The Twisted Crosses on Which Catholics are Being Hung

Dr. John Rao's latest

From Irenaeus to Grotius

A Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought 100-1625, edited by Oliver O'Donovan and Joan Lockwood O'Donovan

Featuring:
Irenaeus of Lyons
Tertullian
Clement of Alexandria
Origen
Lactantius
Eusebius of Caesarea
Ambrose of Milan
John Chrysostom
Augustine
Paulus Orosius
Gelasius I
Agapetos
Justinian
Gregory I
Isidore of Seville (Sentences and Etymologies)
John of Damascus
Joans of Orleans (Institution of the King)
Sedulius Scottus (On Christian Rulers)
The Donation of Constantine
Gregory VII (Dictatus Papae, Letter 8.21)
Norman Anonymous (The Consecration of Bishops and Kings)
Honorius Augustodunensis (Summa Gloria)
Bernard of Clairvaux (On Consideration)
John of Salisbury (Policraticus)
Rufinus the Canonist (Summa Decretorum)
Nikephoros Blemmydes (The King's Statue)
Bonaventure (A Defence of the Mendicants)
Thomas Aquinas
Giles of Rome (On Ecclesiastical Power)
James of Viterbo (On Christian Government)
John of Paris (On Royal and Papal Power)
Dante Alighieri (Monarchia)
Marsilius of Padua (Defens0r Pacis)
William of Ockham (A Dialogue on Papal and Royal Dignity, Eight Questions on Papal Power, A Short Discourse on the Tyrannical Ascendancy of the Pope)
Nicolas Cabsilas (Rulers' Illegal Outrags against Sacred Property)
John Wyclif (Divine Lordship, Civil Lordship)
Antonios IV (Letter 447)
Jean Gerson (On Church Power and the Origin of Law and Right)
John Fortescue (The Nature of the Law of Nature, A Treatise in Commendation of the Laws of England)
Nicholas of Kues (The Catholic Concordance)
Thomas More
Desiderius Erasmus (The Complaint of Peace)
Martin Luther (Temporal Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed, The Sermon on the Mount, Trade and Usury)
Francisco de Vitoria (The American Indians)
The Schleitheim Articles
Hans Hergot (The New Transformation of Christian Living)
Stephen Gardiner (On True Obedience)
Philipp Melanchthon (Loci Communes)
John Calvin (Institutes of the Christian Religion)
John Knox (The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, The Appellation of John Knox)
John Ponet (A Short Treatise of Political Power)
Thomas Cartwright (A Reply to An Answer, The Second Reply against the Second Answer)
Vindiciae, contra Tyrannos
Francisco Suarez (Laws and God the Lawgiver, On Charity, Disputation 13, War)
Richard Hooker (Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity)
Johannes Althusius (Politica Methodice Digesta)
William Perkins (A Treatise of Christian Equitie)
The Convocation Book
Hugo Grotius (The Right of War and Peace, The Satisfaction of Christ)

Liberty Fund: Online Library of Liberty

OUP books

The common good in late medieval political thought by M. S. Kempshall
John Locke: Essays on the Law of Nature
Plato, Res Publica
Anthony Kenny, Aristotle on the Perfect Life
Richard Kraut, Aristotle
Joseph Raz: Engaging Reason, The Authority of Law, The Morality of Freedom
Plato Opera Vol. V
De Anima
Aristotle Ars Rhetorica
Aristotle Fragmenta Selecta
Aristotle Atheniensium Respublica

David Hume: social contract
Cicero: De Re Publica
Cavanaugh (Double Effect)De Arte Poetica

Plus... Bonaventure by Christopher M. Cullen
Aristotle De Arte Poetica ?

edit: (June 1)
see also Malcolm Schofield's Plato: Political Philosophy
George, Making Men Moral

Dark Matter

March 11, 2007

Out There

By RICHARD PANEK

Three days after learning that he won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics, George Smoot was talking about the universe. Sitting across from him in his office at the University of California, Berkeley, was Saul Perlmutter, a fellow cosmologist and a probable future Nobelist in Physics himself. Bearded, booming, eyes pinwheeling from adrenaline and lack of sleep, Smoot leaned back in his chair. Perlmutter, onetime acolyte, longtime colleague, now heir apparent, leaned forward in his.

“Time and time again,” Smoot shouted, “the universe has turned out to be really simple.”

Perlmutter nodded eagerly. “It’s like, why are we able to understand the universe at our level?”

“Right. Exactly. It’s a universe for beginners! ‘The Universe for Dummies’!”

But as Smoot and Perlmutter know, it is also inarguably a universe for Nobelists, and one that in the past decade has become exponentially more complicated. Since the invention of the telescope four centuries ago, astronomers have been able to figure out the workings of the universe simply by observing the heavens and applying some math, and vice versa. Take the discovery of moons, planets, stars and galaxies, apply Newton’s laws and you have a universe that runs like clockwork. Take Einstein’s modifications of Newton, apply the discovery of an expanding universe and you get the big bang. “It’s a ridiculously simple, intentionally cartoonish picture,” Perlmutter said. “We’re just incredibly lucky that that first try has matched so well.”

But is our luck about to run out? Smoot’s and Perlmutter’s work is part of a revolution that has forced their colleagues to confront a universe wholly unlike any they have ever known, one that is made of only 4 percent of the kind of matter we have always assumed it to be — the material that makes up you and me and this magazine and all the planets and stars in our galaxy and in all 125 billion galaxies beyond. The rest — 96 percent of the universe — is ... who knows?

“Dark,” cosmologists call it, in what could go down in history as the ultimate semantic surrender. This is not “dark” as in distant or invisible. This is “dark” as in unknown for now, and possibly forever.

If so, such a development would presumably not be without philosophical consequences of the civilization-altering variety. Cosmologists often refer to this possibility as “the ultimate Copernican revolution”: not only are we not at the center of anything; we’re not even made of the same stuff as most of the rest of everything. “We’re just a bit of pollution,” Lawrence M. Krauss, a theorist at Case Western Reserve, said not long ago at a public panel on cosmology in Chicago. “If you got rid of us, and all the stars and all the galaxies and all the planets and all the aliens and everybody, then the universe would be largely the same. We’re completely irrelevant.”

All well and good. Science is full of homo sapiens-humbling insights. But the trade-off for these lessons in insignificance has always been that at least now we would have a deeper — simpler — understanding of the universe. That the more we could observe, the more we would know. But what about the less we could observe? What happens to new knowledge then? It’s a question cosmologists have been asking themselves lately, and it might well be a question we’ll all be asking ourselves soon, because if they’re right, then the time has come to rethink a fundamental assumption: When we look up at the night sky, we’re seeing the universe.

Not so. Not even close.

In 1963, two scientists at Bell Labs in New Jersey discovered a microwave signal that came from every direction of the heavens. Theorists at nearby Princeton University soon realized that this signal might be the echo from the beginning of the universe, as predicted by the big-bang hypothesis. Take the idea of a cosmos born in a primordial fireball and cooling down ever since, apply the discovery of a microwave signal with a temperature that corresponded precisely to the one that was predicted by theorists — 2.7 degrees above absolute zero — and you have the universe as we know it. Not Newton’s universe, with its stately, eternal procession of benign objects, but Einstein’s universe, violent, evolving, full of births and deaths, with the grandest birth and, maybe, death belonging to the cosmos itself.

But then, in the 1970s, astronomers began noticing something that didn’t seem to fit with the laws of physics. They found that spiral galaxies like our own Milky Way were spinning at such a rate that they should have long ago wobbled out of control, shredding apart, shedding stars in every direction. Yet clearly they had done no such thing. They were living fast but not dying young. This seeming paradox led theorists to wonder if a halo of a hypothetical something else might be cocooning each galaxy, dwarfing each flat spiral disk of stars and gas at just the right mass ratio to keep it gravitationally intact. Borrowing a term from the astronomer Fritz Zwicky, who detected the same problem with the motions of a whole cluster of galaxies back in the 1930s, decades before anyone else took the situation seriously, astronomers called this mystery mass “dark matter.”

So there was more to the universe than meets the eye. But how much more? This was the question Saul Perlmutter’s team at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory set out to answer in the late 1980s. Actually, they wanted to settle an issue that had been nagging astronomers ever since Edwin Hubble discovered in 1929 that the universe seems to be expanding. Gravity, astronomers figured, would be slowing the expansion, and the more matter the greater the gravitational effect. But was the amount of matter in the universe enough to slow the expansion until it eventually stopped, reversed course and collapsed in a backward big bang? Or was the amount of matter not quite enough to do this, in which case the universe would just go on expanding forever? Just how much was the expansion of the universe slowing down?

The tool the team would be using was a specific type of exploding star, or supernova, that reaches a roughly uniform brightness and so can serve as what astronomers call a standard candle. By comparing how bright supernovae appear and how much the expansion of the universe has shifted their light, cosmologists sought to determine the rate of the expansion. “I was trying to tell everybody that this is the measurement that everybody should be doing,” Perlmutter says. “I was trying to convince them that this is going to be the tool of the future.” Perlmutter talks like a microcassette on fast-forward, and he possesses the kind of psychological dexterity that allows him to walk into a room and instantly inhabit each person’s point of view. He can be as persuasive as any force of nature. “The next thing I know,” he says, “we’ve convinced people, and now they’re competing with us!”

By 1997, Perlmutter’s Supernova Cosmology Project and a rival team had amassed data from more than 50 supernovae between them — data that would reveal yet another oddity in the cosmos. Perlmutter noticed that the supernovae weren’t brighter than expected but dimmer. He wondered if he had made a mistake in his observations. A few months later, Adam Riess, a member of a rival international team, noticed the same general drift in his math and wondered the same thing. “I’m a postdoc,” he told himself. “I’m sure I’ve messed up in at least 10 different ways.” But Perlmutter double-checked for intergalactic dust that might have skewed his readings, and Riess cross-checked his math, calculation by calculation, with his team leader, Brian Schmidt. Early in 1998, the two teams announced that they had each independently reached the same conclusion, and it was the opposite of what either of them expected. The rate of the expansion of the universe was not slowing down. Instead, it seemed to be speeding up.

That same year, Michael Turner, the prominent University of Chicago theorist, delivered a paper in which he called this antigravitational force “dark energy.” The purpose of calling it “dark,” he explained recently, was to highlight the similarity to dark matter. The purpose of “energy” was to make a distinction. “It really is very different from dark matter,” Turner said. “It’s more energylike.”

More energylike how, exactly?

Turner raised his eyebrows. “I’m not embarrassed to say it’s the most profound mystery in all of science.”

Extraordinary claims,” Carl Sagan once said, “require extraordinary evidence.” Astronomers love that saying; they quote it all the time. In this case the claim could have hardly been more extraordinary: a new universe was dawning.

It wouldn’t be the first time. We once thought the night sky consisted of the several thousand objects we could see with the naked eye. But the invention of the telescope revealed that it didn’t, and that the farther we saw, the more we saw: planets, stars, galaxies. After that we thought the night sky consisted of only the objects the eye could see with the assistance of telescopes that reached all the way back to the first stars blinking to life. But the discovery of wavelengths beyond the optical revealed that it didn’t, and that the more we saw in the radio or infrared or X-ray parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, the more we discovered: evidence for black holes, the big bang and the distances of supernovae, for starters.

The difference with “dark,” however, is that it lies not only outside the visible but also beyond the entire electromagnetic spectrum. By all indications, it consists of data that our five senses can’t detect other than indirectly. The motions of galaxies don’t make sense unless we infer the existence of dark matter. The brightness of supernovae doesn’t make sense unless we infer the existence of dark energy. It’s not that inference can’t be a powerful tool: an apple falls to the ground, and we infer gravity. But it can also be an incomplete tool: gravity is ... ?

Dark matter is ... ? In the three decades since most astronomers decisively, if reluctantly, accepted the existence of dark matter, observers have eliminated the obvious answer: that dark matter is made of normal matter that is so far away or so dim that it can’t be seen from earth. To account for the dark-matter deficit, this material would have to be so massive and so numerous that we couldn’t possibly miss it.

Which leaves abnormal matter, or what physicists call nonbaryonic matter, meaning that it doesn’t consist of the protons and neutrons of “normal” matter. What’s more (or, perhaps more accurately, less), it doesn’t interact at all with electricity or magnetism, which is why we wouldn’t be able to see it, and it can rarely interact even with protons and neutrons, which is why trillions of these particles might be passing through you every second without your knowing it. Theorists have narrowed the search for dark-matter particles to two hypothetical candidates: the axion and the neutralino. But so far efforts to create one of these ghostly particles in accelerators, which mimic the high levels of energy in the first fraction of a second after the birth of the universe, have come up empty. So have efforts to catch one in ultrasensitive detectors, which number in the dozens around the world.

For now, dark-matter physicists are hanging their hopes on the Large Hadron Collider, the latest-generation subatomic-particle accelerator, which goes online later this year at the European Center for Nuclear Research on the Franco-Swiss border. Many cosmologists think that the L.H.C. has made the creation of a dark-matter particle — as George Smoot said, holding up two fingers — “this close.” But one of the pioneer astronomers investigating dark matter in the 1970s, Vera Rubin, says that she has lived through plenty of this kind of optimism; she herself predicted in 1980 that dark matter would be identified within a decade. “I hope he’s right,” she says of Smoot’s assertion. “But I think it’s more a wish than a belief.” As one particle physicist commented at a “Dark Universe” symposium at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore a few years ago, “If we fail to see anything in the L.H.C., then I’m off to do something else,” adding, “Unfortunately, I’ll be off to do something else at the same time as hundreds of other physicists.”

Juan Collar might be among them. “I know I speak for a generation of people who have been looking for dark-matter particles since they were grad students,” he said one wintry afternoon in his University of Chicago office. “I doubt how many of us will remain in the field if the L.H.C. brings home bad news. I have been looking for dark-matter particles for more than 15 years. I’m 42. So most of my colleagues, my age, we are kind of going through a midlife crisis.” He laughed. “When we get together and we drink enough beer, we start howling at the moon.”

Although many scientists say that the existence of the axion will be proved or disproved within the next 10 years — as a result of work at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory — the detection of a neutralino one way or the other is much less certain. A negative result from an experiment might mean only that theorists haven’t thought hard enough or that observers haven’t looked deep enough. “It could very well be that Mother Nature has decided that the neutralino is way down there,” Collar said, pointing not to a graph that he taped up in his office but to a point below the sheet of paper itself, at the blank wall. “If that is the case,” he went on to say, “we should retreat and worship Mother Nature. These particles maybe exist, but we will not see them, our sons will not see them and their sons won’t see them.”

The challenge with dark energy, as opposed to dark matter, is even more difficult. Dark energy is whatever it is that’s making the expansion of the universe accelerate, but, for instance, does it change over time and space? If so, then cosmologists have a name for it: quintessence. Does it not change? In that case, they’ll call it the cosmological constant, a version of the mathematical fudge factor that Einstein originally inserted into the equations for relativity to explain why the universe had neither expanded nor contracted itself out of existence.

After the discovery of dark energy, Perlmutter concluded that the next generation of dark-energy telescopes would have to include a space-based observatory. But the search for financing for such an ambitious project can require as much forbearance as the search for dark energy itself. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen as much of Washington as I have in the last few years,” he says, sighing. Even if his Supernova Acceleration Probe didn’t now face competition from several other proposals for federal financing (including, perhaps inevitably, one involving his old rival Riess), delays have prevented it from being ready to launch until at least the middle of the next decade. “Ten years from now,” says Josh Frieman of the University of Chicago, “when we’re talking about spending on the order of a billion dollars to put something up in space — which I think we should do — you’re getting into that class where you’re spending real money.”

Even some cosmologists have begun to express reservations. At a conference at Durham University in England last summer, a “whither cosmology?” panel featuring some of the field’s most prominent names questioned the wisdom of concentrating so much money and manpower on one problem. They pointed to what happened when the government-sponsored Dark Energy Task Force solicited proposals for experiments a couple of years ago. The task force was expecting a dozen, according to one member. They got three dozen. Cosmology was choosing a “risky and not very cost-effective way of moving forward,” one Durham panelist told me later, summarizing the sentiment he heard there.

But even if somebody were to figure out whether or not dark energy changes across time and space, astronomers still wouldn’t know what dark energy itself is. “The term doesn’t mean anything,” said David Schlegel of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory this past fall. “It might not be dark. It might not be energy. The whole name is a placeholder. It’s a placeholder for the description that there’s something funny that was discovered eight years ago now that we don’t understand.” Not that theorists haven’t been trying. “It’s just nonstop,” Perlmutter told me. “There’s article after article after article.” He likes to begin public talks with a PowerPoint illustration: papers on dark energy piling up, one on top of the next, until the on-screen stack ascends into the dozens. All the more reason not to put all of cosmology’s eggs into one research basket, argued the Durham panelists. As one summarized the situation, “We don’t even have a hypothesis to test.”

Michael Turner won’t hear of it. “This is one of these godsend problems!” he says. “If you’re a scientist, you’d like to be around when there’s a great problem to work on and solve. The solution is not obvious, and you could imagine it being solved tomorrow, you could imagine it taking another 10 years or you could imagine it taking another 200 years.”

But you could also imagine it taking forever.

“Time to get serious.” The PowerPoint slide, teal letters popping off a black background, stared back at a hotel ballroom full of cosmologists. They gathered in Chicago last winter for a “New Views of the Universe” conference, and Sean Carroll, then at the University of Chicago, had taken it upon himself to give his theorist colleagues their marching orders.

“There was a heyday for talking out all sorts of crazy ideas,” Carroll, now at Caltech, recently explained. That heyday would have been the heady, post-1998 period when Michael Turner might stand up at a conference and turn to anyone voicing caution and say, “Can’t we be exuberant for a while?” But now has come the metaphorical morning after, and with it a sobering realization: Maybe the universe isn’t simple enough for dummies like us humans. Maybe it’s not just our powers of perception that aren’t up to the task but also our powers of conception. Extraordinary claims like the dawn of a new universe might require extraordinary evidence, but what if that evidence has to be literally beyond the ordinary? Astronomers now realize that dark matter probably involves matter that is nonbaryonic. And whatever it is that dark energy involves, we know it’s not “normal,” either. In that case, maybe this next round of evidence will have to be not only beyond anything we know but also beyond anything we know how to know.

That possibility always gnaws at scientists — what Perlmutter calls “that sense of tentativeness, that we have gotten so far based on so little.” Cosmologists in particular have had to confront that possibility throughout the birth of their science. “At various times in the past 20 years it could have gotten to the point where there was no opportunity for advance,” Frieman says. What if, for instance, researchers couldn’t repeat the 1963 Bell Labs detection of the supposed echo from the big bang? Smoot and John C. Mather of NASA (who shared the Nobel in Physics with Smoot) designed the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite telescope to do just that. COBE looked for extremely subtle differences in temperature throughout all of space that carry the imprint of the universe when it was less than a second old. And in 1992, COBE found them: in effect, the quantum fluctuations that 13.7 billion years later would coalesce into a universe that is 22 percent dark matter, 74 percent dark energy and 4 percent the stuff of us.

And if the right ripples hadn’t shown up? As Frieman puts it: “You just would have thrown up your hands and said, ‘My God, we’ve got to go back to the drawing board!’ What’s remarkable to me is that so far that hasn’t happpened.”

Yet in a way it has. In the observation-and-theory, call-and-response system of investigating nature that scientists have refined over the past 400 years, the dark side of the universe represents a disruption. General relativity helped explain the observations of the expanding universe, which led to the idea of the big bang, which anticipated the observations of the cosmic-microwave background, which led to the revival of Einstein’s cosmological constant, which anticipated the observations of supernovae, which led to dark energy. And dark energy is ... ?

The difficulty in answering that question has led some cosmologists to ask an even deeper question: Does dark energy even exist? Or is it perhaps an inference too far? Cosmologists have another saying they like to cite: “You get to invoke the tooth fairy only once,” meaning dark matter, “but now we have to invoke the tooth fairy twice,” meaning dark energy.

One of the most compelling arguments that cosmologists have for the existence of dark energy (whatever it is) is that unlike earlier inferences that physicists eventually had to abandon — the ether that 19th-century physicists thought pervaded space, for instance — this inference makes mathematical sense. Take Perlmutter’s and Riess’s observations of supernovae, apply one cornerstone of 20th-century physics, general relativity, and you have a universe that does indeed consist of .26 matter, dark or otherwise, and .74 something that accelerates the expansion. Yet in another way, dark energy doesn’t add up. Take the observations of supernovae, apply the other cornerstone of 20th-century physics, quantum theory, and you get gibberish — you get an answer 120 orders of magnitude larger than .74.

Which doesn’t mean that dark energy is the ether of our age. But it does mean that its implications extend beyond cosmology to a problem Einstein spent the last 30 years of his life trying to reconcile: how to unify his new physics of the very large (general relativity) with the new physics of the very small (quantum mechanics). What makes the two incompatible — where the physics breaks down — is gravity.

In physics, gravity is the ur-inference. Even Newton admitted that he was making it up as he went along. That a force of attraction might exist between two distant objects, he once wrote in a letter, is “so great an Absurdity that I believe no Man who has in philosophical Matters a competent Faculty of thinking can ever fall into it.” Yet fall into it we all do on a daily basis, and physicists are no exception. “I don’t think we really understand what gravity is,” Vera Rubin says. “So in some sense we’re doing an awful lot on something we don’t know much about.”

It hasn’t escaped the notice of astronomers that both dark matter and dark energy involve gravity. Early this year 50 physicists gathered for a “Rethinking Gravity” conference at the University of Arizona to discuss variations on general relativity. “So far, Einstein is coming through with flying colors,” says Sean Carroll, who was one of the gravity-defying participants. “He’s always smarter than you think he was.”

But he’s not necessarily inviolate. “We’ve never tested gravity across the whole universe before,” Riess pointed out during a news conference last year. “It may be that there’s not really dark energy, that that’s a figment of our misperception about gravity, that gravity actually changes the way it operates on long ranges.”

The only way out, cosmologists and particle physicists agree, would be a “new physics” — a reconciliation of general relativity and quantum mechanics. “Understanding dark energy,” Riess says, “seems to really require understanding and using both of those theories at the same time.”

“It’s been so hard that we’re even willing to consider listening to string theorists,” Perlmutter says, referring to work that posits numerous dimensions beyond the traditional (one of time and three of space). “They’re at least providing a language in which you can talk about both things at the same time.”

According to quantum theory, particles can pop into and out of existence. In that case, maybe the universe itself was born in one such quantum pop. And if one universe can pop into existence, then why not many universes? String theorists say that number could be 10 raised to the power of 500. Those are 10-with-500-zeros universes, give or take. In which case, our universe would just happen to be the one with an energy density of .74, a condition suitable for the existence of creatures that can contemplate their hyper-Copernican existence.

And this is just one of a number of theories that have been popping into existence, quantum-particle-like, in the past few years: parallel universes, intersecting universes or, in the case of Stephen Hawking and Thomas Hertog just last summer, a superposition of universes. But what evidence — extraordinary or otherwise — can anyone offer for such claims? The challenge is to devise an experiment that would do for a new physics what COBE did for the big bang. Predictions in string theory, as in the 10-to-the-power-of-500-universes hypothesis, depend on the existence of extra dimensions, a stipulation that just might put the burden back on particle physics — specifically, the hope that evidence of extra dimensions will emerge in the Large Hadron Collider, or perhaps in its proposed successor, the International Linear Collider, which might come online sometime around 2020, or maybe in the supercollider after that, if the industrial nations of 2030 decide they can afford it.

“You want your mind to be boggled,” Perlmutter says. “That is a pleasure in and of itself. And it’s more a pleasure if it’s boggled by something that you can then demonstrate is really, really true.”

And if you can’t demonstrate that it’s really, really true?

“If the brilliant idea doesn’t come along,” Riess says, “then we will say dark energy has exactly these properties, it acts exactly like this. And then” — a shrug — “we will put it in a box.” And there it will remain, residing perhaps not far from the box labeled “Dark Matter,” and the two of them bookending the biggest box of them all, “Gravity,” to await a future Newton or Einstein to open — or not.

Richard Panek is the author of “The Invisible Century: Einstein, Freud and the Search for Hidden Universes.”

Fr. Lang on the Anaphora of Addai and Mari

Thanks to Fr. Finigan:

A couple of people have asked for more information about the article by Fr Lang on the Anaphora of Addai and Mari. The article was entitled "Eucharist without institution narrative? The anaphora of Addai and Mari revisited" and was written in the 2004 edition of the journal Divinitas published at the Vatican. (Source and online ordering information.)

There was a notice about the article in the German kreuz.net:
Das Rätsel der Liturgie von Addai und Mari.

I understand that Fr Lang may be intending to publish this material more widely in due course.

Public Reason and the Truth of Christianity

Public Reason and the Truth of Christianity

Bishop Crepaldi Examines the Teachings of Benedict XVI

VATICAN CITY, MARCH 10, 2007 (ZENIT.org).- Here is an essay written for ZENIT by Bishop Giampaolo Crepaldi, secretary of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and the director of the Cardinal Van Thuân International Observatory, on the teachings of Benedict XVI on the role of reason and Christianity in the public square.

* * *

Public Reason and the Truth of Christianity in the Teachings of Benedict XVI

Public reason is human reason that believes it can attain, through dialogue and research, certain truths about man and, in particular, about man in society. Public reason is certainly a critical reason, but is also a constructive reason that is not only capable of achieving the "consensus" of opinions, but can also attain the truth and the good of man in society for which it has a cognitive and an arguing ability.

The ability to understand the foundations of the dignity of the person, the main elements of the common good, the inalienability of human rights, justice, the meaning of individual freedom and of community ties, all depend on the possibility of a public reason.

The primary problem of public reason is to determine if it is possible and, secondarily, whether it is self-sufficient, or whether it needs a relationship with religion and, in particular, with the Christian religion. Benedict XVI has addressed this topic on several occasions and in different places, talking on the one hand of the truth of reason and, on the other, of the truth of religions.

The public use of reason and relativism

Public reason is not possible in a culture that is dominated by the "dictatorship of relativism,"[1] for a very simple reason: Relativism is a dogma and therefore it a priori rejects rational argumentation, even toward itself. Those with a taste for paradox could say that relativism is a fundamentalism.

On several occasions, Benedict XVI said that now it has become a dogma, or a presumption, and that it cannot be sustained if not through some sort of faith.[2] Hence, relativism rests upon blind faith. This is unquestionably contradictory because the words "dogma" and "relativism" are incompatible.

The thing is that relativism becomes a faith in order to overcome its internal contradiction, only to fall into a new one. Relativism, in fact, cannot be argued; otherwise it would refer to a capability of reason to argue the truth. In this case, relativism would contradict itself because it would admit the possibility of non-relative truths. Thus, relativism can only be "dogmatically assumed."

The "dictatorial" character -- in the cultural sense -- of relativism, prevents the use of public reason because it prevents the public use of reason. At this point, it could be interesting to go back to the writing where this public use was strongly proclaimed for the first time -- the short essay entitled "An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?" written by Kant in 1784.

For Kant, reason has a public use that serves a critical purpose. To illustrate this public use, Kant especially dwells on the rational critique of religion, i.e. the complete freedom of citizens, indeed even the calling, "to impart to the public all of his carefully considered and well-intentioned thoughts concerning mistaken aspects of that symbol, as well as his suggestions for the better arrangement of religious and church matters."[3]

Reason, with its own categories, claims to be the testing ground and the measure of faith and religion too. Why is a public reason to which Kant assigned such challenging tasks now reduced to relativism, which is incapable of critiquing not just religion, but even itself?

Public reason and the self-limitation of reason

The reason lies in the "self-limitation" of reason, as Benedict XVI has suggested many times.[4] This self-limitation underpins the dogmatically blind assumption of relativism and its inability to play any kind of critical role. The faith in relativism can exist only when the scope of reason has been drastically limited.

The self-limitation of reason consists in its being reduced to mathematical-experimental[5] knowledge, i.e. a type of rationality that is incapable of founding even relativism. This type of knowledge -- the mathematical-experimental type -- simply has "no evidence" of relativism, nor can have any because it is not an empirically observable fact.

Relativism is a philosophy and not a fact, and its foundation would require a different kind of reasoning which, however, is excluded by self-limited reason. This is why relativism can only either be "implicit" -- lived and not justified -- or dogmatically "assumed" -- accepted, for example, by an act of faith. In this sense then, the "dictatorship of relativism" is the necessary conclusion of the "self-limitation" of reason. However, with relativism, the public role of reason fails.

Actually, this self-limitation was already present in Kant's thought. In the above-mentioned 1784 short essay he "pretended" to assign to reason the public role of critiquing even religion, but it was an incautious claim as his vision of reason was already confined to mathematical-experimental knowledge. This is why that claim has to be denied, however, while nevertheless rejecting it and showing how it leads to relativism. It must also be said that a different reason, a reason that can fully breathe, can play a public role and can also engage in some sort of critique of religion.

In 2004, Cardinal Ratzinger participated in a debate with philosopher Jurgen Habermas in Munich that focused exactly on the public role of reason.[6] On that occasion, he argued that if terrorism that is fuelled by religious fundamentalism is the symptom of a pathology of religion that must be corrected by reason, then in the same way the technical-scientific capability of producing human beings is the symptom of a pathology of reason that needs to be corrected by religion.

This is his conclusion: "There are extremely dangerous pathologies in religion that require us to consider the divine light of reason as a control mechanism ... there are also pathologies of reason that are not less dangerous … therefore reason has to accept warning as to its limits and must be willing to listen to the great religious traditions of mankind."[7] As we can see, he credits reason with the ability of "controlling" religion. Christianity, then, does not ask reason to shrink from its public role but to fully fulfill it; however, in order to do that, reason needs to rediscover its own greatness. Christianity wants a reason that is able to breathe and is willing to help reason do that. It wants to be "put to the test" by this reason.

Philosophical relativism and religious relativism

What are the repercussions of the dictatorship of relativism and of such a reductive vision of religions on the part of reason? The consequence of philosophical relativism can only be religious relativism: All religions are different and yet actually the same. They are irrational, they are the result of an unfounded choice, and thus they cannot be compared.

Relativism, unfoundedly dogmatic, views religions as unjustified beliefs. Because it does so in an unfounded manner, it cannot demonstrate it, hence it simply "believes it." Relativism "believes" that religions are unfounded, thus they cannot be compared. In other words, it believes that religions have nothing to do with reason and truth. Then all religions are dogmatic, in the trivial sense of the word, i.e. in the sense of "accepted without evidence" (just like relativism, but relativism does not seem to be aware of that).

In the current relativistic vulgate, in fact, the word dogma generically and superficially means "something that is accepted without evidence and thus in a dogmatic manner." Just as philosophical relativism deprives religion of a true public role, the corresponding religious relativism deprives religion from playing its public role. As we will see better later, the public role of reason and that of religious faith either stand together or die.

In this way, all religions are reduced to myth, i.e. to a way of exorcizing mysterious, bizarre and irrational forces. If religions are unfounded, it means that the divine forces they refer to are irrational and that arbitrariness rules the word. If the primordial forces are arbitrary, religion is a form of insurance against the repercussions of this imponderableness. Therefore religious relativism regresses to a kind of religious primitivism: religion is a way of exorcizing irrational forces.

The critique of religion as myth of the Greeks and Israel

To consider religion as something irrational, according to Benedict XVI, is entirely inconsistent with our whole Western and Christian history. In fact, both Greek thought and the Jewish religion, as well as Christianity, of course, rejected the vision of religion as myth and conceived religion as knowledge and God as Logos.[8]

Let us take a brief look at Greek thought. If we examine the Greek religions of "the mysteries" and even the Olympic religion, we find the characteristic features of the pre-rational myth: mysterious and unfathomable forces, arcane, obscure, underground impulses, the arbitrariness of the gods where the same human action can be either good or bad depending on the deity, man's struggle to placate divine wrath and exorcize these unforeseeable forces.

Nevertheless, Ionian Physics search for the "Arché," which is the nomos that transforms a chaos into a cosmos, the Pythagoreans say that everything is measure and for Anaxagoras a distinct and highly noble pure Mind rules all things. In Plato's Euthyphro, Socrates asks Euthyphro what holiness is and when an action can be said to be holy. Euthyphro answers that holiness is that which is dear to the gods. However, Socrates notes that different things are dear to different gods and then asks the crucial question: "The holy is holy because it is dear to the gods or is dear to the gods because it is holy?"

In the first case, the gods are arbitrary, in the second case they are connected with truth and good. As we can see, the issue raised by Benedict XVI in Regensburg, using a quotation from Manuel II Paleologus, emperor of Constantinople -- "not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature"[9] -- has deep and ancient roots. Socrates' question raises the issue of whether the gods are capricious and arbitrary like acrobats and jugglers or whether they follow the good and the truth.

Euthyphro does not answer, but the path had been opened by Socrates and will be ratified by Plato: "The gods are not magicians who transform themselves, neither do they deceive mankind in any way" ("The Republic," II, 376 c). Therefore Greek philosophy detaches itself from myth and definitely turns to God as Logos. For Aristotle, the supersensible Substance is Intelligence that eternally grasps itself. The world has an order that is transparent to reason and reason can know it because the gods are rational and act according to truth, as Plato's Demiurge, who does not mould and shape things at random, but drawing inspiration from the truth of eternal forms.

If we look at the Jewish religion, we find the same path.[10] The "God of the Fathers" Israel looks to is not a local or a political god, he is not Baal nor Moloch. He is "he who is," he who existed before all powers and will continue to exist even after them. The God of Abraham is not fixed in one place but is everywhere. He is not linked to any specificity, he does not depend from a people, he does not even depend from the Temple, he does not need sacrifices. He is the Spirit of which the world is a reflection, he is the Spirit that is capable of creating matter.[11] Just as Greek philosophy surpasses itself and goes beyond its own religion of myth, the faith of Israel saves him from belonging to a people.

For all these reasons, Benedict XVI said at Regensburg that there is a profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical understanding of faith in God.

Christianity was the ultimate synthesis of all this: For the Gospel of St. John, Jesus is the Logos, he is the spirit of God that created all things. Christianity does not borrow from the many religions of the time, the religions of the myth, but presents us with God-truth reconnecting directly with Greek thought and developing the experience of Israel. It relates "to that divine presence which can be perceived by the rational analysis of reality … In Christianity, rationality became religion."[12]

We believe that at the beginning of everything is the eternal Word, with Reason and not Unreason.[13] Justin (second century) believed that the Word had sown its seeds in Greek philosophy because what is true for reason comes always from the Word. Clement of Alexandria even thought that Greek philosophy had been a natural revelation of the Christian God. There was often the danger of sliding toward an irrational God but it has always been met and overcome by the authentic orthodox line that was embraced by the Church.

William of Ockham, in the 14th century, argued that God, in his omnipotence, could quite as well have created a diametrically opposite world. He, in his absolute power, could have given us one table of the law that was the exact opposite of the Ten Commandments. Ockham embraced and echoed many similar ideas that had already been expressed before and would be expressed again in later centuries, especially after the Protestant Reformation. They believed that a God who was subject to truth was not an omnipotent God. The point is this: Not even God can produce something that is intrinsically impossible.

This is precisely what Ockham thought: To say that God cannot produce something that is intrinsically impossible would be to limit the divine freedom and omnipotence. Then came St. Thomas. His opinion is the following: "Whatever implies contradiction does not come within the scope of divine omnipotence, because it cannot have the aspect of possibility. Hence it is better to say that such things cannot be done, than that God cannot do them." Divine omnipotence is wise, not arbitrary and capricious.

Christianity and the public use of reason

Christianity, and especially Catholicism, cannot accept philosophical relativism, cannot be linked to philosophies that exclude the problem of the truth. This would mean to negate creation and the existence of a creative Spirit. For the same reason, the rational notion of "human nature," which is currently questioned, is not relinquishable.

Therefore, Christian faith confirms and supports the rational search for truth and calls for a public role of reason that will also include the critique of religions. In fact, we cannot say that all religions relate to truth and reason in the same way as Christianity. They relate to truth and reason in a different manner, which is the same as saying that they are more or less rational and that they can more or less adequately support the public role of reason. This was the theme touched upon by the Holy Father at Regensburg. A God who preaches violence is not a rational God, because reason rejects violence as means of transmission of faith. What is not rational cannot come from the true God.

We see here a very important criterion for the evaluation of religions that, in some way, is new to our eyes. Religions are concerned with eternal salvation. Religious relativism says that as far as salvation is concerned, religions are incommensurable, it is not possible to establish which is the most rational. Religions, however, in addition to the promise of an eternal salvation, also say that it starts here on earth.[14]

If a religion teaches a way of life that is not righteous, it cannot be a true religion. Only when man has lost sight of the ability to know what is good and what is true, then all offers of salvation become the same. If we do not have any standards of right living, then all religions are the same. If the standards for right living are relativized, man remains trapped inside religions. Again, this demonstrates that religious relativism is founded on philosophical relativism. Cardinal Ratzinger points out that St. Paul (Romans 2:14ff) does not say that non-Christians will be saved by following their religion, but by following natural religion.

We have to always bear in mind that also the reverse influence is true as well: Religious pluralism in turn produces philosophical relativism. In fact, Benedict XVI reminded us that "The convergence of differences must not convey an impression of surrendering to that relativism which denies the meaning of truth itself and the possibility of attaining it."[15]

The common good and the truth of religions

If it is possible to criticize religions starting from the reasons of man, then it must also be possible to criticize them starting from the reasons of man in society,[16] that is from a public religion. Then it becomes clear that not all religions are equally respectful of the good of man in society.

It is also clear that the political power that seeks to organize society according to reason not only cannot relate to all religions in the same way, but should also cherish its obligations to the true religion. Of course, if the political power is based on the relativistic democracy, it will not feel any obligation in this regard. Relativism, in fact, can only express a procedural public reason. When the truth is replaced by the decision of the majority, culture is set against truth. The relativistic presumption leads to the tearing up of people's spiritual roots and the destruction of the network of social relationships.[17]

Relativism regards all religions as equivalent. It does so because it is incapable of engaging in a public critique of religions because for relativism common good cannot be rationally identified. By doing so, it precludes the possibility for the true religion to religiously support what men do to attain the common good. Here, too, we see a negative spiral. Relativistic democracy produces religious relativism and this strengthens ethical and social relativism.

All this happens when a society is no longer able to use public reason to criticize religions that proclaim polygamy, that incorporate the rite of physical mutilation, that do not respect the dignity of women, that preach violence or offer religious paths that depersonalize and hamper human reason and knowledge. How will our public reason be able to discern between religions if it loses sight of authentic humanity?

The state, the Church and the problem of reciprocity

The respective roles of state and Church are clear, in their complementary distinction, if we take the example of the so-called reciprocity. Benedict XVI has often stressed the importance of interreligious dialogue. He particularly focused on this issue during his trip to Turkey.

However, dialogue requires reciprocity without which there is no real dialogue. The problem is this: Who should demand such reciprocity, the Church or to the state? Not the Church, who must be guided by charity and truth. Her only duty toward the faithful of the other religions is to bear witness to the charity and the truth of Jesus Christ. On the other hand, reciprocity should guide the actions of the states that recognize elements of public truth in Christianity, i.e. a fundamental contribution to the common good. These states often acknowledge the contribution of Christianity to their history and to the formation of their cultural identity.

This is extremely important: Acknowledging that their roots are grounded in Greek thought, in the Jewish religion and in Christianity is a crucial step for developing the awareness of their own identity. However, it is not sufficient because, unfortunately, the past can be forgotten and, given the rapid disenchantment of the new generations, it is possible to lose sight of the importance of Christianity even in the face of historical, artistic and cultural examples that bear witness to its civilizing function.

Alongside the criteria of history and culture we also need the criterion of truth, i.e. of public rationality. This, then, will also foster appreciation for our history and the pride of our own identity. If, instead, we lose sight of the idea that Christianity expresses a truth that relates to the human being and that Christianity corresponds to authentic public reason more than other religious confessions, we also lose appreciation for our history and the pride of our identity. When Benedict XVI bitterly wondered if the West truly loved itself,[18] this is exactly what he meant: Does it truly love the truth it has inside itself?

Interreligious dialogue is not founded on religious relativism or indifferentism. This is true for the Catholic religion, but is also true for a public reason that has not entirely surrendered to the dictatorship of relativism. By proclaiming the right to religious freedom, the Church has never meant to deny that Christianity is the true religion or that the state has obligations towards the true religion.

According to the declaration "Dignitatis humanae" of the Second Vatican Council, the right to religious freedom "leaves untouched traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ."[19] Now, from where does the state, which is secular, derive these obligations to the true religion?

Not from being a "Christian" state, but from reason, that is from the natural ability to see truths about man in society, from the ability to understand the common good. This also founds the ability to see that one religion consolidates and helps pursue humanization objectives while another contributes to the degradation of man. Christian religion has this claim, the claim of preaching a "God with a human face."[20]

---------------------

[1] "Today, having a clear faith based on the creed of the Church is often labeled as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, that is, letting oneself be 'tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine,' seems the only attitude that can cope with modern times. We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one's own ego and desires" (Joseph Ratzinger, Homily at the Mass "Pro Eligendo Romano Pontifice," April 18, 2005). See also Benedict XVI, Address at the Basilica of St. John Lateran to the Participants at the Ecclesial Convention of the Diocese of Rome, June 8, 2005, p. 7. See the analysis of G. Crepaldi, "Brief Notes on Laity According to Joseph Ratzinger-Benedict XVI," in "Social Doctrine of the Church Bulletin," January-February 2006, pp. 3-16.

[2] Expressions such as "the dogma of relativism," "the presumption of relativism," or relativism as "the religion of modern man" are frequent in the book: Joseph Ratzinger, "Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions," Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 2004.
[3] Immanuel Kant, "An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?," translated by Ted Humphrey in "Immanuel Kant: Perpetual Peace and Other Essays," Hackett, Indianapolis, 1983, pp. 41-46.

[4] "Self-limitation of reason" is the expression used by Ratzinger (Joseph Ratzinger, "Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures -- The Europe of Benedict," Ignatius Press, San Francisco 2006).
[5] It is a "purely functional rationality" that "maintains that you can only call rational what can be proven with experiments" (Joseph Ratzinger. "Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures -- The Europe of Benedict," cit.).

[6] Joseph Ratzinger, "Ragione e fede. Scambio reciproco per un'etica comune" [Faith and Reason. Mutual Exchange for a Common Ethics], in J. Habermas-J. Ratzinger, "Ragione e fede in dialogo" [The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion], Marsilio, Padua 2005.
[7] Joseph Ratzinger, "Ragione e fede. Scambio reciproco per un'etica comune," [Faith and Reason. Mutual Exchange for a Common Ethics] cit., pp. 79-80.

[8] Joseph Ratzinger, "The God of Faith and the God of the Philosophers" in "Introduction to Christianity," Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1990, pp. 93-104.
[9] Benedict XVI, Lecture at the University of Regensburg, Sept. 12, 2006.

[10] Joseph Ratzinger, "Introduction to Christianity" cit., pp. 77-93: "The Biblical Belief in God." Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1990.
[11] Many times and in many places Benedict XVI wonders, rhetorically, whether it is more rational to think of a Spirit that creates matter or of matter that creates spirit.

[12] Joseph Ratzinger, Conference "2000 Years After What?," University of Sorbonne, Paris, Nov. 27, 1999 in "Christianity. The Victory of Intelligence Over the World of Religions," English text in 30 Days, no. 1/2000, pp. 33-44
[13] "So we end up with two alternatives. What came first? Creative Reason, the Creator Spirit who makes all things and gives them growth, or Unreason, which, lacking any meaning, yet somehow brings forth a mathematically ordered cosmos, as well as man and his reason" (Benedict XVI, Homily at "Islinger Feld," Regensburg, Sept. 12, 2006).

[14] "We have to ask what heaven is and how it comes upon earth. Future salvation must make its mark in a way of life that makes the person "human" here and capable of relating to God" (Joseph Ratzinger, "Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions" cit., p. 205. Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 2004).
[15] Benedict XVI, Message to the Bishop of Assisi on the occasion of the 20th Anniversary of the Interreligious Meeting of Prayer for Peace of Oct. 27, 1986. "One cannot simply see in any and every religion the way for God to come to man and man to God" (Joseph Ratzinger, "Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions" cit., p. 75). Ratzinger reflected on the theme of interreligious prayer for peace and on the possibility that it could foster relativism and provided clear answers also in "Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions" cit., pp. 106-112.

[16] "Salvation begins with becoming righteous in this world -- something that always includes the twin poles of the individual and society." (Joseph Ratzinger, "Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions" cit., p. 205).
[17] Joseph Ratzinger, "Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions" cit., p. 76. Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 2004.

[18] Joseph Ratzinger, "The Spiritual Roots of Europe: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow," in Joseph Ratzinger & Marcello Pera, "Without Roots: the West, Relativism, Christianity, Islam," Basic Books, New York, 2006, p.86.
[19] Second Vatican Council, Declaration on religious freedom "Dignitatis humanae," Dec. 7, 1965, No. 1.

[20] Benedict XVI, Address to the Participants in the Fourth National Ecclesial Convention of Verona, Oct. 19, 2006. The Holy Father also mentioned "God with a human face" on Nov. 3, 2006 in the Address at the Gregorian Pontifical University.

[Text adapted]

Gratian's Decretum online

here

Some stuff on Orthodox Christianity

http://www.jacwell.org/Fall_Winter99/Fr_Schmemann_The_liturgical_problem.htm
http://www.stnina.org/journal/art/1.3.7
http://www.orthodoxnet.com/
http://orthodoxeurope.org/page/11/1/6.aspx
http://www.fatheralexander.org/booklets/english/history_timothy_ware_2.htm
http://www.hts.edu/seminary/academics.html
http://www.schmemann.org/byhim/westernrite.html
http://jacwell.org/Acrobat/Jacobs%20Well%208_00.pdf
http://www.theandros.com/existential.html
http://www.orthodox.net/articles/index.html
http://www.stpaulsirvine.org/html/orthodoxy.htm
http://www.orthodoxinfo.com/ecumenism/hopko_bem.aspx
http://www.oca.org/OCRecommendedreadings.asp?SID=2

Stuff from Thomistica.net

Excerpts from Garrigou-Lagrange's commentary on De Eucharistia

Kwasniewski provided two documents, the first covering Garrigou-Langrange's
commentary on the Tertia pars, qq. 73-82 (in Word or PDF format) and another with comments of Garrigou-Langrange on the other sacraments and things pertaining to the sacraments (again, in Word or PDF
format).

Get your Quaracchi editions of Franciscan writers Frati Quaracchi is offering various works by Franciscans for sale.

The status quaestionis of Gratian Studies Anders Winroth's page for Gratian Studies

On Remigius of Florence

Matt Levering interview

Sea Squirt Regrows Entire Body from One Blood Vessel

Thanks to Drudge:

source

Sea Squirt Regrows Entire Body from One Blood Vessel

By Charles Q. Choi
Special to LiveScience
posted: 05 March 2007
08:05 pm ET

Our closest invertebrate relative, the humble sea squirt, can regenerate its entire body from just tiny blood vessel fragments, scientists now report.

The entire regeneration process, which in part resembles the early stages of embryonic development, can produce an adult sea squirt in as little as a week.

The finding could illuminate not only the evolutionary origins of regeneration in all organisms, but also subsequent changes to it during vertebrate evolution.

Vertebrates (animals with backbones) such as salamanders are capable of regenerating limbs or tails, and even humans are capable of regenerating portions of skin, lungs and livers.

"However, in general, the more complex the animal, the lower the regeneration abilities are, relatively," biologist Ram Reshef at Technion Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa explained. "No vertebrate could regenerate their whole bodies if you cut them in two."

The ability to regenerate a whole body from a fragment is typically restricted to less complex invertebrates, such as sponges, worms and jellyfish. Nonetheless, Reshef and his colleagues, including biologist Yuval Rinkevich, chose to look at the sea squirt Botrylloides leachi [image], a more complex invertebrate, by carefully peeling off colonies from underneath stones in shallow waters along the Mediterranean coast of Israel.

The scientists found that "massive regeneration is not just confined to low complexity animals, but rather can take place in highly evolved animals," Reshef told LiveScience.

Each colony is composed of up to thousands of genetically identical individuals, each two to three millimeters long and embedded in a gelatinous matrix. A network of blood vessels connects all modules within a colony.

The scientists removed fragments of blood vessels from the colonies and placed them on microscope slides for investigation. Each roughly one-millimeter-long fragment contained one or more ampullae, which are the pear-shaped endpoints of the vessels, as well as 100 to 300 blood cells.

Of 95 fragments, 80 regenerated an entire functional adult within one to three weeks.

The whole body regeneration process that the scientists witnessed proved unlike any recorded so far. "When less complex groups regenerate their bodies, they do so through what we call a blastema, which is a kind of tissue that forms right at the place where you want to regenerate an organ or body," Reshef said.

In contrast, the sea squirts did not employ blastemas. Instead, regeneration began from dozens of tiny compartments loaded with stem cells, which the researchers dubbed regeneration niches. "In mammals, many adult organs and tissues contain specific stem cells that are involved in repair and some restricted regeneration abilities," Reshef said.

The regeneration niches helped form a hollow sphere that organized into a thin and thick layer on opposite sites, very similar to early stages of embryonic development. As cells proliferated, this sphere folded over and over again, developing chambers and organs, with the end result being adults capable of sexual reproduction.

While the stem cells the researchers looked at are much like stem cells in adult mammals that give rise to our tissues and organs, "the huge difference is that they culminate in an entire organism," Reshef said. The most important implication of their finding is the possibility that vertebrate adult tissue stem cells may exhibit the same capabilities to generate any cell in the body, he added.

Reshef and his colleagues are currently teasing apart the molecular mechanisms by which the sea squirt accomplishes its whole body regeneration and to compare that process with similar mechanisms in other invertebrates and vertebrates. "We speculate that vertebrates altered or suppressed parts or all of this ability," Reshef said.

The scientists detailed their latest findings March 6 in the journal PLoS Biology.

Aquinas on Charity

Remember to look at Disputed Questions on the Virtues

See also Cambridge University Press translation

Bishop Fisher on Conscience and Authority

Bishop Fisher on Conscience and Authority

"Struggling to Recover a Catholic Sense"

VATICAN CITY, MARCH 3, 2007 (Zenit.org).- Here is the text Auxiliary Bishop Anthony Fisher of Sydney, Australia, delivered at the conference sponsored by the Pontifical Academy for Life and held in the Vatican last Friday and Saturday. The theme of the conference was "The Christian Conscience in Support of the Right to Life."

* * *

The moral conscience in ethics and the contemporary crisis of authority

1. The voice of conscience
1.1 What conscience is not

It might scandalize you to hear that I keep a lady in my car to instruct me on which way to go in life. "In three kilometers turn left," she commands. "Turn around," she pleads. "Coming up, on your right, you have arrived," she advises. She is, of course, a global positioning satellite navigator and I would be lost without her calm voice telling me where to go. She can be wrong at times, due to mechanical faults or wrong information. Sometimes I ignore her or switch her off. But usually I obey her; and if I don't I am usually sorry later.

In lots of ways conscience might seem to function like my satellite navigator and so we might call her Conscientia. Though I will argue that conscience is not like a satellite navigator, many people think it is a sort of angelic voice distinct from our own reasoning which comes, as it were, from outside us, even if we hear it in our heart; it is generally trustworthy, but we must decide to obey it or not. There is more than a hint of this at several points in our theological tradition. But whatever these texts mean, they clearly do not mean a divine or diabolical voice intrudes into our ordinary reasoning processes, commanding or complaining, a rival with our own moral thinking. If we experience such voices we should probably see a doctor or an exorcist! Were conscience really a voice from outside our reasoning it would play no part in philosophy and there might be some kind of double truth in the moral sphere.

Late scholastic voluntarism and post-scholastic legalism took moral theology down just such a blind alley. Magisterium became the satellite navigator and the role of conscience was to hear, interpret and obey. Many contemporary theologians and pastors are heirs to this. For some the solution to the crisis of moral authority is to keep calling for submission to the navigator. Moral tax lawyers, on the other hand, try to find ways around the moral law, or ways to "sail as close to the wind as possible" without actually breaking the moral law. Can you do a little bit of abortion or embryo experimentation or euthanasia without breaking the moral law? Can we reclassify some of it as something else and thereby avoid the law? What both approaches have in common with the late schoolmen is a view of the magisterium as a voice external to conscience which commands things to which conscience is not naturally disposed.

In my written paper I trace what became of conscience in liberal modernity. By the 1960s it meant something like strong feeling, intuition or sincere opinion. To appeal to conscience was to foreclose all further discussion and to claim immunity to reasoned argument or the moral law. "Follow your conscience" came to be code for pursuing personal preferences over and against Church teaching, especially in sexuality, bioethics, remarriage and communion. Conscience was now the highest court of appeal: it had "primacy" or infallibility. Sophisticated consciences yielded judgments in accord with the New York Times rather than L'Osservatore Romano. Conscience became, as the then-Cardinal Ratzinger put it, "a cloak thrown over human subjectivity, allowing man to … hide from reality."

1.2 What conscience is: a little history

In my written paper I trace the origins of the Christian conception of conscience in the universal experience of agency and the Old and New Testaments, especially in Pauline literature, and thereafter in the Fathers and the scholastics. While the concept of conscience played only a minor role in Aquinas' moral theory, in the early modern period it was "hoisted to new heights" and a whole, lengthy tract devoted to it in the manuals, with practical reason and prudence accordingly diminished. Soon "all roads, in the moral world, led to conscience."

Conscience featured especially often in the documents of the Second Vatican Council. The Council declared that:

-- all are bound to seek, embrace and live the truth faithfully;
-- conscience is experienced as an inner sanctuary or tribunal, rather than something external, yet it mediates a universal and objective moral law which is given rather than invented;

-- conscience summons us to seek good and avoid evil by loving God and neighbor, by keeping the commandments and all universal norms of morality;

-- conscience is common to all human beings, not just Christians, and it is the very dignity of man, a dignity the Gospel protects;

-- we will be judged according to how we formed and followed our conscience;

-- the moral law and the particular judgments of conscience bind the human person;

-- agents may experience anxiety, contradictions and imbalances in conscience; and conscience may err out of "invincible ignorance" or by being blamefully corrupted;

-- claims of personal freedom or of obedience to civil laws or superiors do not excuse a failure to abide by the universal principles of good conscience;

-- conscience must be properly formed and educated by ensuring it is "dutifully conformed to the divine law and submissive toward the Church's teaching office, which authentically interprets that law in the light of the Gospel"; and

-- freedom of conscience, especially in religious matters, must be respected by civil authorities and people not be coerced into any religious practice.

1.3 Three acts of conscience

The Catechism distinguishes three acts or dimensions of conscience: the perception of the principles of morality; their application in the given circumstances by practical discernment of reasons and goods; and finally, judgment about concrete acts yet to be performed or already performed. These require a little unpacking.

The first act of the conscience identified in the Catechism with synderesis is what I call Conscience-1. In my written paper I identify texts from Paul, Aquinas, Newman and Vatican II which propose a very high -- even romanticized -- doctrine of Conscience-1 as a voice or vicar or sanctuary of God. These authors presume a long tradition of reflection on "the first principles of the natural law": basic principles of practical reason accessible to all people of good will and right reason. Because of their "givenness" these principles provide us with bases both for self-criticism and for social criticism. Far from being a cause for the subjectivism of those who think conscience means "doing my own thing" or the relativism of those who think it means "doing what the group does," Conscience-1 is actually the beginning of an antidote to these.

Conscience-2 is the application of principles to given circumstances "by practical discernment of reasons and goods." This requires certain habits of mind and will, especially prudence in deliberation. In the process of deliberation the mind often faces temptations, dilemmas, confusion and apparent conflicts with the teachings of the magisterium. Conscience must therefore be both well-formed and well-informed.

Conscience-3 is our best judgment of what to do or refrain from doing in the here and now (or in the past). St. Thomas mostly used the word in this sense. Conscience-3 is only worthy of respect when it can bite, that is when it can tell us to do what we might otherwise be disinclined to do, or vice versa, or give us cause for remorse. Once again, there is plenty of ground for error here. Thus while insisting that we must follow our last, best judgment of conscience as the proximate norm of action, St. Thomas wrote a great deal about how we might ensure such a judgment is reliable. He would, I think, have been bewildered by contemporary talk of the 'primacy' of conscience or of any intellective operation. Just as the value of memory is in remembering accurately, so the value of conscience, for Thomas, is in yielding the right choice. Truth always had primacy for him.

The Catholic view of conscience presupposes an optimistic view of human capacities to discern the good, even after the Fall. But if conscience is reduced from objective principles to subjective sincerity or from shared principles to private ones, it is hard to see why we would take people's consciences so seriously. Too often in recent years those desperate for moral education or advice have been fobbed off with "follow your conscience" or indulged with "do what you think is best." Too often human rights documents have become weapons against the rights of some people. Without shared objective principles, "conscientious" belief becomes window-dressing for raw preference or power and we have no way of knowing whether our conscience is well-formed or not, well-functioning or not, accurate or disastrously off-course.

1.4 The authority of conscience

Thus when Vatican II uses the term conscience 52 times and its Catechism also, both texts presume a long history and complex content not necessarily shared by users of the word conscience or spokesmen for the Council's "spirit." Nor does the phrase "primacy of conscience" appear anywhere in the Council's texts. On the contrary, the word conscience is always qualified with adjectives such as "right," "upright," "correct," "well-formed," or "Christian" -- allowing, by implication, that not a few consciences are confused, deformed or otherwise misleading. So some other standard (by which conscience is judged) has "primacy.' The Council pointed out that conscience often goes wrong, sometimes "invincibly" (i.e. by no fault of the agent and so without losing its dignity), but at other times "voluntarily" (i.e. due to negligence or vice, in which case conscience is degraded). Conscience, like any intellectual ability, can err because the human mind can be more or less mature, experienced, trained, healthy, sophisticated, imaginative, prudent, integrated with passion, etc. Conscience is only right conscience when it accurately mediates and applies that natural law which participates in the divine law; it is erroneous when it does not. Thus, as I suggested earlier, it may be more helpful to think of conscience as a verb (a doing word), describing the human mind thinking practically towards good or godly choices, rather than reifying it as a noun, a faculty or voice with divine qualities.

Despite the tendency of conscience to error, the Church maintains its high view of the dignity of conscience. From this several things follow:

-- that we must do our best to cultivate a well-formed and well-informed conscience in ourselves and those we influence;

-- that we must take responsibility for our actions and thus always seek seriously to discern what is the right choice to make;

-- that we should seek to resolve doubt rather than act upon it;

-- that we must follow the last and best judgment of our conscience even if, unbeknownst to us, it is objectively in error;

-- that we must do so in all humility, aware that our choice may be wrong and so be ready, if we later realize it is, to repent and start afresh; and

-- that we should avoid coercing people's consciences: People should if possible be persuaded rather than forced to live well and so be given a certain latitude.

Such reverence for persons and their consciences is perfectly consistent with denying that conscience is infallible or has "primacy" over truth or faith or the teachings of Christ and his Church. As we will see, the magisterium seeks to enable conscience to achieve a more reliable mediation and application of moral truth: It is always objective moral truth that has primacy and only this which can be infallibly true.

2. The voice of the magisterium
2.1 What is "magisterium"?

The teaching authority of the Church, restating or unfolding the implications of Christ's teaching is called "magisterium." In my written paper I trace some of the history of and theological warrant for this idea. Interestingly Jesus' departing promise to be with his Church to the end of time was attached to a charge not to teach the nations Christology or Soteriology or even Fundamental Moral Theology, but to teach them his commandments! By the time of Vatican II the Church could assert that Christ's faithful ought to give the unconditional obedience of faith (obsequium fidei) to all that it proposes as certainly true and could express several ways in which this magisterium is operationalized infallibly.

Of course to say that the Church is infallible in certain situations is not to say that it is omniscient or inerrant in everything it says and does. In addition to infallible magisterial teaching there are the much more common pronouncements of various Church bodies or leaders proposed with a lesser degree of authority or more tentatively. Such teachings must be taken very seriously by believers out of respect for the Church as an inspired teacher; but they do not command the unconditional "obedience of faith," only some degree of "religious assent." What degree depends upon who teaches and when and how. When a person's own reasons against a particular non-infallible teaching are so convincing to him that he cannot give an honest interior assent to the teaching, he nonetheless remains a Catholic. On the other hand, it must be recognized that some teachings not yet infallibly defined do in fact belong to the core of our tradition and may well in the future be the object of an infallible determination. If unsure of their own conclusions, believers will therefore be inclined to follow even a non-definitive teaching until such time as they can clarify their own best judgment of what faith and reason require.

2.2 Examples of moral magisterium

In my written paper I argue for several examples of infallible magisterial teaching on moral matters. Given the academy in which we are meeting, it might suffice to recall the three moral "dogmas" to be found in John Paul II's encyclical on bioethics, "Evangelium vitæ." Here he was careful to cite the texts from Vatican II regarding the papal and episcopal magisterium in moral matters, and to use the language of Petrine authority. The clearest exercise of the highest level of papal magisterium was with respect to direct killing of the innocent. John Paul then applied this teaching to abortion and euthanasia, both of which he confirmed were grave moral disorders. Though there are some differences, in each case he claimed the authority of the natural law, the Scriptures and the Tradition, the ordinary and universal magisterium, the disciplinary tradition of the Church, the unanimous agreement of the bishops -- and, now, "the authority which Christ conferred upon Peter and his successors".

2.3 Conscience versus the magisterium after Vatican II

Around the time of Vatican II, Karl Rahner wrote that conscience is the proximate source of moral obligation, and so must be followed even if mistaken; but that we must form our conscience rightly and avoid confusing it with subjective inclination or personal preference. A Catholic must be prepared to accept moral instruction from the Church and never appeal to conscience to make an exception for himself. If we realized that we may very well have to sacrifice everything or lose our soul, then we would not look for exceptions to be made for us from God's law and our confessors would not use evasions like "follow your conscience" when some hard if sensitive teaching were needed. If in our sinful world God's law seems unrealistic, the trouble is not with God's law but with the world!

The early Rahner wrote on the verge of a new age in which Christian ethics faced challenges from many quarters, not least from within the Church. Vatican II sought to restate and update Catholic moral teaching. Though aware of the growing individualism and relativism, the Council seemed optimistic to the point of naïveté about how their words would be received. Many people took up the Council's views on the dignity and liberty of conscience with greater enthusiasm than they did its teaching on the duty to inform conscience and exercise that liberty in accord with moral absolutes known to right reason and proclaimed by the magisterium.

The "crisis of '68" was a crisis at least in part over the meaning of conscience, its implications for decision-making and its relationship to the magisterium. In the 1970s a number of theologians proceeded to deny that the Scriptures, the Tradition and the hierarchy have any "strong" magisterium in moral matters. The "situationists" echoed the contemporary exaltation of human freedom and rejection of appeals to nature, reason, authority or any static, universal or objectivist standards; what mattered, in the end, was whether the person's "heart was in the right place." The "proportionalists" asserted that the role of conscience was to identify and balance upsides and downsides of options and that the Church could propose some "rules of thumb" for this balancing act, but no moral absolutes. Some argued that it was impossible for the Church to teach infallibly in morals; others said that while it could in principle, it never had done so; and both agreed that the ordinary teaching of the Church is "susceptible to error and therefore fallible."

We are all well aware of how thoroughly the 1970s-'80s style of moral thinking filtered down through many of our societies, even if it was rarely dressed up in the highfalutin language of "ontic evils" and "authenticity." In a slightly more sophisticated form it was taught to a generation of priests and lay theology students. It will take some time to recover a more Catholic sense of the role and content of conscience and the magisterium.

3. Conscience in post-modernity
3.1 Rome responds

John Paul II took the opportunity of the 25th anniversary of "Humanæ vitæ" to publish his groundbreaking encyclical "Veritatis splendor." Here he reasserted the teaching of Vatican II that Christ and the Church can, have and do teach definitively in moral matters, and that a well-formed Christian conscience will be informed by such authoritative teaching. Here one ought to proceed with obedience of faith, submitting one's experience, insights and wishes to the judgment of the Gospel, prepared to reform oneself according to the mind of Christ authentically transmitted by the Church. Conscience is indeed the proximate norm of personal morality, but its dignity and authority "derive from the truth about moral good and evil, which it is called to listen to and to express." Sincerity cannot establish the truth of a judgment of conscience and freedom is never freedom from the truth but always and only freedom in the truth. The magisterium does not bring to the conscience truths which are extraneous to it, but serves the Christian conscience by highlighting and clarifying those truths which a well-formed conscience ought already to possess.

In subsequent documents the CDF taught that the magisterium has the task of "discerning, by means of judgments normative for the consciences of believers, those acts which in themselves conform to the demands of faith and foster their expression in life and those acts which, on the contrary, are incompatible with such demands because intrinsically evil." In "Ad tuendam fidem," John Paul II identified three categories of doctrines which I have treated more fully in my written paper. An example of the highest degree of authoritative teaching -- requiring the assent of theological faith by all the faithful -- is "the doctrine on the grave immorality of direct and voluntary killing of an innocent human being." Examples of the second category of doctrines -- teachings which are "necessary for faithfully keeping and expounding the deposit of faith" to which the faithful must give "firm and definitive assent" lest they fall out of full communion with the Church -- are teachings on the illicitness of euthanasia, prostitution, fornication and presumably abortion. The third class are those teachings on faith and morals presented as true or at least sure, but not solemnly defined or definitively proposed by the magisterium, to which "religious submission of will and intellect" are required. Church teaching on IVF falls at least into this class.

3.2 Continuing division over moral conscience and authority

Cardinal Ratzinger opened his 1991 lecture on "Conscience and Truth" by observing that conscience is the core issue in contemporary moral theology. As the bulwark of freedom it supposedly confers on the agent a kind of private infallibility vis-à-vis any other authority. But to say conscience is infallible is contradictory, since any two persons' consciences may differ on a particular point. The "traumatic aversion" some have to faith-as-encumbrance affects their whole understanding of conscience and magisterium. For them conscience is an escape hatch from a demanding religion -- a religion they are very loath to preach or counsel.

When a fellow academic posited that the Nazis were saints because they followed their conscience, Ratzinger was convinced "that there is something wrong with the theory of the justifying power of the subjective conscience." His exploration of ancient Scripture and modern psychology, Socrates and Newman, confirmed that the notion needed to be thoroughly purified. Why does the Psalmist beg pardon for hidden or unknown faults? Because "the loss of the ability to see one's guilt, the falling silent of conscience in so many areas, is a more dangerous illness of the soul than guilt that is recognized." Thus Ratzinger argued that the reduction of conscience to subjective certainty does not liberate but enslaves or abandons us, making us totally dependent on personal taste or prevailing opinion. Though a person's last, best judgment binds him at the moment of acting, this cannot mean "a canonization of subjectivity." While it is never wrong to follow such a judgment, "guilt may very well consist in arriving at such perverse convictions."

The Catholic Church is far from alone today in facing polarization over the meaning and roles of conscience and authority. At one pole are those who hold that if only we attended more carefully to the magisterium instead of the zeitgeist, all would be well. The faithful should be willing to obey and their leaders to lead. Real conscience is the driver obeying the ecclesial satellite navigator, Magisterium, who tells us to turn left or right in the next 500 meters to go to the only destination that matters. At the opposite pole are those who argue that conscience must have "primacy." Vatican II opened up a new space for Catholics to follow their own lights rather than rely too heavily on their pastors. A renewed appreciation of personal experience and interpretation, of individual goals pursued freely without undue interference, is required. Conscience, then, is the ability to switch off the ecclesial satellite navigator and make decisions for oneself.
It is interesting just how much these "opposite" poles have in common. Both are convinced that the other has betrayed Vatican II and is endangering the Church's future. Both view the magisterium as an authority external and often rival to personal conscience. In the last part of my paper I want to examine whether the best of contemporary philosophy might offer any ways forward.

3.3 A communitarian rapprochement between conscience and magisterium

The first comes from a major move in contemporary ethical theory known as communitarianism. The very word conscientia might point us in this direction: For it means, literally, to think "with," and the "with" might refer to some community or tradition of fellow seekers after truth. The autonomous ethics of modernity often fail to take seriously the extent to which these shape people's identity and values. Even our most private life-plans are inevitably interrelated with those of others. More fundamentally, our sense of who we are and what matters to us largely comes with our ties to family, workplace, party, nation, culture and, of course, church. Some of these ties are chosen, others simply "received." Pre-existing models -- models (such as Christ and the saints) and social practices (such as how we worship God and respect and care for others) are relied upon in our moral thinking or emulated in our acting, and a great deal depends on what kinds of moral communities we belong to.

While the modern emphasis upon autonomy has helpfully encouraged individuality, initiative and respect, it has also had very real costs in terms of emotional distress, normative ambivalence and political paralysis. In such situations communities like the Church can call people back into relationships, traditions and practices which help to knit them together and give them a sense of identity and destiny. The common good requires a shared vision and lifestyle, handed down within the community and protected by certain authoritative figures or mechanisms.

Are our beliefs and practices therefore purely arbitrary? Or can there be some more rational standard by which to judge our ecclesial baggage? In the next section I suggest some objective standards. But we must also allow that some of it can be put down to these more "cultural," shifting, particular aspects of the Church's life-history. Thus from among the range of reasonable options even self-consciously "pluralistic" communities do not choose randomly or value-neutrally: They stand for and against certain things, and they do this by their prayer and worship, their scriptures and creeds, and, of course, their moral codes and common projects.

Thus the faith and morals of the Church are normative for the individual who wishes to belong to it. Once a person has chosen (and been chosen) to belong, certain practices "come with the package," so to speak. If you are pro-abortion, pro-euthanasia and pro-cloning the Catholic Church is not for you; or -- better -- since the Catholic Church is for you, you should convert to being anti-abortion, anti-euthanasia, anti-cloning and pro-life and love, pro-the sick and disabled, and pro-the theology of the body. Documents such as the Catechism thus function as an authoritative articulation of "the Catholic story." To be part of the Church is to believe certain things but also to live in accord with that tradition and like other members of that community. Orthopraxis expresses orthodoxy.

3.4 A practical reason rapprochement between conscience and Magisterium

The communitarian reading of magisterium might be thought to reduce magisterium to culture and conscience to a social construct. Recent approaches to "practical reason" are therefore a useful complement. The very word conscientia again provides a hint: For it means to reason (morally) with knowledge and not merely on the basis of opinions or fashions. The "basic human goods" that provide the reasons for all human actions can be specified as the series of underived basic principles found in "Veritatis splendor": transmit and preserve life, refine and develop the material world, cultivate social life, seek truth, practice good, contemplate beauty, serve God, honor parents. This requires openness to all human goods, even those not directly pursued, and never choosing directly against participation by anyone in any of them. With further reflection a series of intermediate principles and more specific norms can be derived. This is the "natural" law known even to the pagans and Christian faith recalls and confirms it. Because revelation affects the whole way we understand God, each other, the world and ourselves, it inevitably colors the application of these "natural" principles and brings some new norms. The Church comes in such a context as teacher-counselor, helping us reach maturity.

Morality, then, is no imposition of an external authority, but an internal pattern of life which challenges us to be more reasonable, mature, flourishing. The magisterium is not some external force with which private conscience must grapple: It informs conscience much like a soul informs a body, giving it shape and direction from within. Any apparent conflict between conscience and magisterium is therefore either a conflict between what I am convinced is right and some other view, in which case, generally speaking, I must favor the first; or, more likely, it is a conflict within my conscience between some received magisterial norm and some other part(s) of my moral reasoning (including other received norms). If what is at stake is taught with a high degree of authority and certainty, the believer in that authority will follow it or be confused. When he does not know for sure whether or not what is taught is a matter of faith, he properly gives that proposition his conditional or religious assent because it might very well be.

Of course, when the Church teaches non-definitively, this may represent a first stage in the development, deeper articulation or authoritative application of the faith and morals of the Church; or it may represent a false start. Here the believer must assent to the Church's non-infallible pronouncements as to all else he knows and do his best to reason and discern. His goal will not be to argue himself out of following some Church-given norm or limit the "moral tax" payable to God, but rather to try to embrace the moral vision proposed by Christ and the Church and to seek to resolve any uncertainties before making an important decision.

4. Where to from here?

The Church post-"Veritatis splendor" is still struggling to recover a Catholic sense of conscience and authority. The task is essentially an evangelical and catechetical one, and one especially urgent in the West where misconceptions about conscience have been commonplace, leading to many disastrous personal decisions. That there could still be Catholic institutions in some places performing or collaborating in abortion, IVF, sterilization or euthanasia beggars belief. That there are still Catholic theologians and pastors supporting these or similar practices means we are yet to recover a sense of the ecclesial vocations of theologian and pastor. That there are still Catholic politicians and voters willing to cooperate in those evils means there are faulty connections between conscience, truth and authority whether ecclesial or civil. Wrong views of conscience have also been pastorally ruinous, resulting in diffidence about evangelization and catechesis, a decline of the practice of Confession and the abuse of Holy Communion.

Without an accurate understanding of Christian conscience it can never be reliably at the service of the culture of life and love or of the growth of individuals in holiness. But even when we get this right, there will still be much to do in properly forming and informing our own and others' consciences and in drawing conclusions in the face of the complex contemporary dilemmas -- in bioethics as elsewhere. Further, thoroughgoing philosophical and theological analysis is required, for instance, on questions such as biolawmaking, cooperation in evil and conscientious objection -- questions to which our present conference will now turn.

[Text adapted]