Why We Are Restless

Great interview by Hope Leman of Ben and Jenna Storey on their new book in my series at Princeton University Press--New Forum Books--"Why We Are Restless: On the Modern Quest for Contentment."https://t.co/VDecqjAdu4

— Robert P. George (@McCormickProf) July 2, 2021

The Quarrel Over the Subject

The Fallout from the 20th Century Quarrel Over the Subject https://t.co/k6wPRXPmBP. This is very clarifying!

— John Cavadini (@JohnCavadini) March 17, 2021

Did anyone outside of academia care?

"Modern" and "Modernity"

Writing a book on the destructive effects of shoehorning medieval International Relations into the "Great Divide" narrative. I'll be citing this excellent piece! https://t.co/zGPAaGSp6i

— Andrew A Latham (@aalatham) January 27, 2021

Cyril Hovorun. Public lecture on International Relations and Ecumenism

The recording of my public lecture, where I explore how the notions of political legitimacy and power-sharing shaped the church and its relations with the state and modern societies.https://t.co/Nje8RtECx0

— Cyril Hovorun (@cyril_hovorun) October 6, 2020

D.C. Schindler on Liberalism

D.C. Schindler does the Lord's work, locating the theological meaning of liberalism in the reduction of God to absolute potency.

This too-long-for-online essay is essential reading for anyone who would build a postliberal Christian society.https://t.co/D7nPJIOXF9

— New Polity (@PostliberalTho1) August 21, 2020

New Polity What is needed is not a philosophical analysis but a historical analysis.

Voluntarism? Nominalism?

OUP: Political Theology of International Order by William Bain

Defenses and critiques of modern politics will ultimately come back to the choice between a metaphysics of inherent order or divine fiat, so which should we choose? https://t.co/lgv4xL7DN0

— Richard Reinsch (@Reinsch84) August 28, 2020

Theological Roots of the Secular World Order by Nathaniel Peters

Did people with power and influence really believe in legal voluntarism? Or were they just acting in accordance with their appetites? Is this sort of genealogy, putting the blame on late medieval theology/philosophy for "modernity" really still useful, in comparison with a proper study of history?

Fr. Edmund Waldstein on Laudato Si'

Catholic Herald: Freedom and Connection: A reflection on Laudato si' by Fr Edmund Waldstein

I wrote something about Laudato si'. https://t.co/rcTVUz5UzM

— Pater Edmund (@sancrucensis) May 24, 2020

My comment: not every vice needs an -ism, nor is every disorder rooted first in an error of the intellect. But intellectuals love genealogy as history, and this is true of John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

Related:

Eight Popes and the Crisis of Modernity

CWR Dispatch: “The crisis of modernity” through the eyes of eight popes by Paul Senz
Russell Shaw’s new book examines how the popes of the 20th century confronted the challenges and shaped the events of late modernity.

Ignatius Press

"At the turn of the century, the pope’s temporal power was significantly diminished, but his moral authority was on the rise."

His moral authority among whom? The temporal powers? The Church Universal? The bishops of Rome did have to make an adjustment with the loss of temporal power and of the papal states, but their claims regarding their authority over the Church Universal and of the world have not wavered. Thanks to advances in communications technology, it is now possible to implement an ultramontanist model of the papacy, with the bishop of Rome as the teacher of the world and of the Church Universal. But who is paying attention?

From the interview:

CWR: Each of these popes confronted the problems of modernity in unique ways. Do you think any of them were particularly successful, or any particularly unsuccessful?

Shaw: The pontificate of Pope St. Paul VI was in some ways a tragic story. Paul certainly engaged the big issues of his times and received an enthusiastic response at first—the reaction to his famous “no more war” United Nations speech illustrates that—but the good feelings and the enthusiasm came to an ugly end with the vicious reaction to Humane Vitae and its reaffirmation of the condemnation of contraception. Pope Paul has been vindicated by events since then, but at the time he was widely written off.

Does Shaw address the disastrous liturgical reform that took place under Paul VI?

CWR: The Second Vatican Council gets its own chapter in this book. What is different about Vatican II’s approach to “the crisis of modernity” from that of the two popes of Vatican II, Sts. John XXIII and Paul VI?

Shaw: As a matter of fact, I see more similarities than dissimilarities between Vatican II and the popes you mention. Gaudium et Spes, the Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, is often criticized for being too optimistic, taking too sunny a view of the modern world, and I suppose there is some of that in its rhetoric. But the Council also saw many grievous problems and abuses in modern times, and it wasn’t hesitant in pointing them out. And the same might be said of the popes. All three—the Council, John XXIII, and Paul VI—were shrewd observers and serious critics of the world around them.

Maybe Vatican II did recognize some of the problems afflicting the "modern" world. But have Latins attempted to do anything else besides lecture and issue documents? In the war between Church and State, the Roman Catholic Church lost when it attempted to fight it on the world's terms, and it's losing now by relying upon outdated institutional practices that not only do not apply now, but never applied. Spiritual atrophy started long ago within the [Latin] [mono]episcopate, even if some think the "Catholic Counter-Reformation" was a moderate success.

The World Needs Christ

Not more academese, and "Modernity" is an invention of the elites, not out of whole cloth but close. Would the pioneers of "modernity" fall somewhere on the spectrum? Where would they fall on the social hierarchy?

Church Life: Renewing Nouvelle Théologie by Cyril O’Regan

Forgetfulness of God is a serious problem - without memory of God we cannot bless Him and thank Him for His manifold benefits. Is this forgetfulness, then, just an intellectual mistake, or is it one caused by sin? If the Latin churches had not first been internally weakened, and then lost to the modern nation-state, would there be a spiritual vacuum to be filled by some ideology? So what Latins have to offer the world in bringing Christ to it, after 50 years of a disastrous liturgical reform?

"And if there is a simple lesson to be drawn from the sprawling work of both de Lubac and Balthasar it may well be that misrememberers are far more dangerous to Christianity because in some lights they look just like it."

We are not talking about heresies but philosophical errors that do not fulfill man's heart, but feed upon sin and vice. what normal person claims to be a Hegelian or Nietzschean? Academics may pretend; there are those on the new right who claim to be followers of other philosophers, but they have rejected Christianity because of its perceived errors in its moral code.



Ressourcement Futures

Eastern Christian Books: Liturgical Subjects and the Byzantine Self

Eastern Christian Books: Liturgical Subjects and the Byzantine Self

William Cavanaugh: "Does Religion Promote Violence?"

The "New" Evangelization

Crisis Magazine: What’s New in the New Evangelization … And Why? by Joseph Woodard

"John Paul II and the Crisis of Modern Times" Russell Hittinger

Brad Gregory Still Eliciting Responses to His Historical Thesis

Don’t Blame the Reformation by Rod Dreher

The Philosophy of Edith Stein

The Imaginative Conservative: The Philosophy of Edith Stein by Robert Cheeks

Jean Bethke Elshtain Videos

Related:

Jean Bethke Elshtain

Jean Bethke Elshtain, a Political Scientist Unafraid to Talk God, Has Died - her faculty page. Chicago Tribune. Christianity Today. National Review.

Mirror of Justice: Jean Bethke Elshtain and "Legal Moralism"

Other on Jean Elshtain: Elshtain on Catholic Social Thought in America
Elshtain's "Augustine and the Limits of Politics"

Eastern Christian Books: The Problem of Sovereignty

Related:
The problems of mandatory sentencing and federal overreach:
Seven Shot Guns Shells, No Weapons, But 15 Years in Prison

A Manufactured Crisis?

From The Impossible "Road Map" of Peace with the Lefebvrists (via Pertinacious Papist and Rorate Caeli):

Fr. Barsotti wrote:

"I am perplexed with regard to the Council: the plethora of documents, their length, often their language, these frightened me. They are documents that bear witness to a purely human assurance more than two a simple firmness of faith. But above all I am outraged by the behavior of the theologians.”

"The Council is the supreme exercise of the magisterium, and is justified only by a supreme necessity. Could not the fearful gravity of the present situation of the Church stem precisely from the foolishness of having wanted to provoke and tempt the Lord? Was there the desire, perhaps, to constrain God to speak when there was not this supreme necessity? Is that the way it is? In order to justify a Council that presumed to renew all things, it had to be affirmed that everything was going poorly, something that is done constantly, if not by the episcopate then by the theologians.”

"Nothing seems to me more grave, contrary to the holiness of God, than the presumption of clerics who believe, with a pride that is purely diabolical, that they can manipulate the truth, who presume to renew the Church and to save the world without renewing themselves. In all the history of the Church nothing is comparable to the latest Council, at which the Catholic episcopate believed that it could renew all things by obeying nothing other than its own pride, without the effort of holiness, in such open opposition to the law of the gospel that it requires us to believe how the humanity of Christ was the instrument of the omnipotence of the love that saves, in his death.”

I think Fr. Barsotti may have just been musing, but if he was dead set in his judgment, he may have been wrong. The pre-conciliar Church may have been in bad shape after all, a decline that first began with the rise of the modern nation-state and nationalism. In the struggle between the Church and the state [at first nominally Christian but progressively secular], the Church has been losing? What is the nature of the defeat, and how did it happen? I will leave that speculation for a future post. What if the theses of the Constantinian Church/Constantinianism/Constaninian shift are not wholly wrong? The overlap between civil society and the Church was bound to lead to problems as the different authorities, temporal and ecclesial, came into conflict. The questions of the nature of each authority and their limits must be constantly revisited and rethought, and there is no guarantee that the answers of the virtuous and wise will prevail.

But Fr. Barsotti may be right to think that some thought they could renew the Church without first renewing themselves and focusing on their duties. Or they thought they could accomplish it by merely being academics and advocates, rather than as saints and true sons of the Church.

Related:
Robert Louis Wilken, In Defense of Constantine

Can we define what we mean by modernity, please?

Irony of Ironies: Vatican II Triumphs Over Moribund Modernity by Samuel Gregg

You don't need to reach the bottom of the essay to guess that the author is associated with the Acton Institute. Defenders of the liberal [dis-]order are apt to credit liberalism or capitalism with the development of new technology, the increase in longevity and decrease in morality, and so on, as if these developments could only happen because of the concentration of capital in the hands of the few.

Brad Gregory "Against Nostalgia: Catholicism, History, and Modernity."

Brad Gregory "Against Nostalgia: Catholicism, History, and Modernity." from The Lumen Christi Institute on Vimeo.