Month: October 2015

“Be ye warmed and filled”

Brandon McGinley, writing at Ethika Politika, has a very interesting piece about poverty and the limits of libertarianism—even so-called Christian libertarianism—in the context of his native Pittsburgh. Check it out.

If there is one unreservedly good thing about this Pope, it is that he has put the Church’s traditional social teaching front and center again. One would have to go back a long time to find such an engaging exponent of the Church’s social teaching. Would you be surprised to hear Francis say,

Just as the unity of human society cannot be founded on an opposition of classes, so also the right ordering of economic life cannot be left to a free competition of forces. For from this source, as from a poisoned spring, have originated and spread all the errors of individualist economic teaching. Destroying through forgetfulness or ignorance the social and moral character of economic life, it held that economic life must be considered and treated as altogether free from and independent of public authority, because in the market, i.e., in the free struggle of competitors, it would have a principle of self direction which governs it much more perfectly than would the intervention of any created intellect. But free competition, while justified and certainly useful provided it is kept within certain limits, clearly cannot direct economic life – a truth which the outcome of the application in practice of the tenets of this evil individualistic spirit has more than sufficiently demonstrated. Therefore, it is most necessary that economic life be again subjected to and governed by a true and effective directing principle. This function is one that the economic dictatorship which has recently displaced free competition can still less perform, since it is a headstrong power and a violent energy that, to benefit people, needs to be strongly curbed and wisely ruled. But it cannot curb and rule itself. Loftier and nobler principles – social justice and social charity – must, therefore, be sought whereby this dictatorship may be governed firmly and fully. Hence, the institutions themselves of peoples and, particularly those of all social life, ought to be penetrated with this justice, and it is most necessary that it be truly effective, that is, establish a juridical and social order which will, as it were, give form and shape to all economic life. Social charity, moreover, ought to be as the soul of this order, an order which public authority ought to be ever ready effectively to protect and defend. It will be able to do this the more easily as it rids itself of those burdens which, as We have stated above, are not properly its own.

Of course not. The Holy Father, you may have heard, is a dreary, conventional leftist, who, like all of his ilk, misunderstands and mistrusts the free market, which is, after all, the only force for good in the world. But Francis did not say that. The great Pius XI (Santo subito!), did, in his groundbreaking 1931 social encyclical, Quadragesimo anno. As on so many matters, Papa Ratti foresaw the shipwreck before the rest of us even left port.

It is an unfortunate fact of life in the Church in the United States that the traditional social teaching of the Church is eschewed by the public defenders of orthodoxy, who, for what we suspect are largely political reasons, run after dreary, conventional liberalism.

McGinley’s piece is good medicine for that sad affliction.

Semper idem.

Elliot Milco at The Paraphasic has a second really good post today: a personal reflection by the author on the question “Why Stay Catholic?” The impetus for the mediation being a question by an Orthodox acquaintance of the blogger’s, “I would be curious to know, given the Synod and the current pontificate, what keeps more faithful Catholics from becoming Eastern Orthodox.” Rod Dreher has implicitly asked the same question in the context of Michael B. Dougherty’s overheated piece in The Week. (Which we will not link to.) We encourage you to read the piece in full at The Paraphasic. It concludes on a hopeful—maybe even inspirational—note, and it is well worth your time.

As for us, we cannot help—as we said in a previous post—but think of Cardinal Ottaviani in all of this. It is no secret, though perhaps not as widely known as it ought to be, that he was humiliated time and time again on the floor of the Council. He was shouted down on the floor of the Council while discussing the schema that became Sacrosanctum Concilium (thus hanging ten thousand felt banners in ten thousand churches in the round) and “in Aula fit plausus” when his microphone was eventually cut off. (Acta Synodalia I.2.20.) Likewise, Norman Cardinal Gilroy, archbishop of Sydney, presiding over the Council, went out of his way to undercut Ottaviani’s legal argument regarding the multiple “alternative” schemata offered as replacements to his De Fontibus Revelationis. (Id. at I.3.132; cf. 1917 CIC 222 § 2.)

And the constant battle took its toll. Ottaviani’s introduction to his schema De Ecclesia, delivered on December 1, 1962, at the very end of the first session of the Council, is worth reading in full:

Exhibiturus vestro examini schema constitutionis de Ecclesia, illud vobis commendo utpote praeparatum diligentissima cura a fere 70 membris commissionis praeparatoriae, deinde examinatum a commissione centrali et, subiectis igitur propositionibus factis a membris commissionis centralis, a commissione emendationum fuit etiam perpensum. Hinc, post hoc iter, Summus Pontifex iussit ut illud exhiberetur vobis examinandum.

Cura eorum qui praeparaverunt schema fuit, ut quam maxime pastorale esset, biblicum et etiam accessibile captui etiam multitudinum, non scholasticum sed potius forma quadam actualiter ab omnibus comprehendenda. Dico haec quia exspecto audire solitas litanias Patrum Conciliarium: non est oecumenicum, est scholasticum, non est pastorale, est negativum et alia huiusmodi.

Immo vobis aliquam confidentiam debeo facere. Puto me et relatores incassum esse locuturos quia iam res praeiudicata est. Illi enim qui solent dicere: tolle! tolle! substitue illud!, illi iam sunt parati hoc proelium facere. Vobis revelationem quamdam facio: antequam schema istud distribueretur, audite! audite!, antequam distribueretur, iam conficiebatur schema substituendum. Igitur ante praevisa merita iam iudicatum est!

Non restat inde, ut taceam, quia docet Sacra Scriptura: ubi non est auditus noli effundere sermonem.

(Acta Synodalia I.4.121 [emphasis supplied].) We see more than a little sadness and even some bitterness in this. As Ottaviani saw it, the questions before the Council were prejudged by an organized clique intent on going through the motions until they got the results they wanted. And Ottaviani had to know that the modernists at the Council were angling at the dismantling of the Church’s doctrine and practice. Ecumenism and pastoral tone were little more than buzzwords intended to obfuscate and conceal this goal. (Sound familiar yet?) Yet, Ottaviani persevered. His episcopal motto was Semper Idem. Always the same. Funny how that works.

As for us, we may be perplexed, concerned, or even disturbed at the developments in Rome. (Though we are not, it seems, as perplexed, concerned, or disturbed as others.) But if Ottaviani endured and stayed not only faithful but also loyal in the face of all that, what else can we do?

Not the wreck but the raft.

As we said a little while ago, our Italian is nonexistent. But our ability to get from Google Translate to something like English is at least average. So, we were able to pick through—gingerly, gingerly—Cardinal Erdo’s relatio ante disceptationem from the Synod this morning. Lots of good stuff in it, near as we can tell, though we thought this was bang-on right:

Riguardo ai divorziati e risposati civilmente è doveroso un accompagnamento pastorale misericordioso il quale però non lascia dubbi circa la verità dell’indissolubilità del matrimonio insegnata da Gesù Cristo stesso. La misericordia di Dio offre al peccatore il perdono, ma richiede la conversione. Il peccato di cui può trattarsi in questo caso non è soprattutto il comportamento che può aver provocato il divorzio nel primo matrimonio. Riguardo a quel fatto è possibile che nel fallimento le parti non siano state ugualmente colpevoli, anche se molto spesso entrambe sono in una certa misura responsabili. Non è quindi il naufragio del primo matrimonio, ma la convivenza nel secondo rapporto che impedisce l’accesso all’Eucarestia.

(Emphasis supplied.) Good medicine, we think, and cheering to a certain extent to hear no less a personage than the general relator of the Synod dispense it so liberally. But, of course, we recall—thanks to New Liturgical Movement’s publication of the Vatican II Acta Synodalia—some of Cardinal Ottaviani’s relationes (and interventions) at the Council. We have in mind especially Cardinal Ottaviani’s relatio in support of schema De Fontibus Revelationis (“Revelatio“), delivered—though by Fr. Salvatore Garofalo—on November 14, 1962. Deeply orthodox, clear-eyed, precise, but doomed all the same.

One wonders, however, if the modernists at the Council would have been able to run rings around Cardinal Ottaviani in the age of Twitter.

“Laudato si'” in Latina

After some months of waiting, the Vatican today issued the Holy Father’s social (environmental?) encyclical, Laudato si’, in Latin. Some commentators, including Father John Hunwicke, whose Latin chops far outstrip our own, have remarked upon the absence of an official Latin text for what will likely be the greatest accomplishment of Francis’s pontificate.

The Vatican has taken something of an inconsistent line with respect to Latin versions of the Holy Father’s writings. It took some time for the Latin text of Misericordiae vultus to be released, for example. And the Holy Father’s motu proprio Fidelis dispensator et prudens, which began the financial reforms of the Holy See, has never been issued in Latin, notwithstanding its Latin incipit. On the other hand, the Holy Father’s bombshell motu proprio reforming the Church’s legal process for matrimonial cases, Mitis iudex Dominus Iesus, was issued first in Latin, and other translations have only gradually trickled out. And, as usual, certain juridical documents addressing the erection of dioceses and the like are published only in Latin. It is, therefore, hard to divine precisely what the Vatican’s policy on Latin editions of papal documents is.

But enough of the inside baseball. For now, let us all enjoy the limpid Latin employed by the Supreme Pontiff in his signature encyclical, a brief example of which follows:

Paradigma technocraticum tendit ad suum imperium etiam super oeconomiam et rem politicam exercendum. Oeconomia omnem technologicam progressionem recipit ut lucrum consequatur, nulla habita attentione ad negativa consectaria pro homine quae evenire possunt. Res nummaria realem oeconomiam demergit. Nihil a discrimine pecuniario mundiali homines didicerunt ac perquam lente ab ambitali detrimento. In quibusdam coetibus asseritur hodiernam oeconomiam atque technologiam soluturas esse omnes ambitus quaestiones, eodem modo cum asseritur, per sermonem haud academicum, famis inopiaeque in mundo quaestiones esse solvendas utique per mercati augmentum. Non agitur de quadam re theoriarum oeconomicarum, quas fortasse hodie nemo defendere audet, sed de earum collocatione in activa oeconomiae progressione. Qui illud verbis non affirmant, sustinent hoc factis, cum haud solliciti videntur de aequa productionis extensione, divitiarum meliore distributione, responsali ambitus cura vel futurarum generationum iuribus tuendis. Suis quidem moribus confirmant sibi maxima lucra consequenda sufficere. Solus tamen mercatus integram humanam progressionem socialemque inclusionem non praestat. […] Interea homines “fruuntur quadam specie sumptuosi et immoderati superprogressus qui improbanda ratione adversatur permanenti infrahumanae egestatis condicioni”, […] dum non satis celeriter apparantur institutiones oeconomicae et normae sociales quae pauperioribus regulari modo ad fundamentales opes accedere sinant. Denique non satis intellegitur ad quos pertineant altiores hodiernarum inaequalitatum radices, quae cum directione coniunguntur, finibus, sensu socialique contextu technologici et oeconomici incrementi.

(Citations omitted.)

Reading “Pastor aeternus”

The Paraphasic, which just had a series on “practical Mottramism,” which is, of course, the disorder that affected poor Rex Mottram so hilariously in Brideshead Revisited, and which has made an unhappy reappearance in our time, is engaging in a “close reading” of Pastor aeternus, the dogmatic constitution of the First Vatican Council that defined the dogma of papal infallibility—and the narrow circumstances under which infallibility can be invoked. We shall follow The Paraphasic‘s series with interest.

“Non è un parlamento”

Our Italian is not good, which is a decorous way of saying it is nonexistent. But Google Translate was made, apparently, for people like us, who never quite got around to studying a modern language. At any rate, the Holy Father, as expected, gave an address to the Synod fathers today in Rome. We suspect that those who enjoy—or cannot help themselves from—reading the tea leaves, so to speak, will find much grist for their speculative mills in the Holy Father’s address.

Cari fratelli, come ho detto, il Sinodo non è un parlamento, dove per raggiungere un consenso o un accordo comune si occorre al negoziato, al patteggiamento o ai compromessi, ma l’unico metodo del Sinodo è quello di aprirsi allo Spirito Santo, con coraggio apostolico, con umiltà evangelica e con orazione fiduciosa; affinché sia Lui a guidarci, a illuminarci e a farci mettere davanti agli occhi non i nostri pareri personali, ma la fede in Dio, la fedeltà al magistero, il bene della Chiesa e la salus animarum.

A comment on comments

We have, for the moment, disabled comments on Semiduplex. If we do activate them, we will institute pretty heavy moderation controls.

Our reasons for doing this are threefold:

  1. In 2015, almost everyone has as many outlets to express his or her opinion on a piece as he or she could want. Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are but three of the options available to someone who wants to make a comment about a piece. The days of the good old combox being the first, best place to talk about a post are over.
  2. Comments frequently require close attention, which we, for a variety of reasons, are not well situated to provide. (This might change, and if it does, it would be an important factor in our reconsideration of our current comment position.)
  3. Comments often devolve either into pointless assent and affirmation of the original post or into nastiness of one kind or another. Neither outcome is especially desirable to us.

Also, it is far from clear that Semiduplex has any readers who wish to comment on posts.

A suggestion relating to reissues

We have always wondered how producers at the classical labels come to settle on their archival releases. For example, what back-catalogue whiz at Deutsche Grammophon decided that Ferenc Fricsay needed not just one but two massive boxes (divided largely into orchestral and vocal music)? Likewise, who at Sony decided that Max Goberman’s influential but, frankly, sort of obscure Haydn recordings needed to be released? We are not complaining, of course, but sometimes it would be nice to know why the records got released.

When a smaller label puts out an archival release—take Marston’s downright necessary set of Fernando De Lucia’s early recordings, for example—we automatically assume that there must be some intrinsic merit to the release. Sometimes the merit is merely sonic (e.g., Music & Arts’ recent remaster of Furtwängler’s 1942 9th) and sometimes the merit is artistic. But because small labels—we assume—have limited resources, there has to be a good reason for them to spend the money working the release up for issue. This is true, also, for blues and jazz releases. Big labels, on the other hand, do not appear to have such financial constraints. In many cases, the masters are in the can and the artwork can be worked up on short notice.

Also, the big labels are much less personal. One can almost get to know the personalities running boutique labels. We have mentioned Ward Marston, but there are others, such as Mark Obert-Thorn, who, either through interesting liner notes or by participating in online discussion boards, become not only record executives but trusted critics. This is not the case, universally, at the big labels. Some names—such as Andreas Meyer—come up repeatedly, but in other cases booklets simply do not provide any meaningful background on the men and women putting the releases together.

Perhaps the big labels would do well to allow their producers to show a little more personality. Obviously, budgets are tight all over the record business, but it seems to us that brief notes from record producers, especially on releases not likely to sell more than a few thousand (or few hundred or few dozen, in some cases) copies, explaining their motivations for putting together the releases would do well. At the very least, it might encourage the casual listener to search out some aspect of the recordings previously overlooked. (On the other hand, it might confirm the cynical listener’s worst fears about the industry.)

“Truth, which is not changed by passing fads…”

We have already seen, elsewhere, positive responses to the Holy Father’s homily at the opening of the Synod. We have also seen negative responses, most notably from those who expect—based, no doubt, on what they have been told by the media—that the Church is going to abandon millennia-old doctrines in favor of a I’m-okay-you’re-okay approach to everything. As for us, we think that the Holy Father frames the basic debate—the real debate—admirably well:

In this extremely difficult social and marital context, the Church is called to carry out her mission in fidelity, truth and love.

To carry out her mission in fidelity to her Master as a voice crying out in the desert, in defending faithful love and encouraging the many families which live married life as an experience which reveals of God’s love; in defending the sacredness of life, of every life; in defending the unity and indissolubility of the conjugal bond as a sign of God’s grace and of the human person’s ability to love seriously.

The Church is called to carry out her mission in truth, which is not changed by passing fads or popular opinions. The truth which protects individuals and humanity as a whole from the temptation of self-centredness and from turning fruitful love into sterile selfishness, faithful union into temporary bonds. “Without truth, charity degenerates into sentimentality. Love becomes an empty shell, to be filled in an arbitrary way. In a culture without truth, this is the fatal risk facing love” (Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate, 3).

And the Church is called to carry out her mission in charity, not pointing a finger in judgment of others, but – faithful to her nature as a mother – conscious of her duty to seek out and care for hurting couples with the balm of acceptance and mercy; to be a “field hospital” with doors wide open to whoever knocks in search of help and support; even more, to reach out to others with true love, to walk with our fellow men and women who suffer, to include them and guide them to the wellspring of salvation.

A Church which teaches and defends fundamental values, while not forgetting that “the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mk 2:27); and that Jesus also said: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I came not to call the righteous, but sinners” (Mk 2:17). A Church which teaches authentic love, which is capable of taking loneliness away, without neglecting her mission to be a good Samaritan to wounded humanity.

I remember when Saint John Paul II said: “Error and evil must always be condemned and opposed; but the man who falls or who errs must be understood and loved… we must love our time and help the man of our time” (John Paul II, Address to the Members of Italian Catholic Action, 30 December 1978). The Church must search out these persons, welcome and accompany them, for a Church with closed doors betrays herself and her mission, and, instead of being a bridge, becomes a roadblock: “For he who sanctifies and those who are sanctified have all one origin. That is why he is not ashamed to call them brethren” (Heb 2:11).

(Translation by http://www.vatican.va.)

“Liturgical providence”

Over at Vultus Christi, the monks of Silverstream Priory have perhaps the best antidote to Synod-mania that we have read:

I have never been led astray by relying on this liturgical providence of God. The sacred liturgy is always this: God Himself giving us the very prayers and petitions that, in His ineffable wisdom, He already wills to grant. The simple fact that we were given this Magnificat Antiphon and not another on the eve of the Synod, reveals, I think, much of what God intends for His Church.

In case you can’t bear the suspense, the antiphon for the Magnificat in the Extraordinary Form for the First Sunday of October is Adaperiat Dominus cor vestrum in lege sua et in praeceptis suis et faciat pacem Dominus, Deus noster.

Check it out there.