Fr. David Anderson: The Sunday Experience of the Resurrection

One of Fr. David's wishes is to write a book on write book on Paschaltime. May God bring it to fruition!

How is our Lord breathing upon the apostles (John 20:22-24) different from what happened at Pentecost? Was this gift of the Holy Spirit a kind of ordination, to give them the power to do the acts necessary to minister to Christians before Pentecost, a prefiguration of the gift of the Holy Spirit to the Church Universal?

As for Fr. David's memories of Sunday Mass: in the Latin ecclesial tradition (justified by texts in the Roman rite?) is the exclusive or almost-exclusive identification of the Eucharist with the "sacrifice of our Lord on the Cross a possible reason why Sunday doesn't feel like a ceelbration of the Resurrection? Maybe Mass wouldfeel more like a mini-Good Friday if anything. In contrast, the Byzantine rite is more holistic in how it understands the sarifice of our Lord, looking at the entirety of His life, both here on earth and after His ascension.

Russell Hittinger on the Compendium of Catholic Social Doctrine

From Pecknold's essay:

Hittinger’s critical analysis comes to a head when he discusses the Compendium’s treatment of the common good. He notes that the older metaphysical definition of the common good—that which belonged to the common philosophical infrastructure of Leo XIII and Pius XI—had given way in the Catechism to a weaker definition lifted from Vatican II’s Gaudium et Spes, which suggested that the common good was concerned with “the sum total of social conditions.” But the compilers of the Compendium are aware that this “sum total” account differs from the older and more precise definition of the metaphysical primacy of the common good. So what do they do? As Hittinger observes, they don’t try to reconcile them, they just “juxtapose” them, like this: 

a. The common good indicates “the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfilment more fully and more easily.”

b. The common good does not consist in the simple sum of the particular goods of each subject of a social entity. Belonging to everyone and to each person, it is and remains “common”, because it is indivisible.

Hittinger thinks that the authors of the Compendium juxtapose these two passages without reconciling them because they don’t know how to do so. They are actually perpetuating the problem that John Paul II was trying to solve. The juxtaposition is not only lazy, but dangerous—in such juxtapositions, usually the weaker, less binding of the formulas wins out. This loss of philosophical coherence leads to a loss of moral authority, ecclesial unity, and evangelical witness.

Hittinger observes that “at best these are equivocations about what the common good means.” What was needed was not a mere juxtaposition, but a synthesis that strengthens rather than weakens principles. Hittinger even suggests an elegant way the Compendium authors could have done so. Rather than let a thousand principles bloom, they could have clarified that the first “broadly accepted sense” of the common good is not an aggregate definition at all but simply concerns “social conditions,” whereas the second is a definition of the common good in the strict and stronger sense. If they had done the work that John Paul II had asked for, Hittinger reckons, they would have secured the tradition instead of exchanging it “for a mess of pottage.”

Httinger is correct, and it should be noted that the Compendium was released with Rome's authority.

C.C. Pecknold on R. Hittinger and RCST

First Things: Defend Us From Ideology by C. C. Pecknold

“To guard ourselves against ideology...we need to strengthen principles through coherent philosophical definition and reflection. Hittinger concludes, ‘it is not only rigid thinking...but also weak thinking is vulnerable to ideology.’

My latest. https://t.co/fZ3x6aVQNw

— C.C. Pecknold (@ccpecknold) May 8, 2020

"Some might take this as a counsel of despair, but I take Hittinger to be issuing an invigorating challenge... we need to strengthen principles through coherent philosophical definition & reflection."https://t.co/EjweJOEHKh

— Josh Hochschild (@JoshHochschild) May 8, 2020

Yet Hittinger sees “warning signs” beginning with Pope Pius XII. Pius was well-schooled in the same philosophical infrastructure, yet issued no social encyclicals from 1940 until his death in 1958. Pope John XXIII began writing social encyclicals again, but no longer “to all bishops,” as was the Leonine custom. Rather, he addressed them “to all men of good will.” This shift of address drastically changed the scope and coherence of social doctrine, since it no longer assumed the shared philosophical infrastructure and distinctions that had been essential to the tradition.

Should a bishop be preaching moral theology to non-believers or Christ instead?

Does Rome have the authority to promulgate principles of moral theology, other than precepts of the Divine Law, as definitive? By what competence? Rome can only affirm that such principles (and conclusions of moral theology) are free from heresy but Rome cannot guarantee that their formulation is true or sound as they stand, at least not with the authority of the pope as defined so far. Not only that, but the Compendium does not include an exhaustive list of the precepts of Divine Law regarding political communities and political life.

Some might take this as a counsel of despair, but I take Hittinger to be issuing an invigorating challenge. If we want to guard ourselves against ideology and corruptions of our traditions, we need to strengthen principles through coherent philosophical definition and reflection. Hittinger concludes, “it is not only rigid thinking that’s vulnerable to ideology, but also weak thinking is vulnerable to ideology.” 

This is true for the political common good as well as the ecclesial common good. Skepticism that eschews a strong, coherent public philosophy will not help us. Only a philosophically coherent account of the American common good will save us from our descent into ideological incoherence.

Preaching the "common good" never transformed a tyranny to a just regime. While we need to critically examine the principles of RCST, I do not think that Latins will have the courage to take such an examination that far, as it may run contrary to accepted beliefs about the state and other beliefs taken from liberalism, egalitarianism, and other political ideologies.

Fr. Stephen Brock Has a New Book

Wondering if any of my Twitter friends have seen Fr. Stephen Brock's new book, The Light that Binds. I look forward to reading it, expect it to be excellent.https://t.co/2vyh1UsfOr

— Josh Hochschild (@JoshHochschild) May 8, 2020

The Feast of the Apparition of the Cross

NLM: The Feast of the Apparition of the Cross by Gregory DiPippo

Who Is the Future of Existential Thomism?

Finished writing a review of John F.X. Knasas’s Thomistic Existentialism & Cosmological Reasoning. Knasas has a distinctive—I think difficult—voice and it left me wondering: who in the younger generation might be carrying the torch for “Thomistic Existentialism”?

— Josh Hochschild (@JoshHochschild) May 4, 2020

European Society of Philosophy CFP

webpage

This call for papers for an issue of the journal of the European Society for Moral Philosophy on political philosophy looks very promising: https://t.co/FZ7l25mZey

— Pater Edmund (@sancrucensis) May 7, 2020

Fr. Stamatis Skliris

Orthodox Arts Journal: The Icon Painting of Fr. Stamatis Skliris: A Call for Authenticity By Fr. Silouan Justiniano


His website.

The Icon as a unique and inimitable fact in the Church

The Pontificale Romano-Germanicum

NLM: The Purest Source of the Roman Palm Sunday Rites by Gregory DiPippo

Western Culture

CWR Dispatch: Ratzinger’s Western Culture delves deeply into the foundations of European life
This collection offers reflections on many of the fundamental underpinnings of the life of society, applicable to both European and non-European countries.

Ignatius Press

Edit. 5/12
A review: What Will Become of Europe? by Carson Halloway

Concilium v. Communio

CWR Dispatch: Joseph Ratzinger, Theological Reformer by George Weigel
(Also published at First Things.)

As I wrote in The Irony of Modern Catholic History, a fissure in the ranks of the reformist theologians at Vatican II began to open up during the Council’s third session, held in the fall of 1964. A new theological journal, Concilium, was being planned by some of the Council’s influential theological advisers (many of whom had been heavily censored in the pre-Vatican II years). A towering figure among them, the French Jesuit Henri de Lubac, began to worry that Concilium would take the reformist project in a deconstructive direction: one that would do serious damage to what John XXIII, in his opening address to the Council, called “the sacred deposit of Christian doctrine,” which Pope John urged “be more effectively defended and presented.”
  
The first several issues of the new journal intensified de Lubac’s concerns. So in May 1965 the most venerable member of its editorial committee quietly withdrew from the Concilium project while continuing his work at the Council itself. As Vatican II drew to a close, others would join him in expressing serious reservations about the tack being taken by their onetime theological allies. And those concerns did not lessen over time.  

The result was what I call in my book “The War of the Conciliar Succession”: the war to define what Vatican II was and what Vatican II intended for the Catholic future. This war was not a struggle between “traditionalists” and “progressives.” It was a bitterly fought contest within the camp of Vatican II theological reformers. It continues to this day. And the question that so concerned Henri de Lubac remains entirely pertinent, 56 years later: Would an interpretation of the Council that effectively set the Catholic Church against “the sacred deposit of Christian doctrine” end up betraying the gospel and emptying it of its power?  

Joseph Ratzinger joined de Lubac and other dissident conciliar reformers in launching another theological journal, Communio, which he and his colleagues hoped would advance an interpretation of Vatican II that was in continuity with the Church’s settled doctrine even as it developed the Church’s understanding of that doctrine. Communio, now published in 14 language editions, has been a creative force in Catholic intellectual life for decades. Like Ratzinger, Communio is not against Vatican II; it has challenged what its authors contend is a wrongheaded interpretation of Vatican II.

Only one group was engaged in true reform, though in a wrong-headed way by employing the council to do it. Would  it be accurate to say the progressives were leaning towards heresy or had embraced it? Or were they guilty of an archaeologistic thinking that reflected a historical reality that existed only in their imagination? (Simplicity, the Eucharist as Last Supper, and all that?)

Evidence of Bugnini Being a Freemason?

Rorate Caeli: BOMBSHELL: New historical evidence emerges in support of Bugnini’s membership in Freemasonry — Names are named

Eastern Christian Books: Bulgakov on the Apocalypse of John

Eastern Christian Books: Bulgakov on the Apocalypse of John

The Apocalypse of John: An Essay in Dogmatic Interpretation by Sergius Bulgakov

Peter Kwasniewski on the Roman Canon

Rorate Caeli:

“The Roman Canon: Pillar and Ground of the Roman Rite” — Full text of Dr. Kwasniewski’s lecture

Today, in honor of the feast of Pope St. Pius V, I am pleased to present to readers of Rorate Caeli the full text of my lecture on the Roman Canon, which in recent years has been delivered in a number of places in varying forms. The lecture had previously been translated into and published in Italian (“Pilastro e Fondamento del Rito Romano: il Canone Romano come Norma Dottrinale e Morale”) and German (“Im Herzen des katholischen Gottesdienstes: Zwölf Glaubenswahrheiten im römischen Kanon”).

More on the Palm Sunday Blessing and Procession

NLM: The Ancient Form of the Palm Sunday Blessing and Procession by Gregory DiPippo

Leonardo Lugaresi on Televised Masses

Sandro Magister: “To Be Or Not To Be.” The Capital Question of Masses on TV

Fausto Bertinotti, Julián Carrón, Antonio Polito - Il muro che cadde due volte

Law 101

How do we understand the law? According to the mind of the legislator, and in the case of the Constitution, according to the mind of the states who ratified it.

Chronicles: Faux Originalism by Mark Pulliam

In response to the activism of the Warren Court (and the marginally better record of the subsequent Burger Court), conservatives in the 1970s, led by Robert Bork, advocated a jurisprudence of “original intent”—hewing to the original meaning of the Constitution, based on its text and history. Following decades of heedless activism, this was a bold position. In a 1982 article in National Review, Bork famously stated that “The truth is that the judge who looks outside the Constitution always looks inside himself and nowhere else.” Like the boy who pointed out that the emperor was naked, Bork’s critique was devastating.

Famed jurist Antonin Scalia and others tweaked “original intent”—which focused on the subjective intentions of individual Framers—into a more general inquiry into the original public meaning of the constitutional provisions when they were enacted and ratified. How were the words understood at the time they were adopted? This is the central doctrinal question of constitutional originalism.

Will Vermeule eventually concede this? Or will he stick to his error of judging "originalism" to be a form of "legal positivism"?

Webinar with Fr. Bogdan Bucur

Waiting for This One to Be Published

Nobody knows more about the history of Catholic social teaching than Russell Hittinger.

This lecture is a preview of Russ’s book forthcoming later this year. https://t.co/sDVXNzu5AA

— Josh Hochschild (@JoshHochschild) April 29, 2020