Kardinaal Dolan op de Republikeinse conventie

De voorzitter van de Amerikaanse bisschoppenconferentie, Timothy kardinaal Dolan, aartsbisschop van New York, heeft vandaag een gebed uitgesproken op de conventie van de Republikeinse Partij (hier de tekst van het gebed en hier een artikel in Trouw erover). Dolan is (in tweede instantie) ook uitgenodigd op de Democratische conventie volgende week, waar hij ook zal bidden.

Ross Douthat in de NYT

Zelfs The New York Times, misschien wereldwijd de grootste 'kneedster van de heersende mentaliteit', kan soms niet anders dan wat minder politiek correcte (maar waarschijnlijk waardere) inzichten publiceren. Uit een opinie-bijdrage van (de hier ook afgelopen juli al eens geciteerde) Ross Douthat op 9 augustus:

Here’s a passage from my colleague Laurie Goodstein’s dispatch from this year’s assembly of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, the American nuns’ organization that was criticized by the Vatican earlier this year:

[The nuns] sat in silence for a long stretch, sang songs about truth and mystery accompanied by a guitar and a choir, and heard a keynote address by a futurist who was escorted to the podium by seven liturgical dancers waving diaphanous scarves of pink and tangerine.
“Crisis precedes transformation,” the futurist, Barbara Marx Hubbard, told the nuns. “You are the best seedbed that I know for evolving the church and the world in the 21st century. Now, that may be a surprise to the world. But, you see, new things always happen from unexpected places.”
The nuns, most dressed informally in pants or skirts, gave a standing ovation to Ms. Hubbard, a beatific presence with a mantle of white hair who quoted Jesus, Buckminster Fuller, the Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the current pope, Benedict XVI.
But if the nuns submit to the Vatican’s plan to overhaul their organization, it is doubtful that their meetings will feature a keynote speaker like Ms. Hubbard, who grew up a nonreligious Jew in a Scarsdale, N.Y., mansion (her father founded the Marx toy company) and is now acclaimed by New Age luminaries like Deepak Chopra for helping to lead what she calls the “conscious evolution” movement.

I’ve already offered my thoughts on how the spiritual trends embodied by a figure like Ms. Hubbard fit into broader trends in American religion, but let me put her LCWR address in the context of the mini-debate over the future of liberal Christianity that I’ve been engaged these last few weeks. Looking at the decline and dissolution of self-consciously progressive denominations, churches and religious orders over the last two generations, one possible conclusion is that their central problem has been a deficit of real, genuine belief, and that only a reaffirmation of historical Christian practice and conviction can restore liberal Christianity’s vitality. This is the roughly the point of the essay by the liberal Protestant historian Gary Dorrien that I’ve repeatedly quoted, and will take the liberty of quoting once again:

Liberal theology has no purpose or integrity as anything but a progressive tradition. Its renewal does not depend on selling out its critical spirit or progressive heritage. Throughout its history, however, liberal theology has made its strongest appeal when it fuses its two heritages with spiritual power. From its Enlightenment/modernist heritage it has emphasized the authority of modern knowledge, affirmed the continuity between reason and revelation, championed the values of humanistic individualism and democracy, and usually distrusted metaphysical reason. From its evangelical heritage it has affirmed a personal transcendent God, the authority of Christian experience, the divinity of Christ, the need of personal redemption, and the importance of Christian missions.
… To put it bluntly, liberal theology has broken beyond its academic base only when it speaks with spiritual conviction about God’s holy and gracious presence, the way of Christ, and the transformative mission of Christianity. That is not how a great deal of liberal theology has spoken over the past generation, to the detriment of liberal theology as a whole. In the past a spiritually vital evangelical liberalism sustained religious communities that supported the entire liberal movement. What would the social gospel movement have been without its gospel-centered preaching and theology? What would the Civil Rights movement have been without its gospel-centered belief in the sacredness of personality and the divine good?
When the social gospelers spoke of the authority of Christian experience, they took for granted their own deep grounding in Bible study, family devotions, personal prayer, and worship. Today the loss of the transcendental, biblical voice in liberal theology is one important reason that much of it gets little notice.

Note that Dorrien is not calling for liberal Christianity to become politically conservative, to abandon its commitment to a social gospel/social justice view of how faith should be manifested in the world, or to cease engaging critically and seriously with modernity’s challenges to Christian belief. But he is calling for it to remain — or, perhaps more aptly, to once again become — recognizably Christian: Biblical and gospel-centered, liturgical and devotional, creedal and churched. In this view, the quest for social justice can’t be separated from the quest for personal conversion, institutions matter as much as good intentions, and no reinvention of Christianity can succeed if it requires completely reinventing Jesus Christ.

Een wanhopige behoefte aan echte opvoeding

Persverklaring van Gemeenschap en Bevrijding in de Verenigde Staten naar aanleiding van de schietpartij in de Aurora-bioscoop in Colorado:

Vrijdag zijn we voor de zoveelste keer getuigen geweest van een bloedbad, deze keer in een bioscoop.

Veel zou gezegd kunnen worden over deze meest recente van wat 'normale' tragedies aan het worden zijn, maar één aspect heeft in het bijzonder onze aandacht getroffen. Op 20 juli maakte de Washington Post het volgende portret van de dader:

"Holmes (24) was veelbelovend op school. [...] Hij had op de highschool een prestigieuze studiebeurs gewonnen. [...] Hij was cum laude afgestudeerd aan het College. [...] Hij zou naar de graduate school van de Universiteit van Colorado in Denver gaan".

En op dezelfde dag meldde de Associated Press: "'Wat academische prestaties betreft behoorde hij tot de top van de top', aldus Chancellor Timothy P. White van Riverside [Universiteit van Californië]".

Kortom, volgens de meeste standaarden zou Holmes beschouwd worden als een hoog opgeleide jonge man.

Deze feiten, samen met de herinnering aan de schietpartijen op Columbine High School en Virginia Tech, schreeuwen om de vragen: wat betekent opleiden en wat betekent opgeleid worden? Betekent studeren aan topuniversiteiten, uitmuntende cijfers halen, deelnemen aan extracurriculaire activiteiten, en alles wat we gewoonlijk associëren met een goede opleidingsgarantie, dat iemand opgevoed wordt?

We richten deze vragen niet eerst en vooral aan onderwijsinstellingen, of aan het onderwijssysteem. Integendeel, wij menen dat elke Amerikaanse volwassene zich met deze vragen moet bezighouden, aangezien de uitdaging van de opvoeding gaat over het doorgeven aan nieuwe generaties van wat een samenleving het waardevolst vindt.

Wij stellen dat elke opvoedingsinspanning haar fundament heeft in de hypothese die ze jonge mensen aanbiedt voor de reden van hun bestaan. We stellen vast dat op dit moment bijna overal het bereiken van succes als de meest betrouwbare hypothese voor de reden om te leven aan jongeren wordt aangeboden.

Wij achten deze hypothese verschrikkelijk ontoereikend om jonge mensen passend uit te rusten voor het leven.

Werkelijke opvoeding betekent binnenleiden in de hele werkelijkheid en - en dat is essentieel - in haar totale betekenis, zoals Luigi Giussani onderstreept in zijn boek Het risico van de opvoeding. Alleen door opnieuw te evalueren wàt we jonge mensen aanbieden als de betekenis van de hele werkelijkheid, inclusief de betekenis van hun eigen leven, kunnen we werkelijk de wortel van zulke terugkerende tragedies aanpakken. Om deze reden nodigen we iedereen van goede wil dringend uit om met ons te pogen de essentie van een echt menselijke opvoeding te herontdekken.

Van harte welkom, Leah!

Hieronder het laatste bericht van blogster Leah Libresco (senior politieke wetenschappen aan Yale University, journalist bij The Huffington Post en columniste van The Yale Daily News) voor het Atheist Portal van website Patheos.com (het laatste - want haar blogs staan voortaan op het Catholic Channel van dezelfde website):

For several years, a lot of my friends have been telling me I had an inconsistent and unsustainable philosophy. ”A virtue ethicist atheist whose transhumanism seems to be rooted in dualism? Who won’t shut up about moral lapses as wounds to the soul and keeps trying to convince us it’s better to be sinned against than sinning? Who has started talking about mortifying her pride and keeps pulling out Lewis and Chesterton quotes? C’mon, convert already.”
I could see where they were coming from, but I stayed put. I was ready to admit that there were parts of Christianity and Catholicism that seemed like a pretty good match for the bits of my moral system that I was most sure of, while meanwhile my own philosophy was pretty kludged together and not particularly satisfactory. But I couldn’t pick consistency over my construction project as long as I didn’t believe it was true.
While I kept working, I tried to kee my eyes open for ways I could test which world I was in, but a lot of the evidence for Christianity was only compelling to me if I at least presupposed Deism. Meanwhile, on the other side, I kept running into moral philosophers who seemed really helpful, until I discovered that their study of virtue ethics has led them to take a tumble into the Tiber. (I’m looking at you, MacIntyre!).
Then, the night before Palm Sunday (I have excellent liturgical timing), I was up at my alma mater for an alumni debate. I had another round of translating a lot of principles out of Catholic in order to use them in my speech, which prompted the now traditional heckling from my friends. After the debate, I buttonholed a Christian friend for another argument. During the discussion, he prodded me on where I thought moral law came from in my metaphysics. I talked about morality as though it were some kind of Platonic form, remote from the plane that humans existed on. He wanted to know where the connection was.
I could hypothesize how a Forms-material world link would work in the case of mathematics (a little long and off topic for this post, but pretty much the canonical idea of recognizing Two-ness as the quality that’s shared by two chairs and two houses, etc. Once you get the natural numbers, the rest of mathematics is in your grasp). But I didn’t have an analogue for how humans got bootstrap up to get even a partial understanding of objective moral law.
I’ve heard some explanations that try to bake morality into the natural world by reaching for evolutionary psychology. They argue that moral dispositions are evolutionarily triumphant over selfishness, or they talk about group selection, or something else. Usually, these proposed solutions radically misunderstand a) evolution b) moral philosophy or c) both. I didn’t think the answer was there. My friend pressed me to stop beating up on other people’s explanations and offer one of my own.
“I don’t know,” I said. ”I’ve got bupkis.”
“Your best guess.”
“I haven’t got one.”
“You must have some idea.”
“I don’t know. I’ve got nothing. I guess Morality just loves me or something.”
“…”
“Ok, ok, yes, I heard what I just said. Give me a second and let me decide if I believe it.”
It turns out I did.
I believed that the Moral Law wasn’t just a Platonic truth, abstract and distant. It turns out I actually believed it was some kind of Person, as well as Truth. And there was one religion that seemed like the most promising way to reach back to that living Truth. I asked my friend what he suggest we do now, and we prayed the night office of the Liturgy of the Hours together (I’ve kept up with that since). Then I suggested hugs and playing Mumford and Sons really, really loudly.
After I changed my mind, I decided to take a little time to make sure I really believed what I thought I believed, before telling my friends, family, and, now, all of you. That left me with the question of what to do about my atheism blog. My solution was to just not write anything I disagreed with. Enough of my friends had accused me of writing in a crypto-Catholic style that I figured no one would notice if I were actually crypto-Catholic for a month and a half (i.e. everything from “Upon this ROC…” on) . That means you already have a bit of a preview of what has and hasn’t changed. I’m still confused about the Church’s teachings on homosexuality, I still need to do a lot of work to accept gifts graciously, and I still love steam engines.
Starting tomorrow, this blog is moving to the the Patheos Catholic channel (the url and RSS will remain unchanged). Meanwhile, I’m in RCIA classes at a DC parish, so you can look forward to more Parsing Catholicism tags (and after the discussion of universalism we had last week, I think it will be prudent to add a “Possibly Heretical” category).
This post isn’t the final word on my conversion. I’m sure there’s a lot more explaining and arguing to do, so be a little charitable in your read of this post and try to give me a little time to expand my ideas over the next few weeks. (Based on my in-person arguments to date, it seems like most of my atheist friends disagree two or three steps back from my deciding Morality is actually God. They usually diverge back around the bit where I assert morality, like math, is objective and independent of humans. As one of my friends said, “Well, I guess if I were a weird quasi-Platonist virtue ethicist, this would probably convince me”).
And how am I doing? Well, I’m baking now (cracking eggs is pretty much the least gnostic thing I can do, since it’s so, so disgusting to touch, and putting effort into food as more than the ransom my body demands for continued function is the second least gnostic). I’ve been using the Liturgy of the Hours and St. Patrick’s Breastplate for most of my prayer attempts. and, over all, I feel a bit like Valentine in this speech from Arcadia:
It makes me so happy… A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.

We herinneren aan de zin van J.H. Newman: "Conversions are nothing more than a deeper discovery of what we already truly desire".

(Via het Katholiek Nieuwsblad. Lees Leahs eigen bericht voor de links naar haar eerdere artikelen die (achteraf) de passen van haar bekering illustreren)

Intellectuele liefdadigheid: anderen tot de waarheid brengen is een daad van liefde

Uit de toespraak van paus Benedictus tot Amerikaanse bisschoppen, op Ad limina-bezoek in Rome (afgelopen zaterdag):

In the present talk, I wish to address the question of religious education and the faith formation of the next generation of Catholics in your country.Before all else, I would acknowledge the great progress that has been made in recent years in improving catechesis, reviewing texts and bringing them into conformity with the Catechism of the Catholic Church. [...]
On the level of higher education, many of you have pointed to a growing recognition on the part of Catholic colleges and universities of the need to reaffirm their distinctive identity in fidelity to their founding ideals and the Church’s mission in service of the Gospel. Yet much remains to be done, especially in such basic areas as compliance with the mandate laid down in Canon 812 for those who teach theological disciplines. The importance of this canonical norm as a tangible expression of ecclesial communion and solidarity in the Church’s educational apostolate becomes all the more evident when we consider the confusion created by instances of apparent dissidence between some representatives of Catholic institutions and the Church’s pastoral leadership: such discord harms the Church’s witness and, as experience has shown, can easily be exploited to compromise her authority and her freedom.
It is no exaggeration to say that providing young people with a sound education in the faith represents the most urgent internal challenge facing the Catholic community in your country. The deposit of faith is a priceless treasure which each generation must pass on to the next by winning hearts to Jesus Christ and shaping minds in the knowledge, understanding and love of his Church. It is gratifying to realize that, in our day too, the Christian vision, presented in its breadth and integrity, proves immensely appealing to the imagination, idealism and aspirations of the young, who have a right to encounter the faith in all its beauty, its intellectual richness and its radical demands.
Here I would simply propose several points which I trust will prove helpful for your discernment in meeting this challenge.
First, as we know, the essential task of authentic education at every level is not simply that of passing on knowledge, essential as this is, but also of shaping hearts. There is a constant need to balance intellectual rigor in communicating effectively, attractively and integrally, the richness of the Church’s faith with forming the young in the love of God, the praxis of the Christian moral and sacramental life and, not least, the cultivation of personal and liturgical prayer.
It follows that the question of Catholic identity, not least at the university level, entails much more than the teaching of religion or the mere presence of a chaplaincy on campus. All too often, it seems, Catholic schools and colleges have failed to challenge students to reappropriate their faith as part of the exciting intellectual discoveries which mark the experience of higher education. The fact that so many new students find themselves dissociated from the family, school and community support systems that previously facilitated the transmission of the faith should continually spur Catholic institutions of learning to create new and effective networks of support. In every aspect of their education, students need to be encouraged to articulate a vision of the harmony of faith and reason capable of guiding a life-long pursuit of knowledge and virtue. As ever, an essential role in this process is played by teachers who inspire others by their evident love of Christ, their witness of sound devotion and their commitment to that sapientia Christiana which integrates faith and life, intellectual passion and reverence for the splendor of truth both human and divine.
In effect, faith by its very nature demands a constant and all-embracing conversion to the fullness of truth revealed in Christ. He is the creative Logos, in whom all things were made and in whom all reality "holds together" (Col 1:17); he is the new Adam who reveals the ultimate truth about man and the world in which we live. In a period of great cultural change and societal displacement not unlike our own, Augustine pointed to this intrinsic connection between faith and the human intellectual enterprise by appealing to Plato, who held, he says, that "to love wisdom is to love God" (cf. De Civitate Dei, VIII, 8). The Christian commitment to learning, which gave birth to the medieval universities, was based upon this conviction that the one God, as the source of all truth and goodness, is likewise the source of the intellect’s passionate desire to know and the will’s yearning for fulfilment in love.
Only in this light can we appreciate the distinctive contribution of Catholic education, which engages in a "diakonia of truth" inspired by an intellectual charity which knows that leading others to the truth is ultimately an act of love (cf. Address to Catholic Educators, Washington, 17 April 2008). Faith’s recognition of the essential unity of all knowledge provides a bulwark against the alienation and fragmentation which occurs when the use of reason is detached from the pursuit of truth and virtue; in this sense, Catholic institutions have a specific role to play in helping to overcome the crisis of universities today. Firmly grounded in this vision of the intrinsic interplay of faith, reason and the pursuit of human excellence, every Christian intellectual and all the Church’s educational institutions must be convinced, and desirous of convincing others, that no aspect of reality remains alien to, or untouched by, the mystery of the redemption and the Risen Lord’s dominion over all creation.
During my Pastoral Visit to the United States, I spoke of the need for the Church in America to cultivate "a mindset, an intellectual culture which is genuinely Catholic" (cf. Homily at Nationals Stadium, Washington, 17 April 2008). Taking up this task certainly involves a renewal of apologetics and an emphasis on Catholic distinctiveness; ultimately however it must be aimed at proclaiming the liberating truth of Christ and stimulating greater dialogue and cooperation in building a society ever more solidly grounded in an authentic humanism inspired by the Gospel and faithful to the highest values of America’s civic and cultural heritage. At the present moment of your nation’s history, this is the challenge and opportunity awaiting the entire Catholic community, and it is one which the Church’s educational institutions should be the first to acknowledge and embrace.

Katholiek onderwijs

In het Katholiek Nieuwsblad een wanhoopskreet van een katholieke onderwijzer; in Amerika schrijft de voorzitter van de bisschoppenconferentie, kardinaal Dolan, op zijn blog dat "If our schools are not visibly and robustly Catholic, let’s save a lot of money and close them in areas where our children can get a decent academic education free of charge".

What we hold most dear

Flyer van Gemeenschap en Bevrijding in Amerika:

After the Way of the Cross in the heart of our city and in most cities in the United States, we are full of gratitude for being able to publicly express what we hold most dear in life. While thankful for this freedom -- which is not available everywhere, as we read in the newspapers every day -- we are also concerned about the attempts in our country to curtail it through the recent unprecedented mandates by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
As the U.S. Catholic Bishops recently wrote, “we wish to clarify what this debate is—and is not—about. This is not about access to contraception, which is ubiquitous and inexpensive, even when it is not provided by the Church’s hand and with the Church’s funds. This is not about the religious freedom of Catholics only, but also of those who recognize that their cherished beliefs may be next on the block. This is not about the Bishops’ somehow “banning contraception,” when the U.S. Supreme Court took that issue off the table two generations ago. Indeed, this is not about the Church wanting to force anybody to do anything; it is instead about the federal government forcing the Church—consisting of its faithful and all but a few of its institutions—to act against Church teachings. This is not a matter of opposition to universal health care, which has been a concern of the Bishops’ Conference since 1919, virtually at its founding. This is not a fight we want or asked for, but one forced upon us by government on its own timing. Finally, this is not a Republican or Democratic, a conservative or liberal issue; it is an American issue.”
Our nation’s roots lie in the ardent desire of men and women to freely live out their deepest religious convictions, as the supreme expression of their perennial desire and search for truth. The Founding Fathers recognized and valued this history when they drafted the first amendment of the Constitution, which not only protects a right to worship one’s god of choice behind closed doors, but to freely and publicly exercise one’s religion and to dialogue with the culture at large. As Pope Benedict XVI stated, “religious freedom should be understood… not merely as immunity from coercion, but even more fundamentally as an ability to order one’s own choices in accordance with the truth. (…) Precisely for this reason, the laws and institution of a society cannot be shaped in such a way as to ignore the religious dimension of its citizens or to prescind completely from it.”
The recent HHS mandates violate religious freedom by requiring both institutions and individuals pay for procedures and medicines that directly contradict their foundational convictions about the nature and dignity of human life. Appealing to notions of equality, rights, and freedom, this ruling claims to have the final word on what the human person is and denies what is most intimate to each of us, namely conscience, the relation to God, free and creative social life, and the very possibility of accessing ultimate truths. A people that accepts government dictating what is most fundamental to human nature is a people at the whim of power.
What is at stake in this moment of our history is not just the possibility for religious groups to continue to give their own original contribution to American society, but also the possibility for any man or woman to gain access to the truth of life. For this reason, we will not give up the right to publicly witness to the world, through our lives and our work, what we hold most dear. With the words of the Russian writer Vladimir Soloviev, we repeat today what Christians have been repeating for 2,000 years.
“In the grieved voice the Emperor addressed them: ‘Tell me yourselves, you strange people...you Christians, deserted by the majority of your brothers and leaders: what do you hold most dear in Christianity?’ At this Elder John rose up and said in a quiet voice: ‘Great sovereign! What we hold the most dear in Christianity is Christ Himself - He in His person. All the rest comes from Him, for we know that in Him dwells bodily the whole fullness of Divinity.’”
Happy Easter.

Dolan vs. Obama: "We hebben niet om deze strijd gevraagd, maar we zullen er niet voor wegrennen"

Opsteker voor de maandagmorgen. Brief van de voorzitter van de Conferentie van katholieke bisschoppen van de VS, de New Yorkse kardinaal Dolan, aan zijn collega-bisschoppen, over de weerstand die de Kerk zal blijven bieden aan de pogingen van de regering-Obama de godsdienstvrijheid in te perken.
Hier het grootste deel van de brief:

As pastors and shepherds, each of us would prefer to spend our energy engaged in and promoting the works of mercy to which the Church is dedicated: healing the sick, teaching our youth, and helping the poor. Yet, precisely because we are pastors and shepherds, we recognize that each of the ministries entrusted to us by Jesus is now in jeopardy due to this bureaucratic intrusion into the internal life of the church. You and I both know well that we were doing those extensive and noble works rather well without these radical new constrictive and forbidding mandates. Our Church has a long tradition of effective partnership with government and the wider community in the service of the sick, our children, our elders, and the poor at home and abroad, and we sure hope to continue it.
Of course, we maintained from the start that this is not a “Catholic” fight alone. I like to quote as often as possible a nurse who emailed me, “I’m not so much mad about all this as a Catholic, but as an American.” And as we recall, a Baptist minister, Governor Mike Huckabee, observed, “In this matter, we’re all Catholics.” No doubt you have heard numerous statements just like these. We are grateful to know so many of our fellow Americans, especially our friends in the ecumenical and interreligious dialogue, stand together in this important moment in our country. They know that this is not just about sterilization, abortifacients, and chemical contraception. It’s about religious freedom, the sacred right of any Church to define its own teaching and ministry.
When the President announced on January 20th that the choking mandates from HHS would remain, not only we bishops and our Catholic faithful, but people of every faith, or none at all, rallied in protest. The worry that we had expressed - that such government control was contrary to our deepest political values - was eloquently articulated by constitutional scholars and leaders of every creed.
On February 10th, the President announced that the insurance providers would have to pay the bill, instead of the Church’s schools, hospitals, clinics, or vast network of charitable outreach having to do so. He considered this “concession” adequate. Did this help? We wondered if it would, and you will recall that the Conference announced at first that, while withholding final judgment, we would certainly give the President’s proposal close scrutiny. Well, we did - and as you know, we are as worried as ever.
For one, there was not even a nod to the deeper concerns about trespassing upon religious freedom, or of modifying the HHS’ attempt to define the how and who of our ministry. Two, since a big part of our ministries are “self-insured,” we still ask how this protects us. We’ll still have to pay and, in addition to that, we’ll still have to maintain in our policies practices which our Church has consistently taught are grave wrongs in which we cannot participate. And what about forcing individual believers to pay for what violates their religious freedom and conscience? We can’t abandon the hard working person of faith who has a right to religious freedom. And three, there was still no resolution about the handcuffs placed upon renowned Catholic charitable agencies, both national and international, and their exclusion from contracts just because they will not refer victims of human trafficking, immigrants and refugees, and the hungry of the world, for abortions, sterilization, or contraception. In many ways, the announcement of February 10 solved little and complicated a lot. We now have more questions than answers, more confusion than clarity.
So the important question arises: What to do now? How can we bishops best respond, especially united in our common pastoral ministry as an Episcopal Conference? For one, under the ongoing leadership of Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, Bishop Blaire and Bishop Lori we will continue our strong efforts of advocacy and education. In the coming weeks the Conference will continue to provide you, among other things, with catechetical resources on the significance of religious freedom to the Church and the Church’s teaching on it from a doctrinal and moral perspective. We are developing liturgical aids to encourage prayer in our efforts and plans on how we can continue to voice our public and strong opposition to this infringement on our freedom. And the Ad Hoc Committee on Religious Liberty, that has served the Conference so well in its short lifespan, will continue its extraordinary work in service to this important cause.
Two, we will ardently continue to seek a rescinding of the suffocating mandates that require us to violate our moral convictions, or at least insist upon a much wider latitude to the exemptions so that churches can be free of the new, rigidly narrow definition of church, minister and ministry that would prevent us from helping those in need, educating children and healing the sick, no matter their religion.
In this regard, the President invited us to “work out the wrinkles.” We have accepted that invitation. Unfortunately, this seems to be stalled: the White House Press Secretary, for instance, informed the nation that the mandates are a fait accompli (and, embarrassingly for him, commented that we bishops have always opposed Health Care anyway, a charge that is scurrilous and insulting, not to mention flat out wrong. Bishop Blaire did a fine job of setting the record straight.) The White House already notified Congress that the dreaded mandates are now published in the Federal Registry “without change.” The Secretary of HHS is widely quoted as saying, “Religious insurance companies don’t really design the plans they sell based on their own religious tenets.” That doesn’t bode well for their getting a truly acceptable “accommodation.”
At a recent meeting between staff of the bishops’ conference and the White House staff, our staff members asked directly whether the broader concerns of religious freedom—that is, revisiting the straight-jacketing mandates, or broadening the maligned exemption—are all off the table. They were informed that they are. So much for “working out the wrinkles.” Instead, they advised the bishops’ conference that we should listen to the “enlightened” voices of accommodation, such as the recent, hardly surprising yet terribly unfortunate editorial in America [een door Amerikaanse jezuïeten (!) uitgegeven tijdschrift -vh]. The White House seems to think we bishops simply do not know or understand Catholic teaching and so, taking a cue from its own definition of religious freedom, now has nominated its own handpicked official Catholic teachers [en deze lenen zich daar graag voor; waar kennen we dat van? -vh].
We will continue to accept invitations to meet with and to voice our concerns to anyone of any party, for this is hardly partisan, who is willing to correct the infringements on religious freedom that we are now under. But as we do so, we cannot rely on off the record promises of fixes without deadlines and without assurances of proposals that will concretely address the concerns in a manner that does not conflict with our principles and teaching.
Congress might provide more hope, since thoughtful elected officials have proposed legislation to protect what should be so obvious: religious freedom. Meanwhile, in our recent debate in the senate, our opponents sought to obscure what is really a religious freedom issue by maintaining that abortion inducing drugs and the like are a “woman’s health issue.” We will not let this deception stand. Our commitment to seeking legislative remedies remains strong. And it is about remedies to the assault on religious freedom. Period. (By the way, the Church hardly needs to be lectured about health care for women. Thanks mostly to our Sisters, the Church is the largest private provider of health care for women and their babies in the country.) Bishop William Lori, Chairman of our Ad Hoc Committee on Religious Liberty, stated it well in a recent press release: “We will build on this base of support as we pursue legislation in the House of Representatives, urge the Administration to change its course on this issue, and explore our legal rights under the Constitution and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.”
Perhaps the courts offer the most light. In the recent Hosanna-Tabor ruling, the Supreme Court unanimously defended the right of a Church to define its own ministry and services, a dramatic rebuff to the administration, apparently unheeded by the White House. Thus, our bishops’ conference, many individual religious entities, and other people of good will are working with some top-notch law firms who feel so strongly about this that they will represent us pro-bono. In the upcoming days, you will hear much more about this encouraging and welcome development.
Given this climate, we have to prepare for tough times. Some, like America magazine, want us to cave-in and stop fighting, saying this is simply a policy issue; some want us to close everything down rather than comply (In an excellent article, Cardinal Francis George wrote that the administration apparently wants us to “give up for Lent” our schools, hospitals, and charitable ministries); some, like Bishop Robert Lynch wisely noted, wonder whether we might have to engage in civil disobedience and risk steep fines; some worry that we’ll have to face a decision between two ethically repugnant choices: subsidizing immoral services or no longer offering insurance coverage, a road none of us wants to travel.
Brothers, we know so very well that religious freedom is our heritage, our legacy and our firm belief, both as loyal Catholics and Americans. There have been many threats to religious freedom over the decades and years, but these often came from without. This one sadly comes from within. As our ancestors did with previous threats, we will tirelessly defend the timeless and enduring truth of religious freedom.

Nu ook "anglicaans-katholiek bisdom" in de VS: het Persoonlijk ordinariaat van de Stoel van sint Petrus

De Congregatie voor de Geloofsleer van de Heilige Stoel heeft per 1 januari een Persoonlijk ordinariaat opgericht voor anglicanen (episcopalen) uit de VS die en groupe katholiek willen worden (door de leer en het gezag van de Kerk te aanvaarden), met behoud van hun eigen geestelijkheid en tradities. Het 'nieuwe stuk Wereldkerk' heet Persoonlijk ordinariaat van de Stoel van sint Petrus, bestrijkt het territorium van de VS en werkt als een bisdom. Anglicaanse priesters, ook gehuwde, die deel uit willen maken van het ordinariaat, worden in beginsel katholiek priester gewijd. Patroon van het Amerikaanse ordinariaat is, net als van dat in Engeland, O.L.Vrouw van Walsingham. Het wordt geleid door Jeffrey Steenson, voormalig episcopaals bisschop van Rio Grande, die twee jaar geleden tot katholiek priester gewijd is. Zijn uitvalsbasis wordt Houston, Texas.
Een jaar geleden werd het eerste "anglicaanse ordinariaat" opgericht, in Engeland zelf. Dit werd mogelijk nadat op 4 november 2009 paus Benedictus XVI, daarom gevraagd door anglicanen, de mogelijkheid had geschapen voor dit soort "Engelse stukken van de Wereldkerk". Hier vindt u wat eerder op onze weblog is verschenen over dit onderwerp.
Meer over het nieuwe Amerikaanse ordinariaat vindt u vooral op de Engelse weblog Ordinariate Portal.

B16: Bisschoppen, blijf je uitspreken

B16 afgelopen zaterdag tot de Amerikaanse bisschoppen, op Ad limina-bezoek in Rome:

Our meetings are the first since my 2008 Pastoral Visit to your country, which was intended to encourage the Catholics of America in the wake of the scandal and disorientation caused by the sexual abuse crisis of recent decades. I wished to acknowledge personally the suffering inflicted on the victims and the honest efforts made both to ensure the safety of our children and to deal appropriately and transparently with allegations as they arise. It is my hope that the Church’s conscientious efforts to confront this reality will help the broader community to recognize the causes, true extent and devastating consequences of sexual abuse, and to respond effectively to this scourge which affects every level of society. By the same token, just as the Church is rightly held to exacting standards in this regard, all other institutions, without exception, should be held to the same standards [ook in Nederland blijft men over het algemeen doen alsof sexueel misbruik van minderjarigen een 'typisch katholiek' probleem is -vh].
A second, equally important, purpose of my Pastoral Visit was to summon the Church in America to recognize, in the light of a dramatically changing social and religious landscape, the urgency and demands of a new evangelization. In continuity with this aim, I plan in the coming months to present for your consideration a number of reflections which I trust you will find helpful for the discernment you are called to make in your task of leading the Church into the future which Christ is opening up for us.
Many of you have shared with me your concern about the grave challenges to a consistent Christian witness presented by an increasingly secularized society. I consider it significant, however, that there is also an increased sense of concern on the part of many men and women, whatever their religious or political views, for the future of our democratic societies. They see a troubling breakdown in the intellectual, cultural and moral foundations of social life, and a growing sense of dislocation and insecurity, especially among the young, in the face of wide-ranging societal changes. Despite attempts to still the Church’s voice in the public square, many people of good will continue to look to her for wisdom, insight and sound guidance in meeting this far-reaching crisis. The present moment can thus be seen, in positive terms, as a summons to exercise the prophetic dimension of your episcopal ministry by speaking out, humbly yet insistently, in defense of moral truth, and offering a word of hope, capable of opening hearts and minds to the truth that sets us free.
At the same time, the seriousness of the challenges which the Church in America, under your leadership, is called to confront in the near future cannot be underestimated. The obstacles to Christian faith and practice raised by a secularized culture also affect the lives of believers, leading at times to that “quiet attrition” from the Church which you raised with me during my Pastoral Visit. Immersed in this culture, believers are daily beset by the objections, the troubling questions and the cynicism of a society which seems to have lost its roots, by a world in which the love of God has grown cold in so many hearts. Evangelization thus appears not simply a task to be undertaken ad extra; we ourselves are the first to need re-evangelization. As with all spiritual crises, whether of individuals or communities, we know that the ultimate answer can only be born of a searching, critical and ongoing self-assessment and conversion in the light of Christ’s truth. Only through such interior renewal will we be able to discern and meet the spiritual needs of our age with the ageless truth of the Gospel.
Here I cannot fail to express my appreciation of the real progress which the American Bishops have made, individually and as a Conference, in responding to these issues and in working together to articulate a common pastoral vision, the fruits of which can be seen, for example, in your recent documents on faithful citizenship and on the institution of marriage. The importance of these authoritative expressions of your shared concern for the authenticity of the Church’s life and witness in your country should be evident to all.
In these days, the Church in the United States is implementing the revised translation of the Roman Missal. I am grateful for your efforts to ensure that this new translation will inspire an ongoing catechesis which emphasizes the true nature of the liturgy and, above all, the unique value of Christ’s saving sacrifice for the redemption of the world. A weakened sense of the meaning and importance of Christian worship can only lead to a weakened sense of the specific and essential vocation of the laity to imbue the temporal order with the spirit of the Gospel. America has a proud tradition of respect for the sabbath; this legacy needs to be consolidated as a summons to the service of God’s Kingdom and the renewal of the social fabric in accordance with its unchanging truth.
In the end, however, the renewal of the Church’s witness to the Gospel in your country is essentially linked to the recovery of a shared vision and sense of mission by the entire Catholic community. I know that this is a concern close to your own heart, as reflected in your efforts to encourage communication, discussion and consistent witness at every level of the life of your local Churches. I think in particular of the importance of Catholic universities and the signs of a renewed sense of their ecclesial mission, as attested by the discussions marking the tenth anniversary of the Apostolic Constitution Ex Corde Ecclesiae, and such initiatives as the symposium recently held at Catholic University of America on the intellectual tasks of the new evangelization. Young people have a right to hear clearly the Church’s teaching and, most importantly, to be inspired by the coherence and beauty of the Christian message, so that they in turn can instill in their peers a deep love of Christ and his Church.

Mooi is niet maar een kwestie van smaak

Amerika's bekendste priester-blogger Fr. Z. wijst op een artikel waarin bisschop Morlino van Madison uitlegt dat liederen die in de liturgie gebruikt worden, een intrinsieke schoonheid moeten bezitten.

Amerikaans commentaar op Europees pausbezoek

Dit commentaar van George Weigel op het staatsbezoek vorige week van paus Benedictus aan XVI verdient het gelezen te worden (aan het eind van elk van de drie pagina's moet je op 'next' klikken om verder te lezen).

"De bron die ervoor heeft gezorgd dat Amerika door 9/11 niet is gebroken"

Column van Bart Jan Spruyt op Binnenlands Bestuur, over Obama die op Ground Zero psalm 46 (telling van Luther; 45 volgens de Vulgaat) citeert.

"Theologie, de enige academische activiteit waarin iemand kan uitblinken zonder het onderwerp te kennen"

Theologen kunnen een “vloek en kwelling voor de Kerk” zijn, zegt de topadviseur van de Amerikaanse bisschoppen inzake geloofsleer.
Als het werk van theologen niet geworteld is in de leer van de Kerk en een actief geloofsleven, bevordert het uiteindelijk “leerstellige en morele dwalingen”. [...]
Capucijn Thomas Weinandy, directeur van het secretariaat voor de geloofsleer van de Amerikaanse bisschoppenconferentie, waarschuwt voor een “crisis” van de katholieke theologie door toedoen van theologen die “vaak weinig eerbied lijken te hebben voor de geloofsgeheimen zoals die traditioneel worden begrepen en nu binnen de Kerk beleden worden.”
Theologie lijkt dan te ontaarden in een “intellectueel spelletje”, gebaseerd op “de pret om spits en geraffineerd onderhoudend te zijn, of op de opwinding en drukte die verbonden zijn aan academische duels.”
“Theologie zou wel eens de enige academische bezigheid kunnen zijn waarin iemand kennelijk als theoloog beschouwd kan worden, zonder werkelijk het onderwerp te kennen”, aldus Weinandy. “Het lijkt er soms wel op dat een theoloog niet werkelijk met God bekend hoeft te zijn.”

(Katholiek Nieuwsblad)

Oorzaken en context van sexueel misbruik door katholieke priesters in de V.S.

Vorige week heeft het onafhankelijke John Jay College of Criminal Justice te New York een 143 A4-tjes dik rapport het licht doen zien over de oorzaken en context van sexueel misbruik door katholieke priesters in de V.S. van 1950 tot 2000.
Omdat bepaalde bevindingen ook nuttig kunnen zijn voor onderzoek naar en bestrijding van misbruik hier te lande (dat helaas, ondanks dure commissies-Deetman, blijkens de recente uitlatingen van salesianer overste Spronck, althans onder de grootste 'risicogroep', de salesianen, tot nog toe helaas nauwelijks van de grond lijkt te zijn gekomen), citeren we (1) het eerste deel van de conclusies (p. 118-120) van het rapport zelf, (2) enkele alinea's uit een commentaar van JP2-biograaf George Weigel erop, en (3) tenslotte enkele passages uit een commentaar uit The Guardian (No Friend Of The Church):

(1) Uit de conclusies van het rapport van het John Jay College:

Historical Nature of Abuse

• The “crisis” of sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests is a historical problem. Data from multiple sources show that incidence of abuse behavior was highest between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s. Sexual abuse continues to occur, but 94 percent of the abuse incidents reported to the Catholic Church from 1950 through 2009 took place before 1990. Each year, fewer new reports are brought forward, and each set of new cases reflects the known pattern.
• Priests ordained in different decades committed their first acts of abuse after different periods of time in ministry, but the abusive acts for all cohorts were clustered in the 1960s and 1970s. The influence of the overall pattern of social change is seen in all ordination cohorts.
• Factors that were invariant during the time period addressed, such as celibacy, were not responsible for the increase or decline in abuse cases over this time period.
• Reports of abuse are associated with periods of publicity about the problem of sexual abuse.
• Before 1985, reports of sexual abuse were most likely to be made by the parent of the youth within a year of the abuse. By the mid-1990s, reports of abuse were being made more often by adult men and women reporting abuse incidents that had happened ten or more years earlier. In 2002, reports of abuse were most often made by adult victims or their lawyers twenty to forty years after the abuse took place.

[In Nederland, waar de wereld vijftig jaar later vergaat dan elders, bestaat een salesianer overste het nog in 2011 te verklaren dat sex tussen kinderen en volwassenen moet kunnen. Maar dat zelfs in onze uithoek van de Kerk de houdbaarheidsdatum van een bepaald type jaren-zestig-opvattingen ("kerk-zijn is een streelgebaar") eindelijk begint te verstrijken, blijkt uit het feit dat de overste kort na zijn uitlatingen toch ontslagen is -vh].

Seminary Education and Priestly Formation

• The majority of abusers (70%) were ordained prior to the 1970s, and more abusers were educated in seminaries in the 1940s and 1950s than at any other time period.
• Human formation in seminary is critically important. The drop in abuse cases preceded the inclusion of a thorough education in human formation, but the development of the curriculum of human formation is consistent with the continued low levels of abuse by Catholic priests.
• Sexual abuse of minors was a national problem, and those who abused were educated in mainstream seminaries. No significant increase in vulnerability was evident in those who attended minor or foreign seminaries.

Clinical and Individual Factors

• Priest-abusers are similar to sex offenders in the general population. They had some motivation to commit the abuse (for example, emotional congruence to adolescents), exhibited techniques of neutralization to excuse and justify their behavior, took advantage of opportunities to abuse (for example, through socialization with the family), and used grooming techniques to gain compliance from potential victims.
• Priest-abusers were not “pedophile priests.” The majority of priests who abused were not driven by particular pathologies, and most did not “specialize” in abuse of particular types of victims. The pathologically driven priests were not influenced by social factors as were the majority of abusers (for example, their behavior was consistent across the time period and did not peak from the mid-1960s to 1980s). “Generalists,” or indiscriminate offenders, constituted the majority of abusers and were influenced by social factors.
• The majority of abusers did not have diagnosable psychological problems. No significant psychological, personality, or IQ differences were found between priests who abused minors and those who were treated for other reasons.
• Most clergy in the clinical sample had been in sexual relationships post-ordination (77%), even if that was not the primary reason for treatment. The majority of priests referred for abuse of a minor had also had sexual behavior with adults (70%).
• Data indicate that the experience of having been sexually abused by an adult while a minor increased the risk that priests would later abuse a child.
• Sexual behavior before ordination predicted sexual behavior after ordination; however, such conduct only predicted subsequent sexual interaction with other
adults, not with minors.
• The clinical data do not support the hypothesis that priests with a homosexual identity or those who committed same-sex sexual behavior with adults are significantly more likely to sexually abuse children than those with a heterosexual orientation or behavior.

(2) George Weigel becommentarieert dit laatste punt als volgt:

The John Jay study is less than illuminating on one point, and that is the relationship of all this to homosexuality. The report frankly states that “the majority of victims (81 percent) were male, in contrast to the distribution by victim gender in the United States [where] national incidence studies have consistently shown that in general girls are three times more likely to be abused than boys.” But then the report states that “the clinical data do not support the hypothesis that priests with a homosexual identity or those who committed same-sex sexual behavior with adults are significantly more likely to sexually abuse children than those with a heterosexual orientation or behavior.”
The disconnect, to the lay mind, seems obvious: Eighty-one percent of the victims of sexual abuse by priests are adolescent males, and yet this has nothing to do with homosexuality? Perhaps it doesn’t from the clinicians’ point of view (especially clinicians ideologically committed to the notion that there is nothing necessarily destructive about same-sex behaviors). But surely the attempt by some theologians to justify what is objectively immoral behavior had something to do with the disciplinary meltdown that the report notes from the late 1960s through the early 1980s; it might be remembered that it was precisely in this period that the Catholic Theological Society of America issued a study, Human Sexuality that was in clear dissent from the Church’s settled teaching on fornication, self-abuse, and homosexual acts, and even found a relatively kind word to say about bestiality. And is there no connection to be found between the spike in abuse cases between the mid-1960s and the early 1980s, with its victimization of adolescent males, and the parallel spike in homoerotic culture in U.S. Catholic seminaries and religious orders in that same period? Given the prevailing shibboleths in the American academy (including the Catholic academy), it may be that no clinically or statistically demonstrable linkage will be found, but it strains credulity to suggest that there wasn’t a cultural connection here, one that bears serious reflection.

Meer in het algemeen concludeert Weigel:

So: If the standard media analytic tropes on clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in the United States have been proven false by a vigorous empirical study conducted by a neutral research institute, what, in fact, did happen? Why did the incidence of abuse spike dramatically from the late 1960s through the mid-1980s? The John Jay researchers propose that the crumbling of sexual mores in the turbulence of the sexual revolution played a significant role. As the report puts it, “The rise in abuse cases in the 1960s and 1970s was influenced by social factors in American society generally. The increase in abusive behavior is consistent with the rise in other types of ‘deviant’ behavior, such as drug use and crime, as well as changes in social behavior, such as an increase in pre-marital sexual behavior and divorce.”

This is not the entire picture, of course. A Church that was not in doctrinal and moral confusion from the late 1960s until the 1978 election of John Paul II might have been better armored against the worst impacts of the sexual free-for-all unleashed in the mid-1960s. A Church that had not internalized unhealthy patterns of clericalism might have run seminary programs that would have more readily weeded out the unfit. A Church that placed a high value on evangelical zeal in its leadership might have produced bishops less inclined to follow the lead of the ambient culture in imagining that grave sexual abusers could be “fixed.” All that can, and must, be said.

Weigels conclusie:

Empirical evidence is unlikely to shift the attention of the mainstream media or the plaintiffs’ bar from the Catholic Church in this matter of the sexual abuse of the young. It would be a good thing for the entire society, however, if the defenders of the sexual revolution would take seriously the question of the relationship between their commitment to lifestyle libertinism and this plague. If the John Jay study on the “causes ands context” of clerical-sexual-abuse problems in the Catholic Church prompts a broader public reflection on the fact that the sexual revolution has not been, and is not, cost-free, and that its victims are often the vulnerable young, then the Church will have done all of American society a signal service in commissioning this study that looks into its own heart of darkness.

(3) Tenslotte, uit Andrew Brown's (The Guardian) commentaar op het rapport:

The pattern that the investigators have to explain is a steep rise in cases of child abuse though the sixties and seventies, followed by a steady decline but a simultaneous rise in reports of earlier incidents in the late Eighties and early Nineties. That, too, has declined towards the present day.
This is an unusual pattern both of reporting and of offending. For comparison I have extracted from the government's web site the Swedish figures for sex crimes against children under 15 and they show no decline at all since 1991. [...]
The John Jay Institute helpfully compares the number of reported offences with the number of confirmation candidates, to get a rough figure of reported assaults per 100,000. This will tend to overestimate the frequency, because obviously a priest has access to many more children than just confirmation candidates. But it is a consistent measure by which to compare year with year.
So in 1992, when the worst was over, the rate was 15 incidents of reported abuse per 100,000 confirmations. By 2001 it had dropped to of 5 incidents of abuse per 100,000 confirmations in the Catholic Church. There was a similar drop in American society as a whole but less steep and from a consistently higher rate.
For comparison, the Swedish figures for reported sex crimes against all children under 15 was 142/100,000 children in 1992, and 169/100,000 in 2001.
These figures suggest that during the 1990s a child in Sweden, possibly the most secularised country in Europe, was between 10 and 30 times more likely to be sexually assaulted than an American Catholic was by his priest. Even making allowances for the considerable margin of error that must be built into these figures, it's clear that what went on in US Catholic churches was terrible but rather less terrible than what went on at the same time in many other places where Catholicism was not involved. If the US Catholic church is a hotbed of child rape, Sweden is an awful lot worse. (Just to be clear here, I think the idea that Sweden is a dangerous country for children is entirely absurd.)
I picked Sweden for comparison largely because I know my way round the crime statistics there. But the US government figures quoted in the John Jay report show also that Alaska has a rate of reported child abuse that dwarfs Sweden's – 788/100,000 in 2001, or 140 times the incidence of reported child abuse in the US Catholic church at the same period. So there is nothing uniquely rotten about the American Catholic church.
[...] The statistics do show a clear and steady decline in reported cases for the last 30 years, even though much of the reporting did not come in until long after the event. If you want to believe that the level of crime has stayed steady while the number of reports has dropped, you would have to come up with some reason why American Catholics (unlike Alaskans or Swedes) would become less likely to report a crime in a period when the social stigma for doing so has almost disappeared and in some cases considerable financial compensation has been on offer. [...]
So perhaps it was celibacy, after all. The trouble with this theory is the same decline in incidence of abuse as was noted before. That was not accompanied by any relaxation in the celibacy rules. It's possible that the discipline of celibacy has simply collapsed in the USA. But the report doesn't suggest this; nor, for that matter does anecdotal (or any other) evidence.
Which leaves the "Woodstock" hypothesis: that it was all the consequence of rapid social change. The combined impact of the sexual revolution outside the Church, and of the Vatican II reforms inside simply broke down the traditional self-discipline of the priesthood along with much of its traditional authority. This is the hypothesis that the report itself favours. But there is a subtlety with this view: if it were only the morals of the surrounding society which made a difference, then – again – the incidence of abuse would hardly have gone down. American society is not more sexually puritanical now than it was in 1975. So, the report argues, it was the impact of the sexual revolution on men who had not been trained to withstand it which was the decisive factor.

[Misschien kunnen we het zo zeggen: onder Johannes Paulus II werd de Kerk weer op de rails gezet en dat had ook consequenties voor het geloof en de discipline van de priesters -vh].

Rectificatie

Op de weblog van Damian Thompson een nadere verklaring van het Witte Huis m.b.t. de uitschakeling van Bin Laden:

In an earlier briefing, we may have given the impression that Osama bin Laden was armed when we stormed his compound. We meant, of course, that he was unarmed. Moreover, we would like to clarify that when we said he resisted arrest, that was merely a figure of speech. In addition, we would like to make a small correction to our report that bin Laden used his wife as a human shield; he did not, in fact, use his wife as a shield. Earlier statements that she was killed were, of course, a misunderstanding. She was not killed; that was another lady. Furthermore, we would like to remove any doubt over our claim that we have decided to release a photograph of Osama bin Laden’s body by confirming that we shall not be releasing any pictures of the body. We trust that this clears up any confusion.

Oplopende spanningen

Ene James Kennedy (woonachtig in Amerika) in Trouw:

Steeds luider klinkt [in Nederland] de roep om de ruimte voor religieuze instellingen in te perken, de subsidie te stoppen en hen zo mogelijk te sluiten. Niet omdat ze hun werk niet goed doen, maar omdat het een keer afgelopen moet zijn met dat religieuze gedoe.
Die zelfvoldaanheid van de meerderheid is mijn grootste zorg. Ik ben blij dat christenen zich de laatste decennia bescheidener zijn gaan opstellen, nu ze hun meerderheid zijn kwijtgeraakt. [...] Maar de zelfvoldaanheid van gelovigen is teruggekomen bij de seculiere meerderheid.
[...] Ik vind [in de mediabehandeling van de katholieke Kerk in Nederland] vooral de arrogante toon interessant. Het lijkt wel een typisch protestantse aanval op het eeuwenlang verfoeide katholicisme [...] De anti-Romehouding heeft een lange geschiedenis in Nederland - ook onder katholieken vanaf de jaren zestig - en die wordt nu [...] voortgezet.
Maar er is ook nog iets anders aan de hand. Toen Nederlanders hun zuilen verlieten en de kerk vaarwel zeiden, hebben ze hun zelfvoldaanheid meegenomen. Net zoals het vanzelfsprekend goed zat in eigen zuil is men is men er nu vanzelfsprekend van overtuigd dat het leven buiten religie veel beter is. Gelukkig geldt dat natuurlijk niet voor iedereen. Er zijn veel niet-gelovigen die alle ruimte bieden aan gelovigen. Maar het verontrust mij dat in een land met een seculiere meerderheid men zo gemakkelijk denigrerend spreekt over gelovigen.
Dit zal zeker leiden tot oplopende spanningen in eigen land. Maar het zal ook niet goed zijn voor de internationale verhoudingen, als Nederlanders alle religiositeit in andere landen interpreteren als een teken van achterlijkheid of gebrek aan eigen kracht. Want de wereld is behoorlijk religieus.
In Nederland hebben we een traditie hoog te houden: het beschermen van minderheden tegen de macht van de meerderheid. We leven niet in een directe democratie of onder de dictatuur van een meerderheid, maar in een samenleving waar we elkaar ruimte gunnen om er afwijkende meningen op na te houden. Arrogantie en zelfvoldaanheid bedreigen die vrijheid.

Toch ook maar eens twee echte sociologen losgelaten op de secularisatietheorie

Catholica brengt de vertaling van een interessant artikel van de (al vaker op deze weblog geciteerde) Italiaanse godsdienstsocioloog Massimo Introvigne over het recente spraakmakende Amerikaanse "onderzoek" dat het verdwijnen van religie in het Westen voorspelt (zie ons eerdere Afnemende sociale voordelen).
Voor de vraag of Christus al dan niet is wie Hij zegt te zijn, is de hoeveelheid van zijn aanhangers natuurlijk niet doorslaggevend. Maar als we sociaal-kwantitatief willen denken, moeten we wel echte sociologische methoden gebruiken, aldus Introvigne. Het artikel besluit als volgt:

Kortom: de reële wereld is niet de wereld van de wiskunde. Godsdienstsociologen hebben het al lang ontdekt; vandaar dat zij tegenwoordig veel meer publiceren over «terugkeer» of «revanche» van religie, over «herbetovering van de wereld» en over «desecularisatie», dan over uitsterven.
Betekent dit dat het religie voor de wind gaat? Zeker niet! Er zijn grensgevallen zoals Frankrijk, Tsjechië en Nederland – overigens met grote verschillen ten opzichte van elkaar – waar er mede sprake is van verkeerde pastorale keuzes van de betreffende kerken. Meer dan over de militante atheïsten dienen we – zoals onder andere blijkt uit de toespraak van de Paus tot het Hof van de Heidenen te Parijs – ons bezorgd te maken over het grote aantal onverschilligen, die ergens in geloven, maar geen contact meer met de Kerk hebben. Dit heeft, echter, niets te maken met het vermeende uitsterven van religie. Het uitsterven van religie is gezichtsbedrog, een conclusie van slechte wetenschap.

Introvigne citeert en verwijst ook naar een gesprek tussen hem en de belangrijke (niet-katholieke!) Amerikaanse godsdienstsocioloog Rodney Stark uit 2007, dat we van de weeromstuit hier ook maar even retweeten:

Introvigne: Against the classic secularization theory, you have argued that there is no real decline of religion in Europe, including in Italy. In short, what motivates this conclusion? And if it is so, why don’t we hear more about it in the media and the academia, where many insist on secularization?

Stark: I am not alone in rejecting the secularization thesis, which is the claim that modernity and religion are incompatible and therefore that religion must soon died out. By now most American sociologists of religion have discarded this notion which was rooted in the anti-religiousness of 18th and 19th century intellectuals. We have discarded it for several reasons, but primarily because it has failed to happen. Aside from Europe, in most of the world religion has gained strength as modernization has occurred. In addition, it turns out that Europe is not nearly so irreligious as it is made out to be and there are many signs that a substantial religious revival has begun. The claim that Europe is irreligious is based on low levels of church attendance. But, as I have long argued, lack of attendance reflects ineffective churches rather than lack of faith, since religious belief remains high all across the continent. It is nonsense to call people secularized who agree “I am a religious person,” as most Europeans do, and when self-professed atheists are scarce. Consider that after more than 70 years of intense atheist indoctrination in the Soviet Union (combined with discrimination against religious people), only 4 percent of Russians today say they are atheists (compared with 3 percent of Italians and 4 percent of Americans). In addition, some European scholars have begun to note various signs of religious renewal in Europe (both belief and mass attendance have been rising in Italy during the past 20 years, especially among younger people) and a conference on that subject is being organized for 2009.

Introvigne: You have discussed in several works a certain anti-Catholic bias in the academia. What are its main reasons?

Stark: For several centuries, the main basis for anti-Catholicism in academia was Protestant antagonism and bias. More recently, Protestant biases have mainly subsided, to be fully replaced by the intense vilification of the church by Catholics (not all of them lapsed), who demand that the Church adopt their liberal views.

Introvigne: What is your assessment of present-day Catholicism under Benedict XVI?

Stark: Had it not been for the enormous damage done by the sexual molestation scandals (so much for experiments in adopting liberal views of sexuality), the Church would be in excellent condition. Even despite these scandals, things seem very much on the rise: mass attendance is up, some of the orders are successfully recruiting, and Catholic participation in intellectual life and culture is thriving − especially in the United States, which is something new.

Introvigne: In Italy we are fortunate to have finally a translation of your “The Rise of Christianity”. I realize it’s a question with many facets, but can we try to compare the first Christian centuries (when Christianity was not yet a State religion) and present-day Christianity in Europe (when Christianity, by and at large – but not without exceptions – is no longer a State religion)?

Stark: In the earliest centuries, Christians had to compete against an immense array of pagan faiths as well as Judaism, and these challenges required them to be energetic and effective. Then came Constantine, whose conversion also had some catastrophic results. It would have been fine had Constantine merely given Christianity the legal right to exist without persecution. But when he made Christianity the most favored religion and showered it with wealth and status, he undercut the commitment of the clergy. Suddenly, a faith that had been meeting in homes and humble structures was housed in magnificent public buildings. A clergy recruited from the people and modestly sustained by member contributions suddenly gained immense power, status, and wealth as part of the imperial civil service. Consequently, in the words of Richard Fletcher, the “privileges and exemptions granted the Christian clergy precipitated a stampede into the priesthood” and Christian offices soon were filled by the sons of the aristocracy, whether or not they were men of faith. Soon the Church was effectively a monopoly ‘firm’ served by lazy officials having no need so exert themselves to gain or retain members. It didn’t matter much if people came to church since the tithes were assured and there was nowhere else for people to go. The Church was saved from eventual collapse only by the continuing vigor and faithfulness of the religious orders, who did continue to minister to the people and to force periodic reforms. Unfortunately, when the Protestants appeared they quickly repeated Constantine’s errors and, lacking orders, they rapidly became state-supported, lazy monopolies, unwilling to energetically pursue public commitment. Hence, Europe’s “empty churches”. In contrast, in the United States, where scores of independent churches are entirely dependent on voluntary support, the lazy churches simply go out of business, their membership attracted away by energetic bodies − which is why American Catholicism has always been so energetic − and the overall result is a high level of religious participation.

Introvigne: If the importance of religion in U.S. politics is not grossly exaggerated, why is the religious identity of a presidential candidate regarded as more important in the U.S. than in Europe?

Stark: I suspect that religion seems less important in European politics because in most countries a candidate’s religious identity can be assumed, since “everyone” is in some sense a Lutheran or a Catholic, or Dutch Reformed, and so on. That, and the lack of overt religious competition, make religion of less interest. In the USA, on the other hand, a person’s religion cannot be assumed and therefore becomes a matter of interest, especially so since competition among faiths generates considerable religious controversy.

Introvigne: Is it conceivable that a new generation of European politicians may emerge, capable of attuning themselves to the current growing interest in religion?

Stark: If, as I believe, there is a religious renewal beginning in Europe, I would expect religion to become important in politics once again. In fact, we have never had any significant religious parties in the United States, although such parties used to dominate European politics.

Introvigne: Finally, a personal question. After reading your last book, Discovering God, many readers probably ask themselves where does exactly Rodney Stark stands with respect to faith, Christianity, belief… Does something like “unchurched believer” or “independent Christian” correctly describe your position?

Stark: I have always been a “cultural” Christian in that I have always been strongly committed to Western Civilization. Through most of my career, however, including when I wrote The Rise of Christianity, I was an admirer, but not a believer. I was never an atheist, but I probably could have been best described as an agnostic. As I continued to write about religion and continued to devote more attention Christian history, I found one day several years ago that I was a Christian. Consequently, I was willing to accept an appointment at Baylor University, the world’s largest Baptist university. They do not require faculty member to be Baptists (many are Catholic) and I am not one. I suppose “independent Christian” is the best description of my current position.

"The app is good, but it needs some additions in order to be very good"

Recensie door de Amerikaanse priester John Zuhlsdorf van een onlangs op de markt gebrachte iPhone application die je helpt je voor te bereiden op het sacrament van de verzoening.

P.S. Zwamkrant Trouw suggereert dat het Vaticaan tegen het programmaatje is en de Kerk in de VS ervoor. Integendeel: zowel de makers van het programma als de Kerk in de VS en de H. Stoel onderstrepen dat het een hulpmiddel is om je voor te bereiden op de biecht; geen vervanging ervan ("abbastanza camino" / nogal kachel).

"That doesn't mean that we should"

Van de weblog van aartsbisschop Dolan van New York:

It almost seems to be an unspoken rule that Christians, and Catholics in particular, are not supposed to respond to criticism, insults, and slights towards their faith with anything more than a smile. Certainly we shouldn’t actually say anything. For some reason, this is not expected of our other religious neighbors – Jews and Muslims – or of any other group, such as blacks or gays. [...]
Our duty to defend our faith is grounded in the true understanding of freedom: the ability to do what we ought to do, not simply what we want to do. Popular opinion may demand that Catholics suffer in silence, or more, embrace an insult as a work of art, but that doesn’t mean that we should, no matter how many in public and private expect us to do so.