Recent News

The Conciliar Circularity of Synodality

Written by Robert Royal

Wednesday, October 23, 2024

          The synodal Church is the Church foreseen by the Second Vatican Council.

Why?

Because the Second Vatican Council foresaw the synodal Church.

In a circular argument, the conclusion is in the premise – and that’s that.

For anyone proposing this particular argument, it doesn’t matter that Lumen gentium(“The Dogmatic Constitution on the Church”) never uses the term synodal as it is used here and doesn’t remotely suggest what the circular argument assumes. Yet the Gregorian University in Rome announced Monday that it will hold a three-day conference at the conclusion of the current synod titled, “From the Council to the Synod. Rereading a Church’s journey 60 years after Lumen Gentium (1964-2024).”

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Rubens’ ‘Consequences of War’

Written by Brad Miner

Wednesday, October 16, 2024

Peter Paul Rubens was a Catholic painter. He was not the most Catholic of Catholic painters, but he was likely the most catholic, as will become clear below.

One thinks of religious artists (i.e., men and women in consecrated life) such as Fra Angelico, Fra Bartolomeo, and Sister Plautilla Nelli – artists whose lives were dedicated not just to painting but also to poverty, chastity, and obedience.

By contrast, Rubens was a wealthy, twice-married man (his first wife died), obedient to the Faith. The case may be made that he was the greatest Baroque-era painter, although the case can also be made that it was Caravaggio. And there’s also no question that Rubens admired Caravaggio’s work and was much influenced by it.

One difference between them was their productivity: Caravaggio produced fewer than 100 paintings that we know of; Rubens’ output (according to expert Michael Jaffé) was 1,403 works. Partly, that has to do with longevity: Rubens died at 62; Caravaggio at 38.

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The Trinity the Synod Needs

Written by Robert Royal

Saturday, October 12, 2024

It’s often been said that our civilization is based on a kind of historical trinity – Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome – in addition (it needs saying in an age bereft of a historical sense) to the Holy Trinity. While the deepest roots of any culture are religious – and we have seen all around us in recent decades what happens when we human beings are uprooted from our rich Christian cultural soil – there are other elements essential to nourishing a full human life. And this is as true of the life of the Church as it is of the “secular” world in which we move, in and through, every day.

Such considerations shed no little light on the difficulties many people are having about the Synod on Synodality, even those who are confirmed synodistas. One way of understanding the problem is that we seem to want to lean entirely on Jerusalem – the Holy Spirit is often invoked as the guarantor of everything, though who gets to decide what is the voice of the Holy Spirit, and what is not, remains up in the air. Meanwhile, we fail to keep in mind the sacred history that God Himself made clear by His appearance on earth “in the fullness of time.” (Galatians 4:4)

Christianity came into the world at a particular time. It needed, and absorbed, the high rationality of Athens so that the human mind, as well as the human heart, could enter profoundly into relation with Revelation. Much of what we understand about the Incarnation, for example, was worked out using ancient Greek terms. In recent years, even at the highest levels of the Church, we’ve often enough heard philosophy and theology denigrated, almost as if having clear ideas about Faith and morals are an affront to God, who seems instead to be pure, undefined “mercy.”

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Treasure in Heaven

Written by Brad Miner

Tuesday, October 8, 2024

I grew up in a secular household. What’s worse, my parents demanded I attend church – a Methodist church – for Sunday school and then confirmation, which I did. This all happened a long time ago, and my memories are fading. But I cannot recall my parents ever coming to church. Not on Sundays when I sang in the children’s choir or even on the day I was confirmed.

They had pushed me toward the Christian faith, but they had neither preceded nor followed me. This is by way of saying my parents considered Christianity a path to respectability and not the way to eternal life. On Sundays, they played golf. I took this lesson into my teens and twenties.

After college, I began to take an interest in religion, and I liked talking about it. Dad grew weary listening and asked, “Are there golf courses in heaven, Brad? If you can assure me there are I’ll make a profession of faith.”

We were both exasperated.

Two weeks later, Dad died suddenly. He was 54. I was 23.

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Perspectives, Paradigms, and Catholicity

Written by Robert Royal

Monday, October 7, 2024

As the first full week of the final session of the Synod on Synodality begins today, little is emerging that has not been heard many times before. Some delegates have expressed pleasure at reconnecting with friends they made last year. It’s no small thing to make friends, good friends, true friends, anno Domini 2024, even in the Church. And while that may not lead to much as many were hoping for in the synodal way – the new way of “being Church,” “listening,” “walking together” – at least it may help keep some measure of calm in the synod hall.

News has been so slow that, at a press briefing the other day, there were just a few more journalists than there were panelists. That may change as things unfold. But there’s “not much there there” – except for Australian Bishop Anthony Randazzo who, on Friday, deplored the focus on so-called “hot button issues,” as if the Church were involved in a political campaign. He dismissed all that as merely being driven by a small number of ideologues. Progressives in the media, however, love to give that small group a big megaphone.

But there was one remark in a previous press briefing that caught my attention. Bishop Daniel E. Flores of Brownsville, Texas has been the synod point man for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Amid some hard-to-get-a-grip-on meandering in the general direction of synodality, he raised a question that will not go away when the synod ends. Or after. Ever. Because it can’t.

For the rest of the column, click here . . .

Some Talking – and Listening – Points

Written by Robert Royal

Saturday, October 5, 2024

Sin, corporate sin, was abundantly confessed this past week during an opening penitential rite for the synod in Rome. And before the whirligig of the news cycle carries off those confessions along with everything else in the coming week – I feel the need to confess myself to a personal temptation to sin in the form of weariness and annoyance with grand gestures that aim at the concrete and spiritual – and result in the abstract and bureaucratic. And pose no little danger. Please bear with me.

The penitential spectacle before the opening of the Synod needs to be viewed through lenses other than pious wishes and all due respect for the doubtless good intentions of the Holy Father. Let us describe it for what it was: Cardinals and others officially confessing sins that they have in all likelihood never personally committed, on behalf of others in the Church, who may themselves be quite personally innocent. (How many people in the Church have in any normal sense of the term sinned against “peace” or women’s contributions or the environment? Repentance on that score is better recommended to the attention of specific criminals, miscreants, terrorists who are not in short supply.)

One might, of course, also start quibbling over why these sins and not others. For instance, how widespread is the “sin” of “using church teaching as weapons to hurl at others.” Particularly as opposed to how frequently this sin is: ignoring Church teaching to please myself. You don’t need a Pew survey to have a fairly good idea of the relative proportions, which now as always tips heavily towards the latter. The Pharisees are a small cohort – the self-willed, especially in our Age of Identity, legion.

For the rest of the column, click here . . .

The Beginning of the End Or. . . .

Written by Robert Royal

Wednesday, October 2, 2024

As the second (and final?) session of the Synod on Synodality opens today, many people are still asking: What is synodality? There seems to be no good answer to that question. Indeed, the synod organizers think the very question is wrong. The best that anyone with some authority to say has been able to come up with is that synodality is not a “what” but a “process.” It “is” what it “does.”

What kind of process, other than continued talking with one another, is hard to say. But it’s an open-ended process that is to continue beyond the closing date of the synodal session later in the month – the end of the beginning, so to speak, not the beginning of the end. Not only for the chosen delegates and those appointed by Pope Francis to ongoing “study groups” slated to report at the earliest in June of 2025, but for the future of the worldwide Catholic Church.

In addition to the also somewhat woolly synodal aims of “communion, participation, and mission” – all of which have been going on for 2000 years without benefit of the synod on synodality – there’s been a renewed emphasis during this process on a “new way of being Church.”

For those too young to have been there, “being Church” – not being “the” Church (more on this below) – was an ungrammatical but stylish neologism in the decade or so after Vatican II.

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No Bad Boys: ‘Heart of a Servant, the Father Flanagan Story’

Written by Brad Miner

Tuesday, September 24, 2024

It was originally called “The City of Little Men,” when the Irish-born Fr. Edward J. Flanagan founded the refuge for orphaned and troubled boys in 1917 at 25th and Dodge Streets in Omaha. It became Boys Town a few years later when Fr. Flanagan purchased a farm – a necessary investment since the number of boys under his care had grown from a few to a few hundred. By the 1960s, the population of Boys Town peaked at 880.

A new documentary film – premiering October 8th in one-night-only, nationwide Fathom Events screenings – seems intended to boost the cause of Servant of God Fr. Flanagan’s canonization. Surely, it will help, as people see the documentary, are inspired by the great man’s story, and begin to pray for his intercession.

Edward Joseph Flanagan was born in 1886 in Leabeg, County Roscommon, emigrated to the United States in 1904, and was educated at Mount St. Mary’s College in Maryland, after which he went to Dunwoodie, as we New Yorkers call it: St. Joseph’s Seminary in (the Dunwoodie section of) Yonkers, NY, which in those days was known as the West Point of American seminaries.

He spent time at the Gregorian University in Rome in 1908 but was forced to take a break because of ill health. (He had been dealing with respiratory and cardiac issues since birth.) His journey continued in, of all places, the Royal Imperial Leopold Francis University in Innsbruck, Austria – in part because it was assumed the mountain air would be good for his lungs – and was ordained there in 1912.

He returned to America and joined his older brother, Patrick, also a priest, and his sister, Nellie, in Omaha.

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Dubia from an Atheist

Written by Robert Royal

Monday, September 16, 2024

A sometimes-tart critic of this site – a self-described atheist who reads this page regularly for reasons unknown – came to the defense of Pope Francis’ recent remarks in Singapore about all religions being a path to God (in the original Italian, Tutte le religioni sono un cammino per arrivare a Dio): “Even as an atheist I have to feel sorry for him. . . .He can’t get away with anything without the reactionary storm.” St. John Paul II, she reminded TCT, said, “Everybody that is just is called to form part of the Kingdom of Heaven – whether they be Buddhists, Jews, or Atheists – as long as they are good.”

She continued, in a somewhat less gracious vein: “He got away with that completely. . . .I was really fond of him, but I guess he was just another jerk who didn’t understand church doctrine and of course there was no Papal Posse then. . . .He also said. . . .Hell is not a place. . . .that caused some stir but not the mass hysteria that follows any little thing Francis says.”

I’m not quite sure that there is something people call a “frenemy,” i.e., someone who, paradoxically, is a friend by sharply attacking. But if so, she might qualify. Because some questions – we might even call them dubia – about critical reactions to Pope Francis are duly formulated here and, in a way, call for an answer. And it’s almost always good when we’re challenged to think more deeply, more justly, more charitably if we are friends – to the truth.

The first thing that might be said about that moment in Singapore is a dubia: Is that correct?

For the rest of the column, click here . . .

The Curious Career of Cultural Christianity

Written by Robert Royal

Monday, September 9, 2024

Among the many abrupt twists and turns in our online-driven, unstable social life, one of the oddest is the recent career of “Cultural Christianity” (hereafter “CC”). CC refers to the merely passive – and precarious – residue of Christianity in many people’s lives, not a fully living faith. In the 1980s and 1990s, it was often denigrated as a sharp decline from the robust religiosity once quite evident in America. Indeed, back then it seemed there was an emerging “Catholic moment” – the title of a 1987 book by our late friend, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, published three years before he converted from Lutheranism. Evangelicals, too, were lamenting “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind,” the lack of substance among their otherwise committed and politically influential fellows. There seemed to be a mood for Christian renewal.

Renewals occurred, but even greater defections. The “commanding heights” of the culture, as the Soviets used to say – schools, media, popular entertainment – all fell into decadence and outright anti-Christian stances. We’re now living in a sewer of “cultural post-Christianity.” And there seems to be no way back from the abyss.

And yet. . . .In recent months, we’ve seen Richard Dawkins, the great panjandrum of the “New Atheists,” publicly proclaiming (as he sees Britain being overrun by Islam) that he now considers himself a “cultural Christian.” As, for other reasons, does Elon Musk. And, in his own elusive way, perhaps, Jordan Peterson.

And Ayaan Hirsi Ali – ex-Somali Muslim – (and now ex-atheist) has repudiated Western feminist and progressive nostrums destroying the Western heritage. And has formally embraced Christianity.

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