Humane Vitae in the Instrumentum Laboris

I will likely post at least on more article on the Instrumentum Laboris for the upcoming III Extraordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops to treat the topic: The Pastoral Challenges of the Family in the Context of Evangelization. In this post I just want to quickly post how the Venerable Pope Paul VI's encyclical letter Humanae Vitae was dealt with in this working document for the synod's participants. As I have mentioned in the past, I believe that Humanae Viate is the centerpiece of what I like to describe as Paul VI's triptych, which also includes his encyclical Populorum Progresso and his Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Nuntiandi.

The first reference to Humanae Vitae occurs in early in the document, in Part I, Chapter I: "God’s Plan for Marriage and the Family":

In the wake of Vatican II, the papal Magisterium has further refined the doctrine on marriage and the family. In a particular manner, Pope Paul VI, in his Encyclical Humanae Vitae, displayed the intimate bond between conjugal love and the generation of life (par 5)

The part of the working document in which Humanae Vitae figures most prominently is in Part III, entitled "An Openness to Life and Parental Responsibility in Upbringing," especially Chapter I, which bears the heading, "The Pastoral Challenges Concerning an Openness to Life":

In recent decades, basic objections have arisen regarding the subject of a couple’s openness to life, which concerns the innermost qualities and aspects of life. In this regard, substantial differences exist between the Christian idea of life and sexuality and that of a highly secularized society. Pope Paul VI, in publishing the Encyclical Humanae Vitae, was well aware of the difficulties his statements could cause over time. He wrote, for example, in the document: “It is to be anticipated that perhaps not everyone will easily accept this particular teaching. An intensive, clamorous outcry is being raised against the voice of the Church which is made more intense by the today’s means of communication. But it comes as no surprise to the Church that she, no less than her divine Founder, is destined to be a ‘sign of contradiction’ (Lk 2:34). She does not, because of this, evade the duty imposed on her of proclaiming humbly but firmly the entire moral law, both natural and evangelical” (HV, 18) (par 121)

The following paragraph (122) states,

The Encyclical Humanae Vitae certainly had a prophetic character in reiterating the unbreakable link between conjugal love and the transmission of life

Finally, in paragraph 123, we read:

When treating a couple’s openness to life and their knowledge of the Church’s teaching, with particular reference to Humanae Vitae, the responses clearly admit that, in the vast majority of cases, the positive aspects are unknown. Those who claim to know the Church’s teaching belong, for the most part, to associations and Church groups actively involved in parishes or programmes of spirituality for the family. A vast majority of responses emphasize how the moral evaluation of the different methods of birth control is commonly perceived today as an intrusion in the intimate life of the couple and an encroachment on the autonomy of conscience. Clearly, believers hold different positions and have diverse attitudes on this subject, depending on the different parts of the world where they live and their local surroundings, including those who find themselves immersed in highly secularized and technically advanced cultures and those who live a simpler life in rural areas. Many responses recommend that for many Catholics the concept of “responsible parenthood” encompasses the shared responsibility in conscience to choose the most appropriate method of birth control, according to a set of criteria ranging from effectiveness to physical tolerance and passing to a real ability to be practiced

This final reference to the difficulties involved in convincingly transmitting Church teaching is most appropriate. The Church will not change her teaching on this matter. The debate will not be about whether to sanction the use of contraceptives, but how the Church's teaching can be communicated in a positive and compelling manner. In this regard, the document, making reference to ways of more effectively communicating the Church's teaching, notes "various episcopal conferences recall the importance of developing the insights of Pope St. John Paul II in his 'theology of the body' series, in which he proposes a fruitful approach to the topics of family through existential and anthropological concerns and an openness to the new demands emerging in our time" (par 18).

I will note, yet again, that this document makes no mention whatsoever of deacons, of the powerful witness to the sanctity of marriage and the potential bridge married deacons and their wives can build within the Church, witnessing to the unity of the sacraments at the service of communion (i.e., matrimony and holy orders), and building ties between the Church and the world in this regard.

It is also worth drawing attention to the Pastoral Letter issued Sunday by Archbishop Samuel Aquila of Denver to his diocese: Family: Become What You Are, which I have just now started reading.

A few notes on rights, the HHS mandate, and contraception

In light of today's Supreme Court ruling in favor of Hobby Lobby, which exempts that company from some aspects of the horrifically unjust HHS mandate, I think it's important to note that the state is not the source of our rights. The U.S. Constitution does not grant us rights, it seeks to enumerate the rights we have in order to protect these rights.

Rights cannot be granted or rescinded by popular vote. Our constitutional order wholly depends on there being a transcendent source of rights, namely God. This is why John Adams insisted, "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people."

The state never has a compelling interest to coerce people to do what is objectively and intrinsically wrong. Further, while, I suppose one can claim the freedom to engage in certain behaviors that are objectively and intrinsically wrong, one may never claim a "right" to do those things.

Contrary to popular belief concerning Church teaching, birth control is not the issue, contraceptives are the issue. Birth control is an end, not a means. Contraception is one means to the end of birth control. It is not the only means of birth control. What is at stake from the perspective of the Catholic Church (i.e., why the Church opposes the HHS mandate as unjust) is the Church holds that contraceptives are an immoral means of birth control, that the use of contraceptives, to use two terms from the language of moral theology, is "objectively disordered," or "intrinsically evil." This can be explained simply by noting that when a man and a woman have sexual intercourse and a pregnancy results something went right, not wrong. The Church teaches that sexual intercourse has both a unitive and procreative dimension (Humanae Vitae par 12). This is why acting in a sexually responsible manner chiefly requires that one only has sexual intercourse with one's spouse.

Some will argue that if using artificial contraceptives, particularly "the pill," is wrong then so should be a whole slew of other medicines. While I certainly agree that people could avoid taking a lot of medications simply by living in a healthier manner, it is an apples and oranges comparison. For example, there is nothing objectively disordered about taking medication to keep your blood pressure down, even if going for a 45 minute walk everyday and eating healthier would do the same thing, or to keep your cholesterol low, even if changing your diet would have the same effect.

It is sometimes the case that a woman will be prescribed birth control pills for therapeutic reasons. This in and of itself does not present a moral problem. However, I would argue that given the effects on a woman's health by the prolonged use of birth control pills, I do not think this could be part of a long term treatment plan. While I am not a doctor or expert on matters medical, I would be wary of taking "the pill" even over a relatively short period of time. From the perspective of the Church, a woman who takes birth control pills for therapeutic reasons should abstain from sexual intercourse with her husband while taking "the pill," which also often (not always) and unpredictably acts as an abortifacient, causing a very early term chemical abortion. The so-called "morning after pill," which was a major focal point of the Hobby Lobby suit, is nothing except an abortifacient.

One's intentions do not determine the morality of an act. However, I have no doubt that many Catholics, who use various methods of contraception, including birth control pills and who even have sterilization procedures, believe they are acting in a conscientious manner, bear little or no moral culpability because those charged with forming their consciences have in many cases either not done so, or have malformed their consciences. This is one reason why we read in Sacred Scripture, "Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you realize that we will be judged more strictly, for we all fall short in many respects" (James 3:1-2a).

In an attempt to tie the two strands of this post together more tightly, I'll end by noting that the Church is not arguing that contraception should be made illegal in the U.S., just that employers should not be legally obligated to pay for contraception in the health care plans they offer their employees. This is not an attempt by the Church to gain access to your bedroom, but to keep the government and your employer out of your bedroom, as well as to prevent the state from violating our God-given rights.

Rising above the provisional nature of politics, in order for me to take the Fortnight for Freedom with any seriousness at all, the USCCB and individual bishops need to promote Natural Family Planning Awareness Week, which, this year, is 20-26 July, not only with as much, but with even more vigor than the "Fortnight."

Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, Apostles

Readings: Readings: Acts 12:1-11; Ps 34:2-9; 2 Tim 4:6-8.17-18; Matt 16:13-19

I think it is important for us to keep track of the liturgical year, with what’s happening now as we celebrate anew the great Paschal mystery each year. Three weeks ago the Easter season ended with our celebration of the great feast of Pentecost, which is second in importance only to our celebration of Christ’s resurrection on Easter Sunday. A week later we celebrated the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity, or, as it is more commonly called, Trinity Sunday. Then last Sunday we participated in the magnificent feast of Corpus Christi, the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ. Today, only by virtue of the fact that the twenty-ninth of June falls on a Sunday, we celebrate one of a number of solemnities that can replace a Sunday: the Solemnity of Saint Peter and Saint Paul. This is an ancient and venerable feast, one that is observed by Christians East and West dating from well before the schism of AD 1054.

Of course, Saints Peter & Paul are united by the fact that they both met their deaths in Rome. Paul was beheaded for an offense of which he had earlier been convicted, which conviction he appealed to the emperor. Making such an appeal was his right as a Roman citizen. He lost his appeal and was beheaded, probably in AD 67. The reason he was put to death by beheading, which was considered merciful, was also due to his being a Roman citizen. Peter was likely martyred during Nero’s persecution of Christians, which occurred in AD 64. Tradition hands on to us that St Peter, who, as we heard in today’s Gospel, was the first to confess Jesus as “the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matt 16:16), insisted on being crucified upside down because he did not deem himself worthy to suffer and die in the same manner as Jesus Christ.

Peter’s profession, which the Lord made clear was not a conclusion he arrived at on his own, but was revealed to him, was the reason, to quote an ancient sermon for today’s solemnity by Pope St Leo the Great, that Jesus entrusted “to one Apostle alone… what was communicated to all the Apostles” (Sermon 83/2).

St. Peter in the West transcept of The Cathedral of the Madeleine

As most of us know, there was tension between these two apostles that stemmed primarily from a dispute about the role of the Mosaic law in the life of the primitive Church. This was a very divisive issue, one that was resolved by the “Council of Jerusalem,” the proceedings of which are described in the fifteenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles. In the second chapter of his Letter to the Galatians, Paul wrote that when Peter “came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face because he clearly was wrong. For, until some people came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles; but when they came, he began to draw back and separated himself, because he was afraid of the circumcised” (Gal 2:11-12). Paul here accused Peter of consorting with the so-called Judaizers, who insisted that in order to become Christians even Gentiles had to observe the law of Moses, including men being circumcised.

Conversely, in 2 Peter 3:16, concerning the complex composition of Paul’s letters, we read: “In them there are some things hard to understand that the ignorant and unstable distort to their own destruction, just as they do the other scriptures.” This is only one of a number of examples that could be given to show something that many people find very vexing, namely that there have been disagreements in the Church from the beginning.

It was G.K. Chesterton, who apparently came with a pithy quote at the rate of about two per minute, who observed, “Every heresy is a truth taught out of proportion.” Christian orthodoxy, beginning with the most fundamental mystery of our faith, that of the Most Holy Trinity, usually requires holding two or more disparate things in tension. And so I think it is fitting that the sanctuary of our lovely Cathedral, including the very ambo from which I am now preaching, is flanked by these two great apostles: St Peter to the West and St Paul to the East.

St Paul in the East transcept of The Cathedral of the Madeleine

In the end, I think the antiphon for the Magnificat for Evening Prayer I of this great solemnity states the matter well: “How glorious are the apostles of Christ; in life they loved one another; in death they rejoice together forever.” You see, my friends, love, at least on this side of heaven, is not devoid of conflict and strife. In fact, it is precisely through conflict and strife that our love is brought to perfection. This is not only true of Sts Peter & Paul, but of wives and husbands, parents and children, brothers and sisters, friends, and, yes, even of fellow parishioners.

The what that united Peter and Paul during their earthly lives and unites them forever is not a what, but a who: Jesus Christ. Both men sealed their apostleship with their blood. The lives and deaths of these holy apostles demonstrate the truthfulness of our Psalm response- “The angel of the Lord will rescue those who fear him.”

Our takeaway today, I think, is encouragement. We should be encouraged by the fact that the Lord has provided and will continue to provide for his Church until He returns. The ordinations we celebrated yesterday are concrete proof of that. This should give us the courage to say, with St Paul, who was not spared a martyr’s death, “The Lord will rescue me from every evil threat and will bring me safe to his heavenly Kingdom” (2 Tim 4:18).

Saints Peter and Paul, holy apostles and martyrs, pray for us.

Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus

Today the Church celebrates the Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus. It is a lovely celebration and observance. Many Catholics, when they think of devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus probably think about all the kitschy depictions of it. Since I converted to Catholicism as a young adult and having been raised in the least Catholic of environments, I actually find a lot of Catholic kitsch attractive, if not attractive, then certainly intriguing, but I understand the sentimentality attached to a lot of it, which can have the effect diluting true devotion.

From Fr Peter Nguyen, SJ's blog Alfred Delp: A Self-surrender at the heart of the world, these words from Alfred Delp, SJ

Familiarity with God entails no lack of reverence. We are no longer familiar with the secret life of the devout. But the devout is the only true person. Only he is capable of the immense experiences and benefits of the human heart, of prayer and of love.

The kitschy nature, which annoys many a heart when it comes to the call of mercy in the message of the devotion to the Heart of Jesus obstructs the call of mercy and has ruined so many human echoes, stems from this lack of reverence

Father,
We honor the heart of your Son broken by man's cruelty,
yet symbol of love's triumph, pledge of all that man is called to be.
Teach us to see Christ in the lives we touch,
to offer him living worship by love-filled service to our brothers and sisters.
We ask this through Christ our Lord.

Our Friday traditio is "Sacred Heart" sung by The Civil Wars:

It's one of those songs the beauty of which depends on to whom you imagine yourself singing it.

Corpus Christi

The Jews quarreled among themselves, saying, "How can this man give us his flesh to eat?" Jesus said to them, "Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink" (John 6:52-56)

In this passage Jesus spoke quite literally. Why else would His words elicit that response?

The empirical evidence that bread and wine are transformed by the Holy Spirit into the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ is supposed to be the lives of those of us who regularly partake of the Blessed Sacrament. I have no doubt that our Lord intended it to be that way. Such a view does not preclude or exclude eucharistic miracles. But keep in mind that Jesus was quite ambivalent about the miracles he performed. This view is given credence by something earlier in the sixth chapter of St. John's Gospel.

After the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, Jesus, along with His disciples, crossed the Sea of Galilee (during which crossing Jesus joined the disciples by walking on the water). The crowds followed and, upon finding Him the next day, they asked Him, "Rabbi, when did you get here?" Jesus replied:

Amen, amen, I say to you, you are looking for me not because you saw signs but because you ate the loaves and were filled. Do not work for food that perishes but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For on him the Father, God, has set his seal (John 6:26-27)

You see, the miracle He performed was a sign, that is, it pointed beyond itself to something else. There are those who balk at using the words "sign" and "symbol" to describe Christ's Real Presence, but, the fact is, it is both a sign and a symbol. Objections to describing the Blessed Sacrament using those terms are, I believe, the kind of thing Walker Percy had in mind when, in his treatise on semiotics, he wrote: "There is an almost intractable confusion about the terms sign and symbol."

The Blessed Sacrament is neither "merely" a sign, it is an efficacious sign, nor merely a symbol, though it surely is that too. It is a symbol when the Son of God makes Himself present to us in and through these every day things. Our words and categorizations always fall short of the mysterium tremendum. It is precisely this about which Corpus Christi seeks to remind us.

Walker Percy on escaping solipsism by means of language

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I had read the section of semiotics in Walker Percy's Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book. As I read it, I was outlining a fairly lengthy post, making all kinds of connections. Semiotics excite me because back in my student days, when I was a Philosophy student, I was immersed in the Philosophy of Language. I was particularly engaged with the work of Jacques Derrida and Ludwig Wittgenstein. I still have books, notes and plans for a thesis on a comparative study of some aspect of language between these two philosophers.

The main reason I have not posted much here the past few months is simply a function of not having the time to do so. As summer gets underway, I plan to post more regularly. Like most people who have "blogged" for a long time, it was an evolution realizing that quality trumps quantity. But, since we love to quantify, with this post, I have exceeded last month's output by 1.

Jacques Derrida

Instead of the post I rigorously outlined, I simply copied and pasted my notes and highlights from the Notepad document I copied from my Kindle, on which I read Lost in the Cosmos. I hope I did this in a way that is coherent and comprehensible:

"The wonder to the scientist is not that God made the world but that the works of God can be understood in terms of a mechanism without giving God a second thought" Percy
==========

"Is it not indeed more wonderful to understand the complex mechanisms (dyads) by which the DNA of a sperm joins with the DNA of an ovum to form a new organism than to have God snap his fingers and create an organism like a rabbit under a hat?" Percy
==========

"The nearest thing to a recorded world of signs is the world of H. C. Earwicker in Joyce’s Finnegan's Wake Percy
==========

A note I made: language and the loss of wonder. Giussani saying new things with old words. John XXIII language and dogma, etc.
==========

"FIRST BIRD WATCHER: What is that? SECOND BIRD WATCHER: That is only a sparrow. A devaluation has occurred. The bird itself has disappeared into the sarcophagus of its sign... A sparrow can be recovered under conditions of catastrophe. The German soldier in All Quiet on the Western Front could see an ordinary butterfly as a creature of immense beauty and value in the trenches of the Somme" Percy
==========

A note I made: the twilight of Christendom, does it present us with such a possibility- the possibility of recovery through catastrophe?
==========

"A poet can wrench signifier out of context and exhibit it in all its queerness and splendor" Percy. Followed by my note: Tricia Lockwood does this
==========

"Scientists recover the inexhaustible mystery of the signified from the mundane closed-off simulacrum of the world-sign" Percy. Followed by my note: Yes, but scientists like Tyson also get confused and truncate this by reducing God to an endeavor undertaken by a sign user, namely science, which descriptive and which spurs creativity from something, not nothing. One of the worst mistakes is believing you can derive metaphysics from physics, or world from environment without triadic relation
==========

A note I made: we are creatures of meaning.which is why the question "Why?" is constitutive of our humanity. it is also a sure sign of the ontological barrier between God us, whom Von Balthasar dubbed the "humanum." See Lewis from A Grief Observed on Eucharist of signifier for Christ - effacacious sign
==========

"Then, like von Frisch and his bees, he discovered there is no end to the mystery of ants" Percy
==========

"What Descartes did not know: no such isolated individual as he described can be conscious" Percy
==========

Walker Percy

"It is no etymological accident that the prefix con- is part of the word, since the origin of consciousness is the initiation of the sign-user into the world of signs by a sign-giver" Percy
==========

"joyful concelebration of the world through an utterance in which the ancient environment of the Cosmos is transformed and beheld in common through the magic prism of the sign, it is also, semiotically speaking, an Eden which harbors its own semiotic snake in the grass" Percy
==========

"Semiotically, the self is literally unspeakable to itself" Percy. Followed by my note: Wittgenstein's private language. Indeed, one person is no person
==========

"You are not a sign in your world" Percy. Followed by my note: Descartes Kant, etc.

"From the moment the signifying self turned inward and became conscious of itself... As a consequence of the unprecedented appearance of the triad in the Cosmos, there appeared for the first time in fifteen billion years (as far as we know) a creature which is ashamed of itself and which seeks cover in exile from Eden is, semiotically, the banishment of the self-conscious self" Percy.
==========

"Might they not have achieved the world of signs without succumbing to the terrible penalty?" Percy. Followed by my note: The fall- oh happy fault? Becoming like God, but in a satanic, or hellish way. In other words, it is to be deceived about divinity and to pursue that- idol worship. God is a communion of divine persons, we are singular non-divine persons. Divinization, what ever that may entail, is something that can't happen on my own. Hence, loving my neighbor. Is it a turning from the concelebration of the world to a solitary absorption with self?
==========

"In a post-religious technological society, these traditional resources of the self are no longer available, leaving in general only the two options: self conceived as immanent, consumer of the techniques, goods, and services of society; or as transcendent, a member of the transcending community of science and art... That is to say, he stands in a posture of objectivity over against the world, a world which he sees as a series of specimens or exemplars, and interactions, energy exchanges, secondary causes—in a word: dyadic events." Percy. Followed by a note, which is a quote from C.S. Lewis' A Grief Observed: “If H. 'is not,' then she never was. I mistook a cloud of atoms for a person. There aren’t, and never were, any people. Death only reveals the vacuity that was always there. What we call the living are simply those who have not yet been unmasked. All equally bankrupt, but some not yet declared"
==========

"The alienation of the artist puzzles many, both the scientists and technologists who are happy and busy and their lay beneficiaries who are happy in the immanence of consumption... it is no accident that, for the past hundred years or so, the artist (poet, novelist, painter, dramatist) has registered a dissent from the modern proposition that, with the advance of science and technology, man’s lot will improve in direct proportion" Percy
==========

"the self can be as desperately stranded in the transcendence of theory as in the immanence of consumption" Percy ==========

"The paradox comes to pass because the impoverishments and enrichments of a self in a world are not necessarily the same as the impoverishments and enrichments of an organism in an environment" Percy. Followed by my note: Intersubjectivity.
==========

"There is an almost intractable confusion about the terms sign and symbol" Percy
==========

"My own conviction is that semiotics provides an escape from the solipsist prison by its stress on the social origins of language—you" Percy
==========

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Just last night I read a very good and rather short article in Commonweal by Prof Scott Moringiello, who teaches at Villanova: "Perpetua, Feliciy, Ludwig." Moringiello discloses a plan (one I hope he carries out):

I’ve been playing around with an idea for a paper that would compare Wittgenstein’s dictum that following a rule is fundamental to a language game with Irenaeus of Lyon’s conception of the rule of faith as the measure of a proper interpretation of Scripture. I haven’t gotten as far as I’d like with the paper, but in my reading (and in many cases re-reading), I’ve been reminded about how seriously Wittgenstein took questions of witness. For him, doing philosophical work was part of living life as a fundamentally decent human being. Wittgenstein did not consider himself a Christian, but he famously said to a friend, “I am not a religious man, but I can’t help seeing every problem for a religious point of view.” I dislike the words “religion” and “religious” for reasons that need not detain me here. But Wittgenstein seems to mean that a religious person understands himself as ethically serious and he sees the world as a source of wonder

"I Am the Lord of the Dance"

I just finished watching Series 3 of the British television program "Rev." This scene, which I post with no spoilers, I found simply breathtaking.

If this doesn't move your heart, you're overdue for a spiritual check-up. I think I can say that we've all been in this place- trying to keep something that matters to us alive and realizing we just don't have the strength to do it. It's beyond discouraging. In my experience, Jesus never comes more quickly to meet me than when I am close to despair. He doesn't give me all the answers, or even try to solve all my problems for me. These experiences are probably why this scene resonates so deeply with me.

Let's face it, life can be a bitch. What's the point in pretending otherwise? I think this is one of the clues, what Rowan Williams might call a "token of trust," that we are made for more. It's okay to follow my heart, as long as I am ruthlessly honest, which is often excruciating.

Writing only on behalf of myself, Jesus always reminds me that, indeed, the open hand has the strongest grip, and that when I am weak, then I am strong. You know what? That's just how it is. I have to trust that it is all leading me not just somewhere, but to where I want to be.

Given all this, smile a little, even through the tears. What the hell? Sing and dance too!