Notes: Thursday-Monday, January 13-17, 2011

1. Some figures on attitudes of mothers towards paid work

From the on-line version of an article which expands on a shorter article which I read in the Sydney Daily Telegraph last week:

... a British survey has found nearly two-thirds of women would love to find a husband with a bigger pay packet than theirs to allow them to care for their kids full time.

The YouGov survey of 922 women found 55 per cent of respondents would like to be home with their children full time if money were not an issue.

And 60 per cent said they felt pressured by society to go out and work.

[...] "Research evidence consistently shows most mothers would prefer not to have competing demands of family work and paid jobs," Dr [Catherine] Hakim said.

Her report arrives as the biggest Australian survey of parents in decades has found a third of women would like to work less, and two-thirds thought working made them less effective as a parent.

But only about 15 per cent of women could afford to be at home full time because their partner earned enough money to support them.

The Australian Institute of Family Studies' Growing Up in Australia study of 10,000 children and their parents shows two-thirds of mothers with four to eight-year-olds worked 20 to 30 hours a week.

Two thirds of these women enjoyed work and thought it made them a good role model for their kids, but they didn't always find it compatible with family life, and would prefer to work less.

[...] Jenny Baxter, Australian Institute of Family Studies senior research fellow, said women might like the idea of being at home full-time, especially if they had young children.

"But many women are highly educated and like working, and would worry about financial dependency given thehigh rate of relationship breakdown," Ms Baxter said.
[http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/mothers-hanker-for-husbands-of-wealth/story-fn6bmg6l-1225985375979]

Labels: families, parenthood, social trends, work

2. Some observations about Mme. Le Pen

If I'm not mistaken, Msgr. Lefebvre regarded M. Jean-Marie Le Pen as the 'least-worst' altervative among French politicians with realistic chances of electoral success. I'm not sure that he would have the same regard for M. Le Pen's daughter and likely successor as leader of the National Front:

She has campaigned against immigration and Brussels but favours a woman's right to have an abortion. She also advocates the return of the death penalty. In a more sober style than her father she has denounced “fundamentalist Catholics” and “those obsessed by the Holocaust”.

“Marine Le Pen portrays herself as a lawyer, a mother, twice-divorced, very liberal on issues like abortion or homosexuality,” said Sylvain Crepon, a sociologist at West-Nanterre University.

“She can woo the working and middle classes, who are worried about crime and immigration and who used to see the National Front as too conservative.”
[http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/daughter-to-succeed-french-far-right-leader-jean-marie-le-pen/story-e6frg6so-1225988872315]

Labels: Marine Le Pen

3. An interesting discussion at Fr. Zuhlsdorf's blog

With some suprising contributions, such as the first red-coloured interpolation in this comment, by Fr. Zuhlsdorf:

http://wdtprs.com/blog/2011/01/sspx-bp-fellay-criticizes-benedict-xvi-about-assisi-meeting/#comments

Labels: John Zuhlsdorf, Papacy, theology

4. Dr. Sudlow is blogging again

http://thesensiblebond.blogspot.com/2010/08/sensible-bond-returns.html

Labels: blogs, Brian Sudlow

5. "Ha'aretz says U.S. officials face 'pro-Israel' background check"

http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/12/04/haaretz_says_us_officials_face_pro_israel_background_check

(brought to my attention by this AQ comment)

Labels: State of Israel

6. Cardinal Pell and the so-called Catholic Charismatic Renewal (C.C.R.)

I was interested to read the following in Msgr. Coleridge's eulogy for the late Lord Bishop of Sandhurst (may he rest in peace):

A sign that things were changing in the Church came when Archbishop Pell chose Joe to be spiritual director of the seminary, an appointment which surprised some who either didn’t know Joe or who underestimated him.
[http://www.dow.org.au/news/death-of-bishop-joe-grech]

I did not know that Cardinal Pell endorsed the C.C.R. so strongly as to appoint one of its major local figures to such a position.

Labels: C.C.R., George Pell

7. Ms Legge on so-called gay marriage

Excerpts (I don't have time to comment on them, unfortunately, so I'm just saving here for future reference the excerpts of most interest to me):

... But when a son or a daughter or a brother or a sister or a niece or a nephew turns out to be gay there’s an inevitable mellowing of suspicion and prejudice. Is there a grandparent on the planet who would spurn a soft, warm bundle of kinship, however tangled the threads?

[...] Days after Liberal frontbencher Malcolm Turnbull spoke against gay marriage, he began to equivocate. He now acknowledges he’s “open” to persuasion. ...

[...] That’s how Tasmanian gay activist Rodney Croome explains the desire for marriage amongst a younger cohort he calls “the Family Law Act generation”. ... The institution of marriage has evolved through no-fault divorce and the rise of de facto relationships. ...

[...] Marriage matters to ["Alex Grimshaw, 30, spokesman for Australian Marriage Equality"]: “It’s important for equality, the symbolism, because it allows us to be more comfortable with who we are.”

[...] Frank Bates, emeritus Professor of Law at Newcastle University, can’t see what’s wrong with another shift to account for the rise of same-sex relationships. Originally seen as a means of securing property rights, marriage became invested with romantic and emotional baggage in the 19th century. “There’s nothing magical about the Marriage Act – it’s just another piece of legislation,” says Bates. ...

[...] Concerns at how these offspring will fare may not be resolved until a generation are well into adulthood. A US study that followed 78 children raised by lesbian mothers for 17 years reported last June that these adolescents demonstrated healthy psychological adjustment. But critics have challenged the veracity of these results. The academic arena is so heavily politicised that one Australian academic who has reviewed the scientific literature for state parliamentary reviews examining same-sex couple adoption now begs anonymity because of the abuse he’s copped for pointing out methodological flaws in the research. He believes work on the children raised in these families is embryonic and suffers from bad science and bias.

Little is known about the impact of donor anonymity on children’s welfare. Much depends on the individual personality of the child and the stability of their adult relationships. There is no rulebook; each couple devises strategies to suit their needs. Australian researcher Dr Ruth McNair shares a three-year-old son, Sam, with her lesbian partner. Sam knows the identity of the man who helped his mothers conceive. The man visits from time to time. Sam calls him by his first name. Eilis Hughes of the Melbourne based Rainbow Families Council says her daughter Drew enjoys frequent contact with the biological father she calls “Dad”. The Mok children can access the identity of their donor father when they turn 17. The Luiciani-Crouts say they have chosen anonymity to limit problems and confusion for their daughter. The Fergusons were concerned to avoid donor intervention down the track.

[...] The couples I interviewed try very hard to bring a mix of genders into their family circle so that male or female family and friends counter the imbalance in their household. Megan and Leanne Ferguson held a “naming ceremony” for baby James where guests were invited to contribute to his lifelong education. ...
[http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/we-are-family/story-e6frg8h6-1225986408817]

Labels: families, G.L.B.T., marriage, morality, parenthood, social trends

Feast of St. Anthony, Abbot, A.D. 2011

H.H. The Pope on religious liberty

According to the Vatican Information Service (V.I.S.) e-mail bulletin for October 2, 2008, H.H. The Pope told the Ordinaries of Kazakhstan and Central Asia that

the force of law must never itself become iniquity, nor can the free exercise of religion be limited, because freely to profess one's faith is a fundamental and universally-recognised human right".

Benedict XVI highlighted how "the Church does not impose but freely proposes the Catholic faith, well aware that conversion is the mysterious fruit of the action of the Holy Spirit. Faith is a gift and a work of God, and hence excludes any form of proselytism that forces, allures or entices people by trickery to embrace it. A person may open to the faith after mature and responsible reflection, and must be able freely to realise that intimate aspiration. This benefits not only the individual, but all society, because the faithful observance of divine precepts helps to build a more just and united form of coexistence".
(my emphasis)

Note His Holiness’ very careful choice of words in the highlighted portion of the first quoted paragraph. To say that “everyone has a natural right to the free exercise of religion” (call this proposition A) is not erroneous, since it does not specify the object of this right. But if one were to add the words ‘any’ and ‘whether Catholic or non-Catholic’, so that the proposition becomes “everyone has a natural right to the free exercise of any religion, whether Catholic or non-Catholic” (call this proposition B), then this would indeed be erroneous. It is the diction of proposition A, as one finds in Dignitatis Humanæ, that has got me wondering whether Dr. Sudlow was right when he said that

I see no reason why a confessional State and religious liberty, not in the Enlightenment sense but as understood by Dignitatis Humanae, cannot be reconciled http://thesensiblebond.blogspot.com/2008/07/confessions-of-nobody-or-why-i-quit.html

and that in fact it was Fr. Murray who was wrong when he inferred, in the commentary to his translation of Dignitatis Humanæ, that

The Church does not make, as a matter of right or divine law, the claim that she should be established as ‘the religion of the state’

and that

The freedoms listed here are those which the Catholic Church claims for herself. The Declaration likewise claims those for all Churches and religious communities.
(both quotations from The Second Vatican Council and Religious Liberty by Mr. Michael Davies)

One might object that the Holy Father’s reference to ‘freely professing one’s faith’ is problematic, but this need not be the case. ‘One’s faith’ can still mean either Catholic or non-Catholic faith.

Nonetheless, the problem of imprecision and misemphasis remains. It’s like saying ‘it is not sinful to do servile work on the weekend’; the statement can be true or false depending on the object i.e. it is false to say that ‘it is not sinful to work on either day of the weekend, whether Saturday or Sunday.”

As for the second highlighted portion, this is not at all in doubt, but unfortunately the straw man of ‘confessional State implies forced belief’ (usually invoked by Americanists) crops up all too frequently in discussions on religious liberty. See, for example, the following discussion at Fr. Zuhlsdorf’s blog:

http://wdtprs.com/blog/2008/07/scholion-benedicts-address-to-non-catholic-christian-leaders/

If I find the time I might do a post in which I elaborate on the question of subjective vs. objective rights in Dignitatis Humanæ.

Reginaldvs Cantvar

Rebuttal of “Confessions of a Nobody or why I quit the SSPX milieu”

In his lengthy blog post, entitled “Confessions of a Nobody or why I quit the SSPX milieu”, Dr. Brian Sudlow explains some of his reasons for disaffiliating himself from the S.S.P.X., as well as offering some impressions of his experiences in this connection. But his reasons for this departure are inadequate and at times contradictory, failing apparently to grasp the extent of the post-Vatican II emergency situation, underestimating the importance of the Sense of the Faith and the objectivity of Tradition, and ignoring the extent to which liturgical abuses have followed naturally from the re-orientation of the liturgy (as well as the humanist/modernist subtext to the new liturgy).

Dr. Sudlow takes for his starting point the notion that, according to Fr. Paul Aulagnier, “on their current course, the SSPX were on, or risked following, a schismatic trajectory”. This seems to me an odd way to begin, since any number of Dioceses in the past forty years have been on such a ‘schismatic trajectory’, and when Traditionalists in those Dioceses have decided to cease their involvement in these Dioceses they can expect accusations of ‘fleeing the fight’ from accomodationists. Why, then, did Dr. Sudlow not remain with the S.S.P.X. and try to reign in any imagined schismatical tendencies?

Dr. Sudlow lists a few of what I think are the more trivial post-Conciliar aberrations as blinding him to this ‘schismatic trajectory’. But these are mere symptoms of the underlying cause of the catastrophic post-Conciliar emergency situation, namely, Vatican II’s overall re-orientation from God towards man, inaugurating a veritable ‘Cult of Man’, a humanism with some Catholic trappings. The key features of this re-orientation are:

• man created as an end in himself
• Christ incarnated to ‘show men how to be truly human’
• re-orientation of the Priesthood from being primarily sacrificial to primarily pastoral
• re-orientation of the Mass from a Holy Sacrifice to a community meal
• re-orientation of marriage from child-bearing to ‘companionship’

The advance of this humanism through the Church is, for me, key to understanding the state of necessity and the clouding of His late Holiness John Paul II’s intellect which rendered him virtually morally inaccessible. We see this in his all-too-frequent basing of his teachings on ‘human dignity’ (in line with Vatican II) rather than the glory of God. (Especially odd, given that most Westerners still do believe in God, and his first duty is to ‘feed his sheep’, the Catholic faithful, anyway.) As this Cult of Man marches through the Church we can only expect the probability of invalid Sacraments to increase over time, especially as Priests start to tinker with the very form of the Sacraments (more on this later).

It is in the nature and exercise of the Church’s Magisterium that Dr. Sudlow’s reasoning seems to me most dubious. He quotes the Rev. Canon Berthod, but ignores two of Berthod’s key points as regards the reception of that Magisterium: namely, the importance of the Sense of the Faith and the objectivity of tradition. Now to speak of the Sense of the Faith is not to fall into the error of universal assent as a requirement for Magisterial status rather than assent as a characteristic of those who have the gift of Faith, nor is it to set up a ‘rival Magisterium’, as the S.S.P.X.’s interlocuters are so keen to allege. (And surely one’s Sense of the Faith is to be trusted all the more when the teacher in question confesses that his primary aim is something extraneous to the Faith, such as appealing to non-Catholics or trying to incorporate into Tradition things that are alien to it?) As for the objectivity of Tradition, this hardly need be elaborated on, especially when some of the propositions that we see advanced during and after the Council contradict, in the manner of polar opposites, earlier teachings.

In particular, I take issue with Dr. Sudlow’s highly dubious dichotomy between the ‘Magisterium of the Teachers’ and the ‘Magisterium of the Pastors’, and an asserted priority of the latter. The Holy Ghost was sent to ‘lead us into all truth’, not to guarantee the pastoral re-orientations that are necessary with the passing of the generations. Theological dissent from Humanæ Vitæ is a bad example, since its opponents were immersed in the contraceptive mentality associated with marriage being valued primarily for the companionship involved, and was really an assertion of truth rather than caving in with what could have been (falsely) rationalised as a ‘pastoral’ concession.

Now of course, a variant on this dichotomy can be found from some opponents of the Council’s teachings in invoking a dichotomy between the pastoral and the dogmatic. But Bl. John XXIII’s description of the Council as pastoral in character is merely to forestall any doubt as to whether the fullness of his Apostolic authority was to be committed behind these teachings, reinforced by his rationale that the Council should study doctrine “thoroughly and [explain it] in the way for which our times are calling” (http://www.ad2000.com.au/articles/2008/jun2008p15_2827.html). One could well argue that these ‘new explanations’ were outdated within five years of the Council’s close.

It was inevitable that we would see the ‘hermeneutic of continuity’ invoked here. But we can hardly be expected to try to cram a blatant discontinuity into such a ‘lens’ for interpretation. The proper way to read Magisterial documents is this: with a respectful presumption that their contents belong to the ordinary and universal Magisterium. If it is unclear, then the Pope or Bishops enjoy the benefit of the doubt. But if it is clearly an innovation, then this hardly need provoke a crisis of faith. In asserting that “I see no reason why a confessional State and religious liberty, not in the Enlightenment sense but as understood by Dignitatis Humanae, cannot be reconciled”, Dr. Sudlow demonstrates just how unhelpful an ‘hermeneutic of continuity’ can be. One can only react with bewilderment when one hears of scholars working on a harmonisation of Dignitatis Humanæ and the Syllabus of Errors, or when people speak of awaiting another interpretation—the documents are supposed to be the interpretation! When the terms are known, the meaning is supposed to be clear!

Dr. Sudlow argues, based on Lumen Gentium, that

“the promulgation of teachings by the Magisterium, even if they are only part of
the authentic Magisterium, requires us to give religious assent of mind and will
to their contents. Their promulgation makes them become a kind of theological
datum which can no longer be treated as a mere theological opinion.”

Now we need firstly to be clear about what is meant by the term ‘authentic Magisterium’. If this is taken to mean, very broadly, a hierarch’s public teaching on faith and morals, then this is fairly unobjectionable. But we need to specify that this public teaching is always a matter of handing on what has been received in an unbroken line from the Apostles. And clearly, this was not the case in sizeable portions of the Vatican II documents. The then-Cardinal Ratzinger acknowledges this in ‘The Ratzinger Report’ and as quoted in Berthod’s essay. And what of statements like

“Thus in Hinduism, men contemplate the divine mystery and express it through an
inexhaustible abundance of myths and through searching philosophical inquiry.
They seek freedom from the anguish of our human condition either through
ascetical practices or profound meditation or a flight to God with love and
trust”

(Nostra Ætate, http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651028_nostra-aetate_en.html)? How can this possibly make any claim on our religious assent? And we can add to this a number of other ambiguities and inconsistencies.

As for liturgical matters, we hear the thesis that the New Mass “had to be considered as integrally Catholic in their original Latin versions.” But the Ottaviani Intervention and comparisons of the Old and New Rites, such as Fr. Franz Schmidberger’s, demonstrate amply that this is not so. The New Mass has a strong humanist/Protestant subtext, unsurprising since His late Holiness Paul VI intended thereby to reduce the ‘stumbling blocks’ to the ‘separated brethren’ that might be associated with the Old Mass. The notion that the Church’s indefectibility in sanctifying her children would guarantee the New Mass books might have had merit if the Old Mass and associated ceremonies had indeed been truly abrogated, but now H.H. The Pope in Summorum Pontificum acknowledges that this was not so! (Just as the S.S.P.X. had been arguing all along!) Surely we can infer from this that the Old Rites were suppressed unjustly, rather than the Holy Ghost abandoning us in our need for sanctification, as one might have inferred otherwise? Might we not detect the Holy Ghost’s assistance, rather, in the surprising resilience and vitality of the ‘indult communities’ and the S.S.P.X.?

Furthermore, is not the spirit of innovation (through inorganic evolution rather than true development) and improvision (numerous Eucharistic Prayers, &c.) at the core of the New Mass, and therefore we must admit that the experimentation that has been observed over the years is a natural consequence of the liturgical revolution, rather than an aberration? And we have seen this kind of experimentation not only in the Sunday Mass, but even in the rite of Baptism (quite recently, as the C.D.F. reminded us), imperilling the souls of babies.

So it is rightly then that the S.S.P.X. continues to hold out against the long march of modernism. Far from ‘privatising ecclesial thought’, they simply look to the unchanging, objective, clear teachings of the Church. And it is hard to see how an acceptance of the New Missal would not imply the potential to have to offer Mass according to it. As for their autonomous governance, clearly this need last only as long as the emergency that necessitated it.

Reginaldvs Cantvar