Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Laudato Si’: Now What Does a Catholic Do?
For Catholics who advocate for free markets, Pope Francis has just made life extremely complicated. The Holy Father’s encyclical, Laudato Si’ — which I have only begun to read — contains statements that clearly indicate that the Pope has fallen in with the progressives. Although the encyclical still prohibits birth control, abortion, and euthanasia, Francis seems tone deaf to the constant demands of the left, particularly the environmental left, that the Church abandon her teachings and encourage the use of these prohibited techniques. The Pope also seems to have largely adopted the platform of the American Democratic Party. As a Republican, my stomach is queasy.
So what to do? As a Catholic, I must submit my personal convictions to the authority of the Magisterium– which means to the Pope insofar as he speaks within Church tradition on theological matters. That gives me some weasel room on Francis’s economic views. But not much room. A Catholic’s first duty is obedience, or as my daughter wrote in her new article for Catholic Exchange:
…our lives are not our own. They belong to God and that means a total emptying of self. It is within this framework that we will examine our call to love and submit in obedience to the hierarchical Church. In learning this obedience, we will mature and grow in our faith. Since Christ left us the Church, it is He who calls us to loving submission to the Church.
To be sure, I need not fully endorse Francis’s’ economics. But I must still carefully study what the encyclical says, and look deeply at the factual and scientific themes therein. Most crucially, I must prayerfully consider the totality of the encyclical, especially in light of Church teaching on Human Ecology. George Weigel writes at National Review:
It is probably inevitable that Laudato Si’ will get labeled “the global-warming encyclical” and that the label will stick. This will please some and displease others, and they will have at each other — which is no bad thing if it helps clarify that there is no simple path to meeting the twin goals of environmental protection and the empowerment (through economic development) of the poor. But the label will be misleading, I think, not because there isn’t a lot about climate change in the encyclical, but because that’s, to my mind, the least important part of Francis-the-pastor’s call to a more integral, indeed more humanistic, ecology. Reading Laudato Si’ as if it were a climate-change encyclical, period, is somewhat akin to reading Moby Dick as if it were a treatise on the 19th-century New England whaling industry. The ships and the harpoons are an important part of the story, to be sure; but if they become the whole story, you miss what Melville’s sprawling novel is really about. Ditto with Laudato Si’: If you read it as “the global-warming encyclical,” you will miss the heart and soul of what this sprawling encyclical is about — which is us.
Which is to say that the encyclical is a moral teaching, not a work of science. Francis writes:
“…we must safeguard the moral conditions for an authentic human ecology.”
Sadly, Laudato Si’ will surely become captive to political ideology. That will pit economic conservatives against progressives, not just on the question of global warming, but also free markets versus government solutions. We’re going to hear a lot about where Francis stands. We’re going to hear a lot of interpretation too. Few people will actually read the encyclical, opting instead to cherry pick those portions that seem to support their views. Which reminds me of my high school debate days, when debaters would skim articles to find the juiciest bits to quote, only to be hammered by opponents who’d actual read the thing from beginning to end. However, in our charged political arena, many of us will miss the cherry picking because we have never actually checked the full text.
So what should Catholics do? To begin with, they ought to go to the trouble of reading all 192 pages, and then work to understand what Francis is really getting at. They might also consider researching the history of Catholic social teaching. And if that is too time consuming, there will be many theologians writing on the encyclical who should be consulted—theologians on all sides of the debate.
That, too, is a moral obligation.
Image Credit: giulio napolitano / Shutterstock.com
Published in Religion & Philosophy, Science & Technology
He’s where the buck stops for all temporal matters.
No, he is “where the buck stops” in matters of faith and morals. In matters of prudential judgment, he is a man like any other and prone to mistakes. My husband (we are both devout Catholics) calls him “Francis the Foolish”, and I think that’s about right. He might be a very holy man, but he has certainly said and done things that I wish he had not. Oh, how I miss Pope Benedict!
So do I. How did this happen, that the Church chose this obvious man of the left?
I appreciate hearing a broad spectrum of the religious on this and other threads – devout and casual Catholics, laymen and the theologically schooled.
I’m a person without religion; this is what I see. The Pope is the authority on all matters for a few Catholics, the last word on the moral and spiritual for most, and influential in temporal matters for a plurality.
My context includes a few things I can state in religious terms. The immanent world including Man is the mind of God. God is an inescapable consequence of intelligence. (I don’t know whether intelligence requires God to create it, that’s a matter of faith.) Sin is that which separates one from the divine, and evil is an act which forces another into one’s sin. (I wonder how many heresies that makes.)
I know that no tendency of the mind exists in isolation. Francis, by choosing easy superstition over difficult and uncertain reality, seems to me to have done evil to those who are bound to him by their Church.
Francis is of the left, having chosen to elevate the content of his mind over the rest of God’s world. That’s been my opinion for some time; I believe it’s shared by many now.
I’ve prayed for the Church and will continue. Francis’ heart is in the right place. It’s only his mind that’s broken. You’ll survive, your Church rides the inertia of centuries and billions.
When I was in the waning effects of being a Protestant, there were only two choices left, the Orthodox or the Catholics. I read the history. I read of the errors that came largely out of the east, and of the fact that Rome made the decisions on what was and what was not orthodox.
I know that there were schisms prior to Constantinople, and I know that Constantinople was playing both sides when the Crusades came to save them, and found out that Constantinople was selling them out.
We tend to use 1054 as the date for the break but in fact the break came largely before then.
If one believes that Peter is able to make binding decisions on faith and morals, which I certainly do, then one falls on one side of the break, decisively. “Thou are Rock.” Not my words.
I am going to assume that I am an orthodox Catholic, with an orthodox Catholic’s understanding of what is and what is not required for Catholics to believe.
The document in question is largely but not exclusively about human beings and their worth in the eyes of God. They are more important than financial systems and should be held as such, since human beings are made for eternity and not just for the here and now.
The document is not however an infallible document, that is it does not qualify under the “faith and morals” clause. So, am I required to believe in the economics offered? No. Should I bow to the idea that there are those who are entitled to hold and consume vast amounts of money without regard to their fellow human beings? No, the earth was made for all of us, not just the chosen few. Am I required to accept the idea that human beings are baking the planet? No.
Am I required to accept the judgment of an individual who thinks bad things about the Church? Never.
I have no problem with Peter. It is his successors who turned away from the faith. Who changed the creed? Why did the Church ever bother with ecumenical councils if the Pope had the authority to settle every question? And if you want to talk about double dealing between East and West, the Fourth Crusade pretty much tops Western Civilization’s betrayal hit parade.
Defenses of the Filioque basically boil down to Latinsux. The Greek ἐκπορεύεσθαι is not equivalent to the Latin procedere, and therefore “et Filioque” is not heretical. Eastern Catholic Churches, which use Greek for their liturgies, are discouraged from using it. The Episcopal Church is moving away from the Filioque. The Double Procession of the Holy Spirit that the Filioque describes is not scriptural.
It’s true that the errors mostly came from the East. Everything comes from the East, at least that survives to us, because the East was the literate and Christian part of the Empire; there isn’t a single Latin Father until Tertullian starts writing in the Third century, although Irenaeus did travel to the West (Lyon) from the East (Izmir) to instruct them. The Church takes a while to take off in the West, and then the Dark Ages were a thing. The Church starts in the East, and doesn’t hit Dark Ages until most of the pre-Schism period had ended.
The errors took hold in the West, though, which was predominantly Arian for much of the period discussed. Obviously, the Montanists and Donatists mostly came from the West.
Do you really think that that’s an objective fact? We’re talking before the schisms? How many of the Councils were in Rome? When I learned theology it was in a Presbyterian seminary, and my private study has mostly been in an Orthodox session, but I was under the impression that the major heresies were declared such at the seven Ecumenical Councils, and that those were all held in the East, with the East having most of the influence and almost all of the attendees. It seems entirely possible that if the Pope had had more influence, the Sixth canon would have been less clear that he was an equal of the other Patriarchs (well, of Alexandria and Antioch, with Jerusalem having a subtly different position).
I recognize that if one’s Church decides that it it wrongful not to rewrite the Nicene Creed, then one would probably want to downplay Nicaea, but I’m not sure what one can replace it with. The smaller heresies too, were generally decided by the East (note the Papal ambiguity regarding Montanism, for instance).
So, my guess is that you’re referring to Irenaeus’ use of Rome as an example of an Apostolic see. If you’re doing something else, please do cite something (and, again, it’d be helpful if you could cite with links or specificities).
I’m not sure if you’re using the 4th Crusade as an example of Catholic moral superiority. If so, props for creativity.
Sure, although not as far before then as one might have thought. Catholics in Rome were still using the Nicene Creed as the Councils described it as late as the 11th century. When Pope Leo IX grew up, the Creed was still being used in its Conciliar form. First, in his lifetime, Rome adopted the innovation, and then, in his lifetime, Rome claimed that everyone else had to change, too, and they had to accept the (forged) Donation of Constantine.
Just to be clear, if you’re using Irenaeus as your source of authority, that authority applies when the tradition has been preserved continuously. And Irenaeus means “continuously since Christ” rather than “continuously since five minutes ago”.
Peter was absolutely the Rock on which the Church was founded. Was that in his capacity as Bishop of Rome, though? See, Peter didn’t go out to Rome, and then start founding the rest of the Church. Peter founded the Church, had Pentecost (the birth of the Church), helped organize the first Council (at Jerusalem), and had a whole series of adventures. It’s only when that’s done that he goes off to Rome and dies.
Peter did a stand up job building the Church, but most of the parts of the Church that he worked with aren’t on the Western side of the ledger.
We’ve taken our time with it, but there’s every chance that the oldest surviving split in the Church, between the Eastern and the Oriental Orthodox, may be healed in our lifetimes. All the Patriarchs and Archbishops I’ve talked to about it seem hopeful. That’s basically it for the Orthodox, because the Orthodox Church didn’t continue to split after the schism. It shed the fractious and changing part, the fashionable and temporal patriarchate, and went on to experience centuries of continuity with the eternal truths. The Orthodox never felt the need for a Vatican I, let alone a Vatican II. There was no “counter reformation” or similar need to come up with new doctrines of eternal truth. There was no reformation. It’s not that we haven’t had bad Patriarchs, but there’s no need to lie awake at night fearing that one of them will get a bug in their posterior and decide to issue “a new commandment”, as in Evangelii Gaudium or receive some kind of personal revelation that air conditioning is a sin, or that we have to have a world government to organize farming. If one of our patriarchs turns out to be a lunatic, we pray that God guides him and hope that nothing particularly bad happens, just like when we have good patriarchs, because there’s no realistic chance that they’ll smash up the faith.
It’s only in the West that the fragmentation continues. You talk about all the heresies springing from the East, but all the big contemporary heresies I’m familiar with have come from the West (Lutheranism, Anglicanism, Calvinism, Mormonism, Quakerism, Marxist Atheism, etc. etc. etc.) If your view of truth depends on the faith not being a breeding ground for division, come visit Greece, where there’s massive secular division, but you’ll find essentially no one claiming that the Eucharist is just a spiritual presence (despite the fact that wealthy people from the West keep sending out missionaries).
If you accepted Orthodoxy, you could rest from having to constantly defend stupid claims (this stuff, for instance), and just defend the kind of Christian doctrine that’s in the Fathers, the Councils, and the Bible. I suspect you’d find it much less exhausting.
Skipping a lot of facts about how the primacy of Rome was established and the revisionism in the East to try and usurp that power once the Capitol moved to Constantinople.
I am in favor of dropping the Filioque. And I feel this way not due to any theological/doctrinal reason.
Even if we assume, purely for argument’s sake, that the theological justification that Catholic’s use is entirely correct, its insertion into the creed caused, and continues to cause, far too much offense and division. Not worth it!
https://youtu.be/E7nqw2hWwTo
The schism is not about the filioque clause, that is a convenient pretext to paper over the fact that the whole thing is entirely political and a question of power. The East and West have kissed and made up over the filioque multiple times and acknowledged that the issue is basically semantic. Theologically both sides believe the same thing about the nature and origin of the Holy Spirit. The filioque continues to get brought up so that people can contend that there is principled reason for the schism, rather than a petty one.
The substantive issue isn’t so important, but if you give a single man the ability to override ecumenical councils, you’d better pray that you never have a bad leader. It’s not so much that Catholics are wrong on details of the Trinity that few understand and fewer care about, it’s that Tradition and continuity are vital to eternal truth. Focusing on the pettiness of the subject is like those guys who defend corner store robbers who get violently arrested on the basis that the robbery was only over petty goods. Altering the word of God isn’t bad only when you impute particularly obnoxious words to him. Telling people that they must include “Pie is often tasty” in the creed would inflict much of the same harm, even though it’s true.
You’ll note that Nicaea proclaimed the equality of the ancient patriarchates (sort of excepting Jerusalem) before Constantinople existed. Irenaeus, too, although as a Bishop of Lyons he came under Rome and so focused on that more.
I can see an argument that says this: both sides have thrown away various aspects of tradition when it suited them. Both will have to make concessions in order to achieve unity.
Would you care to give an example? There are aspects of Christian teaching that have been abandoned (the Holy Kiss, for example), but since everyone abandoned them, I don’t think that restoring them would help with unity. Likewise with cheese at the Eucharist.
And there are concessions that will have to be made. I can’t see East-West unity any time soon, even if Francis’ administration is blessedly brief, but East-Oriental unity is absolutely on the cards, and there’s a million things that have to be compromised, from saints to parochial customs to Church of the Holy Sepulcher arrangements. There are ignorant people who believe the hard work was the bit about Christ, but that was relatively easy.
I just can’t think of a crossover between the two. Maybe if the West developed very strong feelings about 4th Maccabees, that would have to go?