Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Theologie - Studenten: Frage über Jesus

Kurzinhalt: "If I were to meet Jesus Christ," she said, "we would have a chat... No theology teacher could ask for a better illustration of just where religion stands today in our society.

Textausschnitt: 11a I will never forget that day in my classroom, years ago, when I asked my students what they would do were they to meet Jesus Christ in the flesh, as people were able to two thousand years ago during his public ministry. The question was intended to be rhetorical, but one of the students immediately volunteered an answer. "If I were to meet Jesus Christ," she said, "we would have a chat. We would exchange points of view, and I would respect his point of view, just as he would respect mine." No theology teacher could ask for a better illustration of just where religion stands today in our society. First, one would "chat" with Jesus. Nothing too heavy, mind you. Since religion today is widely regarded as a purely private matter with no serious public implications, pivotal discussions about it are precluded. (Fs)

11b Second, this chat would, in today's parlance, take the form of a "dialogue". Since religion is regarded not just as private but also as subjective, it is deemed unlikely that any two people would share the same views, so any religious conversation today would necessarily involve the exchange of different points of view. (Fs)

11c And, third, this dialogue would be "inclusive", inasmuch as neither party would dream of trying to "impose" his or her view on the other. I am not sure whether this student thought it more generous of Jesus not to impose his or more generous of her not to impose hers. Each would respect and accept the view of the other without any uncomfortable questions about right or wrong, true or false, being raised by either of them. Indeed, both of them would presumably be enriched by the opportunity to hear another point of view. Tolerance, sensitivity and openmindedness would mark the exchange from beginning to end. (Fs)

11d The fact that it is impossible to find a single encounter between Jesus and anyone in the whole of Scripture which corresponds to this picture does not deter today's students from such fantasies. In fact, were they to discover that, in all likelihood, Jesus would not engage in such a chat, they would doubtless think much less well of him for it. (Fs)

Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Moderne Geisteshaltung des "sowohl als auch" (both/and); Sentimentalismus (Chesterton)

Kurzinhalt: The desire to have "both/and", rather than to face up to the inescapable "either/or"s of life, has left its mark everywhere... The refusal to make such commitments is frequently presented as a form of freedom, since it always allows one to do as one ...

Textausschnitt: "BOTH/AND"

12a Ours is a sentimental age. That is to say, ours is an age of emotional self-indulgence. As G. K. Chesterton notes,

The sin of sentimentalism only occurs when somebody indulges a feeling, sometimes even a real feeling, at the prejudice of something equally real, which also has its rights. The most common form of this dishonesty is what is called "having it both ways." I have always felt it in the conventionalized laxity of fashionable divorce, where people want to change their partners as rapidly as at a dance, and yet want again and again to thrill at the heroic finality of the sacramental vow, which is like the sound of a trumpet. They want to eat their wedding cake and have it.1

12b The desire to have "both/and", rather than to face up to the inescapable "either/or"s of life, has left its mark everywhere. Nowhere is this more apparent, as Chesterton points out, than in marriage, where the ability to experience the thrill of the romance of an irrevocable commitment 'til death do us part is not thought to be incompatible with the ability to experience the relief that comes from being done with the relationship once the first blush is off the rose, not to mention being able to experience the thrill of the irrevocable commitment all over again. The notion that one ought either live out the relationship to which one has pledged oneself or not enter into such a relationship at all seems, to modern minds, a harsh and dreadful judgment capable of being enunciated only by cold, uncaring people. As a result, today's inclusive mentality has turned the whole sexual landscape into a hodgepodge of premarital, extramarital, postmarital, heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, sado-masochistic, multipartnered or serially monogamous promiscuity. No one type of sexual activity seems to preclude others, and no state of life seems to preclude sexual activity. (Fs) (notabene)

13a The greatest casualty of this "both/and" mentality is the irrevocable commitment, the decision to do one thing or to enter into one relationship to the exclusion of other things or relationships. The refusal to make such commitments is frequently presented as a form of freedom, since it always allows one to do as one likes rather than requiring one to do what one has promised. And this freedom is defended on grounds that people change and cannot therefore reasonably be expected to maintain any long-term commitments. But this new liberation is rather alarming in what it suggests about people today. To cite Chesterton again,

The man who makes a vow makes an appointment with himself at some distant time and place. The danger of it is that he himself should not keep the appointment. And in modern times this terror of one's self, of the weakness and mutability of one's self, has perilously increased, and is the real basis of the objection to vows of any kind. A modern man refrains from swearing to count the leaves on every third tree in Holland Walk, not because it is silly to do so (he does many sillier things), but because he has a profound conviction that before he had got to the three hundred and seventy-ninth leaf on the first tree he would be excessively tired of the subject and want to go home to tea. In other words, he fears that by that time he will be, in the common but hideously significant phrase, another man. Now, it is this horrible fairy tale of a man constantly changing into other men that is the soul of the decadence.2

Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Moderner Nihilismus: sowohl als auch (both/and); Inklusivität (inclusivity); Chesterton; "Botschaft" des Nihilismus (keine Werte, Natur usw); Bild: des Kaisers neue Kleider (umgekehrt)

Kurzinhalt: This nihilism comes dressed up in a variety of styles and colors, but everywhere the message is the same. There are no absolute truths, no absolute values, no absolute judgments, because there is no objective reality in which such absolutes could be ...

Textausschnitt: MODERN NIHILISM

13b This modern sentimentalism, which always attempts to embrace "both/and", recommends itself to us as the "virtue" of inclusivity. Under the umbrella of this inclusivity, we are told, we must welcome both the birth of children and the abortion of children, both the "lifestyles" of heterosexuals and the "lifestyles" of homosexuals, both the belief that marriage is irrevocable until death and the belief that there is nothing wrong with divorce and remarriage, both the rightness of natural death and the rightness of euthanasia, and so forth and so on. Inclusivity as preached today seems to suggest that no ultimate judgments or choices about the nature of reality can or should be made, and therefore we must construct one large umbrella under which all varieties of human experience, belief and action can be sheltered. Conversely, any umbrella incapable of including all manner of belief and action must be regarded as too narrow, too exclusive, too intolerant to be itself any longer tolerated. (Fs) (notabene)

14a This kind of inclusivity, as Chesterton notes, supposes at bottom that there is no constant in human affairs. People are always changing and therefore cannot be held to any one standard of belief or behavior. While it might be charming to envision all human beings, in all of their metamorphoses, sheltered beneath the frame of a single umbrella, what might be missed in that picture is the fact that both the people and the umbrella, like the cartoon character who rushes off the precipice, are hovering over the abyss of nothingness. For there is, in this inclusive view of things, no solid unchanging ground beneath anyone's feet. There is no objective reality upon which anyone can rely. (Fs)

14b Nihilism is the one constant confronting us in the works of postmodern, post-Christian, deconstructionist and liberationist philosophers and theologians. This nihilism comes dressed up in a variety of styles and colors, but everywhere the message is the same. There are no absolute truths, no absolute values, no absolute judgments, because there is no objective reality in which such absolutes could be rooted. There are no texts, only conflicting interpretations; there are no compass points, only differing perspectives; there is no human nature, only changing human beings. We are all familiar with that innocent little boy of yesteryear who recognized the emperor to be wearing no clothes. It would take a particularly astute little boy to recognize that there is no emperor beneath the layers upon layers of nihilistic clothing paraded before us today. All clothing, no emperor—it could not be otherwise. For nihilism robs us of the substance of things, leaving only an ever-changing pageant of empty forms. (Fs)

Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Nihilismus, Walker Percy; Beispiel: Pendler (commuter): Orientierungslosigkeit; alles gleichsam bedeutsam = gleichsam bedeutungslos; entweder - oder;

Kurzinhalt: emotionally inclusive ... Socrates, Jesus, Buddha, St. Francis ... in our scientifically-informed nihilistic society, "needs" such as food, clothing, shelter, affection, etc., are the only categories our "experts" have for understanding our problems...

Textausschnitt: "EITHER/OR"

14c Walker Percy, American novelist and convert to the Catholic faith, wrote extensively about how modern nihilistic alienation eats away at the foundations of the western world today. And much of the problem with regard to it, as he discerned, is that so much of what is offered as a cure only makes the alienation worse. At one point in his writing, he considers modern man under the guise of an "alienated commuter" who finds himself bored or even in a state of anxiety as he rides through the familiar landscape of his journey to and from work. From within that context, Percy offers the following example of a cure for that commuter's alienation and what effect that cure would likely have on him:

Take these two sentences that I once read in a book on mental hygiene: "The most profound of all human needs, the prime requisite for successful living, is to be emotionally inclusive. Socrates, Jesus, Buddha, St. Francis were emotionally inclusive." These words tremble with anxiety and alienation, even though I would not deny that they are, in their own eerie way, true. The alienated commuter shook like a leaf when he read them.1

14a Percy's point is that the alienated commuter would likely be far more alienated by the "cure" than he already is by the disease. For, in our scientifically-informed nihilistic society, "needs" such as food, clothing, shelter, affection, etc., are the only categories our "experts" have for understanding our problems. But the commuter does not suffer from some sort of failure to have his needs met. What the commuter suffers from, what makes the landscape around him either boring or the source of intense anxiety, is the fact that he can no longer "place" himself within that landscape. He no longer has either solid ground beneath his feet or defined compass points at his disposal to identify his own niche within that larger reality. His problem is not a lack of "emotional inclusivity", but a lack of a sense of reality which would give ultimate meaning and significance to his existence within the landscape of his life. As Percy puts it, "he is horrified at his surroundings—he might as well be passing through a lunar landscape and the signs he sees are absurd or at least ambiguous."2 His problem is not that he is insufficiently inclusive, but that he has no basis on which to include or exclude anything. Nothing signifies. (Fs)

16a And when nothing signifies, to be more inclusive means simply to expand the nothingness until everything is consumed by it. This is doubtless why, in his other work of non-fiction, Lost in the Cosmos, Percy speaks metaphorically of the modern self as a "black hole". (Fs)

16b The problem of alienation today, therefore, is indissociable from the problem of nihilism. If all beliefs, all actions, are to be regarded as equally significant, meaningful and valuable, it is impossible to escape the conclusion that they are also equally insignificant, meaningless and valueless. The inclusivity of "both/and" is not a solution to our alienation, but simply another way of clothing it. In the final analysis, Percy's efforts to satirize our society were attempts, as he put it, "to destroy mushy American liberalism. The mushy way of approving everything which is 'life-enhancing,' or 'self-improving,' or 'how to cultivate personality.' To cut it down to an either/or—I'm always trying to cut it down to an either/or—it has either got to be one way or the other."3 (Fs)

16c To act as though inclusivity were an end in itself is to deny the fact that, until we are able to make some judgment about the nature of reality itself, we have no basis at all for knowing what ought to be welcomed and what ought to be rejected. We do not, after all, welcome cancer cells or the AIDS virus on grounds that to reject them would be an insensitive and uncaring act of intolerance. Before we are in a position to make judgments as to what to include and what to exclude, we must first answer some very hard "either/or" questions. Either there is an objective reality or there is not. Either there is an intrinsic order to this universe or there is not. Either there is absolute truth or there is not. Either there is absolute good or there is not. (Fs)
16d Percy stated quite flatly, with regard to his novels, that they are "an attack on the 20th century, on the whole culture. It is a rotten century, we are in terrible trouble." Few would want to have to defend this century. But if there is any silver lining to be found in its closing years, it is the realization that an either/or choice has become virtually unavoidable. With every day that passes, it becomes more and more apparent that one cannot have both the Christian faith and secular liberation. (Fs)

17a As Chesterton, himself a convert to the Catholic faith, wrote more than seven decades ago: "The present writer ... is personally quite convinced that if every human being lived a thousand years, every human being would end up either in utter pessimistic scepticism or in the Catholic creed."4 Were he still alive, I think he would grant that today the choice between the two is so much clearer that an ordinary lifetime would more than suffice to arrive at that conclusion. Walker Percy, in a self-interview for Esquire, explained that he had become a Catholic because, as he put it, "what else is there?" He then posed to himself the question, "What do you mean, what else is there? There is humanism, atheism, agnosticism, Marxism, behaviorism, materiahsm, Buddhism, Muhammadanism, Sufism, astrology, occultism, theosophy." His answer: 'That's what I mean. (Fs) (notabene)

Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Trinität, trinitarische Struktur; Tyrannei: Gegenteil von Autorität; Macht, Nihilismus, Totalitarismus; Chesterton (über die kommende Zeit)

Kurzinhalt: ... every other contemporary conflict covered in this book is a variant on the conflict between the secular exaltation of human power, and the Christian witness to that divine authority which transcends all things merely human and commands ...

Textausschnitt: TRINITARIANISM

19a Theology is "faith seeking understanding". While it is true that Christians could practice their faith in the absence of theologians, it is also true that the practice of that faith is likely to go off the tracks if people do not properly understand it. Indeed, there are some periods in history where a renewal in our understanding of the faith is indispensable to its practice. Henri de Lubac characterizes such periods thusly:

For the most part this sort of thing happens when the whole inheritance of Tradition, hitherto held without question, becomes, in one way or another, disputed territory. Doubts arise as to its value, and insidious comparisons are made between its original form and that which it has at that time; every element in it is put to the test, and there is as much criticism from the man of religion himself as there is from the scholar pure and simple. People begin to ask themselves whether the whole of this assemblage of beliefs and customs is really authentic, and whether there hasn't been in the course of the centuries, a process of accretion which has also been one of corruption. The thing seems to have become a burden rather than a source of vitality, and thus to constitute an obstruction of the very life which it is supposed to feed and transmit.1
19b Our age is just such a period. Everywhere one turns today, one finds among Christians themselves a host of doubts, questions and confusing notions about their own faith. If this age poses to us an "either/or" choice between the inclusivity of popular American culture and the truth of Jesus Christ, we must recognize the general features of each of these alternatives and the implications which flow from those features. The purpose of this book is to set out the major features of these two choices and the manner in which they contrast with one another. (Fs)

20a Broadly speaking, if inclusivity is nihilistic, Christian faith is trinitarian. What confronts us at the outset in the revelation given us by Christ is the unique singularity of the Trinity, three distinct and different Persons in the unity of one divine substance. Everything else in the Christian faith in general, and in the Catholic faith in particular, is an implication of the Trinity. The Creator of the universe is not just one God in the absolute unity of one Person, but one God in the triune communion of three Relations. Everything in creation manifests this triune communion. When we speak of the universe and of ourselves, therefore, as incarnational (Chapter 2), sacramental (Chapter 3), hierarchical (Chapter 4) and free (Chapter 5), we are simply saying that universe reflects the unique singularity of its trinitarian origins. When we stress the importance of motherhood (Chapter 6) and trust (Chapter 7), we recognize the particular significance of the specifically female sphere of God's creation, a sphere which is given special consideration here in light of a pressing need today to understand better the meaning of sexual differentiation, especially the significance of the female in relationship to the male. (Fs)

20b We begin however, with a consideration of Church authority and the nihilistic alternative to it, power, for three reasons. First, there is an enormous ignorance of the true meaning of authority in the world today, reflected in the fact that rarely does one hear the word "authoritative", but only the word "authoritarian", and the latter always in negative or censurious ways. To be "authoritarian" is always, without exception, to be bad. This reflects an enormous misunderstanding about the character of authority. Authority is not the same thing as tyranny. (Fs)
Tyranny is the opposite of authority. For authority simply means right; and nothing is authoritative except when somebody has a right to do, and there is right in doing.... Moreover, a man can only have authority by admitting something better than himself; and the bully does not get his claim from anybody but himself. It is not a question, therefore, of there being authority, and then tyranny, which is too much authority; for tyranny is no authority. Tyranny means too little authority; for though, of course, an individual may use wrongly the power that may go with it, he is in that act disloyal to the law of right, which should be his own authority.2

21a Second, only power can fill the void created by the rejection of authority. Power in the absence of authority, however, is entirely nihilistic, for it rests upon the assumption that there is no God to whom it is accountable and no law to which it must submit. It is no coincidence that this century which has rejected authority has also given rise to totalitarianism, that is, the exercise of unlimited power. (Fs) (notabene)

21b Third, every other contemporary conflict covered in this book is a variant on the conflict between the secular exaltation of human power, and the Christian witness to that divine authority which transcends all things merely human and commands our allegiance to it. In a sense this key conflict defines all of the others. And so, as we take up the theme of power versus authority, we might do well to call to mind one of Chesterton's most striking prophecies about our age:

Christendom has a new battle before it; no longer with the Lust that was called Liberty; no longer with the Scorn that was called Scepticism; no longer with the Envy that was called Divine Discontent; but with something much less mixed with sympathetic elements than any of these: with that primeval Spirit and Prince of the Powers of the world which it first came upon earth to defy.... A Pagan pride, freed from democratic as from religious restraints, is the next foe we have to face; and it may be hoped, in whatever form, that we shall all face it together.3

Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Autorität: auctoritas, augere; H. Arendt, Rom (römische Trinität: Religion, Tradition, Autorität);

Kurzinhalt: In short, those invested with authority were not the authors themselves (the gods were the authors), but those chosen to represent what the authors had originated.

Textausschnitt: AUTHORITY

24a St. Augustine long ago remarked, "If you ask me what time is, I can't tell you; if you don't ask me, then I know." Much the same thing turned out to be true regarding my own knowledge of authority. When I first took up this subject, I knew what authority was. Once, however, I started really working on it, I discovered I did not know. Furthermore, few who write on the subject bother to define the word. And, to make matters worse, many writers use "power" and "authority" interchangeably, as though they were synonymous or as though authority were a variant of power, i.e., legitimate power as opposed to illegitimate power. (Fs)

24b Hannah Arendt is one of the few writers to raise and answer the question of what authority means. As she points out, while the Greeks had no specific word for or concept of authority, the Romans had a well-developed notion of it which was closely linked to their understanding of religion and tradition. In fact, religion, tradition and authority formed what Arendt calls the "Roman trinity". (Fs)

24c The religious element in this trinity was the founding of Rome itself, understood not simply as a political but even more as a primordial religious event for which the gods were responsible. Authority, which is rooted in the Latin words auctoritas and augere, meaning authorship and augmentation, was directly connected to and dependent upon this founding event. Since the gods had authored or instigated the creation of Rome, it was imperative that their wishes regarding its well-being be consulted at all times. Those invested with authority were thought to have the ability to augment or interpret the will of the Roman gods regarding all decisions having a bearing on the life of the city. (Fs) (notabene)

24d This authority was derivative or representational, since those in authority did not have that authority in their own right but only insofar as they represented the founding fathers who, because they had established the city in accordance with the will of the gods, were both eyewitnesses to and participants in that event and the first, therefore, to be invested by the gods with the authority to carry out their will. In the words of Arendt,

Those endowed with authority were the elders, the Senate or the patres, who had obtained it by descent and by transmission (tradition) from those who had laid the foundation for all things to come, the ancestors, whom the Romans therefore called the maiores. The authority of the living was always a derivative, depending upon the auctores imperii Romani conditoresque, as Pliny puts it, upon the authority of the founders who no longer were among the living.1

25a In short, those invested with authority were not the authors themselves (the gods were the authors), but those chosen to represent what the authors had originated. (Fs) (notabene)

25b Because the Romans believed that, if only they obeyed their gods, the city would endure forever, they strictly adhered to the tradition, or the process by which the authority to speak for and interpret the will of the gods was handed on to each new generation. Arendt concludes, "As long as this tradition was uninterrupted, authority was inviolate; and to act without authority and tradition, without accepted, time-honored standards and models, without the help of the wisdom of the founding fathers, was inconceivable."2 (Fs) (notabene)

Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Kirchliche Autorität: kein Zwang, Freiwilligkeit, Gehorsam, Sukzession;

Kurzinhalt: Authority of whatever kind is never self-generated. As Arendt observes, its "legitimacy derives from something outside the range of human deeds; it is either not man-made at all, like natural or divine law, or has at least not been made by (Fn)

Textausschnitt: ECCLESIAL AUTHORITY

25c If all of this sounds familiar it should. As Hannah Arendt points out,
Thanks to the fact that the foundation of the city of Rome was repeated in the foundation of the Catholic Church, though, of course, with a radically different content, the Roman trinity of religion, authority, and tradition could be taken over by the Christian era, with the result that the miracle of permanence, too, repeated itself; for within the framework of our history, the durability and continuity of the Church as a public institution can only be compared with the thousand years of Roman history in antiquity.1

25d The structure of religion, tradition and authority is the same, but the content, as Arendt says, is radically different. The founding event of the Catholic faith is the covenantal relationship of Christ and the Church, established by Christ's death and resurrection. The source of authority is therefore Christ himself. Those specially chosen by Christ to witness to and participate in that founding event, the apostles, provided the testimony about it which has been recognized by all subsequent generations as normative for the Catholic faith. Thus, the Catholic tradition is explicitly "apostolic" and Catholic authority is inviolate precisely because it rests upon an unbroken line of succession which links each new generation of bishops with those who witnessed the founding event.2 (Fs) (notabene)

26a Given the nature of ecclesial authority, several consequences flow from it. First, ecclesial authority is not the same thing as force. As Arendt points out, "where force is used, authority itself has failed."3 The Church is a voluntary society and has no civic penalties to invoke. Second, because ecclesial authority is not force or coercion, it seeks to evoke the free obedience of those whom it addresses. For this reason, as previously noted, the Church is a voluntary society and therefore a community from which the individual member is always free to withdraw if he cannot give his consent to her authority. (Fs) (notabene)

26b Third, ecclesial authority is never self-generated.4 It is derived from Christ and is therefore representational or, in theological terms, sacramental. As Cardinal Ratzinger observes, "To receive the 'sacrament of order' means to represent the faith of the whole Church, the 'holy origin', to be a witness of the faith of the Church. It is a form based on faith of being called to be a representative. But because this representation is sacramental it can only represent what is Church and cannot create what in the opinion of this person or that... it ought to be."5 (Fs) (notabene)

27a Fourth, because ecclesial authority is sacramental or representational, it requires that those who exercise it also obey it. In other words, although authority is hierarchical by nature, the hierarchy it establishes is not one of inequality between some who simply command and others who simply obey. Since those in authority derive that authority from Christ himself, they are as much obliged to obey it as is anyone else in the Church. The ultimate authority is Christ himself, and all who would call themselves his followers are obliged to obey him. (Fs) (notabene)
27b Finally, because ecclesial authority is always handed down from one generation of bishops to the next, it looks back to the founding event of the New Covenant for its legitimacy and depends upon an unbroken line of succession from the apostles who witnessed that event to sustain its legitimacy. Church authority is inviolate only as long as continuity with that past event is sustained in the tradition. To cite Ratzinger, "Succession means cleaving to the apostolic word, just as tradition means the continuance of authorized witnesses."6

27c In summary, ecclesial authority is the ability to witness to and augment (interpret) the New Covenant, an ability which derives its legitimacy from the founding event of Christ's death and resurrection and which remains inviolate by virtue of the unbroken tradition which links every generation of bishops with the original eyewitnesses to that event, the apostles. (Fs)

Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Macht: Antike, Gelasius; Ockham: Gottes absolute Macht; Calvin; Bacon: Wissen als Macht (Naturwissenschaft); Nitzsche; gute Gegenüberstellung: Autorität, Hierarchie (Gleichheit) - Macht (Zwang, Kontrollem Ungleichheit) ; H. Arendt

Kurzinhalt: Ockham ... To say that God commanded us not to kill because murder is intrinsically evil would suggest that God's power is limited by something other than that power itself... since to deny authority is to deny the existence of a reality over which we ...

Textausschnitt: Fußnote:

14 One of the ironies of the situation we find ourselves in today is that hierarchy is associated with inequality, whereas power is associated with egalitarianism (as in the notion held by feminists and others that we will be equal only when we are all "empowered"). The reverse, however, is the case. Belief that hierarchy is synonymous with inequality is based on a misunderstanding of hierarchy. "Hierarchy ... means not holy domination but holy origin. Hierarchical service and ministry is thus guarding an origin that is holy, and not making arbitrary dispositions and decisions" (Ratzinger, Church, Ecumenism and Politics, 128). Furthermore, as Yves R. Simon notes in his study of authority, when authority has to do with the truth of reality, as religious authority always does, those in authority are not leaders in the popular sense of the term; they are rather witnesses to the truth which they represent. Ratzinger concurs: "Apostolic succession is essentially the living presence of the Word in the person of the witness" (Karl Rahner and Joseph Ratzinger, The Episcopate and the Primacy [New York: Herder and Herder, 1962, 54). And witnesses, as Simon reminds us, "do not enjoy, in human relations, a position superior to ours. The authority of the mere witness is nothing else than truthfulness as expressed by signs which make it recognizable in varying degrees of assurance" (A General Theory of Authority [Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1962], 84).
Power, on the other hand, since it always involves in some fashion the exercise of control over someone or something, is synonymous with inequality. To exercise power over someone is always simultaneously to assert superiority over him. The notion that we shall all become equal by being equally empowered supposes that no one will be able to control anyone else, because each person will be able to use his or her power to hold everyone else at bay. Even were this possible, it is hardly a felicitous vision of society. But it is not possible, inasmuch as human beings demonstrably unequal in beauty, brains, athletic skills, etc., are also demonstrably unequal in their abilities to exercise power.
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Fußnote 32/19

19 In point of fact, religion, tradition and authority are apparently as interrelated as the Romans thought them to be. For, as Arendt observes, "Since then [when the Catholic Church took over the triune amalgamation of Roman religion, tradition and authority] it has turned out, and this fact speaks for the stability of the amalgamation, that wherever one of the elements of the Roman trinity, religion or authority or tradition, was doubted or eliminated, the remaining two were no longer secure. Thus, it was Luther's error to think that his challenge of the temporal authority of the Church and his appeal to unguided individual judgment would leave tradition and religion intact. So it was the error of Hobbes and the political theorists of the seventeenth century to hope that authority and religion could be saved without tradition. So, too, was it finally the error of the humanists to think it would be possible to remain within an unbroken tradition of western civilization without religion and without authority" ("What Was Authority", 105).

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POWER
27d When we turn from the subject of ecclesial authority to that of feminist power, we must first ask ourselves what the meaning of power is and whether or not there is a qualitative difference between power and authority. This was not an important question in the Roman Empire, where no clear distinction was made between the secular power of the empire and the sacred authority of the city.1 Once, however, Christ enjoined us to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's, the distinction between secular and sacred could no longer be ignored. All of us are familiar with St. Augustine's distinction between the City of God and the City of Man, a distinction given formulation toward the end of the fifth century by Pope Gelasius I in a letter to Emperor Anastasius I, in which he wrote, "There are two by which this world is ruled: the sacred authority of the popes, and the royal power...."2 What is it about power which distinguishes it from authority?

28a Although the literature abounds with definitions of power, the one thread which seems to run through every discussion of it is best stated by the Catholic priest/theologian Romano Guardini, when he says "To exercise power means, to a degree at least, that one has mastered 'the given.'"3 In other words, to exercise power with regard to any given reality is to exercise control over it. This is true whether we are talking about divine or human power. William of Ockham, the fourteenth-century proponent of God's absolute power, concluded, for example, that the Ten Commandments are good solely because God commanded them and that he could, had he wished, commanded us to do the opposite, i.e., to murder, to commit adultery, etc. Ockham's reasoning was quite simple. If God enjoys absolute power, then there is nothing in the givenness of things, even in the givenness of his own nature, which could limit his power. To say that God commanded us not to kill because murder is intrinsically evil would suggest that God's power is limited by something other than that power itself. Calvin had much the same notion of power in mind when he asserted that whether or not we go to heaven depends not upon our own behavior but solely upon the will of God. To say otherwise would suggest that God's power is limited by the givenness of our behavior. (Fs) (notabene)

28b The same theme appears in all discussions of human power from Francis Bacon through Friedrich Nietzsche. Bacon asserted, in the seventeenth century, that "knowledge is power", thus setting the stage for modern scientific technology. His thesis was also very simple. We should acquire knowledge about the workings of nature in order to exercise mastery over it. Nietzsche at the close of the nineteenth century spoke of the overman whose will to power would be such as to place him beyond all good and evil, thus enabling him to transvalue all values. Man can, in this view, become a god unto himself, whose will to power would know no limits because nothing has been given which he cannot master or overturn. (Fs) (notabene)

29a It should be apparent by now that power and authority are not at all the same thing. They move in quite opposite directions. Authority, on the one hand, is rooted in and derives all of its legitimacy from the givenness of a reality uncreated by those who exercise authority. Authority bears witness to that reality and seeks to evoke our acceptance of and obedience to it. Power, on the other hand, seeks to master or control any reality it encounters. Therefore, while authority employs neither force nor coercion, power is always to one degree or another coercive. Whether we be talking about that power over nature which turns a tree into a bookcase or that power over human beings which turns a citizen into a taxpayer, force is used. Mao Zedong may not have been entirely right when he said that all power comes from the barrel of a gun, but he was right in supposing that all power rests upon the ability to employ force of one kind or another. And because power is coercive, it is self-generated unless authority intervenes to make it otherwise. Those in power rule by the force they possess, not by the authority of some reality greater than themselves.4

29b Power does not evoke the free obedience of those over whom it rules. Power dependent upon free obedience is not power, since that which is freely given is by definition not mastered or controlled by power and can be withheld as easily as it is given. Nor does power require the obedience of those who exercise it. The whole purpose of power is to exercise control over, not to submit to.5 Therefore, power per se sets no limits upon itself. To the extent that it is limited, it is always by something or someone outside itself. In nature, for example, power seeks to overcome the givenness of things but is always at the same time limited by that same givenness. Power can turn a tree into a bookcase, but, given the nature of trees, it cannot turn one into a nuclear weapon. (Fs) (notabene Fußnote 27/14)

30a Finally, while authority looks to a past founding event which creates that reality to which it calls everyone to conform himself, and relies upon tradition to establish continuity between that event and all subsequent generations, power sees the past solely as the source of a given reality it seeks to overcome and looks therefore to the present and especially the future as the arena for its own achievements. And power positively revels in the discontinuities or ruptures it is able to create by destroying or changing what has been given from the past. (Fs) (notabene)
30b As can be seen, authority and power exist in a relationship of tension and even antagonism. Authority seeks to set limits on power, while power seeks to overcome all limits it encounters. If nature itself sets limits on scientific power, only authority can set limits on political power, because only authority in the realm of history confronts us with a reality larger than ourselves to which we are called to give our assent.6 Such authority is always religious in nature, because the reality to which it bears witness is never of our making and always transcends us. To refuse to give our assent to authority is to align ourselves, to one degree or another, with power, since to deny authority is to deny the existence of a reality over which we cannot or at least should not seek to exercise control. (Fs) (notabene)

31a Unfortunately, the world in which we live today is dominated almost exclusively by power. To all practical intents and purposes, authority has disappeared from the landscape. Hannah Arendt entitled her article on authority "What Was Authority", because, as she put it, "It is my contention ... that authority has vanished from the modern world, and that if we raise the question what authority is, we can no longer fall back upon authentic and undisputable experiences common to all."7 Therefore, "Practically as well as theoretically, we are no longer in a position to know what authority really is."8 (Fs)

31b The reason for this she spells out most clearly in her classic work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, in which she notes that the modern world is characterized by a rejection of all givenness, whether in nature or in history. "Our new difficulty is that we start from a fundamental distrust of everything merely given, a distrust of all laws and prescriptions, moral or social, that are deduced from a given, comprehensive, universal whole."9 Unwilling to accept anything as merely given, we are necessarily unwilling to accept any authority, since authority by definition derives its legitimacy from the givenness of the reality to which it bears witness. Arendt points out that this loss of authority is the final chapter in a long and complex process in the West in which religion and tradition were undermined first. This has left authority in the position in which, without religion and tradition, there is nothing which it can bear witness to or represent.10 (Fs)

Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Feminismus (Schussler Fiorenza us.), feministische Auffassung von Macht und Autorität -> Zweifel am Kanon und Magisterium

Kurzinhalt: In the feminist view of things, the only authority is power and the men exercising power in the past are going to be replaced by women exercising power in the future.

Textausschnitt: FEMINIST POWER

32a When we turn to the feminists, we discover that, while they use the word "authority", they understand authority to be power, whether they are talking about the authority of the Magisterium as that has always been exercised or about authority as they themselves would like to exercise it. The reasons are not difficult to discover, and they apply not only to authority but also to tradition and religion as the feminists understand them. (Fs) (notabene)

32b With regard to magisterial authority itself, the feminists clearly see it as nothing more than the self-generated power of patriarchal males bent on controlling everyone else, especially women. This is apparent in their view that if men got pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament, or that the pope, with the stroke of a pen, could permit the ordination of women and refuses to do so solely because he has no desire to share his power with them.1 These women suppose there are no givens or limits in the Christian faith which cannot be overcome by the Magisterium, if only they could get the right people into it. As Sr. Mary Ellen Sheehan puts it, "Feminist analysis uncovers the hitherto almost universally accepted power of patriarchy to define the nature and role of women."2 In other words, the pope and bishops do not represent Christ or the apostles, but only themselves, and thus their exercise of ecclesial authority is nothing more than the use of power to dominate other people.3 (Fs) (notabene)

33a The tradition fares no better than does the Magisterium. Feminists never tire of discussing the tradition as simply male patriarchy and chauvinism spread over time. As Sr. Sandra Schneiders, Professor of New Testament and Spirituality at the Jesuit School of Theology and the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, maintains, the feminist Catholic "sees more and more clearly that every aspect of it [the tradition] is not just tainted but perverted by the evil of patriarchy. It is not that the tradition has some problems; the tradition is the problem."4

33b Most disturbing is the feminist attitude toward the founding event of our faith and that apostolic witness of it which is regarded as normative for our faith. The feminists insist that we cannot trust the canon of Scripture, because it also is tainted by patriarchy. Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza claims: "Insofar as the writings collected and accepted in the New Testament canon were selected and codified by the patristic New Testament church, the canon is a record of the 'historical winners'."5 In other words, the canon we have is the result of nothing more than a power struggle in the early Church. She subtitles her book "A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins" precisely because, in her view, Christian origins (that is, Christ and those events by which he instituted the New Covenant) as they have been presented to us in Scripture were skewed at the very beginning and thus need to be "reconstructed".6 (Fs) (notabene)

34a As Carl J. Friedrich, editor and contributor to a book on authority for The American Society of Political and Legal Philosophy, points out, "It has been argued through the ages that there is only power based on some sort of constraint, and that authority is merely a make-belief, based upon religious faith at best."7 The feminists clearly fall in this camp, inasmuch as their every characterization of ecclesial authority reveals that they regard it as nothing more than the exercise of self-generated power by patriarchal males to keep themselves in power. (Fs)

35a Thus, it should not surprise us that when feminists speak of their own ambitions within the Church, what they have in mind is simply the replacement of patriarchal power by feminist power. What they seek is not the recovery of the truth of the founding event of our faith (supposing that truth to have been suppressed), but a reconstruction of our faith on the foundation of the feminist view of things. Carol P. Christ, in the introduction to Womanspirit Rising, makes this abundantly clear. "What would it mean for women's experience to shape theology and religion in the future? The word experience becomes a key term, a significant norm for feminists reconstructing tradition and creating new religious forms."8 And Schussler Fiorenza, in her reconstruction of Biblical texts, tells us that all Christian texts must be "assessed theologically in terms of a feminist scale of values".9 (Fs)

35b The activity most important to feminists is, as Christ points out, "a 'new naming' of self and world", a process which by allowing "women to name the world for themselves" will "upset the order that has been taken for granted throughout history" and will enable women to "call themselves and the world into new being".10 Or, as another feminist puts it, "Naming the sacred in our own experience is an important theological task for women. Finding the power to name is like being present at the creation of the world."11

35c This process of renaming reality is, as the above passages indicate, nothing more than the exercise of power to break with the past in order that feminist power might assert its claims in the present and the future. Sheila Collins, a contributor to Christ's book, notes that the replacement of history by feminist reconstructionism, or "her-story", will necessarily produce enormous ruptures between the past and the future, but asserts that this does not pose a problem for feminists. She states, "Since feminist women have least to lose from a break with the old system, we are more open to a radically discontinuous future."12

36a Letty Russell, Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School, has written a book entitled Household of Freedom: Authority in Feminist Theology, and in her book we find all of the elements of power disguised as authority. Authority, she tells us, is "legitimated power".13 Feminist authority appeals not to a past founding event but "to the future as the source of authority" and is therefore based on what she calls "our memory of the future" in which the marginalized and the oppressed will enjoy a new society.14 As such "it challenges both the content and the thought structure of Christian theology as we know it."15 What we have been living in heretofore has been a "house of bondage" which feminists must "work to subvert".16 Feminists must do this by naming anew what authority means. "This power of naming has implications for a feminist understanding of power and authority in community. Power ... is the ability to accomplish desired ends, and the power to name our reality does just that."17 Furthermore, the subversion of the old structures, including those of authority, should be done wholesale and not piecemeal, because if one does it piecemeal, one runs the risk of not really destroying them at all. "It is", she says,

a little like trying to win at Monopoly when you just own Baltic Avenue, without any hotels! The only possibility of winning in such circumstances is by changing the rules of the game. If the rules say that property owners should collect rents and distribute them equally, then perhaps everyone would be able to continue in the game and there would be no more losers. In the same way our paradigm of authority needs to change.18

37a Let us grant that her analogy is deeply flawed, if only because only the certifiably insane would voluntarily spend an evening moving pieces around a Monopoly board to no other purpose than that there be no losers. On the other hand, this analogy does clearly reveal that the feminist view of authority is of a power which knows no limits. To the extent that one could ascribe to Monopoly or any other game the notion of authority, that authority would reside in the event by which the game was created, i.e., in the rules which make up the game. After all, games are in the final analysis nothing but the incarnation of a given set of rules. Authority requires us to submit to those rules. Power seeks to overcome all rules. (Fs)

37b Russell sums up the difference between traditional authority and feminist authority in this way:

The patriarchal mind-set decides the truth and draws the line, and suddenly those outside the line become heretics. We know, however, that theological lines are always moving in response to changes in human culture. There are very few clear lines, and it is perhaps better not to pose the question of authority that way. In the Christian faith there is a center (commitment to Jesus Christ) and a circle (a hermeneutical circle). Every theological interpretation affects every other, so that we continue to move around the circle trying to create metaphors and models that are faithful to the center of our commitment.19

37c Here we truly do have a self-generated power which views itself as free to define its own commitment to Christ and to create at will the metaphors and models for expressing it. Starhawk, the witch on staff at Matthew Fox's Creation Spirituality Center, has said, "It is uncomfortable to be one's own authority, but it is the only condition under which true personal power can develop."20 In the feminist view of things, the only authority is power and the men exercising power in the past are going to be replaced by women exercising power in the future. (Fs)

Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Papst, Pasttum: Macht, Autorität; H. Arendt (Revolte gegen das Gegebene); Humanae Vitae - Feminismus, selbstgeschaffene Macht; Kirche: "Verwaltung" der Wahrheit, nicht Schaffung

Kurzinhalt: Hannah Arendt ... "The first disastrous result of man's coming of age is that modern man has come to resent everything given, even his own existence ..." They want to define for themselves what they can do with their bodies just as they want to define ...

Textausschnitt: AUTHORITY, POWER AND THE PAPACY

38a Hannah Arendt observes, "The first disastrous result of man's coming of age is that modern man has come to resent everything given, even his own existence—to resent the very fact that he is not the creator of the universe and himself. In this fundamental resentment, he refuses to see rhyme or reason in the given world. In his resentment of all laws merely given to him, he proclaims openly that everything is permitted and believes secretly that everything is possible."1 She also notes, however, that the one institution in the modern world which retains an authentic notion of authority is the Roman Catholic Church.2 This is particularly true of Popes Paul VI and John Paul II, both of whom have provoked controversy by their exercise of authority in a world no longer able to comprehend, much less accept, it: Paul VI, by his famous encyclical Humane Vitae, and John Paul II, by any number of things he has said and written. (Fs) (notabene)
38b When, in 1968, Humanae Vitae produced such controversy, the question was frequently raised as to whether we were facing a crisis of authority or a crisis of faith. Today it is obvious that it was and is both, and that both crises are rooted in a single cause—the dominance of power in the thinking of so many people today in both the Church and society. (Fs) (notabene)

38c Thus, when Pope Paul VI stated in Humanae Vitae that the teaching found there is simply a reaffirmation of the moral law and that "of such laws the Church was not the author, nor consequently can she be their arbiter; she is only their depositary and their interpreter" (18), a hue and cry went up across the land, because so many people expected the Pope to use what they perceived to be the power of his office to change Church teachings on contraception. They could no longer recognize the fact that those in authority, in the words of Ratzinger, "do not create anything but simply articulate what already exists in the Church of the Lord".3 Rejection of the authority of the Church was itself, however, rooted in a rejection of the faith for which that authority speaks. (Fs) (notabene)

39a What Humanae Vitae affirmed was the fact that something in the very nature of what it means to be a human person precludes the use of contraceptives. As Pope Paul VI put it, "If the mission of generating life is not to be exposed to the arbitrary will of man, one must necessarily recognize insurmountable limits to the possibility of man's domination over his own body and its functions; limits which no man, whether a private individual or one invested with authority, may licitly surpass" (17). The feminists were, however, already well down the path to asserting precisely that kind of domination over their own bodies which knows no such limits. That is, after all, what "reproductive freedom" is all about. (Fs) (notabene)

39b Feminists oppose both the faith of the Church and the authority of the Magisterium, and they oppose both for exactly the same reason—so that they might exercise power. They want to define for themselves what they can do with their bodies just as they want to define for themselves what it means to be Catholic. Reality, whether it has to do with morality or with authority, is something they are determined to name for themselves.4 Feminists do not understand authority, but they are only one group among many who have lost all appreciation for the meaning of the word.5 (Fs) (notabene)

40a Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Pope John Paul II, in his recent encyclical Veritatis Splendor, went to some lengths to point out the current error in thinking which would suppose that human beings have the right and the capacity to determine good and evil for themselves (35). He reminds us that man's "history of sin begins when he no longer acknowledges the Lord as his Creator and himself wishes to be the one who determines, with complete independence, what is good and what is evil. 'You will be like God, knowing good and evil' (Gen 3:5): this was the first temptation, and it is echoed in all the other temptations to which man is more easily inclined to yield as a result of the original Fall" (102). (Fs)

40b John Paul II firmly opposes those who regard truth as something created and thus controlled by us, those who would make, in his words, "freedom self-defining and a phenomenon creative of itself and its values" (46). Neither is he blind to the fact that there is only one alternative open to those no longer seeking the truth. "If one does not acknowledge transcendent truth, then the force of power takes over ..." (99). (Fs)

41a As the Pope points out, human freedom must submit to the "truth of creation" (41), a truth not of our own making but of the Creator's. By the same token, the Church does not decide the truth but simply teaches it. Quoting from Vatican II's Declaration on Religious Freedom, the Pope reminds us that the Church's "charge is to announce and teach authentically the truth which is Christ, and at the same time with her authority to declare and confirm the principles of the moral order which derive from human nature itself" (64). Citing his own earlier apostolic exhortation, Familiaris Consortio, the Pope reiterates this with respect to the Church: "As Teacher, she never tires of proclaiming the moral norm.... The Church is in no way the author or the arbiter of this norm. In obedience to the truth which is Christ ... the Church interprets the moral norm and proposes it to all peoples of good will, without concealing its demands of radicalness and perfection" (95). In other words, the Church did not create the truth and, therefore, has no power to control, master or change it. Where the truth of reality and morality is concerned, the Church has only the authority to bear witness to, represent and proclaim it. (Fs)

Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Papst, Kirche: Verteidiger d. christlichen Gedächtnisses; Macht - Autorität (Christus, Gehorsam); Gottes Allmacht, Schöpfung; Ratzinger über Autorität

Kurzinhalt: Today that authority is under attack as never before, and those who seek to destroy it do so, first, by trying to undermine the tradition which links today's bishops to the apostles and, second, by trying to undermine the validity of the New Testament ...

Textausschnitt: THE POPE: DEFENDER OF THE CHRISTIAN MEMORY

41b Although God is omnipotent, Jesus Christ made it abundantly clear that the Kingdom of God is ruled by authority, not power.1 He impressed people because he spoke with authority, and his authority is, like all authority, derivative or representational, for to see him is, as he tells us, to see the Father, the source of all authority, even his. Thus, at the end of his earthly ministry, he counselled obedience among his followers and practiced it himself, undergoing death in obedience to the will of his Father. As Guardini puts it, "Jesus' whole existence is a translation of power into humility. Or to state it actively: into obedience to the will of the Father as it expresses itself in the situation of each moment.... For the Son, obedience is nothing secondary or additional; it springs from the core of his being."2 His authority to speak for the Father lies in nothing but his obedience to the Father. (Fs)

42a Our ability to speak authoritatively as Christians also lies in nothing but our obedience to Jesus Christ. Such obedience, however, is possible only because Christ's authority continues to make itself visible in the office of the Magisterium by virtue of that unbroken line of succession which links the authority of all bishops today to the authority of the apostles who were specially chosen by Christ to witness to and participate in the founding event of the New Covenant. Today that authority is under attack as never before, and those who seek to destroy it do so, first, by trying to undermine the tradition which links today's bishops to the apostles and, second, by trying to undermine the validity of the New Testament or the apostolic testimony itself. That they seek to do so is understandable. For, as Jeremy Rifkin has observed, "The devaluation of history is a prerequisite for the free exercise of pure power."3 (Fs)

42b Nothing could be more opposed to Catholic authority than this repudiation of the past, for, as Ratzinger points out, "the Church is not something that we make today but something that we receive from the history of those who believe and that we pass on as something as yet incomplete, only to be fulfilled when the Lord shall come again."4 The Church's history is our history, and that history is the common memory we share, not, as Russell would have it, of some non-existent future Utopia, but of those great primordial and historical events by which God has created and redeemed us. (Fs)

43a It is the special obligation of the Magisterium in general, and of the Pope in particular, to safeguard our history. For, to cite Ratzinger again, "The true sense of the teaching authority of the Pope consists in his being the advocate of the Christian memory. The Pope does not impose from without. Rather he elucidates the Christian memory and defends it."5 At the same time, we all have a stake in this authority, since it is our history, our memory he elucidates and defends. Because the Magisterium defends our memory, it is vital that we defend the Magisterium. For if there is one lesson to be learned from the path feminist theologians and others have taken, it is that, to those who deny the authority of the Magisterium, the whole of the Catholic faith is lost. (Fs)

Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Glaube, katholischer Glaube - Sprache: direkt, spezifisch, konkret (Joh 1:1: Wort, Fleisch); heute: Demystifizierung: Natur, Körper, Sexualität, Tod; Vision des neuen Menschen

Kurzinhalt: This modern detachment of man from his body is most apparent in the abstract language that today in matters of sex and death replaces the direct, concrete expressions of earlier ages. Lust is free love, adultery is open marriage ...

Textausschnitt: THE CATHOLIC FAITH AND LANGUAGE

54a Edwin Newman characterizes the good use of language, or "a civil tongue", as he calls it, as "direct, specific, concrete, vigorous, colorful, subtle, and imaginative when it should be, and as lucid and eloquent as we are able to make it".1 And common sense alone should be enough to tell us he is right. But if he is right, and if language is bound up with our perception of reality, then there must also be something about reality itself that allows us to perceive it more readily by way of specific, concrete words than by way of abstractions. To return to one of the questions raised at the beginning: Is there such a thing as a Catholic sentence?

54b If by that question we mean, are there sentences which convey, by their very use of language, a view of reality that is consistent with the Catholic faith, the answer must be an unmistakable yes. What kinds of sentences are they? They are precisely the kind Edwin Newman describes: "direct, specific, concrete". Why? The answer is obvious and simple and can be found in a single verse at the beginning of John's Gospel: "And the Word became flesh." If I may draw once again on Chesterton:

Whenever you hear much of things being unutterable and indefinable and impalpable and unnamable and subtly indescribable, then elevate your aristocratic nose towards heaven and snuff up the smell of decay. It is perfectly true that there is something in all good things that is beyond all speech or figure of speech. But it is also true that there is in all good things a perpetual desire for expression and concrete embodiment; and though the attempt to embody it is always inadequate, the attempt is always made. If the idea does not seek to be the word, the chances are that it is an evil idea. If the word is not made flesh it is a bad word.2
54d In the beginning, and by his word, God spoke things into existence, and the things he spoke into existence were direct, specific and concrete. They were, in short, materially embodied and materially related to one another. And God looked at what he had made and declared it to be very good. (Fs)

55a Millions of years later, scientific man looked at God's handiwork and asked what makes it tick. And he discovered that he could only find out by taking it apart. Thus began what we might call the great deconstruction of that world—and, to some degree, the deconstruction of man himself. The result, as Guardini has observed, is that "man's relations with nature have been altered radically, have become indirect. The old immediateness has been lost, for now his relations are transmitted by mathematics or by instruments. Abstract and formalized, nature has lost all concreteness; having become inorganic and technical, it has lost the quality of real experience."3

55b Abstracted or removed from his old direct relationship with the natural order, man has also abstracted himself from his own human nature, which is to say, from his own flesh. And just as he has come to see the whole order of nature, all of its powers, its forces, as rationally understandable and subject to technological control, so also he has come to see his own body, his own physical existence, in much the same light—as rationally understandable and technologically controllable. (Fs) (notabene)

55c This "demystification of the human body", as one writer puts it, removes all of the traditional restraints that previous ages attached to the two most bodily events we know: sex and death. The result, as that same writer points out, is that

the unborn child is no longer a human person, attached by indelible rights and obligations to the mother who bears him, but a slowly ripening deformity, which can be aborted at will, should the mother choose to cure herself. In surrogate motherhood the relation between mother and child ceases to issue from the very body of the mother and is severed from the experience of incarnation. The bond between mother and child is demystified, made clear, intelligible, scientific— and also provisional, revocable and of no more than contractual force.... In just the same way the sexual bond has become clear and intelligible, and also provisional, revocable and of merely contractual force, governed by the morality of adult "consent".... It no longer seems to us that the merely bodily character of our acts can determine their moral value. Hence arises the extraordinary view that the homosexual act, considered in itself, is morally indistinguishable from the heterosexual act: for what is there, in its merely physical character, to justify the traditional stigma?4

56a This modern detachment of man from his body is most apparent in the abstract language that today in matters of sex and death replaces the direct, concrete expressions of earlier ages. Lust is free love, adultery is open marriage, homosexuality is a lifestyle, masturbation is safe sex, pregnancy is disease, abortion is termination of that disease, procreation is reproduction, birth prevention is birth control, natural mothers are surrogate mothers, unborn children are embryos, embryos are property, murder is mercy killing, mercy killing is assisted suicide, and suicide is death with dignity. (Fs) (notabene)

56b There was a time when I viewed this new language as euphemistic, that is, as a deliberate attempt to find pleasing ways to characterize nasty things in order to rationalize the doing of those things. Unfortunately, something much more ominous is abroad in the land. The people who use this language are not, from their point of view, speaking euphemistically. They are speaking quite accurately, because they are operating with what Cardinal Ratzinger recently characterized as a "revolutionary vision of man". At the heart of this vision, as Ratzinger points out,

the body is something that one has and that one uses. No longer does man expect to receive a message from his bodiliness as to who he is and what he should do; but definitely, on the basis of his reasonable deliberations and even with complete independence, he expects to do with it as he wishes. In consequence, there is indeed no difference whether the body be of the masculine or the feminine sex; the body no longer expresses being at all; on the contrary, it has become a piece of property.5

57a When it no longer matters whether the body be masculine or feminine, then it no longer matters that language reflect the masculine or feminine character of specific human beings; hence the feminist insistence that we employ so-called nonsexist or inclusive language. Men and women become persons, mothering and fathering become parenting, couples expecting a baby are encouraged to mouth such nonsense as "we are pregnant". The abstractive character of such language achieves heights heretofore undreamed of in the expression "significant other", which abstracts not only from sexual differentiation but also from every conceivable differentiation. My "significant other" can be literally anything from my pet rock to God himself (though, of course, we are no longer allowed to refer to God as a "him"). (Fs)

57b At the same time, if my body is my property, at my disposal, then there are virtually no limits to what I can do with it. I can rent it out for sex (hence current justifications of prostitution), rent out my womb for the bearing of someone else's child, view my own children as diseases to be surgically removed, or treat my own physical life as something to be ended when I wish. Women who talk about their rights to control their reproductive organs really do view their bodies, as the language suggests, in some fashion as machines producing goods, such that both the machine and the goods are at the disposal of the woman who possesses them. And the "control" they have in mind is not the control which is appropriate to persons, i.e., self-control, but those kinds of external controls appropriate to machines, i.e., pills, diaphragms, condoms and, if all else fails, abortionists. These women have abstracted themselves from their own materiality, and hence, when they speak of freeing themselves from their biology, they are not talking euphemistically; they are talking abstractly, and they are doing so because abstract language does accurately express their perception of reality. (Fs)

57c The most alarming feature of such language is that, by abstracting from the concrete, the specific, the materially embodied, we also abstract from the limits within which we must live our lives. Just as abstractions float free of any particular context, so human beings who perceive reality this way float free of any particular order. The incessant use of the word "liberation" today expresses precisely the modern, abstracted perception of reality that supposes human beings to be no longer constrained by authority, by irrevocable commitments, by tradition, by history, or even by God. Everything in creation, from our bodies to the farthest flung galaxies, now appears to us to be at our disposal. Everything is just so much playdough, to be manipulated at will. (Fs)

58a As Chesterton once observed: "The Church and the heresies always used to fight about words, because they are the only thing worth fighting about."6 Battles about words are always battles about competing views of reality. And the battle today is about competing and mutually exclusive visions of man, a conflict that confronts Catholics with, in the words of Cardinal Ratzinger, a "truly fundamental opposition to Faith's vision of man, an opposition which admits no possibility of compromise but places squarely before us the alternatives of believing or not".7 (Fs)

Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: George Orwell: Beherrschung d. Bewusstseins, Neusprech; der große Bruder = die große Schwester; Beispiele für feministisches Neusprech

Kurzinhalt: Big Brother and the Party operate on a very simple, but very effective principle: "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past." Big Brother realizes that effective control of the past, present, and future ...

Textausschnitt: BIG BROTHER IS REALLY BIG SISTER

58b If the Catholic vision of man is correct, then the present and the immediate future bode ill, for, as one modern idiom puts it, what goes around comes around. And, to mix our idioms here, the chickens are already coming home to roost on this one. We know they are, not only because we have been forewarned by our own faith but also because we have been forewarned from the pen of the secular writer George Orwell. In his brilliant satire on the future, Nineteen Eighty-Four, he tells us just how it is that modern abstractive thought takes its vengeance on us, and today in American society we can see that vengeance already upon us. (Fs)

58c Big Brother and the Party operate on a very simple, but very effective principle: "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past." Big Brother realizes that effective control of the past, present, and future requires total control of language—hence, Newspeak. (Fs)

58c Big Brother's strategy to control language is basically fourfold. First, replace Oldspeak with Newspeak and impose this change on everyone. Second, see to it that Newspeak operates with a much smaller vocabulary than was available in Oldspeak. This strategy is conducted for two purposes, that the range of thought might be narrowed and that whole categories of words might be destroyed. (Fs)

It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought—that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc—should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so construed as to give exact and subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatsoever.1

59a Third, control people's consciousness and memories by mandated hate sessions, lectures, and assorted activities all conducted in the language of Newspeak. Finally, and most ominously, see to it that all records of the past are translated into Newspeak and continually revised, such that the collective memory of the community, contained in its documents, can never contradict Big Brother's current agenda. Orwell's description is chilling:

The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc. Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records, and is equally in full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it.2

59b Big Brother is already present among us, and he is Big Sister. It takes very little effort to discover that what the feminist movement is up to bears an uncanny and fearful resemblance to the machinations of Big Brother. First, feminism would change the "language of the body", as John Paul II calls it, into "sex-neutral" language, and feminism would have this new way of speaking imposed on everyone. Already dictionaries analogous to the various editions of the Newspeak dictionary have appeared in our midst. But that is not all. The language guidelines to which I made reference earlier are explicitly entitled "Guidelines for Non-Sexist Language", and the copy I have of them is one imposed on graduate students in the Yale University Divinity School. These guidelines, among other things, instruct the students to avoid the generic use of man and of male pronouns, to avoid masculine or masculine-only pronouns for God and to avoid the use of feminine pronouns in reference to Israel and the Church. The student is told at the outset that "language reflects, reinforces and creates reality. It is important that language in term papers represent as full an understanding as possible of human reality. For this reason, linguistic sexism ... is to be avoided."3 Clearly only one view of reality is going to be permitted under these circumstances, and that view is not going to be whatever the student happens to bring with him to Yale's Divinity School. (Fs)

60a Second, this new way of talking diminishes vocabulary in order to diminish the range of thought and in order to destroy words and/or their secondary meanings. With regard to this second strategy, let us first note that our society as a whole has already paved the way to such reductionism, because we already operate with a radically restricted vocabulary and neglect to learn the connotations or secondary meanings of words. In our society, Big Sister finds half her task accomplished for her before she even begins. (Fs)

60b With the vocabulary that we continue to use, however, words are already, in nonsexist language, being destroyed. Man and woman are not necessary if person can cover both. Fathering and mothering give way to parenting. And significant other, as previously noted, could half empty our dictionaries in a single stroke. Secondary meanings also go by the board. The Nonsexist Communicator, one of those handbooks mandating how we are to conform ourselves to feminist Newspeak, provides us with an appendix entitled "Alternatives to Sexist Usage" and instructs us therein on how secondary meanings of words, when applied to women, must be "eliminated" (and that is the text's word, not mine). To give you a sample, the following words beginning with the letter "B" are now, in their secondary application to women and in the parlance of Nineteen Eighty-Four, to be regarded as Oldspeak and crimethought: baby, baby doll, bag, ball and chain, bastard, bat, battle-ax, bearcat, beauty pageants, beauty queen, better half, bitch, boy, broad, brood mare, built, and bunny.4 Although the "L" section of this minidictionary does not include ladybug, it does instruct us that the word "lady" ought to be eliminated as a noun. (Fs)

61a Third, the control of people's consciousness in Nineteen Eighty-Four bears an uncanny and chilling resemblance to feminist conscious-raising sessions and Womanchurch liturgies—mandatory activities, it would seem, for those who seek to be truly feminist. Like the inner Party members in Oceania, whose indoctrination in doublethink is absolute, so too those in the inner circles of the feminist movement all share in similar forms of the same feminist consciousness, maintained and reinforced by activities conducted in the language of feminist newspeak. (Fs)

61b Finally, the altering of past documents, the collective memory of the community, is already upon us in the Christian churches, where the translation of the Bible and liturgical texts into the new language is even now well under way. If this process is carried to its logical conclusion, the day could come when nothing in the documents of the past will be found that contradicts what Big Sister says. If you have ever read the feminist revision of the Nicene Creed in use at the Episcopal Divinity School of Cambridge, Massachusetts, you know that God the Father cannot be found anywhere in it. As William Oddie observes, "The resulting document reminds one of nothing so much as a new edition of the Soviet Encyclopaedia, from which all mention of some luminary who has suddenly become a non-person is unaccountably discovered to be eliminated."5 Or, as O'Brien, the Party rep, says to Winston in Nineteen Eighty-Four, "Posterity will never hear of you. You will be lifted clean out of the stream of history."6

62a "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past." Scientific/technological man (Big Brother) and feminist woman (Big Sister) both operate on the same principle and for the same reason: both are in thrall to abstraction, abstraction from the limits of nature, from the limits of history, from the limits of human bodiliness. When O'Brien tells Winston that he, O'Brien, is capable of floating right off the floor like a soap bubble, Winston, now deeply indoctrinated in doublethink, is able to figure out what O'Brien means: "If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens. . . All happenings are in the mind. Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens. "7 Feminism operates along the same lines. If the feminists believe that sexual differentiation is insignificant, and if the rest of us can be persuaded by them that sexual differentiation is insignificant, then the thing happens. Sexual differentiation becomes insignificant—or so the feminists would like to think. (Fs)

Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Johannes-Paul II; Sakrament, der Mensch als Abbild Gottes; Abbild: geistig, körperlich (als Mann und Frau); sakramentale Dimenison d. Schöpfung

Kurzinhalt: Two elements in this passage tell us that man is constituted as a sacrament right at the outset. First, man is created in the image of God. This means that man is created to be a sign or symbol of God in creation ...

Textausschnitt: MAN: THE SACRAMENT OF GOD

68a A sacrament, as we all know, is an outward or material sign which effects or actualizes or brings into existence the grace it symbolizes. A sacrament, therefore, is a created, material entity symbolic of something that transcends the purely created order of which it is a part. In traditional language, it symbolizes and actualizes supernatural realities within the created order. Bread and wine, for example, become the Body and Blood of Christ, just as baptismal water effects or actualizes the new life of sanctifying grace in the believer. (Fs)

It follows from this understanding of sacrament that, if creation is sacramental, there must be something in creation itself that corresponds to this definition of sacrament. And in point of fact, in the creation narratives in the first two chapters of Genesis, we find one created being who is constituted in his creation by God as a sacrament. That being is man himself. The crucial text is Genesis 1:27: "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them."

68b Two elements in this passage tell us that man is constituted as a sacrament right at the outset. First, man is created in the image of God. This means that man is created to be a sign or symbol of God in creation; indeed, man is, according to Genesis, the only being created to be a sign or symbol of God. However, this alone is not enough to constitute man as a sacrament, because a sacrament is not just a sign, a sacrament is an outward or material sign. Although man is obviously a material being, this does not necessarily also make him a sacrament. For it is possible to think that man is the image of God only insofar as man is a spiritual being, as indeed so many Christians through the centuries have thought. (Fs)

68c But the Genesis text not only says that man is made in the image of God, it also tells us explicitly that man is made in God's image as male and female. In other words, man's imaging of God is material as well as spiritual, as much bound up with his body as with his soul. (Fs)

69a It will be to the everlasting credit of John Paul II that he has made his papacy the occasion for insisting that our imaging of God, as given in the revelation, involves the whole human person in all of his psychosomatic reality. Indeed, the Pope speaks explicitly of the sacramental character of man's creation. "The sacrament, as a visible sign, is constituted with man, as a 'body', by means of his 'visible' masculinity and femininity. The body, in fact, and it alone, is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and the divine. It was created to transfer into the visible reality of the world the mystery hidden since time immemorial in God, and thus be a sign of it."1 (Fs)

69b The second chapter of Genesis adds a new dimension to our understanding of man's creation as male and female. There, in Adam's search for a suitable helpmate, is revealed the fact that man's creation as male and female has a communal dimension to it, a communal dimension that is explicitly marital. As John Paul II puts it, "the words which express the first joy of man's coming to existence as 'male and female' (Gen. 2:23) are followed by the verse which establishes their conjugal unity (Gen. 2:24), and then by the one which testifies to the nakedness of both, without mutual shame (Gen. 2:25)".2 Herein is revealed to us, as the Pope puts it, the nuptial significance of the body which, as male and female in the communion of marital love, makes visible in the created order the invisible reality of the Trinity as a communion of love. (Fs)

Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Sündenfall (Akt d. Stolzes), Erbsünde, Baum der Erkenntnis von gut und böse; gut u. böse in Relation zu Adam und Eva; Selbstermächtigung, -bestimmung, was gut für den Menschen sei; Veritatis Splendor

Kurzinhalt: ... only God knows how his own nature and inner life can be rendered visible. Therefore, only God knows man and what man is supposed to do. Man cannot define this for himself and at the same time be faithful to his purpose ...

Textausschnitt: THE TREE OF THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOOD AND EVIL

69c All of this may seem quite beautiful, leaving one to wonder how any human being could possibly take exception to such an understanding of man, male and female. But there is a catch here. In the Genesis text, it comes in the form of a command not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. What relationship, if any, does this command have to the creation of Adam and Eve as the sacrament of God?

69d Many people view God's command in Genesis as nothing more than a way of establishing his authority as Creator over Adam and Eve as his creatures, and their disobedience as nothing more than a refusal to accept his authority. But much more than this is involved in the text itself. We know this if only because of the form the command takes, a form often overlooked by careless readers, as exemplified by the fact that so many people advert to the "apple" Eve ate. Eve did not eat an apple. The tree is not an apple tree, and that alone should tell us that God's command is not simply an assertion of his authority. If it were, an apple tree would serve his purpose as well as any other. But when the text avoids something simple like "apple tree" and goes out of its way to provide us with something as cumbersome as "the tree of the knowledge of good and evil", it does not take, as they say, the brains of a rocket scientist to grasp that something more than a mere assertion of authority is at stake. (Fs)

70a Let us, for a moment, try to put ourselves in the position of Adam and Eve, and see what implications flow from the situation in which they find themselves. God has created us in his image and likeness. This defines us. As the Pope points out, "There is no adequate definition of man but this one."1 It also defines our end or purpose in creation. We are supposed to make visible both in and to the world the invisible reality of our Creator. Now just what, concretely, are we supposed to do under these circumstances? There is only one answer to this question, and it is so obvious it hardly bears mentioning: namely, we do not have the remotest notion what we are supposed to do, because we do not have the remotest notion what it is we are supposed to be rendering visible. Only God knows God; only God knows how his own nature and inner life can be rendered visible. Therefore, only God knows man and what man is supposed to do. Man cannot define this for himself and at the same time be faithful to his purpose, to his vocation, if you will, of imaging God to the rest of the world. And so we arrive at the command. (Fs)

70b Much ink has been spilt over the meaning of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Most people are tripped up by the word "knowledge". We think of knowledge primarily in the sense of information acquired about already-existing realities. However, this meaning of knowledge cannot possibly apply to the text, since there are no already-existing evils to be known. Everything God has created is very good (Gen 1:31). In the Old Testament, however, knowledge can also mean the ability to name something. This form of knowledge, naming, does presuppose knowledge in the ordinary sense that one knows enough about something to be able to name it. (Fs)

71a We see knowledge in this sense being exercised by Adam when he names the animals. His naming of the animals presupposes that, as they parade by him, he is able to understand them well enough to give them names. And that does indeed seem, from within the text, to be the case, because first, God accepts the names Adam gives the animals, and second, Adam certainly does understand the animals well enough to recognize that a suitable helpmate for him is not to be found among them. (Fs)

71b The knowledge of good and evil might therefore be rendered as the ability to name things good and evil, an ability which presupposes a sufficient understanding of reality to make such naming possible. It must also refer to good and evil not in some general sense, because in a general sense there is nothing evil in existence. It must refer to good and evil in a relative sense, i.e., good and evil in relation to Adam and Eve themselves. In other words, the command God gives them can be translated thus: Do not claim the ability to name or to define what is good and evil for yourselves, because you do not know enough about me to know what you are supposed to do to be my image in the world. Only I know how I can properly be imaged, and therefore only I can tell you what is good and evil for you. (Fs) (notabene)

71c Man is given dominion over the world. The world does not image God, and therefore man does not have to understand God in order to have dominion over it. In fact, as the Pope points out, the world is created as gift for man. Therefore, the world is properly the sphere of man's governance. But man is not given dominion over himself, because only God knows what it means to image God. In fact, we see God use the capacity to name good and evil three times in the Genesis text, first, when he names everything he has created as "very good"; second, when he says that it is "not good" for man to be alone, and third, when he names, for Adam and Eve, the eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil as evil for them. As the Pope recently observed, in Veritatis Splendor, regarding the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,
With this imagery, Revelation teaches that the power to decide what is good and what is evil does not belong to man, but to God alone. The man is certainly free, inasmuch as he can understand and accept God's commands. And he possesses an extremely far-reaching freedom, since he can eat "of every tree of the garden." But his freedom is not unlimited: it must halt before the "tree of the knowledge of good and evil," for it is called to accept the moral law given by God. In fact, human freedom finds its authentic and complete fulfillment precisely in the acceptance of that law. God, who alone is good, knows perfectly what is good for man, and by virtue of his very love proposes this good to man in the commandments (35). (Fs)

Quer: Veritatis Splendor JP2VS_35

72a The Fall comes about because of an act of pride, because of an act of disobedience, to be sure. But it also comes about because Eve does exactly what God forbids not just in the literal but also in the symbolic sense. In the literal sense, she eats the fruit she has been commanded not to eat. In the symbolic sense, she names good and evil for herself, the very thing the eating of the fruit symbolizes as the forbidden act: "So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, and he ate" (Gen 3:6—italics added). God had named the eating of this fruit evil for Adam and Eve. Eve, on the other hand, looked at the fruit and came to the conclusion that it would be good for her, a source of wisdom in fact. And so what God had named evil she renamed good. (Fs) (notabene)

72b God acknowledges this usurpation of his authority by saying, "See, the man has become like us, knowing good and evil." Adam and Eve claimed for themselves the right to moral autonomy, the right to decide for themselves what they would regard as good and evil and not to accept good and evil as God defined it for them. In so doing, they rejected the sacramentality of the good creation, because they rejected the vocation God had written into their very being, the call to image him rather than to assert themselves. Furthermore, their sin set the pattern for every other sin which would be committed by their descendants. To cite Veritatis Splendor again,
His [man's] history of sin begins when he no longer acknowledges the Lord as his Creator and himself wishes to be the one who determines, with complete independence, what is good and what is evil. "You will be like God, knowing good and evil" (Gen 3:5): this was the first temptation, and it is echoed in all the other temptations to which man is more easily inclined to yield as a result of the original Fall (102). (Fs)

Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Feminismus: Umbenennung der Realität; Geschichte als Mittel d. Unterdrückung; keine verlässliche Quelle der Offenbarung; Abbild Gottes - Änderung d. Natur durch Bewusstseinsänderung; Hexerei - Antithese: kath. Glaube

Kurzinhalt: From the feminist point of view, there is no trustworthy revelation of God in history. Everything that purports to be revelation is actually nothing more than the construction of human beings intent on some agenda.

Textausschnitt: FEMINISM: RENAMING REALITY

73a Feminist theologians are today thought by most Catholics to be interested primarily in the ordination of women to the priesthood. This might have been true at one time, but that time is long past. Feminist theologians today have, by and large, either abandoned all efforts to breach the priestly fraternity or seek to breach it solely in order to change it, because they have, by and large, abandoned all interest in the priesthood as the Catholic Church understands it.1 What the feminists learned was that their own initial presuppositions which had led them at the beginning into conflict with the Church over two primary issues—contraception and the male priesthood—in fact constitute a wholesale denial of sacramentality at every level of Church teaching, whether it be the seven sacraments, the Church as sacrament of Christ, the marital union of Christ and the Church as the great sacrament or the sacramentality of the good creation rooted in the creation of male and female as the image of God.2 Indeed, it was their denial of the sacramentality of creation in the human sacramental imaging of God that undermined for them the entire sacramental structure erected on that foundation. And that denial was implicit in the origins of the feminist opposition to Church teaching on contraception and on the male priesthood. (Fs)

74a When Rosemary Radford Ruether declared, in defense of the ordination of women, "Theologically speaking, then, we might say that the maleness of Jesus has no ultimate significance",3 she was really saying that no one's maleness or femaleness has theological, that is to say, sacramental, significance. And when feminists from all sides declared that the ban on contraception kept them imprisoned in their biology from which they demanded liberation, they were declaring war on any notion of the body as sacramentally significant. Nothing made this clearer than the feminist manifesto urging women to take control of their reproductive functions. The language itself, as already noted, betrayed a view of the human body as a kind of machine that could be artificially manipulated to produce or not produce, and of babies as objects, that is, as the products of a process of reproduction. These two strokes, by which human sexuality in particular and then the body in general were robbed of any sacramental significance, made it impossible to sustain any notion of sacramentality consistent with the Catholic faith. Catholic feminist theologians, for good or ill, soon found themselves engaged not in a refurbishing of the Church and the world, but in a total destruction and reconstruction of both. (Fs)

74b In a seminal feminist work, Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion (1979), the two editors, Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow, observed in the introduction that "feminists have called their task a 'new naming' of self and world".4 It was already apparent then that this new naming of self and world was simply the most recent rerun of Eve's renaming of the forbidden fruit back in the garden of Eden. And this renaming constitutes the heart of the feminist agenda. Without this renaming, liberation as the feminists conceive it is not possible. For what they seek is precisely a liberation from the constraints of being called to image God. They wish to be self-actualized, self-realized beings, conforming to no one's image, not even God's, but naming for themselves just who and what they shall be. As Mary Daly puts it, "Metamorphosing women do not imitate/copy some 'fully realized' paternal form or model. Rather, we are Realizing/Forming/Originating.... We already have the powers to will our own further evolution."5
75a It should be clear by now that the feminists operate with a view of reality in which there is no Creator God, there is no call to image God as male and female, there is no revelation apart from female consciousness itself, and then only when that consciousness has gone through a process of consciousness-raising in which the unreality of the Christian revelation becomes transparently obvious. Once this consciousness is achieved, the view that we were created in the image of God and the command not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil are seen to be nothing but two parts of a single larger process by which the powerful males of the past have defined man and morality in order to oppress everyone else. As a woman in the audience of a "Moral Perspectives on Abortion" panel at a conference sponsored by Women Church Convergence, a feminist body, put it so succinctly, "We have assumed that since patriarchy has defined the fetus as human life, we then call ourselves murderers when women choose to abort.... I'm sick of males defining our morality. For God's sake, let us, as women, decide."6 (Fs)

75b From the feminist point of view, there is no trustworthy revelation of God in history. Everything that purports to be revelation is actually nothing more than the construction of human beings intent on some agenda. History is always and everywhere the record of the victors, and this includes every record ever made, including of course the Bible. Everything is a form of propaganda pushing somebody's ideology. Nothing is to be trusted at face value. This is what the feminists mean by their "hermeneutics of suspicion". And on this foundation of suspicion the feminists have constructed their ideological alternative to Christian faith. (Fs) (notabene)
76a The alternative view of reality supplied by feminism is apparent in the use feminists make of consciousness-raising itself. This is a way of coming to view reality differently from the way one has previously seen it. Once this process has been accomplished, one is in a position, as the editors of Womanspirit Rising put it, to rename oneself and the world and thus to reshape the very nature of both. Reality, according to this view, begins in the human mind and then proceeds to change the outer or material world, beginning with the human body itself. All of reality is shaped by the human mind. In the past, according to this view, the human minds shaping reality were male. The future is to be shaped by the minds of females raised to this new consciousness of reality. (Fs) (notabene)

76b Most people are surprised when they first hear that witchcraft is enjoying an enormous revival in feminist circles, but there is a very important reason for this. Witchcraft is the very antithesis of the Catholic faith. It could find no place in a world informed by the faith. Once a view of reality diametrically opposed to Catholicism reappeared in the world, however, witchcraft was once again able to come into its own. (Fs)

76c Why is witchcraft the antithesis of the Catholic faith? Starhawk, the witch employed by Matthew Fox at his Creation Spirituality Institute in California, tells us that the word "witch" comes from the Anglo-Saxon root word wicca or wicce, which means "to bend or shape". According to Starhawk, witches of the past were "those who could shape the unseen to their will".7 The unseen, the invisible, is in this view of things at the disposal of the human will, to be shaped (i.e., rendered material) as the human will sees fit to shape it. This is the very antithesis of the creation narratives in Genesis. There the unseen, the invisible God, names things and, in so doing, shapes them and calls them into existence. The unseen shapes the seen to his will. In the case of the creation of man, the process is carried even further. God not only calls man into existence but specifically shapes him in such a way that man is able to image or render visible the unseen God himself. The invisible God does not conform himself to the will of man; rather he calls man to conform himself to the will of God, and, most importantly, in so doing, to conduct his life, including his bodily life and most especially including his sexual life, in such a way as to render visible in the world an authentic image of the inner life of the Trinity. In witchcraft, the witch assumes the position of God, bending and shaping the unseen as she sees fit. (Fs) (notabene)

77a Hence, when the Pope says, for example, as he did in Familiaris Consortio, that when couples have recourse to contraception they are altering the value of total self-giving or love, feminists not only agree but assert that this is precisely what they are intent on doing. They are renaming themselves and the world, they are bending and shaping the unseen, in this case love, to their own will. (Fs)

77b It should not surprise us that the feminist view of reality ultimately issues in the total displacement of God and the installation of man (or rather, woman) in his place. God in creation defined man, male and female, as his image. That is the only purpose which God has inscribed in our being. He has left us free to accept it or to reject it, but he has not supplied us with any alternatives to it. Hence, when we reject the definition and purpose which he has inscribed in our being, as the feminist view does, we have only two choices at our disposal. We may choose, as some nihilists do, to take the position that man has no particular meaning or purpose in life. Or we may choose, as the feminists among others do, to get into the business of defining our own meaning and purpose in life. In so doing, we usurp the place of God; we become our own gods. This does not change the fact that all paths lead to the grave, but it does mean that every person is now free to define for himself just what path he will take to his own particular grave. (Fs)

77c In the final analysis, this freedom to define reality for ourselves is the liberation that feminism has preached from the beginning. One might argue that being called to image God is an inestimable privilege, but it is a privilege the feminists and many others today would and do gladly forfeit in the name of a newfound liberation from all of the constraints that living out our lives as the image of God places upon us. Those constraints, seen in the Gospel as necessary forms of self-mastery that ultimately liberate us to the greatest freedom of all, the freedom to be the sons and daughters of God, are experienced today by many people as more confining than the worst of prisons. (Fs)

Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Baum der Erkenntnis von gut und böse - moderne Gesellschaft, Amerika; Nietzsche, Vater der Lüge (kein Angriff auf die Existenz Gottes, sondern ...)

Kurzinhalt: The crucial issue is whether people seek to live as the image of God, i.e., to live in obedience to the will of God, who alone knows how he is to be imaged, or whether they seek to be the Nietzschean overmen who command good and evil for themselves.

Textausschnitt: AMERICANS AND THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

78a Feminism, as already noted, is but the tip of an iceberg—an iceberg, already large, that is growing daily. The feminists say, sometimes in terms far more sophisticated and even sometimes far more honest than many Americans would be comfortable hearing, what those Americans themselves really believe and already practice in their own lives. (Fs)

78b This point was made far more effectively than any theologian could by John Chancellor, in his commentary on NBC Nightly News on the night of December 4, 1990, regarding the indictment of Dr. Jack Kevorkian for the aid he had given a woman to kill herself in the back of his van by means of his so-called "death machine". Over the past thirty years, Chancellor said, we have witnessed an enormous change of values in this country. This change, according to him, began in the 1960s with the introduction of the pill and other forms of contraception that made it possible for women to take control of their fertility. Indeed, as he pointed out, contraception has given women more power and control than either sex had ever had before over who enters this world and who does not. This "revolution of immense importance", in turn, has provoked a situation in which, as Chancellor put it, "our system of values is changing so fast we can hardly keep up. One of the themes of change is that people are taking more and more control of their bodies and their lives." This change in attitude, he went on to say, is something the law has not heretofore taken sufficiently into account. Hence, in his view, cases such as that of Kevorkian are to be welcomed, because "we need some guidelines on how to behave when people want to take control of their deaths."

78c John Chancellor is right in his analysis of the impact of the contraceptive pill. All that remains to be said in that regard is that it took him until 1990 to figure out what Paul VI saw in 1968. (Fs)
78d People intent on controlling their bodies and their lives are people intent on defining themselves and their purpose for existing. They are no longer interested, consciously at least, in living their lives in such a way as to make visible in the world the invisible mystery of God. They have set themselves up as morally autonomous agents, defining for themselves what is good and what is evil. Whether consciously or unconsciously, they are not merely tasting the forbidden fruit; they are claiming it as their most precious right. (Fs) (notabene)

79a In 1882, Nietzsche, the great German nihilist philosopher, published a work whose English title is The Joyful Wisdom or The Gay Science. That work contained his famous parable of the madman who comes to the marketplace early in the morning to declare that God is dead, that we have killed God. Those gathered in the marketplace do not understand what he is talking about (hence, their view that he is mad), which leads the madman finally to conclude:

I have come too early ... my time has not come yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering—it has not yet reached the ears of man. Lightning and thunder require time, the light of the stars requires time, deeds require time even after they are done, before they can be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves. (Fs)

79b The primary point of his parable is not that God is dead; the primary point is that we have killed God. How do people kill God? They do so by eliminating him—or any serious need for him—from their lives. They may continue to pay lip service to him, but in reality his existence makes no serious difference in how they live. (Fs)

79c Every poll taken on the subject indicates that more than 90 percent of the American people believe in God. But belief in God is not the crucial issue. As the Pope has pointed out regarding the serpent's temptation in Genesis,

When the father of lies approaches man he does not deny the existence of God; he does not deny God the existence and omnipotence to which creation bears witness; he aims straight at the God of the covenant. (Fs)

Outright denial of God is not possible because his existence is too apparent in the created world ... even in Satan himself. The Apostle James wrote: "Even the demons believe in him, and tremble" (2:19), showing that even they are incapable of denying God's existence and his sovereign power over all beings. But the truth about the God of the covenant, about the God who creates out of love, who in love offers humanity the covenant in Adam, who for love's sake puts to man requirements which have direct bearing on the truth of man's creaturely being—this is the truth that is destroyed in what Satan says. And the destruction is total.1 (Fs)

80a The crucial issue is whether people seek to live as the image of God, i.e., to live in obedience to the will of God, who alone knows how he is to be imaged, or whether they seek to be the Nietzschean overmen who command good and evil for themselves. The Pope clearly believes the temptation to the latter is one of the most prominent notes of our age:
"The spirit of falsehood seeks to make the people of our age believe that they are 'like gods,' beyond good and evil ('knowing good and evil' [Gen 3:5]), that sin does not exist even while the reality of sin and evil assails people as never before, giving proof of its existence by threats on a scale never experienced up to this time."2 Thus, although an overwhelming majority of people still claim to believe in God, we face, as the Pope pointed out in Veritatis Splendor, a situation in which "many, indeed too many, people think and live 'as if God did not exist'" (88). (Fs)

Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Mensch: Sakrament Gottes (Schöpfung) - rein materiellen Wesen; Zivilisation: was wir denken und glauben

Kurzinhalt: Unwilling to be God's image in the world and unable, whatever claims some may make to the contrary, to become God in any serious sense of the word, modern man seeks high and low for something, almost anything, to inform him ...

Textausschnitt: MAN: CIPHER OR SACRAMENT

80b If God created man in his image, then, even prior to the Incarnation, in the very order of creation itself, man is sacramentally linked to God. When man refuses to be the sacrament of God, the only definition God has inscribed in his being, he continues to exist as a material being, but he is no longer a sign or symbol but only a cipher, signifying nothing whatsoever. (Fs) (notabene)

80c Unwilling to be God's image in the world and unable, whatever claims some may make to the contrary, to become God in any serious sense of the word, modern man seeks high and low for something, almost anything, to inform him, to give him an identity: the cosmic consciousness of New Age, the magic and witchcraft of goddess mythology, the archetypes ofjungian psychology, Joseph Campbell's hero of a thousand faces, Carl Sagan's voyage through the cosmos, the cults of Elvis and Marilyn and Madonna, Robin Leach's visits with the rich and famous, 1-900's psychic counselors and personal astrologers, and even in alarming numbers the demonic powers promised by Satanic cults. Virtually no stone is left unturned in this frenetic search for some hint or clue as to where to go from here. As Walker Percy, the novelist and convert to the Catholic faith, said in a self-interview published in Esquire in December 1977: "Despite the catastrophes of this century and man's total failure to understand himself and deal with himself, people still labor under the illusion that a theory of man exists. It doesn't. As bad and confused as things are, they have to get even worse before people realize they don't have the faintest idea what sort of creature man is. Then they might want to know."1

81a Man is created to be the image of God, the sacrament of God. He is created, in short, to make visible in the world, as male and female in the union of marital love, the invisible reality of divine love. The catch to this in creation, as noted earlier, comes in the form of the command. The catch to this in redemption comes in the form of the cross. This is the primary meaning of the cross, according to John Paul II: "Love not only uplifts us, takes us out of ourselves; it also lays burdens on us. And perhaps the burdens tell us more about love than do the moments of ecstasy and spiritual elan."2

81b Today, we are in flight from the burdens divine love implants within us and lays upon us. We are far more interested in our rights than in our responsibilities, in what we can claim from others than in what we can give to them. But even in this fallen state we have brought upon ourselves, we can never entirely destroy the good creation of God and that human imaging of him which constitutes man's greatest glory and his greatest suffering. (Fs)

81c As Philip Rieff notes in his book The Triumph of the Therapeutic,

There is no feeling more desperate than that of being free to choose, and yet without the specific compulsion of being chosen. After all, one does not really choose; one is chosen. This is one way of stating the difference between gods and men. Gods choose; men are chosen. What men lose when they become as free as gods is precisely that sense of being chosen, which encourages them, in their gratitude, to take their subsequent choices seriously.3

82a We have lost the sense of being chosen; we have lost gratitude; we have lost responsible freedom, the taking seriously of the choices we make. (Fs)

82b As Paul Johnson notes, "In the last resort, our civilization is what we think and believe. The externals matter, but they cannot stand if the inner convictions which originally produced them have vanished."4 The most urgent task facing Christians in society today is to be a visible image, a living sacrament, and thus a prophetic witness to the reality of divine love, to the reality that we have been chosen, to the reality that the burdens of love can be embraced and sustained. Only when Christians are willing to do this will we see a genuine renewal of both the Church and the world. (Fs)

Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Gleichheit - Egalitarismus; Unterschied: Menschenrechte, Hautfarbe - Gender-Rechte, sexuelle Orientierung

Kurzinhalt: Precisely at this point at which gender and sexual orientation were declared to be as insignificant as skin color, equality turned into egalitarianism... that all human beings are equal turned into the belief that all differences among human beings ...

Textausschnitt: EGALITARIANISM

85a Belief in the equality of all human beings is one of the foundational principles upon which this country was established. This equality, transcendent in origin ("all men are created equal"), had one enormous implication for this nation founded upon the rule of law, namely, that all men are equal before the law and in the rights and protections they can claim from the law. Unfortunately, transcendent equality (before God) failed to translate into civic equality (before the law) for those whose skin was black. It took a civil war to right this wrong, at least in theory, yet a century later, as the civil rights movement of the 1960s attested, equality before the law had yet to be achieved very well in practice. (Fs)

85b One of the most important and, at the time, unintended consequences of the civil rights movement was that it inspired two other political movements, the feminist movement and the gay rights movement. Each of these movements bears at least a superficial resemblance to the civil rights movement, in that each speaks for people whose rights to equality before the law are thought by them to have been ignored or violated and each claims that the basis upon which such equality has been denied (gender in the case of the feminists, sexual orientation in the case of the gays) is as inconsequential or insignificant as is skin color. Precisely at this point at which gender and sexual orientation were declared to be as insignificant as skin color, equality turned into egalitarianism. For this was the point at which the belief that all human beings are equal turned into the belief that all differences among human beings are also equal—and equally trivial. This was the point at which the equality of all human beings started to be defended specifically on grounds that all people are fundamentally identical and interchangeable, inasmuch as all differences among people are fundamentally insignificant. (Fs)

Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Gleichheit - Egalitarismus; Unterschiede: Hautfarbe - Geschlecht - sexuelle Orientierung (akzidentell - theologisch - moralisch relevant)

Kurzinhalt: The civil rights, the feminist movement and the gay rights movements afford us examples of three different types of differences which can be found among human beings. The first type of difference, that of skin color, is genuinely accidental, since it ...

Textausschnitt: TYPES OF DIFFERENCES

86a Egalitarians proceed on the assumption that all types of differences among human beings are fundamentally and equally trivial, like the difference between one skin color and another. If they are wrong about this, we must ask, first, why they are wrong and, second, why they do not believe they are wrong. First, why are they wrong?

86b The civil rights, the feminist movement and the gay rights movements afford us examples of three different types of differences which can be found among human beings. The first type of difference, that of skin color, is genuinely accidental, since it has neither ontological significance (i.e., it has no bearing on whether someone is a human person) nor moral significance (i.e., it has no bearing on whether someone is a good human person). The second type of difference, that of gender, cannot be regarded as genuinely accidental, inasmuch as God not only created this differentiation, but also placed it at the center of our imaging of him. "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them" (Gen 1:27). Gender differentiation therefore has ontological significance, since it enters into the definition of what it means to be a human person. The third type of difference, that of sexual orientation, cannot be regarded as accidental either, and for two reasons. First, as the Church teaches, homosexuality as an orientation is a disorder, inasmuch as God created male and female for each other. ("Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh" [Gen 2:24].) Second, homosexuality as a "lifestyle", as an orientation lived out in sexual acts and relationships, is immoral. Hence, this type of difference has both ontological and moral significance. When people claim, therefore, that all types of differences are equal and insignificant, the Church must beg to differ with them. Only accidental differences are insignificant. Ontological and moral differences are enormously meaningful. (Fs)

86c Are we prepared to claim, then, that ontological and moral differences among human beings automatically create inequalities among them as well? The Church's answer can only be that it depends on what kind of difference we are talking about. If, for example, we are talking about a moral difference, as between good and evil, the answer can only be yes. Good acts are superior to evil acts; moral lives are superior to immoral lives. (Fs)

87a If, on the other hand, we are talking about an ontological difference, we must once again inquire as to what that difference is. If the difference is between that which is ontologically ordered and that which is ontologically disordered, the difference creates inequality, inasmuch as order is good and disorder is a diminishment of that good. Sight is superior to the disorder of blindness. Heterosexuality is superior to the disorder of homosexuality. (Fs)

87b Ontological differences, however, do not necessarily create inequalities. The difference between male and female is ontological and therefore enormously significant. God created this differentiation himself, and did so for the explicit purpose of enabling us to image himself as Trinity. In the words of John Paul II in Mulieris Dignitatem:

The fact that man "created as man and woman" is the image of God means not only that each of them individually is like God, as a rational and free being. It also means that man and woman, created as a "unity of the two" in their common humanity, are called to live in a communion of love, and in this way to mirror in the world the communion of love that is in God, through which the Three Persons love each other in the intimate mystery of the one divine life (7). (Fs)

87c Therefore, male and female persons are not identical to one another, whether we be speaking biologically, psychologically or spiritually. At the same time, however, they are equal to one another since each one equally images God in the union by which the two of them constitute that image. (Fs)

87d What all of this means regarding the issue of human rights is that not everyone can claim exactly the same rights before the law. Those living immoral lives cannot claim all of the rights enjoyed by those riving moral lives. Hence, convicted criminals can justly be deprived of rights enjoyed by those who obey the law, on grounds that by their immoral actions they have forfeited those rights. People whose lives are in some fashion disordered can be deprived of those rights which have a direct bearing on the disorder in question. Thus, no injustice is done when homosexuals are deprived of marriage licenses, any more than an injustice is done when the blind are deprived of driver's licenses. And even in situations where people are equal but significantly different, no injustice is done when rights are distributed in such a way as to take into account the differences. Thus no injustice is done by allowing men but not women to be ordained priests, or by insisting that wives and mothers have the right to stay at home, if they so choose, while at the same time insisting that husbands and fathers have the responsibility to support their families.1 (Fs)

88a The Catholic view of the relationship between differentiation and equality is, as we can see, complex and nuanced. Those who take seriously the faith of the Church are not permitted an easy road, whether it be paved with the view that all differences among human beings are significant or with the view that all differences among human beings are insignificant. Modern American society, however, has taken a definitive turn down the second easy road toward an egalitarianism which would reduce all differences, accidental, ontological and moral, to the level of triviality. Why have we taken this turn?

Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Das selbstherrlich Selbst; Zusammenhang: Freiheit als Wahltfreiheit - selbstgenügsame Autonomie - Egalitarismus; Akzeptanz von wesentlichen Unterschieden würden Annahme einer realen Ordnung bedeuten

Kurzinhalt: Egalitarianism is a necessity for people intent on believing they are sufficient unto themselves, capable of actualizing, fulfilling and beatifying themselves. They cannot accept moral differentiations ... since that would force them to acknowledge the ..

Textausschnitt: THE IMPERIAL SELF

88b The theological answer to that question is very simple. Today in America the imperial or autonomous self reigns. What more and more Americans seek, above all else, is the feeling that they themselves are in total control of their lives, that in some ultimate sense they are sufficient unto themselves, requiring nothing and no one else. Thirty years ago there was talk of the "me generation". We have now seen two "me generations", with a third already well on the way. These are the people who value above all things self-empowerment and seek as their highest goals self-actualization, self-realization and self-fulfillment. These are the people who, if they are psychologically oriented, find a home among the many therapies which teach them how to manipulate other people and things to enhance their own personal sense of well-being. They have adopted the "character ideal of an autonomous man, using but unused".1 These are the people who, if they are spiritually oriented, find a home in the New Age movement, which assures them they are gods unto themselves. "The self that God created needs nothing. It is forever complete, safe, loved and loving", we are told in the preface to A Course in Miracles, the basic text of New Age. "Spirit is in a state of grace forever. Your reality is only spirit. Therefore you are in a state of grace forever."2 (Fs)

89a Egalitarianism is a necessity for people intent on believing they are sufficient unto themselves, capable of actualizing, fulfilling and beatifying themselves. They cannot accept moral differentiations between a superior good and an inferior evil or ontological differentiations between order and disorder, since that would force them to acknowledge the existence of an objective reality larger than themselves which they cannot control. (Fs) (notabene)

89b Ontological differentiations, as between male and female, in which both are recognized to be good and equal but different, are also unacceptable, since the obvious implication of such a differentiation is that while each is good in itself and equal to the other, each is also incomplete in itself, requiring the other for its own completion. This also the imperial self cannot acknowledge, since the autonomous self holds itself to be already complete or at least capable of becoming complete within itself and by itself. (Fs)

89c This is why, as Robert Nisbet points out, we have so many individuals not seriously connected to anything in society today. "Without doubt there are a great many loose individuals in American society at the present time: loose from marriage and the family, from the school, the church, the nation, job, and moral responsibility."3 They are loose from the church, because they do not really think they need God. They are loose from marriage and family, because they do not really think they need other people. They are loose from moral responsibility, because they do not really want to think other people need them. Nowhere is this looseness more apparent than in the massive numbers of abortions obtained every year. This nationwide refusal to admit the existence of the unborn child is symptomatic of the desire, even in the presence of pregnancy, to retain the illusion of personal independence from any serious bond with another person. This is why feminists such as Mary Daly assert: "It is the autonomy of women that is the target of anti-abortionists."4 (Fs)

90a People intent on exercising total autonomy cannot afford to acknowledge serious ontological and moral differentiations among human beings, because they understand freedom not, as the Church always has, as the power to be and to do the good, but as the ability to do whatever they want to do. And they can act this out only if all choices are equal and interchangeable. As Christopher Lasch points out, in his examination of American society,
"Freedom of choice" means "keeping your options open." The idea that "you can be anything you want," though it preserves something of the older idea of the career open to talents, has come to mean that identities can be adopted and discarded like a change of costume. Ideally, choices of friends, lovers, and careers should all be subject to immediate cancellation: such is the open-ended, experimental conception of the good life upheld by the propaganda of commodities, which surrounds the consumer with images of unlimited possibility.5 (Fs)

90b This trivialization of all choices rests upon a trivialization of all differences found among people. This has resulted in the invidious habit of calling the way a person lives his "lifestyle". Those who speak the language of lifestyles betray by that language the meaninglessness they attach to all choices. As Lasch correctly notes, "They reduce choice to a matter of style and taste, as their preoccupation with 'lifestyles' indicates. Their bland, innocuous conception of pluralism assumes that all preferences, all 'lifestyles,' all 'taste cultures,'... are equally valid." 6

91a In the final analysis, the imperial self, intent on exercising absolute freedom of choice, cannot accept any realm of objective truth or morality which would inhibit that freedom by requiring the self to conform itself to that objective truth. The imperial self, in order to be truly free as it understands freedom, must be able to create its own realm of truth. As the Pope points out in Veritatis Splendor, "Certain currents of modern thought have gone so far as to exalt freedom to such an extent that it becomes an absolute, which would then be the source of values" (32). This notion that every person is the source of his own values is quite popular today. As the Pope observes: "Such an outlook is quite congenial to an individualist ethic, wherein each individual is faced with his own truth, different from the truth of others" (VS 32). The result of this subjectivism is not lost on John Paul II. "This ultimately means making freedom self-defining and a phenomenon creative of itself and its values. Indeed, when all is said and done man would not even have a nature; he would be his own personal life-project" (46). (Fs)

91b In our society today, this kind of radical subjectivism is all but taken for granted across the spectrum from popular television programs to the Supreme Court itself. An episode of Designing Women, for example, had one of the women advising another (who was worried about her weight gain and the unkind remarks it had provoked from her acquaintances) to this effect: "It doesn't matter at all what other people think of you. Ten minutes after you're dead, everyone will have forgotten you. What's important is that you be the person you want to be, that you be true to that and feel it. That's all that's important." (All anyone can add is that if a person really did live this way, it would be easy to understand why he would be forgotten ten minutes after he was dead.) At the other end of the spectrum, we have the Supreme Court telling us, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, that abortion is a right on the basis of that liberty which is protected by the Fourteenth Amendment, since "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe and of the mystery of human life." All of this is music to the ears of the imperial, autonomous self. (Fs)

Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Hierarchie vs. Egalitarismus; Feminismus, Ideologie (Definition); Hierarchie (männliche) als Wurzel allen Übels; Rechtfertigung des Es. durch Psychologen, Theologen usw.

Kurzinhalt: Since all differentiations ... are nothing more than the arbitrary creations of powerful, heterosexual, white males to maintain their own positions of power, these differentiations are at worst evil and at best insignificant and must therefore be ...

Textausschnitt: HIERARCHY VERSUS EGALITARIANISM

92a Our situation would be bad enough if the only thing we had to contend with today were a lot of imperial American selves willy-nilly creating themselves and their values and hanging loose from the larger society as a result. But our situation is much worse than that. For what we also confront is a host of psychologists, ethicists, theologians and New Agers who exalt this way of life as psychologically healthy, morally sound, theologically progressive and spiritually fulfilling. As the Pope observes, "Today's widespread tendencies towards subjectivism, utilitarianism and relativism appear not merely as pragmatic attitudes or patterns of behavior, but rather as approaches having a basis in theory and claiming full cultural and social legitimacy" (VS 106). At the forefront of those who seek to legitimate the egalitarianism of the imperial self are the feminists, who today frankly admit that feminism is an ideology. An ideology is an interpretation of the whole of reality on the basis of one idea or insight into reality which is thought to explain the whole of it. Ideologies are, by definition, easy to understand, because all one really has to understand is the defining idea about which the rest of the ideology revolves. The defining idea of radical feminism is that all evils in the world are rooted in patriarchy and hierarchy and that all evils can therefore be eradicated by destroying patriarchy and hierarchy and replacing them with an egalitarian reordering of the whole of reality. As Sr. Sandra Schneiders puts it,

Because radical feminism identifies patriarchy, especially in its sacralized form of hierarchy, as the root of all forms of oppression, the root of its alternative vision is its resolute anti-hierarchicalism, or, to phrase it positively, its fundamental egalitarianism. This egalitarianism is much more comprehensive than equal individual rights, although equal rights are certainly part of the radical feminist agenda. It has to do with the equality of persons as human beings and even a kind of equality among all the orders of being within creation.1 (Fs)

93a The source of this ideology is a simple observation made by the feminists. All of the injustices in modern history have resulted from one group of human beings who think themselves superior trying to oppress those they believe inferior. And in every instance, those who think themselves superior have been primarily heterosexual males with white skin and political power. Hence, recent American history can be defined as the struggle by blacks, women and homosexuals to free themselves from the oppression of white heterosexual males. Is this not, after all and in the final analysis, what Marxism itself was all about, the attempts of workers to free themselves from the oppression of powerful, heterosexual, white, male capitalists? Indeed, once one's consciousness has been raised to recognize this pattern of superior versus inferior translated everywhere into powerful, heterosexual, white males versus everyone else, even the ecology movement can be viewed as a part of the struggle to eradicate that patriarchal hierarchy by which heterosexual, white, male capitalists see themselves as superior to nature and seek to exploit it as they have exploited everyone else. As Rosemary Radford Ruether puts it, "We cannot criticize the hierarchy of male over female without ultimately criticizing and overcoming the hierarchy of humans over nature."2

93b White over black, male over female, heterosexual over homosexual, capitalist over worker, man over nature—all are variations of a single, evil theme. Everywhere western man (read: male) has dichotomized his world in order to assert the superiority of himself at the expense of others. Everywhere he has created hierarchies of inequality in order to install himself on the top rung. (Fs)

93c Herein lies the theoretical justification for the trivializing of all differentiations. Since all differentiations, by the reckoning of feminist ideology, are nothing more than the arbitrary creations of powerful, heterosexual, white males to maintain their own positions of power, these differentiations are at worst evil and at best insignificant and must therefore be either eradicated or trivialized. Thus feminist theologians confront the Catholic Church today with the "non-negotiable" conviction, as Schneiders puts it, that "hierarchy is the root of sinful structures and ... it must be eradicated and replaced with an egalitarian vision and praxis if the human family and the earth are to survive and flourish."3 Here we have that situation in which the immovable object is confronted by the irresistible force. For the Church's conviction is equally clear and non-negotiable. The Trinity is a patriarchal hierarchy, and it is in the image of that patriarchal hierarchy that man, male and female, is created and from which he must seek his identity. (Fs) (notabene)

Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Trinität: patriarchische Hierarchie (Wortbedeutung: hieros, archein); H.: heilige(r) Ordnung, Ursprung

Kurzinhalt: Therefore, the Trinity is not just a hierarchy or "sacred order"; it is a patriarchal hierarchy, or more simply put a patriarchy, because it is a sacred order whose sacred origin is the Father himself.

Textausschnitt: TRINITY: A PATRIARCHAL HIERARCHY (PATRIARCHY)

94a Most Catholics are taught that to say God is Trinity means that God is one being and three Persons, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Little beyond this, however, is specifically taught about the Trinity. Most Catholics are therefore ignorant of the real character of the inner life of the Trinity and are unprepared to hear that it is, in fact, a patriarchal hierarchy. (Fs)

Sacred Order

94b The word "hierarchy" has two meanings. The first comes from two Greek words, hieros, meaning "sacred", and archein, meaning "to rule". Hierarchy, therefore, means a "sacred rule" or a "sacred order". If we examine carefully the revelation we have received in Christ, we discover that the Trinity is indeed a sacred order. (Fs)

First, the three Persons in the Trinity are subsistent relations. The Father is the relation of paternity, the Son of filiation and the Holy Spirit of passive spiration—spiration, because he is spirated from the Father and Son, passive because he does not do the spirating himself but is spirated by the Father and Son. (Fs)

94c Second, each of the Persons is distinct and irreducible to either of the other two, because each is in himself a unique and unrepeatable relation. Fatherhood is different from sonship and spiration is different from both of them. In other words, the three Persons of the Trinity are non-interchangeable. That is, the Father is defined by his paternity and cannot be the Son or Holy Spirit. By the same token, the Son is defined by his sonship and the Holy Spirit by his spiration. This may seem obvious, and yet the implications are seldom recognized. To say the three Persons are non-interchangeable means that, because the Father cannot be the Son, the Father literally cannot do anything which is bound up with sonship per se, just as the Son cannot do anything which is bound up with fatherhood per se, and so forth. In short, there are things the Father can do that the Son and Holy Spirit cannot, things the Son can do that the Father and Holy Spirit cannot, and things the Holy Spirit can do that the Father and Son cannot. This is reflected in Scripture, for example, in the fact that the Father always begets, commands and sends the Son. It is inconceivable in the revelation as we have received it to imagine the Son begetting, commanding or sending the Father. We have here three distinct, different, irreducibly singular Persons, because they are three distinct, different, irreducibly singular Relations. (Fs)

95a Third, and I cannot stress this enough, these three relations or Persons are ordered to one another. The Father is Person because he is the Father of the Son. He is ordered to the Son precisely insofar as he is Father. There is no question here of his having the ability to enter into whatever sort of relationship he would like to have with the Son. Each of them is related to the other in a specifically ordered way, because these ordered relations are precisely what constitute them as Persons. In the same fashion, the Holy Spirit is not called Spirit because he is immaterial (God is by nature immaterial), but because he is spirated from and therefore ordered to the Father and the Son by virtue of that spiration. The fact that they are ordered to one another allows us to speak of the circumincession of the Persons, by which they exist not only in distinction from one another but also in some fashion within one another. (Fs)

95b Fourth, within the Trinity, each of the Persons, although possessing the fullness of the divine substance and therefore enjoying the fullness of divinity, is nevertheless radically incomplete considered in himself and therefore equally radically dependent upon the other two Persons, since the full reality of the Godhead is realized only in the threeness of the communion. The Father, for example, is God, but God is not just the Father. In other words, there are no imperial, autonomous selves within the Trinity. (Fs)

Kommentar (25/11/11): zu oben: ".. is nevertheless radically incomplete considered in himself ..." Das wäre zu hinterfragen.

Sacred Origin

96a Hierarchy also means "sacred origin", from the Greek word arche, meaning "first" or "beginning" or something that has ontological or temporal priority. Although the Trinity is eternal, i.e., without any temporal beginning, the Trinity does have an ontological beginning or origin, the Father. He is the origin of the Trinity, because the Father begets the Son and the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. The Holy Spirit has his origin in the Father and the Son, and the Son has his origin in the Father, but the Father has no origin. He is, as many of the Church Fathers pointed out, the unoriginated origin. He therefore has ontological priority within the Trinity (this is why he is always the First Person of the Trinity), because he is the absolute source of the order we find in the Trinity. Therefore, the Trinity is not just a hierarchy or "sacred order"; it is a patriarchal hierarchy, or more simply put a patriarchy, because it is a sacred order whose sacred origin is the Father himself.1

Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Mensch als Mann und Frau: Abbild der göttlichen Hierarche (Trinität, Relation); der Mensch als Ereignis der Bezogenheit (Relationalität); Zölibat, Priester (Fußnote)

Kurzinhalt: Just as the Persons of the Trinity are not free to enter into any sort of relationships they would like to have with one another, so men and women may not enter into any sort of sexual relationships they would like to have.

Textausschnitt: MAN: HIERARCHICAL IMAGE OF THE HIERARCHICAL GOD

96b Our creation in the image of God, we might therefore suppose, entails an analogous reading of person at the human level. This means, first, that just as the Persons of the Trinity are communal and relational, so are we. Therefore, the individual human being, considered solely in himself, cannot be the image of God. Moreover, it is not even enough that man be male and female to image God, since male and female considered solely as male and female do not necessarily entail relationality. Once we understand, however, that the man and the woman are created as gift for one another ("It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him", Gen 2:18), it becomes apparent that the man and the woman are called to enter into a relationship with one another and to achieve within that relationship the fullness of what it means to be a male person and a female person, respectively. (Fs)

97a Not just any relationship will do, however. They are explicitly called to enter into a marital relationship. "Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh" (Gen 2:24). Only in marriage does the man become husband and the woman wife, and these are the specific relations they are called as male and female to be. Moreover, only the marital relations of husband and wife are able to effect or bring into existence that sacramental bond which constitutes the third element in their imaging of the triune God and make irrevocable until death their marital relationship to one another.1

97b That they are sexually differentiated is crucial to their imaging of God, because they are called to image not only the plurality of Persons but also the distinction or differentiation of relations within the Godhead. The relation of husband to wife is different from that of wife to husband in a way that is analogous to the difference between, say, the relation of Father to Son and the relation of Son to Father. The relation of husband cannot be reduced to that of wife, and vice versa. By the same token, the husband and the wife, like the Persons of the Trinity, are also non-interchangeable, that is, the male cannot do those things appropriate to the relation of wife per se, just as the female cannot do those things appropriate to the relation of husband per se. (Fs)

98a Third, and again this point cannot be stressed too much, their sexual differentiation is also crucial to the fact that they, like the Persons of the Trinity, are ordered specifically to one another, male to female and female to male. Just as the Persons of the Trinity are not free to enter into any sort of relationships they would like to have with one another, so men and women may not enter into any sort of sexual relationships they would like to have. The woman is created specifically for the man, as gift to the man, just as he is created for the woman, as gift to her. This is reflected, first in the fact that she is specifically created to be a "helper fit for him" and, second, in the fact that Adam, which means "humanity", does not become and is not referred to as male until the point at which Eve is created as female. Furthermore, she is created for him as the gift of wife, just as he is created for her as the gift of husband. That each is sexually ordered to the other in this way and no other is apparent in the fact that only the spousal relationship of husband and wife can effect that bond which constitutes the permanence of their relationship even as it makes that relationship an image of the trinitarian communion of love.2

Fußnote 2/15
15 Once we understand that men and women are created to enter into the ordered relationship of husband and wife, it becomes easier to see why Christ is male and why the ordained priesthood is open to males only. For, as Ephesians tells us, the "profound mystery" at the heart of God's plan for our redemption is the covenantal union of Christ and the Church, a union which is anticipated in the creation of the first man and woman. 'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.' This mystery is a profound one, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church" (Eph 5:31-32). The marital union of Christ and the Church is, as the New Covenant, the fundamental and irrevocable image of the triune communion of love. Christ's maleness, therefore, is not the disclosure of some divine maleness (in God there is no gender), but the disclosure of Christ's relation with the Church. He is male because he is the relation of bridegroom. The priest, who is the sacramental sign of Christ and in whose Person he acts, must therefore be capable of entering into that relation which vis a vis the Church is explicitly male. To think that a woman can do this is to suppose that male and female are not relationally ordered to one another, but simply interchangeable with one another.
---

98b Fourth and finally, both the man and the woman are fully human, but at the same time each is radically dependent upon the other, since each images God not in himself or herself, but only in the "unity of the two". Indeed, just as in the Trinity, the three Persons are persons only by virtue of the fact that they are related to one another; so analogously the male and the female are persons only by virtue of the fact that they too are related to one another. In the words of Cardinal Ratzinger, "relativity toward the other constitutes the human person. The human person is the event or being of relativity.3 (Fs)

Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Trinität, Hierarchie; Theologen d. Egalität: falsches Verständnis von Hierarchie -> Hierarchie = Ungleichheit; dagegen: Personen d. T.: gleich und verschieden, Gleichheit und Hierarchie

Kurzinhalt: Why do so many theologians today fail to understand, much less properly apply to their analysis of human existence, the hierarchical character of the Trinity? The answer lies in a widespread misunderstanding about hierarchy.

Textausschnitt: HIERARCHY MISUNDERSTOOD

99a If man, male and female, is created in the image of God, it would seem inescapable that the differentiation of Persons in the Trinity by which the sacred order of the Trinity is constituted would have an important bearing on the male-female differentiation by which we image God, and that indeed this sexual differentiation would be recognized as the basis for a sacred order or hierarchy within the human community. Unhappily, just the opposite is the case among those theologians intent on arguing for an egalitarian understanding of human beings. Either the Trinity itself or the hierarchical character of the Trinity is ignored. (Fs)

99b Feminists by and large have tried to redefine the Godhead in such a way as to make it compatible with their ideology. Some of these redefinitions completely ignore the Trinitarian character of God. Sr. Mary Luke Tobin, for example, in an article in U.S. Catholic, tells us that language such as "Father" and even "Mother", though having some value when applied to God, is inadequate to expressing who God is. She prefers another way of characterizing him. "Rahner consistently calls God the 'Holy Mystery,' which for me is a much better word to describe God."1 There is only one problem with this. If we are going to abandon the Trinity for "Holy Mystery", we might as well call God the "Wholly Nothingness", since "Holy Mystery" conveys absolutely nothing about who God is. (Fs) (notabene)

99c Other feminists have tried to retain a trinitarian formula for referring to God, while emptying the formula of any trinitarian substance. Hence, we have been offered "Creator-Redeemer-Sustainer" in place of Father-Son-Holy Spirit. Theologian Catherine Mowry LaCugna, however, rightly points out that this kind of formula utterly fails, inasmuch as "distinguishing persons by their function with respect to us does not sufficiently highlight the personal and relational character of God as God. The strong and bold claim of trinitarian theology is that not only is God related to us, but it is the very essence or substance of God to be relational."2

100a Unfortunately, even among those who are fully conscious of the relational character of Trinitarian personhood, we see an inability to come to terms with the full implications of the doctrine of the Trinity. George Tavard, for example, has written a study on the role of woman in Christianity in which he recognizes that the communal character of the Trinity as a union of three related Persons has implications for human existence as a communion of persons. However, he fails to recognize that the differentiation of the Persons in the Trinity is ordered in a specific way such that the Persons are non-interchangeable relations. As a result, he accepts the view that human beings image God as persons in relationship to one another, but rejects the male-female differentiation as having any theological significance for that imaging. Hence he tells us: "Facing their call to the Trinitarian life, men and women cannot be differentiated"3, and, as a result, "at all levels but the strictly sexual one, the roles of both may be interchanged."4 LaCugna, as cited above, rejects feminist formulas which deny the relationality of the three Persons within the Trinity itself, but she also fails to recognize that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are not just Persons in some undifferentiated sense, but ordered and non-interchangeable relations. Hence, she tells us (twice) that in the Trinity there is neither hierarchy nor inequality.5

100b Why do so many theologians today fail to understand, much less properly apply to their analysis of human existence, the hierarchical character of the Trinity? The answer lies in a widespread misunderstanding about hierarchy. When LaCugna twice tells us that there is neither hierarchy nor inequality in the Trinity, she inadvertently reveals the problem we face, that hierarchy is thought to be indissociable from inequality, even among those who ought to know better. Thus, anyone who believes hierarchy and inequality to be indissociable faces an immediate and insurmountable problem regarding the Trinity. (Fs) (notabene)

101a On the one hand, the Persons of the Trinity are co-equal. The Church makes no bones about this. The Godhead consists of three Persons, each of whom fully possesses the one divine substance and is therefore equal to the other two Persons. On the other hand, the Trinity is a hierarchy or sacred order, as we have seen. If one believes that equality and hierarchy are incompatible, one is forced to make a choice here. Either the Persons of the Trinity are not equal, in which case God is not Trinity at all, or the Persons of the Trinity are not hierarchical, in which case there is no order of non-interchangeability to be found among them. Since denial of the Trinity, even in these days of dissent, is still unthinkable to a large number of egalitarian theologians, denial of the hierarchy of the Trinity becomes a necessity. But to deny the specific, ordered relations which make up the Trinity is every bit as much a denial of the Trinity as is the denial of the equality of the Persons, since the differences among the Persons are constituted precisely by their non-interchangeable relations and by nothing else. (Fs) (notabene)

101b Among the radical feminists, hierarchy and inequality are simply assumed to be synonymous, so much so that never is any need felt to justify the assumption. Commonplace, therefore, are statements such as those by feminist Letty Russell that a hierarchical order "is imaged by the pyramid of authority as domination",6 or by Religious Studies Professor Joann Wolski Conn that the tensions between liberal nuns in this country and the Vatican are rooted in "two distinctly different and opposing models of authority based on different ecclesiologies: one is hierarchical, the other is the discipleship of equals",7 or that by Sandra Schneiders that "no form of oppression can be finally overcome until that root [the principle of patriarchy] is cut, until hierarchy as such is delegitimated and replaced by a universal acceptance of the basic equality of all participants in creation."8 (Fs)

Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Hierarchie; Gegenteil von H.: nicht Ungleichheit, sondern Anarchie; autonomes (imperial) Selbst - Wahlfreiheit - Ablehnung jeder Ordnung

Kurzinhalt: This refusal to accept that God has ordered the universe and that there is, as a result, a serious differentiation between that order and the disorder caused by human sin, requires that the distinction between order and disorder be eradicated.

Textausschnitt: HIERARCHY VERSUS ANARCHY

102a It is unfortunate that so many people, theologians and others, have rejected hierarchy under the mistaken impression that it necessarily produces inequalities, when in fact hierarchy per se means neither equality nor inequality but simply sacred order. (Fs) (notabene)

102b More unfortunate, even potentially disastrous for us, is the fact that to reject hierarchy is not to reject inequality but to reject order. For the opposite of hierarchy is not equality, as so many people today seem to think. The opposite of hierarchy is anarchy, that is, no order at all. Anarchy is chaos, and if we doubt that this is what egalitarianism really leads to, all we need do is look at the violence in our streets, the disorder in our families, the lawlessness in our schools, the corruption in our politics, the immorality in our media and the dissent within our churches. Karl Stern observed: "When equality becomes sameness, an immanent principle of order is lost."1 One could go a step further and say that the most important principle of order is lost. (Fs)

102c Nowhere is this more apparent than in the area of human sexuality. Once we have lost the sense that male and female are hierarchically ordered, i.e., differentiated and by that differentiation ordered to one another in marital love, it becomes impossible to see why homosexual relationships are wrong. If the differentiation between male and female is insignificant, then the sexual relationship between a man and a woman cannot be significandy different from the sexual relationship between two men or two women. And if that is true, it then becomes impossible to see how sexual activity is linked to marriage or indeed how procreation is linked to sexual activity. As Cardinal Ratzinger has pointed out, "The issue is the rupture between sexuality and marriage. Separated from motherhood, sex has remained without a locus and has lost its point of reference: it is a kind of drifting mine, a problem and at the same time an omnipresent power."2

103a Sexual activity today is ordered to nothing whatsoever. It has become quite literally chaotic, anarchic. And the implications for society as a whole are incalculable. As sociologist Philip Rieff has noted, the center around which society today revolves is no longer the family but the self, the imperial, autonomous self. As a result, "a new and dynamic acceptance of disorder, in love with life and destructive of it, has been loosed upon the world."3 This new self, loose from all institutions, all commitments, all differentiations, all relationships, in short, from all order whatsoever, is no longer able to see itself as the subject of responsibilities by which it would be bound to others, but only as the subject of rights which it can claim from others. As Gottfried Dietze points out, "In our egalitarian age, the present riot of rights, in a large measure brought about through rioting, threatens to turn into an anarchy of 'rights' that are not right."4

103b Although this turn down the egalitarian path is supported by a large number of misled people genuinely operating under the illusion that hierarchy means nothing more than inequality, we ought not for that reason to suppose that those leading the charge do not know what they are really doing. They know that the path they are on leads to the destruction of order. Chaos is precisely what they seek. And the reasons are not hard to discover. (Fs)

103c The imperial self intent on creating its own values and truths, indeed its own self, through the exercise of an absolute freedom of choice, requires, as the very condition of possibility for being able to "create" such values and truths, the absence of any pre-existing objective order to which it might be required to conform itself. The imperial self literally cannot tolerate the idea that such an order already exists with God as its source or author. The autonomous self wishes to be God, not to obey him; it wishes to become its own life-project, as the Pope puts it, not to make God's will its life-project. (Fs) (notabene)

103d This refusal to accept that God has ordered the universe and that there is, as a result, a serious differentiation between that order and the disorder caused by human sin, requires that the distinction between order and disorder be eradicated. The cover article in a recent issue of The Atlantic Monthly, on the dissolution of the two-parent family and its consequences, noted this phenomenon as it applies to the many attacks made on the two-parent family in recent years. (Fs)

... [T]he attempt to discredit the two-parent family can be understood as part of what Daniel Patrick Moynihan has described as a larger effort to accommodate higher levels of social deviance. "The amount of deviant behavior in American society has increased beyond the levels the community can 'afford to recognize,' " Moynihan argues. One response has been to normalize what was once considered deviant behavior, such as out-of-wedlock birth. An accompanying response has been to detect deviance in what once stood as a social norm, such as the married-couple family. Together these responses reduce the acknowledged levels of deviance by eroding earlier distinctions between the normal and the deviant.5 (Fs)

104a Nowhere is this project of eroding the distinction between the normal and the deviant more vigorously pursued than in America's colleges and universities, where hardly anything today can be spoken of as deviant or abnormal without getting the speaker into trouble with the politically correct. A former student of mine now in graduate study in psychology in a secular university recently told me that the professor in her course on abnormal psychology started the semester by saying that, objectively speaking, there really is nothing one could call abnormal behavior. What is called abnormal behavior is a culturally-conditioned phenomenon and therefore varies from one society to another. Secular schools are not the only place this sort of thing occurs. In my theology course in graduate school entitled "Moral Norms", the professor finally admitted about halfway through the semester, upon being asked why he had not as yet introduced us to a single moral norm, that he did not believe there are such things as moral norms. If nothing is normative, then of course nothing can be abnormal either.6 (Fs)

105a Although intellectuals generally take more extreme positions on such matters than does the public as a whole, the fact is that such thinking sooner or later trickles down into the larger population. As is pointed out in The Atlantic Monthly article, attacks on marriage and the family as normative do not these days simply come from the culturally elite, but also reflect to some degree a shift in attitude that has occurred among the larger population. (Fs)

Survey after survey shows that Americans are less inclined than they were a generation ago to value sexual fidelity, lifelong marriage, and parenthood as worthwhile personal goals. Motherhood no longer defines adult womanhood, as everyone knows; equally important is the fact that fatherhood has declined as a norm for men. In 1976 less than half as many fathers as in 1957 said that providing for children was a life goal. The proportion of working men who found marriage and children burdensome and restrictive more than doubled in the same period. Fewer than half of all adult Americans today regard the idea of sacrifice for others as a positive moral virtue.7

105b The fact that self-sacrifice is regarded by less than half of all adults in this country as a positive moral virtue tells us far more about the current state of American religious belief than do all the polls indicating that more than 90 percent of the American public still believes in God. It tells us that the Trinitarian Godhead which is within itself a communion of self-giving love is no longer the God in whom the American public believes. It tells us that Christ, the source of the sacred or sacramental ordering of our lives, who becomes Head of the Church and source of that order by virtue of his sacrifice for the sake of the Church, no longer informs American religious sensibilities. It also tells us why Americans place less value today on being husbands and wives, fathers and mothers. Those who do not value the Godhead as Trinity or hierarchy are not likely to value their own ability to image that hierarchy in the union of marital love. (Fs)

Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Hierarche - Anarchie - Tyrannei (der monolithische Staat); Ordnung nur möglich: 1 Unterschiede (identische Dinge sind nur austauschbar) 2 Ordnung immanent in den Unterschieden; säkular: kein religiös neutraler Begriff

Kurzinhalt: ... the supreme irony of our situation is that we can safeguard human equality only by safeguarding the significance of our sexual differentiation as male and female... Tyranny is order without sanctity or holiness, order based not on the authority and hi

Textausschnitt: HIERARCHY, ANARCHY, OR TYRANNY?

106a Richard John Neuhaus has said he believes this is the "Catholic moment" in American history. Certainly there are many indications today that Americans are beginning to recognize that anarchy is the real result of egalitarianism (the article in The Atlantic Monthly is one such sign). But if there is to be a Catholic moment in this society, we must catechize the new generation who are now inheriting the anarchy produced by their elders and who therefore will be motivated to embrace some alternative to it. More than anything else, we need to teach them at the outset the doctrine of the Trinity and then make clear the Trinitarian character of the rest of reality, especially with regard to how man, male and female, images the Trinitarian communion of love. Only by preparing Catholics to live out this imaging can the Trinitarian hierarchy or sacred order of communal love become the basis for the restoration of hierarchy or the sacramental order of marital love in American society. (Fs)

106b This, paradoxically enough, is also the only foundation upon which a democracy, committed to the equality of all of its citizens before the law, can truly flourish. In fact, the supreme irony of our situation is that we can safeguard human equality only by safeguarding the significance of our sexual differentiation as male and female. This is true for two reasons. First, there can be an order among things only if those things are differentiated, not identical. Things which are identical cannot be ordered; they can only be interchanged. Hence, differentiation is required if there is to be any kind of order at all. (Fs) (notabene)

107a Second, there can be no order based upon relationality unless those things which are different are ordered to one another by their differences. For if they are merely different but not ordered to one another, they can only be ranked according to their differences, as for example, from the largest to the smallest, from the heaviest to the lightest, from the strongest to the weakest, from the most intelligent to the least, etc., and such ranking necessarily renders them unequal. Only if there is something in the differences themselves which orders them to one another can they be related to one another as equals. (Fs) (notabene)

107b The only such differentiation with which God has invested man is that of male and female. Upon this differentiation, therefore, the whole of human existence and the whole order of human relations rely. This is what the Pope has in mind when he says, "Human life, by its nature, is 'coeducative' and its dignity, its balance, depend, at every moment of history and at every point of geographical longitude and latitude, on 'who' she will be for him, and he for her."1

107c The need to reincarnate within this society that hierarchy which is based on marital love is urgent, for we face two dangers, one immediate and the other in the not-too-distant future. The immediate danger is that anarchy already mentioned, which is both the direct opposite of hierarchy and the direct consequence of egalitarianism, and which we already see being played out in the disorder in our schools, the chaos in our streets and the breakdown of our marriages and families. This anarchy, however, will not be allowed to prevail over the long haul, because people simply will not tolerate the dangers and dislocations caused by it. Sooner or later people will demand the imposition of order, any order. And there is, unhappily, a second antithesis to hierarchy available to them—tyranny. Tyranny is order without sanctity or holiness, order based not on the authority and hierarchy of God but on the power of the monolithic State. It is, in short, the imposition of a desacralized, unholy order of oppression by the most powerful against the least, such as we have seen played out in our own times in virtually every corner of the earth and on every scale imaginable.2 (Fs) (notabene)

108a Our secular society is not immune to tyranny. Indeed, it is somber to reflect that "secular" is an antonym of "sacred". We have been lulled into thinking that "secular" is a religiously neutral term, but it is not. The secular is the "worldly" and the "profane" which, in itself, knows neither the Trinitarian God nor the sacred order with which he has invested his creation. Divorced from its religious mooring in the Judaeo-Christian tradition and, consequently, from all religious notions of authority and order, our society has no way of discovering for itself that hierarchy by which the dignity of the human person and the equality of all human beings can be secured. The only kind of order a "secular" society knows is the "desacralized" order of tyranny. (Fs) (notabene)

108b The most urgent task facing Catholics in particular and Christians in general in a secular society such as ours is to establish and live out, at the level of marriage and family, that imaging of the sacred order of the Trinity which is the only effective means by which to reestablish within such a society the kind of relationships among human beings which, because they are ordered, provide the only basis for human dignity and equality. Such a "holy order" is our one sure bulwark against either the secular anarchy of an undifferentiated multitude, such as looms today in the violence in our schools and on our streets, or the secular (unholy) tyranny of a monolithic state such as looms in the political manipulations of the Constitution and the cultural marginalization of the "politically incorrect", all of which are the consequences of our current egalitarian vision of man. (Fs)

Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Freiheit: Wahlfreiheit, Definition Chesterton,Redemptor Hominis; MacIntyre - Emotivismus, emotivistisches Selbst; d. moderne Mensch: zw. absoluter Wahrheit (die er nicht annehmen kann) und absoluter Freiheit (die im Nichts endet)

Kurzinhalt: ... this self, because it has no particular reason for choosing any particular course of action, finds itself in the absurd position described by Rieflf of "being free to choose and yet having no choice worth making"

Textausschnitt: THE EMOTIVIST SELF

110b Nowhere is this practice of freedom more apparent today than in matters of morality. As Alastair MacIntyre notes, in his recent and already classic work, After Virtue, "we have—very largely, if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality."1 Morality has been replaced by what he calls "emotivism", i.e., "the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character."2 The result is quite what one would expect it to be:

The specifically modern self, the self that I have called emotivist, finds no limits set to that on which it may pass judgment for such limits could only derive from rational criteria for evaluation and, as we have seen, the emotivist self lacks any such criteria. Everything may be criticised from whatever standpoint the self has adopted, including the self's choice of standpoint to adopt.... Anyone and everyone can thus be a moral agent, since it is in the self and not in social roles or practices that moral agency has to be located.3 (Fs; tblStw: Freiheit)

111a This, of course, is the imperial self already discussed, naming good and evil for itself, without recourse to pope, priests, parents or anyone else. This is the autonomous self which will not allow anyone else's "values" to be "imposed" upon itself. This is the egalitarian self whose voracious appetite for "rights" knows virtually no limits. Consequently, "in modern political regimes, where rights precede duties, freedom definitely has primacy over community, family and even nature."4

111b Unfortunately, this self, because it has no particular reason for choosing any particular course of action, finds itself in the absurd position described by Rieflf of "being free to choose and yet having no choice worth making".5 The reason is not difficult to discover, as MacIntyre has observed. "This democratised self which has no necessary social content and no necessary social identity can then be anything, can assume any role or take any point of view, because it is in and for itself nothing."6 This is man the "cipher" who can choose to be anything he wants to be only because he has rejected the notion that God has already chosen something for him to be. (Fs)

111c As George Trow has remarked, "The idea of choice is easily debased if one forgets that the aim is to have chosen successfully, not to be endlessly choosing."7 Unhappily, however, the idea of choice cannot but be debased by the modern emotivist self, if only because that self has rejected all criteria by which one could make any judgments about the success of one's choices. In order for me, for example, to gauge the success of a choice I have made, let us say, in taking a right turn instead of a left, I have to know where it is I am going and where I am in relationship to that destination. Absent such information, right turns are as meaningless as left turns, because I have no reason for making either turn—or even for going straight ahead. In fact, I have no reason for moving at all. G. K. Chesterton once defined liberty as "the power of a thing to be itself"8 But to the modern self, which has rejected the very notion that it has any "self", any "nature", such a notion of freedom seems confining at best and illusory at worst. In short, the modern self is caught between the rock of an absolute truth it cannot accept and the hard place of an absolute freedom of meaningless choices which can lead to no ultimate destination and can signify nothing but personal preference. It may well be that modern secular humanists, neopagans and such can be excused for having gotten themselves into this dilemma. But when Catholics begin to think of freedom of choice as the only kind of freedom and as an end in itself, something has gone radically wrong with their Christianity. When they begin to think that God gave us freedom of choice so that we could make up our own minds about who we want to be and what is right for us, we can only conclude that their democratic karma has run over their Catholic dogma.9 For, as Pope John Paul II, in Redemptor Hominis (RH), pointed out,

Jesus Christ meets the man of every age, including our own, with the same words: "You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free." [John 8:32] These words contain both a fundamental requirement and a warning: the requirement of an honest relationship with regard to truth as a condition for authentic freedom, and the warning to avoid every kind of illusory freedom, every superficial unilateral freedom, every freedom that fails to enter into the whole truth about man and the world (10). (Fs)

Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Freiheit als Geschenk; F. und Wahrheit: Maßstab nach Werten vs. "go with the flow" (Instinkte, Sklave der Gefühle); Totalitarismus; Anpassung an Wahrheit an sich vs. Angepasst-Werden an die Welt d. Dinge

Kurzinhalt: He can either react in an emotive fashion, "go with the flow" of his own likes and dislikes, as it were, or he can measure those things according to a scale of values derived from an objective standard to which he has access and according to which ...

Textausschnitt: Freedom and Truth

114b The notion is widespread today that a freedom which must submit itself to the truth is no freedom at all. Freedom, to be freedom, must submit to nothing whatever. This, of course, is a distortion of freedom even in the political sense of the word. As Bloom points out, freedom in the United States was originally linked to the human ability to reason, not set in opposition to it. He said, "the regime established here promised untrammeled freedom to reason—not to everything indiscriminately, but to reason, the essential freedom that justifies the other freedoms, and on the basis of which, and for the sake of which, much deviance is also tolerated. An openness that denies the special claim of reason bursts the mainspring keeping the mechanism of this regime in motion."1 (Fs; tblStw: Freiheit)

114c Moreover, and more ominously, politically speaking, is the fact that when people lose sight of an objective reality against which their actions can be measured, they leave themselves wide open to the totalitarianisms which have dominated this century. George Orwell's Big Brother is a perfect example of how absolute power can operate only in the absence of any publicly-recognized objective truth against which the claims of Big Brother might be challenged. Winston had written in his diary, "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four." But Big Brother is a thoroughgoing relativist and subjectivist. Truth is what Big Brother says it is and nothing else. Winston is tortured until he acknowledges, of his own "free will", that two plus two equals five or three or both simultaneously—what-ever Big Brother at any given time declares the answer to be. Winston will not be put to death until he has accepted lock, stock and barrel, in his own brainwashed mind, the power of Big Brother to define and incessantly redefine the truth of things. (Fs)

115a The silver lining to the modern emotivist cloud, a lining admittedly thin and not without its serious drawbacks, is the fact that, even today, freedom is not entirely divorced from reason and truth, if only because, as Bloom noted, "our relativism does not extend to matters of bodily health."2 Current campaigns against the tobacco industry, theater popcorn, hot dogs, soda pop, et al.—combined with the condomizing of sex and the attempt to establish a universally mandated health care system from which no one will be allowed to exclude himself-—all offer evidence that not everyone committed to moral relativism is committed to relativism across the boards. Even our campaigns to inform the public about AIDS and drugs bear witness to the fact that most people still understand some Unk to exist between the truth of things and the ways in which people will choose or should be encouraged, if not forced, to behave. (Fs)

115b The reason why the truth is essential to human freedom lies in the fact that man has only two ways in which to respond to the things around him. He can either react in an emotive fashion, "go with the flow" of his own likes and dislikes, as it were, or he can measure those things according to a scale of values derived from an objective standard to which he has access and according to which he makes his choices. In the first instance, he cannot really be regarded as free, for he is simply reacting according to his own "instincts", his own preferences. He is the servant of his own desires, the slave of his own emotions. In a sense, he does not choose anything at all; he simply succumbs to things. (Fs)

115c Pope John Paul II explains the relationship between truth and freedom in this way:
Truth is a condition of freedom, for if a man can preserve his freedom in relation to the objects which thrust themselves on him in the course of his activity as good and desirable, it is only because he is capable of viewing these goods in the light of truth and so adopting an independent attitude to them. Without this faculty man would inevitably be determined by them: these goods would take possession of him and determine totally the character of his actions and the whole direction of his activity. His ability to discover the truth gives man the possibility of self-determination, of deciding for himself the character and direction of his own actions, and that is what freedom means.3

116a In a sense, we are back to Chesterton's definition of freedom: the power of a thing to be itself. Is man to be in freedom what he already is in truth? Will he conform himself to the truth already inscribed in his being, or will he be conformed to the things of this world? In the final analysis, he has no other choices. And, in the final analysis, to be conformed to the things of this world is not freedom at all, but enslavement, for it deprives him of the essence and capacities of his own being. As Chesterton amusingly observed, "You may say, if you like, that the man is free to think himself a poached egg. But it is surely a more massive and important fact that if he is a poached egg he is not free to eat, drink, sleep, walk, or smoke a cigarette."4 Or, in less amusing terms, if man relinquishes "himself or the place in the visible world that belongs to him", he cannot but become "the slave of things, the slave of economic systems, the slave of production, the slave of his own products" (RH 16). If, in other words, he wants to be "like God", i.e., to define for himself who he shall be, he will discover that he is no longer free to be a man but only to be a slave to the whims of his own or someone else's fallen nature.5 (Fs)

Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Freiheit und Sünde; Konkupiszenz; das emotivistische (autonome) Selbst; Augustin: F. von etwas erst Anfang d. F.

Kurzinhalt: Sin is simply another word for that naming of good and evil for ourselves which God's command in Genesis forbids. It is another word for "going with the flow" of our own desires instead of obeying God's commands.

Textausschnitt: Freedom and Sin

116b Choice is a real element in our freedom. The command God gave Adam and Eve is itself a revelation of their freedom of choice. If they had had no such freedom, a command would have been an exercise in futility. And if God had intended to override their freedom of choice, he would simply have forced them into obedience. But freedom of choice is, as Genesis also clearly reveals, for the sake of the choice itself and not simply for the sake of having choices to make. Otherwise, there would have been no command. God would simply have told them to do whatever they wanted to do. (Fs)

117a Freedom of choice, therefore, can be wrongly used, as it was at the beginning, with damaging consequences not only for Adam and Eve but for everyone else as well. One such consequence is what the Church calls concupiscence, a strong tendency to sin or to go against the truth of our being. Since our freedom is dependent upon our knowing and living the truth, our freedom is diminished, not enhanced, by sin. As John Paul II has stated: "within his errors and negative decisions, man glimpses the source of a deep rebellion, which leads him to reject the Truth and the Good in order to set himself up as an absolute principle unto himself: 'You shall be like God' (Gen 3:5). Consequently, freedom itself needs to be set free. It is Christ who sets it free: he 'has set us free for freedom' (cf. Gal 5:1)" (VS 86). (Fs)

117b What does it mean to say that Christ has "set us free for freedom"? Christ "sets us free" by setting "our freedom free from the domination of concupiscence" (VS 103). Sin is simply another word for that naming of good and evil for ourselves which God's command in Genesis forbids. It is another word for "going with the flow" of our own desires instead of obeying God's commands. But this going with the flow, as the language itself suggests, means that we are controlled by the flow, not vice versa. But, as the Pope points out, man can only achieve the dignity appropriate to him "when he frees himself from all subservience to his feelings, and in a free choice of the good, pursues his own end by effectively and assiduously marshalling the appropriate means" (RH 42). (Fs)

117c The emotivist self who rejects all absolute truth in favor of a freedom understood exclusively in terms of choice is that same imperial, egalitarian self who rejects hierarchy in the name of liberation and equality. And, as well we might expect, the results are the same. Just as rejecting the order or hierarchy of creation produces not equality but anarchy, so also rejecting the existence of an objective moral order produces not more freedom of choice but simply more of that disorder which began back in the third chapter of Genesis. The Pope accurately concludes, "The worst situations of all are the ones in which all distinction between good and evil is thrown to the winds; chaos then reigns."1

118a Our freedom needs to be set free from the "mystery of lawlessness [anarchy]" (2 Th 2:7). This freedom from sin is a part of what is meant by that freedom with which God gifts us in creation and which Christ restores to us in redemption. But this freedom "from sin" is for the sake of that freedom "of the gift" of which the Pope speaks and, therefore, is only the first step toward true freedom. As St Augustine said and as the Pope reaffirms in Veritatis Splendor,

"The beginning of freedom," Saint Augustine writes, "is to be free from crimes ... such as murder, adultery, fornication, theft, fraud, sacrilege and so forth. Once one is without these crimes (and every Christian should be without them), one begins to lift up one's head toward freedom. But this is only the beginning of freedom, not perfect freedom ..." (13). (Fs)

118b In Gaudium et Spes Vatican II stated, "It is only in freedom that man can turn to what is good" (GS 11). The Pope cites this text and then asks the crucial question regarding it, "But what sort of freedom?" (VS 34) What sort of freedom allows man to turn to the good? Clearly freedom of choice is implied here, since "turning to the good" certainly requires a choice by which the bad is rejected. But what sort of freedom is capable not only of recognizing and desiring but also of actually choosing the good?

Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Freiheit und Selbstbeherrschung; self-mastery (um der Wahl des Guten willen)- emotivistisches Selbst (Kontrolle gleichsam von außen)

Kurzinhalt: Freedom from sin is a form of self-mastery. That a man does not sin is important, but even more important is that he refrain from sin specifically because he is master of himself, ruling his desires rather than being ruled by them.

Textausschnitt: Freedom and Self-Mastery

118c The only sort of freedom which is capable of freely choosing the good is that freedom which has mastered its own desires, its own inclinations to do its own thing rather than to do the good thing. When the Pope speaks of man and woman at the beginning as "free with the very freedom of the gift", he says that the freedom of the gift itself requires a very particular kind of freedom which he specifies as "mastery of oneself (self-control)".1 Freedom from sin is a form of self-mastery. That a man does not sin is important, but even more important is that he refrain from sin specifically because he is master of himself, ruling his desires rather than being ruled by them. The new universal catechism speaks of that "royal freedom" which is Christ's gift to his followers, citing St. Ambrose's description of what that freedom entails:

That man is rightly called a king who makes his own body an obedient subject and, by governing himself with suitable rigor, refuses to let his passions breed rebellion in his soul, for he exercises a kind of royal power over himself. And because he knows how to rule his own person as king, so too does he sit as its judge. He will not let himself be imprisoned by sin, or thrown headlong into wickedness (908). (Fs)

119a Freedom as self-mastery is a foreign notion to the imperial, emotivist self. Such a self desires self-esteem, self-actualization, self-fulfillment, but rarely self-discipline. (If you doubt this, just watch the talk shows where the emotivist self holds forth and count the number of times the words "self-mastery" and "self-discipline" are used.) This is not to say, however, that the emotivist self is totally unaware of the need to control the bad consequences which all too obviously and often result from unrestrained freedom of choice. It is just that such a self seeks control not from within but from without, more often than not from science and technology. When this self seeks to have sex without babies, it has recourse to pills, condoms, abortionists, etc., which it calls "taking control of one's reproductive organs". When this self seeks to avoid suffering, it has recourse to the Dr. Kevorkians and the "death machines" of this world, and calls it "taking control of one's death". Far from taking control of oneself, however, these are all mechanisms by which many people today hand over the control in their lives to the things of this world, the things their technological societies have produced. This is precisely the sort of thing Pope John Paul II has in mind when he speaks of people becoming enslaved or conformed to the things of this world, rather than being conformed to the truth of their own being. (Fs)

120a It is interesting to note that William Bennett, in his popular Book of Virtues, places self-discipline at the head of his list of virtues. Perhaps this is because, without self-discipline, no other virtue is possible. How, for example, is a man to practice the virtue of, say, honesty without exercising mastery over his own inclinations to lie when it serves his own purposes? Or how is he to exercise the virtue of courage without first mastering his own fear? In a sense, self-mastery is the only way to "liberate" that goodness which resides within us even after the Fall. (Fs)

120b Self-mastery is not for its own sake (for then it would be little more than an exercise in pride) but for the sake of allowing us to "choose the good", a good which resides not only outside but also inside us. Indeed, the Pope insists that a certain "spontaneity" of action (a kind of "going with the flow") is possible to us, but only on condition that we have first mastered that concupiscence which tempts us away from the good. Self-mastery is the means by which we are able to release that goodness within us which concupiscence seeks to dominate. Thus, the Pope is able to speak of "a mature spontaneity of the human 'heart', which does not suffocate its noble desires and aspirations, but, on the contrary, frees them and, in a way, facilitates them."2 Such a mature spontaneity, however, is acquired "precisely at the price of self-control" and in no other way.3

120c Self-mastery exists for the sake of that "mature spontaneity" which frees man's "noble desires and aspirations". The highest level of freedom lies in the realization of those desires and aspirations. This level of freedom the Pope calls "the freedom of the gift", and it is entirely in service to this "freedom of the gift" that freedom of choice and the freedom of self-mastery acquire their significance. (Fs)

Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Freiheit und Geschenk (Johannes Paul II: höhste Form d. Freiheit); Veritatis Splendor; Verlust d. Selbstbeherrschung: Relation d. Geschenks -> R. d. Besitznahme; Genesis 2:24 (ein Fleisch)

Kurzinhalt: "The Crucified Christ reveals the authentic meaning of freedom; he lives it fully in the total gift of himself and calls his disciples to share in his freedom" (VS 85).

Textausschnitt: Freedom and Gift

120d The highest level of freedom is what the Pope calls "the freedom of the gift", by which he means the freedom to give oneself totally to another person. And the place we find this revelation of freedom is in Jesus Christ himself: "Contemplation of Jesus Crucified is thus the highroad which the Church must tread every day if she wishes to understand the full meaning of freedom: the gift of self in service to God and one's brethren. Communion with the Crucified and Risen Lord is the never-ending source from which the Church draws unceasingly in order to live in freedom, to give of herself and to serve" (VS 87). (Fs; tblStw: Freihei) (notabene)

121a Christ is the revelation of this freedom most especially in the fact that he lived out the freedom of the gift for our sake: "The Crucified Christ reveals the authentic meaning of freedom; he lives it fully in the total gift of himself and calls his disciples to share in his freedom" (VS 85). (Fs)

121b If we find the full revelation of the freedom of the gift in Christ, we discover its original revelation in Genesis, where man is created male and female in the image of God. The two are called to become "one flesh" (2:24), a reality which can only be realized in the total giving of themselves to one another. But such self-giving is possible only if each is master of himself or herself. We can give only that which we have mastered. That is why, as already noted, the Pope speaks of Adam and Eve as enjoying the freedom of self-mastery, since only by being masters of themselves is it possible for them to "remain in the relationship of the 'sincere gift of themselves' and to become such a gift for each other through the whole of their humanity made of femininity and masculinity...."1 Indeed, only by recognizing the nuptial character of the body which is bound up with our imaging of God as male and female are we able to appreciate the full implications of our freedom. John Paul II declares, "Understanding of the nuptial meaning of the body in its masculinity and femininity reveals the depths of their freedom, which is the freedom of self-giving."2

121c By the same token, man's original misuse of the freedom of choice had and continues to have ramifications for his freedom as self-mastery and as self-giving. By choosing to be disobedient, Adam and Eve brought about the disorder of concupiscence, which makes self-mastery all but impossible to achieve, and that in turn undermines the freedom of the gift of self-giving. The Pope states, "Concupiscence entails the loss of the interior freedom of the gift.... Man can become a gift—that is, the man and the woman can exist in the relationship of self-giving, if each of them controls himself." With the loss of self-control, however, "The relationship of the gift is changed into the relationship of appropriation".3 Only the grace of Christ can restore to us the freedom of self-mastery which once again makes possible the freedom of the gift. Thus, "The satisfaction of the passions is, in fact, one thing, and the joy that man finds in mastering himself more fully is another thing, since in this way he can also become more fully a real gift for another person."4 (Fs) (notabene)

Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Freiheit und Liebe; F. d. Geschens = Liebe (trinitarisch, interpersonal); Trinität, Zirkuminzession; Liebe als Geschenk: 1) innergöttlich, 2) Schöpfung, 3) Mann u. Frau

Kurzinhalt: This interpenetration of the giving and receiving of human love is, as already noted, an image of the circumincession of the Persons of the Trinity, by which the Persons exist not only in distinction from one another but also in some fashion within ...

Textausschnitt: FREEDOM AND LOVE

122a In the final analysis, the freedom of the gift, when exercised, is simply love itself, the total giving of oneself to another person. The freedom of choice and the freedom which comes from self-mastery is for the sake of the highest form of freedom—love. Thus does Christ reveal "by his whole life, and not only by his words, that freedom is acquired in love, that is, in the gift of self" (VS 87). Freedom of choice and freedom of self-mastery are God's gifts to us so that we might make a gift of ourselves to another and, in so doing, experience the reality of love. Exercising the freedom of the gift is the one thing necessary that we might love and be loved in return. John Paul II states, "The will loves only when a human being consciously commits his or her freedom in respect of another human being seen as a person, a person whose value is fully recognized and affirmed."1

122b When the man and the woman give themselves to one another, each not only commits himself or herself to the other, each also accepts or "welcomes" the other, and in so doing affirms the dignity and value of the other. This giving and accepting, as the Pope points out, interpenetrate in such a way that "the giving itself becomes accepting, and the acceptance is transformed into giving."2 This interpenetration of the giving and receiving of human love is, as already noted, an image of the circumincession of the Persons of the Trinity, by which the Persons exist not only in distinction from one another but also in some fashion within one another. (Fs)

123a God is love and man, made in the image of God, is called to love as God loves. Man cannot become in freedom what he already is in truth unless he exercises the freedom of the gift in giving himself to another and in accepting or welcoming the other into himself. For this man has been created and, in the final analysis, without this he can be neither fully free nor fully human. This is true because "Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it" (RH 10). (Fs)

123b Exercising the freedom of the gift in love does entail for man limitations on his freedom of choice. Now he exists not for himself and his own needs and desires, but for the other to whom he has given himself and whose needs and desires he has accepted in some fashion as his own. "Love commits freedom"3 and binds it to the good of the other. But this sacrifice of freedom of choice for the sake of the choice is not something alien to man created to love as God loves. For, as the Pope notes, "man longs for love more than for freedom—freedom is the means and love the end."4

Kommentar (01/12/11): zwei analoge Aussagen über den trinitarischen Gott: a) Thomas, der als analoge Brücke die höchsten Tätigkeiten im Menschen nimmt: Vernunft, Wille/Liebe; b) JPII, der im Sinn von Hingabe darüber spricht. Wie ließen sich beide Aussagen einander genau zuordnen?

123c Man longs for this kind of love precisely because he has been created in the image of God and is therefore capable of and called to realize it, not only here on earth within the order of human persons, but also in heaven within the Trinitarian communion of love. There, man's "full participation in the interior life of God" will be for man not only a participation in that love which defines the inner life of the Trinity, but also "the discovery, in God, of the whole 'world' of relations, constitutive of His perennial order (cosmos)" as well as "man's discovery of himself, not only in the depth of his own person, but also in that union which is proper to the world of persons in their psychosomatic constitution".5

123d The gift of freedom is for the sake of the freedom of the gift, which itself is for the sake of exercising the freedom of the gift in the total giving of oneself to another and, in the final analysis, of course, to God himself Love is giftedness, first and foremost within the Trinity, within which each of the three Persons gives himself unreservedly to the other two; second, with respect to the universe itself, which is God's gift to man; and finally, with respect to the creation of man as male and female in the image of God, in which each is created as gift for the other. We must recover a sense of the givenness of things as the giftedness of things—and of our own freedom as a gift by which we are invited and enabled to participate in the giftedness of the whole of reality. Speaking of the New Covenant given in Christ, John Paul II says,
That new and definitive covenant will restore for ever to the world and to mankind the sense of receiving as gift everything there is: every created being, every material good, all the treasures of heart and mind; and first and foremost the sense of receiving as gift one's humanity, one's dignity as a human person— and something incomparably superior—one's dignity as an adopted child of God himself (cf I John 3:2).6

Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Theologie, Feminismus, Maria, Mariologie; marginale Rolle Ms. in Zeitgeisttheologie; Entsprechung: Mariologie - Christologie: "Mutter" Gottes - Mutter "Gottes"; Maria - Kirche; M. - Bild d. Frau

Kurzinhalt: ... to say that Mary is the Mother of God affirms that he is genuinely human, whereas to say that she is Mother of God affirms that he is genuinely divine in the unity of the one divine Person, the Logos or Son of God.

Textausschnitt: Chapter Six -- Feminist Autonomy vs. Marian Motherhood

125a One of the unhappy hallmarks of our age is that a certain rift has opened up between Mariology and systematic theology. One finds in most of the systematic theology being done today less reference to the Marian doctrines of the Church than one might come across in an ordinary Sunday afternoon of football viewing, given the commentators' enthusiasm for such expressions as "Hail Mary passes" and "immaculate receptions". A friend of mine several years ago joined an adult religious education course in her parish. She told me after the first meeting of the class that both the priest and the class as a whole were able to agree that no time need be spent on Mary, given the fact that Mary is quite irrelevant to the concerns of modern Catholics. (Fs)

125b This is singularly unfortunate, for several reasons. First, Church teachings on Mary complement and safeguard what we teach about Christ. There is no single teaching about Mary for which a corresponding teaching on Christ cannot be found, and in every instance those teachings have the effect of affirming in one way or another what the Church believes about Christ. Thus, for example, the teaching that Mary is the Mother of God corresponds to the Church's faith that Christ is the Son of God incarnate. It safeguards that teaching, because to say that Mary is the Mother of God affirms that he is genuinely human, whereas to say that she is Mother of God affirms that he is genuinely divine in the unity of the one divine Person, the Logos or Son of God. Second, Church teachings on Mary shed light on the Church, for Mary is the forerunner and archetype of the Church. Therefore, what we say about Mary's role in salvation has significance for what the Church is called to do in bringing salvation to the world. Finally, or so at least the current Pope would insist, Church teachings about Mary have particular application to all women, because in Mary we have a revelation of the specifically female role in God's work of creation and Christ's work of redemption. (Fs)

126a As John Paul II has pointed out in Familiaris Consortio, "Love is ... the fundamental and innate vocation of every human being" (11). At the same time, however, he has declared, "In God's eternal plan, woman is the one in whom the order of love in the created world of persons takes first root."1 For this reason, women enjoy a certain priority in the "order of love". In order to understand what this means, we must understand what he has to say about motherhood in general and about Mary's motherhood in particular, inasmuch as he finds in her life, and especially in her relationship to Christ as mother to son, a revelation not only of her role in salvation, but also more generally of the role of women in the "order of love". Before considering what he has to say, however, about Mary in particular and women in general, it would do well to bear in mind the kinds of views in wide circulation today among the feminists regarding Mary and women which are at least one of the occasions for the Pope's reflections in this area. (Fs)

Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Maria - feministische Theologie; Mary Daly (extreme Postion), Ruther (Offenbarung "hinter" d. O.); feminist.. Anthropologie: nur zufällige Differentierung d. Geschlechter -> Folgen für Christologie und Ekklesiologie und Mariologie (3)

Kurzinhalt: This anthropological belief in sexual nondifferentiation, of course, has important christological and ecclesial implications. If male and female are accidental qualities, then the maleness of Christ must also be accidental, in which case the female ...

Textausschnitt: MARY IN FEMINIST THEOLOGY

126b If systematic theologians and laity alike often find the Marian teachings of the Church peripheral to their primary concerns, feminists by and large find those teachings outright pernicious. The following remark by Mary Daly represents an extreme feminist characterization of them:

The immaculate conception is the ultimate depiction of (prenatal) woman-battering, a mythic model of incestuous assault. It is the primal rape of the Arch-Image. Within the mad ill-logic of dogmatic constructs, it is logically prior to the rape of the Virgin that takes place at "The Annunciation," when the adolescent Mary is told by the angel Gabriel that she is to be the mother-of-god and gives her fictitious assent. To put it in other words, as a consequence of her initial rape ("grace"), Mary has been totaled, made totally unable to resist divine aggression/lust/rape. At "The Annunciation," then, the already raped Mary "consents" to further rape.1

127a While Daly no longer claims to be Catholic, Rosemary Radford Ruether, a feminist theologian who continues to avow her own Catholicity, maintains in her book Mary—The Feminine Face of the Church, first published in 1979, that "the culturally dominant Mariology has been one which has sanctified the image of the female as the principle of passive receptivity in relation to the transcendent activity of the male gods and their agents, the clergy."2
127b Why do the feminists take such a negative view of Church teachings regarding Mary, when in point of fact the Catholic Church has shown so much reverence toward her as to be thought guilty by many Christians of engaging in mariolatry or worship of Mary? Why would the feminists attack that one figure in Catholicism, above all others, who would seem to embody and affirm the full value and dignity of the female? The answers to these questions, of course, are rooted in the ideology of feminism itself. (Fs)

127c The feminist view of Mary originates in the feminist attitude toward sexual differentiation and in the feminist repudiation of the Church's faith regarding that differentiation. Catholicism has traditionally understood human sexuality to be of enormous importance, particularly with regard to the differentiation of the human race into male and female. The significance which the Church attaches to this differentiation can be seen most strikingly in the importance which the Church gives to sexual morality. But at a much deeper level, the vision of the Church regarding human sexuality is grounded as we have already seen, first, in the revelation given in Genesis that our imaging of God is realized precisely in our creation as male and female (Gen 1:26-27), and second, in the revelation given in Ephesians 5 of the Christ/Church relationship, which is the covenantal and marital union of Christ the bridegroom with his bride, the Church. Indeed, the sacramental character of human marriage is rooted in the fact that human marriage images not only the Trinity but also the union of Christ and the Church. (Fs)

128a Feminism, of course and as already noted, explicidy challenges this traditional view of human sexuality. According to feminism there is no fundamental differentiation between male and female. This anthropological belief in sexual nondifferentiation, of course, has important christological and ecclesial implications. If male and female are accidental qualities, then the maleness of Christ must also be accidental, in which case the female character of the Church is without ultimate significance as well. The marital union of Christ and the Church, under these circumstances, cannot be understood as real or significant in any sense whatsoever. In fact, it must be regarded as a distorted view of both Christ and the Church. (Fs) (notabene)

128b If we try to trace the implications of feminism from this point, we find that, like the rock thrown into the pond, the ripples spread in all directions. On the one hand, the sacramental character of marriage and indeed the whole range of Church teachings with regard to human sexuality and sexual morality are called into question. On the other hand, the integrity of the Church and her teaching office or Magisterium can no longer be taken seriously either. For Christ, no longer understood as maritally united with the Church, is no longer in a position to protect her from error. The Church is relegated to the realm of purely human institutions and therefore must be understood as subject to all of the evils which plague any purely human institution. By this method of reckoning, we are not only a sinful people, we are also members of a sinful Church. The reformation and indeed even revolutionizing of the Church obviously must head the list of theological priorities within such a view of things. (Fs) (notabene)

128c Ruether gives us some insight as to how this process of reform works. Speaking of the radical break which "takes place when the institutional structures that transmit tradition are perceived to have become corrupt", she concludes: "It seems necessary to go behind later historical tradition and institutionalized authorities and 'return to' the original revelation.... The original revelation itself, and the foundational stages of its formulation are not challenged but held as all the more authoritative to set them as normative against later traditions."3 In other words, we are to recover from the earliest stages of the Church's history some purer form of the revelation which can then be employed as a weapon against current distortions and corruptions of the Church herself. Instead of a home, the Church becomes a house divided against herself. It is no accident that Ruether cites the Protestant Reformation as a precedent for conducting this feminist purification of the Church.4 (Fs)

129a The Mariological implications of this theology are at once obvious. The identification of Mary in her femininity with the Church as female no longer bears any ultimate significance, given the accidental character of sexual differentiation. Beyond that there is of course no possibility of linking the basic Marian doctrines with the Church now understood as corrupt institution. Mary's personal sinlessness finds no correlate in a sinful Church. Her virginal, bridal character finds no counterpart in a Church which enjoys no marital union with Christ. Her motherhood can find no room in a house divided against itself. (Fs)

129b In this situation three alternatives for dealing with Mary offer themselves. First, one can see her as the victim of a vicious, rapacious male chauvinism which understand women to be, as Mary Daly puts it, nothing more than "vehicles that incarnate the male presence".5 Second, one can seek to "rehabilitate" Mary in terms which are compatible with the feminist program. This can be done by applying to the traditional Marian doctrines radical new interpretations drawn from sources outside the Church. Elizabeth Johnson offers a telling example of how this method can be applied to Mary's virginity when she argues that Mary's virginity need not refer to bodily integrity or sexual abstinence, as we have long supposed, but rather can be interpreted within the framework of pagan goddess cults, where female deities, despite their many lovers, were characterized as virgins, because "virginity symbolized their autonomy, their ability to refuse men or accept them because as female deities they were powerful, independent, self-directed". Johnson concludes, "Whatever the actual historicity of the infancy narratives, the image of Mary as a virgin has significance as the image of a woman from whose personal center power wells up, a woman who symbolizes the independence of the identity of woman."6 The third possibility is simply to ignore Mary. This is the path trod not only by many feminists but also, as noted earlier, by many systematic theologians as well. (Fs)

Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Maria - feministische Theologie; heutige Situation bez. feminist. Th.; griechisch-orthdodoxe Siche (Thomas Hopko, Deborah Belonick), Ausblick: neues Bild der Frau im Licht Marias

Kurzinhalt: Feminism and Catholicism are mutually exclusive and indeed mutually antagonistic views of reality. As has already been noted, either the feminists are right and the Church is wrong, or the Church is right and the feminists are wrong.

Textausschnitt: 130a Before proceeding any further, I would like to note four primary features of the situation in which we find ourselves today vis a vis feminist theology. The first of these has to do with the relationship between feminist theology and traditional Christian faith. Deborah Belonick, a Greek Orthodox theologian, has summed it up well:

The theology that buttresses the female priesthood is at times little more than philosophy extracted from the woman's movement, which was adopted and accepted by some as "theology" to support the ordination of women. Moreover, this underlying "feminist theology" cannot be identified as being within the Judeo-Christian tradition, understood as the tradition of the people who have their roots in the Bible and the councils of the Church. This feminist theology is in fact so opposed to the Bible and tradition of the Christian Church that one may say that two different world views, two visions of God and humanity are present.1 (Fs)

130b Feminism does not provide us with simply one among many alternative ways of understanding our faith. Feminism and Catholicism are mutually exclusive and indeed mutually antagonistic views of reality. As has already been noted, either the feminists are right and the Church is wrong, or the Church is right and the feminists are wrong. (Fs)

130c If the first error of feminist theology lies in its vision of reality, the second lies in the resources upon which it draws. Feminists derive their insights not from the revelation as mediated to us through tradition, Scripture and the Magisterium but from the contemporary experience of women seeking secular liberation from political, economic and social discrimination. This appeal to a secular norm, while compatible enough with the feminist view that the Church herself, not to mention Scripture and tradition, is corrupt and sinful, finds no home in a genuinely Christian understanding of reality. Furthermore, as Thomas Hopko, another Greek Orthodox theologian, has pointed out, "It is truly ironic, in my view, that this age, which most Christians of Roman Catholic, evangelical Protestant and Eastern Orthodox traditions consider to be one of history's most unhappy, insane and disordered, would be raised up by theologians as providing the pattern for the Church's own being and life."2

131a If the first two features of the current situation point to the errors and failures of feminism, the third feature points to the insufficiencies of all theology heretofore done with regard to sexual differentiation. To cite Hopko once again,

Just as the Church knew the Father, Son and Holy Spirit to be equally divine and praiseworthy, but required centuries to forge out the proper and convincing formulation of the dogma of the suprasubstantial Trinity, so, it seems to me, the Church knows what she believes and practices concerning men and women in the life of the Church, including the priesthood, but it appears certain that it will take years of theological labor for her to arrive at a fitting dogmatic statement to explain and defend it.3

131b That Hopko is right is, I think, beyond doubt. And this brings us to the fourth and most explicitly mariological feature of the current situation, aptly expressed by the Catholic theologian and Mariologist Andre Feuillet: "Women will always have the feeling of having been and of still being very unjustly deprived by the Church of a strict right until the specific and irreplaceable role of woman in the Christian economy has been fully brought to light and properly understood in the light of Scripture, and principally in the light of the extraordinary role played by the Virgin Mary in the Church."4

131c I would only add that this theological task which must address the significance of women within a specifically Marian context will in all likelihood have to be done primarily by women theologians if the results are to be accepted by the women (and perhaps even the men) of the Church as a whole. Where are we to go from here? And how does Mary point the way for us? In this chapter and the following one, I would like to suggest some answers to those questions. (Fs)

Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Maria: hohe Bedeutung, Unauffälligkeit, Dürftigkeit d. Quellen; Relation: zweiter Adam (Christus) - zweite Eva : Mann - Frau;

Kurzinhalt: ... we ought to consider the possibility that the juxtaposition of value and inconspicuousness is itself part and parcel of what is revealed to us through Mary... The female side of creation reaches its highest expression in Mary not as the purely ...

Textausschnitt: THE UNOBTRUSIVENESS OF MARY

133c Many things could be said about Mary's discipleship and its meaning for us today. I am going to restrict myself to one facet of it, a facet which I think we find uncomfortable, even a little embarrassing, in this day and age. It has to do with the seeming inconsistency between the striking character of our dogmatic formulations about Mary, on the one hand, and the relative inconspicuousness of Mary in Scripture, on the other. If Mary is all we say she is—Mother of God, immaculately conceived, perpetually virginal, entirely sinless, mediatrix, co-redemptrix, Queen of Heaven—why do we see so little of her in the New Testament? Are we Catholics not distorting the Christian faith, building shrines to Mary when we ought to be praying to Christ? Is our Mariology not really Mariolatry?

134a If questions like that make us at all uncomfortable, it is because such questions make an assumption which most of us to one degree or another share—that the importance of something is somehow correlative to the publicity it is able to command. This is particularly true in our own day and age where attempts to command the attention of the various public media have become for some people almost a career in itself. "Who wouldn't want to be on the Phil Donahue Show?" as one guest of that show put it. (Fs)

I think it safe to say that Mary, were she walking the earth today, would walk miles out of her way to avoid the Donahue Show. We are told Mary stored up and pondered many things in her heart. But no one suggests she did so in order to write a bestseller or make the rounds of the talk shows. Mary's heart, we are told, was pierced by a sword. But no one suggests that she sought to capitalize on her own sufferings or turn them into a nifty little self-help book that would earn her fame and fortune. (Fs)

134b Instead of being uncomfortable about Mary's inconspicuousness in Scripture or apologetic about our faith regarding her enormous importance, we ought to consider the possibility that the juxtaposition of value and inconspicuousness is itself part and parcel of what is revealed to us through Mary. Perhaps discipleship requires us to embrace the silent, the hidden, the inconspicuousness, precisely because only there will we discover what is really important to us. (Fs)

134c Much of what Christ himself said certainly suggests this to be the case. Speaking of the Kingdom of God, which Catholicism has always identified in some fashion with the Church on earth, Christ characterized it in terms of a mustard seed, the salt of the earth, and the leaven in the bread. All of these images have one thing in common. They all suggest elements which go about their work silently in the hidden and inconspicuous recesses of life. If we reexamine Mary's life in her role as mother, particularly as it relates to specific events in her life, I think we shall recover there the enormous importance of the silent, the hidden, the inconspicuous achievement. (Fs)

135a Before addressing the significance of her motherhood, however, I would like to say a few words about her bridal character. I have already referred to the marital union which Ephesians 5 tells us applies in the first instance to Christ and the Church. Because Mary has always been closely identified with the Church, this bridal character of the Church has also been understood to apply to Mary in her relationship to Christ. As one systematic theologian today has pointed out, "The integral femininity of Mary is turned totally to her Son, as his integral masculinity is turned to her."1 Or, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it, "she gave herself entirely to the person and to the work of her Son" (494). The relationship of Christ and Mary is therefore not the organic relationship of head and body, in which Mary, as body, could be reduced to pure passivity. Their relationship as the second Adam and second Eve is one of reciprocity and mutuality in which our creation in the image of God as male and female is not only once again set before us but irrevocably sealed in the actual relationship between Christ and Mary. The female side of creation reaches its highest expression in Mary not as the purely passive recipient of redemption but as the one who complements and completes the activity of Christ. Mary can therefore stand not only as the expression of what is most explicitly bound up with the feminine but also as the expression of what is most explicitly involved in being a disciple of Christ, a member of the Body of Christ, the Church, which is simultaneously his bride and entrusted with the responsibility of carrying to completion Christ's work of redemption. (Fs) (notabene)

135b From the relationship between Christ and Mary, we can gather that both male and female are active, though not in identically the same way. From the fact that Mary stands on the side of the female and also on the side of the Church in relationship to Christ, we can also gather that the activity of discipleship itself involves a distinctly feminine element for both male and female disciples of Christ. What is that distinctly female element and how does Mary help us to understand it? To answer these questions we must look to Mary's motherhood. (Fs)

Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Maria: Mutter, Mutterschaft; Ms Fiat, Schöpfung, mehr als passive Empfängnis; Hochzeit zu Kana

Kurzinhalt: Gertrude von le Fort ... "First comes creation which is the glory of God, then comes conception which is the humility of woman, and only then comes action which is the power of man."

Textausschnitt: THE MOTHERHOOD OF MARY

136a Mary's role as mother is one which begins at the Annunciation with her active consent to bear Christ into the world. In Mary's "Let it be done unto me" we have the perfect intersection of activity and receptivity. In Mary's Fiat we see also the distinctly feminine element in all of that creation which God calls into existence ex nihilo. For every creature, male and female, who is called into existence out of nothing must receive in order to be. And every disciple, male and female, who is called to share in the redemptive activity of Christ must first receive in order to act. (Fs)

136b But Mary's consent is more than a purely passive receptivity. Her consent is active and participatory. She wills what God wills, and in so doing she brings to the situation the one absolute power with which God has invested his creation. As Gertrude von le Fort has pointed out in The Eternal Woman, "Surrender to God is the only absolute power that the creature possesses."1 At the same time, Mary brings to the situation that one specific attribute which God has entrusted to the feminine side of his creation, the power of conception. To quote le Fort again, "First comes creation which is the glory of God, then comes conception which is the humility of woman, and only then comes action which is the power of man."2
136c It is important that we understand here precisely what le Fort has in mind when she speaks of the humility of woman. In the first instance, it involves a fundamental imitation of God. The woman in her humility stands in the same relationship to the man as God in his humility stands in relationship to all of humanity. For God in creating, just like the woman in conceiving, engages in an activity which remains largely hidden and anonymous: "God is a hidden, a silent, an invisible God. In His creation, He remains in a sense anonymous. This helps us to comprehend our previous assertion, that the power which collaborates also cocreates. Woman, therefore, as the hidden collaborator, represents the anonymity of God; she represents it as the one side of all that is creative."3

137a If we consider motherhood as restricted entirely to the conception of a child, we can see how the activity of the woman in conceiving the child is so hidden that, until recently in human history, men were inclined to take almost all of the credit for that conception. Men, or so it was thought especially by men, supplied the human beings; women supplied only the place, the womb, where those human beings could grow and mature until such time as they could survive outside it. (Fs)

There are, however, two far larger and more important senses in which the woman as conceiver is engaged in work which is for the most part hidden and anonymous. The first of these has to do with the biblical notion of motherhood. Eve is characterized as bearing a man into the world (Gen 4:1), and Christ speaks of his own hour, in John's Gospel, in terms of the rejoicing a woman experiences for having brought a man into the world (Jn 16:2) [eg: Stelle stimmt nicht]. The implications are obvious. Motherhood is not, as we might say today, simply biological. It is more than just conceiving and giving birth to a child. It has to do with raising that child up to adulthood. And that responsibility has always been seen as lying much more with mothers than with fathers. Both Eve and Mary are rightly viewed as bearing men into the world. (Fs)
137b The job of raising up a child to adulthood is, however, largely a hidden, anonymous, and too often thankless responsibility. As le Fort notes, "Between birth and death lies not only the achievement of the successful, but the unending weariness of the way, the continuous monotony, all that belongs to the needs of the body and of life."4 And making the role of motherhood all the more inconspicuous is the fact that the more successful the woman is in raising her children, the less likely her own contribution will be seen. If her children fail, we may well inquire into their home life; if her children succeed, however, we shall in all likelihood congratulate the children. (Fs)

137c We have, I think, a good example in Scripture of how attention tends to focus more on the child than on his mother, in the Gospel of Luke, where we are told that Christ grew in wisdom and knowledge (Lk 2:52). Much ink has been spilt over this passage, first, trying to understand how a being who is truly divine could grow in wisdom and knowledge and second, calling our attention to the fact that Christ was truly human inasmuch as he too had to learn like the rest of us. (Fs)
138a But no child, Christ included, simply "grows" in wisdom and knowledge as though in some preprogrammed and automated fashion. Children grow in wisdom and knowledge because someone is teaching them, guiding them, attending to them every day of the week, every week of the year. How often do we read that passage and miss Mary's presence in it? Her role at his conception is prominent, her role at his birth is prominent, but her role in bringing a man into the world is hidden, inconspicuous. (Fs)

138b There is, however, an even larger and more comprehensive sense in which motherhood stands for the hidden, the anonymous, the inconspicuous. If there is any event in Scripture which underscores this, it is surely the wedding at Cana. Seen from the side of Christ, we have in the Gospel of John the initiation of Christ's public ministry by the first sign or miracle in which he changes water into wine. This event not only has Eucharistic overtones, it also has implications with regard to Christ's "hour", an expression which in John's Gospel refers ultimately to Christ's crucifixion, which is simultaneously his exaltation, his installation as king, his universally effective salvific act, and his return to the Father which is also his return to that glory which was his before the creation of the world. The cosmic implications are quite literally staggering. (Fs)

138c Seen from the side of Mary, however, the wedding at Cana takes on entirely different dimensions. What we have here is a domestic crisis, a potentially embarrassing situation in which the wine has quite simply run out. The host of the wedding party has discovered his own resources to be insufficient to meet the obligations he undertook. He is powerless to mend the insufficiency. Not an unusual situation, we can surely all agree, but also not an event of cosmic proportions. Who are these people? We never even learn their names. Who cares if they are momentarily discomfited? We have all been there, and we know that the sun does not stop in the sky when these things happen. Life's embarrassing moments have no cosmic significance. Or do they?

138d At Cana we have an extraordinary exchange between mother and Son, the significance of which I think perhaps we do not yet fully understand. When Mary tells Christ that the wedding party has run out of wine, his answer takes the form of a question, and that question has quite a harsh ring to it: "O woman, what have you to do with me? My hour has not yet come" (Jn 2:4). We might think that if ever there was a moment for Mary to claim her rights, to stand on her dignity, to assert her authority as his mother, this was surely it. Nothing like that happens, however. Instead, Mary addresses herself to the stewards, saying "Do whatever he tells you" (Jn 2:5). (Fs)

139a On one level what we have here, as many Scripture scholars point out, is an act of faith which goes beyond anything which any of his other disciples could have mustered at the time. On this level Mary is the model of the true disciple. But she is also his mother, and we must look beyond the level of discipleship alone to appreciate the full implications of her response. It has been suggested, and I think with good reason, that Mary's response has a direct bearing on Christ's statement that his hour has not yet come. In effect, by addressing the stewards as she does, Mary indicates that she as his mother is releasing him to his hour. Certainly her actions here do precipitate the beginning of his hour and set him on the path to Jerusalem and the cross. (Fs)

Beyond that, I would suggest that Mary's response is also an answer to the question which Christ puts to her, "O woman, what have you to do with me?" Again let me advert to The Eternal Woman, where le Fort discusses the motherly woman and raises the question, "Does this motherly woman owe herself to the strong man or to the weakling?"5 Le Fort's answer, of course, is to the weakling. (Fs)

139b At Cana Christ is the strong man. Mary knows this. The weak man is the host, who faces the embarrassment of a wine shortage for which he is responsible and about which he can do nothing. Mary approaches her Son on that man's behalf. When Christ asks her what she has to do with him, she seems not to answer. Certainly she does not fall back on any of the answers we might expect from her. She does not identify herself with him, as a mother might reasonably be expected to do under such circumstances. Instead, she turns away from him and to the stewards. She addresses them, not him. In so doing, she places herself on the side of their host. Her answer to her Son, or so I would suggest, is that she has to do with him precisely because she has to do with others. If she is releasing him to his hour, she is also simultaneously taking up her own place in his hour, the place of intercessor on behalf of the weak, the vulnerable, the helpless. In so doing, she ceases to be mother to him in order to become mother to others, a shift which he acknowledges by addressing her as "woman", not as mother. (Fs)

140a It is not out of line, I think, to suppose that before his hour begins, she is still involved in the task of bringing a man into the world and therefore is not yet in a position to bring the world to that man. If that is so, once his hour begins, Mary the mother, whose responsibility it once was to raise up a weak child into a strong man, becomes Mary the woman, who as a truly motherly woman now has the responsibility to bring to him the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of others. She who was his mother becomes at the advent of his "hour" woman to him and mother to us. This shift in her motherly responsibilities is in this same Gospel reaffirmed and sealed at the Cross where Christ in the culmination of his hour, looking at his mother and at the beloved disciple who stands for all disciples, says to Mary, "Woman, behold, your son!" and to the beloved disciple, "Behold, your mother!" (John 19:26-27). (Fs)

140b Mary is most prominent in the Gospels at two points in the life of Christ: first, at his conception and birth where she assumes the responsibility of bearing a man into the world and, second, at the inauguration and culmination of Christ's hour where she assumes the responsibility of bearing other men and women to Christ. In both instances she assumes the role of mother, first, in relation to Christ and second, in relation to others. In both instances she appears only to disappear into the anonymity of her calling. Indeed, the fact that she remains for the most part so inconspicuous in the Gospels is the best evidence we have of her fidelity to her vocation. For as mother she is entrusted with the task of attending to the little things, the vulnerable persons, the inconspicuous and, by popular standards, the unimportant events in life. In so doing, she stands as a constant reminder that our popular standards are wrong. (Fs)

140c Is the fact that they have run out of wine at this wedding party in Cana really worth bothering about? Mary certainly thinks so. So much does she think so that she is prepared to make it an issue with her Son. She is willing to ask what she as his mother really has no right to ask, that he exercise those divine and messianic prerogatives which are his by virtue of his Father, not his mother, those powers which once exercised must necessarily set him on the path to Jerusalem, to the cross, to the culmination of his "hour". Having raised him to manhood, she must relinquish her own role as his mother that he might now do the will of his Father. But her own role as mother does not end here; in a sense, we can say that it most truly begins here. For she whom Christ now addresses as woman is the one whom we are now invited to address as mother. (Fs)

141a In a general audience given in January 1979, Pope John Paul II said, "Motherhood is woman's vocation ... yesterday ... today ... always; it is her eternal vocation ... a mother is the one who understands everything and embraces each of us with her heart.... Today the world is hungrier and thirstier than ever for that motherhood which, physically or spiritually, is woman's vocation as it was Mary's."6 (Fs)

141b Nothing demonstrates more clearly the poisoned character of contemporary human and social values than the fact that this kind of statement is not only unappreciated by so many of us today but is actually ridiculed as trivializing the importance of women in the Church and in the world. Motherhood is seen in some circles today, and those circles seem to be expanding, as demeaning to women because it removes them to such an extent from what is valued as the really important, which is to say, the conspicuous achievements in society. Mothers, after all, do not make a lot of money, do not often get their names in the papers, rarely are invited to appear as guests on the Phil Donahue Show (unless their children or husbands or perhaps even they themselves have done something outrageous and therefore conspicuous), and most demeaning of all, are asked to attend not to the big problems in the world or to the important questions of their own self-fulfillment but to the petty and, on a cosmic scale, inconsequential needs of others. The baby needs diapers; the husband needs clean shirts; the third grader needs help with his homework; the teenager needs a talking-to. Even when one gets away from all of this—a night out at a neighbor's party where one might relax for awhile—the host, it turns out, needs wine. It never ends, and it never seems to lead anywhere. (Fs)

142a When we find ourselves starting to think that way, we must either dismiss Mary or we must begin to accept that we have wandered rather far from the path of our calling. If these things do not matter, if they are not worth attending to, if they have no enduring value or importance for us, we have surely, as Catholics, lost our bearings and lost them badly. We have forgotten that life for the most part does not consist in great crises and great achievements. It consists in small crises and oftentimes even smaller achievements. The first step of the baby is far more symbolic of the reality of our lives than was the first step of Neil Armstrong on the moon. Even worse, we have forgotten that the value of life does not reside primarily in extraordinary pleasures and unceasing self-fulfillment but in ordinary pleasures and unceasing concern for the welfare of others. Worst of all, we have forgotten that our God is a humble God, who is present to us not primarily in extraordinary and public acts of power but in the ordinary and hidden acts of love by which he sustains our daily life, our normal activities, our ordinary achievements. (Fs)
142b Henri J. Nouwen in his book Out of Solitude quotes a professor at Notre Dame as saying, "I have always been complaining that my work was constantly interrupted, until I slowly discovered that my interruptions were my work."7 Those of us who pursue a career are all too prone to define for ourselves where the importance of our work lies. We are constantly tempted to dismiss the demands others make on us as a waste of time, their needs as far less significant than the projects to which we have committed ourselves. We can become quite convinced that we are doing what God wants us to do and that he himself would not wish to see that work disrupted by the paltry loose ends of other people's lives. (Fs)

142c What we fail to understand is that if these interruptions are a waste of time, then Christ's life was a waste of time. For when we read the Gospels attentively, we discover that the story of his life is one long sequence of interruptions. The blind Bartimaeus interrupts his departure from Jericho, a woman interrupts his dinner in the home of Simon the leper, a centurion interrupts his entry into Capernaum, Jairus interrupts his meeting with the crowd, the woman with the hemorrhage interrupts his attempts to get to Jairus' daughter, his disciples interrupt virtually everything; even Mary interrupts his enjoyment of the wedding. The list could go on and on. One might even say that the crucifixion interrupts what could have been a splendid messianic career. Those were not interruptions, of course. Those were precisely the people he came to help, the things he came to do. When so much of his work consisted of attending to those who interrupted him, why should we suppose our own lives to be any different?

143a If we find in Christ the revelation of such a notion of vocation, we find in Mary its essence. For motherhood might almost be defined as an interrupted or ruptured life. A mother begins by believing that she can never entirely do her own thing, so involved is she in doing things for others. She ends by discovering that in doing things for others, she is doing her own thing. Yet here at the heart of motherhood we also find ourselves at the heart of discipleship. For we are called upon to love one another as Christ loves us, to serve one another as he serves us Qn 13). (Fs)

143b If we had only the revelation of Christ's achievements to go by, we might well be justified in thinking that extraordinary, visible, public, and powerful achievements are the only ones worth seeking. But we have also the inconspicuous and largely unrecorded achievements of Mary to go by, achievements which, precisely because they do go unrecorded, stand as an irrevocable witness to the importance of both the ordinary, hidden, invisible, anonymous activities of human life and the ordinary, hidden, invisible, anonymous activities of divine love. (Fs)
143c If men by and large have been entrusted with responsibility for the prominent, public achievements of our history, that is not because they are superior to women. It is because women by and large have been entrusted with responsibility for the deeper and therefore much more hidden achievements of our daily lives and, even more perhaps, for the small and ordinary needs of our daily lives. To the woman who points out "They have no wine" is entrusted the enormous responsibility of attending to those who have no food, no water, no clothing, no shelter, no family, no friends. Le Fort beautifully sums up the true role of the motherly woman when she says: As the motherly woman feeds the hungry, so also does she console the afflicted. The weak and the guilty, the neglected and the persecuted, even the justly punished, all those whom a judicial world no longer wishes to support and protect, find their ultimate rights vindicated in the consolation and compassion that the maternal woman gives. For her the words of Antigone will always be valid: "Not to hate, but to love with you, am I here."8

Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Misstrauen, Verdacht (Feminismus) - Vertrauen (Maria); Redemptoris Mater

Kurzinhalt: It is precisely Mary's faith which marks the beginning of the new and eternal Covenant of God with man in Jesus Christ; this heroic faith of hers "precedes" the apostolic witness of the Church ...

Textausschnitt: Chapter Seven -- Feminist Suspicion vs. Marian Trust

145a Pope John Paul II's encyclical on Mary, Redemptoris Mater (RM) , identifies Mary with the "Life of the Pilgrim Church". Her role in this regard is strikingly summarized in a single passage of the document, where John Paul II notes,

It is precisely Mary's faith which marks the beginning of the new and eternal Covenant of God with man in Jesus Christ; this heroic faith of hers "precedes" the apostolic witness of the Church, and ever remains in the Church's heart, hidden like a special heritage of God's revelation. All those who from generation to generation accept the apostolic witness of the Church share in the mysterious inheritance and in a sense share in Mary's faith (RM 27). (Fs)

145b This passage is particularly important for two reasons. First, the Pope identifies the inauguration of the New Covenant with Mary's Fiat, thereby underscoring the fact that the covenant brought fully into existence by Christ's death on the cross is not solely his work, but also involves the complementarity and cooperation of the "woman" (Jn 2:4, 19:26-27). (Fs) (notabene)

145c Second, the Pope points out that Mary's journey of faith "precedes" the apostolic witness of the Church and is shared by all who respond to that witness. In so doing, the Pope suggests that Mary's "non-apostolic" role (in the strict sense of the term) not only precedes but also in some sense provides the necessary foundation for such witness. Those sent out to baptize all nations do so for the purpose of drawing all of humanity back in to the heart, i.e., the faith, of the Church, which is in reality a share in Mary's faith. (Fs)

145d The Pope does not stop there, however. He goes on to make an extraordinary observation about God's relationship to Mary. First, he notes that the Church places great trust in Mary and then adds that "it must be recognized that before anyone else it was God himself, the Eternal Father, who entrusted himself to the Virgin of Nazareth, giving her his own Son in the mystery of the Incarnation" (RM 39). The Eternal Father entrusted his Son to Mary. Mary placed her faith in God, and the Father, in turn, placed his Son in her care. This is an extraordinary act of reciprocity between Creator and creature. (Fs)

146a Did Mary prove trustworthy? Here we have the testimony not of the Father, who entrusted the Son, but of the Son himself, who at the culmination of his hour, from the cross, entrusts to her his fledgling Church (Jn 19:26-27). It is significant that the beloved disciple, who stands for the community of believers, is entrusted to Mary before she is entrusted to him. As the Pope points out, "The redeemer entrusts Mary to John because he entrusts John to Mary. At the foot of the cross there begins that special entrusting of humanity to the Mother of Christ, which in the history of the Church has been practiced and expressed in different ways" (RM 45). (Fs)

146b This theme of "entrusting" is, in the Pope's encyclical, important for the light it sheds on Mary's role in the life of her Son and in the mission of the Church. But it is also important for the light it sheds on the role women in general are called to play in the lives of their children and in the mission of the Church. For it is precisely as the one to whom God entrusted his Son that the Pope sees Mary as illuminating the value and significance of the female: "The figure of Mary of Nazareth sheds light on womanhood as such by the very fact that God, in the sublime event of the Incarnation of his Son, entrusted himself to the ministry, the free and active ministry of a woman" (RM46). (Fs)

Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Maria; Mutterschaft (materia; Relation zw. 2 Personen) - Vaterschaft (sancuts, hagios, abgetrennt); AT: Nt - Patriarchen : Maria als Mutter (Ordnung. Gnade); Unterschied: Glaube - Philosophie; Christus (Wahrheit) - Maria (Vertrauen)

Kurzinhalt: For what distinguishes the New Covenant from the Old is, above all, the immediacy of God's presence among us from within the created material order itself... In the Hebrew liturgy, the patriarches are invoked, as the Blessed Virgin is in the Christian...

Textausschnitt: ENTRUSTING: THE ESSENCE OF MOTHERHOOD

146c Why does the Pope identify "entrusting" as that which defines the importance not only of Mary, but also of women in general? First, the Pope stresses the fact that Mary's vocation is defined by her motherhood. As he puts it, "Mary's Motherhood ... constitutes the first and fundamental dimension of that mediation which the Church confesses and proclaims in her regard" (RM 39). Second, the Pope takes up the meaning of motherhood itself. According to him, "Of the essence of motherhood is the fact that it concerns the person. Motherhood always establishes a unique and unrepeatable relationship between two people: between mother and child and between child and mother" (RM 45). (Fs)

147a It is precisely because motherhood establishes a relationship between the mother and the child which is "unique and unrepeatable" that Mary's role in salvation can be characterized as "special and extraordinary" (RM 38). As his mother, she enjoys a relationship with Christ which cannot be duplicated in the life of anyone else. At the same time, however, and according to the Pope, her role as the mother to whom this child—and later the beloved disciple—would be entrusted tells us what "entrusting" means. As John Paul II put it, "such entrusting is the response to a person's love, and in particular to the love of a mother" (RM 45). (Fs)

147b To say that God entrusted his Son to her is to say that he entrusted his Son to the love which Mary would give precisely as his mother. And to say that Christ entrusted all of humanity to her is to say that he has entrusted us to the love which Mary continues to give as a mother. It is remarkable to think of both the Father and the Son entrusting themselves to this woman, but, beyond that, the Pope's identification of motherhood with entrusting is extraordinary from another point of view. For it raises a very interesting question for us. If "entrusting" has to do with "the response to a person's love", why does the Pope specify that person as a mother? Why not identify that person either as a father, namely, the Eternal Father himself, who "so loved the world that he gave his only Son" (Jn 3:16), or as Christ, whose love was so great that he laid down his life for his friends? The value and significance of Mary in particular and of women in general lies, I think, in the answer to that twofold question. (Fs) (notabene)

147c Why is it that entrusting does not, at least in its most basic form, refer to the relationship which exists between a father and a child, or, more specifically, between the Eternal Father in heaven and his children here on earth? To put it another way, what is the difference between fatherhood and motherhood which requires that we identify "entrusting" more with the love of a mother than with the love of a father? The answer, I believe, lies in the difference between that distancing which is implied by fatherhood, as contrasted with that immediacy which is associated with motherhood. As Walter Ong notes in his work on male consciousness, Fighting for Life, "Masculinity stands in the human psyche for a kind of otherness, difference."1 For that reason, Ong makes this observation about God: "He is likened to the masculine not because he has a masculine physical constitution, but because he is a source of existence that is other, different, separated (kadosh, the Hebrew word translated sanctus, hagios, 'holy', means at root 'separated') from all his creation, even from human beings, though they are "made in his image and likeness'."2

148a This otherness, or difference, is of course related to the fact that God is by nature pure spirit, whereas we are embodied or material beings. But distance, or so it would seem, in some fashion defines the Father, since even when God becomes human or embodied, it is not the Father who comes in Person, but the Son who is "sent" by the Father. The Father who "sends" remains, to some degree at least, in the distance. (Fs)

148b Motherhood, on the other hand, is never directly attributed to God, but only to human beings. Indeed, both Eve and Mary would seem in some fashion to be defined in their very being as mothers, Eve as "Mother of all living" (Gen 3:20) and Mary as Mother of God. The revelation would indicate that the fullness of motherhood is properly found in women, whereas the fullness of fatherhood is found only in God ("Call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven" [Mt 23:9]). The fullness of motherhood found in Mary corresponds to the fullness of fatherhood found not in Joseph, but in God the Father. (Fs) (notabene)

148c The reason motherhood belongs properly to the creature rather than to the Creator seems clear. For, as Karl Stern, a psychiatrist and convert to Catholicism, noted, "Woman, in her being, is deeply committed to bios, to nature itself. The words for mother and matter, for mater and materia are etymologically related."3

148d The statement, "The Father sent the Son", refers to that moment when the Son became incarnate. "The Father sent the Son" is simply another way of saying that the Father entrusted his Son to the materia or materiality of his creation in the only way he could be entrusted, by way of a mater or mother. Indeed, while it is true that Mary is unique because to her God entrusted his only-begotten Son, the fact remains that God entrusts to a mother every child he creates, for mothers provide the only entrance any child has into this world. Human fathers, on the other hand, necessarily share, to some degree, in the distance which separates God the Father from each human child. As Ong has pointed out,

Among higher forms of life, above the egg-laying species, the male's physical relationship to his offspring is distinctly distanced. The male reproductive cell becomes effectively reproductive when it is totally detached from the male's body and joins the cell that, in the higher forms of life, remains attached to the female. Fathers are essentially distant from offspring physically. They can even be dead and buried when the child is being formed and is born.4

149a Because motherhood is bound up with materiality per se, the Pope is quite right to see Mary's Fiat as the moment in which the New Covenant is inaugurated. For what distinguishes the New Covenant from the Old is, above all, the immediacy of God's presence among us from within the created material order itself. In this sense, the Old Testament is properly symbolized by the male patriarchs and prophets, while the New is best symbolized by Mary herself. For, as Stern notes,

The Prophetic—all that which points towards the Incarnation—is the male. In the Hebrew liturgy, the patriarches are invoked, as the Blessed Virgin is in the Christian. The remote foreknowledge of that which one will neither see nor touch, is the paternal.... And it is with the Incarnation as an historical fact that the Blessed Virgin becomes the prototype of faith. Here, contrary to the faith of the prophets, faith achieves the immediacy of certitude, in that carnal link with being which is at the core of all womanhood. (Fs)

150a Motherhood lies at the center of the New Covenant, because the Father entrusts his Son to a mother. But, in point of fact and as noted earlier, God entrusts every child of his making to a mother. Each of us, by our very creation, is forced, as it were, to trust the mother to whom God has entrusted us. As Stern has observed, the paradox of being human resides in the fact that, while we are the summit of God's creation, each one of us must, in order to enter this life, pass through a period of "utter helplessness and dependence". We must trust our mothers for the simple reason that we are given, literally, no alternatives. For that reason alone, as Stern points out, "faith grows out of the relation of child and mother".5 Father, whether divine or human, lies off in the distance, beyond mother. (Fs)

150b If our relationship with God the Father does not supply the most basic instance of "entrusting", it is because we are material beings who must first be "entrusted" to a mother before there is any possibility of our coming to know our father, whether human or divine. And, for the same reason, of course, our relationship with Christ also cannot supply the most basic instance of "entrusting", inasmuch as we must also necessarily trust our mothers before we are in a position to entrust ourselves to Christ. We must, in other words, be born of flesh and blood before we can be born of water and the Spirit. No one can enter into the New Covenant by way of baptism who has not first entered into the world by way of a woman. (Fs)

150c But what about the importance of motherhood within the New Covenant? Given the fact that the Son was sent precisely that he might mediate God to us in the material immediacy of his own humanity, surely no further maternal, material mediation is required. Surely, within the order of grace, entrusting ourselves to the love of Christ is the most basic instance of "entrusting" we now experience. Surely Christ, the one mediator between God and man, does not himself require further mediation. (Fs) (notabene)

151a As plausible as this might sound, it is not, of course, the position of the Church, nor of this Pope. Mary remains mother to us "in the order of grace", and entrusting, even within the New Covenant, according to John Paul II, continues to find its most basic expression in response to a mother's love. Why this should be so brings us, I think, to the core of the role the female is called to play in our salvation. (Fs)

151b A child is entrusted to a mother for two basic reasons. First, because vulnerable and dependent, the child's survival depends upon his mother, always in those months between conception and birth, and for most children in the first few years after birth. Second, a child is entrusted to a mother in order that he might, through her, come to know the larger world into which he must himself someday go. Motherhood is, in the strictest sense of the word, mediation, for mothers are always called to point their children beyond themselves, not only spatially into the world and relationally into the community of other people but also temporally into the maturity of adulthood. Women are called to bear men and women into the world. (Fs)

151c Mothers are therefore the first and, generally, the most influential guides children are given in this world. Children are entrusted to mothers, in order that mothers might enable children to entrust themselves to others, initially their fathers, and, of course, ultimately their Eternal Father. And since not all people or things are trustworthy, children also depend on their mothers to inform them of and protect them from anyone or anything which might harm them. The child is entrusted to his mother in order that he might know, beyond her, what can and cannot be trusted. Although mothers may not have the power to command enjoyed by fathers, they are the primary mediators of reality in a child's life.6 (Fs)

152a Mothers, it might therefore be said, stand for the realm of trust, first, in the sense that the survival of children depends primarily on the trustworthiness of mothers, and second, in the sense that mothers, more than any other persons in our lives, are expected to be able to distinguish, beyond themselves, what can be trusted from what cannot. Indeed, in a larger sense, the female per se would seem to stand for the realm of trust. This, at least, would appear to be the reason why, back in the garden of Eden, the serpent approaches Eve rather than Adam. For the serpent, as John Paul II points out in Redemptoris Mater, is the "father of lies" who sows "suspicion" in the heart of Eve. The serpent's intent is to direct her trust away from God's command and toward his own interpretation of that command. She is seduced into concluding that the serpent is more to be trusted than is God, and Adam clearly relies on her judgment, to his grief and ours. (Fs)

152b Mary, the new Eve, provides the antithesis to Eve's refusal. As John Paul II notes, "In contrast with the 'suspicion' which the 'father of lies' sowed in the heart of Eve the first woman, Mary, whom tradition is wont to call the 'new Eve' and the true 'Mother of the living,' boldly proclaims the undimmed truth about God: the holy and almighty God, who from the beginning is the source of all gifts, he who 'has done great things' in her, as well as in the whole universe" (RM 37). (Fs)

152c Mary, because she entrusted herself to the truth of God, was herself trustworthy. Hence, the Father was able to entrust his only Son to her. Mary's Fiat, however, was not an end in itself but was ultimately directed to the Son being able to entrust humanity to her, as our mother in the order of grace. For, as the Pope points out, "This filial relationship, this self-entrusting of a child to its mother, not only has its beginning in Christ but can also be said to be definitively directed toward him. Mary can be said to continue to say to each individual the words which she spoke at Cana in Galilee: 'Do whatever he tells you' " (RM46). (Fs)

152d That Mary is so crucial to the scheme of things tells us that materiality is just as crucial to the scheme of things. We can see this at a glance by looking at one of the primary differences between philosophy and faith. (Fs)

153a All of the great philosophers of the world have sought the truth of things. And because they have identified truth with abstract knowledge, they have sought to reason their way to it. In so doing, they have bypassed the female. For abstract knowledge is neither personal nor material. It is abstract precisely because it has detached itself from both. And abstractions, as Karl Rahner observed, require no mother.7 (Fs)

153b Christ, on the other hand, tells us that he is the truth—not, mind you, that he has the truth, but that he is the truth. The truth, therefore, the ultimate truth of things, is neither impersonal nor immaterial. And for this reason, the truth does require a mother. In other words, reality (as noted in Chapter 2) is not abstract but incarnational. (Fs) (notabene)

153c By the same token, reason is not sufficient to bring us to the truth. For, in the final analysis, truth in the Person of Jesus Christ requires not just that we recognize it, not just that we make use of it, as we would of abstract knowledge, but that we surrender ourselves to it. We are called to entrust ourselves to Christ. But how is such entrusting possible? Reason alone does not suffice, for reason alone produces only impersonal knowledge. What we require is a different kind of knowledge, the kind which arises not out of abstract reasoning, but out of the intimacy of personal relationship. This knowledge, connatural as opposed to rational, is essential if we are to recognize the truth of Jesus Christ. And as Stern points out, "knowledge by connaturality originates in the child-mother relationship".8 (Fs)

153d Mary is our most reliable guide to Christ, the person in the best position to attest to the truth of Christ, precisely because she is his mother. She knows this Son of hers as no one else among us possibly can. And because God was able to entrust his only Son to her, her Son has been able to entrust us to her guidance. When Mary counsels every one of us to "Do whatever he tells you", she is assuring us that we can entrust ourselves to him. By so doing, she invites everyone of us to do what is, in the created order, the supremely female thing, namely, to surrender ourselves to another. As Stern has noted, "A woman's love, that divine surrender of her ultra-inner being which the impassioned woman makes, is perhaps the only thing which is not achieved by reasoning."9

154a If Christ is the truth, Mary is the trust. And the truth, because personal and material, cannot be efficacious in our world unless we entrust ourselves to him. For that reason Christ requires the female mediation of his mother, for only a mother can offer us the assurance we require that we can not only believe what he says, but also safely entrust ourselves to the Person he is. For that reason, Mary's motherhood can be said to extend to all human beings, since all human beings require the assurance of this woman who is uniquely the Mother of God. (Fs)

154b The Pope, however—and as we have seen—insists that all women share in this ministry which Christ has entrusted to Mary. What concretely does that mean for women today? What are women especially called to do?

Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Mutterschaft - Abtreibung, Verhütung, Kultur des Todes;

Kurzinhalt: The only way ... to subvert a culture of death is to embrace freely and joyfully the hierarchy or sacred order of the sacrament of marriage by which man is able to become the living image of God and thus sustain within this world the trinitarian ...

Textausschnitt: A CULTURE OF LIFE OR DEATH?

164b The watershed issue of our society today is abortion, for whether or not we accept it tells us whether or not we are prepared to accept death itself as a tool of social policy and as a means of solving social problems. Accused of being obsessed by the issue of abortion, Pope John Paul II recently responded:

... I categorically reject every accusation or suspicion concerning the Pope's alleged 'obsession' with this issue. We are dealing with a problem of tremendous importance, in which all of us must show the utmost responsibility and vigilance. We cannot afford forms of permissiveness that would lead directly to the trampling of human rights, and also to the complete destruction of values which are fundamental not only for the lives of individuals and families but for society itself. Isn't there a sad truth in the powerful expression culture of death?1

165a When the freedom of some human beings is upheld by bringing about the deliberate death of other, innocent human beings, freedom itself becomes simply another form of tyranny. (Fs)

Abortion gives the lie to the notion that freedom can be the right to do anything we wish as long as we don't hurt anybody else. The lie resides and always has resided in the fact that those who claim the right to do as they wish also reserve for themselves the right to define what hurts others. Those who claim the freedom to abort also claim the right to define out of existence those whom they abort and thus deny that anyone has been hurt. (Fs) (notabene)

165b In the movie Gettysburg, one of the soldiers fighting for the South asks a northern officer why those in the North cannot just live and let live. A lot of fuss would be avoided, he says, if only the two sides could simply agree to disagree. The problem, of course, is that to let live those Southerners who own slaves is to allow those Southerners to live and to exercise their freedom at the expense of those slaves. One simply cannot live and let live when it involves letting some live at the expense of the freedom and lives of others. (Fs)

165c For Catholics, however, the roots of a culture of death strike deeper than abortion. The watershed issue for Catholics is not abortion but contraception. For contraception places before us the central issue of our age—who has dominion over man? Man himself or God? In Genesis, God gave man dominion over nature (Gen 1:28), but he reserved dominion over man to himself, as exemplified in his one command to Adam and Eve. Is the human body a part of that realm over which God gave man dominion, or is the human body indissociable from the human being over whom God reserved dominion for himself? That is the unavoidable question raised by contraception. To divorce sex from procreation is to divorce man from his role as co-creator with God in order to set man up as the sole lord of even his own existence. It is to reduce sex to the level of a simple biological function which, as such, belongs to the nature over which man has dominion. In doing this, man gives himself the warrant to define for himself what is good and what is evil in all matters pertaining to sex—and thus to life and death. To the man, and even more the woman, who claims contraceptive control over his or her own body, abortion is but the logical and even necessary corollary to such a notion of control. (Fs) (notabene)

166a Because contraception involves us in a false assertion of freedom vis-a-vis God, by claiming a prerogative which rightly belongs to God, and because abortion involves us in a false assertion of freedom vis-a-vis both God and other human beings, by taking a life which God has given to another person, women, who are the primary target of those advocating contraception and abortion, must take the lead in renouncing the culture of death which such techniques produce. Women must recognize within themselves that unique capacity for giving life which defined Eve as "mother of all living" and Mary as Mother of God. A culture of death can prevail only at the expense of motherhood itself, and women must work to see that the female capacity to conceive and bear children is not treated as somehow disordered or flawed. (Fs)

166b This means two things above all else. It means, first, that women must actively resist that contraceptive mentality which supposes that the chemical suppression of the capacity of a normally-functioning female body to conceive a child or the physical disruption by barrier methods of the marital act itself are good things. It means, second, that women must actively combat that attitude which suggests that the woman who does actually conceive a child might be regarded as having contracted a disease. Thinking of the female body and the marital act as flawed and therefore in need of a contraceptive "fix" and viewing pregnancy as a disease in need of the "cure" of abortion are two of the most vicious aspects of a culture of death. Without these mistaken concepts, no such culture could ever flourish. (Fs)

166c If women must take the lead here, this does not mean that men have no role to play. Indeed, a culture centered on contraception and abortion works in the final analysis as much against fatherhood as against motherhood, for it strikes at marriage and the family precisely because it divorces freedom from love and that responsibility which is intrinsic to love. As the Pope points out, "Responsible parenthood is the necessary condition for human love, and it is also the necessary condition for authentic conjugal love, because love cannot be irresponsible. Its beauty is the fruit of responsibility. When love is truly responsible, it is also truly free."2

167a The only way, in short, to subvert a culture of death is to embrace freely and joyfully the hierarchy or sacred order of the sacrament of marriage by which man is able to become the living image of God and thus sustain within this world the trinitarian order with which God has invested it and without which there can be only a world of tyranny and a culture of death. But this means something else of which both Vatican II and the current Pope have been most insistent. This means the laity must assume a much greater responsibility for the mission of the Church in this world. (Fs)

Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Pantheon vs. katholische Kirche; katholisch (Wortbedeutung: katha, holis), universal (3 Weisen); Laien

Kurzinhalt: As lay people seek new ways to renew the Catholic faith, they ought to keep before them the three ways in which their faith is "catholic" or universal.

Textausschnitt: THE ROMAN PANTHEON OR THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH?

168a The temptation to "inclusivity" is not new. The Roman Empire was quite content to embrace in an altogether inclusive fashion the gods of every people and tribe and ensconce them within the Pantheon alongside the gods of Rome. The Jews and later the Christians refused to allow the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to be subsumed into the Pantheon. Because of this refusal, we are forever indebted to them. (Fs)

168b Today the temptation is offered again, this time in the form of a multicultural inclusivity which would reduce the Trinity to one "expression of ultimate concern" among many and the Catholic faith to one "belief system" in a world awash in belief systems. The question before us is whether we are going to let our faith be subsumed into today's multicultural pantheon of the gods, or whether we are going to challenge the nihilism of that pantheon with the good news of Jesus Christ. (Fs)

168c As lay people seek new ways to renew the Catholic faith, they ought to keep before them the three ways in which their faith is "catholic" or universal. It is universal in that all are called to be united with God through Jesus Christ. Traditionally this has meant seeking to convert as many people as possible to the Catholic faith. But the faith is also universal in the sense that the truth of Jesus Christ, the truth of the revelation, is true for everyone in every age and culture. This means that everyone and every culture can benefit from this truth, even if not every person or culture is converted to it. For this reason the Pope speaks of the "dialogue of salvation" begun by Vatican II, as intended for the whole world. "Truth, in fact, cannot be confined. Truth is for one and for all."1 (Fs)

169a And this brings us to the third sense in which the Church is universal. "Catholic" comes from two Greek words, kata, meaning "throughout", and holis, meaning "whole". That the Church is "catholic" means that the Church should influence the whole or penetrate the whole of society. Christ used the images of leaven and salt to express this characteristic of the Kingdom of God which is the Church. In this understanding of "catholic", what is important is not so much that everyone become Catholic as that the faith act as a leaven which raises up the whole society or as the salt which gives flavor to every culture it seasons. If the Church is to be catholic in this sense, the laity must make it happen. They are the only ones in a position to make the Catholic faith, in their homes, neighborhoods and jobs, felt throughout the whole of any society in which they live. (Fs) (notabene)

169b I have cited several times here Crossing the Threshold of Hope, because by this unprecedented book, John Paul II has sought to speak directly to every member of the Church and indeed every person in the world. He recognizes that the world needs now, perhaps more than ever, the truth of Jesus Christ. And he recognizes as well that if that truth is to be extended to the whole of the world, lay people must be its primary bearers. (Fs)

169c The revelation is definitive, as the Pope says. And the Pope himself is a symbol of that choice which each person, faced with the revelation, must make. But every lay person can also be the bearer of that revelation, and every lay person, by what he believes and how he acts, can also be a symbol of the choice which must be made. In Crossing the Threshold of Hope, the Pope offers many reasons why we might hope. He also makes it abundantly clear that much of his hope resides in the very people to whom the book is addressed. It remains to us to ensure that his hope is indeed well-placed. (Fs)

Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Nihilismus, Nihilist(4 Möglichkeiten):

Kurzinhalt: The second choice is the "I can do anything I want" style liberation ...The third choice is despair unto death ... The fourth choice is conversion away from the circularity of pleasure and despair into the linearity of love and responsibility.

Textausschnitt: 192b The movie also reflects real life, because our salvation or damnation lies in how we respond to ordinary existence. Phil lives out the four choices available to everyone living in a nihilistic society such as ours. The first, anxiety and distress, is perhaps what Thoreau had in mind when he spoke of how most people live lives of "quiet desperation". Our therapeutic society exists in large part to cater to the needs of such people, without solving the problem at all. The second choice is the "I can do anything I want" style liberation, with its demands for immediate gratification which lead inevitably into crimes and misdemeanors. This, of course, we see working itself out around us in the abuse of a variety of things, most especially sex and drugs. The third choice is despair unto death, and this includes not only everyone who actively takes his life but everyone who gives up on life (Phil incessantly watching Jeopardy manifests despair just as much as does Phil electrocuting himself in the bathtub). The fourth choice is conversion away from the circularity of pleasure and despair into the linearity of love and responsibility. (Fs)