Theology

Teach the controversy?

Timothy Wilson’s translation of excerpts from Cardinal Zigliara’s Summa philosophica continues at The Josias. Today: the error of “liberty of teaching.” While perhaps not as pressing as the question of toleration of non-Christian cults, this is still an important question. The Cardinal’s analysis begins:

Question. Simultaneously one with liberty of conscience and of cult, there is proclaimed by the more recent liberalism a liberty of teaching, particularly with respect to the means with which it is principally exercised, namely, with respect to liberty of the press (la libertá della stampa). We ask, therefore, whether this liberty is upright, and to be approved by the civil authority. Here again I caution that the discussion is concerned, not with tolerance, but with approbation: evils indeed are able to be tolerated, yet naught but goods ought to be approved.

(Emphasis in original.) You should read the whole thing at The Josias.

For our part, we note that the question of the rights of error seems to be more, not less, important with each passing day.

And he carries the reminders

A very thoughtful acquaintance of ours asked, elsewhere, what the Church has to say about violent sports—think mixed martial arts (MMA) or professional football (NFL, not FIFA).

This is a very good question, which has been on our mind lately. At sports-gossip site Deadspin, Barry Petchesky has a piece, “Wes Welker Is Back and It Feels Terrible,” regarding wide receiver Wes Welker’s return to play for the St. Louis Rams. Petchesky writes,

By all accounts—his own, his teams’, and a top NFL-affiliated concussion specialist’s—Wes Welker is healthy and ready to play. St. Louis badly needs a receiver. Still, when the Rams announced they signed Welker to bolster their etiolated passing attack, my first reaction was disappointment. It’s a strange feeling, to hope that Wes Welker—a talented WR and by all accounts a decent guy—never plays football again.

It’s the concussions. At least six official ones in his career, maybe as many as 10.(That doesn’t count the ones he may not even know about.) He suffered three in nine months with the Broncos, leading one former teammate to publicly declare he wanted Welker to retire. The thing about concussions is that the more you’ve had, the more likely you are to receive more. Welker’s brain is especially fragile and vulnerable. If teams avoided signing the still-useful receiver this offseason solely because of his concussion history—and some very specifically did—it wasn’t necessarily just the potential bad PR in a sport that claims to take brain trauma very seriously. It was legitimate concern for Welker’s well-being.

(Emphasis supplied and hyperlinks omitted.) But Welker is not the only flashpoint for the concussion debate: the NFL has been grappling with the question—and fans have been grappling with the morality—for some time.

Add to this the recent coverage of UFC champion Ronda Rousey’s devastating loss to Holly Holm. Rousey, long touted as an unstoppable fighter, known for thirty-second takedowns of challengers, was knocked out cold by a thudding kick to the head by Holm. But only after Holm had slugged Rousey in the face long enough and hard enough to split her lip and leave her bloodied. (We did not watch the fight, but some observers said that Rousey looked punch drunk. We do not doubt it.) While perhaps not as serious as Welker’s years of concussion after concussion after concussion, which have been discussed repeatedly, the fact remains that Rousey was punched repeatedly in the face, pretty hard as such things go, and kicked in the head hard enough to knock her out. Perhaps we are oversensitive—and we admit that we are not that kind of doctor—but that pummeling cannot be good for the brain.

Therefore, we think that our acquaintance’s question is not only a good question in itself but also a good important question for our time. The problem is that the Church does not appear to have pronounced officially—much less definitively—on the question professional football or MMA fighting or any of a whole host of physically punishing sports. (To our knowledge. If you, dear reader, are aware of something, please feel free to shoot us an e-mail or tweet at @semiduplex; we will gladly post any documents you identify.) But the Church has pronounced several times on dueling, and it seems to us that one can analogize profitably from dueling, especially nonlethal academic dueling, to these extreme sports. And from those pronouncements, some general conclusions may be drawn and applied to the question of these sports. The answer will probably not surprise you, though.

We begin with Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical to the bishops of Germany and Austria-Hungary, Pastoralis officii. It begins,

Mindful of your pastoral duty and moved by your love of neighbor, you wrote to me last year concerning the frequent practice among your people of a private, individual contest called dueling. You indicate, not without grief, that even Catholics customarily engage in this type of combat. At the same time your request that We, too, attempt to dissuade men from this manner of error. It is indeed a deadly error and not restricted to your country, but has spread so far that practically no people can be found free from the contagion of the evil. Hence, We praise your zeal. It is clearly known what Christian philosophy, certainly in agreement with natural reason, prescribes in this matter; nevertheless, because the vicious custom of dueling is being encouraged with greatest forgetfulness of Christian precepts, it will be expedient to briefly review these rules.

(Emphasis supplied.) Thus, the answers to the question of dueling were already evident in Christian doctrine. Leo simply summarizes them in response to the bishops’ request for guidance. Leo goes to say, and this is the interesting part:

Clearly, divine law, both that which is known by the light of reason and that which is revealed in Sacred Scripture, strictly forbids anyone, outside of public cause, to kill or wound a man unless compelled to do so in self defense. Those, moreover, who provoke a private combat or accept one when challenged, deliberately and unnecessarily intend to take a life or at least wound an adversary. Furthermore, divine law prohibits anyone from risking his life rashly, exposing himself to grave and evident danger when not constrained by duty or generous charity. In the very nature of the duel, there is plainly blind temerity and contempt for life. There can be, therefore, no obscurity or doubt in anyone’s mind that those who engage in battle privately and singly take upon themselves a double guilt, that of another’s destruction and the deliberate risk of their own lives. Finally, there is hardly any pestilence more deadly to the discipline of civil society and perversive to the just order of the state than that license be given to citizens to defend their own rights privately and singly and avenge their honor which they believe has been violated.

(Emphasis supplied.) There are two principles here that ought to be unpacked before moving on to some other sources.

One, the divine law—and the natural law, which is simply our participation in the divine law—forbids killing or wounding a man except in self defense. The Fifth Commandment tells us as much. Remember, too, what Aquinas taught us: a man, including his body, belongs to the community; therefore, injuring a man injures the community (ST IIa IIae q.65 a.1 co. & ad 2). The community’s sanction is needed to injure a man (id.) This goes for blows, too (ST IIa IIae q.66 a.1 co.).

Aquinas’s teaching is not squarely on point here, since Aquinas was talking about injury as chastisement or retaliation. However, the principle seems to hold even in the sporting context: a man is part of the community, to injure a man injures the community. Now, the injuries in this case can be fairly remote. Certain brain injuries, as we understand it, can take years to manifest themselves; nevertheless, if it becomes certain that certain sports result in these injuries, then it seems to us, for the purposes of moral reasoning, the sports activities are the proximate cause of the injuries, even if temporally remote. Remember the lesson of the Second Way: real causality is not “this happened, then this happened, then this happened,” and so forth (ST Ia q.2 a.3 co.). Thus, Leo’s teaching, if taken back to its source, seems to apply equally to football as dueling.

Two, one cannot risk death or injury rashly. As the old Baltimore Catechism tells us, “[w]e are commanded by the fifth Commandment to live in peace and union with our neighbor, to respect his rights, to seek his spiritual and bodily welfare, and to take proper care of our own life and health.” (Emphasis supplied.) And as St. Alphonsus Liguori tells us in his Instructions on the Commandments and the Sacraments, God is the lord of our lives and we have no right to throw away our lives or to injure ourselves wantonly. Thus, on this point, too, Leo’s teaching is squarely within the broader current of Christian moral theology. And, unlike the previous point, this point meets squarely the question of violent sports. The Fifth Commandment requires us to take care of ourselves, more or less well, and to avoid unnecessary injury. It seems to us that an argument could be made—convincingly—that an athletic contest does not quite rise to the level of gravity necessary for one to justly risk injury or death.

There are also a couple of decrees of the old Sacred Congregation of the Council, before its transformation to the Congregation for Clergy, regarding German academic dueling: a decree of February 10, 1923, AAS 15 (1923) 154–56, and a decree of June 13, 1925, AAS 18 (1926) 132–38. The latter decree has been excerpted in the current edition of Denzinger, at DH 3672, and it makes it clear that the prohibition on dueling applies even when death is unlikely. (German academic dueling, as we understand it, involved padding and protective gear that prevented serious injury but permitted the flamboyant facial scars seen on a thousand B-movie actors after 1945 or so.) Thus, at least according to the Sacred Congregation of the Council, which undoubtedly would have been aware of Pastoralis officii, the prohibitions on dueling were not affected by measures taken to mitigate the injury. And this makes sense. The Fifth Commandment prohibits this sort of reckless, almost injury-seeking, behavior. We acknowledge that the violation may be only venially sinful. But given the serious neurological disorders that have been mentioned in the popular press, to say nothing of the regular, gruesome injuries that football players suffer, it seems unlikely that one could hold, as a rule, that the violation is a venial sin. It seems that the question of gravity is, as is often the case, one of subjective imputability.

All of this is a long way of saying that, reasoning from the example of dueling and some general comments on the Fifth Commandment, we think that mixed martial arts and professional football are probably sinful. (Once again, if you’re familiar with a more definite pronouncement, let us know and we’ll be happy to draw attention to it, with credit!) Whether, as in the days of dueling, excommunications need to be handed down to players, coaches, support staff, and spectators is another question. What to do, though? Plainly people like extreme sports. While we prefer baseball for a variety of reasons, we enjoy professional football. We root for a team. We have favorite players. We watch games. We talk about games with other people. We are, we admit, football fans. Yet, we have for some time been increasingly bothered by the idea that we are watching men bash their brains out. One can Google very sad stories of ex-players reduced to poverty—or worse—as a result of neurological damage they attribute to football.

Does this mean it’s time to stop formally cooperating in sin? In other words, by turning on the TV or going to a game, it seems to us that an argument could be made that we are formally cooperating in what the players are doing. Buying tickets, watching commercials, or otherwise supporting the broader objectives of the major corporations behind these sports looks an awful lot like formal cooperation, though we would be happy to be corrected by a moral theologian. Is it time to stop? If not now, what would it take? A decree of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith? A papal encyclical?

Update to Girard and the Letter to the Hebrews

It has been called to our attention, by a source acquainted with our prior post, that a discussion of René Girard’s theory of substitutionary atonement in the context of the Letter to the Hebrews has been offered. Raymund Schwager’s Jesus in the Drama of Salvation has a lengthy treatment of the question.  Based upon an initial read, we are not wholly convinced by Schwager’s argument. However, we are away from our copy of Craig Koester’s commentary on Hebrews, which, while written from a Lutheran perspective, with all that entails, is a solid commentary, and we would want to start there (along with, of course, Father Haydock’s notes) in examining Schwager’s argument.

Kasper and Germanicus’s Thomism

Xavier Rynne II, in his Letters from the Synod column for the Catholic Herald, discourses briefly upon the Germanicus group’s invocation of the Angelic Doctor in its second report:

The German-speaking group’s report then quotes St Thomas Aquinas on the virtue of prudence, as if the “Common Doctor” would agree with the approach just sketched. But if the German circulus would read a little further in Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, they’d discover this: “Prudence includes knowledge both of universals, and of the singular matters of action to which prudence applies the universal principles” [emphasis added].

St Thomas’s point is that prudence is precisely the virtue that rightly guides the individual to put the universal principle into action in his life. In fact, some might argue that the “law of graduality” being advocated by various Synod fathers veers dangerously close to what Aquinas called the vices of counterfeit prudence: “craftiness,” which prescribes morally illicit means to obtain a desired end, and “inattentiveness,” where one does not listen to (or even rejects) the Divine Law out of a love for creaturely goods, which could include a desire for human honour, or an excessive respect for persons.

Thomas Aquinas also teaches us that some actions are always and everywhere wrong, because they’re incompatible with the life of sanctifying grace. Thus he cites adultery as an example of an act that has “an intrinsic moral deformity, and can never be rightly done”. Which is to say, adultery is always and objectively a mortal sin. And one who is guilty of mortal sin aggravates his guilt if he receives the Eucharist without first repenting. For an unrepentant grave sinner, Aquinas says, receiving the Eucharist is spiritual poison, not spiritual medicine. Like all truly Catholic theologians, Aquinas understands that the sacraments do not work magically: if a person will not repent of grave sin, not even the Sacrament of Penance can confer sanctifying grace, because there is an obstacle to grace in person’s will.

(Emphasis supplied and footnotes omitted.)

We are reminded that Prof. Thomas Heinrich Stark has noted that Cardinal Kasper reads Aquinas through a Kantian-Hegelian lens. Back in July, Edward Pentin ran an interview with Prof. Stark, in which the good professor noted,

 have said several times, “As far as I understand him,” because the problem with this sort of theology is that it is difficult to understand, not because one has to be very intelligent to understand it, but because it is not coherent, in my opinion. And one can only figure it out if one understands the language they use. I mean, it’s not only Kasper; it’s very many people of influence in modern theology. If one reads this language carefully, one can easily see an admixture of imitating [Martin] Heidegger and the influence of Existentialism, some pieces from [Emmanuel] Kant and Hegel, which are read into Thomas Aquinas. They read Thomas through the lens of Hegel and Kant, which simply cannot be done, in my opinion. And they mix up various philosophical positions that really can’t be put together in a coherent, logical way.

The way they attempt to intertwine all of their theories forms a sort of pseudo-dialectic that is not really logical and coherent, and they put it in such a way as to provide an opportunity to get away with novel theories without being under the critical view of the magisterium, because they can always shift to the right and then to the left, as need be.

(Emphasis supplied.)

“Penitence Has Never Had a Good Press”

Back in May or thereabouts, Swiss theologian Thomas Michelet, OP, had a lengthy, fascinating piece at Nova et Vetera, “Synod on the Family: the path of the Ordo Paenitentium.” Sandro Magister covered it a couple of times. It was in French, though Fr. Michelet’s contribution to Magister’s column, addressing the Instrumentum Laboris, was translated into English. There is now an English translation of the piece available (we don’t know when it was published, but it has made the rounds recently), which takes on new significance in light of Germanicus’s report, emphasizing the law of gradualness and citing John Paul’s Familiaris consortio. Fr. Michelet notes, in one particularly striking paragraph:

We believe that the ordo paenitentium constitutes not only an application par excellence of the law of gradualness but is actually one of its ancient sources. It is also a touchstone, as it allows us to verify objectively that we are not in the process of establishing – even without wishing to – a system based on “gradualness of the law” which would confuse the path of conversion and rejection of evil with an itinerary of spiritual progress in the good and in the state of grace, thus making the distinction between good and evil a simple difference of degree and not of kind. Between the state of grace and the state of sin there is no continuity nor intermediary, even if in both cases there is the possibility of progression or of regression. Also, we cannot apply even by analogy the ecclesiological schema of degrees of communion of Lumen Gentium no. 8 to the situation of the sinner, precisely because the practice of ecumenical dialogue supposes that, with the passing of centuries, the separated brother has no longer any personal intention to participate in the sin of schism, which is not the case of the first generations who are still subject to the discipline of the Church. Likewise, the good cannot be presented as an optional ideal but as the end which one must endeavour to attain through acts which become ever more fully ordered towards that end – a journey of small steps which by dint of perseverance ends up in reaching its goal. It is only in this way that we can admit a progressive path achieved in stages.

(Emphasis supplied.) You ought to read the whole thing, but we can’t help ourselves from posting a little more of it. This portion is absolutely brilliant, as it summarizes all the problems, doctrinal and pastoral, with the sort of penitential path currently being debated at the Synod:

It would not make sense to enter upon such a “penitential journey” without humbly recognising one’s sin and desiring to be purified of it, to “lower oneself to the ground” (substrati) before the Lord so that he may himself come to raise us up. Likewise, it would not be just to bring this penitential journey to an end in a sacramental reconciliation if its conditions were not fulfilled, that is, as long as there exists an attachment which is opposed to it, whether that of a remarriage or of any other relationship contrary to the Gospel. Such an absolution would be deceitful and one has reason to believe it would be invalid.

(Emphasis supplied.) Ideally, the penitent will finally express his or her sorrow for sin through a valid sacramental penance, which includes, necessarily, the firm purpose of amendment—severing the “attachment opposed to” reconciliation. In the case of the divorced and remarried,

the only solution is to undertake to live as “brother and sister”. This is not simply a matter of continence, but rather of a transformation of outlook and of the acquisition of that interior purity which allows the person to be faithful to the truth of their marriage, albeit in the form of a separation which has shown itself to be legitimate.

(Emphasis supplied.) In other words, Fr. Michelet does not argue that the penitent needs to hurry up and file civil divorce proceedings, though obviously that would terminate the sinful, adulterous relationship. Instead, he argues for inner conversion, to an understanding of the truth of the marriage. (We assume that this includes an understanding of the truth of both marriages.)

However, Fr. Michelet acknowledges that those who are capable of committing to continence and chastity—coupled with a recognition of the truth about their marriage—may not be the majority of penitents. What of those who cannot achieve during their lifetimes the inner commitment necessary?

This period is above all one of liberation from interior chains, something not within man’s capacity and which God alone can grant in his own time, even if perhaps not for this world. It may at least be hoped, for those who have resolutely set out on this path, that death will be their reconciliation and their door to salvation, as the catechumen called to the Lord before his baptism and with good dispositions will receive its grace without the sign.

In other words, the process of penance may be life-long, and it may conclude only with death, at which time the penitent properly disposed may receive reconciliation, grace, and salvation.

Addressing spiritual communion, Fr. Michelet says,

What is at stake here is truly spiritual discernment in the service of souls. This truth may be difficult to hear, but that is no reason to keep quiet about it or to deny it. We must do so in charity, accepting that the other may need time to “come to the truth”, to allow it to emerge in her heart, to recognise it as it is, to accept it and to draw consequences from it. It is also matter of charity of language, which consists in finding the right words to express the truth in a way that is audible yet without bending it. For truth without charity is not truth; equally, charity without truth is not charity.

We think this says it all. Go read the piece.