Religion this Week
The big news in Christendom this past week wasn't ABC's exposé on Hell or Gerson's silly essay, rather it was the Catholic Church's Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith issuing this document, which reaffirms that "the Church of Christ subsists in the Catholic Church." The document was particularly harsh on Prostestants:
According to Catholic doctrine, these Communities [ones born out of the Reformation = Prostestants] do not enjoy apostolic succession in the sacrament of Orders, and are, therefore, deprived of a constitutive element of the Church. These ecclesial Communities which, specifically because of the absence of the sacramental priesthood, have not preserved the genuine and integral substance of the Eucharistic Mystery cannot, according to Catholic doctrine, be called “Churches” in the proper sense..
But, TMcD, you can take comfort in the fact that being a member of a Christian ecclesial Community (not a Church though), that you are "deprived neither of significance nor importance in the mystery of salvation." We Atheists, on the other hand, are still damned.
posted by Paul @ 4:52 PM
9 Comments:
Damn!, and my theapist had finally gotten me over my apostolic succession envy. Whatever will I do without an unbroken sacramental priesthood to carry my wafers?
Silly Pope. I kinda like this guy. He's inviting me to make fun of Catholicism with a good conscience again. All this ecumentical respect was getting tiresome. Maybe, out of appreciation, we ecclesiastical communitityists should get together and pay for the college of cardinals to have a weekend with the boys in Bangkok.
Oh, come on. Everyone knows that the apostolic succession was broken during the Great Apostasy and only restored by God to Joesph Smith, his modern prophet. The Pope is the greatest apostate of all.
The Pope's pronouncement is a positive development for contemporary religion. The Pope is standing up for doctrine, the fundamental doctrine that is his church's raison d'etre.
Generally speaking, a religion that doesn't believe in its own teachings is dying, as are most of the mainline faiths in the US. As a nonbeliever, I don't mind all that much (though I wish the more liberal faiths weren't the dying ones). But if you care about the health of religion, then it's a positive sign when a religious leader has the confidence and conviction to actually proclaim the truth as he (usually he) sees it.
Frances, do you really think that Benny's attempt to gradually repeal Vatican II is good for religious health? Somehow I don't see a return to Scalia/Gibson Catholicism as a "positive" sign, although maybe I would if I too were an atheist. While we're at it, we should probably start favoring radical Wahabbism over moderate Islam.
I've got no problem with religious leaders standing up for doctrine, but this semantic sophistry about whether or not Protestants go to "church" is stupid and insulting. He can say he's the "true" church until he's blue in the face and I've got no problem, but denying that other churches even exist!? Get over yourself, Chester. If that's how his holy hatness wants it, we Protestants can play that game too. I like our odds in that fight.
No, I don't like the fact that the only religious faiths that are growing worldwide are conservative, often extremely conservative faiths. Meanwhile the mainline faiths limp along having lost their sense of mission, their conviction, and of course, their adherents.
Have you read Finke and Stark on the history of American Christianity? They show pretty conclusively that the growing faiths are those that maintain a "high level of tension with their surrounding sociocultural environment." Once there is little that distinguishes a given church from alternatives, it starts to die. That distinctiveness is what this Pope believes is necessary, and research backs him up.
TMcD,
I can't understand how you can be upset with The German Shepherd when the Catholic argument on apostolic succession is quite typical of every religious argument. And of course, we all know from Gerson's essay that without religion, which cannot be separated from doctrine, we wouldn't have any morals. In short, why is the argument for apostolic succession any worse than, say, arguing the doctrine that you must believe in Christ in order to be "saved" or that Allah is God and Muhammed is his prophet, or that the Jews are God's chosen people? In the end, there's no more or less reason behind these doctrines than behind the idea that the only real Church of Christ is that which was built upon the rock of Peter and that presided over by a particular apostolic succession (= Roman Catholic Church).
In the end Protagoras must have right: "Man (here inclusive = anthropos) is the measure of all things, of the things that are, that they are, of the things that are not, that they are not." So, there is really no such thing as a theocracy, just a bunch of hierophantocracies.
I think we're about played out here, but I'll make two quick concluding points:
First, Frances, if you lament the recent tendency toward religious extremism, you need to be more critical of it than of its alternative. Whenever we debate religion, you guys unflinchingly paint religion per se as the enemy of human progress, rather than focusing on the extremists as the core problem. I'll gladly stand with the Lockes, the Roger Williamses, the Lincolns, the Niebuhrs and the MLKs of the world on the other side. The extremists can take care of themselves.
Paul, I'm not mad at the Pope. I just find his right-wing sophistries both entertaining and strangely familiar.
As for which side one stands on, I think that it's OK to disagree on fundamental questions, so long as those questions remain, safely, in the private realm. It's when questions of faith become matters of public concern that I object.
P.S., Paul, I love your aphorism: "There is really no such thing as a theocracy, just a bunch of hierophantocracies." Elegant and precise!
And "hierophant" just became my word of the day.
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