.
Madame's Nightshirt
Mrs. Peperium
.
Blessed John Paul II saved the Catholic Church from going the way of the Anglican Communion.
Damian Thompson
May 3, 2011
I’ve been asking myself what future secular historians and sociologists of religion will make of Blessed John Paul II’s long stewardship of the Catholic Church. Let us set aside for the moment his magnificent assault on the foundations of Communism; also, the arguments over the sex abuse crisis. Volumes have already been written on these subjects. Moreover, secular scholars are unlikely to dwell on the heroic sanctity of the man, which led Pope Benedict XVI to beatify him in a ceremony attended by 1.5 million people. But what they may well say – irrespective of their point of view – is that John Paul II preserved the unity of the Catholic Church at a moment when it seemed likely to fracture.
I was a schoolboy during the last years of Paul VI; what I remember from the time was a sense that the boundaries of Catholicism were being stretched until they seemed likely to snap. The Catholic Church in the 1970s had something of the flavour of the Anglican Communion today. The question of women priests did not tip the Church into schism, but it was a distinct possibility. The Dutch Church had effectively declared UDI from the Vatican; beneath the near-impenetrable jargon of American and European theologians lay fundamental assaults on Catholic belief in the Real Presence, the sacramental priesthood and many other doctrines.
John Paul II used the power of the papal office to close down debates over these matters. Liberal Catholics may regard this as an assault on intellectual freedom, but from a sociological perspective what we were witnessing was the leader of a worldwide religion using his teaching authority to declare that his organisation believed X and not Y. No religion can survive without such boundaries, wherever they are drawn. The Church in the past has closed down debate over (for example) the divine nature of Christ; John Paul ruled that the Church did not have the power to ordain women now or ever – and, in issuing this ruling, put the prospect of women priests beyond the boundaries of Roman Catholicism, just as lay presidency at the Eucharist lies beyond the pale. The Church became a more peaceful place as a result.
That is just one example; there are other instances of boundary-drawing which kept in what other Catholics were trying to throw out, such as traditional devotion to the Virgin Mary, which was marginalised after the Second Vatican Council but, thanks to Mary’s devoted servant John Paul II, is now firmly back in the mainstream.
Karol Wojtyla was a man of formidable intellect: his encyclicals, and the Catechism he commissioned, sought to enrich rather than pare down the Magisterium. But it strikes me that his central achievement was to spell out what Catholics believe and what they do not, something that was by no means clear when he took office. Discuss.
.
.
Why I became a Catholic
Conrad Black
September 29, 2009
My religious upbringing in Toronto was casually Protestant. My family was divided between atheism and agnosticism, and I followed rather unthinkingly and inactively in those paths into my 20s.
When I moved to Quebec in 1966, I was astounded by the omnipresence there of Roman Catholicism. In researching my book about Maurice Duplessis, I steeped myself in the relations of Church and state in traditional Quebec, and interviewed many prominent clergymen. I had had the usual English-Canadian view that the Church had allied itself with reactionary political elements to slow the progress of Quebec and keep it in superstitious retardation.
There certainly had been reactionary, and even racist and quasi-fascist elements in the Quebec clergy, but they never predominated.
My research revealed that only the Church had sustained the French language in Quebec, the demographic survival of French Canadians, and the prevalence of literacy, provision of health care, and even most capital formation for nearly two centuries after the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759.
Of course, Quebec had been a priest-ridden society, with a great deal of meddlesome, priggish excess, but with all the secularisation that has occurred in Quebec, relatively few problems of deviant behaviour have been unearthed or even alleged.
In Quebec as in France, those who persist in the practice of the faith are not the oldest, poorest, most desperate, though those are there, but a very random group, including elegant young women, evidently successful men, bright students, unselfconscious, curious, and assured. The spiritual edifice of the Church functions obliviously to market share, and there is a common strain of intelligent and hopeful faith, regardless of fashion, age, or economics. Whether in packed and mighty cathedrals, like St Peter’s or St Patrick’s (New York), a simple wooden building like the Indian church in Sept-Îles, Quebec, in primitive religious structures in Cameroon, at fashionable resorts like Biarritz, St-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, Portofino, or even Palm Beach (“The Lord is my shepherd, even in Palm Beach,” as a guest homilist proclaimed some years ago), or in the improvised chapel in my prison as I write, there is a discernible, but almost inexpressible denominator that unites communicants. I am still impressed by the purposeful spring in the step of people approaching a Catholic Church as the hour of a service peals.
It may be that I was startled to discover this because I was so accustomed from my early years to think of Protestantism, except for the evangelicals, as conditional and tentative, protesting, after all, against the worldliness of Rome. When I first went to Rome, in 1963, I had just read a description of John Updike’s, in the New Yorker, of his first visit to St Peter’s, in which he was astounded by the grandeur of the basilica, by its size, solidity, magnificence, architectural genius and collections of high art, that he felt compelled to add his name to thousands of others written in the graffiti in the wall of the curved stairway to the cupola, 44 storeys above the ground (in a building constructed continuously between the 15th and 18th centuries). I dimly and roughly remembered Byron’s words: “Worthiest of God, the holy and the true … Majesty, power, glory, strength and beauty, all are aisled in this eternal ark of worship undefiled.”
It was hard not to see what he meant. The sense of indulgent receptivity of this incomparable building was somehow emphasised by its ostentatious affordability of indifference to those who would come as sceptics or antagonists. My visits to Lourdes and Fatima in the ensuing couple of years revealed concepts of mass faith in the miraculous, scientifically attested to, that were also amazing to a former spiritually slumbering Protestant, and difficult to ignore or discount.
By the time I left Quebec in 1974 and returned to Toronto, I was satisfied that there were spiritual forces in the world, and that it was possible, occasionally and unpredictably, to gain something enlightening and even inspiriting from them. I had lost faith in the non-existence of God, and had begun to pray at the end of each day, developing my own groping formulations of worship.
I read a good deal of the most admired arguments in support of God’s existence, especially Aquinas and Newman. When Gerald Emmett Carter became the Archbishop of Toronto in 1979, I quickly became an acquaintance, then a friend, and eventually an intimate. He never pressed his religious views or attempted to proselytise. I frequently stopped at his house, in Rosedale, on my way uptown from my office, and we discussed a good many subjects, sometimes ecclesiastical ones, usually over some of his very good claret. These were tumultuous years in my commercial and, at times, personal life also. His counsel was only given when requested and was always wise.
From the early Seventies to the mid-Eighties, I approached Rome at a snail’s pace. Having concluded that God existed, I could not seriously entertain the thought of not trying to be in contact with Him. And since I believed in general and prayed to and worshipped Him, it was not long before I wished to do so in some framework, to benefit from accumulated wisdom and traditions and from a community of faith.
It was not especially challenging, given my light Protestant upbringing, to stay in the Christian tradition. From all accounts, Christ appeared to be a divinely inspired person, in traditional parlance, a divine. There was no reason to doubt that he told St. Peter to found a church. I had never much doubted that, whatever its “inanities, fatuities, and compromises” (a quote from Cardinal Léger), the Catholic Church was the premier Christian church.
As a nominal Anglican, I had always had some problems with Henry VIII as a religious leader. The Anglicans, moreover, have never really decided whether they are Protestant or Catholic, only that they “don’t Pope,” though even that wavers from time to time. Luther, though formidable and righteous, was less appealing to me than both the worldly Romans, tinged with rascality though they were, and the leading papist zealots of the Counter-Reformation.
The serious followers of Calvin, Dr Knox and Wesley were, to me, too puritanical, but also too barricaded into ethnic and cultural fastnesses, too much the antithesis of universalism and of the often flawed, yet grand, Roman effort to reconcile the spiritual and the material without corrupting the first and squandering the second. Fanatics are very tiresome, and usually enjoy the fate of Haman in the book of Esther; of Savonarola, Robespierre, Trotsky, Goebbels, and Guevara.
Islam was out of the question; too anti-western, too identified with the 13th-century decline and contemporary belligerency of the Arabs; and the Koran is alarmingly violent, even compared to the Old Testament. Judaism, though close theologically, is more tribal and philosophical than spiritual. And it was the spiritual bait that I sought, that converted me from atheism, that I premeditatedly swallowed, and that prompted me to agitate the line and be reeled in by the Fisher of Souls. I thought it more likely that the 80% of the early Jews who became Christians, starting with Christ, had correctly identified the Messiah than that the proverbially “stiff-necked” rump of continuing Jewry are right still, ostensibly, to be waiting for Him.
It need hardly be said that the Jews are the chosen people of the Old Testament, that they have made a huge contribution to civilization, and that they have been horribly persecuted. But being Jewish today, apart from the orthodox, is more of an exclusive society, and a tradition of oppression and survival, than an accessible faith. The Eastern religions, to the very slight degree that I have studied them, are philosophical guides to living, not frameworks for the existence and purpose of man. In terms of real religious affiliation for me, it was Rome or nothing.
In the spring of 1986, Cardinal Carter asked me my religious beliefs. I recited my plodding baby steps on the ladder: There were spiritual aspects to life that were not mere superstition, and that constituted or at least evidenced God; that Christ was divinely inspired, had told St. Peter to found a Church, and that the legitimate continuator of that Church was Roman Catholicism. I desired to be in communion with God, and accepted that the surest means of doing so, though not sure, and not the only one, was as a communicant in the Roman Catholic Church. I believed that miracles occurred, though I couldn’t attest to particular ones, that given the wonders of creation and of the infinite, and the imperfections of man, we all properly belonged, frequently, on our knees before an effigy of the Creator or his professed and acclaimed son, and that sincere and concentrated worship could be enlightening. I also, like Chesterton and countless millions of others, wished some method of being “rid of my sins,” as I agree with Newman that “our conscience is God speaking within us.”
The cardinal replied that I was “at the door,” but that the one point I had to embrace if I wished to enter, and without which, all Christianity, he boldly asserted, “is a fraud and a trumpery,” was the Resurrection of Christ. If I believed that, I was eligible; if I did not, I wasn’t. What he was asking was not unreasonable, and I reflected on it for a few minutes and concluded that since, as defined, I believed in God and in miracles, I could at least suppress doubt sufficiently to meet his criterion. I considered it a little longer to be sure that I wasn’t allowing momentum, contemplative fatigue, or my great regard for him to push me over the finish line.
After a silence of perhaps five minutes, I said that I thought I could clear that hurdle. He asked me if I wished to be received. I did, and was, in the chapel in his home a few days later, on June 18, 1986. I have taken the sacraments at least once a week since, and have confessed when I feel sinful. This is not an overly frequent sensation, but when it occurs, I can again agree with Cardinal Newman that our consciences are “powerful, peremptory, unargumentative, irrational, minatory and definitive.” The strain of trying to ignore or restrain an aroused conscience can be intolerable. Confession and repentance, if sincere, are easier, more successful, and more creditable.
Though there are many moments of scepticism as matters arise, and the dark nights of the soul that seem to assail almost everyone visit me too, I have never had anything remotely resembling a lapse, nor a sense of forsakenness, even when I was unjustly indicted, convicted, and imprisoned, in a country I formerly much admired.
Lord Black was released from prison on bail in July of 2010 and is currently awaiting a decision from the Supreme Court on whether or not to hear his appeal. He's a magnificent writer, highly amusing with his wit, and very kind. His latest contribution - A Great Victory for the U.S.
.
Recent Comments