Faint Humor

A short fantasy in the hermeneutic of conspiracy

What follows is pure, groundless speculation. The merest fantasy in the hermeneutic of conspiracy. So, it’s worth at most what you paid for it. But the question we pose has been on our mind for some time. 

As the whole world knows, on July 5, Robert Cardinal Sarah, prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, gave a speech at the Sacra Liturgia conference in London calling for, among other things, a return to ad orientem (versus apsidem) worship. This drew a quick, pointed correction from the Holy See Press Office, no doubt distracting them from the festive-if-bittersweet preparations for Fr. Federico Lombardi’s imminent retirement. Father John Hunwicke suggests that Vincent Cardinal Nichols, archbishop of Westminster and a long-time supporter of the Holy Father’s cause (even before the Conclave, if some are to be believed), was perhaps the prime mover in obtaining an unusual rebuke of a Curial cardinal. All this is, of course, well known among Catholics of all liturgical stripes now.

We were struck, however, by the unusual nature of the very public rebuke to Cardinal Sarah. Certainly he is likely seen by many as a potential leader for next time, in opposition to some candidates more simpatico to the Holy Father’s program, such as Cardinal Tagle. But that was not exactly it. Consider all the things that have not drawn rebukes. Cardinal Müller has criticized at length the liberal interpretation of Amoris laetitia at length. Cardinal Burke called it non-magisterial. And Archbishop Gänswein gave an extraordinary talk that, for a time, called into question just what Benedict thought he was doing when he abdicated. Yet, to our knowledge, none of these comments drew quick, decisive rebukes from official quarters (to say nothing of the rebukes from the Pope’s friends, including dear Father Spadaro). Curious.

But something else was happening at about this time: the Holy Father was handing down his Apostolic Letter motu proprio data on the competences of the Vatican financial organs, I bene temporali. As is now customary for Vatican documents of significant importance, I bene temporali is available in only Italian and Portuguese; however, the Holy See Press Office has provided a capsule summary:

The document published today responds to the need to define further the relationship between the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See and the Secretariat for the Economy. The fundamental principle at the base of the reforms in this area, and in particular at the base of this Motu Proprio, is that of ensuring the clear and unequivocal distinction between control and vigilance, on the one hand, and administration of assets, on the other. Therefore, the Motu Proprio specifies the competencies pertaining to the Administration of the Patrimony of the Holy See and better delineates the Secretariat for the Economy’s fundamental role of control and vigilance.

(Emphasis supplied.) In short, the Administration of the Patrimony of the Holy See (APSA, in Vatican lingo) recovered significant responsibility for the day-to-day financial administration of the Holy See, I beni temporali § 3, from George Cardinal Pell’s Secretariat for the Economy.

Veteran Vatican reporter John Allen was blunt about what this means:

There are many ways of analyzing the fault lines in the Vatican, but perhaps the most time-honored (if also often exaggerated) is the tension between an Italian old guard and pretty much everybody else. By conventional political logic, anyway, Saturday saw the Italians notch a fairly big win.

It could turn out, however, to be a Pyrrhic victory – because by taking back control over a range of financial powers, the old guard has also reclaimed the blame the next time something goes wrong.

On Saturday, Pope Francis issued a motu proprio, meaning a legal edict, delineating the division of responsibility between the Vatican’s Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See (APSA) and the Secretariat of the Economy (SPE). The former is headed by Italian Cardinal Domenico Calcagno, the latter by Australian Cardinal George Pell.

In effect, the motu proprio restores several important functions to APSA that had been given to Pell’s department in 2014. One local news agency bottom-lined the result this way in its headline: “The Italians win!”

(Emphasis supplied.) The Vatican line is more or less that the Holy Father has delineated clearly oversight and management by this action and he has solved the problem of letting the financial watchdog also have control over administration.

And perhaps the Vatican line would be believable, if Pell’s oversight functions hadn’t been undercut recently by Pietro Cardinal Parolin, the secretary of state, when the Secretariat of State, apparently with the Holy Father’s permission, suspended an audit that Cardinal Pell had ordered. In other words, over the last few months, the independent authority of the Secretariat for the Economy and Cardinal Pell have been undermined significantly, always in favor of the Vatican old guard—generally Italian—that had been in charge prior to 2013. And we know what the finances at the Vatican looked like at about the same time.

In other words, reform of the Curia and the Vatican’s finances, one of the Holy Father’s signature initiatives—indeed, the St. Gallen group notwithstanding, one of the major reasons why he was elected in 2013, has apparently gone exactly nowhere. Certainly new organs have been established, but in the name of separation of powers, the new organs have been stripped of actual control, leaving them with policy and “oversight.” But, as we have seen from the audit kerfuffle, it is unclear that the Secretariat for the Economy will be permitted to exercise complete, independent discretion in pursuing its oversight functions. Certainly the Secretariat of State has shown a willingness to intervene in favor of, well, more traditional Vatican concerns. In other words, after three years and numerous provisions and amendments and restructuring, things have not changed much. Were the Holy Father a secular politician, one might call this part of his platform “not a success.”

And this brings us back to the kerfuffle over Cardinal Sarah’s speech. If we were to adopt the hermeneutic of conspiracy, we would wonder whether the timing of the rebuke of Cardinal Sarah’s speech had something to do with I bene temporali. What would be the best way to ensure that everyone focused on a relatively trivial matter, rather than the serious issue that the Holy Father’s reform of the Curia, including the Vatican’s finances, has not made huge progress, even now, three years after his election? Once upon a time, we were going to get a rewritten Pastor Bonus. Now, we’ll be lucky to get anything. Certainly, keeping the motu proprio locked in those hugely widely spoken languages, Italian and Portuguese, would help. But you would want to change the news cycle, wouldn’t you? And what drives page views—left and right—better than liturgy stuff?

As we say, this is rank speculation, mere fantasy, and a feverish indulgence in the hermeneutic of conspiracy. Sometimes it is helpful to clear the cobwebs with such thinking.

Some preliminary comments on “Amoris laetitia”

No, no. No one has leaked the Holy Father’s forthcoming post-Synodal exhortation, Amoris laetitia, to us. And, while dear Father Lombardi could not revoke our Holy See Press Office credentials if only because we don’t have any, we would never in a million years wish to violate the pontifical secret, applied by article 1(1) of the 1974 Instruction Secreta continere. (Though being only human, we imagine that we would like very much the feeling for the next week of wouldn’t you like to know that would attend being in the loop on this one. How they manage in the Curia is beyond us.)

However, we do anticipate that we will make some comments on Amoris laetitia when it is finally released later this week. And, to be frank, our expectations for the document will likely color in a significant way our reaction to it. Thus, we think it is only fair that we go on record with those expectations now. Also, there is something very enjoyable about putting one’s predictions out in the open air. (Sometimes, anyway. It is Opening Day for our beloved Cincinnati Reds, and having seen GM Walt Jocketty’s idea of “rebuilding,” we are far too depressed to offer our predictions for the Reds.) At any rate, here’s what we expect to see:

  1. It will be very long and not always hugely gripping.
  2. There will be something for everyone, but, on the whole, the progressives will be much happier than the orthodox. Because no hard and fast rules will be established, conservative Catholics will feel constrained to put a brave face on things. The progressives’ note of triumph will be a little unseemly. Everyone will start to think a little more seriously about next time.
  3. It will authorize, through the forum internum process, communion for bigamists. The appointment of Cardinal Schönborn as one of the relators for the exhortation sealed the deal for us. He was the moderator of the Germanicus group that came up with that compromise, though his ties to Ratzinger undoubtedly make him, well, more palatable to conservatives than Reinhard Cardinal Marx, one of the other ramrods behind the compromise. It seems to us very natural to select Cardinal Schönborn as the relator for the exhortation in order to sell the forum internum theory to the wider world. But there will be some language emphasizing how “narrow” the exception is, and how those who can prove nullity ought to be encouraged to do so.
  4. There may be some language about episcopal conferences establishing norms for the forum internum process, but it would surprise us if the progressives in the Vatican wanted to trust more conservative episcopates with the keys to the gate they’ve strived so mightily to throw open.
  5. Expect to hear even more about the tendentious misquotation of Familiaris consortio that was forced upon everyone last October. Indeed, expect to see endless citations to John Paul II and Benedict XVI during the really important parts. The argument will be made, implicitly, that Amoris laetitia is but an incremental development on John Paul’s thought and Benedict’s thought.
  6. It will probably remove any other restrictions on participation in the Church by bigamists. All of the other restrictions—e.g., being a godparent—that we have heard about over the last eighteen months will be lifted without reservation.
  7. It will have lots of nice things to say about other irregular situations.
  8. People hoping to hear nice things about same-sex couples are going to be disappointed. That project will have to wait a while.
  9. Much ink will be spilled on marital preparation.
  10. Much ink will also be spilled about what a great procedural success the Synod was and how it represents a model of Church governance for the future.

Just some predictions. Some of them we feel fairly strongly about. Some we threw in just so we could get to ten. But, obviously, we would be happy to be proved wrong about many of these predictions.

The Christian response to March Madness

At First Things, Valparaiso University professor Gilbert Meilaender argues that colleges serious about their Christian identity ought to skip NCAA tournament play on Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday. This argument is, in and of itself, not especially interesting. However, Meilaender makes an interesting connection:

Fast forward to March 2015: The state of Indiana passed its Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), in the midst of that year’s March Madness, offered ­obeisance to the great gods of inclusivity and diversity, issuing not-very-veiled threats to remove its headquarters and future events from Indianapolis. Nor was this the first time the NCAA had used its considerable corporate heft to try to shape public opinion on social issues.

Look forward now to March 2016: The tournament’s first full weekend of play, in which sixty-four teams are reduced to (the sweet) sixteen, will take place from Thursday, March 17, to Sunday, March 20. The second weekend of play (March 24–27) will reduce the Sweet Sixteen first to the Elite Eight and then to the Final Four, who will have to wait yet another week before the tourney is finished and a champion crowned. True fans immerse themselves in the entire tourney, of course, but they may have different opinions about which weekend is most exciting. The second full weekend happens to be my own favorite. By that time the remaining sixteen teams are in large part the cream of the crop, and the competition is intense.

But there is a case to be made this year for suggesting that Christians should pass on this weekend—and perhaps on the entire 2016 tourney. Their God, after all, is not the NCAA’s god. And the dates for the games on the second full weekend should concern us. They are March 24 (Maundy Thursday), March 25 (Good Friday), March 26 (Holy Saturday), March 27 (Easter). Could it be that other things—things more earthshaking than March Madness—should occupy our attention in that span of days?

(Emphasis supplied.) We will have to think on this connection a little bit, since it seems that Meilaender’s point is that at least in part because the NCAA weighed into Indiana’s RFRA debate, Christians ought to recognize the holiness of Holy Week by refraining from tournament play.

To that end, we have a couple of observations. First of all, Indiana’s RFRA—indeed, all RFRA-type statutes—are in some regard incompatible with the rights of Christ and Christ’s Church. The State does not have a duty to protect all religions; it has a duty to protect and promote the true religion. Now, Aquinas tells us that permitting other religions’ to persist may well be justifiable, particularly if the evils arising from suppressing the religion outstrip the evils created by the religion itself. For example, no one would suggest that suppressing a benign sect such as Zen Buddhism ought to be a particularly high priority for a rightly ordered state.

But such toleration does not require, nor could it require, adopting a general position that all religion no matter what is supposed to be protected and favored by the state. Such a position would be the inadmissible error of indifferentism. Last summer, The Josias made available a translation of Pius IX’s allocution, Maxima quidem, in which that great pope said,

In addition, they dare to deny any activity of God in men and in the world. And they rashly assert that human reason, without any reference to God, is the only judge of truth and falsehood, good and evil, and that human reason is a law unto itself, and suffices by its own natural power for the care of the good of persons and peoples. But since they perversely dare to derive all truths of religion from the inborn force of human reason, they assign to man a certain basic right, from which he can think and speak about religion as he likes, and give such honor and worship to God as he finds more agreeable to himself.

(Emphasis supplied.) It was this sharp rebuke in Maxima quidem that formed the basis of one of Pius’s definitive condemnations of indifferentism in Syllabus (#15). Thus, while we agree with Meilaender that the NCAA took a stance incompatible with orthodox Christianity, we cannot agree that RFRA is a permissible expression of orthodox Christianity. Indeed, it is not. It is steeped in error.

And this leads us to our second point: does the NCAA’s stance on RFRA actually have anything to do with whether or not Christian schools’ teams should participate in the games scheduled during Holy Week? Let us assume that the NCAA opposed RFRA for the right reason (i.e., that it is a product of erroneous indifferentism) or, less fantastically, that the NCAA supported RFRA; would it make playing basketball on Good Friday any less unseemly?

Neoplatonism and the rose/pink question

Pater Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist., takes on the rose/pink distinction that pops up in the Catholic blogosphere, especially the priestly blogosphere, oh, about twice a year. Some bloggers insist that the rose vestments worn on Gaudete Sunday and Laetare Sunday are not pink. But Pater Waldstein ventures through etymology— Antonio Telesio’s short treatise De coloribus, in fact—and historical examples to counter this notion that rose is not now and never has been pink. That’s simply not the case. And he comes to the point: some folks may prefer rose because pink has, well, effeminate connotations that rose doesn’t have. Don’t ask us why, though. If we’re judging things by American notions of masculinity, neither rose nor pink are especially masculine.

We write simply to note a (James) Burkean connection here. Pater Waldstein says this,

Indeed, as soon as one begins to think about the naming of colors, one’s native Platonism begins to give way, and one begins to suspect that there is something to the structuralist argument for the division of reality by naming as being a bit arbitrary. One doesn’t have to swallow de Saussure’s theories whole to see that the imposition of color names involves a certain amount of arbitrary choice. To Homer, after all, the sea was the color of wine.

However, Pater Waldstein strikes an apparent blow for “one’s native Platonism.” As we noted above, he cites the Renaissance poet Antonio Telesio’s De coloribus in support of the argument that rose is simply the mixture of red and white, just like pink. One may note, furthermore, that Telesio’s De coloribus cites, on the cover page no less, Marsilio Ficino’s commentary on Plato’s Timaeus, which, of course, includes a theory of colors. Now, Ficino was a Florentine priest and a driving force behind the resurgence of Neoplatonism during the Renaissance. Ficino prepared, in addition to his enormous Platonic Theology and commentaries on Platonic dialogues, an interesting translation and commentary (in elegant Latin) on Dionysius the Areopagite’s Mystical Theology and Divine Names. (The I Tatti Renaissance Library, an imprint of Harvard University Press, has, one suspects out of a spirit of altruism that ignores one’s bottom line, brought out a bunch of Ficino works, in handsome bilingual editions. They’re available on Amazon.) Thus, while the shock of the rose/pink debate may shake one’s Platonism, Pater Waldstein’s road back passes through some very heavy hitters, so to speak, in Neoplatonic circles.

Just one of those connections.

A point of correction

In “Preces meae non sunt dignae,” we referred to the Dies irae as “a splendid old hymn.” It has been brought to our attention—by a source we respect very much and have quoted here from time to time—that this is not quite correct. The Dies irae is a sequence historically used in the Requiem. (This is, of course, why your copies of the Mozart and Verdi Requiems have settings of the Dies irae, for example.) It was dropped from its venerable position in the Mass in the Bugnini revisions, though, which is why it got transported over to the Liturgia Horarum as an optional hymn for the thirty-fourth week of Tempus Per Annum, according to the same source.

We regret the error, not least on account of who pointed it out.

Preces meae non sunt dignae

While, on the whole, we prefer the Breviary of 1960, we think that some aspects of the Liturgia Horarum are clear improvements upon the preceding schemes for the Divine Office. One such aspect is the use (optional, unfortunately, like almost everything else) of the Dies Irae during the thirty-fourth week of Tempus Per Annum—the last week of the Church’s year, which is followed (of course) by the first Sunday of Advent. The wonderful old hymn, attributed to the Franciscan Thomas of Celano, is divided into three parts and sung at the office of readings, lauds, and vespers. This, of course, serves very neatly to emphasize the eschatological aspects both of the end of the Church’s year and of Advent.

Imagine stepping out of the holiday bustle into a church for lauds of Saturday in the thirty-fourth week of Tempus Per Annum, where you hear, after the usual beginning of the hour, the Dies Irae chanted in an austere plainchant. Puts rather a different spin on things, no? Bit of a shock to the system, even. But it is certainly something you’d remember when the deacon chants the Gospel for the first Sunday of Advent in Year C. (Especially if, after a day of shopping, you went back to the same church for the vigil Mass that same Saturday.) One might even get a whole new appreciation for Advent, wholly separate from Advent calendars, wrapping paper, and hot chocolate.

Pure pop for Synod secretaries

One of our favorite New Order singles is “True Faith,” one of the new tracks written for their singles compilation Substance 1987. (We actually thought until just now that “True Faith” had been recorded in connection with 1986’s Brotherhood LP, but apparently it was recorded with Substance in mind.) While not as evocative as the lyrics to “Bizarre Love Triangle,” the single immediately previous, “True Faith” has been much on our minds lately:

I can’t tell you where we’re going
I guess there’s just no way of knowing

We don’t know whether anyone in the Synod secretariat is a New Order fan, though we doubt it. It appears, notwithstanding the cool reception that it might receive in the secretariat’s offices, that “True Faith” is fast climbing the charts to be the theme song for the Synod. This from Tom McFeely at the National Catholic Register:

But echoing Cardinal Tagle’s earlier comments, Father Lombardi stressed that it’s not even known if there will be any final document. The synod is only “approaching he end of the first week, so I cannot know what will happen at the end,” the Vatican spokesman said, noting that the Pope may provide clearer indications in the coming days.

He goes on to report:

More could be known on Monday, however. The small groups are not scheduled to discuss Part III of the instrumentum laboris, which contains the paragraphs referencing the divorced-remarried Communion issue and the pastoral care of persons who have homosexual tendencies, until the third week. But it was disclosed at the Saturday press briefing that the synod fathers progressed through Part II of the synod document with unexpected speed at their general congregations on Friday and Saturday. So they will now kick off their Part III interventions on Monday, at which time the battle lines among them may start to be drawn openly on the two contentious issues potentially in play.

In other words, the Synod is moving far faster than anyone anticipated, and may reach the showdown over the Kasperite proposal this week. However, showdown or no showdown, the Synod may not even produce a Relatio Synodi. (Which tells us that there are serious doubts about whether the Synod will produce the desired-by-so-many results. Though we doubt that that failure will be dispositive of the matter.) And the media continue to notice how poorly the Holy See Press Office, including one priest in particular, is handling the daily reports.

What is that bit from “True Faith”? Ah, yes:

I feel so extraordinary
Something’s got a hold on me
I get this feeling I’m in motion
A sudden sense of liberty
The chances are we’ve gone too far
You took my time and you took my money
Now I fear you’ve left me standing
In a world that’s so demanding

Even pop singers get it right once in a while.