What Will Be Left of the Patriarchate of Rome in 100 Years?

CWR Dispatch: The next hundred years of St. John Paul II’s legacy by Jonah McKeown for CNA

Will ultramontanism still be around then?

Adam DeVille Reviews Eros Crucified

Routledge

CWR Dispatch:The Idolatry of Eros and the Corporeality of God by Dr. Adam A. J. DeVille
Matthew Clemente’s Eros Crucified is philosophy of religion done by a young scholar in such a way as to give one great hope for the future not just of the discipline, but of Catholic letters and intellectual culture more generally.

Some thoughts:

DeVille writes:

One popular, and often dreaded, buzzword in the academy today is “intersectionality,” which is just a newer version of the idea Newman first demonstrated so winsomely: “all knowledge forms one whole.” Clemente, a young Catholic philosopher of religion at Boston College, lives Newman’s method in this book (without mentioning him). Clemente ranges freely across theology and philosophy, refusing to allow them to be forcibly separated via an act of what Paul Ricoeur famously called “controlled schizophrenia.” But Clemente’s point, and method, is not merely reflective of current academic preoccupations to bring things together. It is, in fact, the only method on offer to human thinkers, who cannot (and must not) be bamboozled into seeing the world as divisible, the end result of which is the creation of some “private” sphere labelled the “secular” from which God has been exiled into some other sealed sphere called “religion.” In philosophizing in this way, Clemente is reflecting some of the best insights of recent philosophers including Charles Taylor and one of Clemente’s mentors, the philosopher (and Greek Orthodox priest) John Panteleimon Manoussakis.

Is Clemente's book really philosophy of religion, as opposed to Christian theology? For an unbeliever who reasons accordingly, it might be philosophy of religion. But for a Christian who thinks thus? It is theology, even if the author's academic degree is in philosophy.

Clemente wants us to think about the corporeality of God and its nakedly erotic self-giving in the Eucharist (“this is my body”) as well as its implications for us as human beings in our quotidian living, desiring, and dying, our lovemaking and birth-giving. (Clemente’s one-and-a-half-page conclusion, a meditation on watching and waiting with his wife give birth to their first son, packs in more biblical theology than a year’s worth of homilies from your average preacher.) Clemente writes with verve and a wide sweep of philosophy and theology, ancient and modern. All this learning, including considerable insights from psychoanalytic thought, is rendered in a way that is at once lively and serious.

Might there be some truth in Freud's writings? Perhaps. Would it be better to rely upon sound philosophical psychology which is open to the insights of Christians with rich interior knowledge and wisdom? I would think so. But doesn't it depend on one's audience? What if one is reaching out to those who have been influenced by Freud? How many of those are left?

One does not have a conversation with the dead who can no longer answer for themselves, but with the living, and this is true even in the scholastic method. So how many committed Freudians are there who need an apologia of Christianity or of Christ?

Then there is the question of whether Freud's reasoning and not just his claims can be captured well in essay form... This does raise a question of what the best way of transmitting reasoning through the written word. Something for theologians and philosophers to consider, even if they reject the manualist approach.

Theology of Presbyterate/Episcopate

MASCULINITY AND THE LITURGY by Fr. Thomas Loya

If the priest acts in persona Christi, how does he strengthen the "mystical understanding of his husbandhood and fatherhood"? Do presbyters participate in Christ's role as Bridegroom/Husband for the Church as the Mystical Bride? Not directly but as intermediaries or representatives of Christ who teach and lead, subordinate to Christ and the Holy Spirit. But in what way is Christ analogous to the human husband? Who would claim that Christ and the Church share some sort of egalitarian or even a complementarian relationship?

The Splendor of Marriage

Crisis Magazine: St. John Paul II Is More Relevant Than Ever by JOHN HITTINGER

Interview with Cardinal Brandmüller

CWR Dispatch/CNA: The Church and sexuality: An interview with Cardinal Brandmüller
“I would argue,” says that German prelate, 90, “the real scandal is that when it comes to this issue, clergy and employees of the Church are not sufficiently distinguishable from society overall.”

TOB and Catholic Feminism

Will there be any surprises in this podcast?

CNA: How a new study says premarital sex affects marital happiness

the study

Sanctification Through the Sacrament of Marriage?

Does any prominent Father in the first millenium

apply the image of Spouse to the individual human person, and not just to the Church as a whole? Or is this more of a medieval Latin development, concomitant with shifts in Latin understandings of spirituality and the Eucharist?

Regarding the Bridegroom and the Bride, God the Son is the analogue of the male/man, and the Church (and perhaps the individual human person) is the analogue of the female. Just as the husband is the "active" principle and leads and imprints himself on his wife, and the wife is conformed to the husband, so Christ is the active principle, and the individual human person is conformed to Christ.

While the literal application of this imagery may be useful to female religious, I question its effectiveness for men. (As opposed to its being used as a theological metaphor to help our understanding of our communion with Christ and the Holy Trinity.)

And the individual human person has a filial relationship with God the Father by being sons in the Son. A logical consequence of the first, perhaps, our being conformed to Christ.

Would we say that the individual soul is the bride of the Holy Trinity as a whole? Or of the Father? I don't think so, even though it may be claimed that Israel is the bride of God the Father in the OT? It would be even more problematic if the human person were called to have a "conjugal" relationship with God the Father and a "filial" relationship as well. I believe the latter is literal, even if by analogy, while the former is only a metaphor or figurative language. So as I start reading through John Paul II's catechesis (and not the popularizations put forth by others) I will be keen to see how he parses this out.

Aristotle and the Garments of Skin

James Chastek: The Point of Sexual Desire

Aristotle's reflections on the end of reproduction, on the "natural" level remind me of what I read from St. Maximos the Confessor on the garments of skin and the fall of Adam and Eve and the consequences of that fall.

The intensity of our desire for coitus is a result of the fall?

Aristotle can be used to support a Patristic view on the 'garments of skin' rather than John Paul II's Theology of the Body?

More with Christopher West

Christopher West

will be in the area in August; time to finally do some extended reading of his work and the original catechetical series by John Paul II? His workshop will be based on his 2013 book Fill These Hearts. (I have probably forgotten he was here back in 2014.)










part 2

The Patristic View of Sex or Marital Relations

Was there a consensus?

James Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe
Google Books

Mentioned here by someone who is not particularly orthodox, iirc.

Still, is some sort of revision necessary, not for the basic precepts regarding our sexual powers, but with respect to our attitudees and understanding of the virtues pertaining to those powers and marital relations?

The conjugal act: as God originally intended or a concession to the Fall?

Infants and children may need sensible signs of affection and touch by parents for their emotional/mental health and to flourish, and this may be true of adults to an extent that we may not realize. Would we say that this is merely concupiscence, our desire to touch and to be touched? In so far as it is non-rational, maybe some would. (Concupiscence is not just a condition of the sexual appetite but of the appetite for nutrition as well, and what else? Hunger, indeed.) A consequence of the fall, an increased animality or manifestation of the "sensitive" aspect of the soul? Maybe, maybe not. But a real feature of human beings in this world, nonetheless. So why wouldn't it be the case with how men and women, or husbands and wives relate to one another? Is something to be condemned or criticized or merely permitted because it is "too" carnal, or not "spiritual" enough? What if there is a natural teleology to certain acts of touch that we may be tempted to dismiss because we think we shouldn't need them?

Orthodox TOB?

Alas, the English Translation of His Book is Out of Print

Rorate Caeli: The Church and Asmodeus - Part 3 (and the fallacy of Theology of the Body) by Don Pietro Leone

3. ‘THEOLOGY OF THE BODY’

Faithful attending Pope John Paul II’s Angelus discourses from September 1979 –November 1984 and hoping for catechism or pious disquisitions, would surely have been disappointed. Instead they were to hear him propound in all freedom his personal theories of sexual morality. We shall here briefly examine two tenets of the personalistic ‘Theology of the Body’, having already discussed the theory in detail in our book.

But is his reading of John Paul II's Theology of the Body correct?

Prayer

TOB Conference

CWR: Conference brings the Theology of the Body to Southern California by Jim Graves
The Theology of the Body Congress will be held in Ontario, California this weekend.

More on The Meeting Point

Problems with The Meeting Point

LifeSite

And it is meant to be taught to mixed classes? Incredible.

More on The Meeting Place