Christ, the terms are used interchangeably) is not a spirit of loving kindness or even of firm justice. He is a demanding and capricious overlord. He may not notice one at all. If He does, He may distribute bounty or catastrophe according to whim.

Many think of God as a hostile, aggressive force which must be propitiated. A young woman, very angry with her father for getting drunk and making it necessary for her to leave a festa to take him home, sobbed, "What do I have to do to satisfy Christ ? He never does any nice things for me, and He always does these bad things to me. I don't know what to do to satisfy Him."

Some Montegranesi pray more to the saints than to God. Candles are rarely left before the main altar; most people think it more economical to leave them before the statue of a saint or madonna.

These judgments are made on practical grounds: no one has heard of any noteworthy miracles performed recently by God; this or that saint, on the other hand, has shown himself to be able and willing to afford protection (it is always protection that is asked) in a special class of matters. Some peasants even believe that certain saints are more powerful than God.

Five Madonnas are honored in Montegrano, and for some people the connection between them and the mother of Christ is extremely vague. (When a Montegrano boy who had studied for the priesthood attempted to explain to an old woman that there is only one Madonna, she laughed at him. "You studied with the priests for eight years", she said, "and you haven't learned the differences between the Madonnas!"

That was 2 centuries after the West diverged from the Church.

Worshipping a dog is not that bad compared to the other antics Catholics were up to then.

only full fledged modernity of radio, cinema, TV, urbanization and medicine that actually works, managed to uproot age old superstitions.

Note that Westerners survived their old superstitions, there is no telling if they will survive these newfangled modernities.

From the traditionalist Catholic perspective, this problem should be easily solved. Pope Francis will issue an Ex Cathedra document defining the Church's traditional teaching on same-sex relationships, and the offending bishops will be told to repent of their heresy under penalty of excommunication.

If this happens, it would be appropriate to update, if only slightly, towards the Catholic church being the true church of Jesus Christ protected from error by the Holy Spirit. I expect that Francis will instead issue some vague noncommittal statement, possibly not even through official channels, urging caution when speaking on doctrine of faith and morals or whatever.

I was reading Ratzinger last book a couple of months ago and, apparently, the prevaling mainstream opinion in the vatican is that they do not have infallibility on matters of moral theology, so it probably won't be ex cathedra.

the prevaling mainstream opinion in the vatican is that they do not have infallibility on matters of moral theology

That would seem to be a direct contradiction of Pastor Aeternus.

If, then, any shall say that the Roman Pontiff has the office merely of inspection or direction, and not full and supreme power of jurisdiction over the universal Church, not only in things which belong to faith and morals, but also in those which relate to the discipline and government of the Church spread throughout the world; or assert that he possesses merely the principal part, and not all the fullness of this supreme power; or that this power which he enjoys is not ordinary and immediate, both over each and all the churches, and over each and all the pastors and the faithful: let him be anathema.

And later, the more famous part:

Therefore faithfully adhering to the tradition received from the beginning of the Christian faith, for the glory of God our Saviour, the exaltation of the Catholic religion, and the salvation of Christian people, the sacred Council approving, we teach and define that it is a dogma divinely revealed: that the Roman Pontiff, when he speaks ex cathedra, that is, when in discharge of the office of pastor and doctor of all Christians, by virtue of his supreme Apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine regarding faith or morals to be held by the universal Church, by the divine assistance promised to him in blessed Peter, is possessed of that infallibility with which the divine Redeemer willed that his Church should be endowed for defining doctrine regarding faith or morals; and that therefore such definitions of the Roman Pontiff are irreformable of themselves, and not from the consent of the Church.

What some people thought 150 years ago isn't going to influence what a different set of people will do now as much as what that second set of people thinks.

the offending bishops will be told to repent of their heresy under penalty of excommunication.

That would be my own opinion and what I'd do if I were pope, but I think the German hierarchy would rather schism and set up something along the lines of the Dutch Old Catholics. They'd have the support of the state as a church, the liberals would love them, and they'd have as good a claim as the Lutherans to be in the line of apostolic succession*. Breaking away means they could go the whole hog on female ordination, LGBT clergy and all the rest of the "Why doesn't the Church modernise like the rest of the Christian denominations?" agenda that has been hanging around since Vatican II.

So if you want to have any hope of not tearing the church apart, and it is the job of the pope to be a pastor and keep the flock together after all, you can't wave the stick around too harshly, else the German bishops are (some of them) just straining at the leash for an excuse to break away and set up a German National Catholic Church of their own.

*This does not mean that I agree that Lutherans etc. retain apostolic succession, but if they did schism, we'd have another Lefebvrite mess on our hands since this bunch are bishops and could validly, if illicitly, ordain male clergy. See the likes of Michael Cox - not a Lefebvrite - who has a tangled claim to being validly if irregularly ordained, and has gone on to perform stunts like "ordaining" Sinéad O'Connor (in the five minutes she decided she wanted to be a priest). Better to try to keep them inside the tent pissing out, as the saying goes.

At this point what to the German bishops represent? 4 million active church goers? (10% of 80mm - protestant half)

Pope Francis does not have any political capital remaining to take any measures against the German bishops short of issuing an infallible bull. He would have to make nice with Müller to get a meaningful amount of support which in turn would torpedo the rest of his agenda.

But, realistically, the figure who tried to appoint Heiner Wilmer as DDF head isn’t that strongly motivated to crush this kind of heresy anyways.

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