PART I
Fr Dwight Longenecker has a well-known column, Standing On My Head, and usually it is both educational and insightful. Or it is for “Magisteriums”, the middle-of-the-road Catholics. Progressive Catholics probably are only interested in it to the extent he “toes their line” (if and when he does) and for Trads it’s too lightweight. He’s got a new one out, though, and it has a perfect example of what the Vatican II Church gets wrong about the Faith, and I want to point that out in some detail.
Fr Longenecker puts a lot of effort into his writings and though I don’t read him much any more, his insights are often very interesting, especially his take on the Anglican Church, of which he as great experience (he converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism). And of course, he knows a great deal about conversion and the contemporary Church, as he was originally educated at Bob Jones University. His has been a long road, and many can related to him.
However, the problem he has is an existential one. I mean there’s a lot of sucking sounds going on these days for the Magisterium Catholics. As the truly deplorable papacy of Francis metastasizes to its denouement, Magisteriums are going to have to take sides. The sucking noise is the quicksand under their feet drawing them in ever deeper. They’re going to have to crawl out on either one side or the other. Which will it be? Each must choose. Scramble up slope to the polyester spaghetti Anglican Church in beige, the one that the Progressive Modernists want to make the Catholic Church into, or climb up to the Traditional Catholic Church? I made my choice years ago. (I guess it was just one priest in his polyester sack too many, or when they tore out the beautiful marble altar rail of the church I grew up in, and POW! I hung out with the Melkites until a Traditional Latin Mass (TLM) became available.) But the choice is coming to everyone.
Fr Longenecker column is titled, “Why Doesn’t the Pope Answer His Critics?” Fr Dwight postulates that Papa Bergoglio has a theological reason for not answering them, one based on his, the pope’s, not wanting to “play their game” about getting involved in rules and regs. But that quicksand is getting wetter and deeper by the day.
To begin with, I’ll note although Fr Longenecker clearly strives to be evenhanded, sometimes he does seem to reveal a pretty strong bias against Trads and Trad-leaning Conservative Magisterium Catholics. For example, a while ago he got into some trouble over a very nasty comment or two about Trads he made in a column, and Chris Ferrara of The Remnant got him to quickly apologize and retract them. Longenecker issued an apology and then took both the apology and the article down. It vanished like Moses’ name from the monuments of Egypt, if you believe the Charlton Heston/Yule Brenner classic movie.
Now, however, he’s “gone there again” in a small way with a dash of old Saul Alinsky dusted in, in this ‘Why Doesn’t the Pope Answer His critics?” I say “Saul Alinsky” because one of Alinsky’s tactics was to “name (or frame) your opponent”, target him by putting a moniker on him the demeans him or reduces him in some fashion. How does he suggest this? Longenecker raises the suggestion that Catholics who are (c’mon, this is true) trying to force the Pope to be Catholic possess a Propositional Faith.
What the heck is a “Propositional” Faith? Why, one of rules and regs, of course. This Faith consists of “proposals” and “propositions” and these are what animate Trads, or at least the critics of Bergoglio the Loquacious (unless he’s asked exactly what it is he actually believes; then he is as silent as Stephen Maturin’s “Legendary Mo”. (If you get this ref, you’re definitely a Patrick O’Brian fan.)
Father Dwight writes, “People in the pew probably do not know that many theologians and clergy are critical of what they call ‘propositional faith.’ Propositional faith is a faith that is grounded in rational statements and definitions. It is, if you like a religion based in an authoritative book, a creed, a catechism, a dogmatic systematic theology and, by extension a defined religious law. Those who favor a propositional faith like certainty and clarity.”
Yep, they sure do, Father. And you’ve just described the Catholic Faith as it has existed since the beginning: authoritive, creedal, grounded in rationality (as opposed to “blind faith”), and definitely having a dogmatic and systematic theology. The great early ecumenical Church Councils hammered out those rational statements and definitions, and a millennium of fabulous theologians (St Thomas Aquinas comes to mind) emphasized the “rational” part.
Modern Catholics don’t get much of this from modern theologians. Need I write this? Don’t we all know it? Yes, we certainly do! Modern theologians are not really known for either intellectual greatness nor moral rectitude. Ol’ Karl Rahner, a priest and a bigshot at Vatican II and one of the “hard-core radicals” of the “Concilium school” thereafter (that group included Edward Schillebeeckx and Hans Küng), and who has a hallowed name among Vatican II apologists – well, his is less than sterling.
One could make the case Rahner was, well, complicated: a Jesuit priest in love with a twice-divorced widow named Luise Rinser. Apparently Rahner kept his celibacy vow, but even so, he and Rinser were passionate “lovers”, writing many passionate letters back and forth. I guess we can credit Rahner with “orthodoxy” because she was a she. (The relationship was also complicated in that Rinser claimed to have an abbot for a lover as well. The whole story is bizarre.) But the classic theologians would have excoriated him for treating his woman “unjustly”, he didn’t do right by her. The Principle of the Integral Good insists the ends do not justify the means, and Rahner’s ends of maintaining such a bizarre relationship might well have helped the soul of this woman to perdition, if that’s what happened.
We don’t even know for sure what happened with them in private; we can’t know God’s take on it but only God is Judge of one’s final disposition. I can’t think of any saint or “orthodox” theologian who would have condoned such a relationship. But surely a learned priest theologian ought to have suspected he was allowing her soul to drift into serious jeopardy? Didn’t he give a hoot? Or even about his own soul? Seems to have escaped him, or it languished somewhere on a back burner. But the bottom line was probably that he knew all too well that if he actually tried being a priest to this woman, she’d have ended their relationship.
And that’s just one Progressive theologian, albeit a famous one. A milder Vatican II “big name” was Hans Urs von Balthasar, who had (apparently, we can’t really know) a somewhat similar relationship with a woman named Adrienne von Speyr. This story goes from bizarre to macabre, with all sorts of crazy, private visions and insights – merely trying to read an oversight of their story is a bit much. Yet knowing who these people were and how they lived is a classic “gob-smack” about the very biggest theological names of the Vatican II Church. If you want to know at least some of the underlying reason the Vat2 Church is so grotesque at times, even so outré, however, you need to research a bit on these two, Rahner, the “radical” and Von Balthasar the “conservative”.
The point is: a large number of “Catholic” theologians have “gone Left”, gone Progressive, since back when Humanae Vitae came out. Paul VI should have excommunicated the lot of them and tossed them out of their positions. A modern academic theologian, a professional scholar, would be likely (not all of them, perhaps) cry up “Outrage! Academic Freedom! Violation thereof!” whereas the great theologians of the past would have asserted “Error has not rights”. We’ve fallen, to paraphrase the old commercial, and we can’t seem to get up.
(See Part II.)
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